ABC/Lorenzo BevilaquaIn what was supposed to be a nice getaway in Cabo with the family, Tamar Braxton is claiming she faced racial discrimination while vacationing in the Mexican city.

During several Instagram stories, captured by Hollywood Unlocked, Braxton claimed a restaurant she attended with her son, Logan, and estranged husband Vince Herbert, were racist because they overcharged her group for water and a napkin.

After how horrible our food wasthey made us pay $25 for water and a napkin, she wrote, noting she had paid $1K for the entire meal.

Tamar then said the restaurant staff followed her outside and allegedly threatened to call a Mexican drug cartel to harm Braxton and her group.

SMH!! Yall dont know? she wrote. We are all [minorities] why do you look at Black people as less than? SMH Dont go here! We are just Black people to them.

In a now deleted post, captured by SipChyTea, Tamar shared a photo with Vince and their son, where she sported her new bald head.

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Page: 1 2 Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: kaput

04-12-2018 05:33 AM











Post: #1 Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

Advertisement



THEN:





'Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War,' he tweeted. 'There is no reason for this.'

'Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?'





http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...z5CQQU6gmn





Jezuz what an asshat. You can't f*cking warmonger with a country and then say you want to be friends in the very next sentence.



What the f*#k kind of retard is he??? Donald Trump used Twitter on Wednesday to warn that a missile attack on Syria is imminent,THEN:'Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War,' he tweeted. 'There is no reason for this.''Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?'Jezuz what an asshat. You can't f*cking warmonger with a country and then say you want to be friends in the very next sentence.What the f*#k kind of retard is he??? LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 05:38 AM











Post: #2 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 05:33 AM) Donald Trump used Twitter on Wednesday to warn that a missile attack on Syria is imminent,



THEN:





'Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War,' he tweeted. 'There is no reason for this.'

'Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?'





http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...z5CQQU6gmn





Holy hell what an asshat. You can't warmonger with Russia and then say you want to be friends in the very next sentence.



What kind of unholy retard is he???

"Get ready Russia,' the 'missiles are coming'"

THEN:

"and we need all nations to work together."



What a f*cking moron.

Putin ain't Kim Jong Un you complete utter waste of orange. "Get ready Russia,' the 'missiles are coming'"THEN:"and we need all nations to work together."What a f*cking moron.Putin ain't Kim Jong Un you complete utter waste of orange. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 06:26 AM











Post: #3 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends





>>>Many objectives fulfilled. Has made clear he will punish chem warfare. Spooks Russians. Gets the war mongers off his ass. Kills nobody. Has the whole world looking into false flags.<<<





>>>Look to General Mattis statement.<<<



http://i.magaimg.net/img/32er.jpg



link to image:





>>>1) Take something away that the other side already have (new sanctions, new tariffs, etc)

2) Create a crisis point and escalate

3) Offer an olive branch - forcing opponent to negotiate just to win back part of what they had taken away from them

4) Tell the other side how smart they are and how they got such a great deal



If you know commercial real estate, its what they do in negotiations all day. Hes just trying to apply it to politics....<<< Now here's the fun 4D chess stuff:>>>Many objectives fulfilled. Has made clear he will punish chem warfare. Spooks Russians. Gets the war mongers off his ass. Kills nobody. Has the whole world looking into false flags.<<<>>>Look to General Mattis statement.<< http://i.magaimg.net/img/32er.jpg >>>1) Take something away that the other side already have (new sanctions, new tariffs, etc)2) Create a crisis point and escalate3) Offer an olive branch - forcing opponent to negotiate just to win back part of what they had taken away from them4) Tell the other side how smart they are and how they got such a great dealIf you know commercial real estate, its what they do in negotiations all day. Hes just trying to apply it to politics....<< engineering

Banned

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 06:39 AM



Posts: 5,299









Post: #4 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends



The eagle wants peace it's why he's looking toward the olives but the arrows always there.

Arrows in one talon or olives in the other.The eagle wants peace it's why he's looking toward the olives but the arrows always there. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 06:43 AM











Post: #5 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 06:26 AM) Now here's the fun 4D chess stuff:



>>> Many objectives fulfilled. Has made clear he will punish chem warfare. Spooks Russians. Gets the war mongers off his ass. Kills nobody. Has the whole world looking into false flags .<<<





>>>Look to General Mattis statement.<<<



http://i.magaimg.net/img/32er.jpg



link to image: http://i.magaimg.net/img/32er.jpg





>>>1) Take something away that the other side already have (new sanctions, new tariffs, etc)

2) Create a crisis point and escalate

3) Offer an olive branch - forcing opponent to negotiate just to win back part of what they had taken away from them

4) Tell the other side how smart they are and how they got such a great deal



If you know commercial real estate, its what they do in negotiations all day. Hes just trying to apply it to politics....<<<

I lean towards this. The idea that he is an idiot is less likely. I lean towards this. The idea that he is an idiot is less likely. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 06:51 AM











Post: #6 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

It is sad that Trump has to psychologically con everyome into preferring peace.



Oh well, at least it will work. engineering

Banned

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 06:55 AM



Posts: 5,299









Post: #7 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 06:51 AM) It is sad that Trump has to psychologically con everyome into preferring peace.



Oh well, at least it will work.

All the talk of war people going crazy, Assad escapes to Lebanon his entire army has evacuated all their bases, Russian ships abandon Tartus



And still right now the only ship the USA has near Syria is the Donald Cook.



Guess that ship had the last laugh after all.

All the talk of war people going crazy, Assad escapes to Lebanon his entire army has evacuated all their bases, Russian ships abandon TartusAnd still right now the only ship the USA has near Syria is the Donald Cook.Guess that ship had the last laugh after all. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 07:15 AM











Post: #8 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 06:26 AM) Now here's the fun 4D chess stuff:



>>>Many objectives fulfilled. Has made clear he will punish chem warfare. Spooks Russians. Gets the war mongers off his ass. Kills nobody. Has the whole world looking into false flags.<<<





>>>Look to General Mattis statement.<<<



http://i.magaimg.net/img/32er.jpg



link to image: http://i.magaimg.net/img/32er.jpg





>>>1) Take something away that the other side already have (new sanctions, new tariffs, etc)

2) Create a crisis point and escalate

3) Offer an olive branch - forcing opponent to negotiate just to win back part of what they had taken away from them

4) Tell the other side how smart they are and how they got such a great deal



If you know commercial real estate, its what they do in negotiations all day. Hes just trying to apply it to politics....<<<

Ever hear of the boy who cried wolf? Putin upped the ante Trump doesn't send the missles he folds.



His word is untrustworthy. In business all you have is your word. Either way he has lost. Either he is a liar and not a man of his word or he sparks a conflagration that will see many dead.



I'd say he is insane. Ever hear of the boy who cried wolf? Putin upped the ante Trump doesn't send the missles he folds.His word is untrustworthy. In business all you have is your word. Either way he has lost. Either he is a liar and not a man of his word or he sparks a conflagration that will see many dead.I'd say he is insane. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 07:15 AM











Post: #9 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

engineering Wrote: (04-12-2018 06:55 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 06:51 AM) It is sad that Trump has to psychologically con everyome into preferring peace.



Oh well, at least it will work.

All the talk of war people going crazy, Assad escapes to Lebanon his entire army has evacuated all their bases, Russian ships abandon Tartus



And still right now the only ship the USA has near Syria is the Donald Cook.



Guess that ship had the last laugh after all.



Assad is not fleeing anywhere. Neither will the Russians.

You sound like a patriotard. Assad is not fleeing anywhere. Neither will the Russians.You sound like a patriotard. engineering

Banned

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 07:16 AM



Posts: 5,299









Post: #10 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 07:15 AM) engineering Wrote: (04-12-2018 06:55 AM) All the talk of war people going crazy, Assad escapes to Lebanon his entire army has evacuated all their bases, Russian ships abandon Tartus



And still right now the only ship the USA has near Syria is the Donald Cook.



Guess that ship had the last laugh after all.



Assad is not fleeing anywhere. Neither will the Russians.

You sound like a patriotard.

They already have.

You sound misinformed. They already have.You sound misinformed. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 07:20 AM











Post: #11 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 07:15 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 06:26 AM) Now here's the fun 4D chess stuff:



>>>Many objectives fulfilled. Has made clear he will punish chem warfare. Spooks Russians. Gets the war mongers off his ass. Kills nobody. Has the whole world looking into false flags.<<<





>>>Look to General Mattis statement.<<<



http://i.magaimg.net/img/32er.jpg



link to image: http://i.magaimg.net/img/32er.jpg





>>>1) Take something away that the other side already have (new sanctions, new tariffs, etc)

2) Create a crisis point and escalate

3) Offer an olive branch - forcing opponent to negotiate just to win back part of what they had taken away from them

4) Tell the other side how smart they are and how they got such a great deal



If you know commercial real estate, its what they do in negotiations all day. Hes just trying to apply it to politics....<<<

Ever hear of the boy who cried wolf? Putin upped the ante Trump doesn't send the missles he folds.



His word is untrustworthy. In business all you have is your word. Either way he has lost. Either he is a liar and not a man of his word or he sparks a conflagration that will see many dead.



I'd say he is insane.

As long as someone gets the upper hand over the american war machine for once, I am all for that.

If the war mchine gets humiliated then i am fine with Trumps word being untrustworthy.

Great trade: trump is seen as untrustworthy in return for a humiliating blow to the neocon neolib MIC war machine.



A win all around. As long as someone gets the upper hand over the american war machine for once, I am all for that.If the war mchine gets humiliated then i am fine with Trumps word being untrustworthy.Great trade: trump is seen as untrustworthy in return for a humiliating blow to the neocon neolib MIC war machine.A win all around. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 07:23 AM











Post: #12 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

engineering Wrote: (04-12-2018 07:16 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 07:15 AM) Assad is not fleeing anywhere. Neither will the Russians.

You sound like a patriotard.

They already have.

You sound misinformed.

You sound like someone without a link.

You have some patriotrd fever thinking we are so badass that better people than you will just flee because of the beauty of our weapons ...murka fukk yeah!!! You sound like someone without a link.You have some patriotrd fever thinking we are so badass that better people than you will just flee because of the beauty of our weapons ...murka fukk yeah!!! LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 07:23 AM











Post: #13 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

If he doesn't bomb the place his bluff has been called. He does and he goes down in history as one of the world's worst war criminals. Organicnongmoaware

Registered User

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 07:23 AM



Posts: 15,408









Post: #14 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

Whatever I post online is for entertainment only LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 07:32 AM











Post: #15 RE: Trump warmongers Russia, then says he wants to be friends

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 07:23 AM) If he doesn't bomb the place his bluff has been called. He does and he goes down in history as one of the world's worst war criminals.

As long as someone gets the upper hand over the american war machine for once, I am all for his bluff being called.

If the war mchine gets humiliated then i am fine with Trumps word being untrustworthy.

Great trade: trump is seen as untrustworthy in return for a humiliating blow to the neocon neolib MIC war machine.



A win all around.



No one dies. As long as someone gets the upper hand over the american war machine for once, I am all for his bluff being called.If the war mchine gets humiliated then i am fine with Trumps word being untrustworthy.Great trade: trump is seen as untrustworthy in return for a humiliating blow to the neocon neolib MIC war machine.A win all around.No one dies. Advertisement

















WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump is slated to headline a fundraiser to benefit Senate Republicans in Texas on May 14, according to an invitation obtained by The Washington Post, as attention in the party shifts more urgently toward preserving control of the upper chamber of Congress in the midterm elections.

The president is scheduled to attend a luncheon in Houston for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is the Senate GOP's campaign arm, according to the invitation. Contribution levels range from $5,000 per person to $100,000 per couple, the invitation says.On Wednesday night, like most other weeknights, it was to be expected that President Donald Trump would be tuning into his favorite prime-time pundit. But as if his followers needed a reminder, the president tweeted about it.

"Big show tonight on @seanhannity!" Trump tweeted, promoting Sean Hannity's 9 p.m. segment on Fox News. By early Thursday morning, Hannity was the No. 1 topic trending on Twitter, and scores of viewers watched as Hannity fired out his usual attacks on his favorite subjects: Hillary Clinton, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and former FBI director James Comey.

In a conspiratorial monologue, Hannity charted connections he sees among all three of them. The pundit outlined what he described as "obvious Deep State crime families trying to take down the president," consisting of the Clinton "family," the Comey "family" and the Mueller "family."

Hannity said he was inspired by Comey, who appeared in a video this week promoting an interview between Comey and ABC's George Stephanopoulos that will air Sunday. In the interview, Stephanopoulos suggests that Comey compared Trump to a "mob boss."

"Mr. Comey, you're really going to compare the sitting president of the United States to a mob boss so you can make money?" Hannity said of the former FBI director, who is currently promoting his soon-to-be-released book. "If he's going to use a sweeping analogy I've decided tonight we're going to use the Comey standard . . . and make some comparisons of our own."

He began with what he called "a family responsible for actual crimes . . . the head of the notorious political cabal, of course Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Clinton crime family."

For the Clinton family, Hannity brought up allegations of sexual misconduct against President Bill Clinton and, of course, accused Hillary Clinton of committing crimes, obstructing justice and mishandling national secrets on a private server. Linked to the Clinton "crime family" were individuals such as Hillary Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, "sketchy" former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, former attorney general Loretta E. Lynch, and others, including Christopher Steele, the author of the "dossier" alleging ties between Trump and Russia.

Then there's the "Mueller Crime Family," Hannity said. The host drew connections between the special counsel and his "best friend" Comey, as well as notorious gangster and killer Whitey Bulger. Hannity accused Mueller of "looking the other way" at Bulger's crimes while he was a federal prosecutor in Boston. Then, of course, Hannity mapped out the "Comey Crime Family," linking the former FBI director to Lynch, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, Steele, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and "fellow Comey Deep State sycophant" former CIA director John Brennan.

Though Hannity retweeted Trump's tweet promoting his Wednesday night show, he insisted that the president "was not given ANY heads up on my monologue using the 'Comey' standard!!!"

Regardless of what Trump knew before the show, the president is known to watch Hannity's show regularly and look to it for guidance.

As CNN's Brian Stelter tweeted, Wednesday night illustrated that "the line where Fox News ends and where Trump begins is getting blurrier by the day."

Aides have said Trump regularly calls Hannity before or after the program to give feedback, The Post's Josh Dawsey has reported. "Aides sometimes plot to have guests make points on Fox that they have been unable to get the president to agree to in person," Dawsey wrote.

Hannity on Wednesday night once again called the Russia investigation a "witch hunt," as does Trump, and brought on guests who attempted to discredit Justice Department officials and the special counsel.

One guest, Joseph E. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who served as an independent counsel and a special counsel in the 1990s, called Comey a "dirty cop" and said Mueller has surrounded himself with "a bunch of legal terrorists" who are trying to snag Trump in a "perjury trap."

A Fox News regular who has advised Trump, diGenova said Attorney General Jeff Sessions has an "obligation" to fire Rosenstein as soon as Thursday morning in light of this week's raids of the office, home and hotel room of Trump's personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen.

Rosenstein, who oversees Mueller's work, signed off on the search warrant. Cohen is under federal investigation over possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign-finance violations, The Post reported. Trump lashed out Tuesday at prosecutors for the FBI raid, claiming that it signals an end of attorney-client privilege and tweeting: "A TOTAL WITCH HUNT!!!"

On Hannity's show, diGenova encouraged Trump to stop cooperating with the Russia probe. His remarks fall in line with a plan former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is pitching to the White House, The Post reported Wednesday. Bannon is recommending that Trump fire Rosenstein and end cooperation with the special counsel.

https://youtu.be/WR4cwAqkZqoMore than 180,000 people have been killed in Mexico since then-President Felipe Calderon sent the army to fight organized crime groups in his native state of Michoacan in 2006.

But one small town in that state says it hasn't had a homicide since 2011 because its residents - led by women - took up arms to kick out groups who had expanded from drug trafficking into illegal logging.Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 3 Vote(s) - 3.67 Average

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Iran Says It Could Enrich Uranium to 20% Within Two Days Black [email protected]

We All Watching

User ID: kaput

04-12-2018 06:28 AM



Posts: 15,460









Post: #1 Iran Says It Could Enrich Uranium to 20% Within Two Days

Advertisement



The boast, which came from Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) spokesman, Behrouz Kamalvandi, was consistent with other claims from Iranian officials. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that in the absence of a deal, the United States will see its impact within a week or less than a week.



The boasts that Iran would quickly return to an accelerated nuclear weapons program in the absence of the deal are consistent with claims made by other Iranian officials, and that the nuclear deal left much of Irans nuclear infrastructure untouched.





http://www.thetower.org/6140-iran-says-i...-two-days/



[ ]SooOOoon[/size]



On the occasion of its National Nuclear Day, Iran boasted that it could enrich uranium to 20% in just two days time, if the United States would withdraw from the deal, the Associated Press reported Monday. The threat is an indication that the 2015 nuclear deal left much of the Islamic Republics nuclear infrastructure intact.The boast, which came from Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) spokesman, Behrouz Kamalvandi, was consistent with other claims from Iranian officials. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said that in the absence of a deal, the United States will see its impact within a week or less than a week.The boasts that Iran would quickly return to an accelerated nuclear weapons program in the absence of the deal are consistent with claims made by other Iranian officials, and that the nuclear deal left much of Irans nuclear infrastructure untouched.[ ]SooOOoon[/size] LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 08:14 AM











Post: #2 RE: Iran Says It Could Enrich Uranium to 20% Within Two Days

They should. Those who gave up their WMD/chemical weapons like Iraq, Libya and Syria have been taken out anyway what benefit is there in giving up your WMD?

None. Zero. Ziltch. You just make your demise easier and less likely.



If you train a dog to bite, don't blame it when it does. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 08:16 AM











Post: #3 RE: Iran Says It Could Enrich Uranium to 20% Within Two Days

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 08:14 AM) They should. Those who gave up their WMD/chemical weapons like Iraq, Libya and Syria have been taken out anyway what benefit is there in giving up your WMD?

None. Zero. Ziltch. You just make your demise easier and xxx less xxx likely.



If you train a dog to bite, don't blame it when it does.

should read " more likely" should read "likely" Archangel

Michael

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 08:24 AM



Posts: 14,103









Post: #4 RE: Iran Says It Could Enrich Uranium to 20% Within Two Days

If nuclear disarmament is desired, the P5 + 1 agreement was an excellent one. Iran has been adhering to their part of the bargain. Iran would be an excellent ally, as compared to Israel, which drives America's war agendas. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 10:20 AM











Post: #5 RE: Iran Says It Could Enrich Uranium to 20% Within Two Days

WARNED, not Boasted ! beans

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 10:26 AM











Post: #6 RE: Iran Says It Could Enrich Uranium to 20% Within Two Days

I heard Japan has every thing needed for a nuke and with their tech could put one on a rocket in a week or two..



Crazy times ... LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 11:21 AM











Post: #7 RE: Iran Says It Could Enrich Uranium to 20% Within Two Days

Good, time to nuke Israel, what are they waiting for, just do it.















A former Texas State University student was sentenced Thursday to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty in connection with an August 2016 drunk driving crash that killed a man and his unborn child.

Shana Elliott will begin her 14-year prison term Thursday.

Elliott plead guilty to intoxication assault and two counts of intoxication manslaughter in March, roughly a year and a half after she drunkenly drove her vehicle into a young couple's car in San Marcos. She was sentenced to seven years for each intoxication manslaughter charge and 10 years of probation for intoxication assault.

Judge Jack Robison ruled Thursday that Elliott would serve the prison sentences consecutively.

RELATED: Shana Elliott sentenced to prison in fatal San Marcos crash that killed man, unborn child

Kristian Guerrero, who was 19 weeks pregnant, and her husband Fabian Guerrero-Moreno were headed to their Bryan home in August 2016 when Elliott, who had been drinking on the San Marcos River, plowed into their vehicle.

Guerrero-Moreno and the couple's unborn child were killed in the crash.

Elliott will be eligible for parole in three in a half years for the first count of intoxication manslaughter. If she is granted parole, she will then begin to serve a second seven-year sentence for the second intoxication manslaughter charge.

She was given 10 years probation for the intoxication assault charge, which she will also begin Thursday. Should Elliott serve a full 14 years in prison, she will not be on probation when she gets out.

If she does not spend a full 10 years in prison, she will have to be on probation for the remainder of time.

RELATED: Records: 8 charged with murder in Bexar County in March

A condition of her probation includes turning herself in to the Hays County Jail every year on the anniversary of the incident, Aug. 1 and stay there through Aug. 3.

Guerrero, who survived a brain bleed, took the stand after the verdict was read at the March trial and spoke directly to Elliott.

"You're a murderer and a thief. You stole my life," Guerrero said. "You don't know me. You don't know what my life was like before Fabian. He finally made my world stable. I finally felt safe and you stole that from me."

Kelsey Bradshaw is a digital reporter for mySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| kbradshaw@express-news.net | Twitter: @kbrad5Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 9 Vote(s) - 2.33 Average

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Page: 1 2 3 4 5 ... 7 While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current spo snouou

Vocem sine nomine audivit!

User ID: kaput

04-12-2018 12:30 PM



Posts: 67,592









Post: #1 While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

Advertisement



How can that be? Residents can thank the Gulf Stream, an ocean conveyor belt that pushes warm water their way from the tropics.



And Northern Europeans arent the only ones who should be thankful, either. Much of Europe and the east coast of North America benefit from a massive system of circulating seawater called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, or AMOC. The Gulf Stream is just one small part of that system.



Sunlight might be most intense at Earths equator, but ocean circulation pushes that tropical heat toward the poles. When the currents transporting that heat change, it can have major impacts.



And now new evidence suggests that climate change is already weakening this massive ocean circulatory system. In a pair of papers published Wednesday in Nature, two sets of independent researchers used very different techniques to reach the same startling conclusion.



Both studies found that melting ice from Greenland has spilled huge quantities of freshwater into the North Atlantic, diluting the dense salinity of North Atlantic currents and weakening the AMOC by 15 percent. However, the results disagree on when the changes started.



For decades, scientists have worried that human-caused global warming could weaken this system and drastically alter weather patterns. Its an idea best known from the scientifically and cinematically awful 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow.



But nonetheless, scientists say that changes to these Atlantic Ocean conveyor belts have brought some of the most abrupt climate changes in the past.



more:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brie...ange-amoc/ When you picture the rugged coastlines of Norway, tropical heat probably doesnt come to mind, but it should. Even in the countrys Arctic reaches, the coast is typically free from ice and snow, and the weather is often more Seattle than Anchorage.How can that be? Residents can thank the Gulf Stream, an ocean conveyor belt that pushes warm water their way from the tropics.And Northern Europeans arent the only ones who should be thankful, either. Much of Europe and the east coast of North America benefit from a massive system of circulating seawater called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, or AMOC. The Gulf Stream is just one small part of that system.Sunlight might be most intense at Earths equator, but ocean circulation pushes that tropical heat toward the poles. When the currents transporting that heat change, it can have major impacts.And now new evidence suggests that climate change is already weakening this massive ocean circulatory system. In a pair of papers published Wednesday in Nature, two sets of independent researchers used very different techniques to reach the same startling conclusion.Both studies found that melting ice from Greenland has spilled huge quantities of freshwater into the North Atlantic, diluting the dense salinity of North Atlantic currents and weakening the AMOC by 15 percent. However, the results disagree on when the changes started.For decades, scientists have worried that human-caused global warming could weaken this system and drastically alter weather patterns. Its an idea best known from the scientifically and cinematically awful 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow.But nonetheless, scientists say that changes to these Atlantic Ocean conveyor belts have brought some of the most abrupt climate changes in the past.more: LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 01:07 PM











Post: #2 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

Eggs are bad for you . LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 01:10 PM











Post: #3 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

spo snouou Wrote: (04-12-2018 12:30 PM)



How can that be? Residents can thank the Gulf Stream, an ocean conveyor belt that pushes warm water their way from the tropics.



And Northern Europeans arent the only ones who should be thankful, either. Much of Europe and the east coast of North America benefit from a massive system of circulating seawater called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, or AMOC. The Gulf Stream is just one small part of that system.



Sunlight might be most intense at Earths equator, but ocean circulation pushes that tropical heat toward the poles. When the currents transporting that heat change, it can have major impacts.



And now new evidence suggests that climate change is already weakening this massive ocean circulatory system. In a pair of papers published Wednesday in Nature, two sets of independent researchers used very different techniques to reach the same startling conclusion.



Both studies found that melting ice from Greenland has spilled huge quantities of freshwater into the North Atlantic, diluting the dense salinity of North Atlantic currents and weakening the AMOC by 15 percent. However, the results disagree on when the changes started.



For decades, scientists have worried that human-caused global warming could weaken this system and drastically alter weather patterns. Its an idea best known from the scientifically and cinematically awful 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow.



But nonetheless, scientists say that changes to these Atlantic Ocean conveyor belts have brought some of the most abrupt climate changes in the past.



more:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brie...ange-amoc/ When you picture the rugged coastlines of Norway, tropical heat probably doesnt come to mind, but it should. Even in the countrys Arctic reaches, the coast is typically free from ice and snow, and the weather is often more Seattle than Anchorage.How can that be? Residents can thank the Gulf Stream, an ocean conveyor belt that pushes warm water their way from the tropics.And Northern Europeans arent the only ones who should be thankful, either. Much of Europe and the east coast of North America benefit from a massive system of circulating seawater called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, or AMOC. The Gulf Stream is just one small part of that system.Sunlight might be most intense at Earths equator, but ocean circulation pushes that tropical heat toward the poles. When the currents transporting that heat change, it can have major impacts.And now new evidence suggests that climate change is already weakening this massive ocean circulatory system. In a pair of papers published Wednesday in Nature, two sets of independent researchers used very different techniques to reach the same startling conclusion.Both studies found that melting ice from Greenland has spilled huge quantities of freshwater into the North Atlantic, diluting the dense salinity of North Atlantic currents and weakening the AMOC by 15 percent. However, the results disagree on when the changes started.For decades, scientists have worried that human-caused global warming could weaken this system and drastically alter weather patterns. Its an idea best known from the scientifically and cinematically awful 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow.But nonetheless, scientists say that changes to these Atlantic Ocean conveyor belts have brought some of the most abrupt climate changes in the past.more:

Oceans still eating your global warming, cockhead?



Oceans still eating your global warming, cockhead? LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 01:15 PM











Post: #4 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

I did a lot of research on this very subject many years ago and wrote a long story on a blog I had back in the day.



Interesting stuff to say the least. Donald J Trump

Homer's University of GREATNESS

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04-12-2018 01:39 PM



Posts: 6,934









Post: #5 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

"Go with the flow, like a twig on the shoulders of a mighty stream" Del Griffith



Damrod

lop guest

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04-12-2018 01:40 PM











Post: #6 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

Homer Simpson Wrote: (04-12-2018 01:39 PM)

BlackCat

Every day is an extra day

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04-12-2018 02:35 PM



Posts: 13,451









Post: #7 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current





https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/oc...,32.64,347 Wow, you can see it dissipating in the middle of the Atlantic... Do not grow old no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.



~ Albert Einstein LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 02:44 PM











Post: #8 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

Its the after effect of the Sabotaged Deep Water Horizon, Done purposely under Obamas watch to effect the weather in the EU by diverting or slowing down the gulf stream....



You caused it now live with it! LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 02:45 PM











Post: #9 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 02:44 PM) Its the after effect of the Sabotaged Deep Water Horizon, Done purposely under Obamas watch to effect the weather in the EU by diverting or slowing down the gulf stream....



You caused it now live with it!





spo snouou

Vocem sine nomine audivit!

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04-12-2018 03:12 PM



Posts: 67,592









Post: #10 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

BlackCat Wrote: (04-12-2018 02:35 PM) Wow, you can see it dissipating in the middle of the Atlantic...



https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/oc...,32.64,347

Monk-1

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04-12-2018 03:20 PM



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Post: #11 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 02:44 PM) Its the after effect of the Sabotaged Deep Water Horizon, Done purposely under Obamas watch to effect the weather in the EU by diverting or slowing down the gulf stream....



You caused it now live with it!

Yeah i have no problem with that. The rest of Europe might. lol Yeah i have no problem with that. The rest of Europe might. lol Monk-1

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04-12-2018 03:21 PM



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Post: #12 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

Let`s see how it looks after next winter... LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 03:26 PM











Post: #13 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

No one cares. Damrod

lop guest

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04-12-2018 03:35 PM











Post: #14 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

so?



Are you still so stupid that you think radical changes to our way of living is going to fix this?



Are you really that stupid?



regardless of the "cause"...the tipping point has been crossed (if you believe the same people you quote all the time)



Some scientist say we are now in the throes of abrupt "irreversible" climate change. One scientist I watched gives the human race less than 10 years and there is not a god damned thing you or anyone else is going to do to stop it.



So you expect me to radically change my way of living now when it won't matter either way?



Nope...that is not going to happen.



Live your life like it is the end of the world and be happy.



Prepare yourself for the big dirt nap and stop whining and pining for the years you were never guaranteed to begin with Lobster Boy

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04-12-2018 03:42 PM



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Post: #15 RE: While you were sleeping Climate Change Weakened a Crucial Ocean Current

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 03:26 PM) No one cares.

Exactly, while I prepare to shovel yet ANOTHER 8' of frigging GLOBAL WARMING off my sidewalk after the last 4 WEEKS of the friggin same.



Fools who believe in GLOBAL WARMING need to shovel my sidewalk, the Exactly, while I prepare to shovel yet ANOTHER 8' of frigging GLOBAL WARMING off my sidewalk after the last 4 WEEKS of the friggin same.Fools who believe in GLOBAL WARMING need to shovel my sidewalk, the [email protected] Advertisement

















AUSTIN  President Donald Trump is returning to Houston next month in a quest for cash to help Republicans defend their majorities in Congress.

Trump is scheduled to headline a May 14 fundraising luncheon at a location yet to be publicly disclosed. The fundraiser is to help Senate Republicans raise money for the 2018 midterms that have Republicans on defense trying to hold their majorities in the House and Senate.

The Washington Post, which first reported the event, said the invitation is requesting donors give up to $100,000 per couple to attend the event.

The event will essentially be in Sen. Ted Cruz's backyard, but it's less about helping him in his first re-election bid than it is about helping bolster GOP finances in battleground states like Florida, Missouri and Indiana, where Republicans are in major struggles that could determine control of the Senate.

Cruz is facing stiff opposition from Democrat Beto O'Rourke for re-election, but is considered the favorite in the race. Texas has three other Republican-held U.S. House seats that have become top targets for Democrats as they seek to retake the majority in Congress. One of those seats is in Houston, where U.S. Rep. John Culberson is considered one of the top targets for Democrats in all of the United States.

Culberson is considered vulnerable partly because of how poorly Trump did in the Houston area in 2016. Despite winning the state, Trump lost Harris County to Hillary Clinton by 160,000 more votes than Republican nominee Mitt Romney lost to President Barack Obama in 2012.

And within the confines of Culberson's 7th Congressional District, Clinton won 48.5 percent of the vote to 47 percent for Trump.

Republicans hold a 51 to 49 seat majority in the U.S. Senate. In the House, Republicans hold a 237 to 193 seat edge, with five seats vacant. Democrats are increasingly optimistic they can win the seats necessary to take control of the House, though the Senate represents a more difficult challenge. In a recent fundraising letter to supporters, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said the party needs to win two of three seats from Arizona, Nevada and Texas held by Republicans to retake the majority in the Senate.

Texas and more specifically Houston have become among the Republican Party's most important fundraising hubs outside of the Washington, D.C., region and New York City. In 2016, the Houston metro area donated more than $44 million to federal campaigns and political action committees tied to Republicans. D.C., New York and Chicago were the only metro regions that contributed more to Republican politicians, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Trump's fundraising run follows House Speaker Paul Ryan's trip through Texas this month. Ryan's political action committee touted raising more than $4 million during a four-day run through Texas before Ryan announced he is retiring from Congress.

Democrats, too, have made Houston a regular stop to bolster their cause. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have been in Houston for different events this year to raise money for the party and to motivate Texas Democrats. Schumer attended a private fundraiser near Hobby Airport in January to specifically help Democrats seeking re-election in Florida and Indiana. Pelosi was in Houston in February for the Harris County Democratic Party fundraiser.

jeremy.wallace@chron.com

twitter.com/JeremySWallaceThis story was originally published April 30, 2016.

A set of leaked photos purport to show gun-toting female assassins in the employ of Mexican drug cartels.

RELATED: Masked assassins for the Juarez Cartel in Mexico shown holding guns in leaked photos

The Mexican outlet El Blog del Narco published the photos last week, showing women apparently associated with cartels posing  some masked, others in various states of undress  with assault rifles, tigers, liquor and trucks.

Despite a heavily masculine image, Mexico's cartels have long counted women among their ranks from those managing funds to those spilling blood.

RELATED: Video shows suspected drug smugglers climbing U.S.-Mexico border fence in Arizona

Federal police arrested Guadalupe Fernandez Valencia in February in Culiacan. Authorities have accused Valencia, known as "La Patrona," of being a financial operator for Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

In October, authorities in Chihuahua captured Ana Marie Hernandez, known as "La Muneca." She fled Texas in 2013 after pleading guilty to charges that she smuggled drugs for the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels.

And, in September, authorities apprehended Melissa Margarita Calderon Ojeda, also known as "La China."

Ojeda is the alleged leader of the Damaso cell of Los Antrax, an enforcement arm of the Sinaloa cartel.

RELATED: More than 100 undocumented immigrants captured in Texas after crossing U.S.-Mexico border

Cartel members and associates have been known to flaunt their wealth and weapons on social media, sometimes leading to trouble with the law: Jose Rodrigo Arechiga-Gamboa  a high-ranking enforcer for the Sinaloa cartel known as "El Chino Antrax"  was arrested in the Netherlands on Dec. 30, 2013, after months of sharing his exploits online.

jfechter@mySA.com

Twitter: @JFreportsUsername: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 1 Vote(s) - 1 Average

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Page: 1 2 3 4 Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 01:59 PM











Post: #1 Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

Advertisement











Donald Trump clarifies. It's all over now.Donald Trump clarifies. LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 02:43 PM











Post: #2 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

He never intended to do it, putin owns him. LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 02:46 PM











Post: #3 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 02:43 PM) He never intended to do it, putin owns him.

It's looking like EVERYONE owns him now.



Trump the Chump. It's looking like EVERYONE owns him now.Trump the Chump. LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 03:02 PM











Post: #4 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel





ok, now listen NetnYahoo..when we say shoot you shoot



yes I shoot when told



https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ran...al-history Obama hands Israel the largest military aid deal in historyok, now listen NetnYahoo..when we say shoot you shootyes I shoot when told Damrod

lop guest

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04-12-2018 03:07 PM











Post: #5 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

He's stuck between a rock and a hard place. Scylla and Charybdis.



He was elected on the platform of no more foreign interventions, no more regime change...and ending the ongoing participation in the trainwreck of the middle east.



The limp wristed weaklings want to jump in like big brother and stick their nose where it doesn't belong...in an internal conflict of a sovereign nation...



he can either appease the wimps...or he can do what the people that elected him expect him to do...which is nothing. Get out of it and stay out of it.



no more war... Flic Vange

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04-12-2018 03:24 PM



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Post: #6 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel





When are they making Jeruslaem the capitol of Israel, or whatever May. Start a war in Syria, steal their land,(oil and gas etc are a bonus) hey presto, their GREATER ISRAEL IS COMPLETE???? Also to usher in their sick God or who ever he is Moshiach. Sick mad murdering bastards!!!!













This is all it is about.When are they making Jeruslaem the capitol of Israel, or whatever May. Start a war in Syria, steal their land,(oil and gas etc are a bonus) hey presto, their GREATER ISRAEL IS COMPLETE???? Also to usher in their sick God or who ever he is Moshiach. Sick mad murdering bastards!!!! Voltaire: I detest your views but I would give my life to protect your rights to express them.



https://globalcrypto.exchange/i/R0NYMTYxMDUyMDY0OQ==



Bitcoin-bc1qq9r87uasrxv59hz92zy9t47r96aezdfuqnujfx

Bitcoin-bc1qq9r87uasrxv59hz92zy9t47r96aezdfuqnujfx Archangel

Michael

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04-12-2018 03:33 PM



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Post: #7 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel





https://www.globalresearch.ca/greater-is...st/5324815 Greater Israel: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 05:42 PM











Post: #8 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

Builder of the Adytum

Enemy of the State

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04-12-2018 05:51 PM



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Post: #9 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

Maybe don't count your chickens before they have hatched. Archangel

Michael

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04-12-2018 06:54 PM



Posts: 14,103









Post: #10 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel





Philip M. GIRALDI | 12.04.2018 | FEATURED STORY

Who Wants a Hot War with Syria and Iran?



https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2...-iran.html Philip M. GIRALDI | 12.04.2018 | FEATURED STORYWho Wants a Hot War with Syria and Iran? Krampus

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04-12-2018 07:16 PM



Posts: 10,188









Post: #11 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

Amazing that such a small blip in the middle east can run a nation with the biggest military machine!

It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.  Mark Twain DrVIP

Registered User

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04-12-2018 07:22 PM



Posts: 3,902









Post: #12 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

wow some people are just crazy.



greater Israel... o dear.



yeah American scheming in vietnam and kosovo were all for greater Israel.

the US has no interests in syria... nope. Dreamily Resonant VIP LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 07:27 PM











Post: #13 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

Ummmmm...he hit them before and will again. Just be patient. If you react too soon then it's expected. Even Russia sent their ships away. So it's coming. LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 10:41 PM











Post: #14 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

Archangel Wrote: (04-12-2018 03:33 PM) Greater Israel: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East

LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 10:54 PM











Post: #15 RE: Trump's chumpout on bombing Syria is yet another setback for Greater Israel

DrVIP Wrote: (04-12-2018 07:22 PM) wow some people are just crazy.



greater Israel... o dear.



yeah American scheming in vietnam and kosovo were all for greater Israel.

the US has no interests in syria... nope.

The central banking string pullers have an interest in syria. The central banking string pullers have an interest in syria. Advertisement

















Aldi has announced it is seeking applications from County Longfords small to medium Irish food and drink producers to enter their products to win a place on its new Grow with Aldi supplier development programme.

Aldi is investing 500,000 in the new programme to give up-and-coming Irish food and drink companies the chance to supply all 130 Aldi stores during a special Irish Food Market promotion in August 2018, and potentially secure a permanent place on its shelves with a long-term contract.

ALSO READ: Longford firm to press ahead with major expansion after snapping up key council building

Aldi will select up to 50 of Irelands and County Longfords best new artisan products to take part in the promotion, with each supplier providing a guaranteed volume of their product. Up to five of the products will be given the opportunity to become core line Aldi listed products, winning a contract to be sold in Aldis Irish stores year-round.

Developed in partnership with Bord Bia, Grow with Aldi has been designed to help small to medium Irish food and drink businesses secure a retail listing. Participants will receive tailored mentoring and bespoke workshops with Aldi buyers and Bord Bia technical experts, teaching them the skills to help grow and develop their product and business.

ALSO READ: Longford set to benefit as initial 2m allocated to new Irelands Hidden Heartlands tourism brand

Speaking at the launch, Giles Hurley, Group Managing Director Aldi Ireland, said: We know there are fantastic products from emerging businesses in County Longford and we want to make it easier for them to get our shelves.

We have always led the way with Irish sourcing and supporting Irish food and drink companies, having developed long-term partnerships with over 175 Irish suppliers throughout the country. Last year we increased our support for small Irish suppliers by significantly reducing their payment terms.

In October we were joined by over 400 of Irelands leading food and drink companies at our Irish supplier conference, where we outlined our plans to invest further in our Irish sourced product range and the fantastic opportunities available to small and medium producers to partner with Aldi and supply our stores in Ireland and abroad.

ALSO READ: Longford's fodder crisis deepens

Our Grow with Aldi supplier development programme is the next step in our commitment to buying Irish. For a lot of small food and drink businesses, trying to secure a listing with a major retailer puts huge pressure on their team.

Recent research by Core Research found that provenance is of huge importance to Irish consumers when purchasing groceries. When questioned on what are the most important factors when making grocery purchasing decisions, one in two (47%) answered that the products are made in Ireland, while 78% of Irish shoppers said they always choose an Irish made product over a similar imported option. The survey also revealed that two out of three (66%) consumers now associate Aldi with selling, locally produced Irish food. Aldi spent over 700m with its 175 Irish suppliers in 2016, while over 50% of Aldis grocery range is sourced from Irish producers, suppliers and manufacturers.

Commenting on the programme, Tara McCarthy, Bord Bia CEO said: "We know from our extensive research the importance Irish people place on the availability of locally sourced products.Grow with Aldi will help meet consumers appetite for Irish products and I encourage our smaller Irish producers to get involved. It is a comprehensive programme that provides the platform for companies to develop and expand their businesses exponentially.

Food and drink companies in Ireland with ambitions to take their product from concept to shelf and see it stocked in Aldis 130 Irish stores can apply for the Grow with Aldi supplier development programme by contacting grow@aldi.ie. Further details are available at www.aldi.ie/grow.Longford voters could be going to the polls before Christmas if the soundings of some local TDs are to be believed.

Fianna Fail Longford Westmeath TD Robert Troy said he was fully supportive of comments made by front bench colleague Barry Cowen last week which indicated a general election was in the offing.

Mr Troy, who is Fianna Fails spokesperson on Transport, Sport and Tourism, echoed Mr Cowens remarks by saying his party were fully entitled to refrain from renewing its confidence and supply agreement with Fine Gael once Octobers budget has been announced.

We (Fianna Fail) continued to sign up to the agreement after the last budget when there was no other show in town to provide a stable government so that our people would have stability and we have lived up to the letter of the law in that regard and shown our bona fide, he said.

The Ballynacargy politician stopped short of indicating when an election would likely be called but stressed Fianna Fail were intent on being in government whenever the 33rd Dail is convened.

Mr Troy said that belief remained steadfast despite recent opinion polls which showed satisfaction with the Government was continuing to grow.

A Red C Sunday Business Post poll released at the end of March put Fine Gael on 33 points, nine clear of Fianna Fail on 24.

Mr Troy said while he was disappointed with the result, it was an outcome the former Westmeath county councillor has not put a great deal of weight behind.

I didnt really see where that came from as the poll before that in the Sunday Business Post had us only one per cent behind Fine Gael, he said.

Rather Mr Troy blamed the slump on the partys need to grow its support base in and around the Dublin area, adding Fianna Fail strategists were still hellbent on securing two out of Longford Westmeaths four constituency seats.

That certainly is the target, he said.

It's an aspiration Fine Gael are also looking to realise when voters are tasked with choosing between its three candidates, Peter Burke, Micheal Carrigy and Gabrielle McFadden.

Unlike Mr Troy, Fine Gael's sitting Mullingar TD expressed a desire in seeing its present working arrangement with Fianna Fail continue into a fourth year.

I would imagine negotiations will take place over the summer, he said, despite conceding the current accord was far from perfect.

Mr Burke added: What it has done is it has provided the country with a stable government and when you look at the last number of opinion polls no party is in sight of winning an overall majority.

A large slice of that stability Mr Burke alluded to has, according to the chartered accountant, conjured up plenty of positives for rural counties like Longford.

Seven out of ten jobs are now being created outside of the commuter belt, he said.

Yes it's slow but the important thing to draw from it is its sustainable.

The Leader, at the time of writing, was unable to make contact with OPW Minister and Mr Burke's fellow Longford-Westmeath TD Kevin 'Boxer' Moran.

ALSO READ:

General Election 2016 cost over 260k to stage in Longford-WestmeathAn initial 2m has been allocated to start the development stage of the new Irelands Hidden Heartlands tourism brand.

It was also revealed during today's unveiling of the brand in the Hodson Bay Hotel that 'further funding' will follow.

Irelands Hidden Heartlands is Failte Ireland's latest brand - designed to boost tourism and drive visitor growth across Longford and the Midlands region.



The 2m first round of investment will help to develop visitor experiences, support industry development and develop marketing campaigns for the region.



Longford County Council members, Cllr Gerry Warnock and Chairperson of Longford Tourism, Cllr Micheal Carrigy, attended today's unveiling which was performed by Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross TD.

ALSO READ: New Irelands Hidden Heartlands brand will drive tourism growth in Longford

Failte Irelands Director of Commercial Development, Paul Keeley, said that significant economic activity can be generated by the new Midlands brand as well as additional tourism revenue and employment if the brand realises its full potential.

Mr Keeley added: We believe that Irelands Hidden Heartlands has the potential to attract more visitors to the region each year - transforming the local and regional tourist industry, which to date has under-performed the rest of the country.

Mr Keeley pointed to parts of the region east of the Shannon and stressed that Failte Ireland was building in an overlap here with Irelands Ancient East to allow local operators to decide to leverage one or both of the visitor brands, whatever best suits their businesses.

ALSO READ: Longford poised for significant tourism growth and jobs

Mr Keeley explained: Its important to note that we have not defined the boundaries of our various brand territories based on county boundary lines. Instead, we have looked at clusters of product and the distinctive experience they might offer. There is an area along the east of the Shannon river that is strongly rooted in the new brands appeal but also has many historical attractions which are already benefiting significantly from being part of our Irelands Ancient East brand. Therefore, weve built in some flexibility in this overlapping area to allow local businesses to make the most appropriate decisions for themselves.

From our experience, the visitor is not concerned with our local county boundaries. Instead, they are more interested in the things to see and do and how easy these are to access as part of their itinerary. This is what makes a holiday special. The overlapping area offers the tourism businesses the opportunity to align their own visitor experience with the brand it fits best into and which gives them the best potential to grow.

ALSO READ: Longford firm to press ahead with major expansion after snapping up key council buildingHumans of Longford spoke to Michael Hegarty from Ballymahon yesterday as he collected fodder in Longford town delivered by Lakeland Dairies.

" I'm farming near Ballymahon ......but just now I'm here at Lakelands on the Strokestown Rd., collecting badly needed fodder....there's an awful lot of farmers in Co Longford who are short of silage or any fodder for their cattle......



....this load was imported from England, I believe......this morning two huge lorry loads arrived here....you can see yourself now....it's nearly all gone, already.....there was a huge demand for it.....and there's still a line of tractors and trailers waiting their turn.....



....oh, this load is extremely important to me......for a good while now....I've been rationing and buying extra nuts......it's the longest winter I can ever remember....sure it's been raining since last August you could say....the old farmers talk about the Big Snow of '47....I think this'll be called The Long Winter......



...you see, no one knows how long this winter will last...a week more...a month ?.....



.....it's a very stressful time....really stressful...financially it's a huge extra cost....there's a terrible social cost too....psychological.....it's very worrying.....



....I suppose most farmers work alone now.....and when you're in the middle of a crisis, you'd don't realise there's others in the same position.....



....no farmer wants to see his animals go hungry....they're close to their animals.....you don't want to see them suffering....yea, it's stressful 'cos you don't know where the next feed is coming from....



...the neighbours have already helped as much as humanly possible.....now....there's nothing left....so the future is very uncertain.....that's a horrible way to live...horrible....



...the land is fierce wet too....there's no sign of growth.....animals that were let out early had to be brought back in.......



...earlier on we got help from Wexford and Carlow....they helped the Leitrim farmers too....but now Wexford and Carlow have run out....it's not a great situation, is it ?......



...look, I have to go....but actually, before I go.... could I say a BIG THANKS to Lakelands and all their staff and all the local suppliers and all the people who are helping me and the others......



....only for them....we wouldn't be fit to keep going....



...good luck...bye....."Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average

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04-12-2018 02:51 PM











Post: #1 uk russia war

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VLADIMIR PUTIN could wipe out Britain as tensions rise over Syria as the UK contemplates joining the US and France in military intervention following Syrias alleged chemical weapon attack.

By Darren Hunt

PUBLISHED: 11:53, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 | UPDATED: 12:51, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 Russia could wipe UK out' Expert warns of 'existential threat' if UK joins US in SyriaVLADIMIR PUTIN could wipe out Britain as tensions rise over Syria as the UK contemplates joining the US and France in military intervention following Syrias alleged chemical weapon attack.By Darren HuntPUBLISHED: 11:53, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 | UPDATED: 12:51, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 LoP Guest

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Post: #2 RE: uk russia war

World War 3: Galloway warns world heading for WAR as relations reach most DANGEROUS level

WORLD War 3 is happening in slow motion after US President Donald Trump tweeted a declaration of war on Russia, according to former MP George Galloway.

By Charlotte Davis

PUBLISHED: 11:37, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 | UPDATED: 11:38, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 LoP Guest

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04-12-2018 02:54 PM











Post: #3 RE: uk russia war

US nuclear 'Doomsday Plane' goes AIRBORNE amid fears of WAR with Russia



US forces have deployed the Doomsday Plane amid fears of war with Russia as tensions look ready to snap over Syria. LoP Guest

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04-12-2018 02:56 PM











Post: #4 RE: uk russia war

Russia vs Trump: Will Putin press the nuclear button and send nuclear missile to USA?

VLADIMIR PUTIN is under pressure to respond to allegations of a chemical attack on civilians in Syria, killing and injuring hundreds. World War 3 is bubbling over a threatening tweet sent by President Trump - but will Putin send nuclear missiles to USA? LoP Guest

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04-12-2018 02:57 PM











Post: #5 RE: uk russia war

EU remains QUIET on military action as France and UK prepare for Syria war

THE European Union has refused to condone military action on Syria, following the sick chemical attack in Douma last week, despite two of the spams members preparing their own military intervention.

By Joe Barnes, Brussels Correspondent

PUBLISHED: 13:12, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 | UPDATED: 13:19, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 LoP Guest

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04-12-2018 02:58 PM











Post: #6 RE: uk russia war

Trump on the WARPATH: US warship STRIKE FORCE sets sail as Russia war fears loom



A US warship strike force has set sail bound for the Middle East amid fears of an imminent attack that could trigger a war with Russia. LoP Guest

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04-12-2018 02:59 PM











Post: #7 RE: uk russia war

Russia vs US LIVE updates: Putin on war phoneline as subs move within missile range'

DONALD Trump warned an attack on Syria "could be very soon" as tensions ramped up between the USA and Russia after an alleged chemical attack in Syria. Here is all the latest news and updates live.

By Vickiie Oliphant

PUBLISHED: 12:40, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 | UPDATED: 12:42, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 LoP Guest

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Post: #8 RE: uk russia war

Greece fighter jet CRASHES in dogfight with Turkey plane just day after Greeks open fire

A GREEK fighter jet has crashed into the sea after claims of a dog fight with Turkish planes in disputed airspace just days after Greek soldiers opened fire on a helicopter.

By Mark Chandler

PUBLISHED: 13:42, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 | UPDATED: 13:53, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 03:01 PM











Post: #9 RE: uk russia war

Russia should surrender. They will lose badly. LoP Guest

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04-12-2018 03:01 PM











Post: #10 RE: uk russia war

RING OF STEEL: Russias deadly S-400 anti-aircraft missile system protecting Assad

RUSSIA is protecting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with deadly anti-aircraft missiles described as one of the most formidible air defence systems in the world as tensions soar in the region amid the threat of the US launching an attack.

By Chloe Kerr

PUBLISHED: 11:59, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 | UPDATED: 12:08, Thu, Apr 12, 2018 LoP Guest

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04-12-2018 03:03 PM











Post: #11 RE: uk russia war

in the last 500 years the UK and Russia have always ended up on the same side in every global conflict.. many of which they started off as the worst of enemies, and utterly distrusting each other..



Can you really see Putin attacking the UK when a lot of his allies live in Londongrad, or send their kids to school in the UK? if you see that all start to unravel then things might be getting interesting.. Archangel

Michael

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04-12-2018 03:26 PM



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Post: #12 RE: uk russia war

The Brit's lie as much as their allies do. What's the point? Lobster Boy

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04-12-2018 03:29 PM



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Post: #13 RE: uk russia war

There will be no war.



This is all smoking deep state operatives out on both sides LoP Guest

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04-12-2018 04:09 PM











Post: #14 RE: uk russia war

The British rulers are already wiping out the British population. A nuclear war with Russia would just speed things up and perhaps take some of the elite out before they could get to their bunkers. Monk-1

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04-12-2018 04:13 PM



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Post: #15 RE: uk russia war

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 04:09 PM) The British rulers are already wiping out the British population. A nuclear war with Russia would just speed things up and perhaps take some of the elite out before they could get to their bunkers.

Yeah they will be nuked if they keep making more patsies out of civilians while keeping people as slaves. Yeah they will be nuked if they keep making more patsies out of civilians while keeping people as slaves. (This post was last modified: 04-12-2018 04:13 PM by Monk-1 .) Advertisement

















If anyone is short of fodder or needs fodder, then fodder can be got, Sean Dennehy, IFA National Sheep Committee Chairman told members of Longford Lamb Producers Group earlier tonight.

The newly elected sheep chairman also informed the large gathering at the Rustic Inn, Abbeyshrule, that while the fodder crisis was not as bad on sheep farms as it was on cattle farms, it was necessary, nonetheless, that a clear message went out from tonights meeting that no farmer would be found wanting.

If you are short of fodder, we can get fodder for you and there is no need for farmers to be short of fodder either, Mr Dennehy continued, before pointing out that the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine was currently working to address the matter and IFA was committed to providing farmers who are in dire straits with supplies.

Mr Dennehy also pointed to importance of farmers rallying together and helping each other out during the current difficulties.

Look after people that are under pressure, he added.

Give them a helping hand; let them know they are not alone, and that there are others in the same situation; give them that bit of help.

Meanwhile, it was a good year for Longford Lamb Producers Group which now has the full support of IFA and Kepak.

Supplies into the local meat plant are on the increase and locally prices are good, chairman Joe Estler told members this evening.

For more details from the meeting and lots of photos, check out next weeks Longford Leader, on sale Wednesday!

You may also like to read:

Longford's fodder crisis deepens

Humans of Longford examines the escalating fodder crisisPolice watchdog officials believe a key witness seen close to where a 29-year-old north Longford man was knocked down by a patrol car in Canada three weeks ago could unlock vital clues in their ensuing investigation.

Mullinalaghta man Brendan Keogh remains in a serious condition in hospital despite being moved out of intensive care following the incident in Squamish in northern Vancouver on March 13 last.

In light of those events, local parishioners and people from surrounding areas came out in force once again last Thursday to pray for his recovery.

Mr Keogh, a former student at Cnoc Mhuire in Granard, was walking along the intersection of Highway 99 and Garibaldi Way in the bustling town of Squamish when the incident, which is now the subject of a police watchdog investigation, occurred.

As previously revealed by the Leader, police have confirmed officials from British Columbias Independent Investigations Office (IIO) have been drafted in to examine the circumstances behind the incident.

Senior chiefs have since revealed an officer with the Lower Mainland Integrated Police Dog Services was driving a grey unmarked SUV at the time of the collision and provided medical assistance to Mr Keogh until emergency services arrived.

No definitive timescale has been given over when any ruling will be made on the investigation.

It has since emerged however that IIO officials are eager to track down what they believe could be a key witness in the inquiry.

At the time of the incident, a white hatchback vehicle was turning right from Garibaldi Way to merge with the southbound lane of Highway 99.

The IIO is asking for the driver of this vehicle and any potential occupants or other witnesses who may have seen, heard, or recorded the incident to come forward.

An independent civilian agency, the IIO is a body called in to investigate all officer-related incidents involving serious harm or death.

Members of Mr Keoghs immediate family are continuing to maintain a bedside vigil in the hope the well respected former Dundalk IT graduate student makes a full recovery.

Mr Keogh had been residing in Squamish, 60km north of Vancouver, for a year and was working at one of the biggest restaurant/pubs in town at the time of the incident.



ALSO READ:

North Longford man fighting for life in hospitalLocal News, Business & Finance, Seasonal & Current Events

By Chris Boyle Published: April 12 2018

The Business Expo will feature 175 individual exhibitors, special programming, guest speakers, seminars, classes, and more.

Originally held in its inaugural year of 2016 at Hofstra University in Hempstead , and then moving the next year  following a major growth spurt  to the newly-renovated Nassau Coliseum, the Long Island Business Expo is an offshoot of the New York Business Expo, an event held annually at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan. The Business Expo will feature 175 individual exhibitors, with specific types of businesses divvied up into individual pavilions, covering fields such as marketing, technology, and finance; in addition, the day will be filled to the brim with special programming, guest speakers, seminars, classes, and more.

Event Management LLC President Marc P. Sherer, creator of the Long Island Business Expo, said that the experience at the Nassau Coliseum in 2017 was so positive that he decided to hold the event there again this year; however, considering the massive growth of the Business Expo in such a short amount of time, the resulting choice of possible venues that could accommodate such an event this year was actually limited by its increased scope.

The show doubled in size when it went from year one over at Hofstra to year two when we moved it into the Coliseum...we experienced growth by our two major metrics, which are the exhibitors who participated and more importantly, the attendance, he said. That means we're attracting a wider audience, and there are no other buildings on Long Island that could have hosted an event of this size, nor any that have the capabilities of the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

The Long Island Business Expo is a huge amalgamation of programming targeted specifically at and for the Long Island business community. Photo Credit: Chris Boyle

When you do a first show in a building - such as the Coliseum - that hasn't been open in a number of years, there's always going to be some growing pains. It was an experience that was really exciting for most people there, Sherer continued. We used the space in such a way that attendees got to see a lot of the new building, so it was a very cool experience for those who were in attendance. I think a lot of people walked out on a very high note.

Moving to the Coliseum not only gave Sherer the ability to expand the physical size of the Expo itself, but to also see to the continued improvement and evolution of the content that the event offers attendees as well.

A major way the Coliseum improved the experience was with the deliverability of the content...our attendees are coming to our shows to access intellectual capital through our educational sessions. We had better meeting rooms, and the opportunity to do more sessions that were more accessible to the show floor, he said. That's really where the value is for our attendees...many of them are small business owners who are looking for strategies to grow their business, and that's what our sessions are all about. We run about 30 sessions, we have two major keynote speakers, and two show floor theaters happening throughout the day. There's a ton of content that we have available and the capacity of Nassau Coliseum allows us to fit even more in.

The approach to the 2018 Long Island Business Expo was similar to the one Sherer took last year; give people more of what they liked and what worked, but at the same time find new and exciting ways to push the envelope and break new ground as far as the programming and resources that are made available.

We try to do a healthy mix of Long Island talent, including a tremendous amount of very smart business educators. But because we also do the New York Business Expo at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan, we're able to access talent that comes from outside of Long Island as well, he said. So we have great content, and that changes from year to year. The seminars that we had last year are not the same as the seminars we have this year, and I encourage everyone to go on to our website to see the full schedule , and on there is a full list of the speakers as well. The content this year is different, and there's a lot more of it.

The Long Island Business Expo will offer more vendor booths, speakers, seminars, and networking opportunities than any other business-specific event in the regiony. Photo Credit: Chris Boyle

Sherer also made a point of going in-depth into some of the more notable new additions to the Expo this year, ones that are sure to appeal to anyone looking to get head in the cutthroat world of modern business.

We have one new event in particular that's really a good hand-in-glove fit for Long Island...were doing a facilitated networking room. On Long Island there is a ton of networking opportunities, but a lot of people go to them and leave thinking they didn't get as much from that event as they wanted, he said. We're going to have a whole room dedicated to facilitated networking this year, run by three expert networkers. And the cool thing is that it will not just be a seminar on networkingthere will actually be networking AT that session. People will come, learn from the experts on what to do, and then they'll be able to actually implement those lessons directly in that room, during that session.

Another new innovation that is coming to the show this year is something called A Taste of Long Island, which is essentially a food and networking event that starts late in the day. A Taste of Long Island will see some of the top restaurants in caterers from across the region offering samplings of their wares; in addition, there will be wine and beer stations setup throughout the hall, essentially a turning the entire Expo at that point into an business after-hours event.

The highlight of the 2018 Long Island Business Expo, however, will be the two exciting keynote speakers who will be sharing their personal expertise and experiences with attendees. Scott Duffy, founder of S1Media Studios, is ranked by Entrepreneur and Fortune magazines as one of the top 10 keynote speakers in the United States today; the other speaker, Jen Groover, is considered by many as a rock star in the field of business growth, Sherer said.

Scott Duffy is a serial entrepreneur, but more importantly he's a great educator into how effectively to build a business and be successful, he said. Jen Groover, meanwhile, has published seven books and has been on pretty much all of the major news television shows as a recognized go-to expert on small business.



The Long Island Business Expo has found its permanent home at the Nassau Coliseum for not only for 2018, but hopefully for many years to come. Photo Credit: Chris Boyle

In addition to the keynote speakers, the Business Expo will also be offering a whopping 30 additional business and educational opportunities on the show floor throughout the day. One of the major programs is the Social Media Lab, where professionals can learn about the importance of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and other websites and applications that could be used to promote their businesses.

The 2017 Long Island Business Expo hosted of a grand total of 4875 attendees; Sherer noted that this year's Expo is already on track to exceed that amount, easily making it the most successful outing yet for the auspicious event, signaling that the sky is the limit for the Long Island Business Expo going into 2019 and beyond.

Shows are like the ocean- they tend to have tides. The tides either coming in on a trade show or its it's going out. The tide for us is clearly coming in, and it's obviously not crested because our pre-registration is currently tracking about 30% higher than it was last year at this point, he said. We're really excited about the new additions to our show this year, and we really think the Long Island Business Expo is the place for local business people and entrepreneurs to come, learn, grow, and become successful.Local News, Crime

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 12 2018

Multi-Agency Operation Dirty Deeds Results in 84-Count Indictment Charging 14 Defendants with Distributing Drugs throughout Capital Region.

New York, NY - April 12, 2018 - Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced the arrests of 14 individuals charged with trafficking large quantities of cocaine throughout the Capital Region. The arrests were made in connection with Operation Dirty Deeds, a nine-month investigation spearheaded by the Attorney Generals Organized Crime Task Force (OCTF) as part of Attorney General Schneidermans Suburban and Upstate Response to the Growing Epidemic (S.U.R.G.E.) Initiative  a crackdown on New Yorks widening heroin, opioid, and narcotics distribution networks.

The 84-count indictment, which was unsealed today in Schenectady County Court, charges the 14 individuals with various felonies including Criminal Sale and Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance (class A, B, C, D felonies) and Conspiracy in the Second degree (a class B felony) in relation to their alleged involvement in the narcotics trafficking network. If convicted, the defendants will face between three years and life in prison based on individual cases.

As we allege, this trafficking ring flooded the Capital Region with cocaine  fueling the cycle of addiction that has been ravaging communities across New York, said Attorney General Schneiderman. Through our continued collaboration with our partners in law enforcement, our SURGE Initiative is working to cut off the supply of drugs into our communities and drive traffickers out of business.

New York State Police Superintendent George P. Beach II said, Due to the crucial and collaborative efforts of our law enforcement partners at all levels, a major drug trafficking operation has been disrupted and multiple dangerous drug traffickers have been removed from the streets. These drugs perpetuate a cycle of addiction and criminal behavior which in turn threatens the safety and security of our neighborhoods. We will remain vigilant in keeping these criminals and these highly addictive drugs off of our streets.

Todays takedown  dubbed Operation Dirty Deeds  marks the ninth major drug bust since Attorney General Schneiderman launched his SURGE Initiative in April 2017. The SURGE Initiative is a targeted crackdown on New Yorks growing  and often violent  heroin, opioid, and narcotics trafficking networks operating in upstate and suburban communities. In the past 12 months, Attorney General Schneidermans SURGE initiative has resulted in 302 traffickers taken off the streets throughout New York State; those traffickers have collectively been charged with over 1,400 crimes.

The trafficking network allegedly sourced its narcotics from the New York City area and mostly trafficked drugs in the Capital Region. The indictment alleges that Jevon Dirt Henry  a central figure in the cocaine distribution network, based in Schenectedy  purchased cocaine in bulk from a source in New York City for $31 per gram. Henry then allegedly used his girlfriend, Aisha Murray, to mule kilograms of cocaine in an effort to insulate himself from being caught possessing the cocaine in transit from New York City. Aisha Murray was stopped by investigators on December 7, 2017, in Schenectady County while allegedly transporting a kilogram of cocaine from New York City with her 12 year old son in the vehicle.

In total, over 1,200 grams (1.2 kilos) of cocaine were seized by the Attorney Generals office.

The 84-count indictment unsealed today charges 14 individuals with different crimes in relation to their alleged involvement in the narcotics trafficking operation.

The charges against the defendants are merely accusations and the defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty in a court of law.

The charges contained in the indictment are the result of a nine-month joint investigation by the Attorney Generals OCTF, the New York State Police, and the City of Saratoga Springs Police Department, with the assistance of the Schenectady County Sheriffs Office, the New York National Guard Counterdrug Task Force, and the United States Marshals Service.

The investigation was directed by New York State Police Investigator Matthew Guiry and OCTF Investigator Jeffrey Sauter, under the supervision of New York State Police Senior Investigator Samuel Mercado and with the assistance of OCTF Senior Investigator William Charles and Deputy Chief Investigator Gene Black, under the supervision of Chief Dominick Zarrella.Local News, Business & Finance, Politics

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 12 2018

Zeldin: "Far too many aspects of our nations financial institutions are shrouded in secrecy and free from public accountability and oversight."

Long Island, NY - April 12, 2018 - Congressman Lee Zeldin (R, NY-1), member of the House Financial Services Committee, issued the following statement after his bipartisan legislation, the Stress Test Improvement Act (H.R. 4293), passed the House of Representatives this afternoon by a vote of 245 to 174:

Far too many aspects of our nations financial institutions are shrouded in secrecy and free from public accountability and oversight, hurting the hard working men and women who rely on them to buy their first home, start a small business and plan their retirement. Stress tests are a financial analysis performed internally by financial institutions or externally by a regulator to ensure financial institutions can withstand stressful economic conditions, in an effort to protect the everyday customers they serve.

However, the Federal Reserve is not required to inform financial institutions of the criteria on which they will be analyzed, creating regulatory uncertainty for these organizations and increased compliance costs that stymy their ability to improve fiscal soundness. Ensuring these tests are done right, with fairness and objectivity, is essential for protecting depositors and the overall financial system. This bipartisan legislation I introduced, co-sponsored by Democratic Congressman David Scott of Georgia, bridges the gap between the Federal Reserve and financial institutions, lifting the shroud of secrecy, conducting stress tests based on real world information and safeguarding affordable and reliable access to capital for the American people.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, Dodd-Frank is based on the assumption that uniform Washington rules can be imposed on a diverse nation. This failed idea has harmed a countless number of community banks, which in turn hits all the families and small businesses who depend on them for financing. Today, with the leadership of Representative Lee Zeldin, the House is continuing to fight to provide certainty for financial institutions and the people who rely on them. Sound financial institutions are a cornerstone to growing communities, and this bill will ensure that regulation is based on actual risks and tailored to ensuring the safety of consumers. I thank Lee for his hard work on this bill.

Congressman David Scott (D, GA-13) said, I want to thank Mr. Zeldin for working with me to amend and help pass this important bill. I think every Financial Services Committee member wants to have an honest debate about how we can improve CCAR and this bill starts that conversation. We must always look at our rules and regulations and make sure they are working as intended. And this bill with my amendment included, is a first step in making small tweaks to streamline the work our regulators are doing, so that we are still adequately protected from the next financial crisis.

The Stress Test Improvement Act of 2017 improves the stress test process, by allowing bank holding companies to conduct the stress tests on an annual rather than semiannual basis. This bill also reduces the number of required supervisory scenarios - the type of stress tests mandated by federal regulators - from three to two, to include the baseline and severely adverse scenarios. Under this legislation, the Federal Reserve is also prohibited from objecting to a bank holding companys capital plan solely on the basis of qualitative deficiencies.Three district councillors walked out of a South Bucks District Council (SBDC) meeting on Monday after one compared the actions of council officers to North Korea.

The row erupted after council officers sent an email to South Bucks councillors who also sit on Bucks County Council (BCC) warning them about personal and prejudicial interests in the debate surrounding the countys move to a single unitary authority.

The email, seen by the Advertiser, was sent by the joint democratic and electoral services team and says: If a member only has a personal interest they can remain in the room and take part in the decision.

Members may also have a prejudicial interest to declare if they have supported the countys proposal for a single unitary authority.

For example if a member attended a county council meeting and voted to support the countys proposal, those members would have to declare this personal and prejudicial interest at the meeting, leave the room and not take part in any discussion on the item.

Speaking at the meeting in Denham, Cllr Dev Dhillon (Con, Cliveden) said he had been very upset since he had received the email and described it as completely undemocratic.

He added that even with dispensation to discuss the issue he would not take part in the debate.

Last time I checked this was not North Korea, said Cllr Roger Reed (Con, Denham).

Cllr Lin Hazell (Con, Farnham Common and Burnham Beeches) added: Its an erosion of my democratic rights.

Principal solicitor for SBDC, Sue Malcolm, attempted to defend the decision, but Cllr Hazell said she was confused about how taking part in previous discussions at a district or county level would amount to a personal and prejudicial interest.

All three councillors walked out before declarations of interest were made.

The rest of the district council agreed an initial budget of 20,000 to support a number of potential actions in response to the announcement by Communities and Local Government Secretary, Sajid Javid, that he was minded to implement a single council for the area, including seeking expert legal advice and communication campaigns.

The district council has previously submitted a proposal for two-unitary authorities to rival BCC's plans for a single unitary authority.by Ray Schultz , April 11, 2018

Pegasystems Inc. is offering a product called GDPR Accelerator, consisting of templates that can help firms comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The Accelerator allows brands to manage GDPR requests and to see which data they are holding on customers across the enterprise, according to the company.

Pegasystems found in a study of 7,000 EU residents that 82% plan to exercise the right to view, limit or erase data on themselves. This can be a challenge to legacy systems and siloed organizations, and could result in the loss of valuable data, the firm says

GDPR Accelerator provides customizable GDPR templates and sample best practices extensions for Pega Customer Service and Pega Platform users, the company adds. It can be downloaded by those users for free.by Chuck Martin , April 12, 2018

Thank to virtual reality, choosing a car from a brochure may fade away as car shoppers configure the trim level and color of their vehicle and see the result by wearing 3D glasses.

Thats the vision of the SEAT Group, a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group, that designs, manufactures and markets cars in Spain and exports vehicles to 80 countries through 1,700 dealerships. Customers also could experience a test drive through virtual reality.

For the new SEAT Ibiza, which is manufactured in Barcelona, 95,000 VR simulations were performed during the development stage. During the three years of development that go into a car, up to 3 million elements are analyzed using simulations, which was limited to only about 5,000 30 years ago, according to the SEAT Group.

Using virtual reality in the production process for the SEAT Ateca drove the price down and added 800 improvements before the car went into production.

For the SEAT Group, which sold more than 450,000 vehicles last year, virtual reality has lowered production time by 30%, according to a company announcement.by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, April 12, 2018

Alexa.com -- a wholly owned Amazon subsidiary since 1999, which focuses on analytics and data -- began rolling out a series of offerings Thursday to support search engine optimization, paid-search advertising and content marketing on engines such as Bing and Google.

The company focuses on business that supports other businesses, but also supports companies that serve consumers, explains Andrew Ramm, president of Alexa.com. About 50% are in the United States, and the other half are international.

Ramm said Amazon has internal groups that support analytics for the marketplace and its sites, such as Whole Foods and Zappos. In the past, Alexa.com focused on publishers with Alexa Certified Rank. "We still maintain that business, but it's not our sole business," he said.

The Alexa Agency Plan, designed for small to midsize agencies, targets optimization and competitive intelligence to help them attract key audiences for clients. It eliminates the many hours of work needed to collect and analyze data required to establish knowledge of a clients industry, competitors and audience.

advertisement advertisement

Sean Hakes, CEO, Altitude Agency, a Colorado digital-marketing search agency, estimates that about 80% of the time spent pitching ideas to new clients will be saved.

The new plan provides agencies with intelligence about clients popularity, traffic sources, audience interests, keywords, and backlinks, including side-by-side comparisons with clients competitors across all metrics. Strategic opportunities are instantly revealed, arming agencies with programs that help drive their clients business performance.

The tools include portfolio management tracking, which enables agencies to view all client projects through one dashboard and quickly spot and respond to negative trends or issues. It also includes twice-monthly site audits for all clients, enabling agencies to monitor and address any issues impacting SEO.

Site Audit is one tool clients hope Alexa.com will build out, Ramm said.

The keyword tools provide data that reveals methods to grow a clients traffic to the website through content marketing, SEO and paid search. Agencies also can find new topics and keywords based on competitive research through this tool.

The tool is geared for agencies challenged with continually demonstrating their impact on clients business growth.by Ray Schultz , April 12, 2018

Two-thirds of firms across the globe will not be ready to obey the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on deadline, and many fear a financial hit, according to a new study by NetApp. U.S. firms are especially worried about the impact.

This presumably includes many U.S. brands that conduct business via email.

Globally, 44.1% fear revenue loss from failure to comply with the GDPR. That number rises to 50.2% in the U.S. and 45.7% in the UK.

Worse, 35% think that the financial penalties of GDPR could threaten their very existence. That number tops 40% in both the UK and the U.S.

American firms are least likely to be unconcerned about meeting the deadline  23.6%, compared with 41.3% in France, 40.1% in Germany and 32.6% globally.

Companies that control their data control their destiny, so it is surprising to see that despite the risk-reduction and operational benefits of GDPR compliance, so many businesses are still struggling to meet the deadline, states Bill Miller, senior vice president and chief information officer at NetApp.

advertisement advertisement

Despite their seeming lack of preparation, U.S. companies are most confident that they know the locations of the data centers run by their service providers, and where all their data is stored  with 52.% saying they do, versus 39.8% globally.

In addition, the whole ecosystem is responding to the requirements of GDPR, from resellers to hyperscale cloud providers to manufacturers, states Alexander Wallner, senior vice president and general manager EMEA, for NetApp.

Companies are also worried about these potential hazards of GDPR non-compliance:

Reputational damage  Worldwide, 50.5% fear this, compared with 56% in the UK and 51.5% in the U.S.

 Worldwide, 50.5% fear this, compared with 56% in the UK and 51.5% in the U.S. Mistrust from existing customers  This worries 41% overall, vs. 48.6% in the UK and 43.8% in the U.S.

 This worries 41% overall, vs. 48.6% in the UK and 43.8% in the U.S. Mistrust from exiting partners  This risk bothers 35.4% globally, with 39.7% in the U.S. and 37.% in France.

 This risk bothers 35.4% globally, with 39.7% in the U.S. and 37.% in France. Job loss  35% foresee this, with the U.S. tracking below average  at 34.3%. Germany is most concerned  with 38.2%.

 35% foresee this, with the U.S. tracking below average  at 34.3%. Germany is most concerned  with 38.2%. Mistrust from existing suppliers  31.3% in the U.S. vs. 29.3% globally.

 31.3% in the U.S. vs. 29.3% globally. Mistrust from employees  27.9% in the U.S., 23.6% globally

 27.9% in the U.S., 23.6% globally More difficult conversations with regulators and policy makers  23.6% in the U.S., up from 19.1% in general.

Only 3.3% say non-compliance would have no impact on their business.

NetApp surveyed 1,106 C-suite executives, CIOs and IT managers in the U.S., UK, France, Germany and EAMA. It focused on managers with buying authority in companies with 100 or more employees. This 2018 study extends research NetApp conducted in 2017.In order to escape treatment, melanoma sometimes reverts to a previous stage of cell differentiation. New research investigates this process more closely and finds a potential way to block this skin cancers escape route.

Share on Pinterest Melanoma is an aggresive form of skin cancer that often manages to evade treatment.

Although rare, melanoma is a very aggressive form of skin cancer that can prove fatal.

Of all skin cancers, melanoma has the highest mortality rate and the highest potential to spread.

It is particularly difficult to treat when it mutates and can therefore become treatment-resistant.

Though the latest advances in immunotherapy have drastically improved survival rates and outcomes for people with this mutant form of melanoma, there are still those who do not respond as well to these treatments, or whose cancer returns.

Now, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)  led by Thomas Graeber, a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology  set out to investigate in more detail how this cancer changes in order to evade treatment.

The scientists examined the process of dedifferentiation  that is, the process in which melanoma cells regress to an earlier stage of embryonic development  and found that, depending on the stage that theyre in, melanomas can be broken down into four different subtypes.

Of these subtypes, the researchers found, some are vulnerable to a type of cell death.

Importantly, this type of cell death can be induced with certain drugs, and, as the new research reveals, using these drugs in combination with existing anticancer therapies could block melanomas escape.

The findings were published in the journal Cancer Cell.Advertisement

Gliomas are the most common group of CNS tumors, accounting for some 80% of cases, with a mortality rate of about 92%. The degree of histopathological aggressiveness (based on tissue characteristics) ranges from 1 to 4. The higher the number, the worse the prognosis. "We analyzed samples from 77 patients, from both the primary tumor and the first and second relapse, or even the third in some cases. This is the largest case series survey ever of primary and recurrent gliomas from the same patients," Noushmehr said.Some of the samples analyzed were collected from patients treated at FMRP-USP and Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit (USA). The rest of the data was obtained from studies published in the last three years. Analysis of the samples focused on epigenetic mechanisms, the chemical processes that modulate genome functioning (to adapt to environmental stimuli) and hence cell phenotype by activating or deactivating gene expression.More precisely, in this study the group chose a specific epigenetic regulation mechanism known as DNA methylation, a chemical reaction that adds a methyl group (made up of hydrogen and carbon atoms) to the DNA base cytosine, potentially altering the expression of certain genes.Glioma subtypesIn an article published in the journal Cell in 2016, the group led by Noushmehr had identified seven different glioma subtypes on the basis of tumor epigenetic profiles - among them a more aggressive profile, which they called subtype G-CIMP-low, and one with a more favorable prognosis called G-CIMP-high. "What we show in this new paper is that only 10% of patients who develop a second tumor progress from subtype G-CIMP-high to subtype G-CIMP-low," Noushmehr explained.The group analyzed DNA methylation in the 200 tumor samples by microarray, a methodology that can identify and characterize millions of sites and functional genomic elements simultaneously. As the authors explain, the process whereby a methyl group is added to DNA typically occurs in the base cytosine that usually precedes a guanine (dinucleotide CpG). Microarray analysis shows whether the CpG regions studied, including genes and regulatory elements in the genome, are more or less methylated. The microarray datasets were processed with the aid of machine learning algorithms, a form of artificial intelligence. These algorithms sift through masses of data using advanced statistical techniques in search of patterns on which to base determinations or predictions."In this way we identified seven genomic sites where the level of DNA methylation serves as a biomarker of the risk of evolution from the G-CIMP-high phenotype to the G-CIMP-low phenotype. This is how we produced the biomarker panel," Noushmehr said. Today, he added, all patients diagnosed with glioma are prescribed practically the same treatment. "You have to wait for the cancer to return, undergo another operation and find out whether it has progressed," he said. "If we know from the outset whether there's a risk of progression to the G-CIMP-low phenotype, we can plan treatment accordingly." For Souza, the development of personalized therapies for glioma patients is "suboptimized"."This is due in part to the fact that diagnosis is based mainly on traditional histopathological criteria, meaning the degree of tumor malignancy," she said. The present study, she added, identified epigenetic vulnerabilities that serve to stratify with high levels of sensitivity and specificity phenotypes associated with recurrent gliomas and with distinct clinical prognoses that could not be predicted merely by neurohistopathological grading of tumor biopsies."We expect the panel of clinical biomarkers identified to pave the way for a refinement of our current clinical classification scheme," Souza said. "This will help guide future therapeutic decisions before recurrent malignant gliomas become symptomatic. It will also avoid unnecessarily exposing patients with gliomas that are not highly aggressive to toxic radiation therapy and chemotherapy protocols." Noushmehr and Souza stressed, however, that the biomarker panel must be validated in a clinical trial and that completion of this process typically takes several years.Source: EurekalertAdvertisement

The hospital at Cicalengka city, located 25 km to the east of Bandung, attended to most casualties -- 147 patients -- since Friday. Of these, 31 died, according to hospital records accessed by the news agency.On Wednesday, the Cicalengka hospital was attending to around 37 people after discharging 110.At the press conference, the police presented six suspects of the seven arrested in Jakarta for selling adulterated alcohol, which according to laboratory analysis, contained methanol.Methanol is a colourless, inflammable and toxic chemical compound used as an anti-freeze, a solvent and as fuel.The sale of alcohol in Indonesia, a country where Muslims account for 88 per cent of its 260 million residents, is regulated and subject to high taxation.Nahdlatul Ulama, the country's largest Muslim organization and of a moderate nature, in 2017 opposed a ban on alcohol sought by the most conservative section on grounds of the dangers of consuming adulterated alcohol.Source: IANSAdvertisement

Effect of Long-lasting Insecticidal Net Spraying (LLIN)

Malaria in Tanzania

Revised recommendations on LLIN: WHO

Malaria

Prevent mosquito bites by covering all exposed body parts

Always sleep in a mosquito bed net

Use mosquito repellent creams or patches

Take malaria preventive drugs before visiting any endemic malaria regions

Seek medical help, if there are any symptoms of malaria

Also, throughwith thethe prevalence of malaria after just a single spray was reduced by 48 percent for an entire year.The long-lasting insecticidal net spraying (LLINS) and indoor residual spraying (IRS) are now the cornerstones of malaria control in sub-Sahara Africa. Between 2000 and 2015, malaria disease was reduced by 41 percent and malaria deaths by 62 percent globally.Despite the reduction in the prevalence of malaria, still, half-a-million people die annually because of the disease. For the first time, an increase in malaria cases and mortality rates remained unchanged in 2017, were reported by the World Health Organization (WHO).There is concurrent evidence, which shows that resistance to pyrethroid insecticide is growing in the Anopheline mosquitoes.Currently, only a limited range of alternative insecticides are available, especially for LLINs, and WHO highly recommends pyrethroids for LLINs.For almost 20 years, the WHO and LSHTM have been collaborating with the chemical industry to develop new types of LLIN and new insecticides for IRS.A novel LLIN discovered incorporates piperonyl butoxide (PBO), a chemical that blocks the natural defense mechanisms of insects, i.e., the pyrethroid insecticide on the LLIN remains potent against mosquitoes despite resistance. The chemical PBO stops insects from breaking down the pyrethroid insecticide within their bodies so that the insecticide could stay toxic to the insect.Dr. Natacha Protopopoff from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who led the field research operations in Muleba, Tanzania, said, "It's imperative we try and remain one step ahead of insecticide resistance which threatens to reverse the great gains made in combating malaria. We must develop an improved strategy based on new classes of LLIN to control malaria transmitted by pyrethroid-resistant mosquitoes."This new study involved randomly selected children aged six months to 14 years from villages in Muleba district of North West Tanzania, where high levels of resistance to pyrethroids have been reported.In this study, children are six months till 14 years were selected randomly from villages in Muleba district of North West Tanzania, as there were high levels of resistance to pyrethroids insecticide in this area.In 2015, about 48 villages were divided into four groups randomly with different preventative measures, where 45,000 standard LLINs and 45,000 PBO LLINs were distributed to them. Later, the children were tested for malaria at the end of each rainy season.After nine months, the research team analyzed and found that malaria infection was much lower in the group that received the long-lasting insecticidal net treated with PBO LLIN (31.1%, 275/883).There was also a reduction seen in the group that received indoor residual spraying and standard LLIN (28.7%, 252/877) when compared to the group that received standard LLIN alone (55.3%, 515/932).The team analyzed again after twelve months and found that the PBO LLIN effect was almost similar to the standard LLIN.were placed by the research team in each study arm to strengthen the evidence for the interventions.About 87 percent and 67 percent reduced the number of malaria-infected mosquitoes captured by the mosquito traps in the PBO LLIN villages during the first and second years respectively than the standard LLIN villages.Professor Mark Rowland from LSHTM and Principal Investigator, said, "This project is a game-changer. The trial is the first clear evidence that nets treated with piperonyl butoxide can significantly improve personal and community protection from malaria compared to standard pyrethroid-only nets in areas where there is high pyrethroid resistance. It also demonstrated that resistance is now a significant problem in some areas and standard LLIN are less effective than before and that the new IRS controlled malaria for an entire year before needing to be re-sprayed."In September 2017, WHO revised its recommendations on LLIN as a direct consequence of the trial by giving an interim policy recommendation to PBO LLIN as a new class of LLIN1.Dr. Jan Kolaczinski, Coordinator for Entomology and Vector Control in the WHO Global Malaria Programme said, "WHO recommends PBO LLINs should be deployed for malaria prevention in areas where mosquitoes are pyrethroid resistant, provided that full coverage is maintained. This would include many endemic areas in Africa where standard LLINs are currently used."Professor Rowland said that the research team is pleased with the revised policy of WHO, as it firmly ensures that insecticide-treated nets will be an effective intervention for malaria control. He also said there is a need for further research on alternative insecticides for use on nets and justifies the need for investment.There were limitations in this study, including the short buffer distance between villages; and any spill-over between villages can underestimate the effect of intervention rather than increasing it.It is important to use a bed net in areas where there is a high malaria transmission. The standard pyrethroid-only nets are more protective than non-use of nets and should continue to be used till PBO LLIN are used more widely in areas of resistance.Malaria spread by the bite of an infected female Anopheles mosquito enters the body and infects the red blood cells (RBCs) and liver. The parasites mature into other forms and are subsequently taken up by another mosquito and spread further. Thus, the infection continues cyclically, alternating between the mosquito vector and human hosts.Currently, there are 3,500 species of mosquitoes and 430 Anopheles species, and only 30-40 species have the potential vectors for transmitting Malaria. Here are some tips that help prevent malaria:With required funds and a joint effort from countries in prevention, we can transform our common vision 'End Malaria for Good' into a shared reality.Source: MedindiaA new treatment approach based on nanotechnology was found effective in mouse models for the most common type of lung cancer, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The disease continues to be difficult to treat, with five-year survival rates of about 36 percent for stage 3A tumors. Findings of the study were published in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics . The nanoparticles were designed to deliver a molecule that's been shown to stall tumor growth and may make tumors more susceptible to chemotherapy. The molecule, called microRNA 29b, would be ineffective if delivered by injection alone, as it quickly becomes degraded in the bloodstream or picked up and removed by immune cells.

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a common type of lung cancer is difficult to treat. A new treatment approach based on nanotechnology was found effective in mouse models. More tests are needed before the technology is ready to be tested in human clinical trials.

Dr. Shoyele and colleagues showed that these components formed a spherical nanoparticle capable of properly finding the lung tumors and shrinking the tumors in mouse models of the disease. "This work extends our previous work demonstrating that these particles were effective in shrinking tumor tissue in a petri dish. Here we show that they are also effective in a more complex living system," said Dr. Shoyele.



Additional tests are needed before the technology is ready for testing in human clinical trials. Dr. Shoyele plans to continue the research with comprehensive toxicity tests and scaling the nanoparticle manufacturing process for clinical trials.







Source: Eurekalert

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To bypass these limitations, Sunday Shoyele, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Jefferson (Philadelphia University + Thomas Jefferson University) and colleagues, developed a nanoparticle comprised of four parts. First, Dr. Shoyele included part of a human antibody, immunoglobulin G (IgG), to cloak the particle from the immune system. Second, the research team added the MUC1 antigen, which acts like a navigation system guiding the nanoparticles to the MUC1-covered lung tumors. Finally, the therapeutic payload, microRNA-29b, along with the other two components are glued together using a sticky polymer called poloxamer-188.Advertisement

The study was conducted to evaluate contrast enhanced SHI of the prostate for detection of prostate cancer Among the study group of 28 patients, contrast enhancement was clearly observed with color and power Doppler imaging, as well as with both harmonic imaging (HI) and SHI techniques in all subjects.SHI provided improved contrast signal and tissue suppression relative to conventional HI.Areas of increased vascularity were best delineated with maximum-intensity projection SHI, which allowed visualization of microvascular architecture.This first in vivo application of contrast-enhanced SHI demonstrated contrast enhancement in the prostate of every study patient, with focal areas of contrast enhancement corresponding to sites of cancer in 18 percent of targeted biopsies, including five patients whose cancer was not identified by MRI.The results indicate that SHI provides improved conspicuity of microbubble contrast enhancement and may improve the performance of contrast-enhanced ultrasound for detection of prostate cancer.Source: EurekalertAdvertisement

Researchers say that Parkinson disease is considered one of the most common human adult-onset neurodegenerative diseases and is the second most common disorder after Alzheimer disease.It commonly occurs between the ages of 50 and 80 and also affects children and adolescents at the same time.World Parkinson's Day is celebrated to create awareness about the disease.It also marks the birthday of James Parkinson, a London physician who first described the disease.Source: IANSWith his visit to Zambia, his meeting with the Greek community there, his talks with Foreign Minister Joseph Malanji, and his meeting with former President Kenneth Kaunda, Deputy Foreign Minister Terens Quick completed his tour of four sub-Saharan countries. A tour that combined Easter with the Greek community with important bilateral meetings, either for the first time, as is the case of Tanzania, or after at some 30 or 40 years, as in the case of Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.

In Zambia, which was recently hit by a cholera outbreak, the Deputy Foreign Minister also announced Greece's contribution of humanitarian aid, in the coming days, with 1.5 tons of medical supplies collected by the Ministry of National Defence, which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has committed to send by air, via the Greek Embassy in Harare.

The meeting with the Greek community took place at the seat of the Orthodox Metropolis of Zambia, at an event prepared by Archbishop Ioannis of Zambia, on behalf of the Patriarch Theodoros of Alexandria and Africa. In his meeting with the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Honorary Consul Michail Kroupnik outlined the issues Greeks in Zambia are facing; primarily strengthening of Greek language learning and the resumption of ERT broadcasting. As he characteristically stressed: "we longed for the day when Greece would be with us again, after so many decades. We are overjoyed. We only want to help our homeland. We ask the minimum of it, chiefly to support us morally with its presence from time to time.

In his own welcome message, the Archbishop of Zambia conveyed the gratitude of the Patriarch of Alexandria for Mr. Quicks tour of sub-Saharan countries, and described the Churchs vital missionary and charitable work there.

During his talks with the Foreign Minister of Zambia, Joseph Malanji, Mr. Quick presented the Greek government's new policy pertaining to the African continent, which includes political consultations, business missions, and cooperation in sectors of production, as well as in the cultural and academic fields. At the same time, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs listened with great interest to the observation that Zambia is one of the key countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as well as the Inter-ministerial Committee of the MCO for cooperation on Defence and Security issues for sub-Saharan Africa, the presidency of which will be assumed by Lusaka next August.

It should be noted that, on the initiative of the Hellenic-Zambian Chamber based in Athens, approximately 20 Greek companies are already successfully doing business in Zambia  with its 17 million citizens  with a significant amount of activity.

Mr. Quick described to the Foreign Minister of Zambia the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, referring to Turkeys aggressive stance towards Greece and its turbulent relations with the EU, as well as the diplomatic efforts on the part of our country, which, together with the Republic of Cyprus, represents the regions pillar of stability.

The visit to the home of the countrys first President, Kenneth Kaunda, liberator of Zambia and pioneer of the Non-Aligned Movement, was very emotional. President Kaunda, now 94 years old, reminisced about his cooperation with Andreas Papandreou and Archbishop Makarios within the context of the Movement. He also revealed that he is preparing to publish his autobiography in which he will explain, for the first time, why he always held, and continues to hold, a white kerchief in his left hand during public appearances. Since he lost important pieces of his archive when he was removed from power and placed under house arrest for five years (the Archbishop Ioannis of Zambia presently resides in the same home), he requested that Mr. Quick arrange for a picture of himself with Makarios to be sent from Cyprus, commenting that: "Such a picture must exist in the archives in Nicosia. I would like to add it to the pictures of the rest of my comrades."

On his visit to Zambia, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs was also accompanied by Greek Ambassador George Markantonatos, who is also accredited to that country.In response to a relevant request from Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs, Giorgos Katrougalos, the European Commissioner for Migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, announced that the European Commission agrees to the continued implementation, in 2018, of the issuing of one-week entry visas for visits to Greek islands by Turkish tourists and visitors from third countries who are legally in Turkey.

This programme has been implemented successfully in previous years and is of major importance to the economy of the islands. For this reason, its continuation this year was a standing request from all local authorities. Mr. Katrougalos warmly thanked the Commissioner for his actions leading to the positive decision on the issue.I want to thank the interpreters, who make our lives easier during these negotiations. I want to thank my friend Nikola for the excellent hospitality, as always, because every time we meet, with difficult issues to discuss, beyond the issues we are actually resolving, we gain better mutual understanding. We will be meeting again in the coming time. What is certain is that we will be in Thessaloniki for the quadrilateral Cross-border Meeting on 3 and 4 May, and we will also be in Sounion, Attica, on 11 and 12 May, where we will finally discuss something else: the future of Europe.

I also want to thank the diplomats of the two states, our experts and academics who have made serious progress on the topics they have undertaken. Especially within this whole framework of joint actions and the joint development of projects, and on the issue of irredentism, which is very important to us. As you understand, the closer we get, resolving all of our issues, fewer and fewer issues are left to discuss. But they are also the most difficult issues. We took the positive steps we could take today, and both of us hope we will also succeed in taking the major steps  in making the most difficult ones easy. The major problems were already here  Nikola and I didnt create them. We are trying to solve problems that were created in other eras by other people. But this is the job of diplomacy.

Thank you all very much.N. KOTZIAS: I thank you for the invitation and the hospitality. I thank the Serbian people for their friendship and love for Greece. We are two peoples who have been through difficulties and joys together in the history of the region. My country, Greece, feels the responsibility it has for the stability and security of the region, and we are working with Serbia in that direction. My friend the minister and I talked about the regions problems. We discussed on how to transform the friendship and love we have into a real force, into practical cooperation. We looked at how to deepen the cooperation between our two ministries, our joint actions and cooperation in the European Union and wherever we can help each other with our experience and expertise. We discussed what Europes future should be. I invited Mr. Dacic  and he accepted my invitation  to come to the meeting we will be having in May, in Sounion, between the Balkan member states of the European Union, the Visegrad countries, and the five candidate countries for EU membership. We believe that Serbia belongs in the European family. It is a developed society with knowledge and technology, and today it must discuss not only the chapters in its accession negotiations with the European Union, but also how it sees our common European future. We also talked about some of the changes in the world and issues related to international and regional organizations. I am always happy to be in Belgrade. I thank you for the invitation and the deep positive energy that I get every time I am in this city.

JOURNALIST: Mr. Kotzias, I would like to ask whether you expect the big step, today or tomorrow, towards the resolution of the Skopje name issue, in the talks you are having in Ohrid, and what the key is to the big step. And a question for Mr. Dacic: Bearing in mind the statement you made at an earlier time, that Serbia made a mistake in recognizing fYROM under its constitutional name, what message would you send Skopje, at this critical time in the talks, regarding the need to compromise so that there can be stability and security in the region? Thank you.

N. KOTZIAS: Thank you for the question, your main question, here in Belgrade, where we took a step forward in cooperation between the two friendly states. During the trip to Ohrid we will have the opportunity to discuss, and after the talks in Ohrid we will have the opportunity for a briefing on the results. I think the key to this problem is realism, pragmatism and the realisation that we have to make compromises  not rotten compromises, as I always say, but compromises that are a win for both sides. And compromise means that the two sides have to realise that they cant have it all their own way; that both sides have to win. I hope this has been understood by all the sides in the negotiations and that we will get positive results.

I. DACIC: I can say that it is very good and it would be very effective for these talks to be direct, and, as Nikos said, for common interests to be sought. It is in everyones interest for this issue to be resolved, and this means that all of the deep-running problems have to be removed, as in Serbias case, because they run deep into the past, the history, the tradition of our region. This is why Serbia understands so thoroughly Greeces stance on this issue. I have expressed my opinion a number of times: that I think Serbia made a mistake  it wasnt Serbia, it was the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia  in recognising this country under its constitutional name, because at one time, in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, this country was one of six Republics, and that is where the agreement came from for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to recognise this country, and this name has remained. I consider this stance incorrect, and to be frank, Skopjes behaviour towards Serbia and Serb interests was not appropriate. They have recognised Kosovos independence. I wont talk about these relations, but we want this issue to be resolved, and in this sense we cannot help, we cannot offer major assistance. We can only propose that they meet here in our country.

JOURNALIST: Mr. Kotzias, are the reports in the news media true: that your country supports the opening of a Consulate of Kosovo in Athens?

I. DACIC: Ill just say a few words. I told Mr. Kotzias that you would be asking that, even though I hadnt had any contact with you. I assumed, however, that you would ask him that question. I want to say that we have discussed this issue and that a few years back there was such an initiative for the opening of a Commercial Affairs Office and that it isnt a Diplomatic Bureau and doesnt concern a change in Greeces stance on Kosovos status. Thats what I wanted to say, as you want Nikos himself to tell you...

N. KOTZIAS: Yes, Ivica mentioned what I told him I was going to say. In other words, we do not have diplomatic recognition of Kosovo, nor will we recognise it diplomatically. There is an agreement from 2010-2011 and 2014, from the PASOK and New Democracy governments at the time, on the opening of a Kosovo Commercial Affairs Office in Athens. This Commercial Affairs Office, when it opens  and it will open at some point  will not be a diplomatic representation of Kosovo. A consulate means diplomatic representation and rights of a diplomatic mission. Such an agreement has not been made and we dont foresee such an agreement.SHERMAN TOWNSHIP  A large storage barn located on Purdy Road, just west of Ruth Road, is considered a total loss following a recent fire.

The 60-by-80-foot hip roof barn sat on property owned by Bischer Farms and was used as an equipment storage area for the farm.

According to Sherman Township Fire Chief Kurt Geiger, a passerby called the fire in around 6:20 p.m. Wednesday.

"We were there within five minutes of the call by the time we got to the hall and got our stuff, and the roof was already burned through and had fallen down on a combine," said Geiger.

Geiger said dry grass around the building helped ignite some spot fires, which firefighters were able to extinguish. They were able to contain the blaze to the barn and a couple smaller nearby buildings. There were no injuries.

Inside the barn was a newer combine, a tractor, and two wagons. Officials are unsure of the total damage amount, but Geiger called it "pretty considerable."

The cause of the fire has yet to be determined.

"At this point it is undetermined," Geiger said. "We know what side it started on, but other than that, the insurance guys were going to send an investigator out to determine what was the cause."

Around 35 firefighters were on scene for about three hours. Sherman firefighters received a full assist from Sigel Township and Harbor Beach fire departments, and a tanker assist from Bingham Township.MIDDLETOWN  Tempest, a California Celtic Rock band, will give a special concert to benefit for Amazing Grace Food Pantry (run by St. Vincent de Paul, Middletown) and The Buttonwood Tree Performing Arts & Cultural Center, at Oak & Velvet Fine Upholstered Furniture, 180 Johnson St., Middletown, on April 20.

The event will feature food and games and possibly guest performers. Sponsoring the event is Oak & Velvet Furniture, Middlesex Music Academy and Spoke and Spy Ciderworks.

The last 27 years have seen Tempest release nine critically acclaimed CDs on Magna Carta, and play more than 2,000 gigs. Tempest continues touring and bringing their Celtodelic Rock to their established and new fans.

Tempest were inspired by a Dakota Sioux proverb on the The Tracks We Leave, which has triple references to the environmental, spiritual and musical tracks we leave upon the world we live in. Since forming in 1988, Tempest has delivered a hybrid of high-energy Celtic Rock. But as the band has matured throughout the years, their music has morphed stylistically. World Music has seeped into Tempests over all sound because the band members are drawn to traditional and ethnic music from around the globe. There has been a natural progression towards coloring Tempests music with elements from Scandinavia, India, African and Arabic countries. Middle Eastern flavors, traditional Irish and Scottish Medleys mingle with Robert Burns poems, Norwegian lyrics and heavy rock instrumentals on Tempests finest record to date, according to a press release. Lief Sorbye, the founder of Tempest, has introduced unusual instruments into their own blend of world folk music. Keeping the spirits of the audience and the band uplifted through energetic and entertaining performances that span the spectrum from Celtic and Folk Festivals to Rock Clubs has always been the ultimate goal for Tempest.

Tickets may be purchased at The Buttonwood Tree or online at www.Buttonwood.org

For more information call 860-347-4957 or see http://buttonwood.org/event/tempest/A Czech billionaire's ambition may decide whether his nation remains anchored to European democratic values or slides into the ranks of countries embracing an increasingly euroskeptic, illiberal model.

Prime Minister Andrej Babis has navigated himself into an impasse since winning parliamentary elections in October. He's refused to let anyone else run the government, even as a fraud investigation has torpedoed any chance of traditional political forces giving him the support he needs to get a cabinet confirmed. His most obvious remaining option is to rely on extremist parties.

"What was valid before the elections is valid now," Babis, 63, told journalists Tuesday, about a week after his coalition talks collapsed with the Social Democrats. "I was the only candidate for the prime minister. Nothing has changed in that respect."

As a solution to his my-way-or-the-highway stance, pro-Russian and euroskeptic President Milos Zeman urged Babis to seek the support of the Communist party and the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy, known as SPD. Both want the country of 10.6 million people to leave NATO, and SPD's leader has also called for exiting the European Union.

Such a tie-up would tilt the Czech Republic further in the direction of its regional peers Poland and Hungary, where anti-immigrant governments have clashed with the EU over democratic standards and rule of law. Since winning the October ballot vowing to keep out Muslims and railing against meddling from Brussels, Babis has sought to win the respect of European leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel with assurances that he's a pro-EU leader worthy of being heard.

"Babis is trying really hard to look like a pro-western politician," said Jiri Pehe, the director of New York University in Prague. "Babis' sizable ego very much wants not only domestic, but also also international recognition."

Babis argues that ANO eclipsed all other parties in the October vote, making him the only clear choice to lead the government. And despite the fraud allegations, which he denies, opinion polls show that he's the country's most popular politician. With an estimated fortune of more than $4 billion, Babis said he and his party will decide which path to take as early as Thursday.

The prospects of cooperating with SPD are already causing tension within ANO, however. A number of senior members have said even an informal alliance with SPD is unacceptable after its leader, Tomio Okamura, sparked public outrage for questioning the severity of conditions at a concentration camp near Prague during the Nazi occupation in World War II. Constitutional Court head Pavel Rychetsky called Okamura's views "racist, xenophobic and neo-Nazi."

Babis himself has repeatedly said he won't create a coalition with either the Communists or the SPD, but he hasn't rejected relying on them to win a confidence vote after he failed in a first try in January.

He argues that both the Communist Party and the SPD were elected to parliament with legitimate votes. Relying on backing from the two groups is "the only option on the table for now," Babis told the Mlada Fronta Dnes newspaper, which belongs to his chemical and media empire, in an interview published on Thursday.

ANO has already pushed through some legislation with the help of the two fringe parties, including electing Okamura as deputy speaker and keeping him in the job when the opposition tried to oust him over the concentration camp remarks.

"The only thing that's stopping Babis from an open cooperation with Okamura is his fear of the reaction abroad, of what the EU tells him," said Stanislav Balik, a political scientist at Masaryk University in Brno, the country's second-largest city.EAST HAMPTON  A 30-year veteran police officer has been hired as the towns new police chief.

Capt. Dennis Woessner of the Glastonbury Police Department will assume command of the East Hampton Police Department on April 23. His selection as chief was announced this week by Town Manager Michael Maniscalco.

As captain, Woessner was the second in command of the 58-member Glastonbury department. In East Hampton, he will succeed Chief Sean D. Cox, who led the department for five years before retiring in December.

Thomas Davoren, the former Groton City police chief, has served as interim chief since Coxs departure.

Woessner, Glastonburys police officer of the year in 2001, was chosen from among 35 applicants for the position.

Im very pleased that Capt. Woessner has agreed to join us as our new chief, Maniscalco said Thursday. He brings a wealth of knowledge with him that can only help as we continue down the road toward making our department the best police department in the state.

Maniscalco said he was pleased with both the number and quality of applicants.

I want to take this opportunity to thank the countless volunteers and town staff who work so diligently and effectively to help our community find its next chief of police, Maniscalco said as he announced Woessners appointment.

Woessner and his wife enjoy horses and attending NASCAR races, he said.

I am expecting to swear him into office and welcome him to the town at the Town Council meeting on April 24, Maniscalco said. A reception to introduce Woessner to the community will be held following the ceremony.

In addition to his responsibilities in Glastonbury, Woessner also serves as the team commander of the Capitol Region Emergency Services Team, the regional tactical unit comprising both tactical-team members (35 in all) and 14 negotiators.

One of the largest such teams in the state, CREST covers 10 central Connecticut cities and towns and is responsible for executing high-risk search warrants, dealing with barricaded and/or suicidal people and the protection of dignitaries, Maniscalco said.

Woessner earned both a bachelors degree in criminal justice and a masters degree in criminal justice management from the University of New Haven. He also attended the FBI National Academy. He has continued his education by attending numerous law enforcement courses during his career, Maniscalco said.

Those courses include executive and mid-management courses for police executives at Roger Williams University and first-line supervisory at Babson College.

In addition, Woessner has also taken numerous courses dealing with interview and interrogation, crime scene management and the investigation of sexual assaults, Maniscalco said.

Reporter Jeff Mill covers East Hampton, Cromwell and Portland for The Middletown Press. Contact him at jeff.mill@hearstmediact.com.The Department of Veterans Affairs offers a variety of veteran family and veteran child benefits. Whether you qualify for any or all of them depends on many factors, including the veteran's disability rating and whether he or she is still living.

Veteran Child and Spouse Pay

Payments to the children and spouses of veterans or troops are generally reserved until after the service member's death.

Some surviving spouses may be eligible for a monthly payment known as Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC) if their spouse died on active duty, died after active duty as a result of a service-connected disability, or died after being rated as permanently and totally disabled by the VA.

Spouses or disabled dependent children might be eligible to receive payments from the Survivors Benefit Plan if the service member elected to pay into the plan when he retired from the military.

A surviving family member designated by the service member could be eligible for a benefit known as the death gratuity if the service member dies while on active duty or in a drilling status.

Some low-income surviving spouses, dependents or permanently disabled children of deceased veterans might qualify for a payment known as the survivors pension.

Veteran Child and Spouse Education Benefits

Families might qualify for veteran child education benefits or education help for veteran spouses through several different programs.

Military members who meet certain qualifications, which can include time in service and a service contract extension, can transfer their post-9/11 GI Bill to their dependents. The transfer must be officially made while the service member is on active duty, but the money can be used after he or she leaves the military.

The Fry Scholarship allows spouses and children of those who died on active duty to use the post-9/11 GI Bill even if it wasn't officially transferred before the service member was killed.

Spouses and children of living veterans who have been ruled by the VA to be "permanently and totally disabled" due to service, who died from any cause while considered permanently disabled due to service, or who are ruled by the VA to have died due to a service-connected disability qualify for an education benefit known as the Dependents Education Assistance Program (DEA).

Depending on the circumstance under which a veteran died, children and spouses of veterans might qualify for both the Fry Scholarship and DEA. Although children who qualify for both may be able to use both benefit programs, spouses must choose to use one or the other.

Veteran Family Health Insurance

The VA provides veteran family health insurance to some veteran families through a program known as CHAMPVA.

A family can qualify for that coverage through the VA if their veteran is rated permanently and totally disabled due to service, died while under the rating, is ruled to have died from a service-connected disability, or died on active duty but the family is not eligible for Tricare coverage.

A family might also qualify for CHAMPVA if they are a part of the Comprehensive Assistance for Caregivers Program. That program pays a veteran's primary caregiver a stipend for his or her caregiving work.

Some children born with birth defects to Vietnam or Korean War veteran, or families who were stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, between 1953 and 1987 might also qualify for coverage.

Commissary, Exchange and Shopping Benefits

Although all honorably discharged veterans qualify to shop at the exchanges via their online stores, that benefit does not extend to their families.

Veterans who have been ruled 100 percent disabled due to service and their spouses can shop on base at the exchanges or commissaries using an ID card issued on base. You can visit your local base ID card office to find more about how to apply for that ID.

Grown children of a veteran, regardless of the veteran's service or rating, do not qualify to shop on base or through the online exchange program.

Veteran Family Memorial Benefits

Spouses and dependents of veterans or service members may be eligible for burial in a national cemetery. To qualify, the spouse must either be married to the service member at the time of death or be an non-remarried spouse of a deceased veteran.

Dependent children who were under 21 at the time of their death, children who were under 23 but enrolled in school full time at death, or those who were ruled permanently mentally or physically disabled before age 21 may also be eligible for burial benefits.

Parents of unmarried service members with no dependents who are buried in a national cemetery and who died on active duty after Oct. 7, 2001, may also be eligible.

Other Veteran Family Benefits

The spouses and families of veterans are eligible to use MilitaryOneSource, including the system's free non-medical counseling services, for up to one year after leaving active duty.

Veteran caregivers can access support resources, including mentorship and a help line, even if they do not qualify for payment through the Comprehensive Assistance for Caregivers Program.

Veteran Family Nonprofits

Many nonprofits also serve the families of veterans. National nonprofits such as Team Red, White & Blue, the Wounded Warrior Project and Operation Homefront all have resources for both veterans and their families.

Other nonprofits, like the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), specifically serve surviving family members. Families should also check in their local area for nonprofits that assist with local needs.

STAY ON TOP OF YOUR BENEFITS

Military benefits are always changing -- keep up with everything from pay to health care by signing up for a free Military.com membership, which will send all the latest benefits straight to your inbox, as well as give you access to up-to-date pay charts and more.The U.S. military's fighter shortage is expected to get worse over the next three to five years, and more emphasis should be placed on how the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps reevaluate their fighter pilot workloads and training opportunities before the problem reaches a point of no return, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

According to the GAO report, issued Wednesday, each of the services' fighter pilot shortage gaps hovers at roughly 25 percent. The Air Force has the largest gap, which is expected to grow until at least 2023.

The problems are a direct result of "aircraft readiness challenges, reduced training opportunities, and increased attrition of fighter pilots due to career dissatisfaction," the report said.

"To help increase fighter pilot numbers, the military services are taking actions, including increasing the amounts of financial incentives to retain pilots," it said, but added recommendations, such as reevaluating workload and deployment schedules, for each of the service secretaries to take going forward.

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GAO's findings comes amid Military Times' in-depth report showing that military aviation mishaps have increased exponentially over the last five years.

Each of the services classifies a shortage differently: the Air Force considers pilot communities with less than 100 percent of pilot authorizations filled to be insufficient. The Navy considers itself in shortage when it's unable to fully staff deploying squadrons. And the Marine Corps considers itself to have an "unhealthy" shortage if less than 85 percent of authorizations are staffed.

The Air Force, for example, has a shortage of 2,000 pilots in the midst of an effort to grow its remotely piloted aircraft ranks. The shift has had significant effect on retention in the fighter pilot community, as previous fighter pilots have moved into RPA jobs over the last few years, the report said.

From fiscal 2013 to 2017, the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps had fewer fighter pilots than authorized positions, or billets funded by Congress, the report said.

In the Air Force, Congress had not provided as many authorizations between 2006 and 2013 as it had in the past, which led to some overmanned career fields in 2011. But as Congress made more positions available between 2014 and 2017, the Air Force saw more jobs than pilots, creating a mismatch in its fighter pilot community.

"This gap grew from 192 fighter pilots (5 percent of authorizations) in fiscal year 2006 to 1,005 (27 percent) in fiscal year 2017," the report said.

The service has been sounding the alarm on the pilot shortage since 2016, when it noticed its pilot shortage had grown to at least 700 pilots, then-Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen David Goldfein said in an Op-Ed in DefenseOne.

That number grew to 2,000 by November 2017.

"[We're] almost 2,000 pilots short [in] a force that has 20,000 pilots, so that's one in 10 that we're short," Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said during a briefing at the Pentagon at the time.

Meanwhile, GAO said it could not track down the same kind of detailed staffing data for the Navy that it had for the other services. But through interviews with Navy officials at various commands and locations as well as analysis of available data from between 2011 and 2017, investigators determined that the service had a gap of 57 fighter pilots (12 percent) in fiscal 2013, which grew to 136 fighter pilots (26 percent) in fiscal year 2017.

GAO reviewed data related to fixed-wing fighter pilots' first at-sea tours, completed between 3 and 6 years of service.

"Navy officials told us that they believe current gaps in the fighter pilot community could increase through mid-2019," the report said.

Like the Air Force, the Marine Corps has had fewer fighter pilots than authorizations in recent years. From fiscal 2006 through fiscal 2017, their pilot gap grew from 63 fighter pilots (6 percent of authorizations) in fiscal year 2006 to 322 fighter pilots (24 percent) in fiscal 2017.

Within the last two fiscal years, the service has been unable to fully staff fighter pilot positions.

"[The] gap between staffing levels and operational positions increased from 12 fighter pilots (1 percent of authorizations) to 57 (7 percent) in fiscal years 2016 through 2017," the report said.

The Navy has said it is extending deployments as necessary to fulfill manning requirements for squadrons deploying overseas. This plan to an extent has helped alleviate some of its gaps. For example, extending fighter pilots' deployments has allowed the Navy to reduce the fiscal year 2017 first-tour fighter pilot gap from 136 pilots, or 26 percent, to just 75 pilots, or 15 percent.

But the band-aid solution cannot become the norm, GAO said.

Regardless of service, "squadron leaders and fighter pilots told us that these approaches are having a negative impact on the fighter pilot workforce," the report said.

"Specifically, squadron leaders and fighter pilots told us that the high pace of operations for senior fighter pilots has limited their availability to train junior pilots, which has constrained the military services' ability to increase the number of pilots with specific qualifications."

Various incentives such as bonuses, a tiered flight pay approach and extended rotations at preferred locations are ongoing.

But GAO also recommends that each of the services should reevaluate the workload it requires of its pilots.

Officials have said that's easier said than done.

Wilson last year said she's concerned pilots may be at higher risk for mishaps because of the high operational tempo of missions around the globe.

"I worry about that -- I think we should all worry about that," Wilson said during a briefing at the Pentagon on Aug. 25. "When we characterize our readiness levels, we prioritize being in the current fight and the nuclear mission. That means that some of the missions against integrated air defenses, we're not as ready."

She added, "That doesn't mean we won't go. It means fewer will come back. I think we need to understand that."

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @orianapawlyk.Defense Secretary Jim Mattis signaled Thursday that the U.S. was prepared to wait for definitive proof that Syria carried out a chemical attack before launching an attack, but stressed the moral imperative for a U.S. response.

"Some things are simply inexcusable, beyond the pale and in the worst interest of, not just the chemical weapons convention, but of civilization itself," Mattis said in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.

Currently, the U.S. and its allies "don't have evidence" that the Syrian regime carried out the attack last Saturday in the Damascus suburb of Douma that reportedly killed at least 40, Mattis said.

"I believe there was a chemical attack and we're looking for the evidence," he said. "We're trying to get inspectors in, probably within a week."

Mattis was referring to international investigating teams from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

He cautioned that even if the inspectors get access to the attack sites, they are not permitted under their mandate to assign blame, but only to determine that chemical agents were used.

"We will not know from this investigating team" who was responsible, Mattis said, although he theorized that chlorine or sarin nerve agent -- or a combination of the two -- were used in the barrel bombing of Douma.

"We will not know who did it. Only that it happened. That's where we're at right now," Mattis told the committee.

Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford went before the House to testify on the fiscal 2019 defense budget as Capitol Hill buzzed with speculation about President Donald Trump's threats to attack Syria and possibly start a proxy war with Russia.

Trump earlier this week suggested that an attack was imminent.

"Get ready Russia," he said in a tweet.

But he suggested in another tweet early Thursday that there was no timeline for a U.S. response.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place," Trump said. "Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our "Thank you America?"

Following an agriculture meeting at the White House later Thursday, Trump said of Syria that "we'll see what happens," but he expected decisions would be made "fairly soon."

He said "We're looking very seriously at that situation. It's too bad the world puts us in a position like that." He continued that decisions will be "made fairly soon."

Following their testimony before the Committee, Mattis said that he and Dunford were going to the White House for a National Security Council meeting at which he will "take forward the various options to the president."

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.A sixth woman has begun the Air Force's battlefield airman training program in hopes to become the service's first female Tactical Air Control Party airman, according to Air Education and Training Command.

The airman, whose identity has not been made public for privacy concerns, began her first block of TACP apprentice training on March 12 after suffering a previous medical setback in January, according to Marilyn Holliday, spokeswoman for AETC.

Two female airmen who previously entered the program in August are no longer in the pipeline, added 1st Lt. Geneva E. Croxton, also a spokeswoman.

"To date, there have been five women who have attempted, and a sixth is currently in the pipeline," Croxton said in an email to Military.com on Wednesday.

Related content:

The two female airmen who began battlefield training in August also attempted to become TACP specialists, according to officials. The three before them did not follow through in the program: one TACP trainee ended up removing herself from training due to a leg injury in 2016; a combat rescue officer candidate passed the physical test but never completed the selection program application; and another non-prior service TACP candidate couldn't meet entry standards following Basic Military Training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas.

Since the Defense Department opened combat career fields to women in December 2015, few female airmen have qualified and entered TACP training, a critical job in which airmen are assigned to infantry units to coordinate Air Force fixed-wing aircraft in close-air support against enemy targets, among other responsibilities.

"Once in the training pipelines, it can take almost two years for an airman to graduate training and join an operational Air Force unit," Holliday told Military.com. "This takes into account the natural timeline to recruit, select and train."

Then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter reversed longstanding U.S. military policy Dec. 3, 2015, when he announced that all military occupational specialties would open to women. In the following months, the military services moved to change ground combat and special operations training pipelines to accommodate women without decreasing physical standards.

In the Air Force, seven new career fields opened: Special tactics officer (13CX), combat rescue officer (13DX), combat controller (1C2XX), pararescue (1T2XX), special operations weather (1WOX2), tactical air control party (1C4XX) and air liaison officer (13LX).

The Air Force opened air liaison officer career field to women before opening the remaining career fields.

Women continue to graduate as ALOs from battlefield training, Holliday said.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana0214.'Fat Leonard' in Upcoming Podcast Boasts of Holding US Navy in Palm of His Hand

Leonard Glenn Francis pleaded guilty in federal court in January 2015 and began cooperating with investigators.Military officials on Thursday confirmed that the Defense Department has temporarily suspended acceptance of new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters over corrosion issues.

The suspension has been in place "for a few weeks" but is not expected to impact any major training or operational missions, said Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the Air Force's military deputy for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Acquisition at the Pentagon.

News of the temporary pause was first reported by Reuters on Wednesday.

The issue stems from corrosion in fastener "holes that were drilled and not corrected or properly treated found during an inspection at Hill Air Force Base, [Utah]," Bunch said during a House Armed Services subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. He did no elaborate if it pertains to specific fastener holes in a part of the aircraft, or throughout the entire aircraft.

"We do not see it as a long-term problem, and if we have an operational need for the aircraft, we have discussed [it] with [Vice] Adm. [Mat] Winter," he said referring to the director of the F-35 Joint Program Office.

Related content:

"He's willing to work with us [so] if we need the aircraft for an operational need we will work with him to get those aircraft out of the hold that they're on right now," Bunch said.

Fourteen of the Lot 10 F-35 aircraft have been delivered to the military, Bunch said, but five remain with Lockheed: three F-35As for the Air Force, one for Norway and one for Australia.

Speaking with reporters after the hearing, Bunch said he believes it's not just F-35As that are affected, but could not speak to how many B or C models remain backlogged.

"I can't see that [this issue] would be just us," Bunch said. "All of the F-35s are going through [the same inspection] right now."

Bunch said the corrosion issue is not the same as the corrosion found in the lines back in Sept. 2016. The Air Force grounded 13 out of 104 F-35s in the fleet then, "due to the discovery of peeling and crumbling insulation in avionics cooling lines inside the fuel tanks," the service said at the time.

According to the Reuters report, the Pentagon stopped accepting deliveries of the plane and officials are in discussions with Lockheed Martin, the F-35's manufacturer, about who should pay for the costs.

"This is purely about who is responsible [for] cost," Vice Adm Paul Grosklags, commander of the Naval Air Systems Command, said during the hearing alongside Bunch and other top aviation brass.

"I agree with Adm. Winter's decision about suspending delivery of those aircraft, because quite honestly, this is a mistake made by the contractor during production, and they should pay for that out of their bottom line, not out of our topline [budget]," Grosklags said.

The Joint Program Office said those discussions are ongoing.

"Per the direction of the program executive officer, F-35 deliveries have been temporarily paused while the government and Lockheed Martin reach an agreement on a contractual issue regarding repair work to remediate the known aircraft fastener hole primer quality escape," JPO spokesman Joe DellaVedova told Military.com.

"This is not a safety of flight issue but rather a contractual resourcing issue that needs to be resolved," he said in a statement Thursday. "The government has implemented this pause to ensure the warfighter receives a quality product from industry. We look forward to a swift resolution of this issue."

The latest news comes after Winter publicly condemned Lockheed recently not only for continued high costs within the program but also for poor manufacturing.

"I am not satisfied in the following areas: the price is coming down, but it's not coming down fast enough," Winter said on Feb. 28.

"We don't know, to the level of granularity that I want to know, what it actually costs to produce an aircraft," he said. "And the number of quality escapes and what we call production line defects needs to get better."

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @orianapawlyk.The U.S. Army's chief of staff today said he agreed with President Trump that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should pay a big price for a recent alleged chemical attack on a Damascus suburb.

Under questioning from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Gen. Mark Milley testified at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that Assad's arsenal of chemical weapons should be attacked.

"The President said that Assad is an animal, who killed innocent children by using chlorine gas, and maybe some other form of gas, and he is going to pay a big price. Do you agree with that statement Mr. Secretary -- that Assad should pay a big price?" Graham said, directing the question to Secretary of the Army Mark Esper.

Esper declined to comment on Graham's question.

Milley, however, did not hesitate to answer.

"Absolutely, yes. No question he should," Milley said, adding that Assad's "ability to use chemical munitions on the innocent needs to be significantly degraded."

In a series of Tweets Sunday, Trump called Assad an "animal" and said Russian President Vladimir Putin shared the blame for a suspected chemical attack in a Damascus suburb on Saturday that reportedly killed at least 40.

Trump said Syria would have "a big price to pay."

Graham was one of several Republican senators who was quick to call for a military strike on Assad's forces, similar to the U.S. military's response to a chemical attack on northwestern Syria last April.

Following that chemical attack, the Navy launched 59 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles from two guided-missile destroyers, targeting aircraft and structures at the al-Shayrat Airfield. The airfield was believed to be the origin point for aircraft used to attack the town of Khan Sheikhoun with a deadly nerve agent.

Graham used Thursday's hearing to continue to push for such a response and added that he hoped it will serve as a warning to potential adversaries in North Korea, Iran and Russia.

"I just hope it's a big price. When it is all said and done that Kim Jong-un says, 'hey, that was a big price,' I hope that the Iranians believe that Assad paid a big price, the Russians believe he paid a big price," Graham said. "I hope that they start paying a big price for supporting Assad."

"The question of whether or not it's a big price is yet to be determined and I would say this -- if after saying that, he doesn't pay a big price, America will pay a big price."

Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.Military members and veterans can get up to four free months of Apple Music through the Apple Music military discount -- but...Gold Star kid Cayleigh Hinton, 5, didn't have a date to this year's father-daughter dance.

Described as "Daddy's little girl" by her mom, Jillian Hinton, Cayleigh's father, Army Sgt. Terrence Hinton was killed in a 2017 training accident at his Hawaii duty station.

So the local military community near her home in Springfield, Illinois stepped up. First Sgt. Joseph Bierbrodt, an Illinois National Guard soldier, asked Cayleigh to the ball in her father's stead.

Cayleigh Hinton and Illinois National Guard 1st Sgt. Joseph Bierbrod arrive at a father-daughter dance in February. Cayleighs father, Sgt. Terrence Hinton, died in a 2017 training accident. (Illinois National Guard/Staff Sgt. Robert R. Adams)

"He (Terrence) loved doing school activities with Cayleigh. He would have loved to take her to a father-daughter dance," Jillian Hinton said, according to this Army release. "We wish he could be here today, but we know that he is looking down on us and loves us."

Making the night perfect and magical for Cayleigh was the focus of Bierbrodt's mission. As a father of four who has taken his own daughters to dances, he knew just how important this moment could be.

Cayleigh Hinton whose father, Sgt. Terrence Hinton died in a 2017 training accident, gets in a limo on her way to the February father-daughter dance. (Illinois National Guard/Staff Sgt. Robert R. Adams)

"When I received the request to do this, it touched me," Bierbrodt said in the release. "This is something I felt needed to be done. Military is family to me and as a family we need to be there for each other."

Cayleigh Hinton, daughter of Sgt. Terrence Hinton, dances with 1st Sgt. Joseph Bierbrodt at a father-daughter dance in Illinois. Cayleigh's father, Sgt. Terrence Hinton, died in a training accident May 14, 2017 in Hawaii. (Illinois National Guard/Staff Sgt. Robert R. Adams)

"Cayleigh looks absolutely beautiful tonight and she is priceless," Bierbrodt said at the February event.

Beirbrodt formally asked Cayleigh to the dance at her home with flowers in hand, and even presented her with a six-foot stuffed dog in an Army jacket.

The pair then went to the dance in a limo, escorted by the Patriot Guard and multiple police and fire departments.

Cayleigh Hinton whose father, Sgt. Terrence Hinton died in a 2017 training accident, dances with David Gier, Senior Ride Captain of the Illinois Patriot Guard, at a father-daughter dance. (Illinois National Guard/Staff Sgt. Robert R. Adams)

"When you're five years old everything happens in moments," her mom said at the time, according to the release. "I have seen her get excited over and over again tonight and that's what make me so happy. I'm so thankful for all of this."The Reds announced that right-hander Yovani Gallardo has cleared waivers and rejected an outright assignment to the minors in favor of free agency. Cincinnati had designated him for assignment earlier this week.

Gallardos tenure with the Reds will go down as a brief 2 1/3-inning stint over a span of just three games. Cincinnati picked up the veteran righty after he didnt make the Brewers Opening Day roster, but the 32-year-old will once again hit the open market in search of a new club.

Gallardo was a quality big league starter from 2009-15, averaging 32 starts and 191 innings of 3.69 ERA ball per season with Milwaukee (and, in 2015, with the Rangers). However, his strikeout rate began to deteriorate in 2013. His fastball, which averaged 92.5 mph during his best seasons, fell to an average of 90.4 mph in his lone season with Texas, and the start of his Orioles career was marred by a shoulder/biceps issue which shelved him for roughly six weeks. He gained some of his velocity back in 2017 with Seattle, though that spike is likely in part attributable to a brief move to the bullpen.

Over the past two seasons, Gallardo has struggled to a 5.57 ERA with just 6.5 K/9 against 4.4 BB/9 and 1.4 HR/9 as hes become increasingly susceptible to the long ball. Still, a club in need of some rotation depth could certainly look to bring the veteran into the fold as a depth option  depending on his willingness to head to the minors. Its possible that a club particularly thin on pitching, such as the Marlins, could look to plug Gallardo directly into its staff (thats merely my own speculation), though most clubs would view him as more of a Triple-A depth option at this point.live bse live

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In another twist to the Fortis Healthcare saga, the countrys second largest healthcare provider said on Thursday that it has received an unsolicited binding offer jointly from Sunil Munjal of Hero and Burmans of Dabur to invest Rs 1,250 crore directly into the company through a preferential allotment.

Of the Rs 1,250 crore - Munjal and Burmans have offered to invest Rs 500 crore immediately, and Rs 750 crore post due diligence to be completed within three weeks.

Group entities of Munjal and Burmans are shareholders of Fortis, holding approximately 3 percent shares.

With the latest proposal to pump in Rs 1,250 crore  Munjal and Burmans will get around 16 percent stake in Fortis in addition to the existing 3 percent.

We are investing an amount of Rs 500 crores, based on the current business and financial position of the company reflected in the Company's various public filings, and taking into account information in the public domain, without doing any due diligence, said Munjals and Burmans in a joint statement.

Allotment and pricing will be as per SEBI ICDR guidelines for preferential issues or Rs 156 per share whichever is higher.

Incidentally  Munjal and Burmans are offering one rupee over and above the revised offer of Rs 155 per share of Manipal Hospitals

Our offer is in the best interest of Fortis Healthcare. In fact, all those connected with the companys ecosystem, its shareholders, patients, their attendants, the community and public at large, in addition to the lenders, suppliers, doctors, medical and non-medical staff will benefit from it. We are investing in the company and our aim is to create value for all stakeholders, said Munjal in the letter to Fortis' Board.

Our offer does not envisage any changes in the current structure, operations and assets of the company and is simple and is almost immediately implementable, said Anand Burman.

Since this is in the interest of all concerned, he expressed the hope that the Board would consider this very simple offer and put it before shareholders to take a final decision. We believe that our offer deserves serious and urgent consideration, Burman added.

Munjal and Burmans have sought one board seat to the investors to monitor the above transaction.

Meanwhile, Fortis said the proposal is under evaluation by the company and added the it will keep stock exchanges informed accordingly.

Munjal along with Burmans approached the company in the last week of March 2018 with the offer.

On July 19, 2017, Hero expressed interest in exploring the possibility of an M&A with Fortis, and had entered into a non-disclosure agreement.

Unfortunately, these discussions could not fructify as there was an impasse which arose on account of the management's insistence that Hero should state the commercials, including a price, before any due diligence could commence and Hero insisted that unless a due diligence was permitted, no commercials including a price could be offered, Munjal said in a statement.

This resulted in a stalemate by the end of July 2017, and hence the discussions did not progress further at that stage, the statement added.

Both Munjal and Burmans have thereafter independently acquired and held shares of the company.

As shareholders, we are concerned regarding the Company's future, as it presently finds itself at a very critical juncture of existence, Munjal and Burmans said.

An analyst tracking the series of events in the Fortis saga who didnt want to be named said, Ideally a buyer aims at buying controlling stake, the money that they are talking about will get them 16 percent stake - its interesting to see what Munjal and Burmans are planning to do here, running hospitals isnt there core business.

IHH Healthcare proposed bid

Earlier, Bloomberg News reported that the Malaysia-headquartered healthcare provider had proposed a potential bid of as much as USD 1.3 billion for Fortis that values each share of the company at Rs 160 topping an offer made by the Manipal-TPG consortium, quoting unnamed people with knowledge of the matter.

Manipal Hospitals-TPG combine sweetened the deal to buy Fortis Healthcare on Tuesday revising the bid by upwards of 21 percent valuing Fortis at USD 1.2 billion.

We will make appropriate announcement(s) should there be any material developments, IHH spokesperson from Singapore said in email response to Moneycontrol.

Shares of Fortis rose 4.17 percent to close at Rs 153.80 on the BSE, the benchmark Sensex gained 0.47 percent to end at 34,101.13 points.

Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh - referred as Singh brothers the erstwhile promoters of Fortis now own around 0.77 percent stake in the company.

Yes Bank remains the largest shareholder of Fortis with 15 percent stake in the company.live bse live

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Hindustan Unilever Ltd has appointed Sanjiv Mehta as Chairman of Board of Directors in succession to Harish Manwani who retires at the end of his term, the company informed in an exchange filing today.

Manwani has decided to retire as the Chairman of the company and will not seek re-appointment at the forthcoming Annual General Meeting to be held in June 2018.

The decision was taken at HUL's board meeting held today to discuss succession planning.

HUL board has also approved re-appointment of Sanjiv Mehta as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer for the next five years, after completion of his present term in October 2018.

Mehta was appointed as MD & CEO in October 2013. He will be re-designated at the same position after conclusion of the forthcoming AGM, the company informed in an exchange filing.

Manwani (64) took over as the Non-Executive Chairman of HUL in July 2005. According to a press statement announcing the development, Manwani oversaw a period of sustained growth, with the business nearly tripling in size, and HUL reinforcing itself as one of Indias most admired companies.

One of the most successful leaders of HUL, Manwani closely followed Unilevers credo of doing well by doing good throughout his career. He believes that the challenges businesses face today, can only be addressed through the 4G sustainable growth model of competitive, consistent, rofitable and above all, responsible growth. This model has become a strong focal point for HUL and is central to the Companys business strategy, said the statement.

Mehta added, Harish leaves behind a legacy that few will be able to match. He has lived the values that make HUL such a great company. Through his passion, commitment and endless energy, he leaves a lasting impact on the business. I will personally miss his leadership and wise counsel.

The HUL Board had, as part of its periodic succession planning meetings, discussed the succession plan concerning the Chairman. This was before the Kotak Committee on Corporate Governance Report was in the public domain.

The company has taken note of SEBIs recent decision to accept the recommendation of the Kotak Committee to separate the positions of the Chairman and the Managing Director from April 2020, for the top 500 companies by market capitalisation.

The company said in a statement that HUL Board will ensure compliance with the new regulation of separation of the two positions by April 2020.Vietnamese authorities are investigating an alleged cryptocurrency scam in which about 32,000 investors have been duped of $660 million.

A Ho Chi Minh City-based company, Modern Tech, which was allegedly behind two Ponzi schemes involving cryptocurrencies iFan and Pincoin is now the centre of the investigation. Many investors came out on streets at its office address to protest on Sunday, reported a local publication Tuoi Tre News.

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the quantum of the alleged fraud.

Modern Tech claimed to be the authorised representative to launch ICO (Initial Coin Offering) for two cryptocurrencies, Ifan and Pincoin, in Vietnam. The company has been accused of encouraging people to invest in these new cryptocurrencies.

Pincoin which is based in London and has a mission to develop and promote blockchain technology and cryptocurrency in a rising global sharing economy to help people share assets, resources, time and skills more efficiently claims to deliver up to 40 percent monthly profit, apparently without mentioning risks, to its investors  a hallmark of a Ponzi scheme.

Similarly, iFan aims to provide payment options for content creators and consumers. The outstanding aspect of the iFan platform is the sharing of profits against celebrities, enabling them to generate revenue based on their content, images and information on social networks. Actors, idols, athletes, or celebrities all who act in present or even who have retired, they still manage and work to attract their fans, it says in its whitepaper.

Both cryptocurrencies launched their ICOs in November-December last year. iFan had proposed to sell 10 million coins at varying prices from $1.6 to $6.8 per coin in its first crowdsale last year. On the other hand, Pincoin had a target to raise $150 million from its ICO.

Vietnamese authorities have started the clampdown on cryptocurrencies in the country. On April 4, Vietnamese PM released a directive on strengthening the management of Bitcoin-related activities and other similar virtual currency in the country.

Vietnams central bank has already declared that cryptocurrencies are not a lawful medium of payment in the country.DHFL Pramerica Asset Management Company has appointed Aniruddha Naha as senior equity fund manager, the fund house said in a press release on Thursday.

Naha has more than 18 years of experience in the equity and debt market.

In his last assignment, Naha was Portfolio Manager - Avendus Wealth Management.

Prior to that Naha was Fund Manager - IDFC Asset Management Company, Mirae Asset Global Investments (Hong Kong), and as DSP BlackRock Investment Managers.RBI's former governor Raghuram Rajan has said that he had made it quite clear to the government that the demonetisation was "not a good idea" and that its implementation was "not well-planned" since 87.5 percent of the currency was being demonetised.

On November 8, 2016, the Centre banned Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes to curtail the shadow economy and crack down on the use of illicit and counterfeit cash to fund illegal activities and terrorism.

Speaking at the prestigious Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge yesterday, 55-year-old Rajan rejected the claim that the Reserve Bank of India had not been consulted by the government before it went ahead with the demonetisation.

He, however, reiterated that the move to cancel 87.5 percent of the currency value was "not a good idea".

"I didn't ever say that I wasn't consulted (on demonetisation). In fact, I have made it quite clear that we were consulted and we didn't think it was a good idea," said Rajan who is currently the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

He said demonetisation "was not a well-planned, well thought-out, useful exercise and I told the government that when the idea was first mooted."

He added that any macro-economist would say that if 87.5 percent of the currency is being demonetised, then it better be made sure that a similar amount of currency is printed and ready to be put back in circulation.

"India went into it without having done that. It had a negative economic impact but also the idea was that somehow people who had money stored in their basements without having paid taxes on it would overnight see reason and come to the government and say 'sorry we were hiding this stuff, let me pay taxes on it'," Rajan said, calling it a "naive view".

"Anybody who knows India, knows that very quickly we find ways around the system," he said, adding that with "essentially" all the money that was demonetised coming back into the system, the exercise did not have the direct effect that was sought.

While the longer term impact of demonetisation is yet to be seen, its negative economic impact included people not having currency, not being able to pay and economic activity plummeting especially in the informal sector.

"There may be some longer term impact that people think that if this sort of thing happens then the government is serious about collecting taxes. There may be greater tax payments but we still have to see strong evidence that that is true," he said.

Rajan also expressed concern that a lot of people probably lost their jobs due to demonetisation but that has not been counted well as it would be mostly in the informal sector.

"The positive impacts (of demonetisation) are out there in the future. We have no idea whether they will be important. To my mind it was not a policy that was useful at that time," he said while speaking at the 2018 Albert H Gordon Lecture on the topic 'Leverage, Financial Crises, and Policies to Raise Economic Growth'.

To a suggestion that demonetisation could have positively impacted growth, Rajan said "you would have to find a new economic theory to explain how it helped the economy".

He said most estimates of the cost of demonetisation vary between 1.5-2 percent of the GDP.

"It would be a really die-hard government advocate who would say that the growth benefits of demonetisation were immediate," he said.

"Most of the supporters of the move would say that the benefits of the move are coming by changing the incentive to pay taxes. I would say yes, we will have to wait and see whether that in fact is true," he said.

Rajan, who joined the RBI in September 2013 when the country was facing its worst currency crisis since the 1990s, left the organisation after completing his three-year term in September 2016.live bse live

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JioMoney, the PPI wallet by Reliance Jio Payments Bank has entered into a partnership with meal benefits firm Sodexo. Here, Sodexo customers can use the platform to pay for services. This covers the non-digital standalone food stores on the digital payments ecosystem, where Sodexo Meal Cards will be accepted via the JioMoney application.

In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Stephane Michelin, Managing Director, Benefits & Rewards Services, Sodexo SVC India said they currently have 100,000 merchants accepting Sodexo and aim to multiply their network by three times in 2-3 years.

He added that this partnership will help them get to the hinterland through an addition of 10,000 merchants by August 2018. Initially, the roll-out will happen across eight cities and later will be expanded to other locations as well.

Sodexo has 3 million daily users in India and Michelin explained the partnership with JioMoney will help them penetrate deeper into the hinterland. As part of this partnership, the PoS devices will be installed by JioMoney where the meal cards can be used to pay for food items.

We believe that the need is to expand the network of acceptance of our products and services. On the B2B front, we are tied-up with 11,000 corporates in India, he added.

In April, Reliance Industries' payments bank venture Jio Payments Bank started commercial operations from Tuesday, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in a statement.

Anirban S Mukherjee, Business Head, JioMoney said the integration will bring convenience and new digital transaction options for both Jio Money and Sodexo users in India. Going forward both brands will leverage core strengths, develop synergies and expand their reach and presence in Indias growing digital ecosystem.

Sodexos proprietary meal benefit solution, Sodexo Meal Pass can be linked to the JioMoney App for making quick payments on-the-go, a Jio release today said.

Consumers no longer have to carry the Sodexos physical card for the purchase of food and non-alcoholic beverages. They can simply add the Sodexo Meal Card balance to the JioMoney app and start transacting on-the-go. Jio and Sodexo will continue to work together to accelerate adoption of services offered by both the brands.

Reliance Industries Ltd, the parent company of Reliance Jio Infocomm, is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.In a major restructuring of the Banks Board Bureau, the government removed Vinod Rai as the chairman and appointed Bhanu Pratap Sharma in his place. Sharma is an IAS, who is currently the Chairman of Recruitment and Assessment Centre at Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

Rai's term as the BBB chairman had ended on March 31.

Three other new members have been appointed including Vedika Bhandarkar (former Vice chairman and MD of Credit Suisse India), P. Pradeep Kumar (former MD at State Bank of India), and Pradip Shah (former MD at Crisil ratings agency) who was previously an alternate member at BBB.

Chairman Sharma has held the posts of health secretary, secretary, department of personnel and training and principal secretary of Bihar.

Rajeev Kumar, Secretary, Department Financial Services said in a post on Twitter:



Govt renews commitment to not interfere in Sr level appointments in PSBs. Appoints new BBB with professionals with diverse expertise to select top management in PSBs. BBB Recommendations made so far incl HR reforms agenda to be taken forward. @PMOIndia @FinMinIndia @PIB_INDIA pic.twitter.com/d4qSRaOblM

 Rajeev kumar (@rajeevkumr) April 12, 2018

Govt renews commitment to not interfere in Sr level appointments in PSBs. Appoints new BBB with professionals with diverse expertise to select top management in PSBs. BBB Recommendations made so far incl HR reforms agenda to be taken forward. @PMOIndia @FinMinIndia @PIB_INDIA.

Kumar is currently the Ex-officio member at the BBB along with Seema Bahuguna, Secretary, Department of Public Enterprises, Government of India and N. S. Vishwanathan Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India, who is also ex-officio member.

Previously, Anil K Khandelwal, former chairman and MD at Bank of Baroda; HN Sinor, former joint MD at ICICI Bank; and, Rupa Kudwa, former MD & CEO at CRISIL, were members of the Bureau.

BBB was set up in February 2016 as an autonomous recommendatory body with the former Comptroller and Auditor General - Vinod Rai as the Chairman. It was created to help prepare the banks in the public sector universe to take on the competition, develop resilience, build capacity through talent and technology.

On March 19, almost 10 days before his term was to end, Rai had hit out at the Finance Ministry for sitting over its slew of recommendations for public sector banking reforms and also pointed to a a communication breakdown between the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and the BBB.

Disclosing extracts of a letter sent by him to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to seek time for a meeting to discuss those issues, Rai listed out the need for an organic relationship between the government and the bureau, adding in the footnote that, The bureau continues to await a meeting (with the FM).

In a 60-page report titled Compendium of recommendations, Rai provided a point-wise status update highlighting the work done by the Bureau in the last two years.

He had mentioned this after RBI Governor Urjit Patel raised concerns at a public speech that its role as a regulator was limited with respect to PSBs, which is not on the same lines as its engagement with the banking entities which are not in the public sector.The aerospace and defence manufacturing hub will be spread over 600 acres. The GMR Group overall has 2,100 acres in the area.

The group is looking to leverage on the government's Make in India push, with offset policy in defence sector expected to bring in more investment to set up manufacturing facilities.

"The hub is ideally located, with manufacturing facilities of major defence PSUs, including HAL, Bharat Electronics, situated within a distance of 60km," a senior GMR Group executive told Moneycontrol.

Of the 600 acres, infrastructure like roads, sewage and electric lines will be ready on 275 acres within six to eight months, the executive added.

The GMR Group will invest Rs 1,000 crore in developing the planned aerospace and defence manufacturing hub at its Special Investment Region, in Hosur, in Tamil Nadu's Krishnagiri district.

He added that the planned hub will benefit from established industrial ecosystem in Hosur, where more than 700 MSMEs are present.

"Even players like Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, has a development centre in Bengaluru, which is nearby," said the executive.

The project is a joint venture between GMR Group and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO).

While the company said it is too early to name possible investors in the hub  and the investment amount  executives said they had started the process of reaching out to manufacturers of defence equipment.

"Defence is a capex heavy sector. Investments in the hub will be sizeable," said the executive.

Commenting on the planned hub, BVN Rao, Business Chairman-Transportation & Urban Infrastructure, GMR Group had on Wednesday said: This defence manufacturing hub can potentially be a game changer for the region. We will be providing all the necessary infrastructure facilities to attract global majors to set up their manufacturing facilities here."Uday Kotak

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Government needs to re-look certain provisions of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) as a situation might emerge where there is only one buyer for a stressed asset, Kotak Mahindra Bank Vice Chairman and MD Uday Kotak said today.

The president-designate of CII also said that one of the biggest challenges facing the Indian industry relates to ethics, values and governance.

Addressing the media, he said that "quite a few areas need to be looked at" with regard to IBC.

Referring to Section 29A of the IBC which prohibits promoters from buying back their own stressed assets, Kotak said: "The challenge is not at this stage but as we go into the future, as we go into smaller companies where you may not get even one bid. How are we going to handle that situation. "Are we going to force those companies into liquidation where probably in some of those situations the only buyer may be the promoter at some price."

The choice is between the cost of liquidation versus whether a promoter of a smaller company should be allowed to bid for the stressed asset, he said. "I think that is one area which down the road will be an issue which will need to be addressed".

Kotak said the rules of bidding should be like a prospectus where it should be clearly stated what is the basis on which the bids will be evaluated.

"There are a lot of these things, there is grapevine, there are rumours and all that. So we need to put a very rigorous process in place of how bids will be evaluated. Will it be a standard process for all or for each of the companies the resolution professional puts down the rules of bidding clearly," he said.

On the 270-day moratorium for restructuring a company after its case is admitted by the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), Kotak said many companies are now close to 270 days in April.

"Will the courts allow more than 270 days. In that case is it a valid approach by the courts or will it be challenged in the Supreme Court, that is another big test which will happen by the end of April/early May. This 270 days in the first round is going to be tested for some of the companies," he added.

He said another area is the issues around contingent liabilities which have not become real liabilities.

"Is it an obligation for a buyer to pay for those liabilities or not pay the liabilities. Personal guarantees, do they survive in case the loans are assigned to the buyer, the personal guarantees of the individuals," Kotak said, adding however that the progress on IBC is very good.

Against the backdrop of a spate of scams which have come to light recently in the banking sector, Kotak said he is a firm believer that corporate governance is in place across all sectors including the financial sector and is undergoing a process of evolution

"We will navigate through this and hopefully down the line we will see significantly improved standards of governance as we go forward. Yes, we are running through challenges currently but I am pretty clear that they will get better," he said.

He said we need to certainly find ways of bringing in more capital into the banking system.

On the ICICI Bank controversy involving its CEO Chanda Kochhar in the over Rs 3,000 crore loan to Videocon, Kotak said the Board, regulator and the shareholders will be in a better position to comment.

Asked about the role of RBI, he said: "I think essentially the function of a regulator, is broadly three categories: regulation, supervision and enforcement and as long as the regulator looks at these three both individually and holistically, I think that is how they should be looking at."

He said as far as enforcement is concerned the regulator (RBI) has raised issues about the power of the regulator versus the significant shareholder if it happens to be the state (Indian government) terming it a matter of debate.

However, Kotak said: "We have regulators which have been working very efficiently, in capital markets, in securities markets, and the insurance sector."

He highlighted that one of the biggest challenges at present is ethics, values and governance. "This is something which is at a premium. We need to move the Indian society to a much better level of governance as we go into the future."

Kotak observed that the MSME sector is one area which has seen the pain of some of the bold reforms, and needs to be hand-holded.

CII President Rakesh Bharti said arbitration was "very very frustrating" and the industry body was engaging with the relevant ministries on this issue.

"The fear probably bureaucrats have is that if they don't appeal, they may be hauled up tomorrow for not having done that... I believe that once arbitration has happened because both parties agreed to, then that award needs to be implemented and this is something where the courts also need to take a very judicious and a positive view.

He said it needs to be ensured that the arbitration mechanism becomes more robust, transparent and implemented efficiently and effectively, adding that all foreign companies coming in will have faith in such a fair mechanism.

Mittal also stressed that Indian industry needs to ensure that they abide by the law.

He also called for broad-basing of GST by bringing alcohol, petroleum, electricity and real estate under its ambit.Representational image

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The impact of Reliance Jio Infocomm taking smartphones and data services to the masses at very affordable prices will have an indelible impact on the market, according to the Institute for Competitiveness, an India-based research and knowledge outfit linked to Harvard Business School.

The research body has done a deep study of the socio-economic impact of the Reliance Industries subsidiary. In its 34-page study, the agency points out how prior to Jios entry in September 2016, the internet usage in India remained low even as its penetration rose.

Talking about the internet usage since 2000, the study says that while global internet traffic in peta bytes per month increased at an annual average growth rate of 30 per cent, the countrys internet consumption lagged with a 21.7 per cent rise. But come Jio and all that changed as the company launched affordable data plans besides making voice free on its 4G LTE network.

It is a significant feat for a country that was ranked 155 in terms of mobile broadband penetration in 2015 to become the highest mobile broadband data consumer globally in 2017, the report says.

The escalation in data demand has mainly occurred because of an increase in its affordability. The price of 1 GB of data, which was Rs 375 in 2012 had merely halved to Rs 152 in 2016. But Jios entry and enhanced levels of competition took prices down by 15 times to Rs 10 in 2017. The data implosion has been to the extent that India now uses 100 crore GB of data each month as compared to 20 crore GB earlier, the study reveals.

It can, thus, be said that Jio has reinvented and reimagined the entire telecom market with its innovative product offering, the Institute says commending the RIL unit.

The launch of the Rs 1,500 JioPhone last year has only accelerated the pace of increase in data usage as increased affordability brings internet to more people.

Institute for Competitiveness goes on to reveal a startling impact of Reliance Jio on the countrys economy. It pegs the yearly savings of the entire economy due to a rise in affordability of data prices at a whopping $10 billion.

The study credits Jios direct physical presence in all 29 states and partnerships with telecom infrastructure companies for its feat. The companys most sophisticated, efficient and largest LTE network covers more than 18,000 urban and rural towns and over 2,00,000 villages in the country.

The company has undertaken extensive research to build the network and filed 54 global patents over the course of this development.

Using the network, Jio aims to usher in an era of visuality, where video will replace voice as the new communication medium. Therefore, Jio has successfully boosted the productivity all across its value chain beginning with infrastructure development to product delivery to consumer usage itself, the research outfit says in its report.

Disclosure - Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltdlive bse live

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The recent governance issues in India's banking sector involving ICICI Bank and Axis Bank reiterate the need to improve risk management and maintain strong governance practices, S&P Global Ratings said today.

"As a number of banks in India confront serious governance and risk issues, the 'tone at the top' is crucial. Leadership groups in Indian banks need to ensure that they enhance the risk culture, reputation, and financial strength of banks," S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Michael Puli said.

The US-based rating agency assesses management's ability and expertise to grow the business sustainably while rating banks.

"We view governance and transparency in Indian banking as a negative factor," it said.

S&P has 'BBB-' rating with a stable outlook for both Axis Bank and ICICI Bank.

Recently the board of private sector lender Axis Bank had sought RBI nod for the reappointment of managing director and CEO Shikha Sharma for six months ending December 31, 2018. This is after the central bank declined an earlier proposal to give her a three-year term ending June 30, 2021.

According to reports, the RBI's unwillingness to approve the initial request of three-year term was due to a number of risk management and governance issues that have emerged at the bank over the past year or so.

These include a deterioration in asset quality and under-reporting of non-performing loans, S&P said.

Chanda Kochhar, the managing director and CEO of India's largest private sector bank, ICICI Bank, is currently under investigation for an alleged conflict of interest associated with the bank's loan to Videocon group in 2012.

The Central Bureau of Investigation is conducting a preliminary enquiry into whether the CEO's husband, Deepak Kochhar, benefitted from bank's decision to participate in the consortium loan.

"The ICICI Bank board has offered full support to the leadership team. However, if allegations against the management prove to be true, they could hit the bank's reputation and expose it to legal and financial risk," S&P said.

S&P had on December 21, 2017, revised down the assessment of Axis Bank's standalone creditworthiness to reflect higher risks associated with asset quality and under-reporting of non-performing loans.

"While the effect of our assessment is the same as ICICI Bank, we assess Axis Bank's risk management as weaker than that of private sector peer HDFC Bank," it said.Delhi-based Internet of Things (IoT) startup Chariot has raised Rs 2 crore from venture capitalist GEMs Partners in a Pre-Series A funding round.

The funds will be utilised for servicing existing and future clients, product development and market expansion, Chariot said.

"Raising investment for the first time marks a significant milestone for our start-up, at the core of which lies a dual ecosystem of Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Within only one year of inception, Chariot has started working with large corporates and listed giants in India and across the globe," said said Nilay Mehrotra, co-founder and CEO, Chariot.

Mehrotra added that GEMs Partners' investment will help the company consolidate its reach further on a global level, upgrade its in-house technology platform, infrastructure and products, and also boost internal growth.

Chariot provides end-to-end solutions through its IoT-enabled platforms and devices. It delivers PaaS and SaaS solutions for developing and operating big data, predictive analysis and others.

"IoT will become an integral part of our day-to-day lives. It is the future  in both homes, offices and industries. It will also be the foundation as we move towards 'smart cities'. Chariot, a world leader in both IoT devices and a universal back-end software platform, has huge market potential and growth opportunities. In addition, the founders experience, commitment and existing success played a huge part in our decision making," said Aditya Gupta of GEMs Partners.

Chariot was founded in 2017 by Nilay Mehrotra and Raj Garg.2:59 pm Joint Venture: Kalyani Rafael Advanced Systems (KRAS), a joint venture between Kalyani Strategic Systems and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems (Israel) is all set to expand its product profile.

"The JV will now venture into the space of Missile systems with the New Generation Precision Guided Munitions (NGPGM), Air Defense systems and capabilities for MRSAM, LLQRM and QRSAM programs," Bharat Forge said.

The expansion will also include the Drone Dome system (Radar and laser

beam system for detecting, jamming and destroying drones) and the Naval Remote control Weapon Station Systems Program, it added.

2:52 pm Market Update: The market is off its day's high ahead of macro data due later in the day and Infosys earnings tomorrow.

The Sensex is up over 100 points and the Nifty is hovering around 10,450 levels but the market breadth remained in favour of declines.

Technology stocks continued to support the market, with the Nifty IT index rising more than 3 percent. TCS, Infosys and HCL Technologies are top gainers among Nifty 50 stocks, rising up to 4.5 percent.

HPCL, IOC and BPCL rebound after losing around 10 percent, rising up to 1.5 percent.

2:42 pm Air India Growth: Disinvestment-bound Air India registered around 11 percent growth in revenue, as the airline's fiscal and performance parameters were good in the last financial year, according to its chief Pradeep Singh Kharola.

The loss-making national carrier also recorded 80 percent passenger load factor in 2017-18 amid the government preparing for its strategic disinvestment.

Kharola said the performance parameters of the airline had been good in the last financial year. The load factor was around 80 percent and revenue growth was in the range of 11 per cent, he added.

"... the financials are being firmed up but fiscal parameters have been good (in 2017-18)," the Chairman and Managing Director said.

In 2016-17, the airline raked in total revenue of Rs 22,177.68 crore compared to Rs 20,610.33 crore in the same period a year ago, as per the annual report.

2:32 pm Market Update: Benchmark indices are off day's high in afternoon, with the Sensex trimming gains to 118.74 points from more than 200 points.

The Nifty gained 26.20 points at 10,443.40 but the market breadth remained in favour declines.

About three shares declined for two shares rising on the BSE.

2:28 pm OMCs in focus: Abhijeet Bora, Senior Research Analyst, Sharekhan said, "Marketing earnings of oil marketing companies (OMCs  IOCL, BPCL and HPCL) are likely to be adversely impacted if they absorb Re 1 per litre hike in the auto fuel price (petrol and diesel), as discussed in the media reports.

Moreover, with several state elections scheduled in 2018-2019 and national elections due in May-2019, the government is likely to partially manage the price of auto fuels (although petrol and diesel prices are de-regulated), which could make the marketing earnings volatile and result into poor earnings predictability for OMCs, he added.

2:15 pm M&A activity in consumer & retail sector: Merger and acquisition (M&A)activity in the consumer and retail sector took a breather in 2017 with deals worth USD 392 billion announced in 2017, down 16 percent from the year ago period, says a report.

According to A T Kearney's 2018 Consumer and Retail M&A Report, consumer and retail M&A deal volume declined in 2017, but is set to increase this year as strategic, cross-industry acquisitions were seen as a way to new markets.

"In India, we believe M&A will increasingly be a faster and viable means for consumer companies to gain access to brands, capabilities and customers than organically possible," said Debashish Mukherjee, Partner, Head, Consumer and Retail Industries.

The report further noted that with the completion of several political elections around the world, and both PE firms and consumer products companies reporting record amounts of cash reserves, a rise in global M&A deals is likely.

2:05 pm Europe Update: European markets were mixed, as investor sentiment was curbed by the threat of imminent US military action in Syria.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 was around 0.1 percent higher during early morning deals, with sectors and major bourses pointing in opposite directions.

Here are the top headlines at 2 pm from Moneycontrol News' Sakshi Batra

1:52 pm Market Update: The market is trading at day's high, with the Sensex rising 200 points ahead of macro data due later in the week and Infosys Q4 earnings tomorrow.

The Nifty is trading firmly above the 10,450 levels. Technical analyst feels if the Nifty closes above 10,440, then further upside may take Nifty above 10,500 levels.

IT stocks led the rally as the Nifty IT index is up over 3 percent. Infosys, TCS and HCL Technologies are top gainers among Nifty50 stocks, rising 4 percent each.

1:42 pm Gold tops 32,000: Gold soared by Rs 300 to trade at Rs 32,150 per ten gram at the bullion market today on positive global cues amid continued buying by local jewellers.

Silver also reclaimed the Rs 40,000-level per kg by gaining Rs 240, backed by an increased offtake by industrial units and coin makers.

Marketmen said apart from a firm trend overseas, brisk buying by local jewellers to meet retailer demand in the domestic spot market pushed up gold prices.

1:32 pm GAIL in focus: State-owned gas utility GAIL India said it will bring to India only half of the LNG it has contracted from the US as it has either swapped or sold the remaining volumes.

GAIL has a deal to buy 3.5 million tonne a year of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for 20 years from Cheniere Energy of the US and has also booked capacity for another 2.3 million tonne (MT) at Dominion Energy's Cove Point liquefaction plant.

"Of the volumes contracted, we have already sold 0.5 MT. The remaining volumes translate into 80 cargoes (or shiploads) of LNG in a year. Of this, 50 per cent will come to India," GAIL Chairman and MD B C Tripathi told reporters.

The first US cargo arrived at the firm's Dabhol LNG import terminal in Maharashtra on March 30.

1:22 pm Market Update: Benchmark indices extended gains in afternoon, with the Sensex rising 159.15 points to 34,099.59 ahead of macro data due later in the day and Infosys earnings tomorrow.

The rally was driven by technology stocks. The Nifty IT Index jumped over 3 percent as TCS rallied 4.5 percent.

HCL Technologies was up 3.9 percent and Infosys gained 3.3 percent while Tech Mahindra, Mindtree and Wipro gained up to 2.6 percent.

Private banks also gained strength as ICICI Bank was up 1.5 percent while HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Axis Bank were up to 0.9 percent whereas ITC, IOC, HPCL, BPCL and SBI fell up to 2 percent.

The Nifty reclaimed 10,450 levels, rising 33.10 points from previous close but the broader markets continued to underperform frontliners.

About 1,300 shares declined against 1,142 advancing shares on the BSE.

1:15 pm Content Acquisition Deal: DQ Entertainment International, the global entertainment production and distribution company, has signed a significant number of content acquisition deal with leading broadcasters around the world for multiple properties produced by DQE for distribution.

Various TV distribution deals were concluded for DQE properties such as The Jungle Book TV series, The Jungle Book Christmas special, The Jungle Book Safari, Peter Pan TV series, Robin Hood TV series among others.

With the signing of many of these acquisition agreement, DQE will now be able to expand its footprint into the vast and growing kids entertainment market across the world .

1:05 pm Buzzing: Orissa Minerals Development Company share price rallied 5 percent after the company received six iron and manganese ore mines on lease from the Odisha government.

The company has received mines on lease from the office of Government of Odisha (Steel & Mines Department) in Keonjhar district, Bhubaneswar.

".....received Bhadrasahi iron and manganese ore mines with area over 998.70 hectares, Roida-Bhadrasahi iron ore mines over 103.600 hectares, Roida-Bhadrasahi iron ore mines over 103.600 hectares, Belkundi iron and manganese ore mines over 1,276.790 hectares, Kolha-Roida iron and/or manganese ore mines over 254.952 hectares, Thakurani iron and manganese ore mines over 1,546.55 hectares and Bagiaburu iron ore mines over 21.52 hectares," the company said in its filing.

Here are the top headlines at 1 pm from Moneycontrol News' Anchal Pathak

12:57 pm Asia Closing Update: Asian stocks closed lower as investor confidence seen earlier in the week wavered overnight amid geopolitical tensions.

The Nikkei 225 eased 0.12 percent, or 26.82 points, to close at 21,660.28 while the broader Topix was lower by 0.39 percent.

Over in South Korea, the Kospi gave up gains late in the session, slipping 0.06 percent to close at 2,442.71.

12:53 pm Defence Partnership: Bharat Electronics (BEL) and Mahindra Defence Systems committed to a long-term partnership through a MoU, to jointly address emerging opportunities in the domestic market under the policy initiatives of the Government of India, like 'Make in India' and the 'Export Promotion Policy' of the Ministry of Defence to target the export market.

12:45 pm Market Update: The market continued to trade mildly higher amid consolidation as investors await macro data due later in the day and Infosys earnings tomorrow.

TCS, Infosys, HCL Technologies are top gainers among Nifty50 stocks, rising up to 4 percent on falling rupee and ahead of Infosys earnings.

The 30-share BSE Sensex was up 76.53 points at 34,016.97 and the 50-share NSE Nifty rose 11.30 points to 10,428.50.

12:35 pm FII View: Morgan Stanley feels India's relative growth is likely to accelerate in the coming months.

"The recent RBI policy meeting has convinced the market that a rate hike is not around the corner. Therefore, we think that the relationship between India's short rate differential with the US and equity market performance relative to the world will likely be reestablished (falling relative rates = outperformance)," the global brokerage house explained.

It further explained that the third factor is the collapse in India's beta to a 13- year low. While fundamentally this means that India's prospective absolute returns have shrunk, if beta remains low and the world is in a low-return phase, India will likely outperform. Finally, FPI positioning, which has been falling for three years, is now at 2011 levels.

12:16 pm Defence Collaboration: Punj Lloyd, Rave Gears (USA) and Adani Group announced an intention to collaborate for the design, manufacture and assembly of high precision gears and transmission systems for rotary platforms at DefExpo 2018.

The collaboration intends to manufacture gears and gear assemblies mainly for rotary platforms, currently under production in India for HAL, and for future programs like the Naval Utility Helicopters and Naval Multi Role Helicopters.

The collaboration will use the manufacturing base in India for exports to global OEMs, both in the military and civil aerospace domain.

12:08 pm Allotment of Shares: Strides Shasun said Solara has informed the company that they have completed allotment of equity shares on April 11, 2018 as required under the Composite Scheme to the shareholders of the company who are holding shares of the company as at the record date i.e., April 9, 2018.

The share entitlement ratio for allotment of shares under the Composite Scheme is one equity share of Rs 10 each of Solara for every six equity shares of Rs 10 held by the shareholder in Strides.

The equity shares so allotted by Solara will be subsequently listed on the BSE Limited and National Stock Exchange of India Limited as provided in the Composite Scheme, Strides said.

12:01 pm Insolvency resolution process in Petron begins: Petron Engineering Construction has received an order from the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), Mumbai Bench regarding acceptance of Petition filed by operational creditors against the company and accordingly insolvency resolution process commences in terms of provisions of the Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code, 2016.

Here are the top headlines at 12 pm from Moneycontrol News' Anchal Pathak

11:55 am Market Update: The market is mildly higher amid consolidation ahead of macro data due later in the day and Infosys earnings tomorrow

Infosys extended gains to 3 percent ahead of March quarter earnings, and after the fall in rupee. The Nifty IT index is up nearly 3 percent.

IOC, HPCL and BPCL continued to reel under selling pressure, falling up to 3 percent after crude oil prices hit fresh four-year high.

11:32 am Drug Approval: Strides Shasun announced that its wholly owned subsidiary Strides Pharma Global Pte. Ltd. has received approval for Cyproheptadine Hydrochloride Tablets USP, 4 mg from the United States Food & Drug Administration (US FDA).

Cyproheptadine Hydrochloride Tablets is a generic version of Periactin Tablets of Merck & Co. Inc.

According to IQVIA data, the US market for Cyproheptadine Hydrochloride Tablets USP, 4 mg is approximately USD 20 million.

The product will be manufactured at the companys Oral dosage facility at Bangalore and will be marketed by Strides Pharma Inc. in the US Market.

11:15 am Corporate Governance: The recent governance issues in India's banking sector involving ICICI Bank and Axis Bank reiterate the need to improve risk management and maintain strong governance practices, S&P Global Ratings said today.

"As a number of banks in India confront serious governance and risk issues, the 'tone at the top' is crucial. Leadership groups in Indian banks need to ensure that they enhance the risk culture, reputation, and financial strength

of banks," S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Michael Puli said.

The US-based rating agency assesses management's ability and expertise to grow the business sustainably while rating banks.

"We view governance and transparency in Indian banking as a negative factor," it said.

S&P has 'BBB-' rating with a stable outlook for both Axis Bank and ICICI Bank.

Here are the top headlines at 11 am from Moneycontrol News' Sakshi Batra

: Capacit'e Infraprojects has received contracts worth Rs 162.67 crore, from Sea View Developers Private

Limited, a Brookfield Investee Company, for Civil and Structure work package for construction of Tower 11 and Multi Level Car park.

On securing the new order, Rahul Katyal, Managing Director said, "The repeat orders are important for us as they are from reputed existing client. We remain confident of delivering this project within the stipulated timelines."

10:40 am Open Offer: Promoter group entities of Dish TV have made an offer to buy an additional 26 per cent equity stake from public shareholders of the direct-to-home (DTH) player for Rs 3,701 crore.

In a public announcement made to the shareholders, Dish TV promoter entities World Crest Advisors LLP, together with Veena Investments Pvt Ltd and Direct Media Distribution Venture Pvt Ltd, announced an offer to acquire shares of Dish TV at a price of Rs 74 per share.

The offer is being made to all the shareholders of Dish TV to acquire up to 50.01 crore (50,01,87,979) shares of the company that form 26 per cent of the emerging share capital, payable in cash.

The open offer price is about 3 percent lower than the current price of Dish TV at Rs 76 on the BSE.

Last month, after over a year of snag, the merger of DTH operators Dish TV India and Videocon d2h was concluded.

10:32 am Market Update: The market continued to consolidate, with the Sensex hovering around 34,000 levels ahead of macro data due later in the day and Infosys Q4 earnings due tomorrow.

Sectoral indices were mixed in trade as the Nifty IT index extends gains up to 3 percent while metals, PSU banks and pharma are under pressure.

HPCL, IOC and BPCL fell up to 3 percent as Brent crude traded above USD 72 a barrel.

10:22 am Market Outlook: Since the peak of end January 2018, Indian equity markets underwent a steep correction due to (a) elevated concerns around increasing bond yields; (b) fluid political and fiscal policy environment;(c) fear of a trade war between US and China; (d) rising crude oil prices; and (e) scams and stringent RBI guidelines for NPA recognition in the banking sector.

"We expect the concerns/issues cited above to persist and weigh on the equity markets. Additional concerns are: (a) weak Q4FY18 earnings outlook largely due to high NPA provisions in banking sector; and (b) drop in equity flows into MF schemes, particularly SIP flows," Elara Capital said.

In view of this, it expects the equity market to remain range bound and the stocks with fundamental traits mentioned in (a) are likely to outperform.

10:10 am Aster to build new hospital in Chennai: Aster DM Healthcare has entered into an agreement with Subramanya Constructions & Development Company, a real estate developer, to construct a new hospital in Chennai.

This 500 bedded, state of the art, multi-specialty hospital is expected to be commissioned in 2020, it said.

The hospital, which would be situated at a prime location in Chennai, will provide advanced healthcare services to the residents of Tamil Nadu and customers from other states in India as well as overseas.

Aster DM Healthcare, which was recently listed at NSE and BSE already operates 11 hospitals in South India with 4037 installed beds.

Here are the top headlines at 10 am from Moneycontrol News' Anchal Pathak

9:59 am Gold Off 11-week High: Gold eased off multi-week highs as minutes from the Federal Reserve's last policy meeting raised expectations of a faster pace of US rate hikes, but concerns about possible US military action against Syria limited losses.

US gold futures fell 0.4 percent to USD 1,354 an ounce.

All of the Federal Reserve's policymakers felt that the US economy would firm further and that inflation would rise in the coming months, minutes of the central bank's last policy meeting on March 20-21 released on Wednesday showed.

Higher interest rates discourage the buying of non-interest-paying bullion, which is priced in dollars.

Gold on Wednesday rose 1 percent and hit a high of USD 1,365.23 an ounce, its highest since January 25, CNBC reported.

9:50 am Market Update: The market continued to consolidate amid sharp spike crude oil prices, as investors look for corporate earnings that will being tomorrow and macro data due later in the day.

The 30-share BSE Sensex was up 54.97 points at 33,995.41 and the 50-sahre NSE Nifty rose 2.90 points to 10,420.10.

Brent crude oil hit 2014 highs of USD 73.09 a barrel in previous session, but cooled off a bit from that level to trade around USD 72.35 a barrel today.

Oil retailers BPCL, HPCL and IOC are down over a percent while IT stocks gain up to 3 percent on fall in rupee against the US dollar.

9:40 am Buzzing: Oil retailers extended previous day's losses, falling up to 3 percent after further spike in crude oil prices yesterday on tensions in Middle East.

Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, Bharat Petroleum Corporation and Indian Oil Corporation were down between 1-3 percent while state-run oil explorer ONGC gained a percent.

Oil markets remained tense on concerns of a military escalation in Syria, but prices were some way off Wednesday's 2014 highs as bulging American supplies weighed.

Brent crude futures were at USD 72.42 per barrel, up 0.50 percent from their last close, at the time of writing this article.

US WTI crude futures were at USD 67.20 a barrel, up 0.57 percent from previous close.

Both Brent and WTI crude hit 2014 highs of USD 73.09 and USD 67.45 per barrel on Wednesday, respectively, after Saudi Arabia said it intercepted missiles over Riyadh and US President Donald Trump warned Russia of imminent military action in Syria.

Higher crude oil price is always a concern for country like India which imports more than 80 percent of oil requirement. It is always good for oil exploration companies but bad for oil retailers as experts feel the chance of lowering excise duties on oil seems unlikely.

"With monthly GST collections still falling short of government's target (though the roll-out of e-way bill is expected to help check evasion to some extent), worries about not letting fiscal deficit widen any further than the budgeted estimate for FY18-19 and tough ask in achieving FY18-19's disinvestment target; the wiggle room that the government has in terms of lowering excise duties appear to be extremely slim," Ajay Bodke, CEO & Chief Portfolio Manager PMS, Prabhudas Lilladher said.

9:27 am Tech Stocks: Technology stocks outperformed benchmark indices, taking advantage of falling rupee. The Nifty IT index jumped 1.6 percent.

9:22 am Bond Yield: The 10-year government bond yield fell after sharp rally in previous session, declining 5 basis points to 7.48 percent in morning.

In previous session, the bond yield jumped 15 basis points to close at 7.53 percent.

9:18 am Rupee Trade: The rupee extended losses, falling 0.2 percent to 65.44 against the US dollar after opening flat.

It closed at 65.31 against the US dollar in previous session.

9:15 am Market Update: Benchmark indices opened flat amid weak global cues and spike in crude oil prices, as investors await corporate earnings and macro data.

The 30-share BSE Sensex was up 47.56 points at 33,988 while the 50-share NSE Nifty fell 17.40 points to 10,399.80.

HCL Technologies, TCS, Tech Mahindra, ONGC, Tata Motors, Bajaj Auto and Bharti Infratel were early gainers.

HPCL, BPCL and IOC fell up to 3 percent. Dr Reddy's Labs, Sun Pharma, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Alkem Labs were under pressure.

Nifty Bank was down 0.35 percent.

Aban Offshore, Harrisons, Jayshree Tea, Mcleod Russel, HOEC, Dolphin Offshore, Selan Exploration, TVS Electronics and Biocon gained up to 8 percent.

MRPL, InterGlobe Aviation, IDBI Bank, Jaiprakash Associates, Jet Airways and TVS Electronics were under pressure.

9:06 am Technical Recommendations: We spoke to ICICIdirect and heres what they have to recommend:

Bajaj Finserv: BUY CMP  5420.00 Target  6095.00 Stop Loss  5190.00 Upside  12% Time Frame 6 months

EIH Limited: BUY CMP  165.00 Target  194.00 Stop Loss  145.00 Upside  17% Time Frame 6 months

PNC Infratech: BUY CMP  181.00 Target  205.00 Stop Loss  166.00 Upside  13% Time Frame 1 month

Disclaimer: The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts on moneycontrol.com are their own and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.

9:03 am Stocks in news: Jet Airways: It has appointed Ashok Chawla as non-executive independent director of the Board.

GMR Infra: The group will set up aerospace & defence manufacturing hub in Tamil Nadu

Oil companies: Major agreement has been signed between Saudi Aramco & Hindustan Oil, Indian Oil & Bharat Oil.

Bhushan Steel: NCLT reserves orders on resolution plan approval

Biocon: Mylan and Biocon have sought to accelerate introduction of Adalimumab Biosimilar In EU.

Tata Motors: Global wholesales at 1.53 lakh units in March.

Larsen & Toubro: It has signed an MoU With BEL To Develop Defence Products

Tata Sons: The company will form Tata Aerospace & Defence

IDBI Bank: RBI Imposes Rs 3 crore penalty for non-compliance with IRAC Norms.U.S. President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping chat as they walk along the front patio of the Mar-a-Lago estate after a bilateral meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., April 7, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria - RTX34M80

Chinese President Xi Jinpings statement about a "new phase of opening up" at the Boao Forum for Asia was a refreshing change in an environment clouded by trade protectionism.

The proposals announced at the forum were aimed at increasing imports (reduce trade deficit with the USA by USD 50 billion), reduce import tariffs on vehicles, lower foreign-ownership limits and focus on protection of intellectual property and investment environment.

While the context appears positive for risky assets, trade hawks are not pleased with Chinas support to 'Made in China 2025' initiative.

Opening up of financial sector

In addition, to defusing trade tariff tension, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) laid out a much-awaited timetable to open up the financial sector to foreign investment.

The measures announced include allowing foreign investors to enter its financial leasing, automobile finance, consumer finance and trust sectors, and doing away with foreign ownership limits for financial asset investment companies and wealth management companies set up by commercial banks, by the end of 2018.

The central bank has also accelerated its commitment for foreign investment in the insurance sector. China said it would raise the foreign ownership limit to 51 percent in the next few months and scrap the restriction altogether in three years (which was five years earlier).

'Made in China 2025'

Also read http://english.gov.cn/2016special/madeinchina2025/

However, a major setback for potential trade negotiations was China's decision to reject US President Donald Trumps demand to stop subsidising hi-tech industries (robotics, biotechnology, new-energy vehicles, aerospace, software, etc).

Here, the USA holds China responsible for misusing the policy to compel companies into transferring technology in areas like robotics and artificial intelligence.

For China, the 'Made in China 2025' initiative is seen as one of the main steps towards becoming one of the leading economies in research and development-intensive areas, from the largely-commoditised manufacturing hub that it currently is.

Walking the talk

While the Chinese proposal to narrow the trade deficit by USD 50 billion seems like a considerable step towards rapprochement with the USA, the market will only look at effective actions in that direction, in our view.

It is reported that China might target importing more liquefied natural gas (LNG), agricultural products, semiconductors and luxury goods to bridge the deficit.

Source: The Observatory of Economic Complexity/ The MIT Media Lab

The noteworthy part is that China witnessed a record import of natural gas last year (+68.6 million tonnes, up 27 percent YoY) on account of the governments push for cleaner fuel, particularly in north China.

While a good part of the gas imported came from Central Asian countries like Turkmenistan (24 percent of petroleum gas import), Qatar (12 percent) and Australia (17 percent), the USA is also emerging as an important source for petroleum gas imports, accounting for 6 percent of China's imports this year.

In fact, in November 2017, the USA and China signed some preliminary agreements for LNG imports from USA and thereby participate in Chinas natural gas demand surge, which is expected to more than double by 2030, according to Bernstein.

While this looks promising, Gazproms Power of Siberia pipeline (Russia) is expected to start gas supply at the end of this year, and is seen meeting around 10 percent of China's natural gas demand.

A discussion on a second pipeline is already underway. Chinas import of LNG from South East Asian nations like Indonesia and Malaysia has exceeded that from the United States in the recent past.

Therefore, although China may reach out to USA for its natural gas needs, whether this would become a significant source of supply would depend on alternate available sources, pricing, logistics and strategic interest.

Even in other categories, how far the needle would move is difficult to say at this juncture. On the agriculture imports front, USA contributes 40 percent of China's total soybean import, which is already a substantial chunk.

In case of semi-conductor devices, 82 percent of China's imports come from Asian trade partners that are optimally placed in terms of both technology and pricing.

Even if the quantum of the above-mentioned products imported from USA is doubled in the near future, ceteris paribus, China's trade deficit with the United States will be reduced by around USD 16 billion.

Although we have not accounted for luxury goods and other agriculture products here, the analysis above suggests that a reduction of trade deficit to that extent is a tall ask.

So even if US-China trade tensions appear to be dissipating and the two nations seem to be moving towards reconciliation, geopolitical brinkmanship would keep uncertainty elevated in the near term.

Follow @anubhavsays

For more research articles, visit our Moneycontrol Research PageA Mumbai metro train travels through a residential area in Mumbai

Mumbai Metro has assured to purchase 50 MW power from upcoming Vikhran solar plant in Dhule district, a senior Maharashtra government official said today.

State Energy department Principal Secretary Arvind Singh said the government had signed an agreement to purchase 50 MW solar power from the plant, to be set up in Dhule district in north Maharashtra.

The government, in a bid to strengthen its footing in the renewable energy segment, is planning to set up a 500 MW solar park at Vikhran.

"The entire investment in the park will come from private parties. There are two private players who are looking to set up solar power plants in Maharashtra," said Singh, refusing to divulge names of the interested companies.

He said Mumbai Metro had given a letter to the Maharashtra State Power Generation Corporation (Mahageneco) and has assured to purchase 50 MW power from the plant.

Mumbai Metro is operated by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (all lines except Lines 1 & 3), Mumbai Metro One (Line 1), Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (Line 3).

Dharma Patil, a local farmer from Vikhran, had committed suicide at Mantralaya in January this year, demanding adequate compensation to his land which was acquired for a thermal plant, which was later changed to the solar park.IIFL Mutual Fund is aiming to raise Rs 2,500-3,000 crore through the launch of IIFL Capital Enhancer Fund-Series 1, Amit Shah, Chief Executive Officer of IIFL Mutual Fund told Moneycontrol.

The subscription to IIFL Capital Enhancer Fund-Series 1 will open on April 23 and close on May 4.

The annual interval plan will invest in equity, and equity-related securities with a strategy of hedging the portfolio with Nifty 50 put option and other equity derivatives.

In terms of asset allocation,the scheme will invest at least 65 per cent of its corpus in equity and equity-related instruments and up to 35 per cent in debt and money market instruments.

As a strategy, the scheme will hedge its long position by buying a NIFTY 50 put option of contract value up to 110 per cent of its net assets (the option premium paid not exceeding 8 per cent of net assets).

Other features:

Plans: Regular and Direct

Options: Growth and Dividend

Minimum investment: Rs 5,000 and in multiples of one rupee thereafter

Performance benchmark index: CRISIL Balance Fund  Aggressive Index

Fund Manager: Prashasta SethAnguished over lack of cleanliness and hygiene in parts of Delhi, the high court here said today that the city will die if the situation does not improve as people may have to move out to make room for the increasing garbage.

The court warned authorities of stringent penal action if anyone dies or gets infected by vector-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya. It said if immediate action is not taken by the Centre, the Delhi government or the civic bodies, it will be forced to take strict action against all of them.

At least 12 cases of dengue have been reported in Delhi till April 7, according to a municipal report released on Monday, indicating early spread of the vector-borne disease.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar lamented that there appear to be "no sensitivity" towards health and entitlement of citizens to a clean environment.

The court said it was concerned with citizens's right to life. "No human or animal should be co-existing with garbage," it said, adding: "This is 21st Century India, you can't make people of Delhi live like this."

The bench said it was "high time that those responsible for hygiene and cleanliness are held responsible for their deficiencies".

"We see no reason as to why in event of any death caused by vector-borne diseases, persons heading the concerned departments in Union of India, Delhi government and municipal bodies be not charge with culpable homicide not amounting to murder and those who are infected and does not result into a death be charged with section 269 (negligent act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life) of IPC as well as other penal provisions," it said.

It also observed that every time the court calls senior officials before it, some improvement happens but thereafter, nothing happens and "we are back to square one".

The bench took judicial notice of Central government's 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' launched in 2015 and said collection of garbage in Delhi is equally important in any such mission.

The bench said a copy of its order be sent to the secretaries of central government ministries, departments of Delhi government, Delhi Cantonment Board, New Delhi Municipal Council, commissioners of all the three MCDs and the DDA, and asked them to file action taken reports.

The court was today assured by the commissioners of EDMC, SDMC and North MCD, who were present during the hearing, that they will take action.

It granted them a last opportunity to take immediate steps and listed the matter for further hearing on April 24.

Advocate Monika Arora, who appeared for North MCD, said they have been unable to pay salaries of safai karamcharis for the past two months due to which the staffers were on strike, resulting in the worsening of the situation.

While the counsel for EDMC made a similar submission, SDMC's advocate said there was no strike in south Delhi area.

The court said such a state of affairs in the capital of India "cannot be tolerated".

"Be it want of salaries of staff or collection or disposal of solid waste and cleanliness of the city, it is not only a statutory duty of the authorities but their obligation," it said.

The court was hearing two PILs filed by advocates Arpit Bhargava and Gauri Grover seeking directions to the authorities to take steps to prevent the spread of vector-borne diseases in the national capital.Philippine's national carrier Philippines Airlines has appointed Bird Travels as its general sales agent (GSA) to develop its sales distribution network in the Indian market ahead of starting flight services here by the winter this year.

A GSA is a sales representative for an airline in a specific country or region, responsible for selling all products including tickets and cargo services in the region where the airline does not operate.

As part of the mandate, Bird Travels, which is the airline management services arm of diversified Bird Group, will be responsible for all the airline's sales, marketing and ticketing activities in India through its centrally located headquarters in New Delhi, a release said.

"We are delighted to be associated with Philippine Airlines (PAL) and look forward to building a strong partnership and promote the airline's presence in the country," Bird Group president Vijay Bhatia said.

Philippines Airlines plans to launch services to Delhi and Mumbai from the capital city Manila, which will enable India-based travellers seamless air connectivity to over 31 destinations in the Philippines, out the airline's hubs in Manila, Clark, Cebu and Davao, the release said.

"India's tourism industry is expanding rapidly and we're already seeing a steady flow of leisure and business travellers flying between India and Philippines," said Ryan Uy, vice-president for sales, Philippine Airlines.

"Bird Group will help PAL in successfully launching its upcoming flights to New Delhi and Mumbai and strengthen the presence in the Indian market," he added.live bse live

nse live Volume Todays L/H More 

IDBI Bank today said the Reserve Bank of India has imposed a penalty of Rs 3 crore on the bank for non-compliance to the Income Recognition and Asset Classification (IRAC) norms.

"This is to inform that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) vide its letter dated April 10, 2018 has imposed a monetary penalty of Rs 30 million on the Bank in exercise of the powers...for non compliance with the directions issued by it on Income Recognition and Asset Classification (IRAC) norms," IDBI Bank said in a filing to BSE.

The said penalty will not have any material impact on the Bank, the filing added.Mehul Choksi

live bse live

nse live Volume Todays L/H More 

A loan of Rs 5,280 crore extended by a consortium of 31 banks led by ICICI Bank to the companies of absconding billionaire jeweller Mehul Choksi has come under the scanner of the CBI, officials said.

The agency questioned three officials from foreign branches of Indian banks, which had given credit facilities to the companies of absconding billionaire jewellers Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi, on the basis of Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) issued by Punjab National Bank's Brady House branch in Mumbai.

The USD 2 billion scam became public in January after the CBI registered an FIR in the matter, but by that time both the high-profile jewellers had left India with family, they said.

Two officials of Canara Bank's branch in Bahrain, including its branch manager, and an official of Bank of India's branch in Antwerp in Belgium were questioned by a CBI team in Mumbai, they said.

Meanwhile, the agency officials said that while their focus remains on the fraudulent LoUs, the loan of Rs 5,280 crore to the companies of Choksi in 2016 will come under its probe at a later stage.

They said whether a fresh FIR will be registered in the case or the ambit of an existing FIR will be expanded, will be decided before proceeding with action in the matter.

The agency in February had examined a senior ICICI Bank functionary too, they said.

It is alleged that Choksi and Modi got LoUs and Foreign Letters of Credit (FLCs) of USD 2 billion issued in favour of foreign branches of Indian banks based on fraudulent claims.

The accused PNB officials did not enter the instructions for these LoUs in their internal software to avoid scrutiny.

They were sent through an international messaging system for banking called SWIFT, which is used to pass instructions among banks globally to transfer funds.

An LoU is a guarantee given by an issuing bank to Indian banks having branches abroad to grant short-term credit to the applicant.

In case of default, the bank issuing the LoU has to pay the liability to the credit-giving bank along with the accruing interest.

The PNB officials allegedly sent these messages to Indian banks - Canara Bank, State Bank of India, Bank of India, Axis Bank, Allahabad Bank - located in Antwerp, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Mauritius, Frankfurt without making entries in the banking software about the LoUs.

Upon receiving the messages from PNB under SWIFT, the banks abroad transferred these amounts into Nostro account of PNB with them.

A Nostro account is an account that a bank holds in a foreign currency in another bank to enable foreign trade by its clients.Mumbai: Investers reacts while watching the stock prices at a screen on the facade of the Bombay Stock Exchange in Mumbai on Monday. The sensex soared on Monday follwing the BJP's victory in the Gujarat and HP Assembly polls. PTI Photo by Shashank Parade (PTI12_18_2017_000140B)

live bse live

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Here are the stocks which are in news today:

Jet Airways: It has appointed Ashok Chawla as non-executive independent director of the Board.

GMR Infra: The group will set up aerospace & defence manufacturing hub in Tamil Nadu

L&T and BEL sign MoU for Defence Products and Systems

Zee Entertainment - NCLT approved composite scheme of arrangement and amalgamation between Zee Entertainment, Zee Digital (ZDCL), India Webportal (IWPL), ZEE Unimedia (ZUL) and Sarthak Entertainment (SEPL) as demerger of ZDCL, IWPL, ZUL vesting into ZEE Entertainment and amalgamation of SEPL with ZEEL

RMG Alloy board meeting on April 14 to consider issue of shares / warrants on pref basis to promoter or investor

RBI imposed monetary penalty of Rs 3 crore on IDBI Bank for non-compliance of IRAC norms

IOC, BPCL and HPCL formed JV as 50:25:25 to build an integrated refinery and petrochemicals complex in Maharashtra

GMR to set defence hub at Hosur: Media Reports

Axis Bank sells Echanda Urja loans to IREDA, Central Bank: BS

Ashok Leyland to bid for 20-25 percent of Indian Army tenders: FE

IL&FS Groups PE arm to raise USD 1 billion infrastructure fund: Media Report

-CBI probes into ICICI Bank's Rs 5,000 crore loan to Choksi

-RBIs probe in 2016 had flagged concerns

CBI questions Bank of India, Canara Bank officials in Bahrain w.r.t. PNB fraud case: Mint

Shemaroo to incorporate wholly owned subsidiary at New Jersey US

NCLT approved amalgamation of Tifco Holdings Limited with Indian Hotels

Quess Corp completed 100 percent acquisition in Qdigi Services Ltd (formerly known as HCL Computing)

Kushal has submitted resolution plan for Rainbow Papers Limited, if approved then it will evolve outflow for settlement; will start a new division in education segment to carry out activities of pre-school chain

Oil companies: Major agreement has been signed between Saudi Aramco & Hindustan Oil, Indian Oil & Bharat Oil.

Bhushan Steel: NCLT reserves orders on resolution plan approval

Carlyle to sell 10 percent in PNB Housing Finance: Media Report

Dalmia Bharat Group Company RPPL writes to RBI Governor, SBI Chairman, Committee of Creditors w.r.t Binani CementDalmia Bharat Group reaches out to CVC showing concern over Binani Cement case

Dalmia asks RBI to examine Binani Cement case for violation of IBC process

Tata Motors: Global wholesales at 1.53 lakh units in March.

-Failed to justify changes made to release criteria for finished API Product-Incubation for API product not validated for time frames specified in procedure-Failed to ensure corrective actions are completed within closure period

-Failed to ensure equipment used in finished API product is qualified for use

Larsen & Toubro: It has signed an MoU With BEL To Develop Defence Products

Balrampur Chini - CRISIL rating assigned on Rs 1,200 crore commercial paper programme as CRISIL A1+

Pennar Industries - Pennar & Enertech Engineering formed Special Purpose Vehicle in which Pennar will hold 51 percent stake

Bandhan Bank - ICRA rating upgraded on non-convertible debentures (NCD) and term loan as AA

Biocon made statement on Mylan and Biocon seek to accelerate introduction of adalimumab biosimilar in EU as company retains its economic interest in this arrangement - Biocon Spokesperson said

Shivalik Rasayan has fixed record date as April 20 for Stock split and issue of bonus share in ratio of 1:4.

Tata Sons: The company will form Tata Aerospace & DefenceICICI Direct's currency report on USDINR

Rupee ended sharply lower losing almost 0.49 % against the US $ as a sharp rise in crude oil prices coupled with global geopolitical tensions weighed on emerging currencies including the rupee  The US $ was almost unchanged against majors . However, a rise in crude oil prices and global geopolitical tensions rattled markets. Crude oil prices rose to almost four - year highs with Brent testing $ 72 / bl while the US president warned Russia on Syrias alleged chemical attacks. We expect the JPY to remain supported over a rise in global concerns while the US$ could remain on the back foot.

Sovereign bonds extended declines as yields rose sharply amid concerns over a spurt in crude oil prices and simmering global geopolitical concerns  US 10 - year yields declined to 2 . 78 % as the US President warned Russia over alleged use of chemical weapons by Syria.

The near - month dollar - rupee April contract on the NSE was at 65. 37. The April contract open interest declined 1. 63 % from the previous day  We expect US$INR to find supports at lower levels. Utilise downsides in the pair to go long in US$INR.

Intra-day strategy

US$INR April futures contract (NSE) View: Bullish on US$INR Buy US$INR in the range of 65.20 - 65.24 Market Lot: US$1000 Target: 65.38 / 65.46 Stop Loss: 65.07 Support Resistance S 1/ S 2: 65.20 / 65.10 R 1/R 2:65.40 /65.55

The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts/broking houses/rating agencies on moneycontrol.com are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.

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Shares of Infosys gained around 3 percent as investors waited for cues from its March quarter results which will be declared on Friday. The results are likely to be out at 4 pm, post market hours.

The scrip touched an intraday high of Rs 1,172, while it hovered around Rs 1160-mark.

Consensus estimates see Infosys posting up to 2 percent growth in its rupee and dollar revenue, while its profit after tax (PAT) could be reported a little over Rs 3,600 crore. The third quarter of this fiscal saw its PAT getting boosted on reversal of income tax provision at Rs 1,432 crore.

Q3FY18 PAT boosted by reversal of income tax provision of Rs 1432 cr

Experts at Ajcon Global are upbeat on the stock. We would go long ahead of Infosys Q4FY18 result as we expect the Company to witness an improvement in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) margins in Q4FY18 owing to currency, operational efficiency and automation. We expect revenue guidance can be in the range of 5-7 per cent y-o-y constant currency growth for FY19, Akash Jain of Ajcon Global told Moneycontrol.

Among the key things to watch out, Ajcon has listed out a few things.

The key things to watch out in Q4FY18 Infosys result would be managements outlook on FY19E revenue guidance, along with sustainable margin trends which we think would be above street expectations.

Over the last few quarters, the Company has clocked better profitability owing to higher utilization. We expect OPMs to rise in the range of 20-30 bps.

The companys new CEOs outlook for long term, possible deal wins in future, CEOs commentary on strategy to mitigate risks of US tax code would act as a key trigger to stock prices, Jain further added.The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) may revamp the existing mobile number portability (MNP) rules in the next two months to make it more consumer-friendly and prompt, reported ET Telecom.

Moneycontrol had earlier stated in a report that TRAI was keen to revise norms on mobile number portability, making them more user-friendly while reducing scope for companies to decline requests from customers.

Currently, a substantial number of MNP requests are being rejected due to wrong UPC (Unique Porting Code) and balance issues, TRAI chairman R S Sharma told the paper.

Changes in MNP rules will allow mobile phone users to retain their numbers and telecom service provider while moving cities in a faster and simpler way. Consumers should not be subjected to hassles, and it (process) should not take two weeks (to port), Sharma said.

Stressing on promoting a customer-friendly process, the chief regulator added that in the absence of any specific issues, a mobile number should be instantaneously ported to another telecom.

Mobile number portability has met with reasonable success in India where connectivity is still poor and call drops frequent, particularly in metros. Even in areas where old, established companies claim to have high-speed 4G services, it is the 2G signal that is mostly available.

According to data available on TRAI website, a total of 7.43 million requests were received for mobile number portability during December last year. With this, such requests cumulatively increased to 338.41 million since intra-service area mobile number portability was implemented first in Haryana in November 2010. Inter-service area portability was effected in July 2015. There are 22 service areas or circles in the country.

In January, TRAI had cut down the porting fee to Rs 4 from Rs 19, after a review of such charge.

Statistics from the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) that represents Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular and Reliance Jio, revealed that there was a steep increase in annual MNP requests to 64 million in 2017 from nearly 6.5 million in 2011.

A steep rise in MNP requests stems from the closing down of carriers such as Reliance Communications and Aircel, leaving only the MNP route open for their customers.Worlds largest oil producer Saudi Aramco is keen on venturing into fuel retailing in India, but it will only do so after the planned USD 44 billion refinery-cum-petrochemical complex in Maharashtra is ready to function. The company has signed an agreement to pick up 50 per cent stake in the refinery project.

Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Ratnagiri Refinery & Petrochemicals, a consortium consisting of Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL), Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL) and Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL). Currently, IOCL holds 50 per cent stake in RRPL, while HPCL and BPCL have 25 per cent stake each. After Aramco's entry, the 50 per cent stake will be split in same proportion between IOCL, HPCL and BPCL.

After signing the MoU, the CEO in an interview with The Economic Times, said they were not getting into retail without having a manufacturing hub.

The company is also planning to pick a local partner for the retail venture to dilute some of its 50 per cent equity stake in the 60 million tonne-a-year refinery project. The partner will have its own brand in fuel retailing. Saudi Aramco would also like to have its own brand, said Nasser.

Talking about the investment decision in India, Nasser said "Saudi Aramco is the only company that can undertake project of this scale. Around 1.2 million barrels per annum (60 million tonnes per annum) has never been undertaken at one time," he said, adding that the company had in the 1990s looked at investing in projects in India along with Royal Dutch Shell but they could not take off due to "political and legal issues".

He gave the credit of this investment in India to Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government. "The reforms that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has brought over the last few years are nothing but a game-changer. An opening (up of economy) we have never seen before, the transparency, ease of doing business, removing some of the hurdles" has facilitated investment flow, he said.

(With inputs from PTI)Devendra Fadnavis

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today assured that people from Bihar who live and work in Mumbai have no reason to fear as long as his government is there.

Addressing a gathering of Biharis at a packed Shanmukhanand auditorium here, Fadnavis said, "Mumbai is a mini-India....People rise here by dint of courage and hard work. I want to assure you all that till I am here, you need not to worry.

"You keep doing your job peacefully and keep flourishing," said Fadnavis, who was the chief guest at a function to celebrate 'Bihar Divas', organised by Bihar Foundation, a Bihar government's organisation.

Ancient Bihar had the world's first universities and examples of city planning, he noted.

"Due to some reasons Bihar may not have advanced so much yet, but you are essentially rich (in terms of culture and history)....and I not only hope but strongly believe that under the leadership of Modi-ji (Bihar deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi), the state will witness an unprecedented development in the coming five years," he said.

Sushil Kumar Modi, who is the chairman of Bihar Foundation, was also present.

The Maharashtra government will form a committee which will work in association with Chhath Puja organisations in the city and ensure proper arrangements for Chhath Puja celebration along the Mumbai seashore, Fadnavis said.

Also, his government, in association with Bihar Foundation, will work to provide medical as well as accommodation facilities to cancer patients who come to the city for treatment, Fadnavis said.

Earlier, Sushil Kumar Modi appealed the Biharis who live here to embrace the local culture and language.

"We all are known for our hard-working and die-hard spirit. Wherever we go, we mix easily... However, I would appeal you all to learn Marathi too, which will help you in growing your business," Modi said.

Electrification of rural areas of Bihar was at full speed and every village in Bihar has now electricity, he said. Modi said.

Outlining the work of the foundation, Abhay Kumar, a key functionary, said it serves the Biharis living outside Bihar through several initiatives.

The foundation was working with different agencies and the government to set up a 100-bed branch of the Tata Memorial Center (which specialises in cancer treatment) at Muzaffarpur in Bihar, he said.

"We have an ambitious plan to set up a grand Bihar Bhavan in Mumbai and seek support from Sushil Kumar Modi in this regard," Kumar added.The BJP government in Haryana will give a monthly pension of Rs 10,000 to those residents of the state who were "sufferers" and were imprisoned during the days of Emergency between June 1975 to March 1977, the state Cabinet decided here today.

The Cabinet met here this evening under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar.

The Cabinet approved the Haryana State Shubhra Jyotsna Pension and Other Facilities Scheme, 2018, which will be applicable from November 1, 2017, an official release said.

"Under the scheme, a monthly pension of Rs 10,000 will be given to those residents of Haryana who had actively participated during the period of emergency, that is from June 25,1975 to March 21,1977 and had faced imprisonment under Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), 1971 and Defence of India Act, 1962.

"Apart from this, those people who did not have Haryana domicile, but were arrested in Haryana and jailed in the state during Emergency would also be entitled for the pension," the release said.

Citing the cabinet decision, it said those residents of Haryana who had struggled during the period of Emergency and faced imprisonment even for one day under MISA Act or Defence of India Act, 1972 and rules framed there under shall be eligible to avail the benefit of the scheme.

It said the policy shall also be applicable to widows of such persons.

"The beneficiary shall have to produce a jail certificate for the same issued by the Jail Superintendent concerned and countersigned by District Magistrate. In case any such person is unable to produce the jail certificate due to record missing or being unavailable, he may produce certificate from two co-prisoners. Such certificate of co-prisoners must be authenticated by an MLA or MP of the concerned district," it said.

Such Emergency sufferers will have to open an Aadhaar linked saving bank account in any nationalized bank to transfer the amount of pension to their bank accounts and have to give a 'life certificate' in the month of January every year as is being followed in the case of other pensioners, it said.

"Emergency sufferers who are getting pension or honorarium of any kind from any other State Government will also be eligible. However, if an otherwise eligible Emergency sufferer is getting pension from any other State Government for the same purpose of an amount less than Rs 10,000 per month, the entitlement of pension under this scheme would be reduced by that amount," it said.

The pension shall be cancelled in case of conviction by the Court on charges of moral turpitude or for providing false information or affidavit, the release added.Ram Nath Kovind, nominated presidential candidate of Indias ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), delivers a speech during a welcoming ceremony as part of his nation-wide tour, in Ahmedabad, India, July 15, 2017. REUTERS/Amit Dave - RTX3BL0Y

India and Zambia today signed four agreements including on double taxation avoidance and judicial cooperation as President Ram Nath Kovind held delegation-level talks with his Zambian counterpart Edgar Chagwa Lungu.

President Kovind, who arrived here yesterday on the final leg of his visit to three African countries, had "meaningful and wide-ranging discussions" with his Zambian counterpart, said a statement issued by the Indian President's Office.

"The two Presidents exchanged views on bilateral and global issues. Committing to India's long-standing developmental partnership with Zambia, President Kovind also expressed appreciation for Zambia having signed the International Solar Alliance agreement. He looked forward to early ratification of the agreement from the Zambian side," the statement said.

The two sides signed four agreements - on double taxation avoidance; on judicial cooperation; on mutual visa waivers for officials and diplomats; and on the Entrepreneurship Development Institute that India will build in Zambia.

This is the first visit to the country by an Indian president since 1989.

President Kovind also addressed the Zambia-India Business Forum.

"Zambia and India are time-tested friends. Built on this strong foundation, our bilateral trade and economic engagement has prospered," he said.

"Indian companies have invested significantly in Zambia, especially in mining, telecom, energy and manufacturing. But we can do more. There are opportunities for our businesses to explore - from social enterprises to new technology; from community projects to highways; and from 'Digital India' to 'Smart Zambia'," the President said while addressing the Forum.

Noting that the trade between the two countries has picked up significantly in the past few years, President Kovind urged all stakeholders - small and medium enterprises, Chambers of Commerce, large companies, new entrepreneurs - to diversify and expand the Zambia-India business corridor.

"Both Zambia and India are blessed with a youthful population. We need to connect our young people through start-ups, skills, technology and new ideas," he said.

As part of President Kovind's visit, India has agreed in principle to provide concessional finance and support towards the construction of the Mahatma Gandhi Convention Centre in Lusaka. India has also gifted Zambia medicines and medical equipment worth USD 3 million as well as presented USD 100,000 for the Mahatma Gandhi School in Lusaka.

Earlier in the morning, the President visited the Embassy Park Presidential Memorial in Lusaka and paid tributes to three former Presidents of Zambia  Frederick Chiluba, Levy Mwanawasa and Micheal Sata.

After his arrival here yesterday, President Kovind addressed a gathering of the Indian community.

"Members of the community are our champions in a faraway land. They have made great efforts to embellish India's reputation as well as keep alive our cultural traditions. This is commendable," he told the gathering.

Tomorrow, the President will ceremonially commence work on the 93-km Lusaka Traffic Decongestion Project.In 2017, Uttar Pradesh witnessed the entry of BJP in the state to form the government, which otherwise kept swinging between BSP and SP for decades, and the saffron party found a star poll campaigner  Yogi Adityanath.

The saffron-clad seer turned politician had an image of a firebrand leader who was famous for his Hindutva ideology. The five-time MP from Gorakhpur constituency was limited to UP politics till 2017 state assembly elections. After the polls concluded with a sweeping mandate for the saffron party, speculation started on the name of the CM. From Rajnath Singh, Manoj Sinha, Keshav Prasad Maurya to others, many names came up in media reports on the possible 32nd chief minister of the state. Bringing an end to the suspense, BJP announced Yogi to be the next UP CM.

The Gorakhpur saint not only took up to lead the state government, but also became a prominent face of the partys poll campaigns. The UP CM was seen campaigning for Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh elections. He further added his firepower in BJPs campaign against red terror in Kerala and continued his massive campaigning for the saffron party in Tripura. His actions added positive input to poll strategies of BJP and the party achieved victory in the states.

After achieving positive results, sources said senior party leaders had decided to use Adityanath extensively in the Karnataka Assembly polls. It was apparent as the UP CM was seen addressing three rallies in Hubbali, Bengaluru and Mangaluru of the poll-bound state.

The party was visibly trying to counter CM Siddaramaiahs pro-Hindu narrative with an authoritative Hindutva figure like Yogi. In rallies, he was seen raising issues like cow slaughter, deaths of Hindu karyakartas and other topics concerned with Hindutva ideology, which gained huge attention in the political scenario of the state.

While Yogi had been giving Siddaramaiah a tough challenge on the Hindu identity front in Karnataka, he was hit by the bypoll defeat of the BJP candidate on his Gorakhpur seat, for which he had massively campaigned. It raised questions on the effectiveness of Yogis campaigning.



BJP has suffered humiliating loss in the Lok Sabha seats held by the CM & DyCM of UP. Congratulations to SP & BSP for this historic victory. Unity among the non-BJP parties has played a key role.

Perhaps Yogi Adityanath should spend less time lecturing Karnataka on development.  Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) March 14, 2018

The Congress in Karnataka also did not spare any time in attacking Yogi over his partys defeat in UP. The CM took to Twitter asking him not to lecture his state on development after the BJP lost the twin Lok Sabha by-elections in Uttar Pradesh.

So, will the BJP drop its star campaigner in Karnataka? Asked about it, a senior BJP leader said in a report of 'The Quint', published last month, that the leader will continue to campaign in the state. He had said sticking to the original plan, Yogi will address seven to eight rallies in different parts of Karnataka.

However, ever since the bypoll defeat, Yogi has neither attended a single rally nor has the party announced his visit to the state, which is just a month away from voting. Does it signal loss of BJPs star campaigner in the state? The answer to this will soon be answered depending upon the partys subsequent choice to use Yogi as campaigner.

The state will vote on May 12 and results will be announced on May 15.Addressing the Supreme Courts apprehensions about making Aadhaar linking mandatory with mobiles and bank accounts to contain cases of financial fraud and money laundering, the Centre said the measure of linking Aadhaar with ones bank account is similar to frisking at the airport, a Times of India report said.

In front of the constitutional bench of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Justices AK Sikri, AM Khanwilkar, DY Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, UIDAI additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta said when the government is applying a methodology to weed out possible irregularities, it is not that all are suspected of the irregularity".

Mehta cited a United States' Supreme Court judgment which ruled that checking everyones luggage for possible drugs did not stigmatize innocents. He referred this to all passengers being frisked at the airport, even if chances of them carrying anything objectionable is one in a million.

He added that frisking all passengers does not make everyone a suspect in the eyes of the authorities. Because of linkage of Aadhaar with bank accounts, phone numbers and income tax returns, the government has been able to detect non-taxed funds worth Rs 37,000 crore.

Mehta argued that using Aadhaar linkage closed all escapes for tax evaders. Frisking at airports advance public and national interest. It does not generate stigma. Similarly, Aadhaar linkage does not make everyone a suspect, but facilitates detecting financial crimes, he said.

Justices Sikri and Chandrachud said this comparison might not be an apt one. The top court maintained that it is not feasible to have phone numbers of all citizens, just over suspicion that a few of them might be laundering money.

Different crimes require proportional screening and checking. Non-payment of tax, duty evasion or money laundering is at a different level than carrying drugs, arms or dangerous objects in aircraft, which may be a threat to national security, the bench said.

Mehta responded saying, We are not equating terrorism with tax evasion or trying to project all citizens as tax evaders. But money laundering and financial frauds pose quite a serious threat to national security.Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unlikely to have bilateral talks with his Pakistani counterpart Shahid Khaqan Abbasi when the two attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London next week, officials in the Ministry of External Affairs said.

During his visit to the UK from April 17-20, Modi will meet his counterpart Theresa May and a Memorandum on Return of Illegal Immigrants is likely to be signed between the two nations, K Nagaraj Naidu, Joint Secretary (West Europe), said.

The pact expired in 2014 and it is likely to be renewed during the visit.

Prior to his trip to the UK, Modi will visit Sweden from April 16-17, where he and his Swedish counterpart Stefan Lofven will host the first India-Nordic Summit. He will also have an audience with Carl XVI Gustaf, the King of Sweden.

Besides Lofven, prime Ministers of four other Nordic countries - Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway - will attend the summit.

"As far as the possible meeting (between Modi and Abbasi) on the sidelines of the CHOGM (is concerned)... From the first reading of the scheduling, it is a very packed summit. So, if at all there will be a bilateral meeting, it will probably be on the first day, but even that first day is completely packed.

"So at this juncture, we really don't have any idea of any of the bilateral meetings of the prime minister. We do look at this as opportunity to interact with the heads of the governments of small states, island states. So, prima facie that would be the emphasis of our interaction because this would be so most appropriate place to do so," Rudendra Tandon, Joint Secretary (United Nations Political), said.

The prime ministers of India and Pakistan last met in December 2015, when Modi, in an unplanned visit, landed in Lahore on his way back from Afghanistan and attended then Pakistan premier Nawaz Sharif's granddaughter's wedding.

However, relations turned frosty after the Pathankot terror attack in January 2016 and another strike by terrorists on an Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in September that year.

Another official in the MEA, too, ruled out any meeting between the two prime ministers.

During his visit to the UK, besides meeting his counterpart, the prime minister will meet Prince Charles.

He will also address a townhall in the UK. A visit to the three-storey house in London, where Babasaheb Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution, lived as a student in the 1920s is also likely. The property has been acquired by the Maharashtra government.

Modi will meet scientists, innovators and also launch the India-UK Tech Alliance comprising young CEOs from both the countries.

Asked whether the issue of terrorism will be raised during the CHOGM, Tandon said: "The fact that the international community needs to get together to combat terrorism is an important part of our overall multilateral diplomacy. But we use different platforms for different purposes.

"That way the issue of global counter-terrorism is best done at the United Nations."

The Commonwealth, he added, focuses on developing country problems and keeping that focus is important and keeping that focus is important.

"A lot of society related work is done within the Commonwealth. So, activities that help in preventing violent extremism and that whole series of activities that are contemplated by member states, that is the focus in this Commonwealth."

The Commonwealth comprises 53 nations.Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attends the 'Dialogue of Emerging Market and Developing Countries' on the sideline of the 2017 BRICS Summit in Xiamen, Fujian province,

The central government plans to roll out seven schemes under a major initiative for 17,000 poor villages, under which the households will get free LPG connections, electricity supply, Jan Dhan accounts, two PM insurance schemes and immunization of children in just 21 days, according to a Times of India report.

The Union Council of ministers discussed this initiative labelled Gram Swaraj Abhiyanspecial interventions, through presentations. The BJP government has come under attack by many over rising issues of farmers distress and dilution of Dalit rights. This move is intended to send out strong pro-poor signs to the people.

At least 484 districts in 33 states and Union Territories of the country will benefit from this scheme. Villages of Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Meghalaya are maximum in number. The government is ambitious about total coverage of this scheme in three weeks  between April 15 and May 5.

The scheme is similar to rural development initiatives by the Modi government like Antyodaya based on principles of convergence and saturation. The central government and BJP are also planning elaborate commemorative functions for BR Ambedkars birth anniversary on April 14.

To ensure complete saturation of his flagship programmes in rural areas, PM Narendra Modi has asked for more active engagement of cabinet and state ministers in the schemes operations. The Centre has also appointed many directors and deputy secretaries to push the programmes. There are high-intensity drives in villages that require attention from the government.India Pakistan

Pakistan today accused India of "scuttling" the process to reconvene the SAARC summit in Islamabad and "holding hostage" the development and economic progress of the whole region.

India has said that it was difficult to proceed with the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) initiative under current circumstances, citing Pakistan's continuing support to cross-border terrorism.

The 2016 SAARC Summit was to be held in Islamabad but after a major terror attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on September 18 that year, India expressed its inability to participate in the summit due to "prevailing circumstances" and stepped up diplomatic pressure on Pakistan.

The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate.

Foreign Office (FO) spokesman Dr Mohammad Faisal, addressing the press briefing through video conferencing from Beijing, said that the SAARC summit was "regrettably scuttled" by India.

He said, "Pakistan condemns the attempt to bring the bilateral issues into multilateral forums. Indian belligerence has brought this multilateral forum to a halt, holding hostage the development and economic progress of the whole region".

Pakistan was committed to hold the already-delayed summit in Islamabad at the earliest, Faisal said.

Pakistan would tirelessly continue to highlight the plight of innocent Kashmiris at all relevant forums, until Indian human rights atrocities come to a complete halt and the dispute was resolved in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolutions and the aspirations of the Kashmiri people, the spokesman said.

He said that Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif spoke to the Foreign Ministers of Iran and Turkey, and Secretary General Organisation of Islamic Cooperation on the Kashmir issue.

SAARC Summits are usually held biennially, hosted by a member state in alphabetical order. The member state hosting the summit assumes the Chair of the Association.As outrage mounted over the alleged gangrape of a minor girl over a year ago, the Allahabad High Court today rebuked the UP government for being tardy in arresting the prime accused, BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, despite an FIR against him, warning that it may be forced to observe that the "law and order has collapsed in the state".

The FIR itself came days after the Unnao girl tried to self-immolate in front of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's house on Sunday accusing authorities of inaction, and the death of her father in custody the next day allegedly after being beaten up by the politician's brother and their henchmen in front of policemen.

As the public outcry raged amid growing demands by political parties and civil society for the legislator's arrest, protests were also held outside Adityanath's house. The police put the onus on the CBI to arrest the MLA, who has remained defiant and has dubbed allegations as a political conspiracy.

The FIR was registered against Sengar under various sections of the IPC, including for rape, kidnapping and criminal intimidation as well as under provisions of the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. Under POCSO, an accused has to be arrested immediately.

The case was registered hours before the high court was to hear the matter, and so was the UP government's decision on transferring the case to the CBI late last night.

"Police is not ready to register FIR of a minor rape victim. In spite of the SIT report, you are repeating that you can take any action only after further investigation. If this is the conduct of the police in the state, who will a victim approach to register a complaint," the court said.

"If this is the stand you are repeatedly taking, then we will be forced to observe in our order that law and order has collapsed in the state," it said.

The court, which is expected to pass an order tomorrow, took strong objection to the delay in the MLA's arrest, as it sought details of the action taken by the government in the matter.

The court was told by the Advocate General that three of the accused in the case were arrested, including the MLA's brother, but any further action would depend on statements of the complainant and witnesses.

Observing that the Special Investigation Team (SIT) report showed that the medical officers and police officers were hand in glove with the accused to save them, the court said since these officers have been arrested already why further investigation was needed to arrest the main accused.

Senior Advocate G S Chaturvedi, who had moved the court, said the SIT headed by senior police officers conducted preliminary investigation and then filed a report after which the FIR was registered.

Meanwhile, the Centre issued a notification approving the CBI probe into the case, officials said later in the evening in New Delhi.

When asked when Sengar would be arrested, Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar told reporters here that the CBI would take a decision on this.

State Director General of Police O P Singh said the minor had not named the MLA before the magistrate earlier as she feared for her life. The government has decided to extend security to the family of the 17-year-old girl, he added.

Kumar dismissed allegations that police was trying to shield the MLA.

Strong reactions came from opposition parties, who demanded immediate arrest of the MLA, with senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his silence over the Unnao rape case.

Sibal also alleged that Modi was "not serious" about the crimes against women across the country, in an apparent reference to another rape case in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir, where the BJP is in the ruling alliance with the PDP.

Several Union ministers including Mahesh Sharma, Piyush Goyal and Maneka Gandhi, however, sought to defend the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, saying it is committed to protecting women, and ensuring that law takes its course.

Two doctors have been suspended and disciplinary proceedings initiated against three others for laxity in providing the victim's father with proper medical care and treatment prior to his judicial custody and at the district hospital, officials said.

Kumar said the government decided to transfer the case to the CBI after lodging the case into the incidents of June 4, 2017, (alleged rape) and since the two other cases of April 3 this year (cross FIRs on the beating up of the victim's father leading to his death) are connected, they will also be transferred to the CBI.

The teen rape survivor demanded immediate arrest of the MLA, saying the CBI probe could be conducted later.

"Why is he being shielded? If the MLA is allowed to remain out he will not leave my uncle... He had earlier too hatched conspiracies against my kin," she said.Lucknow: BJP MLA from Unnao Kuldip Singh Sengar, accused in a rape case, outside the office of the Senior Superintendent of Police in Lucknow on Wednesday night. PTI Photo by Nand Kumar(PTI4_12_2018_000002B)

An FIR has been registered against Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the gangrape of a 17-year-old girl in Unnao district. The report was lodged on Thursday morning and probe in the case has been transferred to the CBI.

Late on Wednesday night, the Yogi Adityanath government decided to hand over the probe to the investigative agency.

Heres what happened in the case after the alleged rape in 2017:

June 4, 2017: A local girl in Unnao accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his aides of raping her, while she had gone to meet him with a neighbour to seek his help in getting employment.

June 11, 2017: After the alleged rape, the girl went missing. On June 11, her family lodged a complaint with the local police.

June 20, 2017: Around 10 days after the complaint was filed, the girl was recovered from a village in Auraiya. She was brought to Unnao the next day.

June 22, 2017: The victim was produced in court by the police and her statement recorded under Section 164 of CrPC. However, several media reports state that the police allegedly did not allow her to name the MLA in her statement.

July 3, 2017: After nearly 10 days, the girl was handed over to her family. United with her kin, the girl alleged cops harassed her and started sending complaints to the Chief Ministers Office and senior police officers seeking registration of rape case against the MLA and his brother Atul Singh.

February 24, 2018: Almost nine months after the alleged rape case, the victims mother moved the court of chief judicial magistrate (CJM), Unnao, and sought registration of FIR under Section 156 (3) of CrPC.

April 3, 2018: The case finally came to light this month when the court heard the mothers plea. The victims father, along with the family, came down to Unnao to attend the hearing in the case. The same evening, he was assaulted by Atul Singh and his aides. Later, he was handed over to the police, which lodged a case under Section 25 for illegal possession of firearm.

April 8, 2018: The girl attempted self-immolation at Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow, demanding FIR against the MLA.

April 9, 2018: The victims father died in police custody.



UP                      

           ,               pic.twitter.com/MsXOW0QbPW  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 11, 2018

Meanwhile, the case took a political turn when the Opposition started taking jibes at Adityanaths government over safety of women in his state. The BJP MLA, however, said he was innocent and the family was trying to malign him.

April 11, 2018: Supreme Court decided to hear a plea for a CBI probe into the Unnao gangrape case.

Sangeeta Sengar, wife of MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, told reporters that there was a political conspiracy against her family and accused the complainant of not being consistent in her statements. She demanded a narco test on her husband and the survivor.

Late on Wednesday night, the state government decided to hand over the probe to the CBI.

Also read | MLA's wife seeks narco test, CBI probe

April 12, 2018: The police registered an FIR against Sengar in connection with the rape case. The FIR has been registered under sections 376 (rape), 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing woman to compel her marriage), 363 (kidnapping) and 506 (criminal intimidation) at the Maksi police station, the officer said.

(With inputs from PTI)Congress

The Congress today attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged silence over the Unnao rape case and questioned why the accused BJP MLA was yet to be arrested.

Speaking to reporters here, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal also alleged that Modi was not serious about the crime against women across the country.

Sibal also asked the Prime Minister to observe fast over rape incidents and register his protest against Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over the Unnao rape case.

The BJP is holding a country-wide fast today to corner opposition over the recent washout of the Budget session of Parliament.

Sibal, referring to National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report for 2016, also said that the BJP-ruled states have the highest crime rate against women.

The Uttar Pradesh police today registered an FIR against ruling BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged gangrape of a minor girl in Unnao, hours after the government said it would hand over the investigation into the case to the CBI.

The victim did not name him (the MLA) because she was afraid. Why then was he not arrested? We charge he would never be arrested, said Sibal.

The former Union minister added that once the case is transferred to the CBI, the investigation agency would take its own time to conduct the probe and the MLA concerned would go absconding meanwhile.

After some months, the CBI would give a report that he had no role. Some people would again threaten the family (of the victim). We are seeing what's happening in the country, he said.

Sibal also referred to the reports on the Adityanath government's decision to withdraw a rape and kidnapping case against former Union minister Swami Chinmayananda.

The chief minister wants to withdraw a case against a rape accused former minister this is their mindset the Prime Minister is silent, Sibal said without naming Chinmayanand. Alleging Modi to be not serious over such incidents, Sibal cited NCRB statistics to suggest that the BJP-ruled Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh reported highest crime against women in 2016.Both Congress and BJP understand how important the upcoming elections in Karnataka are. For Congress, the ruling party in Karnataka, a win could come as a face saver after its performance in the North East elections. For the BJP, a victory will be another step closer to their vision of Congress-mukt bharat. Indian political history has taught us how important a candidate is in an election. Modern day political realities also establish this. An Association for Democratic Reforms Survey conducted between December 2017 and February 2018 says that 86% Karnataka voters maintain that the candidate was the most important reason for them to vote in an election. Heres a brief flashback on all Karnataka CMs in the past 30 years:

Bommai (1988-89: 281 days): Dismissal of his government in 1989 without affording him a chance to take a floor test resulted in a landmark Supreme Court judgment. He went on to become the national president of Janata Dal from 1990 to 1996 and briefly, a Union minister in the United Front government.

Veerendra Patil (1989-90: 314 days): This was Veerendra Patils second innings as chief minister, after leading Congress as KPCC chief to a massive victory with a record 181 seats. He had returned to the post after 18 years, serving for the first time during 1968-71. But less than one year into office, fate intervened in the form of massive paralysis, and the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi infamously dismissed his government, talking to the media at Bangalore airport. (Picture: Karnataka.com )

Veerappa Moily: (1992-94: 2 years, 22 days): During the days of the sealed envelope coming from the High Command, Moily pipped the more popular SM Krishna to the post, thanks to his mentor K Karunakaran. After Moilys term ended, Congress hit its nadir in Karnataka winning only 39 seats. But, thanks to the benevolent party, he later not only became an MP, but a Union minister in UPA government. (Picture: Reuters)

Deve Gowda (1994-96: 1 year, 172 days): When Deve Gowda finally achieved his ambition of becoming chief minister in 1994, he would never have dreamt that something bigger awaited him. Just 17 months later, a campaign spearheaded by Ramakrishna Hegde won 16 Lok Sabha seats for Janata Dal, but destiny beckoned Deve Gowda to become prime minister, though he remained in office only for 11 months. (Picture: Reuters)

JH Patel (1996-99: 3 years, 129 days): A quintessential politician who publicly acknowledged his love for wine and women, he had to weather turbulent times in Janata Dal, after Hegde and Gowda fell apart. His Lingayat credentials helped him to hold on to his chair till the elections in 1999, which he lost, and died a year later. (Picture: Karnataka.com)

SM Krishna (1999-04: 4 years, 230 days): The Oxford-educated Krishna brought sophistication to administration and also restored investors faith in Bengaluru. He would have easily completed a full term, until a little bird told him to go for simultaneous polls with Lok Sabha in 2004, and the Congress party lost miserably. But that did not end his political career. (Picture: Reuters)

Dharam Singh (2004-06: 1 year, 245 days): First chief minister of a coalition government in Karnataka, he tried to provide a good administration amidst all the pinpricks from Deve Gowda, de facto leader of coalition partner JD(S). The amiable Dharam Singh did not lose his smile even when Gowda pulled the rug from under his feet to install Kumaraswamy, his son, as chief minister. (Picture: News18/Getty Images)

HD Kumaraswamy: 2006-07: 1 year, 253 days): Being the first-time MLA from Ramanagara, Kumaraswamy, during his short stint, showed that politics was very much in his genes when he ran a coalition government with the BJP. But his failure to hand over power to Yeddyurappa at the end of 20 months as per an agreement gave him the tag of a betrayer, which he is still struggling to shed.

BS Yeddyurappa (2007-11: two terms of 3 years, 69 days in all): Yeddyurappa promised much, but delivered little, as he was embroiled in one controversy after another and he was dogged by dissidents in his own party. BJPs southern hopes have risen and fallen with BSY, and ironically, even in 2018, the situation remains the same.

DV Sadananda Gowda (2011-12: 343 days): A perfect model for Colgate with his permanent smile, Sadananda (which, appropriately, means ever happy) could barely settle down when he was ousted by internal bickering in the party. But he has won three Lok Sabha terms from three different constituencies and currently is the Union minister for statistics in the Modi government. (Picture: Reuters)

Jagadish Shettar (2012-13: 304 days): A former president of BJP, before he could take control of the party or the government, elections were upon him. He saw the BJPs strength slide from 110 to 40 seats and handed back power to the Congress.The Punjab government on Thursday told the Supreme Court that its own minister Navjot Singh Sidhu should serve three years in jail in a 30-year-old road rage case as ordered by the Punjab and Haryana high court.

Sidhu had hit Gurnam Singh, 65, on the head during an argument on a road in Patiala on December 27, 1988. Singh had died in hospital of a haemorrhage.

The high court had held Sidhu guilty and sentenced him to three years in jail in 2006, but the Supreme Court had suspended the sentence a year later and granted him bail, allowing him to contest elections.A woman looks at the screen of her mobile phone in front of an Apple logo outside its store in Shanghai, China July 30, 2017. REUTERS/Aly Song TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY - RC15B60780F0

After fighting an eight-year-long legal battle, Apple has been reportedly ordered to pay a fine of USD 502.6 million to a patent troll VirnetX by a federal court in Texas. The legal battle was fought over Apples usage of FaceTime and iMessage which, according to VirnetX, infringed upon patents.

The two companies had been engaged in a bitter legal battle since 2010 when VirnetX claimed features such as FaceTime, VPN on Demand and iMessage present on Apples devices infringe multiple secure communications patents. Apple had refuted the claims.

The battle, which involved a number of lawsuits and appeals, with the latest one coming from Apple following it being ordered to pay USD 439.7 million back in October 2017.

According to Kendall Larsen, CEO of VirnetX, the USD 502.6 million fine imposed on Apple  a company which has sold more than 400 million devices so far and has generated USD 20 billion profit in the first quarter of this year alone  was fair.

"The evidence was clear," Larsen was quoted by Bloomberg as saying. "Tell the truth and you dont have to worry about anything."

However, VirnetXs joy may be short-lived as The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has declared the patents invalid which may result in the ruling to be struck down soon.

VirnetX, in a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, has mentioned the companys business model revolves around portfolio of intellectual property is the foundation of our business model".

The Zephyr Cove, a Nevada-based company, is a patent troll company which basically generates revenues by suing companies which develop and sell products which infringe upon hard-to-understand patents and loosely-interpreted intellectual property regulations.

According to Bloomberg, the companys stock rose about 44 per cent after the court ruled in its favour.NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden took to Twitter to take a dig at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg comparing his own act and the inability of Zuckerberg to answer the questions of the US Senators properly.



And they call me a criminal. https://t.co/cmpIxY3Cc3

 Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 10, 2018

Replying to a tweet by Alan Rappeport, the economic policy reporter at The New York Times, which read, Zuckerberg is not able to give a straight answer about whether Facebook tracks browsing activity after users log off, Snowden said, And they call me a criminal.

Apart from his own tweet, the privacy crusader also retweeted multiple tweets which one way or other were critical of Facebook or its celebrated owner.

Last month, in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach Snowden had tweeted a 2009 video interview of Zuckerberg by the BBC.

In the interview, Zuckerberg when asked if the company was going to sell  or share  any of the information on Facebook, he had answered, What the terms say is just  we're not going to share people's information except for with the people that they've asked for it to be shared.

Everyone gets privacy settings, which has always been one of the big differentiators for Facebook, and what makes it a really different service for people. You can say, I want this photo album to go to these people or I want this note to go to these people, and the privacy controls on Facebook are really unparalleled by anything else.

Mark Zuckerberg testimony: Here's what the Facebook CEO had to say during Congressional grilling

Snowden, in the tweet, Snowden had written:

Facebook: "This is their information. They own it"

BBC: "And you wont sell it?"

FB: "No! Of course not."

He further urged others to share the video clip with the people who don't use Twitter.Lima : Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of Facebook, speaks at the CEO summit during the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Lima, Peru, Saturday, Nov. 19, 2016. AP/PTI(AP11_19_2016_000287B)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told US lawmakers that his personal data was also harvested and sold by Cambridge Analytica and he intends to initiate legal action against the British firm accused of stealing personal information and using it for political purposes.

Zuckerberg replied "yes" when asked if his personal data was included in the information sold to the "malicious third parties" by the lawmakers during a testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday.

Cambridge Analytica compromised personal information of approximately 87 million users, half a million of whom were from India.

The American people are concerned about how Facebook protects and profits from its users' data, lawmakers said.

Beginning this Monday, Facebook has started to notify those users whose data have been breached.

Responding to a volley of questions, Zuckerberg, 33, said it would take some time to work through all the changes the company needs to make.

"But I am committed to getting this right, and that includes the basic responsibility of protecting people's information, which we failed to do with Cambridge Analytica," he said.

Zuckerberg said he was getting to the bottom of what the UK-based firm did and will tell everyone who may have been affected.

"What we know now is that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained some information about millions of Facebook members by buying it from an app developer that people had shared it with," he said.

"This information was generally information that people share publicly on their profile pages, like their name and profile picture and the list of pages that they follow. When we first contacted Cambridge Analytica, they told us that they had deleted the data. And then, about a month ago, we heard a new report that suggested that this was not true," he said.

Now the Facebook is working with governments in the US, the UK and around the world to do a full audit of what they've done and to make sure that they get rid of any data that they still have.

Responding to a question, he told lawmakers that he intended to initiate legal action against the firm accused of stealing personal data and using it for political purposes in the 2016 US Presidential elections.

To make sure that no other app developers are out there misusing data, Facebook is now investigating every single app that had access to a large amount of people's information on Facebook in the past.

"If we find someone that improperly used data, we're going to ban them from our platform and tell everyone affected," he said.

To prevent this from ever happening again, Facebook is making sure developers can't access as much information, going forward, he said

"The good news here is that we made some big changes to our platform in 2014 that would prevent this specific instance with Cambridge Analytica from happening again today. But there's more to do, and you can find more of the details of the other steps we're taking in the written statement I provided," he said.

Zuckerberg told lawmakers that Facebook had now removed the option for advertisers to exclude ethnic groups from targeting.

"Every time, there is a control right there - not buried in settings somewhere, but right there, when they're posting about who they want to share it with," he added.

Zuckerberg asserted that Facebook did not sell data. "We don't sell data. That's not how advertising works, and I do think we could probably be doing a clearer job explaining that, given the misperceptions that are out there," he said in response to a question.

Facebook is neither a media or a financial institution, he said.

"I consider us to be a technology company, because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build products and services for other people," he said.

"There are certainly other things that we do, too. We do pay to help produce content. We build enterprise software, although I don't consider us an enterprise software company. We build planes to help connect people, and I don't consider ourselves to be an aerospace company," he said.

It is clear now that Facebook didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy, he said.

"We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I am sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and, at the end of the day, I am responsible for what happens here. So, now, we have to go through every part of our relationship with people to make sure that we're taking a broad enough view of our responsibility," he said.Rank 5 | Mark Zuckerberg | Net worth: $78.7 billion | He is the founder of the social media platform, Facebook . (Image: Reuters)

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today told lawmakers that his personal data was also harvested and sold by Cambridge Analytica, a British firm accused of stealing personal data and using it for political purposes in the US presidential elections.

During testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the wake of a data privacy scandal by Cambridge Analytica (CA), Zuckerberg was asked if his personal data was included in the information sold to the "malicious third parties" to which he replied "yes".

Cambridge Analytica compromised personal information of approximately 87 million users, half a million of whom were from India.

The Americans are concerned about how Facebook protects and profits from its users' data, lawmakers said. Beginning this Monday, Facebook has started to notify those users whose data have been breached.

Responding to a volley of questions, Zuckerberg said it is going to take some time to work through all the changes it needs to make.

"But I am committed to getting this right, and that includes the basic responsibility of protecting people's information, which we failed to do with Cambridge Analytica," he said.

Zuckerberg said he is getting to the bottom of exactly what Cambridge Analytica did, and telling everyone who may have been affected.

"What we know now is that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained some information about millions of Facebook members by buying it from an app developer that people had shared it with," he said.

"This information was generally information that people share publicly on their profile pages, like their name and profile picture and the list of pages that they follow. When we first contacted Cambridge Analytica, they told us that they had deleted the data. And then, about a month ago, we heard a new report that suggested that this was not true," he said.

Now the Facebook is working with governments in the US, the UK and around the world to do a full audit of what they've done and to make sure that they get rid of any data that they still have.

Responding to a question, he told lawmakers that he intends to initiate legal action Cambridge Analytica.

To make sure that no other app developers are out there misusing data, Facebook is now investigating every single app that had access to a large amount of people's information on Facebook in the past.

"If we find someone that improperly used data, we're going to ban them from our platform and tell everyone affected," he said.

To prevent this from ever happening again, Facebook is making sure developers can't access as much information, going forward, he said

"The good news here is that we made some big changes to our platform in 2014 that would prevent this specific instance with Cambridge Analytica from happening again today. But there's more to do, and you can find more of the details of the other steps we're taking in the written statement I provided," he said.

Zuckerberg told lawmakers that Facebook has now removed the option for advertisers to exclude ethnic groups from targeting. Every time that a person chooses to share something on Facebook, they're proactively going to the service and choosing that they want to share a photo, write a message to someone.

"And, every time, there is a control right there -- not buried in settings somewhere, but right there, when they're posting about who they want to share it with," he added.

Zuckerberg asserted that Facebook does not sells data. "We don't sell data. That's not how advertising works, and I do think we could probably be doing a clearer job explaining that, given the misperceptions that are out there," he said in response to a question.

Facebook, he said, is neither a media or a financial institution.

"I consider us to be a technology company, because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build products and services for other people," he said.

"There are certainly other things that we do, too. We do pay to help produce content. We build enterprise software, although I don't consider us an enterprise software company. We build planes to help connect people, and I don't consider ourselves to be an aerospace company," he said.

It is clear now that Facebook didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm, as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy, he said.

"We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I am sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and, at the end of the day, I am responsible for what happens here. So, now, we have to go through every part of our relationship with people to make sure that we're taking a broad enough view of our responsibility, he said.Recently Telstra Corporation Ltd [ASX:TLS] have announced their new product, the Telstra Smart Wi-Fi Booster.

The new tech device will counter any wireless complications home owners deal with, when setting up wireless internet.

Easy to set up and use, the booster is an affordable tech piece which features the latest in Wi-Fi technology.

Smart booster isnt their only new form of technology

Telstra have also invested in an electric plane that is able to take flight as well as land on a flat surface.

The electric plane can be piloted autonomously and is forecasted to be worth billions down the track.

The deal will help Telstra display their 5G capabilities which is set to be released later this year.

Telstra have stated that 5G will be essential in supporting devices such as these over the next 10 years.

Acknowledging faults

Telstra have recently owned up to misleading thousands of customers by charging them (via a third-party billing service) for gaming and ringtone content that they werent aware of purchasing.

This fault was due to Telstra customers being able to sign up to subscriptions and charges without fully verifying their identification.

Telstra will offer refunds to customers who were affected by the outcome of the faulty service.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Telstras Group Executive of Consumer and Small Business, Vicki Brady, stated:

In a digital world, increasingly our customers have the option of buying things online that can be charged to their Telstra bill, and for their convenience we aim to make it as simple as possible It is clear for this specific type of service, we did not get that right.

Telstra have made sure to prioritise customer satisfaction, while compensating for any faults which have occurred.

Shares of Telstra are now trading at $3.10 a share.

Regards,

Ryan Clarkson-Ledward,

For Money Morning

PS: Shae Russell from Money Morning offers an insightful (FREE) video series on key investing fundamentals: Your Five Step Beginners Guide to Technical Analysis: Up your investing game today.Laurentian Banks CEO acknowledged having underestimated the market reaction to irregularities surrounding certain mortgages sold to a third-party buyer, although noting that he believes the issue has been over mediatized.

We certainly underestimated the sensitivity of the market to all that (touches) the mortgage sector, Francois Desjardins told The Canadian Press after the banks annual meeting earlier this week.

The bank didnt address the issue in its presentations, but that didnt stop a shareholder from criticizing its leaders and demanding accountability for the companys share performanceThe secret to our success, I would say , is that we are extremely focused on our partners, and specifically our partners are our clients and also our lenders, said Weintraub. We invest a lot of time in understanding our clients needs, our clients situations and our lenders offerings, and how they can help our clients solve their problem.

You work hard for your client and your lender, and its nice to be nominated. Winning would be incredible because it really does highlight our intense dedication to our client and I really feel like our team is incredibly dedicated. We work on files at night in the evenings, weekends, responding to texts. Our clients know they can count on us. Its a huge responsibility and we take that responsibility seriously.

MogoMortgage won the Award for Best Use of Mobile Technology at the 2017 CMAs, and as a fairly new company, winning a Canadian Mortgage Award resonated through the industry, says MogoMortgages broker of record.



We really value the awards, just being new in the mortgage industry, because right away it gave us a little bit of recognition as a new player, said Chantel Chapman. It was important for the industry to see who we were. When the awards came out, lenders reached out to us as well. When we were going through signing up different brokerages, it was helpful to have that award because people were reaching out to us that we hadnt come across before.

Winning the award has proven a useful marketing tool, too.



We use the award recognition symbol, added Chapman. We put it on our email and use it in some of our marketing, so awards can be pretty powerful in marketing to show credibility, because theyre a bit of a social proof tactic that consumers feel comfortable with.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.Companies are now able to offer their employees a home loan benefit though a new platform launched by Neat Capital.

The fintech mortgage lenders home loan benefit platform is designed to deliver financing education, seamless integration with payroll, and customizable benefits for all employees, including executive relocations.

"Taking the friction out of home financing helps accelerate a company's recruiting activity, even if employees are making a regional move to simply improve their commute," said Luke Johnson, Founder and CEO of Neat Capital. "With Neat Capital, our clients receive fast approvals upfront so that they can make a cash-like offer on a home. This means that companies under our benefit program do not lose employee productivity to weeks of failed home bids, document chasing, and stressful unnecessary distractions."A panel of experts from real estate, construction, and property management will meet at a series of event to consider how our cities must evolve for the future.

Organized by global industry body RICS, the Summit Series Americas 2018 began in Houston, San Francisco and Miami in January, but will be heading to New York next month (May 14) along with Mexico City, Toronto and Sao Paulo.

The series tackles the same issues at each location but with local speakers adding their take. There is also a global summit being held in London, UK this month.Geopolitics gripped crude markets from New York to London, pushing prices to levels last seen in 2014.

Futures in New York jumped 2 percent on Wednesday. Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, intercepted a missile attack over the kingdom's capital just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump warned American missiles soon may strike Syria. A U.S. government report on expanding domestic oil inventories barely fazed traders caught up in the rush of world events.

"People are paying attention to geopolitical risks," said Matt Sallee, who helps manage $16 billion in oil-related assets at Tortoise in Leawood, Kansas. Traders "are more interested in the big picture."

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'," Trump wrote on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia said it intercepted a ballistic missile over Riyadh and shot down two drones in other parts of the country. A measure of oil market volatility jumped to levels last seen in mid-February.

"The geopolitical risk has jacked the market up to three-year highs. This is the first day in a long time that the direction of the crude market and the direction of the stock market have diverged," said Thomas Finlon, director of Energy Analytics Group LLC in Wellington, Florida. The correlation "stops with heightened geopolitical risk."

West Texas Intermediate for May delivery surged $1.31 to settle at $66.82 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Total volume traded on Wednesday was about 74 percent above the 100-day average.

Brent for June settlement climbed $1.02 to end the session at $72.06 on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The global benchmark crude traded at a $5.32 premium to June WTI.

Yemen Conflict

Loud blasts were heard in the sky above Riyadh on Wednesday. Two other missiles were intercepted over the southern areas of Jazan and Najran, authorities said. The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen said it also downed a drone targeting an airport in the southwestern province of Abha and another in Jazan.

In the U.S., Energy Information Administration data on Wednesday showed swelling surpluses at the biggest domestic storage complex as well as nationwide last week. American crude production also climbed, while exports of American oil declined to 1.21 million barrels a day.

"If you look through what drove the weekly build, it's pretty much explained by the fact that exports were the second-lowest they've been all year," Sallee said.

Other oil-market news:

Gasoline futures added 1.3 percent to settle at $2.0676 a gallon on Wednesday, the highest level since August. The state of the world is cause for concern though Russia hopes "common sense will prevail," President Vladimir Putin said at a Kremlin ceremony to receive credentials of new foreign ambassadors. Saudi Arabia sees "strong fundamentals" and "reasonable"' balance in the short term, according to Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih.A former Midland High student reported missing by Cortez, Colorado, police has been found in Midland.

William Gallegos, 16, was found by Midland police Wednesday night, according to relatives.

Gallegos was first reported missing by his mother, Ashley Gallegos Crawford, Friday evening.

RELATED: Colorado police search for former MHS student

According to the report by The Journal there was some indication Gallegos was planning to stay with relatives.

Gallegos recently moved to Cortez from Midland and attended Midland High School, according to his stepfather, Midlander Jason Crawford.There is a demand for after-school child care in Midland.

The demand was record-breaking, according to officials with Right to School, the company that will oversee after-school education at Midland ISD.

Company officials said that within 24 hours of word getting out earlier this month that Right to School would be operating after-school activities during the next school year, 140 families had registered. Tuesday night, during a presentation showcasing the Right to School before- and after-school school experience, Cindy Lawson, senior director of school partnerships for the Evanston, Illinois, company, said 286 people had registered and every one of MISDs 27 elementary school campuses were represented. Lawson also expects that the number of families registering to rise dramatically. She said on Tuesday alone more than 40 people had registered and that was before the event at Bowie Fine Arts Academy, attended by parents interested is what Right to School was all about.

Lawson, a single mother of three, said an after-school program matters more than most people realize. She also said that the Right to School program works because staff believe in the mission and because it is innovation-driven, locally inspired and efficiency-obsessed. She said Right to School officials watch every penny we spend, so we can put more money into people, partnerships and the curriculum. She also said Right to School customizes its programs to the community and even to specific campuses.

Lawson said there is an 8:1 child-to-teacher ratio for pre-K and 15:1 for other first through sixth grade. Local staff will include three area managers and a regional director who will be part of the Right to School hierarchy.

The curriculum meets the TEKS standard, and Right to School is available for parents on break weeks --Christmas, Thanksgiving, spring break -- on early-release days, on other days when students are off and during the summer. Some of those break days will come at an additional cost, and a family does not have to be enrolled in the after-school program for the children to take part in Right to School during break times.

The fee schedule provides flexibility because it is month to month and features options for those who need after-school care on a more limited basis, she said. Students can attend one to five days a week, but there is also a punch card -- $280 for 10 days -- which can be used on days a parent needs it.

She repeated information previously released by MISD: free and reduced lunch students receive a 25 percent discount and siblings of a student in the program will receive a 10 percent discount. There is also a discount for MISD employees who work with Right to School programs and a less significant discount for MISD employees in general.

If you are employed with MISD, you get the discount, Lawson said.

MISD officials said with the discounts available, a student currently enrolled in a five-day-a-week after-school program in the district will pay just $6 more a month than the current program offered.

Lawson said Right to Schools goal is to be open on each campus with high-quality employees. She said Right to School had put out information about job opportunities and was performing job searches to be ready in the fall. She told those in attendance, if you have a current child care provider that you love, that you please have them call us (about employment).

Lawson described the curriculum as disguised learning and that it is multi-sensory and supports cross-curricular education objectives. She used the example of children learning about flatulence and snot as ways to keep learning engaging and fun. For instance, she told those in attendance at Bowie that when learning about flatulence  or farts -- students will know it is caused by bacteria in the intestines. Then there will be gas in the bottle experiments for students to learn more about health and nutrition. She said that example is one that reinforced the healthy-bodies and healthy-minds concept.

They are learning, but the kids just think they are having fun, Lawson said.

Lastly, Lawson said when Right to School goes into a community, the company works on developing elective programs for students. Those electives can be science-related or activity-based (such as dance or cooking) and will take place once a week for 10 weeks. There can be a separate cost for those programs, she said.

She said that because it takes time to develop electives for a community, the first course may not be offered until January or February.

Full registration for Right to School in Midland is expected to take place in two weeks, but Lawson said people can pre-register immediately.Cortez, Colorado, police are searching for a 16-year-old boy who was reported missing in early April

Police Sgt. Rex Brinkerhoff told The Journal that police first started searching for William Gallegos after he was reported missing from his Cortez home Friday evening. Police have no reason to believe the teen is in danger, according to the Journal's report. Brinkerhoff encouraged anyone with information about Gallegoss whereabouts to contact investigators.

The teen was first reported missing by his mother , Ashley Gallegos Crawford. According to the report there was some indication Gallegos was planning to stay with relatives. Investigators have not been able to confirm whether Gallegos reached those relatives.

Gallegos recently moved to Cortez from Midland and attended Midland High School, according to his stepfather, Midlander Jason Crawford.

Anyone with information about Gallegos can call the Cortez Police Department at 970-565-8441.I realized something as I was listening to Midland ISD Superintendent Orlando Riddicks presentation on the new after-school program. It hit me when Riddick talked about wanting to provide the best for Midland ISD students  specifically, his fierce expectations to have the best.

It made me think for a second about living in Midland right now, and how my expectations have changed. I go into a typical restaurant and hope that the service will be good and know that I will settle for adequate. Such is life during economically prosperous times for a community with 2.5 percent unemployment.

The issue of settling is not only a restaurant problem but one that frankly has become part of the West Texas psyche.

We have become accepting of mediocrity, and it isnt just when we go to a worker-challenged eating establishment. If it involves life above ground; we have come to learn that is just the way life is.

Highest rents in Texas? Nothing we can do about it.

More for you Parents respond to MISD's Right to School program

Roads as bad as any in a city our size? Oh, well.

A public education system as poor-performing as any in the state our size? Well, the kids speak too many languages, its hard to find teachers, our schools are too old and overcrowded, the state takes too much money from our district. Any of these sound familiar?

But if Riddicks conversation Tuesday with those at Bowe Fine Arts Academy was any indication, the days of the district settling are in the past.

I want to be sure it is offered at gold-seal level and will push the provider that they make it happen, Riddick said about those who choose to be partners. Our kids deserve the best programs. I will reach far and wide to find someone.

We are outpacing programs that have been part of program for a while. That is because of you.

And the after-school program just might be the first chance to see if the product matches the high expectations Riddick has set for himself, his staff and those who partner with MISD. Not only will the after-school program be installed but so will the Collegiate Prep Academy at Sam Houston Elementary, the first choice school established during the Riddick era. I expect is there will be instant feedback on both.

I know there is a tendency to be critical of an outsider, especially on the education front that means so much to thousands of people. But remember, Midland was not operating from a position of strength when it comes to public education. We had little room to be snooty about what someone from the outside was going to do. This community looked the other way while the education of our students dramatically declined. Thats what the data showed, at least.

Riddick said Tuesday he doesnt mind the discussion on issues, but people should realize he wont settle.

We might have to disagree with things, which is OK. But I want the best.

Public education is probably more difficult than other government entities because school superintendents and college presidents have more power in their respective positions than just about any other appointed official. What they say goes and because of that, there is a certain amount of trust required.

Is this community ready to trust the new superintendent of schools? Its tough to say.

For more than a decade, Midlanders probably have felt as if they had to settle when it comes to their childrens education. So, the hope here is Riddick will show us some successes, and the community will be ready to follow. And until then, remember, those longing for the recent past dont have much of a leg to stand on.Photo provided

MOUNT STERLING  Dot Foods has named customer service representative Brandon Kindhart of Timewell as its volunteer of the year.

The annual award program is part of the Dot Foods Teaming with Local Charities program.Since Benjamin Franklins reflection in a 1789 letter that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes, few American traditions have been as time-honored as snark at the expense of the Internal Revenue Service  moreso this time of year, with tax day on the horizon.

Having worked for the IRS for more than three decades, I know the sentiment spans generations. Iconic 1950s comedian Milton Berle quipped of completing his tax forms, Who says you cant get killed by a blank? Modern hip-hop mogul Dr. Dre said he fears only two things: God and the IRS. But however counterintuitive it may feel, Americans could hardly select a more useful frenemy  nor a more guaranteed investment  than the IRS.

The IRS role is constitutionally fundamental to the American way of life. Whether your policy priority be national security, education, foreign policy, immigration, farm subsidies or space exploration, revenue  and an organization to collect said revenue  is necessary to fund these programs.

In fiscal year 2016, the IRS collected more than $3.3 trillion of the $4 trillion federal budget. The IRS received more than 244 million tax returns and other forms, answered 60 million phone calls, helped elderly citizens prepare 3.8 million returns through special programs, and issued nearly $350 billion in refunds. The IRS website alone was viewed nearly 2 billion times and the online Wheres My Refund? tool processed nearly 300 million inquiries.

And added in recent months to the agencys to-do list: implementation of a sweeping tax reform measure passed by Congress and signed by the president, which will require that significant existing resources and personnel be diverted.

The challenge before the IRS would be Herculean even for a fully staffed, fully funded agency. The problem, of course, is that the IRS is neither of those things. In fact, the picture has grown increasingly bleak in recent years.

Since 2010, the IRS has seen its funding levels slashed by 18 percent. Making matters worse, over that period, the agency has lost 14 percent of its staff. Further complicating the process, tax collection efforts still rely on an infamously complex programming language that is 3 decades old, and programmers proficient in the language are in vanishingly short supply.

Enter President Trumps recently unveiled budget proposal for 2019, which cuts the IRS funding for taxpayers services by an additional 8.7 percent, while also slashing more than 4,000 additional IRS employees from the already lean taxpayer services operation.

Some of the challenges stemming from these resource shortfalls are predictable. If the presidents proposed cuts are successful, estimates indicate the IRS customer service rate could plummet from 75 percent in 2018 to 47 percent next year, a page presumably pulled from the If You Aim High, You Set Yourself Up to Fall Far playbook on government success.

Perhaps even more concerning: the refusal to fund adequately the IRS ultimately amounts to a decision to pass up on vital federal revenue. As former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen succinctly told Congress: We dont have enough people to perform all the audits we think are necessary.

The IRS impressively conducted more than a million audits last year, despite limited resources. Nonetheless, that number was down about 16 percent from the previous year, according to the Wall Street Journal, with the IRS auditing only seven-tenths of 1 percent of returns, the lowest audit coverage rate since 2003.

In effect, the federal government negligently leaves billions of dollars in rightfully owed tax revenue on the table every single year, even as it groans over growing budget shortfalls. In 2017, the tax gap  the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid on time  was $458 billion. Only $52 billion of that pool was ultimately collected. Ironically, the national debate over tax reform continues, even as we consistently fail to collect those taxes already on the books.

However Americans may bemoan its existence, the IRS mission  as the main artery through which government funds flow to federal agencies  is essential to all government life. Every dollar spent on the IRS results, on average, in four dollars gained. And thats before factoring in collections. Every dollar spent on collections efforts results in a gain of between $11 and $13.

With the annual tax deadline looming, these truths can be difficult for taxpayers to keep in perspective, but serve as a timely reminder that, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.

Tom Burger is the executive director of the Professional Managers Association, a non-profit, non-partisan professional association representing thousands of managers and employees within the Internal Revenue Service. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.It appears a proposal to get voters to pile more taxes upon themselves through the clever use of semantics is dead for another legislative session.

Good riddance.

For years now, lawmakers have tried to gain support for a misguidedly taxpayer-friendly-sounding progressive tax. Using charts and statistics, a growing number of legislators see a change in the way people are taxed in Illinois as the panacea for the states money problems. They argue that, under the tax system, those who make more money will pay more, or that it will benefit middle-class taxpayer in Illinois.

Not only is it not a cure  especially since the problem in Illinois is not one of revenue, but one of over-spending  it would be a burden to most hard-working people.

Even before tax-rate massacres in 2011 and again last year, Illinois has maintained one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the nation.

While taking more out of the pockets of tax-beleaguered residents, state leaders are realizing its not enough to quench the insatiable thirst for spending without boundaries.

The result is the state still has more than $8 billion in unpaid bills and a $130 billion liability in unfunded pension benefits.

Enter the progressive tax.

Its name is derived from the rather simple concept that the more someone makes, the more their tax burden becomes. Yet buried amid that simplicity is a reality that the median family in Illinois would see at least a 15 percent increase, or about $390, in the amount of taxes they pay each year, according to calculations by the Illinois Policy Institute.

Fortunately, there are some pretty significant roadblocks on the path to such a proposal. The biggest challenge is that it has to be approved by voters. Before that, it would require super-majority votes in both legislative chambers to get it onto the ballot.

Thats where things have been derailed.

Fifty Republican House members are backing a resolution opposing the plan, meaning the votes arent there. There are 118 members of the House, which means 71 lawmakers would have to back the plan. Any constitutional amendment would have to be approved by May 6 to be on Novembers general election ballot.

The math isnt there, nor is the support of the people. A petition by Illinois Policy against the progressive tax has more than 12,000 signatures and, in a poll conducted by the libertarian think tank, 71 percent of people opposed or had no opinion about a progressive tax.

It is unlikely that means the idea wont come back again in years to come.

Perhaps the energy being wasted on trying to cram another anti-taxpayer initiative down the throat of Illinoisans could be better spent hammering out true reform, starting with sensible spending controls.

That would be truly progressive.There is a fine line between ...The local Vietnam Veterans of America chapter 391 is hosting their second annual Bike and Car show this Saturday.

Larry Bramblett, President of the local Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 391, was Thursdays KVML Newsmaker of the Day.

Spectator admission is only $5 for vehicle parking, from 10 AM to 4 PM. Food, drinks, music and prize drawings will all be a part of the event.

All makes, models and years of cars and motor bikes are welcome. The show will be held at the Tuolumne County Sheriff Posse Grounds on Rawhide Road in Jamestown.

The vehicle entry fee is $35 which includes a commemorative pin.

At this late date, online registration is encouraged at www.vietnamveterans391.org or contact Kathi Bramblett at 209-533-1575.

All of the proceeds from Saturdays event will support local veterans, community outreach and scholarships.

The Newsmaker of the Day is heard every weekday morning at 6:45, 7:45 and 8:45 on AM 1450 and FM 102.7 KVML.FBI agents are investigating possible financial malfeasance at a Kerrville consulting company that filed for bankruptcy last week, three people familiar with the probe said.

The HJH Consulting Group Inc., which does business as The Salt Group, disclosed in a Monday court filing that it sought bankruptcy protection due to the fact that one of its employees manipulated the accounting records of the Debtor to the Debtors detriment.

Salt Groups CEO Harlan J. Hall didnt respond to a message left in a general voice message mailbox at the company.

Were still operating, a female employee, who didnt disclose her name, told a reporter at Salt Groups Kerrville headquarters Wednesday. She directed further inquiries to San Antonio attorney James Rosenblatt, who didnt respond to two phone calls.

RELATED: Bankrupt S.A.-based retailer A'Gaci cancels auction

Stephen A. Canty, who has served as Salt Groups president, declined to comment when reached by phone Wednesday but said he was represented by San Antonio criminal defense lawyer Gerald Gerry Goldstein. The attorney declined to comment. Canty was replaced as HJH Consultings registered agent on April 2, state corporate records show.

A person familiar with the bankruptcy case said a company official had overstated its receivables for years to obtain funding on a bank loan. The official recently confessed, triggering a criminal investigation, this person said.

FBI spokeswoman Michelle Lee said the agency doesnt confirm or deny the existence of investigations.

The company filed for Chapter 11 reorganization on April 2. Two related companies, US Tax Recovery Partners and B2B Prospecting, filed their own bankruptcy petitions but the three cases have since been consolidated.

The three companies have substantially overlapping obligations, according to a court filing. Each listed assets of $50,000 or less and liabilities ranging from $10 million to $50 million.

Texas Capital Bank is listed as the largest creditor in each petition, owed $24 million.

Turn to Fridays Business section or click here on ExpressNews.com to read the full article.

Patrick Danner is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | pdanner@express-news.net | @AlamoPDThe City Council sent a draft ordinance regulating short-term housing rentals like Airbnb and HomeAway that was a year in the making back to the drawing board Wednesday as officials disagreed on how to regulate the sharing economy or whether they even should.

Austin, Nashville and Denver among other U.S. cities already regulate and tax properties rented on a short-term basis, but San Antonio officials couldnt come to agreement on an oversight plan.

Clearly this is an issue that cant be simplified, Mayor Ron Nirenberg said, before Council sent the ordinace back to the Governance Committee.

San Antonios zoning laws dont currently allow for short-term rentals through Airbnb, HomeAway and similar companies  used primarily by travelers as a cheaper alternative to hotel rooms.

As drafted, the ordinance would essentially limit the amount of type 2 rentals  properties rented out on a short-term basis where the owner doesnt live  in a given neighborhood by instituting density restrictions.

That proposal doesnt sit well with Austin-based HomeAway Inc.

We believe that all property owners should be treated equally under the law, and as such urge San Antonio City Council to consider policies that protect all property types under this ordinance, company spokesman Philip Minardi said in an email Wednesday.

The ordinance would also require local property owners who rent out their homes to visitors on a short-term basis to register with the city with a $200 fee, be subject to inspections and pay local hotel occupancy taxes among other requirements.

The citys finance department currently collects hotel occupancy tax, at a rate of about 9 percent, from about 290 short-term rental owners  out of 1,600 the city estimates are operating in San Antonio, Michael Shannon, interim director of the citys Development Services department, told council members Wednesday.

Short-term rental property owners could wind up paying a hotel occupancy tax rate of 16.8 percent  which includes city, county and state taxes  if San Antonio officials opt to make them liable for those taxes.

Airbnb struck an agreement in April 2017 with the Texas comptrollers office to collect and remit state hotel occupancy taxes, but Shannon said that arrangement doesnt apply to local taxes.

Airbnb spokeswoman Laura Rillos said the San Francisco-based company would be open to striking a similar agreement with San Antonio.

Airbnb helps San Antonio residents earn meaningful extra money to help make ends meet, while helping the city welcome a growing number of visitors to San Antonio, Laura Spanjian, Airbnbs Texas public policy director, said in a statement. With more San Antonio using Airbnb to pay the bills, we look forward to working with city leaders on clear, fair rules that address community concerns while allowing all residents to participate equally in home sharing.

Council members debated whether putting local restrictions on the industry could potentially violate private property rights.

I really have done some soul-searching on this one and I cant think of anything less Texan than telling people who they can or cant rent their property to, District 8 Councilman Manny Pelaez said.

Also in play was whether having too many type 2 properties would alter the character of a residential neighborhood. Allowing a number of residences to essentially become commercial properties undermines the integrity of residential neighborhoods with longtime residents, District 9 Councilman John Courage said.

When people buy residential homes in residential areas, they should have residential property rights, not commercial property rights, Courage said.

But blighted areas of the city could benefit from reinvestment from property owners buying up dilapidated properties and renovating them for use as short-term rentals, District 5 Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales said, noting there are several vacant properties on the West Side.

I would welcome any kind of investment that meant that we could bring our homes up to code, that we could encourage people to stay long-term, short-term, improve the tax base for our neighborhoods, Gonzales said.

Parts of the East Side including the Dignowity Hill neighborhood near downtown San Antonio already host several short-term rental operators who rehabbed vacant lots or distressed homes, District 2 Councilman William Cruz Shaw said.

People came in, purchased them and renovated, Shaw said. Now they look great.

Former District 10 City Councilman Mike Gallagher initiated the process leading to the current proposed ordinance last year over concerns over whether properties are safe for visitors, whether short-term rental companies and proprietors should pay hotel occupancy taxes and whether renters were taking up too much parking and infringing on the privacy of permanent residents.

But the city found no evidence that short-term rental properties had code violations or police incidents at a higher rate than other properties, Shannon told council members during the Wednesday meeting. Pelaez said existing city codes against noise restrictions and parking violations sufficiently cover any safety concerns raised by neighbors.

Council members were conscious of possible legal repercussions should the city adopt any ordinance regulating the short-term rental industry. The right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation sued the city of Austin after officials there enacted an ordinance restricting short-term rentals by landlords who dont live in the residnece listed for rental. The lawsuit drew the attention of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who asked in 2016 to intervene in the lawsuit.

The Texas Legislature could also undo any action taken by the council to regulate short-term rental properties. Two bills filed in the state House and Senate last year aimed to limit how Texas cities regulate short-term rentals and prevent them from banning the practice outright, but neither made it to Gov. Greg Abbotts desk. Jeff Coyle, the citys director of government and public affairs, said he expects state lawmakers to take up the issue again during the 2019 legislative session.

Joshua Fechter is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreportsU.S. farmers and ranchers are welcoming news U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has authority to draw from at least two funding pools to make up for losses due to tariffs from China.

But the plan is already hotly contested. Producers groups said what they really want is protection from 25 percent tariffs China plans to slap on several commodities  including soybeans, sorghum, cotton and beef.

Producers of pork, one of the products on which China has already slapped with tariffs, are already feeling some pain.

Hog futures have dropped about $9 since the Chinese announcement, inflicting severe harm on hog producers, said Jim Monroe, senior director of communications for the National Pork Producers Council. China was the third largest value market, with more than $1 billion in U.S. pork being shipped there last year. Were pleased that the Trump trade team is talking with its Chinese counterparts and were hopeful that the 25 percent tariffs on U.S. pork will be short lived.

Perdue has two main pots for short-term relief. One is Section 32 authority to draw from an accrual of receipts from tariffs, import duties and entry fees for foreign visitors that can be used to restore producers purchasing power. The other is the Commodity Credit Corporation, a government-owned entity incorporated in 1933 to help stabilize farm income and prices.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Steve Censky, formerly a longtime CEO of the American Soybean Association, on Monday emphasized President Donald Trumps support of farmers and ranchers, who Trump said were getting hit as Chinas way of punishing him for tariffs on imported aluminum and steel. Trump that same day said farmers are great patriots who understand that theyre doing this for the country.

We know these actions have created a lot of anxiety and thats why I think you have a White House, the president directly relayed to Secretary Perdue to please assure farmers and ranchers that I have their backs, Im going to protect them, Censky said. Farmers and ranchers can be on the tip of the spear when it comes to retaliation and we want to make sure that they are not harmed in the process.

Censky said the U.S. Department of Agriculture was looking at all our authorities, to include the CCC.

We have some pretty broad authorities there, Censky said. Were in a process of vigilantly looking at that right now, working hard to make sure that were ready so something can be announced whenever we think its appropriate.

Turn to Thursdays Business section or click here on ExpressNews.com to read the full article.

Lynn Brezosky is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | lbrezosky@express-news.net | @lbrezoskyA 9-year-old died and three others were injured after a Tuesday night a hit-and-run crash in Oakland, authorities said.

The incident occurred just after 9 p.m. when a Toyota Corolla attempted to make a U-turn near the intersection of 35th and Paxton avenues, said Officer Johnna Watson, a spokeswoman with the Oakland Police Department.

An Infinity SUV reportedly rammed into the car and both vehicles crashed into nearby parked cars. After the collisions, the occupants of the Infinity SUV fled the crash on foot in an unknown direction, police said.

A 9-year-old girl in the Corolla died after being listed in critical and unstable condition, police said, while the driver, a 25-year-old woman, was transported to the hospital in critical but stable condition. Two other children in the car, 8- and 10-year-old girls, were transported to the hospital in stable condition.

The victims identities are being withheld pending notification of family members.

It appears that speed was a factor in the collision, Watson said, but its not clear if drugs and alcohol were a factor.

The Oakland Police Department and Crime Stoppers of Oakland are offering up to a $15,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

The Oakland Police Department Traffic Investigation Unit can be reached at (510) 777-8648, and Crime Stoppers can be reached at (510) 777-8572.

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavaniShe lit a veladora

In her bedroom cada dia

No fragrance emanated

Its flicker very low.

Two years ago God called her

But a votive still burns there.

A tradition he continues

De carino a su mama.

Esther Cantu is a native San Antonian. Retired, she attends a writing class weekly with people her age and concentrates on memoir and poetry.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we invited submissions of poems about objects, things in our everyday lives. For more information, visit npmsa.com.

Jim LaVilla-Havelin is the Express-News poetry editor. West, his fifth collection of poems, was published in 2017 by Wings Press. Send poems to Poetry, Express-News Book Editor, P.O. Box 2171, San Antonio, TX 78297-2171 (40-line limit).Snapshot: Martys Cocktails is a bit of an ironic name, sort of like how you might call a 6-foot-7, 350-pound dude Tiny. Beer, whiskey and simple concoctions like a Jack and Coke or Red Bull Blaster are the preferred drinks at Martys, which doesnt feature any sort of official cocktail menu. Still, if you have an idea for something or are hell-bent on an Old Fashioned, the staff is fully capable of making one up. Erin Palmer Guidas has been a fixture behind this working-class bar for so long, she decided she may as well own the place. She took over about a year ago, and outside of some fresh paint and other minor cosmetic changes, its business as usual for a bar thats been in operation since 1984.

Who goes there: Lots of regular customers with their first names patched onto their work shirts hit Martys for happy hour after a hard day of work. Martys draws heavy traffic from the sea of auto dealerships and service centers located nearby on San Pedro Avenue, along with many other area businesses. Plenty of bar crawlers fill the seats, too, as customers from the nearby S.A. Country Saloon and Crazy Ape flock back and forth to Martys.Buy or sell a house in San Antonio, get a year's worth of free tacos.

That's the deal available to clients of Dillingham & Toone Real Estate if they work with Jeffrey P. Dillingham or one of his 17 realtors.

The San Antonio broker told mySA.com the idea was inspired by his love for tacos combined with his grandfather, Jimmy Toone's, legacy.

"I love tacos. Taco Palenque is on of my favorite places," he said. "I want to continue my grandfather's legacy of kindness. It's the little things that gives joy to people. We want give customers a great experience and joy and nothing says 'joy' like tacos."

Dillingham says the trade off is "as simple as it sounds."

RELATED: Bill Miller Bar-B-Q chorizo tacos are back

Clients will receive a $500 Taco Palenque gift card, which should pay for one taco a day for a year, if they buy or sell a home with Dillingham & Toone.

If they're selling a house with the firm, there are a few conditions: the home must be listed for at least 6 months, the client must agree to three marketable price changes and must approve all of the showings.

"Those would be things you do anyway in trying to sell a home," Dillingham said.

Dillingham said he plans on offering the taco deal throughout the year.

"My hope is that it works out and we always do this, forever," he said.

Check out the gallery above for a tour of some of the homes you can be eating free tacos in.

Madalyn Mendoza is a digital reporter for mySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| mmendoza@mysa.com | Twitter: @MaddySkyeNiskayuna

Standing in front of a room jammed with supporters and skeptics, Michael Lozman said he always knew his plan would be contentious.

"Controversy and memorials go hand in hand," Lozman added, leaning toward the TV news microphones that crowded his podium during Tuesday night's public hearing.

Lozman, an orthodontist from Menands, is right about that. Name a memorial of any emotional heft  the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington is an example  and you can guarantee a segment of the public was fiercely against it. Opposition is to be expected.

Usually, the big fight is over aesthetics. Maya Lin's stark design for the Vietnam Memorial was derided as a disrespectful gash when unveiled in 1981. Today, the design is revered as a cherished memorial to a painful war.

Lozman's plan for a Capital District Jewish Holocaust Memorial plan faces resistance on two fronts. Some dislike the unsubtle design of the $1.4 million memorial. Others think the location, Troy-Schenectady Road in Niskayuna, is all wrong.

For sure, the location is atypical. We're used to seeing memorials and monuments clustered in the downtowns of cities. Stroll around the Capitol in Albany and you can hardly avoid tripping over some memorial or another. You become immune to them.

Out in suburbia, along its busy four-lane highway, the Niskayuna memorial would stand alone. It would gain significance by being unexpected, like a noise in the night that jolts you awake.

More Information Contact columnist Chris Churchill at 518-454-5442 or email cchurchill@timesunion.com See More Collapse

The placement next to the Most Holy Redeemer Cemetery has a compelling backstory. The land was donated by Edward Scharfenberger, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, grandchild of a Russian Jew who fled persecution. By Lozman's telling, Sharfenberger saw God's hand in his ability to help such a meaningful project.

Neighbors aren't so sure. They believe the Holocaust memorial  any memorial  is inappropriate for the area. Though no homes abut the site, they say it would be a threat to residential character.

Some opponents have less prosaic concerns. They don't want a daily reminder of an event so horrific. Though the memorial would eventually be shielded from passing traffic by trees, they fear being triggered by a memorial that might be upsetting.

It's an argument for this hypersensitive age of "safe spaces." The reality, though, is that the world is an upsetting place, when we look at it honestly, and few moments in its history are as disturbingly horrific as the Holocaust that killed six million Jews.

The memorial should upset us. What would be far worse is allowing ourselves to forget. More than a few speakers Tuesday mentioned that hate seems to be on the rise.

"It is important to educate people about what happened so it doesn't happen again," said Marian Rosenbloom, 88, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto but not, he said, before witnessing Nazi solders using children for target practice.

The memorial, as proposed, would include railroad tracks positioned in the shape of the Star of David, a box car similar to those that carried Jews to concentration camps and a wall intended to represent a gas chamber.

Lozman said the intent is not to shock, but he insists that the memorial must deal honestly with Nazi monstrosity. It can't sugarcoat the horror.

In response to criticism, Lozman has already toned down the design  scrapping planned barbed wire, for example  but critics still find it overly literal. Mishka Luft, whose parents survived the Holocaust, on Tuesday said a considerate memorial would not reproduce the tools used by the oppressor.

The point is thoughtful, but the standard isn't followed by every memorial.

Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Ala., powerfully depicts the dogs and water hoses that suppressed marchers for civil rights. The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston includes haunting towers that recall gas-chamber smokestacks. Holocaust memorials in other places also include box cars and railroad tracks.

Beauty and design are matters of taste, but a design that bothers nobody is probably bland and forgettable. It's worth remembering the hostility that confronted Lin's Vietnam memorial decades ago. Time has proven those critics wrong.

For now, though, the design debate seems secondary. Those details can be finalized after the Niskayuna Town Board grants the special use permit needed for the memorial to proceed.

As noted Tuesday by Neil Golub, chairman of Price Chopper supermarkets and a significant voice in the region's Jewish community, Lozman erred by failing to reach out for community input before launching a plan that took many by surprise. But he's doing so now, and his initial mistake shouldn't keep the region from embracing so important a project.

"It will be a place where people come to meditate," Lozman said. "It will be a place where people come to pray."

We need as many places like that as we can get, in suburbia or anywhere else.

cchurchill@timesunion.com  518-454-5442  @chris_churchillThe bears are back.

With the warmer weather black bears are leaving their winter dens and becoming more active, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection says.

Residents of towns in western Connecticut should expect a regular presence of black bears as they are now well established in that part of the state.

Last year, there were about 6,500 black bear sightings from 131 out of 169 Connecticut towns were reported to the DEEP Wildlife Division.

Between April 13, 2017 and Oct. 18, there were 228 bear sightings in New Milford and 80 in Danbury.

Some of the bears will be with their cubs. The cubs are born in the bear dens during January or February.

Cubs are weaned when they are about seven months old and will remain with the female until the second summer of their lives, DEEP says on its bear page. Then, the young bears, especially the males, may travel great distances in search of their own territories. Yearling females frequently settle near their mothers home range. Young bears are often forced into less preferred habitat.

The rapid increase in the bear population between the 1980s and early 2000s is expected to continue.

As the bear population expands, interactions between humans and bears will increase.

People should learn what to do if they see a bear and how to avoid unnecessary conflicts by keeping food away from bears.

More for you DEEP: Seasonal jobs available

Tips for living with black bears

To live peacefully with bears, DEEP suggests:

Wait until the morning of collection before bringing out trash. Add a few capfuls of ammonia to trash bags and garbage cans to mask food odors. Keep trash bags in a container with a tight lid and store in a garage or shed.

Do not leave pet food outside overnight. Store livestock food in airtight containers.

Do not put meats or sweet-smelling fruit rinds in compost piles. Lime can be sprinkled on the compost pile to reduce the smell and discourage bears.

Thoroughly clean grills after use or store in a garage or shed.

Never intentionally feed bears. Bears that associate food with people may become aggressive and dangerous. This may lead to personal injury, property damage, and the need to destroy problem animals.

If you see a bear on your property you can either leave the bear alone and wait for it to leave or make loud noises from a safe distance to attempt to scare the bear away.

If you see a bear when hiking or camping, make your presence known by making noise and waving your arms.

If you surprise a bear at close range, walk away slowly while facing the bear. Do not run. Try to stay calm as you make your retreat.

Black bears will sometimes "bluff charge" to within a few feet of you when they feel threatened. If this happens, stand your ground and shout at the bear. Do not climb a tree because black bears are excellent tree climbers.

Make sure your dog is on a leash and under control.GREENWICH  Jennifer Willoughby, ex-wife of former White House staff secretary Rob Porter, who resigned after allegations he abused both of his ex-wives, will be the guest speaker at a May 10 luncheon at the Belle Haven Club.

The event is a fundraiser for YWCA Greenwichs domestic abuse services, which the non-profit agency provides to the community free of charge.

She is an inspiration to thousands of women who suffer in silence at the hands of their abusers, said, Meredith Gold, director of Domestic Abuse Services for YWCA Greenwich.

It is important to put a human face on the issue of domestic violence, said Mary Lee Kiernan, president and CEO of YWCA Greenwich.

Its very easy to cite statistics and trends but when you hear directly from a person it becomes more real, Kiernan said. This is an issue we need support around in order to be able to create change.

Willoughby went public with her accusations against Porter, appearing on TV and writing an op-ed for the Washington Post. In an essay published on her own website in 2017 called Why I Stayed, Willoughby described both physical and mental abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, whom she did not identify at the time but later confirmed was Porter.

Porters other wife, Colbie Holderness, has also accused him of physical abuse. According to Kiernan, Willoughby is expected to discuss her experiences during her remarks at the luncheon as well as the trauma that a victim experiences and the challenges she had to overcome in order to get out of a violent relationship.

Willoughby has said Porter was hired for the position in the Trump administration after she revealed the alleged abuse during the background check process.

YWCA Greenwich is the only provider of 24/7 domestic abuse services in town. Proceeds from the luncheon will exclusively benefit domestic violence victims and their children from the Greenwich community. Kiernan called the vital work in domestic abuse services an important component to our mission to empower women.

Domestic violence is the second most frequently reported crime in town, after larceny. The YWCA hotline receives thousands of calls a year to its 24/7 hotline (203-622-0003). The Y also provides crisis intervention, safety planning, group and individual counseling for adults and children, emergency shelter, and civil and criminal court advocacy.

In the spring, YWCA Greenwich will launch a civil legal clinic, which will provide free legal services to domestic violence victims being served by the YWCA who dont have the assets, or access to their own finances, to pay for legal representation.

Kiernan said the luncheon  dubbed The Old Bags Luncheon  is YWCA Greenwichs biggest fundraiser of the year.

Tickets can be purchased at www.ywcagreenwich.org/bags.

It will feature silent and a live auctions for new and gently used designer handbags includes bags by Hermes, Dior, Saint Laurent, LAUTREC and Chanel. Participating retailers this year include Neiman Marcus, Richards of Greenwich, Hobbs of London, Theory and Dior at Americana Manhasset.

Scott Mitchell, owner of Richards of Greenwich, will serve as auctioneer for the live auction.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.comMIDDLETOWN  The states beleaguered facility for incarcerated male youth under the charge of the Department of Children and Families closed its doors Thursday.

Two years ago, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy ordered Connecticut Juvenile Training School, the secure facility for delinquent boys 12 to 20, be shuttered by July 1.

The number of youths housed at CJTS has dropped precipitously due to a declining rate of juvenile and young adult arrests, record low crime rate, the impact of the governors criminal justice reforms, and the enhanced behavioral health services made available by DCF to all of Connecticuts youth, according to a news release from the governors office.

The facility stopped taking new admissions Jan. 1, and the last youth left the facility Thursday.

CJTS originally opened in 2001 under Gov. John G. Rowland. It cost $57 million to build and millions more in annual costs to operate, the release said.

In Connecticut, were leading the nation in rethinking our approach to criminal justice, especially when it comes to the treatment of our young people, Malloy said in a prepared statement.

The Connecticut Juvenile Training School was an ill-advised and costly relic of the Rowland era. It placed young boys in a prison-like facility, making rehabilitation, healing and growth more challenging, he said.

The fact remains that this isnt a celebratory moment, but a time to reflect on the past mistakes made when it comes to juvenile justice, and an opportunity to create a system that better serves our young people and society as a whole.

It is an important and good day for the children, families and communities of Connecticut, the Bridgeport-based Connecticut Juvenile Justice Alliance said in a press release. We are grateful for all the hard work everyone has done to make this a reality.

The closure of the Connecticut Juvenile Training School marks a beginning, not an end. As a community, Connecticut needs to invest the time, money and resources into ensuring a full array of services is built to guarantee the best outcomes for youth, families and public safety. This continuum of care needs to be co-created in partnership with the young people, families, and communities of Connecticut that have been benefactors of the juvenile justice system, it continued.

I am grateful for the work of the teachers and other staff who dedicated so many years to the challenging task of juvenile justice, state Rep. Matt Lesser, D-100th, said in a release. However, models for juvenile justice have changed. We need to adopt evidence-based approaches to reduce crime and promote a just and restorative society.

As a Middletown lawmaker, I am looking forward to working with the Juvenile Justice Policy Oversight Committee and state and city stakeholders to come up with new uses for the CJTS site.

CJTS is located on 32 acres of land in Middletown. The facility is secure and has a campus-style design with six buildings surrounding a central courtyard. It was originally built with the capacity to house more than 200 youths, according to the state.

As part of the budget deal reached in October 2017, lawmakers voted to transfer care of youths whom the courts previously committed to DCF over to the judicial branch by July 1.

We thank the staff of CJTS who were devoted to rehabilitating these young people and to improving their lifelong outcomes, Malloy continued. But the fact is, they didnt need a prison-like facility that housed over 200 youths to accomplish this important work. As a state, we must endeavor to provide a more suitable setting for this critical work.

The staff at the facility have worked tremendously hard to serve this population of youth, have demonstrated great commitment and compassion, and have proven themselves to be dedicated public servants, DCF Commissioner Joette Katz said in the release. We wish them all the best in their new endeavors, and I thank them for being so instrumental in reforming the Connecticut juvenile justice system.

The way Governor Malloy and Connecticut policy makers have methodically reformed their juvenile justice system to the point where they are now closing their states last youth prison is nothing short of a national model, Vincent Schiraldi, co-director of the Columbia University Justice Lab and former New York City Probation Commissioner, said in the statement.

The fact that Connecticuts juvenile arrest rate has plummeted alongside its decline in youth imprisonment means that state policy makers have figured out a way to make Connecticut residents safer while incarcerating fewer of their sons and daughters, something policy makers in other states should pay attention to, Schiraldi continued.

During the last 10 years, the number of youth entering the criminal justice system has plummeted in the state, according to the governors office. Between 2009 and 2016  the most recent year for which data is available  arrests involving people under 18 dropped by 56 percent.

Additionally, between 2009 and 2017, the number of inmates under 18 incarcerated by the Connecticut Department of Correction dropped by almost 85 percent.1 Congressman convicted: A federal jury in Houston convicted a former Texas congressman on fraud and conspiracy charges Thursday for misusing charitable donations to pay for personal and political expenses. Steve Stockman, a Republican, was accused of conspiring with two staffers to bilk conservative foundations out of at least $775,000 meant for charitable purposes and voter education. A campaign worker and an aide had previously pleaded guilty to various charges. Following his arrest in March 2017, Stockman said a deep state shadow government was targeting him.

2 NSC purge: Another top National Security Council staffer is leaving the White House as new National Security Adviser John Bolton makes his mark. Deputy national security adviser Ricky Waddell will be exiting the administration, said two administration officials who were not authorized to speak publicly. Waddells departure was widely expected as Bolton works to build his own team. A number of high-level staffers have chosen to leave or have been pushed out since Boltons appointment. Waddells exit follows Nadia Schadlow, deputy national security adviser for strategy, as well as NSC spokesman Michael Anton and Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert.Not usually open on Sundays, George Ranch Historical Park is making an exception this month when it welcomes families with children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)and other sensory and developmental challenges on April 15.

The Sensory-Friendly Day is intended to be the first of what will become an annual event at the park, 10215 FM 762 Road in Richmond.

The full-day event will begin at 9 a.m. and will include quiet corners at each of the four main historic sites. Sensory-friendly kits for visitors include weighted lap pads, lavender lotion, stress balls and fidget spinners, crayons, coloring books and picture books. Noise-canceling headphones and colored glasses can be checked out at the Visitors Center.

Krystal Willeby, director of programs, George Ranch Historical Park, said work on the Sensory-Friendly Day began more than a year ago. The park applied for and received a $3,750 grant from nonprofit Fort Bend Cares that enabled it to cover the costs of the kits, staff training, signs and a print map for a sensory friendly audience which features locations and advice on how to navigate the park.

"We wanted it as an exclusive event just for those families dealing with autism disorders," said Jennifer Farrell, director of marketing for the Fort Bend History Association, the parent company of the George Ranch.

"It's a very special event for the families to come and enjoy the park in a very calm and prepared manner."

"The public response has been really positive," said Willeby. "The volunteers are excited by the positive response."

Willeby said the park worked with Margo Pasko, director of transition programs, The Arc of Fort Bend County, who helped create social stories for the visitors.

Pasko said a social story tells the reader what to do one step at a time, what to expect, affirmations that it will be OK and a personal statement for that individual.

Her example focuses on campfire cooking and how some people like to watch the demonstration and some do not. It's OK not to like it. If people decide they don't like to watch it, it's OK to ask the group leader where they can stand to feel safe.

Pasko, whose group is marking its 50th anniversary in Fort Bend, trained historical re-enactors to reach all students, including those with intellectual and developmental delays, who visit the park through school programs.

She said both the incidence and community awareness of ASD are increasing.

The park also worked with mothers who have autistic children and gave advice as staff prepared for the special day.

"Having talked with people with autistic children, it's so important to have a place where they feel comfortable and normal," Willeby said. "We're giving the tools for them to have a good and enjoyable time."

The April date was picked because April is Autism Awareness Month.

Carl Foy, director of development, Hope for Three, said he thinks autism awareness throughout the community has increased. "People are becoming more open to differences between different types of people."

Founded in 2011, Hope for Three is a nonprofit autism advocacy group.

Darla Farmer, the group's executive director/founder, said autism affects 1 in 68 children and 1 in 45 school-age children. As Hope for Three and other nonprofits share responsibility for raising awareness of autism, the community has responded by offering more inclusive opportunities for families, she said.

Visit https://www.georgeranch.org/event/sensory-friendly-day/ to preregister at a discount for Sensory-Friendly Day at George Ranch Historical Park.

It's part of a larger effort underway at the park.

The goal the past year has been to work on becoming more inclusive and to look at what that means, said Willeby. Other efforts include the launch in February, Black History Month, of a program about the legacy of African-American cowboys at the George Ranch. The park focused on the contributions of those cowboys who worked for the Jones-Ryon-Davis-George families at the 1930's George cattle complex.

Caitlen Hill, site lead at the 1890's Davis Victorian Complex, is working with Lee College to create a sign language video, continued Willeby. "Looking at it in a wholistic way, different audiences are part of our story," she said, "We need to better tell our story."

Email info@georgeranch.org or call 281-343-0218 for information.WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote April 26 on a bipartisan bill to prevent the undue firing of special counsels such as Robert Mueller III, as lawmakers warn the president against taking steps to stymie Mueller's ongoing probe of alleged ties between Trump affiliates and the Russian government.

Panel Chairman Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, asked committee ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein, Calif., to endorse plans to swiftly schedule the bill for committee consideration mere hours after Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., Christopher Coons, D-Del., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., announced that they had completed work on a long-awaited compromise between two bills to protect the special counsel. The unified legislation would delay any order to fire a special counsel by 10 days, giving that counsel a window to appeal the decision to a panel of three federal judges. The bill further stipulates that during the 10-day period, no documents or materials related to the counsel's investigation could be destroyed or staffing changes made.

The release of the bill and the fresh momentum behind it are a watershed for lawmakers who struggled to agree upon a middle ground between two separate special counsel protection bills they filed last summer in the wake of President Donald Trump hinting that he might replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Trump reignited similar fears this week when he excoriated the FBI over its recent raid on the offices and home of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, noting that "many people" were advising him to fire Mueller. The comments inspired a strong backlash - including from Grassley, who said on the Fox Business Network that it would be "suicide for the president to want to talk about firing Mueller."

But Republicans backing the special counsel protection bill insist that their efforts are not inspired by the president's latest tirade.

"I want to separate me continuing to have the dialogue and get to a bill from, like, 'It's got to be passed by midnight tomorrow, or all is lost.' I don't buy that," Tillis said in an interview Tuesday. In a statement Wednesday, he stressed that the bill was not just about Mueller, but would help "ensure that special counsels - present or future - have the independence they need to conduct fair and impartial investigations."

Grassley had refused to schedule a committee vote for either special counsel bill until the two measures - both filed last summer - were fused into one piece of legislation.

That happened months ago, according to a congressional aide familiar with the negotiations, but Republican senators hesitated to endorse it, stating publicly that they thought the urgency behind the effort had dissipated, and arguing that Trump was showing no signs that he planned to orchestrate Mueller's firing.

In the past several weeks, Grassley had been urging negotiators to move faster toward striking a final agreement on compromise legislation, according to other aides. He is also planning to offer an amendment to the bill requiring the president to give Congress advance notice of his intention and report the reasons for firing a special counsel, much like the requirements for firing an inspector general.

Feinstein balked on Wednesday at endorsing Grassley's plans without seeing that amendment - pushing Grassley's initial plans to work on the draft during an April 19 committee meeting back to April 26. "I'm worried about an amendment we haven't been able to review that could undermine the investigation," Feinstein said in a statement. But aides familiar with Grassley's plans stressed that the amendment would be an addition to, not a substitute for, the procedures outlined in the compromise bill and are designed to give Congress a fallback political opportunity to take steps - including and up to impeachment - to protect a special counsel if the courts strike down parts of the bill, presuming it becomes law.

Grassley is one of several Republicans who raised constitutional concerns with the original special counsel bills, because they subjected the president's authority to hire and fire an executive employee to review by a different branch of government. Authors of the proposal have pointed to case law to push back on that criticism - including a January decision from the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals that declared that a 1988 Supreme Court ruling about the constitutionality of an independent counsel statute was still good law.

Grassley's chances of voting for the bill are probably higher if his amendment is included in the measure. Democrats already feel confident that there are enough votes to get the special counsel bill through the Judiciary Committee, with Tillis and Graham's sponsorship, and they hope more Republicans come on board.

"It's important to emphasize that the Department of Justice has regulations today that prevent the president" from firing a special counsel, Coons said. "This isn't creating out of new cloth some new protections."

Each of the two original bills the co-authors filed last year envisioned a process by which an order to fire a special counsel would have to pass muster with a panel of three federal judges to actually result in that counsel's termination. But they differed in one key respect: Graham's and Booker's measure stipulated that the panel of judges would weigh in before the special counsel could be terminated, while Tillis's and Coons's created a 14-day window in which an ousted counsel could seek expedited judicial review of the decision.

The compromise, should it get through the Judiciary Committee, would still need the acquiescence of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to come up for the floor votes needed to pass Congress - a process that could take some time. Top Democrats, who huddled in Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer's, D-N.Y., office for a half-hour Tuesday to talk about Mueller, repeatedly warned the president against terminating the special counsel - especially after White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that Trump "certainly believes he has the power" to fire Mueller.

Officially, Mueller would have to be fired by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein - whose role in overseeing the probe and various other matters has not escaped the president's notice.

On Tuesday, Schumer also warned the president that "any attempt to remove Rod J. Rosenstein will create the exact same constitutional crisis as if you fired Special Counsel Mueller."

"Don't do it, do not go down this path," Schumer added. "For the sake of our country, we plead with you. Don't put this country through a constitutional crisis."

- - -

The Washington Post's Seung Min Kim and Sean Sullivan contributed to this report.SPRINGFIELD  Legislation to set aside May 17 of each year to raise awareness of a rare and incurable form of childhood brain cancer was approved Wednesday by the Illinois Senate.

The measure, sponsored by state Sen. Andy Manar (D-Bunker Hill), was prompted by the advocacy efforts of Bunker Hill mother Kim Skief, whose 11-year-old daughter, Grace, died from Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, or DIPG, in 2015.

The Senate approved the measure, Senate Bill 2254, 56-0. It was sent to the House for consideration.

Graces story is a simple reminder that medical cures and care, sadly, are not guaranteed to all of us. Thats why Im working with her mother to help raise awareness about this childhood cancer, Manar said. Although DIPG is rare, when it strikes it is painful, and unfortunately it is quick.

DIPG is an aggressive form of cancer that targets children almost exclusively  about 300 each year in the United States. It affects the part of the brain that controls the heartbeat, breathing, swallowing, sight and eye movement, and balance. It is in operable, and the survival rate is less than 1 percent.

Grace Skief was a fifth-grader when she was diagnosed with DIPG in April 2015. She died three months later, on July 31, 2015.

Twenty other states have set aside May 17 to raise awareness of this heart-breaking childhood cancer and the lack of a cure for it.

Present in the Senate gallery during Wednesdays vote were Kim Skief and her son, James, both of Bunker Hill; and Graces grandmother, Carol Robbins of Alton. Manar thanked them for their advocacy and their courage.

Any number of things could happen after tragedy strikes a family, as we often see when families visit us in the Senate, he said. At the lowest point the Skief family somehow mustered the strength and courage to move on and make something positive out of what undoubtedly is the most difficult situation anybody could go through.

For more information about DIPG, visit http://www.defeatdipg.org and http://www.cancer.gov."Forty percent of Americans under age 35 tell pollsters they think the First Amendment is dangerous because you might use your freedom to say something that hurts somebody else's feelings."

- Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., at a Senate hearing with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, April 10, 2018

---

During a five-hour hearing with Zuckerberg, some Republican senators said they were worried Facebook might feel pressure to censor conservatives.

Sasse illustrated the point with an eye-popping statistic: 40 percent of young Americans believe the First Amendment is dangerous, he said, because somebody's feelings might get hurt by free speech.

"We see this happening on college campuses all across the country. It's dangerous," he said. "Can you imagine a world where you might decide that pro-lifers are prohibited from speaking about their abortion views on your content - on your platform?"

"I certainly would not want that to be the case," Zuckerberg responded.

The exchange got us thinking. What ever happened to grit and toughness? Does 40 percent of America's youth really think the First Amendment is dangerous because it protects offensive speech? We dug into several polls to see how Sasse's claim held up, with help from Washington Post polling director Scott Clement and polling analyst Emily Guskin.

The Facts

Sasse's claim is based on a Pew Research Center poll from 2015, according to his spokesman.

The survey found that 40 percent of American millennials, or people from ages 18 to 34 at the time, said "the government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive statements about minority groups" in some circumstances. A millennial majority, 58 percent, said people should be free to offend minorities in public.

Older generations of Americans were much less inclined to have the government censor speech that offends minorities, Pew found. When combining all age groups, 28 percent of Americans said the government should ban this type of speech, while 67 percent said people should be able to offend minorities in public. "Two-thirds of Americans say this, compared with a median of 35 percent among the 38 nations we polled," wrote Jacob Poushter, a senior researcher at Pew.

The bottom line is that there's a gulf between what Sasse described and what the Pew poll actually shows.

As any pollster will tell you, the specific wording of survey questions can greatly influence the results. So in crafting poll questions and in describing the answers people gave, precision is key.

According to Sasse, 40 percent of Americans under age 35 said the First Amendment was "dangerous." But Pew didn't even mention the First Amendment or the word "dangerous." Had it mentioned either, the poll results might have turned out differently.

Instead, Pew asked about "statements that are offensive to minority groups" and the specific question was, "Do you think people should be able to say these types of things publicly OR the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things in some circumstances."

"The 'in some circumstances' phrase really softens it," said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. "We have limits on First Amendment rights 'in some circumstances' for quite a few situations. So it's hard to see how this is a danger."

Another point: Sasse says the risk at hand is that people in general might experience hurt feelings because of what they hear. But the Pew poll asked about statements that offend minority groups. (Murray said he wouldn't be too bothered by this flub.)

Each senator was allotted five minutes or so to question Zuckerberg. A spokesman for Sasse, James Wegmann, said the senator was trying to convey his point quickly.

"I think that the obvious implication of the poll is that 40 percent of Americans under the age of 35 say that the First Amendment right to say offensive things is dangerous enough to curtail it," Wegmann said. "The senator's point was to quickly cut to the chase that (a) some folks talk a lot about the psychological categories around speech, (b) this is messy (as free speech issues often are and as admitted by Zuckerberg when he said it was hard to define 'hate speech'), and (c) this isn't a conversation that's just happening in Facebook but in a broader cultural context."

But poll results are sensitive to the specific way questions are phrased - and a lot was lost in translation because Sasse "quickly cut to the chase."

Here's a good example of what we mean: Gallup asked a similar question about free speech in a 2016 survey for the Knight Foundation and Newseum Institute, but its question was more verbose and less pointed than Pew's.

"If you had to choose, do you think it is more important for colleges to [ROTATED: create a positive learning environment for all students by prohibiting certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people, (or to) create an open learning environment where students are exposed to all types of speech and viewpoints, even if it means allowing speech that is offensive or biased against certain groups of people]?" Gallup asked.

When the question was asked this way, 22 percent of college students supported the idea of "prohibiting certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people."

That's a far cry from the 40 percent of millennials in the Pew poll who essentially said the same thing. But it's important to note that Pew asked about the government banning speech; Gallup asked whether colleges should.

Interestingly, the age gap in the Gallup poll was opposite the Pew survey, with students 12 points more supportive of a learning environment that allowed offensive or biased speech than U.S. adults overall (78 percent vs. 66 percent).

Sasse spoke about "40 percent of Americans under age 35," but note that the Pew poll was limited to adults under 35. Moreover, some pollsters have found that the idea of banning offensive speech appeals just as widely to the general population.

"Most Americans (59%) say people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions in public, even those that are deeply offensive to other people," a 2017 survey by the Cato Institute found. "A substantial minority (40%), however, say government should prevent people from engaging in hate speech against certain groups in public."

Wegmann said "no argument here that a whole lot of Americans outside the under-35 group also have a bad understanding of the First Amendment" and added that Sasse has "often said that we haven't done civics well in this country for decades."

Sasse does have a point about young Americans and free speech - broadly speaking. Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University and the author of "The Dumbest Generation," said more than half of 12th-graders fail to get passing grades in U.S. history, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress, and in 2010, only 24 percent reached proficiency in civics.

Less than half of college students (46 percent) recognized that the First Amendment protected hate speech, according to a 2017 poll commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and conducted by YouGov. More than one-third of students (35 percent) said hate speech should be protected by the First Amendment.

But this debate about the bounds of free speech also seems to be influenced by political ideology. Many colleges are seen as liberal havens, so Republicans may feel they have more at stake in this debate. Looked at another way, Democrats may feel they have more at stake since they tend to get the greatest share of the minority vote. In the polls we reviewed, the percentage of Democrats favoring bans on hate speech or statements that offend minority groups was larger than the percentage of Republicans or independents.

The Pinocchio Test

Sasse mangled the findings of a Pew poll, but his larger argument - that many American youths and college students are leery of free speech - seems to be on target.

To what extent is difficult to say. The three polls of young Americans that we looked at (from Pew in 2015, Gallup in 2016 and YouGov in 2017) all worded their questions differently and found varying levels of support for the idea of censoring hate speech or statements that offend minorities. At the low end, Gallup found 22 percent support among college students. At the high end, Pew landed on 40 percent among 18- to 34-year-olds.

Asked about the differences between Pew's narrow question and Sasse's liberal reinterpretation, a spokesman said the senator was trying to make his point quickly. But sort-of hitting the target doesn't work when describing polls, which are intricate by nature. No one asked the Pew poll respondents about the First Amendment. No one asked whether it was dangerous. And no one should buy Sasse's 40 percent statistic about the "dangerous" First Amendment, for which we award Two Pinocchios.

Two PinocchiosWASHINGTON - Current and former executives with the pharmaceutical distributors that are accused of flooding communities with powerful prescription painkillers have been summoned to testify before Congress about their role in the U.S. opioid epidemic.

The hearing, scheduled for May 8 before a House Energy and Commerce Committee oversight panel, has the potential to be a defining moment for the pharmaceutical industry, much like when tobacco executives were called to testify before Congress in 1994. The pharmaceutical executives are expected to face tough questions under oath about why their companies pumped so many highly addictive pain pills into West Virginia and other states, fueling what has become the deadliest drug crisis in U.S. history.

Since 2000, the epidemic has killed 200,000 people - more than three times the number of U.S. military deaths in the Vietnam War.

"It's time to directly question the leadership of national and regional drug distributors whom we have probed for critical information," Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., said in a statement.

Executives from distributors McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, Miami-Luken and H.D. Smith wholesale drug company are scheduled to testify at the hearing next month.

The Energy and Commerce Committee has spent the past year investigating the sale of pills in West Virginia by wholesale drug distributors, which are required by law to monitor and report suspicious opioid orders to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). If orders and sales are not correctly reported for oversight, countless doses of potent drugs can be diverted to a booming illegal market and ultimately to drug abusers - many of whom became hopelessly addicted to the powerful painkillers.

Committee members aggressively questioned Robert Patterson, the acting head of the DEA, last month, asking how so many pills flowed freely and why, they said, the agency wasn't forthcoming with information about how it handled opioids.

The panel has sent letters to all of the distributors asking for information about steps they took to keep drugs off the black market and to report suspicious orders of pills.

"This investigation is taking a hard look at troubling issues behind the surge in opioid deaths in America," Walden said. "We expect to get answers next month from these officials about the companies they represent."

Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen and McKesson Corp. are the nation's three biggest pharmaceutical distributors, responsible for shipping nearly 85 percent of all prescription drugs in the United States. McKesson is the fifth-largest company in the country, with revenue of more than $192 billion, according to the Fortune 500 list. Cardinal ranked 15th, with $121 billion in revenue.

McKesson said in a statement that it will "cooperate with the committee's request," and AmerisourceBergen said in a statement that it welcomes the opportunity to speak with the committee about the drug supply chain and the role of distributors: "We are committed to collaborating with all stakeholders on ways to combat opioid abuse, and look forward to a productive dialogue."

John Parker, senior vice president of communications for the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, a national organization that represents primary pharmaceutical distributors, said in an email: "As an industry, we recognize the seriousness of the crisis and have advanced a comprehensive set of policy proposals to reduce overprescribing and address addiction as well as efforts to improve prevention and education. Further, distributors have invested substantially in the use of state-of-the-art tools to detect and prevent potential diversion. We will continue to work with policymakers to advance meaningful solutions to effectively address this epidemic."

The panel hearing could provide more of a road map for how the powerful narcotics made their way to individual communities, some of which received massive amounts of drugs per capita. Committee members hope the hearing will shed light on specific data the companies reported to the DEA about how many pills they sent and where the pills went. That information is kept on a confidential DEA database known as the Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System. The database tracks the flow of prescription painkillers from manufacturers to distributors to pharmacies.

The committee and news reports have disclosed some of the data, and it is staggering: Millions of pills were shipped to small communities in West Virginia, which has the nation's highest rate of drug overdose deaths.

In February, the panel revealed in letters sent to the firms that McKesson and Cardinal Health shipped 12.3 million doses of powerful prescription opioids to the Family Discount Pharmacy in Mount Gay-Shamrock, West Virginia, from 2006 to 2014. The town in southern West Virginia had 1,779 residents, according to the 2010 Census.

An analysis by the committee found that Cardinal Health sent the pharmacy more than 6.5 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills between 2008 and 2012. McKesson sent 5.8 million pills from 2006 to 2014. Other distributors also sold painkillers to the pharmacy, bringing the total to nearly 16.6 million by 2016.

In letters sent to the smaller distributors in January, the committee cited data showing that wholesalers shipped nearly 21 million doses of painkillers to two pharmacies just blocks apart from each other in Williamson, West Virginia, a town of 3,191 on the Kentucky border about 30 miles from Mount Gay-Shamrock. The letter said that Miami-Luken sent about half of the pills.

The town received "approximately 1,565 hydrocodone and oxydocone pills for every man, woman and child" from Miami-Luken in 2007 and 2008, according to a letter sent by the panel.

In total, Miami-Luken shipped 20 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone to West Virginia pharmacies from 2007 to 2012. The company was being investigated by the DEA's Detroit office, but a program officer said his entreaties to close down the company were ignored by superiors in Washington.

"We are continuing to cooperate with the committee," said Richard Blake, an attorney representing Miami-Luken.

The DEA data also is being sought as part of a mammoth court case in Cleveland. Hundreds of lawsuits filed by municipalities against opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies have been consolidated in a federal court there.

The judge in the case, Dan Aaron Polster of the Northern District of Ohio, ruled Wednesday that the DEA must turn over transactional business data and suspicious order reports the companies filed for their activity in Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia between Jan. 1, 2006, and Dec. 31, 2014. The DEA must provide the data to Polster by April 20. Alhough lawyers for the defendants and plaintiffs in the case will have access to the data, it will be sealed from public view under a court-imposed protective order.

Lawmakers and lawyers think the data could show a correlation between shipments of opioids and deaths in those communities. The DEA initially fought the release of the data, but Polster rejected the agency's arguments.

"The vast oversupply of opioid drugs in the United States has caused a plague on its citizens and local governments," Polster wrote in his ruling. The request for the data is "a reasonable step toward defeating the disease."

Paul Farrell Jr., a West Virginia lawyer who represents plaintiffs in the case, praised Polster for ordering the release. He said the order could be a "tipping point" in the case, revealing patterns of drug shipments and deaths and how the flood of prescription pain pills fueled a national epidemic.

The information "has the potential to serve as a Rosetta Stone to decipher and understand how prescription opiate abuse evolved into a national epidemic," Farrell said.WASHINGTON - Two years ago, Kevin Chmielewski was a Donald Trump campaign aide who was working tirelessly to ensure that the New York businessman became America's 45th president. He even convinced Trump to hold a rally at his high school alma mater in Berlin, Maryland, where the candidate called him "a star" and demanded that he stand onstage beside him.

"I don't know what they produce at this school, but this guy is a gem," Trump declared, with his aide next to him. "He's tough as hell. Whenever there's a problem he runs right in - like full blast, just runs in - and he is a wild man."

On Thursday, Chmielewski, who served as deputy chief of staff for operations at the Environmental Protection Agency until last month, became the latest Trump ally to wreak havoc within an administration he helped put in office, publicly alleging EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt engaged in spending excesses and questionable ethics decisions.

Five Democrats in the House and Senate detailed his accusations in a six-page letter that chronicled stays in boutique hotels that busted federal spending caps, frequent trips home to Oklahoma that Pruitt charged to taxpayers, and costly flights on Delta Air Lines aimed at maximizing his frequent flier miles.

The letter to Pruitt from congressional Democrats, including Rep. Elijah Cummings, Md., and Sen. Thomas Carper, Del., included many details that had been previously reported by The Washington Post and other outlets. But it also provided a firsthand account of what happened behind closed doors at the EPA, including expenditures on his office that included a $43,000 soundproof phone booth and telling staff to line up events so that he could visit certain places at taxpayer expense.

Chmielewski met Tuesday with Democratic investigators and huddled Thursday with Republicans from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, according to staffers on Capitol Hill.

"The new information provided by Mr. Chmielewski, if accurate, leaves us certain that your leadership at EPA has been fraught with unethical and potentially illegal actions on a wide range of consequential matters that you and some members of your staff directed," the Democratic lawmakers wrote in their letter to Pruitt, which requested a long list of documents from the agency.

EPA officials previously have dismissed Chmielewski as one of a group of "disgruntled" employees who were dismissed or reassigned. Chmielewski has said he was removed from his position and placed on administrative leave after refusing to approve inappropriate expenditures.

"We will respond to Members of Congress through the proper channel," EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said in a statement.

Pruitt has been under fire in recent weeks over several actions, including a discount rental agreement with a lobbyist on Capitol Hill, frequent first-class travel and stays in boutique hotels, and generous pay raises to two trusted aides.

Chmielewski claims that Pruitt often chose travel destinations based on a desire to visit particular cities or countries rather than official business, according to the letter. He said Pruitt also directed staffers to book flights on Delta, even when it was "not the federal government's contract carrier for the route," to accrue frequent-flier miles. Chmielewski also said Pruitt routinely asked his staff to "find reasons" for him to travel to Oklahoma so that he could remain in his home state for long weekends, often at taxpayer expense.

In addition, Chmielewski claimed that Pruitt "frequently stayed in hotels that exceeded the allowable U.S. government per diem" and that while planning trips to Italy and Australia - the latter trip was canceled - the EPA chief refused to stay at hotels recommended by the U.S. Embassy, even though the hotels suggested by embassy officials "had law enforcement and other U.S. resources on site."

A current EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak frankly, said that Pruitt had pushed to stay in a boutique hotel in Australia but not in Italy, as Chmielewski has told investigators.

Pruitt repeatedly opted to stay in Sofitel chain hotels both domestically and overseas, according to multiple aides, even when those costs exceeded the allowed government per diem. Chmielewski also claims that Pruitt's chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, was excluded from scheduling meetings about the EPA leader's travel after raising concerns about his expenditures, according to the letter.

Chmielewski is facing his own ethics issue at the EPA, though hardly on the scale of the problems facing Pruitt. An EPA lawyer confirmed that he has so far failed to file his financial disclosure form, as required by law. If Chmielewski does not file the form in the coming months, he can be fined $200 and potentially referred to the Justice Department for civil or criminal prosecution, the official said.

Separately, congressional Democrats are now probing Pruitt's use of four separate agency email addresses since taking office. Agency lawyers have raised concerns that the EPA has not disclosed all the documents it would normally release to the public under federal records requests, according to an agency staffer. But Wilcox said the FOIA process encompasses each of Pruitt's accounts.

Two Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee - Carper and Jeff Merkley, Ore. - sent a letter obtained by The Post Thursday that asked the EPA's inspector general to probe the matter. The IG's office declined to comment.

Pruitt's four email addresses include one in the conventional agency format, pruitt.scott@epa.gov, and three others: esp7@epa.gov, adm14pruitt@epa.gov and sooners7@epa.gov, an apparent reference to the University of Oklahoma, whose football team Pruitt follows closely.

In an email, Wilcox said that "all accounts are searched before we respond to [any] FOIA request."

"The EPA maintains three email accounts which are attributed to Administrator Pruitt: two are used by staff for calendaring and public correspondence; the third is used by the Administrator," he added. "A fourth email account was created for use by the Administrator but was superseded and never used beyond three test emails."

The new revelations came as President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday with almost no fanfare that aims to change the way the EPA determines whether states are meeting federal air-quality standards. The measure, which Trump did not mention during two separate appearances before reporters at the White House, imposes stricter deadlines for EPA approval of state plans and changes the way air pollutants are measured.

John Walke, who directs the clean air program at the advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the executive order prescribes measures "intended to allow more air pollution, or abbreviated air quality reviews that risk more air pollution, or both."

Trump originally had been scheduled to appear with Pruitt to sign the order last week, but that event was canceled after a series of reports about the EPA chief's spending and management habits. On Thursday, Pruitt tweeted about the order, but was nowhere to be seen near the president.WASHINGTON - In advance of a publicity tour by James Comey to promote his new book, the Republican National Committee is preparing a widespread campaign to undercut his credibility, including a new website that dubs the former FBI Director as "Lyin' Comey."

The website prominently features quotes from Democrats highly critical of Comey before his firing by Trump nearly a year ago as the president grew agitated by the Russia probe.

RNC officials say their effort will also include digital ads, a "war room" to monitor Comey's television appearances, a rapid response team to rebut his claims in real time and coordination of Trump surrogates to fan out across other TV programs.

The broadside against Comey, a registered Republican for most of his adult life, comes as he is set to begin a media tour to tout his memoir, "A Higher Loyalty" - which, according to copies leaked Thursday, paints a devastating portrait of a president who built "a cocoon of alternative reality that he was busily wrapping around all of us."

In advance of the book's release Tuesday, Comey is scheduled to appear in an interview airing Sunday night with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. A teaser for the interview says Comey compares Trump to a "mob boss."

Among other things, the 304-page tell-all says Trump was obsessed with lewd allegations about him contained in an infamous dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

Comey's memoir could damage the reputations of Trump and some of his top aides, and the president's allies are scrambling to undercut Comey's account.

In a statement, RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said: "James Comey's publicity tour is a self-serving attempt to make money and rehabilitate his own image. If Comey wants the spotlight back on him, we'll make sure the American people understand why he has no one but himself to blame for his complete lack of credibility."

The RNC effort underscores the incredibly high stakes for Trump and his party as Comey details his interactions with the president, including his claim that Trump asked for a loyalty test. Many Democrats, meanwhile, are hopeful that new revelations will further bolster a case for the president's impeachment.

Comey's firing set off a chain of events that have endangered Trump's presidency. The Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to probe Russian interference in the 2016 election - and possible collusion with the Trump campaign - in the aftermath of Comey's ouster.

With the Mueller probe escalating - including the FBI raid this week of Trump's personal lawyer's home and office in Manhattan - Comey's media appearances could pose a major public relations challenge for the White House.

"I've been around politics a long time, and I know fear when I see it," said Jim Manley, a lobbyist and former senior aide to former Senate minority leader Harry Reid. "This White House reeks of fear. ... This shows me that they are prepared to use a scorched-earth strategy to undermine the FBI's credibility. The party of law and order has become the party of trying to protect Trump at all costs."

Doug Heye, a former RNC communications director, said the Republican effort shows Comey's publicity tour is "going to dominate news coverage. He's going to seemingly everywhere."

But Heye said the RNC is doing its job. "It would be political malpractice not to do this," he said.

Heye said the biggest challenge for Republicans could be combating claims from Comey that have not previously made headlines.

In recent weeks, Trump has continued to attack Comey on Twitter, and Comey has suggested that he will have his say through his book.

"Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not," Comey said in a tweet last month.

Earlier this week, Comey tweeted a picture of the room in his home where he was interviewed by Stephanopoulos, which had been transformed into a small television studio.

"Not how my house normally looks," Comey wrote. "One chair for George, one for me."

As part of its effort, the RNC is also distributing talking points to Trump surrogates to further its case against Comey. Among them: "Comey is a consummate Washington insider who knows how to work the media to protect his flanks," and "Americans will remember that his attempts to smear the Trump administration are nothing more than retaliation by a disgraced former official."

Though Comey was a registered Republican for most of his adult life, he has said he no longer is. He was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and deputy attorney general by President George W. Bush; he was appointed FBI director by President Barack Obama.

After Sunday's interview, Comey has numerous other bookings, including news programs as well as appearances with CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert and the hosts of "The View."

A large reception is also planned Tuesday, the day of the book release, at the Newseum in Washington.

Among those quoted on the RNC website is the 2016 Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, who argued that her campaign was seriously undercut by the FBI's investigation, overseen by Comey, into her use of a private email server while secretary of state. "Badly overstepped his bounds," Clinton is quoted as saying of Comey.

Other Democrats whose past quotes are included on the website include Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. ("I do not have confidence in [Comey] any longer"), Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. ("The FBI director has no credibility.") and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. ("It would not be a bad thing for the American people if [Comey] did step down.").

- - -

The Washington Post's Philip Rucker contributed to this report.House Republicans took their first step Thursday toward overhauling the federal safety net, pushing for new work requirements in the food-stamp program used by 42 million Americans.

The plan, introduced as part of the 2018 Farm Bill over the objections of Democrats, would dramatically expand mandatory state workfare programs in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps.

Under the proposal, most adults between 18 and 59 who do not have jobs will be required to enroll in 20 hours a week of workforce training to receive assistance. The plan budgets $1 billion per year to fund the training program expansion.

Preliminary Congressional Budget Office estimates suggest the requirements would cut SNAP participation by as many as 1 million people over the next 10 years.

The bill launches the first major skirmish in Republicans' push to overhaul welfare and nudge recipients closer to self-sufficiency through work. The bill is slated for markup in the House Agriculture Committee April 18. In 2017, 42.2 million people received monthly SNAP benefits averaging $125.80 per person.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and President Donald Trump have vowed to tighten work requirements in a range of welfare programs, with the president directing federal agencies on Tuesday to conduct a broad review of welfare work rules.

In February, the White House put forward a budget proposal that would reduce food aid for low-income families and make up the difference with canned goods, an idea officials likened to a "Blue Apron-type" food delivery program.

The campaign has outraged Democrats, however, who say such changes hurt the poor. They said the proposals in the Farm Bill lack the votes to advance to the Senate.

In a Thursday press conference, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway, R-Texas, defended the bill as a practical plan to protect the needy while also helping them become self-sufficient. "We believe breaking the poverty cycle is the only way forward," he said.

The Republicans' proposed plan functions in two parts: first, it introduces a new, unified work requirement for all SNAP participants. Second, it mandates and massively expands the state training programs available to unemployed participants who cannot find jobs.

Under current law, all adults ages 18 to 59 who are not pregnant, disabled or otherwise exempt are required to work at least a part-time job or agree to take a job if it is offered to them. An additional set of work requirements applies to unemployed childless adults, who lose benefits after three months if they they are unable to find a job in that period. USDA estimates that in 2017 there were 2.9 million unemployed, childless SNAP recipients.

But Republicans have long complained that the current rules are unenforceable, particularly for adults with children. The Farm Bill proposal would establish a new, single work standard for adults ages 18 to 59, requiring them to hold at least a part-time job within a month of applying for benefits.

In addition, the proposal would fund a massive expansion of state education and training or "workfare" programs and mandate, for the first time, that unemployed, working-age SNAP recipients enroll. States will be required to offer a slot to every adult who is eligible, up from the 700,000 slots currently in use. Exceptions are made for pregnant women, people with disabilities and parents with children under 12.

The plan budgets $1 billion per year to fund the expansion, after a two-year phase-in period. States will have wide flexibility in administering the program, Republicans said, offering everything from subsidized employment to far cheaper supervised job search and literacy classes.

"Insufficient, vague and unenforceable work requirements . . . dissuade employment and restrict opportunities for recipients," Republican staffers wrote in a briefing document for reporters. "Instead, the farm bill proposes realistic, supportive and simplified work requirements paired with funding for states to provide guaranteed, improved and constructive options to move participants toward improved wages, higher-quality employment and independence."

The proposal would also change the way that states and counties qualify for work-requirement waivers at times of high unemployment, effectively shrinking the geographic areas allowed to suspend those rules.

And it would impose stricter eligibility guidelines for low-income families who qualify for SNAP through other welfare programs, a practice known as Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility. In single-parent families, it would also link parents' benefit amounts to payment of child support and cooperation with child support agencies.

According to preliminary estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, the changes to the work requirements alone would cut SNAP rolls by as many as 1 million people over the next 10 years. But it is unclear how many participants will leave because their incomes have risen to a point where they no longer need help, and how many will leave because they cannot complete the work requirements.

Supporters of the proposal said it could reduce poverty and hunger among low-income families. Because SNAP benefits alone are not sufficient to cover the full cost of a households' meals, it is particularly important that households have earned incomes, said Robert Doar, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who previously administered the food-stamp programs of both New York City and the state of New York.

"I think when it's explained to the vast majority of the American people, that this is a proposal intended to help move people into jobs where they'll have higher incomes and are less likely to be poor, most people will agree that's something we should be doing," said Doar.

But many Democrats and anti-hunger advocates harbor deep reservations about the proposal - even if they have supported employment and training programs in the past. Most agree that these programs are a valuable and effective way to get people into well-paid jobs and out of poverty, particularly when they consist of more intensive services, such as apprenticeships or subsidized employment.

Experts expressed concerns, however, that the proposal would force SNAP participants into these programs without providing enough funding for them. High-quality training programs such as subsidized employment can range upwards of $10,000 per year per participant, and the national expansion of these programs may require SNAP agencies to invest heavily in new staff to train and track their unemployed recipients.

"There's a kernel of a good idea here," said Kermit Kaleba, the federal policy director at the National Skills Coalition, which advocates for workforce development programs. "There is a lot of evidence that high-quality employment and training programs help people with relatively low basic skills move out of minimum wage jobs and into family-supporting careers. The challenge is that these programs are not cheap to run. And our concern, based on what we've heard so far, is that it isn't clear [the Republican proposal] will make a sufficient investment."

Democrats say they are also puzzled by Republicans' move to expand training programs now, before the Agriculture Department has finished evaluating 10 state pilot programs authorized by the last farm bill. Those pilots were intended to identify best practices for future training programs, as well as to surface funding and implementation challenges.

Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., a member of the House Agriculture Committee who previously implemented SNAP training programs in Delaware, said the proposal will require states to build out large bureaucracies that many are not equipped to launch. Many SNAP recipients face legitimate obstacles to enrolling in these programs, such as unreliable transportation, low housing security, and shifting childcare and medical schedules, she added.

"In our pilot program, it was a significant challenge just reaching out to families to get them in the door," Rochester said. "If our goal is to fill the millions of jobs we have in our country, then investing in people is the right way to go. The question is, is the investment sufficient for this population?"

The Republican proposal is now slated for markup in the House Agriculture Committee. Democrats on the committee have said they will unanimously oppose it. The current law expires on September 30.

But the Republican campaign to overhaul welfare programs is likely to continue. On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to strengthen their existing work requirements, and potentially introduce new ones, for low-income Americans receiving SNAP, Medicaid, public housing subsidies and other forms of assistance.

That move came on top of a February announcement from the Department of Agriculture, which said it will begin reviewing ways to tighten work requirements in SNAP, particularly in high-unemployment areas that have been exempted from them.

"Long-term dependency has never been part of the American dream," Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement at the time. "Everyone who receives SNAP deserves an opportunity to become self-sufficient and build a productive, independent life."The political crisis confronting Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens appeared to deepen significantly on Wednesday with the release of a dramatic legislative report that outlines in sharp detail new allegations about the governor's behavior towards a woman who was his hair dresser.

The 24-page report, prepared by a special committee of the state's predominantly Republican House of Representatives, included detailed testimony by the woman, referred to only as Witness 1, who described a sexual relationship with Greitens that included a string of misconduct and started one day when he groped her.

Once considered a rising star in the Republican Party with a sterling resume, the former Navy SEAL has found his political fortunes badly damaged by the allegations and ensuing felony charge that he invaded the woman's privacy by taking a nude photo of her without her consent. His trial is set to begin in St. Louis circuit court next month.

The result of an investigation which the chamber voted 154-0 to launch, the report raised the specter of impeachment for Greitens and prompted another round of calls for Greitens to step down, including by the state's Republican attorney general and senate hopeful Josh Hawley and Democratic Senator Clair McCaskill. One Republican state representative called Greitens "an embarrassment."

While Greitens has described the extramarital relations as "consensual," the woman said it included unwanted and potentially coerced sexual acts that she felt afraid to say no to and physical violence, in addition to the threat of photographic blackmail.

Greitens, who has resisted calls to step down amid the scandal as he awaits trial next month, declined to participate or testify for the committee's report. In the hours before the report's scheduled release, he delivered a defiant speech in which he called the investigation into him a "political witch hunt," echoing the phrase used regularly by President Donald Trump.

"I will continue to serve the people of Missouri as their governor and to work for you every day," he said. "And they know, they need to know, that fake charges and falsehoods aren't going to stop us."

The special committee set up to investigate the charge, meanwhile, wrote that it found the woman a credible witness.

The woman said the physical contact began in 2015 with Greitens, who is married, after he had been her client on and off for a more than a year. During a haircut, Greitens moved his hand "all the way up," to her crotch without consent, the woman said, a move that left her "curious," and confused.

"Why did he feel like he could do that?" She told the committee.

About a week later, Greitens asked her to meet him in an alleyway behind a Starbucks when she phoned him, and invited her over to his house for a weekend when his wife would be out of town, she said.

The woman later asked if he wanted to meet at a cafe, but Greitens told her he couldn't been seen in public because he was running for office, the woman said, according to the report. Instead, she agreed to go to his house where he told her she could "come in through the back door, nobody will see you, we can talk."

When she arrived at 7 a.m., about 45 minutes before she was supposed to arrive at her job, Greitens took her keys, searched her purse and patted her down, checking outside to see if any one had seen her come in, the report said.

The woman said she wanted to talk to him but he asked to "take her through an exercise," for which he had her change into a white T-shirt with a cut at the top and men's pajama pants. He then told her he was going to show her how to do a proper pull up, she said.

The witness told the committee that she thought they were going to do some sort of "sexy workout," and that she was both "curious" and "confused."

After they went to the house's basement, Greitens taped her hands to the pull-up rings with gauze tape and put a blindfold on her, items which had been laying on a workout bench, the report said. He told her she needed to be hydrated and tried to spit water in her mouth multiple times though she spit it out, she said, "because I didn't even want to kiss him."

Greitens began kissing her neck and chest and ripped her shirt open to expose her, and pulled down her pants.

She said she heard him step back and then take what she believed was a picture on his phone, seeing the flash through her blindfold. She said Greitens warned her not to mention his name "to anybody at all, because if you do, I'm going to take these pictures, and I'm going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are."

The woman said she stayed silent, thinking that this was the "most embarrassing thing" that had ever happened to her, before finally saying she wouldn't tell anyone. He began kissing her again, at which she started "freaking out," and trying to rip down her hands, she said.

"I was like, 'Get me out of here. I'm not ready for this. I don't want this. I don't want this,' " she said.

Of her emotions at that point, she said she was "fearful," "embarrassed," and "ashamed," feeling bad about herself for letting him get her in that position.

She said, "I just kept saying, 'Get me out of here. I'm not ready for this.' It was also, too, that feeling of, I came here not wanting to do anything - nothing."

After she tried to leave, he grabbed her in a bear hug and laid her down on the ground in the basement, she said.

"So he was laying there and I was laying next to him just crying - like uncontrollably crying," she said. "And he was like, 'Shh, shh, it's OK, it's OK.' That's all he was really saying at this point. And he was trying to, like fondle my body."

Greitens eventually undid his pants and moved his crotch near her face, after which she gave him oral sex, she said, feeling that it was the only way she'd be able to leave.

"So this guy literally just wants me for this, and this is all he wants, and then he'll let me - because at this point, too, I also know I have to be at work, and he's not going to let me leave," she said, describing her thoughts to the committee. "So I gave him oral sex at this point."

She said she felt the act was "coerced, maybe," and that one of the emotions she felt was fear for her "physical self."

Two friends testified to the committee that the woman had told her many elements of the story that aligned with the account she gave the committee.

The woman told the committee that Greitens came in for other appointments with her after the first encounter. The first time, he said to her, "You didn't tell anybody, did you?" the woman said. In the next, he showed up early and the two shared a consensual kiss. They later had more consensual relations, including oral sex.

In June, during another encounter, he asked her if she had been intimate with anyone else and slapped her across the face when she said that she had.

She described her reaction as, "What? Eric, what in the heck? You're married. Why would - what do you mean? And he just said, No. Like, that was - you're mine. This is - what do you mean you slept with your husband? You are not supposed to be sleeping with him, you know? And I said, I think you're screwed up from being in the Navy."

Another time he smacked, grabbed and shoved her to the ground in the midst of a sexual act, she said.

"And I instantly just started bawling and was just like, 'What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?' And I just laid there crying while he was just like . . . 'you're fine, you're fine.' "

The woman later told Greitens to leave her alone.

Greiten has hired a high-powered legal team to defend him and a lobbyist to represent him in the state legislature. His lawyers have sought to sow doubt about the woman's account as well as the case brought by St. Louis circuit attorney, Kimberly Gardner.

The committee asked the woman why she continued to have contact with Greitens after the first encounter.

"I've asked myself that so many times," she said. "I think it comes down to a few things. One, I felt really disgusted with myself that I allowed that first time to happen. Really embarrassed that he thought of me as a whore. And so after my - I told my husband and he was clear that he did not want anything to do with me, that he wanted to move into an apartment, and when Eric came back in and he was normal and so kind to me, that felt so much better and it allowed me to just ignore any of those bad feelings about myself, in particular. Because if I thought he was this horrible person, I really felt shameful of myself."

- - -

The Washington Post's Sean Sullivan contributed to this report.JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - The pressure on Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens to resign escalated dramatically Thursday, with two state Republican leaders and a top donor joining the call for him to step down a day after the release of an explosive report alleging he initiated unwanted sexual contact with a woman who worked as his hairdresser.

A onetime rising national star, Greitens is now in his lowest standing among Republican officials and donors since taking office in early 2017, facing intense criticism and even talk of impeachment.

But Greitens has stood defiant, showing no sign that he is preparing to leave office. The governor said Wednesday, when the report was released, that he is the target of a "witch hunt," echoing language President Donald Trump has used to describe the special counsel probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Greitens has said that a separate criminal trial, scheduled for next month, will exonerate him.

David Humphreys, a top Greitens donor, was part of a chorus of powerful Republicans who urged him to step down Thursday. State Senate Majority Leader Mike Kehoe and U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, Mo., also said he should go.

A bipartisan state House panel released a report Wednesday that included detailed testimony from woman they deemed a "credible witness." The woman, Greitens' former hairdresser, said that in 2015, he groped her and slapped her. She also said in testimony that he blindfolded her and taped her hands to exercise equipment and that she felt "coerced, maybe," to perform oral sex on him.

Greitens has acknowledged having an extramarital affair but has denied engaging in any illegal conduct. He declined to testify before the state House committee.

The lawmakers initiated their probe after allegations surfaced that Greitens had photographed the woman naked without her consent, and a St. Louis prosector brought a felony invasion of privacy charge against him.

But the testimony revealed in the state legislative report has spurred leading Republicans not to wait until the outcome of that trial to urge Greitens to step down.

"These new revelations describe behavior that makes it impossible to retain confidence in his ability to govern wisely and well," Humphreys said in a written statement.

Kehoe said he had "come to the conclusion that [Greitens'] ability to lead is not going to be there." He criticized Greitens for his "witch hunt" comment, saying it was "not the right position to be in at this time."

Wagner wrote on Twitter that she was "disgusted, disheartened" and believes Greitens "is unfit to lead our state."

On Thursday, Greitens was quiet on the subject. His office did not comment on the allegations or the resignation calls he faced.

The comments from Humphreys, Kehoe and Wagner came a day after state Attorney General Josh Hawley called on Greitens to step down. Hawley is a top recruit running in the Republican primary to challenge Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, Mo., in a marquee contest in the larger national battle for the majority in the U.S. Senate.

McCaskill also called for Greitens to step down. "He is not in the position that he can lead the state of Missouri at a critical time in our state's history," she said Thursday, repeating her call from a day earlier for Greitens to leave office.

Hawley's office has been investigating allegations that resources at Greitens's former veterans charity were improperly used for his campaign. The state House committee has also been looking into this issue, according to a transcript of its discussions released this week. The committee said it plans to issue a separate report on the matter.

State House Speaker Todd Richardson, a Republican, called the testimony in the report released Wednesday "beyond disturbing." He said the committee voted to "expand their mission" to issue a recommendation of any disciplinary action the governor should face. Richardson said this would happen in a special session after the regular one concludes next month.

Responding to Greitens, Richardson said: "This is not a witch hunt."

State House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty, D, said Greitens "must resign and, if he fails to do so, I believe, we should begin impeachment proceedings."

Asked Thursday whether Greitens should step down, Republican Governors Association spokesman Jon Thompson said the organization had nothing to add to a February statement that indicated Greitens had stepped down from the RGA's executive committee.

- - -

Sullivan reported from Washington.NORWALK  A New York man was charged with identity theft, larceny and forgery on allegations that he cashed more than $13,000 in checks stolen from his Norwalk landlord in 2017.

Igor Ljekocevc, 33, of Pleasant View Road, Pleasant Valley, N.Y., was held on a $100,000 bond and charged with first-degree identity theft, first-degree forgery and second-degree larceny.BEIRUT - Fears that a major war could be imminent eased across the Middle East on Thursday after a flurry of tweets and statements by world leaders that suggested they are looking for ways to de-escalate the tensions of recent days.

U.S.-led military strikes in retaliation for the Syrian government's alleged use of chemical weapons against a Damascus suburb last weekend remained a distinct possibility, but there were indications that efforts to head off a confrontation between global powers are gathering momentum.

In Moscow, the Kremlin sought to tamp down fears of a conflict with the United States by signaling for the first time in days that it might not carry out threats to retaliate against a U.S. strike.

"We still believe that it is very necessary to avoid any steps which can trigger an escalation in tensions in Syria," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. "We believe that this could have a very destructive impact on the entire Syrian settlement."

Analysts in Russia said the focus now is on ways to ensure that any strikes are limited so that they don't kill Russians, thereby allowing Moscow to refrain from carrying out its threats to retaliate. Thousands of Russian troops and military advisers are stationed at military facilities across Syria, where they have been supporting President Bashar Assad's 7-year-old efforts to crush the rebellion against his rule.

"I rule out a scenario in which the United States will intentionally strike a facility in Syria where Russian servicemen are located," Military Sciences Academy Vice President Sergei Modestov said in Thursday's edition of the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

The Kommersant newspaper quoted anonymous Defense Ministry sources as saying that Russia's General Staff was in touch with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and expected to receive coordinates on airstrike targets from the Pentagon to avoid Russian casualties.

"Right now, the talk is about the necessity of de-escalation," said Alexander Golts, an independent military analyst in Moscow. "We've practically come to the brink of war."

French President Emmanuel Macron gave the strongest indication yet that France is ready to join the United States in striking Syria, saying that France has "proof" that some form of chemical attack occurred.

But in a television interview, he also suggested that strikes were not imminent. He said a decision would be made "in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective."

"France will not allow any escalation that could harm stability in the region," he added.

In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May met with her top leadership team Thursday to discuss backing military action in Syria. A statement after the cabinet meeting was limited, saying that Britain believes the use of chemical weapons should not go "unchallenged." The British government "agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime," the statement said, without committing to any form of military involvement.

A tweet from President Trump, which backtracked from his Wednesday warning that missiles soon would be heading toward Syria, further contributed to the sense that the threat of a conflagration was receding. "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place," he tweeted. "Could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

Syrians who had been bracing for U.S. strikes for three nights in a row said the mood in the capital, Damascus, was palpably relaxing, with residents increasingly shrugging off the threat as the days passed.

In the first days of the crisis, text messages circulated urging residents to stock up on supplies and stay indoors, said Maysa Sabouh, who lives in Damascus. Now, "life has gone back to normal," she said. "I can't say no one was worried, but last night all the cafes were full of people watching soccer. People know that Trump is crazy, that he runs the politics of the world as if he is directing an action movie."

Government supporters said they took Trump's tweet to mean the United States was backing down, just as President Barack Obama did not carry through on his threat to strike Syria in 2013 in retaliation for a chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta, the same Damascus suburb that was the target of Saturday's attack.

"This shows that the dog that barks doesn't bite," said Ammar Ismael, speaking from the coastal province of Latakia, a government stronghold. "America knows that Assad is winning."

Assad remained defiant, telling reporters in Damascus that the U.S. allegations of a chemical weapons attack were "based on facts fabricated by their accomplices." Assad has made public appearances throughout the week, dispelling rumors that he had gone into hiding, escaped to Iran or sought refuge on a Russian base.

He was speaking alongside Ali Akbar Velayati, the top adviser to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Velayati is visiting Syria in a strong signal of Iranian support for Damascus. In a reminder that the war in Syria goes well beyond the dispute about chemical weapons, Velayati said he hoped Syria and Iran would "soon" conduct an operation to drive U.S. troops out of northeastern Syria, where they are supporting a mostly Kurdish militia.

There were other signs that diplomatic efforts to avert an escalation are kicking in. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss Syria, a day after speaking on the phone with Trump. Erdogan told a political rally of his supporters that he would discuss ways to end the "chemical massacres" in Syria.

A Russian lawmaker said Turkey is seeking to mediate between Russia and the United States, building on its relationships with the U.S. military in NATO and the Russian military in Syria to establish a channel of communications.

"A dialogue between the chiefs of staff of the U.S. and Russia has begun. The connection has been made possible through our counterparts in Turkey," Vladimir Shamanov, head of the Russian parliament's defense committee, said late Wednesday.

Thursday's statements by Trump and Macron represent a growing recognition that strikes without a strategy will not work and that, if they are to be conducted, it should be in tandem with a broader effort to end the Syrian war, said Nicholas Heras of the Center for a New American Security.

"This entire crisis is about forcing Russia to put a leash on Assad," he said. "What the United States and France are aiming to do is get Russia to the table and to force Russia to take ownership for Assad's behavior.

"The United States has tried diplomacy for diplomacy's sake, but now the mood is to use military force for diplomacy's sake," he added. "Russia can play ball, or it can watch as the U.S. and its allies drive down the field on Assad."

- - -

Troianovski reported from Moscow. James McAuley in Paris, Karla Adams in London and Suzan Haidamous in Beirut contributed to this report.

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Video: Even after international inspections and a U.S. air strike in 2017, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is being accused of using chemical weapons to attack civilians in Douma, Syria, on April 7.(Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

Embed code:The amending of an ordinance regarding the sale of livestock and non-domesticated animals created lots of discussion for the Plainview City Council during their regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday night.

City Manager Jeffrey Snyder introduced the first reading of the amendment to Chapter 2 Article 2.03 and 2.04 of the Plainview Municipal Code. The amendment would clarify the process for sale of impounded livestock and other non-domesticated animals and the disposition of pets and other domestic animals. It would also bring the code closer to the state statute and give the animal control department better guidance.

The chance to clarify the process was brought up for discussion when a pig was picked up by animal control earlier this year.

District Four representative Teressa King moved to accept the motion with an amendment to increase the notification time from the current 72 hours to seven business days. King was adamant that 72 hours may not be enough time for residents to realize their livestock are missing.

The animals could have been released accidently by a fence being blown down or by some other malice, she said. The owners could be out of town and not realize somethings happened.

Seventy-two hours is too quick, she reiterated.

District Two representative Larry Williams voiced his concerns regarding increasing the time limit the city is responsible for the livestock. While he does care about animals, if the livestock is that important, the owners should realize their animal is missing and should reimburse the city for their care.

Snyder explained there is a $50-a-day fee after the livestock was sold. Williams indicated if a longer notification period is implemented, an increase in the fee should also take place. However, since the fees were not included in the specified ordinance, that could not be amended at this time. Snyder also mentioned that only two cases, including the current resident pig, have fallen under this ordinance.

The council voted 4-3 to approve the amendment by King to the amended ordinance. District Three Representative Norma Juarez, District Five Representative Susan Blackerby and Williams voted against. District One Representative Dr. Charles Starnes was absent.

The council then voted to accept the amended ordinance with the same vote.

Director of Finance, Sarianne Beversdorf, asked the council to approve and authorize the city manager to sign an Interlocal Agreement with the North Central Texas Council of Governments to participate in the North Texas Share Agreement Program.

The city is required to post employee retirement benefits and by joining in this agreement, NCTGOG would negotiate prices on their behalf. This would save the city staff time and about $2,000, she said.

Beversdorf also asked the council to authorize the city manager to sign the Engagement Letter, Master Agreement and Business Associate Agreement with Gabriel, Roeder, Smith and Company (GRS) to provide the OPEB Actuarial Valuations and consulting services. GRS was the group chosen through the NCTGOG proposal process. Beversdorf mentioned the fees for this would be more due to the requirements of more reporting. Last years fees were at $6,835, while this years fees would be around $9,700.

The council approved and authorized both on a 7-0 vote.

In other business, the council approved 7-0 to authorize the city manager to sign a Vacation of Subdivision Replat for land in the La Mesa Subdivison. Lots 9B would be replat to Lot 9. The lot was changed back in 2004 and would now be back to its original replat of Lot 9.

The council also voted 7-0 to consider an approval of zoning case at the Plainview-Hale County Business Park. This would authorize the mayor to sign the plat on behalf of the city as the property developer.

Finally, the council authorized 7-0 the reimbursement to General Electric Company of the Tangible Personal Property Tax for the wind turbine components stored at the BNSF Rail Distribution Center within the city.

Rachael Foster, a management analyst for the city, explained the payment stemmed from the Executed Chapter 380 Agreement between the city and GEC. GEC had submitted their tax payment of $30,295.65. The agreement indicated 65 percent would be repaid, which comes to a total of $19,692.16.

The council then entered into a closed meeting to deliberate the purchase, exchange, lease or value of real property. No action was taken.WASHINGTON - If embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt were to leave office, the reins of the agency could fall to a former Senate aide and coal mining lobbyist who was confirmed 53-45 Thursday afternoon to become second-in-command at EPA.

Andrew Wheeler worked at the EPA more than two decades ago and later served as an adviser to Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a high-profile critic of climate science who famously brought a snowball to the Senate floor as a prop. For the past nine years, Wheeler has been a lobbyist for a variety of companies, including Appalachian coal mining firm Murray Energy.

President Donald Trump nominated Wheeler for the deputy administrator job last fall, but only this week did his nomination finally arrive on the Senate floor for a vote.

Wheeler, who works for the lobbying firm FaegreBD Consulting, received $370,000 in fees last year from Murray Energy. Murray has paid Wheeler's firms $225,000 to $559,000 over the past nine years.

In March 2017, shortly after working for the Trump transition team, Wheeler attended a meeting between Murray's chief executive Robert Murray and then-newly confirmed Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Murray asked Perry to increase payments to coal and nuclear plants supplying electricity to the Midwest and Appalachia. Perry tried to implement such a plan, but independent electricity regulators rejected it.

Environmental groups have sharply criticized the notion of installing Wheeler at the EPA in any capacity. But in recent days, as Pruitt has faced scrutiny over allegations of wasteful spending and unusual management of the agency, attention has turned to the prospect that Wheeler could end up in charge of EPA.

"It is critically important that the public understand Wheeler's career as a lobbyist for some of the worst actors in the energy industry," Keith Gaby, a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund, said in an email this week. "Andrew Wheeler running EPA would go far beyond having an administrator overly influenced by lobbyists - the head of EPA would be an energy industry lobbyist."

"The mission of the EPA is to protect human health and the environment, but Andrew Wheeler has dedicated his career to weakening environmental protections, serving as a lobbyist for numerous fossil fuel clients, including one of our country's biggest polluters, Murray Energy," Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, said in an open letter to members of the Senate. "Andrew Wheeler's inherent conflicts of interest from his long history of ties to the fossil fuel industry make him an entirely inappropriate choice for EPA's number two leadership role."

Members of the EPA and others have said that Wheeler worked closely with industry even when he was working for Inhofe, who was then chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Karpinski pointed to a measure known as the Clean Skies Act which would have undermined the landmark Clean Air Act. Inhofe was a vocal critic of climate change, which he said was "the greatest hoax" ever foisted on U.S. citizens.

On Thursday, Wheeler's former boss praised him on the Senate floor. Inhofe called Wheeler "a wonderful guy, and I would like to find anyone who knows him well to say there is any flaw in his character. He's going to do a great job."

Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute who headed Trump's EPA transition team and is a climate skeptic, described Wheeler in a statement as levelheaded and effective.

"He has the experience and the expertise necessary to manage the agency and to make sure that the reforms undertaken by Administrator Pruitt will be fully implemented," Ebell said. "[His]experience in how the EPA operates and his commitment to President Trump's agenda to undo the regulatory onslaught of the previous administration will be valuable to his work managing and reforming the agency."

Wheeler spent four years as a career employee at the EPA under President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton before moving to the Hill.

After leaving the Senate staff, Wheeler received lobbying fees from a variety of clients. Last year he received $40,000 from Energy Fuels Resources Inc., $20,000 from Underwriters Laboratories and $60,000 from Sargento Foods in addition to Murray.

During the 2016 campaign, Wheeler volunteered to consult on energy and environmental policy for the campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

Wheeler wrote a post on his personal Facebook account the day before Super Tuesday pleading with those considering voting for Trump to reconsider. In his six-point critique, Wheeler questioned Trump's character, business acumen and viability as a general-election candidate. Trump was a "bully," Wheeler wrote in the since-deleted Facebook post obtained by The Post. He said that Trump "hasn't been that successful" in business and "has more baggage then all of the other Republican candidates combined." Wheeler added that Trump "has demonstrated through the debates and interviews that he doesn't understand how the government works."

But Wheeler has changed his tune.

"I was just looking at the debates and what I saw on the news, and I hadn't focused on what he was saying," Wheeler told The Post in October, "and when I started looking into what he was saying and what his campaign and what his candidacy was about, I was fully on board."

Given Trump's agenda for rolling back a broad array of EPA rules, that won't assuage environmental and Democratic critics.

"Mr. Wheeler - not atypical of this administration, not atypical of the dense swamp that they've made a whole lot worse - is a former industry lobbyist who has worked on behalf of big polluters and climate change deniers," Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York said on the Senate floor April 9. "He has spent years working to undermine or lobby against the environmental protections he may soon oversee. As a lobbyist, he helped raise money for a few Republican Senators who sit on the committee that recently approved his nomination."

Three Democrats voted for Wheeler, all from coal states. They included Senators Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana.

Lukas Ross, climate and energy campaigner at the advocacy group Friends of the Earth, said in a statement that Wheeler would almost certainly carry out the regulatory rollbacks started under Pruitt.

"Andrew Wheeler is Big Oil's backup plan in case Scott Pruitt's corruption finally finishes him," Ross said. "As Scott Pruitt stumbles from scandal to scandal, there is nothing more dangerous than a dirty energy lobbyist waiting in the wings to become acting Administrator."NEW HAVEN  A home health care aide who police believe stole more than $80,000 worth of jewelry and other items from an elderly New Haven woman and her relative has been sentenced to serve 90 days in jail.

Brittany Green, 25, of Homeside Avenue, West Haven, pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree larceny, after which New Haven Superior Court Judge Philip Scarpellino imposed a five-year sentence, to be suspended after she serves 90 days. Green will then have three years of probation. One of the conditions of the probation is paying restitution of $7,500.

The crime occurred in the daytime hours of May 8, 2017.

On that day police received a call from the elderly womans relative, who reported many items were missing from a bedroom. The woman and the relative were living together.

The relative told police that the older woman had a 24-hour live-in aide, identified as Green.

According to the New Haven police arrest warrant, the relative reported she has had a number of problems with Green, but does not have many options when it comes to help.

Green had been away the weekend before the theft, during which time she was replaced by another aide. Green returned to duty on May 8 at about 10:30 a.m. The relative came back to the home that afternoon and told police she noticed the items were missing.

The warrant listed these stolen items and their estimated value: a mens Rolex watch, $7,542; another mens Rolex watch, $6,600; two baguette diamonds, $18,500 each; a Cartier ring, $3,000; cash of about $300; three Louis Vuitton handbags, $2,500 each; Vuitton luggage, $2,000; two Chanel handbags, $5,500 each; a Chanel purse, $3,000; a Celine handbag, $3,100; two Chanel wallets, $1,000 each; another Chanel handbag, $2,000; another Chanel handbag, $3,000; and another Vuitton handbag, $1,500.

The relative said the residence had an alarm system but it wasnt used when aides were there.

When police spoke with Green, she denied stealing anything. She claimed the relative had accused her of many wrongdoings since she was hired.

But police noted evidence Green had pawned a total of 12 items at Express Pawn in West Haven from June 25, 2016, through the date of the thefts.

When police showed the relative photos of some of the pawned jewelry, she positively identified a necklace with a ball charm and colorful stones as hers. She said it had gone missing May 8, 2017.

At the time she worked for the victims, Green was employed by Compassionate Care at Home, based in Branford. After the thefts, the relative contacted that agency and terminated its service.

When reached for comment, Joe Campano, managing member for Compassionate Care at Home, issued a written statement. He began by confirming his agency had employed Green and assigned her to the victims home starting Feb. 20, 2017.

Brittany had previously been assigned to a couple of brief home care cases without any incident or complaints, Campano said. She was considered to be well-qualified, with numerous years of experience in home care.

Campano added, Brittany was immediately dismissed on May 8, 2017, upon complaints by the relative. He added, The allegations of theft were taken very seriously, given the (relatives) ability to observe Brittany on a daily basis.

Campanos statement continued: My agency utilizes a national agency to perform professional and extensive two-tiered criminal background searches on all employees as part of the hiring process. No past incidents of any criminal activity were detected.

He added, The hiring vetting process also includes interviews with staff members possessing extensive experience in the health care industries. Three professional references that were provided were also contacted who highly recommended her hiring. Brittany was hired based on her extensive experience in the health care field, with no reported incidents of malfeasance or misconduct of any kind.

Campano concluded his statement by saying: This incident is indeed unfortunate but came as a complete surprise to my agency.

In a brief phone interview before Campano issued the statement, he said, Theres an epidemic now with thefts of the elderly. Its very disheartening.Using data from the Texas Education Agency, mySA.com found 32 schools across the San Antonio-area were marked as "improvement required" following the 2017 STAAR tests.

The 2018 tests took place this week.Eight people were newly charged with murder in March in Bexar County, according to records obtained by mySA.com.

Last month, 15 suspects were arrested on similar charges.

Among those charged were Raeshawn Woodard, Drevonte King, Joseph Alvarado and James Berg, who were arrested in connection to the March 6 fatal shooting Tarik Ross, 21, during a suspected drug deal.

RELATED: Family: S.A. man showed signs of mental illness before allegedly killing girlfriend, 11-year-old

An arrest affidavit says Ross drove to the 5300 block of Sherry Drive with his girlfriend and 2-year-old son. When he arrived, one of the suspects jumped in the car and put a gun to his girlfriend's head, the affidavit says. Ross then backed up, causing the suspect to jump out of the car and open fire, fatally striking him. Police said they learned King and Berg were involved after they searched Ross's phone. A Crime Stoppers tip let them to arrest Woodard and Alvarado, authorities said.

In mid-March, Casey Farrell Marshall beat Andrea Gonzalez, 48, and her 11-year-old daughter, Azriah, to death with a hand tool in the bathroom of their home in the 9100 block of Beaudine Avenue, according to an arrest affidavit. Marshall, a mechanic, had been living with Gonzalez, who was his girlfriend and the sister-in-law of State Rep. Justin Rodriguez.

Marshall's family had unsuccessfully tried to get Marshall help with his suspected mental illness months before the killing, but he was continually released from crisis centers and a judge denied a mental health warrant for him just two days before the killing, according to documents and Marshall's family.

RELATED: Affidavit: Gang member said 20-year-old S.A. woman was 'crawling for her life' after he shot her

"I'm hurt. I'm so hurt because this did not have to happen," said Marshall's aunt, Anna Frederick. "If someone had taken the responsibility to diagnose him, I guarantee Andrea and Azriah would be alive today."

Sometime during the night of March 28 or early hours of March 29, Kedreen Pugh allegedly fatally shot 20-year-old Brianna De La Cruz in the 800 block of South Foster Road. Police said Pugh, a documented gang member, was upset because he thought De La Cruz had stolen money from him.

A passing motorist later found De La Cruz "crawling for her life" on the side of the road, but before paramedics could save her, she died, police said.

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 police on Thursday identified the man accused of accidentally shooting an 8-year-old boy on the Northeast Side and then fleeing.

Ronald Mathews Jacobs, 21, remains at large. Carlos Ortiz, a spokesman for the San Antonio Police Department, said detectives have issued a warrant for his arrest in the shooting.San Antonio on Thursday released an image of an alleged gang member who is a person of interest in a triple shooting during a planned brawl at Miller's Pond Park on the Southwest Side.

The image shows the person of interest, dressed in white pants and a striped polo shirt, holding a rifle and a pistol with an extended clip. The image appears to be a screenshot of a video someone took at the park during the brawl.San Antonio police arrested one man after two girls made sexual assault allegations against him.

A teenage girl accused Louis Lawrence Martin, 45, of sexually assaulting her on Saturday. She told police about the incident Tuesday while at a local hospital, according to the arrest affidavit.

RELATED: Teenager arrested after 3 LSD overdose calls involving students at 1 Central Texas high school

The girl described the incident in detail, including the sexual paraphernalia used during the assault, the affidavit says.

Her accusation was corroborated by her sister "who made a similar outcry against (Martin)," according to the affidavit.

Martin was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of sexual assault of a child. A judge set his bail at $75,000.

Fares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here. | fsabawi@mysa.com | Twitter: @FaresInSANEW MILFORD - A North Carolina man who fathered a child with his biological daughter shot and killed her and her adoptive father in Gaylordsville early Thursday, then took his own life in Dover, N.Y., as police closed in.

Meanwhile, authorities visiting the mans home outside Raleigh found the body of the child, who was also dead.

New Milford police said they found the bodies of a man and a woman, both dead of gunshot wounds, in a black pickup truck near the intersection of Routes 7 and 55.

The drivers-side window had been smashed in, and the bodies were still strapped in their seat belts.

The suspect was found shortly afterward in Dover, about 16 miles away, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.

Police did not identify the suspect or his victims. But police in Knightdale, N.C., identified him as Steven Walter Pladl, 45, the slain woman as his biological daughter, Katie Rose Pladl, 20, and the slain man as her adoptive father, Anthony Fusco, 56.

Authorities in Cary, N.C., released the tape of a 9-1-1 call Pladls mother placed Thursday morning. Her son had called her a few minutes earlier, she said, saying he had killed his child, his wife and his wifes father.

Pladls mother also said he had called the night before to report that he and his wife had broken up, and that he was heading to New York with their child.

Knightdale police said the body of 7-month-old Bennett Pladl was found in a home belonging to his father, but did not say how the boy died.

According to Raleigh-area news reports, Steven and Katie Pladl had been charged with incest in February. They had told authorities they planned to marry.

News reports also said Katie Pladl was adopted at an early age by a family in Dutchess County, N.Y., and graduated from Dover High School. When she turned 18, she found her birth parents through social media.

She went south to meet them, the reports said, and eventually became involved in a relationship with her father, who divorced her mother to join her.

New Milford police have not provided details of the shootings in Gaylordsville, but witnesses said the shooter might have used a semi-automatic weapon.

Jeff Weinzievl, who lives near the intersection, said he was feeding his horses around 8:40 a.m. when he heard six to eight shots from what he believed to be a semi-automatic weapon.

It sound like he emptied out his clip, Weinzievl said. It scared the bejesus out of the horses. A lot of people hunt out here and were used to hearing gunshots, but I knew right away something was wrong with this. It was quite scary.

As a precaution, the nearby Sherman School was placed in a lockdown.

New Milford police notified area police agencies to be on the lookout for the suspects vehicle, described as a light blue mini-van registered in North Carolina.

The car was spotted by a Dutchess County probation officer on Dog Tail Corners Road, east of Berkshire Road in the town of Dover.

Police from the Dutchess County Sheriffs Office, New York State Police and New Milford police converged on the vehicle, which was parked with the engine running on the shoulder next to the Ten Mile River. The suspect apparently took his own life as police approached.

Britains Daily Mail published an extensive story about the incest case in February, based largely on interviews with Alyssa Pladl, Katies biological mother and Steven Pladls former wife.

In the story, Alyssa Pladl said she had always hoped to reunite with the daughter she gave up for adoption, and was at first happy when Katie joined their family, which now included two younger siblings.

But she was disturbed that her husband insisted on sleeping on the floor in Katies room, and horrified to read in her 11-year-old daughter's journal early in 2017 that Katie was pregnant and Steven was the father.

The 11-year-old described her father as Satan and said the baby would be a half-demon, the Daily Mail reported.

Excerpts from the journal included in the Daily Mail story show the 11-year-olds revulsion at her father.

He'll go to hell, but he won't be the one getting tortured, he'll be the one torturing people, she wrote.

dperrefort@newstimes.comThe richest man in Africa Aliko Dangote clocked 61 years old on Tuesday, April 10, and it's no surprise that he got the best wishes from all around Nigeria.

Dangote had wishes and cakes sent from top Nigerian companies and banks who have had the pleasure of working with the hard-working business mogul. Billboards wishing the 61-year-old a happy birthday were also erected all over the country.

Friends and family members of the richest man in Africa also took to social media to share birthday wishes. His billionaire best friend Femi Otedola also shared a touching post on his Instagram page.

Oli mogul Otedola described his best friend as his mentor and the greatest man to ever come out of Africa.

See photos of cakes below:

READ ALSO: Femi Otedola celebrates his billionaire best friend Aliko Dangote on his birthday (photo)

Aliko Dangote is a business mogul, investor and owner of Dangote Group. The rich man has interests in commodities all over Nigeria and other parts of Africa.

The 61-year-old is ranked as the 100th richest person in the world and the richest in Africa by Forbes magazine. In 2014, Dangote was ranked the 23rd richest person in the world.

PAY ATTENTION: Get the Latest Nigerian News on Legit.ng News App

Dangote who has been married four times is currently married to his fourth wife. His other marriages ended in divorce. He has three children from the three marriages.

This 2018, it was gathered that Dangote's estimated net worth is currently at 14.1 billion dollars.

Top-4 Nigerian Celebrities and Politician Weddings | Legit.ng TV - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng- President Buhari said he decided to make known his second term ambition because Nigerians were talking too much about whether he would run or not

- He said he is re-contesting because majority of Nigerians appreciate what his administration is doing

- Buhari also spoke about issues challenging the country such as Boko Haram insurgency, herdsmen/farmers clashes and the Dapchi girl in captivity

President Muhammadu Buhari has spoken about his announcement on Monday, April 9, to seek presidential re-election, saying it was to clear the air as a lot of people had been speculating whether he would run or not.

This was contained in a statement by Femi Adesina, the special adviser to the president on media and publicity on Wednesday, April 11.

READ ALSO: Alleged video of Offa, Kwara bank robbery surfaces days after many were killed

The president said he wanted to get the declaration away with so that his administration could focus on more important things like agriculture and security.

On the war against insurgency particularly the fact that Boko Haram terrorists were still holding on to Leah Sharibu, the school girl from Dapchi, President Buhari said his administration was working hard for her return.

Read the statement below:

President Muhammadu Buhari has explained why he declared his intentions to run for another term in office on Monday, April 9, 2018, during the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Receiving the Archbishop of Canterbury, His Grace Justin Welby in London Wednesday, President Buhari said:

"I declared before leaving home because Nigerians were talking too much about whether I would run or not. So, I felt I should break the ice. We have many things to focus on, like security, agriculture, economy, anti-corruption, and many others. We needed to concentrate on them, and politics should not be a distraction. The majority of Nigerians appreciate what we are doing, and that is why I am re-contesting."

The President recounted some successes of the administration to his guest, with whom he has built a deep friendship in recent times, and was quite particular about strides in agriculture.

"We have cut the importation of rice by about 90%, saving billions of dollars in the process. People who rushed into petrol money have now gone back to agriculture. Even professionals have gone back to the land. Nigeria should be able to feed itself comfortably soon. I am so pleased," the President said.

On the war against insurgency, he stressed the need for continuous education of the people, "so that they can be free from religious manipulation," adding that no true religion advocates the hurting or killing of the innocent.

Responding to his guest's comment on the clashes between herdsmen and farmers in different parts of Nigeria, the president submitted:

"The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of armed gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region. These gunmen were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram. Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons. The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions."

President Buhari lamented that "irresponsible politics" has been brought into the farmers/herders crisis, but assured that enduring solutions would be found, and justice done to all concerned.

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On Leah Sharibu, the schoolgirl from Dapchi still being held by insurgents, reportedly because she refused to renounce her Christian faith, the President said:

"We are managing the matter quietly. Making noise would not help. We are collecting as much intelligence as possible, working with the Red Cross and other international organizations. There are too many fraudulent people around, who claim they can do this and that. We won't deal with them. That was how we got the Dapchi girls back, and the Chibok girls."

Archbishop Welby said it was always a delight to see President Buhari, "whom I have tremendous respect for," adding: "You have my best wishes on your recent decision. I read your declaration speech. We are neutral as a church, but we will pray for you. Great statesmen are those who run for the good of their country. We will be praying for you."

The Archbishop presented President Buhari with a copy of his recent book, 'Reimagining Britain. Foundations for Hope.'

Legit.ng had reported that the archbishop of canterbury, Justin Welby and Nigerias high commissioner to the United Kingdom (UK), George Adesola Oguntade, have paid President Muhammadu Buhari a visit at the Abuja House in London.

This is not the first time Justin Welby would be paying the president a visit at the Abuja House in London.

EXCLUSIVE: Be patient with President Buhari, Femi Adesina tells Nigerians on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit Newspaper- Some gunmen attacked a Syrian businessman in Kano state

- The attackers shot him to death and kidnapped one of his sons

Unknown gunmen reportedly attacked and killed a Syrian businessman, Ahmed Abu Areeda, in Kano state on Tuesday, April 10.

It was reported that the mans son, Muhammad Ahmed, was also abducted.

According to The Nation, the tragic incident happened when the deceased, accompanied by two of his children, went to the Kano state office of the Nigerian Red Cross Society on Hospital road to pick his car.

READ ALSO: Majority of Nigerians appreciate what we are doing, that is why I am re-contesting - Buhari

An eyewitness claimed the gunmen were waiting for him at the location.

He said: He closed his shop around 8p.m. and went to pick his car at the Red Cross office compound where he parked his vehicle. Unfortunately, the gunmen, who parked outside the office in a green Peugeot car, with tinted glass, were apparently waiting for him. Some of them followed the deceased into the compound while others remained behind.

Those who followed the Syrian businessman to the Red Cross office instantly shot him on the head and took away one of his sons, Muhammad."

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Meanwhile, Engr. Alex Ogwazuo who served as commissioner for culture and tourism in Imo state has reportedly been kidnapped.

Legit.ng reported that Ogwazuo was kidnapped over the weekend by unknown gangsters in the state capital, Owerri.

The former commissioner who was sacked by Governor Rochas Okorocha reportedly attended a social function when he was attacked by hoodlums. The attackers took him away in his Sports Utility Vehicle.

Victims of herdsmen killing buried in Benue state - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- Three Boko Haram terrorists have been neutralised by troops of Operation Lafiya Dole in Borno state

- During its clearance operation, the troops also rescued 33 family members of Boko Haram insurgents

Troops of 28 Brigade on Operation Lafiya Dole on Wednesday, April 11, while on clearance patrol in conjunction with hunters and vigilantes in Borno state had an encounter with some Boko Haram terrorists.

According to a statement sent to Legit.ng by the director army public relations, Brigadier-General Texas Chukwu, three members of the Boko Haram terrorists were neutralised during the exchange of fire.

The troops also rescued 33 family members of Boko Haram terrorists comprising 15 women, 6 boys and 12 girls. However, their houses and property were also destroyed.

The troops of Operation Lafiya Dole have been consistent with their clearance operations in Borno state. Photo credit: Nigerian Army

READ ALSO: Operation Lafiya Dole: Army neutralize Boko Haram terrorists, recover arms

The public are advised to always be vigilant and to report any suspected movements to the security agency, the statement advised.

In an earlier report by Legit.ng, troops of Operation Lafiya Dole on Friday, April 6, neutralised suspected Boko Haram terrorists in Barkin Dutse area of Adamawa state following a distress call from hunters.

A statement by the director army public relations, Brigadier-General Texas Chukwu, said the terrorists on sighting the troops opened fire which resulted in exchange of fire.

"Five Boko Haram terrorists were neutralized while some escaped into nearby caves during the encounter. Also, one hunter lost his life during the operation, the statement said.

Meanwhile, about 95 former Boko Haram fighters are set to be reintegrated into the Nigerian society after series of training, vocational skills acquisition, and rehabilitation courses.

The repentant terrorists were trained by the Nigerian Army wing charged with the responsibility of Deracialising, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DRR) in Gombe state.

Legit.ng gathered that they were rehabilitated by instructors from departments and agencies from the federal government and the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) with the aim of retraining them to become law abiding citizens.

READ ALSO: Wives of detained Boko Haram suspects, Nigerian military differ on alleged maltreatment

Nigerian Air Force operations against Boko Haram on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng- Governor Ayodele Fayose has been described as the most wasteful governor in Ekitis history, by Victor Kolade

- The APC governorship candidate said Fayoses stomach infrastructure is nothing but a fraud; and that people are still hungry in the state

- He outlined the three problems Ekiti faces; as he lamented over the fact that the state government is the main employer of labour in the state

Victor Olumuyiwa Kolade, a gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ekiti, has described the current governor of the state, Ayodele Fayose, as the most wasteful governor in Ekitis history, The Nation reports.

He made his comments in a chat with journalists after obtaining his nomination and expression of interest form at the APC national secretariat in Abuja on Wednesday, April 11.

Legit.ng gathers that he stated that Fayose was attempting to build a bridge that leads to nowhere, even as he also bashed successive administrations in the state for being monumental failures. He said it was regrettable that despite Fayoses policy of stomach infrastructure, the people of the state were still hungry.

READ ALSO: NAF commences medical outreach for IDPs in Rann, over 3,350 to benefit

In his words: Ekiti state was created in October 1996, but one thing that is certain is that there is no tangible development. You cannot see an improvement. Anybody who visited the state when it was created and now, would agree with me that there is no substantial development.

The infrastructure that the governor is talking about is a farce. What he is talking about stomach infrastructure is nothing but a fraud. One thing I have always told my audience is that the human capital in Ekiti is not developed.

The sitting governor has done a bridge and has not completed it. As of today, he has spent N20 billion and has not completed it. He keeps on reviewing the cost. If you want to go the Ghadaffi way and you divide this money by the 2.5 million people in Ekiti, each of us would be entitled to about N4 million.

Now, if you take N1.6 billion for instance and give N100 million to each of the 16 local governments and then form co-operatives, you then ask people to access the loans, you would have created more millionaires in the state.

The bridge is so long that no one will even use it except few people travelling very far because underneath it, there are so many easy outlets that motorists can use."

According to him, the three problems facing the state are that the government is the only employer of labour, there is hunger and poor social order.

The three problems we have are; government is the only employer of labour. There are no factories. If you do not work with the government, you work in the hotel, filling station, the saw mill or you are an Okada rider. It is mostly a civil service state.

If we had successive governments and they were not able to discern that this burden should be taken off the shoulders of government, then what are we talking about? Successive governments in Ekiti state have failed.

The second problem we have is hunger. We farm so much but so well we are hungry. It is like 90 percent of everybody in the state is a farmer even while doing government work, but hunger is still prevalent in the land. You remember how someone was cooking, went inside in the house and by the time she came out, the food had been stolen from the fire. It happened in Ekiti state.

It is like this because there is no government interference in farming. Farmers till the ground hopelessly. They farm on lands that have been farmed consistently by several generations earlier on.

Thirdly, the behavioural attitude of an average Ekiti person is going down the drain. Most of the youths now take to drugs. The social order in Ekiti is bad. There is so much to be done," he added.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti state boasted that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would score a record breaking victory against the All Progressives Congress (APC) and its candidate in the 2018 governorship election in the state to set electoral records.

Fayose, in a statement by his chief press secretary, Idowu Adelusi, in Ado-Ekiti, expressed confidence that he would emerge victorious in the coming poll.

Governor Fayose warns Nigerian youths ahead of 2019 - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ngEx Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan's daughter Faith, celebrates her 4th wedding anniversary with her husband Edward.

Faith's husband Edward has taken to his social media handle to celebrate and honor his wife on their great day.

The couple got married in 2014 and the then President Jonathan pulled a great event out of it, as it had all the influential people in attendance.

READ ALSO: Swanky Jerry reveals he was paid more to fly in the best Hollywood stylist for Dangote daughters wedding

Jonathan daughter celebrate wedding anniversary with husband. Source: LIB

Edward Godswill overwhelmed with so much happiness praised his wife for always being there for him and for always having his back.

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He wrote: "4 years today, its been an awesome journey and experience with you my love. Thanks for all we share, for constantly standing by my side, for being my no one fan always."

Can you marry from another tribe? - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- Archbishop of Canterbury, His Grace Justin Welby has been told by president Buhari that the herdsmen-farmers crises his older than his administration

- He said the problem was made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region

- Buhari said the gunmen were trained and armed by Late Muammar Gadaffi of Libya

President Muhammadu Buhari while meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury, His Grace Justin Welby in London on Wednesday, April 11, said the herdsmen-farmers crises is older than his administration.

The president said this whilerResponding to his guests comment on the clashes between herdsmen and farmers in different parts of Nigeria.

The president said:The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region.

READ ALSO: Fayose is the most wasteful governor in Ekitis history - APC governorship aspirant

These gunmen were trained and armed by Late Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram.

Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons.

The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions.

Going further, president Buhari also lamented that irresponsible politics had been brought into the farmers/herders crisis, but assured that enduring solutions would be found, and justice done to all concerned.

On Leah Sharibu, the schoolgirl from Dapchi still being held by insurgents, reportedly because she refused to renounce her Christian faith, the President said: We are managing the matter quietly. Making noise would not help.

We are collecting as much intelligence as possible, working with the Red Cross and other international organisations.

There are too many fraudulent people around, who claim they can do this and that.

We wont deal with them. That was how we got the Dapchi girls back, and the Chibok girls.

Archbishop Welby said it was always a delight to see President Buhari, whom I have tremendous respect for.

You have my best wishes on your recent decision. I read your declaration speech.

We are neutral as a church, but we will pray for you. Great statesmen are those who run for the good of their country. We will be praying for you.

The Archbishop presented President Buhari with a copy of his recent book, Reimagining Britain. Foundations for Hope.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng had reported that President Muhammadu Buhari announced that he would seek reelection in the 2019 presidential election.

The development was made public by the president's personal assistant on new media, Bashir Ahmed.

Should President Buhari seek reelection in 2019? - on Legit.ng Street Gist:

Source: Legit.ng- The Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) has sent an urgent message to the federal government

- The group wants the FG to to drop all corruption charges Chief Government Ekpemupolo, also known as Tompolo

- Tompolo has been out of circulation since the advent of the present administration and he's on FG's wanted list

The Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) has called on the federal government to drop all corruption charges against a former Niger Delta leader, Chief Government Ekpemupolo, also known as Tompolo.

The IYC made the demand in a statement sent to journalists by its president, Eric Omare, on Wednesday, April 11.

The IYC demands that the charges against Chief Government Ekpemupolo by the Federal Government in relation to the sale of the temporary site of the Maritime University be dropped, part of the statement read.

Tompolo has been out of circulation since the advent of the present administration. Photo source: Twitter

READ ALSO: 7 reasons Buhari may win re-election in 2019

The group however hailed President Muhammadu Buhari over the commencement of academic activities at the Maritime University.

They however, urged the federal government to mobilise contractors working at the permanent site of the university to enable them to go back to site.

The IYC also lamented the non-implementation of the 16-point demand presented to the federal government during a meeting to stop attacks by the Niger Delta Avengers, particularly the demand for the relocation of headquarters of oil companies operating in the region.

Tompolo has been in hiding since the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) declared him wanted.

Legit.ng had earlier reported that a militant group, Reformed Niger Delta Avengers (RNDA), indicated its willingness to reveal the whereabouts of Tompolo to federal authorities.

Leader of the group and coalition of nine other militant groups, Johnmark Ezonebi, revealed its plans to Vanguard. Ezonebi expressed the group's readiness to guide security agents to Tompolo's hideout in the creeks of Niger Delta.

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Meanwhile, Tompolo has vowed that soldiers under the Joint Task Force in the Niger Delta region will pay for the death of his father Thomas Ekpemupolo.

Speaking from his hiding during the one year anniversary of his late father, the ex-militant said the descendants of Thomas will not rest until the masterminds of his death are held accountable, stressing that his father's soul will find peace if the soldiers are brought to book.

Should President Buhari seek reelection in 2019? (Nigerian Street Interview) - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- Sierra Leones National Electoral Commission (NEC), has advised Nigeria ahead of 2019 elections

- Miatta French, the head of the commission, said that Nigerians should vote only credible candidates who can deliver positively

- French stated that the issues of information management and security should be taken seriously

The head of Sierra Leones National Electoral Commission (NEC), Miatta French, in view of the 2019 polls, has advised Nigerians to vote their preferred candidates despite money and other gifts some candidates may use to buy them over.

French made this comment during a #WatchingTheVote discussion on lessons from Sierra Leone election. The event, which took place in Abuja, was organised by a civic organisation, YIAGA, on Wednesday, April 11, Premium Times reports.

READ ALSO: Again, Nigeria's economy improves as inflation rate drops to 13.34 percent

She remarked that Sierra Leoneans voted for their conscience in the recently concluded election after drinking, partying and collecting money from different political parties in the country.

If the APC ruling party had been told they will lose the election despite the money they spent, they will never believe it. This depicts that Africans are embracing democracy and they know what they want.

She said politicians need to be aware that Africans are getting to the point where rigging of elections will be impossible because citizens are more concerned, aware and vigilant about political issues.

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She said information must be well managed in order to avoid misinformation on the social media especially during election while noting that social media could be dangerous if it not managed properly. French stated that there is need to educate security personnel on the electoral process.

Moreover, Cynthia Mbamalum, the program manager of YIAGA, said one of the things Nigerians need to learn from the Sierra Leone election is the level of communication with the people.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng reported that INEC said it would sanction any political party, individual or corporate organisation that commits an electoral offence during the 2019 general elections.

Francis Ezeonu, the Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) in Imo, said this at a sensitisation meeting of stakeholders with Imo INEC management on Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) held in Mbaitoli and Owerri North local government areas.

Buhari to Contest for Presidency in 2019! Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- The Foundation for Human Rights and Anti-Corruption Crusaders urges the federal government to drop criminal charges against Tompolo

- The group said the continued harassment of Tompolo by the government is unwarranted

- It reiterates its support for the former Niger Delta militant leader

The Foundation for Human Rights and Anti-Corruption Crusaders (FOHURAC) on Wednesday, April 11, called on the federal government to vacate the criminal charges against former Niger Delta militant leader, Government Ekpemupolo, alias Tompolo.

According to the Vanguard, the group said that the continued hounding of Tompolo was unwarranted.

The national president of the rights group, Alaowei Cleric, in a statement, said: As the legendary Niger Delta martyr clocks 47 today (Thursday), there is need for the federal government to give him a birthday gift by withdrawing the criminal charges leveled against him. There is no reason for the continued persecution of Tompolo in the hands of the ruling government.

READ ALSO: Fayose is the most wasteful governor in Ekitis history - APC governorship aspirant blows hot

Tompolo is being persecuted today because of his resolve to fight for the collective will of the Niger Delta people.

For us in this region, we know where his travails are coming from and thus we cannot abandon him. Niger Delta people share his pains because he is fighting for the freedom of the region.

An attack on Tompolo by the federal government is an attack on the Niger Delta people. As far as the government keeps on persecuting him, we the people who are standing by him will ward off the governments aggression against him.

We shall take all lawful means to confront the powers that be for the freedom of Tompolo in his fatherland. Our solidarity with him in recognition of his martyrdom towards the region remains unwavering.

We use this medium to celebrate him and pray God to continuously guide him. We wish him long and prosperous life as he has added another feather to his years.

Legit.ng previously reported that the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) declared its full support for Tompolo.

The council made its position known on Friday, November 10, 2017, via its leader, Pereotubo Oweilaemi.

Oweilaemi warned those he referred to as laptop fraudsters masquerading as militants, to leave Tompolo alone.

He stated that the IYC would not sacrifice Tompolo, like their forefathers sacrificed another Ijaw son, Isaac Boro.

Meet Sunny Ofehe, the new face of Niger Delta development - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng- A member of the Osun state House of Assembly, Olatunbosun Oyintiloye, has defended Buharis decision to seek re-election in 2019

- He said Buharis fate would be determined by the electorate, and that a second term would enable him take Nigeria to great heights

- The lawmaker described the president as a bonafide Nigerian and said his decision to re-contest is not in violation of the constitution

President Muhammadu Buharis decision to seek re-election in 2019 has been described as a good omen for the anti-corruption fight, by a member of the Osun state House of Assembly, Olatunbosun Oyintiloye, Vanguard reports.

According to him, Buhari should be commended for his determination to wage the war against corruption beyond 2019.

READ ALSO: Make your fees affordable - Aisha Buhari tells private doctors

Legit.ng gathers that the lawmaker stated that as a first term president, Buhari had a constitutional right to seek re-election. He opined that a second term would give the president time to finish his good work.

He pointed out that Buharis fate would be determined by the electorate, and stressed that no one had the right to tell him not to re-contest. Oyintiloye also said Buhari's second term would aid Nigeria in reaching great heights in all aspects.

In his words: There is no doubt that the president is good enough to be considered for a second term. Although things are not really working the way we expected, but with the foundation the president has put in place in the last 3 years, his re-election will consolidate the gain.

The president is a bonafide Nigerian; he has every right to seek for re-election and he has not in any way violated the constitution."

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Recall that Legit.ng previously reported that President Muhammadu Buhari announced that he would seek re-election in the 2019 presidential election.

The development was made public by the president's personal assistant on new media, Bashir Ahmed, who took to his Twitter handle, @BashirAhmaad, to announce the development on Monday, April 9.

He further disclosed that the president made the announcement during the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

President Buhari on 2019 presidential election: will you vote for him? - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng NewsOperatives of the Inspector General of Police Intelligence Response Team (IRT) have arrested two leaders of the Amalgamated Niger Delta Avengers members for demanding a ransom payment of N20 million from Niger Delta Petroleum Resources (NDPR).

The militant leaders had threatened NDPR that they will kidnap its oil workers if it fails to pay N20 million ransom and placed them on N3 million monthly salary.

However, in a statement received by the Vanguard, the police said it has arrested two principal leaders of the militant group.

READ ALSO: Fayose is the most wasteful governor in Ekitis history - APC governorship aspirant blows hot

The statement: On Wednesday 11th April 2018, sequel to several reports of threat received by Niger Delta Petroleum Resources (NDPR) located in Obumeze Community, Ahoada LGA Rivers by a group named- Amalgamated Niger Delta Avengers.

Operatives of the IGP- Intelligence Response Team IRT deployed to PH by IGP Ibrahim Idris swooped into action and arrested two (2) principal actors who posed as militants and threatened the company.

The threat messages demanded an initial payment of N20million and to be placed on monthly salary of N3million; failure to do so would be followed with kidnap, death, Vandalism/Explosion and attacks on the companys assets.

The suspects arrested are: LoveGod Chinuzioke 27yrs native of Obumeze Community Ahoada LGA Rivers State; he is from the host community of NDPR and was just granted bail from Port Harcourt Maximum Prison for a case of Armed Robbery and Kidnapping. He hatched the idea of extorting money from the company and got contact numbers of the senior personnel of NDPR.

Justice Okolo 25yrs; native of Aniocha LGA Delta state. He composed and sent the threatening messages to the company. The suspect also admitted belonging to a notorious armed robbery gang terrorizing Ahoada and environs and the phone used for the threat was recovered from him.

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Effort is still ongoing to arrest remaining accomplices at large, and recover arms, Ammunition, and Explosives.

Legit.ng previously reported that Gift Worlu, a senior lecturer at the University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT), aired his views on the activities of militants in the Niger Delta, his opinion on Governor Nyesom Wike's signing of the River state Neighbourhood Watch Bill and what he felt about the achievements of President Muhammadu Buhari.

The lecturer said that contrary to popular opinion and notions, militants in the Niger Delta go about killing innocent indigenes and making money for themselves and their families.

Worlu remarked: "They hide under the fact that the place is underdeveloped, despite being the owners if the economy that the country is running on, yet the people they are killing and destroying their environments are their own people

Meet Sunny Ofehe, the new face of Niger Delta development - On Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng- The Senate went into a rowdy session after a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senator from Abia state, Eyninaya Abaribe, described President Buhari as incompetent

- Abaribe had moved a motion reacting to explanations given by highly ranked security personnel on the matter of herdsmen versus farmers clashes

- Ahmed Lawan, majority leader, cautioned the Abia state lawmaker

The plenary session of the Nigerian Senate on Thursday, April 12, became rowdy over alleged incompetence of President Muhammadu Buhari to address the spate of killings by armed herdsmen by a senator.

Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, representing Abia South senatorial district, raised a point of order citing Order 43 to make reference to the conflicting reasons given by high security personnel in the current administration for the herdsmen/farmers clashes.

He said the inspector general of police attributed the herdsmen killings to varying laws in different states, while the minister of defence said it was as a result of blockage of movement for cattle in various states.

According to The Punch, Abaribe noted that the latest was from Buhari who during his current official visit to the United Kingdom said that the killer herdsmen were from Libya.

READ ALSO: Fayose is the most wasteful governor in Ekitis history - APC governorship aspirant

He said the admittance by the president that Nigeria had been invaded by external forces confirmed his previous claims that Buhari was totally incompetent.

Senator Ahmad Lawan, the majority leader interrupted the lawmaker to raise a point of order, asking Abaribe to withdraw his derogatory comments on Buhari and apologise for his statements.

Legit.ng previously reported that the National Food Security Council warned that if efforts are not intensified to create cattle ranches or provide better security against rustling in the country, the deadly clashes between farmers and herdsmen could worsen by 2019.

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According to The Nation, the warning was given on Monday, April 9, during a meeting at the Presidential Villa which was chaired by the Kebbi state governor, Atiku Bagudu.

The Council urged President Muhammadu Buhari to quickly approve the establishment and training of agro-rangers who would serve as a special unit to assist security agencies check the clashes between herdsmen and farmers.

Nigerian herdsmen vs Nigerian farmers - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng- The Senate suspended Ovie Omo-Agege, an All Progressives Congress (APC) lawmaker for 90 days

- The suspension came as a result of Omo-Agege's opposition to the elections reordering bill

The Senate has suspended Ovie Omo-Agege, an All Progressives Congress (APC) Senator from Delta state, for 90 legislative days.

READ ALSO: Rowdy session in Senate as PDP lawmaker calls Buhari incompetent

The upper legislative chamber took the decision after it considered a report by its ethics committee, The Cable reports.

The committee had recommended that the senator be suspended for 181 days but the senate reduced it after pleas from lawmakers. Omo-Agege was one of the senators who kicked against the election reordering bill.

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Although, he apologised for his stand he still went to the court to get a restraining order against any move by the senate to suspend him.

In a related development, the Senate also disbanded the parliamentary support group for President Muhammadu Buhari.

The group was chaired by Senator Abdullahi Adamu while Omo-Agege was the secretary. The group was made up of 11 members including the late Senator Ali Wakili.

Earlier, Legit.ng reported that Ovie Omo-Agege, the senator representing Delta central, had sued the Senate to put an end to his coming before the committee on ethics, privileges and public petitions which arose because of his views on the amendment of the Electoral Act. Omo-Agege was supposed to appear before Senator Samuel Anyanwu on Tuesday, March 27.

Street gist: Should the Nigerian senate be scrapped? On Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng- The Nigerian Senate on Thursday, April 12, suspended Senator Ovie Omo-Agege for 90 legislative days

- The suspension came as a result of Omo-Agege's opposition to the elections reordering bill and the subsequent court case he instituted in court to avoid being punished

- Senate president, Bukola Saraki, took time to explain the decision of the Senate on the issue

Senate president, Bukola Saraki, has explained why the Nigerian Senate suspended Senator Ovie Omo-Agege for 90 days.

Omo-Agege, an All Progressives Congress member representing Delta Central senatorial district, had openly opposed the red chamber's elections reordering bill and subsequently instituted a case against the Senate in court to avoid being punished for his actions.

Giving his thoughts on the decision of the Senate, Saraki emphasised on the need for serving senators to respect and preserve the integrity of the Senate.

Senator Omo-Agege has been suspended for 90 legislative days by the upper chamber. Photo credit: Nigerian Senate

READ ALSO: Buhari writes condolence letter to NASS over dead lawmakers

His words: Distinguished Colleagues, a number of points have been raised. One borders on the issue of preserving the integrity of this institution. To me, that is what i think is the most important thing for us.

Second, is where we take actions that are not sincere. I think in this chamber, if we want to talk about who has the right to say he is chairman of a Parliamentary Support Group for Mr. President both by action and by what we have done, I think that I have the right to lead that - more than anyone else here.

Those of us that understand politics, understand that because of our own peculiar interest, sometimes some people decide to act like they are holier than thou or more committed - at the expense of others. This is not something that we should tolerate, and I believe that in an institution like this we must show discipline, but at the same time we must also show compassion.

Distinguished Colleagues, there must be discipline. We must show that such groups must be suspended and the case in court must be withdrawn. In consideration of that we can look at leniency on what is being recommended.

Saraki went to say in clear terms:

1. No more of these kind of groups in the Senate;

2. The issue of court actions;

3. We are not in any hurry to take anybody away from this family; and

4. We must lay down an example by showing that there is discipline and apply some form of discipline on this matter.

We must send out a strong message. There are some people who are fanatics and such actions will expose a lot of people and allies, he said.

He then recommended that:

1. The senator involved, Senator Omo-Agege should withdraw the case (in court);

2. The support group should be disbanded; and

3. Out of compassion, we amend the recommendation of the committee to 90 days and we move forward.

I hope we will not have to come to these sort of situations again at this point in this democratic process. We can cue on this and move forward, he concluded.

READ ALSO: 2019: Saraki vows to work for increased participation of women in politics

The Senate ethics committee had earlier recommended that Omo-Agege be suspended for 181 days but the Senate reduced it after pleas from his colleagues.

Street gist: Should the Nigerian senate be scrapped? on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit NigeriaThe Kaduna state police command has named Senator Shehu Sani as a person of interest in an ongoing investigation relating to a case of criminal conspiracy and culpable murder.

Premium Times reports that the police commissioner in the state, Austin Iwar, has asked the senator to appear on April 30 at the command headquarters in Kaduna for questioning over the issue.

This is in connection with a case of criminal conspiracy and culpable homicide transferred to this office by 1 Division, Nigerian Army, Kaduna, alongside with exhibit audio CD in which your name was mentioned by the principal suspect," the Kaduna state police commissioner stated in a letter addressed to Senator Sani.

READ ALSO: Fresh request: Labour reportedly demands N66,500 new minimum wage

Iwar said the invite is to enable the police fairly and timely conclude investigation into the matter.

The letter from the police was reportedly delivered to the senator through the clerk of the National Assembly, while copy of the letter was also forwarded to Senate president Bukola Saraki.

The police commissioner has insisted that the case against the senator was not politically motivated. A case was transferred to me and I am handling the case, Iwar said.

The matter is currently under investigation and we dont think we have reached a stage yet where we could inform the public about it, he added.

The police said the senator will not be detained if he honoured the invitation, adding that Sani would have picked him up at the Senate if the police had any intention of arresting him.

PAY ATTENTION: Read the best news on Nigerias #1 news app

However, the senator has accused the Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, of planning to frame him up with a murder case.

There is an attempt to frame me up with a murder case by the Kaduna State Government using the police. A letter has been written from the office of the Commissioner of Police office but it has not been delivered to us.

This is a case that is before the court of law. The governor wrote the judge expressing his interest in the case," he said on Thursday, April 12.

Meanwhile, the Senate has suspended Ovie Omo-Agege, an All Progressives Congress (APC) Senator from Delta state, for 90 legislative days.

The upper legislative chamber took the decision after it considered a report by its ethics committee, The Cable reports.

The committee had recommended that the senator be suspended for 181 days but the senate reduced it after pleas from lawmakers. Omo-Agege was one of the senators who kicked against the election reordering bill.

Although, he apologised for his stand he still went to the court to get a restraining order against any move by the senate to suspend him.

Lets talk about salaries of Nigerian senators | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- A serving corps member, Maduako Ugonma Chinomso, has been arrested by the EFCC for alleged fraud

- Her alleged accomplices are said to be at large

- The EFCC says further investigation showed six different accounts in different banks with huge amount of money

The Gombe zonal office of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has arraigned one Maduako Ugonma Chinomso before Justice Abubakar Jauro of the state high court on two count charge bordering on conspiracy and obtaining money by false pretence.

Madueke, a serving corps member posted to Kaduna and later redeployed to Akwa Ibom state was reportedly arrested at Uyo by the EFCC operatives following a petition by one Yusuf Idris of Tumfure quarters in Gombe stated.

READ ALSO: Breaking: Senate suspends Omo-Agege for 90 days, disbands Buhari support group in the House

According to the EFCC, the petitioner stated that on March 21, 2017, the defendant and others, now at large, conspired and obtained the sum of N63,000 under false pretence that the said sum was to secure a job for him with the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) which they never did.

The detained corps member. Credit: EFCC

Legit.ng understands that they allegedly converted the money to their personal use.

Investigation revealed that a member of the syndicate, Yusuf Maarku, the acclaimed recruitment officer gave the complainant a Union Bank number 0053158443 bearing Maduako Ugonma Chinomso through which the said sum was deposited as form, uniform and registration fee.

Further investigation revealed that there are six different accounts in different banks with huge amount of money which the suspect operates. When the charges were read to her, she pleaded not guilty; the prosecution counsel AM Labaran applied for a date of trial.

Justice Jauro while adjourning the case to Monday, 16th April, 2018, for hearing of her bail application, he remanded her in EFCC custody, the EFCC said.

PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 news app

Legit.ng earlier reported that Nanle Dariye, son of former Plateau governor, Senator Joshua Dariye, was on Tuesday, April 10, re-arraigned before the Abuja division of the Federal High Court by Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

It was gathered that Nanle is being arraigned on a six-count amended charge of money laundering to the tune of about N1.5 billion.

Dariye who was re-arraigned before Justice Ijeoma Ojukwu at the Federal High Court, Abuja, entered a not guilty plea to all six-counts.

Lagos Police Commissioner parades suspected criminals (Nigeria News) | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- AGF Abubakar Malami says the Nigerian government is concerned about the eight cases being investigated by the ICC

- Malami says Nigeria is a country that believes in rule of law and prosecution of those found to have committed any of such offences

- Prof Chile Osuji says article 27 of the Rome statute is not targeted at African leaders

The federal government, through the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) and minister of justice, Abubabakar Malami (SAN), has said it is worried that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is unrelenting in pursuing eight cases against Nigeria.

The Punch reports that Malami said this on Thursday, April 12, while playing host to the newly elected president of the ICC, Prof Chile Osuji, at his office in Abuja.

According to the report, Malami said the ICC had escalated eight potential cases against Nigeria from the initial preliminary examination to preliminary investigation.

READ ALSO: Breaking: Senate suspends Omo-Agege for 90 days, disbands Buhari support group in the House

It was learnt that six of the cases were said to be against Boko Haram and two against the military.

Malami complained that the stepping up of the investigation against Nigeria was troubling especially because the government had demonstrated its willingness and ability to arrest, investigate and prosecute anyone that committed any offence that fell within the Rome statute of the ICC.

Presently, the ICC has escalated the eight potential cases against Nigeria - six against the Boko Haram and two against the military - from the initial preliminary examination to preliminary investigation.

This is worrisome, as Nigeria has demonstrated beyond doubt, and in absolute cooperation with the ICC, that it is willing and able and, as a matter of fact, it is indeed arresting, investigating and prosecuting anyone that commits any offence that falls within the Rome Statute of the ICC.

The above being the case, Nigeria views the escalation of the eight potential cases as uncalled for in the circumstance, he said while assuring the ICC president that since Nigeria is a country that believes in the operation of the rule of law, fundamental freedom and the need to fight impunity in all ramifications, the escalation of the eight potential cases "would not deter us from further expressing and demonstrating support to the ICC."

PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 news app

In his response, Osuji commended Nigeria for its support to the ICC.

He also assured that the ICC would continue to work against injustice and abuse of powers in its area of jurisdiction just as he described as inaccurate and erroneous the impression that article 27 of the Rome Statute that prohibits immunity being extended to any head of state or senior government officials was targeted at African leaders.

Legit.ng earlier reported that the efforts by the International Criminal Court towards prosecution of Nigerian officials involved in the December 2015 alleged killings of members of Islamic Movements of Nigeria gained momentum recently.

The office of the prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal reached its preliminary conclusion into the killings in December 2017, and demanded explanations about the incident.

Offa bank robbery: Why some residents were shot by armed robbers - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ngToday, we turn to the disparities and inaccuracies of recently-hired CalPERS Chief Financial Officer Charles Asubontens Form 700 filing and his depiction of his private equity business.

As we described in our overview post, contrary to the normal practice of private equity firms, consultants, and businesses generally, Ausbonten has very rarely presented a firm name in public settings such as on LinkedIn and other websites, or on important documments. On the rare occasions when he has, we have been unable to find an instance of him using the same business name twice. He has also used a variant spelling of his name, Asubonteng, in Ghana, further making it difficult to examine his activities over time.

On the Form 700, a disclosure document required of all government officials in California, Asubonten provided an inaccurate address for a partnership which appears to represent most of his net worth. An informal reading from the Fair Political Practices Commission indicated that the response Asubonten provided does not comply with the requirements of the law.

As we discuss in more detail below, further investigation also raises more troubling questions regarding where Asubontens private equity firm was located and what sort of business it was engaged in.

Asubontens Inaccurate Form 700 Filing

Form 700 is an annual filing required of all California government officials, including at the local level. It is a statement of economic interests, designed to identify conflicts of interest, and so is not a comprehensive financial disclosure document. Having $200,000 in the bank or owning a dairy farm in Vermont that sold all of output east of the Mississippi would not represent a conflict of interest for a California official and hence would not be reportable.

Respondents are required, under very strong penalty of perjury language,1 to identify reportable interests. From the instruction section to Form 700:

Below is a screenshot of part of Asubontens Schedule A-2, Investments, Income, and Assets

of Business Entities/Trusts for 2017. You can also view it on page 3 of the first embedded document at the end of the post. Note that Asubonten listed only this business entity on his Schedule A-2:

For the moment, we will put aside the fact that this business name does not appear in any Internet searches and also differs from the business name Asubonten provided on his resume.

The address is a strip mall and does not look like a fitting location for either a private equity business, a consulting firm, or a financial advisory firm serving so-called accredited investors (high net worth individuals and institutions that are deemed by the SEC to be sophisticated and/or rich enough to invest in non-SEC registered securities and private partnerships).

Tenants at 8480 Baltimore National Pike include:

Ellicott City Taxicab Service

The Maids Home Cleaning in Ellicott City

Kumon Math and Reading Center of Ellicott City  Normandy

Ellicott City Sew-Vac

True Nails in Ellicott City MD

The one finance firm is Vaughn Calloway & Associates, a Primerica broker.

Here is another look at the property and the tenants from the listing agents website:

We called the listing broker and the property manager. Neither had heard of a Transmax or Charles Asubonten. Both had been responsible for the property in 2017, the year covered by Asubontens Form 700.

We asked each of them if there was any business that might be acting as a representative for Transmax, such as a law firm or an accountant. We mentioned the accountant at the address, Daniel Stein, and asked if there were any other lawyers or CPAs who had been at that address in 2017. Both said no.

We contacted Daniel Stein, who had just moved to a new location but said he had been a long-standing tenant at 8480 Baltimore National Pike. He said emphatically that neither a Transmax nor a Charles Asubonten had ever been a client and volunteered that hed never heard of them operating out of his former address.

We then called the UPS Store at 8480 Baltimore National Pike. UPS Stores offer a mailbox service, so it was possible that Transmax/RSA Capital had rented a box there.

After we e-mailed a copy of Asubontens Form 700, one of the managers confirmed that:

There had never been a mailbox in the name of Transmax/RSA Capital or even a Transmax at their facility Asubonten had rented a personal mailbox there, but that lease expired on October 1, 2017 The UPS Store would not have accepted mail addressed to Transmax/RSA Capital or Transmax. It would also have refused to take mail with Asubontens name plus Transmax but no box number, or Transmx with Asubontens personal box number. The store would accept mail only if it had both the name of the party renting the box and his box number on it

The Fair Political Practices Commission help line has confirmed that a business address that is not valid for mail delivery is not compliant with the requirements of Form 700.

As you can see from the resume embedded at the end of the page, Asubonten did not provide a location for his business. For all of his employers, he typically gave a city and state or country; for Mopani Copper Mines, he listed Zambia. By contrast, for his alleged private equity concern, he put Maximum Transformation in the spot where he listed the location for all his other job entries.

The fact that Asubontens private equity firm does not appear to have an office or even a valid address, raises further concerns, which we will discuss later.

Asubontens Man of Many Names Problem

As we have pointed out, it is very difficult to find evidence that Asubonten is in fact the principal of a private equity firm, meaning a firm which has committed capital which it invests on a discretionary basis and earns enough in fees and expense reimbursements to support its partners and staff.

Moreover, as you can see from the resume embedded at the end of this page, the description of activities that he provided is not that of a private equity firm, but a service provider to investors.

In the opening section of his resume, Asubonten further describes himself as the CFO of a private equity company when again, the detail under the Transmax section of his resume is inconsistent with that.

Moreover, private equity firms, due to their obsession with credentialing, are typically chary of using the CFO designation unless the job would be filled with someone who had CFO-level experience at a large asset manager or financial services company. While there are exceptions, most funds with less than $300 million under management use a more modest title for an in-house financial manager, like Controller. As we mentioned in an earlier post, if Asubontens firm had more than $150 million in assets under management, it would have been required to register with the SEC and if Asubonten were a principal, his name would be included in that listing. Neither Asubontens name nor that of any Transmax produces results in a search.

As we also stressed, both a private equity firm or a firm providing services to investors would have strong business incentives to promote their business name. By contrast, Asubonten has repeatedly avoiding the use of a business name and even when he has, he does not appear to have used the same name in a public setting twice. 2 Notice that even with CalPERS, Asubonten gave Transmax-Maximum Transformation on his resume and Transmax/RSA Capital on his Form 700.

We have also been unable to find a phone number or a website associated with Asubontens firm, which again is extremely unusual. We did an extensive search of Transmax-named business, nearly all of which are technology companies. We also searched for RSA Capital. While we did get more leads, only two appeared to be in the private equity business.3 One said it had never heard of Charles Asubonten. The other did not reply.

Asubontens wife is Rosiland Sheperd Asubonten, so the RSA in RSA Capital could refer to her.4

He did register transmax.biz on August 12, 2011, according to cubib.com, but the site appears never to have been built. The domain name is now owned by Dallas R. Dempster of Hyperion Energy in Australia.

Here is Asubontens private equity listing on LinkedIn, which true to his practice lists no firm name or location. Notice the prominent play he gives to having taken a two day course:

Asubonten has used firm names other than variants of Transmax when he has had to use names. He is currently renting a house at 5247 Harvey Lane in Ellicott City, Maryland, and public records show he began renting there in August 2015. I called PCF Property Management, who is managing the property, and got them to pull the records on his application. They confirmed the rental history (which Zillow showed initially at $3,700 a month, now $4,200 a month), that Asubonten entered the lease himself without a co-signer or his wife on the lease. They confirmed that he has always paid on time.

I asked whether Asubonten had listed himself as self employed on his rental application or if not, who he showed as his employer. The rental agent pulled up the record and read out Global Finance. I said I had never heard of such a company, and asked if she was sure. She reconfirmed it, and added that they asked renters to provide a pay stub and pass a credit and criminal background check. She said she didnt have an image of the pay stub to see that the employer name matched the employer name on the form, as it normally would.

Asubonten has also described himself as the Managing Director of Tragik Koncepts & Design. This image is from ZoomInfo, which scrapes LinkedIn profiles, meaning this information came from an older version of Asubontens LinkedIn page:

Tragik Koncepts was a tiny computer repair store, founded in 2009, which has closed:

Note again that this is the only company we have been able to find that might have been either an investee business or an consulting client of Asubontens firm.

Asubonten has also operated as Charles Asubonten & Associates. The Mining Indaba Junior Mining Showcase lists Charles Asubonten & Associates as an investor that participated in its 2017.

But finance professionals would regard Charles Asubonten & Associates as an un-investor-like company name, and would be more suited to a consulting firm.

ZoomInfo also indicates that Asubontens older LinkedIn profiles included him describing himself as a Managing Director of Private Equity, Inc. as well as Chief Financial Officer of the Zambia Post Office and of Rio Tinto, a company with $40 billion in revenues and 50 million employees:

As we pointed out earlier, Asubonten has done business under a variant spelling of his name in Ghana, Asubonteng. As an advisory board member, he is in an influential enough position to have the spelling corrected. And he would have incentive to do so, since he included Solar Light in the resume he presented to CalPERS (as we noted yesterday, misrepresenting it as an independent director role):

While one instance of a misspelling could be a mistake, a second sighting suggests it might be a pattern. While there is another Charles Asubonteng in Ghana, he studies ISO/IEC 27001, Medical Electronics, and Electronic Circuits and appears unlikely to be on a public procurement committee:

The reason to be particularly concerned that Asubonten may have operated under a different name in Ghana is that banking experts point out that the use of a mild variation in spelling leads to no realistic possibility of detection that the variant spelling name is that of a completely different individual.

Note that Ghana is on the GFSC Sensitive Sources Notice where financial institutions are required to engage in enhanced due diligence measures and give special attention to all existing and new business relationships and transactions connected with such countries or territories.

https://www.gfsc.gg/sites/default/files/20160322%20-%20Instruction%20Number%2001_2016%20-%20PBs%20-%20March%202016_0.pdf

In addition, one of Asubontens fellow advisory board members at Solar Light, Charles Botchway of Madison Street Capital in Chicago, has a less than savory reputation. The firm has pages of complaints about its boiler room calling operation.

Further Problems With Asubontens Form 700

Well return to Asubontens Form 700 to look at a final set of inconsistencies.

One has to believe a remarkably convenient set of coincidences to view this section of Asubontens description of his firm Transmax/RSA Capital on his Form 700 is accurate.

Recall that listing Transmax/RSA Capital in the Form 700 means Asubonten is acknowledging that it has a California nexus, meaning it has income or investments that are either in California or are companies that do business in California. Recall also that Asubonten has given contradictory descriptions of what business his business is really in. He has regularly described it as a private equity firm which means it manages other peoples money on a discretionary basis. But the description of the activities of Transmax-Maximum Transformation on his resume is that of a service provider, such as a consulting firm, and not an asset manager.

Let us first assume that Asubontens firm is indeed a private equity firm, meaning it acquires significant, usually controlling, interests in private businesses. Somehow, Transmax/RSA Capitals owned businesses do business in or are located in California, but by lucky happenstance, Transmax/RSA Capitals ownership in each of those businesses is worth less than $2,000, so it doesnt have to tell the State of California or the public about them.

To put it politely, that does not seem like a very plausible scenario, particularly given that California requires Form 700 filers to report on investments that were doing business in their jurisdiction in the two years prior to the filing year as well as ones considering doing business in the jurisdiction.

The other scenario is that Transmax/RSA Capital is a firm that provides advisory services to private equity investors. Recall that Asubonten valued his share of the firm as being in excess of $1 million. Let us assume its $1 over $1 million, which is charitable for the purpose of this analysis.

Consulting firms sell for 1 to 2 times revenues (the exceptions are ones with big brand names, which does not apply here). That means Asubontens firm would have had at least $500,000 in revenue in 2017.

Having regularly provided advisory services to private equity investors myself, as well as knowing many ex-McKinsey professionals who are in that business, it would be very unusual to have a client who paid only $10,000 in a year for this type of services, unless it was a small invoice from a bigger assignment in a different year.5 Yet the story we are to believe is that none of Transmax/RSA Capitals clients who had recently, were currently, or were considering doing business in California had paid for more than $10,000 of services.

Needless to say, one would hope to have a clearer and more confidence-inspiring history for someone assuming such an important position.

_____

1 From the bottom of the first page of the Form 700, which incorporates the supporting schedules, such as the one we discuss in this post (emphasis original):

I have used all reasonable diligence in preparing this statement. I have reviewed this statement and to the best of my knowledge the information contained herein and in any attached schedules is true and complete. I acknowledge this is a public document. I certify under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of California that the foregoing is true and complete.

2 I did manage to find one occasion in which Asubonten had use the name Transmax on the application for a program. But the firm stated they did not publish the firm name and the only place it could be found was in their database, which they do not sell for marketing. So that does not disprove the point.

3 We inquired with some of the firms, such as RSA Capital in New York City, which did not list having a private equity operation but could conceivably still have a small one, and we got no replies.

4 Form 700 also requires that respondents report 50% of their spouses community property interest.

5 For a private equity firm or any investor with meaningful funds to deploy, it isnt worth the hassle to vet and negotiate with a new consultant for a mere $10,000 of bespoke work.Yves here. Many readers will find the criticisms in the post to be understated. For instance, its odd to see Frank spend so much time on the difficulty of shopping for health insurance, when the problem of shopping for medical services is even greater due to the vast information asymmetries. Prices are famously opaque, particularly for surgeries and hospitalizations. You as a patient cant do a very good job of assessing whether your doctor is any good, and most people wind up relying on proxies like bedside manner that can be misleading. And American doctors love to overtest and overtreat, and that is enabled by patients who have been encouraged to expect too much of medicine.

By Jag Bhalla, an entrepreneur and writer. His current project is Errors We Live By, a series of short exoteric essays exposing errors in the big ideas running our lives. Follow him: @hangingnoodles. Originally published at Jag Bhallas Big Think blog

Jag Bhalla interview with Economist Robert H. Frank

Fans of let-the-market-decide thinking face a trillion-dollar puzzle thats deadly as well as costly. To diagnose this unhealthy situation, were fortunate to have Robert Frank (RF), an economist who writes regularly for The New York Times (hes also written booksI regularly quote).

JB:Ive long felt that core economic ideas (~creeds) are ailing and failing to meet clearly desirable collective goals. Your latest NYT pieceprovides a great and glaring example, as you say America spends far more on health care than any other nation, yet gets worse outcomes. What are the numbers (per capita)?

RF:American per capita health care expenditures are more than twice the average of those in the 35 advanced countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That was a spending difference of more than $5,000 per person in 2016. But although we spend 18 percent of our national income on health care (or $1.65 trillion more annually than if we spent at the average OECD level), our system delivers significantly less favorable outcomes on the measures we care most about. Among developed countries, for example, we have the lowest life expectancy, the greatest incidence of chronic illnesses, and the highest infant, child, and maternal mortality rates.

JB:Why does Americas more market-oriented system (unique among rich nations) do so badly? How does the persistence and worsening of inefficiencies square with the markets-deliver-efficiency creed (the deep faith that markets self-organize to everyones benefit and incentives ensure efficient resource usage)?

RF: No developed country other than the United States relies on largely unregulated insurance companies for the provision of health care. As I explained in the column you mentioned, we almost certainly would have adopted the single-payer systems common in other countries except for a regulatory loophole during World War II.

The problem with private insurance is that it tends to break down when potential policy holders have much better information about their individual risks than insurers do. That information asymmetry is clearly present for individual risks of illness. People who know themselves to be most at risk of needing costly care are more likely than others to buy insurance, which drives premiums up, making insurance less attractive to the healthiest people. As those people drop out of the insured pool, rates rise further, which makes insurance still less attractive to the healthiest policy holders who remain, and so on. Economists call this an adverse-selection problem.

The American health insurance system was in the throes of the resulting death spiral when the Affordable Care Act was adopted. That legislation reversed the decline in the insured population and made tentative first steps at cost control. But it was not enough to eliminate our systems glaring inefficiencies.

JB:Can you say a bit more about why the US spends so much more?

RF:Administrative costs under private insurance plans, for example, are about six times as high as under single-payer plans like Medicare. And unlike private insurance plans, single-payer plans spend virtually nothing on advertising and marketing. But by far the most important reason for higher health care costs in the US is that service providers charge so much more here than elsewhere. The average cost of coronary bypass surgery, for example, is more than three times higher in the United States than in France, and a day in an American hospital costs twelve times as much as one in The Netherlands.

JB:When Republicans were campaigning to repeal the Affordable Care Act, market enthusiasts like Paul Ryan insisted that competition among private insurers would lead to both lower prices and higher quality health care. Competition seems to have delivered high-quality goods at reasonable prices in many markets. Why shouldnt we expect the same with health care?

RF:Economic theory tells us that this would be a reasonable expectation if certain conditions were met. Many of these conditions concern whether buyers and sellers can assess the attractiveness of transactions they are considering. Because insurance companies find it difficult to measure the risks posed by potential policy holders, we get the adverse selection problem described earlier. A related problem arises on the buyers side. In practice, people have little knowledge of the treatment options for the various maladies they might suffer, and policy language describing insurance coverage is notoriously complex and technical. Although consumers can easily compare the prices charged by competing insurance companies, they simply cannot make informed quality comparisons in this industry.

Because of the latter asymmetry, companies are under pressure to compete by highlighting the lower prices theyre able to offer if they cut costs by degrading the quality of their offerings. For example, its common for insurance companies to deny payment for procedures that their policies ostensibly cover. If policy holders complain loudly enough, they may eventually get reimbursed, but the money companies save by not paying others enables them to offer price cuts, which are a decisive competitive advantage over rivals that dont employ this tactic. Such tactics are essentially absent under single-payer systems like Medicare.

In short, market competition often does deliver the benign results that its proponents claim, but only when important conditions are satisfied. In markets for the delivery of health care, many of those conditions just arent met.

JB:So the very same self-interest that drives markets, in practice often becomes collectively pathological. Your NYT piece ends on an optimistic note by saying, there are attractive paths forward to fix this deadly national embarrassment without requiring painful sacrifices. How can we overcome the self interest of those gaining from the current $ trillion overspend?

RF:Steps that would permit an orderly transition to Medicare-for-All are described in a recent American Prospect articleby the Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. A similar transition proposal has been suggested by policy analysts at the Center for American Progress.

My remark about no painful sacrifices being required for this transition was about the citizens whose tax dollars would support a single-payer system. Since the overall cost of single-payer would be so much lower than under the current system, the switch would actually save money for most of those taxpayers. But because the tax increases required to pay for the switch are far more visible that many of the hidden levies that pay for our current system, wed want to explain carefully why peoples net outlays for health care would actually be going down.

Because the biggest savings associated with single-payer come from reduced payments to service providers, the switch would require American doctors and administrators to work for significantly less than they currently earn. But how painful would those sacrifices be? We know that highly qualified people are eager to become health-care professionals in countries where providers earn nothing like the premium salaries we see here. If you saw Michael Moores interviews with British NHS doctors inSicko, you probably were struck, as I was, by how content they seemed with their standard of living.

A consistent message from the happiness literature is that once a certain absolute material standard is achieved, satisfaction from pay is heavily reference dependent. For doctors to be happy with their pay, they must earn as much as other doctors in the same environment earn. Another consistent message from this literature is that the comparisons that really matter are highly local. That helps explain why American doctors who work for non-profit clinics like Mayo, Cleveland, and Kaiser, who earn substantially less than their fee-for-service counterparts while delivering measurably better health outcomes for their patients, nonetheless seem quite content with their terms of employment. My own view is that asking fee-for-service physicians to work under such contracts here would not qualify as demanding painful sacrifices from them.

Doctors like the ones Atul Gawande profiled in this New Yorker piece would no doubt scream bloody murder if forced to live on only what they could garner under Medicare reimbursement rates. For some of them, the switch really would constitute a painful sacrifice. I probably should have written the last sentence in my column as Avoiding this national embarrassment would actually require few painful sacrifices.

JB:Its critical that we inject more realism into economic creeds (just so stories). Without more market realism (realonomics?) we wont be able to detect and diagnose when markets get stuck in counterproductive conditions (where chronic inflammation or cancerous growth imposes a private tax burden on individuals and businesses (~$19k per employee).Yves here. Real News Network helps cut the fog around the state of play in Syria via an interview with Patrick Cockburn.

BEN NORTON: Its the Real News. Im Ben Norton. Tensions are flaring in Washington as the Donald Trump administration is reportedly considering a military attack on the Syrian government. On April 7, antigovernment opposition groups in the town of Douma, Syria claimed that dozens of people were killed in a chemical weapons attack. The rebels blamed the government. The government has staunchly denied responsibility for the alleged attack.

Douma is the last remaining town in the region of Eastern Ghouta, an enclave for Salafi jihadist militants who have been fighting against the Syrian government with support, including military and economic support, from the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Douma is controlled by the extremist Salafi jihadist militia Jaysh al-Islam, which is notorious for carrying out attacks on civilians. Jaysh al-Islam was created by Saudi Arabia, and has put women from the Shia Alawite minority in cages.

Opposition groups that have received millions of dollars of funding from the United States and other foreign countries have made these allegations. They say that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack that killed more than 40 people.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the OPCW, announced on Tuesday, April 10 that it will be sending a special mission to Douma to verify reports on the ground on the alleged use of chemical weapons. The United Nations condemned the alleged attack and said it is not able to verify the reports. The U.N. called for an independent investigation.

Although there has not yet been an independent investigation, the Trump administration immediately blamed the Syrian government for the attack and has threatened retaliation.

DONALD TRUMP: We are making a decision in respect to the horrible attack that was made near Damascus. It will be met, and it will be met forcefully. And when I will not say, because I dont like talking about timing. We have a lot of options, military, and we will be letting you know pretty soon.

BEN NORTON: Joining us to discuss the story is Patrick Cockburn, an award-winning journalist and longtime correspondent for the British newspaper the Independent. Thanks for joining us, Patrick.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Thank you.

BEN NORTON: So, Patrick, can you speak about what exactly we know? There has not yet been independent investigation into whats been going on. We have photo and video which were released by opposition groups on social media. They have not been independently verified. What exactly do we know from what happened on the ground in Douma?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, theres reporting from within Douma, which at that moment was held by Jaysh al-Islam, but the hospital that we saw shots of now seems to be held by the Syrian army. And there were film of dead and dying children, there was shots of gas cylinders.

The problem with this is that all this comes from the people inside Douma, which as you said is controlled by Jaysh al-Islam. Theres been no independent verification yet. And its pretty clear from what, for instance, in Britain Theresa May is saying, that we are still waiting to be sure who carried out this attack. That governments are being told by their own intelligence services that its not exactly clear what happened. Curiously, the media reporting this sounds much more sure in attributing blame to the Assad government than the people like Theresa May and other political leaders who presumably are getting other information from their intelligence people.

BEN NORTON: Yeah, Patrick, this is also interesting because in the past few weeks there has been another scandal related to chemical weapons, or alleged chemical weapons use. That is, that the British government immediately blamed Russia for the poisoning of the former spy Sergei Skripal. Boris Johnson had claimed that the government intelligence services knew Russia was behind the attack, but then later the British intelligence services themselves acknowledged that they actually arent sure who was behind the attack.

So clearly there is a history here of manipulation of intelligence. This is very partisan. Its very politicized. The United Nations and the OPCW have not been as partisan and politicized. In fact, neither of them have apportioned blame and both have called for investigations. What do you think will happen next? Do you think there will be investigations? And what do you think they could show.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Yes, and I think thats pretty sensible, that they should investigate it. You know you can, you know, the other difficulty in this is motive. If it was intentionally done by the Assad government, why should they do it just as they were capturing Douma, the last opposition stronghold in Eastern Ghouta? They, in fact, they had every reason for this not to happen. This was the one thing that would taint their success there. So that is peculiar. It doesnt rule it out. Governments do very stupid things. And also they do things by accident. But you know, this is one reason for skepticism.

I mean, the answer is one doesnt know. You cant be certain until theres some form of independent investigation, which may now happen. But its a peculiar situation because today there were pictures of 2000 rebel fighters and their families being passed out of Douma. So the situation in the ground has changed since this alleged attack took place. So its, you know, its in a, everything is in a state of great confusion.

BEN NORTON: Yes. And the group that controls Douma, Jaysh al-Islam, is notorious for carrying out attacks against civilians. In fact, mainstream human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and others have documented their attacks, Jaish al-Islams attacks on civilians. Including, as I mentioned, putting Alawite women in cages. So clearly there is a precedent here for many of these extremist groups to carry out these kinds of attacks.

That said, the opposition would claim that the Syrian government is on the verge of retaking this area and is trying to scare any other opposition groups, and force them into submission by carrying out an attack like this. Thats the argument the opposition makes. What would you say in response to that?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Yeah. I think, you know, the opposition itself has said and others have noted, you know, there isnt any doubt about the aggressiveness of the Syrian government in clamping down or crushing dissent or opposition. So you know, I dont see that that argument works, that suddenly they would use chemical munitions to assert this. Im not saying that they didnt, you know. I think that, you know, its quite conceivable that they might.

But you know, for certainty, and I think this is why governments, Western governments are, are cautious, for certainty you need independent verification. You cant just take these assertions by the opposition, or Assad, or the Russians for that matter, saying what happened.

You know, its like anything else that happens in these opposition-held areas, that often the media just takes this as being proof that some atrocity has occurred there, although the only source of information is partisan and uncheckable, because independent journalists, independent investigators cant go to those areas without, or havent been able to go to those areas, without the very strong risk of being kidnapped or beheaded.

BEN NORTON: The Trump administration has jumped the gun on this. Donald Trump tweeted immediately after the attack, Many dead, including women and children, in mindless chemical attack. And then he added, President Putin, Russia, and Iran are responsible for backing animal Assad. Big price to pay. And then he added, If President Obama had crossed his stated red line, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago. And he repeatedly called the Syrian president animal Assad.

The Trump administration appears to be considering airstrikes on Syrian government targets. There were also reports of alleged Israeli attacks on Homs immediately after this attack. Can you speak about the Trump administration, which appears to be certain about this assault, and is considering launching military intervention?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, it seems certain at that moment. You know, one knows that Trumps tweets saying one thing and then, you know, other parts of the U.S. government say something else subsequently, or Trump himself says something different down the line. So that isnt sort of set in steel.

On the other hand, saying that Assad will pay a price and criticizing Obama for what happened in 2013 makes it difficult for him to row back from that without doing something. But you know, Trump himself criticized what happened, the suggestion that there should be an attack on Syria in 2013, and with good reason. You know, we had been, Obama had ordered a strike. How different would it be from the strike that Trump ordered a year ago?

Unless people who advocate a strike are really sort of concealing the fact that what they really propose is an invasion of Syria, or a sustained military campaign, like that which the U.S. has been conducting in eastern Syria. But I think that its a myth that this was the great turning point in 2013, which is believed both on the left and the right. I think they simply wasnt the case.

And it wont, itll be, again, today if there is, what exactly are the military options if there is a one-off attack all over the country against Assads forces? Well, it wont really change the situation on the ground because the armed opposition has lost. So you know, its last troops are being evacuated from Douma. The only opposition still in Damascus, the only enclave still held is one held by ISIS and by Islamic State inside Damascus. So that doesnt really change the military balance of power.

The only thing that would do would be an all-out invasion. And thats not really being proposed. You also have the fact that there are other air forces there. You have Russian air defense. If you will attack all the airports, are the Russian air defense missiles not going to fire? That seems a bit unlikely.

So the sort of knee-jerk idea that to punish Assad you launch military strikes, really regardless of the consequences, including the likelihood that the consequences would be nil, seems to me very, sort of, naive. And its, you know, its rather extraordinary its got such support without any justification in terms of what the effect would be.

BEN NORTON: Well, this week John Bolton, an extremely hardline neoconservative, just entered the White House as Trumps new national security adviser. Bolton, who has repeatedly called for the U.S. to bomb Iran, is also extremely hawkish on Syria, and its a very real possibility that he and the Trump administration may carry out some kind of significant military attack against the Syrian government. What do you think the consequences of that would be?

Theres no question that the groups that would stand to gain from it on the ground would be extremists like Jaysh al-Islam. Also Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which is rebranded al-Qaeda, which controls Idlib. What do you think would happen? We see many arguments today that we saw in 2011 when NATO militarily intervened and toppled the state in Libya. Libya is now a failed state. I dont imagine the same thing happening in Syria, because the war is coming to an end. But what do you think the consequences of dramatic military action could be?

PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, its the end in Damascus of one part of the armed opposition. They still have a lot of strength in Idlib province in the north, and around Aleppo. Theyre backed by Turkey. So theyre not entirely out of business. But you know, its really unlikely that the Assad government is going to collapse. You know its, on the contrary, its been getting stronger, taking east Aleppo in 2016 and taking the final opposition stronghold in Damascus just now. So I dont think that thats likely.

You know, in northeast Syria the U.S. backs up the Kurds, but the Kurds dont want to attack the Assad government. On the contrary, theyre more frightened of the Turks than they are of the Assad government, and will probably look for a deal with Assad when they can.

So I dont think that there are, there just arent any realistic military options other than a sort of gesture by launching these airstrikes, which I guess something will happen, given all that Trump and the others have been saying. But its very difficult to see this changing the situation on the ground.

Which doesnt mean that theyre not very dangerous, because you have all these different air forces flying over a not very big place in western Syria, U.S. aircraft, potentially U.S. aircraft, British aircraft, French aircraft, Russian aircraft, Israeli aircraft, Turkish aircraft. Theres lots of room for mistakes. What if the U.S. launches attacks, and U.S. aircraft are shot down by Russian anti-aircraft missiles? You know, then we, the whole crisis escalates.

So there arent any really good military options. And there are a lot of very dangerous military options.

BEN NORTON: And then finally, Patrick, weve seen a lot of reports, rightfully, on the enormous civilian casualties inflicted by the Syrian government. Hundreds of civilians have been killed in this assault on Eastern Ghouta. But of course, we havent seen many reports in the Western media on the civilian casualties of the extremist Salafi jihadist groups, namely Jaysh al-Islam. Also Faylaq al-Rahman and other groups that control this area. So we saw massacres inside Damascus by Jaysh al-Islam which recently killed dozens of civilians at a market, after shelling a market in Damascus.

And in the past few days, actually, there also have been some reports, mostly in the Middle Eastern press, not so much in the Western press, of the thousands of prisoners, including civilian hostages who were held by Jaysh al-Islam and who were freed by the Syrian government. In fact, there have been reports that several thousand people have been held and only a few hundred have been released. So there are thousands of civilians and political prisoners who are missing. Why dont we hear much about that, and do you know anything about, about these issues?

PATRICK COCKBURN: The reports are that there are 1600 dead, 5000-6000 wounded, injured. So you know, thats pretty high civilian casualties . One shouldnt understate that. The other reports are that there are 3500 prisoners held by Jaysh al-Islam, and one of the reasons that the negotiations were delayed over the last few days was that the discussion was over the release of these prisoners by Jaysh al-Islam. But how many are actually being released, how many are really there, I dont know. I dont think anybody knows at this stage.

BEN NORTON: Patrick Cockburn is an award-winning journalist and longtime correspondent for the British newspaper the Independent. Thanks a lot, Patrick.

PATRICK COCKBURN: Thank you.

BEN NORTON: For the Real News, Im Ben Norton.Over the last two days, weve described how CalPERS recently-hired CFO Charles Asubonten made many misrepresentations on his resume and also gave conflicting and inflated descriptions of his activities in private equity.

In this post, we will discuss why, even if Asubontens resume had been accurate, he is not qualified for the Chief Financial Officer position at CalPERS. That in turn raises troubling questions as to why CalPERS and its search firm, Heidrick & Struggles, let him advance to a finalist in the selection process and then on top of that, failed to do adequate vetting of his claims about his background.

But before we turn to those issues, some context is relevant.

CalPERS Checkered History in Filling Its Chief Financial Officer Position

CalPERS established a Chief Financial Officer position in 2012 to give the manager handling budget and financial operations a stronger policy orientation. The first individual to fill the position, Cheryl Eason, had professional qualifications consistent with the job description for her replacement. From the Chief Financial Officer recruitment brochure at the end of this post:

Candidates must have worked in sophisticated and complex businesses with a specific focus on large pension funds, global financial institutions, asset managers, and other diversified financial services companiesThe CFO must be a seasoned and respected professional with at least 10 years of experience in a large pension fund or financial institution managing complex financial operations.

The job specs also set forth educational requirements (a BA in accounting or a related field) and state a preference for a CPA or a CFA certification.

Eason left CalPERS on January 6, 2017. CalPERS then suffered the self inflicted wound of naming a new Chief Financial Officer, only to have him withdraw.

CalPERS board member Richard Gillihan accepted the the offer to become Chief Financial Officer in early June. CalPERS announced that he would be joining, as you can see from this Sacramento Bee article.

Before CalPERS announced Gillihans appointment, former board member JJ Jelincic pointed out that Gillihan had what is called a 1090 problem. California Government Code Section 1090 prohibits government officials from having a financial interest in any contract they made. Gillihan had been involved in the wage-setting for the CFO position, which meant in taking the job, he would have benefitted from his previous action.

Even though CEO Marcie Frost and General Counsel Matt Jacobs initially waved off Jelincics warning, other lawyers confirmed his concerns, leading to further investigation of the issue. Gillihan decided he did not want the legal exposure and withdrew his acceptance.

CalPERS had already done a salary survey in connection with the CFO search and the preparation of the brochure below in January 2017. They were not redone when the search resumed in June. Asubonten accepted the job offer on September 12 and joined October 2. That is a long enough time lapse that it suggests that CalPERS did not simply take the second or third place candidate from the earlier search, since they presumably would have gotten the offer out sooner.

Asubontens Shortcomings for the CalPERS CFO Position

Asubonten falls dramatically short of CalPERS required professional competencies. Not only has he not worked for ten years in a large pension fund or financial firm overseeing complex operations, he has no financial institutions experience whatsoever. Running what was at best a microscopically small private equity business does not qualify. Nor does having been the chief financial officer at two mining sites.

While it is no doubt tiresome to be told that financial institutions really are different, one way that that is true is in terms of the level of transaction activity and the related operational and control demands. Just think of how many transactions even a mere mid-sized bank handles between its retail customers (checking and saving account transactions, potentially also credit card transactions, as well as mortgage and auto loans) and businesses, who would have even higher transaction levels and more service needs (starting with payroll and vendor payments).

As Associate Professor of Economics and Law and white collar criminologist Bill Black wrote:

Charles A. Asubonten is CalPERS latest chief financial officer (CFO). Over a decade ago, CalPERS set the standard for superb investment by pension funds. It then descended into scandal involving substantial corruption. The acute phase of that corruption has ended, but CalPERS remains a shell of its former glory with weak senior executive officials determined to remove the funds transparency that once set a global standard. Unfortunately, Mr. Asubonten epitomizes CalPERS retreat from the best practices it once championed into the Wall Street sleaze that led to the CalPERS scandals. Mr. Asubonten has a fine education, but his work experience, even if we take his dubious resume as accurate, should not have led to him being included in even the most preliminary pool of potential candidates for CalPERS CFO. Phrased most favorably to him, he may have expertise in mining in Africa. He is not remotely appropriate to lead a massive pension fund. He is not appropriate to lead the vigorous reform effort CalPERS desperately needs in which he would have to take on the culture of concealment and mediocrity that CalPERS senior management team has created. Mr. Asubonten adds to CalPERS problems rather than fixing them.

Other financial institutions experts who have reviewed Asubontens background are surprised that he was hired at CalPERS. They have volunteered that his background is fitting for an assistant Treasurer or Treasurer position at a financial institution, not chief financial officer.

What Does This Fiasco Say About CalPERS and Heidrick & Struggles?

This is not the first time that CEO Marcie Frost has tried to put someone lacking in needed skills in a senior position. She tried bringing in an unqualified crony from her former home, the Washington State pension fund, in the critically important role of Chief Actuary. Bear in mind that the Chief Actuary position at CalPERS is seen as the second most difficult in the US, exceeded only by the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration, by virtue of CalPERS administering over 2200 pension plans. As we wrote in October 2016:

This Thursday, November 3, the California State Personnel Board is set to approve changes to the job description of CalPERS Chief Actuary that are depicted as minor but are anything but. The proposed changes both amount to a violation of the California Constitution by attempting to end the required role of the board in policy-making, and separately so far reducing the minimum qualifications for the job that they will be lower than that for the most junior actuaries now employed at CalPERS. Needless to say, that makes a mockery of the claim that CalPERS needs to dumb down the job description so severely to fill the post. CalPERS could promote someone from inside by relaxing the requirements less or not at all. One has to assume that the motivation for allowing a person who would be deemed to be grossly unqualified under current rules to be hired in the Chief Actuary is that the new CEO, Marcie Frost, has someone specific shed like to bring in. The fact that Frost herself does not have a college degree and certainly does not have the mathematical chops to evaluate an actuarys professional competence certainly looks like she is giving personal loyalty far too much weight in a role where analytical rigor and professionalism are of paramount importance.

CalPERS withdrew its plan to greatly reduce the qualifications required for the Chief Actuary position shortly after our post ran.

If you look at the Chief Financial Officer job description below, you can see how little space it gives to professional skills and how much to touchy-feeley attributes. One industry professional remarked it was almost as if the people who wrote this document either didnt know or didnt care much about what a CFO did.

And some of the leadership fetishes served up as part of the Chief Financial Officer job requirements arent a good fit. Being the Chief Financial Officer is a trains must run on time position. Creativity isnt a necessarily a good thing, for instance. Nor is it clear why a CFO in an organization that does not do financings needs to adapt to changing market positions. Thats the job of the investing side.

Another question is how someone so obviously unqualified for the role got serious consideration, much the less hired. Many observers argued his candidacy must have been pushed by an interested party with some clout. But even so, Asubonten should have gotten more scrutiny. First, large institutions strongly prefer individuals from other large organizations, and for good reason. They typically have higher caliber employees. Senior managers also have large spans of control That means they operate in a more formal manner, with periodic reports, management information systems, and procedures being far more important than in a small shop, where most things are done on an ad hoc basis.

Another reason for opting for candidates from large organizations is that it is much easier to vet their backgrounds. The search community would be familiar not just with the standards and quirks of past employers but even with many of their senior executives. By contrast, someone from a little company is a big unknown unless theyve worked extensively with the prospective employer.

In addition, given CalPERS expressed concern with integrity, such as demonstrates a high degree of integrity, honesty, and ethical behavior, the mining industry is not a paragon of virtue. For instance, one of Asubontens former employers, Mopani Copper Mines refused to pay a windfall tax in 2008 and in 2011 was accused of tax evasion. And, of course, our posts extensive analysis of Asubontens resume and Form 700 inaccuracies and misrepresentations raise pointed questions about his candor.

Asubontens hiring is also a black eye for CalPERS search firm Heidrick & Struggles. It is hard to see how anyone who has spent his last four years in what amounts to a small business could be seen as a serious candidate for a position at CalPERS, absent some visible achievement that showed he had relevant expertise. Heidrick & Struggles was also in a vastly better position than I was to vet resume claims that looked questionable on their face and therefore called for verification. If CalPERS does not demand that Heidrick & Struggles refund this search fee, it would suggest that this search process was more than merely sloppy.

CalPERS needs to suspend Asubonten immediately and conduct a thorough investigation. Anything less than that would confirm that the institution is beyond redemption. But that seems to be precisely what is happening. Several contacts have told us that CalPERS is still defending Asubonten and denying the significance of his extensive misrepresentations on his resume and official forms.

As sometime guest poster Clive pointed out, Yahoo fired its CEO over a single falsification on his resume. Weve presented ample evidence that Asubonten has made many. The message is all too clear. CEO Marcie Frost regards it as more important to defend her decisions and support her inner team than give top priority to her paramount duty, that of protecting CalPERS beneficiaries and California taxpayers.Mechanism of oxidative unzipping of multiwall carbon nanotubes to graphene nanoribbons (Nanowerk News) Graphene, a two-dimensional lattice of carbon atoms, has attracted enormous interest from a broad base of the research community for more than one decade. Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), narrow strips of graphene, being quasi one-dimensional, possess complementary features relative to their two-dimensional counterpart of graphene sheets. Based on theoretical calculations, GNRs' electrical properties can be controlled by the width and edge configuration and they can vary from being metallic to semiconducting.

The physical properties of the GNRs depend significantly on the size and number of layers, which in turn depend on their synthesis method.

There are three major approaches for synthesis of GNRs: cutting graphene by different lithographic techniques; bottom-up synthesis from polycyclic molecules; and unzipping of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). While the bottom-up method provides a route to precise edge control, and the lithographic method can afford GNRs with precise placement, the unzipping method has the advantage of mass-production on a large scale.

Intercalation-unzipping, oxidation, and exfoliation of carbon nanotubes. (Image: Kazan Federal University, Laboratory of Advanced Carbon Nanomaterials) (click on image to enlarge)

MWCNT unzipping methods can be classified into four major types: the reductive-intercalation-assisted approach, the oxidative unzipping, the electrochemical unzipping, and the group of methods that can be denoted as miscellaneous. The first approach is based on the well-known ability of alkali metals to intercalate graphite with expansion in the Z-axis direction.

Being applied toward MWCNTs, such lattice expansion induces extreme stress within the concentric walls, resulted in the bursting, or longitudinal opening, of the tubes. The resulting GNRs are highly conductive, but they remain multi-layered and foliated. Due to the attraction between the surfaces, they do not exfoliate to single-layer ribbons.

The oxidative approach involves treatment of MWCNTs in acidic oxidative media with the formulation almost identical to that used in production of graphene oxide (GO) from graphite by the Hummers method. The resulting product is graphene oxide nanoribbons (GONRs). Unlike GNRs obtained by the reductive-intercalation method, GONRs easily exfoliate in aqueous solution, and they can be obtained as single-layered structures.

A reaction mechanism for oxidative unzipping was proposed by Kosynkin et al (Nature, "Longitudinal Unzipping of Carbon Nanotubes to Form Graphene Nanoribbons"). Invoking the classical oxidation of the alkenes by permanganate in acids, the first step is the formation of manganate ester on a C-C bond, and the second step is the rupture of the C-C bond with formation of ketones at the newly formed edges.

This mechanism was further developed in the theoretical work by Rangel et al (The Journal of Chemical Physics, "Mechanism of Carbon Nanotubes Unzipping Into Graphene Ribbons"). The original synthesis spawned numerous studies on oxidative unzipping of MWCNTs. In many reports, the unzipping process was denoted as "chemical" as opposed to the "intercalation-exfoliation", indicating that the permanganate-induced oxidative mechanism has been commonly accepted, and was even suggested toward unzipping SWCNTs.

The newly proposed mechanism was based on the Lab's competences on the studies of the mechanism of GO formation of graphite that involves three consecutive steps: (a) intercalation of graphite by sulfuric acid with formation of a stage-1 H 2 SO 4 -graphite intercalation compound (GIC); (b) conversion of stage-1 H 2 SO 4 -GIC into pristine GO, and (c) exfoliation of GO to single-layer sheets upon exposure to water. Thus, under given conditions, formation of stage-1 H 2 SO 4 -GIC is unavoidable for any graphitic material. Subsequently, the mechanism of the oxidative unzipping of MWCNTs might be also intercalation-driven.

If this is correct, one should be able to stop the reaction after the first intercalation-unzipping step before the second oxidation step proceeds. If attained, this will afford unzipped but not oxidized or minimally oxidized products possessing properties similar to reductively unzipped GNRs obtained by potassium or sodium-potassium metal intercalation.

In this work (ACS Nano, "Revisiting the Mechanism of Oxidative Unzipping of Multiwall Carbon Nanotubes to Graphene Nanoribbons"), the Lab investigated the impact of the two key parameters, the KMnO 4 /MWCNT ratio, and the time of reaction on the structure and composition of as-obtained GNR products, and derived a revised and more complete understanding of the unzipping process.

The researchers demonstrated that the mechanism of the oxidative unzipping of MWCNTs is indeed intercalation-driven. The overall unzipping process involves the same three steps as in the course of GO production from graphite by the Hummers and modified Hummers methods: intercalation, oxidation, and exfoliation. With MWCNTs, the intercalation is associated with simultaneous unzipping.

At low KMnO 4 /MWCNT ratios, one can obtain GNRs with characteristics similar to those produced by reductive unzipping. 0.12 wt equiv KMnO 4 is the threshold ratio sufficient for almost complete unzipping, with only small amounts of covalent oxidation. Controlling the KMnO 4 /MWCNT ratio and time of reaction allows one to produce GNRs with the properties varying in a broad continuous range from multi-layered graphenic GNRs through single-layered GONRs.

Thus, the team answered several questions that remained open in the field of unzipping MWCNTs, such as the reason why the inner-most walls of the nanotubes remain zipped.A Tipperary Presentation Sister is the subject of a new documentary  Sister India  produced by Irish film-maker, Myles OReilly.

Sr. Loreto, born Peg Houlihan at Tinhalla near Carrick-on-Suir in 1927 has spent 70 years teaching in India where she recently celebrated her 91st birthday. The film is currently being screened at a number of film festivals in Ireland and in India.

The idea for the film was sparked by another Irish woman, Aine Edwards, who has been living in India since 2003 where she runs a business consultancy service. My many conversations with Sr. Loreto she says evoked a passion in me to produce a documentary on her. I wanted to not only share her story, but also to celebrate the work of so many other Irish educators in India, as this era draws to a close and another starts.

The Irish legacy of education in India is one of Irelands strongest links with the country says Aine. The seeds have been sown for the Indian sisters to take this legacy forward for the next generation of children. Sister India was made to preserve not only the story of Sr. Loreto, but to remember all the Irish who have dedicated their lives in the service of education and community support in India.

The first Presentation mission in India began in 1842 when four pioneering sisters from Ireland arrived in Madras (Chennai). The mission spread to many other states in the Indian sub-continent including Rawalpindi which later became part of Pakistan. Sisters from India went on to establish mission foundations Matlock in England, in Zimbabwe, and in Zambia. More recently sisters from India are also ministering in Thailand, Slovakia, Ireland, and the Holy Land. There are currently 165 sisters living and ministering in a number of states including Tamil Nadu, Goa, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. They are involved in formal and informal education, social work, health and pastoral care, as well as justice, peace, and advocacy on behalf of those on the margins, especially women and children.

Film-maker Myles OReilly said that he is not very religious but was invited to follow Sr. Loreto Houlihan, and found her deep love of India and its people absolutely heart-warming and deeply resonant. Sitting in front of her and listening to her talk was like being warmed by the hearth of an Irish fireplace on a rainy day hearing stories as she it from the long ago. I learned from her that India and its culture retains more of the life she left 70 years ago in Ireland than the country of her birth today, and so she chooses to live the rest of her days in India for that natural familiarity he concluded.

Born into a large family in 1927, Peg Houlihan grew up in hard times, especially in the 1930s with a worldwide depression and an economic war between Ireland and Britain. By the time she was five years old, her mother was already a widow as her father, a blacksmith, had died. In 1943, 16-year-old Peg left her rural farmhouse in Tinhalla near Carrick-on-Suir in Co Tipperary. She joined the Presentation Sisters in the UK before departing for the distant shores of India. Her ship set sail from Liverpool to Bombay as the Second World War was drawing to a close, and she celebrated her 17th birthday on board. During that journey and its many blackouts, Sr. Loreto bravely looked forward spending a lot of time on the ship learning the ancient Tamil language.



After landing at the port of Bombay, the rest of the journey was by train down to Madras. On arrival at the Presentation Convent, there was a letter waiting from her mother. It opened with Cead mile failte to India. Sr. Loreto speaks lovingly of that letter, as she knew it was a huge sacrifice for her mother to let her go. It was a gift of the utmost love for a mother to let her daughter go with the words keep up your brave heart Peg, all will be well. They never saw each other again.



Sr. Loreto dedicated her life to love and serve others through education in Chennai. After completing her teacher training at Church Park College in Madras, she went on to work as a primary school teacher spending most of her life at St. Josephs Anglo-Indian School in Perambur in north Chennai. The children in her class were six years old and over the years, she has taught three generations of families, and become a well-loved and respected person in the community. In class she says she was strict, but outside of school, I didnt have enough fingers for them to hold onto.



After Indian independence in 1947, the Indian government asked the Presentation Sisters to continue their education, and the doors were opened to the indigenous population, which in India is almost 80 per cent Hindi. The children were encouraged to celebrate their culture in the schools. Aine Edwards says: the adults I meet nowadays who attended schools where Irish brothers and sisters were teachers, talk fondly of them and their education. The late chief minister of Tamil, Nadu Jayalalitha, has spoken of her school days at Church Park as being the happiest of her life. What a great tribute to Irish missionaries who devoted their lives to the service of the people of India.



Today, Sr. Loreto says she is blessed with strong faith, good sleep, and no regrets, and intends to live out her life in her beloved India. Venerable Nano Nagle  founder of the Presentation Congregation - has been her role model in life. Nano is known as The Lady of the Lamp - a pioneer of Catholic education in Ireland during times of penal law.

Reaction to the film has been very positive as typified by Jennifer Bastian in Australia: My sisters and I were students of St. Loreto at St. Josephs Presentation Convent in Madras many years ago. We now live in Australia. Sr. Loreto is a true example of Christs love for humanity. She is one beautiful human being she said.

Sister India has already been screened at the Dingle International Film Festival and the Silk Road Film Festival. It will be shown at the Fastnet Film Festival on 23-27 May and at the International Christian Film Festival in Florida. Then in August, it will be shown at the Ink Well Theatre in Tracton, Co. Cork on 18th, and at the Clare Island Film Festival.



2018 is the tercentenary of the birth of Nano Nagle and will be marked by a programme of commemorative events at Nano Nagle Birthplace (www.nanonaglebirthplace.ie) at Ballygriffin, Mallow. The film will be shown there and also at Nano Nagle Place (http://nanonagleplace.ie ), Douglas Street, Cork City.Carrick-on-Suir's Brewery Lane Theatre briefly became an academy for 12 aspiring writers last weekend.

The sixth annual Brewery Lane Writers Weekend attracted budding wordsmiths from as far as Dublin and Leitrim as well as counties Tipperary and Waterford.

They all came to hone their creative writing skills at workshops and one-to-one sessions led by professional writers Adam Wyeth and Jessica Traynor.

The three day writers festival opened with Brewery Lane Theatre's monthly "Poetry Plus" session in the Theatre's tearoom last Friday night. At the event, more than 20 people recited poetry and prose they or other authors had written .

It was a fitting start to the intensive weekend of writing tutorials that covered everything from plotting and shaping a short story or novel to tackling poetry forms and rewriting, editing and polishing.

The workshops took place in the Theatre's tearooms while the Tudor Artisan Hub was the venue for the one-to-one sessions with the guest writers. The 12 participants produced a piece of creative writing over the Weekend, which they read at the closing reading session on Sunday afternoon.

Brewery Lane Writers Weekend founder Margaret O'Brien, an English and Creative Writing lecturer at WIT, said Brewery Lane Theatre was a beautiful venue for the festival, which aims to develop people's writing skills and give them an opportunity to work with and learn from professional writers.

Margaret is also involved in the Story House Writers Retreat, which runs longer five day creative writing courses. She also periodically runs "Writing Changes Lives" workshops at Brewery Lane Theatre.A high ranking Garda has praised the part played by the South East Mountain Rescue in Tipperary during Storm Emma.

The driver of the team's 4x4 vehicle became a defacto Garda driver during the blizzard.

However Antoinette Cunningham, president of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (AGSI), said this exposed the force's lack of adequate equipment for such emergencies.

The Templemore Garda College-based official paid tribute to the rescue team at the association's annual conference.

She said that Storm Emma brought severe policing challenges to the organisation and she commended those members of the Association who travelled and worked in severe weather conditions, who walked into work, who stayed overnight in hotels and slept in emergency type accommodation and still provided a service to the public.

Your dedication and commitment is a credit to the uniform you wear and the Association you represent, she said.

And she continued - "However Storm Emma once again highlighted the complete lack of planning and resources available to us as an emergency service to deal with such a crisis.

In Tipperary we had a situation where the south east 4x4 mountain rescue volunteer driver became the defacto Garda driver and assisted our members to answer calls in his vehicle, owing to the fact that we had no suitable transport ourselves.

 We relied on the army, defence forces and civil defence to assist us in our calls while we thank them sincerely for it, the situation exposed us in many areas.

"While we are realistic to know that a significant investment is not going to be made in equipment that is needed only for severe weather events, we would suggest that regional interagency groups should be established to identify the combined resources available and how these might be used to maximum benefit in areas outside Dublin in the event of a National Weather alert.

And addressing the Garda Commissioner, she said - We would ask you Commissioner to consider this and bring it forward so that members are not left exposed and scrambling for solutions without any proper planning or guidance."The NATO Deputy Secretary General, the Honourable Rose Gottemoeller, will visit Ukraine on Thursday, 12 April and Friday, 13 April 2018.

Ms. Gottemoeller will meet the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine for European and Euro-Atlantic, Ms. Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Pavlo Klimkin, the Minister of Education and Science, Ms. Lilia Hrynevych, the Deputy Minister of Defence, Gen. Anatoliy Petrenko, and other senior officials.

On Friday 13 April, the Deputy Secretary General will deliver a speech at the Kyiv Security Forum. She will also participate in a panel discussion. More information on the Kyiv Security Forum can be found here: http://ksf2018.openukraine.org/en

In the margins of the Kyiv Security Forum, the Deputy Secretary General will also meet the Minister of National Defence of Lithuania, Mr. Raimundas Karoblis.

Media Advisory

10:00 (local time) Speech and Panel Discussion: Ukraine and Allies: Security in the fog of Peace and War

The speech and panel discussion will be livestreamed on the NATO website.

Still and video images will be available on the NATO website.

Follow the Deputy Secretary General on Twitter (@Gottemoeller). Also follow us at (@NATOPress).(As delivered)

So Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini,

It is a great pleasure and honour to welcome you here at NATO Headquarters. This is your first visit. Let me also congratulate you on your appointment as Prime Minister.

We discussed many issues during our meeting, we addressed the main topics as we prepare for the next Summit of NATO in July in Brussels. How to strengthen NATOs deterrence and defence, how to project stability to our neighbourhood, and how to continue to modernise the Alliance And this is a response from the whole Alliance to a more demanding and unpredictable security environment which includes a more assertive Russia. And also the turmoil and violence we see in the Middle East and North Africa.

And I would like to start by thanking you Prime Minister for the many contributions Slovakia is making to NATO, to our shared security, to our collective defence. You contribute to our Enhanced Forward Presence in Latvia, with your troops there.

You host what we call a NATO force integration unit, which is a small command which can coordinate exercises through planning and facilitate rapid reinforcements, deployments if needed.

I also welcome that Slovakia is making major contributions through different NATO missions and operations.

I recently visited Iraq where I met Slovak trainers that help train local security forces and also the fact that you have trainers and funding for the Afghan national security forces and army.

And on top of that you also play a part in Ukraine, Slovakia is the lead nation in a Trust Fund to help handling unexploded munitions.

So you play an important part and Slovakia is a highly valued Ally.

We also discussed the situation in Syria. We condemn in the strongest terms the use of chemical weapons.

The latest attack was horrendous, killing dozens of people, including many children.

We call on the Syrian regime and its backers to allow full and unimpeded access to international medical assistance and international monitoring.

NATO considers the use of chemical weapons a threat to international peace and security. And those responsible must be held accountable. We must do all we can to protect the ban on the use of chemical weapons.

Prime Minister,

Let me also strongly thank Slovakia for increasing defence spending, for investing more in our security. You brought your Deputy Prime Minister, Finance Minister Kazimir, and I think the fact that he was in the meeting just underlines the Slovak commitment to increasing defence investments. And we welcome your strong commitment to reach our goal of spending 2% of GDP on defence by 2024.

We also welcome the fact that Slovakia has already met the guideline of spending 20% of the budget on major equipment.

So Prime Minister, its great to have you here and its great to welcome you and I look forward to continue to work together with you. So once again, welcome.

OANA LUNGESCU [NATO Spokesperson]: OK, we have time for a couple of questions. Lady over there, Slovak Television and Radio.

QUESTION [Slovak Radio and TV]: Good morning, Slovak Radio and TV. I would like to ask about the relation with Russia on two layers: one issue is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. Have you discussed this case as well and what is also the stance of NATO, because NATO has sent or has also ousted certain diplomats from NATO or they havent extended their accreditation? Slovakia has recalled its Ambassador from Moscow, but we havent cancelled the presence of any Russian diplomats. Have you discussed about steps to be taken in the future? And also, the current situation in Syria: the American President is considering a military response to the chemical gas attack. So, what is your take? What do you think about the situation? This is a question for both of you.

PETER PELLEGRINI [Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic]: During the meeting with the Secretary General, we have not discussed the Skripal case in the United Kingdom. Here, I'd like to emphasise one issue; that the position of Slovak diplomacy and the Slovak decision to recall our Ambassador from Moscow is an adequate response, especially adequate to our knowledge of the situation so far, and adequate of what we knew at that point in time.

On the other hand, I would like to also use this opportunity to reaffirm also, Mr Secretary General, that this hostile act of Russia cannot be taken or the fact that we have recalled our Ambassador, this is this by no means undermines our membership in NATO. We are a reliable and loyal member of NATO and we will continue to be such in the future. This was simply a decision that we have taken. There were many other decisions by other countries in EU. We have taken a decision which we have taken, but this has no implication on our membership in NATO or on the relationship with our NATO partners.

Regarding Syria, we have discussed with the Secretary General that the priority is to first of all clearly refuse any tolerance of chemical weapons, especially used against civilians. And we have also conveyed a strong message against those perpetrators. But for us, as members of NATO, it is a priority to make sure that experts, expert teams will have a place to work, will have a chance to monitor and observe the situation in the field, on the ground, and will provide us with clear information from the place. And also, it is an absolute priority to make sure that international medical teams will have access and will provide first aid to those who were victims of these attacks.

Regarding your commentary to possible attacks of NATO members, well there is a discussion going on at the level of the Alliance, of what are the other possible venues to look for, apart from international experts and monitors, how else to react. But I am not going to comment any further on that.

JENS STOLTENBERG [NATO Secretary General]: The Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons published a report today and that report confirms the British findings on the nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack. And this is the first time that a nerve agent has been used on NATO territory. We use we of course address this in a very serious way and we also have to understand that this attack takes has taken place against a background of a pattern of reckless behaviour of Russia over several years: with the illegal annexation of Crimea, with the efforts to continue to destabilise Eastern Ukraine; different cyberattacks, and; also the fact that Russia has, in different ways, tried to interfere in our democratic, domestic processes. So, that was the reason why also many NATO Allies, and also NATO as an Alliance, decided to expel Russian officials, as a result of the as a response to the Salisbury attack.

When it comes the situation in Syria, we are, as I said, extremely concerned. We strongly condemn the use of chemical weapons. Many civilians, many children have been killed, and we call on unhindered and full access for international monitors to the area, and also we strongly underline the importance of protecting the ban on the use of chemical weapons. And therefore, those responsible have to be held accountable after the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

OANA LUNGESCU [NATO Spokesperson]: Last question. TASS.

QUESTION [TASS News Agency]: Thank you very much. TASS News Agency. Mr Secretary General, 15 years ago, the State Secretary of United States, Colin Powell, has said in the Council, or Security Council of United Nations, that Iraq had weapons of mass destructions which leads to disastrous invasion in this country and the as an  [inaudible] the creation of the Daesh. So, are you not afraid that supporting the allegations of a chemical attack in Syria without clear verification mechanism, may lead us to more disastrous results? And are you using the military-to- military communications lines with Russia to avoid such consequences? Thank you very much.

JENS STOLTENBERG [NATO Secretary General]: The attack took place in an area which is where the Assad regime and its backers are operating, and Russia and Iran provide strong support to the Assad regime. The Assad regime has used chemical weapons before. And one of the main messages we have, after the attack in eastern Douma is that we call for full and unimpeded access for international observers. And we call on the Assad regime, but also on its supporters, Iran and Russia, to make that possible, both to allow international observers, but also to allow the medical assistance access to the area.

Consultations are ongoing between NATO Allies on how to respond to the attack. We think it is important that those responsible are held accountable and we strongly believe that it's important to protect the ban on chemical weapons, because this is really an important convention which we all have to do our utmost to protect. So, the use of chemical weapons in Syria is not only serious because many civilians are killed, but it's also serious because it undermines the rules-based order, the convention banning nuclear chemical weapons.

OANA LUNGESCU [NATO Spokesperson]: Thank you very much. This concludes this press point.

PETER PELLEGRINI [Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic]: Thank you very much, once again.General Petr Pavel, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee visited Ljubljana10 and 11 April 2018. During his visit, the Chairman met with the President of Slovenia, His Excellency, Borut Pahor, the Minister of Defence, Ms Andreja Katic, the Chief of the General Staff of the Slovenian Armed Forces, Major General Alan Geder, the Committee of Defence of the National Assembly, as well as other high ranking military and political officials.

In his meeting with President Pahor, discussions centered on NATOs continued adaptation and Slovenias contribution to euro-Atlantic security. General Pavel stated The Western Balkans is a region of strategic importance for NATO. Slovenia plays an important role in the region by increasing the stability and security in this region which benefits stability and security in Europe.

Speaking with Ms Andreja Katic, General Pavel commended Slovenia for increasing its defence spending and the progress it has made. The Chairman stressed that it was not just about spending more but investing in key capabilities, and contributing to NATO missions and operations.

Major General Geder and General Pavel focused their discussions on NATO Operations, Missions and Activities. They noted that the Alliance needs to continually be prepared to counter any threats from any direction and the importance of interoperability between Allied and Partner forces. The Chairman used the opportunity to thank Slovenia for its important contributions to NATO. He stressed Slovenia helps build stability in Kosovo and throughout the Western Balkans with hundreds of troops in our KFOR mission, Slovenian troops also participate in our training mission in Afghanistan as well as to the enhanced Forward Presence multinational NATO battlegroup in Latvia

While in Slovenia, the Chairman also received briefings at the General Staff on the status of the Slovenian Armed Forces, their operations and future plans as well as the NATO Mountain Warfare Centre of Excellence. General Pavel delivered a presentation to the Minister of Defence senior officers on Challenges for NATO - today and tomorrow.(Natural News) Its become crystal clear that the once-esteemed federal law enforcement institutions in our country have been so thoroughly politicized and corrupted by the last administration they no longer function as designed and as such have lost all legitimacy.

The FBI raid of Trump lawyer Michael Cohens New York office this week, in which reams of privileged communications between a presidential client and his attorney have likely been unlawfully obtained, has longtime politicos and legal observers shaking their heads in disbelief.

A flabbergasted Newt Gingrich, a former House Speaker who was around for President Bill Clintons impeachment, told Fox News morning program, Fox & Friends, on Wednesday that the raid makes it clear special counsel Robert Mueller  who referred alleged evidence prompting the Cohen raid to the Southern District of New York  has nothing on President Donald J. Trump as it pertains to his collusion with Russia.

No evidence exists, mind you, because collusion never happened. If it had, someone would have leaked it by now.

So instead, Mueller is busting minor Trump campaign figures for things unrelated to the campaign and Russia (though Ukraine seems to be a common theme). And in the meantime, Gingrich said, Muellers team has gone off trying to find ways to create noise, The Gateway Pundit reported.

Regarding the original charge of collusion, Mueller has come up with a big fat zero and we ought to be honest about that, Gingrich noted further. The president ought to relax, focus on being president.

He also lashed out at Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whom Trump appointed to his post.

The fact is that Rosenstein has not done his job. He has not supervised Mueller as he is required to do, the former speaker noted. This whole thing is an absurdity.

He continued:

Weve now had, Paul Manafort and his wife, in their pajamas at 3 oclock in the morning having the FBI break down the door. Weve had this last week Cohen the lawyer had the door taken off the hinges at 6 in the morning. Show me one occasion where out of all the different crimes committed by the Clintons and their staff they ever had that kind of treatment. The fact is this is a left-wing bureaucracy of justice. It is anti-Trump. It is anti-Republican.

Those are tactics that Stalin would use or the Gestapo in [Nazi] Germany, said Gingrich.

Mr. Speaker didnt spare fired FBI Director James Comey, either.

Comey is off grandstanding, Gingrich said regarding his current book tour and an upcoming appearance on ABC with Clinton sycophant (and former staffer) George Stephanopoulos. But the truth is he didnt do his job in the Bush administration, he colluded with Schumer to embarrass President Bush. The truth is he appointed a special counsel during the Bush administration that ran wild. And the truth is he failed to prosecute the people in the Clinton campaign.

Alan Dershowitz, no flaming conservative by any means but certainly a rule-of-law Harvard law professor, noted in an interview with the UKs Daily Mail that it was rare for the FBI to serve such no-knock warrants against a high-profile subject (the presidents lawyer qualifies as high-profile).

Mueller knows this. Rosenstein knows this. And everyone involved in this scandalous Trump-collusion investigation knows that was a bogus charge based on a bogus document (the Russia dossier) that was bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clintons campaign.

So why isnt she being investigated by Mueller? Of course, we all know that answer to that question.

Because this entire probe is a politically motivated farce with one purpose: To bring down a duly-elected president the Deep State fears.

Read more at DeepState.news.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources include:

TheNationalSentinel.com

DailyMail.co.uk

TheGatewayPundit.com(Natural News) Vaccine-obsessed psychopath Richard Pan, a Democrat from Californias 6th Senate District, isnt content just with eliminating the rights of Californians to opt out of mandatory vaccinations on religious and philosophical grounds. Hes now busy trying to pass new Orwellian legislation that would completely abolish all free speech online in California, including free speech pertaining to the dangers of vaccines.

The so-called Online False Information Act, created by Pan, would require that anyone in California who publishes news on the internet  including news about vaccines  first pass it through a fact-checking service that would supposedly determine whether or not its real and acceptable for public consumption. Any information deemed fake would be tagged as such in accordance with the bills ministry of propaganda verbiage.

Filed as Senate Bill 1424, Pans legislation clearly states that it will:

 require any person who operates a social media, as defined, Internet Web site with a physical presence in California to develop a strategic plan to verify news stories shared on its Web site.

It adds that the overall purpose of the bill is:

 to mitigate the spread of false information through news stories, the utilization of fact-checkers to verify news stories, providing outreach to social media users, and placing a warning on a news story containing false information.

Pans colleague, another Democrat, pushing for authoritarian fake news curriculum in California public schools

Its like a page taken straight from the book 1984, and unfortunately it doesnt stop there. Pans colleague, Senator Hannah Beth Jackson, a Democrat from Santa Barbara, is pushing her own authoritarian legislation that would instruct California public schools to teach students about how to spot fake news.

Known as Senate Bill 947, this companion legislation to Pans aims to brainwash Californias youngest residents into believing that all information not officially rubber-stamped by the government is automatically fake, and should thus be rejected. Its a Utopian dream for people like Pan, who hope to completely eliminate all opposition to their deep state agendas.

Sen. Pan believes the state must have direct control of key sectors, manipulate mainstream news coverage, and keep truly independent journalism on the margins of the information landscape, writes Katy Grimes for the Canada Free Press. The news he disagrees with is fake.'

The amoral actions of this vaccine-loving lunatic really arent all that surprising, seeing as how Pan has accepted a whole lot of special interest cash in exchange for his dirty work.

As reported by the Sacramento Bee, Pans previous Senate Bill 277, the one that eliminated personal belief and religious exemptions from public school vaccine mandates, was greased along by Pans treasonous acceptance of cash from the vaccine industry, which collectively doled out more than $2 million to the current members of the California legislature just during the 2013-2014 session.

Pan was reportedly the biggest recipient, having taken $95,000 from Big Vaccine that year in order to push for SB 277, his own pet bill, to pass. The pharmaceutical industry also contributed to the effort, having spent nearly $3 million that same legislative session to force more deadly vaccines on Californias public school children.

California is rapidly collapsing into an authoritarian medical police state run by insane, power-hungry left-wing bureaucrats who fleece their own citizens while handing out hundreds of billions of dollars worth of entitlements to illegals in order to win votes and stay in power, comments Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, about this ongoing crusade against free speech and the right to choose ones own medicine without coercion.

Corrupt sellouts like Richard Pan wont stop selling Californians down the river until they forcibly stop him. You can keep up with Pans latest vaccine shenanigans by visiting RichardPan.news.

Sources for this article include:

CanadaFreePress.com

SacBee.com

NaturalNews.comThe Oakland A's are looking into the possibility of installing a gondola as part of a proposed new stadium near Jack London Square.

The gondola would carry fans from downtown Oakland over Interstate 880 and drop them at a ballpark at Howard Terminal.

The team got the idea from the Oakland Zoo, which has used a gondola system to transport patrons across zoo property for the past nine months.

"We can move more than a thousand people an hour up to the site," said Nik Dehejia, Oakland Zoo CFO, referring to the upper level of the zoo.

It's a success that A's President Dave Kaval said caught the team's attention as it wrestled with ways to move fans into a proposed ballpark at Jack London Square.

Kaval said a gondola or air-tram system could help ease traffic and parking woes at a site with very limited transportation options for fans.

A group that's been working to keep the A's and Raiders in Oakland also is on-board.

"The traffic around there is formidable, and the expense of building a BART station would be too costly," said Chris Dobbins of Save Oakland Sports. "A gondola would be a great idea."

Some fans like the idea too.

"That's an innovative way to do things," said Nick Gardiner, a lifelong A's fan. "I know some the transportation in the past has been BART, but I think being able to transport people by gondola is new and innovative."

Kaval says a bird's-eye view experience could also bring more people to downtown Oakland and Jack London Square, an added benefit the zoo is already noticing.

"This was designed as a mode of transportation to the upper part of the zoo, but the gondola in and of itself has become an attraction," Dehejia said.

Many fans believe the A's should stay at the Coliseum site and rebuild because it has lots of parking, BART access and easy access to and from both I-880 and I-580.

A spokesperson for the city of Oakland said the city is open to the idea of using a gondola system but that it's too soon to really make a statement on whether it's a viable option.Brad Wolfe seems in good health. Hes young, the head of two non-profit companies. He plays guitar, sings and pens nice songs. In other words, he seems unlikely to be someone sitting around thinking about death. But alas

I grew-up hearing stories about death and life from a very early age, Wolfe said. My grandparents were Auschwitz survivors.

Wolfe is at the helm of group that is about to stage one of the most unusual events San Francisco has ever seen  a week-long series of more than 160 events throughout the city exploring the end of life.

Everyone is pulling together to spend a week thinking about big questions about life and death, said Wolfe, founder of the non-profit group Reimagine End of Life.

The festival of the same name, which runs from April 16th to the 22nd, includes art shows, concerts, house gatherings and an opening night concert and talk at SF Jazz. During the week newly minted Oscar winner Frances McDormand will perform in a play about death. Theres even a remembrance ceremony for animal species that have been lost during the year.

This venue is going to be filled to the brim with people who want to talk about the end of life, Wolfe said standing on the stage of SF Jazz where he will perform an original song during opening night festivities.

Although Wolfe was aware of death from a young age, it was the death of a close friend from a rare cancer two decades ago that plunged him into thinking about the end of life.

Although Wolfe had an awareness of death from a young age, it was the death of a close friend two years from cancer that plunged him into the topic. He thought about medical care, preparations for funeral arrangements, even the last sounds people hear at the end of their days.

If you think about that sound, Wolfe said, right now its often the sound of alarms in the hospital.

Following the death of that friend Sara LaBoskey, Wolfe wrote a song about her and founded a group called the Sunbeam Foundation aimed at seeking cures for childhood cancers. As he stared down thoughts about the end of life, it didnt seem as taboo anymore. He thought about funerals, where the newly departed are feted by friends and family.

Those experiences while so tragic theres also something beautiful about them, Wolfe said. And it made me think why are we waiting until the end of our lives to celebrate the people we care about.?

Wolfe envisions the week-long Reimagine End of Life event yielding conversations about death though art, music and interaction. He hopes the event will inspire people to embrace the subject rather than push it away. The conversation about death  Wolfe figures  is ultimately a conversation about life.

Hopefully at the end of this, Wolfe said, people enter in an experience at one of these events and justfeel inspired to live their lives more fully.

For more information, visit LetsReimagine.org.President Donald Trump on Wednesday warned Russia to "get ready" for a missile attack on its ally Syria, suggesting imminent retaliation for last weekend's suspected chemical weapons attack. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis took a more measured tone, saying the U.S. and its military coalition partners were still studying intelligence on the attack.

At stake is the potential for confrontation, if not outright conflict, between the U.S. and Russia, former Cold War foes whose relations have deteriorated in recent years over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine, its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, most recently, its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russian lawmakers have warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime and that it could trigger a direct U.S-Russian military clash. Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted  a stark warning of a potential major confrontation.

Trump, who has often said a commander in chief should never telegraph his military intentions, apparently did so himself, tweeting that missiles "will be coming" in response to the suspected chemical attack that killed at least 40 people near Damascus.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," Trump wrote. "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Defense Secretary Mattis, however, indicated that evidence of what happened was still being studied. At a photo-taking session during a Pentagon meeting with his Dutch counterpart, Mattis was asked by a reporter whether he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian government.

"We're still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies," Mattis said. "We're still working on this."

Trump suggested Monday he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which the U.S. government had video and other evidence of certain aspects of an actual attack by Syrian aircraft, which involved the use of sarin gas. Trump responded then by launching dozens of Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

Asked whether the U.S. military was ready to conduct an attack in Syria if ordered, Mattis replied, "We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the president determined."

Mattis was to meet with Trump later Wednesday.

In the past, Trump has condemned others for forecasting military plans, repeatedly blistering President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign. During one speech, he said, "We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything."

Asked about Trump's tweet about an impending attack on Syria, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who ran the Pentagon for President Bill Clinton, said on CNN that it "compromises the mission somewhat."

Trump did not detail what a strike on Syria would look like, or whether these would be U.S. missiles. U.S. officials have been consulting with France, Britain and other allies on a possible joint military operation, but the timing remained in doubt Wednesday. Trump canceled a foreign trip in order to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Assad.

Shortly after his tweeted warning to Russia, Trump took a more conciliatory tone in lamenting that the U.S.-Russia relationship "is worse now than it has ever been." There is no reason for this, he wrote, adding that "Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together."

Syria's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Trump's threats to attack are "reckless" and endanger international peace and security.

Trump's administration has sought to show toughness on Russia, with a series of economic and diplomatic actions, including new sanctions last week against government officials and oligarchs. Trump has largely avoided criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, though he singled him out in a tweet over the weekend for supporting Assad.

The U.S., France and Britain have been in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, U.S. officials have said. A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the U.S. in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syria's political and military support from Russia and Iran.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday called for a "strong and joint response" to the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday. The Syrian government denies responsibility.

The French president does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the U.S.-led coalition created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Multiple IS terror attacks have targeted France, including one last month.A new poll found that many Connecticut residents are concerned about rising drug prices, and state lawmakers are now trying to pass a bill to hold drug companies accountable.

Berlin resident Greta Stifel was diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2015.

Having a chronic illness requires extensive work to find the right treatment and medical team, she said. The last thing I need is to figure out how to afford my medications.

She said her medications cost $22,000 a month.

I cant go without them and if I do, I will die faster, she said.

The Altarum's Healthcare Value Hub and Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut conducted a poll of more than 900 Connecticut residents.

The poll shows that Connecticut residents are definitely worried about affording their prescription drugs, said Frances Padilla, President, Universal Health Care Foundation.

State lawmakers are now proposing a new bill that would require drug companies to be more transparent about prices and rebates. The bill has passed through the Insurance and Real Estate Committee.

Whether youre insured or uninsured, said state Comptroller, Kevin Lembo. This bill impacts you because whether you have small co-pay or youre on the hook, someones paying. The plan is paying, the state is paying, and were all paying.What to Know In 2017, the state received reports of around 6,500 bear sightings from 131 of the 169 towns.

If a bear appears to be aggressive toward people, immediately call the DEEPs 24-hour dispatch line at 860-424-3333.

Every bear receives a tag in each ear the first time DEEP handles it and they said most tagged bears have not been caught as problem bears.

Bear activity increases in early spring and the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is urging residents to take steps to reduce encounters and potential conflicts with black bears.

In 2017, the state received reports of around 6,500 bear sightings from 131 of the 169 towns in Connecticut.

"We're probably receiving approximately 50 per week at this point," Paul Rego, the DEEP wildlife biologist, said.

State officials are warning residents of towns in western Connecticut that they should expect a regular presence of bears as they are now part of the environment.

[HAR] Moose, Bears, Turtles and Other Connecticut Wildlife

If you genuinely care about bears, you should never feed them  either intentionally or unintentionally, Susan Whalen, DEEPs deputy commissioner, said in a statement. Bears become habituated, losing their fear of humans, when attracted to homes by easily-accessible food sources. Such bears spend more time in neighborhoods and near people, increasing public safety fears, and the likelihood that the bears may be hit and killed by cars or meet with some other misfortune.

A mother bear and four cubs climbed a fence in a back yard in Plainville. You might be in suspense while watching, but rest assured. All the bears made it over and the last one found a way under the fence!

DEEP offers the following tips:

Never feed bears.

Take down, clean and put away birdfeeders by late March, or even earlier during mild weather. Store the feeders until late fall. Clean up spilled seed from the ground.

Store garbage in secure, airtight containers inside a garage or storage area. Adding ammonia to cans and bags will reduce odors that attract bears. Periodically clean garbage cans with ammonia to reduce residual odor. Garbage for pickup should be put outside the morning of collection and not the night before.

Protect beehives, livestock and berry bushes from bears with electric fencing.

Supervise dogs at all times when outside. Keep dogs on a leash when walking and hiking. A roaming dog might be perceived as a threat to a bear or its cubs.

Do not leave pet food outdoors.

Keep barbecue grills clean. Store grills inside a garage or shed.

Avoid placing meat scraps or sweet foods in compost piles.

If you see a bear:

If you encounter a bear while hiking, make your presence known by yelling or making other loud noises.

Never attempt to get closer to a bear to take a photo or video.

If a bear does not retreat, slowly leave the area and find an alternate hiking route.

If the bear persistently approaches, make loud noises, wave your arms and throw sticks or rocks, according to the DEEP. Never run.

While camping:

Keep a clean campsite and make sure food and garbage are inaccessible.

Keep food in a cooler stored in the trunk of a car and never have food in your tent.

Reporting bears:

If a bear appears to be aggressive toward people, immediately call the DEEPs 24-hour dispatch line at 860-424-3333.

Anyone who sees a black bear in Connecticut is encouraged to report the sighting on the DEEPs website or call the Wildlife Division at 860-424-3011.

About the tags:

Every bear receives a tag in each ear the first time DEEP handles it and they said most tagged bears have not been caught as problem bears, but rather as part of a project researching the states population.A man who had an incestuous relationship with his daughter and fathered a child with her shot and killed her and her adoptive father in a pickup in New Milford, Connecticut on Thursday and then killed himself in New York, police said. The child, a 7-month-old boy, was found slain in North Carolina.

The man, 43-year-old Steven Pladl, and his daughter, 20-year-old Katie Pladl, had been arrested on incest charges in January and the baby boy, who was found dead in the bathroom closet of a home in Knightdale, North Carolina, was their biological child, a lawyer for Steven Pladl said.

Knightdale police Chief Lawrence Capps said, Were trying to make sense of all the factors that led up to this senseless taking of life.

He said his understanding is that Steven Pladl had gone to New Milford for the specific purpose of making some confrontations.

It appears from a 911 call Steven Pladl's mother made that Katie Pladl had broken off the relationship with Steven.

The investigation in Connecticut started when officers responded to reports of gunfire around 8:40 a.m. in New Milford after receiving 911 calls.

"Somebody just went by and shot this guy in the truck," a man who called 911 said. He told dispatchers he saw the shooting and the shooter was in a light blue minivan with North Carolina plates.

"We were pulling up to a stop sign. He went around ... these two were behind him. As soon as he opened fire and shot these two people, he went up and around them," the caller said.

Police found two victims -- Katie Pladl and her adoptive father, 56-year-old Anthony Fusco -- inside the pickup with a window shot out, police said.

Both died of multiple gunshot wounds, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

New Milford resident Jeff Weinzievl, who lives near the intersection where Katie Pladl and her adoptive father were found, said he was feeding his horses when he heard eight shots from what sounded like a semi-automatic weapon.



Investigators were searching for Steven Pladls vehicle, a Honda Odyssey minivan, when he was found dead inside it several miles away in Dover, New York. Police said his death appeared to be self-inflicted.

Around the time the shooting was reported, police in Knightdale found the body of the baby, Bennett Pladl.

Steven Pladls mother had called police shortly before 9 a.m. Thursday, asking them to conduct a welfare check on the Knightsdale home after a disturbing phone conversation with her son, Capps said.

The woman had custody of her grandson since Steven and Katie were arrested in January and the baby was last seen alive at 8 p.m. Wednesday night.

She told police Steven Pladl had just picked his infant son up from her and told her that he and the baby were going to Skype with Katie that evening, according to police.

Steven Pladl then called his mother just before midnight and told her he was taking the baby to see Katie in New York, police said.

The next time Steven spoke with his mother was around 7 a.m. Thursday and he said that he and the baby were almost in New York.

Stevens final call to his mother was at 8:45 a.m. and revealed chilling details.

He said hed just killed Katie and her adoptive father, police said. When she asked about the baby, Steven told his mother hed killed his son and left the body in his house, according to police.

Stevens mother then immediately called 911.

My son just called me and he told me ... oh God. He killed his baby and hes in the house, the woman told dispatchers.

When police went to the North Carolina house, they found the infant's body in a bathroom closet. No one else was in the home.

Yesterdays events were sad and devastating, Police Chief Lawrence Capps, of Knightdale, North Carolina, said in a statement. We may never understand the mindset or motives of Steven Pladl, but we do know his actions have shattered the lives of countless people. We pray the families affected are able to find some measure of comfort and peace as they work to cope with this senseless tragedy.

Virginia attorney Rick Friedman, who had been representing Steven Pladl in the felony incest case, said he had breakfast with Pladl only a month ago and had no indication that such violence was possible.

This really bothers me a lot because nobody ever could have predicted this. If anybody had a remote idea anybody was in harms way there would have been no bond set, he said. There was just absolutely no prior notice anything would happen to these people.

As part of the bond requirements, Friedman said, the father and daughter were not supposed to communicate with one another. He said Katie Pladl had been living in New York with her adoptive parents.

It's not clear why Katie and Fusco were in Connecticut, but police believe they were running errands.

People who lived near Fusco in Wingdale, New York, described him as a great neighbor.

He would do anything for anybody. He really would. Just a super guy. Super, super. I don't know we're going to go on without him. I really don't, Gloria Caple said.The murder of a mother and her 10-year-old daughter last Friday has shaken Fort Worth. On Sunday, police arrested Paige Lawyer in Tennessee. He has three past domestic violence cases against the woman he's now accused of killing.

Wednesday night, Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price spoke out against domestic violence, at one of her rolling town hall meetings.

The community bike ride started at Eastern Hills Elementary, where the victim's twin 4-year-old sons were in school on Friday, when police came to tell them their mother and sister had been killed.

A local pastor led the group in prayer to start the meeting, saying: "We're praying that they will gain strength, that the children who are still alive will understand that God is still in control. Let's just have a moment of silence first."

O'Tishae Womack and her 10-year-old daughter Ka'Myria were found strangled to death in their nearby apartment complex Friday afternoon.

Wednesday night, Mayor Betsy Price said this tragedy is the prime opportunity to talk about domestic violence.

The Tarrant County District Attorney's Office has a new intimate partner violence unit that's already working with investigators in this case. The unit started when D.A. Sharen Wilson noticed that more than half the capital murder cases in 2016 were related to family violence.

The Fort Worth school district is also working to educate teachers on recognizing signs of domestic violence at home, to stop the cycle.

"It affects their ability to learn if they're exposed to that kind of violence, said Mayor Price. If they lose a parent or a sibling to violence it really has a dramatic impact on them. So to step up, police, counseling, the district attorney's prosecution, for the schools to step up their counseling will make a difference. But ultimately we have to educate men and women about what to do other than a violent solution."

School Board President Tobi Jackson was at the town hall as well.

What can we do to prevent these tragedies?" Jackson said. "Because we have tragic loss of human life with regard to domestic violence every day and is there something that we dont know that we could see? And the one thing we do know is our community can watch and listen and anything thats not right, especially with regard to a child, they can report it.

Jackson said the surviving twin boys are safe and staying with family.Firefighters in Irving battled a large 3-alarm fire fueled by strong winds that injured two people at an apartment complex Thursday morning.

The fire was reported at about 8 a.m. at the Woodchase and Clarendon Apartments on the 3800 block of North Belt Line Road.

Firefighters in Irving battled a large fire at an apartment complex in Irving Thursday morning.

Fire investigators said the fire was caused by discarded smoking material in a container on the balcony of a first floor residence on the south side of the building.

The fire was quickly escalated to three alarms, with smoke and flames being seen soaring from the roof of a two-story building. About 60 firefighters, with crews from Irving and Dallas, gained control of the fire after more than an hour.



UPDATE: Just spoke with the battalion chief on scene. He says they have the fire under control now. There were some concerns with the wind, which is why they brought about 60 firefighters to the scene. #NBCDFWNow pic.twitter.com/Bqh3xXywjJ  Tim Ciesco (@TimCiescoNBC5) April 12, 2018

There were two reported injuries to residents.

Fire officials said Thursday afternoon that 16 apartments were damage by the fire. Irving's Office of Emergency Management had a team at the scene helping those residents.

A four-year fight over education came to a head back in April at the state capitol, where the Texas Board of Education approved a new course on Mexican-American studies designed for high school students.



The Texas Board of Education has approved creating statewide academic standards for a Mexican-American studies high school course, but some board members wanted it called "ethnic studies."



"I think that's the way our country developed, that we were a melting pot," David Bradley, one of the board members said. "I find hyphenated Americanism divisive."



An amendment changing the name Ethnic Studies: An Overview of Americans of Mexican Descent" was passed.

Erica Beltran is one member who voted against it.



Our country is made up of so many diverse individuals, and part of being inclusive is being able to respect and acknowledge our differences, said Beltran.



Now, groups are fighting back.

Texans who are upset about the name change gathered in several cities Wednesday, including Fort Worth, to announce their opposition to the change.



They will also make an official statement of opposition at the Texas State Board of Education meeting in Austin.



Alberto Govea, a Council President for LULAC district 21 attended the event.

He is against the name change.



Ethnic studies what does that say to me, it does not say a lot. But if I see Mexican-American studies then Ill certainly be more apt to try to find out more at least, if not participate, said Govea.



According to our media partner, The Dallas Morning News, the curriculum will be based on a Mexican-American Studies course already being offered in Houston.



An assistant superintendent for Dallas ISD tells NBC 5 that the name change does not really impact them a great deal in terms of curriculum they will provide.



We want our students to come in and have a culturally relevant, valuable experience that shows that the heritage of Mexican-American students is very important to us, said Dallas ISD Assistant Superintendent for Language, Literacy and Social Studies.

Walmart announced on Wednesday that it will invest $277 million into its Texas based stores over the next year.

The company plans to build 4 new locations across the state, including one in Fort Worth at 5336 Golden Triangle Boulevard. The store will be a super center with a fuel station and online grocery pickup. It's scheduled to open this summer.



Walmart did provided a list of stores in North Texas that are slated for remodels within the next year:

In addition to the new stores and remodeled locations, Walmart will also expand it's "Online Grocery Pickup" where customers can order groceries online and pick them up without ever leaving their car.

The company is also evaluating expansion plans of its "Mobile Express Scan & Go." The downloadable app allows customers to scan items as they shop and and then pay instantly, skipping the check-out line. The service is currently available in more than 20 North Texas Walmart stores and may expand further in the next year.

The retailer is also working to expand its "Pickup Tower" program. Customers shop online at walmart.com and then choose the pickup option at the end of the order. Shoppers can then head to the "Pickup Tower" located inside the store and scan a barcode sent to their phone. The online order is then delivered right to your fingertips.

"With the continued rollout of new innovations, Walmart is re-envisioning the future of shopping right here in DFW," said Walmart North Texas Regional General Manager Sonya Hostetler in a press release. "Through updated stores and convenient new offerings like Online Grocery Pickup, Pickup Towers and Scan & Go, Walmart is working to save our customers time while exceeding their expectations."President Donald Trump on Thursday put off a final decision on possible military strikes against Syria after tweeting earlier that they could happen "very soon or not so soon at all." The White House said he would consult further with allies.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warned such an attack carried the risk of spinning out of control, suggesting caution ahead of a decision on how to respond to an attack against civilians last weekend that U.S. officials are increasingly certain involved the use of banned chemical weapons. British officials said up to 75 people were killed.

The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in a brief statement after Trump met with Mattis and other members of his National Security Council: "No final decision has been made. We are continuing to assess intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies."

Sanders said Trump would speak later with French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Although Mattis noted that military action carried risks, he also emphasized that Syrian use of chemical weapons should not be tolerated. And he insisted it remains U.S. policy not to be involved directly in Syria's civil war.

"Our strategy remains the same as a year ago," he said. "It is to drive this to a U.N.-brokered peace but, at the same time, keep our foot on the neck of ISIS until we suffocate it," referring to the Islamic State extremist group.

Mattis' remarks at a House Armed Services Committee hearing followed a series of Trump tweets this week that initially indicated he was committed to bombing Syria but later suggested he was awaiting further advice and assessment. Trump wrote in a Thursday morning tweet that an attack could happen "very soon or not so soon at all."

Later Thursday he was noncommittal. "We're looking very, very seriously, very closely at the whole situation," he told reporters.

Trump suggested Monday he had little doubt that Syria was to blame. And on Thursday, two U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence told NBC News the U.S. now has blood and urine samples from victims of the attack in Syria, and they have tested positive for chemical weapons.The samples suggested the presence of both chlorine gas and an unnamed nerve agent, two officials said. Such samples are typically obtained from hospitals or collected by U.S. or foreign intelligence agents on the ground.

The officials said they were "confident" in the intelligence, though not 100 percent sure.

Mattis said options would be discussed with Trump at a meeting of his National Security Council on Thursday afternoon. That meant airstrikes, possibly in tandem with France and other allies that have expressed outrage at the alleged Syrian chemical attack, could be launched within hours of a presidential decision.

The U.N. Security Council has scheduled another emergency meeting Friday at Russia's request on the threat to international peace from possible air strikes on Syria by the U.S. and its allies.

Russia had requested a briefing by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. But there was no briefing on the U.N. chief's schedule for Friday, which was released Thursday night. It was not clear who might brief the Security Council.

China and Bolivia backed Russia's call for a briefing by Guterres.

The U.S., France and Britain have been in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, U.S. officials have said. A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the U.S. in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons.

Macron said Thursday that France has proof that the Syrian government launched chlorine gas attacks and said France would not tolerate "regimes that think everything is permitted."

After May met with her Cabinet, a spokesperson issued a statement saying it is highly likely that Syria's President Bashar Assad was responsible for Saturday's attack that killed dozens outside Damascus. The Cabinet agreed on the need to "take action" to deter further chemical weapons use by Assad, but added that May would continue to consult with allies to coordinate an international response.

Mattis said that although the United States has no hard proof, he believes the Syrian government was responsible for Saturday's attack. Initial reports indicated the use of chlorine gas, possibly in addition to the nerve agent Sarin. Trump's ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, told NBC News on Thursday the administration has "enough proof" of the chemical attack but was still considering its response.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in the Netherlands, announced it was sending a fact-finding team to the site of the attack outside Damascus, and it was due to arrive Saturday. It was not clear whether the presence of the investigators could affect the timing of any U.S. military action.

At the House hearing, Democrats grilled Mattis on the wisdom and legality of Trump ordering an attack on Syria without explicit authorization from Congress. Mattis argued it would be justified as an act of self-defense, with 2,000 U.S. ground troops in Syria; he insisted he could not talk about military plans because an attack "is not yet in the offing."

Mattis said he personally believes Syria is guilty of an "inexcusable" use of chemical weapons, while noting that the international fact-finding team would likely fall short of determining who was responsible.

Asked about the risks of U.S. military retaliation, Mattis cited two concerns, starting with avoiding civilian casualties.

"On a strategic level, it's how do we keep this from escalating out of control, if you get my drift on that," he said.

Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said he sees no legal justification for a U.S. strike in Syria, absent explicit authorization by Congress. More broadly, he doubted the wisdom of bombing.

"Until we have a more long-term strategy, until we have some idea where we're going in Syria and the Middle East, it seems unwise, to me, to start launching missiles," said Smith, D-Wash. "We need to know where that's going, what the purpose of it is before we take that act."

At stake in Syria is the potential for confrontation, if not outright conflict, between the U.S. and Russia, former Cold War foes whose relations have deteriorated in recent years over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine, its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russian lawmakers have warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime and that it could trigger a direct U.S-Russian military clash. Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted  a stark warning of a potential major confrontation.

At the House hearing, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, disputed Trump's legal authority to act without congressional authority and suggested a U.S. strike would lead to war with Russia.

"I'm not ready to speculate that that would happen," Mattis said.A search warrant served at a location in Lancaster led to the seizure of more than 1,000 game fowl that were being bred and raised to take part in cockfighting, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced Wednesday.

The seizure was made on Monday in the 6300 block of East Avenue E, according to Deputy Tracy Koerner of the Sheriff's Information Bureau.

"Personnel from the L.A. County Department of Animal Care and Control, with the assistance of members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles, responded to the location in order to examine, care for and take possession of the animals," Koerner said.

The birds are made to fight to the death and those that suffer injuries are allowed to go untreated and are sometimes simply thrown in the trash, Koerner said.

"Having animals fight to death along with letting them go untreated is not only cruel but often times goes hand-in-hand with gambling, drug-dealing and other illegal activities," according to Koerner, who said several people were detained, but no arrests were made.

The investigation is ongoing, Koerner said, and anyone with information was urged to contact the sheriff's Community Partnerships Bureau at (323) 981-5300. Anonymous tips can be submitted through Crime Stoppers by calling (800) 222-TIPS.

Dozens of animals were seized from a High Desert mans home Wednesday after he was accused of running a puppy mill and selling sick puppies for high prices across SoCal.

Officers with the Humane Society of San Bernardino Valley executed a search warrant at the Phelan home of Rick Kenney. The man calls himself a pastor on his Facebook page.

Investigators believe the alleged pastor and his family sold dozens of sick dogs to people all over Southern California. At his Phelan home, dozens of animals were found living in filthy conditions.

"The last that we know was about $1,100 to $1,200 a piece, Officer Frank Padilla of the Humane Society said.

Investigators said it all began about four years ago when they got several complaints from victims who found puppies for sale on the internet.

According to officers, the victims would then meet Kenney or one of his family members at a parking lot to sell the animals. But days later the puppies would get sick.

"They were diagnosed with parvo. Some of them wouldn't make it after thousands of dollars being spent on vet bills, Padilla said.

Canine parvovirus is a contagious virus characterized by vomiting, diarrhea, and weight loss.

When the victim's tried to get a refund, officers say Kenney would stop communicating, or send threatening messages.

Investigators say its been a tough case to put together because the Kenneys would often use fake names and disposable phones.

During Wednesdays raid, officers seized more than 30 dogs and puppies.

"Some of them were in the house, in a tub. No food, no water. There were kennels outside with no food, no water, living in filth, Padilla said.

As veterinarians continue testing the animals for any illnesses, officers are hoping this story will be a warning for anyone who may be thinking about buying a puppy from a private seller on the internet.

"Call the local animal agency and find out if they are reputable, Padilla said.

It was still unclear Wednesday if or when the dogs would be available for adoption.

San Bernardino County Sheriffs deputies said they arrested Kenney for being a felon in possession of firearms.



Kenney was not arrested for animal cruelty, but officers said the case is being handed over to the district attorneys office very soon.What to Know A woman said she was sexually assaulted by a tour guide in Morocco years ago.

She said she began describing her experience on social media.

Numerous women have since come forward alleging the same tour guide also sexually assaulted them.

A Florida woman who says she was sexually assaulted by her tour guide on a trip abroad is warning other college-aged women traveling internationally to think twice before booking a trip with the same tour company after hearing from over a dozen women who claimed "Me Too."

While studying abroad in Spain in November 2013, Gabrielle Vega and two friends booked a weekend getaway to Tangier, Morocco, through the Seville-based company Discover Excursions.

Vega says a man named Manuel Blanco Vela was the leader of their tour in the North African country. In an interview on "Megyn Kelly Today" Wednesday, Vega described Vela as "charismatic" and said he made them feel very comfortable to be around him.

Vela warned the girls against leaving the hotel at night, according to Vega, and urged them to have dinners and hang out on the property instead. On the last night of the excursion, Vega says Vela suggested having drinks in the hotel room the girls shared and ordered champagne from room service.

He had his back turned to us, poured the champagne, she recalled. Then we drank a glass each and quickly things started to escalate.

Vega says she began feeling woozy and fell asleep. When she got up at one point to use the bathroom, she recalled Vela entering the bathroom behind her and putting himself in my mouth before she passed out again. When she woke up the next morning, she said she had flashbacks of the assault and was sure Vela slipped something in her drink and drugged her.

You feel so vulnerable, used and just gross. You want to shower, like, it all off and you cant, she said.

She said after returning to Spain, she mentioned it to one of her friends who was on the trip, who said she recalled Vega being in the bathroom with Vela for about 30 minutes.

Vega didnt report the assault to police and was too ashamed to tell her parents, she said. After dropping out of school and spending years in therapy, Vega finally shared her story in a Facebook post last December when she heard that another woman was a victim of the same tour guide.

It was like a wave of guilt and fear and just pure terror that this had been going on so many years later, so I just went to Facebook and started writing, she said.

Vega told Kelly she was contacted by eight women who said they were also sexually assaulted by Vela within two days of posting her story. Her attorney Mark Eiglarsh told NBC 6 that another dozen women from across the country has contacted his office since the Today show segment aired.

Two additional women, who are Florida State University students that were also studying abroad in Spain at the time of their assault last spring, also shared their story alongside Vega on the NBC show Wednesday. They told Kelly they filed a police report with the school but were told by local authorities that Vela would likely not be prosecuted because of international prosecutorial jurisdiction limits since they were American, the attack happened during a trip to Portugal and it was reported in Spain.

Vega said she reached out to Discover Excursions twice after posting her story on Facebook, but they never responded. The company told Eiglarsh in an email that the people involved in the case are no longer employed by them.

Eiglarsh said the women speaking out are not looking for money from the company, but only want to let everyone know about this predator so that we can decrease the chances of him raping another girl.

Vega says she regrets not speaking out sooner, but it has taken years to heal. Shes hoping she can now make a difference.

I just want women to be able to experience the world without fear, and to be free to be who they are without heaving the fear of being attacked by the person whos there to protect you, Vega said.

Discover Excursions did not respond to repeated requests for comment.What to Know A U.S. Department of Justice news release says 29-year-old Zhelyaz Andreev faces federal charges in South Florida.

Court documents say Andreev was working in the Bulgaria office of AW-Tronics, a Miami export company.

Authorities say a Bulgarian man has been arrested for conspiring to defraud the U.S. and illegally exporting aircraft parts and equipment to Syria.

A U.S. Department of Justice news release says 29-year-old Zhelyaz Andreev faces federal charges in South Florida.

Court documents say Andreev was working in the Bulgaria office of AW-Tronics, a Miami export company, when he sold dual-use goods  articles with both civilian and military uses  to the government-owned Syrian Arab Airlines.

The release says the U.S. Department of Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control has blocked the airline for transporting weapons and ammunition to Syria in conjunction with Hezbollah, a terrorist organization, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

It wasn't immediately clear if Andreev had an attorney.What to Know The 8th Summit of the Americas is scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

The U.S. delegation is expected to use the summit to push for regional partners to continue to isolate Venezuela.

Vice President Mike Pence will lead the U.S. delegation to fill in for President Donald Trump.

More than 50 Cubans protested in Peru during a Summit of the Americas meeting, criticizing the role of Cuban-Americans in the event and demanding representation.

As the 8th Summit of the Americans had just been called to order, a woman from Cuba in the audience stood and demanded representation at the table of delegates.

Within minutes, dozens of others rallied behind the woman and shouted their disapproval of the decision to have Cuban-Americans from Miami represent the interests of the island nation at the summit.

Some called the Cuban-Americans "traitors" because they left the island when Fidel Castro rose to power, adding that the U.S. residents do not understand current Cuban affairs.

The Cuban-Americans, from organizations including the Christian Liberation Movement, said they are at the summit not to partake in politics, but to work for improved human rights.

Vice President Mike Pence plans to meet with four Latin American leaders during his weekend trip to Peru for an international summit where he is filling in for President Donald Trump.

At the Summit of the Americas, Pence will meet Saturday with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra and President Mauricio Macri of Argentina. The White House said Thursday that the vice president is also expected to hold a multilateral meeting with several Caribbean leaders.

Pence is expected to use the summit to push for regional partners to continue to isolate Venezuela while pointing to the United States as a trade partner of choice in relation to China and to promote democratic institutions.

Trump pulled out of the summit to oversee the U.S. response to an apparent chemical weapons attack on civilians in Syria and asked Pence to attend in his place. White House aides said Pence's presence will reassure allies of the administration's commitment to the region.

It will be Pence's second trip to the region  he traveled to Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Panama last August.

With the White House's support, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been barred from the summit over his plans to hold a presidential election that the opposition is boycotting and many foreign governments consider a sham. The U.S. has sanctioned Maduro and dozens of top officials, accusing the country of human rights abuses and sliding into a dictatorship.

The vice president is also expected to try to counter Chinese attempts to increase its economic influence in the Americas. Pence's visit to the region will come as the Trump administration is embroiled in an escalating trade fight with China, seeking a renegotiated version of NAFTA and floating the possibility the U.S. could eventually rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Pence will also arrive as Trump has been pushing a tougher line on immigration and seeking stronger protections along the U.S.-Mexican border. White House aides said Pence does not have any meetings planned with the Mexican delegation.

Trump had planned to attend the summit and also travel to Bogota, Colombia, but backed out after the attack in Syria. Pence will not be traveling on to Colombia and is expected to return from the summit early Sunday.A peace walk was being held in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood Wednesday in light of the recent shootings and murders in the area.

The peace walk began at Northwest 69th Street and 15th Avenue, not far from where 4-year-old Nyla Jones was killed because of gun violence last Sunday.

The shooting was followed this past Sunday by four teenagers being shot in the area. Two of them died and one was 17-year-old Kimson Green, who attended Miami Northwestern High School and was a month away from being nominated into the national honor society.

The other was 18-year-old Ricky Dixon, who was a former student at Miami Northwestern. Students at Northwestern came together for the four victims and former classmates who were the latest victims of gun violence in this community Wednesday, the second day in a row this school came together to show they all want change and curb the gun violence here.

Elementary school students from nearby Holmes Elementary also held a walk out of their own in protest against the gun violence, many of them chanting "Stop the violence, break the silence."

Police are still looking for the killer from this past weekend.

Earlier Wednesday, organizers with Bullets for Life came together to march from Brickell to the justice center in downtown Miami.What to Know Tenants at a Chinatown building said their belongings were tossed in the garbage Wednesday amid repairs

It comes nearly three months after the tenants were evicted by the city from their homes at 83 and 85 Bowery in Chinatown on Jan. 18

Their landlord, Joseph Betesh, has been accused in the past of trying to vacate the building then renovate it and hike up the rent

Tenants forced out of a Chinatown apartment building earlier this year for an unstable staircase said their landlord tossed their belongings in a construction dumpster while doing repairs Wednesday.

Images posted to Facebook show tenants at 83 and 85 Bowery foraging through black garbage bags for their belongings Wednesday, pulling out watches, medicine and children's books that had been mixed in with refuse while crews did asbestos repairs on the building.

It's the latest salvo in the saga of the tenants' fight to get back in the building since being vacated on Jan. 18 for the staircase and other code violations in what was initially thought to be a two-week ordeal that has stretched to nearly three months.

"This is how the landlord did it today: by mixing them with garbage and dropping them into a dumpster," said advocacy group Youth Against Displacement in one post. "The tenants had to go through every garbage bag and picked out usable stuff, but in the end had to give up because usable stuff had become unusable."

News 4 has reached out to landlord Joseph Betesh's company and his spokesman via email seeking comment. But in a statement to am New York, which first reported on Wednesday's action, the spokesman said none of the items thrown away were usable.

Some items removed from the building were discarded because they were perceived to be perishable food or in contact with perishable food and/or other unusable items, the spokesman told am New York in an email.

The spokesman told the newspaper other items would be taken to storage facilities where families will have direct access and that Betesh's management company is "committed to moving the families of 85 Bowery back safely into their homes as quickly as possible."

The city Department of Buildings spokesman said that it decided to partially lift its vacate order so tenants could get their belongings, and the landlord opened the building for several days recently for tenants.

Tenants evicted from a Bowery building started a hunger strike on Thursday.

About three weeks after the tenants were forced out, several tenants staged a days-long hunger strike outside the city Department of Housing Protection and Development in lower Manhattan.

The tenants, who have been living a hotel since being displaced, have also claimed that Betesh was a slumlord that had allowed the building to deteriorate and wanted to evict them to then increase the rent or build a new complex.

They were also embroiled in a lawsuit over whether their units in the tenement building were rent-regulated since at least 2016.

A spokesman for Betesh had previously disputed claims the landlord wanted to demolish the building or replace it with a hotel or condominiums.

Top Tri-State News PhotosGov. Andrew Cuomo has a 47-point lead over actor and activist Cynthia Nixon heading into the coming Democratic primary, though the gap narrows substantially among the most enthusiastic vorters, according to a new NBC 4 New York / Marist Poll.

Cuomo leads Nixon 68-21 among registered New York state voters, per the poll released Thursday. Among voters who consider themselves "highly enthusiastic" to participate in the primary, Cuomo holds a 60-32 lead.

(In 2014, he defeated primary opponent Zephyr Teachout 62 percent to 34 percent.)

"The Nixon candidacy becomes a problem for Cuomo if and by how much she surpasses Teachouts support four years ago," Lee Miringoff, director of The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, said in a statement.



Despite his public battles with Mayor Bill de Blasio over the subway and other matters, a majority of New York City voters still think Cuomo should be re-elected, but a majority of upstate and suburban voters say it's time for someone else.

The phone survey of 697 registered voters was conducted April 3-9 and has a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points.Special Counsel Robert Muellers office and President Donald Trumps legal team are now proceeding with strategies that presume a presidential interview will likely not take place as part of the Russia investigation, after months of talks between the two sides collapsed earlier this week, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, NBC News reported.

On Monday, Trumps lawyers were discussing a possible interview with Mueller's team and had begun to hash out the final sticking points, including the timing, scope and length, according to people familiar with the discussions.

One person familiar with the strategy said the presidents lawyers had over the weekend sought to expand his legal team to include individuals who would prepare him for an interview. Another person familiar with the matter, however, said preparations had not yet gone that far.

But the prospects for a presidential interview dramatically dimmed once the FBI raided the home, office and hotel room of Trumps long-time personal lawyer, Michael Cohen on Monday, these people said.

New Jersey, Colorado, Los Angeles, Raleigh-Durham  the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students reel off their upcoming travel schedule at a dizzying pace. This is their new life, traveling the country advocating for gun control, all while trying to keep up with their studies about two months after 17 people were killed in a shooting at their school.

"I've been invited to synagogues and churches and colleges and high school walkouts, and it's so much, and I wish I could go to everything," said junior Jaclyn Corin, who is part of the core group of "Never Again MSD." ''It's the best problem in the world where everybody wants to help us and wants to include us."

Almost overnight, Corin became one of the leaders in a huge organization that is looking to build on a grassroots movement that spurred hundreds of thousands around the globe to rally for gun reform on March 24. The students' mantra is "vote them out"  a message that applies to any lawmaker who accepts support from the National Rifle Association or declines to talk with them about gun rights. They're inviting lawmakers to town halls, with more than 200 scheduled around the country.

They are also trying to register as many teenagers as they can before November's midterm elections.

At a town hall near Parkland last week, supporters passed out red bumper stickers that called for a ban on assault rifles. Dozens of people were still waiting at microphones to ask questions when the event ended after two hours. Florida Congressman Ted Deutch said another town hall would be held later.

Near the entrance, a sign at a voter registration table let students know they can pre-register to vote as early as age 16.

"Nothing we did on March 24 is going to mean anything if no one goes out to vote in November because that, at the end of the day, that's where our voices are going to be heard," said Alex Wind, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Classmate David Hogg, who has received personal attacks from conservatives falsely accusing him of being a crisis actor, is crisscrossing the country visiting Iowa, Tennessee and possibly Missouri.

"I'm going to different congressional districts, specifically ones where there is a politician, either Democrat or a Republican, that is supported by the NRA ... I'm also going to a lot of these places where the politicians have called us out, like Steve King," he said, referring to the Iowa congressman who has repeatedly criticized the students on social media.

King lambasted student Emma Gonzalez for wearing a Cuban flag patch at the Washington march last month.

Some of the students said they're struggling to find balance as grassroots leaders and students with homework, Advanced Placement exams and college applications. They've outgrown an office donated by a Stoneman Douglas parent and are moving to a new, secret location after their past address was leaked to the press. Most of their engagements are now handled by a professional booking agent and a public relations firm.

Many have missed classes. Corin, whose course load includes several Advanced Placement classes, missed an entire week of school before spring break.

"I'm kind of overwhelmed because I've always been one to value my academics and now school is kind of becoming on a level playing field with everything else," she said.

Several students will head to New York at the end of the month to be honored at a Time magazine event after they were on the cover last month. Chris Grady and a few others will speak at an event in Colorado on the anniversary of the Columbine school shooting. On top of their travels, Cameron Kasky is juggling the school play and Gonzalez is trying to focus on school work.

The frantic pace can be exhausting, the students said. Deutsch was so booked up last week, he asked a reporter to schedule an interview on Easter Sunday.

The students feel pressured that "If we don't stay in the media, the media is going to go away," Wind said.

But they're also getting help from organizations such as Everytown for Gun Safety and Women's March, which provides training and resources. Both groups have chapters in colleges and high schools across the country.

"I feel like now 'til midterms is what we're calling our Phase Two, but there's going to be a Phase Three and a Phase Four and a Phase Five," Corin said. "As much as I want assault rifles to be banned, that probably won't be a reality for another four or six or eight years  or ever."

The students are keenly aware of the dismal youth turnout in general elections, and that it's practically non-existent in midterms.

"The youth have been shot down for far too long, both literally and metaphorically," senior Ryan Deitsch said, citing young voter turnout of less than one in five. "If we can get it to three out of five, we could control and shift every major election to come."Aiming to quell concerns before what is likely to be a narrow confirmation vote, Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo vowed on Thursday to ramp up efforts against Russia in "each place we confront them." But he ducked and dodged when asked whether he supports President Donald Trump's pounding criticism of the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Pompeo, now Trump's CIA chief, tread carefully when confronted with several of the president's controversial and undiplomatic statements, focusing instead on his plans to rebuild a depleted agency and restore its influence. Pompeo suggested he did not share all the president's views  including his skepticism about Russia's interference.

"I take a back seat to no one" when it comes to standing up to Russia, Pompeo said.

However, when asked if he would resign if Trump moved to scuttle the probe by firing special counsel Robert Mueller or the deputy attorney general to whom he reports, he said no.

Pompeo's nomination faces stiff opposition from a handful of Republicans and many Democrats as well as supporters of the Iran nuclear deal, environmentalists and minority rights groups, and his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee appeared designed to blunt their criticism. The CIA chief told senators that he has been miscast as a "hawk" despite previous comments savaging the Iran accord and hinting at regime change in North Korea. He maintained he wants to improve the Iran deal and would continue efforts to do so even if Trump withdraws from it as he has threatened.

In his testimony, Pompeo confirmed for the first time publicly that he's been interviewed by the team of special counsel Mueller, who is investigating possible ties between Russia and Trump's presidential campaign as well as possible obstruction of justice issues. But he wouldn't answer questions about the contents of the interview, arguing it would be improper since, as CIA director in charge of overseas intelligence gathering, he has been a "participant" in Mueller's probe.

Under questioning, he said he would be unlikely to resign as secretary of state if Trump were to fire Mueller. Lawmakers are concerned the president may seek Mueller's ouster to try to shut down the investigation, and the White House has said it believes Trump does have the authority to fire him if desired.

"My instincts tell me no," Pompeo said about possibly resigning. "My instincts tell me my obligation to continue to serve as America's senior diplomat will be more important in times of domestic political turmoil."

Throughout the hearing, he drew a sharp contrast between himself and Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil who Trump unceremoniously fired last month. He lamented the "demoralizing" vacancies at the top echelons of the department during Tillerson's brief tenure and said he planned to fill those vacancies.

He cast his close connection to Trump as an advantage that would help him restore the significance of the department.

"My relationship with President Trump is due to one thing: We've demonstrated value to him at the CIA. So, in turn, he has come to rely on us," Pompeo said. "I intend to ensure that the Department of State will be just as central to the president's policies and the national security of the United States."

His remarks before the committee were the first chance for lawmakers and the public to hear directly from the former Kansas congressman about his approach to diplomacy and the role of the State Department, should he be confirmed. Pompeo's views on global issues are well known  he was questioned extensively by senators for his confirmation to run the CIA  but Democratic senators have raised questions about his fitness to be top diplomat, given his hawkish views and past comments about minorities.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., took Pompeo to task over for saying previously that Muslims have a special obligation to denounce extremism and for his longstanding position that gays should not be able to marry.

"I continue to hold that view," Pompeo said of gay marriage, though he declined repeatedly to answer whether he believes gay sex is a "perversion." Pompeo said that his record at the CIA and elsewhere proves he treats everyone equally and with respect, regardless of religion, gender or sexual orientation.

He sought to pre-empt concerns about Trump's apparent unwillingness to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin directly. He said a long list of punitive actions taken under Trump show the U.S. takes the threat from Russia seriously, adding that "we need to push back in each place we confront them," including the economic and cyber arenas.

An avowed opponent of the Iran nuclear deal, Pompeo said he'd work immediately if confirmed to "fix" the agreement that Trump has threatened to abandon if it's not strengthened. Pompeo wouldn't say explicitly if he'd advocate a withdrawal if there's no fix by Trump's May 12 deadline, suggesting there could be an extension if significant progress was being made by then. Still, he affirmed that he won't support staying in over the long term unless more restrictions are placed on Tehran.

"If there's no chance that we can fix it, I will recommend to the president that we work with our allies to achieve a better outcome and to achieve a better deal," Pompeo said.

To the dismay of some Democratic lawmakers, Pompeo equivocated when asked about climate change  acknowledging it is occurring but saying only that it's "likely" that humans are contributing to it. Still, although Trump has announced the U.S. is pulling out of the Paris global climate agreement, Pompeo said the State Department should be involved in global efforts to address global warming.

Trump's National Security Adviser John Bolton said in a statement that Pompeo is "a talented and experienced public servant" and said the administration needs him as secretary of state "as we support the President and take on some of the toughest foreign policy issues of our time."

Vermont saw the most significant changes to gun laws in many years Wednesday, with the state's Republican governor authorizing new rules he said were designed to boost public safety.

The hot-button issue of gun control drew large crowds to the Vermont Statehouse in Montpelier, both to applaud and to jeer the new rules.

"It's not time to do what's easy  it's time to do what's right," Gov. Phil Scott said before signing three bills into law.

The new laws give police more authority, after due process, to take firearms away from domestic abusers, or from people deemed a risk to harm themselves and others.

Background checks will expand to include private gun sales, with the age for purchases rising to 21 in the state  unless the buyer is with law enforcement, the military, or passes a course on proper handling.

Higher-capacity magazines will soon vanish from store shelves, and bump stocks, which speed up the firing ability of some semi-automatic firearms, will be banned.

Scott noted that the laws do not seize any guns from law-abiding sportsmen and women, or stop them from using them responsibly. Nor, Scott said, will the state grab magazines Vermonters own or buy before the sales of many bullet-loading accessories stop this fall.

The governor described the new steps as tools needed to help cut the chances for violence in Vermont, and said he was moved to act after Vermont State Police said a plot to shoot up a high school in Rutland County was narrowly avoided.

Security was heightened outside the statehouse Wednesday, as hundreds of supporters and opponents of the bills gathered to make their voices heard.

Mike Channon of Newark was dressed in orange and had a foam sword sticking out of his back. He said he feels stabbed in the back by the Republican governor who he didn't think would touch existing gun laws  adding that he fears more restrictions could be coming from the legislature.

"If somebody gets drunk and kills somebody with a car, we don't make it harder for people to drive a car," Channon said in an interview with necn. "Phil Scott used the NRA to get elected. And as far as I'm concerned, he could run on the Democratic ticket now."

Richard Smiles of Essex Junction came to Montpelier to applaud Gov. Scott for prioritizing public safety, holding a sign saying "Thank you Governor Scott."

"I think it was a brave move on his part, and a good move," Smiles said of the new laws. "It's a step in the right direction."

Scott told the crowd  to frequent yelled interruptions  that the conversation doesn't end here. He said the nation needs to focus more on mental health problems and civility to curb gun violence.

"There will always be more work to do, but today, we choose to try," Scott said.

Many gun rights activists said Wednesday they hope to see Phil Scott voted out of office come November.

However, judging from the crowd gathered at the Statehouse, the Republican also appears to have picked up political support with this move, even from some Democrats.

Vermont is the latest state to pass new restrictions on guns since the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott signed a contentious bill that raised the age limit to buy firearms to 21 from 18, banned the sale and possession of bump stocks, and created a mandatory waiting period for gun purchases. Oregon legislators passed a law limiting gun access for those convicted of stalking and domestic violence.

And in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo amended a state law passed after the deadly Sandy Hook school shooting, which prohibited domestic abusers from owning pistols and revolvers, to now include all firearms and adds a list of serious misdemeanors.A man has been arrested for allegedly murdering a college student whose body was found in a Philadelphia creek in November.

Philadelphia police took 22-year-old David Grier into custody Wednesday afternoon for the murder of 21-year-old Kierra Johnson.

Homicide Capt. John Ryan said Grier and Johnson knew one another and had contact with each other prior to Johnson's death. SEPTA surveillance video shows that Grier was the last person Johnson was seen alive with, police said.

Police zeroed in on Grier soon after the killing but it took about five months of detective work to gather enough evidence to charge him, Ryan said.

Grier previously was convicted in California of assault with force with intent to cause great bodily harm, according to the Alameda County District Attorney's office. He had been arrested Sept. 1, 2016. After his conviction, he served a year in jail and was given five years probation. The terms of that probation and if it allowed Grier to leave the state wasn't clear.

Johnson's body was found in the water of Cobbs Creek near Cobbs Creek Parkway and Spruce Street on Nov. 3, 2017. Johnson's mother reported her missing the previous day.

SkyForce10 / Family Photo / Philadelphia Police

A medical examiner ruled Johnson died by strangulation. She was also assaulted, Ryan said.



Ryan didn't reveal where they believe Johnson was killed but he said the motive appeared to be "sexual in nature."

Johnson was a "young lady just living her life, doing the right things," Ryan said at the time of her death.

She studied visual communications at Hussian School of Art in Center City where she was a second-year student.

"It is a small community and students are very upset," said Sylvia McCray, the Dean of Academic Affairs.

McCray said Johnson was always available and helpful to other students. She was passionate about the arts, believed in land conservation and always smiled.

"She was funny," McCray said. "She had her own sense of style."

Grier has been living a short distance from Cobbs Creek Park.

He remained jailed in Philadelphia without bail after being arraigned on murder, robbery and weapons charges Thursday. He has legal representation but has made no statement about the accusations, Ryan said.A man involved in a Lemon Grove domestic violence incident fled from San Diego County sheriff's deputies and led them on a pursuit on local highways until he was arrested in Bonita.

Deputies were called to Lemon Grove for a domestic violence incident just before 10 a.m. and when they arrived, a suspect got into a vehicle and drove off.

The driver failed to pull over and continued in a slow-speed pursuit until he reached southbound Interstate 5 and increased his speed to over 100 mph.

Deputies pursued the suspect's vehicle to an apartment complex near the Briarwood Road exit from SR-54.

At that point, deputies say the driver, identified as Robert Perez, 26, jumped out of the car and ran.

Deputies were on foot searching the area and used the sheriff's department helicopter to locate the man.

He was found in an apartment on the 3000 block of Plaza Mercia where he had entered through an open garage.



One person was inside the home, according to SDSO Sgt. Kelly Moody. Sgt. Kelly said the resident tried to leave but Perez would not let them at first. The resident eventually made it outside of the apartment and alerted officers.

Perez was taken into custody inside the apartment and booked on domestic violence, false imprisonment, burglary and felony evading charges.

Moody said deputies were assisted by San Diego and National City police to secure an arrest in the case.A man accused of impersonating a police officer was arrested in Virginia after allegedly following a woman through three states as he drove a car with police markings and a license plate reading "FILM CAR."

He told police the vehicle had been used in a music video, according to authorities.

It's the second time that the suspect, 28-year-old Jerry Lentz Saintvil, has been arrested for allegedly impersonating an officer, the Fauquier County Sheriff's Office said Wednesday.

Saintvil, of Fredericksburg, is also accused of providing false identification to the deputy who pulled him over.

Saintvil was arrested Saturday in the Warrenton area after a woman called 911 shortly before 5 p.m. and said she was being followed by a police car and was concerned for her safety, according to a release from the sheriff's office.

The woman said a police car with functioning blue lights and "police" markings had followed her from western Maryland to West Virginia and then into Virginia. She said the driver was using the car's emergency equipment to move through traffic and seemed to be trying to keep up with her.

"Was he going to keep following this person until they pulled over to get gas, or to rest? Who knows? And to initiate contact? We don't know. These are things we're trying to find out," said Sgt. James Hartman, with the Fauquier County Sheriff's Office.



A deputy responded to the area and tried to catch up to the car, but authorities said the driver sped up and left Route 29 at the Meetze Road exit.

When the deputy did stop the suspect, Saintvil told him that the car, which had a North Carolina tag, had been used to film a music video in Winchester, Virginia, and that he was on his way home to Fredericksburg, authorities said.

Authorities say Saintvil gave conflicting statements to the deputy. They contacted the registered owner of the vehicle, who was uncooperative, they said.

Deputies said they found a tactical vest with a "Special Police" badge, a Department of Justice pin with a DOJ badge, ammunition carriers, a police utility belt with a handcuff case, air soft gun and portable radios inside the car.

Saintvil was charged with impersonating a police officer, second offense; false ID to law enforcement to avoid arrest, second offense; and driving on a suspended license, third or subsequent offense. He was held in the Fauquier County Adult Detention Center with no bond.

Hartman said the woman did the right thing by not pulling over. Police said drivers can call 911 if they believe a police impersonator is following them or trying to pull them over.



The Fauquier County Sheriff's Office is asking anyone who saw the car on Saturday in Fauquier County or elsewhere to call them at 540-347-3300. Anyone who has any information about Saintvil impersonating law enforcement is also asked to contact the sheriff's office. Callers may remain anonymous.A man convicted of sexually abusing a young girl nearly 20 years ago has been named a person of interest in her mother's disappearance and death.

Montgomery County police identified Fernando Asturizaga, now 51, as a person of interest in the death of Alison Thresher Thursday.

Thresher, 45, disappeared from her Bethesda apartment in the 4500 block of Sangamore Lane in May 2000. The Washington Post copy editor's car was found the next day, about a mile away near the C & O Canal trail.

Her body was never found.

In 1999, Thresher was in the middle of a contentious divorce and was concerned about grooming behavior Asturizaga was exhibiting toward her daughter, Hannah Thresher, police said Thursday. Asturizaga was her daughter's Spanish teacher, and Alison Thresher's ex-husband employed him as a babysitter for their children.

Alison Thresher wrote letters to Asturizaga, her daughter's school and her attorney voicing her concern about the "inappropriate relationship" between Asturizaga and her daughter, police say.

Despite her concerns, Asturizaga was still allowed to babysit her children when they were in her ex-husband's custody.

In February 2000, Alison Thresher got into an altercation with Asturizaga outside her ex-husband's home about his continued contact with Hannah Thresher, police say.

Alison Thresher was last seen May 23, 2000, after having dinner with her parents.

She was scheduled to start a new job with The Washington Post the next day, but early that morning, a neighbor reported hearing cries coming from her apartment.

A short time later, a man was seen running through the neighborhood where her car would later be found.

"A few months later, when I expressed frustration at his lack of empathy towards my grief over the loss of my mother, FA [Fernando Asturizaga] said to me: 'I thought things would be easier for us now that shes gone,'" Hannah Thresher said during a news conference Thursday.

In 2010, Hannah Thresher told police about the sexual abuse she endured at the hands of Asturizaga from 1999 until 2001. When the abuse began, Asturizaga was 32 years old; Hannah Thresher was 10.

Asturizaga was convicted on multiple counts of child abuse and rape and was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison in 2012.

He refused to talk to police about Alison Thresher's disappearance after his arrest.

"That man was by definition a sociopath. He was almost a professional at infiltrating groups of people, schools, especially anywhere with a child," Alison Thatcher's son Sam Thresher said at the Thursday news conference.

Sam Thresher, now 28, said said he has a service dog because of the trauma he experienced after his mother's death.

The lead detective in Hannah Thresher's case was later transferred to the cold case unit and asked to reopen the investigation into Alison Thresher's death in 2016.

Based on recent DNA analysis, police now believe Alison Thresher was murdered inside her apartment and that her body was taken to an unknown location. Police say the suspect tried to destroy evidence at the scene.

Anyone with information about Alison Thresher's death is asked to call police at 240-773-5070. Detectives are also asking that anyone who may have been victimized by Asturizaga call police.The D.C. police officer who shot and killed an unarmed man on a motorcycle in 2016 is fighting to keep his job.

Officer Brian Trainer appeared before a police trial board for a second day on Thursday, in connection to the shooting death of 31-year-old Terrence Sterling. Trainer, who is white, shot Sterling, who is black, after Sterling was reported to be riding his motorcycle recklessly on Sept. 11, 2016.

Multiple witnesses cast doubt on Trainer's account of what happened in the final moments of Sterling's life.

An assistant police chief testified on Thursday that he found Trainer's story hard to believe. Even if he were to accept Trainer's version of events, Trainer still violated police regulations by firing at a moving vehicle, he said.

Trainer has said he shot Sterling because Sterling intentionally rammed his police car, injuring him. He feared for his life, he said.

For the defense, an expert in police shootings testified that Trainer had every reason to fear for his life and was well within his rights to use his gun.

Trainer himself could testify Friday.

On Wednesday, a detective who investigated the shooting pointed out inconsistencies in Trainer's report of what happened. Trainer said his leg was injured after Sterling rammed the door of his police car. But the detective said the injury was more consistent with Trainer being on his knee as he administered first aid to Sterling than with being trapped in the door.

Outside the hearing Wednesday, demonstrators held signs and chanted "Fire Brian Trainer." Then, they marched, blocking traffic and holding a sign that said "Justice for Terrence Sterling."

A police internal review board previously found Trainer was unjustified in shooting Sterling, and the police chief called on him to resign. Earlier this year, the city reached a $3.5 million settlement with Sterling's family.

The DC Police Union, which is paying for Trainer's legal team, is concerned about whether he's getting a fair hearing.

"The DC Police Union continues to support Officer Brian Trainer and his right to due process. Now that the Trial Board has begun, we have serious concerns about his ability to receive a fair hearing," union chairman Stephen Bigelow Jr. said Thursday in a statement. "Numerous city officials have called for his resignation before the department completed its administrative investigation. Our hope is that this case is decided objectively on the merits of the evidence, not on outside political pressure."

Police initially said Sterling, of Fort Washington, Maryland, intentionally rammed the passenger-side door of a police car while trying to flee a traffic stop.

Witnesses disputed the police department's account of the incident and said the crash was unavoidable.

Trainer, a four-year veteran of the department, was wearing a body camera, but he did not turn it on until after the shooting, police said.

According to a review of the incident by the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Metropolitan Police Department, Trainer and his partner, the driver, were stopped at a red light on U Street at 15th Street in Northwest D.C. about 4:20 a.m. on Sept. 11. Sterling pulled in front of their cruiser and briefly stopped before speeding off through the red light. The officers turned on their emergency lights and siren and pursued Sterling.

The officers lost sight of Sterling at times, but other officers and civilians saw him riding at speeds estimated at 100 mph, running red lights and nearly hitting another police cruiser, according to the U.S. attorney.

The pursuit continued for several minutes and covered about 25 blocks, until Sterling stopped at Third and M streets NW and the officers pulled into the intersection to partially block Sterling's path, according to the U.S. attorney.

Trainer drew his weapon and opened his door. Evidence shows Sterling accelerated toward the passenger side, hitting the door as the officer was getting out, the U.S. attorney said.

Trainer reacted by firing two rounds through the front window, according to the U.S. attorney.

Sterling died of wounds to the neck and back, according to the city's chief medical examiner. Toxicology results found Sterlings blood alcohol content was 0.16 -- twice the legal limit.

Trainer did not face criminal charges in the case. He remains on paid administrative leave.

His case will be evaluated by a three-person trial board composed of a police commander and two captains.

What to Know Officer Sean Gannon, a member of the K9 unit at the Yarmouth Police Department, was serving a warrant a Marstons Mills home when he was shot

The 32-year-old was taken to Cape Cod Hospital where he later passed away

Following a standoff, police arrested Thomas Latanowich, 29. He is being charged with murder. Latanowich has had more than 100 prior arrests

A police officer was shot and killed while serving a warrant at a Cape Cod home on Thursday afternoon.

Officer Sean Gannon, 32, a member of the Yarmouth police K9 unit, was serving a warrant at a home on Blueberry Lane in the Marstons Mills area of Barnstable when he was shot. Gannon was taken to Cape Cod Hospital, where he later died.

Gannon's police dog Nero was also shot. He underwent emergency surgery and is recovering at an undisclosed location on Cape Cod.

Police Pay Tribute to Fallen Yarmouth Officer

"With deep sorrow and heavy hearts the Yarmouth Police Department reports the loss of Officer Sean Gannon," the department wrote on Facebook Thursday night.

"I treat all of my officers like they are my own sons and daughters," Yarmouth Police Chief Fred Fredrickson said. "To lose one is like losing my own."

The suspect, 29-year-old Thomas Latanowich, of Somerville, was taken into custody after a standoff with police.

Sharon Ellis, who lives on Blueberry Lane, looked out her window Thursday and saw three people enter the home where the shooting took place. The next thing she knew, there was chaos.

"We did hear what I believed to be a couple of gunshots," she said. "It was all kinds of crazy."

Latanowich has been charged with murder in Gannon's death. He was ordered held without bail at his arraignment Friday in the First District Court of Barnstable.

When Latanowich was arrested in December of 2016 and charged in a non-fatal stabbing, Yarmouth police described him as a "notorious and violent criminal" with over 100 prior criminal charges in Massachusetts.

A warrant was issued for his arrest last week after he violated his probation by being absent for a home visit and missing drug test.

Yarmouth Police

Fellow police departments and other public officials have been showing their support for Gannon, his family members and his colleagues on social media.

Gannon's cruiser is on display outside the Yarmouth Police Department, covered in black-and-purple bunting. A makeshift memorial has been set up in his honor, and flags at the station are flying at half-staff.

"I am heartbroken to learn of the passing of Officer Gannon," Gov. Charlie Baker said in a statement Thursday. "My thoughts and prayers are with his family, loved ones and the Yarmouth Police Department after this tragic loss. The Commonwealth is blessed to have courageous men and women who put their lives on the line to protect our communities every day."The Trump administration is illegally detaining and trying to deport immigrants pursuing lawful immigration status who are married to U.S. citizens, according to a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

The lawsuit, filed late Tuesday, says the administration is targeting people for deportation who are following established rules for becoming lawful permanent residents based on their marriages to American citizens.

Among the people named in the complaint is Lilian Calderon, a Guatemalan living in Rhode Island, who was detained for a month after she appeared for a routine interview at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to discuss her marriage.

"It's not fair what's happening to us,'' the mother of two said Wednesday. "We're just trying to following a process that was implemented.''

A spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit is the latest in a string of challenges to the Republican administration's aggressive immigration policies.

The ACLU says regulations set by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services allows people like Calderon, who are subject to removal orders but have U.S.-citizen spouses, to stay in the country throughout most of the process of obtaining lawful immigration status.

The rules were designed to keep families together and encourage more people to adjust their immigration status, lawyers say. Now, authorities are targeting people for deportation who are trying to do just that, the ACLU says.

"People should not have to fear they may end in prison merely for trying to play by the government's own policies to address their immigration status,'' said Steve Brown, executive director of the ACLU of Rhode Island.

The lawsuit says President Donald Trump's immigration policies are being fueled by "racial animus'' against people of color. The ACLU cites, among other things, reports that the president said he preferred more immigrants from Norway, a predominantly white country.

"When you have an administration taking action that prevents people who are entitled under the law to seek their lawful status in order to stay here with their U.S.-citizen family members, you have to ask: Why? Is it because the administration has a view about what kind of people should be entitled to be Americans?'' said Adriana Lafaille, an ACLU attorney.

Others named in the complaint include a mother being held in Boston after she and her husband attended an interview to confirm their marriage to get lawful immigration status. Another couple fears going to their interview because the husband could be detained.

Calderon, who was brought to the U.S. by her parents when she was 3 years old, was released from detention in February after the ACLU intervened. She became the subject of a final order of removal as a teenager because her father's asylum application was denied.

She now lives in fear of being deported to a country that she doesn't know, she said.

"How can we provide for our kids in a country that we know nothing of?'' she asked.Police and other public officials across Massachusetts showed their support on social media after a police officer was shot on Cape Cod.

Sean Gannon, an officer from the Yarmouth Police Department, died after being shot while serving a warrant in Barnstable.

"With a heavy heart, our condolences go out tonight to our brothers & sisters of the @yarmouthpolice & to Officer Sean Gannon's family & friends," Massachusetts State Police tweeted.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the Yarmouth Police Department," New Bedford Police tweeted. "Your brothers and sisters in blue stand with all of you."

"Thoughts and prayers to all involved officers and the entire Yarmouth Police Department," Woburn Police Chief Robert Ferullo tweeted.

"We are sending prayers to our brothers and sisters on Cape Cod," the police department in Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard tweeted.

With a heavy heart , our condolences go out tonight to our brothers & sisters of the @yarmouthpolice & to Officer Sean Gannon's family & friends. We are also praying tonight for the recovery of Officer Gannon's K9 partner, who was also injured in today's tragic incident.#LODD pic.twitter.com/9ITeLFi3bq  Mass State Police (@MassStatePolice) April 13, 2018

Gov. Charlie Baker also issued his condolences.

"I am heartbroken to learn of the passing of Officer Gannon," Baker said in a statement. "My thoughts and prayers are with his family, loved ones and the Yarmouth Police Department after this tragic loss. The Commonwealth is blessed to have courageous men and women who put their lives on the line to protect our communities every day."



A suspect was taken into custody after a standoff with police and SWAT responders.A series of accidents has highlighted concerns about the construction project underway at Wynn Boston Harbor in Everett. Following the death of a worker last week, NBC 10 Boston has learned the family of another worker has filed a lawsuit.

This is about as bad as it gets, said attorney Neil Sugarman.

On behalf of the family of John Pitcher, Sugarman filed a lawsuit against a subcontractor working on the Wynn project. In December, Sugarman said an employee work for SPS New England was operating an excavator when he struck Pitcher in the head.

He flew 50 feet, Sugarman explained. In addition he suffered internal injuries to his spleen, other organs, he suffered massive fractures involving ribs, a collapsed lung.

Following therapy and surgeries, Pitcher died from a blood clot in March. Sugarman argues it stemmed from injuries that were entirely avoidable.

It was preventable, said Sugarman. If people follow the rules and they are well trained then you minimize or prevent things like this from occurring.

Pinchers death is not the first to be connected to injuries from the Wynn project. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, there are currently four open investigations into accidents at the site.

In a statement, a spokesman for Wynn Boston Harbor extended their condolences to the Pitcher family.

It is difficult to hear when anyone related to our project loses their life, whether the injury was sustained on our site or not. This incident is particularly tragic as the worker was recovering. Our heartfelt condolences go out to his family, friends and co-workers, wrote Greg John, executive director of bran marketing at Wynn Boston Harbor.

While Sugarman said they are still in the early stages of their investigation, he expects to show SPS New England failed to properly train its employees and practice safety on the job.

SPS New England said they extend their deepest sympathies to the Pitcher family and are cooperating with investigators.A group of Christian leaders in Norfolk is inviting churches to help launch a prayer group for the Armed Forces.

A group of Christian leaders in Norfolk is inviting churches to help launch a prayer group for the Armed Forces.

Pathways Tenancy Engagement Worker YMCA Norfolk is looking for a Pathways Tenancy Engagement Worker to work closely with service users by providing them with support to help them successfully manage their new, long term, secure tenancies. Read more

Norfolk's nonagenarian seamstress makes dresses for Jordan Anna Bayles, a 96-year-old dressmaker from Wymondham, has sent her latest consignment of clothing as gifts to Christian refugees in Jordan. Read more

Matthew Projects needs a Unity Service Manager The Matthew Project is seeking to recruit a new Service Manager for its Young Peoples Integrated Substance Misuse Service (Unity) in Norfolk, funded by Norfolk County Council Public Health. Read more

Blue light services visit Dippy at night There are just under five weeks left of Dippy the dinosaurs stay at Norwich Cathedral and a spectacular farewell is planned  with emergency services workers invited to a very special preview of the event. Read more

Update with God before shutting down Ruth Lilley explains that some of the necessary housekeeping practices that keep our computers functioning correctly may have equivalent applications for our spiritual health. Read more

Norwich event to explore sustainable futures Jonathon Porritt will be among speakers looking at sustainable futures at an event leading up to the COP 26 conference on Climate Change in Glasgow. Read more

Great value residential centre in East Anglia Belsey Bridge residential centre offers fully catered group retreats in comfortable budget accommodation from only 40 per person per night Read more

King's Lynn Pastor upcycles his mission to the homeless After serving for fourteen years as Pastor at Cornerstone King`s Lynn Baptist Church, Kevan Crane has taken on a new role serving the homeless. He explains his unusual journey of faith. Read more

Perseverance brings rewards Andrew Frere-Smith has discovered the joys of DIY, but has realised that the best results are obtained when following the advice of James in the bible. Read more

Hubb.church can help your church flourish on the web The Christian Cambridge-based web technology company which has supported the Network Norfolk website for the past 16 years has rebranded its church website, communications, administration and finance platform. Read more

'Visions of Salvation' Julian retreat The Friends of Julian of Norwich present 'Visions of Salvation', a two day in-person and online retreat taking place on October 29 and 30. Read more

SOUL Church set to start work on 1,200-seat site SOUL Church is set to start work on its purpose-built new 1,200-seater church building, designed to be a welcoming home for the people of Norwich. Read more

Dippy's Norwich visit inspires 9,000 planet pledges Dippy the dinosaurs visit to Norwich Anglican Cathedral has inspired more than 9,000 pledges to protect the planet. Read more

Gorleston church reaches out to toddlers Gorleston has a new parent / carer and toddler group which starts this week at St Mary Magdalene Church as part of their outreach into the community. Read more

Norwich FGB's explosive dinner invitation An invitation has been issued to hear the explosive testimony of Norfolk farmer Colin King at the next dinner of the Norwich FGB, at the Mercure Hotel in Norwich, on Monday October 18. Read more

Norwich drug worker takes a dive with her client A remarkable substance misuse worker from the Matthew Project is heading for the skies with her teenage client. Read more

Tributes paid to Norwich Mothers' Union president The Diocese of Norwich Mothers Union has announced the sad death of its "dedicated" President, Val Ovenden. Past President Marguerite Phillips pays tribute. Read moreFILM REVIEW: Wes Anderson's stop-motion comedy Isle of Dogs (say it fast)

Isle of Dogs (15)

Running time 1hr 41mins

Rating: ****

ISLE of Dogs is more of the same from Wes Andersons cinematic confectionery  scrumptious baroque visuals, hip-ironic

gullibility, a script chock-full of loveable absurdities and postmodern whimsy galore. Just as 2014s Grand Budapest Hotel saw the director channel a peculiarly middle-class American conception of interwar Europe (all snow-capped mountains, trench-coated gentry and lavish chocolate-box hotels), Anderson here envisages Japan through the prism of an outsider agog at the countrys post-war renaissance; his plasticine landscapes, replete with metabolist architecture and megacorp towers, flirt with (but never quite cross totally into the realm of) outright parody. Your enjoyment of it will be entirely predicated upon your capacity to stomach the rest of Andersons filmography  its so playful and guileless as to evoke that unique sense of the uncanny the maestro has claimed as his signature, though its childlike veneer here threatens to give way to something much darker lurking just behind the scenes.

Its among Andersons most accessible films to date  perhaps even his most instantly loveable  yet his art direction appears to have taken a gloomy, tantalising turn, evidenced here as he conjures trash heaps and dysfunctional metropolises to people with ninjas and talking dogs. In the not-too-distant future, the evil Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) of Megasaki City (yes) decrees that the local pooches be exiled to Trash Island, after an outbreak of dog flu reduces the nation to a Ghost in the Shell-esque mess. Among the dispossessed dog-lovers is Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin), the mayors preteen nephew, who sets off on a madcap quest to rescue his pet; once on Trash Island, he is aided by a friendly pack of talking canines, led by hardcase Chief (Bryan Cranston). The latter is, by far, the highlight of the film  while you might consider yourself a tad old for a talking animal flick, Cranstons voice work, coupled with the splendid animation, evokes a hero we can all root for, a grizzled survivor with a well-concealed moral conscience.

Accusations of cultural tactlessness are almost certainly misplaced  far from a xenophobic caricature, Andersons is a toybox vista, gentle, sassy and surprisingly subversive in its flirtations with Japanese stereotypes. Though its shoehorning-in a cheeky Yoko Ono cameo will be too much for some, Isle of Dogs (say it fast) balances perfectly juvenile astonishment and artistic

sophistication  in its own, oddball sort of way, the movie is possessed of an uncompromising vision and self-confidence. I feel this will one day make for a worthy double bill with Sofia Coppolas Lost in Translation, a film that has also been tagged with (more plausible) allegations of Orientalism; both movies deal with a Japan as alien to Western palates as it was those of their great-grandparents, yet, whereas Coppola is content to look on from the distance, to find melancholy and torment in the Land of the Rising Sun, Anderson dares to extract it from its box and have fun with it.DANBURY  A former member of Danbury Hospitals board of directors, Rudy L. Ruggles, has given what was described as a transformational gift to the Western Connecticut Health Network to improve its research facility.

WCHN will rename its research laboratory the Rudy L. Ruggles Biomedical Research Institute in his honor.

Ruggles gift will help researchers find better therapies and procedures for patients, according to a release.

I am happy to be a part of the exciting medical developments that are being achieved at WCHNs Research Institute, Ruggles said in a statement. The research is an important part of WCHNs care evolution because it is focused on translational medicine  it is not research for the purpose of conducting research. The overarching goal is to ultimately improve patient care.

Hospital officials did not provide the amount of the gift.

The 17,000-square-foot laboratory focuses on translational research, a method that applies scientific findings to create new therapies, medical procedures and diagnostics that benefit patients. The research has helped scientists better identify people at risk for diseases or those who are likely to resist certain treatment regiments.

At the lab, researchers are trying to learn how to detect Lyme disease sooner, develop a new screening process for people at high risk for pancreatic cancer and more.

Ruggles, of Ridgefield, has been a longtime supporter of Danbury Hospital and WCHN. He and his wife, Sally, were the first investors in the research institute, and Ruggles served as the founding chair of the institutes Advisory Council. He will now serve as the chair of WCHNs new Scientific Research Committee.

Mr. Ruggles has truly been an invaluable partner in our quest to build a state-of-the-art research program in order to improve the current standards of patient care, WCHN CEO John Murphy said in a statement. His expertise and dedication have been essential to advancing our innovative translational research mission.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.

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.

New Milford Rotary Club Scholarship: Deadline: April 15. Open to high school seniors in good standing who are residents of New Milford of Sherman, who have excelled in the area of community volunteer activities as well as academic achievement and involvement in extracurricular activities. Specific dates and descriptions of community service activities are recommended. Applications must be printed legibly or typed. Applications available at high school. Application and supporting materials must be submitted by April 15 to New Milford Rotary Club, P.O. Box 161, New Milford, CT 06776.

New Milford Rotary Clubs Jim Faure Scholarship: Deadline: April 15. Open to students who have a strong record in volunteer service and who may plan on attending a two year college or a vocational or trade school. Specific dates and descriptions of community service activities are recommended. Applications must be printed legibly or typed. General Rotary Club scholarship forms may used to apply for this scholarship and are available at high school. Application and supporting materials must be submitted by April 15 to New Milford Rotary Club, P.O. Box 161, New Milford, CT 06776.

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.

To have a scholarship listed, mail or drop the information off to Deborah Rose at The Greater New Milford Spectrum, 45B Main St., New Milford, CT 06776; fax it to 860-350-6794; or email drose@newstimes.com.NEW MILFORD  The white colonial at 34 Main St. now stands as the last residential property around the Town Green, but when it was built in 1774, it was one of the first.

The home was built by the neighboring First Congregational Churchs second minister, Rev. Nathaniel Taylor, for his eldest son, Revolutionary War Col. Nathaniel Taylor.

(The Taylors) came very early in the birth of New Milford, said Lisa Roush, New Milford Historical Societys curator. His house was one of the earlier houses that were built on the green and other houses followed. The church was always the center of town.

The younger Taylor was a player in the Revolutionary War, traveling to dine with Gen. George Washington at least once, Roush said.

At the New Milford home, he would host military personnel traveling through town, including Lt. Gen. Marquis de Lafayette and Gen. Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau, commanders of the French troops that fought alongside the continental army against the British .

The house would stay in the Taylor family until 1860 and by the 1930s had been converted into four apartments. It was restored to its original state in 1940.

It was this history that gained the attention of its last owner, Charles Beach Barlow, who would buy the home in 1972 and live there until he passed away in 2016.

Barlow, an avid historian and former president of the C.M. Beach Company on Bridge Street, had grown up in another house on the green  now a funeral home  and returned to New Milford after working as a banker in London, Philadelphia, Waterbury and in Worcester, Mass.

When he came back to New Milford, the fact that there was a historical property as important as that  he was very anxious to buy it, Roush said.

Mark Malkin, Barlows friend and the executor of his estate, said that staying on the green, where he grew up, was important to Barlow.

Those who knew him recall Barlow as a formal gentleman who, even in his 80s, would wear a suit and tie each day.

He became well known in town for his involvement in community organizations  more than a dozen in New Milford and throughout the state  and his ability to recall historical details at the drop of a hat.

He was passionate about anything he got involved in, Malkin said. He was an extraordinary man and had an incredible memory. I would sit with him and hed be telling me stories of his childhood. His recollection was amazing.

Barlows passion for history can also be found in the extensive collections he left behind, part of which will become available at an auction later this month.

The auction will be held in two parts because of the number of items that were found on display or tucked away in Barlows home, said Mitchell Borenstein, of Applebrook Auctions.

More than 200 items  including rugs, artwork, sterling and Barlows collection of British royal memorabilia  will be featured in the first auction on April 26.

This was literally like stepping back into a wonderful time that no longer exists, Borenstein said. That formal (kind of collecting)  its a house you wouldve seen in a movie in a different time.

The full collection can be found on Applebrook Auctions website. The home, and parts of Barlows estate not included in the auction, will be donated to a nonprofit, Malkin said. The organization has asked not to be named yet, but has indicated they will continue to use the home.

aquinn@newstimes.comNearly 60,000 people die from bleeding each year, and though injuries that result in extreme blood loss have long been a sight all too common in areas like West Philadelphia, the national spotlight has certainly shone upon the issue of late. These days it seems everyone has a dog in the fight; as politicos battle over gun control legislation, teens march in the streets advocating for improved school safety measures, and debates wear on across the dinner table, trauma experts at the national, state, and local levels are taking cues from decades-long CPR awareness campaigns to improve public education and training in life-saving bleeding control (B-Con) techniques.

Trauma surgeons at Penn Medicine care for several hundred gunshot victims per year. While any one of them would agree that proper CPR training to save the lives of the more than 350,000 people in the United States who suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrests each year is crucial, the fact of the matter is, they also know that proper application of tourniquets and wound packing is the only way to stem blood loss.

"Medical students and residents new to our trauma rotation are frequently shocked when the first maneuver in the trauma bay is to stop chest compressions on patients who are bleeding profusely," said Brian Smith, MD, an assistant professor of Trauma, Critical Care, and Emergency Surgery at Penn Medicine, adding that not only does CPR result in significantly lower blood pressure, but it is also associated with higher rates of organ damage and death. "Thankfully, bleeding control techniques may be one of the easiest lessons to teach. As the saying goes, 'the engine is just fine, the problem is no gas.'"

CPR training programs have been around since the technique was first developed in 1960. That same year, the American Heart Association (AHA) started a program to train physicians with close-chest cardiac resuscitation. A decade later, the first mass citizen training event was held and in just two years, more than 100,000 people had learned the life-saving technique.

Of course, none of this is meant to suggest that CPR has cracked any sort of code on public awareness of the issue  today, fewer than 1 in 5 adults in the United States have received proper training and according to the AHA, only 46 percent of people who experience a cardiac arrest outside the hospital get the help they need before emergency responders arrive. There's no doubt that there's a long way to go, but with the benefit of nearly 60 years of efforts, advocates have certainly come a long way. For example, all fifty states now have laws and/or regulations requiring that public gathering places have AEDs available, and CPR training courses are widely available online and in-person at training centers or in group settings at libraries, community centers, and other public spaces. And to make training even more accessible, programs like the Mobile CPR Project, led by Benjamin Abella, MD, MPhil, a professor of Emergency Medicine, and a team from Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, are taking to the streets to bring CPR training directly to communities.

In some regards, Smith says, bleeding control training is even easier than CPR. Just look to a popular t-shirt for the answer: "This shirt can save a life." It references how even a t-shirt can be used to pack a wound and provide pressure to control bleeding; buying the precious minutes needed to get patients to the hospital. This is just one part of the Stop the Bleed Campaign, a simple and effective collection of techniques aimed at reducing blood loss from traumatic injuries.

The Stop the Bleed Campaign was launched by the White House and National Security Council in 2015 in response to the Hartford Consensus conferences after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The American College of Surgeons has since operationalized the program and supported the efforts of countless doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other professionals to teach bleeding control skills to the public.

It is estimated that more than 150,000 people have learned the basic steps of direct pressure, wound packing, and tourniquet application instructed during 11,000 course offerings since January of 2017. The campaign marks a significant transition from traditional trauma courses which have focused on in-hospital care, to classrooms outside of our hospital walls.

And while B-Con kits are becoming increasingly visible in the public arena, they are conspicuously absent relative to their better-known AED counterparts so often seen in malls, churches, airports, and classrooms. Funding for such kits remains desperately needed.

"We can offer training with tourniquets, but at the end of the day, if there's nothing to leave behind that people can use in the case of an actual emergency or traumatic injury, witnesses of are left to devise their own methods of bleeding control instead of being able to step in and use the most effective tools available," said John Gallagher, DNP, RN, CCNS, trauma program manager, who is leading bleeding control outreach efforts at Penn Medicine.

Announced earlier this month, Gallagher and other Penn trauma experts are joining forces with the Pennsylvania Trauma Systems Foundation and the Pennsylvania State Police to provide STB tourniquet and wound packing training to all Pennsylvania State Troopers. After completing the 90-minute training course, each officer will receive a combat application tourniquet to carry with them while on duty. The tourniquets are provided through a grant funded by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Since the start of the STB campaign, B-Con courses have been taught in countless statehouses and have even reached Capitol Hill, with an estimated 20 members of Congress successfully trained. The pool of instructors also continues to grow as doctors, nurses, medics and other healthcare professionals strive to meet the demands of our communities. However, clearly work remains to advocate for this curriculum and the needs of bleeding patients everywhere.

"The sad truth is that in today's climate, life-saving techniques must go beyond basic CPR training," Smith said. "To save a life, we must consider the times, the injuries, and react with appropriate training for all bystanders. Let's use this moment to make STB and B-Con as familiar as CPR."Cells are the basis of the living world. Our cells make up the tissues and organs of our bodies. Bacteria are also cells, living sometimes alone and sometimes in groups called biofilms. We think of cells mostly as staying in one spot, quietly doing their work. But in many situations, cells move, often very quickly. For example, when you get a cut, infection-fighting cells rally to the site, ready to gobble up bacterial intruders. Then, platelet cells along with proteins from blood gather and form a clot to stop any bleeding. And finally, skin cells surrounding the wound lay down scaffolding before gliding across the cut to close the wound.

This remarkable organization and timing is evident right from the start. Cells migrate within the embryo as it develops so that body tissues and organs end up in the right places. Harmful cells use movement as well, as when cells move and spread (metastasize) from an original cancer tumor to other parts of the body. Learning how and why cells move could give scientists new ways to guide those cells or turn off or slow down the movement when needed.

Glowing Breadcrumbs

Scientists studying how humans and animals form, from a single cell at conception to a complex body at birth, are particularly interested in how and when cells move. They use research organisms like the fruit fly, Drosophila, to watch movements by small populations of cells. Still, watching cells migrate inside a living fly is challenging because the tissue is too dense to see individual cell movement. But moving those cells to a dish in the lab might cause them to behave differently than they do inside the fly. To solve this problem, NIGMS-funded researcher David Bilder and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, came up with a way to alter fly cells so they could track how the cells behave without removing them from the fly. They engineered the cells to lay down a glowing track of proteins behind them as they moved, leaving a traceable path through the fly's tissue. The technique, called M-TRAIL (matrix-labeling technique for real-time and inferred location), allows the researchers to see where a cell travels and how long it takes to get there.

Bilder and his team first used M-TRAIL in flies to confirm the results of past studies of Drosophila ovaries in the lab using other imaging techniques. In addition, they found that M-TRAIL could be used to study a variety of cell types. The new technique also could allow a cell's movement to be tracked over a longer period than other imaging techniques, which become toxic to cells in just a few hours. This is important, because cells often migrate for days to reach their final destinations.

Eventually, Bilder believes M-TRAIL could be used to trace the first movements of metastatic cancer cells in humans from a primary tumor out to a blood vessel and surrounding tissues. Learning how cancer cells take these first steps could uncover new ways to stop their migration.

Feet, Fans or Waves? Changing Cellular Modes of Motion

Besides tracking where cells go when they migrate, scientists need to know what cues set them in motion and what controls their movement. NIGMS grantee Peter Devreotes and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, are studying a network of connected signaling proteins inside cells. Their findings show that this network is key to controlling cell movement.

Once it's turned on, this protein network starts up the cell's movement machinery, including its cellular skeleton, called the cytoskeleton. In response to signals from the network, the cell begins to change shape, an early step in cell migration.

The movement network can start up at random, but it also responds to cues from outside the cell. Devreotes and his team tested this by putting the amoeba cells in a dish of swirling water. Amoeba cells need to be able to respond to liquid moving around them as well as to other signals coming from the surrounding environment. The researchers found that the network proteins within the cells responded to the swirling water in the same way that they respond to other environmental cues. Devreotes thinks the network gives the cell a sophisticated way of interpreting and adjusting to real-world situations.

Once on the move, different cells use different techniques to propel themselves forward. Some, like amoeba or our own white blood cells, reach out with bumps called pseudopods, cellular "feet" that pull the cell forward. Others create a large fan-shaped bulge all along the leading edge of the cell that drives it along, and still others make waves from their centers that ripple through the cell, pulling them forward.

Scientists had thought that each kind of cell used only one of these modes to move. Instead, when Devreotes and his team changed the proteins in the movement network inside cells they found that amoebas altered their movement behavior, switching from pseudopods to fans to rippling waves and back again. So, the network Devreotes studies might be both powerful and universal. It may be similar across many kinds of cells from different species, coordinating signals from outside and determining what mechanism the cells will use to move. Further defining this network could help reveal ways to tweak cell movement when it goes awry.

Saving Resources: Every Cell for Itself

Understanding how individual cells move tells only part of the story. Cells often move as a group, and when they do, they can do complex jobs that you might not expect. For example, instead of using an every-cell-for-itself approach, bacteria can coordinate their behavior to move the entire colony in an orderly way. Scott Chimileski, an NIGMS-funded research fellow and imaging specialist in the laboratory of Roberto Kolter at Harvard University School of Medicine, uses time-lapse photography to observe how bacteria do this.

Moving as a group has benefits for bacteria, but it is also expensive. For example, making and secreting surfactant, a substance that reduces the tension of the surface and makes it easier to slide across, takes a lot of energy for each cell. So, bacteria want to make sure that none of their competitors can use the surfactant they make for a free ride. Bacteria have evolved many methods for telling their close relatives from their enemies. They even release antibiotics that they are immune to but that will kill bacterial cells not related to them. Kolter and his team believe that the weapons bacteria use to compete successfully also make them into close-knit colonies and promote cooperation. Learning about the balance between cooperation and competition in bacterial colonies, Chimileski said, will help clarify what happens in places like our own gut microbiomes, which, we are learning, are highly complex microbial environments very important to our health.Scientists at the University of Wyoming have found that mice engineered to have Huntington's disease (HD) have an over-accumulation of iron in their mitochondria.

The research identifying a pathway for the neurodegenerative disease also has relevance to understanding related disorders such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and Lou Gehrig's disease, says Jonathan Fox, a professor in UW's Department of Veterinary Sciences.

The article, "Brain mitochondrial iron accumulates in Huntington's disease, mediates mitochondrial dysfunction, and can be removed pharmacologically," was published online in the journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine.

Others involved in the research were postdoctoral scientist Sonal Agrawal, in the Fox laboratory in the UW College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and Baskaran Thyagarajan, an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy.

HD is an inherited genetic disorder that causes neurons to die in brain areas important for movement and cognition. Symptoms become progressively worse and include involuntary movements, changes in behaviors and cognitive decline, Fox says. There are no treatments that delay disease progression.

The Fox team experimented with a drug that crossed the mitochondrial membrane and removed excess iron, or it may bind with the iron and make it nontoxic.

Mitochondria are the key site of energy production and also have many other functions critical for cell health and survival, says Fox, who participates in the Neuroscience Program at UW.

Mitochondria are a main site of oxygen use in cells. The Fox lab members collaborated with Thyagarajan, who has expertise in evaluating mitochondrial functions, to measure oxygen consumption in mouse HD mitochondria. They found oxygen deficits in HD mitochondria with unusual amounts of iron. The research suggests iron accumulation in mitochondria interferes with respiration and oxygen uptake, and that this may contribute to neuronal malfunction and death.

Excess iron in cells can be detrimental, but adequate iron supplies also are essential to many cell functions.

"A wide variety of different proteins require iron," says Fox, who also teaches in UW's Wyoming, Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho (WWAMI) medical program. "Probably the best known is hemoglobin. The protein requires iron to transport oxygen properly. Iron metabolism is central for normal cell function."

The flip side is that too much can be toxic. Cells are challenged to provide iron for functions that require it but also prevent toxic accumulations.

"In HD, we think that normal iron metabolism is disrupted, and these adverse effects of iron are allowed to continue," Fox says.

He says, however, that this pathway is not the only factor that drives HD.

"There are many other pathways that have been shown to be important," he says. "We're saying this is an important part of the picture."

Fox says the research helps lay the foundation for developing drug therapies.

Fox's research involves studying mainly mouse models of HD; however, the researchers also obtain human brain tissue collected at autopsies and supplied by a National Institutes of Health-supported brain bank.

"Mouse HD models are great for studying the human disease but are not perfect," he says. "Whenever possible, we try to verify the findings in animal models are actually present in the human condition. We were fortunate enough to obtain human brain tissue and show similar changes to the HD mice in the current study."

The scientists also are interested in environmental factors that can affect HD. Their latest paper adds to previous work showing high iron intake by HD mice early in life promotes the disease in adulthood.

Still, he says the researchers in his lab are interested in pursuing two areas.

They want to further understand the mechanisms by which iron causes mitochondria dysfunction in HD. The other, broader aspect is that HD is part of a group of related diseases, and "while they don't have identical mechanisms, they do have some important features in common," he says.

"So, we are interested in determining if mitochondrial iron accumulation occurs in models of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and brain aging. We are interested in expanding beyond HD mouse models," he says.

Source: http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2018/04/uw-scientists-find-excess-mitochondrial-iron,-huntingtons-disease-link.htmlNearly one billion people will be vaccinated against yellow fever in 27 high-risk African countries by 2026 with support from WHO, Gavi  the Vaccine Alliance, UNICEF and more than 50 health partners.

The commitment is part of the Eliminate Yellow fever Epidemics (EYE) in Africa strategy, which was launched by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, Professor Isaac Folorunso Adewole, Nigerias Minister of Health and partners at a regional meeting in Abuja, Nigeria on Tuesday (10 April).

"The world is facing an increased risk of Yellow fever outbreaks and Africa is particularly vulnerable," said Dr Tedros. "With one injection we can protect a person for life against this dangerous pathogen. This unprecedented commitment by countries will ensure that by 2026 Africa is free of Yellow fever epidemics."

During the three-day EYE strategy regional launch meeting representatives from key African countries, WHO, UNICEF, Gavi, and other partners are developing a roadmap on how to roll-out the EYE strategy at national level. This implementation effort follows the endorsement of the strategy by African Ministers of Health at the 67th WHO regional committee in September 2017.

"This comprehensive, global strategy offers an unprecedented opportunity to end the devastating Yellow fever epidemics that periodically impact Africa," said Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. "Ensuring that the most vulnerable communities have access to the vaccine through routine systems plays a central role in making this happen. Vaccine manufacturers and Gavi partners have worked hard to improve the global vaccine supply situation in recent years to make sure there is enough vaccine to respond to outbreaks, allow preventive campaigns and that routine immunization functions at full capacity."

The three objectives of the strategy include protecting at-risk populations through preventive mass vaccination campaigns and routine immunization programmes, preventing international spread, and containing outbreaks rapidly. Developing strong surveillance with robust laboratory networks is key to these efforts.

UNICEF will make vaccines available, advocate for greater political commitment and provide support in vaccinating children through routine immunization as well as during outbreaks of the disease.

"Today, the threat of yellow fever looms larger than ever before, especially for thousands of children across Africa," said Stefan Peterson, UNICEFs Chief of Health. "Given that almost half of the people to be vaccinated are children under 15 years of age, this campaign is critical to saving childrens lives, and would go a long way toward stamping out this disease."

After outbreaks of Yellow fever in densely populated cities in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo caused 400 deaths in 2016, the acute viral haemorrhagic disease re-emerged as a serious global public health threat. Brazil is currently battling its worst outbreak of Yellow fever in decades with more than 1,000 confirmed cases. The ease and speed of population movements, rapid urbanization and a resurgence of mosquitoes due to global warming have significantly increased the risk of urban outbreaks with international spread.

Experience in West Africa demonstrates that the EYE strategy can work. When Yellow fever re-emerged as a public health issue in the early 2000s, countries in the region controlled the epidemics through preventive mass campaigns combined with routine immunization. No yellow fever epidemics have been recorded since in countries which successfully implemented this approach.Ford Motor Co's premium Lincoln brand plans to build as many as five new vehicles in China by 2022, according to two U.S. sources, in a move to expand sales in the world's largest vehicle market that would also blunt the impact of trade U.S-China trade spats.

Ford has said it plans to build an all-new sport utility vehicle in China by the end of 2019, however, the company has not detailed future production plans for the Lincoln brand in China beyond that.

"Our localization plans to support the China market are on track and will serve to further drive Lincolns growth in China," Lincoln spokeswoman Angie Kozleski said. "Beyond that, it would be premature to discuss our future product and production plans or timing."

Sources familiar with Ford's production plans told Reuters the automaker now expects to begin building the new Lincoln Aviator in China in late 2019 or early 2020, along with replacements for the MKC compact crossover and the MKZ midsize sedan, followed in 2021 by the all-new Nautilus, which replaces the Lincoln MKX crossover.

A fifth model, a small coupe-like crossover, is tentatively slated for production in China in 2022, the sources said.

Ford has much to lose if the war of words over trade between China and U.S. President Donald Trump escalates into a full-blown tariff war. Last year, it shipped about 80,000 vehicles to China from North America, more than half of them Lincolns to support the brand's growth.

All Lincoln vehicles that Ford now sells in China are brought in from North America.

Also Read: Ford Freestyle 1.2L TiVCT First Drive Review

Even if China does reduce its 25 percent tariff on imported vehicles - as Chinese President Xi Jinping promised on Tuesday - it is not clear that would mean a big, long-term increase in Fords and Lincolns made in U.S. factories heading to Chinese showrooms.

Ford is pursuing long-range plans to build more vehicles in China to serve a market that is now roughly 60 percent larger than the U.S. market, and projected to keep growing.

But it is playing catch up to hometown rival General Motors Co and German luxury brands including Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, which have invested heavily in Chinese production in recent years as a form of insurance against trade, political and currency gyrations and to lower price points for their premium cars.

Chinese vehicle imports from all markets last year climbed to 1.2 million, but still represent less than 5 percent of total vehicle sales in the country, according to figures from the China Automobile Dealers Association. Less than a quarter of the imported vehicles sold in China - 267,473, according to Statista - came from U.S. auto plants.

The current 25-percent tariff rate makes it tough for Ford's American premium brand to compete with GM's Cadillac and the Germans, which avoid the import tariff on their locally built vehicles.

As long as Lincolns are not manufactured in China, the brands sales will no doubt suffer continuously, Zhu Kongyuan, Secretary General of the China Auto Dealers Chamber of Commerce (CADCC), told Reuters.

SLOWER START IN CHINA

The Lincoln brand launched in China four years ago, and local production of the first Lincoln-brand vehicles will not start for another 18-24 months, people familiar with the company's plans said.

The entire localization process could take Ford as long as four years.

All five Lincoln models are expected to offer hybrid gasoline-electric variants, to help Ford meet China's tough new quotas for electrified vehicles, the sources said.

While it sold 54,124 vehicles in China last year - a record for the brand - Lincoln continues to trail Cadillac and the German luxury brands by a wide margin in that market.

Cadillac - which GM launched in China in 2004 - builds in China virtually all of the vehicles it sells there and thus avoids the steep import duty. Cadillac outsold Lincoln by more than three-to-one in China last year, selling a total of 175,489 vehicles though a network of roughly 180 retail stores. China is Cadillacs largest market.

If Beijing follows through on its threat to double import tariffs before Lincoln can ramp up local production, the resulting price hikes on its imported models could persuade many people to buy a Cadillac or a Lexus instead, said CADCC's Zhu.

Also Watch:German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday played down the possibility of forcing carmakers to make expensive modifications to diesel car exhaust systems, as her new government tries to avoid driving bans in cities with air quality problems.

The German car industry, which accounts for some 800,000 jobs in Europe's biggest economy, is struggling with a global backlash against diesel cars after Volkswagen admitted in 2015 that it had cheated U.S. exhaust tests.

Tackling the problem of diesel cars with high nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions - known to cause respiratory disease - is one of the most pressing policies facing Merkel's new coalition between her conservatives and the Social Democrats (SPD).

After a cabinet retreat outside Berlin, Merkel made clear she had reservations about carmakers being made to introduce hardware modifications, such as changing filters in exhaust systems.

"The benefits and costs must be proportionate. Hardware refits are relatively cost-intensive," said Merkel.

She reiterated she would do everything possible to avoid bans and that she believed in 2-3 years only about 10 cities would have excess levels of NOx, compared with about 70 cities originally.

The issue came to a head in February when a court allowed local authorities to bar heavily polluting diesel vehicles. Experts say bans could cut the resale value of up to 15 million diesel vehicles in Europe's biggest car market.

Merkel's government has been criticised for having cosy ties with the auto industry due to its importance for jobs and exports. France and Britain have said they will ban new petrol and diesel cars by 2040.

DIESEL DOWN

Sales of new diesel-powered cars in Germany plunged by a quarter in March, according to the KBA automotive watchdog.

So far, Germany has committed to software upgrades for some 5.3 million diesel cars by the end of the year to reduce emissions by up to 30 percent.

With demand for electric cars growing only slowly, Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer has released the first 20 million euros of 175 million euros ($217 million) in subsidies to fund the purchase of electric vehicles for public infrastructure agencies.

However, critics say all this is too little. Juergen Resch, head of the DUH environmental group, criticised Merkel and her cabinet for being "remotely controlled" by the auto industry.

Merkel, and Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, stressed the auto industry was of crucial importance to Germany.

"We want it to be modern and future-oriented," said Merkel.

"We also have clear exceptions of the car industry that has clearly made serious mistakes. The customer or taxpayer cannot be made accountable for that. It must be mainly dealt with by the auto industry," she said.

She added there were no plans for a summit with carmakers and that the new government was not keen on pursuing "blue badges" to indicate how clean a car is, seen by critics as a form of driving restriction.

"Our focus will rather be on individual measures that spare citizens," she said.

The fallout of the diesel scandal, which has also hit Daimler and BMW, is still evident with VW poised for a management shakeup which will include the departure of Chief Executive Matthias Mueller, say sources.

Also Watch:New Delhi: Swedish home furnishings chain IKEA on Thursday said it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Gujarat government to set up its stores in the state with an expected investment of up to Rs 3,000 crore in the long term.

IKEA, which received government approval in 2013 for its Rs 10,500-crore proposal to open retail stores under 100 per cent FDI, has earlier signed MoUs with Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana to open retail stores.

The company plans to open 25 stores by 2025 in nine Indian cities.

The MoU with Gujarat government stands for mutual commitment from both parties and intends to provide clarity on working methods and ensure a legally and ethically compliant, corruption free business environment, IKEA said in a statement.

"Gujarat is a prioritised state for IKEA due to its open progressive policies and positive investment climate," IKEA India Country Property & Expansion Manager David McCausland said.

IKEA will soon set up its retail stores and other touch points in Gujarat to bring good quality and affordable home furnishings for the many people in Gujarat, he added.

Ahmedabad and Surat are the priority cities for now and IKEA has started scouting for suitable real estate, the company said.

The approximate investment in the long term will be around Rs 2,000-3,000 crore. This will generate around 2,000 direct and 3,000 indirect employment, it added.

Gujarat Principal Secretary Manoj Kumar Das said, "IKEA will positively contribute to creating more employment, growth of manufacturing sector, sharing best practices, in skill development and in the overall growth of the home furnishings retail sector."

Das also assured support to the company for timely implementation of projects and enable smooth business operations.

IKEA had initially stated that it would open its first store in India in Hyderabad in the second half of 2017, which is now expected to be during the summer this year.Hong Kong/Mumbai: Walmart Inc is likely to reach a deal to buy a majority stake in Indian e-commerce player Flipkart by the end of June in what could be the U.S. retail giant's biggest acquisition of an online business, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Reuters reported last week that Walmart completed its due diligence on Flipkart and had made a proposal to buy 51 percent or more of the Indian company for between $10 billion to $12 billion.

A deal with Flipkart would step up Walmart's battle with Amazon.com for a bigger share of India's fledgling e-commerce market, which Morgan Stanley estimates will be worth $200 billion in a decade. Local media have reported that Amazon is exploring a possible counter offer for Flipkart.

Both sources declined to be named as the talks are private.

Walmart will buy both new and existing Flipkart shares, with the new shares expected to value the Bengaluru-based firm at at least $18 billion, the sources said. The price for existing shares would value the firm at about $12 billion, one of the people said.

Japan's SoftBank Group, which owns roughly one-fifth of Flipkart via its Vision Fund, is unlikely to sell any of its shares due to the low price being offered for the existing shares, this source said.

Reuters has previously reported that early investors such as Tiger Global, Accel and Naspers will likely sell their entire stakes in Flipkart to Walmart if a deal is reached.

A deal is not yet finalised, and talks between Walmart, Flipkart and its investors are ongoing, one of the people said.

Flipkart also counts eBay, Tencent Holdings and Microsoft Corp among its investors.

Flipkart did not respond to a request for comment, a representative for Walmart in India declined comment while SoftBank said it doesn't comment on speculation.

BIG INDIAN BATTLE

For Walmart, the world's largest retailer known for its superstores, a deal with Flipkart would open up the vast Indian market.

Walmart has for years tried to enter India but has remained confined to a 'cash-and-carry' wholesale business amid tough restrictions on foreign investment. It currently operates 21 such stores in India.

By comparison, Amazon closely trails Flipkart, which along with its fashion units controls nearly 40 percent of India's online retail market, according to estimates by researcher Forrester.

Flipkart's investors are concerned that any deal with Amazon would run into regulatory hurdles as a combination would have more than 70 percent of India's online retail market, one of the sources said.

Walmart's push into e-commerce comes as Amazon has embraced offline retail, with an affiliate of the Seattle-based company picking up a $27.6 million stake in Indian retailer Shopper's Stop Ltd.

In the United States, Amazon also bought high-end grocer Whole Foods Market Inc for $13.7 billion last year.

Walmart's investment would give Flipkart not just additional funds to fight Amazon, but also arm it with a formidable ally with extensive experience in retailing, logistics and supply chain management.

Former Amazon employees Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal founded Flipkart in 2007 in India's tech hub of Bengaluru.

Like Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos, they began by selling books, but have diversified rapidly, including by selling smartphones, such as those made by China's Xiaomi, through exclusive flash sales, and now compete with Amazon in almost all product categories.Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh government has handed over the twin cases of the alleged rape of an 18-year-old woman and the custodial death of her father in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao to the CBI even as the ruling BJP tries to distance itself from the charges against its MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar.

The MLA was booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and POCSO at Unnaos Makhi Police Station on Thursday morning.

The decision to handover the case to the CBI was taken late on Wednesday, hours after the BJP MLA made a dramatic appearance before the police but refused to surrender.

"An FIR be lodged under appropriate sections considering the allegations of rape levied on MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and others and the investigation be handed over to CBI," the Principal Secretary (Information) had said in an statement. "Investigation in to cross cases pertaining to incidents leading to the death of the victim's father be also handed over to the CBI."

Yes we are happy that finally an FIR has been registered against #KuldeepSinghSengar , had this been done much earlier, my brother(victim's father) would be alive today. Still, lets see if he will be arrested or not: Uncle of victim #UnnaoCase pic.twitter.com/mCFiBpAdUO ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 12, 2018

The decisions were taken after the Special Investigation Team constituted under Additional Director General of Police (Lucknow zone) to look into the matter submitted its report to the government.

The development came hours after the Allahabad High Court sought the Yogi Adityanath-led state government's stand on the incident on a letter to the court by senior lawyer Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi detailing the case and posted the matter for hearing tomorrow.

Meanwhile, in a dramatic late night development, Sengar made a surprise appearance outside the Lucknow SSP's residence, triggering speculation that he might surrender, but left the place without handing himself over to the police.

"I came here to show to the media that I am not absconding, and I am very much in Lucknow. I am here, tell me what to do," he told reporters.

He said, "I am a disciplined BJP worker. I am innocent. I am being implicated."

BJP MLA from Bairia in Ballia district Surendra Singh made a shocking remark while defending Sengar. He said, Tell me who will rape a mother of three? He is being falsely implicated."

Earlier in the day, Sangeeta Sengar, the wife of the accused MLA demanded narco tests on her husband and also the 18-year-old victim, who alleged confinement by local authorities.

The Congress latched on to the case to hit out at the BJP government with party president Rahul Gandhi wondering if Prime Minister Narendra Modi would observe a fast on the alleged rape and death of the complainant's father in custody, which he said "has shamed humanity".

The victim, who had tried to immolate herself outside the chief minister's house just a day before her 50-year-old father died on Monday, alleged that she has been confined to a hotel room by the district administration, leaving her "without a phone or water and guards at every corner".

She also accused the MLA's brother and their henchmen of killing her elder uncle earlier. "I want justice, why are they putting pressure on me for an apology? Do they want my (another) uncle to be killed too?" she told TV channels.

A purported video of the alleged rape survivor's father before his death also went viral and was shown by several TV channels, in which he alleged that he was mercilessly beaten up by the MLA's brother and others, including with rifle butts. It also showed the deceased person's back with serious wounds, but its veracity could not be ascertained.

In the state capital, Sangeeta Sengar, the wife of the accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, told reporters after meeting state police chief O P Singh that there was a political conspiracy against her family and accused the complainant of not being consistent in her statements.

"We demand that a narco test be conducted on my husband and the girl as well as her uncle. This will help in ascertaining the truth and presenting the correct picture. There are political reasons behind this and my husband has been made a pawn," Sangeeta Sengar said. The narco analysis test is a type of psychological investigation.

"My husband is innocent and it is my request that he should not be called a rapist. He has been in politics for the past 15 years and has been serving the society and people," she said, adding that her daughters were unable to concentrate on their studies in the wake of this incident.

She said the allegations against her brother-in-law Atul, who was arrested on Tuesday, were false too.

The MLA's wife, as also the alleged rape survivor, have demanded a CBI probe into the entire matter.

The Congress party demanded the dismissal of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, alleging that his government was a "Ravan" regime which has failed to protect women.

Taking a swipe at the prime minister's proposed hunger strike over the non-functioning of Parliament, Rahul Gandhi separately tweeted, "The barbarism inflicted on a father seeking justice for his daughter in Uttar Pradesh has shamed humanity. Hope the prime minister will soon observe a fast over atrocities against women, failed law and order and increasing anarchy under the BJP's watch."

The Congress president also posted a purported video in which the woman's father is seen speaking against the BJP MLA.

In the Supreme Court, a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said it would hear a plea next week for a CBI probe. The plea also alleged that the woman's father was tortured and killed in police custody at the behest of the "ruling party" in the state.

(With PTI inputs)New Delhi: Ever since the Supreme Court began the final hearing in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case, different people and groups have come forward as negotiators to seek an out-of-court settlement in the decades-old legal battle.

Continuing the individual deliberations, a newly-found organisation, New Bharat Foundation, recently held a discussion on the issue, where members suggested that all religious places should be converted into Manavta Mandir (temple of humanity).

As Hindu-Muslim community heads gathered at the discussion, titled Ram Mandir: Chintan Se Samadhan, chants of Jai Sri Ram reverberated in the Delhi University auditorium.

Speaking at the event, Rashtriya Muslim Manchs speaker Indresh Kumar said, For Catholic Christians there is Vatican City. They have many churches but not all are Vatican. Similarly, there are many mosques but the holiest ones are considered to be in Mecca and Medina. In India, there are many Ram Mandirs, but all those temples are not Ram janambhoomi. There is only one Ram Janam Sthal. Over the years, some people have tried to dilute its significance by referring it as mere temple of Lord Ram.

Kumar further said that the religious places of all communities should be converted into Manavta Mandir.

Sharing the same views, another representative of the panel, UP Shia Waqf Board chairperson Waseem Rizvi said that their endeavor is to strike a compromise.

We have no problem if the masjid moves out of the area in Ayodhya and a temple is built instead. The mosque can be built in Lucknow, and we would like to call it Masjid-e-Aman (mosque of peace), he said.

Mohammad Shabbir, who was officiating VC of AMU, said that he backs for out of court settlement in the issue. He gave examples of international settlements in disputed cases and said that it can be worked out here as well.

The Supreme court will resume hearing on the ongoing Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case on April 27.

New Bharat Foundation co-convener Vikkramaditya Singh claimed that their organisation has a core committee of seven people with equal participation of members from Muslim community. Our organization is Delhi specific, but we will slowly expand, he added.

Others present were Yatinder Singh, Professor Rakesh Kumar, former IPS Vikram Singh and Kusumlata Kedia from Varanasi. Minister of State Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju had also graced the event but did not speak at the event.New Delhi: Amid nationwide horror over the brutal gang-rape of an 8-year-old girl in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti said on Thursday that the state will bring in a law that would make death penalty mandatory for those who rape minors.

Saying that the brutal savagery of the crime had shamed humanity, she said that she stands committed to ensure justice and would also seek exemplary punishment for the culprits.

"We will never ever let another child suffer this way. We will bring a new law that will make the death penalty mandatory for those who rape minors," she tweeted.

The Chief Minister has also called a meeting of party legislators and senior leaders to discuss the course of action to ensure that the victim gets justice.

Mufti, who is under fire for not acting against BJP ministers who rallied in defence of the accused, had earlier in the day said that the "law will not be obstructed".

"The Law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions & statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track & justice will be delivered," she had said.

Meanwhile, the J&K government appointed two special public prosecutors, both Sikhs, for the trial in the Kathua rape and murder case.

The state police crime branch which probed the alleged rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl belonging to the nomadic Muslim Bakerwal community had filed a main charge sheet against seven accused persons and a separate charge sheet against a juvenile in a court in Kathua district earlier this week.

J&K Police DGP S P Vaid had written to the government in this regard by recommending two officers as SPPs to conduct the case. "We wanted two officers to pursue the case from police department as others may take the case casually," another official said.

Asked whether two Sikh officers were engaged as SPPs to ensure "neutrality" in view of Hindu-Muslim polarisation over the case, DGP Vaid said "please do not think on religious lines. It has not been done. Police does not think in terms of Hindu or Muslim or Sikh".New Delhi: An eminent lawyer and now a senior PDP leader in Jammu and Kashmir, also known to be the conscience keeper of CM Mehbooba Mufti, Muzaffar Hussain Baig believes the Jammu lawyers and the stand taken by the Jammu Bar in the abduction, rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl in Jammu is nothing but disservice to the profession and the nation.

It has been alleged by the lawyer of the victims family that the Bar Association president has threatened her for supporting the Muslim family.

Speaking to CNN-News18s Marya Shakil, Baig said that he believes there is no question of Mufti resigning on moral grounds, instead she should ensure that justice is delivered to the little girl who was violated and murdered with pre-meditated brutality. While the nation is outraged and shocked to the core, Baig said he is ashamed of the lawyers who are shouting for a CBI probe and supporting the accused.

Here are some edited excerpts from the interview:

Q: What happened to Asifa is a crime against humanity. Your alliance partner leaders are openly backing the alleged rapists. Questions are being asked on why is Mehbooba Mufti continuing as the CM?

Baig: How does this case justify or warrant the resignation of the chief minister. In fact, she must face this challenge and see to it that the investigation is taken to its logical conclusion. The investigation is being conducted under the supervision of the court so no one should fear that this will be a biased investigation. The investigation team is being headed  I am sorry to use these words but just because of the fact that the case is being polarised on communal lines, I have to say this  investigation is being headed by a Hindu, with an impeccable record.

Q: Has Mehbooba Mufti failed? Is she is in some kind of a bind? What is this coalition politics?

Baig: How is Mehbooba to be put in the dock here? She ordered an investigation, she is in touch with the DGP and also the head of the crime branch team. Why should she resign? In fact, if anything, this must encourage her and she should take it as a challenge to take it to its logical conclusion. So, I don't know how this question of Mehbooba resigning on moral grounds arises at all.

Q: Mr Baig, you have often taken a contrarian position, been Mehbooba Muftis conscience keeper in the past, has Mehbooba Muftis moral compass been broken this time?

Baig: Has she committed the crime? Has she said that there should be no investigation? She must see to it that justice is done. This shameful act unfortunately took its present form when two BJP ministers said very irresponsible things and gave the incident a very communal colour. Otherwise, it was the crime of the worst sort that we have witnessed in the last 30 years and the BJP and PDP coalition government should stay firm to ensure that the culprits are brought to the book and justice is served.

Q: Being a lawyer yourself, how do you feel about the Jammu bar association members stand? Some members of your fraternity are indulging in protests, threatening the victims lawyer. Shouldnt some action be taken against them?

Baig: I know most of the leaders of the lawyers' association who did this. I am sorry to say that they have failed not only their own professional, ethical obligations, but also the state. I am sorry that they are failing the entire nation. They are giving an impression based on the majoritarianism that the culprits should go free. They are straightaway playing into the hands of those who want to see a breakup of the state along communal and regional lines. I hope that they rethink their position and come forward and help the court where the matter would be brought for trial.

Q: Do they deserve to be even called lawyers Mr Baig?

Baig: You have some lawyers just as you have some politicians. I am appalled that the chosen representatives of the lawyers are doing something which brings shame to the profession.

Q: This incident shows the moral depravity of our country. Time also for the top leadership of the BJP to speak out?

Baig: Yes, I expect that someone responsible at the central government, the ruling organisation should come forward and admonish those who are carrying out this dishonest campaign in Jammu in name of the Hindu religion. This is the worst in crime even in Hinduism. I don't want to draw parallels but if they look at their own religious history then they will be ashamed that they have brought this kind of disrepute to themselves in the name of religion. That is why I said that they are doing great disservice to the nation, not only to the cause of justice and the poor little girl.New Delhi: Congress chief Rahul Gandhi led a candlelight vigil at India Gate on Thursday night to protest the Kathua and Unnao rape cases, saying the country cannot continue to treat its women the way it does.

Speaking to reporters, Rahul said the protest march was not a political fight but a signal to the government that it must resolve issues of women safety. People are here protesting for the safety of women. Atrocities against women are rising. Women are frightened now. They cant even walk on roads, he said.

Calling what happened in Kathua beyond humanity, Rahul said that an 8-year-old innocent was kidnapped and brutally raped by many men and tortured till she died.

This defies all human values we have grown with as a society. This brutality instead of being punished is actually being shielded. We absolutely condemn this and hope BJP wakes up to its commitment to the people of the nation and ensures stringent punishment is meted out to the perpetrators of the crime, he said.

He said that what happened in Unnao was similar. Instead of ensuring justice, the victims family has been threatened and silenced by the accused. The father of the victim was beaten to death in judicial custody. Only an outrage led to action from Adityanath government. In both the cases we seek immediate action against the accused and allowing justice to prevail even if it involves those who hold positions of power," he added.

A usually reticent Priyanka Gandhi too joined the march along with husband Robert Vadra and her kids, sending the message that she was ready to come to the forefront when it comes to an emotive issue involving womens safety.

Also present were Nirbhayas mother and brother and Bollywood personalities like Nafisa Ali, representing the growing outrage over the brutal gang-rape of the 8-year-old in Kathua and the police inaction against the BJP MLA, who is accused of raping an 18-year-old in Unnao and conspiring to kill her father in police custody.

Several senior Congress leaders like Ahmed Patel, Ashok Gehlot, Digvijaya Singh and Ajay Maken also took to the streets alongside 3,000 people as the party tried to counter criticism for remaining silent on the heinous rape and murder cases.

Priyanka Gandhi at the midnight march on Thursday. (Photo: News18)

Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does. Join me in a silent, peaceful, candlelight vigil at India Gate at midnight tonight to protest this violence and demand justice," Rahul had tweeted.

He had broken his silence on the gruesome incidents earlier in the day, expressing anguish and shock on the brutal rape and murder in Kathua. He also attacked the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh for failing to act against its MLA.

"How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil? What happened at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished. What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?" he wrote on Twitter.

Congress leaders were at pains to emphasise that the march was an apolitical one, but that did not stop party workers from chanting slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP.

The government is sleeping and so at this time the Congress will have to wake them up. PM had given a slogan 'Beti Padhao, Beti Bachao' and it is in his regime that our girls are being raped," Congress Ghulam Nabi Azad said.

The PM has so far been mum on the Kathua rape and murder case, which has been controversial in Jammu because of the support the accused has received from Hindu groups who even sought to prevent a chargesheet being filed in the matter.

The abduction, rape and killing of the girl from the minority Bakherwal community had taken place in January, but the anger has boiled over now as the chilling details of the brutal crime were revealed in a chargesheet filed on Monday.

Minister of state for external affairs, VK Singh, was the first from the Centre to add his voice to the growing outrage. "We have failed her as humans. But she will not be denied justice," tweeted the former army chief.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, who is under fire for not acting against BJP ministers who rallied in defence of the accused, said the law will not be obstructed. She said that the case would be fast-tracked and minor rape would be made punishable by death so that another girl does not have to suffer the same fate.

The Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government has also faced flak for not arresting its MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar. On Thursday, it defended the inaction in Allahabad High Court, saying that an arrest would be made after sufficient evidence is found. The MLA has been booked under POCSO act, which mandates immediate arrest.Lucknow: After an unsuccessful attempt at Rajya Sabha, Bahujan Samaj Party candidate Bhim Rao Ambedkar filed his nomination for Legislative Council berth on Thursday in the state capital.

The Samajwadi Party will be sending one candidate from their own party, while it will extend support to the lone BSP candidate for the Legislative Council elections.

Earlier, News18 had reported how SP national president was mulling to support Bhim Rao Ambedkar's candidature for Legislative Council polls in an attempt to further strengthen ties with BSP ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha elections. However, the suspense still remains over the Samajwadi Party candidate.

There are 13 seats up for grab as the term of some of the stalwart leaders like SP national president Akhilesh Yadav, SP spokesperon Rajendra Chaudhary and SP state president Naresh Uttam have come to an end. Of the 13, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party can easily send together two candidates.

We want to thank our leader Mayawati ji. I would also like to thank Samajwadi Party Chief Akhilesh Yadav and Congress party for extending their support. This time even if BJP fields four extra candidates, there wont be any problem. The BJP played dirty tricks during Rajya Sabha elections just to stop our candidate as his name was Bhim Rao Ambedkar, and they had a problem with that, said BSP General Secretary Satish Chandra Mishra, who accompanied Ambedkar to Vibhan Bhawan during filing of papers.

According ot the figures, support of 29 MLAs is required for one MLC berth. In this case Samajwadi Party, along with Bahujan Samaj Party and Congress, will be able to send only two candidates to the Council, while BJP will be able to send its 11 candidates comfortably. In such a scenario, after Bhim Rao Ambedkar filed nominations, the biggest challenge will be to decide the name of other candidates from SP, who will be entering Legislative Council.

It remains to be seen if Akhilesh Yadav nominates himself for the Legislative Council elections, which are to be held on April 26, or will he send Naresh Uttam Patel, which might send a political message to the Patel community ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Meanwhile, name of Rajendra Chaudhary is also doing the rounds in political circles.New Delhi: The Una-based teacher, allegedly involved in leaking Class 12 economics and Class 10 mathematics papers, harboured the ambition of becoming the principal of the school where he taught, and a relative had assured him she would get it done if he helped her get the papers, an official privy to the probe said.

The CBSE Class 10 mathematics question paper was leaked by Rakesh Kumar, an economics teacher at DAV Centenary School in Una in Himachal Pradesh, who was arrested last week along with two other employees of the school - Amit Sharma and Ashok Kumar - in connection with the economics paper leak. The police said today Rakesh Kumar was found to be also involved with the mathematics paper leak before the March 28 examination.

During intensive questioning by a team led by Rajesh Kumar, assistant commissioner of police (Crime), he confessed his involvement and sending the images of handwritten copy of the papers to his bhabhi in Ferozepur, Punjab, the police said.

The 40-year-old woman, a librarian at a college in Ferozepur, had assured Rakesh Kumar of getting the principal's post at the DAV school, Una. She had told him she has good contacts with the DAV management in Delhi and if he helped her in getting the economics and mathematics papers for her relatives' children, she would ensure that he becomes the principal soon, said the official.

Rakesh Kumar had filled a form applying for the post and she had told him she would ensure his candidature was given preference over other contenders. It was this greed to become principal that prompted Rakesh Kumar to leak the papers. Police, however, said there was no monetary transaction involved and Rakesh Kumar did it only to realise his dream.

On Thursday, the police said two men and a woman have been arrested in connection with the leak of the mathematics paper. The three accused were identified as Sheru Ram (35), branch manager of Union Bank Of India, Om Prakash (58), head cashier of the same bank and the 40-year-old woman who had forwarded the handwritten question papers of Class 12 economics and Class 10 mathematics to others via WhatsApp from her cell-phone which later went viral on social media.New Delhi: India has drastically reduced its infant mortality and maternal mortality rates over the decades, but its still far from achieving the global goals of zero mortality. While maternal mortality is no longer the killer it used to be across the world some time back, it still remains one of the major problems for India, say global leaders in health.

Thirteen years after India helped launch the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH)  a multi-nation alliance under the World Health Organisation (WHO)  it again raised curtains off the December 2018 meeting of the forum it will host.

News18 sat down with Dr Michelle Bachelet, former President of the Republic of Chile and incoming board chair of the PMNCH, Helga Fogstad, Executive Director of PMNCH and Dr Flavia Bustreo former Advisor to Dr. Michelle Bachelet before the curtain raiser, to talk about Indias role and future; what Chile can teach the world and how far we have to go to fulfil the sustainable development goals.

The PMNCH was drafted in the Delhi Declaration in April 2005 and according to world leaders, India has since been fundamental in steering the partnership.

The United Nations Every Woman, Every Child movement calls on countries and PMNCH to end maternal and child mortality by 2030.

Edited Excerpts:

Q: What experiences and lessons have India brought to the table?

Bachelet: Since 1990, India has dramatically reduced its maternal mortality to 174 deaths per 10,000 live births, infant mortality to 34 deaths per 1,000 live births and under-five mortality to 39 deaths per 1,000 live births.

It is the work of successive governments prioritising women, child and adolescent health, of primary care, national schemes and projects with private sector.

Fogstad: The Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA) project has been expanded here like Ethiopias Health Extension Worker project. These health workers not only provide health services to the women, but also help them understand care-seeking behaviour. Women put their health behind that of their husbands, children and in India, even their extended families. In the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) era, India can be an example to show the world how to deal with equality. Its project on midwifery can be a game changer for the world. When you make a change in India, you change the statistics of the world.

Bachelet: Efforts here show that countries outside the global north can have and share good practices. Countries with similar backgrounds across Africa and Latin America can have self-cooperation.

Q: The Partnership has seen the world make a transition from the MDG era to the SDG era. Where do we stand now, globally?

Bachelet: It's early to make an evaluation of the results but the main highlight has been the political commitment and leadership to ensure that SDGs can be achieved. It is everyday work to ensure a cross and multi-sectoral approach. It is easy to talk about coordination and cooperation among multiple actors but difficult to make it work. There are many social determinants outside health. Its important to work for education, sanitation, against child marriage. It was discussed during the MDGs but not grasped fully. If you dont invest in women and girls you wont achieve the results. Not every country did all that they can do. If the SDGs dont focus on this, we run the risk of losing our targets.

Q: Dont we need to look at women not just as mothers but provide care throughout their lives?

Bachelet: Of course. Previous resolutions of the UN put women along with minorities. Weve been downsizing women. Education, early childhood development are crucial. The Every Woman, Every Child strategy works to ensure education for girls and boys as equals. In Chile, when we recovered democracy, the ministry of education went through all textbooks. Men were shown as doctors and women as nurses with short skirts who looked more like models. We rewrote these books, rewrote books meant for kindergarten students, replacing kings with queens. Its also important to have female leaders at the panchayat level and at the national level.

Tarja Halonen, who was the president of Finland for 12 years, once spoke to kindergarten children on what they want to be when they grow up. A little boy told her that he could not be the president as in Finland only women are president. He had always seen a woman in that role. How can we show more successful stories of women in roles not always traditional?

Fogstad: We did not focus on maternal mortality because we saw women as baby-making machines. We did so because women were dying. These were unjust, unfair, silent deaths and totally preventable. Now that weve made this intervention, were focussing on cervical cancer and other issues. The SDGs are not only about reducing preventable deaths, but also better health.

Bustreo: To look at women throughout their life course, we must look at them as girls, mothers and as they grow older. India is lagging behind in some ways. Only last year was the HPV vaccine (for cervical cancer) introduced in the immunisation programme. Globally, maternal mortality has fallen behind cervical cancer, making it the bigger killer of women but in India, its still maternal mortality.

Q: What can Chile teach the world?

Bachelet: One of our case studies, which will be showed at the forum, is Chile Grows With You. It is our early child development intervention through health, education, nutrition, community services and culture. Paraguay and Costa Rica adapted versions of this. Also, our midwives, trained for five years as professional, help with most delivers in the country and have shown excellent results.

Q: How important is the participation and monitoring of the private sector in strengthening systems? What do you think of the private sector involvement in Indias Ayushman Bharat scheme?

Bachelet: The situation changes dramatically from one country to another but any country should try to sync public and private sectors in the best possible way. However, the private sector must set clear standards of quality and of provision of services and professionals. Like how you monitor the public sector, you also need to monitor the private sector.

Fogstad: Prices, and not just out of pocket expenditure, must be controlled. As for Ayushman Bharat, it could be good, as that collaboration between public and private is lacking. Its too early to say as the plan is in its intentions.

Bustreo: When talking about public and private systems, we need to keep in mind who is financing them. Indias latest scheme looks at more financing from the states. We view this as a good direction. Youre forcing India to progressively increase the proportion of GDP invested in health, which is now only 1.3 percent of the GDP. Whether it is a public provider or private, the financing must be public and regulation and quality in place.

Bachelet: In real life, the private sector will not go where there is a real need, where people have less access to services, as there is no profit. Public care will have to be strengthened. We believe a lot in primary care where many affordable interventions can be done.The two BJP ministers in the Jammu and Kashmir government, Chandra Parkash Ganga and Lal Singh, who defended the men arrested for raping and murdering an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua, submitted their resignations to state BJP president Sat Sharma on Friday evening.

In a protest march in Jammus Kathua district on March 4 to demand the release of a special police officer (SPO) accused of raping and murdering an eight-year-old girl, the presence of two Bharatiya Janata Party ministers was unmissable.

Chaudhary Lal Singh, minister for forest, and Chander Prakash Ganga, minister for commerce and industries, attended an event organised by Hindu Ekta Manch, an outfit that has been protesting against the arrests in the case. Both the ministers had addressed the rally and called the police action against the rape accused as 'jungle raj'. While addressing the protesters, Ganga said, "I don't understand this investigation. Why they have arrested a 14-year-old, a 22-year-old, a 28-year-old and a 37-year-old. How is this possible?"

Reportedly, the other BJP MLA, Chaudhary Lal Singh, had also brazenly supported the agitators and questioned the entire police investigation. "If you launch an agitation, do it with full force or sit at home. What's this Section 144? This one girl has died and there is so much of investigation. There have been many deaths of women here," Singh had said. Now a video, said to be shot on March 4th, has surfaced, where Singh is seen saying, "Police is not arresting people who chant anti-India slogans, who burn the tri-colour, but they have arrested people here. I want you to stay put on your resolve and I am with you. I support you for your demand of shifting this case to the CBI."

Many reports are now suggesting a possible divide between the Gujjar and the Hindu community in Kathua. The chargesheet filed by the CBI also alleged the plot was carried to dislodge the Bakarwal community in Rassana, the village in Kathua district where the eight-year-old lived. This, however, is not the first time the two leaders have been part of a controversy. There have been other instances, too, where Sigh and Ganga were found fishing the troubled waters.

In May 2016, when a group Gujjar community had gone to Choudhary Lal Singhs residence in Jammu in connection with an issue pertaining to their orchard land, he allegedly went to the extent of threatening the Gujjars with a repeat of the 1947 massacre of Muslims. Singh was referring to the incident in November 1947 when thousands of Muslims were killed in Jammu by paramilitaries led by the army of Dogra ruler Hari Singh.

Following Singhs statement, the Gujjar community leaders filed a complaint saying that the minister started using abusive language without listening to them, and asked whether they have forgotten the 1947 massacre of Muslims in the region. When the opposition and separatists sought his resignation, Singh denied making the threat and said he would quit if the complainants repeated the charge in front of him.

Interestingly, Singh later on told the media that he was actually referring to the temperature in Jammu city. They (the Gujjar delegation) had come seeking my intervention to get their truck-loads of wood released from forest officials. While refusing to oblige them, what I said was that the temperature in Jammu that day was 47 degrees C due to reckless felling of green trees, and that this would not be tolerated anymore, he told the reporters.

In March 2015, when Singh was the Minister for Health and Medical Education, a female doctor in J&K had sought the registration of a criminal case against him for allegedly misbehaving with her in public. Dr Gurmeet Kour, registrar of the state-run Hospital for Psychiatry Diseases, had said that Singh shouted at her in public, leaving her mentally harassed and wrecked.

The event was also caught on camera. In response, Singh had claimed that it was an attempt to prevent him from bringing an improvement in the health facilities in J&K. Singh, who was an MLA from Basholi constituency in 1996 and 2002 was inducted into the state cabinet as Minister for Health and Medical Education in Congress-PDP coalition government. In 2004, he was elected as an MP in the 14th Lok Sabha from Udhampur constituency. In 2009, he went on to be elected as an MP from the same constituency.

However, in August 2014, Singh parted ways with the Congress after being denied ticket during the 16th Lok Sabha elections and formally joined the BJP in the presence of party president Amit Shah at a function in Kathua. Chander Prakash Ganga, another BJP minister who was also part of the rally, questioned the investigations and told the protesters, We too want that the real accused be punished but we will not allow people to be picked up randomly.

In April last year, Ganga had called for use of bullets on stone pelters in the valley. There is only one remedy for them and that is bullets. And if not bullets, they should be given punishments like the youths who are beaten with sticks by forces. Take my word that next time they (the youth) wont throw stones, Ganga was quoted as saying by the local media.

The minister, however, had expressed regret over his remarks later. Gangas unfair relationship with the Gujjar community had come out in the public earlier too. In 2015, Ganga had said, Gujjar families should be evicted from Samba to start work on construction of an all-India institute of medical sciences (AIIMS).

In 2014, while campaigning for the election, Ganga had said, Once I am elected, I assure that Muslims in Sarore and Vijapur will be evicted, come what may. Ganga, who represents the Vijaypur Assembly constituency was also accused by the locals of aiding in creating a hostile environment for Muslim Gujjars during the 2008 Amarnath land row agitation.New Delhi: Senior Supreme Court judge Kurian Joseph has cautioned Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra that "dignity, honour and respect of this institution is going down day by day" because of the judiciary's inability to get judges appointed.

Writing to the CJI days after his colleague Justice J Chelameswar warned the Chief Justice against governmental interference, Justice Joseph pointed out that letting the government sit over recommendations would eventually impact the independence of the judiciary.

CNN-News18 has accessed the copy of the letter written by the judge to the CJI, which has also been marked to the other judges in the top court.

Justice Joseph called the current state of affairs as "a threat to the very life and existence of the institution, and regretted that "CJI's personal efforts have not been fruitful".

The trigger for the letter is the silence of the Executive with regard to two names that have been proposed for appointment in the Supreme Court by its Collegium, which is headed by the CJI and also has Justice Joseph as its member.

The Collegium had in January cleared names of Uttarakhand HC Chief Justice KM Joseph and senior lawyer Indu Malhotra for elevation as judges in the apex court. But the government has been sitting on the recommendations ever since.

It is the first time in the history of this court where nothing is known as to what has happened to a recommendation after three months," stated Justice Joseph, adding siting over files by the government was" abuse of power".

The letter dated April 10 further said: "The dignity, honour and respect of this institution is going down day by day since we are not able to take the recommendations for appointment to this Court to their logical conclusion within the normally expected times.

According to Justice Joseph, this episode may serve as a message to all the judges down the line not to cause any displeasure to the Executive lest they should suffer.

"Is this not a threat to the independence of the judiciary? asked Justice Joseph, imploring upon the CJI to constitute a bench of the seven most senior judges to deal with the issue of delay in appointment on the judicial side.

Justice Joseph's letter follows the concerns expressed by Justice Chelameswar in his letter dated March 23 whereby the most senior judge in the top court had raised the issue of non-appointment of a judge in Karnataka HC despite the Collegium recommending his name twice.

Justice Chelameswar had then reproached the government for making it a norm to sit over the Collegium's recommendations. He had also emphasised that "bonhomie between judiciary and executive will sound the death-knell to the democracy".New Delhi: The Election Commission of India, in an affidavit to the Supreme Court, has asked for an amendment in the Constitution seeking protection for the Election Commissioners from removal at the behest of the Chief Election Commissioner and rule-making power to remain insulated from political pressure.

The EC was on Thursday replying to a notice issued after BJP leader Ashwini Upadhyay filed a plea in the SC last year seeking more protection for Election Commissioners. In its reply, the EC has said that Article 324(5) of the Constitution should be amended so that similar protection is granted to the other Election Commissioners like the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) who can be removed only like a Supreme Court judge.

Upadhyay had filed a plea seeking not only similar protection for all Election Commissioners, but also sought an independent secretariat for the EC and the authority to make rules on the Election Commission of India.

In its reply to the court, the EC has stated that it supports the idea of bringing a Constitutional amendment and has been asking for it since 1998 so that the removal process of Election Commissioners are not just left to the discretion of the CEC, but is instead made similar to the removal procedure of an SC judge.

The present Constitutional guarantee is inadequate and requires an amendment to provide the same protection and safeguard in the matter of removability of Election Commissioners as is available to the Chief Election Commissioner, reads the EC affidavit.

According to Article 324(5), the CEC enjoys the same protection as an SC judge who can be removed after a motion is passed in either of the two Houses of the Parliament and is subject to the Presidential assent.

However, both the Election Commissioners have no such protection and Article 324(5) of the Constitution provides that they can be removed on the recommendation of the Chief Election Commissioner.

EC has replied that it has been asking for the amendment since 1998. The proposal was again reiterated in July 2004 when the EC sent 22 proposals on electoral reforms to the government, which was referred to the Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee (RS) on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice for examination by the Chairman, Rajya Sabha in 2005.

The commission again said the same to the Prime Minister in January 2010 while another request for the intervention was made in 2012. This was followed by a list of 47 proposals for electoral reforms, sent on December 2016.

Upadhyay had also sought for a direction to the Union government to ask them to take appropriate steps in order to provide an independent secretariat to the EC and declare its expenditure as charged on the consolidated fund of India on the lines of the Lok Sabha/Rajya Sabha secretariat.

The commission, supporting the said contention, has stated, EC had first urged the Central government to ensure an independent secretariat for the Election commission of India on the lines of the Lok Sabha secretariat and also to ensure that the expenditure of the election commission is charged on the consolidated fund of India.

EC is also of the opinion that a changed budget would be a symbol of the independence of the commission and will secure its unconstrained functioning.

This, the commission has based on the reasoning that the EC, entrusted with the task of conducting elections throughout the country, be fully insulated from political pressure or executive interference to maintain the purity of elections, inherent in a democratic process.

The poll watchdog has also further asked for a rule-making power under the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Representation of the People Act, 1951, saying it should be conferred on the Election commission, instead of on the central government, who should, however, be consulted by the Election Commission while framing any rule.New Delhi: The Ministry of Minority Affairs has informed the Delhi High Court that the government has chosen to retain the 30-year-old practice of debarring disabled Muslims from performing Hajj as the Consulate General of India in Jeddah has found many of them begging in the foreign land.

Advocate Gaurav Kumar Bansal had approached the court with respect to the derogatory term used for the disabled in New Haj Policy approved by the government and led by Afzal Amanullah.

The affidavit, which has been filed by the Ministry through its standing counsel, Ajay Digpaul, has stated in the reply that CGI in Jeddah had advised for strict screening of disabled people and in the view of physical hardships, the government has decided to bar disabled from applying for Hajj through the Hajj Committee of India.

CGI, Jeddah advice in 2012 had asked for strict screening of disabled persons in view of instances of many such people indulging in begging which is strictly prohibited in Saudi Arabia, said the government affidavit.

The government has also stated that the practice of barring the disabled from performing Hajj is not new, and that it has been in existence for over 30 years in India.

As per prevailing practice for more than 30 years, persons suffering from physical disabilities or suffering from specified diseases have been debarred from performing the pilgrimage through Hajj Committee of India, states the reply.

Ministry of Minority Affairs has also laid down how difficult is the pilgrimage and how the disabled would be at risk from performing the pilgrimage as risk of stampede, etc, looms high.

Haj pilgrimage is physically demanding and involves arduous journey from Arafat to Mina. There is fear of stampede or mishaps. And in such grueling situation, it is only the pilgrirn with physical disabilities who are likely to suffer the most It is because of the difficulties involved in Haj Pilgrimage that as per Quranic injunction Haj is not cast upon as a duty for everyone but only on those who have the lstatah (physical and financial capacity), said the government affidavit.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice Hari Shankar had served a notice to the government on a petition challenging the new Haj Policy 2018-2022, which bars differently-abled people from undertaking the pilgrimage through the Haj Committee of India.

Advocate Bansal had contended that the new Haj Policy violated Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPWD) Act, 2016 as also Articles 14, 21 and 25 pertaining to equality, personal liberty and religious freedom.

In a letter dated, December 27, The National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled had expressed strong reservation against the terminology used to denote persons with disabilities and called it "abusive and derogatory in nature."

In addition to this, the group highlighted the clause, "those afflicted with polio, tuberculosis, congestive cardiac & respiratory ailment, acute coronary insufficiency, coronary thrombosis, mental disorder, infectious leprosy, AIDS or any other communicable disease / disability, as not allowed to perform Haj," as the one which can be used to ban any disabled person from undertaking the Haj.

However, now in this affidavit before the Delhi HC, the government has justified the usage of the words as, it is important to understand the clientele these guidelines target, a large number of whom are not educated and understand only Urdu or Hindi. Given this background, these wordings might have been used for understanding of the common applicant.

During Haj 2017, the total quota allocated to India was 1, 70,025 out of which 1, 25,025 was allocated to Haj Committee of India and 45,000 was allocated to private tour operators.

V Muralidharan, the president for the National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled has also heavily critiqued this affidavit by the government.

"In its attempt to defend a policy that is outright discriminatory, the government is portraying the entire disabled community as beggars. This is demeaning and an out-and-out abuse, which has to be squarely condemned. That a few disabled are compelled into begging, reflects poorly on skewed priorities of successive governments at the Centre that have failed to ameliorate the conditions of the vast mass of the disabled population," said Muralidharan.

In January this year, after resistance from rights body for disabled on discriminatory provisions of the newly proposed Haj eligibility rules, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, held a meeting with the rights body and had then agreed to amend Haj rules to avoid violation of disability rights.Bengaluru: In a surprise move, BSP supremo Mayawati had joined hands with former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowdas JDS for Assembly polls two months ago. Together they addressed a huge public meeting in Bengaluru and Gowda offered her 21 seats out of 224 seats in the state. Mayawati had thundered that she would be defeating the Congress and the BJP in Karnataka.

BSP chiefs elephant and Gowdas woman with hay stock walking together was acknowledged by the main opposition, BJP.

In fact, saffron partys chief ministerial face, B S Yeddyurappa, admitted in private that BSP was capable of eating into anti-BJP Dalits votes, which otherwise would have gone to the Congress. The state Congress leaders had also expressed fears that Mayawati would end up helping the BJP.

Karnataka Congress in-charge K C Venugopal had also openly attacked Mayawati by calling her a B team of the BJP in Karnataka. However, after two months, there is no sign of Mayawati  the leader who had promised to address at least half a dozen rallies across Karnataka.

The JDS, which had created a hype over the alliance with the BSP, has also stopped talking about it. And most BSP candidates have not even started campaigning.

According to political observers, Mayawati seems to have changed her mind after the triumph in Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha bypolls last month. The SP with BSP support convincingly defeated the ruling BJP candidates in both seats, giving hope to Cycle and Elephant.

UP by-election win has given hopes to SP and BSP. Mayawati has realised that they can defeat the BJP and her main enemy is BJP, not Congress. She is no more interested in aiding the JDS to eat into non-BJP Dalit votes. She seems to be fine with the Congress win in Karnataka. Thats why Mayawati has gone silent, said Professor C Narasimhappa, a close confidante of late Chaudhury Charan Singh and a former national vice president of the JDU.

When contacted, Karnataka state BSP leaders declined to comment on record. One of the leaders told News18 that the alliance with the JDS had no backing of the local unit and it was done in Lucknow. He said, We are not permitted to express our views. We really dont know what is happening. Madam was supposed to tour Karnataka. We are yet to hear from her. We dont know if the alliance with JDS stays or collapses.

Another leader said that if she indeed had taken the decision to remain neutral in Karnataka, it would be a wise decision on her part.

It is not just Mayawati who has pressed the mute button. The MIM chief and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi and NCP chief Sharad Pawar, who were also in talks with Deve Gowda, are also maintaining a strange silence over seat sharing or contesting in the polls.

The MIM was initially planning to field the candidates in about 50 seats in north Karnataka region. According to JDS sources, Owaisi had even approached Deve Gowda for seat sharing arrangements, which was turned down by the former Prime Minister.

The JDS had offered seven Assembly seats to the NCP in Belgaum and Bijapura districts bordering Maharashtra in last February. The alliance collapsed two weeks ago after Deve Gowda accused Pawar of hobnobbing with anti-Karnataka Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti (MES) MLAs and leaders in Belgaum. Sources say that the NCP may not contest at all because Pawar does not want to be seen as someone aiding the BJP in Karnataka.

The JDS maintains that alliance with Mayawati is still intact. Speaking to News18, Deve Gowda said that there was no change in the original plan, but he refused to elaborate further.

The BJP, which was hoping to be benefitted from a non-Congress, non-BJP alliance of regional parties led by the JDS, is reworking its poll strategies. On the other hand, Congress is heaving a sigh of relief, hoping that there will be no splitting of votes by these players.New Delhi: The lawyer who took up the case of the 8-year-old girl, who was gangraped and killed in Kathua in Jammu, has said that she has been battling 'prejudice', 'bias' and 'threats' from her fellow colleagues for the last five years.

Advocate Deepika Singh Rajawat, who is appearing for the father of the victim, told News18 that she has been denied water from any of the bar rooms of the Jammu court.

According to the chargesheet, the girl belonged to the nomadic Bakerwal tribe and sixty-year-old Sanji Ram allegedly hatched a conspiracy to drive the nomads away from the area and the rape and murder of the child was part of the plan.

Rajawat had taken the case initially after she read about it in newspapers and soon decided to approach the family to help them seek justice.

"I wanted to meet her parents," she said. The victim was staying with her maternal uncle when the incident took place. "It was her biological father who wanted a court-monitored probe to fast track the case," said Rajawat who had first moved a writ petition.

"We did not demand all the accused to be hanged or initiate an anti-Hindu movement. We only wanted the court to monitor the investigation. The HC started calling periodical reports from the crime branch and it is only after we went to the court that the investigation started showing results. It was minutely examining the reports filed by the crime branch. On the basis of that, fresh status reports were sought to be filed," said Rajawat.

However, Rajawat said that the threats from the Jammu Bar Association president BS Salathia is not a first threat from the lawyer's body.

The lawyer pointed out that in 2012, a 12-year-old girl died in the residence of advocate Surinder Singh in Jammu under mysterious circumstances. "Singh was earlier the bar president and also the president of the Gurdwara Prabandak Committee also. It was stated by Singh and others that the girl committed suicide after tying her neck with the shower pipe," said Rajawat.

Rajawat said that the parents of the girl approached her after a senior criminal lawyer, who handled the case, destroyed the entire scene of evidence.

"Since I was working for an NGO, I had to take up the case," said Rajawat. But, as soon as she took up the case, Rajawat's bar membership was cancelled. "They (The bar association) gave a statement to the press stating that I was an 'undisciplined lawyer'," said Rajawat.

Rajawat also said that she is being threatened to leave the case and not "spread filth in the court".

"On April 4, when I was there in high court, Salathia asked me not to appear in this matter. When I told the bar president that I was not a member of the bar association and hence I can appear for the cases I want, he replied, "Yaha par gandd phailane ki zarurat nahi hai (no need to spread filth here)" When she protested, she was further threatened, "I have the means to stop you."

The lawyer's plight doesn't end here. She has been denied water too.

"Just recently when I went to one of the bar rooms to have some water, a staff told me that water cannot be served to me since there were directions from senior officers. Is this the property of the bar president?", asked Rajawat.

Lawyers in Jammu brought the city to a standstill on Wednesday to protest the filing of the chargesheet and arrest of the eight accused in the rape and murder case.

Upping the ante, the lawyers of the Jammu Bar Association also demanded the ouster of Rohingyas and Bangladeshis along with the nomadic tribes.

However, Rajawat claims that this is only a strategy to come into the limelight as they had easy legal options to demand a CBI probe earlier than protesting.

"They can get the entire challan quashed in court under CrPC. But no one would ever come to know that they did it and hence the strike and a show of all the mess. All the people protesting are lawyers and they know their way out," she said.

Rajawat has a lot of questions  "When our writ petition was filed, why did the Jammu bar president not file another application asking for a CBI probe? Now when the entire matter has been heard and status reports have been filed, they demand a CBI probe? Why did not they approach the court before us."

The lawyer has also raised questions on the matter based on which the bar association calls for strikes.

"In 2007, lawyer Anil Sethi was involved in a sex scandal. This same bar association stood in defence of Advocate Sethi and suspended work for almost a month. This is usually their grounds for strike. Even now, I was threatened in front of another senior lawyer. This is simply disrespecting the woman," Rajawat said.

Rajawat now believes that this case cannot be taken up in Jammu any longer and that she would soon discuss with the victim's father about transferring the case to another court.Congress president Rahul Gandhi marched from the Congress headquarters to India Gate in the heart of Delhi at midnight to demand justice for the Kathua and Unnao rape victims. "Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does. Join me in a silent, peaceful, candlelight vigil at India Gate at midnight tonight to protest this violence and demand justice," he said in a tweet. The midnight march comes amid nationwide horror over the chilling details of the brutal gangrape of an 8-year-old being revealed in a chargesheet filed by Jammu and Kashmir police. In Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, the BJP MLA accused of rape has still not been arrested despite a case being registered under POCSO, which mandates immediate arrest. The case has now been transferred to the CBI.



Stay tuned for live updates:Thiruvananthapuram: Mohammed Riyas, the main accused in the alleged forceful conversion of a 25-year-old Gujarat-based woman, has been granted bail. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had earlier arrested Riyas for forcefully converting and trying to sell off the woman to the Islamic State in Syria.

The complainant had also alleged that she was used as a sex slave in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The Kerala High Court granted him bail on the condition that he would not travel to any area outside the investigating agencys jurisdiction.

The girl who lives in Gujarat approached the Kerala High Court, alleging that she was forcefully converted to Islam in Kerala, married through fraudulent means, used as a sex slave and that her husband Riyas had plans to take her to Syria. Her complaint to the court states that Riyas had taken her to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia when she escaped his clutches by informing her father.

NIA took Riyas into custody from Chennai airport on February 2 when he was coming back from Jeddah.

Sources had told News18 that they had not found any proof of his involvement with the IS.

Riyas's cousin Fayas was also arrested along with real estate agent Siyad for allegedly helping the accused rent a house. They were both granted bail earlier by the NIA court.

They were charged under sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and IPC.

Riyas had filed an affidavit in the Kerala High Court denying all allegations and stating that they were legally wedded. He also clarified that the charges of him planning to take her to Syria and make her watch Zakir Naiks videos were also false and baseless.

The affidavit further stated, "There was only some marital discord between us and she went to Gujarat as her father had some health issues. The petition also stated that in a habeas filed by Riyas in 2017, the girl herself had told the court that she wants to go with Riyas and they went to Jeddah because his family was there. His father was working there for the past 25 years."

Her complaint in the Kerala High Court however stated that she was studying in Bengaluru in 2013 when she met Muhammed Riyas, a resident of New Mahe in Kannur. The two got into a relationship when he a private video.

According to the petition, he later blackmailed the girl with these visuals and forced her to convert to Islam and marry him.

V Sethunath, counsel for the woman said that Riyas mother was also hand-in-glove with the accused and that she was sent for religious classes and forced to watch to Zakir Naik's videos.

After her wedding, the woman went back to her family in Gujarat when Riyas filed a writ petition. Counsel Sethunath said that she was blackmailed into saying that she went back on her own will and she was threatened with her objectionable photos.

Later, she was taken to Kozhikode, where her passport name was changed to Aisha and she was taken to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She further alleged that she was forced to be his sex slave in Saudi and was told that she will be taken to the Islamic State territory in Syria. When she somehow managed to contact her parents, they sent her a ticket to return to India when she finally came back on October 3.

She later approached the court to nullify the marriage and sought NIA investigation into matter. The case, which was being probed by the Kerala police, was later handed over to the NIA.New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will lead BJP lawmakers across the country in a 24-hour fast on Thursday to protest against the washout of the last session of Parliament.

The opposition has dubbed the token fast as a farce, alleging that the second part of the Budget Session was washed out because of BJP lawmakers.

"To expose the Congress for its undemocratic style of functioning, and pursuing divisive politics and anti-development agenda, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi will observe day-long fast on April 12 while continuing his routine official work. He will be joined by BJP MPs who will also observe a day-long fast and hold dharnas across India," a BJP statement.

BJP leaders all over the country, including Union ministers and BJP chief Amit Shah, will join the Prime Minister in his day-long symbolic fast. I&B Minister Smriti Irani will fast in Amethi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Lucknow, Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari in Nagpur, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in Patna, Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi in Ranchi and Environment Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan in Delhi.

The second part of the Budget Session was a washout and was dominated by the TDP's withdrawal from the ruling NDA coalition and its demand for a special status for Andhra Pradesh.

The Congress supported the TDP's demand for special status.

"Frustrated of being out of power and seeing its popularity dipping to lowest level, the Congress in a planned way is conspiring to spread fear in the society and trying to create an atmosphere of confusion in the country. By inciting hatred and creating rift in the society, the Congress party is disturbing peace and harmony of the country. The entire Budget Session of Parliament which was meant for discussion on important issues related to common man was disrupted by the Congress," the BJP statement read.

Hitting back, the Congress termed the fast as nothing but a "photo-opportunity" and "drama". It also held that the BJP and its allies were responsible for the disruption of Parliament.

"They don't allow discussion on no-trust motion, bank fraud cases, Rafale deal, on farmers' crisis, CBSE leak and SSC scam," said Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala. "They are letting SC/ST Act be diluted... they are also being step-motherly towards south Indian states, they didn't allow discussion on Special status for Andhra Pradesh," he added.

Surjewala said the government wasted 250 hours of Parliament.

"If they are so helpless and weak then they should give up their posts and take retirement," he said, adding: "This is not time for the PM to sit on fast, this is time for his retirement. If not now, then after 2019 they will have to retire."

(With agency inputs)New Delhi: Denying allegations of bias towards northern states, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday tweeted that the Centre has suggested to the Finance Commission to incentivise states that work towards population control.

Modi wrote that this will particularly benefit southern states like Tamil Nadu, a state where protests against the BJP over the Cauvery issue have intensified.

The Union Government has suggested to the Finance Commission to consider incentivizing States who have worked on population control. Thus, a state like Tamil Nadu, which has devoted a lot of effort, energy and resources towards population control would certainly benefit, read the tweet.

A baseless allegation is being made about the Terms of Reference of the 15th Finance Commission, being biased against certain states or a particular region: PM PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 12, 2018

The Union Government has suggested to the Finance Commission to consider incentivizing States who have worked on population control. Thus, a state like Tamil Nadu, which has devoted a lot of effort, energy and resources towards population control would certainly benefit: PM PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 12, 2018

Finance ministers from Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry had met on Tuesday demanding reframing of the Terms of Reference for devolution of funds to states. The ministers alleged it was biased and in contradiction to principles of federalism.

The new terms of reference for the 15th Finance Commission have said that the basis for the population counts relevant for the division of funds must be the 2011 Census and not, as it was in the past, the 1971 Census.

According to reports, between 1971 and 2011, except Telangana, the population share of four southern states in the total declined from 22.01 percent to 18.16 percent. This would mean that by using the 2011 Census for sharing resources there would be a decline in the flow of funds to these states.

Reacting to these allegations, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley through his blog post on Tuesday said that there was no inherent bias or mandate in the ToRs which can be construed as discriminatory against the states which made good progress in population control.

"Nothing could be further from truth", said Jaitley in his Facebook post.Thiruvidanthai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday hailed Tamil saint-poet Thiruvalluvar as a legend and quoted his couplet which said greater learning brings more wisdom.

Amidst applause, the Prime Minister during his address at the Defence Expo here, quoted Thiruvalluvar's couplet in Tamil extemporaneously, describing him as a celebrated poet-philosopher.

"Thottanaith thoorum manarkeni maandharku, kattranaithu thoorum arivu," he said and explained the essence of the couplet.

"In sand and soil the deep you delve you reach the spring below. The more you learn the freer streams of wisdom flow," he said.

Beginning his address with good morning in Tamil saying "Kaalai Vanakkam," Modi said this was the first time he was participating at a defence expo.

He said, "I am both delighted and overwhelmed to see such a gathering here in the great state of Tamil Nadu."

He said the place where the Defence expo was being held (Thiruvidanthai in Kanchipuram district) is historic. He lauded Tamil Nadu as the land of our "glorious maritime legacy," in reference to the great Cholas and added "this is the land from where India looked east and acted east 1000s of years ago."

Prime Minister Narendra Modi further said India's commitment to peace is just as strong as its commitment to protecting the country's territory and asserted that his government is ready to take all necessary measures to equip the armed forces to bolster their strength.

The prime minister's comments, after formally inaugurating the Defence Expo here, comes in the backdrop of increasing Chinese activities along the nearly 4,000 km border with India as well as Beijing's efforts to expand its influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

Listing his government's initiatives to promote defence production in India, Modi also accused the previous UPA government of policy paralysis in the defence sector, which he said affected the country's military preparedness.

There was a time when the critical issue of defence preparedness was hampered by policy paralysis. We have seen the damage such laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives can cause to the nation. Not now, not anymore, never again, Modi said in the presence of top executives of foreign as well as domestic defence firms.

Though the four-day Defence Expo, India's biennial exhibition of military platforms and weapons, began yesterday, it was formally inaugurated by the prime minister today. The event was also attended by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit, state Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam and representatives of a number of countries.

Our commitment to peace is just as strong as our commitment to protecting our people and our territory. For this we are ready to take all necessary measures to equip our armed forces, the prime minister said.

The prime minister -- whose visit to Tamil Nadu comes amid widespread protests in the state over the Cauvery river waters issue -- also discussed modernisation of the armed forces and the long-drawn but unsuccessful initiative of the previous UPA regime to procure 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).

You would recall the long-drawn process of procurement of fighter aircraft that never reached any conclusion. We've not only taken bold action to meet our immediate critical requirements but have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircrafts, Modi said.New Delhi: The Punjab government on Thursday told the Supreme Court that its own minister Navjot Singh Sidhu should serve three years in jail in a 30-year-old road rage case as ordered by the Punjab and Haryana high court.

Sidhu had hit Gurnam Singh, 65, on the head during an argument on a road in Patiala on December 27, 1988. Singh had died in hospital of a haemorrhage.

The high court had held Sidhu guilty and sentenced him to three years in jail in 2006, but the Supreme Court had suspended the sentence a year later and granted him bail, allowing him to contest elections.

The Congress government in Punjab asked the Supreme Court to uphold Sidhu's conviction and set aside the bail, saying that the HC verdict was correct.

Counsel for Punjab government told a bench of Justices J Chelameswar and Sanjay Kishan Kaul that Gurnam Singh had died of brain hemorrhage, and not cardiac arrest, after being struck by Sidhu.

There is not a single evidence that suggest that the cause of death was cardiac arrest and not brain hemorrhage. The trial court verdict was rightly set aside by the High Court. Sidhu had given a fiesty blow to deceased Gurnam Singh leading to his death through brain hemorrhage," the state government counsel told the bench.

Punjab Congress leaders backed the counsels stand, saying that the state prosecution had taken this position in the Punjab & Haryana High Court and could not back out now.

The state government followed the rule of the law in the Supreme Court and has left the apex court to judge the matter on merit, a party leader said.

Drawing a contrast to UP, where the Yogi Adityanath government is facing accusations of shielding MLA Kuldeep Singh in a rape case, he said that the Congress government has upheld the law of the land in this case, as it has done in every case since taking charge in Punjab.

Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh has always maintained that his government will strictly uphold the law and will not interfere in judicial matters. The same principle was stringently adhered to, in the present case, he said.Lucknow: The statue vandalism spree in Uttar Pradesh continues unabated, with two more of BR Ambedkar being vandalized on Thursday, taking the tally into double figures. While the first statue vandalism incident was reported from Firozabad, the other took place in Barabanki district.

Despite the strict orders and guidelines for statue protection from CM Yogi Adityanath, no arrests have been made in any of the Ambedkar statue vandalism incidents so far.

In Firozabad, tensions gripped the Nagla Jhamman village after some "anti-social" elements damaged the statue. The situation was brought under control after intervention from senior police officers.

On the other hand, locals alleged that the statue in Mohammadpur Khala area under Fatehpur Tehsil of Barabanki was damaged by policemen.

They said they were preparing the area for Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations to be held on April 14, when suddenly two constables from the local police chowki reached the venue and shooed the villagers away. When the villagers came back they found the hand of the Ambedkar statue broken. The police, however, blamed unknown miscreants.

The residents also demanded the arrest of Shivkumar Maurya, Jaipal Maurya, Ram Vijay Mishra and Dinesh Maurya  all locals BJP members. They allege that these men were behind the statue vandalism and said they must be arrested immediately. The villagers also staged a protest by blocking the road.

Speaking to News18, ASP Barabanki, Digambar Kushwaha, said, "We received the information of Ambedkar statue being vandalized in the village. The locals allege that some people from their own village have done this. A report has been filed and the matter will be resolved soon. If role of any policeman is found in the incident then proper action will be taken against them too."Allahabad: After taking suo motu cognizance of the Unnao rape case and custodial death of the woman's father, the Allahabad High Court came down heavily on the Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday and asked whether it proposes to arrest accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar.

A bench of Chief Justice D B Bhosale and Justice Suneet Kumar, heard the matter in detail and will pronounce its order on Friday. The court also questioned the conduct of the police in the case, saying that the law and order situation seems to have collapsed in the state.

The bench said that the woman continued to plead for justice for six months but nothing was done on her complaint. It asked whom would a victim approach in such a situation.

Advocate General Raghvendra Singh, who was present in the court on its direction, said there was not enough proof to arrest the MLA and action would be taken as per law once the police gets sufficient evidence.

Sengar was on Thursday booked under various sections of the IPC and provisions of the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. Under POCSO, an accused has to be arrested immediately after a case been filed.

The court took strong objection to this statement, and asked if the police procures proof beforehand in every case. Singh said that three of the accused have been arrested, including the MLA's brother.

The court then asked the Advocate General whether the government proposes to arrest Sengar.

Singh said that he was not in a position to make any statement in this regard and police will proceed in accordance with law only after recording statements of the complainant and witnesses. He said that the case gas been transferred to the CBI and the agency would take a call.

The court referred to the SIT report and said, "according to it, medical officers and police officers, all were hand in glove with the accused to save them and you acted on this report against those officers but for arresting rape accused you need to do further investigation."

"Police was not ready to register FIR of the minor rape victim. In spite of the SIT report, you are repeating that we can only take any action after further investigation, if this is the conduct of the police in state, whom will a victim approach to register a complaint? If this is the stand you are repeatedly taking, then we will be forced to observe in our order that law and order has collapsed in the state'," it said.Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Police Chief OP Singh triggered a controversy on Thursday when he referred to MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, an accused in the Unnao rape case, as mananiya MLA during a press conference called to announce that the case has been handed over to the CBI.

Addressing reporters with Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar, Singh said it was up to the CBI to arrest the lawmaker, who has been charged with raping an 18-year-old woman whose father died in police custody later.

Taking questions from the media, Singh referred to Sengar as mananiya (respected), drawing a protest from the reporters present. Singh, however, said there was nothing wrong in calling the MLA mananiya since he was an accused and not a convict.

There is no issue in using the word mananiya for the MLA. He is just an accused and not convicted as of now, Singh said.

However, sensing a controversy in the making, Singh was quick to add that nobody is trying to defend him. But now when the case is being transferred to the CBI, its their call to decide on the arrest of the MLA. Meanwhile, the SIT constituted will continue to work till the time the CBI takes over the case.

The Uttar Pradesh government has handed over the twin cases of the alleged rape of an 18-year-old woman and the custodial death of her father in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao to the CBI even as the ruling BJP tries to distance itself from the charges against its MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar. The MLA was booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and POCSO at Unnaos Makhi Police Station on Thursday morning.

The decision to handover the case to the CBI was taken late on Wednesday, hours after the BJP MLA made a dramatic appearance before the police but refused to surrender. An FIR be lodged under appropriate sections considering the allegations of rape levied on MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and others and the investigation be handed over to CBI, the Principal Secretary (Information) had said in an statement. "Investigation in to cross cases pertaining to incidents leading to the death of the victim's father be also handed over to the CBI.

The decisions were taken after the Special Investigation Team constituted under Additional Director General of Police (Lucknow zone) to look into the matter submitted its report to the government.

The MLA has denied the allegations and termed the charges against him as a political conspiracy.New Delhi: When the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights got a complaint from a citizen to look into the horrific rape case of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, the Commission immediately forwarded it to the Chief Secretary of Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday.

The reason? In the state of Jammu and Kashmir, Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act 2012 is not applicable.

The chargesheet filed in the case has revealed horrifying details. It has again brought the issue of paucity of stringent provisions to protect children of Jammu and Kashmir.

POCSO is a law for preventing sexual abuse of children and it has been implemented in all states except Jammu and Kashmir, making it difficult for the judiciary to deal with the offenders. Hence, when we got the complaint, and we forwarded it to the state, said Yashwant Jain, member POCSO, NCPCR.

The POCSO Act aims to provide protection to children from violence, including sexual assault, sexual harassment, and the inclusion of children in pornography. The Act also provides for establishment of special courts for trials of such offenders and for related matters.

The clause (3) of article 15 of the Constitution, inter alia, empowers the state to make special provisions for children.

Under this provision, the state parties are required to undertake all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent  the inducement or coercion of a child to engage in any unlawful sexual activity, the exploitative use of children in prostitution, in pornographic performance or other unlawful sexual practices.

The Act enables the sentencing of the offenders between three and 10 years depending upon the nature of the crime.

A petition was filed by activist Musab Omer on change.org for the enactment of a POCSO-like law to address Child Sexual Abuse in Jammu & Kashmir. It mentioned some cases of child sexual abuse where the victims had to fight with no stringent laws to protect them  like, in February 2016, a teacher was convicted for 10 years in prison after he was proven guilty of having raped a class 9 student.

In another case related to mass child sexual abuse, a self-proclaimed faith healer, who is currently facing a trial in the Chief Judicial Magistrates Court of Sopore, District Baramulla, is out on bail. He is continuing abuse under the disguise of faith healing, said the petition.

Further in his petition, Omer said, Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) is the least spoken subject in a conservative society like Jammu & Kashmir (J&K). CSA is spreading like an epidemic in J&K; hence, there has been a consolidated effort by a group of victims and survivors to raise awareness about CSA and the role of parents and schools in preventing CSA, via social media, for almost 2 years.

He mentioned the study conducted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development in 2007, where it revealed that 1 in every 2 children is subjected to sexual abuse in one or more forms, before they reach the age of 18. Though there are no reliable statistics available on Child Sexual Abuse in Jammu & Kashmir, there is enough evidence that abuse happens in our homes, schools and religious institutions. However, Omer said, in his petition, that most people deny the occurrence of child abuse in J&K.

The fraternity of legal activists believe that a strong POCSO-like law in J&K will not only encourage the victims of sexual abuse to come forward and seek help but also ensure speedy trial in such cases.

Khurram Pervez, human rights activist said, "This is a very centrist argument that central laws are not applicable in Jammu and Kashmir. In this particular Kathua rape case there is no need also. Agreed, that in child rape cases we do not have NCPCR kind of protection but in reality, in this case when it was observed that police was doing a bad job, the case was shifted to crime branch. And they did their job well."

He added that if the government wishes then it can assure justice with the existing CRPC laws. In Jammu and Kashmir state, there is Ranbir Penal Code or RPC, which is a criminal code applicable in the state. Indian Penal Code is not applicable here under Article 370 of the Indian constitution.Bollywood actor and international star Priyanka Chopra was in Delhi on Wednesday and met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in regards to an upcoming conference of partnership for the healthcare of women, children and adolescents. The 'Quantico' star took to Instagram to inform about the meet and posted a photo too. Donning a white traditional outfit, the 35-year-old beauty looked like a vision in white while standing next to Prime Minister Modi.

Not too long ago, Priyanka Chopra was slammed on social media for not being "decently" dressed and sitting in a disrespectful posture during her meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Berlin. She met PM Narendra Modi while he was on his six-day tour of four nations.

This time, Priyanka went through public scrutiny for her dress again but passed with flying colours. The so-called 'traditionalists' approved of her outfit terming it the 'appropriate wear for an Indian woman'. Check for yourself:

She, along with the delegation, including Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda and former President of Chile Michelle Bachelet, invited the Prime Minister to join the upcoming the forum, to be held in New Delhi in December.

In her post, the actor, who is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, has expressed gratitude to PM Modi for meeting them and described the conversation with the Prime Minister as "insightful".Jean Paul Gaultier and Roberto Cavalli are in Saudi Arabia -- headlining the kingdom's first ever Arab Fashion Week, an event that opened Tuesday to equal parts excitement and controversy.

Two weeks later than initially planned, the Saudi Arabian edition of Arab Fashion Week joins designers from Europe and the Arab world over the course of four days -- including the kingdom's own Arwa Banawi, whose The Suitable Woman line is adored by fashionistas across the region, and Mashael Alrajhi, the eponymous gender-inclusive label of a rarely-seen Saudi sheikha.

Princess Noura Bint Faisal Al-Saud, honorary president of the Arab Fashion Council in Riyadh, joined designers, influencers, and industry insiders from Ukraine to Lebanon for the inaugural season of fashion week at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, the hotel now infamous as the holding place of hundreds of royals and businessmen arrested in a state-sponsored corruption crackdown.

"Fashion has always an interest of Saudi Arabia," Princess Noura told AFP at the event.

"It has not been something that wasn't on the table or in the picture," she added. "Our fashion council is trying to bring the fashion industry in Saudi Arabia to a whole new level, a whole new industry."

Listed as an international fashion week alongside Paris and Milan, Arab Fashion Week offers exclusively see-now-buy-now collections and pre-collections. Until this week, it had been hosted exclusively by Gulf fashion capital Dubai.

But unlike Dubai, the Riyadh shows are not open to cameras, and attendees remain women-only.

The ultraconservative kingdom has witnessed rapid policy change since the June appointment of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, son of the king and heir to his throne.

As of this summer, women will be allowed to drive in the kingdom. The crown prince has also hinted that the abaya, the long loose robe worn by women from the neck down, may not be compulsory.

"We are so excited today to be announcing a history and new era for the kingdom, and for the entire Arab world, which is Arab Fashion Week," said Jacob Abrian, CEO of the Arab Fashion Council.

A second edition of Saudi Arab Fashion Week is already scheduled for October.

Dubai will continue to host its own parallel Arab Fashion Week, with the sixth edition slotted for May 9-12.Doctors issued a chilli warning Tuesday after an American man who ate the world's hottest pepper was struck by excruciating "thunderclap" headaches.

The 34-year-old man's symptoms began with dry heaves "immediately after participation in a hot pepper contest where he ate one Carolina Reaper," in 2016, said an article published in medical journal BMJ Case Reports. The man then developed intense neck and head pain, and for several days experienced brief but intense "thunderclap" headaches. Each lasted several seconds.

After seeking emergency care, tests for various neurological conditions came back negative. In the end, doctors diagnosed him with a temporary brain condition called "reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome" (RCVS), characterised by the temporary narrowing of blood vessels to the brain.

It was the first reported case of a patient being diagnosed with RCVS after eating a chilli pepper, the authors said. Often accompanied by "thunderclap" headaches, the condition usually occurs as a reaction to certain prescription medications, or after taking illegal drugs. "It was a big surprise to everyone," said doctor Kulothungan Gunasekaran of the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, one of the authors of the article that warns of the dangers of playing with chilli fire.

- World's hottest chilli pepper -

The man's symptoms cleared up by themselves and a follow-up CT scan five weeks after the event showed that his arteries had returned to their normal width.

Eating cayenne pepper has previously been linked to heart attacks, the study authors said. "We would recommend the general public be cautious when eating chilli peppers and to seek medical attention straight away if you develop symptoms like this," Gunasekaran warned. For those who dare, the Carolina Reaper has a fruity, sweet taste with a hint of cinnamon and chocolate undertones, as well as being extremely hot, according to the website of Guinness World Records.

Last year it named the Carolina Reaper -- a cross between Sweet Habanero and Naga Viper chillies -- as the hottest pepper on Earth. It is grown by a producer in South Carolina.

It rates at an average of 1,641,183 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), according to tests conducted by Winthrop University in South Carolina in 2017. A Jalapeno can score anything between 2,500 to 8,000 SHU on the scale, Guinness World Records said. In November 2016, a new record of 120 grammes (just over four ounces) of Carolina Reaper were eaten in one minute at a competition in Arizona.What started out as a mid-air conversation five years ago is now culminating into a wedding for Masaan" and Haraamkhor actress Shweta Tripathi and actor-rapper Chaitnya Sharma aka SlowCheeta on June 29.

SlowCheeta, as he prefers to be called, is five years younger to Shweta, but the actress quips she looks younger at 32.

"We met because both of us were stepping in for other actors. So, from Bombay (Mumbai), we met in Delhi to perform and hardly spoke throughout. On our way back, we were seated next to each other. It was a 5 a.m. flight, so obviously the plan was to doze off. But we started talking and that was that," Shweta recounted as she broke the news of her wedding to IANS.

The proposal was rather romantic -- and much in tune to what both of them love -- theatre.

"He proposed at a place called Cuckoo Club, which is a performing place in Mumbai. He wanted to do it on stage because that's how we met -- for a play. He had told me he has a new play, so I went to see that... But it was the proposal," said Shweta.

SlowCheeta, who has a tattoo of Shweta's name and stands tall at 6 ft, delivered a monologue in front of a full audience about the journey that has led to the new journey they are ready to take.

"They say you fall in love, and I fell hard, from about 36,000 feet! Up in the air, into her heart and she already had mine. Relations start from the ground upwards, mine started in the sky. We spoke about whales and the ocean and everything we know. She found me, and I found Nemo."

The wedding will take place in Goa with "closest" family and friends in attendance.

Shweta -- daughter of Delhi's former Chief Secretary P.K. Tripathi -- came to Mumbai over a decade ago. And her aim was not to become a Bollywood actor.

It was her love for theatre since her childhood days that brought this National Institute of Fashion Technology alumnus closer to a world that she has now made a place for herself in.

Shweta has a theatre group which goes by the quirky name of AllMyTea Productions. Before her film journey, she featured as the lively Zenia Khan in Disney channel's Kya Mast Hai Life, did a couple of short films and advertisements.Author Margaret Atwood has said that she believes the 9/11 terrorists attacks may have been inspired from a plot point of sci-fi classic Star Wars.

Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale is enjoying a cultural resurgence as a TV adaptation has resonated strongly with feminist movements in the Donald Trump era.

In an interview with Variety, the author discussed how an opera based on the novel that premiered in Denmark in 2000 had shown various things blowing up, including the "Twin Towers".

Atwood, who was recognised as one of Variety's Power of Women honorees, said when the opera was staged again, they had to take it out "because it was no longer in the future".

She asked the interviewer whether this gave him a creepy feeling and when he said, "Yes, it does", she replied, "They didn't get that idea from my opera, don't worry. They got the idea from 'Star Wars'.

"Remember the first one? Two guys fly a plane in the middle of something and blow that up? The only difference is, in 'Star Wars', they get away. Right after 9/11, they hired a bunch of

Hollywood screenwriters to tell them how the story might go next. Sci-fi writers are very good at this stuff, anticipating future events. They don't all come true, but there are interesting 'what if' scenarios," she added.

Talking about The Handmaid's Tale, which is set in a future where women have no rights and are used for their womb, Atwood said she began writing the book in West Berlin in 1984.

"The wall was still in place. Because I was Canadian, we could go across to East Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, which we did. They were all Iron Curtain countries at the time. That definitely had an influence on the book, most particularly the feeling that people were very reluctant to talk to you until they absolutely trusted you and you were in a place that wasn't bugged.

"I had been thinking about this book for a while. I had been collecting newspaper clippings, which one did in those days. There was no internet. So my rule for it was, nothing goes in that didn't have a precedent in real life - somewhere, sometime," she said.

Asked whether she was surprised by Trump's win in the US presidential race, the author said she was not.

"I'm too old to really be surprised. Think of how long I've been on the planet. I've seen a lot of regime changes in different countries. The people who were devastated were young people who had never experienced anything of the kind. And some of them were quite upset. But it's not the end of the world, although it's pretty bad for the environment," she saidThis morning, if you havent checked the television channels, you will not know that about 500 kilometres away from the capital city, an eight-year-old was confined to a temple for four days, drugged, repeatedly raped, and finally killed with a stone.

Four years ago, thousands of Indians came out on the streets, raging against the rape of Nirbhaya; she became Indias daughter. The country faced the police and their lathi charges, they didnt run away after the police fired tear gas shells. It was a moment that brought the country together where they put up a unified message - Enough is enough.

Today, the same streets are at peace. There are no candle light marches, there are no silent protests. For some reason, the eight-year-old did not become Indias daughter.

The chargesheet that noted the brutality involved in the crime mentioned that one of the accused rapists (eight men have been arrested in connection with the case, including local police officers) was reportedly invited from Meerut, hundreds of miles away, to participate and "satisfy his lust".

The 15-page document is a chilling account of what happened when the girl from the Bakherwal community had gone out to graze her familys horses in the forests. She never returned.

Police say that this was a part of a planned strategy to instill fear and to drive the nomadic tribe out of the region.

The investigation reveals that after the girl was repeatedly raped by powerful people from the region, a police officer also reached the spot and asked the other accused to wait as he wanted to rape her before she is killed.

The chargesheet said the girl was once again gang-raped. She was strangled with her own scarf; a stone was then slammed on her head to make sure that the victim [was] dead.

You cannot read the chargesheet without feeling a lump in your throat, and without being horrified at the monstrosity of the accused.

And yet, the crime has now turned into a political and religious fight. It is now a battle of Us Vs Them. The suspects are Hindu, and the eight-year-old girl was Muslim. Days after the first news reports came out, our usually angry country still hasnt shown the outrage that it often does at these times. In fact, what it proved was that we as a nation do not care much about things that dont happen in our home, or when we feel threatened.

In Jammu, there were protest marches organised, and shops were shut down in solidarity with the suspects. Two ministers from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were also in attendance. They walked through the town, holding the national flag, screaming Jai Shri Ram in an attempt to prevent the police from filing the chargesheet.

And despite all of this, there has been a deafening silence from all politicians.

But what is worse is, we as a country have failed that eight-year-old, who probably didnt even know what religion meant.

On Facebook, we are sharing a picture of the girl calling for justice, and on Twitter, we are furiously asking the politicians to speak up. But, what about us?

The Kathua rape is a national shame. It shows how powerful people can get together to create divide among the commoners for their own benefit. It shows, yet again, that women are not safe  even if its an eight-year-old. She didnt take an empty bus, or watch a movie late at night or wear revealing clothes.

While we came together after the 2012 Delhi gangrape putting the powerful people to task, and questioning our authorities, whats stopping us now? Its time to put together our collective consciousness and demand justice, for yet another Indias daughter.India has not seen such a scared Prime Minister like you. Narendra Modi, you are a coward, thundered the theatrical Vaiko, lambasting the decision to have the PM fly from Chennai airport to the locations of two events  the Defence Expo and at IIT Madras  in the city on Thursday.

The MDMK leader dared Modi to travel by road and face the black flags that the opposition parties plan to wave during the visit.

It is easy to dismiss Vaiko as a paper tiger. His party accounts for next to nothing in the electoral landscape of Tamil Nadu, coming a cropper in the last elections. But the manner in which Modi is accused of lack of sincerity on the Cauvery issue is a pointer to the direction in which the narrative is being spun. More so when the man on the street, too, is convinced that given its political interests in Karnataka, Modi has reasons to support the cause of the upper riparian state and delay the formation of the Cauvery Management Board.

It is also easy to dismiss the black flag protests at different locations across Chennai as politically motivated. You may also ignore the black balloons released in the sky just when Modi landed at Chennai airport, as the handiwork of fringe groups. But what they do is to underline the sentiment that the Centre has been less than fair to Tamil Nadu.

The presence of a few Tamil Nadu flags that bear the image of a tiger, fish and bow and arrow, signifying the rule of the Chola, Pandyan and Chera kings, emphasise the Thamizhan identity.

It would not please the BJP that lays great store by what is being spoken of on social media that #GoBackModi is one of the top trends on Twitter on Thursday.

The question, therefore, to ask is whether the BJP has lost the plot in Tamil Nadu.

When Jayalalithaa passed away and it was obvious that the second rung leadership of the AIADMK was a political pygmy, the BJP saw an opportunity to increase its footprint in Tamil Nadu. Since December 2016, the party has been accused of remote-controlling the AIADMK government.

With Income Tax and CBI raids putting pressure on movers and shakers within the AIADMK and a split in the party, the alleged skeletons in the ruling party's cupboard helped the BJP wrest control even though it did not have a single MLA in the Tamil Nadu assembly.

If this back-seat driving, even though an immoral arrangement, had helped Tamil Nadu's cause, the people would not have minded. But in a little over one year, the feeling of victimhood has only gained root in the state.

Be it Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam's public admission that he returned to the AIADMK fold because of Modi's nudge or the party's overenthusiasm in disrupting Lok Sabha, thereby ensuring the no-trust vote was not taken up, that the BJP-AIADMK is a combo pack is obvious to all.

The BJP recorded less than 3 percent vote share in the 2016 Assembly elections. But in a post-Jayalalithaa order, the BJP saw an opportunity to forge an alliance with a weakened AIADMK and increase its political strength in the state. Given that it had peaked in the cow belt in 2014, it needed to pick up Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu and this friendship would have been a perfect fit.

Except that while trying to gain control over the AIADMK, the BJP destroyed whatever little credibility the party had. Its leaders were reduced to being seen as BJP's B team in Tamil Nadu, kowtowing to Modi just the way they would prostrate before Jayalalithaa.

No one is disputing security concerns for the PM if he takes the road route especially when agitations are planned. The problem is with the radio silence by the BJP leadership even when it knows Tamil Nadu is agitated over the manner in which the Centre is seeking not to implement the Supreme Court verdict on Cauvery.

Despite being a fantastic communicator, Modi has made no effort to explain to Tamil Nadu why his government is dragging its feet. He has not even granted an audience to an all-party delegation from Tamil Nadu to represent its cause. That sent the message that Modi did not care. The BJP has left it to the AIADMK government to face the heat, with protests erupting over IPL matches in Chennai.

To make matters worse, its Tamil Nadu leaders like H Raja point out that the state will get Cauvery water only if the BJP comes to power in Karnataka. That confirms that the BJP accords lesser priority to a Tamizhan's thirst when compared to its electoral prospects in Karnataka.

In the RK Nagar by-elections in December, the BJP polled lesser votes than NOTA. If the current mood in Tamil Nadu is anything to go by, there is a serious danger of a repeat in 2019.

(Author is a senior journalist. Views are personal)Lucknow (UP): BJP president Amit Shah visited Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday to take stock of the preparations for the upcoming legislative council polls in the state and meet the party's 'sulking' alliance partners.

The BJP national president, who took a day's off from the Karnataka assembly campaign, is understood to have taken a look at the names of probable party candidates for the legislative council polls.

The elections to the 13 seats will be held on April 26 with the ruling BJP being certain of winning at least 11 seats, going by its brute majority in the state legislative assembly.

Shah began his tour by garlanding the statue of Jyotibha Phule. "With party MPs Savitribai Phoole, Ashok Dohrey, Chhotelal, Yashwant Singh virtually raising a banner of revolt against Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Shah had a long discussion with the chief minister at the latter's 5 Kalidas Marg residence to assuage their hurt sentiments. The parliamentarians had written about their discontent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi," a senior party leader said.

UP deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma, and state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey were also present during the discussion, he said.

The party leader said the Lok Sabha bypoll debacle of Gorakhpur and Phulpur also figured in the meeting.

The outburst of the four parliamentarians and another BJP MP Udit Raj came at a time when the country witnessed a public outcry against the Supreme Court's order on the SC/ST Act, which the Dalit leaders said was an attempt to "dilute" the law.

After facing strident criticism from the Opposition on Dalit issues, the BJP is also grappling with a rising voice of discontent among its own MPs belonging to the Scheduled Castes in Uttar Pradesh.

Lok Sabha members from Etawah and Nagina, Ashok Kumar Dohrey and Yashwant Singh respectively, are the latest to join their Dalit colleagues from the party to criticise the UP government.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Dohrey had alleged that the Dalits and tribals across the country, especially in Uttar Pradesh, were being framed by the police in false cases after the protests, leading to growing insecurity among them.

Yashwant Singh, meanwhile, had reportedly said that nothing had been done for Dalits in the last four years.

Party insiders also said that the BJP's sulking ally, SBSP leader O P Rajbhar, who is also a cabinet minister, presented his case before Shah.

Rajbhar told PTI, "I raised the issue of quota within quota for the most backward classes. Apart from this, discrepancies pertaining to ration cards, housing, toilets, pensions and scholarship were also discussed.

Rajbhar-led Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) has four MLAs in the state assembly. He had threatened to boycott last month's Rajya Sabha biennial election.

Apna Dal (Sonelal) leader Ashish Patel also met the BJP president.

"The meeting with the BJP chief was held in a very cordial atmosphere. We spoke for adequate representation of Dalits and backward classes at police stations and Tehsil offices, and we were told that our demands will be looked into," he said.Khandwa: As the anger and outrage over the brutal gangrape of an 8-year-old in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua boils over, a BJP leader has introduced a bizarre theory to shift the blame for the communalisation of the case.

Nandkumar Singh Chauhan, BJPs Madhya Pradesh chief, said that he believes that Pakistan has engineered the whole incident.

If the Jai Shri Ram slogans are raised over the rape of nations eight-year-old daughter in Kashmir, then Pak agents would have done something so that they created rift among us, said Chauhan on the sidelines of a BJP fast organised in his home district of Khandwa.

The BJP MP chief went on to claim that Hindus comprised only 1 per cent population in Kashmir and they cant even speak, so there was no question of them raising slogans to demand release for the accused.

If state like Kashmir is witnessing something like this, then there could be involvement of Pak agents, he said.

The eight-year-old girl was kidnapped and held captive from a village in Jammu's Kathua district on January 10. She was starved, sedated and repeatedly raped inside a devisthan before being murdered and dumped in a nearby forest.

The chilling details of the crime were revealed in the chargesheet filed on Monday. It has evoked nationwide horror. Eight men have been arrested for the crime.

The gang-rape and murder of the 8-year-old wasn't a regular crime, police said. It was a rape inflicted with purpose - to fulfil an agenda, to instil fear and drive away a few nomad families from their lands. Rape, here was deliberate and used as a weapon.

The eight men in police custody have been supported by two BJP MLAs part of Mehbooba Muftis cabinet. Chaudhary Lal Singh, minister for forest, and Chander Prakash Ganga, minister for commerce and industries, attended an event organised by Hindu Ekta Manch, an outfit that has been protesting against the arrests in the case.

Congress MP chief Arun Yadav said that Chauhans bizarre remarks were an attempt to shield BJPs failures.Chennai: Protests against the Centre over the Cauvery dispute have intensified over the last two weeks and on Thursday, all Opposition parties in Tamil Nadu staged protests in different parts of Chennai showing black flags and releasing black balloons in the air during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Chennai.

Demonstrations were held near the airport, where a section of the protesters climbed on top of a billiboard and waved black flags. Protesters raised the #GoBackModi slogan both on social media and during street protests. DMK Working President MK Stalin tweeted and asked the Prime Minister to look down and see black flags and the anger of the people. He added that if the petition is not withdrawn, the anger of the people of Tamil Nadu will not die down.

Meanwhile, DMK leaders staged protests by hoisting black flags at their residences and at the DMK Headquarters in Chennai. DMK Supremo Karunanidhi wore a black shirt to show his displeasure at PM Modi's visit while DMK cadre in Coimbaore district sent messages to Modi through pigeons. They used the carrier birds, they said, because Modi had used a chopper during his visit. The pigeons carried the message Constitute Cauvery Management Board.

Black flag was hoisted atop DMK headquarters ahead of PM Modi's visit.

Manu Sundaram, DMK Spokesperson, said, "The intensity of opposition protests is evident from the sea of black flags on the streets and nationally trending #GoBackModi on social media. Nehru and Indira Gandhi - Modi's illustrious predecessors - had also borne the brunt of Tamil anger for misreading Tamil Nadu and for their roles in Hindi imposition and Emergency, respectively. But, it would be an understatement to say that no Prime Minister has been this despised by the state. BJP will pay a heavy price in the upcoming election for its mishandling of Cauvery and for the continued trampling of rights of Tamils.

Actor turned politician Kamal Haasan sent a video message to the Prime Minister, in which he said the Karnataka elections should not be the reason for the delay in setting up Cauvery Management Board. "People of Tamil Nadu are fighting for justice. Justice has been given but it is not being executed. People have started to believe that this delay is due to Karnataka elections, which is dangerous and embarrassing. I hope you will change this. You have to constitute Cauvery Water Management Board for the betterment of Tamil and Kannadiga people. Thats your duty. To remind you is my duty. Whatever I havent said through this video, I shall include in a letter that Im writing to you. Please act and pave way for change, he said in his video message.

While the Opposition has joined hands to protest Modi's Chennai visit, the AIADMK State Government has not opposed the visit or criticized the Centre over the delay in the setting-up of the BoardVoters pose outside a polling booth in Karnataka.



People were seen standing in queues to cast their votes in the early hours itself, factoring in that the temperature may go up later in the day. Also, it has been raining in different parts of south interior Karnataka for the last couple of days during the evening hours.



Senior citizens were seen in good numbers standing in queues at various polling stations to cast their votes early.



State BJP chief and party's chief ministerial candidate B S Yeddyurappa, and Pradesh Congress Committee G Parameshwara were among the first to cast votes in Shikaripura in Shivamogga and Yaggere in Tumakuru respectively.



Former prime minister HD Deve Gowda along with wife Chennamma cast their votes at Paduvalahippe in Hassan district. Film actors Ramesh Arvind, Ravichandran, also scion of Mysuru royal family Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar were among the prominent personalities to cast their votes early today.



There are reports about delay in polling due to some technical issues with the electronic voting machines (EVMs) from different parts of the state.



Election for the Jayanagara seat in Bengaluru has been countermanded following the death of BJP candidate and sitting MLA BN Vijaykumar.



The Election Commission has also deferred the polls for Rajarajeswari Nagar constituency to May 28 after a massive row erupted over a large number of voter ID cards being found in an apartment.



Suspecting something fishy, both Congress and BJP have pointed accusing fingers at each other in the matter. "Today people of Karnataka are standing in queues to create history & show the nation the way to liberal, progressive, peaceful & compassionate politics & governance. I thank them for their support & wish them well," Chief Minister Siddaramaiah tweeted.



Over 2,600 candidates are in the fray-- more than 2400 men and and over 200 women. The total voters including service electors according to the 2018 final rolls are 5,06,90,538, of whom 2,56,75,579 male voters, 2,50,09,904 female and 5,055 transgender voters.



Officials said 58,008 polling stations have been set up across the state, of which 12002 have been designated as "critical", with over 3,50,000 polling personnel on duty. Police have made elaborate security arrangements for the smooth conduct of polls that will go on till 6 pm.



"82,157 people have been deployed for poll duty that includes DSPs, home guards and civil defence, and forest guards and watchers," Karnataka DGP Neelamani N Raju said. This also includes about 7,500 personnel from states like Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra, Chattisgarh, Kerala and Goa, she said, adding, central forces have been deployed.



One among the interesting aspects of this election is that four candidates who have served as Chief Minister of Karnataka are in the fray-- Chief Minister Siddaramaiah (Chamundeshwari and Badami), B S Yeddyurappa (Shikaripura), H D Kumaraswamy (Chennapatna and Ramanagara) and Jagadish Shettar (Hubli-Dharwad Central.)As the Battle for Karnataka draws nearer, one of the BJP's key strategists Muralidhar Rao, the Karnataka in-charge for the party, speaks to CNN-News18's Deepa Balakrishnan on a range of issues, including the involvement of mining barons Reddy brothers in the campaign to ticket distribution to tainted candidates. Edited excerpts:

What value does Janardhana Reddy hold in the party? You said there is no ticket for Reddy, but he seems to have backdoor access to top leaders. He is actively campaigning for the party in many places.

BJP is supported by many people. Its not that every leader knows who is supporting us and who is not. This is an important thing we have to understand. We cannot equate Somashekara Reddy, who is sitting MLA of BJP, with the other Reddy. Somashekara is a sitting MLA and we have given him a ticket. Similarly, Karunakara Reddy is the part of our executive. So I don't want to equate all these cases and bundle them together. They will be working for the victory of BJP.

Why are you allowing Janardhana Reddy to campaign?

Who can stop him from campaigning? Campaigning is very wide and it is not a restricted thing. There are a lot of people who are working for the partys victory. I am not saying that he is a nameless person, but I cannot control every person whos campaigning for BJP.

You have said that your campaign is against the Congress corruption, but your own CM candidate B S Yeddyurappa is facing an investigation by the Income Tax department.

All these are just allegations. We havent received any notice from the court. He is cleared of all charges. The people and the party see him as a leader of the entire state of Karnataka. He is more popular than any other individual leader in the state.

In your list of candidates, there are many tainted individuals like Y Sampangi, B S Yeddyurappa, Katta Subramanya Naidu and Krishnaiah Setty. Doesnt that undermine your campaign?

We have gone into details of each case before releasing the candidate list. All these issues are outdated. BJP will stand by all the candidates.

Its only a few weeks before voting takes place in Karnataka. Whats the response you are getting from the ground?

We are expecting 150+ seats. Our confidence is increasing day by day. In a way Rahul Gandhi and Siddaramaiah are helping our efforts. Congress is not united and it is not working at the grassroots.

One of the campaign issues raised by the Congress is that of the minority status for Lingayats. Why isnt BJP making its stand on the issue clear?

We dont have to react. Here the people have realised that Congress has granted separate religion status to Lingayats because they are not confident of winning the election. We dont want to make this an election issue because this is not something that a single party can decide. This is an issue where we have to involve various cultural, spiritual and religious leaders. We also have to involve non-political and social leadership.

But people are curious to know where BJP stands on this crucial issue.

BJP hasnt taken a position. We have differed with the procedure followed by the Siddaramaiah government. We have declared everything transparently. BJP President Amit Shah has said that the issue will be discussed after the elections, when the new government takes office. We will relook the whole proposal. State Cabinet approved it and by the time it reached the Central government the elections were declared. We have to understand that code of conduct is into place. Now even the Congress government is not eager as it has realised that the whole issue is working against them.Pune: There were red faces in the BJP after two of its legislators were found snacking on sandwiches and chips as the party leaders and cadres led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi observed a day's fast across India on Thursday.

The development came three days after the Bharatiya Janata Party lampooned the Congress when some of its Delhi leaders were seen eating out at a restaurant prior to its fast on Monday.

Two BJP legislators -- Bhimrao Tapkir and Sanjay Bhegade alias Bala -- were filmed while 'breaking' their fast mid-way during an official meeting convened in the Pune Council Hall by Guardian Minister Girish Bapat.

A video clipping of the two chomping on sandwiches and chips went viral on the social media and was broadcast by television channels, even as embarrassed state BJP leaders kept mum.

In a statement, Maharashtra Congress President Ashok Chavan said that the "drama of fasting will not work anymore" as the people are no longer interested in government's false promises.

"In Pune, the BJP leaders were seen enjoying snacks in the middle of the fast... elaborate arrangements were made for serving snacks before launching the 'fast' and after completing it. This 'fast' is just a farce," Chavan said dismissively during a media briefing.

"If somebody eats three hours before a fast, BJP finds it objectionable, but it is okay for them if they eat during the fast. The reason behind today's fasting programme is bogus, the sentiments are bogus and the fast itself is bogus," said state Congress Spokesperson Sachin Sawant.

Incidentally, it is not clear how the video clip of the BJP legislators enjoying the snack during the fast came into the public domain as the party had issued strict instructions against any publicity stunts on social media networks.

The call for a day-long fast by the BJP leaders led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was given to protest the washout of the second half of parliament's budget session.

The BJP alleged that the Congress did not allow parliament to function, initially on account of the bank scams. Thereafter, the YSR Congress and TDP created hurdles on the issue of special status for Andhra Pradesh and moved no-confidence motions against the government.New Delhi: Noorul Hasan, 58, believes Nitish Kumar isnt the same anymore. Hasan, who lives in Aurangabad and runs a garage with 15 shops on National Highway-2, says the Bihar Chief Minister no longer talks like the man he voted for all these years.

On March 25, Hasans shops were gutted by a group of men who came brandishing weapons. He suffered a loss of over Rs 50 lakh.

Compensation alone wouldnt mean justice. This wasnt a one-off case. It happened in several districts of Bihar and there is a pattern to it, he says, demanding an NIA probe into the riots that engulfed a third of the state for a fortnight after Ram Navami processions. Its all linked to 2019 elections, he adds.

The communal faultlines are on the surface and serious questions are being raised over the ability of the Chief Minister to contain riots.

Nitishs USP of being a sushasan babu (able administrator) is being doubted.

While many like Noorul Hasan didnt care much about who his ally was in the government in the past, it seems to matter now.

The biggest example of coalition pressures was the arrest of BJPs Arijit Shashwat, son of Union Minister Ashwini Choubey. Despite the FIR against him being lodged on March 17 for rioting and inciting violence in Bhagalpur, Shashwat mocked the state machinery and surrendered only a week later in Patna.

The arrest was made in full camera view, with Shashwat himself inviting TV channels to cover the midnight drama. He had converted his act of surrender into an opportunity to resurrect his political career after unsuccessfully contesting the 2015 Assembly polls from Bhagalpur as a BJP candidate.

Sources close to the Bihar CM say he had communicated his displeasure to his deputy, Sushil Kumar Modi, over the delay, but he appeared helpless as Shashwat mocked the law and order machinery.

So, who has tied Nitishs hands?

Sample this: In March, Nitish appointed Krishna Swaroop Diwedi, a 1984 batch IPS officer, as the new DGP of the state. Dwivedi was the SP of Bhagalpur in 1989 when communal riots claimed over 1,000 lives.

As the Opposition questioned the appointment of a tainted officer, allegedly on an order from Nagpur, Nitish rushed his Principal Secretary (Home) Amir Subhani to brief the media. Subhanis defence was it was on the basis of seniority.

He added that the judicial commission set up to probe the communal flare-up and the role played by Bhagalpur district administration had not found Diwedi guilty of dereliction of duty.

But one question he couldnt answer was how an officer, whom Nitish didnt find worthy of better postings for 13 years, suddenly was fit to head the police force.

Sources say on the list was also the name of Sunil Kumar, former DG police training, who had been moved as DGP (Building Construction Corporation) in August last year when Nitish had carried out a major reshuffle in bureaucracy and police by transferring 28 IAS and 42 IPS officers.

This was within a week of ending the Mahagathbandhan and starting fresh innings with the BJP.

Sunil Kumar was not considered for the top job because of his association with RJD chief Lalu Yadav. Nitish didnt want to leave any scope for Lalu to have control over his administration, especially after they had parted ways, a source told News18.

Political observers also point out how the demand for special status has played out in Bihar and in Andhra Pradesh to demonstrate that Nitish is left with few choices.

While Chandrababu Naidu walked out of the NDA over special status, Nitish has put the demand, one championed by him, on the backburner.

A day after TDP chose to exit the NDA, JD(U) leaders said that the demand for special status was very much active as it was a unanimous demand of the Bihar Assembly. But the question is  did Nitish actually negotiate a special category status as a condition for his return into the NDA fold?

According to highly placed sources, at that time the reason for his ghar wapsi was purely to get rid of Lalu Yadav. On July 27, 2017, when he unabashedly moved from Mahagathbandhan to NDA, Nitish cried betrayal, but forgot that the people of the state could do the same.

He didnt respect the mandate. Our vote was for Lalu-Nitish jodi, says Puppo Khan, a resident of Aurangabad. Khans shop was saved by his landlord from being burnt down in the clashes. He says that for 18 years he has been running a shop and vouches for communal harmony in his city.

Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb ki misal tha Aurangabad. Yeh high level par hua hai (Aurangabad was an example of communal harmony. People from the high level flared up the situation), says Khan.

Who was Puppo Khan referring to as high level? While he doesnt name them, many in Bihar talk about an administration that stood as a mute spectator as shops owned by minority community were looted and burnt down.

Those who have felt safe in Bihar all these years today question Nitishs laxity.

After all, he is also the Home Minister of the state. This is an administration failure, says Tridevi, a lawyer at the local civil court. What happened on March 25 and 26 was unprecedented. We had not seen such a scene. Today, I am scared of going to a Muslim locality.

The society is beginning to split. The communities are moving away from each other. It would be unfair to say that the chief minister failed. While he didnt operate the way he usually does, he managed to contain the violence, says a senior police.

Nitish may have monitored the unfolding of the situation for hours but he couldnt figure out how thousands of swords suddenly became part of the Ram Navami celebrations.

The administration didnt foresee the scale of celebrations this year, says Sushil Singh, MP from Aurangabad.

Singh is facing the charge of leading the Ram Navami processions and defends the Bihar CM. How has he failed? How has his administration failed? There was no casualty. It shows that everything was handled in time, Singh says.

But the uneasy equation between Nitish and BJP is being discussed in the corridors of power. It was Nitish who returned to us, so the rules of engagement will be decided by us. We respect him, but he has to understand us too, says a state BJP leader.

Meanwhile, JD(U) leaders claim that Sushil Modi, who has a great equation with the CM, is running his administration without much interference from the BJP.

In the last 10 months, Nitish has faced question on two occasions  one when Manoj Baitha, a BJP leader, mowed down nine children in Muzaffarpur and went absconding; and second, when the administration failed to arrest Arijit Shashwat right after the rioting incident.

Sushasan Babu finds himself in a labyrinth today. And he is running out of time and tactics.

He has to do something soon, else history will remember him as yet another politician who succumbed under the pressure.Last a month a teenager died in Kheriakani district of Odisha after an old Nokia 5233 phone exploded while she was on a call with a relative. According to news reports, the teenager named Uma Oram had plugged in the Nokia 5233 phone for charging while she was talking. HMD Global, the new caretaker of the Nokia brand, was quick to issue an official statement and side-line itself from the incident as the mobile phone in question was not manufactured by them.

The tragic incident is a brutal reminder of the fact that mobile phone batteries are highly unpredictable and it is very dangerous to talk over the phone while charging it. Having said that, this is something almost every mobile phone user does.

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, HMD Global said in a press statement.

Surprisingly, the Nokia 5233 mobile phone is still sold by Nokia and is currently available on Amazon.in for a price of Rs 2,999. So, if the phone is still being sold under the Nokia brand, who is actually responsible for its customer support? The old Nokia branded phones were sold officially by Microsoft Mobile which also sold the Lumia series Windows OS phones. But Microsoft had later sold the Nokia brand to HMD Global and Foxconn.

Also read: Apple iOS 11.3 Update is Turning iPhone 8 With Third-Party Screens Useless

According to the official statement in May 2016, Nokia Technologies had granted HMD Global Oy (HMD), based in Finland, the exclusive global licence to create Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets for the next 10 years. Under the pact, Nokia Technologies will receive royalty payments from HMD for sales of Nokia-branded mobile products, covering both the brand and the intellectual property rights. After HMD Global took over the brand Nokia, the first phones it had launched were Nokia 150 and Nokia 150 Dual SIM on December 13, 2016.

For the laymen, this means that any Nokia phone launched after May 2016 makes HMD Global responsible for the customer support. With Microsoft Mobile out of the equation, who is responsible for the customer support of older Nokia phones? Also, why are old Nokia phone still being sold in the market?

A quick search on both Amazon.in and Flipkart will reveal that not just the Nokia 5233, all popular old Nokia feature phones are being sold. In fact, there is a 'Nokia' keyword page on Amazon.in that are selling old as well as new Nokia phones (manufactured by HMD Global) making it difficult for buyers to choose what to buy and what not to buy. And if old Nokia phones are easily available on popular e-commerce websites, just imagine the situation in retail shops in rural areas.

Despite the Android rush in India, feature phones continue to be in demand. Nokia had a created a niche for itself in the feature phone market in the early days and consumers still continue to praise the good old Nokia days in India. Now this influences the purchase decision of consumers who are not much aware of the current happenings in the mobile industry.

Another concern in buying old Nokia feature phones is that these devices can either be from the old stocks or could be duplicates. While consumer would still want to buy an old Nokia 6600 phone, there is no guarantee that if its the original phone or not. And, of course, the Nokia branding is put for the namesake.

Also read: Facebook's Zuckerberg Unscathed by Congressional Grilling, Stock Rises

So, here is the list of feature phones from Nokia now sold by HMD Global that are a good buy. HMD Global is responsible for the sale and customer support of the same. Any other Nokia feature phone apart from the ones mentioned in the list has no guarantee from HMD Global. Consumers are advised not to buy any other old Nokia feature phone.

Nokia 130, Nokia 130 Dual SIM, Nokia 130 Classic, Nokia 216, Nokia 216 Dual SIM, Nokia 222, Nokia 222 Dual SIM, Nokia 230, Nokia 230 Dual SIM, Nokia 105, Nokia 105 Classic, Nokia 105 Dual SIM, Nokia 150, Nokia 150 Dual SIM, Nokia 3310, Nokia 3310 3G, Nokia 3310 Dual SIM, Nokia 8110 4G

Also note that all Nokia smartphones made by HMD Global run Android operating system. There are officially no smartphones from Nokia that run on Windows operating system. Consumers are advised not to buy old Nokia Lumia smartphones running Windows OS. Nokia Android smartphones made by HMD Global are: Nokia 1, Nokia 2, Nokia 3, Nokia 5, Nokia 6, Nokia (2018), Nokia 7 Plus, Nokia 8 and Nokia 8 Sirocco.

A quick search on Amazon.in will reveal these old Nokia phones: Nokia E63, Nokia 6600, Nokia E71, Nokia 1600, Nokia Asha 311, Nokia E5, Nokia E72, Nokia C5, Nokia 5233, Nokia Asha 501 and others. In fact, you can search and buy any old Nokia phone. It is advisable that consumers avoid buying them.

WATCH VIDEO: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Gives Testimony Before Congress - HighlightsGermany's Bayer plans to sell its digital farming business to BASF as part of changes to concessions it has offered to win over antitrust regulators for its proposed takeover of Monsanto.

Bayer, which had previously only agreed to grant a licence to competitors, said on Wednesday that as part of the changes agreed with the European Commission it would retain a licence to certain digital farming applications.

Digital farming, which combines sensors, software and precision machines, is still in its infancy but all the large players in the seeds and pesticides industry are developing digital offerings.

Also read: After Nokia 5233 Tragedy, Heres a List of Old Nokia Feature Phones You Shouldnt Buy

The changes stem from an agreement in principle with the U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) over an antitrust approval, with only a few remaining details to be hammered out, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The Wall Street Journal reported late on Monday that an outline deal with the DoJ had been reached.

Bayer, which has already secured conditional European approval, declined to comment on Wednesday which regulator had prompted it to make the changes.

It added that BASF was the intended purchaser of all the assets it was selling.

In a separate statement, the European Commission said it had approved Bayer' modifications to the commitments it made to get approval for the Monsanto purchase.

Also read: Apple iOS 11.3 Update is Turning iPhone 8 With Third-Party Screens Useless

The competition watchdog said it was still assessing whether BASF was a suitable buyer for the units under an April 30 deadline.

The head of Bayer's Crop Science unit, Liam Condon, told Reuters in September that Bayer's approach in digital farming had been to control plant pests while Monsanto's focus in digital farming was on improving yields.

The changes to the antitrust remedies were made "in response to corresponding indications from regulators", Bayer said in a statement on Wednesday.

In addition, certain Bayer seed treatment products will be offered for sale instead of Monsanto's NemaStrike seed treatment brand.

The changes do not affect Monsanto's digital farming offering, which Bayer will keep after the deal.

Also read: Walmart Likely to Close Deal With Flipkart by June End: Report

Bayer reiterated on Wednesday that it would seek to wrap up the deal in the second quarter.

The German company has already pledged to sell certain seed and herbicide assets for 5.9 billion euros ($7.2 billion) to BASF, as well as its vegetable seeds business.Tesla Inc is targeting November 2019 as the start of production for its Model Y sport utility vehicle, with production in China to begin two years later, two sources told Reuters this week, shedding some light on the electric vehicle maker's next project that could tax its resources and capacity.

Reuters has learned the Silicon Valley company led by Chief Executive Elon Musk is accepting preliminary bids for supplier contracts on the Model Y, a compact crossover companion to the Model 3 sedan. Tesla has given suppliers scant details about the programme and had not provided a production time frame, but has now indicated the vehicle would begin to be built at its Fremont, California, plant in November of next year, the two sources with knowledge of the supply chain said.

Tesla declined to comment.

Also read: After Nokia 5233 Tragedy, Heres a List of Old Nokia Feature Phones You Shouldnt Buy

The new Model Y details show that Tesla is pushing ahead on plans to build a new vehicle even as it struggles to produce the Model 3, which launched in July. Despite initially attracting about 500,000 advance orders in the form of refundable deposits, the sedan's launch has been plagued by delays and manufacturing bottlenecks, postponing Tesla's anticipated revenue stream and exacerbating a cash crunch for the money-losing company.

Earlier this month, Tesla tried to reassure investors, saying its weekly Model 3 output had doubled during the first quarter and that production rates would accelerate through the second quarter to 5,000 units per week, or about 250,000 vehicles per year.

Competitive bidding is a crucial early step in the complicated process of automotive manufacturing. After the automaker discloses its plans, suppliers compete based on factors including cost and technology.

Tesla issued to suppliers what is known as a "request for information," or RFI, which gives a directional view of what will be needed.

With a new car model, automakers normally choose parts suppliers two to two-and-a-half years before the start of production. At about one-and-a-half years away, a November 2019 start date for the Model Y would be considered "aggressive, but possible," said one of the sources. A shorter timeline is potentially feasible, the source said, as the Model Y will be built on the same platform as the Model 3.

Also read: Apple iOS 11.3 Update is Turning iPhone 8 With Third-Party Screens Useless

Tesla is known for its aggressive timelines and high risk-tolerance in order to get cars to market quicker. To save time and cost, Tesla made the risky bet to skip a pre-production testing phase for the Model 3 in order to advance straight to production tooling, which is harder to fix if problems arise, as Reuters first reported last year.

1 MILLION MODEL Ys?

The Model Y is just one of many projects in the pipeline for Tesla, which also launched a Tesla Semi and a new Roadster in recent months. It is spending to build out its Gigafactory battery factory in Nevada, where battery module assembly issues have contributed to Model 3 delays, and also expects to build a factory in China in the near future.

Tesla has said it will not need to raise additional funds this year. But Moody's cited the likelihood of a capital raise of more than $2 billion in its downgrade of the company last month, spurred by concerns about cash reserves and Tesla's ability to meet production targets. The company burned through $3.4 billion last year.

Without giving a time frame, Musk in February told analysts the company would aim for production capacity of 1 million Model Ys per year.

Also read: Facebook's Zuckerberg Unscathed by Congressional Grilling, Stock Rises

The two sources said suppliers could be estimating an annual production of 500,000 vehicles in the United States, with much lower volume in China, likely in the tens of thousands. Building 500,000 Model Ys per year would be the equivalent of what Musk has planned for total production in Fremont by the end of this year, although the company is nowhere near that volume.

Suppliers generally use automakers' production targets to formulate a good guess on how many vehicles will actually be built, based on the individual automaker's capability to execute and consumer demand. One of the sources said Tesla's RFI was light on details compared with other automakers, and did not provide volume estimates for the Model Y.

Musk said in February that capital investments related to the SUV would begin toward the end of 2018. Tesla has said its current factory in Fremont could produce 10,000 vehicles a week - what the company hopes it will build in the Model 3 alone some time in 2018 - without the need for a new building, although some in the industry believe there is not enough room at the plant to support that volume.

Any major Model Y programme would likely require a new facility, although low volume of the Model Y could be built on the existing Model 3 line, the sources said.

Also read: ISRO Launches IRNSS-1I Navigation SatelliteBlockchain technology is all the rage these days in the technology world. Just in case you have never heard of this before, Blockchain is what powers the crypto-currencies, like the Bitcoin. While Bitcoin has been a hotly debated topic around the globe, its widespread popularity has largely been because of its involvement with money. But in case you think that Bitcoin is in itself a revolutionary technology, you are wrong on many levels. Primarily because it is not Bitcoin that translates into a path-breaking technology but Blockchain. In essence, Bitcoin is a very small, but an important application of the Blockchain technology. Bitcoin IS NOT Blockchain.

So what is Blockchain? In very simple terms, blockchain is a distributed ledger or a distributed record that is used to keep a track of information transfer between points. Consider a monetary transaction between person A and person B. In the banking system prevalent today, it is the bank that keeps the transaction record between the two people. Now consider that an entire network of people has a record, containing all the transaction history amongst these two people (in an encrypted form of course). This shows the distributed element of the blockchain.

So how is it better? It is simple. If the bank has its records deleted tomorrow for any reason, there will be no record of the transactions between person A and B whatsoever. Now consider the same scenario in a distributed ledger. If the records from any one system are deleted for any reason, there is a whole network of people having the same records as a backup. So essentially, the transactions that took place between person A and B will never be lost.

That is not the only plus of a distributed ledger though. It also helps secure the records, more than a centralised system. As an example, consider that a banks system is hacked in a cyber-attack. The hackers have to target only one system and approve the transactions from there in order to move the money to their account. However, in a blockchain, a transaction cannot be initiated until the time more than 50 percent of systems in that distributed ledger approve it. So to steal money in this scenario, the hackers would have to target more than 50 percent of systems for the same.

Now, this is just an overview of how the Blockchain technology works and its advantages. Let us dive a little more into the depth of this technologys working. For this, let us first know how it all started.

Also read: After Nokia 5233 Tragedy, Heres a List of Old Nokia Feature Phones You Shouldnt Buy

A Brief History

Contrary to the popular belief, Blockchain technology was not invented by the creator of Bitcoin, a person or an entity identified as Satoshi Nakamoto. Instead, the first records of the technology have been traced back to 1991, in a paper published by Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, titled How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document. As the title of the document suggests, this involved a use of cryptographic elements to time-stamp digital documents in such a way that they could not be tampered with.

Following its invention, the technology was left largely unused, i.e. until the time Nakamoto came into the picture. Like a scene straight out of a Hollywood sci-fi flick, Satoshi Nakamoto, the entity unknown to this date, published his/ her White Paper explaining a new form of digital currency to the world, called Bitcoin. The Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System used the Blockchain technology in its first conceptual appearance. Little was known at the time that the currency would spread like wild-fire in the following years and grow from being exchanged for a couple of pizzas for one unit to having a value of around Rs 4.5 Lakh for the same at the time of writing.

Along with the Bitcoin, spread the notion of Blockchain and the world started to realize its potential uses in areas other than digital currencies.

Elements of a Blockchain

Now we already know that a Blockchain is a distributed ledger. But what exactly are the elements that constitute a Blockchain? In essence, it is a chain of blocks that works here. So let us have a look at what each of the block includes.

Inside a Block: On a very basic level, every block in a Blockchain comprises of three core elements:

1. Data inside the block

2. Hash or the unique identity of the block.

3. Hash of the previous block.

The Data inside each block depends on the purpose for which the technology is being used. For instance, in a Bitcoin blockchain, the blocks contain the senders ID, the receivers ID as well as the amount of Bitcoins being transferred.

The Hash' of a block can be considered as its digital signature. Each block in a blockchain contains a unique hash and can be compared to a fingerprint. If a hash of a block is changed, the block no-longer remains its original self.

The hash of the previous block is what forms the chain between these blocks. It acts as a valid proof of concept for the further blocks to act upon and is the primary security measure of a Blockchain against tampering.

Image: White Paper

Also read: Facebook's Zuckerberg Unscathed by Congressional Grilling, Stock Rises

How is it Secure?

Now that we know what is inside a block, let us have a look at how the blocks function in a chain.

As we know by now, the blocks are linked in a chain. This is done by each of the block building on the hash of the previous block. Now if in case the hash of any block is changed in a Blockchain, the consecutive blocks no longer recognise it as a valid element. This in-turn renders the entire chain useless, thus not validating any sort of tampering with any block. This is one security measure that the Blockchain provides. In case any tampering has to be made valid, the disturber will have to rework the hashes of the entire following blockchain.

In addition to this, Blockchains use a Proof of Work concept to increase the security. A Proof of Work can be equated to the processing time taken by a computer. This essentially slows down the creation of a new block in a Blockchain. In a Bitcoin Blockchain, for instance, it takes around 10 minutes to create a new block. So to alter an entire Blockchain, one will have to spend ten minutes on each block of a Blockchain, making the process nearly impossible.

These measures, however, do not guarantee that the value of a block cannot be changed. So there is one final security measure that Blockchains use. As discussed before, Blockchains use a distributed ledger, also known as a Peer-to-Peer network. This means that even if one manages to alter one particular copy of a Blockchain by adding a defected block, the altered block will still not be accepted into the system. This is simply because the altered block will not match with the copies that others have in a system and hence will be discarded. In order for a block to be accepted into the system, it has to pass a Consensus, meaning, it has to be validated by more than 50 percent of the network. This makes the alteration of any Blockchain almost impossible.

Image: Reuters

Also read: Does Facebook Track Your Activities Even After You Log Out? Zuckerberg Doesn't Know

Uses of Blockchain

Though the Blockchain technology was developed to create a digital time-stamp and its use was further propagated as a technology for crypto-currencies, Blockchain has immense potential in the world of technology. As of today, Blockchain is considered as the next big step in the field of Banking, Healthcare, Production, Transport and also to maintain Government records, land records and many more of such uses.

As an example, Saudi Arabia recently tied up with Ripple to use Blockchain technology in its Central Bank. Even the Indian Government has announced that the IIT Degrees will be handed out through Blockchain technology in the year 2019. The examples are numerours, the untouched potential is huge. One thing is clear though, Blockchain can be the key to revolutionise the working in any of the industry known to humankind. Bitcoin provided us with a live and biggest example of this.

Watch: Tech and Auto Show | EP35 | Mercedes-Benz S-Class, Samsung Galaxy S9+ & MoreDhaka: Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday said she has decided to scrap the quota system in government services after thousands of students marched across the country in protest against a controversial policy of setting aside jobs for special groups.

In Dhaka, mobs of students blockaded major roads, bringing traffic to a standstill. Police were deployed to the Dhaka University where clashes in recent days left more than 100 students injured by tear gas and rubber bullets.

Prime Minister Hasina has suggested abolishing the quota system for government jobs altogether.

"The quota system will be abolished as the students do not want it," she said in a statement in parliament.

An apparently annoyed premier added that, "they have demonstrated enough protests, now let them return home".

She said classes and examinations were suspended at all universities while the protests exposed ordinary people to worst sufferings which "they don't deserve".

The premier, however, said the government could make special arrangements for jobs for the people with disabilities and the backward ethnic minority ones.

The students began the protests on Sunday against discriminatory quotas for government jobs, leaving scores of people injured at the Dhaka University.

A group of protestors broke into the vice-chancellor's campus residence, forcing his panicked family to go into hiding.

The premier, however, said those who attacked the vice-chancellor's house were not "eligible to be students" and promised to punish the guilty.

Media reports suggested the protests saw several government websites including those of the Bangabhaban presidential palace and the premier's office temporarily hacked.

The pages were replaced with a page that showed messages related to the quota reform along with a picture of the ongoing protest.

The protectors grew in numbers today with chanting mobs of students' blocking major roads turning buses and private cars to a standstill throughout the day in Dhaka while police in riot gears kept a vigil from distance.

Thousands of people were seen walking down miles, leaving the buses and cars in the capital.

The students in the southeastern port city of Chittagong blocked a railway track while they also caused disruptions in the major cities of Khulna, Barisal, Kushtia, Comilla and Mymensingh demanding the share of top government positions set aside for minority groups and the disabled be reduced significantly.

According to police, more than 5,000 protesters rallied at the Dhaka University campus alone while the private universities joined the public ones across the country to mount pressure on the government to abolish the system, meant for freedom fighters decedents, ethnic minority groups and women.

But the protests also drew a number of girl students demanding they be made eligible to compete for the public services on merit basis.

"They (girls) said that they will get job through (appearing) examinations . . . it's a good word and I'm very happy . . . as they don't want quota, what is the necessity of it, Hasina said.

The protests continued despite earlier government pledges to review the quota system as a section of students rejected the proposal demanding an instant government announcement.Beijing: China on Thursday announced live-firing military exercises in the Taiwan Strait amid heightened tensions over increased American support for Taiwan's government.

The announcement by the maritime safety authority in the coastal province of Fujian coincided with a statement from their counterparts in Hainan province that the navy was ending a three-day exercise in the South China Sea one day early.

No explanations were given in either case and the Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to questions. The Fujian authorities said the one-day Taiwan Strait drill will be held next Wednesday.

While Beijing responded mildly to US President Donald Trump's early outreach to Taiwan's independence-leaning government, recent developments have prompted a tougher response. China claims Taiwan, which separated from the mainland during the Chinese civil war in 1949, as its own territory and says the sides must eventually be united, by force if necessary.

Despite the lack of formal ties, Washington is legally bound to respond to threats to Taiwan and is the island's main supplier of imported military hardware.

Chinese officials have denounced the recent passage of a US law encouraging more high-level contacts with Taiwan. China says the Taiwan Travel Act violates US commitments not to restore formal exchanges severed when Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.

An agreement to pass Taiwan submarine manufacturing technology and the appointment of hawkish National Security Adviser John Bolton have also hardened views among anti-American nationalists in China.

Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office on Wednesday warned against additional moves to strengthen relations with Taiwan.

"Any attempt to play the 'Taiwan card' would only be futile," spokesman Ma Xiaoguang said. China, Ma said, would "not hesitate to protect our core interests."

That came after President Xi Jinping last month delivered a strongly nationalistic speech in which he vowed to protect "every inch" of China's territory. China has also stepped-up air force missions in airspace around Taiwan and has repeatedly sailed its sole operating aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, through the 160 kilometer-wide Taiwan Strait.

The just-completed naval drills off Hainan underscored China's growing capabilities in defending its maritime interests and territorial claims, particularly in the disputed South China Sea.Paris: In laying his integrity on the line over Syria's suspected use of chemical weapons, French President Emmanuel Macron might be playing for even higher stakes  maintaining the landmark Iran nuclear accord, analysts say.

The 40-year-old leader, weighing the first foreign military operation on his own initiative, has made clear he considers Damascus behind a suspected chemical attack in the rebel-held Syrian town of Douma last weekend that killed at least 40 people.

Macron's response is expected to be high on the agenda during a TV interview this afternoon, only his third since the centrist swept to power last year.

For many experts, he has no choice but to enforce his "red line" on the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime, which would prompt French military strikes.

"Unlike previous incidents, alleged or real, in recent months, what happened Saturday in Douma is a huge and evident violation of Western red lines," said Bruno Tertrais, a political scientist at the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS).

"If France doesn't react now that the conditions are met, we would lose all credibility," he said.

The country, victim of the first extensive use of chemical weapons in military history during World War I, has long made combatting chemical weapons a priority.

It worries that allowing such attacks by Syria's President Bashar al-Assad could set a dangerous precedent for other repressive regimes.

Many French officials still bristle over former US president Barack Obama's last-minute pullback on Syria strikes after a chemical attack in 2013.The decision shocked the French, whose planes were poised for launch to participate in the operation.

"Emmanuel Macron has tied his hands," said Francois Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "He's in the same position as Obama in 2013, and if he decides not to follow through, there will be a political price to pay."

Macron has spoken at length with US President Donald Trump about how to react to the Douma attack. Both men have played up their sound relations since Macron invited the American leader to attend France's Bastille Day festivities last July.

Macron has also taken advantage of weakened leadership in Britain and Germany to carve out a role as Trump's privileged partner in Europe. But he has been unable to sway the US leader on two crucial issues -- the US decision to exit the 2015 Paris agreement on curbing global warming, and Trump's threat to scupper the deal with Iran to curb its nuclear weapons programme.

Several analysts say ending the deal with Tehran and re-imposing American sanctions could inflame tensions across the Middle East, after years of tensions amid the fight against the Islamic State group.

As Macron prepares for a state visit to Washington later this month, "French military action could earn him some much-needed favour," Benjamin Haddad, a researcher at the Hudson Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine this week.

Decisive joint action could give him leverage in arguing to uphold the deal, which comes up next for Trump's review on May 12.

"At the betting table of international relations, the chances are still 20 to one" against saving the deal, Heisbourg said.

Against such odds, "a show of France-US unity on Syria surely can't do any harm" during Macron's Washington visit, he said.Washington: CIA Director Mike Pompeo on Thursday assured American lawmakers that if confirmed as the US Secretary of State, he would execute diligent and firm diplomacy.

Headed to be the top American diplomat in the next few week, as his nomination moves through the legislative process, Pompeo told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that couched in all of global challenges are opportunities. These are opportunities to promote security, stability, and human rights in key regions, he said. "I also believe we have opportunities for increasingly robust and fair trading relationships that benefit the American people," he said.

While India did not figure even once in his 13-page opening testimony during his confirmation hearing, Pompeo identified China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as the major challenges. In all of these cases, he aligned himself with the new tough policies of President Donald Trump. However, he said war is the last resort.

"Should I be confirmed as Secretary of State, I will execute diligent and firm diplomacy, working alongside the world's finest diplomatic service, to help our President confront the challenges and seize the opportunities of our time," Pompeo said. Noting that diplomatic efforts are underway to rid the world of a nuclear North Korea, he said there is no higher diplomatic task for the State Department team than solving this decades-in-the-making threat to the US.

"The stakes are high for everyone, but I believe them to be the highest for the North Korean regime. The State Department has successfully rallied the world to cut ties and impose sanctions that have had a profound impact," he said. "But there is much diplomatic work left to do, including supporting the President's intent to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. That meeting will take place against a backdrop of commitment by our President to achieve denuclearization and prevent America from being held at risk by a North Korean arsenal of nuclear weapons," Pompeo said.

"I have read the CIA histories of previous negotiations with the North Koreans, and am confident that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past. President Trump isn't one to play games at the negotiating table - and I won't be either," he said. Russia, he alleged, continues to act aggressively, enabled by years of soft policy toward that aggression. "That's now over. The list of this administration's actions to raise the cost for Vladimir Putin is long. We are rebuilding our already strong military and recapitalizing our nuclear deterrent," he said.

The Trump Administration has imposed tough sanctions and expelled more Russian diplomats and intelligence officers from the US than at any time since the Cold War. Pompeo said the actions of this administration make clear that President Trump's national security strategy, rightfully, has identified Russia as a danger to our country.

Iran, he alleged, has been on the march and has paid too low a price for its dangerous behavior. "Our administration has developed a strategy to counter Iran that will raise that cost. The issues surrounding Iran's proliferation threat are real and we, along with our allies, must deal with the long-term risk that its capability presents," he said.

"But we cannot let the nuclear file prevent us from acting against Iran's cyber efforts or its attempts to provide missiles to the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia and Americans who travel there. Iran's activities in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon threaten the very existence of Israel, and the global reach of Hezbollah threatens us right here in the homeland," he asserted.

Pompeo said even while America has reestablished a position of strength in its diplomatic relationship, China continues its concerted and coordinated effort to compete with the United States in diplomatic, military, and economic terms. "For years, through IP theft and coercive technology transfer, China has exploited weak US trade policy and leeched wealth and secrets from our economy. Militarily, it continues its provocation in the South and East China Seas, in cyberspace, and even in outer space. This administration is determined to work diplomatically with the Chinese government in an effort to develop a more productive bilateral partnership," he said.

"We have been pleased with China's support of our efforts to apply pressure on the North Korean regime, but it must do more. The State Department must be at the center of formulating and executing our China policy," he added.Beijing: The Chinese military on Thursday held its largest ever maritime drill in the disputed South China Sea during which it displayed for the first time the country's aircraft carrier strike group and the most advance weaponry of the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

President Xi Jinping, also the general secretary of the ruling Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), reviewed the drill and addressed the sailors, PLA Daily reported. CMC is the overall high command of the 2-million strong Chinese military.

Forty-eight warships, 76 aircraft and more than 10,000 sailors and soldiers took part in the drill which was hailed as "the biggest maritime military parade since the foundation of the new China and a heroic display of the PLA Navy in the new era," the PLA Daily reported on Thursday.

The drill was held amid frequent forays made by US naval and aircraft into the South China Sea to assert the freedom of navigation especially around the artificial islands built by China, where it has also established garrisons. China claims almost all of the South China Sea. Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have counterclaims over the area.

It was the first maritime military parade held in the South China Sea and to be open to the public, state-run Global Times reported. The PLA's previous four maritime parades were held in Beihai. China's aircraft carrier, Liaoning joined the parade for the first time.

All combat systems of the PLA Navy and 10 air echelons joined the parade. "The most advanced weaponry, including the Liaoning, type 052D destroyers, type 052C destroyers, type 071 amphibious transport dock and type 093 submarine all appeared on South China Sea," Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times.

The parade showcased the PLA's aircraft carrier group and its enhanced combat capability in the high seas, Song said, adding that China's upgraded navy signifies the PLA is not afraid of war and is capable of winning any battle.

"China's strength in protecting its national maritime interest has grown. The Thursday parade could also serve as deterrence to maritime hegemony, making adversaries think twice before attempting to harm China's core national interests," Song said. Holding the parade in the South China Sea was strategic move as the waters are a potential combat zone, said Li Jie, a Beijing-based naval expert.GamesRadar+ is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn moreScott Snyder's first three Comixology titles get a new trailer

Scott Snyder is launching three of his creator-owned Comixology titles in October, and now there's a trailer for the storiesWorking here at Entrepreneur, I get to interview all kinds of successful people who are either "killing it!" or "crushing it!" or "smushing it!" (Actually, scratch that, I don't think anyone has told me that they are smushing it.)

But the point is that they are doing quite well and generally speaking, credit their success to a non-stop desire to grind, tackle new challenges and keep, you know, doing stuff. I like to ask these relentless men and women, "Um, why?"

Meaning, how do you stay motivated to work until your eyes are bleeding after you've already found fame and, more importantly, a gigantic pile of money?

I've asked this question a number of times and have gotten a variety of replies, but recently I got the very best answer from James Bond himself, Daniel Craig, who I spoke with as he walked the red carpet at a gala for The Opportunity Network. Watch his response:

In case you missed it, he said, "Oh, Im just terribly not motivated. Id give up tomorrow if I could. If I didnt have to work again for the rest of my life Id be very happy about it. Im probably the wrong person to talk to Entrepreneur!"

No sir, you are exactly the right person to talk to Entrepreneur! I wanted to drop the mic, leap over the velvet rope and hug him, but figured it wasn't the best thing to do to a guy who became famous embodying a character who can kill an entire army with his pinky toe.

Related: 11 Habits of Truly Happy People

See, we always hear about people who live for the challenge of tackling the next big challenge. (My particular challenge at this moment appears to be thinking of another word for "challenge.") I'm going to be honest here for a minute and admit that I just don't relate. Who are these people who are actively looking for extra problems to cram into their lives? I have plenty of problems, thank you. Too many. I'm stuffed, actually! Any innovators out there need some crises to solve? Come to my house in the morning and figure out how to get my children out the door for school without me having to threaten their lives, and fix the clanking radiator while you're at it. And no, the ceiling isn't supposed to be dripping water.

I type these words as I watch Mark Zuckerberg voluntarily sitting before members of Congress answering questions ranging from high-tech data issues to "What is a 'facebook'?" and "Can you help me get my VCR to stop blinking 12:00?" Part of me admires him accepting the invitation to sit before this committee, but a bigger part of me wonders why he didn't just say, "Nah, I'm gonna take my $40 billion and go on vacation forever instead. Peace out, y'all!"

Related: 22 Qualities That Make a Great Leader

It's the same thing I think when I see a 150-pound dumbbell on the rack at the gym. You know what? If you can lift that, youre done. Youre done working out. Great job, now go to the beach and play some volleyball, champ. What more can you possibly want from your biceps?

I guess this is what separates me from great founders. Or maybe Im just extra cranky because it is the middle of April and it is still 30 degrees outside. Its probably mostly the latter, but I think we could all do well to remember James Bonds words and just chill when the opportunity arises. Except for you, Mother Nature, you need to stop chilling immediately.

Related:



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedLONDON, ON, April 12, 2018 /CNW/ - On Thursday, April 12th, six renowned medical pioneers will be recognized as the 2018 Canadian Medical Hall of Fame Inductees at a special ceremony, hosted in partnership with the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, including London's own Dr. Vladimir Hachinski, one of the world's leading neurologists who has changed survival odds for stroke sufferers everywhere.

Canadian Medical Hall of Fame (CMHF) Inductees are individuals whose contributions have led to extraordinary improvements in human health. Their work may be a single outstanding contribution or a career of notable achievements. As trailblazers in their respective fields, these experts underpin Canada's role as a world-class leader in medicine and health sciences. The 2018 CMHF Inductees are:

Dr. Philip B. Berger (Toronto, ON): At the forefront of many battles for humane health care, Dr. Berger is a 40-year veteran of medicine and a tireless advocate for all people. Notably, in 2012 Dr. Berger co-founded Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care, coordinating nationwide protests on cuts to refugee health, eventually leading to the restoration of health coverage to 100,000 refugees.

Dr. B. Brett Finlay (Vancouver, BC): A Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Finlay's research in cellular microbiology has led to vaccines and treatments for drug-resistant infections. He is also known as the co-author of the provocative bestseller, Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from An Oversanitized World, which presents scientific evidence about the dangers of excessive cleanliness.

Dr. Vladimir Hachinski (London, ON): He has transformed our understanding, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of the two greatest threats to the brain: stroke and dementia. Prior to the 1970s, stroke was untreatable. His eponymic Hachinski Ischemic Score (HIS) is now a standard for identifying the treatable components of dementia.

Dr. Balfour M. Mount (Montreal, QC): Credited with coining the term "palliative care," Dr. Mount recognized the need for special care to alleviate suffering and enhance dignity for dying patients. Dr. Mount is known for achieving the integration of palliative care as integral to humane health care. Future patients and their families will experience dignity and compassion facing some of their greatest challenges because of his vision.

Dr. Cheryl Rockman-Greenberg (Winnipeg, MB): Dr. Rockman-Greenberg has devoted her career to bringing advanced medical knowledge and care to isolated and often vulnerable Indigenous populations. Working closely with the communities themselves, she developed diagnostic tests, screening programs, and treatments for disorders once poorly understood, improving the lives of generations of children and their families.

The late Dr. Emily Stowe (Toronto, ON): As the first female physician to practice medicine in Canada, Dr. Stowe was eventually granted her license by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in the 1880s, after being denied entry into medical school in Canada. In 1883, she spearheaded the creation of the Woman's Medical College and later helped found the Toronto Women's Literary Guild, Canada's first suffragette group.



"The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame is proud to welcome these six individuals as honoured members," says Dr. Bryce Taylor, national chair of the CMHF. "Their passion and visionary leadership has improved health in this country, with global impact. Each of these exceptional people has earned their place alongside the current 125 Laureates of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame."

"The Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry is delighted to be a partner host for the 2018 Induction Ceremony in London, Ontario  the home of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame," says Dr. Michael Strong, Dean of Western University's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. "We are pleased to honour these exemplary health care leaders for their extraordinary contributions to medicine and health sciences around the globe."

ABOUT THE CANADIAN MEDICAL HALL OF FAME

The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame (CMHF) celebrates Canadian heroes whose work has advanced heath in Canada and the world and fosters future generations of health professionals through the delivery of local and national youth education programs, scholarships and awards. This enduring tribute to our country's rich medical history is showcased on our virtual hall at www.cdnmedhall.org and in an exhibit hall in downtown London, ON.

ABOUT WESTERN

Western University delivers an academic experience second to none. Since 1878, The Western Experience has combined academic excellence with life-long opportunities for intellectual, social and cultural growth in order to better serve our communities. Our research excellence expands knowledge and drives discovery with real-world application. Western attracts individuals with a broad worldview, seeking to study, influence and lead in the international community.

ABOUT THE SCHULICH SCHOOL OF MEDICINE & DENTISTRY

The Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University is one of Canada's preeminent medical and dental schools. Established in 1881, it was one of the founding schools of Western University and is known for being the birthplace of family medicine in Canada. For more than 130 years, the School has demonstrated a commitment to academic excellence and a passion for scientific discovery.

SOURCE Canadian Medical Hall of Fame

For further information: Katrina Fortner, Media Relations, Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, cell: 519.902.8209, [email protected]SenseTime (the Company), Chinas leading artificial intelligence (AI) company, has successfully raised US$600 million in its Series C round of funding. This gives the company a $4.5 billion valuation. Alibaba Group is taking the lead role for this round of funding and other participants include Temasek and Suning. As the Company set a record by raising US$410 million in its series B round of funding last July, it once again sets a new record for venture capital funding in the AI sector.

The capital injection will provide important impetus to the buildout of SenseTimes AI platform, advancing the companys technological innovation and opening up new business opportunities.

SenseTime is working on facial and object recognition technology that accurately can spot people using cameras, recently demonstrated on CCTV in Beijing.

Honda is using SenseTime for its driverless car research and development and it is also being used at shopping counters that allows customers to check-out using their faces.

Li Xu, SenseTime Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, said, SenseTime has established an AI ecosystem anchored with robust research, deep industry collaboration, and diverse partnerships. Our Round C funding will maximise these advantages by accelerating the development of a global footprint with a larger ecosystem incorporating both domestic and overseas partners. The funding will also help us widen the scope for more industrial application of AI, thus increasing the value of SenseTimes global ecosystem.

Joe Tsai, Executive Vice Chairman of Alibaba Group, said: SenseTime is doing pioneering work in artificial intelligence. We are especially impressed by their R&D capabilities in deep learning and visual computing. Our business at Alibaba is already seeing tangible benefits from our investments in AI and we are committed to further investment. Our strategic partnership with SenseTime will spark more innovation and create value for society.

Currently, SenseTimes high-performance deep learning supercomputing platform is one of Chinas largest, boasting over 8,000 GPUs. It is able to support building models with hundreds of billions of parameters, categorizing hundreds of millions of data and training billions of images. Thanks to its innovative technologies, the Company leads the industry in a range of fields such as facial and image recognition, autonomous driving, medical imaging and deep learning hardware optimization. As to date, it has become Chinas largest AI platform company and AI algorithms supplier.

In 2017, SenseTime announced a series of significant strategic partnerships in China and abroad. With Qualcomm, it initiated an algorithm + chip collaboration increasing the intelligence of smartphones and other devices. The Company partnered with Honda to provide industry-leading autonomous driving technologies. Working with Suning, the largest consumer electronics retailer in China, the Company has helped to develop the Store of Future, which leverages facial recognition for check-out free shopping as well as customer big data analysis. In February 2018, the prestigious Massachusets Institute of Technology announced that SenseTime was the first company to join its Intelligence Quest project and the two parties created an AI alliance to define the next frontier of human and machine intelligence. In March 2018, the Company formed strategic partnerships with several large Chinese state-owned enterprises based in Shanghai such as the INESA Group and Lingang Group. These developments followed from a strategic agreement that the Company signed with the municipal government of Shanghai in 2017. According to the agreement, SenseTime will leverage its AI technologies to help the city on multiple initiatives including smart city, smart traffic, autonomous driving, and smart finance.

SenseTime has established partnerships with more than 400 leading domestic and overseas enterprises across security, fintech, automobile, retail, smartphone, mobile Internet and robotics. By broadening the possibilities of data technology and its application across industries, the Company has the potential to provide a technological leap for a range of verticals and serve as their close partner in AI transformation.

In February 2018, MIT and SenseTime are working together to define the next frontier of human and machine intelligence. SenseTime was founded by MIT alumnus Xiaoou Tang PhD 96 and specializes in computer vision and deep learning technologies. The MIT-SenseTime Alliance on Artificial Intelligence aims to open up new avenues of discovery across MIT in areas such as computer vision, human-intelligence-inspired algorithms, medical imaging, and robotics; drive technological breakthroughs in AI that have the potential to confront some of the worlds greatest challenges; and empower MIT faculty and students to pursue interdisciplinary projects at the vanguard of intelligence research.

SenseTime is the first company to join a new Institute-wide initiative, the MIT Intelligence Quest, since its launch earlier this month. The MIT Intelligence Quest seeks to leverage the Institutes strengths in brain and cognitive science and computer science to advance research into human and machine intelligence in service to all humanity.Asian spending on armored vehicles (tanks and armored personnel carriers) during the next decade is likely to reach USD166 billion.

China, India, and South Korea are among the worlds top 10 spenders on military vehicles and are likely to contribute more than USD126 billion to the global market during the next decade.

China will go from $5.5 billion per year to about $8 billion per year. China makes its own tanks now.

China exports to regional militaries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand. Chinas position as a primary supplier to Southeast Asia is interesting, considering that it is Beijings geopolitical assertiveness that is driving much of the military modernization in the region. China supplies a lot of Pakistan.

India is buying about $2.5 billion per year now but should increase to $3.5 billion per year. Instead of the originally planned widespread adoption of the Arjun, it is likely that there will be an order for a further 700 license-built T-90S Bhishmas from the OFB in the second quarter of 2018. Concurrently India will also be inducting 494 T-90MS MBTs that it acquired in kit form from Russia for USD2 billion to supplement the Bhishma MBTs.

South Korea is spending about $2 billion per year but will increase to $2.5 billion per year. South Koreas plans to produce additional Hyundai Rotem K2 (Black Panther) MBTs have been delayed by three years due to technical issues with the platforms indigenously developed transmission system. The country is now considering importing the transmission from a foreign contractor.While it may seem to some workers that the current economic climate favors employers, a recent study done in collaboration with a national group made up of human resource professionals suggests otherwise.

A 2017 study done by the Society for Human Resource Management in collaboration with Globoforce, an international software company that provides human resource software, found that employee retention and recruitment remain the top challenges facing companies. Those findings beg the question: What exactly do workers look for when they go searching for a new place of employment?

For some recent college graduates, the answer may be something as simple as whether an employer provides a living wage. But for workers of all ages in high demand fields, the answer is a little more complex.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the U.S. job market reached a new milestone in July 2017 when there were 6.2 million job opportunities, the most the U.S. has seen since the BLS began tracking this type of data 17 years ago. And while the data was national and not Connecticut specific, executives in the states manufacturing sector regularly complain they cant find enough skilled workers to fill the jobs they have available.

A recent white paper released by Globoforce on bringing more humanity and social connection to the workplace found that employees increasingly are searching for meaning in their jobs and that frequent, values-based recognition is one of the best ways to meet that need.

While many employers want a satisfied workforce, some are reluctant to spend the money necessary to achieve that goal, according to Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor.com, a website where employees and former employees anonymously review companies and their management teams.

Is it really worth it for employers to invest in becoming an amazing place to work? Chamberlain said in a statement. Employees who are more satisfied  who feel like their job is rewarding, see an upward career path, and have great managers  clearly drive better financial performance for companies.

Hearst Connecticut Media wants to find out what your employer does to keep employees happy and motivated. Readers can nominate their employers for Hearst Connecticut Medias annual Top Workplaces Award.

The program is open to employers with 35 or more employees in Fairfield, New Haven and Litchfield counties, whether public, private, nonprofit or governmental. Recognition is given for small, midsize and large organizations.

Workplaces are evaluated by their employees using a short, 24-question survey.

Last year, 45 companies were honored as Energage, Hearst Connecticut Medias partner in the Top Workplaces program, reviewed nearly 10,000 survey responses.

Energage, formerly WorkplaceDynamics, last year surveyed 2.5 million employees at more than 6,000 organizations.

At our core, we are a research company, and we want companies to know what is going well in their organization and celebrate that, and what challenges there may be and how to address them, Bob Helbig, media partnerships director with Energage, said. The input from employees helps companies know what is going on with their organization.

Hearst Connecticut Media Top Workplace winners will be featured in the Connecticut Post, The News-Times of Danbury, Greenwich Time, The Stamford Advocate, The Norwalk Hour, New Haven Register and The Register Citizen of Torrington in September. Employers can be nominated online at http://topworkplaces.com/nominate/hearstct or by calling 203-617-0727.

luther.turmelle@hearstmedia

ct.comANSONIA Its not yet July but Paul Giansanti is ready to go to work.

"I'd like to start coming in on Saturdays and opening up the school for meetings with the community," Giansanti said. Id like to come in and be a shadow at least one day.

On Wednesday night Giansanti, a 34-year-old Oxford resident, who taught high school history in Bridgeport and Norwalk, was named the new principal of Ansonia High School beginning July 1. The position pays about $144,000.

"He's a home run for us," said Chris Phipps, a Board of Education member. "He brings intelligence, energy and has a desire to get out in the community. He is going to lead by example and you're going to see things get done here."

One of the first things Giansanti will have to do is some mending with the citys minority community. He is a first-generation Italian-American replacing a popular, black city native.

His predecessor, Terri Goldson, worked his way through the citys schools for 30 years before becoming Ansonia Highs principal at the start of the 2016-17 school year. In December Goldson was placed on indefinite administrative leave after evidence surfaced that his twitter account liked a 28-second pornographic video.

Nearly 60 area residents and colleagues pleaded with the Board of Education in January to return Goldson to his job.

That meeting took place just two weeks after the board authorized an independent investigation into Goldsons actions.

But all this came to an end in February when Goldson agreed to retire, accept a $75,000 payment and promise not to sue the school board.

Since then Sara Crooks, Goldsons assistant, has been serving at the interim, principal. She will return to her assistant principal position in July.

Im truly excited and humbled to be selected as the principal of Ansonia High School, Giansanti said. Ansonia has been on my radar because of the small town feel and the diversity of its students.

He admitted knowing there are challenges ahead.

Giansanti's parents, Marisa and Michael came to the U.S. from Italy in the 1960s. For years they ran Rose's Restaurant on Main Street in Stratford.

Schools Superintendent Carol Merlone scheduled a May 3 meet and greet.

Giansanti, the current assistant principal at Hamden High School, was chosen from 34 applicants, Merlone said. The final four were interviewed by high school and district level staff as well as Board of Education members.

I was very impressed with Mr. Giansanti, Merlone said. He is a very intelligent with great work ethic and a lot of energy. He certainly has the qualities needed to lead Ansonia High on a path to endless opportunities.

Giansanti takes over a school of 597 students and ranked 34th of Connecticuts 200 high schools last year by U.S. World and News Reports. Two recent valedictoriansLouis Nicoletti in 2014 and Pablo Suarez in 2015went onto Harvard and Yale respectively.

Paul will help continue that but I also see him making a difference in the lives of those student who fall in the 50 percent category,said Gary Highsmith, the human resource director for Hamdens schools.

In 2014 Highsmith, then Hamden Highs principal hired Giansanti as his assistant.

We had interviewed about 25 people for the assistant principal position and couldnt find the right candidate to fit our needs, recalled Highsmith, who attended the Ansonia announcement. Paul was the last one we interviewed and I knew he was the person for the job.

While in Hamden Giansanti created the first school governance council, developed a Parent 101 session to educate them during freshman orientation about high school expectation and worked with freshman teachers.

He displayed great empathy and compassion and worked hard day and night, said Highsmith. I knew one day hed become a principal. Thats the goal of all assistants. Im sorry to lose him. Im sad to see him go. At the same time, Im glad to see him move forward.

Giansanti is a graduate of Eastern Connecticut State University. He received his Master of Education from the University of New Haven and Masters in Special Education from Fairfield University.

He began his career in 2007 teaching history at Bridgeports Bassick High School during the day and serving as the lead teacher in the Night Alternative School. In 2009, he was hired by the Briggs Alternative High School in Norwalk to teach history during the day while serving as the Norwalk ACE Night School facilitator. Three years later he transferred to Norwalks Brien McMahon High School and served as director of the after school freshman Youth Development Program at Carver Center.

Giansanti and his wife Christina are the parents of two-year-old Giulianna.HAMDEN  Quinnipiac Universitys Great Hunger Museum is showing a new perspective of the American Civil War with a number of first-hand depictions of Irish peoples involvement.

The museum launched a new exhibit Thursday, Making America: The Irish in the Civil War Era, a collection of original drawings by newspaper artists who witnessed major events of the Civil War and American life from 1860 to the end of the century.

The approximately 80 drawings on display come from a private collection by artists Joseph Becker and colleagues who were artist-reporters for Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper during the 19th century . The collection is the largest group of Civil War-era drawing in private hands, totaling nearly 700 drawings.

Our main topic is Irelands Great Hunger and we took that immigrant experience from the time of the Great Hunger, 1840 to 1850s, and really moved the story of Ireland out another 10 to 15 years and what these immigrants were doing when they got here, museum Executive Director Ryan Mahoney said. The exhibition covers the American Civil War, the laying of the trans-Atlantic cable, the building of the transcontinental railroad and the role the Irish played in the growing labor movement during the second half of the century.

The collection of drawings and exhibition is co-directed by Judith Bookbinder and Sheila Gallagher.

More than 200,000 Irish people fought in the Civil War, around 140,000 with the Union army and at least 20,000 fighting with the Confederates. Most who joined the Union Army during the Civil War were recent immigrants and many were not yet U.S. citizens, according to history.com, and between 1861 and 1863, soldiers who fought in the all-Irish units that made up the Irish Brigade were known for their courage, ferocity and toughness in battle.

The exhibit tells the story after Irish immigrants came to the U.S. fleeing mass starvation and death from the famine in Ireland. Like all immigrant groups throughout history, the Irish faced discrimination and hostility. An unintentional consequence of the Civil War was it provided the opportunity for Irish people to assimilate in this country, Mahoney said.

One way to gain acceptance during this time period was to join the military, he said. And then there was trying to find jobs. Building the transcontinental railroad gave them that opportunity to get their foot in the door and slowly move up the ladder.

At a time when photographs were only able to capture still moments, newspaper prints made from sketches were able to show action scenes of the war and happenings of everyday life. Artists captured major battles, prisoners being paraded, execution scenes and the chaos of the war that surrounded them. But the artists also drew camp scenes, an image of the Gettysburg cemetery, people playing games and activities, which convey a real sense of what these guys are doing, Mahoney said.

Everything is field sketches, so theyre first-hand accounts of what these artists were seeing, he said. One, theyre fantastic just for their artwork, but, two, theyre fantastic for the information that they give. This is really an unedited look of what these artists were seeing.

People eagerly viewed the images in the papers to get an account of the ongoing conflict at the time, but what ended up in the papers sometimes had extensive changes made by editors to the details or emphasis of the field drawings, according to an accompanying booklet by the directors of the collection. The exhibit shows some of these changes with reprints of what appeared in the papers alongside the original drawings.

We took a lot of pieces that distinctly told that Irish story, Mahoney said. Many of the images have never been on display before or have never been published and never made it to the papers.

As an information resource this collection is remarkable, Mahoney said. While this isnt a comprehensive look into the Irish experience, it does give a good look into what was going on. ... Everything youve read about in your history textbooks is represented here, which is really neat.

Sponsored by TD Bank, Making America will be on display until Oct. 28. The exhibition fills a hole for the museum as much of its original collection travels abroad to Ireland. Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger is on display at Dublin Castle through June 30, then traveling to West Cork Arts Center in Skibbereen, Ireland, from July 20 through Oct. 13 and making its final stop in Derry, Northern Ireland, from Jan. 18 through March 16, 2019.

mdignan@hearstmediact.comRep. Elizabeth Estys meteoric rise in Congress flamed out after Hearst Connecticut Media and other outlets broke the story of her self-described errors in handling the 2016 exit of her abusive former chief of staff.

But between the story bombshell and her decision not to seek a fourth term in Congress came the self-imposed weekend from hell at her home in Cheshire. There, she contemplated her future, took phone calls, tested the political waters.

All of Connecticut and the nation know the result. But how she weighed the pros and cons is less clear  until now.

In a wide-ranging interview in her office, a noticeably subdued Esty said she believed, despite the fallout, she could have run and won in 2018.

So why not give it a shot?

The story would have been about me, my wanting to win and hold on to power, Esty said, choosing her words carefully, speaking slowly  a stark contrast to her normal ebullient, self-confident demeanor. And thats not the kind of public service I believe in.

Without naming names, she confirmed the obvious: The Democratic Party elders in Connecticut were thumbs down.

For me to run at that point, without the support of my party or without support of significant voices in my party, would have required me to be the kind of person Im not.

Although she may have been a ripe target for Republican challengers in a district thats no slam dunk for Democrats, Esty said her record as an effective bipartisan legislator would have come through the din loud and clear.

But then it would have been about me; people would perceive it that way, she said. I didnt want that. I didnt want it for me, I didnt want it for my family, I didnt want it for my staff. They deserved better.

Blumenthal struggles

to save Mueller from Trump ax

Few people are more concerned than Sen. Richard Blumenthal over the prospect of President Trump firing special counsel Robert Mueller or Muellers boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Theres a growing sense of alarm that the president may do something rash and impulsive, whether out of anger or fear, Blumenthal said.

Firing either one could provoke a deeply destructive Constitutional crisis, said Blumenthal, himself no slouch when it comes to Constitutional law as a former Supreme Court law clerk, U.S. attorney and Connecticut attorney general.

Everybody agrees it should be avoided, he said. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who ultimately controls what does and does not get to the Senate floor, told reporters on Tuesday it wont happen.

But that view seems increasingly a form of wishful thinking, Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal, D-Conn., is co-sponsor of a bill to insulate the special counsel by requiring court approval if the counsel is to be removed under the laws requirement for just cause  dereliction of duty, incapacity, or conflict of interest.

The bill is picking up increasing bipartisan support in the Senate.

So all that being said, what was Blumenthal doing at the White House on Wednesday, exchanging pleasantries with, yes, Trump at the signing of an anti-sex-trafficking bill that Blumenthal co-authored?

And I think Dick Blumenthal is here; I saw Dick, the president said at the signing ceremony attended by lawmakers, victims and relatives. So thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it very much.

Remember, theres no love lost between these two because of Trumps repeated tweets on Blumenthals campaign gaffe that he served in the Marines in Vietnam when, in fact, he served stateside during the Vietnam era.

But Blumenthal insists he didnt find it particularly hard to be in the same room with Trump.

I respect the office of the president, Blumenthal said, sprinkling diplomacy on top of gravitas. |NEW HAVEN  Khizr Khan, the Pakistani-American Gold Star father who rose to national prominence among Democrats in July 2016 when he taunted then-presidential candidate Donald Trump by waving a pocket U.S. Constitution at the Democratic National Convention, said he knows commenting on American policy will be interpreted as political.

However, defining himself outside of his role as an icon of the Democratic Party, but instead as the father of Humayun Khan, a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq in 2004, he said he believes now-President Trump is too cavalier while discussing foreign affairs.

Any step, any action, that concerns our sons and daughters, has to be done so thoughtfully and with careful deliberation, he said.

Khan met with veterans at the Southern Connecticut State University Veterans Center Thursday, a day ahead of his keynote address at the university for a faculty conference, and noted his appreciation that, as he tours the nation, hes noticing more college campuses creating resource centers for veterans.

Now, as the U.S. mulls a military strike on Syria in the midst of a rising death toll from the use of chemical weapons during a years-long civil war there, Khan said his top priority will be that of the safety of American troops.

My concern always remains the safety of my sons and daughters who serve this nation so bravely, he said, adding that he believes he is not qualified to comment further on the conflict.

Jack Mordente, coordinator of Veterans and Military Affairs at SCSU, agreed that veterans believe in brotherhood over politics.

Were not into the politics or the right and wrong, he said. We choose to join the military to serve our country. Thats who we fight for: each other.

Since late 2017, Khan has used his prominence to endorse Democratic candidates, many of them veterans, some of them in crowded primary races, in Texas, Philadelphia, St. Paul, his home state of Virginia and elsewhere.

Who else is more suited to serve than those who have proven their mettle, he said. They all wore the same uniform my son did, why wouldnt I support them?

He said he believes the historically low approval rating of Congress would turn around with more military veterans in the government.

I jump at opportunities to campaign for a veteran, he said. I have no hesitation at all to support our veterans.

In Connecticut, he said he has not yet made any endorsements, but he expects to campaign when there are declared candidates who have been tested in primaries.

Zain Seyan, president of the SCSU Muslim Student Association, said he appreciated having Khan pay visit to SCSU because he views him as a strong voice for the Muslim-American community.

I look up to him, he said. To stand there and deliver a message to millions of Americans, he showed hes a patriotic Pakistani-American Muslim-American, and students can follow his direction of speaking up for Muslim-Americans.

Brokk Tollefson, a senior at SCSU who served in the Marines from 2010 to 2014, said his experience was that losing a member of the platoon is what deepens ones appreciation for the others serving beside him.

Two people going through the same struggle, they can speak the same language, he said.

Khan agreed, saying the death of his son has bonded him to all American troops.

Thats why I call them my sons and daughters, he said.

brian.zahn@hearstmediact.comNEW HAVEN  A group of 30 alumni is asking Yale University President Peter Salovey and the Yale Corporation to apply the same principles that led to the renaming of Calhoun College to re-evaluate the honorary degrees given to a Swiss billionaire industrialist and to comedian Bill Cosby.

A letter was to be sent to Salovey and the trustees on Thursday, but was released Wednesday.

Stephan Ernst Schmidheiny, 70, was convicted by an Italian court in 2012 for his responsibility in the deaths of more than 2,000 people from mesothelioma, asbestosis and other diseases caused by asbestos from four factories his company, Eternit AG, owned in Italy.

His 16-year sentence was increased to 18 years, with fines approaching $15 billion, but an Italian appeals court overturned the verdict on the grounds that the 10-year statute of limitations had run out. Eternit had ceased its involvement in asbestos in 1986, according to Barry Castleman, an environmental consultant in the case. Still, there is one asbestos-related death per week in Casale Monferrato, the most affected town, Castleman said.

But, more recently, the magistrate ruled that there will be a separate manslaughter trial in each of the four areas of Italy where these deaths occurred, Castleman said. Schmidheiny, who has focused on philanthropy in recent years, will first be tried in Turin on two counts of manslaughter. The trial is scheduled to begin April 26.

Schmidheiny received his honorary degree from Yale in 1996, the same year that Brazil awarded him the National Order of the Southern Cross. Mayors of 35 Italian towns and dozens of alumni previously have appealed to Salovey to revoke his degree.

Cosby, 80, who received his honorary degree from Yale in 2003, is on trial in Pennsylvania on three counts of aggravated indecent assault and has been accused by more than 50 women of rape or other forms of sexual misconduct.

Salovey, after first deciding not to rename Calhoun College despite protests that John C. Calhoun was an ardent and vocal supporter of slavery, in 2015 formed a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming. The letter to Salovey summed up the resulting principles by asking, Is a principal legacy of the namesake fundamentally at odds with the mission of the university? and Was the relevant principal legacy significantly contested in the time and place in which the namesake lived?

Based on the committees report, Calhoun College was renamed for Grace Hopper, an admiral, computer scientist and mathematician who had received masters and doctoral degrees from Yale.

We ought to look at this issue of Schmidheiny the same as they looked at the issue of Calhoun College, said Daniel Berman of Davis, California, a 1964 Yale graduate and lead signer of the letter. Its an outrage for Yale to give a degree to a person who ran a murderous business.

Berman said of Cosby, either hell be found guilty or not guilty but other universities  have already withdrawn their honorary degrees to Cosby.  Schmidheiny is much more outrageous. Were talking about hundreds and hundreds of people.

On April 6, Ohio State University became at least the 20th university to rescind an honorary degree given to Cosby, out of more than 60 hes received. Others that have revoked the honor include Brown University, the University of Connecticut and the University of Pennsylvania.

Im concerned about Cosby, Berman said. People understand Cosby because its an American thing  and its important. Youre not supposed to get someone loaded and then have sex with them.

Berman said he and two other Yale alumni met in 2014 with Yale Secretary Kimberly Goff-Crews about the issue. She just said we dont reconsider awards, he said.

Yale Press Secretary Thomas Conroy did not respond to a request for comment.

Contact Ed Stannard at edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com or 203-680-9382.HARTFORD  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on Wednesday used the 50th anniversary of the federal Fair Housing Act to push a bill that would punish towns and cities that continue to block affordable housing.

"[Wednesday] marks exactly fifty years since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law," Malloy said, referring to landmark legislation that banned discrimination when selling or renting housing.

Thats why Im calling on the Connecticut General Assembly to enact the fair housing reforms in legislation that weve proposed," the governor said, noting that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated one week before Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

"In the spirit of Dr. King, our state cannot turn a blind eye to the barriers that exist in our society," Malloy said. "Access to opportunity through decent, safe, affordable housing should not be a politicized issue  it is a fundamental human right."

The bill proposed by Malloy mandates that the "character" of a neighborhood cannot be used by zoning boards to deny multifamily and affordable housing. The bill also forces towns and cities to report progress toward increasing their affordable housing stock to the state every five years.

Communities deemed to be not making sufficient progress, or placing roadblocks in front of affordable housing, could be denied discretionary state funding.

Donna Hamzy, advocacy manager for the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, last month told the General Assemblys Planning and Development Committee that its members oppose much of Malloys bill.

CCM opposes these changes as a direct attack on local zoning authority and control, Hamzy told the committee.

CCM is adamantly opposed to the withholding of discretionary funds if a municipality is deemed to not be making enough progress toward housing goals, Hamzy said. It is difficult, if not impossible, to be in compliance with a standard or criteria that has not been established.

State Sen. George Logan, R-Ansonia and co-chairman of the planning committee, said everyone deserves fair housing, and said the bill is a step in that direction.

""Fifty years ago, America sent a clear message by banning discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing based on race and several other factors," Logan said. "We must always be striving to improve and strengthen our policies."

Erin Kemple, executive director of the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, said despite the Fair Housing Act  and myriad Connecticut regulations designed to force development of affordable housing  barriers are still being erected.

"We see advertisements on a daily basis that say no Section 8," Kemple said, referring to subsidized housing for low income tenants.

"We see our neighborhoods and cities preventing group homes," Kemple said. "We dont see the red lining, but African Americans are [still] denied mortgages. We have made few strides in integrating our neighborhoods."

bcummings@ctpost.comThe conventional wisdom, at least among Democrats, is that white racial resentment powered Donald Trump to victory. But not enough is said about another kind of resentment, one that has been building up over the last year: resentment among Democrats for years of having been told their patriotism doesnt count. Republicans still insist Democrats hate America, even as the president invites a foreign enemy to tea.

The story of the midterm election is dominated so far by reporting on the womens march, the #MeToo movement and most recently the Parkland teens who are inspiring greater demands for action on gun violence. That is as it should be.

But theres room I think for discussing the fact that Republicans have for years hammered liberals with propaganda saying they are tantamount to resident aliens, that Democrats dont represent the values of real red-blooded Americans. With the president inviting Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin to the White House, theres a smell in the air of electoral revenge.

This is not merely a Trump phenomenon. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the GOP under President George W. Bush and chief strategist Karl Rove cemented successfully in a majority of Americans minds that opposition to the Iraq War was tantamount to opposition to the American creed.

This lay the groundwork for any attack to have the ring of truth to it. By the time of the 2004 primaries, the Republicans, in TV ads paid for by the Club for Growth, attacked Gov. Howard Deans young candidacy, telling him to take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show back to Vermont.

So powerful was this propaganda that even a Democrat with a bona fide war record, by some accounts a war hero, could not withstand the onslaught. U.S. Sen. John Kerry really had seen combat as a Navy officer, really had been wounded, really had saved other sailors lives, really had been decorated for courage and valor, as compared to Bush, who served stateside. Kerry lost in part because the nation was at war, but also because the Republicans sabotaged his credibility and convinced a majority of voters that his greatest asset was actually a liability.

But that was nothing compared to what they did to Barack Obama. Almost from the minute he was elected, partisans chipped away at the meaning and legitimacy of his historic victory, so much so that by the time he left office, most of the Republican Party came to believe, and still believes, that Obama is not a U.S. citizen but instead an alien insurgent bent on turning America into a Kenyan communist caliphate.

Liberals could only laugh back then but stopped after the greatest beneficiary of years of GOP propaganda, Donald Trump, became president. Now that it appears President Trump has come to power with the help of actual foreign agents whose mission was to erode our liberties and democratic institutions, the fact that liberals laughed at Republican partisans at the time seems like the height of arrogance.

But from arrogance can come sobriety and from sobriety can come a taste for vengeance. The Republicans now turn away as the president defers to the interests of a foreign leader who orchestrated information warfare against the U.S. And they are doing what they can to ignore or undermine Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Trumps ties to Russia. Meanwhile, Fox News Tucker Carlson says the Democrats do nothing about illegal immigration, because they hate America.

I dont want to make too much out of this. Talking about political revenge is unseemly. And anyway, as I said, I think #MeToo and other movements are prevailing forces this year. But I cant help thinking that a wild card in this years midterms will be turnout from liberals and Democrats who are sick and tired of being held to the GOPs double standards, including the one about who counts as a real American.

Republicans arent the only ones seething with resentment.

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and a New Haven resident.

Viewed 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.But figuring out where methane emissions are coming from is a major challenge. The colorless, odorless gas has proved difficult to measure at the source of leaks without nearby access to the sites . Early attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to determine the scope of the problem significantly underestimated emissions.

Methane leaks are relatively inexpensive to fix, and stopping leaks allows energy companies to sell more gas. The International Energy Agency has estimated that as much as 50 percent of the 84 million tons of methane emitted by the oil and gas industry every year  from leaky wells and pipes and other causes  can be mitigated at no net cost, because the value of the captured methane could cover the abatement measures.

The Environmental Defense Fund has worked for many years on methane issues; it organized a five-year, $20 million research effort into leaks in the United States across the production and supply network. That research, which helped the E.P.A. adjust its national emissions estimates, involved local measurements from ground instruments and airplane flyovers. But such methods are not always feasible  or welcomed  in other countries.

To address the problem of finding leaks around the world, a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences called for methane monitoring from space, where international access is not a problem. Satellite measurements are critical, said David T. Allen, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas who served on the committee that wrote the report. Right now satellite measurements are one area in which we have very limited information.

Some government-launched science satellites do monitor methane, but their instruments lack the resolution to pinpoint sources on the ground. Some commercial ventures also detect methane from space, but their data is proprietary.BOUFARIK, AlgeriaAlgeria suffered its deadliest ever air catastrophe Wednesday when a military plane crashed after takeoff, killing 257 people on board, mostly army personnel and their family members. An AFP photographer at the scene saw the charred wreckage of the plane after it caught fire in a field near the Boufarik airbase, 30 kilometers south of Algiers. Hundreds of ambulances and dozens of fire trucks with sirens wailing rushed to the scene of the crash, in an uninhabited area where one person was injured on the ground by debris. Firefighters extinguished the blaze and security forces set up a cordon to prevent journalists and onlookers from approaching. Witnesses who had been working in nearby fields told AFP that the plane had burst into flames before it hit the ground. The defense ministry said in a statement that 247 passengers and 10 crew were killed without mentioning any survivors. Most of those on board were army members and their families, it said. There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash. Deputy Defense Minister General Ahmed Gaid Salah visited the site and ordered an investigation, the defense ministry said. Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika declared three days of national mourning over the crash starting Wednesday. The veteran leader also ordered that a special prayer be said for the victims after weekly Muslim prayers on Friday, a decree published by state press agency APS said. The Ilyushin IL-76 transport plane was bound for Tindouf in southwest Algeria near the borders with Morocco and Western Sahara. The Tindouf region is home to refugees from Western Sahara and houses the administrative offices of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic declared in 1976 by the Algiers-backed Polisario Front which seeks independence for the disputed region. Among the victims of the plane crash were 30 Sahrawis, the sick and their companions, men, women and children, who had been returning from treatment in Algeria, said the Polisario.Rabat considers Western Sahara an integral part of Morocco and proposes autonomy for the resource-rich territory. According to the plane manufacturers website, the IL-76, a four-engine plane built in the Soviet Union and then Russia, can transport between 126 and 225 passengers depending on the model and configuration. The North African country has suffered a string of military and civilian aviation disasters but Wednesdays was Algerias deadliest ever plane crash and the worlds fourth costliest in human lives in 20 years. Two Algerian military planes collided mid-flight in December 2012 during a training exercise in Tlemcen, in the far west of the country, killing the pilots of both planes. In February 2014, 77 people died when a military plane carrying army personnel and family members crashed between Tamanrasset in southern Algeria and the eastern city of Constantine. Only one person survived after the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft came down in the mountainous Oum El Bouaghi region. The defence ministry blamed that crash on bad weather. An Air Algerie passenger plane flying from Burkina Faso to Algiers crashed in northern Mali in July 2014, killing all 116 people on board including 54 French nationals. In October the same year, a military plane crashed in the south of the country during a training exercise, killing the two men on board. That came more than a decade after all but one of the 103 people on an Air Algerie Boeing 737-200 died in March 2003 when it crashed on takeoff in the countrys south after an engine caught fire.THURSDAY PUZZLE  Jules Markey is back and hes holding the clicker. You know what kind of clicker I mean. The kind that changes the channel every 30 seconds until Mr. Markey decides what he wants to watch. The kind you want to land on a good movie and then you take it and hide it from Mr. Markey before he changes the channel yet again.

But I digress.

Todays Theme

Before we discuss the puzzle, Id like to remind readers that we have this article to help with any difficulties solvers might have entering multiple letters in a square.

Yes, the rebuses are back. Yes, I had trouble with them, too. But thats a Thursday puzzle for you. You never know whats coming at you.

Mr. Markey offers us a theme that looks simple on the surface, but is really very cool: four cable television channels are hidden in four squares in this puzzle, but once you find them, you havent even gotten to the cool part yet. The rebuses (the letters making up the name of the channels must be squeezed into one square each) work both ways, and what I think is cool is that, for the most part, both the Across and Down entries are very lively.Since last year, immigration agents have been making arrests far more frequently in New York Citys courthouses, sparking outrage from lawyers, district attorneys and activists.

Their fight has been with the federal authorities. But now, a rift has erupted along local lines.

It started when agents for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, detained two undocumented immigrants who had come to Queens Criminal Court on minor charges. In protest, lawyers for the Legal Aid Society of New York and Queens Law Associates staged a walkout, saying ICE should stay out of courthouses. It was the second such walkout this week, and the fifth in the last year.

The Office of Court Administration, which oversees the courts in New York State, responded by fulfilling a warning it had made an hour earlier: if the public defenders walked out on the job while court was still in session, cases would be reassigned to private defense lawyers under contract to represent the poor. Ten cases were reassigned.

The public defense organizations saw it as punishment for political advocacy; court administrators saw it as a matter of keeping the courts running.Lois Wheeler Snow, a former actress and writer whose criticism of human rights abuses in China was amplified by the legacy of her husband, the American journalist Edgar Snow, the author of the landmark book Red Star Over China, died on April 3 at a hospital in Nyon, Switzerland. She was 97.

Her daughter, Sian Snow, confirmed the death. Her mother had lived in Switzerland since 1959.

Lois Wheeler was an up-and-coming Broadway actress in 1949 when she married Mr. Snow, who was best known for Red Star Over China (1937), a sympathetic portrayal of Chinas struggling young Communist revolutionaries. It introduced many Western readers to Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and others who would go on to lead the Peoples Republic of China.

China became part of my life when I met and married Edgar Snow, Ms. Snow wrote in an essay in 2011.

On her first visit to that country, in 1970, she and her husband were treated like royalty. She attended a Ping-Pong match with Zhou, the first premier of the Peoples Republic; dined with Soong Ching-ling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen; and, notably, stood with her husband alongside Mao on the Tiananmen rostrum during the National Day Parade  a gesture later understood to be a signal from Mao to President Richard M. Nixon that Beijing was willing to reopen ties with Washington.Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have predominantly been about white men. Overlooked tells the stories of women and others, many of them marginalized, who left indelible marks on society but whose deaths were not reported by The Times.

Many of Chinas ancient architectural treasures crumbled to dust before Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng began documenting them in the 1930s. In China, ancient structures were usually treated like any other buildings rather than protected and studied, as they were in many Western countries. The husband and wife team were among the first preservationists to operate in China, and by far the best known. Their efforts have since inspired generations of people to speak out for architecture threatened by the rush toward development.

Becoming Chinas premier architectural historians was no easy feat. The buildings they wanted to save were centuries old, often in a shambles and situated in remote parts of the country. In many cases they had to journey in treacherous conditions across the Chinese countryside to reach them.

Exploring Chinas outlying areas during the 1930s meant traveling muddy roads by mule, rickshaw or on foot. This was a demanding undertaking for both Liang, who walked with a bad limp after a motorcycle accident as a young man, and Lin, who endured tuberculosis for years. Inns were often squalid and food could be tainted, and there was always a risk of violence by rebels, soldiers and bandits.

Their greatest discovery came on an expedition in 1937, when they dated and meticulously cataloged Foguang Si, or the Temple of Buddhas Light, in Wutai County, Shanxi Province. This breathtaking wooden temple was built in 857 A.D., making it the oldest known building in China at the time. (It is now the fourth-oldest known).CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico  On a sun-scorched prison patio in this sprawling border town, a 23-year-old inmate calmly explained to me how he trafficked hundreds of guns a year from the United States to Mexico. He never bothered paying American citizen straw buyers to purchase the weapons for him, he said. Instead, he would go to one of the many weekend gun shows around Dallas and take advantage of the so-called gun show loophole to buy firearms from private sellers without a background check or proof of citizenship.

He would drive back to Mexico with about a dozen guns hidden in refrigerators and stoves in the back of his truck, and sell the weapons in his hometown, a few hours south of the Rio Grande. His most requested weapon, he told me, was the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which he could buy for as little as $500 and sell for five times that. He became richer than he had dreamed, buying a house and new trucks and motorbikes.

At the beginning I felt bad, but you get used to it, he said. Its the way you can have a good time. You sell weapons, you earn money and you have fun. He got caught only because his cousin informed on him after an argument, he said, and he is now serving a nine-year sentence.

Guns from America inundate Mexico, arming the brutal cartels that have drowned this country in blood, destroyed families and driven people from their homes. Over a six-year period, the Justice Department traced more than 74,500 firearms seized from criminals here to the United States, where they were either manufactured or sold on after being imported from other countries.With few encouraging gestures or initiatives from the White House, it is no surprise that Gallup reports only 16 percent of Latin Americans approve of Trump, a fraction of Mr. Obamas 62 percent first-year approval.

Further muddying the waters are the alarms raised by senior United States officials about Chinas expanding role in the region, which have stirred unpleasant memories of a long-past era when Washington considered Latin America its backyard. Many in the region wonder whether the administrations new, more hawkish foreign policy team might resurrect the Monroe Doctrine, again giving the United States self-appointed authority to intrude on the regions sovereignty.

Washington is already insisting that Latin America make the United States its partner of choice, while simply ignoring that the regions economic and diplomatic ties are already globally diversified and China, not the United States, is South Americas largest trading partner. Pursuing this path will be offensive even to such leaders as Argentinas Mauricio Macri and Chiles Sebastian Pinera, successful entrepreneurs and now presidents.

Still, despite the shared confusion and distrust about United States policies and intentions, nearly all Latin American governments have chosen a pragmatic approach to dealing with Washington, seeking to accommodate Trumps idiosyncrasies without caving in to his often exaggerated demands. They are not ready to risk an open breach and potentially lose the United States huge, profitable market and access to its trade, investment and technology. But Mr. Trumps failure to show up in Lima will leave the region less secure about the future of United States-Latin American relations. Yes, it is good news that Vice President Mike Pence will be there, but he is not the same as having Mr. Trump. The Latin American presidents want the opportunity to engage the president of the United States, as their predecessors have had at every summit meeting of the past quarter-century.

Mr. Trumps absence has reduced expectations that the United States and Latin America can find a way to effectively address the one issue where some signs of common ground can be discerned: the disaster engulfing Venezuela. This crisis of unprecedented proportions has, albeit belatedly, become the concern of almost every nation in the Americas. It poses the most crucial test of the hemispheres capacity for join action, but so far it has produced only limited agreement. Mr. Trumps off-handed suggestion last August of a military option was immediately rejected across the region.There are legal disagreements about whether Trump could directly fire Mueller and whether there would have to be a showing of misconduct, and it might well be difficult to find a credible figure to obey instructions and curb the special counsel. In any case, that would not automatically end the separate investigation that led to the raid on Michael Cohens files, and it might even fuel state investigations and prosecutions in New York.

If Trump were to recklessly end an investigation into whether he is obstructing justice, that would seem prima facie evidence of obstruction of justice. Trump should have learned something from firing James Comey; that misstep didnt stop the investigation but assured that Comeys book will be a best seller when it comes out next week, and handed Comey the ABC interview in which he apparently compares Trump to a mob boss.

Sadly, thats an apt comparison. Trumps ethos, ever since he was first sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination in 1973, has been about cutting corners. He got away with it when he was a businessman buying $100,000 worth of pianos and stiffing the seller.

Now his pattern of behavior may finally be catching up with him; he and those around him may rue the day he was elected president. Trump himself is probably protected from indictment under Justice Department guidelines, and people like Paul Manafort may be counting on a pardon, but the political price of pardons will be increasingly costly  and they wont provide protection from state prosecutions.

Trump says hes the victim of a witch hunt, but its actually a criminal hunt  one presided over by Republicans, most of whom he has appointed. He claims persecution, but its just embarrassing for a billionaire who is the most powerful person in the world to exhibit a victim complex.

Any attempt to block the investigation would discredit not only Trump but also our country. Foreign policy moves such as a strike on Syria or confrontations with Iran or North Korea would be clouded by the assumption that Trump was tossing us a new and shiny object to chase.

Theres a Latin phrase that goes to the heart of this investigation: fiat justitia, ruat caelum, meaning justice be done, though the heavens fall  signifying that the law must be followed wherever it leads. Our legal system may in practice sometimes be as ugly as any sausage factory, but it is inspired by a principle as noble and lofty and simple as any: equality before the law.

This isnt just about Trump, and its not just about sex or hush money or even just about collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice. This is about the kind of nation we live in, and whether we aim to be a nation of citizens equal before the law. This is about America.The predictable response from Democrats will be that Mr. Ryan couldnt square his principles with the reality of Mr. Trumps presidency. That might score a quick rhetorical win, but it misses the bigger political picture. America is in the midst of a major political realignment that is redefining both the left and the right. Mr. Trumps sudden ascendance to power is a symptom of the larger trend and also a catalyst for the intellectual and political reformation that is currently underway on the right, which has led to the announced departures of standard bearers of the ancien regime like Senator Jeff Flake, Senator Bob Corker and now Mr. Ryan.

The job for House Republicans will be to select a new leader who isnt just more of the same. The last effective leader was Newt Gingrich. Since he stepped down in 1999, Republican leadership has been either corrupt or incompetent. Tom DeLay was indicted (although he was eventually acquitted); Dennis Hastert is a convicted felon. John Boehner was a do-nothing placeholder who now works for a marijuana company; and Eric Cantor so infuriated his own constituents that he was defeated by an underfunded economics professor who still holds the seat. What we need is a clean break with the time-markers and careerists who are content being the party of no.

Mr. Ryan came up under the Boehner-Cantor regime, and their sensibilities have stayed with him. Like them, he failed to advocate  let alone pass  legislation supporting the agenda he claimed to believe in. His coda will be the omnibus spending bill passed last month. Not only did the bill fund Democratic priorities, and not fund Mr. Trumps border wall, it also made the walls construction illegal on a stretch of the Texas-Mexico border that is home to the federally owned Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge.

Mr. Ryans legacy will be one of lost opportunities and youthful promise unfulfilled. Hes left a mess that his successor will have to clean up. House Republicans under Mr. Ryan became a disorganized rabble rather than the energetic and effective conference confidently enacting the agenda that one would expect from a party that controls both houses of Congress and the presidency.

Republicans need a leader who is in step with the president and his agenda, one who emphasizes pro-citizen immigration policies, pro-worker economic policies and an America First national security policy that is circumspect about foreign military intervention.

Equally important, the next leader must be someone who commands the respect and obedience of the conference. Voters gave Republicans power because they believed that the policies the party promised offered them a better future. Republicans must repay that trust with action. Just as Moses couldnt enter the promised land because he had broken faith with God, much of the current House leadership has broken faith with its voters. House Republicans need to find their Joshua  a leader who sees the partys future and can bring its members together to build it. Ambitious politicians are always willing, but whos ready?Well, Paul Ryan, youre a free man now  at least, much freer than you were before you announced on Wednesday that youd be stepping down as House speaker and departing Congress in January. What an opportunity you have to serve the country and to demonstrate, despite all the ground youve created for eye-rolling, that you care about something more than short-term partisan advantage.

Have you truly been offended, as you suggested in 2016, by the bigotry and bullying of Donald Trump? Would you like to see the White House, and the Republican Party, set a higher standard? Now you have the chance to go far beyond milquetoast observations, like he could have done better, your less-than-withering reaction to President Trumps claim that there were very fine people among the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., who chanted, Jews will not replace us.

You say youve been given assurances that the president doesnt intend to fire law-enforcement officials who are investigating Russias interference in the 2016 election. So youre clearly worried about that possibility. Why not take steps to ensure your fellow citizens wont have to suffer the constitutional crisis that a step like that would precipitate?

You dont have to worry anymore about weathering a primary challenger from the far right. You dont have to truckle before a blast of presidential tweets. You can use your remaining authority and credibility with your colleagues to pass legislation to make it harder for the president to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and other officials at the Department of Justice. On your way out the door, on that crucial question, you still have a chance to put yourself on the right side of history.Set among the questionable new-builds and Victorian rowhouses of East Londons once gritty, now desirable Shoreditch neighborhood, the facade of the recently opened Blue Mountain School is impossible to miss. The six-level brick townhouse, on the corner of Redchurch and Chance Streets, has been painted in a sleek and surprising silver. Inside, the multipurpose space defies easy categorization.

An impeccably curated showcase of exquisite garments, furniture and objects  of which only a small selection is for sale  this interdisciplinary project also includes an exhibition space, a kitchen with a nightly dinner menu and a listening room that will feature a handpicked music library and monthly music-inspired events. The buildings interior is also an experience unto itself, capturing the ambitious creative vision of Blue Mountain Schools founder, James Brown, and his partner, Christie Fels.

The duo became known as the team behind the upmarket, craft-focused fashion boutique Hostem, which originally occupied the Redchurch Street site before closing, in 2016, to make way for this new endeavor. Having grown weary of the traditional retail model, Brown and Fels wanted to offer their clients something more interesting: an experiential space that prioritizes culture over commerce. Over the course of two years, the building was reimagined from the ground up in collaboration with the architecture firm 6a.

Now, the only real traces of the original retail space live on in the Hostem Archive, a rotating display of clothing, ceramics and artwork presented across the double-height basement and the ground floor of Blue Mountain School. Though most of the items here are for sale, the Archive feels less like a store and more like a secret library of rare goods meant to be examined and admired. This is not about shopping, explains Fels, But providing a platform for artists with integrity, who take their craft to its purist form and create meaningful, enduring work. Among the handful of designers with work on display are the Mallorca-based ceramist Dora Alzamora Good, who makes richly textured stoneware vessels, and the Texan-born artist Amy Revier, known for her sculptural, hand-woven clothing.And wouldnt you know it: James is not only a fan of spoken English, but also a fan of his own voice. Hes glib and lordly and  giving credit to a lovely performance by Joshua Jackson  charming, too. He almost makes you forget that hes browbeating Sarah into the denial of something she sees as a central, positive element of her personhood.

To her, as to many deaf people today, deafness is an identity, not a defect or a curse imposed by a lesser god. (The plays title comes from Tennysons poem Idylls of the King.) And for Sarah, if not Orin (who speaks and lip-reads), sign language is the unique expression of that identity.

At least on the page, Children of a Lesser God seems skeptical of Sarahs conviction, painting her refusal to speak as a form of hysteria, with abuse and cold parenting in the background. (Her mother is played, implacably, by Kecia Lewis.)

But Ms. Ridloffs blistering performance, like Phyllis Frelichs in the original and Marlee Matlins in the 1986 movie, contradicts that skepticism. We see in front of us that A.S.L. is not just a different language, but also a different way of thinking in which veal might be rendered as cowbaby and change the way you feel about it. (Alexandria Wailes is the sign language director.) Dialogue that seems banal in English  as the productions supertitles frequently make plain  is as gorgeous and physical as sculpture when signed.

In any case, the story no longer reads, if it ever did, as simply the conflict between a smug hearing person and a defensive deaf one. Though the romance between Sarah and James is mutual, the antiquated assumptions behind it keep pushing the male-female battle into the foreground.Nobody can do a good job on their own, said Mel Stankewitcz, 69, a plumber who said he had voted for Mr. Ryan. I dont think anyone in Washington is doing what theyre supposed to be doing. They just yell at each other.

Mr. Ryans surprise announcement comes in a year of wild and unpredictable political races in Wisconsin, and instantly sent the election in the states First Congressional District into turmoil. Republicans set off on a furious scramble for a candidate to replace Mr. Ryan on the ticket in a district that could conceivably swing to Democrats.

At least two Democrats have already said they will try to win in Mr. Ryans district: Randy Bryce, a mustachioed ironworker who is known by his Twitter handle, Iron Stache, and Cathy Myers, a schoolteacher. And even before Mr. Ryans departure from consideration, Republicans were contending with a potential spectacle on their own side of the ticket: Paul Nehlen, a white nationalist and anti-Semite who lost to Mr. Ryan in a 2016 Republican primary, has said he is running, though state Republican officials say they have no place for him in the party.

In Janesville, few of Mr. Ryans constituents  neither his supporters nor his detractors  said they could disagree with his choice not to run again. In this hilly city with a proud past as an automotive manufacturing stronghold, residents said they easily remembered when Mr. Ryan first ran for Congress two decades ago, back when he cut a youthful, idealistic figure who seemed to represent the Republican Partys promise.

People thought he was going to be the president, said Leo Salto, 41, a cook.

Though Mr. Ryan spends most of his time in Washington, he remains a familiar face in Janesville, constituents said. With his wife, Janna, he attends St. John Vianney, a Catholic church. Sometimes he is spotted running errands at Ace Hardware. The owner of the Citrus Cafe, a restaurant a short walk from the Ryans house, said the congressman comes by the restaurant with his family, ordering the eggceptional skillets on the menu.Mr. Pompeos call to Mrs. Clinton was particularly surprising, considering his fulminations against her as morally reprehensible when he was a member of the House Intelligence Committee after the Benghazi attacks in 2012.

Hes reached back to every former living secretary of state, again no matter what party, to help receive whatever thoughts, guidance, insights that they would offer up, said Brian Bulatao, the No. 3 official at the C.I.A. and who has known Mr. Pompeo since their first day as cadets at West Point. But thats the kind of style he has. No ones going to out prepare, out-hustle or outwork Mike.

Given Mr. Rands opposition, Mr. Pompeo may not receive the Senate committees blessing, which would be an embarrassing snub. Republicans could still pass his nomination to the full Senate, where 14 Democrats and an independent voted for his nomination as C.I.A. director.

But none of those votes are assured this time.

He has been meeting with moderates in hopes of persuading at least a few Democrats and independents to back him. Liberal groups are mobilizing to oppose him.

Mike Pompeo is absolutely the wrong choice for secretary of state, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, wrote on Twitter. Even Democratic staff members say Mr. Pompeo is likely to be confirmed.

Mr. Pompeos hard-line foreign policy pronouncements as a conservative four-term Republican congressman from Kansas have caused some unease among the left-leaning, altruistic set at the State Department. In the past, he denounced the Iran nuclear deal, suggested that he supports leadership change in North Korea and supported enhanced interrogation techniques.

But his close connection with Mr. Trump and record of encouraging career employees at the C.I.A. have led many to hope that Mr. Pompeo may once again make their diplomatic efforts relevant.But Mr. McFaul said Mr. Putin would welcome Mr. Trumps odd claim that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is fomenting anti-Russian sentiment in the United States.

More than anything, however, Mr. McFaul said the Russians would view Mr. Trumps scattershot approach as weakness.

My sense is that the Kremlin has given up on their previous hope that Trump might repair relations because he is not focused and not in control of foreign policy making, he said.

On Syria, Mr. Trumps promise of a coming missile strike not only violated his own promise never to predict such action  it also put him ahead of Americas allies. While France has been steadfast in its support for strikes, the British government is still deliberating. The administration, officials said, would like its allies to be part of a united front.

As a practical matter, Mr. Trumps foreshadowing might enable Mr. Assad to move some aircraft to get them out of the way of a missile strike. But analysts said any such movement would not alter the outcome, given the military superiority of the United States.

We can pick off his equipment at will, said Andrew J. Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The lack of swift action after Mr. Trumps tweet, however, could add to the perception of a White House not in sync. It comes after a week in which the president at first pushed for a rapid withdrawal of American troops from Syria  only to later acquiesce grudgingly to his generals, who argued that the troops should remain in the country for a few more months to train local forces and stabilize Syrian towns liberated from the Islamic State.WASHINGTON  President Trump made clear on Wednesday that missiles will be coming at Syria at any moment, telegraphing a military operation as he has previously said he would never do. But the real suspense remained  how many missiles, for how long, at what targets and to what end.

The strike that Mr. Trump was preparing as retaliation for a suspected chemical attack carries all sorts of perils that worry military planners and diplomats alike. A fresh intervention in one of the most combustible battlegrounds on the planet  one already crawling with Syrian, Russian, Iranian, American, Turkish and Kurdish forces  could easily bring unintended consequences.

The more expansive the strike, officials and experts said, the greater the risk of accidental casualties that could deepen the conflict with Russia or Iran. Yet a more restrained operation might not inflict enough damage on the government of President Bashar al-Assad to change his calculations.

If Mr. Trump goes beyond missiles and authorizes the use of manned aircraft even from outside Syrian airspace, they face the dangers of a modern air defense system provided by Moscow.A Michigan man who had been released from jail on $100,000 bond while awaiting trial on rape charges murdered the 16-year-old girl who had been expected to testify against him, the authorities said on Wednesday.

The teenager, Mujey Dumbuya, a high school student from Grand Rapids, Mich., was to testify this month at the trial of the man, Quinn Anthony James, who is in his early 40s. But she disappeared in January and was later discovered dead about 50 miles from her home.

In addition to premeditated first-degree murder, Mr. James has also been charged with kidnapping and conspiracy, said Christopher Becker, the prosecuting attorney for Kent County.

Prosecutors have also charged a second man, Gerald Bennett, with one count of conspiracy, Mr. Becker said. They say Mr. Bennett, of Detroit, received a vehicle from Mr. James as payment for assisting with the murder  and possibly the disposal of Mujeys body.SYDNEY, Australia  Australias most prominent female Muslim activist, an outspoken critic of her countrys immigration policies, was denied entry into the United States on Wednesday.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied, 27, an award-winning author and broadcaster, was scheduled to speak next week at the Pen World Voices Festival in New York. When she arrived in Minneapolis around 4 p.m., she said on Twitter, she was detained by border agents.

Im currently at the border, and theyve said Im being deported, Ms. Abdel-Magied wrote on Twitter. This should be fun. What are my rights?

The agents, she said, told her they had canceled her visa and required her to return to London, where she currently lives.STOCKHOLM  A sexual abuse and harassment scandal roiling the committee that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature deepened on Wednesday, as the king of Sweden and the foundation that finances the prize warned that the scandal risked tarnishing one of the worlds most important cultural accolades.

A schism in the Swedish Academy, which has awarded the prize since 1901, erupted into the open last week, the culmination of a scandal that stretches back to November, when the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that 18 women had accused Jean-Claude Arnault, a major cultural figure with close ties to the academy, of sexual assault and harassment.

Mr. Arnault is married to the poet Katarina Frostenson, a member of the academy, and together they run a private cultural club, called the Forum, that has received money from the academy.

The newspaper reported that Mr. Arnault had mistreated women at the club and at academy-owned properties in Stockholm and Paris over a 20-year period. It also reported that Mr. Arnault had leaked information about the prize committees confidential deliberations seven times since 1996.BEIRUT, Lebanon  For two days and a night, the computer science student had been huddling with his family in the basement of their apartment building as pro-government forces rained bombs down on their rebel-held Syrian town.

After night fell, they heard the whirring of helicopter blades followed by the whistling sounds of objects falling from the sky. Soon, a strange smell wafted down the stairs.

People started shouting in the streets, Chemicals! Chemicals! the student, Mohammed al-Hanash, 25, said by phone from Syria.

The attack in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday, which witnesses and medical workers said used chemical weapons, has resonated far beyond the war-scarred communitys destroyed buildings, ratcheting up tensions among world powers and threatening to escalate Syrias multi-sided civil war.Our guide to dance performances happening this weekend and in the week ahead.

AMERICAN BALLET THEATER STUDIO COMPANY at Ailey Citigroup Theater (April 17-18, 7 p.m.). Before they hit the big leagues, catch the next generation of ballet stars in intimate environs as Ballet Theaters junior ensemble presents a mixed bill of classical and contemporary work. The program includes August Bournonvilles William Tell pas de deux and an excerpt from the Romantic staple Giselle as interpreted by Ethan Stiefel and Johan Kobborg. Untitled by the young British choreographer Liam Scarlett and new works by Marco Pelle and Lauren Lovette, a principal ballerina at New York City Ballet, will also be featured.

abt.org

BROOKLYN BALLET at the Actors Fund Arts Center (April 19-20, 8 p.m., through April 22). The lineup for Brooklyn Ballets spring performances is practically a tour of 20th-century dance history. It begins with a juxtaposition of modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncans Chopin Dances with Michel Fokines important 1909 ballet Les Sylphides. Two more giants follow: George Balanchine, represented by The Four Temperaments (three of which will be shown), and modern master Merce Cunningham, represented by a duet from Landrover (1972). Lynn Parkerson, Brooklyn Ballets founding artistic director, also includes two new works of her own.

brooklynballet.orgPosted Thursday, April 12, 2018 10:15 am

After an announcement last week that China has proposed tariffs on $50 billion of American soybeans, pork, and beef, along with aircraft, trucks, and other goods in retaliation for the Trump administrations announcement it will place tariffs on Chinese goods, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill released the following statement:

Im eager to improve our trade deals so theyre better delivering for Missouris working families and businesses. But our agriculture producers and manufacturers need stable, consistent leadership when it comes to negotiating those deals, and I agree with my Republican colleagues whove said the administration needs to scale back this escalating situation before it becomes a trade war that does nothing but slam some of Missouris most critical economic engines.

Missouri is the sixth-largest soybean producing state in the country, producing $2.6 billion in Missouri in 2016, and the seventh-largest pork producing state in the country.LONDON  In his award-winning biography, The Hare With Amber Eyes, the British ceramic artist Edmund de Waal tells the story of his family through its collection of Japanese netsuke carvings.

Netsuke are ornamental toggles made mainly out of ivory or wood and used to fasten things to the sash of a kimono. Each one is a small, tough explosion of exactitude, as Mr. de Waal memorably wrote. Charles Ephrussi, a cousin of the authors great-grandfather, bought a complete collection of 264 of these carvings from a Paris dealer in the late 19th century. Among them was an ivory netsuke of a trembling hare with amber-inlaid eyes.

Extraordinarily, the entire collection has remained intact, surviving World War II in Vienna, hidden in the mattress of a family servant. It spent further years in the apartment of an uncle in Tokyo, before being bequeathed to Mr. de Waal, who keeps it in his London home.

He writes in his book how a disapproving neighbor, surprised by the sight of such precious objects in a private house, suggested that the netsuke should be returned to Japan. No, replied Mr. de Waal. Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost, he said. It is how you tell the stories that matters.BOSTON  An exhibition of works by Nicholas Nixon, the renowned photographer who has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior, is being shut down Thursday at the photographers request.

Mr. Nixon asked the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, to close his exhibition to the public, saying that the allegations swirling around him made it impossible for viewers to regard his work on its merits. The show, Persistence of Vision, which opened in December, features his most notable work  The Brown Sisters, photographs taken every year since 1975 of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters.

In an investigation published last week, The Boston Globe reported that former students said that an atmosphere of intense sexuality had pervaded Mr. Nixons classes at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he was a professor.

The former students told the newspaper that Mr. Nixon, 70, had showed them pictures of his penis, and asked students to photograph genitalia. He also asked students to photograph seven people they wanted to sleep with, The Globe said.The Popcast is hosted by Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times. It covers the latest in pop music criticism, trends and news.

In the last seven days, Cardi B released her major-label debut album, Invasion of Privacy, co-hosted The Tonight Show alongside Jimmy Fallon; and appeared on Saturday Night Live, using a performance of her new song Be Careful to announce her pregnancy.

It has been, by any measurement, a broad-scale takeover for the 25-year-old who came to rap after making herself a star, first on social media, then on reality TV. And it reflects both widespread enthusiasm for Cardi B and her music, and also her willingness to meet the moment with energy.The pianist Shai Wosner might be tempted to relive a formative childhood experience this weekend as the New York Philharmonic plays along to screenings of Amadeus. As a boy of 8 or so in Israel, he was captivated by that 1984 film about Mozart, seeing it three times in the movie theater in quick succession.

I actually forgot it was a movie, Mr. Wosner, now 41, recalled recently in his studio on the Upper West Side, and I started clapping. I thought I was in 18th-century Vienna, watching the opera. I still remember the moment when people turned back to see who was clapping in the middle of the movie, and I actually didnt care that everyone was staring at me.

His interests at the moment date from just a few decades later than Mozarts time. Schuberts piano sonatas, once largely neglected, have come into their own over the last generation or two. It has become almost commonplace for master pianists to present the three great sonatas (in C minor, A and B flat) of 1828, the composers final year, in a single evening, as Mr. Wosner himself has done of late.Scandal started in the Obama presidency and now ends in the Trump one. The show lived through all those political moments and yet now gives us an alternative of what could have been: the first woman president. And the relationship between Olivia and Mellie seems as important as the love triangle among Fitz, Olivia and Jake [played by Scott Foley] that weve struggled with throughout the show.

YOUNG At the outset, it was always a palpable undercurrent of how close they could have been; were not just resigned to Olivia as [the presidents] mistress. To watch women build up women is also very important in terms of representation on television. You get two women in a scene and if theyre not talking about a man or fighting youre like, why are they even speaking to each other?

WASHINGTON What are they talking about? Were talking about world politics, bitches.

YOUNG America is so behind the rest of the world in terms of being comfortable with women in power. It just goes back to representation and they just arent used to it. Theyre used to power as for old, white men.

WASHINGTON Straight.

YOUNG Straight, old, white men.

GOLDWYN It is one of the things that I keep being surprised by, that suddenly something that made you very uncomfortable and felt very strange and not normal becomes normal in a way.

Shondas creating a world for the audience in which the Republican chief of staff happens to be gay and has a husband without mention. There was no mention of an interracial relationship until well into Season 2.WASHINGTON  The Senate on Thursday confirmed the Environmental Protection Agencys second-in-command, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who not only shares the deregulatory zeal of Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. chief, but also his doubtful view of climate science.

More notable, however, are the differences between the two men.

Unlike Mr. Pruitt, a Washington outsider caught in a swirl of controversy over his costly first-class travel and security spending, Mr. Wheeler is viewed as a low-key insider with years of Washington experience in the art of pursuing policy change while avoiding public distraction.

Deregulation is among President Trumps central campaign promises, and Mr. Pruitt has proposed ambitious rollbacks of rules governing clean air and water and fighting against climate change. But many of his initiatives have stumbled because of haste or imprecision, and at least six have been struck down by the courts. That makes the arrival of Mr. Wheelers expertise particularly consequential.

In fact, on Thursday Mr. Trump also sent new marching orders to the E.P.A., directing the agency to weaken or delay implementation of a variety of air pollution regulations, several of which have been priorities for industries for which Mr. Wheeler has lobbied in the past.Sharp is interested in how her characters are shaped by their fantasies of themselves (Cluny Brown takes herself to tea at the Ritz, scandalizing her uncle; Dolores Diver treasures her carved tortoiseshell comb and her signature Spanish shawl), but also how they react when those fantasies bring them up against reality. And this combination of interior life and social reality makes for what may be her greatest portrait in Britannia Mews, her novel of life on a disreputable London street from 1875 through to the Blitz; the book is a love letter to London and Londoners, and the central character, Adelaide, is an extraordinarily distinct creation, determined and definite in her passions, her actions and her ambitions.

Writing in the Book-of-the-Month Club News, the novelist John P. Marquand hailed the book as a fine novel along traditional lines in a beautifully cultivated style that is both polite and biting, and yet its whole complexion is devastatingly clear and modern.

As always, Sharp takes on potentially sentimental subjects with a tone which is almost shockingly unsentimental; never has the trope of a Victorian drawing master romancing his sheltered female pupil been rendered less romantic. Adelaides life unfolds in the sordid surroundings of Britannia Mews as a consequence; she pursues the hapless drawing teacher, despite his attempts to warn her off.

I drink like a fish, he tells her, and she assures him that she will put a stop to all that: You dont know what a very strong character I have. Shes wrong about being able to stop his drinking, but shes certainly right about her own character. Its one of Sharps great talents, creating female characters of toughness and complexity. She gave us profound  and sympathetic  portraits of mothers who feel notably unmoved by motherhood, for example, and realistic stories of women deeply motivated by money, by art, and yes, by sex, even as she created other gentler women in counterpoint, more daunted by convention, but sometimes tougher in the end.

Margery Sharp is sometimes compared to Barbara Pym and to Elizabeth Taylor, and there are certainly overlaps (the retreat for Anglican gentlewomen in Summer Visits, her last novel, published in 1977, seems like it could be peopled with Barbara Pym characters), but Sharp has a touch all her own when it comes to taking on social class, sex and its consequences, and the changes that the 20th century brought to both those arenas, most especially for women. She remained, always, both polite and biting, looking at the intoxications and delusions of life and love with wit and clear-eyed sympathy. And if you try a novel and you like it, you can experience the delightful certainty that there are more than two dozen of them waiting, without even counting the mice.

Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York TimesWhat A Higher Loyalty does give readers are some near-cinematic accounts of what Comey was thinking when, as hes previously said, Trump demanded loyalty from him during a one-on-one dinner at the White House; when Trump pressured him to let go of the investigation into his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn; and when the president asked what Comey could do to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation.

Image

There are some methodical explanations in these pages of the reasoning behind the momentous decisions Comey made regarding Hillary Clintons emails during the 2016 campaign  explanations that attest to his nonpartisan and well-intentioned efforts to protect the independence of the F.B.I., but that will leave at least some readers still questioning the judgment calls he made, including the different approaches he took in handling the bureaus investigation into Clinton (which was made public) and its investigation into the Trump campaign (which was handled with traditional F.B.I. secrecy).

A Higher Loyalty also provides sharp sketches of key players in three presidential administrations. Comey draws a scathing portrait of Vice President Dick Cheneys legal adviser David S. Addington, who spearheaded the arguments of many hard-liners in the George W. Bush White House; Comey describes their point of view: The war on terrorism justified stretching, if not breaking, the written law. He depicts Bush national security adviser and later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as uninterested in having a detailed policy discussion of interrogation policy and the question of torture. He takes Barack Obamas attorney general Loretta Lynch to task for asking him to refer to the Clinton email case as a matter, not an investigation. (Comey tartly notes that the F.B.I. didnt do matters.) And he compares Trumps attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to Alberto R. Gonzales, who served in the same position under Bush, writing that both were overwhelmed and overmatched by the job, but Sessions lacked the kindness Gonzales radiated.

Comey is what Saul Bellow called a first-class noticer. He notices, for instance, the soft white pouches under Trumps expressionless blue eyes; coyly observes that the presidents hands are smaller than his own but did not seem unusually so; and points out that he never saw Trump laugh  a sign, Comey suspects, of his deep insecurity, his inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor of others, which, on reflection, is really very sad in a leader, and a little scary in a president.

During his Senate testimony last June, Comey was boy-scout polite (Lordy, I hope there are tapes) and somewhat elliptical in explaining why he decided to write detailed memos after each of his encounters with Trump (something he did not do with Presidents Obama or Bush), talking gingerly about the nature of the person I was interacting with. Here, however, Comey is blunt about what he thinks of the president, comparing Trumps demand for loyalty over dinner to Sammy the Bulls Cosa Nostra induction ceremony  with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a made man.

Throughout his tenure in the Bush and Obama administrations (he served as deputy attorney general under Bush, and was selected to lead the F.B.I. by Obama in 2013), Comey was known for his fierce, go-it-alone independence, and Trumps behavior catalyzed his worst fears  that the president symbolically wanted the leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to come forward and kiss the great mans ring. Comey was feeling unnerved from the moment he met Trump. In his recent book Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff wrote that Trump invariably thought people found him irresistible, and felt sure, early on, that he could woo and flatter the F.B.I. director into positive feeling for him, if not outright submission (in what the reader takes as yet another instance of the presidents inability to process reality or step beyond his own narcissistic delusions).

After he failed to get that submission and the Russia cloud continued to hover, Trump fired Comey; the following day he told Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office that firing the F.B.I. director  whom he called a real nut job  relieved great pressure on him. A week later, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel overseeing the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.After a chemical attack in Syria on Saturday that killed dozens and is suspected to have been launched by the Assad government, President Trump is warning that the United States may strike back. These books will get you up to speed on the seven-year war and highlight those most affected: the countrys people.

Image

THE SYRIAN REBELLION

By Fouad Ajami

240 pp. Hoover Institution Press. (2012)

In this book, the Middle East scholar Ajami provides crucial historical context for the uprisings in 2011, which precipitated the present war in Syria. Ajami predicted that the countrys complicated history would prove difficult to reconcile. Syria is a religiously and ethnically diverse country composed primarily of Sunni Arabs and a sizable Christian minority, but since the 1970s, it has been ruled by the Assad family, who are members of a Shiite sect called Alawites that make up 12 percent of the population. Hafez al-Assad established a brutal regime from the onset of his reign, and a pivotal moment occurred in 1982, when he squashed an Islamic insurgency in the city of Hama, killing an estimated 30,000 people. When he died in 2000, his son, Bashar, inherited the throne. Bashars regime has been no less repressive and much more decadent; his military has killed so many people that the United Nations has had to stop counting. Our reviewer called Ajamis an elegant and edifying book, written on the fly, by an observer who retains an almost loving intimacy with his subject.

Image

NO TURNING BACK

Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria

By Rania Abouzeid

378 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. (2018)You and your co-founders started a company in your dorm room thats grown to be one of the biggest and most successful businesses in the entire world. While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it may not have matured. I think its time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things. Who do you think owns an individuals presence online? Who owns their virtual you? Is it you or is it them? Congresswoman, I believe that everyone owns their own content online. And thats the first line of our terms of service, if you read it, says that. After this new algorithm was implemented, that there was a tremendous bias against conservative news and content and a favorable bias towards liberal content. Was there a directive to put a bias in and first are you aware of this bias that many people have looked at and analyzed and seen?  Congressman, this is a really important question. There is absolutely no directive in any of the changes that we make to have a bias in anything that we do. Well, you have a long history of growth and success. But you also have a long list of apologies. In 2003, it started at Harvard. I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect. 2006: We really messed this one up. 2007: We simply did a bad job. I apologize for it. This is proof to me that self-regulation simply does not work. Are you aware of other third-party information mishandlings that have not been disclosed? Congresswoman, no, although we are currently going through the process of investigating every single app So youre not sure? that had access to a large amount of data. All right, but I only have four minutes. Was your data included in the data sold to the malicious third parties? Your personal data? Yes. If you dont, youre not listening to us on the phone, who is, and do you have specific contracts with these companies that will provide data that is being acquired verbally through our phones or now through things like Alexa or other products? Congressman, were not collecting any information verbally on the microphone, and we dont have contracts with anyone else who is. Facebook has detailed profiles on people who have never signed up for Facebook. Yes or no? Congressman, in general, we collect data from people have not signed up for Facebook for security purposes to prevent the kind of scraping that you were just referring to. As C.E.O., you didnt know some key facts. You didnt know about major court cases regarding your privacy policies against your company. You didnt know that the F.T.C. doesnt have fining authority and that Facebook could not that have received fines for the 2011 consent order. You didnt know what a shadow profile was.President Assads political and media advisor Wednesday told Lebanon-based media that her county is set to confront the US and its European allies amid their threats to strike the war-torn country following death of dozens of people in Eastern Ghouta following an alleged gas bomb attack by the embattled regime.

Buthaina Shaaban pointed out that Syria in the current state of affairs is far prepared than ever.

We are not afraid of war and we will be prepared for it if it happens, Buthaina Shaaban told Lebanons Hezbollah-affiliated Al Mayadeen TV station.

The regime of Bashar al-Assad has survived an internal conflict, which broke out 7 years ago. The Syrian regime has managed to keep head above water thanks to Russias intervention in 2015.

The prospect of confrontation has risen following threats of direct clash between the US and Russia Wednesday.

President Donald Trump promised smart response to Russia after the Russian military vowed to shoot down US missiles and launchers.

Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! Trump tweeted.

You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

US allies in Europe mainly France and the UK are reportedly mulling plans to hit the Syrian regimes military facilities in the wake of the gas attack, which killed over 40 people in the rebel enclave.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May has called for a cabinet snap consultation in a bid to seek her government approval.

Shaaban said Syria and Russia pointed out that the two allies are prepared for US intervention.She liked the idea, but found no model for the types of stories she wanted to read: funny tales about the sort of children she knew. Years later, after working as a librarian herself, she changed that.

Her first book, Henry Huggins (1950), introduced contemporary characters like Henry, Ramona Quimby and other residents of the fictional Klickitat Street. She dramatized everyday problems in a humorous style, without condescension.

She lives in Northern California and gave this zinging interview for her 100th birthday.

Karen Zraick contributed reporting.

_____



Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online.

Check out this page to find a Morning Briefing for your region. (In addition to our European edition, we have Australian, Asian and U.S. editions.)

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What would you like to see here? Contact us at europebriefing@nytimes.com.There are about a billion $2 bills out there, 3 percent of the total volume of notes. More are occasionally printed.

For his part, your Back Story writer recently received one in change at a newsstand and opted to pay it forward by spending it.

Penn Bullock contributed reporting.

_____

Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online. Sign up here to get it by email in the Australian, Asian, European or American morning. You can also receive an Evening Briefing on U.S. weeknights.

And our Australia bureau chief offers a weekly letter adding analysis and conversations with readers.

Browse our full range of Times newsletters here.

What would you like to see here? Contact us at asiabriefing@nytimes.com.SACRAMENTO  How do you get a landlord to endorse a proposal to limit rent increases?

Yong Her, a 39-year-old bookkeeper, was one of 40 or so organizers who considered the question on a recent afternoon. The group had gathered in a conference room here to discuss strategies for getting people of various backgrounds, incomes and occupations to sign a petition to put a rent-control measure before Sacramentos voters.

It was one small scene in what is shaping up as an epic battle on the state and city levels to combat Californias affordable-housing crisis. Pitting a rising tenants rights movement against apartment owners, the fight will consume tens of millions of dollars worth of organizing effort and political advertising before the November election.

If the Sacramento initiative were to make the ballot and ultimately pass, rent increases would be capped at 5 percent a year. That kind of law is a fairly easy sell in higher-density apartment complexes where everyone is a renter. But organizers need 50,000 signatures for the measure to be certified. That means they have to comb the city in search of registered voters willing to sign  and they arent going to reach their goal, let alone pass the law, unless they persuade homeowners and small landlords to join together with tenants.

So before organizers like Ms. Her left that evening to go door to door with bags full of pens and petitions, they watched while their colleagues play-acted some scenarios. The hardest one was getting a landlord to sign. The man playing the landlord was skeptical (Stop right there  Im a landlord). The man playing the organizer was gentle and persistent (Its just to put it up for a vote).CHENNAI, India  Over the last decade, India has been the worlds largest importer of aircraft, ships and other military gear, most of it from Russia.

It is a dependence that the Indian government is eager to shed  and the United States wants to help.

In fits and starts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been trying to build up a homegrown defense industry that can supply more of Indias needs and even export weapons to other nations. The government in New Delhi is encouraging foreign defense companies seeking contracts from India to partner with local firms and share technology with them.

The Trump administration has supported Indias efforts to get American technology, hoping to strengthen ties with a country it considers a key counterweight to China in the region, while diminishing Russias influence. Major American defense contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin are also gung-ho, seeing the chance to win billions of dollars in business from a country that has historically chosen Russian and European suppliers.A Colorado civic group is spearheading an effort to buy The Denver Post, which on Sunday excoriated its owner, a New York hedge fund, in its opinion section by saying, Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom.

The group, Together for Colorado Springs, said it had begun contacting potential investors in the state, who have so far pledged $10 million to the effort.

We believe that The Denver Post is vital for Colorado, John Weiss, the chairman of Together for Colorado Springs and the founder of The Colorado Springs Independent, a weekly newspaper, said in an interview. It should be owned by people in Denver, but it should also be owned by people statewide because its a statewide paper, not just a Denver paper.

The initiative follows a revolt at The Post that grew out of years of dissatisfaction with the papers owner, Alden Global Capital, which has cut costs and significantly shrunk the newsroom staff. Last month, the hedge fund ordered 30 jobs trimmed from a news-gathering operation that already had fewer than 100 journalists.WASHINGTON  A former Secret Service agent, with a background investigating the Gambino crime family, is serving as the chief of security for Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and has helped build an unusual and costly protective apparatus around him.

The agent, Pasquale Perrotta, has clashed  at least once physically  with top E.P.A. officials who challenged Mr. Pruitts spending, and has steered at least one E.P.A. security contract to a business associate, according to interviews with current and former senior agency officials.

Officially, Mr. Perrotta leads Mr. Pruitts protective detail, but he plays a far larger role at the E.P.A., offering security justifications for management, personnel and spending decisions, said the officials, who were not authorized to speak publicly and feared retribution. Mr. Perrottas outsize influence has placed him at the center of inquiries by the E.P.A. inspector generals office into excessive spending and possible violations of contracting rules by Mr. Pruitts administration, according to the senior officials.

When Mr. Pruitt and his team became convinced that his office might have been bugged by environmentalists or disgruntled career employees, Mr. Perrotta recommended that a sweep for surveillance devices be conducted by a company owned by Edwin Steinmetz, who is listed as a vice president at a security firm Mr. Perrotta operates on the side, the senior officials said. Mr. Perrotta also used agency funds to hire Italy-based private security guards to protect Mr. Pruitt during a trip to Italy, they said.WASHINGTON  Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, insisted on staying in luxury hotels that were costlier than allowed by government standards, while also pushing to fly on an airline not on the governments approved list so he could accrue more frequent flier miles, one of his top former deputies at agency has told congressional investigators.

The new allegations are detailed in a scathing six-page letter signed by two senators and three House lawmakers  all Democrats  whose staff members met this week with Kevin Chmielewski, who served as the E.P.A.s deputy chief of staff until he was removed from his post after raising objections to this and other spending.

In a separate letter on Thursday, Democratic lawmakers also demanded information about two previously unknown E.P.A. email addresses that have been used by Mr. Pruitt, asking if they were a tool for withholding public information from records requests. Their letter echoes a controversy in 2012, during the Obama administration, when Lisa P. Jackson, who was E.P.A. chief at the time, was criticized for a similar use of an undisclosed E.P.A. email account.

Jahan Wilcox, a spokesman for the E.P.A., said the agency had consistently searched all email addresses associated with Mr. Pruitt when responding to records requests. Of the allegations outlined to lawmakers by Mr. Chmielewski, he said, We will respond to members of Congress through the proper channel.Since then, Mr. Ponsot has stayed silent and hidden, as he put it in a recent interview in New York, when for the first time since his departure he spoke about his plans. In typical Ponsot fashion, he is going his own way.

First, Mr. Ponsot said, he will be making wine, both from grapes he purchases as a negociant and from vineyards that he owns. And he will be working with his son, Clement.

I was born above a cellar in Morey-St.-Denis and grew up among barrels and vats, working with my father, he said. I think I have some blood in my wine, not wine in my blood.

Mr. Ponsot, 63, lean and voluble with salt-and-pepper hair that once hung past his shoulders but is now trimmed neatly, said his new label would simply be Laurent Ponsot, which he said represented not an estate or a house, but simply an entity. The name was selected not out of vanity, he said, but as an assumption of responsibility for what is in the bottle.

Domaine Ponsot was best known for its grand cru Burgundies, in particular its Clos de la Roche, a vineyard named for the rockiness of its limestone soils  a character expressed, as the French wine writer Jacky Rigaux once put it, to the chagrin of pickaxes and ploughs but to the delight of the roots that can penetrate into the depths of the parent rock.Last February, Dawnn Karen, a brand consultant, therapist and instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, arrived at a Marcel Ostertag fashion show wearing five-inch studded stilettos and a black jumpsuit with a cape. This cape makes me feel like Superwoman, she said. Its that sense of control. She strutted off to pose for photographers at the shows entrance.

A self-described fashion psychologist, Ms. Karen pays close attention to the relationship between attire and attitude: not just how clothes make you look, but how they make you feel. She had come to the Ostertag show, she said, to analyze the psychology behind the collection.

When a model walked by in a silky pink blouse, Ms. Karen pronounced it an example of mood enhancement theory: how an item could amplify positive emotions. When another model floated past in an all-silver get-up, Ms. Karen said the outfit represented repetitious wardrobe complex, the tendency to use clothes for emotional comfort. Ostertag seems to be a paradox, she said after the show. I would label him and his collection as progressive-conservativism.

To be clear, none of these theories or labels can be found in any psychology textbook or D.S.M. manual. Ms. Karen, 29, developed them over the last few years, as she cultivated her academic career and her personal brand.Citlali Fabian grew up in Oaxaca, Mexico, immersed in her indigenous culture  and photography.

Her people, the Yalatec, have deep roots in Oaxaca, descending from the Zapotecs in the Sierra Juarez mountains. Ms. Fabian, at 29, cannot remember when cameras entered her life. Like her Zapotec traditions, they preceded her. Her father runs a photographic print shop, and she learned the mysteries of the darkroom at his knee, then filed them away as a teenager, lured by the possibilities of digital photography. But a love of the old processes called her back.

 Mestiza , Ms. Fabians current portrait project, uses classic photographic techniques to celebrate an enduring civilization steeped in history.

The moody, chiaroscuro portraits of indigenous women and girls from Oaxaca, taken with large format cameras, are both intimate and universal. While indigenous Oaxacan culture is celebrated by photographers from all over the world, Ms. Fabian wanted to capture its power. She turned to subjects she knew would make arresting images: her mother, cousins, nieces, friends.Saudi air defense system forces intercepted over capital city Riyadh a ballistic missile launched by Yemen Houthi rebels who have stepped up attacks against the kingdom in response to its military intervention in the poorest Arab country languishing in a three-year conflict.

At least three blasts were heard and three clouds of smoke were seen in the sky above the capital, reports say.

The unmanned missile, according the Saudi defense, was targeting Abha international airport in Asir province. A second ballistic missile over the southern city of Najran aiming at a civilian target was also intercepted in Jizan province.

The rebels news outlet Al Masirah TV earlier on took to Twitter to announce two attacks. The media said the missiles targeted the Abha international airport and Saudi oil company Aramco in Jizan.

The latest missile attack marks the fourth time in five months that missiles have been targeting the most powerful Sunni kingdom and its capital.

Saudi Arabia has been since 2015 leading a Pan-Arab coalition in Yemen in view of propping up President Mansour Hadi, himself flashed out from capital Sanaa by the Houthis.Mr. Schemidt noted that the judges make the decisions, not he, adding that the work of my colleague Juan is excellent and he certainly is also deserving to be in first place. When he took the photos he just saw it as one more journey in all the work I did in Venezuela, if anything.

I work the same way anywhere in the world that I have to work but this is my country and I am shocked what Venezuela has become, he said. I have family and friends still in Venezuela struggling with the effects of the crisis.

Jose Victor Salazar Balza, the subject of Mr. Schemidts winning image, recovered from 1st and 2nd degree burns.

Mr. Schemidts image also took first place for Spot News/Singles, while Mr. Prickett took first place in the General News Stories category for photos of the battle for Mosul in Iraq made for The New York Times. Mr. Ferguson won first in the People/Stories category for his portraits of teenage girls enlisted as suicide bombers by Boko Haram in Nigeria.The Cannes Film Festival on Thursday announced the lineup of movies vying for this years Palme dOr. No Netflix titles were among them: After a disagreement last year, Cannes toughened its competition rules, and the streaming service announced on Wednesday it was boycotting the festival entirely.

This years Palme dOr contenders include Spike Lees BlacKkKlansman, about an African-American police officer who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan, and Le Livre dImage (The Image Book) by Jean-Luc Godard, the pioneering filmmaker of the French new wave. Also getting its world premiere at Cannes, though outside the official competition, is Solo: A Star Wars Story, a spinoff from the franchise, directed by Ron Howard. The festival runs May 8-19, and the Australian actress Cate Blanchett is the chairwoman of the main jury.

Last year, two Netflix movies were in the running for the top prize. But a rule now requires all competition titles to be released in French movie theaters. France protects its film industry through a system of subsidies and regulations, and one regulation forbids cinema releases from being streamed in the country on services such as Netflix for three years.

At Thursdays Paris news conference, the festivals artistic director, Thierry Fremaux, said he had asked to include two Netflix films this year: One in competition, which he did not name, and the other out of competition, the Orson Welles movie The Other Side of the Wind, which was unfinished at the time of his death and only completed in 2018. Mr. Fremaux said it was a shame that the Welles film in particular was being kept out of the festival, as the director had been a Palme dOr winner and a jury president.These kinds of juxtapositions  the image of indolent whites served by enslaved blacks  function much like the doubled voice in the novel. Nothing if not dialectical, Zama is filled with such meaningful oppositions: freedom and captivity; open, bright skies and closed, gloomy homes. Ms. Martels cool approach fits di Benedettos story and can be just as devastating, especially when she abruptly flips drama into comedy. In one scene, as Diego receives humiliating news from a superior, his eyes and voice filling with emotion, she sets loose a llama that  after it slowly makes its way to the front of the shot to stand next to him  turns the moment absurd and Diego along with it.

Mr. Gimenez Cacho, who appears in nearly every scene, anchors Zama beautifully in an expressive yet reserved performance that pulls you in intellectually rather than emotionally. (Early on, when he stands in profile to the camera with his tricorn and aquiline nose, he suggests a misplaced George Washington.) This is crucial to how the movie works, particularly because it is told from the point of view of the colonizer, not the colonized. Ms. Martel is exploring the past, how we got here and why, but she is more interested in relations of power than in individual psychological portraits. The monstrous must be humanized to be understood, which doesnt mean it deserves our tears.

Europe has doomed the colonized, and it will doom the colonizers. With their stiff manners and unsuitable clothing, Diego and the rest of the colonialists seem perpetually ill at ease. At other times they seem deranged, delirious. In Zama, their wigs keep slipping; their humanity has already slid away. One man wants to enslave Indians to regain his status. Diego himself may be highly placed in the outpost, but his standing will always be suspect. As an Americano, he is caught  or perhaps lost  between the Old World and the New. He belongs to neither. And so Don Diego de Zama waits and he waits, marooned in a threatening, unwelcoming world that he himself helped create.Of all the figures due for cinematic canonization on the centennial of World War Is conclusion, a dog named Stubby might not seem like the obvious choice. But Stubby was famous  the first dog given rank in the United States Armed Forces, according to the Smithsonian.

Also, Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero is a computer-animated film. Stubbys feats of derring-do would upstage the human interest even if those humans didnt look eerily round and smooth.

Before his heroism, Stubby was a stray from New Haven, Conn., who joined in training exercises with the man who adopted him, J. Richard Conroy (voiced by Logan Lerman), and proved adept at the regimen, even managing a canine version of a salute.Showing the chemistry between these two characters in the boy-and-girl-fall-hard scenes is no problem for Mr. Wenders. Many of his pictures, including some of his greatest, are, to put it bluntly, swoony hymns to hetero-normativity. (See, for example, the finale of his 1987 Wings of Desire.) Theres a scene in this film in which James and Danielle chat in a wooded area, and the way Mr. Wenders frames the characters, the shadows of tree branches falling on their attractive faces, and how he makes the sound of a light wind prominent under their conversation, casts an intimate spell. Which is what cinema is supposed to do, arguably.

Unfortunately the director does not succeed nearly as well in other areas of his endeavor. Once the lovers are separated, their parallel stories are intercut to increasingly diffuse effect. James, having lied to Danielle about his destination  he tells her hes going to Kenya  is cut off from the outside world upon being captured. So Danielle, on a research vessel about to embark on a monumental journey, gets to be the moony one, constantly looking at her smartphone as James fails to text. (The vessel is called LAtalante in the movie  Mr. Wenderss nod to the famous Jean Vigo film by that name.)

The imbalance is arguably sexist, but it also has the effect of skewing all the films metaphors so as to render them close to meaningless. Mr. McAvoys man of action (though one whos almost immediately stymied) is hardly the quintessential Wenders protagonist  that guy is the sulky fellow alone in a room with his stereo, muttering along to the Kinks Too Much on My Mind (from the classic 1977 The American Friend).

Mr. Wenderss camera finds more affinity for Ms. Vikander, even as the narrative lists toward the mounting calamities in Somalia, and Jamess struggles to survive them. The movie feints in the direction of confronting horrific geopolitical realities, but theres a specter of sentimentality hovering above the proceedings, waiting to smother everything in sight. The movies final images could be characterized as signaling a failure of nerve, except that would presume that Submergence had any real nerve to begin with.Dealing mainly with family disputes like spousal abuse, divorce and alimony claims, these courts are governed by Islamic law that can vary in interpretation from region to region. Further complicating matters are chauvinistic cultural traditions that can overrule religious dictates, resulting in adjudications that are fraught and combative.

Undismayed, Ms. al-Faqih presides over a bustling courtroom in the West Bank (intimately filmed by the cinematographer Amber Fares, who directed the warmhearted documentary Speed Sisters). The proceedings are vexingly vague, serving mainly to highlight a personality at once firm and compassionate, sharp-witted and immune to male privilege. A visit with Ms. al-Faqihs parents  who put almost all of their 12 of their children through college  is brief but revealing, as is footage of the judge educating a womens group on their rights. In countries where domestic violence is viewed as a shameful private matter, and honor-killing excuses can be used to deflect a murder charge, women need all the help they can get.Despite the unassuming exterior of Salon G, a barbershop on Sullivan Street in the Village, you could write a dissertation about the place. And its quite possible that someone already has.

Its located a block from Washington Square Park, the center of the New York University campus, and more than half its clientele is faculty or staff and their families.

Not so much the students, said Giovanni Ianniciello, the 70-year-old owner and G of Salon G. Which is pretty much fine with Maria Bermudez, Giuseppe Lupo,  who everybody knows as Joe  Lorraine Dixon, and the other people who work there.

The students, after all, leave for holidays and the summer and are gone after a few years. But the faculty and staff keep coming back.On a recent weekday, Gino Francesconi, the halls archivist, took me on a behind-the-scenes tour to answer this question. We started backstage, where we rode a service elevator to the sixth floor. We then passed through a few rooms, each littered with cases for tubas, trumpets and trombones, until we reached a door that was labeled, Hard Hat Required. Mr. Francesconi reached into his pocket and fished out a sizable ring of keys.

Any time an archivist has to unlock something, you know youre in for a treat.

The key clicked and the door opened. The first thing I noticed was the doors 5.5-inch thickness, designed to keep noise from entering the hall from a nearby practice room.

As we crossed into near-darkness, Mr. Francesconi turned to me. You have to walk very quietly, he whispered. We were now directly above the stage, where a high-school orchestra from Georgia was rehearsing for a concert that evening.

We tiptoed along a metal catwalk, which turned at bizarre angles and had stairs in seemingly random places. At one point, we had to step over a steel beam, and then do the limbo under a duct vent  all while trying our best to remain silent.

Mr. Francesconi pointed out the graffiti on many of the beams and poles; scrawling your name up here is a longtime tradition of the halls stagehands.It was so cold in January in Aseelah Diamonds apartment at Fiorentino Plaza, a public housing development in East New York, that she, her husband and their three daughters all piled into one bed every night to keep warm.

The radiators did not work, the carbon monoxide detector sounded an alarm when the family turned the oven on for heat, and if they tried to run more than one space heater at a time, the electricity would shut off.

The cold was unbearable, Ms. Diamond said. My daughters would bring the blankets from their rooms and everyone would be in the bed like a big burrito.The inclusion of the nuclear subsidy, though, has dampened enthusiasm among some environmental groups for the package of measures, exposing the rift among those who view nuclear energy as inherently clean  in that it has no greenhouse gas emissions  and those who view the industry as a threat because of safety, regulation and waste disposal issues.

Mr. Murphy is wholly in favor of nuclear energy.

I believe the biggest bridge we have to our clean energy future are the nukes and, not to mention, the thousands of jobs they support, he said.

The ambitious goals set forth in the renewable energy bill have caused concern among some environmental groups usually opposed to nuclear energy. But the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been supportive of New Jerseys efforts toward renewable energy, has said it will not oppose the nuclear subsidy bill.

We dont want to see the abrupt closure of nuclear plants, because if you close them tomorrow, we know that theyll just be replaced by more fossil fuels, said Dale Bryk, senior strategic director at the defense council. You have to have an orderly transition plan that involves scaling up renewables first, so that when the nuclear plants close, theyre replaced with clean energy.

Indeed, environmental groups are increasingly being forced to grapple with the climate consequences of retiring nuclear plants. Across the United States, there are still 99 nuclear power plants in operation that supply one-fifth of the nations electricity without generating any carbon dioxide emissions. Six reactors have closed since 2013 and more than a dozen more are scheduled to retire by 2025 unless states decide otherwise.

New Jerseys nuclear subsidy bill is similar to programs passed recently in New York and Illinois, where the Legislature would give the nuclear power plants financial credit for the carbon-free electricity they produce. Every three years, the companies that operate these reactors will have to open their books and show that they need the subsidies to stay operational.

In New Jersey, the Oyster Creek nuclear reactor is expected to close, but the subsidies would benefit the remaining three.US President Donald Trump has lifted the controversial travel ban imposed on Chad about six months ago.

According to the White House, Chad is an important and valuable counterterrorism partner of the United States, and has shown willingness to make improvements in immigration and border management.

Chadian foreign minister, Cherif Mahamat Zene, welcomed the lifting of the ban and hoped the move will further strengthen the strategic partnership and cooperation between the two countries.

Citizens from seven other countries are still banned from entering the US. They include Somalia, Libya, Iran, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and Venezuela.

The Trump administration imposed the ban on Chad last year arguing that the Central African nation does not adequately share public-safety and terrorism-related information. The order also cites terrorist elements active within Chad or in the surrounding region, such as Boko Haram, ISIS, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Making America Safe is my number one priority. We will not admit those into our country we cannot safely vet, Trump tweeted in September.

There have been numerous attacks by armed elements in the Lake Chad region throughout 2016 and 2017, where the terrorist group Boko Haram remains active. Ndjamena is home to the headquarters of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) formed to tackle Boko Haram.The importance of having naloxone available was made clear just last week, when the United States surgeon general, Dr. Jerome M. Adams, issued a national advisory recommending that more Americans carry it and learn to use it  the first advisory from the surgeon general in more than a decade.

Naloxone comes in either an injection or a nasal spray commonly known by the brand name Narcan. New York City officials are engaged in what the citys health commissioner calls a full-court press to get the drug to the public, and since last July, more than 70,000 naloxone kits have been distributed to the police, health care providers, homeless shelters and community-based organizations. When the mayor recently announced the city would spend an additional $22 million a year on anti-opioid initiatives, bringing annual funding for its HealingNYC program to $60 million, he said some of the extra funds would go toward increased training and distribution of naloxone.

But that did not mean pharmacies should be neglected, Mr. Asher said. People might go to pharmacies who would never go into a needle exchange, he said. If they were told they needed a prescription or had to wait for the drug, they could grow discouraged and might not have it when they needed it. The consequence?

Its the loss of a loved one, he said. Plain and simple.

Olivia Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, called the situation unacceptable and said that City Hall had instructed the health department to immediately contact all the participating pharmacies.

The drug was hardest to find outside Manhattan, The Times found. This winter, a woman in her 40s named Rebecca tried to buy naloxone in Brooklyn after learning that a friend was bingeing on prescription painkillers. (Rebecca asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her friends privacy.) Ill just throw it in my work bag and Ill have it wherever I go, she recalled thinking.

She pulled up the citys map on her phone, and a number of pharmacies in Downtown Brooklyn came up. At the first Duane Reade she visited, when she asked for naloxone, I had to repeat it a couple of times, she said. They were nice enough but they said they didnt have any in stock.The complaint sketches the outlines of a tale worthy of a noir novel. It also deepens the mystery of the carefully executed heist, shrouding the identities of two of the players, in part because the Art Crime Team, based in Washington, D.C., is still investigating the theft and trying to find more of the stolen art, according to Mr. Hess, his supervisor and the prosecutor handling the case.

The document reveals that one of the thieves  who has a degree in fine arts and is identified only as Person 1  had worked in the Hellers apartment building. Several people with knowledge of the case said he was the superintendent or the assistant superintendent. A few years after the theft he had been arrested and convicted on federal charges that he committed similar crimes: stealing artworks from other apartment buildings where he worked, according to the document.

The complaint tracks his ill-fated effort to sell the Chagall, complete with a no-honor-among-thieves falling-out he had with a co-conspirator.

Person 1 became frustrated in his own efforts to unload the painting, and in the late 1980s or early 1990s he sought the assistance of the man who is now 72 years old, who was to serve as a fence and who planned to sell it through his Bulgarian organized crime connections.

The fence found a potential buyer. But then the man identified as Person 1 sought to cut him out of the deal. Thats when the fence stole the painting from Person 1 and stored it for years in the attic.

In about 2011, he tried to sell it to a gallery owner in Washington, D.C., according to the complaint. But the owner said he could not display the painting for sale without paperwork showing ownership or provenance, or a certificate from the Chagall committee, which controls the artists estate.

At that time, the gallery owner recognized the artwork as the same painting that had been brought to him in 1989 by an unidentified man, who also had no provenance or proof of ownership, and with whom the gallery owner also declined to do business.That would be a risk for the Working Families Party, too. If its nominee does not win at least 50,000 votes in the general election, it would lose its guaranteed spot on the ballot in races across the state.

Her campaign declined to comment for this story.

Four years ago, the fight for the Working Families nomination was among the most contentious moments in the contest between Mr. Cuomo and his primary challenger, Zephyr Teachout. Mr. Cuomo ended up winning the partys backing, with the help of Mayor Bill de Blasio. The governor recorded a tape  now known widely as the hostage video  making a series of promises that included helping Democrats win back the State Senate, a vow many activists felt he quickly reneged upon.

Bruised egos and raw feelings still remain from that episode.

I think its going to be much harder for the Cuomo faction to seduce us this year, said Sandy Oxford, a Working Families committee member. In 2014, she said she arrived as a supporter of Ms. Teachout but flipped to Mr. Cuomo after his concessions.

There was other fallout. Some labor unions allied with Mr. Cuomo withdrew from Working Families because of the process.

The other unions left because they felt the way the party asserted itself in selecting the governor as a candidate was not giving good consideration to the unions, Mr. Figueroa said. As for the possibility of his own union quitting this year if Ms. Nixon wins the endorsement, he said, Thats a decision that we have to make internally, whether we are going to decide to leave the party or not.

Even before Ms. Nixon had emerged as a possible challenger, top aides to Mr. Cuomo, including his executive secretary, Melissa DeRosa, had begun reaching out to W.F.P. state committee members in February for a series of listening sessions.

It was pretty clear what we were all doing in the room and why, said Blair Goodman, a state committee member who attended one such meeting in Kingston. I suspect its sunk in to someone, perhaps Ms. DeRosa or some other senior staff, that we have a state committee and we do as our conscience guides us.Peter Grunberg, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist who discovered how to store vast amounts of data by manipulating the magnetic and electrical fields of thin layers of atoms, making possible devices like the iPad and the smartphone, has died at 78.

His death was announced by the Juelich Research Center in Juelich, Germany, where he was a longtime researcher. The center did not provide any other details.

Dr. Grunberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007 with Albert Fert of the Universite Paris-Sud in Orsay. They had independently made the same discovery  of an effect known as giant magnetoresistance, in which tiny changes in a magnetic field can result in huge changes in electrical resistance.

The effect is at the heart of modern gadgets that record music, video or other data as dense magnetic patchworks of ones and zeros  that is to say, electronic tablets and smartphones, the GPS devices in our pockets and handbags.Pierre Sioufi, who became an unlikely hero of Egypts 2011 revolution by opening his sprawling apartment and balcony overlooking Tahrir Square in Cairo and turning it into a refuge for the protesters encamped there, would probably have dismissed his own death  if he could still speak to us  as a laughably meaningless detail.

Mr. Sioufi, who died of cancer on March 4 at 56, was a big, kindhearted bohemian who played down his own role in a revolt that he did all he could to abet and encourage. He had spent his life dabbling in the arts and had no interest in Egypts frozen political scene until the kids  his words  started risking their lives on the streets on Jan. 25, 2011.

Pierre, as he was known to all, opened his doors to protect them from police retaliation, and when Al Jazeera, the satellite channel, asked to put a camera on his roof, he accepted with one condition: It must be on 24 hours a day.Robert T. Buck, a visionary art historian who revived the Brooklyn Museums original ambitions of being as celebrated in Manhattan as it was around the world, died on March 30 in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 79.

The cause was lung cancer, his son Thomas said.

When he arrived in Brooklyn in 1983 from Buffalo, where he had run the Albright-Knox Art Gallery for 10 years, Mr. Buck was hailed as an evangelistic outlander who was passionately devoted to 20th-century art.

As the new director, he soon began harnessing the buoyancy generated by the Brooklyn Bridge centennial jubilee that year to kindle a renaissance at what was then a sleepy institution in the shadow of the great museums of Manhattan and often overlooked by fellow New Yorkers there.

Robert A. Levinson, who was chairman of museums trustees when Mr. Buck was hired, expressed his frustration at the time, telling The Times, Were better known around the country and world.To the Editor:

Re U.K. Universities Face Uncertainty as Brexit Looms (Learning section, nytimes.com, April 5):

Brexit is creating uncertainty for British universities that is acutely felt by our European students and staff members. But our global vision remains clear.

Imperial College London and other British universities are assertively campaigning in Westminster and Brussels for policies that support talent mobility and access to European research programs.

Over the last decade, Imperial scholars collaborated on more than 60,000 research papers with European peers. We want that figure to grow. That is why we started a seed fund after the Brexit vote, independent of government. It is supporting scores of Imperial academics European collaborations in fields like data privacy, particle physics and cancer prevention.

We have started similar seed funds with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and with Tsinghua University in Beijing as our global ambitions grow. Imperial recently opened an international mathematics laboratory in London with CNRS, Frances research agency. It cements the status of our two countries as global leaders in mathematics, artificial intelligence and aligned disciplines.Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. The gap between its intelligence and operational capabilities and the way it could have employed these capabilities to help the Syrians was starkly illustrated this week: On Sunday, Mr. Assad appears to have once again used poison gas on his own citizens. He knew that the international community would discover this, but it was more urgent for him to defeat the rebels in the Damascus suburb of Douma before a cease-fire agreement. He also knew very well, based on his experience in recent years, that his war crimes would be likely to go without serious punishment.

One day after that gas attack, Israel did carry out a strike in Syria. But the operation had nothing to do with the atrocity in Douma; its timing was coincidental. Israel struck a Syrian air base, T4, at which various aircraft were reportedly operated by Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. According to reports, seven Iranians were killed.

Israel has several red lines, which it is not prepared to allow to be crossed, including the transfer of sophisticated weapons or chemical weapons to Hezbollah, Avigdor Lieberman, the minister of defense, told a session of the Knessets Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in December 2016. Then he added: We have no interest in intervening in Syrias civil war.

Israel is not alone. Much of the responsibility for what is happening in Syria can be laid on the doorstep of the United States, which has largely stood by as hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been massacred. President Barack Obama decided not to act against Mr. Assad, even when the Syrian president crossed the red lines that Mr. Obama himself had drawn. President Trump has continued down this path, apart from a token salvo of Tomahawk missiles a year ago, which certainly did not deter Mr. Assad. The United States now seems poised to strike once more, but will it do enough to change the Syrian presidents calculus?

Years ago, Israel could easily have forced Mr. Assads military, stretched to its utmost trying to suppress the rebellion, to halt at least some of its actions against civilians. The Israeli armed forces could have stopped the Syrian Army or at least coerced it into declaring a safe zone for refugees with a no-fly zone over it. The claims that this would have entailed a complex or even impossible military operation are rebuffed by the facts: Israel has carried out hundreds of attacks in Syria during this same period.

Syria, in most cases, did not even attempt to defend itself from these attacks. Mr. Assads generals seem fully aware of their militarys inferiority. They also knew that by responding with force, they would only bring on themselves more devastation. On Wednesday, a high-ranking Israeli source told me that if Iran were to attempt to retaliate for the attack on its base in Syria, both the Assad regime and Assad himself would vanish from the face of the earth. Imagine if a threat like this were uttered about saving innocent lives.

Israel has had excellent reasons for not intervening: Operating overtly in a neighboring country would appear as an intolerable interference in Arab affairs to the Arab world, which already hates Israel. And of course, Israel has numerous other security challenges. Moreover, since the West neglected Syria for so long, the situation has grown far more complex: Iran, Hezbollah and Russia are in control. Any Israeli operation now would be far more complicated and would have to be carried out in cooperation with the United States.

The arguments against an Israeli action are based on weighty considerations. But were there not weighty considerations in the 1940s that stopped the Allies from coming to the aid of Europes Jews? And if these explanations were not legitimate then  and we know now that they were not  what about today? What is happening in Syria is not the same as the gas chambers of Auschwitz. But does Israel not have an added obligation, over and above that of the other countries, to do something for nations facing genocide and war crimes, especially when they are right on its northern border, and it has proved several times that it is able to do so?In Brazil, where independent judges have exercised a direct impact on the electoral process, have they not opened the way to extremist rabble-rousers like the conservative candidate Jair Bolsonaro, while simultaneously making the country ungovernable?

And are the calls for an internationally supported truth commission on corruption and human rights violations in Mexico a symptom of civil society being fed up with interminable scandals, or a menace to the countrys eternally weak justice system?

There are no simple answers to these questions. Any flat-out judgment, in either direction, is bound to be schematic and skewed. The facts on the ground are that with two or three exceptions  Uruguay, Chile and perhaps Costa Rica  no country in Latin America has ever been spared massive doses of corruption. Standing institutions alone have never functioned effectively either in wiping it out, diminishing it noticeably or taking action against impunity for corruption or human rights violations. Regarding the latter plague, for which the region has a dismal reputation even today, international cooperation of one sort or another has proved indispensable for bringing criminals to justice or at least naming and shaming them for generations to come. The best example lies probably in Guatemala, but also in Argentina, where former presidents of the Junta were indicted and jailed for human rights violations.

There appears to be no choice but to place any attempt to deal legally, democratically and effectively with the lack of punishment above other considerations: institution-building, national sovereignty, political stability, short-term economic performance. Developments over the past few years in all the regions countries are positive, hopeful ones. In the end, they will strengthen civil society, representative democracy, the rule of law and economic progress. They do not weaken institutions; they help to transform them and make them function.

Similarly, taking corruption to a supranational level that must be addressed through international cooperation is not an abdication of sovereignty; it is a desirable change.

In fact, this is perhaps the most imaginative and productive route for the fight against corruption. It is, by definition, a transnational phenomenon: People who steal money hide it far from where they stole it.

The Odebrecht scandal, the Panama Papers, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States and the European Unions equivalent legislation are all indicators of the need and the tradition of taking on corruption beyond strictly national borders. The inclusion of an anti-corruption chapter in the new Nafta currently being negotiated by Mexico, the United States and Canada is a step in the right direction. But much more has to be done with regard to this supranational approach.Polls show that Mr. da Silva still commands by far more support than any other Brazilian politician. His imprisonment, though, makes it most unlikely  though not impossible  that he will be able to run for president in October. His defense team hopes that the Supreme Court will rule that jailing him before he had exhausted his appeals was unconstitutional, but other investigations against him are underway.

That leaves the field, and the future, wide open. Without Mr. da Silva, the left has begun to fragment. His successor as president, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached for breaking budget rules; her successor, Michel Temer, the current president, has been charged with corruption and his popularity rating is near zero. Left to its own devices, the Congress is not likely to support any anti-corruption drive. About a third of the legislators face legal challenges but are effectively protected by a Constitution under which high officials and politicians can be tried only in the high courts, which move slowly and rarely convict. For all the successes of Operation Car Wash, nothing has been done to fix the judicial system. The danger of a lurch to populism and political radicalization is obvious.

However painful and disheartening the fall of a charismatic and dynamic leader, and however exhausted Brazilians must be from the political havoc of recent years, this is not the time to give up. History shows that battling corruption takes years, but also that incremental successes do change norms. Judges like Sergio Moro, who has courageously led the prosecution in Operation Car Wash, have demonstrated that Brazil does have the institutions and means to take on even the most powerful  and most popular  of malefactors.

There are still six months to go before the national elections. They should be spent in search of a leader who can ensure that the gains against corruption are not setbacks for democracy.Chanting 50 years is too long, thousands of protesters took to the streets in Togo on Wednesday, against President Faure Gnassingbe and his government.

The series of demonstrations against the ruling dynasty have been unfolding for 8 months in the West African tiny nation.

A 14-member opposition coalition is calling for the resignation of Faure Gnassingbe. He succeeded in 2005 with the support of the army to his father, General Gnassingbe Eyadema, who led the country for 38 years. Faure has since been re-elected twice in elections highly disputed by the opposition.

A number of protesters were injured in the police crackdown. Security forces fired tear gas to disperse the demonstrators and a vehicle belonging to opposition leader Jean-Pierre Fabre was smashed, according to local media.

The government said the protest was a violation of the terms included in a mediation effort led by Ghanaian President Akufo-Addo.

The opposition wants a return to the countrys 1992 constitution, which set a two-term limit for presidents, applied retroactively, to prevent Gnassingbe from entering the presidential race in 2020 and 2025.

The political talks have hit a stalemate after the government proposed a two-term limit but without the retroactive clause.

The parties failed to agree on other crucial issues including the electoral reforms.Why did Paul Ryan choose not to run for re-election? What will be the consequences? Your guess is as good as mine  literally. I can speculate based on what I read in the papers, but so can you.

On the other hand, I do have some insight into how Ryan  who has always been an obvious con man, to anyone willing to see  came to become speaker of the House. And thats a story that reflects badly not just on Ryan himself, not just on his party, but also on self-proclaimed centrists and the news media, who boosted his career through their malfeasance. Furthermore, the forces that brought Ryan to a position of power are the same forces that have brought America to the edge of a constitutional crisis.

About Ryan: Incredibly, Im seeing some news reports about his exit that portray him as a serious policy wonk and fiscal hawk who, sadly, found himself unable to fulfill his mission in the Trump era. Unbelievable.

Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. Can anyone name a single instance in which his supposed concern about the deficit made him willing to impose any burden on the wealthy, in which his supposed compassion made him willing to improve the lives of the poor? Remember, he voted against the Simpson-Bowles debt commission proposal not because of its real flaws, but because it would raise taxes and fail to repeal Obamacare.The speaker of the Houses institutional responsibilities date to the founding of our country, but the modern speakership is focused largely on its political roles: protecting the House majority and advancing the partys policy goals. Success in one dimension  as Speaker Paul Ryans decision to retire reflects  does not always translate into success in the other.

In the context of protecting Republican control, theres little reason to think that Mr. Ryan would be a liability to Republicans prospects of holding a majority. A February Politico/Morning Consult poll put Mr. Ryans national favorability at an anemic 36 percent, but he has not been used  at least to this point  as a high-profile symbolic figure in Democrats campaigns to retake the House of Representatives. An analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project of roughly 300,000 House and Senate campaign ads aired since January 2017 indicates that unfavorable mentions of Mr. Ryan (1.9 percent of airings) were much less common than negative depictions of President Trump (6 percent) and the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi (9.9 percent).

The biggest factors affecting what happens in November, according to political science research, are not things like the speaker of the House but so-called fundamentals, like presidential approval, the state of the economy and the number of seats the majority party is defending. And the presidents party is almost always likely to take a beating; in only three midterm elections since 1934 has the party controlling the White House gained seats. Mr. Ryans retirement is not likely to break these trends.

So lets assume Mr. Ryan isnt an exceptional Republican political liability. What about on policy? We can assess his record by looking at what bills the speaker decided to consider in the House. For that, there are two dynamics to assess: One involves keeping things off the agenda that could split the party, even if they could pass the House with votes chipped in from the other party. As Dennis Hastert, a former speaker, put it, The job of the speaker is not to expedite legislation that runs counter to the wishes of the majority of the majority. The second dynamic entails advancing policies favored by his party.This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.

Paul Ryan cultivated an image that was false in some major ways. He pretended to be a budget hawk but consistently supported tax cuts that increased the deficit. He pretended to care about poverty but opposed many policies that had a record of reducing poverty. (Paul Krugman has long written about this hypocrisy, and Matthew Yglesias has a new piece on it in Vox.)

But I dont agree with the notion that Ryan is a complete hypocrite. Hes long displayed one admirable trait: A strain of honesty. He has acknowledged his desire to shrink popular programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Many other Republicans refuse to admit as much. They claim that the government can cut taxes deeply for the rich and that Medicare and Social Security can somehow magically remain exactly as they are. You saw Republicans in Congress and Trump administration officials make precisely this case last year, during the rush to pass a tax cut.At a time when history has never been so widely and blissfully ignored, and not just by our president, millions of Americans are busy spitting into DNA-collection tubes, scrutinizing old newspapers and tracing their family history back as far as they can via the website Ancestry and other services. Historians like me tend to scoff at these attempts. Who cares if youve just found out youre related to George Washingtons aunt? So what?

But that was before I learned of a relation of my own, a Connecticut woman from the early 19th century named Harriet Gold, and Ive gotten fairly obsessed with her.

In my defense, she is a figure of genuine historical interest. I included her in a book of history I was writing without even realizing she was, as the genealogists say, one of ours. She turns out to be the grandniece of the man who lies under an obelisk at the center of my family graveyard  the founder of our clan.

Now youre the one going  so? Heres the thing: Suddenly that book was no longer just by me. It was also about me. Two different books. History and genealogy, after all, are two radically divergent takes on the past. The first says, This matters. The second says, This matters to me.My grandma, one of the millions of Syrians who have been internally displaced by war, just turned 90 amid the news of the chemical attack last week in the city of Douma, on the outskirts of Damascus. A mother of six children, she once lived in what has become a scene of utter destruction in the region known as Ghouta. Appalling images of the chemical attacks now are making headlines as President Trump threatens retribution, with the risk of raising the carnage to a new level.



But the chemical attack is not what concerns many Syrians the most. The civil war, well into its seventh year, has made death part of daily life. And while the violence is often carried out with conventional weapons, the attack last week was not the first time weapons of mass destruction have been used in Syria.

What matters most to Syrians is the sheer scale of killing and displacement, not what weapon has been used to cause it. And what worries my grandma is whether she can ever return to live in her ruined house.

Recently, such a return seemed possible, thanks to a lull in violence after the Syrian regime made military advances in eastern Ghouta. The government forces now control many cities in those once very green and peaceful eastern suburbs of Damascus.Its been a busy week at the White House. President Trump promised to strike Syria and warned Russia against supporting Bashar al-Assad. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, also claimed that the president believes he has the legal authority to fire Robert S. Mueller, the special counsel leading the Russia investigation.I asked Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, about the link between Trumps roots in Queens and his policies as president. Sampson replied by email: My immediate reaction is that it was no accident that All in the Family was set in Queens, Sampson wrote, just as Steve Bannon used to say about his former boss, Dude, he is Archie Bunker.

Sampson pointed out the connection between Trumps roots in Queens and the themes he has stressed as a candidate and as president:

The explosion of immigration and the racial change in the makeup of Queens might have left an especially deep imprint, because his constant references to making America great again evoke an earlier time that was considerably less diverse. Indeed, building walls and stemming the tide of such change seems to be at the heart of Trumps appeals to a remembered national past, and in this case, of his childhood.

Sampson cited the

strong link research has found between perceptions of disorder and the presence of immigrants and minorities  independent of actual disorder and crime  provides another clue, one that applies to neighborhoods and arguably up to the level of societies.

Jennifer Richeson, a psychologist at Yale, emailed me about her perception that shifting demographics of ones town can certainly engender more negative intergroup attitudes and perception.

In a forthcoming paper summarizing research on the effect of growing diversity on white attitudes, The Pitfalls and Promise of Increasing Racial Diversity, Richeson, Maureen A. Craig, and Julian M. Rucker, psychologists at N.Y.U. and Yale, write:

Whites for whom the changing national diversity is salient express (a) more support for conservative policies, including those relevant to race; (b) less support for diversity; (c) more racial resentment and support for the Tea Party; and (d) more support for Donald Trump and anti-immigrant policies.

Trump has long since departed Queens, along with more than 900,000 other whites, many of whom became recruits for his presidential campaign. His administration is in many respects an attempt to restore the Queens of his early childhood.

Anthony Scaramucci, a friend of the presidents who served 10 days as the White House communications director, grasped Trumps outer borough appeal to many voters. In a recent interview with Ed Luce of The Financial Times, Scaramucci argued that Trump understood that Americas aspirational working class had become desperational.

During the campaign, Scaramucci recounted, Trump would say to us: That tweets not for you. Youre probably offended by it. I dont care. That tweet is for the guy in the flyover states, at the steel plant. If I lose some of the effete Republican elite, what difference does it make? 

Luce reports the story of Trump telling foreign investors that his casinos would be flooded by white trash. What did he mean by white trash, the investors asked.

Trump replied: Theyre people just like me, only theyre poor.

Trump is nothing if not consistent in his appeal to this constituency.As it is, the chances of a wider and bloodier war over Syria have grown in recent days. Syrian tanks and artillery have reportedly entered the demilitarized buffer zone near the Israeli border, in brazen violation of the 1974 disengagement agreement, as they prepare to sweep rebel forces from the rest of the border area. Israel did very little to deny its attack Monday on an air base used by Iran in central Syria, and Jerusalem is threatening more aggressive steps to keep Tehran from further entrenching itself militarily in its client state. The Iranians have vowed retaliation for the attack, which they are sure to make good on, probably via their proxies in Hezbollah. And tensions between Israel and Russia are at their highest point since the Cold War, in part because Israel did not notify Russia in advance of Mondays attack.

So where is the United States in all of this?

As Michael Doran pointed out in an astute Times op-ed on Tuesday, Trump seems to have violated his own ostensible rules for winning in recent days. First he promised to withdraw U.S. forces, which would eliminate what little military leverage we have with Syria (and Turkey), and then he telegraphed the kind of feckless missile strike he seems intent on carrying out sometime in the coming hours or days.

But the truth about current U.S. policy is worse. For starters, there is no policy: The president and his commanding general in the Middle East, Joseph Votel, have offered flatly contradictory statements about what the U.S. intends to do in Syria. We long ago pulled the plug on supporting relatively moderate Syrian rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad. And the absence of policy itself runs counter to what is supposed to be Trumps overarching goal of blunting Irans regional ambitions and forcing a renegotiation of the nuclear deal.

To adapt Churchills line about Russia, Trumps approach to Syria is an impulse wrapped in indifference inside an incoherence. It makes Barack Obamas failed Syria policy look savvy, since at least the former presidents reluctance to get involved was consonant with his overarching desire to improve relations with Tehran.

A limited missile strike that slightly degrades Assads military capabilities will change none of this, just as last years U.S. strike changed nothing. What could work? In a column I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2013, I argued that the U.S. should target Assad and his senior lieutenants directly in a decapitation strike, just as the U.S. attempted in Iraq in 2003, and against Osama bin Laden in 2011.On todays episode:

 Kevin Roose, who writes about technology for The New York Times.

Background reading:

 After questioning Mr. Zuckerberg for two days, all lawmakers seemed to have learned is that social media technology  and its potential for abuse  has far outpaced Washington.

 The public scolding on Capitol Hill may do little to change how Facebook powers its $40.6 billion business: meticulously monitoring what you do online. Heres how its done.

 The biggest obstacle to regulating Facebook is not Congresss lack of digital expertise, Mr. Roose argues in a column. Its a lack of political will.

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.

How do I listen?

If you dont see an audio player on this page or to subscribe to The Daily for free, follow the instructions below.Of all the plants that humanity has turned into crops, none is more puzzling than the sweet potato. Indigenous people of Central and South America grew it on farms for generations, and Europeans discovered it when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean.

In the 18th century, however, Captain Cook stumbled across sweet potatoes again  over 4,000 miles away, on remote Polynesian islands. European explorers later found them elsewhere in the Pacific, from Hawaii to New Guinea.

The distribution of the plant baffled scientists. How could sweet potatoes arise from a wild ancestor and then wind up scattered across such a wide range? Was it possible that unknown explorers carried it from South America to countless Pacific islands?

An extensive analysis of sweet potato DNA, published on Thursday in Current Biology, comes to a controversial conclusion: Humans had nothing to do with it. The bulky sweet potato spread across the globe long before humans could have played a part  its a natural traveler.A senior United Nations official Wednesday urged Malian parties to implement 2015 peace agreement, insisting that it is time to move from promises to actions.

While Malians must ensure the successful holding of elections this year, their priority should be the implementation of the 2015 peace agreement, Mahamat Saleh Annadif, Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), said at a briefing before the Security Council.

The peace process is complex, but it is time to move from promises to action to meet agreed deadlines, he said, adding that advancing the peace process and holding the elections must go hand in hand.

He noted that the entire political class agreed that elections must take place on time, with the utmost transparency and credibility. Just as the 2013 elections re-established constitutional order in Mali, those in 2018 must irreversibly anchor democracy, he insisted.

Presidential elections are scheduled for 29 July and 12 August, and legislative elections in November and December.

In terms of preparations, he said, an agreement is in place to revise the electoral law and an order has been placed for eight million voters cards.

In line with its mandate, MINUSMA has started to lend technical and logistical support, including the distribution of election materials and deployment of electoral personnel, while also preparing for any potential violence.

The Special Representative said the Security Council must call upon the Malian political class to respect the adopted timetable and encourage them along the path to consensual, peaceful and credible elections.

The alternative would mean adding one crisis onto another, with the enemies of peace emerging the victors, he said. They do not merit such a gift.

The security situation has deteriorated, particularly in the center of Mali, he said, noting that an independent expert recently voiced concerns about serious human rights violations in the country.

With the UN country team, MINUSMA has launched an initiative to promote the restoration of State authority in central Mali, as well as economic growth and the provision of social services.

Emphasizing that a purely security approach is not enough, he said the Mission is continuing to support the specialist judicial system tackling terrorism, money-laundering and cross-border crime.

He emphasized the need for the training of peacekeeping troops, adding that the Mission remained about 100 armored vehicles short. Troop- and police-contributing countries have been asked to do what they could to fill the equipment gap. Canadas offer of six helicopters, while welcome, fell short of what is needed.

Turning to the ongoing strategic review of MINUSMA, he said the Mission is awaiting the Secretary-Generals recommendations with the hope that ensuing discussions will lead to a better alignment between its mandate and the realities on the ground.On an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday evening, I found myself facing a stranger, swinging my arms back and forth, and hooting like an owl.

HOOOOOO! I yelled, blinking uncomfortably. WOOOOP! she yelled back.

I was warming up for an ecstatic dance session at Union Square Ballroom in Manhattan, which I attended with about 250 other people. Ecstatic dances are essentially free-form dance parties, and the directions for the one I attended  hosted each month by Ecstatic Dance NYC  were pretty simple: no shoes, no drugs or alcohol, no phones or cameras, and no talking on the dance floor.

The only directive: Allow your body to move exactly how it wants to move.

This was no small challenge for me, as my body is much more accustomed to slouching over a laptop, or contorting itself into knots to avoid touching people on the subway. But something about ecstatic dance drew me in.

On the designated evening, I fought my way through an aggressive crush of commuters in Union Square to get to the location and entered a different world. A gentle horde of 20-to-50-somethings in exercise clothes and loose palazzo pants were affectionately touching each others faces and greeting one another with slow embraces.When your mother handed you a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, it meant one of two things: You were about to have a pained conversation with a parent wielding a hand mirror, or you were meant to take the book, read it and never mention it again. Either way, you were prepared.

For generations of girls, Our Bodies, Ourselves was the starter pack to adulthood: It let you know whether your vulva was weird looking (it wasnt), what kind of birth control you might want to use and whether you were the only one who had a special relationship with your pillow. (You werent, Page 162 assured.)

But after nearly 50 years, Our Bodies Ourselves, the Boston nonprofit home of the book, will stop publishing the pubescent tome amid a period of transition. The book, last updated in 2011, will no longer have new editions. The nonprofit organization housing their programmatic work  they reported $279,460 in revenue for its 2016 fiscal year  will now be led by volunteers.

This is a really sad moment for our readers, said Julie Childers, the executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves. But we still have a strong, scrappy board of directors and 300 experts in the field to continue being a voice in the public sphere.Mr. Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night? Um  no. If youve messaged anybody this week, would you share with us the names of the people youve messaged? Senator, no, I would probably not choose to do that publicly here. I think that may be what this is all about. In 2015, we heard the report that this developer Aleksandr Kogan had sold data to Cambridge Analytica. Did you or senior leadership do an inquiry to find out who at Facebook had this information and did they not have a discussion about whether or not the users should be informed back in December of 2015? Senator, in retrospect, I think we clearly view it as a mistake that we didnt inform people. And we did that based on false information that we thought that the case was closed, and that the data had been deleted. So there was a decision made on that basis not to inform the users. Is that correct? Thats my understanding, yes. I assume Facebooks been served with subpoenas from the special counsel Muellers office. Is that correct? Yes. Actually, let me clarify that. I actually am not aware of a subpoena. I believe that there may be. But I know were working with them. Thank you. If I buy a Ford and it doesnt work well and I dont like it, I can buy a Chevy. If Im upset with Facebook, whats the equivalent product that I can go sign up for? The average American uses eight different apps  O.K.  to communicate with their friends and stay in touch with people  O.K.  ranging from text apps   which is   to email. Which is the same service you provide. Well, we provide a number of different services. Is Twitter the same as what you do? It overlaps with a portion of what we do. You dont think you have a monopoly? It certainly doesnt feel like that to me. O.K. [audience laughs] Do you need to look behind shell corporations in order to find out who is really behind the content thats being posted? And if you may need to look behind a shell corporation, how will you go about doing that? How will you get back to the true, what lawyers would call beneficial owner of the site that is putting out the political material? So what were going to do is require a valid government identity and were going to verify the location. So were going to do that, so that way someone sitting in Russia, for example, couldnt say that theyre in America and therefore able to run an election ad. But if they were running through a corporation domiciled in Delaware, you wouldnt know that they were actually a Russian owner. Senator, thats thats correct.This is the first blink of awakening of the world to a danger thats been present for a long time, which is that we are exposed, Mr. Searls said. Cambridge Analytica is old, old news to privacy folks.

John Scott-Railton, who researches digital rights and privacy at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said he recently thought back to all the PowerPoint presentations and papers he had given and seen that cautioned about how third parties might access and abuse user data.

It didnt stick until now, he said. Now its changed, or at least people nod along when we talk about it.

Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, recalled the organizations years of efforts to get Facebook to monitor how third parties were using data. Yet few paid attention at the time, even though the group specifically called out Facebooks quizzes in 2009. (Cambridge Analytica used a third-party quiz app from an independent researcher to harvest Facebook users data.)

The social network has said it will investigate many third-party apps that have had access to large amounts of users information. Nonetheless, the A.C.L.U. is pushing for users to have tighter control over what Facebook apps can do and arguing that Facebook ought to audit its developers. The organization also believes that more privacy protections should be enshrined in law.

Were having the conversation now that we should have had over a decade ago, Ms. Singh Guliani said.

Some privacy experts are prepared for disappointment. There have been privacy scandals before that did not lead to sea changes. For example, Google once collected private Wi-Fi information as it was building out Google Maps. The ensuing outrage did not have a lasting effect on the Silicon Valley companys vast data collection effort.Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages  and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Plus, two Times Talks events. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.

Previews and Openings

DANCE NATION at Playwrights Horizons (previews start on April 13; opens on May 8). A playwright with an abiding and sometimes grotesque interest in the female body, Clare Barron comes to Playwrights Horizons with a drama about a preteen dance competition. The director and choreographer Lee Sunday Evans oversees the spangled, cutthroat fun. Eboni Booth, Ellen Maddow and Thomas Jay Ryan star.

212-279-4200, playwrightshorizons.org

LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE at New York Theater Workshop (previews start on April 18; opens on May 7). The director Rachel Chavkin says she wants a revolution, and in this revival of Caryl Churchills 1976 drama, shes exploring insurrection in 17th-century England. Vinie Burrows, Rob Campbell and Mikeah Ernest Jennings star in a play about Levellers, Ranters and a time when a nation almost remade itself.

212-460-5475, nytw.org

MY FAIR LADY at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (in previews; opens on April 19). Lerner and Loewes musical comedy confection returns to Broadway with the loverly Lauren Ambrose as the spirited flower seller Eliza Doolittle and Harry Hadden-Paton as her eccentric phonetician, Henry Higgins. Bartlett Shers lush production for Lincoln Center Theater includes Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins and Norbert Leo Butz as Elizas church-bound father.

212-239-6200, lct.orgWhile there would be no immediate consequences for World Heritage sites, the withdrawal by the United States may affect Unesco in other ways. According to Dr. Stefan Simon, the director of Global Cultural Heritage Initiatives at Yale University, With the U.S. once responsible for approximately 22 percent of Unescos budget, of course the announced withdrawal is detrimental, and would painfully reduce Unescos ability to fulfill its important missions, such as advancing and promoting literacy, gender equality, freedom of expression and scientific collaboration.

If the United States withdraws from Unesco, it would remain a state party, having signed and ratified the World Heritage Convention. There is one consequence only, Mr. Papagiannis said about the United States withdrawal. The U.S. cannot be elected to the World Heritage Committee, a managing committee made up of elected representatives from 21 countries. The committee is in charge of allocating financial assistance and determining what sites are included on, or removed from, the World Heritage List.

Despite no longer being a paying member, the United States would be able to continue to submit sites for World Heritage List consideration. The World Heritage Committee will next meet in Bahrain from June 24 to July 4, 2018. The leadership of the U.S. is crucial in this debate, said Dr. Simon. Its voice will be thoroughly missed at the table.

The United States played an integral role in the creation of the World Heritage program. Russell Train, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency who is often described as one of the primary architects of World Heritage, talked about the importance of the concept in a 2002 speech at the 30th Anniversary of the World Heritage Convention in Venice, Italy. The World Heritage Convention itself represents a partnership among 175 nations, he said in his speech. I see the program as an opportunity to convey the idea of a common heritage among nations and peoples everywhere. I see it as a compelling idea that can help unite people rather than divide them.

There are several benefits for sites that are included on the World Heritage List. Unesco provides leadership on maintaining the health of the sites, including a focus on sustainable tourism. An important component of what we do is providing guidance for managing tourism numbers in a sustainable way, Mr. Papagiannis said.Good morning.

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John Chiang, the state treasurer of California, is a Democrat running to succeed Gov. Jerry Brown. California Today is conducting occasional question-and-answer sessions with candidates for office, and today is Mr. Chiangs day at the plate. The interview, edited and condensed for clarity, was done for our story on the race.

Q. What do you think of how Governor Brown has done?

A. Jerry and I are aligned on making sure our fiscal house is in order. We dont want to be a poor state. We dont want to be broke  cutting health care, giving pink slips.

Q. How big a problem is homelessness in this state?

A. There are tens of thousands of homeless Californians. Do we take care of the vulnerable who live in the wealthiest state? To leave people in harms way is not acceptable. That is why I have tried to shore up the states financial position so we have the resources to take care of Californias homeless. The state has to partner with local governments  which I would hope to do as governor.For seven decades, never forget has been a rallying cry of the Holocaust remembrance movement.

But a survey released Thursday, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, found that many adults lack basic knowledge of what happened  and this lack of knowledge is more pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18 to 34.

Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. Forty-one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. And 52 percent of Americans wrongly think Hitler came to power through force.

As we get farther away from the actual events, 70-plus years now, it becomes less forefront of what people are talking about or thinking about or discussing or learning, said Matthew Bronfman, a board member of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which commissioned the study. If we wait another generation before you start trying to take remedial action, I think were really going to be behind the eight ball.With respect to Facebook, United States senators dont seem to be too different from many of us: They dont necessarily trust it, but theyre not ready to quit it.

Even as the members of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees were questioning Mark Zuckerberg, Facebooks chief executive, during a nearly five-hour hearing on Tuesday, many of them were feeding content back into the site.

The most active, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, posted more than 20 times during Mr. Zuckerbergs two days on Capitol Hill.

All 44 of the senators who questioned Mr. Zuckerberg on Tuesday have pages on the platform he built. At least 35 of them have two Facebook pages, with many using one page for official Senate communications and a second page for their campaign-related material to avoid violating ethics laws.Mr. Patterson added that he believed that the effort to find and capture Mr. Caro Quintero transcends politics.

The murder of Mr. Camarena remains one of the most significant losses in the history of the D.E.A. It galvanized the Reagan-era war on drugs, leading to the nationwide institution of the Red Ribbon Week, an annual drug awareness effort.

Mr. Camarena is still honored regularly at D.E.A. offices across the country, where the horror of the 1985 episode lingers. The investigation of Kiki Camarenas death is still an open wound, said John C. Lawn, who led the agency from 1985 to 1990.

What is meaningful to D.E.A., Mr. Lawn added, is that Caro is on the loose and has been, and we dont believe that the Mexican government is doing all they can to find him.

Mr. Caro Quintero initially evaded the authorities in 1985 with the help of a Mexican federal police officer, who was later charged over his role in the escape. The drug kingpin was released in 2013 after his conviction was overturned by a Mexican federal judge, who ruled that Mr. Caro Quintero should have been tried in state court  not federal court  decades before. He quickly disappeared.

In a letter days after Mr. Caro Quinteros release, nine previous D.E.A. administrators said it had driven a spike in the heart of Mexican-American bilateral drug enforcement efforts. The D.E.A. at the time called it deeply troubling.

The release happened even as Justice Department authorities said they had made consistently clear to the Mexican government that they were interested in extraditing Mr. Caro Quintero. Asked Thursday about the status of those extradition conversations, James Walsh, who heads the State Departments Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, declined to comment.

Corruption that was endemic in 1985 I believe continues to this day, Mr. Lawn said of Mexico. We will get closure when Caro is captured.Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus A.Dapkiunas participates in the meeting of the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Chernobyl

12-04-2018

On April 11, 2018 at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in New York, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, Andrei Dapkiunas, participated in the meeting of the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) on Chernobyl.

Background Information: IATF on Chernobyl coordinates activities of the United Nations agencies, other international organisations and interested countries on international cooperation on Chernobyl. The Task Force is chaired by the Administrator of the UN Development Programme, Achim Steiner,. Its members are more than ten international organisations, including UNDP, IAEA, WHO, UNEP, FAO, World Bank. The three most Chernobyl-affected countries, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, are permanent participants of IATF.

The event organized by UNDP at the initiative of Belarus is aimed to review the implementation of the UN General Assembly resolution Persistent legacy of the Chernobyl disaster, prepared by the delegation of Belarus and adopted in December 2016. The participants of the meeting reviewed results of international Chernobyl cooperation over the past year and discussed proposals for further cooperation in this area in accordance with the Chernobyl resolution.

During the meeting, Deputy Minister A.Dapkiunas noted the need to ensure sustainable development in the affected regions and presented Belarusian proposals on advancing international cooperation on Chernobyl with the participation of the UN system and interested states. The Belarusian diplomat mentioned IAEA as the only international organization that currently maintains Chernobyl-related projects for Belarus and urged the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the United Nations Children's Fund to engage more actively in project activities in this field.

The Deputy Minister informed participants about measures taken by the Belarusian side for social and economic development of the affected regions, noting the unique experience accumulated by Belarus in this field and the readiness to share its experience.

   

print versionWASHINGTON  President Trump has in his first year marginalized American diplomats, sought to slash the State Departments budget and reversed crucial pieces of his predecessors economic and diplomatic opening to Cuba. But Mike Pompeo promised on Thursday to reverse nearly all of that if he becomes the next secretary of state.

In five hours of testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Pompeo, now the C.I.A. director, said he was hoping for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis, still believed that the Iran nuclear deal could be saved, disagreed with the presidents assertion that poor relations with Russia had been caused by the special counsels investigation and, perhaps most remarkably, promised to defend gay rights around the world.

He was voluble, charming and gracious, which meant he was the opposite of how he had presented himself during the 2015 Benghazi hearings, the last time he had the nations attention. Then, he was the scowling, scathing attack dog hounding Hillary Clinton. On Thursday, he smiled throughout the hearing, occasionally even agreeing with Democrats.

At the State Department, there are too many holes, too many vacancies, too many unfilled positions, Mr. Pompeo said in one of his many promises to restore the department to its former glory after his predecessor, Rex W. Tillerson, pushed out hundreds of diplomats. The vow was greeted with relief by nearly all on the panel.The unfurling scandal has put Mr. Hawley in an unwelcome bind: He is both investigating the governor for unrelated campaign violations and being attacked by a barrage of Democratic television ads trying to link him with the governor in a cloud of impropriety.

While Missouri has become a solidly Republican state  Mr. Trump won here by 19 percentage points  Republicans are facing the potential of both a criminal trial and a messy impeachment fight involving their standard-bearer. Mr. Greitens, who has denied the charges, appears determined to fight on, raising fears among party leaders that a prolonged battle could depress Republican turnout and neutralize some of Mr. Hawleys outsider appeal.

And as a backlash against Mr. Trump and male misbehavior is expected to push record numbers of women to the polls, Ms. McCaskill is practiced in the art of exploiting such moments.

Right now, Greitens is a slow-moving disaster, and one of the people who can pay a price  is it 4 percent? Two percent? I dont know  is Josh Hawley, said Ed Martin, a former chairman of the state Republican Party.

It was not supposed to be this way. Having watched furiously in 2012 as Ms. McCaskill  thought to be all but certain to lose  waded directly into a crowded Republican primary race to help lift Mr. Akin to the nomination, Republicans were intent on giving the senator no such openings.

Ms. McCaskills campaign weighed in during that race with an advertisement laying out Mr. Akins conservative credentials, suggesting that Missouris true conservative was just too conservative.I recognize that there may well be some (a few? a lot?) of people who work here who arent happy that Im working here. Thats fine, Mr. Mulvaney wrote. I also recognize that these folks might be interested in undermining my leadership here, or in quite simply looking to make me look bad.

He has instructed the bureaus inspector general to investigate leaks, he said.

Mr. Mulvaney said he was not seeking to stifle legitimate whistle-blowers, but added that he would support any disciplinary and other actions taken against any bureau employees found to have divulged information about investigations.

The bureau does not play games, he concluded.

The question of Mr. Mulvaneys legal ability to run the consumer bureau stems from the provision in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that created it. The statute mandated that the bureau, which draws its funding from the Federal Reserve, retain complete independence from other federal agencies  particularly the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees rule-making for the executive branch.

The appeals court, which fast-tracked the case, is expected to release a final ruling  which could order Mr. Mulvaneys ouster  within the next few weeks, according to a person with knowledge of the case.

If that happens, Justice Department lawyers, who maintain that Mr. Trump has the right to appoint Mr. Mulvaney under the 1998 federal Vacancies Reform Act, are likely to appeal the case directly to the Supreme Court.

At that point, Mr. Trump would face a tough choice: Keep Mr. Mulvaney in the post under a legal cloud, pending an appeal, or replace him with another appointee who would most likely face a ferocious confirmation fight.

Of all the people in the federal government, Donald Trump chose the one person, Mick Mulvaney, who isnt supposed to run the bureau under the law, said Deepak Gupta, Ms. Englishs lawyer and a former lawyer at the watchdog agency.Mr. Ryan acknowledged that the way he was doing things was not the way things are usually done.

Some of you wonder why I just cant do the normal politician thing, which is to run and then retire after the election, Mr. Ryan said. That is what Im told is the politically shrewd thing to do. I considered that. But just as my conscience is what got me to take this job in the first place, my conscience could not handle going out that way. Mr. Ryan said he pledged to serve his constituents honestly, and for me to ask them to vote to re-elect me, knowing that I wasnt going to stay, is not being honest.

Mr. Ryans constituents, however, are not the only ones potentially being spared. His choice to leave the House voluntarily at 48 gives him a chance to limit his culpability for a potential loss of the majority or face its consequences, possibly leaving him viable for a future political run.

It gives him a chance to spend time with his kids, make some money, and then he will be in his mid-50s and can run for president, if thats what he wants to do, said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York.

Whether that is what he wants to do is unknown at the moment. During his remarks to the news media, the speaker said he intended to keep pursuing policy ideas that he favored, such as reshaping big social programs.

In listing the two greatest honors of his life, he mentioned being elected as speaker and serving as a husband and father. His run for vice president on the national Republican ticket in 2012 never came up. Instead, there was talk around Washington of Mr. Ryan leading some kind of major Washington advocacy group or think tank. He later told CNN that he had no intention of running for the White House.

Should he enter national politics again, Mr. Ryans legacy in the House will no doubt be an issue. He was a champion of fiscal responsibility who will be leaving behind huge deficits piling up under full Republican control of Congress and the White House. He pushed through a long-sought tax overhaul that he celebrated again Wednesday. But one of his chief goals  simplification of the tax code by reducing an array of deductions  was watered down in the final negotiations as Republicans hunted for votes for passage.WASHINGTON  The Treasury Department has relinquished some of its authority over implementation of the Trump tax cuts, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ceding the ability to review regulations to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is headed by Mick Mulvaney.

An agreement announced on Thursday by two of President Trumps top economic advisers marks the end of a monthslong turf war that some tax experts feared could delay rollout of the law. The agreement centralizes more power within the White House, giving it more control over how the tax bill, including some of its murkier provisions, is interpreted.

The $1.5 trillion tax overhaul was rushed through Congress late last year and has left many lingering questions that the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service, which is part of the department, have been scrambling to answer. Key among those are what kinds of businesses qualify as pass-through companies that are eligible for a new 20 percent deduction and how broadly to apply the international tax provisions aimed at preventing large companies from shifting profits overseas.

Last year Mr. Trump called for a review of the Treasurys exemption from the usual practice of the budget office doing cost-benefit analyses of regulations issued by government agencies, sparking a turf war between Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Mnuchin.Rejoining the pact could be a significant change in fortune for many American industries that stood to benefit from the trade accord and for Republican lawmakers who supported it. The deal, which was negotiated by the Obama administration, was largely intended as a tool to prod China into making the type of economic changes that the United States and others have long wanted. Many economists say the best way to combat a rising China and pressure it to open its market is through multilateral trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which create favorable trading terms for participants.

The idea was to set a framework that eventually China would have to accommodate, said David Autor, an economist at M.I.T.

Farmers would stand to benefit from new access to markets, especially Japan, if Mr. Trump rejoins the pact. For instance, ranchers in Australia can currently send beef to Japan more cheaply than ranchers in the United States.

Michael Miller, the chairman of U.S. Wheat Associates and a farmer in Washington, said rejoining the deal would allow his industry to compete on a level playing field with competitors in Australia and Canada, which both remained in the accord.

But rejoining it could be a complex task. The remaining countries, like Japan, moved ahead without the United States, and spent months renegotiating a pact before finally agreeing to a sweeping multinational deal this year. Mr. Trump, who has demanded that any such deal benefit the United States, is unlikely to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership without further concessions for what he has criticized as a terrible agreement. That could complicate talks, since Japan maintains that it has already given all the concessions it could, said William A. Reinsch, a trade expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Yoshihide Suga, Japans chief cabinet secretary, on Friday cautioned against any efforts to change the agreement to accommodate Mr. Trump, calling it a well-balanced pact that addressed the needs of the 11 nations that signed the deal.CHANDLER, Ariz.  An intensifying series of red-state battles over education funding and teacher pay threatens to loosen Republicans grip on some of the countrys most conservative states, as educators and parents rebel against a decade of fiscal austerity that has cut deeply into public education.

As Arizona teachers pressed for higher salaries and more school funding, and Oklahoma teachers won some concessions from lawmakers amid a nine-day walkout, some in Kentucky continued their protests in favor of more money for education. Last month, West Virginias Republican-controlled government raised pay for teachers after a statewide strike.

[Click here to read more on the decision by Oklahoma teachers to return to the classroom.]

The clashes could elevate public education into a major issue in several midterm races this fall. Republicans are defending dozens of governorships and state legislative chambers across the country, including in several Southern and Western states where all-Republican governments have passed sweeping reductions in taxes and spending.

On Wednesday in Chandler, Ariz., a middle class city in the Phoenix suburbs, hundreds of parents and students joined teachers in protesting outside schools. A parent, Christine Clinger Abraham, whose daughter is a senior at Chandler High School, wore a red blouse to show solidarity with the teachers #RedforEd movement. They take so much personal interest in the kids, Ms. Abraham said, but they have to have a second job to make ends meet.HONG KONG  After a long legal battle in China with no known precedent, a surrogate mother has given birth to a boy four years after his parents died in a car crash, a local newspaper has reported.

Shen Jie and Liu Xi, a couple in the eastern Chinese city of Yixing, tried without success to conceive in the first two years of their marriage. They decided to pursue in vitro fertilization, but on March 20, 2013, five days before the embryos were to be implanted, they were killed in a car crash, Beijing News reported on Tuesday in an article detailing the court battle that followed.

The husband and wife were both only children, and the couples parents resolved to use surrogacy to continue the family line. Surrogacy is illegal in China, and the first obstacle for the families was obtaining the embryos.

(Read about how surrogacy has been growing in China because of rising infertility, a relaxation of the one-child policy and a cultural imperative to have children.)BEIJING  In an elegantly furnished back room at a conference in eastern China in December, a member of the Chinese leadership asked American tech executives for help.

The official, Wang Huning, a Communist Party strategist who has spent much of his career sizing up the United States as a geopolitical rival, wanted to know whether President Trump was serious about a trade war with China  and whether his American visitors could serve as a channel of communication to the White House.

He has not been alone.

For the past few months, some of the most powerful men in China  allies of President Xi Jinping with longstanding ties and deep experience with the United States  have been casting about for a better understanding of Mr. Trump and how to respond to his combative trade agenda, according to several people they have consulted.

Vice President Wang Qishan has met in recent weeks with a series of American business leaders and former cabinet officials to question them about Mr. Trumps trade threats. Liu He, the Politburo member coordinating economic policy, has done the same. One longtime China scholar in the United States said five officials had visited him seeking advice in the past two weeks alone.WELLINGTON, New Zealand  New Zealand will stop issuing permits for offshore oil and gas exploration as it moves to combat climate change, the government announced Thursday, but it stopped short of halting exploration already underway.

The move provoked bitter responses from the petroleum industry, which said that New Zealand would be forced to rely on more expensive imports.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the move was part of the countrys efforts to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

When it comes to climate change, our plan is clear, said Ms. Ardern, a member of the center-left Labor Party. We are committed to the goal of becoming a net zero emissions economy by 2050.Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus A.Dapkiunas meets the UNDP Administrator

12-04-2018

On April 11, 2018 during his visit to the UN headquarters in New York, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, Andrei Dapkiunas, met with the Administrator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Achim Steiner.

Background Information: UNDP has been operating in Belarus since 1992. At present, the fifth UNDP country program for Belarus for the period 2016-2020 is in effect with a total funding of $82 million. In 2017 funds disbursed through UNDP for the implementation of technical assistance projects amounted to $9.25 million.

The parties discussed results of the first regional forum of coordinators on sustainable development goals, which was held in Minsk in February 2018, and agreed to continue joint efforts in implementing by Belarus of sustainable development goals of the sustainable development agenda.

The Deputy Foreign Minister of Belarus stressed importance of improving the practice of projects implementation in the framework of international technical assistance through UNDP and UN agencies in Belarus, importance of ensuring trusting cooperation with national partners and of increasing transparency in projects planning and implementation. The sides agreed on joint steps of Belarusian state partners and UN agencies in Belarus to resolve these issues as soon as possible.

   

print versionKABUL, Afghanistan  Taliban insurgents overran a government headquarters in southeastern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing a district governor and the chief of security as well as at least nine others, officials said.

Mohammad Arif Noori, a spokesman for the governor of Ghazni Province, said that Taliban insurgents attacked the government compound of Khwaja Umari district, killing the district governor, Ali Dost Shams, 30, and the district chief of the National Directorate for Security, Ahmad Ziya.

Mr. Noori said the attackers used heavy weapons and destroyed the district government building, killing five police officers and four N.D.S. officers, as well as the officials; ten other officers were injured. They also attacked the police headquarters but were repulsed. In retaliation, he said, the Afghan air force bombed Taliban positions, killing 30 of the insurgents.

The district is the basic unit of local governance in Afghanistan, which has about 400 districts nationwide. The National Directorate of Security is the Afghan intelligence agency, and its local head is one of the top security officials at the district level.HEROUXVILLE, Quebec  The stylized lilies of the Quebec flag, symbols of the French crown, flutter conspicuously in this sleepy village, population 1,300. Also hard to miss is the single set of traffic lights, the convenience store selling cloyingly sweet Quebecois caramel cakes and the local residents, who are eying me suspiciously.

With its gray identikit houses seemingly frozen in a 1950s time warp, Herouxville would seem like just another Quebec village. Except that this quiet hamlet attracted global opprobrium about a decade ago when the local council introduced a code of conduct for immigrants that, among other things, warned against stoning women in public and burning them alive. There was also a section explaining Christmas trees.

We listen to music, we drink alcoholic beverages in public or private places, we dance and at the end of every year, we decorate a tree with balls and tinsel and some lights, the code explained. The only time you may mask or cover your face is during Halloween.

There was just one thing: The town had no immigrants.

The code of conduct, which also affirmed the rights of same-sex parents, was the brainchild of a local official, Andre Drouin, who died last year, and had come up with the idea after traveling in the Middle East.ATHENS  A Greek Air Force jet crashed into the Aegean Sea on Thursday, killing the pilot, as he returned from a mission to intercept Turkish aircraft that had violated the countrys airspace, Greek officials said.

The Turkish government did not comment publicly about the accusations of an encounter. The state-run Anadolu news agency quoted unnamed military officials as disputing scattered reports that there had been a dogfight between jets from the two countries and denying that any Turkish Air Force jet had been in the area.

Greek officials said nothing about what might have caused the crash, or whether it was connected to a confrontation with Turkish jets, though they stressed that the crash occurred several kilometers from the site of the interception mission.

The Hellenic Air Force identified the pilot as Capt. Giorgos Baltadoros, 33, a father of two children, and Defense Minister Panos Kammenos described him on Twitter as a hero who fell defending national sovereignty and territorial integrity.LONDON  Two decades after creating the clone Dolly the sheep and paving the way for new research into Parkinsons, Dr. Ian Wilmut revealed on Wednesday that he has the disease himself.

The 73-year-old professor, who lives in Scotland, announced on World Parkinsons Day that he learned four months ago that he had the disease, and that he would participate in a major research program to test new types of treatments intended to slow the diseases progression.

Initiatives of this kind are very effective not only because they bring more people together, but because they will include people with different experience and expertise, Dr. Wilmut said in a statement. He was referring to the new Dundee-Edinburgh Parkinsons Research Initiative, which aims to investigate the causes of the disease and to translate scientific discoveries into new therapies.

It was from such a rich seedbed that Dolly developed, and we can hope for similar benefits in this project, he added.STOCKHOLM  Swedish authorities have indicted a man who they said presented himself as sympathetic to Tibetan independence but may have been spying on Tibetan refugees for the Chinese government.

The man, identified as Dorjee Gyantsan, 49, in the indictment submitted on Wednesday, attended meetings about Tibetan independence and reported for the Voice of Tibet radio station on a visit to Norway by the Dalai Lama.

But Mr. Gyantsan, who is apparently from Tibet and lived in a suburb of Stockholm, was indicted of suspicion of gathering details about the living situations, family relationships, trips and meetings of Tibetan refugees and dissidents, the indictment said, to pass on to Chinese officials he would meet in Poland and Finland.

Mr. Gyantsans lawyer, Mikael Soderberg, said his client denied the accusations.

Many Tibetans have complained about repressive conditions under China, which has ruled Tibet since 1950. Tibetans are barred from publicly worshiping the Dalai Lama, a Buddhist spiritual leader, and say that their language and culture have been suppressed. After widespread protests by Tibetans in 2008, China imposed a security clampdown.Boris Johnson, the British foreign secretary, released a statement on the organizations report, saying, There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record.

Mr. Skripal, 66, is a former Russian military intelligence officer who has lived for several years in Salisbury; his daughter, 33, lives in Russia and was visiting him at the time of the poisoning.

The attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury was the first time a nerve agent had been deployed in Europe since the Second World War, Mr. Fleming said.

On Wednesday night, the Metropolitan Police released a statement attributed to Ms. Skripal, turning down a Russian offer of consular assistance, adding another irritant to worsening relations with Moscow. Russia has repeatedly requested access to Ms. Skripal, accusing Britain of improperly denying it contact with one of its citizens.

I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian Embassy, who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can, Ms. Skripal was quoted as saying in the statement. At the moment, I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but if I change my mind, I know how to contact them.

Russian officials have ridiculed British accusations, while floating an array of theories, some of them contradictory, about what happened in Salisbury. They claim that neither the Soviet Union nor Russia ever had a novichok program, that other former Soviet bloc countries could have supplied the novichok, that the toxin involved was not novichok, and that the British might have poisoned the Skripals.

The statement attributed to Ms. Skripal, 33, met with derision from the Russian authorities, who described it as an interesting read, pointedly noting that there was no way to verify it, and suggesting that the remarks contained more questions than answers.LONDON  Airlines are avoiding Syrian airspace as the United States and other Western powers consider their response to a suspected chemical attack near Damascus last weekend.

The European Aviation Safety Agency, a European Union organization, issued an alert on Tuesday, prompting a number of airlines to steer away from the countrys airspace.

Due to the possible launch of airstrikes into Syria, the agency said, due consideration needs to be taken when planning flight operations. The alert cited the possible use of air-to-ground and cruise missiles and the likely disruption of radio navigation equipment."According to a statement released by Kalashnikov USA, it relocated to South Florida in 2015. Reports indicate that Kalashnikov USA may have been offered tax incentives as part of Florida Governor Rick Scott's push to lure weapons manufacturers to Florida. According to Kalashnikov USA's own 2015 application for $162,000 in tax incentives, which was approved by Governor Scott's administration, the company planned to assemble its weapons with parts and components imported from Kalashnikov Russia's factory located in Russia.A man who sexually abused his fiancee's three daughters shortly after moving into their family home has had his conviction upheld on appeal.

The girls' mother stood by her partner and destroyed evidence after one daughter confided that she had been raped by the man, the Central Criminal Court heard.

The 40-year-old Meath man was found guilty by a jury of one count of rape and and 12 counts of sexual assault of the three girls in their home in the east of the country in 2009 and 2010 when they were in their early to mid teens.

Sentencing the man to ten years imprisonment, Mr Justice Paul Coffey paid tribute to the three victims, who are now in their early twenties. The abuse wreaked havoc on their family life and caused significant psychological harm. They have been remarkably resilient and strong characters, which is greatly to their credit, he said.

There was nothing that could be said in mitigation for the man, who cannot be named to protect his victims, save that he had no previous convictions, the judge said.

The man lost an appeal against his conviction today on grounds that the trial judge ought to have warned the jury about the dangers of convicting in the absence of corroboration in relation to all three complainants.

The trial judge gave the jury a partial warning in respect of one complainant and, as submitted by the man's barrister, Bernard Condon SC, there was a risk the jury felt they did not need to be as careful in respect of the other two.

Rejecting his appeal today, Mr Justice John Hedigan said the trial judge's approach was completely logical having regard to the evidence in the case.

He said the trial judge warned the jury about the care they must take in their decision emphasising the presumption of innocence.

Mr Justice Hedigan, who sat with Mr Justice George Birmingham and Mr Justice Alan Mahon, said the the court rejected the mans appeal against his conviction.Ban on PFI communally and politically motivated

India

oi-Staff

By Oneindia Staff Writer

The Popular Front of India has termed the decision of the Jharkhand government to ban it as unfortunate. In a press release, the PFI says that the state and central governments have the responsibility to protect their rights and respond to their demands, rather than silencing their voices.

"Unfortunately, in a complete abdication of its duty to protect and uphold fundamental rights of all citizens, Jharkhand state government has banned PFI, alleging some of its members influenced by ISIS. It is an unfortunate development and unconstitutional action, and there is no evidence suggesting that PFI itself identifies with or condones the activities of ISIS in any manner whatsoever. PUCL Karnataka condemns banning state Jharkhand PFI unit."

"The state should have identified such members associated with ISIS and initiated legal action against them, instead of banning PFI as an organisation. It is evident that the banning of the organisation is entirely communally and politically motivated and biased. PFI has been a large organization with thousands of members from minorities and other weaker sections of the society. They have been engaged in mobilizing and educating communities on their rights and entitlements, promoting literacy, education and demanding their share of resources in health services, education, employment, welfare and social security as matter of right guaranteed by constitution of India," the release stated.

"PFI has in recent times been particularly active in seeking justice for communal atrocities through legal interventions. This begs the question of whether there is anything wrong with highlighting lynchings that took place in Jamtara, Latehar, Ramgarh and Seraikela. What is wrong in filing case against police atrocities? What is wrong in demanding justice and compensation to the victim families? The impunity of the majority community in cases of lynching is supported by the police, and PFI has been working tirelessly to expose this nexus. PFI has been raising such issues as human rights violation and demanding action through rallies and protests without any violence. Any action against PFI reeks of state high-handedness, and its tacit support for perpetrators of communal violence. Hence, the ban on Jharkhand PFI is illegal, unconstitutional, and constitutes violation of freedom of expression and freedom of association. It is an organized attempt by the ruling BJP government to misuse the constitutional systems and structures," the release elaborated further.

"Therefore, it is time for Governor as constitutional head of the state of Jharkhand to protect the fundamental rights and democratic rights of minorities living in the state. Thus PUCL - Karnataka urges the Honorable Governor of the Jharkhand to revoke the ban on PFI in the state," the release also added.'Its echo of national interest of the party', says Hariprasad reacting to Siddu's Dalit CM comment

Karnataka: By-polls in Shimoga, Bellary and Mandya to be held on 3rd Nov, says CEC

Cannot win Karnataka election without support of Dalits, OBCs: Yeddyurappa

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

The BJP's chief ministerial candidate, B S Yeddyurappa has said that at least 68 candidates in the first list released by the party would win the Karnataka elections.

Speaking at a day-long workshop, where party's poll plans were introduced to its election management committee members at the Palace Grounds, Yeddyurappa also said that the second list comprising 152 candidates would be released by April 14.

"Siddaramaiah will be defeated if he contests from Chamundeshwari", Yeddyurappa also said. "He has no base left there anymore and will lose", he added. Yeddyurappa also asked party workers to reach out to Dalits, OBCs and women and also added that without their support the party could not win the elections.

Karnataka Assembly Election dates Date of notification April 17 Last date to file nominations April 24 Last date to withdraw nominations April 27 Date of polling May 12 Date of counting May 15Don't preach about democracy Rahul Baba, Congress didn't believe in it: Amit Shah

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The blame game over Parliament disruption escalated to a new level altogether today with both the Congress and the BJP attacking each other with sharp remarks. While the Congress said that the time had come for PM Modi and the BJP to "repent and apologise", the BJP once again reminded the grand old party of the emergency period during former prime minister Indira Gandhi's regime.

BJP president Amir Shah, who staged a sit-in at Hubballi, Karnataka, to protest the recent washout of the Budget Session of Parliament, accused the Congress of dividing the nation and the society. Shah, on the sixth round of his campaigning in poll-bound Karnataka, was joined by BJP's chief ministerial candidate B S Yeddyurappa, MPs Prahlad Joshi and Rajeev Chandrasekhar, former chief minister Jagadish Shettar and other senior party functionaries.

Terming Parliament as the "temple of democracy" and "biggest panchayat in democracy", Shah alleged that because of the stand taken by the Congress and its president Rahul Gandhi, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha could not function.

Launching a scathing attack on the Congress, Shah said the logjam in Parliament for 22 days led to a loss of Rs 250 crore. Usually the government runs away from a debate, but here the opposition was unwilling to discuss important issues, he said. The BJP chief said the government was ready for a discussion but the opposition ran away from it, because "the Congress did not have the guts to discuss (issues)".

"We said we are ready to even discuss the no-confidence motion (if it was brought), because their no-confidence could not have done anything as the people of this country have confidence in Narendra Modi," he said.

Alleging that the Congress did not believe in democracy, Shah said, "Rahul baba is going around everywhere speaking about democracy. It looks like some NGO has handed over to him the word democracy."

"Rahul baba, go through your party's history," he said, recalling the Emergency under "his grandmother Indira Gandhi".

"You come and preach us about democracy, while you had kept democracy imprisoned inside your home," he said, as he launched a sharp attack on the Congress.

"Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi...., (after that) we don't know which Gandhi next. Doesn't anyone else have credibility in this country," he said.

Shah alleged that there was no internal democracy in the Congress party. "The Congress cannot protect democracy in this country," he said.

Accusing the Congress of toppling other governments through "conspiracy" whenever it was out of power, he said by hiring a foreign company, "some people had obtained data on castes".

Asserting that the people clearly understood the Congress and its tactics, Shah listed out the states where BJP has gained after the 2014 parliamentary election win.

"It is Karnataka's turn now. The people of the state have made up their mind to form a BJP government under the leadership of Yeddyurappa (in the May 12 polls)," he said. Shah told Gandhi that the kind of politics which attempts to divide the society, shut the voice of democracy, and not allow the Houses to function, would not continue for long.

"You may be thinking where will the BJP speak by not allowing the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha to function. We have come directly to the people as in democracy the people are supreme. We have come to the people's court," he said.

Reacting to fasts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Shah and other BJP leaders, senior Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma had earlier in the day demanded that Parliament be reconvened to discuss key issues, saying time has come for Modi and the BJP to "repent and apologise" to the people instead of indulging in "theatrics of farcical fast".

Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said, "Facing imminent defeat in (the elections) Karnataka in May this year and in the Lok Sabha polls in 2019, Modi and Shah are enacting an absurd drama of photo-ops and headline management."

The Congress had earlier accused the BJP of orchestrating disruptions in Parliament through smaller parties and not allowing debates on key issues.

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Story first published: Thursday, April 12, 2018, 21:39 [IST]'Existence of Supreme Court under threat', says Justice Kurian Joseph in letter to CJI

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Justice Kurian Joseph has written to the Chief Justice of India stating that the very life and existence of the Supreme Court is under threat. History will not pardon us, if the court does not respond to the government's unprecedented act of sitting on the collegium's recommendation to elevate judge and senior advocate to the Supreme Court, he also wrote to CJI, Dipak Misra.

The reference was being made to the Collegium's decision to elevate senior advocate, Indu Malhotra and Justice K M Joseph, Chief Justice of the Uttarakhand High Cout.

"It is the first time in the history of this court where nothing is known as to what has happened to a recommendation after three months. A 7 judge Bench must be established to take up suo moto the matter of the government sitting over the two names," he also wrote.

"If there is no normal delivery on completion of the gestation period, what is urgently done is a CaesarEan section. Unless such a surgical intervention is made at an appropriate time, the child in the womb dies."

"The dignity, honour and respect of this institution is going down day by day since we are not able to take the recommendations for appointment to this Court to their logical conclusion within the normally expected times".

"The government owes a duty to take a call on the recommendation as soon as the same is sent from the Collegium. Failure to discharge their duty by sitting over on the recommendations of the Collegium doing nothing, in administrative law, is abuse of power."

"More than anything else, it sends a wrong message which is loud and clear to all Judges down the line not to cause any displeasure to the Executive lest they should suffer. Is this not a threat to the independence of the judiciary?"Today is not April Fool's Day: TMC MP Derek O'Brien posts on PMO's working for every Indian tweet

'Government being arm twisted by potential bidders in Air India sale', says unions

India

oi-Staff

By Oneindia Staff Writer

Alleging that the probable bidders are using "arm twisting tactics" to force the government sell the national carrier for cheap, a forum of 10 Air India unions has said that it will take up the issue with the PMO and the civil aviation ministry, among others.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, the forum also reiterated its opposition to the privatisation of the loss-making airline, saying that "it (Air India) is our national pride and it served the nation many a times in need."

The statement comes following one after another potential bidder opting out of the Air India sale process after the government coming out with the terms of offer in the information memorandum.

"The so-claimed probable buyers are using arm twisting tactics so as to put pressure on the government to succumb to change the terms and conditions best suited to them and the Air India is sold for a song," the Joint Forum of Air India Unions/Guilds/Association said in the statement.

The forum comprises Air Corporations Employees Union, All India Service Engineers' Associations, Air India Employees Union, Aviation Industry Employee Guild, Air India Aircraft Engineers' Association, All India Aircraft Engineers' Association, Air India Engineers Association, United Air India Officers Association, All India Cabin Crew Association and All India Airline Retired Personnel Association.

On March 28, the civil aviation ministry came out with the preliminary information memorandum on Air India's strategic disinvestment, as per which, the government plans to offload 76 per cent equity share capital of the national carrier as well as transfer the management control.

The proposed transaction would involve Air India, its low-cost arm Air India Express and Air India SATS Airport Services, which is an equal joint venture between the national airline and Singapore-based SATS.

"The joint forum as stated many times has strongly opposed the privatisation of Air India and its subsidiaries as the Air India is our national pride and served the nation many a times at needs," the forum said.

"This statement is issued by the joint forum to safeguard the national interest. A detailed letter in this regard will be sent to the prime minister office, ministry of civil aviation and Air India management," it added.

Budget carrier IndiGo, which is struggling with Pratt & Whitney engine issues in its A320 Neo planes, had initially evinced interest in acquiring Air India's international operations, but later backed out, saying such an option was not available under the disinvestment plan.

Days later, Naresh Goyal-owned Jet Airways also said it had decided not to participate in the Air India sale process considering the terms of offer in the information memorandum and based on its review.

The forum had held a protest meeting also at the national carrier's Kalina officer here yesterday against the government's privatisation move.

The government is giving the Air India to private players at a time when the carrier is improving its operational and financial performance, the forum had alleged, stating that the move amounts to "socialising losses and privatising profits."In Koratagere, why Parameshwar may not be in for the 2013 shock

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

It would not be wrong to say that the defeat in Koratagere in 2013 cost Dr. G Parameshwar the chief minister's chair. Although there was Siddaramaiah leading the campaign Parameshwar was always in contention for several reasons, one of which was that he is an old-timer in the Congress.

The two contests that were closely watched were the ones in Varuna and Koratagere from Siddaramaiah and Parameshwar were battling their respective opponents. There was, in fact, no moral ground for Parameshwar to claim the CM's chair following this shock defeat.

Parameshwar was in a battle against Sudhakara Lal P R of the JD(S). The JD(S) candidate polled 72,229 votes as opposed to 54,074 that Parameshwar polled. In the 2008 election, Parameshwar won this seat with 49,276 votes while his opponent Chandraiah of the JD(S) polled 37,719 votes.

Since 1962, there have been 12 elections held in this constituency of which the Congress has won it 6 times. The constituency was under the general category until 2004. However, following the delimitation exercise in 2008, it has become reserved for an SC.

All is well?

Back in 2013, there were strong rumours that Siddaramaiah had a hand in the defeat of Parameshwar. The tension between the two leaders was very visible, but none admitted it in public. The differences appear to be ironed out Siddaramaiah who had not attended Parameshwar's campaign in 2013 was present at a mega rally this time in Koratagere.

From the ground, one gets the impression that Parameshwar could easily sail through this time. With the large Kuruba community declaring open support and the BJP fielding a strong candidate, there would be a triangular fight which is expected to benefit Parameshwar.

Further, if the equations go right for Parameshwar and he is able to rope in a majority f the ST Nayaka votes through his friend MLA, K N Rajanna, then he is in with a good chance.

The bigger problem that Parameshwar faced in 2013 was that it was a direct contest between him and Lal. The BJP had fielded a weak candidate who polled just 3,500 votes while the KJP ended up with 15,000 votes. Parameshar's hopes would also lie in the BJP fielding a strong candidate. Back in 2008 when he won, the fight was a triangular one. The JD(S) candidate polled 37,719 votes while Parameshwar had bagged 49,276 votes. The BJP had in 2008 bagged 33,000 votes. This was an indicator that the BJP had eaten into the JD(S) votes which had helped Parameshwar.

This year, the BJP is planning on fielding either Y H Huchaiah or Gangahanumaiah a ticket. Both are strong candidates and are capable of polling a large number of votes. However, Parameshwar would hope once again that the BJP eats into the JD(S) vote share which would make the going easy for him.

The sympathy wave:

The voters do realise this time that in 2013, Parameshwar missed the CM's chair by a whisker. Most voters see the Congress coming back to power and feel that they must give Parameshwar a chance.

Parameshwar this time has spent a considerable amount of time in his constituency and has been going all out to connect with the voter. He has been working overtime to get the caste equations right as well. He feels that he is in with a very good chance this time.

The other factor that Parameshwar is backing on is the anti-incumbency against the sitting MLA, Lal. The people have been complaining about the lack of development works in the constituency. The voters point towards the roads that are incomplete. Howeve,r Lal begs to differ and say that he has not been working for the constituency after he became the MLA but since the past 18 years. He says that the Congress government never released funds as a result of which some of the work has remained incomplete. His followers join him in the chorus to echo their leader's thoughts.

The caste equation:

There are 60,000 and 20,000 SC and STs in this constituency respectively. The Lingayat/Veerashaivas are 20,000 in number while the Vokkaligas are a population numbering 30,000. The Muslims are 12,000 in number while the Kurubas population is at 14,000. There are the Tigalas and Gollas who are 11,000 and 12,000 in number. The remaining from the Madivala and other communities are 20,000 in number.

One of the major mistakes that Parameshwar had rectified was to take a stand on the Sadashiva Commission's report. He was criticised by the SC's community's left faction for not taking a stand over the issue.

The SC communities had united over the commission's report. Parameshwar had said that he is not opposed to the implementation of the report.

Karnataka Assembly Election dates Date of notification April 17 Last date to file nominations April 24 Last date to withdraw nominations April 27 Date of polling May 12 Date of counting May 15Masarat Alam will remain a non-starter in J&K thanks to Centres zero tolerance towards separatism

J&K: Two policemen injured in grenade attack in Pulwama

India

oi-Madhuri

Two policemen were injured on Thursday due to an attack by terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district. The incident happened around 10:40 am when the terrorist lobbed a grenade on police station located in Pulwama.

The incident happened around 10:40 am when the terrorist lobbed a grenade on police station located in Pulwama.

Following the incident, the government forces cordoned off the area and launched a hunt to nab the attackers soon.

Earlier on Wednesday, at least five people, including an Army jawan and two teenagers, were killed and more than 100 others were injured during an anti-terror operation at Khudwani village in South Kashmir's Kulgam district and subsequent civilian protests across the valley. Meanwhile, the three civilians who were killed were identified as Sarjeel Ahmad, 28, Bilal Ahmad Tantray 16, Faisal Ilahi, 14, and Aijaz Ahmad Palla, 30, all from south Kashmir

The terrorists were identified by cops as Muhammad Azad Pala, Bilal Ahmed and Suhail Ahmed Dar from Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Thousands of people participated in the funeral of the civilians killed in the crossfire. The three LeT terrorists, who had escaped, later resurfaced at the encounter site after security forces withdrew the cordon.Karnataka: Will Congress not allow Kumaraswamy to be CM for full 5-year term?

Is it chief minister Kumaraswamy or chief manager of Congress Ktaka ATM? BJP has an answer

All is well between Congress, JD(S)? Kumaraswamy meets Rahul as Karnataka waits for full cabinet

India

oi-Madhuri

It surely was a gruelling election which had all the essence that one could have asked for. Karnataka witnessed all the big wigs from all political parties hitting the campaign trail for the May 12 Karnataka elections.

We hope you enjoyed out LIVE coverage of the elections. Thank you for staying tuned with us.

Newest First Oldest First Election observer conducted a raid in Banaswadi area and seized Rs 19 lakh along with voter list and other election related materials. FIR registered. RR Nagar MLA Muniratna ran his constituency like an independent Republic where rule of law had no place. People were harassed and abused. False cases were filed against political opponents. Finally, seems like karma has caught up with Muniratna. Massive blow to Siddaramaiah, says BJP. Victory for Democracy! EC orders countermanding of RR Nagar polls after court ordered FIR against Congress candidate Muniratna Naidu for creating more than 10k fake voter ids. With Siddaramaiah's money bag, Muniratna in the dock, Congress is in a big soup in Karnataka, tweets BJP Karnataka. Polling in RR Nagar has been deferred. Polling to now be held on May 28 and counting on May 31. Earlier this week 9746 voter IDs were seized from a flat in the area. According reports, IT sleuths and district election commissioner conduct raids at Congress candidate Ashok Kheny's residence in Bidar. Kheny is contesting from Bidar South constituency. RSS ideologue Ram Madhav, says, "Karnataka Elections 2018 is an important election. Both parties, namely BJP & Congress have invested heavily in it. I am certain that BJP will be in a comfortable position & will get simple majority & will form the government in the state." Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) & Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) being dispatched from Smt. Kamala Bai Educational Institution to polling booths. The Congress has sought for the lifting of the ban on telecasting the Sriramulu video in which he is alleged to be discussing a pay off with a Supreme Court judge to bail out Janardhan Reddy in the illegal mining scam. Law and order is completely under control says Neelamanu Raju, Karnataka state police chief. 22,000 home guards have been deployed for security, she says. BJP MP, Prathap Simha urges EC to monitor religious places on polling day. He said that political parties would use these places to lure voters as there is no restriction on gathering there. Security has been tightened across the state ahead of polling to be held tomorrow. In Bengaluru, 14 additional commissioners, 1 joint Commisioner and 16 DCPs will oversee security. EC officials seize Rs 20 lakh unaccounted cash from a house in Bagalkote. The money was seized from the house of a man named Sandeep Maji. A Congress delegation has lodged a complaint with the Election Commission against Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. The Congress has accused both of misleading people and launching personal attacks. Minister Viany Kulkarnis close aide raided by IT officials. Prashanth Kekare whose house was raided was taken into custody. Congress submits memorandum to the Election Commission regarding allegations of bribery of a Judge by BJP candidate B Sriramulu Income Tax Department conduct raids at house of Congress candidate Satish Sail's close associate Mangaldas Kamat in Ankola. According to reports, IT officials raid Prashant Kekare, a close associate of Congress minister Vinay Kulkarni in Dharwad. I-T sleuths raid a house belonging to a doctor in #Mangaluru. I-T officials scrutinise documents. EC officials seize innova car carrying unaccounted cash amount of around Rs 17 lakh in Devanahalli. Poll officials seize Rs 2.17 crore unaccounted cash in Molakalmuru, Chitradurga. Close associate of Congress leader Ramanath Rai, Kachigudda Sanjeev Kumar, allegedly attacked in Bantwal; 4 others including Kumar's wife injured, 2 cars damaged. Police arrest 2 men for trying to bribe voters at Chikkodi in Belagavi. Accused allegedly tried to bribe voters in favour of Rayabagh BJP candidate Duryodhana Aihole. The EC has directed television channels not to air the Sriramulu video in which allegations of him bribing a judge to bail out Janardhan Reddy was made. The direction comes hours after State Home minister Ramalinga Reddy called what the Congress described as an 'explosive press conference' and released the video clippings which were in circulation on social media. Congress claimed the 'sting operation' revealed that alleged attempts were made to bribe to seek a favourable verdict for Reddy. The party alleged that just one day before the then CJI retired, he passed an order in a case related to Reddy brothers' Oblapuram Mining Company. Here are some tips to vote if you do not have a voter ID card. You can vote as long as your name is on the electoral roll. If you do not have a voter ID, then alternative ID proofs can be carried. They are Passport, Driving License, Service Identity Cards with photograph issued to employees by Central/State Govt PSUs/Public Limited Companies, Passbooks with photograph issued by Bank/Post Office, PAN Card, Smart Card issued by RGI under NPR, MNREGA Job Card, Health Insurance Smart Card issued under the scheme of Ministry of Labour, Pension document with photograph,Authenticated Photo Voter Slip issued by the election machinery, Official identity cards issued to MPs/MLAs/MLCs. The big fear among the candidates especially those contesting from Bengaluru is that polling day is a Saturday. Bengalureans who have this habit of complaining about everything ironically are the worst when it comes to voting. They need to shrug off their weekend mode and go out and vote. In the 2013 assembly the voter turn in Bengaluru was 57 while in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls it was 54. Those are poor numbers. The Income Tax Department (ITD) today said that at Rs 37.33 crore, it has seized "six times" more cash and jewellery in poll-bound Karnataka this time as compared to the last elections in 2013. The poll campaign, for the 224-seat Assembly to be held on May 12, ended today. "From the beginning of the code of conduct period on March 27 to till date, the department has seized unaccounted cash of Rs 31.50 crore and unexplained jewellery worth Rs 5.83 crore. This is nearly six times the seizure made by the department in the last state assembly election in 2013," the department said in a statement. "The seizures are likely to further go up in the last days of electioneering," it added. Even in case, if the EC is able to ascertain that attempt was made to stop people from voting, it can cancel the poll. If the EC finds that a fraud was involved, it could even cancel election to the constituency. The Commission, the sources said, deliberated on the issue and decided to seek more information from the state election adminstration before arriving at a conclusion. The Election Commission tonight deferred a decision on the recovery of nearly 10,000 voter I-cards from a flat in Rajrajeshwari Nagar assembly seat of poll-bound Karnataka even as it sought fresh information from the state election machinery. The Election Commission of India has proposed 450 women-friendly booths. Known as Pink or Sakhi booths, these booths would be run by women only. A team of the EC is on a three day visit to Karnataka. Arrangements such as ramps, wheel chairs and magnifying glasses are also being made to ensure that differently abled persons have a smooth voting experience. Congress will have 35 manifestos. The manifesto committee headed by senior Congress leader, Veerappa Moily is already ready with the draft and the same will be released in another 2 weeks. The manifestos would be district and administrative region wise. There would be one common manifesto for the entire state. P.Muralidhar Rao, National BJP General Secretary and Karnataka in charge and N.Ravikumar, state General Secretary will address media at BJP media centre, Malleshwaram in Bengaluru. Congress president Rahul Gandhi on April 4 visited the Lingayat seminary Siddhaganga Mutt and met the 111-year old seer along with Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Congress leader in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge and KPCC President G Parameshwara. Gandhi's visit comes against the backdrop of the Siddaramaiah government's move to recommend to the Centre grant of religious minority status to Lingayats and Veerashaiva Lingayats, who are politically powerful. Kannada actor, Sudeep who recently met with JD(S) chief, H D Kumaraswamy has now called on Chief Minister, Siddaramaiah at his residence. There has been a big push to rope in cine stars into this campaign. Following Sudeeps meeting with Kumaraswamy there were speculations of him either joining the party or campaigning for it. Rahul Gandhi accuses Narendra Modi of disrespecting various institutions by having RSS men sitting in every ministry and giving orders. He said if voted to power, Congress would free these institutions of RSS control. "I don't know if you all know that in every single minister's office, there is an RSS man sitting and giving orders. So what can you expect.... nothing but disrespecting the institutions. The banking system of the country has been demolished by having this structure. "18 lakh people are missing from the voting list. We met with the Chief Electoral Officer and urged him to look into it", said Congress spokesperson, Brijesh Kalappa. "At least 18 to 20 lakh names have gone mysteriously missing. It appears as though only members of a particular community find their names missing in the list", Kalappa said. "EC told us that there is still time to rectify this until April 14," he further added. Lies and only Lies!



See how @RahulGandhi fictitiously revokes the SC/ST Act to incite hatred in society. pic.twitter.com/4vcnM0zltM  Amit Shah (@AmitShah) April 5, 2018 BJP President Amit Shah attacks Congress President Rahul Gandhi in his latest tweet, says "Lies and only Lies". He claimed that the Congress president was "lying and fictitiously revoking the SC/ST Act to incite hatred in society." Karnataka Congress on Thursday tweeted saying, "Thank you Amit Shah for speaking the truth yet again. You are turning out to be our Star Campaigner! Karnataka's Silk production hit an all-time high in 2016-17. Major cocoon markets have been modernised & integrated with e-Mandi platform." Manickram Tagore, Secretary, All India Congress Committee, denied reports suggesting announcement of chief ministerial candidate on April 15. He tweeted, "I am surprised that I was misquoted in an article @thenewsminute about things I have neither said nor implied. Thank you @dhanyarajendran for immediately stepping in and clarifying the same and removing this article." Pramoda Devi Wadiyar, wife of late Srikantadatta Narsimharaja Wadiyar, on Thursday ruled out her entry into politics. I am not entering politics. I have been saying this for a long time. I have no interest in contesting elections, she told the media persons as she ended speculations over her possible entry into politics. Amit Shahs visit, which came ahead of the state assembly elections had attracted unnecessary media attention, she felt. The scion of the erstwhile royal family Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar too had no interest in joining politics, she added. Senior BJP leader K S Eshwarappa on Thursday 'advised' Chief Minister Siddaramaiah not to contest from Chamundeshwari Constituency or face a defeat. Taking a dig at Siddaramaiah's statement to the effect that BJP and JDS have joined hands to defeat him from Chamundeshwari segment on the fringes of Mysuru city, the BJP leader said that by making such a statement Siddaramaiah had conceded his defeat. ''When such is the case why should he contest? That too when he has stated that this is his last election?" he asked. BJP General Secretary, incharge of North East and J&K Ram Madhav has been roped in for Karnataka and is looking at crucial aspects of BJP campaign. Madhav has been tasked to push for a decisive shift in BJP campaign efforts and work towards a repeat of Tripura type performance in Karnataka. He held a series of meetings in Bengaluru today with top Sangh functionaries, intellectuals and civil society members, reports ANI. The BJP's first list of candidates for the Karnataka assembly election 2018 is ready. The party has finalised the names of 130 candidates and would release it soon. The BJP has roped in its Tripura architect Ram Madhav for the Karnataka elections. Sources say he met with several eminent persons in the city to discuss the election strategy. Madhav who is the national general secretary will spend a considerable amount of time in the state, sources say. VS Ugrappa, MLC and Minister Sri HM Revanna to hold press conference at 1:30pm on Friday at KPCC Office today. The party claims that the leaders will give "Breaking News against BJP". The Ministry for Home Affairs has stayed clear of the Lingayat religious minority status issue. The issue is beyond it jurisdiction and the Ministry of Minority Affairs would look into it. An MHA spokesperson said that a decision to this effect would not be taken anytime soon as the model code of conduct is in force in Karnataka. We will win 150 seats in the elections. We will provide good and clean governance. We have to realise Narendra Modis and Amit Shahs dream of a "Congress mukt Bharat. Let also ensure that Karnataka is Congress mukt", B S Yeddyurappa said. "People are in distress because of Congress. Crime rate has gone up, farmers have committed suicide. The only solution to all these problems is the BJP", he also said. Karnataka Assembly Elections: Chamrajpet constituency in Bengaluru set to witness an interesting battle. Zameer Ahmed who quit the JD(S) to contest on Congress ticket while Altaf Khan who quit the Congress to quit on JD(S) ticket. The BJP will field a strong candidate to take advantage of the split in Muslim votes. Will the trick pay off? Let us wait and see. Congress MLC, V.S. Ugrappa and Minister Sri HM Revanna to hold press conference at 1:30pm on Friday at KPCC Office today. The party claims that the leaders will give, "Breaking News against BJP". LED van for BJP campaigning will be inaugurated at Bashan Circle in Bengaluru by B.S.Yeddyurappa, P.Muralidhar Rao, Shobha Karandlaje and other leaders today at 2.30 p.m "I will contest from Chamundeshwari constituency and I will definitely win," says CM Siddaramaiah in Mysore. "Son Dr. Yateendra will contest from Varuna constituency if only party high command decides," he said. CM Siddaramaiah visits famous Lingayat mutt in Suttur. Seeks blessings from the seer. The Election Commission of India has sacked Home Ministry Advisor Kempaiah. This action comes in the wake of JD(S) supremo, H D Deve Gowda complaining to the poll body that Kempaiah was using government vehicles to transport money for the elections. Congress leaders begins press conference at KPCC office in Bengaluru. MLS VS Ugrappa releases 3 Income Tax documents against BJP's chief ministerial candidate BS Yeddyurappa. The party alleged that Yeddyurappa is involved in Rs 1033 Cores scam. Yeddyurappa as CM issued a tender worth Rs. 1033 cr to RNSIL in Upper Bhadra Project.



IT Depts order dated 28/03/2016 after a seizure operation states that Sunil(V.P,Finance,RNSIL) has on oath & based on diary jottings admitted to have paid bribe to BSY: MLC Ugrappa#BSY420 pic.twitter.com/WyydHmT00O  Karnataka Congress (@INCKarnataka) April 6, 2018 Congress levels graft charges on BSY These are not our documents. This is an order against Shri Yeddyurappa by the Income tax department under the Central Govt. Yeddyurappa has even paid a fine for non-declaration, which is in itself an admission of guilt of receiving Rs. 4.11 crore bribe, Karnataka Congress quoted MLC Ugrappa as saying. Former TV journalist and MP Tejaswini is expected to take on HD Kumaraswamy in Ramanagara on a BJP ticket. BJP state general secretary CT Ravi demanded that Jignesh Mewani be barred from entering Karnataka till voting day on May 12. This comes a day after Dalit leader Mevani advised people to disrupt Prime Minister Narendra Modis upcoming rally on April 15. Mevani called for people to enter Modis rally, throw chairs in the air and question the prime minister's promise to generate two crores worth of employment in the state. He said that if Modi does not answer, then he should be asked to leave and take shelter at a Ram Mandir in the Himalayas. Mevani is currently in Chitradurga and he has been appealing to all Dalit groups in the state to not vote for the BJP in the assembly elections. Amit Shah said on Friday he is a Hindu Vaishnav, refuting Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiahs claim that the BJP chief is a Jain. Amit Shah is a Jain. He needs to clarify first whether he is AHINDU. Jain is a separate religion. How can he talk about me like that, Siddaramaiah had said.Karnataka election: One candidate, two seats, it all began with Deve Gowda

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

The Election Commission of India has told the Supreme Court that it is opposed to the idea of candidates contesting from two seats. It said that a few months after the election, the candidate forfeits one seat as a result of which a by-poll needs to hold and this adds to the burden of the exchequer.

This has however not deterred the candidates from Karnataka to contest on two seats. This also could be the last election in which such a practise is followed. This would, however, depend on whether the Supreme Court accepts the recommendations of the EC.

In poll-bound Karnataka, the first to announce that he would be contesting from two seats was H D Kumaraswamy of the JD(S). He would be contesting from Ramanagara, the constituency he represents and Channapatana which is also a stronghold of the JD(S).

The other names doing the rounds are that of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Karnataka Congress chief, Dr. G Parameshwar. While it is not yet confirmed whether they would contest from two seats or not, there are reports doing the rounds that they have sought two tickets.

In the case of Siddaramaiah, the likelihood is that he would contest from Badami and Chamundeshwari. The decision to contest from two seats was taken after reports suggested that Chamundeshwari was not a safe seat. The high command too advised him to take both options or just stick to Badami where is victory is certain owing to high Kuruba voters.

Dr Parameshwar too is said to be in the race for two seats. He was contemplating a safe seat other than Koratagere from where he had lost in 2013. However, in all probability, he may just stick to the Koratagere seat as he has sensed that he is in with a chance this time.

When it all began:

H D Deve Gowda contested from Holenarasipur and erstwhile Sathanur in Kanakapur in 1985. He won both the seats.

In 1989 Gowda contested from the same two seats. He lost Holenarasipur to Putteswamy Gowda and Kanakpur to P G R Sindhia.

In 2004, Gowda contested Kanakapur and Hassan. He won from Hassan but lost to Tejaswini Gowda in Kanakapur.

In 1999 Sonia Gandhi contested from the Bellary Lok Sabha constituency. Her second contest was from Raebareli. She won both seats but retained Raebareli.

Karnataka Assembly Election dates Date of notification April 17 Last date to file nominations April 24 Last date to withdraw nominations April 27 Date of polling May 12 Date of counting May 15Karnataka election: Will MIM, MEP, SDPI split Muslim votes in poll bound state?

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

The Muslim votes will play a crucial role in the Karnataka assembly elections. The Congress is banking on this vote bank to boost its chances of winning the elections and retaining the chair.

Several surveys suggest that the Congress would end up with a large chunk of the Muslim votes in the upcoming elections. The Muslims realising the importance of their votes have now demanded that the Congress field one Muslim candidate from every district.

In Siddaramaiah's scheme of things, he would sail through comfortably with the votes of the Dalits, backward classes and Muslims. If Siddaramaiah's calculations on the Muslim votes goes entirely right, he is then in with a chance.

However there is a good chance of this calculation going wrong for the CM with the entry of the Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (MIM) and the Mahila Empowerment Party. Both these are Muslim dominated parties and while they are not in with any great chance, they could still play spoilsport for the Congress. The MIM has decided to contest in 60 seats while the MEP would go for it all 224 constituencies.

The Muslims account for 13 to 16 per cent of the population and have a strong influence in over 30 seats in the state. The AIMM would have candidates in all these constituencies. While the chance of a win remains remote, the Congress is worried that the party could end up splitting the votes. For the Congress to win big, it will need the Muslims to vote for it in large numbers. The Congress is also aware of the fact that the Muslims also vote for the JD(S) and with the AIMM in the fray the division would be further.

The AIMM is the key worry for the Congress. It realises that the party can spring a surprise in smaller pockets. For instance in the UP Municipal elections, the party won 29 out of the 78 seats it contested. In Nanded Municipal Corporation polls, the party won 11 seats whereas in Aurangabad the MIM finished second.

In the 2015 the MIM fielded 29 candidates from the Muslim dominated belts. The party however failed to impress and did not win a single seat and this is something that the Congress would take solace from. However this time for the Congress the worry is more about the MIM splitting the Muslim vote which would indirectly help the BJP.

Take for instance the Vijayapura City seat. Both the MIM and MEP are fielding candidates. They would also field candidates in the two other seats which fall under Vijayapura.

The MIM which has launched a Ghar Ghar Majlis campaign has being witnessing impressive turnouts at its rallies. The battle at Vijayapura would be a test case of how much the Muslim vote would split. It is a three way fight with sitting MLA, Maqbool Bagwan of the Congress, Basavaraj Yatnal and the MIM candidate who is yet to be announced. Analysts say that Yatnal could have an edge as the MIM would split the Muslim votes which would hurt the Congress. Observers also add that the MIM would have a similar effect in ten or more constituencies.

However for the Congress the worry does not end with the MIM. There are smaller parties such as the SDPI which can split the Muslim votes. The SDPI is no novice in Karnataka and has won 72 seats in the gram panchayat elections. In the BBMP poll, it polled 15 per cent of the votes and even managed to win against the Congress in the Siddapura war.

The Congress would tread carefully as it would not want to lose out on the Muslim votes. In the 30 Muslim dominated constituencies, the worry for the Congress is the consolidation of the MIM coupled with other parties such as the SDPI and MEP.

Karnataka Assembly Election dates Date of notification April 17 Last date to file nominations April 24 Last date to withdraw nominations April 27 Date of polling May 12 Date of counting May 15Karnataka polls: This AAP candidate's fight is not against BJP, Congress, but Dalit marginalisation

India

oi-Maitreyee

Bengaluru, April 12: What is worse than being Dalit? Being Dalit and uneducated.

Well, if you listen to Mohan Dasari's story, who belongs to the nomadic tribe of Maala Dasari in Karnataka and is contesting the upcoming Karnataka Assembly elections, one thing that helped him overcome most obstacles in life is his strong educational background. The Maala Dasari tribe is a part of the schedule caste community in the southern state, which is going to polls on May 12.

Dasari told OneIndia that despite his social background and poor financial conditions, quality education and equal opportunities given to him helped him fight against all odds. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate, who is contesting the polls from Bengaluru's CV Raman Nagar constituency (a reserved seat for schedule caste and schedule tribe candidates), got his bachelor of engineering (BE) degree from the prestigious National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NIRK). Thereafter, he went on to do his masters in technology (M Tech) from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, Rajasthan.

Importance of education

Armed with degrees from country's best engineering colleges, Dasari joined a multi-national company in Mumbai and was enjoying a comfortable, well-paid life. But that was not something the AAP politician had in his mind. During his growing-up years in Karnataka's Hagari Bommana Halli in Ballari district, Dasari had witnessed poverty and inequality from close quarters. Son of a telephone mechanic in the government-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the 34-year-old techie-turned-politician gave his mother the credit for helping him complete his education.

"Most of my friends left school midway. They were unable to complete their education because of poverty. Almost all of my tribesmen are poor and socially ostracised. I was lucky that my parents, especially my mother, worked really hard to send me to engineering colleges," Dasari recalled.

The horror of witnessing his classmates leaving school education midway to work and earn money continued to "agonise" him while he was working in Mumbai. After a few years of work in the Maximum City, Dasari shifted his base to India's IT hub Bengaluru where he along with a couple of friends started Aarushi Foundation seven years ago.

"The NGO works for the education of needy children. We help poor children from government schools to study in private schools of Bengaluru. We finance the education of underprivileged children in private schools. The goal is to give them quality education and restrict their dropouts. Till date, we have helped send at least 200 children to private schools," said a proud techie-turned-politician.

The Dalit angst

At a time when Dalit angst against the Narendra Modi regime is out in the open across the country, Dasari has his own take on the matter as an "insider". Talking on the subject of Dalits, Dasari said that since ages the SC/ST communities in the country have been deprived of basic necessities.

"Give us an equal opportunity and quality education; we are as good as anyone. I am an example of that. Unfortunately, most of the Dalits and tribals don't get education and opportunities. That is why there is a large-scale discontentment across the country," he said.

Dasari, who condemns the recent violence during the protest movement in six states of the country against the alleged dilution of SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, lamented the fact that untouchability is still practised in various parts of India, including Karnataka. "The Dalits and tribals are mostly poor and they have been denied education. Reservation is the need of the hour. Reservation is not a luxury but a necessity to start on a level-playing field in society."

The votes of the Dalits in the upcoming Karnataka polls hold great importance for any party that wishes to win. As per a leaked Census report undertaken by the ruling Congress government, though was never officially shared, the Dalits form 18 per cent of Karnataka's population. The ST, on the other hand, forms 7 per cent of the total population of 6.1 crores in the state. The votes of the Dalits will have an impact on 60 out of the 224-Assembly seats up for grabs in the coming elections.

How politics happened

Regarding joining politics, Dasari, who has already contested two elections, said that activism taught him about social problems and how to solve them. "But without political power, we can't bring real change in society. That is why I joined politics."

His debut election was the 2013 Assembly polls in Karnataka which he contested as an independent candidate from Bellary but lost. In December 2013, he joined the AAP to practice "honest and pro-people politics". In 2014, Dasari, who is a state co-convenor of the AAP, again contested the Lok Sabha polls from the Chitradurga constituency.

"I had little time to campaign. But my experience tells me that people want change. I campaigned for only 15 days and got 15,000 votes. It was a big morale boost for the party as well as me," he said.

As far as the upcoming elections are concerned, Dasari is pitted against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) heavyweight and two-time MLA from the CV Raman Nagar constituency, S Raghu. The Congress is yet to announce its first list of candidates for the 224-member Karnataka Assembly elections.

When asked what gives him the confidence to fight an election against a seasoned politician like Raghu, Dasari said that he and his colleagues have been campaigning door-to-door since November last year. "Already we have campaigned in around 40,000 households. We have got a tremendous response from the people. My constituency has mostly urban and well-educated people who are financially sound. Most of the voters in the constituency are scientists and techies, and they are all like me," he smiled.

There are around 2.4 lakh voters in the constituency. Dasari said he is confident of winning the polls because of the misgovernance of the sitting MLA. "I have also done a lot of social and civic works in the constituency. People know me because of my work. I am hopeful this time CV Raman Nagar voters will vote for honest and clean politics. They will also vote for development," he signed off.Hyderabad rape case: The rapist will be caught and killed in encounter, Telangana minister

Kathua rape and murder case: Hindu Ekta Manch members stage protest, demands CBI probe

India

oi-Madhuri

The family members of the accused and Hindu Ekta Manch members on Thursday staged a protest and demanded CBI probe in Kathua rape case.

Murder, rape most foul: The death of an 8 year old divides Jammu on communal lines

Meanwhile, the lawyers of Jammu Bar Association, President BS Salathia on said, ''We have always maintained that the guilty should be punished and fair probe should be carried out, by CBI. There is a misinformation campaign underway against us, its an attempt to communally divide Jammu.''

Earlier, the lawyers of Jammu Bar Association observed a bandh on Wednesday and demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into the case.

Kathua rape: Who are the Bakarwal tribes

An eight-year-old girl was allegedly abducted, drugged, raped, tortured and killed in January. The victim belonged to a nomadic Muslim tribe in Kathua district of Jammu and Kashmir. After being missing for a week, her body was found on January 17.

The Jammu and Kashmir Police had filed an FIR against lawyers of Jammu who tried to prevent Crime Branch officers from filing a charge sheet in a court on Monday in connection with the Kathua rape and murder case.

The chargesheet was filed amid protests by a group of lawyers who attempted to stop crime branch officials from framing charges. Eight people, including two special police officers, have been arrested in connection with the crime.

On January 17, the body of the minor girl was found in the forests near Rasana, Hiranagar. The girl had been missing for a week. According to police, she had been abducted and raped by an SPO Deepak Khajuria, who was a part of the team sent out to find her when she was missing.

However, Hindu Ekta Manch has been protesting in support of the arrested policeman, demanding transfer of the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation.

The crime has triggered communal tension in the state, with many lawyers in Hindu-dominated Jammu region protesting against police and demanding a CBI probe. Most offices and businesses remained shut in Jammu on Wednesday due to a bandh called by Hindu outfits.

Meanwhile, Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti, on Thursday assured that the investigation in regard to the Kathua rape case is on a fast track, adding "law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions".'If Congress isn't doing anything, we can't be sitting ducks': TMC attacks grand old party

Mahila Congress to hold a nationwide protest against BJP govt on April 17

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

All India Mahila Congress (AIMC) on Thursday lashed out at the BJP-led government at the Centre over alleged rising cases of crime against women and said that it would hold a nationwide protest on April 17 against Modi government's 'jumla'.

"PM promised women of the country that 'Bahut hua mahilaon pe atyachaar, ab ki baar Modi Sarkaar'.All India Mahila Congress (AIMC) will hold protest across the country against this 'jumla' on April 17 and will expose 'Beti bachao, beti padhao' jumla of Modi Ji," AIMC chief Sushmita Dev told ANI.

The BJP government is drawing a lot of flak over rape of a minor in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir, and Unnao rape case, which allegedly involves BJP MLA Kuldeep Senger.

The Kathua rape and murder was a gruesome act in which an 8 year lost her life. The Jammu police have filed its chargesheet in the case and details the most horrific crime one has seen in recent times. Following the chargesheet, protests had broken out in which some sought to defend the accused persons. The Jammu police say that the primary intention of the murder was to frighten the Bakarwal community to which the girl belongs. The intention was to dislodge the nomadic tribe, the police said.

Meanwhile, an FIR has been registered against rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger on Thursday at the Makhi police station in Unnao. The case was registered under several sections of the Indian Penal Code (including Section 376 for rape) and POCSO Act. The four-time lawmaker and his brothers allegedly gang-raped the girl in Unnao - who later attempted suicide outside Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow on Sunday.

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Story first published: Thursday, April 12, 2018, 19:42 [IST]Murder, rape most foul: The death of an 8 year old divides Jammu on communal lines

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

A gang rape and murder of an 8-year-old from Jammu's Kathua has hit headlines. What has been more shocking is the manner in which this issue has taken a turn and divided/polarised the region on communal lines.

The 8-year-old from the nomadic Muslim community of Bakarwals in Kathua was gang-raped and brutally murdered. The issue took a complete turn after the police filed a charge sheet in this case. Two BJP ministers have questioned the role of the police in naming 8 persons in the case and also a revenue department official as the mastermind of the plot.

The girl vanished from her home in Rasana village on January 10. Her body was found a week later and the police said that she had been repeatedly raped. The charge sheet said that the accused persons had plotted this crime to ensure that the Bakarwals moved out of the village.

Two BJP leaders, Chander Parkash Ganga, industries and commerce minister and Lal Singh, forest minister lashed out at the police and demanded that the case is handed over to the CBI. They also took part in the protest organised by the Jammu High Court bar association. During the protest, they alleged that the minority Dogras were being targeted in the case.

Prior to this, a group called the Hindu Ekta Manch held a rally opposing the settlement of Gujjars and Bakarwal tribes in Kathua. They also demanded that a police officer accused in the case be released. The BJP, however, distanced itself from the group.

The issue has put the PDP-BJP alliance into trouble. The PDP has said that it would break the alliance if the BJP failed to deliver justice in the case. The National Conference has been hounding the PDP on this case. Its spokesperson, Junaid Mattu had tweeted, "Knowing all the facts - and seeing how her Cabinet Colleagues openly tried to shield the rapists and murderers of (the girl) - If Mehbooba Mufti still sits with these people in the Government - it will be the lowest ebb of her political career."

Murder most foul:

In its chargesheet, the police said that the entire crime was orchestrated to drive the Bakarwals from Hiranagar tehsil. The Bakarwals are mainly shepherds and move through the Pir Panjal range.

The police said that the mastermind Sanji Ram was opposed to the settlement of Bakarwals in the tehsil. He had also been instigating members of the Hindu community against the Bakarwals and advised them not to give them land for grazing. It also added that one of the 8 accused in the case had come all the way from Meerut.

Further, the chargesheet states that there was a general impression among the Hindu community that the Bakarwals had indulged in cow slaughter and drug trafficking. The rivalry has been on for some time and both communities have filed cases against each other.

Further, the case files state that the deceased was held captive in a temple. She was sedated and raped several times for a week. Commenting on the role played by Vishal who had come from Meerut, the police say that he was called with a proposition to satisfy his lust. Further, the police said that the girl was killed and then head on the head twice to ensure that she was dead.

The accused also tried to cover up the crime by bribing the police Rs 1.5 lakh. The chargesheet names Ram, his son Vishal, sub-inspector Anand Dutta, Parvesh Kumar, a civilian, two special officers, Deepak Khajuria and Surender Verma and head constable Tilak Raj.Only three children of Congress leaders to get ticket for Karnataka election

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

The Congress's list of candidates for the Karnataka assembly elections is expected to be announced anytime soon. The children of several leaders have made a beeline for a ticket, but the high command is likely to oblige only for three of them.

Sources say that the high command has approved tickets only for the children of Siddaramaiah, Ramalinga Reddy and K H Muniyappa. Apart from this, there were around 8 more leaders who had sought tickets for their children, but the same has been rejected.

The source said that the call was taken after taking into consideration the winnability factor. Caste combinations too were taken into consideration while deciding on this issue.

While Karnataka Chief Minister, Siddaramaiah's son, Dr. Yathindra would contest from the Varuna constituency, Ramalinga Reddy's daughter Sowmya Reddy would get a ticket from Jayanagar.

The Central Election Committee of the Congress would meet on Friday at 10 am and clear the list. The list is expected to be released later on Friday.

Karnataka Assembly Election dates Date of notification April 17 Last date to file nominations April 24 Last date to withdraw nominations April 27 Date of polling May 12 Date of counting May 15Police were in search of the murder and the beheaded of a young man in Dindugal

PM Modi in Chennai : #GobackModi trends on Twitter worldwide

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Chennai was marred by protests called by M Karunanidhi's DMK. DMK floated a black balloon in Chennai with the slogan 'Modi Go Back', in protest against PM Modi's visit to Tamil Nadu. Also, Kanimozhi joined the party's protest against PM Modi.

Meanwhile, Tamizhaga Vazhvurimai Katchi (TVK) workers climbed on the roof of Chennai airport to protest against PM Modi's arrival.

Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam leader TTV Dinakaran flayed the central and state governments for their alleged inaction over the Cauvery issue. He was participating in a demonstration demanding setting up of the Cauvery Management Board.

Earlier, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the 10th edition of Defence Expo in Chennai on Thursday. The expo was attended by over 670 exhibitors, including 150 from abroad, will showcase India's capability in the export of defence systems and components.

Newest First Oldest First Tamil Nadu BJP leader H Raja tweets that murder attempt case should be filed against protesters including director Bharatiraja and other politicians. According to Chennai Police, around 30 MLAs and 3020 people have been arrested for showing black flag to PM Modi The RK Nagar MLA TTV Dinakaran hit out at CM K Palaniswami and Deputy CM O Panneerselvam and alleged that they had betrayed people of Tamil Nadu on the Cauvery issue. #GoBackModi, there is no place for modiji or his party. pic.twitter.com/1gJZgqmhWo  Hajakudbudeen Haja (@hkd2912) April 12, 2018 #GobackModi was trending No.1 Worldwide on Twitter In Erode district, DMK workers released black balloons and about 50 workers were detained, reports PTI. Amidst protests, PM Modi conveys Tamil New Year wishes to Tamilians all over the world. "I was not interested to participate in Defence Expo 2018 for not forming Cauvery Management Board," says Puducherry CM Narayanaswamy PM Modi departed to Delhi from Chennai International Airport. "The Prime Minister will have to step down when the election comes" says DMK leader MK Stalin Chennai IIT students raised slogans and black flags in front of PM Modi. Chennai IIT students raised slogans and black flags in front of PM Modi. "The Prime Minister will have to step down when the election comes" says DMK leader MK Stalin PM Modi departed to Delhi from Chennai International Airport. "I was not interested to participate in Defence Expo 2018 for not forming Cauvery Management Board," says Puducherry CM Narayanaswamy Amidst protests, PM Modi conveys Tamil New Year wishes to Tamilians all over the world. In Erode district, DMK workers released black balloons and about 50 workers were detained, reports PTI. #GoBackModi, there is no place for modiji or his party. pic.twitter.com/1gJZgqmhWo  Hajakudbudeen Haja (@hkd2912) April 12, 2018 #GobackModi was trending No.1 Worldwide on Twitter The RK Nagar MLA TTV Dinakaran hit out at CM K Palaniswami and Deputy CM O Panneerselvam and alleged that they had betrayed people of Tamil Nadu on the Cauvery issue. According to Chennai Police, around 30 MLAs and 3020 people have been arrested for showing black flag to PM Modi Tamil Nadu BJP leader H Raja tweets that murder attempt case should be filed against protesters including director Bharatiraja and other politicians.'PM Modi, do you want to give the message of 'Betiyaan Chuppao' or Beti Bachao'?: Kapil Sibal

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

Congress leader Kapil Sibal on Thursday asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to clarify, whether he wants to give a message on 'Betiyaan chuppao' or Beti Bachao'. His reaction comes a day after the Jammu and Kashmir crime branch submitted a charge sheet on the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl in Kathua.

"Prime Minister, do you want to give the message of 'Betiyaan chuppao' or Beti Bachao'?," ANI quotes Sibal as saying.

Earlier, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti said her government will not allow the law to be obstructed and assured that justice will be delivered.

Mehbooba responded to their concerns on the probe. "The law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions and statements of a group of people," she said in a tweet.

Appalled by the shocking incident, many Bollywood celebrities including Farhan Akhtar, Sonam Kapoor, Javed Akhtar, Shirish Kunder and others requested the public to demand justice for the minor in the wake of the shameful incident.

Meanwhile, Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh also said that the Kathua rape victim won't be denied justice.

The brutal rape and murder of the eight-year-old girl from the Muslim Gujjar-Bakarwal community in Kathua district of Jammu and Kashmir once again alarmed the entire nation.

According to reports, the girl was held captive inside a 'Devisthan' or a temple and gang-raped by six men. The Crime Branch of Jammu and Kashmir Police reportedly filed two separate charge sheets against the eight accused persons including a juvenile held in the case.

Wednesday's charge sheet by the Jammu crime branch has also revealed some chilling details about how the girl was gang-raped again before she was killed.Still awaiting Hong Kong's response on Nirav Modi: MEA

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has said that India is still awaiting a response from Hong Kong over any action, if initiated, against fugitive Nirav Modi, who is wanted in India in connection with a Rs 12,700-crore loan default case. MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said there is an agreement between India and Hong Kong about the surrender of fugitive offenders.

Nirav Modi, wanted in connection with the Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam case, is reportedly in Hong Kong which is a Special Administrative Region of China.

"So far we have not received any information about Nirav Modi or about his arrest from the Hong Kong authorities," Raveesh Kumar said.

"We are aware of the written reply submitted to Parliament which shared that Nirav Modi is in Hong Kong. We have requested the Hong Kong authorities to surrender Nirav Modi. There is an agreement between India and Hong Kong about the surrender of fugitive offenders. We are still awaiting a response," he added.

China has left it to Hong Kong to take a final call on the arrest of Nirav Modi. China had said the special administrative region which functioned under its effective control can take a decision over the issue based on its laws and judicial assistance agreements. India has reportedly sought Nirav's arrest under the "Surrender of Fugitive Offenders Agreement" with Hong Kong.

Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh told Parliament last week that his Ministry had sought the provisional arrest of Nirav by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Meanwhile, the Delhi High Court earlier this week directed diamantaire Nirav Modi's company, Firestar Diamond, to ask him to return to the country, dubbing him a "fugitive".

While Hong Kong could act on India's request, it is not yet clear whether Nirav stayed put in the former British colony where he has a diamond store besides the one in Beijing.

Hong Kong was formerly a colony of the British Empire after the perpetual cession of Hong Kong Island from Qing China in 1842. China resumed sovereignty over the former British colony in 1997. As a Special Administrative Region, Hong Kong maintains a separate political and economic system apart from mainland China.

OneIndia News with PTI inputs

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Story first published: Thursday, April 12, 2018, 18:21 [IST]Unnao rape case: FIR registered against accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger

India

oi-Madhuri

An FIR has been registered against rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger on Thursday at the Makhi police station in Unnao.

The case has been registered under several sections of the Indian Penal Code (including Section 376 for rape) and POCSO Act.

Confirming about it, Police SO Rajesh Singh said,''The MLA was booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and POCSO at Unnao's Makhi Police Station.''

The decisions were taken after the Special Investigation Team constituted under Additional Director General of Police (Lucknow zone) to look into the matter submitted its report to the government.

The four-time lawmaker and his brothers allegedly gang-raped the girl in Unnao - who attempted suicide outside Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow on Sunday - and are also accused in the custodial death of the victim's father. A special investigation team (SIT) has been constituted to probe the alleged rape and killing.

Earlier, Sangeeta Sengar, the wife of the accused MLA demanded narco tests on her husband and also the 18-year-old victim, who alleged confinement by local authorities.Unnao rape case: SIT takes statements of victim's mother and uncle

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The Special Investigating Team (SIT) on Thursday (April 12) took statements of Unnao rape case victim's uncle and mother. BJP MLA Kuldeep Sengar is one of the accused in the Unnao rape case. Earlier today, an FIR was registered against Sengar at the Makhi police station in Unnao.

"Special Investigation Team took mine and the girl's mother's statements, we cooperated with them," victim's uncle told the media on Thursday evening.

Earlier, a case was registered under several sections of the Indian Penal Code (including Section 376 for rape) and POCSO Act against Sengar.

Confirming it, Police SO Rajesh Singh said,''The MLA was booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and POCSO at Unnao's Makhi Police Station.''

Yesterday, Sangeeta Sengar, wife of Kuldeep Sengar, met Uttar Pradesh's Director General of Police OP Singh in Lucknow and handed over a letter to him demanding a Narco test for her husband and the Unnao rape victim. Meanwhile, the rape victim had appealed that she be given complete justice. The survivor has alleged that she has been kept in captivity in a hotel room and is not even being given water.

[Unnao rape case to be handed over to CBI, victim's family to get security]

The rape victim's father, who was earlier arrested by the police in a case of assault, died on Monday while he was in judicial custody in Unnao. The rape victim had earlier claimed that her father aged 50, was thrashed on April 3 by the goons of the MLA in order to get him to withdraw the rape case. The 17-year-old girl and her family on Sunday had attempted to commit suicide outside the residence of UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, protesting inaction against Kuldeep Singh Sengar.

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Story first published: Thursday, April 12, 2018, 20:55 [IST]Fight for Mahadayi river crosses 1000 days of protest: 'Water First, Religion Next', say farmers

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Raita Sena leaders in Nargund- the bastion of movement for Mahadayi river water- are not entertaining politicians in the run-up to assembly elections. The leaders are committed to keeping this issue apolitical till the objective of the movement is achieved. Most importantly, they decided to boycott activists from the forum who want to contest the election.

The Raita Sena members took out a rally from the Mahadayi movement stage from the town outskirts to the statue of Naragund king Babasaheb under tight police protection. It was a pitiful sight to see a gathering of 150 people. Under the scorching sun, the fight for Mahadayi river completed 1000 days of protest on April 10th. Veeresh Sobaradmath spearheading the movement bathed in water mixed with cow dung to express displeasure with the Centre and the state governments.

No to politicians:

Meanwhile, former CM HD Kumaraswamy was in Naragund and Navalgund to address a political rally on the same day. Raita Sena leaders refused to meet Kumaraswamy in a stern a message to all political leaders who want to pay a courtesy visit to farmers.

Fakirappa Jogannavar, Raita Sena Convener, says, "Demand for Kalasa-Banduri project is apolitical movement. We urged our farmers not fall prey to day-dreams shown by political leaders during elections. We are waiting for Mahadayi water tribunals judgement in June-July. We hope our movement will be successful?"

Not bothered about Lingayat religion issue:

The farmers are not bothered about separate religion for Lingayats. A furious farmer asked, "What is the need to recommend separate religion for Lingayat when you have an important issue as Mahadayi? What purpose does it serve?"

"This issue will not have any impact during the elections. We are hardly bothered about the Lingayat religion issue. The tussle between Lingayats and Veerashaiva is an old issue. What's new in this? In fact, the issue of Lingayat religion is untimely and unnecessary."

On Swamiji's open support a particular party, he said, "Devotees may not heed what Swamiji's says. They have respect for Swamiji's but voters will take their own call."

The farmers still carry the deep resentment against CM Siddaramaiah government. They opined that CM Siddaramaiah should not have resorted to lathi-charge during their protest in Nargund last year.

Two resolutions were passed on the 1000th day of the movement. 1. One final appeal to President before the conclusion of Karnataka assembly elections, 2. To sack farmer leaders who want to contest elections.

Professor Harish Ramaswamy says, "The Congress government is not effective in Mahadayi issue. For instance in Cauvery river dispute matter, despite the fear of contempt of court Siddaramaiah government decided not to release water to Tamil Nadu. He should have come back to people saying if they elect his government this the problem will be resolved. People would believe. Fortunately or unfortunately, even BJP is also not involved."

Karnataka Assembly Election dates Date of notification April 17 Last date to file nominations April 24 Last date to withdraw nominations April 27 Date of polling May 12 Date of counting May 15Collapse of Kabul will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history: Donald Trump

Thousands of terrorists might have been airlifted out of Kabul: Trump slams Biden

Never in history has withdrawal from war been handled so badly: Trump

Donald Trump holds Syria, Russia responsible for chemical attack: WH

International

pti-PTI

Washington, Apr 12: US President Donald Trump considers Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and his Russian ally responsible for a suspected chemical attack in rebel-held Douma and is still mulling a response, the White House said.

"The president holds Assad and the Russians responsible for the attack," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters. "All options are on the table," Sanders said when asked about a potential US riposte. "Final decisions have not been made on that front." Trump earlier warned that "missiles will be coming" in response to the alleged chemical atrocity in Syria.

The attack on the besieged town of Douma came almost exactly a year after a chemical attack in the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun killed dozens of people. That attack prompted the U.S. to launch several dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air base.

President Donald Trump blamed Syrian government forces for what he called a "mindless CHEMICAL attack" and warned there would be a "big price to pay." He did not elaborate. In a series of tweets, Trump held Russia and Iran, Syrian President Bashar Assad's chief sponsors, responsible.

The Syrian government denied the allegations, calling them fabrications.

PTI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.



Copyrighted Image? DMCA



In the park today I saw a teenager watching two little kids, one of whom apparently stole a piece of candy from the other. The teenager rushed up to the two of them, reprimanded one of them, and stole both of their bicycles. I felt like it was my turn to step in at that point, and I confronted the bicycle thief. "Excuse me," I said, "what makes you think you can commit a larger crime just because you witnessed a smaller one? Who do you think you are?" He stared at me for a while, and replied: "the U.S. military."

There is no crime larger than war. There is no way to legalize it. The Kellogg-Briand Pact bans it, and the United Nations Charter bans it with narrow exceptions that have not remotely been met by any of the U.S. wars of the past 17 years. A small crime cannot justify a larger one. In 2002-2003 Iraq could have had all the weapons the warmongers were lying about. Or it could have not had them. It didn't make the slightest difference legally, morally, or otherwise in justifying a war.

Now, Syria could have used chemical weapons. Or it could not have. The question is not uninteresting or amoral or unimportant or boring, but it is completely and utterly irrelevant to the question of war.

So, yes, it's fun to point out how often they've lied and how they lack any proof of their claims and so forth. But do so with the understanding that you're being played, you're being manipulated into conceding that if they ever can make a case that some crime has been committed, that will justify them in killing large numbers of people and risking global apocalypse.

It won't. The problem is not that Trump wants to start a war before the inspectors can determine whether a war is merited. War cannot be merited. There is no such thing as mass murder getting justified by someone else committing murder with the wrong type of murder weapon. This is ludicrous nonsense.

What if Iraqis really had taken babies out of incubators in Kuwait? What if the Vietnamese really had shot back at the invaders in the Gulf of Tonkin? What if the Spanish really had strip-searched a woman or blown up the U.S.S. Maine? Once the media has got you debating some such question as if it's an application for a license to kill and kill and kill and kill, you've failed at the task of spotting the war lie. The lie is not the answer. The lie is the question.

Imagine if whenever 12 people were killed with a bomb or guns the "International Community" had to kill the nearest 20,000 people with poison gas. Why is the reverse so acceptable? It shouldn't be. It isn't legal or moral or decent or popular enough for the warmongers to let us have a public vote before they do it.

Trump's threat of war -- the threat itself -- is a violation of the UN Charter, which Congress pretends does not exist, but which the U.S. Constitution makes the Supreme Law of the Land along with every other treaty that the United States is party to.

But those Congress members telling Trump he cannot commit the crime of continuing and escalating one of his many wars without Congress, are obliged to act -- and not by "authorizing" the crime. Rather, they are obliged to prevent it -- and not to wait and punish it after the fact. The tool available to them is impeachment and removal from office. The list of impeachable offenses is not exactly lacking.

There are some people I know of who have not been falling for the media manipulation. They are people who've read War Is A Lie.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 Truthout

Donald Trump says the United States is about to bomb Syria, and Russia has vowed to shoot down US aircraft with missile defenses in response. With John Bolton, the new national security adviser and infamous enemy of the United Nations by Trump's side, diplomacy is not in the cards.

Although there has been no independent investigation, Trump is blaming Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for an alleged chemical attack on Saturday in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, that killed 49 people.

As he did before bombing Syria with Tomahawk missiles one year ago -- also in retaliation for an alleged gas attack -- Trump is rushing to judgment about who was responsible. And once again, the military force that he's threatening to use now would violate both the War Powers Resolution and the UN Charter.

Moreover, as a group of international law experts, including this writer, noted in a statement, "an act of violence committed by one government against another government, without lawful justification, amounts to the crime of aggression: the supreme international crime which carries with it the evil of every other international crime, as noted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946."

Bombing Syria could also lead to a dangerous confrontation with Russia. Trump tweeted early Wednesday morning: "Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Yevgeny Serebrennikov, first deputy chairman of Russia's upper house's Defense Committee, said Sunday that Russia would immediately respond to US airstrikes in Syria. "A military intervention under far-fetched and fabricated pretexts in Syria, where there are Russian soldiers at the request of the legitimate Syrian government, is absolutely unacceptable and could have the most dire consequences," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Both Syrian and Russian authorities denied that Assad was responsible for the chemical attack.

Assad has already taken back from the rebels over 90 percent of Eastern Ghouta, which includes Douma, so it seems unlikely he would attack Douma. Moreover, Trump announced last week he intended to withdraw US troops from Syria. It is thus counterintuitive to conclude Assad would have launched a gas attack in Douma.

On April 6, 2017, Trump bombed Syria after declaring that Assad had used sarin gas at Khan Sheikhoun two days earlier. Assad had denied ordering the attack. But the Trump administration ignored all dissenting voices.

Assad's responsibility for the 2017 attack has never been definitively confirmed. Indeed, on February 8, Defense Secretary James Mattis admitted the United States had "no evidence" that the Assad government used Sarin against the Syrian people.

Trump said the United States is "getting clarity" and "some pretty good answers" about who was responsible for the Douma attack. But no independent investigation has yet been done.

Nonetheless, Trump has signaled that he's about to authorize the firing of missiles at Syria. That would be illegal and potentially catastrophic.

The War Powers Resolution, passed by Congress in the wake of the Vietnam War, permits the president to introduce US troops into hostilities or imminent hostilities only when Congress has declared war, when Congress has passed "specific statutory authorization" for the use of military force, or when there is "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."

None of these three prongs is present to justify the use of military force in Syria. Congress has neither declared war nor passed legislation authorizing a US attack on Syria, and Syria has clearly not attacked the United States or US armed forces. As a result, a military attack on Syria would run afoul of the War Powers Resolution.

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From No More Fake News

Don't hesitate. These persons are a danger to the community. Facebook should ban them immediately, before their dangerous word-viruses infect the brains of a billion users.

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." (John F Kennedy, 1962)

Outrageous. Ban him. Everyone knows unpleasant facts and competitive values make people feel unsafe. These are micro-aggressions, and anyone who supports them should have his Facebook page taken down.

"We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks -- that's show business." (Edward R. Murrow, CBS news anchor)

Ban Murrow. He is attacking his own profession and making a mockery of it. By extension, he can be seen to prefer some other kind of news. Who knows what that is? Mainstream news is real news. Other news is fake.

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right...to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees, of the people; and if the cause, the interest, and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute other and better agents, attorneys and trustees." (John Adams, 1765)

Adams is proposing nothing less than the right of the people to remove their rulers. In some cases, this would be useful, but as a general proposition, it is incendiary. His statements would trigger many people. Adams is committing hate speech. Ban him.

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." (Hannah Arendt, 1974)

She is implying that the mainstream press is lying to the people. This is forbidden. Establishment news is our only source of vetted truth. Everything else must be filtered by fact checkers. Take down her Facebook account. Ban her.

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. (George Orwell, 1972)

We know all about Orwell. He champions the idea that mainstream authority, and the press, are perverting truth on an ongoing basis. He might well represent independent media. He needs psychiatric treatment. Ban him.

"Private property ... has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is." (Oscar Wilde)

This is a borderline case. We're not sure where Wilde stands on the issue of private property. Is he completely against it? If so, leave his Facebook account alone. We're submitting this quote to the fact checkers.

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest." (Thomas Paine, 1776)

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(This is a reprint from NewsBred).



Ramachandra Guha and Harsh Mander

(Image by NewsBred) Details DMCA



Ramachandra Guha and Harsh Mander began--and hopefully ended--"the minority space" series in Indian Express on Tuesday. On the Day of Judgment--for they would prefer such an option rather than the presence of Bhagwan Vishnu--the duo would be hard pressed to explain the deviousness of their heart; the venoms of their actions.

Over the last fortnight or so, Indian Express has almost daily pushed this "minority space" agenda on its edit pages. This stems from the fear of "Deep State" that, God forbids, if Muslims--and Dalits--were able to recognize that BJP and Modi are their best friends, the last plank of their survival would sink and take them down too in the vast ocean of human junk and wastefulness.

The agenda of these two academic/activist charlatans is clear: Make Muslims fearfully conscious of their separateness from the Hindu majority so that they are further pushed into a seized mentality and a common ground with Hindus is never created. Create Hinduphobia so the Muslims are not able to see the deviousness of Congress, BSP, Left who have done practically nothing for the minority in the last 70 years. The idea is to deny Hindus and Muslims a common ground.

Guha and Mander would skillfully hide the fact that out of 125 Muslim-majority seats in Uttar Pradesh, 84 went to BJP in the last assembly elections. That BJP has 79 Dalit MPs, 549 Dalit MLAs and one Dalit president.

While they beat their breasts and bemoan Muslims being treated as second-class citizens in Hindu-majority India , you would never see them acknowledge that it was Muslims who plunged the dagger of partition into the heart of this nation. You would never find them question Asaduddin Owaisi as to when the latter swears by the sanctity of the Constitution, what problem he has with the protection it offers to cows; or when its core ethos ask for a Uniform Civil Code.

You would never see them encourage Muslims to let Hindus have their way with the Ram Janmabhoomi. After all, even in austere places like Saudi Arabia it is common to move Masjid out of the way, in case infrastructural or other such need arises. Why, just four years ago, there was even a proposal to move Prophet Muhammad's tomb! After all, Quran ordains that Namaaz could be read anywhere, it doesn't need a Masjid for the act. While Namaaz could thus be performed even on roads, there can only be one Ram Janmabhoomi. Guha and Mander would never ask Muslims to make this one small gesture and see the flood of goodwill that would emanate from the majority. Imagine how much strength and unity just one gesture could do to the idea of a unified and strong India .

Guha and Mander would never highlight the fact that the 1857 War of Independence was an act of revolt by the Hindus who nevertheless chose a Muslim--Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar--to be their leader in the struggle.

You would never see them making an appeal to Muslims to do meaningful reforms. After all, there is a great deal of truth that unlike Christianity went through a Reformation Age, and Hindus had the Bhakti Movement to cleanse the outdated practices, Muslims perhaps never quite clinically reevaluate if a few of Quran's maxims needed a debate. You would never find Guha or Mander question the Muslim leadership on their lack of progressive agenda down the centuries to the present modern age.

Guha even bemoans that Hindus were once led by Nehru-Gandhi and now by Modi-Shah. He would never reflect if this change is because Hindus feel Nehru and Gandhi betrayed them and the nation during the Independence struggle by appeasing Muslims--which led to thousands of Hindus' lives lost during the Khilafat movement and Direct Action Day-- and causing the Partition.

Men like Guha and Mander would show a trishul as a sign of Hindu fundamentalism; they would never analyse why such a majority still treats three Khans as their superstars. Why an APJ Abdul Kalam is loved and respected by practically every educated Hindu.

Most tellingly, Guha and Mander are now marginalized voices because of their selective truths. Just look at the reactions Guha has managed on his twitter handle. By mid-day, it had barely touched 100 reactions. And most of them were scathing to his piece that has appeared in Indian Express on Tuesday.

A point about Indian Express too (and The Wire, predictably, joined the chorus). While they pick up every major (Guha) and minor (Apporvanand) voice to create fear psychosis about "minority space", why there is never an intellectual giant such as Subramaniam Swamy or Rajiv Malhotra being asked to present their viewpoints? Why stray incidents are picked and highlighted to paint the entire Hindu community in bad light?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.

This type of polite journalism where the politician lies through his teeth and the journalist simply reiterates a question without giving the audience the truth hurts America.

"Congressman, it's Heidi," said panelist Heidi Przybyla. "You spoke about the debt in the Omni bill. Let's talk about the debt in the tax cut bill because in that CBO report it says that the tax bill itself will add one point nine trillion to the debt over the next decade We were made a lot of specific promises on this tax cut bill that it would pay for itself and it would generate more revenue, that it would generate a four thousand dollar pay raise per worker, and now we're seeing that a lot of the money is just going to corporate buybacks."

"A lot of it is going to employees too," the congressman lied. We have all kinds of employers in our district giving raises to their employees. And letting families keep more of their money is a darn good thing. So I don't buy into this idea that letting the American people keep their money somehow is a cost to the government. I think it is just good policy letting you keep what you've earned, letting the economy grow, which in fact it is growing, much faster than in the previous ten years."

"But four thousand dollars per person congressman," Heidi interjected. "And that the bill would pay for itself. Those were specific promises."

"The problem with the deficit and the debt is spending," the lying congressman continued. "It's not letting people keep their money; it's not tax cuts, it's spending. Those tax cuts are good. They are gonna produce better economic growth. We know that. And people are getting to keep more of their money. Corporations are talking about what they've given to their employees. All those are positive things. The problem is spending. And the bill that we passed three weeks ago was a big problem because we increased discretionary spending higher than any bill in the last ten years with the exception of the Obama stimulus package."

"All right congressman Jim Jordan," replied Mika Brzezinski. "Thanks for being on this morning."

The last word on the topic Americans heard was an unrefuted diatribe by a lying politician. Paul Krugman proved what Heidi was saying definitively, and that is the last word Americans should have heard. Unfortunately, the mainstream media seem content in leaving these liars unchallenged. And that is why alternative media like "Politics Done Right," I am self-serving here, is a must. We tell it like it is.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.

See original here

By Daily Kos Staff

On Wednesday, GOP Rep. Dennis Ross announced that he would not seek a fifth term. Ross' move came just after news that House Speaker Paul Ryan would also retire, though the Florida Man says he learned of Ryan's departure as he was telling his own staff about his decision.

Florida's 15th Congressional District, which includes some of Tampa's suburbs as well as the city Lakeland, voted for Donald Trump by a 53-43 margin, but it went for Mitt Romney by a narrower 52-47 four years earlier, so it could be competitive in a strong Democratic year -- as 2018 is shaping up to be.

Ross spent years in the state legislature before launching a congressional campaign in 2010 to succeed Adam Putnam, who left that year to run for state agriculture commissioner and is now a GOP candidate for governor. Ross, who was known to many national observers as the other (and less-famous) Dennis Ross, had plenty of support from the party establishment, and he easily won his primary.

However, the general election was a bit more difficult. While Democrat Lori Edwards had trouble raising money, she was helped when Polk County Supervisor Randy Wilkinson, who had planned to run in the GOP primary, decided to campaign as a tea party independent. But 2010 was simply a horrible year for Democrats, and though Wilkinson took 11 percent of the vote, Ross beat Edwards 48-41.

Ross never had another competitive campaign, and while he rose to become senior deputy majority whip, he never attracted much attention in the House. Now, the dude known as the other Dennis Ross also gets to be remembered as the other Republican who retired on April 11, making him the record-smashing 39th member of the House GOP caucus to bail this year.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 To The Point Analyses

Part I -- Two Saudi Leaders -- Then and Now

In a 2 April 2018 interview in the Atlantic, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly declared that the Israelis "have a right to live in their own land just like the Palestinians." It is a problematic assumption, given that the Israelis' "own land" is the land they took away from the Palestinians. This, and much else, has been either forgotten or ignored by the Saudi crown prince.

Seventy-three years ago, Saudi Arabia's first king, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, expressed a very different position in a series of letters to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For instance in a letter of November 1938 Ibn Saud had written, "The [European] Jews have no right to Palestine and their claim is an act of injustice unprecedented in the history of the human race." Sadly, there was in fact plenty of precedent when it came to colonial injustice, but Ibn Saud's declaration certainly demonstrated the King's depth of feeling. Other letters followed, predicting that Palestine was bound to become a "hotbed of disturbances and troubles" if the Zionists got their way.

The two leaders finally met face to face in 1945 on the U.S. Cruiser Quincy during FDR's return trip from Yalta. In that meeting Roosevelt tried to convince the Saudi ruler to allow European Jewish occupation of Palestine. Ibn Saud countered that "Make the enemy and the oppressor pay; that is how we Arabs wage war." He continued, "Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander. What injury have Arabs done to the Jews of Europe? It is the 'Christian' Germans who stole their homes and lives." He finally added that "The Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their land to the Jews."

Part II -- What Has Changed?

Now Crown Prince bin Salman shows us that a lot has changed in the intervening years. Zionist Israel has become an established "fact on the ground" and thus settler colonialism is well rooted in Palestine. Saudi Arabia has, perhaps begrudgingly, accepted this change -- and it is not hard to see why.

The Saudis have built their security around an alliance with Israel's major backer, the United States. One price paid for that alliance has been a de facto acceptance of Israel's existence. Thus, Saudi dislike of Israel has been largely rhetorical. However, it would seem that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has finally abandoned even that facade. That is why during the prince's recent trip to the U. S., he was found publicly rubbing shoulders with AIPAC.

In the face of their inability to do anything about the Zionist occupation of Palestine, the Saudis have moved on to focus on other enemies. This proved easy because there has always been another assumed foe out there. This enemy is the Shiite Muslims, whom the Sunnis have always seen as apostates. Specifically, the enemy is now Shiite Iran. The Saudi crown prince, once more resorting to hyperbole, claims that country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, "makes Hitler look good." Then there are Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Zaydis Houthi of Yemen -- all Shiite and all seen as enemies.

The interesting part of this shift in enemies is that by now focusing on the Shiites, and particularly Iran (which, since the 1979 revolution, has not accepted the permanence of Zionist Israel), the Saudi crown prince has discovered that "there are a lot of interests we share with Israel."

Operating on the motto that the enemies of our enemies must be our friends, the Zionist Israelis have become "good Jews" in the eyes of the present aspiring Saudi leader. Also, the Saudis have become "good Arabs" in the eyes of the Zionists. Both now intrigue together against their common enemies.

Part III -- The Odd Couple

The Saudis and the Israelis no doubt make an odd couple. However, there are, if you will, inborn similarities. For instance:

-- Both Israel and Saudi Arabia assert that they are "chosen people" and therefore nations blessed by their "one true God." In both cases this assertion has led to a claim that the territory they control is "holy land" -- divinely granted to them.

-- Also, in both cases, the religious leadership of society exercises guiding influence over many internal policies.

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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

A Tale of American Hubris

Or Five Lessons in the History of American Defeat

By Tom Engelhardt

The lessons of history? Who needs them? Certainly not Washington's present cast of characters, a crew in flight from history, the past, or knowledge of more or less any sort. Still, just for the hell of it, let's take a few moments to think about what some of the lessons of the last years of the previous century and the first years of this one might be for the world's most exceptional and indispensable nation, the planet's sole superpower, the globe's only sheriff. Those were, of course, commonplace descriptions from the pre-Trump era and yet, in the age of MAGA, already as moldy and cold as the dust in some pharaonic tomb.

Let's start this way: you could think of the post-Cold War era, the years after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, as the moment of America's first opioid crisis. The country's politicians and would-be politicians were, then, taking street drugs (K-Street and military-industrial-complex ones, to be exact) and having remarkable visions of a planet available for the taking, as well as the keeping, forever and ever, amen.

On a globe without another superpower -- pre-Putin Russia was a shattered, impoverished shell of the former Soviet Union, while China was still entering the capitalist world, Communist party in tow -- history's ultimate opportunity had obviously presented itself. And about to ascend to the holodeck of the USS America (beam me up, Dick Cheney!) were history's ultimate opportunists, the men (and woman) who would, in January 2001, occupy the top posts in the administration of President George W. Bush. That, of course, included Cheney who, after overseeing a wide-ranging search for the best candidate for vice president, had appointed himself to the job. As a group, they couldn't have been more ready for America's ultimate moment in the sun. They had been preparing for it for years and largely came out of the first think tank -- the Project for the New American Century -- ever to enter the Oval Office. They had long been in favor of ensuring this country's "unchallenged supremacy" by building its already staggering military into a force beyond compare. In doing so, they had no doubt that they would achieve the previously inconceivable: an "American geopolitical preeminence," as they politely put it, that would be like no other great power's ever.

A Power "Beyond Challenge"

As it happened, their moment came with blinding, thoroughly unexpected speed on September 11, 2001. Their response would be captured perfectly only five hours after the attacks of that day. From the partially devastated Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, already certain that al-Qaeda was behind the strikes, ordered his aides (as one of them scribbled down) to "go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." And so they did. What followed would be not just the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, but of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a country completely unconnected to the attacks of 9/11. And not just Iraq either, not in their fevered imaginations anyway (as once again today in the fever dreams of newly appointed National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo), but Iran, too. Not far behind in the sweep-it-up category would come, they were convinced, the rest of the Greater Middle East (still being called in those days "the arc of instability" -- little did they know!). In the end, they had no doubt that the rest of the planet would fall in line, too (or pay the price). It was to be a Pax Americana planet for the ages.

In the carnage that followed, it was easy to forget just how expansive those fever dreams were. But give them credit: whatever else they did (or didn't do), geopolitically speaking, George W. Bush's crew thought big. Just consider their seminal document of the post-9/11 moment, the 2002 National Security Strategy. Their goal, it stated, was to ensure that the U.S. would "build and maintain" the country's "defenses" (that is, military power) "beyond challenge." And keep in mind that they were already talking about a country in, as that document put it, "a position of unparalleled military strength."

Let that roll around in your head for a second so many years later: on this planet a single, unparalleled military power "beyond challenge." That was a dream of dominion that once would have been left to "Evil Empires" or madmen (or the truly, truly bad guys in Hollywood movies). But in the world as they imagined it then, the one in which only that "sole" superpower stood tall, how easy it proved to imagine a Great Game with just a single player and an eternal arms race of one.

The top officials of the Bush administration were, as I wrote back then, pure fundamentalists when it came to U.S. military power. As President Bush later put it, they considered that military "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known." Under such circumstances, why would anyone be shy about loosing it to "liberate" the rest of the planet? In that 2002 document, the Bush administration essentially called for a world in which no other great power or bloc of powers would ever again be allowed to challenge this country's supremacy. As the president put it in an address at West Point that same year, "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace."

The National Security Strategy put the same thought this way: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." And the president and his men promptly began to hike the Pentagon budget to fit their oversized fantasies of what an American planetary "footprint" should look like (a process that, despite everything that followed, has never ended).

The Lessons of American War

So much of this has, of course, already been buried in the sands of history, but that's no reason for it to be forgotten. Almost 17 years after 9/11, the parts of the planet that "the greatest force, etc., etc." was loosed upon remain in remarkable upheaval and disarray, while failed states and terror groups multiply, producing more displaced people and refugees than at any time since the end of World War II. Another great power, China, is rising, and an economically less than great Russia continues to hang in there militarily and strategically by force of Putinian c hutzpah. Not surprisingly, American decline has become a topic of the moment.

What conclusions, then, might be drawn from the era of folly that led us to this Trumpian moment? Here are my suggestions for five possible lessons from the American experience of war in the twenty-first century:

Lesson one: It should have been too obvious to say, but wasn't: Earth can't be conquered by a single power, no matter how strong. Try to do so and you'll end up taking yourself down in some fashion.

Shakespeare would have been fascinated by the hubris of America's leaders in these years (and that was before Mr. Hubris Himself even hit the White House). It couldn't be clearer today that the military-first grab for an all-American planet proved strikingly too much for the U.S. to swallow by an Iraqi mile. It never even came close to happening. When the history of American decline is written, perhaps it will be said that never was there a great power whose leaders so effectively took it down themselves simply by wanting too much too badly and by woefully misunderstanding the nature of power on this planet. For Washington, the urge to make Earth into its imperium proved the equivalent of a submarine putting a torpedo into its own bow.

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(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).From Paul Craig Roberts Website

Gilbert Doctorow, a knowledgeable and cautious observer of Russia, who, unlike the US National Security Council, Western think tanks and universities, actually understands Russia, appears to have joined The Saker and me in our pessimistic evaluation of the likely outcome of Washington's insane treatment of Russia, loading false accusation after false accusation on the Russian government.

Here is Doctorow's assessment:

"However that may be, I do not offer a bed-time story today but a shock to the system.

"The overriding issue of war or peace, survival of mankind or its utter destruction, is now being decided in Washington and NYC without so much as a 'by your leave' for the rest of us.

"Will Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dunford prevail in warning Trump against any action that will bring a kinetic response from the world's other nuclear super power. Or will 'Mad Dog' Secretary of Defense Mattis win out in pressing Donald Trump to test the Russians' bluff on their red lines in Syria? Will the US launch missiles against Damascus or against Iran, as I suggested yesterday as an alternative scenario? Or will it support Poroshenko in launching a massive attack on Donetsk, as the Russians appear to expect judging by their just putting their entire military on war alert?

"Donald Trump has announced very clearly that he will be authorizing some kind of retribution to the CIA-faked chemical attack in Douma, Eastern Goutha in the coming 24 to 48 hours.

"So, here we are at Judgment Day, and there surely will not be one soul out on Pennsylvania Avenue to raise an anti-war placard. The tattered remains of the American peace movement is rotten to the core. Even Daniel Ellsberg has been suckered into joining the buffoon Noam Chomsky in a cakewalk demo in NYC under the sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee, once the paragon of pacifism and today just another social action group promoting racial equality. Uncle Joe Gerson sent out invitations to participate in that theater of the absurd last night.

"The anti-war movement was a Leftist movement, and we all know where the Left is today, along with the Progressives. In denial and Russia-bashing.

"To anyone watching the UN Security Council 'debate' last night it is crystal clear we are in the last days before all hell breaks out. The wall of mutual contempt between Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya and US Ambassador Nikki Haley was on full display. Nebenzya took to pieces the entire argumentation of the US side regarding Douma and the 'chemical attack.'

"He detailed the rebel caches of chemical weapons and equipment for their manufacture that Russian troops have found in recently liberated territory of Eastern Ghouta and elsewhere. He spoke about the past provocations of faked chemical attacks including the one used to justify the US cruise missile launches on the Syrian air base at Sheirat a year ago. He linked the US training and support for terrorists in fabrication of chemical arms to the faked nerve agent attack on the Skripals in the UK, which he described as a vaudeville act. He heaped scorn on Haley for her denying Russia the status of 'friend,' saying that the US has no friends, only sycophants, whereas Russia has genuine friends, and seeks nothing more in relations with the United States than civilized discourse.

"In response to this unprecedented denunciation of the USA and its policies of global hegemony, we heard from Nikki Haley the familiar story of how the UN Security Council could now either adopt a US resolution condemning the Assad regime, in effect, or admit its total irrelevance while the US continued on its own unilateral path to resolving the Syrian question.

"So, ladies and gents, open the champagne. Last days of Pompey? I was just there last week and I saw the future, not the past."New Major Version of Office 365 Analytics and Monitoring

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Hypersoft released new overhauled monitoring and analytics service for the business customers of Microsoft Office 365.Omnicontext now includes an improved capability for fully automatic activation of Office365 monitoring and reporting directly through its cloud service portal.With this new function, new customers of Omnicontext Analytics can configure the collection of end-user experience monitoring and application usage data for their Office 365 tenants, including Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, OneDrive and other Microsoft cloud productivity applications. All analytics and monitoring are available to users through a web browser or a mobile Omnicontext app.The automated configuration of monitoring and analytics speeds up the onboarding process and makes it available through easy self-service for existing and new customers of Hypersoft, without manual intervention by support engineers.The new release of analytics and monitoring for Office 365 combines the high expectations of consumer-grade easiness of service activation with the enterprise standards of security and scalability, - stated the Managing Director of Hypersoft Dr. Serguei Dobrinevski. - As a monitoring and analytics product of a new generation, Omnicontext will shorten the installation time, reduce the footprint on customer systems, and at the same time increase the quality of reports and real-time status dashboards for businesses using cloud productivity tools. Those tools are expected to fundamentally change the way how people work, and with our Office 365 Analytics Hypersoft shows the true performance of such services for their users and their true impact on the transformation of work habits and culture.Omnicontext Analytics for Microsoft Office 365 are available immediately through the Hypersoft web site.Hypersoft Information Systems is a worldwide leading vendor of software for productivity analytics and technology operations.Omnicontext is our main product. It delivers the most comprehensive information on working time efficiency, productive habits and behaviors, collaboration teams and roles in today's digitized businesses. Omnicontext also measures and monitors how information technology changes work culture and productivity, how technology services are adopted and used, and how well these services perform for their customers.Hypersoft is capable to collect the broadest range of data sources to leverage in our analytics platform. They include application and device utilization data, collaboration and communication details, and a wide range of information technology metrics from data centers or from cloud productivity resources such as Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps for Work.During more than twenty years of its history, Hypersoft has developed numerous innovations. We were the first software company to produce highly scalable integrated analysis of transaction-based services such as email and real-time communication. Our end-user experience measurement technique was the first fully technology-agnostic implementation in the market. We have created the first personal analytics application integrating device, application usage and communication data for in-depth productivity metrics. Most recently we have developed software for discovering communities and subject knowledge in large collaboration environments.The products of Hypersoft are available to individual professionals and to enterprise customers. They can be used as cloud software operated by Hypersoft or as traditional on premise products operated by our customers. Our mobile applications can be acquired directly through Microsoft and Google stores.Hypersoft is headquartered in Munich, Germany, with customers, partners, and operations throughout Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia.Hypersoft Information SystemsTatiana Dobrinevski, MarketingAm Stadtpark 6181243 MunichGermanyDigitized wire & cable manufacturing. The NIEHOFF Magazine 1/2018 is out now

The cover page of "NIEHOFF Magazine" 1/2018

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The latest issue of the NIEHOFF Magazine, customer magazine of the Niehoff Group, is available now. The magazine was published in relation to the wire 2018 trade fair in Dusseldorf and describes the Niehoff exhibits along with their technical data:A multiwire drawing line type MMH 121 + RM 161, a D 632 type double twist bunching machine, an NPS double spooler type SV 402 D, and a rotary braiding machine BMV 16.Niehoff will also present its digitization concept realized by a new application called Niehoff Digital Assistant+ 4.0, which enables process monitoring of modern Niehoff machinery, machines condition monitoring, spare parts identification, and troubleshooting support.There is the completely new MMH 112 type multiwire drawing line, which embodies a new machine generation of multiwire drawing lines. Niehoff will demonstrate its function in the form of video sequences recorded during the industrial testing at different customers.The market report titled Good perspectives for the cable industry explains reasons, which justify the expectation that the order books of cable makers will continue to be filled.Another article concerning Niehoffs activities in the field of technology deals with the development of additional double twist stranding machines for the manufacture of compacted conductors for energy cables. There are also articles about the reconditioning of used Niehoff machines and upgrading components developed by Niehoff, which help increase the productivity and efficiency levels of Niehoff machinery.One of the numerous companies, which rely on Niehoff technology, is also introduced in this magazine: The Coroplast Fritz Muller GmbH & Co. KG, Wuppertal, one of the leading manufacturers of adhesive tapes, cables and wire harnesses.Biannually the NIEHOFF Magazine informs its readers about company news and developments, trade shows and events and other interesting topics. The magazine, published in English and German with some of the articles and summaries in Chinese and Russian, is available at the Niehoff headquarters in Germany, all Niehoff subsidiaries and service offices worldwide, and also on the Niehoff website:Complete solutions from a single sourceMaschinenfabrik Niehoff develops and builds with an experience of more than 60 years all machinery  with the exception of extruders  needed for the production and the downstream processing of non-ferrous wires into automotive, power, data and special cables. In addition, the portfolio contains technical assistance by professional specialists who speak the customers languages. The reliable supply with original Niehoff wear parts and spare parts, machinery inspection, refurbishment and maintenance measures as well as machine operator and maintenance training courses complete the range of services. Niehoff Group offers custom-tailored solutions from development and planning to turnkey projects of complete cable factories.Niehoff Endex North America, Inc. (NENA), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Niehoff Group, with manufacturing and engineering capabilities in NJ, USA, is responsible for the sales, supply, and service of the entire Niehoff product range in the USA, Canada & Mexico.The Group with nearly 800 employees worldwide is comprised of its headquarters, five manufacturing subsidiaries (in Brazil, the US, the Czech Republic, India, and China) as well as sales and service centers in Japan, Singapore and Russia.Maschinenfabrik NIEHOFF GmbH & Co. KGWalter-Niehoff-Strasse 2, D 91126 Schwabach, GermanyTel. +49 9122 977-0 / Fax +49 9122 977-155E-mail: info@niehoff.deWeb:Contact: Norbert Meyer, MarketingTel. +49 9122 977-291 / E-mail: n.meyer@niehoff.deChina Telecom Recognized in Gartners 2018 Critical Capabilities Report for Network Services in APAC

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HERNDON, VA  April 11, 2018  China Telecom, a leading global communications service provider, today announces that it has been recognized among top Network Service Providers (NSPs) in Gartners Critical Capabilities for Asia/Pacific Network Services Report 2018 for its high-performing APAC network.Multinational enterprises are frequently modernizing their regional WANs by improving the performance of their cloud connectivity and enhancing the agility of their network. This trend has led to an increased focus on designing hybrid WANs that use MPLS and internet services to support enterprise cloud adoption as well as offload traffic from MPLS to lower-cost internet services. According to the Gartner report, more than half of all regional NSPs have the ability to support extended domestic connectivity in emerging markets, however their capabilities and experience vary drastically.China Telecom provides customers with a wide range of integrated communications and information technology services, including an extensive global MPLS network with direct connectivity to 31 major markets via 87 Points of Presence (PoPs) and a cutting-edge SD-WAN solution. In addition, the company boasts NFV nodes in 10 APAC countries and managed vCPE via Versa Networks in seven APAC cities and throughout China. These services are delivered alongside advanced Ethernet over Layer 1 and Ethernet over MPLS solutions. For multinational organizations in the banking and finance industry, China Telecoms low-latency network connects 13 financial centers around the world with seven in APAC, including Shanghai, Shenzhen, Dalian, Zhengzhou, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore.As APAC enterprises become increasingly interested in SD-WAN and managed SD-WAN services for the development of hybrid cloud solutions, its important to identify a provider thats capable of meeting companies individual requirements, explains Steven Tan, President, China Telecom Americas. We are honored to be listed among the top APAC Network Service Providers, as this is a testament to our dedication to providing customers with highly effective connectivity solutions. We will continue to leverage our strong domestic network and local support capabilities to serve multinational corporations in the APAC region, and look forward to continuing the expansion of our global network.To download a copy of Gartners APAC Critical Capabilities for Network Services Report 2018, click here.# # #About China Telecom AmericasChina Telecom Americas is a wholly-owned US-based subsidiary of China Telecom Corporation, one of the world's leading providers of integrated communications and information technology services to customers in over 110 countries around the globe. With headquarters in Herndon, Virginia, and offices in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, Toronto and Sao Paolo, China Telecom Americas is advancing transpacific enterprise connectivity through a turnkey suite of locally-based, custom-built IT/network solutions from network architecture, managed cloud and data center services, security, content delivery (CDN), unified communications and mobility solutions. Get more info atMedia Contacts:iMiller Public Relations for China Telecom221 Harbor HillMamaroneck, NY 10543Tel: +1 866.307.2510cta@imillerpr.comRyan OklewiczTel: +1 703.787.0088press@ctamericas.comCoalescing filter elements

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Coalescing and particulate filter elements made from microfibre glass are special designed to separate particles and aerosols with an efficiency of more than 99.9 % at 0.1 micron. The microfibre filter elements follow the coalescence principle with the goal to remove aerosols e.g. oil mist and dust particles from the air stream. The fibres inside are distributed randomly and oriented in all directions. Oil aerosols and dust particles are much smaller than the media pores which means that no sieving occurs. Three different mechanisms take place where each is responsible for capturing particles of a particular size.a) Inertia impactionThe first mechanism is inertia impection. Large particles (light blue) do no follow the gas flow stream lines because of their large inertia. They flow straight and collide directly with the microfibres. Inertia impaction becomes more important with increasing particle size.b) InterceptionInterception occures with aerosols and particles with smaller size. They are light enough to follow the stream line but will hit the fibre when the radius of the particle is larger than the distance between the stream line and the edge of the fibre. It gets stuck there and gets removed from the air. Interception gains more importance with increasing particle size.c) DiffusionDiffusion takes care of the smallest particles. These small particles do not strictly follow the stream lines. They follow the brownian motion and move randomnly due to collisions with gas molecules. Because of this movement they are likely to collide with the fibres. The smaller the particle is the higher its freedom of movement and therefore the higher their probability to encounter a fibre. Captured by diffusion becomes more important with decreasing particle size.The total filter efficiency is the result of the combination of these three filtration mechanisms.Get in touch with FE-Filter-Elements e.K. to get more information about the coalescence principle and how our filter elements can help you to protect your equipment and your employees.Check:Say hello to: hello@filter-elements.euWe are looking forward to your message.FE-Filter-Elements e.K.Neustadter Markt 5031134 HildesheimGermanyElcomsoft Phone Breaker 8.20 Extracts More Evidence from iCloud

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Moscow, Russia - February 08, 2018 - ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. updates Elcomsoft Phone Breaker, the company's forensic extraction tool. Version 8.20 Elcomsoft Phone Breaker receives an update, adding the ability to extract several types of iOS synced data from the user's iCloud account. The newly available types of data include user's and account information, Wi-Fi access point details, as well as select data from Apple Maps, Wallet and iBooks apps.In addition, Elcomsoft Phone Viewer is updated to display the new types of data now supported by Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 8.20.About iCloud SynchronizationApple offers a convenient synchronization mechanism, allowing devices registered with the same Apple ID synchronize certain types of data through Apple iCloud. The iCloud sync can synchronize information such as Safari bookmarks and browsing history, calendars, notes, Wi-Fi passwords, and even call logs.The iCloud synchronization mechanism is separate from and works in addition to iCloud system backups. Unlike daily iCloud backups, synchronization happens near instantly. If the device has an Internet connection, information is updated with little or no delay.iCloud Synced Data ExtractionElcomsoft Phone Breaker 8.20 () can extract many types of synchronized data from the user's iCloud account. The user's iCloud/Apple ID authentication credentials are required to access iCloud data. Elcomsoft Phone Breaker can use a combination of Apple ID and password (with two-factor authentication support) or an authentication token extracted from the user's computer. When using authentication tokens for accessing synced iCloud data, neither the password nor the secondary authentication factor is required. When used for accessing synced data, iCloud authentication tokens do not carry a defined expiry date.Previous versions of Elcomsoft Phone Breaker were able to extract many types of synchronized data including call logs, Safari data (browsing history, open tabs and bookmarks), calendars, notes and contacts. In addition to those types of data, Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 8.20 can now extract all of the following:- Account/User info, including the user's physical address, email accounts and phone numbers- Wi-Fi information including access point names, MAC-addresses, and devices that added the access point- Apple Maps, including routes, searches and bookmarks- Wallet: everything except credit card data- iBooks: manually added books and documents. In iOS, the iBooks app is often the default PDF viewer and the only source of PDF documents.The update is free of charge to all customers who purchased or renewed their Elcomsoft Phone Breaker or Elcomsoft Mobile Forensic Bundle license within one year. Discounted renewal is available to customers whose maintenance plan has already expired.Founded in 1990, ElcomSoft Co.Ltd. develops state-of-the-art computer forensics tools, provides computer forensics training and computer evidence consulting services. Since 1997, ElcomSoft has been providing support to businesses, law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies. ElcomSoft tools are used by most of the Fortune 500 corporations, multiple branches of the military all over the world, foreign governments, and all major accounting firms. ElcomSoft and its officers are members of the Russian Cryptology Association. ElcomSoft is a Microsoft Partner (Gold Application Development and Gold Intelligent Systems), Intel Premier Elite Partner and member of NVIDIA's CUDA/GPU Computing Registered Developer Program.ElcomSoft Co. Ltd.Russian Federation Moscow Zvezdnyi blvd. 21, office 615Vladimir Katalov pad@elcomsoft.comGeneral Surgery Devices Market High Growth Potential during 2017 - 2025

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Global General Surgery Devices Market: SnapshotThe global market for general surgery devices is witnessing a massive surge in demand owing to the mounting global population of geriatrics and the significant rise in number of surgical procedures. While global public-health initiatives have mostly centered around disease prevention, control and surveillance of infectious diseases, and promotion of benefits associated with healthy lifestyles, rising life expectancy in the past few decades, especially in middle- and low-income countries, have changed previous trends.Industrialization and significant lifestyle changes have brought about an epidemiological transition and health conditions afflicting the global population are shifting from conditions caused due to infections and pestilence to lifestyle associated diseases. The condition has led to a substantial rise in health conditions such as cardiovascular diseases, cancers, cerebro-vascular diseases, and bone disorders, in developed, developing, and less developed economies. Numbers of injuries owing to accidents are also significantly increasing across the globe as the global traffic of vehicles and other technologically advanced devices has increased.Request Sample Copy of the Report @These trends are expected to remain strong in the near future as well, presenting a massive rise in demand for general surgeries. The scenario is also expected to lead to a substantial increase in the global demand for general surgery devices. The high growth potential of the global general surgery devices market has attracted a large number of small and large general surgery device manufacturing companies in the global marketplace and the market continues to attract a number of new players.Global General Surgery Devices Market: OverviewSurgical devices find applications in varied surgical procedures such as in closure of wounds and plastic and reconstructive surgeries, among others. They are deployed in hospitals, small clinics, and other healthcare centers and are used in different types of surgeries, namely orthopedics, obstetrics, neurology, urology, cardiovascular medicine, and gynecology. Savvy players in the global general surgery devices market are making efforts to make build inroads in the fast-expanding developing economies of Asia Pacific and Latin America, which hold out strong opportunities.Besides expanding their geographical footprints, market participants are also resorting to other initiatives such as strategic collaborations and partnerships, product development, and carefully-considered mergers and acquisitions to further bolster their positions. A report by TMR Research provides a thorough peek into the global market for general surgery devices. It studies the market after segmenting it based on different parameters and also offers a granular analysis of the factors driving or hindering it.Request TOC of the Report @Further, the report presents a detailed assessment of the competitive landscape in the global market for general surgery devices and identifies key players contributing towards its growth. The companies have been profiled in the report based on important parameters such as key strengths and recent developments, product portfolio, and geographical reach. Market-leading analytical tools have also been leveraged to gauge the opportunities and threats awaiting players.Global General Surgery Devices Market: Trends and OpportunitiesGrowth drivers significantly contributing to the global market for general surgery devices are a burgeoning geriatric population, rising awareness about different surgeries, and the means to go under the knife to better looks as in plastic and reconstructive surgeries. To elaborate a bit further, the elderly population accounted for a large number of surgeries pertaining to the bone, brain, heart, and ear disorders. Technological progress resulting in cutting-edge devices and healthcare institutes providing advanced surgeries such as minimally invasive surgeries in emerging economies is also leading to market growth.One key development to look out for in the global market for general surgery devices is the opportunities opened up by robotics and the computer-assisted sector, both of which are in a nascent stage now. The different products available in the market are open surgery instruments, minimally invasive surgery instruments, disposable surgical supplies, energy based and powered instruments, adhesion prevention products, and medical robotics and computer assisted surgery devices. Among them, the disposable surgical supplies segment leads the market with maximum revenue due to the soaring demand for disposable needles, syringes, and catheters.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global General Surgery Devices Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the key segments of the market are North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Rest of the World. North America, of these, is a crucial market on account of the concentration of well-entrenched players in the region, strong policy support of the government, solid reimbursement policies, and spiking demand for surgeries because of lifestyle-related diseases. In the years ahead, however, Asia Pacific is slated to overtake all other regions in terms of growth due to the increasing spend on healthcare in the developing nations of the region. Some of the prominent markets within Asia Pacific are India, Japan, China, Australia, and Singapore.Companies Mentioned in the ReportSome of the noteworthy companies competing in the global market for general surgery devices market, profiled in the report are B. Braun Melsungen AG, Smith & Nephew, Boston Scientific Corporation, Covidien Plc (Medtronic), Conmed Corporation, Integra LifeSciences, 3M Healthcare, and Care Fusion 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Healthcare Payer Services Market Granular Analysis by 2025

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Global Healthcare Payer Services Market: SnapshotOutsourcing is emerging as a cost-effective tool for healthcare payers. Therefore, the growing trend of outsourcing is working in favor of the global healthcare payer services market. The increasing dependence of technologically advanced solutions to deliver economical business process services, growing popularity of digital technology, and the enforcement of strict health care regulations in several parts of the world are among the primary factors stoking the growth of the market.The growth of the market is also supplemented by the growing investments in healthcare IT (HCIT) and increasing number of private healthcare insurance companies. Moreover, the introduction of favorable policies by governments is escalating the growth of the global healthcare payer services market. On the flip side, the mounting cases of data breaches are resulting in increased skepticism regarding the loss of confidentiality, which in turn is limiting the widespread adoption of healthcare payer services. While outsourcing makes the overall procedure of healthcare payer services easy, it also induces unforeseen costs. This is, in turn, hampering the growth of the global market.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The majority of key players in the global healthcare payer services market are focusing towards implementing mobile technology with health plans to lure in a greater number of customers. A raft of large players are also emphasizing on mergers and acquisitions in order to stay ahead in the market.Global Healthcare Payer Services Market: OverviewThe healthcare industry is at an interesting cusp at present with breakthrough technologies, practices, and services. This also translates as higher costs of treatment and consumer empowerment with digital transformation. Besides, tough regulations and better reimbursement policies are also transforming the contours of the industry. This has spawned the global healthcare payer services market which is primed for robust growth on account of the above factors. Major players operating in the market are focused on mergers and acquisitions to diversify business portfolio and improve delivery outcomes.In healthcare, payer refers to entities other than the patient that finance or reimburse the healthcare services cost. Typically, they include insurance carriers, third-party payers, or health plan sponsors such as employers or unions. Application of payer services include management services, provider management services, billing and accounts management services, integrated front office services and back office operations, member management services, analytics and fraud management services, and HR services. The types of payer services available in the market are BPO services, ITO services, and KPO services. Among them, the BPO services gross maximum revenue.Request TOC of the Report @A report by TMR Research offers essential information on the key trends in the global healthcare payer services market. It presents a granular analysis of the various growth drivers and restraints in the market. The report also presents a detailed assessment of the competitive landscape and identifies key players contributing towards its growth. Further, it leverages market-leading analytical tools to gauge the opportunities and threats awaiting players.Global Healthcare Payer Services Market: Trends and OpportunitiesSome of the factors at the forefront of driving the global healthcare payer services market are increased adoption of technologies  particularly digital technology  to bring about economical business process services, growing focus on consumerism, and a host of healthcare regulatory policies. No wonder then, tech titans are some of the main players in the market. They are increasingly integrating mobility and health plans to engage enrolled members.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Other factors helping the markets growth are the increasing private healthcare insurance exchanges and IT investments. The pressing demand to bring down the overall administrative costs of member management services, rising need for cost effective solutions for the healthcare payer services, and the alarming instances of healthcare fraud cases are few things expected to shape the course of the market in the near future.At present, the private payers are ahead of the public payers in the global market for healthcare payer services. This is because of the massive investment by private players in the healthcare payer vertical and significant government efforts to induce private investment in the healthcare industry. Public payers, however, are slated to clock solid growth in the years ahead.Global Healthcare Payer Services Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, North America holds a dominant position in the global market for healthcare payer services at present, powered mainly by the U.S. This is because of the rising number of health insurance enrollment, helpful reimbursement framework, and dearth of skilled professionals. Besides North America, Asia Pacific is another emerging market that holds out a strong promise of growth. In fact, India, an emerging economy in the region, is a global market leader in the knowledge process outsourcing (KPO). China and Japan in the region are also slated to contribute substantially to the market. In the Rest of the World, Mexico and Brazil are shining stars poised to impact the global market growth.Companies Mentioned in the ReportSome of the prominent companies competing in the global market for healthcare payer services, profiled in the report are Cognizant Technology Solutions, Accenture plc, Xerox Corporation, Genpact Limited, Hewlett-Packard, Hexaware Technologies Limited, HCL Technologies Ltd., Teleperformance Group, Hinduja Global Solutions Ltd., and Wipro Limited.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Gili Islands as The Next Destination Around Bali

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Bali is one of the world's tourist destinations that become the gateway for foreign tourists to visit Indonesia. Beautiful beaches, traditions, cultures and friendly local people are a Balinese excess. Bali is also close to beautiful islands such as Gili Island and Lombok.Gili Island consists of 3 small islands namely Gili Air, Gili Meno and Gili Trawangan surrounded by beaches and wonderful scenery that have different character. All of that three island is have a good sunset and sunrise view and there isnt vehicles pollution because the transportation are only bicycle and cidomo, the horse carriage. Their local people also very friendly and helpful.Gili trawangan is the most famous and biggest island than Gili Air and Gili Meno. Trawangan has heavy visitor traffic, beach parties are almost held every night, very suitable for tourists who want to party and enjoy the night tour. There is also a dive school for tourists who want to learn diving.Gili Meno has a much quieter atmosphere than to Gili trawangan. The clean white sand and the clear of the seawater make the atmosphere of gili meno to be romantic and peacefully.Gili Air is a combination of gili trawangan and gili meno. There is a bar or night club, Gili Air also has a peacefull place like gili meno. Its good combination if you wantnt crowded atmosphere or too quiet atmosphere.To get to Gili Island from Bali, the fastest and easiest transportation is by using fast boats. Estimated travel time of about 2-3 hours, depending on the weather from the sea. You can spend your time with a beautiful scenery during the crossing.Currently there are more than 20 fast boat operators spread all over Bali harbour. But it will be safer if we take tickets online to eliminate running out of tickets and the like.One of the experienced online ticketing agents is gilitransfers.com. Provides many types of fastboats that can be selected as needed, have a lot of money for payments that can save your money. You can select the itinerary that matches with you and make reservation and pay online.Gilitransfers.com is a tour company in Bali specialize in inter island fast boat organizer among Bali  Nusa Lembongan  Lombok  Gili Islands.Company URLContact Info for VisitorsEmail : reservation@gilitransfers.comPhone : +6281353304990Address : Perum Permata Ariza Blok O-2 Lingkungan Mekarsari Jimbaran. Bali  IndonesiaGlobal Critical Infrastructure Protection Market 2018-2028

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Demand for critical infrastructure protection products is anticipated to be driven by the increasing frequency of terror attacks that have taken place in the last couple of years, and the associated fear of knowing that non-state and organized actors could be active within the country; possessing acute local knowledge might enable some of these elements to successfully strike at critically important networks, sites, or processes. Geo-political factors and rise of terrorism in various countries have led to activities such as illegal immigration, drug trafficking, money laundering, weapons smuggling and others across borders.Scope-Global Critical Infrastructure Protection Market is projected to register a CAGR of 2.48% over 2018-2028.-In terms of categories, Physical Security segment is anticipated to account for the largest share of expenditure globally, with a market share of 80.6% followed by the Network Security and Others segment respectively.Get Sample Copy atGovernments worldwide as constantly in pursuit to uplift the surveillance and detection of such activities in order to preserve the national integrity, protect citizens and critical infrastructure. With the rising security threats and cross border violence, nations across the world are becoming more aware of the gaps in their internal security measures, which is expected to drive spending on new and advanced intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technologies.For instance, India and Pakistan maintain a traditional relation of cross border disputes and with increasing militancy in the disputes territories, the former country has adopted several initiatives to enhance border security.The market for Physical Security is anticipated to be the largest category primarily due to the global security concerns, such as such as increasing incidences of terrorist attacks, have urged governments to increase budgetary allocations towards physical security systems and solutions in order to ensure security of their sensitive sites, economic and natural assets, and people.Make an InquiryTable of ContentsExecutive Summary 6Global Critical Infrastructure Protection Market-Overview 9Global Critical Infrastructure Protection Market By Region, 2018-2028Global Critical Infrastructure Protection Market By Segment, 2018-2028Market Dynamics 14Demand Drivers: Analysis of factors that trigger spending within the sectorTrends: Prevalent practices, industry consolidation and procurement patterns within the marketTechnological Developments : New products, processes and innovations recently inducted within the sectorKey Challenges: Obstacles affecting sector growthCritical Infrastructure Protection Market-Segment Analysis 30Segment Analysis: Physical Security 31Market size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Segment Analysis: Network Security 32Market size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Segment Analysis: Others 33Market size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Global Critical Infrastructure Protection Market-Regional Analysis 36Global Critical Infrastructure Protection-Regional Overview, 2018 & 2028Regional Analysis: North America 38Market size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Top SuppliersRegional Analysis: Europe 40Market size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Top SuppliersRegional Analysis: Asia Pacific 42Market size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Top SuppliersRegional Analysis: Middle East44Market size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Top SuppliersRegional Analysis: Latin America 46Market size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Top SuppliersRegional Analysis: Africa 48Market size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Top SuppliersGlobal Critical Infrastructure Protection Market-Trend Analysis 121Top 10 Global Growth Opportunities ScoresGlobal Critical Infrastructure Protection-Country Overview, 2018 & 2028Leading Segments in Key CountriesCountry Analysis-11 leading countriesMarket size and CAGR growth analysis, 2018-2028Change in market share, 2018-2028Segmental Share (%), 2018-2028Country Share (%), 2018 & 2028Major SuppliersSegmental AnalysisAppendix 202For More Information about This ReportContact 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.Pune, IndiaMedical Gas Equipment Projected to Beat its own Market Share by 2025

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Global Medical Gas Equipment Market: SnapshotThe global medical gas equipment market is prognosticated to be significantly advantaged by the augmenting prevalence of respiratory ailments strengthening the rise of point-of-care diagnostics (POCD). Along with the market for home healthcare, POCD could be crucial for the demand for medical gas equipment. Faster than other methodologies, POCD is one of the popular forms of diagnosing diseases at patients bedside. POCD is expected to experience a positive influence with the increasing occurrence of respiratory diseases for the reason that the risk of disease transmission could aggravate when a patient visits a healthcare center.The home healthcare market, on the other hand, is anticipated to bolster the demand for medical gas equipment while riding on the elevating number of diseases that cause immobilization. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) and asthma are some of the primary immobilization diseases which could be treated with home healthcare facilities providing enhanced convenience.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The advent of new products, customizable as per the needs of customers, in the global medical gas equipment market could prove to be significant for the growth of industry players. Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the advantage of incorporating pressure regulator and cylindrical valve into a single device that offers all the required control functions. This could also help for ensuring a quicker delivery of gases. Furthermore, vendors are predicted to improve their current offerings by patenting such innovations. In the next few years, the global medical gas equipment market could gain traction on the back of the enriching trend of product innovation.Medical Gas Equipment Market: OverviewSpecialized gases, which are used for research in biotechnology, medical purposes, and drug processing are commonly known as medical gases. Medical gas can be a mixture of different gases or a single pure gas. Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, ammonia, nitrogen and carbon dioxide are the most common types of gases used in the medical industry.Medical gasses need to be free of any impurities, as recovery of the patient depends on them. Plus, there is always a risk associated with medical gasses, as infection can be acquired through them. Due to these factors, medical gases need to be manufactured according to specified standards.Request TOC of the Report @Medical Gas Equipment Market: Key TrendsDue to the growing pool of geriatric population and development in the pharmaceutical industry, the demand for medical gases and equipment is multiplying. As per the WHO, the population aged above 65 years is slated to increase from 7% in 2000 to 16% by 2050, thereby fuelling the demand for medical gas equipment. In addition, the rising incidence of respiratory diseases, implementation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Safety and Innovation Act, increasing home healthcare market, rapid urbanization, and high occurrence of tobacco smoking are supplementing the markets growth.Key players operating in the medical gas equipment market will stand to benefit from technological advancements and market expansion in emerging countries. On the contrary, low federal reimbursements for respiratory therapies, frequent changes in medical gas calibration standards, and global shortage of helium are bound to act as restrains, limiting the demand for medical gases and equipment.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Medical Gas Equipment Market: Market PotentialAir Liquide established in 1902 has its headquarters in Paris, and is a Fortune 500 company. This company considers innovation as the most important driving force for its business. The company alone invested US$335.2 mn in 2011 and US$313.2mn in research and development of medical gasses.They have partnered with several international research centers of excellence such as Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle epiniere, Pasteur Institute, or Leuven University, and Massachusetts General Hospital, to explore therapeutic gases potential. With over 175 patented inventions currently active, they are stepping up their innovation efforts in the fields of emulsifiers, polymers, and active ingredients.They contribute to therapeutic practices evaluation by performing medico-economic and observational studies on long-term oxygen therapy, ventilation therapy, insulin and apomorphin pumps, CPAP therapy, and other perfusion therapy. Their cost-effective solutions contribute to the sustainability of healthcare systems and improving the patient care pathways.Recently, Air Liquide has commissioned the ever largest hydrogen (H2) underground storage facility in Beaumont, Texas. The storage cavern is proficient enough of holding H2 to up back up a large-scale steam methane reformer (SMR) unit for a month, and is 1,500 metres deep and around 70 metres in diameter. This development will aid in increasing the market value of the company further, making it the undisputed leader of the global medical gas equipment market.Medical Gas Equipment Market: Regional OutlookThe U.S. medical gas equipment market has contributed largely to the markets share, and is expected to lead in the forecast period. Owing to encouraging industry initiatives such as implementation of U.S. FDA Safety and Innovation Act, easier access to healthcare infrastructure, and the growing demand for minimal invasive medical mediations.The Europe medical gas equipment market is projected to beat its own market share and register a remarkable CAGR during the said period. The market players are receiving assistance by Medical Gas Association, European Industrial Gases Association and attractive growth opportunities in emerging regions of Russia and Poland are driving the market growth. However, unpredictable regulatory framework pertaining to medical gas equipment might act as a hindrance to the regional market growth.Medical Gas Equipment Market: Competitive AnalysisSome of the prominent players operating in the global medical gas equipment market are Atlas Copco, Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Air Liquide, Praxair, Inc., Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corp., The Linde Group, SOL-SpA , Airgas, Inc., Messer Group, and GCE Holding AB.In 2015, the global medical gas equipment market share was dominated by Linde Gas and Air Liquide. Through implementation of strong growth strategies, extensive product portfolio, and swift sales growth achieved through investments in emerging Asian, and Latin American economies, Air Liquide is known to have a strong hold over the 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Pharmacovigilance Market Abundant Opportunities for Players by 2025

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Global Pharmacovigilance Market: SnapshotPharmacovigilance (PV) is a process refereeing to the detection, collection, prevention, and monitoring of negative effects that may occur because of the use of pharmaceutical products and other drugs. PV services cater to a wide range of drug related activities such as discovery of a drug to its commercialization. It also helps with the utilization of tools and software that reviews, classifies data on drugs and pharmaceutical products. There has been a soaring demand for pharmacovigilance services due factors such as rising drug consumption, growing prevalence of chronic diseases, respiratory disorders, and cancer symptoms, among others. In addition to this, a large number of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) has added a substantial burden on healthcare sector leading to the increased demand for pharmacovigilance.The global pharmacovigilance market is expanding at a swiftly. Many leading pharmaceutical and IT companies are strategically collaborating and actively promoting pharmacovigilance software to bolster their market contribution. There are extensive post-market controlling mechanisms set up by multiple government supervisory agencies that concentrates on safety and efficiency of the various pharmaceutical products after they are pitched in the market. The governments have also established centers to enhance the pharmacovigilance services. For instance, Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) has aimed to assign around 40 pharmacovigilance officials across the country to coordinate with various ADR centers and strengthen reporting and monitoring of ADR activities. Increased mortality rate because of ADRs and rising awareness among patients about the safety and efficiency of the drugs are expected to be the significant driving factors for the growth of the global pharmacovigilance market.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Pharmacovigilance Market: OverviewPharmacovigilance (PV) is a scientific process pertaining to the collection, detection, monitoring, and prevention of adverse effects that may arise due to use of drugs and pharmaceutical products.Pharmacovigilance services cater to drug development activities ranging from its discovery to commercialization and consist of tools and software that helps in reviewing, classifying, creating, and other data. PV occupies a critical role in drug regulation system that helps in comprehensive monitoring and evaluation of adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Increasing instances of ADR cause an extension of patient morbidity, increase hospitalization fees, and thus pose a significant burden on any responsive healthcare system. These factors stimulate the demand for pharmacovigilance services worldwide and contribute to the expansion of the market. Several pharmaceutical companies prefer collaborating with BPOs and contract research organizations (CROs) for pharmacovigilance services to bring down the cost and augment the operational efficiency.Request TOC of the Report @Global Pharmacovigilance Market: TrendsThe global pharmacovigilance market is primarily driven by the rising incidence of ADR, soaring patient awareness regarding safety of drugs, and stringent regulations by various agencies related to drug approvals. Strict guidelines related to clinical trials of new drug therapies and mandatory requirements to keep electronic medical records (EMR) have propelled the growth of the PV market. Initiatives taken by renowned regulatory agencies, such as the FDA and European Medicines Agency (EMA), and global organizations such as the WHO have mounted pressures on several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to manufacture safe drugs. This is expected to stimulate the demand for pharmacovigilance.Furthermore, the rising trend of outsourcing of PV services to BPOs and CROs has resulted in effective drug regulation system. These outsourcing entities offer pharmacovigilance services that have high regulatory compliance, enhanced productivity, and better strategic outcomes, thus boosting the global PV market. However, concerns of patient data safety, rise in web-based sale of drugs, and lack of expertise are the key factors that may impede the growth of the market to some extent. Nevertheless, the rising number of clinical trials, particularly phase 3 and phase 4 clinical trial will unlock abundant opportunities for the market players.Global Pharmacovigilance Market: Market PotentialThe global pharmacovigilance is growing at a rapid pace. Intense post-market monitoring mechanisms set up by various government regulatory agencies increasingly focus on safety and efficacy of pharmaceutical products after they are launched in the market. This has led to a flurry of PV activities and procedures. Various coordination initiatives between national agencies, healthcare providers, and regional pharmacovigilance centers in several countries such as France, China, India, Romania, and Turkey have put the onus on pharmaceutical companies to collect and assess information relating to adverse drug effects. Subsequently, effective measures can be taken to prevent and mitigate the risks.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Furthermore, governments in various countries have created centers to expand PV services. For instance, Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) has intended to appoint as many as 40 district product safety pharmacovigilance officials in the country; these officials will coordinate with different ADR centers to strengthen the monitoring and reporting of ADR activities. These initiatives are expected to provide a robust boost to the market across the region.Global Pharmacovigilance Market: Regional OutlookThe pharmacovigilance market in the U.S. held a prominent share in 2016 and the regional market is expected to rise at healthy CAGR during the forecast period. The growth is attributed to the rising mortality rates due to ADR and soaring awareness of patients on safety and efficacy of drugs. Asia Pacific is expected to expand at positive CAGR in the next five years. Growth witnessed in the region will be driven by stringent health care regulations, vast geriatric base, intense government initiatives to set up PV centers, and rising number of clinical trials conducted.Global Pharmacovigilance Market: Competitive LandscapeMajor technology and IT companies are actively launching pharmacovigilance software to strengthen their market shares. Pharmaceutical and life sciences companies are forming strategic collaborations with key contract research organizations (CRO) to expand their market presence in various regions. This has also enabled them to gain a better foothold in major regions by effectively positioning their services to new clients. Major players operating in this market include Accenture, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, ICON, Covance, PAREXEL, Quintiles, Synowlwedge, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation, and United BioSource.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Global Agricultural Enzymes Market Size, Share, Development, Growth and Demand Forecast to 2023

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The agricultural enzymes market is growing due to high investments in the biotechnology sector, increasing global population and increase in production yield from limited arable land. Demand for high quality agricultural products and adoption of modern farming practices, helping in cost improvement are creating ample opportunities for the growth of the agricultural enzymes market in the coming years.Request sample copy of report here :Agro biotechnological processes including bioprocessing of crop residues and crops, enzyme-assisted silage fermentation, construction of feed supplements to enhance feed effectiveness and fiber processing uses agricultural enzymes.Agricultural enzymes are also used in some advanced applications such as use of phytases for improving effectiveness of nutrient utilization and reducing waste. Organic agriculture prevents effects of land degradation, climate change, food insecurity and poverty.On the basis of product types, the agricultural enzymes market can be categorized as proteases, lipases, carbohydrases, polymerases and nucleases. The agricultural enzymes market can be categorized on the basis of crop types as oil seeds and pulses, cereals and grains, and fruits and vegetables.Trend of organic farming is increasing with a significant rate; as a result, it is supporting the agricultural enzymes market to grow by a considerable rate. Cheaper production methods, new application fields and new enzymes are also supporting the agricultural enzymes market to grow with a considerable rate.Access Report Summary with Detailed TOC at :Some of the competitors in the agricultural enzymes market are Deepak Fertilisers & Petrochemicals Corp Ltd, GreenMax AgroTech, Aries Agro Ltd., Novozymes A/S, Agrinos Inc., Agri Life, Bioworks Inc, Camson Bio Technologies Ltd, Syngenta AG and Stoller Inc.About P&S Market ResearchP&S Market Research is a market research company, which offers market research and consulting services for various geographies around the globe. We provide market research reports, industry forecasting reports, business intelligence, and research based consulting services across different industry/business verticals.As one of the top growing market research agency, were keen upon providing market landscape and accurate forecasting. Our analysts and consultants are proficient with business intelligence and market analysis, through their interaction with leading companies of the concerned domain. We help our clients with B2B market research and assist them in identifying various windows of opportunity, and framing informed and customized business expansion strategies in different regions.Contact:P&S Market Research347, 5th Ave. #1402New York City, NY - 10016Toll-Free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb:Biopreservation Market Enormous Growth during 2017 - 2025

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Global Biopreservation Market: SnapshotBiopreservation is a process for conserving the tissues, organs and cells along with maintaining their integrity and functionality at different temperatures for a prolonged period of time. The necessary products for biopreservation are cryo bags, tubes, refrigerators, liquid nitrogen tanks, and freezers. These biopreservation equipment have applications in stem cell, DNA, and plasma and tissue research which helps the market to grow steadily. Various researches being carried out in cell therapy and the increasing number of bio banks also encourage market expansion. Currently, the geriatric population is affected with many disorders related to their lifestyle, namely cardiovascular disease, chronic illness, hypertension, and cancer. Biopreservation applications such as drug discovery, regenerative medicines, and bio banking help the consumers or patients during their life span and even at the time of death.The enormous growth in the global biopreservation market is accelerated by the rising healthcare expenditure, increasing trend of conserving cord blood stem cells of newborns, and the growing investments in research and development pertaining to this field. A considerable healthcare spending is expected to drive the gene banks, bio banks and hospitals to focus on biopreservation. High costs of advanced techniques and stability issues such as tissue injury during thawing and freezing have been considered as some of the primary factors restraining the biopreservation market growth. One of the prominent names in the industry, BioLife Solutions has signed a ten years business supply agreement with Bellicum Pharmaceuticals for manufacturing, marketing of proprietary tissue and cell, and various cellular immunotherapies which target solid tumors and blood cancers. The influential regions for the biopreservation market are North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is expected to offer significant growth opportunities to market players, mostly driven by the demand arising from India and China.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Biopreservation Market: OverviewBiopreservation involves maintaining the functionality and integrity of cells, tissues, and organs outside their natural environment for an extended period of storage at different temperatures. For instance, vaccines save 3 million lives every year in the U.S, however, vaccines worth US$ 20 million are wasted each year due to inadequate storage and improper refrigeration.Biopreservation safeguards the stability, purity, and quality of biospecimens saved in hospitals, biobanks, and gene banks. For instance, preservation of red blood cells (RBCs) is required for the ready availability of safe blood for blood transfusion needs. The biopreservation of RBCs for clinical purposes can be divided on the basis of techniques used to attain biologic stability and safeguard a viable state after extended storage times.Global Biopreservation Market: Key TrendsThe major factors driving the global biopreservation market include increasing R&D expenditure, increasing number of sperm and egg banks, increasing demand for preserving the stem cells of newborns, and rising adoption of regenerative medicine.Request TOC of the Report @Across the world, the increasing healthcare expenditure for health and well-being will stimulate the growth of the biopreservation market. This is because healthcare expenditure accounts for a significant part of the developmental budget of most countries. According to data from the World Bank, public healthcare spending is expected to rise at a substantially high rate, which along with a substantial healthcare spending will be an important driver for gene banks, hospitals, and biobanks, which are the key end-users of biopreservation market.A large population afflicted with chronic disorders such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancer, and hypertension as well as lifestyle diseases will bolster the markets growth. The increasing public and private spending on, medical goods and services, rising disposable income, increasing demand for biobanking services for the preservation of cells, tissues, and organs, and rising disposable income are also expected to further enhance the growth of the global biopreservation market.Global Biopreservation Market: Market PotentialIn a recent development in the biopreservation industry, BioLife Solutions, a leading name in developing, manufacturing, and marketing of proprietary cell and tissue has entered into a ten year business supply agreement with Bellicum Pharmaceuticals. The latter is a leading name in the development of cellular immunotherapies for cancers and inherited blood disorders. On account of this supply agreement, BioLifes CryoStor cell freeze media is incorporated into Bellicums production process for various cellular immunotherapies that targets blood cancers and solid tumors.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @In another industry development, BioLife Solutions has entered into a partnership with transportation firm MNX and expects heightened demand for its biologistics services with the entry of more cell therapies into the clinic.Global Biopreservation Market: Regional OutlookThe global biopreservation market can be analyzed with respect to the regional segments of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. In North America, the U.S. accounts for almost half the revenue of the region. This is due to the increasing demand for detection of chronic diseases, government stipulations for the ethical usage of biological samples, and introduction of newer of biopreservation methodologies.Asia Pacific biopreservation market, driven by India and China will display a sustainable growth over the next couple of yearsGlobal Biopreservation Market: Competitive AnalysisSome of the key companies operating in the global Biopreservation market include Thermo Fischer Scientific Inc., VWR Corporation, Lifeline Scientific Inc., BioCision LLC, Custom Biogenic Systems Inc., Princeton Cryotech Inc., Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, Biolife Solutions Inc., Cesca Therapeutics Inc., Core Dynamics Ltd., and So-Low Environmental Equipment Co. Inc.Top companies in the market are focused on mergers and acquisitions, practicing effective services, and develop new products to stay competitive in the biopreservation market. Expanding geographical reach and developing a broad product portfolio with respect to refrigerators, freezers, and consumables is also leading to the increased market share of some of the top players.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Blood Preparation Significant Regional Market over 2025

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Global Blood Preparation Market: SnapshotThe process for preparing blood components is the centrifugation of one unit of the whole blood. The whole blood comprises of colloids, cells and crystalloids which can be differentiated into different blood components such as red blood cell, white blood cell, platelet, plasma, and precipitate. For therapeutic efficacy, these different blood components need different temperature requirements and storage conditions. The blood preparation market is developing due to the increasing use of leucocyte reduced RBCs, platelet concentrate, packed red cells, cryoprecipitate and the whole blood components. Major applications involves in blood preparation are renal impairment, pulmonary embolism, thrombocytosis, angina blood vessel complications which helps the market to grow rapidly. Increasing clinical research studies in hematology and emergence of various therapeutic agents help to treat the patients and improves the quality of life.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The growing demand for blood transfusion, highly needed blood during surgical procedures and increasing number of blood disorders to make up for extreme blood loss are stimulating the growth in blood preparation market. One of the primary factors which can obstruct the market growth is the high risk of blood transmission disease such as viral hemorrhagic fever, Hepatitis B and HIV. Nevertheless, the opportunities present in the market will be highly extended by the development of advanced technologies for separating the blood components. Many companies are involved in the development of newer high-speed technologies and instruments for easily preparing blood components. North America, Europe and Asia pacific are the influential region for the growth of the blood preparation market. Favorable reimbursement policies for blood components has been noticed in those regions. In Asia Pacific, India and China provides support for the development of advanced technology for the blood preparation process.Global Blood Preparation Market: OverviewBlood components preparation involves the centrifugation of one unit of whole blood. Developed in 1960, the process is carried out by a specialized equipment known as a refrigerated centrifuge. Whole blood, which is a mixture of cellular elements, crystalloids, and colloids of varying relative density, size, and sediment rate can be separated by the application of centrifugal force.Request TOC of the Report @According to the World Health Organization, every year almost 108 million units of donated blood is collected across the world. The whole blood needs to be separated into components that can be used for a different indication.Global Blood Preparation Market: Key TrendsThe rising demand for blood transfusion in the casualty department of hospitals is steering the growth of the global market for blood preparation. The increasing number of blood disorders and the increasing need for blood during surgical procedures and casualties to make up for blood loss are bolstering the growth of this market. According to the statistics of Center for Disease Prevention and Control, in the U.S., almost 1-2 per 1,000 individuals suffer from deep vein thrombosis (DVT) each year. To address this, the National Institutes of Health and other accredited bodies are running programs in order to raise awareness about the complications that these conditions can lead to.However, the growth of the blood preparation market is impeded due to a single major restraint. Blood transfusion involves a high risk of transmission of diseases such as HIV, viral hemorrhagic fever, and Hepatitis B, thereby limiting its use for serious cases. Nevertheless, the development of newer high-speed technology for separating blood components will extend opportunities to this market.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Blood Preparation Market: Market PotentialWith the development of high-speed technology for separating blood components, the blood preparation market is expected to reach new heights. Companies are engaged in the development of advanced instruments for the easy preparation of blood components. For example, Compomat G4 introduced by Fresenius Kabi can separate large volumes of blood at enhanced speed. Moreover, the rising demand for source plasma and the demand for specific blood constituents such as packed red blood cells will further present growth opportunities to this market.The use of digital technology is another trend coming to the fore in blood preparation practices. In a recent industry development, BloodCenter of Wisconsin has introduced the utilization of radio frequency identification technology (RFID) for maintaining blood utilization and inventory records.Global Blood Preparation Market: Regional OverviewThe global market for blood preparation can be broadly segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. North America is a significant regional market due to an ultra-modern healthcare infrastructure and use of hi-technology for treatment purposes. In the U.S., the entire process of blood transfusion right from collection to preparation to storage is controlled by the FDA. Various other federal agencies are striving for health insurance portability standards to come into effect for favorable reimbursements for blood components.However, Asia Pacific is expected to display robust growth in the blood preparation market in the near future. Several governments, especially in China and India are extending support for technological advancements for blood preparation processes. The continual growth of the healthcare sector in Australia and Japan will also support the growth of the Asia Pacific market for blood preparation.Global Blood Preparation Market: Competitive AnalysisSome of the leading players in the global market for blood preparation include Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Celgene, Bristol-Myers, Shandong East Chemical, GlaxoSmithKline, Leo Pharma, Sanofi-Aventis, and Baxter Healthcare.Major players in this marker are investing heavily in research and development for the development of newer, effective, and cost-efficient drugs for several blood-related disorders. These companies are engaged in introducing new technologies and hiring expert personnel for the development of newer pipeline drugs to cater to the needs of the ever-increasing patient population.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Compostable Packaging Materials Market - Analysis, Reliability And Innovations In Technology

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Compostable food packaging represents a sustainable, environmentally-friendly method of packaging. Against the backdrop of rising consciousness among consumers, the packaging industry has been hard-pressed to incorporate more sustainable solutions in their offerings, resulting into adoption of biodegradable and compostable packaging solutions. For instance, in May 2016, Novamont SpA, a bio-based plastics manufacturer launched enhanced versions of its Mater-Bi material  biodegradable and compostable bioplastics to be used primarily for fruit and vegetable bags.Download PDF Brochure @Compostable packaging refers to use of bioplastics in packaging materials. The global compostable packaging market is expected to witness a strong growth owing to the increasing consumer awareness about environmentally-friendly products.Brows the Report @Other growth drivers for the compostable packaging market include increased focus on sustainable packaging by brand owners and retail companies, global rise in implementation of plastic bag bans, etc. Moreover, significant demand from food and beverage industry for compostable bags is also anticipated to boost demand for compostable packaging during the forecast period.Download TOC @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:FPSO Market Foretold to Grow at a Stagnant Rate by 2025

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Global FPSO Market : SnapshotA floating production, storage, and offloading unit is considered as a vessel that is being used widely by a large number of gas and offshore oil industries. These vessels are used for the purpose of manufacturing and processing of hydrocarbons and further for the storage of oil. The use of FPSO vessels helps in storing oil and transporting it through a pipeline, which saves time as well as resources of the oil and gas companies. As a result, the global FPSO market is anticipated to witness a robust growth in the next few years.A significant rise in the number of exploration activities across the globe is one of the vital factors projected to fuel the growth of the global FPSO market in the next few years. The rising focus of key players on research and development activities and new product development are predicted to generate promising opportunities in the coming years. In addition, the rising number of oil and gas exploration sites in order to cater the rising demand from consumers are projected to accelerate the growth of the global FPSO market in the near future.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Among the key regions, the developed economies, including Europe and North America are expected to experience a steady growth in the next few years. At present, the global FPSO market is growing at a rapid pace and is likely to witness a high level of competition in the coming years. The increasing number of mergers and acquisition is expected to enhance the competitive scenario of the FPSO market in the near future, encouraging the expansion of product portfolio. As a result, the overall market is likely to supplement the development of the market in the near future.Global FPSO Market: OverviewA floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) unit could be a newly constructed vessel or converted oil tanker which is equipped with oil and gas processing and production facilities. An FPSO is able to carry out all the activities for which the term stands for. It is a commodious vessel which resembles the shape of a ship and finds extensive usage in extracting raw hydrocarbons from sea beds. With processing facilities provided onboard, it can also transport processed oil and gas to desired onshore locations using a shuttle tanker.Request TOC of the Report @With more number of countries producing their own FPSOs and higher sales achieved by manufacturers, the world FPSO market is anticipated to rack up a staggering amount of revenue until the end of the forecast period.Global FPSO Market: Key TrendsThe substantial degree of growth witnessed in the FPSO market is predicted to be augmented by the soaring demand for enhanced productivity and controlled capital spending. With a view to achieve this, companies are looking to convert tank vessels into FPSOs. The very nature of FPSO to be able to operate at any depth, relocate to any location, and offer high return on investment is deemed to be a strong reason for its incrementing demand.The redeployed FPSO market is prognosticated to rise above freshly converted or newly built vessels with the capability to minimize project execution timeline. Suitable for operation in medium and small offshore fields, converted FPSO poses a lesser capital cost compared to new built products.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @The rising exploration activities in ultra-deep offshore fields led by maturing onshore oil and gas reserves are expected to provide an aggressive boost to the global FPSO market. More opportunities are envisaged to take birth as the need to counter difficult conditions in ultra-deep and deep sea reserves surges the demand for integrated compact systems.Global FPSO Market: Market PotentialIran is all set to install its first ever FPSO named FPSO Cyrus near South Pars in the Persian Gulf. The vessel is expected to employ pipelines to draw hydrocarbons from subsea wells. On an average, the Iranian FPSO holds the capacity to extract 30,000 barrels per day in the first production phase, which could be increased to a whopping 55,000 to 60,000 barrels per day in the second production phase.On similar lines, Keppel Offshore & Marine will be delivering its first FPSO unit named John Agyekum Kufuor to Yinson Production (West Africa) Pte. Ltd. in 2017. The vessel will be engaged by ENI Ghana Exploration & Production Limited for oil and gas processing at the Offshore Cape Three Points (OCTP) positioned in Offshore Ghana. The unit is studied to boast a 58,000 barrels per day processing capacity and 1.7 million barrel storage capacity. With an approximate 15,000 ton topside weight, it has the potential to be moored in a standard 1,000 meter water depth.Global FPSO Market: Regional OutlookWith ample of support furnished by the government of Brazil, the country is predicted to stand out as a chief FPSO market in the South America region. The prominence of the Brazilian market could also be accredited to the elevating number of oil and gas activities. The oil field discoveries in deep water and latest offshore exploration and production developments of East Africa and South America are envisaged to help the regions register growth at a significant rate.However, regions such as Europe and North America of the FPSO market are foretold to grow at a stagnant rate but secure a valuable share on account of their mature oil and gas reserves.In order to curb its dependence on imports of energy resources, China is forecasted to offer profit-making opportunities for vendors in the FPSO market. Besides this, the development of offloading technologies, production advancement, surging area of ultra-deep and deep sea reserves, and maturing shallow water and inland oil and gas fields are envisioned to help China take precedence in the global market.Global FPSO Market: Competitive LandscapeWith mergers and acquisitions and fast building of product portfolio, key players in the international FPSO market are foreseen to take charge of a leading share. Some of the tough competitors in the global market are Sembcorp Marine Ltd., COSCO Shipyard Group Co. Ltd., PetroleoBrasileiro S.A., MODEC, Inc., TOTAL S.A., SBM Offshore N.V., and Samsung Heavy Industries Ltd.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eLearning Carnival helps Global Automobile Giant to Implement LMS for their Dealer Network

eLearning Carnival

https://elearningcarnival.com/elearning-services/learning-technologies-lms/

eLearning Carnival, a network of eLearning Researchers and Professionals, announced that it has successfully consulted and implemented a Learning Management System for a Global Automobile Giant.The Far East Asian company having the presence in India works with more than 2500 dealers across India. Each of these dealers has a workforce of 20-25 people that need to training on the new product launches and the servicing standards and SOPs. The company has been training the workforce using the train-the-trainer model, but this mode is not able to catch-up with the vast growth of organizations past five years.Gireesh Sharma, the Principal Consultant with eLearning Carnival, said, "We are happy on this success in automotive vertical. Our team has helped the client to pinpoint their exact needs & eliminate the non-essential features of the LMS."L&D Director of the Automobile Company said, "eLearning Carnival provided us practical insights and case studies from the similar industry. These insights helped us to buy what was needed and reduced the time to implement. Our users are also happy with the minimalistic approach. Overall we save 30% on our LMS purchase."By moving to Online Learning from Classroom or Train-the-Training model, companies can scale up their offering, collect analytics on training initiatives and provide more training to the employees and network associates. LMS for Extended Enterprise () helps the organization to extend their learning resources to partners, customers, vendors without compromising on security.e-Learning Carnival, a research and consulting company for workforce development with the focus on performance management & support, digital learning, and learning technologies. We provide consulting/services in the following areas:1. Learning Strategy & Design2. Digital Learning Content3. Learning Technologies4. Learning Budget Management5. Learning Impact Research6. Marketing Internal L&D Initiatives7. Vendor Search & Evaluation8. Recruitment of L&D StaffIf you are looking for an opinion /consulting/ services around workforce development, please reply back. First three hours of consulting are free for new customers.Business Name: Learning Carnival Pvt. Ltd.Address: LGF 6, Commercial Coplex, Sector 17, Vasundhara, Ghazaiabad, New Delhi NCREmail: contact@elearningcarnival.comPhone: +91-880-037-6503Gruyere Market Analysis, Segments, Growth and Value Chain 2014-2024

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Gruyere is one of the finest cheese majorly used in culinary. It is a hard textured yellow color cheese originated from Switzerland named after the town in Switzerland. It is an excellent source of protein, calcium, and essential fatty acids. Gruyere, the Swiss cheese is used to make food products such as fondue, Tarts, pies, hot sandwiches, souffles, and gratins. It is known for its creaminess and is a good melting cheese. Also, it is also broadly used as a table cheese. Similar to other Alpine or Swiss cheeses, gruyere is served with wines and beers like Riesling, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc and Beaujolais. Production of gruyere is comparatively less than other cheese because of adherence to high standard quality during manufacturing, packaging, and storage. It is prepared by curing raw milk for six months than it is aged for several months to gain mildly nutty, earthy flavor. Gruyere is available in ranges, such as Beaufort and Comte. Gruyere substitutes are available in the cheese market among which French cheese is considered to be nearly identical. Other substitutes available in the market include Gouda, plain Swiss, fontina, appenzell, abondance, mild provolone, emmentaler, cantal, raclette or graviera.Request to view Sample Report:Global Gruyere Market: Drivers & RestraintsThe ever growing demand for cheese in food products and as a table cheese with the variety of liquor has enhanced the growth of Gruyere cheese across the globe particularly in Europe and nearby regions. Being a tourist destination, many tourists around the world visit the Switzerland places to taste the variety of wine, cheese, and chocolate. Therefore the range of Swiss cheeses is getting recognized globally especially as a luxury food.Another major factor that drives gruyere market is the reduction of cheese trade barrier between Europe (EU) and Switzerland. In 2007, due to the agreement between World Trade Organization and Europe, left Switzerland government to open their cheese market worldwide. The Swiss government also reduced export subsidies and protective duties as well as eliminated milk price guarantees and quotas to enhance their dairy product market. Because of free cheese trade between Switzerland and Europe open the opportunities for food & beverage sector key players to get varieties and qualities at a lower price.Although demand for gruyere cheese in the market is recognizable; but tight competition with other cheese, availability of many gruyere substitutes in food market are some major restraint that holds gruyeres market.Read Report Overview @Global Gruyere Market: Regional OutlookBased on the geographies, the global gruyere market is segmented into seven regions; namely, North America gruyere market, Latin America gruyere market, Eastern Europe gruyere market, Western Europe gruyere market, Asia Pacific excluding Japan gruyere market, Japan gruyere market and the Middle East & Africa gruyere market. Free cheese trade between Europe and Switzerland made Eastern and Western Europe leading region in the market of gruyere cheese globally, neighboring countries such as Germany, France, and Spain are the prominent consumers of this luxury cheese. High-end preference of Swiss cheese in restaurants of US and Canada made North America, second largest consuming region of gruyere cheese.Global Gruyere Market: Key PlayersFew of the market players accounting on gruyere market includes La Maison Du Gruyere, Wisconsin cheese, Bel UK, Bradburys, Castelli, Harvey & Brockless, Emmi, Eurilait, Golden Acre Dairy Foods, Interprofession du Gruyere, Lactalis, Arla, Norseland Ltd, Anthony Rowcliffe & Son, The Pimpernel Wharf, and Savencia Fromage & Dairy.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:Telepsychiatry Market Set to Record Exponential Growth by 2026

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Telepsychiatry Market OverviewThe arrival of telecommunication technology in the 20th century truly revolutionised a number of fields. National boundaries become irrelevant and the world became one big global village. It also led to the advent of telemedicine which would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. Telemedicine is taking the help of Information Technology and telecommunication equipment to provide medical diagnoses from a distance. It helps eliminate the barriers of distance and is vital in serving far-flung rural communities with medical care. One of the main constituents of telemedicine is the telepsychiatry market. At its core, it is about using telecommunications equipment to provide psychiatric assessment and also care. It relies on video conferencing technology to connect psychiatrists to their patients. Telepsychiatry can be offered through intermediary companies or even individual specialists. The telepsychiatry market has truly come of age in the 21st century and is poised to have a very bright future.A sample of this report is available upon request @Telepsychiatry Market DriversOne of the key drivers of the telepsychiatry market, especially in the U.S. has been the severe shortage of psychiatric doctors, particularly those specialising in child & adolescent psychiatry. Telepsychiatry can allow a doctor to see a larger number of patients quicker, thus utilising their limited time to the fullest. Another driver is the rapidly improving mobile network infrastructure, enabling doctors to clinically assess and treat patients in small villages and semi-urban areas. This eliminates the need for either the doctor or patient to travel long distances, significantly saving both parties time and money. Rural areas suffer from a dearth of trained medical professionals along with a severe lack of awareness. Hence, even if they possess serious mental health issues, they might be ignored or even suppressed. The third factor is cost reduction. Telepsychiatry ensures that neither the psychiatrist nor their patient needs to travel. All that they require is an Internet connection, saving them substantial costs. The telepsychiatry market can also be beneficial for psychiatrists seeking a quick second opinion. Psychiatrists have the advantage of beginning the treatment quickly and sharing their knowledge, while their patients can be assured of the doctors diagnoses being validated.Telepsychiatry Market RestraintsThere are two sides to every coin. Just as Information Technology & telecommunications have benefited us in numerous ways, they have caused a lot of problems like data hacking, privacy concerns, identity fraud etc. which were unheard of in the past. Patchy Internet connectivity can be a serious constraint to the growth of the telepsychiatry market. Mobile coverage can be notoriously fickle even in developed countries and there are many regions around the world which still use antiquated 2G network connections. There is a strong likelihood of a patient being disconnected from their psychiatrist in the middle of a therapy session, causing great inconvenience to both. A second challenge can be privacy concerns. People have become digitally wary now with all the cases of data hacking, email leaks and confidential data being made public by insider leaks. They might be concerned that their psychotherapy sessions could be compromised or might even be recorded making them reluctant to agree to this kind of treatment. The third restraint for the telepsychiatry market is the ambiguity of regulatory policy. Telepsychiatry blurs the line between medicine and technology and each country has separate laws for each, making governing this field a challenge.Telepsychiatry Market Key RegionsIn the U.S, telepsychiatry is typically covered by insurance when it is incorporated into a Medicare program. The U.S is the largest telepsychiatry market at present, followed by the E.U. This is because they have the required technology in place already and also the required funding from the government or private sector. There is a higher prevalence of psychiatric ailments in this part of the world and the general population are well aware of the need to seek medical assistance to overcome them. In countries like India, Latin American and the Middle East, a young population leading an increasingly stressful life along with comparatively fewer psychiatrists in percentage terms will contribute to the growth of the telepsychiatry market there.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Telepsychiatry Market Key Market PlayersSome of the players in the telepsychiatry market are InSight Telepsychiatry, Iris Telehealth, Arcadian Telepsychiatry and Advanced Telemed Services.About UsFuture 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 centres in the U.S. and India.FMIs research and consulting services help businesses around the globe navigate the challenges in a rapidly evolving marketplace with confidence and clarity. Our customised and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. We continuously track emerging trends and events in a broad range of end industries to ensure our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers.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:Global Thawing System Market, Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2026

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This report on the global market for thawing system market offers in-depth analysis for the period 2017 to 2026, keeping 2016 as the base year. The report provides insights into key market dynamics that are influencing the global market for thawing system. The report offers an all-inclusive analysis of the market in terms of revenues estimates (in US$ Mn) across various region.Ask for detailed Sample of the Research Report @Report FeaturesAnalyzing multiple aspects of thawing systems and connecting the analytical information together towards creating key presumptive scenarios on the expansion of the global thawing systems market is the main feature of this report. The report has provided analysis on a range of parameters and across several global perimeters. Cost structure, pricing, product life cycle, and distribution network has been analyzed in the report.The report has also provided a study on the thawing systems patents filed till date. Moreover, macroeconomic factors driving the growth of the global thawing systems market have been decoded. The report has also provided an overview of the global medical device industry. Industry trends and new sales opportunities have been studied and revealed in several key sections of the report.Competition LandscapeAnalysis on the global thawing system markets competition backdrop has been delivered with updated information on active manufacturers of thawing systems. Players with greater contribution to the global thawing system revenues have been profiled in the report. These companies will play a key role in introducing new advancements for thawing systems, and in boosting the overall expansion of the global market. Presence of companies across different regions in the world has been illustrated in an intensity map provided in the report. Insights on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of these companies has been revealed in the study. Detailed sections have disclosed the product overviews, strategic undertakings, and mergers & acquisitions of market participants. This information can be repurposed to gain competitive edge in the production of thawing systems.Request for complete TOC of this report @Research MethodologyTransparency Market Research employs proven and reliable research methodology in the development of this report. By conducting direct telephonic interviews, our analysts record the statements and valuations provided by the designated company representatives. The quantitative data procured from each player gets aggregated to create historic baselines upon which market size forecasting in piloted. Qualitative insights provided by each individual company are analyzed and further infused with the market size estimations. The entire report is validated across multiple levels of screening and quality checks. The report serves as a great business document that can enable the manufacturers of thawing systems plan their next steps towards business development.About (MRRSE)Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research 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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY  12207 (United States)Telephone: +1-518-730-0559 (US- Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@mrrse.comWireless Healthcare Asset Management Market to Surge at a Robust Pace in Terms of Revenue Over 2026

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Wireless Healthcare Asset Management Market OverviewWe all own multiple gadgets like smartphones, tablet computers, desktops and laptops which have increased our dependence on wires to charge these electronic devices. Wouldnt we all like a wire-free, tangle-free existence? The immense desire to go wireless has also begun to impact the medical profession in the form of the Wireless Healthcare Asset Management Market. Medical institutions must constantly monitor their equipment, tools, patients or even the professionals working there. A great many of them have opted to go in for the wireless route for the comfort and convenience provided by it. Hospitals have to manage a number of costly systems, tools & equipment which requires a significant investment of time.A sample of this report is available upon request @Loss, theft or misplacement of any of these healthcare assets would be a massive financial loss to the organisation. The Wireless Healthcare Asset Management Market provides a real-time solution for medical institutes to keep track of not only physical assets but also the patients & medical professionals. Going wireless provides flexibility, portability and scalability to the system. It ensures that assets & their various categories are easily searchable by indicating both room location & availability, sterilisation status, and also whether it is free or currently in use.Wireless Healthcare Asset Management Market DriversThere are several factors responsible for the long-term growth of the wireless healthcare asset management market. One is improving wireless technology. Initially, there were concerns amongst medical professionals that wireless systems would interfere with hospital systems like telemetry which is crucial for measuring a patients vital signs. These problems have been largely taken care of by newer systems which use different wireless frequencies. Another driver is the reduced fears among the public & the industry as a whole about wireless technologies. Great research has been undertaken in this field which has made all radio frequencies used in wireless healthcare asset management equipment quite safe. Agencies like the FCC, FDA, EPA and OSHA have also certified the technologies reassuring patients. A third factor is the patient comfort & convenience. Medical institutions have begun to provide a number of added facilities & those hospitals which do not might lose their patients to those who do. It is not only patients but also medical staff who are becoming increasingly dependent on wireless technology. Doctors & nurses can use hands-free VoFi to stay in continuous contact with the other staff or the main nursing station. Nurses can enter information about their patients while moving around the hospital on a tablet computer. Doctors could even use their mobile phones to access the office servers or various medical applications. All of this is anticipated to drive the wireless healthcare asset management market globally.Wireless Healthcare Asset Management Market RestraintsThere are still some challenges which must be overcome in the wireless healthcare asset management market. A major one is a high cost involved in installing wireless management systems. While organisations want to provide all the services that they can to their patients, they may not have the required funding or government support to do so. Wireless systems are usually the first to be sacrificed in cost-cutting. Another issue is designating responsibility for such equipment. All too often, the departments that oversee wireless systems like IT or Biometrics are overloaded and are unable or unwilling to take on additional managerial responsibility. This is especially true when the equipment takes up a lot of space. Lastly, there is a lack of knowledge & expertise concerning such wireless healthcare asset management systems. Medical institutions face difficulty in hiring quality personnel able to understand & exploit this technology to the fullest. These problems must be dealt with for the long term prospects of the wireless healthcare asset management market.Wireless Healthcare Asset Management Market Key RegionsThe U.S is both the largest wireless healthcare asset management market and its fastest growing because of a large number of American RFID and RTLS providers and strong healthcare in the country. Asia-Pacific will become a crucial future market because of rising awareness & greater public & private healthcare investments.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Wireless Healthcare Asset Management Market Key Market PlayersSome companies competing in the wireless healthcare asset management market are AeroScout, Inc, GE Healthcare, Ekahau, Inc, IBM Corporation and Siemens Healthcare.About UsFuture 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 centres in the U.S. and India.FMIs research and consulting services help businesses around the globe navigate the challenges in a rapidly evolving marketplace with confidence and clarity. Our customised and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. We continuously track emerging trends and events in a broad range of end industries to ensure our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers.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:Social Media Records Management Market Expected to Witness a Sustainable Growth over 2026

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Social media refers to the activities which integrate web technology, social interaction, and user-generated content. Social media includes blogs, social networks, photo libraries, virtual worlds, location-based services, and video sharing sites. Worldwide agencies use social media internally and externally to share information, support business processes, and connect people to government, according to The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. As for all records management purposes, capturing and maintaining evidence are key capabilities of such solutions.A sample of this report is available upon request @Social Media Records Management Market: Drivers & RestraintsAccording to a survey by Gartner, 39% of all businesses participating said they do not any form of social media tracking or monitoring in the organization. Among the participating B-2-B firms, 51% said they lacked social media tracking policies and processes. In social media records management, agencies are facing the challenges because of the dynamic and collaborative nature of social media such as recordkeeping in a collaborative environment. Also, the content is located in multiple places and the ownership of data relies on a third party.Social Media Records Management Market: SegmentationThe global social media records management market is classified on the basis of region.Social Media Records Management Market: OverviewDue to the increasing amount of content and activities on social media, documentation of the information which is related to a specific organization becomes increasingly relevant. This covers all platforms where multiple users and organizations interact in a social and unstructured manner which includes large platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn among other social networking websites, and social media content and activities on individual forums, blogs, etc. For the preservation of social media activities, software are designed for capturing a number of scattered blogs or other social media content.Social Media Records Management Market: Region wise OverviewGeographically, global Social Media Records Management market is classified into regions viz. North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan, Middle East and Africa (MEA). Social media records management is the application of records management principles to unstructured social media content. Social media allows individuals to create, organize, edit, collaborate, comment on, combine, share content, like content, resulting in the creation of Federal records. The Federal Records Act defines Federal records as any material that is recorded, made or received in the course of Federal business, regardless of its form or characteristics, and is worthy of preservation. Social media content which satisfies the requirements of this definition must be managed according to the applicable laws and regulations.In December 2012, North Carolina state government unveiled a social media archiving platform which is the first of its kinds to offer complete public access to archived social media data and metadata. The Social Media Archive displayed Facebook and Twitter posts from or directed at a handful of agencies initially, but eventually the tool expanded to include more than 130 of the states social media websites. Federal agencies and state and municipal government offices are required to store records of communications so that they will be available for future researchers and can be produced in response to Freedom of Information Act.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Social Media Records Management Market: Key PlayersThe key players in global social media records management market are Iron Mountain Incorporated, ArchiveSocial, Qumram AG to name a few.About UsFuture 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 centres in the U.S. and India.FMIs research and consulting services help businesses around the globe navigate the challenges in a rapidly evolving marketplace with confidence and clarity. Our customised and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. We continuously track emerging trends and events in a broad range of end industries to ensure our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers.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:Global Airway/Lung Stent Market Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2026

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High prevalence of tobacco smoking, the rapid rise in aging population and increasing incidence of lung cancer are major factors driving the demand for airway/lung stent. Although primary and metastatic lung cancer is treated with the help of airway/lung stent, various new treatments for lung diseases and the lack of skilled professionals are acting as restraints in the airway/lung stent market. Airway stent therapy is being used by hospitals, especially in the case of lung cancer diagnosed at a later stage in order to open the airway blocked by a tumor.Ask for detailed Sample of the Research Report @Manufacturers are constantly focusing on the product development, this has resulted in the development of technologically advanced stents. Moreover, the government in developing countries are also focusing on offering supportive reimbursement policies and insurance schemes. Despite the various challenges in the market such as stringent regulations in approval for lung stent, companies are using innovative technologies to develop advanced stents, for instance, patient-specific stents are being made for respiratory tract support.Global Airway/Lung Stent Market- Research MethodologyThe report on the global airway/lung stent market offers detailed analysis and forecast on various segments and regions. The report used both top-down and bottom-up approaches to estimate the revenue and size of the global airway/lung stent market. the report provides detail on various trends, drivers, business opportunities, and factors hampering market growth. The primary and secondary research was also done in order to identify opportunities in the market and gather information on all the major factors in the airway/lung stent market. The researchers also did interviews and analyzed all the information and opinions offered by the primary respondents. Meanwhile, validation of the information obtained through secondary resources was also crosschecked with various available data sources.The study comprises SWOT analysis, market attractiveness analysis, and Porters five force analysis. The research also offers impact analysis of the weighted average model based on growth drivers. The study includes estimated revenue, market share, value and volume, year-on-year growth, and CAGR. Incremental opportunity in the global airway/lung stent market is also provided as it is considered an important factor in analyzing business opportunities for leading players.The information on the leading players in the global airway/lung stent market is also provided. The financial overview, key business strategies, new product launches by the companies are also given in the report for each company.Request for complete TOC of this report @Global Airway/Lung Stent Market- Market SegmentationThe global airway/lung stent market is segmented on the basis of product, end user, material type, and region. On the basis of product, the market is divided into self-expandable, balloon-expandable, and non-expandable. In terms of the end user, the market is segmented into ambulatory surgery centers, hospitals, and other end users. On the basis of material type, the market includes metal, silicone, and hybrid.Region-wise, the global airway/lung stent market is segmented into the Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Europe, Latin America, North America, Japan, and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). The report offers a country-wise forecast for each segment based on all the major parameters in the global airway/lung stent market.Competitor AnalysisA study on the global airway/lung stent market includes information on the leading players in the market such as E.I. Dupont DE Nemours & Company, Asahi Glass Co. Ltd., Solvay SA, 3M Company, Daikin Industries Ltd., Honeywell International, Inc., The Chemours Company, Mexichem S.A.B. de C.V., Compagnie de Saint-Gobain SA (Saint Gobain Performance Plastics), W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., and Zeus Industrial Products Inc.About (MRRSE)Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research 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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY  12207 (United States)Telephone: +1-518-730-0559 (US- Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@mrrse.comCorrugated Boxes Market 2018 Industry Key Players: International Paper, WestRock (RockTenn), Smurfit Kappa Group, Rengo, SCA, Georgia-Pacific, Mondi Group, Inland Paper, Oji

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In this report, the global Corrugated Boxes 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 is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Corrugated Boxes in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaRequest a Sample Report @Global Corrugated Boxes market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingInternational PaperWestRock (RockTenn)Smurfit Kappa GroupRengoSCAGeorgia-PacificMondi GroupInland PaperOjiCascadesAlliabox International (Alliance)DS SmithPackaging Corporation of AmericaBingxin PaperSAICAShanying PaperRossmannBBP (Alliance)YFYCheng Loong CorpStora EnsoTHIMMHexing PackingEuropac GroupLong Chen PaperKapStoneSalfo GroupCome Sure GroupJingxing PaperPMPGCOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoSingle CorrugatedDouble CorrugatedTriple CorrugatedOn the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate of Corrugated Boxes for each application, includingFood & BeverageElectronics & Home ApplianceConsumer GoodsPharmaceutical IndustryOtherIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of ContentsGlobal Corrugated Boxes Market Research Report 20171 Corrugated Boxes Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Corrugated Boxes1.2 Corrugated Boxes Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Corrugated Boxes Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2012-2022)1.2.2 Global Corrugated Boxes Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20161.2.3 Single Corrugated1.2.4 Double Corrugated1.2.5 Triple Corrugated1.3 Global Corrugated Boxes Segment by Application1.3.1 Corrugated Boxes Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2012-2022)1.3.2 Food & Beverage1.3.3 Electronics & Home Appliance1.3.4 Consumer Goods1.3.5 Pharmaceutical Industry1.3.6 Other1.4 Global Corrugated Boxes Market by Region (2012-2022)1.4.1 Global Corrugated Boxes Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2012-2022)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Corrugated Boxes (2012-2022)1.5.1 Global Corrugated Boxes Revenue Status and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5.2 Global Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2012-2022)2 Global Corrugated Boxes Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.1 Global Corrugated Boxes Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.2 Global Corrugated Boxes Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.2 Global Corrugated Boxes Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.3 Global Corrugated Boxes Average Price by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.4 Manufacturers Corrugated Boxes Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Corrugated Boxes Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Corrugated Boxes Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Corrugated Boxes Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)3.1 Global Corrugated Boxes Capacity and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.2 Global Corrugated Boxes Production and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.3 Global Corrugated Boxes Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.4 Global Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.5 North America Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.6 Europe Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.7 China Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.8 Japan Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.9 Southeast Asia Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.10 India Corrugated Boxes Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)4 Global Corrugated Boxes Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2012-2017)4.1 Global Corrugated Boxes Consumption by Region (2012-2017)4.2 North America Corrugated Boxes Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.3 Europe Corrugated Boxes Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.4 China Corrugated Boxes Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.5 Japan Corrugated Boxes Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.6 Southeast Asia Corrugated Boxes Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.7 India Corrugated Boxes Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)5 Global Corrugated Boxes Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Corrugated Boxes Production and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.2 Global Corrugated Boxes Revenue and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.3 Global Corrugated Boxes Price by Type (2012-2017)5.4 Global Corrugated Boxes Production Growth by Type (2012-2017)6 Global Corrugated Boxes Market Analysis by Application6.1 Global Corrugated Boxes Consumption and Market Share by Application (2012-2017)6.2 Global Corrugated Boxes Consumption Growth Rate by Application (2012-2017)6.3 Market Drivers and Opportunities6.3.1 Potential Applications6.3.2 Emerging Markets/CountriesContinuedAccess Complete Report @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Hydrogen Peroxide Market for Gold Extraction - by Types, Region and Key Companies Profile in a Latest Research | 2017 - 2025

Hydrogen Peroxide Market

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Hydrogen peroxide, a strong oxidant, is a light blue fluid and is a bit more viscous than water. It is weakly acidic in nature but has strong oxidizing properties due to which it acts as a powerful bleaching agent that is typically used for bleaching paper. Hydrogen peroxide is highly unstable, readily decomposing into oxygen and water with release of heat. The end use industries of hydrogen peroxide include pulp & paper, chemicals, water treatment, and mining. Application of hydrogen peroxide in the mining industry is primarily for extraction of precious metals especially gold.Based on the process of synthesis, the hydrogen peroxide market for gold extraction can be segmented in two different ways, namely: direct synthesis from hydrogen and oxygen, and anthraquinone process. The former method is typically a laboratory synthesis method while the latter is used for large scale manufacturing of hydrogen peroxide for industrial use. The industrial synthesis includes hydrogenation of anthraquinone to obtain anthrahydroquinone, which is later oxidized and finally hydrogen peroxide is obtained by liquid-liquid extraction and vacuum distillation. The anthraquinone process synthesis segment was the prominent synthesis in 2016 and is expected to continue to dominate during the forecast period. This is due to the fact that it is an economical method for large scale production of hydrogen peroxide for industrial purposes.Browse Research Report With Complete TOC @Hydrogen peroxide is used in the mining industry for the extraction of precious metals such as gold, platinum, and palladium. Gold extraction from natural sources, including gold rocks and gold ores, can be done by leaching the gold concentrate or crushed gold rocks, in a solution of hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid. By using hydrogen peroxide, the extraction of gold is reasonably economical and eco-friendly compared to other extraction methods. The hydrogen peroxide market for gold extraction is driven by the demand for gold in jewelry, investment, central banks & other institutes, and technology.Based on region, the global hydrogen peroxide market for gold extraction is divided into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Among these regions, Asia Pacific is the dominant regional segment of the global hydrogen peroxide market for gold extraction as China and India created significant demand for gold in 2016, which is expected to increase further during the forecast period. The market in Asia Pacific is anticipated to be followed by Europe owing to increasing demand in countries such as Germany and the sub-region of the U.K. In developed regions such as North America and Europe, the demand for gold is primarily from major central banks which is quite low as compared to the demand from jewelry in regions such as Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. These factors are major drivers for the global hydrogen peroxide market for gold extraction. The markets in Brazil and South Africa (in Latin America and Middle East & Africa respectively) are projected to show stable growth for the hydrogen peroxide market for gold extraction in the coming years as the latter is a significant producer of gold.Request a PDF Brochure with Research Report Analysis @Key players operating in the global hydrogen peroxide market for gold extraction are BASF SE, Evonik Industries AG, Arkema S.A, Akzo Nobel N.V., and Solvay S.A., among others. The competition between prominent players is consolidated, with strategies such as mergers & acquisitions are expected to be observed as companies strive for improved revenues and shares in the market.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Push-To-Talk Market, Technology Advancement, Leading Players, Development Trend, Future Growth & Forecast to 2025

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Global Push-To-Talk Market Research Report 2018Push-to-talk (PTT), also known as press-to-transmit, is a method of having conversations or talking on half-duplex communication lines, including two-way radio, using a momentary button to switch from voice reception mode to transmit mode.Get sample copy of this report:Top Manufacturers: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Corporation, Ericsson, Iridium, Kodiak, C Spire, Azetti, HipVoice, Cybertel BridgeMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversUnited StatesEUChinaJapanSouth KoreaTaiwanMarket Segment by Type, covers3G4GWi-FiOthersMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoPublic SafetyTransportBusiness and CommerceGovernmentPAMR (Operator)OtherGet Discount of this report:In PC and mobile voice chat applications, push-to-talk is a software feature that requires the speaker to press a button to enable voice speaking. This prevents background noises and talking from sending during the chat session.Table of Content:Global Push-To-Talk Market Research Report 20181 Push-To-Talk Market Overview2 Global Push-To-Talk Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Push-To-Talk Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Push-To-Talk Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Push-To-Talk Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Push-To-Talk Market Analysis by Application7 Global Push-To-Talk Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Verizon7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Push-To-Talk Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Verizon Push-To-Talk Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 AT&T7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Push-To-Talk Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 AT&T Push-To-Talk Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Sprint Corporation7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Push-To-Talk Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Sprint Corporation Push-To-Talk Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview8 Push-To-Talk Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Push-To-Talk Market Forecast (2018-2025)Complete 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Hardwood Market : Overview, Development by Companies and Comparative Analysis by 2025

Hardwood Market

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Hardwood is the timber obtained from dicot angiosperm trees. Most common dicot angiosperm trees used for obtaining hardwood are ash, cherry, maple, oak, birch, and poplar. A major difference between soft wood and hard wood is the presence of pores or vessels of distinguished shapes & sizes in the latter and the distinct structure of its cell wall. Hardwood is observed to display a conspicuously wide variety of characteristics, mainly due to the presence of different hardwood in the market, each with its own distinctive features.Hardwood is available in textures and colors of varying degrees depending on the tree from which it has been obtained. The weight of hardwood also differs based again on its source. For example, hardwood obtained from the balsa tree is flexible and light, whereas that obtained from mahogany is comparatively dense.Browse Research Report With Complete TOC @Hardwood Market: TrendsIn recent times, hardwood has been used in a range of applications such as furniture, decorative articles, building & construction, and interior & outdoor structures. Its other uses include craft material, firewood boilers, and decorative articles.Hardwood is extensively employed in flooring and furniture. It is not just a useful material but also attractive in the aesthetic sense. Hardwood is easy to maintain and does not require special measures to be kept clean. Another positive aspect is its ability to retain heat and keep a room insulated even in cold weather conditions.The increasing demand for wood flooring are important factors driving this market. Its distinct properties make it a suitable material to be used in furniture as well as flooring.However, the usage of hardwood in different applications is linked to a number of environmental concerns. Hardwood is obtained from valuable species of flora which are almost on the verge of extinction. The limited availability of tress also leads to a surge in its price. The scope of using hardwood flooring is limited only in dry areas of the house such as living rooms and bed rooms. Since, hardwood is not waterproof, it cant be used in areas such as bathroom, basement or kitchen.Cheaper alternatives for hardwood are being chosen these days, primarily due to its low rate of availability and high cost. Keeping its benefits in mind, the market is expected to experience moderate growth during the forecast period as well as in the future, as wood floorings are used exclusively in historic buildings and not on a domestic level.Request a PDF Brochure with Research Report Analysis @Hardwood Market: Region-wise OutlookThe market for hardwood is flourishing in Asia Pacific, mainly due to the need for wood flooring in China. North America is next in terms of demand for hardwood-based furniture, which was considerably high in Canada and the southern part of U.S., which boosted the overall market in this region. The market here is in its developmental stage and likely to expand further in the future as well.The development of the hardwood market is moderate in Europe and anticipated to remain constant in the future as well. Among all of its varieties, demand for oak was comparatively high in Europe. Middle East & Africa exhibited considerable growth in its requirement of hardwood furniture. The market is comparatively less developed in Latin America mainly due to the limited demand for hardwood products.Hardwood Market: Key PlayersKey players operating in the market for hardwood include Appalachian Hardwood Manufacturers Inc., Mullican Flooring, A & M Wood Specialty, Armstrong Flooring, and Somerset Hardwood Flooring.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:3D Bioprinting Market 2018-2027 is Projected to Expand at an Approximate CAGR of 25% with Rganovo Holdings Inc., Stratasys Ltd., Materialise, Fathom

3D Bioprinting Market

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The Global 3D Bio-Printing Market is expected to grow at an approximate CAGR of 25% during the forecast period 2018-2023. 3D bio-printing is used to identify key compositional and architectural elements of a target tissue. This elements are used to create a design that is utilized by a bio-printer to generate that tissue in a laboratory environment. 3D Bioprinting has wide range of applications in the field of medicine, engineering, education, and others.Get Sample Report @The 3D Bioprinting Market is exhibits growth due to developed healthcare infrastructure in the U.S. and presence of key players in the market. European 3D Bioprinting market also shows positive growth with rising government support for clinical trials and availability of funds for research. Focus on the applications of 3D Bioprinting in healthcare and overall development in the market are the major factors for the growth of the market. The market is led by Germany followed by France and U.K.Major factor driving the market is use of3D bio-printing to regenerative medicine addressing need for tissues and organs suitable for transplantation. Further, healthcare expenditure and research and development activities in 3D Bioprinting also influence the market growth. North3D Bioprinting Market - Competitive Analysis & NewsRGANOVO HOLDINGS, INC. (U.S.), CELLINK AB (Sweden), Bio3D Technologies (Singapore), Aspect Biosystems Ltd. (Canada), Stratasys Ltd. (U.S.), Materialise (U.S.), FATHOM (U.S.), Allevi (U.S.), ENVISIONTEC, INC. (Germany), Nano3D Biosciences, Inc.(U.S.), Cyfuse Biomedical K.K. (Tokyo), 3Dynamic Systems Ltd. (U.K), REGENHU (Switzerland), Poietis (France), and others are some of the key players for the global 3D bio-printing market are some of the prominent players at the forefront of competition in the global 3D Bioprinting market and top seven players are profiled in MRFR Analysis.In 3D Bioprinting, significant increase in the number of the companies offering various products including number of healthcare IT solutions leads rising emphasis on use of information technology for healthcare management. Product launch, mergers, acquisition and collaboration are major strategic approaches of these players to achieve growth in the market.Get Discount on Report @MaterialiseMaterialise is one of the major players in the market. The company undertakes 3D printing of anatomical models and offers 3D bioprinters.In June 2017, Materialise improved 3D imaging and printing- clinical trials conducted in the U.S.In March 2017, Materialise declared FDA clearance for its 3D-printed patient-specific radius and ulna osteotomy guides for children. In May 2017, the company announced it would start the production of 3D bioprinter using technology-HP Jet Fusion 3D 4200.Organovo Holdings, Inc.The company use 3D Bioprinting technology to create functional 3D human tissues for medical research, surgical, and therapeutic applications. It product ExVive is the 3D bioprinted human tissues, that is used in Organomics- the study of living organs in-vitro. Another product, NovoGen Bioprinter platform manufactured by the company is used for translating tissue specific geometries and cellular components.In December, 2017, the company was granted orphan drug designation for the treatment of alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (A1AT) with its 3D bioprinted liver therapeutic tissue by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).Some of Major Table of Content for Global 3D Bioprinting Market Research Report  forecast till 2023:1 Report Prologue2 Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope of the Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 Limitations2.3 Market Structure2.4. Market Segmentation3 Research Methodology3.1 Research Process3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research3.4 Market Size Estimation3.5 Forecast Model4 Market DynamicsTOC Continued..!To Know More Enquire @About 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 FutureOffice No. 528,Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra,India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal EP Catheter Ablation Market - Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2026

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In an exclusive report, Transparency Market Research has compiled a range of sections analyzing the expansion of the global EP catheter ablation market for the assessment period, 2017-2026. The study delivers insightful forecast on how the demand for EP catheters and ablation catheters will expand in the near future. From regional to local, the report covers the expanse of the EP catheter ablation market across global perimeters. The study has profiled leading manufacturers of medical devices to identify the top players in EP catheter and ablation catheter manufacturing. Company profiles in this report provide a greater understanding on the developments of each players, and reveals the hidden motive behind their recent strategies. The report serves as a reliable business document that can enable market participants in developing new strategies towards future market direction.Ask for detailed Sample of the Research Report @Report HighlightsThe report is equipped with first-hand information derived from direct interviews and procurement of statistics from authentic databases. Key features of the report include a segmental analysis of the global EP catheter ablation market, and competition snapshot. An overview of the parent industry for medical devices has been provided in the report. The report further delivers a standard introduction to the global EP catheter ablation market and provides definition on the catheters used in the procedures.Analysis on supply chain, medical regulations, cost structure, and product life cycle has been provided in the report. Information on latest as well as pending patents has been offered in the report. From the list of distributors to recent mergers and acquisitions, the report has analyzed multiple aspects encircling the sales of EP catheters and ablation catheters. Moreover, distinct sections on PESTLE analysis and competitive footprint are also compiled in the study. The report further reveals an intensity map that traces the presence of each market participant across the regions and sub-regions.Request for complete TOC of this report @Market TaxonomyThe global market for EP catheter ablation has been segmented on the basis of regions, which include: North America Japan Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) Latin America Europe, and Middle East & Africa (MEA)In terms of end-use, the global EP catheter ablation market is segmented into: Hospitals Ambulatory Surgical Centers Specialty ClinicsKey products segmented in the global EP catheter ablation market are: Cryoablation Electrophysiology Catheters Radiofrequency (RF) Ablation Catheters Microwave Ablation (MWA) Systems Laser Ablation Systems, and Navigational Advanced Mapping AccessoriesOn the basis of disease indication, the global market for EP catheter ablation has been segmented into: Cardiac Arrhythmia Atrial Fibrillation and Flutter Tachycardia Other IndicationResearch ScopeA slew of research methods have been employed in the development of this report. The study remains unbiased with its information and doesnt intend to promote individual entities through inferences that reveal high value statistics. In fact, such inferences are the USPs of the report as they can be redirected towards business development of market participants. The report has infused quantitative estimations and qualitative insights, and has been developed by considering metrics such as absolute dollar opportunities, compounded annual growth rates (CAGR) and Year-on-Year (Y-o-Y) growth rates for interpreting the market size estimations. To capture universal understanding, the estimations and evaluations in the report have been quantified in US dollars (US$). The scope of the report is to provide valuable information for manufacturers of EP catheters and ablation catheters. This information will enable them to make the required changes in terms of product developments, technology partnerships, and entering untapped markets.About (MRRSE)Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research 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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY  12207 (United States)Telephone: +1-518-730-0559 (US- Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@mrrse.comGlobal Metal Fibers Market Research Report 2017  BASF, Huntsman, Dupont, Hyosung, PPG Industries

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"The Latest Research Report Global Metal Fibers Market Research Report 2017 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"In this report, the global Metal Fibers 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 is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Metal Fibers in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGlobal Metal Fibers market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingBASFHuntsmanDupontHyosungPPG IndustriesAhlstrom CorporationHoneywellAmerican Metal FibersIntraMicronGet Sample Copy of this report @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoSteel FiberCast FiberCopper FiberAluminum FiberOthersOn the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate of Metal Fibers for each application, includingTextileElectronicsChemical & MaterialAerospace & DefenseOthersTable of ContentsGlobal Metal Fibers Market Research Report 20171 Metal Fibers Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Metal Fibers1.2 Metal Fibers Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Metal Fibers Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category) (2012-2022)1.2.2 Global Metal Fibers Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20161.2.3 Steel Fiber1.2.4 Cast Fiber1.2.5 Copper Fiber1.2.6 Aluminum Fiber1.2.7 Others1.3 Global Metal Fibers Segment by Application1.3.1 Metal Fibers Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2012-2022)1.3.2 Textile1.3.3 Electronics1.3.4 Chemical & Material1.3.5 Aerospace & Defense1.3.6 OthersBrowse Complete Report with TOC @1.4 Global Metal Fibers Market by Region (2012-2022)1.4.1 Global Metal Fibers Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2012-2022)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Metal Fibers (2012-2022)1.5.1 Global Metal Fibers Revenue Status and Outlook (2012-2022)1.5.2 Global Metal Fibers Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2012-2022)2 Global Metal Fibers Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Metal Fibers Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.1 Global Metal Fibers Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.1.2 Global Metal Fibers Production and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.2 Global Metal Fibers Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.3 Global Metal Fibers Average Price by Manufacturers (2012-2017)2.4 Manufacturers Metal Fibers Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Metal Fibers Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Metal Fibers Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Metal Fibers Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global Metal Fibers Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)3.1 Global Metal Fibers Capacity and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.2 Global Metal Fibers Production and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.3 Global Metal Fibers Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)3.4 Global Metal Fibers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.5 North America Metal Fibers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.6 Europe Metal Fibers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.7 China Metal Fibers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.8 Japan Metal Fibers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.9 Southeast Asia Metal Fibers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)3.10 India Metal Fibers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)4 Global Metal Fibers Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2012-2017)4.1 Global Metal Fibers Consumption by Region (2012-2017)4.2 North America Metal Fibers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.3 Europe Metal Fibers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.4 China Metal Fibers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.5 Japan Metal Fibers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.6 Southeast Asia Metal Fibers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)4.7 India Metal Fibers Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2012-2017)View Sample PDF @5 Global Metal Fibers Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Metal Fibers Production and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.2 Global Metal Fibers Revenue and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)5.3 Global Metal Fibers Price by Type (2012-2017)5.4 Global Metal Fibers Production Growth by Type (2012-2017)About 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Software Defined Networking Market is Expected to Witness a Steady Growth by 2026

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In this ever changing technological world, there is sharp inclusion of objects that are getting connected on day-to-day basis via public or private network. Traditional networking architecture are slow to response to demand generated by connected objects in a particular network. Thats where software defined networking (SDN) comes into the picture. Software Defined Networking separates control layer of a particular network from infrastructure and application layer, so that a network operator can easily manage the data flow through a centralized console, without touching switches and routers. SDN allows network engineer and operators to response instantaneously to changing business demand. A traditional network generally uses special appliance such as firewall and load balancer, instead SDN usages a software application that usages the controller to manage data plane.A sample of this report is available upon request @In SDN, software control entire network and its physical devices. Its about a software is integrated into networking hardware so that hardware can itself take decision about where to send data packets. It makes SDN next generation networking solution. Software Defined Networking usages northbound API to integrate control layer and application layer and uses southbound APIs to programmatically control data plane forwarding decision.Global Software Defined Networking Market: Drivers and ChallengesTechnological advancements in cloud computing and data center are contributing immensely in the growth of global Software Defined Networking market. Some of the big players of the market such as VMware and Cisco are offering separate Software Defined Networking solution for data center. Software Defined Networking deployment in data center is reducing downtime and increasing productivity of business organizations. In addition to this, increasing data consumption via mobile devices and growth in OTT services are putting enormous pressure on telecom service providers to digitalize their existing 3G and 4G networks. To meet increasing demand of data consumption, telecommunication service providers are transforming their networks with the help of Software Defined Networkingtechnology.Though Software Defined Networkingfacilitates network operators to control switches and routers through software but it doesnt virtualize functions and commands. In other worlds, Software Defined Networkingdoesnt allow to run the central network in software hardware. Moreover, enterprises are still reluctant to adopt Software Defined Networkingtechnology to some extent. They have fear that services running on their existing network will get hampered.Global Software Defined Networking (SDN) Market: SegmentationSoftware defined networking (SDN) Market can be segmented on the basis of component, application, end-user, and region. Component category include software and different types of services such as professional services and managed services. On the basis of application, the market can be segmented into SDN for data center and SD-WAN. Different type of end-user that are deploying SDN are cloud service providers, telecommunication service providers, and enterprises. Region wise, global software defined networking (SDN) Market can be segmented into North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Japan, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Middle East & Africa.Cisco System Inc. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM Corporation, Juniper Networks, Pica8, Inc., Intel Corporation, and Big Switch Networks, Inc. are some of the big players of global software defined networking (SDN) market.Regional OverviewNorth America is the largest Software Defined Networking market as most of the Software Defined Networking providers such as Cisco, IBM, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are based in the North America region and are making huge investment over there. Also, due to the ongoing advancements in 4G and 5G technologies the US, telecommunication service providers are deploying SDN at every layer of their network.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @In Europe region, technology service providers have already understood the value proportion of SDN and have already started deploying Software Defined Networking in their networks but enterprise market still remain gloomy in terms of adoption of Software Defined Networking.In Asia Pacific region, growth in countries such as China, India, and Japan are immensely contributing in the market. In India, the telecommunication services industry is going through the transformation and service providers have started to deploy Software Defined Networking technology at massive scale.About UsFuture 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 centres in the U.S. and India.FMIs research and consulting services help businesses around the globe navigate the challenges in a rapidly evolving marketplace with confidence and clarity. Our customised and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. We continuously track emerging trends and events in a broad range of end industries to ensure our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers.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:Rabies Treatment Market key players Sanofi (France), Merck & Co. Inc., CSC Pharmaceuticals International, Pfizer (U.S.), outlook 2023

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Rabies Treatment Market key players Sanofi (France), Merck & Co. Inc., CSC Pharmaceuticals International, Pfizer (U.S.), outlook 2023Rabies Treatment Market Research Information Type (Furious Rabies, Paralytic Rabies and others), By Treatment (Rabies Immunoglobulin, Brain Tissue Vaccines, Tissue Culture Vaccines and others), End Users (Hospital, Clinics) - Global Forecast till 2023Key Players for Rabies Treatment MarketSanofi (France), Merck & Co. Inc. , CSC Pharmaceuticals International , Pfizer (U.S.), VBI Vaccines Inc. (U.S.), Taj Pharmaceuticals Limited (India), Bio Med Pvt. Ltd., Bavarian Nordic(U.S.), Solvay(U.S.), Informa plc.(U.S.) and others.It is estimated that global rabies treatment market is expected to grow at a CAGR 4.5% during the forecast period of 2017-2023.Get Sample Report of the Research Study @MARKET SCENARIO FOR RABIES TREATMENT MARKETRabies is a deadly virus that usually spreads from the saliva of infected/rabid animals. Animals that are most likely to transmit rabies include bats, raccoons, coyotes, foxes, and skunks. In developing countries, stray dogs are the most likely to get infected with rabies. It is stated by the WHO that rabies infection is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths every year, especially, in Asia and Africa. Signs and symptoms of rabies include headache, nausea, vomiting, confusion, hyperactivity, difficulty in swallowing, agitation, anxiety, hallucinations, insomnia, partial paralysis, hydrophobia (fear of water), and excessive salivation. Rabies virus basically infects the central nervous system and salivary glands which ultimately leads to death. Treatment by vaccination is the best and most effective method in treating as well as preventing rabies. One of the approved and effective methods against rabies is when inactivated rabies vaccine is combined with rabies immunoglobulin. Rabies is diagnosed by detecting proteins present on the surface of rabies virus using samples of blood, saliva samples, and skin. To get rid of this deadly disease, various government, and privately held organizations actively participate to make people aware of the current scenario. For instance, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Global Alliance for Rabies Control (GARC), WHO, and International Organization for Animal Health (OIE) teamed up together in 2015 to achieve strategic plan of "Zero human Rabies deaths by 2030". The main aim of this initiative is to prioritize healthcare investments in rabies control and coordinate the rabies-elimination efforts.SEGMENTATION FOR RABIES TREATMENT MARKETThe rabies treatment market is segmented on the basis of type of rabies, type of treatment, and end users.On the basis of type of rabies, market is segmented into furious rabies, paralytic rabies and othersOn the basis of type of treatment, market is classified into rabies immunoglobin vaccine, bran tissue vaccine, tissue culture and others.On the basis of end-users, market is segmented into hospitals, clinics, epidemic prevention centers and others.REGIONAL ANALYSIS FOR RABIES TREATMENT MARKETOn the regional basis, the market is segmented into America, Europe, Asia Pacific and the Middle East & Africa.The Americas dominate the rabies treatment market owing to the remarkable use of the vaccine for preventing diseases and favorable conditions for research and development. In America, rabies vaccination programs have eliminated domestic dogs as reservoirs of rabies virus. According to the data suggested by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated health costs associated with rabies disease detection, and control have risen, exceeding $300 million annuallyEurope is the second largest market for rabies treatment market followed by Asia Pacific. Owing to the availability of funds for research and development activities and growing emphasis on research for treating diseases. Asia Pacific shows the fastest growth in this market due to an increase in prevalence of communicable diseases. Particularly, India and China are expected to be an emerging and the fastest growing market.Top 5 Reasons to Get this Report:Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent development activitiesMarket Strategic Business Influence DataMarket Research Future recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimationsMarket share analysis of the top industry playersMarket forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, Trends and the regional markets With SWOT AnalysisGet Discount @BRIEF TOC FOR RABIES TREATMENT MARKETChapter 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 Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restrains4.3 Opportunities4.4 Challenges4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4.6 Technology Trends & AssessmentChapter 5. Market Factor Analysis5.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis5.1.1 Bargaining Power of Suppliers5.1.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers5.1.3 Threat of New Entrants5.1.4 Threat of Substitutes5.1.5 Intensity of Rivalry5.2 Value Chain Analysis5.3 Investment Feasibility Analysis5.4 Pricing AnalysisTOC Continued.Enquire about Report @About 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 Us:Market Research Future, Office No. 528,Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar, Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comV2X Market 2018 Global Industry Outlook To 2023: Key Players: Continental, Qualcomm, NXP Semiconductors, Robert Bosch, and Delphi Automotive

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V2X (Vehicle-to-everything) Market 2018 Global Research Report provides comprehensive information on the Global V2X Market development by Communication Type (V2C, V2D, V2G, V2P, V2V and V2I), Component Type (Hardware and Software), and Propulsion Type (ICE and EV) and by Regions. The guide covers V2X Market by Companies, Share, Size, Growth, Market Drivers, Restraints and Regional Analysis with forecast to 2023.This report reviews key companies involved in V2X Market and enlists all their Product/Business Segment Overview, Financials Analysis and Key Developments includes Continental (Germany), Qualcomm (US), NXP Semiconductors (Netherlands), Robert Bosch (Germany), and Delphi Automotive (U.K.).Get Sample report of Global V2X Market at: The V2X market has witnessed significant growth in recent times mainly due to the advent of advanced technology in vehicles as advanced driver assistance systems. Rapidly rising safety concerns among individuals and increased emphasis by the insurance companies, the market for V2X is expected to register high growth rate. Increasing demand for vehicles and the corresponding increasing production is expected to have significant contribution in the V2X market. Rapidly developing infrastructure across the globe to accommodate the changing tide in the automotive industry, will have a positive impact on the V2X market.Scope of the Report:By Component:Rotary Switch.roof light.Touch Pad.Smart Roof.Locking Function.Side mirror.Door Panel Light.Driver Monitoring Camera.Electric Window.By Control Panel Type:Manual.Push button.Touch Screen.By Vehicle Type:Passenger Cars.Commercial Vehicles.By Regions:Asia Pacific (China, Japan, South Korea, and India).Europe (Germany, France, UK, and Italy).North America (US, Mexico, and Canada).Rest of the World (Brazil and Russia).The V2X 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 incidence of vehicle electrification in the Asia Pacific region is also expected to impact the V2X market positively. Availability of cheap labor in Asia Pacific has also been a critical factor in the V2X market. Additionally rapidly growing automotive infrastructure in this region is expected to lay the groundwork for the rapid development of the automotive sector.The report for Global V2X Market of Market Research Future comprises 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.Enquire For Complete 111 Pages Licensed Copy Of Report: 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.528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312sales@marketresearchfuture.comAbout 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.528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312sales@marketresearchfuture.comActive Pharmaceutical Ingredients Market -Company Profiling with Detailed Strategies, Financials, And Recent Developments

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The global active pharmaceutical ingredient market is growing significantly due to patent expiry of biologic drugs in the industry. Patent expiry of blockbuster drugs has boosted the demand for low cost substitutes, which further increases the demand for active pharmaceutical ingredients in the industry. Moreover, increasing investment into biosimilars is expected to support the growth of the market in the coming years.Access Report Overview:Massive unexplored market in active pharmaceutical ingredient industry of developing economies are creating ample opportunities for the active pharmaceutical ingredient market to grow at a considerable rate in the coming years. Active pharmaceutical ingredients are the primary components of manufacturing effective and safe essential drugs. The advanced research and development facilities of the companies are supporting to address the demand of the active pharmaceutical ingredient industry.Download Free Sample of This Research Report:Geographically, North America will be leading the global active pharmaceutical ingredient market in the coming years due to increasing research and development programs in the field of drugs and medical science. Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing region in the global active pharmaceutical ingredient market. The major reasons for the fastest growth of the market in the region are increasing healthcare expenditure, large pool of patients, and presence of large pool of generic medicine producers in the region. Moreover, the active pharmaceutical ingredient market is growing due to increasing awareness of lifestyle associated diseses in the emerging countries, such as India and China, of Asia-Pacific region.Make Enquiry Before Buying the Report:Some of the companies operating in the active pharmaceutical ingredient market are Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Dr. Reddys Laboratories, Actavis Plc, Hospira Inc., Boehringer Ingelheim Group, Lonza Group, Cambrex Corporation, Novartis International AG, BASF SE, Pfizer, Inc., Mylan, Inc., Watson Pharmaceutical Inc., and WuXi Apptec.About P&S Market ResearchP&S Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. We provide market research reports, industry reports, business intelligence and research-based consulting services across a range of industries.With the help of our professional corporate relations with various companies, our market research offers the most accurate market forecasting. Our analysts and consultants interact with leading companies of the concerned domain to substantiate every single data presented in our publication. Our research assists our client in identifying new and different windows of opportunity and frame informed and customized strategies for expansion in different regions.Contact:P&S Market Research347, 5th Ave. #1402New York City, NY - 10016Toll-free: +1-888-778-7886 (USA/Canada)Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.comWeb:Global and U.S. Synthetic Carotenoids Market Status and Forecast by Players, Types and Applications 2018-2025

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "2018-2025 Synthetic Carotenoids Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies the Synthetic Carotenoids market status and outlook of global and United States, from angles of players, regions, product types and end industries; this report analyzes the top players in global and United States market, and splits the Synthetic Carotenoids market by product type and application/end industries.The Global and United States Synthetic Carotenoids market will be extensively covered in our latest report, which mainly outlines key occurrences in the market. Product launches, advancements in technology, and collaborations within businesses are some of these events, which are exhaustively covered in the report. The study has been carried out based on qualitative as well as quantitative information derived from primary and secondary research. This study describes market size from a Global and United States and local perspective, trends, progress, and various other parameters. A thorough representation of the competitive landscape has been given in the report.For more info, Get a Free Sample Report :The global Synthetic Carotenoids market is valued at XX million USD in 2017 and is expected to reach XX million USD by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.The Asia-Pacific will occupy for more market share in following years, especially in China, also fast growing India and Southeast Asia regions.North America, especially the United States, will still play an important role which cannot be ignored. Any changes from United States might affect the development trend of Synthetic Carotenoids.United States plays an important role in global market, with market size of xx million USD in 2017 and will be xx million USD in 2025, with a CAGR of XX.The major players in global and United States market, includingBASF SERoyal DSM N.V.Chr. Hansen A/SFMC CorporationCyanotech CorporationKemin Industries Inc.D.D. Williamson & Co., Inc.Dohler GroupAllied Biotech CorporationExcelvite SDN. BHD.The report provides a clear overview of the Global and United States Synthetic Carotenoids market in its beginning section, followed by a product/service description. Various factors that are driving as well as restraining the market are covered in detail in this report. These factors comprise individual aspects such as macro-fundamentals, policies and amendments, micro-trends, and future projections, among many others. The Global and United States market for Synthetic Carotenoids mainly deals with revenue generation based on relevant newly-launched products and services, thereby bringing criteria such as applications, end users, and technology type into the picture.The Global and United States Synthetic Carotenoids market is mainly divided into numerous segments based on the above mentioned criteria, and each segment has been covered in minute detail in the report. Under every criteria, a leading segment has been demarcated in terms of revenue gained and lucrativeness. These segments are described from the viewpoint to provide a valuable insight to players, in order to make them maximize their profits. This section is also followed by considerably detailed geographical outlook.Obtain Table of Content @Table of Contents1 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 Source1.3 Disclaimer2 Synthetic Carotenoids Market Overview2.1 Synthetic Carotenoids Product Overview2.2 Synthetic Carotenoids Market Segment by Type2.3 Global Synthetic Carotenoids Product Segment by Type2.3.1 Global Synthetic Carotenoids Sales (K MT) and Growth (%) by Type (2013, 2017 and 2025)2.3.2 Global Synthetic Carotenoids Sales (K MT) and Market Share (%) by Type (2013-2018)2.3.3 Global Synthetic Carotenoids Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Type (2013-2018)2.3.4 Global Synthetic Carotenoids Price (USD/MT) by Type (2013-2018)2.4 United States Synthetic Carotenoids Product Segment by Type3 Synthetic Carotenoids Application/End Users3.1 Synthetic Carotenoids Segment by Application/End Users3.2 Global Synthetic Carotenoids Product Segment by Application3.2.1 Global Synthetic Carotenoids Sales (K MT) and CGAR (%) by Application (2013, 2017 and 2025)3.2.2 Global Synthetic Carotenoids Sales (K MT) and Market Share (%) by Application (2013-2018)3.3 United States Synthetic Carotenoids Product Segment by Application3.3.1 United States Synthetic Carotenoids Sales (K MT) and CGAR (%) by Application (2013, 2017 and 2025)3.3.2 United States Synthetic Carotenoids Sales (K MT) and Market Share (%) by Application (2013-2018)Avail Discount @List of Tables and FiguresTable Research Programs/Design for This ReportFigure Bottom-up and Top-down Approaches for This ReportFigure Global Synthetic Carotenoids Revenue (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2013-2025)Figure United States Synthetic Carotenoids Revenue (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2013-2025)Table Global Synthetic Carotenoids Revenue (Million USD) and CAGR Comparison by Regions (2013-2025)Figure North America Synthetic Carotenoids Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (%)(2013-2025)Figure Asia-Pacific Synthetic Carotenoids Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (%)(2013-2025)Figure Europe Synthetic Carotenoids Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (%)(2013-2025)Figure South America Synthetic Carotenoids Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (%)(2013-2025)Figure Middle East and Africa Synthetic Carotenoids Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (%)(2013-2025)Figure United States Synthetic Carotenoids 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: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com64bit computing Market - Global Industry Insights, Trends, Outlook, and Opportunity Analysis, 20162024

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Bit computing refers to the bit number in a processor corresponding to processing speed and storage capacity. In computer architecture, a processor with memory address widths, integer size, and data path widths of 64 bits is referred to as 64-bit computing. Advanced technologies such as collision avoidance systems, parking assistance, and lane departure warning in the automotive industry, require instillation of 64-bit processors for smooth functioning. Growing integration of these technologies in automotive is in turn, increasing demand for 640-bit computing, globally. According to International Energy Agency Organization, in 2016, over 750,000 electronic cars were sold worldwide, with China, the U.S., Norway, U.K., France, and Japan being major countries in this market.Request For Sample Copy of this Research Report :North America holds the largest market share of the global 64-bit computing marketOn the basis of geography, the global 64-bit computing market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa. North America held a dominant position in the global 64-bit computing market in 2016 and is projected to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period. Due to increasing demand for microcontrollers in photovoltaic systems and smart energy management application is boosting growth of the market for 64-bit computing in the North America. Additionally, the increasing penetration of smartphone and tablets and other consumer electronic devices is creating growth opportunities for the 64-bit computing market in this region. The U.S. and Canada are the major growth engines in the region. According to Coherent Market Insights analysis, 207 million smartphone users were recorded in 2016, the number for which is expected to reach up to 264 million smartphone users by 2021. Similarly, in Canada, smartphone user population is expected to reach 27.3 million by 2021 i.e. 72.2% of the total population. Asia Pacific 64 bit computing market is expected to exhibit fastest growth in the near future. Growing automotive and consumer electronics industry in Asia Pacific countries is a major factor influencing growth of the 64-bit computing market in this region. Increasing adoption of electronic vehicles in Asia Pacific is increasing the demand for 64-bit computing. China is the leading country for the electronic cars worldwide, followed by the U.S.Key companies in the global 64-bit computing marketKey players operating in the global 64-bit computing market include Analog Devices, Inc., Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, Broadcom Limited, Cavium Inc., Infineon Technologies AG, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA Graphics Pvt. Ltd, and NXP Semiconductors N.V.Request For Customization as per Your Need :About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comVisit Our New Website:Atherosclerosis Global Key Players - Amgen Inc, Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, Cardax Inc, and Dybly AG Market Analysis & Forecast 2018 to 2022

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AtherosclerosisOverviewAtherosclerosis (or arteriosclerotic vascular disease) is a condition where the arteries become narrowed and hardened due to an excessive build up of plaque around the artery wall. The disease disrupts the flow of blood around the body, posing serious cardiovascular complications. Symptoms of atherosclerosis are chest pain (angina), pain in the leg, arm, and anywhere else that an artery is blocked, shortness of breath, fatigue, confusion (if the blockage affects circulation to the brain) and muscle weakness in the legs from lack of circulation.Click here for sample report @Major Key Players:Amgen IncBoehringer Ingelheim GmbHCardax IncDybly AGEsperion Therapeutics IncForty Seven IncGenKyoTex SAAtherosclerosis Industry Major OutlookPharmaceutical and Healthcare latest pipeline guide Atherosclerosis - Pipeline Review, H1 2018, provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development for Atherosclerosis , complete with analysis by stage of development, drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type. The guide covers the descriptive pharmacological action of the therapeutics, its complete research and development history and latest news and press releases.The Atherosclerosis (Cardiovascular) pipeline guide also reviews of key players involved in therapeutic development for Atherosclerosis and features dormant and discontinued projects. The guide covers therapeutics under Development by Companies /Universities /Institutes, the molecules developed by Companies in Phase III, Phase II, Phase I, Preclinical, Discovery and Unknown stages are 3, 3, 4, 47, 13 and 1 respectively. Similarly, the Universities portfolio in Phase I, Preclinical and Discovery stages comprises 1, 22 and 2 molecules, respectively.Atherosclerosis pipeline guide helps in identifying and tracking emerging players in the market and their portfolios, enhances decision making capabilities and helps to create effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage.Atherosclerosis - Competitive AnalysisKey players are making innovative developments in Atherosclerosis industry. The same will help in improving the market performance. Heavy investments are made by major players in the R&D sectorScopeThe pipeline guide provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of Atherosclerosis.The pipeline guide reviews pipeline therapeutics for Atherosclerosis by companies and universities/research institutes based on information derived from company and industry-specific sources.The pipeline guide covers pipeline products based on several stages of development ranging from pre-registration till discovery and undisclosed stages.The pipeline guide features descriptive drug profiles for the pipeline products which comprise, product description, descriptive licensing and collaboration details, R&D brief, MoA & other developmental activities.The pipeline guide reviews key companies involved in Atherosclerosis therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects.The pipeline guide evaluates Atherosclerosis therapeutics based on mechanism of action (MoA), drug target, route of administration (RoA) and molecule type.The pipeline guide encapsulates all the dormant and discontinued pipeline projects.The pipeline guide reviews latest news related to pipeline therapeutics for Atherosclerosis..ContinuedFor Detailed Reading Please visit @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.WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaBionematicides Market - Significant Expansion During 2017 - 2025

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Global Bionematicides Market: SnapshotBionematicides are referred to as bio pesticides which are employed for controlling and treating nematode infestation in agricultural crops. These type of pesticides comprise microorganisms such as fungus and bacteria. Furthermore, bio fertilizers are extracted from renewable resources such as plant and animal extracts and are also low in cost. The application of bionematicides starts from the pre-plantation stage for it to work better. The bionematicides market is chiefly influenced by robust industrialization which results in the decline of availability of fertile land for agriculture. The agriculture sector is highly affected by leading industry players focusing on the use of organic and biological methods employing bio fertilizers in order to improve the crop yield, thus avoiding chemical fertilizers. Moreover, the excessive use of chemical fertilizers, contaminate the soil thus resulting in soil pollution. The market will be thus driven by the rising use of microorganisms in order to manufacture organic nutrients to enhance the soil fertility.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The report examines the growth of the global bionematicides market that occurred in the last over the last few years and is likely to occur in the coming years. The research publication additionally explains the causes of the fluctuations in the global market. It does this by assessing of the facets and the different trends that have been prevalent from past few years and also the aspects that are anticipated to maintain a strong impact on the market over the coming years. The Porters five forces analysis has been considered by analysts to present a clear picture of the vendor landscape to readers. Agreements, mergers, acquisitions, and other dealings have been further mentioned in the study. It focuses on the strategies, products, and market share along with position of the companies operating in the marketRequest TOC of the Report @Global Bionematicides Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe growth of the global bionematicides market is likely to be supplemented by robust industrialization leading to decrease in the fertility of the agricultural lands. Additionally, high invasion of nematodes in crops and their growing resistance to the conventional methods is further expected to propel the demand for bionematicides over the coming years. Strict regulations imposed by governments pertaining to the harmful impact of chemical nematicides on the environment and loss of yield are factors triggering the adoption of bionematicides. With the global population growing exponentially, the demand for food is expected to gain momentum. As a result of this, the need for effective land and high yielding fertilizer, seed and crop management is also expected to increase, thus benefitting the market in return. The applications of bionematicides is likely to expand owing to its environment friendly nature. However, limited varieties of bionematicides is expected to inhibit the growth of the market.Global Bionematicides Market: Regional OutlookRegion-wise, the global market for bionematicides can segmented into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Rest of the World. Asia Pacific is expected to witness strong growth over the coming years owing to factors such as environmental concerns, climate change, sustainability, affordability, demographic shifts, overpopulation, and robust industrialization. The market in North America is also likely to significantly expand owing to the growing acceptance of bionematicides.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Bionematicides Market: Vendor LandscapeSome of the leading companies in the market are Marrone Bio Innovations, Inc., LAM International, Monsanto Company, Bayer CropScience AG, ow AgroSciences LLC, and BASF SE.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Global Smart Infrastructure Market - Smart Cities In The Hands Of Cities and Communities

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"The Latest Research Report Global Smart Infrastructure - A Smart Approach to Smart Cities in 2016 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"Slowly but surely we are beginning to see a transformation take place in many parts of the world, as governments and councils realise they need to take a holistic approach to future city-wide development. In Australia, for example, we see that Adelaide, Canberra, Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Sydney, Ipswich and Sunshine Coast have all been identified as being among the leading smart cities. The Netherlands also has great examples of emerging Smart Cities including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Eindhoven.While it can be difficult for councils to obtain funding for Smart City projects  there are many things that cities can do within their existing budget. Every city needs to develop its vision and leadership from the top down and requires a Smart Council to lead initiatives. Councils need to consider how one aspect of a Smart City can benefit another. For example, how can communication technologies such as WiFi, mobile broadband, apps, M2M, Internet of Things (IoT) and smart micro-grids be used to achieve synergy or asset sharing?Get Sample Copy of this report @Even more importantly, perhaps, is establishing community Buy-in for Smart City projects. Directly engaging with citizens, businesses and others can establish the essential support required for developments - and they can also assist in building business models that can lead to investment.For those operating in the telecoms sector  smart city developments offer enormous opportunities going forward. Billions of dollars are already being poured into the essential telecoms infrastructure and technologies required for smart cities. Implementing an holistic IoT infrastructure using sensors and M2M requires the heavy involvement of the telecoms industry. Establishing the networking solutions is also important and this is where developments such as Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are being closely monitored.To progress towards a smart city, local councils should lead the vision, set the strategy, and work side-by-side with their citizens, neighbourhood communities, businesses, local stakeholders and others. They need to abolish the internal silo mentality. Most of the political and financial powers still reside with state and federal governments and transformation is also often needed to create a better and more equal level of collaboration between all levels of government. As local councils still have a long way to go, state and federal governments will need to guide and support local councils in this complex transformation process.Key developments:As we look towards 2017 there are some great smart city examples emerging both nationally and internationally.State-of-the-art telecommunications are vital to a citys economic health and well-being.Developments linked to Block Chain may be useful for Smart Cities and Smart Grids.Smart cities present significant opportunities for telecoms operators.In 2016 Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft continue to show a keen interest in Artificial Intelligence developments.Wearable technology has become a thriving industry, with an ever-broadening range of possible uses and devices for our smart communities of the future.In May 2016 the ITU and United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) launched an important initiative called: United for Smart Sustainable Cities, with the abbreviation U4SSC.In 2016 the global smart city market is estimated to be worth around $1 trillion.The most difficult issue to resolve in building smart cities is the funding.In mid-2015 the ITU members decided to establish a study group which would focus specifically on smart cities in terms of the standardization requirements for the broader Internet of Things (IoT).Browse Complete Report with TOC @Table of Contents1. Smart city infrastructure transformation1.1 Smart Cities in the Hands of Cities and Communities1.1.1 Defining smart cities1.1.2 Smart city challenges becoming clearer1.1.3 Published smart city statistics1.1.4 The use of telecommunications in smart cities1.1.5 Smart buildings1.1.6 Smart Cities and the open data dilemma1.1.7 Connected homes gaining market share1.1.8 Alphabet, Microsoft, Samsung and Apple target smart Home market1.1.9 Smart Factory  Industry 4.01.1.10 Standards1.1.11 Working groups1.1.12 Smart Cities, Smart Councils1.1.13 Selected examples of smart cites and communities1.1.14 A great city is much more than a smart city1.2 How to become a Smart City1.2.1 Introduction1.2.2 Holistic thinking essential in smart city vision1.2.3 The role of local councils1.2.4 How to get started1.2.5 The Sharing Economy1.3 Smart Cities and Social Stability1.3.1 Inclusion weakens polarisation and populism1.3.2 So what do cities and smart cities have to do with all of this?1.3.3 So what is a smart city in this context?1.3.4 Rural areas and inner and outer suburbs1.3.5 Smart cities empower their citizens1.3.6 Conclusions2. Smart grids and smart meters2.1 Radical changes for electricity utilities2.2 The future of the electricity industry2.2.1 Consequences for the electricity industry2.2.2 A perfect storm2.3 Smart grids analysis2.3.1 The second phase: Smart Grid 2.02.3.2 Escalating costs beyond the meter2.4 Smart grids and blockchains2.4.1 Alliander N.V.2.5 Strategic mistakes from governments and the energy industry2.5.1 This is resulting in a rethink and a regrouping2.5.2 Where are the government leaders?2.5.3 No smart grids without government leadership2.5.4 Confusion regarding regulations2.5.5 Muni Smart Grids2.6 Smart energy for the future2.6.1 Why solar may not be the biggest threat to energy utilities2.7 Smart grid vision2.7.1 Smart grids in need of strategic plans2.7.2 Trans-sector policies and an holistic approach required2.8 Global smart grid market2.8.1 Historical overview2.8.2 The current market2.8.3 Smart grid benefits and challenges2.8.4 Smart grid market value and investment2.8.5 Smart grid cyber security2.8.6 Smart grids and mobile technology2.8.7 Disruptive developments in smart grids2.9 Global smart meter market2.10 Remember the consumer2.10.1 Delighting and exciting electricity customers2.10.2 Whats in it for the customer?2.11 A concept, not a single technology2.12 M2M a key component2.12.1 From SCaDa to IoT2.12.2 Low power wide area (LPWA) networksView Sample PDF @3. Intelligent transport systems and drones3.1 Smart transport trends and analysis3.1.1 Smart transport  introduction3.1.2 Smart vehicles3.1.3 Electric vehicles3.1.4 Vehicle to Grid (V2G)3.1.5 Dedicated Short-Range Communications3.1.6 Freight in the digital age3.1.7 Further smart transport project examples3.1.8 Drones and Unmanned Aircraft3.1.9 Examples of applications for drones4. Artificial intelligence4.1 Smart societies based on artificial intelligence4.1.1 The proposition4.1.2 Philosophy and science4.1.3 Social and economic developments4.1.4 Are we reaching another breaking point?4.1.5 Solutions by using information technology to increase our intelligence4.1.6 Examples of developments4.1.7 ConclusionAbout 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Wireless Mesh Networking Market by Technology, Innovation, Regional Outlook, Perspective, Comprehensive Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Segment, Trends and Forecast during 2018-2023

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The research report, titled Wireless Mesh Networking Market offers a clear understanding of the subject matter. Continuous technological advancements and the tenacious entrance of Internet in the remote corners of the world are additionally in charge of the noteworthy growth of the market. The demand for the products in the market is increasing substantially due to the growing awareness among individuals regarding the latest technological advancements and innovations. It also presents a nitty-gritty and unbiased investigation of the past performance and the present status of this market, taking the prominent trends, essential variables, difficulties, opportunities, and the development prospects into consideration.Top Key Vendors:Motorola Solutions, Tropos Networks, Ruckus Wireless, Strix Systems, BelAir, Synapse Wireless, Coronis, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, Firetide, Aruba Networks, Rajant Corporation, Fluidmesh Networks, Qorvus SystemsRequest a sample of this research report @Wireless Mesh Networking is rapidly emerging as a cost-effective solution for the improvement of wireless communications across various industry in the globe. The fast and easy deployment in the public safety infrastructure is indicative of their rising popularity and the significant growth the wireless mesh market is likely to experience in the coming years. The adoption of these networks has become critical in most industries where worker safety is a concern and this is a major factor driving the Wireless Mesh Networking Market.The analysis of the manufacturing cost structure of the Global Wireless Mesh Networking Market has been performed in view of key aspects, for example, industry chain structure, manufacturing process, crude materials, and their providers. Technology is being looked after for both in the engineering procedure and in terms of product features. The market is dynamic in nature and this is rousing testing prerequisites and moreover, the advancement of superior hardware, advancing the development prospects of the market.Make an enquiry before purchasing this report @The report on Global Wireless Mesh Networking Market is an all-inclusive study of the business sectors latest outlines, industry growth drivers, and inadequacies. It gives market forecasts for the coming years. It contains an examination of the latest progressions in technology, Porter's five force analysis and dynamic profiles of exclusive industry competitors. The report besides conveys an investigation of trivial and full-scale factors prosecuting for the new candidates in the market and the ones currently in the market. A methodical value chain analysis is also carried out in this report.The steady support to the IT & Telecom sector in developed regions is likely to enable their steady dominance in the Global Wireless Mesh Networking Market in the coming years, but the growing acknowledgment of the high volume of unmet demand in emerging regions has driven the healthcare sector in countries such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa, notwithstanding other dynamic economies in the region such as South East Asia, Japan, and China.Table of Content:Global Wireless Mesh Networking Market Research Report 2018-2023Chapter 1 Global Wireless Mesh Networking Market OverviewChapter 2 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.Mr. Sunny DenisContact No. +1-888-631-6977sales@researchnreports.com(ResearchnReports)Electric two-wheeler Market: 2018 Global Industry Outlook By Key Players - Accell, Vmoto, NYCeWheels, Derby Cycle, Easy Motion, Moustache Bikes, Jiangsu Xinri E-Vehicle, myStromer, Karbon Kinetics To 2023

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Electric two-wheeler market 2018 global report provides comprehensive analysis of Electric two-wheeler Market key companies with all their Product/Business Segment Overview, Financials Analysis and Key Developments. Report analyzes Electric two-wheeler Market development by Battery type (Sealed lead Acid, Li-ion, Ni-MH), By Product (Retro, Standing/ self-Balancing, Folding), By Technology (Plug-in based, Battery-based), By Type (Electric Motorcycle, Electric Bicycle, Electric Scooter) and By Regions.Key companies discussed in report are Accell Group (Netherlands), Vmoto Limited (Australia), NYCeWheels (U.S.), Derby Cycle AG (Germany), Easy Motion USA (California), Moustache Bikes (France), Jiangsu Xinri E-Vehicle Co (China), myStromer AG (Switzerland), Karbon Kinetics Limited (U.K.) and Pedego Electric Bikes (California) among others.Get Sample report of Global V2X Market at: Market Scope of the Report:By Battery Type:Sealed lead AcidLi-ionNi-MHBy Product:RetroStanding/ self-BalancingFoldingBy Technology:Plug-in basedBattery-basedBy Type:Electric MotorcycleElectric BicycleElectric ScooterBy Regions:Asia Pacific (China, Japan, South Korea, and India)Europe (Germany, France, UK, and Italy)North America (US, Mexico, and Canada)Rest of the World (Brazil and Russia)The global electric two-wheeler market is majorly driven by the increase in the prices of fuel. The prices of crude oil are increasing very rapidly, with the availability of the crude oil decreasing day by day. Due to these factors, the mindset of the population is shifting their preference towards electric two-wheelers. Also, the developing nations such as China, India, Thailand, and Indonesia, among others are becoming manufacturing hubs for global automotive players. As the global auto-manufacturers continue to expand into growing and emerging markets, the demand for electric two-wheelers such as an electric motorcycle, electric bicycle and electric scooter will also rise. The surge in demand for electric two-wheelers worldwide with the increase in the environmental awareness and the various government initiatives undertaken for promoting the electric vehicle adoption drive the growth of the electric two-wheeler market.Geographically, the global Electric two-wheeler market has been divided into four major regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World. Asia Pacific region is expected to dominate the global electric two-wheeler market. The presence of China, Japan and South Korea, is one of the major factors driving the electric motorcycle and scooter market. China is the largest market for an electric two-wheeler. Since 2015, the sales have grown massively in China. However, it has created ample scope for the automakers to cover the region. Moreover, the major automakers have decided to initiate the electric vehicle production in India as well. This decision has been quite a profitable as the government has also taken various steps to make more investment in these countries.Enquire For Complete 111 Pages Licensed Copy Of Report: Table Of Content:1 Executive Summary2 Scope Of The Report2.1 Market Definition2.2 Scope Of The Study2.2.1 Definition2.2.2 Research Objective2.2.3 Assumptions2.2.4 Limitations2.3 Research Process2.3.1 Primary Research2.3.2 Secondary Research2.4 Market Size Estimation2.5 Forecast Model3 Market Landscape3.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis3.1.1 Threat Of New Entrants3.1.2 Bargaining Power Of Buyers3.1.3 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers3.1.4 Threat Of Substitutes3.1.5 Segment Rivalry3.2 Value Chain/Supply Chain Analysis4 Market Dynamics4.1 Introduction4.2 Market Drivers4.3 Market Restraints4.4 Market Opportunities4.5 Market Trends5 Global Electric Two Wheeler Market , By Battery Type5.1 Introduction5.2 Sealed Lead Acid5.2.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20235.2.2 Market Estimates & Forecast By Region, 2017-20235.3 Li-Ion5.3.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20235.3.2 Market Estimates & Forecast By Region, 2017-20235.2 Ni-MH5.2.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20235.2.2 Market Estimates & Forecast By Region, 2017-2023About 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.528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312sales@marketresearchfuture.comHong Kong Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband Market  Overview, Key Statistics and Analyses

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"The Latest Research Report Hong Kong - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband - Statistics and Analyses provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"Hong Kongs small size and high population density has enabled the country to extensively rollout fixed broadband infrastructure and provide almost all households with access to high-speed broadband connectivity. This has propelled Hong Kong to boast the highest peak average broadband speeds in the world.Hong Kong is ranked 2nd out of 34 with an Asian Telecoms Maturity Index score of 90. This places Hong Kong 2nd in the Market Leaders category. (BuddeComms Asian Telecoms Maturity Index, is an index (on a scale between 0 and 100) that measures and ranks the relative maturity of the telecoms industry in all of the 34 countries in Asia.) Compared to other Asian nations, Hong Kong has very high mobile, mobile broadband and fixed broadband penetration.International internet connectivity continues to grow, driven by Hong Kongs status as an international financial hub and its location next to China.Get Sample Copy of this report @Fixed line growth in Hong Kong has declined over the past five years as consumers migrate to wireless voice and data services. This trend is predicted to continue over the next five years to 2022.The government has taken steps towards coordinated development of a smart city. The Hong Kong government announced a range of measures in six areas, including Smart Mobility, Smart Living, and Smart Environment, which will be introduced over the next five years to 2022.Broadband investment initially focused on DSL and HFC technology platforms although operators have switched focus to higher bandwidth fibre access platforms, due to inherent advantage of fibre access networks over competing platforms, especially in the geographically compact territory of Hong Kong.Fixed-line broadband market penetration has grown slowly over the past five years in a highly mature market. Over the next five years to 2022 growth is expected to continue to increase slowly.Demand for broadband is driven by consumption of bandwidth-intensive online services such as OTT video, music and games; the proliferation of Internet connected devices including TVs, smartphones, tablets and PCs; and increasing usage of corporate broadband services that include cloud services and software.Hong Kong possesses a small but well developed mobile market and a number of Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs). Intense competition within a small market has led to consolidation, with the number of mobile network operators reduced to four.Mobile subscriber penetration is now well over 200% due to the high number of tourists visiting Hong Kong and high number of local residents with more than one mobile device. Mobile subscriber growth is expected to be relatively low over the next five years to 2022 due to a highly mature and highly competitive market.Browse Complete Report with TOC @Strong infrastructure-based competition has forced operators to continually upgrade network capacity and speed, deploying mobile broadband technologies such as HSPA and LTE combined with wireless broadband technologies such as WiFi.Mobile broadband subscriber growth is expected to be relatively low over the next five years to 2022 due to a highly mature mobile subscriber market, with a significant proportion of subscribers already having mobile broadband access.The government of Hong Kong expects the territory to be among the worlds earliest adopters of 5G mobile technology in 2020. During 2017 /2018 a number of Hong Kong Mobile Operators are paving the way for the introduction of 5G services.Key developments:HGC Global Communications is looking to 5G as a key opportunity for its fibre business.HKT has set up a one-stop Internet of Things ecosystem with multiple connectivity technologies in Hong Kong.Fixed line growth in Hong Kong has declined over the past five years. This trend will continue over the next five years to 2022.Hong Kong expects the territory to be among the worlds earliest adopters of 5G mobile technology in 2020.SmarTone trialled FDD Massive MIMO technology with Ericsson as part of its development plans towards 5G services.Mobile broadband subscriber growth is expected to be relatively low over the next five years to 2022Companies mentioned in this report:PCCW; HKT; CSL; Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN); Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong, i-Cable, HGC Global Communications.View Sample PDF @Table of Contents1. Key statistics2. Telecommunications market2.1 Market Overview and Analysis2.2 Regional Asian Market Comparison3. Regulatory environment3.1 Historical overview3.2 Regulatory authority3.3 OFCA (Office of the Communications Authority)3.4 Government policies3.4.1 Telecom Sector Liberalisation3.4.2 Universal Service Obligation (USO)3.4.3 Digital 21 IT Strategy3.4.4 FttB/FttH building registration scheme3.4.5 Number Portability (NP)4. Fixed network operators4.1 Introduction4.2 Hong Kong Telecom (HKT)4.2.1 Company overview4.2.2 Company background4.3 Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN)4.4 Hutchison Telecom Hong Kong Holdings (HTHKH)4.4.1 Company overview4.4.2 Company background4.5 HGC Global Communications4.6 i-Cable5. Telecommunications infrastructure5.1 Overview of the national telecom network5.1.1 Fixed-line statistics5.2 International infrastructure5.2.1 Submarine cable networks5.3 Specific IT developments5.3.1 Data Centres5.4 Smart infrastructure5.4.1 Introduction5.4.2 IoT5.4.3 Smart Grids5.4.4 Smart Cities6. Broadband market6.1 Market Overview and Analysis6.2 Fixed Broadband Statistics and Forecasts6.3 Fixed Broadband Service Providers6.4 Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) networks6.5 Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Networks6.6 Fibre-to-the-Premises (FttP)6.6.1 Overview6.6.2 Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN)6.6.3 HKT6.6.4 i-Cable6.7 Other fixed broadband services6.7.1 WiFi7. Digital economy7.1 Introduction7.2 E-Commerce7.3 E-Payments7.4 E-Government7.4.1 E-government statistics7.4.2 E-Government Infrastructure Services (EGIS)7.4.3 E-government network7.4.4 Smart Card7.5 E-Health7.5.1 Overview of Hong Kongs healthcare system7.5.2 ICT usage in Hong Kongs healthcare system7.5.3 Electronic Health Record7.5.4 Improving the accuracy of drug dispensing7.6 E-EducationAbout 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Advanced Battery Energy Storage System Market - Growth Of The Global Advanced Industry 2017 - 2025

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Global Advanced Battery Energy Storage System Market: OverviewEnergy storage is referred to as the capturing of energy produced at one point of time for future use. A device that is used for storing energy is often known as an accumulator. Energy is found in multiple forms such as kinetic, latent heat, elevated temperature, electricity, electrical potential, gravitational potential, chemical, and radiation. Battery energy storage comprises converting energy into a form that can be easily stored in the form of battery and are more convenient and economically feasible. Battery energy systems are gaining prominence among residential, commercial, and transportation sectors as a mean of storing natural energy and using it at the time of emergency. Manufacturers seek huge growth potentials in the micro-grid developments in advanced battery energy storage systems for disaster relief and military purposes. Batteries such as lithium ion used for energy storage are witnessing high demand owing to factors such as low cost, long battery life, fast charging, light weight, and low requirement for space.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The report examines the growth of the global advanced battery energy storage systems market that occurred in the last over the last few years and is likely to occur in the coming years. The research publication additionally explains the causes of the fluctuations in the global market. It does this by assessing of the facets and the different trends that have been prevalent from past few years and also the aspects that are anticipated to maintain a strong impact on the market over the coming years. The Porters five forces analysis has been considered by analysts to present a clear picture of the vendor landscape to readers. Agreements, mergers, acquisitions, and other dealings have been further mentioned in the study. It focuses on the strategies, products, and market share along with position of the companies operating in the market.Global Advanced Battery Energy Storage System Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe global market for advanced battery energy storage systems is likely to benefit from the growing emphasis on decreasing the dependence on fossil fuels and magnifying the share of clean resources in the energy mix. The burgeoning demand for enhanced power quality, time shifting, improved grid network utilization, and the availability of emergency power source for protecting and controlling equipment is expected to further drive the global advanced battery energy storage system market. These advanced battery energy storage systems have application in sectors such as forklifts, UPS, telecom, grid storage, and transportation. The growing demand from these sectors is likely to boost the growth of the market over the coming years. In order to enhance business productivity, there is an incessant need for uninterrupted supply of power in telecommunications and data centers. As a result of this, the demand for these storage systems is likely to exponentially rise.Request TOC of the Report @Global Advanced Battery Energy Storage System Market: Regional OutlookRegionally, the global market for advanced battery energy storage system can be segmented into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Rest of the World. North America and Europe are likely to emerge as prominent regions in the market owing to high availability of natural resources and advanced means of converting and storing them. Asia Pacific is also expected to catch up in the run owing to rising focus on the use of the available natural sources for energy needs.Global Advanced Battery Energy Storage System Market: Competitive LandscapeSome of the key participants in the market are EnerSys, Samsung SDI, AES Technologies, Exide Technologies, Hitachi Ltd., and General Electric.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @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Organic Food & Organic Beverages Market - Rising Demand In Coming Years By 2025

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Global Organic Food and Beverages Market: OverviewOrganic foods are grown without the use of synthetic additives, chemicals, genetic manipulation, and coloring agents, and need to satisfy the criteria set by the USDA National Organic Program. Organic foods and beverages are in high demand as they are healthy alternative to their traditional counterparts. As the world becomes more aware about the goodness of everything natural and products free from chemicals, the demand for organic food and beverages is growing at a fast pace. Some of the other factors boosting the market include growing health hazards due to inorganic food products, high income level, and improvement in organic farming practices.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Organic Food and Beverages Market: Key TrendsIncidences such as the mad cow scandal in the U.S., Canada, and other countries have resulted in the questioning of using genetically modified foods. Such incidences also bring to light, the abuse of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides in traditional farming practices. The result is a society that is more aware and concerned about such unhealthy food products and therefore seeking organic food and beverages. Although, expensive than non-organic products, organic food and beverages are increasingly being purchased and it has become a lifestyle for many upper middle class people in the world.Retailers of organic food and beverages are recognizing the need to educate young families so as to ensure a long-term loyalty and this is expected to boost the global organic food and beverages market in the long run. Hotels and restaurants are also capitalizing on this trend and serving organic food and beverages to customers, further boosting the market. Manufacturers are attempting to develop products in an organic way and obtaining organic certification, thus attracting customers and furthering the growth of the industry.Request TOC of the Report @Organic Food and Beverages Market: Market PotentialThe success in the retail organic sector that offer organic food and beverages is creating huge opportunities for manufacturers to increase their sales. Many food and beverage companies are associating with organic food and beverage companies so as to enhance their brand equity and be linked to healthy platforms. Big names such as General Mills for instance, have purchased Small Planet Foods, which is a U.S. based company that grows, markets, and distributes organic food products. Coca-Cola acquired Odwalla, which is another American company that sells organic fruit juices, smoothies, and bars.Organic Food and Beverages Market: Regional OutlookThe key markets for organic foods and beverages have been Europe and North America traditionally, but today, countries across the globe are proving to be lucrative markets for these products. There is high demand for organic food and beverages in countries such as India, Argentina, China, Brazil, and Mexico, and thus, manufacturers are forced to expand their manufacturing base to these countries. This in turn is ensuring a steady development of the market. Of regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Rest of the World, Asia Pacific is anticipated to hold promising growth opportunities in the organic food and beverages market. The regions expected success in the market can be attributed to growing awareness and affinity for organic ingredients. The market in the Rest of the World is also expected to flourish in the coming years.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Organic Food and Beverages Market: Competitive LandscapeThe global food and beverages market is fragmented with players such as Kraft Foods Group Inc., Groupe Danone SA, Starbucks, Whole Foods Market, Dean Foods Co., 365 Everyday Value/Whole Foods, Eden Foods, The Hain Celestial Group, Inc., Kellogg Company, Organic Valley, and Amy's Kitchen Inc.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Tesco PLC: Retailer Profile with IT Spending by Geography-Technology Profile

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Orbisresearch.com published Tesco PLC - Retailer Profile Market from its database. 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."Tesco PLC - Retailer Profile with IT Spending by Geography", report provides a technology overview of Tesco PLC, including its ICT spend for 2016, information on key IT decision makers, and its primary IT contracts. Furthermore, the report focuses on the IT strategies adopted by Tesco in order to provide actionable insights for ICT vendors and service providers when pitching their solutions to the company.Tesco has witnessed tremendous growth over the past decades in the UK and internationally which has led to becoming the third largest global retailer. Tesco is increasingly recognizing the need for a shopping experience with customer satisfaction as a main objective. Tesco has become known for its innovative shopping experiences and solutions that differentiate its strategy from various discounters that it increasingly competes with on price.Get Sample Copy of this Report@Key Players:TescoTataSime Darby GroupHome PlusMicrosoftDHLIBMDunnhumbyScope:- Tesco implemented Big Data analytics to improve supply chains and inventory management systems, and for segmenting customers for more tailored marketing approaches- Tesco has launched a mobile payment app PayQwiq that allows customers to scan items and pay without having to visit the checkout counter- Tesco collaborates with several IT players in order to build a technology ecosystem, which includes investments in brick and mortar stores, supply chains, inventory management, eCommerce, but also data centers, cloud services, and digital checkouts.Get more information about this report@Reasons to buy:- Get a detailed understanding of Tesco's IT spending by technology and geography, and its strategic and IT related priorities. This profile can help you target the retailer with tailored solutions and access the right decision-makers.Table of Content:1 Introduction 52 Regional and Country Operations 62.1 Overview of Geographic Coverage 62.2 Tesco UK 72.3 Tesco India 72.4 Tesco Malaysia 82.5 Tesco Thailand (Lotus). 82.6 Tesco Czech Republic 82.7 Tesco Hungary 82.8 TescoIreland 92.9 Tesco Poland 92.10 Tesco Slovakia 102.11 TescoTurkey (Kipa) 102.12 Tesco China 102.13 Tesco USA (Fresh & Easy) 102.14 Tesco South Korea (Home Plus) 112.15 Tesco Japan 113 Financial Information 124 ICT Decision Making Hierarchy 275 IT Services and Software Contracts 285.1 IT Services 285.2 Software 306 Stores and Formats 316.1 Tesco Group 326.2 Tesco Europe 336.3 Tesco South-East Asia 336.4 Tesco UK 347 Tescos Distribution Centers 358 Data Centers and Cloud 368.1 Cloud Computing Strategy 368.2 Dunnhumby Data Analytics. 369 Tescos Strategies 389.1 Tesco?s Dotcom Business 389.2 Tesco Implements Big Data 389.3 Tesco?s PayQwiq App 3910 Technological Advance 4010.1 Beacon Technology Reshaping Tesco 4110.2 Digital Transformation 4110.3 IoT, Robotics and Augmented Reality 4411 Appendix 4511.1 Further reading 4811.2 Contact the authors 48Note: If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Inquiry before Buying@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 Info:Hector CostelloSenior Manager  Client Engagements4144N Central Expressway,Suite 600, Dallas,Texas - 75204, U.S.A.Phone No.: +1 (214) 884-6817; +912064101019Email id: sales@orbisresearch.comCancer Diagnostics Market - Scope And Growth Analysis 2017 - 2025

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Global Cancer Diagnostics Market: OverviewCancer, caused by environmental factors causing gene mutations and affecting cell regulatory proteins, is one of the diseases that is resulting in the highest expenditure for treatment. Growing incidences of cancer is fueling the market for cancer diagnostics at an exponential rate. Advancements in technology coupled with growing government funding, and initiatives for research and development have resulted in the positive growth of the global cancer diagnostics market. As per the World Health Organization, the number of deaths reported due to cancer was 8.2 mn in 2012. In addition to this, 14 mn new cases are being registered across the globe. All these factors are expected to push the demand for cancer diagnostics.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Cancer can be diagnosed by using diagnostic devices which not only confirms the presence of tumor, but also gives information regarding the rate at which it is growing inside the body. This is boosting the global demand for cancer diagnostic devices.Global Cancer Diagnostics: Key TrendsThe advent of proteomics, genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics and other such breakthrough detection techniques is expected to fuel the demand for cancer diagnostic devices. Additionally, the breakthrough development in companion diagnostics is also expected to create positive environment for an increase in the demand for cancer diagnostic devices. Some of the other factors anticipated to drive this market is the rise in the awareness level of patients and an increase in the number of screenings, which in turn is leading to an early diagnosis of cancer and increasing the chances of survival. However, there are various factors that are affecting the demand for these devices. Some of them include, the high cost of medical laboratory infrastructure, insufficient reimbursement for innovative technologies, and strict guidelines and procedures implemented by government.Request TOC of the Report @Global Cancer Diagnostics: Market PotentialCancer diagnostic devices are being used by pharmaceutical companies for monitoring, administering, and diagnosing the cancer treatment process. Pharmaceutical companies such as Roche are shifting their focus from developing drugs to diagnostic devices. Roches cobas EGFR mutation test helps in the diagnosis of neck and head cancers.Scientific advancements have made possible complex and customized approach to cancer in molecular diagnostics. Abbott Molecular is one of the key players in oncology molecular diagnostics and has developed Vysis FISH assays, which offers features such as processing flexibility, reduced inventory management, and simplified workflow. All these factors help to reduce operating costs. Such developments are helping the growth and progress of the global cancer diagnostics market.Global Cancer Diagnostics Market: Regional OutlookIn terms of geography, North America, followed by Europe is leading in the cancer diagnostics market. The adoption rate of preventive diagnostic techniques is high, fueled by increasing government efforts to create awareness about cancer. Other factors pushing the demand for cancer diagnostic devices in the region include, growing prevalence of breast, lung, and prostate cancer in these regions.As per the report, Asia Pacific is also expected to witness a positive growth in the forecast period with developed nations such as Australia and Japan as well as developing nations such as China, Thailand, Singapore, and India creating opportunities of growth for the cancer diagnostics market.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Cancer Diagnostics Market: Competitive LandscapeSome of the key vendors operating in the global cancer diagnostics market are: Abbott Laboratories, AstraZeneca, Ambry Genetics, Eli Lilly and Co., bioMerieux, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Pfizer, and Novartis.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Excellent Growth of Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Outlook 2025: Comprehensive Study by Worldwide Top Key Players: Abbott, Becton, Dickinson, GE Healthcare, Epigenomics AG, Agilent, Biocept

Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market

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Businessindustryreports.com adds new report Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Research Report 2018 which contains global key players survey information and forecast analysis to 2025.Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Overview:The report spread across 109 pages is an overview of the Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Research Report 2018. Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy 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. Some of the key factors driving the growth of Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market include increasing prevalence of Cancer, increasing preference for Noninvasive Procedures and Availability of Funding for Liquid Biopsy R&D.The Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market is expected to grow steadily at an impressive Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025. Liquid biopsy is a non-invasive technology that detects molecular biomarkers using liquid sample without the need for costly or invasive procedures. The abilities of liquid biopsy like, easy and minimal invasiveness, early cancer diagnosis & detection, characterization of new lesions, drug & therapeutic target identifications for cancer treatment are some advantages of liquid biopsies, which improve the safety and efficiency of cancer therapy for patients.Advantages of Liquid Biopsy over Solid Tumor Biopsy, rising prevalence of Cancer, increasing preference for Non-Invasive Procedures, growing Public and Private Funding to support research Activities in the Field of Liquid Biopsy and favorable Government Initiatives, are some of the factors expected to propel the growth of Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market in the coming years.Available Exclusive Sample Copy of this Report @A complete analysis of the competitive landscape of the Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market is provided in the report. This section includes company profiles of market key players. The profiles include contact information, gross, capacity, product details of each firm, price, and cost. This report investigates new project feasibility with a purpose of enlightening new entrants about the possibilities in this market. In this report, thorough SWOT analysis & investment analysis is provided which forecasts imminent opportunities for the Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market players.Major Key Players:Abbott LaboratoriesBecton, Dickinson and CompanyGE HealthcareEpigenomics AGAgilent TechnologiesBioceptAffymetrixFluxion BiosciencesPurchase this report online with 109 Pages, List of Tables & Figures and in-depth Table of Contents on Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Research Report 2018 @Market Segments:On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into -Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs)Circulating Tumor DNA (ctDNA)Cell-Free DNA (cfDNA)Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) and OthersGeographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), covering:North AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaWhat Information does this report contain?A detailed analysis of regulatory trends, drivers, industry pitfalls, challenges and growth opportunities for participantsWhich are the leading market products, applications & regions and how will they perform by 2025?What are the technologies & innovation trends, how will they evolve by 2025?Which companies lead the industry, how are they positioned in the market in terms of sustainability, competency, production capacity and strategic outlook?Ask Question to Expert @In the end, this report covers data and information on capacity and production overview, production, market share analysis, sales overview, supply, sales, and shortage, import, export and consumption as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin of Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market.Major Points in Table of Contents:Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Report 20181 Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Overview2 Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Analysis by Application7 Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Circulating Biomarker for Liquid Biopsy Market Forecast (2018-2025)13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixAbout usBusinessindustryReports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined  we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media ContactBusiness Industry ReportsPune  Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940Global Smart Lighting & Control System Market Research and Forecast 2018-2023

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Global Smart Lighting & Control System Market, Size, Share, Market Intelligence, Company Profiles, Market Trends, Strategy, Analysis, Forecast 2018-2023LIGHTING CONTROL SYSTEM MARKET INSIGHTS:The Lighting Control System Market increasing consumer demand for energy-efficient lighting systems, rising demand for intelligent solutions for street lighting systems and the development in IoT technology in the field of smart lighting are the major factors that are driving the growth of the market. Additionally, increasing awareness of energy management has fostered the growth of the global smart lighting controls market.The robust demand for wireless lighting controls is growing across the globe owning to the rising penetration of smartphones and internet of things technology (IoT). High cost, lack of awareness, and lack of skilled professionals are the major restrains for the market. However, due to government initiatives and penetration of major market players in emerging economies, it can be expected that adoption across residential and outdoor lighting will grow in emerging economies during the forecast period and act as opportunity in the market. Technological advancement and smart lighting will also act as factors that drive the growth of the market during the forecast period.For Full Reports:Lighting Control System Market is segmented on the basis of type, component, technology and end user. By type, the market is divided into fluorescent lamps and compact fluorescent lamps, High Intensity Discharge Lamps (HID), and Light Emitting Diodes (LED) lights and lamp. In the near future, due to its cost efficiency and low carbon emission it is expected that the LED segment will have the major market share along with highest growth rate. By component the market is divided into control & communication, intelligent luminaries, sensors, microcontrollers, dimmers and actuators, transmitters and receivers. Control & communication and microcontrollers will have a major market share in the forecast period due to cost of communication technology (IoT) and so on. By technology market is divided into wired and wireless. The wireless communication is expected to acquire major portion of the market during 2018-2023. The future of Lighting Control System Market is expected with Wi-Fi technology, Bluetooth or hybrid technology, which comes under wireless technology. By end-user application, the market is divided into residential, commercial, industrial, and public utilities. It is expected that the public utility will show the highest market growth in the near future. As smart lighting project are getting approval all across the globe. Additionally, it is expected that for the energy saving, government will install smart light at other public facilities too such as government building & offices, parking lots and so on.Global Smart lighting and control systems market is segmented on the basis of geography as North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Rest of the World. Europe will have a significant market dominance during the forecasted period. The growth of the region is backed by the increasing standard of living and increasing building automation in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. As most of the key players of smart lighting and control systems are present within the region, a high degree of mergers and acquisitions are expected to foster the growth prospects in Europe over the projected period. APAC region is estimated to be emerged as the fastest growing region during the forecast period. The major factors that are contributing to the growth of the APAC market include increasing trend of LED lighting, government incentives and so on. North America is also expected to show a significant market growth as the market is not price sensitive, and the adoption rate is high toward new technology. Additionally, the trend of smart homes is increasing considerably in the US and various smart light companies in the country are integrating their smart light with the smart technology companies such as Google and Apple. The report includes detailed market overview, market determinants, company profiling, sector analysis, market segmentation, geographical analysis, patent analysis, strategic recommendations, key company analysis, gap analysis, key findings, market estimations, market insights, analyst insights and predictive analysis of the market.The global smart lighting and control systems market is highly fragmented and extremely competitive in nature due to the presence of a large number of market players. Key market players of the smart lighting and control systems market include Philips Lighting, Acuity Brands Lighting, General Electric Company, OSRAM Licht AG, Cooper Industries Inc., Digital Lumens Inc. and Lutron Electronics Company Inc. The key strategies adopted by the market players for strengthening their market share in global smart lighting and control systems market includes mergers & acquisitions, development of innovative packaging technology, contracts & agreements, and geographical expansion. The report also includes detailed market overview, strategic recommendations, key company analysis, key findings, analyst insights, predictive analysis, patent analysis, pipeline analysis, market determinants, market segmentation and company profiling of the market.Market Segmentation:Global Waterjet Market is segmented on the basis of regional outlook and following segments:Lighting Control System Market Research and Analysis, By TypeLighting Control System Market Research and Analysis, By ComponentLighting Control System Market Research and Analysis, By technologyLighting Control System Market Research and Analysis, By End UserLighting Control System Market Research and Analysis, By RegionTHE REPORT COVERS:Comprehensive research methodology of Global Smart Lighting & Control System Market.This report also includes detailed and extensive market overview with key analyst insights.Exhaustive analysis of macro and micro factors influencing the market guided by key recommendations.Analysis of regional regulations and other government policies impacting the Smart Lighting & Control System Market.Insights about market determinants which are stimulating the Smart Lighting & Control System Market.Detailed and extensive market segments with regional distribution of forecasted revenues.Extensive profiles and recent developments of market players.For More Related Reports:Orion Market Research (OMR) is an Indian research company known for its crisp and concise reports.The company is equipped with an experienced team and young brigade of analysts. The company provides quality syndicated research reports, customized research reports, company profiling, consulting and other research-based services. OMR provide global and regional market reports of various domains such as healthcare, energy, IT, chemicals, and automobiles. The company provides a 360-degree view of the market with parametric analysis, key market insights, key findings, statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, extensive segmentation, key trends, strategic recommendations and detailed company profiles.CORPORATE OFFICE:Orion Market Research Pvt Ltd116, Shagun ArcadeVijay Nagar SquareIndore, Madhya Pradesh  India- 452010Email: info@omrglobal.com, support@omrglobal.comIndia: +91-780-304-0404, +919179828694Insights of Offshore Drilling Rigs Market in Global Industry : Share, Trends and Application 2018

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Albany, NY, 12th April : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "Offshore Drilling Rigs Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2022" globally.The research report on the global offshore drilling rigs market provides a comprehensive overview of developments in the said market during the 2017-2022 period. It provides detailed insights into market indicators, growth trends, and technological advancements that are expected to have a bearing on the market dynamics over the aforementioned forecast period.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @The report looks into key market segments and provides market size estimates and estimates of revenue contribution of each of the leading segments over the 2017-2022 forecast period. Following this, the report discusses industry statutes and industry policies that are in the purview of oil and gas exploration activities that market participants need to adhere to. This is followed by a market attractiveness analysis that is depicted pictorially that existing as well as new market participants can leverage for business decision making.Global Offshore Drilling Rigs Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe incessantly increasing demand for energy that have led to efforts to tap into non-conventional resources is positively impacting the global offshore drilling rigs market. Offshore drilling rigs have evolved manifold from wharf-based rigs that were used in late 1800s. Today, offshore drilling rigs can tap into petroleum reserves in waters that are more than 7,500 feet deep, and are as much as 200 miles away from the nearest shore. These rigs are equipped with advanced technology and are supported on poles that can be as long as 10,000 feet. With unparalleled development in oil exploration technologies, rigs incorporated with useful elements from different models have been developed for specific needs.Offshore oil production which was complicated at one time has now become routine. Currently, there are around 900 large-scale oil and gas platforms that are being used to tap deep-water reserves. With drilling and extraction technology becoming increasingly sophisticated, oil and gas at even greater depths can be tapped.View Complete TOC with tables & Figures @According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2015, more than 27 million barrels of oil was produced offshore across more than 50 countries. Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Mexico, Norway, and the United States are the top countries for offshore crude oil production. Almost one-third of oil and gas explored comes from offshore resources. This is likely to increase to increase in the coming years, as there exist abundant oil and gas reserves in deep seas. However, the nearing exhaustion of shallow water oil and gas fields is leading companies to tap into reserves at greater depths.Global Offshore Drilling Rigs Market: Market SegmentationThe research report studies the global offshore drilling rigs market on the basis of type, application, and region. The segments of the market based on type are jack up rigs, semi-submersible rigs, and drill ships. On the basis of application, the market is segregated into shallow water, deep water, and ultra-deep water drilling.The report studies the global offshore drilling rigs market across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific except Japan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Japan from a geographical perspective. Of them, North America is the most attractive market and is envisaged to post a 3.9% CAGR over the 2017-2022 forecast period.Global Offshore Drilling Rigs Market: Competitive DynamicsThis section of the report covers a detailed competitive profile of leading players in the global offshore drilling rigs market. The leading companies in this market are Tranocean, Ensco, Seadrill, COSL, Diamond Offshore, Paragon Offshore, Ocean Rig, and Nabors Industries Limited. Following this, competitive strategies such as technological advancements, joint ventures, and strategic partnerships that leading markets are engaged in have been discussed at length. Lastly, the report covers current competitive hierarchy and the winning essentials of key stakeholders for competitive gains.The global offshore drilling rigs market is segmented as follows;Global Offshore Drilling Market, by TypeJack up RigsSemi-SubmersibleDrill ShipsGlobal Offshore Drilling Market, by ApplicationShallow Water DrillingDeep Water DrillingUltra Deep Water DrillingBrowse Report @Global Offshore Drilling Market, by RegionNorth AmericaLatin AmericaEuropeAsia Pacific except JapanJapanMiddle East and AfricaResearchMoz 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 Industry Dynamic of Global Dry Strength Agent Sales Market Report 2018

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The Global Dry Strength Agent Sales Market Report 2018 is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Dry Strength Agent industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Dry Strength Agent 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 Dry Strength Agent 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.To ask a complete & Professional report sample:This report studies the global Dry Strength Agent market status and forecast, categorizes the global Dry Strength Agent market size (value & volume) by key players, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top players in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia India and Other regions (Middle East & Africa, Central & South America).In 2017, the global Dry Strength Agent market size was xx million US$ and it is expected to reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, with a CAGR of xx.x % between 2018 and 2025.The major players covered in this reportPT Lautan Luas Tbk.SEIKO PMC CORPORATIONKemiraHarima Chemicals GroupShandong Tiancheng ChemicalKapp ChemieNew Tech Polymers (India)Papertex Speciality ChemicalsGeographically, this report studies the key regions, focuses on product sales, value, market share and growth opportunity in these regions, coveringUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaThe regional scope of the study is as follows:North AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaSingaporeRest of Asia-PacificEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalySpainRussiaRest of EuropeCentral & South AmericaBrazilArgentinaRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaSaudi ArabiaTurkeyRest of Middle East & AfricaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoPolyvinylamine (PVAm)GPAM (Glyoxylated Polyacrylamide)Starch-based PolymerOn 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 for each application, includingPulp & PaperChemical IndustryOtherThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Dry Strength Agent sales, value, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);To analyze the top players in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia and India, to study the sales, value and market share of top players in these regions.Focuses on the key Dry Strength Agent players, to study the sales, value, market share and development plans in future.Focuses on the global key manufacturers, to define, describe and analyze the market competition landscape, SWOT analysis.To define, describe and forecast the market by type, application and region.To analyze the global and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends and factors driving or inhibiting the market growth.To analyze the opportunities in the market for stakeholders by identifying the high growth segments.To strategically analyze each submarket with respect to individual growth trend and their contribution to the marketTo analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the marketTo strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their growth strategies.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Dry Strength Agent are as follows:History Year: 2013-2017Base Year: 2017Estimated Year: 2018Forecast Year 2018 to 2025For the data information by region, company, type and application, 2017 is considered as the base year. Whenever data information was unavailable for the base year, the prior year has been considered.Key StakeholdersDry Strength Agent ManufacturersDry Strength Agent Distributors/Traders/WholesalersDry Strength Agent Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsAvailable CustomizationsWith the given market data, QYResearch offers customizations according to the company's specific needs. The following customization options are available for the report:Regional and country-level analysis of the Dry Strength Agent market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.Table of contents:Charpter 1 - Dry Strength Agent Market OverviewCharpter 2 - Global Dry Strength Agent Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and ApplicationCharpter 3 - United States Dry Strength Agent (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 4 - China Dry Strength Agent (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 5- Europe Dry Strength Agent (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 6 - Japan Dry Strength Agent (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 7 - Southeast Asia Dry Strength Agent (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 8 - India Dry Strength Agent (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 9 - Global Dry Strength Agent Players/Suppliers Profiles and Sales DataCharpter 10 - Dry Strength Agent Maufacturing Cost AnalysisCharpter 11 - Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersCharpter 12 - Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersCharpter 13 - Market Effect Factors AnalysisCharpter 14 - Global Dry Strength Agent Market Forecast (2018-2022)Charpter 15 - Research Findings and ConclusionCharpter 16 - AppendixContact 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, focuses on custom research, management consulting, IPO consulting, industry chain research, and data base &seminar services. The company owns large basic databases (such as National Bureau of Statistics Database, Customs Import and Export Database, Industry Association Database, etc.), expert resources (including industry experts who own more than 10 years experiences on marketing or R&D in industries of energy, automotive, chemicals, medical ICT consumer goods, etc.), professional survey team (the team members obtained more than 3 years market survey experience and more than 2 years deep expert interview experience), and excellent data analysis team (SPSS statistics and PPT graphics process team).Room 2901 VILI International Building No.167 Linhe West RoadGlobal Marine Wind Sensors Market Is Set to Boom in 2018 And Coming Years

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Marine Wind Sensors Market Professional Survey Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.The dynamics of the global Marine Wind Sensors market is changing at a frequent pace. Emphasizing on these changes, this research report presents an in-depth analysis of the performance of this market during the period from 2018 to 2025. In this research study, with the help of proficient analytical tools such as market feasibility analysis and investment return analysis, experts have determined the attractiveness of this market. The future status of the worldwide market for Marine Wind Sensors has also been predicted by them on the basis of results attained from these analyses.These assessments also assist in the expansion of the global market for Marine Wind Sensors and provide a clear picture of the impacts of various crucial strategies implemented by leading market participants for the expansion of their businesses over the past few years.Request For Free sample Copy of this research to evaluate more:This report studies Marine Wind Sensors 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, coveringGarminR.M. YoungGill InstrumentsKomolineRenewable NRG SystemBristolThe research report further examines the competitive landscape of the global market for Marine Wind Sensors by studying the company profiles of the major market participants thoroughly. It also categorizes the market into various segments on the basis of a number of major market factors. The industry chain and the government policies and regulations that influence the demand for Marine Wind Sensors have also been studied at length in this report.In conclusion, the report examines the worldwide market for Marine Wind Sensors on the basis of the availability of products. The volume of production, products pricing, and the revenue generated in the overall market are the key factors, based on which analysts determine the performance of this market. The sales dynamics and the production chain have also been assessed in this research report.On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoUltrasonic TypeMechanical TypeOthersBrowse Table of Content of this Research Report:By Application, the market can be split intoPowerboatsYachtsOthersIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of ContentsGlobal Marine Wind Sensors Market Professional Survey Report 20181 Industry Overview of Marine Wind Sensors1.1 Definition and Specifications of Marine Wind Sensors1.1.1 Definition of Marine Wind Sensors1.1.2 Specifications of Marine Wind Sensors1.2 Classification of Marine Wind Sensors1.2.1 Ultrasonic Type1.2.2 Mechanical Type1.2.3 Others1.3 Applications of Marine Wind Sensors1.3.1 Powerboats1.3.2 Yachts1.3.3 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 India2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Marine Wind Sensors2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Marine Wind Sensors2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Marine Wind Sensors2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Marine Wind SensorsGet discount on this report at3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Marine Wind Sensors3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Marine Wind Sensors Major Manufacturers in 20173.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Marine Wind Sensors Major Manufacturers in 20173.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Marine Wind Sensors Major Manufacturers in 20173.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Marine Wind Sensors Major Manufacturers in 2017About USQYResearchReports.com is an unimpeachable source of market research data for clients that comprise acclaimed SMEs, Chinese companies, private equity firms, and MNCs. We provide market research reports on various categories such as Energy, Chemicals, Alternative and Green Energy, Manufacturing, Machinery, Pharmaceuticals and Materials, and Glass.We provide a variety of syndicated studies and hold the potential of assisting our clients with their specific market research needs by offering insights based on extensive primary interviews, market surveys, company profiles, and competitive landscaping. Our far-sighted ideas have been successful in igniting a number of startups, investment programs, technology breakthroughs, and new product development projects.Contact US1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.comBlog:DNA Polymerase Market Will hit at a CAGR of 6.5%from 2017 - 2027

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Future Market Insights presents a detailed forecast and in-depth insights on the global DNA polymerase market in a new report titled DNA Polymerase Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012  2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017  2027). According to the report, the global DNA polymerase market is anticipated to record a compounded annual growth rate of 6.5% and reach a market value of US$ 389.4 Mn in 2027.Factors Impacting Market Revenue GrowthStaggering increase in the use of DNA polymerases in point-of-care and molecular diagnostics kits is expected to continue to influence the adoption of DNA polymerases. Increasing use of DNA polymerases in epigenetics research, in addition to the increasing investments in life sciences R&D is also expected to boost revenue growth of the global market. However, high cost of reagents and availability of alternative techniques are expected to limit market growth over the forecast period.Global DNA Polymerase Market: Segmental Analysis & ForecastBy product type, growth of the eukaryotic DNA polymerase segment will be positively impacted by the introduction of various innovative products such as high-fidelity DNA polymerase that show excellent results in whole blood and other samples containing crude lysates. These products have been used in direct PCR applications, with limited sample processing, which have been a constant requirement especially for high throughput applications. In addition, the use of PCR-based technologies in point-of-care tests, companion diagnostics and other applications have led to a major boost for the DNA polymerase market. Manufacturers of DNA polymerases are entering into distribution agreements to extend product reach and collaborations to ensure they gain market share and remain competitive in global markets. Eukaryotic DNA polymerase segment is expected to hold the highest share of the market, as well as display strong growth, expanding at a CAGR of 6.7% over the forecast period. Among end use segments, molecular diagnostics companies are expected to hold the largest share of the global DNA polymerase market at over 31% market share in terms of revenue in 2027. However, the academic and research institutes segment is anticipated to expand at a robust growth rate of 7.4% over the forecast period.Request to Sample Report -Global DNA Polymerase Market: Regional Analysis & ForecastFMIs report segments the global DNA polymerase market on the basis of region into North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan, Japan, and the Middle East & Africa. This report assesses key trends driving each market segment and offers analysis and insights on the DNA polymerase market across specific regions. The market in North America is anticipated to dominate the global DNA polymerase market with maximum value share by end of 2027, accounting for over 56% in terms of revenue. In terms of value, the market in Latin America is expected to be the fastest growing, registering a CAGR of 7.8% over the forecast period. The market in Asia Pacific Excluding Japan is also expected to show a significant growth of 7.7% over the forecast period.Global DNA Polymerase Market: Vendor LandscapeSome of the key competitors covered in this report include Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc, Roche Diagnostics, Agilent Technologies, Qiagen NV, Takara Bio Company, Merck KGaA, Genscript, Illumina, New England Biolabs, and Promega Corporation. These vendors in the global DNA polymerase market are expanding their business by launching new and innovative products tailored for both research and in-vitro applications. Companies are also focussing on emerging markets in Asia Pacific to increase their geographical presence and tap into various end use segments that have the ability to invest in R&D for life sciences as well as develop innovative diagnostics tools.Request Report TOC @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 :Respiratory Devices Market to Reach US$ 34.17 Billion by 2027

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The global respiratory devices market was valued at nearly US$ 13 billion in 2016. It is projected to grow at 9.2% CAGR during the period 2017-2027 to reach US$ 34.17 billion in revenues.Demand for respiratory devices will continue to be driven by increasing ageing population and rising prevalence of COPD and obstructive sleep apnea. Increasing emphasis on healthcare spending in developing countries, especially in Asia Pacific and Latin America, will continue to positively influence the growth of the market.Adoption of non-invasive techniques in pulse oximeters and advancement in full polysomnography testing are also favourably impacting the growth of the market.Although Future Market Insights maintains a positive outlook on the global respiratory devices market, premium pricing, budgetary constraints, and increasing use of generic product types can impede the growth of the market.The key trends expected to influence the global respiratory devices market in the foreseeable future are,Portable and wearable devices are steadily gaining popularity among patients owing to ease-of-use and flexibility in carrying the devices.Growing demand for stationary oxygen concentrator with pulse flow technology and rechargeable batteries.Increasing demand for respiratory devices in Asia Pacific on account of rising prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases. Multinational companies are focusing on consolidating their position in developing countries to leverage upon the emerging opportunities.Request to Sample Report -Positive Airway Pressure Devices Account for the Highest DemandAccording to Future Market Insights research, positive airway pressure devices currently account for the highest demand. This segment accounted for nearly 29% revenue share of the market in 2017; by 2027, this is projected to increase to 34.6%. In terms of revenues, positive airway pressure devices segment is projected to reach US$ 11.81 billion in revenues by 2027.Other key product types by revenue are respiratory consumables (respiratory masks, nasal cannulas, tracheostomy tubes and oxygen tubes) and pulse oximeters.Future Market Insights also offers market forecast and analysis on other key respiratory devices, including nebulisers, oxygen concentrators, polysomnography devices, mechanical ventilators, and spirometers.Hospitals Largest End-usersBy end-user, the key segments include hospitals, ambulatory surgical centres, clinics, and long-term care centres. Currently, hospitals account for the highest demand for respiratory devices, followed by ambulatory surgical centres and long-term care centres. Demand for respiratory devices from hospitals was worth US$ 5.18 billion in 2016; by 2027, this is projected to grow at 9.8% CAGR to reach US$ 14.36 billion.U.S. Continues to Account for Significant Percentage of Global SalesThe U.S. remains the largest market for respiratory devices globally. On the back of strong sales in the U.S., the North America respiratory devices market accounted for over 40% revenue share of the market in 2016. Future Market Insights projects North America to remain the largest market for respiratory devices during the period 2017-2027.Western Europe and APEJ are the other leading markets for respiratory devices. These two markets collectively accounted for a revenue share of over 35% in 2016.Request Report TOC @Future Market Insights, in its report, has also profiled the respiratory devices market in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Japan, and MEA.In its report, companies profiled by Future Market Insights are Massimo Corporation, Teleflex Incorporated, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare Limited, ResMed Inc, Hamilton Medical AG, Medtronic PLC, Koninklijke Philips N.V., Smiths Medical, General Electric Healthcare Limited, Dragerwerk AG & Co. and KGaA, Inogen 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: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 :Anaesthesia Machines Market to expand at a CAGR of 5.7% by 2027

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The research report Anaesthesia Machines Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017-2027) published by Future Market Insights throws light on several aspects driving the global market. The growth of the market is impacted by various trends, developments, drivers and challenges, the analysis of which is included in the fact based research report. The exhaustive research publication covers historical data analysis along with current scenario as well as future projections of the market from a value standpoint for a 10 year period, starting from 2017 till 2027. The analysis on various segments playing a major role in the expansion of the global anaesthesia market has been carried out to get a complete picture of the global market.Mergers and Collaborations to Present High Growth Opportunities for Market Players in the Coming YearsMergers and collaborations between local and international players in developing regions are expected to present potential opportunities for growth in terms of successful market penetration and sales. The regional markets of Asia Pacific, Latin America and GCC countries is anticipated to create significant opportunities to players involved in anaesthesia machines market. This can be attributed to the increasing surgical procedures in these regions coupled with increasing per capita expenditure on cosmetic surgeries and other healthcare associated procedures. Players in this market are establishing business relationships with healthcare facilities in these regions as well as government agencies for long term gains and enhancing their presence in the region. Moreover, partnership programs between organizations and institutions are observed to facilitate anaesthesia training programs.Request to Sample Report -Increasing Need for Anaesthesia Procedures to Spur the Adoption of Anaesthesia Machines in the Coming YearsAccording to WHO (World Health Organization) and World Bank, by 2026, the treatments demanding surgeries and hence anaesthesia machines would eclipse that of tuberculosis and HIV as well as malaria. Current market scenario portrays the fact that about 30% of the population in the entire globe do not have access to surgeries. On the contrary, about 75% of major procedures are being performed in the wealthiest countries in the world whereas poor countries are witnessing only 3.5% of operations. Government bodies along with non-government institutions are continuously working on offering healthcare access to every region, which is expected to trigger the adoption of anaesthesia machines. The growing number of surgeries and increasing government support are expected to fuel the growth of the anaesthesia machines market at a global level in the years to follow.Global Market for Anaesthesia Machines: Factors Promoting GrowthThe global market for anaesthesia machines is influenced by several aspects that facilitate the growth of the global market. Few of these aspects include continual technological advancements in anaesthesia machines, integration of IT in healthcare systems pushing the demand for anaesthesia workstations, emergence of anaesthesia information management systems, increasing public and private investments in healthcare, expanding imports and exports of medical devices among different regions, expanding private sector, enhancement in product lines by various manufacturers of anaesthesia machines, growing trend of patient monitoring using IoT, favourable government support, increasing medical tourism, growing geriatric population and manufacturing of cost effective anaesthesia machines.However, product recalls due to defects in devices, shortage of healthcare professionals, adoption of refurbished machines, lack of public access to healthcare facilities and lack of clinical resources are expected to pose hindrances to the growth of the global market.Request Report TOC @Segmental Highlights on the Anaesthesia Machines MarketWith respect to region, North America and Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) are expected to showcase high potential for growth. Anaesthesia machines market in North America (led by US) is estimated to be the largest, whereas the market in APEJ is expected to rise at a comparatively high value CAGR during the forecast periodWith respect to modality, the standalone anaesthesia machines are expected to witness increased adoption across the globe in several hospitals and clinics. This segment is expected to lead the global market with a high valuation and projected to expand at a relatively high CAGR throughout the period of assessmentTop Players Competing in the Global Anaesthesia Machines MarketThe research report includes profiles of major players operating in the anaesthesia machines market. To name a few, the report includes intelligence on players such as GE Healthcare, Dragerwerk AG & Co. KGaA, Mindray Medical International Limited, Getinge AB, Spacelabs Healthcare, Heyer Medical AG, Infinium Medical, Inc., ACOMA Medical Industry Co., Ltd., Chirana Medical A.S., DRE Medical, BPL Medical Technologies, Beijing Aeonmed Co. Ltd., Comen Medical Instruments Co. Ltd., Okuman Medical System Ltd., Narang Medical Limited and Lowenstein Medical GmbH & Co.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 :Latest Trend and Development of Precious Metals Market in Global Industry 2018-2025

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Albany, NY, 12th April : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "Global Precious Metals Market Research Report 2018" globally.In this report, the global Precious Metals 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.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Precious Metals in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGlobal Precious Metals market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingBarrick Gold CorporationImpalaJohnson MattheyLonminAnglo AmericanNewmont MiningAquarius PlatinumBHP BillitonAffinity Gold Corp.B2GoldGoldCorpKGHM PolskaMiedzNorilsk NickelNortham PlatinumNorth American PalladiumStillwater MiningPPX Mining CorpChesapeake Gold CorporationMining AtlasOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoGoldSilverPalladiumPlatinumOtherView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @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, includingJewelryReserve and CurrencyIndustrial UseOtherTable of Contents1 Precious Metals Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Precious Metals1.2 Precious Metals Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Precious Metals Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Precious Metals Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Gold1.2.4 Silver1.2.5 Palladium1.2.6 Platinum1.2.7 Other1.3 Global Precious Metals Segment by Application1.3.1 Precious Metals Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Jewelry1.3.3 Reserve and Currency1.3.4 Industrial Use1.3.5 Other1.4 Global Precious Metals Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Precious Metals Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Precious Metals (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Precious Metals Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Precious Metals Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)Browse Report @2 Global Precious Metals Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Precious Metals Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Precious Metals Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Precious Metals Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Precious Metals Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Precious Metals Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Precious Metals Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Precious Metals Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Precious Metals Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Precious Metals Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, ExpansionResearchMoz 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 :Mopinion releases new mobile SDK for collecting in-app feedback

Mopinion, market leader in online feedback analysis, has just launched a new mobile feedback SDK for companies collecting customer feedback in iOS and Android apps. This innovative solution will continue to provide marketers with an easy way of gathering powerful feedback within their native apps, only now with more customisation options, a wider range of targeting features based on in-app user behaviour and more advanced analysis capabilities.Developed in response to an increasing demand from the market, this new SDK provides mobile developers and product managers with a flexible and easy-to-install solution for in-app feedback. In tune with the needs of these digital roles, the Mopinion SDK is unique in that it includes many important functionalities that other existing SDKs lack. For example, other SDKs tend to fall short in terms of their use of well-known customer experience KPIs (such as NPS), dynamic and easy-to-edit feedback forms, triggering options and in-app notifications based on events (certain user behaviour). These are all coveted tools of the modern marketer looking to improve their native mobile apps based on the voice of the customer.Kees Wolters, Co-Founder and responsible for product management at Mopinion comments,The constant and ever-increasing demand for a smooth mobile experience is defining the digital strategy of many businesses today, pushing them to take action and make improvements to their mobile apps continuously. As a result, in-app feedback has gained a lot of ground in the market as it enables these digital-first businesses to obtain meaningful insights - directly from their customers - into the mobile experience. The added valueMopinions SDK includes a wide range of features and capabilities that further enhance the feedback collection and analysis processes allowing marketers to achieve greater and more in-depth customer insights than most other feedback SDKs. Additionally, this SDK is part of a wider all-in-one solution for collecting and analysing feedback on all digital channels including websites, mobile web and email. This solution brings all data from these digital channels together giving our clients a better view and understanding of the digital customer.Customisable feedback formsMarketers are provided with multiple options in terms of customisation and targeting. Unlike other providers, Mopinions clients are not limited to standard templates (that simply consist of just a rating and open comments section), but rather they can customise feedback forms however they wish. The software includes scoring options which are popular in the field of Customer Experience, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), Goal Completion Rate (GCR), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and more. There are also various research elements to choose from such as multiple choice, selection lists (drop down lists), contact forms, and more.Clients can also set up notifications or messages with the new SDK. These customisable notifications help digital teams meet important marketing needs such as onboarding, influencing how visitors navigate within the app, informing customers of special offers or maintenance.Feedback form triggers based on behaviourSince you cannot activate feedback forms via mouse movement and click behaviour in a mobile app, you have to adapt your approach. Using the Mopinion SDK, you can trigger feedback forms based on certain events. Examples of these events include performing a search, tapping on a button with your finger, or leaving an (ordering) process. Whats particularly unique about the new Mopinion SDK is that it now enables clients to combine these events. In other words, a feedback form can be deployed using a combination of multiple triggers.For example, you can customise trigger settings so that after a user navigates to a specific part of the app such as an in-app search function, 50% of users are shown a feedback form if they have used the app for at least 60 seconds.Visual feedbackThe Mopinion SDK also allows Mopinion clients to collect visual feedback via their mobile app. This type of feedback gives mobile users the opportunity to add a screenshot from the app to their feedback. Once the screenshot option is selected in the feedback form by the user, the Mopinion software renders a screenshot and saves it in the Mopinion admin suite, which can then be analysed alongside other feedback items (e.g. scores, feedback categories or user agent).Advanced analyticsAll feedback collected via the SDK trickles automatically into the customisable dashboard, where you can compare and zoom in on different feedback variables and trends. Mopinion clients can also analyse feedback items using text and sentiment analysis, categorise feedback automatically, set up email notifications, assign feedback tasks to team members, add notes and much more.Universal compatibilityThe Mopinion SDK is compatible with both iOS and Android operating systems. However, in addition to using programming languages Swift (for iOS) and Java (for Android), developers can also use React Native. React Native is an increasingly popular framework used to build mobile apps.About MopinionMopinion is a rapidly growing SaaS provider and market leader in the field of online feedback analysis for digital channels such as websites and mobile apps. This all-in-one solution turns feedback into actionable data that gives you as a marketer, more insight into the voice of the customer. Mopinion works with many forward-thinking digital teams such as TomTom, Interpolis, TUI, Ahold, Kia and Decathlon.Pannekoekstraat 1043011LL RotterdamThe Netherlands+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++For more information about Mopinion or interview requests, please contact Kees Wolters.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Calciphylaxis Market 2018: Size, Share, Key Leaders, Amgen Inc., Smith & Nephew plc, Medtronics, 3M, BSN Medical, ConvaTec Inc, Sanifit, Foreseeing 2023

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Calciphylaxis Market Information: By Diagnosis (Deep Skin Biopsies, Blood Tests and Imaging), Treatment, (Intensive Wound Care, Medication, Therapy, and Clot-Dissolving), End User (Hospitals, Clinics, Medical Research Centers) - Global Forecast till 2023.The global calciphylaxis market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.70% during the forecast period 2017-2023.KEY PLAYERS FOR CALCIPHYLAXIS MARKETAmgen Inc.,Smith & Nephew plc,Medtronics,3M, BSN Medical,ConvaTec Inc,Sanifit,And others.Request Sample Copy of the Report @MARKET SCENARIO FOR CALCIPHYLAXIS MARKETCalciphylaxis, also known as calcific uremic arteriolopathy (CUA), is a syndrome associated with end-stage renal disease. The syndrome causes necrotic skin ulcers, which often leads to a fatal outcome. In 2008, Rogers and Coates stated that CUA is a rare but important cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with chronic kidney disease. The prevalence of CUA is increasing in patients with renal failure, and the condition is also being recognized in non-uremic patients. Calciphylaxis affects up to 4% of dialysis patients, which starts with a calcification of small peripheral vessels that quickly becomes enlarged.SEGMENTATION FOR CALCIPHYLAXIS MARKETThe global calciphylaxis market is segmented on the basis of diagnosis, treatment, and end user.On the basis of the diagnosis, the calciphylaxis market is further segmented into deep skin biopsies, blood tests, imaging, and others. Deep skin biopsies is further segmented into shave biopsy, punch biopsy, and excisional biopsy. The blood tests is further segmented into serum parathormone levels, blood glucose levels, BUN (blood urea nitrogen), calcium levels, and others. Imaging is further segmented into magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), CT scan, ultrasound, and others.On the basis of the applications, the market is segmented into intensive wound care, medication, therapy, clot-dissolving, and others. Intensive wound care unit is further segmented into debridement, wet dressings, and others. Medication is further segmented into cinacalcet, sodium thiosulfate, steroids, and bisphosphonates.On the basis of end user, it is segmented into hospitals, clinics, medical research centers, academic institutes, and others.REGIONAL ANALYSIS FOR CALCIPHYLAXIS MARKETThe Americas dominate the global calciphylaxis market owing to the presence of strong economic condition, huge development in the healthcare domain, and focus of research institutions on updating technology for new and advanced diagnosis and treatment methods. Moreover, advanced hospitals infrastructures, and availability of skilled healthcare professional are further adding fuel to the growth of the market.TOP 5 REASONS TO GET THIS REPORTCompany profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent development activitiesMarket Strategic Business Influence DataMarket Research Future recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimationsMarket share analysis of the top industry playersMarket forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, Trends and the regional markets With SWOT AnalysisGet Discount @MAJOR TOC FOR CALCIPHYLAXIS MARKETChapter 1. REPORT PROLOGUEChapter 2. MARKET INTRODUCTION2.1 Introduction2.2 Scope of Study2.3 Research Objective2.4 Assumptions & Limitations2.4.1 Assumptions2.4.2 Limitations2.5 Market StructureChapter 3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: CALCIPHYLAXIS MARKET3.1 Research Process3.2 Market Size Estimation3.2.1 Market Share Analysis3.3 Forecast ModelChapter 4. MARKET DYNAMICS4.1 Drivers4.1.1 Increasing Patients Population with Renal Failure4.1.2 Increasing Use of Warfarin Therapy4.2 Restraints4.2.1 Lack of Treatment Availability4.2.2 Higher Cost of Existing Treatment4.3 Opportunities4.3.1 Development of Innovative Drugs4.3.2 Research and Development4.4 Mega Trends4.4.1 Improved Treatment for Hyperparathyroidism4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4.6 Technology Trends & Assessment4.6.1 Improvement in Novel TherapiesChapter 5. MARKET FACTOR ANALYSIS5.1 Value Chain Analysis5.1.1 R&D5.1.2 Manufacturing5.1.3 Distribution & Sales5.1.4 Post-Sales Monitoring5.3 Porters Five Forces Model5.3.1 Bargaining Power of Suppliers5.3.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers5.3.3 Threat of New Entrants5.3.4 Threat of Substitutes5.3.5 Intensity of Rivalry5.4 Pricing Analysis5.5 Investment Opportunity Analysis5.6 Merger and Acquisition LandscapeTOC 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 Us:Market Research Future, Office No. 528,Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar, Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal Broccoli Extract Market Outlook and Growth Forecast to 2025

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A latest research report titled as Global Market Study on Broccoli Extract: Seed Extract Product Type to Exhibit Relatively High Market Attractiveness Index During 2017 - 2027 has been recently added to the vast portfolio of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) online research offerings. This report is a professional and in-depth analysis on the present state and future prospect for the global market. It provides valuable information to the industry insiders, potential entrants or investors. It includes an exhaustive enquiry with the reliability of logic and the comprehensiveness of contents.Click here For Free Sample Report @Broccoli is famous for its functional use due to high content of nutrients. The manufacturing of broccoli extract takes place with the help of two parts of the broccoli plant, i.e. sprout and seed. The sprout extract is said to contain higher amount of glucosinolates and is considered as the purified powder form of broccoli sprouts. Whereas, broccoli seeds yield a better quality and purified form of glucosinolates.According to the forecast presented in the report, the seed extract market is expected to lead the product type category with a projected market size reaching over US$ 2,000 Mn by the end of 2027. However, the sprout extract market is expected to expand at a higher growth rate of 4% during the forecast period.Owing to the rising awareness among people regarding the health benefits of broccoli, the global broccoli extract market is expected to experience significant growth given the increase in consumption of broccoli extract. Manufacturers of broccoli extract are focusing on introducing organic, clean label ingredients, due to increase in the demand for transparency in the quality of products. Additionally, consumers are seeking broccoli extract that is healthy, convenient to consume, organic, and provides quick results. Top companies in the broccoli extract market are focusing on research and development activities in order to develop novel products to treat various health conditions such as diabetes, cancer, high cholesterol, etc., which are rampant among the global population. Manufacturers are also strengthening their capabilities with broader offerings to meet the growing market demand for organic products.Awareness of certain major health benefits of broccoli to fuel the growth of the global broccoli extract marketBroccoli is known to be a tasty vegetable that is rich in nutrients. A phytochemical derived from broccoli sprouts  called sulforaphane  helps in preventing cancer by detoxifying compounds taken into the body and by enhancing the anti-oxidation ability. Sulforaphane is also known to improve symptoms of autism in some people. A study has also revealed that broccoli can optimize the blood-sugar level in patients with Type 2 diabetes. This makes the application of broccoli extract in the healthcare industry an important revenue growth driver for the global market.Browse Full Report with TOC @Also, there is a visible increase in the use of broccoli in the production of personal care and cosmetics in regions like Latin America. Sulforaphane present in broccoli extract aids in skin repair and helps in slowing down ageing. The vitamin C in this wonder veggie eliminates free radicals, making hair thick and healthy. This appeals the most to the younger segment of the population who seek to invest in personal grooming to look beautiful and to maintain their health.Growth in e-commerce as a lucrative sales channel is trending the global broccoli extract marketE-commerce has become a convenient and accessible channel for the sale of products. This is helped by the increase in adoption of smartphones and high speed internet facilities. E-commerce has also impacted the global broccoli extract market with manufacturers and retailers setting up online distribution channels on their websites and other popular e-commerce chains for selling broccoli products. People prefer purchasing such products online due to the discounts and other freebies offered by e-retailers. For instance, iherb.com, vitacost.com, grofers.com, Amazon, etc. are some of the online stores that supply broccoli extract products to consumers all over the world.Enquire about this Report @About Market Research Reports Search EngineMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research 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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:Miebach designs automated and robotized Distribution Center for Binzagr Company in Saudi Arabia

New Distribution Center Binzagr Company in Saudi Arabia

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Frankfurt am Main, Saudi Arabia, April 12th, 2018. Binzagr Company is one of the leading, well-reputed distribution companies in Saudi Arabia for a wide range of consumer goods and brands, such as Unilever, Carlsberg and TIGI. Their new Distribution Center is designed to meet the future growth, strengthen their ability to provide premium customer service and to guarantee the quality of their products. Miebach Consulting was responsible for the concept and detailed plan of the logistics center, and will now support the implementation phase as General Planner.With the new state-of-the-art facility Binzagr will be able to improve the performance of their distribution network by enhancing the speed, flexibility of movements and transportation of their products in the Middle East and Northern Africa region. The site will be located in the King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) taking advantage of the effectiveness of the port infrastructure and the new regulations for the special economic development zones. The project is fully aligned with the Kingdoms 2030 Vision and will be an integral part of this existing initiative.The complexity as well as the sheer size of the project drove Binzagr Company to look for a solid supply chain consulting and engineering partner. The proven technical capabilities of Miebach Consulting as well as the development of the companys presence in the Middle East area were essential elements in the selection process.Miebach Consultings first step in 2015 was to determine the concept for the Distribution Center. The best solution proved to be a highly automated system including layer picking robots to implement efficient intralogistics processes and obtain substantial financial benefits. In 2016 and 2017 the detail planning phase took place, including the preparation of technical specifications and documents for the selection of the necessary contractors, followed by the assessment of the proposals and the recommendation to Binzagr Company for the final selection. As General Planner, Miebach Consulting managed among others the selection of architecture and civil engineering companies as well as all specialist firms necessary to the project. Furthermore, Miebach conducted a simulation of the facility during design planning and post tendering to verify the performance of the selected suppliers.In 2018 to 2019 the testing and commissioning of the Distribution Center will be carried out.Through this project and with the support of Miebach Consulting we are expecting to triple productivity while employing the same number of staff and reduce the processing time for each product by at least 10 days. These advantages can be generated both due to the new DC and through the efficiency provided by KAECs port, says Abdullah Binzagr, CEO and chairman of Binzagr Group.Randy Brown, Sr. Vice President of WareHouse & Logistics for Binzagr Company, adds: Binzagr and the appointed general contractor are fully committed to the design developed by Miebach for this landmark project securing Binzagrs leading position in the market for the future. Implementation is currently going full steam ahead."The project includes: The development of the ~300.000 m site including a low bay warehouse equipped with more than 70 loading docks for the receipt and dispatch of roughly 3.000 pallets per day Two automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS), protected with Oxygen Reduced atmosphere to prevent fires and connected to a high speed, high throughput rail guided vehicle system Fully automated preparation of layer stratified pallets through a layer picking robot and semi-automated preparation of completely mixed pallets through automated sequencing and manual picking Additional spaces for Added Value Services on a mezzanine floor as well as a comprehensive administration and management office areaA video about the Distribution Center can be viewed here:About Binzagr:Binzagr Company, a part of the reputed and long established Binzagr Group, is amongst the largest and leading Distributors in Saudi Arabia. The company distributes over 1,500 SKUs spread across 28 categories, comprising 55 leading brands, e.g. Unilever, Carlsberg, Hershey, Heinz and SunTop. The Distribution business forms the foundation of Binzagr Company, and one that traces the companys history from trading on the ancient spice route between Europe and East, since the year 1881. Today, it is among the leading and well reputed Distribution companies in Saudi Arabia, specializing in the distribution and logistics of a wide range of Consumer Products, spanning Food and Drink, Personal & Beauty Care, Home Care and Automotive Tires. More information is available on the companys website.Apart from its core business of planning and implementing logistics centers and network structures, Miebach Consulting offers a wide range of services regarding supply chain and intralogistics - from strategic development to ramp-up. Miebach Supply Chain Engineers have 25 branch offices on four continents for its global and local customers. Established more than 40 years ago by Dr. Joachim Miebach the company with a total of 350 employees is among the internationally leading consulting companies for logistics and supply chain design.Miebach Consulting GmbHWiebke TillmannsUntermainanlage 660329 Frankfurt am MainE-Mail: tillmanns@miebach.comTel. +49 69 273992-0Global Peptide Therapeutics Market Expected to Reach a Value of over US$ 46 Bn by 2024

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Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) has been acting as an impressive data source when it comes to evaluating various industrial verticals. The research report titled Global Peptide Therapeutics Market offers a clear insight about the Peptide Therapeutics assessed over the global platform. This analysis proves beneficial for readers & new investors who are aiming to enter the market for Peptide Therapeutics in the near future.Get Exclusive Sample Copy @This research gives a broad overview of the market considering all major aspects sufficient enough to assist the reader decide on goals and set up benchmarks. All latest trends, developments and opportunities are covered in this research. Moreover, the growth of the entire market is impacted by several factors. All these are analyzed in detail and the impact level of these factors is slated. A detailed market segmentation is carried out which gives justice to the credibility of the research report. Future projections have been carried out for a duration of eight years. All data and statistical analyses have been carried out considering all major regions of North America, Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, Latin America and Middle East and Africa (MEA).Global Peptide Therapeutics Market: ForecastThe global peptide therapeutics market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.10% throughout the assessment period, 2016-2024. The market, in 2015, was valued at US$ 21.3 Bn and is projected to reflect a value of about US$ 46 Bn by the end of 2024.Global Peptide Therapeutics Market: Segmental AnalysisThe global market for peptide therapeutics has been segmented by application (cancer, CVD, metabolic, GIT, respiratory, dermatology, anti-infective, renal, CNS, others), by route of administration (oral, parental, others), by type (generic and innovative), by technology (solid phase, liquid phase and hybrid phase), by type of molecule (vasopressin, calcitonin, somatostatin, natriuretic, immunopeptide, others), by API peptide type (CMO and In-house) and by geography.By application, the cancer segment is more likely to be the leading segment in terms of revenue. Increasing mortality due to cancer has forced the players in this market to develop new products and drugs. This aspect has impacted the global market for peptide therapeutics at a substantial levelBy route of administration, the parental segment dominated the market in 2015. The oral segment is also expected to grow by the end of 2024 at a higher growth rateNorth America region dominated the global market for peptide therapeutics by region. In 2015 it accounted for a market share of around 38.8% and is anticipated to witness growth and dominate the entire market in the coming years, followed by EuropeBrowse Full Report with Table of Content, List of Table and Figures -Global Peptide Therapeutics Market: DynamicsThe global market for peptide therapeutics is poised to witness significant growth. Increasing prevalence of cancer and metabolic disorders are the main factors fuelling the development of the entire market. There have been increased developments in medical science giving rise to different technological advancements in the medical and biopharmaceutical field. The development of peptide drugs at comparatively lower costs of production is spurring the evolution of the global market for peptide therapeutics.The development of new drugs to treat cancer, owing to rise in the number of patients affected with cancer has a major role in driving the expansion of the peptide therapeutic market on a worldwide basis. However, a main limitation associated with peptide with respect to its complexity can hinder the growth process of the global market for peptide therapeutics.Global Peptide Therapeutics Market: Competition ScenarioThe research report on global peptide therapeutics market has profiled tier companies involved in the market. Key tier companies such as Amgen Inc., Bachem Holding AG, Eli Lilly and Co., F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc., Sanofi, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. are covered in this research 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:Trend of Infant Formula Market in Global Industry : Market Demands, Insights, Research and Forecast 2018-2025

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Albany, NY, 12th April : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "Infant Formula Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025" globally.Infant formula is engineered food that is used as a substitute to human breast milk. It is one of the most complex foods as it requires specific manufacturing capabilities and sophisticated quality assurance protocols.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @Infant formula sits on the dividing line between pharmaceuticals and food. This is indicated by the fact that the infant formula industry has historically been dominated by major pharmaceutical firms such Danone Nutricia, Abbott Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Pfizer, Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, etc. Growth in the baby food/formula market is significantly driven by rise in number of working women. According to the World Bank, the percentage of women workforce increased by 4% all over the world from 1990 to 2013. Currently, many working mothers resume their jobs shortly after giving birth. In such a situation, prepared baby formulas and foods offer an attractive alternative to working mothers, fulfilling their need for healthy and nutritious food for their babies.The infant formula market can be segmented on the basis of formula type, formulation, and geography. On the basis of formula type, the market is segmented into infant milk formula, follow on milk formula, growing up milk formula, and specialty baby milk formula. On the basis of formulation, the market is segmented into powder, liquid concentrate, and ready to feed formulas. On the basis of region, the market is segmented into five major geographies; North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa.The infant formula market is witnessing significant growth due to rise in baby boomers population, increasing disposable income of people in developing regions, and growing female participation in the labor force that has encouraged the acceptance of baby formula and prepared baby foods. In addition, rapid urbanization and the growth of the middle class have further propelled the infant formula market. However, the main barrier to entry for the market is the regulatory hurdle associated with gaining approval for manufacturing of infant formula and food. China has recently implemented more stringent quality and safety standards for manufacturers and distributors of infant formula and food in the country. The China Certification and Accreditation Administration (CNCA) stated that of the 800+ foreign brands distributing infant formula in China, only 94 brands received approval for sale in China. Stringent regulations associated with infant formula products might hinder the growth of the market.Make An Enquiry About TOC with tables & Figures @In terms of geography, North America accounts for the largest market in terms of revenue. Factors such as high disposable income, presence of major players in the region, and well developed pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry is attributed to the growth of the market in the region. Europe is the second largest market for infant formula owing to good manufacturing facilities and high spending power per baby. Asia Pacific is expected to witness the highest growth rate in the coming years. Factors such as high baby boomer population, increasing disposable income, and high rate of urbanization contribute to the growth of the market in Asia Pacific. Moreover, slowdown in sales in developed regions has compelled leading players to target emerging markets. Chinas large population base and rapidly growing volume of consumers with increasing purchasing power is very attractive to multinational brands, however, the 2008 melamine infant formula issue still overshadows the market and has created an environment where consumers are concerned with the health and safety of infant formula.Ausnutria Hyproca, Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Glanbia plc, Pfizer, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline plc, Mead Johnson, Nestle S.A., Perrigo Nutritionals, and Danone Nutricia are some of the key players operating in the infant formula market globally.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.Browse Report @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 analysisResearchMoz 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 :Superconducting Wire Market - Industry Rising Rapidly 2017 - 2025

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https://www.tmrresearch.com/superconducting-wire-market

Global Superconducting Wire Market: OverviewSuperconducting wires are made up of superconducting materials which, when cooled below a certain temperature (transition temperature), exhibit zero electrical resistance. The superconductor material used is usually in the form of filament and theoretically allows the persistent flow of electric current across any loop of superconductor wire. Superconductor magnets find extensive applications in MRI/NMR machines, mass spectrometers, and in particle accelerators as beam-steering magnets. Recent applications of superconducting wires include their use in smart grid, transformers, power storage devices, and electric motors.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Second-generation high temperature superconducting wires, with significantly higher transition temperatures, are mainly made up of rare Earth compounds such as yttrium, samarium, and neodymium. Allowing competitive cost-benefits and multi-functionalities, the demand for these materials is rising rapidly in the making of various electrical power equipment and medical equipment, opening up a spate of promising avenues in the market.Global Superconducting Wire Market: Key TrendsThe global market is primarily driven by the burgeoning demand for superconducting materials in high-voltage transmission applications and in making MRI systems. The increasing demand for high-temperatures superconducting materials in numerous areas such as energy, medical, defense, electronics, and industrial applications is expected to boost the market. Advances in computer chip designing technology are expected to spur the demand for superconductors with high critical current capacity and enhanced power performance.High manufacturing cost involved in making superconductors and dearth of standard testing facilities are likely to restrain the superconducting wire market to some extent. On the other hand, continuous scaling efforts by manufacturing units and intensive advances in R&D technology are expected to expand the commercial applications of superconducting wires.Request TOC of the Report @Global Superconducting Wire Market: Market PotentialBruker Corporation, a U.S. based manufacturer of scientific instruments for materials researches and industrial analysis, announced at the end of 2016 that it was planning to acquire Oxford Instruments Superconducting Wire LLC (OST). The deal was finalized by Brukers subsidiary, Bruker Energy and Supercon Technologies (BEST), for an aggregate sum of U$17.5 million. BEST pioneers in low temperature superconductors for being used in MRI, NMR, and fusion energy researches. Post finalization of the buyout deal, the manufacturer made efforts to expand its technology portfolio with the Rod Restack Process (RRP) conductor technology from OST. The technology is especially in demand for various high-energy physics applications that require considerably high magnetic fields.The deal marked a strategic acquisition for BEST as it strengthened its position in the low-temperature superconductors (LTS) market. The company already enjoys a sustained position in LTS segment and has made numerous investments in the past to boost capacity automation and quality control.With the integration of the OST technology, BEST hopes to emerge as a world-leading LTS provider with a broad product portfolio that will house superconducting wires with advanced conductor performance and quality. Furthermore, with such strategic buyouts in place, Bruker Corporation hopes to consolidate its positions across prominent regions such as the U.S. and China. These developments are poised to expand the potential of the superconducting wire market.Global Superconducting Wire Market: Regional OutlookNorth America, Europe, and Asia Pacific are the prominent markets for superconductor wires. Europe is expected to offer lucrative growth avenues to manufacturers and vendors of superconducting wires. The substantial growth in the regional market is expected to be driven by increased commercialization of high-technology superconducting materials and extensive R&D investments in developing second-generation superconducting wire technology.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Asia Pacific is anticipated to show impressive growth over the forecast period; the growth is attributed to significant advances in semiconductor technology leading to the wide use of LTS electromagnets in making magnetic resonance imaging and nuclear magnetic resonance magnets.Global Superconducting Wire Market: Competitive AnalysisLeading players are making substantial investments in R&D in order to launch advanced products made with cost-effective technologies. Several players are making technology integrations to expand their expertise in the manufacture of superconducting wires. Major players vying for a sustained share in the superconducting wires market include American Superconductor, Bruker Corporation, Fujikura Ltd., Superconductor Technologies Inc., Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd., Japan Superconductor Technology, Inc., Supercon Inc., and Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd.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South Korea Telecoms, Mobile, Broadband and Digital Media Market - Key Statistics, Country Overview and Analyses

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"The Latest Research Report South Korea - Telecoms, Mobile, Broadband and Digital Media - Statistics and Analyses provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"South Korea has one of the worlds most active telecommunications and Information Technology (IT) markets backed by strong support from the government. As well as the commitment of the government, the sector is boosted by an innovative private sector and a technologically savvy population. Spending on ICT and high-technology equipment helped lead a transformation of the economy. The government aims to transform the country into a knowledge-based information society in a smart-age.By 2017, KT was still the largest telephone and fixed-line company. With declining revenues from its fixed-line services, the company has forged ahead with IPTV and LTE. Competition with LG U+ and SK Broadband had intensified on many fronts ranging from IPTV to VoIP.South Koreas mobile market has slow growth over the last few years due to a highly mature market. Organic growth by the three main mobile operators, together with the multitude of niche MVNOs will result in further growth to 2018 however growth rates will taper off further over the next few years as the market further matures. Market penetration reached 117% in 2016 and is predicted to reach between 119% and 122% by 2021 driven by the uptake of both 4G and 5G services. The split in mobile operator market share has remained relatively constant over the last two decades. LG Telecom however has made a marginal increase in market share over that time.Get Sample Copy of this report @The mobile broadband market is highly mature in South Korea. Penetration has increased moderately over the past five years from 105% in 2012 to 111% in 2016. Prepaid voice services have not been particularly prevalent in South Korea, with the subscription model dominating the mobile market. South Korea has the worlds highest number of broadband services per capita. Koreas policy emphasis has been to establish an Ultra Broadband convergence Network (UBcN) with 1Gb/s speeds on fixed lines and 10Mb/s on wireless.Since breaking through the 10 million subscriber mark in 2002, subscriber growth has steadily increased, reaching over 20 million fixed broadband subscribers by 2016. Market penetration is predicted to continue to grow moderately over the next five years reaching over 50% by 2021, with a market penetration of 41%. Growth is being driven by an expected increase in converged solutions being offered such as IPTV and Smart Home services. Much will depend on the continuing strength of the economy in South Korea.Internet use is widespread in South Korea with surveys even including children as young as three years of age. The internet has permeated all aspects of society and has made a significant contribution to education even at pre-school level. Internet penetration reached 91% by 2016.The widespread adoption of the Internet in South Korea coupled with the continued pace of development has resulted in an exciting digital economy. This report also looks at various aspects of the digital economy in South Korea that support the drive to converged services. It includes information on e-commerce users, e-banking and e-government. It also contains information on internet usage patterns.Browse Complete Report with TOC @Key developments:ISK Telecom (SKT) signed a contract with Samsung Electronics for the deployment the worlds first commercial Internet of Things (IoT)-dedicated nationwide LoRaWAN network.KT and Nokia Networks launched the first IoT lab in South Korea.Three operators hold over 80% of the Korean broadband market: KT, SK Broadband and LGU+.South Koreas broadband subscriber base continues to rise. The move towards faster speeds and becoming full-service operators is expected to further drive this trend.FttX deployments have increased as operators try to gain customers through bundled services such as high-definition IPTV.Growth is being driven by an expected increase in converged solutions being offered such as IPTV and Smart Home services.South Koreas mobile network operators are expected to roll out trial 5G services in time for the 2018 Winter Olympics.SK Telecom (SKT) completed a successful test of five-band carrier aggregation (5C).SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus launched the worlds first commercial interconnected VoLTE service.Key Companies mentioned in this report:KT; LG U+; SK Broadband; SK TelecomTable of Content1. Key statistics1.1 Country overview1.2 Background1.3 South Koreas economy2. Telecommunications market2.1 Market Overview3. Regulatory environment3.1 Historic overview3.2 Regulatory authority3.2.1 KCC  Overview and responsibilities3.2.2 KCC  related laws4. Fixed network operators4.1 KT Corp4.2 LG U+View Sample PDF @5. Telecommunications infrastructure5.1 Overview of the national telecom network5.1.1 Internet eXchange (IX)5.1.2 National submarine cable infrastructure5.2 International infrastructure5.2.1 International submarine cable infrastructure5.3 Smart infrastructure5.3.1 M2M/IoT5.3.2 Smart grids5.3.3 Smart cities5.3.4 Connected / Smart homes6. Broadband market6.1 Introduction and statistical overview6.1.1 Market Overview and analysis6.1.2 Broadband statistics6.2 Broadband Technologies6.2.1 Overview6.2.2 Cable modem6.2.3 Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)6.2.4 Apartment LAN6.2.5 Fibre-to-the-Home6.3 Fixed network operators6.3.1 Operator Statistics6.3.2 KT Corp6.3.3 SK Broadband6.3.4 LG U+6.4 Other fixed broadband services6.4.1 Fixed wireless (WiFi and WiMAX)7. Digital media7.1 Cable TV (CATV)7.2 Satellite infrastructure7.3 Videostreaming7.3.1 IPTV7.4 Communications: VoIP, messaging, conferencing7.4.1 Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)8. Digital economy8.1 e-Commerce8.2 e-Banking8.3 e-Government8.3.1 Next Generation e-government plan: 2008 - 20128.3.2 E-Government Global Academy (eGGA) established in South Korea9. Mobile communications9.1 Market Overview and Analysis9.2 Background of South Koreas mobile market9.3 Mobile statistics9.3.1 General statistics9.3.2 Mobile Broadband9.3.3 Forecasts9.4 Regulatory issues9.4.1 Licensing9.4.2 SpectrumAbout 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Consumer Electronics Market  Technology, Applications, Trends and Growth Drivers to 2024

Global Market Insights, Inc.

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http://algosonline.com/technology

Key players in the consumer electronics market consist of Apple, Samsung Electronics, General Electric, Bose, Sony Corporation, AB Electrolux, Haier, LG Electronics, Huawei, Philips, Canon, GoPro, Nikon and Sennheiser. The industry is characterized by intense competition owing to the presence of large number of international and regional players in the marketplace. The strong hold of major players in the industry poses strong barriers for the new entrants.Consumer Electronics Market is expected to exceed USD 1,500 billion by 2024. Rising popularity of OLED and 4K televisions followed by the declining prices of these devices across various regions is expected to drive the consumer electronics market over the forecast timeline. In addition, with the growing replacement rate of traditional televisions with newer ones, adoption is expected to increase over the years. The launch of televisions with new and advanced features such as built-in Wi-Fi & internet connectivity, ultra-high resolution & color contrast, Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos to deliver outstanding picture and sound quality, further contributes to the industry demand.Request for a sample of this research report @Rapid fall in mobile data rates coupled with the integration of cutting-edge features such as powerful imaging systems, high resolution displays and fingerprint scanners in smartphones is anticipated to catapult the consumer electronics market growth. The smartphone industry is currently witnessing a gradual decline in prices resulting in increasing number of users worldwide. Rising disposable income of the middle-class population across the emerging economies is providing significant growth opportunities to the consumer electronics market growth.Increasing use of tablets with enhanced capabilities for performing less-intensive tasks is resulting in the slow growth of laptops. For most of the users, laptop is not considered to be a high priority device, which resulted in lower upgrades and replacement rates. Declining demand across the major economies is posing significant threat to the audio & video equipment industry, further limiting the consumer electronics market growth.Rapid industrialization, technological advancements and reducing prices of the air conditioner technology is anticipated to spur the demand for room air conditioners. Split air conditioners will witness a significant demand due to the ease of installation, higher energy efficiency and varying building infrastructures. Growing demand for energy efficient appliances followed by the increasing requirement for replacement of older electric household appliances is expected to have a positive impact on the consumer electronics market growth.Increasing prominence of advanced and wireless technologies is expected to drive the personal consumer electronics market segment growth. Emerging trend of smart and IoT connected devices, such as smart refrigerators and TVs, having remote, app-based control and sensing capabilities is causing an increasing number of consumers to replace traditional equipment with smart devices. Globalization and fast industrialization in the Asian economies such as China, India and Japan help in increasing the income level of working class, further contributing to the industry growth.North America consumer electronics market is anticipated to witness substantial growth during the forecast timeframe owing to large-scale technological advancements. The region is fast adopter and developer of new technologies such as 5G technology for smartphone users. Consumer spending on high-end electronics in the region is due to the high disposable income and low consumer debt, allowing an increasing number of consumers to incorporate these technologies as a part of their daily lives.Browse key industry insights spread across 340 pages with 296 market data tables & 75 figures & charts from this 2018 report Consumer Electronics Market Size By Product (Audio & Video Equipment [Personal, Professional], Major Household Appliance, Small Household Appliance, Digital Photo Equipment [Personal, Professional]), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa), Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Landscape & Forecast, 2017  2024 in detail along with the table of contents:Chapter 2. Executive Summary2.1. Consumer electronics industry 360 synopsis, 2013 - 20242.1.1. Business trends2.1.2. Regional trends2.1.3. Product trends2.1.4. Application trendsAbout Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog:Cloud Object Storage Market 2018 Global Industry Key Players Analysis: Dell EMC, International Business Machines Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Caringo Inc, Hitachi Data Systems

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Market Highlights:The Cloud Object Storage Market is segmented on the basis of service, organization size, cloud deployment and end-user. By cloud deployment it consists of public, private and hybrid. Cloud solution accounts for highest market share as it helps enterprises by minimizing cost associated with the IT infrastructure. Cloud solution enable enterprise to focus on core business competencies. It provides enterprises with data protection and security, efficiently manage storage and privacy issues, offers data integrity and provides information related to governance and make enterprise legally prepared.The cloud object storage market is growing rapidly over 14% of CAGR and is expected to reach at USD 6 billion by the end of forecast period.The major growth driver of cloud object storage market includes growing demand for technologically upgraded services, growing expansion of professional and managed services and increasing awareness about cost-effective cloud services among others.IBM Corporation a prominent player in Cloud Object Storage Market offers widest and most flexible ranges of object storage solutions in the industry. It enable enterprises by allowing them to select the deployment option that meets their needs, including public, dedicated and hybrid cloud or on-premises solutions. Hewlett-Packard Enterprises a major player in cloud storage market has designed cloud object storage technology for ultra-high durability of the data that is available for immediate retrieval. Every object is copied three times and stored in physically separate availability zones. HP Cloud Object Storage is powered by Open Stack technology and runs on high-performance HP servers.North America region is the leading player in the cloud object storage market owing to the presence of major market players in the region. The cloud based services is adopted by both small and medium enterprises. The factors contributing towards the growth of cloud services in the region is the increasing data volumes from various vertical and technologies such as cloud computing, big data analytics and internet of things boosting the cloud object storage market. Asia-Pacific region to grow significantly in the cloud object storage market by the forecast period. Apart from it the rising adoption of it services and big data analysis is also driving the market.Request a Sample Report @Major Key Players: Dell EMC (U.S.) International Business Machines Corporation (U.S.) Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (U.S.) Caringo Inc. (U.S.) Hitachi Data Systems (U.S.) Datadirect Networks (U.S.) Netapp, Inc. (U.S.) International Data Corporation (U.S.) Microsoft Corporation (U.S.) Google (U.S.)Cloud Object Storage Market Segmentation:Cloud solution accounts for highest market share as it helps enterprises by minimizing cost associated with the IT infrastructure. Cloud solution enable enterprise to focus on core business competencies.It provides enterprises with data protection and security, efficiently manage storage and privacy issues, offers data integrity and provides information related to governance and make enterprise legally prepared.Market Regional Analysis:Regional analysis for Cloud Object Storage Market is studied in different geographic regions as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of World. North America region is mainly dominating the market due to adoption of advanced marketing techniques in enhancing business and increase adoption of analytics by organization in cloud marketing platform. North America region is one of the prominent player in the market due to advanced technological implementation in numerous vertical. European region is also gaining growth owing to growing demand from citizens and huge investment by enterprise in cloud object storage market.Asia-Pacific region is the fastest growing player in the cloud object storage market owing to advanced technological development from countries such as China and India is boosting the market growth. Increasing urbanization, business expansion, industrial developments and growing educational sector is driving the growth of cloud Object Storage market in the region. Growing economies such as India, Japan, and China accounted for the largest market share due to growing IT network in this region. The region consists of many small and medium size enterprise that is contributing towards the growth of market from the region.Browse Full Report Details @Intended Audience: Investors and consultants System Integrators Government Organizations Research/Consultancy firms Technology solution providersTable of Contents1 Market Introduction1.1 Introduction1.2 Scope of Study1.2.1 Research Objective1.2.2 Assumptions1.2.3 Limitations1.3 Market Structure2 Research Methodology2.1 Research Type2.2 Primary Research2.3 Secondary Research2.4 Forecast Model2.4.1 Market Data Collection, Analysis & Forecast2.4.2 Market Size EstimationContinued.List of TablesTable 1 Cloud Object Storage Market, By ServiceTable 2 Cloud Object Storage Market, By Organization SizeTable 3 Cloud Object Storage Market, By Cloud DeploymentContinued.List of FiguresFigure 1 Research TypeFigure 2 Cloud Object Storage Market: By Service (%)Figure 3 Cloud Object Storage Market: By Organization Size (%)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.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. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal Containers Market 2018 - Seaco, Klinge, Daikin, AICANG CIMC

Global Containers Market

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www.apexmarketreports.com

Apex Market Reports, recently published a detailed market research study focused on the Containers Market across the global, regional and country level. The report provides 360 analysis of Containers 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 Containers on the basis of this detailed study. The study shares Containers performance both in terms of volume and revenue.The market research report explores the Containers Market across the globe along with major regions and countries. The research report provides a detailed study on each and every aspect of Containers 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 Containers Market based on major product types, application and end users industries of Containers. Besides, the report also covers geographical segmentation for Containers Market. The report further provides production, capacity, price per region, gross margin, production cost, for all major regions and countries listed in report.Get Free Sample Copy of Report Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of This ReportSeacoKlingeDaikinAICANG CIMCCarrier CorporationEldapointSEA BOXRCS GroupBSL ContainersInno Cool IndiaHexagon CompositesLuxfer GroupQuantum TechnologiesEverest Kanto CylindersPraxair TechnologiesFaber IndustrieThe competitive landscape of the global market for Containers is determined by assessing the major industry participants, production capacity, production capacity utilization rate, Containers Markets production chain, pricing by each manufacturer and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Containers Market globally.Inquire Before Buying @The Global Containers Market 2018 is further analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Containers production volume, data pertaining to demand and Containers supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. The report provides upstream and downstream analysis covering major raw material used in manufacturing of Containers 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 Containers 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 Home Security Products and Solutions Market will Expand 2.8X Between 2017 and 2025

MRRSE

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The home security products and solutions market is experiencing rapid growth in the form of sales of CCTV cameras and electronic alarm sensors due to the fact that crime rate is increasing in most of the countries of the world. Moreover, consumers are able to invest in high-end home security products and solutions due to an increase in the disposable income. In the present times, consumers are more informed and tech savvy and they want solutions that are equipped with advanced features. Consumers in developing countries are also participating in this market due to a rise in their purchasing power.Get Exclusive Sample Copy @Looking at this market from another dimension, home security solutions like video surveillance, fire control systems and access management systems help in the monitoring and control of traffic in several countries and this factor is responsible for boosting market growth. In addition, the integration of smartphones with smart home security solutions is also increasing the revenues of the home security products and solutions market. Smartphones have become popular amongst the masses and are being used for a variety of purposes. In regions such as Europe, there are security systems that are being monitored through smartphones and this is driving the growth of this market. As far as the Asia Pacific region is concerned, the boom in construction activity will give way for more demand of video surveillance systems. Keeping in mind the above factors, the Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) has included a new report in its repository titled Home Security Products and Solutions Market: Global Industry Analysis (20122016) and Forecast (20172025).Global Market ForecastThe home security products and solutions market is forecasted to be valued at more than US$ 12 Bn by the end of the year 2025 and this market is set to expand 2.8X during the assessment period 2017 to 2025. The home security products and solutions market is slated to exhibit a CAGR of 11.9% value wise. The developing economies of the world are playing a central part in the growth of this market.Market TaxonomyThe home security products and solutions market is classified as per technology and services (fire protection systems, video surveillance systems, access control systems, services) and as per region (North America, Europe, Latin America, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific).Browse Full Report with Table of Content, List of Table and Figures -Regional Market ForecastNorth America will remain the most attractive regional market. The North America home security products and solutions market is slated to register a CAGR of 11.8% during the period of assessment and reach a value of US$ 3,739 Mn by the end of the year 2025. The Asia Pacific market will deliver high year-on-year growth rates and exhibit a CAGR of 12.1% during the period of assessment. The Asia Pacific market is poised to represent an incremental opportunity of US$ 2204.3 Mn during the period of assessment.While the global home security products and solutions market remained concentrated in North America and Asia Pacific in the year 2016; in the coming years, the developing economies will witness lucrative growth, as there is a limited penetration of home security products and solutions in these regions. This will present a great opportunity for companies operating in the global home security products and solutions market. For example, in Latin America, the home security products and solutions market is confined to just the real estate sector. In this region, home security products and solutions are being used in high end housing projects in big cities. However, other critical industry sectors are yet to be tapped and this can present a huge opportunity for market growth.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:Vietnam Telecoms, Mobile, Broadband and Digital Media Market - Overview, Key Statistics and Recent Developments

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"The Latest Research Report Vietnam - Telecoms, Mobile, Broadband and Digital Media - Statistics and Analyses provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"After peaking in 2009 Vietnams fixed line market in Vietnam has seen a significant decline. Market penetration has fallen from 20.1% in 2009 to 10.5% in 2012 and 5.7% in 2016.In the meantime, having come late to the internet, Vietnam is finally embracing the higher access speeds offered by the various broadband platforms. Although there has been a surge in subscriber numbers, fixed broadband remains a relatively small but expanding market segment. Most significantly, the arrival of mobile broadband has seen widespread access to faster internet speeds.Vietnams mobile market has grown strongly over the last decade, evidence that the competition model the government has put in place, although with some limitations, has been working. At the same time, demand for new mobile services appeared to have dropped and growth had generally slowed. There has been a gradual shift to value added services, with the arrival of 3G and 3G+ and ahead of the launch of 4G.Get Sample Copy of this report @The highly competitive nature of Vietnams mobile segment is due in no small part to it being opened up to new players, importantly including some with no involvement of the state-owned VNPT. As with most other Asian mobile markets, growth in Vietnam was boosted by the early introduction of prepaid mobile services and prepaid remains a vital component of the business today.Viettel is the largest mobile operator in Vietnam with over 40% market share, followed by MobiFone VTNL-Vinaphone and Vietnamobile. The Vietnamese mobile market has shown moderate growth over the past few years, increasing from mobile penetration of 135% in 2013 to 147% in 2016. However over the past two years the market has reached a saturation point, as mobile growth slow significantly. Further slow growth is expected to continue over the next five years to 2021. By that time penetration is expected to reach over 150%.The initial roll-out of fixed broadband services win Vietnam as followed by a strong surge in growth; however, broadband remained a small but expanding market segment. It needed a stronger market focus by the providers; this seemed to have finally happened with the arrival of mobile broadband. As with other developing markets in Asia, there has been major shift in Vietnams broadband market with the widespread adoption of mobile broadband, with lower tariffs, ready availability and the convenience of mobility being the big attractions. Mobile broadband has been growing strongly in Vietnam over the past five years. Penetration has increased from 14% in 2011 to 31% in 2014 and 43% in 2016. Further strong growth is predicted over the next five years to 2021.The fixed broadband subscriber market in Vietnam has been growing moderately over the past few years from a relatively small base. Penetration has increased from 6% in 2013 to 8% in 2015 and 9% in 2016. Fixed broadband penetration is predicted to grow moderately over the next five years, reaching between 14% and 17% by 2021.Incumbent operator VNPT has been leading Vietnams charge into the broadband market. It has doing this largely as part of its Next Generation Network (NGN) development.In the meantime, the digital economy in Vietnam has been flourishing, although its reach may not be as great as government policy would wish. The government has been the driving force behind the countrys move into the age of the digital economy. It has been constantly emphasising the need to use e-commerce to improve the countrys economic competitiveness. The government has also been particularly active in the development of cyber laws, no doubt because of its deeply ingrained political culture of central control. On another related front, Vietnam is moving quickly towards the digitalisation of TV broadcasting. A strategy plan for conversion to digital TV should see the countrys television stations broadcasting completely digital by 2020.Browse Complete Report with TOC @Key developments:Vietnams broadband market is growing strongly, on the back of the mobile broadband sector;fibre-based broadband subscribers continue to grow strongly.The MIC has set 2017 as the target date for introducing Mobile Number Portability (MNP).Viettel Telecom announced plans to launch its 4G LTE network.Vietnamobile, announced plans to expand the coverage of its 3G network nationwide.after a long period of low fixed broadband penetration, the market has started to grow strongly;most significantly, fibre-based broadband (FttH) subscribers have been growing rapidly;DSL technology continues to support the majority of fixed broadband services;the MIC issued a set of digital TV standards ahead of the planned digitalisation.Companies mentioned in this report:VNPT; Vinaphone; Mobifone; Viettel; S-Fone; Viettel; VietnamobileTable of Contents1. Key statistics1.1 Country Overview1.1.1 Background1.1.2 World Trade Organization (WTO)2. Telecommunications market2.1 Recent developments2.2 Historical Overview2.3 Market analysis2.3.1 Mobile operators2.3.2 Foreign investment2.3.3 The governments role3. Regulatory environment3.1 Historical overview3.2 Regulatory authority3.2.1 Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC)3.2.2 Viet Nam Telecommunications Authority (VNTA)3.3 Government policies3.3.1 Liberalisation3.3.2 Privatisation of state-owned enterprises: VNPT3.3.3 Decree limiting shares in telecom companies3.4 Telecom licences3.5 Mobile Number Portability (MNP)View Sample PDF @4. Competition issues5. Fixed network operators5.1 Introduction5.2 Vietnam Post & Telecommunications (VNPT)5.2.1 Overview5.2.2 Statistics5.3 Viettel5.4 FPT Telecom5.5 GTel6. Telecommunications infrastructure6.1 National telecom network6.1.1 Overview6.1.2 Statistics6.1.3 Forecasts  fixed-line subscribers  2016; 2017; 20206.2 New developments6.2.1 Next Generation Networks (NGNs)6.2.2 Proposed Samsung investment6.3 International infrastructure6.3.1 Background to development6.3.2 Statistics6.3.3 Submarine cable networks6.3.4 Satellite networks7. Broadband market7.1 Introduction and statistical overview7.1.1 Market overview and Analysis7.1.2 Broadband Development Plan7.1.3 Statistics7.1.4 Forecasts  fixed broadband subscribers  2016 - 2018; 20217.1.5 Government control7.1.6 Vietnam Internet Network Information Center (VNNIC)7.1.7 Vietnam National Internet eXchange (VNIX)7.1.8 IPv6 v. IPv47.2 Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)7.2.1 Introduction7.2.2 Service providers7.3 Fibre-to-the-Home (FttH)7.3.1 Introduction7.3.2 Service providers7.4 Other fixed broadband services7.4.1 Fixed wireless broadband7.4.2 WiFi7.4.3 WiMAX7.4.4 Cable modem7.4.5 Satellite internetAbout 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 Market for Radiation Dose Optimisation Software is expected to rise at a CAGR of 27.4% from 2017 to 2027

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A report of Future Market Insights titled Global Radiation Dose Optimisation Software Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017-2027) states that favourable government regulations for controlling radiation are likely to have a positive impact on the growth of the global radiation dose optimisation software market in the years ahead. Doctors are using radiation dose optimisation software for monitoring and controlling the doses of radiation. Correspondingly, radiation dose optimisation software is used for controlling multiple aspects related to the dose. The radiation dose quantity varies as per the patient and the disease. The global market for radiation dose optimisation software is expected to rise at a CAGR of 27.4% from 2017 to 2027.Inclination Towards Smart Technology to Accelerate AdoptionWith technology becoming ubiquitous and advanced technologies replacing existing ones, the demand for more cutting-edge technology is rising with each passing day. Consumers are gaining awareness about the availability of advanced technologies for treating diseases such as smart technology products. As a result of this, the demand for radiation dose optimisation software has also taken a surge and is expected to foresee the same trend in the coming years. The need to monitor the limits of annual dose of the workers in CT/PET imaging is also one of the factors that will have an influential impact on the market in the long run. The growing adoption of electronic health recording systems along with a rising awareness regarding radiation safety is expected to bode well for the market in the near future. However, the dearth of expert operators and the lack of knowledge and training among the existing workers for operating radiation dose optimisation software might act as a roadblock in the progress of the market during the course of the forecast period.Request Report Sample@North America to Take the Lead in Terms of DeploymentIn order to avoid high dosage of radiation and for increasing the safety of workers, the U.S. government has introduced a number of reimbursement policies for radiologists for encouraging them to follow the various guidelines that have been set up by several organisations to maintain proper dose levels. As a result of these stringent regulatory requirements, the adoption of radiation dose optimisation software is expected to increase during the forecast period. As a result of these dynamics, the market for radiation dose optimisation software in North America is expected to witness an outstanding CAGR of 30.8% over the course of the forecast period.Other than this, on the basis of end user, the market has been segmented into hospitals, diagnostic centres, cancer research institutes, and others. Based on component the market has been bifurcated into software and services. The software segment has been further divided into automatic and manual and the services segment has been further divided into education and training and support.Visit For TOC@Companies to Strengthen Product Offering for Cancer DiagnosisProduct innovation, expansion in product portfolio, and acquisitions are likely to be the key areas that companies operating in the global radiation dose optimisation software market are likely to focus on in the coming years. Some of the leading companies in the market are General Electric Company, Koninklijke Philips N.V., Siemens AG, Agfa-Gevaert Group, Bracco, Sectra AB, and FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation.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:Industrial Robotics Market Trends Growth Forecast Research 2018-2024

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The segmentation of the industrial robotics market by product indicates that collaborative robots are expected to have the highest growth rate over the forecast timeframe. These have a large work envelope and high usage as they allow employees to work alongside and are priced significantly lower as compared to its counterparts. Additionally, the adoption of the collaborative industrial robotics market decreases human idle time by 85% and substantially boosts the efficiency of the overall manufacturing process.Industrial Robotics Market is projected to reach a revenue of over USD 80 billion by 2024. The rapid growth of the industrial sector across the world and the high adoption of automation technologies as a part of the manufacturing process are the major factors propelling the industry growth during the forecast timeframe.Request for a sample of this research report @The high growth of the industrial sector is largely facilitated by government initiatives promoting the use of locally manufactured goods and equipment. For instance, the Make in India strategy was initiated to increase the manufacturing share in India's GDP to 25% by 2022 while simultaneously promoting the adoption of regionally manufactured products such as food & beverages and electronics as opposed to foreign brands amongst the general population. Under this strategy, the government is providing subsidies, financial support, and expertise to regional players such as the capital subsidy of up to 25% for 10 years to boost the manufacturing of electronics. Furthermore, the application of the industrial robotics market technology allows for miniaturization, increased throughput, and reduced lead times and human errors for manufacturers.The high adoption of automation technology is projected to aid in the growth of the industrial robotics market. The usage of these technologies can aid in the reduction of the development time and the exorbitant variable costs such as labor and electricity prices. In regions including Western Europe and North America, the labor costs are very high, over USD 38 hourly wage in Germany.The end-use segmentation of the industrial robotics market indicates that the electrical and electronics segment will account for a high growth. The increase in the disposable income and the economic prosperity stemming from the industrial boom across various regions, primarily in South-East Asia, are contributing to the high proliferation of these devices.Competitive advantage and reduced per-hour cost as compared to human results will augment the North America industrial robotics market growth. Major players are developing affordable, and compact energy-efficient solutions to access a wider customer base. The rise of outsourced manufacturing activities and the increase in SMEs in the Asia Pacific region are contributing to the high industry demand of the in the region.Industrial robotics market players comprise Fanuc Corporation, OTC Daihen, Inc., Epson America, Inc., ABB Group Ltd., KUKA AG, Nachi Fujikoshi Corp., and Kawasaki Heavy Industries. The industrial robotics market is subject to rapid technological changes owing to which players are required to invest heavily in R&D activities and launch products to sustain the growth. For instance, in November 2017, ABB announced the launch of its single arm co-bot with an aim to enhance its collaborative robot product portfolio. The robot is expected to be available for commercial usage by 2018.Browse key industry insights spread across 262 pages with 337 market data tables & 38 figures & charts from the report Industrial Robotics Market Size By Product (Articulated, SCARA, Gantry, Cartesian, Parallel, Cylindrical, Collaborative), By End-Use (Automotive, Metals & Machinery, Rubber & Plastics, Food & Beverage, Electrical & Electronics) Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa), Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Landscape & Forecast, 2017  2024in detail along with the table of contents:Chapter 1 Methodology & Scope1.1 Methodology1.1.1 Initial data exploration1.1.2 Statistical model and forecast1.1.3 Industry insights and validation1.1.4 Definition and forecast parameters1.2 Data Sources1.2.1 Secondary1.2.2 PrimaryAbout Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog:Latest Industry Dynamic of China WLAN Front-end Modules Market Research Report 2018

Latest Industry Dynamic of China WLAN Front-end Modules Market Research Report 2018

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The China WLAN Front-end Modules Market Research Report 2018 is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the WLAN Front-end Modules industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The WLAN Front-end Modules 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 WLAN Front-end Modules 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.Browse a complete report sample:The global WLAN Front-end Modules market is valued at XX million USD in 2017 and is expected to reach XX million USD by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.China plays an important role in global market, with market size of xx million USD in 2017 and will be xx million USD in 2025, with a CAGR of xx%.This report studies the WLAN Front-end Modules development status and future trend in China, focuses on top players in China, also splits WLAN Front-end Modules by type and by applications, to fully and deeply research and reveal the market general situation and future forecast.The major players in China market includeMicrosemiSkyworksQorvoMurata ManufacturingBroadcom LimitedTDKNXPTaiyo YudenTexas InstrumentsInfineonSTRDATeradyne(LitePoint)VanchipGeographically, this report splits the China market into six regions,South ChinaEast ChinaSouthwest ChinaNortheast ChinaNorth ChinaCentral ChinaNorthwest ChinaOn 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 intoPower Amplifier (PA)Low Noise Amplifiers (LNA)SwitchesOthersOn the basis of the end users/application, this report coversConsumer ElectronicsAutomotiveConnected HomeIndustrialM2MMedicalOthersTable of contents:Chapter One - WLAN Front-end Modules OverviewChapter Two - China WLAN Front-end Modules Market Competition by Players/ManufacturersChapter Three - China WLAN Front-end Modules Sales and Revenue by Region (2012-2018)Chapter Four - China "&B1&" Sales and Revenue by Type/ Product Category (2012-2018)"Chapter Five - China "&B1&" Sales by Application (2012-2018)"Chapter Six - China WLAN Front-end Modules Players/Suppliers Profiles and Sales DataChapter Seven - WLAN Front-end Modules Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter Eight - Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter Nine - Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter Ten - Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter Eleven - China WLAN Front-end Modules Market Size (Sales and Revenue) Forecast (2018-2022)Chapter Twelve - Research Findings and ConclusionChapter Thirteen - Methodology and Data SourceContact 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, focuses on custom research, management consulting, IPO consulting, industry chain research, and data base &seminar services. The company owns large basic databases (such as National Bureau of Statistics Database, Customs Import and Export Database, Industry Association Database, etc.), expert resources (including industry experts who own more than 10 years experiences on marketing or R&D in industries of energy, automotive, chemicals, medical ICT consumer goods, etc.), professional survey team (the team members obtained more than 3 years market survey experience and more than 2 years deep expert interview experience), and excellent data analysis team (SPSS statistics and PPT graphics process team).Room 2901 VILI International Building No.167 Linhe West RoadVaractor Diode Market is likely to reach a valuation of nearly US$ 1,300 Mn in 2027

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Future Market Insights presents a new report titled Varactor Diode Market: Global Industry Analysis 2012  2016 and Opportunity Assessment 2017  2027 that studies the performance of the global varactor diode market over a ten year assessment period from 2017 to 2027. The report presents the value forecasts of the global varactor diode market and provides important insights into the factors driving market growth as well as the factors restricting market growth. As per the assessment of Future Market Insights, the global varactor diode market was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 490 Mn in 2017 and is likely to reach a valuation of nearly US$ 1,300 Mn in 2027 and in the process exhibit a CAGR of 10.3% during the period of assessment 2017-2027.Rising Adoption of 5G Technologies in the Coming Years and Increasing Usage of Smartphones to Boost the Global Varactor Diode MarketVaractor diodes that are used in wireless infrastructure play an important role in the proper functioning of 5G technology, as these diodes are increasingly used for enhanced linearity function for high speed applications. Due to the emergence of 5G technology, there will be a significant increase in the sales of electronic goods such as smartphones, laptops and tablets. Presently, 5G technologies are under research and development stage, and varactor diodes are majorly integrated in VCOs, and are used in applications like radar, consumer devices and seaports. Hence, manufactures are grabbing the chance of expanding their product portfolio of different kinds of varactor diodes that are used for several applications.Request Report Sample@In addition, the market for varactor diodes is expected to witness a significant traction due to the fact that the proliferation of smartphones is happening at a fast rate all across the world. Since mobile phones accompanied with high speed data services are the norm of the day with a high usage rate, this is likely to positively impact the global varactor diode market.Global Varactor Diode Market: Segmentation and ForecastThe global varactor diode market is segmented on the basis of breakdown voltage, application and region.By breakdown voltage, the 5V-30V segment was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 300 Mn in 2017 and is likely to reach a valuation of nearly US$ 780 Mn in 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 10% during the period of forecast 2017-2027.By application, the mobile devices segment was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 260 Mn in 2017 and is anticipated to reach a valuation of nearly US$ 750 Mn in 2027, displaying a CAGR of 11.2% during the assessment period.By region, the APEJ varactor diode market was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 140 Mn in 2017 and is expected to reach a valuation of nearly US$ 420 Mn in 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 11.7% during the period of forecast.Visit For TOC@Global Varactor Diode Market: Competitive LandscapeIn this report, some of the important players functioning in the global varactor diode market have been profiled, which include players such as NXP Semiconductors, STMicroelectronics, MACOM, Vishay Intertechnology, ON Semiconductor, Analog Devices Inc., Infineon Technologies, Integrated Device Technology Inc. and Micro Semi Corporation.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:IT Management as a Service Market 2018 by Hewlett Packard Enterprises, CA Technologies, CiBRA, Five Runs, Kace, Klir Technologies, Persystent Technologies

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Worldwide IT Management as a Service Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the IT Management as a Service industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global IT Management as a Service market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global IT Management as a Service market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the IT Management as a Service players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.In the last decade IT has become one of the backbones for development of every industry vertical. Cost efficiencies achieved by the deployment of IT in operations have lured companies to scale up the deployment of IT departments. This has resulted in increasing complexities, and thus a need to manage these resources had raised. SaaS has made it easy for the deployment of IT tools and a large number of SMEs have adopted these solutions. ITMaaS is delivered through SaaS and it uses big data analytics coupled with the expertise of the vendor to ease the IT administration process and thus optimize operational costs for companies.FREE | Request a Sample Report atIT Management as a Service Market Players:1. Hewlett Packard Enterprises2. CA Technologies3. CiBRA4. Five Runs5. Kace6. Klir Technologies7. Persystent Technologies8. Q1 Labs9. Splunk10.UplogixThe report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global IT Management as a Service market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall IT Management as a Service 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 and segments. The report evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend and provides exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions.Inquire before Buying atAlso, key IT Management as a Service market players influencing the market are profiled in the study along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. The report also 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.Reason to Buy- Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies.- The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the IT Management as a Service market, thereby allowing players to develop effective long term strategies.- Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets.- Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it.- Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to products, segmentation and industry verticals.View Complete Report atAbout 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, Media, and Telecommunication industries.Contact 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, Media, and Telecommunication industries.Contact Us:533, 5th Floor,Amanora Chambers, East Block, Amanora Township,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028Intelligent Total Station Market: Growing Demand, Analysis by Key Players: Hexagon, Topcon, Trimble

Intelligent Total Station Market: Growing Demand, Analysis

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A new research study from HTF MI with title Global Intelligent Total Station Sales Market Report 2018 provides an in-depth assessment of the Intelligent Total Station including key market trends, upcoming technologies, industry drivers, challenges, regulatory policies, key players company profiles and strategies. The research study provides forecasts for Intelligent Total Station investments till 2022.Access Sample Copy @:If you are involved in the Intelligent Total Station industry or intend to be, then this study will provide you comprehensive outlook. Its vital you keep your market knowledge up to date segmented by Surveying, Engineering and Construction & Excavation, Robotic Intelligent Total Station & Manual Intelligent Total Station and major players. If you have a different set of players/manufacturers according to geography or needs regional or country segmented reports we can provide customization according to your requirement.Buy this research report @The Study is segmented by following Product Type: Robotic Intelligent Total Station & Manual Intelligent Total StationMajor applications/end-users industry are as follows: Surveying, Engineering and Construction & ExcavationGeographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions such as United States, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia & India, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), and market share and growth rate of Global Intelligent Total Station in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast)Early buyers will receive 10% customization on reports. Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Major companies covered in the report are Hexagon, Topcon, Trimble, HILTE, CST/berger, South Group, FOIF, Boif & DadiThis study also contains company profiling, product picture and specifications, sales, market share and contact information of various international, regional, and local vendors of Global Intelligent Total Station Market. The market competition is constantly growing higher with the rise in technological innovation and M&A activities in the industry. Moreover, many local and regional vendors are offering specific application products for varied end-users. The new vendor entrants in the market are finding it hard to compete with the international vendors based on quality, reliability, and innovations in technology.Some of the key questions answered in this report:- Detailed Overview of Global Intelligent Total Station market helps deliver clients and businesses making strategies.- Influential factors that are thriving demand and constraints in the market.- What is the market concentration? Is it fragmented or highly concentrated?- What trends, challenges and barriers will impact the development and sizing of Intelligent Total Station market?- SWOT Analysis of each key players mentioned along with its company profile with the help of Porters five forces tool mechanism to compliment the same.- What growth momentum or acceleration market carries during the forecast period?- Which region is going to tap highest market share in future?- What Application/end-user category or Product Type may see incremental growth prospects?- What would be the market share of key countries like United States, France, UK, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia, Japan, China or Brazil etc.?- What focused approach and constraints are holding the market tight?Make inquiry before purchase @Check for discount @There are 15 Chapters to display the Global Intelligent Total Station market.Chapter 1, About Executive Summary to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of Intelligent Total Station market, Applications [Surveying, Engineering and Construction & Excavation], Market Segment by Regions;Chapter 2, to analyze objective of the study.Chapter 3, to display Research methodology and techniques.Chapter 4 and 5 , to show the Overall Market Analysis, segmentation analysis, characteristics;Chapter 6 and 7, to show the Market size, share and forecast; Five forces analysis (bargaining Power of buyers/suppliers), Threats to new entrants and market condition;Chapter 8 and 9, to show analysis by regional segmentation[United States, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia & India ], comparison, leading countries and opportunities; Regional Marketing Type Analysis, Supply Chain AnalysisChapter 10, focus on identifying the key industry influencers, overview of decision framework accumulated through Industry experts and strategic decision makers;Chapter 11 and 12, Market Trend Analysis, Drivers, Challenges by consumer behavior, Marketing Channels and demand & supply.Chapter 13 and 14, describe about the vendor landscape (classification and Market Positioning)Chapter 15, deals with Global Intelligent Total Station Market sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Thanks 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.HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Private LimitedUnit No. 429, Parsonage Road Edison, NJNew Jersey USA  08837sales@htfmarketreport.com+1 (206) 317 1218Global Decorative Laminates Market Assessment and Key Insights Analyzed till 2025

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A new exhaustive study titled Global Market Study on Decorative Laminates: Impressive Growth to be Witnessed in the Furniture and Cabinets Application Segment During 2017 - 2025 has recently been submitted to the database of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE). According to the report, the global decorative laminates market is likely to grow at a CAGR of 4.7% through 2025, and reach a valuation of nearly US$ 95 Bn by the end of 2025.Get Exclusive Sample Copy @According to the report, demand for decorative laminates is likely to witness steady growth on account of a range of broader and industry-specific factors. In addition to rising per capita expenditure on home decor, the demand for decorative laminates is also rising on account of growing urbanization and steady recovery of the housing market.The report segments the global decorative, laminates market into application, type and region. The application segment is further sub-segmented into wall panel, flooring, furniture & cabinets and others. On the basis of type segment, global market is categorized into edge banding, high pressure and low pressure. Geographically, the market is divided into key regions globally which are North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa.According to the report, demand for low pressure laminates is expected to be higher than high pressure and edge banding laminates. The report projects the low pressure laminates segment to grow at a CAGR of 4.9% during the assessment period. By application, demand for furniture and cabinets is likely to grow at steady CAGR during the assessment period.Browse Full Report with Table of Content, List of Table and Figures -By region, North America and Asia Pacific are likely to be the key regions in the market. Demand for decorative laminates in North America is likely to remain resurgent in the US, whereas China and India are the key markets in Asia Pacific. Demand for decorative laminates in Japan is also likely to grow at a steady pace during the assessment period. The Asia Pacific decorative laminates market is likely to account for over 50% revenue share of the market.The report profiles some of the leading players operating in the market. Some of these players are Stylam Industries Ltd., Fundermax GmbH, Panolam Industries International, Inc., Archidply Industries Ltd., Illinois Tool Works, Inc., Abet Laminati S.P.A., Merino Group, Omnova Solution Inc., Greenlam Industries Ltd. and Fletcher Building Limited. These players are focusing on consolidating their position in developing regions to leverage the emerging opportunities.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:Low Power Wide Area Networks Market 2018 Overview by Semtech Corporation, Senet, Inc, Intel Corporation, Nwave Technologies, Sigfox S.A.

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Worldwide LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks Market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks Market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.Low-power Wide Area (LPWA) is a wireless Wide Area Network (WAN) technology that is designed for interconnecting devices with low-bandwidth connectivity, dedicated on power efficiency and range.FREE | Request a Sample Report atThe report aims to provide an overview of Global LPWA Market along with detailed segmentation of market by connectivity technology, end-user vertical, and five major geographical regions. Global LPWA market is expected to witness growth during the forecast period attributed to the increasing adoption of M2M or IoT devices.LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks Market Players:Semtech CorporationSenet, Inc.Intel CorporationTelensa Ltd.Link Labs, Inc.ZTE CorporationQualcomm, Inc.Vodafone Group plcNwave TechnologiesSigfox S.A.The report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks Market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks 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 and segments. The report evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend and provides exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions.Inquire before Buying atAlso, key LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks Market players influencing the market are profiled in the study along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. The report also 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.Reason to Buy- Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies.- The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) Networks Market, thereby allowing players to develop effective long term strategies.- Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets.- Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it.- Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to products, segmentation and industry verticals.View Complete Report atAbout 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, Media, and Telecommunication industries.Contact Us:533, 5th Floor,Amanora Chambers, East Block, Amanora Township,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028Forecast 2017  2026: Cyclopentane Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends

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The global market discussion on Cyclopentane can be found in the latest study by Fact.MR, which has been freshly added to its massive collection of research database. The report is titled Cyclopentane Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking - Global Review 2017 to 2026, which works to enlighten the readers about the major factors prompting the growth of the concerned market. Apart from that, the research majorly focuses on global Cyclopentane markets competitive outlook by profiling major players functioning across the globe. As the report moves ahead, information regarding the prominent trends as well as opportunities in the key geographical segments have also been elaborated, thus enabling companies to be able to make region-specific strategies for gaining competitive lead. Some of the prime regions emphasized in the study include key regions.Request Free Sample Report-Production of Refrigeration Products to Boost DemandDemand for cyclopentane is mainly derived from increasing production of various refrigerating products. Surge in demand for freezers and refrigeration products in the residential, automotive, food and beverage, and construction industry has led manufacturers to develop effective insulating foams. In addition, production of epoxy resins for composite materials, carbon fiber and fiberglass reinforcements is further expected to contribute towards growth of the global cyclopentane market during the forecast period.Demand for Environment Friendly Products to Impact Global Market GrowthAttributed to comparatively low potential of global warming and ozone depletion, manufacturers are increasingly looking for options that have low environmental impact. As cyclopentane possesses comparatively low ozone depletion features, manufacturers are increasingly witnessing demand for cyclopentane for production of the perfumes and adhesives. With the growing need for manufacturing range of paints, coatings, pharmaceutical and food products, demand for cyclopentane is expected to remain high in the global market. Increasing production of heaters, refrigerators and other chemical solvents will continue to impact growth of the global market of cyclopentane during the forecast period.However, various factors are expected to impact growth of the global cyclopentane market negatively. Ingesting cyclopentane during the production process can lead to vomiting and nausea due to irritation in the gastrointestinal tract. In addition, exposure to cyclopentane leads to incoordination, loss of consciousness, dizziness, lightheadedness and excitement. Moreover, severe exposure to cyclopentane can result in fatality due to respiratory failure. These factors are expected to inhibit growth of the global cyclopentane market significantly throughout the forecast period.Insulating Construction Material to Represent a Leading SegmentAs the need for insulators in the refrigerator products continue to increase, demand for the foam-blowing agents is expected to remain high. On the basis of product type, the foam-blowing agents segment is expected to represent significant growth in terms of volume, accounting for over 99,200 units by the end of 2026. In addition, the foam-blowing agents product type segment is expected to register a significant CAGR throughout the forecast period.Based on application, the insulating construction material segment is expected to represent the highest growth in terms of volume, recording over 18,300 units in terms of volume by the end of 2017. On the other hand, the residential refrigerators application segment is expected to register a robust CAGR throughout the forecast period.Competition TrackingLeading market players operating in the global cyclopentane market include Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC, Dymatic Chemicals, Inc., Beijing Eastern Acrylic Chemical Technology Co., Ltd., LG Chem, Ltd., Yeochun NCC Co. Ltd., Trecora Resources, INEOS Group Ltd., Merck & Co. Ltd, Maruzen Petrochemical Co., Ltd., Haldia Petrochemicals Limited, ZEON Corporation, Exxon Mobil Corporation, and HCS Group GmbH.Browse Full Report With TOC-Table of ContentGlobal Economic OutlookGlobal Cyclopentane Market - Executive SummaryGlobal Cyclopentane Market Overview3.1. Introduction3.1.1. Global Cyclopentane Market Taxonomy3.1.2. Global Cyclopentane Market Definition3.2. Global Cyclopentane Market Size (US$ Mn) and Forecast, 2012-20263.2.1. Global Cyclopentane Market Y-o-Y Growth3.3. Global Cyclopentane Market Dynamics3.4. Supply Chain3.5. Cost Structure3.6. Pricing Analysis3.7. PESTLE Analysis3.8. List of Distributors3.9. Key Participants Market Presence (Intensity Map) By RegionGlobal Cyclopentane Market Analysis and Forecast 2012-20264.1. Global Cyclopentane Market Size and Forecast By Product Type, 2012-20264.1.1. Foam-Blowing Agent Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.1.1.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) & Volume (MT) Comparison, By Region4.1.1.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.1.1.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.1.2. Solvent and Reagents Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.1.2.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) & Volume (MT) Comparison, By Region4.1.2.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.1.2.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.2. Global Cyclopentane Market Size and Forecast By, 2012-20264.2.1. Residential Refrigerators Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.2.1.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) & Volume (MT) Comparison, By Region4.2.1.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.2.1.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.2.2. Commercial Refrigerators Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.2.2.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) & Volume (MT) Comparison, By Region4.2.2.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.2.2.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.2.3. Insulated Containers and Sippers Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.2.3.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) & Volume (MT) Comparison, By Region4.2.3.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.2.3.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.2.4. Insulating Construction Material Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.2.4.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) & Volume (MT) Comparison, By Region4.2.4.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.2.4.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.2.5. Analytical and Scientific Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.2.5.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) & Volume (MT) Comparison, By Region4.2.5.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.2.5.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.2.6. Others Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.2.6.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) & Volume (MT) Comparison, By Region4.2.6.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.2.6.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By RegionContinued@@@...Check Discount 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:Display Market - Industry Trends Growth Forecast Research 2017-2024

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Some of the key vendors in the display market include Fujitsu Limited, Pax Technology, Inc., NCR Corporation, TCL Displays, Epson America, Inc., Posiflex Technology, Inc., Diebold Nixdorf, Inc., Fametech, Inc., Displax SA, Topfoison Electronic Technology Co., Ltd., and Ingenico Group. The industry is exceedingly competitive with the presence of a large number of global and regional players. The manufacturers differentiate their products based on cost, quality, and technology. For instance, 3M has developed multi-touch projected capacitive (PCAP) displays with multi-touch and ultra-fast response.Display Market is projected to exceed USD 20 billion by 2024. The rapid proliferation of devices such as smart ATMs, intelligent interactive kiosks, and NFC-enabled POS systems is expected to propel the display market growth over the next seven years. The deployment of smart ATMs is increasing significantly over the past few years, particularly in developing economies, owing to the access to enhanced banking services these machines provide. With increasing deployment of these devices, the demand for advanced screens is also increasing, thus aiding the industry growth.Request for a sample of this research report @Reducing cost of components has resulted in the declining costs of these devices. With the lowering costs, the end users are widely adopting the solutions with technologically-advanced components. The manufacturers of solutions, such as ATMs and POS, are reducing the total cost of ownership of these devices and preferring the use of low-cost components without compromising on the quality. The declining cost of raw materials is expected to accelerate the growth of display market.Rapid technological advancements, such as multi-touch LCDs and surface acoustic wave technology, are increasing the rate of obsolescence of products. The products with older technologies fade out quickly and manufacturers find it difficult to provide services for such products. This bodes well for the display market growth; however, decreases the profitability of the OEMs as these companies need to implement the technologically-advanced devices in the systems.The display market in kiosk applications is expected to grow significantly owing to the rapid adoption of kiosks in applications such as ticketing, self-checkout, and ordering food. Large retailers in countries such as the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Germany are increasingly adopting the self-checkout kiosks to enhance efficiency, save customer time, and improve operational profits. The trend of self-checkout kiosks is penetrating in other retail segments such as departmental stores, small convenience stores, and specialty retailers. Ease-of-use and swiftness of operations are the key factors driving the demand for self-checkout kiosks. This is projected to propel the industry growth in kiosk applications over the forecast timespan.Asia Pacific display market is expected to grow significantly owing to the increasing number of display manufacturers in the region. Increasing manufacturers in the region have increased the cost-competitiveness among the players, which has resulted in the manufacture of low-cost components. Furthermore, the region is characterized by the increasing deployment of ATMs, POS terminals, and kiosks, thus increasing the demand for displays.Browse key industry insights spread across 550 pages with 924 market data tables & 30 figures & charts from the report, Display Market Size By Application (ATM [By Display Size {7, 8, 10, Above 10}, By Resolution {700x340 pixels, 800x600 pixels}], POS Terminals [By Display Size {10, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20}, By Resolution {1024x768 pixels, 1366x768 pixels, 1280x800 pixels}], Kiosks [By Display Size {15  17, 17  32, 32  65, Above 65}, By Resolution {1024x768 pixels, 1280x1024 pixels, 1920x1080 pixels}]), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, And South Africa), Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017  2024 in detail along with the table of contents:Chapter 1. Methodology and Scope1.1. Methodology1.1.1. Initial data exploration1.1.2. Statistical model and forecast1.1.3. Industry insights and validation1.1.4. Definition and forecast parameters1.1.4.1. Definitions1.1.4.2. Assumptions, methodology & forecast parameters1.2. Data Sources1.2.1. Primary1.2.2. SecondaryAbout Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog:Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size 2018: Akorn, Bayer AG, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Merck & Co.

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size,Status and Forecast 2025 to its huge collection of research reports.This report is constructed on critical and factual data about, keeping in mind the different areas of the global Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs market. It essentially offers intelligent insights into pivotal growth factors of the market and how they could influence the overall Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs market in the coming years. Besides an analysis on a global front, the analysts have thrown light on the basis of territorial segmentation of the market to present predictions based on the past as well as current industry trends. They have also illustrated various market dynamics, and provide readers with an in-depth market study. The study provides a primary analysis of the markets prevalent trends applicable for the forecast period. It has presented an opportunity to assess some of the key market opportunities, driver, and restraints, which are likely to influence the market in the years to come.Download Free exclusive Sample of this report:The report has makes an effort to comprehend how particular segments of the global Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs market are likely to grow at a higher rate in the near future. There could also be segments that may not showcase as much growth as the leading segments of the market. The segmentation study of the market has been provided with the help of statistical figures so that readers could gain sound understanding of how different segments may shape in the foreseeable future.The competitive landscape of the global Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs market has been carefully studied while allowing readers to know about its nature and how it may change or remain stable during the course of the forecast period. The report has profiled some of the prominent players of the market taking into consideration their market share, recent developments, and other aspects.Table of ContentsGlobal Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size,Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs1.1 Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Overview1.1.1 Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.3 Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market by Type1.3.1 Fluoroquinolones (Ciprofloxacin,Ofloxacin,Levofloxacin,Moxifloxacin,Gatifloxacin,Besifloxacin)1.3.2 Aminoglycosides (Tobramycin,Gentamycin)1.3.3 Macrolides (Erythromycin,Azithromycin)1.4 Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Hospital Pharmacy1.4.2 Retail Pharmacy1.4.3 Online Sales1.4.4 Others2 Global Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs 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 Actavis plc (now Allergan plc)3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products,Services and Solutions3.1.4 Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Akorn,Inc.3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products,Services and Solutions3.2.4 Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Bayer AG3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products,Services and Solutions3.3.4 Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business OverviewRead Complete Table of Content @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Global Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2013-2018)Table Global Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Revenue (Million USD) Comparison by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Global Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Share by Regions (2013-2018)Figure United States Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure EU Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Japan Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure China Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure India Bacterial Conjunctivitis Drugs Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Make An Enquiry For Discount :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Scattering-based Optical Sensor Market 2018 by Business Players: ABB, ams AG,Texas Instruments, Analog Devices

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report 2018-2025 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications to its huge collection of research reports.This report is constructed on critical and factual data about, keeping in mind the different areas of the global Scattering-based Optical Sensor market. It essentially offers intelligent insights into pivotal growth factors of the market and how they could influence the overall Scattering-based Optical Sensor market in the coming years. Besides an analysis on a global front, the analysts have thrown light on the basis of territorial segmentation of the market to present predictions based on the past as well as current industry trends. They have also illustrated various market dynamics, and provide readers with an in-depth market study. The study provides a primary analysis of the markets prevalent trends applicable for the forecast period. It has presented an opportunity to assess some of the key market opportunities, driver, and restraints, which are likely to influence the market in the years to come.Have Any Query? Ask Our Expert @The report has makes an effort to comprehend how particular segments of the global Scattering-based Optical Sensor market are likely to grow at a higher rate in the near future. There could also be segments that may not showcase as much growth as the leading segments of the market. The segmentation study of the market has been provided with the help of statistical figures so that readers could gain sound understanding of how different segments may shape in the foreseeable future.The competitive landscape of the global Scattering-based Optical Sensor market has been carefully studied while allowing readers to know about its nature and how it may change or remain stable during the course of the forecast period. The report has profiled some of the prominent players of the market taking into consideration their market share, recent developments, and other aspects.Table of Contents2018-2025 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications1 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 Disclaimer2 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Market Overview2.1 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Product Overview2.2 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Market Segment by Type2.2.1 Raman2.2.2 Rayleigh2.2.3 Brillouin2.3 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Product Segment by Type2.3.1 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Sales (K Units) and Growth (%) by Type (2013, 2017 and 2025)2.3.2 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Type (2013-2018)2.3.3 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Type (2013-2018)2.3.4 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Price (USD/Unit) by Type (2013-2018)3 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Application/End Users3.1 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Segment by Application/End Users3.1.1 Pressure and strain sensing3.1.2 Temperature sensing3.1.3 Geological survey3.1.4 Biochemical sensing3.1.5 Biometric and ambience sensing3.1.6 Others4 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Market Status and Outlook by Regions5 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Market Competition by Players/Manufacturers5.1 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Sales (K Units) and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)5.2 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Players (2013-2018)5.3 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Average Price (USD/Unit) by Players (2013-2018)5.4 Global Top Players Scattering-based Optical Sensor Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area, Product Types5.5 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Market Competitive Situation and Trends5.5.1 Scattering-based Optical Sensor Market Concentration Rate5.5.2 Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Market Share (%) of Top 3 and Top 5 Players5.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, ExpansionView TOC (table of content) of the Report:List of Tables and FiguresTable Research Programs/Design for This ReportFigure Bottom-up and Top-down Approaches for This ReportFigure Data TriangulationTable Key Data Information from Secondary SourcesTable Key Data Information from Primary SourcesFigure Scattering-based Optical Sensor Product PictureFigure Global Scattering-based Optical Sensor Revenue (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2013-2025)Figure United States Scattering-based Optical Sensor Revenue (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2013-2025)Figure Product Picture of RamanTable Major Players of RamanMake An Enquiry For Discount :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Global Organic Skim Milk Market Expand Their Businesses with New Investments

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Organic Skim Milk to its huge collection of research reports.The global Organic Skim Milk market has been assessed with an exclusive forecast study that traces its progress from the past through future years. The report offered herewith is an intelligent guideline for players looking to successfully counter market challenges and cement their growth in the industry. With objective information provided on market restraints, readers could prepare themselves beforehand and devise strategies to overcome challenges while setting a foot on lucrative growth. A study on trends and opportunities has been expected to encourage players to take bold steps in their journey toward attaining an impressive growth in the market.Readers have also been offered a comprehensive study on the segmentation of the global Organic Skim Milk market. Each segment of the market has been critically evaluated for any opportunities that could be prevailing in the near future. On the other hand, readers could become aware of segments that have been anticipated to exhibit a slower growth in the market. The study has been backed by accurate information and meticulously calculated statistical figures for readers to be rest assured about the authenticity of the report. A standout section of the study could be regional segmentation as it informs readers of how well the market is performing in different geographies of the world.Get Sample Report of the Research Study at:The analysts authoring the report have profiled some of the top-ranking companies of the global Organic Skim Milk market. Factors such as strategic developments and current market standings have been taken into account when profiling each company studied in the report. The analysts have assessed a number of aspects of the competitive landscape to provide a good view of how the competitive scenario of the market could shape in the coming years. Competitor analysis and related insights presented in the report have been validated through multiple quality checks and are completely unbiased.Global Organic Skim Milk market competition by top manufacturers/players, with Organic Skim Milk sales volume, Price (USD/MT), revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingHorizon OrganicArlaOrganic ValleyEmmiAurora Organic DairyYeo ValleyAndechser Molkerei ScheitzThise DairyAvalonBruton DairyYiliMengniu...On 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 for each application, includingChildrenAdultThe AgedRead Complete Table of Content of the Report at:Table of ContentsGlobal Organic Skim Milk Sales Market Report 20181 Organic Skim Milk Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Organic Skim Milk1.2 Classification of Organic Skim Milk by Product Category1.2.1 Global Organic Skim Milk Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Organic Skim Milk Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 200-250mL1.2.4 300-330mL1.2.5 450-500mL1.2.6 900-1000mL1.2.7 Other2 Global Organic Skim Milk Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Organic Skim Milk Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Organic Skim Milk Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Organic Skim Milk Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Organic Skim Milk (Volume and Value) by Type2.2.1 Global Organic Skim Milk Sales and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.2.2 Global Organic Skim Milk Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.3 Global Organic Skim Milk (Volume and Value) by Region2.3.1 Global Organic Skim Milk Sales and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.3.2 Global Organic Skim Milk Revenue and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.4 Global Organic Skim Milk (Volume) by Application3 United States Organic Skim Milk (Volume, Value and Sales Price)3.1 United States Organic Skim Milk Sales and Value (2013-2018)3.1.1 United States Organic Skim Milk Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.2 United States Organic Skim Milk Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.3 United States Organic Skim Milk Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)3.2 United States Organic Skim Milk Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)3.3 United States Organic Skim Milk Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)3.4 United States Organic Skim Milk Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)...About QYResearchReports.comQyresearchreports.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:Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-618-1030Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.comWorldwide Trends In Baby Foods and Formula Market 2018: AMUL (India), Bellamys Organic (Australia), Biostime Inc. (China), Wakodo Co. Ltd.

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Baby Foods and Formula Market Research Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.The report on the global Baby Foods and Formula market is prepared with the help of several rounds of primary research and comprehensive secondary research, backed by industry-standard qualitative methods and quantitative tools. The elaborate study on the global Baby Foods and Formula market takes a holistic view of prominent and emerging growth dynamics, notable trends, and the competitive landscape. Policy holders in various regions can glean through the report to gain comprehensible insights on the investment profiles of various players. In addition, they are offered insights into their research and development initiatives. The evidence-backed insights on the global Baby Foods and Formula market help them identify promising avenues and accelerate the development for the support of the entire economy. The insights in the report takes an intelligent approach over identifying which trends will gain traction and which tends to become lackluster over the forecast period of 20182025.Interpret a Competitive outlook Analysis Report with Sample Report:The study sheds light on recently governmental spending in key regions and evaluates the way it will impact the value chain the global Baby Foods and Formula market. The strategies adopted by players to get over operational and strategic risks of business ecosystem are also given an incisive look. The analysis on the Baby Foods and Formula market dynamics strives to offer a dispassionate view of technology trends gathering steam in specific regions. In addition, the disruptive potential these technologies have on the overall competitive dynamics of the Baby Foods and Formula market is covered in the analysis. Furthermore, the study offers a glance into game-changing technologies and innovative offerings built around them.Table of ContentsGlobal Baby Foods and Formula Market Research Report 20181 Baby Foods and Formula Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Baby Foods and Formula1.2 Baby Foods and Formula Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Baby Foods and Formula Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Baby Foods and Formula Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Infant Formula1.2.4 RTE Foods1.2.5 Dried Foods1.2.6 Others1.3 Global Baby Foods and Formula Segment by Application1.3.1 Baby Foods and Formula Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 0-1 Year-old Baby1.3.3 1-3 Year-old Baby1.3.4 3-6 Year-old Baby2 Global Baby Foods and Formula Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Baby Foods and Formula Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Baby Foods and Formula Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Baby Foods and Formula Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Baby Foods and Formula Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Baby Foods and Formula Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Baby Foods and Formula Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type3 Global Baby Foods and Formula Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Baby Foods and Formula Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Baby Foods and Formula Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Baby Foods and Formula Market Analysis by Application6.1 Global Baby Foods and Formula Consumption and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)6.2 Global Baby Foods and Formula Consumption Growth Rate by Application (2013-2018)6.3 Market Drivers and Opportunities6.3.1 Potential Applications6.3.2 Emerging Markets/CountriesRead Complete Table of Content @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Baby Foods and FormulaFigure Global Baby Foods and Formula Production (K Units) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Types (Product Category) (2013-2025)Figure Global Baby Foods and Formula Production Market Share by Types (Product Category) in 2017Figure Product Picture of Infant FormulaTable Major Manufacturers of Infant FormulaFigure Product Picture of RTE FoodsTable Major Manufacturers of RTE FoodsFigure Product Picture of Dried FoodsTable Major Manufacturers of Dried FoodsFigure Product Picture of OthersTable Major Manufacturers of OthersFigure Global Baby Foods and Formula Consumption (K Units) by Applications (2013-2025)Make An Enquiry For Discount :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Dicing Machines Market Analysis 2018 Globally: Accretech, DISCO Corporation, Loadpoint, Tong Hsing

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Dicing Machines Market Research Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.The global market for Dicing Machines has been witnessing a continued alteration in the pattern of the demand for Dicing Machines. This research report attempts to understand the frequent changes in the consumer behavior and their impact on the Dicing Machines market across the world. The research report delivers an exhaustive analysis of the worldwide Dicing Machines market and proves to be a source of valuable information for all the active market players across the value chain, helping them in capitalizing the opportunities as well as planning out crucial business strategies.The research report also assists the companies functional in the global Dicing Machines market in understanding the existing market trends and, thus, shaping their businesses accordingly. It further analyzes the past and the current performance of this market and makes future projections on the basis of these assessments. It also evaluates this market from the perspective of the existing market chain, using the data about the import and export and the sales dynamics of the products available in this market across the world.Fill the form to gain deeper insights on this market @From the definition of the global Dicing Machines market to defining various segments, categorized on the basis of various criteria, the research study covers each and every aspect of this market. The geographical segmentation of the worldwide Dicing Machines market has also been discussed at length in this research study. Further, in this report, the global market has been examined on the basis of an analysis carried out using the production chain, production capacity, and the revenue generated by each of the leading players functional in this market. The data regarding availability of products, their types, pricing, volume of production, and the revenue generated, have also been utilized in the analysis of this market in this report.Table of ContentsGlobal Dicing Machines Market Research Report 20181 Dicing Machines Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Dicing Machines1.2 Dicing Machines Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Dicing Machines Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Dicing Machines Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Automatic Cutting Machine1.2.4 Manual Cutting Machine1.3 Global Dicing Machines Segment by Application1.3.1 Dicing Machines Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Silicon1.3.3 Glass1.3.4 Ceramics1.3.5 Other2 Global Dicing Machines Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Dicing Machines Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Dicing Machines Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Dicing Machines Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Dicing Machines Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Dicing Machines Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Dicing Machines Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type3 Global Dicing Machines Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Dicing Machines Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Dicing Machines Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Dicing Machines Production and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.2 Global Dicing Machines Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.3 Global Dicing Machines Price by Type (2013-2018)5.4 Global Dicing Machines Production Growth by Type (2013-2018)6 Global Dicing Machines Market Analysis by Application6.1 Global Dicing Machines Consumption and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)6.2 Global Dicing Machines Consumption Growth Rate by Application (2013-2018)6.3 Market Drivers and Opportunities6.3.1 Potential Applications6.3.2 Emerging Markets/CountriesRead Complete Table of Content @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Dicing MachinesFigure Global Dicing Machines Production (K Units) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Types (Product Category) (2013-2025)Figure Global Dicing Machines Production Market Share by Types (Product Category) in 2017Figure Product Picture of Automatic Cutting MachineTable Major Manufacturers of Automatic Cutting MachineFigure Product Picture of Manual Cutting MachineTable Major Manufacturers of Manual Cutting MachineFigure Global Dicing Machines Consumption (K Units) by Applications (2013-2025)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Vision Processing Unit Market 2018: CEVA, Synopsys, Movidius, Inuitive, Verisilicon

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Vision Processing Unit Market Research Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.Our recently added research study on the global market for Vision Processing Unit is a powerhouse of information on it. Our team of in-house experts pulled out all stops to create a well-researched report that would enable key stakeholders in the market to bet right on it. It sets out with a succinct yet insightful description of the scope of the market. It then discusses the size of the market by uncovering details on revenue of various product segments that constitute the market.For more information on this report, fill the form @The report also throws light on the various growth drivers and restraints shaping the trajectory of the market for Vision Processing Unit. To do so, it factors in various macro-fundamentals, latest technologies underpinning the product, and the changing government policies. It also offers detailed comparison of the various product and application segments to understand which one holds out maximum opportunity. Geographically, its divides the market for Vision Processing Unit into Asia Pacific, Europe, South America, North America, and the Middle East and Africa. It tries to fathom how each one is faring or will fare vis-a-vis growth in the near term.In order to understand the competitive landscape in the market for Vision Processing Unit, the report studies the companies with unique propositions. It banks upon a comparative study on the services and solutions of such companies by leveraging parameters such as sales and revenues. It also digs up information on the deal-making scene and research and development activities in the market for Vision Processing Unit to understand in which direction it is headed.The report packages all the crucial bits of information in digestible chunks by the usage of charts and graphs which would enable readers to spot key trends automatically.Table of ContentsGlobal Vision Processing Unit Market Research Report 20181 Vision Processing Unit Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Vision Processing Unit1.2 Vision Processing Unit Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Vision Processing Unit Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Vision Processing Unit Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.3 Global Vision Processing Unit Segment by Application1.3.1 Vision Processing Unit Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Aerospace & Defense1.3.3 Commercial1.3.4 Healthcare1.3.5 Consumer1.3.6 Automotive2 Global Vision Processing Unit Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Vision Processing Unit Capacity,Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Vision Processing Unit Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Vision Processing Unit Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Vision Processing Unit Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Vision Processing Unit Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Vision Processing Unit Manufacturing Base Distribution,Sales Area and Product Type3 Global Vision Processing Unit Capacity,Production,Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Vision Processing Unit Supply (Production),Consumption,Export,Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Vision Processing Unit Production,Revenue (Value),Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Vision Processing Unit Production and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.2 Global Vision Processing Unit Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.3 Global Vision Processing Unit Price by Type (2013-2018)5.4 Global Vision Processing Unit Production Growth by Type (2013-2018)6 Global Vision Processing Unit Market Analysis by Application6.1 Global Vision Processing Unit Consumption and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)6.2 Global Vision Processing Unit Consumption Growth Rate by Application (2013-2018)6.3 Market Drivers and Opportunities6.3.1 Potential Applications6.3.2 Emerging Markets/CountriesView TOC (table of content) of the Report:List of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Vision Processing UnitFigure Global Vision Processing Unit Production (K Units) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Types (Product Category) (2013-2025)Figure Global Vision Processing Unit Production Market Share by Types (Product Category) in 2017Figure Product Picture of Type ITable Major Manufacturers of Type IFigure Product Picture of Type IITable Major Manufacturers of Type IIFigure Global Vision Processing Unit Consumption (K Units) by Applications (2013-2025)Figure Global Vision Processing Unit Consumption Market Share by Applications in 2017Figure Aerospace & Defense ExamplesTable Key Downstream Customer in Aerospace & DefenseCheck Discount For This Report @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Pharmaceutical Packaging Market 2018 Leading Players Amcor Ltd, Schott AG, AptarGroup, Gerresheimer AG, Berry Plastics Group and More

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Market Research Future published a research report on Pharmaceutical Packaging Market Research Report- Forecast 2021  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2021.Global Pharmaceutical Packaging Market Information by Types (Bottles, Aerosol packs, Tubes, Blister packs, Sachets, Ampoules and others), by Material (Glass, Plastic, Cardboard and Paper) and Region - Forecast to 2021Global Pharmaceutical Packaging Market - OverviewThe advanced manufacturing processes used to develop pharmaceutical packages plays an important role in the growth of the global pharmaceutical packaging market. Advanced manufacturing processes, including green packaging technologies, use environment-friendly materials to develop pharmaceutical packages, which inflict minimal harm to the environment. All of these factors, along with the growing pharmaceutical industry, will continue to drive demand for packaging. However, the packaging industry will have to overcome challenges, such as the availability and price volatility of raw materials and changing health regulations, in order to meet increasing demand from the growing pharmaceutical industry.Get Sample of Report @Plastic bottles emerged as the largest revenue generating segment for the pharmaceutical packaging Industry. Growing plastic packaging demand due to cost effectiveness, easy handling & transportation, durability, and aesthetic features will negatively affect the Pharmaceutical packaging market in coming years. Moreover, rise in outsourcing of pharmaceutical manufacturing to emerging economies is expected to open new growth avenues for the market. Favourable government policies is expected to have a positive impact on the pharmaceutical packaging market demand. Whereas, increase in demand from the different end-user, such as food & beverage sector, pharmaceutical products, and laboratory chemicals. Pharmaceutical packaging, due to its high cost, brittleness and transportation inconvenience is may face hindrance in growth in future period.Increasing demand for flexible and integrated packaging, rising incidence of diseases, innovations in drug delivery techniques and rapid growth of pharmaceutical industry are some of the key factors driving the growth for global pharmaceutical packaging market. Growing demographics and economies in the developing countries such as India and China would lead to growth in pharmaceutical packaging market.Global Pharmaceutical packaging market is growing with the rapid pace; mainly due to advancement in technologies. According to a recent study report published by the Market Research Future, The global market of Pharmaceutical packaging is booming and expected to gain prominence over the forecast period. The market is forecasted to demonstrate a stunning growth by 2023, surpassing its previous growth records in terms of value with a striking CAGR during the estimated period (2017  2023).Key Players Bemis Healthcare Packaging Gerresheimer Owens-Illinois West Pharmaceutical Westrock Alexander (James) Corporation Baxter International Amcor Limited Unilife Corporation AptarGroup Inc Rexam PLCThese are some of the prominent players profiled in MRFR Analysis and are at the forefront of competition in the global pharmaceutical packaging market.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:April 20, 2016: Bemis Company, Inc. acquired the medical device packaging operations and related value-added services of SteriPack Group, a global manufacturer of sterile packaging solutions for medical device and pharmaceutical applications.In 2017: Amcor Ltd. has started a series of investments in flexible printing for healthcare packaging in Europe.In 2012, Gerresheimer acquires Indian pharma plastic packaging manufacturer TriveniAccess Full Report @Pharmaceutical packaging Market - Segments:Global Pharmaceutical packaging Market is segmented in to 2 Key dynamics for an easy grasp and enhanced understanding.Segmentation by Types: Bottles, Aerosol packs, Tubes, Blister packs, Sachets, Ampoules and othersSegmentation by Material: Glass, Plastic, Cardboard and PaperSegmentation by Regions: Comprises Geographical regions - North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.Pharmaceutical packaging Market - Regional AnalysisNorth America region dominated the overall Pharmaceutical packaging market. One of the main reason for the growth of this market is new product launches with specialized packaging needs is growing rapidly. This is due to increase investment in novel drug delivery techniques, increasing awareness about healthcare sector and high healthcare spending in the region. Asia is expected to experience a high growth rate in the forecasted period. India and China will form the fastest growing markets due to rapidly expanding pharmaceutical manufacturing capabilities and the adoption of more stringent regulations aimed at improving the quality and integrity of domestically produced medicines.Brief Toc:1. Executive Summary2. Research Methodology3. Market Dynamics4. Global Market, By Packaging Type5. Global Market, By Technology6. Global Market, By Application7. Global Market, By End-user8. Regional Market Analysis9. Competitive Analysis10. Conclusion11. List Of Tables12. List Of FiguresAsk for your specific company profile and country level customization on reports.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.Market Research FutureMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal Market- Interactive Display 2018 Key Players: LG Display, Sharp, Hitachi, Microsoft, Google

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Interactive Display Sales Market Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.The dynamics of the global Interactive Display market is changing at a frequent pace. Emphasizing on these changes, this research report presents an in-depth analysis of the performance of this market during the period from 2018 to 2025. In this research study, with the help of proficient analytical tools such as market feasibility analysis and investment return analysis, experts have determined the attractiveness of this market. The future status of the worldwide market for Interactive Display has also been predicted by them on the basis of results attained from these analyses.These assessments also assist in the expansion of the global market for Interactive Display and provide a clear picture of the impacts of various crucial strategies implemented by leading market participants for the expansion of their businesses over the past few years.Get Research Summary of the Report:The research report further examines the competitive landscape of the global market for Interactive Display by studying the company profiles of the major market participants thoroughly. It also categorizes the market into various segments on the basis of a number of major market factors. The industry chain and the government policies and regulations that influence the demand for Interactive Display have also been studied at length in this report.In conclusion, the report examines the worldwide market for Interactive Display on the basis of the availability of products. The volume of production, products pricing, and the revenue generated in the overall market are the key factors, based on which analysts determine the performance of this market. The sales dynamics and the production chain have also been assessed in this research report.The main objective of this report is to provide a clear picture of the global market for Interactive Display to participants and help them in preparing apt strategies to attain a competitive edge over their rivals.Table of ContentsGlobal Interactive Display Sales Market Report 20181 Interactive Display Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Interactive Display1.2 Classification of Interactive Display by Product Category1.2.1 Global Interactive Display Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Interactive Display Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Interactive White Board1.2.4 Interactive Flat Panel Display1.2.5 Interactive Projectors1.3 Global Interactive Display Market by Application/End Users1.3.1 Global Interactive Display Sales (Volume) and Market Share Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Education1.3.3 Finance & Professional Services1.3.8 Others2 Global Interactive Display Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Interactive Display Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Interactive Display Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Interactive Display Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Interactive Display (Volume and Value) by Type2.2.1 Global Interactive Display Sales and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.2.2 Global Interactive Display Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)3 United States Interactive Display (Volume, Value and Sales Price)3.1 United States Interactive Display Sales and Value (2013-2018)3.1.1 United States Interactive Display Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.2 United States Interactive Display Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.3 United States Interactive Display Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)3.2 United States Interactive Display Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)3.3 United States Interactive Display Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)3.4 United States Interactive Display Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)4 China Interactive Display (Volume, Value and Sales Price)5 Europe Interactive Display (Volume, Value and Sales Price)6 Japan Interactive Display (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Read Complete Table of Content @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Product Picture of Interactive DisplayFigure Global Interactive Display Sales Volume Comparison (K Units) by Type (2013-2025)Figure Global Interactive Display Sales Volume Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 2017Figure Interactive White Board Product PictureFigure Interactive Flat Panel Display Product PictureFigure Interactive Projectors Product PictureFigure Global Interactive Display Sales Comparison (K Units) by Application (2013-2025)Figure Global Sales Market Share of Interactive Display by Application in 2017Get discount on this report at@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Underwater Monitoring System Market in The Oil and Gas Industry is Estimated to be Worth US$1881.3 mn by 2025

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.Global Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas Market: OverviewThis report analyzes and forecasts the market for Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas market at the global and regional level. The market has been forecast based on revenue (US$ Mn) from 2017 to 2025. The study includes drivers and restraints of the global Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas market. It also covers the impact of these drivers and restraints on demand for underwater monitoring systems during the forecast period. The report also highlights opportunities in the Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas market at the global and the regional level.The report comprises of the detailed value chain analysis, which provides a comprehensive view of the Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas market. Report also includes Porters Five Forces model for the market to help and understand the competitive landscape in the market. The study encompasses market attractiveness analysis, wherein end-users are benchmarked based on their market size, growth rate, and general attractiveness.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The report provides the estimated market size of underwater monitoring system for oil and gas for 2016 and forecast for the next eight years. The global market size of underwater monitoring has been provided in terms of revenue. Market numbers have been estimated based on Subsea Sensor, Monitoring System, and Communication method segments of underwater monitoring market. Market size and forecast for each of major Subsea Sensor, Monitoring System, and Communication method have been provided in terms of global and regional markets.Global Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas Market: Research PrinciplesIn order to compile the research report, we conducted in-depth interviews and discussions with a number of key industry participants and opinion leaders. Primary research represents the bulk of research efforts, supplemented by extensive secondary research. We reviewed key players product literature, annual reports, press releases, and relevant documents for competitive analysis and market understanding. Secondary research also includes a search of recent trade, technical writing, internet sources, and statistical data from government websites, trade associations, and agencies. This has proven to be the most reliable, effective, and successful approach for obtaining precise market data, capturing industry participants insights, and recognizing business opportunities.Secondary research sources that are typically referred to include, but are not limited to company websites, annual reports, financial reports, broker reports, investor presentations, and SEC filings, internal and external proprietary databases, and relevant patent and regulatory databases, national government documents, statistical databases, and market reports, news articles, press releases, webcasts specific to companies operating in the market. Oil and Gas journal, International Trade Administration, wireless sensors market with Communication method in Oil and Gas Primary research involves e-mail interactions, telephonic interviews, and face-to-face interviews for each market, Subsea Sensor, segment, and sub-segment across geographies. We conduct primary interviews on an ongoing basis with industry participants and commentators in order to validate the data and analysis. Primary interviews provide firsthand information on market size, market trends, growth trends, competitive landscape, and outlook, etc. These help validate and strengthen secondary research findings. These also help develop the analysis teams expertise and market understanding.Global Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas Market: SegmentationsThe study provides a decisive view of the global Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas market by segmenting it in terms of Subsea Sensor, Monitoring System, and Communication method. These segments have been analyzed based on present and future trends. Regional segmentation includes the current and forecast demand for the underwater oil and gas monitoring systems market in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. The report also covers demand for subsea sensor, monitoring system, and communication methods segments in all the regions.Global Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas Market: Competitive LandscapeThe study includes profiles of major companies operating in the underwater monitoring system market. Key players of the market include KCF technologies, BMT group, Fugro, Schlumberger-one Subsea, Sonardyne,Konsberg maritime, Bowtech products, and ocean sonics. Market players have been profiled in terms of attributes such as company overview, overall revenue, business strategies, recent developments, and SWOT analysis.Table of Content1. Preface1.1. Report Scope and Market Segmentation1.2. Research Highlights2. Assumptions and Research Methodology2.1. Assumptions and Acronyms Used2.2. Research Methodology3. Executive Summary3.1. Market Size, Global Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas Market (US$ Mn)3.2. Key TrendsGet Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @4. Market Overview4.1. Product Overview4.2. Key Market Developments4.3. Market Indicators4.4. Market Dynamics4.4.1. Drivers4.4.2. Restraints4.4.3. Key Opportunities4.5. Porters Analysis4.5.1. Threat of Substitutes4.5.2. Bargaining Power of Buyers4.5.3. Bargaining Power of Suppliers4.5.4. Threat of New Entrants4.5.5. Degree of Competition4.6. Value Chain Analysis4.7. Regulatory Scenario4.8. SWOT 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 @Transient Ischemic Attack Market 2018 by Trend, Size, Top Leaders, LivaNova PLC (U.K), EnteroMedics Inc. (U.S.), ElectroCore Medical LLC (U.S.) Business Statistics and Prediction by 2023

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Transient Ischemic Attack Market Information: By Diagnosis (Imaging Technique), Treatment (Surgery, Antiplatelet Medications, Anticoagulant Medications), End Users (Hospitals & Clinics, Research Laboratories, and others) - Global Forecast till 2023KEY PLAYERS FOR TRANSIENT ISCHEMIC ATTACK MARKETLivaNova PLC (U.K), EnteroMedics Inc. (U.S.), ElectroCore Medical LLC (U.S.), Boston Scientific Corporation (US), Cyberonics, Inc. (US), NeuroMetrix, Inc.(U.S.), ImThera Medical (U.S.), and Inspire Medical Systems, Inc.(U.S.), Nihon Kohden Corporation (Japan), Electrical Geodesics Inc. (U.S.), Masimo Corporation (U.S.), Hologic (U.S.), Esaote (Italy), and othersThe global transient ischemic attack market is expected to grow at a CAGR of ~ 6.8% during the forecast period 2017-2023.Get Sample Report @MARKET SCENARIO FOR TRANSIENT ISCHEMIC ATTACK MARKETTransient ischemic attack (TIA) is neurological dysfunction which is caused by loss of blood flow in the brain, spinal cord, or retina. The primary causes of transient ischemic attack are loss of blood supply to brain and which may occur due to various reasons. For instance, when a blood vessels become blocked, and blood supply to a part of the brain is lost, or a blood vessel can leak blood into the brain. However, the blockage can be caused by a blood clot that forms in the blood vessel (thrombosis) or it can be caused by a clot or debris that floats downstream.Increasing prevalence of neurological disorders, increasing investment of biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries in R&D, and rising need for the better treatment methods drives the growth of the market. Moreover, favorable reimbursement policies, increased application and significant investments in development of new technologies for the treatment of epilepsy, and other cardiac indications will fuel the market growth during the forecast period.SEGMENTATIONS FOR TRANSIENT ISCHEMIC ATTACK MARKETThe global transient ischemic attack market has been segmented on the basis of diagnosis, treatment, and end user.On the basis of diagnosis, the market is segmented into imaging technique and others. Imaging technique is further segmented into magnetic resonance angiography (MRA), CT angiography (CTA), carotid ultrasonography/transcranial doppler ultrasonography, and others.On the basis of treatment, the market is segmented into surgery, antiplatelet medications, anticoagulant medications, and others. Surgery is further segmented into carotid endarterectomy and others. Antiplatelet medications is further segmented into clopidogrel, aspirin, and others. Anticoagulant medications is further segmented into warfarin, apixaban, and others.On the basis of end user, the market is segmented into hospitals & clinics, research Laboratories, and others.REGIONAL ANALYSIS FOR TRANSIENT ISCHEMIC ATTACK MARKETThe Americas dominates the global transient ischemic attack market owing to well-developed technology, increasing prevalence neurological disorders, high healthcare spending, and increasing government support for research & development. Furthermore, increasing R&D activities and the presence of major companies have fuelled the growth of the market in this region.Europe holds the second position in the global transient ischemic attack market. It is expected that the government support for research & development and availability of funds for research will drive the market in Europe region over the review period.Asia Pacific is the fastest growing transient ischemic attack market owing to the presence of rapidly developing healthcare technology, huge patient population, and high healthcare expenditure. Moreover, increasing new opportunities in countries like China, India, Japan, and South Korea will make this as emerging and the fastest growing market across the globe. Furthermore, increasing demand for quality devices in the healthcare will lead to the use of advanced equipment, which, in turn, will increase the growth of the market in the region.Get Discount @Top 5 Reasons to Get this Report:Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent development activitiesMarket Strategic Business Influence DataMarket Research Future recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimationsMarket share analysis of the top industry playersMarket forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, Trends and the regional markets With SWOT AnalysisBRIEF TOC FOR TRANSIENT ISCHEMIC ATTACK MARKETChapter 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 Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restrains4.3 Opportunities4.4 Challenges4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4.6 Technology Trends & AssessmentChapter 5. Market Factor Analysis5.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis5.1.1 Bargaining Power of Suppliers5.1.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers5.1.3 Threat of New Entrants5.1.4 Threat of Substitutes5.1.5 Intensity of Rivalry5.2 Value Chain Analysis5.3 Investment Feasibility Analysis5.4 Pricing AnalysisLIST OF TABLESTable 1 Transient Ischemic Attack Industry Synopsis, 2017  2023Table 2 Global Transient Ischemic Attack Market Estimates and Forecast, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 3 Global Transient Ischemic Attack Market by Region, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 4 Global Transient Ischemic Attack Market by Diagnosis, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 5 Global Transient Ischemic Attack Market by Treatment, 2017  2023, (USD Million)LIST OF FIGURESFigure 1 Research ProcessFigure 2 Segmentation for Global Transient Ischemic Attack MarketFigure 3 Segmentation Market Dynamics for Global Transient Ischemic Attack MarketFigure 4 Global Transient Ischemic Attack Market Share, By Diagnosis 2016Figure 5 Global Transient Ischemic Attack Market Share, By Treatment 2016Figure 6 Global Transient Ischemic Attack Market Share, By End Users, 2016TOC and Table of List, Fig Continued..Inquire before Buying @About 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 Us:Market Research Future, Office No. 528,Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar, Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comMilitary Aircraft Actuation Systems Market 2018 to 2023 Global Key Players: Honeywell, Moog, Parker Aerospace, Rockwell Collins, United Technologies, Curtiss-Wright, Eaton, GE Aviation, Saab, and Woodward.

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Military Aircraft Actuation Systems Market  OverviewThe global military aircraft actuation systems market is growing with the rapid pace. According to a recent study report published by the Market Research Future, The global market of military aircraft actuation systems will grow at a rapid pace over the forecast period. The market is forecasted to witness slow but steady growth by 2027, which will be a surplus growth at a moderate CAGR during the projected period (2016 -2027).A military aircraft actuation systems help to give an aircraft, a control broad range of applications such as extension and retraction of landing gears, monitoring, and controlling velocity and controlling engine speed by adjusting levers and flaps. Different sources of energy such as electricity, hydraulic fluid pressure, or pneumatic pressure, which convert energy into motion, are used to operate the actuation systems. Moreover, rising investment in research and development will boost the market growth. The growing demand for automation and increase in the number of aircraft are estimated to gain higher popularity during the forecast period. Focus towards the development of autopilot landing system and the emergence of Auto-GCAS enhance the growth of the gear market for the automotive sector. However, high cost associated with autopilot system and thermal challenges of more electric aircraft (MEA) acts as a barrier to the growth of military aircraft actuation systems market.Request a Sample Report @The automotive military aircraft actuation systems market is completely dependent on the growth of military aircraft. Thus, the increasing or decreasing demand for the aircraft directly has an impact on the market. The total volume of aircraft operation, across the globe, in 2015, was almost 51,000 units and is expected to witness further boost by the year 2020. Moreover, the increase in the sales of aircraft has mainly been because of competitive and diverse options available for finance. The aerospace industry adopted new strategies to achieve greater efficiency, and reduced costs are increasing OEM's dependence on tier 1 suppliers. Big players such as Boeing and Airbus focus more on integration and less on internal production capability. Thus, the growth of the military aircraft actuation systems market is expected to go hand in hand with the growth of aircraft.Key PlayersHoneywell International, Moog, Parker Aerospace, Rockwell Collins, United Technologies (UTC), Curtiss Wright, Eaton, GE Aviation, Saab, and Woodward and others are some of the prominent players profiled in MRFR Analysis and are at the forefront of competition in the Global Military Aircraft Actuation Systems Market.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:January, 2018  Moog Inc. was selected to supply its Common Electromechanical Actuation (CEMA) TVC system and its Rocket Engine Modules (REM) featuring the MONARC  90 engines to Boeing for the NASA SLS Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) program.May, 2016  Rockwell Collins announced that its horizontal stabilizer trim and flap actuation systems installed on Cessna Citation Longitude super-midsize business jet.June, 2013  TransDigm Group acquired the assets of GE Aviations electromechanical actuation division for approximately $150 million in cash.Military Aircraft Actuation Systems Market  SegmentationThe Global Military aircraft actuation systems Market is segmented in to 3 key dynamics for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding;Segmentation by Type : Comprises Hydraulic, Electric and PneumaticSegmentation by Aircraft Wing: Comprises Fixed Wing and Rotary WingSegmentation by Regions : Comprises Geographical regions - North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.Military Aircraft Actuation Systems Market: Regional AnalysisAmerica market is dominating the market of military aircraft actuation systems market due to growth in aircraft industry. Development of UAV sector of the USAF and growing investment on UAVs are driving the market for military aircraft actuation systems. The market in the America is largely driven by increasing number of aircraft, UAV and the growing investments which helps in operations of aircrafts and other output.Asia-Pacific region is referred to as the second-largest military aircraft actuation systems market due to factors such as growing number of military aircraft and simultaneously increasing military expenditure have fuelled the demand for vehicles in the country.Browse Complete Report @Target Audience Military Aircraft Actuator OEMs Component Suppliers Aftermarket suppliers /MROs Research Institute / Education Institute Potential Investors Key executive (CEO and COO) and strategy growth managerAbout 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 Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comAutomotive Business Process Management Market 10-Year Market Forecast and Trends Analysis Research Report

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Automotive industry has countersigned a long run of success with its ability to effortlessly adapt to changing consumer demands in terms of design and technology. This has led to high level of product development in this industry. High competition in automotive market has increased the competitive pressure on businesses which as forced them to remove all delays of decision making process and business process. Business process management has evolved as a best solution to overcome these delays by combining two different individual activity. Business process management is a process of transforming business activity by integrating individual process to create new way or scope of the combined management capabilities.Business process management provides capabilities & direction to convert the complex, high lead time & high cost operational process into simple, less time consuming & low cost operational process. Business process management contributes in achieving real-time goals of organization by strengthening its operational process. Stiff competition in automotive industry has urged the manufacturers into new era of automotive business process management. Automotive business process management market is expected to increase at a significant pace in terms of value over the forecast period.Request For Report Sample @Global Automotive Business Process Management Market: DynamicsHigh initial cost of business process fusion technology is expected to be a major restraining factor for the growth of automotive business process management market over the forecast period. In addition to this, lack of knowledge about the benefits of business process fusion has led to less adoption. This factor is anticipated to be a major challenge for key players in the global automotive business process management market.The global automotive business process management market is segmented into key regions namely North America, Latin America, Middle East Africa, Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Eastern Europe & Japan region. Europe is expected to grow rapidly in automotive business process management market because of adoption of new way of business process & need of minimization in operational time. Apart from Europe, Asia-Pacific is expected to witness high growth in the global automotive business process management market because of Asia-pacific emerging as automotive destination. North America is also expected to exhibit growth in the near future in the global automotive business process management market.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 Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Global Tax Software Market -Save Time & Maximize Revenue with Greater Accuracy

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Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Tax Software 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.Market OverviewThis report studies the Tax Software market. Tax software is defined as a type of computer software designed to help individuals or companies prepare for and file income, corporate and similar tax returns.Tax software is software that ensures tax compliance for income tax, corporate tax, VAT, service tax, customs, sales tax, use tax, or other taxes its users may be required to pay. The software automatically calculates a user's tax liabilities to the government, keeps track of all transactions, keeps track of eligible tax credits, etc. The software can also generate forms or filings needed for tax. The software will have pre-defined tax rates and slabs and can allocate income or revenue in the right slab itself.The aim of the software is to provide the user with easy way to calculate tax payment and minimize any human error. Tax compliance software has been present in developed countries for long in the form of tax calculators mainly for direct taxes, such as income tax and corporate tax. Gradually some more complex and customized tax compliance software were designed and developed by organizations around the globe.Detailed Sample Copy of Updated Analysis @Top Industry Players:This report studies the global Tax Software market, analyzes and researches the Tax 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, like: Avalara, Vertex, Inc., SOVOS, H&R Block, EGov Systems, Intuit Inc., Xero, Thomson Reuters, Exactor, Wolters Kluwer, FedTax, Drake Software, BLUCORA, LumaTax, LegalRaasta.com, Service Objects.Key Benefits This report provides an extensive analysis of the current and emerging market trends and dynamics of the Tax Software market. The market trend analysis for all the countries is conducted by constructing estimations for key segments between 2018 and 2023 to identify the prevailing opportunities. The report assists to understand the strategies adopted by the leading companies in the industry. Extensive analysis is conducted by key player positioning and monitoring the top competitors within the regional market.Request Discount on this repots @Market SegmentsMarket 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)Market Segment by Type, covers Cloud Based On-PremisesMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided into Small Business and Individuals Midsize Enterprise Large EnterpriseBrowse 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Naval Combat Systems Market 2018 to 2021 Global Key Players: BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Saab, Thales, Harris, Israel Military Industries, L-3 Technologies, and NORTHROP GRUMMAN.

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Naval Combat Systems Market  OverviewThe global naval combat systems market is growing with the rapid pace. According to a recent study report published by the Market Research Future, The global market of naval combat systems will grow at a rapid pace over the forecast period. The market is forecasted to witness slow but steady growth by 2027, which will be a surplus growth at a moderate CAGR during the projected period (2016 -2027).The high demand for naval combat systems is due to the growth in the military. The emergence of advanced naval combat system has changed the defense industry. Due to the global proliferation of progressively sophisticated arms, an imperative need to reassess the current approach to naval fleet operations has emerged. To address this need, naval combat systems have come into existence. The new companies that are trying to enter the market should have high capital in order to engage in the R&D of the naval combat systems market. However, the 3D printing evolution, emergence of advanced airborne radar and modernisation of naval combat systems acts as a barrier for the growth of naval combat systems market.The naval combat systems market is completely dependent on the investment on military system. Another factor responsible for the increase in growth of naval combat systems is the advanced automation systems and growing demand of UUVs. This is the primary factor that drives the growth of the naval combat systems market and has gained prevalence in the recent times, with increasing investments on naval combat systems. Thus, the growth of the naval combat systems market is expected to go hand in hand with the growth of military expenditure.Request a Sample Report @Major Key PlayersBAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Thales, General Dynamics, Harris Corporation, L-3 Communication Systems, Northrop Grumman, and Sagem and others are some of the prominent players profiled in MRFR Analysis and are at the forefront of competition in the global naval combat systems market.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:October, 2016 - BAE Systems has signed a ten-and-a-half-year contract extension to provide the Royal Navy with combat systems integration services to both in-service and future platforms, including Type 45 destroyers, the new Queen Elizabeth (QE) Class aircraft carriers, and the Type 26 Global Combat Ships.February, 2016 - The U.S. Navy awarded Lockheed Martin a $15 million contract to mature its Freedom-variant Frigate design as a part of the Navy's FFG(X) competition.Naval Combat Systems Market  SegmentationThe Global Naval combat systems market is segmented in to 4 key dynamics for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding;Segmentation by System : Comprises Weapon Systems, C4ISR Systems, Electronic Warfare and Signal & Communication IntelligenceSegmentation by Vessel Type : Comprises Submarine, Destroyer ship, Frigate, Corvette and othersSegmentation by Vehicle Type : Comprises Passenger vehicle, Commercial vehicleSegmentation by Regions : Comprises Geographical regions - North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.Naval Combat Systems Market: Regional AnalysisNorth America market is dominating the market of naval combat systems market due to growth in global military expenditure and technological advancements. The increasing military expenses by the US Department of Defense (DOD) on naval combat system, in the recent years, have fuelled the demand for systems in the country.Europe is referred to as the second-largest naval combat systems market due to factors such as increasing military spending in various countries across EMEA regions, ultimately drives the market.Browse Complete Report @The market report for Naval Combat Systems 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.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:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312sales@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal Real-Time PCR System Market Professional Survey Report 2018 - Roche, QIAGEN, Bio-rad, Agilent, Bioer, Biosynex, Esco,

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Real-Time PCR System Market Professional Survey Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies Real-Time PCR System 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, coveringThermo FisherRocheQIAGENBio-radAgilentBioerBiosynexEscoAnalytik JenaTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoLEDHalogen LampOthersBy Application, the market can be split intoUniversitiesHospitalsOthersBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaTable of ContentsGlobal Real-Time PCR System Market Professional Survey Report 20181 Industry Overview of Real-Time PCR System1.1 Definition and Specifications of Real-Time PCR System1.1.1 Definition of Real-Time PCR System1.1.2 Specifications of Real-Time PCR System1.2 Classification of Real-Time PCR System1.2.1 LED1.2.2 Halogen Lamp1.2.3 Others1.3 Applications of Real-Time PCR System1.3.1 Universities1.3.2 Hospitals1.3.3 Others1.4 Market Segment by Regions2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Real-Time PCR System2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Real-Time PCR System2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Real-Time PCR System2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Real-Time PCR System3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Real-Time PCR System3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Real-Time PCR System Major Manufacturers in 20173.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Real-Time PCR System Major Manufacturers in 20173.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Real-Time PCR System Major Manufacturers in 20173.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Real-Time PCR System Major Manufacturers in 2017Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @4 Global Real-Time PCR System Overall Market Overview4.1 2013-2018E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2013-2018E Global Real-Time PCR System Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2017 Real-Time PCR System Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2013-2018E Global Real-Time PCR System Sales and Growth Rate 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 @Cosmetic Packaging Market Expected to Cross USD 35.6 Billion at CAGR of 5.2% by 2022

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Global Cosmetic Packaging Market Information by Materials (Plastic, Paper, Glass , Metal and others), by Product (Bottles & Jars, Tubes, Containers, Pouches, Sticks, Roller balls, Dispensers and others) by Application (Hair Care, Skin Care, Nail Care, Make-up and others) and region - Forecast to 2022Market Synopsis of Cosmetic Packaging MarketThe key drivers of cosmetic packaging are growth on innovative and alluring packaging. Major cosmetics and personal care brands have started considering effective packaging as an important attribute of product marketing. Therefore, the strategy enhanced brand visibility, increased sales, reduced brand recall rates.Materials such as glass, plastic, paper, metal, and wood are used for packaging cosmetics. Plastic leads the market in terms of both value and volume. The changing lifestyles and rising consumer preference the demand for eco-friendly products are increasing. UK, US and Germany contributes largely to the global cosmetic packaging market, majorly due to increase in demand for luxury goods. In terms of demand APAC is currently dominating the market. The rising awareness about anti- aging products with the flourishing e-commerce sector in the APAC region is expected to increase the demand of this market. The global cosmetic packaging market size is expected to cross USD 35.6 billion at CAGR of 5.2% by 2022.Get Sample of Report @Key PlayersThe key players of global cosmetic packaging market report include ABC Packaging Ltd Aptar Group Inc. Amcor Limited Albea S.A Fusion Packaging Gerresheimer AG HCP Packaging. Libo Cosmetics Company Ltd. Quadpack Industries RPC Group Plc.Market Research Analysis:The market is highly application based. The key drivers of cosmetic packaging are growth on innovative and alluring packaging. Major cosmetics and personal care brands have started considering effective packaging as an important attribute of product marketing. Therefore, the strategy enhanced brand visibility, increased sales, reduced brand recall rates.On the basis of materials such as glass, plastic, paper, metal, and wood are used for packaging cosmetics. Plastic leads the market in terms of both value and volume. The changing lifestyles and rising consumer preference the demand for eco-friendly products are increasing. The share owes to the properties of plastic such as light-weight, and durability. On the basis of applications, hair care and skin care accounts for the largest share in the market. The share is attributed to the changing lifestyles and preferences. The industry demands durable and light weight packaging.On the basis of region, UK, US and Germany contributes largely to the global cosmetic packaging market, majorly due to increase in demand for luxury goods. In terms of demand APAC is currently dominating the market. The rising awareness about anti- aging products with the flourishing e-commerce sector in the APAC region is expected to increase the demand of this market. The region has also seen a lot of investment in R&D towards the technological advancement in cosmetic packaging industries.Scope of the reportAseptic packaging plays an important role in sealing sterilized products under unsterilized atmosphere. There are two types of aseptic packaging; packaging of pre-sterilized and sterile products, and packaging of non-sterile products. Aseptic packaging products can range from bags and pouches to metal cans. The purpose of aseptic packaging is to produce food items that can be stored without refrigeration for a longer time and also maintains chemical and sensory properties. Aseptic packages offer environmental and economical advantages that use preservatives and refrigeration to achieve a long shelf life for food products.The increasing demand for transportation for longer distance is creating a need for extending the shelf life of the product. Moreover, growth in the milk and dairy products markets worldwide is creating ample of opportunities for the growth of the market.Recent trend shows that sustainable packaging and sustainable manufacturing practices are being adopted across the industry. Additionally, shifting consumer preferences fueling the growth of the aseptic packaging market. The growth of tea, healthy juice, and dairy-based drinks requires alternative technologies to conventional hot fill and retort-based approaches that limit flavour quality. Additionally, aseptic packaging is influenced by shifts in preferred package formats and food processing advances that enable flash pasteurization and continued the rise of single-serve bottle-based packaging. Whereas, high R&D costs and initial investment are challenging the aseptic packaging market.In the process of aseptic packaging, the food product is sterilized using ultra-heat treatment, where the food or drink is heated to a high temperature and then cooled quickly. This process allows retaining natural texture, colour, and flavour. This is provided with an opportunity in aseptic food packaging market, especially in the dairy and processed foods categories. Popular retail brands are turning to aseptic packaging due to various advantages such as protection of nutritional content, storage efficiency, and food safety. In developed countries, aseptic packaging provides benefits such as protection of sensitive ingredients and greater efficiency in different stages of the supply chain.This study provides an overview of the global cosmetic packaging industry, tracking three market segments across four geographic regions. The report studies key players, providing a five-year annual trend analysis that highlights market size, volume and share for North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. The report also provides a forecast, focusing on the market opportunities for the next five years for each region. The scope of the study segments the global cosmetic packaging market as material, product and application. On the basis of material it is segmented as metals, plastics, paper, glass and others. On the basis of product it is segmented as bottles, tubes, jars, containers, sticks, roller balls and others. On the basis of application it is segmented as hair care, skin care, nail care, makeup care and others.Target Audience Manufactures Raw Materials Suppliers Aftermarket suppliers Research Institute / Education Institute Potential Investors Key executive (CEO and COO) and strategy growth managerEnquiry Before Buying @The report for Global Aseptic Packaging 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 economic 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.Brief Toc:1. Executive Summary2. Research Methodology3. Market Dynamics4. Global Market, By Packaging Type5. Global Market, By Technology6. Global Market, By Application7. Global Market, By End-user8. Regional Market Analysis9. Competitive Analysis10. Conclusion11. List Of Tables12. List Of FiguresAsk for your specific company profile and country level customization on reports.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.Market Research FutureMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comNew Research Examined Carotenoids Market Analysis, Growth Drivers and Opportunity Assessment till 2026

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A latest research report titled as Global Market Study on Carotenoids: Europe to Lead the Global Market in Terms of Revenue during 2017 - 2026 has been recently added to the vast portfolio of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) online research offerings. This report is a professional and in-depth analysis on the present state and future prospect for the global market. It provides valuable information to the industry insiders, potential entrants or investors. It includes an exhaustive enquiry with the reliability of logic and the comprehensiveness of contents.Click here For Free Sample Report @The global market for carotenoids is likely to witness lucrative growth opportunities, thanks to the growing scope of carotenoids in the medical and healthcare industry, on account of its recently discovered health benefits. Its efficiency in preventing prostate cancer and curing various age-related macular degeneration diseases is anticipated to reflect positively on the growth of this market over the next few years.Currently, the rising preference of consumers for natural and organic products and the increasing commercial scope of carotenoids in animal feeds and supplements are acting as the key growth driver of this market. The antioxidative feature of carotenoids makes it more viable medically and is influencing its demand in the healthcare industry substantially. However, the limited number of carotenoids in the market and the lack of research and development in emerging economies may hamper the markets growth to some extent in the near future.The main objective of this market report is to offer a clear picture and a deep insight into the worldwide market for carotenoids, examining its historical performance and present status. The prominent trends, growth drivers, obstructions, challenges, opportunities, and future potential of this market have also been analyzed thoroughly in this research study.Global Carotenoids Market: Trends and OpportunitiesBeta-carotene, canthaxanthin, astaxanthin, and annatto are the main carotenoids commercially available across the world. Among these, the demand for beta-carotene is greater as is closely followed by astaxanthin. With the considerable increase in the number of algae-derived and synthetic beta-carotenes, the competition in this market has intensified and consequently, has led to a reduction in beta-carotene prices.Food, animal feed, cosmetics, supplements, and pharmaceuticals have emerged as the key application areas for carotenoids, globally. Thanks to the high nutritive value of carotenoid and the pigmentation present in it that raises the palatability of the feed and enhance the appearance of fish, meat, and meat products, its usage in animal feed is likely to increase substantially in the near future.To Know The latest Trends and Insights Prevalent in This Market, Click the link below @Global Carotenoids Market: Geographical AnalysisAmong all the regional markets for carotenoids, Europe has a strong presence due to the growing demand for animal feed and health supplements. A robust cosmetics industry, supported by the presence of the leading cosmetic producers, such as Unilever, L'Oreal, Henkel, and Beiersdorf, is expected to impact the growth of Europe market for carotenoids positively in the near future.On the other hand, Asia Pacific is anticipated to witness lucrative growth opportunities in the near future on account of the increasing utilization of these additives in animal feed and food supplement. The technological advancements, economic rise, industrial growth, and low production costs in several countries, such as Japan, China, and India are also projected to stimulate the Asia Pacific market for carotenoids in the years to come.Companies Mentioned in the Research ReportWith the presence of a large number of players, the global market for carotenoids is demonstrating a highly fragmented and a competitive landscape. BASF SE, Lycored, Royal DSM N.V., Naturex SA, Chr. Hansen A/S, Divis Laboratories, FMC Corp., DSM Nutritional Products, Cyanotech Corp., Brenntag, Kemin Industries Inc., ExcelVite SDN. BHD., D.D. Williamson & Co. Inc., Allied Biotech Corp., and Dohler Group, are the leading vendors of carotenoids across the world.Enquire about this Report @About Market Research Reports Search EngineMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research 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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:Missouri State (7-6) at Palmetto Invitationalvs. Coastal Carolina (0-12), Friday, April 13, 8 a.m.vs. #20 College of Charleston (13-6), Friday, April 13, 2 p.m.vs. #19 Tulane (18-11), Saturday, April 14, 8 a.m.at #9 South Carolina (16-6), Saturday, April 14, 12 p.m.Wheeler Beach, Columbia, S.C.Center Court matches of the MSU/South Carolina match will be streamed on SEC Network+ , available at ESPN.com/Watch and the ESPN app.-- Missouri State will play the final four matches of its inaugural beach volleyball season this weekend at the Palmetto Invitational in Columbia, S.C. The Bears will play three teams ranked in the top 20 of the AVCA poll in a schedule that includes contests against Coastal Carolina, No. 20 College of Charleston, No. 19 Tulane, host and ninth-ranked South Carolina.Missouri State is 7-6 overall and owns a .508 pairs winning percentage. Three different pairs own a winning record, led byand's 8-4 record primarily at the No. 4 spot.andown the distinction of picking up the school's first ever victory, March 2 at Nebraska, and are 8-5 on the year, with 11 of those matches in the third flight.andalso have eight victories, all coming at the fifth position.Coastal Carolina is 0-12 overall and owns an 8-52 pairs record on the year. College of Charleston is 13-6 and ranked 20th in the latest AVCA poll. The Cougars owns a pair of top-20 wins on the year. Tulane is 18-11, ranked 19th, and owns four top-20 victories this season. South Carolina is ranked ninth nationally with a 16-6 record.There are more than 60 NCAA varsity beach volleyball programs across the nation, with several schools slated to add the sport in the near future.A match is two sets to 21 points with a 15-point third set if needed, and all sets are rally scoring. Each school divides its roster into five teams of two players each (10 total players will compete for each school in a match), and the winner is the school that captures three of the five matches between the two-player teams.Plastics in Electrical Vehicles Market  Current Trends and Future Aspect 2025

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The pressing need for reducing CO2 emissions from vehicles in a number of industrialized nations has bolstered the demand for reducing the vehicular weight. Plastics have been popularly used in various automobile parts, interior as well as exterior, as substitutes for metals to significantly reduce the weight and mitigate the adverse environmental impact. The growing use of plastic composites and hybrids in electric vehicles will lead to interesting avenues in the automotive industry world over. The striking emergence of electric vehicles in several developing and developed countries follows from a robust push from government and private players to reduce the dependence on internal combustion engines and fossil fuels.Read Report Overview @A number of prominent automobile manufacturers in major regions are focused on rolling out electric cars or their variants in the coming years. They are increasingly inclined to reduce the weight of the vehicles by using cost-effective materials such as plastics. The use of plastics enable auto makers to achieve the objective of fuel efficient engines and embark on the path of design innovations.Various types of plastics such as polyurethane, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene, polyoxymethylene, polycarbonate, acrylic, and polyamide are used for automotive parts, reduces the overall weight of the vehicles, apart from imparting remarkable strength. The report offers a comprehensive insights into the growth drivers and notable trends, key challenges and emerging opportunities, regulatory landscape, major technological advances, and the competitive landscape in various regions.The persistent drive for achieving fuel economy and reducing vehicular emissions in various parts of the world has led to the demand for materials and composites in the automotive industry to reduce the vehicles weight. This is the primary factor stimulating the demand for plastics in electric vehicles. The sustained focus on greener transportation solutions by governments in several emerging and developed nations is a key factor bolstering the production of electric vehicles and their variants. This is fortifying the demand for plastics for making automotive parts of electric vehicles (EV). The extensive use of various types of composite plastics in battery electric vehicle (BEV) to achieve the desired weight saving cost is a key factor boosting the market for plastics in electric vehicles.Research in various developing and developed nations into developing highly innovative lightweight materials using plastics are catalyzing the growth of the market. Furthermore, the policy push in several developing economies to promote the use of electric vehicles is a notable trend accentuating the growth of the market. The decrease in the prices of raw materials for manufacturing electric vehicles in several countries is expected to provide a robust fillip to their production, which positively reflects on the uptake of plastics to achieve the lightweight architectures. The advent of biodegradable plastic or bioplastics in the automotive industry is likely to open up exciting prospects over the forecast period.Regionally, both North America and Europe are prominent markets for plastics in electric vehicles. The extensive production of electric vehicles in various economies of North America is stoking the demand for plastics for lightweighting of vehicles. The rapid strides taken in EV production in various parts of Europe and substantial developments in charging infrastructures are expected to fuel the growth of this regional market.Meanwhile, Asia Pacific is witnessing a surge of promising opportunities for market players to capitalize on. Sustained government initiatives in the form of subsidies and taxation schemes in major economies are crucial factors accentuating the regional market. Japan and China being the major producers of EVs are likely to witness burgeoning demand for plastics for automotive parts.Request to view Sample Report:Some of the prominent players operating in the plastics in electric vehicles market are Dow, DuPont, INEOS, Evonik Industries, LyondellBasell Industries Holdings B.V., Formosa Plastics Corporation, BASF SE, and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC). The report highlights their key strategies and evaluates their impact on the global competitive dynamics over the forecast period.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.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.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:Tuberculosis Testing Market: Players Take the Inorganic Route to Grow Share

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In order to steal a march over their competitors, keen players in the global tuberculosis testing market are banking upon strategic acquisitions. It enables them to expand their outreach into new markets and diversify their product portfolio. Besides the inorganic route, companies are also spending on research and development to come up with better products. They are also seen lapping up opportunities offered by the government for research on tuberculosis testing.Request for Sample Copy of Report @Some of the prominent players in the global tuberculosis testing market are Becton, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Hain Lifescience GmbH, Hologic Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Alere Inc., Epistem plc, Cepheid, bioMerieux SA, Akonni Biosystems Inc., LIONEX Diagnostics & Therapeutics GmbH., Danaher Corporation, Creative Diagnostics, QIAGEN, and Oxford Immunotec Ltd.As per a report by Transparency Market Research, the global tuberculosis testing market will likely expand at a tepid CAGR of 3.9% during the period between 2017 and 2025. Rising at this pace the market is projected to reach a value of US$3.18 bn by 2025.Based on type, the global tuberculosis testing market can be segmented into chest x-ray, culture based tests, IGRA (interferon-gamma release assays), mantoux test (TST), nucleic acid testing (NAT), Xpert test, serological tests, smear microscopy, and other tests such as ADA, etc. Of them, the culture based tests held a leading share in 2016. In the years ahead too, the segment is expected to retain its dominant share vis-a-vis revenue. This is because it helps to diagnose and confirm active tuberculosis more accurately.Request a Brochure of the Report @Geographically, the key segments of the global tuberculosis testing market are North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. Among them, Asia Pacific, at present accounts for maximum share in the market in terms of revenue. It is expected to hold on to its leading revenue share in the near future too by rising at a maximum CAGR of 4.9% from 2017 to 2025.Tuberculosis claims numerous lives annually. As per a WHO report, around 10.4 mn new tuberculosis incidents occurred in 2015. Men comprised almost 56% of that figure. Such alarming numbers have benefitted the global tuberculosis testing market.Adds the lead analyst of the TMR report, The global tuberculosis testing market will likely expand at an incremental pace owing to different factors such as high return on investments, first-mover advantage to the tuberculosis test kits manufacturers, growing focus on awareness programs by the governmental and non-governmental organizations, and tax credits, and fee waivers offered by the government.Enquiry for discount on this report @Currently, hospital laboratories generate maximum demand in the global tuberculosis testing market. The growth in the hospital laboratories can be attributed to the cost effective tests available in hospital laboratories. The physician's office laboratories segment is another key segment which is proliferating worldwide because of their cost effectiveness.About UsTransparency Market Research is a next-generation market intelligence provider, offering fact-based solutions to business leaders, consultants, and strategy professionals.Our reports are single-point solutions for businesses to grow, evolve, and mature. Our real-time data collection methods along with ability to track more than one million high growth niche products are aligned with your aims. The detailed and proprietary statistical models used by our analysts offer insights for making right decision in the shortest span of time. For organizations that require specific but comprehensive information we offer customized solutions through adhoc reports. These requests are delivered with the perfect combination of right sense of fact-oriented problem solving methodologies and leveraging existing data repositories.TMR believes that unison of solutions for clients-specific problems with right methodology of research is the key to help enterprises reach right decision.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Potassium Hydrogen Sulfite Market to Undertake Strapping Growth | 2025

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Potassium hydrogen sulfite is also known as potassium bisulfite (KHSO3). This colorless to white hygroscopic crystalline powder is used as a sterilizing agent in the production of alcoholic beverages. Potassium bisulfite is end product by the reaction of sulfur dioxide and potassium carbonate salts. The sulfur dioxide is passed through a solution of the potassium carbonate to completely eliminate the carbon di oxide from the salt solution. The concentrated solution is allowed to crystallize to give it a powdered form. Potassium hydrogen sulfite is used to preserve foods & beverages such as fruit juices, squashes, and several types of fruits.Read Report Overview @The use of the potassium hydrogen sulfite is approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration. In the food & beverage industry potassium hydrogen sulfite acts as an antioxidant and is used as a preservative. In the pharmaceutical industry, large doses of potassium hydrogen sulfite are acceptable as they get rapidly oxidized to sulfates. Potassium hydrogen sulfite is used in oenology (study of wines)The global potassium hydrogen sulfite market has been segmented based on grade, type, application, and region. In terms of grade, the global market has been segregated into food grade, photo grade, and technical grade. Based on type, the market has been divided into liquid and powders. Potassium hydrogen sulfite in solution form containing more than 15 pp 100 (m/v) of sulfur dioxide; therefore it must not be stored at low temperatures to avoid the risk of crystallization. In terms of application, the potassium hydrogen sulfite market has been categorized into chemicals, pharmaceutical, leather, photography, food & beverage, wastewater, textiles, and paper & pulp.In terms of region, Europe is the dominant region which is using potassium hydrogen sulfite in the beverage industry. Countries such as Italy, Spain, France, and Germany are popular for their wine. Increasing demand for ready-to-eat food products is propelling the potassium bisulfite market in North America. The potassium bisulfite market in Latin America is expected to expand in the near future. The leather industry in Brazil and Argentina has made an overall development being responsible for 4.4% of world leather production. This, in turn, is increasing the demand for potassium hydrogen sulfite as a leather processing chemical. Potassium hydrogen sulfite is used to make the leather products softer, wearable, waterproof, and long-lasting. The potassium hydrogen sulfite market in Asia Pacific is expand due to its use in the beverage industry. Demand for potassium hydrogen sulfite is increasing in countries such as Australia, India, and China owing to the increasing usage in the food industry.Request to view Sample Report:Key players operating in the global potassium hydrogen sulfite market include Aditya Birla Chemicals Thailand, Akos Consulting & Solutions, Tractus, Wubei-Biochem, Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC., Chemtex Speciality Limited, and BASF SE.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.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.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:Primary Aldosteronism Market Highlight, by type and Treatment Topmost Leading Key Players Pfizer Inc. (U.S.), Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (India), Bristol Laboratories Ltd (England), Outlook 2023

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Primary Aldosteronism Market research report, Type (type I, type II), Indication (heart attack, kidney failure, stroke), by Diagnosis (blood test, imaging), Treatment (surgery, aldosterone antagonists), End User (hospitals) - Global forecast till 2023.The global primary aldosteronism market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.40% during forecast period.KEY PLAYERS FOR PRIMARY ALDOSTERONISM MARKETThe key players for the global primary aldosteronism market are Pfizer Inc. (U.S.), Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (India), Bristol Laboratories Ltd (England), CMP Pharma. (U.S.), Koninklijke Philips N.V. (The Netherlands), GE Healthcare (U.K), Siemens AG (Germany), Shimadzu Corporation (Japan), Canon Inc. (Japan), and others.Get Sample Report @MARKET SCENARIO FOR PRIMARY ALDOSTERONISM MARKETThe adrenal glands within the body produce some essential hormones like aldosterone. This hormone balances the levels of sodium and potassium in the blood. Primary aldosteronism is a medical condition in which the adrenal glands produce high levels of aldosterone, causing the patient to lose potassium and retain sodium. This excess levels of sodium, increases the blood volume and blood pressure. The diagnosis and treatment of primary aldosteronism is important because it increases the risk of the heart diseases and stroke. This has provided the essential background for market growth. Factors such as increasing prevalence of primary aldosteronism and the growing geriatric population are the major drivers for the market growth. According to a study published in the International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2016, the prevalence of the primary aldosteronism was estimated to be greater than 5%. Moreover, increasing obese population and rising consumption of alcohol is estimated to fuel the market. According to the World Health Organization, in 2016, approximately 1.9 billion adults aged 18 years or more were overweight. Moreover, it was estimated that out this population more than 650 million were obese. Additionally, rising per capita healthcare expenditure boosts the market growth.SEGMENTATION FOR PRIMARY ALDOSTERONISM MARKETThe global primary aldosteronism market is segmented on the basis of type, indications, diagnosis, treatment and end users.On the basis of type, the market is segmented as Type I, and Type II. On the basis of indications, the market is categorized into heart attack, kidney failure, stroke, and others. On the basis of diagnosis, the market is segmented into blood test, imaging, and others. The blood test segment is sub-segmented into aldosterone profiling, renin profiling, and others. The imaging segment is sub-segmented into computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and others.On the basis of end users, the market is segmented into surgery, aldosterone antagonists, and others. The aldosterone antagonists is sub-m segmented into spironolactone, eplerenone, and others.REGIONAL ANALYSIS FOR PRIMARY ALDOSTERONISM MARKETAmerica dominates the global primary aldosteronism market owing to a well-developed healthcare sector and a huge patient population. Apart from this, changing lifestyle and increasing healthcare expenditure have boosted the growth of the market in America. According to the Population Reference Bureau, the American geriatric population is projected to double and reach approximately over 98 million by 2060.Europe is the second largest market for primary aldosteronism, and is followed by Asia Pacific. Availability of funds for research, a huge patient population and government support for research & development are the driving factors for the market within the region. On a regional basis, the market is segmented into Western Europe, and Eastern Europe. The Western Europe leads the market due to the presence of developed economies like Germany, Italy, France, and others. On the other hand, Eastern Europe is estimated to be the fastest growing market.Get Discount @MAJOR TOC FOR PRIMARY ALDOSTERONISM MARKETChapter 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 Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restrains4.3 Opportunities4.4 Challenges4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4.6 Technology Trends & AssessmentChapter 5. Market Factor Analysis5.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis5.1.1 Bargaining Power of Suppliers5.1.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers5.1.3 Threat of New Entrants5.1.4 Threat of Substitutes5.1.5 Intensity of Rivalry5.2 Value Chain Analysis5.3 Investment Feasibility Analysis5.4 Pricing AnalysisLIST OF TABLESTable 1 Primary Aldosteronism Industry Synopsis, 2017  2023Table 2 Global Primary Aldosteronism Market Estimates and Forecast, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 3 Global Primary Aldosteronism Market by Region, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 4 Global Primary Aldosteronism Market by Type, 2017  2023, (USD Million)Table 5 Global Primary Aldosteronism Market by Indications, 2017  2023, (USD Million)LIST OF FIGURESFigure 1 Research ProcessFigure 2 Segmentation for Global Primary Aldosteronism MarketFigure 3 Segmentation Market Dynamics for Global Primary Aldosteronism MarketFigure 4 Global Primary Aldosteronism Market Share, By Type 2016Figure 5 Global Primary Aldosteronism Market Share, By Indications 2016Figure 6 Global Primary Aldosteronism Market Share, By Diagnosis 2016Figure 7 Global Primary Aldosteronism Market Share, By Treatment 2016TOC Continued..Inquire before Buying@About 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 Us:Market Research Future, Office No. 528,Amanora Chambers Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar, Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comAirport Baggage Screening Systems Market 2018 to 2023 Global Key Players: Glidepath Group, L3 Security & Detection Systems, NUCTECH COMPANY LIMITED, Rapiscan Systems, and Smiths Detection.

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Airport Baggage Screening Systems Market - Overview:Market Research Future published a cooked research report on Global Airport Baggage Screening Systems Market. This report includes a study of strategies, of major market players. It includes the product portfolios and developments of leading major players such as American Science and Engineering, Inc., Analogic Corporation, Astrophysics Inc., C.E.I.A. S.p.A., Gilardoni S.p.A., Glidepath Group, L3 Security & Detection Systems, NUCTECH COMPANY LIMITED, Rapiscan Systems, and Smiths Detection.The increasing development of smart airports and new terminals, are some major factors that boost the global market for airport baggage screening systems. Over the years, there have been increasing investments on airport infrastructure, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Moreover, a number of smart initiatives are being introduced at the airports, which is expected to augment the aviation industry, as a whole. With the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and Airports Council International (ACI) focusing on ensuring minimal inconvenience to passengers and facilitate optimized airport operations, the airport baggage screening systems are expected to be subjected to rapid technological developments. With the development of new airports the role for baggage handling systems has become significant, over the years. As a result, the global airport baggage screening market is expected to register a CAGR of 5.43%Request a Sample Report @North America dominated the global airport baggage screening systems market in 2016North America dominated the market for the airport baggage screening systems in 2016, largely due to existence of major market players in this region. Over the years, there have been high investments into airport security systems in the region, due to the growing number of attacks and terror threats across the globe.Asia-Pacific is expected to be the leading market for the airport baggage screening systems, primarily due to the increasing expenses on the development and upgradation of airport infrastructure in the region. Countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand have witnessed steady rise in international air traffic in the recent years, which have resulted in higher investments on the airports by their governments.In countries such as India and China, there has been a significant rise in domestic air traffic. In addition, there have been a large number of terrorist threats in this region, which have compelled governments to improve their security measures. Thus, the region has become very lucrative for the companies that manufacture Airport Baggage Screening Systems Market.Ask for your specific company profile and country level customization on reports.The growing demand for air travel and the increasing air traffic, are expected to propel the demand for the market. The manufacturers of these are increasingly focusing on the development and provision of efficient baggage screening systems, as the improvement of the existing baggage screening processes can support the performance and efficiency of an airport, simultaneously. Therefore, the global airport baggage screening market is expected to register a CAGR of more than 5.43%.This research report provides insights, on various levels of analysis such as industry analysis, and market share analysis for the leading players along with their profiles. It also helps in studying the target segments by providing views on emerging & high-growth segments. The market data comprises the basic assessment of the competitive scenarios & strategies in the global construction lift market, including high-growth regions and/or countries, and political, & economic environments. The project report, further, provides views on both the historical market values and pricing & cost analysis.Browse Complete Report @Intended Audience Distributer & Supplier companies End Users Consultants and Investment bankers Government as well as Independent Regulatory AuthoritiesAbout 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:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comZygomatic and Pterygoid Implants Market: Acquisitions Undertaken by Savvy Companies to Bolster Positions

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In the battle for supremacy in the global zygomatic and pterygoid implants market, most companies are seen taking the inorganic route of acquisitions. A leading player Danaher Corporation, for example, shot to the forefront after acquiring Nobel Biocare, which is a powerhouse in zygomatic and pterygoid implants. Danaher Corporation has also burgeoned with multiple products under its wing and a solid geographical presence.Request for Sample Copy of Report @Yet another strategic buyout which changed the contours of the zygomatic and pterygoid implants market is that of a Brazil-headquartered implant company Neodent by Straumann Holding AG. Apart from Danaher Corporation and Straumann Holding AG, other big shot companies operating in the market are Noris Medical, Silimed, S.I.N. Implant System, Implance, Southern Implants, Jeil Medical Corporation, and Titaniumfix.The global zygomatic and pterygoid implants market is expected to tread a steady growth trajectory by clocking a CAGR of 5.9% from 2017 to 2025, predicts a report by Transparency Market Research prepared after an exhaustive primary and secondary research. The opportunity in the market is expected to become US$350.2 mn by 2025 from US$211.4 mn in 2016.Based on the length, the zygomatic and pterygoid implants can be categorized into above 50 mm, 4150 mm, 3140 mm, and 30 mm. The 31-40 mm segment, of them, held a leading share in 2016.Request a Brochure of the Report @Latin America, North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa are the dominant geographic segments in the global market for zygomatic and pterygoid implants. At present, Europe among them, leads the market with maximum share. In the next couple of years too, the region is expected to retain its dominant share by rising at a maximum CAGR of 6.2% during the period between 2017 and 2025. A good deal of pharmaceutical companies pouring money into development of better dental implants for atrophy of maxillofacial bone is the primary reason for the dominant position of the region.Varied unique perceived benefits of zygomatic technique has had a positive impact on their market. They allow fixing a row of teeth in just 72 hours as opposed to the traditional methods that take a protracted 6 months. They also not require bone graft and serve to bring down discomfort dramatically, so much so people can chew or bite into crunchy food instantaneously. Elaborates our lead analyst, Zygomatic and pterygoid implants impart aesthetically better results for patients having atrophic edentulous maxilla. Treatment is hassle-free and recovery much faster.Our report informs that zygomatic implants succeed almost 95% of the time. Their advantages over prevalent implant procedures and greater success rate are the primarily serving to boost their market. But there are other factors too that are positively impacting the market such as a large pool of elderly highly susceptible to dental issues, alarming rise in dental injuries, more money with people to go for such dental procedures, and increasing concerns about ones appearance.Enquiry for discount on this report @Multispecialty hospitals, equipped with surgical instruments, general anesthesia, and specialty care  all of which are needed for zygomatic implant procedure  are generating maximum demand and revenue in the global zygomatic and pterygoid implants market.About UsTransparency Market Research is a next-generation market intelligence provider, offering fact-based solutions to business leaders, consultants, and strategy professionals.Our reports are single-point solutions for businesses to grow, evolve, and mature. Our real-time data collection methods along with ability to track more than one million high growth niche products are aligned with your aims. The detailed and proprietary statistical models used by our analysts offer insights for making right decision in the shortest span of time. For organizations that require specific but comprehensive information we offer customized solutions through adhoc reports. These requests are delivered with the perfect combination of right sense of fact-oriented problem solving methodologies and leveraging existing data repositories.TMR believes that unison of solutions for clients-specific problems with right methodology of research is the key to help enterprises reach right decision.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Corrugated Paperboard IBCs Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Corrugated Paperboard IBCs Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.Global corrugated paperboard IBCs Market: OverviewIntermediate Bulk Containers are useful for transporting heavy goods. However, often, companies look for alternative solutions, which are more economical, safe, and are ecologically more compatible. A corrugated paperboard IBC is an efficient alternative to conventional Intermediate Bulk Containers. Corrugated paperboard IBCs are widely used to transport liquid food and non-hazardous liquid chemicals. Corrugated paperboard IBCs enjoy high preference among logistics service providers as an alternative and affordable solution. The global corrugated paperboard IBCs market is expected to have a positive outlook over the forecast period, due to their economical pricing as compared to alternative solutions, and higher efficiency in saving storage space. Moreover, corrugated paperboard IBCs are more environment friendly than traditional Intermediate Bulk Containers. Conventional methods of transporting bulk liquid using steel and plastic drums are considered hectic and pose serious challenges to the environment. Due to all these factors, the global corrugated paperboard IBCs market growth is expected to remain largely positive, during the forecast period.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Global corrugated paperboard IBCs Market: DynamicsGlobal trade has undergone rapid transformation in the last decade. Corrugated paperboard IBCs are used to transport a wide range of non-hazardous chemicals such as, adhesives, cleaners, emulsions, latex, and shampoo, among others. The global liquid transportation market has faced substantial demand in the past few years, and is supported by growing trade between countries. In addition to non-hazardous chemicals, corrugated paperboard IBCs are also used to transport food products, such as, soy sauce, juice concentrates, buttermilk, milk products, and sweeteners, among others. Since corrugated paperboard IBCs widely cater to the food & beverage industry, personal care & cosmetics industry, a strong demand for products such as shampoos and food products is anticipated to be a key driver for the growth of the global corrugated paperboard IBCs market. The need for sustainable packaging solutions is expected to play a significant role in fuelling the growth of the global corrugated paperboard IBCs market. Despite the positive outlook, there are certain factors, which might hamper the growth of the global corrugated paperboard IBCs market. These include the rise of alternative packaging solutions such as Octabins.Global corrugated paperboard IBCs Market: SegmentationThe global corrugated paperboard IBCs has been segmented as On the basis of capacity, the global corrugated paperboard IBCs market has been segmented as -2000 LOn the basis of applications, the global corrugated paperboard IBCs market has been segmented as -ChemicalsAdhesivesEmulsionsInksLubricantsShampoo & DetergentsOthersFood & BeveragesJuice concentratesSour CreamSweetenersVinegarCitrus JuiceOthersGlobal corrugated paperboard IBCs Market: Geographical OutlookThe global corrugated paperboard IBCs market has been divided into seven regions North AmericaLatin AmericaWestern EuropeEastern EuropeAsia Pacific excluding JapanMiddle East & AfricaJapanThe North America region is expected to lead the global corrugated paperboard IBCs sales, owing to a much higher volume to sea trade than other regions. The Western Europe region is expected to closely follow, in terms of volume. The Asia Pacific region is anticipated to provide significant opportunities for the growth of the global corrugated paperboard IBCs. Emerging economies such as India and China have witnessed government efforts in recent years, which aim to essentially increase their trade volume, several folds. The Asia Pacific corrugated paperboard IBCs market is expected to surpass its North American counterpart, during the early 2020s. The Latin America and Eastern Europe corrugated paperboard IBCs markets are expected to witness sluggish growth during the next five years, due to the still prevalent effects of the recession of 2015, after which, the pace of growth might pick up.Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Global corrugated paperboard IBCs Market: Key PlayersFew of the key players operating in the global corrugated paperboard market are  Bulk Handling Australia, BlackVel, Karions Ltd, Qingdao LAF Packaging Co., Ltd., and BARR Plastics, Inc., among others.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 @Erectile Dysfunction Market to Witness Development of Innovative Device Therapy Solutions by 2023 |Arizton Erectile dysfunction is one of the most common sexual health disorders, and it affects a significant portion of the male population.



A recent report by Arizton states that the high prevalence of ED and associated chronic conditions such as prostate cancer, benign prostate hyperplasia, diabetes, CVDs, which can, in turn, pose as a high-risk factor for the occurrence of this disease are factors driving the development of innovative drug and device therapy in the global market.



Increasing disease awareness, growing patient willingness to seek medical assistance for disease management, and the increasing presence of favorable healthcare guidelines will enable vendors to launch new treatment solutions in the global erectile dysfunction market. The recent emergent low-intensity extra-corporeal shockwave therapy holds the potential to deliver a permanent treatment solution to the disease during the forecast period.



The global erectile dysfunction market is estimated to generate revenues of over $4.5 billion by 2023.



Read the full report on Erectile Dysfunction Market  Global Outlook and Forecast 2018-2023

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The various device therapy available in the erectile dysfunction market are:



 Penile Implants



Penile implants are known as a penile prosthesis. These implants are the medical devices that are implanted into the penis through an outpatient surgical procedure. Penile implants were one of the initial therapies to be used for the treatment of erectile dysfunction. Penile implants are considered as an end-stage treatment option for ED.



Two broad types of penile implants are currently available in the market, and it consists of non-inflatable implants (3-piece and 2-piece) and non-inflatable or malleable implants. The leading vendors are focusing on introducing advances in penile prosthesis to make the implant more natural, durable, and reliable devices. The various prosthesis available in the market includes kink resistant tubing, rear tip extenders, lock-out valve, tactile pump, polypropylene cylinder coating, and antibiotic-impregnated devices. The key benefits of penile implants include potential to cure the disease permanently, end-therapy for an option for other therapy type non-responders, high patient satisfaction rates, and leads to a more natural erection. The key players are investing in the R&D for innovative, superior, and newer generation prosthesis with safer and high-efficacy profile as the demand for better quality products is the top priority for healthcare providers as well as patients.



 Vacuum Therapy Devices



Vacuum therapy devices use negative pressure to distend the corporal sinusoids and increase the blood inflow to the penis, thereby achieving penile erections. The device consists of a hollow tube, automated or manual pump, and constriction rings. Vacuum therapy devices may be classified as vacuum constriction device (VCD) and vacuum erectile device (VED). The VCD features an external constricting ring, which needs to be placed at the base of the penis to prevent blood outflow from the corpora cavernosa to maintain an erection. The VED uses the vacuum therapy without a constrictive ring, with the objective of increasing blood oxygenation in the corpora cavernosa. The use of VCDs are considered as one of a key non-invasive, effective, safe, drug-free and cost-effective erectile dysfunction treatment options, especially for PDE5 non-responders, and these devices are often used in penile rehabilitation programs. The increasing commercial availability of these vacuum therapy devices will boost the adoption of these devices and result in effective management of erectile dysfunction in the global market. The increase in a number of people seeking erectile dysfunction treatment, growth in e-commerce promotions and marketing of VCDs, and increase in disease awareness, high availability of OTC certified devices will propel the growth of the market during the forecast period.



 Others Erectile Dysfunction Devices



The discoveries and technological innovations through medical research is resulting in the expansion of treatment modalities for various diseases, especially erectile dysfunction. The top players are leveraging technology to introduce a wide range option in the global market such as external penile support devices, penile vibrators, and low-intensity extracorporeal shockwave devices. The use of low-intensity extracorporeal shockwave (LI-ESW) for the treatment of ED is one of highly research areas. The device is a new and noninvasive technique to modify the structures involved in developing an erection through the application of shockwaves to targeted sites along the penile shaft, which, in turn, causes reactions that result in neovascularization of the penile tissue. The product is approved for use in select countries such as Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, and Mexico.



The prominent players operating in the erectile dysfunction market are Bayer AG, Eli Lilly and Company, VIVUS, Inc, Pfizer, Boston Scientific Corp., and Coloplast A/S.



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Read: Erectile Dysfunction Market is Expected to Worth Over $4 Billion by 2023

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Read: Erectile Dysfunction Devices Therapies Market to Worth Over $645 Million by 2023

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About Arizton

Arizton  Advisory and Intelligence is an innovation and quality-driven firm, which offers cutting-edge research solutions to clients across the world. We excel in providing comprehensive market intelligence reports and advisory and consulting services.



We offer comprehensive market research reports on industries such as consumer goods & retail technology, automotive and mobility, smart tech, healthcare and life sciences, industrial machinery, chemicals and materials, IT and media, logistics and packaging. These reports contain detailed industry analysis, market size, share, growth drivers, and trend forecasts.



Arizton comprises a team of exuberant and well-experienced analysts who have mastered in generating incisive reports. Our specialist analysts possess exemplary skills in market research. We train our team in advanced research practices, techniques, and ethics to outperform in fabricating impregnable research reports.



Arizton Advisory & Intelligence

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Permanent link to this press release: Copy Please set a link in the press area of your homepage to this press release on openPR. openPR disclaims liability for any content contained in this release.Device-Embedded Biometric Authentication Market to Record Sturdy Growth by 2026

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Growing trend towards secure and convenient way of authentication of devices is the key factor triggers the growth of global device-embedded biometric authentication market. Device-embedded biometric authentication is defined as the use of biometric authentication method to enhance the security and accessibility of devices, such as smartphones, tablets notebook PCs, and wearable devices. Devices enabled with biometric authentication are embedded with necessary hardware and software for authentication. Based on the application various type of biometric authentication can be deployed, such as face, iris, voice and fingerprint authenticationGlobal Device-Embedded Biometric Authentication Market: Market DynamicsIncreasing need for effective personal authentication in wide range applications such as ID verification, access control, electronic commerce are the factors contributes the healthy growth rate of global device-embedded biometric authentication market. Additionally, rising interest on deploying biometric authentication for verifying individual identity of users seeking access to various virtual asserts and increasing adoption mobile payment applications, accelerates the growth of device-embedded biometric authentication market globally. Also, increasing smartphone sales, growing telecommunication infrastructure and growing preference for automated identity authentication solutions across various platforms, further fuels the growth of global device-embedded biometric authentication market. However, high initial cost and technical concerns related to compatibility with existing system are the key factors likely to deter the progression of global device-embedded biometric authentication market.Request For Report Sample @On the basis of type, the global device-embedded biometric authentication market can be segmented into hardware and software. On the basis of technology, the global device-embedded biometric authentication market can be segmented into fingerprint recognition, iris recognition, face recognition, and Voice .authentication. On the basis of type of devices, global device-embedded biometric authentication market can be segmented into smartphones, laptops, tablets and wearable devices. On the basis of end-user, global device-embedded biometric authentication market can be segmented into Banking, Financial services and Insurance (BFSI), e  commerce, healthcare government and others.Regionally, global device-embedded biometric authentication market can be segmented into Regionally, Global Device-Embedded Biometric Authentication Market can be segmented into North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa (MEA), Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) and Japan.North America followed by Western Europe is expected to dominate the market due to continuous investment to deploy new technologies and high customer preference to enhanced security solutions. Asia pacific is identified as the fastest growing market due to increasing number of smartphone users and rapid adaptation to mobile banking applications.Request For Table Of Content @The key vendors in the Global Device-Embedded Biometric Authentication Market, include HID Global, IDEX America, Inc., Gemalto NV, ImageWare Systems., FUJITSU, Fingerprint Cards AB, Techshino Technology, Apple Inc., Nuance Communications, Inc., and ArmorVox.Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Spinal Implants Market to Witness Robust Expansion by 2025

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Worldwide Market Reports added Latest Research Report titled Global Spinal Implants Market Professional Survey Report 2018 to its Large Report database.This report studies Spinal Implants 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.Request Sample Copy of the Business Report @This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering DePuy Synthes, Stryker Corporation, Medtronic, NuVasive, Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Accel Spine, Aesculap, Globus Medical, Alphatec Holdings, Orthofix International, Amedica, Apollo Spine, K2M Group Holdings, RTI Surgical, Centinel Spine.On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into Spinal Fusion and Fixation Technologies, Vertebral Compression Fracture Treatment, Motion Preservation/Non-fusion Technologies, Spinal Decompression.By Application, the market can be split into Open Surgery, Minimally Invasive Surgery.By Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want) North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, India.Get discount on this report :Table of Contents :Global Spinal Implants Market Professional Survey Report 20181 Industry Overview of Spinal Implants2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Spinal Implants3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Spinal Implants4 Global Spinal Implants Overall Market Overview5 Spinal Implants Regional Market Analysis6 Global 2013-2018E Spinal Implants Segment Market Analysis (by Type)7 Global 2013-2018E Spinal Implants Segment Market Analysis (by Application)9 Development Trend of Analysis of Spinal Implants Market10 Spinal Implants Marketing Type Analysis11 Consumers Analysis of Spinal Implants12 Conclusion of the Global Spinal Implants Market Professional Survey Report 2017If 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.CONTACT US:Mr. ShahWorldwide Market Reports1001 4th Ave,U.STel: +1 415 871 0703Email: sales@worldwidemarketreports.comWebsite:Guidewires Market: Companies up Spends on Research and Development to Stay Ahead of Curve

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A prominent trend in the global guidewires market is the thrust on research and development by keen companies to come up with innovative products to suit an array of medical procedures. This strategy of product development is meant to up sales and revenues. To that end, companies are increasing allocations on research and development.Request for Sample Copy of Report @Some of the noteworthy players in the global guidewires market are Abbott, Terumo Medical Corporation, Integer Holdings Corporation, ASAHI INTECC CO., LTD., B. Braun Melsungen AG, Olympus Corporation, Stryker, Cardinal Health, Inc., CONMED Corporation, Cook, Merit Medical Systems, Inc., Boston Scientific Corporation, and Medtronic. Upcoming names in the market include Entellus Medical, Inc., EPflex Feinwerktechnik GmbH, and SP Medical A/S.A report by Transparency Market Research predicts the global guidewires market to clock a steady CAGR of 6.2% during the period between 2017 and 2025 to become worth US$2.7 bn by 2025-end from US$1.6 bn in 2016.Key products purveyed in the global guidewires market are coronary guidewires, peripheral guidewires, neurovascular guidewires, urology guidewires, radiology guidewires, gastroenterology guidewires, and others such as otolaryngology and oncology guidewires. Among them, the segment of coronary guidewires hold a leading share in the market because of the alarming increase in instances of cardiovascular diseases, worldwide.Geographically, the main segments of the global guidewires market are North America, Asia Pacific, South America, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific, of them, is expected to outshine all other regions in the global guidewires market because of the increasing incidence of cardiovascular diseases, increasing allocations for healthcare in developing nations, and demand for affordable minimally invasive interventional procedures. Rising number of local manufacturers of guidewires providing innovative products at lower costs is also benefitting the market in the region which is expected to clock a CAGR of 7.0% from 2017 to 2025.Request a Brochure of the Report @Some of the major growth drivers in the global guidewires market are rapid uptake of interventional procedures for diagnosis and treatment and surging popularity of minimally invasive procedures for angiography, prostatic stenting, transurethral electroporation of the prostate, transurethral needle ablation, and transurethral microwave. Growing per capita healthcare expenditure is also said to be positively influencing the market.The global guidewires market is seeing a considerably degree of technological evolution because of efforts of savvy players to come up with more effective products. Rapid evolution of guidewire tips technology in the form of magnetically rich guidewires has resulted in increased scope of guidewires application from therapeutic to diagnostic purposes, and this is likely to boost the growth of diagnostic centers segment in the global guidewires market during the forecast period, adds the lead analyst of TMR report.One factor, posing a hindrance to the market, on the flipside, is the steep cost of guidewires owing to significant time and money invested in their research and development. Non-reusable nature of guidewires also makes them expensive.At present, the end-use segment of hospitals is driving maximum demand in the global guidewires market owing to the rising preference among patients for minimally invasive interventional procedures. Clinics too are contributing significantly to the demand, along with ambulatory surgical centers.Report Overview @About UsTransparency Market Research is a next-generation market intelligence provider, offering fact-based solutions to business leaders, consultants, and strategy professionals.Our reports are single-point solutions for businesses to grow, evolve, and mature. Our real-time data collection methods along with ability to track more than one million high growth niche products are aligned with your aims. The detailed and proprietary statistical models used by our analysts offer insights for making right decision in the shortest span of time. For organizations that require specific but comprehensive information we offer customized solutions through adhoc reports. These requests are delivered with the perfect combination of right sense of fact-oriented problem solving methodologies and leveraging existing data repositories.TMR believes that unison of solutions for clients-specific problems with right methodology of research is the key to help enterprises reach right decision.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:FMI Predicts Bromine Derivatives Market Worth US$ 5,572.8 Mn by 2026

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Demand for bromine derivatives will continue to surge owing to increasing adoption as reactants in the manufacturing of agrochemicals, water disinfectants, dyes and photographic chemicals. Considering a Y-o-Y growth of 3.5% over 2015, the global bromine derivatives market is expected to reach a value of US$ 3.70 Bn in 2016 end. Owing to the catalyst properties of bromine derivatives, global consumption volume will be significantly influenced by increasing production of rubber, plastics and flame retardants over the forecast period.The extensive use of bromide compounds as clear brine fluids in oil and gas industries is one of the primary factors driving growth of the global bromine derivatives market. Furthermore, use of bromine in reducing mercury emissions from coal-fired power stations is another factor expected to drive demand. However, varying environmental legislations can hamper growth of the global bromine derivatives market during the forecast period.Request For Sample@Based on the derivative-type, use of brine fluids derived from zinc bromide, sodium bromide and calcium bromide in the homogenous extraction of oil and gas is increasing and will continue to drive market growth to a significant extent. Tetrabromobisphenol A  commonly known as TBBPA  is expected to be the highest consumed derivative, and is estimated to reach 219,640.2 MT by 2016 end.The chemical sector will remain the largest consumer of bromine derivatives, accounting for around 60% of the global market volume share in 2016. Declining oil prices could result in reduced consumption of bromine derivatives in the oil and gas industry; whereas increasing applications of bromides in the electronics industry is expected to bolster growth of the global bromine derivatives market over the forecast period.Flame retardants will continue to be the largest end-use application for bromine derivatives, with total revenues anticipated to reach US$ 1,756.3 Mn in 2016 end.The growth of the global bromine derivatives market will be mainly concentrated in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. In 2015, China accounted for 28.2% of the global volume share of the bromine derivatives market, and it will continue to be a lucrative market for bromine derivatives in 2016 and beyond. India and Japan are the other key regions likely to dominate the bromine derivatives market in the Asia Pacific.Request For Table Of Content @Key players in the global bromine derivatives market include Tosoh Corporation, Chemtura Corporation, Gulf Resources Inc., ICL-Group, Tata Chemicals Ltd., TETRA Technologies Inc. and Albemarle Corporation, among others.Long-term Outlook: Revenue from the global bromine derivatives market is projected to increase at a moderate CAGR of 4.2% and reach a value of US$ 5,572.8 Mn by 2026. Markets in APAC countries such as China, Japan and India are expected to collectively dominate the global bromine derivatives market during the forecast period.Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Ultrasound Transducers Market to Witness Robust Expansion by 2024

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Worldwide Market Reports added Latest Research Report titled Global Ultrasound Transducers Market Professional Survey Report 2018 to its Large Report database.This report studies Ultrasound Transducers 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.Request Sample Copy of the Business Report @This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering Broadsound Corporation, Carestream, ESAOTE, KOELIS, Meditech Equipment, Samsung, Shenzhen Well.D Medical Electronics, SIUI, Sonosite, Telemed Medical Systems, ZONARE Medical Systems.On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into Linear, Convex, Microconvex, Other.By Application, the market can be split into Vascula, Abdominal, Musculoskeletal .By Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want) North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, India.Get discount on this report :Table of Contents :Global Ultrasound Transducers Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of Ultrasound Transducers2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Ultrasound Transducers3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Ultrasound Transducers4 Global Ultrasound Transducers Overall Market Overview5 Ultrasound Transducers Regional Market Analysis6 Global 2012-2017E Ultrasound Transducers Segment Market Analysis (by Type)7 Global 2012-2017E Ultrasound Transducers Segment Market Analysis (by Application)8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Ultrasound Transducers9 Development Trend of Analysis of Ultrasound Transducers Market10 Ultrasound Transducers Marketing Type Analysis11 Consumers Analysis of Ultrasound Transducers12 Conclusion of the Global Ultrasound Transducers Market Professional Survey Report 2017If 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.CONTACT US:Mr. ShahWorldwide Market Reports1001 4th Ave,U.STel: +1 415 871 0703Email: sales@worldwidemarketreports.comWebsite:Expansion of Ethylene Dichloride Market During 2015 - 2025 to Gain Robust Traction

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The chemical compound 1,2-dichloroethane is commonly known as ethylene dichloride (EDC). EDC is mainly used to manufacture vinyl chloride monomer. It is also a major precursor to manufacture polyvinyl chloride (PVC). EDC is a colorless liquid which has an odour similar to that of chloroform. EDC is widely used as an intermediate for manufacturing various other solvents as well as other organic chemical compound.Request For Report Sample@Majority of the ethylene dichloride manufactured is consumed in the production of vinyl chloride monomer. The vinyl chloride monomer is used in the production of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Thus, the growing PVC market is expected to boost the growth of the overall market of ethylene dichloride. EDC is widely used to manufacture PVC that has end uses in pipe, windows, fittings, roof tiles, fencing and automobile parts. Most of the end-user applications are in the construction industry. Thus, the growing construction industry is expected to boost the overall growth of the EDC market. Changing lifestyle and growing purchasing power in Asia Pacific has led to an increase in the demand for larger living space which in turn has boosted the growth of the overall construction industry.EDC is an essential chemical used in the construction industry. New resin grades are being developed using ethylene dichloride which in turn is expected to augment the growth of the market. EDC is also widely used to manufacture a wide range of chlorinated solvents such as vinylidene chloride, ethylene amines, trichloroethane and trichloroethylene among others. EDC is also widely used as solvents in textile, metal cleaning and adhesive industries. However, various stringent environment regulations regarding the solvent emissions is expected to hamper the growth of ethylene dichloride market.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Some of the companys manufacturing ethylene dichloride includes Gendorf, Dow Chemicals, Henan Furuidi Chemical Industry Co. Ltd., PT Asahimas Chemical and Horizon Chemical Industry Co. 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:Comprehensive study explore how Bonding Wire Packaging Material Market will grow in Future?

Bonding Wire Packaging Material Market

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Latest research study from HTF MI with title Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023. The Research report presents a complete assessment of the market and contains Future trend, Current Growth Factors, attentive opinions, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry validated market data. The study is segmented by products type, application/end-users. The research study provides estimates for Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material Forecast till 2023.If you are involved in the Bonding Wire Packaging Material industry or intend to be, then this study will provide you comprehensive outlook. Its vital you keep your market knowledge up to date segmented by Applications IC, Transistor & Others, Product Types such as [Gold Bonding Wire, Copper Bonding Wire, Silver Bonding Wire, Palladium Coated Copper & Others] and some major players in the industry. If you have a different set of players/manufacturers according to geography or needs regional or country segmented reports we can provide customization according to your requirement.Request Sample of Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material Sales Market Report 2018 @:Key Companies/players: Heraeus, Tanaka, Sumitomo Metal Mining, MK Electron, AMETEK, Doublink Solders, Yantai Zhaojin Kanfort, Tatsuta Electric Wire & Cable, Kangqiang Electronics, The Prince & Izant, Custom Chip Connections & Yantai YesNo Electronic Materials.Application: IC, Transistor & Others, Product Type: Gold Bonding Wire, Copper Bonding Wire, Silver Bonding Wire, Palladium Coated Copper & Others.The research covers the current & Future market size of the Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material market and its growth rates based on 5 year history data. It also covers various types of segmentation such as by geography [United States, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia & India]. The market competition is constantly growing higher with the rise in technological innovation and M&A activities in the industry. Moreover, many local and regional vendors are offering specific application products for varied end-users. On the basis of attributes such as company overview, recent developments, strategies adopted by the market leaders to ensure growth, sustainability, financial overview and recent developments.Stay up-to-date with Bonding Wire Packaging Material market research offered by HTF MI. Check how key trends and emerging drivers are shaping this industry growth as the study avails you with market characteristics, size and growth, segmentation, regional breakdowns, competitive landscape, shares, trend and strategies for this market. In the Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material Market Analysis & Forecast 2018-2023, the revenue is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2018 and 2023. The production is estimated at XX million in 2017 and is forecasted to reach XX million by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2018 and 2023.Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Key questions answered in this report - Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material Sales Market Report 2018What will the market size be in 2023 and what will the growth rate beWhat are the key market trendsWhat is driving Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material Market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in Bonding Wire Packaging Material Market space?What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material Market ?What are the key outcomes of the five forces analysis of the Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material Market?What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material market? Get in-depth details about factors influencing the market shares of the Americas, APAC, and EMEA?Enquire for customization in Report @There are 15 Chapters to display the Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material market.Chapter 1, to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material, Applications of Bonding Wire Packaging Material, 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 , Capacity and Commercial Production Date, Manufacturing Plants Distribution, Export & Import, 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, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia & India, Bonding Wire Packaging Material Segment Market Analysis (by Type);Chapter 7 and 8, to analyze the Bonding Wire Packaging Material Segment Market Analysis (by Application [IC, Transistor & Others]) Major Manufacturers Analysis;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product Type [Gold Bonding Wire, Copper Bonding Wire, Silver Bonding Wire, Palladium Coated Copper & Others], Market Trend by Application [IC, Transistor & Others];Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, to analyze the Consumers Analysis of Global Bonding Wire Packaging Material by region, type and application ;Chapter 12, to describe Bonding Wire Packaging Material Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Bonding Wire Packaging Material sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Buy 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 5-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.Contact US :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.comConnect with us atSnack Maker Appliance Market: Future Forecast Assessed on the basis of how the Market is Predicted to Grow

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Snack maker appliance is a device that is used to prepare various snack products with the application of hot air technology, by holding the snack in a closed vessel. It is easy to use, install, and requires minimum maintenance. It is fast and portable to utilize in the kitchen for preparing snacks in less time.It also keeps the food warm. It consists of a closed lid that helps to regulate heat inside the appliance. Snack maker is used to make snacks such as popcorn, potato chips, roast peanuts, dry fruits, poppadom, fritters and more with less utilization of oil. This is one of the rapidly expanding segment in kitchen electronic appliances industry and rising day by day due to easy usage.Additionally, it has other additional features which attracts towards consumer such as automation, timer, and temperature regulator. Increase in consumption of snack products will also lead to increase in demand for Snack maker appliances during this forecast period.Obtain ReportThe global snack maker appliance market can be segmented based on material type, application type, by snack maker device, technology, end-user, distribution channel, and region. The snack maker assures the safety of the food and maintains its nutritional value. In terms of material type, the snack maker appliances market can be classified into metallic and ABS plastic.Based on application, the snack maker appliances market can be categorized into electric snack maker, microwave snack maker, and non-electric snack maker. In terms of snack making device, the market can be segregated into toasters, sandwich & grill, air fryers, deep fryers, ice-cream maker, popcorn maker, and multi snack maker. The snack maker appliances on the basis of application is categorized into gas and electricity. In terms of technology, the market can be segmented into automatic, semi-automatic, and manual.Request BrochureBased on end-user, the market can be segregated into residential, food industry, and commercial restaurants and cafes. In terms of distribution channel, the snack maker appliances market can be classified into online distribution channel and offline distribution channel. The offline distribution channel segment can be further sub-segmented into hypermarket, supermarket, retail stores, and ecommerce distributors.In terms of region, the global snack maker appliances market can be segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and South America. Europe and North America hold a major share of the market, in terms of demand, due to busy schedule of the general population in these region, high trend of use and strong network of distribution channel in these regions.For Detail Analysis Get Table Of ContentThe market in Asia pacific is expanding due to the expansion of the distribution channel network in the region. Additionally, the demand for snack maker appliances is rising in the region due to its attractive features such as timer, temperature regulator for the customer ease usage. The market in Middle East & Africa is also expanding due to the rise in number of commercial restaurants and cafes in the region. South America is witnessing an increase in demand for snack market appliances due to the ease of using them.The drivers for the snack maker appliances market are increase in consumption of fast food due to busy schedule of consumers, and less time required to prepare the snack. However, it has constraints such as high prices of appliance and equipment malfunction due to liming and corrosion. It is also a rising opportunity for innovation in new design and technology of snack maker appliances to gain better 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:Competitive Pipes Market is Projected to Register at a Healthy CAGR of 4.4% by 2024

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Global sales of competitive pipes continue to be impacted by the growth of the building & construction sector. Some of the primary use of pipes include laying down water pipelines, in the construction of wastewater drainage systems, laying gas pipelines and HVAC systems. As per Persistence Market Researchs latest report, the global market for competitive pipes stood at around US$ 88,809.4 Mn in 2016. This market is projected to register a CAGR of 4.5% during the forecast period (20162024), to surpass a valuation of US$ 125,968 Mn by 2024 end.China, the U.S. and India are contributing substantially to the growth of the construction industry and will collectively contribute for more than 50% share of the growth in the construction industry by the end of 2020. In 2014, the total housing count reached more than 1 Mn with Y-o-Y growth of around 3%. With the continuous growth in the building & construction sector, the demand for competitive pipes is also projected to increase over the forecast period. Also, application for competitive pipes is widespread in the oil and gas industry.Steel will remain the most preferred material for manufacturing of competitive pipe through the forecast period. Currently, steel competitive pipes account for more than 77% market value share of the market. Demand for steel competitive pipes will remain higher as compared to other materials. During the forecast period, copper competitive pipes will witness favorable traction as well. This is primarily owing to extensive application of steel and copper competitive pipes in construction, agriculture, energy, and other industrial sectorsOn the basis of end use industry, the oil & gas segment held the largest value share of the market in 2016, and the trend is expected to continue throughout the forecast period. Between 2016 and 2024, this segment is expected to witness a CAGR of 4.9%.By application, the liquid conduits segment accounted for around 47.7% of the market in terms of volume in 2016. Towards the end of the forecast period, this segment is expected to reach a market valuation in excess of US$62,129 Mn.Among regions, the competitive pipes market in Asia Pacific (APAC) is expected to remain highly lucrative over 2024. APAC accounted for more than 49% value share of the market in 2016, surpassing a valuation of US$43,782 Mn. During the forecast period, the regions market is anticipated to increase at a CAGR of 5.2%.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the leading companies partaking in the global competitive pipes market include Tenaris S.A., Vallourec S.A., Welspun Group, Georg Fischer Ltd., GERDAU S.A., JFE Holdings Corporation, ThyssenKrupp AG, Novolipetsk Steel, ArcelorMittal S.A., Tata Steel Limited, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo, Metal Corporation, Pohang Iron and Steel Company JSW Steel Ltd., Atkore International Group Inc., China Steel Corporation, Advanced Drainage System, Essar Steel, Contech Engineered Solutions LLC and Can Clay Corporation.To Know More Information @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Enterprise Asset Management Software Market Business Strategy & Qualitative Analysis 2018-2023

Enterprise Asset Management Software market

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Latest research study from HTF MI with title Global Enterprise Asset Management Software by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023. The Research report presents a complete assessment of the market and contains Future trend, Current Growth Factors, attentive opinions, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry validated market data. The study is segmented by products type, application/end-users. The research study provides estimates for Global Enterprise Asset Management Software Forecast till 2023.If you are involved in the Enterprise Asset Management Software industry or intend to be, then this study will provide you comprehensive outlook. Its vital you keep your market knowledge up to date segmented by Applications Government, Oil and Gas, Healthcare, Transportation and Logistics, Manufacturing, Energy and Utilities & Others, Product Types such as [Linear Assets, Non-Linear Assets, Field Service Management (FSM) & Assets Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO)] and some major players in the industry. If you have a different set of players/manufacturers according to geography or needs regional or country segmented reports we can provide customization according to your requirement.Request Sample of Global Enterprise Asset Management Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022 @:Key Companies/players: IFS AB, Oracle Corporation, SAP SE, International Business Machines Corporation, ABB Ltd, CGI Group, Inc., Schneider Electric, Infor, Vesta Partners, LLC, Emaint & Ramco Systems.Application: Government, Oil and Gas, Healthcare, Transportation and Logistics, Manufacturing, Energy and Utilities & Others, Product Type: Linear Assets, Non-Linear Assets, Field Service Management (FSM) & Assets Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO).The research covers the current & Future market size of the Global Enterprise Asset Management Software market and its growth rates based on 5 year history data. It also covers various types of segmentation such as by geography [United States, EU, Japan, China, India & Southeast Asia]. The market competition is constantly growing higher with the rise in technological innovation and M&A activities in the industry. Moreover, many local and regional vendors are offering specific application products for varied end-users. On the basis of attributes such as company overview, recent developments, strategies adopted by the market leaders to ensure growth, sustainability, financial overview and recent developments.Stay up-to-date with Enterprise Asset Management Software market research offered by HTF MI. Check how key trends and emerging drivers are shaping this industry growth as the study avails you with market characteristics, size and growth, segmentation, regional breakdowns, competitive landscape, shares, trend and strategies for this market. In the Global Enterprise Asset Management Software Market Analysis & Forecast 2018-2023, the revenue is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2018 and 2023. The production is estimated at XX million in 2017 and is forecasted to reach XX million by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2018 and 2023.Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Key questions answered in this report - Global Enterprise Asset Management Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022What will the market size be in 2023 and what will the growth rate beWhat are the key market trendsWhat is driving Global Enterprise Asset Management Software Market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in Enterprise Asset Management Software Market space?What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the Global Enterprise Asset Management Software Market ?What are the key outcomes of the five forces analysis of the Global Enterprise Asset Management Software Market?What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the Global Enterprise Asset Management Software market? Get in-depth details about factors influencing the market shares of the Americas, APAC, and EMEA?Enquire for customization in Report @There are 15 Chapters to display the Global Enterprise Asset Management Software market.Chapter 1, to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of Global Enterprise Asset Management Software, Applications of Enterprise Asset Management Software, 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 , Capacity and Commercial Production Date, Manufacturing Plants Distribution, Export & Import, 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, Enterprise Asset Management Software Segment Market Analysis (by Type);Chapter 7 and 8, to analyze the Enterprise Asset Management Software Segment Market Analysis (by Application [Government, Oil and Gas, Healthcare, Transportation and Logistics, Manufacturing, Energy and Utilities & Others]) Major Manufacturers Analysis;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product Type [Linear Assets, Non-Linear Assets, Field Service Management (FSM) & Assets Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO)], Market Trend by Application [Government, Oil and Gas, Healthcare, Transportation and Logistics, Manufacturing, Energy and Utilities & Others];Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, to analyze the Consumers Analysis of Global Enterprise Asset Management Software by region, type and application ;Chapter 12, to describe Enterprise Asset Management Software Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Enterprise Asset Management Software sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Buy 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 5-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.Contact US :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.comConnect with us atGlobal Delta Decalactone Market: Rising Need for Business Agility, Dynamics, Analysis and Growth Trends, Forecast to 2023

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The report begins from overview of Industry Chain structure, and describes industry environment, then analyses market size and forecast of Delta Decalactone by product, region and application, in addition, this report introduces market competition situation among the vendors and company profile, besides, market price analysis and value chain features are covered in this report.Market HighlightsDelta decalactone is found in animal foods such as butter oil, coconut oil, apricots, peaches, cheese, cane sugar, pork fat, margarine, lavender oil, and other substances. The chemical name for delta decalactone is Decan-5-olide. It is heat-sensitive and light-sensitive, due to which its container needs to be tightly closed in a dry and well-ventilated place. Delta decalactone is an indispensable lactone that is useful for lending roundness, creaminess, or a fleshy character to brown nuts, vanilla, diary, red fruit, meat, tropical fruit, and yellow fruit. Natural delta decalactone is an important constituent of a variety of natural flavorings. Its chemical formula is C10H18O2. Optical isomers of delta decalactone and delta dodecalactone imparts and / or enhance the aroma and taste of consumable materials including chewing gums, foodstuffs, beverages, perfume compositions, colognes, and fragrant articles such as solid & liquid anionic, cationic, nonionic, or zwitterionic detergents, hair preparations, and fabric softeners.Detailed Sample Copy of Updated Analysis @Market Outlook:Delta decalactone is used as a fragrance in creams, household products; mango, coconut, raspberry, & nectarine flavors; and as a coumarin replacer. It is employed in pharmaceutical preparations and flavorings and is also an ingredient in the manufacturing of mixtures. The good solvency properties of delta decalactone is useful in industrial application. They also have wide demand in artificial fiber industry, they are polymerizable and can be used as nylon precursors. Usage of delta decalactone by the general public is strongly discouraged.Top Industry Players:The major players in global Delta Decalactone market include Robertet, Fleurchem, Vigon International, Sunaux, Ernesto Ventos, M&U International, Sigma-Aldrich, A.C.S. International, United International Company, Shenzhen Simeiquan Biotechnology, Nanjing Oriental Pearl Industry & Trade Industry, Xiamen Miracle Bio-Technology Company, Guangzhou Rihua Flavor & Fragrance, Fairlong Aroma Chemical Company, Beijing LYS ChemicalsRequest Discount on this repots @Key Benefits This report provides a quantitative analysis of the current trends, estimations, and dynamics of the global Delta Decalactone market from 2018 to 2023 to identify the prevailing market opportunities. The key countries in all the majors regions are mapped based on their market share. Major countries in each region are mapped according to their revenue contribution to the global industry. Market player positioning segment facilitates benchmarking and provides a clear understanding of the present position of market players. The report includes in details the analysis of the regional as well as global market, key players, market segments, and application areas, and growth strategies.Market Segments:Product Type Coverage (Market Size & Forecast, Major Company of Product Type etc.):By Source Coconut Oil Butter Oil Peaches Apricots Cane Sugar Cheese Pork FatApplication Coverage (Market Size & Forecast, Different Demand Market by Region, Main Consumer Profile etc.): Food & Beverages Fragrance CosmeticsRegion Coverage (Regional Output, Demand & Forecast by Countries etc.): North America (U.S., Canada, Mexico) Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Italy, Russia, Spain etc.) Asia-Pacific (China, India, Japan, Southeast Asia etc.) South America (Brazil, Argentina etc.) Middle East & Africa (Saudi Arabia, South Africa etc.)Browse 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Forecast 2017  2026: Global Vitamins and Derivatives Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends

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The global market discussion on Vitamins and Derivatives can be found in the latest study by Fact.MR, which has been freshly added to its massive collection of research database. The report is titled Vitamins and Derivatives Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking - Global Review 2017 to 2026, which works to enlighten the readers about the major factors prompting the growth of the concerned market. Apart from that, the research majorly focuses on global Vitamins and Derivatives markets competitive outlook by profiling major players functioning across the globe. As the report moves ahead, information regarding the prominent trends as well as opportunities in the key geographical segments have also been elaborated, thus enabling companies to be able to make region-specific strategies for gaining competitive lead. Some of the prime regions emphasized in the study include key regions.Request Free Sample Report-Increasing level of awareness about consuming healthy food, especially among aging population is driving the demand for food products with vitamins and derivatives. Consumption of such products has also increased in emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil. Regular intake of vitamins and derivatives is extremely important for proper development and functioning of the health. Vitamins are added to a wide range of healthcare products, which continue to witness an uptrend owing to their growing importance in the fast-paced life of a modern consumer. At the same time, increased consumption of vitamin supplements and desires of having enhanced physical appearance has led to a greater demand for vitamins and derivatives globally. Fact.MRs recently published report reveals that the global vitamins and derivatives market will exhibit a steady growth during the forecast period (2017-2026). In terms of volume, the market is expected to reach 165,075 tons by 2026-end. In recent years, trend of leading a healthier and active life has become more prominent, which is fueling the demand for functional food.Vitamins and derivatives are also used for making drugs to treatment of various metabolic syndrome diseases. These essential nutrients have profound therapeutic potential in the prevention and treatment of various chronic ailments. Consumer are moving towards preventive healthcare and products that can fulfill the daily nutrition quotient. Vitamins and derivatives are available in the form of tablets, capsules, powder, oral liquid and gummies and softgels. Some of these variants can be consumed without medical prescription as well. Factors such as expanding geriatric population, changing lifestyle, increasing discretionary spending have partly influenced the global sales of vitamins and derivatives.Browse Full Report With TOC-Table of ContentGlobal Economic OutlookGlobal Vitamins and Derivatives Market - Executive SummaryGlobal Vitamins and Derivatives Market Overview3.1. Introduction3.1.1. Global Vitamins and Derivatives Market Taxonomy3.1.2. Global Vitamins and Derivatives Market Definition3.2. Global Vitamins and Derivatives Market Value (US$ Mn) and Volume (Tonnes) Forecast, 2012-20263.2.1. Global Vitamins and Derivatives Market Y-o-Y Growth3.3. Global Vitamins & Derivatives Market Dynamics3.4. Value Chain3.5. Consumer Trend Analysis3.6. Trade Analysis3.7. Regulations3.8. Product Innovations3.9. Product Life Cycle3.10. PESTLE Analysis3.11. Key Participants Market Presence (Intensity Map) By RegionGlobal Vitamins and Derivatives Market Analysis and Forecast 2012-20264.1. Global Vitamins and Derivatives Market Size and Forecast By Product Type, 2012-20264.1.1. Vitamin B Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.1.1.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region4.1.1.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.1.1.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.1.2. Vitamin D Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.1.2.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region4.1.2.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.1.2.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.1.3. Vitamin E Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.1.3.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region4.1.3.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.1.3.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By RegionContinued@@@...Check Discount 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:Overview of Air Cargo Market Globally Grow at a CAGR of 4.76% by Revenue During the Forecast Period 2017-2021: Emirates SkyCargo, FedEx, UPS, CAL Group, Cargolux

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Air Cargo Market 2017-2021" to its huge collection of research reports.About Air CargoAir cargo service providers ship different kinds of goods by air, which are either for international or domestic customers. The cargo is either transported by passenger aircraft or dedicated freighter aircraft. The global air cargo market can be segmented by the two types goods that are transported, airmail and air freight. The transportation of mail via air is referred to an airmail service. Typically, airmail costs more than other modes of transportation but there is an advantage of the mail getting delivered faster.Technavios analysts forecast the global air cargo market to grow at a CAGR of 4.76% during the period 2017-2021.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global air cargo market for 2017-2021. To calculate the market size, the report considers the volume transported by different vendors that provide air cargo transportation services to end-user industries such as manufacturing, FMCG and retail, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, and other industries.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:AmericasAPACEMEATechnavio's report, Global Air Cargo Market 2017-2021, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendorsCathay Pacific CargoEmirates SkyCargoFedExUPSView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Other prominent vendorsAIR FRANCE KLM MARTINAIR CargoBritish AirwaysCAL GroupCargoluxChina AirlinesDelta Air LinesDeutsche Post DHL GroupEtihad AirwaysKorean AirLufthansa CargoQatar Airways CargoSaudi Airlines CargoSingapore AirlinesMarket driverIncrease in e-commerce sales to boost air cargo marketFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challengeExpected rise in jet fuel pricesFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trendExpected rise in demand for temperature-sensitive productsFor a full, detailed list, view our reportBrowse Report @Key questions answered in this reportWhat will the market size be in 2021 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?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 @Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) Market 2018 Global Leaders: Semtech, Link Labs, Qualcomm, Huawei Technologies, Senet, Weightless SIG, Actility, LORIOT, NWave Technologies, SIGFOX

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Market Research Future published a research report on Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Low Power Wide Area Network Global Market - OverviewThe Global Low Power Wide Area Network Market is growing with the rapid pace mainly due to the increasing number of connected devices and increase in the internet of things market. According to a recent study report published by the Market Research Future, the global market of Low Power Wide Area Network is booming and expected to gain prominence over the forecast period. The market is projected to demonstrate a spectacular growth by 2023, surpassing its previous growth records in terms of value with a striking CAGR during the anticipated period (2017  2023).Low power wide area network is referred to a particular network that enables long range communication at a low bit rate. This network also prevails the technology choice for building IoT networks across the globe. This wireless technology can be integrated into the cars, manufacturing equipment, street lights, home appliances and wearable devices. Low power wide area network offers a persuasive mix of long range, low power consumption and secure data transmission.MRFR Analysis exhibits that the increasing number M2M applications, rapid increase in the number of connected devices and rising need of long range connectivity between devices that are the driving factor for the growth of the global low power wide area network market. Apart from it, increasing demand for low cost and low power consumption of LPWAN technology is driving the growth in the market.Get Sample of Report @Industry NewsMarch 2018 - The provider of local, nationwide and international cellular coverage, Senet and Inland Cellular, have announced a partnership to deliver Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) connectivity across Inland Cellulars coverage areas and extend Inlands branded services to support the rapid growth of IoT applications.March 2018  Sigfox U.S.A., the North America network operator for the global Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) connectivity provider Sigfox, has focused its growth strategy on densifying the network in key regional markets and expanding its partner ecosystem.March 2018- Senet, a leading provider of cloud-based software, global connectivity service platforms and network buildout for the Internet of Things (IoT), and NanoThings, a full service IoT logistics solution provider and pioneer of advancements in nano electronics to enable a new era of affordability in IoT devices, have announced a partnership to disrupt the logistics industry with the introduction of NanoThings LoRa-powered NanoTag technology.Key Players:Some of the prominent players in the global low power wide area network market are Semtech Corporation (U.S.), LORIOT (Switzerland), NWave Technologies (London), SIGFOX (France), WAVIoT (U.S.), Cisco Systems (U.S.), Actility (France), Weightless SIG (U.K), Senet, Inc. (U.S.), AT&T Inc. (Germany), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (China), Ingenu (U.S.), Link Labs Inc. (U.S.), Qualcomm Inc. (U.S.), Telefonica SA (Spain) and Vodafone Group Plc. (U.K).Low Power Wide Area Network Global Market - SegmentationThe Low Power Wide Area Network Market can be segmented in to 4 key dynamics for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding; Segmentation by Connectivity Technology: Comprises SIGFOX, LoRaWAN and Others Segmentation by Service: Comprises Professional Service and Managed Service. Segmentation by Network Deployment: Comprises Private Sector and Public Sector Segmentation by Application: Comprises Smart Waste Management, smart building, Smart Gas & Water Metering, Smart Street Light, Smart Parking, livestock monitoring and others Segmentation by Regions: Comprises Geographical regions - North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World.Low Power Wide Area Network Global Market - Regional AnalysisNorth-America is dominating the Global Low Power Wide Area Network Market with the largest market share and is expected to grow over its previous growth records by 2023. This is due to increasing support of the U.S government and investment for the adoption of IOT technology in various industries such as utilities, manufacturing, and healthcare are providing a key growth opportunities for narrowband internet of things market in North America. Low Power Wide Area Network Market in Asia-Pacific market is expected to grow at a substantial CAGR during 2017 to 2023 due to rapid technological advancements and China being the manufacturing hub is dominating the market in Asia-pacific region. Moreover, the increasing investments for smart city projects in Asia Pacific countries is boosting the Low Power Wide Area Network Market. The European market for Low Power Wide Area Network Market is expected to grow at a considerable CAGR (2017-2023).Get Complete Report @Intended Audience Technology Investors Research/Consultancy Firms Technology Solution Providers Government Bodies Regulatory Agencies Corporate Low Power Wide Area Network Solution Providers Telecom Operators Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) Mobile Service Providers (MSPs) Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)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.Media Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comAutomotive Labels Market 2018 Global Major Key Players: 3M, Avery Dennison, UPM-Kymmene, H.B. Fuller, Sika AG, CCL Industries, Barry-Wehmiller Companies , Dunmore

Automotive Labels Market 2018

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Automotive Labels Market 2018Automotive Labels Market Share, Size, Trends, And Business Opportunity Analysis Report 2018 include historic data, with forecast data to 2022. Automotive Labels 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 2022This report provides in depth study of Automotive Labels Market using SWOT analysis i.e. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat to the organization. The Licorice Candy 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 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.This report provides valuable information for companies like manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, traders, customers, investors and individuals who have interests in this industry.Get Sample Report @Global Automotive Labels Market Information Report by Purpose (Asset labels, dome labels), by Mechanism (In-mold, Heat transfer), by Identification (Hologram, Barcode), by Application (Chassis labels, Interior labels) and by Region - Global Forecast to 2022Market ScenarioA Label is used to identify information written or printed on a piece of paper, cloth, polymer or other materials and attached to an article. Labels used in automotive industry are tough to stand up against harsh environments and provides identification, dating, usage information and security to assure customers that they are getting original manufacturers quality products. The market for automotive labels market is growing due to increasing demand for smart labels such as Barcode and RFID in automotive industry for automotive parts safety, identification and information. Increasing demand for eco-friendly label production techniques is also a major driving factor for the growth of automotive labels market. However, rising raw material cost of labels act as a restraint in the growth of automotive labels market.Global Automotive Labels market is expected to register a CAGR of about 5% during the forecast period, to reach USD 8.05 Billion by 2022.Key PlayersThe leading players in the Automotive Labels market are 3M (U.S.), Avery Dennison Corporation (U.S), UPM-Kymmene Corporation (Finland), H.B. Fuller (U.S.), Sika AG (Switzerland), CCL Industries Inc. (Canada), Barry-Wehmiller Companies Inc. (U.S), Dunmore (U.S.), Lewis Labels Products Corp. (U.S), Precision Contract Manufacturing (U.S) and others.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:January, 2015 - Rafsec Ltd., a part of UPM-Kymmene Corporation, is increasing its investment in the development of smart label technologies. Rafsec's goal is to strengthen its position as a global technological leader in the smart label business and contribute to the growth of the industry by investing heavily in technologies that will help lower the price of smart labels. With this purpose in mind, Rafsec has formed a strategic alliance with the California-based Alien Technology Corp. UPM-Kymmene Corporation has simultaneously made an investment in Alien Technology. Alien Technology has developed technology that paves the way for a significant reduction in the size of smart label microchips as well as a cost-effective method of attaching them to the antenna.January, 2016 CCL Industries Inc., a world leader in specialty label and packaging solutions for global corporations, small businesses and consumers, announced that it has acquired Mabels Labels, Inc. and Mabels Labels Retail, Inc., privately owned companies with common shareholders, based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Mabels Labels is a well-known North American brand for durable, personalized identification labels for children and families. Fiscal year end March 31, 2016 sales are forecasted to be $9.5 million, with an adjusted EBITDA of approximately $2.8 million for the combined entities..Automotive Labels Market  SegmentationThe Global Automotive Labels Market is segmented in to 4 key dynamics for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding;Segmentation by Purpose : Comprises Asset labels, dome labels.Segmentation by Mechanism : Comprises In-mold and Heat transferSegmentation by Application : Comprises Chassis labels, Interior labelsSegmentation by Regions : Comprises Geographical regions - North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.The report for Global Automotive Labels 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.Get Complete Report Details @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 9312salse@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal Outdoor Wi-Fi Market Investigation & Industry Evolution till 2019

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In order to study the various trends and patterns prevailing in the overall market for Outdoor Wi-Fi, Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) has included a new report titled Outdoor Wi-Fi Market to its wide online database. This research assessment offers a clear insight about the influential factors that are expected to transform the global market in the near future. Readers can access the regional as well as segment-wise analysis for acquiring precise information about the global market structureTo Request a Free Sample Report or View Summary of Report Visit @Wi-Fi technology is crucial for various systems such as Machine to Machine (M2M), Hot Spots, Outdoor Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi on the Go and In-Flight Wi-Fi. Outdoor Wi-Fi market is expected to grow at a substantial growth rate throughout the forecast period. Outdoor W-Fi technology is emerging across various verticals such as healthcare, education, public sector and travel and hospitality among others.The global outdoor Wi-Fi market is segmented into three major categories, on the basis of product into: access points, Wlan controllers, wireless hotspot gateways, and others (repeaters, relays). The market is also segmented by services into network planning and design, installation, support, survey and analysis. On the basis of end use industry the market is segmented into education, healthcare, public sector, logistics and transportation, travel and hospitality and others. The market is further segmented by geography into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and rest of the world (RoW) regions.The market is driven by factors such as the rising adoption and popularity of smartphones, tablets, and Wi-Fi enabled consumer electronics. The growing population of mobile work force and growing demand for data connectivity in outdoor setups will also act as driver for the global outdoor Wi-Fi market. Some of the factors inhibiting the growth of the global outdoor Wi-Fi market are contention loss (too many clients converging on the single access point) and other technical challenges such as regulation of power limits etc.Some of the key players dominating the market are Aerohive Networks, Airspan, Acatel-Lucent, Alvarion, Hewlett-Packard, Juniper Networks, Motorola Solutions, Nokia Siemens Networks, Avaya Inc., Aruba Networks, Ericsson, Netgear and Meru Networks.This research report analyzes this market depending on its market segments, major geographies, and current market trends. Geographies analyzed under this research report includeNorth AmericaAsia PacificEuropeRest of the WorldThis report provides comprehensive analysis ofMarket growth driversFactors limiting market growthCurrent market trendsMarket structureMarket projections for upcoming yearsThis report is a complete study of current trends in the market, industry growth drivers, and restraints. It provides market projections for the coming years. It includes analysis of recent developments in technology, Porters five force model analysis and detailed profiles of top industry players. The report also includes a review of micro and macro factors essential for the existing market players and new entrants along with detailed value chain analysis.To Access Complete Research Report with TOC Visit @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 technological growth map over time to understand the industry growth rateIt provides a seven-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 segmentsIt provides distinctive graphics and exemplified SWOT analysis of major market segmentsAbout Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE)Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research 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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comGlobal cement volumes to rise through 2022, despite declining Chinese demand

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Global cement consumption is forecasted to expand 0.7% per year on average in the period from 2017 to 2022, according to CW Researchs 1H2018 update of the Global Cement Volume Forecast Report (GCVFR). Global ex-China demand is expected to rise at an annual average rate of 3.6 percent, with advanced growth expected in most economies  a trend bound to be disrupted by a decline in Chinas cement demand.As noted by Tea Vukicevic, CW Groups Associate Analyst: over the next five years, we are expecting to witness a separation in cement demand growth patterns. Global ex-China consumption will experience a healthy growth over the forecast period, but Chinas 50% share of the total consumption will weaken global demand levels.*Latin America and Africa to rebound*Despite an overall improvement in economic indices, and thus in cement consumption, regional uncertainties remain regarding the continuity of this rising trend.For the first time in decades, economic growth was almost ubiquitous in the year that just ended. But alarms are bound to sound off when so many countries are experiencing synchronized growth, and especially when geopolitical risks are lurking in the shadows. But in 2017 the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the current macro landscape did little to deter growth in cement consumption, observes Robert Madeira, CW Groups Managing Director and Head of Research.On a regional level, CW Research downgraded its previous U.S. demand forecast for 2018, due to political instability and uncertainty around trade agreements that could damage investor confidence.In 2017, demand in Latin America performed worse than previously expected. Nonetheless, regional demand in 2018 is projected to pick up, with Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Chile recovering from low levels. Looking onwards, CW Research expects the region to recover by 2022, growing at a yearly average of two percent, driven by Mexico and Argentinas fast-growing cement markets.Regional cement demand in Africa performed around four percent worse than previously anticipated, on the back of sluggish demand in Nigeria and high political instability in Kenya. Nevertheless, large housing deficit and a growing middle class population will contribute to higher demand in the coming years.Asia ex-China remains the fastest-growing region, with markets such as India, Bangladesh and Philippines driving an annual average growth rate of 3.8 percent. Despite declining in 2017, Indian cement demand is expected to rebound quite fast, as large infrastructure projects are now approaching the construction phase, and the budget for affordable housing has been doubled.*China to curb cement demand through 2050*The Chinese cement market is expected to eliminate about 290 million tons of capacity by 2022, while the rest of the world is expected to add 450 million tons. The largest capacity additions in the 2017-2022 period will take place in Africa and Asia ex-China. However, the global growth will be counterbalanced by Chinas stricter eliminations.Over a 33-year period, CW Research expects cement demand to decrease to around 3.9 billion tons. The declining trend will be more pronounced in China, whose capacity rationalization efforts will pose the main obstacle to demand growth, together with cement substitutes, and emission regulations.****For more information, placing an order, or interview inquiries, please contact Liviu Dinu, Market Services & Marketing Consultant, CW Group, by phone at +40-744-67-44-11, or e-mail at ld@cwgrp.com.About the ReportCW Groups Global Cement Volume Forecast Report (GCVFR) is a twice-yearly update on projections for cement volumes on a national, regional and global level. The forecast provides global and regional outlooks, as well as detailed perspective on 57 of the worlds most important countries cement consumption, production, net trade and cement production capacity. The five-year outlook presented in this benchmark study enables industry professionals to shape their perspective on markets and business priorities. The report also includes a long-term forecast through 2050, with qualitative analysis on drivers and constraints of global cement demand.The Global Cement Volume Forecast Report has two updates a year: Extended (October): an extended update (includes briefs on the 57 key markets with principal supply-demand impacting drivers and CW Research's analyst market assessments presenting a detailed numerical worldwide analysis, as well as the regional and global supply-demand model). Quantitative update (March): a quantitative update (only includes the numerical sections of the report, not country write-ups).More information about the report can be found here:About CW GroupThe Greenwich (Conn.), USA headquartered CW Group is a leading advisory, research and business intelligence boutique with a global presence and a multi-industry orientation. CW Group is particularly recognized for its sector expertise in heavy-side building materials (cement), light-side building materials, traditional and renewable power & energy, petrochemicals, metals & mining, industrial minerals, industrial manufacturing, bulk cargo & shipping, among others. We have a strong functional capability, grounded in our methodical and quantitative philosophy, including due diligence, sourcing intelligence, feasibility studies and commodity forecasting.CW GroupPO Box 5263, Greenwich, CT 06831, USALiviu Dinu (inquiries@cwgrp.com)Alternative Energy Sources To Fuel The American Data Center Power Market by 2023 | Arizton

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Data centers are the backbone of the modern world. With the development of intelligent and innovative infrastructure and growing demand for cloud computing, Internet of things (IoT), and big data analytics growth of the data center power market is getting a boost. The increasing adoption of converged and hyper-converged solutions and virtualization is fueling the need for high-performance computing (HPC) in the market. The increase rack power density of the IT infrastructure is propelling the requirement of efficient power sources in the data center market. The introduction of lithium-ion batteries and adoption of fuel cells will reduce the energy consumption and result in cost savings in the data center power market. Additionally, increasing focus on building green data centers that ensure a PUE of 1.0  1.2 will lead to innovations in the market.A study by Arizton states that the data center power market in Americas is anticipated to generate revenues of around $5.1 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of more than 5% during 2018-2023.Read the full report on Data Center Power Market in America  Industry Outlook and Forecast 2018-2023The different type of electrical infrastructure available in the data center power market are: Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)UPS systems are a critical component of continuous operations and help prevent data center power failure in the market. UPS systems comprise components such as rectifiers to charge the battery and inverters to convert the power from DC to AC for the infrastructure. There are three types of UPS systems topology used in data centers includes standby UPS, line interactive UPS, and double conversion UPS systems. The implementation of flywheel technology allows to store energy in motion, and during an outage, the flywheels energy is converted back to electrical energy to power the IT infrastructure. The introduction of rack-level UPS systems in modular infrastructure will transform the data center power market. GeneratorGenerators are adopted by data center operators to make sure that they operate at 100% availability irrespective of the changes in incoming power from utility grids. The three main types of generators available in the market diesel generators, natural gas or liquid propane generators, and bi-fuel generators. The procurement of generators is mainly to supply power backup in MWs. Generators in data centers are designed with N+1 or N+N redundancy in tier 2 and tier 3 data centers. The vendors are designing generators for tier 4 facilities that are designed with 2N redundancy. The increasing adoption of diesel rotary uninterruptible power supply (DRUPS) systems will result in the evolution of the data center power market. These systems are reliable, efficient, and require no maintenance. Transfer Switches & SwitchgearTransfer switches and switchgear are used in data centers for switching incoming power from the utility grid or generators. The power from the switches is transferred to UPS systems and IT equipment. The two types of transfer switched available in the market are automatic transfer switch (ATS) and static transfer switch (STS). The data center power vendors are designing hybrid transfer switches that can provide benefits of both ATS and STS. Hybrid switches cost less than STS and provide greater reliability than ATSs. The use of transfer switch also depends on the power option of IT infrastructure, i.e., a single cord or a dual cord power supply. Rack Power Distribution Unit (PDU)Rack PDUs are used to supply power to the IT infrastructure inside racks, and they are connected to the UPS system in case of power outages. Rack PDUs are available in two forms mainly, horizontal and vertical. The constant innovations in rack PDUs in data centers have grown significantly in the past few years, owing to the concerns of consumption and power outages. PDUs are available with a variety of features and power capacities. Key players are also involved in offering PDUs in a variety of color for identification and additional features that include accessories such as mounting brackets, circuit breakers, whip cables, and outlet covers. The introduction of metered, monitored, or switched PDU, enabling remote monitoring of power supply in the IT infrastructure will attribute to the growth of the data center power market. Other Electrical InfrastructureThe other infrastructure in data center power market comprises of utility transformer, lighting equipment, power cables and panels, busbar, circuit breakers, and transient voltage surge suppressor (TVSS) systems. With designing and construction of several modern data centers of tier 3 and tier 4 standards, many data centers are powered by dual feel from the utility to the IT infrastructure. The development of hyperscale data centers with on-site renewable generation solar or wind farm is augmenting the development of the data center power market.The top vendors in the data center power market are ABB, Eaton, General Electric, Schneider Electric, and Vertiv.Order a report now:Read: Data Center Power Market in North America Worth Over $4 billion by 2023Read: Data Center Power Market in Americas to Worth $5 Billion by 2023About Arizton Advisory & IntelligenceArizton  Advisory and Intelligence is an innovation and quality-driven firm, which offers cutting-edge research solutions to clients across the world. We excel in providing comprehensive market intelligence reports and advisory and consulting services.Arizton has gained a paramount standpoint in the market research arena as it offers top of the line solutions to clients to assess market landscape and to finalize foolproof business strategies. We are committed to provide inclusive market research reports and consulting services to clients from diversified industries including Consumer Goods & Retail Technology, Automotive and Mobility, Smart Tech, Healthcare and Lifesciences, Industrial Machinery, Chemicals and Materials, IT and Media, Logistics and PackagingArizton comprises a team of exuberant and well-experienced analysts who have mastered in generating incisive reports. Our specialist analysts possess exemplary skills in market research. We train our team in advanced research practices, techniques, and ethics to outperform in fabricating impregnable research reports.Arizton Advisory & IntelligenceChicago, Illinois, 60605Mail: enquiry@arizton.comCall: +1-312-465-7864Learn details of the Advances in Manioc Flour Market Forecast and Segments, 2017-2025

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Manioc flour is prepared from the tuberous root of the Manihot esculenta plant, which is inherent to Central and Southern America. This woody plant is more commonly known as manioc, cassava, or yucca, and in toting to being the source of this flour, it is also used to produce tapioca in recipes in which it might be fried, steamed, or stewed. It has been used by Native Americans for centuries, and many Latin American cultures use it as traditional recipes. The flour has a coarse, mealy texture and a nutty flavor with a faint hint of acidity that can be quite distinctive.The food industry has created a lot of opportunities for the products like cassava resulting in increasing the market share of manioc flour market. Manioc flour is the flour which is used in baking and for commercial purposes in some countries. It has replaced wheat flour because of its exceptional properties of being gluten free, grain free and nut free.Market Overview:Manioc flour market is expected to grow at a high CAGR in the forecast period because of Cassava which is used in making this flour. Cassava is the most important food crop because of its wide range of applications in different industries. Manioc flour market is highest in the countries like Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil because of the increasing demand at both domestic and international level which has driven the manioc flour market.Request for Table of Contents @Market Dynamics:The biggest drivers for the growth of manioc flour market is the strong government support and increasing research and development centers which are making efforts in creating various new products which can increase the sales of manioc flour. The other driving force for the growth of manioc flour market is the supporting role of government in financing to the small farmers in accessing improved varieties and quality products.This has increased the productivity of Cassava resulting in increasing the manioc flour market. For example  Thailand government has created a lot of programs giving technical support to small and medium enterprises and building proper transportation and logistics system for the manioc flour manufacturers. The government has also helped in marketing and developing industries resulting in increasing the demand of manioc flour.The factor restraining the manioc flour market is the availability of cheaper alternatives or invention of other products which have similar features and applications. The other factor hampering the growth of manioc flour is production costs are high which results in the rise of prices of manioc flour and hinders the growth of manioc flour marketMarket Segmentation:The manioc flour market is segmented on the basis of the application, by end - user and region.On the basis of the applications, the manioc flour market is segmented into commercial and personal uses.On the basis of the end-user industries, the manioc flour market is segmented into dairy and confectionary industry.On the basis of region, the manioc flour market is segmented into Latin America, North America, Japan, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific has the largest market share in the manioc flour market the countries like China, Thailand, Vietnam, and others are the global exporters & consumers of manioc flour.Thailand and Vietnam are among the leading manioc flour exporters to the United States and European region for commercial uses. Manioc flour market in Africa has a significant market share globally and is expected to grow at a high CAGR in the forecast period. The demand for manioc flour in Africa is because of the countries like Ghana, Nigeria, and Mozambique which are the leading regions in producing manioc flours in Africa. Latin America and North America have a significant market share and are forecasted to grow at a decent rate in future.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Market Key Players:The key players in the manioc flour market include Otto's Naturals, Binhngoc JSC, XNY farms, Dareslauf & Co Limited, Young Franco Nigeria Ltd, Advance Flour Ltd, Theophade manufacturers, JNC Corp, Agro Trade International limited and Moeljantini Hardjo.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:Global Coil Wound Devices Market Outlook and Growth Stance Forecasted Through 2025

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Market Research Report Search Engine (MRRSE) recently announced the addition of a new research study to its comprehensive collection of research reports. The research report, titled Global Market Study on Coil Wound Devices: Industrial Machinery & Equipment End Use Sector to Hold over 40% Value Share in the Global Market by 2025 offers a detailed analysis of the market providing insights into the market dynamics that are expected to influence the overall market positively in the next few years. Furthermore, the product segmentation, drivers, barriers, key geographical segments, and the competitive scenario of the global Coil Wound Devices market have been elaborated upon in the research report.To get sample copy of Report Click Here @Urbanization and increasing consumption key factors driving the global coil wound devices marketIncreasing per capita consumption in emerging countries has led to an increasing demand for efficient coil wound devices for various industries such as automotive, food and beverages, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture, among others. This, in turn, has increased the shipment of electronic devices, and appliances which in turn has been a driving factor for the global coil wound devices market. As of 2014, the urban population accounted for 54% of the total population globally and is expected to further increase at a healthy pace. Substantial growth in the service and manufacturing sectors has led to a healthy growth in GDP worldwide. This, in turn, has had a positive impact on the global spending on smartphones, thereby eventually impacting the demand for coil wound devices. Global GDP is projected to register a steady growth during the forecast period owing to higher rate of industrialization in emerging economies such as Asia Pacific. Moreover, increasing adoption of coil wound devices in the automotive sector is anticipated to fuel the demand in near future.Aging power infrastructure in United States is driving the market for coil wound devicesAdvancement and replacement of aging power infrastructure in the U.S. is one of the key factors driving the coil wound devices demand in North America. The aging electricity infrastructure will require new technologies to enable better failure detection. Traditional systems do not meet many emerging trends, such as growing penetration of distributed generation resources and need for greater resilience. The new transmission technologies combine power electronic devices with capacitors and inductors to provide a range of controlling capabilities for transmission and distribution systems. The demand for coil wound devices, especially transformers, is anticipated to witness a notable growth as they are important components that are used for carrying out electric grid transition from traditional designs to the designs of future in the coming years.Negative impact on alternative energy sources due to U.S. government policiesIn 2017, the U.S. government decided to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. This step is likely to cause solar and wind deployment rate to move slowly, ultimately slowing down the ongoing transition to renewable energy. The pace of renewables growth will also be affected by numerous separate policy decisions, including the Clean Power Plan, Investment Tax Credit and Production Tax Credit for renewables and by the addition or reduction of restrictions on fossil fuel production and consumption. It is anticipated that these steps will negatively impact passive components demand, devoted to developing environment-friendly technologies for alternative energy. However, the impact is expected to remain minimal, largely offset by other driving forces.As per the data provided by Persistence Market Research, the transportation segment in the end-use sector was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 18,200 Mn in 2017 and is anticipated to reach a valuation of nearly US$ 27,900 Mn in 2025, exhibiting a CAGR of 5.5% during the period of assessment 2017-2025. The medical devices segment in the end-use sector was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 9,000 Mn in 2017 and is forecasted to reach a valuation of nearly US$ 14,200 Mn in 2025, displaying a CAGR of 5.8% during the period of forecast.Browse Complete Report details with TOC Click Here @A detailed and up-to-date research methodology results in accuracyOverall market size has been analysed through historical data, primary responses, and public domain data. Revenue of companies in the global coil wound devices market has been benchmarked to ascertain the market size for the base year. Macroeconomic indicators such as GDP and industry growth have been considered to forecast the market size over the forecast period. The historical growth trend of end-use industries, market participants performance, as well as the present macro-economic outlook has been taken into consideration for estimating the overall market trend forecast. This data is then validated using the triangulation method and is extensively scrutinised using advanced tools to garner quantitative and qualitative insights into the global coil wound devices market.Market TaxonomyBy ApplicationElectrical MotorsDC motorsAC motorsTransformersLow VoltageMedium VoltageHigh VoltageValves & ActuatorsSwitches, Contactors & RelaysOther Electrical DevicesBy Device TypeSensorsBobbinsElectromagnetic CoilsSolenoidsLightning CoilBy End Use SectorTransportationAutomotiveRailwaysMarineAerospaceIndustrial Machinery & EquipmentMedical DevicesMiningAbout (MRRSE)Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research 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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:Accounts Receivable Software Market 2018 by New Developments, Revenue Growth, Financial Overview and Investment Scenario

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ReportsWeb adds Accounts Receivable Software Market report it contains in depth information major drivers, restraints, opportunities, challenges, trends, business structure, areas of operation, products and their impact on the market forecast. Component, Business Function, Deployment Type, Organization Size, Vertical and services offered by the company.This report studies the Accounts Receivable Software market status and outlook of global and major regions, from angles of players, regions, product and end Application/industries; this report analyzes the top players in global and major regions, and splits the Accounts Receivable Software market by product and Application/end industries.For more information about this report atThis report focuses on the global top players, coveredAraizePaidYETSlickPieMicroneticsWorkflowARFunding GatesAccountMate SoftwareGo Daddy Online BookkeepingClickNoticesArmaticHansaWorldAynaxMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaThe study objectives of this report are:To study and forecast the market size of Accounts Receivable Software in global market.To analyze the global key players, SWOT analysis, value and global market share for top players.To define, describe and forecast the market by type, end use and region.To analyze and compare the market status and forecast between China and major regions, namely, United States, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India and Rest of World.To analyze the global key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends and factors driving or inhibiting the market growth.To analyze the opportunities in the market for stakeholders by identifying the high growth segments.To strategically analyze each submarket with respect to individual growth trend and their contribution to the marketTo analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the marketTo strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their growth strategies.Request a sample copy atMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoCloud-BasedOn-premisesMarket segment by Application, Accounts Receivable Software can be split intoPersonalBanksEnterpriseOtherKey Highlights:A Clear understanding of the Accounts Receivable Software market based on growth, constraints, opportunities, feasibility study.Concise Accounts Receivable Software Market study based on major geographical regions.Analysis of evolving market segments as well as a complete study of existing Accounts Receivable Software market segments.Key Points from Table of Content1 Industry Overview of Accounts Receivable Software2 Global Accounts Receivable Software Competition Analysis by Players3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Araize3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Accounts Receivable Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2 PaidYET3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Accounts Receivable Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3 SlickPie3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Accounts Receivable Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)Ask for Discount at4 Global Accounts Receivable Software Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018)5 United States Accounts Receivable Software Development Status and Outlook6 EU Accounts Receivable Software Development Status and Outlook7 Japan Accounts Receivable Software Development Status and Outlook8 China Accounts Receivable Software Development Status and Outlook9 India Accounts Receivable Software Development Status and Outlook10 Southeast Asia Accounts Receivable Software Development Status and Outlook11 Market Forecast by Regions, Type and Application (2018-2025)12 Accounts Receivable Software Market Dynamics13 Market Effect Factors Analysis14 Research Finding/ConclusionList of Tables and FiguresFigure Japan Accounts Receivable Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Southeast Asia Accounts Receivable Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure India Accounts Receivable Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Table Global Accounts Receivable Software Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (%) Comparison by Product (2013-2018)Figure Global Accounts Receivable Software Revenue Market Share by Type in 2017Figure Cloud-Based Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)Figure On-premises Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)Figure Global Accounts Receivable Software Market Share by Application in 2017Figure Accounts Receivable Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate in Personal (2013-2018)Figure Accounts Receivable Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate in Banks (2013-2018)Figure Accounts Receivable Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate in Enterprise (2013-2018)Figure Accounts Receivable Software Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate in Other (2013-2018)Table Accounts Receivable Software Market Size (Million USD) by Players (2013-2018)Figure Accounts Receivable Software Market Size Share by Players in 2013Figure Accounts Receivable Software Market Size Share by Players in 2017Place a Direct order for complete report at(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Scope of Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market Sales, Size, Share, Leading Player & Forecast to 2025

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The market for machinery industry is growing with the expansion of this Industry Sector Worldwide. Market Research Hub (MRH) has added a new report titled Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market Size, Trends, Revenue and Future Scenario Forecast Until 2025which offer details about the current trends and analysis, as well as scope for the near future. This research study also covers information about the production, consumption and market share based on different active regions. Furthermore, an anticipated growth at a double-digit CAGR for the concerned machinery industry sector is highlighted in the report which indicates a prosperous future.Request Free Sample Report:This report studies the global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines market status and forecast, categorizes the global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines market size (value & volume) by manufacturers, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top manufacturers in North America, Europe, Japan, China, and other regions (India, Southeast Asia, Central & South America, and Middle East & Africa).The global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines market is valued at xx million US$ in 2017 and is expected to reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of xx.x % between 2018 and 2025.The major manufacturers covered in this reportBystronicColfaxHuffmanOmaxKMT WaterjetKoike AronsonDardi InternationalJetEdgeWard JetResato InternationalFlow InternationalAdvanced Kiffer SystemsAsia Machine GroupHornet Cutting SystemsBretonGeographically, this report studies the top producers and consumers, focuses on product capacity, production, value, consumption, market share and growth opportunity in these key regions, coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanOther RegionsThe regional scope of the study is as follows:North AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaSingaporeRest of Asia-PacificEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalySpainRussiaRest of EuropeCentral & South AmericaBrazilArgentinaRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaSaudi ArabiaTurkeyRest of Middle East & AfricaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into3-axis5-axisOthersOn 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, includingAutomobileShipAircraftGlass ProductConstructionMachine ShopsPackagingOthersThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines manufacturers, to study the capacity, production, value, market share and development plans in future.Focuses on the global key manufacturers, to define, describe and analyze the market competition landscape, SWOT analysis.To define, describe and forecast the market by type, application and region.To analyze the global and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends and factors driving or inhibiting the market growth.To analyze the opportunities in the market for stakeholders by identifying the high growth segments.To strategically analyze each submarket with respect to individual growth trend and their contribution to the marketTo analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the marketTo strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their growth strategies.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines are as follows:History Year: 2013-2017Base Year: 2017Estimated Year: 2018Forecast Year 2018 to 2025For the data information by region, company, type and application, 2017 is considered as the base year. Whenever data information was unavailable for the base year, the prior year has been considered.Key StakeholdersCNC Waterjet Cutting Machines ManufacturersCNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Distributors/Traders/WholesalersCNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsAvailable CustomizationsWith the given market data, QYResearch offers customizations according to the company's specific needs. The following customization options are available for the report:Regional and country-level analysis of the CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.Top of FormBrowse Full Report with TOC:Table of Content:Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market Research Report 20181 CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines1.2 CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 3-axis1.2.4 5-axis1.2.5 Others1.3 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Segment by Application1.3.1 CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Automobile1.3.3 Ship1.3.4 Aircraft1.3.5 Glass Product1.3.6 Construction1.3.7 Machine Shops1.3.8 Packaging1.3.9 Others1.4 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)2 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 China CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.8 Japan CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)4 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)4.1 Global CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Consumption by Region (2013-2018)4.2 North America CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.3 Europe CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.4 China CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.5 Japan CNC Waterjet Cutting Machines Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018).. @@ ContinuedAbout Market Research HubMarket Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports and analysis. MRHs expansive collection of Machinery market research reports has been carefully curated to help key personnel and decision makers across industry verticals to clearly visualize their operating environment and take strategic steps.MRH functions as an integrated platform for the following products and services: Objective and sound market forecasts, qualitative and quantitative analysis, incisive insight into defining industry trends, and market share estimates. Our reputation lies in delivering value and world-class capabilities to our clients.Contact Us90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United StatesToll Free: - 800-998-4852 (US-Canada)Email:- press@marketresearchhub.comWebsite:-Read Industry News at :-Super capacitor Market grow at 22% of CAGR between 2016 and 2022 with Top Key Players by: LS Ultracapacitor, Angstron Materials, CAP-XX, Panasonic, Vina, Nesscap Energy

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capacitor Market Trends, Super capacitor Industry, Super capacitor Market Leaders, Super capacitor Market Statistic, Super capacitor Market SegmentMarket Scenario:The study indicates that by the introduction of hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), smart grids, and renewable energy systems the demand for super capacitors has increased and thus resulted as driving factors for the super capacitor market. The super capacitor has advanced features which provides backups to low power equipments such as micro controllers, RAM, SRAM at the time of power cut off. Apart from it, laptop computers, portable media players, hand-held device, GPS and others have a requirement of stabilized power supply which can be easily satisfied by using super capacitors resulting to be the key driving factor for the growth of super capacitor market.Super capacitors, also known as ultra-capacitors, available in different types as electrochemical double layer capacitors, electric double-layer capacitors and pseudo capacitors, do not have a conventional dielectric. They instead have plates that are filled with two layers of an identical substance, which allows for separating the charge. Without the need for a dielectric, the plates of a super capacitor is packed with a larger surface area which results in high capacitance.A super capacitor contains a positive cathode which uses activated carbon material. Charges are stored in an electric double layer. Development of the layer happens at the interface between the electrolyte and the carbon. The Super Capacitor Market consists of different materials such as electrodes, activated carbon, activated carbon fibres, carbon aerogel, carbide-derived carbon, graphene, metal oxides and others.The Global Super capacitor Market is expected to grow at USD 4 Billion by 2022, at 22% of CAGR between 2016 and 2022.Request a Sample Report @Regional Analysis:The regional analysis of Super capacitor Market is being studied for region such as Asia pacific, North America, Europe and Rest of the World. The study indicates that Asia-Pacific is dominating the super capacitor market with a highest market share. Asia  Pacific countries like China, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and Japan are ahead in the in Super capacitor market due to increasing penetration of high-tech devices, increased installation of energy storage systems, introduction to hybrid transportation and many more. The study predicts Asia-Pacific would be the fastest growing region in the super capacitor market.Key Players:The prominent players in the Super capacitor Market are  Panasonic Corporation (Japan), Ioxus (U.S.), CAP-XX (Australia), Angstron Materials (U.S.), Maxwell Technologies, Inc. (U.S.), LS Ultracapacitor (South Korea), Graphenex (UK), Vina Technology (South Korea), Nesscap Energy Inc. (Canada), Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (Japan) among others.Segments:The global super capacitor market has been segmented on the basis of type, material, application, end-user and region.Super capacitor by Type: Double layer capacitor Pseudo capacitor Hybrid capacitorSuper capacitor by Material: Electrodes Activated carbon Activated carbon fibres Carbon aerogel Carbide-derived carbon Graphene Metal oxides OthersSuper capacitor by Application: Audio system Camera Solar Watch Laptop Aircraft OthersSuper capacitor by End-user: Consumer Electronics Automotive Manufacturing Aerospace & Defense Healthcare OthersAccess Report Details @Intended Audience System Integrators Super capacitor Panel Technicians and Technologist Network equipment vendors OEMs Super capacitor vendors Network infrastructure integrators Government Organizations Research/Consultancy firms1 MARKET INTRODUCTION1.1 INTRODUCTION1.2 SCOPE OF STUDY1.2.1 RESEARCH OBJECTIVE1.2.2 ASSUMPTIONS1.2.3 LIMITATIONS1.3 MARKET STRUCTURE2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY2.1 RESEARCH NETWORK SOLUTION2.2 PRIMARY RESEARCH2.3 SECONDARY RESEARCH2.4 FORECAST MODEL2.4.1 MARKET DATA COLLECTION, ANALYSIS & FORECAST2.4.2 MARKET SIZE ESTIMATIONContinue...LIST OF TABLESTABLE 1 SUPER CAPACITOR MARKET, BY TYPETABLE 2 SUPER CAPACITOR MARKET, BY MATERIALTABLE 3 SUPER CAPACITOR MARKET, BY APPLICATIONContinue...LIST OF FIGURESFIGURE 1 RESEARCH NETWORK SOLUTIONFIGURE 2 SUPER CAPACITOR MARKET: BY TYPE (%)FIGURE 3 SUPER CAPACITOR MARKET: BY MATERIAL (%)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 Components, Application, Logistics 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.Market Research FuturePune  411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +91 841 198 5042Mail: sales@marketresearchfuture.comReleases New Report on the Global Presence sensing devices Market (2017-2025)

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Presence Sensing Devices Market: OverviewPresence sensing devices are one of the most important safety devices used for press brake safety. Presence sensing devices are categorized into various sensing devices such as, photoelectric Sensors, proximity sensor, motion sensor, human sensing and occupancy sensor. Photoelectric sensors works on the principle of light, light falling on curtains which uses infrared rays. Proximity sensor are used for detecting the various objects without any physical contact.A proximity sensors emits an electromagnetic field radiation and looks for changes in the field or return signal. The motion sensor is an infrared human detection sensor, which, as opposed to factory automation sensors that are used with factory equipment, is designed to be incorporated into various devices that exist around us in daily life. Human sensing is a technology used for the sensing the people in a particular area. Occupancy sensor is a device which contains light or heat, which is being used for sensing the occupancy of a people in a space.Presence Sensing Devices Market: DynamicsOne of the most important driving factor of the presence sensing devices is machine safeguarding. Presence sensing devices are used for machine safeguarding for various operations such as, point of operation, in-running nip points, rotating parts, flying chips and sparks. Another major driving factor is electronic safety industry, presence sensing devices are manly used in detecting foreign objects by using lasers and cameras. Some challenges of presence sensing devices are such as, improper installation of machine safeguard and mechanical failure. Machine accidents can be reduce by proper installation of presence sensing devices, so this reduces the mechanical failure. Some opportunities of the presence sensing devices are such as, this devices can be used to recognize the air gestures and hover manipulations.Request for Table of Contents @Other opportunities is in the ground proximity warning system and in automatic faucets. There are some latest trends in the presence sensing devices are such as, passive infrared sensing devices, ultrasonic presence sensing devices, tomographic motion detector, video camera software presence sensing devices and gesture detector presence sensing devices.Presence Sensing Devices Market: SegmentationBased on the type presence sensing devices market is segmented into:Photoelectric presence sensing devicesProximity presence sensing devicesmotion presence sensing devicesHuman presence sensing devicesoccupancy presence sensing devicesBased on the application presence sensing devices market is segmented into:Parking sensorsGround proximity warning systemVibration measurements of rotating shaftsAir aircrafts warfareRoller coastersConveyor systemImprovised explosive devicesMobile devicesPresence Sensing Devices Market: Regional OverviewThe global presence sensing devices market is divided into seven regions, namely North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan and Middle East and Africa (MEA). North America holds the major share in the global presence sensing devices market in terms of production and revenue sharing. The presence sensing devices market in electronic safety is currently dominated by the North American market.Followed by North America, Europe and Latin America are expected to grow relatively at a higher CAGR during the forecast period since the use of presence sensing devices market improves the various operations in many industries. The global presence sensing devices market in Japan is well established and expected to grow at average CAGR over the forecast period. MEA is expected to expand at sluggish growth rate due to very high population in this region.Presence Sensing Devices Market: Regional SegmentationIn Asia-Pacific, the growth of the presence sensing devices market 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 presence sensing devices in conveyor and electronic industryRequest to View Sample of Research Report @Presence Sensing Devices Market: Key PlayersABB LTD.Ametek, INC.Eaton CORPPLCEmerson Electric CO.Honeywell International, INC.IFM Electronic GmbhKASchmersal Gmbh & COKG.Leuze Electronic Gmbh & COKGMayser Gmbh & COKG.Mitsubishi Electric CorporationOmron CorporationPepperl+Fuchs GmbhPilz Gmbh & COKG.Rockwell Automation, INC.Schneider Electric S.A.Sense Eletronica LTDA.Sick AGSiemens AGSitema Gmbh & COKG.Wenglor Sensoric GmbhABOUT 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:Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market Revenue and Value Chain 2017-2025

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Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market: OverviewNon-condensable as well as condensable gases can be discharged with a very little loss and consumption of the live stream with the help of a stream trap. Stream traps are like automotive valves. They modulate, close and open on their own. The inverted bucket stream traps have a bucket that is attached by a lever with the trap. The lever is responsible for sensing the buckets motion and close and open the trap valve in accordance with it. When the inverted bucket is surrounded by the condensate on the outside and air or steam flow from the bottom, the bucket becomes buoyant and rises due to the steam. In this condition, the inverted bucket forces the trap valve to close. A small at the top off the inverted bucket, known as vent hole is the place where small amount of pressure can be released.Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe growth in the Inverted Bucket Stream Trap Market can be attributed to factors such as stringent policies and regulations to decrease carbon footprint led by the government and increased adoption of the inverted bucket stream traps by the end- user industries for the purpose of increasing their fuel savings. The gas and oil industry is estimated to be responsible for the growth of Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market in the forecast period 2017 to 2022 owing to the huge investments in the gas and oil fields and also to the growing concern for energy management solutions. Increasing concerns related to the environment such as reduction in CO2 levels is likely to push the growth of the Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market.In oil refineries, steam is a part of many applications. Some of these applications include huge reboilers that are responsible for the consumption of many tons of steam every hour and trace heating system that are responsible for maintaining the product in the correct viscosity range. Owing to its applications in the oil refineries, huge demand for the inverted bucket stream traps is likely to be generated in the oil refineries sector. However efficient the inverted bucket stream traps may be, there are energy losses in the inverted bucket steam traps as well. This factor is likely to restrain the growth of the Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market.Request for Table of Contents @Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market: Market SegmentationThe Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market can be segmented by the end user, by body type and the geography.On the basis of end user type, Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market can be segmented into:-Thermal powerOil and gasChemicalsEnergy and PowerFood & BeveragesPharmaceuticalsOthersOn the basis of body type, Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market can be segmented into:-SteelIronOthersOn the basis of application type, Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market can be segmented into:-Drip ApplicationTracing ApplicationProcess ApplicationOn the basis of geography, Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market can be segmented into:-AmericasEMEAAPACInverted Bucket Steam Trap Market: Regional OutlookThe North America region is estimated to dominate the Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market in the forecast period 2017 to 2022. In 2015, The APAC (Asia Pacific) region was the highest revenue generating region in the Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market. By the end of 2022, it is expected that the APAC region will continue its dominance in the Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market owing to its increasing demand in the thermal power sector and refinery industry. Also, the increased consumption of electricity and the increased demand for gasoline can be accounted as the reasons for the growth of the Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market in the APAC region.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market: Key PlayersSome of the major players of the Inverted Bucket Steam Trap Market are:-Watts Water Technologies, Inc. (US)CIRCOR International, Inc. (US)Velan Inc. (Canada)Emerson Electric Co. (US)The Weir Group PLC (U.K.)Flowserve Corporation (US)Thermax Limited (India)Pentair plc (US)Spirax-Sarco Engineering plc (UK)Schlumberger N.V. (US)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:Neem Extract Market Report for Period 2018 till 2024 Neeming Australia Pvt. Ltd (Australia), Bros India Group (India), The Indian Neem Tree Company (India), PJ Margo Pvt. Ltd. (India), Agro Extracts Limited (India) and Others.

Neem Extract Market

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Global Neem Extract market report emphasizes on detailed analysis of companies and manufacturers like Fortune Biotech Ltd. (India), The Indian Neem Tree Company (India), PJ Margo Pvt. Ltd. (India), Gramin India AgriBusiNes (India), GreeNeem Agri Private Limited (India), Certis USA LLC (U.S.), Ozone Biotech (India), E.I.D Parry India Ltd. (India), Neeming Australia Pvt. Ltd (Australia), Bros India Group (India), Agro Extracts Limited (India), Parker India Group (India) and Others.This market study includes data about global market statistics, market share, company performances, historical analysis 2012 to 2016, market forecast 2017 to 2023 in terms of volume, revenue, YOY growth rate, and CAGR for the year 2017 to 2023, etc. The Global Neem Extract market report provides detailed segmentation of Global Neem Extract Market based on product type, application, end user and regional segmentation. The regional segment is further bifurcated on country level.Request for Free Sample Copy of Global Neem Extract Market 2017 @Top Manufactures of Global Neem Extract market:E.I.D Parry India Ltd. (India)Neeming Australia Pvt. Ltd (Australia)Bros India Group (India)Agro Extracts Limited (India)Parker India Group (India)Fortune Biotech Ltd. (India)The Indian Neem Tree Company (India)PJ Margo Pvt. Ltd. (India)Gramin India AgriBusiNes (India)GreeNeem Agri Private Limited (India)Certis USA LLC (U.S.)Ozone Biotech (India)Others(Note: We can profile additional players without extra charges)Global Neem Extract Market: Key Product Type:Seed ExtractLeaf ExtractBark ExtractOthersKey Application Types for Global Neem Extract Market:AgriculturePersonal CarePharmaceuticalAnimal FeedothersKey Regions for Global Neem Extract Market:North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy and Others)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia and Others)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia and Others)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Others)(Note: We can provide specific country or region specific report on request)The Global Neem Extract Market analysis report provides detailed value chain for analysis of Global Neem Extract Market. The value chain helps to analyze major upstream in raw materials, major equipments, manufacturing process, downstream customer analysis and major distributor analysis.The report also covers in-depth description, competitive scenario, wide product portfolio of prime players active in this market and business strategies adopted by competitors along with their SWOT analysis. The report also provides Porter analysis, PESTEL analysis and market attractiveness which helps to better understand the market scenario. Side by side, it also explicitly provides information about mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and all the other important activities occurred in current and past few years. The Global Neem Extract Market report explores manufacturers competitive scenario and provides market share for all major players of this market based on production capacity, sales, revenue, geographical presence and other major factors. The report also covers import/export data across all major regions covered in this report. Moreover, import/export data across any particular country as per requirement.The report finally provides detailed research report conclusion, which provides summary of entire report and vital suggestions from analysts particular to Neem Extract Market which will help existing as well as new players who wish to enter this market.Enquire before Buying @ put actual website like for exampleTable of Contents:1 Industry Overview of Neem Extract1.1 Definition and Specifications of Neem Extract1.1.1 Definition of Neem Extract1.1.2 Specifications of Neem Extract1.2 Classification of Neem Extract1.2.1 Seed Extract1.2.2 Leaf Extract1.2.3 Bark Extract1.3 Applications of Neem Extract1.3.1 Agriculture1.3.2 Personal Care1.3.3 Pharmaceutical1.3.4 Animal Feed........................Continue (Global Neem Extract Market Research Industry Report is prepared with the help of extensive primary and secondary sources, directories, journals, newsletters and with the help of third-party application like Hoovers, Factiva, Bloomberg, Businessweek, etc.About Market Reports Company:Market Reports Company delivers high quality precise research studies which include data about top manufacturers and market survey of various industries. We also work as a consulting company and publisher of market research reports. We are specialized in providing customized reports according to clients needs and requirements which ultimately help them grow in industry and beat their competition.What We Offer:Customized Reports: We provide customized research reports on your demand.Region Specific Study: We have resources all over the world so, if you are Interested in region specific study please contact us.How we work: Perfect blend of primary and secondary research to provide best result.Expertise: Team of Industry experienced research associates and experts, primary and secondary sources, 24*7 customer care service and post-sale support.Contact UsJason Smith,Sales Manager, Global Business Development,Website: marketreportscompany.comEmail: jasonsmith@marketreportscompany.comContact us: +1-888-220-3424Address: 20 N State Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60602 United StatesClutch Housing Market Segments and Key Trends 2017-2025

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Market Definition and IntroductionThe clutch housing is metal case which is used for covering the clutch and the flywheel mechanism. Clutch housing is also known as bell housing as it looks a somewhat similar to the shape of the bell. The key function of the clutch housing is to protect the clutch and flywheel mechanism from the dirt, water and pollution of the environment. Clutch housing is bolted to the engine block and is usually made up of metals such as cast iron or aluminium. Clutch housing is manufactured by cold forming of thick metals. The alignment of the clutch housing is relative to the flywheel axis, and this is done with the help of bolts, collars, and locating pins. The clutch housing should be designed and manufactured in such a way so that it ensures good airing and ventilations for cooling the friction surfaces inside the assembly. Moreover, it should also have proper openings to remove the wear products from the mechanism.Market SegmentationOn the basis of Material type, the global Clutch Housing market is segmented as follows:Cast IronAluminiumOthersOn the basis of application, the global Clutch Housing market is segmented as follows:Heavy Clutch HousingLarge Clutch HousingSmall Clutch HousingOn the basis of Sales Channel, the global Clutch Housing market is segmented as follows:OEM (Original Equipment ManufacturersAftermarketRequest for Table of Contents @On the basis of Vehicle Type, the global Clutch Housing market is segmented as follows:Two wheelersPassengers CarsLight Commercial VehiclesHeavy Commercial VehiclesHybrid VehiclesOthers (ATV, Construction & Agricultural Vehicles)Key Trends, Drivers & Challenges for the Global Clutch Housing MarketCurrently, manufacturers of Clutch Housing systems have been focusing aggressively on innovative product developments to develop and launch new Clutch Housing systems that are strong and provide proper ventilation to the friction components within the housing. It should be noted that the demand for new automobiles is being fuelled by the ever rising number of international as well as domestic passengers along with the increasing fast transportation. This increase in demand for new vehicles will, in turn, fuel the global demand for clutch housing systems in future.In developed economies, vehicle buyers are looking for equipment equipped with advanced diagnosis and automation. Through process R&D and product innovation in advanced telematics systems, manufacturers have significantly improved their response time for such custom requirements from clients. This trend is expected to gain traction across the global market and create tremendous opportunity in the near future and in turn fuel market growth of clutch housing.Prominent market players in global market are trying to develop strong and long lasting clutch housing for all the vehicles. The advancement in the material science technologies in the manufacturing industries have enabled them to use new invented materials such as alloys of steel and aluminium, which makes the engine body which includes clutch housing assembly of the vehicles stronger and durable under extreme load conditionsHowever, the relatively higher price of advanced clutch housing systems is proving to be a deterrent for smaller, low-budget passenger cars and two wheelers. This particular factor is seen to be hampering the growth rate of the global clutch housing systems market. Additionally, one of the socio-economic factors for the global clutch housing market is the rising automation and technology which is a boon for the faster and accurate production of automotive components but, it has also larger impact on the unemployment rate.Automation and technological advances may lead to high unemployment rates in the global automotive market in the near future. Also, an increasingly pollution level due to the commercial vehicles is being witnessed across multiple countries which has translated into various regulatory bodies of different countries. For instance, the pollution control boards across various regions have made it mandatory for the automotive manufacturers to ensure the installation of eco-friendly products and the use of good quality of fuel.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants operating in the global Clutch Housing market are as follows:Schaeffler GroupMEANS INDUSTRIES INC.NINGBO BEILUN LEMA MACHINERY TECHNOLOGY CO.,LTDWeasler EngineeringSaraswati Engineering Ltd.Logan Clutch CorporationMACAS AutomotiveClutch Auto LimitedC.C. Co.,Ltd.Transtar Industries, Inc.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:Integration Security Service Market is Expected to Witness Significant Growth of US$ 36,135.9 million by 2026

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The latest report by Persistence Market Research (PMR) expects the global integration security services market to witness robust growth. The market is estimated to expand at the CAGR of 13.6% during the forecast period 2017-2026. By the end of 2026, the global integration security services market is expected to reach US$ 36,135.9 million revenue.Companies are offering integration security services by integrating multi-layered security system into one solution. Key market players are focusing on offering integration security services that can centralize business security operations and real-time monitoring of the facility and different areas of work. Integration security services are being provided with solutions for cyber security management, identity and access management, and compliance management. The demand for an integrated solution with the single user interface that can integrate directly with diverse systems and networks is increasing to keep systems, data, and content protected.Request for Table of Contents @Increasing Demand for Easy to Deploy and Easy to Use Integrated Security Solutions : With the availability of various security solutions in the market, it has become difficult for customers to choose the right solution. Moreover, it is also time consuming and expensive to implement single security solution. Hence, customers are demanding security solutions that are integrated into a single package, is easy to use and easy to deploy. Hence the adoption of integrated security solutions has increased among large as well as small and mid-sized organizations. Integration security service providers are also focusing on enhancing network visibility and incident response.Global Integration Security Services Market- Market Segmentation : The global integration security services market is categorized into end user, industry, deployment type, application, and region. Based on the deployment type, the market segment consists SaaS and on-premises. Among these, on-premises is expected to witness robust growth, accounting for more than half of the revenue share by the end of 2017.End User segment is further bifurcated into small & medium enterprise and large enterprise. Large enterprise is expected to be the largest user of integration security services. By the end of 2026, large enterprise is estimated to surpass US$ 23,600 million revenue.By application, the market is segmented into theft management, identity & access management, compliance management, and others. Integration security services are anticipated to be largely used for compliance management. By the end of 2026, compliance management is estimated to surpass US$ 13,500 million revenue.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Based on industry, the market is categorized into healthcare, manufacturing, BFSI, energy & utilities, retail, IT & telecom, and other industries. Healthcare is likely to witness strong growth in the global integration security services market during the forecast period 2017-2026.On the basis of region, the market segment includes Latin America, North America, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Europe, the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Japan. Europe is likely to be the largest market in the global integration security services market. The demand in the region is growing due to the presence of key players.Global Integration Security Services Market- Competition TrackingThe report also offers detailed profile of some of the key players in the market such as Symantec, CGI, Decipher Works Pty Ltd, Cisco Systems, Trend Micro, IBM Corporation, Sophos, Optiv, Microsoft Corporation, and DynTek. These key players are constantly working on offering an advanced solution by integrating innovative technologies in the integrated security solution. The companies are also entering into a partnership to expand globally and offer a unique solution.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:e-Zest announces Gold level sponsorship for Magento Imagine 2018

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e-Zest, a leading digital innovation partner for enterprises and technology companies, announces its presence at Magento Imagine 2018 as a gold sponsor. The eighth edition of the conference brings together 3000+ of the worlds brightest e-commerce experts and visionaries. This year the global Magento conference will be held in Las Vegas from April 23-25th.The conference is organized by Magento with the main aim to inspire, advance, educate, collaborate, and to provide an enjoyable Magento experience.Devendra Deshmukh, CEO and Founder of e-Zest, is thrilled about the sponsorship. "It is always great to be part of such events to create lasting connections. We look forward to meeting other visionaries in the digital commerce domain who strive to innovate with Magento as their platform," he said.Imagine brings together senior executives, marketers, merchandisers, developers, and e-commerce opportunists. The event encompasses three engaging days of keynote speakers, breakout, and special sessions, and networking events designed to help entrepreneurs develop their business. It is also expected that Magento executives will reveal their latest strategic directions. The conference is renowned for curating new insights, incredible developments, and engaging presentations."e-Zest has been providing enterprise B2B digital commerce solutions for its F500 customers. We look forward to learning about new enhancements to the platform that will help us create value for our enterprise customers. We will also be launching our new offering, an onsite e-Commerce Innovation Workshop. The workshop will help customers reimagine their e-commerce solution and strategize roadmap to successful implementation," said Satish Chavan, President  e-Zest Solutions Inc.e-Zest leverages the benefits of Magento to deliver high-end B2B digital commerce portals to its enterprise clients designed to enable easier adoption of e-commerce applications that can support large online stores. We facilitate Magento certified developers with deep expertise in development, migration, and integration of enterprise applications that guide you at every stage of your adoption.e-Zest will be stationed at Booth 213 in the Sponsors Marketplace. Attendees can interact with e-Zests leadership team about their digital commerce goals and roadmap. You may register at () to meet with the team.e-Zest is a leading digital innovation partner for enterprises and technology companies that utilizes emerging technologies for creating engaging customers experiences. Being a customer-focused and technology-driven company, it always helps clients in crafting holistic business value for their software development efforts. It offers software development and consulting services for cloud computing, enterprise mobility, big data and analytics, user experience and digital commerce.e-Zest is an ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2013 and SEI CMMI Level 3 certified company with more than 600 software professionals on board with customers spread across the world. It is consistently delivering cutting-edge technology solutions to its broad range of clients from manufacturing, healthcare, public sector, financial services, retail, e-learning and travel industries since its inception in 2000. e-Zest is Microsoft Gold Certified partner, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, and Oracle Silver Level Partner.-e-Zest Solutions,-3rd Floor, Building IT-09, Qubix Business Park - SEZ Blueridge, Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park, Hinjawadi Phase-1, Pune, Maharashtra 411057-Mandar Thosar-9975574955Industrial Sludge Treatment Chemicals Market to grow by a CAGR of around 6% up to 2024.

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Industrial expansion coupled with a rapid increase in manufacturing activities will have a significant impact on the overall industrial sludge treatment chemicals market growth by 2024. A heavy amount of sludge and waste are generated from these units and treatment chemicals are required for the same. The economic growth of developing regions resulting in a surge in chemical and mining industries will positively influence the market demand due to an extensive release of waste products from these sectors. Strict government protocols related to the sludge and excessive waste generation will spur the demand for the industrial sludge treatment chemicals market over the forecast period.Industrial Sludge Treatment Chemicals Market will surpass USD 7.5 billion by 2024; according to a new research report.The proper disposal of waste and sludge content is an important issue across the globe due to the presence of hazardous chemical components in it. Special handling and appropriate care are essential at the time of the disposal and treatment to make them suitable for the use in the agriculture sector in the form of fertilizers, etc. These factors will enhance the industrial sludge treatment chemicals market growth by 2024.Request for Sample Copy of this Report@Excessive usage of water and the resultant high transportation and operational cost are the key restraining factors for industrial sludge treatment chemicals market growth over the forecast timeframe. Integrated production systems and technology advancements to reduce the sludge production will further hinder the market growth in the future owing to the lesser sludge produced from the industries.Industrial sludge treatment chemicals market is segmented based on sludge type, process chemical, process treatment, end-user, and regions. The three major sludge types include mixed, activated, and primary. The minor sludge types are tertiary, humus, etc., and have been included in the others segment. Among these, activated type dominated the overall the market and in 2016, it was valued at over USD 1.5 billion.The four key processes are widely used in the industry, which include digestion, dewatering & drying, thickening, and conditioning & stabilization. Dewatering & drying process treatment is extensively used and held a significant share of the overall industrial sludge treatment chemicals market in 2024. This segment is likely to grow at a substantial CAGR of more than 6% by the end of the forecast period.There are three major process chemical segments, flocculants, disinfectants, and coagulants. The minor chemicals include defoamers, activated carbon, etc. Among these, flocculants held a significant share in the overall industrial sludge treatment chemicals market and will grow at a substantial CAGR of around 6% by the end of the forecast time.Browse key industry insights from the report, Industrial sludge treatment chemicals market in detail along with the table of contents:The major industrial sludge treatment chemicals market end-user segments include pulp & paper, oil & gas, food & beverages, electronics, automotive, metal processing, personal care, and chemicals. The minor industries include paint & coating, textiles, and others. Among these, the personal care segment held a notable share in the industry and will also grow at a significant CAGR by 2024. The food & beverage segment valued at around USD 1.5 billion over the forecast time frame.North America, led by the U.S. and Canada, is likely to hold a major chunk in the industrial sludge treatment chemicals market in future due to the developed industries in this area. Asia Pacific is likely to grow at a notable CAGR of around 6.5% in future due to the rapid expansion in regional manufacturing units.The prominent industry players include Ecolab, ITS Group, BASF, Veolia, Beckart, Kurita Industries, Kemira, AkzoNobel, Hubbard-Hall, Ashland, Ovivo, SAS Environmental, Accepta, and others.Request for Inquiry before buying this Report @Industrial sludge treatment chemicals market research report includes an in-depth coverage of the industry with estimates & forecast in terms of revenue in USD million from 2013 to 2024, for the following segments:Industrial Sludge Treatment Chemicals Market by Sludge Typeo Activated sludgeo Primary sludgeo Mixed sludgeo OthersIndustrial Sludge Treatment Chemicals Market by Process Treatmento Dewatering & drying treatmento Conditioning & stabilization treatmento Thickening treatmento Digestion treatmentIndustrial Sludge Treatment Chemicals Market by Process Chemicals by End-usero Flocculants Automotive Oil & gas Metal processing Food & beverages Pulp & paper Personal care & chemicals Electronics Otherso Coagulants Automotive Oil & gas Metal processing Food & beverages Pulp & paper Personal care & chemicals Electronics Otherso Disinfectants Automotive Oil & gas Metal processing Food & beverages Pulp & paper Personal care & chemicals Electronics Otherso Others Automotive Oil & gas Metal processing Food & beverages Pulp & paper Personal care & chemicals Electronics OthersIndustrial Sludge Treatment Chemicals Market by End-usero Automotiveo Oil & gaso Metal processingo Food & beverageso Pulp & papero Personal care & chemicalso Electronicso OthersThe above information is provided on a regional and country basis for the following:o North America U.S. Canadao Europe Germany UK France Spain Italyo Asia Pacific China India Japan Australia Indonesia Malaysiao Latin America Brazil Mexicoo MEA South Africa GCCReport ContentChapter 8. Industrial Sludge Treatment Chemicals Market, By Region8.1. Global industrial sludge treatment chemicals market share by region, 2016 & 20248.2. North America8.2.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.2.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.2.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.2.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.2.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.2.6. U.S.8.2.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.2.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.2.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.2.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.2.6.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.2.7. Canada8.2.7.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.2.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.2.7.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.2.7.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.2.7.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.3. Europe8.3.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.3.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.3.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.3.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.3.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.3.6. Germany8.3.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.3.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.3.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.3.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.3.6.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.3.7. UK8.3.7.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.3.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.3.7.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.3.7.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.3.7.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.3.8. France8.3.8.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.3.8.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.3.8.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.3.8.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.3.8.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.3.9. Spain8.3.9.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.3.9.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.3.9.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.3.9.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.3.9.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.3.10. Italy8.3.10.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.3.10.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.3.10.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.3.10.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.3.10.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.4. Asia Pacific8.4.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.4.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.4.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.4.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.4.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.4.6. China8.4.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.4.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.4.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.4.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.4.6.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.4.7. India8.4.7.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.4.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.4.7.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.4.7.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.4.7.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.4.8. Japan8.4.8.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.4.8.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.4.8.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.4.8.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.4.8.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.4.9. Australia8.4.9.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.4.9.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.4.9.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.4.9.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.4.9.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.4.10. Indonesia8.4.10.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.4.10.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.4.10.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.4.10.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.4.10.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.4.11. Malaysia8.4.11.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.4.11.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.4.11.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.4.11.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.4.11.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.5. Latin America8.5.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.5.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.5.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.5.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.5.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.5.6. Brazil8.5.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.5.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.5.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.5.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.5.6.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.5.7. Mexico8.5.7.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.5.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.5.7.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.5.7.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.5.7.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.6. Middle East & Africa (MEA)8.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.6.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.6.6. South Africa8.6.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.6.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.6.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.6.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.6.6.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 201320248.6.7. GCC8.6.7.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20248.6.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by sludge type, 201320248.6.7.3. Market estimates and forecast, by process treatment, 201320248.6.7.4. Market estimates and forecast, process chemicals by end-user, 201320248.6.7.5. Market estimates and forecast, by end-user, 20132024Chapter 9. Company Profiles9.1. BASF9.1.1. Business overview9.1.2. Financial data9.1.3. Process chemicals landscape9.1.4. Strategic outlook9.1.5. SWOT analysis9.2. Accepta9.2.1. Business overview9.2.2. Financial data9.2.3. Process chemicals landscape9.2.4. Strategic outlook9.2.5. SWOT analysis9.3. Kemira Oyj9.3.1. Business overview9.3.2. Financial data9.3.3. Process chemicals landscape9.3.4. Strategic outlook9.3.5. SWOT analysis9.4. SUEZ9.4.1. Business overview9.4.2. Financial data9.4.3. Process chemicals landscape9.4.4. Strategic outlook9.4.5. SWOT analysis9.5. Ovivo9.5.1. Business overview9.5.2. Financial data9.5.3. Process chemicals landscape9.5.4. Strategic outlook9.5.5. SWOT analysis9.6. Ecolab9.6.1. Business overview9.6.2. Financial data9.6.3. Process chemicals landscape9.6.4. Strategic outlook9.6.5. SWOT analysis9.7. Kurita Water Industries Ltd.9.7.1. Business overview9.7.2. Financial data9.7.3. Process chemicals landscape9.7.4. Strategic outlook9.7.5. SWOT analysis9.8. Beckart Environmental, Inc.9.8.1. Business overview9.8.2. Financial data9.8.3. Process chemicals landscape9.8.4. Strategic outlook9.8.5. SWOT analysis9.9. Amcon Inc.9.9.1. Business overview9.9.2. Financial data9.9.3. Process chemicals landscape9.9.4. Strategic outlook9.9.5. SWOT analysis9.10. Hubbard-Hall Inc.9.10.1. Business overview9.10.2. Financial data9.10.3. Process chemicals landscape9.10.4. Strategic outlook9.10.5. SWOT analysis9.11. ITS Group9.11.1. Business overview9.11.2. Financial data9.11.3. Process chemicals landscape9.11.4. Strategic outlook9.11.5. SWOT analysis9.12. Ashland9.12.1. Business overview9.12.2. Financial data9.12.3. Process chemicals landscape9.12.4. Strategic outlook9.12.5. SWOT analysis9.13. Veolia9.13.1. Business overview9.13.2. Financial data9.13.3. Process chemicals landscape9.13.4. Strategic outlook9.13.5. SWOT analysis9.14. AkzoNobel N.V.9.14.1. Business overview9.14.2. Financial data9.14.3. Process chemicals landscape9.14.4. Strategic outlook9.14.5. SWOT analysis9.15. SAS Environmental Services9.15.1. Business overview9.15.2. Financial data9.15.3. Process chemicals landscape9.15.4. Strategic outlook9.15.5. SWOT analysisBrowse full Table of Content @About Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnologyContact UsArun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1 888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Worldwide Avionics Systems Market | Trending Key Players Rockwell Collins, Honeywell Aerospace, Thales Group, Garmin Ltd, Cobham, GE Aviation | Forecast till 2023

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BusinessIndustryReports.com has new research report on the global Avionics Systems Market. The global Avionics Systems market is growing continuously and expected to grow healthy CAGR by Forecast year 2023Avionics Systems Market are the electronic systems used on aircraft, artificial satellites, and spacecraft. Avionic systems include communications, navigation, the display and management of multiple systems, and the hundreds of systems that are fitted to aircraft to perform individual functions.Avionics Systems Market can be as simple as a searchlight for a police helicopter or as complicated as the tactical system for an airborne early warning platform. The term avionics is a portmanteau of the words aviation and electronics.The term Avionics Systems Market was coined by the journalist Philip J. Klass as a portmanteau of "aviation electronics". Many modern avionics have their origins in World War II wartime developments. For example, autopilot systems that are prolific today were started to help bomber planes fly steadily enough to hit precision targets from high altitudes.Famously, radar was developed in the UK, Germany, and the United States during the same period. Modern avionics is a substantial portion of military aircraft spending. Aircraft like the F15E and the now retired F14 have roughly 20 percent of their budget spent on avionics. Most modern helicopters now have budget splits of 60/40 in favour of avionics.[citation needed]Get a Premium Sample Report atAvionics are electronics systems used in aircraft for communication, navigation, and various other flight critical applications. Modern avionics also aid in improved navigation and routing, provide enhanced situational awareness to pilots, and improve the ATM process.This report includes market status and forecast of global and major regions, with introduction of vendors, regions, product types and end industries; and this report counts product types and end industries in global and major regions. Market Segment as follows:By Region / Countries - North America (U.S., Canada, Mexico), Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Italy, Russia, Spain etc), South America (Brazil, Argentina etc), Middle East & Africa (Saudi Arabia, South Africa etc), By Type- Flight Control System, Flight Management System, Health Monitoring System, Others. By End-User / Application- Commercial UseMilitary UseAvionics Systems Market Worldwide key Players Rockwell CollinsHoneywell AerospaceThales GroupGarmin LtdCobhamGE AviationBAE SystemsLockheed MartinNorthrop GrummanRaytheonMore Inquire atMajor Table of Content1 Global Avionics Systems Market Research Report 20182 Global Avionics Systems Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Avionics Systems Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Avionics Systems Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Avionics Systems Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Avionics Systems Market Analysis by Application7 Global Avionics Systems Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Avionics Systems Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Avionics Systems Market Forecast (2018-2023 )13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixKey questions answered in the report:What will the market growth rate of Avionics Systems market in 2023 ?What are the key factors driving the global Avionics Systems market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis of top manufacturers of Avionics Systems market?Who are the distributors, traders and dealers of Avionics Systems market?Who are the key manufacturers in Avionics Systems market space?What are the Avionics Systems market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the global Avionics Systems market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by types and applications of Avionics Systems market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by regions of Avionics Systems market?What are the market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Avionics Systems market?Purchased this report online with 127 Pages and List of figures and table atAbout usBusinessindustryReports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined - we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media ContactBusiness Industry ReportsPune  Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940Hospital Security Systems Market Projected to Show Strong Growth

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Latest research study from HTF MI with title Global Hospital Security Systems by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023. The Research report presents a complete assessment of the market and contains Future trend, Current Growth Factors, attentive opinions, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry validated market data. The study is segmented by products type, application/end-users. The research study provides estimates for Global Hospital Security Systems Forecast till 2023.If you are involved in the Hospital Security Systems industry or intend to be, then this study will provide you comprehensive outlook. Its vital you keep your market knowledge up to date segmented by Applications Hospitals & Other Medical Institutes, Product Types such as [Hardware, Software & Services] and some major players in the industry. If you have a different set of players/manufacturers according to geography or needs regional or country segmented reports we can provide customization according to your requirement.Request Sample of Global Hospital Security Systems Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022 @:Consumer Services-102Key Companies/players: Honeywell International, Johnson Controls, Schneider Electric, Bosch Security Systems, Stanley Security, Siemens AG, Securitas, Cisco Systems, Seico Security, Matrix Systems & Tyco International.Application: Hospitals & Other Medical Institutes, Product Type: Hardware, Software & Services.The research covers the current & Future market size of the Global Hospital Security Systems market and its growth rates based on 5 year history data. It also covers various types of segmentation such as by geography [United States, EU, Japan, China, India & Southeast Asia]. The market competition is constantly growing higher with the rise in technological innovation and M&A activities in the industry. Moreover, many local and regional vendors are offering specific application products for varied end-users. On the basis of attributes such as company overview, recent developments, strategies adopted by the market leaders to ensure growth, sustainability, financial overview and recent developments.Stay up-to-date with Hospital Security Systems market research offered by HTF MI. Check how key trends and emerging drivers are shaping this industry growth as the study avails you with market characteristics, size and growth, segmentation, regional breakdowns, competitive landscape, shares, trend and strategies for this market. In the Global Hospital Security Systems Market Analysis & Forecast 2018-2023, the revenue is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2018 and 2023. The production is estimated at XX million in 2017 and is forecasted to reach XX million by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2018 and 2023.Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Consumer Services-102Key questions answered in this report - Global Hospital Security Systems Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022What will the market size be in 2023 and what will the growth rate beWhat are the key market trendsWhat is driving Global Hospital Security Systems Market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in Hospital Security Systems Market space?What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the Global Hospital Security Systems Market ?What are the key outcomes of the five forces analysis of the Global Hospital Security Systems Market?What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the Global Hospital Security Systems market? Get in-depth details about factors influencing the market shares of the Americas, APAC, and EMEA?Enquire for customization in Report @Consumer Services-102There are 15 Chapters to display the Global Hospital Security Systems market.Chapter 1, to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of Global Hospital Security Systems, Applications of Hospital Security Systems, 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 , Capacity and Commercial Production Date, Manufacturing Plants Distribution, Export & Import, 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, Hospital Security Systems Segment Market Analysis (by Type);Chapter 7 and 8, to analyze the Hospital Security Systems Segment Market Analysis (by Application [Hospitals & Other Medical Institutes]) Major Manufacturers Analysis;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product Type [Hardware, Software & Services], Market Trend by Application [Hospitals & Other Medical Institutes];Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, to analyze the Consumers Analysis of Global Hospital Security Systems by region, type and application ;Chapter 12, to describe Hospital Security Systems Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Hospital Security Systems sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Buy this research report @Consumer ServicesReasons 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 5-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.Contact US :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.comConnect with us atAutomotive Thermostat Market Value to Increase to US$ 2,094.5 Mn by 2025

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This market is significantly fragmented, and is characterized by the presence of a number of regional players. Widespread adoption for safety towards high performance cars is being witnessed in developing countries, and manufacturers are focusing on providing a complete range of automotive thermostats. According to the recently published report by Persistence Market Research titled, Automotive Thermostat Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Forecast (2017-2025), the global automotive thermostat market valued at US$ 1,598.3 Mn in 2017, and is projected to be valued at US$ 2,094.5 Mn by 2025 end. The market value is slated to expand at a CAGR of 3.4% over the forecast period.Automotive Thermostat Market Research Report Overview @Persistence Market Research has covered five regions of North America, Latin America, Europe, APAC and MEA while examining any market. It has been observed that the APAC automotive thermostat market is estimated to be the most attractive owing to growing automotive production and the strong demand for passenger cars and commercial vehicles from emerging economies such as China, India, and other APAC countries. Growing automotive production in Mexico, followed by Brazil, and the demand for advanced auto parts is estimated to contribute to growth of the Latin America automotive thermostat market during the forecast period. North America automotive thermostat market is anticipated to show relatively steady growth owing to a slowdown in automotive production in U.S. and Canada.Request Sample Report@On the basis of design, global automotive thermostats market is segmented into single valve and dual valve. The single valve segment is expected to emerge as the most attractive component type segment in the automotive thermostat market over the forecast period. The segment has a higher index value in terms of CAGR and incremental $ opportunity. On the other hand, the dual valve segment is expected to hold a minimal share in the global automotive thermostat market throughout the forecast period. However, this segment will witness a steady growth rate over the forecast period.Sales channel segment includes OEM and aftermarket segments. Growth of OEM segment is largely supported by the changing preference of automakers towards advanced auto components, and the growing adoption of automotive thermostats. The OEM segment accounted for a value share of 56.62% in 2017, and is estimated to reach 57.04% in 2025.Download and View Report TOC, Figures and Tables @On the basis of vehicle type, the global automotive thermostat market is segmented into passenger car, light commercial vehicle and heavy commercial vehicle. The passenger vehicle segment accounted for a value share of 73.1% in 2017, and is estimated to reach 73.6% in 2025. The passenger vehicle segment is estimated to gain in 60 BPS point. The heavy commercial vehicle segment is estimated to reach 4.7% in 2025. LCV and HC segment is expected to show steady growth in automotive thermostat market.BorgWarner Inc., Continental AG, Denso Corporation, Hella KGaA Hueck & Co., MAHLE GmbH, MotoRad Ltd., Robert Bosch GmbH, Sogefi S.p.A., Valeo SA, Stant Manufacturing, Inc., Tama Enterprises Co., Ltd., Nippon Thermostat Co. Ltd., Vernet SAS, Ningbo Xingci Thermal Electric Appliances Co. Ltd., and K?raca Holding Enterprise are some of the key manufacturers operating in the global market for automotive thermostats.To Know More Information @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:Aerospace maintenance chemicals market Outlook by Product (Aircraft Cleaning Chemicals, Aircraft Leather Cleaners, Aviation Paint Removers, Aviation Paint Strippers, Speciality Solvents, Degreasers, Aircraft Wash & Polish).

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Aerospace maintenance chemicals market from aircraft cleaning chemicals is expected to dominate the revenue share surpassing USD 2 billion by 2024. High revenue generation can be attributed to extensive usage in interior & exterior aircraft surfaces along with continuous growth in air passenger traffic. Usage by wide range of defense and commercial aircrafts for ensuring cleanliness will further have a positive impact on the industry growth. Benefits such as fast and efficient operations will also strengthen the product penetration.Aerospace maintenance chemicals market is likely to cross 700 kilo tons till 2024. Significant growth in airline traffic across the globe coupled with stringent regulatory norms associated with regular maintenance checks for aircrafts will primarily drive the industry growth. Increasing maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), specifically in developing economies of Asia Pacific will further impact the industry positively over the forecast timeframe.Low air fare and enhancement in living standards in developing countries have led to growth in travel and tourism sector. This has further resulted in increased aircraft deliveries and high aircraft maintenance requirement, propelling the industry growth till 2024.Various regulatory associations and authorities including European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are continuously making amendments in the requirements of chemicals in maintenance procedures. The industry players are focusing on regular advancements to gain a competitive edge. They are making huge investments in R&D activities for cost reduction and innovate their maintenance procedures. Technological advancements in the industry for producing environment friendly products will induce immense potential to the aerospace maintenance chemicals market till 2024.Request for Sample Copy of this Report@Aviation paint remover is anticipated to grow at over 3% CAGR owing to provision of benefits such as superior and rapid operation. Shifting consumer focus towards the product owing to fast paint removal and extended shelf life will further support the industry growth till 2024.Commercial aircrafts are projected to capture over 35% revenue share over the next eight years. High requirement of maintenance owing to stringent passenger security regulations will lead to extensive usage of these chemicals in these aircrafts, fueling the industry growth. Continuous growth in travel & tourism sector will further support the industry dominance over the forecast timeframe. OEMs are focusing on superior-grade products to cater to all the specifications and for faster operations.Browse key industry insights from the report, Aerospace Maintenance Chemicals market in detail along with the table of contents:Aerospace maintenance chemicals market share from military aircrafts will exhibit at over 4% CAGR owing to increasing investments in military aviation sector in various countries across the globe. For instance, the military aviation sector in India is likely to invest approximately USD 35 billion over next twenty years.Organic chemicals are expected to account for more than 60% industry share by 2024. Cost effectiveness coupled with operational efficiency are the factors primarily driving the industry growth. High preference towards the viscosity of the product owing to labor friendly maintenance will escalate the revenue generation till 2024.Easy compatibility with various equipment offering fast operations and enhanced performance has led to shifting preference towards inorganic chemicals, propelling their growth over the coming years. Product availability in customized quantity according to customer requirement along with competitive pricing will further strengthen the product penetration over the next eight years.Request for Inquiry before buying this Report @North America is projected to cross USD 2.5 billion over the next eight years. Substantial growth in MRO sector providing competitive pricing along with presence of various maintenance bases across the region will foster the product demand. The region is primarily dominated by U.S. due to vast expansion of the aerospace sector, further supporting regions dominance over the forecast timeframe.Asia pacific aerospace maintenance chemicals market is led by India, Japan, China, Singapore, Thailand, and South Korea. Enhanced technologies fulfilling the demand for aircraft manufacturers and increasing MRO bases across the region will propel the product penetration across the region. Rising investments from aerospace industry leaders for MRO will further strengthen the product penetration over the coming years.The Dow Chemical Company, Shell, Arrow solutions, and 3M are among the prominent players in the industry. Other notable players include Wesco aircraft, Henkel, KLX Inc, and Eastman. Partnerships are witnessed among the prominent strategies implemented by the industry players to strengthen their foothold. For instance, in October 2017, Arrow Solutions announced the strengthening of its partnership with one of its key distributors in Norway to boost its visibility in the industry.Report ContentChapter 7 Aerospace Maintenance Chemicals Market, By Region7.1 Aerospace maintenance chemicals market share by region, 2016 & 20247.2 North America7.2.1 North America market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.2 North America market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.3 North America market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.4 North America market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.5 U.S.7.2.5.1 U.S. market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.5.2 U.S. market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.5.3 U.S. market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.5.4 U.S. market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.6 Canada7.2.6.1 Canada market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.6.2 Canada market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.6.3 Canada market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.2.6.4 Canada market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3 Europe7.3.1 Europe market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.2 Europe market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.3 Europe market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.4 Europe market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.5 Germany7.3.5.1 Germany market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.5.2 Germany market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.5.3 Germany market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.5.4 Germany market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.6 UK7.3.6.1 UK market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.6.2 UK market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.6.3 UK market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.6.4 UK market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.7 France7.3.7.1 France market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.7.2 France market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.7.3 France market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.7.4 France market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.8 Russia7.3.8.1 Russia market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.8.2 Russia market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.8.3 Russia market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.8.4 Russia market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.9 Italy7.3.9.1 Italy market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.9.2 Italy market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.9.3 Italy market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.9.4 Italy market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.10 Poland7.3.10.1 Poland market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.10.2 Poland market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.10.3 Poland market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.10.4 Poland market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.11 Netherlands7.3.11.1 Netherlands market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.11.2 Netherlands market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.11.3 Netherland market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.3.11.4 Netherland market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4 Asia Pacific7.4.1 Asia Pacific market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.2 Asia Pacific market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.3 Asia Pacific market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.4 Asia Pacific market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.5 China7.4.5.1 China market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.5.2 China market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.5.3 China market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.5.4 China market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.6 Japan7.4.6.1 Japan market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.6.2 Japan market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.6.3 Japan market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.6.4 Japan market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.7 India7.4.7.1 India market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.7.2 India market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.7.3 India market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.7.4 India market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.8 South Korea7.4.8.1 South Korea market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.8.2 South Korea market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.8.3 South Korea market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.8.4 South Korea market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.9 Singapore7.4.9.1 Singapore market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.9.2 Singapore market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.9.3 Singapore market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.9.4 Singapore market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.10 Australia7.4.10.1 Australia market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.10.2 Australia market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.10.3 Australia market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.10.4 Australia market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.11 Thailand7.4.11.1 Thailand market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.11.2 Thailand market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.11.3 Thailand market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.11.4 Thailand market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.12 Malaysia7.4.12.1 Malaysia market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.12.2 Malaysia market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.12.3 Malaysia market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.12.4 Malaysia market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.13 Vietnam7.4.13.1 Vietnam market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.13.2 Vietnam market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.13.3 Vietnam market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.4.13.4 Vietnam market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5 Latin America7.5.1 Latin America market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.2 Latin America market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.3 Latin America market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.4 Latin America market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.5 Brazil7.5.5.1 Brazil market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.5.2 Brazil market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.5.3 Brazil market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.5.4 Brazil market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.6 Mexico7.5.6.1 Mexico market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.6.2 Mexico market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.6.3 Mexico market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.6.4 Mexico market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.7 Argentina7.5.7.1 Argentina market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.7.2 Argentina market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.7.3 Argentina market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.5.7.4 Argentina market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6 MEA7.6.1 MEA market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.2 MEA market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.3 MEA market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.4 MEA market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.5 Saudi Arabia7.6.5.1 Saudi Arabia market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.5.2 Saudi Arabia market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.5.3 Saudi Arabia market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.5.4 Saudi Arabia market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.6 Qatar7.6.6.1 Qatar market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.6.2 Qatar market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.6.3 Qatar market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.6.4 Qatar market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.7 UAE7.6.7.1 UAE market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.7.2 UAE market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.7.3 UAE market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.7.4 UAE market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.8 Oman7.6.8.1 Oman market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.8.2 Oman market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.8.3 Oman market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.8.4 Oman market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.9 South Africa7.6.9.1 South Africa market estimates and forecast, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.9.2 South Africa market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.9.3 South Africa market estimates and forecast, by aircraft, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)7.6.9.4 South Africa market estimates and forecast, by nature, 2013  2024, (Kilo Tons) (USD Million)Chapter 8 Company Profiles8.1 3M8.1.1 Business overview8.1.2 Financial data8.1.3 Product landscape8.1.4 Strategic outlook8.1.5 SWOT analysis8.2 Aerochemicals8.2.1 Business overview8.2.2 Financial data8.2.3 Product landscape8.2.4 SWOT analysis8.3 Aircraft Spruce and Specialty Co.8.3.1 Business overview8.3.2 Financial data8.3.3 Product landscape8.3.4 SWOT analysis8.4 Arrow Solutions8.4.1 Business overview8.4.2 Financial data8.4.3 Product landscape8.4.4 Strategic outlook8.4.5 SWOT analysis8.5 Aviation Chemical Solutions, Inc.8.5.1 Business overview8.5.2 Financial data8.5.3 Product landscape8.5.4 SWOT analysis8.6 Callington Haven Pty. Ltd.8.6.1 Business overview8.6.2 Financial data8.6.3 Product landscape8.6.4 SWOT analysis8.7 The Dow Chemical Company (Dow)8.7.1 Business overview8.7.2 Financial data8.7.3 Product landscape8.7.4 Strategic outlook8.7.5 SWOT analysis8.8 Eastman Chemical Company8.8.1 Business overview8.8.2 Financial data8.8.3 Product landscape8.8.4 Strategic outlook8.8.5 SWOT analysis8.9 Exxon Mobil Corporation8.9.1 Business overview8.9.2 Financial data8.9.3 Product landscape8.9.4 Strategic outlook8.9.5 SWOT analysis8.10 Florida Chemical8.10.1 Business overview8.10.2 Financial data8.10.3 Product landscape8.10.4 Strategic outlook8.10.5 SWOT analysis8.11 Hansair Logistics, Inc.8.11.1 Business overview8.11.2 Financial data8.11.3 Product landscape8.11.4 SWOT analysis8.12 Henkel AG & Co. KGaA8.12.1 Business overview8.12.2 Financial data8.12.3 Product landscape8.12.4 Strategic outlook8.12.5 SWOT analysis8.13 High Performance Composites & Coatings Private Limited8.13.1 Business overview8.13.2 Financial data8.13.3 Product landscape8.13.4 SWOT analysis8.14 Hypercoat Enterprises Pte Ltd.8.14.1 Business overview8.14.2 Financial data8.14.3 Product landscape8.14.4 SWOT analysis8.15 Klean Strip8.15.1 Business overview8.15.2 Financial data8.15.3 Product landscape8.15.4 SWOT analysis8.16 KLX, Inc.8.16.1 Business overview8.16.2 Financial data8.16.3 Product landscape8.16.4 Strategic outlook8.16.5 SWOT analysis8.17 Krayden, Inc.8.17.1 Business overview8.17.2 Financial data8.17.3 Product landscape8.17.4 Strategic outlook8.17.5 SWOT analysis8.18 McGean-Rohco, Inc.8.18.1 Business overview8.18.2 Financial data8.18.3 Product landscape8.18.4 SWOT analysis8.19 Nexeo Solutions, LLC8.19.1 Business overview8.19.2 Financial data8.19.3 Product landscape8.19.4 Strategic outlook8.19.5 SWOT analysis8.20 NUVITE Chemical Compounds8.20.1 Business overview8.20.2 Financial data8.20.3 Product landscape8.20.4 Strategic outlook8.20.5 SWOT analysis8.21 Pexa8.21.1 Business overview8.21.2 Financial data8.21.3 Product landscape8.21.4 Strategic outlook8.21.5 SWOT analysis8.22 Shell8.22.1 Business overview8.22.2 Financial data8.22.3 Product landscape8.22.4 SWOT analysis8.23 Sil-Mid Limited8.23.1 Business overview8.23.2 Financial data8.23.3 Product landscape8.23.4 SWOT analysis8.24 Socomore8.24.1 Business overview8.24.2 Financial data8.24.3 Product landscape8.24.4 Strategic outlook8.24.5 SWOT analysis8.25 Wesco Aircraft Hardware Corp.8.25.1 Business overview8.25.2 Financial data8.25.3 Product landscape8.25.4 Strategic outlook8.25.5 SWOT analysis8.26 W.W. Grainger, Inc.8.26.1 Business overview8.26.2 Financial data8.26.3 Product landscape8.26.4 Strategic outlook8.26.5 SWOT analysis8.27 Chemetall8.27.1 Business overview8.27.2 Financial data8.27.3 Product landscape8.27.4 SWOT AnalysisBrowse full Table of Content @About Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnologyContact UsArun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1 888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Global Secure Digital Memory Cards Market is Anticipated to Register at a Healthy CAGR of 1.6%

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Secure Digital (SD) memory cards are used for storing digital information in smartphones, cameras, tablets, and other such portable devices. Increasing use of devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras are adding to the explosion of data. This is resulting in the need for additional storage space, thereby driving the demand for SD memory card. Moreover, Big Data is likely to grow along with the exponential growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Hence, the personal information of the consumers created and exchanged will also increase. This is creating the need for advanced storage solutions and technologies.Request to Sample of Report @Manufacturers are working on the smart SD memory cards with advanced features and safety. The growing demand for smartphones especially in the developing region is expected to create an opportunity for micro SD card manufacturers. Companies are also introducing high speed and capacity SD cards for various devices. Increasing use of social networking sites is also driving the need for increased capacity SD card. Key players are also focusing on offering unique features to attract customers. However, the presence of counterfeit SD cards in the market with fake capacity is emerging as one of the biggest challenges in the global SD memory card market.As per the report by Persistence Market Research (PMR), the global market for SD memory card is likely to witness sluggish growth during the forecast period 2017-2022. By 2022 end, the global SD memory card market is estimated to surpass US$ 8,900 Million revenue.SD Memory Card to Find Largest Application in Mobile PhonesBased on the application, SD memory card is anticipated to find the largest application in mobile phones. Towards the end of 2022, mobile phones are estimated to exceed US$ 6,400 Million revenue.On the basis of card type, Compared to the SD card, micro SD card is likely to witness substantial growth during 2017-2022. Micro SD card is projected to bring in close to US$ 8,900 Million revenue by the end of 2022.By storage capacity, 32GB SD memory card is expected to be the most preferred during 2017-2022. 32GB SD card is projected to surpass US$ 1,900 Million revenue by 2022 end. Meanwhile, SD card with 16GB storage capacity is also likely to witness growth in the coming years.Asia Pacific to Emerge as a Leading Region in the Global Market for SD Memory CardGeographically, Asia Pacific is likely to witness the highest growth in the global SD memory card market between 2017 and 2022. By 2022 end, Asia Pacific is projected to exceed US$ 3,700 Million revenue. Increasing demand for smartphones is resulting in the increasing use of SD cards for additional storage space. Also, companies in China, Japan, and India are launching new mobile phones at low cost. This is driving the demand for smartphones, thereby, increasing use of SD cards. Manufacturers in the region are also working on introducing Secure Digital Input Output (SDIO) as an extension of SD memory card to provide support to I/O functions.Request Report for TOC @Competitive LandscapeSome of the key companies operating in the global market for SD memory card are Transcend Information Inc., SanDisk Corporation, ADATA Technologies Co. Ltd., Kingston Technology Corporation, Panasonic Corporation, Micron Technology, Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sony Corporation, PNY Technologies, Inc., and Toshiba Corporation.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:Oral Contraceptive Pills Market Will hit at a CAGR of 6.6% from 2015 to 2023

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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.Request for Sample Copy of Report @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 for TOC @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.Obtain Report Details @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 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:Geriatric Medicines Market Expected to Witness a CAGR of 7.27% through 2017-2023

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A recent business and commerce study conducted at Transparency Market Research (TMR) has detected that the geriatric medicine has opened a niche for the major pharmaceutical companies, and there is strong potential of profit if leveraged properly. The intelligence report has notified that the competition in the global geriatric medicine market is intensifying as a result of more and more players making a foray.However, there are vast new opportunities in vastly populated region of Asia Pacific and those players who expand their businesses into emerging economies such as China and India will stand to benefit in the near future. In addition to that, overcoming technical complexities via R&D practices to treat chronic diseases such as diabetes and CVDs is a strategic mode for the players to gain ground over their competitors. For instance, Sanofi S.A. introduced Fluzone High-Dose vaccine in the U.S. market mid-last year, which is first of its kind vaccine that has showcased strong efficacy against influence among geriatrics.Request for Sample Copy of Report @Global Geriatric Medicine Market to be worth US$948,005.3 mn by 2023The report identifies Abbott Laboratories, Inc., Pfizer, Inc., Merck & Company Inc., Novartis International AG, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Eli Lilly and Company, and AstraZeneca plc. as some of the other companies that are ahead of the curve in the global geriatric medicine market. As per the estimations of the TMR report, the global geriatric medicine market will be worth US$948,005.3 mn by the end of 2023, with the demand expanding at a notable CAGR of 7.27% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2023.Based on the category of therapeutic, the market for geriatric medicine has been segmented into anticoagulant, proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs), antidiabetic, statins, antihypertensive, analgesic, antipsychotic, and others. On the basis of medical condition, the market has been bifurcated into respiratory, osteoporosis, neurological, cancer, arthritis, cardiovascular, and others. Geographically, while North America and Europe are expected to hold onto their position as the regions with most potential, the demand for geriatric medicine from the region of Asia Pacific is anticipated to multiply at a much strong CAGR than then global average.Request for TOC @R&D Activities by Major Pharmaceutical Companies Driving the MarketThe radical manner with which the percentage of people aged over 60 years has increased in the Worlds population is the primary driver of the global geriatric medicine market. The United Nations has estimated that there will be 1.4 billion people aged over 60 years by 2030, posing for a strong demand potential. In addition to that, rigorous research and development activities undertaken by pioneering pharmaceutical companies to cater to this demand is expected to bear fruits in the near future.Prevalence of several chronic diseases, improving healthcare infrastructure in a number of emerging economies, growing popularity of medical tourism, government initiatives to provide care to elderly, and mushrooming of specialty clinics are some of the other driver of the geriatric medicine market. On the other hand, complexities pertaining to drug compatibility, strong lack of patient participation for clinical trials, and side effects are a few challenges obstructing the market from achieving its potential.Obtain Report Details @Key Takeaways:Demand in the global geriatric medicine market is projected to increment at a CAGR of 7.27% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2023Prevalence of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases driving demandAbout 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:Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis Market to Grow at CAGR of 6.8% through 2023

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The competitive scenario in the Asia preimplantation genetic diagnostics market is highly intense owing to the several global and local players trying their luck in the region, states Transparency Market Research (TMR) in a research report. Pertaining to the number of service providers of preimplantation genetic diagnosis market, it is a highly fragmented one in nature. The penetration of other regional players might further intensify the level of competition in the market in the years ahead. Some of the companies operating in the market might be F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Perkin Elmer Inc., Illumina Inc., Natera Inc., and Abbott Laboratories, among many others.The Asia perimplantation genetic diagnosis market is anticipated to exhibit a 6.8% CAGR between 2015 and 2023. The market is expected to rise to a valuation of US$28.8 mn by the end of 2023 from worth US$16.0 mn in 2014.Request for Sample Copy of Report @Single Gene Disorder Screening to be Preferred over Prenatal Diagnostic TestingPreimplantation hereditary finding for the screening of aneuploidy held the chief offer of 34.7% in the Asia PGD showcase in 2014. Liberal controls relating to this range of conclusion in most Asian nations is the central point behind the high quantities of aneuploidy screening tests embraced each year in the district. Be that as it may, PGD for single quality issue is anticipated to grow at the quicker CAGR from the period in the vicinity of 2015 and 2023. Expanded inclination of this demonstrative methodology is supported by innovative progressions and generally high precision of results. Additionally, single quality issue screening is more useful contrasted with customary pre-birth demonstrative testing in developing life, driving the market for PGD for single quality issue.Region-wise, the Asia preimplantation genetic diagnosis market is likely to witness fruitful opportunities in the Southern Asia region. In most Asian nations where PGD is not disallowed, it is controlled by the provincial or national government. The high expenses of PGD methods are likewise a zone of massive worry for certain cost sensitive nations in the area. Consolidated with liberal administrative standards and the rising populace of high-procuring people, Southern Asia will rise as the most lucrative market for preimplantation hereditary conclusion in the following couple of years. The PGD advertise in Southern Asia is required to ascend at an ideal 7.9% CAGR from 2015 to 2023.Request for TOC @Growing Penchant towards Assisted Reproductive Techniques to Bolster DeploymentRising inclination to helped regenerative methods, which include preimplantation hereditary finding as a standard game-plan for guaranteeing that the incipient organism is free of any hereditary oddities, is integral to the solid development of the Asia PGD advertise. The interest for helped regenerative systems in the locale is driven significantly because of two elements: postponed period of origination among ladies and the alarmingly rising rate of fruitlessness in the area. With rising support in the locale's workforce, countless ladies are considering their infants in late 20s to late 30s. As infertility issues and difficulties worried about imagining begin heightening as the age rises, couples in the area are progressively favoring helped conceptive systems, for example, in vitro treatment.Obtain Report Details @The rate of infertility in nations, for example, China and India has considerably expanded in the previous couple of years. Xinhua, one of China's unmistakable news offices has expressed that around 12.5% of China's populace was fruitless in 2010. In India as well, around 10% of the populace was said to be experiencing infertility in 2013. This factor is likely to be a core triggering factor for the growth of the 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. 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:Deception Technology Market 2018 Global Leaders: TrapX Security, Rapid7, Attivo Networks, Allure Security Technology, Guardicore, Cymmetria, TopSpin Security, Illusive Networks, LogRhythm

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Market Research Future published a research report on Deception Technology Market Research Report- Forecast 2022  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2022.Deception Technology Global Market - OverviewThe Global Deception Technology market is growing with the rapid pace; mainly due to the advent of automation and high adoption of internet of things in automotive industry. According to a recent study report published by the Market Research Future, the global market of Deception Technology is booming and expected to gain importance over the forecast period. The market is projected to demonstrate a spectacular growth by 2022, surpassing its previous growth records in terms of value with a striking CAGR during the anticipated period (2016  2022).The factors driving the global market of Deception Technology Market are rising adoption bring your own device (BYOD), internet of things, and rise in threats among others. On the other hand, technology limitation, lack of awareness about technical threats via internet are some of the factors hindering the growth of Deception Technology Market.The Deception Technology market is highly competitive due to the increase cyber-attacks and DDOS attacks. The major benefits of deception technology like reduction in risks of economic losses, advanced real time forensics and others are fuelling the deception technology market. Deception is expected to play a critical role as the next line of defense for detecting intrusions that have made their way inside the network before an attack can be completed and damages done. Thus, deception technology is closing the gaps between current prevention solutions and the previous limitations of honeypots thereby seeking the mainstream in IT and security infrastructure.Get Sample of Report @Key PlayersThe prominent players in the Deception Technology Market are  TrapX Security (U.S.), Rapid7, Inc. (U.S.), Attivo Networks (U.S.), Allure Security Technology (U.S.), Guardicore (Israel), Cymmetria, Inc. (Israel), TopSpin Security (Israel), Smokescreen Technologies (India), Illusive Networks (Israel), LogRhythm Inc. (U.S), vArmour (U.S.) among othersIndustry NewsNov 2017 - Attivo Networks, the leader in deception for cyber security threat detection, announced a strategic partnership with Networks Unlimited, Africas leading value-added distributor. With this distribution partnership, Attivo Networks and Networks Unlimited together aim to extend comprehensive next-generation deception-based cyber security defence to customers across the South and Sub-Saharan region. Next generation deception technology such as the Attivo ThreatDefend Platform is expected to advance the deception level well beyond simple emulations.30 Oct. 2017 - Symantec announced an updated portfolio of endpoint security products, it is positioning as a next generation security platform for the cloud generation. Among the new and updated products in the Endpoint Security for the Cloud Generation portfolio is the Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) platform 14.1 release which now benefits from the addition of deception technology that detects and decoys stealthy attacks. Symantec is also adding new hardening capabilities to SEP that aims to prevent zero-day exploits and provide improves application isolation.Deception Technology Global Market - Regional AnalysisNorth-America is dominating the Global Deception Technology Market with the largest market share owing to the developments in deception technologies in the countries like U.S. and Canada. Deception Technology Market in Asia-Pacific market is expected to grow at a substantial CAGR during 2016 to 2022 owing to a large enterprises and SMEs in the region are increasingly adopting cloud computing solutions. Moreover, countries like China, Japan, South Korea and India are increasing investing in network security companies in the IT & telecom sectors. The European market for Deception Technology Market is expected to grow at a considerable CAGR (2016-2022).Deception Technology Global Market - SegmentationThe Deception Technology Market can be segmented in to 4 key dynamics for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding; Segmentation By Component: Comprises Solutions and Services- support and maintenance, system integration, consulting and professional services. Segmentation By Deception Stack: Comprises Application security, data security, network security, and endpoint security Segmentation By Deployment Mode: Comprises of cloud and on premise mode Segmentation By End-user: Comprises Manufacturing, BFSI, Healthcare, retail, transport, government, telecom and others Segmentation By Regions : Comprises Geographical regions - North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World.Get complete Report @Intended Audience: Deception Technology vendors Resellers and distributors Technology investors System Integrators Government Organizations Research/Consultancy firms Network solution providers Independent software vendors Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs)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 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.Media Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comUlnar Nerve Entrapment Market by Application, Trends and Growth Rate to 2025

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The ulnar nerve is one of the major nerves in a human arm and travels from neck down to the hands. It controls movement and provides feeling for parts of hand. However, at times, ulnar nerve becomes compressed or physically trapped, resulting in pain, numbness, or weakness. This condition is known as ulnar nerve entrapment.Depending on the location of entrapment, there are two types of ulnar entrapment: cubital tunnel syndrome and ulnar tunnel syndrome. Entrapment at the elbow in the cubital tunnel is termed as cubital tunnel syndrome. Ulnar tunnel entrapment occurs in anatomical space in the wrist. The common causes of ulnar nerve entrapment are forceful exercising and strain involving the elbow, bench pressing, and sleeping with the arm folded behind the neck.Download Report Brochure @Weakness in hand, sensitivity to cold, and muscle wasting are the common symptoms of ulnar nerve entrapment. In the other hand treatment part, which includes there is no specific treatment for ulnar nerve entrapment but joint mobilizations, stretching exercises, neural flossing can be effective in ulnar nerve entrapment. If ulnar nerve pain is mild to moderate, then surgery is not required. Physicians prefer non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug such as ibuprofen and others for treatment. However, when pain associated with ulnar nerve is quite severe, physicians advice surgery. Before surgery, physicians suggest physiological tests such as X-ray. These imaging tests provide detailed pictures of dense structures, like bone, and nerve conduction studies this test helps to identify where it is being compressed, and determine how well the nerve is working.The global ulnar nerve entrapment market is expected to grow substantially due to increasing investment in research and development by pharmaceutical companies, rising incidence rate of vascular diseases, and development of innovative products and advanced technology for the treatment of ulnar nerve entrapment. In addition ignore the pain associated with ulnar nerve, and high cost required for surgery fuel the growth of the market. However, long duration of treatment and limited budget of small and medium sized companies restrain the market.Request for TOC @The global market of ulnar nerve entrapments are quite limited because it is still emerging at global level. The market has been segmented based on type of treatment, end-user, and region. In terms of type of treatment, the ulnar nerve entrapments market has been categorized into surgical and non-surgical. Non-surgical treatment includes medicines such as amitriptyline, NSAIDs, and vitamin B6 supplement, and devices such as supporter or splint.Based on end-user, the market has been segmented into hospitals, ambulatory surgical clinics, chronic & acute care, and sports. In terms of region, the ulnar nerve entrapment market has been segmented into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Rest of the World. North America dominates the market as the U.S. is the major contributor in this region due to invention of advance technology, research & development in this area, rising prevalence of disorders, and other chronic diseases. Asia Pacific is also a fast growing market due to growing health care expanse and high patient base.Obtain Report Details @Key players operating in this market are Pfizer, Inc., Alkem Laboratories, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Apotex, Inc., Amneal Pharmaceuticals LLC, Aurobindo Pharma, and Mylan N.V., among others. In order to gain high market share in the industry, the key players are actively involved in variation in products, services, and periodic new product launches. Collaborations, partnerships, are agreements are some of the important strategies followed by the market players.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:Off Street Parking Management System Market Growing at a CAGR of 8.9% over the Forecast Period 2017-2025

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Persistence Market Research presents pertinent insights and a revised forecast of the global off-street parking management system market in its published report titled, Off-Street Parking Management Systems Market: Global Industry Analysis 2012  2016 and Forecast 2017  2025. As per the report, global off-street parking management system market was valued at nearly US$ 3,301 Mn in 2017, and is expected to register a CAGR of 8.9% from 2017 to 2025. The rise in the demand for flexible payment solutions and proliferation of internet-enabled solutions is driving the growth of this market.Rising Vehicle Parc and Increasing Rate of Urbanization Driving the Global Off-Street Parking Management Systems MarketRising concerns for safe and obstacle-free walking spaces for pedestrians is driving the demand for off-street parking facilities, which is expected to further increase over the next five to six years. This is expected to increase concerns of the public as well as private sectors towards the construction of parking garages and lots. Also, increasing car parc size has a direct impact on the utilization of parking spaces in various nations. This poses challenges for companies to maintain a proper balance between demand and supply in developed as well as developing nations.Request to Sample of Report @Urbanization is increasingly gaining importance as a key factor depicting the economic condition of a nation. This is due to concerns by governments of various nations seeking modernization in all aspects of their respective countries. In addition, urbanization has led to a changing consumer lifestyle, which is expected to fuel the demand for parking management solutions, primarily in developing nations. By 2050, 66% of the total worlds population is expected to be living in urban areas, and this is anticipated to drive demand for more efficient parking management solutions to suit varied consumer needs.Global Off-Street Parking Management Systems Market: Segmentation and ForecastGlobal Off-Street Parking Management System market is categorized by SCS, by solutions, by end-user and by region. By SCS, the market is segmented as parking software, system devices and professional devices. The parking software sub segment accounted for relatively higher CAGR of 9.1% during the forecast period. The system devices sub segment is accounted for the largest market share of 41.7% in 2017. Moreover, proliferation of internet-enabled solutions and demand for flexible payment solutions are the factors which are fueling the growth of the off-street parking management system market.By solutions, the market is segmented as access control parking fee and revenue management, parking reservation management, valet parking management, parking guidance and slot management, and others. The parking guidance and slot management sub segment accounted for relatively higher CAGR of 9.6% during the forecast period. The parking reservation management sub segment is accounted for the largest market share of 33.1% in 2017.By application, the market is segmented as government and municipalities, airports, healthcare, corporate and commercial parks, commercial Institutions, and others. The commercial institutions sub-segment accounted for relatively higher CAGR of 9.7% during the forecast period. The airports sub-segment accounted for the largest market share of 30.9% in 2017.Global Off-Street Parking Management Systems Market: Regional ForecastEurope off-street parking management system market was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 880 Mn in 2017 and is slated to reach a value of nearly US$ 1,750 Mn in 2025, exhibiting a CAGR of 8.8% during the period of assessment. The North America off-street parking management system market accounted for the largest market share of 29.6% in 2017.Global Off-Street Parking Management Systems Market: Competitive LandscapeRequest Report for TOC @Some of the popular vendors in off-street parking management system market are IBM Corporation, Xerox Corporation, Cubic Corporation, Kapsch TrafficCom AG, TIBA Parking , Amano Corporation , Kudelski SA, SWARCO AG, Nortech Control Systems Limited, and CREE, INC.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:Clear Aligner (Invisible Braces) Market To Hold a High Potential for Growth by 2025

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Dental braces and aligners are used in orthodontics to straighten and align teeth in order to position them appropriately to a persons bite. These instruments are often used to correct under bites, cross bites, over bites, malocclusions, crooked teeth, deep bites and various other oral flaws. Metal and ceramic braces are the most well-known types of braces for the orthodontic treatment. Aligners are relatively new orthodontic treatment option which removes the need for attaching braces and brackets to the teeth. In addition, clear aligners are not visible as the metal braces, thus do not impact the daily life of the patient. Aligners are made of smooth and virtually invisible plastic that will gradually and gently shift the teeth in the right place over a period of time.Request Report for Table of Contents @Treatment using clear aligners offers better comfort, flexibility and convenience compared to the traditional braces. There are no metal brackets or wires to be attached to this aligner for tightening it as they are customized specific to the patients requirement. Further, this aligners are cost effective and take less time to complete the treatment procedure. Moreover, clear aligners also avoid common side effects such as mouth sores, injuries, tooth decay and plaque buildup caused by the regular metal braces.The market for clear aligners (invisible braces) is analyzed based on the geographies categorized as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and rest of the world. North America dominates the market in terms of revenue generation and demand and is the one of the largest market for clear aligner manufacturers. Increasing consumer awareness for dental health and rising disposable incomes of the general population are the factors fueling the growth of the global clear aligners market.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the major players in this industry include Align Technology, Inc., Clear Correct, LLC, and DENTSPLY International. Align Technology currently dominates the clear aligners 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.comWeb:Closed Drug Transfer Systems Market Display Significant Growth by 2025

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Closed drug transfer systems are defined as drug transfer devices that prohibit the transfer of environmental contaminants into the system and release the hazardous vapor concentrations outside the system. The system is used to transfer hazardous drugs from one receptacle to another without being exposed to outside environment and to the person who is working on it. For example, for preparing and administering chemotherapy drugs containing hazardous antineoplastic agents, there is a need to transfer drug from vial to syringe and then from syringe to IV infusion bag. During each transfer there is a possibility for exposure to the hazardous drugs. To prevent such exposure, closed drug transfer systems are used as these exposures may lead to serious health complications from skin irritation to birth defects and even some type of cancers. One of the studies demonstrates that nurses working with cytotoxic drugs on regular basis have found a statistically higher rate of spontaneous abortion.Request Report for Table of Contents @The market for closed drug transfer systems is growing at faster pace driven by the regulatory and industry efforts to design the procedures and standards for protecting workers and patients from incidental and accidental exposure to cytotoxics. Various government regulatories such as American Society of Health System Pharmacists, The Oncology Nursing Society and The Occupational Safety and Health Administration among many others have set up a list of guidelines for safer handling of hazardous drugs leading to the increased use of the closed drug transfer systems. On the basis of the available closed drug transfer systems, the market for closed drug transfer system is segmented into five segments namely:PhaSealAquaShieldOnGuardSmartSiteChemoClaveAll of the above mentioned closed drug transfer systems are approved by Food and Drug Association (FDA) and are used extensively. One of the trials conducted at the Yamada Red Cross Hospital, Japan using PhaSeal to detect the concentration of cyclophosphamide in pharmacists urine samples demonstrated that the mean amount of cyclosphosphamide in the samples was 3.6 ng in 24 hours in comparison to 47.4 ng in 24 hours before the installation of PhaSeal. The major restraint which the market is facing is the bio-hazardous waste generated by the closed drug transfer systems as this waste could lead to serious infections. Among all the available closed drug transfer systems, ChemoClave is considered as the most efficient system on the basis of exposure percentage, cost-effectiveness and amount of bio-hazardous waste generation.North America leads the closed drug transfer system market followed by Europe majorly due to strict government safety regulations driving the demand for these systems and presence of high awareness about these products. The available reimbursement policies in U.S., Europe and Japan are an additional factor leading to increased use of these systems. Market of Asia-Pacific is driven by the growing awareness about the healthcare products in emerging countries such as India and China and strict government guidelines for preparing anti-cancer drugs in Japan. Additionally, new products innovations is also helping the market to grow as currently there is no 100% safe closed drug transfer system available in the market.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Companies whose products are approved by the U.S. FDA in the closed drug transfer systems market include B.Braun Medical, Inc., Becton, Dickinson and Company, iCU Medical, Inc., EquaShield Medical and Carefusion Corporation.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.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:Multi Rotor Drones Market - report provides key statistics on the market status of the leading market players | future scenario 2025

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The Insight Partners has announced the addition of the Multi Rotor Drones Market 2025  Global Analysis and Forecasts by Payload (Cameras, Wireless HD Video Transmission Systems, Electro-Optical Sensors, Laser Designators, Obstacle sensors, & Others); and Application (Surveillance, Research, Aerial Photography, and Others) report to their offering.A multi rotor drone or a rotorcraft are unmanned aerial systems with more than two motors. These rotors have fixed pitch blades and the control of vehicle motion is achieved by varying the relative speed of each rotor to change the thrust and torque produced by each rotor. Increasing use of UAVs in the military and law enforcement applications is one of the major driver for the growth of the multi rotor drones market.Benefits from the multi rotor drones such as flexibility in operation, low cost of ownership and low maintenance cost, and high precision in action are also driving the growth in the market. However, declining defense budgets, and lack of skilled operators can act as restraining factors in the market. Increasing demand of drones from the business and commercial sectors could bring new opportunities in the market in the coming years.Request Sample is Available atThe Global Multi Rotor Drones Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the multi rotor drones industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global multi rotor drones market with detailed market segmentation by payload, application and geography. The global multi rotor drones 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 of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global multi rotor drones market based on payload and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall multi rotor drones market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America (SAM). The market by each region is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report covers analysis and forecast of 15 counties globally along with current trend and opportunities prevailing in the region.Besides this, the 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 Porters Five Forces analysis.Complete Report is Available atAlso, key multi rotor drones market players influencing the market are profiled in the study along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. The report also 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 Aerovironment Inc., Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Dji, Aibotix GmbH, 3D Robotics Inc., Coptercam Pty. Ltd., Draganfly Drones, Microdrones GmbH, Aeryon Labs Inc., and Cyberhawk Innovations Limited among others.About 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, Media, and Telecommunication industries.Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comWearable Injectors Market Expansion Projected to Gain an Uptick During 2017 - 2025

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Wearable injectors are smart drug delivery devices that can be worn on the body which can be programmed to deliver large amounts of viscous and sensitive drug products over a period of time. It is different from the insulin pumps as it can b. After the use of the device the patient peels of the device and throws it away. Patients do not require to undergo the training about the use of wearable injectors as it preset by the medical devices companies to deliver particular amount of drug. Biologics are difficult to administer via traditional subcutaneous injections as they are very viscous in nature. The wearable injector device can generally deliver 2-10mL of the drug solution. Wearable injectors are painless in nature and can deliver very high amount of drug up to 50mL. The wearable injector contains the osmotic actuator, a reservoir which contains the therapeutic agent and trigger button to start injection.Request Report for Table of Contents @There has been substantial increase in the number of approvals of the biologics over the last few years. Each year new biologics and biosimilars hit the market. The injectable market is also growing significantly and anticipated to be a major driving factor for the wearable injectors market.The wearable injectors provide additional benefits to the patients which includes comfort, confidence, self-administration and also painless and precise drug delivery.The global wearable injector market is anticipated to register a significant growth over the forecast period. The maximum injectable dose for the auto injectors is about 1-2ml because the drug administered above 2ml may revert back and cause pain. The wearable injector is an alternative to conventional injections and auto injectors and anticipated to boost the demand for wearable injector and drive the growth of the global market over the long run.There has been a considerable increase in the number of biologics approval in the past few years as the chemical synthesis pipeline is getting diminished which also propel the adoption of wearable injectors to deliver the biologics by the subcutaneous route and expected to drive the global wearable injector market. The technological innovation and advancements in the wearable injectors such as customization as per the end user need and self-administration, is also anticipated to drive the growth of the global wearable injectors market.However, the stringent rules and regulations by the regulatory authority such as U.S. FDA and European commission may restrain the growth for the wearable injectors market over forecast period.The wearable injectors market is segmented based on the modality, therapeutic are application, usability and end user. Based on type, the wearable injectors market is segmented into hand held, on body (patches) and off body. The rising approvals for the biologics in the past few years is anticipated to be the main area of focus for therapeutics as a biologics. Thus the use of wearable injector is expected to boom in the coming years.Region wise, the global wearable injectors market is classified into regions such as North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific including Japan (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA). North America is estimated to account for leading share to the global wearable injectors market due to the increasing adoption of wearable injectors over traditional injectors. The Europe is also contribute the significant shares to the global wearable injectors market followed by North America. The APEJ has become a lucrative market for wearable injectors as the due to the cost benefit of the wearable injectors as an economical alternative to the pre-existing treatments. The MEA is at nascent stage to the global wearable injectors market and projected to grow at a moderate rate over forecast period.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the key players in global wearable injectors market are Amdex Corporation, Unilife Corporation, Enable injections, BD pharmaceutical systems, ypsomed, West Pharmaceutical Services Inc., Cane s.p.a, and others.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.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:IP Multimedia Subsystem Market 2018 by Global Leaders: LM Ericsson, Oracle, Nokia, IBM, Huawei Technologies, Brocade Communications Systems, Bradford Networks, HP, Ascom Holdings AG, Allot Communication

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Market Research Future published a research report on IP Multimedia Subsystem Market Research Report- Forecast 2022  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2022.Market HighlightsIn this rapidly changing environment, companies are expanding their scale of operations by advancing the existing technologies. In the recent years IP Multimedia Subsystem is becoming worldwide. The rising popularity of Rich Communication Services (RCS) and Voice over LTE (VoLTE) has led to an increase in IP multimedia subsystems market.The growing investments in 4G and explosive sale of smartphones have been the major factors increasing the LTE market which in result is boosting the IP Multimedia Subsystem Market. It has been observed that the demand to modernize the existing networks and the ability to offer converged services is driving the IP multimedia market. The study indicates that many companies are trying to evolve LTE and add new features to the present LTE market. Recently there has been news about Telefonica regarding LTE; they are working on private LTE technology based on mobile edge computing (MEC). Also LM Ericsson is been signing deals with many companies to implement, deploy and evolve LTE. All these factors are boosting the IP multimedia systems market.The IP Multimedia Subsystem Market is growing rapidly over 18% of CAGR and is expected to reach at USD ~4 billion by the end of forecast period.Get Sample of Report @Key PlayersThe prominent players in the IP Multimedia Subsystem market are LM Ericsson (Sweden), Oracle (U.S.), Nokia Corporation (Finland), Alcatel-Lucent S.A. (France), IBM Corporation (U.S.), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (China), Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (U.S.), Cisco Systems, Inc. (U.S.), HP (U.S.), Bradford Networks, Inc. (U.S.), Ascom Holdings AG (Switzerland), Allot Communication (Israel), among others.Market Research Analysis:Market Research Future Analysis shows that many organizations are rigorously deploying 4G in the recent years. There has been tremendous increase in the LTE market. The trend of using various data applications, video calling and VoLTE is observed.Regional analysis for IP Multimedia Subsystem market is studied in different geographic regions as Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of world. It has been observed that Asia-Pacific region would dominate in IP Multimedia Subsystem market. Countries like Japan, China and Korea are currently dominating the IP multimedia market.IP Multimedia Subsystem Market SegmentationThe IP Multimedia Subsystem Market has been segmented on the basis of functions, access network, applications and services. Considering the IP multimedia subsystems market segment based on functions consists of Call Session Control Function (CSCF), Home Subscriber Server (HSS), Signaling Gateway (SGW) and Media Gateway Control Function (MGCF) and Media Resource Functions (MRF).Get complete Report @Intended Audience Technology investors Key market innovators Venture capitalists Private equity groups Telecom service providers Internet service providers IMS providers Research/Consultancy firmsAbout 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 Components, Application, Logistics 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.Media Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comBakelite Market - Global Industry Analysis, Growth, and Forecast 2016 - 2024

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Global Bakelite Market: SnapshotThe world market for bakelite is envisaged to earn propitious opportunities over the period of the next seven years due to the catholic consumption of bakelite in multiple industrial applications. The electrical non-conductivity and heat resistance properties of bakelite find application in automotive components manufacturing on a sizable scale. Marking the start of plastics, bakelite offers improved sound properties, durability, and fine finishing, which have earned the global market a high demand in developing nations for the production of gaming devices. The market growth is envisioned to be complemented by the spectacular artisanship of bakelite jewelry in the coming years.The segmentation of the global bakelite market could be based on industrial application, definitions of bakelite, and product type. The report has provided intelligence on the geographic segmentation of the market to unveil lucrative opportunities in different regions.Download Brochure For Recent Industry Insights@The analysts have followed an overarching and iterative research methodology spanning over primary and secondary research to bring to light the present and future scenario of the global bakelite market. The publication presented herewith is a comprehensive guide to interpret the growth and restraining factors and the competitive landscape of the global market.Global Bakelite Market: TrendsHigh production of electrical components such as insulators, electron tubes, and sockets in emerging nations has promised a sturdy advancement for the international bakelite market. A countable number of industrial applications involve the employment of bakelite because of its protective coating feature and role of molding and adhesive compound. Besides this, its high resistance property has attracted more number of applications.Among the few hindrances in the growth path of the global bakelite market, the hazardous nature of bakelite during its production processes is more prominent. However, tight regulations formulated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) have offered favorable market opportunities. Moreover, intensifying awareness about health hazards is significantly diluting the restraints of the global market.Global Bakelite Market: GeographyOwing to its extensive consumption in a host of end-user divisions such as automotive brake pads, moderately priced games, and semiconductors, bakelite has become increasingly popular in Asia Pacific. The growth of the market in Asia Pacific is anticipated to be enhanced by Japan and China with aggressive usage of dominoes and billiard balls. The regional market in Asia Pacific is foreseen to exhibit an aggravating growth on the back of countries such as India, China, Korea, and Japan which are involved in spiraling automotive production.Even though the Europe market could suffer from the resultant effects of chancy handling of bakelite and strict government policies concerning its disposal, there are a few factors that could promise growth, such as elevating power generation and automotive manufacturing.Get ToC of Research Report@With a rising number of power generation and aerospace industries, North America is predicted to showcase a considerable growth.Global Bakelite Market: CompetitionAlthough the prevalence of the mass production of bakelite is not high, there are a few companies existing in the global bakelite market that splurge on bakelite production at a commercial level. Some of them are MingQun Optoelectronics Technology Co. Ltd., Elkor, Sumitomo Bakelite Co. Ltd., Momentive Specialty Chemicals, Romit Resins Pvt. Ltd., and Borden Chemical Inc. Casual disposal of bakelite could be deleterious for the environment since the early form of brittle plastic seats harsh toxins such as asbestos and formaldehyde. Hence, proper disposal of bakelite after its use is deemed to be one of the important aspects for the reputation and long sustenance of any player in the industry.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c-MET / HGF Inhibitors Market to Record an Exponential CAGR by 2025

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c-Met is a proto-oncogene responsible for encoding the high-affinity receptor for hepatocyte growth factor (HGF). Hepatocyte growth factor is also known as scatter factor which participates in HGF/c-MET signaling pathway. This pathway plays vital role in mitogenesis and morphogenesis during embryonic development and wound healing. The controlled natural activity of c-Met and HGF is important in mammalian development, tissue maintenance, and repair. Binding of HGF to c-MET receptor induces several biological responses collectively known as invasive growth program. These responses are elicited due to activation of several pathways such as RAS pathway, PI3K pathway, STAT pathway, beta-catenin pathway and Notch pathway. However, dysregulation of the HGF/c-MET signaling pathway has been associated with the progression of cancers through activation of oncogenic pathways, angiogenesis and metastasis.Request Report for Table of Contents @c-Met kinase represents a novel target for cancer therapy and several research institutes and pharmaceuticals companies are engaged in developing new oncology drugs based on this inhibition of HGF or c-Met-dependent signaling pathway. Number of approaches being attempted to target c-Met include: c-Met biologic inhibitors, small molecule c-Met inhibitors, HGF antagonist antibodies, c-Met antagonist antibodies (MetMAb) and HGF kringle variant antagonists. A study undertaken by University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany demonstrated therapeutic potential of cabozantinib (Exelixis, Inc., Phase III) for against pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) and this molecule induced low-level of resistance compared to gemcitabine.The major cancers such as breast, colon and non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) are being examined for efficacy with c-MET / HGF inhibitors. Several small molecule c-Met kinase inhibitors have demonstrated clinical efficacy in cancer treatment and many clinical trials are underway. However, as the small molecule inhibitors lack specificity or selectivity they can cause toxicity. Therefore, researchers are increasing focus to develop antibody therapeutics against c-Met or HGF. Several drugs are in developmental stage and underway clinical trials in various phases of clinical trials. Some of the prominent molecules include ARQ 197 (Arcule, Inc., Phase II), AV-299 (AVEO Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Phase II), cabozantinib (Exelixis, Inc., Phase III), JNJ-38877605 (Johnson & Johnson), PF04217903 (Pfizer, Inc., Phase I), PF02341066 (Pfizer, Inc., Phase II), GSK1363089 (GlaxoSmithKline plc), MK-2461 (Merck & Co., Phase II), MP470 (SuperGen, Inc., Phase I), and MGCD265 (Methylgene, Inc., Phase I), AMG102 (Amgen, Inc., Phase II), HuL2G7 (Galaxy Biotech, LLC) and MetMAb (Genentech, Inc., Phase I).The global c-MET / HGF inhibitors market is yet to establish and hence every company is trying to expedite the research and development activity along with clinical trials. The larger multinationals are collaborating with companies having intellectual property rights but suffer from an insufficient capacity to commercialize the molecules. For instance, AstraZeneca signed a licensing deal with Hutchison MediPharma Ltd., to develop volitinib (HMPL-504/AZD6094) in non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC). Another recent development in the market was AVEO Oncology entering into a worldwide agreement with Biodexis in which latter companys companion diagnostic test will be commercialized with AVEOs ficlatuzumab (HGF inhibitory antibody).Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the companies having presence in the global c-MET / HGF inhibitors market are Abxign, Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Amgen, Inc., ArQule, Inc., Astex Therapeutics Ltd., AVEO Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) Co., Chroma Therapeutics Ltd., Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd., Deciphera Pharmaceuticals, LLC, Eisai Co., Ltd., Eli Lilly and Co., Exelixis, Inc., Genmab A/S, Galaxy Biotech, LLC, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) plc, Hutchison MediPharma Ltd., Johnson & Johnson, Kringle Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Merck & Co., Methylgene, Inc., Novartis AG, Pfizer, Inc., ProMetic BioTherapeutics, Inc., and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.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:FMS-WISDOM Banasthali Vidyapith workshop on What-Why-How of Bharatiya Culture

FMS-WISDOM Banasthali Vidyapith workshop on What-Why-How of Bharatiya Culture

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Pandit Hiralal Shastri founded Banasthali Vidyapith has been in media attention recently for getting the Four Star Ranking in Quacquarelli Symonds - QS Stars Rated for Excellence and Diamond status under QS I.Gauge Indian University Rating. At the core Banasthali is all in all Bharatiya and no one has doubts about it.On 11 Apr 2018 at Atal Incubation Centre, Banasthali B School FMS WISDOM conducted a workshop on What Why How of Bharatiya Culture. About 300 participants including the students and faculty members from various disciplines across Banasthali campus attended and found the workshop interesting and insightful.The session witnessed discussion on various aspects of Bharatiya culture. Many people believe that questioning is not part of Bharatiya culture, so this session began with a discussion on Sanshay (suspicion) and Jigyasa (curiosity) as two ways to question. The sanshay does not lead anywhere while its the curiosity which helps mental acumen to grow, is always encouraged in Bharat.Another interesting idea shared in the session was on the correct pronunciation of Samskriti (in general pronounced as Sanskriti, the correct one is Samskriti). Further, the session highlighted that our Shastra are not mythology, which is very essential to note in the beginning itself.The participants were curious to know about origin of life as well as what is after life. Later the participants involved interaction on theme of Education, Jyotish, Dharm and Law, Clothing, Ramayan, existence of Bhagwan, relevance of scriptures, relationships and stress management.The facilitators shared stories and anecdotes to drive home the message. This was appreciated by the participants.This session was conducted under Promotion of Research in Indian Management and Ethos (PRIME) initiative of FMS-WISDOM, Banasthali Vidyapith.The students and faculty who participated in the workshop indeed left with clear mind as well as beaming faces and pride that they were part of an institution which is a jewel in the crown among the womens universities not only in India today but across the globe,For more details about Banasthali seeAbout Banasthali: The Institution which is also the largest fully residential womens university in the world has played a big role in revolutionizing womens education in the country for the last eight decades with a belief that there is a tremendous role of higher education in empowering the women. Banasthali has scripted numerous success stories in a wide range of fields, and stands tall among the citadels of learning in India today. Team Banasthali with Vice Chancellor J C Bose Memorial Award for eminent scientist recipient Prof Aditya Shastri a highly acclaimed alumnus of BITS Pilani, SUNY State University of New York Stony Brook and MIT USA is indeed racing forward to be the very best among global women universities. It is a matter of pride that NITI Aayog had selected Banasthali along with ISB CCMB in Top 10 to host Atal Incubation Centre. Proud to be Banasthali alumni who call themselves as Banasthalites can be found in all latitudes, longitudes and altitudes in all walks oflife across the globe.Banasthali UniversityP.O. Banasthali VidyapithRajasthan  304022Phone 91 1438 228456 / 228341Email: info@banasthali.ac.inWebsite:Facebook:Transcriptomics Technologies Market Along with Key Drivers, Major Manufactures, Business Insights, Trends and Forecast 2023

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The report on global transcriptomics technologies market is an in depth analysis of the segments and sub-segments in the transcriptomics technologies market. The report provides analysis for the global as well as regional markets over the period of 2015 to 2023. According to report the global transcriptomics technologies market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11% over the forecast period of 2017 - 2023.Get Sample Copy of this Report:Segments CoveredThe report on global transcriptomics technologies market covers segments such as technology, application and end-user. The technology segments include next generation sequencing, microarray, gene regulation technologies and PCR. On the basis of application, the global transcriptomics technologies market is categorized into bioinformatics, clinical diagnostics, comparative transcriptomics and drug discovery and research. Furthermore, on the basis of end-user the transcriptomics technologies market is segmented as academic research and pharmaceutical and biotech companies.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 2015  2023.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. The U.S. drives the grwoth 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 transcriptomics technologies market such as, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Sigma Aldrich Corporation, Qiagen N. V., Fluidigm Corporation , Life Technologies Corporation, Illumina Inc., F. Hoffmann La Roche Ltd, Danaher Corporation, Bio-Rad Laboratories, and Agilent Technologies Inc..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 transcriptomics technologies 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 Porters five forces analysis and DRO analysis of transcriptomics technologies market. Moreover, the study highlights current market trends and provides forecast from 2017 to 2023. We also have highlighted future trends in the transcriptomics technologies 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. Additionally, the analysis highlights rise and fall in the market shares of the key players in the market.This report will help manufacturers, suppliers and distributors of the transcriptomics technologies 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Dermatology Devices Market: Analysis of Opportunities Offered by High Growth Economies, Review till 2022

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The global market discussion on dermatology devices industry can be found in the latest study by Fact.MR, which has been freshly added to its massive collection of research database. The report is titled Dermatology Devices Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking: Global Review 2017 to 2022, which works to enlighten the readers about the major factors prompting the growth of the concerned market. Apart from that, the research majorly focuses on dermatology devices markets competitive outlook by profiling major players functioning across the globe. As the report moves ahead, information regarding the prominent trends as well as opportunities in the key geographical segments have also been elaborated, thus enabling companies to be able to make region-specific strategies for gaining competitive lead. Some of the prime regions emphasized in the study include key regions.Request for Sample Report-The global dermatology devices market is estimated to expand at an above-average CAGR over the forecast period (2017-2022). The global market for dermatology devices is expected to account for over US$ 1,000 Mn revenues by 2022-end. Dermatology devices have been installed in various hospitals and dermatology clinics for assisting physicians in treatment of skin disorders.Procedures associated with non-invasive cosmetic correction have witnessed a surge in demand, with growing geriatric population, soaring healthcare expenditure, and rising disposable income of people in developing and developed countries. In contrast, high costs of dermatology devices have made the dermatological treatments expensive, which may act as a restraining factor to adoption of these treatments. Moreover, several side effects are associated with dermatological treatments, which in turn, incurs significant challenges for leading players in the global dermatology devices market.The prevalence of skin-related disorders has been increasing around the world. As per The Skin Cancer Foundation, more than 10,000 people died owing to melanoma in 2016. In order to lower such high mortality rates, diagnosis of skin diseases, such as skin cancer. In addition, several diagnostic equipment have been utilized for treating various types of skin cancer. For instance  dermatoscopes are playing an indispensable role in detecting melanoma, with evaluation of the pigmented lesions. A number of technological advancements are being made in dermatology devices, for example  laser instruments, and light therapy improved aesthetic appeal of people. The advanced liposuction equipment have improved body contouring treatment. Power- and vibration-assisted liposuction devices have aided in reducing significant amount of fat in shorter time period. Developments such as these will impact growth of the market in the upcoming years.North America to Remain Dominant in the Global Dermatology Devices MarketNorth America is projected to retain its dominance in the global dermatology devices market, in terms of revenues. Sales of dermatology devices in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) will exhibit the highest CAGR through 2022, followed by Europe. Europe will continue to remain the second largest market for dermatology devices over the forecast period.Radiofrequency electrosurgery devices will remain the most lucrative dermatology devices, and revenues from sales of these devices will account for over one-third share of the market during 2017 to 2022. Sales of ultrasonic electrosurgery devices are expected to account for the lowest revenues in the market.Although hospitals are expected to remain the largest end-users of dermatology devices, sales in dermatology clinics will register the fastest expansion during the forecast period. Based on application, dermatology devices will witness the largest adoption in hair removal, followed by stretch marks reduction.Competition TrackingKey players mentioned in Fact.MRs report on the Global dermatology devices market include B. Braun Melsungen AG, Erbe Elektromedizin GmbH, Heal Force Bio-meditech Holdings Limited, Johnson & Johnson Private Limited, Bovie Medical Corporation, Medtronic Plc, Smith and Nephew Co., and AngioDynamics, Inc.Browse Full Report with TOC-Table of Content:1. Global Dermatology Devices Market - Executive Summary2. Global Dermatology Devices Market Overview2.1. Introduction2.1.1. Global Dermatology Devices Market Taxonomy2.1.2. Global Dermatology Devices Market Definition2.2. Global Dermatology Devices Market Size (US$ Mn) and Forecast, 2012-20222.2.1. Global Dermatology Devices Market Y-o-Y Growth2.3. Global Dermatology Devices Market Dynamics2.3.1. Drivers2.3.2. Restraints2.3.3. Trends2.4. Supply Chain2.5. Epidemiology2.6. List of Distributors2.7. Average Pricing Analysis2.8. Regulations2.9. Key Participants Market Presence (Intensity Map) By Region3. Global Dermatology Devices Market Analysis and Forecast By Product Type3.1. Global Dermatology Devices Market Size and Forecast By Product Type, 2012-20223.1.1. Radiofrequency Electrosurgery Devices Dermatology Devices 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 Region3.1.2. Electrocautery Devices Dermatology Devices Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.2.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.2.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.2.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By RegionContinued.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 Healthcare 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:Lighting Controllers Market is Anticipated to Register at a Healthy CAGR of 17.6%

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Persistence Market Research presents a new report titled Lighting Controllers Market: Global Industry Analysis 2012  2016 and Forecast 2017  2025 that studies the performance of the global lighting controllers market over an eight year assessment period from 2017 to 2025. The report presents the value forecast of the global lighting controllers market and provides important insights into the factors driving market growth as well as the factors restricting market growth. As per the assessment of Persistence Market Research, the global lighting controllers market was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 4,800 Mn in 2017 and is anticipated to touch a valuation of nearly US$ 17,400 Mn in 2025 and in the process exhibit a CAGR of 17.6% during the period of forecast 2017-2025.For more information @Government Spending on Smart City Projects in the APAC Region Boosting Revenue Growth of the Lighting Controllers MarketThe governments in emerging economies such as China and India are focusing on developing smart cities by changing the existing infrastructure, such as old incandescent bulbs and outdated communication systems, and are installing new technologies such as embedded and connected lighting fixtures to impart better living standards to the people. Also, government spending on smart city management services such as road monitoring applications, environment, light sensing, and advanced energy saving is the primary factor which is fueling the growth of the lighting controllers market. For example, in April 2017, the Indian government announced plans to invest in the smart cities initiative. The Indian government has already allocated over US$ 2.3 Bn to this project in the last two budgets.Global Lighting Controllers Market: Segmentation and ForecastThe global lighting controllers market is segmented on the basis of technology, application and region.Request to Sample of Report @By technology, the sensor segment was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 1,400 Mn in 2017 and is expected to reach a valuation of nearly US$ 4,700 Mn in 2025, witnessing significant growth during the forecast period.By application, the commercial segment was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 2,000 Mn in 2017 and is anticipated to register a CAGR of 17.0% during the period of forecast.By region, the Asia Pacific lighting controllers market was estimated to be valued at nearly US$ 1,550 Mn in 2017 and is likely to reach a valuation of nearly US$ 6,000 Mn in 2025, reflecting a CAGR of 18.5% during the period of assessment.Request Report for TOC @Global Lighting Controllers Market: Competitive LandscapeIn this report, some of the prominent companies active in the global lighting controllers market have been profiled, which include companies such as Hubbell, GE Lighting, LLC, OSRAM Licht AG, Philips Lighting Holding B.V., Acuity Brands Lighting, Inc., Eaton Corporation, Schneider Electric S.E., Honeywell International, Lutron Electronics and CREE, INC.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 Lemon Oil Market Research Report with Key Players Analysis, Trends and Growth Forecast till 2022

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The global market discussion on lemon oil industry can be found in the latest study by Fact.MR, which has been freshly added to its massive collection of research database. The report is titled Lemon Oil Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking: Global Review 2017 to 2022, which works to enlighten the readers about the major factors prompting the growth of the concerned market. Apart from that, the research majorly focuses on lemon oil markets competitive outlook by profiling major players functioning across the globe. As the report moves ahead, information regarding the prominent trends as well as opportunities in the key geographical segments have also been elaborated, thus enabling companies to be able to make region-specific strategies for gaining competitive lead. Some of the prime regions emphasized in the study include key regions.Request for Sample Report-Numerous Uses of Lemon Oil to Benefit Lemon Oil MarketLemon oil has astringent, antifungal, disinfectant, antiseptic, and detoxifying properties and it can be deployed in a variety of ways. Some examples include house cleaning, laundry, and air freshening. Lemon oil also blends extremely well with other essential oils such as tea tree oil, geranium oil, peppermint oil, sandalwood oil, rose oil, and lavender oil, making it a good choice for herbalists who rely on aromatherapy. All of this is anticipated to boost the overall lemon oil market which is predicted to cross US$ 410 million by the year 2022.Natural Segment Winning Over Organic in the Lemon Oil MarketIt is a two-horse race in the lemon oil market between the natural segment and the organic one with the scales tilted decisively in favor of the former. A revenue share exceeding two third of the lemon oil market by source type makes the natural segment extremely lucrative and a projected market size of almost US$ 300 million by the end of the forecast period attests the segment's dominance. Europe accounts for approx. 2/5th of the natural segment which can largely be attributed to the awareness and desire of customers in this region to opt for natural products whenever they are available. The organic segment is much smaller and is only a third of the lemon oil market in terms of revenue share. Europe dominates the organic segment as the region contributes almost as much to the lemon oil market as North America and APEJ combined.Absolute and Concentrate Segments Focus Areas in Lemon Oil MarketTogether, the absolute and concentrate segment are more than half of the lemon oil market revenue by form type and key stakeholders are advised to take this into consideration while devising their business strategies. The only two regions poised to have a market value in excess of US$ 40 million in the absolute segment of the lemon oil market are Europe and North America, with the former recording an impressive CAGR. The concentrate segment represents slightly over a quarter revenue share and it is predicted to remain steady during the course of the forecast period.Competition Dashboard in the Lemon Oil MarketKey companies in the lemon oil market, which are expected to remain active in the market through 2022, are Citromax Flavors, American Vegetable Oils, Grief Inc., Fischer S/A, Citrus and Allied Essences, Askuvital, Aromaaz International, Biolandes, DoTERRA International, and Lionel Hitchen Essential Oils.Browse Full Report with TOC-Table of Content:1. Global Lemon Oil Market - Executive Summary2. Global Lemon Oil Market Overview2.1. Introduction2.1.1. Global Lemon Oil Market Taxonomy2.1.2. Global Lemon Oil Market Definition2.2. Global Lemon Oil Market Size (US$ Mn) and Forecast, 2012-20222.2.1. Global Lemon Oil Market Y-o-Y Growth2.3. Global Lemon Oil Market Dynamics2.3.1. Drivers2.3.2. Restraints2.3.3. Trends2.4. Supply Chain2.5. Cost Structure2.6. Pricing Analysis2.7. Raw Material Sourcing Strategy and Analysis2.8. List of Distributors2.9. Key Participants Market Presence (Intensity Map) By Region3. Global Lemon Oil Market Analysis and Forecast By Source Type3.1. Global Lemon Oil Market Size and Forecast By Source Type, 2012-20223.1.1. Natural Lemon Oil 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 Region3.1.2. Organic Lemon Oil Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.2.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.2.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.2.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By RegionContinued.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:2-in-1 Laptops Global Market 2018: Key Players Samsung, HP, Asus, Microsoft

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Report DescriptionGlobal 2-in-1 Laptops seen tremendous growth in the future. High demand of for the personal computing devices and heavy investment in the R&D sector by the key companies is boosting the market. Enterprises play a vital role in the market growth as more and more companies are shifting their technological business aspects from traditional to modern. The concept of BYOD is one of the major factors supporting the market growth. The advancements in the display technology have led the laptops manufacturers to come up with sleeker and more efficient laptopss and tablets that can benefit both the consumers and the business users. The consumer adoption of tablets is decreasing. However, business users are increasingly adopting 2-in-1 laptopss. The major factor that affects the decline of tablets is the growing consumer demand for large screen mobile phones that work similar to a tablet holds more battery life and is compact and portable.GET SAMPLE REPORT @The 2-in-1 laptops is getting popular each day with the increase in the technology and thus holds many of the application in personal usage, corporate usage, manufacturing units, hotels and restaurants, education and much more. These are categorized into personal and commercial applications which include all of the end users mentioned above. With the decline in the traditional tablet segment in the consumer market, the corporate market is showing tremendous growth in adoption of detachable notebooks or 2-in-1 laptopss.Global 2-in-1 laptops Market Analysis & Forecast, from 2012-2022 To provide a detailed analysis of the market structure, along with the forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the 2-in-1 laptops market To provide insights into factors affecting the market growth To analyze the 2-in-1 laptops market based on Porter's five forces 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 Pacific, and Rest of the World To provide country-level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and prospects To provide country-level analysis of the market for a segment on the basis of technology, services, component, and end-user 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 & acquisitions, new product developments, and research & developments in the 2-in-1 laptops marketKey Findings The global 2-in-1 laptops market is expected to reach USD ~5 billion by 2022 By product, screen size 13.3 inches segment was dominating the market in 2012 and is estimated to grow at a rate of 20.93% CAGR By end-user, the commercial was dominating the market in 2012 and is estimated to grow at a rate of 16.73% CAGR Geographically, North America region has been projected to hold the largest market share in global 2-in-1 laptops market, followed by Europe and Asia Pacific, respectively.Key PlayersThe prominent players in the 2-in-1 laptops market are Samsung (South Korea), HP Inc (U.S.), Asus (Taiwan), Dell (U.S.), Microsoft Corporation (U.S.), Lenovo (China), Sony (Japan), Acer (Taiwan), and Toshiba Corporation (Japan) among others.Regional Analysis of 2-in-1 laptops Market Estimation and ForecastThe global 2-in-1 laptops market is estimated to grow at a promising rate in the upcoming years. North America is the leading region among Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa. Growing adoption of cloud technology and connected space is making it easy for the consumers to detach the laptops from one application and use it for another application. Another factor that leads the growth of detachable laptops is the growing demand for rugged detachable laptops for security, manufacturing, police, fire, and many enterprise professionals.Target Audience Market research and consulting firms Original equipment manufacturers Associations and industrial bodies Electronic component suppliers and distributors Semiconductor product designers and fabricators Product manufacturers/ developers Consultancy firms/advisory firms Technology investors Research institutes System Integrators Research/Consultancy firmTable of Content: Key Points1 Market Introduction1.1 Scope of the Study1.1.1 Research Objective1.1.2 Assumption1.1.3 Limitation1.2 Market Structure:2 Research Methodology2.1 Research Process2.2 Primary Research2.3 Secondary Research2.4 Market Size Estimation3 Market Dynamics3.1 Market Drivers3.1.1 Decreasing demand of tablets3.1.2 Advancement in detachable notebooks3.1.3 Integration with touch displays and mobile OS.3.1.4 Growing consumer demand for flexibility and mobility3.2 Restraints3.2.1 Lack of integration in battery and storage capacity3.2.2 High prices as compared to the traditional laptop4 Market Factor Analysis5 2-In-1 Laptop MarketContinuedACCESS 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Monochloroacetic Acid Market Research Report by Share, Size, Top Key Players, Drivers and Forecast to 2024

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Global Monochloroacetic Acid Market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market.Global Monochloroacetic Acid Market report contains data for historic years 2015 & 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.Get Free Sample Report@Global Monochloroacetic Acid Market is expected to reach USD 987.3 billion by 2025, from USD 742.3 billion in 2017, growing at a CAGR of 3.8% during the forecast period of 2018 to 2028.Major Market Drivers and Restraints: Rapidy increasing demand for agrochemicals. Growing demand for carboxymethylcellulose (CMC). High demand from the construction industry of emerging economies Increased of harmful effects of MCA exposureMarket Definition:This market report defines the market trends and forecast the upcoming opportunities and threats of the monochloroacetic acid (mca) market in the next 8 years. Monochloroacetic acid (MCA) is that type of compound which undergoes in various reactions to form a number of intermediates for the production of a range of products. There is huge demand for monochloroacetic acid from China which is estimated to boost the MCA market during the forecast period in Asia-Pacific region.The monochloroacetic acid are CMC( critical micelle concentration) is used in a wide range of end-use industries, such as construction, detergent, paper, agriculture, adhesive, cosmetic, paint, oil, plastic, ceramic, textile, pharmaceutical, food, and medicine.As per article published by CIDC (Construction Industry Development Council) cidc is that Indias construction industry employs a work force of nearly 32 million and its market size is worth about 3816.72 USD. This will effect in increase in high demand from the construction Industry of Emerging EconomiesAccording to the article NCBI, Systemic effects and skin injury after experimental dermal exposure to monochloroacetic acid .In agrochemicals, cellulosic consists in largest application segment which accounting for over 32% of the total monochloroacetic acid. So due to the Increase of harmful effects will restrain the market in future.Inquiry Before Buying@Market Segmentation: The global monochloroacetic acid market is segmented based on product Form, application and geographical segments. Based on product form, the global monochloroacetic acid market is segmented into crystalline, liquid, andand flakes and others. On the basis of application, the global monochloroacetic acid market segmented into carboxymethylcellulose, agrochemicals, surfactants, and others. Based on geography, the global monochloroacetic acid market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies namely North America & South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and, Middle East & Africa. Some of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and, Brazil among others.For Any query talk to Analyst @Competitive Analysis:The global monochloroacetic acid market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of monochloroacetic acid market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America.Major Market Competitors/Players: BASF SE, The Dow Chemical Company, Eastman Chemical Company, Arkema S.A, Ashland Inc, Celanese Corporation, evonik, INEOS, OMNOVA Solutions Inc, shell, Solvay, Permaset Aqua, anugrah IN-ORG(P) LIMITED, Kimberlitesoftwares, Chemical Processing, ChemCologne, bagantrade.com, The Good Scents Company (tgsc), Alibaba.com., swatichemicalindustries among others.Access Full Report @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: +1-888-387-281Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comActivated Carbon Market Type, Innovative Application, Advanced Technology, New Development, Future Opportunities and Key Manufacturers Outlook  Global Analysis and 2025 Forecasts

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The Insight Partners has announced the addition of the Activated Carbon Market to 2025  Global Analysis and Forecasts by Type (Powdered Activated Carbon (PAC), Granular Activated Carbon (GAC), Extruded Activated carbon (EAC), Bead Activated Carbon (BAC) and Others); and Application (Water Treatment, Mineral Recovery, Food & Beverage, Chemical & Pharmaceutical, Industrial, and Automotive) report to their offering.High carbon content with organic material such as coal, wood, and coconut husks is processed to manufacture activated carbon. The main property of activated carbon is physical absorption which is useful for the purification of water treatment, metal finishing, medicine, fuel storage and many others. Porous structure of activated carbon along with its versatility, have made it one of the most extensively used adsorbents.Request Sample Copy is Available atIncreased demand for clean drinking water and environment protocols to control carbon and pollutants emission are the major drivers which help in surging the growth of activated carbon market whereas high price of raw material act as a restraining factor for this market. Application such as decolonization, deodorization, and solvent recovery is expected to drive the demand in the forecast period.The Global Activated Carbon Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the activated carbon industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global activated carbon market with detailed market segmentation by type, application and geography. The global activated carbon 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.Place a Direct Purchase Order atThe report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global activated carbon market based on type and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall activated carbon market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America (SAM). The market by each region is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report covers analysis and forecast of 16 counties globally along with current trend and opportunities prevailing in the region.Besides this, the 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 America after evaluating political, economic, social and technological factors effecting the market in these regions.Also, key activated carbon market players influencing the market are profiled in the study along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. The report also 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 Osaka Gas Co., Ltd., Haycarb PLC, Donau Carbon GmbH, Silcarbon, Aktivkohle GmbH, Prominent Systems, Inc., Oxbow Activated Carbon LLC, Jacobi Carbons AB, Cabot Corporation., Calgon Carbon Corporation and Kuraray Co., Ltd. among others.Complete Report is Available atAbout 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, Media, and Telecommunication industries.Contact Us:Email: sales@theinsightpartners.com+1-646-491-9876In-depth Study on Global GPS Tracker Market Drivers, Revenue and Competition Examined in a New Report

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A latest research report titled as GPS Tracker Market: Advanced Trackers Segment by Type to Witness High Growth During the Forecast Period: Global Industry Analysis (2012 - 2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017 - 2027) has been recently added to the vast portfolio of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) online research offerings. This report is a professional and in-depth analysis on the present state and future prospect for the global market. It provides valuable information to the industry insiders, potential entrants or investors. It includes an exhaustive enquiry with the reliability of logic and the comprehensiveness of contents.Click here For Free Sample Report @New applications of GPS trackers are developing in Western Europe. The use of GPS tracking in laser aimed darts is a novel concept which got success after its testing. Such areas of applications, getting developed successfully and now need to be brought to light to the population. For instance, In June 2017, the police in Waterloo, Belgium used GPS trackers to track a truck. The police found the laser-aimed darts a safer alternative to chase. This innovative technology was deployed for the first time.Eastern EuropeGPS tracking is still in introductory stages of its application in the aviation industry. The delay in delivery of correct piece of information is a major drawback of this application, which is particularly critical in regions like Eastern Europe, where pilots have to operate in regions with unstable connection. This is motivating the several companies to launch high standard GPS trackers that could be helpful in aviation industry. In February 2017, UTair-Helicopter services, a Russian helicopter operator, launched GPS tracking over its entire fleet. These trackers monitor aircraft movements and thus work towards improving the aircraft safety.Latin AmericaThe rising imports and exports between countries bolsters the market growth for GPS trackers. The amount of cargos transported between countries is witnessing a fast growth which create an inevitable need for fleet management solutions to ensure the safe delivery of goods. These needs create an opportunity for a strong growth potential in the global GPS trackers market. According to World Bank, the exports and imports of goods from Brazil and Mexico increased significantly from 2010 to 2016.Browse Full Report with TOC @APEJApart from the traditional usage of GPS trackers in vehicles for navigation, umpteenth of new areas of applications are developing. One of the emerging area of development is in nabbing of criminals by the police department. In July 2017, Police officers in India used a small, discreet GPS tracker called the Track 247 Mini-Tracker developed by a local Indian developer. The device was used to track suspects in a special case. Further, satisfied with the results, the police asked the developer to provide them 50 more mini-trackersJapanGPS is critical to the development of new applications like drones and self-driving cars, which has become an indispensable part of population especially in the developed regions like Japan where people lead a luxurious life yet are very much concerned about their safety.MEAThe increasing amount of goods transported between the countries mainly the UAE and gulf countries is one of the primary driver for the growth of GPS tracker market in MEA. Due to rising transport, companies providing fleet management solutions.North AmericaAdvanced tracking in high value air cargos is still a nascent technology which needs careful handling. The transportation of valuables like pharmaceuticals and temperature sensitive electronics, needs to be monitored throughout the journey very carefully. The trackers used for such purposes are undergoing extensive R&D, with the launch of successful trackers are expected to increase the demand for trackers in the near future.Advanced Trackers segment is anticipated to exhibit high market attractiveness index over the forecast periodIn terms of value, advanced trackers segment is projected to be the most attractive in the global GPS tracker market during the forecast period. OBD trackers segment is expected to register moderate Y-o-Y growth rate throughout the forecast period. In terms of value, this segment is expected to expand at a CAGR of 8.2% during the forecast period. In 2017, advanced trackers segment is estimated to be valued more than US$ 445 Mn and is expected to witness steady growth in terms of revenue throughout the forecast period.About Market Research Reports Search EngineMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research 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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:Gold Smelting Market - Global Industry Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024

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Global Gold Smelting Market: OverviewIn response to the increasing demand and possession of gold, the global market for gold smelting is likely to expand. Smelting, a metallurgical term, refers to the burning off of the impurities present in gold, in order to obtain a purer form. Gold, in its original form, contains certain impurities. In order to eliminate these undesirable elements, processing of the raw ore is conducted, wherein the gold is ground to fine particles. These particles then enter a furnace, which is heated above the melting point of gold. The metal is then treated with certain chemicals so as to purify the metal further.Download Brochure For Recent Industry Insights@The report provides valuable information about the factors driving the global gold smelting market. It also analyzes opportunities, recent developments, and challenges influencing the markets trajectory. The report discusses the market attractiveness, competitive landscape, value chain analysis, the present, projected, and past leading segments, and market structure in detail. It also conducts SWOT analysis on the companies profiled.Global Gold Smelting Market: Drivers and RestraintsGold, as a valuable metal represents wealth, abundance, and luxury. It also breeds a sense of security and stability among people possessing it. The more the purchasing power of people, the more are they inclined to invest in gold. As the disposable incomes of people worldwide increase, the number of gold buyers is expected to rise simultaneously. Thus, the increasing per capita incomes of people, the historical and cultural value of gold, global obsession about the possession of this metal, and government policies as to the refining process of gold have been boosting the demand for gold smelting. Also, as an increasing number of people choose to buy this metal, the possibility of their sending the gold ornaments, gold coins, scrap gold, and other objects to a smelter increases. Therefore, the global market for gold smelting is expected to reach new heights over the next few years.On the other hand, the high cost of gold and gold smelting equipment might prove to be major deterrent of the market. Nevertheless, technological advancements, coupled with investments in developing more efficient gold smelting furnaces, are expected to neutralize the negative impact of these restraints.Global Gold Smelting Market: Regional OutlookBased on geography, the global gold smelting market can be segmented into Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and the Rest of the World (RoW). The U.S., being among the top five gold producing nations, is slated to contribute significantly to the development of the global gold smelting market.Asia Pacific is projected to contribute significantly to profits earned by the global gold smelting market. Taiwan, India, China, and Hong Kong are some of the emerging economies exhibiting increased demand for gold smelting over the last few years. Government policies related to efficient gold refining units in countries such as India are expected to aid the expansion of the gold smelting market. Presently, Switzerland and Turkey appear to be among the most prominent refiners of gold. The Netherlands, Japan, Russia, France, and Italy are some other major countries that offer lucrative opportunities on account to the immense gold reserves they possess.Get ToC of Research Report@Companies Mentioned in the ReportSome of the prominent companies mentioned in the global gold smelting market are Chongjin Gold Corporation, Ronghua Industry Group Co. Ltd., Ohio precious metals LLC, Global Advanced Metals, Chenzhou Mining Group Co. Ltd., Johnson Matthey Ltd., Materion, Ohio precious metals LLC, Gannon and Scott, Aida Chemical Industries Co. Ltd., Yuyuan Tourist Mart Zijin Mining Group Co. Ltd., and OJSC Kolyma Refinery.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Global Thyroid Functioning Tests Market Will Witness a Staggering Growth During 20162026

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Worldwide Market Reports added Latest Research Report titled " Global Thyroid Functioning Tests Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022 " to its Large Report database.This report studies the global Thyroid Functioning Tests market, analyzes and researches the Thyroid Functioning Tests development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, like Abbott, bioMerieux, Danaher, DiaSorin, Siemens Healthineers, Ameritek USA, Autobio Diagnostics, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, GeTein BioMedical, IBL-America, Sigma-Aldrich, Teco Diagnostics, Thermo Fisher Scientific.Request for Sample Copy of Research Report:Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report covers United States EU, Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia.Market segment by Type, Thyroid Functioning Tests can be split into TSH Test, FT3 Test, FT4 Test.Market segment by Application, Thyroid Functioning Tests can be split intoHospitals Diagnostic Centers, Research Institutes.Request for Discount @Table of ContentsGlobal Thyroid Functioning Tests Market Size, Status and Forecast 20221 Industry Overview of Thyroid Functioning Tests2 Global Thyroid Functioning Tests Competition Analysis by Players3 Company (Top Players) Profiles4 Global Thyroid Functioning Tests Market Size by Type and Application (2012-2017)5 United States Thyroid Functioning Tests Development Status and Outlook6 EU Thyroid Functioning Tests Development Status and Outlook7 Japan Thyroid Functioning Tests Development Status and Outlook8 China Thyroid Functioning Tests Development Status and Outlook9 India Thyroid Functioning Tests Development Status and Outlook10 Southeast Asia Thyroid Functioning Tests Development Status and Outlook11 Market Forecast by Regions, Type and Application (2017-2022)12 Thyroid Functioning Tests Market Dynamics13 Market Effect Factors Analysis14 Research Finding/Conclusion15 AppendixList of Tables and FiguresContinue*Any special requirements about this report, please let us know and we can provide custom report.About WMRWorldwide 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.Contact Us:Mr. ShahWorldwide Market Reports1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154,U.STel: +1 415 871 0703Email: sales@worldwidemarketreports.comCommercial Refrigeration Equipment Market: Substantial Rising Food Service Industry to Fortify Demand for Commercial Refrigeration Equipment

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Global Commercial Refrigeration Equipment Market: SnapshotThe global commercial refrigeration equipment market has been accumulating lucrative opportunities with the increasing rate of international food trade over the past years. Commercial refrigeration equipment is largely used in the transportation of extremely perishable foods and beverages, promising the market of an improving growth rate.Food as the number one human need in all parts of the world is anticipated to remain as a strong growth factor for the global commercial refrigeration equipment market. For instance, China, Indonesia, and India have been at the forefront of increasing the production rates of seafood, whereas Peru has been a leader in aquaculture activities.Download Brochure For Recent Industry Insights@There are some interesting figures to take into consideration if you are a player operating in the global commercial refrigeration equipment market. Analysts foresee the market to be valued at a US$66.88 bn by the end of 2022 after progressing from a US$39.44 bn earned in 2016. During the forecast tenure 2015-2022, the market could expand at a 9.1% CAGR.Trade Liberalization Helps Transportation Refrigeration Equipment to Lead MarketResearchers authoring the report segment the world commercial refrigeration equipment market as per application and product with different segments taken into account. On the basis of application, you could find some or the other prospects in four key segments, viz. food and beverage production, food and beverage distribution, food and beverage retail, and food service.However, analysts foretell the world commercial refrigeration equipment market to be largely benefited with the leading rise of food service anticipated to secure a kings share until the end of the forecast tenure. The food and beverage industry could witness an escalation in the demand for commercial refrigeration equipment due to the improvement of cascade refrigeration systems installed with variable speed compressors.By product, the world commercial refrigeration equipment market has been classified into commercial refrigeration equipment parts, beverage refrigerators, refrigerators and freezers, transportation refrigeration equipment, and other equipment. The last classification in the list could include equipment such as egg refrigerators, dairy coolers, compressor racks, liquid chillers, cryogenic equipment, refrigerated vending machines, ice machines, and display cases.Out of the above segments, transportation refrigeration equipment is predicted to demonstrate a faster growth in the coming years. This segment could be favored for growth on account of the rise in international food trade with trade liberalization and globalization in agriculture.Asia Pacific Grows Prominent with Increasing Food Demand in Emerging NationsThe growth of the international commercial refrigeration equipment market is envisaged to remain dominant in Asia Pacific as the region holds a leading position in the global food industry. The demand for food has been growing at a brisk rate in the region on the back of the speedy progress of emerging economies therein. International horticulture and food trading could see the achievement of a higher rate owing to enhanced consumer trends based on rising disposable income. It is important for players to note that this region is envisioned to attain a valuation of US$29.06 bn by the final forecast year.Get ToC of Research Report@Nevertheless, developed regions are also projected to significantly contribute to the international commercial refrigeration equipment market. For instance, North America could make its presence known in the market while riding on a vast consumption of foods that require commercial refrigeration. However, concerned players may look into the latest changes brought about by North American governments, especially the U.S., regarding the deployment of greener, modern refrigeration systems while replacing older units.The report also provides a regional study of other important markets, viz. Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Europe. Besides this, it analyzes the competitive landscape while profiling key players such as Dover Corporation, United Technologies Corporation  Unit (Carrier), and Daikin Industries, Ltd.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Digital Camera Market Outlook 2018 to 2025  Leica Camera, Sony, Nikon, Ricoh Imaging, Canon, Polaroid, Panasonic and Eastman Kodak

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A comprehensive research report created through extensive primary research (inputs from industry experts, companies, and stakeholders) and secondary research, the report aims to present the analysis of Global Digital Camera Market By Type, By Application, By Region  North America, Europe, South America, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The report intends to provide cutting-edge market intelligence and help decision makers take sound investment evaluation. Besides, the report also identifies and analyses the emerging trends along with major drivers, challenges and opportunities in the global Digital Camera market. Additionally, the report also highlights market entry strategies for various companies across the globe.Request Sample Copy is Available atWorldwide Digital Camera Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the Digital Camera industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global Digital Camera market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global Digital Camera market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Digital Camera players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.Major Digital Camera Market Players:1. Sony Corporation2. Ricoh Imaging Company Ltd.3. Nikon Corporation4. Canon Inc.5. Leica Camera AG6. Polaroid Corporation7. Fujifilm Holdings Corporation8. Panasonic Corporation9. Eastman Kodak Company10. Olympus CorporationThe report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global Digital Camera market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall Digital Camera 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 and segments. The report evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend and provides exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions.Get Detail Facts and Figures atAlso, key Digital Camera market players influencing the market are profiled in the study along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. The report also 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.Reason to Buy Save and reduce time carrying out entry-level research by identifying the growth, size, leading players and segments in the global algorithm trading market Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies. The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the Digital Camera market, thereby allowing players to develop effective long term strategies. Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets. Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it. Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to products, segmentation and industry verticals.Complete Report is Available atAbout 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, Media, and Telecommunication industries.About The Insight Partners: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, Media, and Telecommunication industries.Contact Us:Email: sales@theinsightpartners.com+1-646-491-9876Lead Frame Materials Market Competitive Intelligence Study  Insights on Market Challenges and New Trends

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Latest research study from HTF MI with title Global Lead Frame Materials by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023. The Research report presents a complete assessment of the market and contains Future trend, Current Growth Factors, attentive opinions, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry validated market data. The study is segmented by products type, application/end-users. The research study provides estimates for Global Lead Frame Materials Forecast till 2023.If you are involved in the Lead Frame Materials industry or intend to be, then this study will provide you comprehensive outlook. Its vital you keep your market knowledge up to date segmented by Applications Integrated Circuit, Discrete Device & Others, Product Types such as [Etching Process Lead Frame, Stamping Process Lead Frame & Others] and some major players in the industry. If you have a different set of players/manufacturers according to geography or needs regional or country segmented reports we can provide customization according to your requirement.Request Sample of Global Lead Frame Materials Sales Market Report 2018 @:Key Companies/players: SH Materials, Mitsui High-tec, SDI, Shinko, ASM Assembly Materials Limited, Samsung, POSSEHL, I-Chiun, Enomoto, Dynacraft Industries, DNP, LG Innotek, Kangqiang, Hualong & Jentech.Application: Integrated Circuit, Discrete Device & Others, Product Type: Etching Process Lead Frame, Stamping Process Lead Frame & Others.The research covers the current & Future market size of the Global Lead Frame Materials market and its growth rates based on 5 year history data. It also covers various types of segmentation such as by geography [United States, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia & India]. The market competition is constantly growing higher with the rise in technological innovation and M&A activities in the industry. Moreover, many local and regional vendors are offering specific application products for varied end-users. On the basis of attributes such as company overview, recent developments, strategies adopted by the market leaders to ensure growth, sustainability, financial overview and recent developments.Stay up-to-date with Lead Frame Materials market research offered by HTF MI. Check how key trends and emerging drivers are shaping this industry growth as the study avails you with market characteristics, size and growth, segmentation, regional breakdowns, competitive landscape, shares, trend and strategies for this market. In the Global Lead Frame Materials Market Analysis & Forecast 2018-2023, the revenue is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2018 and 2023. The production is estimated at XX million in 2017 and is forecasted to reach XX million by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2018 and 2023.Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Key questions answered in this report - Global Lead Frame Materials Sales Market Report 2018What will the market size be in 2023 and what will the growth rate beWhat are the key market trendsWhat is driving Global Lead Frame Materials Market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in Lead Frame Materials Market space?What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the Global Lead Frame Materials Market ?What are the key outcomes of the five forces analysis of the Global Lead Frame Materials Market?What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the Global Lead Frame Materials market? Get in-depth details about factors influencing the market shares of the Americas, APAC, and EMEA?Check for discount @There are 15 Chapters to display the Global Lead Frame Materials market.Chapter 1, to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of Global Lead Frame Materials, Applications of Lead Frame Materials, 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 , Capacity and Commercial Production Date, Manufacturing Plants Distribution, Export & Import, 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, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia & India, Lead Frame Materials Segment Market Analysis (by Type);Chapter 7 and 8, to analyze the Lead Frame Materials Segment Market Analysis (by Application [Integrated Circuit, Discrete Device & Others]) Major Manufacturers Analysis;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product Type [Etching Process Lead Frame, Stamping Process Lead Frame & Others], Market Trend by Application [Integrated Circuit, Discrete Device & Others];Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, to analyze the Consumers Analysis of Global Lead Frame Materials by region, type and application ;Chapter 12, to describe Lead Frame Materials Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Lead Frame Materials sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Buy 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 5-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.Contact Us:HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Private LimitedUnit No. 429, Parsonage Road, Edison, NJ USA - 08837sales@htfmarketreport.comPh: +1 (206) 317 1218Oxytocic Pharmaceuticals Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012 to 2016 and Forecast 2017 to 2023

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Global Oxytocic Pharmaceuticals Market: By Product Type (Intramuscular Injection, Intravenous Injection), By Source (Natural Oxytocin (Animal Pituitary Extracts), Synthetic Oxytocin), By End-User (Maternity Clinics, Hospitals), and Geography  Oxytocic Pharmaceuticals Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012 to 2016 and Forecast 2017 to 2023Market Dynamics: Oxytocic Pharmaceuticals MarketOxytocin is a female reproductive hormone secreted in the hypothalamus and released into blood circulation during childbirth to induce the labor and milk production in mothers. It is also used as uterotonic (induce uterine contractions) and reduce the hemorrhage after C-section. Increase in the number of preterm births, rise in labor induction rates, escalation in complicated pregnancy cases in developing countries, and increase in awareness about maternal health are anticipated to propel the oxytocic pharmaceuticals market. However, adverse effects associated with oxytocic drugs may restrain the growth of oxytocic drugs market over the forecast period.A sample of this report is available upon request @Market Scope: Oxytocic Pharmaceuticals MarketGlobally This market segmented on the basis of product type, source, end user, and regionBased on product type, the market is segmented into the following Intramuscular Injection Intravenous InjectionBased on the source, the market is segmented into the following Natural Oxytocin (Animal Pituitary Extracts) Synthetic OxytocinBased on the end user, the market is segmented into the following Maternity Clinics HospitalsBased on the region, the market is segmented into the following North America Europe Asia Pacific Latin America Middle East and AfricaTo view TOC of this report is available upon request @Regional Analysis: Oxytocic Pharmaceuticals MarketGeographically, global oxytocic pharmaceuticals market segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa regions. North America oxytocic pharmaceuticals market is growing due to rise in incidence of induced labor, high awareness about oxytocic drugs, and rise in awareness about maternal health. Europe oxytocic pharmaceuticals market has a lucrative growth, which is attributed to presence of huge number of companies manufacturing the oxytocin drugs and rise in oxytocin usage during labor in the region. Asia Pacific oxytocic pharmaceuticals market is poised to grow at significant rate due to rise in childbirths in India and China, increase in female population, and rise in awareness about oxytocic drugs among healthcare professionals. Latin America oxytocic pharmaceuticals market has a notable share owing to increase in adolescent pregnancies in Brazil and rise in labor induction procedures. Middle East and Africa oxytocic pharmaceuticals market growth driven by higher prevalence of post-partum hemorrhage due to lack of nutrition in pregnant women and rise in awareness about pregnancy-related issues among healthcare professionals.Need more information about this report @Competition Assessment: Oxytocic Pharmaceuticals MarketKey players profiles in the global oxytocic pharmaceuticals market include Pfizer, Inc. (U.S.) Fresenius Kabi AG (Germany) Novartis AG (Switzerland) Cardinal Health (U.S.) Par Pharmaceutical, Inc. (U.S.)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 @Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Services Market Worth 2,921.4 Million USD By 2023

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Meticulous Research the leading global market research company published a research report titled Next Generation Sequencing Services (NGS) Market  Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast (2018-2023)According to this latest publication from Meticulous Research, the global Next Generation Sequencing Services market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20.1% from 2018 to 2023 to reach USD 2,921.4 million by 2023, driven by the plummeting cost of sequencing, growing need of skilled professionals for efficient NGS sample preparation and analysis, technological advancements in NGS, increase in genome mapping programs, and high cost of sequencing infrastructure. Moreover, increasing applications in cancer and agrigenomics research and capability enhancement in analysis of complex sequence data further provides significant opportunities for the various stakeholders in the global NGS services market. However, accuracy & standardization concerns in diagnostic testing and ethical issues related to NIPT may obstruct the growth of NGS services market to some extent.Download sample:The global NGS services market is mainly segmented by service type (targeted sequencing, RNA sequencing, exome sequencing, de novo sequencing, ChIP-sequencing, whole genome sequencing, methyl sequencing, and other services), technology (sequencing by synthesis, ion semiconductor sequencing, single molecule real time sequencing, nanopore sequencing, and true single molecule sequencing), application (diagnostics, drug discovery, biomarker discovery, agriculture & animal research and other applications), end user (academic & research institutes, pharmaceuticals & biotechnology industry, hospitals & clinics and other end users), and geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa).Browse in-depth Report onNorth America held the largest share in the global NGS services market in 2017, followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific. High burden of chronic and infectious diseases, increasing R&D expenditure, better availability of NGS technology and services, and various supporting government initiatives are the major factors fueling the growth of NGS services market in North America. However, Asia-Pacific region possesses lucrative growth potential for the NGS services market during the forecast period. This is mainly attributed to the increasing population, rising rate of diseases, growing outsourced research activities in this region, improving infrastructure, and various government initiatives for the genomic research to understand the complex biological process and genetic mutations present in life threatening diseases.The key players in the global NGS services market are Illumina, Inc. (U.S.), Qiagen N.V. (The Netherlands), PerkinElmer, Inc. (U.S.), Eurofins Scientific SE (Luxembourg), GATC Biotech AG (Germany), Macrogen, Inc. (South Korea), Genotypic Technology Pvt. Ltd. (India), GENEWIZ, Inc. (U.S.), Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) (China), SciGenom Labs Pvt. Ltd (India), MedGenome (India), DNA Link, Inc. (South Korea), Otogenetics Corporation (U.S.), Novogene Corporation (China), LGC Limited (U.K.), CD Genomics (U.S.), and SeqLL, LLC (U.S.).Download Free Sample@About Meticulous ResearchMeticulous Research is founded in 2010 and incorporated as Meticulous Market Research Pvt. Ltd. in 2013 as a private limited company under the Companies Act, 1956. Since its incorporation, the company has become the leading provider of premium market intelligence in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa.Contact info:Viren ShrivastavaAVP- Global Sales and MarketingMeticulous ResearchEmail: viren@meticulousresearch.comDirect Lines: +1-646-781-8004 (North America)+44-203-868-8738 (Europe)+91 744-7780008 (Asia-Pacific)Office No-402, 4th Floor, Pushpak Business Hub, Wakad, Pune-411057Postpartum Hemorrhage Devices Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012 to 2016 and Forecast 2017 to 2023

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Global Postpartum Hemorrhage Devices Market: By Product Type (Uniject Prefilled Injection System, Non-Pneumatic Anti-Shock Garment, Uterine Balloon Tamponade, Condom Catheter, Foley Catheter, Rusch Balloon, Others), End Users (Hospitals, Maternity Clinics, Others), and Geography  Postpartum Hemorrhage Devices Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012 to 2016 and Forecast 2017 to 2023Market Dynamics: Postpartum Hemorrhage Devices MarketPostpartum Hemorrhage (PPH) is an obstetric hemorrhagic condition that is a prime reason for maternal mortality. In postpartum hemorrhagic condition patient loss about 500mL blood in vaginal delivery or approximately 1000mL blood after cesarean delivery. It is categorized into two types namely, primary postpartum hemorrhage and secondary postpartum hemorrhage. Increase in the incidence of pregnancy complication cases like multiple pregnancies, baby size and inverted uterus, rise in risk factors like trauma, uterine atony, rise in anemia in pregnant woman, growing support from healthcare organizations, and technology advancements in the devices are anticipated to fuel the postpartum hemorrhage devices market. However, stringent regulations for postpartum hemorrhage device approval, lack of awareness about devices in underdeveloped countries, high cost of devices, and dearth of well-trained professionals may restrain the growth of postpartum hemorrhage devices market over the forecast period.A sample of this report is available upon request @Market Scope: Postpartum Hemorrhage Devices MarketPostpartum hemorrhage devices market is segmented on the basis of product type, end user, and regionBased on the product type, the market is segmented into the following: Uniject Prefilled Injection System Non-Pneumatic Anti-Shock Garment Uterine Balloon Tamponade Condom Catheter Foley Catheter Rusch Balloon OthersBased on the end user, the market is segmented into the following: Hospitals Maternity Clinics OthersBased on the region, the market is segmented into the following: North America Europe Asia Pacific Latin America Middle East and AfricaTo view TOC of this report is available upon request @Regional Analysis: Postpartum Hemorrhage Devices MarketGeographically, global postpartum hemorrhage devices market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa regions. North America postpartum hemorrhage devices market is growing at a significant rate owing to high adoption of advanced medical devices, sophisticated healthcare infrastructure, and presence of huge number of device manufacturers in the region. Europe postpartum hemorrhage devices market has a lucrative growth due to increase in complicated pregnancy cases, high incidence of anemia, severe preeclampsia, and postpartum hemorrhage in women, and high awareness about postpartum hemorrhage devices among healthcare professionals are bolster the market. Asia Pacific postpartum hemorrhage devices market is poised to grow due to rise in demand for postpartum hemorrhage devices in China due to policy change from single child policy to two children policy, increase in postpartum hemorrhage cases in South Korea, and sophisticated healthcare infrastructure in Japan are expected to boost the market. Latin America postpartum hemorrhage devices market growth attributed to increase in pre-mature labors in Brazil, rise in prevalence of postpartum hemorrhage cases, and expansion of business by the market players in the region. Middle East and Africa postpartum hemorrhage devices market is poised to grow at significant rate due rise in prevalence of obstetric hemorrhage owing to abruption placenta, uterine rupture, and uterine trauma, prolonged third stage of labor and multiple gestations in Saudi Arabia women are expected to propel the market growth.Competition Assessment: Postpartum Hemorrhage Devices MarketKey players profiles in the global postpartum hemorrhage devices market include: R. Bard, Inc. (U.S.) Becton, Dickinson, and Company (U.S.) Cook Medical, Inc. (U.S.) Utah Medical Products, Inc. (U.S.) Bactiguard AB (Bactiguard Holding) (Sweden) Teleflex Incorporated (U.S.) 3RD Stone Design, Inc. (U.S.) Zoex Niasg (U.S.) Revmedx Inc. (U.S.) Clinical Innovations, LLC (U.S.) Inpress Technologies (U.S.)Notable Market Developments: Postpartum Hemorrhage Devices Market In April 2016, Clinical Innovations LLC launched ebb Complete Tamponade System for the treatment of postpartum hemorrhage.Need more information about this report @Key Features of the Report: The report provides granular level information about the market size, regional market share, historic market (2012-2016) and forecast (2017-2023) 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 marketGet 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 @Global Immunohematology Market Trends, Growth Drivers and Opportunities Analyzed in a New Market Report

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A latest research report titled as Immunohematology Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2017 - 2025 has been recently added to the vast portfolio of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) online research offerings. This report is a professional and in-depth analysis on the present state and future prospect for the global market. It provides valuable information to the industry insiders, potential entrants or investors. It includes an exhaustive enquiry with the reliability of logic and the comprehensiveness of contents.Click here For Free Sample Report @Rapid increase in the global disease burden and rise in the demand for blood- and plasma-derived products such as platelets, immunoglobulin, and plasma factors are augmenting the demand for immunohematology testing instruments and reagents. The number of patients with different hematological and other chronic diseases is also increasing rapidly across the world. This is likely to raise the number of surgical procedures in the near future, consequently propelling the demand for blood transfusions. Demand for advanced immunohematology tests in also anticipated to increase during the forecast period in order to maintain the quality standards and safety profiles during blood transfusions.Awareness among the general public regarding the importance of blood compatibility and transfusion-related diseases is increasing due to the development of health care infrastructure, government campaigns, and increasing per capita income in developed as well as developing countries. Awareness among patients about proper compatibility tests for transfusion is also increasing. Increasing health care expenditure and rising worldwide concerns about medical safety are also driving the global immunohematology market. Moreover, government reimbursement programs in developed as well as developing countries are likely to provide growth opportunities to the immunohematology market in the near future. Demandsupply gap of safe and adequate human blood and plasma is a major bottleneck in the blood transfusion & blood typing industry. According to the World Health Organization, there is a significant difference between the blood demandsupply gap in developing countries and that in developed countries. Developed countries account for more than 50% of the global blood collections. These countries represent only 19% of the global population. Supply disorders in both source materials and finished products, if not managed properly, can hamper the global immunohematology market during the forecast period.Advancements in the immunohematology technology have led to rapid development in the diagnostic approach toward in vitro study of the antigenantibody interaction, facilitating improvement in the compatibility reaction between the donors blood and the recipients blood. Technological improvements in devices and reagents available for immunohematology testing have enabled clinicians to provide proper emergency assistance to patients. These technological advancements include development of automated systems which make the identification process easier and provide more accurate results as compared to manual systems.To Know The latest Trends and Insights Prevalent in This Market, Click the link below @Based on product, the global immunohematology market has been segmented into analyzers and reagents. The analyzers segment has been sub-segmented into automatic analyzers and semi-automatic/non-automatic analyzers. Based on application, the global immunohematology market has been divided into blood typing and antibody screening. Based on end-user, the market has been classified into hospitals, academic & research institutes, diagnostic & reference laboratories, and blood banks. The hospitals segment is expected to remain dominant during the forecast period, due to increasing usage of automated analyzers with high throughput in hospitals.Geographically, the global immunohematology market has been segmented into five regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. North America dominated the global market in 2016 and is projected to continue its dominance between 2017 and 2025. Growth of the market in North America is primarily attributable to the increased funding by governments and the private sector and large volumes of blood transfusions. In addition, increased focus on research by pharmaceutical companies and well-established health care infrastructure are major factors driving the market in the region. The market in Europe is projected to expand at a significant CAGR from 2017 to 2025. Europe held the second-largest market share in 2016. High adoption and usage of superior-quality diagnostics and treatments is one of the major factors driving the market in the region. This can be attributed to increasing number of diagnostic laboratories and blood banks, rising government funding for research activities, and growing application of immunohematology in transfusion safety in the region. Asia Pacific is one of the rapidly developing regions in the world. High per capita income has increased the consumption of blood products in the region.Key companies profiled in the report are Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., Grifols, S.A., Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, IMMUCOR, INC., Abbott Laboratories, Beckman Coulter, Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Becton, Dickinson and Company, Merck KGaA, and Siemens Healthineers. These players are adopting organic and inorganic growth strategies to expand their product offerings, enhance their geographical reach, widen their customer base, and gain market share. In 2016, Grifols, S.A. won a contract for supplying blood-typing solutions to the Red Cross of South Korea. The Malaysian National Blood Bank renewed its contract for Grifolss NAT technology that analyzes about 450,000 blood donations every year.Enquire about this Report @About Market Research Reports Search EngineMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research 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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At:Cinnamic Aldehyde Market to surpass 150 Kilo Tons by 2024.

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Potential outlook in various end use industries including home care, personal care and agriculture will propel cinnamic aldehyde market growth. Increasing demand for food & beverages coupled with rising disposable income are significant factors supporting product demand.Increasing product demand in food industry to attain desired flavors and fragrances for several applications will positively influence cinnamic aldehyde market over the forecast timeframe. According to industry analysis, global food flavoring industry is projected to surpass USD 15 billion by 2024.Rising concern to decrease blood sugar levels in type II diabetic patients along will support cinnamic aldehyde market growth in healthcare sector. Benefits such as prevention from cancer producing bacteria and permitting anti-cancer activities is a major driving factor supporting product demand.Request for Sample Copy of this Report@Rising consciousness regarding skin infection due to undiluted form usage may pose threat for industry growth. Increasing research & development cost for organic products along with fluctuating cinnamon prices are major factors affecting cinnamic aldehyde market price trend.Flavor agent will register growth over 6.5% in 2016. Increasing product demand for food & beverages application to manufacture better quality products will stimulate cinnamic aldehyde market growth. Changing consumer preference for flavor enhancing confectioneries such as candies, ice creams and chewing gums will fuel demand.Natural source is anticipated to be valued over USD 1.8 billion by 2024. Natural flavors are derived through abstraction, purification and several biotechnological processes from vegetable, fruit and plants. Rising demand for processed food owing to rising disposable income will significantly drive cinnamic aldehyde market expansion.Browse key industry insights from the report, Cinnamic Aldehyde market in detail along with the table of contents:Agriculture industry witnessed more than 11 kilo tons demand in 2016. Rising product adoption as fungicide farming due to its antimicrobial characteristics propelling product demand. Strong application outlook in insecticides to provide smell repelling feature towards various undesired insects and mosquitos will enhance product demand.High demand for providing strength to plant root structures will positively support product penetration. As per industry experts, product concentration of 29 ppm kills more than half of aegypti mosquito larvae within a day span. Robust application as effective fumigant for mature mosquitos is further expected to propel cinnamic aldehyde market over the forecast timespan.Asia Pacific is expected to account over 35% industry share in 2024 due to increasing disposable income amongst middle class families in the region. Rising income and demographic trends prompting inclination towards luxury consumer goods in China, Japan and India will foster product demand. Moreover, development of household and personal care industries will significantly contribute to business growth.Request for Inquiry before buying this Report @Global cinnamic aldehyde market share includes Bide Pharmatech, Kao Global Chemicals, Indukern F&F, Aurochemicals, LANXESS, Graham Chemical, Vee Kay International, Kalpsutra Chemicals and Emerald Kalama Chemical. Rising competition among existing players and new entrants is anticipated to enhance product development during the forecast timeframe.Report ContentChapter 7. Cinnamic Aldehyde Market, By Region7.1. Global cinnamic aldehyde market share by region, 2016 & 20247.2. North America7.2.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.2.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.2.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.2.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.2.5. U.S.7.2.5.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.2.5.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.2.5.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.2.5.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.2.6. Canada7.2.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.2.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.2.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.2.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.3. Europe7.3.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.3.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.3.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.3.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.3.5. Germany7.3.5.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.3.5.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.3.5.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.3.5.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.3.6. UK7.3.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.3.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.3.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.3.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.3.7. France7.3.7.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.3.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.3.7.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.3.7.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.3.8. Italy7.3.8.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.3.8.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.3.8.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.3.8.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.3.9. Spain7.3.9.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.3.9.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.3.9.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.3.9.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.3.10. Russia7.3.10.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.3.10.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.3.10.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.3.10.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.3.11. Poland7.3.11.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.3.11.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.3.11.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.3.11.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.4. Asia Pacific7.4.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.4.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.4.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.4.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.4.5. China7.4.5.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.4.5.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.4.5.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.4.5.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.4.6. India7.4.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.4.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.4.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.4.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.4.7. Japan7.4.7.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.4.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.4.7.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.4.7.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.4.8. Australia7.4.8.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.4.8.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.4.8.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.4.8.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.4.9. Indonesia7.4.9.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.4.9.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.4.9.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.4.9.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.4.10. South Korea7.4.10.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.4.10.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.4.10.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.4.10.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.4.11. Thailand7.4.11.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.4.11.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.4.11.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.4.11.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.5. Latin America7.5.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.5.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.5.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.5.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.5.5. Brazil7.5.5.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.5.5.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.5.5.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.5.5.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.5.6. Argentina7.5.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.5.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.5.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.5.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.5.7. Mexico7.5.7.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.5.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.5.7.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.5.7.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.5.8. Venezuela7.5.8.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.5.8.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.5.8.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.5.8.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.6. MEA7.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.6.5. Saudi Arabia7.6.5.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.6.5.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.6.5.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.6.5.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.6.6. UAE7.6.6.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.6.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.6.6.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.6.6.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.6.7. Egypt7.6.7.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.6.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.6.7.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.6.7.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.6.8. South Africa7.6.8.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.6.8.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.6.8.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.6.8.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  20247.6.9. Iran7.6.9.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013  20247.6.9.2. Market estimates and forecast, by product, 2013  20247.6.9.3. Market estimates and forecast, by source, 2013  20247.6.9.4. Market estimates and forecast, by end-use, 2013  2024Chapter 8. Company Profiles8.1. Emerald Kalama Chemical8.1.1. Business Overview8.1.2. Financial Data8.1.3. Product Landscape8.1.4. Strategic Outlook8.1.5. SWOT Analysis8.2. Kalpsutra Chemicals8.2.1. Business Overview8.2.2. Financial Data8.2.3. Product Landscape8.2.4. Strategic Outlook8.2.5. SWOT Analysis8.3. Vee Kay International8.3.1. Business Overview8.3.2. Financial Data8.3.3. Product Landscape8.3.4. Strategic Outlook8.3.5. SWOT Analysis8.4. Graham Chemical8.4.1. Business Overview8.4.2. Financial Data8.4.3. Product Landscape8.4.4. Strategic Outlook8.4.5. SWOT Analysis8.5. LANXESS8.5.1. Business Overview8.5.2. Financial Data8.5.3. Product Landscape8.5.4. Strategic Outlook8.5.5. SWOT Analysis8.6. Aurochemicals8.6.1. Business Overview8.6.2. Financial Data8.6.3. Product Landscape8.6.4. Strategic Outlook8.6.5. SWOT Analysis8.7. Kao Global Chemicals8.7.1. Business Overview8.7.2. Financial Data8.7.3. Product Landscape8.7.4. Strategic Outlook8.7.5. SWOT Analysis8.8. Bide Pharmatech8.8.1. Business Overview8.8.2. Financial Data8.8.3. Product Landscape8.8.4. Strategic Outlook8.8.5. SWOT Analysis8.9. Prakash Chemicals International8.9.1. Business Overview8.9.2. Financial Data8.9.3. Product Landscape8.9.4. Strategic Outlook8.9.5. SWOT Analysis8.10. Jayshree Aromatics8.10.1. Business Overview8.10.2. Financial Data8.10.3. Product Landscape8.10.4. Strategic Outlook8.10.5. SWOT Analysis8.11. ECSA Chemicals8.11.1. Business Overview8.11.2. Financial Data8.11.3. Product Landscape8.11.4. Strategic Outlook8.11.5. SWOT Analysis8.12. Elan8.12.1. Business Overview8.12.2. Financial Data8.12.3. Product Landscape8.12.4. Strategic Outlook8.12.5. SWOT Analysis8.13. Symrise8.13.1. Business Overview8.13.2. Financial Data8.13.3. Product Landscape8.13.4. Strategic Outlook8.13.5. SWOT Analysis8.14. Taytonn8.14.1. Business Overview8.14.2. Financial Data8.14.3. Product Landscape8.14.4. Strategic Outlook8.14.5. SWOT Analysis8.15. SRS Aromatics8.15.1. Business Overview8.15.2. Financial Data8.15.3. Product Landscape8.15.4. Strategic Outlook8.15.5. SWOT Analysis8.16. John D. Walsh Company8.16.1. Business Overview8.16.2. Financial Data8.16.3. Product Landscape8.16.4. Strategic Outlook8.16.5. SWOT Analysis8.17. Treatt8.17.1. Business Overview8.17.2. Financial Data8.17.3. Product Landscape8.17.4. Strategic Outlook8.17.5. SWOT Analysis8.18. M&U International8.18.1. Business Overview8.18.2. Financial Data8.18.3. Product Landscape8.18.4. Strategic Outlook8.18.5. SWOT Analysis8.19. Lansdowne Chemicals8.19.1. Business Overview8.19.2. Financial Data8.19.3. Product Landscape8.19.4. Strategic Outlook8.19.5. SWOT Analysis8.20. Indukern F&F8.20.1. Business Overview8.20.2. Financial Data8.20.3. Product Landscape8.20.4. Strategic Outlook8.20.5. SWOT AnalysisBrowse full Table of Content @About Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnologyContact UsArun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1 888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Food Cultures Market Trends & Forecasts (2018-2022): Chr. Hansen, Dhler, DSM and DowDuPont

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Scope of the ReportThe report entitled Global Food Cultures Market: Size, Trends & Forecasts (2018-2022), provides analysis of the global food cultures, with detailed analysis of market size and growth. The analysis includes the market by value, by volume, by segment, by segment volume and by applications. The report also provides the analysis of the global food cultures (dairy culture) market volume of Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), North America, Latin America, Middle East & Africa (MEA), and ROW regions.Moreover, the report also 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 overall global food cultures has also been forecasted for the years 2018-2022, taking into consideration the previous growth patterns, the growth drivers and the current and future trends.Chr. Hansen, Dhler, DSM and DowDuPont are some of the key players operating in the global food cultures, whose company profiling has been done in the report. In this segment of the report, business overview, financial overview and business strategies of the companies are provided.Get the sample copy of report @Country CoverageEuropeAsia PacificNorth AmericaLatin AmericaMiddle East & Africa (MEA)ROWCompany CoverageChr. HansenDhlerDSMDowDuPontExecutive SummaryFood Cultures (Starter Culture) defined as a microorganism such as live bacteria, yeasts or moulds, are used in various food manufacturing. Food Cultures preparations comprise of formulations, involving one or more live and active microbial species carry out the fermentation process in foodstuffs which, helps to preserve perishable foods and improve their nutritional qualities. Cultures are used to fundamentally change a food products taste, texture, color, nutritional value and shelf-life.The different types of food cultures are Dairy Cultures and Meat Cultures. Dairy Cultures are live bacteria used in the production of fermented dairy foodstuff products such as cheese, yoghurt, etc. Cheese culture grows in the milk, converts the sugar lactose into lactic acid, which ensures the correct level of acidity and gives the cheese its moisture. In yoghurt and other fermented milk products, the culture is responsible for the taste and texture of the final product. Depending on the acidity, the product will have either a mild or strong taste.Meat cultures are used to make dry, fermented products such as salami, pepperoni, chorizo and dried ham. The culture bacteria develop the flavor and color of the products.Request for sample copy of report @The global food cultures market is expected to increase at high growth rates during the forecasted period (2018-2022). The global food cultures market is supported by various growth drivers, such as, swelling demand for fast food and fermented foods, rapid urbanization, growing alcohol consumption, accelerating meat consumption and rising cheese production & Consumption, etc.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. Our document database is updated by the hour, which means that you always have access to fresh data spanning over 300 industries and their sub-segments.State Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948(USA-Canada)Tel: +1-518-621-2074E: sales@marketresearchreports.bizGlobal Medical Packaging Market by Manufacturers, States, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023

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"The Report United States Medical Packaging Market by Manufacturers, States, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Medical Packaging MarketMedical Packaging is supplied in sterile conditions by the manufacture companies after the sterilization. With the development of the pharmaceutical industry, the medical instruments and the medicine has higher and higher quality demand in the sterile, because the medical instruments and the medicine can infect the patients.Get Sample copy of this Report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Medical Packaging in United States market, to split the market based on manufacturers, states, type and application.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers"AmcorDoW3MBerry PlasticsWihuri GroupDupontCatalentKlockner PentaplastBemisWest PharmaceuticalConstantia FlexiblesGerresheimerWestRockAvery DennisonOliver-TolasMarket Segment by States, coveringCaliforniaTexasNew YorkFloridaIllinoisRequest for TOC @Market Segment by Type, coversPlasticsGlassMetalNonwovenOtherMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoPharmaceuticalMedical InstrumentsMedical ImplantsOthersThere are 17 Chapters to deeply display the United States Medical Packaging market.Chapter 1, to describe Medical Packaging Introduction, product type and application, market overview, market analysis by States, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the manufacturers of Medical Packaging, with profile, main business, news, sales, price, revenue and market share 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 United States market by States, covering California, New York, Texas, Illinois and Florida, with sales, price, revenue and market share of Medical Packaging, for each state, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5 and 6, to show the market by type and application, with sales, price, revenue, market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, to analyze the key States by Type and Application, covering California, New York, Texas, Illinois and Florida, with sales, revenue and market share by types and applications;Chapter 12, Medical Packaging market forecast, by States, type and application, with sales, price, revenue and growth rate forecast, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, to analyze the manufacturing cost, key raw materials and manufacturing process, etc.Chapter 14, to analyze the industrial chain, sourcing strategy and downstream end users (buyers);Chapter 15, to describe sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, etc.Chapter 16 and 17, to describe Medical Packaging Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source.View Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Medical Packaging Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Plastics1.2.2 Glass1.2.3 Metal1.2.4 Nonwoven1.2.5 Other1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Pharmaceutical1.3.2 Medical Instruments1.3.3 Medical Implants1.3.4 Others1.4 Market Analysis by States1.4.1 California Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.2 Texas Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.3 New York Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.4 Florida Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.5 Illinois Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Amcor2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Amcor Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 DoW2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 DoW Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 3M2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 3M Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Berry Plastics2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 Berry Plastics Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Wihuri Group2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 Wihuri Group Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Dupont2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 Dupont Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Catalent2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 Catalent Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Klockner Pentaplast2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 Klockner Pentaplast Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 Bemis2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 Bemis Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 West Pharmaceutical2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 West Pharmaceutical Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 Constantia Flexibles2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 Constantia Flexibles Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 Gerresheimer2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 Gerresheimer Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 WestRock2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Type 12.13.2.2 Type 22.13.3 WestRock Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 Avery Dennison2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Type 12.14.2.2 Type 22.14.3 Avery Dennison Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.15 Oliver-Tolas2.15.1 Business Overview2.15.2 Medical Packaging Type and Applications2.15.2.1 Type 12.15.2.2 Type 22.15.3 Oliver-Tolas Medical Packaging Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)3 United States Medical Packaging Market Competition, by Manufacturer3.1 United States Medical Packaging Sales and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.1.1 United States Medical Packaging Sales by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.1.2 United States Medical Packaging Sales Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2 United States Medical Packaging Revenue and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2.1 United States Medical Packaging Revenue by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2.2 United States Medical Packaging Revenue Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.3 United States Medical Packaging Price by Manufacturers (2016-2017)3.4 Market Concentration Rate3.4.1 Top 3 Medical Packaging Manufacturer Market Share (2016-2017)3.4.2 Top 5 Medical Packaging Manufacturer Market Share (2016-2017)3.5 Market Competition TrendBuy Now @About 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 Offshore ROV Market by Manufacturers, States, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023

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"The Report United States Offshore ROV Market by Manufacturers, States, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Offshore ROV MarketRemotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are a vital part of underwater activities. The offshore industry could not function without them as ROVs perform crucial installation, inspection, maintenance, and decommissioning of subsea infrastructure.Get Sample copy of this Report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Offshore ROV in United States market, to split the market based on manufacturers, states, type and application.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers"Forum Energy TechnologiesOceaneeringFMC TechnologiesSaab Seaeye LimitedFurgoSaipemECA GroupSMDLIGHTHOUSE SpADeep Ocean Engineering, Inc.TMTDWTEKMarket Segment by States, coveringCaliforniaTexasNew YorkFloridaIllinoisRequest for TOC @Market Segment by Type, coversInspection Class ROVLight Class ROVHeavy Class ROVMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoDrilling SupportConstruction SupportOffshore InspectionOthersThere are 17 Chapters to deeply display the United States Offshore ROV market.Chapter 1, to describe Offshore ROV Introduction, product type and application, market overview, market analysis by States, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the manufacturers of Offshore ROV, with profile, main business, news, sales, price, revenue and market share 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 United States market by States, covering California, New York, Texas, Illinois and Florida, with sales, price, revenue and market share of Offshore ROV, for each state, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5 and 6, to show the market by type and application, with sales, price, revenue, market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, to analyze the key States by Type and Application, covering California, New York, Texas, Illinois and Florida, with sales, revenue and market share by types and applications;Chapter 12, Offshore ROV market forecast, by States, type and application, with sales, price, revenue and growth rate forecast, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, to analyze the manufacturing cost, key raw materials and manufacturing process, etc.Chapter 14, to analyze the industrial chain, sourcing strategy and downstream end users (buyers);Chapter 15, to describe sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, etc.Chapter 16 and 17, to describe Offshore ROV Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source.View Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Offshore ROV Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Inspection Class ROV1.2.2 Light Class ROV1.2.3 Heavy Class ROV1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Drilling Support1.3.2 Construction Support1.3.3 Offshore Inspection1.3.4 Others1.4 Market Analysis by States1.4.1 California Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.2 Texas Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.3 New York Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.4 Florida Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.5 Illinois Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Forum Energy Technologies2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Forum Energy Technologies Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Oceaneering2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 Oceaneering Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 FMC Technologies2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 FMC Technologies Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Saab Seaeye Limited2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 Saab Seaeye Limited Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Furgo2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 Furgo Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Saipem2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 Saipem Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 ECA Group2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 ECA Group Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 SMD2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 SMD Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 LIGHTHOUSE SpA2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 LIGHTHOUSE SpA Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 Deep Ocean Engineering, Inc.2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 Deep Ocean Engineering, Inc. Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 TMT2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 TMT Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 DWTEK2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Offshore ROV Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 DWTEK Offshore ROV Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)3 United States Offshore ROV Market Competition, by Manufacturer3.1 United States Offshore ROV Sales and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.1.1 United States Offshore ROV Sales by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.1.2 United States Offshore ROV Sales Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2 United States Offshore ROV Revenue and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2.1 United States Offshore ROV Revenue by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2.2 United States Offshore ROV Revenue Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.3 United States Offshore ROV Price by Manufacturers (2016-2017)3.4 Market Concentration Rate3.4.1 Top 3 Offshore ROV Manufacturer Market Share (2016-2017)3.4.2 Top 5 Offshore ROV Manufacturer Market Share (2016-2017)3.5 Market Competition TrendBuy Now @About 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Electric Vehicles: A deep dive in the technology that is the future of the Auto industry - Researchmoz

Electric Vehicles

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Electric Vehicles: A deep dive in the technology that is the future of the Auto industry" to its huge collection of research reports.Almost conclusively now, electric vehicles appear to have won the power train argument in the automotive industry and car manufacturers from all over the world have made significant promises to deliver only hybrid and electric vehicles in the future.From automotive shows to the worlds cities, new models and ideas are being tested and the general public whilst being broadly reticent at first, is now beginning to accept the idea of battery powered chargeable vehicles. Whilst the industry waits for consumer adoption levels to really boom, manufacturers are gearing up for a serious fight to establish a position in what will undoubtedly become the main automotive market.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The leaders of a few years ago now have significant new challengers and are having to fight harder for sales than ever before. Huge new challenges are becoming obvious as the world tries to establish exactly how it will power and build all these new vehicles. There is a new heavy demand for the rare earth materials that electric vehicles need and some concerns about the environmental implications of replacing the global fleet with this technology.One country that is not being overly cautious about this change is China and it has ploughed ahead to the point where its manufacturers are now dominant in the electric vehicle industry. Within the next decade a point will arrive where electric vehicles will outsell traditional combustion engine vehicles, but in order for that to happen and it not be a charging and technical disaster many things must change.Key Highlights- In the global EV market there have been some companies that have jumped on EV technology and run with it from an early stage and companies like Nissan and Tesla have capitalized on being bold and first to market.- However in early 2018 the market is proving to be much more fluid than ever before and as new models come to market and more big automotive players start to get serious with their EV products, it is changing the leaderboard from month to month.- A number of factors are starting to come together which should eventually propel EV sales so that they stop being niche and start becoming ubiquitous, but the market is not quite there yet.- However, when it comes, players will have to be ready with compelling products or they risk trying to survive on dwindling internal combustion engine vehicle sales alone whilst their customers are taxed heavily for buying them.Despite the very ambitious targets that have been set by governments and automotive manufacturers all over the world, how to transition the global fleet onto electric vehicles is still very far from being clear.- There is a wide array of charging technologies and solutions range from service station fast chargers to on road chargers. However, as yet, there are very few countries even close to a complete solution on the scale that will allow the global fleet to be transferred over.- A number of innovative startup companies are working on solutions to the problem but this could be a very limiting factor on the progress of the industry and big money is needed to role out charging infrastructure that will cover entire countries, both in terms of the places to charge and the power distribution networks.Much of the attention placed upon the development of EVs has been focused upon the fast-charging, full-electric-vehicle (FEV), but that concept remains in the future and requires several major technical breakthroughs before a cheap, reliable and almost instantly chargeable electric vehicle emerges from a major manufacturer.- Hybrid cars have been in development for some time; being ahead in the development race means hybrid technology represents the immediate future of EV technology.- Attracting large research and development budgets, hybrid cars are increasingly becoming mainstream and offer solutions to the problems currently afflicting FEVs.Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Scope- Examine who the main players are in the EV industry and who are the emerging new players- Look at the challenges faced by the industry and how likely these are to be overcome- See the countries that are really pushing ahead with the technology and why- Analyze the future of the industry, who the winners and losers are and what the competition looks likeReasons to buy- What are the most important EV models on sale?- What companies are going to become dominant?- Why are hybrids so important in EV tech?- What does the future of the industry look like?- What do governments need to do to encourage growth?- How far away are we from the expected EV boom?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.ResearchMozState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @Urine Collection Devices Market to Register Substantial Expansion by 2025

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Urine collection devices are devices employed to collect urine from the urinary bladder either internally through inserting a catheter in the bladder to drain urine, or externally by using devices such as the Texas catheter. Urine collection devices are used in the treatment of urinary incontinence. Urinary catheterization is performed it a patient is unable to urinate naturally. These devices can be made of latex, polyurethane, rubber, or silicon. Use of closed urinary drainage systems is more preferred over other devices in order to avoid any infection. These systems meet all hygiene criteria that are required for a high-quality closed system used for long-term medical care.The Urine Collection Devices Market can be segmented based on device type, product, disease condition, and end-user. Based on device type, the market has been divided into external urine collection devices and internal urine collection devices. Based on product, the market can be classified into urinary catheters, urine collection accessories, and urine bags. Catheters are used to remove any obstruction in urine flow, which is caused due to bladder or kidney stones, or enlargement of the prostate gland. Key variants of urinary catheters currently in use are Robinson (no balloon), Foley (self-retaining balloon), Coude (curved-tip Foley with or without balloon), the external Texas catheter, and irrigation (3 ports).Request to View Brochure of Report -Based on disease condition, the urine collection devices market can be segregated into urinary incontinence, urine retention, chronic kidney disease (CKD), multiple sclerosis, and others. CKD is a kidney disease that affects the nephrons and damages the kidneys, making them unable to filter blood. CKD can result in various complications caused by deposition of the fluid waste. Based on end-user, the urine collection devices market can be divided into hospitals, clinics, home care settings, diagnostic laboratories, and ASCs.The urine collection devices market is driven by several factors such as high prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and rise in the prevalence of prostate gland enlargement among geriatric population. According to an NIH study, the overall prevalence of chronic kidney disease in the general public is nearly 15%. High blood pressure and diabetes are primary causes of chronic kidney disease. Around 50% of the people suffering from chronic kidney disease are either diabetic or are suffering from cardiovascular disease (CVD). Enlargement of the prostate gland is a common problem in men aged above 58 years. It causes blockage of the urinary tract, which restricts proper urination. This condition can be relieved by inserting a catheter into the urinary bladder through the urethra and emptying the bladder. If the size of the prostate gland is large, it is surgically removed in order to provide relief to the patient.Request to View ToC of Report -Major restraints for the urinary collection devices market are side-effects of catheterization and unfavorable reimbursement policies. The catheter-associated infection is a major issue faced by patients. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), under the rule CMS-1533-FC, does not provide reimbursement for the treatment of urinary tract infections caused due to use of catheters. Thus, preventive measures are being taken in order to reduce the incidence of infections. A non-profit organization responsible for developing national urgencies and targets for performance improvement called the National Quality Forum estimates that 17% to 69% of catheter-associated urinary tract infections can be prevented with measures recommended for infection control. Maintenance of proper hygiene in order to prevent any kind of urine collection devices associated infection is the current market trend. Maintaining better hygiene conditions is expected to get more importance in the urine collection devices market during the next few years.Based on geography, the global urine collection devices market has been divided into five regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. North America is the leading market for urine collection devices with the U.S. being the largest revenue-generating country in the region. North America is followed by Europe. More than 661,000 people in the U.S. have kidney failure. Among these, 468,000 individuals are on dialysis and around 193,000 survive with operative kidney transplants. Factors such as increased prevalence of urinary bladder disorders and growing elderly population have boosted the urine collecting devices market in North America. The Asia Pacific market is expanding rapidly due to rise in the number of cases reported for catheter-associated infection. The market in Middle East & Africa is expected to expand at a rapid pace during the forecast period, due to rise in government initiatives for increasing awareness about better hygiene conditions in the region. The market in Latin America is expected to witness steady growth during the forecast period, due to unavailability of proper options such as better hygienic and advanced products.Key players operating in the global urine collection devices market are C.R. Brad, B.Braun Melsungen, Coloplast, Teleflex, and Hollister. Other prominent players are Cook Medical, Medline Industries, Medtronic, and Thermo Fischer Scientific.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 Mobile Anti-Malware Market 2018 Key Players: Mcafee, Avast Software, AVG Technologies, Malwarebytes, Bitdefender, Lookout, Kaspersky.

Mobile Anti-Malware Market

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Mobile Anti-Malware Market:WiseGuyReports.com adds Mobile Anti-Malware Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2025reports to its database.Executive SummaryThis report studies the global Mobile Anti-Malware market, analyzes and researches the Mobile Anti-Malware development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeMcafeeAvast SoftwareAVG TechnologiesMalwarebytesBitdefenderLookoutKaspersky...Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoAndroidIOSWindowsOtherMarket segment by Application, Mobile Anti-Malware can be split intoRetailTelecom & ITUtilitiesOtherIf 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 Mobile Anti-Malware Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Mobile Anti-Malware1.1 Mobile Anti-Malware Market Overview1.1.1 Mobile Anti-Malware Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Mobile Anti-Malware 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 Mobile Anti-Malware Market by Type1.3.1 Android1.3.2 IOS1.3.3 Windows1.3.4 Other1.4 Mobile Anti-Malware Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Retail1.4.2 Telecom & IT1.4.3 Utilities1.4.4 Other2 Global Mobile Anti-Malware Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Mobile Anti-Malware 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 Mcafee3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Mobile Anti-Malware Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Avast Software3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Mobile Anti-Malware Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 AVG Technologies3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Mobile Anti-Malware Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 Malwarebytes3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Mobile Anti-Malware Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 Bitdefender3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Mobile Anti-Malware Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 Lookout3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Mobile Anti-Malware Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 Kaspersky3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Mobile Anti-Malware Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7.5 Recent Developments4 Global Mobile Anti-Malware Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018)4.1 Global Mobile Anti-Malware Market Size by Type (2013-2018)4.2 Global Mobile Anti-Malware Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.3 Potential Application of Mobile Anti-Malware in Future4.4 Top Consumer/End Users of Mobile Anti-MalwareContinuousFor 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Fluoroelastomer Market Enhancement in Chemical and Materials Industry & Global Professional In-Depth Market Analysis 2018-2025

"Global Fluoroelastomer Market Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025"

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Global Fluoroelastomer Market is expected to reach USD 1.21 billion by 2025, from USD 1.9 billion in 2017, growing at a CAGR of 6.1% during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025. The upcoming market report contains data for historic years 2015 & 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.Get Free Sample Copy of this Report @Global Fluoroelastomer Market, by Type (Fluorocarbon, Fluorosilicone, Per-fluoroelastomers), By End use (Automotive, Aerospace, Oil & Gas, Energy & Power, Chemical Processing, Semiconductor, Pharmaceutical & Food Processing) By Geography (North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa) and Forecast to 2025.Major Market Competitors/Players:Some of the major players operating in the global fluoroelastomer market are Asahi Glass Co., Daikin Industries, DuPont, Gujarat Fluorochemicals Limited, HaloPolymer OJSC, Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Solvay, Chemours, 3M. Goodyear Rubber Company of Southern California, among others.Competitive Analysis:The global fluoroelastomer market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of fluoroelastomer market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America.Report Definition:This market report defines the market trends and forecast the upcoming opportunities and threats of the fluoroelastomer market in the next 8 years. Fluoroelastomers are a type of synthetic rubber which gives resistance to chemicals, oil and heat. It is used for moulding the products such as o-rings, shaft seals, manifold gaskets, firewall seals, gaskets, valve stem seals, diaphragms, and others. Fluoroelastomers are normally compatible with hydrocarbons, but they are not compatible with acetone and acetic acid. There is growing demand for specialized products like fuel hoses, shaft seals, fuel injector o-ring, and others, which is driving the growth of fluoroelastomer market. As per article published by, The Chemours Company, the vehicle production will increased by 25% in 2021. It will support the demand of fluoro elastomer. There is also pressure in the market in automotive manufacturers. However, increasing environmental concern is considered to be one of restraining factor of the market in future.Order a copy of Global Fluoroelastomer Market Report @Major Market Drivers and Restraints:Huge economic growth in Asia-Pacific regionRegulations imposed on the standard of emissions in automobile industryNew product development in sealing applicationsEnvironmental concerns related to usage of fluoroelastomerReport Segmentation:The global fluoroelastomer market is segmented based on type, application and geographical segments.Based on type, the global fluoroelastomer market is segmented into fluorocarbon, fluorosilicone, and per-fluoroelastomers and other.On the basis of application, the global fluoroelastomer market is segmented into automotive, aerospace, oil & gas, energy & power, chemical processing, semiconductor, pharmaceutical & food processing and others.Based on geography, the global fluoroelastomer market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies namely North America & South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and, Middle East & Africa. Some of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and, Brazil among others.Research Methodology:Data collection and base year analysis is done using data collection modules with large sample sizes. The market data is analysed and forecasted using market statistical and coherent models. Also market share analysis and key trend analysis are the major success factors in the market report. To know more please Request an Analyst Call or can drop down your inquiry.The key research methodology used by DBMR Research team is data triangulation which involves data mining, analysis of the impact of data variables on the market, and primary (industry expert) validation. Apart from this, other data models include Vendor Positioning Grid, Market Time Line Analysis, Market Overview and Guide, Company Positioning Grid, Company Market Share Analysis, Standards of Measurement, Top to Bottom Analysis and Vendor Share Analysis. To know more about the research methodology, drop in an inquiry to speak to our industry experts.View Full Report @Related ReportGlobal Polyurethane Sealants Market Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Global Polyurethane sealants Market, By Type (One-Component Polyurethane Sealants, Two-Component Polyurethane Sealants); End User (Building & Construction, Automotive, General Industrial, Marine, Others) By Geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Europe, South America, Middle East and Africa)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Report 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.Data Bridge adepts in creating satisfied clients who reckon upon our services and rely on our hard work with certitude. Get 10% Discount on Report by emailing sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com . We are content with our glorious 99.9 % client satisfying rate.Contact:Vishal DixitData Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comFlat Steel Market Likely to Emerge over a Period of 2017 - 2025

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Flat steel is rolled from a semi-furnished material such as ingots or billets, and slabs. It is commonly used in consumer durable, white goods, construction as well as automotive industry. Flat steel is used by various manufacturers such as light bar industries, cable trays, truck trailers, automobile industry, railways, tippers, grating manufacturers, and other engineering industries. Flat steel enhances the quality, ductility, toughness, reliability, consistency of end product along with reduces the waste as well as a rework of production process.Moreover, it helps in maximized yield, trouble-free processing, improves product shelf life, and enhance the overall performance of the end product. According to World Steel Association, the overall steel products consumption in Asia & Oceania market was estimated around 990 Mn metric tons in 2015.Request Report for TOC @Flat Steel Market: Drivers and RestraintsInnovative steel production techniques, expansion in the manufacturing capacity, and steel companies are inclining towards electric arc furnace manufacturing process which will provide them an operating flexibility are a primary factor driving the growth of global flat steel market.Moreover, extensive use of flat steel in the construction of factories, roads, and engineering structure, and growing automobile and construction industry globally which account about two third of steel consumption are some of the prominent factors fueling the growth of flat steel market over the forecast period. However, the high fixed cost of blast furnace production process have a severely adverse impact on the profitability of steel manufacturers, and fluctuation in product price may limiting the growth of the flat steel market during the forecast period.For Instance, In February 2017, the average price of flat steel in Asian market was increased by around US$25 per ton compared to previous month. Flat steel market revenue is expected to grow at a rapid growth rate, over the forecast period. The market is anticipated to perform well in the near future owing to the low cost of cold rolled steel sheets compared to hot rolled sheets and expanding industrialization. Moreover, increasing public sector expenditure and the rise in infrastructure investments are some of the factors that can propel the market revenue growth of flat steel soon.Based on product type, sheets segment is projected to lead the global flat steel market over the forecast period attributed to the extensive use of hot rolled steel sheets for the development of the major sized structures such as heavy equipment, construction, and railroads, and high malleable property. On the other hand, the cold rolled sheets are a finished form of the sheet used when a surface finishing is required automotive parts. The cold steel is processed in cold reduction mills at room temperature along with tempers rolling which make steel closer dimensional tolerance, improve surface finish, and enhance the tensile strength.Flat Steel Market: Region-wise OutlookDepending on the geographic region, flat steel market is divided into seven key regions: North America, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Western Europe, Japan, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the flat steel market followed by Europe, and Japan is owing to expanding automotive output, high adoption of oil and gas tubular, and government initiatives.The market in Asia Pacific and Japan is expected to grow at significant CAGR owing to expanding construction and automobile industry, the presence of prominent players in these regions. Additionally, increasing exports of steel from developing countries such as India which has escalated by 78% during April 2016 to February 2017 are the factors which are anticipated to drive the growth of flat steel market throughout the forecast period.Request to Sample Report @Flat Steel Market: Key PlayersSome of the prominent players in the flat steel market are ArcelorMittal S.A., Allegheny Technologies Inc., Zeeco Metals, Inc., SSAB AB, Clingan Steel, Inc., United States Steel Corporation, AK Steel Holding Corporation, Hascall Steel Co., Essar Group ThyssenKrupp AG, Posco Co. Ltd., Precision Brand Products, Inc., Johnson Bros. Metal Forming Co., Voestalpine AG, Jindal Steel and Power Limited, JSW Steel Ltd., Tata Steel Limited, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp, Hyundai Steel Co., and Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), and many more.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:Steel Rebar Market to Gain a Stronghold by 2025

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Rebar is also known as steel reinforcement bar used as a tensioning device in the construction industry mainly for concrete reinforcement. Steel rebar is the versatile constructional material extensively used to hold and strengthen the concrete in a compressed state. Reinforcement concrete is a complex material fabricated from concrete along with some procedure of reinforcement. Concrete is adamant in density, but nearly with less strength.Though, to overcome this imbalance in concrete, steel rebar is cast into it to hold the tensile load. There are five types of rebar namely welded wire fabric, sheet metal reinforcing bars, stainless steel rebar, wire mesh or expanded metal. The steel rebar usually consists of such size and shape that they can easily be placed and bent in the concrete to form a monolithic structure. The steel rebar has an excellent bendability property which makes it the best material as reinforcement raw material in the concrete structure. The steel rebar significantly reduce the risk of cracking, has a high impact resistance, reduce spalling joint edges, and high durability.Request Report for TOC @Steel Rebar Market: Drivers and RestraintsExpanding construction industry globally, declining steel price, reduce wastage, minimize overlapping at joints, helps in faster infrastructure development are the primary factor driving the growth of global steel rebar market. Moreover, an advanced thermo-mechanical technology that helps in improving the quality of steel rebar, and unique features of steel rebar such as high tension.ductility, provide perfect shaped beams, and columns with accurate quantity of cover concrete are some of the prominent factors fueling the growth of steel rebar market over the forecast period. However, rusting of unprotected steel will reduce its strength which will further minimize the reinforced concrete strength, and the high cost of fabrication used for casting rebar concrete may limiting the growth of the steel rebar market during the forecast period.Steel rebar market revenue is expected to grow at a rapid growth rate, over the forecast period. The market is anticipated to perform well soon owing to use of steel rebar in construction to strengthen infrastructures along with minimizing the effect of stressors such as temperature, and tension. Additionally, steel is used as the finest material for reinforcement of concrete because of its expansion property, and its bond strength with concrete are the factors that can propel the market revenue growth of steel rebar in the near future.Based on product type, deformed steel bar segment is projected to lead the global steel rebar market over the forecast period attributed to the fact that it reduces slippage in concrete along with enhancing the bond between the two materials, and have more tensile strength compared to mild steel bars. According to World Steel Association, in 2013, the per capita finish steel consumption of India was around 59 kg compared to 215 kg of globally.Steel Rebar Market: Region-wise OutlookDepending on the geographic region, steel rebar market is divided into seven key regions: North America, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Western Europe, Japan, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the steel rebar market followed by Europe, and Japan is owing to developed infrastructure, and expanding imports of steel rebar or concrete reinforcing bar in the U.S, established research & development institutes, and favorable market conditions such as rebounding non-residential construction activities.The market in Asia-Pacific is projected to have the fastest growth due to growing manufacturing industry, expanding construction technology, government initiatives to promote steel use, the rise in demand for steel rebar for concrete reinforcement, and the presence of domestic steel trades. Moreover, growing national investment, and expanding the number of high profile steel ventures and selling duty-free steel rebar products by key players in developing countries are some of the factors which are anticipated to surge the growth of steel rebar market throughout the forecast period.Request to Sample Report @Steel Rebar Market: Key PlayersSome of the prominent players in the steel rebar market are Nucor Corporation, ArcelorMittal S.A., Tillos Group, Commercial Metals Corporation, Rajhi Steel Industries Co. Ltd., Gerdau Long Steel, Power Steel Co., Ltd., Akron Rebar Co., EVRAZ PLC, Zamil Steel Holding Company Ltd., Saudi Iron and Steel Company.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:New Trends of Mobile Enterprise Application Development Platform Market with Worldwide Industry Analysis to 2016-2026

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Mobile enterprise application development platform is an integrated development environment that provides tools, and client/server middleware for creating and managing mobile applications. These platform addresses the challenges of mobile application development related to diverse sets of devices, platforms, networks, and users. Mobile enterprise application development platforms allows easier integration of mobile applications with the features and capabilities of mobile devices. It interfaces with client management server and backend infrastructure to provide high visibility and control via web-based console over the entire network. This makes it easy for the businesses to centrally manage devices and applications, install and update mobile software over the entire company network.Mobile Enterprise Application Development Platform Brings Following Capabilities for Mobile SoftwareComplete Integrated Development EnvironmentSupport for Design, Develop, Test, Deploy, and Manage Mobile ApplicationsRun-Time Middleware Server to Handle Back-End Systems of the EnterprisesRobust Security CapabilitiesLocal and Remote Data Handling CapabilityAbility to Integrate External Devices like Credit Card Readers, Scanners, Printers etc.Request Report Sample@Mobile Enterprise Application Development Platform Market: Drivers and ChallengesThe increasing trend of bring your own device (BYOD) and mobility amongst the enterprises are driving the growth of the market. Enterprises around the world are aiming at creating agile platforms and increase their mobility capabilities. Mobile devices and applications are changing the way enterprises interact with their processes, customers, and employees. An important element in any mobility adoption process is the platform that host the mobile application. Enterprise need to select a platform which provides an optimum mix of features and security.However, mobile enterprise application development platforms are in-house software, and therefore requires in-house expertise for development, maintenance, and troubleshooting. This means higher cost in training and personnel, and recruiting mobile enterprise application development platform experts. Moreover, expenses towards licensing, maintaining mobile enterprise application development platforms are significant thus, restraining its adoption across enterprises with limited financial resources..Mobile Enterprise Application Development Platform Market: SegmentationMobile Enterprise Application Development Platform market on the basis of Deployment Model:On-Premises:On-Premises mobile enterprise application development platform are deployed the computers in the premises an organization using the software as against at remote facility such as remote servers..Hosted :Hosted mobile enterprise application development platform are provided by cloud service providers. In hosted environments, cost associated with mobile enterprise application development platform is relatively low.Visit For TOC@Regional OverviewIn North America, enterprise mobility is the top priority for the business enterprises to stay ahead in the competitive business environment. Due to this business organizations are increasingly deploying the mobile enterprise application development platforms.In China, enterprise mobility is becoming one of the top technology issues for enterprises. SMEs are expected to propel the market growth in this region. While in India, most of the business organizations are still reluctant to adopt enterprise mobility solutions due to security related concerns.Huge spending by business enterprises in middleware software is driving the growth of the market in Europe. U.K. and Germany, and Italy are major players in the middleware software market, and are expected to drive mobile enterprise application development market in this region.Limited resources with the early stage startups is inhibiting the growth of market in Latin America and Middle East Africa regions. However, with the advent of cost effective cloud solutions, the market is expected to observe substantial growth during the forecast period.IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, MobileIron, Oracle Corporation, SAP SE, and Apple Inc. are some of the major players of 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:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Now Available Global Virtual Machine Market Forecast And Growth 2016-2026

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Virtual machine is a software program on the computer which acts as a virtual computers. It runs on the pre-installed operating system or host operating system of the computer and get access of virtual hardware such as virtual CPU, virtual memory, network interface and other devices and work as a guest operating system. This guest or secondary operating system runs in a small window just like any other application do run over the computer system. This secondary OS runs on the system as normally as the host one, the virtual hardware used by guest operating system are mapped to real hardware on real machine for example, virtual memory of virtual machine is stored on the real hard drive in the form of a file. Virtual machines have number of uses: testing of new version of operating systems, use software compatible to other operating system or outdated OS, test software on different operating system by using single physical machine and the most important is consolidate software. Global virtual machine market has been witnessing a tremendous growth for last decades and is expected to grow with a substantial CAGR over a forecast period.Virtual Machine Market: DynamicsAs virtualization of system is becoming more popular in modern data centers because IT decision makers expecting that virtualization of systems benefit the organizations in the near future. The key drivers responsible in the growth of virtual machine market include high adoption rate of virtual machine by modern data centers and IT organizations because of the advantageous features provided by these virtual machines, such as it helps to reduce investment in installing different real machines for using different operating systems, rather single real machine can be installed with multiple virtual machine, as various virtual machines can be installed over the single system with sufficient memory, virtual machine also helps to protect data, as any harmful application running over virtual OS cant affect the data saved on host OS means virtual OS is completely isolated from the host one. On the contrary side, lack of awareness and market presence of more advanced and economic solutions are proving to be the key restraints hindering the growth of global virtual machine market.Request Report Sample@Virtual Machine Market: SegmentationSegmentation of virtual machine market is done on the basis of type and Geography. On the basis of type, virtual machine market is segmented into system virtual machine and process virtual machine. System virtual machine used to mirror the components and processes of an actual computer. Process virtual machine is used to run only a single application and disappear when the application is closed. On the basis of application, global virtual machine market is segmented into; small scale enterprises, medium scale enterprises & large scale enterprises.On the basis of Geography, segmentation of virtual machine market is done as; North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), and Middle East and Africa (MEA). Among which, North America is having largest market share of virtual machine and Western Europe is expected to be the second largest market of virtual machine &Asia Pacific is the fastest growing marketfor virtual machine provider during the forecasting period.Visit For TOC@Virtual Machine Market: Key playersThe key players of the virtual machine market are Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, Citrix Systems, Inc., International Business Machines Corporation, Parallels IP Holdings GmbH, VMware, Inc. and 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:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Oat Protein Market Estimated To Witness a Phenomenal Growth by 2022

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Worldwide Market Reports added Latest Research Report titled Oat Protein Market Estimated To Witness a Phenomenal Growth by 2022.Oat protein is a kind of active protein rich in essential amino acids and is the exciting new way to boost products protein content.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Oat Protein in Europe market, especially in Germany, UK, France, Russia, and Italy. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, countries, type and application.Request Sample Copy of the Business Report @Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversTate & Lyle, Croda, Provital GroupMarket Segment by Countries, coveringGermany, UK, France, Russia, ItalyMarket Segment by Type, coversIsolates, ConcentratesMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoFood & Beverage, CosmeticGet discount on this report :Table of Contents1 Market Overview2 Manufacturers Profiles3 Europe Oat Protein Market Competition, by Manufacturer4 Europe Oat Protein Market Analysis by Countries (2012-2017)5 Europe Market Segmentation Oat Protein by Type6 Europe Market Segmentation Oat Protein by Application7 Germany Oat Protein Sales, Revenue, by Type, Application and Manufacturers8 UK Oat Protein Sales, Revenue, by Type, Application and Manufacturers9 France Oat Protein Sales, Revenue, by Type, Application and Manufacturers10 Russia Oat Protein Sales, Revenue, by Type, Application and Manufacturers11 Italy Oat Protein Sales, Revenue, by Type, Application and Manufacturers12 Oat Protein Market Forecast (2017-2022)13 Oat Protein Manufacturing Cost Analysis14 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers15 Sales Channel, Distributors, Traders and Dealers16 Research Findings and Conclusion17 AppendixList of Tables and Figures**If 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Web Based e-Detailing Market To Make Great Impact In Near Future by 2016-2026

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Web based E-detailing is an interacting media platform wherein the pharmaceutical companies display their products sales presentation and brochures. Web based E-detailing allows the doctor or physician to look up to the medicines as per their requirement. The web based E-detailing is comparatively cost effective than the traditional methods such as sales representatives. Web based E-detailing gives high return on investment to pharmaceutical companies in terms of sales, previously the medical representatives used to meet with the physicians detailing about the product. The technological advances and internet penetration in every sector has changed the scenario for the conventional method of detailing. Moreover, the web based E-detailing eliminates the long waiting hours of sales representatives to meet doctors and web based E-detailing is found to be more effective than the conventional way of detailing. Web based E-detailing provides more profound details about the pharmaceutical drugs to the physicians which the sales representatives fail to do so in many cases thus affecting the sales of the company. Considering the above factors the global web based e-detailing market will highlight significant growth rate over the forecast period.Global Web Based e-Detailing Market: Drivers & RestraintsThe drivers identified in the global web based e-detailing market are the increasing adaptability of internet among the doctors. The efficiency of web based E-detailing to provide in depth details about the pharmaceutical drugs to the doctors without any error is increasing the sales ratio of the pharmaceutical companies compared to that of the traditional sales method. Thus, the return on investment for sales of the pharmaceutical companies is attributing to the growth of the global web based E-detailing market. The web based E-detailing provides the physicians to check out the details of the drugs as per their convenient time. The initial cost associated with the web based E- detailing are high and non-linear which might pose as a restraint to its adaptability among the medium and small pharmaceutical players globally.Request Report Sample@Global Web Based e-Detailing Market: Market SegmentationBased on the E-detailing formats, the global web based E-detailing market can be segmented into:Virtual Live E-detailingScripted E-detailingE-detailing websitesBased on the applications, the web based E-detailing market is segmented into:PharmaceuticalsBiotechnologyVisit For TOC@Global Web Based e-Detailing Market: Regional OutlookBased on the geographic regions, global web based E-detailing market is segmented into seven key market segments namely North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. The North American region dominates the market for web based E-detailing market. According to survey, the physicians in the region prefer web based E-detailing rather than interacting with medical representatives due to their busy schedules and web based E-detailing provides the exact informations as per physicians preference. The Western Europe market for web based E-detailing market is followed by the North American market and the adaptability in the region for web based E-detailing is increasing. Over the course of time and growth of pharmaceutical industries in the countries like China and India, the web based E-detailing market in the APEJ region will show considerable growth.Global Web Based e-Detailing Market: Key PlayersSome of the major players identified in the global enterprise laboratory informatics market includes, AstraZeneca, Plc., Abbott Health care, Inc., Pfizer, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Plc., Boston Scientific, Johnson and Johnson and Merck & Co. 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:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Worldwide Analysis on Smart Fabrics Market Strategies and Forecasts, 2016-2026

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Smart fabrics, also known as smart textiles, E-textiles or electronic textiles, are the fabrics that has electronics and digital components embedded in them. These are the fabrics that can sense stimuli from environment and adapt and react to those stimuli in a predetermined manner. Smart fabrics can incorporate actuators/sensors, communication and processing for applications in automotive sector, consumer products and health monitoring. The basic elements of smart fabrics are semi conductive and conductive yarns and threads, Nano electronics applied to yarns, fibres or woven elements. Smart fabrics are even chemically treated to provide distinct and special features. Smart fabrics are traditional fabrics with integrated functionalities, which could include storage or power generation, sensing devices, human interface elements, assistive technology or radio frequency functionality. Smart fabrics are distinct from wearable fabrics in a way that wearable devices are only carried and contained by clothing, whereas smart fabrics has wearable devices integrated into the fabrics. Nowadays, smart fabric technology is developing in the fields of sport, medical, artistic communities, fashion etc. The global smart fabrics market is expected to expand at a healthy CAGR in the forecast period.Global smart fabrics market  Drivers and RestrainsThe ever increasing use of electronics devices in day to day life is driving the smart fabrics market due to major application of smart fabrics as an electronics device. The ease of use of smart fabrics and the integration of electronic devices in it, makes it an integrated device for normal use as a simple fabric, which further contributes in the flourishing global smart fabrics market. The rising awareness and multiple applications of smart fabrics such as energy harvesting, sensing, and thermo-electricity is anticipated to bolster the global smart fabrics market.However, the smart fabrics devices require a portable power supply that need to be removed during washing and needs to be charged frequently. Thus this is a factor that can slowdown the growth of global smart fabrics market. Also the initial high cost and the expertise required to manufacture these fabrics can be a hurdle in the path of global smart fabrics market.Request Report Sample@Global smart fabrics market  SegmentationOn the basis of the product type, the global smart fabrics market can be segmented as follows:Ultra-smart fabricsActive smart fabricsPassive smart fabricsOn the basis of the functionality, the global smart fabrics market can be segmented as follows:Thermo-electricityEnergy harvestingSensingLuminanceOn the basis of the end use industry, the global smart fabrics market can be segmented as follows:HealthcareAutomobilesElectrical & ElectronicsArtichetureConstructionVisit For TOC@Global smart fabrics market  Region wise OutlookThe global smart fabrics market can be divided into seven regions, namely North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East and Africa. North America is a leading player in the global smart fabrics market due to the ever increasing electronics market in this region and the booming information technology sector. Asia Pacific is the next upcoming region in the global smart fabrics market owing to the flourishing healthcare industry and construction industry. India and China are the leading countries in this region contributing in the growth of global smart fabrics market. The ever increasing automobiles market in Europe is a driving factor for the growth of smart fabrics in this region, thus witnessing a healthy CAGR in the forecast period. Latin America and Middle East and Africa are at a nascent stage in the global smart fabrics market but are projected to have a significant CAGR in the future.Global smart fabrics market  Key PlayersSome of the key players in the global smart fabrics market are:adidas GroupTextronics, IncOutlast Technologies LLCMilliken & CompanyKCWWInternational Fashion MachinesInteractivewearFibertronicEleksen Group PlcAbout 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:New Trends of Base Transceiver Station (BTS) Market with Worldwide Industry Analysis to 2016-2026

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A base transceiver station (BTS), also called as radio base station (RBS), is an equipment that enables wireless communication between user equipment, such as mobile phones, WLL phones and computers, and a network. The equipment sends/receives radio signals to/from user equipment and converts them to digital signals. These signals are passed on to the network to route to other terminals in the network or to the Internet.The term BTS is applicable for any type of wireless communication standards, it is generally used with respect to mobile communication technologies such as CDMA and GSM. A BTS is controlled by a base station controller.BTS offers several benefits such as faster telephony coverage to remote places, promotion of universal access to ICT services, easing information dissemination and supporting a broad range of value added services in under-served and unserved areas.Market Overview:Growth in maturity in voice communication market and declining ARPUs, has paved way for telecom operators to explore the new business opportunities, such as mobile data, to generate higher revenues. Over the past few years, mobile traffic has witnessed an exponential growth globally, adding load on existing telecom infrastructure. This increasing load is creating the need for new BTS installations.Request Report Sample@Market Dynamics:Major factors propelling the global market of BTS include expansion of telecom infrastructure, growing mobile subscriber base in rural areas and growth in telecom tower sharing business. The high growth in the number of mobile subscribers along with increasing data traffic and declining tariffs is continuously increasing the load on existing telecom infrastructure globally.Additionally, with stringent government regulations regarding restricting the harmful effects of radiations from new tower installations, increasing number of telecom players are adopting tower sharing business model. Moreover, growing 3G and 4G subscriber penetration and government initiatives to facilitate the achievement of the AMPE (Accelerated Mobile Phone Expansion) Programs, is expected to fuel the BTS market during the forecast period.Market Segmentation:Global BTS market is mainly classified on the basis of components and geographies.On the basis of components, global BTS market is segmented into antennas, transceivers, duplexers, amplifiers and others (combiner and alarm extension system). The transceivers are further sub-segmented into single (sTRU), double (dTRU) and composite double radio unit (DRU).Visit For TOC@On the basis of geographies, global market of BTS is segmented into 7 key regions:North AmericaLatin AmericaWestern EuropeEastern EuropeAsia Pacific Excluding JapanJapanMiddle East & AfricaKey Market PlayersThe major players active in the Global BTS market include Nokia Solutions and Networks, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., ZTE Corporation, Advanced RF Technologies, Inc., GSTeletech Co., Ltd. Shenzhen Hexinkaiye Electronic Telecom Co., Ltd and Alcatel-Lucent.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:Tea Tree Oil Market - To Grow in the Coming Years, New Research explores Factors Responsible

Worldwide Market Reports added Latest Research Report titled " Global Tea Tree Oil Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 " to its Large Report database.Tea tree oil, also known as melaleuca oil is an essential oil with a fresh camphoraceous odor and a color that ranges from pale yellow to nearly colorless and clear. It is taken from the leaves of the Melaleuca alternifolia, which is native to Southeast Queensland and the Northeast coast of New South Wales, Australia.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Tea Tree Oil in Global 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.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers Main Camp, G.R. Davis, Maria River Plantation, Cassegrain Kalara, NATTO, Jenbrook, LvHuan Technology, Coromandel Mountains, Fuyang Biotechnology, Oribi Oils, Nandu Biology, Bestdo Technology, Thursday Plantation, SOiL.Request for Sample Copy of Research Report: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)Market Segment by Type, covers Pharmaceutical Grade Oil, Premium Grade Oil.Market Segment by Applications, can be divided into Medicine, Skincare Products, Other Use.Request for Discount @Table of Contents1 Market Overview2 Manufacturers Profiles3 Global Tea Tree Oil Market Competition, by Manufacturer4 Global Tea Tree Oil Market Analysis by Regions5 North America Tea Tree Oil by Countries6 Europe Tea Tree Oil by Countries7 Asia-Pacific Tea Tree Oil by Countries8 South America Tea Tree Oil by Countries9 Middle East and Africa Tea Tree Oil by Countries10 Global Tea Tree Oil Market Segment by Type11 Global Tea Tree Oil Market Segment by Application12 Tea Tree Oil Market Forecast (2017-2022)13 Sales Channel, Distributors, Traders and Dealers14 Research Findings and Conclusion15 AppendixList of Tables and FiguresContinue*Any special requirements about this report, please let us know and we can provide custom report.About WMRWorldwide 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.Contact Us:Mr. ShahWorldwide Market Reports1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154,U.STel: +1 415 871 0703Email: sales@worldwidemarketreports.comPolyvinyl Alcohol Polyethylene Glycol Graft Copolymer Market to Gain a Stronghold by 2025

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Polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymer is also called as Ethylene glycol and vinyl alcohol graft copolymer and Macrogol poly (vinyl alcohol) grafted copolymer. The compound is used as a stabilizer, binder for tablets, and glazing agent. The excipients used in pharmaceutical preparation such as coloring agents, flavoring agents, etc. have a low binding property with the drug molecule. The polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers help to bind these excipients with drug molecule without creating any peroxide during the life of a product.The polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers are also an important constituent for the instant release dosage form and are used in the various oral dosage form. The molecule is preferred over other substitutes such as Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) due to its high efficiency and less adverse effects. Thus, leads to strong demand for polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers in pharmaceutical industry.Request Report for TOC @For instance, the polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers are used in omeprazole formulation which is used to treat gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and growing at a rapid rate in terms of both value and volume. The North America polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market accounts for relatively high revenue share, followed by Western Europe polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market. Asia-Pacific is expected to grow at a relatively high growth rate over the forecast period, owing to the increasing consumption of pharmaceuticals and food product in the region.Global Polyvinyl Alcohol Polyethylene Glycol Graft Copolymer Market: DynamicsThe important factor driving the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market include growing industry such as food and pharmaceutical across the globe. The advantages of polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers over PVP and HPMC in instant release formulations is also expected to fuel the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market.The macroeconomic factors making a positive impact on the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market include the predominance of diseases, changing consumer lifestyle, increasing population, and growing domestic income. The significant trending factor for global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market includes the obtaining a patent on the applications and derivatives of polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers. The company manufacturing polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers products has a significant opportunity in regions such as North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, attributed to high demand for food and pharmaceuticals over the forecast period.Global Polyvinyl Alcohol Polyethylene Glycol Graft Copolymer Market: SegmentationThe global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market is segmented by application and by region. By application, the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market is classified as food, pharmaceuticals, and others. Among the aforementioned segments, the pharmaceutical segment account for relatively high revenue share in the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market over the forecast period, owing to growing popularity of excipients used in the production of various pharmaceutical formulations such as coloring agents, flavoring agents, etc. Food segment is followed by pharmaceutical segmentBy geographies, the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market is segmented into seven regions -- North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific except Japan (APEJ), Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East & Africa, and Japan. Among the regions, North America dominates the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market in terms of value, owing to a significant revenue share of the region in the pharmaceutical market.Request Sample Report@Western Europe is followed by North America in the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market, attributed to a predominance of lifestyle diseases such as gastroesophageal reflux disease. The APEJ is expected to account for relatively high volume share in the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market,owing to high demand for pharmaceutical additives across the region. Eastern Europe and Japan also accounts for a relatively low-value share in the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market. Latin America and Middle East Africa is expected to have a moderate opportunity for the polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market, owing to moderately growing healthcare industry. Overall, the outlook for the global polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market will have a positive growth over the forecast period.Global Polyvinyl Alcohol Polyethylene Glycol Graft Copolymer Market: Key PlayersFew of the players are involved in the polyvinyl alcohol-polyethylene glycol graft copolymers market as various derivatives and applications of the compound is patented. The companies participating in the market include BASF SE and Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC.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:New Trends of Digital Glass Military Aircraft Cockpit Systems Market with Worldwide Industry Analysis to 2016-2026

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A digital glass cockpit, also known as electronic flight information systems (EFIS) and cockpit display system (CDS), is an aircraft cockpit that consist digital flight instrument displays, generally large LCD screens, instead of conventional analog dials and gauges. A digital glass cockpit simplifies aircraft operations and navigation by enabling the usage of several displays driven by flight management systems, that can be adjusted (multi-function display) to display flight information as needed.Advanced digital glass cockpit systems utilize LCD screens to display crucial flight information. Digital glass cockpit displays systems are based around primary flight displays (PFDs), engine indications and crew alerting system (EICAS) and multifunction displays (MFDs). This enables the replacement of mechanical flight instrument gauges with graphical representations of information from onboard and external sensors and navigation systems.The digital glass cockpits are being increasingly adopted by military and defense along with airline companies, as they eliminate the need for a flight engineer, in turn reducing costs. In recent past, this digital glass cockpit has become widely available in small aircrafts too.Market Overview:Digital glass cockpit systems, which were prevalent in the civil aviation sector, are being increasingly adopted among military aircraft operators, in order to add capabilities to their fleets. Along with facilitating reduction in information management workload for pilots coordinating large networks of sensors and platforms, digital glass cockpits offer advantages such as weight and power savings, enabling easier interaction with air traffic control, and enable faster training for new pilots.Request Report Sample@Market Dynamics:The cockpits of both fixed and rotary-wing military aircraft are going digital. These glass cockpits facilitate the pilot's tasks throughout the flight, especially under difficult conditions, by improving access to vital information. The global market of digital glass military aircraft cockpit systems is mainly driven by the advantages offered by these systems over traditional cockpit systems. These advantages include the enhanced accuracy and precision of automation systems, and more ergonomic display of the data. These glass cockpits also comprise feedback loops and self-checking capabilities to alert the pilot about threats before they become emergencies. Additionally, these advanced system offers checklist of issues, the pilot can utilize to troubleshoot a problem and correct it immediately.However, as the aircraft operations become increasingly dependent on digital glass cockpit systems, flight crews must be trained to deal with possible failures. In recent years, several incidents involving glass-cockpit blackout have occurred. Therefore, proper training is considered as one of the key components for reducing miss happenings of aircrafts equipped with digital glass cockpit systems.To counter these blackouts, aircrafts with digital glass cockpit systems are provided with backup analogue displays for key flight instruments including airspeed indicator and altimeter.Market Segmentation:Global digital glass military aircraft cockpit systems market is mainly classified on the basis of system, end use sector and geographies.Visit For TOC@On the basis of system, global digital glass military aircraft cockpit systems market is segmented into Multi-function flight display systems, Primary flight display systems and EICAS (Engine-indicating and crew-alerting system).On the basis of end use sector, global digital glass military aircraft cockpit systems market is segmented as general aviation, commercial aviation and the defense & aerospace.On the basis of geographies, global market of BTS is segmented into 7 key regions:North AmericaLatin AmericaWestern EuropeEastern EuropeAsia Pacific Excluding JapanJapanMiddle East & AfricaPresently, North America is holds the majority share in the digital glass cockpit systems market. However, the region is expected to lose its share to Asia Pacific region during the forecast period, mainly due to falling defense expenditure in North America. In the APAC region, India, China and Japan are expected to lead the growth in the forecast period.Key Market PlayersThe major players active in the Global digital glass cockpit systems market include Honeywell Aerospace, GE Aviation, Garmin Ltd., Avidyne Corporation, MGL Avionics, Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems Ltd., Esterline Technologies Corporation, Airbus Group SE and Rockwell Collins, 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:The Road Ahead for FM Broadcast Transmitter  Market Trends Now & Beyond

FM Broadcast Transmitter Market

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The qualitative research study conducted by HTF MI titled Global FM Broadcast Transmitter Sales Market Report 2018 provides primary Data, surveys, Scope of the Product and vendor briefings. The market dynamic forces have been determined after conducting a detailed study of the Global FM Broadcast Transmitter market. The study provides forecasts for FM Broadcast Transmitter investments till 2023.If you are involved in the FM Broadcast Transmitter industry or intend to be, then this study will provide you comprehensive outlook. It offers a consequential analysis of the FM Broadcast Transmitter company, key tactics followed by leading manufactures and trending segments.Get the inside scoop of the Sample report @:The research study is segmented by Types [?300W, 300W~1KW(Include 1KW), 1KW~5KW(Include 5KW) & >5KW] as well as Key Applications [Radio Station(National, Provincial, City, County) & Rural and Other Radio Stations] with historical and projected market share along with the growth rate, revenue figures and gross profit margin in tabular format which makes easy to understand product/service differences, market concentration rate and product distribution for past 5 years.Major geographical regions like United States, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia & India and leading players such as RVR, Nautel, Elenos, Worldcast Ecreso, DB Electtrronica, Eddystone Broadcast, Broadcast Electronics, Inc., GatesAir, BBEF, ZHC(China)Digital Equipment & Electrolink S.r.l involved in this report. The report gives a clear idea about the growth factors, reasons for deterioration of Global FM Broadcast Transmitter in recent years and different opportunities and strategies to expand market.Early buyers will receive 10% customization on reports. Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @If you have a different set of players/manufacturers according to geography or needs regional or country segmented reports we can provide customization according to your requirement.Each player highlighted in the research study contains companies Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors, in-depth business overview, geographic footprint and contact information. The report contains a comprehensive market and vendor landscape in addition to SWOT Analysis.Buy this research @Reasons to Buy:- What will be the market size in 2023 and at what rate will it grow?- What growth potential do FM Broadcast Transmitter market have?- Procure strategically important competitor information, analysis, and insights to formulate effective R&D strategies.- Recognize emerging players with potentially strong product portfolio and create effective counter-strategies to gain competitive advantage.- Classify potential new clients or partners in the target demographic.- Plan mergers and acquisitions meritoriously by identifying key players and its most promising contributions.- New Development and identify prospective partners with the most attractive projects to enhance and expand business potential and scope.- Influential factors that are thriving demand and constraints in the market.To add, value to product and services research report comprises of valuable insights with distinguishable traits that influence consumers behavior and demand. The report offers a measurable and verifiable method made towards analysis of market concentration, new entrants and the technological trends in future.Some of the key questions answered in this report:- Detailed Overview of Global FM Broadcast Transmitter market helps deliver clients and businesses making strategies.- Influential factors that are thriving demand and constraints in the market.- What is the market concentration? Is it fragmented or highly concentrated?- What trends, challenges and barriers will impact the development and sizing of FM Broadcast Transmitter market?- SWOT Analysis of each key player mentioned along with its company profile.- What growth momentum or acceleration market carries during the forecast period?- Which region is going to tap highest market share in future?- What Application/end-user category or Product Type may see incremental growth prospects?- What focused approach and constraints are holding the market tight?Any Query or Specific Requirement? Ask to our Expert @There are 15 Chapters to display the Global FM Broadcast Transmitter marketChapter 1, to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of FM Broadcast Transmitter, Applications of FM Broadcast Transmitter, 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 , Capacity and Commercial Production Rate, Manufacturing Plants Distribution, Export & Import, 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, China, Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia & India, FM Broadcast Transmitter Segment Market Analysis (by Type);Chapter 7 and 8, to analyze the FM Broadcast Transmitter Segment Market Analysis (by Application [Radio Station(National, Provincial, City, County) & Rural and Other Radio Stations]) & Type [?300W, 300W~1KW(Include 1KW), 1KW~5KW(Include 5KW) & >5KW] Major Manufacturers Analysis of FM Broadcast Transmitter;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product Type [?300W, 300W~1KW(Include 1KW), 1KW~5KW(Include 5KW) & >5KW], Market Trend by Application Radio Station(National, Provincial, City, County) & Rural and Other Radio Stations;Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, to analyze the Consumers Analysis of Global FM Broadcast Transmitter;Chapter 12, to describe FM Broadcast Transmitter Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe FM Broadcast Transmitter sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Thanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.About Author: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.Contact US :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Research report covers the Semiconductor Inspection System Market share and Growth, 2016-2026

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Semiconductor industry has witnessed drastic changes over the years and these changes led to make complex semiconductor manufacturing assembly lines. Semiconductor inspection system operates in the semiconductor production lines in order to improve the quality of manufactured semiconductor device. The primary functions of semiconductor inspection system to provide application support provisioning, yield and process management provisioning, and inspection and evaluation system module provisioning.There are various type of inspection required in the production line of semiconductor industry; in-line inspection, on-line defect analysis, and critical dimension-measurement in lithography. Moreover, wafer detection systems are also used to detect pattern defects and particles and analyzes possible causes for poor yield.There is a tectonic shift in semiconductor industry due to the exponential growth in internet of things (IoT) market. Without the semiconductor sensor technology, the existence of IoT cannot be imagined. Hence, the role of semiconductor inspection systems became more crucial in order to produce sensors of extreme quality.Semiconductor Inspection System Market: Drivers and ChallengesNow-a-days, miniaturization is playing a vital part in the manufacturing of the semiconductor devices. Miniaturization is immensely contributing in reduction of material cost, on the flip side of this, it is also increasing the complexity in the assembly lines. This might take the productivity of a particular assembly line to south. It has led to the demand of semiconductor inspection system that integrates and controls high-performance inspection and evaluation tools.Request Report Sample@In near future, Planarization process and multi-layer wiring will be more comely used in assembly lines of semiconductor industry. It can generate some serious inspection problems such as metal grain and color variations. The existing inspection systems arent capable to inspect and detect such kind of problems. It is the biggest challenges for vendors to provide inspection systems that are capable in eliminating these false defects in order to detect true defects.Semiconductor Inspection System Market: SegmentationSegmentation of semiconductor inspection system market on the basis of types:Wafer Inspection System :Wafer inspection systems assist semiconductor manufactures enhance integrated circuit (IC) chip gain. The IC industry deploys inspection system to detect defects that happen during the manufacturing process. The main function of these system to check whether the process is under control. If the system find any discrepancy during the manufacturing process, it indicate the root cause of the problem. Wafer inspection systems are holding maximum chunk of overall semiconductor inspection system market.Mask Inspection System:In semiconductor industry, a mask or a photo mask is a series of electronic data that lay the foundation for photolithography steps of semiconductor fabrication. Mask inspection is nothing but task perform before actual fabrication of real mask. Since a mask acts as a light absorbing layer of semiconductor chip, the inspection of it is essential as the defected mask can entirely damage the semiconductor chip.Visit For TOC@KLA-Tencor, Applied Materials, Herms Microvision, Lasertech, ASML Holding, FEI, Hitachi High-Technologies, and Nanometrics are some of the key vendors of semiconductor inspection system market.Regional OverviewThe North America region holds the largest market share of global semiconductor inspection system market. The semiconductor device manufactures are speeding huge amount of money in countries such as US and Canada in order to expand their capacity and opening the new facilities. The North America region is also home to many of the key vendors of semiconductor inspection system.The Asia Pacific region is closely following the North America region and is expected to have the highest growth rate in coming future due to the growth of semiconductor industry in countries such as China, Taiwan, and Japan.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:Medical Maintenance Equipment Market at USD 48,257.4 million by 2025, at 7.6% of CAGR with Top Key Players- Medtronic, Hitachi, Olympus Corporation, Carestream Health, AGFA-GEVAERT GROUP and GE HEALTHCARE

Medical Maintenance Equipment Market Global Research Analysis 2025

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The major factors contributing to the growth of the market includes factors such as rising focus on preventive medical equipment maintenance, increasing preference for purchase of refurbished medical equipment, rising investments of key companies to build healthcare infrastructure, technological advancements for complex equipment maintenance, increasing number of public-private partnerships. On the other hand, high initial cost & significant maintenance expenditure and lack of skilled professionals are hampering the growth of the market.Global medical equipment maintenance market is expected to reach USD 48,257.4 million by 2025 from USD 27,060.0 million in 2017, at a CAGR of 7.6% in the forecast period 2018 to 2025. The new market report contains data for historic years 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.Request For Free Sample Copy of Report Click Here@:The key market players for Global medical equipment maintenance market are listed below: Carestream Health (a subsidiary of ONEX corporation) AGFA-GEVAERT GROUP DRAGERWERK AG & CO. KGAA Canon Inc. Medtronic Hitachi, Ltd Olympus Corporation Althea Group (TBS G.B. TELEMATIC & BIOMEDICAL SERVICES LTD and Pantheon Healthcare Group) Siemens AG B. Braun Melsungen AG KARL STORZ GMBH & CO. KG FUJIFILM HOLDINGS CORPORATION SHIMADZU CORPORATION Alpha Source, Inc. (BC Technical, Inc.) SAMSUNG MEDISON CO., LTD HOYA Corporation (PENTAX MEDICAL) Medipass Healthcare Limited GRUPO EMPRESARIAL ELECTROMEDICO Aramark GE HEALTHCARE Koninklijke Philips N.V.Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global medical maintenance equipment for 2018-2025. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sales of the web conferencing and unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) and video conferencing, secondary resources and doing in-depth company share analysis of major 10 players in the market.You can request one free hour of our analysts time when you purchase this market report. Details are provided within the report.Request For Toc Here:Market Competitors Research Analysis: Siemens AGSiemens AG founded in 1847 and is headquartered in Munich, Germany. The company is involved in production and manufacturing of plants across the world. The company is involved in electrification, automation and digitalization technologies. Siemens AG works in following segments power and gas, energy management, building technologies, mobility, digital factory and process industries drives, healthineers and renewable energy. The Siemens Healthineers segment provides technology to the healthcare industry and, diagnostic imaging and laboratory diagnostics. Siemens AG provides medical maintenance services through imaging and therapy services. Its remote monitoring program can detect and corrects medical equipment before they need larger repair.The company has 377,000 employees and has global presence in more than 200 countries. It offers equipment services for medical equipment maintenance. It serves in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, North America and South America.Any Questions? Inquire Here Before Buying:Market segmented into: Device Service Type Service Provider End-userGlobal medical equipment maintenance market is segmented on the basis of device into imaging equipment, endoscopic device surgical instrument, electro-medical equipment and others. In 2018, imaging equipment is expected to dominate the market with 32.5% market share and is expected to reach 16,350.2 million by 2025, growing at the highest CAGR of 8.2% in the forecast period 2018 to 2025.Global medical maintenance equipment market is segmented on the basis of services type into preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, and operational maintenance. In 2018, global preventive maintenance market is expected to dominate market with 45.4% market share and is expected to reach 22,471.7 million by 2025, growing at the highest CAGR of 8.0% in the forecast period 2018 to 2025.Global medical maintenance equipment market is segmented on the basis of service provider into original equipment manufacturers, independent service organizations and in-house maintenance. In 2018, global medical maintenance equipment original equipment manufacturers market is expected to dominate market with 47.0% market share and is expected to reach 23,052.2 million by 2025, growing at the highest CAGR of 7.9% in the forecast period 2018 to 2025.Questions? Well Put You On The Right Path Request Analyst Call:The original equipment manufacturers segment is further sub-segmented into multi-vendor OEMs and single-vendor OEMs. In 2018, global medical maintenance equipment multi-vendor OEMs market is expected to dominate market with 54.1% market share and is expected to reach 12,873.9 million by 2025, growing at the highest CAGR of 8.4% in the forecast period 2018 to 2025.Global medical maintenance equipment market is segmented on the basis of end-user into public-sector organizations and private-sector organizations. In 2018, global medical maintenance equipment private-sector organizations market is expected to dominate market with 57.2% market share and is expected to reach 28,053.7 million by 2025, growing at the highest CAGR of 7.8% in the forecast period 2018 to 2025.Based on geography, the market is segmented into 5 geographical regions: North America Europe Asia-Pacific South America Middle East and AfricaTABLE OF CONTENTS GLOBAL MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE MARKET1. INTRODUCTION1.1. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY1.2. MARKET DEFINITION1.3. OVERVIEW OF GLOBAL MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE MARKET1.4. CURRENCY AND PRICING1.5. LIMITATION1.6. MARKETS COVERED2. MARKET SEGMENTATION2.1. MARKETS COVERED2.2. GEOGRAPHIC SCOPE2.3. YEARS CONSIDERED FOR THE STUDY2.4. CURRENCY AND PRICING2.5. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY2.6. PRIMARY INTERVIEWS WITH KEY OPINION LEADERS2.7. SECONDARY SOURCES2.8. ASSUMPTIONS3. MARKET OVERVIEW3.1. DRIVERS3.1.1. RISING FOCUS ON PREVENTIVE MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE3.1.2. INCREASING PREFERENCE FOR PURCHASE OF REFURBISHED MEDICAL EQUIPMENTS3.1.3. RISING INVESTMENTS OF KEY COMPANIES TO BUILD HEALTHCARE INFRASTRUCTURE3.1.4. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS FOR COMPLEX EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE3.1.5. INCREASING NUMBER OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS3.2. RESTRAINTS3.2.1. HIGH INITIAL COST AND SIGNIFICANT MAINTENANCE EXPENDITURE3.2.2. LACK OF SKILLED PROFESSIONALS3.3. OPPORTUNITIES3.3.1. KEY STRATEGIES INCORPORATED BY VARIOUS COMPANIES3.3.2. UNTAPPED POTENTIAL IN EMERGING COUNTRIES3.4. CHALLENGES3.4.1. NEWER ALTERNATIVES TO OFFER TAILOR-MADE PRODUCTS4. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY5. PREMIUM INSIGHTS6. GLOBAL MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE MARKET, BY DEVICE6.1. OVERVIEW6.2. IMAGING EQUIPMENT6.2.1. ADVANCED IMAGING MODALITIES6.2.2. PRIMARY IMAGING MODALITIES6.3. ENDOSCOPIC DEVICE6.4. SURGICAL INSTRUMENT6.5. ELECTRO-MEDICAL EQUIPMENT6.6. OTHERS6.6.1. LIFE SUPPORT DEVICES6.6.2. DENTAL EQUIPMENT7. GLOBAL MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE MARKET, BY SERVICE TYPE7.1. OVERVIEW7.2. PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE7.3. CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE7.4. OPERATIONAL MAINTENANCE8. GLOBAL MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE MARKET, BY SERVICE PROVIDER8.1. OVERVIEW8.2. ORIGINAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURER (OEM)8.2.1. MULTI-VENDOR OEMS8.2.2. SINGLE-VENDOR OEMS8.3. INDEPENDENT SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS8.4. IN-HOUSE MAINTENANCE9. GLOBAL MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE MARKET, BY END USER9.1. OVERVIEW9.2. PRIVATE-SECTOR ORGANIZATIONS9.3. PUBLIC-SECTOR ORGANIZATIONS10. GLOBAL MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE MARKET, BY GEOGRAPHY10.1. OVERVIEW10.2. NORTH AMERICA10.2.1. U.S.10.2.1. CANADA10.2.2. MEXICO10.3. EUROPE10.3.1. GERMANY10.3.2. FRANCE10.3.3. U.K.10.3.4. ITALY10.3.5. SPAIN10.3.6. SWITZERLAND10.3.7. NETHERLANDS10.3.8. TURKEY10.3.9. BELGIUM10.3.10. RUSSIA10.3.11. REST OF EUROPE10.4. ASIA PACIFIC10.4.1. JAPAN10.4.2. CHINA10.4.3. INDIA10.4.4. SOUTH KOREA10.4.5. AUSTRALIA10.4.6. SINGAPPRE10.4.7. THAILAND10.4.8. MALAYSIA10.4.9. INDONESIA10.4.10. PHILIPPINES10.4.11. REST OF ASIA PACIFIC10.5. SOUTH AMERICA10.5.1. BRAZIL10.5.2. REST OF SOUTH AMERICA10.6. MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA10.6.1. SOUTH AFRICA10.6.2. REST OF MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA11. GLOBAL MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MAINTENANCE MARKET, COMPANY LANDSCAPE12. COMPANY PROFILES12.1. CARESTREAM HEALTH (A SUBSIDIARY OF ONEX CORPORATION)12.2. AGFA-GEVAERT GROUP12.3. DRAGERWERK AG & CO. KGAA12.4. CANON INC.12.5. MEDTRONIC12.6. HITACHI, LTD12.7. OLYMPUS CORPORATION12.8. ALTHEA GROUP (TBS G.B. TELEMATIC & BIOMEDICAL SERVICES LTD AND PANTHEON HEALTHCARE GROUP)12.9. SIEMENS AG12.10. B. BRAUN MELSUNGEN AG12.11. AVENSYS UK LTD.12.12. KARL STORZ GMBH & CO. KG12.13. FUJIFILM HOLDINGS CORPORATION13. RELATED REPORTSFull Report:Related ReportNorth America Digital Health Monitoring Market  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024North America Digital Health Monitoring Market By Product Type Devices (Blood Pressure Monitors, Blood Glucose Monitors, ECG, Oximeters, Peak Flow Monitors, Multi Parameter Monitors, Sleep Neap Monitors, Neurological Monitors, Others), Software (Healthcare Apps, Chronic Disease Apps, Personal Health Apps, Others), Services (Remote Monitoring, Consultancy Services, Treatment Services, Fitness and Wellness Services, Others), By Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Report 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:Vishal DixitData Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comReyes Syndrome Market Plying for Significant Growth During 2017 - 2025

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Reyes Syndrome Market:: OverviewReyes syndrome is a rare and critical condition which causes swelling of the brain and liver. The syndrome mainly affects young adults below the age of 20 and children who are recovering from chicken pox or any viral infection. The symptoms include continuous vomiting, lethargy, rapid breathing etc. The cause of the disease is unknown. It is believed that in Reyes syndrome, mitochondria in the cell gets damaged, which are the powerhouse of the cells. Thus if the liver does not get energy supply, it fails, leading to accumulation of toxins, which can cause damage and swelling.Download PDF Brochure of Report:The global Reyes syndrome market is expected to expand at a steady CAGR during the forecast period. Reyes syndrome is a rare disease and occurs mainly in children with high fatality rate which is one of the important factors likely to drive Reyes syndrome market during the forecast period. Usage of aspirin in the treatment of flu etc. in children is linked to Reyes syndrome which is another factor, driving Reyes syndrome market since aspirin is used very often. Factors such as increase in incidence of influenza and other viral infections are also expected to influence the growth of the global Reyes syndrome market during the forecast period. Moreover, increase in R & D, surge in per capita expenditure, and government initiatives for childrens health are further driving the growth of the global Reyes syndrome market. Lack of awareness of the condition in many developing countries, fewer treatment options etc are some of the factors restraining the growth of the global Reyes syndrome market.The global Reyes syndrome market can be segmented based on diagnosis, treatment, end users, and geographical regions. Based on diagnosis, Reyes syndrome market can be classified into liver biopsies, imaging, blood tests and others. On the basis of treatment, Reyes syndrome market can be divided into blood electrolytes and fluids, diuretics, ammonia detoxicants, anticonvulsants and others. Treatment for Reyes syndrome includes minimizing the symptoms of the disease which is usually done in hospitals. Based on end users, the global Reyes syndrome market can be classified into hospitals and clinics, diagnostic centers and others.Request to View TOC of Report Geographically, the Reyes syndrome market is divided into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. North America is anticipated to dominate Reyes syndrome market with the largest share. Increase in prevalence of viral diseases and usage of aspirin is leading to Reyes syndrome which are some of the major factors driving the growth of Reyes syndrome market in the region. Moreover, rise in awareness among people regarding diagnosis of the disease, high healthcare expenditure etc. are some of the factors attributed to the growth of the North America market. Europe is anticipated to hold second largest share of the global Reyes syndrome market due to factors such as increase in healthcare investment, incidence of Reyes syndrome in the region, entry of market players etc. The Asia Pacific Reyes syndrome market is anticipated to register faster growth rate during the forecast period due to developing countries like India and China investing on healthcare expenditure, growing adolescent population, increasing number of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies in the region etc. Furthermore, adoption of healthcare solutions for better standard of life, rising awareness about healthcare, increase in healthcare expenditure etc are some of the factors driving the growth of Reyes syndrome market in the Asia Pacific region.In order to obtain a significant position in the global Reyes syndrome market, players are operating specific strategies such as robust R & D, collaboration, and acquisitions. Some of the key players operating in the global Reyes syndrome market are Pfizer Inc., AstraZeneca plc, Abbott Laboratories, Eli Lilly and Company, Merck & Co., Inc. and others.Request to View Discount 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.More Trending Reports by Transparency Market Research:Thrombin Market:Human Microbiome Market:About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Why Offices are Starting to Look and Feel Like Home

Commercial Office Space

https://formaspace.com/articles/office-furniture/why-offices-look-and-feel-like-home/?utm_source=openpr&utm_medium=content&utm_campaign=article-110717

Close your eyes and imagine the setting: On the left are inviting overstuffed sofas that practically beg you to sit down for a spell to read your weekly reports. Behind you is a brass-trimmed bar with an impressive Italian espresso machine that makes the perfect flat whites to fuel those impromptu afternoon get-togethers. A few steps down the hall is an exercise room, kitted out with colorful yoga mats on a gleaming hardwood floor, which beckon you to stretch out and meditate. Sounds like the ideal, well-appointed luxury home, doesn't it? Yet, thanks to major changes in commercial office design trends, more and more of these residential home design features are finding their way into commercial office spaces. Today, we ask the question: what's driving architects and designers toward creating comfortable office spaces that feel like home?How to Spot the Trend of Residential Interior Design Infiltrating Commercial Office SpacesNot sure which design elements make your workplace more like a homey workplace?Check out our handy field guide:Field-spotters Guide to Homey Offices Warm, natural wood surfaces, textiles, and carpets designed to counteract traditional cold, sterile office environments. A wider variety of "curated" furniture selected to make each area within the office unique, e.g. fewer "bulk orders" of identical systems furniture. Convenient placement of "chillax" areas with comfortable sofas and seating for reading and impromptu meetings. Informal, residential-style interior lighting, such as free-standing table lamps. Communal dining tables and coffee/drink bars for employees to meet in informal settings. Art and collectible conversation pieces that reflect employee talent, taste, and interests. Non-traditional functional spaces, such as gyms and exercise rooms, showers/changing rooms, as well as private areas for nursing mothers or religious worship. Convenience offerings, such as on-site kitchen food service, concierge services for errands (such as laundry), shared vehicles or commuter vans, and electric vehicle charge points and bicycle storage for bike commuters.Take a Tour of "Homey" Offices with Residential Design ElementsLet's take an inside look at some of the companies using residential interior design to transform their offices.Pinterest Employees Incorporate Collections from Home into Their Office DecorAs you might imagine at a company that helps people create visual collections of their favorite ideas and projects, Pinterest, the seven-year-old San Francisco-based social media company, has an eclectic look that reflects their mission.The Pinterest office vibe is very casual and homelike. Not only do the employees eat together at large family-style communal dining tables, they also bring their passions from outside of work into the office, including prized collections of favorite artworks and antiques.Home Design Elements at the Pinterest Office: 1950s dinette set brought in by the founder to fill original space. Display galleries for employees' personal collections of typewriters, radios, and other collectibles. Communal dining at the company kitchen mess.San DiegoBased Real Estate Company Hughes Marino Uses Residential Design Elements to Help Build Company CultureFor commercial real estate brokerage Hughes Marino, gutting out their 12,000 plus square foot headquarters was the best way to create a homey office environment that matches the company's family-style culture. The result is an award-winning design by Gensler that supports Hughes Marino's vision that employees should be "happy and successful, not just in work but in life."According to COO Shay Hughes, "We are a family business, and our team members treat one another like family. We wanted them to feel at home. We wanted our guests to feel at home. We were committed to creating a space that felt cozy and welcoming because everyone knows that happy employees are productive employees."Home Design Elements at the Hughes Marino Office: Open floor plan with a "Living Room" at the center that flows from one functional area to another. Groupings of comfy sofas for seating employees at all-hands Baby-grand piano and guitars for impromptu jam sessions. Residential-style lamps and other lighting elements that add warmth.Tour de Force: the Headquarters of Minted, where the Company Mission Aligns with Its Curated, Residential-Inspired Office DesignIf you are a fan of unique designer products, you may be familiar with Minted, the SF-based firm that sells a wide range of furnishings created by small-scale artisans and designers.Naturally, the Minted headquarters in Jackson Square is kitted out with many of the products that it offers for sale. Not only is it an inspiring place to work, this "eat your own dog food" approach also allows its employees to familiarize themselves with its roster of designers and products. The result is a warm, comfortable and casual home-like office atmosphere that thrives on an artistic, industrial look which is at the foundation of the company's creative spirit.Home Design Elements at the Minted Office: Look-and-feel of a converted loft with industrial look elements softened by home-like elements. Overstuffed furniture, floors, and wall-coverings kitted out in natural designer textiles. Floor with bleached herringbone pattern underscores industrial heritage of the building.The bottom line: Not only is Minted's office attractive in person, it allows them to leverage their investment by serving up authentic "Instagram Moments" on social media that promote the company's products. Importantly, this also helps get a message out to potential employees that share Minted's passion for art and design.Read more ...Formaspace advances the spirit of discovery and creation through the design and manufacture of custom business furniture. Our furniture marries form to function with flexible solutions for clients in the laboratory, industrial, and office environments.Formaspace serves over 80% of the Fortune 500, as well as universities, governments, small businesses, and individuals.Formaspace1100 E. Howard Lane, Suite 400Austin, TX 78753800.251.1505Global Bioeconomy Summit in Berlin - Invitation to Global Bioeconomy Summit 2018 met with great response

www.biookonomierat.de/en

Around 800 experts from more than 70 countries are expected to participate in the second Global Bioeconomy Summit in Berlin. High-ranking representatives from politics, science, civil society and the business sector will meet from 19 - 20 April to discuss the latest bioeconomy developments. In focus: opportunities and challenges for an increasingly biobased and sustainable economy.For the second time, the German Bioeconomy Council, with the financial support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), has invited experts on bioeconomy, innovation and sustainability from all over the world to Berlin.H.E. Anja Karliczek, the Federal Minister of Education and Research, will open the GlobalBioeconomy Summit 2018 at the Telekom-Forum (HSR) on 19 April. More than 100 top-class speakers will join the event, among them ministers and government representatives from Asia, Africa, Europe, South and North America, international policy experts from the United Nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission, as well as high-level representatives of science and industry.In six plenary sessions and 14 workshops, the conference offers a broad platform for discussing the current societal and political challenges from a bioeconomy point of view. The focus is on the following questions:How can the protection of biodiversity and nature become compatible with the economic use of biological resources?What role can the bioeconomy play in finding new solutions to global challenges such as climate change, food security, health and increasing environmental pollution?Which biobased innovations and technical solutions are currently being developed in the industrialized and developing countries, in the northern and southern hemispheres?Which political framework conditions are necessary to accelerate change towards resource- friendly industrial production?How can such a substantial economic transformation away from fossil resources and towards the use of biological resources be financed?What do investors expect from startups and established companies and where should public funding step in?How can the the innovation potential of young scientists, founders and high-tech companies be leveraged?The creation of a sustainable, biobased economy is more urgent than ever, considering the growing environmental and climate problems. The great response to the summit is a clear sign that we need a global policy exchange, beyond national policy and research strategies, says Joachim von Braun, co-chair of the German Bioeconomy Council, pointing out: With this conference, we are creating an unparalleled global forum where key players of the bioeconomy can discuss future political actions, exchange best practices and learn from each other. At the same time, the summit provides an opportunity to review the progress made since the first Summit in 2015.On the first day, the German Bioeconomy Council will present its new study, which provides an overview of political bioeconomy activities worldwide. Around 50 countries have integrated the bioeconomy in their strategies to date. On the second day, the results of an expert survey on expectations and future visions for the bioeconomy will be published. This survey was commissioned by the German Bioeconomy Council and received contributions from 350 international bioeconomy experts. The 40 members of the International Advisory Council of the summit will also present key policy recommendations in a Communique.Bioeconomy products in the exhibition  Bioeconomy World ExhibitionA world exhibition of bioeconomy products will illustrate how current products can contribute to the global sustainability goals. Around 50 innovative bioeconomy products from more than 25 countries will be presented and show that we already have products which are manufactured using biobased processes or which are based on renewable resources. Thanks to rapid progress in the life sciences, an increasing number of biological processes have been established and organic residues can now be upgraded to valuable materials. Industry sectors such as the chemical, construction, textile and food industries benefit from these developments. The innovation potential is far from exhausted and digitization will contribute to an acceleration of bio-innovation, says Christine Lang, co-chair of the German Bioeconomy Council. Against this background, the summit provides insights into current research initiatives and focuses on questions such as: How do financial investors evaluate the sector? What kind of framework conditions do companies need to get bioeconomy products and services to the consumer? How do we create synergies from the interaction between low-tech and high-tech in a global bioeconomy?The Global Bioeconomy Summit has been organized in Berlin for the second time. In November 2015, the bioeconomy community met for the first GBS and agreed in a Communique to better anchor the bioeconomy in international policy and to pursue it as a strategy for achieving climate protection and the Sustainable Development Goals.Berlin, 11.4.2018Geschaftsstelle Biookonomierat | Lutzowstrae 33 - 36 | 10785 BerlinDr. Beate El-Chichakli | 030 - 46 77 67 43 | b.elchichakli@biooekonomierat.de4492 characters, 774 words; Reprint free of chargeAbout the Bioeconomy Council of the German Federal Government:The Bioeconomy Council advises the Federal German Government on the implementation of the National Research Strategy Bioeconomy 2030 towards a biobased economy. It is the Councils aim to establish a cross-sectoral knowledge-based bioeconomy, which generates sustainably created products and services, thus combining economic growth with the objective of environmental compatibility. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) established the Bioeconomy Council as an independent advisory board to the Federal Government in 2009. The two co- chairs, Prof. Dr. Christine Lang and Prof. Dr. Joachim von Braun, lead the Council, whose members cover a broad spectrum of the bioeconomy. The Council conducts an open dialogue with the general public. The Councils activities are aligned with both long-term objectives and current political requirements.The Bioeconomy Council is an independant advisory body to the German Federal Government. On this website you'll find comprehensive information on bioeconomy, the work and publications of the Council, the office in Berlin, and the latest news on the subject.Geschaftsstelle Biookonomierat | Lutzowstrae 33 - 36 | 10785 BerlinDr. Beate El-Chichakli | 030 - 46 77 67 43 | b.elchichakli@biooekonomierat.dePayment Company myPOS Celebrates its Amsterdam Store Opening

External view of the myPOS Amsterdam Store

www.mypos.eu/en

www.mypos.eu/en

www.mypos.eu

myPOS, the innovative payment company with headquarter in London, UK, opened a myPOS Experience Centre in Amsterdam on the 05 April 2018.In addition to online shop and a resellers network across Europe, the flagship store is the third sales channel for customers in Amsterdam and the Netherlands as a whole. With its opening, myPOS responds to the needs of entrepreneurs who want to see, feel and experience payment solutions and get a face-to-face experts advice.Launched in 2014 and introduced in the Netherlands in 2015, myPOS quickly grew into the fifth provider of point-of-sale terminals in the Dutch payment market. The goal is to grow to third place next year. The Amsterdam office is one of the components of the strategy to achieve this goal.TechnologyThe myPOS system works on a pay-as-you-use model, whereby businesses pay a price per transaction. There are no subscription fees, service contracts or activation costs and card payments can be accepted both in-store and online. All myPOS devices are mobile, with a ready-t use software and a data SIM card, which provides uninterrupted connectivity across Europe. Moreover, myPOS technology is built on the basis of the latest developments and knowledge, ensuring that small and midsize enterprises can all take advantage of it.A Pan-European productmyPOS is the only provider in Europe that supplies POS terminals operating in all EU countries as well as in Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. To make this possible, myPOS works with own e-money accounts instead of links with banking systems. The key advantage is that all payments gets settled instantly and are at the disposal of the merchant to withdraw as cash or make business payments.Our proposition will definitely change the payment market", predicts Anthony Notos, Country Manager myPOS Netherlands,  High purchase and subscription prices make a payment terminal very expensive or even unreachable for many SME entrepreneurs, while the so-called card readers for smartphones are not a fully-fledged option for many. With myPOS we offer a simple and affordable alternative. And with our speed of new developments, we are going to get even closer to the competition - because in 2018 it is no longer the size that counts, but the speed at which you change.Amsterdam StoreThe myPOS Experience Centre Amsterdam is located at 253 Cruquiuskade, Amsterdam. From 5 April, customers can go here for the payment solutions, which are available from 99 euros. They can also purchase them online viaThe shop in Amsterdam is the second to open in 2018. In addition, branches will also be opened this year in Paris, Geneva, Milan and Vienna.myPOS was introduced at Mobile World Congress in 2014 and is now being sold in over 24 countries in Europe. It is an innovative mobile payment system that processes payments immediately and is designed with the aim of making payments for SME entrepreneurs easier and cheaper. For more information, visitmyPOS Europe Ltd25 Canada Square, Level 33, Canary Wharf London E14 5LB, United KingdomPress contact:Irina Stefanova, irina.stefanova@mypos.comRetort Packaging Market worth 41.14 Billion USD by 2020

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/retort-packaging-market-114264174.html

The report Retort Packaging Market by type (Pouches, Tray, and Cartons), by Material (Polyester, Polypropylene, Aluminum foil, and others), by End Use (Food, Beverage, and Others) - Global Forecast to 2020 defines and segments the retort packaging market, along with the analyses and projections of the market size. It also identifies the driving and restraining factors for the retort packaging market with the analysis of trends and opportunities.Browse 115 tables and 51 figures spread through 215 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Retort Packaging Market by type (Pouches, Tray, and Cartons), by Material (Polyester, Polypropylene, Aluminum foil, and others), by End Use (Food, Beverage, and Others) - Global Forecast to 2020"End-Use of retort packaging market includes food, beverage, healthcare, and personal care. Growth in pre-made food and pet food and the demand for quality and convenient food are the key drivers of the retort packaging market.The global retort packaging market is projected to reach USD 41.14 Billion by 2020, with a CAGR of 6.7% from 2015 to 2020. Increasing disposable incomes of people in developing countries, increasing urbanization, and changing preferences of people towards convenient packaging drive the growth of the retort packaging market. The major restraining factor for the growth of this market is the high capital investment involved in sealing technologies. Defects due to poor sealing technology is the biggest challenge faced by players in the market. Asia-Pacific is estimated to grow the fastest in the forecast period, due to the increasing demand of convenience food and the growing health and personal care industry.The retort packaging market is buyer-oriented. It has shown substantial growth due to the remarkable advantages to the customers and the processors of the retort packaging industry. Leading players in this market are Amcor Limited (Australia), Berry Plastics Corporation (U.S.), Mondi Group (South Africa), Otsuka Holdings Company Limited (Japan), Sonoco (U.S.), Astrapak Limited (South Africa), Tredegar Corporation (U.S.), Coveris (U.S.), Bemis Company Inc. (U.S.), and Clondalkin Industries BV (Europe). In this report, the global retort packaging market is segmented into type, material, end-use, and region. Major players in the market are developing new techniques to achieve sustainability.One of the major developments observed in the retort packaging market is acquisitions & mergers. The requirements for retort packaging are continuously changing, making it essential for manufacturers to continually invest in R&D activities and come up with innovative solutions. Companies are adopting inorganic growth strategies, such as acquisitions to cope with the increasing demand for retort packaging in the key emerging markets. These strategies have aided companies to create a large customer and partner base in the most attractive markets.MarketsandMarkets is worlds No. 2 firm in terms of annually published premium market research reports. Serving 1700 global fortune enterprises with more than 1200 premium studies in a year, M&M is catering to multitude of clients across 8 different industrial verticals. We specialize in consulting assignments and business research across high growth markets, cutting edge technologies and newer applications. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model  GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors.M&Ms flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. The new included chapters on Methodology and Benchmarking presented with high quality analytical infographics in our reports gives complete visibility of how the numbers have been arrived and defend the accuracy of the numbers.Mr. RohanMarkets and MarketsUNIT no 802, Tower no. 7, SEZMagarpatta city, HadapsarPune, Maharashtra 411013, India1-888-600-6441Busbar Trunking System Market to surpass USD 1 Billion by 2024

https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/2217

https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/busbar-trunking-system-market

https://www.gminsights.com

http://algosonline.com/news

Growing demand for reliable and cost-efficient distribution networks coupled with mounting investments toward rapid urbanization and industrialization across developing economies will drive the global busbar trunking system market. Ongoing electricity generation from power plants along with rapid deployment of the renewable energy will positively impact the business growth. High degree of fire safety along with low space requirements will further boost the product penetration. Busbar Trunking System market size will exceed USD 9 billion by 2024, as reported in the latest study by Global Market Insights, Inc.U.S. busbar trunking system market will reach over USD 1 billion by 2024. Replacement and refurbishment of outmoded cable networks to meet the needs of a low-carbon, digital economy has significantly favored the product adoption. In 2015, the Department of Energy (DOE) estimated an investment of over USD 2 Trillion for grid modernization in the U.S. for the next twenty years.Request for a sample of this research report -Rapid expansion of micro grid networks for decentralized electricity generation will proliferate the busbar trunking system market growth. Stringent government regulations to curb energy losses across residential, commercial and industrial establishments will further complement the business outlook.Lighting busbar trunking system market will witness strong growth prospects owing to its ease of installation and longevity over traditional cable tray systems. High flexibility along with the ability to suffice a wide range of residential and commercial businesses has led to a mass influx in the product demand.Rising demand for distribution networks with capability of optimizing electricity supplies and reduce the overall electric losses will foster the busbar trunking system market growth. Rapid technological advancements along with inclination towards the integration of power cables into a single unit will further complement the business outlook.Saudi Arabia busbar trunking system market in 2016 was valued over USD 200 million. Rapid infrastructure development along with positive outlook toward industrial sector has led to a robust industry growth. According to International Trade Administration, Saudi Arabia in 2016, has introduced investment plans of USD 14.7 Billion to develop transmission of electricity and over USD 13.7 Billion for distribution of electric power over the next decade.Rapid deployment of ongoing power generation plants along with escalating demand for expansion of electric distribution networks owing to exponential upsurge in load capacity will positively complement the utility busbar trunking system market. Transparent network layout, improved planning reliability, direct link between the transformer to the switchboard till the power sockets has significantly favored its adoption over the conventional cable tray systems.Browse Full Report Details @Aluminum busbar trunking system market will grow owing to the improved conductivity per mass ratio which reduces the overall project cost. Low fire load, low susceptibility to electromagnetic fields and superior aesthetic value are some of the key imperative features which will escalate the business growth.Notable market players in the busbar trunking system market include Legrand, General Electric, ABB, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Eaton, Larsen & Toubro, ARJ Group, Megabarre, DBTS, C&S Electric, Godrej & Boyce, Naxso, Effibar and MK Electric.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Explore Our Blog @Connect with us: Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn | TwitterThermal Gravimetric Analyzers Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players  Netzsch, METTLER TOLEDO, SETARAM, Hitachi, PerkinElmer

Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Market

https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3120349-global-thermal-gravimetric-analyzers-market-research-report-2018

https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3120349-global-thermal-gravimetric-analyzers-market-research-report-2018

WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On  Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players  Netzsch, METTLER TOLEDO, SETARAM, Hitachi, PerkinElmer.Description:This report studies the global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers market status and forecast, categorizes the global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers market size (value & volume) by manufacturers, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top manufacturers in North America, Europe, Japan, China, and other regions (India, Southeast Asia, Central & South America, and Middle East & Africa).The global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers market is valued at xx million US$ in 2017 and is expected to reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of xx.x % between 2018 and 2025.The major manufacturers covered in this reportNetzschMETTLER TOLEDOSETARAMHitachiPerkinElmerLinseis Thermal AnalysisShimadzuTA InstrumentsRigakuLECO CorporationNanjing DazhanShanghai InnuoGet a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comGeographically, this report studies the top producers and consumers, focuses on product capacity, production, value, consumption, market share and growth opportunity in these key regions, coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanOther RegionsThe regional scope of the study is as follows:North AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaSingaporeRest of Asia-PacificEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalySpainRussiaRest of EuropeCentral & South AmericaBrazilArgentinaRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaSaudi ArabiaTurkeyRest of Middle East & AfricaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoTop-loading Thermogravimetric Analyzer (TGA)Bottomloading Thermogravimetric Analyzer (TGA)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, includingDrug AnalysisGeneral Chemical AnalysisFood ScienceOthersComplete Report Details @Table Of Contents  Major Key PointsGlobal Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Market Research Report 20181 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers1.2 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Top-loading Thermogravimetric Analyzer (TGA)1.2.4 Bottomloading Thermogravimetric Analyzer (TGA)1.3 Global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Segment by Application1.3.1 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Drug Analysis1.3.3 General Chemical Analysis1.3.4 Food Science1.3.5 Others1.4 Global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025).7 Global Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Netzsch7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Netzsch Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 METTLER TOLEDO7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 METTLER TOLEDO Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 SETARAM7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 SETARAM Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 Hitachi7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 Hitachi Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 PerkinElmer7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 PerkinElmer Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 Linseis Thermal Analysis7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 Linseis Thermal Analysis Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 Shimadzu7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 Shimadzu Thermal Gravimetric Analyzers Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business OverviewContinueFor 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.New Research on United States Solar Photovoltaic Backsheet Market: Growth, Research, Analysis, Future Trends And Forecasts To 2023

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United States Solar Photovoltaic Backsheet Market Research Report.This study has been particularly collated in order to present a detailed analysis of the market. 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 encapsulated under this study. The key factors driving and inhibiting the development of the market have also been presented.The research report takes a close look at the United States Solar Photovoltaic Backsheet Market by analyzing several criteria such as product type, application, end-user, vertical, and geography. A supply chain model along with relevant values and statistics have been discussed in the report, which supports the market projections presented herein. Other parameters such as shipments, sales, demand and supply, market trends, and the most important recent developments have all been extensively covered in the research-based compilation. In the light of growing interest from market stakeholders, technological advancements, and government aid, the global market is expected to show positive signs of growth in the next few years.Download Sample Copy @Some of the most prominent Key Vendors:Coveme, DUNMORE, Isovoltaic, Toppan, KREMPEL GmbH, Toray, Taiflex, Toyal, 3M, SFC, Madico, Suzhou Sunshine New Materials Technology, Shanghai SCH Filmtec, Fujifilm, ZTT, Targray, Hangzhou Hongfu Technologies, Honeywell, Jolywood, HANGZHOU FIRST PV MATERIAThe report investigates and projects the market at the global level including North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa. The research analysts considered every one of the aspects of the United States Solar Photovoltaic Backsheet Market to depict a perfectly clear picture of the present and future market prospects. Significant drivers and trends have been distinguished that are expected to boost the market development, alongside the barricades preventing the market's growth.To get more information, About This Report @The performance of the product and end-user segments of the United States Solar Photovoltaic Backsheet Market in each regional divisions has been explained in the report. Likewise, each provincial markets competitive analysis has been explained by providing data about the hierarchy among the leading players functioning in it. This helps provide a thorough granular analysis of the global market. The report also provides forecasts for each product, end-user, and geographical segments of the global market.Other industry-related processes about the market, such as a detailed description of the manufacturing structure, the financial background of the market, supply and demand analysis, and production value margins are also analyzed in the report. Prime development policies and strategies regarding the United States Solar Photovoltaic Backsheet Market are examined with regards to their impact on the market during the forecast period.Get Up To 40% Discount @Table Of Content:Chapter 1 United States Solar Photovoltaic Backsheet Market OverviewChapter 2 United States Economic Impact on IndustryChapter 3 United States Market Competition by ManufacturersChapter 4 United States Production, Revenue (Value) by RegionChapter 5 United States Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by RegionsChapter 6 United States Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 United States Market 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 AppendixAbout QYReports:We at, QYReports , a leading market research report publisher 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 include 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 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.Contact:QYReportsJones JohnSales Manager+91-9764607607sales@qyreports.comHOMECOMING HOMECOMING  The Orchard Park School District held its annual homecoming events this past weekend. The events included a powder puff football game, parade, carnival and varsity football game. In...

Former supervisor lambastes Majchrzak Since leaving the highest post in the town almost a year ago, the Orchard Park community has barely heard any public statements from former Supervisor Patrick Keem. That changed this...

Orchard Park native set to star on Netflixs Baking Impossible Those searching for something new to stream on Netflix will soon have the opportunity to watch one of Orchard Parks own in action. Sara Schonour, a native of Orchard Park,...By Mike Rogoway and Ted Sickinger | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Oregon Business & Industry, newly established as the voice of the state's business community, fired its chief executive Wednesday amid accusations of improper conduct and a six-month tenure characterized by organizational chaos.

Word came a little more than an hour after The Oregonian/OregonLive published an article recounting accusations that CEO Mark Johnson had mismanaged the association and used racially charged language. The organization acted Wednesday while Johnson was vacationing in Hawaii. He issued a statement apologizing "for any insensitive comments I may have made."

Oregon Business & Industry said it hadn't been aware of Johnson's specific comments until Tuesday night, amid an ongoing investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive. The organization said its executive committee voted unanimously to remove Johnson.

Oregon Business & Industry named former CenturyLink executive Ginny Lang as interim CEO and said it will begin a search for a long-term replacement. With Johnson's exit, and a surge in staff turnover that followed his hiring, the organization must now replace nearly its entire leadership team.

Signs of trouble had been apparent for weeks at the trade group, which hired the Republican legislator from Hood River as its first chief executive in October. The selection occurred three months after the merger of Associated Oregon Industries and the Oregon Business Association.

It was a galvanizing moment for Oregon's fractured business lobby, meant to usher in a newly unified, more proactive and well-funded business voice at the state capitol.

Instead, Johnson's tenure has been plagued by turnover of senior staff, frayed relationships internally and externally, questions surrounding his executive and managerial skills, and the lack of a coherent strategy for members.

Several top staffers left during Johnson's first months on the job, and he unsuccessfully sought to install his legislative chief of staff as the business association's chief operating officer. Moreover, a fired staffer accused Johnson of making a racially charged comment about one of his former colleagues in the Oregon House.

That staffer, Joel Fischer, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that Johnson denigrated Rep. Diego Hernandez, "and his chain-migration homeboys from the hood." Two other people, who asked not to be named because of sensitive relationships to the organization, told The Oregonian/OregonLive they also heard him make those comments.

Oregon Business & Industry's executive committee hired Portland lawyer Courtney Angeli to investigate claims Fischer made in a letter to the board, which accused Johnson of broad mismanagement, as well as using racist and misogynistic language, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Fischer's letter did not specifically reference the comments about Hernandez, but he and the two others who heard the comments said investigators never asked them about any accusations against Johnson.

Angeli said Wednesday that she had sought to contact Fischer through his attorney but didn't get a response. Fischer disputes that, and says she never contacted his lawyer.

"There wasn't anything to substantiate the claims, and so we moved forward," Scott Parrish, the organization's board chairman, told The Oregonian/OregonLive during an interview last week.

That changed Tuesday night, the organization said in a written statement.

"When vague allegations were raised about OBI President Mark Johnson by a former employee, the executive committee retained an experienced outside investigator to thoroughly review and evaluate them. The details of the investigator's report are privileged, but the investigator did not find any pattern of misconduct.

"However, the full executive committee has learned that, on one occasion in a private meeting, Mr. Johnson made an inappropriate comment that, regardless of any joking intent, is unacceptable and wholly inconsistent with OBI's values and the values of its members. At its meeting Tuesday evening, the OBI executive committee was informed of the inappropriate comment, and reached the unanimous decision to ask Mr. Johnson to step down as CEO."

In a prior interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Johnson had said he didn't believe he had used the racially charged language.

"I don't recall that at all," he said. "I don't know where that would have come from."

In Wednesday's statement, though, Johnson did not specifically deny the comments. He noted that he had supported access to driver's cards and affordable college tuition as a state lawmaker.

"I'm proud of the work that I have done to promote equity and improve outcomes for students across our state," Johnson said. "So it is shocking to be accused of insensitivity on equity issues I have demonstrated I care about."

In a statement following The Oregonian/OregonLive's initial report, Hernandez said it's "disheartening" to hear such comments from the leader of a major organization.

"But I know that this isn't reflective of the larger business community," Hernandez said, "and I look forward to working with OBI on our state issues."

OBI inherited 1,700 members and an annual budget around $2.2 million from last year's combination of Associated Oregon Industries and the Oregon Business Association.

In addition to its advocacy role in public policy, OBI offers its members access to health insurance and workers' compensation programs designed to help small businesses tap insurance plans typically available only to large corporations.

OBI also inherited the schism that produced two competing business organizations in 2000. OBA formed as a "progressive" alternative to AOI, which dated to the 19th century. The organizations increasingly embodied Oregon's urban-rural split, with OBA speaking for large Portland employers including Nike while AOI advocated for traditional industrial interests and outlying parts of the state.

Business leaders worked for years to heal that split and combine OBA and AOI. They hoped a single voice would be more effective in Salem, and that it would spare some members paying dues to two organizations.

In practice, though, OBI has struggled to find its footing.

A homebuilder and school board member, Johnson had a reputation for reaching across the aisle at the capitol. But he was not a thought leader in his caucus and had no experience running an organization of any size.

Wednesday's firing comes as Oregon heads into the May primaries, the fall campaign season and a 2019 legislative session that is already shaping up as a budgetary train wreck.

The group claims one of its priorities is heading off Democratic super majorities by focusing on key legislative races. But with $188,000 on hand, its political action committee is underfunded, both in absolute terms and relative to smaller, more specialized business organizations.

Meanwhile, it is outsourcing its lobbying on critical issues, such as tax policy, to contractors. And it will be fielding a green team on other issues, such as the environment, in a session when Democrats are again determined to pass an expansive climate bill.

The combined organization's dues structure is still a work in progress, and some key members who were part of both groups have balked at a request to continue paying at a dual dues level for the first year.

Oregon Business & Industry formed in the afterglow of the business lobby's thrashing of Measure 97, a union-backed initiative on the 2016 ballot that threatened to raise corporate taxes by $3 billion a year.

But instead of capitalizing on that momentum, Johnson frayed relationships, both internally and externally. In his first major policy pronouncement, denouncing Democrats' climate change legislation as a California-style boondoggle that would hobble Oregon business, Johnson surprised some of his group's liberal members and many Democratic lawmakers who consider environmental issues among their top priorities.

Some 80 businesses have formed a new organization -- the Oregon Business Alliance for Climate -- that is supportive of the cap and trade legislation lawmakers were considering. They included many OBI members, such as Nike. OBI, meanwhile, has developed no viable alternative to offer legislators.

Johnson also found himself in fence-mending mode with Gov. Kate Brown in January after OBI criticized her plan to address the state's pension fund crisis -- the public system is $22 billion in the red -- while she was on stage at the Oregon Leadership Summit, the business community's annual policy confab with state political leaders.

"I honestly still can't tell you what all the ruffled feathers were about," Johnson said. "I think it was overblown."

The arrival and quick departure of a key Johnson staffer is emblematic of OBI's internal struggles.

As one of his first acts as CEO, Johnson installed his legislative campaign manager and chief of staff, Cassandra Hayt, as his right hand at OBI. Hayt had moved to Pennsylvania more than a year earlier, public records show.

But Johnson had flown her regularly to Salem, tapping his own campaign funds and the House leadership political action committee to cover her pay, airfare and her housing at a hotel near the capitol, according to campaign finance records. Oregon allows lawmakers wide latitude in how they spend campaign funds.

Both Johnson and the trade group's executive committee agreed that he needed a chief operating officer to help manage membership services, which include the health insurance and worker's comp programs.

Though she lived thousands of miles away in another state and had even less managerial experience than Johnson, he tried to slot Hayt into that role.

Parrish said he made it clear to Johnson that was an untenable situation: "This can't work with her not moving." Johnson, though, says Hayt came to that conclusion on her own.

So Hayt left within months of being hired, and the business group began a fresh search for a new COO. It's also seeking a political director, membership director and potentially a communications chief after prior staffers left early in Johnson's tenure.

This article has been updated with additional context and comment from Johnson.

-- Ted Sickinger; 503-221-8505; @tedsickinger

-- Mike Rogoway; 503-294-7699; @rogoway;Because life is a little different right now, make sure you have the most up-to-date information for your situation, including scholarships and online study options.

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Today

A mix of clouds and sun. High 88F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Considerable clouds this evening. Some decrease in clouds late. Low 68F. Winds light and variable.In order to highlight student work and innovation, Mid Michigan Community College hosts the Student Showcase on each campus. These events take place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 18 at the college's Harrison campus and on Thursday, April 19 at the Mount Pleasant campus. Exhibits feature work completed in the current previous academic years by MMCC students.

"The Student Showcase is an important event for staff and students that allows the community to recognize the dedication and collaboration that take place throughout the semester. We hope that everyone will stop by to talk with students about their projects and their learning," says Lucia Elden, MMCC English/humanities faculty and student showcase committee member.As a young boy growing up in Soviet-controlled East Berlin, Jiri Tresl wasn't so much concerned about politics or ideologies. For him, it was all about the great toys  or lack thereof.

Now, Tresl is a 34-year-old resident of the United States and a professor of finance at Central Michigan University enjoying the benefits of a free market economy. But he still has vivid memories of growing up under an oppressive communist regime, and on Thursday he shared those memories with the fifth-graders at Central Park Elementary.

As Tresl recalled, the opportunities for East Berliners to purchase common luxuries were almost nonexistent back then, so quality family time became the main source of happiness and contentment.

"Everybody (living in East Berlin in the late 1980s) was the same  poor. There were really no opportunities to obtain wealth, so the emphasis shifts toward the family and building families. Looking back, that was something extremely positive (about my childhood)," said Tresl, who lived with his parents and older sister in East Berlin for most of his formative years.

" ... If you have a great family and a great family life, then you have a happy childhood," he added. "I spent a lot of time with my parents, playing games."

Tresl was born in Prague, Czech Republic, but he and his family relocated when he was very young after his father, an engineer, accepted a job in East Berlin. Tresl noted that the oppressiveness of the communist regime caused families to become very tight knit.

"The thing about the communist system is that people didn't really trust each other, so you didn't really go out much. There was really a huge distrust among people, so, even though we had some friends, we didn't go out and we didn't have people over (to our house)," he said. " ... My memories (of East Berlin) are mostly of my parents being home with me all the time and us doing some weekend trips (as a family).

" ... That part, as a child, was just amazing," he added.

It wasn't an existence entirely without regret, though. As Tresl pointed out, he and his sister longed for a better life whenever they got a little taste of Western democracy.

"My sister would go to a West German shopping mall and see a doll that was bigger than her, and it would cost 100 deutsche marks, and my parents didn't have that kind of money back then," recalled Tresl, noting that his father had permission to occasionally travel back and forth between East and West Berlin.

"I think they were really sad (that they couldn't afford such things for their kids)," he added. " ... The difference (between communism and democracy) was huge in terms of toys (and other luxuries)."

Tresl's talk at Central Park was the culmination of the fifth grade's "How We Organize Ourselves" unit, which focuses on the various forms of government around the world and how they affect individual citizens' personal responsibilities. As part of that unit, the entire Central Park fifth grade read Jennifer Nielsen's book A Night Divided, an historical fiction novel about a young girl's struggle to remain true to herself under the oppression of communism as well as her hopes of reuniting her family after it is torn apart by the erection of the Berlin Wall.

"I was really happy to see that they read that book," Tresl said. "That book really places them back in the (communist) era and really shows the impact it had and how it divided families. There is a strong message there."

Speaking of which, Tresl recalled living in East Berlin and watching on TV in 1989 when the Berlin Wall was torn down, unofficially heralding the end of communism in eastern Europe.

"I saw people celebrating, and I knew that was a special moment because it stuck in my memory," said Tresl, who was five years old at the time. "As a child, I didn't really understand just what a huge moment it was in history, but I do remember people celebrating and jumping up and down and tearing down the wall."

Tresl, whose grandfather was a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, said that his main message to the fifth-graders was simply to "be good."

"Everything comes down to being a good person at heart. The (communist) system, of course, was cruel to many people. But in the end, you can have a happy childhood in any system," he said. "Happy families are the foundation (of true contentment)."

Afterward, fifth-grader Sydney Lipschitz said she "really liked" Tresl's talk.

"It was cool how he talked about his opinion on what it was like (growing up in East Berlin)," she said. " ... I didn't know all of those things, like how (some families) were able to travel to the other side of Berlin. ... Mostly (I enjoyed hearing about) their different traditions and different (ways of life)."

Fifth-grade teacher Whitney Jacobs said that Tresl's talk was the perfect complement to her class's unit on world governments.

"The biggest thing (I enjoyed) was just having a perspective from East Berlin and ... just being able to make a real-life connection to our unit," Jacobs said. " ... I really liked how he kept emphasizing family and how, under any government regime, family is really the most important thing."As a critical care paramedic, Kelby Klassen was not trained to administer stitches, but it was a skill the Midland native learned as a doctor in Haiti.

"You have to learn as you go," Klassen said. "I'm the doctor for a lot of people, it's me or nobody."

Klassen grew up in Midland and attended Midland Christian School in the 1980s, and always had a desire to pursue mission work. He now lives in Haiti and works as a full time missionary administering medical care through his charity organization, Kelby's Kids.

On Tuesday, April 10, Klassen returned to his old school and told the students of Midland Christian about his missionary work.

"This kind of work is dying," Klassen said. "It's important for them to see, a lot of times people don't think about giving back like they used to."

Klassen went on his first mission trip to Haiti in 2003 where he worked mostly with children and babies at an orphanage.

"Simple love is good medicine," Klassen said. "I fell in love with the country."

By simply giving affection to the children, Klassen saw it actually made a tangible difference. But as a trained critical care paramedic and firefighter, Klassen knew he could do more to offer medical services for the people in Haiti.

"Haiti is really not that far away from America, but it is a world away," Klassen said. "One of the main things that brought me to Haiti was the kids, so my ministry focuses on kids, but I work with all kinds of people."

Klassen's organization is funded through private donations, and allows him to treat people for malnutrition, basic injuries and infections, and he also set up a maternal clinic.

"I thoroughly enjoy and am blessed by what I get to do," Klassen said. "Sometimes it's a struggle to not let it get to you, because there's a lot of sadness."

One of the main struggles Klassen runs into is gaining the trust of the Haitian people who have not been served by the broken health care system. Klassen shares the gospel with locals through a weekly program, which helps him foster relationships with the community that he is serving.

"It's a constant struggle of re-educating people about medical practices," Klassen said.

To hear from Klassen about another part of the world was a great opportunity for the school's 50 students, said Midland Christian Principal Betsy Haigh.

"It's a great example for young people to hear," Haigh said. "There's a lot you can do."

More information about Klassen's work can be found on the Kelby's Kids website.Soybeans will surpass corn as the most planted crop in the country for the first time in 35 years, while Michigan plans to decrease its soybean yield.

Farmers indicated their planting intentions in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) prospective planting report released March 29.Trinity Lutheran Church in Midland will celebrate its 75th anniversary Sunday with a Celebration Worship Service at 10 a.m. and dinner/music to follow. The theme is "Honoring the Past ... Celebrating the Future."

It was on Dec. 7, 1941 that a group of people met to begin a new Lutheran church in Midland. As radio reports came over the wires of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, prayers were offered on behalf of the country.

Trinity Lutheran's first worship services took place in the basement of Sugnet School until the first building was built and dedicated on Christmas Eve 1947. When the property was purchased, it was only a thicket of willow trees in the area. Today, a community and neighborhood surround Trinity.

In 1964 the congregation moved across the street to its present location at 3701 Jefferson Ave. In 1998 the congregation doubled its facility size by adding on fellowship and educational spaces. The original building still serves as a Youth Center. Starting with only 46 charter members, today Trinity is a congregation of more than 1,800 members, whose ministry and mission is service in our community and world.

Through the years, Trinity has understood its mission to the community, serving as an advocate for families and those less fortunate. As it always has, Trinity is currently working with Habitat for Humanity in rebuilding three area homes because of last year's flooding. Twenty-two individuals will be working for the next two weeks bringing hope back to these families. Trinity has been a lead congregation for Habitat through the years working on Habitat builds and on the summer revitalization of Midland.

Trinity has a long history of rebuilding homes. Hearing the great need and devastation from Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, Trinity responded by sending work teams to muck out homes and rebuild them. Ever since that time, Trinity embarks on two mission trips a year, one in spring and again in fall with more than 40 people involved working in places across the United States that have been affected by natural disasters. This work has taken them to places on the East Coast, Midwest and to neighboring states.

Along with its work with Habitat, the people of Trinity have been active in feeding those in need through its work with the Midland County Emergency Food Pantry Network, and was one of the founding congregations of the pantry. Two mobile food pantries are sponsored by the congregation each year along with its work providing Thanksgiving baskets through efforts with Aldersgate United Methodist Church.

Trinity has a devoted team that serves the needs of others through cooking at the Open Door twice a month and providing Meals of Grace that are available at the church for families and individuals in need. Trinity enjoys being able to work with and alongside other congregations in the community.

Trinity was instrumental, along with First United Methodist Church, in putting together the Midland Faith-Base Community Assistance Group, which brings together more than 40 services, organizations and congregations to discuss needs in the community and resources that are available. The group meets monthly, hosted by Trinity, and is a part of Midland's neighboring initiative.

Trinity has been honored by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in which it is affiliated, as one of the top 100 congregations identified out of 9,320 throughout the United States in its giving to the ELCA World Hunger appeal. On the second Sunday of each month, congregational offerings go directly to fighting hunger in the world. Farm animals are purchased each Christmas to help villages in developing countries to become self-sufficient. The women of Trinity are also active in making more than 300 quilts a year that are sent overseas through Lutheran World Relief.

As a congregation, Trinity values the ministry that happens in the homes of the community. Out of its marriage and family ministry and along with eight other congregations, Trinity found it essential in offering marriage renewal conferences that gave birth to Midland Community Family Ministries. The program recently hosted the "Weekend with the Smalleys" at Midland Nazarene Church in March.

For more than 50 years, Trinity has provided a preschool, which is thriving today offering classes for 2 year olds through young 5s. The church also has celebrated with many families working with them to find their way out of debt by bringing Dave Ramsey's "Financial Peace University" classes. In addition, Trinity hosts a summer camp each year for inner-city youth from Saginaw at its camp on Wixom Lake.

Trinity opens its doors to many community events and organizations that use its facilities including, Special Olympics, Open Door, Recovery groups, Midland DHHS, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Samaritas, ARC of Midland, Kiwanis, Lion's, Midland High, Dow High, Delta College and yoga classes. On any one day there are at least two of three groups from the community using the church. Trinity welcomes the opportunity to be a neighbor to the community and welcoming all people through its doors.

The Sunday Celebration Worship will give thanks to God for 75 years of faithfulness as God's people. The people of Trinity live out what they believe: "God's Work, Our Hands." The 10 a.m. worship will include the many musical groups of Trinity, brass, handbells and vocal along with welcoming previous pastors and their families. The Rev. David Sprang, assistant to the bishop and director for evangelical mission of the North/West Lower Michigan Synod, will deliver the message.

Trinity is currently served by the Rev. Gerald Ferguson and Rev. Danielle Sheally.People write software, including antivirus software. People arent perfect. Ergo, your antivirus may not be perfect. Some zero-day innovative malware attack might elude your protection, and then disable it. Or you might have an existing malware infestation that prevents installation of any full-scale antivirus. Malwarebytes Free exists to wipe out attackers that get past your main defenses or that already compromised your PC before you could install protection. It can't help with attacks that do permanent damage, such as ransomware, but it's a handy tool when other approaches fail.

While many security companies release product updates every year, Malwarebytes only does so when necessary. The release of version 4 in 2019 was the first whole-number update since version 3 in 2016. Version 2 came out a couple years before that. The current version is 4.3.

When you install the free edition, you can choose a 14-day trial of Malwarebytes Premium. If you let the trial expire without upgrading, you'll find that you lose quite a few features. In particular, the free edition, reviewed here, doesn't include any real-time protection. It does just one thing; it cleans up existing malware problems. The free version is full of subtle and not-so-subtle suggestions to spring for the upgrade to Premium.

I found that the product installed very quickly. A banner across the top of the pastel-toned main window features silhouettes of mountains, clouds, and a city skyline, adorned with a big message suggesting that you upgrade to premium. The rest of the window consists of three rectangular panels. One displays detection history, and one displays real-time protection options, all of which are disabled in the free edition. The middle panel, the important one, lets you launch a scan for malware. It's an attractive presentation.

Lab Results Uninformative

Simple-minded signature-based malware detection alone isn't enough in the modern world of zero-day attacks and polymorphic malware. Every successful antivirus adds heuristic detection, behavior-based detection, and other non-signature protection layers. In Malwarebytes Premium, machine learning and detection of anomalous behavior catch many malware samples. Exploit protection watches attack vectors and heads off exploits. The anti-ransomware engine strictly uses behavioral detection.

This emphasis on active, prevalent threats and advanced detection methods makes testing Malwarebytes tough. A lab test that uses outdated samples could make the product look bad. In the past, Malwarebytes didnt submit even its Premium edition to most of the labs I follow.

More recently, Malwarebytes has been showing up in reports from AV-Test Institute. Its scores have varied quite a bit, but it looks quite good in the latest report. This lab rates antivirus products in three categories, Protection, Performance, and Usability, with six points available for each. Just over half the products in the latest report scored a perfect 18 points, among them Microsoft, Norton AntiVirus Plus, and Kaspersky. A score of 17.5 points is enough to earn the title Top Product; Malwarebytes Premium and a few others scored 17.5.

Malware experts at SE Labs use a capture and replay system to hit every tested antivirus with the exact same real-world malware attack. Products can earn certification at five levels: AAA, AA, A, B, and C. A dozen products managed either AAA or AA certification, among them Avast Free Antivirus, AVG, and Avira. Malwarebytes took the only B in this report.

In any case, these tests arent directly relevant to the current review, because they evaluate an antivirus tools ability to defend against malware attack. You call on Malwarebytes Free for those occasions when your real-time antivirus failed to defend you, perhaps because you forgot to renew it. Malwarebytes Free does not offer any real-time protection itself, but the fact that its premium edition is now earning good lab scores is encouraging.

The Problem of Ransomware

With the rise of ransomware attacks on businesses, governments, and individuals, ransomware protection is more important than ever. However, ransomware is intrinsically different from other kinds of malware. Most types of malware want to use your computer's resources, whether for mining bitcoins, launching DDoS attacks or simply stealing your personal data. Typically, they aim to avoid notice, which means they carefully avoid any visible harm to the computer. A post-infestation antivirus cleanup can scour the malware from your computer's crannies and crevices, restoring it to a safe, secure state.

Ransomware, on the other hand, only stays quiet until it has done its nefarious work, locking away your important files in unreadable encrypted form. Once finished, it displays its ransom terms. Removing the ransomware at this point doesn't help. It could even interfere with your ability to get your files decrypted, should you decide to pay the ransom. Malwarebytes Premium eliminates ransomware before it attacks; Malwarebytes Free can't do anything once your files are already locked away.

Effective Malware Cleanup

When you install Malwarebytes, it insists on giving you a free 14-day trial of the Premium edition. Clearly the company hopes youll love the Premium features so much that youll pay to keep them after the trial ends. If youre sure you dont want the trial, go ahead with the installation, and then dive into Settings. Click the Account tab and click Deactivate to revert to the plain, free edition.

Usually, I test malware protection by challenging an antivirus utility to prevent installation of my malware sample collection. However, as noted, Malwarebytes Free doesn't include real-time protection. With no help from the labs, I had to find some way to see the product in action. So, skipping the ransomware, I launched my samples five at a time, gave them time to finish installing, and challenged Malwarebytes to clean up each mess.

At the end of every scan, Malwarebytes displayed its findings; I used these details to identify exactly which of the samples it detected. In every case, I told it to quarantine everything it found, and in every case, it requested a reboot to finish the process. After reboot, I ran a tool that reports on any leftover malware traces.

The scans ran very quickly, much faster than when I last tested this product. Scans averaged 90 seconds, with none longer than two minutes and none shorter than one minute. Last time around the average scan time was seven minutes.

Malwarebytes reacted in some way to every sample. However, for about one sixth of them it eliminated the malware installer without doing anything about the installed malicious code. Thats not useful; I counted that as a miss.

For just under a quarter of the samples, Malwarebytes detected the installation and removed some traces, but left one or more executable files behind. Even when it did wipe out all the executable files, it often left behind non-executable traces, sometimes hundreds of them. Admittedly, those traces cant actively harm your system, but gunking things up with malware-related files and Registry entries cant be good for performance.

For a different sort of test, I rolled back the virtual machine testbed to a snapshot before any malware samples were launched and ran a full scan. Malwarebytes detected and quarantined every single one of the malware installers, including the dozen or so ransomware samples.

I maintain a second set of malware samples that Ive created by hand-modifying the basic collection. For each sample, I change the filename, append nulls to give it a different file size, and overwrite some non-executable bytes. Malwarebytes detected most, but not all, of these. It missed a quarter of the hand-modified ransomware samples, which is a bit alarming. About 18% of the modified non-ransomware samples slipped past the scan.

Admittedly, my hands-on tests don't precisely simulate the real-world malware cleansing that is this product's specialty. Normally, you'd bring in Malwarebytes to handle an attack that eluded your existing antivirus or that put up roadblocks to installation of a more traditional antivirus. The high-tech behaviors and technologies that such an infestation requires would be a red flag for Malwarebytes. A potentially unwanted program (PUP) or other less-risky sample accidentally launched by the user might not raise the same concerns.

See How We Test Security Software

Browser Guard for Online Protection

When you install Malwarebytes, it prompts you to add the free Browser Guard extension for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. Even if you skip this step at installation, you can download the extension later. Browser guard aims to protect against phishing and malware-hosting URLs, ads and trackers, tech support scams, sites with bad reputations, and more. I put those aims to the test.

As far as ad-blocking goes, it seemed to do the job. I installed Browser Guard in Chrome, then visited several ad-laden sites in both Chrome and an unprotected browser. The extension visibly removed ads. By clicking its toolbar icon, I could view specifics about ads and trackers on the current site or check statistics of past activity. The list of trackers is interactiveif you trust any of the tracking sites you can click it so Malwarebytes will stop blocking it. I doubt many will take advantage of this fine tuning, though.

My malicious URL blocking test uses a feed supplied by London-based testing lab MRG-Effitas, consisting of malware-hosting URLs discovered in the last few days. Most antivirus tools get two chances to fend off a malware download. First, they can divert the browser away from the malware-hosting URL. Second, they can eliminate the malware payload. With no real-time protection, Browser Guard only has the one opportunity.

Out of about 100 samples, Browser Guard blocked 98%. In most cases it replaced the page in the browser with a message that the site was blocked due to a Trojan. In a few cases it gave the reason as riskware, phishing, or a suspicious download. It also blocked some sites based on reputation, which it explains means sites with light traffic for which malicious activity has been reported. This result is a huge improvement over testing during my last review, in which Browser Guard caught just 9% of the samples.

Very few full-scale antivirus products have done better in this test. McAfee AntiVirus Plus leads the pack with 100% protection. Bitdefender, G Data, and Sophos scored 99%. No other recent products scored better than the 98% achieved by Malwarebytes.

I also put Browser Guard through my standard phishing protection test. Phishing sites dont try to infest your computer with malware. Rather, they masquerade as popular secure sites, hoping they can entice you to log in. If you do, youve given the fraudsters your login credentials. Whatever the account was, whether for online banking, gaming, email, or some other purpose, youve given it away to the creators of the phishing page.

For this test I scrape hundreds of recently reported fraudulent URLs from pages that collect and analyze such things. I make sure to include both verified phishing pages and pages that havent yet been analyzed and blacklisted. I use a hand-coded tool to launch each URL simultaneously in four browsers, one protected by the product under test and the other three by the built-in protection of Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. The testing tool also lets me record how each testbed handled the URL.

If any of the four browsers couldnt load a page, I discard it. If any alleged phishing page doesnt truly fit the profile, meaning it doesnt try to steal your login credentials, I discard it. After processing all the URLs, I calculate the scores.

Malwarebytes scored an impressive 95%, better than two-thirds of recent products. It beat out Edge and Firefox handily, though it came in a couple percentage points behind Chrome. To be fair, Chromes score varies a lot in these tests. At 97%, this was its best score, with other scores as low as 66% and an average of 88%.

My Malwarebytes cautioned me that Browser Guard doesnt have phishing protection as its primary focus, so it might not do well. He neednt have worried; 95% is a fine score. At the very top, F-Secure and McAfee managed 100% protection in their respective tests, with Bitdefender Antivirus Plus and Norton close behind at 99%.

Keep It in Your Toolbox

Malwarebytes Free remains a useful tool, despite some issues we encountered in testing. If you carry a thumb drive full of security tools, do include Malwarebytes. But remember, it offers no real-time protection, so it can't help you with ransomware. Use it along with Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Webroot SecureAnywhere AntiVirus, or another antivirus that provides real-time protection. Bring out Malwarebytes when your regular antivirus slips up, or consider upgrading to Malwarebytes Premium.

With ransomware on the rise, a cleanup-only antivirus tool like Malwarebytes Free can't possibly be your first line of malware defense. You need multiple layers of real-time protection. We no longer declare an Editors' Choice in the cleanup-only category, but Malwarebytes remains a top choice.

Malwarebytes Free 4.0 Check Price Pros Very fast scan

Removed many malware infestations

Browser Guard extension proved effective in testing

Free View More Cons No real-time protection

Missed some installed malware in testing The Bottom Line Use Malwarebytes Free to root out malware that got past your antivirus or is keeping you from installing an antivirus update. It doesnt offer real-time protection, though, so dont rely on it as your first line of defense.East Jordan chamber conducts three ribbon cuttings

The East Jordan Area Chamber of Commerce recently conducted three ribbon cuttings welcoming new businesses to the area.Simon Spier (Nick Robinson) has the kind of life that most teens can only dream of. He has a family that he truly likes, a home straight out of a catalogue, a new car, close friends Leah (Katherine Langford), Abby (Alexandra Shipp) and Nick (Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.) and is getting good grades whilst chugging iced coffees. Its a blessed life except for one thing; Simon has been keeping his sexuality a secret from those he loves most.

Terrified that his cosy life will change, hes unable to tell people that he loves that hes gay until he reads about a fellow closeted kid who is posting anonymously on his high school blog. Simon tentatively begins an email exchange with the anonymous gay kid (nicknamed Blue) but when his emails get into the hands of Martin (Logan Miller) he uses them to blackmail Simon into setting up dates between him and Abby. Simon is forced to re-evaluate the viability of his secret sexuality and must imagine what his life might look like as an openly gay high-schooler.

In a different world Love, Simon could simply be what it is; a funny, sincere, gently moving story about a boy working out the parameters of his own happiness. Its sweet, and competently made, and has an emotional arc that almost everyone can relate to. Yet as one of the first major motion pictures that concerns itself primarily with the love life of a gay man in a romantic comedy set-up, it has to speak for more than itself. As such, Love, Simon has been a lightning rod for discussion; presented as a breakthrough in gay cinema as well as a disappointingly generic snapshot of what it means to come out.

Its probably neither of these things and both at the same time. It feels familiar right up until it feels revelatory, and it hits all of the anticipated narrative beats whilst chiming just a few new ones. Its lovely and its ordinary. Its smarter than it has to be, though no more than other good examples of the genre. But thats what makes it special; Love, Simon has a magical ordinariness, you could come across it on Netflix and be charmed by it first and interrogate it as a gay narrative second.

Unfortunately, with such limited representation of young gay lead characters in mainstream Hollywood genres, Love, Simon is tasked with carrying the burden of representation for the LGBTQ+ community in ways that other rom-coms simply arent. While its true that the film represents just about the best circumstances in which someone may have to come out, its a white-washed world of financial privilege and sympathetic liberal parenting, though there are several nods to the racial and religious diversity of the gay community. It presents a John Hughes world in which the greatest stumbling block to personal happiness is an unwillingness to take personal responsibility  that the key to lasting joy is being true to yourself. In the real world, we know that there are many more complicating factors facing young members of the LGBTQ+ community, a large number of which are external; disapproving parents, an increasingly hostile political climate, religious opposition, and aggressive schoolmates, to name a few.

Love, Simon skirts around these issues, though doesnt ignore them completely, in order to tell a story that may seem in some ways alien to anyone that doesnt look like a model or isnt in one of the higher tax brackets. That just may be the point. The romantic comedy as a whole is often maligned or disregarded as escapist fantasy, but that fantasy allows filmmakers to explore the intricate emotions of people, the way that they fall in, and become fearful, of love. By removing some of the everyday concerns of the audience, the rom-com allows them to zero in on the kinds of emotions that get side-lined in other genres. It reveals the secret hopes and fears of people when they arent worrying about money, or fighting giant robots, or trying to master their newfound superpowers. Indeed, this is where Love, Simon succeeds; in telling a small story about how hard it can be to declare who you are and who you want to be.

It will hopefully be heartening for young audiences to see a story that takes the heartbreaks and triumphs of a gay teenager seriously. Its particularly compassionate to the ways in which coming out both reinforces and disrupts a persons sense of self. In one of the movies most sensitively rendered scenes, Simon tries to assure those around him that he hasnt changed, that all that has happened is an invisible thing about him has become visible. Its a clever nod, from a deceptively clever screenplay, to the fact that a lot of the fear of declaring a new identity is the fear that you wont be able to retreat back to who you once were.

Love, Simon depicts coming out as a struggle between wanting to declare your difference whilst wanting things to stay the same; a dichotomy that is given real emotional weight and narrative traction. In some ways, by adopting the trappings of the rom-com, which those unsympathetic to the genre will dismiss as artificial, the movie is able to reveal some universal truths about how frightening the prospect of not being loved is, as well as how scary it can be to want to be loved.

The film feels surprisingly well-attuned to the small, shifting emotional peaks and valleys of almost every character, with some fairly full emotional arcs handed over to even third-tier characters. Despite concerning itself with Simons struggle, it never feels myopic; two big moments between Simon and his parents (bolstered by lovely, fine-tuned performances from Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel) provide short but keen insights into the myriad of ways that family members fear that they have let each other down. Anyone who has ever kept a secret or had to grapple with the limitations of a comfortable life will surely recognize when Simons mom reassures him that he can finally exhale after years of holding his breath.

Equally, Simons relationship with Leah is one that plays out again and again in the real world, but rarely gets this sensitive treatment on-screen. Sometimes this doesnt work and pulls focus from Simons love story; a mid-movie gear change in which Simon is revealed to have betrayed his friends feels vaguely out of place and the much anticipated romantic denouement is swoon-worthy but somewhat airy because the romantic leads have little-to-no screen time together.

Jorge Lendenborg, Jr., Nick Robinson, Alexandra Shipp and Katherine Lanford (20th Century Fox)

The best rom-coms are about transformation, about becoming someone that you worried you would never be able to become, and Simons transformation is consistently convincing. Nick Robinson puts in a surprising, funny, emotionally involving performance that toes the line between likeable and authentic impressively. Somehow, he conveys a person who could, at the slightest provocation, burst into tears or a fit of laughter, which is an enormously appealing combination. Robinson is more than capable of doing the films dramatic heavy lifting (the films biggest gut-punch, involving a gossip site and Simons sister, is intimately acted to the point that it feels surprisingly raw) and is equally happy when playing drunk slap-stick.

Those looking for a radical queer teen rom-com may be disappointed by Love, Simon. Its more Hallmark movie than a meditation on the richness and cultural diversity of the LGBTQ+ community and experience. But maybe that is radical in and of itself. Its a movie about opening yourself up in ways that allow people to truly show how much they love you. Its a movie about how keeping a secret can make you a stranger to yourself and others. If its pedestrian in some ways, then young gay audiences deserve that, too.

So much of this film brings to mind rom-coms of the 90s; the emails, the big romantic gesture, the fairground, the struggle to be true to yourself and to what you want. But this film belongs to those who were either ignored or maligned in those films; it wrestles the signifiers from a genre of films and puts them in the hands of someone who wouldnt have seen himself in them.

In the opening moments of the other falling-in-love-after-exchanging-email-addresses rom-com, Youve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1988), Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) emails her internet paramour in voice-over whilst she wanders New York. In the background, the Cranberries sing the most bracing line from the hit song Dreams  you have my heart so dont hurt me. What feels most revelatory about Love, Simon is that it shows coming out, even to someone as well placed to do so as Simon, as a series of attempts to hand your heart over to people and a series of subsequent pleas for people not to hurt it. Simon has to ask his dad to treat him the same way, his mother to support him, his best friend to renegotiate what love might mean for her, his blackmailer to have compassion, and his anonymous crush to take a chance on him. It isnt presented as easy, but nor it it presented as the end of the world, which is refreshing in a cinema landscape which frequently shows gay life as grim and mired by confrontation (though, of course, those narrative are much needed too.)

Love, Simon wont represent everyones coming out story (that is unless most of the population lives in a Clearasil commercial), but its funny and heart-warming and interested in asking bigger questions than it can really answer. Most of all, by making the rom-com belong to Simon, it means it belongs to all of us, too.Todd Rushing of Concentrics Restaurant Group is opening The Establishment at 28 Broad St. this May. Staff/Stephanie Barna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.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.Magistrate Amy J. Mikell ruled in favor of a tenant on Feb. 28, 2018. The tenant had received an eviction notice from her landlord and she requested a hearing to challenge the eviction. North Charleston leads the nation in eviction rates, according to preliminary findings from researchers at Princeton University. File/Brad Nettles/StaffBrandon Fludd, the man shot last month by a volunteer constable in Florence, was arrested earlier this week in connection with the confrontation.

Fludd, 28, surrendered Tuesday afternoon at the Florence Police Department, said Lt. Mike Brandt, a police spokesman.

He faces misdemeanor charges of failure to stop for blue lights and malicious injury to personal property, Brandt said. He also was ticketed with driving on the wrong side of the road.

Fludd spent 17 minutes in custody before his release on personal recognizance, Florence County jail officials said.

His attorneys have called the shooting excessive. Thom Berry, a spokesman for the State Law Enforcement Division, said Wednesday that the agency was still investigating the shooting.

The constable, Christopher Bachochin, was riding with Florence patrolman Edward Sieban after 11 p.m. March 24 when they stopped Fludd's car. According to body camera video, Sieban had seen Fludd's car cross the center line.

Sieban questioned Fludd while Bachochin moved to the driver's side. Fludd denied having any guns or drugs but Sieban said he smelled marijuana.

Upset by the questions, Fludd threw his Cadillac into gear, backing into the patrol car behind him.

Bachochin backed away as he shot at the driver's side, firing eight shots.

Fludd was stuck by three bullets, suffering wounds to the arm, knee and chest.

The car took off. Officers found it abandoned and bloodied on another street several minutes later.

In the officers' body camera footage, Bachochin describes why he shot at the moving vehicle: He thought Fludd was going to run him over.

"That scared the (expletive) out of me," the constable said in the footage. "He about run us ... over."

Fludd's attorneys, Justin Bamberg and Robert Stucks, said they are prepared to defend their client, who acknowledges his role in the ordeal.

The two have called the shooting excessive and questioned why Bachochin, a pharmacist by trade who volunteers with the Florence Police Department, fired his weapon while sworn police officers involved in the incident did not shoot.

Constables go through training at technical schools and are certified by SLED. Bachochin served for five years as a police officer before becoming a pharmacist. He had been volunteering in Florence for about four years.

"The constable program needs to be further scrutinized," the attorneys said in a statement. "Arming ordinary citizens and putting them in real-life situations for which they are not trained is a danger to everyone in the community."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.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.Vous etes confrontes a une infestation par la puce, la punaise de lit ? Voici plusieurs actions qui sont a mettre en uvre pour faire []Editor's note: This is the sixth and final part in a series of stories about living with autism on Guam.

Everyone interviewed for this series agreed Guam is doing fantastic with autism awareness.

Now comes the next part, one of the cornerstone themes of this year's autism fair taking place at the Agana Shopping Center on Saturday: accepting and supporting those and their families affected by autism.

Teressa Cruz-Blas' son Eli, age 5, has autism, and they love frequently taking him out. But she also said they sometimes get stares or hear side comments, and while she said she understands people might get slightly annoyed, she'd also just like more acceptance from the community.

"I'm not saying you need to go up to my son and hug him, but when you see a family in the grocery store and their child is having a meltdown, just don't stare and say, 'Naughty kid,'" she said. "Maybe ask, 'Can I help?' because just asking is encouragement for that mother."

Kristal Flores' son Jacob, age 5, also has the occasional meltdown in public, and she too expressed similar feelings.

Ill be honest: Sometimes when he has those meltdowns in public, Im embarrassed, and Im his mom and I know better," she said. "But when people start staring and looking, you do get embarrassed.

The mom asked that people be more compassionate, which is what she's learned since Jacob was born.

"You just dont understand what is happening in other peoples homes," she said. "And the image they present in public isnt always the reality."

Her husband, Isaac, said he gets slightly annoyed when people tell him Jacob looks so "normal" for being autistic.

The face of autism ... there is no face of autism," he said, emphatically.

Kristal Flores said each person with autism is unique just like all human beings are, and likened the autism spectrum disorder to the things in life that just happen to be not so black and white, but rather are in a huge gray area.

If you know one person whos autistic, you know one person whos autistic," she said. "You cant transfer that or project what you know about that one person onto everyone whos autistic."

Isaac added that one of his favorite and most meaningful T-shirts that Jacob wears includes a picture of a puzzle piece on it. Written on the tee are the words, "Think before you judge. I have autism. What is your excuse?

One school is showing an example of how it can make a difference.

To show support for autism, as well as to raise money for grade-level academic needs, Agana Heights Elementary School held a T-shirt fundraiser this month, with nearly $5 for each shirt sold going to the grade-level fund. They did the same thing last year.

The school is showing support for a student diagnosed with it  Rique Ray Calvo, a first-grader who loves to draw. His artwork is featured on the shirt. With the school's mascot being bumblebees, it only made sense that the front of the shirt includes pictures of them with the words, "Dare to BEE different."

The school is also holding a special "#irockwithriqueray" Zumba event with him during its spirit week in late April where the students also will hear a brief presentation about autism.

According to Ray's mother, Liz Calvo, Rique does exhibit some behaviors associated with autism. She said she still occasionally gets the "stink eye" in public if Rique doesn't listen initially, or just runs off or even hits other kids, which is how he sometimes shows affection.

"Why can't you control your child," she said, are the words she feels as being associated with those looks.

Calvo said it is her hope that events like Rique's at Agana Heights Elementary, coupled with further education, will get some kids to go home and educate mom and dad while also remembering the experience for future use elsewhere on Guam and in the world.

1 in 45 children

After all, according to advocacy and support group Autism Speaks, a 2015 government survey of American parents suggested that 1 in 45 children, ages 3 through 17, have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, which is notably higher than the official government estimate of 1 in 68 American children with autism, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That's roughly 2 percent of children in the U.S. living with autism, and it's those, Calvo said, we need to accept and support.

"Maybe it will bring that awareness back to them to say, 'You know, maybe this child has autism and we just need to be a little more understanding,'" Calvo said. "There is still a lot of progress to be made in terms of awareness, in terms of bringing it toward understanding and acceptance."PR-Inside.com: 2018-04-12 12:39:03

Emergent BioSolutions Announces Successful Completion of Mutual Recognition Procedure for Market Authorisation of BioThrax in European Countries

Emergent BioSolutions Inc.

Investor Contact:

Robert G. Burrows, +1 240-631-3280

Vice President, Investor Relations

BurrowsR@ebsi.com

or

Media Contact:

Lynn Kieffer, +1 240-631-3391

Vice President, Corporate Communications

KiefferL@ebsi.com

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. (NYSE:EBS) today announced the successful completion of the Mutual Recognition Procedure (MRP) for market authorisation of BioThrax (Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed) in five Concerned Member States (CMS) within the European Union (EU), including Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the U.K., and France (where it will be marketed as BaciThrax). Emergent filed the mutual recognition application based on the existing Marketing Authorisation of BioThrax in Germany granted by the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut. Following the positive MRP outcome, national licences are due to be issued shortly by the five CMS countries.

Expanding the licence of BioThrax globally has been part of Emergents strategy and we are pleased with the completion of this process and the positive outcome of our application for market authorisation in these Member States, said Adam Havey, Executive Vice-President, Business Operations at Emergent BioSolutions. With the heightened awareness of the need to protect militaries and civilians against public health threats, we are proud to be able to support allied governments with preparedness solutions that align with their national security plans. Based on this regulatory approval, we look forward to further expanding our footprint within the EU.

Where approved in Europe, BioThrax is indicated for prevention of disease caused by Bacillus anthracis in adults at risk of exposure. BioThrax is administered in a three-dose primary schedule (0, 1 and 6 months) with boosters at three-year intervals recommended thereafter. For full details of EU prescribing information, please visit https://emergentbiosolutions.com/sites/default/fil.

BioThrax is also licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the active immunisation for prevention of disease caused by Bacillus anthracis in persons 18 through 65 years of age for both pre-exposure and post-exposure prophylactic use. For full U.S. prescribing information, please visit http://www.biothrax.com/prescribinginformation_bio.

BioThrax is also licensed by the Singapore Health Sciences Authority.

About BioThrax

BioThrax is the only anthrax vaccine licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Singapore Health Sciences Authority, and Germanys Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, for the prevention of anthrax disease. The safety and efficacy of BioThrax have not been established in paediatric or geriatric populations. Individuals are not considered protected until they have completed the three-dose primary immunisation series. Vaccination with BioThrax may not protect all individuals.

BioThrax is manufactured from a culture filtrate, made from a non-virulent strain of Bacillus anthracis. Over 14 million doses of BioThrax have been administered to more than 3 million individuals.

About Emergent BioSolutions Inc.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. is a global life sciences company seeking to protect and enhance life by focusing on providing specialty products for civilian and military populations that address accidental, intentional, and naturally occurring public health threats. Through our work, we envision protecting and enhancing 50 million lives with our products by 2025. Additional information about the company may be found at www.emergentbiosolutions.com. Follow us on Twitter @emergentbiosolu and Instagram @life_at_emergent.

Safe Harbour Statement

This press release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements, other than statements of historical fact, including statements containing the words believes, expects, anticipates, intends, plans, estimates and similar expressions, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current intentions, beliefs and expectations regarding future events. We cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statement will be accurate and there can be no guarantee that BioThrax will receive any additional marketing approvals in any other countries, or that it will reach any particular sales levels in any country where market authorisation has been granted. Investors should realise that if underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or unknown risks or uncertainties materialise, actual results could differ materially from our expectations. Investors are, therefore, cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statement. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date of this press release, and, except as required by law, we do not undertake to update any forward-looking statement to reflect new information, events or circumstances.

There are a number of important factors that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, including demand and governmental funding for and the success of marketing efforts related to BioThrax in countries where it has been approved; the ability to obtain licensure of BioThrax in other foreign countries, and regulatory actions or government regulations generally. The foregoing sets forth many, but not all, of the factors that could cause actual results to differ from our expectations in any forward-looking statement. Investors should consider this cautionary statement, as well as the risk factors identified in our periodic reports filed with the SEC, when evaluating our forward-looking statements.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005

Emergent BioSolutions announces marketing authorisation approval of the anthrax vaccine, BioThrax across a number of European countriesPR-Inside.com: 2018-04-12 13:00:17

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for GreenBank Capital Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Toronto, Ontario (FSCWire) - GreenBank Capital Inc. (CSE:GBC). has issued a press release with the following headline:GreenBank Completes Acquisition of 19.9% of Gander ExplorationTo 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 GreenBank Capital Inc., 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/GreenBank Capital Inc.Source: GreenBank Capital Inc. (CSE: GBC, OTC Pink: GRNBF, FWB: 2TL, WKN: A1W8UJ, ISIN: CA3935762029)Date: April 12, 2018Time: 7:00 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of GreenBank Capital Inc. 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: 2018-04-12 00:22:17

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Lincoln Mining Corporation--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - Lincoln Mining Corporation (TSX Venture:LMG). has issued a press release with the following headline:Lincoln Mining Announces Proposed Private Placement of up to $400,000To 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 Lincoln Mining Corporation, 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/Lincoln Mining CorporationSource: Lincoln Mining Corporation (TSX Venture: LMG, OTC Pink: LNCLF, FWB: ZMG1)Date: April 11, 2018Time: 6:21 PM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Lincoln Mining Corporation 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: 2018-04-12 12:08:03

Robust alternative to GRE or VPN tunnels provides a more secure connection for transferring data

Neustar Announces NetProtect: A Direct Connect Distributed Denial of Service Defense Solution

Media contact:

Hannah Lock

Hotwire for Neustar

neustar@hotwirepr.com

Neustar, Inc., a trusted, neutral provider of real-time information services, today announced the release of Neustar NetProtect, a direct connect Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) defense solution that is currently available in 61 data centres located across ten countries. In complement to Neustar SiteProtect NG, a DDoS mitigation solution that protects against web application attacks, the NetProtect network is strategically situated directly inside data centres in order to address and mitigate or entirely avoid the concerns of latency, complexity and other anomalies which are commonly associated with legacy Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel systems.

Created specifically for demanding and advanced network requirements that require support beyond basic proxy or VPN services, NetProtect is focused on transmitting sensitive data quickly and securely. Neustars strategic fortification of a vast data centre ecosystem in combination with Neustar's design and implementation of the new NetProtect solution decreases system complexity. Such system simplification has traditionally presented a technical challenge because of the need to overlay networks on top of physical networks in order to transfer data between multiple locations.

DDoS defense technology is constantly improving and as a result Neustar is focused on creating solutions that provide our clients with a secure infrastructure built on a foundation of unmatched stability, resiliency and performance, said Barrett Lyon, General Manager, DDoS Defense at Neustar. I am very bullish about the DDoS evolution and, without a doubt, connecting directly to defense networks rather than routing through tunnels will become the norm. This will allow for greater security and less intrusive protection in order to mitigate attacks consistently and effectively, without introducing unnecessary volatility.

Unlike legacy tunneling services, NetProtect does not require additional software or hardware to transfer data across networks. By connecting directly within the data centre, NetProtect removes the introduction of unnecessary additional entry points on the network and eliminates the associated risk that can lead to an increase of malicious traffic or impair or complicate a customers ability to define its routing policies. As well, by reducing susceptibility to variances and vulnerabilities derived from traversing external locations allows Neustar to decrease associated issues such as network connection latency and fragmentation.

With plans to expand into 14 countries and over 80 data centres within the next six months, the NetProtect solution will be one of the most robust and always-on direct-connect DDoS defense services in the industry. NetProtect is unparalleled in its ability to connect mission critical network applications directly across global facilities in order to provide advanced defenses across any application. More information on Neustar SiteProtect NG or Neustar NetProtect is available at security.neustar.

About Neustar Security Solutions

Neustar Security Solutions defend against network threats, inform users of potential network vulnerabilities, accelerate online asset performance and monitor user website performance through multiple services and offerings. Neustars industry leading SiteProtect NG DDoS defense service ensures full-layered coverage in an attack. Neustar UltraDNS service manages 10% of all internet traffic, routes over 1 trillion queries a month and provides industry leading uptime with 100% availability. Neustar IP Intelligence is the authoritative source of IP decisioning data on 99.99% of routable IP addresses worldwide. Neustars nearly 20 years of unparalleled expertise ensures that our customers are protected and optimised during normal business practices and when unsolicited events occur. Our services ensure that customers' network connectivity are protected and optimised whether in crisis or just business as usual. Neustar is trusted by many of the worlds largest brands to keep their mission critical systems up and running.

About Neustar

Neustar, Inc. is a leading global information services provider driving the connected world forward with trusted, holistic identity resolution. As the only company capable of understanding who is on the other end of every interaction, Neustar is trusted by the worlds great brands to grow and guard their businesses with the most complete understanding of how to connect people, places and things. The combination of Neustars unique, accurate, and real-time identity system and our cloud-based workflow solutions empower our clients to make actionable, precise and valuable decisions across marketing, risk, IT/security, network and operations departments. More information is available at https://www.home.neustar.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005

Neustar Announces NetProtect: A Direct Connect Distributed Denial of Service Defense SolutionPR-Inside.com: 2018-04-12 09:01:01

Pacific Prime Receives Bupa Global's Best Performance - Intermediary Award

Media:

Pacific Prime and Kwiksure

Stephen Ho, +852 3589 0508

Marketing Director

Pacific Prime is pleased to announce that they have been honored with the 'Best Performance Award - Intermediary' from Bupa Global at their annual APAC conference.

Held annually, this conference recognizes outstanding achievements among Bupa Global's key partners around the APAC region. This year, Pacific Prime was recognized for their strong performance in 2017, a recognition that highlights the expertise held by the company.

Upon winning the award, Neil Raymond, Pacific Prime's CEO commented, "Being named as a top performer is a huge honor for Pacific Prime; one we feel exemplifies the achievements of our company in 2017." He continued, "As a long-term partner of Bupa Global, we believe this award exemplifies the commitment our two companies have to bringing robust insurance solutions to our clients in the APAC region and beyond."

Commenting on the award, Sheldon Kenton, Managing Director at Bupa Global said, "As one of our trusted insurance intermediaries, we are delighted to present Pacific Prime with the Best Performance award which is demonstrative of the energy, enthusiasm and commitment of our partnership. Together, we are able to leverage market insight, understand industry developments and ensure customers receive the very best standard of service.

This award will go on the shelf beside numerous other awards from Bupa Global that Pacific Prime has earned, including two awards naming the broker as Bupa's Top Distributor two years in a row, and another award for being a top producer of individual sales. Together, these awards highlight Pacific Prime's dedication to delivering high quality insurance solutions and services.

About Pacific Prime

Pacific Prime is a global insurance and employee benefits broker that provides high quality products to people and companies around the world. Their seven offices throughout Asia, the Middle East, and North America provide outstanding sales, service, and ongoing support to the more than 500,000 clients theyve insured over 18 years in business.

About Bupa Global

Bupa Global, the international arm of Bupa, provides customers around the world with premium international health insurance. These products allow one to access the healthcare they need, when they need it, at anytime and in any location.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005

Pacific Prime is proud to annouce that we have been named 'Best Performance Award - Intermediary' by Bupa Global.PR-Inside.com: 2018-04-12 09:15:17

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Saville Resources Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, B.C. (FSCWire) - Saville Resources Inc. (TSX Venture:SRE). has issued a press release with the following headline:Saville Resources Releases 4.30% Nb2O5 Sampled on the Niobium Claim Group, QuebecTo 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 Saville Resources Inc., 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/Saville Resources Inc.Source: Saville Resources Inc. (TSX Venture: SRE, ISIN: CA80517N1078)Date: April 12, 2018Time: 3:15 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Saville Resources Inc. 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: 2018-04-12 12:36:02

Taipei Exchange to Hold 2018 Taiwan CEO DAY

Taipei Exchange

Philip Hsu, +886 916-626-628

Listing Supervision Department

philip@tpex.org.tw

Taipei Exchange (TPEx), in cooperation with Capital Securities, will be holding the 2018 Taiwan CEO Day in Hong Kong on April 12 through 13.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005

Managing Director& CEO Yu-Ching Su of Taipei Exchange is pictured with representatives from TPEX mainboard and emerging stock board companies at Taiwan CEO Day (Photo: Business Wire)

There will be 17 TPEx Mainboard and Emerging Stock Board listed companies joining the event including Chime Ball Technology Co., Ltd., TTFB Co., Ltd., WIN Semiconductors Corp., Bothhand Enterprise Inc., Macroblock Inc., ATE Energy International Co., Ltd., Intech Biopharm Ltd., Senhwa Biosciences Inc., Chunghwa Precision Test Tech Co., Ltd., Chang Wah Technology Co., Ltd., Syngen Biotech Co., Ltd., Phison Electronics Corp., Bon Fame Co., Ltd., Green River Holding Co., Ltd., Kwong Lung Enterprise Co., Ltd., Xxentria Technology Materials Co., Ltd. and Pan German Universal Motors Ltd.

The participating companies represent main industry categories within the TPEx market that includes Electronic Parts/Components, Computer & Peripheral Equipment, Tourism, Semiconductor, Biotechnology & Medical Care, Electric Machinery,Trading & Consumers' Goods Industry and Optoelectronic.

Taipei Exchange emphasizes that not only do the companies joining the event have excellent records of profitability, but also that most of the representatives from these companies are senior executives (including 11 chairmen and 7 CEOs). This event will provide these companies with an opportunity to introduce themselves to international institutional investors face- to-face, present a briefing on their current operating situation and share their vision regarding both the company itself and the industry as a whole.

Taipei Exchange proactively builds bilateral channels to connect TPEx-listed companies with international capital markets. Through this event, Taipei Exchange will offer the listed companies an excellent opportunity to introduce themselves to global long-term investors and a forum in which they can receive strategic advice from overseas investors directly. On the other hand, international investors will also benefit from discovering more investment candidates among the outstanding companies listed on TPEx to add to their investment portfolios.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005PR-Inside.com: 2018-04-12 09:02:02

The Netherlands a Global Innovation Champion, Says CTA

Consumer Technology Association (CTA)

Bronwyn Flores, 703-907-7679

bflores@CTA.tech

www.CTA.tech

A new global ranking from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) identifies the Netherlands as one of 13 countries earning the designation of 2018 Innovation Champion. CTAs inaugural International Innovation Scorecard identifies critical areas of national policy that spur innovation and reveals the areas in which countries may be stunting their own futures and economic growth.

The trend lines are clear  innovation is encouraged where governments, such as the Netherlands, are hospitable to new ideas, people enjoy great freedom and clean environments, and innovators are embraced, said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, CTA. Countries futures are tied to innovation, because it will bolster economic growth and provide future generations with the jobs they want. Graduates entering the workforce today dont necessarily want to stay in the factory jobs of previous generations  they want to use their creativity and curiosity to build brighter futures worldwide.

CTA, the largest U.S. tech trade association, conducted a comparative analysis of 38 countries and the European Union. In addition to the Netherlands, CTAs Scorecard named Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States as global Innovation Champions.

The Netherlands made a strong showing in a number of categories. The report finds the countrys startup sector has continued to expand, pushing the Netherlands annual new business entry rate to 5.34 per 1,000 people and helping the country produce six unicorn companies. The Netherlands also allows testing of self-driving vehicles and opened a new testing facility for self-driving cars as part of a collaboration with the Delft University of Technology. The country also offers average broadband speeds that far exceed those of most other countries, including average fixed internet speeds of 17.4 mbps.

Although the Netherlands performed well in the Scorecard, it could benefit from actions taken to be more hospitable to drones, including eliminating barriers to recreational drone use, such as expensive certificate requirements. Current policies support only commercial drone operations. In a joint welcome letter to the International Innovation Scorecard, Ambassador of the Netherlands in the United States Henne Schuwer and Consul General of the Netherlands in San Francisco Gerbert Kunst thank CTA for this recognition, but also for its support of Dutch startups. Startups are the engine of innovation, and this year 53 Dutch startups presented themselves to the world at CES 2018. This experience provides an enormous boost to their business by bringing them in contact with the established tech world, major investors and international corporations. This way, these startups find the maximum opportunity for growth, solve societys challenges and help people worldwide. Thats why CTA has given them the best launching platform imaginable.

The Scorecard uses several objective criteria including whether governments welcome disruptive business models and technologies such as the sharing economy and self-driving vehicles; how friendly their tax systems are; how well they protect the environment; and issues of perennial importance such as broadband speed and cost. The Scorecard also gauges countries on diversity; the ratio of female-to-male employees in the workplace in key age demographics; immigrants as a share of the national population; and freedom of thought and expression.

Other key international findings, ranked by grade, include:

The countries that have, on average, the fastest and most affordable internet connections are the Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The countries with the highest level of entrepreneurial activity are Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden and United Kingdom.

The countries leading the way in self-driving vehicle policy are Australia, Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

CTA considered a range of indicators to determine the final roster of countries. The Scorecard evaluates countries that fit two guidelines: the government must be able to influence public policy; and publicly available, verifiable and independent third-party data must exist and can be compared with different nations. In future editions, CTA will expand the scope of the Scorecard and include more countries.

To read more about the Scorecard, visit www.internationalscorecard.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005Over one million smallholder farmers under the Anchor Borrowers Programme will benefit from seeds and cropping technology deal between Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL) and Syngenta Agrochemical Company.

Syngenta is a global agribusiness company that produces agrochemicals and seeds.

Signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Abuja on Thursday, Aliyu Abdulhameed, the Managing Director of NIRSAL, said the partnership with Syngenta, would engender increased production for smallholder farmers.

Mr Abdulhammed said the partnership would grant farmers including women and youth, access to quality discounted inputs, modern technology, and training on best use of farm inputs to achieve high yields.

The managing director explained that the technology which included seeds and good agronomic practices was capable of increasing farm yields by 40 per cent minimum.

According to him, our farmers need simple and reliable ways to maximise their yields.

This partnership between NIRSAL and Syngenta is designed to ensure basic business management, end- to-end agronomy, crops protocols and safe and effective use of crop protection products.

This partnership is not only focused on making quality inputs available but will more importantly provide productivity, enhancing technology and practices for small holder farmers in Nigeria.

Farmers under the CBNs ABP as well as primary production activities will enjoy these yields enhancing technology through our Project Monitoring, Reporting and Remediation Offices across 36 states plus FCT, he said.

Luzius Caviezel, the Regional Director, Africa of Syngenta, said the company was a leading agribusiness firm which was investing resources to keep up technology on eight crops which included maize, rice, soybeans, sugarcane and vegetables.

Mr Caviezel said the company would bring competitive and discounted inputs to increase farmers agricultural productivity and improve their livelihoods.

He stated that the company would work toward improving farmers productivity by 30 per cent to 50 per cent.

We want to be a trusted partner. Our focus is to support food security.

What we want is more income for farmers and Nigeria leads on our priority list in Africa.

This is because it has a large population, large economy and openness of the government to innovation, technology and this is the engine to improve agriculture.

The input or product alone is not enough, there is the follow up, how you use the products, and how you manage crops, this is very important and it can make a large difference.

If this product is not properly used, the poor farmer would have wasted money which is not expected. This is the solution we want to provide, the regional director explained.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Syngenta is a biotechnology company, formed in 2000 by the merger of Novartis Agribusiness and Zeneca Agrochemicals.

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Syngenta in 2014 became the worlds largest crop chemical producer, strongest in Europe. (NAN)The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands on Thursday said that there was no truth in allegation that it is witch-hunting African leaders.

The President of the Court, Judge Chile Eboe-Osuji, a Nigerian, made the remark in Abuja while fielding questions from journalists after a courtesy visit to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama.

The ICC was perceived as witch-hunting African leaders, a situation leading to withdrawal of membership by some African countries.

The African Union had in 2017 backed a strategy for collective withdrawal from the Court over this allegation, but the decision suffered a setback after Nigeria joined others in support of the Court.

Three African countries; Burundi, South Africa and The Gambia had announced withdrawal of membership of the Court.

Mr Eboe-Osuji however said: There is no witch-hunting of African countries by the court.

Actually, some of the complaints being made have not taken into account the fact that the court was set up for the protection of people who are suffering from some kinds of violations.

And those Africans, who have been suffering from such violations, are not complaining that the court is biased. They are not complaining that there is witch-hunting going on, he said.

According to him, Nigeria has been very supportive in saying that there is a need for the ICC to stand and to be supported.

He commended President Muhammadu Buhari for his support to the Court, noting that Nigeria had stood to lay a good legacy for other countries to follow that the court needs to stand.

And we are here to express gratitude to Nigeria for doing that. The Court appreciated Nigerias support.

We are very much encouraged that it took no lesser authority than the president himself signaled that to happen for the Nigerian leader to stand behind the court and robustly stand by the court, he said

Mr Onyeama, while also fielding questions from journalists said it would be wrong to see the court as witch-hunting.

I think it is wrong to look at it this way. I think the question we should be asking is has any right been violated?

Should people have the right to have the people who violated their rights made to face some kind of tribunal. That is the question we should ask.

Another way to look at it is, those African leaders that are being tried, is the trial justifiable?

That is all that should concern us and whether 10 African leaders are arrested, the question is, is the process fair, were rights violated, he said

The minister told the visiting jurist that Nigeria was solidly behind him and in support of the court.

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President Muhammadu Buhari is a firm believer in the rule of law and he has directed that when the matter came up in the AU when a number of countries wanted a collective withdrawal from the ICC.

President Buhari has firm belief that Nigeria should speak out in support of the Court because the objective of the court is something that Mr President and his government believed firmly in.

Which is the rule of law and accountability by the political leaders of the continent and firm believe that ordinary Africans should have the possibility of having rights defended and upheld in the court of law.

And that the African leaders should also be held accountable in court of law. So, we do believe that the ICC is an institution for good and the benefit of the global community, he said.

He expressed hope that other countries around the world yet to join would also walk the talk and join the ICC.

We know that there are a numbers of big countries, democratic countries that are still not acceded, so we are delighted that the court is now being led by a Nigerian.

We will certainly do whatever we need to do to support the work and to promote global justice, he said.

(NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

Chinas commerce ministry said on Thursday trade negotiations with the United States would be impossible as Washingtons attempts at dialogue were not sincere.

The country vowed to retaliate should U.S. President Donald Trump escalate current tensions.

China President Xi Jinping on Tuesday vowed to open Chinas economy further and lower import duties on goods such as cars which had boosted hopes for a compromise.

Mr Trump responded in a tweet saying he was thankful for Xis remarks on tariffs and access for U.S. automakers, and said both countries would make great progress together.

Commerce Ministry spokesman, Gao Feng, told reporters during a regular briefing that Mr Xis remarks had nothing to do with the trade row.

It should not be mischaracterised as a concession to Washington, he said.

I hope some people in the U.S do not misjudge the situation, he said.

If the United States takes any action to escalate the situation, China will not hesitate to fight back.

The worlds two largest economies have threatened each other with tens of billions of dollars worth of tariffs in recent weeks.

Such has led to worries that Washington and Beijing may engage in a full-scale trade war that could damage global growth and roil markets.

Some U.S. officials and analysts have said that they believe the dispute could eventually be resolved via dialogue, but Beijing reiterated on Thursday that no formal talks have taken place.

It is not a matter of whether China is willing to participate in the negotiations. It is about the U.S. not showing sincerity at all, Mr Gao said.

Washington accuses Chinese firms of stealing the trade secrets of U.S. companies and forcing them into joint ventures to acquire their technology  the crux of Mr Trumps current tariff threats against China. Beijing denies this charge.

He said China will continue opening its markets based on its own plans and implement lower tariffs pledged by Mr Xi as soon as possible.

(Reuters/NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

Direct flights between Moscow and Cairo resumed on Thursday, more than two years after Russia banned flights to Egypt in response to a terrorist attack.

A plane from Russian carrier Aeroflot flying from Moscow landed early Thursday at Cairo airport with 120 passengers aboard, sources at the airport said.

Hours later, an Egypt Air flight with 109 passengers departed Cairo to Moscow, the sources added.

Egypt was a major Russian tourist destination until Russia stopped flights to the country in November 2015 after a Russian passenger plane crashed in the restive Sinai Peninsula, shortly after taking off from the resort town of Sharm El Sheikh.

All 224 people on board were killed. The extremist Islamic State militia claimed responsibility for downing the airliner.

Aeroflot and EgyptAir were originally scheduled to begin operating flights between Moscow and Cairo in February, but the resumption of flights was postponed several times as Russia required more security measures at Egyptian airports.

Russian flights to Egyptian resorts remain suspended.

Russias ban had crippled Egypts ailing tourism industry, a main source of national income.

In recent months, Russian security experts have regularly inspected Egyptian airports to ensure tightened security measures are in place before reopening the route. (dpa/NAN)Armed intruders have struck again in Benue, one of the troubled states experiencing deadly attacks and destruction of properties in central Nigeria, killing 41 villagers in simultaneous assaults overnight, residents and officials have told PREMIUM TIMES.

Residents who informed PREMIUM TIMES in separate exchanges between Thursday morning and afternoon said the killings occurred in two communities in Logo and Ukum Local Government Areas, Benue State.

The residents also said the death toll may rise sharply in the coming hours, as more bodies are still being removed from nearby bushes.

The attacks come a day after 10 people were killed by gunmen said to be wearing military uniform.

The first attack happened in Tse Hwer in Ukemberyge/Tsweray Council Ward in Logo Local Government around 6:30 p.m. to this morning, said a senior state government official who did not want to be named, saying he had been warned by federal authorities for talking to the media in the past. Some people are saying their families are missing, but we havent been able to confirm how many exactly.

The victims were said to be two men and one woman.

When they arrived at about 6:00 p.m. in Jande-Ikyura in Ukum Local Government Area, the gunmen appeared determined to wipe out the entire community, said a resident of the area who said he had been to the village Thursday morning to witness the aftermath. Jande-Ikyura is a border community between Ukum LGA in Benue and Wukari Local Government Area in Taraba State.

It was like they wanted to be sure that all the villagers were killed before they would run back to their hideouts, said 48-year-old Isaac Ihiev. They killed 22 people who were living there.

Mr Ihiev said three of the attackers who were killed when some youth responded to the assault were found in military uniform.

Three of them were killed and they dressed like soldiers when their bodies were moved out from the bush, Mr Ihiev said, adding that he lives in a nearby village that falls under Wukari LGA in Taraba State.

He said efforts were underway to find the missing people. Mr Ihiev had mistakenly described Jande-Ikyura as being in Wukari LGA due to its proximity, but government officials have now clarified this confusion to PREMIUM TIMES.

A resident of Zaki Biam, seat of Ukum LGA, who arrived at the scene around 12:15 p.m. told PREMIUM TIMES the corpses have risen to 41 as at 2:09 p.m. Thursday, and still raised fears the number could unavoidably rise.

PREMIUM TIMES could not independently verify the claims as at 2:49 p.m. Thursday, but they have a history of raising alarms about their ordeal that would later be corroborated by security agencies.

Terver Akase, a spokesperson for Governor Samuel Ortom, said he had heard of the killings and expressed sadness about the shocking death toll.

David Akinremi, the police commissioner in Taraba, and his Benue counterpart, Fatai Owoseni, did not immediately return PREMIUM TIMES requests for comments about the attacks early Thursday afternoon.

Emmanuel Bello, a spokesperson for Governor Darius Ishaku, said news of the killings had spread to Jalingo, Taraba State capital.

He, however, said he didnt have all the details as yet. He said a military panel probing alleged complicity by soldiers in the ongoing killings has arrived the state and is sitting in Jalingo.

The killings come two weeks after the Nigerian Army ended Exercise Ayem Akpatuma and withdrew troops from the villages in Benue, Kogi and Taraba, despite pleas from residents that doing so would expose them to wanton killings by gunmen.

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Although the Army denied withdrawing the troops, residents across three states insist there is no evidence to show that the exercise was extended as announced, and PREMIUM TIMES requests to the Army for the location of the troops participating in the exercise were rebuffed. The residents, including a local government chairman, told PREMIUM TIMES the troops left their villages on March 31, exactly the same day the exercise was initially billed to end.

This story is developing and will be updated as more reports are confirmed.

(EDITORS NOTE: Apart from the updates of the killings, this story has been corrected to reflect that the scene of one of the attacks, Jande-Ikyura, is in Benue and not Taraba State).In a daring move, a committee of the House of Representatives has decided to invite Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to appear before it.

The committees decision on Thursday was reached as part of its investigation into an agency, whose board Mr. Osinbajo chairs.

The committee is investigating alleged violation of public trust by the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) that led to the suspension of six directors of the agency.

Mr. Osinbajo is the chairman of the governing board of the NEMA and the lawmakers want him to explain his role in the suspension of the officials as well as other scandals rocking the agency.

At its public hearing, the committee, on emergency and disaster preparedness, also summoned Ibrahim Magu, acting chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Winifred Oyo-Ita, Head of Civil Service of the Federation.

The 35-member committee, headed by Ali Isa (Gombe-PDP), also resolved to invite the representatives of the State Security Service, pension commission, Federal Inland Revenue Service, as well as ministers of agriculture, national planning and finance.

The next stage for the committee is to write the affected persons, including Mr Osinbajo, to appear before them.

The National Assembly, or its designated committee, has constitutional powers to summon all government appointees, with lawyers saying neither the president nor the vice president is constitutionally exempted from such summons.

A senior lawyer, Simon Ameh, told PREMIUM TIMES the invitation was in order so long as the vice president would not have to talk on any other matter to do with his office.

If they will focus only on NEMA, it is in order, the Senior Advocate of Nigeria said.

He added that the constitution gives the legislature power to oversight the executive, hence the National Assembly has powers to invite any occupier of such position.

House of Reps

Another lawyer, Ola Adeosun, agreed with the submission, saying the National Assembly is empowered under section 88 of the constitution to summon any government official, including the president.

The invitation is in order he said.

THE NEMA SCANDAL

The governing council of NEMA on the same day it was inaugurated on April 3, suspended six directors of the agency. The affected officials allegedly kicked against the NEMA DGs contract awards in breach of due process.

The House committee, however, demanded the immediate recall of the six directors.

It said the civil service rule was grossly abused, and natural justice turned upside down in the ways and manners the directors were placed on suspension.

NEMA Headquarters

The suspended officers are Director of Finance and Accounts, Akinbola Gbolahan; Ag. Director, Special Duties, Umesi Emenike; and Director, Risk Reduction, Alhassan Nuhu.

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Others are pilot in charge of Air Ambulance and Aviation Unit, Mamman Ibrahim; the Chief Maintenance Officer, Ganiyu Deji; and the Director of Welfare, Kanar Mohammed.

During the cause of investigation, the committee said it discovered N3.1 billion was approved and released for the agency by the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation for procurement of rice for the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the Boko Haram-ravaged North-east.

It said the Director-General of the agency, Mustapha Maihaja, expended the sum on award of contracts to companies with no legal qualifications to get contract from the federal government.

Two of the companies, Olam Limited, a foreign firm, and Three Brothers Rice Mill, were said to have been awarded huge rice supply contract without meeting the pre-qualification conditions.

It was also discovered that the Chinese government donated 6,779 metric tonnes of rice in June 2017 but a large part of it was abandoned by NEMA for about one year at the ports without clearing. As of today, the lawmakers said, the rice has accumulated about N800 million in port charges.

Mr. Maihaja, while appearing on Thursday before the committee, admitted that his agency has so far paid N400 million as part of the demurrage.

The committee frowned at NEMA for spending N400 million taxpayers fund on the demurrage on the rice due to the long delay in clearing the containers.

Mr. Maihaja is expected to report to the committee with relevant documents relating to the rice donation and other allegations at the next hearing. No date was fixed for the next hearing.Ahead of the 2019 general elections, the head of Sierra Leones National Electoral Commission (NEC), Miatta French, has urged Nigerians to vote their preferred candidates despite money and other gifts some candidates may offer them.

The commissioner said this during a #WatchingTheVote discussion on lessons from Sierra Leone election in Abuja. The event was organised by a civic organisation, YIAGA, on Wednesday.

According to her, Sierra Leoneans voted for their conscience in the just concluded election after drinking, partying and collecting money from different political parties in the country.

If the APC ruling party had been told they will lose the election despite the money they spent, they will never believe it. This depicts that Africans are embracing democracy and they know what they want, she said.

She said politicians need to be aware that Africans are getting to the point where rigging of elections will be impossible because citizens are vigilant.

She said information must be well managed in order to avoid misinformation on the social media especially during election while noting that social media could be dangerous if it not managed properly.

According to her, there is need to sensitise security personnel on the electoral process if they will be involved in the elections.

The police in Sierra Leone were too visible and at some point became overzealous. They were arresting electoral officers at some point, Mrs Miatta said.

She said there are lots of issues with biometric verification in elections.

We did not use technology for biometric verification. We gave each party names of candidates that registered in a particular polling unit, in which they call the names out. This promotes transparency and there was no issue of missing names or (data), Mrs Miatta said.

Similarly, Raouf Salami, program officer at the ECOWAS Network of Electoral Commissions, said one of the challenges of the Sierra Leone election is low civic education, which could be avoided.

Mr Salami, who was an observer at the election, said there was no issue at the registration point and there was no complain of missing data.

Meanwhile, Samson Itodo, the executive director, YIAGA, said the extent in which we deploy technology must guarantee transparency and trust of the citizens in the forthcoming election.

According to him, any technology that is not subscribed to the principles of transparency, openess and accountability will be challenged.

The program manager of the civil society organisation, YIAGA, Cynthia Mbamalum, said one of the things Nigerians need to learn from the Sierra Leone election is the level of communication with the people.

According to her, Nigerians need to be sensitised that their vote is powerful and hence, the need for them to come out and vote.

Sierra Leone had 84 per cent turn out in the first election and 81 per cent in the second round and we were struggling with 22 to 24 per cent turn out in Anambra election, Ms Mbamalum said.

She said there is a need for intensive voter education especially for people in rural areas.

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She urged Nigerians to report cases of over registration, under-age registration or voting, in order to achieve a credible registration and voting process.

We are bigger than Sierra Leone and in terms of democracy, we should be setting the pace in Africa, she said.ADVERTISEMENT

The House of Representatives on Thursday resolved to set up an ad-hoc committee to investigate the payment of $16.9 million to lawyers by the Attorney-General of the Federation for the recovery of Abacha loot.

The committee is also to investigate the controversy surrounding the engagement of Nigerian lawyers for a fee of N6 billion after the actual work had been concluded by another set of lawyers.

The Cable reported that the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, refused to approve the payment of $16.9 million fees to two lawyers for the recovery of the loot worth $321 million.

It said Mrs Adeosun also wrote a letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, raising objections to the payment.

But the minister has denied being involved in any controversy over the issue.

Enrico Monfrini, a Swiss lawyer hired by the Federal Government since 1999 to work on recovering Abacha loot, had finished the Luxembourg leg of the job since 2014 when Mohammed Bello Adoke was Attorney-General of the Federation.

Mr Monfrini had also been paid his fees by the Federal Government.

The recovered money was then domiciled with the Attorney-General of Switzerland, pending the signing of an MoU with Nigeria to avoid the issues of accountability around previous recoveries.

All that was left after the signing of the MoU was a government-to-government communication for the money to be repatriated to Nigeria.

But Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, engaged the services of another set of lawyers in 2016 for a fee of about N6 billion.

The lawyers are Oladipo Okpeseyi and Temitope Adebayo who both worked for President Muhammadu Buharis Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), a legacy party of the All Progressive Congress (APC) when Mr Malami was the legal adviser of CPC

In the unanimously adopted motion moved by Mark Gbilah (Benue-APC), the House called on President Buhari to suspend the payment of the said fee of $16.9 million or any part thereof pending investigation on the matter.

The committee is expected to conclude the investigation within six weeks.Nigerias National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) has given 23 Health Management Organisations, (HMOs) two weeks to comply with qualification requirements for which they were initially removed from the scheme.

This was the outcome of a meeting Thursday between the management of NHIS and representatives of HMOs, spokesperson of the scheme, Ayo Osinlu, said after the meeting.

We had planned to officially release the names of the delisted HMOs in the national dailies but after this meeting we resolved to give them a second chance, Mr. Osinlu told PREMIUM TIMES.

The NHIS Executive Secretary, Usman Yusuf, the 11-member governing council and its chairperson, Ifenne Enyanatu, and representatives of the 57 HMOs in the country all attended the meeting held in Abuja.

Mr Osinlu said the delisted HMOs were given two weeks to meet the schemes requirements.

If after two weeks they do not meet up with our demands, they will now be finally kicked out of the scheme, he noted.

Last week, NHIS announced the sack of 23 HMOs it said failed a validity test carried out on all the 57 HMOS.

According to the newly inaugurated governing council of the scheme, the HMOs failed to meet the minimum operational standard for the scheme.

Some of the criteria for accreditation of an HMO are registration with the Corporate Affairs Commission, adequacy of payoff share capital, current asset including fix asset, shareholders composition, company reserve, integrity of shareholders and composition of Board of Directors.

Others are that the company and its directors must have current tax clearance, appoint an audit fund, submit audit account to the NHIS as and when due, and comply with the Pension PENCOM Act, among others.

One of the criteria used as a critical irreducible minimum was the adequacy of payoff shares capital.

The payoff share capital for National HMOs is N400 million, zonal coverage is N200 million and the state coverage is N100 million. And this is a critical requirement because the Payoff capital share of a company is a requirement for accreditation and evidence of their financial stability, the chairperson of the governing council of the NHIS, Ms Enyanatu, explained.

Only one out of the 57 HMOs actually scored 100 per cent and is therefore granted accreditation to operate, Ms Ifenne, chairperson of the board, had said.

She had added that 34 HMOs were granted provisional accreditation until they fulfill all the conditions for re-accreditation, while 23 were delisted.

The NHIS spokesperson said on Thursday that the 34 HMOs granted provisional accreditation are also given two weeks to fully comply with the accreditation requirements.

All the representatives of the HMOs refused to speak with the press at the end of the meeting.

But an official of the agency who does not want to be mentioned said there is a lot of pressure and internal friction between the HMOs which they are trying to resolve.

NHIS deals with HMOs and Health Service Providers (HSPs).

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The HMOs operate between beneficiaries of NHIS and service providers (hospitals), effectively making them managers of the schemes funds.

NHIS, as the regulatory body, monitors and regulates the activities of the HMOs and the service providers.

The HMOs were established in 2005 and had operated freely for 13 years without formal examination of their operations.

There have been complaints that the NHIS is unable to relieve Nigerians of their health finance burdens as a result of which people still largely spend out of pocket for health care.

No fewer than 450 petitions were sent to the National Assembly by frustrated Nigerians. The complaints ranged from lack of attention by hospitals, delayed attention, low drug dispensing to enrollees in the scheme and sometimes rejection of patients because of the inability of HMOs to meet their payment obligations to hospitals.

Calls for investigation into the activities of the scheme prompted a public hearing at the floor of the House of Representatives last June on how N351 billion was spent by the scheme since inception.

Mr. Yusuf, had at the hearing blamed the HMOs for the failure of the NHIS to deliver on its mandate.

He likened the alleged corruption by the HMOs to the fraud in the fuel subsidy scheme, stressing that enrolee figures were being padded.

But the HMOs refuted the allegations, blaming the several breaches in the implementation of the scheme on improper coordination and structural defects in the NHIS management.Aminu Atiku, son of a former Vice-President, Abubakar Atiku, on Thursday took the battle of his childrens custody against his ex-wife, Fatima Bolori, to an Igbosere High Court in Lagos.

Aminu asked the court to upturn a magistrates courts decision which awarded the custody of his two children to Fatima as well as a N250,000 monthly upkeep.

He told Justice Kazeem Alogba that the lower court disregarded his constitutional right of fair hearing before granting judgment in Fatimas favour.

A magistrate court in Tinubu on Lagos Island had on January 10 awarded full custody of the ex-couples daughter, Ameera, 11, and son, Aamir, 7, to Fatima.

The lower court held that Aminu failed to file a response to Fatimas application for the childrens custody.

But Aminu, through his counsel, Oyinkan Badejo, filed an application to the high court seeking leave to appeal the lower courts judgment and another application for a stay of further execution of its terms.

The first application, a motion on notice, was brought pursuant to Section 70 of the Magistrates Court Law, 2009 and supported by a 16-paragraph application.

Mrs Badejo said: In response to whether the applicant has shown sufficient grounds for the grant of the application, there is not more sufficient ground than the partys right to fair hearing.

We arrived at the magistrates court at 12.30 p.m. believing the matter was for mention at 1.00 p.m.

She contended that the lower court erred by hearing and granting Fatimas application for custody on a date the suit was fixed for mention.

On the second application, Mrs Badejo urged the court to vary the conditions attached to the custody order.

Mrs Badejo said according to the lower courts order, Aminu would pay his ex-wife N250, 000 monthly for the upkeep of the children, beginning from January.

She also said that Magistrate Kikelomo Ayeye ordered Aminu to carry out medical insurance on each child among others.

But Mrs Badejo said: We are not seeking a stay of the execution of the judgment but some of the terms were onerous.

We were asked to pay N250,000 for the upkeep of two young children and medical allowances. We find that rather onerous.

Fatimas counsel, O. N. Olabisi and Ethel Okoh opposed her.

But in a bench ruling, Justice Alogba granted Aminu leave to appeal the lower courts judgment.

Further hearing was adjourned until May 17 and June 14.

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Nigerias Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, has urged the World Health Organisation to make Nigeria one of the priority countries on its list.

According to a press statement from WHO, Mr Osinbajo made the request when he received in audience the Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, Regional Directors and other Global Policy Group members of WHO at the Presidential Villa on Wednesday in Abuja.

Mr Ghebreyesus was in Nigeria for WHOs Global Policy Group (GPG) meeting which was held for the first time in the country.

The vice president said Nigeria is in a challenging times and in the next decade or two, will have more challenges given that the population is rapidly growing.

This calls for a lot of work especially with regards to health of our citizens. Our focus on universal health care is in line with WHOs vision and is one that we have chosen deliberately and there is no question in our minds that it is the way to go, he said.

On polio eradication, Mr Osinbajo assured the WHO leaders that Nigeria is working with relevant stakeholders with a fair amount of success to reach vulnerable children in areas made inaccessible due to insecurity, adding, We want to be as vigorous as possible and progress achieved will be irreversible.

Earlier, the WHOs Director-General in his remarks stated that Nigeria is a critical partner on the global stage because the country is driving health policy on the continent.

He also re- pledged WHO committed to supporting Nigerias efforts on improving health care for vulnerable populations.

Nigerias leadership has shown great vision in promoting universal health care coverage with the expansion of primary health care centre, he said.

Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Regional Director for Africa, in her remark urged the Nigerian government to transition the huge investments by donors and partners beyond polio eradication to saving lives and impacting positively on peoples health.

WHO for the first time held its Global Policy Group (GPG) meeting in Nigeria.

The GPG consists of the Director-General, the Deputy Director-General and six Regional Directors.

The group is an internal advisory mechanism to the Director-General, established to ensure the coherent implementation of decisions, policies and strategies of WHO across all levels of the Organisation.A civil society group, Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), has urged the authorities of the University of Ibadan and Adekunle Ajasin University to reverse their recent increases in school fees.

In a statement issued on Thursday, the Deputy Director of the group, Timothy Adewale, said the hike in fees may stigmatise students who will be unable to pay and which may lead to filtering out of such students, foreclosing their contributions to the progress of our country.

The group said students that are unable to pay the fees may become disillusioned, gradually disassociate from the universities, and eventually drop out.

The dramatic increases would have the effect of discriminating against disadvantaged students who may be unable to pay the new fees, and who are not granted any exemption, thereby creating a classification based on the economic and social status of their parents. The increases would also undermine the students rights to education and equal protection guarantees, the statement said.

The group said institutions should find solutions to their funding challenges elsewhere, warning that it would take legal action if the schools fail to reverse the increase within seven days.

SERAP also urged the leadership of the National Assembly to come up with legislation that would end arbitrary imposition of fees.

The right to education is too important to be left to the budgetary circumstances of individual university or socio-economic status of parents and families. Any perceived financial hardship faced by the UI and AAUA cannot justify the violations of the students constitutional guarantees of equal protection and Nigerias international obligations to ensure equal access to the right to education. The right to education is not a commodity for sale.

Similarly, the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) appealed to Governor of Ondo State, Rotimi Akeredolu, to reverse the increase in the tuition fees in state-owned institutions in the state.

According to News Agency of Nigeria, the National Public Relations Officer (PRO), Bestman Okereafor, said this in a statement on Thursday in Enugu.

He said the recent increase in the tuition fees was alarming and beyond normal.

Mr Okereafor said that students were paying between N25, 000 and N30, 000 but the fees had been increased to N120,000 and N180,000 in state-owned institutions.

The students of the school have since embarked on street protests to express their displeasure.

Also, Education Rights Campaign (ERC), condemned the repression of the protesting students of Adekunle Ajasin University Akungba Akoko (AAUA) by armed policemen on the orders of the state Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu.

The national co-ordinator of the group, Hassan Soweto, in a statement said the students were peacefully protesting when policemen descended on them with live bullets and tear gas.

On Monday 9 April 2018, a student was shot in the leg. Equally on Wednesday 11 April 2018, the peaceful protest was again attacked and several students were arrested by the police. demands the immediate and unconditional release of all those arrested, the statement said.

The group called for the immediate sack of the Commissioner of Police in Ondo State for the attacks on students.

The right to peacefully protest injustice is a universally recognized inalienable right. We warn the Ondo state government to desist from unleashing violence on students demanding their rights. We call on the labour movement and civil society organizations to condemn the repression. We hereby join students to demand an immediate and unconditional reversal of the hiked fees as well as increase in the subvention of AAUA and other state-owned tertiary institutions, the statement said.

According to the group, given the dire economic situation whereby workers and artisans are struggling to keep their heads above water, the hike will lead to massive dropout of indigent students.

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On this basis, we therefore urge members of staff of AAUA not to be hoodwinked or cajoled to support the fee hike in the expectation that it would ensure that workers salaries are paid as at when due. Now workers of the institution are being owed backlog of salary and allowances spanning months, it said.

It further said the argument of the Universitys governing council that it is cash- strapped and must increase fees is unacceptable.

We therefore demand that a full statement of the Universitys finances be published and that an independent panel made of elected representatives of staff unions, students unions, alumni body and other stakeholders be constituted to probe how the Universitys finances has been managed or mismanaged in the last 10 years.

The group advised the pro-Chancellor and vice-chancellor of the university to resign if they have no other means of rectifying the financial situation of the university except by increasing the burden of students and their poor parents.

As far as we are concerned, education is a right and not a privilege. It is the social responsibility of government to its citizens. We are strongly of the opinion that the Ondo state government can fund public education appropriately if the state resources are placed under democratic control and management and the routine corruption of elected public office holders stopped, the statement concluded.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the Commissioner for Information, Yemi Olowolabi, defended the fees increment. He said it was to shore up funding for the institution.ADVERTISEMENT

An eight-month-old baby simply identified as Abdulaziz, was on Thursday found dead inside a four-feet drum of water in Benin.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the incident occurred early Thursday morning at number 53 Obakhavbaye Street, Benin City.

It was gathered that mother of the baby had gone to urinate outside at about 6 a.m, but did not find the baby where she kept him.

After three hours of searching around the house, the baby was eventually found inside the drum of water dead.

The landlord of the house, Ali Abubakar, said he was observing his prayers when he heard shouting and wailing.

Mr Abubakar said he went downstairs and was told that Abdulaziz died inside a drum of water.

It is difficult for that baby to open that drum and enter inside. We dont know what happened yet but it is a mystery, he said.

A neighbour, who gave her name as Blessing Akpo, told NAN that it was only God that could unravel the babys killers.

I have never seen where a baby of eight months old will open a drum of water, enter inside and close it, she said.

Mother of the baby could not talk as she was still in shock.

NAN also noticed presence of some police officers from Aideyan Police station at the residence to investigate the incident.

When contacted, Chidi Nwanbuzour, the police spokesperson told NAN that he had just been briefed about the case.

He added that the command was already investigating the circumstances leading to the death of the boy.

(NAN)President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday publicly blamed former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi who was killed seven years ago for the ongoing killings across central Nigeria.

The killings have long been linked to herdsmen, and some herders of the Fulani ethnic stock have claimed responsibility for some attacks.

But the president said Mr Gaddafi, a dictator swept away by an uprising in 2011, was to blame for the alarming dimension the attacks have taken in recent years.

Mr Gaddafi was killed in October 2011 following weeks of violent uprising across Libya, ending his 42-year reign. He was 69.

Prior to his death, which was aided by the Western incursion into the country, Mr Gaddafi reportedly armed his supporters to ward off the rebellion against him. Libya subsequently plunged into a civil war that still lingers nearly seven years later.

In London with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby on Wednesday, President Buhari said the arms Mr Gaddafi provided to his supporters had filtered into Nigeria where they are now being used to fuel killings across the north-central.

The problem is even older than us, Mr Buhari said of killings. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of armed gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region.

These gunmen were trained and armed by Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram.

Muammar Gaddafi

Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons, Mr Buhari said.

He once again dismissed claims that the attacks might have tribal or religious undertone because they largely occurred at Christian-dominated and minority tribes areas, saying those propagating the assertion are doing so for political gains.

The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions, Mr Buhari said.

The president has faced criticism from for his response in combating the crisis headlong.

Former Nigerian leaders Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida have criticised Mr Buhari for not demonstrating the capacity to contain the killings, asking him not to run again in 2019. They had also been joined by Theophilus Danjuma, a former chief of army staff, who admonished citizens to defend themselves rather than wait for security agencies.

Mr Danjuma said the Nigerian security agencies are complicit in the killings, saying many tribes may be wiped out if they wait for federal authorities to protect them.

Both Mr Buhari and the military have separately issued statements condemning Mr Danjumas remarks and imploring Nigerians not to arm themselves.

The killings, especially in Benue, Nasarawa and Taraba States, have resulted in over a thousand deaths this year alone. They have also caused humanitarian emergencies in those states, with each of them running camps for hundreds of thousands of internally-displaced persons.

Mr Buhari has long implied that the attackers are foreigners and not herdsmen, contrary to the accounts of villagers who insist they are being killed by herders.

In the past, Fulani leaders have openly claimed responsibility for killings hundreds of villagers, but said they were provoked by the wanton rustling of their livestock.

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Following the killings in Benue in early January, leaders of the group in the state vowed that there would be no peace unless the anti-open grazing law being implemented in the state is immediately abolished.

That position has been repeatedly reechoed by senior government officials, including the Minister of Defence Mansur Dan Ali and the Inspector-General of Police Ibrahim Idris.

Security analysts expressed concerns that Mr Buhari might not have a good grasp of the crisis, despite how frequent it has manifested in recent months.

Unfortunately, the president appears to be misinformed, said security analyst Cheta Nwanze.

Mr Nwanze, head of SBM Intelligence in Lagos, said while it is true that some of the arms in Libya have found their ways into Nigeria following the death of Mr Gaddafi, there is little evidence to support the assertion that they are being used in the north-central killings.

Most arms from Libya that have been tracked end up with Boko Haram by way of NDjamena in Chad, Mr Nwanze said.

He said the arms being used in the north-central have been linked to previously intercepted weapons by the Nigerian government.

On the assertion that the killers are not herdsmen or Fulani, Mr Nwanze said the president may need to reassess his statement because leaders of cattle breeders association have repeatedly claimed responsibility for deadly attacks or warned of impending ones in the past.

Another security expert who weighed in on the presidents comments with PREMIUM TIMES Thursday morning was Mike Ejiofor, a former director at the State Security Service (SSS).

It is really unfortunate that the president would go outside to tell the terrorists are coming from Libya, he said. We have no borders with Libya and there are no similar senseless killings in other countries which have borders with Libya.

Mr Ejiofor expressed a splinter support for the presidents assertion that the killers might not be herdsmen, saying he believes some of them are actually terrorists taking advantage of the fluid security situation to further polarise the country.ADVERTISEMENT

The Senate on Thursday mandated its committee on police affairs and national security intelligence to investigate a bank robbery in Offa, Kwara State, that led to the death of many.

PREMIUM TIMES reported the attack last week on five banks and a police station in the town. The police later said 17 people including eight police officers were killed. The affected banks, which have since been shut, and the police are yet to disclose the amount stolen by the robbers.

The senators on Thursday urged the affected banks to resume operations to forestall a crippling of commercial activities in the town.

The resolutions followed a motion by, Rafiu Ibrahim, the senator from the district where the robbery was carried out.

Mr Ibrahim said, The senate notes with dismay the deadly attack on five deposit money banks in Offa on the 5th of April 2018 in which nine policemen and nine others, including passersby lost their lives during the attack as confirmed by the Nigeria Police.

The deposit money banks include; Union Bank, Eco Bank, GtBank, First Bank, Zenith Mank and Micro Finance Bank which suffered huge financial losses after the attack.

The senate also notes that the robbers, numbering about 30 shattered bank buildings, blew up bank vaults with dynamite and explosives, terrorise workers, customers, passers-by within the vicinity and carted away a substantial amount of money. The senate is concerned that this is the fourth time within ten years that such organised attack will be carried out within the area, but this one was more severe.

The senate is worried that if such attack is allowed to continue, it may lead to closure of financial institutions in the town and this may cripple commercial activities.

Adopting other resolutions, the senate directed the Inspector-General of Police to reinforce security measures to secure lives and properties in the area.

The senate also urged the federal government through the Nigerian Army to consider setting up an operation base for Kwara south senatorial district.The police in Kaduna have identified a serving Nigerian senator as a person of interest in an ongoing homicide investigation.

Consequently, Austin Iwar, the police commissioner in the state has written to the senator asking him to appear on April 30 at the Command Headquarters in Kaduna for questioning.

This is in connection with a case of criminal conspiracy and culpable homicide transferred to this office by 1 Division, Nigerian Army, Kaduna, alongside with exhibit audio CD in which your name was mentioned by the principal suspect, Mr Iwar said in a letter to Mr Sani, APC-Kaduna Central.

PREMIUM TIMES obtained a copy of the letter on Thursday.

This is to enable us fairly and timely conclude investigation into the matter, Mr Iwar concluded in the letter addressed to Mr Sani through the Clerk of the National Assembly. A copy of the letter was forwarded to Senate President Bukola Saraki.

The specific case for which the senator is being sought is also not immediately ascertained. But there have been several reports of violent confrontations between Mr Sanis supporters and loyalists of Nasir el-Rufai, the Kaduna State governor.

The crisis has also left the APC chapter in the state factionalised.

The police commissioner told PREMIUM TIMES that the case was not politically-motivated.

A case was transferred to me and I am handling the case, Mr Iwar said, adding that he would not give further details on the matter.

The matter is currently under investigation and we dont think we have reached a stage yet where we could inform the public about it, he added.

Mr Iwar also said Mr. Sani will not be detained if he honoured the invitation, saying the police would have picked him up at the Senate if they had any intention of arresting him.

Mr. Sani blamed the Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, for the move by the police.

He alleged that the Kaduna government had concluded plans to frame him up with a murder case.

The state government is using the instrumentality of the police to carry out this act, Mr Sani told PREMIUM TIMES Thursday afternoon.

He said the plan was revealed to him through a letter already prepared by the police inviting him for interrogation on the said murder case.

There is an attempt to frame me up with a murder case by the Kaduna State Government using the police. A letter has been written from the office of the Commissioner of Police office but it has not been delivered to us, he said.

Mr Sani said the case for which he was invited by the police is already before the court.

This is a case that is before the court of law. The governor wrote the judge expressing his interest in the case, he said.

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He alleged that Mr El-Rufai wrote the judge handling the case to express interest in the case.

Mr Sani also sent a copy of the letter dated February 26 to PREMIUM TIMES.

A spokesperson for the Kaduna state governor, Samuel Aruwan, declined comments.Governor Jibrilla Bindow of Adamawa has endorsed the leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) from ward to state levels in the state, saying, no more congress in this state.

Mr Bindow announced the endorsement when the party leaders paid him a solidarity visit at Government House, Yola.

The governor said that the endorsement became necessary due to their patience and support to the APC administration in the state.

The governors move may be seen as a way to ensure his control of the part executives especially as he faces the challenge of an ex-governor of the state, Murtala Nyako, who has called for congresses.

The APC had last week resolved to hold elective congresses and national convention after President Muhammadu Buhari advised its leaders to jettison their decision to extend the tenure of the executive committees at all levels by one year.

Mr Buhari said this was to prevent the party from being punished by the court for violating the provisions of its own constitution.

But on Thursday, Governor Bindow said that the party in Adamawa would only replace executive members who have died, insisting that all the others must be retained.

He also said he supported tenure extension of the tenure of the party executives in order to avoid acrimony in the party, and not out of fear the partys structure could be hijacked by some people.

I must thank members of the APC executives from the ward to the state levels because you have demonstrated faith in our administration. For this, I have endorsed you for another tenure of four years.

I will also insist that only those who have passed on will be replaced but all others should be retained.

I am carrying on with this advocacy with the view to pay you back for your support to my administration and as the leader of the party in the state. I will make sure that I uphold my promise to you.

 I am one of the governors that supported tenure elongation and this was done in good faith, to forestall crisis in our party and not that I am afraid of losing grip of the party to some group of individuals, Mr Bindow said.

He urged the party leaders in the state to discourage money politics and go for credibility, adding, I feel that I have not disappointed the party and the people of the state.

The governor thanked the APC leaders for their support and assured that he would not let the party and the people of the state down.

Earlier, Ibrahim Bilal, state chairman of the party, thanked the governor for standing by the executives in challenging times.

Mr Bilal said the party would support the governors re-election bid and ensure that he continues to fly the flag of the party.

The state party chairman announced the death of the acting local government chairman of the party in Maiha, John Batam, and called for a minute silence in his honour.

APC at a meeting of its National Executive Committee (NEC) last year extended by one year the tenure of the executives of the party from the national down to the ward levels.

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The party, following President Buharis advice, later reversed the decision and announced it would conduct congresses and national convention to elect new party leaders.ADVERTISEMENT

Governor Darius Ishaku of Taraba State on Thursday threw his weight behind the recent statement by a former Chief of Army Staff, Theophilus Danjuma, which accused the army of colluding with armed bandits and a called for self- defence by citizens.

Mr Ishaku disclosed this when he hosted the probe panel set up by the Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, a lieutenant general, to investigate the recent allegation made against the Nigerian armed forces by the elder statesman.

We in Taraba are fully behind what Danjuma said on self defence.

As an ex-army general with a high reputation, I think that call deserves to be looked into and not to be criticised because he spoke the minds of everyone in Taraba and indeed all Nigerians, he said.

He described the coming of the committee as timely, assuring them of a conducive working environment to succeed in their assignment.

Mr Ishaku explained that the frequent attacks by herdsmen led to the promulgation of the open grazing prohibition and ranches establishment law after consultations with stakeholders.

The governor decried the activities of soldiers in Taraba State who, he noted, were going about mistreating citizens and disarming them of petty arms while ignoring those with lethal weapons.

He debunked the claim by the military that his government did not complain about all that was happening in the state.

According to him, he had visited the president, the vice president, as well as written several letters on the alarming situation and therefore the claim couldnt have been true.

Earlier, Chairman of the Army Probe Panel, John Nimyel, a retired major general, sympathised with the governor and people of Taraba over the loss of lives and property in the state.

He told the governor that they were in the state to ascertain facts on the comments made by Mr Danjuma, a retired lieutenant general, so as to enable them come up with ways the army can serve the country better.

According to him, members of the committee were selected based on their past track records of excellence and pledged the determination of the panel to be unbiased, free and transparent in their assignment.

The statements by Danjuma has indeed cut short the reputation of the Armed Forces of Nigeria which cannot be ignored.

If the Nigerian Army will continue to earn the trust and respect of the people of the state and indeed Nigerians it must investigate such a statement.

We will do our best and visit all the three senatorial districts and interface with traditional rulers, stakeholders and government representatives so as to come out with a decision as regards the allegations raised by the General, he said.

(NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

The World Bank-assisted Fadama III Additional Financing II programme in Yobe State has spent N195 million on 133 rural infrastructure, food and projects for rehabilitation of communities affected by the Boko Haram insurgency.

The Project Coordinator, Musa Garba, made the disclosure in Nangere, Yobe on Thursday while inaugurating market stalls in Sabon Garin Nangere.

Mr Garba said the intervention, under the World Banks Northeast food assistance and emergency support programme, would support the communities to reclaim their means of livelihood.

He said 77 out of 133 rural infrastructure projects had been completed to boost socio-economic activities in the communities.

The balance of 56 projects had reached advanced stage of completion to improve the lives of the people and the communities, he said.

The project coordinator said the projects, which include feeder roads, market stores, drains, culverts and embankments in flood-prone communities, were demand-driven and based on the needs of the people.

He said N52 million was spent on infrastructure, food support and livelihood support programmes in Nangere Local Government Area.

He added that N57 million was spent on support programmes in Potiskum and N86 million in Fika local government areas.

Baba Langawa, Chairman, Nangere Local Government Area, assured that the council would ensure the maintenance of the infrastructure for the benefit of the people.

He praised Fadama III for executing projects that had direct bearing on the lives of the people, saying these projects and programmes will certainly add value to the lives of the people.

(NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

Governor Abubakar Bello of Niger State, has sought a resolution of the State House of Assembly in support of N21.5bn Sukuk Bond Issuance in multiple and consecutive tranches.

In a letter read by the Speaker, Ahmed Marafa on the floor of the House on Thursday, Mr Bello noted that the bond was part of a third funding plan to rehabilitate and reactivate essential infrastructure in the state.

He stated that the first funding plan involved provision of direct budgetary funds allocation from state resources, while the second funding plan would be a Public Private Partnership (PPP) arrangement.

The government of Niger State is committed to the objective of transforming the state so as to set it firmly on the path of sustainable growth and development.

Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) have been working on the improvement of health care services, development of trailer parks as well as diversification of sales income system through the development of a mining city.

After due consideration, it has been decided that in terms of cost, speed and ease of implementation, the most appropriate option for the third funding plan is through Sukuk Bond Issuance and external funding from multilateral development banks.

Therefore, the third phase entails procurement of Sukuk Bond to fund Minna township roads, Kontagora, General Hospital Suleja, trailer parks, and Kontagora water supply schemes.

Others are Mariga Ultra-Modern Market and Mining City, with three mineral processing centres across the state, Bello said.

The governor maintained that the proposed projects; road infrastructure, health care services, industrial parks and water supply schemes were key aspects of his administrations priority programmes.

According to him, the projects will enhance commercial activities, improve socio-economic welfare and internal revenue generation capacity of the state.

The planned projects will improve economic productivity and internal revenue generation capacity of the state.

This will therefore, ensure that the state continues to generate growth and employment while reducing poverty.

The Speaker consequently set up a six-member special committee led by Abdulmalik Kabir to interface with institutions and report back to the House on April 24.

(NAN)The Plateau State Government has threatened to sack 155 teachers recently found to be holding appointments in both the local and state governments.

Vonjen Lar, Chairman, Plateau State Teachers Service Commission, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Jos that the teachers were among the 834 engaged in February 2017, to teach in secondary schools.

After employing them, we found that they were already engaged as primary school teachers by the State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB).

By their attitude, the teachers have violated the civil service rule number 030402 (q), which frowns at holding two government appointments at the same time.

What these teachers have done is a gross misconduct punishable by outright dismissal.

It is a common law that you cant be working in two places within the same civil service. You have to resign one before taking up the other. It is criminal to keep the two, he said.

He said government was categorical about this, while advertising the teaching job.

When we advertised the vacancies, we were categorical that anyone already working with either the local or state government need not apply because it will be against the civil service rule.

Surprisingly, when we completed the recruitment processes, we discovered that 90 permanent teachers and 65 ad-hoc teachers already engaged by SUBEB were among those we employed to teach in our secondary schools, he said.

He said the teachers were discovered when a soft copy of the names of the 834 newly employed teachers was sent to SUBEB for scrutiny.

Some of the teachers have requested the transfer of their services from the local government to state government; clearly, this is not possible because of the embargo placed on such transfers by the government.

If they will be allowed to switch, it will not be on transfer basis; they can only come in as fresh employees.

We have asked the affected teachers to fill forms indicating an agreement with our terms or remain where they were before we engaged them, he said.

He described the attitude as bad, pointing out that schools would resume next week and be hit by the confusion.

Schools will resume next week and face the crisis of teachers not being at their duty posts because they are neither here nor there. Can you imagine the effect of that situation on the pupils or students?

Teachers are supposed to be people of high integrity, but these ones are fraudulent, he alleged.

Mr Lar advised the affected teachers to report to the commission in their own interest.

(NAN)

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Bayelsa State Government has commenced plans to redeploy its workforce with the sack of about 222 staffers from its radio station and newspaper.

About 86 staff of New Waves Newspaper and 136 others from Radio Bayelsa were affected in the exercise.

The Bayelsa Council of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) on Wednesday condemned the move, describing it as a sack. A statement from the NUJ urged the state government to review its decision.

The sack was sequel to a circular from the office of the Head of Service to heads of media parastatals to redeploy excess staff.

The statement signed by the Bayelsa NUJ Chairman, John Angese and Secretary, Stanley Imgbi noted that the unions and labour leaders in the state and affected establishments were not privy to the exercise

The NUJ argued that the parameter for determining the desired staff strength was not specified and shrouded in secrecy adding that the best hands have been affected in the exercise that jettisoned competence.

According to the statement, the output of the media houses would nosedive as professionalism and competence were not factored in while compiling the list.

The union maintained that the directive to stop salaries of the affected workers from the April 2018 was in breach of civil service rules and labour laws.

It said that seizure of the salaries of the affected staff and holding it in the state treasury clearly shows that the exercise is not redeployment as presented by government.

The union leaders urged the government to review the decision due to the economic implication on the affected workers as most of them are bread winners of their families.

Meanwhile, the Bayelsa government said the ongoing public service reforms in the state was to eliminate endemic employment racketeering and pay roll fraud in its public sector.

Deputy Governor, John Jonah, assured the workers that they would not be thrown into the labour market adding that the exercise would only affect those involved in employment fraud, redundancy and truancy.

Bayelsa government had on November 7, 2017 announced that it withheld the October, 2017 salaries of about 4,202 civil servants suspected to be involved in irregularities.The Bayelsa State Government has announced the suspension of salaries of hundreds of workers, sparking outrage amid fears of a mass sack.

The government said excess staff were being considered for redeployment, but staff unions, including the Nigerian Union of Journalists, said at least 222 their members in the state radio and newspaper had been fired.

A memo signed by the head of service, Thomas Zidafomo, addressed to general manager of Bayelsa Newspaper Corporation, said the exercise was part of an ongoing public service reforms meant to eliminate endemic employment racketeering and payroll fraud.

The letter directed the management of the two media outlets to withhold and remit April salaries of affected workers to a special account at the accountant generals office.

The letter showed that 86 staff of New Waves Newspaper and 136 workers from the Radio Bayelsa were affected from the list so far released.

The Governor set up a committee to formulate an overall policy on staffing and funding of these parastatals in the state, the letter said.

Based on the recommendation of that committee, the government has directed that excess staff be deployed away from these parastatals with effect from April 2018.

You are directed to notify the affected staff of this decision and deposit their monthly salaries in the State Unpaid Salary Account at the Office of Accountant-General commencing with April 2018.

The affected staff should be advised to present themselves to the Committee on Screening of Staff to verify their area of professional competence for deployment exercise, the head of service stated.

Last year, the government said it had withheld the October salary of 4,202 civil servants suspected to be involved in irregularities.

The new decision has seen apprehensive staff accuse the government of plotting to sack them, dismissing its claim of redeploying excess workers.

The mood amongst workers at the Bayelsa State Secretariat on Wednesday was gloomy and tense as workers discussed the development.

Although most of the civil servants were reluctant to make comments on the policy for fear of victimization, some of the affected workers faulted the process adopted by the state government.

What makes this one suspicious is the issue of retrenchment before giving employers the chance the justify their expertise, one government journalist said.

I am a reporter and my name was listed and I was asked to meet a committee to prove my professional competence for redeployment when my name has been expunged from the payroll, is that not a sack?

The labour ethics gives the employer the right to hire and fire so if they must fire us, why not do it procedurally which will take care of end of service benefits rather than this approach ? another staff asked.

Tari Dounana, who is the chairman of the Bayelsa chapter of Trade Union Congress, said the labour movement in the state was worried about the suspension of workers salaries.

We are following the developments with keen interest on the impact of the reforms on the workforce and it should be done in line with labour guidelines; the redeployment of workers does not have to involve stopping salaries, he said. We are looking at the issue with a view to making a statement on the exercise.

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A statement issued by the state NUJ, signed by its chairman, John Angese, and secretary, Stanley Imgbi, said the unions and affected establishments were not privy to the exercise.

The union said the governments decision to withhold salaries was indicative the workers had been sacked.

The NUJ argued that the parameter for determining the desired staff strength was not specified and was shrouded in secrecy.

It said the seizure of salaries of the affected staff showed that the exercise was not redeployment as claimed by the government.

Editors Note: This report has been updated with clearer details of the positions taken by the Bayelsa government and its workers.The Imo State Governor, Rochas Okorocha, on Thursday doled out a cash of N15.42 million to the 2017 Batch A, Stream 1 corps members deployed to the state as parting gift.

Mr Okorocha made the cash donation at the passing out ceremony of the 1,542 corps members held at the Heroes Square, Owerri.

He said the donation was in appreciation of the commitment and dedication of the corps members during their service year.

He said the NYSC in the state has made significant contributions to the success story of his Rescue Misson Initiative.

The governor said the corps members diligence, high sense of responsibility and exceptional determination displayed in their places of primary assignments, contributed to the socio-economic development of the state.

He advised the corps members to utilise what they had learnt during the service year to become entreprenuers and employers of labour.

Mr Okorocha also advised them to be good ambassadors of the state and Nigeria at large wherever they found themselves.

As you pass out from the scheme, I enjoin you to avoid mingling with mischief makers and other unpatriotic elements in the country that propagate terrorism, drug peddling, human trafficking and Advance Fee Fraud as a means of livelihood, he said.

He promised to provide additional accommodation to the scheme in the state that would house more than 2,000 corps members.

The governor also gave a cash award of N200,000 and automatic employment to the overall best outgoing corps member to any place of her choice.

The State NYSC Coordinator, Josephine Bakare, said that a total of 1,542 corps members, comprising 615 male and 927 female were deployed to the state.

Mr Bakare said that the outgoing corps members contributed to the socio-economic development of the state by carrying out enlightenment programmes extra-mural classes as well as skills acquisition programmes in various communities.

She commended the Imo State Governnent for its unflinching support to the scheme.

According to her, the Okorocha-led government had almost completed a twin-storey hostel building at the NYSC permanent orientation camp.

Mr Bakare urged the corps members not to forget all the knowledge, experience and skills they had acquired through the skills acquisition and entrepreneurship development programme of the scheme.

She disclosed that two corps members died in the course of the programme.

She added that while a corps member was rewarded for being outstanding, four others would be repeating the service year for absconding and six would have extension of between one and six months according to NYSC rule.

The high point of the event was the presentation of wheelchairs to three indigent and disabled persons from the three zones of the state by the Imo NYSC as part of its corporate social responsibility.

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The scheme also thanked the Old Boys Association of King Jaja College, Amaigbo, for building a three-bedroom corps members lodge at their Alma mater and urged other organisations and employers to emulate them.

(NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

The Minister of Mines and Steel, Kayode Fayemi, has officially notified the leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and governors elected on the platform of the party of his intention to contest the July 14 governorship election in Ekiti.

Mr Fayemi, who is the immediate past governor of Ekiti State, gave the notification on Thursday after a tour of local governments in the state.

A statement signed by his Special Adviser on Media, Yinka Oyebode, on Thursday said the minister would formally make his declaration on Saturday.

According to the statement, Mr Fayemis letter conveying his intention to run was addressed to the National Chairman of APC, John Oyegun; national leader of the party, Bola Tinubu; former Interim National Chairman of the party, Bisi Akande; all traditional rulers in Ekiti State; his colleagues in the Federal Executive Council (FEC); former and serving governors elected on APC platform, as well as prominent sons and daughters of Ekiti.

The minister had on April 2 hinted of his plan to run for the partys ticket during the quarterly meeting of the Ekiti APC leaders at his Isan Ekiti country home.

Mr Oyebode said the minister held meetings with local government and ward executives as well as elders of the party during the tour of the 16 local government areas.

The tour had kicked off on Monday in Efon Local Government, and ended in Oye Local Government on Thursday.

Mr Fayemi, in the letter said his decision to join the governorship race was informed by the need to join other patriots to rescue the state from the grip of the current insensitive and incompetent PDP-led administration, that had plunged the state and its people into unimaginable misery and poverty.

My mission in public life which has always centered on transforming the material conditions of our people has always revolved around these three imperatives  breaking the yoke of ignorance that keeps our people down; liberating them from ill-health and other limitations that restrain them from achieving their potentials; and breaking the stranglehold of poverty which keeps people from living full creative lives, he said.

In practical and policy terms, this for me has always meant prioritising social investments in education, healthcare and other social interventions that reduce the cost of living, while raising the quality of life.

The Vice Chairman, South-west, of the APC, Segun Oni, who served as governor before Mr Fayemi, is also seeking the APC ticket to run for governor.

The number of aspirants seeking the APC ticket has risen to about 35, raising fears that the contest might mark a dangerous turn for the primaries.

However, the party leadership had maintained that it would provide a level playing field for all aspirants as a step to minimising discontentment during and after the primaries.ADVERTISEMENT

The Oyo State Governor, Abiola Ajimobi, has directed butchers in the 11 local governments of Ibadan land to relocate to the multi-billion naira central abattoir located in Amosun village, Akinyele Local Government, Ibadan, latest by the end of April.

A statement from the governors media office said Mr. Ajimobi gave the directive during a stakeholders meeting held at the House of Chiefs, Secretariat, Ibadan, on Thursday.

The butchers association was led to the meeting by the Southwest Coordinator, Biliaminu Elesinmeta; and the State Chairman, Azeez Alagunfon.

Apart from its facilities that would promote the hygiene of the consumers of meat, the governor said that the move was also capable of ending the incessant clashes between herders and farmers.

He said the meeting was specifically called to find a lasting solution to issues surrounding the relocation of butchers in the state capital to the central abattoir and to dispel the misgivings about the project.

Mr. Ajimobi explained that the abattoir was a joint venture among a private establishment, C & E Consulting Ltd, the state government, the 11 LGs and 14 Local Council Development Areas in Ibadan land, as well as the butchers.

He stressed that the private partners would have 50 per cent share; the LGs and LCDAs would have 36 per cent; state government, 10 per cent; while the butchers would have per cent in the ownership structure.

We plan to develop your business through the central abattoir. I told those in charge of the arrangement that the butchers, state government, LGs and LCDAs and our private partners should co-own the facility, he said.

We are sure that the crisis between the farmers and herdsmen will not arise again, because cows will now be transported here directly instead of our towns and villages where grazing on farmlands had been generating tension.

Im also happy that this arrangement will bring about a change in the way butchers handle meat and it will improve the hygiene of the business. The facility is going to have health and sanitary officers that will ensure strict compliance with the basic hygiene of meat handling.

So effective from May, we must actualize this project. A committee comprising of all stakeholders will start meeting immediately and I shall call for another meeting before the end of this month.

The governor also informed the butchers that each cow butchered at the central abattoir would attract a fee of N3,500, which will cover the use of the facilities at the centre. He added that the state had entered into an agreement with the private investors to use the facility for 30 years, after which the total ownership would be transferred to the butchers.

Mr. Ajimobi appealed for support and understanding of the butchers to comply with the relocation order, on the premise that the facility had suffered neglect for too long due to unresolved issues among the stakeholders.

The statement said leaders of the butchers expressed gratitude to the governor for allaying their fears about the project, and for the support of the government to the association in the area of financial empowerment and donation of a new bus to members.

Mr. Elesinmeta, however, appealed to the state government to reduce the N3,500 cost attached to each butchered cow in the new facility, while he also solicited logistic support for the members located in different parts of Ibadan .For the New World Order, a world government is just the beginning. Once in place they can engage their plan to exterminate 80% of the world's population, while enabling the "elites" to live forever with the aid of advanced technology. For the first time, crusading filmmaker ALEX JONES reveals their secret plan for humanity's extermination: Operation ENDGAME.

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Watch as Jones and his team track the elusive Bilderberg Group to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III.





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Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words.



DUBLIN, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "India Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) Market Overview, 2018-2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

With the Make in India initiative, more foreign companies have entered in India. The pricing strategy of foreign companies is to manufacture locally in India, and supply at Chinese prices to capture the market. Government support for foreign brand is helping them to gradually invade India UPS market.

The India UPS Market has been very competitive over the last few years. Price war between Indian manufacturer and foreign players is fierce in UPS Market. The market is very fragmented and the Industry associations are not very effective in streamlining the industry or the customer's buying procedures. Customers are getting more brands agnostic and focusing more on prices. Government orders have a high procurement costs which is very unfortunate for OEMs in UPS market. On other hand, foreign players in India UPS market with better dealer segments and Retail channels are becoming a bigger challenge for the Indian UPS Manufacturers.

According to the report, the UPS solution is ever increasing due to the rising demand for electricity amongst consumers and enterprises as well as the need for quality power. The India UPS industry has seen much interest from international players, while some big foreign names are operating through wholly owned Indian subsidiaries; there are several others that have chosen the inorganic route to gain entry into the market.

China as a nation is a worldwide center for most items (of even MNC brands) that one can envision today. With a few remote brands getting their items made in China for worldwide appropriation, China is and will keep on being the pioneer in assembling volumes and costs. Additionally, China being such a tremendous assembling center, the hardware segments are accessible to them at low costs and their assembling ecosystem is superb.

India and the normal Indian producer with the assets accessible to them will think that it's exceptionally hard to coordinate Chinese costs in the mass market items. The significant difficulties that UPS makers confront are the minimal effort imports from China and Taiwan, and additionally expanding raw material costs. As end clients have particular applications and diverse necessities, it is vital for providers to offer redid answers for survive and manage high development in this furiously aggressive market. Shoddy imports from China and Taiwan, paralleled by mounting raw material costs, will posture noteworthy difficulties to Indian UPS manufacturers. The expansion in battery costs, combined with rising labour costs, has brought about UPS providers attempting to keep up their edges.

The main drawback for Indian companies to make UPS in India is the lack of technology. 80-90% of High frequency UPS selling in India is imported not manufactured. Even there are more than 800 UPS companies in India, no one have the right technology. To support Indian UPS Manufacturer, government should have to source or develop indigenous high frequency technology and provide this to all UPS manufacturers. This will strengthen the UPS manufacturer in India and to stop cheap imports and price war in between foreign and local players.

Companies Mentioned



Vertiv Energy Private Limited

Schneider Electric India Private Limited

Eaton Power Quality Private Limited

Delta Power Solution ( India ) Private Limited

) Private Limited Hitachi Hi-Rel Power Electronics Private Limited

Swelect Energy Systems Limited

Luminous Power Technologies Private Limited

Microtek International private limited

V-Guard Industries Limited

Su-Kam Power Systems Limited

Key Topics Covered



1. Executive Summary



2. Global Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Market Outlook

2.1. Market Size & Forecast

2.2. Market Share



3. India Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Market Outlook

3.1. Market Size & Forecast

3.2. Market Share

3.3. Less Than 5 KVA UPS Market Outlook

3.4. 5.1 KVA to 30 KVA UPS Market Outlook

3.5. 30.1 KVA to 100 KVA UPS Market Outlook

3.6. Above 100 KVA UPS Market Outlook

3.7. India Consumption of Electricity

3.8. Pricing Analysis



4. Companies Profiled

4.1. Eaton Power Quality Private Limited

4.2. Delta Power Solutions (India) Private Limited

4.3. Hitachi Hi-Rel Power Electronics Private Limited

4.4. Luminous Power Technologies Private Limited

4.5. Microtek International Private Limited



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/93ws98/2018_india?w=5

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com

DUBLIN, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "2018 Luxembourg Telecom Market Analysis and Outlook Report" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The research work strategically analyzes Luxembourg telecommunications market, examining the recent trends, drivers and challenges across diverse dimensions such as growth, demand, pricing, competition, consumer behaviour, infrastructure, policies and others.



The study also provides in-depth analysis of segment wise telecommunications including mobile, fixed line and fixed broadband services. The number of subscribers and penetration rates are forecast for each of the sub-segment including mobile, fixed landline and broadband segments from 2005 to 2025.



Luxembourg telecommunication revenues, investment and infrastructure details are also covered in the report. Further, emerging business environment in Luxembourg together with comparison to five competitive benchmark countries are included, to assess the country's prominence on regional front.



On the competitive analysis front, leading companies along with their market shares are identified. Further, key business strategies of market leaders, their tariffs and SWOT profiles are included. In addition, the research work forecasts the demographic and economic drivers of Luxembourg that enable strategy planners to formulate their pricing and branding strategies.



The report also includes latest telecommunication market developments, mergers, acquisitions and launches, spectrum availability, tenders and other aspects are analyzed.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Executive Summary



2. Luxembourg Telecom Market - Strategic Analysis



3. Luxembourg Telecom Market Outlook



4. Luxembourg Telecom Competitive Environment



5. Luxembourg Telecom Industry Benchmarking



6. Luxembourg Economic Outlook to 2025



7. Luxembourg Demographic Outlook to 2025



8. Competitor Analysis



9. Recent Industry Developments



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/z6wl39/2018_luxembourg?w=5

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com

PHILADELPHIA, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Aberdeen Israel Fund, Inc. (NYSE American: ISL) (the "Fund"), a closed-end equity fund, announced today an increase to the amount of the distribution previously announced. On April 9, 2018, the Fund announced that it would pay a distribution of US$1.09161 per share on April 25, 2018 to all shareholders of record as of April 19, 2018.

Instead, the amount of the distribution per share payable on April 25, 2018 to all shareholders of record as of April 19, 2018 will be US$1.11131. This distribution is comprised entirely of net realized long-term capital gains. The record date and the payment date of such distribution are unchanged.

This distribution is being made in respect to the upcoming reorganization which was approved by shareholders on April 2, 2018. As was previously noted in the Fund's Joint Proxy/Prospectus dated February 1, 2018, prior to the reorganization closing date, the Fund will declare a distribution that will have the effect of distributing all of the Fund's investment company taxable income, if any, through the Closing Date, all of its net capital gains, if any, through the Closing Date, and all of its net tax-exempt interest income, if any, through the Closing Date. The distribution will be paid in all cash with no reinvestment option.

In January 2019, a Form 1099-DIV will be sent to shareholders, which will state the amount and composition of distributions and provide information with respect to their appropriate tax treatment for the 2018 calendar year.

The Fund is managed and advised by Aberdeen Asset Managers Limited. The Fund's shares trade on the NYSE American under the symbol "ISL".

You should not draw any conclusions about the Fund's investment performance from the amount of this distribution.

Closed-end funds are traded on the secondary market through one of the stock exchanges. The Fund's investment return and principal value will fluctuate so that an investor's shares may be worth more or less than the original cost. Shares of closed-end funds may trade above (a premium) or below (a discount) the net asset value (NAV) of the fund's portfolio. There is no assurance that the Fund will achieve its investment objective.

If you wish to receive this information electronically,

please contact [email protected]

aberdeenisl.com

SOURCE Aberdeen Israel Fund, Inc.Achieving Certification as Largest B Corp in the World and Unveiling New Name: Danone North America Celebrates First Anniversary with Two Major MilestonesHILLSBOROUGH, N.C., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Adameve.com (https://www.adameve.com), America's most trusted source for adult products, is interested in all facets of sexuality. In their latest infographic, they take a close look at today's trends with teens and sex, and the results may surprise you.

This informational bulletin provides data on everything from the average age of first intercourse to contraceptive use among teens, as well as thoughts on who should teach sex education to teens.According to report by China's State Information Center, Chinese house sharing market grew by 70.6% in 2017, achieving an accelerated speed of growth. "After more than 5 years of development, house sharing has taken deep root in China, while it is also penetrating rapidly to lower tier cities and the countryside", Chen Chi commented. On Xiaozhu's platform, as Chen pointed out, tier 2 cities like Tianjin, Chongqing and Changsha were among the fastest expanding markets. When speaking about the profitability of sharing economy platforms in China, Chen revealed that Xiaozhu has developed a healthy and profitable business model.

When asked about Airbnb's recent active movements in China, Chen said this is an example of how foreign companies are learning from Chinese companies, in terms of localization and business innovation. Xiaozhu's competitiveness, as Chen emphasized, lies in strong offline service capability, which imposes high requirements for the teams' philosophy and execution. The company has devoted great effort in the construction of service system and infrastructure since the very beginning, which is different from its US competitor.

Founded in 2012, Xiaozhu.com is among China's largest house-sharing platforms. In November 2017, the company announced it had raised $120 million in its latest financing round, led by the Jack Ma-backed Yunfeng Capital.

SOURCE Xiaozhu.comVANCOUVER, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Alexco Resource Corp. (NYSE American: AXU, TSX: AXR) ("Alexco" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the appointment of Karen McMaster to the Board of Directors (the "Board") effective immediately. Ms. McMaster's extensive history in the mining industry has been primarily focussed on legal counsel for environmental matters as well as exploration and mine development. In addition to law Ms. McMaster has a MBA in Sustainability and has occupied a number of roles including legal counsel & investor relations advisor for Caledonia Mining Corporation, legal counsel for Rio Algom Limited and internal auditor for BHP Billton PLC.

Clynt Nauman, Alexco CEO and Chairman commented, "We are very pleased to have Karen join our Board. With over 25 years of experience working in the mining sector focussing on environmental and sustainability matters as well as First Nations and community work, we look forward to Karen being an important contributor to the growth of our overall business including our environmental business, AEG."

About Alexco

Alexco owns 100% of the high-grade Keno Hill Silver District ("KHSD") in Canada's Yukon. Alexco published an updated Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA") in March 2017 which anticipates the sequential development of four high grade silver deposits over an eight year mine life to produce more than a million tonnes with an average grade of 843 grams per tonne ("g/t"), 3.3% lead and 4.2% zinc. Silver production is anticipated to be approximately 3.5 million ounces per year.

Employing a unique business model, the Alexco Environmental Group also provides mine-related environmental services, remediation technologies and reclamation and mine closure services to both government and industry clients.

Please visit the Alexco website at www.alexcoresource.com

Some statements ("forward-looking statements") in this news release contain forward-looking information concerning Alexco's anticipated results and developments in Alexco's operations in future periods, planned exploration and development of its properties, plans related to its business and other matters that may occur in the future, made as of the date of this news release. Forward-looking statements may include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to future remediation and reclamation activities, future mineral exploration, the estimation of mineral reserves and mineral resources, the realization of mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates, future mine construction and development activities, future mine operation and production, the timing of activities and reports, the amount of estimated revenues and expenses, the success of exploration activities, permitting time lines, requirements for additional capital and sources and uses of funds. Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, risks related to actual results and timing of exploration and development activities; actual results and timing of mining activities; actual results and timing of environmental services activities; actual results and timing of remediation and reclamation activities; conclusions of economic evaluations; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; future prices of silver, gold, lead, zinc and other commodities; possible variations in mineable resources, grade or recovery rates; failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry; First Nation rights and title; continued capitalization and commercial viability; global economic conditions; competition; and delays in obtaining governmental approvals or financing or in the completion of development activities. Forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions that management believes are reasonable at the time they are made. In making the forward-looking statements included in this news release, Alexco has applied several material assumptions, including, but not limited to, the assumption that Alexco will be able to implement the restructuring without negative consequences, Alexco will be able to raise additional capital as necessary, that the proposed exploration and development will proceed as planned, and that market fundamentals will result in sustained silver, gold, lead and zinc demand and prices. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Alexco expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation.

SOURCE Alexco Resource Corp.

Related Links

www.alexcoresource.com

NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Algomizer Group, specializing in the online marketing field, announces today the findings of the dedicated blockchain and ICO taskforce the company had appointed to evaluate its ICO.

According to estimates made by the taskforce, the addition of a new blockchain layer to technologies developed or acquired by the company, as opposed to the development of a new product altogether, greatly increases the ICO's success potential. Such addition is highly appealing, according to the advisors, since typically, ICOs feature the development of brand new products, which involves great technological risk. At Algomizer's ICO, this risk is almost eliminated. Moreover, Algomizer is a public company, with esteemed, experienced entrepreneur and leadership, compared to the relatively early stages of most companies holding ICOs, which will contribute to its success.

The added blockchain technology will improve the capabilities of the company's products by allowing users better tracking of their advertising and marketing budgets. The improvement will solves one of the greatest challenges in online services marketing: the link between the expense and the income attributed to it.

Algomizer intends to adopt the advisors' findings and offer a security token, an advanced token rapidly gaining popularity. The company takes into consideration the committee's interim report, as published by the Israel Securities Authority, and chooses to comply with the security token regulations in advance.

The framework of the ICO:

Algomizer will establish a subsidiary overseas to hold the ICO.

The security token will be offered to investors in accordance with existing provisions.

Each participant in the ICO will transparently identify themselves, the sources of their funds and/or payment methods and any other information required to fully convert their digital currency.

The company estimates that within the upcoming months, such tokens will be tradable on security token markets which, the company estimates, will be properly regulated. The company is aware of several entities which had reached out to American authorities requesting approvals for establishing designated marketplaces for such tokens.

Any security token holder will be entitled, after the vesting period ends and the technological development of blockchain for implementation in the company's products and its commercialization are completed, to convert their tokens to utility tokens of the company, which will be used within its systems. Using these tokens will offer users many benefits, including discounts, warranty and preferred payment terms.

The company aims for an amount between $ 15M and $ 50M , and it reserves the right to increase the maximal amount according to demand arising within the ICO.

and , and it reserves the right to increase the maximal amount according to demand arising within the ICO. As customary in ICOs, early participants will be offered additional bonus tokens.

Furthermore, the company will conduct a periodic reacquisition of tokens from their holders, from the blockchain system profits at a substantial scope.

Contact information:

[email protected]

+1-888-508-6010

http://www.algomizer.com

SOURCE Algomizer(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/676319/Cover_A4D.jpg )

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/629895/HIVENTURE_Logo.jpg )



Millennials with a game-changing idea for a Mobile App can upload the Video of their Elevator Pitch to www.appfordisruption.com . From here they will be routed to a dedicated YouTube Channel, where the Internet will democratically select the Top 100 by liking and interacting with them. Out of these, the final 14 entrepreneurs and coders selected by APPETITE FOR DISRUPTION's stakeholders will star and compete in this life changing adventure ( see Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/appfordisruption/ for more information).

APPETITE FOR DISRUPTION is the first truly Decentralised, Democratized and fully Interactive Reality Show of the Digital Age. The show will intimately capture the development of the 14 Digital Start-Ups, in a high-stakes race against time and the odds, from abstract concept into the No. 1 App in Stores; all within 3 months and while yielding a highly disruptive impact on society. The public can vote and invest directly in the young entrepreneurs thanks to a Gamified Crowdfunding App and a Decentralised Autonomous Organization.

Johan Schotte, Chairman of the JOHAN SCHOTTE FOUNDATION, Film Producer and Director of HIVENTURE MEDIA, states: "With the advent of AI and robotics appearing at an alarming rate around the world, and while youth unemployment is at an all-time high, the prospects of a better future, or any future at all, for young people joining the work force right now are seriously testing their hopes and self-esteem. I am very pleased that APPETITE FOR DISRUPTION addresses this problem head-on by offering a stage for young people to take their future in their own hands with a reality show like this one. Enabling and empowering young people to endow them with a better future is the differentiating factor of this series which is made possible by a great team, timing and technology."

About HIVENTURE MEDIA SA (Luxembourg):

HIVENTURE MEDIA is active in Luxembourg and Internationally with a slate of projects in the Production of Digital and Multimedia Content, focused on a selected few that are best suited to bridge the digital gap and appeal to Millennials utilizing their preferred channels. Packaged into content to be launched using guerrilla marketing tactics, HIVENTURE MEDIA is a Socially Disruptive Force to be reckoned with, bringing progressive change through positively reinforcing messages targeted to Tomorrow's Decision Makers.

For more Information, please Contact Mr. Thomas Sanne @ Hiventure Media SA: [email protected]

Web:

www.appfordisruption.com

www.hiventuremedia.com



Links Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/appfordisruption/

https://www.facebook.com/hiventuremedia/



This press release includes forward-looking statements that are based on information currently available to management, management's beliefs, as well as on a number of assumptions concerning future events. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of performance and are subject to a number of uncertainties and other factors, which could cause the actual results to differ materially from those currently expected. In providing forward-looking statements, the company does not intend, and is not undertaking any obligation or duty, to update these statements as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE HIVENTURE MEDIA SACANTON, Ohio, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Apple Growth Partners, an Akron-based accounting firm, has announced it will be opening a North Canton office location in May 2018. The new location will be on Belpar Street near Belden Village.

Apple Growth chairman Charles Mullen said that while the firm had been considering a physical presence there for some time, the decision to pull the trigger with a new office there primarily was motivated by staff.

This logical move for the CPA firm will further develop its presence along I-77 in a market it already knows well, and capitalize on further opportunities there in what marks the firm's 75th anniversary this year. The firm plans to market its work for manufacturing, construction, and real estate, particularly in the Stark County region.

Leading up to the new opening, Apple Growth completed two acquisitions in 2017: KPFF LLC of Beachwood in the first quarter and Schlabig & Associates of Akron and Kent in the latter half of the year.

Those deals have helped Apple Growth grow to 105 employees and $17.5 million in annual revenue, Mullen said. That's growth of more than 33 percent from the firm's revenue of $13.1 million in 2016 reported last year.

The new office will open with six current staff initially, and there are concerted plans to grow that presence through the coming years.

"We would like to have that office staffed with 12 people within a three-year period," Mullen said. "We want to outgrow that office and hopefully be up to 20 people there after five years."

By the end of 2018, Mullen is projecting the firm to have at least $18.5 million in revenue and 115 employees.

The Canton office is yet another move in the firm's "measured and conservative" growth plans, he added. Apple Growth is a couple years into a strategic plan for doubling the business by 2020, which means growing to about $20 million in revenues and 160 people.

For the full story on Apple Growth Partners new Canton location and what growth is in store for the team, visit: http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20180408/news/157491/apple-growth-partners-takes-bite-out-north-canton?#utm_medium=email&utm_source=ccl-morningroundup&utm_campaign=ccl-morningroundup-20180409&cci_test=morning

You can also learn more about Apple Growth Partners at www.applegrowth.com.

SOURCE Apple Growth Partners

Related Links

http://www.applegrowth.com

DENVER, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ashford University announced today that it is a National Honor Society Sponsor of the Denver Public Schools Foundation's 2018 Achieve Gala. This will be the third consecutive year it has sponsored the gala.

"The Achieve Gala showcases Denver Public Schools students' triumphs and demonstrates what is possible when our schools and students have access to greater opportunities," said Veronica Figoli, president and chief executive officer of the Denver Public Schools Foundation. "We are grateful for Ashford University's continued and comprehensive partnership, including their sponsorship of this important event. With their support, we are truly creating futures together."

"Expanding access to higher education is central to Ashford University's mission. We believe this begins when we build a strong foundation for a quality secondary education system," said Dr. Craig Swenson, president and chief executive officer of Ashford University. "We are proud to continue our partnership with the Denver Public Schools Foundation and are honored to support students in the Denver community."

Event details:

Date: Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Time: Reception at 5:30 p.m., dinner and program at 7 p.m.

Location: Hyatt Regency Denver at the Colorado Convention Center, 650 15th Street, Denver, CO 80202



The Denver Public Schools Foundation generates resources and champions public education on behalf of more than 200 schools in the Denver-area school system. The annual fundraiser brings the Denver community together to support the more than 90,000 students who attend Denver Public Schools, and features a reception, dinner, student performances, and speakers.

To learn more about the Denver Public Schools Foundation Achieve Gala, visit https://dpsfoundation.org/get-involved/achieve/.

About Ashford University

Where heritage meets innovation  that's Ashford University. At Ashford, students discover relevant degree programs, innovative technology, and cherished tradition. Ashford offers associates, bachelor's, and master's degree programs online, allowing students to balance life by providing the flexibility to do school work anywhere, anytime. For more information, please visit www.ashford.edu, www.facebook.com/ashforduniversity, or www.twitter.com/AshfordU.

Contact: Kathleen Park

858.513.9240 x11636  [email protected]

SOURCE Ashford University

Related Links

http://www.ashford.edu

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AVMA President Dr. Michael Topper released the following statement on today's introduction of the Farm Bill by the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture.

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) is encouraged by the committee taking this first step in the farm bill legislative process, and we applaud the inclusion of veterinary priorities. The bill's new authorizations and partial funding for a three-pronged approach to animal pest and disease prevention, detection, and rapid response is a great step forward towards a robust defense against future outbreaks. We appreciate the committee's work and are also pleased with the bill's reauthorization of programs that advance animal health and welfare through important research and data gathering.

We are continuing to analyze the bill and look forward to working with Congress to ensure these new programs are permanent and to protect veterinary priorities such as providing rural farmers with access to veterinary medicine. We're eager to aid both chambers of Congress in their timely passage of an effective and proactive Farm Bill.

The AVMA is the nation's leading representative of the veterinary profession, speaking for more than 91,000 member veterinarians across the United States who care passionately about protecting animal health, animal welfare and human health. Informed by its members' unique scientific training and knowledge, the AVMA advocates for policies that advance the practice of veterinary medicine and support the crucial work of veterinarians nationwide.

For More Information

Cat Ulrich

Phone: 202-289-3213

Cell: 202-740-1659

SOURCE American Veterinary Medical Association

Related Links

http://www.avma.org

In fact, 100 percent of the donations collected for the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund on National Pretzel Day will go toward building new Intrepid Spirit centers for military personnel who suffer from traumatic brain injury or psychological health conditions. All of the administrative costs of the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund are underwritten by the Fund's Board of Directors. In total, Ben's Soft Pretzels has raised more than $100,000 for the IFHF in the last few years.

The soft pretzel franchise will also be giving away a year's worth of free pretzels to one lucky fan via a contest app on its Facebook page. Pretzel fans can enter to win by filling out the entry form found at www.facebook.com/benspretzels and listing the name of their favorite service member.

"We are so proud to support an organization as incredible as the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund on our favorite day of the year. The success of the National Pretzel Day promotion is a testament to the generosity of our customers who understand the sacrifice of the men and women of the U.S. military and their families, and are eager to give back," said Scott Jones, CEO and co-founder of Ben's Soft Pretzels.

"We are so grateful to Ben's Soft Pretzels and all of their customers for their generosity and willingness to give back to our military heroes," said David Winters, President of the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. "We are proud to be able to say that 100% of every donation to the IFHF, every cent, directly goes to building these Intrepid Spirit centers."

About Ben's Soft Pretzels

Ben's Soft Pretzels is home of the World's Greatest Soft Pretzel. One bite will forever change your perception of what a pretzel should taste like. The nearly half-pound of fluffy, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth artisan pretzel goodness features imported German pretzel salt and 11 gourmet dipping sauces to choose from. For more information visit benspretzels.com.

Media Contact: Stephanie Krol, [email protected] or (773) 580-9726

SOURCE Ben's Soft Pretzels

Related Links

http://www.benspretzels.com

PORTLAND, Ore., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Boeing [NYSE: BA] has named its 2017 Supplier of the Year Award winners, recognizing 13 companies for the high-quality products, services and value they create for Boeing as well as its commercial airplanes; services; and defense, space and security customers.

Strong performance and close collaboration with these award-winning suppliers in 2017 helped Boeing realize record commercial airplane deliveries, growth in our services business and solid defense, space and security performance.

"Our continued success in an increasingly challenging business environment is driven in large part by having the aerospace industry's best team and talentand that includes the world's best supply chain," said Boeing Chairman, President and CEO Dennis Muilenburg. "This year's Supplier of the Year award recipients all share a passion for innovation, collaboration and sustained exceptional performancequalities we look for in all of our industry partners."

In 2017, Boeing spent almost $60 billion with nearly 13,000 suppliers from all 50 U.S. states and 57 countries. Supplier-provided components, services and engineering support make up approximately 65 percent of the cost of Boeing products.

"At a time marked by heightened competitive pressure, Supplier of the Year winners demonstrate an unrelenting dedication and commitment to Boeing and its global customers," said Jenette Ramos, senior vice president, Supply Chain & Operations. "They are among the best aerospace suppliers the world has to offer, and with their help, we will continue to lead the market by delivering value together throughout Boeing's second century."

Supplier of the Year Award winners for 2017:

Gary Jet Center  Gary, Ind., USA

Community Engagement Award  Supplier with demonstrated strategic investments, engagements and advocacy to strengthen the communities where we live and work.

Watson Furniture Group  Poulsbo, Wash., USA

Environment Award  Supplier with demonstrated leadership, outstanding performance or successful partnerships in a formal, measurable environmental program and culture of environmental leadership.

RB Enterprises  Mukilteo, Wash., USA

Collaboration Award  Supplier has worked with Boeing to achieve a shared goal in areas of innovation, process or product improvement.

Airgas USA, LLC  Radnor, Pa., USA

Safety Award  Supplier models a zero-injury mindset, investing in and implementing a formal, measurable safety program.

Cyient Limited  Hyderabad, India

Support & Services Award  Supplier provides outstanding support or services to Boeing, including engineering support, logistical support and/or site services.

Woodland Trade Co  Tacoma, Wash., USA

Production & Design Award  Supplier or institution has been instrumental in the design, modification or production of a product.

nLogic  Huntsville, Ala., USA

Outstanding Performance Award  Supplier has exhibited superior performance and has achieved Boeing Performance Excellence Award status for five consecutive years.

East/West Industries  Ronkonkoma, N.Y., USA

Global Supplier Diversity Award  Small diverse supplier that has worked with Boeing to achieve a shared goal.

Lepton Global Solutions  Vienna, Va., USA

Pathfinder Award  Supplier delivers outstanding efforts and/or improvements during the year.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation  Canberra, Australia

Technology Award  Supplier's outstanding performance in research and development has been instrumental in the introduction of new products to meet Boeing's current and future business needs.

Dell Computer Inc.  Round Rock, Texas, USA

Advantage Award  Supplier provides competitive advantage by exceeding cost performance goals and objectives for the product or services provided.

University of Cambridge  Cambridge, UK

Innovation Award  Supplier's outstanding performance in research and development efforts are instrumental in the introduction of new products to meet Boeing's current and future business needs.

Turkish Aerospace Industries  Ankara, Turkey

Alliance Award  Supplier contributes to Boeing's success by sharing risk and through long-term relationships that support and advance Boeing's strategic objectives.

Contact:

Tom Brabant

Supplier Management Communications

The Boeing Company

425-876-0287

[email protected]

SOURCE Boeing

Related Links

http://www.boeing.com

CHICAGO, April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Boeing [NYSE: BA] announced its investment in Reaction Engines Limited, a leader in advanced propulsion systems based in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. Reaction Engines' technology will contribute to the next generation of hypersonic flight and space access vehicles.

Reaction Engines is known for its Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE), a hybrid engine blending jet and rocket technology that is capable of Mach 5 in air-breathing mode and Mach 25 in rocket mode for space flight. As part of the SABRE program, Reaction Engines developed an ultra-lightweight heat exchanger that stops engine components from overheating at high speeds, thus improving access to hypersonic flight and space.

"As Reaction Engines unlocks advanced propulsion that could change the future of air and space travel, we expect to leverage their revolutionary technology to support Boeing's pursuit of hypersonic flight," said Steve Nordlund, vice president of Boeing HorizonX.

Founded by three propulsion engineers in 1989, Reaction Engines produces robust technical designs for advanced heat exchangers, air-breathing engines, and the vehicles they could power. These capabilities may lead to high-speed point-to-point transport that is cost-effective and sustainable.

"Boeing is a world-leader in many fields, bringing invaluable expertise in hypersonic research and space systems. I am thrilled and honored that Boeing HorizonX has chosen Reaction Engines as its first UK investment," said Mark Thomas, CEO of Reaction Engines. "This is a very exciting step that will contribute to our efforts to develop a commercial technology business and accelerate opportunities to further the future of air and space travel through SABRE technology."

Boeing HorizonX Ventures participated in this $37.3 million Series B funding round alongside Rolls-Royce Plc and BAE Systems. The Boeing HorizonX Ventures investment portfolio is made up of companies specializing in technologies for aerospace and manufacturing innovations, including autonomous systems, energy storage, advanced materials, augmented reality systems and software, machine learning, hybrid-electric propulsion and Internet of Things connectivity.

Boeing is the world's largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial jetliners and defense, space and security systems. A top U.S. exporter, the company supports airlines and U.S. and allied government customers in more than 150 countries.

Boeing employs more than 2,200 people across the UK at numerous sites, and in 2018 the company celebrates 80 years of partnership with British customers, suppliers, manufacturing, the Armed Forces and the air transport industry. Today, the UK remains a critically important market, supplier base and a source of some of the world's most innovative technology partners.

_________________________

Contact

Megan Hilfer

Boeing Communications

Office: +1 425-237-9375

Mobile: +1 206-465-5379

[email protected]

SOURCE Boeing

Related Links

http://www.boeing.com

DUBLIN, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "2018 Brazil Telecom Market Analysis and Outlook Report" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The research work strategically analyzes Brazil telecommunications market, examining the recent trends, drivers and challenges across diverse dimensions such as growth, demand, pricing, competition, consumer behaviour, infrastructure, policies and others.



The study also provides in-depth analysis of segment wise telecommunications including mobile, fixed line and fixed broadband services. The number of subscribers and penetration rates are forecast for each of the sub-segment including mobile, fixed landline and broadband segments from 2005 to 2025.



Brazil telecommunication revenues, investment and infrastructure details are also covered in the report. Further, emerging business environment in Brazil together with comparison to five competitive benchmark countries are included, to assess the country's prominence on regional front.



On the competitive analysis front, leading companies along with their market shares are identified. Further, key business strategies of market leaders, their tariffs and SWOT profiles are included. In addition, the research work forecasts the demographic and economic drivers of Brazil that enable strategy planners to formulate their pricing and branding strategies.



The report also includes latest telecommunication market developments, mergers, acquisitions and launches, spectrum availability, tenders and other aspects are analyzed.



Key Topics Covered:



Executive Summary

Key Findings

Brazil Telecom Market Overview

Brazil Telecom Market - Strategic Analysis

Trends Shaping the Future of Brazil Telecom Industry

Key strategies being Implemented by Market Leaders

Telecom Revenues in Brazil

Telecom Investments in Brazil

Market Drivers

Market Restraints

Brazil Telecom Market Outlook

Fixed Line Subscriber and Penetration Outlook

Mobile Subscriber and Penetration Outlook

Fixed Broadband Subscriber and Penetration Outlook

Brazil Telecom Competitive Environment

Market Shares by Company

Major Operators-Domestic vs International

Regulatory Body and Its Role in Industry

Brazil Telecom Industry Benchmarking

Overall Ranking as Compared to Peer Markets

Demand Index

Infrastructure Index

Growth Index

Brazil Economic Outlook to 2025

GDP Forecast, 2005-2025

GDP per Capita Forecast, 2005-2025

Inflation Trends

Brazil Demographic Outlook to 2025

Population Forecast, 2005-2025

Population Forecast by Gender, 2005-2025

Population Forecast by Age Group, 2005-2025

Population Forecast by Location-Rural Population: Urban Population, 2005-2025

Unemployment Trends in Brazil

Competitor Analysis

Company A: Profile and operations in Brazil

Company B: Profile and operations in Brazil

Company C: Profile and operations in Brazil

Recent Industry Developments



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/bnq2ld/brazil_telecoms?w=5

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com

SAN MATEO, Calif., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Brekeke Software announced the release of Unified Communication software, Brekeke UC. Brekeke's Unified Communication software is unique in that it offers superb telephony functions and flexibility backed with their SIP technology products. The product is designed to provide more secure and private communication for employees and businesses, allowing them to save all data and user information on their premises.

"As a business owner, I am concerned for the privacy of our employees and information shared between our team. I knew that we needed to have a more secure and private team collaboration tool," said Shin Yamade, Brekeke's CEO. "We are known for our voice software products, so it is a natural path for us to develop Unified Communication software to bring all types of communication methods into one simple tool," added Yamade.

Brekeke UC is a unified communication tool that runs on web-browser applications. All functions, including file sharing, presence, voice/video calls, group chat, voice/video conference, are available on the browser on your phone, tablet, or desktop. The software is available for both on-premises installation and cloud-based services.

Learn more about Brekeke UC, visit http://www.brekeke.com/unified-communication/

About Brekeke Software

Brekeke Software, Inc., is an industry-leading developer of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) software products for IP (Internet Protocol) network communications. With a variety of standards-based SIP software, Brekeke products provide a highly scalable and reliable voice and data communication platform for telephony carriers, service providers, and enterprises. Founded in 2002, Brekeke is headquartered in San Mateo, California. For more information, visit http://www.brekeke.com.

Contact Information

Brekeke Software, Inc.

Tomoko Shimizu

+1 (650) 401-6636

[email protected]

SOURCE Brekeke Software, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.brekeke.com

SAN MATEO, Calif., April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- For the first time in more than 150 years, Californians are poised for the unprecedented and historic opportunity to vote on a ballot measure to sensibly partition California into three states.

Next week, CAL 3 will deliver to the California Legislature more than 600,000 signatures from Californians representing all 58 counties to ensure a November ballot measure to let Californians vote on the partition. That is nearly twice as much support as is required by state law to get an initiative on the ballot and the first time in modern state history that a partition has reached the preponderance of support required to be approved as a ballot measure.

"This is an unprecedented show of support on behalf of every corner of California to create three state governments that emphasize representation, responsiveness, reliability and regional identity," CAL 3 chairman Tim Draper said.

CAL 3 is committed to solving California's most pressing issues, including the state's failing school systems that impact more than 6 million kids, highest-in-the-nation taxes, deteriorating infrastructure and strained government. Partitioning California into three states would empower regional communities to make better, fairer and more sensible decisions for their citizens.

After CAL 3 delivers the support of more than 600,000 citizens to the Secretary of State and the signatures are properly vetted and approved, the initiative will be slotted for inclusion on the ballot in November, giving everyone in California a chance to be heard. After the measure is approved by voters, the Governor will transfer notice of state approval to Congress, which will vote to ratify the creation of the new three-state structure.

"The unanimous support for CAL 3 from all 58 of California's counties to reach this unprecedented milestone in the legislative process is the signal that across California, we are united behind CAL 3 to create a brighter future for everyone," Draper said.

To discuss this historic milestone in the effort to partition California into three states, Draper will be holding a press conference on Thursday, April 12 at 4:30 PM PT in the 2nd floor offices of his investment firm, Draper Associates, 55 E. 3rd Avenue in San Mateo.

For more information, visit threestateca.com.

SOURCE CAL 3

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BIG LAKE, Minn., April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- To meet increasing customer and consumer demand for a greater variety of cooked egg products, Cargill is investing $20 million to expand its Big Lake, Minn., egg processing facility. The Big Lake expansion includes capabilities to pasteurize, mix and cook a number of additional egg products for foodservice and protein ingredient customers.

Employment at the plant is expected to increase by approximately 16 percent, adding a dozen new positions to support the growth. The expansion will double the facility's annual requirement for eggs from family farms in the area to 170 million. Construction begins in May, with the new capabilities expected to become operational in January 2019.

"We continue to invest in the traditional protein space to provide our foodservice and food ingredient customers innovative, high-quality cooked egg products to meet growing consumer demand," said Jared Johnson, Big Lake plant general manager. "This investment underscores our ongoing commitment to the Big Lake community and our employees, egg suppliers and restaurant and foodservice customers throughout the upper Midwest."

The Big Lake expansion is part of nearly $900 million of investments Cargill has made in the past two years to grow its traditional protein business in North America. At egg production facilities, this included a 2016 investment of $27 million in Lake Odessa, Mich., and a $12 million expansion in Mason City, Iowa, in 2017.

"Economies are improving. More people are moving into the middle class and the world population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. These factors are driving significantly increased demand for animal protein around the world," said Johnson. "Cargill's protein team is prepared to play a critical role in meeting this demand and nourish the world with sustainable, high quality protein."

Cargill opened the Big Lake facility in 2001. It complements Cargill's egg processing facilities in Monticello, Minn.; Mason City, Iowa; and Lake Odessa, Mich.

About Cargill

Cargill's 155,000 employees across 70 countries work relentlessly to achieve our purpose of nourishing the world in a safe, responsible and sustainable way. Every day, we connect farmers with markets, customers with ingredients, and people and animals with the food they need to thrive.

We combine 153 years of experience with new technologies and insights to serve as a trusted partner for food, agriculture, financial and industrial customers in more than 125 countries. Side-by-side, we are building a stronger, sustainable future for agriculture. For more information, visit Cargill.com and our News Center.

About Cargill Protein

Headquartered in Wichita, Kan., Cargill Protein is an industry leader that produces, distributes and markets beef, turkey, chicken and egg products to retail, foodservice and food ingredient companies throughout North America, and exports meat and by-products around the world. Cargill Protein's 28,000 employees, and more than three dozen protein processing facilities in the U.S. and Canada, are focused on delivering superior, innovative, products and services to help customers grow their businesses by meeting consumer desires. Cargill Protein is a unit of Minneapolis-based Cargill, Incorporated. For more information, visit Cargill.com and our News Center.

SOURCE Cargill

Related Links

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"I've spent a career finding ways to reduce nursing deficiencies and improve long term care and resident outcomes," said Ms. Hendrix. "Whether it's creating retention programs that are proven to reduce turnover among our most skilled nurses, developing internal education programs, or implementing procedures to improve compliance with health department directives, it all comes down to creating better outcomes for our residents."

Kenny Rozenberg, CEO of Centers Health Care, highlights that Ms. Hendrix comes equipped with the large scale organizational experience that Centers was searching for.

"Centers Health Care has always had strong leadership on our clinical teams, leaders that placed great emphasis on training, motivation and demonstrable effectiveness," Rozenberg said. With Heidi heading our nursing team, we have all that as well as someone with a great depth of experience leading very large, regional and national organizations."

Centers Health Care has been one of the fastest growing companies in the nation in the post-acute care industry. In the past three years, the company has more than doubled in size and today the Centers family includes 45 skilled nursing and rehabilitation facilities in five states, as well as a number of other providers. The company offers assisted living, adult day health care, medical transportation, urgent care, managed long term care, home care and a host of post-acute specialty services.

"In order to help us effectively manage the growth we've experienced and our continued growth in the future, we needed to add someone to the team who has done it already and has a proven track record of success," added Rozenberg. Ms. Hendrix, who will be working from the company's Bronx, New York headquarters, will have a noticeable presence in all of Centers' facilities. "Nursing happens at the facility level and no matter how large the company, that's where the real leadership happens."

Ms. Hendrix received her Registered Nursing Degree from Northwest Shoals Community College, Phil Campbell, Alabama in 1993 and her BSN from Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond, OK in August 2016.

About Centers Health Care

Centers Health Care is one of the largest and most complete post-acute health care continuums in the northeast. The Centers Health Care family includes 45 skilled nursing and rehabilitation facilities in New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Kansas and Missouri, four home health care companies, NY State's largest Managed Long-Term Care company and a provider of durable medical goods. Centers facilities also operate eight fully accredited Adult Day Healthcare Centers, two state-of-the-art Renal Dialysis Centers, three assisted living facilities and Centers Urgent Care provides walk-in medical care. More than 20,000 dedicated staffers and caregivers provide for the needs or over 7,000 long-and short-term residents throughout the Centers Health Care family.

For more information, please visit us at http://www.centershealthcare.org.

Contact:

Jeff Jacomowitz, Centers Health Care

(845) 269-2893, [email protected]

SOURCE Centers Health Care

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DUBAI, UAE, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Payment solutions provider commits to merchant growth and solving friction points in the region

International online payment solutions provider Checkout.com welcomes Remo Giovanni Abbondandolo as its new VP of Business Development for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

In his new role, Abbondandolo will help strategically grow Checkout.com's e-commerce business and client base in the Middle East and Africa. Particularly, his travel sector expertise will contribute to cementing the company's position as a leading provider of payment services to online travel agencies. His appointment signifies Checkout.com's intent to further invest in and hire talent in the region.

Abbondandolo joins Checkout.com from Travelstart, Africa's largest online travel agency, where he managed the company's expansion into the Middle East. As General Manager at Travelstart, Abbondandolo managed suppliers, drove marketing operations and oversaw payment systems. Previously, Abbondandolo was on the founding team of Africa Internet Accelerator (a Naspers investment), which launched three of the fastest growing e-commerce businesses in South Africa.

Abbondandolo was also part of Rocket Internet where he was a member of the founding team that launched leading e-commerce companies such as, Zalora, The Iconic and Lazada. Remo holds a Dual Master's of Science, Economics and Management of Innovation and Technology from Bocconi University and Copenhagen Business School.

"E-commerce is thriving in the Middle East, but there remain many friction points that make it difficult for foreign companies to process online payments." says Abbondandolo. "After working with Checkout.com at Travelstart, I was impressed with the company's ability to reduce the declined transaction rate. This is largely due to its unique proprietary technology - created by a team that has excellent knowledge of local markets. Checkout.com has rapidly grown its business. I'm excited to join the team and help the company meet the growing needs of online retailers in MENA."

Guillaume Pousaz, Founder and CEO of Checkout.com says, "Remo Abbondandolo is a very welcome addition to the Checkout.com team. His deep e-commerce knowledge and expertise in the travel sector will prove valuable, as we enable more international companies to adapt their online offerings to better service local customers. Remo's appointment represents our commitment to investing in this region. We look forward to working with him, especially as we continue to help innovative businesses in MENA and around the world deliver seamless payment experiences to their customers."

Checkout.com processes payments in over 150 currencies for major global brands. GCC customers include Talabat, The ENTERTAINER, Wadi.com, Sharaf DG, Tajawal, Dubizzle and Samsung.

About Checkout.com

Launched in 2012, Checkout.com is a leading provider of international online payment solutions. Checkout.com is built on 100% proprietary technology and handles every part of the payment process, providing complete transparency across the entire payment value chain.

We currently process 150+ currencies. In addition, we give you the ability to accept all international cards, plus popular alternative and local payments through one integration.

With customers like Samsung, Talabat, The ENTERTAINER and Wadi.com, we're proud of the company we keep. Our mission is to partner with smart businesses of all sizes to optimize their payments, increase revenues, and meet the dynamic needs of their customers.

SOURCE Checkout.comJACKSON, Mich., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CMS Energy announced today that it will provide its first-quarter results and provide a business and financial outlook at 8:30 a.m. EDT on Thursday, April 26, 2018.

A webcast of the presentation will be available on CMS Energy's website, cmsenergy.com. An audio replay will be available approximately three hours after the webcast, and will be archived for 30 days on CMS Energy's website in the "Investor Relations" section.

CMS Energy (NYSE: CMS) is a Michigan-based company that has an electric and natural gas utility, Consumers Energy, as its primary business and also owns and operates independent power generation businesses.

For more information on CMS Energy, please visit our website at cmsenergy.com. To sign up for email alert notifications, please visit the Investor Relations section of our website.

SOURCE CMS Energy

Related Links

http://www.cmsenergy.com

NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Gone are the days when commissions and bonuses are the failsafe mechanisms for incentivizing employee productivity. As job duties become increasingly wide-ranging, so too does the need to design compensation packages that correspond to the needs of a changing, global market. According to Ann Bartel, Merrill Lynch Professor of Workforce Transformation at Columbia Business School, companies that want to remain competitive should adopt multidimensional performance evaluations that consider a wider range of performance metrics where appropriate. In other words, one size no longer fits all when it comes to pay.

"Employers often use performance-based pay to align employees' interests with firm goals, but designing such a compensation plan is challenging because performance is typically multifaceted," Bartel explains.

Bartel lays out the nuances of pay-for-performance plans in a paper, published by IZA World of Labor. While many previous studies have pointed to the benefits that pay-for-performance systems have on productivity, the paper details a multitasking or "you get what you pay for" problem, which arises when a performance pay plan only rewards employees for a subset of their actual job duties.

The Multitasking Problem in Pay-for-Performance

A classic example of the traditional pay-for-performance problem is a sales employee, who might be incentivized to sell the company's product based on the promise of a commission. In this case, by focusing solely on the sale at hand, there's no metric, and no way to reward the salesperson according to the quality of the product or the customer service experience, potentially resulting in negative short-term feedback and long-term impacts on profit. A more recent example is President Trump's proposal to slow the frequency of regular step increases for federal employees, and instead creating pay incentives to reward and retain "high performers" with performance-based raises. While this approach can work successfully in some contexts, it can become a serious problem when job duties combine tasks that are easy to measure with tasks that are hard to measure.

But the multitasking problem doesn't only exist on the sales floor or within the federal government. For instance, elementary school teachers often have two main tasks in the classroom: making sure their students are at grade-level and that they are engaging and inspiring students to learn. While the former is relatively easy to measure, the latter is nearly impossible. In this example, firms should carefully consider whether it might be in fact more profitable to forego incentive-based rewards because of the risk that staff will ignore the hard-to-measure tasks altogether.

Bartel, along with co-authors Brianna Cardiff-Hicks and Kathryn Shaw, also studied the effects of the problem in the legal profession. In "Incentives for Lawyers: Moving Away from 'Eat What You Kill'", the researchers found that partners were focusing their efforts on billable hours and not spending sufficient time on leadership activities to build the firm. When compensation was changed to provide greater incentives for leadership activities, such as presenting at conferences, attending firm meetings, and training and mentoring associates, the partners significantly increased their non-billable hours and shifted billable hours to other team members. While law firms have historically relied on billable hours to compensate their partners, today, fewer than 10% of firms rely on this approach exclusively.

Moving Beyond a One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Pay-for-Performance

Scaling a pay-for-performance system where multiple elements of job performance are being evaluated can be beneficial, but requires experienced managers to oversee the evaluation process. Even then, complex compensation plans may be difficult for employees to understand. Therefore, for knowledge workers (e.g. managers, software engineers, scientists, lawyers, physicians, and academics), pay-for-performance compensation may not be appropriate, and companies may instead choose to devote a larger share of the compensation package to a fixed salary, but either way, today's marketplace requires a more nuanced understanding of worker responsibilities and a more thoughtful indicator of job performance.

To be competitive in the marketplace, employers should consider the following recommendations when structuring pay-for-performance plans:

Measure and reward all job duties in order to ensure employees are not ignoring those duties for which there is no existing metric.

Provide training to help employees understand the metrics in more comprehensive compensation plans.

Be aware that for knowledge jobs with more emphasis on non-routine problem solving, pay for performance may not be the best reward system.

Use subjective performance evaluations to reward hard-to-measure tasks (e.g. teamwork).

To learn more about the cutting-edge research being conducted at Columbia Business School, please visit www.gsb.columbia.edu.

About Columbia Business School

Columbia Business School is the only worldclass, Ivy League business school that delivers a learning experience where academic excellence meets with realtime exposure to the pulse of global business. Led by Dean Glenn Hubbard, the School's transformative curriculum bridges academic theory with unparalleled exposure to real world business practice, equipping students with an entrepreneurial mindset that allows them to recognize, capture, and create opportunity in any business environment. The thought leadership of the School's faculty and staff, combined with the accomplishments of its distinguished alumni and position in the center of global business, means that the School's efforts have an immediate, measurable impact on the forces shaping business every day. To learn more about Columbia Business School's position at the very center of business, please visit www.gsb.columbia.edu.

SOURCE Columbia Business School

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PETALUMA, Calif., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- "No one succeeds alone" is hard-won wisdom by many in business. Despite the persistent myth of the independently triumphant entrepreneur, everyone who has made it has had opportunities given to them or advice that has guided them to where they are today. Whether it's an employer, a mentor, a teacher, or a manager, no one climbs to the top totally solo.

Brandon Frere, startup founder and chief executive, values creating opportunity as a vital component of his entrepreneurial ethic. Providing a pathway to success for not just himself but also his colleagues and employees is one aspect of his philosophy of opportunity. The other is providing a clearer path to success through the services his businesses provide.

"What I'm really interested in is not only reaching my fullest potential but helping others tap into their great potential, as well," Frere said, referring to his multiple ventures. "I really like the idea of clearing the way for folks to do what they do best."

As a job creator, Frere is happy to be able to achieve what he believes is an important part of doing business: sowing the seeds of success for others. By gathering a team of stellar professionals to staff his businesses, he hopes to bring out the best in them.

By being in the financial and wellness services industry, Frere also seeks to create opportunities for clients of his companies. Frere's companies aim to make it easier to maintain sound financial habits as well as healthy lifestyle habits. Services in these areas create opportunities for clients to live better lives.

"Even as a chief executive, creating opportunity is about working with people, on their level," said Frere. "It's about figuring out what their strengths and weaknesses are and creating ways for them to improve and, hopefully, succeed."

About

Brandon Frere is an entrepreneur and businessman who lives in Sonoma County, California. He has designed and created multiple companies to meet the ever-demanding needs of businesses and consumers alike. His company website, www.FrereEnterprises.com, is used as a means to communicate many of the lessons, fundamentals, and information he has learned throughout his extensive business and personal endeavors, most recently in advocating on behalf of student loan borrowers nationwide.

As experienced during his own student loan repayment, Mr. Frere found out how difficult it can be to work with federally contracted student loan servicers and the repayment programs designed to help borrowers. Through those efforts, he gained an insider's look into the repayment process and the motivations behind the inflating student loan debt bubble. His knowledge of the confusing landscape of student loan repayment became a vital theme in his future endeavors, and he now uses those experiences to help guide others through the daunting process of applying for available federal repayment and loan forgiveness programs.

FrereEnterprises.com

Related Links

Frere Enterprises website

SOURCE Frere Enterprises

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BOSTON and DALLAS, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Crescendo Power announces the formation of a Board of Advisors comprised of three energy veterans with a diverse background to provide strategic guidance and market strategy for Crescendo's $30M Fund 1. Hugh Baker, Scott Deatherage, and Craig Rizzo will be supporting Managing Directors Coleman Adams, Urs Gisiger and Todd Price in an advisory capacity.

"As Crescendo continues to invest in the microgrid and distributed energy market, it is imperative that we have a diversity of thought and insights from our advisors to ensure that our clear investment strategy within this developing market is adaptable to new changes and opportunities," said Todd Price, Co-Founder of Crescendo Power. "Crescendo is excited to work with this group. Their backgrounds and experiences are extremely valuable for our mission to help customers finance tailored, on-site power generation projects with confidence and professionalism."

Appointments to Crescendo Power's Advisory Board are:

Mr. Hugh Baker  Managing Director, HD Baker & Company, Hawaii

Hugh Baker has more than three decades of experience in North American wholesale and retail power markets. At HD Baker & Company, Mr. Baker provides consulting support for utilities, independent power producers, financial firms, and commercial and industrial energy users. Previously, Mr. Baker led the electric power arm of a Dallas-based energy conglomerate, was a principal in an Atlanta-based consulting firm, and served as a regional VP for a Virginia-based IPP. He has extensive project implementation experience across the utility value chain.

Mr. Scott Deatherage  Managing Member, S Deatherage Law, PLLC, Texas

Scott Deatherage has spent the last 30 years of his legal career solving various energy and environmental challenges. Mr. Deatherage has worked on over $5 billion of electricity generating projects throughout the United States, including solar, wind, low emissions natural gas plants, energy efficiency and alternative energy projects. Mr. Deatherage is an award-winning attorney with career accomplishments covering successful projects, industry knowledge and precedent, and visionary work in the energy sector.

Mr. Craig Rizzo  CEO, EnerGrid, New York

Craig Rizzo's experience encompasses 25 years of demonstrated technical leadership and business/solution incubation and execution. At EnerGrid, Mr. Rizzo provides professional energy consulting services to electric utilities, governments, and commercial and industrial customers. Prior to EnerGrid, Mr. Rizzo led the Distributed Energy Solutions business for LEIDOS. From the start of his career as a U.S. Air Force Captain, Mr. Rizzo has solved technical barriers to enable complex projects.

About Crescendo Power, LLC

Crescendo Power brings a flexible investment strategy to support a variety of distributed energy projects in the 1-10MW size range. Crescendo services the full capital stack from sponsor and tax equity to sourcing debt in order to have the project efficiently deployed for the end customer. Crescendo collaborates with project developers, hardware/software providers, and EPC firms to bring a complete solution to the customer's onsite energy goals. For more information, visit www.crescendopower.com.

Crescendo Power contact:

Coleman Adams, 301-922-6141, [email protected]

SOURCE Crescendo Power

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NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cyber crime today poses tremendous threats to the nation's financial markets, undermines public confidence, and costs hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The need for cyber security expertise is critical, yet there is a significant shortage of this skill set at all levels.

Against that backdrop, international cyber education and training leader Cybint Solutions, a BARBRI Group company, has unveiled a breadth of cyber education solutions to help solve the shortage. Designed for higher education institutions and their students, Cybint's offerings encompass all levels of cyber education:

Level One -- Cyber Literacy: Cyber has become an important component in non-technological fields of study, such as business, law, criminal justice, finance and others. It is critical for future managers, law enforcers, business professionals and leaders to understand cyber terminology, threats and opportunities. Cybint provides schools with cyber literacy online training, evergreen curriculum, and certificates that can be integrated into non-technical programs. The two leading programs are the Cyber Security Protection (CSPC) and the Cyber Intelligence (CIC) programs.

Cyber has become an important component in non-technological fields of study, such as business, law, criminal justice, finance and others. It is critical for future managers, law enforcers, business professionals and leaders to understand cyber terminology, threats and opportunities. Cybint provides schools with cyber literacy online training, evergreen curriculum, and certificates that can be integrated into non-technical programs. The two leading programs are the Cyber Security Protection (CSPC) and the Cyber Intelligence (CIC) programs. Level Two -- Hands-On Simulator-Labs: The most critical component for a career in cyber security is hands-on skills. Cybint's Cyber Security Analyst (CSA) Simu-Lab Suite, the product of extensive military and industry experience, offers advanced practical training in a simulated environment. It provides learners with the skills required to work as a cyber security analyst in Security Operation Centers  allowing them to gain the skills and experience to start working in the cyber industry  even without a computer science degree.

The most critical component for a career in cyber security is hands-on skills. Cybint's Cyber Security Analyst (CSA) Simu-Lab Suite, the product of extensive military and industry experience, offers advanced practical training in a simulated environment. It provides learners with the skills required to work as a cyber security analyst in Security Operation Centers  allowing them to gain the skills and experience to start working in the cyber industry  even without a computer science degree. Level Three -- Advanced Cyber Specializations: Cyber security positions include different types of specializations. Cybint's customized training programs allow higher-ed institutions to train students in advanced specialized topics such as cyber threat intelligence, penetration testing, malware analysis and reverse engineering, and crypto analysis. Customizable programs are also available.

"Many higher education institutions today may not offer the hands-on, 'real-life' education necessary to build expertise. That's where our solutions come in," said Roy Zur, Cybint CEO and global cyber security and intelligence expert. "Ultimately, our goal is to enable colleges and universities to prepare students to enter the business and professional world with a profound level of cyber literacy, or to position them for success in a cyber security career."

Learn more at cybintsolutions.com/education/

ABOUT CYBINT

Cybint, part of The BARBRI Group, is an international cyber education company, providing training, certifications and learning solutions across the cyber security and intelligence spectrum. At Cybint we believe that protecting our assets, companies and national security, starts with cyber education. That's why we are dedicated to building the most knowledgeable cyber teams for governments, educating the best cyber experts at universities and colleges, and training employees around the world to be aware of cyber threats.

Cybint is a collaboration between military-trained cyber security and intelligence experts and the education experts at BARBRI. Together, we've created programs that address cyber security and intelligence at the individual level  creating a deep and powerful network of cyber expertise that goes far beyond the typical technical expertise.

About The BARBRI Group

The BARBRI Group companies meet the legal education, cyber skills education and specialized training needs of law students, attorneys, IT students and other professionals throughout their careers. The companies offer a comprehensive portfolio of learning solutions for higher education institutions and law- and finance-related businesses. At the core of The BARBRI Group Companies is BARBRI Bar Review, which has helped more than 1.3 million lawyers around the world pass a U.S. bar exam. The company also provides online J.D., post-J.D. and international programs for U.S. law schools, hands-on cyber skills training for IT and criminal justice programs, and specialized ongoing training and certifications in areas such as financial crime prevention, eDiscovery and cyber literacy. The BARBRI Group, founded in 1967, is a Leeds Equity Partners portfolio company headquartered in Dallas with offices throughout the United States and around the world.

Contact: Cindy Parks

913-526-6912

[email protected]

SOURCE Cybint Solutions

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DALLAS, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ryan, a leading global tax services and software provider, announced that Josh Cohen was honored by the Dallas Business Journal as one of the 40 most highly accomplished Dallas/Fort Worth professionals under the age of 40. The annual Dallas Business Journal 40 Under 40 award recognizes North Texas men and women in business who represent innovation and excellence in their fields and have achieved outstanding accomplishments early in their careers. The 2018 40 Under 40 class includes young entrepreneurs and executives who have experienced great professional success, while demonstrating a personal commitment to the North Texas community.

Mr. Cohen began his career at the Firm in 2002 and was promoted to Principal in 2013. In 2017, four years after becoming a principal, Mr. Cohen was named Transaction Tax Practice Leader to lead the Firm's largest practice area, where he manages more than 400 professionals across 34 locations. He lectures on various topics for leading industry associations and is a member of the Institute for Professionals in Taxation (IPT). Mr. Cohen holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Emory University.

"I am proud to be honored among such an impressive group of young Dallas/Fort Worth professionals," said Mr. Cohen. "I am also thankful to work for an incredible Firm like Ryan, where I am empowered within a dynamic work environment that offers an incredible opportunity for personal and professional growth."

"Josh is one of the premier tax professionals in our industry and consistently demonstrates superior leadership skills, outstanding technical expertise, and a commitment to client service excellence," said G. Brint Ryan, Chairman and CEO of Ryan. "I am very proud of his incredible achievement and thank him for his continued dedication to serving our clients and our business."

About Ryan

Ryan, an award-winning global tax services and software provider, is the largest Firm in the world dedicated exclusively to business taxes. With global headquarters in Dallas, Texas, the Firm provides an integrated suite of federal, state, local, and international tax services on a multi-jurisdictional basis, including tax recovery, consulting, advocacy, compliance, and technology services. Ryan is a six-time recipient of the International Service Excellence Award from the Customer Service Institute of America (CSIA) for its commitment to world-class client service. Empowered by the dynamic myRyan work environment, which is widely recognized as the most innovative in the tax services industry, Ryan's multi-disciplinary team of more than 2,200 professionals and associates serves over 14,000 clients in more than 45 countries, including many of the world's most prominent Global 5000 companies. More information about Ryan can be found at ryan.com. "Ryan" and "Firm" refer to the global organizational network and may refer to one or more of the member firms of Ryan International, each of which is a separate legal entity.

PRESS INFORMATION CONTACT

Jim Aubele

SVP, Chief Marketing Officer

Ryan

972.934.0022

[email protected]

SOURCE Ryan

Related Links

http://www.ryan.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- E.E. Ward Moving & Storage, the oldest continuously operating black-owned business in the United States and agent for North American Van Lines, received the highly coveted 2017 Moving & Storage Agent of the Year Service Excellence Award from the American Moving & Storage Association (AMSA) at its 99th Annual Education Conference & Expo. E.E. Ward, located in Columbus, Ohio, was selected for the award by a panel of experts from approximately 2,000 eligible companies across the country.

The Agent of the Year Award reflects AMSA's and the industry's commitment to excellent customer service, and is presented to agents nominated by their affiliated van line based on customer surveys and van line experience. Nominations are judged primarily on customer service assessments and other industry awards and recognitions. Consideration is also given to factors such as leadership, innovation, community involvement, and activities that enhance the industry's image.

"Congratulations to E.E. Ward Moving & Storage for earning this high honor in recognition of their long history of innovation, excellent customer service and support for the local community," said Scott Michael, AMSA President and CEO. "E.E. Ward has shown their strong commitment to maintaining high levels of service and a commitment to charitable causes in the communities they serve. All of us at AMSA salute them for their success and achievements."

E.E. Ward is owned by Brian and Dominique Brooks, a husband and wife team who have ensured the 137-year legacy of the company remains strong. E.E. Ward started with just two horses and a wagon in 1881. The company has grown since then into a thriving multi-million dollar moving business. Beginning as a stop on the Underground Railroad, this company's historical past is part of the company culture today that inspires its promising future. E.E. Ward has received many awards for its high level of service, including OMSDC MBE Supplier of the Year Award, BBB of Central Ohio's Torch Award, Corporate Caring Human Services Award, and Diversity in Business Outstanding Diverse Organization Award.

More information about the AMSA Awards at ProMover.org/Awards. More information about E.E. Ward can be found at www.eeward.com.

CONTACT: Sarah Irvin Clark, Irvin PR, 614.296.4057

SOURCE E.E. Ward Moving & Storage

Related Links

http://www.eeward.com

This expansion of global connectivity and mobile internet adoption, otherwise known as Digital Inclusion, extends both economic and social benefits to unconnected populations, fueling a cycle that reduces poverty, improves infrastructure and services, and further increases internet access and usage.

"Today's announcement with ITOCHU and Erajaya is another step towards fulfilling our mission to make smartphones accessible to more people," said PayJoy's CEO and co-founder, Doug Ricket. "Our technology enables distributors to offer installment financing options to customers who have no access to credit and may not be able to afford a smartphone. This deal will put the internet and all the tools smartphones offer in the hands of more people in Indonesia, enabling growth that comes with having a more connected population."

Atsushi Hashimoto, General Manager of Communication & Mobile Business Dept. at ITOCHU, said, "We are pleased to be a part of this deal that will put more smartphones into more people's hands in Indonesia. ITOCHU is proud of the work we have done to create a more connected world and this is one more example of bringing together technology, distribution and capital to create a winning solution."

The smartphone, with its improved availability and affordability, is quickly becoming a fundamental tool for accessing mobile internet, in developed and developing countries alike. The opportunity for companies in the mobile space to shape the future of this rapidly growing market  and the lives of consumers in Indonesia  is enormous.

About PayJoy

PayJoy was founded in 2015 in San Francisco with the mission of making smartphone technology and financial services affordable to everyone worldwide. PayJoy's patented technology for locking smartphones and proprietary data science for underwriting customers enables people who lack credit to qualify for an installment plan to purchase their first smartphone. Today, PayJoy offers finance to millions of customers in the US and Mexico, and is expanding throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa in 2018. PayJoy's team of 60 professionals bring premier fintech experience from Google, Facebook, Amazon, PIMCO, McKinsey, Oportun, and Merrill Lynch. PayJoy is funded with over $30M of equity and debt from top fintech investors including Union Square Ventures.

About ITOCHU

ITOCHU, based in Japan, is one of the leading general trading companies. ITOCHU engages in domestic trading, import/export, and overseas trading of various products such as textile, machinery, metals, minerals, energy, chemicals, food, general products, realty, information and communications technology, and finance, as well as business investment in Japan and overseas. ITOCHU was originally founded in 1858, and has approximately 120 bases in 63 countries.

About Erajaya

Established in 1996, Erajaya conduct of business activities importer, distribution and retail trade of telecommunications equipment such as mobile cellular phones and tablets, subscriber identity module card (SIM card), vouchers mobile network operator, accessories, and gadgets such as computers and other electronic devices . In 2011, Erajaya officially became an open company and sold its shares on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, making Erajaya the largest and most trusted company in its business in Indonesia.

SOURCE PayJoy

Related Links

www.payjoy.com

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Evolab, a CBx Sciences brand, today announced that Terpenes & Testing Magazine has recognized Alchemy as 'Best Vape Cartridge' at its Terpenes & Testing World Conference. The first annual Terpenes and Testing Awards honor the individuals and companies that have and continue to influence the future of cannabis science.

"We've been making Colorado's favorite vapes for nearly a decade now," said Nicole Smith, CEO, CBx Sciences. "Over that time, numerous states have introduced medical and recreational cannabis programs. With so many respected manufacturers from across the country in this increasingly competitive space, it's satisfying to receive this major recognition from the team at Terpenes and Testing. Alchemy was one of the industry's first premium terpene-rich CO2 oils when we introduced it, and it continues to lead the national cannabis vape market today."

Evolab has been recognized in numerous award programs for its potent products and unique approach to cannabis processing. Most recently, Evolab was awarded Best Flavored Vape at the 2018 Rooster Magazine THC Classic and Best Infused Product at the 2017 Cannabis Business Awards.

Alchemy is Evolab's flagship oil, combining cannabis-derived FreshTerps with potent CO2 distillate for unparalleled, strain specific flavor and effects. Evolab products are currently available at hundreds of locations across Colorado, and the company is exploring opportunities to introduce its products into additional markets.

To find the medical or recreational location with Evolab products nearest you, please visit: https://www.evolab.com/find-our-products/ or https://weedmaps.com/brands/evolab.

About Evolab:

Evolab, a CBx Sciences brand, is a pioneer in the use of chromatography and CO2 to produce pharmaceutical-grade cannabis extracts. The company manufactures a full range of cannabis extracts and infused products that are rich in terpenes and pure cannabinoids -- while remaining free of solvents, cutting agents and diluting additives. Evolab is also a provider of cutting-edge technology solutions and production services to other cannabis manufacturers. Learn more at www.evolab.com.

Supporting Resources:

SOURCE Evolab

Related Links

http://www.evolab.com

After being named the 2nd fastest-growing company in Europe in the 2017 FT 1000 report, Codewise continues its rapid growth this year, ranking 53rd out of 1000 fastest-growing companies included in the FT 1000 report in 2018, with a growth of 1,923%. According to FT 1000, Codewise is also one of the top-5 fastest-growing AdTech companies in Europe.

"I am excited to see that Codewise has been recognized for the second year straight as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies. Our company's inclusive and bureaucracy-free culture that empowers every employee to achieve their maximum potential and fosters uninterrupted innovation has delivered once again. Every member of our team had an important part to play in achieving this success, and I am incredibly honoured to lead such an exceptional company," said Robert Gryn, CEO and owner of Codewise.

"Being recognized again by the Financial Times as one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe clearly demonstrates that our core value, outside-in centricity, is delivering exceptional results. The secret of our rapid and profitable revenue growth, 16,900% since our first year of operations in 2012, and an average 290% YoY growth in the last 5 years, resides in a total detachment from revenue targets obsession," said Dr. John Malatesta, Chief Revenue and Marketing Officer at Codewise. "Instead, we prioritize deep attention to customer needs, achieved through smart in-product feedback and a world-class customer success and account management practice. We funnel the constantly updated customer inputs into relentless product innovation, and the result is a tight match between customer expectations and product values, which naturally drives adoption and satisfaction, and consequently exponential revenue growth."

The latest FT 1000 list of Europe's fastest-growing companies is available at https://ig.ft.com/ft-1000/2018.

About Codewise

Codewise is a place where talent thrives. Since 2011 it has provided a collaborative environment that fosters creative solutions and growth, enabling it to build its flagship advertising technology platforms: Zeropark, a performance traffic exchange, and Voluum, the market-leading campaign tracker with an integrated native advertising Demand-Side Platform. Codewise is an entirely self-funded, venture-building company, headquartered in Krakow, Poland, with offices in London and Santa Monica. The company employs over 200 talented individuals and supports customers in over 190 countries worldwide. www.codewise.com

About Voluum

Voluum is a full-stack marketing platform for all your performance analytics, tracking, optimization and media buying. The suite consists of the Voluum Tracker, the trusted leader in cross-screen performance tracking, and the integrated Voluum DSP, a next-generation native advertising Demand-Side Platform. Voluum is the go-to tool for optimizing and scaling your campaigns, featuring anti-fraud filtering, whitelisting and an outstanding reporting speed. Powered by a powerful proprietary database, since September 2014, Voluum has served thousands of SaaS customers in over 190 countries worldwide. www.voluum.com

About Zeropark

Zeropark is a performance traffic exchange connecting the advertisers, affiliates and media buying teams with high performance traffic sources, in Real-Time. It offers hand-picked traffic from parked domain redirects, Mobile App and Premium Pop. It features robust targeting options and powerful optimization tools bolstered by machine learning mechanisms, all in a user-friendly interface. Zeropark serves 150 million ad views every day.www.zeropark.com

PR Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Codewise

Related Links

https://codewise.com/

Celebrated for his humanitarian efforts as much as his culinary abilities, Chef Andres' Fish menu serves to underscore The Cove's commitment to flourishing Bahamian ecology and the protection of one of the nation's most precious natural resources, the ocean. Jose Andres' menu highlights sustainable Bahamian fishing practices and includes a signature dish of simply prepared, fried local lionfish  a species that while delicious, has been severely damaging to the coral reefs of The Bahamas.

Lionfish outlive, out-eat and out-breed all other marine species, which affects the health of the ocean. By overfishing the lionfish using a spear, so as not to damage the delicate reef systems, Chef Jose Andres, a fisherman and avid diver, is committed to hunting this invasive species, so that coral reefs and the local marine life can continue to flourish. A portion of the cost of this dish will go directly to the Blue Project Foundation, the resort's non-profit 501(c)3 organization dedicated to saving marine species and their extraordinary habitats throughout The Bahamas.

"Anyone who knows me knows how much I love the ocean  whether it's enjoying the freshest delicacies of the local waters or going diving," said Chef Andres. "Fish tells the story of this beautiful, mysterious thing we call the sea, through food -- and my team and I are very excited to create this new experience at The Cove. Our Bahamian team is as committed as I am to supporting sustainable fishing practices and the protection of the Bahamian coral reefs."

Preparation of the restaurant's menu items range from simple and flavorful to innovative and creative and can be served as either small plates for sharing or in the style of larger-format dishes. The restaurant highlights the freshest possible seafood such as local Bahamian conch, served as traditional Scorched Conch or, with a Jose twist, as Conch Fritters with a liquid center, much like Spanish croquetas. The menu also features celebrity chef Andres and team's transformative take on other Bahamian favorites such as local Hog Snapper, grilled over a wood fire and served with a crisp endive salad, marcona almonds and radishes and Seared Scallops, with Hawaiian hearts of palm, tamarind, caperberries and citrus.

Fish's open 'fire stage' features two Josper ovens, whose high temperatures are harnessed by the chefs for dishes such as Grilled Oysters, their own fiery version of Jerk Chicken and many of the menu's vegetable dishes, all cooked to a smoky perfection. The Josper also lends a delicate caramel char to the Grilled Pineapple dessert, served with tamarind and coconut sorbet. Or guests can enjoy Chocolate Paradise, featuring spiced chocolate cream, cocoa streusel, passionfruit caramel and meringue ice cream.

To start or accompany their meal, guests can choose from an array of innovative, hand-crafted cocktails including A Bird in the Hand (Plantation Pineapple Rum, Appleton Estate Rare Blend Rum, Aperol and Carpano Formula Antica Sweet Vermouth) and Apollo No. 2 (Elyx Vodka, St. Germain, Cocchi Americano Blanc Vermouth, lemon, ginger and soda). The restaurant's extensive wine list features wines produced in regions known for the world's best seafood, throughout Europe and the United States.

The design of Fish at The Cove, by Spanish firm Capella Garcia, is meant to give guests the impression that they are diving into an underwater world  immersed in the marine life, the rocks, the sand and the flora and fauna that inhabit the ocean. Dappled with a romantic palette of cerulean, pearl and azure hues, the open layout creates a tranquil, tasteful atmosphere. The space is chic, yet comfortable, with a modern and organic design.

As guests enter the space, they are greeted by a lounge with an undulating seating area crowned with a magnificent cylindrical hanging light sculpture made of hundreds of white and gold ceramic fish, swirling to welcome people. To the right is the bar, whose dramatic glowing backdrop gives the impression of a giant blue wave, luring guests to partake in a refreshing cocktail under the shelter of the crest. In the dining room, an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows connects the space to the resort's white-sand beaches, the beautiful Bahamian sky and the local vegetation. The dining room, bathed in rich oceanic hues of teal, sand and coral, offers guests several different dining options  ranging from intimate banquettes and rattan partitions to private dining spaces for larger parties that can be enclosed with fishnet curtains to offer privacy yet still allow guests to be part of the restaurant action. The restaurant's central "fire stage" grill station, raw seafood bar and several fish tanks bring the restaurant's preparations directly in view of diners, highlighting the very best of the surrounding ocean.

Large format photographic murals from Bahamas-based artist, Elena Kalis, whose graceful images immerse guests in a silent, tranquil underwater world are displayed around the dining room. The center of the dining space features a large hanging koi fish that was hand-constructed with delicate interlacing strips of wood, by Spanish designers Inocuo The Sign and LZF Lab.

Nestled between Paradise and Cove Beaches, The Cove offers unparalleled culinary talent, opulent all-suite accommodations and a breathtaking beachside ambiance that creates the feeling of being cast away on a private, white sand sanctuary. The Cove has become a fixture for vacationing gourmands who seek a resort experience that reflects the vibrant culture and cuisine of The Bahamas. The debut of Fish underscores the property's commitment to create an authentic, conservation-focused environment for guests, complemented by impeccable high design, style and sophistication.

"The inclusion of Chef Andres' craftsmanship at The Cove provides an impactful opportunity to showcase the exceptional elements of The Bahamas," says Audrey Oswell, President and Managing Director of Atlantis, Paradise Island. "We are incredibly proud that we have been able to create locally-infused, ocean-linked dining experiences for our guests, in partnership with visionaries like Chef Andres, who is not only one of the most talented Master Chefs in the world, but also an advocate for the protection and preservation of our country's natural resources."

About The Cove, Paradise Island:

The Cove, the 600-suite resort on Paradise Island, raises the bar among distinctive resort destinations. The ultra-luxury property is elegantly situated between Cove and Paradise Beaches, within the 171 acres that comprise Atlantis Paradise Island, creating the feeling of being cast away on a private, white-sand sanctuary. Designed by acclaimed interior architect, Jeffrey Beers of Jeffrey Beers International (JBI). The Cove features an open-air lobby, sensual suites and super suites, Escape retail store, dining, bespoke amenities and purposeful service delivered with Bahamian warmth. Private all-adult and family pools, lavish cabanas and breathtaking views of the ocean are featured every turn.

About the Atlantis Blue Project Foundation:

The Atlantis Blue Project Foundation (ABPF) is dedicated to saving sea species and their extraordinary habitats throughout The Bahamas and surrounding Caribbean seas. By funding scientific research, conservation programs and community outreach efforts, its mission is to protect the waters and its vast marine wildlife, ensuring that The Bahamas will remain a haven for a myriad of one-of-a-kind, rare and endangered species for generations to come.

A nonprofit, 501(c)3 organization, the foundation receives its funding from the generosity of Atlantis, Paradise Island's guests and their participation in the resort's marine interactions and experiences. Since its inception, the Blue Project Foundation has funded more than $5 million to support conservation and Atlantis' marine biologists, aquarists, veterinarians, lab technicians and international and local partners who contribute to these important research efforts. Efforts include but are not limited to: developing and implementing marine habitat protection and restoration strategies, conducting ongoing coral reef research, training individuals in marine ecosystem research and management, as well as animal husbandry, the rescue, rehabilitation and release of marine wildlife including sea turtles, manatees and dolphins, creating programs to heighten public awareness of the ocean and its inhabitants and delivering marine education programs to communities and schools.

About Fish by Jose Andres:

Fish by Jose Andres is a culinary destination, celebrating the magic and bounty of the sea, in all its forms and preparations. At its core, Fish highlights the freshest possible seafood delicacies, skillfully transformed into memorable dishes as only chef Jose and team can. There are two locations of Fish, at MGM National Harbor in Maryland, and the newest incarnation of the concept at The Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Each location of Fish provides a unique interpretation of local fish and seafood, making the most of the local or seasonal 'catch of the day' as well as offering a dining environment that speaks to its setting. ThinkFoodGroup is the creative team behind the Fish by Jose Andres concept, and is known for renowned dining destinations throughout the country from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles as well as in Mexico, including five Jaleo restaurants, two Zaytinya restaurants, Bazaar by Jose Andres in four SLS Hotels, and the two-star Michelin minibar by jose andres. To learn more about ThinkFoodGroup, visit www.thinkfoodgroup.com.

SOURCE The Cove, Paradise Island

Related Links

https://www.atlantisbahamas.com/rooms/thecoveatlantis

From private wine tastings in the renowned La Cave , the underground cellar of Four Seasons Hotel George V, Paris, to a traditional tea ceremony at the Shakusui-tei tea house at Four Seasons Hotel Kyoto, planners know that when they host at Four Seasons the results will be exceptional. Groups have access to the unforgettable backdrops, caring and passionate people, and extraordinary experiences that only Four Seasons can offer.

"On the occasion of Global Meetings Industry Day, we would like to recognise the importance of meetings, events, and incentive travel to our business, and thank our partners for choosing Four Seasons," says Peter Nowlan, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. "Meeting and events are not only an important part of business growth, they are also an opportunity for us to showcase the passion, creativity, and excellence that happens every day at Four Seasons hotels and resorts around the world."

Meetings and events are an important business for Four Seasons and a key consideration when designing a new hotel or resort. Four Seasons function spaces are strategically designed to act as the perfect backdrop for any occasion, allowing for flexibility and customisation of every event, as well as creating seamless integration with hotel amenities such as world-class dining and spa facilities.

General Managers and entire property teams, alongside conference service professionals, are all dedicated to providing the highest levels of personalised service, and going above and beyond to make every event a success. Planners can even leverage the full extent of Four Seasons experiences, services, amenities and people when choosing to book an exclusive or buyout.

Here's what industry experts around the world are saying about meetings and events at Four Seasons:

"We see great success when booking with Four Seasons because our guests are excited about the brand. What's more is that Four Seasons employees care as much as we do about both the small and large things and how we create event impact together. It's a brilliant formula for us and for our customers."  Deb Parsons, EVP Sales and Marketing, The Performance Group, Inc., a Creative Group Company, USA

"There is nothing more memorable than personal experiences, which is why we and our clients choose to partner with Four Seasons. They continuously deliver caring personal touch, memorable experiences, and always exceed expectations for all of their guests and visitors. It is wonderful working with the exceptional people at Four Seasons!"  Mark Riches, Non-Executive Director, FIRST London, UK

"It is an absolute pleasure for us to partner with Four Seasons on a conference or incentive program. Our strong relationships with their incredible people, complemented by consistent service excellence globally, ensure programs with Four Seasons are always a huge success for us and our clients. We have many Four Seasons highlights; most recently the privilege to do a full buyout of the magnificent Four Seasons Hotel Prague."  Leon Burman, Managing Director, TRIBE Travel & Events, Australia

To see how Four Seasons goes above and beyond to create unforgettable meetings and events experiences, click here.

To plan your next Four Seasons meeting or event, visit our website.

About Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts

Founded in 1960, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts is dedicated to perfecting the travel experience through continual innovation and the highest standards of hospitality. Currently operating 110 hotels and resorts, and 38 residential properties in major city centres and resort destinations in 46 countries, and with more than 50 projects under planning or development, Four Seasons consistently ranks among the world's best hotels and most prestigious brands in reader polls, traveller reviews and industry awards. For more information and reservations, visit fourseasons.com. For the latest news, visit press.fourseasons.com and follow @FourSeasonsPR on Twitter.

Press Contact:

Laura Schlecht

[email protected]

646-460-8922

SOURCE Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts

Related Links

https://www.fourseasons.com

3.1 million ounce (147%) increase in Inferred Mineral Resource estimate at Wassa Underground to 5.2 million ounces of gold (44.9 million tonnes at 3.6 grams per tonne ("g/t") of gold ("Au")), compared to December 31, 2017 estimate

estimate 9% increase in grade of Wassa Underground's Inferred Mineral Resources from 3.3 g/t Au to 3.6 g/t Au

Updated Inferred Mineral Resource estimate includes results of 9 drill holes reported previously from Wassa Underground, one deepened hole and 2 new mother holes drilled subsequently

Assay results from two new mother holes confirm that high grade gold mineralization extends approximately 75 metres ("m") up dip and approximately 150 m down dip of previously intersected high grade zones

down dip of previously intersected high grade zones Significant intercepts from the 2 new mother holes were as follows:

58.5 m grading 4.8 g/t Au from 1,007.0m in hole BS18DD388M

grading 4.8 g/t Au from in hole BS18DD388M

18.3 m grading 4.3 g/t Au from 696.0m in hole BS18DD389M

grading 4.3 g/t Au from in hole BS18DD389M Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA") on the Inferred Mineral Resources of Wassa Underground expected to commence late in the second quarter of 2018

Sam Coetzer, President and Chief Executive Officer of Golden Star, commented:

"By more than doubling the Inferred Mineral Resources at Wassa Underground, we have begun to demonstrate the compelling potential of this asset in the longer term. We had believed for some time that Wassa was a larger deposit than previous estimates suggested and as the deposit remains open to the south, we believe that further upside exists still. Wassa Underground has ramped up well and this operational success forms a solid foundation for the next stage of the mine's growth. We have under-utilized capacity within Wassa's processing plant and the southern portion of the deposit represents the potential to 'fill the mill' and increase production. I am looking forward to commencing the PEA and to exploring further the viability of this strategy."

Updated Wassa Underground Inferred Mineral Resource Estimate

The table below displays Wassa's updated Inferred Mineral Resource estimate and the December 31, 2017 estimate as a comparison.

Wassa Underground Inferred

Mineral Resource Estimate Tonnes ('000) Grade (g/t Au) Ounces ('000) December 31, 2017 estimate 19,838 3.31 2,110 Updated estimate as of April 6, 2018 44,909 3.57 5,153

Wassa Complex's Indicated Mineral Resource Estimate

The table below displays Wassa's Indicated Mineral Resource estimate, which has not been updated since December 31, 2017.

Wassa Complex Indicated

Mineral Resource Estimate Tonnes

('000) Grade

(g/t Au) Ounces

('000) Wassa Open Pit 26,652 1.32 1,134 Wassa Underground 13,003 4.10 1,713 Wassa Other 4,251 3.49 476 Total December 31, 2017 estimate 43,906 2.35 3,323



Notes to Mineral Resource Estimate 1. The Mineral Resources were estimated in compliance with the requirements of National Instrument ("NI") 43-101. 2. The Mineral Resources for "Wassa Other" include Father Brown, Benso and Chichiwilli. 3. The Wassa Underground Mineral Resource has been estimated below the $1,450 per ounce of gold pit shell using an economic gold grade cut-off of 1.62 g/t Au. The Inferred Mineral Resource has been constrained further by the high grade mineralized wireframe. 4. Mineral Resources were estimated using optimized pit shells at a gold price of $1,450 per ounce. Other than gold price, the same optimized pit shell parameters and modifying factors used to determine the mineral reserves were used to determine the mineral resources. 5. The identified Mineral Resources in the block model are classified according to the CIM definitions for the Measured, Indicated and Inferred categories and are constrained by a block cut-off grade calculated using a gold price of $1,450 per ounce and below the 2017 year-end topographic surface. The Mineral Resources are reported in situ without modifying factors applied. 6. The stated Mineral Resources were prepared under the supervision of S. Mitchel Wasel, Vice President of Exploration for the Company. Mr. Wasel is a Qualified Person as defined in NI 43-101. 7. Numbers may not add due to rounding. 8. Mineral Resources are not mineral reserves and do not necessarily demonstrate economic viability.

Wassa Underground's Inferred Mineral Resources have increased by 147% to 5.2 million ounces, in the B Shoot South and F Shoot South areas. The grade of the Inferred Mineral Resources has increased by 9% to 3.6 g/t Au.

Today's updated Inferred Mineral Resource estimate includes 9 holes that have been released previously1, one deepened historical hole and two new mother holes, the results of which are reported today.

Golden Star is drilling the Wassa South extensions currently and the Company expects that Wassa Underground's Inferred Mineral Resources will continue to grow with further step out drilling.

Notes 1. Eight holes were released on February 14, 2018 in the press release entitled, 'Golden Star reports further high grade drilling results from Wassa Underground' (holes BS17DD385D1-4, BS17DD386M, BS17DD387M, BSDD308M and BSDD347). One hole was released on September 19, 2017 in the press release entitled, 'Golden Star extends high grade B Shoot zone through step out drilling at Wassa Underground Gold Mine' (hole BS17DD385M).

Results from New Mother Holes

The two new mother holes (BS18DD388M and BS18DD389M) were planned to test the up and down dip extensions of the previously intersected, high grade mineralization that was reported in hole BSDD315M (70.5 m grading 5.9 g/t Au from 742.4 m)1,2, which was drilled in 2014, and in hole BS17DD385D3 (94.0 m grading 4.4 g/t Au from 1,305.7 m)1,3, which was drilled in 2017.

The two new holes have confirmed that gold mineralization extends approximately 150 m down dip of the zones intersected in the 2017 hole (BS17DD385D3) and approximately 75 m up dip of the 2014 hole (BSDD315M).

Hole BS18DD388M

The first of the two mother holes, BS18DD388M, reported a significant intercept of 58.5 m grading 4.8 g/t Au from 1,007.0 m1. This was approximately 150 m down dip of the two upper zones intersected in the 2017 hole (BS17DD385D3) of 15.0 m at 3.6 g/t Au from 942.0 m1,3 and 8.1m at 3.6 g/t Au1,3, which confirms that the gold mineralization extends 150 m further down dip.

The wider zone intercepted in the 2017 hole (BS17DD385D3) of 94.0 m at 4.4 g/t Au from 1,305.7 m1,3 has been intersected approximately 250 m down dip in hole BS18DD388M. However the results suggest the zone has narrowed, with the hole intersecting two zones of 5.3 m grading 3.0 g/t Au from 1,516.1 m1 and 4.4 m grading 4.6 g/t Au from 1,539.8 m1.

Further directional drilling is currently being conducted from the BS18DD388M mother hole, with the objective of assessing if gold mineralization extends down dip and to further delineate the geometry of this wider zone of gold mineralization.

Hole BS18DD389M

The second of the two mother holes, BS18DD389M, was drilled to test the up dip extension of the 2014 hole (BSDD315M). This new hole intersected two mineralized zones approximately 75 m up dip from the wide zone in the 2014 hole (BSDD315M) of 70.5 m at 5.9 g/t Au1,2. The upper zone of this new hole intersected 18.3 m grading 4.3 g/t Au from 696.0 m1 and the lower zone intersected 12.6 m grading 3.7 g/t Au from 747.8 m1. This new hole has confirmed significant additional volume in this area of the deposit by extending the mineralization 75 m up dip. Further drilling is currently being done to test the limits of these zones both up and down dip.

The full set of drilling results released today is listed in Appendix A, including the significant intercepts set out below.

Significant intercepts from two new mother holes (from surface)

HOLE ID Azimuth

() Dip

() From

(m) To

(m) Drilled

Width

(m) ~True

Width

(m) Grade Au

(g/t) B Shoot South and F Shoot South







BS18DD388M 88.9 -77.5 1007.0 1076.3 69.3 58.5 4.8 BS18DD389M 95.4 -62 696.0 721.0 25.0 18.3 4.3 BS18DD389M 94.3 -61.8 747.8 765.0 17.2 12.6 3.7

Further drill sections showing the location of the drill holes are available at: http://www.gsr.com/operations/wassa/wassa-main

Three diamond drill rigs are currently drilling between the 18900 and 19300N drill fences. Golden Star is planning to drill another step out fence 200 m to the south, on section 18700N, and this drilling is expected to commence late in the second quarter of 2018, with results anticipated to be released during the third quarter of 2018.

Notes 1. All widths quoted in this press release are estimated true widths. The full set of intercepts, including the drilled widths, are included in Appendix A. 2. See press release entitled, 'Golden Star has continued exploration drilling success at Wassa', dated July 30, 2014. 3. See press release entitled, 'Golden Star extends high grade B Shoot zone through step out drilling at Wassa Underground Gold Mine', dated September 19, 2017.

Preliminary Economic Assessment

Golden Star is planning to undertake a PEA on the Inferred Mineral Resources of the Wassa Underground deposit. The objective of the PEA is to demonstrate the viability of the Inferred Mineral Resources, potentially including a new access shaft and new ventilation infrastructure. As Golden Star has significant under-utilized capacity in the Wassa processing plant, this additional material could be processed without the need to build any additional processing capacity. If the results of the PEA are positive, it will demonstrate the potential to increase production from the Wassa complex and to fast track cash flow.

Golden Star expects to commence work on the PEA late in the second quarter of 2018 and the Company anticipates it will be completed in the third quarter of 2018.

Background on compilation of updated Inferred Mineral Resource estimate

The Inferred Mineral Resource estimate was created by Golden Star with the assistance of the Cardiff, Wales and Toronto, Canada offices of SRK Consulting ("SRK"). SRK Cardiff created the Leapfrog wire frames with guidance from site geologists and using previous structural interpretations. Leapfrog Geo 3.1 software was used for the modeling of the isoclinal fold closures, which are believed to be the major controls of the high grade gold mineralization found at Wassa.

SRK Toronto assisted with the resource block model gold grade estimations. The folded nature of the Wassa model has led to a resource modeling technique that accounts for the changing attitude of the mineralized zones by assigning a dip direction and dip to each of the blocks. The block dip and direction information controls the search ellipses that are used to look for drill data for estimation of block grade. This technique is commonly used in folded ore bodies and is considered appropriate for estimating gold grades at deposits such as Wassa.

Golden Star has extensive experience with these modeling techniques as they are utilized in the stope design process at Wassa Underground. These modeling techniques are well suited to the geology seen at Wassa and their accuracy is strengthened through experience gained through operational reconciliation.

All monetary amounts refer to United States dollars unless otherwise indicated.

Company Profile:

Golden Star is an established gold mining company that owns and operates the Wassa and Prestea mines in Ghana, West Africa. Listed on the NYSE American, the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ghanaian Stock Exchange, Golden Star is focused on delivering strong margins and free cash flow from its two high grade, low cost underground mines. Gold production guidance for 2018 is 230,000-255,000 ounces at a cash operating cost per ounce of $650-730. As the winner of the PDAC 2018 Environmental and Social Responsibility Award, Golden Star is committed to leaving a positive and sustainable legacy in its areas of operation.

APPENDIX A

Assay results received from the drilling of Wassa Underground targets in the first quarter of 2018

HOLE ID Azimuth

() Dip () From

(m) To (m) Drilled

Width

(m) ~ True

Width

(m) Grade

Au

(g/t) BSDD315 97.8 -74.5 No significant intersections BS18DD388M 88.9 -77.5 1007.0 1076.3 69.3 58.5 4.8 BS18DD388M 87.8 -78.5 1097.0 1104.0 7.0 5.8 4.8 BS18DD388M 84.3 -78.5 1118.0 1123.0 5.0 4.2 3.1 BS18DD388M 82.8 -78.7 1183.0 1191.0 8.0 6.7 3.1 BS18DD388M 42.6 -73.3 1516.1 1522.1 6.0 5.3 3.0 BS18DD388M 42.4 -73.1 1539.8 1544.8 5.0 4.4 4.6 BS18DD389M 91.3 -67.2 260.2 264.2 4.0 2.7 3.7 BS18DD389M 92.7 -65.3 384.5 390.5 6.0 4.1 11.1 BS18DD389M 92.4 -64.7 433.0 436.0 3.0 2.1 6.7 BS18DD389M 93.9 -63.8 481.0 485.5 4.5 3.2 9.6 BS18DD389M 95.4 -63.4 503.0 510.0 7.0 5.0 2.6 BS18DD389M 95.4 -62 696.0 721.0 25.0 18.3 4.3 BS18DD389M 94.3 -61.8 747.8 765.0 17.2 12.6 3.7 BS18DD389M 93.5 -61.8 771.3 776.3 5.0 3.7 3.5 BS18DD389M 92.8 -61.3 808.5 814.5 6.0 4.4 10.3

Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Some statements contained in this news release are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and "forward looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities laws. Forward looking statements and information include but are not limited to, statements and information regarding: the timing of commencement of work on the PEA; the ability to achieve Wassa Underground's next stage of growth; the growth of Wassa Underground's Inferred Mineral Resources through further step-out drilling; the ability to utilize greater capacity at Wassa's processing plant and increase production; the drilling at 18700N and 19300N to commence in the second quarter of 2018; the timing of results from the drilling at 18700N and 19300N; the timing for completion of the PEA; the potential results of the PEA; and production guidance and cash operating cost guidance for 2018. Generally, forward-looking information and statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", "believes" or variations of such words and phrases (including negative or grammatical variations) or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved" or the negative connotation thereof. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements and information are inherently uncertain and involve risks, assumptions and uncertainties that could cause actual facts to differ materially. There can be no assurance that future developments affecting the Company will be those anticipated by management. Please refer to the discussion of these and other factors in Management's Discussion and Analysis of financial conditions and results of operations for the year ended December 31, 2017. Additional and/or updated factors will be included in our annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2017 which will be filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The forecasts contained in this press release constitute management's current estimates, as of the date of this press release, with respect to the matters covered thereby. We expect that these estimates will change as new information is received. While we may elect to update these estimates at any time, we do not undertake any estimate at any particular time or in response to any particular event.

Technical Information

The Mineral Resource estimates have been compiled by the Company's technical personnel in accordance with definitions and guidelines set out in the Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves adopted by the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum and as required by Canada's National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101").

The Mineral Resource technical contents of this press release have been reviewed and approved by S. Mitchel Wasel, BSc Geology, a "Qualified Person" pursuant to NI 43-101. Mr. Wasel is Vice President Exploration for Golden Star and an active member of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. The 2018 and 2017 estimates of Mineral Resources were prepared under the supervision of Mr. Wasel.

Additional scientific and technical information relating to the mineral properties referenced in this news release are contained in the following current technical reports for those properties available at www.sedar.com: (i) Wassa - "NI 43-101 Technical Report on feasibility study of the Wassa open pit mine and underground project in Ghana" effective date December 31, 2014; (ii) Bogoso/Prestea - "NI 43-101 Technical Report on Resources and Reserves, Golden Star Resources, Bogoso/Prestea Gold Mine, Ghana" dated March 28, 2018.

The results for Wassa Underground stated herein are based on the analysis of saw-split HQ/NQ diamond half core or a three kilogram single stage riffle split of a nominal 25 to 30 kg Reverse Circulation chip sample which has been sampled over nominal one meter intervals (adjusted where necessary for mineralized structures). Sample preparation and analyses have been carried out at SGS or Intertek Laboratories in Tarkwa, which are independent from Golden Star, using a 1,000 gram slurry of sample and tap water which is prepared and subjected to an accelerated cyanide leach (LEACHWELL). The sample is then rolled for twelve hours before being allowed to settle. An aliquot of solution is then taken, gold extracted into Di-iso Butyl Keytone (DiBK), and determined by flame Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry (AAS). Detection Limit is 0.01 ppm.

All analytical work is subject to a systematic and rigorous Quality Assurance-Quality Control (QA-QC). At least 5% of samples are certified standards and the accuracy of the analysis is confirmed to be acceptable from comparison of the recommended and actual "standards" results. The remaining half core is stored on site for future inspection and detailed logging, to provide valuable information on mineralogy, structure, alteration patterns and the controls on gold mineralization.

Cautionary Note to US Investors Concerning Estimates of Inferred Mineral Resources

This press release uses the term "Inferred Mineral Resources." The Company advises US investors that while this term is recognized and required by NI 43-101, the SEC does not recognize it. "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 Inferred Mineral Resources will ever be upgraded to a higher category. In accordance with Canadian rules, estimates of Inferred Mineral Resources cannot form the basis of feasibility or other economic studies. US investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of the Inferred Mineral Resource exists, or is economically or legally mineable.

SOURCE Golden Star Resources Ltd.

Related Links

www.gsr.com

MIAMI, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Britton Hill Partners today announced its portfolio company, Hawker Pacific Airservices Limited, has agreed to be acquired by Jet Aviation for $250 million, subject to customary closing adjustments and conditions.

Founded in 1978 and headquartered in Sydney, Australia, Hawker Pacific is the largest business and general aviation service provider within the Asia Pacific region, the fastest-growing market for private aviation globally. Through the largest network of MRO and FBO facilities across Asia Pacific, the company provides a wide range of aviation services, including civil MRO services, government fleet management, FBO services, aircraft sales and parts sales.

Ross Rodrigues, a Managing Partner at Britton Hill, said, "Hawker Pacific has grown significantly since we acquired a majority stake in 2014, reflecting the robust growth of the business and general aviation market in the Asia Pacific region, successful M&A execution, and a strategic realignment of the company's core business units. This growth could not have been achieved without the support and guidance from our partners at SEACOR and outstanding leadership from Hawker Pacific's senior management team. We are very pleased to announce a transaction that reflects Hawker's strategic value while giving the business a leading industry partner that will enhance the company's future growth."

Alan Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Hawker Pacific, added, "We are excited about our future as the leading business and general aviation service provider within Asia Pacific. Our business is well positioned to capitalize on many attractive growth opportunities within the region and we believe the backing of our new partners will further enhance the service we are able to provide our customer base. We want to sincerely thank Britton Hill for their partnership and support and look forward to working with the Jet Aviation team to further Hawker Pacific's strong history of growth."

Sidley Austin LLP is serving as legal counsel and Jefferies LLC is serving as exclusive financial advisor to Hawker Pacific with respect to the transaction.

About Britton Hill Partners

Britton Hill Partners, LLC, is a privately-held investment and advisory firm headquartered in Miami, Florida. Britton Hill combines its unique network of relationships and diverse experiences at leading investment firms with a long-term investment horizon. The firm focuses on making investments in the energy, logistics, business and consumer services, special situations and real estate sectors.

About SEACOR

SEACOR Holdings Inc. is a diversified holding company with interests in domestic and international transportation and logistics and risk management consultancy. SEACOR is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol CKH. For more information about SEACOR, please visit www.seacorholdings.com.

About Hawker Pacific

Founded in 1978, Hawker Pacific is the largest business & general aviation ("BG&A") service provider within Asia Pacific, the fastest growing region for private and aviation globally. Hawker Pacific services BG&A operators, as well as governments, large fleet operators, corporates, charter companies, special mission operators, training providers and individuals. Hawker Pacific provides a wide range of services including civil MRO, government fleet management, FBO services, aircraft management, aircraft sales and parts sales. Hawker Pacific also owns and operates the largest FBO network across Asia Pacific. For more information about Hawker Pacific, please visit www.hawkerpacific.com.

Contact: Mark Semer

Kekst

(212) 521-4800

[email protected]

SOURCE Britton Hill PartnersThe Saudi Patient Safety Center, in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Houston Methodist, will launch the first national sepsis reduction campaign in the Kingdom, using a successful sepsis prevention and reduction program created at Houston Methodist Hospital.

"We've had a longstanding business relationship with Saudi Arabia, implementing programs for medical students and physicians and guiding health care providers on ways to deliver the highest level of care to their patients. Now we want to share our successes with sepsis prevention, and help save lives in the Kingdom," said Cathy Easter, President and CEO of Houston Methodist Global Health Care Services.

Sepsis is a life-threatening condition when the body's response to infection causes injury to its own tissues and organs. It is the leading cause of death by infection globally, with an estimated 30 million new cases diagnosed each year. Of these, 6 to 8 million patients die.

The Houston Methodist sepsis program focused on several major components including an early detection screening tool to help bedside nurses screen patients. Another significant component included screening and response protocols for newly admitted patients from the emergency department or other health care facility, as well as patients in the intensive care units. Over the course of eight years, Houston Methodist Hospital reported more than 1,000 lives saved and a reduction in hospital costs of more than $35 million. These guidelines have since been implemented across the U.S.

Dr. Faisal Masud, medical director of critical care at Houston Methodist Hospital and vice chair for quality and patient safety, will lead the Kingdom's multi-year project which will begin with a pilot study later this year.

Sepsis is most common and most dangerous in the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. Early treatment, usually with antibiotics and large amounts of intravenous fluids, typically improves chances for survival.

For more information on Houston Methodist Global Health Services, visit www.houstonmethodist.org/global or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

This news release was issued on behalf of Newswise(TM). For more information, visit http://www.newswise.com.

SOURCE Houston Methodist

Related Links

http://www.methodisthealth.com

TORONTO, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Hydro One Inc. and the Power Workers' Union ("PWU") are pleased to announce the achievement of a tentative settlement of a two-year collective agreement covering approximately 4,000 employees in critical front line roles.

"Our respective negotiations teams worked diligently over the course of the last several months to arrive at an agreement which recognizes the significant contributions our employees make in maintaining the supply of power across the province while delivering value to our customers and shareholders," said Mayo Schmidt, President and CEO, Hydro One.

"The Power Workers' Union prides itself on working with employers to provide job security for our membership as well as delivering improvements and stability over the course of the Collective Agreement," said Mel Hyatt, President of the PWU. "I am pleased that the leadership in both parties were able to reach a tentative memorandum of agreement." The leadership of the PWU are recommending that their members accept this agreement.

The collective agreement between Hydro One Inc. and the PWU covers approximately 4,000 employees involved in the company's operations in Ontario. Union members will now vote on this tentative agreement with the outcome anticipated by June 27, 2018.

About Hydro One Inc.

Hydro One Inc. is a fully owned subsidiary of Hydro One Limited, Ontario's largest electricity transmission and distribution provider with more than 1.3 million valued customers, $25 billion in assets and 2017 annual revenues of nearly $6 billion. Our team of over 7,400 skilled and dedicated regular and non-regular employees proudly and safely serves suburban, rural and remote communities across Ontario through our 30,000 circuit km of high-voltage transmission and 123,000 circuit km of primary distribution networks. Hydro One is committed to the communities we serve, and has been rated as the top utility in Canada for its corporate citizenship, sustainability, and diversity initiatives. We are one of only five utility companies in Canada to achieve the Sustainable Energy Company designation from the Canadian Electricity Association. We also provide advanced broadband telecommunications services on a wholesale basis utilizing our extensive fibre optic network. Hydro One Limited's common shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: H).

Forward-Looking Statements and Information

This press release may contain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Words such as "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "attempt," "may," "plan," "will", "can", "believe," "seek," "estimate," and variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking information. These statements are not guarantees of future performance or actions and involve assumptions and risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual outcomes and results may differ materially from what is expressed, implied or forecasted in such forward-looking information. Some of the factors that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from the results expressed, implied or forecasted by such forward-looking information, including some of the assumptions used in making such statements, are discussed more fully in Hydro One's filings with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada, which are available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Hydro One does not intend, and it disclaims any obligation, to update any forward-looking information, except as required by law.

About the Power Workers' Union

The Power Workers' Union (PWU) has been representing the highly skilled people who work in Ontario's electricity sector since 1945. Presently representing about 16,000 members, the PWU has worked hard to build its reputation in Ontario as a credible source of knowledge for its members, and in advocating for better energy choices for all Ontarians. Learn more at www.pwu.ca and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

SOURCE Hydro One Inc.

Related Links

http://www.hydroone.com

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Global Industrial Protective Footwear Market is segmented on the basis of material as Waterproof, Rubber, Leather, Polyurethane, Plastic, and others.

Industrial protective footwear is the equipment that is usually put on at the industrial workplace. The main purpose behind designing the products was to avert work-related mishaps and damages like wet surfaces, chemical spill, falling of objects, contact with sharp objects, and electricity related accidents. It is also popularly known as Industrial safety footwear. The key features associated with the use of these products may include lightweight, comfortable to wear, slip-resistant, puncture-resistant, resistance to oils, water-resistant, safeguarding against chemicals, and ability to absorb shocks. The industrial protective shoes are equipped with toecaps that assist in carrying out appropriate protection against thermal impacts. Due to rising demands from various industries, the Industrial Protective Footwear Market is gaining huge recognition across the globe.

The factors that are playing a significant role in raising the market share entails rising concerns regarding safety, implementation of strict regulations by the government authorities, rising demand, technological developments, rise in the investments by the leading manufacturers, mounting adoptions of the product, and rising prerequisites.

The only factor that is acting as a hurdle in the overall growth of the market includes lack of awareness and knowledge among the end users regarding the use of the product.

It has been estimated that the Industrial Protective Footwear Market will experience a huge upsurge in the forthcoming years due to rising applications across various industries.

Industrial Protective Footwear Market is segmented on the basis of product as Boots, Shoes, and others.

Industrial Protective Footwear Market is segmented on the basis of application as Oil and Gas, Construction, Manufacturing, Food, Pharmaceuticals, Transport, and Mining. Among all the applications, the Construction segment is taking up the largest share in the market.

Access 119 page research report with TOC on "Global Industrial Protective Footwear Market" available with Radiant Insights, Inc. @: https://www.radiantinsights.com/research/global-industrial-protective-footwear-market-professional-survey-report-2016

Industrial Protective Footwear Market is segmented on the basis of geography as North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Rest of the World.

Among all the geographical regions, North America is the leader of the market and it is currently holding the largest share in the market, the reason being rise in the industrialization, augmented demand from various industries, implementation of strict policies related to safety, and existence of leading manufacturers.

Other than that, Asia Pacific region is also estimated to display a significant growth rate in the near future, the reason being rising market growth opportunities and augmented investments by the leading manufacturers in the particular region.

The key players operating in the Industrial Protective Footwear Market are recognized as W.L. Gore, Uvex Group, Liberty Group, Pezzol Industries, Hewats Edinburgh, Rahman Group, COFRA, Rock Fall, Dunlop Boots, Honeywell International, V.F. Corporation, JAL Group France, Wolverine, Bata Industrials, and Simon Corporation.

Market Segment:

This report studies Industrial Protective Footwear in Global market, especially in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia and India, with production, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions, from 2011 to 2015, and forecast to 2021.

This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering

Honeywell

Rocky

Georgia Boot

Lehigh Safety Shoes

Durango

Rocky 4EurSole

Ariat

Baffin

Black Diamond

Blundstone

Dan Post

Dr Martens

Florsheim

Impacto

Iron Age

Justin Workboots

Keen

Kodiak

Puma

Reebok

Rockport Works

Royer

Thorogood

Terra

Tingley

By types, the market can be split into

Type I

Type II

Type III

By Application, the market can be split into

Chemical

Construction

Fire Protection

Manufacturing

Mining

Oil and Gas

Steel and Metals

Welding

Other

By Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)

North America

China

Europe

Southeast Asia

Japan

India

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.DUBLIN, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "2018 Jamaica Telecom Market Analysis and Outlook Report" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The research work strategically analyzes Jamaica telecommunications market, examining the recent trends, drivers and challenges across diverse dimensions such as growth, demand, pricing, competition, consumer behaviour, infrastructure, policies and others.



The study also provides in-depth analysis of segment wise telecommunications including mobile, fixed line and fixed broadband services. The number of subscribers and penetration rates are forecast for each of the sub-segment including mobile, fixed landline and broadband segments from 2005 to 2025.



Jamaica telecommunication revenues, investment and infrastructure details are also covered in the report. Further, emerging business environment in Jamaica together with comparison to five competitive benchmark countries are included, to assess the country's prominence on regional front.



On the competitive analysis front, leading companies along with their market shares are identified. Further, key business strategies of market leaders, their tariffs and SWOT profiles are included. In addition, the research work forecasts the demographic and economic drivers of Jamaica that enable strategy planners to formulate their pricing and branding strategies.



The report also includes latest telecommunication market developments, mergers, acquisitions and launches, spectrum availability, tenders and other aspects are analyzed.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Executive Summary



2. Jamaica Telecom Market - Strategic Analysis



3. Jamaica Telecom Market Outlook



4. Jamaica Telecom Competitive Environment



5. Jamaica Telecom Industry Benchmarking



6. Jamaica Economic Outlook to 2025



7. Jamaica Demographic Outlook to 2025



8. Competitor Analysis



9. Recent Industry Developments



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/pjnjxf/jamaican_telecoms?w=5

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com

NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- KIERIN NYC announces a pre-launch preview of its debut collection, prior to the official launch at BeautyCon NYC on April 21st-22nd.

KIERIN NYC is a bold, new, disruptive brand challenging the rules of fragrance. Unlike conventional fragrance brands, KIERIN NYC invites users to be inspired, not defined or confined, by its fragrances and hopes to make KIERIN NYC deeply personal through individual stories.

Your Real NYC Stories Illuminated in Fragrance by KIERIN NYC KIERIN NYC fragrance collection, embodying the inspirational vibes of a pivotal generation: Highline Flirt, Nolita Noir, Santal Park and Sunday Brunch inspired by a culturally diverse, motivated and thoughtful city lifestyle.

The KIERIN NYC brand is artistic, genderless and individualistic with fragrances that are cruelty free, made with natural ingredients and sustainable materials.

Diversity and inclusion are core to the brand and not just presented as an afterthought.

KIERIN NYC fragrances are vibrations inspiring users to beneficial moods and celebrating diversity, inclusivity, beauty, art, and culture with utmost style and thoughtfulness.

-Highline Flirt, a vibrant mix of refreshing notes that focus on the art of possibility within the city.

-Nolita Noir, joining notes that encompass the intoxicating, hypnotic, and sensual scent of a night on the town, stepping out in a New York that never sleeps

-Santal Park, scents inspire the meditative moments of a leisurely stroll through the city's special oasis.

-Sunday Brunch, the friendly gathering of notes of warmth, effervescence and positivity.

KIERIN NYC encourages our community to share their own #FragranceStories on social channels. Don't forget to tag us and follow on Instagram @KierinNYC, #KierinNYC, Twitter @kierin_NYC, Facebook, YouTube. For more information about the line, brand vision, and its founders, visit www.kierin-nyc.com or check out Manhattan Minds.

Press Contact:

Mona Maine de Biran

[email protected]

917-868-1001

About KIERIN NYC:

Didier Maine de Biran is a Beauty Industry veteran who moved to New York from Paris in 1997 and has worked in the Fragrance Industry for over 20 years. Didier's rich knowledge of the industry is only matched by his enthusiasm for it.

Mona Maine de Biran is a former international model and champion of the TV talent show Star Search, an entrepreneur, and investor. Mona is incredibly invested in cultural diversity and KIERIN NYC's community and mission. She is also the founder of the New York City lifestyle blog and community, Manhattan Minds.

Chris Rosasco is a former street artist and one of the creative minds behind the brand. His experience in art and passion for beauty and fragrance inspires the vision and energy of the brand.

SOURCE KIERIN NYC

Related Links

http://www.kierin-nyc.com

MOBILE, Ala., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Kimberly-Clark Corporation has approved a capacity expansion project at its Mobile, Alabama manufacturing facility that will support K-C Professional's continued bath tissue category growth in North America.

"The Mobile team is excited about the role we will play in supporting the projected growth of the bath tissue category in North America as a result of this capacity expansion project," said Todd Visscher, Mill Manager for Kimberly-Clark's Mobile operations. "This investment, the commitment of our employees, and the community support will together bolster Mobile Mill's competitive position within Kimberly-Clark."

With an estimated investment of more than $100 million, this two-year project is expected to deliver improved capacity, greater manufacturing efficiency, and enhanced product quality.

Less than a year ago, Kimberly-Clark announced another significant investment in the Mobile facility for the construction of an on-site state-of-the-art combined heat-power plant and various other production enhancements.

"This investment is a testament to the strength of Kimberly-Clark's Mobile facility and its workforce," said Bill Sisson, President and CEO of the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce.

"It's rewarding to see Kimberly-Clark make another significant re-investment in its Mobile mill, which has been a major employer in the area for more than two decades," said Greg Canfield, secretary of the Alabama Department of Commerce. "We've forged a great partnership with Kimberly-Clark over the years, and the state and local teams will continue to support the company's future successes."

"This expansion by Kimberly-Clark is about more than just jobs  it's about a global, Fortune 500 company reinvesting in our city and deepening a partnership that dates back more than 20 years. When existing businesses are thriving in combination with new jobs and investment, that's a winning formula. That's how we're transforming Mobile into the most business-friendly city in America," said City of Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson.

Mobile County Commission District 1 Commissioner Merceria Ludgood said, "We're happy that Kimberly-Clark has found Mobile County's economy good for business as they continue to invest and provide jobs. In just the past year, Kimberly Clark has committed more than $200 million in improvements to their plant here."

Kimberly-Clark employs more than 680 workers at the Mobile site, where it first established a presence in 1995 by acquiring it from Scott Paper Company, and produces bath tissue and paper towels under the Scott, Cottonelle, and K-C Professional brand names.

About the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce's Economic Development Efforts

The Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce is a private business organization with 2,000 members, and the economic developer of record for the city of Mobile and Mobile County. With the support of the Chamber's Partners for Growth public and private investors, over the last decade Mobile's economic development efforts have garnered $8.33 billion in capital investment and added 14,074 jobs, including 31 new businesses recruited and 60 expansions made at existing area companies. Additional information is on the Chamber's website at www.mobilechamber.com, Facebook @MobileChamber and Twitter at @MobileChamber.

About Kimberly-Clark Professional

Kimberly-Clark Professional partners with businesses to create Exceptional Workplaces, helping to make them healthier, safer and more productive. Key brands in this segment include: Kleenex, Scott, WypAll, Kimtech and Jackson Safety. To see how Kimberly-Clark Professional is helping people around the world to work better, please visit www.kcprofessional.com.

About Kimberly-Clark

Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB) and its trusted brands are an indispensable part of life for people in more than 175 countries. Fueled by ingenuity, creativity, and an understanding of people's most essential needs, we create products that help individuals experience more of what's important to them. Our portfolio of brands, including Huggies, Kleenex, Scott, Kotex, Cottonelle, Poise, Depend, Andrex, Pull-Ups, GoodNites, Intimus, Neve, Plenitud, Viva and WypAll, hold the No. 1 or No. 2 share position in 80 countries. We use sustainable practices that support a healthy planet, build stronger communities, and ensure our business thrives for decades to come. To keep up with the latest news and to learn more about the company's 146-year history of innovation, visit kimberly-clark.com or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

[KMB-C]

SOURCE Kimberly-Clark Corporation

Related Links

http://www.kimberly-clark.com

BALTIMORE, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Greater Baltimore Committee and Associated Black Charities, both independent non-partisan organizations, will host a town-hall style Maryland Gubernatorial Forum to educate their constituents and other voters about mainstream candidates running for Governor, their election agendas and positions on key regional and statewide issues.



Seven Democratic candidates vying in the primary election for governor have accepted invitations to participate. They are: Rushern Baker, Benjamin Jealous, Kevin Kamenetz, Richard Madaleno, Alec Ross, Jim Shea and Krish Vignarajah.



Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican who is running for re-election, also has been invited to participate.

"Electing a governor is one of the most critical decisions Marylanders can make," said Donald C. Fry, President and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Committee.

"With so many candidates vying for the office this year and a number of critical issues, including the economy, jobs and the business climate, we felt it was imperative to take an active role getting the top candidates in front of influencers and voters to ensure they are well informed when they go to the polls for the June 26 primary."

Diane Bell-McKoy, President and CEO of Associated Black Charities, said the organization is "excited to provide the opportunity for those invited to see and hear the candidates up close and personal."

"Maryland is one of many states across the country where racial and ethnic demographics are increasing," Bell-McKoy noted. "The importance of using a racial equity lens in policy in order to create more equitable outcomes for all Marylanders is imperative. We are excited about Marylanders getting to know these candidates and to assess which of them would best speak to their dreams and aspirations for a better, more equitable Maryland."

Details :

When: April 26, 5:30-6 p.m. reception; 6-7:30 p.m. program.

Where: University of Maryland School of Medicine, Leadership Hall, 685 West Baltimore Street, Baltimore, MD 21201

Program Format: Each candidate will be allowed a two minute opening statement followed by questions from the event moderators, Fry of the Greater Baltimore Committee and Bell-McKoy of Associated Black Charities. Questions from the audience will then be selected.

Attendance: This event is limited to: employees of Greater Baltimore Committee member organizations and their guests; invited constituents of Associated Black Charities.



More Information:

https://gbc.org/events/maryland-gubernatorial-forum-april-2018/

ABOUT THE GREATER BALTIMORE COMMITTEE



The Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) is a regional organization of business and civic leaders that includes businesses, nonprofit organizations and educational and civic institutions. It is the leading voice for the private sector in the Baltimore region on issues relating to economic growth, job creation, workforce development, transportation, the business climate and quality of life. The GBC's membership is comprised of over 500 member organizations, including large, mid-size and small companies, nonprofits, education and foundations in the Greater Baltimore region.

ABOUT ASSOCIATED BLACK CHARITIES

Associated Black Charities is a public foundation that advocates and facilitates the creation of measurably healthier and more prosperous communities through responsible leadership and philanthropic investment throughout the State of Maryland. Through it's More in the Middle Initiative and its health disparities work, ABC acts as a convener, advocate and grant maker to address issues impacting Maryland communities.

SOURCE Greater Baltimore Committee

Related Links

http://www.gbc.org

CHICAGO, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mayor Rahm Emanuel and David Whitaker, President & CEO of Choose Chicago, today announced Chicago reached record tourism levels in the first quarter of 2018. The results build on Chicago's record performance of 55.2 million visitors in 2017 and reflect the city's growing strength in attracting more leisure visitors and convention delegates.

"Tourism in Chicago means jobs throughout Chicago," Mayor Emanuel said. "By continuing to set new tourism records and bring millions more people to Chicago every year, we are creating jobs and generating economic opportunities that reach every Chicago neighborhood."

In the first quarter of 2018, total rooms occupied reached a record 2.33 million, an increase of 10.5 percent. The double-digit growth was fueled by both an increase in leisure rooms booked - up 7.1 percent, and a significant increase in group rooms booked - up 20.5 percent. The occupancy rate increased 5.7 percent, up to 61.2 percent, which ties for the highest level ever recorded, set over a decade ago.

"We're encouraged to see the momentum continue as Chicago experiences unparalleled growth, especially in winter visitation," Whitaker said. "A primary focus of Choose Chicago and our partners is to establish Chicago as a 12-month visitor destination for both vacationers and meetings delegates."

Chicago's tourism industry supported an estimated 146,500 jobs in 2017, a 17 percent increase since Mayor Emanuel took office. Prior to 2011, there were an estimated 124,400 tourism-related positions. The 55.2 million visitors to Chicago in 2017 generated an estimated 22,000 additional jobs. In 2010 Chicago saw approximately 39.25 million visitors. 2017's performance is an approximately 40 percent increase.

Choose Chicago continues to aggressively work to bring in meetings and conventions that have not previously met in Chicago, including six the city hosted in the first quarter. The growth in leisure rooms was also reflected in Expedia bookings data, which paced up 14 percent in the first quarter year over year. The positive trend looks to continue as Choose Chicago announced that current reports indicate advance room-nights booked on Expedia are currently pacing up 25 percent for the combined key summer travel months of June, July and August.

Six new hotels opened their doors in Chicago's Central Business District in 2017 with another eight new hotels scheduled to open in 2018, including the new 175-room Hotel Zachary, which opened last week adjacent to Wrigley Field. The continued hotel boom further demonstrates investor confidence in Chicago.

About Choose Chicago

Choose Chicago is the official destination marketing organization for Chicago, Illinois. Its mission is to bring regional, national and international business and leisure visitors to Chicago for the economic benefit of the city, the community and its membership. For more information, visit www.choosechicago.com. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @ChooseChicago.

SOURCE Choose Chicago

Related Links

http://www.choosechicago.com

LOS ANGELES, April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Abby J. Leibman, President & CEO of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, today issued the following statement, in response to President Trump's Executive Order on "Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility."

"This cruel order relies on partisan rhetoric instead of facts to set up a false dichotomy between those Americans who struggle and those the Administration calls 'truly in need.' It was clearly shaped without any real understanding of what causes poverty in the United States or how to actually combat it. It contains troubling misogynistic sentiments that are hard to ignore, especially when we know that this country's nutrition safety net disproportionately supports women. As a single mother, I know the importance of both hard work and educating my children on great values. I also know that without enough food, neither is possible.

"This misguided executive order provides another example to prove that the Administration's actions aim to strip Americans of public benefits like the Supplemental Food Assistance Program (SNAP). These programs provide Americans with vitally needed stability when crushing circumstances throw them into poverty. Conflating safety net programs with workforce development programs undermine the long-held and highly successful purposes for which these programs were designed. While we can all agree that work is essential, placing more stringent restrictions on struggling Americans without also expanding childcare programs, viable job opportunities, access to college education, and other support systems will not help anyone find gainful employment.

"We anticipate a draft of the 2018 Farm Bill soon, which many say will echo President Trump's dangerous rhetoric about work requirements and include deep cuts to SNAP. We once again call on our elected officials to work with us toward our goal of ending hunger in America, rather than adding to the problem."

About MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger

Inspired by Jewish values and ideals, MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger is a national advocacy organization working to end hunger among people of all faiths and backgrounds in the United States and Israel. Learn more about MAZON's 2018 Farm Bill Priorities and other programs at mazon.org.

Contact:

Michelle Stuffmann

Phone: (424) 208-7203

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger

Related Links

http://mazon.org

MCLEAN, Va., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Jeff Rumburg, co-founder and Managing Partner of MetricNet, presented Session 302, 'Leveraging Metrics to Take Southwest Airlines to a Higher Plane', at the Annual HDI Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. This marks the 26th consecutive year Mr. Rumburg has been selected as a speaker for the Annual HDI Conference & Expo.

In this presentation, Mr. Rumburg presented a case study that examined how Southwest Airlines leveraged metrics to close performance gaps and achieve world-class performance. It illustrated, in detail, how Southwest established performance targets, implemented a scorecard, and drove accountability, to go from Good to Great in less than 12 months.

"By maturing their metrics, Southwest has reduced their costs while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction, first contact resolution rate, service levels, and agent job satisfaction." said Rumburg. "Moreover, chat now represents more than 30% of their ticket volume, and agents have a well-defined career path!"

Those interested in this presentation can find a copy of the slide deck on MetricNet's website. Mr. Rumburg will also be presenting Session 604, 'The Enterprise Service Desk: The Greatest Opportunity In A Generation!', on Thursday, April 12, 2018; co-presenting Session 701, 'TECHTalk With Rae Ann And Rumburg', on Friday, April 13, 2018; and demonstrating MetricNet and HDI's co-branded Peer Group Service Desk Benchmark at the Solutions Spotlight on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Additionally, he facilitated 'Succeeding with Metrics', a new interactive, consultative HDI Training Workshop on Monday, April 9, 2018 and Tuesday, April 10, 2018.

Mr. Rumburg is the winner of the Ron Muns Lifetime Achievement Award, was named to HDI's Top 25 Thought Leaders list for 2016 and 2017, and has served on HDI's Strategic Advisory Board. He is co-founder and Managing Partner of MetricNet, LLC, where he is responsible for global strategy, product development, and client engagement delivery. As a leading expert in benchmarking and re-engineering, Mr. Rumburg authored a best selling book on benchmarking, and has been retained as a benchmarking expert by such well-known companies as American Express, Hewlett- Packard, General Motors, and IBM.

If you would like more information about benchmarking your service and support functions, please visit http://www.metricnet.com or e-mail MetricNet at info(at)metricnet(dot)com.

About MetricNet

MetricNet is the global leader in IT service and support benchmarking. More than half of the FORTUNE 500 rely on MetricNet benchmarks to improve and optimize their performance. MetricNet is the first, and still the only company to offer downloadable service desk and desktop support benchmarks from their website. With a global benchmarking database of more than 4,000 IT service and support benchmarks, MetricNet has the most comprehensive database of process and performance metrics in the industry.

About HDI

Founded in 1989, HDI is the first membership association and certification body created for the technical service and support industry. Since then, HDI has remained the source for professional development by offering the resources needed to promote organization-wide success through exceptional customer service. In other words, we help professionals in service management better serve customers. We do this by facilitating collaboration and networking, hosting acclaimed conferences and events, producing renowned publications and research, certifying and training thousands of professionals each year, and connecting solution providers with practitioners. Learn more at www.ThinkHDI.com. HDI is organized by UBM Americas, a part of UBM plc, an Events First marketing and communications services business. For more information, visit ubmamericas.com.

SOURCE MetricNet, LLCCHICAGO, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- LEAP Innovations, a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to transforming education through personalized learning, today announced the latest release of its free Personalized Learning Teacher and Student Surveys, designed to help schools understand their progress toward implementing personalized learning practices in the classroom.

"The personalization process, much like the learning process, is different for everyonethere is no right way for a school to implement a personalized learning model. That's why we designed this tool to give educators direct, concrete feedback on what is working and what is not," said Chris Liang-Vergara, Chief of Learning Innovation at LEAP Innovations. "We want to ensure that as schools move into this new era of learning, they are, above all, listening to the needs of their teachers and students. And we want to give them tools to innovate and iterate based on an understanding of how new strategies are playing out in the classroom."

In the 2016-17 school year, over 1,000 teachers and 14,000 students participated in LEAP Innovations' surveys. Participating schools receive an individualized report to help them understand their progress toward creating an environment that is Learner Focused, Learner Demonstrated, and Learner Led. Schools that implement the surveys are also able to identify challenges and progress at the classroom level, with access to detailed information across 105 teacher-reported indicators, including educator-familiarity with students' community context and evidence of peer-based learning.

"We have seen incredible benefits stem from listening to our students and teachers and adjusting our strategy based on their feedback," said Tiffany Brown, principal at Wendell Smith Elementary School in Chicago. "As school leaders, we can either spend tremendous time and energy speculating on what students need, or we can ask them. We've found that the latter is more efficientand far more effective."

The surveys were designed to benchmark schools' progress in meeting the guidelines of the LEAP Learning Framework, which outlines specific objectives and strategies for schools seeking to implement personalized learning models. Using these indicators, LEAP will work with schools to strengthen the connection between personalized learning practices and student outcomes, providing valuable data back to the field on which practices make the most difference.

Schools can learn more about the surveys and sign up to participate here.

About LEAP Innovations

LEAP Innovations is a national organization headquartered in Chicago that connects innovation and education to transform how students learn. LEAP works directly with educators and innovators to discover, pilot and scale personalized learning technologies and innovative practices. LEAP's work is anchored by the LEAP Learning Framework, a suite of resources that educators across the country are using to define, design, and implement personalized learning models.

SOURCE LEAP Innovations

Related Links

http://leapinnovations.org

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants the Board of Immigration Appeals to dismiss 500 pages of evidence presented by The National Press Club and 16 other professional journalism organizations in the asylum case of Emilio Gutierrez Soto, an award-winning Mexican journalist.

In a brief filed before the board  which earlier accepted the Press Club petition to allow it and the other journalism groups to enter the Gutierrez case as "friends of the court"  DHS argues that the board should throw out extensive documentation the Club provided of Gutierrez's work as an investigative reporter. That work made him the subject of death threats in this country, prompting him and his then-teenage son to seek asylum in the United States in 2008.

"The board cannot consider new evidence presented for the first time on appeal," the department writes in its brief.

For the Press Club and its lawyers, the government's effort to suppress proof of Gutierrez's journalism bona fides  offered because an immigration judge questioned them  comes as a shock.

"It's appalling that an agency of the U.S. government would put the lives of two men at risk on what amounts to a legal technicality," said National Press Club President Andrea Edney. "There should be no statute of limitation on the truth."

Other arguments DHS offers in favor of rejecting the Gutierrezes' asylum appeal:

An El Paso immigration judge's July decision against them was "not clearly erroneous;"

immigration judge's July decision against them was "not clearly erroneous;" Gutierrez was "never physically hurt" while in Mexico and "threats alone are ordinarily insufficient to constitute persecution," and

and "threats alone are ordinarily insufficient to constitute persecution," and "There is nothing on the record to suggest that the government of Mexico is unable or unwilling to protect" the two men.

"The disingenuousness of these arguments is truly breathtaking," said Barbara Cochran, president of the National Press Club's nonprofit Journalism Institute. "Countless well-respected organizations, including the U.S. Department of State, have documented the dangers facing journalists in Mexico. A recent United Nations report concluded that government officials there not only have been unable to protect reporters but are sometimes complicit in targeting them. When people's lives are at stake, we should be about getting it right."

Gutierrez and his then-15-year-old son, Oscar, requested asylum in the United States nearly 10 years ago after the Mexican reporter's stories on official corruption made him the target of harassment and death threats. U.S. authorities initially found the two to have "credible fear" of returning and allowed them to stay while their case was investigated. It languished for nearly a decade until, last summer, an El Paso immigration judge denied their asylum request. While that case was on appeal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Dec. 7 attempted to deport the pair, a move that was thwarted by an emergency stay from the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Since then, Immigration and Customs Enforcement have held the pair in detention. The Press Club and other journalism organizations are supporting a writ of habeas corpus to free the two men.

In October  two months before he was jailed  Gutierrez appeared at the National Press Club to accept the John Aubuchon Press Freedom award on behalf of Mexico's journalists.

A #FreeEmilio petition posted by the Press Club at Change.org has garnered nearly 100,000 signatures. The Washington Post, along with The Denver Post and the Houston Chronicle have editorialized for the Gutierrezes release, and Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso has called the government's treatment of the two men "morally wrong."

Founded in Washington, D.C. in 1908, the National Press Club represents 3,000 journalists and communicators worldwide. Its nonprofit Journalism Institute provides professional development programs and works to advance the cause of free speech in the United States and abroad.

Contact: Kathy Kiely, National Press Club Journalism Institute Press Freedom Fellow, [email protected]

SOURCE National Press Club

Related Links

http://www.press.org/

RENO, Nev., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- This year, as the news media celebrates the 50th anniversary of a major turning point in the Vietnam War, we are often being reminded how, in early 1968, world attention was focused on the isolated Khe Sanh Combat Base, and the plight of outnumbered American forces being besieged by nearly 30,000 North Vietnamese Army soldiers.

The Gunpowder Prince: How Marine Corps Captain Mirza Munir Baig Saved Khe Sanh Enemy artillery fire on Khe Sanh was relentless and deadly.

Yet, what few know is that the fate of those 6,000 Americans hinged upon the talent of a small band of resourceful officers at Khe Sanh, whose high-stakes responsibility it was to devise imaginative schemes, dependent on the ebb-and-flow of the battle swirling around them, to save the base.

Chief among them was thirty-six-year-old, Marine Corps Captain Mirza Munir "Harry" Baig, a scholarly, Cambridge University-educated, Pakistani immigrant, born in India, and heir to a celebrated family military tradition dating back centuries to the Mongol conquest of the Western Himalayas. His classical education, an uncanny grasp of his adversary's historical tendencies, and some murky, counterintelligence work developing spy networks deep into North Vietnam, permitted the enigmatic Baig, like some chess grandmaster, to "get into the heads" of North Vietnamese military strategistsanticipating their every move.

Award-winning author Michael Archer worked alongside this brilliant eccentric throughout that bitter ten-week siege. Supported by declassified American and Vietnamese military records and memoirs, Archer leaves little doubt that Baig's presence at Khe Sanh was critical in saving thousands of his fellow defenders from death or captivityand averting one of the gravest military defeats in American history.

For more information about The Gunpowder Prince: How Marine Corps Captain Mirza Munir Baig Saved Khe Sanh (Paperback:143 pages/$9.95) please visit www.michaelarcher.net.

Author Michael Archer served in Vietnam as a U.S. Marine in 1967-1968. His books include A Patch of Ground: Khe Sanh Remembered, which VIETNAM magazine called "the best first-hand account of the battle of Khe Sanh;" and The Long Goodbye: Khe Sanh Revisited, winner of FOREWORD Reviews 2016 INDIES Book of the Year Award. Michael lives in Reno, Nevada.

Contact: Michael Archer

Phone: (775) 846-4995

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.michaelarcher.net

SOURCE Michael Archer

Related Links

http://www.michaelarcher.net

IRVINE, Calif., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ivantis Inc., developer of the novel Hydrus Microstent device designed to lower eye pressure for glaucoma patients, announced today that the HORIZON US cohort data will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery (ASCRS) in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, April 14, 2018. The full global HORIZON pivotal trial results were previously presented at the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting last November.

The results will be presented by Dr. Iqbal "Ike" Ahmed, assistant professor at the University of Toronto, who serves as the Research Director at the Kensington Eye Institute and the Director of the Glaucoma and Advanced Anterior Segment Surgery (GAASS) Fellowship Program at the University of Toronto.

The US cohort analysis included 331 of the 556 HORIZON subjects (60 percent of all HORIZON eyes) treated in the United States at the 26 US centers that participated in the trial. The HORIZON Trial compared reductions in intraocular pressure (IOP) and ocular hypotensive medication use in patients having cataract surgery, with and without the Hydrus Microstent. Patients in the study had mild-to-moderate primary open angle glaucoma (POAG) and were taking one to four eye drops.

The 24 month US cohort data, analyzed with the conservative intention-to-treat methodology, showed:

79 percent of Hydrus Microstent patients achieved a 20 percent or greater reduction in IOP, compared to 55 percent in the cataract only group for a difference of 24 percent.

Hydrus Microstent reduced IOP 50 percent more than cataract surgery alone (7.9 mmHg vs. 5.2 mmHg, a difference of 2.7 mmHg).

Twice the number of Hydrus Microstent patients remained medication free compared to the control group (79 percent vs. 39 percent).

Of patients on one eye drop at entry into the study, which represents the most common glaucoma patient in the US, 87 percent were medication free compared to 38 percent in the control group.

The treatment effect at 24 months for each of these metrics is the largest improvement over control of any MIGS pivotal trial reported to date.

"These are the best results we have seen to date in a US patient population from a randomized controlled MIGS trial," said Dr. Ahmed. "As a glaucoma specialist, it's encouraging to see more robust improvements in IOP lowering compared to cataract surgery alone. A near 3-point improvement in IOP lowering compared to control is significant, and clearly this benefit will help keep patients on fewer medications. Whereas the global HORIZON results were excellent, the US cohort results appear even stronger and may give us even greater insights into differences in how patients are treated with MIGS from region to region. I look forward to a more detailed analysis of patient demographics and potential differences in practice patterns in the forthcoming publication."

Dr. Douglas Koch, Professor and Allen, Mosbacher, and Law Chair in Ophthalmology at Baylor College of Medicine, added, "The ability of the Hydrus device to keep patients medication free, and do so consistently for up to two years, with virtually the same safety profile as cataract surgery, is of utmost importance and should resonate with any busy cataract practice in the US. The surgery is elegant, straight forward, and easy to learn. When you consider this and the efficacy reported, I am certain that the Hydrus will become a widely adopted new MIGS solution. I am eager to have the opportunity to offer this to my patients when it becomes available."

The global HORIZON study is the largest prospective, randomized, controlled trial conducted to date for a MIGS device. The initial study included 556 patients and was conducted at 38 centers in nine countries on three continents and was designed to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of the Hydrus Microstent in lowering intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients undergoing cataract surgery.

"This data gives us great confidence that the Hydrus Microstent could become standard of care for glaucoma patients undergoing cataract surgery," said Dave Van Meter, President and CEO of Ivantis. "While we are proud to have conducted the first global MIGS pivotal trial in HORIZON, we also recognize that this analysis was an important step in allowing surgeons an opportunity to assess a US cohort of the HORIZON Trial and evaluate the Hydrus technology in the context of a growing body of MIGS clinical data."

About the Hydrus Microstent

Roughly the size of an eyelash, the Hydrus Microstent is a next-generation MIGS device designed to reduce eye pressure by reestablishing flow through Schlemm's canal, the eye's natural outflow pathway. When placed in the canal during minimally invasive microsurgery, the device restores the flow of fluid in the eye using a tri-modal mechanism of action:

The Hydrus Microstent creates a bypass through the trabecular meshwork, allowing outflow of aqueous humor. It then dilates and scaffolds Schlemm's canal to augment outflow. Its length spans 90 degrees of the canal to provide consistent access to the fluid collector channels in the eye.

The Hydrus Microstent is one of the most rigorously researched and thoroughly studied MIGS devices, with more than 3,500 cases treated globally, in patients with a wide range of disease severities. Ivantis anticipates marketing approval of the Hydrus Microstent in the US in 2018.

About Ivantis

Ivantis, Inc. is a privately held company established in 2007 to design, develop and commercialize new technologies to treat eye disease. Investors include New Enterprise Associates, Delphi Ventures, Foresite Capital, RA Capital Management, Ascension Ventures, EDBI, GBS Ventures, MemorialCare Innovation Fund, Merieux Development, and Vertex HealthCare. The company is headquartered in Irvine, Calif.

Hydrus Microstent is not currently approved for sale in the United States.

www.IvantisInc.com

Media Contact

Capwell Communications

[email protected]

949-999-3303

SOURCE Ivantis, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.ivantisinc.com

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- New Jersey's legal online gambling industry closed a record-setting quarter with a record-shattering March, continuing to buoy the state's gaming industry, according to PlayNJ.com analysts.

"The revenue records grab headlines, but the story doesn't end there," said PlayNJ.com lead analyst Steve Ruddock. "Online gaming is increasingly important to the bottom line of every casino operator in New Jersey. It was a key factor in the gaming industry's 23.7 percent increase in gross operating profit in Q4 2017."

New Jersey online casinos generated $25.6 million in gross revenue in March, up 16.3 percent percent from February's $21.99 million.

New Jersey has now amassed $69.5 million in total revenue this year, up 17.3 percent from $59.3 million in Q1 2017. The three months of 2018 represent the three highest monthly revenue totals since New Jersey legalized and regulated online gambling in 2013.

"Online casinos were able to produce another incredible month of revenue as the market for these games continues to grow," Ruddock said. "Few obvious signs of a slow down exist."

Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa became the first first license holder to surpass $200 million in total gaming win ($201.8 million) after generating $4.6 million in March.

The Golden Nugget posted a record $8.7 million in March, up 9.8 percent from $7.9 million in February.

"The Golden Nugget has become a bellwether for New Jersey. As it goes, so goes the state's legal online gambling industry," Ruddock said.

More from the March report:

New Jersey is on pace to tally $278.1 million this year.

is on pace to tally this year. The industry generated $825,168 per day in the 31 days of March, up from $785,433 per day in February.

per day in the 31 days of March, up from per day in February. New Jersey online casinos paid $4.5 million in taxes to the state in March.

online casinos paid in taxes to the state in March. Online casino games generated $23.6 million in March; online poker brought in $1.97 million .

For more, visit PlayNJ.com.

About The PlayUSA Network:

The PlayUSA Network and its state-focused branches (including PlayNJ.com, PlayNY.com, PlayPennsylvania.com, and PlayCA.com) is a leading source for news, analysis, and research related to the market for regulated online gaming in the U.S.

Contacts:

Zack Hall, DVA Advertising & PR, 541-389-2411, [email protected]

SOURCE PlayNJ.comCARLSBAD, Calif., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Elan Growth Partners, LLC ("Elan" or the "Firm") announced its successful launch on April 2, 2018. The launch was accompanied by the closing of a round of initial funding that was oversubscribed, despite its limited offering to select investors with longstanding prior relationships. Elan is founded by Craig Dupper, a long-time Southern California investor who spent the last 16 years investing through two funds at Orange County-headquartered Solis Capital Partners, LLC ("Solis"). Max Young, who worked with Craig at Solis, will join Craig in Elan's new Carlsbad offices on May 1.

"In an increasingly commoditized capital environment, Elan's partnering philosophy, extensive experience and access to human capital and other resources, set us apart from alternatives that simply provide capital at close," said Craig Dupper, Founder and Managing Partner. "By bringing capital and these valuable non-financial resources to our partnerships, we enable company owners to achieve their business and personal objectives, while generating consistent returns for our investors."

Elan seeks to partner with companies generating $1 - $6 million of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization ("EBITDA"), operating in the manufacturing, niche software, business services and food sectors. In addition to providing capital, the Firm provides active mentorship to its partners and collaboratively tailors solutions for succession planning, family-owned business transitions, accelerated organic growth and strategic acquisitive growth, among others.

"Elan solves an unsatisfied need that exists for Southern California businesses," said Max Young, Principal. "Our Southern California focus encompasses San Diego to Ventura counties, a region that is dense with lower middle market companies but lacks sufficient value-added capital partners. According to the US Small Business Administration, there are nearly 49,000 companies in Southern California with 20 to 500 employees, outnumbering the region's local private equity firms 300 to 1."

About Elan Growth Partners

Headquartered in Carlsbad, California, Elan Growth Partners invests in lower middle market companies operating in the manufacturing, niche software, business services and food sectors that seek to accelerate growth and unlock embedded enterprise value. Investing $5-25 million of equity per transaction, the Firm helps businesses evolve to the next level. For more information about Elan, please visit www.elangrowth.com.

SOURCE Elan Growth Partners, LLC

Related Links

http://www.elangrowth.com

TEMPE, Ariz., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Arizona State University Action Lab at EdPlus and The Boston Consulting Group today released Making Digital Learning Work, a report that highlights new findings about the impact of digital learning on student access, outcomes, and cost. Rooted in the study of initiatives at six two- and four-year public institutions, the project was designed to inform the field with a quantitative understanding of the return on investment for digital learning programs. The evidence surfaced in the study suggests that colleges and universities looking to grow enrollment, expand access to high-quality education, improve student performance, and do so at lower cost, should consider investing in high-quality digital learning.

"We are now seeing how scaled digital learning environments circumnavigate barriers of time and space, decrease time to completion amidst a radical demographic shift, and provide pathways for unprecedented program completion," says Lou Pugliese, Managing Director and Senior Education Fellow, EdPlus at ASU. "The maturity of digital technologies has given way to new design methods that now allow institutions to more effectively address the unique set of specific learner needs in order to sustain in their academic journey."

The project selected six institutions to study from a total pool of 50, including three four-year institutions (Arizona State University, Georgia State University, and the University of Central Florida) and three two-year institutions (Houston Community College, Rio Salado College, and the Kentucky Community and Technical College System).

On-site analyses, conducted by the Boston Consulting Group with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, examined a range of modalities, including fully online courses, hybrid programs, adaptive technology, and open educational resources. The report's findings center on three primary institutional objectives:

Improving student outcomes and affordability , including higher retention and graduation rates for students who took least some portion of their degree program online. Additionally, students who took some courses online graduated faster, saving them tuition and fees and allowing them to return or enter the workforce sooner.





, including higher retention and graduation rates for students who took least some portion of their degree program online. Additionally, students who took some courses online graduated faster, saving them tuition and fees and allowing them to return or enter the workforce sooner. Expanding access: By moving beyond the traditional academic year, offering blended learning modalities and increasing the number of enrollment periods to accommodate work and family commitments, the institutions increased the total volume of student enrollment and the proportion of specific populations, including Pell Grant-eligible students, older or female students.





By moving beyond the traditional academic year, offering blended learning modalities and increasing the number of enrollment periods to accommodate work and family commitments, the institutions increased the total volume of student enrollment and the proportion of specific populations, including Pell Grant-eligible students, older or female students. Reducing operational costs: Ongoing investments in support of high-quality implementation of digital learning are largely offset by lower costs associated with delivering digital learning. At four of the institutions in the study, the savings for online courses ranged from $12 to $66 per credit hour, representing differences from 3% to 50% less than the average cost per credit hour.

The report identified seven promising practices from the case study institutions that colleges and universities can adopt to implement successful digital learning approaches:

Develop a portfolio of different digital delivery models tailored to the particular needs of the institution's student populations;

Build the capabilities and expertise to ensure quality courses and curricula given the unique challenges and opportunities in the digital realm;

Offer a network of tailored student success services for online learners;

Engage faculty as partners by ensuring they play a role in key decisions, and providing professional development for teaching online;

Create a central team to manage the institution's digital learning portfolio ensuring it remains a high priority and sustains momentum;

Tap outside vendors strategically to accelerate innovation, expand capabilities and boost enrollment;

Develop strong analytical capabilities and reporting systems to engage in continuous improvement.

To learn more and to download a full copy of the report, please visit: https://edplus.asu.edu/what-we-do/making-digital-learning-work.

SOURCE Arizona State University

Related Links

https://edplus.asu.edu

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Quetglas Law Offices, P.S.C. ("QLO") announced that on April 9, 2018, it filed an amended securities class action lawsuit on behalf of Jorge Ponsa-Rabell and other investors against Santander Securities, LLC; Santander Bancorp; Santander Holdings USA, Inc.; Banco Santander Puerto Rico; and Banco Santander S.A. (jointly "Santander") (NYSE: SAN). The action, which is captioned Jorge Ponsa-Rabell, et al. vs. Santander Securites, LLC, et al., 17-cv-02243-CCC (D. P.R.), asserts that during the period from December 2012 through October 2013, that is from December 1, 2012 through October 31, 2013 (the "Class Period"), through the omission or concealment of material facts, in violation of the federal securities laws, Santander solicited and caused the Plaintiffs and other putative Class members (the "Class") to purchase over $180 million worth of Puerto Rico Municipal Bonds ("PRMBs") and $101 million worth of Puerto Rico Closed End Funds ("PRCEFs" or "CEFs") and other Open-End Puerto Rico Funds ("PROEFs") (collectively "PR securities"). The action alleges that, as a result of the foregoing, Class members sustained severe economic losses.

If you wish to serve as Lead Plaintiff for the Class, you must file a motion with the Court no later than 60 days from today. Accordingly, the deadline for filing a motion for appointment as Lead Plaintiff is June 11, 2018. Any member of the proposed Class may move the Court by the above deadline to serve as Lead Plaintiff through counsel of their choice, or may choose to do nothing and remain a member of the proposed Class.

If you wish to discuss this Action or have any questions concerning this notice or your rights or interests, please contact Eric Quetglas-Jordan of QLO at 787-722-0635, or by email at [email protected]. Information about QLO can be found online at www.QuetglasLawPSC.com.

SOURCE Quetglas Law Offices, P.S.C.

Related Links

http://www.QuetglasLawPSC.com

LUXEMBOURG, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Millicom will announce its first quarter results for the period ending 31 March 2018, on 24 April 2018 at approximately 22:00 (Stockholm) / 21:00 (London) / 16:00 (New York) via a press release.

The company will host a conference call for the global financial community on 25 April 2018 at 14:00 (Stockholm) / 13:00 (London) / 08:00 (New York).

The conference call will be webcast at www.millicom.com

Dial-in information:

Please dial in 5-10 minutes before the scheduled start time to register your attendance. Dial-in numbers for the call are as follows:

Sweden: +46(0)8-5065-3942 Luxembourg: +352-2787-0187

UK: +44(0)330-336-9411 US: +1-646-828-8143

The access code is: 6273539

Replay information:

A replay of the call will be available for 7 days from 25 April 2018 at:

Sweden: +46(0)-8-5199-3077 UK: +44(0)207-660-0134 US: +1-719-457-0820

Replay passcode is: 6273539

For further information, please contact

Press:

Vivian Kobeh, Corporate Communications Director

+1-305-476-7352 / +1-305-302-2858

[email protected]



Investors:

Michel Morin, VP Investor Relations

+352-277-59094

[email protected]

Mauricio Pinzon, Investor Relations Manager

Tel: +44-20-3249-2460

[email protected]

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/millicom-international-cellular/r/notice-of-first-quarter-2018-results-and-conference-call,c2494350

The following files are available for download:

http://mb.cision.com/Main/950/2494350/821025.pdf Millicom Notice of First Quarter 2018 Results and Conference Call

SOURCE Millicom International Cellular

Related Links

http://www.millicom.com

LOS ANGELES, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Omax Health, a leading nutraceuticals brand dedicated to creating products that optimize whole body vitality, announces the launch of Alpha & Omega Cognitive Boost to support optimal memory, focus and concentration. Using breakthrough ingredient technology, this powerhouse brain health supplement can help increase your brainpower and productivity, giving your brain a boost  without any caffeine or harmful ingredients.

The star ingredient blend is a combination of Alpha & Omega, which helps your neurons fire more rapidly to improve your mind-body connection. The dual-action technology combines two essential brain health nutrients, Omega-3 DHA and Alpha GPC, in a breakthrough formula that is supported by more than three decades of clinical research.

"Brain health is top of mind for everyone  from students to moms, gamers, professionals and seniors," said Kristin Chadwick, President & CEO of Omax Health. "The process of aging, combined with overwhelming stress, eating on the go, sedentary lifestyles and technology overload, puts a huge amount of stress on our bodies every day. Omax Cognitive Boost is a safe and effective way to naturally boost your brain's function, supporting a better brain for life."

The product will be officially unveiled at the A4M (The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine) Spring World Congress, an annual gathering of healthcare practitioners and providers working toward advancing technology that can detect, prevent and ultimately treat aging-related diseases while optimizing the human aging process. Dr. Joseph Maroon, neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers, author and triathlete will also be in attendance to speak on behalf of the brand.

In addition to the introduction of Cognitive Boost, Omax Health will also preview their groundbreaking supplement, Stress Relief with CBD, designed to alleviate stress, calm the mind and relieve pain without the side effects of feeling drowsy or tired.

Cognitive Boost is available in a pack of 60 and retails for $49.95. The easy-to-swallow soft gel capsules are sealed in pharmaceutical-grade blister-packs, ensuring freshness in each dose and are NSF Tested and Certified. To purchase Cognitive Boost, visit www.omaxboost.com.

ABOUT OMAX HEALTH

Omax Health is a leading nutraceuticals company focused on developing premium, science-based supplements including Omax3, The Ultra-Pure Omega-3 Supplement that has become the industry leader in omega-3 products. Founded in 2010 by Yale-affiliated scientists, Omax Health has since expanded to a global health and wellness company committed to delivering exceptionally pure, concentrated, and third-party tested products that are trusted by thousands of consumers, athletes, and healthcare practitioners. Omax Health's products are designed to optimize health and vitality so you can live your life to the max.

For additional information, please visit www.omaxhealth.com.

SOURCE Omax Health

Related Links

https://omaxhealth.com

Launched in 2001, the Boao Forum for Asia is a high-level platform which brings together global political leaders, business leaders, economists, and academics annually for important discussions with major implications for the future of Asia and the world. This year's annual meeting has highlighted themes of reform, opening up and innovation. Chinese President Xi Jinping opened the forum on April 10 and delivered a keynote speech.

Mr. Lei Chen was participating in a panel on the future of blockchain, titled "Blockchain: In Plain Words and In Practice" on April 10. The discussion was moderated by Deloitte China Blockchain Lab Founder Jennifer Qin and joined by Former Bank of China President Li Lihui, Counselor to People's Bank of China Prof. Finance Sheng Songcheng, Samsung SDS President & CEO Hong Won-Pyo, Visa Chairman Ellen Richey and Inspur Group Chairman & CEO Sun Pishu.

At the panel, all participants acknowledged that blockchain should be adopted in other application scenarios beyond financial services, including the logistics, manufacturing and retail sectors. Meanwhile, they also noted the significance of transaction processing capability for any blockchain application platform, which is seen as one of core problems facing the wider adoption of the technology nowadays. According to Mr. Chen, Xunlei is planning to launch an ultra-high-performance blockchain platform, which can process millions of transactions per second. "Such breakthroughs are all driven by customers, developers and enterprises, who demand more adoptions of blockchain to tackle practical issues they have in daily life and work," said Mr. Lei Chen.

Regulation on blockchain was another key topic discussed at the panel. "Regulatory and standardization frameworks are urgently needed to promote large-scale adoption of blockchain in business scenarios," said Li Lihui, who heads the Blockchain Research Working Group at China's National Internet Finance Association (NIFA). Mr. Lei Chen and other participants echoed Li's views. "Regulation is essential for the adoption and development of new technologies. What blockchain innovators need for the future are clear regulatory guidelines to follow, to help them unlock the real value of the technology that ultimately benefits customers."

Since 2014, Xunlei and its cloud computing subsidiary Onething Technologies have been studying blockchain applications to enhance user experience and value for its corporate and personal customers. The blockchain-based private cloud Onething Cloud was introduced in 2017. In December 2017, Xunlei was named as one of the most outstanding entities in China's blockchain industry in an award which was presented by the China High-tech Industrialization Research Association. Onething Cloud has been named as a Global Blockchain Innovation Product by TMTPost, China's leading business & technology information provider.

CONTACT:

Shenzhen Onething Technologies Co., Ltd

Email: [email protected]

Website: http://www.onethingcloud.com/

SOURCE Onething Technologies Co., Ltd.NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tax Day is coming up, which means Americans are starting to receive their long-awaited tax refund checks. The IRS expects 70% of taxpayers will receive a refund this year and the average refund is usually just under $3,000 per person1. OneTravel, a leading online travel agency, has analyzed airfare for April, May, and June of 2018 and is offering suggestions on where travelers can visit, while remaining within four different budget tiers this spring.

Flights under $3002 

There is a large selection of domestic destinations that can be visited for under $300 including popular cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York City, and Chicago. International destinations on the other hand are hard to come by. Instead, OneTravel suggests visiting Puerto Rico. As a territory of the United States, it's not technically an international getaway, but the Hispanic culture gives it an international feel at a much less costly price. Plus, the Caribbean island doesn't require a passport for entry. San Juan, Aguadilla, and Ponce all have average fares under $300 this spring.

Flights under $5002 

Portland and the surrounding coast of Maine offer a perfect spring retreat. Enjoy the charm and tranquility of the rugged shoreline before the masses arrive for the summer beginning Memorial Day Weekend. Internationally, Colombia is climbing the ranks of popular destinations for Americans. The short flight time and cheap airfare available make Bogota, Colombia's capital, even more attractive this spring. The city's central location has made it a melting pot of Colombian people and culture.

Flights under $8002 

Hawaii is officially a hot spot this year. Though the average fare from all US gateways is just under $800, the west coast can expect to see fares to Honolulu or Kahului even lower this spring. Hawaii has something for everyone from the adventure seekers, to the beach goers, to those seeking a peaceful hideaway. If you're looking to spend around $800, OneTravel also suggests a week in Ireland. International low-cost carriers have drastically reduced the prices to get to Dublin and spring offers mild weather and blossoming greenery.

Flights under $1,0002 

There are very few places in the Unites States that are off limits when you're willing to spend $1,000 on airfare. Depending on where you're travelling, there might even be the option of upgrading to a premium cabin seat. If you're looking for a high-end international adventure, look no further than Dubai. The destination is known for being over the top, and if you're looking to really spend that tax refund, Dubai is the place to do it. Check out some of the 90+ shopping malls, the iconic skyscrapers including the Burj Khalifa, and the countless luxury hotels, restaurants, and bars throughout the city.

About OneTravel

OneTravel is a leading online travel agency that offers deals for savvy travelers seeking both quality and value. Launched in the mid-nineties, OneTravel is now recognized globally for providing one-stop shopping for all travel needs. Customers have access to millions of cheap flights including business class and first class airfare, hotel rooms, car rentals, and cheap vacation packages to top destinations around the world. Visit OneTravel's social media pages at www.facebook.com/onetravel and www.twitter.com/onetravel. For an on-the-go travel concierge experience, download OneTravel's app for Apple or Android

1 https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-announces-2018-tax-filing-season-opens-with-april-17-deadline-155-million-tax-returns-projected-70-percent-expect-refunds

2 Based on average airfare per passenger as of 4/1/2018 for travel between 4/1/2018  6/31/2018

SOURCE OneTravel

Related Links

https://www.onetravel.com

Pioneering the recovery footwear category since its launch in 2012, OOFOS continues to innovate and build on its groundbreaking and proprietary OOfoam technology to deliver a product that transforms the lives of those who wear it. The ideation for the campaign was centered around reflecting the cutting-edge technology of the product through dynamic movement that's both vibrant and aspirational, while also highlighting the unique impact-absorbing recovery benefits of OOfoam.

"Our customers are fanatic about wearing OOFOS because what the product provides truly makes them feel better," said OOFOS President Steve Gallo. "For those who aren't as familiar with our brand, our goal with this campaign was to illustrate the product benefits in a way that's engaging to our target consumer, while demonstrating the comfort and recovery properties of the shoe."

Also imperative was resonating with a global audience, as the campaign will be rolled out to 32 countries. The 6-year-old brand is adrenalized to share this modern, electrifying and invigorating campaign with fitness enthusiasts and athletes around the world. Everything from casting to location to music was carefully considered. London-based Academy Films Director Jack Driscoll felt strongly that the film have an innovative, cutting-edge feel with cinematic layers and impact, without taking away from the product.

"I was thrilled with the opportunity to get involved in this project and provide a real visual spectacle that has widespread impact and announces the arrival of OOFOS on the big stage," said Driscoll.

The Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, was selected as the location for its clean, geometric aesthetic that would allow the product to stand out, and its offering of numerous potential backgrounds for the limitless movement of the cast. Beyond its visual appeal, the center, a landmark of the Lisbon riverfront, is home to a foundation that works to improve the health and well-being of people around the world. This uncovered synergy between the Foundation and OOFOS was undeniable.

Casting focused on identifying highly-fit individuals that possess the dance skills, physical movement and agility the campaign demanded. The dancers selected for the campaign have impressive resumes that include everything from acrobatic gymnastics to ballet and salsa; and several have appeared on television, in international competitions, and as part of global campaigns.

The combination of the breathtaking location and talented dancers allowed Driscoll to bring his concept to life.

"I wanted to use a form of dance to inject this product film with human dynamism," said Driscoll. "It was vital that the choreography exist solely as an expression and manifestation of the freedom, comfort, relaxation and recuperative properties OOFOS provides."

The final campaign will be released in still and video shorts beginning Thursday, April 12, across social media, in Runner's World, on Hulu and more.

Creative Agency

PLUS Agency, London

Tom Lardner and Chris West, founders

Direction

Academy Films, London

Jack Driscoll, Director



Media Agency

CommCreative, Framingham, Mass.

Joanna Bittle, agency partner

About OOFOS

Based in Braintree, Massachusetts, OOFOS is a pioneer in the recovery footwear market whose mission is to make yOO feel better. To learn more about OOFOS please visit www.oofos.com, or follow @oofosfootwear on Facebook and @oofos on Instagram.

Media contact:

Monica Higgins

Hollywood Agency for OOFOS

[email protected]

781-749-0077, extension 22

SOURCE OOFOS

Related Links

http://www.oofos.com

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Between the battle over border security and illegal immigration, the push to legalize marijuana, and the effort to combat climate change, the State of California seems to be constantly at odds with the agenda of the Trump Administration. For California Governor Jerry Brown, a man known for embracing the political "canoe theory" - the idea that if one paddles a little on the left and a little on the right one can steer safely down the political middle  this is not comfortable territory.

Now in the final year of his historic fourth term in office and with the distinction of being the longest-serving governor in U.S. history, Governor Brown will join National Press Club President Andrea Edney to discuss how California has changed under his leadership and the challenges facing his successor and the nation at a National Press Club Headliners event on Tuesday, April 17 at 8:30 a.m. in the club's Zenger Room.

Chief among those challenges, according to Governor Brown, are rising deficits and crumbling infrastructure, and the ongoing and escalating threats posed by climate change and global nuclear proliferation.

This news conference is open to credentialed media and members of the National Press Club free of charge, however registration is required. Please click here to register.

A California native and son of the state's 32nd Governor Edmund Gerald "Pat" Brown Sr., Edmund Gerald "Jerry" Brown Jr.'s life in state politics began back in 1969 when he was elected Trustee for the Los Angeles Community College District. In 1970 he was elected the 23rd Secretary of State of California, and went on to serve his first two terms as Governor in 1974 and 1978. Brown declined to run for a third term in 1982, opting instead for an unsuccessful bid for US Senate. He served as Chairman of the California Democratic Party from 1989-1991 before returning to elected office as Mayor of Oakland in 1998 and then California Attorney General in 2006. He was elected Governor again in 2010 and reelected in 2014.

The National Press Club is located on the 13th Floor of the National Press Building at 529 14th St., NW, Washington, D.C.

Contact: Lindsay Underwood, [email protected], (202) 662-7561

SOURCE National Press ClubHARRISBURG, Pa., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Acting Secretary of State Robert Torres today informed Pennsylvania's counties to have voter-verifiable paper record voting systems selected no later than December 31, 2019, and preferably in place by the November 2019 general election. He also announced the commonwealth will receive nearly $14 million in federal funding to assist counties with replacement.

"We have been planning for some time to bring Pennsylvania's voting machines up to 21st-century standards of security, auditability and resiliency," Torres said. "The federal assistance could not come at a more opportune moment."

Pennsylvania's allocation of $13.5 million comes from Congress' recent appropriation of $380 million for election security under the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2018. The funding is being distributed under provisions of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Each state's allocation requires a 5-percent state match, bringing Pennsylvania's total funding package to $14.15 million.

The administration is committed to working with the legislature to help fund these voting system upgrades, including but not limited to the consideration of future year cost-sharing arrangements which could use local, state, and federal dollars.

Last week the department released an Invitation For Bid (IFB) for new voting systems, directing that new systems meet enhanced security and auditability standards. The IFB updated an existing state-negotiated agreement with vendors and can be used by counties to purchase voting systems that meet the department's certification requirements.

"We want to bring about the system upgrades so Pennsylvania voters are voting on the most secure and auditable equipment as promptly and feasibly as possible, while also being supportive of the counties' need to plan and budget for the new systems," Torres said.

The department is also exploring every option to help fund or finance the upgrades, including lease agreements, grant opportunities, state, local, and additional federal appropriations, partnerships, bonds, and more.

To kick off public education about new voting systems on the market, the department plans to hold a vendor demonstration April 26 at the Farm Show complex. The event will provide an opportunity for county and state officials, legislators, the media, and the public to explore the features and options offered by the new machines. Details on the event will be forthcoming.

Counties will be able to choose from among any of the voting systems examined and certified after January 1, 2018, by both the federal Election Assistance Commission and the Secretary of the Commonwealth. To date, one system has been certified, and several others will follow in the summer and fall of 2018. Information regarding the examination and certification process (PDF) can be found on the department's website. The department will provide extensive support and guidance to the county Boards of Election and voters to ensure a smooth transition to the new systems.

In the meantime, Pennsylvania is employing extensive measures and partnering with federal and state law enforcement agencies to stay one step ahead of any threats to our security and infrastructure, including comprehensive monitoring and assessment of risk, fortification of physical and cyber security, training and resources to counties and partners, and increasing communications at all levels.

MEDIA CONTACT: Wanda Murren, 717-783-1621

SOURCE Pennsylvania Department of State

Related Links

http://www.state.pa.us

DALLAS, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Perennials and Sutherland, LLC is pleased to announce Ted Chappell as President, enhancing the executive team. With the company's continued growth and expansion, Chappell will manage day to day operations. In the wake of Chappell's appointment, David Sutherland moves to Chairman of the Board and will continue his oversight of the entire company. Lastly, after founding Perennials Fabrics in 1997, and serving as President of Perennials and Sutherland, LLC, Ann Sutherland is pleased to move into the chief executive role. Ann will continue to oversee company management and overall business strategy. The Sutherlands will also continue to mentor design talent, lead product development and provide leadership to the company.

Chappell brings over 20 years of leadership experience with him, overseeing international growth and strategic development at expanding companies, with particular experience in the luxury interiors market. Chappell joins the Perennials and Sutherland team in Dallas after serving as CEO at SieMatic Mobelwerke USA, a luxury kitchen furnishings company. Previously, Chappell led as President at Ann Sacks Tile & Stone in Portland, overseeing global business development and strategic direction. His past experience also includes serving as President at Poggenpohl USA, a luxury kitchen company, and Erco Lighting, a high-performance architecture lighting company. Chappell has a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University.

"We are incredibly impressed by Ted's background and proven abilities. He will not only bring a broader background of experience to our company, but will also provide great insight on future growth and direction," said David Sutherland, Chairman of the Board. "We look forward to continuing to be a leader in the international design community with Ted's guidance and strategic knowledge."

About Perennials and Sutherland, LLC

The Perennials and Sutherland, LLC companies are icons and acknowledged leaders in the international design industry. CEO David Sutherland and President Ann Sutherland share an ingenious talent for curating the finest interior and exterior collections of luxury furniture, fabrics, rugs and accessories. Based in Dallas, Texas, the company is comprised of Sutherland Furniture, Perennials Luxury Performance Fabrics and David Sutherland Showrooms.

Perennials Fabrics is recognized by interior designers and high-end retail customers as the leader in luxury performance fabrics. Perennials Fabrics and Perennials Luxury Performance Rugs combine the look and feel of high-quality, natural materials with the superior performance properties of their genuine 100% solution-dyed acrylic fiber technology. View the full collections at perennialsfabrics.com.

Sutherland Furniture is a world leader in luxury outdoor furniture for modern lifestyles. The company has created the preeminent furniture brand through partnerships with the world's leading designers, along with utilizing the highest quality materials. View the full collections at sutherlandfurniture.com.

David Sutherland Showrooms are full-service, multi-line showrooms which serve the professional design market in showrooms and studios across the United States. For more information and locations, visit davidsutherlandshowroom.com.

SOURCE Perennials and Sutherland, LLCDuring the visit, Hanze Chen, Meitu's VP of marketing, introduced Meitu's development, its line-up of products and the firm's overseas expansion plans to Mr. Machado. Cai Hua, VP of Meipai, Meitu's short-video arm, also presented the "short-form video community platform" and trends of live streaming to the visiting group.

"We are looking to cooperate more with the consulate on cultural projects and support their public service events," said Chen. "With Meitu and Meipai's well-established platforms and communities in China, the U.S. Consulate will be able to further reach the target audience for public good."

"We often host guests from the U.S., including scholars, artists, musicians and dancers," said Mr. Machado. "We can use short videos or even live-streaming platforms to broadcast our events to the audience nation-wide."

Meitu cooperated with the U.S. Consulate in Chinese Zodiac Year of the Goat to produce a short video through Meipai to celebrate Chinese New Year, with the video was being posted on the Consulate's Weibo page. "The video went viral among the consulate staff, and was posted on our social media platforms. Fans liked it," said Mr. Machado. "That video gave us a character, and it was the most successful thing we've done in terms of public outreach."

As Meitu expands overseas with a growing user base, its slate of products will become more appealing to overseas users as a communication tool. In 2017, Meitu saw a 29.5% year-on-year growth in overseas users and has reached strategic partnerships with Google and Facebook for years. Meitu rolled out three AR effects within the Facebook app last year, and has worked with Google in advertisement placement in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

In addition, this March Meitu launched a co-SNS campaign with AliExpress on Facebook, incentivizing users to download BeautyPlus, a photo enhancement app that helps Meitu make a foray into overseas markets where its number of MAUs (Monthly Active Users) already top 50 million. People who download the app can use its AR filters to win coupons by playing games and completing tasks.

"Our overseas expansion has grown exponentially thanks to our partnerships with Google and Facebook," said Xinhong Wu, founder and CEO of Meitu. "Through more cooperation with the American Consulate in China, we aim to serve a broader audience and promote their content with our social media resources for the public good."

According to Meitu's 2016 Annual Report, it indicates the company has amassed over 500 million overseas users. The total number of users in 11 countries and regions each has exceeded 10 million in Brazil, the United States, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam, etc.

About Meitu (Stock code: 1357.HK)

Established in October 2008, Meitu is a leading mobile Internet company headquartered in China. With the vision of building software and hardware around beauty, Meitu has developed a rich portfolio of software and smart hardware products such as Meitu, BeautyCam, Meipai (a short-form video community app) and Meitu Smartphones, which have transformed the way people create and share the idea of beauty. As of June 2017, Meitu has amassed over 1.5 billion unique users worldwide and engaged 481.3 million MAUs. It has successfully established its influence in overseas markets with more than 500 million users abroad, even launching localized apps and building teams overseas in places such as New Delhi, India; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Palo Alto, California; Singapore and Tokyo, Japan. According to App Annie, Meitu has repeatedly ranked as one of the top eight iOS non-game app developers globally from June 2014 to January 2017.

SOURCE MeituCOLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Polaris Alpha, a leading provider of mission-critical technology, software, and solutions to the defense and intelligence communities, today announced a major expansion of its Colorado offices, which will create 450 new high-paying jobs in the Metro Denver region and Colorado Springs.

The expansion will occur over the next eight years in two phases. The first portion will focus on the company's facilities in Metro Denver, where Polaris Alpha will build a new 20,000 square foot office. Through this first phase, 150 new jobs will be created at the Metro Denver location.

The second phase will involve the expansion of Polaris Alpha's Colorado Springs facilities. The company is planning to expand those offices by an additional 80,000 square feet of new space, and will hire 300 more employees there by 2026.

The expansion plans are the culmination of efforts by both the Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC and the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation in obtaining state tax credits and job incentives to help facilitate this expansion by Polaris Alpha. The two organizations worked together to secure a Colorado Job Growth Incentive Tax Credit from the State of Colorado that will assist in Polaris Alpha's recruiting efforts to fill its job openings. It will also enable Polaris Alpha to execute a multi-pronged advertising campaign to generate interest from potential employees in both the Denver region and Colorado Springs.

"We are extremely excited to accelerate our growth plans in Colorado," said Jay Jesse, president, Polaris Alpha. "The state is a major hub in our growing company. We are very bullish on Colorado as a location not only to work, but also to provide a great environment for employees and their families to thrive."

"Polaris Alpha plays a crucial and foundational role in Colorado Springs' and our region's defense and technology industries, and the Chamber & EDC is pleased we could help secure this long-term commitment." said Tammy Fields, chief economic development officer for the Colorado Springs Chamber & EDC. "This announcement further validates Colorado Springs as a technology powerhouse and helps ensure a robust business climate for years to come."

J.J. Ament, CEO of the Metro Denver EDC, added, "We are very proud to have Polaris Alpha expand in both the Metro Denver region and Colorado Springs. Polaris Alpha is taking advantage of our state's greatest assets, our highly educated and skilled workforce."

In both locations, Polaris Alpha will be looking to hire software engineers, systems engineers, space scientists, cloud enterprise architects, machine learning specialists, and other IT professionals. Those applicants with security clearances will be at a distinct advantage since much of the work performed by the company is for agencies within the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Polaris Alpha, with dual headquarters in Colorado Springs and Fredericksburg, Va., is also expanding in other parts of the U.S. as well. The company is currently looking to fill a number of similar positions at its offices in several East Coast locations.

About Polaris Alpha

Polaris Alpha ("Polaris") provides advanced technical capabilities, specialized domain expertise, and mission critical solutions to Department of Defense and Intelligence Community customers. Polaris has approximately 1,300 employees with major offices in Annapolis Junction, Md.; Columbia, Md.; Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Denver; and Fredericksburg, Va.; as well as customer sites both domestically and internationally. For further details on its customers and capabilities, please visit its website at www.polarisalpha.com or at LinkedIn.

SOURCE Polaris Alpha

Related Links

http://www.polarisalpha.com

NEW YORK, April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Global public relations leader Porter Novelli (PN) today announced that Byron Calamese has been named managing director of the agency's Boston office, which drives technology, purpose and consumer work. As managing director, Calamese is responsible for talent management and strategic growth while building on the combined strength of the Porter Novelli and Cone brands. Calamese starts today and reports to Jennifer Swint, president, North America.

"Byron has an entrepreneurial mindset that will deliver immediate traction for the growth of our talent and for clients," said Swint. "His inspiring leadership style and passion for helping brands make a meaningful impact are the perfect ingredients for this role."

Calamese spent more than a decade at Cone, starting as an intern in 2002 and returning in 2008 to work for eight years. At the end of his second turn at the agency, Calamese was an executive vice president and managing director. After Cone, he become senior vice president and chief experience officer for Phoenix House, a national leader in substance use disorder treatment and wellness management.

"I'm excited for the opportunity to collaborate with such a talented and accomplished team," said Calamese. "There's unequivocally a strong connection between purpose-led communications and the industries Boston leads in, from technology and healthcare to a range of consumer goods. We are well-positioned to be the partner that helps companies advance their performance, enhance customer relationships and have a positive impact on society."

Calamese has served as a senior strategist to solve business challenges for lifestyle brands including Timberland, ECCO, Kenneth Cole, Barbour, General Mills, Nestle, Whole Foods Market, Lindt and Bayer, as well as serving as head of global public relations for Rockport.

About Porter Novelli

Porter Novelli is a global public relations agency born from the idea that the art of communication can advance society. Over 45 years ago, we opened our doors  and people's eyes and minds  for brands driven to make a positive impact. Today, we are a global agency with the entrepreneurial spirit of boutique specialists. We continue to build that bridge between purpose and business imperatives, and believe that a healthy bottom line can also make a remarkable impact. For additional information, please visit www.porternovelli.com. Porter Novelli is a part of the Omnicom Public Relations Group.

Cone (http://www.conecomm.com/) is a public relations and marketing agency that is Always Making a Difference for business, brands and society. We help organizations define their authentic Purpose, weaving it into the brand DNA to both grow the business and positively impact the world. Our deep subject matter expertise in Purpose Brand Strategy, CSR, Social Marketing, Social Impact and Brand Communications creates breakthrough work and unforgettable experiences to ignite action around issues that matter. Cone is a Porter Novelli company and part of the Omnicom Public Relations Group.

About Omnicom Public Relations Group

Omnicom Public Relations Group (NYSE: OMC) is a global collective of three of the top global public relations agencies worldwide and specialist agencies in areas including public affairs, marketing to women, fashion, global health strategy and corporate social responsibility. It encompasses more than 6,000 public relations professionals in more than 330 offices worldwide who provide their expertise to companies, government agencies, NGOs and nonprofits across a wide range of industries. Omnicom Public Relations Group is part of the DAS Group of Companies, a division of Omnicom Group Inc. that includes more than 200 companies in a wide range of marketing disciplines including advertising, public relations, healthcare, customer relationship management, events, promotional marketing, branding and research.

Contact:

Amy Marriott

Porter Novelli

[email protected]

404-917-6988

SOURCE Porter Novelli

Related Links

http://www.porternovelli.com

NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Below are experts from the ProfNet network who are available to discuss timely issues in your coverage area.

You can also submit a query to the hundreds of thousands of experts in our network  it's easy and free. Just fill out the query form to get started: http://prn.to/queryform

EXPERT ALERTS

NAEP Results Are Disappointing But Not Surprising

Trump Taunts Russia, Says U.S. Military Response Coming in Syria

MEDIA JOBS

US Picture Researcher, Freelance  Mirror Online (NY)

Finance Editor, Overnight  SmartBrief (Remote)

Investment Writer  Pzena Investment Management (NY)

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Blog Profiles: Health & Wellness News Blogs

-------------------------------------------------------------------

EXPERT ALERTS:

NAEP Results Are Disappointing But Not Surprising

Yong Zhao

Foundation Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies

University of Kansas

Zhao is available to discuss the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results released this week, what the decline in performance means for American schools, and the gap between low- and high-performing schools: "The results are disappointing but not surprising. They add to the evidence that the reform policies America has been pursuing are wrongly headed and unlikely to address the challenges the nation faces."

Zhao has authored more than 20 books, including "Reach For Greatness: Personalizable Education for All," "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World" and "Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization," as well as more than 100 journal articles. He is based in Lawrence, Kan., and is fluent in English and Mandarin.

Contact: Mike Krings, [email protected]

Trump Taunts Russia, Says U.S. Military Response Coming in Syria

Harlan Ullman

Chairman

Killowen Group

President Trump warned Russia on Wednesday that it should "get ready" for a missile strike on Syria, vowing to thwart any missile defenses. Says Ullman: ""President Trump is in a bind. He needs absolute proof of nerve agents/Syrian guilt. The UK is not on board yet. We cannot assume away that rebels did it."

Based in Washington, D.C., Ullman has served on the Senior Advisory Group for Supreme Allied Commander Europe (2004-16) and is senior adviser at Washington D.C.'s Atlantic Council. He is also chairman of two private companies and principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. A former naval person, he commanded a destroyer in the Persian Gulf and led over 150 missions and operations in Vietnam as a Swift Boat skipper. His newest book, "Anatomy of Failure: Why America Has Lost Every War It Starts," is just out.

Previous TV clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGP9BJtfylY

Contact: Ryan McCormick, [email protected]

****************

MEDIA JOBS:

Following are links to job listings for staff and freelance writers, editors and producers. You can view these and more job listings on our Job Board: https://prnmedia.prnewswire.com/community/jobs/

US Picture Researcher, Freelance  Mirror Online (NY)

Finance Editor, Overnight  SmartBrief (Remote)

Investment Writer  Pzena Investment Management (NY)

*****************

OTHER NEWS & RESOURCES:

Following are links to other news and resources we think you might find useful. If you have an item you think other reporters would be interested in and would like us to include in a future alert, please drop us a line at [email protected]

THE RISE OF NEWSROOM SMART MACHINES: OPTIMIZING WORKFLOW WITH AI. As computer algorithms become more advanced, artificial intelligence (AI) has increasingly grown prominent in top news organizations, which now use AI for a variety of newsroom tasks. But current AI systems are largely still dependent on humans to function correctly, and the most pressing concern is understanding how to correctly operate these systems as they continue to thrive in a variety of media-related industries: https://prn.to/2qq8zbu

11 ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS SITES THAT BRING INNOVATION TO STORIES ON CLIMATE CHANGE. Two years ago, we asked award-winning TV reporter Jeff Burnside to break down environmental journalism. He's the past president of the Society of Environmental Journalists, so he's an expert in this arena. What came of that conversation turned out to be the most popular post in the history of the Beyond Bylines blog: our 11 favorite news sites for out-of-this-world environmental coverage. Now, as Earth Day approaches, we've got even more: https://prn.to/2GT4SVR

BLOG PROFILES: HEALTH & WELLNESS NEWS BLOGS. Each week, PR Newswire's Audience Relations team selects an industry/subject and profiles a handful of sites that do a good job with promoting and contributing to the conversation. This week, they look at a few health and wellness news blogs: https://prn.to/2GVWdxS

****************

PROFNET is an exclusive service of PR Newswire.

To contact ProfNet: [email protected] or 800-776-3638, ext. 1

SOURCE ProfNet

Related Links

http://www.profnet.com

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The ALS Association today announced the launch of "Project Revoice," an international initiative to help people with ALS [also known as Motor Neurone Disease] record their voices so they still use their "voice" after they lose their ability to speak. The new technology, powered by the Canadian company Lyrebird, can recreate high-quality voices with only a few hours of "voice banking."

To demonstrate the power of this innovation, Project Revoice has given Pat Quinn, co-founder of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, a recreation of his voice. Pat did not record (or bank) his voice before ALS robbed him of his ability to speak, but using footage from his many Ice Bucket Challenge interviews, Project Revoice was able to clone his voice. See full video here .

Quinn said: "This takes speech tech to a whole new level and means everything to how I communicate. I really didn't like to hear my old computer voice, so I often avoided getting involved in conversations. This technology gives me back a vital piece of myself that was missing. After hearing my voice through this new technology, I was blown away! For patients to know that they can still speak in their own voice after ALS takes it away will transform the way people live with this disease."

Project Revoice is now working to encourage ALS/MND communities around the world to record their voices so they can be digitally recreated in the future using the innovative new voice cloning technology from Lyrebird. The company's state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms create artificial voices that sound more natural than has ever been possible. Using just two to three hours of high-quality audio recordings, this model can synthesize the essence of a voice and build a complete digital recreation. Project Revoice linked this tech with eye reader assistive technology to enable Pat Quinn to deliver words in his original, unique voice, rather than a 'machine' voice.

"Recreating Pat's voice and hearing him use it for the first time with his friends and family was truly inspirational," said Brian Frederick, Executive Vice President for Communications at The ALS Association. "Our next step is to build this into a program to ensure that people with ALS can maintain that unique part of themselves  their voice  even after they lose the ability to speak. This amazing new technology will make it much easier and quicker for people with ALS to record their voices so they can later be recreated."

Project Revoice was the brainchild of Oskar Westerdal and Rene Schultz, a Swede and a Dane, living and working in Australia. In collaboration with Lyrebird in Canada, Finch in Sydney, and The ALS Association in the USA, they spent a year to bring this revolutionary speech synthesis project to life.

"This technology is 100% dependent on having consistent, high-quality voice material to work with. Since ALS/MND is a progressive and sometimes unpredictable disease, we believe it's crucial to get the message out now and encourage more people to start voice banking while they still can, so they have the voice material necessary to create their 'Revoice' when the full application launches," said Westerdal.

Project Revoice aims to encourage all those with voice degenerative diseases to record and preserve their voices, with a view to making the Project Revoice application available -- at no cost -- to the entire ALS/MND community by the end of 2018.

To learn more  and to sign up for updates on Project Revoice  visit www.projectrevoice.org.

To hear how your re-voiced voice might sound, you can check a lower-quality demo version at www.lyrebird.ai.

About ALS/MND: ALS [MND] is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. This affects the ability to walk, move, eat, talk, and breathe. Many people with ALS lose the ability to speak and rely on a robotic "machine" voice to read the words they input into text-to-speech devices.

About The ALS Association

The ALS Association is the largest private funder of ALS research in the world, provides support for people with ALS throughout the United States via its nationwide network of chapters, and advocates for better policies for people living with ALS. For more information about The ALS Association, visit www.alsa.org.

SOURCE The ALS Association

Related Links

http://www.alsa.org

SCHAUMBURG, Ill., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- PSC Group, LLC (www.psclistens.com), an IT business technology consulting firm, is proud to announce it has been ranked 48th in the Crain's Chicago Business 2018 Best Places to Work rankings. The honor is awarded based on a survey of employees and employers on various criteria including culture, compensation, advancement and training opportunities, benefits, and more. PSC Group's focus on employee development and engagement, community service and culture helped it earn the spot. PSC's Five Points of Excellence Program, Labs technology research projects and strong support and hosting of various technology users and trade groups drive employee engagement and support for ongoing employee learning opportunities.

PSC enables strategic business technology driven tools, processes, and objectives that help companies improve and grow their value. The firm works with clients across North America and is a recognized Microsoft Gold and IBM Silver Business Partner in several cloud-based application and solution competencies.

"PSC is very proud to be named as a Best Place to Work amongst all of these successful Chicago companies. This recognition reflects the success of the talented, client-focused and fun-loving team of professionals who have helped build and grow the firm for more than 27 years," said John Quirk, Partner. "We feel strongly about fostering a collaborative, energized and opportunity-rich environment for our employees because it helps everyone achieve excellent client experiences and maintain long term employee and client relationships."

In addition to PSC's focus on continuous improvement and supportive learning opportunities, PSC Group's employee benefits and perks helped the firm earn its place on the list.

ABOUT PSC GROUP LLC

Founded in 1990, PSC Group, LLC is a business technology consulting firm focused on enabling strategic technology driven tools, processes, and objectives that help companies improve and grow their value. Our process begins in the way we listen and ends with our clients experiencing a greater return on their technology investment. With offices in Chicago and Kansas City, PSC has a proud history with our clientele that is based on mutual respect, integrity, and honesty. www.psclistens.com

SOURCE PSC Group, LLC

Related Links

http://www.psclistens.com

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Majorities of voters support a number of bold reforms to change how members of Congress are elected, including redrawing congressional districts by independent citizen commissions, ranked choice voting and multi-member districts, according to a new, in-depth survey from the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation. These three reforms comprise new legislation  The Fair Representation Act  sponsored by Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA.) and cosponsored by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN.), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).

The highest level of support was for changing the way that House congressional districts are designeda prominent issue now that the Supreme Court is considering whether the federal government should prevent state legislatures from designing congressional districts to the benefit of the dominant party, popularly known as gerrymandering.

Two thirds of respondents  including 53 percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents  favored having congressional districts drawn by a nonpartisan commission of citizens.

The survey of 2,482 registered voters was conducted by the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation (PPC), and released today by the nonpartisan organization Voice of the People (VOP). Neither VOP nor PPC take a position on the issues, but seek to the give the public a greater voice.

"As the Supreme Court justices consider the question of how best to design congressional districts, they may want to consider an approach supported by a large bipartisan majority of American voters," said PPC Director Steven Kull.

To ensure that respondents understood the issues, they were given a short briefing on the proposals and asked to evaluate arguments for and against. The content was reviewed by proponents and opponents of the legislation to ensure that the briefing was accurate and balanced, and that the arguments presented were the strongest ones being made.

'Ranked choice voting,' or 'instant runoff' voting also received majority support from respondents. This is a method for electing members of Congress when there are more than two candidates. Voters select not only their most preferred candidate, but also their second choice, third-choice and so on. This method is meant to make it more possible for independent and third-party candidates to be competitive.

This proposal was favored by 55 percent, including 64 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independents. Only 46 percent of Republicans favored the idea, with 52 percent opposed.

Resistance to the idea is fairly low. In a separate question just 29% said the idea would be unacceptable, including 37% of Republicans and 21% of Democrats, with the remainder saying it would be tolerable or acceptable.

Similar levels of support were found for a third measure to create 'multi-member districts.' This would be a new way of structuring Congressional districts with larger districts represented by 3-5 members, making it more likely that the partisan mix of the members would more closely reflect the partisan balance of the population.

This proposal was favored by 55 percent, including 66 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independents. Among Republicans, only 44 percent favored the idea with 53 percent opposed. But here too opposition was not strongly held  only 27 percent said it would be unacceptable, including 34 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats.

The survey was conducted online from September 7- October 3, 2017 with a national probability-based sample of 2,482 registered voters, provided by Nielsen Scarborough from Nielsen Scarborough's sample of respondents, who were recruited by mail and telephone using a random sample of households. The margin of error was +/- 2.0 percent.

Questionnaire: http://vop.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Elections_Redistricting_Quaire041218.pdf

Slides: http://vop.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Elections_Redistricting_Slides041218.pdf

Survey: https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/4221322/rankedchoice

Contact: Steven Kull, 202-232-7500, [email protected]

SOURCE Program for Public ConsultationNEW YORK, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- QBE North America has hired Kevin Brogan as Regional Executive - Central Region to be accountable for the region's profitable growth across QBE's specialized insurance business portfolio, as well as the development of all agent and broker relationships in the region.

Based in Chicago, Mr. Brogan will oversee business planning and collaborate with Underwriting and Claims leadership to deliver better end-to-end risk management solutions, leveraging the applied expertise, customer service excellence and global strength of QBE.

"As Regional Executive, Kevin is the primary representative of the entire QBE enterprise in the Central Region," said Mark Cantin, President, Field Operations at QBE North America. "We're thrilled to have him come aboard and already know him very well, since he has been serving on our National Advisory Council as the senior representative for Wells Fargo Insurance Services (now USI). Attracting someone of his stature highlights QBE's commitment to its national franchise with a regional structure to better understand customer needs and build the strongest partnerships with agents, brokers and clients."

With more than 30 years in the insurance business, Kevin is a highly accomplished insurance executive with deep knowledge of the business from both carrier and broker perspectives. He joins QBE from Wells Fargo, where over a span of 10 years he served in a variety of senior leadership roles, most recently Head of P&C National Practices and Safehold Special Risk. Prior to Wells Fargo, he served for five years at Marsh as Managing Director of its Midwest-zone casualty practice and as SVP, Risk Management - Casualty. Before Marsh, he was Senior Vice President - Northeast Region at Liberty Mutual. He also held leadership roles at Wausau Insurance, which Liberty Mutual acquired in 1999. Kevin has a bachelor's degree in management, with a specialization in insurance, from Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.

Mr. Brogan noted, "As an integrated specialist insurer, QBE North America impressed me with its agile and tenacious approach to focusing on customer needs and delivering better end-to-end risk management solutions. I am excited to be joining the team to help QBE's trading partners and clients achieve their ambitions."

QBE North America's Central Region includes the states of AR, IA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, NM, OH, OK, SD, TX and WI.

About QBE

QBE North America is an integrated specialist insurer, which is part of QBE Insurance Group Limited, one of the largest insurers and reinsurers worldwide. QBE NA reported Gross Written Premiums in 2017 of $4.6 billion. QBE Insurance Group's 2017 results can be found at www.qbena.com. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, QBE operates out of 31 countries around the globe, with a presence in every key insurance market. The North America division, headquartered in New York, conducts business through its property and casualty insurance subsidiaries. QBE insurance companies are rated "A" (Excellent) by A.M. Best and "A+" by Standard & Poor's. Additional information can be found at www.qbena.com, or follow QBE North America on Twitter.

SOURCE QBE North America

Related Links

http://www.qbena.com

The Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure and the Nairobi County Government have teamed up to deliver a solution to Nairobis perennial drainage problems.

Transport CS James Macharia and Governor Sonko on Wednesday launched a stormwater drain flushing machine for unclogging drainage systems.

The CS handed over the keys of the Sh25 Million truck to Sonko at the Sunken Car Park along Harambee Avenue.

CS Macharia said unblocking of drainages is part of the projects funded by World Bank under the Nairobi Metropolitan Services Improvement Project ( NAMSIP).

The whole project costs around Sh500 million and Nairobi alone is allocated 75 per cent of the total amount, Macharia said.

The project started in December 2012 and is expected to be completed by end of May 2019.

Sonko noted that the machine will work faster as no manual labour will be required.

The flushing machine is a modern machine used to clean and unclog the drainage system by radiant heating system. The exercise is done with the help of chemicals and high water pressure that has the capacity to deal with flooding disasters, said Sonko.

The launch comes barely a month after President Uhuru Kenyatta directed the Transport CS and Sonko to work together to improve the citys drainage system.

I Dont Want to See People Drown in Nairobi Again, Uhuru To CS Macharia and SonkoBiotechnology competition modeled after popular TV program Dragons' Den

TORONTO, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - A panel of investor-judges has selected Ontario-based oncology researcher Soror Sharifpoor of Polumiros Inc. as the winner of the 2018 FACIT Falcons' Fortunes competition. The $50,000 award is intended to support further development of their innovative cancer research. FACIT runs the annual competition as part of its broader mandate to support translating research into Ontario companies to impact the lives of patients with cancer.

Now in its fifth year, the FACIT Falcons' Fortunes competition is open to any Ontario-based oncology researcher (academics, research institutions, research hospitals and start-ups). Entrepreneurial scientists are invited to pitch innovative research ideas to a panel of four investors in a competition that is modeled after the popular CBC television program Dragons' Den. The winners receive the $50,000 "Ernsting Entrepreneurship Award." After follow-up technical evaluation of the underlying innovation, the money funds product development for one year.

"We are really, truly thrilled. We put a lot of time into this technology," says Dr. Sharifpoor. "This has been years of work and effort by our team. To have FACIT's help to get to the next stage, this means the world of difference to us."

Polumiros Inc. specializes in the development of ReFilx , a polymeric soft tissue filler that provides breast cancer patients with an esthetically superior and minimally-invasive solution for the permanent restoration of breast tissue defects following lumpectomy.

FACIT received a total of 38 applications from across Ontario for this year's Falcons' Fortunes competition. From those initial entries, FACIT narrowed the field to six researchers to appear in-person and pitch their innovation to the investor judging panel. Since it started in 2014, the number of applications has grown by about 15% per year. The event has also grown in popularity with the community and this year's event is at capacity.

"Without companies to develop experimental therapies and technologies, the benefits of research can be confined to the laboratory. With our partners at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, FACIT plays a leading role in supporting Ontario entrepreneurs," says David O'Neill, acting President of FACIT. "Securing funding to bring an innovation to market is a difficult but necessary step if you want your idea to impact patients at the bedside."

The six entrepreneurs each gave a 10-minute pitch to the panel, followed by a five-minute question and answer session. The winner was announced at a reception immediately following the competition on April 11 in Toronto.

Scott Tanner, former President and Chief Executive Officer of DVS Sciences, transformed an early breakthrough technology into a highly successful company that continues to employ a number of Ontario scientists. Dr. Tanner started DVS with funding from FACIT and returned this year to share some of his wisdom and experience as one of the panel judges.

"As a researcher, being challenged to pitch your ideas effectively is crucial," he says. "It's not enough to have just a great technology. You have to provide incentive for people to invest in your business. It's a risky thing for them. FACIT helps scientists like me become businesspeople investors can trust."

About FACIT

Established by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and the Province of Ontario as a strategic partner to accelerate commercialization of oncology innovations, the Fight Against Cancer Innovation Trust (FACIT) leads these innovations from the lab to the marketplace to benefit patients, researchers, investors and the Ontario economy. For more information, please visit the website at facit.ca.

The Ernsting Entrepreneurship Award is named in honour of Dr. Mark Ernsting, Senior Biomedical Engineer at OICR, whose life was tragically cut short in December 2015. Mark exemplified the entrepreneurial spirit that FACIT strives to build and support within Ontario.

SOURCE Fight Against Cancer Innovation Trust

Related Links

www.facit.ca

PHILADELPHIA and SHORT HILLS, New Jersey, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The Business Intelligence Group today announced that Safe-T (TASE: SAFE) has won the 2018 Fortress Cyber Security Awards in both the Compliance and Authentication & Identity categories. The inaugural program sought to identify and reward the world's leading companies and products that are working to keep data and electronic assets safe among a growing threat from hackers. Safe-T is listed among 35 other organizations as top innovators in the cybersecurity space.

(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/555825/Safe_T_Logo.jpg )

As the perimeter is the first layer of authentication and access services into an organization, it's crucial that it is secured. Safe-T Software-Defined Access (SDA) solves the trusted access challenge for organizations, concealing their sensitive data, and making it available to authorized and authenticated people only. Safe-T SDA controls the data access life cycle, putting organizations in charge of exactly who sees the data and how it is accessed and used on-premises and in the hybrid cloud.

Safe-T's SDA solution was also designed with compliance as a top priority. By preventing unauthorized access and usage of data, services, or APIs, incidents of data exfiltration, leakage, malware, ransomware and fraud are significantly reduced. Safe-T ensures customer data is not compromised, thereby enabling enterprises to achieve General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance.

The directive of the GDPR is to ensure that companies collecting or processing personal data do not compromise it. To achieve this, organizations must follow strict authentication, access control, encryption, integrity, and audit standards. Safe-T has controls in place to ensure that only authorized users will have access, it can encrypt information in transit and at rest using AES, SSH and SSL protocols, has connectors to anti-malware and DLP scanning solutions, and provides event and action logging to achieve strict auditing compliance.

"We are thrilled to be recognized as a leader and innovator in compliance by the Fortress Cyber Security Awards," said Safe-T CEO Shachar Daniel. "We work diligently to ensure that only those who have been authorized and are trusted have access to sensitive data, services and API's. Also, with compliance initiatives like GDPR being implemented across the world, it's critical for any global company to focus on solutions that will enable them to remain compliant and keep their data safe."

"We are so proud to name Safe-T as a winner in our inaugural Fortress Cyber Security Awards program," said Maria Jimenez, Chief Nominations Officer, Business Intelligence Group. "It was clear to our expert judges that the entire group of 35 innovators and innovations are leading the way in helping to prepare, defend and respond to the growing threat of cyber-attacks. Congratulations to all!"

For information about the Safe-T please visit http://www.safe-t.com. For information about the annual Fortress Cyber Security Awards, please visit https://www.fortressawards.com/.

About Safe-T http://www.safe-t.com

Safe-T, a wholly owned subsidiary of Safe-T Group Ltd. (TASE: SAFE), is a leading provider of software-defined access solutions which mitigate attacks on enterprises' business-critical services and sensitive data. Safe-T solves the data access challenge by masking data at the perimeter, keeping information assets safe and limiting access only to authorized and intended entities in hybrid cloud environments. Safe-T enhances operational productivity, efficiency, security, and compliance by protecting organizations from data exfiltration, leakage, malware, ransomware, and fraud. With Safe-T's patented, multi-layer software-defined access, financial services, healthcare, utility companies and governments can secure their data, services, and networks from internal and external data threats.

About Business Intelligence Group http://www.bintelligence.com

The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry award programs, these programs are judged by business executives having experience and knowledge. The organization's proprietary and unique scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers.

Contacts

Maria Jimenez

Chief Nominations Officer

Business Intelligence Group

[email protected]

+1-909-529-2737

Fehmida Bholat

Fusion Public Relations on behalf of Safe-T

[email protected]

+1-646-452-7112

SOURCE Safe-TGROSSE POINTE FARMS, Mich., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Saga Communications, Inc. (NYSE American: SGA) announced today that it will release its 1st Quarter 2018 results at 9:00 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 8, 2018. The company will be holding a conference call on the same date at 11:00 a.m. EDT. The dial-in numbers are as follows:

Domestic and International Dial-in Number: (612) 288-0329

The Company requests that all parties that have a question that they would like to submit to the Company to please email the inquiry by 10:00 a.m. EDT on May 8, 2018 to [email protected]. The Company will discuss, during the limited period of the conference call, those inquiries it deems of general relevance and interest. Only inquiries made in compliance with the foregoing will be discussed during the call.

Saga's earnings release will contain certain non-GAAP financial measures including station operating income and free cash flow. A reconciliation of all non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures will be provided in the earnings release.

Saga Communications, Inc. is a broadcasting company whose business is devoted to acquiring, developing and operating broadcast properties. The company owns or operates broadcast properties in 26 markets, including 75 FM, 33 AM radio stations and 64 metro signals. For additional information, contact us at (313) 886-7070 or visit our website at www.sagacom.com.

SOURCE Saga Communications, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.sagacom.com

ARLINGTON, Va., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- By expanding Earth Day into Earth Month, the Student Conservation Association (SCA) is out to transform stewardship into a year-round endeavor.

SCA, the nation's largest and most effective youth conservation force, today announced the most sweeping Earth Day observance in its 60-year history  involving more than 5,000 volunteers at over 80 locations nationwide throughout the month of April. Projects include restoring hurricane-damaged greenscapes in Houston, crafting native wildower seed balls in San Francisco, and removing tons of trash from the Potomac River Watershed near Washington, DC.

"We look forward to celebrating our planet every April 22nd, but SCA's commitment to our natural world is ongoing," states CEO Jaime Matyas. "Across America, young volunteers and others will mark 'Earth Month' by strengthening local parks and habitats, an empowering process that will hone individuals' leadership skills, bolster our communities, and forge a more sustainable future for all."

Thousands of employees from corporate partners dedicated to living responsibly will participate in SCA's coast-to-coast conservation ventures. These companies include Southwest Airlines, American Express, and Exelon.

"For the past ten years, Southwest Airlines has partnered with SCA to support environmental stewardship, a cause close to our Heart," said Laurie Barnett, Managing Director Communications and Outreach at Southwest Airlines. "We are proud to participate in this year's Earth Month activities and further our dedication to the planet."

"American Express has a longstanding commitment to community service and civic engagement programs, and we're thrilled to again partner with SCA on a nationwide network of Earth Month celebrations," said Timothy J. McClimon, president, American Express Foundation. "This month, our colleagues will aid preservation and disaster relief efforts in Washington Square Park in New York City, Papago Park in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, and the Urban Farming Institute in Sunrise, Florida. In addition, we will be volunteering to help bring native wildflower pollinator populations back to their communities."

"Every day, Exelon works tirelessly to deliver clean energy to our customers and the communities we serve," said Maggie FitzPatrick, Exelon's Senior Vice President for Corporate Affairs. "Our partnership with the Student Conservation Association will expand our impact by advancing sustainability programs in cities where we work and live."

SCA projects that during its Earth Month, volunteers will remove 15 tons of debris from park lands, improve 200 miles of trails and waterfront areas, restore 125 acres of wildlife habitat, and create more than 10,000 native seed balls to support pollinator species.

Among other locations, SCA volunteers will be out in force in Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Indianapolis, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Miami, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. For a complete list of SCA's April projects, or to register to join the hands-on activities, visit www.thesca.org/events.

About Southwest Airlines

In its 47th year of service, Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co. (LUV) continues to differentiate itself from other air carriers with exemplary Customer Service delivered by more than 56,000 Employees to a Customer base topping 120 million passengers annually, in recent years. Southwest became the nation's largest domestic air carrier in 2003 and maintains that ranking based on the U.S. Department of Transportation's most recent reporting of domestic originating passengers boarded. During peak travel seasons, Southwest operates more than 4,000 weekday departures among a network of 100 destinations in the United States and 10 additional countries. Southwest has announced its intention to sell tickets in 2018 for service to Hawaii, subject to requisite governmental approvals.

About American Express

American Express is a global services company, providing customers with access to products, insights and experiences that enrich lives and build business success. Learn more at americanexpress.com, and connect with us on facebook.com/americanexpress, instagram.com/americanexpress/, linkedin.com/company/american-express, twitter.com/americanexpress, and youtube.com/americanexpress.

Key links to products, services and corporate responsibility information: charge and credit cards, business credit cards, Plenti rewards program, travel services, gift cards, prepaid cards, merchant services, Accertify, corporate card, business travel, and corporate responsibility.

About Exelon

Exelon Corporation (EXC) is a Fortune 100 energy company with the largest number of utility customers in the U.S. Exelon does business in 48 states, the District of Columbia and Canada and had 2017 revenue of $33.5 billion. Exelon's six utilities deliver electricity and natural gas to approximately 10 million customers in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania through its Atlantic City Electric, BGE, ComEd, Delmarva Power, PECO and Pepco subsidiaries. Exelon is one of the largest competitive U.S. power generators, with more than 35,168 megawatts of nuclear, gas, wind, solar and hydroelectric generating capacity comprising one of the nation's cleanest and lowest-cost power generation fleets. The company's Constellation business unit provides energy products and services to approximately 2 million residential, public sector and business customers, including more than two-thirds of the Fortune 100. Follow Exelon on Twitter @Exelon.

About the Student Conservation Association

The Student Conservation Association (SCA) is America's largest and most effective youth conservation service organization. SCA conserves lands and transforms lives by empowering young people of all backgrounds to plan, act, and lead, while they protect and restore our natural and cultural resources. Founded in 1957, SCA's mission is to build the next generation of conservation leaders, and 70% of its alumni are employed or studying in conservation-related fields. For more, visit www.thesca.org.

Contact: Kevin Hamilton

[email protected]

603.372.7068

SOURCE Student Conservation Association

Related Links

https://www.thesca.org

Joining Senator Savino on the "New York State of Cannabis," panel taking place Friday, June 1 st , will be Kate M. Bell, Legislative Counsel, State Policies Department, Marijuana Policy Project (MPP); Rosalind McCarthy, Founder, Minorities for Medical Marijuana, Inc.; and Dr. Kenneth Weinberg, Chief Medical Officer, Cannabis Doctors of New York. These experts will help attendees navigate the rapid changes and new opportunities being presented in New York and surrounding tri-state region as well as provide the tools needed for businesses to prosper in this dynamic region.

"I'm excited to partner with the CWCBExpo, which is one of the cannabis industries most trusted brands. The "New York State of Cannabis" panel will undoubtedly be exciting, informative and go a long way in continuing to educate people about the business of cannabis here in New York State and beyond," said Diane Savino, New York State Senator.

CWCBExpo NY is a must attend event for established and emerging businesses in the medical marijuana, legalized cannabis and industrial hemp industries. The trade show and conference will provide expert guidance and the latest innovations for business growth in this evolving and highly regulated industry.

CWCBExpo's educational highlights include:

Keynote Addresses by Bruce Linton , CEO, Canopy Growth and Montel Williams , medical cannabis advocate and media personality

Industry Update by investment expert, Sumit Mehta of Mazakali

Add-on Workshops providing in-depth information and actionable insight including: the popular "Open A Cannabis Business;" "NJ Cannabis Symposium;" " and "Advanced Cannabis Investment Workshop  Beyond the Basics;" on Wednesday, May 30th . Two Saturday, June 1 , Add-on Workshops include: "The Secret Sauce: Developing IP and Production Best Practices with the Incredibles Kitchen & Extraction Laboratory;" and "Teaming with Microbes, Nutrients, and the Future!"

"Branding Strategies for Cannabis" led by a top CMO from one of the USA's oldest and most iconic brands.

CWCBExpo NY will include an expanded exhibit floor (May 31-June 2) with suppliers in the industry showcasing cutting-edge products and services. Featured exhibitors include: Advanced Nutrients, Folium Biosciences, Isodiol, and Elixinol.

For the first time, CWCBExpo NY exhibits and seminars will be open on Saturday, June 2nd, to offer attendees a bonus day of sourcing, education, and networking.

Early bird registration discounts are in effect until May 11th. For more information on CWCBExpo NY and to register visit http://www.cwcbexpo.com/new-york/2018/attend. For information on sponsoring or exhibiting at the coast-to-coast CWCBExpo events, contact [email protected] or call 201-580-2050.

About Cannabis World Congress & Business Expositions (CWCBExpo )

The Cannabis World Congress & Business Expositions (CWCBExpo) are business-to-business events for the legalized cannabis industry and are held 3 times per year in the largest media, financial and business markets. The CWCBExpos are held in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, and are the leading forums for dispensary owners, growers, suppliers, investors, medical professionals, government regulators, legal counsel, and entrepreneurs looking to achieve business success and identify new areas of growth in this dynamic and fast-growing industry. CWCBExpo is produced by Leading Edge Expositions in partnership with the International Cannabis Association (ICA). To learn more about the coast-to-coast CWCBExpos in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, go to www.cwcbexpo.com. Connect on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn: @cwcbexpo.

Contacts: Fred Polsinelli, [email protected], 646-306-7413

Annie Scully, [email protected], 201-310-9252

SOURCE Cannabis World Congress & Business ExpositionsTo participate in the campaign, all you have to do is: 1 - Talk about a cause you want to "shine the light" on. 2 - Dedicate a song or performance to that cause. 3 - Upload the above in a video tagged.

Participants are encouraged to use flashlights and other props to make their performance even more creative. Direct donations to the DBA Foundation are also encouraged to support research towards curing this extremely rare and dangerous disease.

About Audrey Nethery:

Audrey Nethery is one of the most well-known patients of the rare disease, Diamond Blackfan Anemia. Despite the challenges she faces in everyday life, her optimism, charm, and lovable music videos have captured the hearts of thousands of fans. Her father, Scott Nethery, helps her channel her support towards charitable causes and support for DBA research.

About Singing Machine

Singing Machine is the largest manufacturer of karaoke machines in the United States. The company has recently been very involved with charitable causes and corporate responsibility. Singing Machine discovered Audrey Nethery when she posted her first karaoke videos with one of the company's products.

Contacts:

Scott Nethery

Audrey's Father

[email protected]

Radelys Comas

Director of Marketing at Singing Machine

954-519-2418

[email protected]

Campaign Landing Page

Featuring Audrey's first "shine the light" video.

https://singingmachine.com/pages/shine-the-light

Audrey's YouTube Page:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfCq-0GqaJQuZGcuGtnNgLQ

SOURCE Singing MachineFlamboyant Bungoma politician Moses Nandalwe has maintained that his deep pockets are as a result of hard work, and denied any links to the Illuminati.

Moses Nandwale of Orange Democratic Movement unsuccessfully vied for the Sirisia Constituency Parliamentary Seat in the August 8 , General Election. This despite spending loads of cash in his campaign.

He is said to have dished out Sh1000 to each youth who registered as a voter. And after losing the bid, Nandwale on Sunday, December 10, 2017, threw a pompous party for Sirisia residents to thank them for rejecting him.

Moses Nandalwe, who serves as an aide to COTU Secretary General Francis Atwoli, told The Nairobian that he learnt a good lesson about saving money in 2013 when he unsuccessfully contested for the Sirisia parliamentary seat without money.

I saved money since then. I also ventured into business in the city, so far things have been good for me. I have decided to share part of what I saved with my friends and supporters. I give them Sh1,000 each which I think is not wrong.

Moses, who often flies by chopper to his rural home in Sirisia added: I am not an Illuminati member or a thug as some people and detractors want others to believe. I am a hardworking Kenyan who has a big heart.

The former Kenyatta University student leader further dispelled accusations by some Bungoma county residents that he is a show-off for walking around with bodyguards in tow at funerals and other functions in his Sirisia backyard.

It is not a show-off, politics, especially in my constituency, is murky and meetings easily degenerate into chaos. My bodyguards come in handy in such situations.

Nandalwe, who has a penchant for dressing in colourful West African attires, reportedly fell in love with the clothes after being expelled from campus in July 2009 following students riots and for which student leaders were put to task for breach of university regulations.

I went to Gabon and later Nigeria. I have 24 such clothes. And they do not come cheaply, as the cheapest costs Sh50, 000, he revealed.PARIS, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Dental Monitoring SAS ("DM") is proud to announce a strategic investment by the Straumann Group (SIX: STMN) ("Straumann"), one of the world's largest dental companies.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/675696/Dental_Monitoring_Logo.jpg )



The two companies have signed an agreement that provides Straumann with global distribution rights to DM's technology in return for an injection of capital and a minor stake in DM. Straumann will integrate DM's technology into its portfolio of orthodontic and digital solutions and the two companies will collaborate to develop further applications for artificial intelligence in the dental field. DM will continue to support and sell to orthodontic customers through its own network.

Remote Monitoring - Transforming orthodontics

DM is the first company to enable orthodontists and dentists to remotely monitor treatment progress in their patients. Together with the introduction of virtual check-ups to supplement chairside appointments, this offers a significant improvement to patient care. After downloading the DM application on their smartphones, patients use the proprietary DM self-scanning process, usually on a weekly basis from the comfort and convenience of their home. DM's proprietary artificial intelligence technology extracts information from the collected data and combines it with the digital impression data acquired when treatment began.

The software uses highly accurate clinical measurement tools and photo-simulations that record actual tooth movement over the course of treatment and monitors any relapse during the post-treatment retention phase. The system communicates with the orthodontist whenever necessary or required, allowing for timely intervention and adjustments that make the treatment more efficient. The DM web-based dashboard allows the orthodontist to communicate effortlessly with the patient, to support compliance and motivation.

Artificial Intelligence ("AI") - next generation of dental products

The use of machine-learning algorithms to transform medicine and dentistry is an important technological innovation to improve treatment outcomes and patient engagement.

DM's engineering team based in Paris, has spent the last 4 years developing the DM proprietary technology to make remote monitoring a reality. The company has invested millions of dollars gathering and tagging clinically relevant data to enable the development of highly accurate artificial intelligence algorithms. Today its technology can detect over 170 different clinical situations from images taken by patients using their smartphones. These results are constantly clinically validated by DM's panel of orthodontists, prior to being communicated back to the treating orthodontist or dentist. In just a few years, DM has validated nearly 2 million clinical records from patients and the number is growing exponentially.

Integrating DM technologies into other dental products

DM's artificial intelligence technology will support Straumann's orthodontic and intraoral scanning businesses and could be extended to applications in implant and preventative dentistry. A significant part of Straumann's investment will be used to fund these developments and the Group will be represented in DM's Strategic Management and Development Board.

Marco Gadola, CEO of Straumann Group

"Enabling dentists to offer patients a reliable, easy-to-use mobile application for checking their teeth and treatment progress will change dentistry. Our investment in DM provides us with a proven orthodontics tracking system, which is commercially-available in addition to securing a partner with the expertise to develop further artificial intelligence solutions in our field".

Philippe Salah, CEO of Dental Monitoring

"In 2017, DM commenced a search for a strategic investor in the dental industry to provide funding and access to large global dental markets and to accompany us beyond our current position in orthodontic monitoring. Straumann is an ideal partner for many reasons: they are a truly global company and are investing significantly in digital dentistry as a core business. They are renowned for clinical excellence and brand leadership and share our passion for pioneering innovation and entrepreneurism. With their scientific heritage and strength in digital, they are our partner of choice for developing and establishing remote monitoring coupled with AI as the new standard of care".

Other DM Investors

In March 2018, DM completed a US$9.5m investment round with over 50 individual investors - mainly orthodontists who see the opportunity that DM has to transform not only orthodontics but also dentistry. DM is also backed by Naxicap Partners, one of France's largest private equity and venture capital firms who were DM's first external investors in 2016. The remainder of the shares are held by the founders and employees.

Use of Funds

DM will use the funds raised to invest in additional engineering resources and in the development of other dental fields beyond orthodontics. The funds will also be used by DM to invest in sales and marketing in core markets such as the USA, Europe and Asia Pacific countries.

About Dental Monitoring

Dental Monitoring SAS developed and launched the world's first remote monitoring orthodontic system and pioneered the use of AI in the field of dentistry. DM has applied for over 40 patents to protect its intellectual property developed in the remote dental monitoring field. Founded in 2013, DM launched its product in the French market in 2015 initially to acquire sufficient clinical data and develop proprietary dental algorithms to the required accuracy. In 2017, commercial sales commenced; DM products are now sold in the USA, France, the UK, Germany, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. With headquarters in Paris, France, and offices in the USA, Australia and Hong Kong, DM has nearly 100 employees.

About Straumann

The Straumann Group (SIX: STMN) is a global leader in tooth replacement and orthodontic solutions that restore smiles and confidence. It unites global and international brands that stand for excellence, innovation and quality in replacement, corrective and digital dentistry, including Straumann, Neodent, Medentika, ClearCorrect, Dental Wings, and other fully/partly owned companies and partners. In collaboration with leading clinics, institutes and universities, the Group researches, develops, manufactures and supplies dental implants, instruments, CADCAM prosthetics, biomaterials and digital solutions for use in tooth replacement and restoration or to prevent tooth loss.

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, the Group currently employs 4881 people worldwide and its products, solutions and services are available in more than 100 countries through a broad network of distribution subsidiaries and partners.

Dental Monitoring SAS, 47 avenue Hoche, 75008 Paris, France

Phone: +33-(0)-186-95-01-01

Homepage: dental-monitoring.com



Contacts:

Corporate Communication

Alexe Espiand: +33-(0)-659-32-37-78

E-mail: [email protected]



Investor Relations

Mark Van Weelde: +61-418-236-848

E-mail: [email protected]



SOURCE Dental MonitoringVANCOUVER, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -

Sunniva Inc. ("Sunniva" or the "Company") (CSE:SNN) (OTCQX:SNNVF) is pleased to announce that its US subsidiaries have recently received all the necessary State of California temporary licenses (the "Licenses") for phase one and two for its purpose built state-of-the-art greenhouse cultivation facilities in Cathedral City, California (the "Sunniva California Campus").

The Sunniva California Campus (CNW Group/Sunniva Inc.)

At this time, the State of California has only issued temporary licenses while they develop permanent regulations. The Company will apply, with all other license holders in the State of California, for annual state licenses within the next four months.

The Licenses will permit Sunniva to cultivate and process top quality medical and adult-use cannabis and cannabis products while accommodating other licensed cultivation businesses already selected who will leverage the services and infrastructure that the Sunniva California Campus provides. Those tenant cultivators ("Tenants") not only gain access to world class cultivation infrastructure, but also to Sunniva's genetics, management and consulting services, distribution network, processing and manufacturing capabilities, brand partnerships and retail relationships. Sunniva's Tenant relationships will have minimal impact to Sunniva's revenue and bottom line as it provides turn-key services to these third-party cultivation businesses.

Sunniva's US subsidiaries hold eight 10,000 sq. ft. cultivation licenses, two manufacturing licenses, one 22,000 sq. ft. cultivation license, one 22,000 sq. ft. nursery license, and one 10,000 sq. ft. nursery license. Sunniva will additionally lease seven 22,000 sq. ft. cultivation bays to these selected licensed Tenants. All of Sunniva's annual state license applications will be completed and submitted per the state's regulatory mandate within 120 days following receipt of the temporary Licenses.

"This is a very significant milestone for Sunniva's operations in California. An important aspect of the licensing process has been completed and now our focus is on completing construction on time and entering into supply contracts with distribution partners, leading brands and creating Sunniva branded products for the California marketplace," said Dr. Anthony Holler, CEO, Sunniva.

Sunniva would also like to provide the following update on the Sunniva California Campus construction progress:

Rough Grading - 100% complete Steel Erection, Greenhouse Glass and Glazing- 100% complete Blackout Screening Install - 60% complete Fire Suppression Equipment- 60% complete Header House Roof Panels - 30% complete Utility Work - 10% complete

It is anticipated that plant propagating materials will be onboarded late Q3, 2018 in the Sunniva California Campus. For a complete video of the March construction progress, please visit us at www.sunniva.com or click the direct link below:

Sunniva Campus  Cathedral City  March Construction Update

About Sunniva Inc.

Sunniva, through its subsidiaries, is a vertically integrated medical cannabis company operating in the world's two largest cannabis markets  Canada and California  where we are committed to delivering safe, high-quality products and services at scale. Our vision is to become the lowest cost, highest quality cannabis producer in the markets we serve by building large scale purpose-built current good manufacturing practices ("cGMP") greenhouses, offering better quality assurance with cannabis products free from pesticides, providing better patient and doctor access to cannabis education and sourcing better therapeutic delivery devices. Sunniva's management and board of directors have a proven track record for creating significant shareholder value both in the healthcare and biotech industries.

Sunniva operates through its wholly owned subsidiaries:

Sunniva Medical Inc. ("SMI")  SMI is a late stage Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations ("ACMPR") applicant in final review and is building the Sunniva Canada Campus, 700,000 square feet of purpose-built cGMP compliant greenhouse facilities to be located in British Columbia. The total campus is expected to produce over 100,000 kg of premium medical cannabis a year and over 25,000 kg of trim used for extraction. The facility will produce pesticide free products and will convert trim to extracted products such as cannabis oil. The oil will be used for drug delivery formats such as capsules, dissolvable strips, vaporization cartridges, tinctures and creams. Sunniva anticipates to break ground in early 2018. As the facility is not yet under construction, revenue and costs are not known, therefore, profitability cannot be assured.

CP Logistics, LLC ("CPL")  Through CPL, Sunniva has commenced construction of the Sunniva California Campus, state-of-the-art, purpose-built greenhouse facilities in Cathedral City, California. The Sunniva California Campus is planned in two phases and has been cGMP designed. Phase 1 is designed to be 325,000-square feet producing in excess of 60,000 kg of premium cannabis a year. The total campus is expected to produce over 100,000 kg of premium cannabis a year after Phases 1 and 2 are complete. At this facility, it is estimated 30% of all product will be used for higher margin extracted products and will be produced free from the pesticides commonly used within today's industry. As the facility is not complete, revenue and costs are not known, therefore, profitability cannot be assured.

Natural Health Services Ltd. ("NHS")  NHS owns and operates a network of 8 medical clinics in Canada specializing in medical cannabis under ACMPR. NHS connects patients with safe and effective medical cannabis products through Licensed Producers ("LPs"). NHS has in-house physicians and nurse practitioners specializing in the endocannabinoid system providing expert consultation, education, and recommendations for patients. NHS' proprietary technology infrastructure assists physicians, patients and LPs to comply with the rules of Health Canada. NHS has more than 129,000 active medical documents outstanding and 93,000 active patients.

Full-Scale Distributors, LLC ("FSD")  FSD, through its brand, Vapor Connoisseur, is a provider of custom, private-label vaporizers and accessories. FSD currently serves the needs of over 80 brands in the North American marketplace. Vapor Connoisseur is recognized for its high quality and innovative vaporization devices. Products are tailored to client needs, ensuring both safety and reliability and FSD will continue to provide these services in coordination with the large supply from both Sunniva Campuses.

For more information please visit: www.sunniva.com

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.

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements that are not historical facts, including without limitation, statements regarding relating to the application for annual state licenses, future estimates, plans, programs, forecasts, projections, objectives, assumptions, expectations or beliefs of future performance, statements regarding Sunniva's plan to cultivate, produce and distribute a broad range of solutions focused on patients' needs and Sunniva's plans, timing and estimates of production for its facilities, are "forward-looking statements." Forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "estimates", "intends", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, events or developments to be materially different from any future results, events or developments expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, among others, the risk factors included in the Sunniva's continuous disclosure documents available on www.sedar.com. These factors should be considered carefully and readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. Although Sunniva has attempted to identify important risk factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other risk factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended. 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 forward-looking statements. Sunniva assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, even if new information becomes available as a result of future events, new information or for any other reason except as required by law.

SOURCE Sunniva Inc.This program was tailored by AGS to host undergraduate students from the University of New England for a semester in the heart of Paris, experiencing French and European culture while gaining credits toward their degree at UNE. It will combine coursework in international relations with French classes at the Alliance Francaise and using the city of Paris and its many institutions as an expanded classroom. Students will stay with Parisian families to make the most of this immersive experience.

This project was initiated by Anouar Majid, UNE's Vice President for Global Affairs, who founded the University's Center for Global Humanities (Maine, USA) and Tangier Global Forum (Morocco).

AGS Director Larry Kilman says: "Being a 'boutique' institution, we were able to design a custom-made program based on the specific needs and goals presented by UNE. We are very proud for this opportunity to support UNE's mission of providing international education to students, which very much converges with our own mission."

The first session of the program will start in January 2019.

Majid added: "The president of UNE, James Herbert, and I are tremendously excited by this unique opportunity to offer our students a first-rate American education in English while learning French and living in Paris. AGS, with its visionary and flexible attitude, as well as with its excellent faculty and staff, is the ideal partner for us. We will do our best to recruit students and grow the program."

The American Graduate School in Paris offers US higher education programs in France to students from around the world. It specializes in two types of activities: graduate degree programs in International Relations and Diplomacy, and providing undergraduate study abroad programs to partner universities wishing to develop their international offering. AGS concentrates all of the qualities of a top-rate educational institution in an intimate learning environment with personalized attention to each student.

The University of New England is an American, private university located in the state of Maine, with a campus in Tangier, Morocco.

Contact: Corentine Chaillet  [email protected]  +33(0)1-47-20-00-94  www.ags.edu

SOURCE American Graduate School in Paris

Related Links

http://www.ags.edu/

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Audacious Project was launched in early April with a mission to foster "collaborative philanthropy for bold ideas." A joint endeavor housed at TED, the nonprofit devoted to ideas worth spreading, The Audacious Project surfaces and funds up to five critical projects annually that have the potential to create massive, global change. This coalition of leading organizations and individuals  among them the Skoll Foundation, Virgin Unite, Dalio Foundation, The Bridgespan Group and others  has collectively raised over $250 million to help fund the inaugural round of big ideas. This commitment has catalyzed additional funding from the projects' networks. To date, The Audacious Project has over $400 million committed towards its $634 million goal.

Today, the first class of The Audacious Project takes to the TED stage  each delivering a TED Talk detailing their world-changing projects. All of them are thrillingly bold with a credible path to execution, scale and impact.

Watch the reveal of The Audacious Project ideas on April 11 at 5 PM PDT live from the TED2018 stage in a session that will be livestreamed exclusively on Facebook Watch at go.ted.com/audaciouslive.

Following the session, the talks will be available on AudaciousProject.org.

The 2018 Audacious Project awardees are as follows, with their big ideas detailed in full below. Each starts with a question.

What if we ended the injustice of automatic jail time for those who can't afford bail?

The Bail Project is working to correct an injustice at the heart of the American legal system with its self-sustaining national bail fund.

What if we could hit the brakes on climate change by tracking pollution from space?

Environmental Defense Fund is launching a satellite to track methane emissions and empower companies and governments to take action.

What if a million Black women launched a health revolution?

GirlTrek will train frontline health activists to disrupt disease and inspire a bright and beautiful new culture of physical activity in the 50 highest-need communities in America.

What if we eliminated one of the world's oldest diseases?

Sightsavers has a plan to eliminate trachoma in less than a generation.

What if we explored the ocean's vast twilight zone, teeming with undiscovered life?

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has new technology to uncover the secrets of a mysterious layer of the ocean that's an integral part of the marine food web and Earth's climate system.

Over the past three years, The Audacious Project has beta-tested its model with several ideas. These include:

What if we digitally empower thousands of community health workers to make care available to all?

Living Goods & Last Mile Health are working together to improve access to lifesaving healthcare for millions by leveraging mobile technology to transform community health.

What if we could support millions of African farmers in growing more food?

One Acre Fund is scaling up its methods for bundling services to boost small-farm productivity, prosperity and food security in rural Sub-Saharan Africa.

With the projects public and the TED Talks now live, people around the world are invited to support each initiative financially  and in other ways  alongside participating members of The Audacious Project coalition. Each idea includes a specific budget that matches its ambition with viable, sustainable timelines that span years.

"Our goal here is to build a platform for ideas so audacious, but also so well prepared, that they can attract large amounts of financial support pooled from multiple donors," said Chris Anderson, TED Curator. "This could and should allow us all to dream more creatively, more boldly and more confidently about possible routes to a better future. We're deeply excited by these inaugural projects and invite the world to join us in carrying them forward."

"This is a new and bold chapter in philanthropic collaboration," said Anna Verghese, Executive Director of The Audacious Project. "Having spent a decade mobilizing globally impactful projects with the TED Prize, we now have a coalition ready to support some of the world's most heroic and devoted social entrepreneurs as they're asked to dream and collaborate at the most transformative scale possible. The 2018 recipients are forcefully leading the charge in tackling global warming, social injustices, disease and health care. Collectively confronting these daunting challenges is what The Audacious Project is all about and our team is here to support this critical work."

IN DETAIL: THE 2018 AUDACIOUS PROJECTS

THE BAIL PROJECT

What if we ended the injustice of automatic jail time for those who can't afford bail?

The Bail Project is an unprecedented national effort to combat mass incarceration by disrupting the money bail system, which disproportionately affects low-income communities, women and people of color. The new organization builds on the success of its pilot program, The Bronx Freedom Fund, which has been in operation for 10 years. With the support of The Audacious Project, The Bail Project will manage a revolving national bail fund and develop a network of local teams  known as Bail Disruptors  who will work with public defenders, advocates and impacted community members to post bail for over 160,000 people in the next five years.

The Bail Project's revolving fund will pay bail for those who can't afford it, keeping families together, protecting livelihoods and preventing the human suffering caused by pretrial detention. Since bail is returned at the end of a case, donated funds can be used several times a year, making this model a highly sustainable game-changer for combatting mass incarceration and the racial disparities endemic to the American legal system.

"Pretrial detention is a key driver of mass incarceration in the United States, accounting for all of the net jail growth in the last 20 years," said Robin Steinberg, CEO of The Bail Project. "Thanks to The Audacious Project, we have an incredible opportunity to help turn the tide on this crisis. We have a proven model, strong local partners and a growing team ready to give it their all until our work is no longer necessary."

The Bail Project is launching with four strategic sites: Bronx, New York; Queens, New York; St. Louis, Missouri; and Tulsa, Oklahoma. By the end of year one, it will expand to five additional cities, including Detroit and Louisville. By the end of year five, The Bail Project will be operating in 40 sites and bailing out an average of 1,000 people per site per year, all while collecting stories and data to support reform efforts and demonstrate  as it has done in the Bronx  that money bail is not only unfair, but also unnecessary.

For more information, visit: audaciousproject.org/ideas/2018/bail-project/

The Bail Project Media Contact:

Camilo A. Ramirez

Communications Director

[email protected] | 864.905.4974

ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND

What if we could hit the brakes on climate change by tracking pollution from space?

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas responsible for a quarter of the warming our planet is experiencing. One of the largest man-made sources is the oil and gas industry, releasing about 75 million metric tons of methane into the atmosphere each year (enough to generate electricity for all of Africa twice over).

Cutting these emissions is the fastest, cheapest thing we can do to slow the rate of warming today (even as we continue to attack carbon dioxide emissions). Simple, cost-effective steps can reduce emissions dramatically, but only if we know how much methane is coming from which facilities. But gathering this data on a global scale is a huge challenge.

That's why the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), with support from The Audacious Project, will build and launch MethaneSAT, a low-cost, purpose-built satellite, to locate and measure oil and gas methane emissions globally. Information from MethaneSAT will be a critical new resource for both companies and countries to reduce those emissions and create a transparent way to track that progress.

Improved data on oil and gas methane emissions can turn this threat into the biggest climate opportunity of our time. We already know that immediate substantial reductions are both necessary and possible. The International Energy Agency estimates the industry can feasibly reduce its worldwide emissions by 75 percent  and that up to two thirds of those reductions can be achieved at zero net cost.

"Cutting methane emissions from the global oil and gas industry is the fastest thing we can do right now to put the brakes on climate change," said Fred Krupp, EDF President. "MethaneSAT gives us the power to map and measure the problem, identify reduction opportunities and track that progress over time."

For more information, visit: audaciousproject.org/ideas/2018/environmental-defense-fund/

EDF Media Contact:

Jon Coifman

Communications Director

[email protected]

GIRLTREK

What if a million Black women launched a health revolution?

GirlTrek, the largest health movement and organization for Black women in the United States, has an Audacious idea to improve the overall health and well-being of African-American women  starting with walking. Factors like the stress of underemployment and unsafe streets, chronic poverty and culture norms that value service above self-care have all contributed to African-American women engaging in fewer leisure-time physical activities. As a result, 82 percent of African-American women are overweight and 59 percent are obese  they die from preventable diseases at higher rates and younger ages than any other group of women in the United States.

GirlTrek believes the solution to this health crisis is simple: daily walking, which has been proven to ameliorate the risk factors of obesity. To attain their goal of reaching a million Black women, GirlTrek will bring together 10,000 of the brightest and most committed women in their network to be trained as a new vanguard of public health activists.

"When I think of people power, I close my eyes and see images of women walking on the sidewalks of Montgomery in the bus boycotts. I see women crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. GirlTrek is reestablishing walking as a transformative tradition in Black communities and as an effective solution to the current health crisis," said T. Morgan Dixon, Cofounder of GirlTrek and Chief Executive Officer.

"We are not a workout group. We are an army of women who in the iconic words of Fannie Lou Hamer, are 'sick and tired of being sick and tired,'" said Vanessa Garrison, Cofounder of GirlTrek and Chief Operating Officer.

To scale their impact tenfold, GirlTrek will launch a five-day training inspired by the "tent revivals" and "teach-ins" of the Civil Rights Era. This immersive training experience, "Summer of Selma," will include three parts: skills training, an inspiring Woodstock-type festival and a 54-mile trek along the iconic Selma-to-Montgomery trail. From there, newly-trained activists will use local rallying power, practical skills and an unwavering sense of purpose to recruit new walkers and lead more than 10,000 weekly walks in the highest-need communities in America.

For more information, visit: audaciousproject.org/ideas/2018/girl-trek/

GirlTrek Media Contact:

Jewel Bush

National Communications Director

[email protected] | 202.681.3033

SIGHTSAVERS

What if we eliminated one of the world's oldest diseases?

Sightsavers  an international charity working to prevent avoidable blindness  has an Audacious idea to tackle the bacterial infection trachoma, which causes people to go irreversibly blind in an excruciatingly painful way. Trachoma has plagued humanity for thousands of years, recorded as far back as Ancient Egypt, but is completely preventable. Yet, it still blights the world's poorest communities. More than 182 million people are at risk.

With support from The Audacious Project, Sightsavers and their partners can reach a major milestone in the history of human health in the next few years by stopping trachoma from blinding people.

The global economy loses $8 billion to trachoma each year, but eliminating the disease for good will cost much less. Sightsavers plans to implement the World Health Organization-endorsed SAFE strategy (surgery, antibiotics, face-washing and environmental improvements) in key countries where funding gaps are the only thing standing in the way of eliminating the disease. It will also scale up efforts in countries with some of the most severe need to make sure no one is left behind.

Dr. Caroline Harper, CEO of Sightsavers, said: "Trachoma traps the most vulnerable people in a vicious cycle of poverty. Together we can consign this awful disease to the history books, where it belongs. We'll free millions of people, today and for generations to come, from this scourge of the world's poorest communities."

For more information, visit: sightsavers.org/protecting-sight/ntds/ and audaciousproject.org/ideas/2018/sightsavers/

Sightsavers Media Contact:

Hester Philips

[email protected] | +44 (0)7786926907

WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION

What if we explored the ocean's vast twilight zone, teeming with undiscovered life?

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the world's leading, independent non-profit organization dedicated to ocean research, exploration and education, is announcing an Audacious idea to explore the twilight zone, a globe-spanning ecosystem that is integral to the ocean food web and Earth's climate system.

Known to scientists as the mesopelagic or midwater region of the ocean, the twilight zone sits about 200 to 1,000 meters beneath the surface. The sun barely reaches the twilight zone, but it is home to the largest animal migration on Earth  one that happens every day  as well as the most common vertebrate on the planet, up to 90 percent of the world's total fish biomass and a multitude of as-yet undiscovered species. Despite this, the region remains largely unexplored.

Using next-generation robotic vehicles and sensors, WHOI will research what lives in the twilight zone; how organisms there interact with each other, their surroundings and surface waters; how to design new tools to explore the region; and how the twilight zone influences Earth's climate. Because it's teeming with life and largely unregulated, commercial fishing interests are already scaling up efforts to harvest the twilight zone, despite a fundamental lack of knowledge about how unbridled extraction of resources might affect marine life and global climate. Sound data will fuel informed policies to support sustainable use of this unexplored frontier.

"We want to take advantage of the amazing advances in technology  existing and under development  to launch large-scale exploration of the twilight zone. With so much that is still unknown, I think there's an almost unlimited opportunity for new discovery and for smart policies to arise from sound data," said Dr. Heidi Sosik, Senior Scientist at WHOI.

For more information, visit: twilightzone.whoi.edu and audaciousproject.org/ideas/2018/woods-hole-oceanographic-institution/

WHOI Media Contact:

Erin Koenig

Media Relations Coordinator

[email protected] | 508.289.2270

LIVING GOODS & LAST MILE HEALTH

What if we digitally empower thousands of community health workers to make care available to all?

Living Goods and Last Mile Health have been individually working to improve healthcare delivery by training and empowering community health workers in East and West Africa, respectively. The two organizations are teaming up with an Audacious idea to create Africa's largest network of digitally-empowered community health workers.

Through support from The Audacious Project, by 2021, Living Goods and Last Mile Health will bring quality health care to 34 million people in 6 countries in East and West Africa. They will also generate jobs for 50,000 people in the regions.

The joint venture will leverage two key innovations to make this possible: first, community health workers will be equipped with the Smart Health app, created by Living Goods and Medic Mobile, which automates diagnosis of deadly conditions and captures accurate, real-time data to manage thousands of far-flung workers. Second, the project will transform how community health workers and health systems leaders are trained through the Community Health Academy, launched by Last Mile Health with the 2017 TED Prize.

"Virtually every other sector  from books, to retail, to taxis  has been positively reinvented by mobile technology. Now it's time for technology to reinvent community health care on a game-changing scale by transforming ordinary women and men into life-saving community health workers. Research proves Living Goods' approach reduces child deaths by more than 25% for an annual cost of less than $2 per person reached," said Chuck Slaughter, Founder of Living Goods.

"For all of human history, illness has been universal and access to care has not. But no condition is permanent. Due to the support of The Audacious Project, we now have the opportunity to operationalize a plan on the scale of this problem. Last Mile Health and Living Goods are deeply grateful for the opportunity to embark on a journey over the next four years to fundamentally change the way millions of people access healthcare alongside our partners in government and philanthropy," said Raj Panjabi, CEO and Cofounder of Last Mile Health.

For more information, visit: audaciousproject.org/ideas/2018/living-goods-last-mile-health/

Media Contacts:

Siobhan Kelley Jennifer Hyman LMH Communications Manager LG Communications Director [email protected] | 802.735.7841 [email protected]

ONE ACRE FUND

What if we could support millions of African farmers in growing more food?

One Acre Fund, a nonprofit social enterprise, has an Audacious idea to make the world's small-scale farmers more prosperous. Seventy percent of people around the world living in poverty are farmers. With access to agricultural resources and trainings, these farming families can harvest more food and earn a sustainable income.

One Acre Fund currently works with 600,000 smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. With support from The Audacious Project, the organization plans to reach 1.25 million rural farm families per year by 2020. Farmers select and pay for the services, empowering them as customers.

As farmers' incomes rise, they can invest more in long-term goals for their families, like health, education and care for their land. They learn sustainable farming practices to increase yields on existing farmland without converting tracts of forest and savannah for agricultural use.

"The world's smallholder farmers are some of the hardest working people on the planet," said Andrew Youn, Cofounder and Executive Director of One Acre Fund. "By working together and increasing access to financing, tools and training, we envision a future where all farmers can achieve big harvests, healthy families and rich soils."

For more information, visit: audaciousproject.org/ideas/2018/one-acre-fund/

One Acre Fund Media Contact:

Whitney McFerron

Lead Writer & Editor

[email protected]

ABOUT TED

TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, usually in the form of short, powerful talks delivered by today's leading thinkers and doers. Many of these talks are given at TED's annual gathering in Vancouver, Canada, its TEDWomen and TEDGlobal conferences, and at thousands of independently organized TEDx events around the world, then made available, free, on TED.com and other channels.

TED's open and free initiatives for spreading ideas include, among many others, TED.com, where new TED Talk videos are posted daily; TEDx, which provides licenses to thousands of individuals and groups who host local, self-organized TED-style events around the world; the TED Fellows program, which selects innovators from around the globe to amplify the impact of their remarkable projects and activities; subtitles and interactive transcripts thanks to thousands of volunteer translators worldwide; and the educational initiative TED-Ed.

Press Contacts

TED - Erin Allweiss: 202.446.8265 / [email protected]

SOURCE TED(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/675868/1st_International_NASH_Day_Logo.jpg )



(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/675869/The_NASH_Education_Program_Logo.jpg )



"We are thrilled to see a growing number of stakeholders coming on board with The NASH Education Program's mission to raise awareness about NASH by supporting the 1st International NASH Day on June 12," said Pascaline Clerc, PhD, U.S. Campaign Manager for The NASH Education Program. "We are looking forward to this 1st global day of action and are calling all stakeholders involved in the fight against NASH to join us and amplify patients' voice."

"NASH is a serious disease with grave, and potentially deadly, outcomes," said Pr. Stephen Harrison, MD, PhD Medical Director of Pinnacle Clinical Research - San Antonio, Texas, USA, and visiting Professor of Hepatology at the Radcliffe Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, UK and member of the scientific committee of The NASH Education Program. "Yet it works in silence, with most patients not knowing they even have the disease. The NASH Education Program is going to change that, giving physicians and patients the information they need to fight back."

The growing coalition of partners - broadening the program's global reach through massive support for the first-of-its-kind International NASH Day on June 12, 2018 - today includes:

The new members join the program on the second day of the European Association for the Study of the Liver's International Liver Congress, which takes place in Paris from April 11-15 and where NASH is a centerpiece of discussion.

The 1st International NASH Day will convene physicians, scientists and patients across several cities around the world for a day of action against this worldwide public health crisis. It will also centralize rich educational content on a dedicated platform, with interviews involving key stakeholders and the most prominent experts from the NASH ecosystem, as well as informative reports.

"International NASH Day will be this global community's most important event of 2018," says Pr. Sven Francque, MD, PhD, Professor of Hepatology, Head of Department, Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Antwerp University Hospital, Antwerp, Belgium, and member of the Scientific Committee of The NASH Education Program. "We are thrilled to welcome such powerful partners and to grow this coalition so quickly and so broadly around the world and are working to include additional stakeholders to contribute to this global effort."

It is estimated that almost 12 percent of adults in developed countries suffer from NASH - most of them unaware that they do, as NASH is asymptomatic, or "silent," in presenting no symptoms until very late in the disease's damaging trajectory. NASH is also associated with the type 2 diabetes and obesity epidemics, which affect a growing number of adults but also an alarming number of children and teenagers.

The disease is characterized by the accumulation of fat in the liver, along with inflammation and the degeneration of liver cells, and is expected to become the leading cause for liver transplantation in the U.S. by 2020. And while there is no treatment for NASH approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the European Medicines Agency (EMA), there are more than 50 potential treatments in development or clinical review. If diagnosed at an early stage, the disease progression can be managed through therapeutic intervention which includes sustained lifestyle changes.

Tom Nealon, CEO of the American Liver Foundation said: "We are proud to support the International NASH Day on June 12th. This initiative will help many patients better understand their risk as well as their options for the management of the disease and better care."

Donna Cryer, CEO of the Global Liver Institute said: "We are very excited to be a part of this effort. The GLI is a patient driven advocacy organization that promotes innovations and collaborations to advance in liver health. The June 12 1st International NASH Day is the first but truly pivotal step in building a global movement from the ground up."

Wayne Eskridge, President & CEO of the Fatty Liver Foundation added: "The work of The NASH Education Program is right in line with our mission to provide support and education to patients about Fatty Liver Disease and NASH. We are proud to be part of this international effort to raise awareness of this silent disease.

Sujal Shah, President & CEO of Cymabay Therapeutics commented: "The NASH Education Program's goal of educating patients and the medical community on NASH matches with our mission to enhance the quality of healthcare by addressing the needs of patients and advancing medical knowledge."

Sebastien Aguettant, CEO of Delpharm said: "The NASH Education Program is a powerful opportunity to add our expertise to those stakeholders committed to raising awareness and fighting against NASH."

Hugues Tariel, CEO & Co-founder of Diafir commented: "We are thrilled to support The NASH Education Program's initiative to give physicians resources to better understand NASH so that they can diagnose patients at a much earlier stage of the disease."

Dr. Nathalie Adda, Senior VP Clinical & Regulatory, & Chief Medical Officer of Enanta commented: "NASH is a deteriorating liver disease often associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes. We are proud to join the program's initiative to better educate physicians and patients about risk factors for NASH, a disease that is still little known in the general population."

Jean-Francois Mouney, CEO & Co-founder of GENFIT commented: "There are so many unmet needs within the medical community in charge of clinical management of NASH patients, and also so many stigmas around liver disease making it difficult for NASH patients to talk about their disease and be understood. Therefore we are thrilled to see the growing level of support from our peers to make the 1st International NASH Day a success."

Pierre Broqua, Chief Scientific Officer & Co-founder of Inventiva said: "NASH is more than just a liver disease and awareness on this global public health issue needs to cross medical specialties. The NASH Education Program is the perfect initiative to achieve this goal, and we are proud to support its work, starting with the 1st International NASH Day on June 12, 2018."

Mario Papillon, CEO of BARC commented: "Our industry faces a growing, global demand for NASH services and we are excited to join this coalition of key NASH stakeholders to meet that demand when they most need it."

About NASH

NASH, or nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, is a metabolic disease characterized by the accumulation of fat in the liver, along with inflammation and the degeneration of liver cells. The disease is associated with long-term risk of progression into diminished liver functionality, leading to non-alcoholic cirrhosis, liver insufficiency and possibly even liver cancer. It also is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular mortality. Its rise is believed to be connected to the type 2 diabetes and obesity epidemics that are growing globally.

About The NASH Education Program[TM]

The non-profit NASH Education Program defines and drives initiatives in collaboration with an independent scientific committee composed of four international key opinion leaders well-known and respected in the hepatic and metabolic disease ecosystems in the U.S. and Europe. To learn more, visit http://www.the-nash-education-program.com. Twitter: @NASH_Education



Contact

Press Relations | [email protected]

SOURCE The NASH Education ProgramFOXBOROUGH, Mass., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Thrive, a leading provider of next generation managed services, proudly announces today that they've completed a merger transaction with BizCompass, a highly respected and fast growing managed services provider (MSP) serving the greater Portland, Maine area. Led by CEO Tony Correale and CTO John Burghardt, BizCompass has grown to become a well-respected and recognized MSP in Maine and the surrounding northern New England region. The BizCompass focus upon superior customer service, private cloud hosting and technical expertise is a natural fit for Thrive as they continue to expand their geographic and service delivery coverage.

"Thrive is pleased to welcome BizCompass, their customers and employees to our growing portfolio of MSP partnerships in the Northeast United States. This transaction is another win-win for both companies and most importantly, our customers, as BizCompass will become the technical operations center for Thrive's Northern New England region," said Rob Stephenson, Thrive CEO.

"On behalf of everyone at BizCompass, John and I are very excited about this opportunity to join one of the largest and most respected technology service firms," said Tony Correale, CEO at BizCompass. "The engineering depth, vast amount of technical and financial resources and advanced Cloud and Cyber Security capabilities that Thrive will be able to offer our customers are the driving factors for Tony and I to join this winning team," said John Burghardt, CTO at BizCompass.

Mr. Burghardt will join Thrive as a corporate executive with responsibilities for Northern New England technical operations and working on Thrive's five national data center and Cloud footprints. Tony Correale will continue as the leading business development executive in Northern New England and he will be joined by Rob Nevins, a Maine technology veteran of more than 18 years. BizCompass now becomes the fourth member to join the Thrive platform within the past eighteen months and they will be the new operational center for Northern New England.

"Thrive continues to successfully executive on their acquisition strategy. The BizCompass deal solidifies their status as an industry leader by introducing the Thrive portfolio of Cloud, Networking and Cyber Security next generation managed services to Northern New England," said Gillis Cashman, Thrive Chairman and Managing Partner at M/C Partners.

About Thrive

Thrive is a leading next generation managed services provider. The Thrive technology solutions suite utilizes Cloud, Cyber Security, Networking, Disaster Recovery and other pioneering managed services to help compliance-driven businesses solve complex IT issues. Thrive was acquired by M/C Partners in 2016 as a Northeast United States growth platform to service the Financial Services, Healthcare, Biotech, Life Sciences, Banking and other mid-market verticals. In developing this new technology service ecosystem, Thrive is uniquely positioned to offer compliance-based solutions to its valued client base.

To learn more, visit Thrives new and improved website www.ThriveNetworks.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.

About BizCompass

BizCompass is one of the most advanced and fastest-growing IT support companies in Maine. Offering proactive and evasive monitoring and prevention services for all your technology devices, BizCompass is leading the way in becoming a truly customer focused source for IT services. Our programs provide complete protection of Windows-based servers, Windows-based PCs, network hardware, and supported peripherals. BizCompass solutions are engineered to evade costly repairs through a smart response technology that will take evasive action while contacting us for follow through resolution. This helps avoid downtime, and allows for fixed budget technology solutions. BizCompass maximizes productivity while our technology reduces system downtime. At BizCompass all of our managed offerings monitor your systems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year.

About M/C Partners

M/C Partners is a private equity firm focused exclusively on the communications, media, and information technology sectors. The firm has invested over $2.2 billion of capital into nearly 100 companies in those sectors. Companies M/C has backed include Cavalier Telephone, Denovo, Ensono, Everstream, Fusepoint, ICG Communications, Involta, Legendary Pictures, Lightower, MetroPCS, NuVox, and Zayo Group. The firm has strong institutional backing from the nation's leading pension funds and endowments as well as a long track record of success. M/C Partners has offices in Boston and San Francisco. For more information, visit www.mcpartners.com.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Brian J. Hawthorne , VP of Marketing

[email protected]

781-352-5522

SOURCE Thrive

Related Links

http://www.thrivenetworks.com

Major contract win shows confidence in the system's life-saving protection and capabilities

Secures highly-skilled manufacturing jobs in New York state for up to five years

OGDENSBURG, N.Y., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Med-Eng, a brand of The Safariland Group, today announced it has been awarded a five-year Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to provide the United States Air Force (USAF) with the Med-Eng EOD 10 bomb suit to protect personnel conducting Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) operations. The USAF selected the EOD 10 suit and accessories through a competitive solicitation process that required meeting the new National Institute of Justice Standard 0117.01 (NIJ Standard) for protection against blast, fragmentation, impact and heat, among many other demanding factors. Under the contract, which has a maximum value of $15 million, the USAF may procure up to 305 EOD 10 bomb suits during the five-year term.

"Med-Eng is honored to provide equipment that will help protect the lives of the United States Air Force's EOD teams as they carry out critical, dangerous and life-saving missions," said Rob Reynolds, vice president, general manager, Med-Eng. "Selecting Med-Eng and our EOD 10 suit demonstrates the USAF's confidence in our ability to meet the evolving threats and operational requirements facing our military EOD operators and public safety bomb technicians in even the harshest conditions."

The EOD 10 bomb suit is certified to the NIJ Standard and meets or exceeds the USAF's rigorous criteria. This NIJ Standard focuses on six crucial areas  fragmentation, impact, flame, some blast overpressure, optics, and ergonomics  that reconcile protection requirements with bomb technicians' need for mobility, clear vision, and dexterity. Med-Eng is currently the only bomb suit manufacturer to meet the new NIJ Standard certification.

This sophisticated bomb suit ensemble provides an optimal balance between multi-threat blast protection and ergonomic flexibility. Its user-focused design features voice activation, integrated cooling and compatibility with Chemical & Biological protective equipment. It has also been extensively tested against threats representative of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

Fulfilment of the contract will support highly skilled manufacturing operations in Ogdensburg, New York, where Med-Eng produces bomb suits for all four branches of the U.S. Military, as well as for state and local law enforcement bomb squads. This facility currently manufactures the U.S. Army's in-service Advanced Bomb Suit (ABS) and all other Med-Eng bomb suit models, which are widely used across the United States.

The EOD 10 bomb suit has been procured by military and public safety agencies in 28 countries and is currently in service worldwide. For more information about Med-Eng, please visit www.med-eng.com.

About Med-Eng

The Med-Eng brand provides integrated and battle-proven solutions for protecting frontline personnel from blast and heat threats. Its Personal Protective Equipment and specialized tools for Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD), bomb disposal, tactical operations and demining are trusted by military and public safety agencies in approximately 100 countries and territories worldwide. Its Crew Survivability solutions, including customized blast attenuation seats and thermal management systems, protect military vehicle crews and their mission-critical electronics. All Med-Eng equipment is engineered and rigorously tested to help save lives and enhance operational capabilities. Med-Eng is a part of The Safariland Group of brands. For more information, visit www.med-eng.com.

About The Safariland Group

The Safariland Group is a leading global provider of a broad range of safety and survivability products designed for the public safety, military, professional and outdoor markets. The Safariland Group offers a number of recognized brand names in these markets including Safariland, Med-Eng, Safariland Armor, Safariland VIEVU, Mustang Survival, Bianchi, Break Free, PROTECH Tactical, Defense Technology, Hatch, Monadnock, Identicator and NIK. The Safariland Group's mission, "Together, We Save Lives", is inherent in the lifesaving and protective products it delivers. The Safariland Group is headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. The Safariland Group is a trade name of Safariland, LLC.

For more information about The Safariland Group and these products, please visit www.safariland.com.

For media resources and information, please visit the www.safariland.com/media-center.html.

For further information, please contact:

Angie Mathews

CGPR

(714) 768-1140

[email protected]

SOURCE The Safariland Group

Related Links

http://www.safariland.com

SAN DIEGO, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ViaCyte, Inc., a privately-held regenerative medicine company, today announced President and CEO, Paul Laikind, Ph.D., will present at Alliance for Regenerative Medicine's 6th Annual Cell & Gene Therapy Investor Day in New York. ViaCyte is developing novel stem cell-derived islet replacement therapies for insulin-requiring diabetes. To deliver a functional cure for all patients with type 1 diabetes and an important new therapy for patients with type 2 disease that require insulin to maintain control, ViaCyte is developing products with numerous advantages including a virtually unlimited supply of cells manufactured under quality-controlled conditions, and a potentially safer and more optimal route of administration.

A live webcast at the 6th Annual Cell & Gene Therapy Investor Day will be available at the time of the presentation here: http://www.arminvestorday.com/webcast.

Alliance for Regenerative Medicine 6th Annual Cell & Gene Therapy Investor Day

Speaker: Paul Laikind, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer

Date/Time: April 17, 5:00 PM EDT

Location: Metropolitan Club, New York

ViaCyte will also present at four additional upcoming healthcare events. Details of the events are as follows:

TypeOneNation Summit  San Diego 2018

Speaker: Eugene Brandon, Ph.D., Director, Strategic Relations and Communications

Date: April 22, 12:45 PM PDT

Location: La Jolla Institute, La Jolla, California

IPITA, The Transplantation Society, JDRF, and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute KOL Meeting on Stem Cell-Derived Beta Cells

Speaker: Kevin D'Amour, Ph.D., Vice President, Research and Chief Scientific Officer

Presentation: Session 4  Moving Stem Cell Therapeutics to the Clinic

Date/Time: May 7, 3:00 PM EDT

Location: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School, Boston

American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy Annual Meeting

Speaker: Olivia Kelly, Ph.D., Senior Director, Cell Biology

Presentation: Developing a Cell Therapy Combination Product for Diabetes

Date/Time: May 16, 8:30 AM EDT

Location: Hilton Chicago, Chicago

World Advanced Therapies and Regenerative Medicine Congress

Speaker: Mark Zimmerman, Ph.D., Vice President, Operations and Business Development

Presentation: New data on a novel stem cell combination product for diabetes - development and clinical update

Date/Time: May 17, 3:30 PM BST

Location: Business Design Centre, London

About ViaCyte

ViaCyte is a privately-held regenerative medicine company developing novel cell replacement therapies as potential long-term diabetes treatments to achieve glucose control targets and reduce the risk of hypoglycemia and diabetes-related complications. ViaCyte's product candidates are based on the derivation of pancreatic progenitor cells from stem cells, which are then implanted in durable and retrievable cell delivery devices. Once implanted and matured, these cells are designed to secrete insulin and other pancreatic hormones in response to blood glucose levels. ViaCyte has two product candidates in clinical-stage development. The PEC-Direct product candidate delivers the pancreatic progenitor cells in a non-immunoprotective device and is being developed for type 1 diabetes patients who have hypoglycemia unawareness, extreme glycemic lability, and/or recurrent severe hypoglycemic episodes. The PEC-Encap (also known as VC-01) product candidate delivers the same pancreatic progenitor cells in an immunoprotective device and is being developed for all patients with diabetes, type 1 and type 2, who use insulin. ViaCyte is also developing immune-evasive 'universal donor' stem cell lines, from its proprietary CyT49 cell line, which are expected to further broaden the availability of cell therapy for diabetes and other potential indications. ViaCyte is headquartered in San Diego, California. The Company is funded in part by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) and JDRF. For more information on ViaCyte, please visit www.viacyte.com and connect with ViaCyte on Twitter and Facebook.

SOURCE ViaCyte, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.viacyte.com

SANTA ROSA, Calif., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Pat Roney, CEO/President of Vintage Wine Estates announced that AGR Partners, an investment firm dedicated to food and agribusiness, has provided growth capital through a minority equity stake in the company.

"We are delighted to enter into a partnership with AGR Partners," commented Roney. "They understand the agricultural nature of our business and are fully on-board with our growth and long-term acquisition strategy."

Already on a rapid-growth trajectory, the $75 million investment by AGR and existing shareholders will help support future winery and brand acquisitions and expansion-related production efficiencies. Recent Vintage Wine Estates acquisitions include Tamarack Cellars (Washington State), Firesteed Vineyards, (Oregon), and the California brands Layer Cake, Cherry Pie and If You See Kay. Over the past several years, Vintage Wine Estates added Cameron Hughes, B.R. Cohn Winery, Swanson Vineyards and Delectus to its growing portfolio of brands and estates.

Vintage Wine Estates was founded in 2008 when Pat Roney, owner of Napa Valley's Girard Winery, purchased Sonoma's Windsor Vineyards, the wine industry's first direct-to-consumer brand. Today, Vintage Wine Estates produces close to 2 million cases, owns a collection of wineries and estates, consumer and exclusive wine brands. Vintage Wine Estates markets and sells their wines across multiple channels, including wholesale, direct-to-consumer, tasting rooms, wine clubs, internet, telesales and television.

"We are excited to partner with Pat Roney and the Vintage Wine Estates team to support their growth plans," said Ejnar Knudsen, CEO of AGR Partners. "We look to make long-term investments to support best in class businesses with great partners; our investment in Vintage Wine Estates aligns closely with this goal."

AGR Partners' portfolio of investments in food and agribusiness companies includes Almark Foods, Ridley, Opal Foods, SEMO Milling, 3D Corporate Solutions, Icicle Seafoods and Tru-Test Group.

About Vintage Wine Estates

Vintage Wine Estates is a privately held wine company owned by a group of vintner families with deep roots in the wine business. The families own a collection of winery estates and brands including Clos Pegase Winery, Cosentino Winery, Girard Winery, B.R. Cohn Winery, Swanson Vineyards, Viansa Sonoma, Windsor Vineyards, Cameron Hughes, Firesteed, Sonoma Coast Vineyards, Clayhouse, Tamarack Cellars, Layer Cake, Cherry Pie, Splinter Group Spirits, Middle Sister, Bar Dog, Girl & Dragon, Purple Cowboy and a number of exclusive wine brands. An industry leader across all sales channels and dedicated to providing wine consumers with a range of wines from $10 to $100 dollars and at many price points in between, Vintage Wine Estates produces outstanding wines from Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino, Paso Robles, Washington State and Oregon. www.vintagewineestates.com

About AGR Partners

AGR Partners is an investment firm based in Davis, California, and Chicago, Illinois, dedicated to backing strong, food company and agribusiness teams through long-term investments of non-controlling equity or subordinated debt to facilitate late-stage growth, strategic acquisitions, full buyouts and ownership transitions. For further information, visit www.AGRpartners.com

For more information:

Mary Ann Vangrin

Vintage Wine Estates

[email protected]

707-738-0338

SOURCE Vintage Wine Estates

Related Links

http://www.vintagewineestates.com

Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet and Immigration Director Gordon Kihalangwa have been tasked with the deportation of a Nigerian man who has been in the country illegally for six years.

A Nairobi Court this week ordered the two officials to immediately deport Okeke Patrick Godwin Chukwudu, 56, who has been preying on Nairobi women to survive in the city.

Chief Magistrate Francis Andayi ordered Boinnet to liaise with Kihalangwa to ensure a flight destined to his home country is secured in order to deport him Wednesday evening.

The Inspector General of National Police Service to liaise with the Director of Immigration to ensure the accused person is deported this evening. You must be on a flight to Nigeria this evening, added

Okeke was found on April 9 along Limuru Road within Nairobi without a valid pass or permit allowing him to be present in the country.

He was charged with being in Kenya unlawfully and pleaded guilty to the charge.

In his mitigation, he alleged that his Nigerian passport had been confiscated by his Kenyan wife following a domestic row.

He told the magistrate that he reported that matter with his embassy in order to help him regularize his stay in the country.

Okeke was, however, unable to provide any evidence to the trial magistrate who asked him to indicate why he had stayed in the country since 2010 without a valid document.

The court also questioned the sincerity of his assertion that his passport was forcefully taken away by his alleged Kenya wife.

Senior prosecuting counsel Solomon Naulikha told the Court that Okeke is a high flight risk and opposed for his release on bond.

He noted the man was arrested with a vehicle belonging to a Ms Valentine Arigi who reported its disappearance.

He has no business or residence in Kenya but preys on women whom he conned and moves on to another Kenyan, added the prosecution.

The man, who hails from Igbo State in Nigeria, was also found with a copy of a Nigerian passport number A02044924.

Outside the court, he told Nation that his Kenyan wife orchestrated a plot to ensure he is deported from the country.

I bought the vehicle in 2015 from Judy Maneka and my wife set me up with police and I will make sure she will not use my vehicle, added Mr Okeke.CHEVY CHASE, Md., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- WeddingWire, the global online leader connecting engaged couples with wedding professionals, is proud to announce today three appointments to its executive leadership team. Emily Markmann is now Executive Vice President of People, Jessica Finnefrock is now Executive Vice President of Global Operations and Andy Ivanovich is now Executive Vice President of Strategy.

These executive promotions recognize the achievements of three significant members of the organization's management team and reflect WeddingWire's continued growth as a global wedding industry leader.

"We are delighted to welcome Emily, Jessica and Andy as key additions to WeddingWire's executive team," said Tim Chi, CEO, WeddingWire. "They have, and will continue to play, an integral role in scaling our global footprint and bringing great experiences to our couples, vendors and staff worldwide. Their progressive leadership and strategic discipline have been invaluable and I look forward to Emily, Jessica and Andy's continued contributions."

Emily Markmann, Executive Vice President of People

Since joining the company in 2016, Emily has transformed WeddingWire's people operations into a world class organization, benefiting a global workforce of more than 900 employees. With support from teams across the globe, Emily will drive the transformation of WeddingWire's talent into a cohesive global team, creating shared values and goals, while understanding the unique needs of the company's eight offices worldwide. Emily has 20 years of experience leading award-winning, progressive human resources initiatives and strategic business operations for high-growth technology companies.

Jessica Finnefrock, Executive Vice President of Global Operations

Jessica has provided invaluable support and coordination across various departments, including product, sales, marketing and business operations, since coming to WeddingWire in 2016. She will be essential in streamlining operations across WeddingWire's global organization from the company's international headquarters in Barcelona, where she currently resides. Previously, Jessica was Senior Vice President of Development at Liaison International and spent 11 years at Blackboard as a senior executive managing product development and product strategy.

Andrew Ivanovich, Executive Vice President of Strategy

Andy has led various strategy and finance functions since joining WeddingWire in 2013, and currently oversees corporate development, partnerships, financing and strategic initiatives. Under his leadership, the company has expanded its portfolio of brands to a global scale through both acquisitions and organic growth. He will continue to drive the strategic efforts for WeddingWire worldwide, deepening reach within the company's existing portfolio of markets while extending into new arenas. Prior to WeddingWire, Andy was with Spectrum Equity Investors in San Francisco and Oliver Wyman in New York.

Founded in 2007, WeddingWire is a trusted global brand with portfolio sites operating across 15 countries in North America, Latin America, Asia and Europe, including WeddingWire.com, Bodas.net, Casamentos.com.br, Matrimonio.com, WeddingWire.in and more. This past January, WeddingWire announced the launch of its website in the United Kingdom, and in July 2017 the company opened its India headquarters located in Guragon, New Delhi.

About WeddingWire, Inc.

WeddingWire, Inc. is the leading global online marketplace, connecting consumers with local wedding professionals and a suite of comprehensive tools that make wedding planning easier. Operating within a $200 billion industry, WeddingWire helps 13 million couples every month find the right team of wedding professionals to personalize and pull off their special day. Consumers around the world are able to read more than 4 million vendor reviews and search, compare and book from a directory of over 400,000 vendors. Founded in 2007, the WeddingWire portfolio serves couples and wedding professionals across 15 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. The company has more than 900 employees and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. with international headquarters in Barcelona, Spain.

Media Contact:

Elizabeth Millett

Senior Public Relations Manager

WeddingWire

[email protected]

301.231.9473

SOURCE WeddingWire, Inc.

Related Links

https://www.weddingwire.com

MOUNTAINSIDE, N.J., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- New Jersey's recently elected Governor Phil Murphy is expected to legalize recreational marijuana, giving rise to questions on road safety and accident rates. Identifying the impact of marijuana intoxication is much more complicated than it is for alcohol.

Crash statistics in states where marijuana is legal

Francis M. Smith, Esq.

Studies examining crash statistics of states that have legalized recreational marijuana use have not been conclusive. One study, conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) compared the frequency of auto insurance claims in states that had recently legalized marijuana use (Washington, Oregon, and Colorado) with rates in neighboring states where marijuana use remains illegal. This study revealed a 3 percent increase in total claims filed in legal-marijuana states. However, the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) released a study shortly after the IIHS study came out, showing that in the three years since recreational marijuana had been legalized there, Washington and Colorado experienced no measurable increase in traffic fatalities relative to areas with comparable traffic patterns, population density, and road characteristics in states without legal marijuana.

Are marijuana-intoxicated drivers more likely to get into minor fender-benders, but not any more inclined to cause life-threatening crashes? Part of the problem faced by researchers and law enforcement alike in answering this question is that there is no reliable chemical test to determine whether a motorist is actively under the influence of marijuana at the scene of an accident or at a roadside traffic stop. Unlike alcohol, which is metabolized and cleared by the body in a matter of hours after consumption, the intoxicating chemicals in marijuana leave traces in the body that can be detected for weeks after the "high" has worn off. Currently available drug testing methods can identify, with arguable accuracy, whether an individual has consumed marijuana within the past month or so, but not whether they are currently under the influence. In fact, the chemical agents in marijuana take time to work their way through the body, so a drug test performed on a person who smoked a joint fifteen minutes prior may come back clean, despite the person's obvious intoxication.

It is unclear just how marijuana affects a driver. Denver state police officers administered standard performance-based roadside sobriety tests of balance, coordination, and cognitive function to volunteers who had just gotten high. Two of the four volunteers passed the tests, one was a marginal case, and only one would definitely have been deemed intoxicated enough to arrest if caught behind the wheel.

What can NJ drivers do when confronted with the prospect of legal marijuana in their state? The best courses of action are similar to how we approach drunk driving: support public awareness campaigns, intervene to stop friends and acquaintances from getting behind the wheel while high, and remain aware and alert when driving for other motorists exhibiting erratic, unpredictable, or dangerous driving behavior. If you do suffer a serious accident and believe that marijuana use may have been a factor in causing the crash, be sure to obtain the police report from your accident and inform your personal injury attorney about your suspicions. Your lawyer can work to build a case that includes the negligent driver's history of intoxicant use, which is likely to sway a jury in your favor and increase the likelihood of a fair and favorable award or settlement agreement for any injuries.

About Francis M. Smith, NJ Personal Injury Attorney

Francis M. Smith, Esq. handles all types of personal injury cases throughout northern NJ. More information: http://www.FrankSmithLaw.com

Francis M. Smith, Esq.

908 233-5800

Cell: (908) 337-5888

[email protected]

SOURCE Francis M. Smith, Esq. NJ Personal Injury Attorney

Related Links

https://www.FrankSmithLaw.com

The Focus Estate Fund has acquired Park Handlowy Eden (Galeria Eden) in Zgorzelec. The investment fund intends to invest more than 1.5 million in repositioning the 8,500 sqm retail centre with the support of its partner in development and leasing, Myn Retail Parks Sp. z o.o. Galleria Eden will

[]GUEST OBSERVER

The 30% increase in the number of homeless people between the 2006 and 2016 censuses is likely to continue in the absence of evidence-based public housing policy. We need to rapidly extend public housing and services, according to housing and homelessness research.

Despite this research, the common approach by governments, in Australia and overseas, is to adopt a program of renewal and regeneration funded by the transfer of public lands to private hands. Housing estates are sold, transferred or redeveloped in partnership with a private developer. This often results in a shift of social housing dwellings from 100% publicly owned to mixed forms of tenure.

For public housing residents, being told that their estate is to be renewed is destabilising and can cause extreme stress. A lack of clarity about relocation timelines and processes compounds this.

David Kelly

Similar issues in Sydney, Melbourne and London

Residents acceptance of this renewal approach varies greatly. While some are happy with the promise of a new home, opposition is growing in Australia and internationally.

The main issues being contested are planning approaches, consultation processes and the loss of public land overseen by housing authorities steering estate regeneration.

In Sydney, the governments Communities Plus program is redeveloping public housing assets and land through partnerships with not-for-profit and private developers.

The City of Melbourne recorded a 74% increase in the numbers of people sleeping rough between 2014 and 2016. Opposition to the governments public housing renewal program is now growing in Melbourne. The government is relocating residents from nine inner-city housing estates, demolishing homes and transferring public land to private developers.

In London, Harringey Council is working with Australian developer Lendlease to transfer over 2 billion in council assets, including several housing estates across the borough. In response, the Stop-HDV campaign is challenging the partnership and lack of community consultation through direct action, political campaigning, media representation and an ongoing legal challenge.

Opposition is fuelled by the redevelopment of the Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle. This has resulted in the loss of over 1,000 social housing units at council rental rates.

Affordable housing stock, rented at 80% of the standard market rate, replaced social housing. This makes it difficult for low-income residents to return to the estate.

Residents struggle to be heard

While government and developers undertake forms of consultation, residents affected by renewal repeatedly report that their voices are not being heard. This poses major problems for the reception of viable alternatives presented to development authorities by residents.

At a local scale, residents work to find other ways to make their voices heard. Visible across Sydney, a community light sculpture at the Waterloo estate expressed residents feelings about the redevelopment of their homes through coloured lights.

Other responses to regeneration by estate residents include theatre, book writing, spoken word and street art.

David Kelly

In Melbourne, the government claims the renewal of the nine estates will result in an increase of 180 (10%) public housing dwellings.

This claim requires closer scrutiny. On the Northcote estate, for example, there are 85 dwellings with 201 bedrooms. According to a government-commissioned report from September 2017, the public component of the redevelopment will have 96 properties with 139 bedrooms. Thats an 11% increase in dwellings, but a 31% decrease in bedrooms.

Even if the overall number of public housing bedrooms increased by 10%, this would not be enough. According to the Victorian Housing Register, in December 2017 there were over 36,000 applications for public housing and over 7,000 waiting for more adequate housing.

Alternatives need to be heard

One of the underpinning assumptions made by government is that dispersing disadvantage will lead to better outcomes for public housing residents.

This, and the resulting social mix, is the rationale for the program. This assumption is completely flawed. It imagines a fallacy of trickle-down socioeconomics achieved through minimal government spending.

David Kelly

Academic experts and public housing resident activists continually express their objections to the rhetoric of renewal. Kate Shaw, an urban geographer with expertise in housing and planning, says: "Pretty much everything about the program in its current approach is wrong."

Delegates at a December 2017 public housing forum in Melbourne called on the government to impose a moratorium on the process so alternatives can be heard. Yet voices continue to be ignored.

The progressive rhetoric of renewal obscures the displacement of residents, the fragmentation of lives and the privatisation of the public realm. Narratives of improvement drown out objections by residents and the wider public. Any argument against renewal is falsely equated with an argument against improving the lives of public housing residents.

This misdirection infects the public discourse around housing more generally. We are witnessing the complete reorganisation of the home. We think of homes as exchangeable stock.

For residents of public housing estates, the public realm is home, and home is a place of sanctuary and respite. The voices of residents need to be to the fore in the conversation if evidence-based public housing policy is to prevail. Retaining public places should be of interest to all who count themselves as part of the public.

David Kelly, PhD Candidate, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

This article was written in conversation with public housing advocate and resident William Gwynne. The author thanks William for his integral insights.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.The Brisbane bold home with rich history, Avondale, has been listed for sale by Sam Mayes and Zac Tully from Ray White.

It is built in 1912 by William Francis Corbett, a lawyer from Toorak Road in Hamilton, who also owned the Carlton Hotel in Queen Street.

Avondale has enjoyed a rich history serving as a boarding house in the 1950s before becoming home to a well-known journalist and then a prominent Brisbane builder, who completed significant expansions in the 1980s.

It last sold in 2012 at $2.5 million.

Positioned at 26 Thornbury St, the house comes with six bedrooms, three bathrooms and multiple living spaces.

The kitchen was completely renovated and the original kitchen fireplace now houses a pair of V-Zug ovens.

Renovated in 2006, the light fittings, wiring, security system and air-conditioning were all upgraded.

Extra features include double-hung, full-length sash windows, pressed metal ceilings, and two working fireplaces with marble surrounds.

It is close to Schools, shops and public transport.

The gentleman's residence was built in 1912 by William Francis Corbett, a lawyer from Toorak Road in Hamilton, who also owned the Carlton Hotel in Queen Street.



Corbett lived in the home on his own until his death in 1937. His initials remain on the decorative detail in the hallway.EXPERT OBSERVATION

The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) report on affordable housing policies should support incentive approaches but must not increase apartment costs.

The AHURI report by a number of Australian academics is a useful exploration of trends and policies across the world but the Sydney market is different.

Many countries use taxation deductions and other incentives to achieve a supply of affordable homes.

Even the South Australian system referred to in the report is different to anything proposed in Sydney as it defines 15% of homes for sale at a reduced price.

This is much more feasible than giving 15% of all your homes to the local council.

Houses and apartments in Sydney are amongst the most expensive in the world when related to household income.

Much of this high price is driven by restrictions on zoning new land for residential homes according to the Reserve Bank report on the Effect of Zoning on Housing Prices.

The zoning effect increased Sydney per house price by a whopping $489,000 and in Melbourne by $324,000.

On top of all this there is a range of levies and taxes added to the cost of a dwelling by the NSW Government and the local council.

To add even more cost to new dwellings as proposed by AHURI will only drive overall housing costs upwards.

The AHURI preferred approach is to have inclusionary zoning only applied to apartments yet apartments have already become the affordable way to live for many Sydney households.

The average apartment in Sydney is around 40% cheaper than the average house so this dwelling type has become the affordable way to live for many households.

AHURI however proposes an inclusionary zoning system that can only lead to forcing apartment costs up.

We should be getting other building types like detached houses, commercial and retail developments to contribute to affordable housing rather than add an extra cost to the most affordable dwellings in the city.

The Urban Taskforce has developed an approach to providing up to 40,000 affordable homes across Sydney over a ten year period.

We propose using the Affordable Rental Housing SEPP that gives an uplift in floor space if 20% of the apartments are affordable rentals for 10 years.

The incentive needs to also be 20% and this will encourage most developers to provide a percentage of apartments that are lower in rent than the market.

Stronger leadership by government on affordable housing policies is needed in NSW.

Currently the Department of Planning and Environment controls some policies, the Greater Sydney Commission proposes targets only on uplift and if feasible yet many councils are pushing for inclusionary zoning percentages that would make new housing projects unviable.

The Urban Taskforce is keen to work with all agencies to get a Sydney approach to housing affordability that is sustainable in the long term.

CHRIS JOHNSON is the Urban Taskforce CEO.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

World news

Finland confirms no coal in 2029

AUTHOR: publics.bg



 pexels.com



Finlands environment minister said on 10 April the country would ban the use of coal in energy generation in 2029. The Finnish government is also looking into a large-scale subsidy scheme that will reward energy firms for abandoning fossil fuel ahead of time, EURACTIV cited.

Environment Minister Kimmo Tiilikainen confirmed that the government would move up its plans for a 2030 ban on coal as an energy source to 2029. Helsinki will propose legislation in the coming year as part of its national energy plan for the next decade. Tiilikainen is a committed advocate of moving away from coal and in January he even suggested that Finland could ban the fossil fuel as early as 2025. An impact assessment was recently commissioned to consider the date as a secondary option. In a press release, the environment chief nevertheless insisted that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced much sooner than initially planned to mitigate climate change.

EURACTIV reminds that Finland lags behind its Nordic and Scandinavian counterparts in terms of transitioning to a clean energy supply, as 10% of its power is still sourced from coal. Coal use is associated with human health risks due to bad air quality and it is one of the highest GHG emitting fuels.

From a geopolitical standpoint, abandoning coal will help Finland and, more broadly, the EU, cut its dependence on Russian imports, as 66% of the countrys coal comes from its eastern neighbour.

But the energy industry was disappointed by the decision to confirm and move up the coal phase-out saying it would be costly for the government and ineffective as a climate measure.

Following these comments, the government announced that it would draft a subsidy package worth around 90 million that would be used to reward energy firms that get rid of coal by 2025. The idea is the boost investments in renewable energy and make better use of Finlands sizeable district heating network, which has the potential to increase the share of hydro, solar and wind power in the heating sector.

With energy consumption expected to grow in the coming years, Finland will have to replace coal in the energy mix with something else. At the moment, nuclear power is among the leading contenders to fill the gap.Yassmin Abdel-Magied, an Australian author, mechanical engineer, and Muslim activist, has been deported from Minneapolis to Amsterdam after U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials claimed that she did not have the correct visa. Abdel-Magied was visiting the country in order to speak at the PEN World Voices festival in New York this month.

Abdel-Magied is an outspoken critic of her country's immigration policies. In 2007, then 16, she co-founded Youth Without Borders, a group whose mission is to "empower young people as leaders of positive change and build capacity through collaborative community-based initiatives."

Abdel-Magied took to Twitter to explain her situation, adding that the CBP agents seized her phone and passport.

Theyve taken my phone, cancelled my visa and are deporting me. Will follow up on messages once I understand whats going on. https://t.co/uT61v8cZXG  Yassmin Abdel-Magied (@yassmin_a) April 11, 2018

She later followed up her string of tweets with a statement.

"On 11 April 2018, I attempted to enter the United States of America. The validity of my visa to enter was challenged and I have now returned to London," she said. "I have previously traveled to the United States on the visa that I sought entry with on this occasion. I am now seeking advice and working to resolve this issue as soon as possible."

In a statement, Customs and Border Patrol said that its officers "determined this individual did not possess the appropriate visa to receive monetary compensation for the speaking engagements she had planned during her visit to the United States." The agency added that Abdel-Magied "is eligible to reapply for a visa for future visits."

Responding to the situation in a statement, PEN America executive director Suzanne Nossel said her organization was "dismayed" at the news and that "Abdel-Magied is an advocate of the rights of Muslim women and refugees and is a citizen of Australia, traveling on that countrys passport." Nossel went on to say that the PEN World Voices Festival was created, in the aftermath of 9/11, to "sustain the connectedness between the U.S. and the wider world," and that this effort is "in jeopardy...when efforts at visa bans and tightened immigration restrictions threaten to choke off vital channels of dialogue."

Nossel then demanded that Abdel-Magied be allowed to enter the country. "We call on Customs and Border Patrol to admit her to the U.S. so that she can take her rightful place in the urgent international conversation to take place at the Festival next week.In his new book, a Literary Tour de France (Oxford University Press) renowned historian and Harvard University Librarian Emeritus Robert Darnton offers a rich, fascinating look at the book trade in pre-revolutionary France. PW recently caught up with Darnton to talk about this extraordinary work, and the state of the book business then and now.

For those interested in the history of the book, A Literary Tour de France is just incredible stuff. Tell us a little about the genesis of this book. How is it that we can know so much about the book business in pre-revolutionary France?

Robert Darnton: In 1965, I walked into a historian's dream: an archive of 50,000 letters that had lain unread in an attic in Neuchatel, Switzerland for two centuries. The manuscripts came from the Societe typographique de Neuchatel (STN), one of the largest publishers and wholesale book dealers of the 18th century. I stumbled across them by following up a footnote when I was a graduate student at OxfordI was seeking information about one of the most prominent leaders of the French Revolution, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the head of the Girondist party, who published his books with the STN before 1789. The footnote suggested that some of his letters might be in the Neuchatel library. So I wrote to the library's director, and in reply he said they had 119 letters by Brissot. After joining the Society of Fellows at Harvard in 1965, I headed straight for Neuchatel. And sure enough, there were Brissot's letterssurrounded by 50,000 others, all of them by people concerned with printing and the book trade: authors, printers, paper makers, typographical workers, smugglers, peddlers, and booksellers of all shapes and sizes. Having embarked on a biography of Brissot, I changed my mind and started studying the world of books. The history of the book is now an important academic discipline, but at that time it hardly existed and didnt even have a name.

We think the book business can be rough today, but describe for us the world of books for a young traveling sales rep in the 1700s?

What I discovered in these letters was a world that was endlessly fascinating, full of obscure human beings, the kind who rarely appear in history, scrambling to make a living by providing readers with the printed word. It was similar to the world Balzac described in his great novel, Lost Illusions, yet populated by real, flesh-and-blood characters whose lives could now be reconstructed in great detail.

In A Literary Tour de France, I follow a traveling sales rep who got on a horse in July 1778 and spent five months visiting every bookshop on his route, an enormous circuit through all of eastern, southern, and central France. During this trip, he kept a diary and corresponded with the home office in Neuchatel. And the documentation is so rich that you get to know the book trade at street level, as experienced by the booksellers and as assessed by a professional representative of a publisher. And the booksellers he met also have dossiers in the STN archives stretching from 1769 to 1789. So, it was possible to combine a horizontal view of the system in 1778 with vertical views of the businesses of dozens of booksellers. By systematically studying their orders, I could discover what books circulated, and even produce a retrospective bestseller list.

So you can tell us what was popular among readers in pre-revolutiory France?

Yes, I was able to compile statistics on 1,145 titlesenough, I believe, to have a clear idea of literary demand as it actually existed in a society about to explode in the first great revolution of modern times. I could confirm that the Enlightenment did indeed penetrate deeply into the Ancien Regime, along with literature of a kind that has since been forgottenexotic travel books, sentimental love novels, popular histories, moralistic tales for children, reference works, popular science, and a great many libelous tracts about the private lives of public figures. Works such as The Private Life of Louis XV and Anecdotes about Mme la comtesse Du Barry made France look like a decadent despotism. Books like these did not lead to the Revolution in a direct, causal manner, but they contributed greatly to the radicalization of public opinion before 1789.

I found the role of piracy and smugglers, which you detail in the book, to be especially fascinating. Publishers fear a different kind of piracy today, in the digial age, but can you talk a little about piracy in the 1700s?

Copyright did not exist before 1789, except in England (the statute of Anne, 1710). But pirates could be punished for violating "privileges," which functioned as primitive copyrights within individual countries, although publishers in Holland and Switzerland were not subject to French law. These book pirates were canny businessmen. And they pirated French books and marketed them in France with the complicity of French booksellers, especially those in the provinces who resented the dominationand the high pricesof the Parisian publishers. And there was an enormous underground system that supplied booksellers and worked quite effectively, despite occasional disasters.

How prevalent were pirated books in the market back then?

I studied the smuggling industry and the underground trade in detail, because, in my estimation it conveyed more than half the books that were in circulation. Also, the underground was full of colorful characters and I had great fun reconstructing the trajectory of their careers. For booksellers in the 18th century there were no returns, and the trade was monopolized by guilds. The Paris guild dominated the publishing industry, and even had the power to reinforce its monopoly by inspecting shops and shipments, and the policing of literature involved extensive censorship, along with specialized police inspectors. Put it all togetherno copyrights, no returns, guild monopoly, censorship, policingand you can see why pirates flourished. In fact, piracy was so widely developed that you might think of it almost as a counterpart to the way information today circulates outside the commercial trade by means of the Internet.

 Though we have gone through several phases in our views of the Internet, I still see it as a force that makes possible the democratization of access to knowledge. 

You ask publishers today about their main challenge in the Internet age and they will often say "discoverability." How did French publishers and authors get the word out in the 1700s?

One thing about 18th Century publishing and the book trade that surprised me was the intensity of the flow of information, mainly through the mail. The STN received a constant stream of letters from booksellers everywhere in France, and the rest of Europe, who accompanied their orders for books with shop talk, gossip, and general observations. Important publishers dispatched sales reps who gathered information from oral exchanges. And marketing involved the circulation of prospectuses, catalogues, and notices in journals. There was no lack of informationbut much of it was false. In fact, pirate publishers would often announce they were reprinting a book merely to test demand, or to scare off other pirates. Defying the legitimate publishers in Paris, pirates opened up a large, downscale market that would become known as "le grand public" in 19th Century. Sometimes authors sold the same work to different publishers under different titles. And among pirates, there was relatively little respect for the original textpirates cut and abridged as they pleased, lowering the price by eliminating what they called "typographical luxury."

Youre an author, a leading historian of literary and publishing history, and you ran the Harvard University library system during a fascinating period of technological change, most notably during the Google Books controversy. Whats your take on the state of publishing, and for that matter, libraries today?

I don't believe in jeremiads about "the death of the book" and "the obsolescence" of libraries. More books are published in print each year than the year before, and the sale of e-books has leveled off. And our libraries are crowded with readers. We have seen that at Harvard, where I directed the library system for eight years, and public librarians have witnessed it everywhere.

But libraries have acquired new functions, especially as gatekeepers and preservers of material from the Internet, and librarians have developed new skills, many of them technological, pedagogical, and vocational. And thanks to new institutions like the Digital Public Library of America, which we developed here at Harvard in 2010, the great majority of the population has free access to much of our cultural heritage. I believe that librarians today are among the most underappreciated and underpaid of all the public servants in the United States.

Publishers today remain concerned about the impact of technology and the Internet, and of course how copyright and Intellectual property laws are developing. Whats your take on how the book business is handling the transformation to a digital, networked world?

I admit to some sympathy for the pirate publishers of the 18th century, but I know that publishers today must insist on the strict observation of copyright law. But copyright now covers the life of the author plus 70 years, which makes it impossible for libraries and organizations like the DPLA to provide access to most of the literature from the last century, and I don't think that adequately serves the public good.

Though we have gone through several phases in our views of the Internet, I still see it as a force that makes possible the democratization of access to knowledge. We now have serious concerns about issues like privacy, and the manipulation of politics through the misuse of technology. Nonetheless, we now have it within our power to realize what was only a utopian dream at the time of the Founding Fathers. If I could recommend two changes, I would advocate for creating a more flexible copyright law, and that we take steps to prevent the monopolization of information by commercial giants like Google and Facebook.ACK Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit has added his voice to the ongoing nationwide debate about polygamy.

The clergyman is of the opinion that polygamy is not Biblical and should not even be debated among members of the Christian faith.

The Bible says one man shall marry one wife. The debate over whether polygamy can be allowed or not should not even exist among Christians, said Sapit.

The church is very clear through the teachings of the Bible especially the New Testament that one man and one woman make a family. We want to make it clear from the perspective that as a church, a family is one wife and one husband joined together to form a couple and form a family.

Sapit, who was speaking during the launch of the ACK Cathedral in Bungoma town on Tuesday, was reacting to remarks by Kiambu woman representative Gathoni wa Muchomba.

The man of the cloth lashed at those in support of polygamy saying it will have adverse consequences on families.

Sapit noted that marriage, being the basic cornerstone of a family, should only involve two consenting adults.

Polygamy is not a way of solving any problems in a marriage, he said.

The clergyman also used the opportunity to condemn homosexuality saying Christians should not engage in the ungodly practice.

As a church, we only encourage sex among people of the opposite gender. After all, the purpose of marriage is procreation, the ACK head said.

We dont encourage any discussion about homosexuality or lesbianism because that is not the way the Bible teaches. We shall resist any law that comes forward with a view of legalising these evil vices, added the Anglican head.

He also urged church members to lead in efforts of spreading the message of peace, love and unity, especially after President Uhuru Kenyatta and ODM leader Raila Odingas handshake.

It was a big relief for some of us to see the opposition leader shake hands with President Kenyatta and declare before all of us that they are going to unite Kenya. We should therefore ask each one of us that let us be practical in ways that we are uniting as a country because we want to see more and more people talking about the peace of this country and even individually.

Also Read: Mombasa Women Rep Challenges President Kenyatta to Marry Second WifeIn its report, the TMT research arm of S&P Global Market Intelligence noted that the online video market in Western Europe continues to grow, with international media players continuously expanding in new territories. Yet it added that the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are facing robust competition from local and other internal media groups. Shudder, available in multiple countries in Western Europe, was noted as an example of an SVOD service that follows a niche approach to content by offering horror movies and TV series.Netflix was found to be the leading VOD service in all countries bar Germany and Austria, where Amazon Prime Video is ranked first in terms of subscribers. With that said, in those two markets, Netflix is closing the gap each year. Kagan calculated that Austria's low over-the-top (OTT) adoption can be attributed to an underpenetrated fixed broadband and multichannel sector. Kagans report found that in Germany, a preference for free-to-air TV coupled with a strong broadcasting sector has kept OTT adoption lower than in the UK and the Nordics. Kagan added that in Germany, competition among SVOD players has gained momentum and revenues from SVOD are set to grow from $593 million in 2017 to $970 million in 2022.The Skripal poisoning and shrill Kremlin denials of asphyxiating gas attacks by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad raise doubts about Moscows commitment to the purposes of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Russia is also violating the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Never has the future of negotiated arms control involving Russia been at greater risk.

In two prominent assassination attempts in the UK, Moscow has used exotic weapons known to be associated with Russian programs, perhaps to warn their own people about disloyalty.

In 2006, Russian defector and former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko died from poisoning by Polonium -210 , a rare and highly radioactive isotope. The next year Andrei Lugovoy, who met with Litvinenko before his death and is wanted by British police on suspicion of assassinating him, was elected to the Russian Duma, implying high-level support in Moscow.

Last month Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer and UK double-agent, and his daughter were poisoned. The British have identified the weapon as Novichok, a series of nerve agents developed by the USSR and Russia. Novichok is up to 10 times more potent than VX, used last year to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-uns half-brother.

Addressing the Skripal poisoning on April 3, then-National Security Advisor Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster said: any use of chemical weapons by a state-party is a clear violation  of the CWC. This 1997 treaty bans the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons and their precursors, and has 192 states-parties.

Another concern is whether Russia is complying with the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which has 180 states-parties. After adhering to it, the USSR operated an offensive biological weapons program for over 15 years. According to the U.S. Department of State, it remains unclear whether Russia has fulfilled all its BWC obligations.

Experience shows that wider developments are sometimes necessary catalysts to learning the truth about or reduce risks from exotic Russian weapons.

In 1979 a release of anthrax spores from a weapons facility in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) killed at least 66 people. When word leaked, Soviet authorities blamed consumption of tainted meat. Only after the collapse of the USSR did the truth emerge; in 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted the Soviet BWC violation.

The USSR operated the worlds largest anthrax factory at Stepnogorsk, in Kazakhstan, and an open-air biological test range on an island (later peninsula) in the Aral Sea. Through the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, the U.S. helped eliminate these facilities. Only after the Soviet collapse was this possible.

Russia is inconsistent in dealing with chemical weapons use in Syria. In 2013 after over 1,400 Syrians died a sarin attack, Moscow forced the Assad regime to cooperate with the U.S. in the removal and elimination of Syrias declared chemical weapons. But despite multiple asphyxiating gas attacks since then, most recently on April 8, Russia denies Assads culpability and has blocked UN Security Council action. Only under a U.S. threat to strike Syria in 2013 after its sarin use did Moscow pressure Assad to give up some of his chemical weapons.

For several years the U.S. has accused Russia of violating the INF Treaty, which bans the possession, production, or flight-testing of ground-launched cruise missiles with a range capability of 500 kilometers to 5,500 kilometers. Despite the significance of this challenge to the treaty, the U.S and its NATO Allies have been low-key in publicly discussing it.

Raising the profile of Russian cheating and measures to counter it may be essential for Western governments to sustain political and public support for arms control as a tool to reduce threats.

Washington could take this step to marshal more support for extending the New START Treaty, which constrains long-range nuclear forces. It expires in 2021 but can be extended for another five years. Any perceptions that arms control violations are being downplayed or not effectively countered may feed suspicions in some quarters that Washington cannot be trusted to enforce compliance with the Treaty.

In his first term, President Reagan faced a similar challenge. Some in Congress suspected that the executive branch had long ignored Soviet cheating on arms pacts. In 1984 Reagan cleared the air by sending Congress a first-ever comprehensive report on Soviet noncompliance.

His forthrightness helped ease the way a few years later for the Senate to assent to the INF Treaty, which Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed at the White House in 1987.

As a first step, the West could begin giving higher-profile attention to Russian noncompliance and take more initiative in using existing treaty mechanisms to resolve them. This could help Western leaders assess threats and build political and public support for diplomatic and military measures to reduce and offset dangerous risks.

William Courtney is an adjunct senior fellow at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, and a former U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, Georgia and the U.S.-Soviet commission to implement the Threshold Test Ban Treaty.Now That Russia Has Apparently Hacked America's Grid, Shoring up Security Is More Important Than Ever

Hackers taking down the U.S. electricity grid may sound like a plot ripped from a Bruce Willis action movie, but the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI recently disclosed that Russia has infiltrated critical infrastructure like American power plants, water facilities and gas pipelines.

This hacking is similar to the 2015 and 2016 attacks on Ukraines grid. While it hasnt risen beyond scouting mode, the specter of sabotage in the U.S. now seems more realistic than it used to.

Clearly, theres no time to waste in shoring up the grids security. Yet getting that done is not easy, as Ive learned through my research regarding efforts in to stave off outages in hurricane-prone Florida.

A catch-22

There is no way to completely protect the grid. Even if that were possible, utilities tend to adopt new and better security procedures after mishaps, boosting the chance that some attacks will succeed.

Regulation at the state and federal levels makes it hard for utilities and regulators to work together to get this job done.

Utilities can charge their customers only what it takes for them to cover reasonable expenses. Regulators must approve their rates through a process that needs to be open to public scrutiny.

Say, for example, a power company is building a substation. The utility would disclose what it spent on construction, prove that it picked its contractors responsibly and explain how this new capacity is enhancing its service. The regulator then must decide what rate hikes, if any, would be reasonable  after hearing out everyone with something at stake.

Following this routine is harder with cyberdefense spending. Security concerns make it tough if not impossible for utilities to say what theyre doing with that money. Regulators, therefore, have a hard time figuring out whether utilities are spending too much or too little or maybe even wasting money on an unnecessary expense.

If regulators blindly approve these rate hikes, it can be an abdication of their duties. If they reject them, utilities get penalized for shoring up their security and then lose an incentive to keep doing the right thing.

To err is human

Even though the idiosyncrasies of utility regulation make cyberdefense a more complicated issue than it might otherwise be, tools to manage this risk are available.

Mitigating the damage that human error can cause in response to malicious attacks, for example, may not demand any spending beyond what it costs to teach workers at utilities and their contractors to refrain from blindly opening perilous email attachments, the avenue into the electricity system used by hackers in the 2015 Ukraine attacks and in the system breaches the government recently disclosed.

Indeed, hackers delivered almost 94 percent of all malware in 2016 through email systems. Clearly, more widespread awareness of the need to keep an eye out for phishing attacks will help secure infrastructure.

Regulators have been studying strategies that might enhance cybersecurity. Standards are already in place in the U.S., Canada and part of Mexico for utilities to assess their capability to prevent or detect cyberattacks.

Preventative measures can include states adopting new regulations that protect utilities confidential information and doing more to train utility workers to spot and confront cybersecurity threats.

Its also important that regulators recognize that securing systems is an ongoing process. It can never really end because as system security measures change, hackers devise new ways to circumvent them.

Grid resilience

Grid resilience strategies can help to maintain service regardless of the source of the outage. For example, many utilities have invested in self-healing systems that isolate glitches in the grid and quickly restore service amid outages.

Heres an example of how that works. During Hurricane Matthew in Florida, in 2016, Florida Power and Light identified a threatened substation and isolated it from the rest of the grid. This measure protected its customers by ensuring that outages at that substation would not spread.

Utilities can also create microgrids, or portions of the grid that can be isolated from the rest of the system in the event of an attack. Most of these systems have been designed to improve resilience in the event of natural disasters and storm events. But they can help defend the grid against cyberattacks as well.

Public concerns over grid security are more justified than ever. But I believe that minimizing the risk of a catastrophic infrastructure attack is within reach. All it will take is for utilities to educate their workers on system security while the government updates its rules and practices  and for everyone involved to keep doing what they can to avert outages of all kinds and to restore power as quickly as possible when outages occur despite those efforts.

Theodore J. Kury, Director of Energy Studies, University of Florida

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.For more than 50 years, the Supreme Court has prevented states from requiring out-of-state sellers to collect sales tax unless the seller has a physical presence, such as a local store or warehouse, in the state in which the sale occurs. Although the out-of-state sellers customers are supposed to remit tax on such sales, very few of them do so. As online retail sales continue to grow, states annual revenue loss has been estimated to be as much as $33.9 billion in 2018.

In 2016, the South Dakota legislature launched a challenge to the Supreme Courts holdings by passing Senate Bill 106, which requires any large seller of tangible personal property that does not have a physical presence in the state to collect and remit sales tax. Wayfair and other online sellers challenged the law. On April 17, the Court will hear oral argument in South Dakota v. Wayfair.

The fundamental issue is the impact of state and local sales taxes on the competition between online sellers and traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. In order to uphold the South Dakota law, the Court must find that (1) the law does not discriminate against interstate commerce and (2) the laws tax collection obligations do not impose undue burdens on interstate commerce.

South Dakota and many of its supporters argue that the physical-presence requirement sharply reduces state revenue collections, seriously harms competing brick-and-mortar businesses, and causes out-of-state sellers to take costly steps to avoid establishing a physical presence. The physical-presence requirement, they argue, effectively forces states to favor out-of-state sellers without a physical presence over local sellers.

Wayfair and its supporters argue that eliminating the physical-presence requirement would impose undue burdens on out-of-state sellers, especially small and mid-size companies. They emphasize the heavy costs businesses will incur trying to comply with as many as 16,000 inconsistent and changing state and local sales tax regimes across the country and the legal risks they could face when they make mistakes.

It may seem that the Supreme Court will be forced to simply pick a side in a tug of war between two parties. Luckily, there is an established legal framework that recognizes and protects the legitimate economic interests of both camps. In a 1970 case called Pike v. Bruce Church, Inc., the Court established a balancing test that weighs the burdens on interstate commerce against the benefits to the state from the regulation. In our view, applying Pike balancing is the right approach for the Court to take in reviewing tax collection obligations, which are ultimately a type of regulation. If the Court applies that balancing test in South Dakota v. Wayfair, two factors should make it easy to conclude that any burden placed on out-of-state sellers is minimal relative to South Dakotas interest in collecting sales taxes.

First, the regulatory burden on out-of-state retailers of complying with South Dakotas sales tax regime is negligible. South Dakota, along with 22 other states, is a full member of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement (SSUTA), under which the member states sales taxes are standardized to minimize the administration and recordkeeping burden on sellers. The SSUTA provides for a centralized online registration system through which retailers can register and agree to collect and remit sales and use taxes for all taxable sales to customers in the member states. And importantly, the SSUTA also allows out-of-state retailers to use approved service providers  paid for by the state, not the retailers  to collect and remit taxes to the state. By standardizing and harmonizing many aspects of their sales taxes and by providing compliance software and other assistance, the states that have signed on to the SSTUA have reduced the cost to out-of-state sellers of complying with sales tax in other states almost to zero.

Second, the South Dakota law contains clear rules that protect small or infrequent out-of-state sellers. An out-of-state seller with no physical presence in South Dakota has no obligation to collect or remit taxes if it makes fewer than 200 sales of tangible personal property, with a total value of no more than $100,000, per year in the state.

As we explained in an amicus brief that we filed in this case, Pike balancing makes more sense than the rigid, obsolete, and inefficient physical-presence requirement. Under Pike balancing, states could require out-of-state sellers to collect and remit sales tax, but only if the states take steps (as South Dakota has done) to reduce the potential harms emphasized by Wayfair and its supporters. While balancing tests can sometimes be difficult to implement, Wayfair is an easy case to resolve. The South Dakota law should be upheld because it has been carefully structured to avoid placing undue burdens on interstate commerce.In this series of articles running through July, RealClearPolitics and RealClearDefense take an in-depth look at the intersection of cybersecurity, technology, and warfare in the 21st century. Below is Part 3.

Six years ago, while describing the inexorable march of progress, President Obama casually slandered one of his predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes. In Obamas telling, Hayes was a hapless Luddite who, when confronted with the newfangled telephone, muttered, Its a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?

Thats why hes not on Mount Rushmore -- because hes looking backwards, Obama continued. He not looking forward.

Not to sound pedantic, but the 19th U.S. president isnt on Mount Rushmore because he was an accidental president who served a single, uneventful term. If Hayes is remembered for anything, its for prematurely pulling federal troops from the South after the Civil War. As for that line about the telephone, in todays parlance it would be called fake news. Rutherford B. Hayes, who had the first telephone installed in the White House, loved technology. What he really said while testing the device with its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, was: That is wonderful!

In addition, because he had trouble making out all the words being spoken over this rudimentary device, Hayes added, Please speak a little more slowly.

Pumping the brakes on change is an understandable impulse, but its not what new technologies do. They speed things up, often with unpredictable, highly disruptive results. At the dawn of the Internet Age, for example, it was hoped that the World Wide Web would bridge human differences in age, gender, race, religion, and nationality. How well has that worked out? Ask GoDaddy and Google, which have had to wrestle with the ethics of giving neo-Nazi groups space on their platforms.

When Mark Zuckerberg testified to a joint Senate committee on Capitol Hill Tuesday, the technology gap between Facebooks 33-year-old founder and the well-seasoned senators on the dais was conspicuous. Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, elected to the Senate more than seven years before Zuckerberg was born, didnt seem to realize that Facebook ran ads on its site. When Roger Wicker of Mississippi asked a question that elicited a response from Zuckerberg about Internet cookies, he was met with blank stares from several senators on the panel.

What did you expect? This is Washington, D.C., not Silicon Valley. Two years ago, a Government Accountability Office review of the federal governments technological systems uncovered shockingly outmoded equipment and software. The U.S. nuclear arsenal was under the control of a vintage computer system that used 8-inch floppy disks, along with a communication network using assembly language code, which was developed in the 1950s.

Then there was the Pentagons Strategic Automated Command and Control System, which, as the GAO noted, coordinates operational functions of the United States' nuclear forces, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers, and tanker support aircrafts. It was being run -- this was 2016, mind you -- on an IBM Series/1 computer, a machine that was state-of-the-art when it was first introduced 40 years earlier.

Facebook Faceoff

In 2009, Zuckerberg described the philosophy hed been imparting to his companys software developers in rah-rah language that provided a stark contrast to the tortoise pace of innovation in Washington. Move fast and break things, Zuckerberg told his coders. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough. Mark Zuckerberg's instruction to coders

By 2014, while on one of his periodic apology tours, Zuckerberg realized that this mantra was impolitic. He downplayed it and revised it. In truth, it was a pretty good working definition of the ethos that has reigned in Silicon Valley for a long time. Before move fast and break things came the quest for the killer app. Before that, the Holy Grail was simply known in the Valley as the Next Big Thing. Contrast such attitudes with the prevailing M.O. in Washington, where the approach to substantive change might best be described as with all deliberate speed.

That wording comes from a famous Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, in which the high court ordered the integration of Americas public schools. They did this, just to put it in perspective, nearly 100 years after the Civil War ended. Even then, all deliberate speed took another 14 years before much of the South complied.

In other words, the radically different pace of innovation between government and private industry -- particularly the tech sector -- is not an academic question of rival cultures. Its a real problem, with blame in each camp, and it helps explain why the U.S. government has been slow responding to cybersecurity threats and also why the techies have been so blase about these weapons theyve created.

When Arizona State University professor Braden Allenby explains how the data mining and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used Facebooks personal information in the 2016 on behalf of Donald Trumps campaign, he invariably gets incredulous questions from the tech-savvy millennials in his class: Why didnt President Obama or the Hillary Clinton campaign do more to counter it? And how could Facebook claim that none of this impacted the election?

The answer, Allenby says, is that the cycle time of technological change -- especially as cutting-edge behavioral economics, video technology, and AI-based big-data analytics using Facebook data came together with some playful Russian postmodernist KGB types -- caught everyone by surprise.

The difference is that the techies, who were used to that rate of change, got it, he adds. The pols didnt.

One can overstate the case. Certainly, the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency use cutting-edge technology in their black box capers. As University of Illinois professor Robert W. McChesney mentioned in an email exchange with RCP, the Internet itself was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- and Silicon Valley and private-sector tech companies elsewhere have extremely lucrative relationships with U.S. military and intelligence agencies.

Some of our federal agencies have been, and are, bankrolling and encouraging these same disruptive technologies, McChesney noted. DARPA continues to drive an inordinate amount of innovation [in areas such as] AI and robotics.

That said, the inability of the federal government to protect its own agencies from foreign hackers has been a national embarrassment, with potentially devastating consequences. Among the agencies in which personnel files were accessed in 2014 -- dubbed the year of the hack -- was the White House, the State Department, Department of Health and Human Services, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The next year was even worse. In 2015, the Department of Defense was accessed by hackers, as were the computers of the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Office of Personnel Management, which coughed up employee information on some 22 million current and former federal employees.

Earlier this year, nine Iranian hackers were indicted by the Justice Department for a hacking spree that went on from 2013 to 2018 and which broke into 144 American colleges and universities, nearly 50 private companies based in the U.S. and Europe, and five U.S. regulatory agencies, including the Labor Department, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission -- not to mention the United Nations.

"That type of criminal activity does not just cause economic harm. It also threatens our national security." Deputyy AG Rod Rosenstein, annoucing hacking charges

That type of criminal activity does not just cause economic harm, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in announcing the charges. It also threatens our national security. Identifying and prosecuting computer hackers is a priority for the Department of Justice.

Enthusiastic Hubris

Digital communication wasnt supposed to go this way. DARPA may have invented the thing, but control of it was wrested rather quickly by the community, as early users thought of themselves. And this community recoiled at the very idea of government oversight. In 1996, John Perry Barlow, a programmer, philosopher, and former lyricist for The Grateful Dead, put it this way in the opening lines of his famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Except that this avowal has proven so naive as to be dangerous. The pioneers of the Internet were not malicious. Far from it. They were idealistic to a fault. But their own lack of malice blinded them to how easily their tools could be used by other users with nefarious intent. Or misused by tech companies founded by ambitious prodigies whose wizardry with software instilled a hubris so profound that the result was the destruction of the very concept of personal privacy -- at least for users who availed themselves of social media, the Internet, or even email.

The subtext of this weeks congressional hearings, then, was comeuppance, which Mark Zuckerberg knew full well, as evidenced by his opening statement. But expressions of contrition are not going to be enough to satisfy Facebooks many critics. Sen. Lindsey Graham, for one, walked Zuckerberg through his paces Tuesday, demonstrating that in any way that matters to consumers, Facebook is a monopoly. In a subsequent written statement issued by his office, Graham spelled out where he is going: self-regulation of tech companies in general, and Facebook in particular, clearly hasnt worked.

Contrary to Mr. Zuckerbergs assertion, Facebook is a virtual monopoly, Graham added, and monopolies need to be regulated.

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Even those critical of Silicon Valleys heedless approach are skeptical that this is the answer. Brad Allenbys boss, Arizona State University President Michael Crow, said in an interview that using the regulatory tools employed against heavy industry in the early 20th century against a company that is essentially a data collection platform would be unlikely to work, and might make things worse. Its not Facebooks size that is the problem, its its willy-nilly habit of sharing information -- and letting its data be misused or ripped off -- problems that are standard procedure in the tech industry and which wouldnt go away if Facebook were broken into pieces.

Facebook began, as Zuckerberg reminded the senators Tuesday, on a college campus. With 72,000 students, Arizona State is a juicy target for digital hucksters, and Cambridge Analytica approached Crow three times before the 2016 election in attempts to get its hooks into the ASU community. Based on an uneasy feeling, Crow turned the company down, and chuckles aloud when told that if he had decided otherwise he might have been seated next to Zuckerberg at the witness table this week.

But if the goal is bridging the cultures of tech and government, the way forward is not yet clear. All technology can be used for good or for bad, Crow says. And Silicon Valley culture is powerful, but its concepts are too narrow. It doesnt think in a real-time way how its innovations can be misused, or how they should be applied.

Yet all the hubris doesnt flow from one direction. Twenty years before the Russians meddled in a U.S. presidential election, Congress defunded and closed the Office of Technology Assessment -- with the acquiescence of the Clinton administration. This $22 million agency was targeted by the Republicans 1994 Contract With America. Many of those Republicans, and even more Clinton administration veterans, surely wish they could get a do-over on that vote. The point here is that both cultures, Washington and Silicon Valley, could use a new mantra. It might not be sexy, but it could be more effective: How about: Move fast  but not too fast  and fix things.

Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Bureau Chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.

Our rap prayers have been answered; Kenyas hip-hop OGs Abbas Kubaff and Khaligraph Jones might bless us with a joint soon.

The two rappers had Kenyas rap fans excited when they each took to their respective social pages to pay homage to each other, a rare gesture in Kenyas Hip-hop culture.

It started with the Omollo rapper who paid a glowing tribute to the pioneer OG of Kenyan rap with a video on Instagram.

In the clip, a humbled Khaligraph talks up Abbas contribution to his rap career, revealing how the former K-South rapper put him on when he was starting out.

Abbas didnt ask me for money, he didnt for anythingI have a lot of respect for that guylike total utmost respect, says Khali.



A few hours later, Abbas Doobeez returned the favour, and gave Khali a glowing endorsement before hinting at a collabo.

He captioned a picture they had taken back in the day:

Most rappers are not bold enough to pay homage because of pride and all that extra shit! Game wreconize Game and I give a big shout out to @khaligraph_jones for giving props and remembering where he srtarted from. I said it before in 2008 watch out 4 this Ninja coz he is the future of Hip-Hop!! Some pple might have a different opinion but i aint mad at thatcoz everyone is entitled to theirs anywaysand if u preffer otherwise, well urs is out the window!!! But u cant deny the fact that my nigga ryt there can spit that venomous flame!!? #Fax This picture speaks volumes if u grasp the meaning.?(Hip-Hop is in good hands) Accept the fact that his hard work is finally paying off and if i were yall id APPRECIATE rather than HATE!! I cant wait 4 that day i touch down in 254 and hit the booth then the stage with Khali and drop another classic 4 the Hip-Hop fans and fam coz U already know what time it is when we gets bizzy #TeamKhali RESPECT THE OGz!!!! KAANG KAAANG KAAANG KAAANG!!Speaker Paul Ryans retirement announcement threatens to upend the midterm map for House Republicans and could shift the partys focus and resources toward preserving its Senate majority in the coming elections.

Several GOP strategists said Ryans decision not to seek re-election sends a signal to party donors, operatives, and campaigns that the battle for control of the House may already be a lost cause, and that there could be a greater return on investment from shoring up the Senate.

For people worried about losing the House, this is confirmation, basically, says former Rep. Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee. The captain isnt going down with the ship. I dont think theres any good news here.

While the House map and political climate suggest favorable conditions for Democrats, Republicans see a silver lining in the Senate contests, where 10 Democratic incumbents are aiming to hold on to their seats in states Donald Trump won. But even the typically stone-faced Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has started to fire warning shots to fellow Republicans, arguing that control of the upper chamber is imperative for the near and long term. Even if we were to lose the House and be stymied legislatively, we could still approve judicial appointments, which is a huge part of what we do, he said last week.

Ryans decision this week seemed to makes those stakes higher.

I think the message to donors is pretty unmistakable, says Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and former longtime aide to McConnell. I know that is not the speakers intention, and I know that hes going to do everything he can do to ensure [candidates] have all the resources necessary. But I think increasingly in the last several weeks youve seen a migration towards the Senate and I think this doesnt do anything to stop that.

"His timing now is going to be interpreted as an acknowledgment that the House is lost," Dan Eberhart, a top GOP fundraiser, told NBC News. "Donors are going to naturally shift their focus to the Senate."

Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican operative who chairs a pro-Trump super PAC involved in congressional races, says Ryan could alleviate some of the concerns from donors and candidates by resigning from the speakership immediately. Holding on to the post through the midterms only ensures a long, competitive and distracting leadership race at a time when the party should be singularly focused on protecting the majority, and begs donors to ask, Who do you give to? A lame duck leadership fund? Or would you rather bet on the Senate and get in the good graces of Senate leadership? Rollins says.

Senate candidates have already been making adherence to the Trump agenda central to their campaigns, and the prospect of lifelong judicial confirmations by a GOP Senate has been an energizing force for party activists. Trump has also started to intervene to preserve the upper chamber majority, signaling the importance of the Senates work to his legacy as president.

Last month, for example, he successfully urged Republican Danny Tarkanian to withdraw his primary challenge to Nevada Sen. Dean Heller and run for the House instead. And during a policy roundtable in West Virginia last week, he criticized Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, who is up for re-election this year, for voting against the GOP tax bill. He votes against everything and he voted against our tax cuts, and that was bad, Trump said of the incumbent.

Holding one chamber for President Trump's agenda is better than losing both, and so I think that's where the focus is going to shift now, strategist and former McConnell aide Scott Jennings told NPR, framing the mindset of Republican donors and activists.

Rep. Steve Stivers, the chairman of House Republicans campaign committee, pushed back on the idea that Ryans retirement could have ripple effects with donors.

No, none. The House matters, Stivers said. The House is the idea factory in Washington and thats why the House matters.

Corry Bliss, who heads the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Ryan, said in a statement that the group had raised nearly $50 million, thanks to the speaker, and predicted that there would be no downturn in that fundraising pace.

I know the speaker remains personally committed to ensuring [that] CLF continues to succeed and has the resources it needs to maintain the House Majority.

One GOP operative familiar with House races said a potential leadership fight between Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Whip Steve Scalise could be a fundraising boon and make up for any money that doesnt flow through Ryan.

Theyre going to try to outdo each other with fundraising, and donors will curry favor, the operative predicted. Its a little bit of an arms race.

Davis, however, said neither McCarthy nor Scalise has a large enough profile to be able to make up the difference in money Ryan could have pulled in.

The guy ran for vice president. Nobody is going to replace Ryan, Davis said.

Caitlin Huey-Burns is a national political reporter for RealClearPolitics. She can be reached at chueyburns@realclearpolitics.com. Follow her on Twitter @CHueyBurns.President Trump isn't taking his first trip to Latin America, after all. He was supposed to attend the Summit of the Americas, but says he needs to monitor the situation in Syria. Still, crises never stopped other U.S. presidents from attending regional summits.President Donald Trump is taunting Russia as he makes clear that he has decided to strike the forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, Trump is also offering cooperation to Russia on a range of issues including arms control. Meanwhile, Moscow is reiterating once more that its forces will retaliate forcefully if Russian citizens are harmed as a result of an American attack.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria, Trump tweeted on April 11. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Method Behind the Madness

What should we make of Trumps belligerent tweet? I think Trump's tweets are a signal to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to consider sending his people to shelter, Jerry Hendrix, a senior fellow and the director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security told the National Interest. Its a 'You better think real seriously about your next move son' moment."

The problem comes, of course, if Russia fails to heed the warning. Indeed, Moscow is reiterating its warning that if Russian forces or civilians are killed in an American attack, the Kremlin will respond. If there is a strike by the Americans, then...the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired, Amb. Alexander Zasypkin told Hezbollahs al-Manar TV, speaking in Arabic according to Reuters.

Zasypkins statement reinforces a recent declaration by the Chief of the General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov. If lives of the Russian officers are threatened, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation will retaliate against missile and launch systems, Gerasimov said on March 13.

Gerasimov, as both American and Russian-based experts have noted, is not prone to bluffing and strictly follows directives from Putin. When the Russian chief of the general staff says something, you have to listen because someone told him to say it, Center for Naval Analyses senior research scientist Michael Kofman said recently at the Center for the National Interest.

Has a Decision Really Been Made?

Defense Secretary James Mattis said that the investigation as to who is responsible for the Douma chemical attack remains open, but added that the military will have options ready for the president when the time comes. We're still assessing the intelligence ourselves, and our allies. We're still working on this, Mattis said. We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the President determines.

Americas Forces in the Region

Trump, for his part, seems to have made his determination. However, the fact that Mattis seemed to be unaware of the presidents tweets suggests that an attack may not be imminent in the next twelve hours. An attack is most likely coming in the next several days.

Trump did not add any other details to the tweet, but presumably the president is referring to advanced cruise missiles such as the U.S. Navys Tomahawk Block IV long-range cruise missile and the AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range (JASSM-ER). Indeed, there are U.S. Navy warships, including the Arleigh Burkeclass USS Donald Cook (DDG-75), USS Laboon (DDG-58) and the Ohio-class guided missile submarine USS Georgia (SSGN-729) that can fire long-range cruise missiles. Georgia, for example, is armed with some 155 Tomahawks. It is likely that any strike on Syria will be launched first from the Georgia.

The Allies

The French and the British may join in the fray. The British apparently have more or less made a decision to attack Syriaand according sources who spoke to the BBCeven without a vote to authorize the strike in Parliament. France, meanwhile, is ready to make a decision to strike Syria in the coming days.

French president Emmanuel Macron said that his country would make the decision to strike Syria in coordination with Britain and the United States in days. The third element is the red lines defined by France. These red lines, which are shared by other powers, have nothing to do with the discussions taking place at the U.N. Security Council, Macron said alongside Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to Reuters. In this context, we will continue exchanges of technical and strategic information with our partners in particular Britain and America, and in the coming days we will announce our decision.

The French frigate Aquitaine, which is armed with sixteen 300-nautical-mile-range SCALP EG land-attack cruise missiles is in the vicinity of Syria. Meanwhile, the French Armee de l'Air (French Air Force) can strike at Syria from bases in France itself. However, without the United States to beat down the Syrian air defenses, France would place its forces in grave danger. The French are adamant that they will only strike at Syrian forces and strictly avoid hitting Russian military targets.

The Russians

The Kremlin, for its part, says that it will not participate in Twitter diplomacy and will approach the problem through proper channels. "We are not participating in Twitter-diplomacy," Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the state-run TASS news agency in Moscow. "We are supporting serious approaches. We still firmly believe that it is important to abstain from taking steps, which may be detrimental to the already fragile situation (in Syria)."

Peskov reiterated the Russian position that the alleged chemical attack in Douma was a sham being used a pretext to launch an intervention in Syria. We remain certain that the claims chemical weapons have been allegedly used in (Syrias) Douma are far-fetched and cannot excuse any use of force," Peskov said.

Meanwhile, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested that the United States aim its cruise missiles towards terrorists rather than the Syrian government. Smart missiles must fly towards terrorists, not a legitimate government that has been fighting international terrorism in its territory for several years, Zakharova wrote on her Facebook page in Russian.

Zakharova also suggested that an American missile strike would serve only destroy evidence at the scene of the Douma attack. Yeah, by the way, the OPCW [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] inspectors warned that smart missiles would destroy all evidence of the use of chemical on Earth? Zakharova wrote. Or is the whole idea to quickly cover up the provocations of smart missiles, and the international inspectors have nothing to look for as evidence?

Conciliatory Tweets

Trump also expressed hope for cooperation with Russia.

Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War, Trump tweeted. There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?

Trump blamed Democrats and special counsel Robert Mueller for the current tensions with Russia. He also denied that his presidential campaign colluded with Russia. Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama, Trump tweeted. Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!

Zakharova, however, seemed unimpressed. Commenting on the Trumps suggestion about ending the arms race, Zakharova sarcastically suggested that the president should start by disposing of the U.S. chemical-weapons arsenal, which Washington has been dragging its feet on to dispose of despite treaty obligations. Great idea! Zakharova said. There's an offer to start with the destruction of chemical weapons. American.

Reprinted with permission from The National Interest. Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for The National Interest. You can follow him on Twitter: @davemajumdar.First on the Agenda: Infrastructure

Montgomery wants to first create jobs through investing in infrastructure improvements because of broad, bipartisan support for this issue.

As a consensus builder in my professional life up to this point, I know now important it is to go after the points of agreement, Montgomery said. The policies we know will have a large impact and easily passed. People are tired of a Congress that does nothing, and Im determined to change that.

According to her campaign site, she wants to create a job plan with five priorities: portable benefits, infrastructure investment, wage fairness, trade and collective bargaining, access to capital.First on the agenda: "Setting the stage"

Winfield said hes currently working on setting the stage and having public discussions to gain support for a progressive wave of policy and legislation.

I think, realistically, if I were to be elected in this district, its going to be part of a wave. So I think someone is going to be elected as a Democrat, its very possible that not only the Senate but also the House of Representatives may switch sides [to Democrats]. There will be a Republican president, whether or not Trump is that president, Winfield said. That means, whatever Congress does will be limited by the president, so realistically speaking, we cant do anything until 2020 for something really decisive to happen.In the May 22 primary election, residents of Georgias 10th Congressional District, which en

First on the Agenda: Healthcare

Being in the medical field, Johnson-Green said she has seen the structural problems of the healthcare system on a daily basis, such as seeing patients, who are living in poverty, barely making co-pays to rural hospitals closing their doors at alarming rates.

Every American deserves access to quality healthcare Johnson-Green said. As it stands now, healthcare insurance coverage and co-pays are outrageously priced. As a nurse of 20 years, Ive seen people who cannot afford quality access to healthcare.In the May 22 primary election, residents of Georgias 10th Congressional District, which en

First on the Agenda: Immigration

In November, Griffins priority will be hitting the ground running and doing the best we can, he said.

One issue he plans to tackle first is immigration, on which he has strict views against immigrants coming into the U.S. illegally.

Griffin believes the government should deport all immigrants who came to the country illegally because it is unfair to legal immigrants and other nationalize citizens.

But my question is why would 320 million Americans, legal citizens, want to take on the burdens of individuals who, before they get any kind of citizenship, are already burning the place down and already causing problems? Griffin said.First on the Agenda: Immigration

Hunt said Congress cant address the immigration issue as a one size fits all approach, but rather should tailor solutions to different areas of the country.

There are quite a few industries that are dependent on a solid, stable and dependable labor force, and a significant portion of that immigrant flow does provide opportunities for small businesses who depend on that type of labor to grow, Hunt said.

He wants to streamline the immigration system and strengthen the border security but make sure the government acts with mercy and compassion toward those seeking a better life in the U.S., according to his campaign website.As University of Georgia students are preparing for finals, some are also gearing up for Georgia's 10th Congressional District elections this May.It seems that Indie South could not have chosen a better day to host the first day of its Springtacular market event than on Saturday, April 1James Beard Award-winning Netflix star Phil Rosenthal will speak at a one-time screening of his hit show "Somebody Feed Phil," on April 19 at 5 p.m. at The Cameo Cinema, 1340 Main St., in St. Helena.

The episode of the show being shown is the one filmed in Tel Aviv, Israel. Rosenthal will answer questions after the screening. Napa Valley-based photographer Steven Rothfeld will be at the event to sign copies of his new book "Israel Eats." The event includes Napa Valley wines with links to Israel and hors doeuvres featuring recipes from Rothfelds book.

In this Netflix series, Rosenthal travels around the globe taking in the local cuisine and culture of Bangkok, Lisbon, Mexico City and more. In Tel Aviv, he meets up with famous culinary faces including Master Chef judge Michal Ansky and chef Michael Solomonov. Rosenthals infectious enthusiasm for food, travel and meeting new people explains how he has won a James Beard award.

Rosenthal may be best known for being the creator, writer and executive producer of the sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond." In 2015, he started a food travelogue show for PBS called "Ill Have What Phils Having," which ran for one season. Netflix acquired the show, and it was re-named "Somebody Feed Phil."In need of farm-fresh eggs and produce? Saturday, April 14 is the time to go  its the opening day for the Oconee Farmers Market. Saturday maIf empathy, education and tourism drive the expansion of the Aquarium, the funds would be better spent in other places.Got some scoop for our reporters or editors? Click on the link below to send us your information.

Send your newsTORRINGTON  Northwest Connecticuts Chamber of Commerce, in conjunction with the Credit Union League of Connecticut, will present the ninth annual Northwest CT Financial Reality Fair on Wednesday, April 25 at Torrington High School.

The Financial Reality Fair provides high school students with a hands on budgeting experience to gain practical knowledge about personal financial management in a one day real world environment. The Fair is designed to teach students the value of using money responsibly. This real world exercise requires each student to choose a career and salary and then budget their money wisely to make ends meet. The hands on practical aspect of this initiative will occur at the Reality Fair.For Story Pirates Greatest Hits show in Napa, the company has chosen some of their favorite stories collected over the past 14 years. Whether its a world where cats can fly, or a rock opera about fuzzy alien tickle monsters, the Pirates can turn any short story into a hilarious sketch comedy musical. (The final story performed in each show will be created from kids suggestions in the Napa audiences.)

Twins Emerson and Mikayla Stevens, fourth-graders at Vichy Elementary School, have been writing their own stories in school and at home since age 6. I think my first story was about a blueberry, Emerson said. It was called A Berry Named Jerry, and Im obsessed with unicorns. I like everything with a horn!

Mikaylas first foray into story writing was 10 pages long, and based on a dream in which she found herself entering the Candyland game board. I like coming up with ideas, she said, because sometimes they can be really funny, and I like drawing pictures for them.

We believe that kids have the best ideas, Doyle said. Adults are very nervous about getting it right. Kids, however, will be silly and unfiltered as a default, which leads to the discovery of new ideas. In Story Pirates, we like to grant everyone permission to be weird. Kids are not afraid to take us up on that offer, which points us to some really exciting stories.FAIRFIELD  Partnership HealthPlan of California (PHC) has awarded a $1 million grant to Heritage House, a development in north Napa that will offer affordable housing to low-income Napa residents and permanent supportive housing for homeless residents.

The funding granted to the Peter A. and Vernice Gasser Foundation is one of 24 awards, totaling $25 million, made by PHC for housing-related projects across the Medi-Cal managed care plans 14-county service area. Through this grant program, PHC seeks to address the critical housing and housing-related needs that affect the health of its more than 560,000 members.

Without a roof over your head and a safe place to sleep, its difficult to stay healthy, said Liz Gibboney, CEO of PHC. We decided to address this critical health-related issue right where it starts  by funding projects that address homelessness and the lack of housing for the most vulnerable populations in our communities.

The $1 million for Heritage House will be used to rehabilitate a former assisted living facility at 3700 Valle Verde Drive that Gasser bought in 2016.Fans of a humorous video app shut down by the ruling Chinese Communist Party for "vulgar content" staged traffic-stopping and horn-honking protests around the country on Thursday, as President Xi Jinping's administration extended government control over what China's internet users may see or do online.



Video footage seen by RFA showed a group of singing protesters, waving their lit-up smartphones, gathered outside the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) late on Wednesday after the agency ordered the removal of the Neihan Duanzi app from app stores.



In Yichuan county in the central province of Henan, a group of people holds up a banner expressing support for "Duanzi friends" everywhere while a man shouts out a coded slogan linked to the online community.



In the eastern province of Jiangsu, rows of cars with headlights and hazard lights flashing were seen stationary in the middle of a highway, while people stood holding a banner supporting "Duanzi friends" in the middle of the road.



Meanwhile, motorists in the southern province of Hunan parked up with lights flashing, emitting long honking sounds on their horns, in a protest also related to the removal of the app.



Earlier, video footage emerged on Twitter claiming to be of a similar, horn-honking protest at the heart of the Chinese capital, although RFA was unable to verify the video independently.



Sources told RFA that the protests were flash-mobs organized online, using secret signals to allow "Duanzi friends" to recognize each other: a car-horn beeped in a specific long-short-short rhythm, and a double-flash of the headlights.



Platform for the disgruntled



Neihan Duanzi will permanently shut down its app and user accounts at the request of regulatory authorities," according to an Apr. 11 statement displayed on the app's website.



The platform had allowed users to share satirical videos, spoofs and mashups of a kind targeted by the ruling party in recent years, as propaganda officials seek to clamp down on any content not generated by officially recognized sources.



One humorous video posted to the Neihan Duanzi Facebook page last November showed a group of young men in college dorm beds, unable to motivate themselves because of a lack of life prospects.



"If we get up for class, that doesn't mean we'll pay attention," says one. "If we pay attention, we won't necessarily learn anything," quips another. "If we learn anything, that doesn't mean we'll pass the test ... or graduate ... or find a job ... or make money ... or find a wife ... or that she'll get pregnant ... or that the kid will even be ours," they conclude, in humor heavily linked with the online culture of "diaosi," a slang term for young men without particularly bright prospects.



While such jokes aren't overtly political, the fact that the app community used a system of "secret codes" and gave a platform to disgruntled voices would likely raise a red flag among party propagandists in Xi Jinping's China.



A Duanzi user surnamed Zhang from Yingkou city in the northeastern province of Liaoning said he had attended a protest in the city that saw around 140 cars converge on the city's Minghu Square, West Fort and Ping An Square to protest at the app's removal.



"We did it in our city yesterday night ... there were 140 cars at Minghu Square, running from about 7:00 p.m. to about 9:00 p.m.," he said. "However, we didn't make trouble, and we didn't affect the flow of traffic. [The authorities] didn't make any response."



Zhang said the protests were organized in the hope that the government would reverse the decision to shutter Neihan Duanzi for good.



But he said he had been unable to upload video of the protest to the internet, suggesting that news of the protests is also being censored.



Vast community



Political commentators who spoke to RFA said that while the app wasn't overtly political, it did provide a way for people to overcome social fragmentation, and its potential for organizing and connecting its more than 100 million users likely made the government nervous.



Repeated calls to officials at SARFT rang unanswered during office hours on Thursday.



Zhang Yiming, CEO and founder of Neihan Duanzi's parent company Jinri Toutiao, issued a public apology on Wednesday to Neihan Duanzi users.



"Jinri Toutiao will permanently shut down Neihan Duanzi," Zhang said. "The product took a wrong turn. The content that appeared there went against core socialist values and we did not do a thorough job in guiding public opinion."



Zhang blamed Toutiao's reliance on recommendation algorithms, at the expense of government guidelines.



He said the company is currently undergoing a "rectification" process aimed at "restoring order to the Toutiao community," by hiring 4,000 new staff to monitor content.



Beijing artist and poet Wang Zang said the protests could be indicative of a much broader, simmering public resentment over years of micromanaged censorship by the government, however.



"Actually, in such a restricted climate, with the advent of the New Cultural Revolution where the suppression of freedom of speech is at crazy levels, it's actually pretty important to see people standing up over the closure of an app," Wang said.



"We have become so accustomed to being shut down and blocked in the past few years ... and a lot of people have just been keeping their mouths shut," he said. "[But] I think the authorities will only create more resistance from internet users, with their crazy levels of censorship."



Earlier this month, SARFT also suspended news apps Jinri Toutiao for three weeks; Phoenix News for two weeks; and NetEase News for one week, while Tiantian News was shut down for three days.



The authorities said the apps had been broadcasting unauthorized news content without an online broadcasting license.



Reported by Wong Siu-san and Lam Kwok-lap for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Yang Fan for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.Chongqing Communist Party Secretary Sun Zhengcai (C) speaks during the Anhui province opening session as part of the National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, March 6, 2017.

A former top ruling Chinese Communist Party official pleaded guilty to bribery at his heavily scripted trial in the northern city of Tianjin on Thursday.

Former Chongqing party secretary and Politburo member Sun Zhengcai stood trial at the Tianjin No. 1 Intermediate Peoples Court, state media reported.

Sun admitted to taking advantage of his posts to seek profits for others, as well as illegally accepting huge amounts of money and property during postings to Beijings Shunyi district, Beijings municipal party committee, Jilin province, while serving on the 25-member Politburo and as Chongqing party chief.

"Between 2002 and 2017, Sun took advantage of his posts to provide help for certain units and individuals in project procurement, enterprise operation and adjustment of official positions, and accepted money and property worth 170 million yuan (U.S. $27.1 million," state news agency Xinhua reported.

I am seriously guilty of violating [party] discipline and the law, and I have been given a solemn judgment by the law," Sun told the court in footage aired by state broadcaster CCTV.

"I am convinced [by the prosecution's arguments], and I hereby solemnly plead guilty," he said. "I feel remorse for my crimes, and I will sincerely submit to the court's decision."

A senior official has said that the investigation into Sun was sparked after authorities discovered his involvement in a conspiracy to overthrow President Xi Jinping.

The chairman of China's securities regulator Liu Shiyu told a meeting of top finance officials during the 19th party congress last October that the once-rising political star had plotted to seize power from the current leadership.

Grassroots anti-corruption campaigner Ma Bo said that corruption is still rife in China, in spite of a nationwide anti-corruption campaign waged by President Xi Jinping since taking power in 2012.

She said Sun's trial doesn't mean that the daily problems of ordinary Chinese citizens are being dealt with by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

"There are still huge numbers of petitioning cases; it's sort of like the fibers in a marrow," Ma said. "The bigger the marrow, the more numerous the fibers. They are going all-out against corruption, and yet they haven't succeeded in eradicating it."

She said the current campaign remains selective.

"A genuine anti-corruption campaign would go after anyone found to have engaged in corrupt practices, regardless of who they were," Ma said.

An endemic political disease

Writer Tie Liu, who was once classed by the Communist Party as a "rightist," agreed, saying Sun was more a victim of internal power struggles within the party than the target of any genuine clean-up campaign.

"If you don't engage in corruption, you don't get a promotion," Tie told RFA. "In China we say that there is no such thing as a clean official; this is an endemic political disease."

"Of course, it was totally right to arrest Sun Zhengcai ... but this was all about an internal power struggle," he said. "Xi Jinping is taking down the allies of [former president] Jiang Zemin one by one, and basically replacing them all [with his own people]."

Reported by Wen Yuqing for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.The wife of "disappeared" human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang has been released from house arrest after growing pressure from overseas activists, she told RFA on .



Earlier this week, police in Beijing prevented Wang's wife Li Wenzu from finishing her planned 120 kilometer (60-mile) trek from the capital to neighboring Tianjin to highlight Wang's disappearance.



Li was confined to her home, while dozens of security guards, officials and state security police stood guard over the building, beating up friends and fellow activists who tried to visit her.



The surveillance detail decamped on , leaving her free to go out again, she said.



"I have been able to move around freely since ," Li told RFA. "I have my freedom back, for now, anyway."



She said a friend had already been to her home to visit her.



"She told me there wasn't anyone watching me downstairs any more," she said. "I want ... to thank everyone for their concern over Wang Quanzhang's situation, which I think has been enormously helpful."



"They may have stopped us from continuing the march, but I haven't decided what I am going to do next yet," she said. "But I definitely won't stop speaking out ... for as long as Wang Quanzhang doesn't come home and the authorities fail to deal with his case according to law."



Meanwhile, Beijing rights activists Li Meiqing and Chen Yanhua were set upon, punched and kicked by the guards when they tried to take fresh food to Li on .



"They punched and kicked us; we were surrounded by a lot of people," Chen told RFA on . "We're not talking about one or two people; there were more than a dozen of them."



Footage of the incident posted on Twitter showed a group of unidentified men surround two women, one of whom falls to the ground, and is kicked.



Chen said the guards had taken the two women's phones and destroyed them.



"They told us we were traitors to the Chinese people," she said. "The police came but they did nothing; they just watched them beat us up."



"After Li Meiqing fell to the ground, they poured filthy water ... over her."



Chen said both women had sustained multiple injuries from the beating, and had sought medical attention.



Li Meiqing was diagnosed with a caudal bone fracture, which could cause potential problems for her in future, and could take two or three months to heal.



She told RFA on : "I can walk, but only very slowly, because it's very painful. Every step and movement causes pain because the bone is fractured."



Fellow rights activist Li Wei said she had been to visit Li Meiqing and Chen on .



"It was very clear that officials were operating in the background and giving their tacit consent [to the attack]," Li Wei said. "Preventing citizens from visiting their friends has no basis in law, while going so far as to steal mobile phones is entirely criminal behavior."



"I am feeling very disappointed with the rule of law in this country," she said.



Reported by Gao Feng for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Wong Lok-to for the Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.After the arrival of Joshua Kiser as the Yountville homes spokesman in 2016, Rickman said, the Observation Posts printing schedule grew increasingly erratic and tardy.

For eight months, we have been three or more weeks late, said Rickman. My July Fourth issue came out on July 27; my Black History Month issue never came out at all. It was very frustrating. Four of those months it was because (Kiser) forgot to get in a purchase order for the paper (to) Minuteman Press in Napa. The other four times, he didnt even give me an explanation.

Eventually myself and Dan Goodman, the assistant editor, got frustrated knowing our work was going to come out late. We jokingly ran the date of one issue as November-ish, which Josh objected to. The issue finally came out on Nov. 30.

As one guy said to me, Josh Kisers desk is where dreams go to die.

Attempts to contact Kiser this week were unsuccessful.

In a Wednesday email, CalVet spokesperson June Iljana said the agency suspended the Observation Post pending a reorganization of our published products due to a required review of our associated budget.Sweden has charged a Tibetan resident with spying on members of the Tibetan exile community for the Chinese government, according to the countrys counter-intelligence agency and media reports.



The man, who was arrested on Feb. 26 last year on suspicion of espionage against refugees in Sweden, has now been charged with serious unlawful intelligence activities against several individuals in the country, the Swedish Security Service said in a statement Wednesday.



Unlawful intelligence activities targeting refugees is a very serious crime, said Daniel Stenling, head of the Security Service's Counter-Intelligence Unit.



It undermines the democratic process, as it prevents people who are already vulnerable and have fled their countries from exercising the rights and freedoms they should be enjoying under Swedens constitution.



According to the statement, the charges stemmed from evidence that the Tibetan man had been tasked by another country to unlawfully gather information about individuals in the Tibetan diaspora in Sweden and subsequently handed the information to a foreign power.



The Security Service noted that unlawful intelligence activities targeting refugees is a method used to prevent them from criticizing the regime of the country from which they have fled, and is also used by certain regimes in an attempt to gain control over people who have fled their countries.



Stenling added that unlawful intelligence activities targeting refugees is not a new phenomenon in Sweden.



According to media reports, the suspect is a 49-year-old Tibetan who was working for the radio station Voice of Tibet, and is believed to have provided the Chinese government with information about the families, housing situations and travel plans of members of the exile community.



The reports cited Swedish state prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist as saying that the manwho had deep ties to Swedens Tibetan exile community of around 140 individualshad contacted Chinese officials in Poland and Finland, and had been paid 50,000 krona (U.S. $5,945) on one occasion.



He faces charges that carry a maximum sentence of up to four years in prison.



Sowing discord



In an interview on Thursday, Tibets exile prime minister Lobsang Sangay told RFAs Tibetan Service that the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) is concerned about this [spying] and is closely following the situation, adding that the India-based exile government is in contact with all relevant agencies.



The Swedish government would not charge the person, unless there is sufficient evidence, Sangay said.



Not even a small Tibetan community in Sweden is spared by the Chinese government [which attempts to undermine them] through various methods and financial temptation.



According to Sangay, while some Tibetans obtain visas to travel to Tibetan areas of China to visit family, there is danger that the Chinese government taking advantage of such opportunities, suggesting that Beijing may force them to do its bidding and assist in destabilizing exile communities.



It is certain that the Chinese governments hands have reached into Tibetan exile society, sowing discord and causing disharmony among us, he added.



Earlier, Jamyang Choedon, the president of Tibetan Community in Sweden, told RFA that the suspect had been released a month after his arrest last year, but charged on Wednesday following an investigation by the Swedish government.



Until there is evidence, you cannot prosecute the person, Choedon siad.



Tibetan Community is very concerned about this, but until the person is found guilty, we do not wish to blacken his name and we will bear no grudge against him.



An anonymous source told RFA that the suspects name is Dorjee Gyaltsen, a refugee who had formerly lived in India and Nepal before relocating to Sweden.



Bilateral tensions



The charges come around two months after Hong Kong-based bookseller and Swedish passport holder Gui Minhai was snatched by Chinese authorities from a train in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo, while en route to Beijing in the company of two Swedish diplomats.



Gui, who remains in detention, has been accused of carrying state secrets to supply to overseas organizations, according to state media, and critics have said Sweden is not doing enough to stand up to Beijing over his treatment.



Ethnic Uyghurs living in Sweden have also reported being pressured by China to spy on the exile community there.



In 2009, the government sentenced a Swedish national of Uyghur descent named Babur Mahsut to 16 months in prison for aggravated illegal espionage activity after he was found to have collected personal information about exiled Uyghursincluding details on their health, travel and political involvementand passed the information on to agents from the Chinese intelligence service.



Reported by RFAs Tibetan Service. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.A 34-year-old ethnic Uyghur father of two has died from health complications after being incarcerated for nearly six months at a political re-education camp in Ili Kazakh (in Chinese, Yili Hasake) Autonomous Prefecture, in northwest Chinas Xinjiang region, 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.



While investigating reports that a Uyghur woman in her 60s had recently died at a camp in Bayanday township, in Ili Kazakhs Ghulja (Yining) county, RFAs Uyghur Service determined that a young man from the area passed away late last year after becoming sick in detention.



An official who answered the phone at the No. 2 Village government building in Bayanday said no women from her village had died, but volunteered that a man fell ill in the camp and then died in the hospital.



The phone was then passed to a security officer at the village government building, who told RFA that the mans name was Abdughappar Abdujappar, and that he had died in December last year at the Bayanday Township Peoples Hospital, after being held in the School of Finance Re-education Camp  [for] a maximum of five to six months.



He was about 34  [and had] a wife with two children, the security officer said.



He was a cook in a dumpling restaurant in Bayanday.



When asked about Abdujappars health and the reason for his detention, the security chief said he could not provide details, as he had only been working in his position for about four months.



It happened before I started, he said, adding that Abdujappar was taken for re-education from a different village."



He is from No. 4 Village, the officer said.



Calls by RFA to the No. 4 Village government office went unanswered.



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 activists say nearly every Uyghur household has been affected by the campaign.



Prior reporting by RFAs Uyghur Service found that as arrests in Xinjiang increased around the sensitive 19th Communist Party Congress in Beijing in October, the regions re-education camps have been inundated by detainees, who are forced to endure cramped and squalid conditions in the facilities.



Last month, authorities in Kashgar (Kashi) prefectures Yopurgha (Yuepuhu) county told RFA that a 17-year-old Uyghur boy named Yaqupjan Naman, who was detained for traveling overseas, had died of unknown causes at a local re-education camp. His father was not provided with the cause of the boys death and was forced to bury his body under police supervision, the sources said.



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.The United Nations says more than 700 civilians were killed in the first three months of 2018 in Afghanistan.

In its quarterly report issued on April 12, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said 763 civilians were killed and 1,495 others injured between January 1 and March 31, a similar figure to the same period in 2017.

UNAMA said it was concerned by a 6 percent increase in civilian casualties caused by antigovernment groups.

It said pro-government forces, including Afghan security forces, government-sponsored militias, and international troops, reduced civilian casualties by 13 percent compared to the previous year, killing and injuring 407 civilians.

"Afghan civilians continue to suffer, caught in the conflict, in ways that are preventable; this must stop now," said Ingrid Hayden, the UN secretary-general's deputy special representative for Afghanistan.

For the whole of 2017, the UN said 3,438 civilians were killed and 7,015 others injured. It was the fourth year in a row with more than 10,000 civilian casualties.

The UN figures are considered a conservative estimate because they need at least three independent sources to officially register a case.

Based on reporting by AP and dpaWASHINGTON  CIA Director Mike Pompeo has said that a "couple hundred Russians" were killed in eastern Syria during U.S. artillery and air strikes in early February, an attack that remains shrouded in mystery.

The comments by Pompeo, which came during his testimony before a Senate committee on April 12, were a rare open acknowledgement by a top U.S. official about the incident.

Speaking during a hearing to consider his nomination to be the next U.S. secretary of state, Pompeo also said he would seek a tougher approach toward Russia.

He said President Donald Trump's administration had been tough in its policies toward Moscow, citing the recent Treasury sanctions imposed on Russian business and political figures, and the expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats.

But he said Russian President Vladimir Putin "has not yet received the message sufficiently and we need to continue to work at that."

"But it hasn't just been sanctions, the largest expulsion of 60 folks was from this administration," he added.

"In Syria, now, a handful of weeks ago the Russians met their match. A couple hundred Russians were killed. The list of actions that this administration has taken.... I'm happy to walk through each of them but I don't want to take up more time," he said.

U.S. military commanders had previously said that a massive ground and air assault was launched on February 7 against a column of fighters and weaponry in the eastern Syrian province of Deir al-Zor.

The assault was launched immediately after a base housing U.S.-backed fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces and U.S. military advisers was attacked.

U.S. officials earlier said more than 100 pro-government Syrian fighters had been killed, and that AC-130 gunships, F-15 and F-22 fighter jets, and Apache helicopter gunships had been used in the U.S. assault, along with Marine Corps artillery units.

No U.S. personnel were injured in the attack.

A few days after the attack, U.S. officials revealed that U.S. commanders had utilized a special "hot line" to communicate directly with their Russian counterparts, before, during, and after the attack.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis later called the attack "perplexing."

In Moscow, Russian officials said no uniformed Russian troops were involved in the attack.

Russian and Western news media, including RFE/RL, have sought out relatives of those killed, trying to tally the casualty figures.BRUSSELS  The European Union says it has decided to prolong sanctions against Iran over its human rights record for another year.

The European Council of member states said in an April 12 statement that the measures were extended until April 2019 in response to what it called "serious human rights violations in Iran."

The sanctions, which consist of travel bans and asset freezes against 82 people and one entity, were first put in place in 2011. They are mainly targeting Iranian judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers.

They also include a ban to export equipment to Iran that might be used for internal repression as well as equipment for monitoring telecommunications.

In early 2016, the EU lifted all its economic and financial sanctions related to Irans nuclear program.

The move came after Tehran and world powers struck a deal in July 2015 to limit Irans nuclear activities.

Executions and death sentences continued to drop globally in 2017 after hitting record-high levels in previous years, with Iran and Pakistan remaining among the worlds top five executioners, Amnesty International said on April 12.

The London-based human rights watchdog said in its latest report  Death Sentences And Executions 2017  that positive measures, such as legal amendments in Iran to limit capital punishment for drug-related crimes, and notable reductions in the number of death sentences worldwide have contributed to a 4 percent drop in executions compared to the previous year.

The number of executions  993  returned to levels recorded before the 2015 peak, when more than 1,600 people were put to death, Amnesty said.

More than half of recorded executions -- 507 -- were carried out in Iran, followed by Saudi Arabia, with 146, Iraq, with 125, and Pakistan, with 60 confirmed executions.

However, the number does not include thousands of executions carried out by China, which remains by far the worlds top executioner but does not disclose data on executions and treats such information as a state secret.

At least five people in Iran last year were reportedly executed for crimes committed before they were 18 years of age, while juvenile offenders remained on death row in Pakistan, the report said.

"We remain highly concerned about the continued practice of the death penalty [in Iran] in clear violation of protections established by international law and standards," Chiara Sangiorgio, Amnesty Internationals adviser on the death penalty, told RFE/RL.

At least 31 public executions were carried out in Iran, where hanging remained the main method of execution, the same as in Pakistan.

Both Iran and Pakistan saw a decline in the number of executions compared to the previous year  some 10 percent in Iran and more than 30 percent in Pakistan.

The report said a record-high number of people -- at least 7,000 -- remained on death row in Pakistan, almost 5,000 in Punjab Province alone.

In Afghanistan, five people were put to death by hanging, the report said, in what appeared to be a hasty response to a growing number of terrorist attacks.

"The executions appeared to be carried out, in fact, in reaction to attacks that were carried out in the country. We know that the death penalty does not help solve that problem, and that was our appeal to the president of Afghanistan -- not to move ahead with executions anymore because they won't help the country reach the stability which I think we all want to see, Sangiorgio told RFE/RL.

In the majority of countries where people were sentenced to death or executed, the death penalty was imposed after proceedings that did not meet international fair trial standards. Among the countries cited were Iran, Pakistan, Belarus, Iraq, and China.

Military courts sentenced a high number of civilians to death in Pakistan, the report noted.

"We remain nonetheless highly concerned about the fact that nearly half of the executions that we recorded [in Pakistan] are actually carried out after people were sentenced to death for terrorism-related offenses by a military court, Sangiorgio told RFE/RL.

In Iran and Iraq, the report says, confessions of guilt reportedly obtained through torture were broadcast on television before the trial took place, in violation of the presumption of innocence.

Amnesty also noted that people with mental or intellectual disabilities were put to death or remained under death sentence in Pakistan and the United States.

The sole country in Europe and Central Asia to carry out the death penalty remained Belarus, where two people convicted for rape and murder, Siarhei Vostrykau and Kiryl Kazachok, were executed by shooting in 2017. The two were put to death in secret, in May and October, the report says.

"What I find particularly concerning about the use of the death penalty in Belarus is the way in which executions are carried out. No notification is being given. The families of the prisoners only find out about the executions when they go to the prison expecting to visit or to leave parcels for the [detained] relative," Sangiorgio told RFE/RL.

Russia, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan continued to observe moratoriums on executions, although in Kazakhstan one man remained under sentence of death after being convicted and sentenced in 2016 for terrorism.

In Russia, senior legislator Vasily Piskaryov and the Kremlin-backed head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, publicly called on two separate occasions last year for the reintroduction of the death penalty. But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that Russia's moratorium on the use of the death penalty will not be suspended, the report said.

Among the positive developments, the report highlights the progress in sub-Saharan Africa, where Guinea became the 20th state of the region to abolish the death penalty for all crimes.

Besides Guinea, Mongolia also scrapped the death penalty for all crimes, taking the total number of abolitionist countries to 106 in 2017.

Over the past 40 years, weve seen a huge positive shift in the global outlook for the death penalty, but more urgent steps need to be taken to stop the horrifying practice of state killing, said Salil Shetty, Amnesty Internationals secretary-general.

The death penalty is a symptom of a culture of violence, not a solution to it. We know that by galvanizing the support of people worldwide, we can stand up to this cruel punishment and end the death penalty everywhere, Shetty said.KYIV  Ukrainian police say a missing family of four has been killed in an antitank mine explosion near the front line in the eastern region of Luhansk, an area the United Nations has called one of the most mine-contaminated places on Earth.

Police officers discovered the bodies of a couple -- both man and woman were aged 57 -- their 38-year-old son, and his common-law wife, also aged 38, near the charred remains of a Chevrolet Niva.

The incident took place in a wooded area near the Siversky Donets River, which marks the front line between territory controlled by government forces and Russia-backed separatists.

The family members were residents of Pischane village in the Stanytsia Luhanska district of Luhansk region and were reported missing by a neighbor on April 7, according to police.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) identified one of the women as Nina Vasylivna, a Pischane community leader who talked with the organization days earlier about raising chickens and growing vegetables in greenhouses to feed residents of the frontline village.

Police believe the family drove over an antitank mine with the car, resulting in a large blast that killed all four.

Photographs published to the website of Ukraines National Police show tire tracks beside a swathe of scorched earth several meters wide, the destroyed car, and what appears to be one of the bodies splayed out nearby.

Investigators first classified the incident as a homicide but have since changed it to a terrorist act.

Forensic experts, bomb disposal technicians, and members of an investigative team were still working at the scene on April 11, police said.

The United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) has called the area of eastern Ukraine where fighting has entered its fifth year one of the most mine-contaminated places on Earth.

UNICEF and the ICRC have both repeatedly called on all warring parties to immediately end the use of mines, which they say have contaminated communities and put residents -- especially children -- in constant danger of injury and death.

More than 10,300 people have been killed since the conflict broke out in April 2014, according to the United Nations.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Iran not to test Israel and compared Tehran to Nazi Germany on the day Israel commemorates the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

"I have a message to the Iranian rulers: Do not test the determination of the state of Israel," Netanyahu said on April 11 at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. "These are not empty words.

"During the Holocaust, we were helpless, defenseless, and voiceless. In truth, our voice was not heard at all. Today, we have a strong country, a strong army, and our voice is heard among the nations," Netanyahu said.

The Israeli leader's speech came two days after an air strike on a Syrian military base that Syria and Iran blamed on Israel. The strike killed at least 14 pro-government fighters, including seven Iranian soldiers.

Netanyahu has repeatedly warned Iran against trying to establish a permanent military presence in Syria, where it has been President Bashar al-Assad's staunchest ally in a seven-year civil war against Sunni rebels.

After the air strike, Tehran warned that it would retaliate against Israel, prompting Tel Aviv to put its military forces on high alert.

Israel appeared to justify the air strike afterward by citing an alleged chemical-weapons strike by Syrian forces in the town of Douma over the weekend that killed at least 40 Syrian civilians.

The United States and European allies are currently threatening to carry out retaliatory air strikes over the incident.

Netanyahu said in his address that every generation must "confront evil and aggression."

"We saw the Syrian children being slaughtered with chemical weapons. Our hearts were torn from the horror," he said.

"Today...a murderous regime threatens us.... This regime explicitly declares that it intends to annihilate us, the Jewish state," Netanyahu said.

He said a big lesson of the Holocaust is that "murderous evil" that goes unchallenged "spreads quickly and gradually threatens all of humanity."

Israel considers Iran an archenemy because of Tehran's repeated calls for destruction of the Jewish state and support for violent anti-Israeli groups like Palestine's Hamas and Lebanon's Hizballah.

Netanyahu compared Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers to the 1938 Munich Agreement, which was seen as a failed attempt by European powers to appease Nazi Germany.

The Iranian nuclear deal lifted sanctions on the country in exchange for limits on Tehran's nuclear activities. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, such as power generation.

Also on April 11, Netanyahu in a phone call told Russian President Vladimir Putin that Israel "will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria," his office said.

The Kremlin said the two leaders "discussed recent Israeli air strikes against the T-4 air base," and Putin called on Netanyahu not to take any action that could "further destabilize" Syria.

Putin "stressed the importance of respecting Syria's sovereignty," the Kremlin's website said.

With reporting by AP, AFP, and dpa

CALISTOGA  Father Mac admits it: He totally flunked retirement.

The Rev. William Father Mac McIlmoyl spent 23 years as rector at Grace Episcopal Church in St. Helena, but after retiring in May 2016, he said he was a little more adrift than I thought I would be, missing people and the congregation. And, he said, I missed being a priest. I really didnt realize how deeply that was in my identity.

Since January, McIlmoyl has been the priest in charge at St. Lukes Episcopal Church in Calistoga. The title is a bit of a misnomer, he said with a laugh, because, Im in charge of nothing. He serves on Sunday mornings, arranges for the liturgy, provides pastoral care for individuals and parishioners and works with the Rev. Deacon Susan Napoliello, who has been at St. Lukes for the past two years.

And although his job description calls for him to work two days a week, he said, I have no formal office hours. If someone needs spiritual care or guidance, McIlmoyl has a simple suggestion: I think the best way is to show up on a Sunday morning, introduce yourself to me and Susan, say hello and become a part of the family and ask whatever questions you feel like asking.

Fit is perfect

Church member Cathy Keag said the fit between McIlmoyl and St. Lukes is perfect. McIlmoyl is retired and didnt want another full-time job running a parish. St. Lukes is a small congregation and couldnt afford a full-time priest. Also, Keag said, Were pretty independent and self-sufficient, because weve been without a priest for so much of the time. We can handle most of it, she said.

Keag said after the former priest in charge, Mary Goshert Ekanstam, retired, the church leadership looked for a priest, but theres an extreme shortage of priests who can do part-time work. Lots of our small churches need that, because not many churches can afford a full-time priest. Churches are small and they have small budgets.

Napoliello came to St. Lukes about two years ago, just before Goshert Ekanstam, who had been at St. Lukes for four or five years, retired.

McIlmoyl thinks the world of Napoliello. Deacon Susan has been an unbelievable godsend to this congregation, he said. She really held this team together. Understandably, they let her do everything she could do, which was a lot.

She was responsible for liturgy, organizing the Lay Eucharistic Ministers, who serve at the altar and other kinds of volunteerism, McIlmoyl said. She spends time out in the community, starting the PFLAG (a Napa support group for Upvalley parents, families and allies of LGBTQ+ people) organization and was a presence at the Veterans Home. The PFLAG group meets the second Thursday of every month at the church.

She was the chief cook and bottle washer, he said. When she saw me coming, she thought, Wow, theres somebody else to join the team. Shes been great to work with. I continue to see us both very much as colleagues.

I needed a place to be

From May 2016 to January 2018, McIlmoyl and his wife, Sandi, attended different churches around the valley. But when they got to St. Lukes, something very special and very sweet happened, McIlmoyl said. There werent very many people, but they were so sweet and so welcoming, especially to my wife, which was very important to me. Sandi and I found a very comfortable home here and they have struggled without leadership.

And, McIlmoyl admitted, I really needed a place to be. So he offered to serve as priest and did so on and off for a while and added it felt very good. The vestry, the members of the church that provide leadership, talked among themselves, McIlmoyl said, about the possibility of having a relationship with me. I talked a lot about it with Sandi and it just seemed like the right thing to do. Heres a place that needed a priest, Im only eight miles away, and Im a priest that needed an altar and a pulpit, and it was a nice fit for our whole family, which is just me and Sandi.

Since St. Lukes is a mission church, one that is it is not self-supporting, it belongs to the Rt. Rev. Barry Beisner, bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Northern California, Keag said. Before McIlmoyl could serve at St. Lukes, Beisner had to approve the move.

McIlmoyl said he is confident his decision to retire from Grace Church was the right thing to do, although he said he came to realize that he desperately missed being behind the altar.

The fact remains that a priest is a priest. My ordination didnt go away just because I retired from that particular post. It didnt mean my ordination was no longer valid or I was no longer a priest. I realized that there was something very, very missing in my life, he said.

St. Lukes built in 1949

Keag, who is St. Lukes treasurer, Altar Guild member and president of Episcopal Church Women, said the concrete block church was finished in 1949, although the congregation is older than that. It might be 100 or close to 100 years old. Weve been around for a long time, she said.

In the 1940s, the women of the church raised the money to build it by selling Acoch-brand flatware. They ordered a lot of it  a set remains in use at the church  and went to every fair they could, Keag said, selling it to help build the church. Additionally, there are numerous brass plaques on the wall from early Calistoga families who were members and who helped build the church.

A lot of ladies melted their silver down to make the original chalices, Keag said.

Whats the future for St. Lukes? McIlmoyl said Calistoga has wonderful people and a great community. I think St. Lukes could be a real community benefit. It could be a place where people are spiritually nourished and sent back out into their lives with joy and love and spiritual grounding. Id like to see it have a prominent place in the community.BISHKEK  A group of Kyrgyz lawmakers has called for a thorough investigation into a violent protest that has hit a southern district over plans to build a new mining facility.

Lawmakers Aitmamat Nazarov, Dastan Jumabekov, and Irina Karamushkina on April 12 accused local officials and law enforcement authorities of failing to prevent a conflict that had been brewing for some time around gold mines in the Jalal-Abad region.

On April 10, thousands of residents of Toguz-Torou district set several buildings of the Kyrgyz-Chinese joint venture Makmal GL Developing ablaze and threw stones at police officers when they arrived to the site.

The rioters were protesting against plans to build a new gold processing facility near the town of Kazarman.

Prime Minister Sapar Isakov on April 12 sacked the district governor for failing to prevent the riot.

Law enforcement officials told RFE/RL that the situation in Kazarman was back under control after additional police forces deployed to the district from Bishkek.The chief executive of Russia's state-run oil giant Rosneft has testified in the appeals case of former Russian Economy Minister Aleksei Ulyukayev, who has been sentenced to eight years in prison for bribery.

Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, who did not show up at Ulyukayev's trial last year, gave his close-door testimony for about 90 minutes at the Moscow City Court on April 12.

Following Sechin's questiionning, the court gave Ulyukayev's defense team two hours to work out a new position.

No more details were made public.

A Moscow court on December 15 convicted Ulyukayev of taking a "large bribe" and sentenced him to eight years in a strict-regime prison.

Ulyukayevs lawyers asked the appeals court to cancel the verdict and sentence, saying the trial was biased.

Ulyukayev, who was fired by Putin hours after his arrest in the middle of the night in November 2016, is the highest Russian official to be arrested since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ulyukayev was found guilty of taking $2 million in cash from Sechin, a longtime Putin associate.

Prosecutors said the bribe was given in exchange for Ulyukayev approving the sale of state-controlled oil company Bashneft to Rosneft.

Police detained Ulyukayev inside Rosneft headquarters shortly after Sechin handed him the cash inside a lockable brown bag, prosecutors said.

Ulyukayev has said he thought the package contained a gift but that a trap had been set for him.

Ulyukayev is seen as a member of the liberal camp in the Russian ruling elite, while Sechin, a longtime former deputy chief of staff at the Kremlin, is perceived as a hard-liner and one of Putin's closest allies.

He refused to testify as a witness in court last year despite four summonses, saying that he was busy with work related to Rosneft -- the biggest Russian producer of oil, a key export.

With reporting by TASS, RIA Novosti, Interfax, and RapsinewsAman Tuleyev, the former governor of Russia's Kemerovo region in Siberia, has asked prosecutors to check and make public his incomes, expenditures, and property to prove that allegations about his "uncountable wealth" are false.

Tuleyev's office said on April 12 that opposition politician Aleksei Navalny's claim "disinforms" the public and "morally humiliates" the former governor.

On April 10, veteran Russian politician Tuleyev was elected as speaker of the Kemerovo regional legislature, eight days after he resigned as governor following a shopping-mall fire that killed 64 people.

The same day, Navalny posted on his website the findings of an investigation alleging that Tuleyev owns 12 big houses and other buildings on as many as 150,000 square meters in the region.

Tuleyev, 73, had been governor of the coal-mining Kemerovo region since 1997.

He resigned on April 1, saying it was "morally impossible" to stay on after the March 25 fire at the Zimnyaya Vishnya (Winter Cherry) mall in the regional capital -- one of the deadliest blazes in post-Soviet Russia.

Tuleyev had faced public calls to step down, including by people in a crowd of thousands who demonstrated outside his administration's office two days after the fire.

He and his subordinates were criticized over what many have seen as a callous response to the tragedy, including their characterizations of public outrage as the work of political opportunists.

Residents, relatives of victims, and Russians nationwide blamed corruption and government negligence for the high casualty toll in blaze.

Investigators said initial investigations indicated that blocked fire exits, a shutdown alarm system, and "glaring violations" of safety rules exacerbated the human toll of the fire.

Seven people have been arrested in the case, including the head of the local building-inspection agency and an executive with the firm that owns the shopping mall.

With reporting by TASSSyrian rebel fighters and their families continued to leave the Syrian town of Douma on April 12 through the Al-Wafideen crossing point, as Russian military police units prepared to enter the town. A withdrawal agreement was reached with the rebel group Jaish al-Islam hours after a suspected chemical weapons attack on the town. The Syrian and Russian governments deny such an attack took place. (Reuters)Dozens of children in the southern Tajik village of Chargi are recovering after they lost consciousness at school for no apparent reason.

School authorities and parents say a total of 27 children aged between 12 and 16 fainted one after another in the early afternoon of April 6, sparking rumors in the village that they had been poisoned.

Public-health authorities, however, concluded that the incident was collective hysteria caused by "faintheartedness."

"A team of toxicologists, psychologists, and other medical specialists thoroughly checked everything and everyone involved. They didn't find any sign of poisoning," Health Ministry spokeswoman Fazila Yaftalieva told RFE/RL on April 9.

Yaftalieva described students falling like dominoes. "First, one child fainted, then other children who saw him fall also lost consciousness because of faintheartedness," she said.

WATCH: A report from the school, in Tajik:



'Collective Hysteria'

The first to fall unconscious was 12-year-old Parziv Khusrav, a fifth-grader who recalls suddenly feeling faint when he "stood up to answer the teacher's question about the lesson."

"My head was swimming, I felt sick, and fell," Khusrav told RFE/RL.

Chargi school director Basbi Samadova said that three other pupils from the same class fainted some 20 minutes later, followed by several others.

Village doctors were called to the scene, at which point dozens of students -- most of them from the fifth and ninth grades -- fell to the ground within minutes of each other. The children complained of vertigo, nausea, and headaches.

The pupils were taken to a hospital in the district center, where they stayed overnight.

"They are feeling better now," Samadova says.

After taking blood samples and other tests and monitoring the children's health, doctors came to the conclusion that the children had not been poisoned.

"It was collective hysteria that was prompted by symptoms in one child," hospital chief Rustam Sharifov said.

The affected pupils in Chargi were in at least two different classrooms when they fell unconscious. Two other pupils were not even at school when they fainted the same day with similar symptoms.

Sharifamoh Alisher was among the children who passed out at school, while her older sister, Oluftamoh, fainted at home. "I felt dizzy and fell," Oluftamoh says. "I only remember feeling dizzy."

Food poisoning has been ruled out, because there is no school lunch or even a cafeteria in the small, one-story, mud-brick school building.

Some villagers suspected tainted water from a nearby well, where children often drink water, but tests ruled that out as well.

Pesticide Poisoning

A similar mass-fainting incident at another Tajik school nearly two years ago was blamed on poisoning by a pesticide commonly used to kill insects.

That incident involved 11 pupils who lost consciousness after allegedly collecting red roses from the schoolyard in the southern Vahdat district in May 2016.

Initially, it was explained as a severe allergic reaction, but doctors later said they found traces of the chemicals in the children's blood.

The same month, pesticide poisoning sent more than 50 pupils from the Shamsiddin Shohin district to the hospital.

No fatalities were recorded in either incident.

In Kazakhstan, dozens of children and adults lost consciousness at a school in the northwestern village of Berezovka in November 2014.

Similar incidents were reported in Berezovka the following year. The residents linked the cases to a nearby oil-and-gas field.

Kazakh authorities have since begun to resettle the villagers elsewhere.

Written by Farangis Najibullah based on reporting by RFE/RL's Tajik Service correspondent Mumin AhmadiPresident Donald Trump has promised a decision on possible military action in Syria "fairly soon," saying he is holding meetings with his advisers over the U.S. response to a suspected chemical attack in Syria, as Russia's UN envoy urged Washington and its allies to refrain from military action.

Trump had raised the possibility of an imminent military response to the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on April 7, warning Syria that missiles "will be coming" and criticizing Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" Trump wrote on April 12.

"In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'" he added.

Later on April 12, he said: "We're having a number of meetings today, we'll see what happens. Now we have to make some...decisions, so they'll be made fairly soon."

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on April 12 said he personally believed an "inexcusable" use of chemical weapons had taken place in Syria. But Mattis, at a congressional hearing on the Pentagon's 2019 budget request, declined to discuss military plans, saying just that legislative leaders would be notified before any attack was undertaken.

Syria and ally Russia deny there was a chemical attack and have warned that any missile strike on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces and facilities would be countered in kind.

Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said in New York on April 12 that the "immediate priority is to avert the danger of war."

Asked by reporters if he meant a war between the United States and Russia, Nebenzya said: "We cannot exclude any possibilities unfortunately because we saw messages that are coming from Washington. They were very bellicose."

"The danger of escalation is higher than simply Syria because our militaries are there.... So the situation is very dangerous."

Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, on April 12 urged against "any steps which could lead to an escalation of tensions."

And Assad said any potential action by Western states would contribute nothing but an increase in instability in the region, Syrian state television reported.

In an April 11 tweet, Trump told Russia to "get ready" because missiles "will be coming."

In response, the Russian Foreign Ministry said that missiles "should fly toward terrorists, not toward the lawful government" of Syria.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders later said that Trump's national security team had discussed "a number of options" in response to the attack.

"We are still considering a number of those, and a final decision on that front has not been made," she told reporters.

During a television interview, French President Emmanuel Macron said on April 12 that he would decide "in due course" whether to strike Syria.

French and U.S. officials are "working together very closely, and we will have decisions to take, at the time we choose, when we consider it most useful and most effective," Macron said.

"We have proof that last week chemical weapons were used, at least chlorine, and that they were used by Assads forces," he also said.

He did not give the source of his information.

In London, British Prime Minister Theresa May said late on April 11 that all indications pointed to Syrian government responsibility for "a shocking and barbaric act" that could not go unchallenged.

With reporting by AFP, AP, Reuters, and dpaU.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has signaled that the United States may impose "very strong" sanctions on Iran as President Donald Trump seeks to address what he called the "disastrous flaws" in the 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and world powers.

Mnuchin, testifying before a House appropriations subcommittee, said on April 11 that the measures would include sanctions against both Iran and entities that do business with the country.

He said he believed such sanctions would have a very strong impact" on the Iranian economy.

Trump has set a May 12 deadline to either improve or scrap the accord, which was negotiated under his predecessor, Barack Obama. The deal granted Iran relief from economic sanctions that have crippled its economy in exchange for limits on its nuclear activity.

Following the hearing, Mnuchin told reporters that the U.S. administration was considering both a fresh round of sanctions and the return of previous sanctions that have been periodically waived as part of the nuclear accord.

Trump "is very concerned about Iran's behavior" and "wants to have a better deal," Mnuchin told U.S. lawmakers.

He also said that the Trump administration was in talks with U.S. allies and would "not do anything abruptly."

The U.S. president accuses Tehran of violating the spirit of the nuclear deal and called on European powers to "fix" what he says are the "terrible flaws" of the agreement. He wants new restrictions to be imposed on Tehran's nuclear and missile programs.

France, Britain, and Germany  which are also signatories to the nuclear agreement, along with Russia and China -- are seeking to persuade their EU partners to back new sanctions on Iran, mainly on its missile program, in hopes of persuading Trump not to pull the United States out.

EU foreign ministers were set to meet in Luxembourg on April 16 to discuss the issue.

New EU measures against Iran could possible hit the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, but sources who were not authorized to speak on the record told RFE/RL that some member states, including Austria, Italy, and Sweden, remain reluctant to agree on new sanctions.

On April 9, Iranian President Hassan Rohani warned that Washington "will regret it" if the United States violates the accord.

"We are much more prepared than they think, and they will see that if they violate this accord, within a week, less than a week, they will see the result," Rohani said.

With reporting by Bloomberg and ReutersUkrainian President Petro Poroshenko has announced plans to quit the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and terminate parts of a friendship treaty with Russia.

Poroshenko urged the government to present a proposal to lawmakers on Ukraine's full withdrawal from the CIS, which Kyiv has been an associate member of since the group was formed following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

"Ukraine has never been a [full] member of the CIS and [given] CIS's failure to denounce Russia's aggression [in Ukraine], I would ask that we, together with the government, produce a proposal regarding an official termination of our participation in the statutory organs of the CIS," Poroshenko said at security forum in Kyiv on April 12.

Poroshenko also told the forum that he would propose a draft bill before parliament for "an immediate and unilateral termination of individual articles" of the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between Ukraine and Russia that were "incompatible with [Ukraine's] national interests and its right to self-defense."

Ukraine has been fighting against Russia-backed separatists in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk since April 2014, after Russia seized control of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.

Although Moscow denies interfering in Ukraine's domestic affairs, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in November 2016 determined the conflict to be "an international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation."

The conflict has left more than 10,300 people dead and some 1.6 million people displaced.

Full members of the CIS include Russia and eight former Soviet republics -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

With reporting by Obozrevatel.ua and Pravda.uaThe evident discrepancies in the bond measures wordage were uncovered by Richard Michael, a self-appointed Southern California bond watchdog.

He compiled a report on the school bond measures and wrote letters to local authorities demanding that they comply with the laws governing their drafting, including the new Obernolte law. But his pleas were ignored.

Its possible, though not probable, that faulty measures would be challenged in court and cancelled, even if they are approved by voters.

Obernoltes law had sparked much criticism from school officials. They said it was too difficult to obey, although another likely motive is that they feared voters would reject bonds if their full costs were revealed.

The critics have now persuaded Obernolte to introduce a new bill that exempts all local bond measures, including those of non-school agencies, from placing tax estimates in their ballot labels.

Unfortunately, we have realized that it is near to impossible to comply with the requirements of AB 195 for general obligation (GO) bonds, Obernoltes chief of staff, Teresa Trujillo, said in an email.The head of the United Nations and a former U.S. president warned against allowing the war in Syria to spiral out of control, hours after President Donald Trump told Syrian ally Russia to "get ready" for retaliatory missile strikes.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he called the ambassadors of the UN Security Council's veto-wielding powers late on April 11 -- the United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China -- "to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse."

Guterres said he "stressed the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control."

Meanwhile, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, in an interview with the Associated Press, urged Trump to "keep our country at peace and not exaggerate or exacerbate the challenges that come up with North Korea, in Russia, or in Syria."

The 93-year-old former president said that even one-time, conventional missiles like those Trump appears to be considering in response to an alleged chemical-weapons attack can be "a dangerous thing" that can spiral out of control when two nuclear powers are involved.

"I hope he realizes very profoundly, as I did, and as other presidents have done, that any nuclear exchange could involve catastrophe for all human beings," Carter told the AP.

Some top Russian officials, including Moscow's UN ambassador, have also urged caution and warned of "grave" consequences, while other top officials on both sides have said they expect "common sense" to prevail and prevent the situation from spiraling out of control.

Trump early on April 11 had suggested a missile strike on Syria might be imminent in retaliation for a suspected chemical-weapons attack in the town of Douma that killed at least 43 civilians on April 7.

Russia and Syria deny there was a chemical attack and have warned that any missile strike on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces and facilities would be countered in kind.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," Trump wrote on Twitter. "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

In response to Trump's tweet, the Russian Foreign Ministry said: "Smart missiles should fly towards terrorists, not towards the lawful government" of Syria.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders later said that Trump's national security team met on April 11 to discuss a number of options" in response to the suspected chemical-weapons attack in Syria.

We are still considering a number of those and a final decision on that front has not been made," she told reporters.

Sanders also said that Washington holds Russia and Syria responsible for the incident.

U.S., French, and British forces have positioned submarines and navy guided-missile destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean within striking distance of Syria in what appeared to be preparations for an attack, while Trump has repeatedly conferred with the leaders of both countries.

In London, British Prime Minister Theresa May said late on April 11 that all indications pointed to Syrian government responsibility for "a shocking and barbaric act" that could not go unchallenged.

May called ministers to a cabinet meeting on Syria on April 12, which media reports said was likely to lead to London joining in a military response to the suspected chemical attack.

Meanwhile, Russia and Syria claimed that Syrian government forces had taken full control of Douma, the site of the suspected chemical attack and the last rebel holdout in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta that had been under opposition control for years.

"Today, a significant event in the history of Syria took place. The raising of the [Syrian] flag over a building in the town of Douma signified control over this town and consequently over eastern Ghouta as a whole," Russian Major-General Yuri Yevtushenko said on April 12.

The claim has not been independently verified.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said pro-government forces were emptying main airports and military air bases throughout Syria.

The Syrian military has also been repositioning some air assets to avoid possible missile strikes, U.S. officials told Reuters.

Earlier on April 11, Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iran's supreme leader, said Tehran would "stand by Syria's government against any foreign aggression." Iran has been one of Syria's key allies.

The World Health Organization said that 43 people who died in the attack on Douma suffered "symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals" and more than 500 in all had been treated. In total, more than 70 people were killed during the attack, the WHO said.

Global stock markets fell on worries that what had been a seven-year civil war in Syria could escalate into an international conflict, while oil prices jumped to their highest levels in more than three years.

The UN Security Council is scheduled to meet on April 12 to discuss the escalation of rhetoric over Syria and threats of unilateral military action.

With reporting by AP, AFP, dpa, Interfax, and Reuters

All these years, Maruti Suzuki had 4 cars in the list of top 5 highest selling cars in India. Usually they had the top 4, and the fifth slot would either belong to a Hyunda Grand Santro, i10 or a i20. This happened for years. But, for the first time in years, Maruti owns all the top five slots in the list of highest selling cars in India for 2018-19.

Maruti Suzuki Alto  2.5 lakh units, DZire  2.4 lakh units, Baleno  1.9 lakh units, Swift  1.7 lakh units and WagonR  1.68 lakh units have each seen outstanding sales over the past fiscal.

Of these five best selling passenger cars, it was the WagonR that saw sales dip from 1.72 lakh units to 1.68 lakh units. Whereas, all other cars have posted an increase in sales.

Taking into account sales in FY16-17 and FY17-18 reveals that it was the Maruti Suzuki Baleno that recorded highest growth among these 5 best selling passenger cars. Baleno sales grew at 58% YoY followed by DZire sales. The Swift grew at 5.4% while the WagonR saw growth of just 2%.

Besides the smaller hatchbacks and sedans in the Maruti Suzuki lineup, it was seen that buyers in India are showing more preference to SUVs. Two more Maruti Suzuki models that featured in the list of top 10 best selling passenger cars included the Vitara Brezza at No. 7 with sales of 1.5 lakh units and growth of 37%. The Celerio was at No.10 with sales of 94,721 units and growth of 3%.

As compared to its closest competitor, Maruti Suzuki India Limited sold 16,43,467 units during the past fiscal, up 13.84% as compared to Hyundai Motors India which sold 5,36,241 units, up 5.21%.[Cairo] Experts and stakeholders in Egypt warn of imminent water poverty as a result of the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is about to become operational. Meanwhile, agricultural production consumes about 85 per cent of the countrys water resources, half of which goes towards rice irrigation.

Rice cultivation consumes more than 10 billion cubic meters of water annually, or more than one-sixth of Egypt's share of Nile water, Khaled Ghanem, professor of Organic Farming in Al-Azhar University, told SciDev.Net. And this does not account for the water used for cultivation in unauthorized areas, estimated to be about a third of that used in authorized ones, he explained.

But there could be a solution, in the form of a machine that ploughs fields in a manner that saves about half the amount of water usually used for irrigation, and a quarter of fertilizers used in cultivation. A specially imported unit, which sows rice seedlings mechanically, is mounted on the machine.

The machines Egyptian inventor, Mohamed El-Sayyed El-Hagarey, a researcher at the Desert Research Center in Cairo, was granted the prestigious WatSave Award for Young Professionals from the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) during the Second World Irrigation Forum held in Thailand in mid-November.



Rice cultivation consumes more than 10 billion cubic meters of water annually via traditional methods Sowing rice seedlings mechanically costs US$ 400 per acre, while sowing it manually cost US$ 150 The new machine ploughs fields in a manner that saves about half the amount of water usually used for irrigation, and a quarter of fertilizers used in cultivation, and a lot of time consumed in sowing seedlings The machine makes V shaped lines into the soil at a depth and width of 20cm, and sows rice seedlings automatically The V-shaped troughs maintains the water level necessary for rice to grow, but with less water than that is used in conventional agriculture that requires the entire plot of land to be completely submerged The machine also helped increasing the crop yield by 4.6 per cent

In an interview with SciDev.Net, El-Hagarey explained his motivation for inventing the machine. He said that during cultivation, rice requires complete submersion in a layer of water 10-15 cm above the soil surface, which demands huge amounts of water and fertilizers.

He designed the soil and water management machine to tackle this. The machine makes V shaped lines into the soil, at a depth and width of 20cm, and sows rice seedlings automatically. This operation maintains the water level necessary for rice to grow in the V-shaped troughs, which is less than the water used in conventional agriculture that requires the entire plot of land to be completely submerged.

The machine was tested in a field in Kafr el-Sheikh governorate, which is known for rice crop cultivation in Egypt, with good results. It reduced the amount of water used by half, and the crop yield increased by 4.6 per cent, Al-Hagary said.

This machine will save a lot of irrigation water in Egypt each year, which will help the country face these challenges and direct the water saved towards cultivating other crops. Khaled Ghanem, Al-Azhar University

Atef Sweilem, water management and irrigation expert at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, (ICARDA), praised the machine, but added that saving water and fertilizers would not tempt small farmers to buy it, as the increase in the yield was not huge. He pointed out that the rice agricultural plots owned by most farmers do not exceed half an acre.

Saving water and fertilizers does not mean much for farmers, who get water for free and fertilizers subsidized by the state, Sweilem explained.

Therefore, he believes that Egypts ministries of Agriculture and Water Resources and Irrigation should play an important role in supporting farmers financially and with training in using the machine.

Al-Hagary said the machine costs about US$5000, but needs further development before it is ready for commercial production.

He intends to re-submit a proposal to the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology in Egypt, hoping it would support further development of the innovation. An earlier proposal made in 2014 went unanswered, and he had to design it at his own expense.

Ghanem believes that Egypt needs to use this machine widely range for several reasons, the most important of which is the implications of Ethiopias Renaissance Dam on Egypt's share of water. He also referred to the effects of climate change including drought, desertification, and an increase in evaporation rates, as well as the water wasted along the Nile.

This machine will save a lot of irrigation water in Egypt each year, which will help the country face these challenges and direct the water saved towards cultivating other crops, Ghanem said.

He added: The concerned ministries might not pay attention to this innovation. The solution is to establish major companies to market similar innovations that can be funded by low-priced stocks, making them available to a larger number of consumers.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Nets Middle East and North Africa desk.A handful of tiny teeth have led scientists to identify the most distant ancestor of today's kangaroos. The fossils were found in the desert heart of Australia, and then hidden away, and almost forgotten in a museum collection for over three decades. The findings are published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Kangaroos are icons of Australia's unique living fauna. However, their earliest ancestry is shrouded in mystery. At the beginning of the 1980's, a few enigmatic molar teeth were excavated by palaeontologists hunting for fossils around a dry salt lake in northern South Australia. The rare specimens were recognised as an ancient kangaroo ancestor, but had to wait for over 30 years before modern computer-based analyses could confirm the significance of the discovery.

Originally dubbed Palaeopotorous priscus, Latin for '[very] ancient', 'ancient rat-kangaroo', by the now eminent Australian palaeontologists Prof. Tim Flannery (University of Melbourne) and Dr Tom Rich (Museums Victoria), the importance of these remains was suggested in their first unveiling to science.

"The teeth of Palaeopotorous were initially described in 1986. Even then they were stated as representing possibly the most primitive relative of the entire modern kangaroo radiation. Yet, nobody ever evaluated this claim, and despite being occasionally mentioned in the scientific literature, they were never again examined in detail," said Dr Wendy den Boer, who studied the fossils as part of her recently awarded PhD from Uppsala University in Sweden.

"The name Palaeopotorous was established using a single molar tooth, although, eleven other anatomically very similar teeth were recovered during the expedition. None of these fossils were found in association, so it is still unclear whether we are dealing with one, or more species," said Dr Benjamin Kear, Dr den Boer's PhD supervisor and co-author on the published article. "This uncertainly means that we have had to use a complex series of analyses to assess its morphological similarity and evolutionary relationships relative to other members of the kangaroo family tree."

"Our results showed that Palaeopotorous was most similar to living rat-kangaroos, as well as some other extinct kangaroo relatives. Using information from fossils, and the DNA of living species, we were able to further determine that at around 24 million years old, Palaeopotorous is not just primitive, but likely represents the most distant forerunner of all known kangaroos, rat-kangaroos and their more ancient ancestors," said Dr den Boer.

"Palaeopotorous was about the size of a small rabbit, and probably did not hop, but would have bounded on all four legs. Nevertheless, a few bones found at the same site in central Australia indicate that the earliest kangaroos already possessed some key adaptations for hopping gaits," said Dr Kear.

Palaeopotorous lived at a time when central Australia was much wetter than it is today. Its fossils were buried in clay deposits left by a river, but these earliest kangaroo ancestors would have foraged amongst vegetation growing nearby and along the banks. The teeth of Palaeopotorous were washed into the river after death, along with the remains of many other ancient marsupials.After years of tough drunk-driving penalties and numerous public awareness campaigns, DUI-related deaths in the U.S. have declined by about a third, yet still number about 10,000 a year. Now consider the results of driving experiments conducted by Car and Driver magazine: Sober drivers who were texting or reading email took significantly longer to react to an alert than drivers with a blood alcohol content of .08, a common legal standard for intoxication.

So in some situations, device-distracted driving is more dangerous than DUI. Yet in California, a driver who kills another person because of texting or talking on a handheld phone faces no more than a vehicular manslaughter charge  up to a year in jail, and possibly no jail time at all.

With the rate of smartphone ownership in the U.S. doubling from 2011 to 2018, one wonders how great the carnage will become. Will an organization as influential as Mothers Against Drunk Driving emerge to confront and stigmatize driving while intexticated? If not, what can bring about a meaningful cultural shift when millions of drivers are so addicted to their cellphones theyve become oblivious to their own safety, let alone the safety of others?An Oxford University collaboration has shed light on the origins of some of South East Asia's most iconic and unique wildlife; the 'deer-pig' (Sulawesi Babirusa), 'warty pig' and the 'miniature buffalo.' In doing so, the research has revealed that Sulawesi, the island paradise where they were discovered, is younger than previously thought.

Sitting in a region called Wallacea (named after Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the island), at the interface of Eurasia and Australia -- two vastly different eco-zones, the island of Sulawesi is home to hundreds of unique plant and animal species. The origin of these species has fascinated generations of Naturalists since the 1700s.

To better understand the ancestry of Sulawesi's extraordinary fauna, a team of researchers from Oxford's Department of Archaeology and Queen Mary University of London, used a combination of morphological and genetic data, alongside geological reconstructions of the island. Their analysis, which makes use of over one thousand samples, many of which were collected during the 19th and 20th century, represent the largest genetic study of these species.

The results reveal that though each species most likely arrived on what is now the island of Sulawesi at different times over the past 13 million years, all of them began to spread across the island simultaneously about 1-2 million years ago. This timing exactly coincides with geological evidence for the emergence of the arms of the island from the ocean. This coincidence indicates that the highly biodiverse and endemic ecosystems of Sulawesi have been assembled over a far more recent time frame than previously thought.

Professor Greger Larson, Director of Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network at Oxford and senior author of the study, said: 'Sulawesi is an amazing island, unlike any other on Earth. The key link between the three large mammals in this the study is that none of them fly. Sulawesi has been an island for a long time so however they arrived, they have been evolving in isolation.

'Understanding their evolutionary history was only possible by looking not only at their genetic signatures but also the geologic history of the island. The whole region is highly tectonic and we were able to reconstruct how much of the island was under water and when.

'Using a molecular clock we were then able to date the time of the expansion of all three species and by correlating those dates with the appearance of the different land masses that make up Sulawesi, we found a perfect temporal match.'

Laurent Frantz, Lecturer in Molecular Genetics and Informatics at the Queen Mary University of London said: 'Following his famous explorations, Alfred Wallace described Sulawesi as anomalous, first noting the merging of two immensely different worlds on this island. For a long time, we thought these anomalous ecosystems slowly assembled over tens of millions of years, as continents drifted. Yet, we now know that very recent geological processes, over only the last few million years, dramatically shaped this singular tropical paradise.

'This research relied not only on state-of-the-art technologies, but also the efforts of 19th and 20th century naturalists and museum curators, who meticulously collected and preserved specimens for future generations.'For more than 40 years, frog populations around the world have been declining. Now, a new study reports that some Central American frog species are recovering, perhaps because they have better defenses against a deadly fungal pathogen.

"It's a hopeful, optimistic chapter," said Louise Rollins-Smith, PhD, associate professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, and a co-author of a study recently published in the journal Science.

A collaborative group of investigators at multiple institutions showed that the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis continues to be as lethal now as it was more than 10 years ago. The antimicrobial defenses produced by frog skin, however, appear to be more effective than they were before the fungal epidemic began.

Rollins-Smith and her colleagues began studying how frogs combat B. dendrobatidis in Panama in 2004. For several years, Douglas Woodhams, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow on her team, and laboratory manager Laura Reinert made multiple trips to Central America to collect samples of frog skin secretions.

At the time, the fungal disease was spreading eastward from Costa Rica through Panama.

"There was a predictable wave of pathogen moving to new populations," said Rollins-Smith, who also traveled to Panama in 2010. "It gave us the opportunity to collect samples from populations of animals that had already encountered the epidemic and from the same species in places where the epidemic had not yet occurred."

The researchers found that skin secretions from frogs in areas with endemic (established) disease were more effective against the fungus compared to skin secretions from frogs that had not been exposed to the disease.

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They also compared early samples of the fungus to current samples, evaluating fungal genetics, growth patterns, infectability and production of substances that inhibit frog immune responses.

"By all of these criteria, the pathogen is not different," Rollins-Smith said.

The findings were surprising, she said.

"We expected that frogs were recovering because the pathogen had become less virulent. Instead, the pathogen seems to be just as virulent and the frog defenses appear to be better."

Rollins-Smith said it is not clear whether frogs that survived and are recovering already had better skin defenses or if the presence of the irritating fungus in the skin caused the skin defenses to change.

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Understanding how amphibian species recover from an epidemic may hold clues for improving conservation strategies and confronting emerging diseases in other species.

Rollins-Smith hopes to explore how the skin secretions have changed by defining and comparing the peptides (small protein pieces) in pre- and post-epidemic secretions.

Her team previously showed that frog skin secretions block HIV infection, and in recent work they have studied the effectiveness of frog skin secretions against a pathogen similar to the bacterium that causes gonorrhea.

"Frogs are a rich source of potentially useful molecules that might work against human pathogens," Rollins-Smith said.

She noted the critical role played by the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama in supporting these and other studies of amphibian populations.

Vanderbilt colleagues who contributed to the current studies included Reinert, Shawna McLetchie and Florence Ann Sobell. Jamie Voyles, PhD, at the University of Nevada, Reno, was the lead author of the Science paper.

Additional funding for the research was provided by the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the National Institutes of Health (grant GM103451).An analysis of radar data led scientists to an unexpected discovery of two lakes located beneath 550 to 750 metres of ice underneath the Devon Ice Cap, one of the largest ice caps in the Canadian Arctic. They are thought to be the first isolated hypersaline subglacial lakes in the world.

"We weren't looking for subglacial lakes. The ice is frozen to the ground underneath that part of the Devon Ice Cap, so we didn't expect to find liquid water," said Anja Rutishauser, PhD student at the University of Alberta, who made the discovery while studying airborne radar data acquired by NASA and The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) to describe the bedrock conditions underneath the Devon Ice Cap. Ice penetrating radar sounding measurements are based on electromagnetic waves that are sent through the ice and reflected back at contrasts in the subsurface materials, essentially allowing scientists to see through the ice.

"We saw these radar signatures telling us there's water, but we thought it was impossible that there could be liquid water underneath this ice, where it is below -10C."

While there are more than 400 known subglacial lakes in the world, concentrated primarily in Antarctica with a few in Greenland, these are the first found in the Canadian Arctic. And unlike all the others -- which are believed to contain freshwater -- these two appear to consist of hypersaline water. Rutishauser explained that the source of the salinity comes from salt-bearing geologic outcrops underneath the ice.

Rutishauser collaborated with her PhD supervisor, UAlberta glaciologist Martin Sharp and University of Texas geophysicist Don Blankenship as well as other scientists from University of Texas at Austin, Montana State University, Stanford University, and the Scott Polar Research Institute to test her hypothesis. The bodies of water -- roughly eight and five kilometres squared, respectively -- exist at temperatures below freezing and are not connected to any marine water sources or surface meltwater inputs, but rather are hypersaline, containing water four to five times saltier than seawater, which allows the water to remain liquid at these cold temperatures.

These newly discovered lakes are a potential habitat for microbial life and may assist scientists in the search for life beyond earth. Though all subglacial lakes are good analogues for life beyond Earth, the hypersaline nature of the Devon lakes makes them particularly tantalizing analogues for ice-covered moons in our solar system.

"We think they can serve as a good analogue for Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons, which has similar conditions of salty liquid water underneath -- and maybe within -- an ice shell," said Rutishauser.

"If there is microbial life in these lakes, it has likely been under the ice for at least 120,000 years, so it likely evolved in isolation. If we can collect a sample of the water, we may determine whether microbial life exists, how it evolved, and how it continues to live in this cold environment with no connection to the atmosphere."

Rutishauser believes that similar salty rock outcrops occur underneath other Canadian Arctic ice caps. "Although the Devon hypersaline subglacial lakes are very unique discoveries, we may find networks of brine-rich subglacial water systems elsewhere in the Canadian Arctic."

Rutishauser and her colleagues are now partnering with The W. Garfield Weston Foundation to undertake a more detailed airborne geophysical survey over the Devon Ice Cap this spring to derive more information about the lakes and their geological and hydrological contexts. For three generations, The W. Garfield Weston Foundation has pursued its mission to enhance and enrich the lives of Canadians. With a focus on medical research, the environment, and education, the Foundation aims to catalyze inquiry and innovation to bring about long-term change. As the Foundation marks its 60th anniversary, it continues to collaborate with a broad range of Canadian charities to further world-class research, explore new ideas, and create tangible benefits for the communities in which it works.

Following completion of her PhD with Sharp at the University of Alberta this summer, Rutishauser will start a postdoctoral fellowship in the fall at the University of Texas at Austin.Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) is a lethal disease in humans, caused by a coronavirus (MERS-CoV). It was first identified in man in 2012, in the Arabian Peninsula. The main MERS-CoV reservoir species is the dromedary, which is found in large numbers in many African countries. Why is it that they have never transmitted the virus to humans, as they have in parts of the Middle East? The first clues were published in an article in the journal PNAS on 5 March. The work in question associated researchers from CIRAD, in partnership with IRD and several African partners, and an international team led by Professor Malik Peiris from Hong Kong University, who is Scientific Director of the Institut Pasteur's Hong Kong research pole.

Genetic and phenotypic differences between coronaviruses could explain why there was an epidemic of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV) in humans in the Arabian Peninsula in 2012, but not in Morocco, Nigeria, Ethiopia or Burkina Faso, where the virus nevertheless circulates intensely between dromedaries. This was reported in a study published on 5 March in the journal PNAS, conducted by Hong Kong University, CIRAD, African organizations and a large international team. With a mortality rate in humans of 35%, and no treatment or vaccine available, the virus is now one of the 10 priority emerging diseases in terms of research and diagnosis identified by the World Health Organization.

The MERS-CoV strains circulating in African dromedaries are different from those isolated in the Arabian Peninsula, the only world region in which indigenous cases of MERS disease have been declared (except those cases declared after travel and nosocomial transmission). This work also showed that there is no contact, hence no recombination between the different strains. "The MERS-CoV seen in North and West Africa is a sub-group that differs not only from those in the Middle East but also from that seen in East Africa," says Veronique Chevalier, a CIRAD epidemiologist who was one of the co-authors of the publication. These slight genetic differences between the viruses isolated in the Arabian Peninsula and those found in dromedaries in West and North Africa could account for the fact that the disease has not been transmitted to humans in these regions.

"We are continuing our work on the mechanisms and factors of transmission within camelid po pulations and between dromedaries and man," Veronique Chevalier adds, "particularly in East Africa, where the absence of declared cases in humans despite the virus being similar to that isolated in the Arabian Peninsula remains to be studied in more detail." To this end, as part of the programme being conducted by the University of Hong Kong and CIRAD, two PhD students are being co-supervised in partnership with the Universities of Haramaya for animal health (by CIRAD and the IRD) and Addis Ababa for veterinary public health and the risks of transmission to humans (by HKU-PRP and CIRAD).

"Dromedaries are hugely socially, culturally and economically important in the countries where they are found. Their capacity for adaptation and resilience is extremely promising in the light of climate change. We are contonuing our ecology and epidemiology studies in the hope of understanding their role in the spread of several animal and zoonotic diseases" Francois Roger, Co-Head of UMR ASTRE for CIRAD.

This research fits into the One Health concept, which advocates studying animal and human health jointly, within a given ecological or socioeconomic context.An American, a Brit and a Dutch guy go for a walk. That may sound like the beginning of a joke, but it's actually the end of a USC-led study that could impact future research on physical activity.

With the help of fitness-tracking devices, an international team of scientists studied how physically active people consider themselves to be, versus how physically active they really are.

The research has revealed that no one gets it right. The American responses suggest they are as active as the Dutch or the English. Older people think they are as active as young people. In reality, though, Americans are much less active than the Europeans and older people are less active than the young.

Does this mean Americans are liars about their physical activity, or the Dutch and the English humbly underestimate theirs?

"It means people in different countries or at different age groups can have vastly different interpretations of the same survey questions," says Arie Kapteyn, the study's lead author and executive director of the Center for Economic and Social Research at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Kapteyn believes the differences in fitness perceptions are driven by cultural and environmental differences.

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For instance, Americans are largely dependent on cars while the Dutch frequently walk or ride bicycles to work and for simple errands, Kapteyn says.

The study was published on April 11 in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.

Perception vs. reality

For the study, the scientists tracked 540 participants from the United States, 748 people from the Netherlands and 254 from England.

Men and women in the study, ages 18 and up, were asked in a survey to report their physical activity on a five-point scale, ranging from inactive to very active. They also wore a fitness-tracking device on their wrist (an accelerometer) so that scientists could measure their actual physical activity over a seven-day period.

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The researchers found that the Dutch and English were slightly more likely to rate themselves toward the "moderate" center of the scale, while Americans tended to rate themselves at the extreme ends of the scale, either as "very active" or "inactive." But overall, the differences in how people from all three countries self-reported their physical activity was modest or non-existent.

The wearable devices revealed hard truths: Americans were much less physically active than both the Dutch and English. In fact, the percentage of Americans in the inactive category was nearly twice as large as the percentage of Dutch participants.

Reality bytes by age group

A comparison of fitness tracker data by age group reveals that people in all three countries are generally less active as they get older. That said, inactivity appeared more widespread among older Americans than participants in the other countries: 60 percent of Americans were inactive, compared to 42 percent of the Dutch and 32 percent of the English.

The researchers found that, in all three countries, the disparities between perceived and real activity levels were greatest among participants who reported that they were either "very active" or "very inactive."

"Individuals in different age groups simply have different standards of what it means to be physically active," said Kapteyn. "They adjust their standards based on their circumstances, including their age."

Kapteyn says that since physical activity is so central to a healthy life, accurate measurements are important to science. The findings indicate that scientists should proceed with caution when interpreting and comparing the results of international fitness studies that have utilized standardized questionnaires.

"When you rely on self-reported data, you're not only relying on people to share a common understanding of survey terms, but to accurately remember the physical activity that they report," says Kapteyn. "With the wide availability of low-cost activity tracking devices, we have the potential to make future studies more reliable."Many of the world's most charismatic animal species -- those that attract the largest interest and deepest empathy from the public -- are at high risk of extinction in part because many people believe their iconic stature guarantees their survival.

A new international study published today in PLOS Biology suggests that the popularity of tigers, lions, polar bears and others may actually contribute to the species' downfall.

The researchers used a combination of online surveys, school questionnaires, zoo websites and animated films to identify the 10 most charismatic animals. The top three were tigers, lions and elephants, followed by giraffes, leopards, pandas, cheetahs, polar bears, gray wolves and gorillas.

"I was surprised to see that although these 10 animals are the most charismatic, a major threat faced by nearly all of them is direct killing by humans, especially from hunting and snaring," said William Ripple, a distinguished professor of forest ecology at Oregon State University and a co-author on the study.

"This killing by humans seems sadly ironic to me, as these are some of our most beloved wild animals."

Many of these animals are so frequently depicted in pop culture and marketing materials that they may constitute a deceptive "virtual population" that is doing better in the media than in nature, noted lead author Franck Courchamp of the University of Paris.

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The researchers found, for example, that the average French citizen will see more virtual lions through photos, cartoons, logos and brands in one month than there are wild lions left in West Africa.

"Unknowingly, companies using giraffes, cheetahs or polar bears for marketing purposes may be actively contributing to the false perception that these animals are not at risk of extinction, and therefore not in need of conservation," Courchamp said.

In their paper, the researchers propose that companies using images of threatened species for marketing purposes provide information to promote their conservation, and perhaps part of their revenue for protection of the species.

Endangered species conservation efforts are numerous, though splintered. The researchers note that 20 million Americans took to the streets in 1970 to demonstrate on the first Earth Day, but there hasn't been a similar mobilization for conservation since.

Oregon State's Ripple said the concept of charismatic species is pervasive in conservation literature and the public may assume that efforts to ensure their survival are in place and successful.

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"Even much of the literature emphasizes the need to go beyond charismatic species and focus on the lesser known ones," Ripple said. "The public may be taking for granted that we're doing all we can to save them, when we don't even know for certain how many elephants, gorillas, or polar bears exist in the wild."

The status of most of the top charismatic species is cause for alarm, Ripple pointed out.

The abundance of tigers in the wild is estimated to be less than 7 percent of their historic number, and at least three sub-species -- Bali, Javan and Caspian tigers -- are now extinct.

Lions are declining almost everywhere in Africa, with populations estimated to be at less than 8 percent of historic levels; only 175 individuals are thought to exist in Eurasia -- all of these are in India.

The African forest elephant has declined by 62 percent in the last nine years, while savannah elephants are thought to be at less than 10 percent of their historic numbers -- mostly because of poaching.

Fewer than 2,000 pandas remain, occupying less than 1 percent of their historic range and their future is uncertain because of climate change.

"The top 10 charismatic animals are all mammals and include some of the largest carnivores and largest herbivores in the terrestrial world," Ripple said. "The fact that humans are also large mammals might explain why the public has a strong affinity for these 10 mammals -- it seems like people also love large animals much more than small ones."

Nearly half (48.6 percent) of all the non-teddy bear stuffed animals sold in the United States on Amazon were one of the 10 charismatic animals, while in France some 800,000 "Sophie the giraffe" baby toys were sold in 2010 -- more than eight times the numbers of giraffes living in Africa.

"The appearance of these beloved animals in stores, in movies, on television, and on a variety of products seems to be deluding the public into believing they are doing okay," Ripple said. "If we don't act in a concerted effort to save these species, that may soon be the only way anyone will see them."Karen Williams and her then-business partner, David Stevens, started selling Napa Valleys small-production wines from mostly unheard-of wineries at a time when such things were just not being done.

The year was 2003, and at that time the Napa Valley cult-wine phenomenon was relatively new, with many of such wines often exceptionally difficult to find but even harder to purchase.

Hence, ACME Fine Wines was born  a new model of wine shops that focused on finding, procuring and doling out some of Californias rarest and most highly sought-after wines to a clientele of luxury-seeking collectors and enthusiasts.

It was an exciting time  the world had come to desire cult wines from the Napa Valley, and because we were local and knew most of the producers we had a unique position, Williams said. The original list of cult wines never changed that much  Screaming Eagle, Harlan, Bryant, Abreu, Araujo, Colgin and a few others  but there were other wines out there that we called contenders that were certainly cult-worthy wines.

But back then, because many of these new contenders were ultra-small operations  often making less than a few hundred cases of wine with limited access to wine-buying clientele  winemakers had few options when it came to finding buyers who might pay hundreds of dollars for a little-known and unrated wine at the time from producers like Hourglass, Switchback, Bob Foley, Lail, Realm, Hundred Acre, Herb Lamb, Schrader, Paloma, Orin-Swift, Tor and many others.

A move to exclusive luxury wine sales

To me, it (ACME) represented a concerted move to the luxury Napa wine market by retail, said Dan Dawson, former owner of Back Room Wines retail shop who now runs Dan Dawsons Wine Advisor. From my recollection, they were the first retailer to successfully cater to the high-end wine buyer with tastings and luxury customer service. They did their part in expanding the success of high-end Napa wines beyond the first wave of Cult Cabs.

Jennifer Lamb, co-owner of Herb Lamb Vineyards, adds, ACME was (and remains) the only cutting-edge, Napa producer retail wine shop around. They actually sought out the smaller-producing, cult and off-the-wall varietal producers that no one had yet heard about.

Much of ACMEs initial success stemmed from where the two business partners had originally met and worked.

I had come to the valley to learn more about wine, Williams said. I had been working as a sommelier in Colorado and San Francisco but really wanted to become immersed, so I moved to St. Helena and got a job with Kent Rasmussen at his winery cleaning tanks and hauling hoses.

In order to make ends meet, Williams also began working as a bartender at Tra Vigne restaurant in St. Helena, where Stevens also worked.

People dont realize just how important Tra Vigne was to the Napa Valley, said winemaker Russell Bevan. It basically served as a hub for winemakers, owners and customers in the know who were looking for something that had a wow factor.

Williams and Stevens had come to realize that the customers at Tra Vigne had a real desire for finding and purchasing many of the wines they were serving.

The clients would come into the restaurant  Danny DeVito or Drew Bledsoe or they didnt have to be famous but just really interested in wine  theyd come in and say, Hey, where the heck can I buy this wine? Williams said. But because we were tasked with helping to serve them food, coffee, drinks, what we decided was that these customers needed more attention and time dedicated just to wine, and so that was the real motivation to strike out on our own and open ACME.

At first, they rented a tiny space in the old stone Pritchard Building in St. Helena, where they converted an old tool shed into a wine-storage room. There was no sign outside, and the only way to know about ACME was to be so into wine that through word of mouth you learned about this tiny, hidden gem where you might find a few bottles of the newest cult-worthy wine from the Napa Valley.

Before email and social media

ACME opened during a time when keeping in touch meant phone calls, faxes and printed newsletters  and, of course, face-to-face meetings.

We had a growing list of clients that always were looking for the next great wine, Williams said. But because wed left Tra Vigne we decided that taking a winemaker or winery owner to lunch every week would allow us to keep in touch with the new producers.

One of those meetings included Jennifer Lamb. She and her husband made only a few cases of Cabernet Sauvignon from their own grapes, which theyd been selling to the likes of Colgin for years.

I remember tasting Jennifers wine  it was spectacular, Williams said. Then she told me they only had 50 cases and I thought, I hope theres more of this in the future. When I mentioned my concern to Jennifer about having left Tra Vigne and losing that space, she told me something that really helped: Its not the place, its the people, she said.

Supporting emerging brands

In those days, there were more locals and struggling winemakers present at the tastings to sample wines than purchasing clientele, so it was always fun to see who would show up and what their opinion was of our wine, Lamb said. The eclectic array of wines that ACME promoted was amazing, even to a local, to the point that we actually joined one of their local find monthly wine clubs early on so that we could see who was producing wines in the neighborhood.

The ACME model of wine retail sales included something uncommon at the time: a luxury boutique approach.

After arriving in the Napa Valley, Amanda McCrossin, who is now one of the valleys most influential sommeliers, found ACMEs approach to wine sales unfamiliar but compelling.

I wandered in one day in search of wine and was greeted by one of the ladies, McCrossin said. It was an environment I was unaccustomed to, having been fresh off the boat from NYC, where the wine-buying experience is quite different. What I quickly came to realize was that this was a store intent on having a conversation and a relationship with the consumer.

The ACME model continues to evolve

The time of cult wines is not what it used to be, Williams said. Our customers are still focused on small producers of excellent wine, but the focus has shifted toward people looking to be educated on the wines and more eclectic varietals  where and how they were grown and made, the stories behind the wines and discovery. Scores are less important while these other things are becoming more important to many buyers.

Customers can stop in the ACME shop and pick up a bottle of hard-to-find wine or become a member of their wine club, which has various options  from the $500 per month Big Kahuna that focuses on collectors interested in Napa Cabernet to the $95-$107 per month, Under the Radar collection that includes two bottles of new, recently launched domestic wine. Of course, those interested in purchasing wine can do so directly from their website, (acmefinewines.com) too.

Although our business continues to evolve, the core of our philosophy is that we know each of our clients preferences and proclivities when it comes to wine, Williams said. We also never repeat a wine in any of our wine clubs and are constantly on the search for what is new and exciting. The way we think about it is, we do the searching, you do the discovering.Joel agreed with the explanation about increased dimension of wines from older vines as expressed by Mitch and Randle and added an additional thought on the nature of the vine itself. Old vines are not just about longevity but are an indication of vines totally in sync with a definitive terroir as they intuitively know their site and are more consistently expressive of the flavor of place.

Zinfandel, along with a few other varietals, has been able to stand the test of time by being among the first vines planted after the late 19th centurys bout with phyllorexa and its propensity for higher yields. During Prohibition some vineyards remained in production since grapes (primarily Zinfandel that traveled well) were shipped across the country for home winemaking as was allowed under the law.

Zinfandels second battle for survival was won during the late 1970s and 1980s when red varietals were pulled as white wines lead the market. Many older vineyards were spared when Sutter Home established itself as the trailblazer for White Zinfandel and others followed suit. Zinfandel has proven itself as the ultimate survivor.Last fall, when the Trump administration rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, Yosimar Reyes looked around the undocumented community and watched as the heaviness settled in.

Our lives were consumed with this tragic news of everything that was happening, he says. So Reyes, a poet, did what a poet often does: He wrote about what he was feeling, what other undocumented people were feeling.

I love my undocumented people/ I love us because every day we wake up to a country that hates us, he begins the poem. I love us/ Because we have constantly had to prove our humanity/ And constantly done it beautifully.

He ends it with this: But look at us/ Thriving.

Once he was done with the piece, he had another idea. Reyes imagined a room full of art by undocumented people, art that didnt play into the usual images of undocumented sorrow and fear, but instead made space for their resilience and joy.

Instead of asking What do you fear? or What are you scared of?  what if we were to ask What brings you joy? and How do you manage to thrive? Reyes says. Undocumented people wake up every day and still go to work and still go to school and still choose to thrive, and I think thats something to celebrate.

The result of that small but revelatory idea now hangs on the walls of the Missions Galeria de la Raza in a group show called #UndocuJoy. In all, 14 undocumented artists (chosen from about 100 applicants from across the United States), working in different media, display art that aims to reframe the stories of immigrants like themselves.

One artist, Kenia Guillen, who came to the United States from El Salvador, knits together old family movies shot in 2004 in El Salvador with more recent iPhone footage she collected during a return trip in 2017. Guillen wanted to celebrate the memories of her homeland, the beauty and the connections that she had to leave behind. Were asked to declare our homelands as unsafe, poverty-stricken dead ends in order to validate our presence here, she writes in her artist statement. But, for some of us, our lives did not start the moment we crossed the border. We were also loved on the other side, in our homelands.

Define American

Another artist, Leo Carmona, presents dynamic portraits of his grandparents, to remind viewers that conversations around undocumented immigration should also include elders  the original dreamers. Other artists address DACA directly, while still others reach back to tie their indigenous heritage to the present.

The pieces together serve to create a complex portrait, Reyes says. The exhibition, which he now expects to travel throughout the country, folding in more perspectives as it moves along, shows us as full human beings.

Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @RyanKost

#UndocuJoy: On display through Saturday, May 12, at Galeria de la Raza, 2857 24th St, S.F. www.galeriadelaraza.orgThe owners of a seaside apartment complex in Pacifica will pay $1.45 million in penalties after a state agency said they failed to maintain the seawall and public access stairway to a local beach and carried out unauthorized construction at the site in an attempt to fix it.

Board members of the California Coastal Commission on Thursday unanimously approved the settlement agreement with a group of companies affiliated with OceanAire Apartments, which sits on properties at 100 and 101 Esplanade Ave. in Pacifica.

The owners violations varied from dumping boulders that weighed up to 6 tons on the beach, grading and trenching the land and blocking public access to the beach  all without a coastal development permit, according to a report from the commission.

Having a public hearing on an item like this with a serious resolution and a serious amount of penalty sends a message that people need to take their (California) Coastal Act permit requirements seriously, said Lisa Haage, chief of enforcement for the commission. Were hoping this kind of casual response wouldnt happen in the future.

The public access stairway to the beach ultimately collapsed in December 2016, in part due to winter storms, high tide events, structural issues and a lack of maintenance on the part of the owners.

Dave Goldberg, an attorney representing OceanAire Apartments, said at Thursdays meeting that work is already under way to restore public access to the beach in the next few weeks, with more permanent fixes expected in the coming months.

This enforcement case is somewhat atypical, Goldberg told commissioners. Enforcement here did not rise out of an affirmative act to obstruct or remove access, rather, the events that gave rise to the obstructions to access arose from an unfortunate combination of severe weather events and  based on (owner) FPAs informed knowledge and belief  contractor error in constructing the seawall.

In the five months after the stair collapse, a commission report stated, repeated requests from staff to restore public access went ignored. The commission said it received a response only after informing owners in June 2017 that the agency opened a violation case.

The properties principal engineer responded that the storm caused seawall damage and did not warrant an investigation.

Both parties started exchanging information, but the owners of the properties did not go through with the commissions requests to provide more information and develop a plan to mitigate the violations, according to the report.

Instead, without seeking permits, the property owners began construction on the site at the end of October 2017 in an attempt to make the repairs. They did not contact the city of Pacifica, nor the commission.

The apartments, originally known as the Lands End Apartments, were permitted by the city in 1972 with a requirement that the owners build and maintain a public access stairway down the coastal bluff.

Its not the first time the stairs have given way. They washed out from erosion in 2004 and again in 2008, which closed access through 2010.

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Commissioners, aware of the ongoing erosion and bluff instability, issued a permit in 2013 permanently authorizing construction of a stairway and seawall. It included conditions to provide for potential erosion, structural failures and maintaining public access.

The commission could have fined owners $11,250 per day for each violation, which would have led to a $5,220,000 fee for one violation alone. The OceanAire Apartments are owned by FPA Multifamily; FPA/WC Lands End LLC; and FWC Lands End LLC. Trinity Property Consultants and Redwood Construction manages the complex.

Susan Jordan, executive director of the California Coastal Protection Network, said the case highlights the importance of keeping the coast clear.

Its always a reminder that you have to be vigilant when it comes to coastal access in our great state, she said. Theres always a situation that arises. Sometimes its out of mal-intent, sometimes its not, but its always happening.

Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJournoSan Francisco is looking to build on a new set of policing strategies that helped shrink auto burglaries significantly in the first three months of the year, after a dismal 2017 that saw an average of 85 break-ins a day, officials said Wednesday.

Citywide, car break-ins fell 17 percent in the period from January through March, compared with the same period last year, police data show. The number reported in March was down 24 percent year to year.

Officials credit the dip to a constellation of adjustments the city and its police force made to try to contain the epidemic, including expanding foot patrols, focusing on burglary hot spots and creating a centralized investigation team to pursue cases citywide.

Police said they have also placed a greater emphasis on collecting fingerprints from break-in crime scenes in an effort to grow the citys database of prints.

Perhaps the most visible example of the efforts in San Francisco  which posted the worst break-in rate of any big city in the state last year  is the Park Smart campaign, a public-awareness initiative to remind city residents, and especially vulnerable tourists, never to leave valuables in cars.

On Thursday, Mayor Mark Farrell and Police Chief Bill Scott will announce a vast expansion of the campaign.

San Francisco residents and visitors saw their faith in police ability to curb property crimes deeply shaken last year, when vehicle break-ins rose 24 percent from 2016. Less than 2 percent of those incidents resulted in arrests, data show, which has ramped up pressure on city officials to respond, and do it quickly.

Restoring confidence among motorists will take time, and city officials acknowledge that they have a long way to go. But the strides so far this year have city officials feeling theyre on the right track.

At the end of the day, a crime prevented is much better than a crime solved, Farrell said. We have a car break-in epidemic in San Francisco that, thankfully, has been decreasing here in 2018, but we cannot rest on our laurels.

The police force has nearly doubled foot patrol officers since September, from 76 to 140 since September, while reorganizing assignments at district stations to better address property crimes, officials said.

In November, Chief Scott reinstated a centralized investigative unit focused on robberies, burglaries and vehicle crimes. Ten investigators now work on car break-in cases exclusively, he said.

Farrell has also pledged to further increase overall police staffing in the citys upcoming budget.

Were working collaboratively with the SFPD to finalize those details, he said.

Police are also working to expand their database of fingerprints collected from car break-ins, a bid to spot repeat offenders.

Most officers carry fingerprinting kits when responding to car break-in calls, Scott said. But the department is now training 36 additional non-patrol officers to collect prints at all 10 district stations, giving victims more options when reporting a break-in.

Scott urged car break-in victims to spend the time needed for officers to process a car for prints.

You wake up and your cars been broken into. You still have to go to work, so you might not take that moment to get your car fingerprinted, Scott said. Oftentimes, theres absolutely nothing to follow up on. So whatever we can do to increase what we can get into our (fingerprint) database for comparison purposes, it helps us have a better chance of solving the case.

In February, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon set up a tip line for victims and witnesses of auto break-ins, and announced that he was seeking city funding to create an auto burglary task force.

In perhaps the most novel potential approach to the problem, the city has begun studying whether it should seek to create a dedicated criminal court department to deal with property crimes.

Im going to be exploring, with our criminal justice partners  including the court system, the district attorney and the public defender  ways that we can focus on car break-ins and make sure we hold people accountable, Farrell said.

While it may seem like an unsatisfactory solution to some, officials said the heightened public awareness about the property crime problem, and the need to clear cars of visible valuables, have served as a key deterrent to would-be thieves.

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The Park Smart campaigns theme is a simple one, Scott said: We just want to make sure people do everything they can to not make themselves easy prey.

In coming weeks, the city will be putting signs, stickers and pamphlets on parking meters, garages and Muni buses, reminding people to keep their valuables on their person, not in their cars.

If you love it, dont leave it, say many of the signs, which will be placed in well-traveled areas, tourist destinations and burglary hot spots.

Weve had some really sad stories, said Troy Campbell, executive director of the Fishermans Wharf Community Benefit District. People have had cameras stolen with all of their vacation photos on it; passports, cash, wallets.

In addition to Fishermans Wharf, the city plans to put Park Smart messaging at Fifth and Mission streets in the South of Market neighborhood, Alamo Square, Dolores Park and the Palace of Fine Arts.

Campbell said he was heartened by the decrease in break-ins.

Proliferating that message across the whole city, rather than just little organizations spreading the word here and there  its going to make a tremendous leap forward, he said.

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassaHunters Point activists and shipyard neighbors had hoped to get answers Wednesday night to newly released documents suggesting that misconduct in the federal cleanup of radioactive soil at San Franciscos biggest redevelopment site is likely far more widespread than previously reported.

But a community meeting by naval shipyard officials turned out to be an open house on waterfront cleanup plans for the site, which is slated for thousands of homes as well as offices, retail and industrial use  and not a forum for asking questions about wrongdoing.

Its a dog-and-pony show, said a frustrated Brian Butler, a community organizer for Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice. Stop calling them community meetings.

Butler and a handful of other advocates called on the Navy to establish a transparent cleanup process with community oversight and expressed doubts about the desire to clean up the former shipyard.

Theyve already spent a billion dollars to date, and this is the second time theyve been scammed, said Michelle Pierce of Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates. This is not going to get cleaned up. They are just going to keep throwing money at it until it goes away.

Derek Robinson, a Navy environmental coordinator at Hunters Point, attended the meeting but declined to answer questions about the alleged cleanup fraud.

A preliminary inquiry conducted by a team of U.S. Navy consultants last year found that nearly half of soil samples tested in two swaths of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a federal Superfund site since 1989, had been manipulated or falsified to make the pollution seem less severe. The revelation alarmed residents and workers in and around the burgeoning new neighborhood.

But a subsequent review by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state agencies found that the estimate significantly understated the failure of Tetra Tech, a Navy contractor paid between $350 million and $450 million to oversee the cleanup of the 450-acre property.

In fact, as much as 97 percent of Tetra Techs cleanup data for the two parcels was found to be suspect and should be retested, according to a Dec. 27 letter written by John Chesnutt, manager of the EPAs local Superfund Division, which was released this week by an environmental advocacy group.

The data analyzed demonstrate a widespread pattern of practices that appear to show deliberate falsification, failure to perform the work in a manner required to ensure (the EPAs approval) requirements were met, or both, Chesnutt stated.

The discrepancy has raised questions about whether the Navy properly responded to the scandal, said Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the Washington, D.C.-based organization that obtained Chesnutts letter.

Hunters Point is unfolding into the biggest case of eco-fraud in U.S. history, Executive Director Jeff Ruch said in a statement. The Navy created an environmental nightmare on this stretch of the San Francisco Bay but, instead of cleaning it up, has spent the past several years compounding it.

A waterfront property located in the citys southeast corner, the shipyard was long the site of nuclear weapons research, where Navy ships contaminated by hydrogen bomb tests were taken to be cleaned.

In recent years, however, it has been slated for the citys largest redevelopment project since the 1906 earthquake, with more than 12,000 housing units planned along with millions of square feet for retail, offices and research and development facilities.

To that end, the Navy hired Tetra Tech, a Pasadena-based company that has long-contracted with the EPA to assist in environmental clean ups.

But questions over the accuracy of soil tests overseen by Tetra Tech emerged in October 2012 when the Navy discovered that some results were inconsistent with results from previous samples collected in the same areas. Later, four whistle-blowers alleged the $1 billion cleanup effort had been marred by widespread fraud, faked soil samples and a high-pressure culture where speed was valued over accuracy and safety.

The workers said soil samples from areas known to be highly contaminated were switched with dirt gathered from the foundation of an old movie theater, where there were minimal toxic chemicals.

The nonprofit Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice filed a petition with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to revoke Tetra Techs license. David Anton, a lawyer for the workers who has alleged that at least 2,500 samples were faked, said the petition is pending.

I am not surprised at all, Anton said of the EPAs findings. What is really unusual, though, is the dramatic conflict between the Navys take and EPA and state agencies.

EPA spokeswoman Michele Huitric said the agencys assessment of the data included looking more closely for signs of data quality problems in addition to potential falsification. For example, EPA recommended resampling when data were missing or when different data collection methods did not produce consistent results, she said.

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EPA is pleased that the Navy will be resampling the impacted parcels and relying on these new data to determine where additional cleanup may be needed, Huitric said in a statement.

A Tetra Tech spokeswoman on Wednesday referred comments to the Navy. In a statement in June, Tetra Tech said the company emphatically denies the allegations made by individuals ... that Tetra Tech engaged in a cover-up of fraud on the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

Navy representatives could not be reached for comment. In January, The Chronicle reported that the Navy was preparing a comprehensive re-examination of the soil, slowing the redevelopment of the second phase of the property by at least a year.

FivePoint, the firm developing the property, directed questions about the cleanup to government agencies.

The Navys re-examination was slated to begin with Parcel G, a square block of flat land just to the south of the first phase of housing, that FivePoint had hoped would already have been transferred to prepare for construction.

In his December letter, however, Chesnutt highlighted two parcels, including Parcel G. For that piece of the property, he noted that although the Navy had recommended resampling 49 percent of the units, the EPA found that nearly all of the units should be retested.

The two parcels represent only 40 percent of the total site, raising the possibility of the need for even more testing and delays if the same pattern plays out across the other parcels, said Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

EPA is still reviewing the testing at other parcels covering 60 percent of the site, the group said. So there may be more shoes to drop.

Cynthia Dizikes and Michael Cabanatuan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: cdizikes@sfchronicle.com, mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.comCourts throughout the nation are considering President Trumps efforts to compel unwilling cities and states to help carry out his hard-line immigration policies. But his most far-reaching decree, a January 2017 order to cut off federal funds to San Francisco and other sanctuary cities, received an apparently chilly reception from a federal appeals court Wednesday.

Trump issued the executive order five days after taking office, telling Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that sanctuary jurisdictions are not eligible to receive any federal grants.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco issued a nationwide injunction blocking the order in April 2017. Attorneys in Sessions office had argued that Trump was referring only to a few federal grants, but Orrick said the presidents words, and his later statement on Fox News that a funding cutoff would be a weapon to force a change in sanctuary policies, showed that he was threatening local governments with losses of huge sums that he had no legal authority to withdraw.

The federal government funds a wide range of state and local programs, including schools, transportation, health care and social services. San Francisco receives about $2 billion a year in federal aid, one-fifth of its overall budget, and Santa Clara County, the other plaintiff in the suit against the Trump administration, receives $1.7 billion, more than one-third of its revenue.

On Wednesday, a high-ranking Justice Department lawyer, Assistant Attorney General Chad Readler, told the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that Trump hadnt made any threats or withdrawn any funding and had merely directed Sessions to carry out the law. Members of the three-judge panel seemed skeptical.

Chief Judge Sidney Thomas said Trump had made statements about withholding money from sanctuary cities, and the actions he took threatened their funding. Thomas also said the Trump administration appeared to be claiming authority that goes beyond federal law by seeking to require cities and counties to cooperate with immigration officers or lose their funding.

If Orricks interpretation of Trumps order was accurate, Thomas asked Readler, would you agree that the executive order was unconstitutional?

Perhaps, Readler replied, but Trumps order was actually much narrower and applied only to specific Justice Department and Homeland Security grants.

In that case, Thomas asked, why does the administration object to an injunction against withdrawing other categories of federal funding?

Judge Ronald Gould asked Readler whether Sessions, at Trumps directive, would have the constitutional authority to strip sanctuary cities of funding for education, health care and disaster relief. Readler said no such order had been issued.

Gould, however, also asked San Franciscos lawyer, Deputy City Attorney Christine Van Aken, why the city and Santa Clara County needed a nationwide injunction to protect their funding. Van Aken replied that Trumps order had nationwide impact.

The third panel member, Judge Ferdinand Fernandez, asked no questions during the 40-minute hearing.

More than 300 cities and counties nationwide have limited the cooperation their law enforcement agencies are allowed to extend to federal immigration officials seeking to detain and deport immigrants for crimes or illegal entry.

In a separate case before Orrick, the Trump administration is seeking to withdraw several million dollars from San Francisco and Santa Clara County for refusing to notify immigration officials of the planned release of undocumented immigrants in local custody. Orrick refused to dismiss the local governments case last month and has scheduled a hearing for September on whether the administration has the power to revoke the grants. A federal judge in Chicago has ruled in a similar case that no such advance notice to immigration officials is required by federal law.

The Trump administration has also sued the state of California, in federal court in Sacramento, seeking to overturn state laws that limit local governments authority to cooperate with immigration agents or allow them access to local jails and prohibit employers from allowing federal agents to enter private workplaces without a judicial warrant.

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.

At Wednesdays hearing, lawyers for San Francisco and Santa Clara County urged the court to reject the administrations attempt to interpret Trumps order as merely a directive to the Justice Department to target a few federal grants.

San Francisco has had to set aside substantial funds as a hedge against the prospect of federal withdrawal, and shouldnt be required simply to trust the federal government on this continuing threat, said Van Aken, the citys lawyer.

Danielle Goldstein, a deputy Santa Clara County counsel, noted that Trump had commended the city of Miami for revoking its sanctuary policy because it feared the loss of federal funds.

Trumps executive order, Goldstein said, forces her county to decide whether to follow its own policy or risk financial ruin.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@BobEgelkoPaul Chinn / The Chronicle 2017

General Motors Cruise division has snapped up the founding team of Zippy.ai, a San Francisco startup which sought to build autonomous delivery robots.

Zippys seven-person team started worked in February with Cruise in San Francisco on its push into self-driving cars, the companies said on Wednesday. GM has said it hopes to have fleets of robot taxis with no manual controls on the streets by 2019. Terms of the deal, which did not include Zippys product or intellectual property, were not disclosed.The number of H-1B applications for the next fiscal year dipped for the second year in a row  a trend experts say could be influenced by the current administrations America First rhetoric and a rise in scrutiny of companies petitions.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency said Thursday that it received 190,098 H-1B applications for the next fiscal year, a 4 percent drop from 2017, when 199,000 applications were filed. It is also a sharp decline from its peak in 2016, when the government received 236,000 applications.

The dip comes after years of steady increases in applications for the visa, which allows foreigners to live and work in the U.S. for three to six years. Tech companies large and small, particularly in Silicon Valley, have come to rely on the visa to staff engineering positions.

Only 85,000 visas are granted to for-profit companies every year, a number set in 2005 that hasnt budged despite the rise in demand.

Companies apply for the visa on behalf of the foreigner they want to hire, and the visas are doled out through a lottery held on the first Monday in April each year. Nonprofits like hospitals and colleges are exempt from the cap, so their petitions dont go through the lottery.

Under the Trump administration, officials doubled the number of requests for evidence issued, which are documents asking for more proof that a position requires a foreigners special skills. At the same time, the government also increased its number of denials, according to government data obtained by The Chronicle last year.

Experts say the threat of more requests for evidence and denials could have deterred some companies from using the program. It could have also pushed foreigners to seek out other countries with seemingly more welcoming immigration policies, such as Canada.

When we stop being this welcoming country to the best and brightest in the world, were ultimately limiting the ability for the economy to grow to only people within the United States of America, said immigration attorney Jason Finkelman.

But the decrease in overall numbers may have masked shifts in the companies requesting visas. Some lawyers, like Hiba Anver, an immigration attorney with the Erickson Immigration Group, said her firm, which represents large Bay Area tech companies, noticed an uptick in petitions this year.

Employers want to get as many cases filed as soon as possible because they are worried about how things are going to (change) in years to come, she previously told The Chronicle.

However, due to the increases in requests for evidence, Anver said many lawyers are now viewing H-1Bs as one of the harder visas to get approved. Employers have been looking at using other visas, like the O-1 or L-1, instead.

While the increased scrutiny has made the process of applying for an H-1B more rigorous, some foreigners like Alejandro Castillejo, 25, are undeterred.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

Castillejo, a Spanish citizen, was not chosen in the lottery last year and is taking another chance this year. Because he graduated with a technical degree, he has a few shots at the lottery. And the fewer people that apply, he said, the more likely he is to be chosen.

It would be nice to know if I had six years here, so I could take control of my life plans and not leave it to luck, he previously told The Chronicle. But, he added, if more people are deterred from the scrutiny, then thats lucky for me.

Editors note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the Erickson Immigration Group.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Wendy Lee contributed to this report.

Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @trishathadaniGood news for thousands of California community college students hoping to transfer into the University of California: Succeed in a rigorous set of courses, and your UC admission is guaranteed.

Students who begin community college in fall 2019 and do well in courses that UC faculty helped develop  the required grade-point average is still to be determined  will win admission into a UC campus under an agreement announced Wednesday by the two higher education systems.

The courses will lead to an associate degree for transfer into UC, similar to the degree established in 2013 for guaranteed transfer into California State University. Applicants may not get into their first choice, but will be admitted into one of the nine undergraduate UC campuses.

Im pleased that President Napolitano and I and our two Faculty Senates were willing to come together and improve access to more transfer students, California Community College Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley said, noting that transfer students at UC do as well as or better academically than those who begin as freshmen.

UC President Janet Napolitano said in a statement that collaborating with the community colleges will not only make it easier for qualified students to transfer to the university, it will help ensure that they excel once they arrive.

Currently, 21 community college majors satisfy UC rigor, UC officials said. The majors are some of the most popular at UC, they said, including psychology, anthropology, business administration and sociology.

Gov. Jerry Brown has said he considers increasing the number of UC transfer students to be a money-saver for the state. He has withheld $50 million from UCs budget in part until the university complies with state audit requirements, but another condition is that UC sign up one transfer student for every two freshmen who enroll.

UC has already achieved those numbers systemwide across its nine undergraduate campuses, said Claire Doan, a UC spokeswoman. But UC is also working hard to hit the target for each campus, she added.

In all, UC enrolled 20,000 transfer students this year  the most in its history. UCs enrollment of transfer students rose by 19 percent from 2013 to 2017, records show.

Most of those students, but not all, come from community colleges. UC increased the number of community college transfers by 18 percent during the same period, adding 2,819 more community college transfers.

The Chronicle also looked at community college transfers into CSU before and after its guaranteed admission program began in 2013. Surprisingly, the increase of transfer students slowed after it began.

In the four years before the program was set up, CSU added 18 percent more community college transfer students  an increase of 6,589 students, to 44,236.

In the four years after it began, community college transfers rose by 9 percent  an increase of 5,306 students, to 61,871.

COVID Resources Coronavirus Map Tracking COVID-19 cases across the Bay Area and California.

Although its not clear why the guarantee of admission didnt accelerate transfers into CSU, Paul Feist, a spokesman for the community college system suggested that lingering effects of the recession could be the cause.

Both systems were recovering from drastic cuts, he said.

Doan of UC said it was too early to predict how UCs new admissions guarantee might impact transfer enrollment.

But UC faculty and students have repeatedly complained to the governing Board of Regents that classroom space and dorms havent kept pace with rising enrollment.

In a nod to that reality, the new agreement promises that if transfer enrollment grows as as result of the admission guarantee, leaders of UC and the community college system will together ask the state for more money  a pre-requisite for transfer students success at the university.

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimovA few hundred feet beneath the oceans surface, spots known as twilight zones are home to extraordinary and glowing deepwater creatures that few humans have ever seen in their natural habitat. An exploration of life underwater, the twilight zone is featured in the latest California Academy of Sciences Planetarium show, Expedition Reef, a 24-minute cinematic adventure that was entirely created by a tiny but incredibly dedicated staff of designers and filmmakers who work in a twilight zone of their own.

Underneath the main level of the California Academy of Sciences sits, among other things, the VizStudio. Windowless and located next door to a jellyfish breeding facility, the studio is where designers and scientists work together to create all of the academys video elements, most notably the series of short science films presented in the museums planetarium.

Ken Ackerman joined the design team at the academy a few years ago. Now an animator and motion graphics designer, one of his initial tasks on the job was to animate a scared horse for part of the earthquake exhibit. That paranoid pony was the first of thousands of animals Ackerman has since animated for the California Academy of Sciences. In fact, for Expedition Reef, he worked on a scene that featured approximately 5,000 fish on the planetariums massive dome screen all at once.

We want people to walk away from this being in love with coral reefs, Ackerman said, sitting on a swivel chair in the underground studio. Ackerman is definitely in love with coral reefs, although its not quite clear if that love has always lived inside the 35-year-old or is a result of the two years he and the academys visuals team spent creating Expedition Reef.

Thats right. It can take up to two years to make a 25-minute show, and the process is almost as fascinating as the result. The topic of reefs came from the top. Jon Foley, the academys executive director, earmarked coral reef sustainability as one of the organizations five areas of focus (along with accessibility, environmental solution planning, educational materials development and a multimedia magazine called bioGraphic.)

Reefs it was for the visualization studio, and the small team got to work. Basically, all planetarium films start with a short list of bullet points that the audience should take away from the show. From there, scientists and experts on the subject come in and debate the most important things that need to be included in the 25-minute feature. According to Ackerman, these discussions can get thrillingly heated.

The team decided to start explaining the science of coral reefs at Devils Point, a location off the coast of the Philippines. They worked with scientists already on site, as well as a local company that flew drones throughout the area, to develop a near-perfect representation of the scenes both above and below the water.

Ackerman called dibs on animating the fish.

According to Tom Kennedy, producer and head of production, the Viz team has two main goals. They want the show to be correct, current and meaningful, which is a challenge considering the time it takes to make a film and the rapidly changing world of science.

Throughout the making of several of the Academys films, new discoveries meant that the script and design needed to be changed to reflect the most current scientific knowledge. Secondly, Kennedy wants folks to leave the planetarium inspired. Expedition Reef offers not only education on the issues facing coral reefs, but makes small suggestions on ways regular folks can help.

Upstairs, above the VizStudio and the jellyfish breeding lab, hundreds of CalAcademy visitors shuffled into their seats beneath the dome. One woman sitting near me managed to transform her coats and bags into a pillow, as if she was settling in for a trans-Atlantic flight. In some rather virtual ways, she was.

After ushers instructed us to keep our feetsies off the seatsies, Expedition Reef began, setting the first scene in the academys actual aquarium. Suddenly, the aquariums glass disappeared, and the audience was transported into a scientifically accurate underwater wonderland. We zipped into the air, we flew across the planet, we got up close and personal with the inside of an eels mouth. And somewhere, a few dozen feet below us, the men and women of the VizStudio were hard at work at finding new ways to visually explain whatever might come next for the planetarium, the world of science and the people of Earth.

Beth Spotswoods column appears Thursdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.comTuck some cheese between two slices of bread, cook until the bread is crisp and the cheese is melted, and voila!  youve got yourself a grilled cheese sandwich.

There may be no such thing as bad grilled cheese, but like so many seemingly simple dishes, the devils in the details. Achieving golden crisp and gooey nirvana can be harder than it looks.

So what constitutes a truly superior grilled cheese sandwich? Well, it depends on whom you ask.

For Michael Davidson, a.k.a. the Grilled Cheez Guy (also the name of his SoMa restaurant), his cheesy equivalent of Prousts madeleine is a variation based on the grilled cheese sandwich that his French grandmother used to make for him as an after-school snack.

That sandwich consisted of muenster and cheddar cheeses, along with some simple deli ham slipped between slices of not-too-fancy bread. But it was how she cooked it that really stood out: Her gimmick was that shed have a tin foil-wrapped brick that shed use to press down sandwiches.

Its a technique that Davidson, a former R&D scientist turned grilled cheese guru, has carried over to his own business, where he offers a rotating menu of different grilled cheese  all pressed.

When he first started doing pop-ups, Davidson used a flat-top griddle and a foil-wrapped brick like his grandmother, but he has since graduated to using a commercial panini press. He says he prefers this method because applying even pressure over medium-high heat guarantees a uniform melt and bread thats perfectly crisp and browned.

Now Playing: This playful - and great for a party - twist on nachos, is courtesy of Michael Davidson, a.k.a. the Grilled Cheez Guy. Video: SFChronicle

But not everyone is a fan of the panini/pressed method.

Heidi Gibson, author of a grilled cheese book and co-founder of the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen, prefers to cook her grilled cheese on a griddle with no pressure. She says that this method creates a crunchy exterior to the bread while leaving a soft layer underneath, allowing the cheese to slowly melt over medium-low heat.

A panini is a panini, and a grilled cheese does not smoosh, Gibson says.

However, Gibson agrees with Davidson on the emotional and nostalgic value of grilled cheese. They also both say that one of the keys to perfect golden brown crust is to butter the bread, not the pan.

Russell Yip / The Chronicle

Both use sliced cheese at their respective restaurants. Shredding will melt better generally, says Gibson, but she likes the visual of seeing distinct layers of cheese in her sandwiches. Its also easier for portion control.

Ultimately, as Davidson puts it, cheese is subjective. Unless its really fancy, most cheese melts.

The cheese may seem like the star, but Gibson says that the bread is even more important. Gibson has hers custom made by a South San Francisco bakery. Davidson uses Acme loaves. Since he presses his sandwiches, he slices the bread about an inch thick; Gibsons bread is sliced about -inch thick.

Using Gibson and Davidsons guidance and expertise as starting points, we at the Chronicle decided to create the best possible rendition of a classic grilled cheese.

We tested a dozen variations in the Chronicle Test Kitchen, pitting thinner pre-sliced bread against thicker hand-sliced bread, shredded cheese versus sliced cheese, pressed versus not pressed. As for exterior fat, we tried both softened and clarified butter, as well as mayonnaise  a trick learned from former Chronicle staff writer Lynne Char Bennett.

All of the sandwiches tested were pretty darn delicious, but the favorite (see recipe) among taste testers was made with pre-sliced bread and sliced cheese, griddled low and slow.

In perhaps the biggest surprise, the best exterior spread was mayonnaise. Much like butter, the mayo helped the bread turn a toasty golden brown, but also imparted a pleasant tang to contrast the richness of the cheese.

We opted for sourdough as our bread of choice. We live in San Francisco, so it seemed like a no-brainer to feature our iconic hometown bread. We tested Acmes sour batard, cut into 1-inch-thick slices for pressing, but ended up favoring the California Sourdough from Beckmanns in Santa Cruz, which comes in slices about -inch thick and has a sturdy and rugged texture that stands up well to spreading and griddling.

When it came to cooking techniques, the slower method won the day: The resulting juxtaposition of the breads crisp exterior and fluffy interior was preferred to the chewier texture of the fast-cooked pressed sandwiches.

Russell Yip / The Chronicle

For the cheese, we used a trio: mild American and Gouda for their meltability and a bit of pepper jack for a flavorful kick. Depending on the size of the bread, aim for 3 to 5 slices of cheese. As for the shredded versus sliced debate, we found there wasnt a huge difference between the two.

With so many possibilities, its easy to get lost in all the variables, but at the end of the day, the most important thing, as Gibson points out, is to make it your own.

Sarah Fritsche is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sfritsche@sfchronicle.com Twitter/Instagram: @foodcentric

Chef tips for grilled cheese perfection

1. The bread is key. Give as much thought to the type of bread as the type of cheese, says Sorrels Alex Hong, who loves using freshly baked sourdough focaccia.

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Heidi Gibson, of American Grilled Cheese Kitchen, shies away from bread that has added sugar, preferring a heartier bread such as one from Acme, Semifreddis or Tartine; she adds that fresh bread is fine, but its even better when its a day or two old. Batter Bakerys Jen Musty likes to use a hearty, whole grain bread, such as rye, seeded wheat or sesame, for tons of flavor and texture.

2. Use a spread on the exterior: Clarified butter, with its high smoke point, is great for restaurant service, says Gibson, but not necessary for home. Instead, try making a flavorful compound by mixing garlic powder into softened butter to spread on the outside of the bread.

Ayesha Curry melts butter in the pan and infuses it with fresh rosemary (see recipe), while her partner at International Smoke, Michael Mina, spreads softened butter on the slices of bread.

Nick Cobarruvias of Sons Addition is a mayonnaise fan; he says it helps the bread get a nice crust and adds some fat, which boosts the richness. Media Noches Casey Rebecca Nunes likes to spread garlic aioli on slices of bread.

3. Be fearless with the cheese. It takes a lot more cheese than you think to make a really good grilled cheese, so dont be afraid to really pile it on, says Rich Tables Sarah Rich.

Russell Yip / The Chronicle

Musty likes to combine ooey-gooey soft cheeses with something a bit drier for different levels of melt and flavor. Some of her favorite cheeses are Brillat-Savarin, Point Reyes Toma, blue cheese and manchego. Nunes is also a fan of using multiple cheeses, citing gluttony. Outerlands chef Yoni Levy, who has an intolerance for cow milk, uses a mixture of goats milk cheeses (chevre and cheddar) for the versions he makes at home.

4. If you add extras, add them at the right time. Michael Davidson (Grilled Cheez Guy) says deli meats should be added before cooking so they warm up as the cheese melts, but more delicate accompaniments, such as fresh herbs, tomato and avocado, should be added just before serving.

Because the cheese needs the most heat to melt, and since it better adheres to the bread, Gibson tucks additional fillings between the slices of cheese. She also likes to toast her tomatoes to intensify flavor and draw out some of the moisture, which she says is the enemy of grilled cheese.

Musty likes to add something spicy and something sweet (think hot honey, savory jam or pepper spread), as well as crunchy (pickles, apple or Asian pear slices). Nightbirds Kim Alter likes to add chopped scallions to her grilled cheese.

But dont go crazy with the add-ons, as Sarah Rich advises: Maaaaaaaybe Ill add some bacon or tomato but thats about it, and very rarely. I dont really get the appeal of adding a bunch of crap to a perfectly good grilled cheese.

5. Season, season, season: For an added flavor punch, dont forget to add a bit of salt and fresh-cracked pepper to the sandwich before it hits the griddle. After griddling, Levy rubs the hot, toasty bread with a few passes of raw garlic.

6. Its OK to char your cheese: For extra drips of cheese that will hit the pan and crisp as the sandwiches cook, place the cheese slices so the points stick out past the edges of the bread.Napa Valley College instructor Paul Wagner will be honored this year by the American Wine Society as the winner of its annual Award of Merit for 2018.

Paul has been a great friend not only to our organization, but also to the wine industry, said David Falcheck, executive director of the American Wine Society (AWS). Working in the background as a marketing professional and an educator, Paul has influenced the way the public drinks wine and thinks about wine. His passion and work has aligned with the AWS mission to promote wine appreciation through education.

Other recipients of the award include Robert Mondavi, Gina Gallo, Warren Winiarski, and UC Davis professor Maynard Amerine.

Its really lovely that they have done this, said Wagner, who will attend the organizations national conference in November to accept the award.

I have great respect for John Hames, who recently retired as the executive director of the AWS, and I am delighted that he is being honored with the Member of the Year Award at this same conference. And I have loved the many sessions at that national conferences that I have taught. The members are so appreciative and energized. I think I get more from them than they ever get from me.The National Park Service is abandoning its plan to more than double entrance fees at its most popular parks after strong public backlash, announcing Thursday more modest, yet broader price increases instead.

Starting June 1, the cost of a seven-day vehicle pass will increase by $5 at 117 parks, officials said. The parks now charge $15 to $30 for admission. Yosemites entrance fee will rise to $35.

Last year, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who oversees the Park Service, proposed raising entrance fees to $70 at 17 popular parks, including Yosemite, Sequoia-Kings Canyon and Joshua Tree, in an effort to shore up an $11.6 billion backlog of maintenance work across the agency.

The plan prompted more than 100,000 public comments, the bulk of which opposed the rate hike. Many worried that it would price Americans out of the nations iconic monuments and landscapes. Several critics praised the Park Services change of course.

The public spoke, and the administration listened, said Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association. The administrations move to abandon its original proposal in favor of more measured fee increases will put additional funds into enhancing park experiences without threatening visitation or local economies.

The new fee hike is expected to boost annual admissions revenue, which was $199 million in the 2016 fiscal year, by about $60 million. The earlier plan would have increased annual revenue by an estimated $70 million.

The money raised from the $5 fee increase will remain within the Park Service, with 80 percent of it staying at the park that collects the money. It will be used to upgrade visitor services, officials said, with much of it going to deferred maintenance.

I want to thank the American people who made their voices heard through the public comment process on the original fee proposal, Zinke said, in a statement. This is just one of the ways we are carrying out our commitment to ensure that national parks remain world class destinations that provide an excellent value for families from all income levels.

Still, some panned the fee hike, saying the Trump administration should be raising revenue for the Park Service by increasing the agencys budget, not burdening park users.

Secretary Zinkes decision to raise all national park entrance fees will barely make a dent in the $11.6 billion maintenance backlog, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D- Calif. Instead, this drastic fee hike will make visiting their national parks unaffordable for too many families.

The prices for both the America the Beautiful National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Annual Pass and the Lifetime Senior Pass will remain $80, according to the new plan. Those passes gain entrance into all national parks.

Annual passes for individual parks will increase $5 to $10, depending on the park. The seven-day price of admission for pedestrians, currently $7 to $15, will increase $3 to $5. The seven-day price of admission for motorcyclists, currently $10 to $25, will increase $5.

Most of the Park Services 417 historical, cultural and ecological sites, such as Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco, are free to enter. These areas will remain free.

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexanderHog & Rocks Scott Youkilis is still adjusting to the idea of not owning a restaurant in the Mission. The role is the only thing hes known for more than a decade, going back to his Maverick days.

Since 2010, when he and partner Dave Esler remodeled a run-down building on the corner of 19th and San Carlos, Youkilis has run Hog & Rocks there, a neighborhood hangout known for oysters, whiskey and a lively late-night crowd.

The restaurants final service will be Saturday, April 14.

Its a weird routine to have to leave behind, Youkilis said. Im just so used to getting up and going to work and just going about the day. But things change.

Things change, indeed. The amount of change on this particular stretch of 19th Street, between Mission and Valencia, could be even be seen as a microcosm of how rapidly the Mission has changed as a whole.

When we first opened, this area was super cheap eats, really, he said. Now, theres multiple Michelin stars in the area. Its great to be on the front of that, but it does have an effect.

John Storey / Special to the Chronicle

Youkilis Hi Lo BBQ was replaced by David Barzelays tasting menu restaurant Lazy Bear in 2014, a year after the barbecue spot opened. Boba Guys opened in the former Chamalyn space nearby. Come 2016, the famous Lexington Club was replaced by Wildhawk, a cocktail bar that ruffled a few feathers when it was announced. Most recently came Media Noche, the Instagram-friendly fast-casual space sporting 1950s Acapulco hues and pressed sandwiches.

Way back when, people from like Pac Heights or the Marina would just pop in to explore the dangerous Mission. Those were basically the tourist crowds. But now its normal to come here, Youkilis said with a laugh. Everything has shifted a bit over the years.

The last day at Hog & Rocks wont be elaborate, Youkilis said, mainly because the place is running with a skeleton crew. Most of the workers have moved on to other jobs.

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.

Instead, the lights will go off after closing time and the keys to the space will be handed over to Anthony Strong, who made his name cooking at Locanda, Pizzeria Delfina and most recently, his short-lived delivery-only restaurant, Young Fava.

When asked if there was anything almost kismet about handing his space over to a young chef like Strong, Youkilis just laughs.

I guess there is something interesting about that. But honestly, in this business its more about being a better businessman than a chef. You have to be business-savvy, he said. Anthony is great. Thats part of why I made a proposition and said I wanted to help him out. I think he can look at the restaurant industry and the model and improve it.

Hog and Rocks: 3431 19th St., between Mission and Valencia. (415) 550-8627 or www.hogandrocks.com

2 1 of 2 John Storey / Special to the Chronicle Show More Show Less 2 of 2 John Storey / Special to the Chronicle Show More Show Less



Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillipsSACRAMENTO  Gov. Jerry Brown said Wednesday that California would accept money from the Trump administration to beef up the states National Guard by 400 troops, but will not deploy service members specifically to the U.S.-Mexico border to stop undocumented immigrants from entering the country.

President Trump said last week that he wanted California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to send a total of 2,000 to 4,000 National Guard troops to the border, partly to stop a convoy of migrants from crossing into the country. The migrants, about 1,200 mostly from Honduras, had moved north into Mexico but largely disbanded there without approaching the U.S., although about 200 reportedly are expected to seek asylum in this country.

Trumps proclamation April 4 deploying the National Guard said he had no choice but to act to ensure national security.

Now Playing: The deployment of National Guard members to the U.S.-Mexico border at President Donald Trump's request was underway Tuesday. National Guard soldiers were seen along the Rio Grande river in south Texas. (April 11) Video: Associated Press

With our current laws and resources, we cannot stop illegal aliens from crossing the border, he said.

Related National Guardsmen arrive on the southern border to assist immigration authorities

The Republican governors of the three other states promptly said they would comply, but Brown waited several days. When he answered, the response was nuanced.

There is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California, Brown wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Defense Secretary James Mattis. He said the California National Guard would accept federal funding to add 400 service members to fight transnational criminal gangs, human trafficking, and firearms and drug smuggling along the border and across the state.

Lets be crystal clear on the scope of this mission, Brown wrote. This will not be a mission to build a new wall. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life. And the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws.

California now has 250 Guard members working throughout the state on efforts targeting gangs, smuggling and trafficking, including 55 who are stationed at the border.

Browns announcement straddled a line between accepting and rejecting Trumps request. One expert noted that if the administration goes along with Brown, both sides could claim victory  California would gain resources to fight transnational crime in the state, and Trump could claim the states cooperation on an issue that at least touches on illegal immigration.

Hes not absolutely rejecting the request, said Louis DeSipio, professor of political science and Chicano studies at UC Irvine. In the long run, its an untenable position for California to oppose the Trump administration on every policy.

There were calls from fellow Democrats for Brown to reject Trumps request outright.

State Sen. Kevin de Leon, whose SB54 sanctuary law minimizing local law enforcements cooperation with federal immigration agents is the target of a Trump administration lawsuit, said last week that Brown should ignore Trumps pointless and expensive call.

The Los Angeles Democrat, who is trying to unseat Sen. Dianne Feinstein in this years elections, said Wednesday, I appreciate that Gov. Brown has designed a clear and limited mission focused on real public safety threats  not phantom threats posed by women and children fleeing violence.

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.

There was no immediate response from the Trump administration on Browns request for money to pay for 400 new Guard troops. However, Homeland Security spokeswoman Katie Waldman said the governors efforts to help secure the border were welcome.

Nielsen and Brown spoke recently, Waldman said in a statement.

She is pleased to have the support of all four border governors to help secure our Southwest border. Issues of border security require the partnership of the federal government and our state and local allies to be successful.

At least one proponent of clamping down on illegal immigration said Brown needed to do more to keep California safe.

Jerry Brown has just admitted that there are transnational gangs operating on the U.S.-Mexico border, said Assemblyman Travis Allen, a Republican from Huntington Beach who is running for governor. Its necessary that we take steps to further secure our border to make sure that anyone coming into our state has been vetted and is coming through the front door.

If the Trump administration approves Californias funding request, Brown would retain the ability to decline certain missions. Its unclear how many of the new troops would be sent to the border. The memorandum outlining Californias conditions says the agreement would end Sept. 30.

Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MelodyGutierrezFormer Raiders and 49ers linebacker Aldon Smith had a blood alcohol content of 0.40  five times the legal limit for driving in California  when he showed up at the San Francisco Sheriffs Department last week to be fitted with GPS and alcohol-testing ankle monitors, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Smith, 28, whose career has been marred by troubles with the law, had been ordered to enroll in monitoring during a court appearance last Thursday following arrests stemming from a March 3 alleged domestic violence incident in San Francisco.

He arrived at the sheriffs department Friday evening to be fitted for the monitors, but he was extremely intoxicated, Assistant District Attorney Courtney Burris said at a brief court hearing Wednesday.

While at the sheriffs department, Smiths blood alcohol content rose slightly to 0.41, Burris said. He was taken into custody for violating a court order, and remains in custody on $500,000 bail.

Burris said the incident was evidence of a severe alcohol issue for Smith and recommended he be taken to a residential alcohol rehab facility for treatment.

Smith, wearing orange jail-issued clothing, only responded once to San Francisco Superior Court Judge Robert Foley during Wednesdays hearing, saying he understood his rights. His attorney, Josh Bentley, declined to comment outside court.

Smiths arrest Friday marked the third time he has been jailed in recent weeks following the alleged domestic violence incident. He allegedly assaulted a woman in a home on the 600 block of Bush Street on March 3 and fled the scene before San Francisco police arrived. He turned himself in three days later and posted $30,000 bond.

But three weeks after the alleged incident, Smith allegedly contacted the victim, prompting police to issue a warrant for his arrest. He was held on suspicion of three misdemeanor counts of violating a protective order after turning himself in.

Smith was in domestic violence court last week to face the new charges and was granted conditional release, which included not drinking alcohol. Thats when a judge ordered that he wear a GPS monitor and a SCRAM alcohol monitor. He has pleaded not guilty to charges in the domestic violence case.

The Raiders released Smith shortly after his arrest in early March. Smith played four seasons with the 49ers, but was released from the team following several brushes with the law.

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.

Smith has had alcohol-related run-ins with the law before, including DUIs. But Fridays arrest appeared to suggest severe addiction, one expert said.

If he can walk around at 0.40, he has to be exceptionally alcohol-dependent already, said Dr. Keith Humphreys, an addiction expert and professor in Stanfords Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science. Thats an exceptional amount of consumption. Anyone at that level has a serious alcohol problem.

Humphreys said Smith would likely have had to detoxify under medical supervision in jail.

That amount of alcohol is the equivalent of the anesthesia for major surgery, he said. A normal-type person would be blacked out unconscious and at risk of a coma.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffskySenate Judiciary and Commerce committees joint hearing, April 10.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.: So, would you work with us in terms of what regulations you think are necessary in your industry?

Mark Zuckerberg: Absolutely.

Graham: OK, would you submit to us some proposed regulations?

Zuckerberg: Yes, and Ill have my team follow up with you.

That was the mildly tense, obviously jovial and always civilized discussion Tuesday between a top U.S. lawmaker and the 33-year-old billionaire CEO whose company is accused of mishandling  no  deliberately selling for unknown and potentially malicious use, the personal data of hundreds of millions of individuals. The technology Mark Zuckerberg pioneered and the company he runs are both implicated in acts that possibly violate personal liberties and quite likely the source of atrocities of national political (the 2016 presidential election) and global humanitarian (Myanmar genocide) scale.

Contrast that with the coarse and boorish handling of 22-year-old Stephon Clark. The Sacramento son of rough hoods and impoverished upbringing was a suspect (and thus similarly innocent as Zuckerberg) in the breaking of car windows. Read that one more time  he was accused by police officers that night of March 18 of breaking glass. As the story unfolds over the next eight minutes, Sacramento police dispatched a helicopter to track him running into the yard of his grandmothers home, where officers on the ground shot at him 20 times, hitting him eight times (six bullets in the back)  because they mistook his cell phone for a gun. Make no mistake, the cops were armed and prepared for this encounter.

As Americans, we have been taught to revere the Founding Fathers and their notion of liberty and law. The Second Amendment, we are told, is to give free individuals of the free states the ability to withstand the potential rogue force of a standing federal army. But in the two examples above, the nation clearly has gotten it wrong. And because of these examples, and countless others in our country, the rest of the world is shaking its head at us in disbelief. Again.

Assuming that we agree the most lethal of liberties bestowed upon us is our right to bear arms; and that we also agree with Supreme Court rulings, such as the Heller decision, which further modified this right (by ignoring the well-regulated militia qualifier) to use guns to protect ourselves and not just the State, then we have to ask ourselves, was the intent of the founders that we use this right to protect against theft from automobiles or the theft of a nation?

Which of the two is the more egregious and worrisome crime? Which of the two suspects, if they were found guilty, is the more dangerous criminal?

The way we, as cities, states, a nation, have implemented our Second Amendment right leaves one to wonder how the ultimate punishment could be applied to the least meaningful of malefactors?

How is it that we can tolerate dispatching public resources  men, helicopters and bullets  to expeditiously extinguish the threat of stolen CDs and ashtray change, yet, when corporate billionaires are aiding and abetting atrocities of untold magnitude, we give them a cushy leather seat and a microphone in our ivory tower so they can tell lawmakers how hard to slap them on the wrist?

Chirag Asaravala lives in the East Bay.Throughout his career in Congress, Rep. Jeff Denham of Turlock has regularly appeared on Democratic lists of Republicans who can be knocked off in the next election  but hes always survived.

Hes there again this year, largely because Hillary Clinton outpolled Donald Trump in his district in 2016 and Denham won his own race by just three points.

On Thursday, a super PAC founded by former Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer launched an ad that seeks to turn a traditional Republican strength into a weakness: Denhams support from the National Rifle Association.

The 30-second digital ad by Boxers PAC for a Change opens with a photo of teenagers, coupled with the question: Isnt it time for reasonable gun laws to keep our kids safe? Congressman Jeff Denham doesnt think so.

In giving Denham an A rating, the NRAs 2016 endorsement letter praised him for opposing the Obama/Bloomberg/Clinton agenda of banning guns, ammunition, magazines, and creating a so-called universal background check system that would criminalize the private transfer of firearms.

Boxer told The Chronicle on Wednesday that Im just going against him on the truth. He is beloved by the NRA. I think that people need to understand that.

Denhams campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

With the issue of gun control surfacing in a more prominent way after the teenager-led protests after the killings of 17 students and adults in February at a Florida high school, Boxer said, its a different time and place. He doesnt support background checks? Are you kidding?

In the aftermath of that and other mass shootings, Boxer said, she thinks this is an issue that is very different than it was when (gun rights) people voted single issue.

The $25,000 ad buy will run for three weeks, targeting 100,000 voters in Denhams Central Valley district. Six Democrats and two Republicans, including Denham, are on the June 5 ballot.

Boxers super PAC has raised more than $2 million to spend on electing Democrats to the House and Senate.

 Joe Garofoli

Labors boost: The 2.1 million-member California Labor Federation endorsed Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom for governor and state Sen. Kevin de Leon for U.S. Senate on Thursday.

The endorsement could be particularly helpful in providing grassroots campaign help for de Leon.

According to the latest campaign finance reports, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has $9.8 million cash on hand going into the June 5 primary, compared with $359,261 for de Leon. She also sits on a personal fortune of more than $50 million. And she was also well ahead of the Los Angeles Democrat in a March poll by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

If (union members) do what I know theyre capable of doing, they can have a sizable impact, de Leon said after being informed of the endorsement.

In 2012, the labor federation endorsed Feinstein.

The groups executive secretary-treasurer, Art Pulaski, said de Leon was more closely allied with the labor federation on good jobs, climate change, $15 minimum wage, protecting immigrant workers and supporting the right to stand together in a union.

As for Newsom, Pulaski said the Democratic front-runner for governor has demonstrated that he will fight for the values that bind us together as Californians and vigorously resist any effort to dismantle the progress weve made to give working people a better life.

 Joe Garofoli[Editor's note: Since this story was published, Duna has closed and reopened as Smokebread, a lunch spot serving many of the same dishes as Duna, including the potato bread and cheese dip.]

Welcome to Housemade, a new Chronicle column by culinary scientist Ali Bouzari. Here, we will take diners on a guided tour of the silent sciences, brilliant ideas and awesome techniques behind your favorite restaurant menus.

At Duna, Nicolaus Balla and Cortney Burns serve weaponized grandma food. It feels like someone took the crispy, savory, tawny-but-not-burnt piece of cheese that falls off of every quesadilla onto the griddle ... and then built an entire restaurant with it. A restaurant review would spend 1,000 words judging whether or not the food tastes good. It tastes good. Now, instead, here are 1,500 words on how the Duna crew makes three of its unique dishes.

Housemade illustrations by Christina Chung

Potato flatbread

Quick version: Smoke potatoes over alder, hickory or apple wood. Chill potatoes, then grind and mix them with sourdough starter, salt and oil. Ferment for several hours and griddle to order.

At some restaurants, potatoes are inert, starchy gravy-catchers. At Duna, theyre perfume.

Potatoes are genetically destined for smoked greatness, and Dunas potato bread is barbecue brisket reincarnate. Our best tools for capturing smoke in food are fats, starches and proteins. Barbecue meats rely on a combination of fats and proteins, and the starches and proteins within potatoes form a tangled molecular web, perfect for ensnaring the heady fragrances that drift off of burning embers.

After smoking the potatoes, the Duna crew chills them before grinding them into the sourdough, which prevents gummy, molten starch from ruining the grinder  and keeps those carefully gathered aromas securely locked in their starchy prison.

Good barbecue goes beyond perfuming food with smoke, however. Hours of slow heat forge a new alloy of flavor from the combination of smoke and the proteins, sugars, fats and water in a piece of meat.

In Dunas flatbread, the molecular hammer takes the shape of microbes rather than heat. As yeast and bacteria in the sourdough starter feast on sugars, carbs, proteins and fats in the potatoes and wheat flour, the scraps that they cast aside form a mosaic of savory flavor that could never come from smoke alone.

Theres one more step: When alder, hickory, apple or any other hardwood bursts into flame, its carbohydrate skeletons disintegrate into fragments that often smell like warm vanilla and cloves. The skin of a potato is loaded with some of that same carbohydrate mise en place. Every service, a Duna cook finishes each flatbread to order by searing it in one of the six cast-iron skillets that are kept ripping hot at all times. When superheated cast iron meets shreds of potato skin embedded in the dough, the slight charring ignites one final flourish of barbecue brisket essence. In graduate school, I wrote a 356-page dissertation on cooking potatoes, and this dish still blows my mind.

Housemade Illustrations by Christina Chung

Liptauer cheese dip

Quick version: Mix milk and cream with dairy starter, and ferment for a couple of days. In a deep pot, heat fermented dairy mixture to set curds, and collect the butterfat that separates. Fry onions, garlic, chiles and paprika in butterfat. Blend fried mixture with curds and smoked potato. Top with more paprika, toasted sesame, herbs and garlic powder.

Milk proteins huddle together when exposed to acid. You can make fresh cheese curds by simply adding lemon juice or vinegar to milk, but the Duna crew opts to let microbes do the work, generating lactic acid and a cocktail of other flavors while theyre at it. The added cream, for example, ensures that the curdled milk proteins leave behind a thick layer of intensely flavored, cultured butterfat.

They take this infused butterfat and use it to saute a mixture of chiles, garlic and onions. An added spoonful of aged green chile paste, fermented with the same cultures as the milk, echoes the bright lactic edge of the dairy itself. When the vegetables are sufficiently soft, they blast the pan with paprika.

The house-made paprika at Duna deserves its own paragraph detour. A few years ago, Balla and Burns collaborated with Juston and Mindy Enos at Full Table Farm in Sonoma in search of the perfect pepper for drying. After countless trials sprouting and growing more than 50 cultivars of pepper, they abandoned seed catalogs altogether and tried reviving some seeds from a promising sample of oily Hungarian chile flakes. The seeds germinated, and the couple of peppers they got from that first plant were dripping with fragrant oil. Over years, they saved seeds from the individual plants that grew happiest in the Enoses Wine Country soil to breed a pepper unlike anything they had ever found in the U.S. They carefully dried them whole and arranged for Full Table to stone grind them to order each week.

Back to the dip: Fats are universal havens for aroma. When the hot butterfat ruptures intact cells remaining in the gently ground pepper powder, the fragrant oils released by the process are safely stored for later enjoyment. To stabilize the greasy multitudes and make the mixture dippable, they combine the fresh cheese curds with a small amount of leftover smoked potato before blending everything together. The whole concoction gets topped with a mixture of crunchy bits and an in-house garlic powder that is slow-dried from fresh cloves smashed by hand.

Duna kola

The quick version: Mix brown sugar and water with dried apples, dried apricots, dried cherries and wedges of fresh lemon. Ferment the mixture for two to four days with kefir culture. Strain and add fresh lemon juice, date molasses, buckwheat honey, vanilla, cinnamon, black pepper, allspice, juniper, black limes and salt. Pour into kegs, carbonate overnight and serve.

Store-bought colas drape sugary syrup in a thin veil of flavor intrigue with bubbles, purified caramel coloring, phosphoric acid and the ghostly remains of real spices in their natural flavors blend. A few minutes after opening a can, the bubbles depart and the illusion dissolves, leaving you mired in a sticky bog of sickening sweetness.

When sugar hits your tongue, it triggers a sweet beacon that ripples and bounces off of "tasty signals" from your other senses  such as textures, colors, temperatures, aromas, sounds  as they all compete to deliver the loudest flavor message to your brain. Duna's version of cola ("kola") relies on that sensory ruckus to pull you back from the edge of cloying sweetness with caramel-laden brown complexity, piercing acidity and bitingly aromatic spices. Mainstream colas check these boxes with precisely targeted, single-purpose compounds, but Duna curates an interlocking collage of intoxicating flavors drawn directly from the innards of whole ingredients.

There are only two ways to generate malty brownness in your food, whether it's coffee or croissants, fried chicken or flan, bourbon or aged balsamic vinegar. You can either use heat to blast sugars and proteins to roasty smithereens, or you can enlist a fleet of enzymes  microscopic protein demolition crews  to do it for you.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Duna applies both of these tactics to nearly every ingredient in its kola, lacquering layers of gently bitter brownness to a deep mahogany.

Instead of one-dimensional white sugar, brown sugar veils each lily-white granule of pure sucrose with murky, seasoned molasses. Unlike the aggressively preserved, sulfured fruit found in most bulk grocery bins, the dried apples, cherries and apricots at Duna taste like solid caramel. The gentle, persistent heat of a dehydrator drives natural enzymes in the fruit to kick-start the darkening process before they disintegrate into delicious amber bits. Buckwheat honey and date molasses render solar heat into sugary turmoil through weeks of slow caramelization in hot hives and outdoor drying mats.

The kola's dark master plan culminates with the spices; enzymes in vanilla pods, pepper berries and black limes (salted key limes that are dried and aged whole) instigate a graceful decomposition that continues for months as each ingredient matures to pitch black.

Balla keeps your brain lucid amid all that darkness by combining several flavors of edible acid to create illuminating flashes of sourness. Each type of acid contributes a different hue to the sour landscape. Cherries, apples and apricots are full of fruity malic acid, and the microbes in the kefir culture manufacture creamy lactic and bracing acetic acid.

The three ages of citrus  fermented lemon, fresh lemon and aged lime  contribute multifaceted sparks of crackling citric acid. The Duna crew also cranks up the pressure on their keg system to carbonate this soda hard, which brings the persistent low hum of carbonic acid to the party. Store-bought cola tastes sour; this kola tastes alive.

We perceive aromas when fragrant bits of food float up to chemical receptors in our noses. Those aromatic messages, however, aren't targeted missiles  they'll just as easily vanish into oblivion if we don't take care to release them at the right moment for smelling.

To make sure that the spices in Duna's kola don't get lost in the crossfire, everything is freshly ground and cold-steeped minutes before kegging. Oily spice aromas want nothing to do with the watery matrix of a soda, but the pressurized keg ceiling keeps volatile flavors from blowing away. As each glass is poured to order, effervescent bubbles trigger millions of perfectly timed micro-explosions that launch those scented oils skyward. If you don't know what allspice, juniper or black lime smell like, this will sear them into your memory.

***

Balla and Burns are always tinkering. Zoom in on a molecular level, and all of the food at Duna is packed to standing-room-only capacity for taste, aroma and color. Inside the restaurant right now, there are apples oxidizing, pepper pastes aging and millions of microbes working hard to mine flavor from unexpected places. Go to Duna tomorrow. Then again in a month, and then again in a year. Theyre leveraging the wisdom of all of our grandmas, and those kinds of ideas get better with age.

Dr. Ali Bouzari is a culinary scientist, author, and co-founder of Pilot R&D and Render. Twitter: @alibouzari Instagram: @bouzariali

Disclosure: Bouzari has collaborated with Balla and Burns in a professional capacity going back several years, most recently with Render, a company that develops chef products to bring to market.Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery  unless its a potential trademark infringement.

Levi Strauss & Co. filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California April 6 against Kenzo, alleging that the French brands recent La Collection Memento N2 archive denim capsule mimics Levis signature back-pocket tab. The San Francisco denim company is seeking an injunction against Kenzo to stop selling and producing items with the tab, as well as unspecified monetary damages. The Kenzo collection was launched last month with a campaign photographed by Peter Lindbergh and featuring pop star Britney Spears, whom the brand calls the quintessential queen of denim.

In the court filing, Levis alleges that Kenzo has manufactured, sourced, marketed and/or sold substantial quantities of jeans, shorts, overalls, and other garments bearing pocket tab devices that are highly similar to LS&Co.s Tab trademark.

A representative for Kenzo, which is owned by LVMH and overseen by creative directors Humberto Leon and Carole Lim (also the founders of Opening Ceremony), declined to comment. Levis told the Chronicle: We are constantly protecting and enforcing our trademark rights. We take any decision to file a new lawsuit very seriously and aim for amicable resolution.

Tony Bravo is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tbravo@sfchronicle.comAt the Navy Leagues Sea-Air-Space 2018 exposition currently held near Washington D.C., Japanese company Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is showcasing for the first time the concept model of the 30DX multi-mission frigate.

At the Navy Leagues Sea-Air-Space 2018 exposition currently held near Washington D.C., Japanese company Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is showcasing for the first time the concept model of the 30DX multi-mission frigate.

MHI showcasing its 30DX / Future Multi Mission Frigate concept model at Sea Air Space 2018



Japan's Acquisition Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA) announced on August 9th 2017 the launch of a new surface vessel programme called 30DX for the JMSDF. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) was selected as prime contractor while Mitsui Engineering & Shipbuilding (Mitsui) was selected as subcontractor. ATLA is a branch of Japan's MoD created in 2015 to "ensure technological superiority and respond to operational needs smoothly and quickly".



ATLA also announced that MHI would build the first vessel and Mitsui the second unit of the new class. Construction of the first two units is expected to begin in 2018; The series should consist of eight units built in pairs.

Video: MHI Future multi mission frigate.



The original plan considered a design similar to the American LCS concept, but finaly it looks like ATLA decided on a more conservative plan. MHI has been working (with its own funds) on the 30FF concept since 2015: A 3000 tons frigate capable of speeds in excess of 40 knots. However the latest ATLA CGI looks quite different compared to the 30FF design. The three main factors driving the 30DX design appear to be affordability, miniaturization/automation and multi-mission capabilities.



The 30DX will follow the latest Asahi-class of Destroyers. It will be quite smaller and some of its mission set include mine warfare. 30DX is expected to replace both the Asagiri-class destroyer (8 units built in the 1980ies) and the Abukuma-class destroyer escort (6 corvettes built in the late 1980ies/early 1990ies).

The frigate will be fitted with SeaRAM and some next generation anti-ship missiles.



According the ATLA, the 30DX is set to have a standard displacement of approximately 3,900 tons, a length of 130 meters and width of 16 meters. The top speed is set to be in excess of 30 knots. The propulsion system will be in CODAG arrangement with 1x Rolls-Royce MT30 gas turbine and 2x MAN diesel engines.



Specifications of the MHI scale model at Sea Air Space 2018 showed the same specifications except for the displacement: MHI is giving a value of 6,000 tons. A company representative explained that this is the "full load displacement" value, with all equipment onboard. Two propulsion systems are possible: propellers or waterjets.



The MHI representative (a naval architect) stressed that this future frigate is:

- Stealthy (applying MHI's radar and acoustic stealth technology),

- Smart (automated damage control system based on distributed sensors, ship ressource management and maneuver control)

- Scalable (modular compartment to accommodate the payload for greater mission requirements)



The goal of the programme is to come out with a vessel with similar or greater capabilities compared to the Akizuki-class of destroyers but on a smaller, smarter frigate design. MHI believes this design could match potential export customers, for this reason the Japanese company is showcasing its design at Sea Air Space 2018.

The future Multi Mission frigate will be fitted with an integrated mast and two RSW on top of the bridge.



The MHI representative didn't want to provide details about the weapon systems, however based on the scale model we can assume that the vessel will be fitted with a BAE Systems 5 inch Mark 45 naval gun system, 16x Mk41 VLS cells for surface to air missiles, 8x anti-ship missiles (likely XSSM because of the shape of the cannisters), a Raytheon SeaRAM short range missile launcher on top of the helicopter hangar, torpedo and decoy launchers.

As far as sensors are concerned, the 30DX is fitted with a multi-functionr radar (in an integrated mast possibly from NEC), Electro Optic sensors, variable depth sonar and passive towed array as well as a hull mounted mine countermeasure sonar. 30DX will be able to deploy and recover UUV, USV, helicopter as well as sea mines.

The future Multi Mission frigate / 30DX conceptual model at Sea Air Space 2018 on MHI booth.

The owners of a seaside apartment complex in Pacifica will pay $1.45 million in penalties after a state agency said they failed to maintain the seawall and public access stairway to a local beach and carried out unauthorized construction at the site in an attempt to fix it.

Board members of the California Coastal Commission on Thursday unanimously approved the settlement agreement with a group of companies affiliated with OceanAire Apartments, which sits on properties at 100 and 101 Esplanade Ave. in Pacifica.

The owners violations varied from dumping boulders that weighed up to 6 tons on the beach, grading and trenching the land and blocking public access to the beach  all without a coastal development permit, according to a report from the commission.

Having a public hearing on an item like this with a serious resolution and a serious amount of penalty sends a message that people need to take their (California) Coastal Act permit requirements seriously, said Lisa Haage, chief of enforcement for the commission. Were hoping this kind of casual response wouldnt happen in the future.

The public access stairway to the beach ultimately collapsed in December 2016, in part due to winter storms, high tide events, structural issues and a lack of maintenance on the part of the owners.

Dave Goldberg, an attorney representing OceanAire Apartments, said at Thursdays meeting that work is already under way to restore public access to the beach in the next few weeks, with more permanent fixes expected in the coming months.

This enforcement case is somewhat atypical, Goldberg told commissioners. Enforcement here did not rise out of an affirmative act to obstruct or remove access, rather, the events that gave rise to the obstructions to access arose from an unfortunate combination of severe weather events and  based on (owner) FPAs informed knowledge and belief  contractor error in constructing the seawall.

In the five months after the stair collapse, a commission report stated, repeated requests from staff to restore public access went ignored. The commission said it received a response only after informing owners in June 2017 that the agency opened a violation case.

The properties principal engineer responded that the storm caused seawall damage and did not warrant an investigation.

Both parties started exchanging information, but the owners of the properties did not go through with the commissions requests to provide more information and develop a plan to mitigate the violations, according to the report.

Instead, without seeking permits, the property owners began construction on the site at the end of October 2017 in an attempt to make the repairs. They did not contact the city of Pacifica, nor the commission.

The apartments, originally known as the Lands End Apartments, were permitted by the city in 1972 with a requirement that the owners build and maintain a public access stairway down the coastal bluff.

Its not the first time the stairs have given way. They washed out from erosion in 2004 and again in 2008, which closed access through 2010.

Commissioners, aware of the ongoing erosion and bluff instability, issued a permit in 2013 permanently authorizing construction of a stairway and seawall. It included conditions to provide for potential erosion, structural failures and maintaining public access.

The commission could have fined owners $11,250 per day for each violation, which would have led to a $5,220,000 fee for one violation alone. The OceanAire Apartments are owned by FPA Multifamily; FPA/WC Lands End LLC; and FWC Lands End LLC. Trinity Property Consultants and Redwood Construction manages the complex.

Susan Jordan, executive director of the California Coastal Protection Network, said the case highlights the importance of keeping the coast clear.

Its always a reminder that you have to be vigilant when it comes to coastal access in our great state, she said. Theres always a situation that arises. Sometimes its out of mal-intent, sometimes its not, but its always happening.

Jenna Lyons is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jlyons@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JennaJournoA colorful tribute to Prince has attracted media attention to a Sacramento suburb  including a flood of visitors to the artist's home, sending her into apparent seclusion.

The mural was painted by Citrus Heights artist Christine Stein in 2016 after the artist's death and was strategically placed in her front yard, enshrouded in a tree that serves as a leafy version of Prince's hair.

The tribute, however, is receiving fresh attention after a photo Stein posted to social media on Easter showed the tree in bloom.

"Our #Prince bush started flowering all of a sudden!" Stein wrote on Twitter. "Now there are hundreds bees buzzing and a few birds living in the bush! Happy #Easter Everyone!"

The photo spread internationally, with publications such as Britain's Independent writing about the Sacramento "Prince tree."

Stein is now encountering Prince fans outside her home, arriving from as far as Georgia, Florida and Minnesota, The California Sun reported. According to Stein, visitors leave items such as flowers, wax sculptures and other odd items, calling the groups that arrive "very nice people" but "fanatics."

"They have all purple going on," Stein told the California Sun. "They have purple hair."

Now, it seems the artist is seeking a bit of privacy from the purple one's fans, according to The California Sun:

"Stein said she used to chat with the pilgrims. Now, she's disconnected her doorbell, covered her front windows, and started using a side entrance to her home. She even put a fake address number on the house."

The flow of visitors isn't expected to dwindle anytime soon, however. The anniversary of Prince's death is around the corner on April 21, and the crowds are only expected to get worse.

As for the reason behind the suddenly flowering tree, Stein told broadcast station KCRA that she wasn't aware that the tree could even bloom. She attributed the floral display to an accidental delivery of mulch that was dropped off in front of the tree, saying it may have given the plant some extra nutrients, causing it to flower the way it did.

But before the Prince mural became the phenomenon that it was, Stein had another artist enshrined at that tree: Bob Ross.

"Before the Prince mural was up, I had another mural of Bob Ross that made people happy," Stein said in 2016. "I hope to make people happy in my neighborhood with this Prince mural, and possibly inspire others to do more public art."One hundred years ago, amid armed combat around the world, Randolph Bourne, a contributing editor at the New Republic, proclaimed that war is essentially the health of the State. The moment a government declares war, Bourne wrote, the vast majority of its citizens identify with its purposes. The state, now an august presence, walks through their imaginations and becomes the inexorable arbiter and determinant of attitudes and opinions. As the masses allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction, the state maintains and augments the prerogatives of power.

In Empire of Guns, Priya Satia, a professor of history at Stanford University, provides a perspective that complements Bournes. Focusing primarily on 18th century England, Satia claims that war, and, more specifically, the gun industry, helped usher in the Industrial Revolution, redefined the roles of public and private sectors and the functions and contours of the state, and facilitated imperial expansion.

Empire of Guns covers a lot of ground. Extraordinarily (and, at times, excessively) detailed chapters address the evolving state of the gun trade in Birmingham; the myth of pacific British industrialism and the reality of continuous war; the social life of guns in England, Africa, India and North America; the relationship between guns, money and private property; changes in the firearms industry after 1815; and opposition to the gun trade over the past 200 years.

Satia makes clear where she stands. Deeply bound up with the rise of the very principle of property, she writes, guns (along with the law) protected its impersonal, bourgeois qualities. The sheer insanity of mass production of arms and the uses to which they were put, she indicates, pervaded 18th century England.

Industrial-capitalist society survives, Satia asserts, by focusing critical energy on elimination of particular evils and abuses rather than on the perniciousness of that entire mode of existence.

These days as well, recognition of wide areas of complicity in arms manufacturing and sales is accompanied by a failure to indict the mode of industrial-capitalist imperialism in which these iniquities have flourished  at least since the collapse of Marxism.

Satia illuminates many of her key themes in an account of the controversy between the Birmingham Chapter of the Society of Friends, which in 1795 censured Samuel Galton Jr., one of the most prominent gun manufacturers in England, for violating the pacifist principles of the Quakers. In his defense, Galton pointed out that his family had been engaged in this Manufactory for 70 years before receiving any Animadversions from the society. The assets of the gun business, he pointed out, were not easily convertible to other purposes.

Galton emphasized as well that arms manufacturing did not in and of itself cause or promote offensive war. Scripture, he added, sanctioned war. In any event, he was no more responsible for the uses to which guns were put than were distillers for the abuse of alcohol. Most important, by paying taxes and engaging in many, many other activities, all Quakers furnished the means of war in some incremental way.

His logical exercise, Galton concluded, demonstrated that the Practice of your principles is not compatible with the situation in which Providence has placed us. Echoing an emerging tenet of capitalism, that consumers, not producers, should exercise moral principles in the economy, Galton suggested that the answer was to respect the Right and Duty of Private Judgment.

Although she takes Galton to task for failing to recognize differences in degrees of complicity, Satia notes that his defense helps us understand how what appears hypocritical might have felt ethically consistent in a different imagining of the world. She reveals as well that although the Birmingham Meeting did not find his arguments persuasive and disowned him, Galton did not accept the verdict. He continued to attend worship, engaged in charitable work, and emerged with little damage to his reputation.

By focusing on a single toxic activity, Satia concludes, rather harshly, both sides avoided the truth that modern life is founded, intrinsically, on militarism and that industrial life has historically depended on it.

Satia appears to believe that things have not gotten better in the 21st century. To be sure, four developed countries (Japan, Great Britain, Australia and Canada) have enacted legislation to reduce gun violence. In the United States, however, in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protected the right of individuals to possess firearms unconnected with militia service. And, Satia emphasizes, small arms remain the most abundant and most destructive category of weapons and the only category that continues to proliferate virtually unregulated.

Six hundred and forty million small arms, concentrated in the unhappiest parts of the world, most of them in private hands, increasing each year by 8 million, with the war of terror accelerating their spread, cause the death of one human being every minute. A $72 billion industry, with England as the second-biggest supplier, augmenting the political power and economic prowess of governments and private contractors, arms exports are not likely to decline anytime soon.

Like Samuel Galton Jr., Satia reminds us, gun manufacturers these days suffer no pangs of conscience. During a liability lawsuit before 2005, when Congress shielded them from litigation, she reports, Paul Jannuzzo, an executive at Glock, justified his companys refusal to police sales, insisting that theres nothing intrinsically evil about these things.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

Empire of Guns

The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution

By Priya Satia

(Penguin Press; 528 pages; $35)BEIJING  A Chinese startup that appears to have mastered the art of keeping people glued to their smartphones also has a knack for something else: drawing the ire of Chinas censors.

The countrys top media regulator has ordered the company, Bytedance, to shut down its app for sharing jokes and silly videos. Vulgar content on the Neihan Duanzi app had caused strong dislike among Internet users, a brief notice from the State Administration of Radio and Television said. The company was told to clean up its other platforms, too.

The shutdown was only the latest blow for Bytedance. Its flagship app, a popular news aggregator called Jinri Toutiao, was also pulled from app stores this week for unspecified reasons.

And last week, Huoshan, the companys platform for sharing slice-of-life video clips, vanished from app stores after Chinas official television broadcaster rapped it for glorifying underage pregnancy.

Over the past few years, we put more effort and resources toward expanding the business, and did not take enough measures to supervise our platform, Zhang Yiming, Bytedances founder and CEO, said in a statement.

He added that Bytedance would expand its team for monitoring content to 10,000 people from 6,000 presently.

The developments show how the government in Beijing has broadened its restrictions on what people see and say on the Internet. Regulators are suppressing content that they deem pornographic or in poor taste, and not merely material that touches on politically sensitive topics.

Authorities are also scrambling to keep up as a new wave of Chinese apps, many of them built around short, spontaneously recorded video clips or live streams, helps people communicate and express themselves in new and hard-to-supervise ways.

Bytedance  which investors have valued at more than $30 billion  has assembled a confederation of these new apps. And it has made no secret of its desire to dominate phone screens across the rest of the world, too.

Raymond Zhong is a New York Times writer.East Bay travelers got a new option for trips to Europe this week with the launch of Norwegian Airs non-stop flights from Oakland International Airport to Paris Charles de Gaulle.

The low-cost carrier has been showing air fares as low as $179 one-way (plus fees) for the 11-hour Boeing 787 flights, which will operate four days a week (Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday).

TravelSkills with Chris McGinnis sponsored by See More Collapse

Keep in mind that Norwegians base fares for travel in the economy cabin dont cover much except a seat and one carry-on bag of 10 kilograms or less; the airline tacks on additional fees for various services and amenities like a checked bag, a reserved seat, in-flight meals, and even blankets and headsets.

The airline also offers a premium cabin at higher prices that include on-board meals, one carry-on, two checked bags, a reserved seat and lounge access at select airports. You can see details of Norwegians fare types and fees here.

RELATED VIDEO: This Pilot Flew the Fastest Flight From New York to London Since the Concorde

Norwegian has settled on Oakland International as its airport of choice in the Bay Area, and the low-cost carrier has been expanding transatlantic routes there since it started Oakland service in 2014. In February, it added Oakland-Rome non-stop flights, bringing fares down in that market, and it also flies from OAK to London Gatwick, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Barcelona.

The new Oakland-Paris service is just one of several European routes being added or extended for Bay Area travelers this year.

>Next month, Iberia Airlines is due to launch non-stops from San Francisco International to Madrid.

>French airline called French Bee is due to start flying between SFO and Paris Orly as one leg of its new Paris-Tahiti service.

>Last month, Lufthansa resumed San Jose-Frankfurt flights.

>Finnairs SFO-Helsinki service, which was supposed to end in late September, has been extended at least through December 5.

>Icelandair is due to resume flights from San Francisco International to Reykjavik in June, with onward connections to two dozen European cities.

Which airline will you fly to Europe this year? Why? Please leave you answer in the comments.

Read all recent TravelSkills posts here

Get twice-per-week updates from TravelSkills via email! Sign up here

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.Two men were arrested in Arizona and New Mexico after the fatal shooting of a 23-year-old Pleasant Hill man during a marijuana-related robbery over the weekend, authorities said.

Luther Lee, 24, of Columbus, Ga., was taken into custody Monday by Arizona state troopers on suspicion of conspiracy to commit robbery and murder. He was arrested during a traffic stop.

Keith Jones, 29, of Cusseta, Ga., was arrested Monday on suspicion of conspiracy to commit robbery and murder after leading police on a high-speed chase that started in Arizona and crossed over the state border into New Mexico, according to the Pleasant Hill Police Department.

The two men are accused of killing Oshry Elor, 23, who died Saturday in Pleasant Hill in what police believe was a marijuana-related home invasion. Officers responded to a report of a person with gunshot wounds in the 2100 block of Norse Drive at 11:14 p.m. Inside the residence, officers found Elor, who had been shot multiple times.

He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Investigators tracked down Lee and Jones on Interstate 40 in Arizona and believed the two were en-route to Georgia. After notifying the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Lee was taken into during a traffic stop, police said. He and two others reportedly got out of the vehicle and Lee was arrested on an outstanding warrant by the Pleasant Hill Police Department. The other passengers, who were not identified, were detained briefly and released.

One vehicle occupant, later identified as Jones, attempted to flee the scene, police said. Arizona state troopers reportedly trailed him for about 90 miles at speeds in excess of 120 mph before the tires of his car were deflated with the use of a spike strip, after he crossed the New Mexico state border. Jones was then taken into custody.

Jones is being held at the McKinley County Adult Detention Center in New Mexico. Lee was booked at the Navajo County Detention Center in Arizona.

This is the third marijuana robbery that involved suspects out of state this year.

In March, seven men from North Carolina and Virginia were arrested after invading three Petaluma homes in the hopes of stealing cannabis, the Sonoma County Sheriffs Office said. A woman was later arrested in Winston-Salem, N.C., as the eight suspect in the incidents.

In February, two violent home invasions carried out by five suspects  some of whom were from the East Coast  were carried out to steal guns and cannabis. Four suspects were arrested after those invasions and one woman fled the scene.

The suspects were residents of Mississippi, New York and Virginia.

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavaniTwo men face murder and driving under the influence charges in connection with separate fatal crashes in Contra Costa County, the district attorneys office said.

Jose Amaya-Rivera, 41, and Bo Steven Robledo, 33, were both charged with felony counts of murder and drunk driving causing injury within 10 years of another DUI offense in unrelated fatal collisions. Both also face misdemeanor charges of driving with a suspended or revoked license.

The decision to charge both men with murder rather than manslaughter stems from the implied malice of driving while intoxicated, deputy district attorney Derek Butts said.

It means they know it was dangerous to human life but acted that way regardless, Butts said. It doesnt take a DUI conviction to know these dangers.

Amaya-Rivera was charged in connection with a crash on Highway 4 near Willow Pass Road around 11:43 p.m. on March 23, when his car hit a guardrail and collided with another car. The crash killed 21-year-old Yvonne Magdelano and injured 22-year-old Susana Zarate, both passengers in Amaya-Riveras car.

According to court records, Amaya-Rivera was convicted in November 2013 of driving under the influence in Contra Costa County.

The charges against Robledo stem from a Nov. 5 collision in Concord that took place just before midnight. Robledo allegedly collided head-on at high speed with another car while intoxicated near Kinne Bridge on Willow Pass Road, the district attorney said.

The crash killed 21-year-old Natalie Davies and seriously injured her 26-year-old passenger, Zachary Punty, according to court documents.

Court records show that Robledo was convicted of driving under the influence in March 2013 in Fresno County.

Butts said the district attorneys office has recently taken a more aggressive stance on pursuing murder charges in fatal DUI cases, but that each case had to be considered individually.

Factors the office considers include level of intoxication, previous DUI convictions and driving history, Butts said, which make it easier to demonstrate the implied malice component to a jury.

Annie Ma is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ama@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @anniema15Photo: Lucas Klappas/Flickr

If numbers dont lie, then the numbers are saying that the Queens housing market is on an upswing.

Queens home inventory was up substantially from last year in the first quarter while price growth outpaced both Manhattan and Brooklyn, according to a report released today by New York brokerage Stribling and Associates.

Over the last year, both median and average prices in Queens grew by 11 percent year-over-year to $530,000 and $606,347, respectively, in the first quarter of 2018. Nearly every submarket recorded price increases in the first quarter as the sales pace quickened. At the same time, the total number of sales increased four percent from last year.

Total listing inventory in Queens was up 41 percent from last year in the first quarter, with houses (including townhouses) comprising 47 percent of all active listings. Some 18 percent of all listings were condos.

Most of the Queens housing stock is single and multi-family homes, which attracts a different buyer pool than a high-rise condo overlooking the city, Striblings Director of Data and Reporting Garrett Derderian tells BuzzBuzzNews.

Queens condos recorded the largest average price gains in the first quarter, up 17 percent from last year to $630,000. Condos accounted for 13 percent of all sales in the first quarter  the smallest share of all Queens closings. The average price per square foot for a Queens condo jumped 33 percent annually to $1,040.

Home sales (including townhouses) accounted for 58 percent of all sales in the first quarter, while co-ops accounted for 28 percent. Average home (and townhouse) and co-op prices were up 7 percent and 11 percent, respectively, from last year in the first quarter.

The Queens housing market is on an upswing, while still remaining the most affordable when compared to Manhattan and Brooklyn. We see the Hunters Point neighborhood  where much of the new developing is taking place  on par with areas of Brooklyn, while still being a more affordable alternative to most of Manhattan, Derderian says.

Northwestern Queens  which includes new development hotbeds Long Island City (LIC) and Hunters Point  accounted for 8 percent of all sales. The median price rose 18 percent year-over-year to $793,189 and the average price per square foot jumped 16 percent from last year to $1,029.

The areas prices were driven by development, and it is having a profound impact on overall pricing in the immediate area, Derderian notes.

Buyers continue to flock here because of the relative affordability and proximity to Manhattan. And while it may have seemed a far-fetched notion ten years ago, LIC is now synonymous with luxury, Stribling says in the report.

The upward momentum seen in the first quarter will likely carry over into the second quarter, which includes the typically busy spring homebuying season.

We expect borough-wide momentum to continue. Buyers are now looking to parts of Queens as a first choice option, and as a Brooklyn alternative, where housing costs have significantly escalated, Derderian predicts.

Click here to read the entire report.Associated Press

A former San Jose school board member convicted of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from a bond measure campaign was sentenced Tuesday to 60 days in county jail, prosecutors said.

John Lindner, 55, pleaded no contest to grand theft, perjury and violations of the Political Reform Act in February after an investigation found he took $28,000 from the 2010 Measure J campaign for personal use.A notorious San Francisco con artist seeking to have his life sentence overturned in the murder of a Palm Springs man may have strengthened his case with the emergence of secret recordings capturing the trial judge making homophobic and biased comments about him and other defendants.

The existence of potentially scandalous recordings made in a Riverside County courtroom in 2012 has been acknowledged in recent years. But the content wasnt publicly confirmed until this week, when the Desert Sun newspaper released a partial audio clip of Judge David B. Downing.

Downing called defendants Kaushal Niroula  the prolific swindler known as the Dark Prince  and his co-defendant Daniel Garcia assholes and clowns and commented on the fact that one of the men was HIV-positive and had licked envelopes containing documents submitted to the court.

God knows where that tongue has been, Downing said on the recording released by the Desert Sun.

Calls to Downing on Thursday were not returned.

The recordings mark the most recent chapter in Niroulas twisting tale of scams and cons, one that features a cast of bizarre accomplices and disparate victims. It started when the Nepali exchange student arrived in San Francisco as a student in 2002 and culminated with a murder conviction a decade later.

In between, Niroula claimed variously to be royalty; an estate attorney doling out an inheritance; a man desperate to save a kidnapped sister; an art dealer with a Nazi-stolen painting to sell; and the love-struck beau of a Japanese tourist, who would eventually be separated from half a million dollars.

When he arrived in the United States, Niroula enrolled as a student at New College in San Francisco, where he scammed President Martin Hamilton, saying he was rich and would eventually give the financially strapped college $1 million, once his assets were released in Nepal.

Hamilton allegedly approved forged transcripts and course credits to extend Niroulas student visa while also giving the exchange student money to rescue his purportedly kidnapped sister. In the wake of the scandal, New College lost its accreditation and shut down in 2008.

That was about the time Niroula embarked on a con to help British royalty sell a painting by surrealist Yves Tanguy, a piece of art reportedly at one point stolen by Nazis. An art collector paid a more than $400,000 advance for the piece  which Niroula did not have  money that the Dark Prince spent in Las Vegas before he was arrested by San Francisco police.

Out on bail, he pursued a fateful friendship with Daniel Garcia  who by then had his own sordid tale, suing wealthy San Francisco financier Thomas White in 2003, alleging the older man had sex with him when he was a teen. Later, Garcia found Mexican boys who claimed White sexually abused them in Puerta Vallarta.

Garcias lawyer, David Replogle, negotiated settlements with White in both cases for $12 million total. White died in 2013 while in Mexican custody.

Niroula, Garcia and Replogle formed a friendship around 2007 and would later become co-conspirators, along with two others, in the murder of Clifford Lambert, 74, who was killed for his Palm Springs property and assets, authorities said. Lambert disappeared in 2008 and his body has not been found, though one of the other accomplices allegedly confessed to police and implicated the others.

Charged with murder, Niroula and Garcia landed in Downings courtroom in 2012. During a break in proceedings, Garcia left a laptop on a table, which recorded the judges comments, according to the Desert Sun.

In addition to homophobic comments, the recording raises questions about Downings decision to deny a defense motion to try Garcia and Niroula in front of separate juries. Downing said he knew the decision was improper, but did it anyway.

The fact is that if I sever them, then it means that we have to try this twice, Downing said.

Niroula, Garcia and Replogle have appealed their convictions based on the information in the recordings.

The judges commentary reveals the ugly truth that you dont always get a fair trial in this country, Niroulas attorney, Shaun Sullivan, told The Chronicle on Thursday. Thankfully, in this case, we can do something about it.

The Riverside County district attorneys office said it is reviewing the evidence and the appeals.

We are deeply troubled by and do not condone the improper comments made by the trial judge, said Assistant District Attorney Elaina Bentley in an emailed statement. We take very seriously our obligation to ensure that the rights of the defendants and the victims are protected and that above all justice is done.

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltuckerAuthorities are seeking the publics help in catching a man responsible for a series of armed bank robberies throughout the Bay Area, officials said Wednesday.

The man, who was not identified, most recently robbed a Pacific Service Credit Union, at 2005 Crow Canyon Place, in San Ramon, the citys police department said.Two shootings broke out on highways in Contra Costa County late Wednesday night in what appear to be unrelated road rage incidents, authorities said.

The first shooting occurred about 9:45 p.m. on the northbound lanes of Interstate 680 near the Treat Boulevard exit in Walnut Creek, said Officer Nathan Johnson, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol.

A man said a driver started flashing lights at him from behind for no apparent reason, then drove up next to him and threw a bottle at his car, Johnson said.

Shortly after, the victim reported that the rear window of his vehicle shattered. He initially thought a bottle had been thrown by the suspect. It wasnt until the man got home nearly an hour later, Johnson said, that he realized his car had been shot when he found a bullet fragment inside the vehicle.

About the same time the man got home, authorities were investigating another potential road rage incident in Concord on Highway 4 between Highway 242 and Port Chicago Highway.

Two drivers exchanged words through open windows and one fired a handgun in the victims direction, Johnson said.

The victims vehicle was struck and the suspect fled the scene.

No one was injured in either incident.

Road rage comes in different types and varieties, Johnson said. These do appear to be random and they dont appear to be targeted. And they dont appear to be related at this time.

No arrests were made, but authorities are pursuing leads. Suspect information was not released.

We always encourage people to not let these (situations) escalate, Johnson said. If someone flashes their high beams or cuts you off, just take the high road. Let it go.

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavaniAn accomplished jazz bassist majoring in music studies and psychology, Emory junior Chris Batterman has won a prestigious Beinecke Scholarship to help fund his PhD in ethnomusicology. Emory Photo/Video

Learn more about scholarships Students interested in learning more about Beinecke Scholarships and other prestigious awards should contact Megan Friddle in Emory's National Scholarships and Fellowships Program. Find more information or schedule an appointment through the National Scholarships and Fellowships Program website.

Chris Batterman, an accomplished jazz bassist, has long known the link between music and culture.

In a first-year seminar at Emory College of Arts & Sciences, though, it clicked that studying those connections could play into the question of identity. His success at examining those crossroads won Batterman, now a junior with a double major in music studies and psychology, one of just 18 Beinecke Scholarships given this year.

The prestigious award comes with $34,000 to help defray the cost of graduate school: $4,000 prior to entering and the rest while attending the graduate school of his choice to pursue a PhD in ethnomusicology, or the study of music across different cultures.

I had never even considered the academic pursuit of music. I thought the whole point was in performance, says Batterman, a Deans Achievement Scholar. Now when I perform, though, I am more attuned to the audience reception and the cultural dialogue happening with every song.

The Beinecke award is designed to support graduate education for students of exceptional promise who select study in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Batterman already had the tools to excel in cultural study of music. A performer with the Emory Jazz Ensemble, he also works as a tutor at the Emory Writing Center and seeks interdisciplinary views as an IDEAS Fellow.

Examining how music addresses and shapes identity, especially for marginalized groups, is an outgrowth of Battermans curiosity that Laura Emmery, an assistant professor of music theory, observed firsthand.

Batterman was in her upper-level course that taught undergraduates how to work with primary sources and analyze them to create narratives about music.

Batterman, who is Mexican American, submitted research on the impact of that communitys folk songs on the Chicano Civil Rights Movement. The work exceeded expectations, including information he unearthed from the Library of Congress, in its argument that Chicano artists used the music to both reflect their newly constructed identity, as well as to contest dominant narratives of political and social marginalization.

He has since presented his research at three national and international conferences and is preparing it for a peer-reviewed journal.

I have never seen an undergraduate student engage in critical discourse at such a rigorous level, says Emmery, who is his honors thesis adviser. Chris is so remarkable and has already shown so much potential at such an early stage of his career, its clear that he will continue down this trajectory and become one of the leading scholars in the field.

Interdisciplinary approach to studying music

Being able to make those connections, and understand the music on so many levels, tells Department of Music Chair Kevin Karnes that Batterman was already thinking about music as a field of cultural expression.

The department has worked to position itself as the home for that serious discussion, leveraging Emorys excellent liberal arts and sciences to showcase how music interacts with other disciplines.

That Batterman is the second Beinecke winner in two years  senior Mallory Carnes won last year for her work in ethnomusicology  is a heartening indication that the approach is working, Karnes says.

Its thrilling to see students drawn to thinking and exploring music in an interdisciplinary way, Karnes says. Its an exciting time for music scholarship in our department, and Chris represents the kind of incredible talent whose curiosity and engagement let us have these discussions at the highest level of the humanities.

Battermans honors thesis, for instance, requires more than his knowledge of music. After six semesters of Portuguese at Emory, he is fluent enough in his third language to examine letters and notes written by and about Antonio Carlos Gomes as he composed Il Guarany and "Lo Schiavo" in post-colonial Brazil.

In doing so, Batterman hopes to better understand how Gomes' work reflects notions of Brazilian identity, especially in terms of race and indigeneity. For instance, Gomes adapted the Il Guarany libretto in Italian and used musical devices very Italianate in nature, reflective of his idea that Brazil was more a European than New World country, Batterman says.

Still, the opera is inflected with native rhythms, a musical hint to his plot, in which an indigenous man dies to save a mixed-race couple. The symbolism: Brazils origins must perish for the modern, whiter state to excel.

You have a 19th century Brazilian composer romanticizing indigenous roots while simultaneously saying that Brazil has been eclipsed into a whiter, more modern society, says Batterman, who will travel to Rio de Janeiro this summer to examine Gomes papers. Its such a clear use of music to shape race and identity for an entire nation.

Batterman plans to focus his doctoral work on overlapping trends in Mexican and Brazilian music in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is considering several ethnomusicology programs, including those at Columbia University and UCLA, where affiliated institutes focus on the history and culture of Latin America.

Its very appealing to work with people outside of music, to help understand the context in which that music was made, Batterman says. Im not even sure the exact moment that I realized this was a path, only that I knew it was something I love to do. The Beinecke is very affirming that I can do what I love.California-based fast food chain In-N-Out Burger is suing a restaurant Down Under for infringing its trademark and misleading customers with its name, Down N' Out.

Down N' Out currently operates two locations in the Sydney area, where it sells burgers, chicken sandwiches, fries and onion rings. In-N-Out doesn't have a single location on the continent (though a pop-up in Melbourne held in March sold out in just 30 minutes).

But even though Down N' Out isn't exactly huge competition for a beloved fast food chain that has more than 300 locations nationwide, In-N-Out is still taking the restaurant to court.

LUCKY DAY: In-N-Out worker goes viral after Raiders QB shows up in the drive-thru

The company filed a lawsuit against Down N' Out's owner, Hashtag Burgers, in an Australian court, claiming its trademark was violated and Down N' Out has been misleading customers by passing off its goods as similar to In-N-Out's, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. In-N-Out claims the Australian restaurant has been unfairly benefiting from the American fast food chain's "substantial reputation and goodwill."

In-N-Out is reportedly asking the court to order Down N' Out to change its similar, albeit slightly sadder name, pay damages, and fork over any money it made from using the name.

So other than the name, are there any similarities? The branding on Down N' Out's website has no trace of In-N-Out's signature red and white color scheme, nor its double palm trees. The menu at the Australian burger joint is also a bit more expansive than In-N-Out's famously simple offerings.

TERRIBLE TIMING: Engagement ring stolen at In-N-Out just before tourist was about to propose

However, at Down N' Out you can order your burger "Tiger Style" with caramelized onions and a mustard grilled patty, which sounds a lot like a certain option on In-N-Out's secret menu.

We'll have to wait a while to see how this burger battle plays out. The next court date is scheduled for June, reports the Morning Herald.

Read Alix Martichoux's latest stories and send her news tips at amartichoux@sfchronicle.com.A kombucha battle has descended upon California's courts.

A series of lawsuits filed Monday on behalf of a California kombucha company alleges the kombucha beverages produced by Trader Joe's and other manufacturers are more alcoholic and sugary than advertised.

Tortilla Factory LLC, which owns Los Angeles-based Kombucha Dog, claims six kombucha producers  Trader Joe's Co., Better Booch LLC, Health-Ade Kombucha LLC, Humm Kombucha LLC, Makana Beverages Inc. and Rowdy Mermaid Kombucha LLC  tricked consumers into purchasing beverages they believed had no or minimal amounts of alcohol and sugar. Prior to the four lawsuits Monday, two were filed in December.

The filings claim the companies' failure to properly disclose the alcoholic content of their kombuchas jeopardizes "health and safety" of consumers, who may have unwittingly consumed the drinks when pregnant or breastfeeding, or served them to minors.

Plus, Kombucha Dog, which has an alcoholic content high enough to be sold in beer sections of stores, lost money.

"They can sell in more stores, sell next to juices," said Stephen Weisskopf of Levato Law, who is representing Tortilla Factory. "My client's product has to sell next to Budweisers."

The complaint filed against Trader Joe's alleges Tortilla Factory "lost profits, failed to obtain the market share it would otherwise have obtained, and was denied a fair marketplace."

Michael Faye started Kombucha Dog more than a decade ago to combine his passion for holistic living and pooches. Each bottle of Kombucha Dog is decorated with a photo of a Los Angeles rescue dog in need of a home.

Despite having won awards and recognition from local media for his "traditionally fermented" product, Faye "can't compete in the marketplace because he's not on a level playing field," Weisskopf said of his client.

But more importantly, "it's about consumers knowing what they're buying, otherwise, there's dangers associated with it."

Kombucha has long been a sticky product for manufacturers, who must contend with stringent state and federal alcoholic beverage laws. The drink, which skyrocketed in popularity among the health-food crowd in recent years, is made by combining tea and sugar with a culture of yeast strains and bacteria, and sometimes fruit juice. The mixture of tea and sugar triggers fermentation, meaning most kombucha drinks contain some amount of alcohol.

Here's where things get tricky: Drinks with alcohol contents of .5 percent or more are classified as alcoholic beverages under federal law and subject to strict regulation. A beverage that contains .5 percent or higher alcohol by volume (ABV)  even a drink touted as a health beverage, like kombucha  is subject to the same state and federal laws that regulate other alcoholic beverages, including limits on where and to whom the product can be sold.

The federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) generally classifies kombucha beverages with alcohol contents of .5 percent or higher as beer. This means the kombucha producer must qualify as a brewer, pay taxes to the federal government, file a formula with TTB and label bottles with a warning from the U.S. Attorney General.

The six companies being sued by Tortilla Factory claim their beverages have alcohol contents below .5 percent. Independent testing sponsored by Tortilla Factory found these claims to be false, Weisskopf said.

The "majority" of products they tested were above .5 percent, he said.

Trader Joe's refused to comment on pending litigation. The five other companies could not be reached for comment.

According to Weisskopf, the kombucha industry is rife with violations. He says many of the kombuchas on the market have alcohol contents higher than .5 percent, and in some cases, "considerably more, approaching 1 or 2 or 3 percent." Standard light beers contain anywhere between 2 and 5 percent ABV.

Faye's Kombucha Dog drinks are brewed from a "traditional recipe," according to the company's website, and most contain around 1.4 percent ABV.

"Rather than dilute the flavor and the antioxidant and probiotic potency to reduce the alcohol content, we prefer to bottle as is, so Kombucha Dog is a 21+ beverage," the website says. According to the company, some kombucha makers dilute their beverages with water to skirt alcohol restrictions.

Weisskopf said they plan to sue for "significant damages." Other kombucha makers may come under fire in the coming months.

"We're still investigating other companies," he said. "We'll make determinations down the road whether there are additional lawsuits."

Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.If youre going to take the Chicago architecture tour, pick a day when a gigantic sea creature isnt terrorizing the city. Likewise, if hundred-foot wolves and apes are crashing into buildings, its probably best to take a personal day and avoid downtown.

Rampage is a monster movie, and in many ways an old-fashioned one, with a misunderstood ape, not unlike King Kong, a sea monster whos akin to Godzilla, and with effects that are striking and yet just cheesy enough to be more fun than disturbing. Mixed in, theres a warning about science run amok, but mostly its all about giving viewers a good time, and it does.

But what makes Rampage especially enjoyable is the way it sneaks up on the audience. Before casting off every shred of dignity and abandoning itself to good-humored excess, the movie passes itself off as a reasonably serious science-fiction movie. It begins with Marley Shelton as a scientist in an outer-space laboratory in the midst of a crisis. A test mouse has grown to gigantic proportions, and in a genuinely exciting scene, the scientist has to gather up her data and get to the escape pod before being devoured like a little piece of cheese.

Next we meet Dwayne Johnson as Davis, a primatologist, introducing a new team of scientists to his gorillas. Davis favorite gorilla is George, a silverback who can speak in sign language and possesses a genial rapport with Davis, who is probably the only human being who could beat him at arm wrestling. Its an idyllic little world, devoted to science and to the spread of goodwill and understanding among the species. Its a world in contrast to the shadowy corporate types working to weaponize DNA and create monsters.

Those worlds collide when George and a handful of other creatures are exposed to an inhalant that sets off a genetic chain reaction. George starts getting bigger and bigger, and the movie starts getting crazier and crazier. A sober movie about genetics turns into a Dwayne Johnson free-for-all, a little like San Andreas, which, like Rampage, was directed by Brad Peyton.

But this is all for the good. There is something about Johnson, as a screen entity, that creates a bridge between normal daily life and extreme sci-fi action movie madness. His look is extreme  like a cartoon character  but his manner couldnt be more down-to-earth, and he has a way of being inside the action, making sense of it, and standing on the outside, too, not quite making fun of it, but winking at us all the same.

Theres a terrific scene that is just this side of ridiculous, in which the primatologist and a concerned scientist, played by Naomie Harris, are atop a skyscraper thats about to collapse. Waiting for an elevator is not an option, and so he gets a brilliant idea: How about they get into a busted helicopter, one without a tail, and hover above the building as it falls? Thanks to movie magic, they can crash-land safely into a bed of rubble.

Obviously, this makes no sense, but if you worry too much about sense, you will never really love movies or appreciate a star like Johnson. Hes the guy who gets us from mundane reality into a world where the impossible is ... not quite believable, but believable enough to savor and appreciate.

That helicopter escape is hardly the most extreme action sequence in Rampage. There are others, plenty of others, including a beautifully choreographed plane crash that goes on and on. The movie also gets a lift from Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a wily Southern G-man, trying to contain the monster damage, and Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy, as the brother-sister team behind the mayhem. Akerman and Lacy play their roles with all the restraint of Gene Hackman in the old Superman movies  that is, with no restraint at all.

But then, restraint has no business in a movie with lines like, Weve got to get to them before they level Chicago! Or my favorite: Weve got to evacuate Chicago! The latter is said just 10 minutes before the monsters show up.

Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicles movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle

Rampage

Starring Dwayne Johnson and Naomie Harris. Directed by Brad Peyton. (PG-13. 107 minutes.)

Movie newsletter

Get the latest movie reviews, Mick LaSalles views, critics picks and more film news each week in the San Francisco Chronicles revamped movie newsletter! Sign up here for Popcorn Picks and other Chronicle and SFGATE newsletters like the Taploid, Chronicle Commuter, and breaking news alerts.Its a bit odd to see a feel-good animated war film, but Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero is interesting in a couple of ways: Its the only film Im aware of that commemorates the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I (1914-18), and its the true story of the most decorated dog in military history.

World War II movies are still a reliable genre  two of the nine best picture nominees of 2017 were set during that wartime  but the Great War, Wonder Woman aside, rarely gets much love. The 100th anniversary of the wars end is Nov. 11, but I doubt a wave of World War I films will be flooding the front lines of awards season.

This time, the hero fighting in the trenches isnt Gal Gadots fictional superhero, but a Boston terrier who attached himself to a 102nd Infantry Regiment unit during training in New Haven, Conn., and notably became not just the 26th Yankee Divisions mascot, but also a lifesaver in battle.

The real Stubby fought in 17 battles across four campaigns in France during 18 months of service. He saved soldiers from mustard gas attacks through his acute sense of smell, located wounded soldiers and comforted them, and once pinned down a German soldier until American soldiers arrived on the scene. There is an exhibit in his honor at the Smithsonian.

However, Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero, while amiable enough, only skims the surface of this meaty story. Part of the problem is its mission to remain family friendly; theres no blood in the movie  not even when Stubby is injured clearing a hand grenade.

Gaston (Gerard Depardieu), a grizzled French soldier, advises Robert, an inexperienced American solder who is Stubbys master, to stay alive, you need to feel fear. And yet, you dont feel fear in this movie.

Its as if director Richard Lanni is being too protective of his audience. Children, I think, can assimilate a thoughtful presentation of troubling issues such as war. A few scenes of Stubby comforting a wounded soldier, for example, would have provided some much-needed dramatic depth and gone a long way to help young viewers understand that war is a serious business without being too graphic.

The great Japanese animator Isao Takahata, who died this month at 82, conveyed the horrors of World War II through two children in his 1988 masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, a gut-wrenching movie that is beloved by children (and adults). Kids can take it.

Still, Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero is a cute and scruffy movie. Helena Bonham Carter, lending a female presence to the otherwise all-male story, charmingly narrates as Roberts sister, who pieces together the Stubby legend from letters sent home.

Best joke: When Stubby is officially inducted into the unit, the company commander says, Make sure he receives some dog tags.

G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BRfilmsAllen

Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero

Animation. With the voices of Logan Lerman, Helena Bonham Carter, Gerard Depardieu. Directed by Richard Lanni. (PG. 85 minutes.)

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Get the latest movie reviews, Mick LaSalles views, critics picks and more film news each week in the San Francisco Chronicles revamped movie newsletter! Sign up here for Popcorn Picks and other Chronicle and SFGATE newsletters like the Taploid, Chronicle Commuter, and breaking news alerts.NORRISTOWN, Pa.  The first accuser to testify at Bill Cosbys retrial described the comedian Wednesday as a serial rapist as she parried with his lawyers, while a second accuser tearfully confronted the comedian over a 32-year-old assault allegation: You remember, dont you, Mr. Cosby?

The courtroom dramatics prompted mistrial requests from Cosbys lawyers  which were denied  as prosecutors began putting on a parade of women who say Cosby drugged and molested them long before he met Andrea Constand, the chief accuser in his sexual assault retrial.

Sobbing uncontrollably as she testified, Chelan Lasha told jurors she got to know Cosby through a family connection as a 17-year-old aspiring model and actress. She met the star at a Las Vegas hotel in 1986 under the pretense that he had arranged a photo shoot for her.

She said Cosby gave her a little blue pill he described as an antihistamine to help her get over a cold, along with two shots of amaretto to help break up the cough. The combination immobilized her and rendered her unable to speak. Cosby then assaulted her, touching her breast and rubbing himself against her leg, Lasha said.

I could barely move. He guided me there, and he laid me in the bed. I couldnt move any more after that. He laid next to me, and he kept touching my breast and humping my leg. I remember something warm hitting my leg, she said.

Seeking to portray Lasha as a chronic liar, Cosbys lawyers won permission from a judge to tell jurors about her 2007 guilty plea for filing a false police report in Arizona.

Cosby, 80, is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison. His first trial last year ended in a hung jury.

Michael R. Sisak is an Associated Press writer.NEW YORK  Eight months before the company that owns the National Enquirer paid $150,000 to a former Playboy Playmate who claimed shed had an affair with Donald Trump, the tabloids parent made a $30,000 payment to a less famous individual: a former doorman at one of the real estate moguls New York City buildings.

As it did with the ex-Playmate, the Enquirer signed the ex-doorman to a contract that effectively prevented him from going public with a juicy tale that might hurt Trumps campaign for president.

The payout to the former Playmate, Karen McDougal, stayed a secret until The Wall Street Journal published a story about it days before Election Day. Since then curiosity about that deal has spawned intense media coverage and, this week, helped prompt the FBI to raid the hotel room and offices of Trumps personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

The story of the ex-doorman, Dino Sajudin, hasnt been told until now.

The Associated Press confirmed the details of the Enquirers payment through a review of a confidential contract and interviews with dozens of current and former employees of the Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc. Sajudin got $30,000 in exchange for signing over the rights, in perpetuity, to a rumor hed heard about Trumps sex life  that the president had fathered a child with an employee at Trump World Tower, a skyscraper he owns near the United Nations. The contract subjected Sajudin to a $1 million penalty if he disclosed either the rumor or the terms of the deal to anyone.

Cohen, the longtime Trump attorney, acknowledged that he had discussed Sajudins story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it. He said he was acting as a Trump spokesman when he did so and denied knowing anything beforehand about the Enquirer payment to the ex-doorman.

The parallel between the ex-Playmates and the ex-doormans dealings with the Enquirer raises new questions about the roles that the Enquirer and Cohen may have played in protecting Trumps image during a hard-fought presidential election. Prosecutors are probing whether Cohen broke banking or campaign laws in connection with AMIs payment to McDougal and a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels that Cohen said he paid out of his own pocket.

Federal investigators have sought communications between Cohen, American Medias chief executive and the Enquirers top editor, the New York Times reported.

The woman at the center of the rumor about Trump denied emphatically to the AP last August that shed ever had an affair with Trump.

The AP has not been able to determine if the rumor is true and is not naming the woman.

Jake Pearson and Jeff Horwitz are Associated Press writers.A Target worker was reportedly fired after allegedly stuffing cards containing white supremacist information into boxes of diapers that the store sold around the country.

Laminated cards with the phrase, "IT'S OKAY TO BE WHITE" were found inside diaper boxes purchased at Target stores in various states, BuzzFeed News reported.

The catchphrase, which is associated with white supremacist groups, was accompanied by neo-Nazi websites listed on the back of the cards.

Target apologized to customers Tuesday in a statement to the news site, saying that the company "launched a thorough investigation" after hearing about the cards.

"We have identified the source, and given this is a violation of our policies and our commitment to inclusivity, terminated the team member," said Target spokesman Joshua Thomas.

Reports of the cards appearing in Target purchases began surfacing in early March and continued throughout the month; affected customers turned up in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Tennessee.

More for you 'Simpsons' reference to Apu criticism sparks backlash

Customers shared photos of the cards on social media, all saying they found them in diaper boxes they bought at a Target store.

"Just opened a box of @Pampers from @Target and found some knuckle-dragging racist slipped this card into the box," tweeted one customer about the card he found.

Another person said they found the card in a Target brand box of diapers that was donated to a diaper bank.

It's unclear how many boxes contain the cards, but the Anti-Defamation League stated that it had received at least two complaints and that the group contacted local and federal law enforcement about the cards.With the prospect of executions resuming in California, news organizations are suing state prison officials for their plans to conceal some of the lethal injection process from reporters and witnesses, and to pull the curtain if the drugs fail to kill the condemned inmate.

The secrecy, under state regulations adopted last month by Gov. Jerry Browns Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, serves no purpose other than suppressing important information about the execution process from the public and the press, said the suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco.

The plaintiffs are the Los Angeles Times, public broadcaster KQED and the San Francisco Progressive Media Center, publisher of the online journal 48hills.org.

The press serves as the eyes of the public, said Linda Lye of the American Civil Liberties Union, a lawyer for Progressive Media Center. If the state is going to conduct executions, the media has a right to attend, observe and report on all aspects of the procedure, especially because the new protocol could give rise to complications and botched executions.

Another attorney, Ajay Krishnan, said the courts have ruled that executions are public proceedings.

The lawyers noted that federal courts had struck down in 2002 a San Quentin policy of keeping the death chamber curtains closed while guards strapped the inmate down and inserted injection tubes.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which runs the prisons, declined to comment on the suit.

Californias last execution was in January 2006. A federal judge then ruled that flaws in staff training and lethal injection procedures had created an undue risk of a botched and agonizing execution. The state has revised its rules several times but has not yet won court approval.

A voter-approved ballot measure in 2016, however, prohibited further state regulatory review of new single-drug execution procedures, and the U.S. Supreme Court has sharply restricted inmates ability to challenge potentially painful execution methods. Of the 746 California prisoners on the nations largest Death Row, at least 21 have exhausted all appeals of their sentences, and unless Brown or his successor intervenes with commutations, executions are likely to resume within a year.

The lawsuit challenged state regulations that allow witnesses and reporters to observe the Lethal Injection Room in San Quentin, where the inmate is strapped to a gurney, but block their view of the Infusion Control Room, where the chemicals are prepared and injected into tubes that flow into the inmates body.

That prevents the viewers from seeing which of two available drugs is being used for the execution, how it is prepared and administered, how many doses are used, how the inmate reacts to each dose, and how effectively and professionally the execution staff performed, the suit said.

The state regulations also say that if the inmate has not died after three doses of the drug, the warden must stop the execution and call for medical help for the inmate. At that point, the curtains on the viewing windows are closed, the sound system is turned off, and the witnesses are led away.

The public is thereby prevented from observing (prison officials) response when the execution does not proceed as intended, the suit said. California must not execute Death Row inmates in a manner that violates the First Amendment rights of the press and the public.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelkoCalifornia can legally suspend the drivers licenses of the unhappy members of a state top 500 list, a federal appeals court said Wednesday in a ruling that applies to a roster of taxpayers who owe the state at least $100,000 and havent paid it.

Since 2012, state law has required the license suspensions of the top 500 delinquent taxpayers, a list published twice a year. Before losing their driving privileges, they are given 90 days notice and a chance to keep their licenses if they pay their taxes, reach an agreement on a payment plan, or show financial hardship. They also get 30 days notice that theyre about to be added to the list of 500, but can avoid it by agreeing to pay what they owe.

The law was challenged by Ernest Franceschi Jr., a Los Angeles attorney, who filed no state tax returns from 1995 through 2012. Franceschi contended he owed no taxes because he paid himself, through his law firm, only $100 a year in salary. The state Franchise Tax Board told him in 2014 that he owed more than $242,000 in back taxes, and his license was soon suspended.

In his lawsuit, Franceschi also contested the inclusion of interest and penalties. More broadly, he argued that the drivers license law was unconstitutional because it did not provide for a hearing before suspension and because driving a car was essential to his law practice.

But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1971 that a state may legally revoke a drivers license without a hearing. The appeals court also noted that Franceschi could have kept his license by paying his tax bill and filing for a refund with the Franchise Tax Board, whose decision could be appealed in court.

A drivers license is not a fundamental right, and courts have found that pay-first, litigate-later procedures protect drivers adequately, the court said in a 3-0 ruling that upheld a lower-court decision in the states favor. The ruling was written by Barrington Parker, a judge from the federal appeals court in New York temporarily assigned to the Ninth Circuit.

While the lack of a car in Los Angeles could make the practice of law more difficult, Parker said, Franceschi has access to public transit and taxis, and the state, meanwhile, has a powerful interest in the prompt collection of revenue.

Franceschi, who has practiced law since 1984, said he would probably ask the full appeals court for a rehearing. He said the Franchise Tax Board had based its assessment against him on a nonexistent salary, pegged to the average pay of similar lawyers in the area, and would have reached a different conclusion if it had allowed him a hearing.

A salarys only one way to earn compensation, he said. There are other ways that are tax-free or at a lower rate.

He said he now files tax returns with the state, listing his minimal salary, and they havent contested a single filing. But hes still without a drivers license.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelkoBEIJING  Chinas government on Thursday denied President Xi Jinpings promise of market-opening measures this week was aimed at settling a tariff dispute with Washington and said negotiations are impossible under unilateral coercion by the United States.

A commerce ministry spokesman, Gao Feng, complained President Trumps government has shown no sincerity, according to the Xinhua News Agency. Gao said the two sides have yet to start negotiations.

Gao repeated complaints that Trump acted improperly when he responded to Beijings protest over his plan to raise tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods by saying he might add another $100 billion of imports to the list.

Under unilateral coercion, it is impossible for the Chinese side to conduct any negotiations, Gao was paraphrased as saying.

Trumps proposed tariff hike is a response to complaints Beijing steals or pressures foreign companies to hand over technology. China has responded with its own $50 billion list of U.S. goods for retaliation if Washington goes ahead with the increase.

Gao denied Xi was making an overture to Washington when he announced plans in a speech Tuesday to cut import duties on autos, ease restrictions on foreign ownership in Chinas auto industry and make other market-opening changes.

Share prices of global automakers rose on investor hopes for their China operations, while some economists said the positive tone of Xis comments might provide a basis for talks with Washington.

The measures to increase opening ... have nothing to do with Chinese-U.S. trade frictions, Gao was paraphrased as saying.Paul Chinn / The Chronicle 2016

A federal judge formally ended a 14-year dispute involving a proposed casino on the western tip of Richmond, approving an agreement quashing the casino plan and ruling that the city did not have to pay damages to the American Indian tribe that had been pushing for it.

The ruling, issued in federal court in Oakland on Thursday, closes the long battle between the city and the Guidiville Rancheria tribe over development of the former U.S. Navy depot at Point Molate, a 270-acre tract near the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.A German aid worker has been abducted by unknown gunmen in Niger.





The man and his Nigerien colleagues were travelling near the border with Mali on Wednesday when armed men on motorbikes surrounded their convoy.





The four Nigeriens have been freed and no demands have been made by the kidnappers.





It is not clear who was behind the incident, but Islamist militants have repeatedly carried out attacks in the region.





The man, who worked for the German non-governmental organisation Help, had been travelling the Tillaberi region of western Niger.





He was kidnapped near the town of Ayorou, about 200km (124 miles) north-west of the capital, Niamey.





His driver told the AFP news agency that the attackers beat them up, burnt the vehicle and then left with the German.





BBC Monitoring's Africa security correspondent Tomi Oladipo says the area is a dangerous part of Niger where militants regularly target the army.





Aid agencies are working in Niger to help refugees from neighbouring Mali and Nigeria and to alleviate hunger. The UN says 1.7 million people are not getting enough food in the country.





In October, four US soldiers were killed in Niger and an offshoot of the Islamic State (IS) group said it carried out the attack.













BBC







Posted by Mark Williams | April 11, 2018

Jeep has officially been coming to Moab, Utah, for the Easter Jeep Safari  a 4x4 love fest sponsored by the local Red Rock 4-Wheelers Jeep club that sets up various trail rides in the area over the course of a week  for the last 10 years, bringing a number of concept vehicles put together by its internal Skunk Works squad on the team's own time (meaning a lot of late-night, after-hours wrenching sessions).

We've been to just about every one of these relatively low-key safari drive events, and it seems like every year there is at least one "pickup truck"-like concept vehicle  maybe it's a heavily modified Ram 1500, maybe a stretched Renegade unibody, maybe an imposing FC concept or maybe something completely custom with a utilitarian flare. No matter what type of custom, resto-rod wonder-truck it might be, there's usually one  except this year.

Less than a year after the official announcement of the debut of Jeep's return to the truck segment (can you believe it's been almost 30 years since we've had a Jeep pickup  and longer, if you want a ladder frame?), Jeep decided not to offer any hints about what's coming.

Or did they?

The only concept vehicle that vaguely resembles a pickup truck this year was the Sandstorm, which was really a Wrangler Unlimited with an open bed and a custom dual-shock (at each corner) desert racing personality, monster tires, manual transmission and Hemi power under the hood. But it also had a powerful underbody-mounted air compressor with an external hose fitting near the rear of the bed area. (Hmm.) Additionally, it also had a Mopar-made, bed-mounted spare tire carrier to make it look just like those Raptor-ish desert racing pickups you might see in the Southwest.

As we said, nobody at Jeep would talk much at all about why no pickup concepts made the cut this year, but we did have interesting conversations with some Mopar folks, who obviously have quite a bit to gain with the addition of a Jeep pickup truck  whether it's more Jeep than pickup or more pickup than Jeep. Either way, Mopar wins.

On the subject of Mopar, it's been very busy lately, with the introductions of arguably the two most modifiable vehicles in the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles portfolio-the 2018 Jeep Wrangler JL and the 2019 Ram 1500. Both, although quite new, have more than 200 Mopar parts available for each as they ramp up to full production capacity at their respective plants. Likewise, both are offering overlapping old (previous-generation) and new (current-gen) versions at the same time, giving customers a choice between upgrades and significant price differences  not coincidently, both Wranglers and Ram 1500s have two separate production facilities. To the best of our knowledge, no one else has ever done that before, at least not to this extent.

You should also know that FCA has been quite deliberate over the last several years about moving many of the important Ram and Jeep personnel back and forth between the two brands, very likely to help spread the personalization aspects of each brand's core values. Just as the Mopar folks weren't shy about talking about Ram and Jeep parts, Jeep's people weren't shy about discussing the aspects of overlap between the average Jeep buyer's attitude about his or her vehicle and the attitude of the average Ram half-ton buyer. This, no doubt, is where Mopar is probably drooling over the possibilities.

Not only has the Wrangler, Grand Cherokee and Ram 1500 had huge successes with limited-edition packages, but they're also some of the most customized vehicles around, and you can bet a Jeep Scrambler pickup could potentially allow for twice the customization and personality-focused add-on features covering both the off-road and pickup sides. Whether that starts with a hidden air compressor and hose in a small storage pocket of the bed or a bed-mounted spare tire rack in a Mopar Baja Blaster special-edition Scrambler, we'll have to wait and see, but you get the idea.

Put another way, the debut of a Jeep pickup (finally) allows FCA to create a single vehicle that could potentially deliver two hugely strong personalities: one more Jeep than pickup, the other more pickup than Jeep, serving two incredibly important constituencies. Of course, the potential of doing neither side of that equation very well also exists (and the automotive landscape is littered with examples). The important thing to watch is to see if the new Scrambler will be credible to Jeep faithful first; then we'll be watching to see how many pickup enthusiasts are lured over.

Additionally, beyond the fact that Jeep is getting back into the pickup game (which many thought long overdue), we assume there have been quite a few internal arguments about whether Jeep should be allowed to make a pickup at all. For all practical purposes, Ram is the pickup brand for FCA and Jeep is supposed to be the SUV brand; will Ram be making an SUV anytime soon? It's crossed our minds  quite a few times recently  whether or not representatives of the Ram team are invited to any Jeep Scrambler meetings or how many design discussions included a possible Ram mid-size pickup. Similarly, if Mopar is involved, is it pushing to make more off-roading parts or extra towing kits? This could get muddied quickly unless both teams have a clear definition of the Wrangler pickup and the right people in the right places to protect those boundaries. We'll find out once we see the new truck perform.

On our most recent trip to Moab, we had the chance to meet the lead Jeep person on the Jeep JT, Brandon Girmus  a guy we're predicting you'll be hearing about for a long time to come. He was raised on a farm in Nebraska, where he grew up watching his dad drive Super Dutys and John Deeres, but for now, Brandon's in charge of making sure FCA gets this new Jeep pickup right. The priority, of course, is to make sure his team is making sure this is first and foremost a Jeep, meaning it will be exceptionally good off-road like the Wrangler Unlimited, have a strong and adaptable ladder frame, and deliver strong, traditional Wrangler core values. In short, from what we gather, there will be no doubt this new vehicle will be more Jeep than pickup when it debuts.

But that doesn't mean it won't fit in nicely with the other mid-size players in many of the same important categories. Even though the Wrangler's max towing capacity is 3,500 pounds, each Jeep engineer we spoke with understood the standard for the class  the price of entry, basically  is closer to double that number.

(As a side note, we can tell you it was encouraging to hear the Jeep engineers talk a lot about important issues like payload capacities, gearing, gross vehicle weight ratings, peak torque and hitch strength  maybe not surprisingly, they seem to get it.)

As you may have gathered, it's no accident that Jeep was quiet about why it didn't have any pickup concepts for us to drive in Moab, and that was probably the loudest message of all about how important this vehicle is to them. Getting this wrong could mean damage not only to Jeep, but also to anyone else who makes an FCA pickup truck  and that means Ram.

Maybe that's why Jeep brought what seemed like more FCA employees than ever to Moab to get out with other Jeep owners on the exact trails and terrain its products were designed to challenge and conquer. If you've ever been on a Jeep trail ride or attended a Jeep Jamboree or Camp Jeep and happen across one of the many off-road clubs out there, you know they're not shy about offering opinions and suggestions or talking about their own Jeep. In that way, they can be similar to some of our own regular commenters here on PickupTrucks.com  both your harshest critic and most loyal advocate, delivering some of the most brutally honest insight around. Getting that kind of quality feedback is priceless, so we applaud Jeep for taking its employees to this year's Easter Jeep Safari to learn more about how to use its own Jeeps and talk to the ground troops. And we can only hope that education and exposure to the real owners and users of its next important vehicle launch will result in as few compromises as possible  because if there are any, we'll find them.

According to Automotive News (subscription required), the new Scrambler should be in dealerships by April 2019, which we hope means we'll get a chance to drive it before the end of 2018. We'll no doubt be seeing more spy photos of the pickup as it gets closer to finalizing engine software and multiple package suspension details, and you can bet we'll pass them along to you as fast as possible. In the meantime, we'll keep pushing Jeep on how many changes to the Wrangler frame and chassis it's making (we're guessing they're adding about 16 inches to the center section of the frame and maybe a cross-member or two), then keeping you up to date. More to come.

SpiedBilde images; Manufacturer imagesSAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

After meeting with San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon in February, the family of a homeless Mayan immigrant fatally shot by police in the city's Mission District more than two years ago say they're still waiting to find out if Gascon will charge the involved officers.

This morning members of the group Justice 4 Luis rallied outside the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant St. to demand that Gascon charge the two officers involved in the fatal shooting of Luis Gongora Pat by April 25.

According to the group, when Gongora Pat's family met with Gascon on Feb. 28, Gascon said he would make a decision on whether to charge the officers in six to eight weeks, which is between today and April 25.

"We're starting a countdown today. He has 15 days to make his decision. We're hoping he'll charge the killer cops and if not, were asking, at this point, for his resignation," Adriana Camarena, spokeswoman for the group, said.

According to Camarena, at the meeting Gascon discussed with the family the laws around police shootings, saying that the laws allow officers to use force when they feel threatened, which makes it hard for him to charge officers involved in fatal shootings.

"He's dismissing cases without letting them get to a jury; he's deciding. He's being the judge, the jury, the prosecutor and he's not allowing any police shooting case to make it to a jury and that's not his job," Camarena said.

Gascon today said that he never gave a specific timeline for when he would make his decision. While he acknowledged that two years is a long time for the family to wait, he said the investigation is complicated.

"I won't compromise the integrity of an investigation because of a deadline," Gascon said.

However, in a recording of the Feb. 28 meeting between Gascon and Gongora Pat's family posted on www.justice4luis.org, when asked by Camarena for a timeline of when he would reach a decision, Gascon can be heard saying "Probably, I would say, that no more than maybe six to eight weeks maximum."

According to police, on April 7, 2016, officers encountered Gongora Pat, 45, when they responded to a report of a man swinging a kitchen knife on Shotwell Street near 18th Street.

There, they found Gongora Pat seated on the sidewalk with the knife in his hands and the blade pointed up. They ordered him to put it down multiple times in both English and Spanish, police said.

Gongora Pat apparently briefly put the knife down but then picked it back up, at which point an officer fired less-lethal beanbag rounds at him. Gongora Pat then stood up and ran at the officers with the knife, prompting two other officers to fire seven shots at him, six of which hit him, according to police.

Gongora Pat was taken to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital but died a short time later.

The officers who shot at Gongora Pat have since been identified as Sgt. Nate Steger, who has 17 years of law enforcement experience, and Officer Michael Mellone, who has 13 years' experience.

Gongora Pat's brother, Jose Gongora Pat, said today at the rally that Luis Gongora Pat was a hardworking man who initially came to the U.S. to work and help their family most of who still lives in a small town in the Yucatan state of Mexico. He said his family in Mexico remains angry over the fatal shooting.

The family has created and donated embroidery works, which their Yucatan village is known for. The embroidery works call for justice for Luis Gongora Pat and will be on display at the Mayan War Room at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts at 2868 Mission St. through the end of the month.

"We've already spoken to him, but as of right now it seems like he won't do anything," Jose Gongora Pat said of Gascon. "He doesn't have compassion."

###Gov. Jerry Brown has agreed to add 400 hundred members of the California National Guard to an ongoing program combating transnational crime in compliance with President Donald Trump's directive to send thousands of military personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border.

"Let's be crystal clear on the scope of this mission," Brown said in a statement today.

"This will not be a mission to build a new wall," he said. "This will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life."

The additional 400 troops will more than double the existing 250 already working on this program statewide, which includes 55 stationed at the border, and the state will accept federal funding to make it happen, according to an agreement Brown's administration sent to the federal government for review and approval.

This detail will be under the command of the California governor and the state adjutant general, and their operations will be limited to targeting transnational criminal gangs as well as smugglers of drugs and weapons - statewide, on the border and offshore.

The agreement stipulates that the troops will not enforce federal immigration laws, but they will target human trafficking operations.

It also stipulates that they won't be employed in any direct law enforcement capacity or participate in the construction of any border wall.

The agreement goes into effect as soon as it's signed by Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.

###18:25

Jammu and Kashmir Police chief S P Vaid today asserted that all necessary steps will be taken to provide protection to the family members of the eight-year-old girl, who was raped and killed in Kathua, and the witnesses in the case.



His assurance came amid a nationwide outrage over the rape and killing of the girl.



"We will do whatever is required and take care of it. Nothing to worry about," Vaid said when asked about alleged threats to the witnesses, including the family members of the victim.



On the demand by some people for a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry into the case, the Director General of Jammu and Kashmir Police said, "Only they (those demanding CBI probe) can answer this. Why they don't have trust on the same J&K police which is fighting a war in Kashmir."



Vaid said he was satisfied with the investigation carried out by the state Crime Branch, in spite of attempts to destroy evidence during the initial investigations.



"I am satisfied with the investigations and am sure the people who committed this heinous crime on an eight-year-old child must get severest possible punishment," Vaid said.



"The state crime branch did a commendable job in spite of the fact that initially the investigation was not done in a professional manner. There were some attempts to destroy evidence," he said.



The DGP noted that the police has taken action against its own personnel who were involved in the crime.



"We took action against our own two policemen -- two SPOs -- who were involved in this heinous crime. The Special Investigation Team of Crime Branch went about the investigation in a professional manner, systematically collecting evidence and scientifically pursuing the case. Now, they have produced the challan (charge sheet) in the court for judicial determination," he said.



Vaid, however, refused to comment on whether any action would be taken against those people -- including two state ministers -- who attended a rally in support of the accused persons in Kathua.



The girl, who was from the nomadic Bakerwal Muslim community, disappeared near her house in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir, on January 10.



A week later, her body was found in the same area. -- PTI

Salinas Valley State Prison officials are investigating the death of an inmate on Sunday morning as a homicide, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The CDCR said that just after 10 a.m., inmate Michael Ellison attacked inmate Jason Lewis with a self-manufactured weapon. Officers quickly intervened and used chemical agents to stop the fight.An Oakland man found with just over a pound of heroin in his apartment after San Francisco police arrested him for selling drugs was sentenced Tuesday to 62 months in federal prison, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Marvin Gustavo Benegas-Castro, 32, was spotted selling drugs in Civic Center Plaza on Aug. 31 and arrested with 35 grams of heroin and nine grams of methamphetamine.SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

At least one person was injured in a shooting in San Francisco's Tenderloin district on Wednesday night, according to police.

Police said the shooting occurred in the 200 block of Golden Gate Avenue just after 10:25 p.m. Officers arrived on the scene, according to police, and found a man suffering from a gunshot wound not considered to be life threatening. The man was taken to a local hospital.

No further information was immediately available.

###CONCORD (BCN)

A man was charged with murder on April 3 after a fatal DUI collision in Concord last year.

Bo Steven Robledo, 33, of Selma was driving near Kinne Bridge on Willow Pass Road in Concord when he collided head-on into another vehicle on November 5, 2017, police said.

A 21-year-old woman died at the scene and a 26-year-old man suffered a brain injury and other traumatic injuries. Robledo also suffered major injuries and was taken to the hospital, according to Contra Costa County District Attorney spokesman Scott Alonso.

Alonso said Robledo turned himself in to Fresno police on April 6, three days after the charges were filed. He said Robledo might not have been arrested out of the hospital because police were still investigating the collision.

Robledo was charged with felony counts of murder, DUI causing injury within 10 years of another DUI, causing injury within 10 years of another DUI while driving with a .08 percent blood alcohol content and a misdemeanor count of driving with a suspended license.

County prosecutors said Robledo faces 15 years to life in state prison if he's convicted of the crimes. Robledo's bail is set at $1.18 million.

###SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen has teamed up with a Mission District elementary School for a proposal that would provide temporary shelter for families struggling with housing security, her office announced Wednesday.

According to officials at Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 School, located at 3351 23rd St., at least 64 out of 600 families with children enrolled at the school are currently living without safe and stable housing.

The problem, which school officials say has gotten worse in the last two years, prompted them to approach Ronen with the idea of housing families overnight at the school's gymnasium as they find permanent places to live, according to Ronen's office.

"The stories we hear from our families are heartbreaking. There are times when a parent has asked me 'Is there a corner somewhere at the school where we can sleep tonight?'" school principal Richard Zapien said in a statement.

The proposed program would open up one of the school's two gymnasiums for up to 20 families, allowing them to stay in the space from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. the following morning. The families' cots and personal belongings would be packed up and stored daily before school starts.

A nonprofit would be contracted to supervise the day-to-day operations, guided by the city's Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing.

The partnership between the department and the school district was made possible by a resolution passed earlier this year by the district's Board of Education requiring funding and programming in coordination with the housing department to help San Francisco Unified School District students facing housing insecurity.

Eligible families for the program would be identified by the school's social worker. In addition to a place to sleep, the families would also have access to case managers to assist them with finding permanent housing, according to Ronen's office.

"Unfortunately, our housing crisis is so severe in San Francisco, that teachers, students and administrators are spending an enormous amount of school time to address unsafe and insecure housing of students," Ronen said in a statement.

"I am fully supportive of helping the school realize this plan by making sure that city funds and contracted service providers address this essential need of students so school staff can concentrate on their core function -- educating our students," she said.

The city's budget, not school or staff resources, would fund start-up costs and maintenance operations. If approved, the program could begin as early as October, pending funding, according to Ronen's office.

According to the school district, during the 2015-2016 school year about one in 25 students reported experiencing housing instability by living with friends or family, at temporary shelters, at short-term motels, in cars or on the streets.

###REDWOOD CITY (BCN)

Two men who were arrested in connection to a double fatal shooting in San Mateo County in February pleaded not guilty to several charges this afternoon, prosecutors said.

Devin Lum, 20, of South San Francisco was charged with two counts of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of multiple murders, shooting into or from a vehicle and felony assault with a firearm.

He faces life without parole or the death penalty, according to San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe.

Dorian Duff-Guardado, 23, of Oakland, was charged with being an accessory to murder and he faces a 3-year sentence.

Lum is being held without bail and Duff-Guardado's bail is set at $500,000. Both men are currently in custody, Wagstaffe said.

The shooting was first reported to police at 8:40 p.m. on Feb. 25 in the unincorporated San Mateo County community of Broadmoor.

The San Mateo County coroner's office identified the two people killed as Vanessa Guillory, 21, of San Francisco and Michael Garcia-Salem, 22, of Half Moon Bay. Guillory died at the scene and Garcia-Salem died at a hospital.

The two suspects pulled into the parking lot of Mr. Liquor in Broadmoor and Lum began having an argument with the victims. When he was approached by Garcia-Salem, Lum allegedly brandished a semi-automatic firearm and shot him in the chest repeatedly.

Guillory was standing about 15 feet behind the first victim and was allegedly shot several times in the torso.

Another man who was standing behind Guillory was also allegedly shot, but suffered injuries that were not life-threatening. The two suspects then fled in a vehicle driven by Duff-Guardado, according to court records.

The liquor store's surveillance camera captured the shooting and the two suspects were eventually arrested at Duff-Guardado's father's home in Oakland.

A preliminary hearing for the case is set for Sept. 5. Lum's defense attorney is Kevin Nowack and Duff-Guardado's attorney is Brandon Douglass.

###

(650) 363-4752SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A U.S. Department of Justice lawyer asked a federal appeals court in San Francisco today to reinstate President Donald Trump's executive order restricting federal funding to sanctuary cities and counties.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Chad Readler argued before a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the order could be found constitutional if interpreted narrowly.

"At every turn, the order states it should be interpreted 'consistent with law,'" Readler told a three-judge panel.

Trump issued the order concerning cities and counties deemed to be sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants on Jan. 25, 2017, five days after taking office.

Among other provisions, it says "sanctuary jurisdictions across the United States willfully violate federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States."

The order says federal policy is to "ensure that jurisdictions that fail to comply with applicable federal law do not receive federal funds, except as mandated by law."

The order has been blocked for the past year by injunctions issued by U.S. District Judge William Orrick of San Francisco, acting on lawsuits filed by San Francisco and Santa Clara County.

Orrick said in a preliminary injunction last April and a permanent injunction in November that the order was unconstitutional because it intruded on Congress's exclusive power to determine federal spending.

He also said the "plain language" of the order threatens all federal funding for cities and counties deemed to be sanctuary jurisdictions, rather than a just a small number of law enforcement grants, as contended by the Department of Justice.

The panel took the government's appeal of Orrick's ruling under submission after hearing 40 minutes of arguments and will issue a written ruling at a later date.

Readler argued the order should be interpreted to apply only to the law enforcement grants and only to violations of one federal law, which bars local governments from prohibiting employees from communicating with federal officials about individuals' immigration status.

He also contended that even if the court upholds part of Orrick's ruling, there is no need for a nationwide rather than local injunction.

Chief Circuit Judge Sidney Thomas asked Readler about the significance of statements by Trump and the White House press office that appear to say that all federal funding for sanctuary cities could be withheld.

"The order has to be judged by its terms, not by public statements," Readler responded.

San Francisco Deputy City Attorney Christine Van Aken told the judges, "This executive order is simply not susceptible to the gloss the Department of Justice has placed on it.

"We shouldn't be required to simply trust the federal government on this," she said.

Deputy Santa Clara County Counsel Danielle Goldstein said the order caused sanctuary cities and counties to either "risk financial ruin" or abandon their lawmakers' policies on undocumented immigrants.

"The order was expected and intended to cause that kind of coercion," she argued.

County Counsel James Williams said in a statement after the hearing that Santa Clara County was at risk of losing about $1.7 billion in federal funds -- nearly 35 percent of its annual revenue -- for services such as emergency medical care, mental health services, public safety, and basic food and nutrition programs.

"President Trump cannot use federal funding as a weapon to force local governments to participate in the federal government's immigration enforcement efforts," Williams said.

San Francisco has told the court in a filing that it expects to receive about $1 billion in federal grants and another $1 billion in annual entitlement funds in the 2017-18 fiscal year.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera said after the hearing, "San Francisco follows immigration law. The federal government has always been free to enforce immigration law in San Francisco ... The federal government knows who is in our jails. If they think someone is dangerous, all they need is a criminal warrant."

###

299-5119

San Francisco City Attorney's Office (415) 554-46622018 Honors Day celebrations are Saturday

CARBONDALE, Ill.  A celebration to acknowledge and salute exceptional students will take place during Honors Day ceremonies on Saturday, April 14.

More than 1,900 undergraduate students will be recognized. Individual colleges begin their respective Honors Day programs at 1 p.m. at various locations on campus.

University-wide reception will be in the Student Center

After college ceremonies are finished, a university-wide reception with Chancellor Carlo Montemagno will be from 2 to 4:30 p.m. in Student Center Ballroom D.

Criteria for honoring students

Attained an undergraduate GPA of 3.50 or better, and if applicable, a 3.50 GPA or better in all undergraduate work, including transfer credit recognized by SIU

Reached the benchmarks of 12, 45, 75 or 105 SIU credit hours of coursework since the prior years determination.

The locations for each of the college ceremonies are:2018 Rickert-Ziebold Trust Award winners: Three seniors in Southern Illinois University Carbondales School of Art and Design program are recipients of Rickert-Ziebold Trust Award. From left, Timothy Miller, Lindsey Perry and Kelly Carter were chosen from 11 finalists for the annual award, the most prestigious within the School of Art and Design. The artists with their individual works are below. (Photos by Russell Bailey)

Three students share Rickert-Ziebold Award honors

by Pete Rosenbery

CARBONDALE, Ill.  Three graduating seniors from Southern Illinois University Carbondales School of Art and Design are sharing the 2018 Rickert-Ziebold Trust Award.

Kelly Carter of Charles Town, W. Va., Timothy Miller, Evansville, Ind., and Lindsey Perry of Johnston City, were selected from 11 finalists to share the award and an associated $15,000 prize.

The three students will be recognized during an exhibition reception and award presentation on April 13 in the Studio Arts Building Surplus Gallery, 432 S. Washington, St., Carbondale (formerly the Glove Factory). The reception is from 6 to 8 p.m.; the awards presentation starts at 7 p.m.

The exhibition features work of all 11 Rickert-Ziebold Trust Award finalists and continues through April 14. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Gallery hours are:

April 12-13  10 a.m.-4 p.m.

April 14  10 a.m.-noon.

Media Advisory

Reporters, photographers and news crews are welcome to cover the 2018 Rickert-Ziebold Trust Award reception and awards presentation on April 13 in the Studio Arts Building Surplus Gallery, 432 S. Washington, St., Carbondale (formerly the Glove Factory). The reception is from 6 to 8 p.m.; the awards presentation starts at 7 p.m. For more information, contact Sun Kim, associate professor of metalsmithing and jewelry at sunkim@siu.edu or 618-453-4315.

Carters installation relates to changing memories in a small, but potent way

Lets Talk About Power is a series of three paintings, each about 6 feet by 3 feet, that addresses a traumatic event in Carters life and the spaces incorporated within that event, she said.

The paintings also show a reminder of the unwavering human need to have control or power over their surroundings.

This award has been a much needed confidence booster, said Carter, the daughter of Stan and Cissey Carroll and Cheryl Carroll. My work is generally very personal and a little unorthodox and I often think because of this it is not relatable to an audience. Now I know that to be an unfounded thought. This confidence will help to drive me forward in my career and to continue making and exhibiting work.

Art and Design program was a good fit for Miller

Millers installation allows the viewer to be conscious of their visual perceptions. His work uses a configuration of small dots on two different planes, one of which is transparent.

The configuration, combined with the viewers own movement, generates an optical illusion called a moire pattern, which is caused when repeating patterns overlap each other.

The Art and Design department has put together a great curriculum which has done a great job at increasing my capabilities as an artist, said Miller, the son of Cindy Smith and Mark Miller, who has had family members also attend SIU.

The Printmaking program in particular has had a formative impact on me and has pushed me further as an artist than what I would have believed to be possible within four years.

Perrys work features illustrations for mothers struggling with postpartum depression

Perrys installation, Hey There, Momma, features the work for a planned book When Skies are Gray, which she illustrated. She drew each page by hand in ink and then scanned the drawings into Photoshop, where she digitally painted them, she said.

Using the medium of a childrens book, her message is meant to encourage, support and raise awareness about postpartum depression, said Perry, the daughter of Andrea and Tim Hartwell.

I am so honored to be one of the winners, said Perry, a communication design major, who attended SIU Carbondale after an almost three-year hiatus from college.

If I had known how much I would come to enjoy attending school here, and how much I would learn in the Communication Design program, I would have gone back to school much sooner.

Historically Significant Award

The awards are made possible through the generosity of the late Joseph Rickert family. Rickert, a prominent lawyer and state senator from Waterloo, Ill., had a personal interest in the arts.

Through the family's friendship with Delyte Morris and Henry Shryock, who both served in the role of SIU president (now chancellor), the Rickerts came to appreciate the central role played by Southern Illinois University in the cultural life of the region.

This award, established in 1974 in memory of the Rickert family, serves to support and encourage that tradition of excellence. Because of the Rickert familys vision, love of art, and confidence in the future, the School of Art and Design is able to make an annual distribution of cash awards to outstanding Rickert-Ziebold scholars.

Kelly Carter Kelly Carter

Timothy Miller Timothy MillerA Japanese government panel started talks Thursday on action to be taken if the Japan Meteorological Agency announces a significant rise in the possibility of a major earthquake occurring at the Nankai Trough off the country's Pacific coast.

The central disaster management council held the first meeting of a related working group on the day. The working group is slated to draw up a report within the year, and based on the report, the government will consider the feasibility of introducing guidelines for the action.

The working group was set up after the meteorological agency launched a new scheme last November to release information on the possible Nankai Trough earthquake.

The panel will study action to follow information releases under the new scheme in the Pacific coastal prefectures of Shizuoka and Kochi, to serve as a model for other areas.

According to the government, there is a 70 to 80 pct chance of an 8- to 9-magnitude earthquake occurring at the Nankai Trough within 30 years.

 307080The Japanese government will focus on cutting social security spending with specific targets over the next three years or so, bracing for an accelerating rise in social security costs in and after fiscal 2022, when baby boomers begin to reach 75 years old, officials said Thursday.

The decision was made at a meeting of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, chaired by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, on the day. "We need to fully consider spending levels and other issues," Abe told the meeting.

Measures to reduce social security spending under the initiative are expected to be included in a fiscal consolidation plan that the government is slated to adopt in June.

Annual growth in social security spending is estimated to accelerate from some 650 billion yen in fiscal 2016 to 2018 to 900 billion yen in and after fiscal 2022, according to the Cabinet Office.

During the council's meeting, private-sector members proposed promoting measures to prevent illness and making medical and nursing care services more efficient by utilizing artificial intelligence technology.There cant possibly be that many Russians of importance left to sanction. But President Trump has laid more economic restrictions on Russia, Russians and Russian companies for a variety of evildoings.

Forget for a moment that every president loudly announces such sanctions, which then are largely forgotten by everybody. If theres any Russian (or Iranian or North Korean) dense enough to still keep assets in these United States, maybe they dont really care about them. And if President Vladimir Putin has buckled to pull troops out of Crimea after four years of escalating U.S. sanctions, no ones noticed.

All this, mixed with Trumps poorly explained trade tariff tiff with China and his abnormal normal White House chaos, has managed to distract from development of an unholy Middle Eastern alliance that should cause serious concerns, not just for the White House.

Last week Putin, Irans President Hassan Rouhani and Turkeys strongman Tayyip Erdogan completed a summit in Ankara by announcing their new partnership to establish a cease-fire in Syria and to start rebuilding the war-ravaged land that is ravaged in large part by their own forces.

All this without even an FYI to the U.S. administration that once played a major role in the oil-rich region. Its a continuation of Putins deft power-plays to restore Russian influence well beyond its own borders and especially within the tumultuous Middle East. Its been years in the making and benefited from President Barack Obamas inept inaction.

Remember Obamas unscripted red-line threat about Syrias use of chemical weapons on its own people? With Russian knowledge, Syrias Bashar Assad defiantly did just that. Putin offered to broker the phony destruction of all those lethal gases, which bailed out Obama and cemented Putins influence in Syria.

Last year Assad gassed civilians again. Within 48 hours on Trumps orders, 60 cruise missiles devastated the launching airbase. They repeated the gas attack this month. Trump threatened new retaliation, which Russia vowed to stop.

Trump tweeted: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Trumps instincts are to abandon the region. He recently announced a complete pullout from Syria of about 2,000 special operations advisers.

As they had with Trumps desire to leave Afghanistan, his advisers, mainly Defense Secretary James Mattis convinced him to walk that back. Their valid argument being such hasty retreats would leave the same power vacuum as Obamas hasty 2011 troop withdrawal from Iraq, which allowed ISIS to flourish.

Turkey is allegedly a NATO ally, allowing U.S. planes to fly against ISIS from Incirlik. But Erdogan regards the Kurds as terrorists and has now thrown in his lot with Putin and Iran. NATOs European members will not do much because Turkey houses 3.5 million Syrian refugees and if Erdogan opened that human spigot, they would flood into Europe.

To cement Russian influence in Turkey, Putin is building a $20 billion nuclear reactor there and has just sold Erdogan $2.5 billion in sophisticated antiaircraft missiles to use against someones planes.

Thats the same self-serving economic infiltration Putin used to tie Irans militant mullahs to Moscow. As the worlds largest exporter of terror, Iran has sent 100,000 troops to bolster Assad.

Iran now has a direct landline through Syria to support its terror partners in Hezbollah on the borders of Israel, where Trump may soon visit. Much as Iran is arming and supporting Yemens Houthi rebels to destabilize Saudi Arabia.

Still pending this spring is Trumps decision to abandon Obamas nuclear deal with Iran. Tehran maintains that will free it to resume full-scale weapons development, which will likely prompt the Saudis to do the same. Trump has threatened to  wait for it  slap sanctions back on Iran.

Sound familiar?

Andrew Malcolm is a veteran national and foreign correspondent. Twitter: @AHMalcolmThe childhood home of everybodys favorite intergalactic delivery boy, Philip J. Fry, is on the market in Brooklyn, NY, for $2.2 million.

In reality, the seven-bedroom, three-bath house was where Futurama writer and producer Eric Kaplan grew up. In the 2001 episode The Luck of the Fryrish, Fry, Turanga Leela, and Bender travel underground to Old New York to track down the house, in search of a seven-leaf clover that Fry is convinced will turn his luck around in the year 3002.

Holy Camoly! The house I grew up in, its still there, Fry says, standing in front of a dilapidated two-story, with a collapsing roof, broken windows, and a toilet sitting on the front lawn.

Philip J. Fry's childhood home realtor.com

Man, Father Time really took a bat to this place, Bender says. The camera pans out to the punchlinerevealing that the house looked exactly the same as when Fry was a child.

The shows animators really nailed the homes exterior, including the columns on the front porch, the orientation of the front steps, the angles of the roofline, the four bushes in the front yard, and even the rectangular stained-glass window above the staircase.

The childhood home of the writer and producer of "Futurama" realtor.com

The house appears in the show just once, for a few seconds at that, and is the perfect Matt Groening-esque Easter eggan inside joke that the shows creators would find hilarious, but would take the fans years to figure out.

The real estate blog Bklyner unraveled the mystery in late 2012 (more than a decade after the episode first aired) after asking readers to help it track down the house.

Reporters there guessed that it must be a real house, given the episodes other incredibly specific clues: The trio take the B train to Brooklyns Newkirk Avenue stop (which was renamed Newkirk Plaza 10 years after the episode aired), and later walk to Prospect Park, a little over a mile away from Kaplans childhood home.

Built in 1905, the house doesn't appear to have changed much since Kaplan lived there in the 1970s. Double doors open to a mosaic-tiled entryway, with a second door to the homes foyera must during the cold Northeastern winters. Theres intricate parquet flooring in the foyer, and original woodwork on the ground floor.

Foyer realtor.com

The kitchen looks like it was renovated at some point in Kaplans childhood, and theres funky, '70s-era floral wallpaper in one of the homes three bathrooms. Otherwise, the homes walls are painted a stark, modern white. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine how beautiful the house will be once its renovated by new owners.

Kitchen realtor.com

Bathroom realtor.com

Living room realtor.com

Bedroom realtor.com

Kaplan certainly believes the house has staying potentialin his fictional animated world, it survives for at least the next 1,000 years.

Shut up and take our money!

The post Attention, 'Futurama' Fans: Philip J. Fry's Childhood House in Brooklyn Is Up for Sale appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.LONDON  The nerve agent attack on two people in England demonstrates how reckless Russia is prepared to be, how little the Kremlin cares for the international rules-based order, one of Britains intelligence chiefs said Thursday, in an unusually public and scathing commentary on a foreign power.

In his first speech after a year as director of the Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, Jeremy Fleming said the threat from Russia had never gone away, but had become impossible to ignore after the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter, cyberattacks on Ukranian infrastructure and other actions.JOHANNESBURG  A new annual report on the death penalty calls sub-Saharan Africa a beacon of hope amid a decline in executions worldwide.

Twenty countries across sub-Saharan Africa have now abolished the death penalty for all crimes, Amnesty International says in the report released early Thursday. Just two countries in the region, Somalia and South Sudan, carried out executions last year.

Executions worldwide dropped again in 2017, with at least 993 recorded in 23 countries. Thats down 4 percent from the year before and down 39 percent from 2015.

At least 2,591 death sentences were recorded in 53 countries last year, down from a record high of 3,117 the year before, the London-based human rights organization said.

The numbers dont include the thousands of executions and death sentences that Amnesty International believes have occurred in China, where they are considered a state secret.

China remained the worlds top executioner, the report said. Excluding China, 84 percent of the reported executions last year were carried out in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan. Countries resuming executions in 2017 were Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The United States remained the only country in the Americas to carry out executions, with 23 last year, up slightly from the year before.

With the progress in Africa, the isolation of the worlds remaining executing countries could not be starker, said the organizations secretary general, Salil Shetty.

Even among those countries some significant steps were seen. In Iran, executions were down 11 percent and drug-related executions were reduced to 40 percent. In Malaysia, changes to antidrug laws now allow discretion in sentencing for drug trafficking crimes.

But Amnesty International called distressing the continued use of the death penalty for drug-related offenses, with 15 countries last year imposing death sentences or carrying out executions. Drug-related executions were recorded in China, Iran, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, where drug-related beheadings rocketed from 16 percent of total executions in 2016 to 40 percent in 2017.

The rights group also expressed concern that at least five people in Iran were executed last year for crimes committed when they were under the age of 18, with another 80 people with similar pasts still on death row.

People with mental or intellectual disabilities were executed or faced a death sentence in the United States, Japan, Pakistan, Singapore and the Maldives.

Cara Anna is an Associated Press writer.DAMASCUS, Syria  A team of inspectors from the international chemical weapons watchdog was on its way to Syria on Thursday to begin an investigation into a suspected chemical weapons attack near the capital that has brought the war-torn country to the brink of a wider conflict, amid Western threats of retaliation and Russian warnings of the potential for a dangerous escalation.

The fact-finding mission from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was expected to head to Douma, where the suspected attack took place and where Russia said rebels had now capitulated to government control. The Syrian government said it would facilitate the missions investigation, which was to begin Saturday.

Syria and its ally, Russia, deny any such attack, which activists say killed more than 43 people last weekend.

Speaking at the United Nations on Thursday, Russias U.N. ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said the top priority had to be to avert a wider war, and he didnt rule out the possibility of a U.S.-Russia conflict. Speaking to reporters after a closed emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, Nebenzia said Russia was very concerned with the dangerous escalation of the situation and aggressive policies and preparations that some governments were making  a clear reference to the Trump administration and its allies.

We hope that there will be no point of no return  that the U.S. and their allies will refrain from military action against a sovereign state, Nebenzia said, adding that the danger of escalation is higher than simply Syria.

The imminent arrival of the chemical weapons inspectors came as rebels in Douma surrendered their weapons and left the town for opposition-held areas in the north.

Amid conflicting tweets about the timing of any retaliation, President Trump said Thursday that an attack on Syria could take place very soon or not so soon at all. On Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the National Security Council would be meeting to present Trump with various options, adding that he could not talk about any military plans because an attack is not yet in the offing.

Meanwhile, the British Cabinet on Thursday gave Prime Minister Theresa May the green light to work with the U.S. and France to coordinate an international response, though it gave no indication of the timing or scale of any action.

Bassem Mroue and Sarah El Deeb are Associated Press writers.TEL AVIV  Violent attacks on Jews worldwide dropped in 2017 despite a rise in other forms of anti-Semitism, researchers reported Wednesday, in a year characterized by normalization and mainstreaming of anti-Semitism not seen in Europe since World War II.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University said assaults specifically targeting Jews fell 9 percent last year. They recorded 327 cases compared to 361 in 2016, which had already been the lowest number in a decade.This item is available in full to subscribers.

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A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much!Rapid growth in renewable energy investment has propelled the sector to a "tipping point," former NSW premier Mike Baird says, amid predictions investors will pour trillions of dollars globally into green electricity projects in the coming decades.

Amid a bitter political fight over energy policy in Australia, Mr Baird, now a senior National Australia Bank executive, said global market forces were already driving long-term changes in the energy mix.

Mike Baird, former NSW premier and NAB's chief customer officer for corporate and institutional banking, says green energy is a "huge" opportunity for the bank. Credit:Louise Kennerley

After NAB last year became the first major Australian bank to stop lending for new thermal coal mines, Mr Baird said the lender's balance sheet also reflected the "exponential" growth in renewable energy financing, which he viewed as a "huge opportunity".

Were in a position that there are many moving parts to the energy policy discussion framework, but weve reached a critical point where the markets and investors are moving in respect of these challenges, Mr Baird said in an interview with Fairfax Media.Yoga teacher trainer Denise Payne runs courses all over the world.

Every year, resolutions are made about pursuing a passion via a side project, making a career switch, going somewhere exotic or just getting fit. Yoga teacher training is one way to tick all those boxes simultaneously.

While it takes work and commitment, its the ideal way to combine travel with accomplishing an internationally recognised qualification.

Not only will doing the training deepen the practitioners self-knowledge and yoga practice, but after a month of immersive, daily practice, theyll arrive home, qualified to teach others.

It is both the bane and the bounty of the yoga industry that there are so many training options, as the sector remains informal with no strict international regulations enforced.

Courses can range from thorough to ramshackle. A bit of research, though, will turn up, often in an idyllic location, a decent course with daily yoga classes, discussion and study of yogic philosophy, physiology and anatomy. Its also an opportunity to meet and develop relationships with fellow yoga lovers.One of the big questions hanging over newly installed Wesfarmers boss Rob Scott is where he will look to invest shareholders cash once he has demerged the Coles business.

While there is pressure from the market to show he has plans to revive investor returns - which have flagged over the past three years - there is growing speculation the Perth-headquartered giant has already identified one potential acquisition target.

Wesfarmers managing director Rob Scott has signaled he would look for new business to drive growth. Credit:Trevor Collens

According to some sources close to the company, Wesfarmers has bought a stake of about 3 to 4 per cent in the strife-ridden New Zealand construction and industrial materials company Fletcher Building.

Fletcher is dual-listed on the Australian and New Zealand stock exchanges and is one of the largest listed companies in New Zealand. It has assets on both sides of the Tasman, about 21,000 employees and a market value of $NZ4.1 billion ($3.9 billion).We all know that toilets are for flushing the three P's only: pee, poo, and (toilet) paper. Anything else can pose a pricey problem for your plumbing and the planet.

But that hasn't stopped some manufacturers of wet wipes confusing the message with claims their products, too, can simply be flushed away. One of those companies was slapped with a significant penalty on Thursday by the Federal Court for misleading advertising.

Pental Limited and Pental Products Pty Ltd is the manufacturer behind White King's "flushable" toilet and bathroom cleaning wipes. It's been ordered to pay penalties totalling $700,000 for making false and misleading representations about its product; namely, that it would disintegrate in the sewage system "just like toilet paper".

Packaging and promotional materials for the White King wipes included statements like flushable, Simply wipe over the hard surface of the toilet  and just flush away, and White King Toilet Wipes are made from a specially designed material, which will disintegrate in the sewage system when flushed, just like toilet paper.It started with a $105 billion ($132 billion) blunder, and then it got worse.

Someone at Samsung Securities, one of South Korea's largest brokerages, was trying to pay employees 1,000 won ($1.10) per share in dividends under a company compensation plan. Somehow, they gave them 1,000 Samsung Securities shares instead.

Share sell-off: A trader in Seoul, South Korea. Credit:AP

In total, the company distributed 2.83 billion shares, worth -- on paper -- about 112.6 trillion won. That was more than 30 times the company's market value.

The fact that the shares didn't exist didn't stop 16 employees from selling them. And that spurred a rout in Samsung Securities' stock. It plunged as much as 12 per cent in the space of minutes on April 6, the biggest decline since the global financial crisis. Many retail investors got burned.That is impressive for a company launched only in 2016 amid a blaze of publicity and with backing from some of the nation's most respected and powerful tech luminaries, including Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes. Its ambition was to shake up the nation's superannuation industry, giving customers more exposure to the global technology sector, in stark contrast to the mining and bank stock heavy weightings of most retirement savings portfolios in this country. Yet within months, founding chief executive Andrew Sellen was ousted and replaced by Bennetts, a former Goldman Sachs staffer and AirTree Ventures partner, who originally served as chief investment officer. Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes has backed Spaceship. Credit:Louie Douvis Spaceship was then vociferously criticised by industry incumbents, competitors and sections of the media for its relatively high fees and low return targets, and for using index funds (rather than individual shares) to build exposure to tech stocks in its portfolios.

It was the latter issue that got Spaceship and its trustee in hot water with ASIC, culminating in this week's fines. Last year, Cannon Brookes' likeness was abruptly removed from Spaceship's website. Whether this was due to concerns raised by ASIC, Cannon-Brookes himself, or a combination of the two is not fully clear. (ASIC did not respond to requests for clarification ). Sources close to the Atlassian billionaire said he is "emotionally exhausted" by his involvement with Spaceship. That said, his family office, Grok Ventures, remains a significant shareholder in the business, and it still controls a board seat. Cannon-Brookes declined to comment. What [Spaceship] have achieved is incredibly impressive in such a short space of time in a highly regulated industry. Daniel Petre Bennetts, 37 is described variously by leading venture capital figures as an "odd duck", "a bit weird" and "a genius product guy, but still very young."

A source of much industry chatter is his relationship with Daniel Petre, the AirTree Ventures co-founder, and former lieutenant of Bill Gates at Microsoft, who is one of the grandfathers of Australia's tech industry. Some liken the relationship between Petre and Bennetts to that of a mentor and mentee. Others depict it as more strained that that. Bennetts decision to leave AirTree for Spaceship in 2016 disappointed his former employers according to three sources. But AirTree still went on to invest in Spaceship - not just once but twice - and Petre now sits on the company's board. Daniel Petre is regarded as a grandfather of the tech industry. Credit:Louise Kennerley "I have a lot of time for Paul," Petre says. "Some of what he and Spaceship are doing and have done is extraordinary. Perhaps a small part of was was done in the past was maybe not that well thought through initially.

"On balance however what they have achieved is incredibly impressive in such a short space of time in a highly regulated industry." Last December, Spaceship quietly appointed Andrew Moore, formerly a senior executive at St George Bank, as chairman. AirTree was instrumental in this appointment, sources said. Staff turnover has been another feature of the Spaceship journey. Of the four founders photographed at its unveiling, only two - Bennetts and chief operating officer Kaushik Sen, remain. Other high profile hires have abruptly left the business after joining. These include Michelle Moffat, who previously worked at Tyro Payments, who left her role as chief risk officer after four months; Chris Thomas, was investment director for seven months, but is now with BCG; and Cameron Newman, a highly regarded engineer who jumped ship after a year to another hyped start-up, Safety Culture. The company's funding position has also generated constant headlines.

Late least year reports surfaced that Spaceship had raised $50 million from investors including Amplo VC, a US venture capital firm which counts former Prime Minister Julia Gillard as a board member. Contacted for comment this week, Sheel Tyle, the founder of Amplo said the reports were "erroneous" and that "Amplo has no investment in Spaceship". He added that it has "no plans in the foreseeable future" to invest in Spaceship. After Fairfax Media revealed Spaceship's plans to raise funds from significant US investors last year, the company limited all communication with smaller shareholders. "Unfortunately we have had leaks to the press on our positive progress and challenges to date," the company said in an update to investors for the third quarter of fiscal 2017. "As a result ... we will be limiting some information disclosure to only our major investors." Multiple small shareholders contacted by Fairfax this week say had not heard anything substantial from the company since then. But this week Spaceship finally issued a fresh update to all of its investors addressing the ASIC infringement notice, and attempting to soothe any concerns. It pointed out that it had paid the fine in January, and in a nod to tensions with Tidswell, noted that its trustee had attempted to fight the fine. It also foreshadowed some imminent product expansions.Youre probably reading this on a Friday, most likely at work. As the hours inch towards the end of the day, there might be one thing stuck in your mind: beer oclock. Perhaps wine oclock. Any kind of drink oclock. And not at a bar or a pub but in the office.

Friday often means work drinks. Credit:Andrew Quilty / Australian Financial Review

Some businesses, particularly those in IT or advertising, take it a giant leap further by installing bar fridges so employees have an immediate selection of beverages to choose from whenever the craving arises  a perk for those in need of perking up. Even if it happens to be a Monday morning. (Or indeed because it is actually a Monday morning.)

The reasons for this boozy workplace culture arent as simplistic as the pervasive perception that Aussies love to drink. Its more true that many leaders believe a glass or two is a way of fostering team cohesion, of reducing stress, of keeping people back at work longer, of stimulating creativity.

And according to research to be published soon in the Human Resource Management journal, its a method many employers use to attract staff during the job interview process. But to what effect? To answer that question, the scholars conducted a couple of studies.Renewable energy projects would be clustered together to take better advantage of existing grid infrastructure under a proposal put forward by Australian Energy Market Commission to help limit cost increases.

The AEMC will on Friday launch a discussion paper calling for submissions on how to avoid leaving the growing level of wind, solar and pumped hydro generation stranded and unable to connect to the grid.

It stated renewable project may have trouble providing power into an already congested system as there is not enough transmission capacity to connect them to the grid. It proposes potentially bunching wind and solar together they can connect without having to pay to build more infrastructure.

A lack of transmission and poles and wires could leave new wind and solar farms unable to provide power into the grid. Credit:Jessica Shapiro

The AEMC expect about 45 gigawatts of generation to enter the national electricity market and much of it would need new infrastructure to connect to the grid.Port Botany now handles about 2.4 million containers a year and that is forecast to rise to 5 million by 2040. Credit:Jon Reid

This raises the possibility of the federal governments competition watchdog taking action over the arrangements imposed during the privatisation process.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is now investigating the restrictions, which were introduced when Port Botany and the Port of Newcastle were being privatised.

Hundreds of thousands of trucks could be shifted from Sydneys roads by a new container terminal at Newcastle, but secret restrictions introduced during the privatisation of NSW ports are preventing its development.

Modelling by Deloitte Access Economics has found a new container terminal at the Port of Newcastle would immediately slash the number of shipping containers transported through Sydneys transport networks by half a million, rising to 1.1 million by mid-century.

The operator of Newcastles port wants to build a container terminal but claims that a new facility is not viable because of constraints imposed at the time of privatisation.

Roy Green, the chair of the Port of Newcastle, said the efficiency of our port system "is being compromised by the restrictive arrangements that the government set up at the time of privatisation".

Deloitte's analysis, which was commissioned by the Port of Newcastle, draws attention to the impact of tolls on the movement of containers to and from Port Botany. It will cost $60-$80 in tolls to move a container west of Port Botany in future, the report estimates.

Mr Green said the business model for the WestConnex motorway was thoroughly tied up with restrictions favouring Port Botany.Manne notes that, only a few years ago, a bipartisan commitment to climate mitigation could be found throughout the industrialised world  during the 2008 presidential election, the Republican candidate John McCain proved nearly as outspoken about global warming as his opponent.

Today, though, denialism features almost as a matter of principle for conservatives, the result, Manne says, of a deliberate campaign by those with a material stake in the status quo. We see the consequences in two essays about Malcolm Turnbull.

In the first, based on an interview in early 2012, Manne finds much to like in the then shadow minister for communication and broadband, a man he describes as the "principal inheritor of the noble but now threatened liberal tradition stretching from Alfred Deakin to Malcolm Fraser, and the principal obstacle to the Howard-inspired and Abbott-led transformation from small-l liberalism to populist conservatism".

In the second, published in 2017 under the telling title Malcolm Turnbull: A Brief Lament, Manne muses about the metamorphosis of a minister who described climate change as "a profound moral challenge" into a leader who laughed as treasurer Scott Morrison clowned with a lump of coal in parliament. Was Manne wrong to expect any better? Perhaps. Yet what makes this collection interesting is the eclecticism of his enthusiasms: Noel Pearson and Fraser, yes, but also Kevin Rudd, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

Manne revisits the debates of his own Cold War past, arguing that new documentary material substantiates charges levelled by anti-communists against the radical journalist Wilfred Burchett. Yet he also writes with genuine horror about the massacres of 1965 and 1966 in which the Indonesian military murdered half a million or more leftists and concludes, ''If I had known then what I know now, while my attitude to the crimes of communism would have been no different, I hope I would have had sufficient judgement to have given the anti-communist movement a far wider berth"."We know somewhere out there is a tipping point where this current system is likely to break down," said study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "We still don't know how far away or close to this tipping point we might be ... This is uncharted territory." Studies from the planet's history suggest that such a sudden change in the North Atlantic has occurred many times in earth's past, perhaps as recently as about 13,000 years ago. But it's not clear how close the tipping point might be. This is "something that climate models have predicted for a long time, but we weren't sure it was really happening. I think it is happening," Rahmstorf said. "And I think it's bad news." "I think in the long run ... Greenland will start melting even faster, so I think the long-term prospect for that ocean circulation system is that it will weaken further," Rahmstorf said.

"And I think that's going to affect all of us basically, in a negative way." But the full role of climate change in the slowing ocean current is not fully understood, and another study released on Wednesday drew somewhat different conclusions. This study, which was also published in the journal Nature, found that the AMOC has slowed over the past 150 years, and similarly found that it is now weaker than at any time in more than a millennium. "The last 100 years has been its lowest point for the last few thousand years," said Jon Robson, a researcher at the University of Reading and one of the study's authors. The study's lead author was David Thornalley of the University College London. The two studies have their differences: the second suggests the slowdown probably began for natural reasons about the time of the industrial revolution in 1850, rather than being spurred by human-caused climate change, which fully kicked in later.

But like the first study, the second too finds that the circulation has remained weak, or even weakened further, through the present era of warming. "These two new papers do point strongly to the fact that the overturning has probably weakened over the last 150 years," Robson said. "There's uncertainty about when, but the analogy between what happened 150 years ago and today is quite strong." The AMOC circulation is just one part of a far larger global system of ocean currents, driven by differences in the temperature and salinity of ocean water. Warm surface waters flow northwards in the Atlantic, eventually cooling and - because cold, salty water is very dense - sink and travel back southwards at great depths. The circulation has thus been likened to a conveyor belt. A fisherman sails past melting icebergs in Greenland, Credit:New York Times But the melting of Arctic sea ice and Greenland's ice sheet can freshen northern waters and interfere with sinking. Recent research has in fact confirmed that meltwater from Greenland is lingering on the ocean surface, where it could be interrupting the circulation.

Direct measurements of the circulation are only a little over a decade old. And while those have shown a downturn, that's too short a time period to detect a definitive trend. So the new studies sought to infer the state of the circulation from more indirect evidence. In the first, the authors highlight a curious pattern of ocean temperatures that match what one would expect from a weakening AMOC - namely, a strong warming off the coast of the eastern US, paired with a cooling south of Greenland, which has sometimes been called the cold "blob". The research finds that the odd alignment, which has produced regions of both record cold and also record warmth right next to one another, has been developing since the 1950s and closely matches what a very high resolution climate model predicted would occur. The study was led by the Potsdam Institute's Levke Caesar along with co-authors at institutions in Germany, Greece, and Spain, as well as from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The second study, meanwhile, draws on sediment samples from the deep ocean off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to infer the strength of the current going back well over 1000 years. Because a stronger current can carry thicker sand grains, the study was able to detect a weakening beginning about 160 or 170 years ago when the "Little Ice Age" in the northern hemisphere ended. That trend has then continued through the present. "In terms of this initial drop in the AMOC, it's very likely that's a kind of natural process," Robson said. "It's very likely, based on other evidence, that human activities may have continued to suppress the AMOC, or maybe led to further weakening." Meric Srokosz, an oceanographer at the National Oceanography Centre in Britain, noted that the two studies have "somewhat different messages" - but emphasised that neither makes a direct measurement of the circulation. "Essentially, what view you take of the results depends on how good you believe the models used are and likewise how well the chosen proxies represent the AMOC over the time scales of interest," he said. Marilena Oltmanns, an oceanographer at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, went further, saying that the two studies may not be measuring the same thing.

"I think, by applying different methods and looking at different time scales, the two studies focused on different components of the ocean circulation," she said. "Both of them had to use some kind of approximation or proxy which inevitably results in limitations and cannot give a complete picture." But Rahmstorf argued in an email that, given the difficulties and limitations involved in such work, "I think the overall agreement of the various independent estimates is very good!" The authors of the first study believe the shift in the circulation may already be having a big impact along the US coastline. "Of all the US waters, this region has definitely warmed the fastest in the last decade," said Vincent Saba, a marine biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and one of its co-authors. And that has had major impacts on fisheries. The Gulf of Maine, for instance, has seen a giant boom in the local lobster industry and crash of the cod fishery.A plan is being drawn up by federal Health Minister Greg Hunt to tackle endometriosis, a chronic, painful condition suffered by 700,000 women nationally.

Mr Hunt will place a draft national action plan on endometriosis front and centre at the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting of health ministers on Friday in Sydney.

Around one in 10 women suffer endometriosis. Credit:Stocksy

It is understood he will be seeking the support of all state and territory ministers for his plan to teach schoolchildren about pelvic pain and endometriosis and better equip general practitioners.

He will also be seeking their input during a public consultation process, which will begin next month. The final plan is likely to be released in June.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes a drink of water while testifying before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington this week. Credit:AAP

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has just completed two days of hearings in front of the US Congress. The hearings were billed as a grilling that would take the social media behemoths creator to task for the massive Cambridge Analytica data breach that, if reports are true, helped the Russians manipulate the US election.

The hearings, however, have largely failed to live up to expectations, with many expressing their frustration at the Senators failure to sustain a deep, probing line of questioning, essentially letting Zuckerberg off the hook.

But I wondered if Mark Zuckerberg was the latest in a long line of grown men with significant responsibility to invoke the man-boy defence. We all know the popular expression, "boys will be boys". The man-boy defence essentially extends the life-span of this particular "get out of jail free" card well into adulthood, casting grown men as Peter-Pan figures, incapable of growing up, or relinquishing the shackles of the gendered behaviour norms that defined, and excused, the indiscretions of their youth.

The internet was awash in a sea of jokes about Zuckerberg, all wide-eyed innocence and big ears with his back-to-school haircut, wearing his big boy suit. Many laughed about the fact that Zuckerberg sat on a booster seat during the hearings, (it was a standard cushion, but that did not stop the memes).Police have appealed to the public for help identifying a man who allegedly stole a World's Greatest Shave charity donation box in Canberra.

ACT Policing said the box was taken from the Hellenic Club in Phillip about 12.30am on Friday, March 30. It contained a sum of cash, but police did not say how much.

Police want to identify this man after a charity donation box was stolen at the Hellenic Club in Phillip, Canberra. Credit:ACT Policing

The suspected thief is described as Caucasian, about 183cm tall, slim, and with a shaved head. He was wearing a black hoodie, blue denim jeans and grey and white shoes.

Anyone who can identify the man or provide information is asked to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000, or via the Crime Stoppers ACT website.Police investigating the drowning death of a Canberra teenager last month have re-appealed for witnesses, especially two people seen fishing nearby.

Mount Stromlo High School pupil Georgia Vizovitis, 13, died after a boat capsized as it tried to cross the Moruya River bar, on the New South Wales south coast, about 7am on March 24.

Emergency services at the scene in Moruya after Canberra teenager Georgia Vizovitis drowned on March 24.

NSW Police Acting Superintendent Darren Wood said she was found under the boat's hull, about 40 minutes after it capsized.

On Thursday, NSW police called for any witnesses who hadn't yet spoken with them to come forward.If a knock-off Andy Warhol painting from Kmart was hung next to Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles in the National Gallery of Australia, there would be outrage. So how should we feel about knock-off furniture next to Australian-designed originals?

Last week Fairfax Media reported the National Gallery of Australia had spent almost $30,000 on armchairs for its members lounge, at the same time as the institution was facing budget cuts and staff losses. Six of the chairs came in at $3702 a chair - but that's not the price tag that has angered members of the Australian furniture design community.

An original Grant Featherston armchair in the National Gallery of Australia's members' lounge Credit:Anne-Maree Sargeant

The gallery also spent $6246 on 10 chairs from Milan Direct, referred to by the gallery as "red swan chairs".

The gallery defended the spending by saying it was supporting Australian designers, but that's not the whole story. While the green chairs with the four-figure price tag have been confirmed as original Grant Featherston contour armchairs, they sit alongside replicas of chairs originally designed by Danish designer Arne Jacobsen.Actually sorry? Credit:Bloomberg

A corporate apology echoes the words we are so familiar with from our everyday lives  but it is a distinct beast. It happens under the glare of media and is issued by an office holder in a complex management structure, to a mass and impersonalised audience.

And its contents may be subject to legal proceedings. It may also be couched in words which create the veneer of an apology without a detailed admission of guilt.

This week, two high-profile chief executives have issued public apologies on behalf of their corporations. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologised at a US Congress hearing for failing to protect the personal data of millions of users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australias newly ascended CEO, Matt Comyn, started his first day in the job with an internal email apologising to the banks employees, and taking responsibility for the banks mistakes.His support remains solid, with about 40 per cent of voters, give or take a few, consistently approving his performance. But despite their full-throated approval in the past for his promise to drain the Washington swamp, even they may find it hard to accept a president who defied US laws and conventions to sack an investigator.

In Washington, the US President is beset by intractable difficulties. The investigation by Robert Mueller into his campaigns links to Russia is coming ever closer to him personally, as the raid on the offices of his lawyer shows. He threatens to sack Mr Mueller, but the constitutional crisis that would produce might make things worse.

Could Donald Trump see a missile strike at Syria as a way to distract attention from his domestic political troubles? He would not be the first leader to use foreign conflict this way.

Mr Trump may well need to distract them and action in Syria may do it. The President will not care that the United States lacks a strategic purpose in Syria. Washington and its allies have no aim other than getting rid of Bashar al-Assad, the dictator guilty of many crimes against his own people, the latest of which appears to be the use of poison gas against them.

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The recent attacks in Douma obviously cross the much-ballyhooed red line. But what lies beyond the red line? Thus far it is belligerent tweets and name-calling from the leader of the free world (Mr Assad is an animal, Mr Trump says) and equally threatening responses from Moscow. Washington, with its allies, is presumably mulling a surgical military response which might cause photogenic damage to Syrian installations and personnel without harming a single Russian soldier, diplomat or adviser. Let us all hope they are very careful indeed, since what they are contemplating is both an empty gesture and phenomenally dangerous.

The US under Donald Trump appears to know nothing, and to care less, about what happens after Assad goes  if indeed he goes at all. This may explain why Assad is so hard to get rid of. It explains why Washington has few genuine allies in the region and why its supposed NATO ally, Turkey, which has deep interests in who runs Syria, is undermining it at every turn.

For Turkey, Syria is next door. It is full of Kurds, who loathe the Turks as much as they loathe Assad. For Russia and Turkey, neither of which cares greatly for human rights, Bashar al-Assad, murderous and vile despot though he is, is a safe bet. He will keep the lid on things and cause his powerful neighbours and patrons as little trouble as possible. Nothing the US can do will achieve that.Jailed former NSW Labor minister Eddie Obeid and three of his sons have lost a costly lawsuit against two Independent Commission Against Corruption investigators, in the latest legal defeat for the controversial clan.

Obeid and three of his five sons  Moses, Paul and Eddie junior  have been pursuing ICAC in court since 2016, claiming they suffered reputational and financial harm as a result of a 2012 corruption inquiry into a $30 million coal deal.

From left, lawyer Nick di Girolamo, Moses Obeid, Eddie Obeid jnr, lawyer Tim Breene (back) and Paul Obeid at the Supreme Court last year. Credit:Peter Rae

The inquiry led to criminal charges against Obeid snr and middle son Moses.

In a scathing judgment delivered in September 2016, Supreme Court justice David Hammerschlag threw out the case and said some of the family's claims bordered on "eccentric".Sunday afternoon about 2pm and the car park at the Harris Farm at Willoughby was on the boil, simmering but not yet spilling its guts. The cursing was mild, and contained to the interior of cars.

Imagine a parking area of about 30 spaces. It is one way, with entry from the south and the exit to the north. There's parking on both sides of a narrow alley.

Parking attendants are in a vulnerable position dealing with angry drivers. Credit:Sylvia Liber

Two attendants help shoppers reverse in and out on weekend afternoons, public holidays, and other days like Christmas Eve when the place is on the verge of explosion. They're saints who earn little, I guess, compared with the privileged shoppers who regularly hurl abuse at them.

About 30 minutes later, I am about to leave with my shopping when a man roars in the wrong way. To stop him, a parking attendant placed himself and his orange high-vis vest squarely in front of the driver, about two metres inside the gate. "Mate, mate, it is one way," he said. "Go round the other way."Two of the state's wealthiest registered clubs are being investigated by the independent gaming regulator after they rejected the membership of journalists who asked questions about their finances.

Western Sydney super clubs Mounties and Rooty Hill RSL cancelled the membership of journalists from the Herald and SBS after they requested access to information that clubs are legally required to disclose.

Liquor and Gaming NSW confirmed it was currently investigating a number of complaints that allege breaches relating to the requirement to provide information to members.

Mounties club, located in Mt Pritchard, is ranked as NSW's most pokie-profitable club. It has refused to allow journalists from the Herald and SBS to join its membership.

Under NSW law, registered clubs must keep a record of detailed financial data and disclosures, including pokie profits, executive pay, overseas trips, consultancy fees and potential conflicts of interest.Suburbs clustered around Sydneys CBD and the industrial areas to its south are the destination for one in every nine of the shipping containers imported to NSW.

But as with many districts in the state most of them leave empty.

A report by Deloitte Access Economics shows nearly 125,000 imported containers ended up in Sydneys City and Inner South statistical region in 2014-15, equivalent to 11 per cent of the states total. But only about 27,000 containers were sent offshore filled with export goods from that district.

The Parramatta region was the second biggest recipient of imported shipping containers  about 95,000 or 8 per cent of the states total. It was also the origin of about 27,000 exported containers.A group of rebel doctors has taken over the board of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, in an election that has been marred by allegations of online abuse and claims of potential breaches of the law.

An independent investigator will be called in to probe the allegations, which also include claims of improper access of people's contact details.

The dispute is yet another sign of dysfunction within the college that was recently slammed for its handling of a high-stakes exam for 1200 trainees, which was abruptly cancelled in the middle of the February test due to a technical fault. No back-up paper exams were provided.

The board election delivered a landslide win to a dissenting group of doctors that had been highly critical of the colleges handling of the botched exam and their response to earlier whistleblower and bullying allegations.

Head of the reform team", Melbourne respiratory physician Professor John Wilson, was announced as the new president-elect on Wednesday evening. He will serve two years in this role from May, before taking over as college president in 2020.The Queensland government has hit out at the federal coalition for offering to fund a major Victorian rail project while denying money for Brisbane's $5.4 billion Cross River Rail project.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Thursday pledged up to $5 billion to build a Melbourne Airport rail link and urged the state government to agree to share the funding, with any shortfall to be made up by the private sector.

An artist impression of the Cross River Rail project's Albert Street station.

"Today's announcement that the federal government is injecting $5 billion into Victoria for a project which doesn't have a business case and a rail line which doesn't yet have an alignment, just proves that Queensland continues to be dudded by Malcolm Turnbull," Queensland Treasurer Jackie Trad said.

Mr Turnbull's Victorian announcement followed a cash splash for a series of projects last week, including upgrades to the M1 north and south of Brisbane as well as funding for the long-awaited Rookwood weir in central Queensland.A rail link to Melbourne Airport might be built for as little as $5 billion, the Victorian Liberals say.

Party leader Matthew Guy said the money pledged by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in next months federal budget could be enough to cover the cost of the line, relieving the state government of the need to kick in billions of dollars to match the Commonwealths commitment.

Mr Turnbull, who believes the price of an airport rail link could be as high as $15 billion, suggested on Thursday Victoria might use money from the sale of the Snowy Hydro scheme to pay for its share of the proposed railway.

Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy. Credit:Alex Murray

But Mr Guy already has plans for much of the $2 billion the state is expected to get from the sale of its share of the Snowy scheme, earmarking about $1.4 billion to pay for the Liberals policy of removing congested road intersections.Just months ago in December, Infrastructure Victoria published the most comprehensive analysis yet of Victorias infrastructure needs.

It examined 300 potential projects, many of them desperately needed, and pronounced the Melbourne Airport Rail Link only supported in principle.

And not for a long time.

Upgrades to SkyBus should be pursued first, as a more cost effective solution in the short-term.

How long was that short term? Infrastructure Victoria said the airport rail link wouldnt be needed for 15 to 30 years.Police are investigating a horror incident in Scarborough overnight which ended when a ute crashed into a wall.

A girl and her mother are believed to have been caught up in the carnage when the out-of-control car collided with their vehicle.

The crash happened just after 7pm on Duke Street.

A man and a girl were injured in the crash.

Police say the driver of a white Toyota Hilux is believed to have suffered a medical episode and collided with several vehicles before hitting a boundary wall and power pole at the intersection of Moorland and Duke Streets.Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull concedes Australia's relationship with China is suffering from "some tension" amid fallout from the government's foreign interference laws and Beijing's growing influence in the Pacific.

Mr Turnbull blamed "misunderstandings and mischaracterisations" in Chinese media for the heightened tensions, and declined to confirm or deny a report that an angry Chinese government is denying Australian ministers visas to visit.

Malcolm Turnbull and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Credit:Fairfax Media

"There's clearly been some tension in the relationship following the introduction of our legislation about foreign interference but I'm very confident that any misunderstandings will be resolved," the Prime Minister told 3AW radio.NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley has abandoned his support for moving the Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta as the state government was left red-faced when one of its MPs crossed the floor of parliament on the issue.

In a significant shift, Mr Foley outlined the policy he would take to the election, saying he would not move the museum from Ultimo and would build a dedicated performance and exhibition space in Parramatta.

NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley says he cannot support the 'dismembering of a great cultural institution'. Credit:AAP

His position on the museum comes as rogue Liberal MP, Matthew Mason-Cox, crossed the floor of the upper house yesterday to support a Greens motion calling for a release of the full business case for the relocation of the Powerhouse.

The business case will have to be released within 14 days.Rogue Liberal MP Matthew Mason-Cox has forced his government into releasing the business case for the relocation of the Powerhouse Museum, in a move that could see him suspended from the party room.

In what has been described as an unprecedented step, Mr Mason-Cox crossed the floor of parliament to support a Greens' motion to have the business case released within 14 days.

The parliamentary order comes less than a fortnight after the government committed to releasing only a summary of the business case, and not until 90 days after its investment decision had been made.

Liberal MP Matthew Mason-Cox. Credit:Samuel Groves

A senior Liberal source said the upper house MP's decision to cross the floor could see a push to have him suspended from the Liberal party room.An adult shop owner who pedalled toxic synthetic cannabis, that was linked to the deaths of two Queensland people, has been jailed for six years.

Victorian man David Andre Jules Piccinato, 45, and Toowoomba's Ross McGlone, 38, admitted trafficking $350,000 worth of the drug from five Love Heart Adult Shop stores across regional Queensland.

Piccinato owned the sex shops while McGlone worked as the operations manager.

The offending took place between October 2014 and January 2015 but they were not charged until January of the following year.

Mackay was their most profitable outlet, with the store raking in $180,000 in sales of the drug, which was packaged as tea.But it appears the federal government, which owns a sprawling 127-hectare former Defence Department site in Maribyrnong near Highpoint shopping centre, hopes to include that land in the rail project. It would mean Highpoint was brought into Melbournes rail network. This would require tunnelling of up to 26 kilometres - making that route less likely, as it would cost double the Sunshine route. Canberra has given Victoria no assurances it will pick up the tab for the unpredictable costs of such a project. The wrangling over the rail lines route means it will not start construction before 2023, Victorian Public Transport Minister Jacinta Allan said on Thursday.

Victorian rail and aviation planning experts backed the Sunshine route, saying it would help free up space on other metropolitan rail lines and link to V/Line, connect the citys south-east to the airport via rail, and get passengers to the airport from the CBD in 15 minutes. In a statement issued by Mr Turnbull and other ministers on Thursday morning, the city-shaping project was described as our $5 billion congestion-busting investment that would help reduce the strain on the Tullamarine Freeway. Mr Turnbull wrote to Premier Daniel Andrews early on Thursday morning - after telling selected media about the plan on Wednesday - suggesting a 50-50 funding arrangement with the state. The plan would use the $2 billion Victoria will get from selling its share of the Snowy Hydro scheme. Mr Turnbull proposed the federal government retain a 50 per cent ownership stake in the airport rail line. Mr Turnbulls promise to partly fund the rail line was welcomed by Ms Allan. But she pointed out that the promise, first made in Mr Turnbulls 2017 budget, needed to be fleshed out.

"It's good the Prime Minister has finally found Victoria on a map, and well accept this funding given how much he short changes our state," she said. She said there was a lot of work still to be done on a preliminary business case, due to be completed in September. Opposition leader Bill Shorten said he supported a rail link to Melbourne Airport, but also said careful consideration was needed to select the best route. I want to take traffic out of the backyards of that part of north-west melb where I live, Mr Shorten said. But I want to make sure were not taking peoples backyards as well. A preliminary business case is already underway, and is expected to recommend a route when it is released in September.

The Andrews government's advisor Infrastructure Victoria said in 2016 that the link would be needed within the next 15 to 30 years and would cost up to $5 billion - far less than is now being floated. The four rail link options the Prime Minister released on Thursday are the same as those discussed in a 2013 report completed by Public Transport Victoria. That report backed the Sunshine route. The Public Transport Users Association welcomed the airport plan, but said the rail line must be part of the suburban railway network or it would fail. If its not going to suffer the problems of other projects, its critical that it's properly integrated, said president Tony Morton. Planners also backed the rail line, but warned it needed to be part of a broader transport strategy for Melbourne. And the RACVs Bryce Prosser urged the government to ensure the route was fast, cost-effective, and did not put added strain on the rail network.Paris: French President Emmanuel Macron sharpened his stance on Thursday on possible intervention in Syria, claiming that France has "proof" of a chemical attack last week and insisting that regimes must be held accountable for their abuses.

Macron's comments were widely interpreted as moving France closer to joining the United States in a possible military strike despite critics' worries about a reprise of France's participation in a 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, which helped bring down ruler Moammar Gadhafi but threw Libya into deeper chaos.

President Emmanuel Macron Credit:Bllomberg

Macron's tough statement also contrasted with remarks by major European partners.Geneva: The World Health Organisation said on Wednesday around 500 people had been treated for "signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals" after a suspected poison gas attack in a Syrian rebel enclave just before it fell.

The WHO condemned the incident alleged by the United States and its allies to have taken place on Saturday in rebel-held Douma, near Damascus.

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"In particular, there were signs of severe irritation of mucous membranes, respiratory failure and disruption to central nervous systems of those exposed," it said in a statement issued in Geneva.

But Hussam Edin Aala, Syrian ambassador to the UN in Geneva, rejected the statement as containing "baseless allegations" and questioned its timing and the credibility of the United Nations health agency which has not been to Douma in eastern Ghouta. The incident had been "staged", he added.[April 11, 2018]

BCE Q1 2018 results to be announced May 3

MONTREAL, April 11, 2018 /CNW Telbec/ - BCE Inc. (TSX: BCE)(NYSE: BCE) will hold its first-quarter 2018 results conference call with the financial community on Thursday, May 3, 2018 at 8:00 am eastern.

Participants will include George Cope, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Glen LeBlanc, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Media are welcome to participate on a listen-only basis.

To participate, please dial toll-free 1-800-377-0758 or 416-340-2219. A replay will be available for one week by dialing 1-800-408-3053 or 905-694-9451 and entering pass code 8461008#.

A live audio webcast of the conference call will be available on BCE's website at BCE Q1-2018 conference call.

About BCE

BE is Canada's largest communications company, providing advanced broadband wireless, TV, Internet and business communication services throughout the country. Bell Media is Canada's premier multimedia company with leading assets in television, radio, out of home, and digital media. To learn more, please visit Bell.ca or BCE.ca.

Bell Let's Talk promotes Canadian mental health with national awareness and anti-stigma campaigns like Bell Let's Talk Day and significant Bell funding of community care and access, research and workplace mental health initiatives. To learn more, please visit Bell.ca/LetsTalk.

Media inquiries:

Jean Charles Robillard

514-870-4739

jean_charles.robillard@bell.ca

Investor inquiries:

Thane Fotopoulos

514-870-4619

thane.fotopoulos@bell.ca

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bce-q1-2018-results-to-be-announced-may-3-300627638.html

SOURCE Bell CanadaUS President Donald Trump has asked top administration officials to look into rejoining talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, from which the US withdrew last year, rural legislators said.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe helped create the new TPP-11 group of countries after Trump sensationally withdrew from the trade agreement last year. Eleven Pacific Rim countries signed the sweeping agreement: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

The Turnbull government has been in negotiations with US respresentatives about rejoining and Turnbull has repeatedly said that the door "remains open" to the US.

On Friday, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse said that Trump said during a White House meeting with Midwest governors and legislators that he had "deputised" US trade representative Robert Lighthizer and economic adviser Larry Kudlow to look into the US rejoining the TPP. It would be aimed at opening US farmers to more overseas markets.Thoughtonomy Partners with Codebase8

London, 12 April 2018: Thoughtonomy, the Intelligent Automation Company, has announced a new partnership with Codebase8.

Codebase8, who has worked with over 65% of the UK\-\-s top FTSE 200 companies, will make Virtual Workers available as a Managed Service to clients in financial services, health, retail, and energy sectors. As experts in a range of technical and commercial services from modern AI and robotic automation solutions through to legacy application support and migration services, Codebase8\-\-s provision of Virtual Workers will only serve to strengthen their services offering.

Thoughtonomy recently announced a new Partner Program designed to recruit a significant number of new partners to support the continued expansion of the business, both in the UK and internationally. Thoughtonomy\-\-s strategic growth plan is focused on increasing its channel business from around 45% of current transactions to over 90% within the next 12 months.

\We\-\-ve grown our partner network by 20% since the start of the year and as a hyper-growth company in an innovative market we are keen to partner with companies such as Codebase8 who recognise the benefits of Intelligent Automation. We need the right partners to help us scale across the globe\, said Terry Walby, CEO and Founder Thoughtonomy.

Commenting on the announcement, Liz Callaghan the Managing Director of Codebase8, explains, \Automation is a natural extension to our application development, modernisation and support portfolio. We partner with our Customers to deliver greater efficiency, enhanced productivity and improved information to influence and drive business success. By harnessing the power of intelligent automation as a layer within our business solutions we are able to accelerate digital transformation with a focus on delivering greater return on investment for our Customers.\

This news comes after a period of impressive growth; UK based Thoughtonomy has consistently reported Year on Year growth over 300%, with growth of 316% reported in 2017. Last year the company expanded internationally with offices in New York and Austin and earlier this year, established an R&D hub in Manchester, UK.

For further information about the Thoughtonomy Partner Programme please contact Dean Chapman at partnerdesk@thoughtonomy.com.ISC West in Las Vegas kicked off with a bang on Wednesday, reflecting a healthy physical security industry with an overall upbeat outlook on the future. Driving the optimism is a pending new wave of product innovation, propelled largely by developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning. Some of that new wave is evident at ISC West, but much of the talk still centres on whats to come. Attendees flocked to the first day of the show to check out the newest technologies, and they were rewarded with a wide range of innovations. Tempering the optimism are ongoing concerns about ensuring the cybersecurity of IP-based physical security systems.

Cybersecurity standards for physical security

At least one news announcement is related to cybersecurity at the show: Johnson Controls is the first company to achieve UL (Underwriters Laboratories) certification 2900-2-3 for cybersecurity of life safety and security products and systems for their VideoEdge network video recording platform from American Dynamics. The UL brand ensures that the certification involves a standards-based and scientific approach to evaluating cybersecurity, and that JCIs certified products meet the requirements.

We were able to be first because we understand issues of cybersecurity, and the UL standard matches very closely to what we have been doing in cybersecurity, says Will Brown, Senior Engineering Manager, Cyber Protection at Johnson Controls. Tempering the optimism are ongoing concerns about ensuring the cybersecurity of IP-based physical security systems

Neil Lakomiak, Director of Business Development and Innovation at Underwriters Laboratories, says relatively few companies have invested sufficiently in cybersecurity, and much of ULs work in the physical security market is to help manufacturers develop a roadmap to meet cybersecurity goals. A lot of companies have not invested, but Johnson Controls has, said Lakomiak. He speculated that it could be some time before another security company achieves the certification; there certainly wont be a rush of additional companies to do so in the near term, based on the progress he has seen to date, says Lakomiak.

Cybersecurity is a topic that has hit the Board of Directors level, says Lakomiak. They are definitely inquiring about it and trying to understand what their posture should be. The leadership teams of companies will be asking a lot of questions.

In terms of cyber-consciousness among the integrator community, Brown estimates about 10 percent are on board with the issue. Among the manufacturing community, more than half of the companies are pursuing cybersecurity goals, although the levels of those efforts run a full gamut, says Lakomiak.

Vertical markets that are especially cyber-aware are enterprise, government, and critical infrastructure. Financial and retail companies are also coming on board, as well as companies  even small companies  in regulated industries such as utilities

Cybersecurity is a topic that has hit the Board of Directors level

Cybersecurity in the cloud

Another company emphasising cybersecurity at ISC West is access control company Isonas. Whats really new at the show for us is that we are being very transparent about the levels of cybersecurity we are applying to our cloud software platform and our IP network hardware, says Rob Lydic, Isonas Global Vice President of Sales.

The levels of complexity we are putting into our cybersecurity, including the fact that we host our software on Amazon web services, ensures a really high level of security. We are taking painstaking efforts to subject ourselves to third-party penetration testing to give us the visibility of what is going on with our cybersecurity  are we actually as cybersecure as we believe? The answer: They have come back to us to say we have an amazing strategy for cybersecurity; the surface that is attackable is minuscule, and the complex layers underneath really prevent anybody from hacking the product.We are being very transparent about the levels of cybersecurity we are applying to our cloud software platform"

Lydic says he sees higher levels of awareness about cybersecurity at the show, especially among end users. Several other exhibitors agree. Because edge devices have often been targeted in cybersecurity attacks, they are especially an area of concern. Were raising that conversation, saying we are a cloud service provider that uses edge devices, and it is core to us to make sure we have a great cybersecurity profile, so the customer can be assured we are doing what we say we are doing and delivering on those promises, says Lydic.

Awareness is filtering through channel: Isonas is seeing many customers who want to have that cybersecurity conversation at the show. We have had probably 20 or 30 conversations with end users at the show who want to understand what it means to be in the cloud, to understand how the level of communication is encrypted between devices, says Lydic.

Many end users at ISC West want to understand what it means to be in the cloud

Ambitions for growth

Successful companies often increase their ISC West booth size as a reflection of their ambition to grow as a company and their success in sales so far. One such company is Paxton Access Inc., which has increased its booth size from a 20x40-foot booth last year to a 30x50-foot space this year. Beyond the show, another reflection of Paxtons growth is addition of personnel to cover 11 U.S. sales territories that have been newly restructured. New regional sales managers will work with dealers locally.

At the show, Paxton is introducing its Net2 Entry Premium monitor, the latest addition to the companys Net2 Entry line of door entry products. The show is definitely a great way to promote who we are and what we offer, says Linda Soriano, Paxton Marketing Communications Coordinator. Its great to meet new customers and interact with existing customers, to build new relationships. Its an opportunity to promote the new things we have going on.

Paxton measures success at ISC West in terms of how many people they interact with at the show. In addition to welcoming booth visitors, the company is signing up attendance at free training through a show promotion. Anyone who signs up for training at the show is entered into a drawing for a $500 Visa gift card and a $1,000 discount off MSRP of Paxton products.

Tim Shen, Director of Marketing at Dahua Technology USA, one of the larger exhibitors, says the company is emphasising solutions at ISC West, just one element of the successful international business model they are bringing to the United States.With AI and business analytics in transportation and retail markets, we are letting the market know that we can build solutions"

Another topic for Dahua is artificial intelligence. With AI and business analytics in transportation and retail markets, we are letting the market know that we can build solutions, he says. Dahua sponsored a keynote address Wednesday on AI, including a presentation from Intel about AI trends.

AI is the future, but what can we use it for now? asks Shen. We need to give a very clear strategy of what we think about AI. Dahua will bring AI cameras and an AI network video recorder to the U.S. market in the second quarter; in effect, they will be testing the water to see how well the AI concept is embraced here. Other new products from Dahua include multi-image and thermal cameras. In the thermal category, Dahua has developed their own chipset to help bring the price down and provide affordable thermal cameras to the U.S. market. Another focus will be e-POE (extended Power over Ethernet), which Dahua sees as a big differentiator.

[Main photo credit: Abbey Masciarotte | Larry Anderson]Is hybrid working a red flag for business security?

The new normal was all we heard about when it came to the working model shift after the pandemic hit. Businesses worldwide adopted working from home, and then the hybrid model: a balance of remote work and office work. And according to a recent survey by 451 Research, nearly 80% of organisations surveyed said they have implemented or expanded universal work-from-home policies as a result of COVID-19, whilst 67% expect these policies to remain in place either permanently or for the long-term. With more vacant office spaces, the question is: is hybrid working a red flag for business security? Empty-office days When buildings and office spaces are still active with advanced technology, equipment and assets on show, yet footfall is not as busy as it once was, opportunistic criminals are closely watching and taking note. But what are they learning? Security systems provider, Expert Security UK, investigates our new normal. Offices are nests for expensive, valuable equipment, with maybe the latest technology Instead of a packed, busy office five or six days a week, hybrid working means more empty-office days, which is music to the ears of burglars. Offices are nests for expensive, valuable equipment, with maybe the latest technology and safes sitting there, or potential stacks of cash or company cards. You may be thinking, well, who leaves company cards or cash out? Youd be surprised, especially when business owners think theyll never be a victim, or sometimes, staff make mistakes. Hybrid working model And dont forget, burglars dont always know whats been left and will take their chances. And when a hybrid working model is the new normal, that means a lapse in security - at least in a thiefs mind. So how worried should business owners be? Well, the latest figures are pretty worrying, but also, not massively shocking. Reiterating the temptation and lure the working model shift has on robbers, Statista recorded a 12-year high for robbery offences in the UK in 2019/2020. When more businesses either shut up shop or sent staff away to home offices, its not hard to make a connection. These figures reflect how, when given the opportunity, thieves will strike and take advantage. Handing vital information Whether youve decided to go fully remote, its crucial to review and rethink your business security However, its worth noting that the lockdowns and empty streets would also have played a part in this spike, and now that were out of lockdowns with a world back to flipping its sign to open, many businesses will be carrying on working from home, but towns, shops, and streets are busy again. Whether youve decided to go fully remote, or have adopted the hybrid model, its crucial to review and rethink your business security, starting with your social media presence. Its a good idea to review your social media channels. We forget how open we can be on social media, and how our digital presence can actually work as a perfect guide and insight for criminals. All they have to do is follow your channels to pick up on clues. And if youre not giving it a minutes thought about what you're putting out there, you may even be just handing them vital information and helping their plans. Remote working shift Of course, there is information readily available such as your opening times, location etc. But, do you really want/need to show off the new, state-of-the-art tablets youve just kitted your office out with? It can be hard as a business, or even as a social person, to not want to share positive news on social media, but we really do have to stop and think, especially if people know a lot about the company and its remote working shift. Its also a good idea to have a meeting with your staff about a social media policy Maybe share a post about that new, intelligent security system you've installed instead. Its also a good idea to have a meeting with your staff about a social media policy or maybe just a casual chat about best practices, e.g. not to tag the business in a post about their new office gadget etc. Improving business security With fewer office days, you probably wont need to take up as much work space anymore. Maybe some equipment has become more ornamental. Anything you dont use or need, you could sell or donate. If you do have expensive equipment lying around thats not being used, try and make money back from it or store it elsewhere. If you are keeping a lot of expensive equipment in vacant premises, especially fixed equipment and technology, then consider installing bars and shutters over the windows. Whatever your budget, you can improve your business security tenfold with key security measures. One of them being access control. Security gates with access control are incredibly effective at stopping unauthorised people from gaining entry. There are also car park barriers and bollards that are highly effective at keeping any potential getaway vehicles out. Easily portable technology High-quality CCTV is a best friend to any business, but you need to be reviewing it frequently High-quality CCTV is a best friend to any business, but you need to be reviewing it frequently, especially if youve done a perimeter check and noticed any signs of forced entry or damage. Dont forget those signs either, let visitors or trespassers know theyre on camera. To fit in with the hybrid working model, static fixtures are becoming redundant. For instance, companies are switching to laptops instead of computers, so that workers can transport them easily to and from the office. This is not only more efficient and convenient, but it means assets are more guarded. Its the same for any other gadgets. Having easily portable technology is good for business, hybrid working, and security. Dont forget about your deterrents. Simple signs to warn people of alarms, CCTV, and even the fact that you dont leave equipment inside overnight can go a long way. Best security technology Thieves are famous for taking their chances. Some will meticulously plan, and many strike at a convenient, opportune time. So having signs in place that show you have high-quality, intelligent security in place can work wonders, making them think twice. Its also worth noting that you may not have the best security technology in place at the moment, but those on the outside dont need to know that; they can be fooled. However, having the best physical security in place is vital, as criminals lurk and will take chances. Keep reviewing your security, especially as your business adapts and reshapes - whether you return back to full office days or carry on the hybrid working model. This guest post was contributed by Danny Scholfield, Managing Director of Expert Security UK.You have permission to edit this article.

Edit CloseProtesters at a rally against offshore drilling outside the Statehouse in Columbia in February.Image 1 of 29 (Image credit: ESA/alldayru.com) First Human in Space On 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space, launched into orbit on the Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft (Vostok 1). Related: Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1: How the 1st human spaceflight worked (infographic)

Image 2 of 29 (Image credit: RSC Energia) Space Pioneers: Gagarin and Korolev The first human ever to fly in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (left), meets with spacecraft designer Sergei Korolev.

Image 3 of 29 (Image credit: ESA) Vostok 3KA-3 Spacecraft The Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft (Vostok 1) awaits the launch of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961, which would make him the first human to travel into space.

Image 4 of 29 (Image credit: NASA) History's First Human Spaceflight Blasts Off The Soviet Union's powerful Vostok launch vehicle put cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's capsule high enough for one 108-minute orbit of the Earth on April 12, 1961.

Image 5 of 29 (Image credit: ESA/alldayru.com) Family Man Famed Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is seen here with daughters Yelena and Galina in an undated photo. On April 12, 1961, Gagarin became the first human to travel into space, launched into orbit on the Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft (Vostok 1).

Image 6 of 29 (Image credit: Valentina Mikhno via Russian Federal Space Agency/Roscosmos) Looking Up Famed Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin - the first human in space - and others pose for a photo with a model of a winged spacecraft.

Image 7 of 29 (Image credit: RSC Energia) Vostok Up Close This photo released by spacecraft manufacturer RSC Energia shows the Vostok spacecraft. On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launched into orbit on Vostok 1 to become the first human to fly in space.

Image 8 of 29 (Image credit: alldayru.com) Dressing in Layers Yuri Gagarin seen dressing in a heating/cooling garment worn under his orange pressure suit.

Image 9 of 29 (Image credit: RSC Energia) Walking to the Launch Pad Famed Russian spacecraft S. P. Korolev (in fedora hat) and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin walk to the launch pad on April 12, 1961 ahead of the launch of Vostok 1, which would become the first manned spaceship to send a human into space.

Image 10 of 29 (Image credit: RSC Energia) Almost to the Pad Russian spacecraft designer S. P. Korolev (partially obscured, in fedora hat) and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin approach the launch pad ahead of the April 12, 1961 launch of Vostok 1, the first human spaceflight.

Image 11 of 29 (Image credit: RSC Energia) Waving to the Crowd Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin prepares to board the Vostok 1 spacecraft on April 12, 1961 to make history's first human spaceflight.

Image 12 of 29 (Image credit: Evgeny A. Sivukhin via Russian Federal Space Agency/Roscosmos) Getting in the Spacecraft In this collage of photos posted by Russia's Federal Space Agency, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin has arrived at the Vostok 1 spacecraft, and climbs inside ahead of the April 12, 1961 launch that made him the first human in space.

Image 13 of 29 (Image credit: ESA) Re-entry Capsule of Vostok 1 Here the re-entry capsule of the Vostok 3KA-3 (also known as Vostok 1) spacecraft (Vostok 1) is seen with charring and its parachute on the ground after landing south west of Engels, in the Saratov region of southern Russia.

Image 14 of 29 (Image credit: NASA) Yuri Gagarin, First Human in Space On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (left, on the way to the launch pad) made the first human spaceflight, a 108-minute orbital journey in his Vostok 1 spacecraft. Newspapers like The Huntsville Times (right) trumpeted Gagarin's accomplishment.

Image 15 of 29 (Image credit: NASA) NASA Reacts to Vostok 1 After the successful spaceflight of Yuri Gagarin, the first person to fly in space, as well as orbit Earth, on April 12, 1961 NASA held a press conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC to respond to questions concerning Gagarin's flight and the status of the American space program. From left to right: Dr. Robert C. Seamans Jr., Associate Administrator; Dr. Hugh L. Dryden, Deputy Administrator; Mr. James E. Webb, Administrator; and Dr. Abe Silverstein, Director of Space Flight Programs.

Image 16 of 29 (Image credit: RSC Energia) Gagarin as He Was, Playing Pool In a lighter moment, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin - the first human to fly in space - poses for a photo while playing billiards.

Image 17 of 29 (Image credit: Embassy of Russia at Sri Lanka via Russian Federal Space Agency/Roscosmos) Gagarin in Sri Lanka This collage of photos from Russia's Federal Space Agency shows cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin receiving honors in Sri Lanka.

Image 18 of 29 (Image credit: Andreas Veize via Russian Federal Space Agency/Roscosmos) Signing Autographs Famed cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin signs autographs in 1963, two years after becoming the first human to fly in space on April 12, 1961.

Image 19 of 29 (Image credit: S.P. Korolev RSC "Energia") Yuri Gagarin Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space.

Image 20 of 29 (Image credit: RSC Energia) Before His Last Take-off In 1968, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin trained for another space mission, but was killed in a plane crash before doing so. Here, Gagarin is shown just before that flight in a photo released by the Russian aerospace firm RSC Energia.

Image 21 of 29 (Image credit: ESA) Gone but Not Forgotten Jean-Francois Clervoy, ESA astronaut, said, "On the STS-84 mission of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, in May 1997, I stayed nearly five days on the Russian Mir space station. When you enter of the core module of Mir, you could not be unaware of the photo of Gagarin."

Image 22 of 29 (Image credit: ESA/Andre Kuipers) Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre The training center for cosmonauts named after first man in space Yuri Gagarin is located in Star City, about 30 kilometers north of Moscow.

Image 23 of 29 (Image credit: Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos)) Yuri Gagarin in Stamp Form The legacy cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and his historic launch on April 12, 1961, ushering in the era of human spaceflight, continues today. This year, Russia is releasing these commemorative stamps to honor Gagarin's 108-minute orbital flight.

Image 24 of 29 (Image credit: Victor Zelentsov/NASA ) Reaching for the Stars A larger-than-life statue of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin with his arms stretched toward the heavens stands at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the launch site of his historic April 12, 1961 spaceflight, making him the first human in space. Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin (left), NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria (right) and space tourist Anousheh Ansari pose with Gagarin's statue on Sept. 13, 2006 while training for a launch toward the International Space Station.

Image 25 of 29 (Image credit: NASA) Monument to Spaceflight A monument in honor of cosmonaut Yuriy A. Gagarin, the first human to fly in space, stands in front of a cosmonaut apartment building at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.

Image 26 of 29 (Image credit: NASA) Yuri Gagarin on the Space Station In 2001, Russian cosmonauts Yuri V. Lonchakov and Yury V. Usachev hold a photo of the late cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin for a photo aboard the International Space Station to mark the 40th anniversary of Gagarin's spaceflight on April 12, 1961.

Image 27 of 29 (Image credit: NASA) Astronaut Ron Garan with booster for "Yuri Gagarin" Soyuz spacecraft NASA astronaut Ron Garan poses in front of the booster for the "Yuri Gagarin" Soyuz spacecraft that will carry him and two Russian cosmonauts to the International Space Station.

Image 28 of 29 (Image credit: NASA TV) Soyuz Named For Yuri Gagarin Blasts Off A Russian Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft, named for famed cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin - the first human in space - launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 4, 2011 at 6:18 p.m. EDT.The 2018 China (Ningbo) Cultural Industries Fair will take place in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province from April 13 to 16. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The 2018 China (Ningbo) Cultural Industries Fair is set to take place in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang province from April 13 to 16, local media reported on April 10.

With a total exhibition area of 53,000 square meters, the fair will set up eight pavilions for more than 2,800 booths.

Taking international, branding, market-oriented and specialized commerce as the goals, the eight pavilions in the fair will focus on cultural trade between Belt and Road countries, traditional culture and modern life, and intelligent digital technology for cultural products.

More than 1,500 enterprises have signed up for this year's fair, including some from over 30 countries along the Belt and Road route, a 20 percent increase year-on-year.

Various activities related to culture and cultural trade, including forums, seminars, festivals and competitions, are expected to be organized during the four-day event, such as a culture plus Internet technology forum, a cultural trade seminar, a "Maritime Silk Road" music festival and a Chinese-style gown design contest.

Centered on the principle of "the market is the touchstone", the fair this year will invite strategic cooperation partners from the market, a first step in a market-oriented approach.

The China (Ningbo) Cultural Industries Fair has attracted more than 350,000 visitors and many international agencies and delegations from 35 countries since it was first held in 2016.

The fair reached on-site deals worth 378 million yuan ($59.7 million) and future contracts totaling 12.84 billion yuan in 2017.The Full Worm Moon

Victor Rogus

See photos of planetary conjunctions and other astronomical events captured by amateur astronomer and astrophotographer Victor Rogus in March and April of 2018. HERE: The Full Worm Moon of March 1, 2018.

Conjunction of Venus and Mercury

Victor Rogus

On March 3, Rogus captured this photo of Venus and Mercury shining about one degree apart just after sunset in Arcadia, Florida. The two planets officially reached conjunction  when they line up at the same celestial longitude  two days later on March 5. [Celestial Snapshots of My Favorite Conjunctions (Op-Ed)]

Saturn and Mars Snuggle Up with the Moon

Victor Rogus

On March 10, one day after the moon reached its last quarter phase, Rogus captured two planets glowing near the moon in the early morning sky: Saturn (lower left) and Mars (right).

Mercury, Venus and the Moon

Victor Rogus

The crescent moon, Venus and Mercury form a nearly straight line in this photo Rogus took on the evening of March 18. The two planets were officially at conjunction the night before on March 17. [Capturing Venus: An Amateur Astronomer's Famous Moon Shot]

Saturn and Mars

Victor Rogus

Saturn and Mars appeared about 8 degrees apart on the morning of March 21. In this photo, Saturn looks like a bright pink speck near the center of the view, and Mars is up and to the right.

Jupiter Joins the Scene

Victor Rogus

In another photo from the same night, Rogus captured the bright planet Jupiter (upper right) in line with Saturn and Mars. "Dense fog here in Arcadia, Florida has made it difficult to view these early morning conjunctions," Rogus told Space.com. "However, this March 21, 2018 morning offered clear skies, clear enough to photograph the planets Saturn and Mars about 8 degrees apart. Further to their right is the bright star Antares, and further yet is the brilliant gas giant, Jupiter."

Messier 45 Meets the Moon

Victor Rogus

A star cluster known as the Pleiades shines near the waxing crescent moon in this photo taken by Rogus on March 21. "The Pleiades, also known as Messier 45 (M45), are among those objects which are known since the earliest times," Rogus said. "At least six member stars are visible to the naked eye  a test of vision in days long ago!"

Mars and Saturn Grow Closer

Victor Rogus

"On this March 22, 2018 morning we see the planets Mars and Saturn drawing closer to each other in the predawn sky, now only about 5 degrees apart they will draw closer yet by the end of the month," Rogus told Space.com.

The Moon Occults Aldebaran

Victor Rogus

On March 22, the moon occulted, or passed in front of the bright star Aldebaran. The occultation was not visible from Florida  only a small part of the northeastern U.S. and parts of northern Europe were well-positioned to see it. But that didn't stop Victor Rogus from photographing the moon and the star from Arcadia, Florida that night! [Watch the Moon Play 'Peekaboo' with Bright Star Aldebaran]

A Parting View of Mercury

Victor Rogus

The dim planet Mercury briefly made an appearance during the first few weeks of March, but it faded out of view by the end of the month as it appeared closer to the horizon near the setting sun. Rogus captured this view of Mercury to the lower right of the much brighter planet Venus on March 23.

'The Beehive' and the Moon

Victor Rogus

The "Beehive" star cluster, also known as M44, faintly glistens to the left of the waxing gibbous moon in this photo taken by Rogus on March 26. "The conjunction was placed well overhead nearly at the zenith," Rogus said.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 Nicky Fox of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to talk about our nearest star, the Sun. Fox and Green discuss solar flares and space weather, as well as NASA's upcoming Parker Solar Probe, on which Fox is Project Scientist, and which is a mission to "touch the Sun."

You can listen to the full podcast here, or read the transcript below.

Nicky Fox speaking to Jim Green in the Gravity Assist studios. (Image credit: NASA)

Jim Green: Nicky, what do we know about the Sun? [So Hot, It's Cool: Record-Breaking Sun Probe Nearly Ready for Launch]

Nicky Fox: The Sun, of course, is in the center of our Solar System. It provides light and heat to us here on Earth. But of course, even though it's the most important thing to us, the Sun is just a very average, very basic star. And so it works just like any other star. In the center, there is a core that is kind of a roiling mass of gas very much like a nuclear furnace and nuclear reactions occur there. Hydrogen combines to make helium, etc., just like you would have in a nuclear reactor. And as that heat moves out towards the surface of the Sun, it gradually cools. So the core of the Sun is about 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit). By the time we get to the visible surface, it's cooled to about 5,500 degrees Celsius (10,000 degrees Fahrenheit). From there, the atmosphere of the Sun lifts off and moves away from the Sun and bathes all of the planets. So we here on Earth actually live in the atmosphere of the Sun.

Jim Green: The analogy I use for that is that it's like the Sun is exhaling in all directions.

Nicky Fox: It absolutely is, and as it exhales, sometimes it sneezes. And when the Sun sneezes, the Earth catches a cold.

Jim Green: So let's talk about some of those sneezes. We call them space weather events, and the Sun can be really violent at times.

Nicky Fox: The Sun can indeed be very violent, and one of the ways to measure the activity on the Sun is to count sunspots. Not that you should ever look at the Sun with your naked eye, but you can pull up a web browser and look at the spectacular images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. If you look at sunspots in ultraviolet light, they suddenly become very bright, very active spots. The more spots there are, the more active the Sun is, and that's how we characterize the solar cycle: when there is the fewest number of spots we are at solar minimum, and when it has the most number of spots it is at solar maximum. It takes about 11 years for a full solar cycle. During those 11 years, we see all kinds of different stuff coming from our Sun.

Our active Sun. (Image credit: NASA/SDO)

As you mentioned, there are these very intense events that we call coronal mass ejections, literally a mass of coronal material ejected fast from the Sun. When we see a flare, it's followed by very high-energy particles. They travel at about half the speed of light and they can cause issues for astronauts, which is why on the International Space Station we make sure that the crew area is very well-protected. NASA watches for any big solar events before they allow spacewalks. Then particles can also smash into solar panels and cause damage to spacecraft. But behind the particles comes the main event, the big blob of plasma.

When that enters our atmosphere, it powers the beautiful aurora, and that's a gorgeous, gorgeous effect. When the Sun is exhaling and it puts all that material out, as the material is accelerated, it grabs the solar magnetic field with it and it carries it out towards the Earth. Just as you remember from high school, like poles repel, opposite poles attract. If the magnetic field in the solar wind is pointing in the opposite direction to the Earth's magnetic field, they will attract and connect and they will let all of that solar plasma come into our atmosphere. We call this process magnetic reconnection, and when that happens all of these energetic particles come streaming down the magnetic fields and they impact our atmosphere.

Earth's atmosphere is predominantly nitrogen and oxygen. When it gets struck by these really high-energy particles, the molecules and atoms in our own atmosphere are excited, causing them to glow. That glow is what we see as the aurora.

The solar wind buffets Earth's magnetic field, creating space weather events and aurorae. (Image credit: NASA/SOHO)

The aurora is basically a big current in the sky and a current always needs somewhere to close, and the ground is not conducting, so the particles will look for long structures that they can flow through, like a power grid, or undersea pipelines, or any kind of long, straight conducting surface. They can cause catastrophic power outages like we saw in 1989 when the Hydro-Quebec system went down, leaving six million people without power. It also pumps up our radiation belts where the Van Allen probes are working and taking data, causing issues for spacecraft. It can also cause the atmosphere to become much more dense, slowing down spacecraft and changing its orbit, which has to be mitigated. It causes problems for GPS, causing outages or inaccuracies, and we rely on our GPS to get us everywhere, every day. So we really do rely on technology, and technology is very much affected by the Sun.[Proton Fusion, the Sun's Power Source, Explained (Infographic)]

Jim Green: There's another phenomenon on the Sun not like a coronal mass ejection, but equally important, and that is solar flares.

Nicky Fox: They often occur right before a coronal mass ejection leaves the Sun. The Sun has a magnetic field very similar to the Earth, but it's a lot more complex. These little magnetic loops can pop out, and if you look at a really nice Solar Dynamics Observatory image, you can often see these long loops of illumination. As the loops become stretched like an elastic band at some point they will break. When an elastic band snaps, you always feel pain in your hand, and that pain is actually the heat coming from the band into your fingers. So as you stretch the Sun's magnetic field lines, they become more and more energetic. You're putting more into it. At some point, they will burst and let off a whole bunch of energy in all kinds of different forms, and one of them is visible light, and that's when we see a flare.

An artist's impression of NASA's Parker Solar probe, which will launch in the summer of 2018. (Image credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)

Jim Green: The study of the Sun has all been very remote, and we've really got to go there and make some measurements where some of this action happens. You're involved in a fabulous mission called the Parker Solar Probe that is going to try and do that. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Nicky Fox: The Parker Solar Probe is the coolest, hottest mission under the Sun. We're going to go and visit this area where all of the magic [on the Sun] happens. Everything happens in that hazy atmosphere around the Sun that we call the corona. In that atmosphere we have two mysteries. One, is that that material in the corona is about 300 times hotter than the visible surface of the Sun, with temperatures around three million degrees Celsius, and yet the surface is about 5,500 degrees Celsius. It's a big mystery. If you walk away from a campfire, you get colder, not hotter. But if you walk away from the Sun, you would suddenly move into a much hotter region. Where this big rise in temperature happens, the plasma becomes so energized that it can actually break away from the huge gravitational hold of the Sun and form the solar wind that bathes all of the planets.

So that is the second mystery: why is the solar wind born there and why is it accelerated so much? That's kind of the final piece of the puzzle and going there and visiting is the key. For the very first time, Parker Solar Probe will journey into the Sun's corona and take those key, missing, in situ measurements.

Magnetic loops reach up into the solar corona from an active region on the Sun. If those loops break, they initiate a solar flare and coronal mass ejection event. (Image credit: NASA/SDO)

Jim Green: When it's launched, it's not going to fly directly to the Sun, but is going to make some encounters with some of the planets. What's the plan?

Nicky Fox: Our launch window opens on 31 July 2018. We launch out of Cape Canaveral, and our first encounter is with the planet Venus. We're moving so fast when we launch that it will take us just six weeks to get to Venus, where we will get our first gravity assist. Now Jim, I know that you're used to missions using gravity assists to speed up. New Horizons went to Jupiter, shot around there and came out much faster. But Parker Solar Probe is not using Venus to speed up, we are actually using Venus to trim our orbit very slightly and very carefully to allow us to move around the Sun in very big petal-shaped orbits. We actually encounter Venus seven times during our seven-year mission, and each time, we trim our orbit just a little bit to allow us to gradually come closer and closer to the Sun until, in our final orbital configuration we are just under 6.4 million kilometers (four million miles) away from the Sun's surface. I realize that when I say four million miles, that doesn't sound particularly close, but if you put the Earth and the Sun one meter apart, Parker Solar Probe will be four centimeters from the solar surface, and that is close.

Jim Green: We ended Cassini by having it plow into the atmosphere of Saturn. Is the plan that Parker Solar Probe will end by plowing into the Sun?

Nicky Fox: I hate that question. I really do. It's such a sad end for us. Our prime mission is seven years long. After that, the final orbit is totally stable, so we can stay in that orbit and continue taking science as long as we still have fuel on the spacecraft. We use the momentum wheels to keep our spacecraft oriented so our wonderful heat shield remains between us and the Sun at all times. However, these wheels do need to be de-spun. Every now and again, we do need to fire thrusters. So at some point we will run out of fuel and we won't be able to keep that heat shield where it needs to be. At that point, the spacecraft will start to turn. That means the Sun is now hitting parts of the spacecraft that are not designed to have the Sun on them, so the spacecraft at that point will start to break up and eventually will join the dust cloud around the Sun. That will be a very sad day.

Jim Green: Yes, it will be. So many people work on our missions and really devote a significant part of their career to make them happen.

Nicky Fox: People have devoted decades and decades of work to Parker Solar Probe, because Parker was first proposed in 1958, around the time that Gene Parker put out his seminal paper postulating about what was happening around the Sun. He in fact named the solar wind. Since 1958 it's been the highest priority mission in many decadal surveys and many NASA roadmaps, and it's taken us nearly 60 years to finally have the technology available to really make our dreams come true.

A group of sunspots. More sunspots appear near solar maximum than at solar minimum. (Image credit: NASA/SDO)

Jim Green: Last year we had a total solar eclipse in the United States and maybe as many as 85 percent of the entire U.S. population had an opportunity to see it. Solar eclipses give us the chance to see the corona with our own eyes. Where were you for the eclipse?

Nicky Fox: It was actually my first solar eclipse, and I was in Beatrice National Park in Nebraska with about 10,000 people supporting a NASA event. I'd brought my friends and family with me, but it was cloudy and, in fact, after the beginning of the eclipse it even started to rain. We were very, very lucky that right at totality, the clouds parted and we actually saw the most amazing corona, the most fantastic diamond ring. It was a truly spectacular, truly momentous occasion. Not only that, I actually could see the part of the sky where Parker Solar Probe will be working, so it was very exciting.

Jim Green: As the Sun's magnetic field is moving out with the solar wind, it has to stop at some point. Do we know where?

Nicky Fox: We do know that the solar wind's influence has a finite boundary. We call it the interstellar boundary. The Voyager 1 spacecraft crossed that boundary and is now out in interstellar space.

We continue to learn more and more about the boundary, particularly with our IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft that has actually managed to image the heliopause, which is the name given to the final boundary before interstellar space. IBEX found a ribbon structure along the boundary and has actually promoted a new mission to be proposed in the decadal survey called IMAP (Interstellar Mapping Probe), which is going to take those observations to the next stage. With IBEX, we've found all the questions we want to answer, and with IMAP we'll bring answers to those questions.

Jim Green: It was thought at one time that the heliopause, like the Earth's magnetosphere, had a very blunt front end in the direction that the Sun is moving around the center of our Galaxy, and then a long tail in the trailing direction. But some recent observations, particularly those from an instrument on Cassini, have indicated that it's a little different from that. What have we found?

Nicky Fox: The boundary is not a fixed boundary as we first thought it was, but it's changing in time. It's moving in and out and we think it's related to the solar cycle, as the Sun's influence changes with the solar cycle. As the Sun changes, everything feels an effect, even the boundary with interstellar space.

Jim Green: I always ask my guests, what was your gravity assist that really propelled you into this field and kept you going?

Nicky Fox: My gravity assist happened at a very early age, and it was my dad, because he was fascinated by everything NASA, everything space. Instead of bedtime stories, I would get how the Sun was in the center of the Solar System and the Earth went around the Sun and the Moon went around the Earth. He followed every single thing that NASA did and absolutely loved it, and instilled in me the idea that the best possible thing I could do would be to work for NASA. As a girl in England where you don't think that really is possible, it was still this magical thought that stayed with me that. Then I went to college and I did space plasma physics, and then a very good friend of mine, Dr Jim Slavin, came up to me and asked if I'd be interested in a job at NASA. And that was probably my final gravity assist.

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+.The nearest exoplanet to Earth may get hit hard by damaging ultraviolet radiation, making it tough for life to survive there, a new study suggests.

That planet, the roughly Earth-mass Proxima b, circles the small, dim star Proxima Centauri, which lies just 4.2 light-years from Earth. And Proxima b orbits in its host's star "habitable zone"  the just-right range of distances where liquid water could theoretically exist on a world's surface.

But there's a lot more to habitability than just being in the habitable zone, as the new study indicates. In it, a team of researchers analyzing observations by the Evryscope, an array of small telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Chilean Andes, report that Proxima Centauri fired off a powerful "superflare" whose light made it to Earth's neighborhood in March 2016. [Proxima b: Closest Earth-Like Planet Discovery in Pictures]

In August 2016, astronomers announced that a potentially Earth-like planet orbits Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun. Learn about the exciting discovery in this infographic. See our full infographic here

The outburst was 10 times more energetic than any previously observed Proxima Centauri flare, and it briefly boosted the star's brightness by a factor of 68, study team members said. In the flare's immediate aftermath, observers under dark skies would have been able to see the star with the naked eye, which is pretty much unheard of for "red dwarfs" such as Proxima Centauri.

The Evryscope also spotted 23 less-powerful Proxima Centauri flares over the past two years, according to the study. Based on these observations, the researchers calculated that the red dwarf probably blasts out superflares at least five times per year.

Such activity likely has a profound effect on Proxima b and its atmosphere, the team further found. The team's computer-modeling work suggested that Proxima Centauri's repeated flaring would reduce concentrations of UV-blocking ozone in an Earth-like atmosphere by 90 percent in just five years, and would strip the stuff out of the air completely in a few hundred thousand years. (This isn't to imply that Proxima b has, or ever had, an Earth-like atmosphere; nothing is known about the exoplanet's putative air.)

The UV light generated by the March 2016 superflare "therefore reached the surface with about 100 times the intensity required to kill simple UV-hardy microorganisms, suggesting that life would struggle to survive in the areas of Proxima b exposed to these flares," the team wrote in the new study, which has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. (You can read it for free at the online preprint site arXiv.org.)

The new results further bolster a growing sense among astronomers and astrobiologists that radiation could pose a major hurdle to the establishment and evolution of life on Proxima b and other planets circling red dwarfs (which are also known as M dwarfs). Previous studies, for example, have suggested that flares might completely strip away the atmospheres of such worlds over time, leaving their surfaces bare and exposed.

Such dangers aren't as high for possibly habitable worlds around sun-like stars, which tend not to be so active. Also, because sun-like stars are hotter than red dwarfs, their habitable zones are farther away  meaning potentially life-supporting worlds don't get hammered as hard by stellar eruptions.

Still, we shouldn't write off red-dwarf systems as possible abodes of life, said Ward Howard, the lead author of the new study. He cited the lack of detailed knowledge about such planetary systems, as well as the toughness and tenacity of "extremophile" organisms here on Earth, which have surprised researchers time and again.

Researchers "should be careful not to go beyond what we can actually compute and study and measure and observe right now," Howard, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, told Space.com. "I don't think we can say that there is not life around M-dwarf stars, given the current state of the field."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space when he launched into orbit on the Vostok 3KA-3 spacecraft (Vostok 1).

Space fans take note: You can meet up with like-minded folks tonight (April 12) for a global celebration of space science and exploration.

Tonight is "Yuri's Night," and events around the world will bring together people of all backgrounds, from children to former astronauts, for a global "Space Party."

The easiest way to find an event near you is to look at the official website, https://yurisnight.net. And if you're tied up tonight, don't despair; some activities will continue into the weekend. For example, tomorrow (April 13), "Yuri's Night Space Coast" will take place near the retired space shuttle Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor's Complex in Florida. Former NASA astronaut Nicole Stott will make an appearance there. [Vostok 1: How the First Human Spaceflight Worked (Infographic)]

Yuri's Night is named after& Yuri Gagarin, the first human to make it to space. Gagarin launched on April 12, 1961, reaching a maximum altitude of 203 miles (327 kilometers). His Vostok 1 spacecraft made one orbit of Earth, staying aloft for 108 minutes. Because Vostok 1 didn't have engines to land softly, Gagarin parachuted out, making a safe landing.

The Yuri's Night logo (Image credit: Yuris Night)

April 12 marks a huge milestone in U.S. space exploration as well. On that day in 1981, the space shuttle Columbia kicked off the shuttle program's first-ever spaceflight , blasting into orbit with astronauts John Young and Bob Crippen aboard. Columbia successfully capped off its two-day space mission with a safe landing, despite the loss of 16 heat-shield tiles.

More than 500 individuals have flown to space since 1961. A few have died in the endeavor, and NASA remembers these fallen pioneers every year in a Day of Remembrance, which takes place on the last Thursday in January.

Astronauts today fly to the International Space Station (ISS) using Russian Soyuz rockets, which lift off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. But NASA has contracted with the companies SpaceX and Boeing to build space taxis for U.S. astronauts. These private vehicles could begin flying in the next year or so.

While the "space race" of the 1960s featured Soviet cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts, the field has now widened to include astronauts from many other countries. Sixteen nations alone participate in the ISS, while the Chinese have their own orbiting space lab, called Tiangong-2.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.Launch of the Soyuz MS-05 mission from the Baikonour Cosmodrome on July 28, 2017. The mission used a Soyuz-FG rocket to take a crew to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz rocket  not to be confused with the Soyuz spacecraft  is a line of Russian boosters that have seen variants fly since the mid-1960s. It is used for both cargo and astronaut transportation.

The Soyuz rocket was the main form of transportation to the International Space Station between 2011 and 2020. NASA bought astronaut seats on Soyuz spacecraft (which the rocket carries into space), after the space shuttle program retired. Now that commercial spacecraft have safely reached the space station carrying US astronauts, NASA is unlikely to purchase any further seats on Soyuz rockets.

Read more: How Soyuz safety features saved its passengers after a rocket failure

Another variant of the Soyuz rocket carries cargo to the ISS via regular Progress flights, which take place every few months.

Description

Soyuz is one of the oldest rocket lines still in service, with its first launch dating to Nov. 28, 1966. Soyuz's heritage comes from the Vostok launcher that took the first Soviet astronauts into space in the early 1960s. It also has a legacy from the R-7a intercontinental ballistic missile, which conducted a couple of dozen test missions in the 1960s.

There are multiple variants of the Soyuz rocket, and the line has evolved many times over its history. Some current examples include the Soyuz-2.1a that is designed for ISS cargo, the Soyuz-FG that is designed to ferry astronauts to the ISS and the Soyuz-FG/Fregat that a European-Russian company called Starsem uses for commercial operations.

Most Soyuz rockets use RP-1 (a kerosene-based fuel) and liquid oxygen as propellant, although a variant known as the Soyuz-U2 used liquid oxygen and an RP-1 variant known as Syntin. The height, payload capacity and other characteristics of Soyuz depend on what variant is being used. Russia does not have a lot of easily accessible information available about different variants of the rocket, making it difficult to compare the types in terms of their payloads and physical dimensions.

Notable launches

The long heritage of Soyuz  some sources estimate it has flown over 1,700 times  makes it probably the world's longest-lived rocket line. It has had relatively few failures in hundreds of launches, making it an extremely reliable type of rocket. The history of the Soyuz line includes many dozens of crewed flights in support of the Salyut and Mir space station program, as well as the ISS. It also is a proven supplier of cargo to the ISS, with only a few failures across dozens of flights there.

While the vast majority of launches are successful, there have been a handful of failures during the rocket's long history. Notably, the human missions Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11, which killed four astronauts between them, were both launched aboard Soyuz rockets. However, both of these missions failed due to problems during re-entry, not launch, so the rocket was not implicated in the disasters.

Here are some examples of Soyuz rocket failures from the last 20 years.

On Oct. 5, 2002, a Soyuz U exploded catastrophically 29 seconds after liftoff, during the launch of a Photon-M satellite. The European Space Agency says a ground crew member was killed, and eight people injured.

On June 21, 2005, a Soyuz rocket (carrying a Molniya military communications satellite) abruptly terminated its flight after six minutes. The second and third stages of the rocket, along with the satellite, crashed into the ground in Siberia.

On Aug. 24, 2011, an uncrewed Soyuz crashed during a planned cargo flight to the International Space Station. Later that year, on Dec. 23, a Soyuz-21.b failed in its mission to launch a Meridian-5 military communications satellite, due to a problem in the third stage.

On April 28, 2015, a Progress 59 supply ship to the ISS began spinning out of control shortly after its Soyuz-U launched it into orbit. The ship eventually burned up in Earth's atmosphere, cargo undelivered.

On Nov. 28, 2017, nineteen satellites riding aboard a Soyuz rocket could not be reached. However, the fault lay more with the main satellite's programming than with the rocket. The following January, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin told Russian state television that the satellite was programmed with co-ordinates from a launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, east of Russia. However, the satellite actually launched from a new launchpad called Vostochny, in eastern Russia.

A Soyuz rocket suffered an anomaly in booster separation on Oct. 11, 2018, shortly after launching the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin toward the International Space Station. The MS-10 made an emergency landing back on Earth, and both Hague and Ovchinin are safe.

Read more: Full Space.com coverage of the 2018 Soyuz failure

After the 2018 launch failure, Russia committed to three robotic, or uncrewed, launches before attempting to send any more crew to space.

Additional resource

This article was updated on Jan. 27, 2021 by Space.com Reference Editor Vicky SteinApollo 15 astronaut David Scott is suing Bulova and Kay Jewelers over the marketing of a replica moon watch.

If an astronaut wears a wristwatch on the surface of the moon, does the watchmaker then have the right to use the moonwalker's name and likeness to market a replica of the lunar-landed timepiece?

That is the question behind a lawsuit filed by David Scott, the seventh person to walk on the moon, against Bulova and Kay Jewelers. Bulova produced and Kay subsequently sold a watch based on the Bulova-made chronograph that Scott wore during NASA's Apollo 15 mission in 1971.

Scott's lawsuit, first filed last year, has now been given the go to proceed after a U.S. District Court judge dismissed in part Bulova's and Kay's motions for a summary judgement on April 4. The court, however, rejected Scott's claims that he also suffered emotional distress. [Apollo 15 Lunar Landing Mission (Photos)]

"Even viewed in the light most favorable to Scott, this evidence is a parsec away from describing distress that no reasonable person can be expected to endure," Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins of the U.S. District Court for the northern district of California wrote.

Apollo 15 commander David Scott salutes a U.S. flag on the moon in 1971. Strapped to Scott's left arm is a Bulova chronograph. (Image credit: NASA via collectSPACE.com)

Unauthorized uses

Like all of NASA's Apollo astronauts, Scott was issued an Omega Speedmaster chronograph to wear while exploring the moon. That watch worked as expected for the first two of Scott's surface outings, including while he drove the first lunar rover across the moon's Hadley rille.

But sometime during Scott's second moonwalk, the crystal covering the Speedmaster's face popped off and was lost.

Scott would have likely gone without a watch for his third and final excursion, had his personal items not included a chronograph provided by Bulova. NASA described it post-flight as an "unauthorized timepiece," but for five hours on Aug. 2, 1971, Scott wore the Bulova wristwatch outside on the surface of the moon.

Forty-four years later, Scott auctioned the Bulova watch for a record $1.625 million. One month after the sale, Bulova announced it was producing a "re-edition" of the watch.

The special edition moon watch replica took its "inspiration from astronaut Dave Scott's personal Bulova chronograph worn during the Apollo 15 moon landing," Bulova wrote on its website in early 2016.

That text, along with other examples including the content of a booklet packaged with the replica moon watch and the description that Kay posted to its website, made reference to Scott without his permission, he said, violating his "right of publicity through commercial appropriation" and was an unauthorized use of his persona.

Mission or misappropriation

In their separate filings for a summary judgement, Bulova (the Citizen Watch Company of America) and Kay (Sterling Jewelers) claimed in part that the use of Scott's name and likeness  the latter in both photo and video form  was incidental and fell under fair use.

"What compels the court ... is the fine line that must be drawn between the historical event that was Apollo 15 and the person that is David Randolph Scott," wrote Cousins in response to the defendants' motion. "The fact that Bulova manufactured Scott's original chronograph certainly gives Bulova greater license to boast about its connection to the Apollo 15 mission. But whatever connection the original chronograph created between Bulova and Apollo 15 does not automatically make Scott fair game."

While acknowledging Bulova could showcase its legitimate connection to the mission, the judge could not state "as a matter of law that defendants' advertisements do not cross the event horizon into the black hole of misappropriation."

In examining the precedence for or against Scott's lawsuit, Cousins cited the distinction between a previous case that involved a different moonwalker that was found in favor of a manufacturer.

In late 2010, astronaut Buzz Aldrin sued the Topps Company over a set of trading cards that included his image on the wrapper, as well as photos and details from the first moon landing on one of the cards. In that case, the court found the cards' primary purpose was to "disseminate historical information."

"The key point is that, unlike [the Aldrin case], defendants' product is not speech," wrote Cousins. "Defendants did not sell an informational piece of media  fact-based trading cards, a newspaper, or a documentary  about Apollo 15 or space exploration. The commercial product is a watch, and the references to history and space exploration simply help to sell it."

Bulovas moon watch chronograph replica comes with two straps, including a replica Velcro strap as worn by David Scott. (Image credit: Bulova)

Go/No Go

Scott further claimed that he suffered emotionally because people may believe "I abandoned my private life in favor of commercially promoting products."

Cousins rejected that argument and found that another of Scott's charges  that Bulova and Kay were negligent  was "duplicative recasting" of his misappropriation claims.

"While the court remains perplexed why Scott insists on a claim that adds nothing to the case, this supernovic white dwarf star of a claim burns on," wrote the judge.

With his claims standing, Scott can now proceed with the lawsuit, if he so chooses. According to a clerk's notice filed Monday (April 9), the parties have until May 23 to address whether they will pursue a settlement instead.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2018 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.Here we go again: Fresh reports claim that the end of the world is nigh. Forgetting that we were all a little burned out by the 2012 end-of-Maya-calendar debacle, outlets such as the Daily Express are claiming that the Rapture  the end-time event when Christians are said to ascend to heaven at the second coming of Christ  is coming April 23 and we should get ready for it. In case you were inclined to jump on the Armageddon bandwagon, know this: The reports are bogus, and the celestial bodies aren't even in the predicted position for this supposed doomsday to occur!

According to the Daily Express' claims, the position of the planets on April 23, 2018, echoes language in the Bible from Revelation 12:1-2. The New International Version of that passage (according to BibleGateway.com) says, "A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant, and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth."

The Daily Express's source says this passage refers to the second coming of Jesus Christ and the beginning of the Rapture. Further, they say the passage refers to Virgo, a woman from Greek and Roman mythology. Virgo also is represented in astrology (which is not a science, by the way) and as a constellation. [What's the Draw of Dystopian Sci-Fi?]

"On April 23, the sun and moon will be in Virgo, as will Jupiter, which represents the Messiah," the Daily Express report says. "Experts at first dismissed this claim when they discovered this alignment happens every 12 years. However, the conspiracy theories claim another planetary alignment, representing 'the Lion of the tribe of Judah', will make this time the Rapture."

The moon, Jupiter and the sun are nowhere near Virgo on April 23  the least of the many reasons we're not on the verge of the Rapture. (Image credit: Starry Night software)

What planet is responsible for this alignment? It's Nibiru, a mythical world supposedly orbiting the sun in an extremely long, eccentric orbit that has been debunked again and again by NASA  but it somehow keeps popping up in forecasts of doom. In the latest prediction, Nibiru is supposed to pass by Earth this October, causing volcanic eruptions as the gravity of this massive world disturbs our own.

Nibiru has been implicated in all sorts of planetary trouble, going back as far as 1995, when there were nasty predictions that it would collide with Earth. NASA, however, reassured us a few years ago that "No giant, rogue planet has been found in the outer solar system to play the role of Nibiru."

Astronomy popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson also tackled the subject back in 2009, addressing the claim that Nibiru was supposed to disturb our planet during an alignment of Earth, the sun and the center of the galaxy on Dec. 21, 2012. "What the [conspiracy web]site doesn't tell you is that [alignment] happens every year on December 21," Tyson said. "They left that out of the account." In a more charitable moment, he referred to the doomsday prediction as "a marvelous work of fiction."

Some people may argue that "Planet Nine," a hypothetical large world that could be causing disturbances in the Kuiper Belt, is Nibiru. But again, NASA has emphasized that no one knows for sure if Planet Nine exists  and, even if it does, it's disturbing only small, icy objects far away from Earth.

"The existence of this distant world is only theoretical at this point and no direct observation of the object nicknamed have been made," reads a web page about Planet Nine from NASA, which makes no mention of any collision or encounter with Earth. "The mathematical prediction of a planet could explain the unique orbits of some smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt," the agency noted, but that's far from home  way beyond the orbit of Neptune.

And here's the kicker: The sky arrangement is totally wrong. Jupiter is actually in Libra all day and night on April 23, while the moon is between Leo and Cancer. (The sun, out of view when Jupiter and the moon are in the sky, is over by Pisces.) None of those bodies is in Virgo, and again, even if they were, astrology is not real science.

So, we feel safe in saying there will be no apocalypse on April 23. On that cheerful note, since the world isn't ending this month, it's best to file your taxes this weekend as planned.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.Press Release

MURTAUGH ASSUMES THE ROLE OF CAPTAIN ON AN ALL-NEW "LETHAL WEAPON" TUESDAY, MAY 1, ON FOXOn Murtaugh's first day on the job as interim captain, the wife of a popular businessman is abducted and the squad finds a connection in the case to Riggs' father (guest star Rex Linn). Meanwhile, Riggs is left to grapple with his family and work in the all-new "Family Ties" episode of LETHAL WEAPON airing Tuesday, May 1 (8:00-9:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX. (LET-221) (TV-14 D, L, V)Cast: Damon Wayans, Sr. as Roger Murtaugh, Clayne Crawford as Martin Riggs, Keesha Sharp as Trish Murtaugh, Jordana Brewster as Dr. Maureen "Mo" Cahill, Michelle Mitchenor as Sonya BaileyGuest Cast: Thomas Lennon as Leo Getz, Rex Linn as Nathan Riggs, Adam Sinclair as Llewyn Scott, Peter Coventry Smith as Garrett, Charlie Talbert as Travis, Hector Hugo as Mark Conlon, Rebecca Wisocky as Commissioner Debra, Chad Rook as Sean, George Sharperson as MontySales of condominiums were hot in Connecticut in February while single-family home sales were not, according to data released Monday by the Boston-based Warren Group, publisher of The Commercial Record.

There were 496 condominium sales in Connecticut during February, up by 9.3 percent from the same period in 2017. Single-family home sales in Connecticut during February were off 3 percent in February compared to the same period year earlier.

There were 1,688 single-family home sales in February, compared to 1,741 during the same period in 2017.

But while the number of single-family homes sold in February declined, the median price paid increased dramatically. The median price for the sale of a single-family home in the state increased by $16,000, or 7.2 percent, to $237,000 compared to a year ago.

The increase in median sale price for single-family homes was the largest year-over-year increase since September 2013, according to Timothy Warren, chief executive officer of the Warren Group.

Sales may have slowed in February, but the rising price is a good sign for any current homeowners who are thinking of selling, Warren said in a statement. The inventory of homes for sale is dropping in Connecticut and the tighter supply may be pushing up prices. Well soon know if this trend continues or if homeowners rush to put their homes on the market to take advantage of higher prices.

Donald Klepper-Smith, chief economist and director of research for New Haven-based DataCore Partners, was a bit more skeptical about the increase in single-family home sale prices.

It looks to be somewhat of an anomaly given economic fundamentals, Klepper-Smith said. Job growth is non-existent and full job recovery isnt expected until the end of 2019. Add in the fact that traction in the housing markets is tied to traction in the labor markets and you can see that the small sample we have for the first two months of 2018 is probably overstating strength in the Connecticut housing market.

The median sale price for condominiums sold in Connecticut during March was up slightly, increasing by $1,625, or 1.1 percent, to $145,000

February single-family home sales decreased in five of Connecticuts eight counties, with the biggest percentage decrease coming in Windham County, where the number of transactions year-over-year was off by 15.2 percent. Tolland County led the state in terms of the percentage increase in single-family home sales, with a 17.2 percent increase.

Fairfield County saw condo sales jump 11.3 percent from 2017, with 167 units sold in February compared to 150 for the same month last year.

Single-family home sales in New Haven County during February fell by 2 percent from the same period last year. But the median single-family home sale price there rose by 7.6 percent to $204,500, according to the Warren Group data.

Middlesex County led the state in median sale price gains. The median sale price of single-family homes in the county during February was $274,450, an increase of $44,450, or 19.3 percent.

The number of condominium units sold during February in New Haven County increased by 14.8 percent to 132. The median sale price of those units sold during February increased by 4.1 percent, or $4,800, to $123,000.GREENWICH  Kids at the Boys and Girls Club of Greenwich spent their spring break in the pool. But the week was not just fun and games  in between splashes there were valuable lessons about safety to be learned.

The club was once again host to ZAC Camp, during which 120 kids from the Greenwich and Stamford clubs learned about safe swimming and spent time with Greenwichs first responders to see ambulances and fire trucks up close and learn they should never be afraid to ask for help.

The event is a deeply personal one for Greenwich residents Karen and Brian Cohn, who started the ZAC Foundation after the 2007 death of their son Zachary. The six-year-old drowned in a backyard swimming pool after his arm became trapped in the suction of a drain that had an improperly installed cover.

In 2011, the foundation began sponsoring the ZAC Camp during spring break at the Boys and Girls Club to teach children how to be safe swimmers.

I feel that Zachary is watching down and he is smiling, Karen Cohn said on Thursday.

Since its launch, ZAC Camp has gone national, which Cohn said has allowed them to reach 15,000 children over the years. There are camps each year in 20 different cities with a focus on states like Florida, Texas and California where there are a high number of drownings.

For Boys and Girls Club of Greenwich CEO Bobby Walker Jr., the ZAC Foundation is a welcome presence in the club every spring.

This is so important, Walker said. If you do any research about drowning rates among young kids of color, particularly those who are from lower socio-economic backgrounds, youll see its significantly higher than any other segment of the population. Knowing these young kids are learning these skills now in first, second and third grade, you know theyre going to live a life where theyre safer in the water.

Walker said the best part for him is seeing the kids teach someone else the incredible skills they learned.

You have the youngest among us teaching everyone about safety and telling their parents what to do, Walker said. Thats what makes ZAC Camp so special. Its a gift that keeps on giving so to speak.

The lessons of ZAC Camp are built around what the Cohns call the ABCDs of safe swimming: A for having an adult nearby when you swim, B for barriers  gates or fences  that must surround pools, C for classes to teach about swimming and water safety and D for drain safety.

On Thursday afternoon, the camp held its annual closing ceremony at which all of the kids were given medals for participating.

I feel so happy to have created a legacy in memory of Zachary, Cohn said prior to the ceremony. Weve been doing this for eight years now and we actually have kids that have outgrown it. Its really great to see new kids coming in and there were several children that at the start of this week were too afraid of swimming to get in and by the end were in the water and blowing bubbles and putting their faces in.

As part of the ceremony, Cohn brought up several of the children who had been too afraid to get in the water at first. They received a loud round of applause for what they accomplished during the four days of camp.

One was seven-year-old Sebastian Modzelewski-Verdan, who was swimming around with his sister Ariana by the end of the camp. Eight-year old Sophia Materon said her favorite part was getting a kayak into the pool water and tipping over in it as she learned how to properly wear a life jacket.

The closing ceremony featured appearances by Police Chief James Heavey, Fire Chief Peter Siecinski, representatives from GEMS, state Sen. L. Scott Frantz, R-36, and state Reps. Michael Bocchino, R-150, and Fred Camillo, R-151. Heavey and Camillo both talked about how they were once club kids who learned to swim there, just like all of the kids in attendance had done.

Youve just completed one of the most important safety courses you will ever complete in your life, Frantz said. Theres water everywhere you go and its super critical that you know how to handle water so you can swim and recognize when someone else is having a problem in the water.

In 2018, the ZAC Foundation is marking its 10th year. A second ZAC Camp will be held locally in Stamford at the end of July, and there are additional plans expected to be formalized soon to provide kids in town with safe swimming instruction, creating what Cohn called a community of water safety.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.comSTAMFORD  As the clock rapidly ticks before the next opioid overdose victim becomes another fatality statistic, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a rare advisory last week: More Americans should carry Naloxone.

Each day we lose 115 Americans to opioid overdoses  thats one person every 12.5 minutes, Dr. Jerome M. Adams said. It is time to make sure more Americans have access to this life-saving medication because 77 percent of opioid overdoses occur outside a medical setting and more than half occur at home.

Commonly sold under the brand name Narcan, Naloxone reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. The drug is already carried by many first responders, including Stamford fire, EMS and police.

We make sure that all of our first responders  police, fire, EMS  carry Narcan, said Ted Jankowski, Stamfords director of public safety, health and welfare. I think everybody is in agreement with (the surgeon general). Were in the business of saving lives and, from my perspective, having more Narcan out there is a positive thing.

The quicker, the better

Within the city limits, Stamford EMS Assistant Chief Edward Browne said the average response time for an ambulance is five and a half minutes from when 911 is called.

In cases of opioid overdoses, Browne said the faster intervention is administered, the better the outcome for the patient.

What happens in the case of an opioid overdose is that it suppresses respiratory function, he said. So, an overdosing patient basically stops breathing, which means theyre not getting oxygen to their brain. So, time is crucial in a case like that.

Browne said the general accepted threshold of time a brain can survive without oxygen is about eight minutes. After that, the patient can suffer permanent damage.

When a person is found overdosing, Browne said every minute is crucial because you dont know how long that person has been down.

If that person was down for 10 minutes before he was found, and it takes another five minutes for the ambulance to get there, that persons brain has gone without oxygen for 15 minutes, he said. So, having Narcan on hand, in the home, and being able to administer it, can make a huge difference for that patients chances.

Peace of mind

Dr. John Douglas, service chief of the Outpatient Addiction Programs at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, considers Narcan to be an essential tool in battling the opioid crisis.

We commonly recommend patients keep (Narcan) in their home and commonly recommend that their families and friends have it available as well, he said.

In many cases, opioid addiction is difficult to overcome, he said, and relapse is likely even with treatment.

The relapse rates for opioid addiction are extremely high, and having Narcan available is something that is a good idea and can definitely help save lives, he said.

For those trying to kick the habit without help, Johnson said, the relapse rate is about 100 percent. He said the rate is reduced to about 80 percent for those who complete a residential program but do not take a maintenance medication. For those who complete treatment and take a maintenance medication, the rates are much lower, he said.

Additionally, Johnson said opioid relapses are unforgiving and often result in death.

Though making Narcan more available may not be a long-term solution in battling the opioid crisis, Johnson said its a step in the right direction.

I encourage anyone who is addicted to opioids or anyone who has a loved one who is addicted to opioids to have Narcan available, he said. It is an important tool that can be used to decreased the rate of people dying from opioid overdoses.

Miracle drug or safety net?

Some opponents, however, believe making Narcan widely available enables addicts to continue abusing opioids without seeking help.

Stamford Police Capt. Richard Conklin said some addicts view Narcan as a safety net.

Were seeing some opioid users who use Narcan as a crutch, or a safety net, he said. Theyre not worried about overdosing because they think Narcan will save them. Occasionally, when we talk to addicts, and were telling them what theyre doing is going to kill them, theyre response is no theyll just give me the can and Ill be fine.

The can Conklin said is a slang term addicts use when referring to Narcan.

You just realize thats a kind of delusional thinking, he said. It would really be much more prudent to get help and try to overcome the addiction, but they are so entrenched, they cant see that.

But Conklin said he is not opposed to any tool that can help first responders save more lives.

Narcan is a miracle drug, and its saving a lot of lives, he said. Should civilians carry Narcan? Yeah. If they have loved ones who are struggling with an opioid addiction, it would probably be prudent for them to have Narcan on hand.

A solution, but not a panacea

Though Narcan plays an important role in addressing the opioid problem, Conklin said it will take a community effort to make a significant impact.

There is no one solution for this, he said. Its not like were going to arrest our way out of this and its not like every user is suddenly going to go to rehab. Its a multi-pronged problem and we have to attack it on many fronts.

Narcan can help reduce overdose deaths, but Ingrid Gillespie, executive director of local nonprofit Communities 4 Action, agreed combatting the epidemic will take a multi-front effort.

To combat this crisis is going to require efforts from law enforcement and first responders, as well as the education, mental health and medical communities, she said.

In the meantime, Gillespie said Narcan can save lives and give addicts the chance to get help.

Every time we reverse an opioid overdose, its an opportunity for us to connect with that person and get them the help they need, she said. Every time we reverse an opioid overdose, its an opportunity to save a life and to change a life.

kat.russell@hearstmediact.comG aming software giant Playtech took a major punt on the fast-growing Italian market on Thursday, gobbling up betting and gaming operator Snaitech for 846 million (738 million).

Its swoop for a 70.6% stake in the firm gives the Israeli-based giant a significant foothold in one of Europes biggest betting markets, worth some 20 billion a year, but with major scope for online growth.

Less than 10% of gambling in the fragmented Italian market is online, compared with 40% in the UK, which Playtech hopes will offer scope for rapid growth.

It also increases Playtechs exposure to the retail market as Snai has a network of franchised betting shops and betting machines, while bolstering revenues from more certain, regulated markets.

Snaitech generated 890 million in revenues last year, generating profits of 136 million. Playtech also reckons it can draw out 10 million in cost savings though the deal.

Shore Capitals Greg Johnson said: Although the market may harbour some concerns over retail exposure, the opportunity is to build a material online offering with the Italian retail model also mainly franchised.F iona Greiner reveals how she came to work at luxury retailer Matchesfashion.com ...

What is Matchesfashion?

It is a luxury online retailer which also has shops in London and was founded 31 years ago. We have 400 people in our Shard headquarters, stock brands such as Erdem and Gucci, and had sales of 200 million in the year to January 2017.

Last September [founding couple] Tom and Ruth Chapman sold the business to funds advised by private-equity firm Apax Partners.

What do you do?

My role is to help us grow in a profitable and considered way. This week has included spending time with the property team to get an update on our new tech and design studio opening in Stratford; working with our head of merchandising on spring/summer 2019 buys, and discussing new tech investments.

What do you like about it?

I spend a lot of time looking at the website. It is impossible not to shop, so a staff discount is nice.

I love the emerging brands that we support. It is really exciting when we see them grow with us.

What dont you like?

I get annoyed at people turning up late for meetings, something that happens a fair bit in the fashion industry.

Biggest break?

I grew up in Bradford, west Yorkshire, and did a business studies course at college. My first role in finance was at an architectural practice in London, and I then went to Germany to work at Citicorp Kartenservice as financial controller for credit cards. They were training a number of Brits and Americans on the job, and they had a tutor to come in and teach German.

I moved back to London when I was 28 with my husband, whom I met in Germany.

I became a finance manager at Woolworths  then owned by Kingfisher  which was a big break because they really invested in people, providing great training. Then I was headhunted by Gap, eventually becoming their European head of finance, followed by spells at fashion groups Polo Ralph Lauren, Charles Tyrwhitt and Jack Wills.

The move to Matchesfashion in 2011 was a massive opportunity because I was given the chance to join the board and be part of transforming a small but loved brand into this major global business.

Biggest setback?

Having two companies relocate was not pleasant. Gap moved its head office to Rugby and Polo Ralph Lauren moved to Geneva.

I loved the companies, but I had two young children and we were not in a position to leave London. However, those not working out ultimately led me to my current job, which I love.

Hows your work-life balance?

My husband is an architect and we have two children: Joshua, 15, and Amy, 13. I like to spend my working hours in the Shard, be visible and know what is going on in all departments. That means I am at home in Kingston at a decent time most evenings to have dinner with my family.

My parents also moved in with us when they retired 10 years ago, so they have been a huge help with the kids over the years. Weve also just bought a holiday home in Devon.

Any tips?N ot long ago it felt as if all around me boring divorcing men in their 40s were talking about their 27-year-old girlfriends. Perhaps this was to impress their friends  the perverse joy of pulling like Paul Hollywood  but ultimately the women were reduced to a number.

My 27-year-old girlfriend one prattled on (I only found out her name, Elizabeth, when she turned 30). Another called his clear-eyed, clear-skinned ingenue the 25-year-old; a third would joke, as he introduced a succession of university students: I like them young. God knows why women are attracted to these regressed child-men in their 40s.

Lately, all this appears to be turned on its head. We are hearing more about older women having relationships with younger men and shaping them. Its not just Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron - who have a 24-year age gap.

An old friend of Julian Barnes has disclosed how influenced he was by his relationship aged 19 with Laurien Wade, 51, which gives depth to his new novel The Only Story (in which the central character, 19, has an affair with a 48 year-old).

Of course most public interest is prurient: its about sex. Yesterday, thee was a serious case of a 53-year-old former teacher who appeared in court for allegedly sleeping with a pupil of 15. The boy told jurors it was every lads fantasy.

Is it? My male colleagues say yes: one admits being fixated by his Latin teacher. Another  obsessed with The Graduate  revealed he had sex with his driving instructor. She was 45 and thought I was the worlds worst driver. I wanted to prove her wrong.

Which is worse, I asked them, a relationship where the man or woman is older? Both versions elicit a wolfish grin  in both the power imbalance is alluring. But in the cases of Brigitte and Laurien these women have been powerful influences on important men. They are more than just a number.

Stilletos spark my first Tube chat

A man sitting beside me on the District line broke the spell of a steady silence to ask about my boots.

Are they hard to walk in, with that heel?

We both considered the 3.5-inch stiletto. I assured him they were remarkably comfortable.

Yes, the leather looks very soft, he mused. Its Italian, I told him, adding that though they were new Id had them resoled because of the tough London pavements.

Well, he concluded, they are very nice.

Afterwards on the platform I was puzzled. In 20 years no one has ever struck up conversation with me on the Tube.

Only then did I realise how intimate it was.

A womans lecherous brush with Picasso

The Tates Picasso 1932  Love, Fame, Tragedy exhibition features his mistress Marie-Therese Walter, 23, whom the artist introduced to the writing of the Marquis de Sade. I saw it with a curator who pointed out the phalluses and sphincter.

Samantha Colley / Getty Images

It chimes with a forthcoming biopic entitled Genius in which Poppy Delevingne plays Walter and Samantha Colley plays Dora Maar.

Picasso encouraged them to fight physically over him. Picasso  like Lucian Freud, who had 14 identified children by 12 women  is often excused as a Bohemian. Actually he was a manipulative sexual predator.

The curator said Freud introduced Picasso to his wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and was delighted when the artist whisked her away.

Blackwood remembered: He had this iron staircase leading to the roof and all around us was the best view of Paris.

"Picasso does a complete plunge at me. All I felt was fear. I kept saying, Go down the stairs, go down. He said, No, no, we are together above the roofs of Paris. Picasso was just an old lech, genius or no.

Face up to the tough times of your life

Like all self-respecting north Londoners, I have a therapist. My therapist is pro-truth, at least in my case.

She says some people cannot be lied to. They have a sharp sense of false realities.

Lies make them uncomfortable; relationships where lies exist feel dislocated.

My friend has a therapist who believes in withholding truths if it makes life easier. But what is an easy life if not a stagnant life?

Isnt learning the truth about life, lovers, friends, even with its stinging agonies, part of graduating to a purer level of understanding?S o many nations acted in solidarity with the UK in the wake of Russias nerve agent attack in Salisbury. Now Britain has a moral imperative to match that solidarity by making itself part of the forthcoming action in response to Bashir al-Assads latest chemical weapons atrocity in Syria.

As scores lies dead in the city of Douma, the UK should be part of a united front which makes clear that the use of these evil weapons will always attract severe consequences.

If the Government can rediscover the will to protect civilians against this growing threat, I am confident many Labour MPs will want to play their part and rise above the excuses and diversions which emanate from the shadow front bench whenever there is a crisis.

The horror of attacks like that seen in Douma, and the Russian representatives Comical Ali-style performance at the UN, is becoming depressingly familiar.

The question usually posed to the international community after each atrocity is how many times will this be permitted to happen before we take sufficient action to deter it? Yet the more chilling question is surely this: how many more similar acts of slaughter will the world stand by and watch before outrage simply peters out and this indiscriminate killing of innocents is accepted as the norm?

Chemical weapons have been outlawed by the global community for nearly 100 years after their effects became understood during the First World War.

Yet allowing Assad to rain gas on his citizens with minimal sanction may have brought the day of meek acceptance perilously close.

Which is why it is vital that the global community, including Britain, now acts concertedly and firmly as America did alone last year.

The cruise missile strikes ordered by President Trump after Assad killed more than 80 people with sarin in the opposition-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in April last year were proportionate and right.

We must now show that such a response was not a one-off by a solitary country.

President Putin will undoubtedly try to twist any process, as he did last year after the Khan Sheikhoun atrocity.

Then, when the joint investigation by the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found sarin had indeed been used, Russia prevented investigators stating the obvious conclusion that Assad himself was responsible.

This week, true to form, it has vetoed a US resolution at the security council to start an inquiry into the Douma attack. So, with our once cherished international institutions rendered impotent to intervene, it falls to individual nations to act.

Britain must be among those nations, backed by all politics parties.M ark Zuckerberg is living every young persons worst nightmare: trying to explain how tech stuff works to the nations elderly. That was one Twitter users verdict after watching veteran US politicians doing a comically bad job of grilling the 33-year-old Facebook founder in two high-profile public hearings this week.

Zuckerberg had come to Washington DC to be quizzed about data privacy, in the wake of the news that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica might have unlawfully collected personal information on 87 million Facebook users without permission.

This is a hugely important topic  but sadly, even though the politicians got to interview Zuckerberg for 10 solid hours, they didnt make any real headway, because barely any of them seemed to know much about technology or business. In the words of the influential tech writer Kara Swisher: The senators really dropped every single ball possible.

In fact, investors were so happy about how well Zuckerberg was doing against the politicos that Facebooks share price went up during the first hearing  increasing the value of the company by more than 2 billion. But if I owned Facebook stock, Im not sure Id be quite so confident.

One line of questioning that kept popping up was the issue of whether or not his company is a monopoly, meaning it has little or no competition from other companies.

One senator asserted that Facebook is the dominant social platform with no true competition, while another made the point that if you buy a car, you can easily switch to another brand if you dont like it, but its much harder to find an alternative to Facebook. On this point, Zuckerberg was much less confident, struggling to name another business thats a genuine rival.

Its perhaps not surprising that he stumbled  after all, many experts have long argued that the social network has effectively become a monopoly, and action should be taken.

As the director of the Roosevelt Institute said after the hearings were over: The fact that Zuckerberg couldnt name his competitors spoke volumes.

The reason this matters is that in business, competition is vital. It helps ensure consumers dont get ripped off because in a competitive market companies cant easily hike up prices, as they know consumers will switch to a rival. Competition also helps drive innovation, as companies fight to stay ahead of the rest by coming up with new products.

Mark Zuckerberg: 'It was my mistake and I'm sorry'

Ever since President Roosevelt took action to break up big oil and railway companies in the early 20th century, successive generations of American politicians have seen it as their responsibility to tackle monopolies and ensure the US economy remains dynamic and innovative.

But whats fascinating  and complex  about Facebook is that it doesnt fit into the old way lawmakers have tended to think about monopolies, which is to focus on whether theyre abusing their dominant position to push up prices.

That makes sense if youre thinking about a traditional business such as a bank or an energy company. But as we all know, Facebook is free to use  no matter how many hours a day you spend on it or how many photos you upload.

But the thing about social networks  which obviously hadnt been invented when competition laws were first drawn up  is that they tend towards monopoly because if all your friends are using Facebook, then its really hard for you to use a different service.

''Given that EU rules set a lower bar for judging market dominance by a company, it wouldnt be surprising if it took action''

According to business analyst Ben Thompson: The issue is straightforward. Networks are the monopoly-makers of the internet era. To build one is extremely difficult but, once built, they are nearly impregnable.

This helps explain why 95 per cent of young American adults use Facebook  and why Facebook accounted for 77 per cent of revenue growth in digital advertising in the US in 2016.

For many experts the fact that the social network giant has been able to buy companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp is further proof that it may be becoming a monopoly, and using its power to reduce competition and stifle innovation.

Um... no: Zuckerberg challenged on privacy

Another example is the way Facebook tried to buy Snapchat  and, having been rebuffed, immediately started copying its best features in order to undermine the fledgling business.

According to academics such as Professor Scott Galloway at New York University, this all adds up to a clear picture: Bottom line  this is a monopoly. Only time will tell whether American politicians take the same view and decide to act.

And, of course, the EU will no doubt be looking closely at this issue too. Given that EU rules set a lower bar for judging market dominance by a company, it wouldnt be surprising if it took action, much like it did with Microsoft and Google.

If politicians stepped in, what might this mean? For starters, it could make it much more difficult for Facebook to keep buying other companies, so further entrenching its dominant position.

It might lead to new restrictions on how Facebook can access information from Instagram, WhatsApp and other businesses it has acquired  or even force these companies to be divested or sold, breaking up the social network.

Or, as weve seen with other monopolies in the past, even if the company isnt broken up, regulations could be introduced to make it harder for it to abuse its dominant position.

In the words of the chief economics commentator of The Wall Street Journal: Facebooks days as an unregulated monopoly may be numbered.D OES anyone seriously believe that removing President Assad will bring peace to Syria [May: We will hold Assad to account, 10 April]? If we can confirm that the Syrian army carried out the alleged chemical attack, international law could ensure Assad is brought to account but, as far as I can see, bringing him down would only allow all the rebel factions to continue fighting. These groups are mostly fanatics prepared to use hospitals, women and children as shields to keep the rebellion going. Islamic State may be in retreat but there are plenty of other factions prepared to battle on until death.

The problems of the Middle East, and I would include the Israel-Palestine situation, are largely of European making, led by Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. Lawrence of Arabia told us how wrong we were when we and our allies drew all those straight lines, largely around our former colonial occupation zones, with little understanding or involvement of the local people. Even the Iraq War taught us little, which is why the various factions of that benighted country are still killing one another.

Of course, Assad must be brought to justice and, if shown to be responsible for war crimes, tried in a proper court. But prolonging the Syrian civil war will help no one.

David Reed

EDITOR'S REPLY

Dear David

SO FAR no one is talking about regime change in Damascus, though it may eventually come to it. With Bashar al-Assad still in power, propped by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, there is little chance of bringing him or his generals before an international court. The court at The Hague has successfully tried political leaders, but this depends largely on one side being beaten. It is unlikely that it could unite Syria, let alone offer much hope of reconciliation and reconstruction.

To lay blame for the ills of the Middle East at the door of European powers  Britain and France are always first in the dock  is too easy an approach. The crapulous and corrupt Ottoman rule across the region would have ended anyway, whatever Sir Mark Sykes and Monsieur Francois Georges-Picot may have cooked up.

And what if France and Britain hadnt prevailed, and there had been no League of Nations mandates? Thats an interesting counterfactual exercise.

Robert Fox, Defence Editor

Why hasnt Barrys approach to Brexit lost him his job?

I WONDER what your readers must make of recent statements from shadow international trade spokesman Barry Gardiner? No sooner had he apologised for saying the Good Friday Agreement was an outdated shibboleth, than he described his colleague Keir Starmers policy on Brexit as bollocks. The mystery is why, unlike some of my Labour colleagues who have spoken from the heart and been sacked as a result, Gardiner seems certain to keep his job.

This issue is now too important to leave in the hands of shadow ministers adopting Gardiners approach. The Brexiteers promised us that we would get the exact same benefits as single-market membership in any final deal. So it is right for MPs of all parties to hold them to that, otherwise Parliament could reject the final deal.

Chris Leslie MP (Lab)

Enforce the rules on aeroplanes

THE latest initiative to combat rowdy or drunk passengers causing trouble on planes by sealing duty-free drinks in bags is ridiculous, [Duty-free drink could be sealed in bags to halt rowdy passengers April 11].

Why not stop drunken passengers getting on planes in the first place? And then when passengers are on board, restrict the amount of alcohol being served?

I recently flew on a plane with a hen party and it was bedlam. They were drunk before boarding and were served unlimited alcohol throughout the flight.

Once again in our liberal society the many are being punished for the behaviour of a small minority. Instead of new rules to accommodate the few all that is required is to enforce rigidly the rules that are already in place.

Paul Casey

Shield the autistic from exploitation

In FRIDAYS story about extremism, [Revealed: Purge of extremist workers on London transport network, April 6] security minister Ben Wallace asked if enough is being done to support autistic people and others vulnerable to exploitation.

This is a very important issue and he is right that more support is needed. There are, of course, cases where autistic people can commit an offence. Some struggle to interpret other peoples motives and understand possible consequences, which can make them vulnerable to being exploited by so-called friends. This is why autistic people must get the right support from an early age, including specialist programmes, both to deter the few people at risk of offending and to rehabilitate the even smaller number who do.

Claire Hughes

National Autistic Society

Rogue CEOs can do untold damage

Further to Simon Englishs column The Cryan Game was no help for bank that cant make up its mind [Business, April 10], I worked for Deutsche Bank in New York in the late Eighties. It was a totally different animal in those days  the dominant force in German banking and the go-to outfit for anyone wanting to do business in Germany but not a major player in international finance.

I always think the rot set in with Rolf Breuer and his grandiose ambition to join the bulge bracket, as he put it. As Simon says, Fred Goodwins similar hubris put paid to RBS. And Juergen Schrempps ambitious expansions wounded Daimler.The Kardashians just keep on multiplying.

Catching up with eldest Kourtney Kardashian's three offspring, Kim recently welcomed her third child via surrogate, meanwhile 20-year-old Kylie birth to her first child, Stormi, in February.

Then, in December, after months of speculation, Khloe Kardashian also confirmed the news that she too was pregnant with her first child with professional basketball player Tristan Thompson.

The 33-year-old announced the news in an Instagram snap of Tristan and her cradling the bump. The caption read: "My greatest dream realized! We are having a baby!"

The reality TV star also praised her partner, saying, "Tristan, thank you for loving me the way that you do! Thank you for treating me like a Queen! Thank you for making me feel beautiful at all stages! Tristan, most of all, Thank you for making me a MOMMY!!! [sic]"

People. Fashion. Power. Delivered weekly. Email Sign up Sign up I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice {{message}} {{permutiveUid}} {{message}}

However, with rumours of Tristian's infidelity currently circling the Internet, the couple's relationship status currently hangs in the balance.

With Khloe due to give birth any day now, we take a look back at the Kardashian's signature maternity styles:

*That jumpsuit*

After concealing her bump for months in a bid to keep her pregnancy secret, once the news broke Khloe fully embraced maternity style.

At Christmas the star stepped out in her first maternity look and it was a show-stopper.

Wearing a bespoke jumpsuit dripping in jewels by Yousef Aljasmi, it was clear that Khloe's pregnancy wardrobe was going to be on-point.

Baby body con

A figure-hugging body con dress is a Kardashian style staple, and much like her elder sisters before her, pregnancy wasn't going stop Khloe from wearing the family's signature style.

From a chic blue satin number by Cushnie et Ochs for an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel to glitzy 90s designs for nights out, the fitness fanatic filled her maternity wardrobe with super-tight dresses.

Pink, everything

After discovering the gender of the baby (a girl), Khloe fittingly started wearing a plethora of pink hues.

While on a trip to Japan with Kim and Kourtney, last month, she covered up her eight-month bump in a pink skirt and statement fluffy coat.

Ever the Kardashian, she also made all her sisters wear the girly shade to her pink-themed baby shower.

The DIY maternity line

Khloe quickly saw the business opportunity and got to work creating a maternity range for her brand, Good American.T here's always a market for the sort of self-identifying newspaper column which goes against fashion. Why I as a gay man think marriage should only be between a man and a woman or Why, as a vegan, I back fox hunting. Mark Lynas has turned this into a career and now a book: Why I, as a former radical Green activist, now see that we need GM crops to feed the world. Its an excellent read, fluent, persuasive and surely right.

His story starts in a Brighton squat in 1996, when he became convinced  on no scientific basis at all, he decides much later  that genetically modified plants would hand control of the food chain to rapacious agro-industrialists. Their Frankenfoods, he decided, would cause existing seed supplies to mutate and do huge harm to human health and the environment. So he set out to stop them, joining minibus-loads of young idealistic activists to slash down fields of GM crops at night before their creators could complete their research.

Soon parts of the media  and Prince Charles  joined the cry against GM crops. The European Union banned them. Monsanto, the US company most widely associated with their development, retreated. Victory was unexpectedly easy. Our food was kept safe.

But safe from what? And at what cost? One day  after dashing off yet another piece for The Guardian deploring their use  Lynas started asking questions. Environmentalists like him denounced people who ignored the scientific evidence of climate change as deniers. But on GM crops, it turned out, he was the denier  ignoring the weight of scientific opinion which suggested GM was not only safe but could help the planet by cutting back on the use of pesticides and increasing food production. He even found evidence that Monsanto, whose name had become mud because of its efforts to enforce its patents through the courts, was being wronged.

At this point in his book Lynas writes with all the zeal of a convert: and many will think he goes too far, not least in aiding Monsanto, which is surely rich enough to look after itself.

Organic food, too, has much in its favour beyond the fact that it does not involve GM. But it is hard to dispute his broad point: that well-meaning people got carried away in support of a cause which had little but prejudice and superstition in its favour  and in so doing made people poorer and left them hungry.

Thats an important lesson: our world, which likes to think of itself as educated and rational, can be anything but when it comes to political activism.

Towards the end of his story he pulls back a little: revisiting the friends from his early environmentalist days, whom he respects for their decency, if not their grasp of science. And when, from the other side, an ecomodernist asks him to come out in favour of a world of GM modified plants designed to glow in the dark, to replace street lights, he is repelled. Like all centrists, he can see the complexities that extremists on both sides ignore. Being an expert is like that sometimes.D avid Sampedro and Melanie Hickman tend vines clinging to the valleys of the Sierra Cantabria mountains in northern Spain.

Bequeathed to him by his mother, Sampedro, a former professional rugby player, increased his initial inheritance of four acres by buying a few more at a fair price from his aunt. The thick, gnarled vines punch like giant hands through the rocky limestone.

In a quest to bottle the fruit of this dramatic landscape as soulfully as possible, Sampedro and Hickman banished chemicals from their vineyards. While weaker vines died without the man-made life support, the majority grew stronger, producing grapes with a concentrated flavour.

The white variety, Viura, confers a direct, lemon-fresh pour, akin, says Sampedro, to Spanish Chardonnay. The so-called humble village reds, evoking grapes Tempranillo and Graciano, are vividly purple, complex and fine, but never overly polished, with herbal notes such as wild fennel that are carried by the winds barrelling Riojas most marginal enclave. At the top of the range is the single vineyard Phinca Lali, which takes the nickname of Sampedros mother and has earthy truffle and dark cherry flavours, and even a hint of Fernet Branca spirit.

I taste the articulate wines of Bodegas Bhilar  the name derived from the Basque for Elvillar village over lunch of mangalitsa, a pig famed for its fat content, in the former spice warehouse now home to the barbecue restaurant Pitt Cue in London. Hickman mentions that she met Sampedro in Madrid as she was making her way home from Morocco to Honolulu. David heard me asking for Rioja in a restaurant and was impressed, saying he thought American women only drank sweet white wine.

The couples uncompromising vision has earned Bhilar recognition in Rioja and internationally, with them having been invited to share their sustainable wines as far afield as Peking University.I n a noisy corner of Shoreditch House, Ella Purnell plonks two cubes of sugar into her coffee.

No judgement, please, the 21-year-old actress says, her saucer-sized eyes mockingly wide.

Until now the former child star was best-known for playing juvenile versions of Keira Knightley, Angelina Jolie and Margot Robbie in Never Let Me Go, Maleficent and The Legend of Tarzan  and latterly as grist to the relentless tabloid gossip mill that linked her to Brad Pitt and Spider-Man star Tom Holland. But this year Purnell has come of age. She is currently on screen in the Sunday-night must-see Agatha Christie adaptation, Ordeal by Innocence, and has shot her first grown-up lead role, as waitress Tess in the Starz networks controversial adaptation of Stephanie Danlers New York-set bestseller, Sweetbitter. She has a new role as brand ambassador for her red-carpet favourite, Chanel. And she is also a year into a relationship with James Coates, a singer and a good egg, and in a place where she can talk for the first time about the depression she suffered in her teens.

Cover photographed by Vanina Sorrenti. Styled by Bay Garnett. CHANEL cardigan, 3,605 (chanel.com).

But the sad stuff can wait a little. First, we talk about her Chanel gig. Its not a hard job, she sparkles. You get to wear amazing clothes and meet amazing people, and then, like Cinderella, you give the dress back at the end of the night. (Not always: she gets to keep some of them.) For this professed tomboy who hates high heels, attending couture shows with the Chanel family was a steep learning curve.

I didnt understand anything. I had to google everything, she says. The detail that goes into couture stuff is insane. Everything is handmade, every sequin, every double stitch. I learned about the silhouettes, the textures, the colours, the fabrics, the shapes. To me, before, fashion was just jeans and a top. There, I got to try on the new collection afterwards  it takes four people to get you into a dress. It helps that she is tiny. Shes come to Shoreditch House from The Vault, the gym her mother and stepfather run nearby.

Purnells parents split up soon after she was born. Her Scottish businessman father lives in Fulham with his second wife and their three sons. Purnell is close to them all and holidays with them every year, but grew up all over east London with her mum and stepdad and still lives with them near Canary Wharf.

CHANEL VINTAGE T-shirt, POA; CHANEL jeans, 1,315 (chanel.com)

She attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School and spent a year in Oliver! in the West End aged 12 in 2008. Never Let Me Go followed in 2010, and parts in Ways to Live Forever, Intruders and Kick-Ass 2, before Maleficent in 2014. Keira Knightley remains one of my mentors, Purnell says. I absolutely love her and will turn to her for industry advice or reassurance or validation at any time. She is very classy and elegant and lovely. I have a bit of a woman-crush on Keira. She adores Margot Robbie, too, but was only briefly on the Tarzan set with her; she didnt meet Angelina Jolie at all during Maleficent.

Acting helped pay for her education at City of London School for Girls: Some of the girls took the piss out of my accent so I started to talk posher. I learned survival skills pretty quickly. She went on to the Forest School and took her GCSEs a year early in order to make Miss Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children with Tim Burton when she was 17. She loved working with Burton, too, but filming was taking its toll. Growing up and working at the same time is difficult, she says. Just when she should have been working out who she was as a person, she was on camera, under pressure to look good and to perform, terrified of tripping up and making a mistake.

She took some time out to go travelling in New Zealand and Australia, where she made friends who subsequently introduced her to Coates at a London party. As her almost 300,000 Instagram followers know, the two are very loved up  when their schedules permit them to be together. Yeah, I have a weird thing against PDA [public display of affection] on social media, she laughs, sheepishly, but long-distance relationships are bloody hard, so any sign of affection Weve been together just over a year, not very long, but it feels good. While were on the subject, she has never met Brad Pitt, and though she danced and chatted with Tom Holland at a Bafta party, she was already with Coates and he with his girlfriend (plus, his mum was at the Bafta bash, too.)

CHANEL Metiers dArt pullover, 1,760 (chanel.com). Jeans, vintage

While her love life was falling into place she was having doubts about her profession. Just before I got Sweetbitter I thought, Im 21, I havent had a job in a while, I really dont know if this is a job I want to continue doing, she says. The roles she was being offered were the girlfriend of the main, male character; a female that needs saving; or the goal, something that is wanted. Just there to be a sex object, portrayed as weak, pretty, nice. I had all these plans to go to university to study English or film or psychology and never did go. I felt really quite lost and didnt know who I was. Then I read the first line of the breakdown of my character in Sweetbitter: Tesss life is a shambles. I thought: Ha! This is relatable.

In Sweetbitter, small-town Tess moves to the Big Apple and via waitressing learns, as Purnell puts it, about drugs, alcohol, food, wine, sex, including an ill-advised liaison with her older boss. When the (admittedly, sex-heavy) trailer screened at the Television Critics Association in January the makers were asked whether the show deserved a place in the post-Weinstein world of #MeToo. Purnell, angry, points out that it features a female [character] leading a show, who is completely unapologetic about not fitting into any box, who wants to explore and learn about her sexuality and her sexual preferences in her own way in her own time.

In some ways, though, she felt as far out of her comfort zone as Tess. It was the first time I had done nudity, which is why it was such a hard role for me, she says. I was terrified and it was awkward as hell, but the most important thing for me was that it was real, that it doesnt look like a porno, theres no shaved things and no weird uncomfortable sexual positions, and its sometimes awkward and gross. She was helped through the process by the shows female assistant director, and the books author Danler, who is a producer on the series.

CHANEL Metiers dArt dress, 2,155 (chanel.com). Belt and boots, both vintage. All jewellery, Ellas own

However, #MeToo still looms over our conversation. Ordeal by Innocence, initially planned for the Christmas schedules, was delayed and then reshot, with actor Christian Cooke taking the role originally played by Ed Westwick, after Westwick was accused of sexual assault and rape, which he denies. Legally I cant speculate on anything, says Purnell firmly. But it is good that we are having these conversations.

She has never personally been sexually harassed, but as we are learning  or as weve always known  the culture of film sets and many other work environments offers subtler power-plays. Its very hard to not give in, to sell your soul: to flatter a more experienced male person of power, a producer or director, in order to get what you want, she says. You feel a pressure to flutter your eyelashes and flirt, because you know that will work, and I think its admirable to not do that. I dont think that is a comment on women, I think it is a comment on men in power.

Purnell is keen to put her burgeoning visibility to good use. In the future, she wants her professional projects to reflect gender (and other) diversity. She already works with the charity Educate 2 Eradicate, which helps teachers and students address FGM and honour-based violence. And she is looking to hook up with a mental-health charity this year, for intensely personal reasons.

I have anxiety and have had depression in the past, she says. When I was 15 or 16 I had a bad experience at school  some issues with other classmates and somebody I was seeing, we dont need to go into it. I started self-harming and did that for a long time until my mum caught me and I started to learn about it [mental health]. I thought depression was something you could only have if your parents died, or you were really ill and about to jump off the bridge. I certainly didnt feel comfortable enough to talk about it then. Had this happened to me now Id feel able to say, Mum, I need to take some time off school, or, Mum, I am suffering with this thing.

Self-harm is not about attention  I hid [my scars] for six months, wore long T-shirts, covered them up with make-up. Its about punishing yourself, for people who dislike themselves or suffer from insecurity or self-doubt. They want to hurt themselves because they think they deserve it: thats where I was at. You know its wrong, you dont want to worry other people, but if you are in that headspace it feels good. Im sure it releases adrenaline or something, it made me calm, and for that reason for me it became an addiction. I had to work very hard to remove my trigger points and to create a safe space so I wouldnt become tempted to get back into it again.

I still have the scars, she continues, and its something that I did that I will always regret: it hurt a lot of people around me and its on my body forever. Its something I never felt comfortable talking about before, but I have decided I am going to start working with mental health charities this year. Because through opening up about my own experiences I can start conversations and make other people feel less alone and less guilty.

Purnell says she always needs to feel part of something bigger, whether it is a cause, an artistic endeavour or her extended family, to abate her feelings of loneliness. Many of her friends are away at university, but she has compensated by taking Coates and his muso mates to old haunts: Ronnie Scotts, the Queen of Hoxton and the funk and soul nights at Peckhams Bussey Building. Shes also started singing with a blues-jazz band herself: Amy Winehouse is one of my biggest inspirations. And shes looking to move out of home and buy a flat, in Shoreditch or Limehouse (she fancied a houseboat but is away too much to maintain one), another thing that sets her apart from her contemporaries. I still need a mortgage and everything, though, she qualifies as she hugs me goodbye. Im only 21.

For confidential support on mental health call the Samaritans on 116 123, email jo@samaritans.org or attend a local Samaritans branch.I m in a quaint little west London pub, perched on a stool.

Cider in hand, chicken and leek pie with mash on its way, Im nodding along as my new friend Corey tells me about her office nemesis. Were deep into personal revelations by now, because this is at least our fourth friendship date. Weve covered all the essentials: our feelings about love, favourite dog breeds, our strong opinions on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. We met doing a work thing and then casually, courageously, stealthily moved into friendship territory with a WhatsApp emoji exchange, a coffee, a walk in the park and an afternoon at the cinema. Weve reached that level of friendship where we fully expect one another to attend birthday dinners, be transparent about our mental health and support each others decision to have pancakes at 3pm on a Saturday.

My friendship with Corey was part of a larger befriending campaign for me. I have become, by necessity, a serial befriender. Almost exactly three years ago I moved from Sydney to London on my own. Id just got out of a seven-year relationship and come to the end of a job, so naturally I got on a plane and put 10,500 miles between myself and everything I knew. The drizzle, the proximity to continental Europe, the history in every sandstone building  I was enchanted by it all. But I knew almost immediately that London would make me feel small, that it was a great rollicking big city with a reputation for silence on public transport and a typically British sort of stoicism.

Illustration by Michelle Thompson

I knew what I had to do to settle in here: get a regular coffee place, learn how to use the Tube, earn a living, make new friends. It was that latter challenge  convincing strangers to hang out with me  that I took to with particular enthusiasm. I knew I just wouldnt be able to call London home until I had collected a group of kind, funny, smart people who made me feel welcome. I began almost immediately: being overly friendly with people at the first place that gave me freelance editing work, following people my age on Twitter for the express purpose of sliding into their DMs to ask for coffee, fearlessly inviting strangers out for wine. Anything to keep loneliness at bay.

Its not just me who feels this way, of course. You dont have to relocate across the world in order to suddenly feel alone. It could be to do with any sort of change in your life: a break-up, a new job, a significant birthday, marriage, kids. For Alice, it was getting to 29 and going freelance. I still met up with my work friends but Id lost the social hit I got from the office. Some days Id see no one but the corner shopkeeper, she says. Im naturally quite introspective and left to my own devices can become quite hermit-like  which made things worse as Id get nervous before social occasions. So Alice actually did something similar to me and deliberately set up a befriending strategy.

I started seeking out new friends through other means  I took up yoga, tried to say yes to any invitations I received and made a rule not to cancel. If I met someone I liked that I wanted to get to know better, Id ask for their email and suggest coffee. Now I work in an office again which is very social  and I treasure that. But I make sure to keep up with outside friends, too.

With eight million strangers to potentially convert into friends, youd think loneliness would be impossible in London. And yet, a Time Out survey from 2017 found that London was the loneliest city in the world, with 55 per cent of Londoners confessing they feel lonely here sometimes. We are significantly less likely to chat with a stranger (just smile at someone on the Tube to test your resolve on that one) and less likely to bump into friends because of the citys layout. In fact, according to a study by the Co-op and the British Red Cross, more than nine million people across the UK are either always or often lonely. Loneliness does not discriminate by age, postcode or demographic.

Loneliness can be linked to feeling like you dont have enough, or the right friends, says clinical psychologist Dr Abigael San, who sees a lot of clients feeling despondent but sometimes unable to identify their own loneliness. But it can also be because someone has focused all their attention on themselves or become preoccupied with something to the extent that theyre not connecting with people. The first thing I ask them to do is gently acknowledge whats going on. The first step to not feeling lonely is actually to name what youre feeling.

This is certainly true of my experience. We are often frightened to say the words Im lonely because they carry a certain shame, but when you do, you rob that feeling of some of its power over you. The next step, Dr San says, is to take your socialising up a notch. From there, Id encourage them to relinquish their safety behaviours and challenge themselves to do something towards feeling connected  which might mean taking a conversation with someone past the superficial level and really talking.

This is exactly what Ive been doing the past three years: ditching my safety behaviours (for me, spending more time with Netflix than other human beings) and proactively chasing genuine connections. Besides my ruthlessly friendly manner to strangers I like and respect, I also try to make our friendships authentic and profound. The quickest shortcut to that kind of intimacy  the kind that actually banishes loneliness  is to make yourself vulnerable.

When I meet someone out for a cuppa or a tequila, I dont mess around. I speed through small talk, divulge personal things about myself and ask questions like a friendly investigative journalist, until I feel like Im actually getting to know someone. I once got every gory detail of a recent break-up from a new friend on our first outing; I could memorise the sequence of events that lead to the broken family of another; and one time I made a work meeting last three full hours because we had so much deeply personal information to exchange. If you want to make a new friend, youve got to do it properly  youve got to commit.

And so here I am, three years on, with a collection of kind, funny, smart friends. People who go to the pub with me, who check on me when Im down, who make me novelty birthday cakes, who tolerate my many dog photos, who lift me up and make me a better person. My new London friends dont just help me avoid loneliness; they help make me the person I am. Just because I have a group of delightful friends now doesnt mean Ill stop asking people for coffee. Thats the gorgeous thing about friendships: you can always find room in your life for more.W here to Drink

Red Stripe and rum are two very good reasons to visit Jamaica. There are roadside bars dotted all over the island, offering welcome relief from the midday sun. At Ricks Cafe in Negril (below), nab yourself a seat on the upstairs deck and watch the psychedelic pink and purple sunset while sipping a rum cocktail.

(Ricks Cafe)

Get a Guide

A great way to see Jamaica is with a guide. David from Paradise Travels, a local who knows all the best spots, showed us where to get the sweetest roadside coconuts, hidden away food shacks and even took us to visit his wonderful father, who lives in a beautiful village. Daily prices from 89 (paradisetravelsinjamaica.com)

Where to Eat

Jamaica is home to the best jerk cooking in the world. Visit Miss Ts Kitchen (below) in Ocho Rios and the lady herself will fill you up with homemade dishes such as jerk chicken. Little Ochie, a seafood restaurant on a black-sand beach in the south of the island, was founded by Evrol Christian in 1989 and he has refused to change anything since, including the tables, most of which are old wooden canoes. You choose your fish from the daily catch and it goes straight on the charcoal grill.

(Miss Ts Kitchen)

Where to Dance

You cant visit Jamaica without experiencing the islands music. While most of the club and concert venues are situated in the capital, Kingston, there is music to be found everywhere you go. In Negril, head to The Jungle on Saturday night, pay 15 and spend the early hours letting loose to classic dancehall tracks while enjoying the free bar.

What to Visit

Negril can be touristy, with places like Dunns River Falls visited by thousands of holidaymakers every year. Drive a short distance, however, and you will soon reach some of the most beautiful, lesser-known natural spots on the island. Take the Luminous Lagoon: visit after dark and the water seems lit from within, thanks to the distinctive plankton that illuminate the water when disturbed. More intrepid types should try Black River Safari, a nature reserve thats home to the Crocodile Nursery & Museum. Take a cruise and meet George, David and Henry  resident crocodiles that live alongside the locals.

(Black River Safari)

Where to Stay

Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios, on the north coast, was frequented by Marilyn Monroe, Ian Fleming and Sir Winston Churchill. Step straight on to the beach from your suite (there are 52 suites and cottages in total) and order a rum punch from Teddy, the legendary 75-year-old, who has been running the bar here for 59 years. For a more boutique experience, try the Rockhouse hotel, which sits on the cliff face of Negril. With totally tropical sunsets, pools nestled in the rocky cliffs and suites housed in individual huts, its barefoot bliss at its best.

(Jamaica Inn; Nigel Lord 2016) / A Nigel Lord 2016I ts a bitingly cold day in Brooklyn, New York, but Johnny Flynn is demonstrating true British stoicism.

Our photographer has the actor and singer-songwriter perching, coatless, on a stone plinth. Theres a frigid wind whistling off the East River, but Flynn, who later admits that he doesnt actually much enjoy having his picture taken, is a pliant model. He has the look of a young Robert Redford, observes our hair stylist, who has been given strict instructions by Flynns agent not to trim his wild and wavy, strawberry blond hair or his generous sideburns to protect the aesthetic of his current on-stage incarnation.

Rapidly becoming one of the UKs most in-demand actors, 35-year-old Flynn is, when we meet, temporarily on loan to the US, starring in an off-Broadway production of Martin McDonaghs Hangmen  the critically acclaimed play that first opened at the Royal Court in 2015 before transferring to the West End.

Todd Snyder coat, POA (toddsnyder.com). Ovadia & Sons trousers, 210 (ovadiaandsons.com). Converse sneakers, 70 (converse.com)

Its not just on stage that hes making his mark. Soon cinema-goers will be able to see him showing his prowess on the big screen, starring opposite Jessie Buckley in Beast, in which he plays the enigmatic Pascal. Written and directed by Michael Pearce, the film is an unusually languid whodunit, set on the island of Jersey, and heavy on the ambiguity. I think Pascal does feel emotions, but hes buried elements of his past. He sees himself as an outsider, a Robin Hood character. Flynn can also do funny, as evidenced by Lovesick, the Netflix comedy series about chlamydia. His character, Dylan, is diagnosed with the STI and has to contact all the women hes ever slept with. Set in Glasgow, its a very British sitcom, and Flynn and I both express surprise at its enormous popularity in the US. People come up to me here all the time and say, I love your show.

Flynn was born in his mothers native South Africa, but the family left the country when he was just two years old. They were campaigning for the end of apartheid and had secret police on their doorstep, and felt they needed to leave, he says. They lived in London for a few years, then Hampshire, where his younger sister, Lillie, was born, then in rural Wales. Flynn now lives in Clapton.

A shore thing: Jessie Buckley and Flynn in Beast

His father, Eric  who died after becoming ill with cancer when Flynn was 18  was also an actor, mainly in West End musicals, but employment was patchy. We had no money, my dad was out of work a lot and we never owned a house. It was very hand-to-mouth.

His mother, Caroline, is a ceramicist and painter, but almost everyone else in the family was an actor, including his two older brothers from his fathers first marriage; Jerome  star of Soldier Soldier and Game of Thrones  and Daniel, who had a role in The Bill. I imagine that, for most people, acting isnt something they think is a viable option, whereas for me it was the most viable option. No adults around me knew how to do anything else.

photographs by Rebecca Miller Styled by Shala Rothenberg

It was an English teacher at Bedales, the liberal Hampshire boarding school to which he won a music scholarship, who lit the thespian fire in him, though. Alastair Langlands, he says, taught us Shakespeare and Pinter and Yeats and Dickens in a way that I just wanted to be in those stories. He treated us with so much respect that you were empowered to start thinking for yourself in a really interesting way. Hed always give me terrible marks, but I became a more original thinker because of him.

Flynn struggles, however, with being a product of the boarding-school system. I cant deny that it gave me an experience that is unique and rare and very privileged, but privileged in a way that I now rail against, that people have that as a birthright, he says. I had this weird experience of being inside it but always feeling outside it.

He began dating his now wife, Beatrice Minns, a designer for the Punchdrunk theatre group, when she joined the sixth form. I was very shy as a teenager, but completely in love with her. There was just something about her that I felt a real connection to, he says. They broke up when they parted ways, her to Winchester School of Art, him to drama school Webber Douglas. We came in and out of each others lives for years, until the frequencies collided and we started spending more time together than apart, says Flynn. Theres always been a sense of destiny. Minns joined him for three of his four months here in New York, with their two children, Gabriel, seven, and Ida, two. Their third is due in July.

Johnny Flynn at Green Man Festival / Redferns

Devoted father though he clearly is, Flynn had something of a crisis after Gabriel was born. One day youre working in Starbucks and the next youre being asked to fly a 747 with no training, he says of fatherhood. The moment you have children, its like your heart gets out of your body, puts on clothes and walks away. I just wasnt prepared for that. Youre always running in to check that theyre still breathing. Then, later on, its like, I dont know if hes got any friends. What do I say when he asks, Wheres Grandpa? I wouldnt call it a full-on breakdown, but I had to talk to the right people to help me through it.

I suggest that he was, perhaps, also experiencing delayed-onset grief from the loss of his own father. That was the biggest thing I learned, that there was a transferral in me becoming a dad and suddenly thinking that I had to be my dad.

Flynn also plays the guitar, banjo, trumpet and violin, has recorded several folksy, balladeering albums and has toured with his band, The Sussex Wit. But hes now so in demand as an actor hes had to put music on the back burner. Music always gets bumped until I have some time to get around to it.

Officine Generale jacket, 355; trousers, 175 (officinegenerale.com). Burberry T-shirt, as before

As well as Beast, we will soon be seeing him in the forthcoming ITV adaptation of Vanity Fair. He plays William Dobbin, the narrator of William Makepeace Thackerays 1848 tale of social climbing and fluctuating fortunes, in a starry cast that also includes Olivia Cooke and Michael Palin.

Not that hes complaining. The day after we meet is his birthday and he will celebrate with a matinee and evening performance, then a drink with his castmates. I like getting older, he says, reflectively. I always looked younger than I was, and I found that people wouldnt give me the room to speak. The older I get, its like, Oh, Im still talking and theyre still listening.

Foursome: Flynn, second left, in LovesickM ore and more brands are choosing to go palm oil free with their products. This includes Iceland supermarkets who are banning the use of palm oil from their own brand products from 2019  making them the first UK supermarket to do so.

The reason behind this? Palm oils harmful environmental impact,' which is having a devastating impact on wildlife and tropical forests.

Here's everything you need to know about the production, uses and dangers of palm oil:

What is palm oil?

A type of vegetable oil that is made from the fruit of oil palm trees.

It is the most commonly used vegetable oil with around 66 million tonnes produced each year  and its found in around half of all supermarket products.

Why do products contain palm oil?

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Dr Emma Keller from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) told BBC Newsround: "Palm oil is a super-efficient crop, meaning that we can produce a lot more palm oil per area of land compared to other oil crops like soybean oil or coconut oil."

Oil palm fruit / Pixabay

Palm oil production has also provided jobs for millions of small farmers, helping them to get out of poverty.

Is palm oil bad for the environment?

Over the past century, the demand for palm oil has risen dramatically which means large areas of tropical forest in south-east Asia and Africa have been destroyed as a result.

Between 1990 and 2008 palm oil production was responsible for 8 per cent of the worlds deforestation as forests are burnt to clear areas for people to grow oil palms  which, in some cases, is illegal.

Burning these forests means destroying the habitats for wildlife and plants in the area, with elephants, orangutans, tigers and rhinos among the animals affected.

In fact, around 100,000 orangutans were lost between 1999 and 2015 due to palm oil production, other animals are being pushed to extinction and indigenous people are losing their homes.

Furthermore, destruction of rainforests contributes to rising greenhouse gas emissions which contributes to climate change.

Which products contain palm oil?

Many everyday products contain palm oil including lipstick, shampoo, detergent, chocolate, biscuits, soap, ice cream and pizza dough  so it's difficult to avoid it completely.

The solution? Try to choose palm oil free products where you can to cut down your consumption. The lower the demand for palm oil based products, the more likely brands will be to change their policies.I n the UK, one in every 500 people are affected by Parkinsons disease.

While the cause of Parkinsons is not yet known, it is a progressive and chronic neurological disease that typically affects those aged over 55 and is caused by a build-up of clumps of a protein called alpha synuclein in brain cells and lack of the neurotransmitter dopamine in certain parts of the brain.

This is what leads to problems with movement  meaning everyday activities like writing, walking and talking can be impacted.

Spotting the early signs of Parkinsons can be difficult, as symptoms vary between individuals, so weve spoken to Dr Paul Jarman, Consultant Neurologist at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and the Wellington Hospital to see what you need to look out for.

What Are the early signs of Parkinsons?

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Dr Jarman told the Standard: There is no one defining symptom or sign of Parkinsons, but rather a combination of warning signs and symptoms, which each individual can experience differently.

The classic symptoms that typically bring people to medical attention relate to abnormalities of movement: particularly shaking (tremor), slowness and stiffness.

What it's like to live with parkinsons in your thirties

Tremors, meaning a slight shake in fingers, hands or legs (typically on one side of the body) is a common early sign of Parkinsons disease.

Another common sign is a change in handwriting, if it becomes small and untidy, or difficulty with buttons or using a computer mouse.

However prior to this these signs you may experience early Prodromal symptoms.

As Dr Jarmon explained: There are often subtle non-specific symptoms that precede the onset of the movement related symptoms, often by 7 years or more. These non-motor symptoms are not necessarily recognised as being early symptoms of Parkinsons disease.

Things to be aware of are:

Reduction or loss of sense of smell.

Constipation.

Aches and pains.

REM sleep behaviour disorder.

Depression and anxiety

Cognitive symptoms like a mild slowness of mental processing speed, concentration and lack of motivation.

Parkinsons develops gradually, so it can sometimes be years before symptoms develop enough to see a doctor.

How is Parkinsons diagnosed?

Dr Jarmon explained: If you seek advice from your GP and they suspect you might have Parkinsons, you should be referred to a Parkinsons specialist, usually a neurologist or geriatrician. There is no specific test for Parkinsons, it is a clinical diagnosis based on your medical history, a review of your symptoms, and a neurological and physical examination. You might be asked to write, walk and make fast repetitive movements of fingers or hands so the specialist can look for signs of Parkinsons.

"The classic symptoms relate to abnormalities of movement: particularly shaking (tremor), slowness and stiffness"

Your doctor may also order tests, such as MRI scans, to rule out other conditions that may be causing your symptoms. Sometimes where the diagnosis of Parkinsons is not certain, a specialised scan to image the dopamine cells in the brain called a DaTscan may be requested.

What medication can you take to manage Parkinsons?

While Parkinsons currently has no cure, it can be effectively treated with medication.

Medications used to treat Parkinsons help increase the levels of dopamine in the brain, Dr Jarmon said. Physical activity and regular aerobic exercise are considered to be important in managing Parkinsons symptoms.

Medication used in PD needs to be gradually adjusted over time as the condition progresses and dopamine levels in the brain reduce. Advanced forms of treatment such as deep brain stimulation are sometimes required after a number of years of treatment if medication becomes less effective over time in controlling the symptoms.

There is a lot of research ongoing to develop new treatments for PD including stem cell therapy, fetal cell transplantation, gene therapy and new treatment approaches to dissolve the abnormal protein clumps in nerve cells in the brain using antibody treatments. Repurposing of existing medications for other conditions to see if they help Parkinsons is also a promising area of research.

If you notice any of these symptoms, make an appointment with your GP.T he tiny, sleepy village of Bouillac, about 30 minutes drive from Bordeaux town centre. This is where you'll find Le Saint James.

There's not much in the immediate vicinity of Le Saint James, bar the church of Saint-Simeon Stylite (famous for living for 37 year on a small pillar near Aleppo, dontcha know) and the hotel's second extremely good casual restaurant opposite, so hire a car at the airport if you want to do anything except eat and chill by the hotel pool - taxis into Bordeaux town centre are breathtakingly expensive for those used to Ubers.

Style

This is one of those stunning art hotels (un hotel d'architecte) which make you more cultured just by dint of having stayed there - great if you're too busy sipping wine for gallery visits. Designed by Jean Nouvel - the French architect responsible for Barcelona's Torre Gloreis, Madrid's Museo Reina Sofia and, most recently, the new Louvre in Abu Dhabi - the gloriously glowing gravel forecourt is filled with modernist sculptures. Inside the four buildings which make up the hotel, it's all wine cellar cool concrete floor and white waxed plaster walls, creating a gallery-like atmosphere that offsets regularly changing installations.

Facilities

You could do worse than spend a 48 hour break exclusively by the French indie movie pool, a small but perfectly formed azure rectangle down the slope from the hotel restaurant, skimpily sheltered by a few trees from al fresco diners. It's also right next to the hotel's own vineyard - the smallest in Bordeaux, with 950 merlot vines, apparently, producing a maximum of 600 bottles per year - for exploring before sampling a glass of Le Saint-James vin du jardin. There's also a cookery school onsite, with regularly changing themes - our Greek lesson involved vines leaf stuffing and .

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Le Saint-James

Food and Drink

Pretty meh. Just kidding - this is Bordeaux, so obviously fabulous wines flow every time you sit down, and the food is butter-rich and groaningly generous.

Le Saint James's 1 Michelin star restaurant is a known detour for gourmands - chef Nicolas Magie's food is hyperlocal and seasonal, naturally, with fun, creative twist interspersed with classics. At dinner it's all about the eight course Menu Inspiration - dishes perhaps including canapes of Bloody Mary candyfloss, caviar with rhubarb sorbet or the sublime red mullet with truffled, buttery, musky mushrooms that redefine fungi for ever more.

For a more casual lunch, Cafe de L'Esperance opposite is precisely that great little bistro that you always want to find on holiday but never do. Plonk yourself outside with a large, icy glass of Bordeaux de Citron and pick at anchovies, fresh bread and a mozzarella tomato salad followed by steak-frites for two or three hours, to feel far more relaxed than six weeks meditating in Bali.

Rooms

The cool, gallery-esque vibe continues in the 18 white, low-ceilinged bedrooms. All are at the back of the hotel, meaning that every room has a view - although 'view' doesn't do it justice. Windows at the height of the raised beds span the west-facing wall, with blinds operable from your bedside, giving you a panoramic view of Bordeaux upon waking each morning and, post-afternoon kip, sunsets worthy of National Geographic. Rainforest showers come with essential oils capsules, turning your quick morning wash into a full on spa experience.

Le Saint-James

Extracurricular

Of course, you're in Bordeaux, so if you're here for more than a day or two it would be criminal not to take advantage of the vineyard trips that Le Saint-James will happily organise for you to Saint-Emillion or Pessac. Daytime drinkers should beware that wine bars in Bordeaux town centre tend not to open until 5pm, so head in then to sip vertical vintages at hyper-cool Vins Urbains or natural stuff with les hipsters at Wine More Time.

When to go

For optimal lazing outside weather, May through September.T his is the first picture of a father killed in a fight outside a betting shop in east London.

Bobby Awofeso, 53, is thought to have suffered a fatal head injury after reportedly being punched to the floor outside Betfred in Upper Clapton Road.

His alleged attacker reportedly fled the scene after the brawl just before 4.30pm on April 4.

Mr Awofeso, believed to be from Nigeria, was pronounced dead at the scene.

The investigation into his killing was handed over to City of London police by Scotland Yard during a sharp spike in violent crime which has resulted in 55 homicides so far this year.

Mr Awofesos son Jordan wrote on Facebook: I just cant deal with this news. I literally dont know what to do right now. But just know we will meet again one day.

Another relative wrote: Get up and prove to the world that youre still alive.

A 26-year-old man was arrested over Mr Awofesos death after attending a police station the day after the killing. He has been bailed until later this month.A Skorpion machine gun along with cash and class A drugs were seized by police as more than 200 officers dealt a massive blow to a notorious violent gang.

Scotland Yard officers arrested nine people including suspected senior members of a heroine and crack cocaine-dealing MDP gang in west London last night.

An alleged drug-running boy, aged 14, arrested at his family home, was among those detained in eight raids in the Northolt, Greenford, Fulham and Brentford areas.

Those detained were held over offences such as conspiracy to supply drugs and possession of firearms.

At a house in Dorchester Close, Northolt, young children could be heard crying as dozens of officers flooded inside shouting: "Police".

Armed raid: Officers at an address in west London / Lucy Young

Elsewhere, as a police squad crept up to one seemingly empty address in Stephendale Road, Fulham, officers noticed a 30-year-old suspect sitting in a car.

During a search officers found a Skorpion machine pistol along with another handgun, 40 rounds of ammunition, and a kilo of suspected class A drugs, Scotland Yard said.

Detective Inspector Driss Hayoukane said: "This is a massive blow to an established gang.

A file image of a Skorpion sub-machine gun

"What we've taken out is probably a line which has been supplying the Earl's Court and Fulham areas. This gang have been running that line for quite a while and making a lot of money.

"These gangs have corrupted children and are using them to ferry drugs.

"If you look across London these are the kids that are getting involved in violence and stabbings because they are generally on the streets while the suppliers are removed from it, collecting the cash."

Key gangsters drove flashy cars and showed off their wealth online with luxury holidays to places like Dubai, he added.

Arrest: a man is led away by police during the row / Lucy Young

One address in Earl's Court had been "cuckooed", which happens when criminals take over a vulnerable person's or drug addict's flat to sell drugs from it - named after the parasitic practice of the cuckoo bird which lays its eggs in other birds' nests.

Overall, six males and three females, aged between 14 and 49, were arrested in the early hours of Thursday and are now in custody.

The operation was the result of about six months of planning by the Met's anti-gang Trident unit.

Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, who accompanied officers on the raids, said the gang members were very violent.

She added: They've been using violence, they've been exploiting vulnerable people and very young people, as young as 14, have been engaged in the drug dealing operation, so they need to be locked up.

"People like this, who may appear to have been operating with impunity for a period of time, cause devastation and fear.

Asked if raids had been stepped up following a recent rise in violent crime in London, DI Hayoukane said: "It's business as usual for us, our unit works to capacity all the time."S cotland Yard has admitted it has no new lines of inquiry in the investigation into Stephen Lawrence's murder.

The force said on Wednesday that unless detectives receive new information the investigation is "unlikely to progress further".

It comes after Mr Lawrences mother Doreen last week said that the investigation should end.

She told the Daily Mail: "They say they're carrying on the investigation, but carrying on doing what?

"If they've come to the end they should be honest, say they've come to an end and stop."

In a statement the Met said that after "numerous reviews and every possible advance in forensic techniques, the Met investigation team is now at a stage where without new information the investigation is unlikely to progress further, and this was explained to the family earlier this year."

Chris Le Pere, the senior investigator, said: "We understand that 25 years is a poignant anniversary of the tragedy of the murder of Stephen, and our thoughts remain very much with those who loved him, and feel his loss.

"With the approaching anniversary and airing of a documentary, Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation, there is still the opportunity for someone who knows what happened that night, to have a conscience and come forward. I would say to you, it is never too late to do the right thing.

"We continue to speak to Baroness Doreen Lawrence and Dr Neville Lawrence to update them on the current Met position."

Mr Lawrence was murdered by a gang of racists in Eltham, south-east London, on April 22 1993.

Of his five or six attackers, two are serving life sentences for his murder - Gary Dobson and David Norris.

They were jailed in 2012 after an Old Bailey trial that hinged on tiny traces of forensic evidence.C omedian John Bishop has branded a police chief's plea to "respect" a floral shrine to burglar Henry Vincent "disgusting".

The controversial shrine was erected after career criminal Henry Vincent was stabbed to death in a scuffle with pensioner Richard Osborn-Brooks in Hither Green, south London.

Floral tributes left for the 37-year-old opposite Mr Osborn-Brook's house were torn down four times in 48 hours, with neighbours saying that the dispute had turned their quiet street into a "war zone".

The Met's Deputy Commissioner Sir Craig Mackey intervened in a bid to calm tensions calling for protesters to act "reasonably and respectfully".

But the 51-year-old funnyman took to Twitter to blast Scotland Yard's response.

He ranted: The police suggesting that the family of Henry Vincent should be allowed to place floral tributes opposite the house he tried to rob is a disgrace.

He was a scum bag who preyed on pensioners. Tributes condone his actions and imagine how it makes Mr Osborn-Brooks feel. Disgusting!

The tweet has been retweeted more than 2,500 times and liked more than 14,000 times in seven hours.

Pam Todd replied to the comedian suggesting that tributes should be left in a more sensitive area.

She said: The dilemma is: the family needs to mourn, they weren't the burglar and they loved the guy. The Council should offer them a more sensitive place to set up their shrine. The burgled guy needs to feel safe. It's very emotive, sense needs to prevail.

Bishop personally replied to the comment and said: There should be no shrine. He was not a kid finding his way in the world who found himself out his depth. He was a career criminal who chose to threaten and prey on the vulnerable. There will be more unknown victims of his career. They should feel shame not expect a memorial.

Ms Todd further responded: If one of your lads committed a crime, probably like me, you'd march him down to the police station by the scruff of the neck, this wouldn't stop you loving him or wanting to mourn his death if he died.

Bishop added: I would mourn in private . Not outside the property of the pensioner who was placed in a terrifying situation to protect himself and his family.

"This is not mourning it is intimidation. The victim should come first and he cant return to his own home due to all this."

More than 100 bouquets of flowers as well as cards, teddies and balloons have been repeatedly placed on a fence in South Park Crescent since Monday.

Vigilante Iain Gordon pulls the flowers down from a fence opposite the house of Richard Osborn-Brooks / Gareth Fuller/PA

The comedian's rant comes after Sir Mackey today called for those opposed to the shrine to act "responsibly and respectfully".

He said: "It would have been preferable if the pavement had remained clear and the local area had not become the focus of disruption which then needed police resources to manage.

Comedian John Bishop / Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA

"The local authority are considering how the flowers and items are managed and we are inputting to that. As the situation stands, that is how this has to be dealt with as laying flowers is not a crime.A rock entrepreneur who is reopening one of the capitals best-known venues next week has warned that live music is being killed in west London by soaring rents and hostile councils.

Vince Power, whose Subterania in Ladbroke Grove returns with three shows by Van Morrison beginning on Thursday next week, said there had been a drift towards east London.

The 600-capacity club under the Westway off Portobello Road originally opened in 1989 and hosted stars such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eminem, Foo Fighters, Paul Weller, Madonna, Pulp and Alanis Morissette.

Its predecessor, the post-punk venue Acklam Hall, hosted Joy Division, The Fall and Scritti Politti, as well as 1979s Rock Against Racism concert.

Subterania closed in 2003 before returning as Neighbourhood, which was shut down in 2012.

Mr Power said: Its all about the east now, its just a question of pounds per square foot. If you go to Dalston or Hackney youve got access to big warehouse spaces, but there is nothing cheap in Kensington, not even at the cheap end like Ladbroke Grove.

The music industry has changed so much. Its been left in the hands of a few people. Its really difficult for a young entrepreneur to be a promoter or launch a small venue. Anything good that rises above the parapet tends to get taken out by the big boys.S adiq Khan was today at the centre of row after two City Hall meetings about knife crime were held in secret.

Editors at BBC, Sky News and ITN made an unprecedented joint complaint to the Greater London Authority after press and public were barred from an emergency meeting of the London Assemblys police and crime committee yesterday.

It had been called to quiz the Mayor and Met chiefs on a surge in street violence which has seen more than 50 murders so far this year in the capital.

The Mayors knife crime summit on Tuesday, with Met commissioner Cressida Dick and Home Secretary Amber Rudd, was also held in secret.

GLA officials claimed the meetings were subject to purdah restrictions on party-political publicity in the run-up to the May 3 town hall elections.

They have offered to release a video of yesterdays meeting after May 3.

The broadcasters said the decision to hold the meetings in private was astonishing given the public concern about violent crime.

They claim the GLA had misinterpreted the rules on pre-election publicity.

Mr Khan is understood to have been personally in favour of allowing press and public access. A spokeswoman said he was disappointed at the ban.

The letter, from Michael MacFarlane of the BBC, Hannah Emerson-Thomas from ITN and Peter Lowe of Sky News, said: We can think of no precedent whereby access is denied in this manner.

Public access to a meeting of the [police committee], where the Mayor is being held to account on an important issue, is not publicity but proper scrutiny.

It is quite astinishing that you should come to the conclusion that such a meeting should be kept out of the public domain for more than three weeks.

Jeff Jacobs, the GLAs top official, said the rules meant public forums might have to be closed to avoid breaching legal restrictions.A spectacular spurt of water was sent skywards as a burst main cause rush hour delays.

An enormous jet of water could be seen towering above cars on Westminster Bridge Road, near Waterloo station, at 7am on Thursday.

Emergency services rushed to the scene between Lower Marsh and Baylis Road as water cascaded down the tarmac.

Transport for London warned that the road would be closed while workers attempted to stem the flow of water and repair the main.

At least six bus routes were placed on diversion as thousands of Londoners made their way to work. They included routes 12, 53, 148,159, 453 and C10.A RE Home Office staff allowed Alexa-style listening devices? The smart assistants  which recognise your voice and perform tasks  could be privy to sensitive conversations in the homes of high-powered officials, and some are skittish about the potential for the devices to be hacked.

The devices are only supposed to listen when spoken to and this supposedly controls what Alexa can and cant hear. But Amazon has filed a patent in the US for voice sniffing, which would let Alexa earwig passively. The patent is aimed at building more sophisticated profiles of users likes, dislikes, and shopping habits.

But I understand that senior officials at the Home Office are already wary of the products. I wouldnt have one anywhere near my house, says one high-ranking source. Its an obvious security risk. Nor do I know anyone working in government who would.

Not only could the device be inadvertently beaming private conversations to Amazons HQ, data could also be intercepted by, say, the Russians.

And its not just Alexa that is cause for concern. Jeremy Bowen, the BBCs Middle East Editor, pictured, tweeted earlier today, This is weird. Just being interviewed on @BBCr4today when Siri on my iPhone woke up and started recording and transcribing what I said. He went on: I hadnt touched the phone. Siri struggled to understand what I was saying. But Id prefer it if my phone didnt decide to record me.

Unsolicited recording has long been acknowledged as an issue: ministers take clean phones for official visits to China and Russia.

We take the security and integrity of Home Office data extremely seriously, said a spokesperson. Staff are provided with regularly updated guidance on cyber-security including how to maintain a safe working environment at work and at home.

GCHQ point to official advice which says, Think about what data your device may be collecting. It may not be obvious where the device is sending it, or how they will use it.

Softer side of the Prince of Darkness

PANIC turned to relief for one Regents Park family. After being let out in the park one evening, their beloved shih tzu Cody went missing. For two agonising days they searched  fearful for Codys well-being as no vet was alerted and no apparent effort had been made to read the dogs ID chip. Happily, local resident Peter Mandelson, New Labours former Minister for Darkness, Mystery and Sorcery, had found the little pooch and, after feeding him and keeping him warm for a couple of nights, returned him to his owners. Sweet!

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ITs the perennial question, who is more eccentric, actress Helena Bonham Carter or her ex, director Tim Burton? The couple had a pet tortoise named after Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. When they split,s Bonham Carter kept the reptile with her in an unofficial settlement. Shelley, apparently, follows her everywhere.

---

GOOD news for Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A. The Smithsonian in Washington has rubber-stamped a proposal to work with the South Kensington institution on a joint space in the Olympic Park. The partnership has been teased for years but this formal approval sets plans in motion for a 2023 opening.

Mixed memories for guests in return to BBC HQ for White City House launch

Old pals: Richard Bacon and Victoria Derbyshire (Photo by Mark R. Milan/GC Images) / GC Images

A CIVILISED affair for west London types last night, at the launch of White City House, a new club from the Soho House Group.

Set within the BBCs former headquarters, the venue provided something of a blast from the past for many. Among the attendees was Richard Bacon, who must have conflicted memories of the building: he was fired from Blue Peter in the Nineties for taking cocaine.

Did he discuss it with fellow guest Sophie Ellis-Bextor? Her mother Janet Ellis also hosted the childrens programme: on her departure it was suggested she had been sacked for getting pregnant but she has said the decision to leave was purely hers.

Other guests included fellow BBC regulars Emilia Fox, star of Silent Witness, and Newsnight host Emily Maitlis.

SW1A

Abroad: Emily Thornberry (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images) / Getty Images

WHERE is Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, as Theresa May announces imminent air strikes on Syria? President Donald Trump is threatening Putin and the US is about to fire nice, new and smart missiles in retaliation for the suspected chemical attack on Douma. Actually Thornberry is in Washington, talking gender inequality with former Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders and US Senator Patty Murray. Someone might want to book her a last-minute flight home.

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POOR Barry Gardiner is in hot water after describing Keir Starmers six-point Brexit plan as bollocks. Perhaps he should take advice from his wife, poet Caroline Smith. Poets and artists can harness the power of words to change public opinion in a positive and sustained way, she writes on her blog. Although there are times when you cant beat good old Anglo-Saxon.

Quote of the day

Theres a time and a place for hedgehogs. This isnt it

Labour MP Mary Creagh was unimpressed when Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson tweeted about visiting a hedgehog sanctuary

Hollande tells of all the president's women

Lover: Julie Gayet (Photo by Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images) / Getty Images

EX-FRENCH President Francoise Hollande has new book out, in which he recalls his affair with actress Julie Gayet. He had been in a long-term relationship with Valerie Trierweiler, pictured, but now admits a single tweet caused something to break.U K submarines have reportedly been moved to within striking range of Syria in preparation for possible military action against Bashar Assad's regime.

Mrs May had declared that "all the indications" suggested Assads forces were responsible for the alleged chemical strike that left dozens dead in the town of Douma on Saturday.

And cruise missiles have now been positioned within striking range of the country as speculation over a US-led response continued to mount, according to reports.

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US President Donald Trump dramatically escalated growing tensions surrounding the crisis on Wednesday by warning Russia, which is backing the Syrian regime, that nice and new and smart cruise missiles will be coming.

Mrs May has not reached a final decision on whether Britain would join any strikes by the US and France in response to the suspected attack.

But the Telegraph reported overnight that she had ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military.

Syria crisis: Theresa May to chair emergency Cabinet meeting

The Prime Minister was under pressure to give Parliament the chance to vote before committing UK forces to any new action amid fears it could draw the West into direct conflict with Assad's main backer, Russia.

Speaking during a visit to Birmingham on Wednesday, Mrs May again said the use of chemical weapons by the regime "cannot go unchallenged" as she reaffirmed her intention to continue working with the UK's "closest allies".

Theresa May: The Prime Minister has called an emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the UK's response to suspected chemical attacks in Syria / Getty Images

"We have been working to get an understanding of what happened on the ground. We are rapidly reaching that understanding," she said.

"All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible and we will be working with our closest allies on how we can ensure that those who are responsible are held to account.

War of Words: US v Russia on Syria

"The continued use of chemical weapons cannot go unchallenged."

Russia has warned against military action and said it will shoot down rockets fired at its ally.

In a tweet responding to the threat, President Trump said: "Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria.

"Get ready, Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart'. You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"H ousing minister Dominic Raab today faced mounting pressure as the UK statistics watchdog demanded he publish evidence for a controversial claim blaming surging house prices on immigrants.

The UK Statistics Authority is calling for the model he used to claim property prices spiralled by 20 per cent over 25 years because of immigration to be made available to the public.

Ed Humpherson, head of the watchdogs Office for Statistics Regulation, said: Where analysis is quoted in public debate, the UK Statistics Authority believes it is essential that it be made equally available to all.

We have been speaking to officials at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government about the ministers statements on migration and housing.

Mr Humpherson is preparing to write to officials at MHCLG today to request the analysis is released publicly.

Mr Raab has come under fire amid reports the claim relied on analysis from a quango which shut down eight years ago. Independent fact-checking organisation Full Fact said it had been unable to find any evidence in the public domain to support his comments, published in the Sunday Times.

It also says the data that is available does not conclusively prove a link between immigration and house prices.

Full Fact director Will Moy said: Its inappropriate for ministers to use figures that arent in the public domain, and figures like these should be published in full so that anyone can check where theyre from and how theyre calculated.

The UK Statistics Authoritys rare intervention comes as Yvette Cooper MP, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, also called on Mr Raab to show her committee the evidence.

She said: Ministers need to ensure that the debate on immigration is based on facts and evidence. Otherwise it undermines trust in the whole system.

Mr Raab made his claim based on National Housing and Planning Advice Unit analysis, which incorporated Office for National Statistics data on property prices between 1991 and 2016.

He said his concerns about the link between immigration and housing will be passed to the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), which is to publish a report to help the Government formulate new immigration plans.

An MHCLG spokesman said: This government delivered 217,000 new homes last year, a record number.

We will continue to build on that success by increasing supply and helping people onto the property ladder.

Immigration brings clear benefits and pressures, and a balanced approach must factor in both.

Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Vince Cable, has also written to the UK Statistics Authority asking it to force the Government into releasing the data.

A Government source said there are ongoing discussions between MHCLG and the UK Statistics Authority over publishing the data.T he Cabinet has agreed the use of chemical weapons in Syria "must not go unchallenged" - but gave no immediate details of British involvement in any military action against the regime.

Following a two-hour emergency meeting summoned by Theresa May, No 10 said ministers had agreed Bashar al-Assad had a "track record" of using chemical weapons.

They agreed it was "highly likely" he was responsible for the attack on the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "The Prime Minister said it was a shocking and barbaric act which killed up to 75 people, including children, in the most appalling and inhumane way.

Donald Trump said there will be a "big price to pay" after what he called a "mindless chemical attack" (Getty) / AFP/Getty Images

"Cabinet agreed that the Assad regime has a track record of the use of chemical weapons and it is highly likely that the regime is responsible for Saturday's attack.

"The Prime Minister said it was a further example of the erosion of international law in relation to the use of chemical weapons, which was deeply concerning to us all.

Corbyn on Syria: More bombing will not save life

"Following a discussion in which every member present made a contribution, Cabinet agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged.

"Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

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"Cabinet agreed the Prime Minister should continue to work with allies in the US and France to co-ordinate an international response."

Donald Trump said he was holding meetings on Thursday on Syria and expected to make decisions "fairly soon".

Syria: What weaponry could the UK use?

The US president previously said that missiles "will be coming" in response to the attack, and lambasted Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" Trump then wrote in a tweet on Thursday.

Later, he said: "We're having a number of meetings today, we'll see what happens. Now we have to make some ... decisions, so they'll be made fairly soon."

Russia's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said Russia is very concerned with "the dangerous escalation" of the situation and "aggressive policies" of some governments, a clear reference to the Trump administration and its allies.

He said: "We hope that there will be no point of no return  that the U.S. and their allies will refrain from military action against a sovereign state."T heresa May was today laying out the case for missile strikes against tyrant Bashar Assads regime for its use of chemical weapons as a row grew over whether she should first seek Parliaments consent.

Senior ministers were summoned back to London for a War Cabinet this afternoon as America, Britain and France prepared to unleash a barrage of missiles at Assads military bases in Syria.

Intelligence chiefs were said to have firmed up evidence that his forces were almost certainly behind the attack on Douma, near Damascus, which rescuers say killed at least 70, including children. The BBC cited independent reports that two Mil Mi-8 Hip helicopters were seen taking off from the regimes Dumayr airbase and were later spotted over nearby Douma, though this has not been officially confirmed.

Today French president Emmanuel Macron tweeted: We have proof that chemical weapons were used by Bashar Assads regime. He added: We will need to take decisions in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective. After tweeting yesterday that missiles are coming

Syria: What weaponry could the UK use?

Donald Trump was due to meet defence chiefs. However, early this morning US time he sent a new tweet saying: Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!

It added: In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America? It was not clear if this was a signal that military action may not be imminent, or an attempt to cause confusion in Moscow and Damascus, or a response to criticism that his earlier tweet, warning of an attack, could put military lives at risk.

UK submarines are reportedly ready to strike / Ministry of Defence via EPA

A growing number of MPs are backing Mrs May to support US-led air strikes without a parliamentary vote. However, she also faced calls for Parliament to be recalled, possibly on Saturday, to debate military action. As air strikes appeared imminent:

Syrian troops were said to have regained full control of Douma, in Eastern Ghouta, from rebels.

A Russian plane was reported to have buzzed French warship Aquitaine in the Mediterranean at the weekend.

Royal Navy submarines, including HMS Astute, have reportedly been ordered to cruise into range for launching Tomahawk cruise missiles as early as tonight.

Former MI6 boss Sir John Sawers warned it was vital to keep open channels of communication with Russia to avoid the danger that targeting Syrias chemical weapon stockpiles could spiral into a far bigger clash.

The Kremlin warned against raising tensions and added that a deconfliction hotline between the US and Russia was still being used.

At the War Cabinet Mrs May was expected to outline that Britains strategic objective for military strikes would be to prevent the normalisation of the use of chemical weapons.

In 2013, MPs voted to stop David Cameron ordering UK forces to join threatened American military action after another chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus. This time it appeared she could win a Commons majority for intervention, but may press ahead before Parliament returns.

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Brexit Secretary David Davis said that he did not think that there was the evidence in 2013 to justify intervention, which is why he voted against action.

He added: The situation in Syria is horrific, the use of chemical weapons is something the world has to prevent. But also its a very, very delicate circumstance and weve got to make this judgment on a very careful, very deliberate, very well-thought-through basis.

Sports minister Tracey Crouch, who voted against intervention in 2013, said she would now back the Prime Minister if she chose to take action.

Conservative select committee chair Sarah Wollaston voted against military action in 2013 but said she would support it this time: In 2013 the shadow of Iraq and the consequences of military action were hanging very heavily and overshadowed that vote.

Whereas those who made warning at the time about the consequences of inaction have been proved to be correct. What is different this time is the fact that the escalation has now happened.

Tory MP Zac Goldsmith said Parliament must be involved before any military action is agreed.

He said: We need a clear response to the Syrian chemical outrage. But Parliament must be involved before any action is agreed. Specifically the Government needs to explain who is strengthened if and when Assad is weakened. And what happens after.

Corbyn on Syria: More bombing will not save life

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is expected to oppose any military intervention, has called for Parliament to have its say, as did Labour MP Catherine West.T he BBC has come under fire over plans to broadcast Enoch Powells racist Rivers of Blood speech on Radio 4.

The broadcast marks the 50th anniversary of the politicians controversial speech on immigration, widely considered one of the most inflammatory in modern history by a British politician.

On Saturday the speech will be broadcast in full for the first time on British radio.

Actor Ian McDirmid will read it out half a century after it was delivered in Birmingham days before a crucial stage of the 1968 Race Relations Bill.

The speech included observations on immigrants taken from Powell's Wolverhampton constituents.

The 45 minute speech is widely believed to have incited racism against immigrants and led to Powell being dismissed from the Conservative Party. In it, Powell proposed a policy encouraging people who had come to the UK from abroad to return their country of origin.

It ended with a reference to a line in Virgil's poem Aeneid when civil war in Italy is predicted using the phrase "the River Tiber foaming with much blood".

Plans for the broadcast have been branded appalling and repugnant.

Labour peer Lord Andrew Adonis wrote on Twitter: Now the BBC thinks there is a public service in broadcasting Enoch Powells rivers of blood speech, what next? Oswald Mosleys memoirs? Genghis Khans views on peacemaking?

He added: Powells 1968 speech - I see the River Tiber foaming with much blood; in 15 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man - is the worst incitement to racial violence by a public figure in modern Britain. The BBC should not be broadcasting it on Saturday.

SNP politician Dr Paul Monaghan said: BBC decision to broadcast Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood speech after 50 years is unfortunate.

Chris Applegate wrote: The Rivers of Blood speech has never been read out on radio on full until this weekend. Sadly, nobody on @BBCRadio4 has worked out there might be a very good reason why their predecessors exercised that judgement.

Mark Hebden added: BBC will broadcast a reading of the Rivers of Blood speech this Saturday - 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell's speech. I can't imagine a more naked, squalid attempt to stir up controversy and division. Whoever commissioned it should be thoroughly ashamed at their irresponsibility.

BBC Media Editor Amol Rajan defended the broadcast, saying it would be "broken up, and critiqued by voices from across the spectrum. Not just read out in a single go."

"Though of course some will still object," he added.

Lord Adonis has also written a letter to the head of Ofcom asking her to instruct the BBC not to broadcast Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech.

The Labour peer described the speech as "incendiary and racist".

It reads: "Because of the time sensitive and urgent nature of the issue, I am writing directly to ask Ofcom to instruct the BBC to cancel its proposed broadcast on Saturday of Enoch Powell's infamous 1968 speech predicting 'rivers of blood' and 'the black man having the whip hand over the white man' because of immigration.

"It seems extraordinary that one should have to make the argument in today's Britain that Powell's speech is an incitement to racial hatred and violence which should not be broadcast.

Vince Cable: Enoch Powell speeches predicted the future but in a horror way

"If a contemporary politician made such a speech they would almost certainly be arrested and charged with serious offences.

"The BBC claims in its advance publicity (attached) that this is some kind of artistic enterprise. This argument is unsustainable, particularly in context of the BBC's boast that the broadcast provides a unique opportunity to hear the speech in full.

"Only a short section of the speech was quoted on the night, but for this programme the full text is recreated', it says.

"In other words, as a special tribute to the 50th anniversary of 'rivers of blood', the BBC is broadcasting the full text of the most incendiary racist speech of modern Britain that was not even broadcast at the time."

"Obviously this matter will be raised in Parliament if Enoch Powell's broadcast goes ahead."

The speech will be broadcast on BBC Radio Four on Saturday at 8pm.

Powell died aged 95 in 1988.

A BBC spokesman said: Many people know of this controversial speech but few have heard it beyond soundbites. Radio 4s well established programme Archive on 4 reflects in detail on historical events and, in order to assess the speech fully and its impact on the immigration debate, it will be analysed by a wide range of contributors including many anti-racism campaigners.I ndependent inspectors confirmed today that the deadly nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack was from the Novichok family of toxins as found by British investigators.

They also highlighted its high purity and identified its sub-set, but are keeping this secret to avoid the risk of proliferation.

The conclusion by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) strengthens the Governments case over how former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury last month. Britains military laboratory at Porton Down had quickly identified the agent as Novichok.

The OPCW report states: The analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples confirm the findings of the UK relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal's daughter Yulia Skripal speaks for the first time since Salisbury nerve agent attack

Treasury minister John Glen, who is MP for the Wiltshire city, said: This news from the OPCW confirms what the Government knew from very early after the incident  Putins regime in the Kremlin are responsible for the attempted assassination in Salisbury. The country is entitled to expect a full explanation from the Russians following publication of this authoritative independent report.

The report will be discussed by the OPCW Council next Wednesday and a meeting of the United Nations Security Council the following day.

Russian spy poisoning: Military forces work on a van in Winterslow / AP

The OPCW team, which made two visits to the UK last month, collected blood samples from the Skripals and Police Sergeant Nick Bailey, who was affected when he went to help the couple, as well as environmental samples from suspected hot spots of residual contamination in the city.

The Government believes that there is no plausible alternative explanation than that Moscow was behind the targeting of Mr Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter.

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

Novichok was developed by the military in the Soviet Union, though Russia denies holding stocks of it or being involved in the incident in Salisbury.

The attack led to around 30 nations expelling more than 150 Russian diplomats, including many suspected of being spies, which has been met with tit-for-tat responses by Moscow.M eghan Markles estranged half-sister has blasted the bride-to-be for "inviting complete strangers to the Royal wedding and not her family."

Samantha Grant unleashed a furious rant claiming that none of the Markle family have been invited to the big day and criticised the couple for showing a lack of respect.

Prince Harry and his fiancee have decided to invite an additional 1200 members of the public to celebrate the event in the grounds of Windsor Castle on May 19.

But the Palace announced on Wednesday that world leaders and politicians would not be included on the list of those attending the wedding.

Who is Samantha Grant? All you need to know about Meghan Markle's half-sister

US President Donald Trump, UK Prime Minister Theresa May and the Obamas have not been invited to the wedding.

And Ms Grant has now suggested that her family, including her and Ms Markles father Thomas also did not make the cut.

Family: Samantha shared pictures of herself and Meghan on her Twitter page

Ms Grant wrote a post on Wednesday saying: The Markle family is looking forward to our wedding invites. No-one has one yet. Still waiting. I hope London is wheelchair friendly. Excited!

Invites: She said none of the family had been invited to the wedding / Twitter

On the same day Ms Grant, who uses a wheelchair after being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, changed her picture to a couple of photos of her and the former Suits actress from when they grew up together.

Wedding: She referred to the decision to invited over a 1000 members of the public to the wedding / Twitter

She said that one of the pictures, which shows her holding a young Ms Markle on her lap, was her all-time favourite pic of her.

Smoke and mirrors: She ranted about not being invited on Twitter / Twitter

But Ms Grant, who has spoken out against her sister several times and is writing a book about her, later shared a pointed message referring to the announcement that members of the public from across the UK would be invited to join the festivities.

Half-sister: Samantha Markle / ITV

At issue is not a matter of closeness as more than 1000 complete strangers are invited, she tweeted.

Family is family. I have an uncle I have only seen once by I would never say he is not family because we are not close. Humanitarians move forward with love and kindness especially to family.

Wedding: The couple have announced that no politicians will be invited to the event / Getty Images

She then added: Smoke and mirrors cannot hide the elephant in the room. Out of respect, tradition and humanitarianism, the #Markles should be invited if 2,000 complete strangers are invited.

Our uncle who got her the internship, brother, me, best friend of 30 years Nikki Priddy, nephews. Fact.

Kensington Palace announced in March that members of the public would be among the crowds allowed into the grounds of the castle to share in the atmosphere of the wedding.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex: Prince Harry & Meghan Markle 1 /78 The Duke and Duchess of Sussex: Prince Harry & Meghan Markle Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex attend The Endeavour Fund Awards at Mansion House Samir Hussein/WireImage Oprah Winfrey interviews Duke and Duchess of Sussex PA Media Misan Harriman Prince Harry and Meghan Markle kiss on the steps of St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle after their wedding in St George's Chapel PA Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, pose with their newborn son Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor in St George's Hall at Windsor Castle Getty Images The Duke and Duchess of Sussex holding their son Archie during a meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mrs Tutu at their legacy foundation in cape Town, on day three of their tour of Africa PA Prince Harry and Ms Meghan Markle announce their engagement in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attend a Wheelchair Tennis match during the Invictus Games 2017 Reuters Prince Harry and Meghan Markle embrace following the polo at Coworth Park on 7 May 2017 Rex Features Prince Harry and Ms Meghan Markle announce their engagement in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace EPA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle during a walkabout on the esplanade at Edinburgh Castle PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle meet Pony Major Mark Wilkinson and regimental mascot Cruachan IV during a walkabout on the esplanade at Edinburgh Castle Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attend a Wheelchair Tennis match during the Invictus Games 2017 at Nathan Philips Square on 25 September 2017 in Toronto, Canada Reuters Prince Harry with girlfriend Meghan Markle at the Invictus Games in Toronto PA Prince Harry with girlfriend Meghan Markle at the Invictus Games in Toronto Getty Images Prince Harry arrives with girlfriend actress Meghan Markle at the wheelchair tennis event during the Invictus Games in Toronto Reuters Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attend a Wheelchair Tennis match during the Invictus Games 2017 at Nathan Philips Square on 25 September 2017 in Toronto, Canada Getty Images Prince Harry with girlfriend Meghan Markle at the Invictus Games in Toronto Getty Images Meghan Markle at the Invictus Games in Toronto Karwai Tang/WireImage Prince Harry arrives with girlfriend actress Meghan Markle at the wheelchair tennis event during the Invictus Games in Toronto, Ontario Reuters Meghan Markle attends the Opening Ceremony of the 2017 Invictus Games at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, Canada PA Meghan Markle on the cover of Vanity Fair Peter Lindbergh exclusively for Vanity Fair Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attend a Wheelchair Tennis match during the Invictus Games 2017 Getty Images Prince Harry and Ms Meghan Markle announce their engagement in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace Jeremy Selwyn Larking around: Harry and Meghan pull faces in footage not shown in the BBC engagement interview BBC Meghan Markle visits Nottingham for her first official public engagement with fiancee Prince Harry Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and Meghan Markle arrive at the Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, to attend a Terrence Higgins Trust World AIDS Day charity fair on their first official engagement together PA Meghan Markle arrives at the Terrance Higgins Trust World AIDS Day charity fair at Nottingham Contemporary Getty Images The royal brothers and their partners on Christmas Day. AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle listen to a broadcast through headphones during a visit to youth-orientated radio station, Reprezent FM, in Brixton PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle arrive in Brixton EPA Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle visit Reprezent 107.3FM in Brixton Getty Images Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle visit Reprezent 107.3FM in Brixton Getty Images Loved up: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle visit Cardiff Castle EPA Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle attend a street dance class during their visit to Star Hub in during their visit to Star Hub on January 18, 2018 in Cardiff, Wales. Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will visit the people of Edinburgh Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle arrive to attend the annual Endeavour Fund Awards PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle arrive to attend the annual Endeavour Fund Awards Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attend a reception for young people at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh AFP/Getty Images rince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle meet a Shetland Pony as they arrive at Edinburgh Castle in Edinburgh, Frank Augstein/AP Meghan Markle during a walkabout on the esplanade at Edinburgh Castle PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle speak with patrons at the Social Bite in Edinburgh AP Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on a walkabout during a visit to Millennium Point in Birmingham PA Meghan Markle arrives for a visit in Birmingham on International Women's Day PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on a walkabout during a visit to Millennium Point in Birmingham Splash News Prince Harry and Meghan Markle meet members of the public on a walkabout during a visit to Millennium Point in Birmingham PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle meet members of the public on a walkabout during a visit to Millennium Point in Birmingham PA The Reverend Canon David Stanton, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leave after attending a Commonwealth Day Service at Westminster Abbey AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attend a Commonwealth Day Service at Westminster Abbet AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attend a reception with delegates from the Commonwealth Youth Forum at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle ride in an Ascot Landau along the Long Walk after their wedding PA Meghan Markle walks down the aisle in St George's Chapel PA Harry and Meghan leaving Windsor Castle for the glamorous evening reception PA Harry and Meghan leaving Windsor Castle for the glamorous evening reception PA Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex head back down the Mall to Buckingham Palace during Trooping The Colour on June 9, 2018 Getty Images Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex talk to members of OneWave, an awareness group for mental health and wellbeing at South Bondi Beach on October 19, 2018 in Sydney, Australia. Getty Images Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex are seen during the closing ceremony of the Invictus Games in Sydney, Australia, 27 October 2018 EPA Meghan, Duchess of Sussex visits the Hubb Community Kitchen to see how funds raised by the 'Together: Our Community' Cookbook are making a difference at Al Manaar, North Kensington on November 21, 2018 in London Getty Images Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and Britain's Prince Harry unveil a plaque to officially open Number 7, a 'Feeding Birkenhead' citizens supermarket and community cafe, at Pyramids Shopping Centre, as part of a visit to Birkenhead, northwest England, Monday Jan. 14, 2019 AP Meghan, Duchess of Sussex visits the National theatre in central London on January 30, 2019 AFP/Getty Images The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive for a visit to the Bristol Old Vic theatre, which is undergoing a multimillion-pound restoration PA Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (L) and Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, reacts as they visit Bristol Old Vic theatre in Bristol, south-west England on February 1, 2019 AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex (R) and Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (C) help volunteers in the kitchen as they pack food parcels to go in the charity outreach van during a visit to One25 charity in Bristol, south west England on February 1, 2019 AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex arrive to attend the annual Endeavour Fund Awards at Drapers Hall in London on February 7, 2019 AFP/Getty Images The Duke and Duchess of Sussex try some food during a cooking school demonstration at Villa des Ambassadors in Rabat on the third day of their tour of Morocco PA Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, Duke & Duchess of Sussex, pet a horse at the Moroccan Royal Federation of Equestrian Sports in Rabat on February 25, 2019 AFP/Getty Images Meghan Markle wearing a short Reiss dress on International Women's Day AFP/Getty Images Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex attend a Commonwealth Day Youth Event at Canada House, where they meet young people who demonstrate a Canadian spring tradition of making maple taffy (maple syrup cooled on snow to make sweets) on March 11, 2019 in London Getty Images The Duke and Duchess of Sussex leave following a Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey, London PA Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess Of Sussex attend a Commonwealth Day Youth Event at Canada House on March 11, 2019 in London WireImage Members of Britain's Royal family leave after attending the Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey AP The Duchess of Cambridge (left) talks with the Duchess of Sussex (right) as they attend the Commonwealth Service at Westminster Abbey, Richard Pohle/The Times/PA Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex hold their baby son in St George's Hall at Windsor Castle, Berkshire on 8 May 2019 REUTERS Archbishop Desmond Tutu kisses the forehead of baby Archie as his mother smiles on warmly Reuters The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive for a visit to the Auwal Mosque, the oldest mosque in South Africa, on day two of their tour of Africa. PA Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex attend a roundtable discussion on gender equality with The Queens Commonwealth Trust (QCT) and One Young World at Windsor Castle Jeremy Selwyn Prince Harry and Duchess of Sussex at The Fields of Remembrance in Westminster Abbey Jeremy Selwyn pixel8000

The lucky group were nominated by the nine regional Lord Lieutenant offices after Harry and Meghan asked for those picked to come from a broad range of backgrounds and ages, including young people who have shown strong leadership, and those who have served their communities.T he international chemical weapons watchdogs report on the Salisbury nerve agent attack is set to be released as a fierce diplomatic battle between Russia and the UK continues.

The Foreign Office asked for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to release an executive summary of its findings at midday on Thursday.

Former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in a nerve agent attack believed to have been ordered by Moscow.

The ex-spy and his daughter were left seriously ill in hospital.

In a statement shared on her behalf by Scotland Yard, she added: "I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves."

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

The 33-year-old said she has found herself in a "totally different life" as she continues to recover from the attack.

It is believed that British authorities immediately spirited Ms Skripal away to a secure location when she was discharged from hospital earlier this week.

The Russian embassy reacted angrily, suggesting in a series of tweets that the Russian national had been taken against her will.

The embassy is perturbed by a refusal from UK authorities to grant Ms Skripal's cousin Viktoria a visa to visit her family.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal's daughter Yulia Skripal speaks for the first time since Salisbury nerve agent attack

It escalated the war of words on Tuesday, saying in a series of statements posted on social media: "Secret resettlement of Mr and Ms Skripal, barred from any contact with their family will be seen as an abduction or at least as their forced isolation."

But Ms Skripal said in a statement: "I have specially trained officers available to me, who are helping to take care of me and to explain the investigative processes that are being undertaken.

"I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can.

"At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.

"Most importantly, I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do.

"Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

"I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being.

"Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's."

A Foreign Office spokesman said it has asked the OPCW to distribute the report to all state parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention, including Russia.

Emergency services investigate the scene in Salisbury where the pair were found / AFP/Getty Images

"This transparent and open approach, which we have pursued from the outset, is in sharp contrast to the Russian state's ongoing tactics of obfuscation and distraction," the spokesman said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly attempted to challenge Britain's claims that it was responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals.

Theresa May has said that UK military experts at Porton Down found that they were poisoned by Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Russia, and that the only plausible explanation was that the Russian state was responsible.

Despite the denials from Moscow, Britain has received strong diplomatic backing from western allies for its stance, with more than 20 countries expelling in excess of 150 Russian diplomats in protest at the Russian actions.E ight Argentinian police officers have been fired after blaming mice for the disappearance of half a ton of cannabis from a police warehouse.

They claimed rodents had eaten the stockpile after it was discovered missing during an inspection at the warehouse for impounded drugs in Pilar, 60km away from Buenos Aires.

Around 6,000kg of cannabis had been stored there for four years, but only 5,460kg was found.

Former police chief commissioner Javier Specia was hauled before a judge along with three of his subordinates, but they all claimed the drugs had been eaten by mice.

However, scientists at Buenos Aires University cast doubt on the claim.

Buenos Aires University experts have explained that mice wouldn't mistake the drug for food, and that if a large group of mice had eaten it, a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse, said a spokesperson for the judge.A irlines have begun to halt flights to parts of the Middle East amid safety fears over the increasing prospect of Syrian airstrikes.

Kuwait Airways said concerns for aircraft in the skies around Lebanon which neighbours Syria had prompted it to cancel flights to the country's capital Beirut Thursday.

The carrier said it had received a warning from Cypriot authorities over operations in the area.

The move came after Middle East Airlines, Lebanon's national airline, said it was rerouting some of its flights "due to the recent security situation between US and Syria".

President Donald Trump has threatened military action against the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad after he was accused of carrying out a chemical attack on his own people.

Trump: The US President has threatened military action / AFP/Getty Images

Assad, who has been described as an animal by Mr Trump, has strongly denied being responsible for the attack in Douma, late on Saturday.

The Prime Minister said "all the indications" were that the regime was responsible for the alleged attack, which is believed to have left 43 peopple dead and more than 500 injured.

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As tensions between Syria and the US continued to fester, European aviation authorities issued a warning on Wednesday to all airlines operating in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The announcement, which was extended to pilots flying from the UK to Cyprus, warned of possible military action.

Attack: Image released by Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets shows a child receiving oxygen following an alleged poison gas attack in Douma / AP

The "rapid alert" told crews that "due consideration needs to be taken" of possible air-to-ground strikes or cruise missiles into Syria "within the next 72 hours".

The notification from the European Aviation Security Agency (Easa) covers the Eastern Mediterranean/Nicosia flight information region, which includes airspace over Cyprus.

Most carriers already avoid Syrian airspace due to previous warnings from aviation regulators in the UK and other countries, but the Easa alert could affect flights in neighbouring regions.

The Douma attack happened amid a resumed offensive by Syrian government forces after the collapse of a truce with the Army of Islam rebel group.

A volunteer holds an oxygen mask over a child's face at a hospital in Douma / AFP/Getty Images

Syrian opposition activists and rescuers said poison gas was used on the rebel-held town near the capital.Syrian government 'in control of rebel town'

The Russian military has said the Syrian government is now in full control of the town on the outskirts of Damascus that was held by the rebels and that was the site of a suspected chemical attack over the weekend.

The Defense Ministry said in a statement on Thursday that the situation in the town of Douma, in Eastern Ghouta, is "normalizing."

Eastern Ghouta had been the biggest rebel stronghold near Damascus, but insurgent groups there surrendered after a series of ferocious government assaults aided by Russia under a massive bombardment.

Douma is shown here inside the white circle

The Jaish al-Islam group in Douma agreed on Sunday to withdraw, hours after a suspected chemical weapons attack on the town. The Syrian government and Russia have called reports of the attack bogus.

"The raised state flag over a building in the town of Douma has heralded the control over this location and therefore over the whole of eastern Ghouta," Major-General Yuri Yevtushenko, head of the Russian Peace and Reconciliation Centre in Syria, was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.A former airport security officer who was fired after a passenger was dragged screaming off an overbooked flight is suing United Airlines.

James Long is also suing Chicagos Department of Aviation, its commissioner and the city over the incident in April last year.

He claims he was not trained on the level of force required, resulting in the shocking video footage which sparked outcry across the world.

The clip showed David Dao being dragged from the plane by his arms in order to make room for United Airlines employees.

The Vietnamese-American, 69, had been forcibly removed after refusing to give up his seat on the flight from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky.

The treatment of Dr David Dao from United Airlines received widespread criticism / Reuters

Dr Dao, who suffered a broken nose, concussion and lost two front teeth in the ordeal, later received an undisclosed amount of money from the airline in a settlement.

United also publicly apologised for the incident in the face of demonstrations at Chicagos OHare International Airport.

Mr Long and three other security officers were placed on leave after the incident and he was fired in August.

He now claims the airline should have known that calling security would result in the use of physical force, according to the complaint filed on Tuesday.A ustralian author and TV personality Yassmin Abdel-Magied has said she was deported from the US just hours after landing in Minneapolis.

She was stopped by border control before her passport was confiscated and her visa was cancelled, the author said in a Twitter rant today.

Ms Abdel-Magied had been expected to deliver talks in New York at a festival panel titled The M Word: No country for young Muslim Women.

But the TV personality, who is now based in London, said that three hours after touching down in Minneapolis, she was back on a plane without her passport.

Roughly three hours since touch down in Minneapolis, Im on a plane back. Subhanallah. Well, guess that tightening of immigration laws business is working, despite my Australian passport. Were taking off now, she wrote.

Theyve taken my phone, cancelled my visa and are deporting me. Will follow up on messages once I understand whats going on.

A spokesperson for the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) later said Ms Abdel-Magied did not have the correct visa upon arriving in the US, the Guardian reported.

Ms Abdel-Magied is a mechanical engineer and rose to prominence as the founder of the Youth Without Borders organisation.V ictoria Beckham faced a backlash online after fans accused her of allowing her daughter to ride a branded horse.

Beckham, 43, posted a picture of six-year-old Harper sitting on a horse that had a crown design on its rear.

She captioned the image: Riding in the sunshine kisses from Harper and her prince x #mummytime x.

The former Spice Girl failed to specify whether the marking was shaved on or branded leaving her open to attack from users who accused her of causing the animal pain.

One user commented: Stop branding your horses.

A second posted: Poor little animal what will have suffered.

A third asked: I really wanna ask how did you do that thing on that horse butt didn't it hurt? #hurtinganimals.

Victoria Beckham in Kenya for Sport Relief - In pictures 1 /7 Victoria Beckham in Kenya for Sport Relief - In pictures Victoria Beckham Victoria Beckham Victoria Beckham Victoria Beckham Victoria Beckham Victoria Beckham Victoria Beckham

Another wrote: Is this horse branded with hot iron?! I dont know if is the case, but if it is this is so cruel!

She should have specified, in brackets, if it was a hair cut. She didnt therefore she left the benefit of the doubt

But others defended the post, claiming the crown design is clearly a haircut with one posting: Its clipped into his hair. There are no health or welfare concerns with this!

Victoria Beckham talks kickboxing and big dreams with girls in Kenya

Another wrote: Christ there is a thing called quarter marks all it is is getting a stencil brushing the coat the wrong way with a wet brush then brushing it back it the right direction of the coat.

Katie Price was previously branded a disgrace after she came under fire for shaving patterns on to her ponies.

The heart and diamond designs were blasted as undignified, while others told the former glamour model to get a grip.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S tephen Mulhern will front The National Lottery results as the draws make their television comeback.

The results were traditionally broadcast on BBC up until a 2017 move to BBC iPlayer but it is rival broadcaster ITV who now own the rights to the lucky numbers draws.

The new format will see the results delivered in a prime-time television slot, starting this Saturday with a 90-second slot during a Britains Got Talent advert break.

Mulhern, who was revealed as host in a teaser clip by Camelot, said [via Digital Spy]: The National Lottery is an iconic institution and Im hugely excited to be part of its return to primetime Saturday night TV.

The National Lottery Results on ITV with Stephen Mulhern

When you think about The National Lottery you think of people winning life-changing prizes.

"But sometimes you forget that players raise around 30 million every week for Good Causes across the UK.

New gig: Stephen Mulhern will host as The National Lottery returns to television / The National Lottery

I feel privileged to be bringing those lucky numbers to the nation but also being able to show players how the money theyve helped raise has made a difference to communities across the UK.

Hayley Stringfellow, Head of Brand Marketing at Camelot, added: Were hugely excited by this innovative commercial partnership.

One the outcomes of our recent strategic review was to make The National Lottery and its purpose far more relevant and visible  so what better way to do this than by partnering with ITV to deliver the results during some of the most popular primetime shows.W e've been warned about the death of cash for a while.

Across the city, people are turning their backs on cash payments, like coffee shop, Browns of Brockley. And, in a survey of Londoners taken in 2016, nearly three quarters said they believe London will be completely cashless by 2036.

Last year, non-cash payment racked up more than 522.4 billion transactions worldwide.

The London-based fintech start-up Revolut says the cashless society is coming and its ready for it.

The companys co-founder and CTO, Vlad Yatsenko, told the Evening Standard: Businesses, especially financial institutions, are having to adapt as we move towards a cashless society. With the rise of contactless and mobile payments, I hope and believe that it will be possible for the UK to be fully cashless within the next 10 years.

Fully cashless in 10 years could be possible, if the UK follows the direction of Sweden. Around 36 per cent of Swedens population claim they never use cash, compared to around 17 per cent of UK shoppers.

The amount of Swedish krona cash in circulation is now at the lowest level its been since 1990.

Outside of Europe, non-cash transactions are growing. In Canada, China and Singapore, 56 per cent of all transactions are cashless.

Theres certainly benefits to going cashless. For instance, it cracks down on crime.

In 2016, when Indias prime minister Narendra Modi pulled two of the countrys major notes out of circulation, he said it was in order to purge black money, money earned through illegal activity, from the Indian economy.

Revolut's co-founder and CTO, Vlad Yatsenko / Revolut

As well, cashless transactions speed up services and are more convenient. Remember the days before you could use contactless cards on the tube? It doesnt even bear thinking about.

Whats slowing the UK down in this cashless revolution. Yatsenko says we can blame the UKs infrastructure.

Weve still got a long way to go until lumbering traditional banks fully adopt cashless technology, and even then not all consumers tend to trust the big banks or institutions with their information or money.

Trust is a major part of it, and the fact that many people in the UK have a strong, emotional connection to cash.

Many people, in particular, the elderly, dont have as much access to the digital society, so we need to educate people and make it as easy as possible to transition into a fully cashless age, said Yatsenko.

But, there is also the question of how cashless society will impact other sectors. Its well documented that a transition away from cash would have a detrimental effect on the homeless community, or charities that raise money on the street through charity buckets.

Yet, if the cashless society is on its way, theres little we can do to fight it. App-only digital banks like Revolut are propelling this with features unlike those available from traditional banks.

Revolut card users can spend abroad in over 150 currencies with no fees, meaning theres no need to scramble to a Bureau De Change before your flight abroad.

The start-up recently launched disposable virtual cards for its premium account holders. The card details automatically change after every transaction, protecting customers against account fraud when shopping online.Countries & Areas

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According to a press release issued by the Ministry of Justice (MJ), the meeting is a preliminary phase to the conclusion of a loan agreement in the context of the approval by the Government of Romania, on March 7, of the memorandum for the financing of the project "Investment in Prison Infrastructure".

The project includes measures included in the calendar of measures 2018-2024 approved by the Government in January this year to solve the over-crowding and detention conditions in the execution of the pilot-ruling "Rezmives and Others Against Romania", pronounced by ECHR on April 25, 2017.According to the MJ, the provision of detention conditions in line with international standards is a priority of the Government, with the governing program 2017 - 2020, chapter Justice, section Fundamental Rights, measure 20 mentioning: "Continuation of the investment project in prisons and modernization and extension where locations permit".The meeting took place at the seat of the Ministry of Justice, the Development Bank of the Council of Europe having been represented by Karin Lepp - Country Manager and Cristian Tabacariu - Director of Projects.The meeting was attended by Sebastian Costea - personal adviser to the Minister of Justice; Carmen Ghita - Head of Service and Roxana Badea - adviser within the Ministry of Finance; Marian Dobrica - General Manager, Cristian Plesa - Deputy General Manager and Aurelian Oprea - Economic Director with the National Administration of Penitentiaries.

AGERPRES .President Klaus Iohannis on Thursday welcomed France's Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian, underscoring the importance that Romania attaches to joining the Schengen Area and the hope that France will support a decision in that regard.

"President Klaus Iohannis stressed the importance that Romania attaches to joining the Schengen Area and the hope that France will support a decision in that respect, in line with what has been discussed in recent years' contacts, including the visit of President Macron in August 2017. Minister Le Drian mentioned France's support for Romania's accession to the Schengen Area, along with the completion of the area's ongoing reform, stressing that there is no blockage on the part of France to Romania's prospects of becoming a member of the Schengen Area," the Presidential Administration said Thursday in a press statement.

The head of state also highlighted the excellent level of the bilateral relationship in the context of a year with multiple meanings to the relationship, namely the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Strategic Partnership Declaration, the launch of the Romania-France Cultural Season, and the Centennial of Romania's Greater Union, to which France made a significant contribution.Iohannis also hailed the level of excellence and positive dynamics in the Strategic Partnership between Romania and France, one of Romania's most valuable strategic partnerships. He emphasised the efforts of the two countries to modernise the founding documents of the strategic partnership, which should include components of common interest, position and action of Romania and France.The two senior officials also voiced their support for the Romania-France Season, a large-scale cultural and diplomacy project to be launched late this autumn by Presidents Klaus Iohannis and Emmanuel Macron, so that it may be a success contributing to providing a current, modern and innovative image of the two states.Iohannis expressed Romania's desire to co-operate as closely as possible and to co-ordinate with France in addressing the main issues of the Romanian Presidency of the EU Council, with the two senior officials mentioning to the point negotiations on the future EU budget post-2020, and highlighting common positions on the need to maintain significant allocations for the EU's cohesion policy and the common agricultural policy.The Presidential Administration shows that President Klaus Iohannis highlighted the shared interests and actions of Romania and France in increasingly more current European files, with Le Drian commending Romania for its positions. At the same time, the head of state highlighted support for the European journey and the deep European values at the level of the Romanian society.The two senior officials also exchanged views on a number of current international affairs.Iohannis expressed Romania's deep concern over the recent developments in Syria, strongly condemning the use of chemical weapons in conflict, which is not justified by any reason. He also showed that these developments, despite international condemnations and reactions to previous chemical weapons use in Syria, indicate that unfortunately, the proper conclusions were not drawn. In his turn, Le Drian presented France's firm stance that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is a "red line" and an element of concern for the entire world community.UK Prime Minister Theresa May believes the Skripal case is an unlawful use of force by the Russian state against the United Kingdom. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson chimes in, saying that Russia undermines the fundamental basis of international order. A bipartisan legislative initiative has been recently introduced in US Congress in support for the UK government. It says Moscow has violated international law. Now, lets look who is talking!

So, London states that Moscow spurns the universally adopted rules and the Salisbury case is a fresh example to confirm this affirmation. A look at the facts gives a reason to take it with a grain of salt. What do we know so far? Two Russian citizens have been reported to be poisoned on the territory of the UK. Nothing is known about the culprits, no proof has been produced. Material evidence is being purposefully eliminated, be it a cat and guinea pigs dead after police sealed off the house for investigators or the bench where Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found slumped after leaving the restaurant. No questions the Russian Foreign Ministry asked have been answered. The very fact the Skripals were poisoned has never been proven. The international community has to take the UK governments word for it.

Russia has been denied consular access to the Skripals who hold Russian citizenship. This is a flagrant violation of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and the 1968 consular agreement signed between the former Soviet Union and the UK under which the parties are to provide access to the other sides nationals on their soil. Sergei Skripals niece, Viktoria, has been denied entrance visa to the UK for no reason. London is considering the possibility of the Skripals secret resettlement, probably in the US. With no access to them, there is no way to know that it will be done in accordance with their will. It looks very much like an abduction or illegal isolation. The poisoning is not proven but the abduction is there for everyone to see.

Gone overseas with new identities, theyll never provide openly any evidence for the investigation. And whatever they say being in hiding cannot be taken at face value as the version of events could be presented under pressure with their mental health conditions unknown. Suppose video footages will be produced to show the Skripals blaming Russia. How can we know they are not speaking under duress?

Now let's get back to the subject at hand. UK police and customs services performed a search aboard an Aeroflot Airbus A321 aircraft after it landed in Heathrow on March 29. It was done in the absence of the crew, which was to accompany the inspectors according to the rules. The captain was locked in the cabin. No explanation was given, no written document was provided to specify the reasons for the search. This is a gross breach of rules. What we see is one violation of the international law after another.

For the last 15 years, Britain has declined 60 out of 83 Russian requests for extradition of people accused of committing crimes. 55 of them have been granted refugee status or asylum in the country. The largest number of denials was issued in the period between 2010 and 2016 during the incumbent PMs tenure as home secretary. Moscow never received any information regarding investigations into the deaths of Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko.

Classifying the Salisbury poisoning case is also a breach of law. Expelling Russian diplomats before a report from the OPCW has nothing to do with the established diplomatic practice. Its rather amusing to hear the calls for observing the rules from the country that never repented of such illegal actions as the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the unprovoked 2003 invasion of Iraq or the participation in the NATO attack against Libya in 2011  the operation evidently going beyond the terms of the UN resolution 1973/2011. Today, British commando teams are illegally operating on Syrian soil. If the UK joins a US-led sustained operation in Syria, itll be in gross violation of international law again.

Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself, they say. Its either you comply with obligations or you dont. London is breaching elementary rules of inter-state relations and the Salisbury case is a good example to bolster the claim. The UK makes mockery of international law, while blaming others for its violations.Americans desperate for news from the Syrian front, where an alleged chemical attack has prompted the Trump administration to consider a military strike against Damascus, are in for a real disappointment. Any balanced discussion of a possible military offensive against Syria, which Moscow has warned would have grave consequences, has been swept clean from the news slate.

On Wednesday morning, in an apparent state of wishful thinking mixed with a dash of masochism, I consulted multiple US news sites to see how the Syrian crisis was being reported. Expecting to find large-font headlines warning of a possible military offensive, not to mention World War 3, I was greeted instead with multi-layered stories on former porn star, Stormy Daniels, and her 10-year old affair with Donald Trump. Im guessing there was a Russian connection to that salacious story somewhere, but exactly where I could not immediately say.

The lead story in the Bezos-owned Washington Post, for example, was headlined, Investigators sought Trump lawyers records on two women who alleged affairs with president. Next to that salacious piece of bozo journalism was another nothing burger, at least as far as the Syrian crisis is concerned, which discussed the current trials and tribulations of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Zuckerberg apologizes, promises reform during hours-long Senate grilling over Facebooks failings). While that may seem like important news to some, it pales in comparison with the prospect of the US launching an attack on the Syrian government.

Buried deep below that media debris and detritus was a single story devoted to Syria, headlined: Nerve gas in Syria attack, leaving victims foaming at the mouth, evidence suggests. This glaringly one-sided narrative, much like the one used last month in the Salisbury chemical attack that allegedly sickened Sergey Skripal and his daughter, is tenuous at best, a bald-faced lie at worst. Indeed, judging by an examination of the site carried out by Russian experts and the Syrian Red Cross, no trace of chemical weapons could be found.

A switch to CNN provided a near duplicate of The Posts paucity of pickings, albeit with a slightly different twist. Trump considering firing Rosenstein, sources say, was the headline of the main story, which shows that the Russiagate show trial is beginning to eat its tail, yet the media  after almost two years  just cant resist reporting on it. Next to that show-stopper, US media consumers are provided yet another cure for insomnia with riveting details on Zuckerbergs 5-hour grilling by the US Senate.

Finally, a CNN article on Syria. Yet the headline says everything we need to know as far as what the American consumer of mainstream media fare is permitted to think: Haley says Russia chose 'protecting a monster' over Syrian people (Incidentally, this is same way US political elections are carried out. There is freedom, but only a severely limited freedom that allows the populace to freely choose between candidates that have already been carefully selected by the powers-that-be).

Below that gratuitous bugle blast for war is an open letter to the US leader, entitled, President Trump, now is not the time for half-baked military action. Translation: President Trump, now is the time for full-blown military action

Here is CNN opinionator Sam Kiley inveighing against the Syrian government, using cheap emotional imagery as a substitute for hardnosed facts: Outrage over the images of children frozen in death, their mouths gagged with foam as the alleged victims of another Syrian government gas attack on its own people, has led Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, to call the perpetrator behind the attack "a monster."

Such passionate intensity is understandable, Kiley continues, building up momentum for a hysterical Hitler analogy. There's something visceral about killing with gas. It recalls the Holocaust. It conjures up almost identical photographs of Saddam Hussein's attack on the Kurds of Halabja.

Ah, yes. The sweet sound of impartial journalism. What is so deplorable about this brand of so-called reporting is that it refuses to consider the very high probability that it was not the Syrian government that resorted to chemical weapons in Douma, but rather the rebel forces, who were suffering on every military front up until that point. Would President Bashar Assad really be so reckless to risk a chemical attack at the very moment he was bringing to an end an 8-year struggle against terrorist-infiltrated militants in his country? Common sense would say no.

Its not that the American people are inherently stupid to believe such absurd claims; its that they are woefully misinformed by a media machine that is marching in lockstep  sometimes even owned  by the military industrial complex. Mark Twain summed up the Catch-22 situation confronting Americans: If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.

And it is not just the run-of-the-mill news sources that are serving as cheerleaders for imperialistic regime change operations. The purportedly intelligent thinking man publications are also peddling a shameless pro-war stance, which takes the government line for granted.

In this months issue of The Atlantic, for example, investigative journalism is reduced to roadkill in the rush to war. In an article entitled, The Logic of Assads Brutality, it is obvious that the magazine has already predetermined Assads guilt. Yet the UN weapons inspectors have not even reached Syria to begin their investigative work? What kind of journalist could put his name on an article that could only be called an elaborate piece of pro-war propaganda?

And then there is the conservative journal Foreign Policy, which argued in an article entitled Macron needs to Attack Syria: Its not clear whether France can count on the United States to commit to the enforcement of any red lines against the Assad regime. But this should only concentrate Macrons mind. If the United States abstains, he should prepare, for the sake of not only his personal credibility, but French national interests, to strike alone.

No call for restraint, no call for evidence, no suggestion that the terrorists may have been to blame. Just a reckless gunshot from the hip to settle matters, and who cares if it may trigger a global conflagration.

This only serves to prove that the United States, and its people, learned absolutely nothing from the Iraq War, which saw the same brazen disregard for legal precedent by launching an attack against Saddam Hussein in 2003, the consequences of which we are experiencing to this day. As the UN weapon inspectors were on the ground, practically screaming that they could not locate weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration shrugged off these uncomfortable truths and carried out its diabolical designs anyways.

In reality, the US did learn one valuable lesson from the Iraq War. It learned it can manipulate the opinions of the people to an astonishing degree. By using the entire media leviathan to coordinate a hate campaign against one state leader, in this case Bashar Assad, it can make the people forget legal precedent, not to mention common sense.

Wake up, America, before its too late.There is a vast industry in the United States that wants a hot war with Syria and Iran as well as increased confrontation with Russia and China. It is appropriate to refer to it as an industry because it has many components and is largely driven by money, much of which itself comes from Wall Street and major corporations that profit from war related business. Some prefer to refer to this monster as the Military Industrial Complex, but since that phrase was coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961, it has grown enormously, developing a political dimension that includes a majority of congressmen who are addicted to receiving a tithe from the profits from the war economy to finance their own campaigns, permitting them to stay in office indefinitely and retire comfortably to a lobbying position or corporate directorship.

The defense industry also has spawned hundreds of so-called think-tanks whose sole business is promoting war. Some, like the neoconservative Institute for the Study of War, have a clear agenda, but the most powerful rely on euphemisms to conceal what they are doing. They include the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, both of which promote a hard-line foreign policy directed against Iran and Russia, to include intensified confrontation with both in Syria.

The national media, which also benefits from the same food chain, is also complicit in the process, knowing that the public can easily be deceived by pronouncements coming from alleged experts in Washington. Leading politicians like Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain lead the pack but there is no shortage of lesser known congressmen to also raise the cry about foreign threats to national security. Regarding developments in Syria, Graham advised last weekend that Trump must attack and destroy the Syrian Air Force or look weak while McCain said White House talk of pulling troops out of the country had emboldened al-Assad.

Unenlightened self-interest prevails in the White House over the formulation of policy, with the public interest completely lost from sight as high officials jockey in support of the agendas being promoted by those with money and access to those in power. There is no other explanation for the astonishing performance last weekend, which pushed the United States closer to a new war in spite of Trumps earlier expressed claims that he wants to exit from Syria, a comment that he quickly backed away from under pressure from the Israelis and Congress.

But now we have a dubious narrative of a horrible new chemical weapon attack in Syria and the Israelis, who have spent the past two weeks shooting two thousand unarmed demonstrators, have attacked a Syrian airbase, killing 14, pretending that they care about civilian casualties when all they really want to do is jumpstart a seven-year war which has been winding down.

Anyone could see there was something not quite right about this latest chemical attack, supposedly implemented by Bashar al-Assad just as his troops are about to finish off the last rebels near Damascus. But Donald Trump apparently could not appreciate that the Syrian government had no motive to use chemical weapons, while the rebels, who control the space where the attack supposedly took place, have every reason to motivate an international coalition to attack the Syrian Army.

At 8 a.m. on Sunday morning the President of the United States sent out this tweet:

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. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay

Donald Trump could not have possibly known who staged the gas attack so soon after it occurred, but he felt compelled to tweet something anyway. And it was not as if other observers hadnt suspected that a big lie was coming. Days before the staged attack, the Russian Defense Ministry warned that a false flag incident was being prepared.

One hour later, the Sunday morning talk shows in the US were full of reports about the Syrian regimes use of chemical weapons. No one contradicted that narrative and the news was soon headlined in the late editions of the Sunday newspapers. Fake news had won out again, in spite of a complete lack or evidence or credibility. This is completely crazy. There is something very wrong with what is going on currently in the United States.At the end of 2017 the U.S. withdrew American maintenance and repair technicians working for the Iraqi Army to maintain their force of nearly a hundred M1 tanks. The Americans also stopped supply spare parts of the Iraqi M1s and refused to restore this tech support until Iraq retrieved two M1s still unaccounted for and believed to be held by pro-Iranian PMF militias. The U.S. is also holding up delivery of additional M1s the Iraqis ordered. The Iraqi government had recently retrieved seven M1s from pro-Iranian militias and one was taken back with the help of U.S. backed Kurds who were attacked by militiamen in October 2017 when the Iraqi government took control of Kirkuk province, settling a dispute that went back over a decade. The Kurds withdrew from Kirkuk province but not before immobilizing an M1 tank used by one of the advancing militias.

By December Iraq had retrieved all but two M1s and showed no enthusiasm for finding and retrieving the last two tanks because it would involve a confrontation with Iran and one the more militant pro-Iran Shia militias. At that point, the Americans invoked the sales contract Iraq had agreed to for the M1 tanks which allowed the U.S. to suspend support for the M1s if the Iraqis could not account for them at all times. The Iraqis are still looking for a way out of this mess. In March Iraq made the militias (the PMF, Peoples Mobilization Forces) part of the Iraqi military which apparently enables the government to put more pressure on the pro-Iran PMF units, which are believed to hold the two M1 tanks, to surrender them or else. The or else includes all the Iraqi M1s becoming inoperable eventually and additional American sanctions imposed that could include the growing Iraqi force of F-16 jet fighters and other American made weapons. That gambit has not worked as the militias insist that they still retain a degree of autonomy despite now being part of the military.

This mess had its origins in the mid-2014 ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) offensive that captured about a third of Iraqi territory, including the city of Mosul. The Iraqi forces that were in the way largely collapsed and fled, abandoning hundreds of armored vehicles, Corruption in the Iraqi Army led, before 2014, to Iraqi M1 crews being poorly trained and led. Thus during the 2014 rout Iraqi troops lost (or abandoned) at least 40 M-s to enemy action or panic. At least one Iraqi M1 was destroyed by a Russian ATGM (anti-tank guided missile). The United States directed air strikes to destroy any M-1s spotted in the possession of ISIL. By 2015 it became obvious that some of the missing M1s had been recovered by PMF units that Iran helped organize in late 2014. The PMF played a key role in halting the ISIL offensive and then pushing back ISIL until all the lost territory was regained by the end of 2017. The U.S. documented at least nine M1s that had apparently been retrieved by pro-Iran PMF units from ISIL and, instead of turning them over to the Iraqi Army, continued to operate them. Some maintenance support was obtained, illegally, for these M1s from the Iraqi Army but repairs for major problems had to be performed at an Iraqi Army facility where American technicians carried out more complex work or shipped tanks back to the United States for a major overhaul. The Americans there noted evidence that some of these tanks had been in the possession of PMF units when they became inoperable.

Currently, ten of these U.S. technicians remain in Iraq, mainly to keep an eye on (but not repair) several dozen Iraqi M1s awaiting repairs. These M1s are also watched by American security personnel. Meanwhile, Iraq had ordered 73 Russian T-90 tanks and 36 arrived in February. The rest are to arrive before the end of April. The T-90 is one of many upgraded T-72s available. Until 2003 the Iraqi Army operated hundreds of T-72s. The T-90 has been produced in large quantities but not for Russia. It is mostly an export item. The T-90 was a 1980s project that was to incorporate T-80 features into many upgrades of the T-72. Originally it was designated the T-72BU but when Russia finally began production in 1993 it was renamed the T-90. That succeeded in making the tank an export success with most (84 percent) of those produced were for export. In fact, India and Algeria each have more T-90s in service than Russia. Worse Russia has quietly put over a third of its newly 550 built T-90s into reserve. While the T-90 was loudly proclaimed to be the next big thing the Russian army preferred the refurbished T-72s in the form of the T-72B3. These proved to be more reliable, something that got little publicity. While all the upgrades (new engine, gun, fire control and protection) made it nearly as expensive as the T-90 it was preferred by the troops and the older officers quietly agreed that it was a better tank than the new T-90/T-72BUs.

This apparently has something to do with the design of the T-72BU (trying to merge T-80 elements into the T-72 design) and the decline in manufacturing quality in Russian the defense industry after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Since the T-72B3 was introduced in 2013 it has been produced in far greater numbers than any other tank and that continues. Especially telling was how T-90s began to be taken out of service (and put in reserve) as soon as enough T-72B3s became available. At the same time, the most popular Russian tank for export customers is the T-72B (a B3 with fewer of the upgrades) and these cost nearly two million each but can be delivered in a few months after the contract is signed. The T-72B3 has been so popular with Russian troops that the government is giving it more publicity in the state-controlled mass media.

Iraqi knew of the T-90 when in 2008 they ordered and received (by 2010) 140 M1A1 tanks. Then in 2015, Iraq ordered 170 more. Delivery of those is being held up until Iraq can account for all the M1s it already has. The U.S. threatens to cut more military support, including deliveries of F-16s and other aircraft if the M1s are not recovered.

Iran says it can supply Iraq with what it needs. Iraq does not believe or want that. Iraq has seen the American equipment in action since the 1990s and has been increasingly using that stuff over the last decade. Iraqi commanders want the American weapons and equipment and the U.S. government is not cutting Iraq any slack over the missing M1s. This could get interesting. Meanwhile, Iraq is not the only Arab nation to become fond of its M1 tanks. Iraq was not the first Arab country to operate the M1 tank. Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia already operate over 1,600 of them, and Egypt has built hundreds of them (mainly using components imported from the U.S., but with some locally made parts). Iraq received the M-1A1 version. All the other Arab users have at least some of the latest model (M1A2 SEP). The Iraqis promise they will do better with their new batch of M-1s but first, they have to account for the ones they already have and so far that has not happened. But there is hope. Until about a week before the American technicians were ordered home and all support for the M1s was halted the Iraqis thought the Americans were bluffing.Since 2015 the Shia rebels have fired 108 ballistic missiles, nearly 90 percent at targets in Saudi Arabia. Most of the ballistic missiles are shorter range models aimed at targets in Asir and Jazan provinces, which border Yemen. Few, if any, have hit their intended target either because they were intercepted by Patriot missiles or were headed for an uninhabited area and ignored by the air defense system.

Iran denies any involvement with providing ballistic missiles to the Shia rebels but has, again, offered to assist the UN in persuading the Shia rebels to discuss peace terms. Iran has done this before and no one expects anything to come of it. For Iran, the Shia rebels are a low-risk/high payoff investment because it keeps their Arab enemies busy and looking bad in the media.

In the south (Aden and surrounding areas) many (at least fifty) clergy have fled the country because of the growing number of Mosque imams and preachers being murdered. Most of the dead were conservatives who supported an independent south ruled by Islamic law in cooperation with tribal leaders. There have been 25 such killings since 2016 but fifteen have taken place in the last six months. The tribes blame the Arab Coalition, especially the UAE, for the murders but there is no evidence of UAE involvement. The tribes point out that these killings benefit the UAE backed government in the south and that the dead (or fled) clerics are usually replaced (by the government) with more moderate ones.

April 10, 2018: In the northwest (Hajjah province) Arab coalition and Yemeni troops have spent the last four days advancing into coastal parts of this province which also borders Saudi Arabia. The fighting has been around the coastal town of Midi. The Shia rebels lost Midi in by June 2017 and have been trying to get it back ever since. This most recent battle has inflicted heavy casualties on the rebels because the coalition can apply lots of artillery and airstrikes.

April 9, 2018: In the southwest (Taiz province) government and Arab coalition forces continue more than a month of pushing rebels out of areas the rebels have held since 2015. The most heavily fought over area continues to be Taiz city, near the Red Sea and the current fighting concentrates on taking all the high ground surrounding the city. This is part of an operation to clear Shia rebels from most of Taiz province, especially along the Red Sea coast. Currently, the main purpose of the coastal drive is to find and eliminate rebel bases where missiles, naval mines or remotely controlled bomb boats are being stored and prepared for use against ships in the Red Sea. This is an Iranian idea, to make life more difficult for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and nations that depend on the Suez Canal to avoid taking the longer route around Africa. Hasnt worked yet but could if Iran supplied anti-ship weapons sink a tanker or large freighter.

April 8, 2018: In the northwest Shia rebels fired a short-range ballistic missile into Saudi Arabia (Asir province) at a military radar.

April 7, 2018: In the north, the Shia rebels launched a ballistic missile from Saada province towards the Saudi city of Narjan near the border. The missile was intercepted.

In the past 48 hours airstrikes on rebel bases in central Yemen (Baida province) and the north (Saada province) have killed three rebel leaders as well as destroying large quantities of weapons and ammo stored at those bases.

April 6, 2018: In the northwest (Hajjah province) Arab coalition troops from Sudan were ambushed by rebels who opened fire on several trucks carrying soldiers, killing over 30 of them. These were the heaviest losses suffered by the Sudanese troops since they arrived in 2o15. The Sudanese government said it would keep its forces in Yemen. The Sudanese troops were part of the reinforcements being sent north, from quieter areas in the south, to push the rebels away from the Red Sea.

April 5, 2018: The UN agreed to increase the inspection of ships carrying relief aid to Yemen, especially those delivering it via the Red Sea port of Hodeida. This wont stop the smuggling, which is able to get ballistic missile components and other Iranian weapons into rebel controlled areas. Enough of this stuff is intercepted to make it clear that Iran is sending weapons meant to hit targets inside Saudi Arabia or take down Saudi warplanes operating over Yemen. This stuff is getting through in large part because Yemen has always been smuggler friendly. With Iranian help (cash and diplomacy) the smuggled weapons kept the war going. This was also helped by the fact that Qatar and Oman had always been active in using Yemeni smuggling networks. But the main conduit for smuggled goods was via aid shipments. For most of 2017, the UN has been pressing the Shia rebels to peacefully give up control of the Red Sea port of Hodeida but the rebels have refused to consider this. Even proposals that Hodeida be turned over to a neutral third party are turned down. This is not a matter of trust, its a matter of survival for the rebels. In part, this is because of the smuggling. The rebels have prevented UN personnel from inspecting aid shipments (for weapons and other contraband) and the government claims the rebels have been seizing aid shipments and preventing UN personnel from verifying that the aid is going to civilians. As long as the rebels hold onto Hodeida and Iran still has powerful allies in the UN (mainly Russia and China, who can veto some measures) the smuggling can continue as can the use of food to control civilian populations that are hostile to the rebels. The government and coalition forces are now concentrating on taking Hodeida and other Red Sea coast areas held by the Shia rebels. This is working but it is slow going and has increased casualties among government and coalition forces. Some weapons are smuggled in via government controlled ports, like Aden. This involves more risk, and more bribes, to get trucks carrying aid or commercial goods, along with illegal weapons, to rebel controlled territory.

April 4, 2018: In the northwest Shia rebels fired a short-range ballistic missile into Saudi Arabia (Jazan province), apparently at Jazan city. This missile was intercepted before it could hit oil facility (mainly large oil storage tanks) it was apparently aimed at.

April 3, 2018: In Yemen Shia rebels used an Iranian missile to hit a Saudi tanker in the Red Sea as it passed near the port of Hodeida. Damage was slight. Over the last week, at least eight Iranian ballistic missiles were used in Yemen to attack Saudi Arabia. These continued to be unsuccessful, but one missile, fired at a Saudi base in Yemen did hit the target and there were casualties. The mass missile attack on Saudi Arabia did do some damage when debris from one shot down missile hit and damaged two homes. One Egyptian foreign worker was killed and two wounded. The U.S. warned a month ago that Iran is succeeding in building up a stock of anti-ship missiles, naval mines and remotely controlled bomb boats on rebel held areas of the Red Sea coast. These would threaten, as they already have, military ships maintaining the blockade as well as commercial shipping in the Red Sea (a vital sea lane for Saudi Arabia and, because of the Suez Canal, Egypt.)

March 29, 2018: In central Yemen (Baida province) an American UAV used a missile to kill four AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) members. This is the seventh UAV attack this month. The American UAV attacks continue in Yemen and many of the attacks are not announced. So far in 2018, there have been 23 attacks. As in 2017 (when there were 131 attacks), the ones in 2018 have been mainly against AQAP and ISIL camps and key personnel in central Yemen (especially Baida province). This greatly reduces Islamic terrorist capabilities in Baida, which had long been an Islamic terrorist stronghold. East of Baida province are Shabwa and Hadramawt provinces. The later stretches from the sea to the Saudi border and is largely desert. Along with Baida, these two provinces used to host most of AQAP personnel and base areas. But in the last year, AQAP has been under heavy attack by the Americans and the Arab coalition and responded by shifting more of their terror attacks to the government and Arab coalition forces. AQAP took credit for 273 attacks in 2017 and in the first six months of that year, some 75 percent of these attacks were against the Shia rebels. But in the second half of 2017 half, the attacks were against fellow Sunnis (government and coalition forces). In 2018 the remaining AQAP are mainly fighting for survival against the government and coalition forces.

March 28, 2018: In the southeast (Hadramawt province) an army checkpoint was attacked by AQAP and a dozen soldiers killed and beheaded.

March 25, 2018: Shia rebels commemorated the third anniversary of the civil war by firing seven ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia. All were aimed at cities, three at the Saudi capital and all but one was intercepted. This mass use of ballistic missiles also featured a very visible, and rare, failure of Patriot anti-missile missiles. One interception involved two Patriot missiles (to ensure the target was hit) but both Patriots failed with one exploding in the air and the other flying out of control and into the ground. All this was caught on cell phone video. Because of the multiple ballistic missiles launched a lot of Saudi were up, outside and had their cell phones. Saudi Arabia ordered 600 more PAC 3 (the anti-missile version) missiles in 2015 and has fired over 200 PAC 3s since then. Saudi Arabia has had to hire more foreign contractors to maintain their Patriot systems, which have never seen such high, and sustained use. It will probably be a few months before the report of why those two PAC-3 missiles failed. That information will be shared because there are many PAC-3 users in the region who want to know what happened.

March 21, 2018: In the north (Saada province) Shia rebels claim they shot down a Saudi F-15 operating overhead. The Saudis said an F-15 was damaged but returned safely. The F-15 was apparently fired on by a Russian R-27 air-to-air missile (previously owned by the Yemen Air Force) adapted to be fired from the ground.Japan achieved another first recently when a female naval officer (Captain Ryoko Azuma) was appointed the commander of the navys First Escort Division, which includes four warships including the 27,000 ton Helicopter Destroyer Izumo which looks like an aircraft carrier and can carry 28 helicopters. Japan has two of these ships (plus some smaller ones) which could also operate ten of the vertical takeoff F-35B stealth fighters and, as expected, Japan is now looking into doing that. While captain Azuma is the first female squadron commander she is but one of many firsts for women in the Japanese navy. It wasnt until 2008 that all female officers were allowed to serve on warships. Before that female medical officers were allowed to serve as medical officers on warships. One of those, medical officer Hikaru Saeki, n 2001 became the first female admiral in the Japanese navy. The experience with female medical officers at sea apparently played a role allowing all women to serve at sea and then the appointment of a female officer to command a squadron. In this case, the First Escort Division has a thousand sailors, three percent of them women. Overall about six percent of the Japanese navy is female. Like many other major navies, more women are being recruited in part because there is a shortage of men willing or able to do this work.

Japan is also suffering from a shrinking population and a growing shortage of working age men and women in general. Captain Azuma joined the navy in 1996, at a time when the U.S. Navy already had hundreds of female naval officers working their way into the higher ranks. Young Japanese women knew that in the mid-1970s, the U.S. Navy began letting women into Annapolis (the Naval Academy) and flight school. Some 35 years later the U.S. Navy had women commanding combat aircraft squadrons, cruisers, an amphibious task force (expeditionary strike group) and a strike group (a carrier task force.) By 2014 twelve percent of crews were female in the U.S. Navy. This came about after American women were allowed to serve on American combat ships in 1994. In most NATO countries between 5-10 percent of sailors are women, while in Britain it is 10 percent, and in the United States 16 percent.

British women have served in the Royal Navy since World War I as a separate force, the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS, or "wrens"). The U.S. Navy had a similar system, which gradually faded away by the 1970s. In Britain, the WRNS did not disappear until 1993. In the 1990s, women were completely integrated into the Royal Navy and allowed to serve on ships.

The British Royal Navy had its first female warship commander in 2012. Actually female British naval officers had commanded smaller warships and in 2012 one took command of a minesweeper squadron. But command of a major warship is a big deal. This didnt happen in the U.S. Navy until a female officer took command of a destroyer in 2002. That particular officer, Holly Graf, went on to take command of a cruiser (USS Cowpens) in 2008, but was relieved in 2010, because of complaints by officers that the captain yelled a lot and treated them cruelly. Turns out Graf had always been tough on her subordinates but that her superiors had always looked the other way (to avoid antagonizing politicians or the media), leaving Graf the impression that her rough manners were acceptable. In the end, her only punishment, aside from having to explain herself in front of several boards of officers, was to be forcibly retired at her highest rank (captain).

Over the last century, women have been increasingly a part of the military. In most Western nations over ten percent of military personnel are female. In the U.S. military, its now 15 percent. A century ago it was under one percent (and most of those were nurses and other medical personnel). More women are in uniform now because there aren't enough qualified men, especially for many of the technical jobs armed forces now have to fill.

During World War II over five million women served in the military, although they suffered fewer losses than the men, several hundred thousand did die. These women were often exposed to combat, especially when fighting as guerillas or operating anti-aircraft guns and early warning systems in Russia, Germany, and Britain. Russia also used women as traffic cops near the front line, as snipers, and as combat pilots. They tried using them as tank crews and regular infantry, but that didnt work out. Women were most frequently employed in medical and other support jobs. The few who served as snipers or pilots were very good at it.

In the last century, there have been several attempts to use women in combat units, and all have failed. When given a choice, far fewer women will choose combat jobs (infantry, armor, artillery) than will men. But duty as MPs does attract a lot of women, as do jobs like fighter, bomber, helicopter pilots and crews, and aboard warships. That works. During a major war more women are willing to carry out combat tasks, thus the large number of Russian female snipers and pilots and female irregulars (guerillas and spies) in nearly all countries. After the war, all of these women were demobilized, but not forgotten. As more nations abolished conscription in the decades after World War II it became practical to recruit women for jobs that were difficult to fill (not enough qualified men) and women were willing to undertake.The 700,000 Burmese Rohingya Moslem refugees in Bangladesh are still stuck there. The Burmese government insists that only validated Burmese residents will be allowed back and the verification process is stalled. Burma is only approving about seven percent of the names Bangladesh presents as authentic Burmese Rohingya. The repatriation back to Burma of was supposed to begin in January but continued army violence against Rohingya still in Burma made that impossible. Added to that were the administrative problems and so much more. Those Rohingya going back must do so voluntarily but there have been many reports of Rohingya refugee camp leaders putting Rohingya on the will return list even if the refugee does not want to return. This abuse of the lists may have to do with corruption or Rohingya politics. There has been some violence in the camps over this issue and others.

Back in Burma UN officials report that adequate preparations have not been made to handle a large scale return of Rohingya. A further complication is that those Rohingya willing to return want to return to their homes. If their home was destroyed (as many were during the military violence) the returnees want an opportunity to rebuild and for the government to supply money and supplies to make that possible. That would be difficult because in many of the areas Rohingya fled from local officials have treated the former Rohingya property as abandoned and available or resale and reuse. Rohingya refugees are aware of this and will not return until the government clears up the property ownership issues. That happening is considered an impossible dream by all concerned. As a result, many Rohingya refugees are seeking new homelands. Bangladesh is not considered a good candidate because the country is already crowded and poor and long the source of illegal migrants to other nations. At the moment Moslem refugees are a hard sell, even in Moslem countries. No one is willing to take a lot of Rohingya and Bangladesh does not like being stuck with these large refugee camps near the Burmese border.

Facebook The Foreign Oppressor

Facebook, a popular form of mass communications in Burma has announced that it is increasing its staff of Burmese speakers so that hate speech can be deleted. This caused an uproar in Burma where both the government and opposition groups wanted to know why a foreign company is spying on Burmese Facebook users by scanning private messages and deleting those the Americans decide are improper. Since the return of democracy in 2011 more Burmese have had access to the Internet and social media. Facebook is an international favorite and by 2016 ten million Burmese were users. Thats about a fifth of the population and since neither the government nor anyone else could censor Facebook it became the gathering place for all sorts of groups. This included the Buddhist nationalists who called for the expulsion of the Rohingya minority. Recently the head of Facebook came under growing political pressure to justify censorship of Facebook users and define exactly what criteria is used to determine what is forbidden speech. This is a contentious issue in the United States where the constitution explicitly allowed freedom of speech. Most other nations, even in the democratic West, have no such guarantees. Even so, Facebook users in other nations dont care for Facebook taking away their free speech online.

April 11, 2018: The army has sentenced seven soldiers (four officers and three NCOs) to ten years in prison for the murder of ten Rohingya men in 2017. Two Burmese journalists working for a foreign news operation (Reuters) who reported the murder were subsequently arrested (for exposing state secrets) and are still being held. The military has always been hostile to any media poking around in the north and before the new 2011 constitution journalists who ventured north would often just disappear.

April 6, 2018: In the north (Kachin State) KIA rebels raided a small army base at night and captured it. Over a dozen soldiers were captured, some of them wounded. The KIA looted the base and left the 13 wounded soldiers behind after the army sent two armed helicopters to attack the base. This is part of a KIA counter offensive against the expanded army presence in KIA controlled territory. This is a continuation of an army offensive that began at the end of 2017 to halt illegal (not paying a tax to the army) mining of amber and gold. Control of these mines helps finance the KIA, which has refused to participate in peace talks. The KIA still controls large portions of Kachin state but the army is spread thin and distracted by the Rohingya situation. Meanwhile, over 100,000 locals have been driven from their homes by the fighting and most of the gold and amber mining operations are still shut down, leaving the miners destitute. For the locals, the KIA offensive is popular. Moreover, many of the gold and amber mining operations are legitimate companies recognized by the government. The army incursion is seen as another example of the military acting like outlaws in the north.

Sometimes the rebels can do what the army does and go total outlaw. That is currently happening in nearby Shan state where two rival rebel groups, the RCSS (Restoration Council of the Shan State Army) and TNLA (Tang National Liberation Army), have been fighting for control of disputed territory. In areas where the issue has been settled many villagers driven from their homes by the fighting are reluctant to return home because the rebels have a reputation for demanding payment from locals.

April 3, 2018: In the south (Bago) a Burmese Air Force F-7 jet fighter crashed after takeoff for a training flight. The cause was a mechanical failure. The pilot ejected but was injured and later died. The F-7 is the Chinese clone of the Russian MiG-21.

March 31, 2018: In the far north (Kachin state) border guards note that India has increased patrols, particularly where the borders of India, China and Burma meet. India wants to detect new Chinese incursions into disputed Indian territory as quickly as possible so the Chinese can be confronted before they can become too established (by erecting structures and building roads). China claims much northeastern India but has no similar claims on Burmese territory.

March 30, 2018: The newly elected Burmese president said he would work to change the constitution that grants the army a lot of political power and bars Aung San Suu Kyi from running for president. The 2011 constitution gives the military control of all the security forces (police, border patrol and so on) as well as 25 percent of the seats in parliament. A few other items were added as well, like barring Aung San Suu Kyi (a key leader in the effort for forces the generals from power) from high office. Changing the 2011 constitution wont be easy, even is such a move is supported by most Burmese. The military will not surrender their constitutional privileges willingly and have been cultivating their relationship with the Chinese. But the Burmese generals really have few friends as the Chinese will do business with whoever is in power.

March 28, 2018: Chinese officials, during a meeting with leaders of the Northern Alliance (a Burmese rebel coalition that operates near the Chinese border) told the rebels that they must not cooperate with Rohingya Islamic terror group ARSA (Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army) because that group has connections to Chinese Uighur Islamic terrorists. The Chinese threat has weight behind it since the Northern Alliance survives by maintaining good relations with China and free access to China for sanctuary and a source of supplies. Northern Alliance members finance themselves by producing illegal drugs and various other illegal activities (like smuggling). The Chinese warning is mainly aimed at the AA (Arakan Army). AA leaders denied that they supported any form of religious radicalism and said they consider Rohingya Bengali people whose citizenship status is something for the Burma government to decide. In other words, the AA does not want to make an enemy of China.TICKERS: LAC

Source: Streetwise Reports (4/12/18)

Canaccord Genuity analyst Eric Zaunscherb provided an update on this company's two major assets.



In an April 8 research note, analyst Eric Zaunscherb reported that Canaccord Genuity raised its target price on Lithium Americas Corp. (LAC:TSX; LHMAF:OTCQX) to CA$12 from CA$11 per share to reflect the potential near-term upside from its Nevada project.

Production of lithium carbonate at Lithium Americas' primary asset, its interest in the Cauchari-Olaroz project in Jujuy, Argentina, is slated to start in 2020, be ramped up to 25 thousand tons per annum and ultimately, expanded to 50 thousand tons per year. Lithium Americas' partner in the fully funded project is the Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile S.A., the operator. Lithium Americas' "secondary asset should be gaining prominence as the market awaits first cash flow at Cauchari-Olaroz," Zaunscherb noted.

That secondary holding is Lithium Nevada, or the "amuse-bouche" to Cauchari-Olaroz, and it "drives our increased target price," explained Zaunscherb. "We believe that this project has scale and the potential to deliver several potentially impactful valuation catalysts while the market anticipates the main course."

Those catalysts include drill results from the 2018 program aimed at testing "the exploration upside uncovered in 2017" and a prefeasibility study in mid-2018. "Test work demonstrates the potential of a conceptual flowsheet employing acid leaching, purification and crystallization processes," the analyst added.

A recently released resource estimate at the project, for zone 1, now called the Thacker Pass lithium deposit, features "a consistent grade of 0.29% lithium (2,900 parts per meter) but a significant boost in mass and contained lithium carbonate equivalent," Zaunscherb indicated. Since the previous estimate in 2016, the Measured and Indicated resource of lithium carbonate equivalent increased 80% and the Inferred resource for the same grew 18%.

Lithium Americas is rated Speculative Buy and is trading at about CA$7.02 per share, which, Zaunscherb pointed out, is at a significant discount to the development companies under Canaccord Genuity's coverage.

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Disclosures are available here.Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif said on Thursday that Wajid Zia, who headed the Panama case investigation, will have to reveal identities of the joint investigation team (JIT) staff.

Nawaz, who was disqualified by the Supreme Court in the Panama Papers case last year, was speaking to the media outside the accountability court hearing corruption cases against him.

He had made similar remarks yesterday after leaving the courtroom.

The former premier said the Supreme Courts decision was based on the Iqama [foreign work permit] which has been proved a lie.

Basing his statements on facts revealed by Zia inside the court today during his cross-examination, Nawaz questioned identities of people whose assistance was sought by the JIT for the investigation.

"It has been revealed now that 40 people were involved in drafting the JIT report," said Nawaz, asking further who the 30 investigators and 10 staffers were.

The three-time prime minister also questioned who approved the recruitment of the JIT support staff, asserting that, "facts are pouring out of the false case after the false decision".Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Mian Saqib Nisar Thursday took notice of alleged rape of an eight-year-old girl before she was set alight in Chichawatni.

The CJP sought a report from Punjab Police inspector general (IG) within 24 hours.

The victims family and their neighbours had appealed to the CJP to provide them justice.

Earlier on Wednesday, Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif formed a committee to probe the alleged rape of a minor girl before she was set alight in Chichawatni.

Eight-year-old Noor Fatima had gone missing on Monday after she left her home to buy sweets from a nearby shop. Three hours later, the family found the girl with 90 percent of her body burnt.

She was rushed to a nearby hospital from where she was referred to the Jinnah Hospital in Lahore an succumbed to her wounds there on Tuesday.

The post-mortem report confirmed that eight-year-old Noor Fatima was raped before being burnt. The minor girl was then laid to rest amid tears and wails.

A complete shutter-down strike was observed by Anjuman-e-Tajran in Chichawatni follwing the brutal incident.

Police had arrested a suspect, identified as Imdad.India and Saudi Arabia on Wednesday signed an agreement to set up a crude-oil refinery with a capacity to process 1.2 million barrels a day in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.

State-run Saudi Aramco will hold a 50% stake in the refinery while ownership of the remaining half will be shared by three Indian state-run refiners and retailers Indian Oil Corp EQIOC -1.70% Ltd., Hindustan Petroleum Corp EQHINDPETRO -2.25% Ltd. and Bharat Petroleum Corp EQBPCL -1.99% Ltd.

Saudi oil minister Khalid al-Falih, who announced the deal along with Indian oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan, didnt disclose the investment Saudi Aramco will be making in the project, which will cost $44 billion to build.

Global oil producers are trying to establish a footprint in India, which is seen as an increasingly important engine of global demand as consumption in China slows.

Mr. Falih said Saudi Arabia has committed to supply half the crude oil to be used in the refinery and that it could bring in another international partner to the joint venture, called Ratnagiri Refinery & Petrochemicals Ltd.20 Irish Companies Pay Almost Half Of All Corporate Tax

by Jason Gorringe, Tax-News.com, London

06 April 2018

45 percent of Ireland's corporate tax take in 2017 came from 20 multinational groups, Ireland's Finance Minister has said.

Paschal Donohoe was asked to provide Parliament with information on the gross amount of corporation tax paid in 2017 by the top-10 and by top-20 multinational groups, respectively.

Donohoe said that he had been advised by Revenue that the 10 largest multinationals paid EUR3.4bn (USD3.2bn) in corporate tax in 2017. This represented 37 percent of the total gross corporation tax payments.

The top 20 multinationals paid EUR4.2bn, or 45 percent of the total.

Donohoe explained that these figures are provisional, and that Revenue will publish a detailed analysis of the most recently available corporate tax data in April.

EUR8.2m was collected in corporation tax receipts in 2017. The Government has set a target for 2018 of EUR8.5bn, an increase of almost four percent year-on-year.

The European Union has previously warned policymakers in Ireland that the country is too reliant on corporate tax contributions from a handful of large companies. As such, Ireland would be most affected by the European Commission's proposals to overhaul corporate tax rules in the EU so that multinationals are taxed more according to where they generate their revenues, rather than where they are tax resident. Notably, the Commission's proposal for a common corporate tax base would involve the division of tax revenues from multinational enterprises based on a formulary apportionment approach  for instance, based on their turnover, sales, and employment levels in different member states. Unsurprisingly, Ireland is opposed to the proposal, alongside a number of other states.India To Expand GST E-Way Bill Pilot

by Mary Swire, Tax-News.com, Hong Kong

12 April 2018

The Indian Government has provided an update on the roll-out of the e-Way Bill system, which was introduced on April 1, 2018, confirming it will be extended to another five states from April 15, 2018.

The e-Way Bill system is intended to enable goods to be sent to other Indian states without border checks, following on from the introduction of goods and services tax (GST) last year.

The regime provides that taxable persons have to declare ahead of time consignments worth at least INR50,000 (USD780) and obtain and furnish on request an "e-way bill," to eliminate the need for checks at border checkpoints between states. The system is intended to enable the removal of non-tariff barriers to trading between states, to establish a single market across India, similar to that in place in the European Union.

However, when attempting to launch the system before, on February 1, the tax agency announced the administration platform had buckled under demand, tweeting that: "In view of difficulties faced by the trade in generating e-way bill due to initial tech glitches, it has been decided to extend the trial phase for generation of e-way bill, both for inter- and intra-State movement of goods. It shall be made compulsory from a date to be announced."

At its March 10 meeting, the GST Council announced that it would be relaunched in a handful of states from April 1. By law, states have until June 30, 2018, to introduce the system.

In an April 10 update, the Indian Government said: "E-Way Bills are getting generated successfully and [as of] April 9, 2018, more than [6.3 million] e-Way Bills have been successfully generated. It is hereby informed that e-Way Bill system for intra-State movement of goods would be implemented from April 15, 2018, in the following States:

(i) Andhra Pradesh

(ii) Gujarat

(iii) Kerala

(iv) Telangana

(v) Uttar Pradesh"

"With the roll-out of e-Way Bill system in these states, it is expected that trade and industry will be further facilitated insofar as the transport of goods is concerned, thereby eventually paving the way for a nationwide single e-Way Bill system."

Affected businesses are being encouraged to enrol ahead of implementation in these states via the Government's e-Way Bill portal.Significant Changes To UK Tax Regime As Of April 6

by Jason Gorringe, Tax-News.com, London

12 April 2018

A number of changes to the UK tax regime became effective from the beginning of the new fiscal year, on April 6, 2018, including the introduction of the new Soft Drinks Industry Levy.

The aim of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy is to encourage companies to reformulate their soft drinks. According to the Government, it has already resulted in over half of manufacturers reducing the sugar content of drinks since it was announced in March 2016.

The tax is levied at:

GBP0.24 (USD0.32) per litre of drink if it contains eight grams of sugar per 100 millilitres; and

GBP0.18 per litre of drink if it contains between five to eight grams of sugar per 100 millilitres.

Another change to the UK tax regime from April 6 was an increase to the personal allowance  the tax-exempt personal income tax threshold  to GBP11,850 (USD16,820) from GBP11,500.

The Association of Tax Technicians (ATT) has released a brief to its members highlighting another change: the end of transitional arrangements that provided tax relief for salary sacrifice and flexible benefit packages agreed for employees prior to April 6, 2017. As a result, it said, some employers will need to consider if they need to recalculate the value of affected benefits, and some employees will face larger tax bills.

The ATT explained: "Transitional protections from tax which had applied to benefits provided to employees under optional remuneration arrangements (OpRA), such as salary sacrifice or flexible benefit packages made prior to April 6, 2017, came to an end last week with the start of the new tax year. The OpRA rules were introduced on April 6, 2017, to reduce the tax savings that an employee might otherwise enjoy by exchanging potential or actual salary for a more tax-efficient benefit."

"Where the OpRA rules apply, they ensure that the value of the benefit subject to tax for the employee is the higher of the earnings given up or the cash equivalent of the benefit. Arrangements entered into before April 6, 2017, were given transitional protection so that the new rules would not apply until the earlier of April 6, 2018, or the date of variation, modification, or renewal of the agreement. It is the benefits under those arrangements which may now be less tax-efficient."

Yvette Nunn, Co-chair of ATT's Technical Steering Group, said: "Employers who continue to provide flexible benefits or salary sacrifice arrangements where the arrangements were made prior to April 6, 2017, should review these to ensure that the value of any taxable benefit is calculated on the right figure. Care needs to be taken as the OpRA rules do not apply to all benefits, and some benefits get a longer period of transitional protection."

"The new rules can operate particularly harshly in some circumstances. Before April 2017, an employee who had chosen to give up salary in exchange for a mobile phone would not normally have paid any tax on the benefit of the mobile provided. This is because the provision by an employer of a single mobile phone to an employee is generally a non-taxable benefit. But now, where a mobile is provided as part of an OpRA, the employee cannot benefit from the exemption. Any such arrangement to provide a mobile phone made prior to April 6, 2017, will have been given one year's grace under the transitional provisions but will now be subject to tax from 2018-19 onwards."

"Employers need to ensure that they use the correct taxable figure when they report the benefits in kind which they have provided to employees at the end of the 2018-19 tax year. Any employer who includes taxable benefits on their payroll will need to do this very quickly, to ensure that they process the correct figure in their first salary payments for 2018-19."

Meanwhile, Fiona Bell, tax partner at RSM, the audit, tax, and consulting services provider, noted a different change of relevance for employers and their employees. She said: "Due to a lapse in EU State Aid approval, the tax reliefs for the most popular share option scheme (Enterprise Management Incentive Schemes  EMI) may not be available for options granted after April 6. HMRC confirmed this week that it has yet to receive final confirmation from the EU Commission that approval to renew the arrangement has been agreed."

"There are parameters within which the EU Commission has to respond, and HMRC was discussing the renewal process in good time, but the actual reason for this lapse in the State Aid approval is unknown. Until recently we had been told the Government was working to ensure there was no problem so it was inconvenient for companies to have just two days' notice by HMRC that State Aid approval was not going to be received in time."

"It means that any tax advantages for EMI options granted before 11pm tonight [April 6] will still apply, but there is no certainty that EMI options granted after this point will be eligible until such time as HMRC receives EU State Aid approval. Any businesses planning to issue options intended to qualify as EMI share options that are not able to meet today's deadline will need to consider delaying until the issue is resolved."

"EMI schemes have been in place of 18 years and the EU Commission has previously given approval. Businesses, particularly smaller companies, need to have the time to plan and implement key schemes and the lapse in approval and uncertainty it brings adds further operational and financial pressure for SMEs, which is not helpful within a turbulent trading environment," she said.LG Electronics has officially opened a new facility in Seoul, South Korea dedicated to working on software updates. The Software Upgrade Center is part of LG's Magok-dong campus located in western Seoul.

The new building will house developers responsible for handling updates on smartphones as well as ongoing firmware testing. Greater emphasis will be placed on checking compatibility between software and hardware before and after new releases are made.

One of the first tasks for the new team will be pushing out Android Oreo to the LG G6. Although Oreo was originally released in August 2017, it has taken time for many phone makers to push out updates to all of their devices. Google is right on top of updates since Pixel devices are not as reliant on carriers to approve software changes. Samsung has implemented Oreo on its Galaxy S8, Note 8, and newer models, but not on older devices.

Purchasing a smartphone is buying into more than just a piece of hardware. The software running on it can make or break the entire user experience. LG's CEO declares, "Stable and consistent upgrades will demonstrate to our customers that LG smartphones have long and reliable lifespans." Having properly updated software helps keep devices secure and running smoothly.

Renewed efforts to improve the user experience come at a critical time for LG. Earlier this year the company was forced to exit the Chinese smartphone market due to intense competition from rivals Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo. The upcoming G7 was also ordered to be completely revised to better meet consumer expectations, causing it to be delayed until after Mobile World Congress.Though Uber has been the center of controversy on more than one occasion, there's no denying the ride-hailing service's popularity. It provides drivers with a relatively straightforward way to pick up fares and earn an income while offering customers a level of convenience ordinary taxi services don't.

However, that doesn't mean the service is perfect. Drivers and passengers alike always assume some level of risk when they use the service - after all, both parties are essentially strangers in most cases. While most drivers and passengers are likely trustworthy individuals, Uber is looking to do more to improve the situation.

In a blog post today, Uber's Dara Khosrowshahi unveiled a few new safety-oriented features for their ride-hailing app. The first of these features is the new in-app "Safety Center," a resource that offers passengers information on Uber's driver screening process, their community guidelines, safety tips and more.

The second major feature worth noting is "Trusted Contacts." Trusted Contacts allows you to select up to five friends or family members who will receive trip details for every ride you take using the platform, essentially allowing them to keep track of your safety. If you'd only prefer to share trip details about rides you take at night, that will be a separate option.

Should an incident -- such as a robbery or car crash -- occur during an Uber drive, passengers will soon be able to dial 911 using a dedicated "emergency button" in the Uber app. Additionally, in Denver, Uber will be teaming up with RapidSOS to automatically forward a 911 dialer's location and trip details to authorities.

Finally, Uber plans to take several steps to improve their driver screening process by performing "annual reruns" to check for any new driver offenses that may have appeared in their criminal record.

It's unclear whether or not these new safety decisions will be enough to please all of Uber's passengers but it's nice to see the company taking steps in the right direction.Mercedes-Benz has announced a new car subscription program that they plan to launch in June. They are latest luxury car brand to offer a service for those car lovers who can't settle for just one model.

The program is called the Mercedes-Benz Collection and will begin with pilot programs in Nashville and Philadelphia. The company has not disclosed what models will be available for rent on the service, but there will likely be several price tiers. Users will have access to the vehicles through a mobile app and they plan to include some Mercedes-AMG models as well.

This is certainly a service for those with extra money and not enough cars. Mercedes-Benz has not announced pricing, but similar services from other luxury manufacturers cost between $2000-3000 per month.

In the luxury car market, leasing is extremely common. Edmunds conducted a study a while back and concluded that the percentage of drivers who choose to lease is up 40% in the last few years. Many view this as limiting their exposure to the used car market and getting more car for less money.

Cadillac has Book by Cadillac, Porsche has Porsche Passport, Audi has Audi on Demand, and BMW has also just launched a similar service. We saw rumors about such a program last January as Mercedes-Benz is certainly keen to get in on this growing market.Through this museum, Argentines keep alive the memory of the victims of Jorge Videla's dictatorship (1976-1981). | Read MoreThe head of the NSW police watchdog authority has warned Parliament that a government plan to restructure the NSW Crime Commission and downgrade the status of its commissioner could be "retrograde", "dangerous" and threaten its independence.

Former NSW Supreme Court judge Michael Adams, QC, who was last year appointed as the first Chief Commissioner of the new Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC), has raised the concerns in a letter to a parliamentary committee that oversees the NSW Crime Commission.

Chief Commissioner of the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, Michael Adams. Credit:Phil Carrick

In the letter to the committee, Mr Adams said the LECC "was not consulted in any way" about the proposal to restructure the Crime Commission and replace the commissioner with a chief executive.

Under the current model, the commissioner has qualifications equivalent to a Supreme Court judge.Investors must now contend with the prospect that almost any oligarch could be targeted and that any Russian asset could be tainted and plunge in value overnight. Credit:Bloomberg Deripaska has described the sanctions as "groundless, ridiculous and absurd". What is new about these sanctions is that they target the pre-existing securities, and not just new issuance. This turns the named companies into international pariah, as Rusal is discovering. It has been blackballed from the London Metal Exchange. Its listed share price on the Hong Kong exchange has fallen 58 per cent this week. Loading It is a foretaste of what lies in store for Russia's corporate elite as the Mueller investigation uncovers the whole ghastly truth about Kremlin cyber-aggression against the US political system. Whatever the White House may or may not want to do, the policy is being pushed by a wrathful Congress intent on avenging what some call a Russian Pearl Harbor.

No Americans can deal with sanctioned entities, and no Europeans can do so lightly without provoking the US Treasury under "secondary sanctions" clauses, if they have any commercial dealings with the US. Belgium-based Euroclear said immediately that it would comply. Investors must now contend with the prospect that almost any oligarch could be targeted and that any Russian asset - including sovereign bonds - could be tainted and plunge in value overnight. This risks a collective rush for the exits since nobody wants to be trapped in a fire sale. Sberbank shares are down 17 per cent over the last two days even though it is not on the list. Russian vice-premier Arkady Dvorkovich has promised to rescue sanctioned companies, implying that the state will cover the debts of private firms and state-owned companies if need be. Yet the Reserve Fund is exhausted and was shut down in December. Much of the residual $US67 billion Welfare Fund is committed. The Kremlin will have to tap the central bank's $US453 billion portfolio of foreign reserves. "If the sanctions go on long enough and the circle expands, the cushion may not be enough" warned Vedomosti. To be clear, the country is not facing an imminent financial crisis. The floating rouble acted as a shock absorber through the oil and commodity crash. Russia survived the trauma. What it faces instead is "neo-stagnation", to borrow from former British ambassador Sir Andrew Wood. It is caught in a self-feeding cycle of decline as infrastructure crumbles and young brains leave.

Loading The deep recession of 2015 and 2016 may be over but per capita income is stuck at $US8,800 and industrial wages are now lower than in eastern China - let alone Poland. The post-Soviet convergence with the West has stalled. There is no new growth model for the 21st century. The drastic plan of autarky and import substitution launched three years ago by President Putin to break dependence on commodities - 80 per cent of exports during the boom - has come to little. Reliance on foreign farm machinery was to be cut 56 per cent by 2020, and engineering equipment by 34 per cent. None of this is happening. Russia is still hostage to oil and gas. Energy provides a tolerable living for now but US shale has entirely changed of global oil industry, capping each rise in prices with a surge of new drilling. It has become a structural headwind. Russia's own production costs are rising as the old fields decline by 5 per cent a year in Western Siberia. The energy ministry warns that output could halve by 2035 unless there is a wave of investment. The coming surge of US liquefied natural gas (LNG) has deprived Mr Putin of his pricing power in Europe. He was able to charge $US12 (MMBtu) in the glory days of 2012. Today his gas fetches around $US5. By the mid-2020s, other powerful forces will be at work. Electric vehicles will probably have reached take-off; battery costs will have come down far enough to give wind and solar an edge over gas. By then the fossil industry will be looking tired.A teacher at a top Sydney private school has been refused bail after he was charged with sharing child pornography material and possessing child abuse material.

Reinier Jessurun, 52, a teacher at Newington College in Sydney's inner west, was arrested on Tuesday and appeared at Central Local Court where he was formally refused bail.

Wyvern House at Newington College. Credit:Google Maps

The Australian Federal Police, which searched premises in Edgecliff and Stanmore in relation to the case, is alleging that Mr Jessurun "used an online persona to share child exploitation images online".

In a statement emailed to parents and former students on Thursday, acting school headmaster David Roberts said "the teacher was immediately stood down pending the outcome of court proceedingsNo independent scholar of the Chappaquiddick tragedy has come forward to endorse or condemn this movie. Political journalists aren't sure what to make of it, either. And the latest book on the tragedy has an entirely different theory, that Kennedy was actually with another woman in the car and neither of them knew Kopechne was asleep in the back seat. No one from the Kennedy family or the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston agreed to talk to USA TODAY. The senator's widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, "isn't commenting on the movie, nor is his family," family spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter told USA TODAY. Kopechne's relatives also did not call back, but her aunt and her cousin wrote a column for USA TODAY saying they're happy with the "honest" movie and how it portrays her. "Chappaquiddick is an honest recounting of American history, pivotal to understanding the lengths to which those in power will go to avoid accountability, protect their power and preserve their political viability," Georgetta Potowski and William Nelson wrote.

"We were pleasantly surprised with the care the producers, writers and cast took when tackling this movie, and pleased with their portrayal of Mary Jo's character and ambitions." The basics Chappaquiddick is a tiny island off Martha's Vineyard. Late on July 18, 1969, an Oldsmobile driven by Kennedy (played by Jason Clarke), 37, careened off the ramshackle Dike Bridge, plunging upside down in Poucha Pond. Kennedy, a father of three with a pregnant wife, survived. Kopechne (Kate Mara), 28, a respected political operative, drowned. Her body was found the next morning in the back seat. The context

It happened the same week Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first Earthlings to walk on the moon -- a historic story that dominated front pages and newscasts around the world. It happened less than a year after Ted's brother, Bobby Kennedy, was assassinated as he campaigned for president. It happened less than six years after Ted's other brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas. It happened five years after Ted survived a plane crash in which his back was broken. It happened as Ted was under pressure from his party and family to run for president. The source Allen and Logan say they based their screenplay for Chappaquiddick on the official record. They say it is neither pro-Kennedy nor anti-Kennedy, it is pro-Kopechne and pro-truth.

"Even though I can be very tribal and a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, at the end of the day, the truth has no political party," Allen says. Their film (directed by John Curran) attempts to reconstruct for a too-young-to-know audience what can happen when scandal strikes in an era of three networks, no cellphones, no Internet or social media, and way more trust in authority. "It could never happen again in the same way, but now the audience's attention is so scattered by the deluge of (news), you can bury something by sheer volume," says Allen. "Our naivety was one of our greatest assets because we did not know the questions not to ask, so we didn't get bogged with conspiracy theories," says Logan. Why now?

Allen says the screenplay "started out as a character study, became a thriller and finally became a way to honor a woman who was tragically underserved and misunderstood. We wanted to finally give her a chance to be a three-dimensional human being." Logan says Kopechne's name has been "dragged through the mud for almost 50 years. This will bring to life the promising future she would have had." What happened after the crash? Kennedy called his actions on Chappaquiddick "irrational and indefensible and inexcusable and inexplicable." He said he escaped through an open window, and tried to rescue Kopechne but couldn't reach her. Panicked, he said, he sought help at the party they'd been attending.

The film shows him lying about whether he had been drinking. It also shows he delayed reporting the accident for hours. But did he really say, as he surveyed the submerged car with Kopechne inside: "I'm not going to be president"? Did he have nightmares about Kopechne whispering prayers as the water engulfs her? The cover-up The movie shows how a posse of former Camelot men, including ex-defense secretary Robert McNamara and JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen, help contain the scandal, boss around deferential local cops and school Teddy in Cover-Up 101. No autopsy, they decree, and so it goes. The nation's attention is focused on the moon while the clock runs out on newspaper deadlines and the PR team manipulates the press to "write what we want them to write."

The speech A week later, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the accident scene; he received a two-month suspended jail sentence. Then he addressed the nation. The movie shows Kennedy asking his cousin and fix-it man Joe Gargan to write a resignation speech (dramatic license, Allen acknowledges). But Ted delivers a different speech in which he admits to bad judgment and explains he was overcome by grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion and shock. He did not resign, despite Gargan's entreaties. A year later, when Kennedy ran for re-election, he won with 62 per cent of the vote. When he did run for president, in 1980, he failed to get the Democratic nomination in large part because he couldn't answer coherently when asked in a TV interview why he wanted to be president. He went on to become the long-serving and accomplished "lion of the Senate," who was widely mourned across party lines when he died of brain cancer in 2009 at the age of 77.On the other hand, there are plenty of singlets that cost a bomb, and look better than a raggedy old T-shirt that was last worn to paint the fence on the weekend, turps stains and all. And yet, the T-shirt makes it past the bouncers and the singlet-wearer is left crying at the door.

Singlets are tricky because like thongs, they can be hard to define. Once a thong has a heel, does it become a sandal? Similarly, where does a singlet stop being a singlet and start being something else, say a T-shirt, or a crop top?

Tanks, crops, racers, muscle tees, Chestys. These are all essentially words for the same thing, according to the strictest application of the clubs' draconian rules. But in reality they are quite different.

A quick search of fashion e-commerce website The Iconic shows 841 singlet and muscle tee styles for women but only 289 styles for men. So while women have more options when it comes to singlets, it seems silly that they're the only ones who should be able to wear them while enjoying a bevvy.

In the days when surf clubs tried to position themselves as a classier alternative to the local pub, the dress code made more sense. The idea was probably borne from the fact that they didn't want tradies, who back then were almost exclusively male, walking straight off the work site and into the bar. Women, on the other hand, were welcome to wear a strappy dress or top to help lift the standards (and it proved valuable eye candy).The Melbourne General Cemetery is the final resting place of thousands of Melburnians, including former Premiers and sporting stars. But there is only one grave for a king there, or should I say, the king.

The grave for Elvis Presley is arguably one of the most visited ones in the entire cemetery, although he is not buried there. When I was there last, it certainly had more flowers and tributes placed at its base than any other monument in the area.

Where was today\'s Mystery Melbourne photo taken? Credit:Craig Butt

The first with the answer were Hans (via email), Anna (via Facebook) and Dave Watson (via Twitter).

But my favourite answer comes from gun Guardian reporter Jack Latimore:Director Jordan Best's atmospherically orchestrated direction held no terror for me. Instead, I was overwhelmed by a curious fascination with the play's moral dilemma. Victoria Frankenstein (Jenna Roberts) is consumed by the passionate curiosity of the driven scientist and we are left to question the means to her end, to stop time between life and death and achieve immortality.

Playwright Selma Dimitrijevic's intention in writing Dr Frankenstein, in which her central character is the female version of Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein, is clearly noted in Canberra Repertory's program. "The feeling I wanted to create was the same one I had when I read the book  I was terrified."

From left, Jenna Roberts, Saban Berrell, Emily Pogson, Cole Hilder (standing) and Georgina Horsburgh in Dr Frankenstein. Credit:Helen Drum

By making Frankenstein a woman, confronting the strict conventions and expectations of her era, Dimitrijevic challenges the stereotype of the punctilious Victorian father (Saban Lloyd Berrell), the conforming sister, Elizabeth (Georgina Horsburgh) and Henry (Cole Hilder), a typical and compliant young Victorian gentleman.

The characters stand at the cusp of a new age, but it is Dimitrijevic's central female character who holds the promise of Percy Bysshe Shelley's sighs for a new dawn. However, in her visionary attempt to unleash the Holy Grail of eternal life, Frankenstein lifts the lid on a Pandora's box of consequences. Nature and science appear locked in moral combat. Frankenstein denies God and Faith while the hapless Justine (Emily Pogson) goes to her death because of her honest belief in the Devil.

Frankenstein's creature, played with commanding power and painful pathos by Michael Sparks, made even more awesome by Sian Phillips's excellent make-up, hurls his ironic accusations of hypocrisy at the audience in a plea for compassion and understanding.

It is to the credit of Canberra Rep and the cast and creatives of Dr Frankenstein that this production is much more than a fearful Gothic thriller, although there is homage to the tradition of frightening ghost stories and tales of the walking dead.A man has been charged over a seven-week spree of armed robberies of pizza shops in Sydney.

The robberies occurred between late November and early January in Sydney's west and inner west.

A 28-year-old man was arrested at a construction site at Pagewood just after 9am on Wednesday. Credit:NSW Police

Police allege that, in the first four incidents - in Canley Vale, Fairfield East, North Strathfield and Strathfield - a man armed with a firearm entered the restaurants, threatened staff and demanded cash.

In the fifth incident, in Wentworthville, Domino's Pizza worker Anand Singh was involved in an altercation with the man and was shot twice - in the chest and hand - before the man fled.A marriage bringing together Sydney's infamous Mehajer and Ibrahim families has ended in tears after the bride was allegedly abased with degrading terms by her husband on their honeymoon.

Court documents reveal Salim Mehajer's sister Sanaa, 22, applied for an apprehended violence order earlier this month after her short-lived marriage to 34-year-old Mouhamed Tajjour turned sour.

Mouhamed Tajjour leaves Burwood Local Court in Sydney, on Thursday. Credit:AAP

The AVO was granted against Tajjour - a former senior Nomads bikie and the cousin of Sydney underworld identity John Ibrahim - at Burwood Local Court on Thursday.

Tajjour consented to the AVO without admitting to what his wife has accused him of. The application was filed by NSW Police on behalf of Ms Mehajer.Judicial officers see a parade of human need, disadvantage and extremity before them every day. Credit:Nicolas Walker NKW

Over the last year a lot of negative coverage of the states judiciary has featured in the Victorian press. Particularly under the spotlight have been the decisions of magistrates  judicial officers who deal with the greatest volume of matters in our legal system, and who see a parade of human need, disadvantage and extremity before them every day.

Family violence, drug abuse, child abuse, mental illness, acquired brain injury, problem gambling, intergenerational poverty, homelessness, trauma and refugee experiences  these are what feature on the huge daily lists of the Victorian magistracy, for these are the drivers of crime. Far from an ivory tower, these magistrates spend each day in the trenches of human reality.

Curiously, however, the common accusation is that these magistrates are out of touch  apparently aloof and oblivious to, in this case, what is claimed is the opinion of the community. The same community that is deprived of all of the evidence that many of the most scrutinised magistrates hear, including evidence about how particular lives can be turned around  evidence that treating parties with respect will increase the likelihood that theyll abide by the law; evidence that people need support and direction to be put on a better path if theyre to stop committing crime and therefore keep the community safe.

Even more curiously, when the same community is provided with this evidence  including about the detail and context of individual cases  its members are often shown to be likely to prefer more compassion, more second chances and more lenient decisions than the judiciary itself. This is the same community that, despite its concerns about safety and crime rates, understands the value of judicial independence  the need for the judiciary to be free from the influence of other spheres, such as government or the media  when making decisions about an individuals liberty.Police in rural Victoria will be armed with semi-automatic guns because of a growing concern about terrorism in country towns.

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton and Police Minister Lisa Neville announced on Thursday that $25 million from the state budget would be allocated to arm and train 600 police officers to use long arm semi-automatic firearms.

Mr Ashton speaks to officers holding long arm firearms. These are not the exact weapons Victoria Police will use. This is still be decided. Credit:Scott McNaughton

Police said hundreds of guns would be provided to officers via the scheme but it would not amount to one weapon per trained officer.

The weapons and training will be for operational response unit officers in the CBD and selected officers in some country towns. Mr Ashton said the weapons would not be carried by officers on patrol and would only be used in high-risk situations such as terror attacks or siege incidents.Kathleen Hollingworth, the wife of former governor-general Peter Hollingworth, has been found safe and well after going missing in Melbourne's east overnight.

Kathleen 'Ann' Hollingworth and her husband former governor-general Peter Hollingworth, pictured in 2001.

Mrs Hollingworth, who goes by her middle name Ann, was found in Malvern by a friend about 7am on Friday.

She had been last seen outside her Malvern home about 9.30pm on Thursday night.

Police and State Emergency Service volunteers had scoured the area and doorknocked houses overnight with more volunteers joining the search early on Friday morning.He has been bailed to appear in Melbourne Magistrates Court on June 8.

A 49-year-old Kew man was charged on Thursday after police went public with the April 5 incident. The 15-year-old girl fled into a stranger's yard to escape the man.

A man has been charged with one count of stalking after he allegedly followed a teenage girl off a tram.

The teenager had boarded the 109 tram in Kew about 1.40pm last Thursday when she noticed a man watching her.

Feeling uncomfortable, the girl got off the tram at Surrey Hills. But police said the man saw her getting off the tram and rushed through the doors before following her down Whitehorse Road.

Detective Senior Constable Christian Arbanovski from the Victoria Police Transit Crime investigation unit said the teenager grew increasingly uncomfortable and tried to escape the man by walking down a side street.

"She's fairly panicked at this stage and she's seen the male crossing the road again to follow her down a side street," he said.

The teenager then ran to a tradesman working in a front yard who told her to hide at the back of the house.If you woke up warm and wondering what season we're in, you weren't alone.

A dust storm covered the city this morning. In some parts it was 30 degrees at 5am. Credit: Paul Jeffers

Thursday morning brought a confusing array of wild weather to the city including wild winds, a dust storm causing flight delays and temperatures as high as 30 degrees at 5am.

The dust storm was reported across Deer Park, Manor Lakes and Laverton and was moving into Footscray on Thursday morning. The State Emergency Service said a dust storm hit Ballarat and Ararat overnight.State schools are expected to receive an estimated $10 billion in extra funding from the Victorian government over the next decade as part of a major breakthrough in the Gonski 2.0 funding deal.

For the first time, Victorian Education Minister James Merlino has declared hes serious about reaching a new school funding agreement with the Turnbull government.

Education Minister James Merlino Credit:Wayne Taylor

He has promised to significantly boost Victorias contribution towards the Schooling Resource Standard  the bedrock of the Gonski review into school funding which measures how much funding each school needs to support its students.

Mr Merlino said he's prepared to lift Victorias contribution from 66 per cent, the lowest share in Australia, to 75 per cent.A woman has been arrested over an alleged road rage assault in which another woman had her nose broken.

The arrest comes after 58-year-old Ellenbrook woman Sonja was assaulted following a crash near a roundabout on the Broadway and Elmridge Parkway on Monday afternoon.

She was driving her white Hyundai TQ van when she collided with a green Holden Commodore.

Sonja told 9 News Perth both cars pulled over immediately after the crash, and the woman walked to the driver's side window.A Canberra mother who lost her son to mental health and prescription drugs has questioned delays to real-time prescription monitoring in the ACT, and called for it to be mandatory for all doctors.

Ann Finlay lost her son, Paul Fennessy, in January 2010 to a prescription drug overdose, leading to a seven-year battle for an coronial inquest into his death, which was completed in August last year.

Ann Finlay has questioned delays to a long-awaited real-time prescription drug monitoring system in the ACT. Credit:Rohan Thomson

In the three years before his death, Mr Fennessy accessed 150 prescriptions from 18 different Canberra doctors, a period chronicled in The Canberra Times' investigative podcast Losing Paul.

The Coroner, Margaret Hunter, recommended the territory government implement a real-time prescription monitoring system urgently so both doctors and chemists could see red flags if a patient was accessing too many medications.Espiritu Santo: Yango Wilsons mother is of Chinese descent, his father a native of Vanuatu. Growing up, the 25-year-old cattle station manager was treated like anyone else.

But in recent years, there has been a large and swift influx of Beijing money, investment and short-term workers into Vanuatu, provoking widespread anti-Chinese resentment.

"The newer Chinese and the older ones mostly stay separate," he said.

Yango Wilson, the operations manager of Milai Vanuatu cattle farm on Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Yet for the long-term, multigenerational Chinese communities of Vanuatu, attitudes towards them have been hardening.The prospect of constant sniping from Tony Abbott on migration is more proof of the lust for destruction within a federal Coalition that is struggling so badly to offer the stable government it promised at the last election.

No issue has the power to divide Australians like a call to turn away migrants. Anxiety about population growth is a force that cannot be contained once it is unleashed. Knowing this, the political leaders of the past agreed on bipartisan policy for decades.

Illustration: Simon Letch

The implications for Malcolm Turnbulls leadership are plain. Abbott used energy policy to create constant friction within the Coalition last year and is using the population debate to intensify those tactics this year.

This is an irresistible issue for the conservative base but it could break the settled bipartisan approach to migration. What hope is there for an agreement in Canberra when the governing party cannot agree with itself?Coalition MPs feeling the political heat over housing affordability say the battle to bring down prices is not over, with one predicting a "war to come" unless the Turnbull government takes decisive action in the May budget.

In a rebuke of the budget's expected focus on income tax cuts and infrastructure spending, Liberal MP John Alexander told Fairfax Media that Treasurer Scott Morrison should tighten restrictions on foreign home ownership, place further curbs on investors, and allow Australians to part-own houses and apartments under a government-backed scheme.

Mr Alexander said the high cost of housing "needed to be proactively addressed rather than waiting for a war to come".

Housing affordability was nominated by voters in a Roy Morgan survey released on Tuesday as one of the top economic issues facing the country.Delhi: She was an eight-year-old girl who, while grazing her horses in a meadow in northern India in January, followed a man into the forest. Days later, Asifa Bano's small, lifeless body was recovered there.

Police say that Asifa was given sedatives and, for three days, was raped several times by different men. Asifa was eventually strangled on January 17, something police say would have happened sooner had one man not insisted on waiting, so that he could rape her a final time.

To ensure she was dead, Asifa's killers hit her twice on the head with a stone, according to charging documents filed by police in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and published by the Indian news website Firstpost.

Asifa Bano.

In the months since, Asifa's death has brought anguish to Kathua, the small town where she was killed. But it's also brought division. Asifa's case is the latest example of India's religious friction: as some denounce sexual violence and demand justice for Asifa's family, others demand justice for the men accused.Jakarta: Asia-Pacific nations should be wary about accepting big loans from China to build infrastructure, the World Bank's chief economist for East Asia and the Pacific, Sudhir Shetty, has suggested.

China has been lending billions of dollars to Asian and Pacific countries as part of its Belt and Road Initiative  a massive series of projects designed to revive old land and sea routes linking south-east Asia, Africa, Europe and China to facilitate trade and grow Beijing's strategic influence.

Phillip Ryan, CEO of Northern Island stevedoring company limited, at the under-performing new, Chinese-funded wharf in Luganville on Santo island, Vanuatu, on Wednesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

But Dr Shetty delivered a blunt warning to Asia-Pacific nations, saying the BRI initiative was very ambitious, and that some of the infrastructure projects planned would only be promising "as long as there are safeguards in place to ensure that good projects are selected".

Concerns included the amount of debt some nations have signed up to.May recalled ministers from their Easter holiday to debate action over what she has cast as a barbaric poison gas attack in Douma, then rebel-held, just east of the capital Damascus. There were signs, though, of a global effort to head off a direct confrontation between Russia and the West. The Kremlin said a crisis communications link with the United States, created to avoid an accidental clash over Syria, was in use. Frants Klintsevich, a senator who's a member of the upper house's defense and security committee, says Russia is counting on cooler heads to prevail. "If these strikes start, it could end very tragically and it's impossible to predict the outcome - that's the nature of military actions," Klintsevich said in a phone interview in Moscow.

"There are no madmen [among the US military top brass] - these are professionals who aren't populists and know what this could lead to," he said. There was no direct word from Russian President Vladimir Putin on the crisis, though he discussed the situation with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan by phone on Thursday, Interfax news agency said. The Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow sought no escalation of the situation, but that it could not support "dishonest accusations" and it had found no evidence of a chemical weapons attack in Douma. Statements from Washington have been militaristic, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, and threats by the United States and France were a violation of the UN charter. 'Germany will not take part': Merkel

Meanwhile, Germany says it will not join any military strikes against Syria in response to the suspected poison gas attack, but that it supports Western efforts to show the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable, Chancellor Angela Merkel said. "Germany will not take part in possible - there have not been any decisions yet, I want to stress that - military action," Merkel said after meeting Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen in Berlin. "But we support everything that is being done to show that the use of chemical weapons is not acceptable," she added. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, and the Prime Minister of Denmark Lars Loekke Rasmussen, right, shake hands after a meeting at the chancellery in Berlin. Credit:AP In Dublin, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Germany expects to be consulted before any Western allies conduct an attack on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces as the allies must be united on the matter.

Naval manoeuvres Syria's military has repositioned some air assets to avoid missile strikes, US officials said. Locating them alongside Russian military hardware might make Washington reluctant to hit them. Russia, Assad's most important ally in his seven-year-old war with rebels, said it had deployed military police in Douma on Thursday after the town was taken over by government forces. "They are the guarantors of law and order in the town," RIA news agency quoted Russia's defence ministry as saying. Assad said any Western action "will contribute nothing but an increase in instability in the region, threatening international peace and security", Syrian state TV reported.

The Russian military said it had observed movements of US Navy forces in the Gulf. Any US strike would probably involve the navy, given the risk to aircraft from Russian and Syrian air defences. A US guided-missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, is in the Mediterranean. Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing the troops at the Hemeimeem air base in Syria in December 2017. Credit:AP Moscow's ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, warned on Wednesday any US missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted. The Syrian conflict has increasingly widened the rifts between Moscow, Washington and European powers and inflamed the bitter rivalries that run across the Middle East. Syria and its allies Russia and Iran say reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers in Douma and have accused the United States of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the government.

Nervous world stock markets showed signs of recovery after Trump signalled military strikes might not be imminent. Israeli air strike Syria, Iran and Russia say Israel was behind an air strike on a Syrian air base on Monday that killed seven Iranian military personnel, something Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone on Wednesday and urged him to do nothing to destabilise Syria. Netanyahu's office said: "The Prime Minister reiterated that Israel will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria." Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said the Western threats were "based on lies" about the poison gas assault, after meeting Assad. He said later he hoped Syria's army and its allies would drive US troops out of eastern Syria, and take Idlib in the northwest from rebels.

Assad, left, meeting with Ali Akbar Velayati in Damascus on Thursday. Credit:SANA via AP Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he had spoken to Trump on Wednesday and would speak to Putin on Thursday night about the chemical attack. May has ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military that could begin as early as Thursday night, London's Daily Telegraph newspaper said on Wednesday. The BBC reported that May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in military action. She would not seek approval from Parliament, the BBC said. Opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Parliament must be consulted.A Chicago aviation security officer, fired last year for his part in dragging David Dao off a United Airlines flight, is suing the city, saying his employers were negligent because they didn't provide him with proper training to deal with passengers who are difficult to remove from a plane.

James Long also alleged in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, that United, also named in the action, should have known that summoning officers to the plane would "require the use of physical force."

The United Airlines incident in April with Dr David Dao made global headlines. Credit:Facebook

A spokesman for the City of Chicago said he could not comment because the city had not been served with the suit. A United spokeswoman also declined to comment because the airline had not received a copy of the suit.

Long and another officer were fired last year. A report by the Chicago inspector general found that excessive force was used in removing 69-year-old Dao from the flight on April 9, 2017. The report said a non-life-threatening situation was turned into the "physically violent and forceful removal of a passenger."Despite being on a plane out of the US, Ms Abdel-Magied said officials still had her passport and would not return it until she arrived in Amsterdam. "Roughly three hours since touch down in Minneapolis, Im on a plane back," she tweeted. "Well, guess that tightening of immigration laws business is working, despite my Australian passport. Were taking off now. What a time." Fairfax Media has contacted Ms Abdel-Magied for comment.

The former Queensland Young Australian of the Year was due to appear at two events for the PEN America World Voices Festival. The first talk, titled The M Word: No Country For Young Muslim Women, was set to feature Ms Abdel-Magied and US author Amani Al-Khatahtbeh discussing the difficulties of being young Muslim women in Western countries. Yassmin Abdel-Magied posted an Instagram story after being put on a plane out of the US. Credit:Instagram The second event is a panel discussion about how to counter online hate and the womens experience with it. PEN America chief executive Suzanne Nossel said festival organisers were "dismayed" Ms Abdel-Magied had been denied entry to the US.

"We call on Customs and Border Patrol to admit her to the US so that she can take her rightful place in the urgent international conversation to take place at the festival next week." Ms Abdel-Magied on the wrong visa, US Customs says US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said all travellers must have a valid visa to enter the US, but that did not guarantee entry into the country. A CBP officer at the port of entry will conduct an inspection to determine if the individual is eligible for admission under US immigration law and possesses valid documents for their purpose of travel, the CBP said in a statement. During the inspection, CBP officers determined this individual did not possess the appropriate visa to receive monetary compensation for the speaking engagement she had planned during her visit to the United States.

As such, she was deemed inadmissible to enter the United States for her visit, but was allowed to withdraw her application for admission. The CBP said Ms Abdel-Magied was not banned from entering the US in the future and could reapply for a visa for later visits. According to the US Department of State, activities allowed on the B1/B2 visitor visa include consulting with business associates, attending a scientific, educational, professional, or business convention or conference or holidaying. Paid performances are not permitted on that visa. However, Ms Nossel said Ms Abdel-Magied had travelled on that visa previously.

"We understand that Yassmin was travelling on a type of visa that she had used in the past for similar trips without issue," Ms Nossel said in a statement. Ms Nossel said the very purpose of the festival - to promote open expression around the world - was "in jeopardy". "Efforts at visa bans and tightened immigration restrictions threaten to choke off vital channels of dialogue," she said. So far, Ms Abdel-Magied has been able to see the lighter side of her deportation situation. "Funniest thing is that throughout this whole ordeal all I am thinking about is what a good story this would make," she tweeted.

"We all have ways of dealing with situations." Abdel-Magied's case unusual: minister Australia's Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, Alan Tudge, told Sky News that, while he did not know exactly why Ms Abdel-Magied had been denied entry, deportation of Australian citizens was rare. "Obviously these are decisions of the United States government, but at the end of the day it is unusual for an Australian citizen to not be granted a visa to go into the United States," he said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the department was aware of the incident. "The decision on who can enter the United States is a matter solely for the US Government," they said in a statement. "The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade stands ready to offer consular assistance to any Australian citizen should they request it." Ms Abdel-Magied moved to London after her Anzac Day social media post, "Lest We Forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine ...)" led to a massive public backlash. In November last year, in her first Australian television appearance since she moved overseas, she told The Projects hosts the reaction was surreal.Washington: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that regulation of social media companies was "inevitable" and disclosed that his own personal information had been compromised by malicious outsiders. But after two days of congressional testimony, what seemed clear was how little Congress seems to know about Facebook, much less what to do about it.

Cardboard cut outs of Mark Zuckerberg welcome him to the US Capitol where he testified for five hours on Tuesday. Credit:New York Times

House lawmakers aggressively questioned Zuckerberg on day 2 about user data, privacy settings and whether the company is biased against conservatives. As they did in the Senate a day earlier, both Republicans and Democrats suggested that regulation might be needed, but there was no consensus and few specifics about what that might look like - or even what the biggest problems are.

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New Jersey Reprepresentative Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the panel and a 30-year veteran of the House, said at the beginning of the hearing that he planned to work on legislation but was pessimistic that Congress would pass anything.Benedict Cumberbatch will star in the New York premiere of Letters Live, running May 18-19 at Town Hall.

Letters Live celebrates the enduring power of literary correspondence by inviting brilliant actors to perform remarkable and unforgettable letters to a live audience. Additional celebrity cast members will join Cumberbatch for these events. Some will be announced beforehand; the rest will be a surprise.

Inspired by Shaun Usher's international best-selling Letters of Note series and Simon Garfield's To the Letter, Letters Live premiered in December 2013 at the Tabernacle in London. Each show always features a completely different array of great performers, reading remarkable letters written over the centuries and from around the world.Rebel Theatrical Management, in association with the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, has announced the cast and the creative team for the New York premiere of Little Rock, a new play written and directed by Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj. Performances will run from May 30-September 8 at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture. The production's press opening is set for June 14.

The cast of will feature Rebekah Brockman (Bridge of Spies), Justin Cunningham (The Winter's Tale), Brandon Gill (Too Heavy for Your Pocket), Charlie Hudson III (A Raisin in the Sun), Crystal Lucas-Perry (Ain't No Mo'), Quentin Mare (The Good Fight), Ashley Robinson (A Clockwork Orange), Stephanie Umoh (Ragtime), and Shanice Williams (NBC's The Wiz Live) making her New York stage debut.

The creative team for Little Rock includes Darryl G. Ivey (music director), Rasean Davonte Johnson (scenic design), Leslie Bernstein (costume Design), Anshuman Bhatia (lighting design), Lindsay Jones (sound design), Wendall K. Harrington (projection design), Robert Westley (fight direction), and Nikkole Salter (dramaturg). The production stage manager is Giles T. Horne.

Little Rock tells the true story of the Little Rock Nine, the first black students to attend their city's formerly segregated Little Rock Central High School three years after the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ruled separating students based on race was unconstitutional. What began as their quest for a better education soon became a national crisis, igniting the passions of a divided country and sparking a historic fight for justice in the Jim Crow south. On the cusp of the Civil Rights movement, a changing world watched as these nine children from Arkansas battled for their rights, armed with only a notebook and pencil.

Little Rock received a developmental production as part of the 2011 New Works Festival at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, California. It went on to receive a production in 2014 at Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, where it won the 2015 Barrymore Award for Outstanding Ensemble.

For tickets and more information, click here.Find these stories and more in the April 12 issue of The Carillon.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 11/4/2018 (1267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Find these stories and more in the April 12 issue of The Carillon.

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Humboldt in their hearts

Sports editor Terry Frey shares how the Steinbach Pistons have begun moving towards the resumption of the MJHL playoffs, put on hold by Friday's tragedy.

On the farm

Reporter Jordan Ross talks with a filmmaker focused Mennonites and farming from different perspectives around the world.

Not so fast

Reporter Dave Baxter shares why a local mental health expert has concerns about impending marijuana legalization.Donald Trump. Photo: Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images

Its not often that I read a story about Donald Trump  the multi-millionaire president of the United States, alleged sexual harasser, and onetime Sharper Image steak-pusher  and think Ah, yes. This is relatable. But when I read the New York Times story about how poorly the president has been handling the FBIs raid on the home and offices of his lawyer, Michael Cohen, I thought, Ah, yes. This is relatable.

According to the Times, the president had already been in a bad mood for some time when the FBI raided Cohens office at 30 Rock on Monday. That weekend, the Grouchy boy-in-chief was reportedly bent out of shape about a Fox News report about the countrys deep state  a cabal of power players that secretly controls the government. He reportedly consoled himself, as we all do when were frustrated, by isolating himself, eating a lot, and watching hours of TV.

Granted, the food wasnt pad thai from Seamless, it was (presumably overcooked steaks) from his Trump International Hotel, and the TV wasnt old episodes of Gilmore Girls, it was Fox News, but otherwise, this is an extremely relatable reaction.

Since Mondays raid, sources say the president has been bitching and moaning and losing his shit. It is unclear if the food and TV have helped at all. Maybe he has something hidden in that lumpy coat of his that will make him feel better.The first and only time jurors heard Yoselyn Ortega speak, she was undermining herself.

Seated next to her lawyers in court on Monday, the murder defendant buried her face in her hands and cried when prosecutors played a video of her saying she never hallucinated, and expressing surprise that she had ever claimed to. The former nanny is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity for the 2012 murders of Lucia and Leo Krim, ages 6 and 2. Her defense rests on a theory that Ortega was psychotic and dissociated when she killed, with kitchen knives, the two children she once she cared for. But in a bizarre twist, a video filmed during a psychological assessment in 2016  four years after the crime, and months after her lawyers announced they would use an insanity defense  shows Ortega emphatically denying critical psychiatric claims that her defense has spent the last month trying to validate in court.

Ortegas lawyers admit she killed the children, but argue that she was too ill to understand the consequences or morality of her actions. Two forensic psychiatrists testified that Ortega believed she was under the Devils control when she slashed a 2-year-olds throat and stabbed a 6-year-old to death. To prevent the defense from proving Ortega didnt understand her actions, prosecutors point to behavior that seems to indicate a disgruntled child-care provider who went to work with a plan to kill: Ortega left insurance cards, legal documents, and bank statements in an envelope for her sister; hung a pocketbook filled with valuables on her sons bedroom door; and altered her routine so she would be alone with the kids in the apartment. In the days after the crime, Ortega aired workplace grievances. When Ortega later opened up to psychiatrists, she downplayed those complaints, and described a long struggle against demonic voices commanding her to kill. But in the video presented by prosecutors, she denied hearing voices, and claimed the childrens mother, Marina Krim, had humiliated her.

She said at no point during that day did she experience hallucination or hear any command hallucination to kill, Dr. Ali Khadivi, the forensic psychologist who performed that assessment, said during Mondays testimony. During the most damning portions of the video, the camera is tight on Ortegas face. Offscreen, Khadivis voice asks about being possessed by the Devil. Ortega furrows her brow and shakes her head as though hearing a ridiculous claim for the first time. Her face is an exaggerated version of an expression I have seen on many onlookers at her trial. Its a look of disbelief and bafflement, with an undercurrent of horror, disdain, and disgust. Its a look that says, I am listening to something totally crazy.

When I watched the video, I felt my face slide into a similar expression. Why would she say or think this? Because shes crazy, another reporter said with a shrug. If her reactions were genuine, it would suggest she has at least two separate and internally consistent understandings of her personal history, self-perception, and relationship with the Krims. But if her reactions were fake, that would, in the colloquial sense of the word, also be crazy: Why deny hallucinations after long reporting otherwise, when your lawyers are building an insanity defense? Dr. Khadivi examined Ortega after she rejected a pre-trial offer from Judge Gregory Carro for 30 years to life in prison in exchange for a guilty plea  an offer generous enough that Assistant District Attorney Stuart Silberg objected to it. But she still wanted to plead not guilty. Soon thereafter, she undermined her own case.

A seasoned forensic psychologist, Dr. Khadivi testified that Ortegas considerable unreliability and gross inconsistencies suggest she had feigned psychosis. But Dr. Khadivis most memorable contributions to this trial are not the things he said, but how Yoselyn Ortega reacted to them, both on video and in court. In the video, Ortega denies not just her hallucinations, but any memory of speaking to Dr. Phillip Resnick, the legendary forensic psychiatrist whose forensic analysis has influenced the cases of Jeffrey Dahmer, Casey Anthony, the Unabomber, and Timothy McVeigh. Dr. Resnick examined Ortega twice in 2013 and later testified on her behalf. In court last week, he said he believes Ortega is not lying about hearing voices and feeling transformed by the Devil. Resnick believes she lacked substantial capacity to organize her mind and carry out a meaningful deliberate intention, due to a combination of psychosis and dissociation.

Dr. Khadivi believes otherwise. After examining Ortega and reviewing her medical records and other evidence from the case, he concluded that Ortega was feigning psychosis. During his trial testimony, he implied that she switched to feigning amnesia for her interview with him. Dr. Khadivi believes Ortega suffers from anxiety and depression, which could explain some distortions of reality. He also said Ortega has low cognitive ability, which he tested during a series of neuropsychological exams. Ortega described a history of hallucinations many times, to many people, in a variety of medical states and physical places, Dr. Khadivi said. She retained other memories from those times and places, Dr. Khadivi testified, and showed no signs of reticence or delusional thinking during their time together  even though medical records suggested shed been refusing antipsychotic medication for months.

Three forensic psychiatrists have testified at this trial  one for the prosecution and two for the defense. (Dr. Karen Rosenbaum worked alongside Resnick.) All three quoted and summarized numerous statements Yoselyn Ortega made to them, as did doctors who treated Ortega in the hospital after the crime. But since most of them spoke to Ortega through interpreters, they were actually quoting a person who was quoting Ortega. And since each doctors analysis included material culled from other doctors reports  as well as police reports, statements from loved ones, and other material featuring layers of interpretation  testimony on a defendants state of mind sometimes can feel like a game of telephone.

Ortegas hospital-bed rant about being overworked, for instance, was obtained at a time when Ortega could not audibly speak. (She damaged her vocal cords while stabbing her neck.) NYPD Sergeant Yoel Hidalgo was guarding Ortega two days after the crime when she awoke and seemed to initiate communication. Hidalgo, who is a native speaker of Spanish, described the process as laborious. Ortega mouthed words, gestured, and pointed at an alphabet board; Hidalgo wrote down her words, sometimes showing his notes to her for confirmation. His only instruction was to write down everything Ortega freely said.

Some of Hidalgos notes are in the original Spanish, but sometimes he translated her words into English in his head, and wrote that down instead. Ortegas headline-grabbing accusation that I had to do everything and take care of the kids is among the sentences that Hidalgo wrote entirely in English. Hidalgo started his testimony with a clear voice and square posture. Defense lawyer Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg laid into him, scrutinizing every communicative choice at length, demanding explanations for every dot and squiggle in his notes, and quizzing him on spelling. By the time she finished, Hidalgo was slumped in his chair and speaking quietly. I cant hear, Van Leer-Greenberg called out, theatrically cupping her ear.

During the trial, Ortega sits at a table with her two lawyers and an interpreter who translates English to Spanish for her, in a whisper. (When witnesses testify in Spanish, the interpreter moves to the witness stand.) She converses quietly with mother-son lawyers Valerie and Evan Van Leer-Greenberg, often without an interpreters help. She exchanges brief words with the court officers who walk her in and out of court in handcuffs, and deliver water to her in a plastic cup. (Once, she raised a plastic cup to Valerie and said, Salud.) She sometimes scoffs, and occasionally comments under her breath. (Never said that, she growled, in English, during a fellow nannys testimony, also in English.) But those utterances are not on the record, nor are they part of the evidence the jury will be instructed to consider when deciding this case. For the jurys purposes, the only utterances that have come directly from Ortegas lips are the ones in Dr. Khadivis video  and even they are provided with oral translation, provided by a Spanish-speaking psychologist who interpreted for the English-speaking Khadivi.

The most damning parts of the video require no translation. No, Ortega says every time she is asked about prior descriptions of psychosis. No, no, no.Donald Trump. Photo: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Just a few months after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States, the National Enquirer paid doorman Dino Sajudin $30,000 in exchange for the rights to a rumor he had heard that Trump fathered an illegitimate child with one of his former employees at Trump World Towers, AP reports.

Sajudin, a doorman at Trump World Towers in New York City, reportedly signed the deal in November 2015. In addition to the money he received for signing over the rights to the story in perpetuity, the contract subjected him to a $1 million penalty if he told anyone about the rumor or the terms of his deal with the Enquirer. The company allegedly released Sajudin from the deal after Trumps election.

Dylan Howard, Chief Content Officer at American Media Inc (AMI)  the parent company of the Enquirer, whose publisher, David Pecker, is an outspoken Trump supporter  told the AP that the company paid the doorman, because if the tip proved to be true, it would sell hundreds of thousands of magazines. But according to RadarOnline, another AMI publication, after four weeks of reporting the story, the Enquirer determined it was not true. According to the AP, however, sources told them the motivation behind quashing the story may have been more nefarious:

The Enquirer staffers, all with years of experience negotiating source contracts, said the abrupt end to reporting combined with a binding, seven-figure penalty to stop the tipster from talking to anyone led them to conclude that this was a so-called catch and kill  a tabloid practice in which a publication pays for a story to never run, either as a favor to the celebrity subject of the tip or as leverage over that person.

The AP says they cannot determine whether the rumor is true, and that the woman in question denies shed ever had an affair with Trump.

This is the second report of the Enquirer paying sources to kill potentially damaging stories about Trump. In March, former Playboy model Karen McDougal claimed AMI paid her $150,000 in 2016 to keep quiet about her alleged 2006 affair with the president.

Read the full report here.

Updated, 04/12/2018, 4:00 p.m.:

Thursday afternoon, CNN producer Sonia Moghe tweeted the following statement from Dino Sajudin:

The former TT doorman stands by his story of Trumps alleged affair. pic.twitter.com/QkY8RBfYnB  Sonia Moghe (@soniamoghe) April 12, 2018A persons looks at a cellphone displaying virtual currencies exchange rates at La Maison du Bitcoin in Paris on Jan. 17, 2018. (GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP/Getty Images)

Australian Money-Laundering Watchdog Moves to Regulate Cryptocurrency Providers

SYDNEYAustralia has brought the countrys cryptocurrency providers under the purview of its financial intelligence unit, a move it hopes will help minimize the risk of money laundering, terrorism financing and cybercrime.

Effective immediately, all so-called digital currency exchange providers with operations in Australia must register with AUSTRAC, the government agency said in a statement.

The change is part of the first stage of reforms to strengthen the countrys Anti-Money Laundering And Counter Terrorism Financing Act (AML/CTF).

It comes months after AUSTRAC initiated a lawsuit against Commonwealth Bank of Australia for breaches of money laundering laws.

The AML/CTF Act requires all regulated entities such as banks and money transfer operators to collect information to establish a customers identity, monitor transactions, and report activity that is suspicious or involves cash over A$10,000 ($7,755).

AUSTRAC now has increased opportunities to facilitate the sharing of financial intelligence and information relating to the use of digital currencies, such as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, with its industry and government partners, chief executive Nicole Rose said.

The information that these businesses will collect and report to AUSTRAC will have immediate benefit in the fight against serious crime and terrorism financing.

The changes come more than two years after global watchdog Financial Action Task Force (FATF) found significant deficiencies in Australias anti-money laundering framework.

The next and more challenging phase of legislative reforms in Australia will be to extend the rules to lawyers, accountants, real estate agents and dealers in high-value goods.

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Kangaroo Attacks CyclistBritain's Secretary of State for International Development Penny Mordaunt speaks to Reuters reporter during her visit to a rehabilitation centre in Rusaifa city, Jordan, April 10, 2018. (Re/Muhammad Hamed)

Britain to Expand Aid for Syrian Refugees

AMMANBritain is stepping up humanitarian aid in Syria and in neighboring countries where millions of refugees have found shelter, International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt said on Tuesday.

Mordaunt said Britain was seeking ways to get more humanitarian aid to civilians in besieged opposition-held areas where the Syrian government has made it hard for NGOs to deliver supplies.

Western officials and NGOs bemoan the Syrian governments repeated use of long sieges and military offensives to push rebels to surrender densely populated strongholds.

My role is to relentlessly call for a cease in hostilities and that we get the humanitarian access we need, Mordaunt said in an interview with Reuters. Its incredibly difficult to get medical supplies and equipment in, even when a ceasefire is agreed.

Britain is a major Western donor to the Syrian crisis with over 2.46 billion pounds ($3.48 billion) committed in humanitarian funding to the region.

Mordaunt said that what appeared to be a chemical weapons attack that killed dozens in rebel-held Douma on Saturday should not deflect attention from the suffering endured by Syrians for an extremely long time.

She said discussions were ongoing over a possible military response by Britain and its allies that would prevent repeats.

As well as holding people to account and as well as responding when appalling things happen, we must also remember those individuals who are still in the firing line, she added. My role is to try and protect those people as much as we can.

Mordaunt said a meeting for international donors and host governments in Brussels this month to try urgently to cover a funding shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars would seek to help the neighbors suffering the fallout from Syrias war.

We obviously need to keep commitments high  We are here for the long term and we are going to be supporting Jordan and the others who are shouldering a huge burden, she said.

Officials say British aid money has helped to revamp schools and rehabilitation centers in Jordan, for the benefit of both Jordanians and Syrian refugees.

After more than seven years of war, some 5 million people have fled to neighboring states, including around 1.3 million to Jordan, and an estimated 6.3 million are displaced from their homes across Syria.

By Suleiman Al-Khalidi

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Media Tries to Implicate Trump in Syria Chemical AttackA sign towards Salisbury District Hospital is seen after Yulia Skripal was discharged, in Salisbury, UK, April 10, 2018. (Reuters/Peter Nicholls)

Chemical Inspectors Confirm UK Findings on Nerve Agent

THE HAGUE/LONDONTesting by four laboratories affiliated with the global chemical weapons watchdog have confirmed British findings on the nerve agent used in last months attack on a former Russian spy in England, a summary of the findings published on Thursday, April 12, showed.

British Prime Minister Theresa May said on March 12 that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia had been poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent from the Novichok group of poisons, developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which collected its own samples in the city of Salisbury at Britains request, did not assign blame for the attackin which Russia has denied involvementor specifically name the chemical agent. But it said it agreed with the UKs findings on the identity of the nerve agent.

The results of analysis by OPCW-designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people, it said.

A police officer was also taken ill after helping the Skripals.

The results will be discussed at an emergency OPCW session next Wednesday, to be convened at Britains request.

Testing by the OPCW laboratories also found the substance to be of a high purity, which supports the British governments assertion that a state was involved.

The laboratory results, which came in on Wednesday night, were to be circulated to OPCWs members on Thursday.

Yulia Skripal, who was released from hospital on Monday, said in a statement she was suffering from the effects of the poisoning, while her father remained seriously ill. She said she was declining an offer of assistance from the Russian embassy

There are several variants of Novichok, a binary weapon containing two less toxic chemicals that when mixed react to produce a poison several times more lethal than sarin or VX.

Russias ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko, has identified the alleged poison as Novichok A-234, derived from an earlier version known as A-232.

By Anthony Deutsch

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Putin Responds to Speculation of New Cold WarChinese Regime Forces Xinjiang Residents to Download Spying App, Which Has Ability to Track and Censor Users, Report Says

When news emerged last July that residents in Xinjiang, located in the northwestern frontiers of China, were required to install a surveillance app on their mobile phones, it drew the attention of the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a U.S. government-funded program that researches and develops internet freedom technology.

On April 9, the OTF published an analysis of the apps tech capabilities, revealing the great breadth with which the app can track and monitor a phone users activities.

In July 2017, Radio Free Asia (RFA) first reported that authorities in the Tianshan district of Urumqi City, the capital of Xinjiang, had issued a notice to residents requesting that all Android phone users in Urumqi download an app called Jingwang Weishi, which translates to defender of a clean internet in Chinese.

The app was developed in conjunction with Urumqi police and a Chinese tech company, according to a copy of the notice obtained by RFA.

The app is able to detect harmful audio, video, photos, ebooks, and other electronic files related to violence, terror, and illegal religions, it said. The app then prompts the user to delete the files. If the user does not delete them promptly, the user will be held responsible by law.

The region of Xinjiang has long been the subject of iron-fisted suppression by the Chinese regime. In recent years, violence between the Uyghur ethnic minority and Han Chinese, who are the ethnic majority in China, has been met with harsh police tactics.

Xinjiang residents are subject to surveillance in their everyday livesfrom constant security presence in public areas, to requirements to register their ID information for store purchases. In recent months, residents have been detained in political education centers, where they are forced to view propaganda content promoting the regimes version of Chinese identity, according to Human Rights Watch.

The new app is the regimes latest form of surveillance using high-tech innovation. The mention of terror in the notice could be a reference to the Chinese regimes labeling of Uyghursa majority of whom are Muslimas a terror threat, which has been the regimes justification for persecuting the ethnic group and suppressing their faith.

In July, RFA had reported that 10 women of Kazakh ethnicity were arrested after downloading the app. The police said their crime was posting content the authorities deemed inappropriate on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media platform.

The OTF conducted a security audit of the app and found that it could extract information about the phones model, subscriber ID, filenames, and other specs. This allows a third party to easily track the mobile device and its contents.

When the app is installed, every file stored on the mobile device is sent to a government server for monitoring.

The app scans the devices external storage for files, recording the names, sizes, pathways, and other specs, then compares them to a list of identifiers from the server. If the app identifies a suspect file, it will prompt the user to delete it.

The OTF also found that the information sent to the government server was in plain text, which meant someone with a trivial amount of technical knowledge could easily intercept and manipulate the data.

Such techniques could be easily extended across the Chinese population or to other repressive environments, the OTF warned.

The organization published the list of the apps targeted identifiers in the hope that tech experts could help determine what types of content the app has deemed dangerous.Irwin Cotler, former minister of justice and former attorney general of Canada, speaks during a press conference on Parliament Hill in this file photo. (Matthew Little/The Epoch Times)

Former Justice Minister Calls for Release of Canadian Citizen Held in China

Irwin Cotler says Falun Gong persecution a criminalization of innocence

Former justice minister Irwin Cotler is calling for the immediate release of Canadian citizen Sun Qian, who has been illegally detained in Beijing for more than a year because she practises the traditional discipline of Falun Gong.

We call on the Chinese authorities to cease and desist from this arbitrary and illegal assault on Sun Qians rights and fundamental freedoms, to release herand to permit her to be reunited with her family in Canada, Cotler wrote in a statement.

We call on the Canadian government to make all the necessary representations to Chinese authorities so that Sun Qians rights can be protected and her release secured.

Cotler, a renowned international human rights lawyer, is acting pro bono on Suns behalf to seek her release.

In the statement, he listed several ways in which the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong launched in 1999 by the Chinese communist regime criminalizes innocent people, including criminalization of the freedom of expression, assembly, and association; arbitrary arrest and illegal detention; torture; and denial of the right to a fair hearing.

Sun Qian is yet another case study of the persecution and prosecution of a Falun Gong practitionerin this case also a Canadian citizenand involving yet another tragic criminalization of innocence, he said.

A Chinese-Canadian businesswoman from Vancouver who became a citizen in 2007, Sun was detained by the authorities last February during a visit to China. She has since been held at the Beijing No. 1 Detention Centre, where she has suffered mistreatment and torture.

She was also forced to undergo brainwashing sessions last month prior to a show trial scheduled to take place April 9. But that trial has now been postponed until sometime after May 1, Suns sister told The Epoch Times this week.

Rallies were held across Canada last week to support Sun and urge Beijing to release her.

Meanwhile, the Falun Dafa Association of Canada has written to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seeking help to secure Suns release.

Ms. Sun is a Canadian citizen. She must not be subject to mental or physical torture, association president Xun Li said in the letter.

The Canadian government has a responsibility to intervene immediately to help rescue her. The Canadian government has an obligation to protect Canadian citizens in China and also protect the dignity of Canadian values from being eroded by this repressive regime.

In December 2017, before Trudeaus visit to Beijing, Suns lawyers wrote an open letter to Trudeau asking him to help bring about Suns release, stating that the arrests of Falun Gong practitioners in China violate Chinese law.

By mid-March, the lawyers who signed the letter had quit Suns case due to pressure and intimidation from the authorities. The Justice Bureau attempted to appoint a lawyer for Sun before the April 9 trial, but then her family managed to find another lawyer, who is now preparing for her next trial.

According to Teng Biao, a prominent Chinese lawyer and human rights defender currently living in the United States, trials for Falun Gong practitioners are usually show trials, and 90 percent of the lawyers appointed by the Justice Bureau simply plead guilty for the practitioners, while outside lawyers would defend them as not guilty.

Oftentimes an appointed lawyer would assist the Chinese Communist Party in persecuting Falun Gong and cover up facts like torture and what the government has done illegally, Teng said. Human rights lawyers, however, would usually make such facts public in the court, especially how the public security, the procuratorate, and the court acted in violation of the law.

For the cases for Falun Gong practitioners, the verdict is usually decided ahead of time, he added.French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attend a press conference at the Elysee Palace in Paris on Apr. 10, 2018. (Yoan Valat/Pool via Reuters)

Give Saudi Arabia a Chance, French President Tells Critics

PARISFrances President Emmanuel Macron took on critics of Saudi Arabias Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday, saying it was too easy to criticize the young leaders haste to reform and urged detractors to give him time.

Prince Mohammed, who was ending a three-day tour to France on Tuesday, has won Western plaudits for seeking to reduce Saudi Arabias reliance on oil, tackle chronic corruption and transform the deeply conservative, mainly Sunni Muslim kingdom.

But the severity and secrecy of an anti-corruption crackdown last November, after the prince ousted an older cousin as crown prince in a palace coup last June, has unnerved some investors.

Human rights groups also question how far the kingdom has come.

After a tense first exchange between the two leaders in Riyadh last November that was dominated by a difference of opinion on how to handle Riyadhs regional rival Iran, Macron and Prince Mohammed sought to get to know each other and work on what they have in common rather than their differences.

I hear legitimate questions from civil society, journalists about human rights and various sensitive issues concerning your country, (but) Im also looking at whats going on in the region. We have here a young leader who is going to be in the highest functions in a country where 70 percent of the population is under 30, Macron said alongside the 32-year-old prince.

We can have the choice to stick to our traditional positions and we can decide that the first acts of modernization of his society are cosmetic. If we do that then we are leaving Prince Mohammed to face those in his area that think the opposite and decide to go backwards and keep to a political Islam or terrorism, he said.

Under the reforms closely associated with the crown prince, social restrictions have been loosened, such as bans on cinemas and women driving. He has promised to promote a more moderate form of Islam.

During his visit to Paris, he met interfaith leaders and pushed for a new strategic partnership that in essence focused heavily on Frances cultural soft power and tourism know-how rather than signing billions of dollars worth of lucrative contracts as he had done in the United States and Britain.

You and I are old in Saudi Arabia because 70 percent of the population is younger than us, Prince Mohammed joked during the news conference at the Elysee palace. Macron is only eight years older than the prince.

The partnership between Saudi Arabia and France is very important, especially now that Europe and the Middle East are going through changes in the world.

The two leaders also had some tense moments in November after Lebanese officials accused Saudi Arabia of holding Prime Minister Saad Hariri hostage in the kingdom.

Macron eventually mediated a solution with Prince Mohammed to the problem, and on Tuesday the three dined at the Elysee palace with Hariri tweeting a selfie of the three of them.

While Macron made no specific references to human rights or freedoms in the kingdom, he had perhaps opted to push a more subtle message two days earlier in a private dinner and tour of the Louvre museum, including an exhibition of revolutionary 19th-century French painter Eugene Delacroix.

A picture on Macrons Twitter feed showed the two men contemplating Delacroix most famous painting, Liberty Leading The People, a bare-breasted woman standing over revolutionary barricades holding a French tricolore flag.

If there is one chance that his project succeeds, then its the responsibility of France to accompany him, Macron said on Tuesday.

By John Irish

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President Trump Comments on the FBI Raid of His Personal AttorneyHuge Blaze Consumes Apartment Building While Families AsleepThen Frantic Neighbors Rush In

A swift calamity struck residents of an apartment building in North Hollywood in the middle of the night on Wednesday, April 11.

Families were apparently still sleeping while a massive fire was eating through the building on Lankershim Boulevard near Sherman Way.

Neighbors rushed in, trying to alert the residents.

Wake up! Wake up! one man yelled, banging on the doors.

Get out! Get out! another shouted.

It was not clear what caused the fire, but it was believed to start at a nearby homeless encampment, fire officials told FOX 11.

Last year a nearby apartment building caught fire displacing 31also in the middle of the night, KTLA reported.

This time, somebody at the scene captured the stirring moments on camera, as the residents started to walk out of their apartments, sometimes in their underwear, looking confused and scared.

Crews arrived on scene around 1:15 a.m., facing a heavy volume of fire, said Los Angeles Fire Department Battalion Chief Daniel Curr, according to KTLA.

Before long, 87 firefighters were on scene. It took them some 38 minutes to put out the flames. Four apartment units were heavily damaged.

In the end, after the quick action of the neighbors helping with the evacuation, three people ended up injured.

A 57-year-old man suffered burns and a 30-year-old woman was hurt by smoke inhalation. Both were taken to a local hospital, according to Amy Bastman of the Los Angeles Fire Department, though their conditions were not immediately reported.

Another person suffered minor burns but was not hospitalized, authorities said.

The cause of the fire was under investigation.

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Officer Saves Woman Who Was PinnedIraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi speaks during the Tokyo Conference on Supporting Job Creation and Vocational Training to Facilitate Weapons Reduction for Iraqi Society in Tokyo, Japan, April 5, 2018. (Reuters/Toru Hanai)

Iraq to Take All Necessary Measures to Prevent ISIS Attacks From Syria, PM Says

BAGHDADIraq will take all the necessary measures to prevent cross-border attacks by ISIS terrorists in Syria, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Tuesday.

Last year Iraqi warplanes carried out at least one strike on ISIS targets inside Syria, in coordination with the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition and with the approval of the Syrian government.

Daesh are present in eastern Syria, at the Iraqi border. I will take all necessary measures if they threaten the security Iraq, Abadi told a news conference in Baghdad. He said he had communicated this position to U.S President Donald Trump on the telephone on Sunday.

He said he had asked the countrys military command to lay out all possible plans, as I am keen to protect Iraqi citizens from cross-border attacks.

An expert close to the Baghdad government told Reuters last week that Iraq may carry out special forces operations against ISIS terrorists in Syria.

While troops could be dropped into Syria, the plan did not at this stage involve sending ground forces over the border, Hisham al-Hashimi, who advises several governments on ISIS, including Iraqs, told Reuters.

Iraq has good relations with Iran and Russia, Syrian President Bashar al-Assads main backers in the seven-year Syrian civil war, while it also has strong support from the U.S.-led coalition.

Abadi declared victory over ISIS within Iraq in December, although the terrorists have continued to carry out ambushes, assassinations and bombings across the country.

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces dislodged the terrorists from Mosul, their de facto capital in the north of the country, putting an end to the cross-border caliphate they declared in 2014.

Special forces from a number of countries already operate in Syria, including the United States, Russia and Iran. Turkey has also sent in ground forces to push Kurdish fighters away from its border.

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Media Tries to Implicate Trump in Syria Chemical AttackDeputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe Gabriella Battaini-Dragoni commended the progress made by Morocco in the areas of human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

Battaini-Dragoni told local reporters while on a visit to Rabat that Moroccos 2011 constitution is a milestone that crowned a reform process.

Morocco strengthened its legislative and institutional frameworks in terms of combatting violence against women and children, fighting human trafficking and promoting gender equality, she said.

She also praised Moroccos immigration policy, which enabled migrants to apply for residency status and enjoy access to basic services.

The reform of the judicial system has been largely undertaken, with a view to consolidating its independence and effectiveness, she added, citing particularly the organic laws relating to the status of judges and the establishment of a Higher Council of the Judiciary.

I want to assure Moroccos authorities of our full commitment to continue and deepen our cooperation in the future, in these areas and in other sectors related to the reform agenda, she said.

The Council of Europe commends Morocco as a key partner in its neighborhood policy, launched in 2011, the Council said on its website on the eve of the visit by Gabriella Battaini-Dragoni to Rabat.Members of the Arizona National Guard at the Papago Park Military Reservation in Phoenix on April 9. Arizona deployed its first 348 National Guard members to the Mexican border by April 10, after President Donald Trump ordered troops to boost border security. (CAITLIN O'HARA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

National Guard Troops Deployed to Southern Border

President says hell keep military on the border until the wall is built

WASHINGTONThe National Guard has started deploying troops to bolster Homeland Security efforts along the southwest border.

Illegal border crossings spiked in March, reaching 50,308 apprehensionsup 37 percent from February and more than triple from the same period last year. Last years historic lows have been mostly attributed to the so-called Trump effect that saw huge decreases for five months following Inauguration Day.

However, since May last year, the number of illegal crossings has slowly been climbing and has since reached previous levels. The spring and summer months tend to see the highest numbers of illegal crossings.

Until we can have a wall and proper security, were going to be guarding our border with the military. Thats a big step, President Donald Trump said during a meeting with Baltic leaders on April 3.

On April 7, after the National Guard deployment was announced, Trump wrote on Twitter, We are sealing up our southern border. The people of our great country want safety and security. The Dems have been a disaster on this very important issue!

The governors of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico sent their first troops to the border just days after Trump called for them.

Texas is preparing to increase our National Guard presence to more than 1,000 along our southern border, said Gov. Greg Abbott, in a statement on April 10.

The Texas National Guard activated 250 members on April 6 and will add 300 members per week until all Department of Homeland Security requirements are met, Abbott said.

Arizona had deployed 348 personnel by April 10, and Gov. Doug Ducey said he welcomed Trumps call for the National Guard.

For years, Americans, particularly in border states such as Arizona, have been calling on the federal government to secure our border, Ducey said in a press release on April 9.

The majority of illegal drugs in this country come through our southern border. If you know someone impacted by drug addiction, theres a good chance their last hit came from drugs that flowed through Arizona.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the National Guards role will be similar to that during Operation Jump Start launched in 2006 by President George W. Bush, when 6,000 troops were deployed in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

Several years later, in 201o, Operation Phalanx, under former President Barack Obama, saw 1,200 National Guard troops deployed during a border surge.

During the two-year Jump Start operation, National Guard troops mostly assisted Border Patrol with logistical and administrative support.

National Guard units operated detection systems, provided mobile communications, augmented border-related intelligence analysis efforts, and built and installed border security infrastructure, according to Customs and Border Protection.

Defense Secretary Gen. Jim Mattis signed a memo on April 6 authorizing the deployment of up to 4,000 National Guard troops. The memo said the troops will not perform law enforcement activities or interact with migrants.

In the 2006 memorandum of understanding between the Department of Defense and the governors of participating states, the National Guard was prohibited from overt law enforcement.

After guardsmen spot suspected illegal immigrants crossing the border, they will inform Border Patrol agents, who will then respond to the scene, the Department of Defense said. In essence, the Guard will do detection work and Border Patrol agents will make the appropriate apprehensions.

The National Guard is precluded from making arrests because of concerns raised about militarizing the U.S. border, according to a 2011 GAO report.

Mexicos secretary of foreign affairs, Luis Videgaray Caso, issued a statement on April 4 after talking with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

In all communications on the subject, the government of Mexico has expressed to the government of the United States that, if the announced deployment of the National Guard resulted in a militarization of the border, it would seriously damage the bilateral relationship, Caso said.

Cost

A GAO report estimated the combined total cost of sending the National Guard to the border during operations Jump Start and Phalanx was about $1.35 billion.

Jump Start ran from June 2006 to July 2008 and Phalanx ran from June 2010 through Sept. 30, 2011.

Background

The National Guard plays a dual role in the U.S. military. Guardsmen can be deployed by the governors of their resident states to support communities stricken by natural disasters like floods and hurricanes, or they can be deployed by the president to defend the United States or support allies overseas.

Guard soldiers hold civilian jobs or attend college while maintaining their military training part time, according to the National Guard website.

In border operations, Trump would use the National Guard under Title 32 of the U.S. Code, which doesnt require congressional support.

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PARISSaudi Arabia could take part in military action in Syria after a suspected chemical attack that killed at least 60 people in the eastern Ghouta region over the weekend, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said on Tuesday.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday promised quick, forceful action in response to the attack, appearing to suggest a potential military response.

If our alliance with our partners requires it, we will be present, Prince Mohammed said at a news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, wrapping up a three-day visit to Paris.

Earlier, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir had told reporters that a number of countries were holding consultations on how to respond to a chemical weapons attack in Syria and called for those responsible to be held accountable.

Our position is that those responsible have to be held accountable and brought to justice, he said.

The attack late on Saturday killed at least 60 people and hurt more than 1,000 at several sites in Douma, a town near the capital, Damascus, according to the Union of Medical Care Organizations.

When asked whether Saudi Arabia could be part of such a response, Jubeir declined to comment.

Im not going to get into speculation about what may nor may not take place but all I can say is that there are discussions with regards to the options that are available to deal with this matter, he said.

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Media Tries to Implicate Trump in Syria Chemical AttackA missile that the U.S. Department of Defense says is confirmed as a "Qiam" ballistic missile manufactured in Iran by its distinctively Iranian nine fueling ports and that the Pentagon says was fired by Houthi rebels from Yemen into Saudi Arabia on July 22, 2017 is seen on display at a military base in Washington, U.S. Dec. 13, 2017. (Reuters/Jim Bourg)

Saudi Says It Shot Down Houthi Missiles Over Riyadh and Southern Cities

RIYADHSaudi Arabias air defense forces intercepted three ballistic missiles fired at Riyadh and other cities on Wednesday by Yemens Iran-aligned Houthis who have stepped up attacks recently, threatening to escalate a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the Iranian regime.

Three rockets were shot down above the capital and the southern cities of Jizan and Najran, according to state media and the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis rebels in Yemen.

The Houthis claimed to have targeted the defense ministry in Riyadh and a Saudi Aramco distribution facility in Najran.

There were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

The attacks mark the fourth time in five months that missiles have flown over Riyadh, as the Houthis step up efforts to demonstrate they can reach the Saudi capital.

The ballistic missile which was intercepted successfully by saudi royal air forces ! Allhumdillah no harm to anyone #riyadh #riyadhnow #_ #

No need to worry people everything is fine Alhumdillah ! Saudi has one of the best defence system and best people to use it pic.twitter.com/QfCFJqh0Yd  Adnan (@adii_khaan) March 25, 2018

Last month, one man was killed in Riyadh by debris after the military shot down a flurry of missiles, the first casualty of the Yemen war in the Saudi capital.

Alhumdillah The saudi army has successfully intercepted a ballistic missile in the riyadh #saudiarmy #riyadh #riyadhnow #_

I hope everyone is safe and fine many prayers to the brave and strong army  ???????? # pic.twitter.com/n1ThqBpO1r  Adnan (@adii_khaan) March 25, 2018

Wednesdays missiles followed the downing of two Houthi drones earlier in the day in Jizan and the nearby Saudi city of Abha, the coalition said. The Houthis said they were targeting an Aramco facility in Jizan, but the company said its facilities there were operating normally and safely.

The company is building a 400,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Jizan, part of a new economic city on the Red Sea, which is expected to become fully operational in 2019.

Aramco was not immediately available to comment on the missiles.

The Houthis say their missile attacks on the kingdom are in retaliation for air raids on their forces in Yemen by the Western-backed coalition.

Their news agency SABA said four people were killed, including a woman and a child, and 10 others wounded in two air strikes on Wednesday in the Razih district of western Saada province. There was no immediate comment from the coalition.

Saudi Arabia and an alliance of Muslim states intervened in Yemens civil war in 2015 to try and push back the Houthis rebels after they drove the internationally-recognized government into exile in Riyadh.

The coalition has launched thousands of air strikes in Yemen which have hit schools, markets and hospitals, killing hundreds of people  though it says it does not target civilians.

The United Nations says 10,000 people have died in the three-year-old war, and three out of four Yemenis  22 million civilians  need relief aid.

The coalition accuses the Houthis of being armed and supported by Iran  charges the group and Tehran deny.

Arms monitor Conflict Armament Research says it has evidence that the drones used on Wednesday and other Houthi kit were made in Iran and was not of indigenous design and construction in contrast to Houthi statements.

By Stephen Kalin and Sarah Dadouch

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Media Tries to Implicate Trump in Syria Chemical AttackSen. Kim Pate in a file photo. Pate is planning to introduce legislation that would allow judges to decide whether to impose mandatory minimum penalties. (The Canadian Press/Colin Perkel)

Sen. Kim Pate to Introduce Bill Aimed at Mandatory Minimum Penalties

OTTAWAAn Ontario senator tired of waiting for the Liberals to bring in their promised changes to mandatory minimum penalties while they watch how they fare in the courts, is now prepared to go it alone.

Independent Sen. Kim Pate said she plans to introduce legislation that would allow judges to decide whether they should impose mandatory minimum penalties on offenders at sentencing time.

They are in the best position to determine: Is this is an appropriate place for the application of the mandatory minimum penalty? said Pate, who was a longtime advocate for the rights of prisoners before she was named to the Senate in November 2016.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tasked Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould with reviewing the controversial sentencing reforms the previous Conservative government brought in as part of their tough-on-crime agenda.

Many of those changes involved imposing or increasing mandatory minimum penalties for dozens of offencesa measure critics say prevents judges from being able to use their discretion when necessary. The Supreme Court has already struck down two of them.

The government seemed close to overhauling mandatory minimum penalties last spring, after justice ministers from across the country gathered to tackle court backlogsa problem in urgent need of a solution after the high court imposed strict limits on the amount of time it can take for a case to make its way through the system.

Ottawa later pushed its own timeline back to last fall and then, late last month, introduced its massive Bill C-75, which is aimed at improving the criminal justice system, but is silent on mandatory minimums.

That appeared to be the final straw for Pate, who said she plans to introduce her private members bill within the next month, barring any signs the government will change its course.

What we want to be able to do is advance sentencing reforms that will stand the test of time, Wilson-Raybould said March 29 as she explained the absence, but also noted she would be watching what is happening to the Conservative-era sentencing provisions in courts around the country.

There is quite a bit of activity to monitor.

According to the Justice Department, which has been tracking charter challenges to the Criminal Code and the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, as of April 10, 68 percent of 256 court challenges are related to mandatory minimum penalties. Eighty-nine of those relate to child sexual offences, 44 are for drug offences, and 30 have to do with firearms.

Carissima Mathen, a University of Ottawa law professor, said the commitment to repeal or reform at least some mandatory minimum penalties could be putting Wilson-Raybould, in her role as attorney general of Canada, in an uncomfortable position as federal lawyers defend what she plans to change.

I find for them to vigorously defend mandatory minimums would be odd given what theyve said about their concern that mandatory minimums inappropriately interfere with judicial discretion, said Mathen. Im very intrigued to know what they are going to do.

The answer? It depends.

A memo prepared for Wilson-Raybould last June suggests her promises would play a role in federal litigation strategy.

Your criminal law mandate letter commitments and actions taken in respect of those commitments influence (attorney general of Canada) involvement in litigation, said the briefing note, which The Canadian Press obtained in response to an access-to-information request.

Earlier last year, Wilson-Raybould spelled out six principles she believed should follow when it comes to these kinds of cases, which include upholding the charter but also the laws passed by the Parliament until they are changedor the courts declare them to be unconstitutional.

David Taylor, her director of communications, said Wilson-Raybould has been letting the relevant prosecutorial authorities handle charter challenges in the various courts of appeal, while deciding whether to intervene in Supreme Court cases on a case-by-case basis.

The federal government will intervene in a Supreme Court case involving a judge who refused to apply the mandatory minimum penalty for an Ontario man convicted of using a computer to lure a childwho was really a police officerbut has not yet filed its arguments.

Jonathan Rudin, program director at Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, said he doesnt think the wait-and-see approach is working, or fair to those who are currently facing charges associated with mandatory minimum sentences the courts could strike down or the Liberals revise.

Not doing anything doesnt seem to help at all, he said. This isnt justice. Its roulette.

From The Canadian PressSun Zhengcai shown on Chinese state television at his court trial in Tianjin, China, on April 12, 2018. (Screenshot via Reuters)

Sun Zhengcai, Former Contender to Succeed Chinese Communist Party Leadership, Admits Taking Millions in Bribes

BEIJINGA former senior official once considered a contender for the top leader position admitted to taking bribes of more than 170 million yuan ($27 million), Chinese state media said on April 12.

Sun Zhengcai, 54, was abruptly removed last July from his post as Communist Party chief of southwestern Chongqing, one of Chinas most important cities, to be replaced by Chen Miner, who is close to current leader Xi Jinping.

Sun is the latest casualty of Xis unrelenting war on graftwhich has also served as a mechanism for Xi to eliminate officials in the Partys opposition faction who challenge his rule.

Until last year, Sun, one of the youngest of the 25 members of the Partys decision-making Politburo, had been considered Xis successor.

Prosecutors in February had charged Sun with accepting huge sums in bribes during various posts going back 15 years in Chongqing, Beijing, the northeastern province of Jilin, and during his term as minister of agriculture.

At a hearing on April 12, Sun was charged with illegally accepting cash and gifts worth a total of over 170 million, the court said on its official social media account, adding that its verdict would be released later.

I severely violated discipline and the law, Sun said in videos of his statement to a court in the city of Tianjin released by state broadcaster CCTV. I completely accept (the charges). I sincerely admit my guilt and express regret.

Sun is certain to be found guilty as the courts are controlled by the Party and will not challenge the accusations against him.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has presided over a sweeping corruption crackdown, targeting members loyal to former leader Jiang Zemin. Previous media reports have revealed Sun was Jiangs pick for a loyalist successor to become Party leader.

During last years critical Party conclave, the 19th National Congress, Sun was named along with several other key Jiang faction members, such as Zhou Yongkang, Bo Xilai, and Ling Jihua, as co-conspirators in a plot to usurp the Party leadership and seize power.

Chongqing state media subsequently criticized Sun as being politically corrupt.

In recent months, Chinese media have also exposed Suns affairs with multiple mistresses, who received financial benefits through connections to him.

From Reuters. Epoch Times staff member Annie Wu contributed to this report.Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers stand guard at the check post in Khawaja Omari district of Ghazni province, Afghanistan April 12, 2018. (REUTERS/Stringer)

Taliban Storm District in Afghanistans Ghazni Province, Killing More Than 12 People

GHAZNI, AfghanistanTaliban militants over-ran a district in Afghanistans Ghazni province on Thursday, killing more than a dozen people including the districts governor before retreating, a police official said.

Ghaznis Khawaja Omari district was considered one of the provinces safest areas.

The militants killed district governor Ali Dost Shams, his bodyguards, seven police and five government intelligence agents, said Ramazan Ali Mohseni, deputy police chief in Ghazni. At least 45 to 50 militants were killed, he said.

The Taliban then torched the district headquarters, he said. Later, the Taliban left the headquarters and government security forces returned.

Bodies wrapped in blankets were laid on the ground of the district compound by late Thursday morning.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement 20 police officers were killed in the attack.

Khawaja Omari is near the provincial capital, also called Ghazni, a city of 150,000 people 150 km (95 miles) southwest of the Afghan capital, Kabul.

Fighting in Afghanistan traditionally increases in the spring when warmer weather melts snow blocking mountain passes, increasing the mobility of the insurgents.

The Taliban usually announce the launch of a spring offensive in April.

By Mustafa Andalib

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Trump Makes Remarks on Chemical Attack in SyriaThe Awan IT Scandal Put Congressional Data at Risk

Congressional IT workers paid by 44 House Democrats gained unauthorized access to sensitive networks

The emails and personal files of at least 44 House Democrats could have been stolen and transferred overseas by their own IT workers, in a scandal that has been quietly brewing in Congress.

At the center of the controversy are Imran Awan, his brother Abid Awan, and five other family members and associates.

They worked as shared IT employees for 44 House Democrats and had access to the House members sensitive data, including emails, calendars, constituents data, and personal files, despite having little to no IT experience.

Click on timeline to enlarge.

All of the 44 House members had waived the background check on the employees, according to an inspector generals report. Some of the members serve on committees that handle sensitive and sometimes classified information, such as the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Homeland Security, and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

The IT workers were paid an estimated $7 million by Congress since 2004, despite the fact that some of them were often not seen at work and in some cases worked remotely from Pakistan.

In September 2016, the House Office of Inspector General warned House leadership and the Committee on House Administration that the IT workers had made unauthorized logins on systems of House members they were not employed by, and in some cases continued to log in to the computers of members who had previously fired them. They also logged in using the personal credentials of congressmen, the office found.

The findings came during the heat of the 2016 presidential race and as WikiLeaks was publishing emails taken from the Democratic National Committee, which was chaired by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who had employed Imran Awan since 2005.

Despite the findings, access to congressional servers by the IT workers was not restricted until months later, after the election.

An analysis spanning seven months by the IG found that the five IT workers made excessive logons to a server belonging to a group similar to the DNC, the House Democratic Caucus. A total of 5,735 logons were recorded, an average of 27 times per day.

Excessive logons are an indication that the server is being used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information, said the IG in the briefing, which was not publicly released.

The IG briefing also reveals that Dropbox had been installed on at least two computers that were uploading files online, in defiance of House policy. The Dropbox accounts contained thousands of files, which, according to the IG, contained information that was likely sensitive.

The House leaders, Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi, did not ban the five IT workers from the network until Feb. 2, 2017, when their access was blocked by the sergeant at arms. The Committee on House Administration put out a statement that acknowledged suspicious activity and said a theft investigation was ongoing.

Awan Family

Imran Awan, who immigrated from Pakistan to the United States in 1997 under the diversity lottery program, was hired in 2004the same year he gained citizenshipby Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), and, soon after, Wasserman Schultz.

Imran quickly began earning among the highest salaries on Capitol Hill. After his salary hit a pay cap under congressional rules that prevent staffers from earning more than congressmen, other Democrats began adding Imrans relatives to their own payrolls as IT aides, even though they did not have any background in IT.

In 2005, Imrans brother Abid joined the payroll, and in 2007 Imrans wife, Hina Alvi Awan, was added.

In 2011, Abid Awans wife, Ukrainian-born Natalia Sova, was added to the congressional payroll. Civil court documents show that during this time, Abid and his wife were running a used car dealership named Cars International A, which accepted a loan from Ali al-Attar, an Iraqi political figure of Iranian heritage who is wanted by the IRS and FBI on unrelated tax fraud charges.

In 2012, Abid Awan filed for bankruptcy, discharging $1.1 million in debts, despite his high salary. Documents showed that Abid Awan owed money to a man named Rao Abbas, who reportedly worked at McDonalds. Shortly after, several House Democrats began paying Abbas as their ostensible IT aide.

In 2014, the youngest Awan brother, Jamal, was added to the payroll at age 20 and was soon earning as much as a congressman.

In total, the IT workers received $7 million in congressional pay and were responsible for the IT of 1 in every 5 House Democrats, or 44 in total.

Imran Awan himself took frequent trips to Pakistan and told associates he worked remotely from that country, The Daily Caller reported.

Background checks on the Awans and their associates were waived despite a number of red flags. Background checks are designed, in part, to reveal weaknesses, such as financial difficulty, that could be exploited by outside actors.

Suspicious Activity on Server

The House Democratic Caucus, whose server was identified as ground zero of the cybersecurity problems, was led by Becerra from 2013 to January 2017, when he became Californias attorney general.

The total logons onto the system, 5,735 during a seven-month period, were considered suspicious, as the computers in offices managed by the shared IT employees were accessed in total less than 60 times during the same time period.

The IG investigation also revealed that the pattern of login activity suggests steps [were] being taken to conceal their activity. This included the use of active role servers, which could have been used to grant access on a temporary basis and could have been used to evade network monitoring.

The Democratic Caucus server could be used to store documents taken from other offices or evidence of other illicit activity, according to the IG presentation.

The unusual login activity could also indicate computers were used as a launching point to access other systems for which access may be unauthorized.

The installation of Dropbox on two Democratic Caucus computers used by the IT workers raises concerns that those computers could have been used to transfer data out of Congress to other groups or nation-states.

According to other congressional IT workers, congressional staff and IT workers are prohibited from using Dropbox due to security concerns.

While file sharing sites, such as Dropbox, have legitimate business purposes, use of such sites is also a classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization, the IG report states.

Sensitive Data and Potential Blackmail

Among the data hosted on the IT systems of House members are emails, calendars, House members personal files, and personal information of constituents who have contacted their representatives office.

Such sensitive data could prove useful to companies and other entities around the world.

We know that there are countries and companies, entities around the world, who would pay a lot of money to have access to some members calendars, to their e-mails, see who they are meeting with, see what theyre saying about those meetings, that could be very valuable information, said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), during an informal hearing on the issue in Congress on Oct. 10, 2017.

In certain cases, personal files and data could also be used to blackmail politicians.

Investigations

Following its warning to House leadership on Sept. 20, 2016, the Office of Inspector General provided another briefing on Sept. 30, warning of continuing unauthorized access by the IT workers.

The investigation was then taken away from the inspector general in October and handed over to Capitol Police, despite the police having no cybersecurity expertise. In January, Imran Awan was able to travel to Pakistan unimpeded.

A server belonging to the House Democratic Caucus was stolen after the inspector generals report named it as evidence in a hacking probe, three senior government officials told The Daily Caller. Around the same time, the head of the caucus, Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), left Congress to become Californias attorney general.

On Feb. 2, 2017, the sergeant at arms officially banned the IT workers from the House network. A day later, most of the 44 House Democrats ended their contracts with the IT workers and fired them.

Wasserman Schultz did not fire Imran, saying the IT worker could service her technology needs without connecting to the House network. She also added Hina Alvi Awan as a second IT aide well after the investigation was underway.

In March 2017, Hina left for Pakistan with her children without notifying their schools. Prosecutors say that FBI agents had been surveilling her, and that they approached her at the airport, where she refused to speak to them. A search revealed Hina was carrying $12,400 in cash and many of her personal belongings, some packed in cardboard boxes. Despite this, she was allowed to board the plane.

When Imran Awan tried to leave the country on July 24, the FBI arrested him at the airport. A month later, on Aug. 17, both Imran and Hina were indicted for bank fraud. In September, Hina reached a deal with prosecutors to return to the United States from Pakistan.

Missing IT Equipment

The initial investigation by the Office of Inspector General also found that the shared IT employees were involved in irregular purchases of technology, such as iPads, iPhones, and other equipment.

Under congressional rules, inventory must be kept of all purchases by House members of equipment that has a purchase price of $500 or more. The IG found that some offices that employed the Awans were signing off on forms that manipulated pricing to make expensive products appear like they cost less than that.

Examples of purchases made this way include an iPad with an original cost of $799, that was billed for $499 together with Apple Care that was billed for $350, despite its actual cost being $88. To accomplish this, the Awans allegedly worked with CDW Government, a major government contractor, which says it is cooperating with prosecutors but has been told it is not a target.

The IG report also found that 75 pieces of equipment with a total purchase price of $118,416 went missing from one of the offices where Abid Awan worked. The office was later revealed to be that of Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.). The missing equipment included laptops, iPads, TVs, video conferencing equipment, and computers. The IG report said Abid Awan, who was responsible for the equipment, made contradicting statements about it.

Family members of the Awans told The Daily Caller that they shipped a significant number of devices, such as iPads and iPhones, to Pakistan.

But one of Imran Awans lawyers said it was congressmen who wanted invoices falsified. This is what experienced members of Congress expect: to expedite things, they adjust the pricing, Aaron Page told The Daily Caller.

Abid Awans attorney, Jim Bacon, told The Washington Post: In a fluid situation, you do what youre ordered to do.  It sounds to me like theres a lot of scapegoating here.

Wasserman Schultzs Laptop

Two months after being banned from the House IT network by the sergeant at arms, Imran Awan left a laptop with a username RepDWS in a phone booth, along with a letter to prosecutors and copies of his House ID card and drivers license, according to a Capitol Police report. The bag was found by Capitol Hill police and seized.

During a televised hearing on May 18, 2017, Wasserman Schultz threatened the Capitol Police chief with consequences if the laptop was not returned. She hired a lawyer in an attempt to prevent prosecutors from looking at the contents of the laptop.

In August 2017, Wasserman Schultz seemingly changed course, saying: This was not my laptop. I have never seen that laptop. I dont know whats on the laptop.

Emails of Wasserman Schultz released by WikiLeaks reveal that Imran Awan had the login to her iPad. This means he would have had access to all of her personal information, including her calendar, emails, and notes.

In an October court appearance, Imran Awans lawyer, Chris Gowen, said he feels very strongly that the RepDWS laptop should not be used as evidence, citing attorney-client privilege. Both Imran Awan and Wasserman Schultz have been provided with an image of its hard drive.

In the six months since, prosecutors have postponed the next court date four times, pointing to voluminous discovery and discussions about the attorney-client privilege argument. Observers of the justice system say such delays would not be necessary for a bank fraud case and tare a sign that prosecutors are stalling while they build the cybersecurity and fraud cases.

Imran Awan remains out of jail with a GPS tracking monitor, which his lawyer has repeatedly requested be removed. On Dec. 18 prosecutors objected to that request. Taking into account (1) Awans strong connections to Pakistan, (2) the wealth he already transferred there, and (3) his attempt to depart to Pakistan while knowing he was under investigation, the government asserts that Awan is a flight risk, they wrote.

Epoch Times reporter Joshua Philipp contributed to this report.Trudeau Looks to Turn the Page on China, India With Major Foreign Trip

PMs 10-day trip includes stops in Lima, Paris, and London

OTTAWAPrime Minister Justin Trudeau will be looking to turn the page on his disastrous trips to China and Indiaand land some new trade partners for Canadawith a major 10-day foreign tour, including two major international summits with leaders from around the globe.

The stakes are high, starting with Trudeaus first stop in Peru for the 8th Summit of the Americas April 13-14, which plays host every four years to more than 30 countries across the Western Hemisphere.

There had been speculation that Canada, the United States, and Mexico would announce some form of an agreement in principle on a new North American Free Trade Agreement. But while high-level talks are still expected to take place, the absence of U.S. President Donald Trumphes staying home, ostensibly to oversee the possible American response to a chemical attack in Syriahas dampened talk of ceremonial surprises.

Instead, the meeting is likely to be dominated by the political crisis in Venezuela, where President Nicolas Maduro, who will also not take part, has abandoned all pretence of democratic rule, cracking down on dissent in the face of spiralling economic calamity.

Canada has been an outspoken critic of Maduro and will no doubt join the chorus of condemnation in Peru while pushing for a tougher stand against corruption throughout the Americas.

Trudeau will also meet with leaders from the Pacific Alliance, a trade bloc comprising Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, all of which have free trade dealsand close political relationshipswith Canada. Hell also get a rare chance to meet with Latin Americas largest trading bloc, Mercosur, which counts powerhouse Brazil as well as Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay among its members.

With the fate of NAFTA up in the air and efforts afoot to diversify trade away from the United States, Canada and Mercosur quietly held a first round of free trade talks in March.

University of Ottawa professor Roland Paris, formerly Trudeaus foreign policy adviser, says advancing trade discussions with Mercosur and the Pacific Alliance would top his to-do list.

Indeed, Trumps absence could offer the perfect chance for Trudeau to speak freely with Mercosur leaders and other potential trade partners, said Pablo Heidrich, an expert on Latin America at Carleton University in Ottawa.

He may be able to have a more direct conversation with Latin America, Heidrich said. That could open more space for Canada to further its negotiations in trade agreements and to try to sell something to other countries or to the same countries that Canada is already interested in.

Trudeau, however, cant afford the sort of missteps that plagued him in China and India.

Observers will be watching to see how far he goes in opposing Trumps controversial comments on Latin American immigrants, as well as in promoting western democratic values without coming across as arrogant or preachy.

Lecturing is what really brought Trudeau down in China and in India, Heidrich said. And so I hope the Canadian diplomacy does not go into lecturing, because it is not going to go well.

Officials say the prime minister will also likely make Canadas case, both during his visit to Peru and throughout the rest of the trip, for a UN Security Council seat in 2020.

Huge opportunity

Following two days of meetings in Peru, Trudeau will travel to Paris for his first official visit to France. There he will meet French President Emmanuel Macron, address the French National Assembly, and hold several speaking engagements.

The visit will include a heavy emphasis on business, particularly in the context of the new Canada-EU free trade deal, but is also expected to include discussions on climate change, Russia, Syria, rising nationalism, and Mali.

Canada has committed six military helicopters to the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali, where France has been conducting counter-terror operations for years alongside troops from several neighbouring African countries.

The prime minister will end his tour in London, where he will meet the Queen and British Prime Minister Theresa May before joining leaders from 52 other nations for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, where trade will top the agendaparticularly in the face of Britains imminent departure from the EU and a natural impulse to look to its former colonies as new trade partners.

With or without a formal trade agreement, the Commonwealth is already a group of countries who have a huge opportunity to enhance and facilitate trade between them, Commonwealth secretary general Patricia Scotland said in an interview.

Because of our common language, because of our common culture, our common law that binds us together, it makes it easier and more efficient for us to trade amongst ourselves.

Brexit is also being seen as a potential catalyst for re-energizing the Commonwealth, thanks to a newly engaged British government, following years of questions about the organizations importance.

The meeting, whose participants include a number of African and Asian countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, is also expected to tackle concerns about human rights and democracy.

One issue close to Canadas heart that wont get individual billing during the London meeting, however, will be LGBTQ rights; member states have taken it off the agenda.

From The Canadian PressTrump Nominates First Black Woman to Serve as Brigadier General

President Donald Trump made history on Tuesday, April 10, by nominating the first black woman to serve as a brigadier general in the Marine Corps, according to a Department of Defense press release.

If confirmed, Marine Corps Col. Lorna M. Mahlock will be the first black woman to serve as a brigadier general in the Marine Corps, the smallest of the four American military branches.

Currently, Mahlock serving as the deputy director of Operations, Plans, Policies, and Operations Directorate, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, District of Columbia.

Women make up 8 percent of the Marine Corps service members. That percentage is likely to increase, Gen. Glenn Walters, the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps, told ABC News.

The Marine Corps accepted its first female infantry officer last year. The woman chose to remain unnamed.

The Pentagon opened all military jobs in the armed forces to women three years ago.

Brigadier general is a senior rank in the Marines, represented by a single star. There are three more ranks above the brigadier general: major general, lieutenant general, and general.

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Trump Wants to Create a Space ForceMorocco and the European Union have signed the Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA), a joint international program focusing on the development of solutions for food systems and water resources in the Mediterranean basin.

Prima has been launched to help the agricultural sector in the Mediterranean area, which has been suffering from severe water shortages and decreasing crop yields in recent years.

According to the EU, 180 million people in the Mediterranean basin are currently considered water poor. The lack of clean water and nutritious food has adverse effects on the health and stability of the populations.

The North African Kingdom has been involved in this international program since its inception 2017, committing to provide 20 million cash and 20 million in-kind over a 10-year period.

This agreement will enable Morocco to implement its water strategy, support its agricultural sector and benefit from scientific research to speed up socio-economic development.

PRIMA is supported by Horizon 2020, the EUs research and innovation framework program. It seeks to develop much-needed solutions for a more sustainable management of water and agro-food systems.

The main objective of the ten-year initiative (2018 2028), which is partly funded by EUs research and innovation program Horizon 2020, is to devise new research and innovation pproaches to improve water availability and sustainable agriculture production in a region heavily distressed by climate change, urbanization and population growth.

The partnership will be financed through a combination of funding from participating countries (currently 274 million), and a 220 million contribution from the EU through Horizon 2020, its research and innovation funding program (2014  2020).

PRIMA aims to promote research and innovation capacities, develop knowledge & common innovative solutions for agro-food systems with a view to making them sustainable for integrated water management in the Mediterranean region.

The innovative and sustainable solutions should be efficient, cost-effective and environmentally and socially sustainable, contributing to solve the issues of water scarcity, food security, nutrition, health and migration problems.US President Donald Trump listens to Yvonne Ambrose, whose 16-year old daughter was murdered, before signing the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 11, 2018. (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

Trump Scores Major Victory in Human-Trafficking Battle, Signs Bill Targeting Online Hubs

President Donald Trump signed a bill on Wednesday that empowers state prosecutors to go after the owners of websites that host sex-trafficking ads and for victims to file lawsuits against those websites.

Human trafficking, also known as modern slavery, is worse today than at any other time in history, Trump said, emphasizing that traffickers exploit modern tools. Reports of suspected child-sex trafficking increased 846% between 2010-2015, largely due to the use of the internet, according to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

The president said he was signing the bill, titled Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), in part to honor the victims and survivors. He gave credit to his daughter and senior advisor Ivanka Trump for spearheading the battle against human trafficking

Youve endured what no person on earth should endure and we are going to do everything in our power to make sure that traffickers are brought to a swift and firm justice, Trump said.

The woman by Trumps side at the signing ceremony, Yvonne Ambrose, lost her 16-year-old daughter Desiree Robinson to human trafficking. Robinson who was slain after being prostituted on sex-ads website Backpage.com.

To lose your child, who has been trafficked, which is modern-day slavery, in our country, to get that call on Christmas that your one daughter, your oldest child has been brutally murdered because she said no, because she did not want to be a part of this, is the worst thing, Ambrose said in thanking lawmakers and Trump. It means so much to our family.

A woman whose daughter was trafficked at the age of 15 said: hopefully there wont be too many more.

Websites known to be major hubs for human trafficking began shutting down sections frequently used by traffickers before Trump signed FOSTA into law. Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Montana) said that 87 percent of these hubs are already offline.

Prosecutors have been frustrated for years because such websites are protected under a clause in the Communications Decency Act that shields website operators from legal action based on the content posted by users. FOSTA limits this protection by specifying that website owners are liable for posts by their users that facilitate human trafficking.

It was never the intention of the CDA to make a red-light district out of the internet, Wagner said. It was a crime offline, its a crime online.

Days before Trump signed the bill, federal authorities seized and shut down Backpage.com, the largest human-trafficking portal in the United States. Seven of the companys executives were arrested and indicted on with 93 counts, including facilitating prostitution and money laundering. The indictment charges that teenage girls were trafficked on the website. Some of the girls were killed.

Backpage.com listed ads primarily for sex and had affiliates across the United States and in 96 countries around the world. The company generated $135 million in revenue in 2014, according to a Senate report.

Nearly three-quarters of the cases submitted to NCMEC relate to ads posted on Backpage.com. The National Association of Attorneys General described the website as a hub of human trafficking, especially the trafficking of minors.

Today, Backpage was shut down. Its a huge step. Now no child will be sold for sex through this website, Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) wrote in a Twitter message.

Backpage was at the center of a 20-month Senate investigation which led to the passage of FOSTA. In a seething report, the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations concluded that Backpage knowingly facilitated and concealed illegal activity, specifically child-sex trafficking, and that nearly every dollar of the websites revenue stemmed from illegal activity.

Internet giants, specifically Facebook and Google, have long resisted the passage of bills similar to FOSTA. This year, both companies caved amid increased scrutiny over their involvement in election meddling and data practices.

Some of the lawmakers present spent years attempting to pass similar bills.

Ive been working on this issue for more than a decade, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). They said it literally couldnt be done because we couldnt overcome the power and the wealth of the folks who had a vested interest in that statute that was protecting the online traffickers.

We have tried for 10 years to get this bill through. Youve just achieved something we havent been able to, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Trump. You are saving lives.

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Trump Leads a Listening Session on Domestic and International Human TraffickingWoman Exits Her Car to Pump Gas When Man Pulls up by HerHe Commits Extremely Brazen Crime

Police are warning residents in one California city to be on the lookout for so-called sliding, a crime of opportunity which has recently been popping up at gas stations.

The crime is a common theft, yet with an especially sly and brazen execution.

The victim, usually a woman driving alone, stops at a gas station, exits her car, and proceeds to the machine to pump the gas.

Meanwhile, the thief pulls up right beside.

While the woman is operating the machine, the thief surreptitiously exits his car and slides over to the adjacent vehicle.

The trick is, the thief stays close to the ground and thus hidden behind the car doors, remaining out of the line of sight of his victim.

The victim may feel quite comfortable leaving her car unlocked and her handbag, wallet, or other belongings right on the front seat. After all, the car is standing right by her side.

The thief then carefully opens the door to the victims vehicle, and while still keeping his head down grabs whatever valuables are in sight and slides back to his car, closing the door behind him. The thief then drives off leaving the victim oblivious to the fact shes just been robbed. Until she re-enters her car, that is.

So far, one such incident happened in Simi Valley and two more in a neighboring jurisdiction, the Simi Valley Police Department stated in a release.

The police shared gas station security footage documenting one such crime.

Sliding now needs to be added to the list of crimes of opportunity, such as the theft of wallets from purses left unattended in shopping carts, purses slung over the back of chairs in restaurants, and purses left in cars at gyms, parks, and hiking trails.

The police suggest removing keys, closing the window, and locking car doors when stopping to pump gas.

Refuse to be a victim! the department stated. Crime Prevention is everybodys business so Protect Your Purse!

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Dont Be Fooled By These Ingredients That Are Actually SugarBebeto Matthews / AP

A Norwalk man was sentenced to 9 months in prison for failing to pay nearly $600,000 in taxes while chief financial officer of a company whose creator inspired the Soup Nazi character on NBCs Seinfield.

Robert N. Bertrand, 63, was CFO of Soupman Inc. based in New York City, which licensed recipes from chef Al Yeganeh for its Original Soupman label. The soup line is carried in some 7,000 grocery stores nationally, with the Original Soupman also operating takeout counters including at Mohegan Sun in eastern Connecticut.Springfield Bank of Illinois pulled out of working with legal medical marijuana companies in the state this month, leaving many businesses working on a cash-only basis while scrambling to find another banking partner. The bank tied the move directly to actions taken by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions earlier this year, rescinding Obama-era rules that essentially kept the federal government from interfering in states where marijuana is legal.

Meanwhile, in Canada, just the opposite is happening. The Bank of Montreal already is involved in two deals with legal marijuana companies and TD Bank Group is considering involvement as the country prepares to make cannabis legal nationwide this summer for both medical and recreational use.

TD Bank Group CEO Bharat Masrani told The Canadian Press that national legalization is an important data point. He said TD Bank Group is actively studying cannabis investment in the cannabis industry. Both TD Bank Group and the Bank of Montreal are among the Big Five banks in Canada.

Related: Baby Boomers Support Medical Marijuana but Skeptically

Actions Backing Words

The interest of Canadian banks in backing the legal marijuana industry took off in January, when the Bank of Montreal backed a $175 million stock-purchase deal to raise cash for Canopy Growth. Technically, the Bank of Montreal did the deal through a subsidiary, BMO Capital Markets, along with co-lead underwriter GMP Securities. Based in Ontario, Canopy is Canadas largest licensed producer of medical marijuana. Importantly, they have no business dealings in the U.S.

Speaking about the potential of entering deals with cannabis companies, Masrani said TD Bank Group will not consider any deals with companies that have a presence in the U.S. A few weeks after the Canopy Growth deal, BMO Capital Markets was named in a similar deal involving marijuana producer Cronos Group.

Related: How to Stand Out From the Crowd: Entrepreneurial Lessons from Jeff the 420 Chef

Meanwhile, In Springfield.

Legal medical marijuana companies in Illinois may now have to deal in cash after the main bank for the industry, the Bank of Springfield, announced it was pulling out of the industry. The decision came after Sessions' decision to rescind the Cole Memo.

It is one of the few concrete consequences, so far, of Sessions actions.

To be fair, the Bank of Springfield was something of an aberration. Most banks have refused to extend services to the marijuana industry because cannabis remains illegal at the federal level. Frustrated leaders in California are even considering setting up a state-run bank to serve the industry.

There were about $8.5 million in medical marijuana sales in Illinois in February alone, according to state numbers quoted in the Chicago Tribune.

Ross Morreale, co-founder of Ataraxia, a company that runs a cultivation facility and co-owns three dispensaries, told the Tribune: This is the closest weve been to being without banks in Illinois in this industry  which isnt good. It makes everything more difficult.

For the bank, it was a process of doing a risk assessment given Sessions action. The bank could not jeopardize customers working with businesses in the legal gray zone, a bank spokesman told the Tribune.

To stay up to date on the latest marijuana related news make sure to like dispensaries.com on Facebook

Related:

A Tale of Neighboring Countries and Their Very Different Legal-Marijuana Banking Systems

How to Stand Out From the Crowd: Entrepreneurial Lessons from Jeff the 420 Chef

Baby Boomers Support Medical Marijuana but Skeptically



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedNORWALK  At Keystone House, a nonprofit serving individuals with psychosocial challenges, Mike Boll sat in the art room next to a few of his paintings as he worked on something new. The one on top showed a buoy floating in the Five Mile River; the buoys reflection swirled in the water, forming a yin and a yang.

What I do is experiment with the human language, Boll reflected as he drew a series of question marks and exclamation points. Theres two things the mind does. One: it inquires. The other: it exclaims.

Boll and other artists at Keystone House had been thinking about the subject as they geared up for their first-ever art show, The Nature of the Mind.

Roughly a mile away, their artwork had been hung on the walls of the ARTWorks Gallery at St. Pauls on the Green. The exhibit will be the focus of Norwalks Slow Art Day, when people are invited to take their time looking at art and discussing it afterward.

On Thursday afternoon, Michelle Beyman, the Keystone art teacher, stood in the light-filled gallery surrounded by paintings, drawings and sculptures of artists at the nonprofit, some of whom she has worked with for 15 years (even before the art program at Keystone started three-and-a-half years ago, Beyman taught some Keystone artists at Clay Place).

In one room stood a collaged figure made of wood and magazine cutouts  a woman placed a finger to her lips as a profusion of flowers exploded from her mind. On the walls hung scenes from everyday life (a store selling Wicked Good Lobstah Rolls! and sunsets) alongside fantastical or abstract images. One artwork featured cut up newspaper articles about Syria and the possibility of nuclear war, painted over in flame-like colors (Words Matter, by Rachel B.). In front of the gallerys fireplace stood a collaged sculpture covered in white feathers and drawings of doves  a tribute to the three Keystone artists who passed away in the past year and a half.

When Beyman brainstormed the name of the exhibit with the artists, they called out several suggestions, riffing off of one anothers ideas until someone finally came up with The Nature of the Mind.

Beyman remembered Boll seconding the suggestion. [He] said, Its whatever comes from our mind, she said. Which is true. Its whats in there, whether its been stored in there for a long time, and its able to flow out. Whether its about treats, an indulgence, and enjoying themselves  she paused before Theresa B.s paintings of macaroons and ice cream  or whether, this is one of Rachels, its see no evil. The black-and-white charcoal drawing showed a girl with a gray blur obscuring her eyes.

Some of the art contained themes that are on the minds of many at the nonprofit. Beyman pulled a piece by Jim T., who recently passed away, out of a folder. On the back, he had written, Dear Mr. Trump, I hope that you will make it your business to help the underprivileged like the poor needy children on TV.

While the Trump administration is not responsible for Connecticuts cuts to nonprofits, Keystone House has been feeling the squeeze of increasingly tight budgets. In the past three years, the organization has been forced to lay off staff and increase its staff-to-client ratio.

A skillfully rendered oil pastel portrait of Donald Trump by Diane C. gazed down on the room next to a drawing of icicles and a painting of an angel titled Please Watch Over Me.

I said she should think about sending it to the president with a letter about supporting mental health funding, Beyman said. Because as we know, in the state of Connecticut  not just here, but everyplace  the budgets for mental health are being slashed.

The grand opening is 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, April 15. The exhibit will be on display through May 20 on Mondays through Fridays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. All proceeds will go to the artists.

Slow Art Day takes place Saturday, April 14 from 10:30 a.m. until noon. The morning includes refreshments and a discussion led by Beyman. Tickets are $5 and can be purchased at eventbrite.com/e/slow-art-day-at-artworks-gallery-tickets-44411897180.

rschuetz@hearstmediact.com; @raschuetzThe 2017-18 SIUE Arts & Issues season comes to a close when once again, the SIUE and SIUC orchestras join together for a one-of-a-kind musical event.

The combined orchestra performance, which will feature guest violinist Rachel Barton Pine, will take place at 7:30 p.m. on April 23 in the SIUE Dunham Hall Theater.

This event is sponsored by TheBANK of Edwardsville.

This will be the seventh consecutive year that the two orchestras have come together to perform.

Michael Mishra, professor of music and director of Orchestral Studies at SIUE, and Edward Benyas, music director of the SIUC Symphony Orchestra, will conduct the concert.

Mishra has pointed out in the past that although they have now joined orchestras together for several years, that at that initial point that the two groups come together, its always an eye opener. Youre facing this orchestra that is twice the size of the one you usually have, Mishra has noted. But its always fun to get together.

He also explained that the process of combining the two orchestras usually involves him traveling to Carbondale the week before so that he can rehearse once with the SIUC orchestra. But even doing that, its always an adventure when you combine two orchestras together 24 hours before the concert. Its a very intensive 24 hours, Mishra has said.

This years performance will feature guest violinist Rachel Barton Pine. Pine has appeared as a soloist with many of worlds most prestigious ensembles and holds prizes from several of the worlds leading competitions, including a gold medal at the J.S. Bach International Violin Competition in Leipzig, Germany.

The Washington Post has described Pine as, An exciting, boundary-defying performer  Pine displays a power and confidence that puts her in the top echelon.

Tickets for the combined orchestra performance range in price from $20 for general admission, $18 for SIUE staff, faculty, retirees, alumni and those 55 and older or $13 for students at any school or university.

Tickets can be ordered on-line at artsandissues.com or in-person at the Morris University Center (MUC) Welcome Desk. The MUC Welcome Desk is open Monday through Friday 7:30 a.m. until 7:30 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. The Welcome Desk is closed on Sunday. To place your order by phone call 1-866-698-4253.Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the powerful warlord in eastern Libya, has been admitted to hospital in Paris, reportedly in critical condition.

According to several Libyan and French sources, he suffered a stroke and was evacuated to France via Jordan. He arrived in France Tuesday in coma following the stroke.

According to Libya Express that relayed French Le Monde, the former close aid of late leader Muammar Gaddafi has been admitted in the Paris military hospital of Val De Grace for treatment of an alleged cerebral bleed following a stroke.

The Field Marshal, aligned with the countrys internationally recognized parliament; the House of Representatives (HoR), was reportedly first flown to Jordan before being sent to the French capital.

While the information is denied by some of his relatives and by his spokesperson, Ahmed Al-Mismari, who claim he is in Jordan for political negotiations, other people close to him have reportedly confirmed the information, stressing that his health is stable.

It must be said that the health of this strong man of post-Gaddafi Libya is a political and military issue in his country.

Speculations about Haftars health come as the country inches towards elections for the first time since 2014. The UN has advanced a political roadmap with climax being the elections scheduled for later this year.

The commander of the self-imposed Libyan National Army (LNA), which is opposed to the UN-backed Presidential Council and its affiliated Government of National Accord, had hinted he would be a candidate.

The 75-year old warlord has positioned himself as a major ally in the fight against terrorism.EDWARDSVILLE  Congress is bracing for what could soon be a lively debate on the re-authorization of the Agriculture Act of 2014, commonly known as the Farm Bill.

Signed into law on Feb. 7, 2014, the $95 billion bill authorized spending of $750 million on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other food nutrition programs. That figure, according to the Congressional Budget Office, amounts to 80 percent of the overall Farm Bill. Given the record-high food stamp spending and the recent increase in manufacturing jobs, U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis says that now is the time to tweak the Farm Bill to use funds to form a partnership with community colleges and technical schools.

Meanwhile, higher paying jobs have returned not only to U.S. Steel in Granite City but also to economically depressed cities such as Decatur and RockIsland, Davis said. The pivot, said Davis, a Republican from Taylorville, should be away from more food stamps and toward job training for people who receive them.

"We've got to invest in proper workforce training programs that are going to get people into the jobs that are available and off of government benefit programs," he said during a recent stop at the Intelligencer.

That switch in focus won't mean Congress will "be kicking people off of SNAP that really need it," he added.

"No one's talking about kicking off moms with young kids. What we're talking about is investing in those families and allowing them, through SNAP, to get partnered up with training opportunities to get the skills they need" to land a job.

U.S. Steel announced last month that it will be re-instating 500 jobs for the re-opening of a steel processing facility and Caterpillar is opening more than 200 jobs soon at its Decatur Caterpillar plant. The key is to use funds to form partnerships with technical and community colleges, Davis said.

"We've got to do a better job of getting people who are on benefits programs the training they need to take those good paying jobs," he said. Davis, a member of the House Agriculture Committee, helped forge the Farm Bill four years ago.

The announcement that U.S. Steel will be re-instating 500 jobs in Granite City came days after President Donald Trump announced a get tough policy with China for dumping cheap, government subsidized steel on the market. It's an issue that local officials have warned of for years. In late 2015, state Sen. Bill Haine filed a resolution urging then-President Barack Obama and Congress to review the national tariff policy on steel goods. The practices, he said, were unfair and "resulted in Americans losing important, quality jobs."

"It's simply inexcusable for us to allow this injury to one of our key industries by a foreign country that is clearly hostile to the U.S.," Haine said in a December 2015 interview with the Intelligencer. "They hack us, they've been aggressive in the South China Sea, their currency is undervalued so that their goods are more attractive. Why we tolerate that is beyond me."

The president has proposed steep tariffs on Chinese goods coming into the U.S., and China has responded with plans to impose tax American products including soybeans and small aircraft, according to the Associated Press.

Davis said that Trump's actions should not be a surprise to anyone who recalls Trump's campaign rhetoric on global trade. He was right to confront China over its aggressive trade policies, Davis said. He pointed to the return of jobs at U.S. Steel as one of the benefits of those actions.

Asked whether the escalations might lead to a trade war with China, Davis said: "I'm very concerned. I hope it's like with the initial steel tariff announcement: his initial announcement was a lot worse than the policy that was put in place." The president, he said, is also "getting good advice" from people like Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue "that we have to watch out for an adverse impact on agriculture."EDWARDSVILLE  Madison County State's Attorney Tom Gibbons submitted a series of written answers to questions regarding the possibility of a lawsuit against the opioid industry at a recent Judiciary Committee meeting.

The six-page document was in response to a series of questions by Madison County Board Member Phil Chapman, R-Highland, a member of the committee. It deals with how much the county might be expected to gain from a lawsuit, how that money could be spent, how long the process would take and ethical concerns over the bidding process to select a law firm to handle the case. Gibbons and other county officials have been considering joining a growing number of governmental entities filing suit against opioid manufacturers.

A suit could be initiated by Gibbons under his own authority as state's attorney, or if the County Board authorized it. In November, the committee started seriously discussing the issue. Attorneys have claimed pharmaceutical companies created much of the problem by changing how opioids were prescribed in the mid-1990s. Prior to 1995, opioids were generally prescribed for acute pain following surgery and terminal cancer cases.

That changed when doctors started prescribing opioids more readily for pain management, which led to widespread abuse. In his written response, Gibbons noted that there is "no accurate means to determine the amount of damages" the county could receive. He noted that one area that would be easier to determine would be actual government expenses, such as the cost of ambulance services for overdose cases.

How the money might be used would be determined by the County Board. "I strongly recommend the board immediately engage in establishing a plan providing for the appropriation of any recovered funds," he stated.

"This would allow for an open, public discussion of possible uses."

Whether individuals could apply for any of the money would depend on the lawsuit; governmental uses would follow three broad categories  treatment, education and law enforcement. Regarding how long it could take, Gibbons said it would be "impossible" to give a definite answer, but compared it to tobacco litigation. States began filing suit in 1994, he said, with Illinois joining in 1996. The 1998 master settlement included $9.1 billion for Illinois paid out over 25 years to various funds and programs.

"We can expect the process to take sometime between 2-4 years to reach settlement or longer, if trials or appeals are required," the letter stated.

If the county joins a lawsuit, Gibbons said his office would take bids requesting law firms "or more likely groups of firms" to submit proposals. He said the process would probably take 2-4 months.

He also said that political contributions would not be allowed as part of the contract for the life of the litigation. Because contributions are considered a free speech issue, any limitations would be "narrowly limited." Committee Chairman Mike Walters, R-Godfrey, said the issue would be discussed at the next committee meeting in May.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.

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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.4 hours ago

Jabil Inc. Q4 Results: More Than Meets The Eye

Jabil Descends Into A Buying Opportunity Jabil Inc. (NYSE: JBL) reported a mixed bag of results and outlook for the Q4 and Q1 period sending shares down 10% from their recent high. As mixed as the news is, it is the guidance that really counts and the guidance is positive.

Read ArticleCountry living as a springboard for roaming and rambling. With occasional music and light exercise. Now with more Kyoto!A quizzical John Kelly. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

After President Trump fired James Comey last May, the former FBI director received a phone call from then-DHS secretary John Kelly. Two months before he would be named White House chief of staff, Kelly told Comey that he was sick over the firing, Comey writes in his new book A Higher Loyalty, according to a report in the Daily Beast.

Kelly added that he intended to quit, Comey writes, and said he didnt want to work for dishonorable people. But Comey encouraged Kelly to stay on, telling him that Trump, more than other presidents, needed to be surrounded by principled people.

This revelation will do little to help Kellys standing in the White House, assuming Trump believes a man hes branded Lyin Comey. The chief of staff has found himself less engaged in West Wing decisions and less visible in Trumps day-to-day, CNN reported Wednesday. Kellys weakened position in the White House is reflected by Trumps chaotic behavior, which includes tweeting about an upcoming bomb strike against Syria that remains unplanned.

If calling Trump dishonorable proves to be the nail in Kellys coffin, he will join former secretary of State Rex Tillerson on the list of Trump appointees felled by a insult. Tillerson lasted months after calling Trump a moron, but the presidents anger about the remark reportedly hadnt subsided when he axed Tillerson on Twitter last month.Alan Dershowitz and Steve Bannon. Photo: Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images

With his legal team in tatters and his advances to high-profile Washington, D.C., lawyers spurned, President Trump is growing increasingly desperate for advice on how to fight back against Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into 2016 election interference. So desperate, Politico reports, that hes asking for advice from virtually any attorney who calls him up, including Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and his preferred talking head of the moment, Alan Dershowitz.

The retired Harvard law professor has endeared himself to Trump by going on TV and saying things such as: There never should have been a special counsel appointed. This week, hes twice met with the president. Though his public comments make it clear he has many opinions on the Mueller probe, Dershowitz insists that he hasnt offered Trump legal advice in private. Politico hears otherwise, reporting that Dershowitz has advised Trump on his escalating legal troubles, despite not being on the payroll.

On Wednesday, after another trip to the White House, Dershowitz was a guest on Sean Hannitys Fox News show, an appearance that Trump teased in a tweet.

I dont give advice to the president, except on television, Dershowitz told Hannity. And then he gave some of that advice, suggesting that Trumps lawyers move for the recusal of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

If I were a lawyer for Donald Trump, and I am not, I am just saying what I would say about anybody, I would be making a motion in front of a judge, he explained. First Id make it in the Justice Department, to recuse Rosenstein. Then Id make it in front of a judge. You cannot be a prosecutor and you cannot be a witness in the same case.

While Dershowitz plays coy about advising Trump, Steve Bannon is hoping to slither his way back into the presidents ear. Trumps former senior adviser has a plan for kneecapping Mueller that hes currently pitching to White House aides and congressional Republicans, the Washington Post reports. The plan calls for Trump to fire Rosenstein, end his cooperation with Mueller, and assert retroactive executive privilege in an attempt to invalidate the interviews Muellers team has already conducted with White House officials.

That last suggestion drew heckles from some legal experts. On Twitter, University of Texas Steve Vladeck called it stunningly incoherent. Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal wrote that Bannons idea proves hes an even worse lawyer than he is a human being.

Bannon, who hasnt been welcomed back into Trumps orbit, is reportedly pitching this plan to those close to the president. Its unclear, the Post says, whether Trump had been made aware of Bannons plot. Or at least it was until someone leaked it to the Post, where Trump will see it on the front page Thursday morning.Fill the swamp. Photo: Alessandro Serrano/AGF/REX/Shutterstock

Kevin Chmielewski is a former Trump campaign aide, and current supporter of the Republican president. His loyalty to the conservative cause earned him an appointment as an EPA deputy chief of staff. He supports rolling back environmental regulations; but he opposes using taxpayer money to rent Scott Pruitt a private jet  and so, the EPA director removed him from his job.

Or so Chmielewski alleged in his scathing testimony to Congress. On Thursday, six Democratic lawmakers sent Pruitt a letter detailing Chmielewskis charges. That indictment is so long and colorful, its worth reading in full. But here are a few of the letters more incendiary allegations:

 Pruitt sought to have the agency enter into a $100,000 per month contract to rent a private jet despite the fact that such an arrangement would exhaust the administrators annual travel budget in under five months.

 When this fell through, Pruitt forced staffers to book him on Delta, even though that is not the federal governments contracted airline, because he wanted to accrue more frequent flier miles.

 Another way he accrued such miles: instructing staff to invent official meetings for him to attend in Oklahoma on long weekends, so that he could fly back home at the taxpayers expense.

 When traveling abroad, Pruitt insisted on staying at hotels that were both more expensive  and less secure  than those recommended by the U.S. embassy.

 Pruitt ordered one staffer, Millan Hupp, to act as your personal real estate representative, spending weeks improperly using federal government resources and time to contact rental and sellers agents, and touring numerous properties in which you might wish to reside.

 Pruitts (previously reported) wasteful security spending included a contract awarded to an individual with professional ties to the head of the EPA directors security detail.

 Pruitt personally orchestrated large salary increases for his favorite aides.

 The EPA director insisted on the use of lights and sirens to transport you more quickly through traffic to the airport, meetings, and social events on numerous occasions, and permitted your drivers to speed through residential neighborhoods and red lights, far in excess of posted speed limits.

Its possible that allegations this serious  and from a source this credible  will convince Republican lawmakers that Pruitt needs to go.

But you probably shouldnt put money on that. To see why, take a gander at the statement James Inhofe released in defense of Pruitt last week:

Since being sworn in, Administrator Pruitt has been instrumental in carrying out President Trumps deregulatory agenda at the EPAending the war on fossil fuels, repealing WOTUS, exiting the Paris Agreement and announcing new fuel emissions standards.. So far, his reforms are estimated to save taxpayers over $1 billion in deregulatory savings. Hes been an effective member of the Presidents team and I look forward to continuing to work with him to restore the EPA to its proper size and scope.

It was hardly surprising that Senator Snowball rallied to the defense of a fellow climate-change-denying Sooner, even amid copious evidence of the latters misconduct. But it was remarkable that Inhofe felt no obligation to rebut (or even acknowledge) that evidence. Inhofe did not deny that Pruitt had abused taxpayer funds. Unlike the president, he didnt bother to rationalize the EPA directors lavish travel and security spending with references to the (alleged) death threats that Pruitt had received. Rather, Inhofe suggested that Pruitts fealty to the presidents deregulatory agenda made his abuses of power irrelevant.

Support for this basic premise  that corruption is fine so long as the right people are doing it  is fast becoming a litmus test for ideological purity on the American right. Its not enough to give lip service to the conservative movements policy goals; true believers must prove their faith by defending the indefensible acts of the movements leaders. Thus, when Steve Bannon (briefly, clumsily) tried to mount a challenge to the GOP Establishment, he did not target incumbent senators whod deviated from right-wing dogma, but merely ones whod evinced insufficient appetite for defending Donald Trumps every obscenity.

All of which is to say: The fact that many of the most damning allegations against Scott Pruitt have come from a conservative EPA official probably wont stop congressional Republicans from portraying said allegations as a liberal conspiracy  after all, if Kevin Chmielewski were really conservative, then why would he complain about a conservative bureaucrat stealing from taxpayers?CALGARYShaw Communications Inc. shares were up about ten per cent Thursday as strong operational performance by its main business units offset concerns about $417 million in restructuring-related costs booked in its second quarter.

Shaws B shares closed at $26.42, up $2.35 or 9.76 per cent after the company reported it had a $164-million loss in its latest quarter, mostly because of a previously announced restructuring that will affect one-quarter of its workforce.

The companys loss, including the restructuring costs, resulted in a net loss of $164 million or 33 cents per share. A year earlier, Shaw had a net profit of $150 million or 30 cents per share.

Read more:

3,300 Shaw employees are taking buyouts. Thats one-quarter of the companys workforce

Shaw Communications reports $114-million profit, added 34,000 wireless subscribers

Quebecor ready to invest in wireless, cable operations, CEO says

Excluding the restructuring costs and non-cash amortization costs, Shaws operating income was $501 million  down 0.4 per cent from $503 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2017.

The vast number of 3,300 planned departures over the next 18 to 24 months will be from the Calgary-based companys legacy wireline businesses  primarily cable and internet  which are bringing in a new generation of digital technology.

Chief executive Brad Shaw told analysts on a conference call that the restructuring, called the total business transformation program, is vital to future growth in both its legacy landline and new wireless businesses.

We remain confident that through the next 18 months  extended to 24 months in some circumstances  we can manage the transition with limited disruption to our day-to-day business operations, Shaw said.

He added that the employees who chose to remain are excited about their future.

We have a wireless business with tremendous growth opportunity and a step-by-step strategic operating plan that is delivering results in a meaningful way.

Shaw is a relative newcomer to the wireless business, anchored by its 2016 acquisition of Wind Mobile, which has been renamed Freedom Mobile.

While Freedom network is primarily in just three provinces  Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia  it is the largest rival to Canadas three national carriers: Rogers, Bell and Telus.

During the quarter ended Feb. 28, which included intense pre-Christmas discounting by most players in Freedoms key markets, it added a net 89,700 wireless customers. That included 93,500 additional postpaid subscribers, offset by a loss of 3,800 prepaid customers.

In total, that was 2.5 times the 33,400 net additions achieved by Freedom in the second quarter of 2017.

Analyst Drew McReynolds of RBC Dominion Securities wrote in a commentary that Shaws wireless growth was above his estimates, in terms of customer additions, revenue, earnings and average revenue per user.

He also found the year-over-year decline of earnings at the wireline business was lower than expected, although customer additions were light because of reduced promotional spending for Shaws BlueSky cable-internet packages.

Overall revenue in the quarter totalled nearly $1.36 billion, up from nearly $1.21 billion.

Wireline revenue was $1.07 billion, flat compared with a year earlier. Total wireless revenue was $290 million, up 106 per cent from last year.

The addition of Apple products as Shaws second quarter was beginning was a major reason for the wireless arms growth, partly because more people bought iPhones from Freedom rather than bringing their own devices to its service and partly because average revenue per user increased as Apple products operate on an advanced network.

Wireless equipment revenue soared to $148 million from $24 million a year before and service revenue was up 21 per cent to $142 million.

Free cash flow, which is whats available for management to allocate after servicing current debt obligations, fell to $135 million from $147 million a year earlier  mainly due to higher capital spending.CALGARY  In the coming months, Calgary Economic Development officials plan to fan out across North America and the U.K.  often with the mayor in tow  in an aggressive bid to lure business and investment to the city.

CED president and CEO Mary Moran said the organization is razor-focused on areas like modernizing energy, agriculture, and transportation logistics, but cautioned Calgarians shouldnt expect immediate results.

This is a 10-year project, not a two-year project, she said, adding Calgary faces tough competition from other jurisdictions that have been hungrier than we have for a longer time.

Because our economy was so strong, there was less pressure on an organization like ours, Moran said.

Now there's a fair amount of pressure, and having tools including the mayor out selling Calgary is very helpful.

A painful two-year recession, triggered by cratering oil markets, hit Calgary particularly hard. Pink slips rained downtown. Unemployment skyrocketed. Shimmering downtown office towers darkened.

There are signs of a recovery, a fragile one.

After leading the country in economic growth last year, Calgarys GDP is expected to slow to 2.5 per cent in 2018, according to the Conference Board of Canada.

Jobless figures have improved, but still hover around eight per cent.

And the estimated 13 million square feet of empty office space downtown will take years to fill.

We are seeing some positive numbers on job growth, but not at the velocity I would like, mayor Naheed Nenshi said in a recent interview. And I continue to be concerned about an overall jobless recovery.

When I look at the downtown vacancy rate, it's not going to be filled through organic growth of existing companies, he said.

We need to bring in investment from outside and support the growth of new entrepreneurs.

The CEDs efforts will be bolstered, in part, through a newly-created $100-million Economic Development Investment Fund (EDIF), which will be used to attract talent, spur employment and support entrepreneurs. The money was pulled from the citys fiscal stability reserves.

Its a small fund compared to provincial or federal subsidies offered to the petrochemical industry, said Nenshi, but its enough money to sort of grease the wheels.

University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe praised CEDs efforts to market Calgary, lure new investment and support local business, but criticized the citys use of rainy day funds to bankroll the EDIF.

The bigger issue that the city needs to face ... is property taxes, Tombe said.

We've seen that the drop-off in downtown assessments has really led to a spike in non-residential taxes, and the reason for that is the city decides how much money it wants to bring in and how much money it wants to bring in from businesses and from households, he said.

Calgarys downtown vacancy rate hit 28 per cent late last year and likely wont recover to healthy levels for years. In the past two years, downtown towers lost $3.8 billion and $1.6 billion respectively in assessed value.

Suburban business owners ultimately bore the brunt of the massive shortfall in downtown property taxes. Council, in turn, provided some relief by capping non-residential municipal tax hikes to five per cent.

But those are short-term solutions to a larger problem, specifically the differential between residential and non-residential property taxes, says Tombe.

According to a 2017 report by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Calgary businesses paid roughly 3.5 times more than homeowners on similarly assessed properties.

That's a big political challenge because that would mean homeowners and residential properties would be facing higher property tax increases, Tombe said.

Bringing our business property taxes more in line with literally any other city in the province would go some way toward attracting more investment to the city.

Read more about:CALGARY Charcoal-drawn faces and outstretched hands now grace the walls of the Calgary Police Service headquarters.

The pieces are large and captivating  titled Faith and Hope  and will be on permanent display at the headquarters. Its a somewhat of a shock to Sisay Shimeles, the local artist behind the pieces, who never imagined he would ever leave his homeland of Ethiopia.

At the age of 24, Shimeles, then a recent graduate of fine art from Addis Ababa University, was one of two artists chosen to represent Ethiopia at World Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany.

He was excited to show off his art skills and represent his country, but when he landed in the new foreign place, he learned how the West viewed Ethiopia. CNN, BBC, and other news channels were showing how war, drought and famine were plaguing the nation.

Shimeles was devastated that he didnt know about it  he couldnt fathom that eight million people were suffering from droughts throughout the 1980s and 90s.

We only had one news channel in Ethiopia at the time, so they told you what the government wanted.

And as an artist, he wanted to incorporate what he was seeing on the news to his piece, but that was met with scrutiny from the Ethiopian government.

The government wanted us to focus on how Ethiopia is the land of coffee and that there are more than 80 tribes living in harmony, but that was a kind of fairy-taleish aspect of the story.

Against the government's wishes, the two artists decided to create something that blended both the current realities of Ethiopia with the image they knew.

Its not a harmful thing what we did to the government. We just added a little bit of something that the government didnt want, says Shimeles. We were thinking if the government doesnt like it, should we expect people at the airport waiting for us with flowers?

What was only supposed to be a month-long trip ended up being a nearly 10-year stay in Germany. Fearing his safety, Shimeles chose to stay in Germany and was granted political asylum.

Shimeles created a new life for himself from scratch. He learned the language, culture and enrolled in a graphic design program in Germany. The two pieces that hang at Calgarys police headquarters were part of his final grad project.

In 2009, he made the move to Canada and hes been making a name for himself in Calgarys art scene.

Shimeles has worked with the police on translating and helping educate police on the Ethiopian community. He wanted to use his art as a way to bridge gaps between the African community and the police.

We have to narrow the gap by any means. They are trying to study what kind of problems we have in the African community, what kind of understanding we have of police, says Shimeles.

There are positives to the police knowing our communities not by stereotyping us. If they understand our cultures we can work with them better.

Shimeles met Const. Raul Espinosa, a member of the CPS diversity resource team, at an event two years ago and theyve been working to find Shimeles work a permanent home. Espinosa says hes moved to finally see the pieces on their walls.

It shows the relationship weve built with our diverse communities. Its something special to me because I come from a place where this is needed, says Espinosa.

Getachew Assefa, a member of Calgarys Ethiopian community, attended the Wednesdays unveiling and says he has seen how Shimeles work has brought visibility to the Ethiopian community.

His work today and his previous works with the police and the city has increased our visibility and our voice. It means that not only our community, but our city, will be stronger and more diverse.

Shimeles never imagined his works would end up where they did, but hes thrilled. To him, these two pieces convey diversity and unity and he hopes that it will bring communities together.

Mary Getaneh is a Calgary-based reporter covering arts, culture and diversity. Follow her on Twitter: @marygetaneh

Read more about:The Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival is always fraught with argument, because Cannes officials see themselves as cinema curators, not social engineers. They simply want the best films they can get, with no attempt made to meet quotas of any kind.

With only about 20 slots available in the Palme dOr competition, chosen from a pool of 1,900 international submissions, omissions and oversights become inevitable, as artistic director Thierry Fremaux told the press Thursday in Paris: There are more than 200 countries in the U.N. (United Nations). We cannot be totally representative.

Second-guessing is also inevitable, yet Thursdays live unveiling of the 2018 Cannes slate, which screened online at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. Toronto time, seemed more ripe for debate than usual. In fact, it seemed downright topsy-turvy, with traditionally rebellious directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Spike Lee happily agreeing to join the party in the Palais des Festivals while normally obliging moviegoers, journalists and distributors grumbled about selfies, screenings and cinema venues.

Fremaux, accompanied by festival president Pierre Lescure, joked about how he normally has to negotiate to get the films he wants. But when he asked Godard if hed premiere in competition his new film The Image Book, the famously cranky 87-year-old director replied in three short words of affirmation: If you like.

This is quite a change from the Godard of 50 years ago, when he and other directors demanded and succeeded in closing down the 1968 edition of the festival as a gesture of solidarity with striking workers and students across France. The protest led to the creation of the parallel Directors Fortnight program at Cannes, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary.

Fremaux has also been busy extending the Palme branch to the always-outspoken Spike Lee, whose controversial competition drama BlacKkKlansman, starring Adam Driver, Topher Grace and Laura Harrier in the fact-based story of a Black cop infiltrating the racist Ku Klux Klan, will return Lee to the Croisette for the first time in about 20 years.

And Fremaux hinted hes close to working out a deal to return festival black sheep Lars von Trier to the competition with his new serial-killer drama The House That Jack Built, starring Riley Keough, Uma Thurman and Matt Dillon. This will end seven years of von Trier being officially deemed persona non grata by the fest, after he joked about feeling kinship with Hitler at a 201l festival presser.

Yet even as rebels become comrades at Cannes 2018, Fremaux and Lescure are bracing themselves for static from groups who typically try to go along to get along at the fest.

This includes regular moviegoers who find themselves lucky enough to walk up the red carpet outside the Palais for movie premieres  a procession in recent years which has turned into slow-moving mob of selfie-takers. Cannes has responded with an official ban on selfies, which Fremaux and Lescure said they will attempt to enforce firmly but respectfully.

We have 2,200 people to get into the theatre, and many times people are falling over stairs, Fremaux said. So we decided its not nice to have people taking photos of themselves ... (and) we stand by our decision. Wed rather look at each other through the eyes rather than through a screen. He added that he likes how our Canadian friends call them ego portraits. 

Fremaux also addressed the controversial shift this year of press screening times, aligning them with public ones. He compared the change to a newspaper altering its design and he assured everybody theyll get used to the new routine.

He responded to the evergreen question of the lack of female directors in the competition  just three of the 18 so far, but perhaps one more to come  by insisting as much as hed like to see more women competing for the Palme, the issue of quotas cannot be relevant for artistic purposes.

Then he came around to a more recent elephant in the room, the row with Netflix. The online streaming giant had two films in the Palme competition last year, but there are none this year because Cannes has been unable to persuade Netflix boss Ted Sarandos to release his films theatrically in France, which is an old rule that is now being enforced to protect the sanctity of cinema.

Netflix is permitted to show films out of competition, a concession the company rejects. A peeved Sarandos responded by pulling several movies that hed planned to take to France, including the long-gestating The Other Side of the Wind, the final film by the late Orson Welles, that Netflix was instrumental in bringing to fruition.

We are choosing to be about the future of cinema, Sarandos groused to trade mag Variety. If Cannes is choosing to be stuck in the history of cinema, thats fine.

Fremaux said he stills thinks some sort of compromise can be achieved, although maybe not for this year: We have a fruitful dialogue with Netflix, despite what it looks like.

Perhaps the best sign that Cannes is eager to work things out with all the groups it deals with is the photo used for this years poster, which was unveiled this week.

Taken by on-set photographer Georges Pierre during filming of Godards outlaw amour tale Pierrot le Fou in 1965, it shows co-stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina exchanging a romantic kiss as they drive cars past each other.

We like it a lot, Fremaux said of the image, adding hed also be happy to show two men kissing, or two women.

This is the symbol we want to give for this year: joyful, exuberant and free.

Peter Howell is the Stars movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.

Read more about:The construction cranes that pierce the Auckland skyline are a visual indication of the growth New Zealands largest city is experiencing. Close to one-third of New Zealands estimated 4.5-million population lives in Auckland, a geographically blessed  and traffic-cursed  city spread over at least 50 volcanic cones on a North Island neck of land between two large harbours. The emerging Wynyard Quarter on the western waterfront is home to a new theatre, a park where movies are projected onto the side of a former cement silo in the Southern Hemisphere summer and several restaurants. Aucklands personality, like New Zealands, is laid-back and outdoorsy, but its sophistication shines in its expanding art scene, thriving fashion industry and a new generation of chefs embracing native ingredients.

FRIDAY

3 p.m.

New Art, Old Issues

Through its ground-level galleries devoted to contemporary New Zealand art, the Auckland Art Gallery (free for New Zealanders; 20 New Zealand dollars, or about $18.80 Canadian for international adults) is a great place to get a feel for national concerns and the influence of the Indigenous Maori culture on visual art. The lacelike paper panels, entitled Milk and Honey, commissioned from the artist Lonnie Hutchinson that explore the exploitation of Indigenous women are particularly powerful. Wander upstairs under space-potato sculptures by the artist Judy Darragh suspended in the atrium, part of a 2011 expansion, to an older wing of the building where a series of portraits by the painter Charles F. Goldie, done in the early 20th century, lovingly capture detailed images of his tattooed Maori subjects.

5 p.m.

Cruising K Road

Take a walk on Aucklands counter cultural side along Karangahape Road, known locally as K Road. Near the citys oldest cemetery, a string of music shops, cheap clothing dealers and craft stores mingle with bars and restaurants over several blocks. Wander into the vintage shopping mall St. Kevins Arcade to browse the retro wares, from the secondhand bookstore Green Dolphin, focusing on childrens books, to vintage-inspired dresses from Rita Sue Clothing.

Read more:

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Wild dolphin adventure in New Zealand pays strict attention to rules when moms with calves are spotted

Sea kayaking in New Zealand with the promise of glow-worms

7:30 p.m.

Edible Landscape

Before opening their innovative restaurant Pasture in 2016, the chef Ed Verner and his wife Laura Verner, who manages the wine list, spent a year gathering elderflowers to steep in vermouth, pickling spruce leaves, brining wild fennel and aging butter so it tastes like Camembert. Now just 20 diners at a time can try that butter with their house-made sourdough, a side dish to a set menu of five to six small, seasonal and astonishing courses (NZ$160 to NZ$180). Ed Verner makes ample use of an open fire for torching leeks and smoking everything from quince to duck. Menus highlight the bounty of New Zealand with an emphasis on vegetables. The drinks pairings  alcoholic (NZ$85) and non-alcoholic (NZ$75)  are as original as the food, and might include an intentionally oxidized rose. Youll make no decisions about what to eat or drink, but youll be in hands so passionate that if you express a love of the eel broth, the couple might offer to package up an extra serving to take home.

SATURDAY

7:30 a.m.

City Hike

New Zealand is known for its Great Walks, nine stunning long-distance trails that span the geographic breadth of the country from coastlines to mountains. These lie far beyond the city, but the new Coast to Coast Walkway in Auckland takes a similarly comprehensive approach to trekking across town. The roughly 10-mile route goes from the Waitemata Harbour downtown south across the isthmus to Manukau Harbour, stringing together a series of parks. Pick a portion to get a sense of the hilly volcanic topography and the locals love of nature from the vast Auckland Domain to verdant Mount Eden, the citys tallest peak at roughly 640 feet, and One Tree Hill, another stamina-testing summit.

10:30 a.m.

Indigenous Dive

Devoted to the story of New Zealand from geology to politics, the Auckland War Memorial Museum holds treasures obscured by its title, namely the vast collection of Indigenous Maori art works and crafts. Its currently in the early phases of a 20-year plan to update the galleries, layout and access, but its rich collections remain on view, including more than 1,000 pieces of Maori treasures known as taonga. These include full-size buildings, a war canoe and everyday objects such as fish hooks, all intricately carved. Arrive in time to purchase your ticket for the 11 a.m. Maori song and dance performance which brings the culture enshrined in the exhibition halls to life (museum admission is NZ$25, or NZ$45, including the show).

1 p.m.

Skippers in Training

The city estimates that 1 in 4 Auckland residents owns a boat, and seemingly 4 in 4 are sailing fans  particularly after the Kiwi team won the most recent Americas Cup race versus the U.S. team so decisively. The Americas Cup Sailing experience from the tour company Explore Group (NZ$180) allows amateurs to feel the thrill of a heeling 80-foot boat and the grind of raising the sails on two-hour trips in Waitemata Harbour. The fleet includes a 2003 vintage boat that served as a practice ship for Team New Zealand long before the twin-hulled, hydrofoil catamarans of present-day racing came along. But the older model still provides plenty of speed and the crew encourages all passengers to steer and crank on the grinders to adjust the sails throughout the trip.

3:30 p.m.

Shop Local

The 16-acre waterfront development Britomart, wedged between the harbour and the Central Business District, or CBD, mixes historic and new buildings that are rapidly filling with upscale tenants. A strong contingent of them wave the Kiwi flag for fashion, including boutiques from local designers such as Karen Walker, known for refining street styles in ruffle-edge dresses and cropped stovepipe pants; Trelise Cooper, whose dresses combine bohemian silhouettes with glam touches; and Kathryn Wilson, a womens shoemaker with a taste for embellishment. Men get equal attention at Zambesi Store which makes progressive fashion for both sexes, and the spirited World which supplements its inventory of colourful, avant-garde looks with boutique beauty brands.

6 p.m.

Britomart Bites

Chic cafes spill into the streets that web the Britomart district, offering convenient respite. The new Amano scales up farm-to-table and nose-to-tail cooking to serve sizable crowds in a former warehouse with rough plaster walls and exposed beams. An open kitchen spans the space, making theatre of chefs cutting fresh pasta or roasting chicken. The menu champions New Zealand ingredients from Kaipara oysters (NZ$4 each), to grilled lamb chops (NZ$34). Down the street, the similarly seasonal Ortolana offers fewer but no-less-sophisticated choices  try kingfish crudo (NZ$20) and pasta with clams (NZ$29)  plus superb people-watching from the patio or the conservatory indoors.

7:30 p.m.

Curtain Call

The developing Wynyard Quarter on Aucklands western waterfront, reached by footbridge across Viaduct harbour, can seem like a warren of construction fencing. But the Auckland Theater Co., among the nations most acclaimed troupes, already calls it home with the ASB Waterfront Theater, opened in 2016. The 672-seat theatre and its spacious lobby, including a cafe, offers exposure to Aucklands enthusiastic arts patrons as well as New Zealand playwrights such as Roger Hall and Briar Grace-Smith in comedic and thoughtful productions tucked between crowd-pleasing musicals and dramatic classics.

10 p.m.

Tippling Tour

From the Wynyard Quarter to the CBD, its easy to make a progressive dessert and nightcap crawl on foot. In the Wynyard, the waterfront patio at the North Park Restaurant and Bar, decorated like a vintage sea shack, is a fitting locale for a white and dark chocolate brownie (NZ$13.90). Across Viaduct harbour, try to snag a seat on the packed patio of Soul Bar and Bistro for ginger creme brulee (NZ$16) and a barrel-aged Negroni (NZ$18). Order your nightcap neat at the Jefferson, a moody club which stocks 600 global varieties of whiskey, tucked away in the alleylike Fort Lane.

SUNDAY

9 a.m.

Breakfast Club

Coffee-crazed New Zealand is a country where you can find a barista at a rural gas station. Espresso bars seem stationed on every corner in Auckland, but when it comes to caffeine and the accompanying breakfast its worth the trek to the inner-city suburb of Ponsonby to rub elbows with the flat-white sippers seated at communal tables in Orphans Kitchen. The 40-seat restaurant offers unusual dishes that might include spicy peanut butter and carrot kimchi on toast (NZ$8) and poached eggs with anchovy on sourdough (NZ$17). Its about a block away from the bustling Ponsonby Central, a green market and restaurant hive where you can pick up that spicy peanut butter and other New Zealand comestibles to take home.

11 a.m.

Island Time

Auckland can hardly be considered frenzied, but for an extra dose of tranquillity hop the ferry to Waiheke Island, where culture meets nature over 35 square miles of scalloped beaches, vineyard-planted hillsides and welcoming art galleries. Departing from Aucklands downtown waterfront, Fullers offers regular 40-minute ferry rides to the island (NZ$38 round trip, or NZ$48 with an island bus pass). One of the newer wineries, Batch Winery, will even send a bus to the ferry. After tasting its bright sparkling wine and smooth pinot gris (tastings, NZ$15), hit the boutique-filled town of Oneroa to indulge in local bivalves at the breezy Oyster Inn, a nautically themed boutique hotel with a second-floor restaurant where patrons linger at tables on the balcony in view of the sea.

IF YOU GO

Aucklands top boutique hotel, the 25-room Hotel DeBrett downtown, has changed hands several times since opening in 1925, but its intimate, wood-paneled House Bar has been a popular gathering spot for decades. Colourful, striped, New Zealand wool rugs accent uniquely decorated rooms upstairs. Doubles from NZ$350, including breakfast and a welcome drink. 2 High St., hoteldebrett.com.

Airbnb offers great value in Auckland where a shortage of hotel rooms has inspired a hotel construction boom. For example, the one-bedroom listed as a Luxury Bohemian City Apartment is in a historic building on Queen Street, downtowns main street, with high ceilings, an efficiency kitchen and plenty of plants. The apartment costs around NZ$136 a night. https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/15119807In 2016, Angelique EagleWoman packed up her life in the United States and moved north to Thunder Bay, where she became the first Indigenous dean of a Canadian law school. Her appointment at Lakehead Universitys law faculty was celebrated as historic by the Indigenous legal community and felt particularly poignant in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Thunder Bay, where race relations are particularly fraught, it was a hopeful moment.

But less than two years into the job, EagleWoman is quitting, alleging systemic racism at Lakehead University. Writing to the law facultys Aboriginal Advisory Committee on March 7, she said her efforts have been thwarted by the university, which systematically sought to minimize her work as dean.

EagleWoman said she also faced allegations of reverse discrimination. In November 2016  just months into her first year  a former employee filed a human rights complaint against EagleWoman and Lakehead, accusing the dean of bullying and firing her because she is a young blonde Caucasian woman.

EagleWoman says there is no truth to the allegations and she was removed as a respondent to the complaint in March. The case was recently settled by the university, which does not necessarily mean the allegations were substantiated but that a negotiated deal was reached between the parties.

I have been the victim of systemic discrimination at Lakehead University, EagleWoman wrote in her March letter. I have felt constantly challenged by a lack of funding, a hostile environment, and other negative actions directed at me as an Indigenous woman. It has reached a point that I am under such mental and emotional stress that it is untenable for me to stay.

The rupture between EagleWoman and Lakehead University underscores the entrenched difficulty of making systemic changes, even when everybody shares the same overarching goal. Its a tragedy, said Celina Reitberger, former executive director of the Nishnawbe-Aski Legal Services who worked closely with EagleWoman. Its going to leave a huge gap.

When the law schools first dean quit in 2015, EagleWoman  a respected Indigenous legal scholar and accomplished lawyer  seemed an ideal replacement.

The Bora Laskin Faculty of Law was founded in 2013 with the backing of local communities like Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which pushed for the creation of a law school that emphasized Indigenous people and law.

This was particularly needed in Thunder Bay, a city with acute problems of anti-Indigenous racism. The facultys Indigenous mandate became all the more timely after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which called on law schools to offer mandatory Indigenous courses.

In emailed statements, Lakehead University emphasized its unwavering commitment to its core pillars, including Aboriginal and Indigenous law. The university said it makes exceptional efforts to foster an inclusive culture and was committed to ensuring EagleWomans success.

The university worked hard with the dean to address matters she brought to our attention during her employment, read the statement.

But in her first interview about her resignation, EagleWoman said meaningful change requires deliberate efforts and systemic racism doesnt magically disappear by bringing in the Indigenous person, even in a leadership position.

I knew there would be challenges, she said. What I didnt expect was lots of resistance and a sense that my opinions as dean coming in were not going to be taken seriously or valued. Right from the beginning, I was putting out fires constantly.

EagleWoman said she was accused of focusing too much on the Indigenous mandate and often felt targeted as an Indigenous woman.

Her repeated requests to provide cultural competency training for law faculty and administration fell on deaf ears, she said. In the last academic year, she also taught all of the mandatory Indigenous courses, working seven days a week to juggle her significant course load with the demands of being dean.

Before resigning, EagleWoman said she offered mediated conversations to both senior administrators and the law faculty but her requests were denied.

Im very exhausted, EagleWoman said. Its been a difficult decision (to resign). However, I have to put my health and my family first at this time.

Lakehead University does not comment on personnel matters so could not answer questions about EagleWomans departure. The university declined to share their response to the human rights complaint or answer questions about it, citing settlement confidentiality.

The complainant Amanda Trevisanutto, a former office administrator with Lakehead Universitys community legal clinic, also said she could not speak about her complaint. But her filing with the tribunal, obtained by the Star, illustrates some of the issues that simmered during EagleWomans tenure.

In her complaint, Trevisanutto said she always received stellar performance reviews but within five weeks of EagleWomans arrival, she was terminated with no justification. She alleged that five out of seven administrative staff were fired or had their employment status adversely impacted by September 2016, representing over 70 per cent of the wholly Caucasian female administrative personnel.

Meanwhile, Ms. EagleWoman and Lakehead University had been busy procuring the services of Aboriginal employees to join the university, she wrote, referencing two Indigenous people appointed as director of Indigenous relations and the universitys chair on Truth and Reconciliation.

She added that while there is nothing inherently wrong with these appointments, a closer look at the recruitment process brings to light discriminatory elements in hiring. She said the job posting for her replacement called for cultural competency  something she interpreted as discriminatory towards her as a non-Indigenous person who does not have knowledge of specific cultural practices gained through immersion within Aboriginal culture.

Trevisanutto further alleged that EagleWoman bullied her and once made a sexist remark, commenting in a condescending tone that she looked like a supermodel.

Ms. EagleWoman had already concluded that because Ms. Trevisanutto is a young blonde Caucasian female that she must not be very smart, she must have obtained her success based on looks, and that she is not deserving of her job, she alleged. These types of assumptions continue to plague Ontario workplaces and are precisely the type of assumptions that perpetuate inequality.

EagleWoman declined to comment on specific allegations in Trevisanuttos human rights filing, which her lawyers said were all unfounded, which would likely have been the finding of the (human rights tribunal) had the matter proceeded. But EagleWoman said she did not renew Trevisanuttos contract because she was concerned about her professionalism, especially since she was the administrative assistant for a low-income clinic where the majority of clients were Aboriginal.

In an email to the Star, Trevisanutto said she lost her job less than a month after her immediate supervisor gave her a 9 out of 10 in a performance review, which commended her excellent can do attitude and ability to deal with colleagues, students and the public in a very professional and friendly manner. I never knew anything about my job being in jeopardy or why until after I was told I was fired, she said.

Trevisanuttos human rights complaint described EagleWoman as curt, dismissive and aggressive  descriptors echoed by another former employee, who declined to be interviewed on the record.

That employee identified Gilbert Deschamps, the law facultys former director of Indigenous relations, as someone EagleWoman berated. But Deschamps said he found the dean to be a very kind woman.

Hearing people say she was cold  she was extremely busy. She didnt have a lot of time to sit down and chit chat, said Deschamps, who now works at the University of Ottawa. If a man had been in that role, they would have said hes hard driving and focused  but for an Indigenous woman, people have different attitudes.

To Karen Drake, one of Bora Laskins founding Indigenous faculty members, EagleWoman was incredibly smart and inspirational. It was really powerful to have her as a dean, said Drake, who left Lakehead last year for a job with York University. Its a real loss for the faculty.

The Indigenous Bar Association, which trumpeted EagleWomans historic appointment in 2016, is now in shock over her resignation, said president Scott Robertson. (His law firm, Nahwegahbow, Corbiere, is representing EagleWoman but Robertson said he has no involvement with her case.)

Robertson said the circumstances around EagleWomans departure are murky and he doesnt want to fault Lakehead University without knowing any specifics. But he emphasized that law schools are conservative spaces that are stubbornly resistant to change.

Any time you challenge establishments, you get pushback, he said. My question is  what was the university doing to help? What were they doing to facilitate and what were they doing to frustrate?

Update - April 16, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version to include comments from Amanda Trevisanutto, a former office administrator with Lakehead University's community legal clinic.

Jennifer Yang can be reached at jyang@thestar.caMONTREALA popular western festival and a Montreal law professor are at odds again over whether rodeo events in Quebec last year contravened the provinces animal-welfare rules.

Alain Roy of Universite de Montreal published a report Wednesday using evidence gathered by observers at 20 such events and analyzed by a veterinarian.

He says it demonstrated that the animals were exposed to serious risk and injury as well as psychological distress.

That would violate a Quebec law adopted in December 2015 regarding animal welfare and safety that prohibits abuse or mistreatment affecting the health of an animal or any act that could expose them to distress.

However, the promoters of the popular Festival Western de St-Tite in central Quebec pushed back Wednesday, dismissing the report as biased.

In a statement, they said the findings were based solely on the conclusions of a single veterinarian and derived from what they called an abusive interpretation of the law.

The festival said the same images used to shape Roys report were given to their own animal treatment specialist who found no abuse, negligence or unacceptable behaviour on the part of organizers, volunteers or competitors.

The events general manager, Pascal Lafreniere, said the well-being of animals is at the heart of his organizations values and that rodeos are strictly regulated within governing bodies in Quebec and internationally.

Lafreniere also noted the tone of Roys report was expected.

We are not surprised by the reports negative findings, since Mr. Roy had already publicly announced his position on rodeos, even before undertaking his analysis, Lafreniere said.

The law professor had filed a request for an injunction almost a year ago to prevent the holding of a controversial urban rodeo during Montreals 375th anniversary celebrations.

A number of groups, including the Montreal SPCA, opposed the event taking place, which was put on by the St-Tite group.

A deal brokered between both sides, and approved by Quebec Superior Court, allowed the rodeo to go ahead in August as well as another a month later at the St-Tite festival.

As part of the deal, Roy was able to send three observers to attend and film the events and had unlimited access.

A veterinarian and a behavioural specialist examined the footage of the animals before and after the events.

The result was Roys 600-page report that found horses and bulls were subjected to serious risk and injuries like fractures.

It was the same in calf-roping and steer-wrestling and, according to the findings, all the animals were exposed to psychological distress.

The treatment of horses, bulls, steers and calves in rodeos is irreconcilable with the provisions of the new law, according to which animals are no longer objects, but beings endowed with sentience whose welfare and safety must be assured, Roy said in a statement.

A provincial committee that falls under the jurisdiction of the Agriculture Department will determine any next steps. But Roy said if the government fails to act, animal-rights advocates are prepared to pursue further action.

Agriculture Minister Laurent Lessard told reporters in Quebec City he will wait to hear back from the committee, but believes rodeos  either in Quebec or elsewhere  could continue while respecting the provinces animal-welfare rules.

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Read more about:Syrian children in Douma. Photo: Halil el-Abdullah/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

On Saturday, when objects falling from helicopters in a Damascus suburb began emitting a strange odor, the residents of Douma knew immediately what was happening. People started shouting in the streets, Chemicals! Chemicals! a 25-year-old student named Mohammed al-Hanash told the New York Times.

Syria and its allies in Russia have denied that chemical weapons were used in Douma, labeling the attack a hoax. Videos and photos from the site of the attack, along with witness testimony contradicted that, and on Thursday, the U.S. reportedly received physical evidence.

Blood and urine samples from victims of the attack have tested positive for chlorine and an unknown nerve agent, NBC News reports. The Syrian government has been known to use chlorine bombs, along with sarin, a nerve agent developed by Nazi Germany that was used in a 2013 attack that killed nearly 1,500 people outside of Damascus.

The NBC News reports come several hours after French president Emmanuel Macron said he too has proof that the attack used chemical weapons. He also said the proof shows it was carried out by the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Asked if France is planning to participate in retaliatory attacks on Syria, he was noncommittal.

We will need to take decisions in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective, Macron said. Regimes that think they can do everything they want, including the worst things that violate international law, cannot be allowed to act.

The U.S. stance on striking Syria is no clearer, even after President Trump tweeted that missiles will be coming. In another tweet on Thursday, Trump wrote that an attack on Syria could be very soon or not so soon at all!

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis urged caution on attacking Syria. We are trying to stop the murder of innocent people. But on a strategic level, its how do we keep this from escalating out of control  if you get my drift on that, Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee Thursday morning. He added that an attack is not yet in the offingA Lancaster bomber has flown into turbulence as the City of Toronto debates where the rare and significant piece of Second World War history should land.

City staff have recommended the bomber be donated to the British Columbia Aviation Museum near Victoria, B.C., a plan the grassroots #SaveLancasterFM104 organization is staunchly against.

I just cannot see that airplane being anywhere else, said Dan Grant, co-head of the group campaigning to restore the Lancaster bomber FM104 and display it in Toronto.

Avro Lancaster bombers are one of the most famous Allied bombers of the Second World War. There are only 17 complete Lancasters left, and eight are located in Canada.

Donating the bomber to the British Columbia Aviation Museum should assure the aircrafts long-term preservation and yield substantial public benefits through a novel approach to restoring and interpreting the Lancaster, the staff report said.

The aircraft was built in Malton, Ont. in 1944. After the war ended, it was used for maritime patrols and search-and-rescues by the Royal Canadian Air Force. The bomber was retired in 1964 and displayed at Torontos Coronation Park, and, later, at the Canadian Air and Space Museum at Downsview Park.

The City of Toronto is paying $25,000 a year to store the dismantled plane near Stayner, Ont. There are no suitable city properties within Toronto to house the aircraft.

The staff report says the city does not have a budget for restoring objects like the Lancaster.

The British Columbia Aviation Museum is prepared to invest five figures into transporting the bomber across the country, and millions of dollars into its restoration, said museum president John Lewis.

Any museum would be delighted to have this very iconic aircraft and were no different, Lewis said.

The museum is uniquely capable of restoring the bomber, Lewis said. It will partner with Victoria Air Maintenance, which has an international reputation as aircraft restorers.

Were particularly interested because there are currently no Lancasters in any condition, west of the Rockies, said Lewis, who added that Lancasters were flown in British Columbia during the 1950s.

Many Canadians lost their lives in Lancasters over Germany . Its important to remember that sacrifice, Lewis said.

The #SaveLancasterFM104 groups proposal suggests the city keep the aircraft and move it to a vacant city property where restoration can take place.

Having grown up with that airplane in Toronto and it being there almost all our lives, as a part of our heritage, we decided that we needed to do something, Grant said. We needed to do whatever it took to let the people down at city hall know that this is the wrong move.

Grant said he was assembled a team of aviation experts for the bombers restoration and display. Hes also identified conceptual buildings to house the bomber.

Weve got the whole package in place, Grant said.

According to the staff report, there is no suitable city property for the plane to be stored, and no room in the citys operating budget for the substantial moving and storage costs the city would incur under the #SaveLancasterFM104 groups proposal.

The Economic Development Committee will consider the report Friday.

Correction - April 13, 2018: This article was updated from a previous version that mistakenly said the British Columbia Aviation Museum is located on Victoria Island, B.C. It is located near Victoria, B.C. on Vancouver Island.The list of things residents of Cabbagetown found to be both outrageous and distressing with a recent proposal in their neighbourhood was long: Intolerable noise during daytime hours, traffic jams, jungle gyms and pastel colours.

The concerns centred on an application to allow a daycare in a mixed-use building on the corner of Sackville St. and Amelia St. for up to 82 children and 16 to 18 staff. The building, a Victorian-era home originally built with ground-floor stores, has long been designated a heritage building. The space, in a residential neighbourhood in the downtown core, has been vacant for years.

A request to vary the citys zoning rules to allow the daycare use proved to be most controversial, garnering an unprecedented response, the chair of the Toronto and East York panel of the committee of adjustment said Wednesday. After panel members cited concerns about a lack of parking that would exacerbate traffic problems in the area, the application was refused.

Read more:

Cabbagetown residents up in arms over proposed daycare

Editorial | Daycare wont destroy Cabbagetowns heritage

This is Cabbagetown. This is a historic, heritage neighbourhood. Its not like any other neighbourhood in the city, said Sackville St. resident Ken Mathieson before the panel voted. If we allow non-detached, non-semi-detached . . . houses to become de facto commercial operations, its a slippery slope for this iconic neighbourhood.

Simply, he said, leaving the lectern: Its an outrage.

He was not alone. The second-floor committee room at city hall was packed with concerned residents Wednesday.

Dozens wrote to the panel to oppose the application. Dozens more penned letters in support, noting the lack of affordable childcare options locally and across the city.

My wife and I are both self-employed, and work at home, wrote one, Evan J. Wright, who said he was worried about dozens of children playing in the backyard. The idea of tolerating this type of noise is frankly ludicrous, and completely incongruent with this, or any other, residential corner in this city.

The heritage status of area properties would be eroded by the daycare use, he said, and the idea of plastic toys, jungle gyms and signage in pastel colours truly distressing.

Lea Wiljer, the architect representing the applicants, explained that nothing significant about the buildings footprint or structure would change other than a external staircase added to meet code requirements.

The biggest concerns heard by the committee Wednesday were about available parking and plans for drop-off of children.

The daycare would need to apply to use three spaces on a boulevard next to the property.

Blaine Pearson, a local resident and mother of two, said she supported the need for more daycare across the city but said she was speaking on behalf of her neighbours to say they could not support this daycare  not of this scale and not at this location.

A presentation showed traffic congestion on the narrow, one-way streets that are easily blocked, causing some to pull onto the sidewalk.

Parents and children are at risk, pedestrians are at risk, she said.

A city staff report about the application said the existing street conditions has the potential to create an undesirable traffic flow pattern and requested further information about parking and drop-off plans if the application was approved.

Wiljer told the committee the suggestion that most parents would drive to drop-off their children was not realistic in the walkable, bicycle-friendly neighbourhood accessible to transit.

Panel members said traffic concerns remained unresolved and that the daycare use would exacerbate a bad situation.

Councillor Lucy Troisi, who was appointed by council to the Ward 28 (Toronto Centre-Rosedale) seat when longtime councillor Pam McConnell died last summer, opposed the application, raising safety concerns and writing a letter to the panel to say that, The protection of this delicate neighbourhood is imperative.

Troisi refused to say if she was considering running in the upcoming election when asked by the Star after the decision. She told council she had no intention to run when she was appointed.

Local residents who supported the daycare proposal said they were disappointed by the decision Wednesday.

I think that theres a culture amongst the opponents. . . that I would describe as a sense of entitlement, said Maggie OConnor, who has lived in the neighbourhood for 20 years with her partner and two kids.

She said traffic concerns were scapegoat issues and called daycare an essential service needed in the neighbourhood.

I feel really disappointed that the idea of parking and traffic was considered weighty enough to seriously, possibly halt or shut down this project.

The applicants have the right to appeal the decision of the committee of adjustment to the citys Local Appeal Body.Sitting in a coffee shop at the heart of Torontos Gay Village, a half-hour after Toronto police concluded their latest press conference on the Bruce McArthur case, Shakir Rahim was pained.

Seeing day in and day out, members of your community allegedly killed in such a fashion is deeply emotional and unsettling, Rahim told the Star shortly after police announced McArthurs seventh murder charge for the killing of Abdulbasir Faizi.

Faizi was last of three subjects of Project Houston, a shuttered missing persons task force, to be named as a murder victim. All three were men of colour. All three police now believe were killed by the same man.

Faizis last debit card transaction reportedly came on Dec. 28, 2010, across the street from this Second Cup, near Church and Wellesley Sts. Many of the cafes patrons say they knew either McArthur or his alleged victims.

Selim Esen, another alleged victim, applied for a job there before he went missing. He never showed up for his interview.

It really breaks your heart, Rahim said of the new charge. And part of it is because you see yourself.

Rahim is a board member for the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention, who have been actively involved with questioning what happened during that early task force and the investigation at large. A statement from the group questioned whether adequate resources and efforts were put into the mens disappearances, despite the initial public outcry, outreach and demand for an investigation.

What did investigators think about why these men went missing, or what rationale there was? Rahim asked on Wednesday. Did they think they went back to the countries they were from?

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Faizis life was complicated: He had a wife and children who appeared to know nothing about the time he spent in the Gay Village before his disappearance.

There are many lingering questions over how police handled the Faizi case, Rahim said. There are hard questions that have to be asked, about how you deal with individuals who have complex lives, he said. And it requires a really high degree of cultural competency, outreach, all of these sorts of things.

The 519 community centre, a LGBTQ-focused facility one block north, offered its heartfelt condolences to Faizis loved ones in a Facebook post Wednesday. The post included a list of support contacts for the community, from grief counselling to crisis phone lines.

Deidre Olsen, a queer Toronto-based journalist who frequents the village, said Wednesdays charge brought up the pain of a 2016 Toronto police sting operation at Marie Curtis Park in Etobicoke, where undercover officers sought out men interested in sexual activity, ticketing at least 72.

Olsen said she was jarred by the possibility that McArthur may have met Faizi there at a park near Moore Ave., where his car was found abandoned.

Queer people are often relegated to these dark spaces, Olsen said. Gay men were being over-policed by the police, but at the same time, under-protected.Striking academic workers say they want to negotiate a deal, and have rejected York Universitys plea for arbitration, calling it a last resort.

But York now says we are at that point of last resort.

With the two sides not budging, the strike now six weeks old and the school year nearing the end, post-secondary Minister Mitzie Hunter is urging York and Local 3903 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees to get back to bargaining.

This is a situation that is concerning, she said in the legislature. ... We know that the priority has to be to settle this agreement and focus on students education.

My call to both sides in this situation is that they get back to the table and recognize that compromise is needed on both sides. If we put the needs of the students first and their learning  I ask both sides to do that and to come to an agreement that is fair for both parties.

Some 3,000 teaching assistants, graduate assistants and contract faculty walked off the job in early March, seeking improved job security, pay and benefits. About half of classes have been cancelled, and should the strike drag on much longer the semester may be extended into the summer.

NDP Education Critic Peggy Sattler accused the government of years of underfunding of post-secondary education, saying it has led to an explosion of insecure, unstable and low-paid academic jobs and undermined the quality of post-secondary education.

Its not only Carleton and York where these issues have come to a head, she said, referring to a recently resolved strike at the Ottawa school.

Western graduate teaching assistants may soon be on strike and other universities may follow. Ultimately, as we know, it is students who are most affected by these labour disputes.

PC Education Critic Lorne Coe said the record-breaking five-week college strike last fall  only resolved after back-to-work legislation was introduced  showed how the government is lacking in leadership on the issue. He urged the government to act now to save the semester.

CUPE 3903 bargaining team member Lina Nasr said the university needs to come to to the table instead of calling on the union to agree to let an arbitrator settle the issues.

Carleton University resolved their dispute because the parties agreed to sit down at a table and work through what were very significant differences. If Carleton can do this, so can York, said CUPE President Fred Hahn.

York said it has had numerous bargaining dates with CUPE since last September, and one since the strike began.

The university already has the best pay and offers the best benefits in the province for the assistants and contract faculty, it says, and has called union demands unreasonable.A motion by the Walt Disney Company to seal employment documents related to sullied Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has been dismissed by a Toronto court.

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty, court master Tamara Sugunasiri said, quoting the 19th-century French thinker Madame de Stael in her decision denying the sealing order on Wednesday. Disney had not met the high threshold set out by our Supreme Court of Canada to curb the open court principle.

Disneys motion, which was argued in court last month, came as part of an ongoing sexual assault lawsuit filed by a Toronto actress and model, known in proceedings as Jane Doe. Doe alleges that Weinstein sexually assaulted her during two incidents in 2000. Her suit holds his company Miramax, its owner at the time, Disney, and Weinsteins assistant Barbara Schneeweiss each partly responsible.

Wednesdays ruling may open the door to allowing the public to see details of Disneys arrangements with Weinstein. Sugunasiri ordered Disney to provide a complete, unredacted copy of its agreements to Weinstein and all counsel for a future motion on whether Disney should be removed from the suit entirely.

The allegations against Weinstein have yet to be tested in court.

In a short statement of defence, Weinstein said he denies each and every allegation against him, including specifically denying any sexual assault, sexual battery, harassment or infliction of mental injury or any other wrongful conduct against Doe.

Disney has denied liability in the case, saying Does claim has no legal basis and it had no knowledge of any complaints, lawsuits or settlements against Weinstein. It said the executive, who was co-chairman of Miramax at the time, had virtual autonomy to manage his business.

In March, Disney asked the court to seal three documents related to Weinsteins business relationship with Disney and Miramax films, arguing that the public interest in confidentiality outweighed the public interest in openness.

Does lawyers, Marie Henein and Alex Smith, argued against the sealing order. If, at the end of the day, Disney escapes liability, the public will not know the basis for it. They will have done so, effectively, in secret, Henein argued in court.

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Powerful men continue to be accused of sexual harassment and assaults, and have been responding by accepting, hedging or dodging the allegations. (The New York Times)

Sugunasiris decision says that Disney needed three elements to prove a sealing order was necessary:

First, the risk of harm to an important interest must be real and substantial, well grounded in the evidence, and pose a serious threat to the companys commercial interest.

There is no evidence that Disney is subject to an obligation to keep the agreements confidential, Sugunasiri wrote.

Second, that commercial interest must be capable of being expressed in terms of a public interest in confidentiality. Sugunasiri wrote that Disneys evidence was scant on this point.

Third, there must be minimal impairment of the open court principle.

In other words, Disney must show that there is no other reasonable alternative to a full sealing order, Sugunasiri wrote. Disney, she wrote, took an all or nothing approach and failed to tender any evidence or make any argument on other options.

In conclusion, I am not persuaded that Disney requires a sealing order, she wrote.

Together, each clients counsel can agree what the relevant portions are for the later motion, and then Disney and Weinstein can redact all other portions of the documents.

The public shall have access to any materials the parties choose to file with respect to the stay motion, Sugunasiri wrote.Construction in a portion of the tunnel for the Eglinton Crosstown LRT was shut down over safety concerns Wednesday after a resident complained she saw three employees working on the project smoking marijuana, the Star has learned.

Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency in charge of the Crosstown, and Crosslinx, the private consortium delivering the $5.3-billion project, confirmed that a resident told a nearby parking enforcement officer that she saw three workers smoking marijuana near her house, which is close to an emergency exit at Eglinton Ave. East and Bayview Ave. that crews use to access the tunnel.

The resident claimed she saw the workers smoking pot Wednesday morning, and again around lunch time.

According to Crosslinx spokesperson Kristin Jenkins, as soon as the site supervisor learned of the incident he ordered all work shut down. The entire crew of about 25 people was sent home, she said.

We take this very seriously. We have zero tolerance for any kind of consumption of drugs or alcohol on the job, said Jenkins, who couldnt immediately provide details of the work the crew was performing Wednesday.

She said the penalty for using drugs or alcohol on the job is immediate termination.

Crosslinxs investigation into the incident is ongoing and the workers allegedly involved have not been identified. The company has ordered all workers to take their breaks on-site from now on, Jenkins said, and deployed additional security to the area. The suspended work resumed Thursday morning.

Jason Ottey, a spokesperson for Liuna Local 183, the union representing the workers, declined to answer questions about whether the union was concerned about the allegations. He said there was a safety stand down at the site but to his knowledge workers had not been sent home.

Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins called the incident shocking.

Thats something that we are taking extremely seriously, she said.

It was completely irresponsible, against all of our fit-for-duty policies and our commitment to safety ... We expect our contractors to respond appropriately, immediately, and swiftly to any allegation like this. They must follow all applicable health and safety legislation.

In a statement, Transportation Minister Kathryn McGarry also condemned the incident.

This type of behaviour is absolutely unacceptable. I expect that Crosslinx will conduct a thorough investigation and they are well aware that this behaviour will not be tolerated, she said, adding that safety is always our number one priority.

Industry associations and workplace safety groups have raised concerns that on-the-job drug use by construction workers is a problem that will only be exacerbated by the legalization of cannabis later this year.

In a July 2017 submission to the provincial governments consultations on legalization, the Ontario General Contractors Association said the construction industry has a significant problem with employees drug and alcohol use, which impairs their productivity, gross motor skills, awareness and judgment.

The agency said legalization will significantly increase usage, leading to a spike in workplace injury and fatalities.

Jenkins said in light of Wednesdays incident, Crosslinx has decided to accelerate its introduction of an education campaign to tell workers that legalization doesnt change its policies about on-the-job drug use.

Read more about:One month after opening Ontarios first investigation into an officers use of opioid antidote naloxone, the provinces police watchdog has terminated the probe, finding the responding officers actions did not contribute to a Brampton mans fatal overdose.

Tony Loparco, director of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), said in a brief statement Thursday that his agency would no longer pursue an investigation into police actions in the early morning hours of March 12, when they were summoned by an emergency call about a possible overdose.

When officers arrived on scene, they found a 36-year-old man who was motionless and not breathing, according to the statement. Arriving before paramedics, police performed CPR and administered Narcan nasal spray containing naloxone  a drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose  but the man was later pronounced dead.

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The life-saving attempts were the only contact police had with the man, Loparco said.

While neither of these interventions was able to save the mans life, they did not contribute to the mans death. As such, I have terminated the investigation into this incident, Loparco wrote.

The decision comes amid a debate about whether the SIU, which probes police-involved deaths, serious injuries and allegations of sexual assault, should initiate investigations into life-saving attempts by officers that nonetheless fail to prevent a death.

The issue has grown in prominence as more police services equip their officers with naloxone kits to fight against the growing opioid crisis. In fact, since opening the first naloxone investigation last month, the SIU has initiated a second such probe, involving the death of a 45-year-old man in Mississauga.

Earlier this year, the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police sent a written request that the SIU abandon its expectation that it be notified when a police officer administers naloxone but an injury or death still occurs. The police chiefs association and other police organizations, including Toronto police, have said the policy might discourage officers from acting quickly to save lives, knowing they might become the subjects of a stressful and sometimes lengthy probe.

Loparco later shot back, saying the SIUs legal mandate clearly states that police must contact the watchdog when an officer is involved in a serious injury or death.

The director stressed that being notified does not mean there will be a lengthy investigation; sometimes, no probe will be opened at all, or in other cases, it will be terminated at an early stage if it is determined that police actions had nothing to do with a death.

That is what happened in the March 12 naloxone fatality. SIU spokesperson Monica Hudon confirmed that the investigation was closed by memo  meaning the decision was made to terminate the probe because it became clear there was no police wrongdoing to investigate. In these cases, the director does not make any conclusion about whether a criminal charge is warranted.

The March 12 naloxone investigation was completed within 30 days, far less than the 111-day average length of investigation by the watchdog in 2016, the most recent available statistic.

Read more about:Murder, arson, illegal gambling, fraud and even criminal uses of Vaseline are being discussed in an ongoing Ndrangheta organized crime trial underway at the University Ave. courthouse.

Theres also plenty of talk about respect.

The word respect came up at least 33 times in the dozens of secretly taped conversations between paid police agent Carmine Guido, 47, and men accused of involvement in the local Ndrangheta network.

Respect was also in the opening statement from Crown attorney Aaron Shachter on March 19, when he began his address to the jury with the statement: Respect, its something everybody wants.

Shachter said he was talking of respect in the context of criminal power and the Ndrangheta, which he described as a highly structured criminal network with a base in Calabria and global reach, including into Germany, Australia and Canada.

Guiseppe (Pino) Ursino, 64, of Bradford and Cosmin (Chris) Dracea, 41, of Toronto each face two counts of cocaine trafficking for the benefit of a criminal organization and one charge of conspiracy to commit an indictable offence.

The case marks the first time the Ndrangheta has been targeted in a Canadian court as an organized crime group since the offence of criminal organization came into effect 21 years ago, senior federal prosecutor Tom Andreopoulos said earlier in an interview.

Ursino is a small-scale food distributor. He and Dracea are accused of trying to import mass shipments of cocaine into the GTA from the Caribbean, in shipments of Jamaican jerk sauce, yucca plants and plantains.

Read more:

Paid police agent used cocaine while undercover, drug trafficking trial told

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Despite all of the alleged plotting, only one kilo of cocaine was actually seized in the operation.

Guido, a former construction executive and self-described wise guy, made $2.4 million as a paid agent for the RCMP between 2013 and 2015.

The word cocaine wasnt mentioned by the accused in the secretly recorded conversations, several of which were in Italian. However, there was plenty of talk about respect, like on March 3, 2014.

Im not saying that you never gave me anything, okay? Ursino told Guido that day. Ive always respected you and you know it.

Yes, Guido replied.

Listen, you didnt ... you didnt respect me like you should have respected me, Ursino continued.

A little later, Guido added: Dont worry, okay, Ill respect you.

Im not tell you what you have to do Ursino replied.

A lot, a lot of times I havent respected you, yes, Guido admitted.

On March 28, 2014, Guido talked about making fifty thousand bucks with someone named Cosimo.

And you said that I never respect you, Guido said. This is five hundred dollars, a gift.

Oh thank, thank you, thank you, Ursino replied.

On May 23, 2014, Guido and Ursino spoke elliptically about the murder of reputed York Region mobster Carmine Verduci a month earlier.

Verduci was shot dead outside the Regina Cafe in an industrial and retail plaza near Hwy. 7 and Martin Grove Rd. The killing remains unsolved.

Guido told Ursino that a man named Antonio Coluccio ordered the closure of the Regina Cafe after the murder.

They said close it for respect for Carmine, and they closed it, Guido said.

Whats Carmine have to do with this?, Ursino asked.

Because they killed him outside of there, Guido said. Closed. I dont know why but together ... now its 

They were four or five that were involved, Ursino said in a combination of English and Italian.

Court heard that Guido met Dracea 17 months into the operation.

There was notably no use of the word respect when Guido and Dracea spoke about Daniele Ranieri of Bolton, who police say was connected to the criminal organization of the late Vito Rizzuto of Montreal.

Ranieri has been a fugitive since 2015, wanted by York Regional Police on charges of extortion and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence

Guido instead used words like psychopath and crazy to talk about Ranieri in the secretly recorded conversation with Dracea on Dec. 23, 2014. He testified that Ranieri would smear Vaseline on his face in order to keep gunpowder residue for sticking to his skin while committing crimes.

In a gentler moment, Guido and Dracea each used the word respect in a secretly recorded conversation on March 12, 2015.

And you know what, if somebody treats you with respect they deserve it back doesnt matter if theyre (expletive) bum on the street, Guido said.

Of course You dont need to be an animal.., Dracea replied.

Shortly after that, Guido talked of a Toronto restaurant owner he clearly didnt respect.

Yeah, I almost took a bottle and crushed it over his head, Guido said.

The trial continues.A Toronto high school teacher is facing charges after an allegation of sexual assault involving one of his students.

Toronto police said they were called at Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts, near Lawrence Ave. and Pharmacy Ave. around 9:40 a.m. on March 29.

Following an investigation, it is alleged that a teacher sexually assaulted a female student. Police said the incidents occurred at the school from late 2017 to March 2018.

According to a school letter sent to parents on Wednesday, the suspect was a visual media arts teacher.

Upon learning of the allegations, staff acted immediately to place the employee on home assignment and to notify the authorities, wrote school principal Tom Lazarou. The safety of our students is a top priority and we are committed to enforcing policies about their well-being.

The school has arranged a meeting for parents on April 16 in the school library to review procedures and respond to questions or concerns.

John Kraft, 57, was arrested on Tuesday and has been charged with sexual assault and sexual exploitation.

Kraft is scheduled to appear in a Scarborough court on May 22.

Police are asking anyone with information to contact police or Crime Stoppers.Premier Kathleen Wynne is demanding answers on why one of the Ontario governments first cannabis stores will be located 450 metres from a school in a Gerrard St. plaza.

The Toronto District School Board also has concerns  saying it had asked to be consulted, but was not.

I would love to know if schools were even considered as part of the equation. I hope they were, said board Chair Robin Pilkey. ... This is new, and it is an opportunity to do things the right way from the beginning  because once (the stores) are established, its hard to go back.

It all seems not very well thought out.

Wynne, speaking to reporters Thursday at Mount Sinai Hospital, said she was going to ask staff to find out exactly how the decision was made.

My priority in the implementation of the federal governments decision to legalize cannabis has been safety. Its been safety and security particularly for young people, the premier said. I just want to know that the school board had input into it. I know there are a lot of factors and in Toronto there are 800 schools so there are schools in many, many, many neighbourhoods.

Of the provinces other three initial sites  in Guelph, Kingston and Thunder Bay  only the Lakehead school board in the north had any say.

It was made very clear throughout the process that we did not support a location that was near a school or where young people frequent, said spokesperson Bruce Nugent, noting the board is satisfied given the closest elementary is three kilometres away and secondary school more than five.

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In Kingston, the outlet will be at least two kilometres from the nearest school. In the Upper Grand board, the closest school is an elementary about 850 metres away, with two others about a kilometre away.

Toronto families whose children attend Blantyre Public School, just south of the location at Victoria Park Ave. and Gerrard St. E., say the strip mall is a place where many elementary and high school students go at lunchtime to get food from McDonalds or Tim Hortons  or where kids go for after-school math tutoring or martial arts classes.

Were disappointed we werent consulted at all, said Scarborough Southwest Trustee Parthi Kandavel. If we were, we would have consulted with parents on this.

Parents discussed the matter at a Wednesday night school council meeting at Blantyre, said co-chair Garfield Richards.

Overall, they werent welcoming of the idea, he said, adding families want to know if there are any alternate sites that could be considered instead.

That just speaks to one of our concerns, Richards said of the lack of information on how the spot was chosen. There isnt the level of engagement there. It seems like a decision that was made removed from any of the key stakeholders in the community. To me, that is very worrying.

The Ontario Cannabis Store outlets will be run by a subsidiary of the LCBO. The federal government is expected to legalize marijuana this summer.

In a statement, the LCBO said we are continuing to engage with municipalities through the siting and ultimately through the construction process and that guidelines include minimizing proximity to primary and secondary schools.

We can confirm that the Toronto location does adhere to the local criteria that were provided to us by City of Toronto staff.

Local Toronto Councillor Gary Crawford is worried about the volume of traffic in the already busy area.

Ultimately, safety is the biggest concern, and (the location) does pose challenges, he said.

With files from David RiderKevin McCarthy (at center-left in photograph) and Steve Scalise are no longer rivals for the job of succeeding Paul Ryan  for the present, at least. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call,Inc.

While it reflected a position that Steve Scalise has been expressing privately for a while, a formal statement on Fox News from U.S. Representative Steve Scalise made it official today: Ive never run against Kevin, and wouldnt run against Kevin.

Kevin, of course, is House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, of California, who is one step above Majority Whip Scalise on the House GOP leadership ladder. And the run is for the top position held by Speaker Paul Ryan, who announced yesterday he would hand over his gavel and retire from Congress at the end of his current term.

While it may be a distinction without a difference, Scalise did not say he was backing McCarthys elevation, though Ryan was quick to suggest that was what he intended in eschewing a contest. The general feeling up until now has been that Scalise will stand by and see if McCarthy can get the House GOP conference behind him. In the Californians last run for the speakership, in 2015, he couldnt, which led to the draft Ryan movement that eventually lifted the 2012 veep nominee to the job.

It is entirely possible, and even likely, that McCarthys done enough outreach to conservatives since then to get him over the top, particularly given his close relationship with Donald J. Trump, who calls him my Kevin. So its McCarthys race to lose, once you recognize that its possible he might.

An interesting variable, though, is timing. Ryan expressed an interest in staying right where he is until January of next year, which means prospective successors wouldnt know if they were signing on for the speakership or the far less exciting gig of Minority Leader. But Axios is reporting that a lot of influential people want to get the question of the succession out of the way much earlier:

One source close to leadership told us: Scuttlebutt is that Paul will have to step down from speakership soon. Members wont follow a lame duck, hell have no leverage to cut deals, and the last thing they need in this environment is 6 months of palace intrigue and everyone stabbing everyone else in the back.

An earlier transfer of power would benefit McCarthy in two ways: it would reduce the possibility that a bad November could shake up the leadership race (you have to figure a debacle would eliminate more of the moderate-to-Establishment-conservative types who are McCarthys base than skeptical hard-core conservatives who probably prefer Scalise), and it would guarantee he goes down in the history books as a Speaker, not a Speaker-wannabe. But on the other hand, it would leave McCarthy less time to consolidate his support.

Its one of those situations where calm unity in public could disguise some pretty serious jockeying for position in the background. But for now, life looks good for Kevin McCarthy.The FBI agents who raided the office and hotel of U.S. President Donald Trumps lawyer, Michael Cohen, were seeking details on his relationship with the Trump campaign and his efforts to suppress negative information about Trump, according to three people briefed on the matter.

Prosecutors are interested in whether Cohen, who had no official role in the 2016 campaign, co-ordinated with it to quash the release of anything detrimental to it and whether that violated campaign finance laws  a new front in the investigation into Cohen.

The warrant executed Monday by the agents was striking in its breadth, according to those people. It demanded documents related to the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women, and to other materials related to secret agreements Cohen made with women in exchange for them not speaking publicly about sexual encounters with Trump.

Read more:

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FBI raid on Trumps lawyer seeks payment records related to 2 women who alleged affairs

The warrant also covered emails and other documents that could reveal Cohens private communications with Trump during a tense period in the presidential campaign. And it delved deeply into Cohens past, including documents about Cohens personal and business finances.

The additional details the agents were seeking came a day after it was revealed that the authorities sought documents from Cohen related to payments made to two women who claim they had affairs with Trump, Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels, as well as information on the role of the publisher of The National Enquirer in silencing the women.

The investigation is being run by Robert Khuzami, a veteran federal prosecutor whose boss, Geoffrey Berman, is the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Though the raids on Cohens office and hotel room were overseen by Khuzami, people close to Trump and Cohen regard the investigation as a surreptitious attempt by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to pry into Trumps personal life by using other prosecutors as his proxy.

Asked for comment on Wednesday, Stephen Ryan, a lawyer for Cohen, referred to his earlier description of the raids as completely inappropriate and unnecessary. He has described the raids as an overreach by prosecutors into the privileged communications between Cohen and his client, Trump.

Read more about:A California teacher who unintentionally discharged a handgun during a class on gun safety has resigned.

Dennis Alexander, who teaches at Seaside High School in Monterey and moonlights as a reserve police officer in a neighbouring town, submitted his resignation March 29 effective at the end of the school year, Marci McFadden, a spokeswoman for the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District said in an email to local news organizations on Tuesday.

He remains on administrative leave, she added.

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Alexander fired his Glock handgun toward the ceiling of the classroom on March 13, officials said. It still isn't clear how that happened or what precisely Alexander was attempting to demonstrate about gun safety in his class on the administration of justice.

One student received minor injuries from debris dislodged by the bullet.

Alexander is trained in weapons handling and safety as a part-time reserve officer for the Sand City Police Department. The Glock 21 .45-calibre semi-automatic handgun was issued by that department, though the county superintendent said he was not authorized to bring it to school.

Alexander, who is also a Seaside City Council member, apologized at a council meeting after the event. He still faces possible prosecution in connection with the incident, which attracted national attention because it came shortly after the Feb. 14 mass killings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at a time when the subject of arming teachers was being hotly debated.

Alexander, who is apparently popular among many students at the school, reportedly had brought his weapon to class on previous occasions, allowing students to handle it, according to local news media.

Alexander has also resigned from the Sand City Police Department. The chief there said Alexander broke rules requiring safe handling of weapons and keeping them out of the hands of others.An oil painting by Marc Chagall stolen from a New York City apartment has been recovered by the FBI and is expected to fetch several hundred thousand dollars at auction three decades after it went missing, the U.S. attorneys office of Washington and its owners estate said.

The theft was an inside job by a temporary employee who had access to the apartment building in Manhattans stately Sutton Place neighbourhood when the owners were on vacation, FBI art crimes unit and Washington Field Office Special Agent Marc Hess said.

A Maryland associate of the thief who acquired the work after a dispute tried to sell it last year  still labelled with the names of its true owners, Mr. + Mrs. E.S. Heller, New York. A Washington art gallery owner balked, however, because the piece lacked documents proving ownership and referred the would-be seller to the FBI, prosecutors said in a court filing Thursday.

The filing asks a court to approve returning the work to the Hellers estate, which intends to sell it at auction to benefit charities and refund the insurance carriers payment estimated at about $100,000 (U.S.) at the time.

A feud between the thief and a middleman with ties to Bulgarian mobsters, eventually led to the recovery of the 13-inch by 16-inch painting, one of 14 works stolen in the 1988 heist, the FBI and federal prosecutors said.

Because the investigation and efforts to recover the other 13 paintings continue, the suspects are not identified in the court filing.

Both suspects are now in their 70s and may be motivated by coming to your end times and wanting to set the record straight, Hess said. The co-operation is not a (deathbed) confession Hess said, but may be the associates attempt to even the score with a thief he believed double-crossed him on a promised fee to find a buyer for the stolen Chagall through connections with Bulgarian organized crime, as court papers describe the criminal network.

I would say old rivalries die hard, and its never too late to get your revenge, Hess said.

The building employee was convicted in federal court in Manhattan in connection with other art thefts from residences on charges of interstate transport of stolen property and mail fraud, court filings state without providing more details.

The employee approached the associate in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when the associate then lived in Virginia.

The two argued over the associates fee, setting off a decades-long grudge and the attempt last year to sell the painting on his own, according to the saga in the court filings.

The associate by then was in Maryland and had stashed the Chagall for years in a specially made wooden crate, before approaching the gallery in Washington.

None of the other items stolen from the Hellers have been found, but of all the works that could have been recovered, this is the one that would have pleased them the most, said Alan Scott, the Madison Avenue attorney who handled Ernest Pike Hellers estate and is the executor for Rose Red Heller, nicknamed after her hair.

Ernest Heller was a jeweller and pearl importer who died in 1998 at 95 after a lifetime of expanding his inherited collection of paintings, jewelry, sculptures, silverware and carpets. Rose Heller died at 105 in 2003.

They were the quintessential old married couple, recalled Scott, who met the couple in the late 1980s before the theft, They told it like it is to each other. And they got along well with everyone, particularly Red .... and they had a very active social life.

In a 1988 article reporting the $600,000 theft of all the items, Ernest Heller said he prized most Othello and Desdemona,  one of Chagalls early Paris works, depicting the jealous title character from William Shakespeares play holding a sword in a threatening pose over his doomed wife.

I liked them all, but the Chagall was a very interesting one because it was a 1911 painting, Heller said.

Heller was about 8 and living in Paris when his father, a jeweller named Samuel Heller, bought the painting from Chagall, who was one of several artists in his familys social circle, said Scott.

It remained in the family and part of the collection that came to fill the Hellers New York prewar three-bedroom apartment along with works by French painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir, George Rouault and Fernand Leger, the Italian Amadeo Modigliani and the American Edward Hopper. The Hellers also acquired Asian and pre-Columbian pottery.

Chagall, a Russian-French painter and Modernist pioneer, became a preeminent Jewish artist of the 20th century but was little known in 1911, having arrived in Paris just the year before.

Chagall thought enough of Othello and Desdemona that he suggested the Hellers offer a Zurich art museum a chance to include it in a 1967 retrospective of his work. It was exhibited and that June, Heller politely rebuffed a Basel gallery owner who asked whether the painting was for sale.

Under the circumstances we would not like to part with it, Heller wrote, citing its great sentimental value after almost 50 years in his family, according to correspondence kept by Art Recovery International, a private firm employed by the Hellers insurance company that recovers stolen and looted art.

The Hellers were longtime art and music patrons. Ernest Heller, who graduated from Princeton University at age 19 and joined the family jewelry business importing Mikimoto pearls before retiring in 1975, learned Chinese and became a trustee of the New York City Center, a forerunner of the Lincoln Center, according to his university alumni death notice.

Rose Heller, served on the boards of several U.S. contemporary music organizations, supporting festivals in Aspen, Colo., and Tanglewood in Massachusetts, and raised more than $1 million for the MacDowell Colony, which has supported more than 7,700 artists in residence since 1907 including Aaron Copeland, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein and Alice Walker.

Art investigators said it is not unusual for thieves to try to sell a painting over the span of many years, whether to an established business or through a formal but illegal network or ring.

In the case of the Chagall piece, various sales approaches by the Maryland associate failed before he finally called the FBI asking if there was a reward out for the stolen painting, said Hess and Tim Carpenter, who oversees field programs for the FBI art crimes unit that has about 150 pending cases.

There was no reward but agents confirmed the work was stolen using FBI and Interpol stolen art databases.

Theres no harm in asking if there is a reward, because sometimes there are rewards posted by insurance companies, either publicly or privately, said Art Recovery Internationals chief executive, Christopher Marinello. But not for anyone holding back an art piece or information for ransom, which is extortion, Marinello said.

U.S. prosecutors in Washington working with the FBI filed a formal civil forfeiture claim for the painting in federal court on Thursday to return the painting to the estate.

If the court agrees later this year, the painting is to be sold at auction, with proceeds going to refund a payout by the Hellers insurance company and any remainder to charities named by their estate, 80 percent for the MacDowell Colony and 10 percent each to Columbia University and New York University Medical School, said Assistant U.S. attorney Zia Faruqui.

Marinello said the Heller painting has an excellent provenance but awaits formal blessing from the Chagall committee in Paris, to which it will be submitted before auction for examination and authentication.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston offered a $10 million reward in the 1990 theft of 13 works valued at half a billion dollars, Marinello said, while there is also a sizable bounty for one of two Aston Martin D5s used in the James Bond film Goldfinger, stolen from a Boca Raton airfield in 1997.

Marinello said collectors, sales rooms, auction houses and dealers to can check items offered for sale against databases of stolen art maintained by the FBI, Interpol and Artive, a non-profit group.

The art market is reluctant sometimes of course to perform due diligence because that tends to get in the way of earning profits, he observed. There are lot of people that do the right thing, I dont want to be critical of the entire art trade, but when someone comes to them with a painting that doesnt have proper paperwork, one has to be suspicious.MILWAUKEENewspaper publishers across the U.S. already strapped by years of declining revenue say theyre dealing with an existential threat: Recently imposed tariffs on Canadian newsprint driving up their business costs.

The tariffs are a response to a complaint to the U.S. Department of Commerce from a hedge fund-owned paper producer in Washington state, which argues that its Canadian competitors are taking advantage of government subsidies to sell their product at unfairly low prices. The tariffs, imposed in January and increased in March, are not permanent yet. But newspaper publishers are bracing for another blow to an industry that has shrunk with the loss of advertising revenue to the internet.

Critics of the paper tariffs say the businesses that will ultimately be harmed are not Canadian paper producers, but U.S. newspapers that will have to cut staff and reduce publication days to afford higher prices of newsprint  the sheets newspapers are printed on. The newspaper industry employs just over 150,000 Americans, which is about 276,000, or 65 per cent, fewer than two decades ago.

To get an unbudgeted increase of this magnitude will be for many publishers very, very serious to catastrophic, said Tom Slaughter, the executive director of the Inland Press Association, which represents about 1,500 daily and non-daily newspapers in every state.

A large metro newspaper can expect annual increases of about $3 million in printing costs, according to Paul Boyle, senior vice-president for the News Media Alliance. While larger papers might be able to survive the increase, Boyle said smaller publications might not.

Ive heard from small publishers whove said, Im worried about shutting my doors, he said.

Boyle said his organization  formerly called the Newspaper Association of America  is compiling a survey from its member and nearly every publisher is exploring layoffs and scaling back news coverage.

Steve Stewart, publisher of The State Journal in Frankfort, Kentucky, told readers in a March 30 column that the newspaper they were reading cost 10 per cent more to produce than a few weeks earlier and could cost as much as 40 per cent more in a few months. He said this will result in fewer pages, higher subscription costs and less non-local content.

The newsprint tariffs reflect President Donald Trumps tough new approach to U.S. trade relations. Trump is engaged in a tense standoff with China over Beijings sharp-elbowed attempts to gain access to U.S. technology. Hes trying to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. And his administration has wrangled with Canada directly over low-priced Canadian timber imports, Canadian barriers to U.S. dairy farmers and now cheap Canadian newsprint.

The International Trade Commission is expected to make a final determination on the tariffs in August or September.

Canadian newsprint producers began paying an average of 6.53 per cent more to export their products to the U.S. in January, when the Commerce Department concluded that would help offset the foreign paper mills advantage over American companies. In March, the department increased the cost by another 22 per cent after its preliminary investigation concluded that one Canadian company, British Columbia-based Catalyst, was underselling the uncoated groundwood paper newspapers use by that much less.

In response to the second increase, Catalyst said the tariff was without merit and that it will continue to vigorously defend itself against an unwarranted and onerous U.S. trade action.

The North Pacific Paper Company, which New York hedge fund One Rock Capital Partners bought in 2016, petitioned for the tariffs, arguing that Canadian companies had an unfair advantage. NORPAC, which employs about 300 people, is the only U.S. paper producer making that argument.

While our company understands the concerns recently surfaced by some newspaper publishers, which also face a challenging marketplace, we strongly disagree with the notion that their industry requires low-priced, subsidized newsprint from Canada to sustain their own business model, Craig Annenberg, the CEO of NORPAC, said in a statement. The statement went on to say that high-quality journalism in communities across the country should not depend on unfairly traded inputs that cause material injury to a U.S. industry and American jobs.

The U.S. currently has five operating mills, including NORPAC. Three are in Washington state, with one of them partly owned by a Canadian company. Canada owns the remaining two in Georgia and Mississippi.

Publishers say Canadian imports are not the reason for the decline of U.S.-based paper mills, but rather a 75 per cent drop in newsprint consumption over the last two decades. That has led mills to switch to more profitable products such as the boxes Amazon uses for shipping, said Tony Smithson, vice-president of printing operations at Bliss Communications, which owns multiple newspapers and radio stations in Wisconsin. The newsprint the company buys all comes from Canada.

Smithson said that even if every paper mill in the U.S. operated at full capacity, they still would only be able to produce about 60 per cent of the newsprint consumed in the country. He said that raises another concern: A scarcity of available newsprint if Canadian producers decide to ship to other countries to avoid the new tariffs.

The hidden danger isnt just in the price ... The hidden danger is in availability, he said.

China, for example, doesnt accept mixed-waste paper from the U.S. or elsewhere to produce recycled newsprint, so Chinese publishers buy their product from Canada and Chinese demand is high, Boyle said.

Before a final decision on tariffs is made, publishers can still make their case with the International Trade Commission, which has scheduled a hearing on July 17. Boyle said the ITC has the power to reject the tariffs, but Smithson isnt optimistic.

If you think about it politically, once tariffs are in place, theyre essentially permanent, he said. Theres no political capital in making a tariff go away, because then you put a target on yourself that says, Hey, this politician is getting rid of American jobs.PMs pipeline woes of his own making, Harper, April 11

According to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, B.C. Premier John Horgan should compromise because this pipeline is in the national interest. Why is that? He doesnt say.

I see the national interest as one where all of us move in a planned and purposeful way toward an economy that does not depend on oil and gas. In that world view, giving oil companies breaks on environmental assessments or emissions rules or buying pipelines so they can move their oil is against the national interest. It is the interest of oil companies not to leave stranded assets. The national interest is to move forward into a low-carbon future in Canada and around the world.

Mr. Trudeau speaks out of both sides of his mouth. Yes, he says, we will meet our Paris targets. Then he approves drilling in Nova Scotia, refuses to sign on to an Arctic heavy-oil treaty and permits Alberta oil to triple production of a very inefficient, high-greenhouse-gas emissions product, and approves a pipeline without ever reviewing its climate impacts or demonstrating that bitumen can be cleaned up.

Meanwhile we have never reduced our emissions targets as a country and are not projected to meet those targets any time soon.

And how can he say he has consulted with First Nations when the B.C. Federation of Indian Chiefs is standing at the Watch Tower, committing civil disobedience, and getting arrested to make their voices heard? Yes, lets act in the national interest. Lets all of us move toward a low-carbon future in right relations with our first peoples.

Rev. Frances Deverell, Nanaimo, B.C.

Pipeline politics pit profits against planet, Walkom, April 11

A quick search of the federal governments own data shows that our entire country accounts for just 1.6 per cent of the globes greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity. With such a small footprint, how will a complete shutdown of Albertas oilsands solve the existential crisis columnist Thomas Walkom articulates?

And his inference that alternative forms of energy are ready to fill the gap is patent nonsense. Alarmists such as Mr. Walkom seem to be in denial that our high standard of living is due, in large measure, to the benefits we glean from our oil resources. It will take more than a nudge for wind/solar/etc. to be able to step up and support our social programs in a similar fashion.

Jeff Barker, MississaugaThe demilitarized zone between North and South Korea was once considered the most dangerous place in the world.

It was the site of the biggest military conflict of the Cold War. It separated sworn enemies, each backed by a nuclear power.

A wrong move by either side could trigger the Third World War.

But while the DMZ is still desperately dangerous  particularly now that North Korea has its own nuclear weapons  it is no longer the worlds most dangerous spot.

That honour belongs to Syria, where the worlds great and not-so-great powers are jockeying for position as they try to upstage one another.

The crisis over Syrian President Bashar al Assads alleged chemical weapons attack against rebels in the Damascus suburb of Douma is only the latest chapter in this game.

The Syrian conflict began seven years ago as a popular rebellion against a dictatorial regime. It soon became a civil war with religious overtones before morphing into a series of proxy wars.

Saudi Arabia and its allies funded Sunni militias (some of them terrorist) fighting Assad. The U.S. tried, with little success, to find moderate rebel groups that it could arm and fund.

Kurdish militias in Syria made deals  first with Assad and later with the U.S.  designed to help them eventually carve out an independent state.

Turkey funded and armed its own militias, in part to maintain influence in a country that historically was part of its empire, in part to counter the Kurds.

Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah intervened on Assads side to protect their Shiite co-religionists from the Sunni militias and to expand Tehrans influence in the region.

Israel intervened to counter Hezbollah and Iran.

The U.S. and its allies, including Canada, eventually intervened directly to fight the extremists known as Daesh, or the Islamic State. Russia intervened directly to prevent the Assad regime from collapsing.

There are now 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria and an unknown number of so-called Russian mercenaries. The two forces clashed in a bloody battle last February.

American troops have also fought Iranian-backed militias in Syria and shot down a Syrian warplane.

There is a high risk of conflict between Turkey and U.S. troops backing Kurdish militias that Ankara calls terrorists. Turkey and the U.S. are both NATO members.

This is the backdrop to the current poison gas crisis. On Saturday, residents of rebel-held Douma reported a deadly chemical attack by the regime. While the attack has not been independently verified, U.S. President Donald Trump was apparently convinced. He tweeted his intention to launch missiles against the Assad regime. French President Emmanuel Macron signalled he would support him.

The Syrian regime denies it was behind any poison gas attack. The Russians deny that a chemical attack took place. In any case, whether because of the alleged chemical attack or weeks of devastating conventional bombing, Douma fell. Rebels abandoned their last foothold in the suburb and government forces moved in.

Should Assad be punished for waging chemical warfare? There is of course the possibility that this time hes innocent. A 2016 report by the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons found one instance where antiregime rebels used poison gas. Theoretically, this could be another.

Theoretically, the Russians could be right and there was no chemical attack at all.

But the real reason to hold off is that a serious attack on Assad is too dangerous. Russia has signalled that it wont stand by and allow the U.S. to trash its ally. Matters could spiral out of control.

Syria is a disaster. There are already enough players with conflicting aims making war inside this small country. The world does not need any more.

Thomas Walkom appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Read more about:This Trump is starting to worry me. And Im not so impressed with the efforts of those trying to take him down either.

Siccing the national political police, AKA the FBI, on him, isnt a great strategy. (Thats what theyve always been, starting with the Palmer raids on foreign anarchists post-First World War. And still they raid: law offices, hotels, early morning at the home of Trumps former campaign manager.)

If this was any other president, the voices now cheering themselves hoarse (New York Times: The Law is Coming, Mr. Trump) would be taking liberal fits.

It may seem more hopeful than just trying to impeach Trump, which hangs totally on the Dems sweeping Congress in the fall, and if they did  and then do  it would be disastrous for U.S. democracy, which would henceforward for all time become all and only about electing a Congress to impeach whomevers president.

And what if Trump just fires his tormentor Bob Mueller (and Rosenstein and Sessions)? They  the anti-Trumpers  seem to think the Murrican people wont take it because it negates their entire history of rule by law blahblahblah.

But what do they think the past is? A mighty force a la Faulkner that isnt over, it isnt even past? Maybe sometimes its that but sometimes its a diaphanous sliver blowing apart in a light breeze.

Im betting thats the current phase. History is tuckered out and no source of hope. For sure the time when history will be least useful is when you count on it to save you since you cant think of anything else to do.

Trumps base  35 to 40 per cent  remain utterly loyal. Thats populism for you: they feel so disdained and patronized that when someone shows up who they believe really cares, an earthquake couldnt shake them, so great is their need.

The best hope of shedding him Id say is more along the lines of a distraught, disoriented Trump quitting because hes too good for this crap and the White House is a dump to live in so hell return to fantasizing about building a Trump Tower in Moscow or Azerbaijan  oh wait, theres already one there. Its irrational and wouldnt save him and you cant see Nixon at his most paranoid contemplating it  but Nixon was a model of tranquil calculation by comparison.

I pause, exhausted, to note that the only other strategy in play is his extramarital affairs. Huh? Does anyone remember a mere 20 years ago when that didnt work on Bill Clinton? He came out of it with the only real bragging point of his presidency: standing up against 400 years of American sexual puritanism.

This was also the week that Zuckerberg testified to Congress, looking like the headshot of a medieval nun painted on wood. He kept saying Facebooks only goal is to connect people and make the world better. Spoken like someone whos never been able to connect to people. He made even the congressional goofs sound smart. Together, he and Trump look like what America deserves.

Lenin said there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen. Then theres Trumptime, when every day seems to last a century of cataclysmic moments and then tomorrow is another century where you cant remember what just happened. Mercy, please.

If you want some way to make it through these consecutive daily eternities, I recommend seeing The Death of Stalin; its so funny and so deathly serious. Its made by Armando Ianucci, who created, then departed the brilliant U.S. sitcom on the inanity of presidential politics, Veep. He mustve known, once Trump won, that the madcappishness of Veep would fall flat in his light (or shade), so he moved to the only arena that could outcreep Trump: the czar of sinister political unpredictability himself, the one, the only JS.

An Italian politician this week, speaking on the chaos there, railed about people staying on the sidelines: You cant just sit back and eat popcorn. There are no spectators in democracy.

Actually at this point theres almost nothing else to do. But if you are going to sit back and spectate the current farce, I suggest munching your popcorn while watching The Death of Stalin.Many longtime Liberal loyalists in the private sector proved less loyal when the tables turned last June, newly released Elections B.C. donations data reveals.

Experts say the leftward exodus of traditional Liberal donors to the New Democrats is proof such gifts were corrosive to democracy, but warned loopholes in the NDPs big money ban still give donors sway.

Were constantly battling against the pervasive power of corporate interests and individuals with deep pockets, said University of British Columbia political scientist Maxwell Cameron, director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions. When you take the brakes off, like in the U.S., the corrosive effect of that on democracy is absolutely clear.

Cameron lauded B.C.s new ban on corporate and union donations, and $1,200 cap on individual gifts, which came into effect last November.

But when the curtain fell, both major parties had raked in a massive haul after a costly election.

Traditionally, the B.C. Liberals have usually out-fundraised their rivals. But last year the NDP raised the most, $16 million; the Liberals raised $13.4 million; and the Greens a record $1.9 million in a pivotal year when their three MLAs became the balance of power in the Legislature.

StarMetro analyzed newly revealed gifts to parties before and after the NDP rose to power after 16 years of Liberal rule, handed the reins by the lieutenant-governor on June 29, 2017.

According to records released Monday, business donations saw the biggest shift starting the day after Premier John Horgan took over.

Before June 29, the B.C. private sector had showered the self-described free enterprise coalition Liberals with $7.1 million; that dropped 86 per cent in the rest of the year.

In contrast, after June 29 the NDPs business donations rose 26 per cent to $2 million.

Its the political system that existed, said former NDP strategist and consultant Bill Tieleman in a phone interview. (He donated $3,475 to the NDP in 2017). Its now changed, thankfully for the better.

But if you want to show youre supportive of the political system, and supportive of the party itself, then you probably will make donations to whoevers around.

Integrity B.C. executive director Dermod Travis said the major donor shift was obvious across many industries, but particularly among real estate, automotive and liquor sectors.

Many of these donors on the NDP (donor) list had not given to the NDP before, or gave very little, he said in a phone interview. Whenever a government changes, suddenly people who never donated to one party suddenly feel a deep urge to 'support democracy.

Travis said its a bit rich to claim to be supporting democracy when donors are really looking for a friendly ear.

He said there are examples of donors who contributed to both major parties for years, even if unequally. Others were consistently loyal, such as real estate marketer Bob Rennie to the Liberals, or the pro-NDP United Steelworkers.

Nearly half of that unions $1.1 million NDP donations last year was in a single donation of $500,000 on April 7, 2017.

Cameron said when large sums are in play, donors must expect a return, even if they dont always get the policy outcomes they hoped for.

They dont say, Hey, we support you because we just wish you the best, Cameron said. Its, Heres $500,000, when you win the election and I pick up the phone, I should be able to speak to the senior official able to issue a permit, license, or help me with a problem.

But Tieleman said donations have nothing to do with buying influence as some allege, or access to decision-makers.

Any major business can get the ear of government, anytime, period, he countered, whether they gave a donation or not.

One of the big donors to both NDP and Liberals is the New Car Dealers Association of B.C.

From 2005 until mid-2017, the association gave the Liberals more than $1.3 million, and less than $83,000 to the NDP  three quarters came in the year before the 2013 election, as New Democrats rose in the polls.

But as soon as the New Democrats took office on June 29 the money began flowing their way. Until the end of last year, the New Car Dealers Association poured $55,500 into NDP coffers, nearly a third more than they gave the Opposition.

Over the previous dozen years theyd donated 12 times more to the Liberals than the NDP.

The association didnt just show its appreciation for the reigning government with cash. A string of press releases over 2017 also saw its praises shift, too.

It applauded Christy Clarks B.C. Liberal policies twice in February  for promoting clean energy vehicles and for $1 billion in tax cuts  before thanking her publicly for her transformational leadership on July 28.

Suddenly, the association had nothing but kind public statements about the NDP, despite Clarks own final speech ever in the Legislature, reminding MLAs on June 29 of the New Democrats association with deficits and credit downgrades and a mass exodus of British Columbians.

The association issued a statement Dec. 11 applauding Premier John Horgans decision to OK the Site C dam.

Likewise, real estate moguls (and Vancouver Canucks owners) Aquilini Investments and its owners showered the NDP with $151,000 last year, nearly one-fifth more than the B.C. Liberals.

Theyd donated more than 12 times the amount to the Liberals than the NDP previously.

And the B.C. Trial Lawyers Association  which gave Liberals roughly twice as much as NDP from 2005-2016  flipped their donations and gave New Democrats 42 per cent more than Liberals last year, who got nothing at all after the NDP took office.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) likewise shut off the taps to the Liberals after June 29, but continued giving to the governing NDP.

Obviously, with the NDP in power for the first time in 16 years, I think businesses recognized they want to be seen as accepting of the NDP as a legitimate government  by making donations while they still could, Tieleman said.

The New Car Dealers Associations CEO was out-of-country and unable to comment. Requests for interviews with representatives of the Aquilinis, CAPP, or Trial Lawyers were not returned by press time.

Attorney-General David Eby, who oversees political financing and introduced the big money ban, could not be immediately reached for comment, nor could a Liberal critic.

But Integrity B.C. said Ebys new big money ban legislation, while an improvement, left open several loopholes  most notably allowing individual $1,200 donations from staff, directors and affiliates of corporations or unions.

The biggest loopholes they still have to address, in terms of campaign financing, is disclosure, Travis said. The problems will continue to surround (not declaring) a donors address and employer  in case if theyre all coming from individuals working for the same company.

David P Ball is a reporter at StarMetro Vancouver, covering democracy and politics. Email david.ball@metronews.ca

Read more about:VANCOUVERFirst Responders and their supporters are overjoyed following an announcement Wednesday that the B.C. government wants to make it easier and faster to file claims of work-related mental injury like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Paramedics, firefighters and police would also have better access to compensation and support for mental injuries, according to a statement from Labour Minister Harry Bains.

This proposed change ensures that when the people who protect us need support, B.C.s workers compensation system supports them to ensure a full recovery, read Bains statement.

Former paramedic Lisa Jennings, 53, was emotional when StarMetro reached her at home Wednesday afternoon following Bains announcement.

I cant explain how validated I feel, said Jennings, who in 2017 won an appeal overturning several WorkSafeBC decisions denying her compensation for her claim of work-related PTSD, stemming from years of traumatic experiences on the job.

Jennings has been a staunch advocate for reform to the WorkSafeBC policies that made winning her claim so challenging. She said she felt overwhelmed at the news that changes she had spent years fighting for were finally becoming a reality.

I just feel like were also honouring all the people that we couldnt have saved, said Jennings, who founded a group called You Are Not Alone PTSD BC in support of fellow traumatized first responders who, Jennings said, were left without access to help.

Currently, first responders are required to prove a mental injury is work-related when filing a claim with WorkSafeBC. This means claimants can be tied up for years in hearings with little or no access to treatment, recounting their traumatic experiences to a panel in charge of deciding the fate of that claim.

Under the proposed amendment, claims of mental injury like PTSD would be presumed to have happened at work unless proven otherwise. The amendment would also provide better compensation for successful claims, and easier access to specialized psychological support services for claimants.

Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Yukon have all adopted legislation around PTSD and mental injury presumptions for police, fire and ambulance workers. First Responders in B.C. have been calling for their province to follow suit for years.

Robert Weeks, vice-president of the B.C. Professional Fire Fighters Association, said his group is pleased a proposal is finally headed to the legislature.

Its incredibly significant to have the provincial government recognize this (risk of PTSD) is a reality for this profession, Weeks said.

As labour critic in 2015, Shane Simpson  now B.C.s social development minister  signed a private members bill proposing some of the same changes Bains announced Wednesday, though it was ultimately unsuccessful.

Simpson told StarMetro it felt wonderful to see government finally making a difference in the lives of first responders whose health he had fought for years ago.

These are the people we look for in emergency situations, Simpson said. These are the people you want to take care of you ... And now were showing them we can care for them too.

Read more about:VANCOUVER Surrey Coun. Vera LeFranc says a number of her Surrey First colleagues on council are considering a run for leadership, in the wake of Mayor Linda Hepners decision not to run for re-election.

LeFranc told StarMetro her party has yet to sit down as a team to hammer out a vision for its future, but that a decision on who will be making a mayoral bid will be part of that process.

There are many of us who are giving leadership serious consideration, LeFranc said in a phone interview Wednesday. I think that its going be an interesting and exciting campaign and Im looking forward to it.

In Hepners announcement by email Tuesday, she said, there is never an ideal time to leave.

I have thought long and hard about this and it has not been an easy decision to make, but I sincerely believe now is the right time to dedicate more time to my family and friends.

LeFranc said her partys first priority would be sitting down with community members to hear their concerns, which she said would impact the partys direction.

Our community will be voting based on our track record and our vision for the future, LeFranc said. I think we need to be very clear what that vision is.

Although Hepners career in public service lasted more than three decades, her tenure as mayor lasted only one term. Her Surrey First party won all nine council seats in the 2014 election, during which she handily defeated her opponents.

Read more about:Trump offers farm-state reps subsidies to offset the cost to farmers of his trade war. They professed to be shocked. Photo: Evan Vucci/AP

Donald Trump has been getting some heat from farm-state members of Congress  including Republicans  concerned that his trade war agenda (most notably with China) could seriously mess with the incomes of their constituents. Chinas already announced extensive tariffs on some agricultural commodities in retaliation for the Trump administrations new tariffs on Chinese exports of technology, transportation, and medical products, as the Los Angeles Times reported earlier this month:

Besides items like aircraft, cotton, beef and orange juice, Beijing targeted American soybeans, whose producers count on China for more than half of their total foreign sales. In 2016, China purchased $14 billion worth of U.S. soybeans, many produced in states Trump won.

President Trumps trade war will hit California farmers hard, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter. $2 billion worth of CA exports including all exported almonds, walnuts, raisins, plums, grapes, kiwis, dates and figs  will now be subject to a 15% tariff when exported to China. How does that protect American jobs?

So Trump had a meeting today with farm-state interests to discuss his trade agenda. And according to Axios, he had a bright new idea:

President Trump floated the idea of subsidy payments for farmers in a meeting today with Republican lawmakers, but nobody voiced support, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

Multiple senators echoed the message our farmers dont want welfare, one source briefed on the meeting told me. The source added that Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds got the Presidents attention by saying our farmers dont want welfare  our farmers want to work and win.

The Washington Posts account of the meeting quoted Trump as expressing satisfaction at what he was hearing:

The White House had been looking at using a Depression-era program known as the Commodity Credit Corporation that could be used to extend subsidies to farmers, but Republican lawmakers pushed back hard on that idea during Thursdays meeting.

Farmers dont want a handout. They want access to markets, [Sen. Steve] Daines said, adding that senators made that point very clear.

The president was surprised by that. Hes like, really? He said, Oh really? Ok, so we wont do that, Daines said.

Like a lot of things involving this president, its not quite clear what was going on here. Was Trump not aware that there is a relatively large system of agriculture subsidies (valued at over $20 billion per year, not counting the costs passed on to consumers by production controls that boost prices)? Was he aware that probably everyone in the room who protested the idea of welfare for farmers supports these subsidies? Did he just not understand the code whereby farm-state folk defend subsidies as a hand-up rather than a hand-out?

I have to say, if I were one of those abrasive conservative ideologues who would like to scrap the entire federal farm program infrastructure, Id find some way to remind Trump of this meeting when the next subsidy-engorged farm bill comes waddling toward his desk. Perhaps there was some staff follow-up to reassure the farm-state lawmakers know the discussion was something the president would soon forget, or that he didnt take their rejection of a new trade-related subsidy as representing a sudden free-market epiphany. But you never know when this kind of exchange can leap back into the presidents mind and cause havoc.Nearly 120 million cubic metres of untreated sewage and runoff entered Canadian waterways in 2016, StarMetro has learned.

Thats roughly the same amount of water that roars over the edge of Niagara Falls over the course of 12 hours  except its not whitewater spewing from these pipes. Its murky, brown and a little bit chunky.

Environment Canada provided the 2016 figures, the most recent data available, at StarMetros request.

In combined sewer systems, the pipes that carry rainwater runoff also carry sewage from homes and businesses to the treatment plant. During heavy rains, these pipes can end up carrying more wastewater than the plant can handle, so they have overflow points where the wastewater can pour directly into a waterway, like a river or lake. It protects the treatment plant from being overloaded, but it can put human and environmental health at risk.

Anything that youre flushing is going directly into the stream or receiving waters, said Sarah Dorner, a Canada research chair in source water protection.

That means pathogens  bacteria, viruses or other harmful micro-organisms  could end up in waterways used for recreation or even drinking water.

While drinking-water treatment systems are typically equipped to handle pathogens, some parasites are more resistant, she said, adding the best way to ensure clean drinking water at the tap is to start with clean drinking water at the source.

British Columbia was responsible for almost 40 per cent of the sewage overflows across the country in 2016.

The risks to human health were highlighted this week by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. About 40 people have reported acute gastrointestinal illness after eating raw oysters since early March, and norovirus was confirmed in some of those cases. As a result, two oyster farms in B.C. have been closed.

The most probable cause, according to the centre, is human sewage in the ocean. While authorities havent pinpointed the source, it could come from various places including combined sewage overflows or discharge from septic systems, explained Marsha Taylor, an epidemiologist with the centre.

Its important for people to know that human sewage in our waters may be impacting some of the food we eat, Taylor said. Its an important issue to a lot of us that live so close to the water.

It absolutely concerns me, said Lauren Hornor with Swim Drink Fish, an organization focused on water protection.

Hornor noted its not just pathogens from human waste that are a concern. The waters draining from combined sewer overflows can also contain oil and grease from cars, microplastics, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals and other toxins.

So much of who we are as a community can be reflected in how we treat our waters, she said. We are really a country of waterscapes.

While Hornor said she believes cities are moving in the right direction  for example, the City of Vancouver aims to separate all of its combined sewers by 2050  she thinks the public should be notified in real time when sewage overflows are happening so they can make informed choices about using water.

Its alarming that some cities dont currently notify people when sewage overflows are occurring, she said, because it means recreational water users could unknowingly swim or come into contact with those contaminated waters.

Data provided by Environment Canada shows B.C. was responsible for the highest volume of sewage overflows across the country in 2016, and that doesnt include the untreated sewage released on purpose in cities like Victoria, which doesnt yet have a sewage treatment plant.

But combined sewage overflows remain a persistent concern in other provinces as well.

Nova Scotia, the second-worst offender, released more than 19 million cubic metres of sewage and runoff in 2016.

Ontario released more than eight million cubic metres.

Alberta, which released more untreated sewage in 2016 than in 2015, saw five million cubic metres of untreated sewage and wastewater flowed into waterways.

Overall, the total volume of untreated wastewater released across the country decreased from 2015 to 2016.

Dorner cautioned there could be various reasons for that. It could be that cities across the country are moving to address the issue, either by separating their stormwater and sewage systems or through other initiatives to capture more rainwater. But the amount of rainfall is also a major factor in how much wastewater overflows each year.

Some regions, including Vancouver and Ottawa, are expected to see more rainfall as the climate changes, which could mean more sewage and runoff flowing untreated into the environment if cities dont continue to take action.VANCOUVERThe alleged assault of a 17-year-old Canadian teenager in Cuba has prompted the arrest of two Vancouver-area police officers.

The Vancouver and Port Moody police departments each confirmed Thursday by email that one of their members was arrested and then released during a personal vacation in Cuba.

Port Moody Mayor Mike Clay said in an interview Thursday that his police department has been in touch with the officers family and was told both officers had their passports confiscated a few weeks ago.

Clay, whos also the head of the police board in the city, said there has been an allegation that the Vancouver officer assaulted a 17-year-old Ontario female, but no charges have been laid.

The Port Moody officer is being held as a material witness, Clay said.

Unfortunately, what were told is that investigations move quite slowly and in fact weve been told that it could be up to 60 days before he might be allowed to leave the country, he said.

Deputy Police Complaint Commissioner Rollie Woods also said he believes the Port Moody officer was detained as a witness.

My understanding is the person or the officer that may be in some jeopardy for his actions there was the Vancouver member, he said, noting that his office has been given very little information and is still confirming details.

Once the commission has more information, it will determine whether to launch an investigation, Woods said, noting that officers are bound by professional conduct standards outlined in the Police Act, no matter where they are in the world.

Municipal police in British Columbia are accountable for their actions, whether they are in Canada or any other country in the world. Theyre always held to account and could be subject to a Police Act investigation, if they have committed or are alleged to commit misconduct, Woods said.

Read more about:GLEN CARBON  The newly renovated Altitude Trampoline Park officially celebrates its grand re-opening with special kids activities and hourly giveaways.

The party is from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the park at 91 Fountain Drive, just off Illinois Route 157, in Glen Carbon.

We have all kinds of exciting activities for the kids lined up  a photo booth, face painter and balloon artist, Altitudes new co-ownerSteve Wineriter said. We will also have free pizza at noon, while it lasts, and the Granite City High School cheerleaders will perform and hang-out with everyone from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Families can enter for a chance to win hourly door prizes, including the grand prize, which is a birthday party for 10 jumpers. The giveaways will continue that evening during Saturday Teen Night, with DJ Tegs spinning tunes from 7 to 10 p.m.

Grand opening activities are free with the purchase of any jump pass. Families are encouraged to buy passes in advance, available online at www.altitudeglencarbon.com, to secure preferred jump time on Saturday.

Altitude Glen Carbon re-opened its doors under new ownership one month ago after closing the park late last year to ensure the facility was operating to its fullest potential  and bringing the newest and most exiting activities to families, with its safety-first approach.

The community welcomed us back with open arms and has taken notice of everything we are doing Wineriter said. We added some new cool attractions, like our state-of-the-art ninja warrior course, animated rock-climbing wall and an enlarged foam pit, but at the end of the day, its about giving families a first-rate experience every time they visit.

To further build excitement around Altitude Glen Carbons grand re-opening celebration, the park will award one jumper with free jumps for one year. From now until 11:59 p.m. Friday residents can text JUMP to 797979 for a chance to win. The text-to-win promotion allows one entry per participant.ALTON  Aldermen Wednesday followed their votes in committee, approving an amended resolution and subsequent ordinance allowing Alton to sell its sanitary sewer system to Illinois American Water for $53.8 million.

Vote was 7-1 each time, with Mayor Brant Walker casting a positive vote. State statute required the mayor to vote so as to comprise a super majority, as it involved a city property sale.

As she did at Mondays Committee of the Whole meeting, Alderwoman Stephanie Elliott, 6th Ward, voted no against the resolution and ordinance, the latter after a rules suspension. She said Monday that the resolution does not contain a specific plan addressing exactly how the city will use the money from the sale to pay down the $113,760,754 the city owed to the Firemens and Police pension funds, as of April 1, 2017.

Officials do not expect the sale to be completed until next year.

The citys massive pension debt, along with expensive repairs needed at the wastewater treatment plant and overall sanitary sewer collection and treatment system prompted the city to consider selling the assets after Illinois American approached officials. The utility was the only respondent to submit a formal proposal, with the $53.8 million offer being the mid-price of three options. The other prices were $50- and $60 million, each with different rates for customers.

During negotiations that followed, Mayor Brant Walker said the city was able to get the utility to switch the price schedule from the $50 million offer to the $53.8 million option, which he said is more favorable to 85 percent of customers, as follows:

Lower the existing monthly base rate from $22.08 (includes 1,000 gallons usage) to $20; lower usage charge from $0.475 per 100 gallons to $0.30 per 100 gallons for usage from 1,000 to 2,000 gallons; and increase charge from $0.475 to $0.58 per 100 gallons for usage over 2,000 gallons.

(Beginning) in 2020, Illinois American then would increase the proposed rates by 2.5 percent annually. The utility calculations still show reductions in typical monthly residential bills (3,500 gallons)  by $2.33 the first year (from the current $33.96 to $31.63); by $2.23 (to $32.42) in the second year; and then by $2.12 (to $33.23).

The bills also are subject to Illinois Commerce Commissions Gross Receipts Tax of 0.10 percent.

More Information After Wednesday's Alton City Council meeting, Karen Cooper, senior manager, Illinois American Water's Alton office provided the following printed statement: "Illinois American Water appreciates the confidence Mayor Walker and the City Council have shown in us. We are honored and excited about the opportunity to broaden our partnership with the Alton Community to include the wastewater system. A sale must be approved by the Illinois Commerce Commission to ensure it is in the best interests of customers, the City of Alton and our company. Once a sale is approved and closed, all current City of Alton wastewater employees will have positions with us. We will need their experience, knowledge and skills to help ensure a smooth transition and continue to provide quality wastewater service to our customers. In the meantime, the City of Alton will continue to provide wastewater service, and we will continue to build our partnership with the city. "Illinois American is part of the Alton community," it continues. "We have been providing water service here in the River Bend for more than 140 years. Alton has a proud history, tradition and a bright future. We at Illinois American Water look forward to our continued partnership here in the city." See More Collapse

The proposed rates would provide savings for customers using 5,400 gallons or less per month in all three years, yet still support the full service and capital investment that Illinois American provides, the proposal says. The rates apply to residential and commercial customers.

Previous Telegraph articles quoted Illinois Americans rates as being effective this year, as contained in the printed copy of the proposal, but the mayors office said Wednesday:

We (the city of Alton) are confident that the sale is not going to be effective by January (2019) and therefore will not impact 2018 rates. IAWs use of the 2018 rates were used for comparison purposes only. Nonetheless, it is correct that following the closing of the sale, rates will go down.

Some people  including Alton attorney Jonathon Forbes at the March 28 City Council meeting  have complained that using 3,500 gallons as typical monthly residential water/sewer usage is misleading as to calculations of what average consumers will pay.

Other Altonians also have told The Telegraph that a typical family actually uses 4,500-5,000 gallons of water each month.

Walker, though, said there are many older, empty nest couples and single person households in Alton contributing to that 3,500-gallon, typical monthly residential figure.

Besides the switch in rate schedules, an amendment to the sale resolution that came to the floor Monday for recommendation vote eliminates allocation of not less than $25 million each to the Firemens and Police pension funds from the sale in the original document.

The amendment says auditors Scheffel & Boyle CPA would determine the proportions and amounts so as to produce the best use of said funds in fulfilling the obligations established by the State of Illinois within the year the proceeds are received by the city of Alton. The city is to contribute to each respective pension fund not less than the level payment schedule calculated annually for each fund by an independent actuary to accomplish full funding of each pension fund by the State of Illinois deadline, currently 2040.

Another amendment says upon the sale, the city would return funds to Bethalto that the village contributed to Altons sanitary sewer system reserve account; then similarly return money that the Village of Godfrey provided.

Then, from the remaining funds left in that reserve account, the city would deposit $1 million into a new account set up by the city comptroller and treasurer that would be used exclusively for demolitions of derelict or unsafe buildings, or for Alton to buy properties with such structures to be demolished. The City Council would have to approve each withdrawal from the account.

Also taking from the sanitary sewer system reserve fund, the city would deposit another $1 million into Altons motor fuel tax account for street and infrastructure improvements; then, 75 percent of the remaining funds are to go into another reserve fund to be established that would require a 2/3 majority of the City Council for any withdrawals. Interest that the new account generates would be deposited equally in the new demolition account and motor fuel tax account.

Finally, the amendment says the remainder of funds left in the sanitary sewer reserve account would go into the citys General Fund, up to $2 million. If more than $2 million remained, the city would put the excess into the new reserve account.

The most recent city treasurers report says the city had $2,312,924 in cash and certificates of deposit in its Sewer Reserve Fund as of Feb. 28.

The votes on the amendment and resolution Monday was 6-1, with Elliott voting no.

Reach Linda N. Weller at 618-208-6450 or on Twitter @Linda_WellerEDWARDSVILLE  The League of Women Voters of the Edwardsville area will be hosting a Drinks and Dialogue on Thursday, April 19 at Wang Gang in Edwardsville.

The speaker is Dr. John Foster, an assistant professor at SIUE in the Pubic Administration and Policy Analysis Department. He will be presenting information about the state income tax in Illinois.SOUTH ROXANA  A South Roxana man was arrested Wednesday for allegedly hitting his girlfriend and their 1-year-old child in the face repeatedly.

Darryl D. Mason, 31, of the 700 block of Connor Street, South Roxana, was charged Thursday with aggravated battery, a Class 3 felony, and domestic battery, a Class A felony, for allegedly striking the woman and child repeatedly in the face, causing bruising and, for his girlfriend, a swollen eye. Bond was set at $40,000.

At around 8:02 a.m. Wednesday, the South Roxana Police Department responded to the Connor Place apartment in South Roxana for a domestic battery, according to a release from South Roxana Police Chief Bob Coles. Mason, who lives in the apartment with his girlfriend and their 1-year-old child, had fled the scene in a vehicle prior to the police arriving, Coles said.

According to Coles, Mason had abandoned the vehicle at the intersection of Broadway and Illinois Route 111 and fled on foot into the woods.

The South Roxana Police Department was assisted by the Wood River Police Department, Roxana Police Department, and Hartford Police Department and, after an extensive search of the woods, Mason was observed running out of the Broadway Place apartments. A short foot pursuit ended with Mason being taken into custody, Coles said.

The police department went and interviewed neighbors in the apartment complex. Multiple people heard the disturbance, Coles said, but failed to notify law enforcement because they did not want to get involved.

I cannot stress the importance of contacting 911 when you hear a disturbance, Coles said. This resulted in a mother and her child allegedly being hurt and could (have) ended a lot worse. If you hear someone in trouble and feel you do not want to get involved, you can still dial 911 and tell the dispatcher you wish to remain anonymous.MARYVILLE  State Rep. Katie Stuart, D-Edwardsville, and the Illinois State Treasurers Office is hosting an I-Cash event on Thursday, April 12 from 3:30 to 6 p.m. at Cerettos Pharmacy, located at 2700 N. Center St. in Maryville.

Many residents, businesses and non-profit organizations are unaware that they have unclaimed property that is being held by the state, said Stuart. Whether its a check from an old job or an uncashed dividend check, these forgotten monies are turned over to the treasurers office. These free I-Cash events are one way I can help my constituents determine if they have any unclaimed property or money and take the steps necessary to claim it.This is one part of a 10-part series introducing this years YWCA of Alton Women of Distinction honorees. The YWCA of Alton will host the 28th annual Women of Distinction dinner on Thursday, April 19, at 6 p.m. at the Lewis and Clark Community College Commons in Godfrey.

ALTON  The legal and military career of Edwardsvilles Sarah Smith has seemingly always rested on the cusp of something historic, even during its meteoric rise.

The 2018 Alton YWCA Women of Distinction honoree has gone from an ambitious Army mechanic to Illinois first ever military judge, possibly a Madison and Bond County Third Judicial Circuit seat and likely U.S. Army Colonel after 23 years of military service, earning the Bronze Star after a deployment in Afghanistan, also serving as the states highest-ranking JAG officer.

And thats just the cliff notes.

I come from a middle class family, Smith begins the story of her life. My dad (a lineman) always taught me that whatever you want, you have to be willing to work hard to get it.

When I enlisted, the recruiter mentioned that they had a $1,500 bonus to go in as a mechanic, and he didnt think Id take it, she recalls. But when I heard that, I was like, Heck yeah!

Thats where she stayed through earning her law degree via the GI bill, and parlayed her mechanic career into the roll of a JAG officer.

Later, Smith worked at Ezra & Associates for over a decade. In her judicial career, she has tried hundreds of bench trials and successfully prosecuted dozens of sexual assault and other complex cases.

Last year, she was appointed the first ever Illinois National Guard Military Judge, charged with setting a new precedent in possible courts martial.

All-the-while, Smith has remained an active member of the National Guard, attending drill for the required weekend per month.

Just recently, shes been selected as a candidate of United States Colonel. The affirmation is a process of vetting, that includes scrutiny from the FBI, Pentagon and the Office of the President of the United States.

Only in her early 40s, Smith is admittedly surprised at how quickly her career has escalated. While shes on the November ballot for Circuit Court Judge, shes not sure at how high her career could ultimately reach.

I never shut a door once its been opened, she says. Id absolutely be open to anything, as long as its at the right time and for the right reasons.

Looking at Smiths resume, its difficult to see where she finds the time for the seemingly endless facets of her career, while raising three young children.

Honestly, I dont, she explains. I have a wonder husband (Michael Raschen) and a big-time supportive mother. Those two people help me out so much. My husband hasnt necessarily given up his own (military) career aspirations, but hes sort of put those on hold. Hes so supportive. I have them, and thats the only way I can do it. He knows Im impassioned about this, and he sees that its what makes me happy. When it comes to something new Im thinking about doing, I always run it by him first Family is always first, but I have a very supportive husband.

Smith attributes much of the catalogue of her achievements as circumstance.

Its just like the stars and moon sort of aligned, she says. I will say that Ive worked very hard in my military career and to become an associate judge. I dont mean to toot my own horn, but I didnt think any of this would happen so soon in my life.

That experience rolls with the advice she would give to young people pursuing her career, or any other aspirations.

Its exactly what my dad taught me, she said. You just really have to work hard for it. Any deficiency can be overcome by hard work. You just have to go after what you want.

Still, above all, Smith says some of her most rewarding public service is work shes done with the Boys and Girls Club of Alton.

I get more from those girls and from those kids than anything, she said. Thats what I would encourage anyone to do. My big motto is, Be bigger than yourself. Just get out there and help.Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday recalled how India's defence preparedness was hampered by policy paralysis and how there was a shortage of bullet-proof jackets and fighter aircraft. "We have seen the damage such laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives, can cause to the nation. Not now, not anymore, never again," he said during his 30-minute long speech.

Pointing out the policy paralysis during the earlier UPA regime, he said, "The issue of bullet-proof jackets to soldiers was kept hanging for years. You would also have seen that we have brought the project to a successful conclusion with a contract that will provide a successful boost to defence manufacturing in India," he said. He added his government was ready to take all necessary steps to equip India's armed forces by establishing a strategically independent defence industrial complex.

Modi was speaking on Thursday after inaugurating the 10th edition of the Defence Expo at Thiruvidanthai on the outskirts of Chennai near Mahabalipuram. Addressing the gathering after launching the iDex scheme, a scheme to support innovations and newer manufacturers in the Defence sector, Modi said his government is committed to equip the armed forces.

Modi's speech, however, did not touch upon any areas other than defence, manufacturing and Make in India.

Meanwhile, the sprawling venue where the Defence Expo is held at Thiruvidanthai has been turned into a fortress overnight, with around 5,000 police personnel being deployed at the site. Also, the Special Action Force and Special Task Force have been roped in and a three-tier security were arranged at the airport following black flag protests against Modi demanding Cauvery Water Management Board.

However, there were no signs of protests inside the premises. No one, including Tamil Nadu Chief minister Edappadi K. Palanisamy and Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam, mentioned about the protests or Cauvery in their brief speech during the event.

Stating that his government's commitment to peace is "just as strong as our commitment to protecting our people and our territory", Modi emphasised that the BJP government in Delhi has taken bold action to meet the immediate critical requirements in the defense sector. "We have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircraft," he added. In addition, we have launched the Innovation for Defence Excellence scheme. It will set up defence innovation hubs throughout the country to provide necessary incubation and infrastructure support to the start-ups in the defence sector."

On the two proposed defense corridorsone in Tamil Nadu and the other one in Uttar PradeshModi said, "These would utilise defence manufacturing ecosystems in the regions and further build upon it. The corridors will become engines of economic development and growth of defence industrial base."

Giving details of the defense export, Modi said it has gone up in recent years after the BJP government took over. "In May 2014, the total number of defence export permission granted stood at 118, for a total value of $577 million. In less than four years, we have issued 794 more export permissions, for a total value of over $1.3 billion."

"Over the last few years, we have made a humble beginning. We have taken many steps towards defence manufacturing licences, defence offsets, defence exports clearances, foreign direct investment in defence manufacturing, and on reforming our defence procurement," he added.

Later, Modi watched a live demo of the armed forces and also visited the 700 odd stalls in the Defence Expo along with his cabinet colleague and Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman.Globalist or solipsist? Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

For more than two years now, pundits and policy wonks have been trying to ascertain the principles of Donald Trumps foreign policy  a task thats proven roughly analogous to trying to derive the ethical convictions of an empty bag of Doritos from the way it moves in the wind.

The president has argued that NATO is obsolete, and then reiterated Americas commitment to defending its NATO allies. Hes derided diplomacy with North Korea as pointless, then agreed to an unprecedented, face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong-Un; decried Americas war in Afghanistan as a total waste, then sent more troops to fight it; insisted that Bashar al-Assads talent for killing terrorists was more important than his crimes against humanity, then ordered a missile strike to punish the Syrian ruler for using chemical weapons; likened Chinas trade policies to rape, then showered praise on Xi Jinping; and condemned the architects of the Iraq War as a band of idiotic globalists, before making John Bolton his national security adviser.

But in a series of tweets Wednesday morning, Trump took the incoherence of his foreign policy to new heights. In recent days, the president has called for removing all U.S. troops from Syria, and touted the supreme importance of maintaining good relations with Russia. Throughout his campaign and presidency, Trump has argued that the worst thing a commander-in-chief can do is telegraph his intentions to an adversary. And yet, shortly after waking Wednesday, the president informed Russia that he would soon launch a missile strike against the Gas Killing Animal in Damascus whether they liked it or not.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

Within an hour, Trump was once again arguing that maintain warm relations with Moscow should be a top priority of U.S. foreign policy  and blaming American law enforcement for jeopardizing that goal.

Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War. There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama. Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

By Thursday morning, the president was insisting that hed never told Russia to prepare for incoming missiles, at all.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2018

Given the dizzying dissonance of Trumps foreign policy pronouncements, one might reasonably conclude that there is no such thing as the Trump Doctrine: The presidents foreign policy isnt derived from principles, but rather, from a complex series of interactions between the Fox News channels programming decisions, the national security states institutional inertia, and Trumps fickle moods.

And yet, one could also argue that the presidents subordination of consistency to self-indulgence on matters of foreign policy is, itself, a kind of principle. Trump does not believe that his authority over the worlds most powerful military requires him to develop  or abide by  a coherent security strategy. He feels no obligation to justify his actions in logically consistent terms to the world or even to himself. Rather, he feels it perfectly appropriate to shape Americas approach to geopolitics around his own immediate emotional desires. He sees U.S. foreign policy as a form of self-care.

Take Trumps recent hiring of John Bolton. The president did not choose the former U.N. ambassador as his national security adviser because hed come to believe that Boltons analysis of geopolitics was sound; rather, according to Vanity Fair, Trump still regards Bolton as a war-party person  but saw hiring him as a sound way of pushing Stormy Daniels out of the headlines, in the wake of her 60 Minutes interview. Which is to say: Seeing his (alleged) ex-lover get media attention caused the president emotional distress, which he then tried to alleviate through an immensely consequential act of foreign policy.

Similarly, when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched a blockade against Qatar last year  on the (transparently insincere) grounds that they could not abide Dohas financial support for terrorism  Trump did not concern himself with how this move could impact the 11,000 American military personnel stationed at Al Udeid Air Base. He did not ask advisers how a conflict between the Saudis and Qataris could jeopardize his administrations broader Middle East strategy. Instead, he saw an opportunity to declare victory  he had called on the Arab world to crack down on terrorism, and here were two Arab governments claiming to heed his call. The Saudis actual motivations and his military and diplomatic advisers analysis were irrelevant  it would just feel good to announce over Twitter that he had whipped the Middle East into shape, and so that is what he did.

During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar - look!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Just last month, Trump unilaterally announced across the board steel tariffs  because he was in desperate need of an emotional release. As NBC News reported:

On Wednesday evening, the president became unglued, in the words of one official familiar with the presidents state of mind.

A trifecta of events had set him off in a way that two officials said they had not seen before: Hope Hicks testimony to lawmakers investigating Russias interference in the 2016 election, conduct by his embattled attorney general and the treatment of his son-in-law by his chief of staff.

Trump, the two officials said, was angry and gunning for a fight, and he chose a trade war, spurred on by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, the White House director for trade  and against longstanding advice from his economic chair Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

Last April, Trump saw upsetting images of Syrian children gassed to death by the Assad regime. He felt an impulse to do something about it, and so he ordered a missile strike, despite the fact that hed long known about Assads use of chemical weapons, and deemed such violations of international law irrelevant to U.S. policy.

And once those images left his television screen, Trumps indifference to the fate of Syrian civilians returned. Last month, Trump implored his advisers to immediately withdraw all American troops from Syria  and to end to all U.S. civilian stabilization programs designed to restore basic infrastructure to war-shattered Syrian communities.

On Wednesday morning, the disturbing images out of Syria  and unflattering headlines out of the Mueller investigation  were back, and so Trump decided that he would once again enjoy playing defender of the Syrian people. When his staff proved unprepared to execute this act, and media figures started suggesting that hed failed to enforce his own red line, Trump decided to reclaim the element of surprise.

As Voxs Zack Beauchamp notes, the fact that American foreign policy is guided by our presidents (ever-changing) emotional needs could have perilous consequences:

[A] functioning foreign policy depends on being able to send messages about what youre planning to do. When the US threatens to use military force against an adversary, thats a commitment about what the country will do in the future. The policy only works if people think you mean what you say.

Imagine all the ways this could go wrong when it comes to Syria, for example.

What if the seemingly inevitable US strike hits Russian or Iranian troops who are on the ground fighting for Assad? What if an American warplane gets shot down by Syrian air defenses?

In the event of such a crisis, the signals sent from Washington will be critical to prevent the situation from escalating dangerously. But which words will foreign leaders take seriously? How will they know what the United States will actually do next, and what they need to do to avoid provoking another response from the US military?

On first blush, one might assume that Trump is ignorant of the geopolitical hazards that his freewheeling approach to foreign policy creates. But that assessment is far too generous. There is no doubt that Trump has been told that he should not make major policy decisions on a whim, without consulting the Pentagon or State Department. He is not actually a toddler, oblivious to the consequences of his irrepressible tantrums. He is 71-year-old billionaire who has consciously decided that his emotional needs take precedence over Americas national security interests. This is the core principle of his foreign policy. The Trump Doctrine isnt nationalist or globalist, but merely solipsist  it all boils down to Me First.The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has alleged that state-run Punjab National Bank (PNB) is not sharing details related to the over Rs 13,000 scam linked to billionaire diamantaire Nirav Modi.

ICAI is the apex body of chartered accountants, and falls under the control of ministry of corporate affairs. It has set up a high-powered committee to probe if there were any systemic lapses that led to the PNB fraud. The committee is also expected to suggest remedial measures.

The ICAI had asked market regulator SEBI, the investigating agencies, and the bank itself to share details and findings in relation to the fraud. However, more than a month later, the CA regulator says the bank has not been cooperating with the committee.

The entire concurrent audit of the Punjab National Bank was done internally; more emphasis was on their employees. In order to find out the systemic issues, we have called for lot of information from PNB. We could not get information from PNB; they are not at all cooperating, said S.B. Zaware, member of the central council of ICAI, and chairman of the accounting standards board.

The relevant information has not been shared with ICAI, despite the government writing to the lender to do so, Zaware added.

In its initial report, ICAI had recommended appointment of external concurrent auditors at banks.

The ICAI hopes to release its final report soon, but is awaiting additional information, including any details from PNB, without which it feels the report will be haphazard.

The ICAI has also sent notices to the statutory auditors from 2011-2018, including to the auditors of PNB's Brady House Branch in Mumbai, where the fraud was unearthed.

ICAI officials say it would not have been possible for the the auditors to check each and every transaction, and the primary duty was that of company managements to put systems and processes in place to check fraudulent activities, they add.

However, the role of auditors would also be examined, and if there was any non-compliance or negligence action would be taken, say officials.

Separately, the ICAI has set up a panel comprising around seven to eight people to study the current operating framework of international accounting firms in India. The panel will be headed by Prafulla Chhajed, the vice president of ICAI.

The move follows an order issued by the Supreme Court in February, directing the government to set up a committee to examine the current regulatory framework for the multi-national accounting firms. The Big Four global accounting firmsErnst & Young, KPMG, Deloittee and Price Waterhouseall operate in India through a network of Indian firms.

We are looking at overall how these multi-national accounting firms operate in India. As per the act, no foreign firms can practice in India. Their current presence is through network partners. The issue is about how are the arrangements they have with their network firms in India. How they are operating and all those things. Supreme Court wants ICAI to look into those matters, said Chhajed.

The committee will send the report to ICAI's central council members, which will then be submitted to the Supreme Court.

A petition in the Supreme Court by a non-profit organisation Centre for Public Interest Litigation had alleged that foreign accounting firms were practising in India in violation of the FDI laws.The government has been informed by the Indian mission in Hong Kong that the Department of Justice of Hong Kong will respond soon to New Delhi's request for provisional arrest of diamond merchant Nirav Modi, accused in the multi-crore Punjab National Bank fraud case.

The ministry of external affairs on Thursday said in a statement that the Hong Kong Department of Justice is examining Indias request for provisional order of arrest of Modi. We are awaiting response from the Hong Kong authorities, it said.

The MEA said it has requested the Hong Kong authorities to extradite Modi based on the agreement for the surrender of fugitive offenders signed between India and Hong Kong in 1997.

Our mission in Hong Kong has informed that the Department of Justice of Hong Kong are still examining our request for provisional order of arrest of Nirav Modi. We are awaiting response from the Hong Kong authorities, the statement said.

Modi, who has been elusive, has given many a sleepless night to the CBI and ED that have been on his trail, trying to find the exact location of the absconder. The CBI has issued look-out notices against Modi and his uncle, Mehul Choksi, in the bank fraud case worth Rs 13,578 crore.

Recently, the CBI also secured non-bailable warrants against them from a Mumbai court. The duo face allegations of defrauding Punjab National bank of Rs 13,578 crore in issuance of letters of undertaking and foreign letters of credit on the basis of allegedly fabricated documents.

Meanwhile, the CBI has widened its probe in the case after it came to light that there was another loan of Rs 5,280 crore provided by a consortium of 31 banks to Choksi's Gitanjali group of companies as working capital.

ICICI was the lead bank in the consortium. The agency will also be probing the said loan amount and its findings will become part of the investigation launched by the CBI, sources in the CBI said.

Meanwhile, the CBI on Wednesday questioned two bank officials in connection with its PNB scam probeone of the officials was posted in the Bahrain branch of Canara bank and another at the Antwerp branch of Bank of India.State-run Punjab National Bank (PNB) is conducting an internal investigation into an alleged $2 billion fraud and more heads could roll, its chief executive said in an interview on Wednesday.

The countrys second-biggest state lender disclosed in February that companies owned by two jewellers defrauded it by raising credit from overseas branches of other Indian banks, using illegal guarantees issued by rogue staff at a Mumbai PNB branch over several years.

The authorities have arrested 20 people, and a court has issued non-bailable warrants against jewellers Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. The duo have denied the allegations against them, and authorities say they both left the country before the fraud was uncovered.

We are examining every aspect of it, and if we find others involved we will not spare them, said PNB CEO Sunil Mehta.

PNB has so far suspended 21 officials and Mehta said the bank was carrying out an investigation to find out how the fraudthe biggest in Indian banking historywent unnoticed for more than half a decade.

Several experts have also questioned the failure of external auditors approved by Indias central bankknown as statutory auditorsto detect the illegalities. These firms often only do top line reviews, not in-depth inspections.

I dont blame them. They come only for a short period of time and they go and basically see data only on the CBS, said Mehta, referring to PNBs core banking software.

PNB has said the rogue bankers hid the fraud by issuing the guarantees via the SWIFT interbank messaging system, while not entering corresponding entries in the CBS.

The bank will soon finish integrating its CBS with SWIFT so this cannot happen again, Mehta said.

The Reserve Bank of India, which has directed all banks to ensure this fix is implemented before the end of April, has not done any specific audit of PNB since the incident, Mehta said.

Mehta, who took over as PNB CEO last May, said the bank was adding more checks to prevent a handful of employees from carrying out a similar fraud. That would also mean centralising some tasks and cutting branches powers to approve credit.

Earlier we were dependent mainly on physical inspection of the branches. Now were going to create an offline monitoring cell. Besides the physical inspection we will also monitor all exceptional transactions, he said, flanked by a team of media advisers in his spacious office.

PNB will route all its foreign exchange transactions through its back office at its New Delhi headquarters. Branches on their own will not be allowed to both receive and approve credit requests.

Mehta said PNB grew its domestic deposits by 6.2 per cent in the year ended March 31. Domestic credit grew by 10 per cent, a figure he expects the bank will be able to replicate in the current fiscal year.

He declined to reveal any other financial figures for the January-March quarter, which could take a hit due to a hefty provision. The central bank has allowed PNB to spread the losses over four quarters, Mehta said.

In March, PNB agreed to pay Rs 6,500 crore ($996 million) to counterparty banks. It added it would assume any subsequent liability from the fraud, to prevent disruptions in the banking sector.

We have the capacity and the capability to bear the loss. he said, adding that privatisation of public sector banks was not the answer to the current crisis.

ReutersWithin couple of hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi assured foreign companies that his government would not spend a decade to decide on recently initiated process to get 110 fighter jets for the Indian Air Force, global defence giants enthusiastically came forward to make it into a reality.

Last week, IAF came out with a Request for Information (RFI)the first ladder on the procurement processexpected to be worth $9 - 13 billion (Rs 584  844 billion). In what is considered to be the worlds biggest international fighter race for supplying 110 fighters, 75 per cent (82-83 fighters) would be single-seat aircraft while the remaining 27-28 fighters would be twin-seat variants. Only 15 per cent of the order to be supplied in flyaway condition and the remaining fighter jets must be built in India by a Strategic Partner/Indian Production Agency (SP/IPA).

Speaking at the tenth edition of the DefExpo, being held in Chennai, Modi took a dig at the previous UPA government and said the issues that should have been addressed long back by previous governments, are being resolved now. The prime minister was referring to 126 Multi Medium role combat aircraft (MMRCA) which was started in 2004 and scrapped in 2015 after years of negotiations and trials with defence firms. It had made the foreign industry apprehensive about India's procurement plans.

The obvious reference has come as the foreign industry is skeptical that the tender is a re-run of the scrapped tender to buy 126 fighter jets.

"We have not only taken bold action to meet our immediate critical requirements, but have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircraft. We do not want to spend ten years in discussions without any tangible outcomes," Modi said while adding that his government will work with foreign companies with a sense of mission to keep the defence forces equipped with state-of-the-art systems, and to create the necessary domestic manufacturing ecosystem to achieve this. In all our efforts to pursue efficiency and effectiveness in partnership with you, we will be guided by the highest ideals of integrity and probity, he said.

Soon after PM assurance, global aerospace giant Boeing announced a partnership with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Mahindra Defence Systems (MDS) for manufacturing the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets in India for the armed forces and pursuing the joint development of future technologies as a push towards Make in India.

"Our partnership with HAL and Mahindra will enable us to optimise the full potential of Indias public and private sector to deliver next-generation F/A-18 fighter capabilities. Together we can deliver an affordable, combat-proven fighter platform for India, while adding growth momentum to the Indian aerospace ecosystem with manufacturing, skill development, innovation and engineering and job creation,"says Pratyush Kumar, president, Boeing India.

T. Suvarna Raju, HAL Chairman said: This partnership with Boeing and Mahindra Defence Systems will create an opportunity to develop capabilities of the aerospace industry and strengthen indigenous platforms in India thereby contributing to the Make in India activities. Raju also maintained that HAL is stepping up its facilities for producing LCA Tejas, as he claimed all the eight Tejas aircraft, which are in service with the IAF are flying three sorties per day with efficiency.

Boeing stated that the Super Hornet Make in India proposal is to build an entirely new and state-of-the-art production facility that can be utilized for other programs like Indias Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) program.

Similarly, the Swedish firm SAAB, which produces Grippen fighter jet, also offered to provide its upgraded version of Grippen E jets to India under the Make in India theme.

"SAAB can assure India that it has much more than just shifting the assembly to India. Innovate, design, develop, source, produce, test, support and to upgradeall will be in India only. We offer transfer of critical latest generation technology to indigenously develop the the next generation fighter to India," said Mats Palmberg, vice president, industrial cooperation and head of Grippen program in India.Acclaimed Indian actress-filmmaker Nandita Das' directorial Manto, a biographical on controversial Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, has made its way to the Un Certain Regard segment of the prestigious 71st Cannes Film Festival.

The official line-up was announced by the festival's artistic director Thierry Fremaux in Paris on Thursday.

A historical period drama about Manto, who is known for his writings around the partition of India and Pakistan, is the only Indian film competing in the Un Certain Regard category of the gala, to be held from May 8-19.

Nandita, who has been a jury member at the movie jamboree twicein 2005 and 2013had last year introduced Manto to the Cannes audience via "In Defence of Freedom", a prelude to the feature film.

Now heading to the fest with the film in full form, Nandita's happiness knows no bounds.

"We are in Cannes! 'Manto' is selected in the official section Un Certain Regard. Exciting moment for the entire crew and cast," tweeted the filmmaker, whose 2008 directorial debut Firaaq, on the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, was also screened at Cannes.

Nawazuddin, who plays the bespectacled Manto in the eponymous film, is also excited.

"'And it is possible that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive. Glad to inform that Manto is selected for competition at Cannes 2018 in Un Certain Regard section. Congratulations Nandita Das and Team Manto."

Actress Rasika Dugal, who essays Safia Mantothe protagonist's wifetold IANS: "It will be such an honour to present our film there. In the times we live in, a film which strongly defends freedom of speech, should reach a wide audience not just in our country but across the world."

Rasika added that the film speaks of "fearlessness with sensitivity and that's something to nurture and celebrate".

The film also features Tahir Raj Bhasin as Shyam Chaddha, Manto's friend, confidant and inspiration for a number of stories; Rajshri Deshpande as author Ismat Chughtai and veteran actor Rishi Kapoor in a cameo.

The background score is by table maestro Zakir Hussain, with music composed by Sneha Khanwalkar.

The Un Certain Regard is a competition section separate from the Cannes fest's main Palme d'Or competition section.

Manto will compete with Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey into Night, Andrea Bescond and Eric Metayer's Little Tickles, French-Morrocan director Meyem Benm'Barek's Sofia and Ali Abbasi's Border, among others.

Some Indian titles that have been screened in this section earlier include Gautam Ghose's Antarjali Yatra (1987), Aribam Syam Sharma's Ishanou (1990), Shaji N Karun's Swaham (1994), Ashim Ahluwalia's Miss Lovely (2012) and Neeraj Ghaywan's Masaan (2015). In 1999, Murali Nair's Marana Simhasanam won the Camera d'Or for best first feature in the Un Certain Regard section.

The Cannes Film Festival will this year open with Asghar Farhadi's Spanish-language thriller Everybody Knows, starring Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Ricardo Darin.The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a plea by the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) seeking to block the release of film Nanak Shah Fakir. The film based on first Sikh Guru, Guru Nanak, is set for release on Friday. The court will take the matter up on Monday.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud told petitioner Satinder Singh Gulati that the Central Board of Film Certification has already cleared the film for release.

It also said that outsiders cannot control freedom of expression of an artist. Gulati told the court that by a 2003 resolution, the SGPC has said that no one can act as any of the 10 Sikh Gurus, their family members and the Panj Pyaras.

He mentioned the plea for an urgent hearing. The apex court was also told that till date, in the last 550 years, no one has depicted the role of the 10 Sikh Gurus.

Gulati urged the court to hear the matter on Friday, but Chief Justice Misra said: "We will take it up on Monday."The NHRC has sent notices to the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry as well as the Telangana government, seeking detailed reports into a protest by a Telugu actor who stripped in public to highlight her complaint of sexual exploitation of women in the regional film industry.

The NHRC has asked the state government and the ministry to submit its reports within four weeks, it said in a statement on Thursday.

Following her protest, the Movie Artistes Association (MAA), an apex body of the Telugu film industry, had said on April 8 the aspiring actor would not be made a member of the organisation.

The police had also booked the actor under Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code (obscene acts in a public place).

"It appears to be an attempt to muzzle the voice of a whistle-blower both from the side of MAA and the state authorities," the apex rights body said.

The NHRC has sent the notices to the chief secretary of the state government and the secretary of the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

The state authorities have to intimate the NHRC about existing or proposed mechanisms to the deal with the issue, it said.

The commission is of the opinion that the "reported prohibitions imposed upon the actress", barring her from acting in films and stopping others from working with her, were a "violation of her right to livelihood and live a life with dignity".

The NHRC in the statement observed that the "issues raised by the actress demand action on the part of the state government in the form of a committee to address and redress the grievances of female actors and women employees, in case of any sexual harassment at the workplace i.e., the Telugu film industry in this case".

The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, has broadly laid down provisions to prevent sexual harassment of women at their workplace. Under the Act, a workplace includes not only government organisations or offices but also private ventures.

"The commission has also observed that reportedly, legal action has been taken against the actor under Section 294 of the IPC, but it is nowhere mentioned, if action on the serious allegations of a casting couch and sexual harassment, levelled by her, has been taken by the authorities," the NHRC said.

The actor had on April 7 staged a semi-nude protest outside the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce. She had also alleged that local artistes were not given enough opportunities in the industry, and that the MAA had denied her membership.

Rejecting her charges a day after the protest, office-bearers of the MAA had said several Telugu actors had over the years got adequate opportunities in their film careers.

"The MAA, reportedly, has even moved further stating that action will be taken against any artiste who decides to share screen space with her," the NHRC said.Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah from Thursday will tour the poll-bound state of Karnataka, in a bid to canvas votes for the party in the upcoming assembly elections due next month.

Amit Shah will participate in 'Musti Dhanya Sangrah Abhiyan' at noon, in Abbigeri village of Gadag district.

Besides other programmes, Shah will join farmers for lunch in Abbigeri village, a BJP statement said. Shah will also visit the Veera Narayanaswamy temple in Gadag district and Murusavira Mutt in Hubballi in Durgadabail, Dharwad district before holding a road show in the evening.

Amit Shah, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders are also slated to observe a day-long fast today to protest the washout of the Budget session of Parliament due to disruptions caused by the opposition.

The BJP has launched an intensive campaign to oust the Congress government from the state with Shah making frequent visits to lead the exercise. Karnataka will go to polls on May 12 to elect its representatives for the 225-member assembly. The results will be out on May 15.The adage that failures can teach many lessons seems quite...The Calcutta High Court on Thursday put on hold the panchayat election process in West Bengal until the state election commission submitted a detailed report on the election process so far by April 16. The High Court, however, also punished the BJP and slapped a fine of Rs 5 lakh on the party for hiding the fact that it simultaneously filed petitions to the Supreme Court along with the High Court.

The High Court has asked the state election commission to furnish details on the method it was following for conducting the three-tier panchayat election and how many complaints it received regarding this. The High Court also asked the state election commission why it went back from its earlier decision of extending the nomination filing date and what steps it took to contain the violence and alleged irregularities in the election process.

The High Court also said it might consider deferring the election date if it finds that the state election commission did not take enough steps for ensuring a free and fair election.

The lawyers representing the state election commissioner could not say anything regarding the issue and the High Court then asked the commission to file a detailed report on April 16 and till then the election process would be stopped.

Kalyan Banerjee, senior advocate of Calcutta High Court representing the state government, said, The court has fined BJP because of my complaint that it was doing a suppression of facts. High Court has accepted my admission. However, it wanted a detailed report from the election commission, which will be filed on April 16.

The High Court had taken up the case after being asked by the Supreme Court three days ago on hearing a plea from the BJP.

The opposition parties alleged that the state election commissioner came under tremendous pressure from the state government run by the Trinamool Congress. And that was the reason due to which the state election commission could not contain the violence across the state. Thousands of opposition party candidates could not file their nominations due to violence from the Trinamool Congress party.

Three senior ministers of state went to the state election commissioners office on the day he decided to extend the date of filing nominations. We have information that he was assaulted by ministers, said Kailash Vijayvargiya, state in-charge of BJP in West Bengal.

Dilip Ghosh, BJPs Bengal president, said, High Court has upheld the spirit of Constitution, which has been ruined in Bengal. We hope the court would give us a favourable verdict for democracy.

Earlier in the week, the Supreme Court had rejected a plea from the BJP for intervening in the panchayat poll issue. The party had sought the deployment of Central security forces. The BJP had expected positive action from the Supreme Court similar to 2013 when the court ordered Central forces to be deployed in parts of West Bengal during the then-panchayat election.

Despite the setback in the Supreme Court, BJP had managed to file nominations in 25,000 seats out of 48,000 panchayat seats. The CPI(M) and Congress could not file nominations in even 20 per cent of the total seats, showing how these two political parties, once the major players in West Bengal, have been marginalised over the past two years.A man holds a photo of a victim of the Douma attack as he and other demonstrators protest the Assad regime in Idlib, Syria, on April 8, 2018. Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Theres no shortage of reasons to be appalled by President Trump announcing on Wednesday that he plans to launch missiles at Syria. Its likely the first time such a declaration has been made on Twitter, he doesnt have congressional authorization to conduct the strike, one of our closest allies wasnt onboard yet, and the move increases the chances of the U.S. getting into a shooting war with Russia. One other fundamental issue that hasnt been getting enough consideration is that we still dont know exactly what happened in Douma, Syria, on Saturday.

Eyewitness reports, photos, and videos of limp children and people struggling to breathe make it apparent that an atrocity occurred in Douma (though Syria and its allies claim its all a hoax). But tragically, Syrians have been subjected to horrors throughout their countrys seven-year civil war, and in the world of international relations, the nature of the chemical weapons allegedly used by Bashar al-Assads forces last weekend matters. The State Department said the victims injuries appear to be consistent with an asphyxiation agent and of a nerve agent of some type. However, so far no one has said definitively that the attack was different from the chlorine attacks on Syrians that the international community regularly ignores. Heres what we know:

Syria Has a Long History of Using Chemical Weapons

Syria began developing its chemical weapons program in the 1970s with help from the Soviet Union in Egypt, and was believed to have one of the largest stockpiles in the world. Syria only admitted this in 2012, though its foreign ministry claimed the weapons were only for responding to external aggression.

The Syrian government denies ever using chemical weapons during its civil war, and says it got rid of all its stockpiles in 2013, when it ratified the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention banning the production, storage, and use of chemical weapons.

That move was what resulted from the Assad regime crossing President Obamas red line by using sarin to kill an estimated 1,429 people in the Damascus suburbs in 2013. Obama considered a military response, but the situation was resolved when the U.S. and Russia brokered a deal to have Syria destroy its chemical weapons.

Why Syria Wasnt Fully Disarmed of Chemical Weapons

Inspectors seized and destroyed 1,300 metric tons of banned materials after Syria signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. That limited Assads capabilities, but as Wired explains, completely disarming him isnt really possible.

Producing sarin, a nerve agent developed by Nazi Germany, isnt tremendously difficult and doesnt require a large facility. A small amount can do massive damage, so it wouldnt be too hard to hide it from inspectors. International monitors have the right to inspect any facility in Syria on short notice, but thats physically and politically tricky in the middle of a civil war. Russia and China have repeatedly blocked efforts to hold Syria accountable for its chemical weapons use in the United Nations.

Another complication: chlorine isnt banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention, as it has many legitimate uses. Using the substance as a chemical weapon isnt allowed, of course, but there have been dozens of reports of Assads forces using it in opposition-held areas since 2013.

The Difference Between Using Chlorine and a Nerve Agent

As the U.N. focused on eliminating Syrias banned chemical weapons, Assads forces shifted to using cruder chlorine bombs, according to Reuters. Sarin has no smell or taste, and causes death through asphyxiation. When inhaled, chlorine turns to hydrochloric acid in the lungs, which can cause drowning from fluid buildup. While chlorine works more slowly and is less efficient than sarin, both can kill.

U.S. officials have avoided saying explicitly whether chlorine attacks  which have become a regular occurrence  should be treated differently from sarin attacks. But thats been the attitude among many leaders and diplomats, according to Tobias Schneider, an independent analyst who has tracked the reported chlorine attacks. Even though officials have been loath to admit it, the prohibition against chemical weapons use in Syria has in the past been understood to only pertain to highly lethal nerve agents such as sarin but not the easily produced and far less deadly chlorine, he told the Post.

As CBS News notes, the Trump administrations official policy is that the use of any chemical weapon is illegal and would warrant a military response. However, if its determined that sarin was involved, the reaction might be more severe. Trump ordered an airstrike on Syria a year ago when it was found that a substance like sarin killed around 80 people in Khan Shaykhun, but since then theres been no military response to alleged chlorine attacks.

Evidence About the Chemicals Used in Douma

The World Health Organization said that about 500 people in Douma were treated for signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals over the weekend. According to the WHOs local health partners, of the 70 people who died, 43 showed symptoms related to symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals.

Theres significant evidence that chlorine was involved in two bombings, which took place several hours apart. Witnesses described smelling chlorine during the bombings, but as the Post reported, it seemed different from the usual chlorine attacks:

The victims emitted a powerful smell of chlorine, but there were more people affected than in previous chlorine attacks, said Mohammed Marhoum, a medical worker. He saw around 70 and said six of them died.

They also seemed to be more severely affected than those he had treated after previous chlorine attacks, and they displayed symptoms he had never seen before. Some were twitching, others had abnormal pupils, and some were foaming at the mouth. Several arrived at the hospital unconscious.

He and the other medical workers began to suspect that whatever killed them may have been stronger than chlorine. We believe the gas used was chlorine and another kind of gas, he said.

Alastair W.M. Hay, a professor of toxicology at Leeds University, said the images of dozens of bodies with foam at the mouth but no other injuries were more consistent with nerve agent exposure than a chlorine attack. Thats suggestive of something that was very toxic, and people have pretty much died where they were when they inhaled the agent, he said. Theyve just dropped dead.

Chlorine victims usually manage to get out to somewhere they can get treatment, Hay added, while viewing video of casualties who died in a basement apartment. Nerve agent kills pretty instantly.

Other videos from the scene show large yellow cylinders characteristic of a chlorine attack, with no obvious signs of modification to carry a nerve agent.

Were looking at the possibility that there were separate canisters inside the cylinder, one regional official told The Guardian. [The contents] cannot be mixed, because that would be volatile and unstable, but they can be combined. Thats a working theory  that they were in the same cylinder but kept separately. The point of detonation dispersed them together. Weve seen this happen elsewhere in the country, but it didnt cause a death toll like this. Were in this situation because those poor people were trapped in a basement where they had no chance.

Important: video from 9 April, 7:02pm showing presence of chemical gas canister in Douma. Same location as video of casualties. Also same location that Russia visited reporting no sign of chemical weapons. pic.twitter.com/Sbz64cPi4w  The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef) April 10, 2018

Could the Douma Attack Be a Hoax?

The Syrian government and its ally Russia have denied that chemical weapons were used, or that Assads forces had anything to do with an attack. After Russian military police visited the site of the attack on Monday, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed it had refuted all reports of chemical weapons use in the city, and called all evidence to the contrary fake.

However, the New York Times reported that eyewitness reports, more than 20 videos, and an examination of flight records by citizen observers suggested that Assads forces dropped some kind of chemical compound on the area as part of their ongoing effort to break the will of Doumas rebels:

A number of residents recalled hearing the sounds of helicopters near the time of the attack. A network of citizen observers that tracks Syrian aircraft said that two Mil Mi-8 helicopters, which they said belonged to the Syrian government, had been seen flying from the Dumayr air base toward Douma near the time of the attack.

Its not entirely clear why Assads forces would conduct a particularly deadly chemical attack when he could have retaken Douma with standard bombs and avoided international uproar  though some have suggested the Syrian president was emboldened by Trumps talk of troop withdrawal.

As The Independent notes, its true that Western media sometimes present the accounts of opposition supporters as unbiased eyewitnesses, but Russia and Syria havent presented any evidence to back up their claims of a vast conspiracy to fake a gas attack.

What It Will Take to Get Answers

The window for getting a decisive answer on what happened in Douma may have already closed. After Saturdays attack, the citys remaining rebels surrendered, and Russian troops moved in. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said it had accepted the Syrian governments invitation to come and investigate, and would travel to Douma soon. However, since the Russians were already on the site, many doubt that any meaningful evidence will remain.

The Financial Times reported that journalists were having difficulty contacting sources on the ground, and Syrian activists accused the government of purposely cutting communication lines.

By this point, many of the medical workers and activists who were on hand in the aftermath of the attack have dispersed. Dr. Ahmad Tarakji, president of the Syrian American Medical Society, noted that with Assads forces heading back in, many locals are too afraid to talk. You are witnessing the transition of the town, he said. You cant speak against the government.Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami on Thursday submitted a memorandum to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, requesting him to constitute the Cauvery Management Board immediately.

The CM submitted the memorandum while seeing off the prime minister, who had come down to Chennai to inaugurate the 10th edition of the DefExpo, and to participate in an event at the prestigious Adyar Cancer Institute, at Chennai airport.

As you are aware, the Supreme Court, in its verdict on 16.2.2018, has directed that a scheme should be formulated by the Government of India within six weeks to implement the notified Final Order of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal as modified by its judgment. Further, on 9.4.2018, the Supreme Court has clearly stated that the Final Order of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal has merged with the judgment of the Supreme Court. Therefore, constitution of the Cauvery Management Board has become an integral part of Honble Supreme Courts judgment, the CM said in the memorandum.

Describing the plight of farmers of the Delta areas of Tamil Nadu, who are dependent on Cauvery water for irrigation, Palaniswami said, The farmers are fervently hoping that the above implementation machinery would be constituted by the Government of India to enable them to commence the agricultural operations in the next irrigation season which starts on 1.6.2018.

The memorandum was released as a press note by the state governments department of information and public relations.It was a day of massive protests in Chennai. Black flags and huge black balloons flew high on the sky with a clear message written on them, asking Prime Minister Narendra Modi to go back'.

The 4km-long road from Guindy to Chennai airport at Meenambakkam, where the prime minister landed this morning to participate in the 10th edition of the DefExpo at Thiruvidanthai near Chennai, was flooded with protesters, forcing Defence Minister Nirmala Sithraman to walk down one kilometre to reach the airport to welcome Modi.

Several protesters thronged near the airport, raising slogans and holding placards which said 'Go Back Modi.' They even climbed up a giant hoarding to register their dissent, forcing the PM to not to travel by the road and instead take a chopper.

In fact Modi, who travelled by road in Chennai and deviated from his schedule to meet Karunanidhi when he came down for the Daily Thanthi event a few months ago, had to stay away from the Chennai roads only fearing the protesters. The sentiments of the people of the state was massive that most people took to wearing black.

At IIT Madras where Modis chopper landed to take the private lane to reach the cancer institute, students protested with black flags.

Protests led by the opposition DMK turned massive as cinema directors, other political parties like Vaikos MDMK, Velmurugans Thamizhaga Vazhvurimai Katchi and others joined the agitation. Vaiko called Modi coward.

Security was stepped up in the city, and over 5,000 police personnel were deployed in and around the city to avoid any untoward incidents.Terrorism is unlikely to be a thrust area for India at the Heads of Commonwealth Meeting in London this month. This will be the first time Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes face to face with his Pakistani counterpart Shahid Khaqan Abbasi after Davos in January. Both the leaders did not have any bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the conference. The schedule at CHOGM is packed, claims the ministry of external affairs.

It is a very packed summit, said Rudrendra Tandon, joint secretary of the United Nations (political) division at the foreign ministry, at a press briefing. If there are bilateral meetings it has to be on the first dayit is very packed. At this juncture we dont have the list of the PM. But we are looking at the opportunity to meet heads of small island states. Prima facie that will be our emphasis.

On being asked whether the forum would be used to push for a strong statement against terrorismread PakistanTandon said that the focus would be on issues of developing countries. The fact that international community needs to come together to combat terrorism is a part of overall multilateral diplomacy. It was not appropriate to bring the T word here. He, however, added that UN is the best focus on these issues.

India had boycotted the last meeting as it was held in Sri Lanka. The CHOGM, however, will require Indian diplomats to use all their skills to find a balanced position on the spy poisoning case in Salisbury. Britain will be keen to push the CHOGM to come out strongly against Russia for the chemical attack. It would want to use this opportunity to name Russia as culprit as well as get the CHOGM to condemn the attack. Russia is an old ally, and India has very strong relationship with the UK.

To make matters more complicated, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) report on the samples collected by them submitted on Thursday confirms that finding of the UK relating to the identity of the toxic chemical used in the attack. While it doesnt name Novichok, it does say it was of high purity.

When asked what Indias position would be, Tandon, chose to deflect. I dont think we should speculate what another commonwealth country is likely to do or not do. This wouldnt be the right place to speculate, he said.

The finding of the report has put India in a difficult position. So far, India has refrained of pointing any fingers. In a statement at OPCWat a meeting called by the Russians to request for a joint probe on the incidentIndia came out strongly against the use of chemical weapons, however, abstained from voting. The stance was clear: there was no need to jump to conclusions till the report came out.

India had maintained that investigations of "alleged use of chemical weapons" should be conducted "strictly in accordance with the provisions of the Convention. We also urge that all provisions of the Convention be utilised to address concerns in accordance with the procedures laid down in the Convention, so as to reach evidence-based conclusions,'' Venu Rajamony, India's permanent representative to Hague had said in his statement.

With the evidence now pointing to Russiaits old allythere will be a push to take sides, something India can't do. And it will require considerable skills for India to come out of this diplomatic pickle. It doesnt help that Pakistan has already pledged its loyaltyand bought brownie points of coursewith Russia, by voting for a joint probe at the emergency session of the OPCW last week. The incident has become a huge trigger for an anti-Russia stance by the West.BJP MPs starting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi observed a day-long fast against the continuous disruption of the budget session of the Parliament by opposition parties. Party leaders including chief ministers, ministers and party MLAs were spread across the country to build public sentiment against the opposition bloc led by the Congress.

BJP chief Amit Shah said that Congress policy was to disrupt the Parliament so that it cannot work on the pro-poor agenda of the Modi government.

Congress has become an expert in obstructing the Parliament. Instead of holding a discussion within the house, it has taken up the task of hampering the work. Its only interest is in creating ruckus inside and outside the house.

The finance minister, parliamentary affairs minister and home minister had assured that the house be allowed to run and debate on issues, be it special status to Andhra Pradesh, Cauvery water dispute or the non-confidence motion. But the Congress kept on harping that the government does not want to debate, Shah said in a blog released by the BJP.

Shah was in Karnataka for the election campaign on Thursday. Modi went to Chennai to inaugurate the Defence Expo.

Modi will now be the second prime minister after Atal Bihari Vajpayee to observe a fast while in office. But if the reason were to be taken into account, he would be the first prime minister to undertake a fast against his political opponents.

Congress sought to stir up a controversy by releasing the list of the official programmes of Modi and Shah, in which time for meals had been mentioned.

The fast also marks another set of programmes of the BJP where the party leaders have been asked to propagate various initiatives of the Modi government among the people.

Modi has asked the party leaders to celebrate April 18 as Swachh Bharat Parv. Ujwala Diwas will be organised on April 20, and LPG panchayats will be called to give new connections. Gram Shakti Abhiyan will be organised on April 28, during which there will be an interaction with beneficiaries of various schemes like Saubhagya Yojana and LED bulb distribution. April 30 will be celebrated as Ayushman Bharat Diwas  which is popularly known as Modi care.Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders, including the Union ministers, has begun a day-long fast as a mark of protest to corner the opposition over the recent washout of the budget session of Parliament.

Addressing party MPs through an audio conference call ahead of the protest, Modi said the BJP leaders and its workers will observe the fast on Thursday to "expose" those handful of people who "throttled" democracy by stalling Parliament proceedings during the budget session.

Last week, while speaking at the BJP's parliamentary party meeting, Modi had accused the opposition, particularly the Congress, of practising divisive politics and stalling Parliament.

Proxy disruption in Parliament: Tharoor

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor accused the BJP of engineering "proxy disruption" during the recently-concluded Budget session of Parliament. "The allegations (against the opposition) are baseless. Congress members remained seated and never trooped into the well," Tharoor said, when asked about the BJP's accusation that the session was washed out because of disruptions by Congress members. "Modi had said four years ago that`Na khaunga,na khane dunga', and it is good that he is not going to eat tomorrow."

"Earlier, BJP's ally, was disrupting the House," he said, in an apparent reference to the TDP which had raised the issue of special status for Andhra Pradesh in Parliament.

"When they sat down after 10 days, the AIADMK, which survives in Chennai only because of the support of the BJP, started protesting in the House over the Cauvery issue.

"They are not opposition parties, they had never opposed the BJP so far," he said. "I feel it was a government-sponsored disruption. The way they (government) want proxy voting (rights) for non- resident Indians, they did proxy-disruption inside Parliament," the Congress MP said.

"The BJP wanted to avoid debate on no-confidence motion. Just to avoid the country listening to a debate on the failure of the government, they did not allow the debate," Tharoor alleged. "Naturally, the government was going to win the vote (on no-confidence motion) but they did not even want to have a discussion on the allegations being levelled against them," he said.

'Farce of a fast'

However, the opposition has questioned Modi's fast and termed it a "farce of a fast" and a "photo-op".

Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said the proposed fast by the BJP MPs led by the prime minister tomorrow was a "drama", adding that time has come for the PM to take 'sanyas' (retirement). ""This is a farce of a fast by the Modi government.It is only a photo opportunity. The BJP should apologise to the nation and hold a fast for disrupting Parliament for over 250 hours. The Lok Sabha, where the BJP has a majority, functioned for only one percent of its time and the Rajya Sabha functioned for six percent of its time," he told reporters in New Delhi. "Prime Minister ji, it is not the time to observe fast, in view of your failures... it is time to take retirement instead. If you do not wake up now, you should understand that the time of your retirement will come in 2019 when people will vote you out," he said.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi earlier today hit out at the Centre over the alleged rape of a 18-year-old woman by a BJP MLA and the custodial death of her father in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district.

"The brutality unleashed on a father seeking justice for his daughter in Uttar Pradesh has shamed humanity. I hope the prime minister will soon observe a fast over the atrocities committed on women, failure of law and order and rising anarchy under the BJP rule," he tweeted in Hindi.

Gandhi also posted a purported video in which the victim's father is seen speaking against the BJP MLA.

Atrocious, says Naidu

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu also questioned Modi's decision to observe a fast protesting the washout of Parliament's budget session, alleging it was the Centre which had caused the disruption by provoking the AIADMK over the Cauvery issue. Naidu claimed the Centre did not constitute the Cauvery Management Board because of upcoming elections in Karnataka.

They government "provoked" the AIADMK and "ensured" that the MPs of the ruling party in Tamil Nadu stormed the well of the Lok Sabha and thereby did not allow the TDP to raise its demand (for granting a special category status to Andhra Pradesh), he said here. "How atrocious... And now he (Modi) says he will observe a protest... seeking to portray the opposition as wrong and he as right. Is it correct? Is it justified," the chief minister asked.

Naidu, whose party recently snapped ties with the NDA, was addressing a meeting in connection with the birth anniversary celebrations of social activist Jyotirao Phule.

"A person of the stature of the Prime Minister should stand by his word He should keep his word. It is not correct for him to provoke people of different states and foment hatred," he said in a hard-hitting speech.

Nation-wide fast

Besides Modi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu will observe the fast in Delhi.

As per the schedule prepared by the BJP for observing the fast across the country, Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda will be in Modi's constituency Varanasi, while Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad will travel to Patna for it, party sources said.

Many other ministers will travel to various places across the country to observe the fast. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will observe the fast in Chennai, Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javdekar in Benguluru, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel in Tamil Nadu and Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh.

Tourism Minister KJ Alphons will observe the fast in Kerala.

Besides ministers, all the party MPs will also sit on a fast in their respective constituencies, while BJP chief Amit Shah will hold a sit-in at Hubli in poll-bound Karnataka.

Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani will observe a day-long 'symbolic fast' in Lal Darwaja area, Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel would join in the protest in his constituency, Mehsana.

(With inputs from PTI)The Samajwadi Party will be supporting the candidate of its new ally Bahujan Samaj Party in the upcoming Legislative Council elections in Uttar Pradesh, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav announced on Wednesday.

The elections to 13 seats of the Legislative Council will be held on April 26 and results will be declared the same day.

The SP holds the majority of the 61 seats in the 100-member UP Legislative Council, while the BSP has nine seats. The ruling party in the state, BJP, has only 13 seats.

The SP and BSP that set aside their differences to ally during the bypolls for Lok Sabha seats of Gorakhpur and Phulpur, struck gold by defeating BJP in both the seats, the former being the home turf of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and a BJP stronghold.

Meanwhile, BJP president Amit Shah on Wednesday visited Uttar Pradesh to take stock of the preparations for the upcoming Legislative Council polls in the state and meet the party's 'sulking' alliance partners.

The BJP national president, who took a day off from the Karnataka Assembly campaign, is understood to have taken a look at the names of probable party candidates for the Legislative Council polls.

The ruling BJP is certain of winning at least 11 seats, going by its brute majority in the state legislative Assembly.

Shah began his tour by garlanding the statue of Jyotibha Phule, sending a message that the saffron party did not want to keep the dalits at an arms distance at a time when the Lok Sabha polls were barely a few months away.

"With party MPs Savitri Bai Phoole, Ashok Dohrey, Chhotelal and Yashwant Singh virtually raising a banner of revolt against Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, Shah had a long discussion with the chief minister at the latter's 5 Kalidas Marg residence to assuage their hurt sentiments. The parliamentarians had written about their discontent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi," a senior party leader said.

UP deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma and state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey were also present during the discussion, he said.

The party leader said the Lok Sabha bypoll debacles of Gorakhpur and Phulpur also figured in the meeting.

The outburst of the four parliamentarians and another BJP MP Udit Raj came at a time when the country witnessed a public outcry against the Supreme Court's order on the SC/ST Act, which the dalit leaders said was an attempt to "dilute" the law.

After facing strident criticism from the opposition on dalit issues, the BJP is also grappling with a rising voice of discontent among its own MPs belonging to the scheduled castes in Uttar Pradesh.

BJP Lok Sabha members from Etawah and Nagina, Ashok Kumar Dohrey and Yashwant Singh, respectively, are the latest to join their dalit colleagues from the party to criticise the UP government.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Dohrey had alleged that the dalits and tribals across the country, especially in Uttar Pradesh, were being framed by the police in false cases after the protests, leading to growing insecurity among them.

Yashwant Singh, meanwhile, had said that nothing had been done for dalits in the last four years of the BJP government.

Party insiders also said that the BJP's sulking ally, SBSP leader O.P. Rajbhar, who is also a cabinet minister, presented his case before Shah.

Rajbhar told reporters, "I raised the issue of quota within quota for the most backward classes. Apart from this, discrepancies pertaining to ration cards, housing, toilets, pensions and scholarship were also discussed.

The Rajbhar-led Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) has four MLAs in the state Assembly. He had threatened to boycott last month's Rajya Sabha biennial election.

Apna Dal (Sonelal) leader Ashish Patel also met the BJP president.

"The meeting with the BJP chief was held in a very cordial atmosphere. We spoke for adequate representation of dalits and backward classes at police stations and Tehsil offices, and we were told that our demands will be looked into," he said.Jammu and Kashmir Director General of Police Shesh Paul Vaid said talks, including with neighbour Pakistan, was the only solution to Kashmir issue.

''Gun and violence is not the solution,'' Vaid said, while replying to questions on Twitter. "Talks between all parties, including neighbour (Pakistan) is the only solution.''

"It is too complicated. I wish Kashmir problem was simple so that I could answer in one reply," he said.

He said people have been working for decades to find a solution the issue.

''I personally feel that the gun is not the solution,'' he said. ''Let every party concerned, including even our neighbour, talk it out and sort out.''

He also requested people not to come near the encounter sites as the bullets don't differentiate between militants, army men, stone pelters or young boys.

''People have no business being there,'' he said. "I will tell you again; people should not come near the encounter sites."

He said they are responsible for their own deaths.

He agreed with the suggestion about minimising deaths of civilians near encounter sites.

He said they would ensure minimum disruption was caused to the education of students. "I also have a lot of relatives studying in schools and colleges, he said. We will see to it that minimum disruption is caused."Uttar Pradesh Police chief O.P. Singh on Thursday referred to BJP MLA Kuldip Singh Sengar, who has been accused of raping a minor girl, as "mananiya" or 'honourable' at a press conference, inviting objection from media persons.

As soon as the director general of police said, "Mananiya vidhayakji ke virudh jo balatkar ka aarop lagaya gaya hai...(the rape charges that have been levelled against the honourable MLA)," media persons raised questions over the use of the word "mananiya".

Singh apparently tried to defend himself saying Senger is an MLA and not a convict.

"The respect that is being given to the accused is because he is an MLA... he is not a convict so far. Only a charge has been levelled against him and the case is being handed over to the CBI for investigation. The CBI will now decide whether he has to be arrested or not on the merit of the case," he said.Comey dont play that. Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post/The Washington Post/Getty Images

The Republican Party is racing to assassinate James Comeys character before his tell-all book hits shelves next Tuesday. The former FBI directors literary debut is expected to paint Donald Trump as an authoritarian oaf with no respect for the rule of law. The Republican National Committee has built a website explaining why you shouldnt believe that.

With the White Houses blessing, the RNC is launching a multifaceted campaign to rebrand George W. Bushs deputy attorney general as Lyin Comey. The party is airing digital ads and dispersing talking points to Republican officials across the country, all built around three core arguments:

1) Comey has a long history of misstatements and misconduct, including damage caused to the FBI because of bizarre decisions, contradictory statements and acting against Department of Justice and FBI protocol.

2) Attempts to smear the Trump administration are nothing more than retaliation by a disgraced former official.

3) Comey isnt credible  just ask Democrats. The digital ads will show several Democrats calling for Comeys resignation after he injected himself into the 2016 presidential race, including House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who is shown saying: All I can tell you is the FBI Director has no credibility.

This case is, of course, mendacious and absurd. Yes, Democrats (rightly) criticized Comeys handling of the Clinton email investigation. But that is only relevant if Trump can credibly claim that he fired Comey in response to those complaints. And he cant  both because he applauded the very action that Democrats criticized most, and because Trump has already said, on national television, that he fired Comey because he disapproved of the FBIs Russia probe.

Photo: lyincomey.com

And then, theres the inconvenient fact that James Comey hasnt actually told very many demonstrable lies. Trump landed a clean (if ironic) hit on the former FBI director when he derided him as a showboat. There is something a bit unseemly about Comeys love of the spotlight (let alone about his cashing in on abetting the election of Donald Trump). But hes just not that big of a liar  a reality that lyincomey.com inadvertently affirms. Heres how the website fact checks Comeys claim that Trump attempted to obstruct the FBIs investigation into Michael Flynn:

No matter what his grandstanding book says, Comey has already confirmed multiple times under oath that neither President Trump nor his staff asked him to stop the Russia investigation.

SEN. RICHARD BURR: Director Comey, did the president at any time ask you to stop the FBI investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. elections? DIR. COMEY: Not to my understanding, no.

Of course, there isnt actually any contradiction between Comeys answer and his allegation. Trump could have tried to obstruct certain lines of the FBIs investigation into his campaign, without ordering an end to the broader probe into Russian interference.

But such quibbles are ultimately beside the point. The hype around Comeys book and the RNCs attempts to discredit it both proceed from the same false premise: that James Comey has something important to reveal about Donald Trump that Donald Trump has not already revealed about himself.

Comeys primary allegation is that the president has contempt for the concept of equality before the law, and believes that the Justice Departments first loyalty should be to him, not the Constitution (the title of Comeys memoir, A Higher Loyalty, is an implicit reference to this charge). The thing is, we dont actually need to take Comeys word for that.

The president has said, publicly and repeatedly, that he believes he has the absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department. He has suggested that former attorney general Eric Holder helped Barack Obama get away with illegal acts  and praised Holder for doing so, telling the New York Times, When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, Ill be honest. Meanwhile, the president berates his own attorney general for failing to display such loyalty on a near-daily basis.

There is no he said-he said here. Trump might officially deny that he pressured Comey to drop his investigation into Flynn. But hes made it perfectly clear that he thinks he had the right to do so. The substance of Trumps dispute with Comey is not about whether he has tried to compromise the independence of federal law enforcement; its about whether federal law enforcement should be independent of his will. For legal and political reasons, Trumps allies have tried to pretend theyre having the former argument. And to an extent, the mainstream media has followed suit  because if we all stopped pretending that there was any mystery about the presidents contempt for the rule of law, wed have to confront the fact that one of Americas major political parties is actively helping a would-be authoritarian consolidate power over the Justice Department. And acknowledging that objective fact would make it quite difficult for mainstream news outlets to maintain their objectivity.The Yogi Adityanath government has decided to order a CBI probe into the alleged rape case, in which a girl has charged BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar. The victim's father had died on Monday of injuries sustained while he was in police custody.

In a late night decision, after getting the Special Investigation Team report in the high profile case, the state government has decided to register cases of rape and custodial death of the victim's father against Sengar.

The government suspended circle officer Safipur, Kunwar Bahadur Singh and two doctors who were involved in examining the injured father of the victim.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has not given any information officially, but based on the SIT report, it will take disciplinary action against Sengar.

Meanwhile, after coming to know that the noose is tightening around him, MLA Sanger made an appearance at the Lucknow SSP's residence, but refused to surrender. His supporters present there also created a ruckus.

The Unnao rape case has been hogging the limelight nationally and has caused acute embarrassment to the present Yogi government.

After pressure started mounting on the government, the police arrested the MLA's brother, Atul Sengar, who is also an accused in the case.

The SIT in its preliminary investigation found Unnao police guilty of utter neglect and callous attitude in dealing with the case. It has also recommended a detailed probe into the case and removal of the present police chief of Unnao, Pushpanjali.

The SIT completed its preliminary inquiry in two and half hour after questioning persons involved in the case.

It may be recalled that Allahabad High court has taken the cognizance of the matter and will take up the case. According to sources, the SIT report will be reviewed by the court today.Several Union ministers on Thursday sought to defend the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, facing criticism over its response to the alleged rape of a minor girl in Unnao, saying it is committed to protecting women and ensuring that the law takes its course.

BJP legislator from Bangarmau, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, was on Thursday booked by the UP Police on various charges under the IPC, including rape, kidnapping and criminal intimidation, in connection with the alleged rape.

The state government said it would hand the probe over to the CBI.

"When we say Beti Bachao, we really mean that. We are here to safeguard the interests of our daughters and we are committed to their safety. As far as Unnao incident is concerned, the law of justice will prevail," Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma told reporters.

Sharma said whosoever is found responsible for the incident, irrespective of his stature, will be punished.

Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi said action should be taken in every such case against women.

"This is distressing and justice will be done. The case has been given to CBI and law will take its course," she said.

Backing the Yogi Adityanath government, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal said the Uttar Pradesh government is working day and night to maintain law and order in the state.

"The state government will bring to book all the culprits in the state," he said.

The Uttar Pradesh government is facing strong criticism over its response to the case. Opposition political parties have hit out at the BJP government in the state.

On Wednesday, Congress president Rahul Gandhi wondered if Prime Minister Narendra Modi would observe a fast on the alleged rape and death of the complainant's father in custody, which he said "has shamed humanity."

The case came into the limelight after the victim tried to immolate herself outside Adityanath's residence on Sunday, alleging police inaction against Sengar.

On Wednesday night, an SIT probing the case handed over its report to the government, after which it was decided that an FIR would be registered against the MLA and the case would be handed over to the CBI.

A purported video of the alleged rape survivor's father before his death has also gone viral and was aired by several TV news channels. In the video, he has alleged that he was mercilessly beaten up, including with rifle butts, by the MLA's brother and others.

It also showed the victim's fatherwho died on Mondaywith serious wounds on his back. The veracity of the video could not be ascertained.The international chemical weapons watchdog on Thursday confirmed the UK's findings that the source of the military-grade nerve agent used to target the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury originally came from Russia.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the chemical used against Sergei and Yulia Skripal was "of high purity", without mentioning the exact name of the substance which will be reserved for the complete classified report it has prepared.

The Hague-based OPCW said its team "notes that the toxic chemical was of high purity. The latter is concluded from the almost complete absence of impurities."

The OPCW had sent a team of specialists to the UK last month to investigate the March 4 attack.

The experts took samples from several locations as well as biomedical samples from the Skripals and police officer Nick Bailey, who was also exposed to the nerve agent.

In a declassified summary of its findings, the OPCW did not make any assessment on who carried out the attack on 66-year-old Sergei and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said: "There can be no doubt what was used."

"There remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible - only Russia has the means, motive and record," he said.

Johnson said the OPCW's findings were based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world, all of which returned the same "conclusive" results.

"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible only Russia has the means, motive and record...The Kremlin must give answers," he said.

The minister said the UK had asked the OPCW to publish the executive summary of its findings in the "interest of transparency" and called a session of the OPCW Executive Council next Wednesday to discuss next steps.

"We must, as a world community, stand up for the rules based order which keeps us all safe. The use of weapons of this kind can never be justified, and must be ended," he said.

The UK's finding of a Soviet era Novichok stock of nerve agent used in the attack against the Skripals had been presented before the House of Commons by British Prime Minister Theresa May last month, when she declared that Russia was "culpable".

The UK government has since made several statements pointing the finger of blame of the Kremlin and expelled Russian diplomats in retaliation of the poisoning of the Skripals. The incident has led to a diplomatic crisis between Moscow and the West as Moscow denies any involvement and accuses Britain of inventing a "fake story".

In retaliation, Russia also expelled 60 American diplomats.

The OPCW report comes as Yulia turned down help from the Russian embassy in a statement issued through Scotland Yard yesterday to say that she was "safe" and trying to come to terms with her new life.

"I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me," she said.

The 33-year-old Russian citizen has been taken to a secure location after being discharged from Salisbury District Hospital earlier this week. In her statement, she said that she has been made aware of the Russian embassy's attempts to contact her but she did not wish to avail of their services for the moment.

Making a specific reference to her Russia-based cousin, Viktoria, she said that "her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's".

Viktoria had been quoted widely in the Russian media following a phone conversation she claimed to have had with Yulia from hospital last week.

The Russian embassy in London immediately raised doubts over the authenticity of the statement, claiming it "only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen".

"With no possibility to verify it, the publication by the Metropolitan Police raises new questions rather than gives answers. As before, we would like to make sure that the statement really belongs to Yulia. So far, we doubt it much," an embassy statement said.

Sergei Skripal remains in hospital as he recovers from the effects of the toxic nerve agent. His daughter thanked the Salisbury hospital staff, adding: "I have left my father in their care, and he is still seriously ill. I too am still suffering with the effects of the nerve agent used against us."

The UK's intelligence officials are believed to be in talks with the CIA over the possible repatriation of the Skripals to the US or another friendly country for their safety.

PTIBritish ministers planned to gather on Thursday to discuss whether to join the United States and France in a possible military attack on Syria that threatens to bring Western and Russian forces into direct confrontation.

Prime Minister Theresa May recalled the ministers from their Easter holiday for a special cabinet meeting on how to respond to what she has cast as a barbaric poison gas attack by Syrian government forces on civilians in the formerly rebel-held town of Douma, just east of the capital Damascus.

There were signs, though, of a global effort to head off a dangerous conflict pitting Russia against the West. The Kremlin said a crisis communications link with the United States, created to avoid an accidental clash over Syria, was in use.

The British cabinet meeting was due to begin at 1430 GMT. The situation in Syria is horrific, the use of chemical weapons is something the world has to prevent, Brexit minister David Davis said on Thursday morning.

But also its a very, very delicate circumstance and weve got to make this judgment on a very careful, very deliberate, very well thought-through basis.

Russia, the Syrian governments most important ally in its seven-year-old war with rebels, said it had deployed military police in Douma on Thursday after the town was taken over by government forces.

They are the guarantors of law and order in the town, RIA news agency quoted Russias defence ministry as saying.

US President Donald Trump warned Russia on Wednesday that missiles will be coming in response to the April 7 gas attack, alleged to have killed dozens of people, and lambasted Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrias military has repositioned some air assets to avoid fallout from possible missile strikes, US officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

Syrias attempt to shelter aircraft, perhaps by locating them alongside Russian military hardware that Washington might be reluctant to hit, could limit damage that the United States and its allies might be able to inflict on Assads military.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, also said pro-Syrian government forces were emptying main airports and military air bases.

World stocks edged down as anxious investors stayed wary of risky assets.

MATTIS CAUTIOUS

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, striking a cautious tone after Trumps threat of missile strikes, said on Wednesday the United States was assessing intelligence about the suspected toxic gas attack.

Asked if he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian president, Mattis said: Were still working on this.

Both Syria and Russia have said reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers in Douma and have accused the United States of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the government.

In Moscow, the head of a Russian parliamentary defence committee, Vladimir Shamanov, said Russia was in direct contact with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff about the situation.

The Russian military said it had observed movements of US Navy forces in the Gulf. Any US strike would probably involve the navy, given the risk to aircraft from Russian and Syrian air defences. A US guided-missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, is in the Mediterranean.

Moscows ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, warned on Wednesday that any US missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted.

The Syrian conflict has increasingly widened the rifts between Moscow, Washington and European powers and inflamed the bitter rivalries that run across the Middle East.

Syria, Iran and Russia say Israel was behind an air strike on a Syrian air base on Monday that killed seven Iranian military personnel, something Israel has neither confirmed nor denied.

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone on Wednesday and urged him to do nothing to destabilise Syria.

Netanyahus office said: The prime minister reiterated that Israel will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he had spoken to Trump on Wednesday and would speak to Putin on Thursday night about the chemical attack.

May has ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military that could begin as early as Thursday night, Londons Daily Telegraph newspaper said on Wednesday.

The BBC reported that May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in military action. She would not seek approval from parliament, the BBC said, despite calls from the opposition Labour Party for parliament to be given a say.

Parliament voted down British military action against Assads government in 2013 in an embarrassment for Mays predecessor, David Cameron. That then deterred the US administration of Barack Obama from similar action.

British Minister Davis said his decision then to vote against action was based on a lack of clear evidence and a lack of a clear plan. Those two things, Im assured, we will get an answer to today, he said of Thursdays cabinet meeting.Missouri Governor Eric Greitens walks through Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in University City, Missouri with Vice President Mike Pence on February 22, 2017. Photo: J.B. Forbes/TNS via Getty Images

In sworn testimony before lawmakers, a woman who had an affair with Missouri governor Eric Greitens accused him of forcing her into a sexual encounter, hitting her, taking a nude photo without her consent, and threatening to release it if she didnt keep quiet. The disturbing allegations were included in a 25-page report released on Wednesday by a special committee of the Missouri House of Representatives.

When the story broke in January, Greitens admitted to having an affair with his former hairdresser in 2015, but insisted it was entirely consensual and denied trying to blackmail her. At a press conference just before the reports release, the Republican governor said it was filled with tabloid trash, gossip, according to the Kansas City Star. He also borrowed a term from President Trump, saying, This is exactly what happens with witch hunts in Washington, D.C. Smearing, lying, attacking people who want to change how things are done is wrong in Washington and its wrong in Missouri.

The Missouri House of Representatives began investigating Greitens after he was indicted in February on a charge of invasion of privacy for allegedly taking a nonconsensual nude photo. A St. Louis TV station broke the story after the womans ex-husband provided a secretly recorded conversation in which she described the affair.

In her first public statements on the matter, the woman told lawmakers that shed developed a crush on Greitens, a longtime client, and during an appointment in March 2015 he moved his hand up her leg all the way up to [her] crotch without her consent.

A week later he invited her to his home while his wife was out of town, saying they could not talk in public because he was running for office. She said she arrived around 7 a.m. and told him she had to be at work in 45 minutes. After taking her keys, searching her purse, and patting her down, he said he wanted to show her a workout and invited her to change into an outfit hed put out for her  mens pajama pants and a T-shirt with a slit cut at the top.

The woman testified that she would not have been interested if he simply told her he wanted to have sex at that time, but she thought he was suggesting a sexy workout and was curious and confused. She said that when they got into the basement, he taped her hands to pull-up rings and blindfolded her. Then he said she needed to be hydrated, so he put water in his mouth and tried to spit it into hers.

So I just spit it out, she said. He does it and hes like, Youre not going to be a bad girl, are you? Tries to do it again, to which I just let it dribble out, because I didnt even want to kiss him.

She said he began kissing down her chest, then tore off the shirt and pulled down her pants without her consent. Then I hear him kind of, like, step back  take a step back and I hear  I can hear like, a cell phone  like a picture, and I can see a flash through the blindfold.

She said he then told her that if she ever mentioned his name to anyone, Im going to take these pictures, and Im going to put them everywhere I can  and then everyone will know what a little whore you are.

Next, she said, Greitens spanked her and asked if she would tell anyone. She said no, and hes like, Good, now thats a good girl.

She said he started kissing her stomach again, and as soon as he got, like, low on me, I just started freaking out and I started ripping down my hands. I was like, Get me out of here. Im not ready for this. I dont want this. I dont want this.

After Greitens helped her down, she said she told him, Im leaving, and headed for the stairs. But then he grabs me and like  like in a bear hug, and was like, Shh, shh, its okay, calm down, calm down, and like, lays me down on the ground in his basement. Not, like, hard, like  I mean, I was like a puddle of  no. I just, like, was crying.

She said that while she was still on the floor bawling my eyes out, he took out his penis and put it near her face. She said she gave him oral sex because she felt that was the only way he would let her out of the basement. It felt like consent, but, no, I didnt want to do it, she told lawmakers, later adding, Coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave.

The woman left her keys at Greitenss house, and said when she came back later in the day to retrieve them he told her he needed the picture to protect himself, since he was running for office, but that he felt bad and deleted it.

She said they went on to have several consensual encounters over the next few months. When asked why she continued seeing him, the woman said, Ive asked myself that so many times.

She explained Greitens was kind to her after the first incident and she didnt want to think that he thought of me as just a whore. I wanted to think that he actually really liked me and wanted to have a relationship with me of sorts.

However, she described two more nonconsensual incidents: one where Greitens smacked her hard across the face and said, youre mine, after she confessed to having sex with her husband, and another in which he out of nowhere, just, like, kind of smacked me and grabbed me and shoved me down on the ground during a sexual encounter.

Eventually they learned someone, later revealed to be the womans husband, had emailed Greitenss wife about the affair, and they called things off.

Greitens refused to testify or provide documents to the committee, and he has not directly addressed questions about whether he took the photo. However, hes said he expects to be proven innocent when he goes to trial in May, and released a statement on Wednesday night saying this was an entirely consensual relationship, and any allegation of violence or sexual assault is false.

Members of the committee said they found the womans testimony credible. GOP legislative leaders announced that the panel will continue its investigation and decide whether to file articles of impeachment. If a majority of House members vote for impeachment, the Senate will select seven judges to conduct a trial.

For now Greitens, who was once considered a rising star in the GOP, is refusing calls to resign. In another significant blow, Missouris Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley, who is attempting to unseat Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in November, responded to the report by calling on Greitens to step down.

The conduct the report details is certainly impeachable, in my judgment, and the House is well within its rights to proceed on that front. But the people of Missouri should not be put through that ordeal. Governor Greitens should resign immediately, Hawley said.

McCaskill called for his resignation as well:

I cant get my head around a mans character that would put his wife and children through this kind of pain.  Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) April 11, 2018Richard Echoku, 54, is one of many HIV-positive Ugandans on second-line antiretroviral treatment, having failed to respond to first-line drugs.

They tested my viral load several times, but it was not suppressing yet I was taking the drugs, Echoku told The Observer. However, doctors realized I was not taking my medicine on time especially during stock-outs. Sometimes I could miss getting drugs in hospital for some days, he said.

Jane Nassolo gets her medication from Kasangati health centre IV but for long the doctors had wondered why her viral load was not suppressing yet she was taking drugs daily, and on time.

When the doctors asked me where I store my drugs, I told them at home in the drawer, although I used to take one tablet daily to my working place at the farm and keep it in the bush before I swallow it on time, she said. Then doctors realised the medicine I used to keep in the bush lost its quality and stopped working. That was why the viral load was not suppressing.

These are typical cases and, according to Dr Peter Andrew Kalema, head, Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) clinic, at Kiswa health centre III in Kampala, treatment failure can lead to drug resistance.

Treatment failure is when someone on ART treatment fails to respond due to poor adherence, which increases the viral load, while HIV drug resistance is when the virus has mutated or changed its shape, and even if you take the medicine properly, its not suppressed by the drug until you switch to another line, he says.

Of recent, HIV drug stock-out is adding a lot of misery to us as service providers in the ART clinics because we get very few drugs from National Medical Stores (NMS) which is not enough for our patients. We keep on begging for drugs from nearby health centres. When patients spend long time without taking drugs, they develop resistance, Kalema laments.

He said the most affected patients are those on second-line treatment because their drugs are very expensive and are supplied in smaller quantities. Last December, says Kalema, most patients on second line were advised to buy drugs from pharmacies.

The biggest challenge has been due to new UNAIDS guidelines of test and treat policy, where they recommended all people tested HIV-positive to start treatment immediately yet 40 per cent of HIV-positive patients were still on septrin because their CD4 counts were still high, says Kalema.

There was massive prescription of ARVs and the NMS stores cleared in December. Since then, we are struggling with stock-outs. Most patients are not getting enough drugs, which causes drug resistance.

Dr Ivan Arinaitwe, also at Kiswa health centre III, observes that the ministry of Health recommendation for all patients failing on first line to be switched to second line also increased stock-outs. Arinaitwe points out that majority of patients on second-line drugs today were not budgeted for this financial year.

The cost of testing a person resisting on second line to third line is Shs 800,000. Third-line drugs are also very expensive and can only be found in HIV centres of excellence such as Mulago hospital, Infectious Diseases Institute and Joint Clinical Research Centre, he said.

Of the 5,900 people under Kiswas care, about one per cent are on second line treatment. Countrywide, about 5.7 per cent HIV- positive people are on second line.

One appreciates how troubling the stock-out situation is  given its correlation with drug resistance -- when you hear from Prossy Luzige. As programme manager, National Forum of People Living with HIV Networks in Uganda (NAFOPHANU), she has disturbing inside knowledge.

Most health centre IIs and IVs in rural areas dont have second-line treatment. When doctors shift you to second line, they refer you to regional hospitals where they order for second-line treatment, says Luzige.

But in rural areas, regional hospitals are too far from patients home and it becomes difficult for patients to move; hence, ending up abandoning drugs, becoming drug-resistant and dying.

Both Echoku and Nassolo fear that if the government is failing to provide second- line treatment, then the more costly third-line phase is but a dream. Another threat to the fight against HIV comes in the shape of so-called voluntary drug holidays.

Drug holiday means people stop taking drugs after finding out their viral load is suppressed. Others are deceived by pastors to stop taking drugs, while others are just fed up of swallowing drugs and abandon them, she says.

She warns that the moment the virus is exposed to a drug holiday, it changes form and becomes resistant. All this, however, does not come anywhere near the dangers posed by stock-outs. For instance, Luzige remembers how last year many HIV-positive people in eastern Uganda developed resistance which forced NAFOPHANU to petition government.

With peoples lives being unnecessarily exposed to grave danger, a sinister truth has been revealed about why stock-outs persist.

Alice Kayongo, the regional policy and advocacy manager at Aids Health Care Foundation (Uganda Cares), says they have evidence that donor money from USAID which was initially meant to buy HIV drugs was used by government to pay off some of its debts.

The donors communicated that since the money was pulled out of HIV treatment, we are likely to face stock-outs until May, Kayongo said.

This is happening in an environment where Kayongo reveals that drug resistance is also occurring on account of many people objecting to taking new drug combinations. Some worry about the suspected side effects such as damage to the liver, kidneys and changes in body colour and weight.

People dont have faith in new medicine  without sensitisation, she says.

I was with an old man in Lyantonde hospital recently. He was in tears because he had moved a long distance and failed to get drugs on second line treatment. Second-line has been consistently out of stock yet many people have been shifted to it, she said.

Worse still, stock-outs are affecting laboratory reagents used in testing for HIV viral load.

In case the donors pull out completely, many poor people will die, she says.

But at the health ministry, Dr Joshua Musinguzi, the Aids Control Programme manager, says most people with HIV drug resistance come late to the hospital when the virus is already in advanced stages and they have low CD4 counts. The doctors cant do much and they die.

Musinguzi also blames stock-outs on health centres.

They dont make correct orders; right quality, right quantity, right mix and right type of drugs. [National Medical Stores NMS] cant give them what they didnt order for, Musinguzi said.

According to the 2017 UNAIDS global report, by June, about 21 million people living with HIV were accessing ART, up from 17.8 million in 2015 and eight million in 2010.

As such, the cost of treatment remains very high. It is estimated by UNAIDS that $26.2 billion will be needed for the AIDS response by 2020 in low and middle-income countries.

Sources at NMS say the challenge facing health centres is that ARVs are ordered online yet most of them dont have bio-statisticians.

If a bio-statistician goes on leave and he or she is replaced with someone who doesnt know the system... you find they put quantity in the place of unit, and this creates problems with suppliers, a source said.

This confusion is further complicated by policy contradictions. Dan Kimosho, spokesman at NMS, acknowledges that the test and treat policy caught them off guard: they dont give out drugs to expected patients as UNAIDS proposed. They only consider those who were ordered for.

The donors tell health centres to order ART for expected patients not only for patients they currently have. Yet for us, we give drugs for current number of patients and advise them to make orders for expected patients in the next budget, he said.

zurah@observer.ugBanco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA engages in the traditional banking businesses of retail banking, asset management, private banking, and wholesale banking. It operates through the following segments: Spain, the United States, Mexico, Turkey, South America, and Rest of Eurasia. The Spain segment includes mainly the banking and insurance business that the group carries out in Spain. The United States segment consists of the financial business activity of BBVA USA in the country and the activity of the branch of BBVA SA in New York. The Mexico segment refers to banking and insurance businesses in this country as well as the activity of its branch in Houston. The Turkey segment reports the activity of Garanti BBVA group that is mainly carried out in this country and, to a lesser extent, in Romania and the Netherlands. The South America segment comprises of operations in n Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The Rest of Eurasia segment includes the banking business activity carried out by the group in Europe and Asia, excluding Spain. The company was founded in 1857 and is headquartered in Madrid, Spain.

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View William Lyon Homes' earnings history.The director of public prosecutions (DPP) Mike Chibita has blamed police for the collapsed investigations into the assassination of state prosecutor Joan Kagezi, who was gunned down three years ago.



Chibita while addressing journalists at Uganda Media Centre today said police had followed a wrong track in the investigations thus giving the criminals space to cover their tracks.

DPP Mike Chibita

Kagezi was shot dead at about 7:15 pm on March 30, 2015 near her residence in Kiwatule, a city suburb as she drove home with her children. Kagezi had stopped at a fruit stall by the roadside where she normally stopped to purchase fruits, when assailants riding on a motorcycle, red in colour, stopped next to the parked vehicle and shot her twice in the neck and shoulder, through the widow on the driver's side.



The director of Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID), Grace Akullo, who, by coincidence was driving some distance behind Kagezi, was the first police officer on the scene. She coordinated the evacuation of the deceased to Mulago hospital where she was pronounced dead on arrival. Three children who were with her were unhurt.



Immediately after her death, a team of police officers led by the then inspector general of police Kale Kayihura arrested more than 50 suspects who were later released after the DPP advised that there was no evidence linking them to the crime scene.



Chibita says it is this following of the wrong track in the investigations that messed up the case - since the right tracks have since gone cold and covered.

"Remember when the late Joan was killed, there were a number of arrests actually. About 50 people were arrested, and about two files generated. but when we looked through the evidence, we realised that these could not have been the people. This, I think was part of what made it hardthe investigators followed a track which was not the right one. And every time you follow a wrong track, that means youre missing the right one and then the tracks sometimes get covered", said Chibita.



Chibita revealed that there are still leads that can help trace the people behind the assassination like telephone call records, bullets and fingerprints all recovered from the scene of crime. With all the available leads, the DPP says the current lack of forensic investigators in the police force has made all the leads useless.

"It is lack of resources I would say, forensic especially because in this day and age where there is mobile phone evidence and laptop evidence. If we had the sophisticated forensic resources and well trained investigators, I think wed have been able to crack it by now", he added.



On Friday, the DPP's office will hold a memorial lecture for Kagezi at Hotel Africana under the theme, "Combating International and Transnational Organised Crime; lessons learnt and best practices." The main speaker will be the United Kingdom chief crown prosecutor Grace Onoruna.



At the time of her death, Kagezi was in charge of the International Crimes Division handling international crimes such as terrorism, war crimes, and human trafficking.

She was the lead prosecutor in the case of the July 2010 terror attacks in Kampala. Kagezi was also working with the police in the prosecution of the suspects in the spate of murders, robberies and terrorism in Busoga region and Kampala.The following companies are subsidiares of Lloyds Banking Group: A G Finance Ltd, A.C.L. Ltd, ACL Autolease Holdings Ltd, ADF No.1 Pty Ltd, Addison Social Housing Holdings Ltd, Alex Lawrie Factors Ltd, Alex. 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The company operates in two segments, Western Hemisphere and Eastern Hemisphere. It offers artificial lift systems, including reciprocating rod, progressing cavity pumping, gas, hydraulic, plunger, and hybrid lift systems, as well as related automation and control systems; pressure pumping and reservoir stimulation services, such as acidizing, fracturing and fluid systems, cementing, and coiled-tubing intervention; and drill stem test tools, and surface well testing and multiphase flow measurement services. The company also provides safety, downhole reservoir monitoring, flow control, and multistage fracturing systems, as well as sand-control technologies, and production and isolation packers; liner hangers to suspend a casing string in high-temperature and high-pressure wells; cementing products, including plugs, float and stage equipment, and torque-and-drag reduction technology for zonal isolation; and pre-job planning and installation services. In addition, it offers directional drilling services, and logging and measurement services while drilling; services related to rotary-steerable systems, high-temperature and high-pressure sensors, drilling reamers, and circulation subs; managed pressure drilling, conventional mud-logging, drilling instrumentation, gas analysis, wellsite consultancy, and open hole and cased-hole logging services; reservoir solutions and software products; and intervention and remediation services. Further, the company provides equipment and drilling tools; tubular handling, management, and connection services; equipment rental services; and onshore contract drilling and related services through a fleet of land drilling and workover rigs. Weatherford International plc was incorporated in 1972 and is headquartered in Baar, Switzerland.

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given LINE 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 LINE wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.The piece stands as a crown jewel in the repertoire. Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 is so monumental  three movements, 40 minutes in duration  that a publisher gave it the subtitle "Emperor."

To pianist Young Kim, the work has been a touchstone throughout her career. In her youth she analyzed and refined the piece during studies with four different teachers. Kim returns to the masterpiece on Sunday, April 22, with the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra on the stage at Proctors.

"I know this piece more than any other concerto," says Kim. "I play other Beethoven concertos, but this is always so special because it reminds me of all these great teachers and their lessons. It stays in my heart very strong and is definitely one of my favorites."

Kim is a professor of music at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, where she's taught since 2007. Her own path as a student took her to three different continents. Kim was born in South Korea and started piano lessons at age 5. Her father, a business executive, never studied music but had a natural ability at the keyboard.

"He could play piano by ear, without any lessons," she says. "When he heard 'Autumn Leaves,' he could play and harmonize it, so I think I got it from him."

Her father's career took the family to New York where Kim, then a high school student, enrolled in the Juilliard School's pre-college division. A transfer back to the homeland meant that Kim got her first degree in music at the Seoul National University. Then, with the family back in the U.S., Kim was accepted at Juilliard where she received a master's degree in music, followed by studies at Yale and the University of Minnesota, where she learned from her teacher Lydia Artymiw. She also spent several months in St. Petersburg, Russia, for private instruction. That period climaxed with a performance of the "Emperor" with St. Petersburg State Capella Symphony Orchestra.

From Manhattan to St. Petersburg, Beethoven was a constant.

"My different teachers guided my way, but I was never given totally controversial or contradicting ideas," recalls Kim. "It was a process of polishing the piece and it was interesting each time. But not all at the same time, then I would get confused."

Throughout all those years of travel and all those lessons, Kim used the same published edition of the "Emperor." But in brushing up for the Schenectady performance, she decided to start fresh and ordered a new score.

"I didn't want to take it for granted that I had learned it," says Kim. "All my notes and the teachers' markings are in my old copy, which I can use for reference. But I'm trying to stay away from it so that I have a fresh perspective and new ideas. Now it's my interpretation."

According to Kim certain big chords in the third movement can be a tough reach for women pianists. These days she's found herself more comfortable with those passages and with the piece in general. But she quickly adds, "I can't say I mastered it. I dare not say that."

The upcoming Beethoven performance marks Kim's third appearance with the Schenectady Symphony. She's also performed with the Glens Falls Symphony and is a regular presence with the St. Rose Camerata, which is made up of college faculty members.

Kim has been on the teaching side of music since her undergraduate days. She arrived in the Capital Region in 2000 when her husband took a job teaching chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At Saint Rose she has taught classroom courses in keyboard harmony, piano pedagogue, and piano repertoire. But private lessons are her mainstay.

In Kim's teaching studio, there are two pianos side by side so she can easily demonstrate things to a private student. But she allows each student to make their own decisions, at least to an extent.

"I'll give the same piece to 10 students and each one plays it differently," she explain. "I make them do their best to show their personality. Music reflects who are you are as a person."

But interpretive choices come only after one has mastered the technique, which means getting all the notes in their right places. Once a student has the piece well in hand, that's when Kim gives them some freedom. But they have to make their case through musical expression.

"I give them the option to find their way," says Kim. "But they really have to convince me."

She encourages attendance at concerts as an essential means of developing musical tastes. Again, the students have to support their views.

"Someone will say, 'I don't like that performance.' Well, can you tell me why you didn't like that? Too much emotion? Too much pedal?" she says.

More Information Pianist Young Kim performs with the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra Diane Wittry, guest conductor Kim is the soloist in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 "Emperor." Also on the program is Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture and Borodin's Symphony No. 2. When: 3 p.m. Sunday, April 22 Where: Proctors, 432 State St., Schenectady. Tickets: $12-$20 More information: 518-346-6204, proctors.org., schenectady symphony.org See More Collapse

On the other hand, Kim is against students relying on YouTube during the early stages of learning a new piece.

"It's hard to teach classical music to this digital generation," she says. "They want answers right away and results right away. But music is not like that."

Kim's relationship with Beethoven stands as a good example. She's still in wonder at his body of music.

"The more of his music you do, the more you appreciate it," she says. Pointing to the daunting body of 32 piano sonatas that he wrote, Kim says she'd like to learn them all and has so far performed 13 or 14 of them. The biggest revelations come when she returns to a piece she thought she already knew so well.

"When years go by and you approach something again, [you think] 'Wow do I know this piece?'" says Kim. "You always discover something new, that's the beauty of music. You don't master music at any time in your life. You learn constantly through your lifetime."

Joseph Dalton is a freelance writer based in Troy.Last month, we introduced you to Jacob Monday, the Shenendehowa High School student battling terminal bone cancer. Monday  and his mom  created a bucket least, titled "Jacob's Wishes."

On that list?

To meet Chris Pratt.

From earlier: Shen students help ill classmate complete bucket list

That item is no longer a dream. The meeting is a reality  and it's social media-official with Chris Pratt writing:

"This is Chris Pratt writing from Jacob's Instagram. He wanted me to write this caption. We're kicking it in New York City playing some games and catching up. He's hilarious, earnest, honest and powerful. I love this kid. Take a moment to hug your kids."

Pratt posted to his own Instagram (and Facebook) about his day with Monday. The two got their hair and makeup done and hung out and talked about a whole host of things, including Monday's wish for a whole lot of Instagram followers. You can read about that here.

Monday continues to check things off his list, including camping and other outdoor activities.

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The GoFundMe page his friends and classmates set up exceeded the original goal by nearly 70 percent. You can see that here.

Find out more about Monday, including how to help with his bucket list, here.

Related: Celebrity sightings in the Capital RegionIt isn't always pretty when idealism collides with the real world.

Passionate belief in a cause can shape a person's life  but not always in the direction she expects. Inspiration and disappointment are two sides of one coin, and betrayal can come from the least likely sources.

Two women  one young, one older  grapple with those realities in Meg Wolitzer's wise and absorbing new novel, "The Female Persuasion."

Faith Frank is a feminist icon in her 60s, Greer Kadetsky a college student when they meet after a talk Faith gives on campus in 2006. Faith founded Bloomer magazine back in the 1970s and was just "a couple of steps down from Gloria Steinem in fame." Greer has only a foggy idea who she is; her friend Zee, an activist in feminist and gay rights causes, brings her to the older woman's talk.

But when the charismatic Faith speaks, Greer is galvanized. When Faith hands her a business card, it might be just one more fan encounter for the older woman, but for the younger one it's life-changing.

Greer thought she had her life planned. She and her boyfriend, Cory Pinto, both exceptional students, connected as youngsters over their shared feeling that they were odd kids out. Cory was born Duarte Pinto Jr., son of immigrant parents, and renamed himself after the kid on TV's ''Boy Meets World'' to seem more American.

Greer's parents were late-stage hippies in the '80s when they met as part of a "community of people living on a retrofitted school bus in the Pacific Northwest." They never really got off that bus; when their only child starts getting her college rejection/acceptance letters, she discovers they dropped the ball on filling out financial aid applications, and she'll have to settle for a lesser college.

So the first part of her plan with Cory  attending the Ivy League together  is scuttled, but they still plan for a millennials' idyll in a cute apartment in Brooklyn. "At the end of an industrious day, he would come home from microfinance, and she would come home from nonprofit" and they'll share beers on the fire escape.

After graduation, Greer pulls out that business card and gets an appointment to interview for a job at Bloomer  only to arrive just as the magazine folds. But Faith creates a new platform for her activism, a foundation called Loci that supports feminist conferences and projects  and is funded by a billionaire ex-lover of Faith's named Emmett Shrader. A rapacious capitalist and serial seducer, Shrader seems born to be Faith's nemesis, but they have a singular connection.

Greer's job at Loci is entry level but puts her in a position to be mentored by her idol: "Faith was still a person of gravitas and glamour, intelligence, cheekbones, warmth, greatness, all of which was once again exciting." It also gets her close enough to see the cogs turning beneath the sleek surface of Loci, and she won't always like what she sees.

Cory, meanwhile, gets a ridiculously high-paying job  but then tragedy strikes his family, and the whole plan for the future disintegrates.

Despite its politics, "The Female Persuasion" is far from being a polemic. Wolitzer devotes substantial portions of the book not only to Greer's and Faith's back stories, but to those of Cory and Zee, Greer's college friend, all warmly told.

She's deft with telling details, like Greer in her early days at college, overwhelmed by other people after a lonely childhood: "She watched the girls standing with heads tilted and elbows jutted, pushing in earrings, and boys aerosolizing themselves with a body spray called Stadium, which seemed to be half pine sap, half A.1. sauce."

Years later, she observes Greer in a relationship with a colleague: "Sometimes one of them would slam his or her laptop shut, and the other one would follow, the laptops making a decisive sound like two car doors closing, a big part of foreplay these days."

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We see the foundations of Faith's feminism in her youthful experience of taking a friend who is bleeding out after an illegal abortion to the hospital. "In the ER, one nurse in particular gave Annie the leper treatment. ... 'I could have you thrown in the slammer, did you know that? I could call the police right this minute, you little harlot.'"

And there's Faith decades later, powerful but still vulnerable to criticism: "Loci was doing good business, and naturally people were writing things on Twitter like #whiteladyfeminism and #richladies, and the hashtag that for some reason irritated Faith most, #fingersandwichfeminism."

Among the most heartbreaking details is Cory's response to the death of someone dear to him. He designs a video game called SoulFinder, "a sort of mortality-based witness protection program. ... If only you knew where to find them. If only you knew where to look."

In some ways "The Female Persuasion" seems very much of the moment, from Greer's nasty #MeToo moment in college to Loci's projects to rescue human trafficking victims. But what's really striking is how nostalgic much of it seems. Although most of the plot takes place no more than a decade ago, it's lit with the warm glow of an era of progressive politics, when it felt as if feminism, gay rights and other human rights were blooming, if not fully realized then on the path.

It does not feel like that now. The novel's final chapter is a coda several years later, in the wake of what one character calls "the big terribleness."

"'The thing that really gets me,' she said, 'is that the worst kind of man, the kind that you would never allow yourself to be alone with, because you would know he was a danger to you, was left alone with all of us.'"

Women's work is truly never done.The hearing of our petition challenging the constitutionality of the Raphael Magyezi/Yoweri Museveni age removal law got underway on Monday in Mbale, over 170 kilometres from Kampala.

There are seven different parties challenging the legality of these constitutional amendments passed by parliament with the support of the 317 NRM MPs on December 20, 2017.

Uganda Law Society, represented by Prof Fredrick Ssempebwa, is one party. Leader of the Opposition in Parliament Winfred Kiiza, opposition chief whip Ssemujju Ibrahim Nganda and MPs Gerald Karuhanga, Jonathan Odur, Mubarak Munyagwa and Allan Ssewanyana are another party represented by Erias Lukwago and Ladislaus Rwakafuuzi.

There are five other parties represented by different lawyers. Truth of the matter is I dont know why Deputy Chief Justice Alfonse Owiny-Dollo, decided to take us to Mbale for this historic case.

I really dont know whether this is going to be the standard procedure that such cases will be heard outside Kampala henceforth. The judges and their staff are certainly accommodated in a hotel, while drawing allowances.

And the Magyezi law is not the only business of the Constitutional court. Mind you, this same court doubles as the Court of Appeal. Owiny-Dollo has to perform other administrative duties as its head at the headquarters in Kampala. He has now decided to operate from Mbale.

It is a ridiculous decision, but that is what Uganda has become under Museveni. Coming to Mbale offers us an opportunity to interact with problems citizens in this part of the country are grappling with, such as the unattended-to Tirinyi road.

The last section of this road, about 20 kilometers to Mbale town, is the worst I have encountered almost in my entire adult life. Why? There has been war between various government departments over the contractor  Dott Services Limited. Uganda National Roads Authority (Unra), under its new leader Allen Kagina, was uncomfortable at one time with this company, and Gen Museveni agreed with her.

He recommended that Dott Services should not be given any other road construction contract. But using its lobbyists, the company got Museveni reverse his directive. Parliament, through various committees, recommended that this company is blacklisted, especially basing on their performance on Tororo-Soroti road.

The speaker of parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, somehow intervened on behalf of Dott Services. This is what has caused the deterioration of the road, especially the last section towards Mbale. Away from the road, there are three areas of interest for us challenging the law.

First, all known procedures of parliament were flouted by the parties involved. We drew the attention of the speaker to these procedures and practices, but she was adamant. She insisted on consultations, but at the same time called for the final consideration of the controversial bill before the committee on legal and parliamentary affairs had consulted.

Our prayer is that the whole Magyezi/Museveni law should be annulled. Second point is the violence used not only on the citizens, but their representatives as well.

The story of how we were dragged from the parliamentary chambers by presidential guards must still be fresh in the mind of those who follow Ugandan politics.

MPs such as Francis Zaake and Betty Nambooze Bakireke had to be flown out of the country for medical attention. The chief of defence forces, Gen David Muhoozi, one of the witnesses of Magyezi, now argues beating up MPs was proportionate force.

The third point which has made us unpopular at parliament is the smuggling into the already fraudulent bill the provision to extend MPs term to seven years. This matter is unfortunately supported by some of our opposition colleagues.

Many of the MPs, especially those who ate money to change the Constitution, have become fugitives in their own constituencies. They dont want to face elections in 2021. They, therefore, negotiated a package with Museveni. The package included Shs 200 million and extension of their term by two years.

These are the matters we have asked the Constitutional court to pronounce itself on. We must put everybody on test and must stay the course. You cant weaken dictatorship by folding hands. We must engage the dictatorship on all fronts, and this is what will give us victory. The Mbale hearing is now one of the fronts.

The author is Kira municipality MP and opposition chief whip in parliament.When Jacob Monday slipped and fell over Thanksgiving break in 2015, emergency room doctors told him the pain he felt was nothing more than a bone bruise.

His mother, Barbara Williams, recalls taking him home and lovingly telling him to suck it up.

And he tried.

Jacob lives with his mom and his brother Lee. The high school student considers himself the man of the house and takes that role seriously, rarely complaining. But, by February 2016, Jacob struggled to walk.

Barbara took him to their family doctor where Jacob received X-rays.

That afternoon, the medical office called with the results.

Jacob's pain was due to much more than a bone bruise.

Over the next few weeks the young man learned he had osteosarcoma, a type of cancer that starts in the bones. The Shenendehowa student, who is now in tenth grade, underwent five forms of chemotherapy over the next three months, spending five days in the hospital, coming home for two days, then going back in for another five days. He would do this for three weeks and then get his blood counts back up.

In June of 2016, Jacob had his first surgery. His knee and part of his femur were replaced, followed by more chemo.

In December 2017, he did his last round of chemo, and went home to spend Christmas with his family.

In January, Jacob had a routine chest X-ray so he could get the port from chemotherapy removed. Doctors found four spots on his right lung.

Over February break, Jacob met with his doctor. They had him in surgery the next morning.

The spots were osteosarcoma.

Jacob, his mom and his doctors discussed options.

They were told the next form of chemo would be extremely hard and that  with his cancer  the options are few, Barbara says. Her son's cancer moved into his cells and will come back, they were told. His survival rate with chemo would be almost 50 percent and without chemo 20 percent, his mother said.

"Jacob decided he wants to spend what time he has left being with his family," Barbara says. "I decided that I wanted him to have a bucket list and so I worked on it and asked him different things that he would like to get a chance to do."

Jack Voce, one of Jacob's friends, reached out to his friends and followers on social media.

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Jacob's list consists of things like going indoor skydiving and visiting his younger brother in Michigan.

Shen classmates have rallied around Jacob, raising funds to help him complete his list. They're using the #shenformonday hashtag on social media and the teachers are working with the students to collect donations at the Clifton Park high school from March 26-29.

The mom of a fellow classmate set up a GoFundMe page, where they've raised $4,000 toward helping Jacob fulfill his list.

To learn more, check out that hashtag on social media or go to the GoFundMe page.

Jacob's bucket list:

 Do indoor skydiving

 Swim with sea turtles

 Stand under a waterfall

 Meet someone famous like Chris Pratt or Jeff Dunham

 Be on a movie set

 Go camping

 Go to the ocean

 Go to a hot spring

 Visit younger brother Shane in Michigan

For more information, go to Kristi Gustafson Barlette's blog.Chesterfield County Police Chief, Col. Jeffrey Katz

A Virginia police chief is warning parents to be vigilant of 10 different apps that could potentially groom their teenagers for human trafficking.

"Parents, the World Wide Web is the modern day equivalent to the Wild Wild West," Chesterfield County Police Chief, Col. Jeffrey Katz wrote in a Friday Facebook post. "There are bad actors out there who will leverage your child's desire for privacy to groom them for exploitation while using otherwise legitimate apps. Do not give them this space or opportunity! Monitor lovingly & unapologetically!"Albany

Two Capital Region men were sentenced Thursday for their roles in defrauding investors of $150,ooo and money laundering involving $200,000, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office said.

David Mazzeo, 59, of Guilderland, and Michael Caruso, 62, of Schenectady must serve time behind bars and pay restitution for their roles, state prosecutors said.

This is Mazzeo's fourth investment fraud conviction in six years. He received a prison sentence of nine to eighteen years to run consecutively to another sentence lasting from 2 years and 4 month to 7 years.

Caruso received a sentence of six months in jail and five years' probation and he must pay $127,235 in restitution. Mazzeo was ordered to pay $133,091. They were convicted Feb. 15 after a two-week jury trial before Judge Thomas A. Breslin in Albany County Supreme Court.

Mazzeo was also convicted of three counts of grand larceny and one count of securities fraud.

Schneiderman's statement said that between July 2012 and September 2013, the two conducted a complex scam while Mazzeo was under investigation for investment fraud. The pair used the money they got illegally to pay attorney fees and court-ordered restitution for Mazzeo's prior crimes.

They used money obtained through fraud to pay off some victims threatening to sue Mazzeo. In return for Caruso's help, Mazzeo obtained fake loan commitment letters for Caruso to use to delay foreclosure on Caruso's Latham business, which custom builds wooden lockers for colleges and country clubs, the prosecutors said.

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Caruso owned the failing Prozone Lockers, which never became financially viable. By May 2012, Caruso was facing eviction from his Amsterdam factory.

On July 18, 2012, Caruso opened a personal bank account solely in his name at First Niagara Bank and gave Mazzeo exclusive authority over the account debit card. The evidence at trial showed how, during the entire time Mazzeo was under investigation, he exclusively used the Caruso account to conceal his new investment fraud scheme.

For Mazzeo's most recent scam, he approached potential investors about investing in his fictitious coal or natural gas industry deals. The defendants spent the money raised on attorneys they hired to defend them. They spent some money shopping at Albany's Victoria's Secret and liquor stores. Caruso also used some funds to prop up Prozone Lockers, Schneiderman's statement says.HALFMOON  FBI agents seized more than $520,000 in cash when they raided the Saratoga County residence of NXIVM President Nancy Salzman last month as part of a widening U.S. Justice Department investigation of the secretive organization.

Federal search warrant documents unsealed by a judge this week at the request of the Times Union indicate the U.S. currency was stuffed in bags, envelopes and shoe boxes, including one shoe box that held more than $390,000.

The FBI agents who raided Salzman's Oregon Trail residence in Halfmoon also seized numerous computers, data-storage devices, cameras, various mobile phones and BlackBerrys, and small amounts of Mexican and Russian currency, the records indicate.

Evidence also was seized from a nearby townhouse that was raided by federal agents that same day  March 27  and had allegedly been used for years as a private sex lair by Keith Raniere. The items seized from that residence, on Hale Drive in the Knox Woods subdivision, included audio-video recording equipment, a box of unidentified white pills, computer storage devices, binders, VHS tapes, and a book titled "History of Torture."

The beige townhouse on Hale Drive is a short walk from the small residence where Raniere had lived for more than 15 years before he abruptly flew to Mexico last fall -- after he became the target of an intensive federal criminal investigation.

FBI affidavits filed in support of the search warrant applications also confirm that Allison Mack, a television actress who has been part of Raniere's inner circle in NXIVM for many years, was an alleged co-conspirator with Raniere in his efforts to recruit women into a secret slave-master club.

The records say Mack helped recruit women into the club and made them pose for nude photographs that she would forward to Raniere. She also delivered some of the women to Raniere for sexual encounters, and at least one alleged victim described the sex as unwanted.

Raniere was arrested March 25 at a luxury villa in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He was with several female devotees, including Mack, when Mexican federal police took him into custody and deported him to the United States, where he was arrested on a federal criminal complaint charging him with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor.

The federal complaint alleges that Raniere, known to his followers as "The Vanguard," organized the secret group within NXIVM in which women said they were coerced into joining a slave-master club and later branded with a design that included the initials of Raniere and Mack.

Raniere, in statements previously posted on NXIVM's website, had characterized the slave-master group as a consenting, private "sorority" and said that he and the corporation had no role in it.

But federal court records indicate emails seized from Raniere's private messaging accounts "support the conclusion that Raniere created" the club, which was known as "Dominus Obsequious Sororium," which means "Master Over the Slave Women."

The women in the group, according to the federal complaint, were lured into the club by other female NXIVM members, including Mack, who considered Raniere her "grand master," and were required to provide "collateral" in order to join. If they tried to leave, they were threatened that their collateral  sometimes damaging information about family members or close-up photographs of their genitalia  would be released.

"Collateral consisted of material or information that the prospective slave would not want revealed because it would be ruinous to the prospective slave herself and/or someone close to her," states an FBI agent's affidavit filed as part of the complaint.

Raniere is being held without bond at a federal detention center in Brooklyn and is scheduled to appear before a U.S. magistrate judge on Friday afternoon.

The federal search warrant records also disclose the support that Raniere has received from Clare W. Bronfman, an heiress of the Seagram Co. business empire who has described herself as the operations director of NXIVM. The records indicate Bronfman assisted Raniere in sending threatening letters purported to be from a Mexican attorney to women who had defected from the secret club or criticized NXIVM.

"Additionally, the heiress has made multiple attempts to have criminal charges brought against a former DOS slave, who has discussed her experience in the media," the search warrant documents state.

Raniere fled to Mexico last fall with Bronfman, a member of NXIVM's executive board who has supplied Raniere with access to millions of dollars and private jets, the records indicate.

"Prior to this trip, R.aniere had not flown out of the country since 2015, when he visited the heiress's private island in Fiji," according to the FBI.

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In Mexico, authorities said, Raniere dumped his mobile phone and used only encrypted email to communicate with his followers. It took authorities nearly two months to locate and arrest him in Mexico.

The U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York, which is prosecuting the case, is expected to ask a judge to keep Raniere in custody without bond. They said his access to large amounts of cash and private jets make him a flight risk. They also described him as dangerous.

Property records indicate the Hale Drive residence has been owned since 2004 by a now-inactive corporation, Executive Housing & Properties, which lists Salzman as its chief executive officer. The corporation's address, 455 New Karner Road in Albany, is also the location of NXIVM's headquarters.

In the federal criminal complaint filed against Raniere, prosecutors said the residence known as the Library is where Raniere, 57, repeatedly had sex with an unidentified actress in her 30s. Raniere and Mack are accused of coercing the woman into becoming part of a secretive slave-master sex club associated with NXIVM.

The Hale Drive townhouse is where federal authorities say the unidentified actress, who is listed as "Jane Doe 1" in the criminal complaint, became a victim of sex trafficking and forced labor. The actress lived in Brooklyn during the time she was allegedly a victim of Raniere's -- which is part of the reason the case is being pursued in Brooklyn.

During one of her trips to Halfmoon, the actress said Mack instructed her to meet Raniere in the middle of the night near his residence. He allegedly instructed the actress to remove her clothing, placed a blindfold over her eyes and drove her around. Once he stopped the vehicle, they walked through some woods to a shack where the actress said she was tied to a table and forced to engage in oral sex with an unidentified person who was in the room with Raniere. It's unclear if the unidentified person was male or female.

Some experts have described NXIVM as a cult, and the criminal prosecution of Raniere has forced the secretive man who calls himself "Vanguard" under the spotlight of an ongoing federal grand jury investigation.

But the search warrant records indicate there are other federal crimes also being investigated. Sources close to NXIVM have previously alleged, in court records, that the organization was involved in kidnapping, money laundering, tax evasion and human trafficking.

A former NXIVM associate, Kristen M. Keeffe, who defected from the organization several years ago, alleged in 2015 that large amounts of cash were stored at Salzman's residence, and that money collected from people who took NXIVM training sessions in Mexico was funneled across the border into the United States. Keeffe, in a court filing, claimed that Salzman, among others, would allegedly "bring the cash over the border."

The money, which was allegedly funneled through the bank account of a Mexican associate, was "logged on the system as a scholarship, and cash was kept in Nancy's house," Keeffe said in a conversation attributed to her that was filed in Albany County Court.

In a federal court filing, the Justice Department said that for the past 18 months Raniere had been using a credit card and bank account in the name of a former NXIVM associate and girlfriend, Pamela Cafritz, who died in November 2016. Federal prosecutors said the bank account holds about $8 million.

Copies of some of the American Express credit card statements associated with an account that belonged to Cafritz indicate there were numerous purchases made with that card after her death. The statements, shared with the Times Union last year, indicate the account was used to make purchases from iTunes and Amazon and to make payments to a Saratoga Springs chiropractor.COLONIE  The organizers of a free speech conference at Siena College insist they want Sunday's event to be civil and thoughtful. It's unclear if they'll get their wish.

The conference features several prominent and controversial figures from conservative and libertarian politics, including self-described political "dirty trickster" Roger Stone.

The weeks leading up to the Siena event have been marked by the kinds of controversies that have attended similar campus gatherings around the nation. Among the questions raised: Should there be limits on who can be invited to speak on campus?

In a recent interview, the presidents of the three conservative campus organizations behind the event made it clear that they do not want it to devolve into a chaotic free-for-all, much less the sort of rioting prompted by recent visits from alt-right figures to the University of California's Berkeley campus.

The goal of the conference is to educate students on free speech, and how it affects them and how important it is to their country, said Siena junior Antonio Bianchi, president of Turning Point Siena.

Bianchi organized the event along with Alec Barkett, president of Young Americans for Liberty's Siena College chapter, and Michael Bove, president of Sienas College Republicans.

All said they focused on inviting speakers who could talk about free speech from several angles and help balance what they saw a liberal tilt amongst past speakers on campus.

Stone is slated to discuss free speech on social media. The longtime political adviser, lobbyist and author was recently banned from Twitter. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating Stone's contacts with Wikileaks as party of the ongoing probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race, according to numerous recent reports.

James OKeefe, who will talk about free speech in the media, leads a Mamaroneck-based nonprofit called Project Veritas. The conservative provocateur has made his career attempting to expose what he describes as liberal media bias and left-wing hypocrisy, frequently through undercover videos.

The group has been denounced for its deceptions. Last fall, a Project Veritas operative named Jamie Phillips approached the Washington Post with her account of an affair with Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, whose campaign was reeling from multiple allegations of his relations with underaged girls. Phillips told the Post  which had broken the initial story about Moore's relations with underage girls  that he had impregnated her when she was a teenager.

The Post exposed her ruse in a story that included a video of its reporter confronting Phillips about her deception.

Sunday's other speakers include Christian Ragosta, a field coordinator for the National Rifle Association; Austin Petersen, a libertarian political candidate; Nico Perrino, communications director for the Foundation for Individuals Rights in Education; and Kassy Dillon, founder of the Lone Conservative website.

Payments to the speakers are being paid for with the student activity fees. It is open only to people with a valid Siena ID.

There will be a protest outside the conference, and students and professors are planning on attending to ask the speakers hard questions, said Jim LaValle, president of the Siena Democrats club. He said he had encouraged those both inside and outside the conference not to be disruptive.

Use your First Amendment rights just as theyre using it  but dont put anything across the line, dont incite anything, he said.

Bianchi said they had reached out to other student organizations to invite them to take part in the event, but none agreed.

LaValle, however, said no one had reached out to his group.

Why is this now just a platform for conservative speakers and pundits who have a checkered and marked history of racist and inflammatory comments? he said. Why were we never provided the opportunity to provide a different point of view?

And there has been pushback from faculty, as well. Jenn McErlean, a philosophy professor, resigned from a committee that had been formed to develop methods of civil discourse on campus because she did not want to work with students like Bianchi, according to an email forwarded to the Times Union.

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Roy Gutterman, director at the Tully Center for Free Speech at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, said that in the current politically charged national climate, college campuses are a precarious place for free speech.

Theres not a lot of tolerance, he said.

There is also a belief in some conservative circles that right-leaning students right to speak is more likely to be curtailed in the name of "political correctness."

Theres some validity behind that, Gutterman said. When you see people who believe they are being censored or punished it tends to be people on the political right, and that seems to be just how college campuses have evolved.

These issues were the subject of two days of discussion in "Shall Make No Law: An Exploration of Current First Amendment Issues on College Campuses," a two-day session hosted Wednesday and Thursday by the state University at Albany, and organized by the office of the SUNY system's General Counsel. One panel discussion was titled "Campus Unrest  The New Normal?"

At Siena, Bianchi, Barkett and Bove stressed that the schools administration has been supportive since they began planning the event early last semester. The pushback, they said, has come from faculty.

And we had to clarify to them: Even if you dont like some of the people who are coming to this conference, neither do we, Bianchi said. We dont agree with everything that people at this conference have done or said.

Siena College President Brother F. Ed Coughlin said conferences and other events like this are a balancing act.

Youre always trying to navigate that tension," he said. " ... How do you respect academic freedom and the individuals right to have a conference, to talk to individuals they want to talk to  individuals who in different ways, because of their reputation, have values that are very much opposed to or stand in contrast to the values of the college?

Gutterman, who also teaches journalism and media ethics at Syracuse, said that private colleges such as Siena have much more latitude in deciding how to govern free speech issues on campus than public universities do.

I think you cant have a college education without free speech, he said. Just because someone brings a speaker to campus doesnt mean you believe in what they say.BALLSTON SPA  Former Stillwater Mayor Rick W. Nelson pleaded guilty to felony counts of child pornography possession, Saratoga County District Attorney Karen Heggen said Thursday.

He admitted to knowingly having and accessing images of children less than 16 years of age engaged in sexual conduct in August 2017, Heggen said.

He faces a sentence of 5 to 15 years in state prison and must to register as a sex offender.

Nelson, 62, was arrested last year after an investigation by a State Police Computer Crime Unit found a Stillwater IP address was being used to download child pornography, police said. The investigation led to a search of Nelson's home and his arrest, troopers said.

Nelson's arrest marked at least the fifth time in the last 42 years that the former school bus driver has been accused of victimizing children or teenagers.

Nelson faced three separate sex crime cases between 1975 and 1986  with one of the latter cases including allegations of rape and sodomy. And in 1982, the future mayor was accused of inappropriate behavior toward a 5-year-old on the school bus.

Nelson, a Republican, was elected mayor of the village in early 2015, defeating a 23-year incumbent for the right to lead the village of about 1,700 inhabitants on the Hudson River.

His son, Patrick, is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro, to represent the 21st Congressional District. Speaking through his spokesman Paul Paterakis, Nelson said he condemns his father's actions.

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"I welcome all who would join me in condemning his crimes," he said. "Making this a political issue belittles and devalues the victims of these crimes. The focus should be on the work that remains to be done to ensure that all children, and indeed all people, are protected from exploitation of all kinds."

Stillwater Mayor Frank Tatum called the situation "tragic."

"The village want to move past this," Tatum said. "There are no good outcomes to any of this."

Nelson will be sentenced June 19.Washington

President Donald Trump on Wednesday warned Russia to "get ready" for a missile attack on its ally Syria, suggesting imminent retaliation for last weekend's suspected chemical weapons attack. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis took a more measured tone, saying the U.S. and its military coalition partners were still studying intelligence on the attack.

At stake is the potential for confrontation, if not outright conflict, between the U.S. and Russia, former Cold War foes whose relations have deteriorated in recent years over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine, its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, most recently, its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russian lawmakers have warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime and that it could trigger a direct U.S-Russian military clash. Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted  a stark warning of a potential major confrontation.

Trump, who has often said a commander in chief should never telegraph his military intentions, apparently did so himself, tweeting that missiles "will be coming" in response to the suspected chemical attack that killed at least 40 people near Damascus.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," Trump wrote. "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Defense Secretary Mattis, however, indicated that evidence of what happened was still being studied. At a photo-taking session during a Pentagon meeting with his Dutch counterpart, Mattis was asked by a reporter whether he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian government.

"We're still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies," Mattis said. "We're still working on this."

Trump suggested Monday he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which the U.S. government had video and other evidence of certain aspects of an actual attack by Syrian aircraft, which involved the use of sarin gas. Trump responded then by launching dozens of Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

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Asked whether the U.S. military was ready to conduct an attack in Syria if ordered, Mattis replied, "We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the president determined."

Mattis was to meet with Trump later Wednesday.

In the past, Trump has condemned others for forecasting military plans, repeatedly blistering President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign. During one speech, he said, "We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything."

Asked about Trump's tweet about an impending attack on Syria, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who ran the Pentagon for President Bill Clinton, said on CNN that it "compromises the mission somewhat."

Trump did not detail what a strike on Syria would look like, or whether these would be U.S. missiles. U.S. officials have been consulting with France, Britain and other allies on a possible joint military operation, but the timing remained in doubt Wednesday. Trump canceled a foreign trip in order to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Assad.

Shortly after his tweeted warning to Russia, Trump took a more conciliatory tone in lamenting that the U.S.-Russia relationship "is worse now than it has ever been." There is no reason for this, he wrote, adding that "Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together."Alcoholics Anonymous is holding its 61st All-Ireland Convention at the Clonmel Park Hotel, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, on Friday 20th, Saturday 21st, and Sunday 22nd of April 2018.

The purpose of the convention is to carry the message of recovery to alcoholics who are members of AA, and to those who may consider themselves as having a drink problem. It gives members of the fellowship an opportunity to share their combined experiences, to renew old acquaintances and to make new friends. The theme of this year's convention is AAs Singleness of Purpose.

The Official Opening of the Convention takes place on the Friday evening at 8.30pm. This open meeting is for anyone who may consider themselves as having a problem with alcohol.

During the course of the weekend there will be an Open Public Meeting on Sunday 22nd at 12 noon. This meeting is open to all and in particular to those working in the professional community e.g. healthcare workers, gardai, teachers etc. or any others who, through the course of their work, may come in contact with or have to deal with someone with an alcohol problem.

A large attendance is anticipated at the Convention as it is the first time the All-Ireland has been held in Tipperary. Visitors are expected not only from Tipperary and surrounding areas, but also from all over Ireland, the UK, Europe and further afield. The fellowship this year is putting an emphasis on welcoming our International Community who hold AA meetings throughout the country.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other, that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organisation or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses or opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a worldwide fellowship. It had its beginning in 1935 in Akron, Ohio as a result of a chance meeting between Bill W, a New York stockbroker, and Dr Bob Smith an Akron surgeon. Both were hopeless alcoholics. They carried their message of recovery to other suffering alcoholics. Today Alcoholics Anonymous reaches out to over 160 countries worldwide with a membership estimated to be in excess of 3 million. The first public meeting of AA in Europe was held in Ireland, in Dublin on the 25th November 1946. Since then, the fellowship has spread to every corner of Ireland today, with over 900 groups holding 2,500 meetings weekly.

Alcoholics Anonymous would like to emphasise its message of hope and recovery and would suggest that the unhappiest person in the world is the alcoholic who has an insistent yearning to enjoy life as he/she once knew it, but cannot picture life without alcohol. He/she has a heart-breaking obsession that by some miracle of control he/she will be able to do so

Contact Details for AA General Service Office; Phone 01-8420700

Website; www.alcoholicsanonymous.ie

email; gso@alcoholicsanonymous.ieShould ICICI CEO Chanda Kochhar step down, or continue in office? Well, it is always a tough call for anyone who is under the lens for alleged conflict of interest. It is rather a double-aged sword.

Stepping down while an inquiry is on may not always be the best option, given that it may be seen as an acceptance of guilt. But if you do not, it is often bad optics, and you may be accused of being arrogant.

Therefore, Kochhar needs to decide. One of the options that rests with Kochhar, of course, is what former Sebi chief M Damodaran said: The CEO could step down for a while, get the probe done from an external agency, and return once she is proven innocent.

"There are two ways to handle the situation -- one is for the CEO to step down and say I do not want any part of this. I will prove myself to be right as and when the procedure gets completed," he said.

Damodaran also said that the ICICI board should have handled the controversy better to gain the confidence of investors as well as customers.

"The stakeholders are asking questions, institutional investors who are large shareholders are asking questions; the lay person who is reading newspaper reports is also asking questions. A depositor could be asking questions in the light of all of this and the fact that there is an investigation," he said during an interview to a TV channel.

He added that Kochhar should step down for her own good. "All these years, she has worked very hard. So, I request her to go on leave for a while. She does not have to vacate the post forever and then see what the outcome of the investigation is."

There are allegations of quid pro quo and nepotism involving ICICI bank and its CEO in extending a loan to the Videocon Group. Kochhar's husband Deepak Kochhar's tie up with Videocon promoter Venugopal Dhoot for a renewable energy venture is in the midst of the controversy, given that Videocon had availed a loan from ICICI Bank, at a time when Deepak was allegedly at the helm of the business after Dhoot's exit.



Bank board awaits RBI directive



A Finance Ministry official has said that the ICICI Bank board is waiting for directive from the Reserve Bank of India before taking a call in Chanda Kochhar's case, PTI reported on Wednesday.

Earlier, reports stated that the ICICI Bank board was divided over whether to allow Kochhar to continue or ask her to step down.

A few weeks ago, the bank had said that it has full faith and confidence in her. In a statement issued on March 28, the bank clarified that there was "no question of quid pro quo / nepotism / conflict of interest" in the sanction of loans.Three, seriously at-risk, Tipperary adolescents are currently being catered for in the paediatric section of South Tipperary General Hospital in Clonmel because there is no place in all of Ireland to treat them.

The situation is so dire that one heartbroken mother is sleeping by her child's bed in order to ensure that the patient does not self harm.

This totaly distressing and shameful situation has been highlighted by Deputy Jackie Cahill this week who pointed out that there is no prospects of the three patients of 15 and 16 years af age, being transferred to Cork for treatment, or anywhere else for that matter.

I am disgusted with how these three adolescents are being treated by the HSE, and it cannot go on any longer, a distressed Deputy Cahill told The Tipperary Star.

At present, three of the six paediatric beds at STGH are being filled by adolescents in need of acute psychiatric care.

One patient has been in the hospital since the first week of February. Its now the second week of April  eight weeks have passed and that patients family are at their wits end.

This is all happening as the general public have been asked to stay away from the Emergency Department at the hospital due to chronic overcrowding, he said.



Fianna Fail Deputy Jackie Cahill

Deputy Cahill pointed out that the reason for the delay is clear - the adolescent psychiatric unit at Cork University Hospital is under staffed and cannot take any more patients.

Its wholly unfair on these three patients, their families and the staff at the Paediatric Unit at South Tipperary General Hospital to be left in this situation.

First of all, three beds that are needed for other paediatric patients are being used, and the staff are not trained to deal with the acute psychiatric issues these patients are suffering from.

One patient is under constant 24 hour suicide watch. They need to get the psychiatric treatment they desperately require at the appropriate unit at CUH.

The Government must start providing locally based psychiatric services in Tipperary. Adults are either sent to Kilkenny or Ennis, and children and adolescents are sent to Cork, but they dont have the capacity to deal with the volumes involved.

Minister Harris needs to intervene now, concluded Deputy Cahill.



A Dublin man who was told he may never run again is breaking records by being the first person ever to take on a grueling 930km 'Ireland Way' challenge to promote Organ Donor Awareness.

Ultra runner Don Hannon was given a heros reception in Tipperary earlier today after completing over 600km of the demanding trial when he stopped by Upperchurch NS this morning to rapturous applause.

Hannon, who donated half of his liver to his sister Therese in 2016, set himself the ultimate challenge to cover 930km (578miles) over 14 mountain ranges to encourage people to become organ donors. Along the way, Don is also aiming to distribute 1,000 organ donor cards to "anyone he meets" to encourage members of the public to sign up as card carrying donors.

"My sister has a rare disease. Primary biliary cholangitis (PBC). Much like other forms of liver disease, PBC permanently damages the liver as tissue is replaced with scar tissue. As more scar tissue develops, the structure and function of the liver are affected. The exact cause of PBC is unknown. There is no cure," explains Hannon.

"This was my sisters second transplant and without my liver being donated the reality is that she would not be alive today. This is the sad truth with people waiting for a donor. Theres not enough people registered as donors and so people die waiting for an organ," he adds.

Following the life saving operation, Hannon promised his sister he would take part in a run to raise awareness for organ donation leading to the 'Running the Ireland Way' challenge, where he aims to complete 930km (578miles) over a 12 day period.

Despite a slight injury to his ankle in Roscommon, Hannon is on course to complete his challenge in the next four days when he touches down at his final stop in Castletownbere, Co Cork.

Supporters can follow Hannon's progress on RunningDonor.com and live track his progress here.

****************************************************************************************************

Free information fact files, which accompany organ donor cards, are obtainable from the Irish Kidney Association and are available nationwide from pharmacies, GP surgeries and Citizen Information Offices.

Organ Donor Cards can also be obtained by phoning the Irish Kidney Association tel. 01 6205306 or Free text the word DONOR to 50050. Visit website www.ika.ie/cardAndroid handset manufacturers may not be telling the whole truth about security updates, according to two well-known German researchers.

(Image credit: Edaccor/Shutterstock)

Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell of Berlin's Security Research Labs plan to release a report tomorrow (April 13) showing that many Android security updates are bogus, according to a report in Wired and a preview of the "Android Patch Gap" the researchers put online.

Manufacturers tell users that phones are patched up to a certain month, the researchers said, but some months have been skipped, leaving security holes that can be exploited by hackers or Android malware.

ZTE and TCL appear to be among the worst offenders, while Google, Samsung and Sony are the best at patching. Most other major Android phone makers fall somewhere in between.

MORE: Best Android Antivirus Software and Apps

"Our large study of Android phones finds that most Android vendors regularly forget to include some patches, leaving parts of the ecosystem exposed to the underlying risks," the SRL website preview says.

It can get worse that that, Nohl told Wired's Andy Greenberg.

"Sometimes these guys just change the date without installing any patches," Nohl was quoted as saying. "We found several vendors that didn't install a single patch but changed the patch date forward by several months."

The researchers told Greenberg that they examined 1,200 handsets for evidence of every Android security patch released in 2017. The phones all claim to have received at least one security update since October 2017.

Nohl and Lell plan to present their findings at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam tomorrow, and post their full paper online after their presentation.

SRL has updated its SnoopSnitch Android security app to detect whether a phone has missed security updates. For some features, the app needs to be run on rooted Android phones, but the security patch analysis will work on all phones using a Qualcomm chipset.

This OnePlus phone seems to be in decent, if outdated, security shape. Screenshot: Tom's Guide

Google pushes out Android security updates at the beginning of each month, but only Google's own Pixel and late-model Nexus phones will get them right away. Other handset makers have to examine each update and, if necessary, tailor them to fit each of their own devices.

Most non-Google Android phone makers (except for Sony) were once terrible at keeping up with security patches. But in the last couple of years many of them, including Samsung and Motorola, sped up the process and now issue the Google patches within a few weeks.

Or so you'd think. While Nohl and Lell found, on average, between zero to one missed patches since October 2017 on each Samsung, Google and Sony phone they tested, they found between three and four missed patches on the Motorola phones. It appears Motorola may not be living up to its promises.

Motorola was joined in the three-to-four-missed-patch purgatory by HTC, Huawei and LG. In a somewhat better grouping, each Xiaomi, OnePlus and Nokia phone tested had between one and three missed patches.

Bringing up the rear were ZTE and TCL, whose phones had an average of more than four missed Android security practices. If a phone made by either of those companies is your daily driver, you might want to trade up to something a little more secure.As disappointing as it is to see the manual transmission fade into the sunset as more automakers lean on its automatic counterpart, there are some automakers who are keeping the dream alive. One of these manufacturers is Subaru , which coincidentally dropped hints a month ago that it was axing the manual transmission from its models. Turns out, not every Subaru model is completely ditching the manual transmission because the fun-tactic three-pedal setup will live on through the WRX performance line.

Not every Subaru model is completely ditching the manual transmission because the fun-tactic three-pedal setup will live on through the WRX performance line.

This is a welcome development. When Subaru U.K. managing director Chris Graham spoke to Auto Express at the 2018 Geneva Motor Show, he hinted that the manual transmissions days could be numbered because it wasnt compatible with the companys Eyesight suite of active safety tech. "Im not sure if its compatible at all with a manual gearbox, Graham said. My gut tells me it will be EyeSight with Lineartronic [CVT] ongoing and long-term. They want to steal the mantle of the safest car in the world. I think if they do that, then they say heres a manual without EyeSight, theyll just ruin that."

More recently, though, Subaru North America CEO Tom Doll told Drive that just because most Subarus will adopt a CVT transmission, that doesnt mean that a car like the WRX would have to acquiesce to that change as well. "Well still have manual transmissions in our performance line like for the WRX," Doll said.

This is a big deal for those who buy the WRX for the purpose of enjoying it as a drivers car.

If his comments have any weight to them  theres no reason to think otherwise  the manual transmission will remain an integral part of the WRX lineup, maintaining its status as one of only a handful of models that will keep using a manual transmission. That should be music to the ears of driving purists.

This is a big deal for those who buy the WRX for the purpose of enjoying it as a drivers car. As advantageous as CVT transmissions are in the overall experience of driving a car  theyre much better as far as efficiency is concerned  nothing beats the rush that drivers can get when theyre in full control of their car, blending all three pedals together to create a driving experience thats hard to replicate on a car that largely does the gear-switching itself.

So, breathe a sigh of relief, fellas. The Subaru WRX is still getting a manual transmission. Sure, its going to come as an option, and its probably going to be a temporary move, but well take the victory any way we can get it. Its hard to imagine a world where a Subaru WRX doesnt have three pedals in it anymore. Thankfully, that day hasnt arrived yet.

References

Read our full review on the 2018 Subaru WRX STI.

Read our full review on the 2018 Subaru WRX.

Read more Subaru news.

Source: DriveGovernors of Central Banks and representatives from eleven COMESA countries have reiterated that achieving monetary integration is possible and it will be enabled if Member countries have larger and deeper financial markets. Other factors such as having more competitive banking sectors, stronger institutional and regulatory environment and more transparent central banks also need to be in place.

The Bank chiefs have also agreed that for deeper regional integration to take effect, Central Banks have a huge role to play in bringing about the required transformation in the respective COMESA economies.

This was said during the 23rd meeting of the COMESA Committee of Governors of Central Banks held on 29th March 2018 in Djibouti. The meeting was preceded by a symposium on the Roles of Central Banks in promoting Sustainable Growth.

Speaking during the event, Governor of the Central Bank of Djibouti Mr Ahmed Osman urged central banks in the region to put deliberate effort towards greater development of efficient, stable and healthy financial markets further calling for greater monetary integration.

While appreciating the success that has been achieved so far under the COMESA Integration Agenda in general and monetary integration programme in particular, Mr Osman added, We as Central Banks have a critical role to play in the implementation of the COMESA Monetary Integration programme to make the region a zone of macroeconomic and financial stability.

Both the meeting and the symposium underscored that success of the COMESA Free Trade Area, Customs Union, Common Investment Area, the drive towards industrialization and the plan to establish the Common Market and economic community which he said require greater monetary integration.

Speaking when he officially opened the meeting, Djiboutis Minister of Trade and Industry Honourable Hassan Houmed Kamil emphasized the importance of sustaining a conducive environment for stability, investment and growth. He called on Member States to ensure predictability, transparency and accountability to achieve sustainable economic growth. He also called for speedy implementation of the Regional Payment and Settlement System (REPSS) in order to achieve significant increases in intra-COMESA trade.

Secretary General Sindiso Ngwenya, who was at the meeting, stated that the focus of COMESA is to contribute to structural transformation of the economies of the Member States so as to foster the overall economic development through trade facilitation and investment promotion.

This will help create an enabling environment for trade facilitation, market integration, infrastructure development, industrialization, small and medium enterprise development, regional industrial clusters, modernising institutional and regulatory policies, capacity development as well as resource mobilization.

He added that the COMESA Monetary Institute and the COMESA Clearing House are important instruments for developing policy and institutional frameworks to enhance monetary integration in the region.

Central Bank Governors and experts from Burundi, Djibouti, DR Congo, Egypt, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe attended the meeting. The Chief Executive Officers of the COMESA Monetary Institute, the COMESA Clearing House, the Association of African Central Banks and a Representative of the Trade and Development Bank also attended the annual meeting.Unleashing potentials: Developing Sustainable Economic and Investment Cooperation

[The] Indonesia-Africa Forum is the embodiment of the commitment of Indonesia and African countries to advance and prosper together and become the first forum, where Africa and Indonesia can meet and discuss concrete cooperation involving various stakeholders, said Indonesian Minister for Foreign Affairs H.E. Retno Marsudi in her report during the opening of the Indonesia-Africa Forum (IAF) 2018 at Bali Nusa Dua Convention Center, Denpasar.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs hoped that the IAF event can be maximally utilized to explore more potential cooperation that will benefit Indonesia-Africa in order to achieve mutual prosperity. This time for Africa, she affirmed.

The first-ever IAF event on the theme Developing Sustainable Economic and Investment Cooperation was officially opened by Vice President Jusuf Kalla. Lets [walk] hand in hand in strengthening the relations between Indonesia and Africa and to build a just and prosperous world together, he said in his keynote speech at the opening session of the IAF 2018.

The event was attended by over 500 participants including 240 delegates from 46 African countries, International Organizations and Development Partners while from Indonesia, about 200 people were present from the government, private sector, and business players. Indonesian Coordinating Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Trade, and Minister for Foreign Affairs were also present at the opening.

The series of the IAF 2018 meeting programs will include discussion forums, industry fairs, and business deals. On the sidelines of the meeting there will also be a number of bilateral meetings between Indonesia and African countries.

In his opening speech, the Vice President expressed his hope that the forum will be able to establish real economic cooperation, in various fields and continue to map cooperation in infrastructure, strategic industries, and financing facilities.

Currently, Indonesia needs oil, cotton, and cocoa beans from Africa, while Africa requires palm oil, motor vehicles, and instant noodles from Indonesia. In the field of investment, more than 30 companies in the fields of pharmaceuticals, textiles, energy and others, operating in Africa.

IAF 2018 is a showcase of concrete economic cooperation between Indonesia and African countries to translate the political and historical closeness of Indonesia-Africa into a close and tangible economic cooperation.

During the IAF 2018 event, business deals worth USD 586.56 million will be signed, and Indonesia also expressed its commitment to strengthen cooperation with Africa, among others, through the enhancement of technical cooperation and capacity building to Africa region; improvement of scholarship cooperation, development of competitive export credit facilities, increased connectivity cooperation, and exploring trade agreements through the establishment of Preferential Trade Agreement.

In addition, in the next year as an effort to follow up the IAF 2018 meeting, there is a plan to hold Indonesia-Africa Infrastructure Dialogue in August/September 2019.

The meeting will also discuss the potential and opportunities of cooperation between the two countries, such as the cooperation in food security, creative and digital economy, energy, and construction, and action steps to realize the possibility of cooperation programs that have not been explored so far.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla opens IAF 2018 and affirms Indonesia-Africa forever!

Vice President Jusuf Kalla officially opened the first Indonesia-Africa Forum (IAF 2018) in Bali Nusa Dua Convention Center on 10 April 2018.

The Vice President conveyed that Indonesia and Africa have a long history beginning with the organizing of the Asian-African Conference (KAA) in Bandung in 1955 and subsequently with the Non-Alignment Movement in 1965. The spirit of cooperation between Indonesia and Africa has been continuous, marked by the 50-year and 60-year anniversaries of the Asia-Africa Conference in the years 2005 and 2015, respectively.

Indonesia and Africa thereafter keep working together in promoting the economic cooperation. Indonesia also considered Africa as a strategic partner in foreign policy. African countries, likened to Wakanda in the Black Panther film have uncharted potential and resources that are not widely known by the international community.

Like Africa, Indonesia  as a growing economy in Asia, the largest in Southeast Asia, as well as a member of the G20  is developing infrastructure to boost economic growth. In addition, the Vice President also encouraged the continuation of Kerja Sama Selatan-selatan dan Triangular (KSST) (South-South and Triangular Cooperation) program of Indonesia-Africa that may explore the potential of economic cooperation in the future.

The value of Indonesia-Africa trade, according to the Vice President, continues to increase. According to the latest statistics in 2017, the value of Indonesia-Africa trade was USD 4.86 billion in export value and USD 3.97 billion in import value, with a surplus trade balance for Indonesia of USD 887.28 million and an upward trend of 15.25% from 2016.

The main export commodities of RI to Africa, among others, are palm oil, processed food and beverages, soaps, paper, garments, motor vehicles and spare parts. Meanwhile, Indonesias main import commodities from Africa are petroleum, cotton, cocoa beans, pulp, and chemicals for fertilizers and industries.

The trade value still has great potential to grow continuously in considering the African countries still need Indonesian export goods such as palm oil, motor vehicles, and mass transportation vehicles, in addition to existing ones such as Indomie.

Such effort needs to be supported by cooperation of export policy, connectivity, trade agreements, and infrastructure improvement, said the Vice President in front of the invitees.

Before officially opening IAF 2018, Vice President Jusuf Kalla advised that in order for the hard work to be continued, cooperation agreements that have been made together should be followed up for the sake of common welfare of Indonesia and Africa.With the growing demand for India to write laws on data protection and privacy, Business Today speaks to Shaundra Watson, Director of Policy at The Software Alliance, also known as BSA, on laws from across the globe that will support positive legislative change.

Consent is a central issue in the privacy law area but should it be all and end all basis to determine if companies can use the personal information?

Consent is certainly important. GDPR that is going to be enforced on May 25 this year has strengthened individual rights and have set the standard of consent that is fairly high. For instance, it should be clear, unambiguous, freely given. It shouldn't be just a tick in the box but the consumer needs to state that he or she is giving consent to the data.



However, relying only on consent as a legal basis for handling personal data can stymie growth and innovation in the digital economy. Also, users might simply accept whatever terms are presented to them without fully understanding the information presented to them.



Law in data protection should allow different basis (or ways) to lawfully process personal information because there can be a number of legitimate reasons to do so.



One practice is recognizing multiple bases for processing personal information. Legitimate interest is another one apart from consent. For instance, when a user uses the credit card the bank knows whether it is that owner of the card or not because they have data on their purchasing pattern. In this case, the company is using their personal information on spending patterns to detect fraud and protect the user's interest and might not seek their consent because there is a legitimate reason for them to do so.

But if companies are given the freedom to decide what is legitimate and what isn't, wouldn't that leave a lot of scope for misuse of data as we have already seen?



A fundamental question is how you protect privacy and balance it with innovation in a digital world. One way is to create clear rules for both individuals and business. Identify what consumer expectations should be, what their rights are and what company's obligations are. Baseline is to give individuals more control but at the same time recognise that there has to be some flexibility.



When companies use information on legitimate interest, it is not that they just use it because they say they have a legitimate interest. The first thing EU law says is they have to do a balancing test, something like a risk assessment test where they have to ask what is the risk of harm to an individual if their personal information is used. For instance, fraud prevention is legitimate or to protect personal identity.



Another feature to the balancing test is demonstrating accountability. Companies can record that they went through this analysis and document how privacy would be impacted by what they are proposing to do. If there is a problem later they can demonstrate to the regulator the process they underwent and they take accountability seriously.



Companies operate in multiple geographies, so, how can accountability play a role there?



When data crosses borders governments want to protect their citizens as personal information leaves the country. There are a number of other ways governments have tried to protect the data many of which are not good solutions. One is data localization.



It has been proven time and again that data locationalisation leads to negative long term effects on economic growth because it impedes companies' ability to enter a market and restrict them to use services that can reduce cost and reach consumers outside the country.



Accountability is the touchstone of modern data protection law. It is a global world and information flow is ubiquitous. That's where the principle of accountability which means company is responsible for the data no matter where it is processed. As a company it is their obligation to keep it safe no matter where it is kept or send, they are on the hook for it.



How can law ensure accountability from companies present in multiple locations or working across geographies?



There are two model ways that can be created that allows data to flow and yet enables companies to protect data.



One is Privacy Shield, an agreement between the US and the EU to provide companies on both sides of the Atlantic to flow between these two regions but also create obligations for companies to protect individual privacy.



There is another example in APEC Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) System which is a voluntary, accountability-based mechanism that certifies a company's compliance with the principles in the APEC CBPR and facilitates privacy-respecting transfers of data among APEC member economies.

Currently six APEC economies have joined the CBPR system: USA, Mexico, Japan, Canada, Singapore and the Republic of Korea but it is in its early stages and is growing very fast.The Indonesia-Africa Forum (IAF) 2018, a forum organized by Indonesia for the first time, has succeeded in drawing up a series of concrete agreements to further strengthen Indonesia's partnership with African countries.

The forum, which at the opening on 10 April 2018 was started with the signing of a series of business deals worth USD 586.56 million in the presence of the Vice President, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Trade and other Ministers of Kabinet Kerja, was concluded with additional business deals worth USD 499.2 million. The Forum also recorded 11 business announcements with a total potential value of USD 1.3 billion.

Indonesia and the African countries agreed to further intensify economic and trade diplomacy and to strengthen Indonesias presence in Africa, said Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi in a joint press conference with Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita on 11 April. In addition, Foreign Minister Retno also clarified on the various key sectors identified in this forum such as energy, infrastructure, digital economy and innovations, strategic industries, and agriculture.

A number of initiatives will also be strengthened, among others through the holding of various meetings to share experiences and to encourage the interest of businessmen, both at the Government and private levels.

On the sidelines of the IAF meeting, a Task Force on Indonesian Infrastructure to Africa has also been established. The Task Force consists of the Government and the private sectors that will map out and implement infrastructure-related policies.

Furthermore, Indonesia and the African countries also agreed to increase cooperation in the field of financing. Since 2015, Indonesia has implemented a National Interest Account (NIA). Foreign Minister Retno said that the scale and scope of NIA is expected to be increased to further promote the value of trade.

On the occasion of the press conference, the Foreign Minister also conveyed Indonesias plan to host Indonesia-Africa Infrastructure Dialogue in 2019.

The Foreign Minister and the Finance Minister have launched a book Road to Africa. This book is expected to be a reference for businessmen in establishing business cooperation with businessmen in Africa. In addition, the Foreign Minister also witnessed the signing of the MoU on Economic Diplomacy between the Foreign Ministry and Exim Bank.

A meeting was held to begin the Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) discussion with Mozambique, Tunisia, Angola, Kenya and South Africa. Currently, the PTA draft between Indonesia and Mozambique is being discussed and targeted for completion next year. In the field of connectivity, there is Ethiopian Airlines plan to open a new flight route from Addis Ababa to Jakarta in the near future.

In the field of development cooperation, Indonesia and Africa also encourage the South-South technical cooperation and development. Indonesia has committed to double the scholarship program and triple the capacity building program with Africa.

On the occasion of the joint press conference, Trade Minister Enggartiasto expressed appreciation for the implementation of the IAF which was able to produce significant achievements in encouraging the concrete cooperation of both parties. This forum is amazing. This is really a breakthrough, and for us, it is so much easier, in accordance with the Presidents order to open up new markets, non-traditional markets, said the Trade Minister.

IAF 2018 themed Developing Sustainable Economic and Investment Cooperation was held at Bali Nusa Dua Convention Center on 10-11 April 2018. The meeting was opened by Vice President Jusuf Kalla and attended by approximately 575 delegates consisting of governments and businessmen from 47 African countries.

The IAF series consisted of a Panel Discussion themed Policy Makers Perspective and a business forum involving the participation of 39 speakers from Indonesia and Africa. During the forum, to facilitate business to business contacts, an exhibition was held on Indonesian industries and products, which was open to the public. On the sidelines of the IAF, various bilateral meetings had also been held to enhance cooperation between Indonesia and African countries.

Foreign Minister Retno targets strengthening Indonesia-Africa economic cooperation

Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Retno L.P. Marsudi conducted bilateral meetings with government officials and businessmen from five African countries on the sidelines of the IAF 2018 series at Bali Nusa Dua Convention Center to discuss various opportunities to strengthen Indonesias cooperation with countries in the African region.

The five meetings were with the Vice Minister for Agriculture of Somalia, Vice Minister for Agriculture and Food of Ghana, Ambassador of Uganda to Indonesia based in Kuala Lumpur, Head of BKPM Nigeria, and the CEO of Ethiopian Airlines.

The Indonesian government welcomes the development of economic relations between Indonesia and Africa, which is marked by an increase in trade volume with a numbers of countries, said Foreign Minister Retno.

With Somalia, the Foreign Minister explained that the average bilateral trade volume increases by 30% every year. In fact, it was recorded that the trade value of both countries went up by 80% in 2017 as compared to 2016. The increase in trade volume was also recorded in the bilateral trade between RI-Uganda with an average of 3.42% and increased to 55% in 2017.

Indonesias trade volume with African countries still has the potential to increase due to the high economic growth of African countries. One example of the potential increase in trading volume is with Ghana, because this country has an average economic growth of 7.9%, said the Foreign Minister.

At various bilateral meetings, Indonesia was also invited to be active in investment and infrastructure in Africa. Somalia, which is pushing for infrastructure development, has also invited Indonesia to invest in infrastructure development in the form of roads and ports, as well as agriculture.

Indonesia welcomes and plans to send a team of experts to join the international team as designers in the construction of the port in Somalia, said Foreign Minister Retno.

Meanwhile, the Government of Ghana also invited Indonesian construction companies to take part in the development and financing mechanism of 1 million houses in Ghana.

Foreign Minister Retno also emphasized that the Indonesian Government is seriously pushing for increased Indonesia-Africa connectivity, one of which is through the opening of Jakarta-Addis Ababa direct flights.

This opening of the first Indonesia-Africa direct flight is to be served by Ethiopian Airlines. Ethiopian Airlines will cooperate with Garuda Maintenance Facility (GMF AeroAsia) in aircraft maintenance and ground handling.

Currently GMF AeroAsia has cooperated with airlines from African countries such as from Nigeria (Max Air and Hax Air), Libya and Djibouti, explained the Foreign Minister.

Foreign Minister Retno added that currently the Indonesian Government is seriously working to target the African market. Some efforts that have been and are being pursued include the initiation of a Preferential Trade Agreement with Mozambique and East African countries that are incorporated in the East African Community (EAC) and efforts to reduce trade barriers.

To achieve such target, Foreign Minister Retno has instructed the Indonesian Ambassadors in African countries to appoint candidates for Honorary Consul in the countries that do not yet have an Indonesian representation. With a Honorary Consul at least we have eyes and ears for economic affairs and protection of Indonesian citizens, said Foreign Minister Retno.

Besides economic cooperation, the bilateral meetings of Foreign Minister Retno also discussed technical cooperation and development through training and scholarship. Many requests came from African countries including Somalia requiring diplomatic and agricultural training, as well as Uganda in the fields of small economics, fisheries, and energy.

Foreign Minister Retno explained that in the field of political cooperation, the meetings discussed efforts of mutual support. Somalia and Uganda expressed support for Indonesias nomination as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for the period 2019-2020.Africas industrialisation needs a boost. Implemented correctly, the AfCFTA could provide it. Heres how.

On 21 March, dozens of African countries agreed to establish what could be a truly transformative trade deal. At a special African Union summit convened in Rwanda, 44 governments signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement. The majority of the remaining 11 AU member states signed the Kigali Declaration, a promissory note to ratify the AfCFTA. 27 additionally signed a separate AU Protocol on the Free Movement of People.

Africas two biggest economies  Nigeria and South Africa  did not sign the AfCFTA agreement. However, it is expected that they  along with the remaining member states  will do so following national consultations or the fulfilment of constitutional requirements for signing international treaties.

The agreement will enter into force once 22 African countries have ratified the deal. Given the current momentum behind the project, this process is expected to be swift and smooth.

Credit: African Union.

The AfCFTA commits members to cut tariffs down to zero on imports covering 90% of tariff lines, as well as address a host of other non-tariff barriers. All this is expected boost trade between African countries by an impressive 52.3%. This could have momentous repercussions for a trade area that would potentially contain 55 countries, 1.2 billion people, and a combined $2.5 trillion in GDP. It would enable significant scale economies and attract external investment.

More intra-African trade would also have crucial knock-on effects. Given that manufactured goods make up a much higher proportion of regional exports than those leaving the continent  41.9% compared to 14.8% in 2014  more intra-African trade means much more opportunity for industrialisation.

As noted in a recent report by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Africa is bizarrely less industrialised today than it was three decades ago. In 2014, manufacturing contributed just 9.8% on average to Africas GDP, a quarter lower than in 1990. Africas exports today still predominantly consist of primary commodities and raw materials, with fuels alone accounting for 53.9% of exports in 2014.

At the same time, however, manufacturing in Africa is on the rise in absolute terms. Between 2009 and 2014, for instance, manufacturing production grew at an average 5.1% per year in real terms, with particularly strong performances in Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Niger and Sudan.

Statistics show that from 2004 to 2014, the value of African manufacturing exports more than doubled. Meanwhile, in 2016, UNCTAD calculated that the manufacturing sector now contributes approximately one-fifth of Africas inward FDI stock.

Despite a disappointing backdrop, these trends are promising and suggest that with the right impetus, they could be accelerated.

Industrialisation matters

The benefits of industrialisation  and the reasons its been central to national development strategies across Africa  are clear to see.

Manufactured goods are much less vulnerable to fluctuating global prices than extractive goods, meaning they can provide a more sustainable tax base. They are more frequently produced by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which comprise about 80% of all enterprises in Africa, and are therefore key to poverty reduction. And, perhaps most importantly, manufactured goods tend to be labour intensive, meaning they can better create jobs for Africas bulging youth population.

Industrialisation is also crucial to transforming the agricultural sector, which accounts for about half of Africas workforce. Increasing agricultural productivity through agro-processing would help reduce rural poverty and facilitate the release of more labour. These workers could move onto the more productive activity of manufacturing itself, whose output is six times that of agriculture.

Making the AfCFTA work for industrialisation

It is for these reasons that the AfCFTA has been specifically designed to drive industrialisation. It is crucial this remains a priority as the agreement is implemented. How can this be done?

To begin with, the ratification and implementation of the agreement must be expedited. Industries on the continent must have time to find and build their competitive edge before African markets are further opened up to the rest of the world.

The AfCFTAs process of reducing tariffs should also prioritise intermediate goods  namely semi-finished products used in the production of final goods. This would boost incentives for businesses to source these inputs from within Africa and support the expansion of manufacturing.

The removal of non-tariff barriers and harmonisation of standards across borders could also focus initially on products with industrial potential. Mechanisms to monitor non-tariff barriers, simple rules of origin requirements, and common accreditation practices will be crucial in supporting the expansion of industrial supply chains between African countries.

The AfCFTAs second phase will see negotiations around investment, intellectual property rights and competition policy. This much-needed legal framework  in particular common investment rules  should facilitate cross-border investments that could alleviate constraints to intra-African trade including in infrastructure and technology. This would further help regional industrialisation.

Finally, if the AfCFTA is to fulfil its potential in boosting African manufacturing, it must come up with a clear digital strategy. Technological innovations such as automation threaten traditionally labour-intensive routes to industrialisation. The continent must be ready to address these challenges, but also recognise the opportunities these trends present.

Expanding the scope of the AfCFTA to include e-commerce, for instance, could provide a platform for connecting African businesses. Meanwhile, it should be recognised that while technology may remove some routes to employment, new jobs are being created in agro-processing as well as trade-related sectors such as branding, marketing, logistics, transportation and distribution. In fact, services now account for over 50% of Africas GDP, although there is scope to move from low to higher value services.

With discussions over the AfCFTAs implementation ongoing at the AU, it is promising that the continents leaders appreciate that the landmark agreement could play a game-changing role in Africas industrialisation. This is not an opportunity to be missed.

David Luke is Coordinator of the African Trade Policy Centre at the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Lily Sommer is a Trade Policy Fellow at the African Trade Policy Centre.

This article was originally published by African Arguments.Underway, in Windhoek: SACU Council of Ministers meeting

The ministers will discuss, among others, SACU trade negotiations, including the recently launched African Continental Free Trade Area, and provide strategic guidance. Minister Rob Davies will also attend the inaugural meeting of the Ministerial Task Team on Trade and Industry set up by the SACU Summit in Swaziland in June 2017 to review the trade and industry aspects of the 2002 SACU Agreement. The objective of the review is to identify critical areas of the SACU Agreement to be amended to facilitate the transformation of SACU into a development integration arrangement, said Davies. He emphasised that SACU has already identified the critical pillars to advance this objective through the six-point plan. The pillars of the six-point plan include:

SADC-EU Economic Partnership Agreement: a briefing note on Protocol 1 on the rules of origin

EPA rules of origin allow for extended cumulation that can facilitate intra-regional trade and industrialisation. Cumulation allows materials and inputs from certain other countries to be considered as if they were already originating from South Africa when used in the manufacture of another product. These cumulation provisions allow manufacturers to source materials not readily available in the country, while still ensuring that the final product enjoys preferential access to the EU. In addition to allowing cumulation between South Africa, the EU and other parties to the agreement, cumulation is also allowed under certain conditions with all ACP countries, as well as with materials from other countries that may enter the EU duty-free. Examples of sectors that could benefit from the more flexible rules of origin include clothing and textiles, automobile sector and fisheries.

Rwanda: Cabinet gives green light to AfCFTA protocol (New Times)

A cabinet meeting on Wednesday approved the draft law ratifying the African Continental Free Trade Area, which aims at easing intra-Africa trade. The cabinet meeting, chaired by President Paul Kagame, also gave a green light to protocols on trade in goods, trade in services, and one on rules and procedures for settlement of disputes, according to minutes signed by Cabinet Affairs Minister Solange Kayisire. The instruments will now head to parliament for ratification.

David Luke and Lily Sommer: How to ensure Africas bold free trade area propels industrialisation (African Arguments)

It is for these reasons that the AfCFTA has been specifically designed to drive industrialisation. It is crucial this remains a priority as the agreement is implemented. How can this be done? To begin with, the ratification and implementation of the agreement must be expedited. Industries on the continent must have time to find and build their competitive edge before African markets are further opened up to the rest of the world. The AfCFTAs process of reducing tariffs should also prioritise intermediate goods  namely semi-finished products used in the production of final goods. This would boost incentives for businesses to source these inputs from within Africa and support the expansion of manufacturing. The removal of non-tariff barriers and harmonisation of standards across borders could also focus initially on products with industrial potential. Mechanisms to monitor non-tariff barriers, simple rules of origin requirements, and common accreditation practices will be crucial in supporting the expansion of industrial supply chains between African countries.

Ken Ukaoha: Lessons for Africa before crucifying Nigerias President on AfCFTA (ThisDay)

As the dust around Nigeria and the CFTA gradually begins to settle down, it is perhaps needful to appropriately reflect and contextualise the needless stigmatisation on the country, the President and indeed Nigerians for the well thought out decision on the CFTA. It is noteworthy that prior to the 21 March planned signing of the AfCTFA Framework in Kigali, there was a window created for member states to engage their citizens in consultations with the AfCFTA draft text. The truth is that while the duration of that window was not enough to mobilise and sensitise citizens on such a highly technical subject; essentially and regrettably, many countries in Africa did not effectively undertake such needful journey of sensitisation of their people. To many Governments, they preferred to embark on sensitisation after signing of the Agreement (putting the cart before the horse) thereby condemning the citizens to a secondary and irrelevant status to the Agreement. This action completely negates the concept of good governance especially within the confines of democracy which pre-supposes that persons in Government are trustees to the citizens.

Perhaps most laughable is that most of those who cried foul against Nigeria Presidents withholding of his signature had neither seen the copy of the concluded Framework Agreement nor gone through the contents of the 253-page document. Yet, one more bullet for those critics is that the Presidents withholding of his signature has even provided them the only opportunity to discuss, perhaps analyse or even organise meetings around the subject of the AfCFTA, and for such Nigerians, yes Africans, they should be most grateful to Nigerias Government. [The author is a member of the ECOWAS Task Force on Trade, and President of NANTS]

Related AfCFTA perspectives:

(i) Sensitisation workshop: Zambia will only sign up for AfCFTA after thorough engagements with local stakeholders, private sector

(ii) John Aglionby: Africa free trade pact raises hopes of prosperity

(iii) Dianna Games: African trade is crippled for a reason and fine words will not change that

West Africa: The reach of West Africas mobile money sector is 13 times wider than local banks (Quartz)

As the West Africa mobile economy report by GSMA shows, mobile adoption in West Africa has nearly doubled from 28% at the turn of the decade to 47% last year. Indeed, by the end of 2017, there were 176 million unique subscribers across the regions 15 member states. Just as importantly, by the end of last year, the number of mobile internet subscribers has doubled over the last four years to reach 78 millionnearly half of the total number of mobile subscribers.

Strong trade growth in 2018 rests on policy choices (WTO)

The WTO anticipates merchandise trade volume growth of 4.4% in 2018, as measured by the average of exports and imports, roughly matching the 4.7% increase recorded for 2017. Growth is expected to moderate to 4.0% in 2019, below the average rate of 4.8% since 1990 but still firmly above the post-crisis average of 3.0%. However, there are signs that escalating trade tensions may already be affecting business confidence and investment decisions, which could compromise the current outlook. The strong trade growth that we are seeing today will be vital for continued economic growth and recovery and to support job creation. However this important progress could be quickly undermined if governments resort to restrictive trade policies, especially in a tit-for-tat process that could lead to an unmanageable escalation. A cycle of retaliation is the last thing the world economy needs. The pressing trade problems confronting WTO Members is best tackled through collective action. I urge governments to show restraint and settle their differences through dialogue and serious engagement, said WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo. [Note: See Appendix Table 1: World merchandise trade by region and selected economies, 2017]

Asian Development Outlook 2018: how technology affects jobs

Growth picked up across most of the economies in developing Asia, supported by continued high demand for exports and rapidly expanding domestic demand, says a new Asian Development Bank report. In its new Asian Development Outlook 2018, ADB forecasts GDP growth in Asia and the Pacific to reach 6.0% in 2018 and 5.9% in 2019, a slight deceleration from the 6.1% registered in 2017. Excluding the high-income newly industrialized economies, growth is expected to reach 6.5% in 2018 and 6.4% in 2019, from 6.6% in 2017. Technological advances have transformed the two billion worker Asian labor market, helping create 30 million jobs annually in industry and services over the last 25 years, drive increases in productivity and wages, and reduce poverty, says a new report by the Asian Development Bank. New research on how technology affects jobs, the subject of the special theme chapter in the ADO 2018 report, points out that while some of the regions jobs will be eliminated through automation, countervailing forces will more than compensate against job losses.

Christine Lagarde: Belt and Road Initiative  strategies to deliver in the next phase (IMF)

The Belt and Road Initiative can provide much-needed infrastructure financing to partner countries. However, these ventures can also lead to a problematic increase in debt, potentially limiting other spending as debt service rises, and creating balance of payment challenges. In countries where public debt is already high, careful management of financing terms is critical. This will protect both China and partner governments from entering into agreements that will cause financial difficulties in the future. Fortunately, we know that Chinas leadership is aware of these potential risks  as well as the proven strategies that can help address the challenges. A good starting point is ensuring transparent decision-making. An overarching framework between the various agencies involved in the Belt and Road Initiative would help provide clarity to all stakeholders. [Speech delivered at the Fifth PBC and IMF Joint Conference: Strengthening financial and exchange rate frameworks  international experience and relevance for China]A host of adaptations have allowed these cunning creatures to thrive, despite the challenges.

In the hierarchy of cuteness in which we humans love to arrange things, foxes usually rank pretty high. Their vulpine attributes bring to mind both dogs and cats, which makes them feel familiar to us; toss in those expressive faces, bushy tails and sly goings-on ... and their irresistibility is clinched.

Now perhaps this is just the musings of a city girl (read: someone whose food is not imperiled by hungry foxes and doesnt rely on the fur trade), but its hard to believe that in some parts of the world, these wonderful creatures have nearly been hunted into extinction. What the heck?

Case in point, Icelands arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus).

 Erlend Haarberg via bioGraphic

Foxes first found their way to Iceland, trekking over the sea ice, around 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age. Everything was likely fine for a while, until humans settlers came in the 10th century and started hunting them for their fur and to keep them away from livestock. For centuries, there was legislation actually requiring farmers to kill a certain number of foxes every year ... and even to take out whole dens.

By the time the government realized that mandatory poisoning of foxes was also causing the deaths of white-tailed eagles, in 1964, the foxes finally caught a break. By then, the population of arctic foxes had dwindled to a mere 1,000 to 1,300 members.

But now, things are looking up for Icelands foxes.

The fabulous site, bioGraphic (which kindly shared these incredible images with us), writes:

With the threat of poison eliminated, Icelands population of foxes began to recover in the 1970s. But the biggest win for the countrys oft-maligned predators came when Iceland established its first Ministry of the Environment in 1990. By 1994, the new Ministry had developed the first legislation to offer protection to arctic foxes: The Protection and Hunting of Wild Species Act. Today, hunting is still the main cause of mortality for Icelandic foxes; nearly half of all adults fall prey to hunters each year. But now, hunting licenses are required to shoot arctic foxes; poisoning is still prohibited; and fox populations are carefully monitored.



 Erlend Haarberg via bioGraphic

Today, there are around 8,000 arctic foxes in Iceland, and in places like Hornstrandir Nature Reserve on Icelands northwest coast, the foxes are fantastic. Here they are thriving; is it any wonder that scientists call the reserve, The Kingdom of Arctic Foxes?

But even without the threat of hunters and poison, life at the edge of the Arctic Circle has its challenges. Temperatures drop to frigid a -40 degrees during the dark winter months, with winds that kick up to a blustery 165 miles per hour. Many animals hightail it south for the winter, but the stoic foxes hang tough  thanks much in part to a number of physical and behavioral adaptations.

 Orsolya Haarberg via bioGraphic

Their fur coats (which look much better on them than on humans, by the way), transform from light in the summer to three times thicker in the winter  resulting in a coat that insulates better than any other mammals, writes bioGraphic. And if that werent cozy enough, the fur extends to the soles of their feet to insulate from the bottom up.

To compensate for the lack of prey in the winter, they bulk up in the summer and also hunt in excess, storing their booty in subterranean caches. Dens have been found containing more than a hundred birds; the smart fox need not go hungry in the dark cold.

When things get especially extreme winter-wise, they nestle in their lairs; curled up like kitties with their legs beneath their bodies, all wrapped up in that fluffy tail for a blanket.

 Erlend Haarberg via bioGraphic

Even though theyve come close to doom, these arctic foxes prove their moxie and resilience  especially once humans stopped trying to kill them all. bioGraphic notes:

Surely the species opportunistic tendencies, cleverness, and ability to adapt to extreme and highly variable environmental conditions have contributed to its success. For example, although the winter coats of arctic foxes in many regions of the world are bright white, in Hornstrandir, especially along the coast, as many as two-thirds of the foxes wear a very different color. Rather than trading their dark brown summer fur for white, a large portion of the population here has evolved to grow a winter coat typically described as blue-gray, which closely matches the volcanic sand that remains exposed throughout the winter here.



Now that theyve got the extreme Arctic Circle winter thing all figured out  the next challenge might be in undoing some of those adaptations. As climate change is heating things up in Iceland the Arctic is warming up twice as fast as the global average, by some accounts  the arctic fox may need to put that resilience to test. What new challenges they may face are yet to be known; but if any creature can figure it out, Id put my money on these fervent foxes. If they can survive a millennia of human persecution and Arctic winters, whats a little climate change?

 Orsolya Haarberg via bioGraphic

Photos by husband-and-wife team Erlend and Orsolya Haarberg, nature photographers based in Norway. You can see more of their beautiful work at Haarberg Nature Photography.

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)Within days of the government seeking Expression of Interest for Air India stake sale, budget carrier IndiGo and Naresh Goyal-led Jet Airways opted out of the race citing not so favourable terms to strike a deal. However, all is not over yet for the Maharaja as some major airlines have expressed their interest in buying the state-run carrier.

The Times of India today reported that four major international airlines - including British Airways, Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines - are among those that are considering the disinvestment proposal.



This comes a day after a report emerged that the Tata Group, who was keen to buy Air India and waiting for the detailed memorandum, may not bid for the national carrier as the terms are not workable. However, the TOI report suggest that the four airlines are in active consultation with the government.



"Among the Indian players they are in touch with to form a consortia is a medium-sized domestic airline. The head of an international airline is also eying the process with interest. A leading Indian industrial house is also in touch," the report said citing a source. It also said that the overseas carriers are in talks with Indian business houses to meet the criterion of substantial ownership and control.



On March 28, the government unveiled plans to divest up to 76 per cent stake in Air India and transfer the management control to private players. The government will retain 24 per cent stake in the national carrier and the winning bidder would be required to stay invested in the airline for at least three years. Bidding can be done as a single player or as part of a consortium.



British Airways' parent company International Airlines Group in a response to TOI said: "IAG doesn't comment on rumours or speculation." The report also said that apart from these four airlines, sovereign funds are also in touch with the government. The last date for submission of Expression of Interest is May 14 and intimation to the qualified interest bidders would be made on May 28.



So far, two airlines IndiGo and Jet Airways have formally announced that they will not participate in the process. Both the airlines found the terms and conditions laid out in the proposal simply not workable. IndiGo President and whole time Director Aditya Ghosh in a statement issued earlier this week said: "From day one, IndiGo has expressed its interest primarily in the acquisition of Air India's international operation and Air India Express. However, that option is not available under the government's current disinvestment plan for Air India."



There were quite a few aviation players who were interested before the government put out the detailed proposal that included Tata as well. Last year, Tata Sons Executive Chairman N Chandrasekaran in an interview had said that the group was interested in buying Air India but was waiting for the details.

It's time for action on the federal level.

On November 3, 2016, a South Korean ship spilled 35 containers off the coast of Vancouver Island. The result was a mess of Styrofoam and metal that washed up on the famously beautiful beaches of Tofino and surrounding area. To make the situation worse, the federal government refused to provide funds to help with the cleanup, leaving local organizations and volunteers to do all the work. (The government said it was the shipping company's responsibility to pay.)

For Gord Johns, the MP who represents the region, this experience made him realize the need for a federal strategy on (a) shoreline cleanups, which are an unfortunate reality in this day and age, and (b) an effort to stop the flow of plastic at its source. In response, Johns has tabled a new bill, titled M-151, that

"aims to create permanent, dedicated, and annual funding for community led projects to clean up plastics and debris, and to reduce the use of micro-plastics and single-use plastics."

It is a good time for Canada to consider such a step. As president of the G7, environment minister Catherine McKenna has mentioned adopting a zero-plastics-waste charter and pushing anti-plastics interest beyond the G7 nations to the G20. However, McKenna and Prime Minister Trudeau have both been criticized for failing to take stronger action at home. Canada has not implemented any broad-reaching bans on plastics bags or single-use disposable plastics, despite several cities doing so independently. Nor does it seem to have any kind of comprehensive response to disasters, such as the one in Tofino, when they happen. Mayor Josie Osborne described the community's struggle to get any kind of response to the Globe and Mail. Clearly it's not a priority:

"You've got Coast Guard, Parks Canada and Transport Canada. That's three departments of the federal government that all have some role here but, but to be honest, I don't really know who does what. And it seems like not very many people do know."



A federal policy would be far more effective than leaving it up to municipalities, said Tony Walker, a professor of environmental studies at Dalhousie University. He told CBC that "Canada is actually lagging behind many other countries, at least 40 of which have enacted some sort of national policy to curb the use of single-use plastic drink bottles, plates, straws and grocery bags."

Enter MP Gord Johns' new motion, which is exactly what many Canadians are wanting to see. Already, the online petition associated with the motion has nearly 30,000 signatures from citizens who want corporations and retailers to be held accountable for their waste and forced to come up with alternatives. Speaking in the House of Commons last December, Johns said:

"The petitioners call on the government to recognize plastic pollution in aquatic environments and the fact that they pose a serious threat to the health and well-being of wildlife, sensitive ecosystems, communities, and the environment. They call on the government to create a permanent, dedicated, and annual fund for community-led projects to clean up plastics and debris, and additionally to reduce industrial use of micro-plastics, plastic debris, discharge from stormwater outfalls, and consumer and industrial use of single-use plastics."



This is the kind of planet-improving politics I want to read about and throw my support behind. Join the fight against plastic pollution by adding your name and voice to the petition. You can sign here.If you live in the countryside, the suburbs or even parts of urban areas, you would be familiar with some of our feathery, neighbourhood friends. There are several small-sized bird species which live around our homes, schools and workplaces.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This weeks announcements of increased taxi fares on some major routes and a hike in bread prices by the countrys largest producer have rattled consumers who are already contending with higher prices for groceries, fresh produce and a range of other itemsBroome for First-Time Visitors:

First of all, remember you are 2,400 kilometres away from Western Australia's capital city Perth, or 27 hours solid driving time, so Broome is a relatively small country town and everything is done in tropical "Broome time". Chances are you are on holidays, so just go with it and enjoy. Take the time to look around at the brilliant red colour of the ground and the lush tropical greenery and flowers. On your first day there it might seem small and slow, on your second day there it all feels normal, and after that you wonder why the rest of the world is rushing around so much - now you are on "Broome Time".

The striking colours of the red earth, turquoise sea and blue sky are a major drawcard for artists and photographers.

Best time to visit

Best time to come is June to October, when all the peak season tourist attractions are operating in full swing. (Swimming in the ocean is not recommended in Summer - December to February - due to some tiny but dangerous stinging jellyfish, unless you wear a special full body lycra swimsuit, but most resorts have lovely swimming pools.)

Broome has a small modern airport and there are plenty of Australian and overseas visitors particularly in the peak season, when the population usually triples. Visitors who come in summer (Dec to Feb) are likely to find it swelteringly hot and humid, and it's also the cyclone season (translated as hurricane season for visitors from USA!)

Things to do

Some Natural/Free Attractions:

- Cable Beach on the western facing coast is the really big attraction in Broome, with kilometres and kilometres of clean white sand and ridiculously turquoise ocean water as far as the eye can see, in both directions. In peak season you can hire loungers and umbrellas from a beach van, as well as surf boards, boogie boards and assorted other beach gear. Camel rides are a popular attraction for visitors and photographers at sunset. It is recommended to use sunscreen protection because the tropical UV can be very damaging at just 17 degrees south of the Equator.

- Gantheaume Point has brightly coloured rocky outcrops that make a great visual contrast with the colour of the tropical ocean. If you know where to look, fossilised dinosaur imprints can be found but only at low tide. The Broome Visitor Centre can advise good times for that. There is also a steel-framed lighthouse where a large sea osprey nest can be seen high up. Anastasia's Pool is another interesting story associated with the original lighthouse family.

- Town Beach on the east side of Broome peninsula has grassy playgrounds near a sheltered beach, with a cafe as well. Its also near the historical cemetery, where you will find the headstones of Chinese and 900 Japanese pearl divers who died in the early days of the pearling industry.

- The Courthouse Weekend Markets are held in the grounds of the historic Broome Courthouse on weekends. Here you will find local industry stands selling locally grown fruit and vegetables in season, handmade soap, mango products, jewellery and beachwear/casual clothing. Also musicians and food stands reflecting cultural diversity of the area.

- Pearl shops - Broome is the pearl capital of Australia and has many jewellery shops in and around the town centre specialising in pearls. It is famous for its huge pearls, reputedly the largest in the world from the large Pinctada pearl shell. It's free to look in the windows!

- Broome Jetty and Deepwater Point - cruise ships dock here from time to time. Popular with fishing and it's interesting just to walk out and enjoy the view.

Some Commercial/Tour Attractions (some of these may not operate in the low "Wet" season)

- Willie Creek Pearl Farm - You can also drive 30 kilometres and join the tour there at reduced cost of you have a hire car, or do a half day tour of the pearl farm, including a short boat tour on a pearling boat and listen afterwards to the sales pitch to buy a souvenir Broome pearl from their shop!

- Horizontal Falls - (approx 4 hrs) several seaplane flights leave from Broome airport most days, landing in one of the ocean inlets near the Buccaneer Archipelago such as Cyclone Creek. Once landed, the tour transfers you to a large inflatable high powered boat, which travels the amazing the 9 metre tidal cascade during the full tide change. Best time to go is when the tide change is most evident.

- Hovercraft Tour (approx 1.5 hrs) around Roebuck Bay to see fossilised dinosaur footprints and the remains of wrecked flying boats from the 1942 air raid on Broome during WW2.

- Crocodile Farm/Wilderness Wildlife Park - 15 minutes drive from Broome, open afternoons. Crocodile feeding tour is at 3pm - apart from saltwater crocodiles, other animals include dingoes, kangaroos, lizards, wallabies, emus. Maybe buy a Malcolm Douglas video, or even crocodile-skin wallet or handbag as a souvenir!

- Sunsets - eat fresh seafood and drink cocktails or a cold beer as the sun sets over Cable Beach.

- Matso's Brewery - the original boutique beer brewery in Broome with a restaurant overlooking Roebuck Bay. For a change, try the mango beer.

Accommodation

There is a wide range of accommodation, mainly grouped on the west and east sides of the Broome peninsula:

 Cable Beach side (west side on Cable Beach, main street is Cable Beach Rd.) This side has the best beaches, major resorts, a smaller selection of bars, restaurants and cafes.

 Broome town side (east side on Roebuck Bay, main street is Carnarvon St.) This side has the hospital and government offices, with pubs, most of the Broome restaurants, shopping centre with Coles supermarket, tourism/visitors centre, the historic Sun outdoor theatre etc.

Seasonal Attractions:

- Stairway to the Moon - peak viewing times are after sunset as the full moon rises in July, August and September. Best vantage points are on the shore looking east over Roebuck Bay, special dinner events at selected venues.

- Opera Under the Stars - annual open air opera gala experience presented at the end of August each year. (link to website)

- Shinju Matsuri Festival - Festival of the Pearl - held late Aug/Sept for the last 40+ years, inc lots of free/artistic events. Events over 10 days include the Waking the Dragon Opening Ceremony, Fireworks, Mardi Gras, Art Festival and awards, Floating Lanterns remembrance ceremony and much more. ( )

Enjoy!Re: Perth to Albany in August. What to see on the way?

1. Re: Perth to Albany in August. What to see on the way?

Its your holiday, and only you have an idea of your preferences and budget. Why dont you do some research both here in the Things to do section and the trip ideas over at the right of the screen in the Western Australia forum, and on the WA Tourism website, , and get some ideas? Once you have your itinerary nutted out roughly, we can help you refine it.

Four things to note:

Spend your first night at least in Perth. Rural roads should not be attempted by novices when theyre tired from a long flight.

It is mandatory that your child be restrained in an appropriate Australian child seat.

Plan to drive on country roads only in daylight hours- animals come out at night and if you hit one, your holiday will be spoiled as well as your bank account.

August is the dead of winter here and the southwest is even colder than Perth. Bring appropriate clothing (in layers so you can remove some in heated shops, restaurants and hotels) and some wet weather gear as with luck we will have rain. You could visit the beaches and fossick for shells etc, but unless you have penguin blood you wont want to swim.The government on Thursday announced the new members of Banks Board Bureau (BBB), a professional body which was set up 2016 for selection of CEOs and other top level executives of public sector banks (PSBs). Former DoPT Secretary Bhanu P Sharma was appointed as the Chairman of the body for two years. Until recently, the BBB was headed by the former CAG Vinod Rai.

This appointment comes at a time when some public sector bank officials at the Punjab National Bank have been accused of being complicit in the Nirav Modi scam, where fake LoUs were allegedly issued in connivance of bank staffers.

While announcing the appointment, Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar said Sharma will have the same mandate as was given Rai. "Govt renews commitment to not interfere in Sr level appointments in PSBs," Kumar said in a tweet while announcing the new appointment.

He said the new BBB has professionals with diverse expertise to select top management in public sector banks (PSBs). BBB recommendations made so far include HR reforms agenda to be taken forward, Kumar added.

The other members of the BBB are: Vedika Bhandarkar (former MD Credit Suisse India), P Pradeep Kumar (former MD SBI) and Pradip P Shah (founder MD Crisil).

Banks Board Bureau was announced after the recommendations of the RBI-appointed Nayak Committee which was set up to review the governance of boards of banks in India. BBB's broad agenda was to improve governance at state-owned lenders.

Its mandate also involved advising the government on top-level bank appointments and assisting banks with capital-raising plans as well as strategies to deal with bad loans. However, Despite BBBs recommendations coming on time, there have been delays in announcing successors.

The Banks Board Bureau members will also have to tackle the continuing pile up of stressed assets at PSBs.-:- Message from Tripadvisor staff -:-

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We remove posts that do not follow our posting guidelines, and we reserve the right to remove any post for any reason.Not sure how the weather will be for Hoi An and Nha Trang.

Usually rainy or cloudy in Hoi An.

Nha Trang is normally better, but not so much last year.

Otherwise, your itinerary looks fine.

Cheers,

JohnIm currently on my 3rd week of traveling from south to North Vietnam, so Ill share with you what I know so far.

Transit: HCMC Uber, now (Nha Trang) its Grab. Depending on where youre going 5minutes = 15k-20k, 20minutes = 60k-150k *depending on the time of day.

If you go with Grab youll need a Vietnam SIM card. Make sure it comes with a phone number. See the number before you buy it. Its cheaper to split up your party and travel from destinations if you dont have a large bag and if youre ok with scooters, otherwise be prepared to spend more. You can hook up your credit card to the app so it takes out funds automatically OR you can add credit.

Either way, its the cheapest. Ive spend roughly 20$ CAD (360k d) for 14 days.

Accommodations, Beware of extra add ons: water, bike, scooter etc. If your accommodations dont accept credit youll have to have dong to pay for these. (Leeway, 30$)

**accomidations will probably charge in the expensive range for food 150-200k.

How do you want to spend?

Expensive food: 100-300k + for a meal.

Budget: 25-50k

Traveling in twos is great. Buy a couple of meals and split it, estimate 75k. (4$/meal)

Drinks: 10k-60k coffee/tea/fruit juices.

Souvenirs, get a look at a market when you get here, figure out what you want to buy, BEFORE you buy ask a local how much its worth. Barter. Dont settle. Its a game.

IMO 200-400k a day, you wont spend it and youll have extra. If you brought 5mill dong, youd be set.

Keep a wallet with majority, split it up in your bag.

Good luck, safe travels :)

Edited: 3 years agoWe are in the planning process of a three week vacation in Vietnam / Cambodia. We will be starting in Hanoi and working our way down to the south. We are doing a 2 night/ 3 day Halong Bay cruise.

For those that have been, would you recommend March or April. We are ok with heat, but are told that it can get quite cold in the north?Ill be flying out this Saturday for my 3rd solo trip to Japan. I have a Suica card that I got on my first trip. I will be going back to Japan (Osaka/Tokyo) early/mid October 2018. This time with my sister and her family. For this upcoming trip, I plan on getting 2 adult ICOCA cards for my sister and brother in law to use when they come in October from the vending machine. Is it possible to get the Childrens version (via manned Ticket Office) during my trip next week for them to use in October? I can bring their passports with me to take care of this. Both children are currently ages 7 and 10 and will be 8 and 11 at time of travel in October. So both will still be in age for Childrens card. Will I be able to do this with them not being in the country? I think I read an old post saying that forms must be filled out. What questions are on the form? Im thinking of doing this so they dont have to do all this in October to save some time. If cant, I guess theyll just have to add this to the things they have to do after arrival.Re: Japan Itinerary, JR Pass or Not

4. Re: Japan Itinerary, JR Pass or Not

Well...I am sure you can save a lot (taking about around 20000) if you discard Nara

Your attractions are mostly in Kanto area.

Edited: 3 years agoIf the Bronx Zoo is a priority, you will probably want to drive there and pay to park. Hopefully someone can confirm the feasibility of paid parking availability but I'm under the impression that it will be okay. Taking public transit looks like it will be a beast.

For the Manhattan destinations in your plans, have you worked out exactly how you will travel from wherever in Edgewater you are staying and how much that will cost for 6 of you each way (so 12 trips each day)?

For arranging your days, MoMA is in Midtown. It would be nice to combine that with Rockefeller Center and Top of the Rock for views. For TOTR, book your tickets online in advance as the time slots fill up and just showing up can lead to a disappointing answer to come back hours later when they have remaining openings.

Right across the street from Rockefeller Center is St Patrick's Cathedral, which is beautiful after its restoration. Of course you will want to see Times Square and the Broadway Theater District but save that until after dark if you can. It's more exciting with the lights and things stay open late.

The Met Museum is big but not huge. Depending on your museum style and level of interest in some of the more esoteric exhibits, you might find that you spend only 2-3 hours there. You could decide to include another neighborhood that day. Maybe Financial District/Wall St? Lots of impressive historic stuff down there and you could stop by the 911 Memorial too.

Alternatively, you could think about doing a sightseeing cruise. That will also get you close up views of Statue of Liberty.

Another day can be the AMNH and Central Park

As for your Monday evening plans, confirm what your transportation into the city will be and how late it runs. Transportation to and from the less convenient NJ neighborhoods may be geared mostly towards those traveling to and from work and be less feasible for nighttime. Just something to confirm.Grocery stores, delis and some "drug" stores (as mentioned above) will also sell beer.

Many are open pretty late so you should be able to get what you need closer to your hotel on the way back.

IIRC the Cranberry Cafe is open 24 hours - so even if it's not the cheapest it may be convenient. I think a couple of the drug stores are also open 24/7

You might scout out the area after you drop off your luggage and head out for your sightseeing or ask at the hotel about the nearest places to get what you need, especially later at night.Axis Bank Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Shikha Sharma seems to be looking at making a graceful exit from the Axis Bank with her decision to shorten the term of next term. About a week after the RBI asked the Axis Bank board to reconsider its decision to appoint Sharma for the fourth term, the board on Monday accepted her request to shorten her next term from three years to seven months.



Sharma has been heading the bank since June 2009. Her third term would end on May 31, while her fourth term as the bank CEO would now end on December 31, 2018.

The bank didn't mention why Sharma sought to cut short her fourth term but it is apparent from its statement - a release from the bank says Sikha Sharma "requested the board to reconsider the period of her re-appointment" - that she already knew what was coming after the central bank red flagged Axis bank's performance and deteriorating asset quality as the reasons to not give her another term.

Now that she herself has decided not to continue her services beyond December 31, 2018, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) would likely give a green signal to her shorter term.

Sikha Sharma's term ends at a time when the country's third largest private bank is rocked with the problems of rising non-performing assets, leak of financial results, non-compliance with its asset classification norms, and falling profit.

Despite some achievements, including the acquisition of Enam Securities investment banking arm for Rs 2,067 crore and the takeover of digital payments platform Freecharge for Rs 385 crore, controversies have overshadowed Shikha Sharma's success.

So, what issues have forced Sharma to rethink her association with Axis Bank?

FIVE-FOLD RISE IN NPAs



Axis Bank's NPAs increased by around Rs 23,800 crore in eight years between December 2009 and December 2017. The year in which Sharma took over as the CEO, the bank's NPAs were at Rs 1,173 crore, while the number reached Rs 25,001 crore in December-2017 end. Last year, post the RBI's annual audit exercise on NPAs for 2016-17, it reclassified nine accounts amounting to Rs 4,867 crore with Axis Bank, following which its NPA has shot up 55 per cent in the declared Q2 results compared to the previous quarter of this fiscal. The RBI also imposed a penalty of Rs 3 crore on Axis Bank for non-compliance with its directions on Income Recognition and Asset Classification (IRAC) norms back in fiscal 2016.

SHARP FALL IN PROFIT

Things started going south in December 2015 after the central bank announced its asset quality review. In April 2016, Axis Bank came out with a 'watch list' of Rs 22,000 crore-plus stressed corporate loans, accounting for 15 per cent advances to companies. The bank admitted 60 per cent of these loans would become NPAs in the next two years. To the bank's surprise, half turned into full-blown NPAs by the end of the first year itself, that is, by March 2017. The bank reported an increase of over Rs 15,000 crore worth of bad loans in just one year from December 2015 till December 2016. With the rise in non-performing assets came a big downfall in net profit. The bank's net profit took a fall of around Rs 1,600 crore from Rs 2,175 crore in December 2015 to just Rs 597 crore in December 2016. Even a year later in December 2017, it didn't show much sign of improvement, except a little uptick at Rs 726 crore.



BOARD'S LEADER DILEMMA

The rumours regarding the uncertainty over Shikha Sharma's role as the Axis Bank head started emerging in June 2018 when the board reportedly appointed a consultant, Egon Zehnder, to find a new CEO. However, things took a different turn when speculation emerged that she might consider taking an offer from one of the three big companies - Tata, Bajaj Group and Piramal. The board, in order to clear air regarding the top post at the bank, then gave her a fourth term.



NOTE BAN & MONEY LAUNDERING

After demonetisation in November 2016, several incidents of money laundering were reported at the bank's branches across India. The ED arrested many of its bank officials in connection with its probe for alleged irregularities in the conversion of old currency and supply of new notes. On December 9, 2016, the I-T officials discovered 44 fake Axis Bank accounts holding collectively around Rs 100 crore in raids on its branch in Chandni Chowk, Delhi. A few days after the note ban, two people were held with Rs 3.5 crore in new notes - even though there was a withdrawal limit of Rs 2,500 a day - at Axis Bank's Kashmere Gate branch in Delhi. In the same month, the ED arrested two Kashmiri Gate branch officials for money laundering. Both had received 3KG gold bars as bribe. The Income Tax Department had reported several such incidents at the bank's branches, which left a dent on its image.

Also read: Who will RBI target next after Axis Bank CEO Shikha Sharma?

- He said it was highly unlikely for the ODM leader to retire from politics any time soon

- The former senator said he would be disappointed if Raila's name wasn't in the ballot

- He commended Raila for showing exemplary presidential qualities of late

- Raila seems to have garnered support from Mt Kenya politicians ever since his handshake with Uhuru

Former Nyeri senator Mutahi Kagwe has said he wants to see ODM leader Raila Odinga's name in the presidential ballot come 2022.

Kagwe admitted that it was highly unlikely for the former prime minister to drop his ambition for political office any time soon.

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Speaking on NTV's AM Live show, Kagwe said it was implausible for Raila not to run for political office and that his time to retire was yet to come.

READ ALSO: It's time for you to leave NASA - Wetangula to Raila

The former Nyeri senator confessed he would be disappointed if Raila didn't vie for presidency in 2022. Photo: Raila Odinga/Twitter

The former Nyeri senator confessed he would be disappointed if Raila didn't vie for the presidency in 2022.

"I would hate to think of a situation where Raila Odinga is not running for political office," the former Nyeri senator said.

He said there was none in Kenya who exuded presidential qualities surpassing the NASA leader.

READ ALSO: William Ruto marvels at technology used in Sudans well developed sugar industry

He said Raila as of late had upheld his name as an elder stateman and commended the ODM leader for exuding presidential mannerisms. Photo: Raila Odinga/Twitter

"If you ask me, he has been extremely presidential, so for my money and for me as a Kenyan, I would like to see Raila run for presidency in the next elections," Kagwe said.

He said the 72-year-old has of late upheld his name as an elder statesman and commended the ODM leader for exuding presidential mannerism.

READ ALSO: DP Ruto's security interferred with Kirinyaga elections - Karua

The former senator urged Kenyans to distance themselves from tribal politics and move away from tribal thinking. Photo: Star

The former senator urged Kenyans to distance themselves from tribal politics and move away from tribal thinking for the sake of the nation.

"Let us think beyond ourselves, let us think beyond tribe, one of the things Kenyans should remember is that there is not a single person in Kenya who voted to be in one tribe," he said.

READ ALSO: Jamaa amfumania mkewe akifyonzwa na mpango wa kando nyumbani kwake

Following Raila and President Uhuru Kenyatta's landmark unity pact, the ODM leader has been on a reconciliation path with political leaders especially those from Mt Kenya region.

Kiambu governor William Kabogo paid Raila a courtesy call in his office on Wednesday, April 11, where they discussed a wide range of issues concerning the nation.

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

Uhuru and Raila full speech at Harambee House - on TUKO TV

Source: Breaking News- Uhuru is expected to open the governors' meeting i Kakamega and Ruto is slated to address them later

- The three leaders could make a stop-over in Kisumu before proceeding to Kakamega

- There has been heightened political temperatures with calls for the Luhya unity under one party

Kakamega county Governor Wycliffe Oparanya will from Monday, April 23 to Friday, 27, play host to Kenya's top three leaders during a Devolution conference.

President Uhuru Kenyatta, Deputy President William Ruto and NASA leader Raila Odinga are scheduled to speak at the three-day event though on separate dates.

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In a live Facebook post, Oparanya said the meeting will be opened by Uhuru while his deputy Ruto is slated to address the governors and other stakeholders on the last day.

READ ALSO: Nyumba ya kifahari ya mbunge wa Rarieda, Otiende Amollo, yasisimua wengi (picha)

Oparanya said while Uhuru is expected to open the meeting, his deputy Ruto is slated address the governors and other stakeholders on the last day. Photo: Governor Oparanya/Facebook.

READ ALSO: Oparanya and Khalwale fight over Raila's endorsement

Raila will however, on the second day give a keynote address on devolution.

"The Head of State will open the meeting on the first day and the second day, the former prime minister Raila Amollo Odinga will give his keynote address touching on devolution and the conference will be closed by the Deputy President William Ruto," he said.

Other reports reaching TUKO.co.ke indicated the three leaders could make a stop-over in Kisumu before proceeding to Kakamega.

READ ALSO: Luhya unity remains elusive as leaders clash over formation of single party for western region

This is going to be the first time, the three are visiting Western region after the historic handshake. Photo: Raila Odinga/Facebook.

A total of 6,000 guests will attend this year's conference which is the fifth one since the inception of devolved county governments.

This is going to be the first time the three politicians are visiting Western region after the historic handshake between Uhuru and Raila.

It also came at a time the region is witnessing heightened political temperatures with calls for the Luhya unity under one party.

READ ALSO: Kalonzo isolated as Raila, Mudavadi, Wetangula gradually drift away from NASA coalition

But Senate Speaker Ken Lusaka and Cabinet Secretary for Devolution Eugene Wamalwa have opposed the new call.

Lusaka argued although he was fully in support of calls for unity in the region, the time was not ripe for 2022 politics.

He added even if Western Kenya leaders had to come up with a party, that party would have to reflect the face of Kenya for it to sell in other parts of the country.

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.

Kalonzo Musyoka dismisses removal of Moses Wetangula from Senate - On Tuko TV

Source: Tuko Kenya- He took issue with the manner in which state agencies banished Miguna

- Mutunga was also concerned with Matiangi's recent onslaught against the Judiciary

- The former CJ said some of the recent happenings in Kenya are reminiscent of dark old days

Former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga on Thursday, April 12, waded into the simmering row between the Judiciary and the executive.

The vocal Mutunga also said he was traumatised by some of the events happening in Kenya currently which according to him, were reminiscent of the dark old days.

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In an interview with NTV, he particularly took issue with the manner in which state agencies banished self-declared NRM General Miguna Miguna even after courts had stopped his deportation.

READ ALSO: Nyumba ya kifahari ya mbunge wa Rarieda, Otiende Amollo, yasisimua wengi (picha)

The vocal Mutunga also said he was traumatised by the some of the event happening in Kenya currently. Photo: Willy Mutunga/Instagram.

READ ALSO: Kenyans give their views on the deportation of Miguna Miguna

"What happened to Miguna , Ndii and people like Jimi Wanjigi losing their passports has actually traumatised me because this is what happened in 70s and 80s," he said.

He maintained no Kenyan citizen loses his citizenship by birth.

"Freedom of movement is absolute. And even if you are taking somebody's passport, you must tell him why," the former Supreme Court judge added.

Mutunga was also concerned with Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiangi's recent onslaught against judicial officers.

READ ALSO: Miguna Miguna is a Kenyan by birth - Matiang'i

Matiang'i claimed some 'evil' judges were working with opposition leaning activist lawyers to undermine his work. Photo: Fred Matiangi/Twiter.

READ ALSO: Miguna Miguna dares Interior CS Fred Matiang'i to arrest him

"You cannot be summoned by the court and you say, you were not given a hearing, you did not go. You see the way he is talking and you wonder who advises this guy," Mutunga continued.

Matiang'i while, appearing before Parliament's Security Committee had claimed some 'evil clique' of judges was working with Opposition leaning activist and lawyers to undermine his work.

This was after he had failed to honour court summonses requiring him to explain why Miguna was deported.

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.

Miguna Miguna's return: Chaos at Jomo Kenyatta Int. Airport (JKIA) - On Tuko TV

Source: Tuko- Kenyans took to social media to express their views following the rare meeting

- Some hailed the meeting saying it was a good start to national reconciliation

- Others said it was a political move by the two major political families to protect their dynasties

Kenyan were on Thursday, April 12, divided in opinion following a surprise meeting between Opposition leader Raila Odinga and retired President Daniel Toroitich arap Moi.

Moi and Raila released photographs of their meeting at the home of the former Head of State in Kabarak in company of their relatives and close allies.

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Mois son, Gideon, who is also the Baringo Senator and KANU Secretary General Nick Salat, were at hand to welcome the former prime minister who tagged along Mvita MP Abdulswamad Nassir and Vihiga senator George Khaniri.

READ ALSO: Raila Odinga meets retired president Daniel Moi days after famous handshake with Uhuru

Raila Odinga shakes hands with retired president Daniel Moi. Photo: Raila Odinga/Facebook

Following the meeting, Kenyans took to Social Media to share their views and TUKO.co.ke compiled a section of them.

Some commentators hailed the meeting saying it was in the right direction as Raila had earlier committed to spearheading national reconciliation when he signed a deal with President Uhuru Kenyatta.

READ ALSO: Nyeri pastor exposed for preying on women, conning them

Others read politics in the meeting explaining that the two families were working on protecting their dynasties.

Leaders pose for a group photo with Raila and Moi during the meeting. Photo: Raila Odinga/Facebook

READ ALSO: 12 most notorious Nairobi streets where you should never use your phone

A section of others told the NASA leader to retire from active politics.

The 2022 presidential race was discussed with commentators putting it between Raila, Gideon and Deputy President William Ruto.

READ ALSO: Uhuru, Ruto, Raila to tour Western Kenya for the first time after historic handshake

Raila and Moi share a light moment during their meeting at Kabarak farm. Photo: Raila Odinga/Facebook

They said Ruto stood no chance against the three major political families in the country, should they unite.

Raila Odinga arrives at former president Daniel Moi's Kabarak home. Photo: Gideon Moi/Facebook

READ ALSO: What happened to Miguna, Jimi Wanjigi and Ndii traumatised me - former Chief Justice Mutunga

Others were hilarious as they said two fathers-one for the nation and the other for the people-had finally met.

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.

TUKO LIFESTYLE: Giveaway of dinner for two in Branch restaurant (Nairobi) - on TUKO TV

Source: Tuko- The mother shocked the wor;ld by giving birth to a six-kilogramme baby

- The baby was born through a caesarian section operation

- Doctors said the baby was in good health as well as the mother

- The mother has a history of giving birth to overweight babies

A middle-aged mother of three shocked hospital staff when she gave birth to a Six-kilogramme baby in Mt Elgon, Bungoma County.

Helen Chepkwemoi Kesis from Kaptama village gave birth to the beautiful baby girl she named Blessing Cherotich through caesarian section at Kapsokwony Sub county hospital on Thursday, April 12.

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Kesis is a mother of three, the eldest being 10 years old.

READ ALSO: 6.3 Kg Baby Stuns Kenyans

Mother and her baby recuperating at the hospital. Photo: Titus Oteba/TUKO

The nursing officer in charge of theatre Stanley Limo told TUKO..co.ke Kesis was admitted to the facility on Wednesday, April 11 at about 5.30pm while in labour.

"After a series of checksups, she was taken to the caesarian section of the theatre after the medical examination had revealed that she could not give birth through the normal route," said Limo.

The baby is probably the worlds heaviest baby to be born.

READ ALSO: Nairobi woman who poisoned children to save marriage with matatu driver sentenced

He added that the mother and baby were recuperating well and were in stable condition at the health facility.

He said that the mother has a history of giving birth to big babies all through.

"The three other children were delivered through the normal way even though they were overweight. The first born weighed 3.5Kgs, the second born was weighing 5.1Kgs, the third was weighing 2.7Kgs but the fourth one shocked us because she was weighing 6Kgs," said the nurse.

"Assisted by my other professional nurses we only took 45 minutes to conclude the delivery," added Limo.

READ ALSO: Uhuru, Ruto, Raila to tour Western Kenya for the first time after historic handshake

He said that they suspected that she might be suffering from blood sugar.

"We are happy that my daughter has brought forth my grandchild, even though it was a tense time, I thank the nurses for working tirelessly and conducting a safe delivery," the babys grandmother Eunice Chemoss said.

In May 2015, a 37-year-old mother Carolyne Chemutai gave birth to probably the World's heaviest baby who weighed 6.3 Kgs then at the same facility.

As reported by TUKO.co.ke, Chemutai who hails from Masindet village on the outskirts of Kapsokwony town, gave birth to the overweight baby through normal delivery.

Story by Titus Oteba, Bungoma County Correspondent.

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.

TUKO LIFESTYLE: Giveaway of dinner for two in Branch restaurant (Nairobi) - on TUKO TV

Source: Kenya Breaking News Today- The Embakasi East MP believes he will succeed Governor Sonko

- Owino said he did not wish to stick to one position for long as he did at the university

- His election as the Embakasi lawmaker was nullified after being challenged by Francis Mureithi

- Owino has since moved to Court of Appeal to try and overturn the nullification of his win

Embakasi East MP Babu Owino believes he will succeed Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko come 2022.

Owino asked his constituents to work with him so that he could represent them at City Hall in the next General Election.

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Addressing demonstrating traders at Savannah area on Thursday, April 12, the controversial legislator said he did not wish to stick to one position for long as he did at the university.

READ ALSO: Meet new Nyeri county female deputy governor nominee

Owino said he did not wish to stick to one position for long as he did at the University of Nairobi. Photo: Babu Owino/Facebook

READ ALSO: Babu Owino in narrow lead with 77 polling stations yet to be recounted in Embakasi East

" I have been under a lot of pressure, my head is blowing up. When you are going about your businesses, please remember to pray for me. What I know in 2022 I'm your governor. I don't want to be Mugabe," he said amidst thunderous applause.

READ ALSO: Court hears how Babu Owino could have voted twice in two different streams in August 8 election

Babu shot to fame after his long stint at the University of Nairobi students' body where he served in three consecutive terms.

His election as the Embakasi lawmaker however was successfully challenged by his closest opponent Francis Mureithi.

Mureithi filed an application seeking to have a vote recount and provided evidence of gross abuse of the electoral process, which he argued gave Owino an unfair advantage.

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.

Babu Owino threatens to arrest Matiang'i once he becomes Interior Cs - On Tuko TV

Source: Tuko News- The governor's convoy was en route to Kisumu at the time of the accident

- Although Oparanya was unhurt in the incident, the cars involved were severely damaged

- The accident involved chase cars belonging to governor Oparanya and CS Amina Mohammed

- Further reports suggest the cars were travelling in opposite directions at the time

Kakamega governor and ODM deputy party leader's Wycliffe Oparanya's car was on Thursday, April 12 involved in a nasty accident near Chavakali township in Kakamega.

Reports reaching TUKO.co.ke indicate that the accident, which happened along the Kisumu-Kakamega highway, bizzarely involved chase cars belonging to the Kakamega governor and education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohammed.

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Scenes from the accident involving chase cars belonging to Kakamega governor Wycliffe Oparanya and education CS Amina Mohammed. Photo: Oparanya/Twitter

READ ALSO: Raila Odinga meets retired president Daniel Moi days after famous handshake with Uhuru

Mohammeds convoy was reportedly headed to Kakamega while Oparanyas was travelling in the opposite direction en route to Kisumu.

Oparanya confirmed the incident, adding that no one , including himself and CS Amina was hurt in the incident.

"My chase car has this evening been involved in an accident with Amb. Amina Mohameds car near Chavakali township. No injuries have been reported so far. I urge all of you to be calm because we are safe, he tweeted.

READ ALSO: No salary for striking lecturers - Moi University's new VC cracks the whip

Despite calls for calm from the governor, photos which are fast circulating on social media show the alarming extent of damage in one of the vehicles identified as a Toyota Prado TX.

Kakamega governor and ODM deputy chairmans car involved in road accident. Photo: Oparanya/Twitter

Earlier in the day, the Kakamega governor had hosted his Machakos counterpart Alfred Mutua in his county as the two toured several projects in the county including site of a level 4 hospital in Muranda ward, Shinyalu.

Oparanya and Mutua were earlier in the day touring several projects in Kakamega. Photo: Alfred Mutua/Twitter

READ ALSO: I cannot support William Ruto in 2022 - Martha Karua

On the other hand, the Education CS is set to grace Kakamega county on Saturday, April 14, for a homecoming ceremony.

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

From a House girl to an MCA. Tuko / Tuco - Kenya on TUKO TV:

Source: Tuko Breaking News Latest- Darasa sued KRA for demanding taxes over importation of alleged duty free sugar

- High Court ruled in favour of the sugar importer

- KRA moved to the Court of Appeal to challenge the High Court ruling

- Darasa failed to produce evidence to show the sugar was imported during duty free window

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) on Wednesday, April 11, won a KSh 2.5 billion court case against sugar importer Darasa Investments Limited.

A three-judge bench comprised of judges Alnashir Visram, Wanjiru Karanja and Martha Koome sitting at Mombasa Court of Appeal ruled that Darasa Investments Limited did not provide credible evidence to prove it imported sugar withing the duty free window.

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Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) had been sued by Darasa Investments Limited over taxation of alleged duty free sugar.Photo: Kass Media Group.

READ ALSO: How to Check My KRA Pin Using ID Number

"The importation of the sugar did not fit within the Gazette Notice No. 9802 of October 4, 2017 (as read with Gazette Notice 4536 of May 12, 2017) which stated exempted sugar was loaded into a vessel destined to a port in Kenya from May 12 to August 31, 2017. No credible evidence was presented by the importer to show that Vessel MV ANANGEL SUN was ever destined to a port in Kenya," the judges ruled.

The tax-man will consequently proceed to execute its mandate of collecting the accrued import duty on the 40,000 metric tonnes of sugar imported by the company.

READ ALSO: New KRA PAYE Rates 2017

Darasa had earlier moved to the High Court seeking Judicial Review orders barring KRA from demanding taxes over the consignment allegedly imported during the duty free window.

High Court ruled in favour of the importer.

Aggrieved by the ruling, KRA moved to the Court of Appeal to challenge the High Court decision.

The appellate court found documents submitted by the importer to the Commissioner of Customs and Border Control for clearance had inconsistencies on the date of loading, the date and the place of inspection, the certificate of origin and change of ownership.

READ ALSO: Kenyans panic after receiving confusing message from KRA and its super funny

The documents showed that the sugar was loaded into M.V. IRON LADY at the port of Jabel Ali (Dubai), United Arab Emirates, around October 19, 2017, which was outside the gazetted duty free period of 11, 2017 to August 31, 2017.

According to the KRA, the goods were not inspected at the port of loading, Santos, Brazil by an appointed inspection agent of Kenya Bureau of Standards (KBS). Instead, the inspection was done in Dubai, UAE.

READ ALSO: Requirements for KRA Clearance Certificate

Despite the existence of alternative dispute resolution mechanism of a Tax Appeals Tribunal as per the East African Community Customs Management Act, 2004, the defendant (Darasa Investments Limited) opted to sue the tax-man.

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

First Kenyan in America with a Masters in Nuclear Medicine Technology - On Tuko TV

Source: Tuko Breaking News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.It's our pre budget show where we bring you some of the most talked about items on the econoThe Cambridge Analytica scandal in which personal data of over 87 million Facebook users, including 500,000 Indians, was compromised, has not hit the social media platform in a significant way in terms of people deactivating their accounts.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged this during a Congressional hearing, his second in two days, on issues related on data privacy and security in view of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

"Yes," Zuckerberg replied when Congresswoman Dana Louise DeGette said since the revelations surrounding Cambridge Analytica, Facebook has not noticed a significant increase in users deactivating their accounts.

"Yes, that's correct," he said when DeGette said since the revelations surrounding Cambridge Analytica, Facebook has also not noticed a decrease in user interaction on Facebook.

Zuckerberg said as a result of the scandal, and the questions raised, Facebook is going to put, at the top of everyone's app when they sign in, a tool that walks people through the settings and gives people the choices and asks them to make decisions on how they want their settings set.

Everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls, he said.

"We've had a lot of these controls in place for years. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requires us to do a few more things, and we're going to extend that to the world, he told lawmakers.

The GDPR is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union.

Introduced by the European Union, GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation requires that the company's request for user consent in a clear and concise way, using language that is understandable, and be clearly distinguishable from other pieces of information, including terms and conditions.

It is prescription on how companies treat consumer data. And it makes it clear that consumers need to be in control of their own data.

"I think we may be updating it a little bit. But, as you say, we've had the ability to download your information for years now. And people have the ability to see everything that they have in Facebook, to take that out, delete their account and move their data anywhere that they want," he said.

Responding to a question, Zuckerberg acknowledged that a lot of people probably just accept terms of service without taking the time to read through it.

"I view our responsibility not as just legally complying with laying it out and getting that consent, but actually trying to make sure that people understand what's happening throughout the product," he said.

"That's why, every single time that you share something on Facebook or one of our services, right there is a control in line, where you control who you want to share with, because I don't just think that this is about a terms of service. It's contextual," he noted.

"You want to present people with the information about what they might be doing and give them the relevant controls in line, at the time that they're making those decisions, not just have it be in the background sometime, or make a one-time decision," he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has the ability to detect when a foreign entity is attempting to buy a political advertisement.

"This is an extremely important area. After we were slow to identify the Russian information operations in 2016, this has become a top priority for our company to prevent that from ever happening again, especially this year, in 2018, which is such an important election year with the US mid-terms, but also major elections in India, Brazil, Mexico, Hungary, Pakistan and a number of other places," he said.

Facebook is working on a number of things, including deploying new Artificial Intelligence tools that can proactively catch fake accounts that Russia or others might create to spread misinformation.

The social media company, he said, is not aware of any specific groups like that, that have engaged in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville last year.

"We are conducting a full investigation of any apps that had access to a large amount of data. And, if we find anything suspicious, we'll tell everyone affected," he said.This website uses cookies to make sure you get the best experience on our website. You can find more information under the Privacy Statement. You are free to change your cookies' settings in the privacy settings.No Ukrainian soldier has been injured in the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) area in eastern Ukraine over the past day.

Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Spokesperson for ATO issues, Colonel Dmytro Hutsuliak said this at a press briefing on Thursday, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"As a result of enemy attacks, there have been no casualties among our defenders, servicepersons of the Ukrainian Armed Forces," he said.

The ministrys spokesperson added that Russian-backed militants continue to violate the ceasefire. Over the past day, they launched 38 attacks on positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, of which 35 attacks were targeted. The Ukrainian side returned fire 14 times, using weapons that are not prohibited by the Minsk agreements.

iyThe Interior Ministry of Ukraine will cooperate with Turkey in countering terrorism and extremism.

This was stated during the meeting of Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman and Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov with Turkish Interior Minister Suleiman Soylu on April 12, the press service of the Interior Ministry of Ukraine reports.

"Ukraine experiences difficult times as we have the external enemy and terrorist threats inside the country. Turkey has a great experience in effectively managing the activities of police units and gendarmerie in countering terrorism and extremism. This experience needs to be adopted by the National Police and the National Guard of Ukraine," Avakov said.

As the minister noted, Turkey's support for ensuring secure environment in Ukraine is very important.

Turkey is ready to cooperate with Ukraine in internal security issues, Suleiman Soylu added.

olUkraine and Lithuania have agreed to intensify efforts to ensure European energy security and confirmed the need to prevent the Nord Stream 2 project implementation.

Such an agreement was reached at the meeting of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko with Prime Minister of the Republic of Lithuania Saulius Skvernelis in Kyiv on Thursday, the press service of the President reports.

"The parties confirmed the need for the further joint work on topical issues of European energy security, in particular regarding the prevention of the Nord Stream 2 project," the statement reads.

In this context, as the press service reports, Ukraine's intention to officially join the work of the NATO Energy Security Centre of Excellence located in Vilnius was positively noted.

Poroshenko thanked the Republic of Lithuania for the consistent support of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity. The President also noted important practical assistance of Lithuania, including military, in countering Russian aggression, as well as in matters of European integration of Ukraine, in particular, in implementing relevant domestic reforms.

Petro Poroshenko thanked the Lithuanian side for the initiative on the European plan for Ukraine and stressed the importance of ensuring its support by the EU and the G7.

The parties discussed prospects for expanding bilateral trade and economic cooperation, including the possibility of attracting new Lithuanian investments in Ukraine.

In addition, the prospects for strengthening sanctions against Russia were discussed.

olUkrainian President Petro Poroshenko has held a telephone conversation with British Prime Minister Theresa May, the press service of the head of state has reported.

"The head of the Ukrainian state expressed solidarity with the British people and the government about the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in the city of Salisbury. Petro Poroshenko stressed Ukraine's readiness to help investigate this case if necessary," the statement reads.

May thanked Ukraine for showing solidarity with Britain and, in turn, condemned Russia's aggression in Donbas and Crimea.

Poroshenko thanked the British side for continued support of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and non-recognition of the results of recent illegal elections in occupied Crimea. The issue of strengthening sanctions in response to Russia's aggressive actions was also discussed.

The sides discussed the strengthening of bilateral cooperation in the field of security and defense.

They also spoke about preparations for the 2nd Ukraine Reform Conference in Copenhagen, which will take place in June.

Poroshenko invited May to pay an official visit to Ukraine.

opUkrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has met with Macedonia's leadership to discuss the prospects for deepening bilateral cooperation in key areas, the press service of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has reported.

"The prospects for deepening Ukrainian-Macedonian cooperation in the economic, energy, transport, agricultural and other spheres were discussed at a meeting with Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev," reads the statement.

The sides emphasized the importance of holding another meeting of the Ukrainian-Macedonian intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation and the joint committee on the implementation of the free trade agreement.

At the same time, Klimkin and Zaev noted the need to amend the existing bilateral free trade agreement to ensure its maximum liberalization. The parties also agreed on further coordination of efforts aimed at implementing large-scale projects in Macedonia in the field of gasification and modernization of thermal power plants.

The sides also emphasized the need to speed up the preparation of an intergovernmental agreement on the mutual abolition of visa requirements on a permanent basis.

Klimkin also met with President of the Assembly of the Republic of Macedonia Talat Xhaferi to discuss inter-parliamentary cooperation. "The practice of cooperation between the parliaments of both countries at the level of inter-parliamentary groups was positively noted," the statement reads.

Klimkin also asked Xhaferi to consider recognizing the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide of the Ukrainian people.

During the talks with Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov, the sides noted the common foreign policy priorities of Ukraine and Macedonia - membership of the European Union and NATO and the importance of sharing experience in these areas.

"The ministers agreed to intensify bilateral contacts aimed at deepening the political dialogue and economic cooperation between the two countries and discussed coordination in the UN, the OSCE, and the Council of Europe," the Foreign Ministry reported.

In addition, the foreign ministers signed a memorandum of cooperation between the diplomatic academies of the two countries and a joint declaration between the foreign ministries of both countries.

Earlier, Klimkin and Dimitrov agreed to sign a visa waiver agreement in the near future.

Klimkin is on an official visit to Macedonia on April 11-12.

opPoland is a genuine ally of Ukraine and is trying to provide the greatest possible assistance, so Ukrainian politicians should focus more on common interests and maintaining unity between the countries.

Polish Ambassador to Ukraine Jan Pieklo said this at the 11th Kyiv Security Forum, organized by Arseniy Yatsenyuk's The Open Ukraine Foundation, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"We support the democratic stability of Ukraine at various possible levels: through military exercises, establishment of the Ukrainian-Polish-Lithuanian brigade, which is located on the border with Poland and is completely ready for action, we give recommendations and consultations through an ad hoc committee on defense, provide financial support for some projects for internally displaced persons in Donbas in Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Mariupol. Please, keep in mind and do not forget that Poland is a genuine ally of Ukraine, and we try to do everything possible for Ukraine," Pieklo said.

In this context, he noted that some Ukrainian politicians considered Poland a country that generates problems in bilateral relations. In his opinion, such an approach is not constructive.

We should focus on our common interests and unity as Russia is interested in violating our unity and creating problems, the diplomat stressed.

olUkraine and Moldova plan to intensify cooperation and coordinate their efforts as part of the Eastern Partnership in order to speed up the process of integration into the EU.

Such agreement was reached in Kyiv on Thursday at a meeting between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Moldovan Prime Minister Pavel Filip, the press service of the head of state reported.

"Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko held a meeting with Prime Minister of the Republic of Moldova Pavel Filip. It was agreed to strengthen the coordination of positions as part the Eastern Partnership in order to speed up the process of integration into the EU," the statement reads.

Poroshenko and Filip discussed the topical issues of the bilateral agenda. The parties positively assessed the growth of trade between the two countries, which increased by 13% in 2017.

The sides also called for the speedy finalization of the negotiation process regarding the conclusion of an intergovernmental agreement on the functioning of the Dniester Hydroelectric Pumped Storage Power Plant.

Particular attention was paid during the meeting to some aspects of the Transdniestrian settlement.

The president thanked the Moldovan side for helping recreate Ukrainian children from the Donbas region in Moldova.

In the presence of the Moldovan prime minister, Poroshenko signed the law ratifying an agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Government of the Republic of Moldova on joint control of persons, vehicles, goods and objects at common border crossing points through the Ukrainian-Moldovan state border, the press service said.

opUkraine and Turkey are ready to enhance cooperation in the implementation of joint projects in the energy, aviation and military-technical sectors.

These issues were discussed at a meeting of Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman and Interior Minister of the Turkish Republic Suleyman Soylu, the governments press service reports.

Turkey is our strategic partner. And strengthening cooperation in the trade and economic sphere is one of the key prerequisites for the successful development of a strategic partnership," said Groysman.

The Ukrainian prime minister stressed that Turkeys support of Ukraines territorial integrity, the non- recognition of the occupation of Crimea, the protection of the rights and interests of Ukrainian citizens - the Crimean Tatars  are very important for Kyiv, as well as the efforts of the both sides to strengthen the economic aspect of cooperation.

In turn, the Turkish Interior Minister said that "our relations with Ukraine were based and are based on partnership and solidarity."

He also stressed during the current uneasy period it is necessary to be together and continue joint cooperation.

The meeting was held in the scope of the 11th Kyiv Security Forum, which is held in the Ukrainian capital on April 12-13.

iyU.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison says that the United States supports Ukraine's aspirations to NATO membership and considers the implementation of the Annual National Programs as real step to make progress along this path.

Ambassador Hutchison said this at the 11th Kyiv Security Forum, organized by Arseniy Yatsenyuk's The Open Ukraine Foundation, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"Accession to NATO membership is a long one for many countries. Nothing is going to happen instantly. The Annual National Program is the next step the NATO and Ukraine can do together. The Annual National Program is a good tool for Ukraine to continue making progress in obtaining membership in NATO. We want your membership in NATO, let me assure you, Hutchison said.

Speaking about Russias reaction to Ukraines possible NATO membership she said it wont be good.

Theres no question, and we saw in Montenegro that Russia gets pretty aggressive when country starts looking towards joining NATO, the Permanent Representative of the United States to NATO said.

Russia is using hybrid warfare, cyber warfare to destabilize the situation in countries that might be looking at NATO membership or NATO partnerships, Ambassador Hutchison added.

olTo expand its empire, Reliance Jio is now eyeing the next big thing for the Indian market. The company is in talks with American chipmaker Qualcomm to bring out a laptop with built-in cellular connection for the Indian market. The laptop that is likely to run on Windows 10 is Reliance Jio's next bet to increase the company's average revenue per user (ARPU).

Senior Director, product management of Qualcomm Technologies, Miguel Nunes said that Jio can take the device and bundle it with data and content. Qualcomm is already working on an 'Always Connected PC' with bigwigs such as HP, Asus and Lenovo globally. Already 14 operators have extended their support for this including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon in the US, as well as major operators in UK, Australia, Germany, France and Italy.

Homegrown Internet of Things brand Smartron is also working with Qualcomm to bring laptops powered by with cellular connectivity.

Counterpoint Research, a global research firm specializing in mobile & technology products, said that almost 5 million laptops are sold every year in India, with most of them utilising Wi-Fi for connectivity, as mentioned in a report by the Economic Times. So needless to say, laptops with cellular connectivity could be the next big thing for ARPU.

Counterpoint Research further mentioned that even if operators can connect a million laptops, that is only 20% of the total sold in a year, to 4G networks by end of next year and can charge Rs 300 to Rs 1,000 per month, operators could generate monthly revenue of Rs 30 crore or close to Rs 360 crore. It could touch Rs 1000 crore a year from these users only.

Qualcomm and Reliance Jio are already working together for a 4G feature phone.Ukraine will officially terminate its cooperation with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and close its representative offices at the relevant institutions in Minsk.

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko stated this in his speech at the 11th Kyiv Security Forum organized by the Arseniy Yatsenyuk Open Ukraine Foundation, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"Taking into account the fact that Ukraine has never been and is not currently a member of the CIS, and the refusal of this structure to condemn the Russian aggression, I would ask that we, together with the government, draw up a proposal for the official termination of our participation in the CIS statutory bodies, as well as the complete closure of the Ukrainian representation at the relevant institutions in Minsk, Poroshenko stated.

He also called on foreign partners to reconsider contractual obligations with the Russian Federation, especially in sensitive areas of cooperation.

iyUkraine will raise the issue of closer cooperation and prospects for membership in the EU and NATO at the upcoming high-level meetings.

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said this at the 11th Kyiv Security Forum, organized by Arseniy Yatsenyuk's The Open Ukraine Foundation, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"It is now time to adopt strategic decisions on determination of the Eastern European borders of the European Union and NATO. I emphasize that there will be no better opportunity. Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia belong to the western alliance and should be the part of it. It is our agenda for the next high-level meetings in NATO and the EU," Poroshenko said.

In particular, Poroshenko noted that he would insist on providing Ukraine with the NATO Enhanced Opportunities Program and the NATO Membership Action Plan. As for the EU, "we will gradually promote the comprehensive sectoral integration alongside the Association Agreement," the President said.

"I am talking about the single digital market, the Energy Union, the association with the Schengen Area, the so-called Eastern Partnership Plus, new ambitious goals and targets for those countries, including Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, who have determined their path," the President of Ukraine underscored.

Poroshenko added that the path had been determined not by the country's leadership, but by the people, who demonstrate a very powerful support for this choice.

olA delegation from Lithuania, headed by Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis, has visited Avdiyivka, a town in Donetsk region located almost three kilometers from the contact line.

Foreign guests were accompanied by Ukraine's Minister for Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons Vadym Chernysh, according to the government portal.

"The delegation visited a symbolic building that was shelled, however, people continue to live there. The delegation also visited an ambulance station in the town of Avdiyivka, which was repaired at the expense of the Lithuanian government. EUR 40,000 was allocated as part of a grant for restoration work," reads the report.

During their trip, the guests met with servicemen and volunteers and passed humanitarian aid to them from the Lithuanian government and the Blue/Yellow charity organization.

The delegation also attended the opening of a children's playground that was constructed at the expense of funds collected by Blue/Yellow, and visited school No. 5.

According to Skvernelis, the purpose of this visit is to show solidarity with Ukraine.

"The Government of Lithuania and our people support Ukraine in a political way and in any other way. The purpose of our visit is to show this solidarity. It's easy to express concern, but it's necessary to be here with you, to feel and see what's going on along the contact line. It's important to see that in the 21st century, in the center of Europe, there are residential buildings that were hit by direct tank attacks," Skvernelis said.

The Lithuanian delegation included, in particular, Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis, Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Darius Skusevicius, and others. The guests were accompanied by Lithuanian Ambassador to Ukraine Marius Janukonis and chairman of the Donetsk military and civil administration Pavlo Zhebrivsky.

opAccording to Ancient Greek literature, the origins of Derinkuyu caves date back to prehistoric times when Phrygians of HellenoPelasgic origin built them out of the soft volcanic rock of Cappadocia, a historical region in Central Anatolia. The Phrygians, who later became Christians, expanded the underground caves to protect themselves during Arab-Byzantine Wars in 1st and 2nd centuries and the Mongolian incursions of Timur in the 14th century. When the city fell to the Ottomans, the underground caves were used as a refuge for the Cappadocian Greeks until 1923 when the Christian inhabitants were expelled during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The tunnels were soon abandoned and long forgotten until in 1963 when a man was renovating his subterranean home and a wall caved in revealing a hidden room. Further exploration showed that it was a deep labyrinth of tunnel networks.

1. The Derinkuyu underground city is located under the town and district of the same name in Nevsehir Province, Turkey, and 40 kilometers from Goreme, another historical town famous for its fairy chimney rock formations.

2. Cappadocia is home to various underground cities including Derinkuyu and Kaymakli with vast defense networks and traps such as large round stone doors throughout their many floors.

3. At 60 to 85 meters (200 to 280 feet), Derinkuyu is the deepest underground city of them all in Cappadocia, while Kaymakli is the widest. The two cities are connected by an eight kilometer (five mile) tunnel.

4. There are over 600 doors to the city that are hidden on the surface in the courtyards of their homes.

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5. The doors are usually rollable, disc-shaped ones that could only be opened and closed from the inside. It also has an early example of peephole through which the inhabitants could see or shoot arrows.

6. The city contains all types of rooms including stables, cellars, storage rooms, water tanks, wine and oil presses, refectories, and chapels. There are also niches for oil lamps.

7. The city could accommodate as many as 20,000 people and still have enough space to house horses, goats, sheep, fowls and their chicks, as well as their fodder.

8. The inhabitants mostly used ladders to descend the levels and the tunnels were used for the animals.

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9. There are at least 15,000 ventilation ducts in Derinkuyu that provide the residents with fresh air even when they are deep within the city.

10. The large 55-meter (180-foot) ventilation shaft was also used as a well to provide water for those both above and below. Not all floors have wells that reach the surface to avoid being poisoned by the enemies during raids.

11. Each level is connected to the next level by a hallway with a round stone door. The passages are narrow to force people to pass in a single file, making it easy to defend if enemies entered the city.

12. The city also has a very spacious chamber with a barrel-vaulted ceiling, which is unique to Derinkuyu, on the second floor. It is believed that the chamber was used as a religious school and the rooms to the left were for studies.

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13. From the third and fourth floor, the way down is via vertical staircases that lead to a cruciform church on the lowest floor.

14. Family rooms and communal places where people could meet, worship or work are connected by an extensive network of tunnels, passages, inclined corridors, and staircases.

15. Derinkuyu also provided the residents protection from the weather which is very hot in summers and very cold in winters.

16. The temperature in the city was stable throughout the year at 12C (55F) which is ideal for keeping the animals, maintaining fresh water supplies, and more importantly for keeping the food fresh.

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17. While there are as many as 18 floors in the city, only eight are accessible now.

18. The entire underground city, as well as some of the houses in the town above, are carved from soft rock made from layers and layers of ash called tuft that spewed from the volcanoes millions of years ago.

19. As many as 200 underground cities, around 40 of them with three or more floors and the rest with a minimum of two floors, were discovered between Nevsehir and Kayseri.

20. Most of these underground cities and structures that were carved out of unique, geological formations are now archaeological tourist attraction sites.

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[Sources: WikipediaThe engineering world has seen some great achievements. However, history has shown that engineering has also faced many terrible failures. Manufacturers, workers, and engineers carry huge responsibilities on their shoulders. A slight miscalculation or a lack of communication has led to some of the worst catastrophes ever. These disasters claimed the lives of many workers and innocent people, not to mention the huge economic loss that followed.

Here, you can gain some insight into such disasters through our chronologically-ordered list of the 14 worst engineering disasters of all time.

1. The SS Sultana steamboat explosion near Memphis, Tennessee in 1865 is the worst maritime disaster in the US history, but it did not get a lot of media coverage that time. People hardly remember this disaster today.

The SS Sultana was a steamboat engineered in Cincinnati and usually sailed on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. The steamboat was state-of-the-art, boasting the most advanced safety equipment for those times.

On 27th April 1865, the steamboat carried approximately 2,300 passengers including released Union prisoners of war, civilians, and the crew. Three of Sultanas four boilers exploded at around 2 a.m., and the steamboat sank around seven miles from Memphis, Tennessee. The death toll was estimated to have been between 1,500-1,800 passengers.

After the investigation, the conclusion was reached that the water levels in the boiler caused this disaster. The crew had overloaded the steamboat (Sultanas carrying capacity was 376) which made the situation worse. Furthermore, the investigation cited that one of the four boilers had been leaking a few days prior to the mishap, and its repair was dubious. The combined effects of these factors led to the unfortunate catastrophe.(source)

2. The Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, 1889. Heavy rains and failure of a neglected dam led to the disaster which caused 2,209 reported deaths, and nearly wiped off the city of Johnstown.

Johnstown was a prosperous town in central Pennsylvania, USA. It was known for its steel production.

The South Fork dam was a poorly maintained dam and hardly strong enough to handle the tremendous pressure from Lake Conemaugh. However, heavy downpours combined with the lakes pressure led to the catastrophic failure of the dam and a terrible flood ensued. 2,209 people reportedly died in the Great Flood of 1889. Moreover, the estimated property damage was around $17 million, a huge sum at that time.

The American Red Cross led the relief effort and they collected around $3.7 million from donations. The flood is a prime example of an engineering failure and poor maintenance.(source)



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3. The Quebec Bridge collapse in Canada was the largest ever cantilever bridge in the world. It collapsed twice, once in 1907 and again in 1916. The disaster killed a reported 88-89 workers.

The Quebec Bridge with its span of 1,801 feet, is still the worlds largest ever cantilever bridge. In fact, the bridge still has its name in the National Historic Site of Canada.

The bridge collapsed the first time on 29th August 1907. During the collapse, the workers were working on the cantilever arm. Fifty-five people reportedly died by either drowning or the falling debris.

The board of engineers felt they had learned from their mistakes and decided to rebuild the bridge with the lower chords of the cantilevers arms several times stronger than before. Yet again, on the 11th September 1916, the bridges central span crumbled killing 13 workers.

The total damage cost of the two disasters was estimated to be $22 million. The incident showed humanity the disastrous effects of engineering failures and improper supervision.(source)

4. The sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912 is a famous catastrophe. The grand British passenger liner sank into the North Atlantic Ocean after hitting an iceberg. It is reported that 1,514 passengers died. The accident incurred an estimated economic loss of $7.5 million.

The world had declared RMS Titanic a legend even before its maiden voyage. When the ship set sail from Southampton to New York, the crew was so assured about Titanics safety that they carried only 20 lifeboats. This was barely enough for half of the 2,200 passengers.

Four days after the voyage began, the ship struck an iceberg at 11:40 p.m on 14 April 1912. The collision proved deadly as the icy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean soon filled the ship. The death toll was 1,514 passengers. Later on, the liner Carpathia rescued 705 survivors.

According to the builders, Titanic should have stayed afloat for at least two more days despite the collision. After several investigations, conclusions came out that the grand liner had several design flaws and material failures. The collision with iceberg caused a fracture of the brittle hull steel and the wrought iron rivets. The fracture was immediate and it was a result of a combination of three factors: low temperature, high impact loading, and high sulfur content in the hull steel.(1,2)



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5. The Hindenburg airship disaster in 1937 during a docking attempt in New Jersey, USA caused 36 fatalities, and the catastrophe marked the end of airship travel.

The German LZ-129 Hindenburg was the biggest commercial airship ever built. Moreover, at that time, it was technologically the most advanced airship. Its size was three times that of a Boeing 747, and it was capable of a top speed of 84 mph.

The mishap occurred on 6 May 1937. The Hindenburg was carrying 97 passengers when it exploded filling the sky over New Jersey with fiery smoke. The gigantic airship fell to the ground on its tail and burned to ashes within a minute. Sixty-two passengers leaped over dozens of feet to their safety and managed to survive.

The cause of the accident was a hydrogen gas leak from the fuel cells which combined with oxygen to form a highly flammable mixture. This mixture ignited and spawned a massive fire. It was the first engineering mishap caught on film, and it shattered the publics confidence in airships.(source)

6. The Tacoma Bridge collapse of 1940 in Washington, USA was a calamity of the worlds third longest suspension bridge back then and had a crucial impact on engineering. It caused the governing of the modeling of all the long-span bridges in the future.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was an iconic, long-span bridge built in the state of Washington in the USA in the 1930s. It was opened to traffic on t July 1940. Leon Moisseiff planned the buildings design to be far more flexible than the acceptable standard ratios.

On 7 November 1940, strong winds of 40 mph battered the area and the bridge oscillated significantly. The bridge towers were made of strong, structural carbon steel, yet they proved no match for the violent movements which eventually caused the bridge to collapse. Fortunately, there were no fatalities except for a dog. The estimated loss from the mishap was $6.4 million.

The disaster is now presented in popular physics textbooks as an illustration of elementary forced-resonance. The high-velocity winds caused aero-elastic flutter at a frequency equaling the bridges natural frequency. Furthermore, the bridge was vulnerable to wind-generated vibrations, and the investigations proved that the collapse was inevitable.(source)

7. The failure of the Banqiao Dam in China in 1975, now a forgotten legacy, is arguably the worst engineering disaster of all time. Estimates tell that an unprecedented 171,000 to 230,000 people died in the calamity while 11 million more people had to relocate.

The Banqiao Dam was built on the river of Ru in June 1952. The design of the dam gave it the name iron dam as it was considered unbreakable. However, Chen Xing, a prominent hydrologist of the country warned that the overbuilding of dams and reservoirs could increase the water table beyond safe levels and cause a disaster. The government removed Chen from the project.

Chens warnings turned out to be true when in August 1975, Henan Provinces Banqiao Dam toppled. The flooding killed an estimated 171,000 to 230,000 people and forced 11 million people to displace. Moreover, the disaster caused a staggering economic loss of approximately $1.6 billion.

This disaster was a culmination of many factors including unsafe construction, poor design and maintenance, overbuilding of dams in the region, and the typhoon Nina which precipitated the disaster.(source)Her health has deteriorated.

Member of Parliament in Ukraine Nadiia Savchenko says her hunger strike will last until she is freed.

"I'm on hunger strike until the day I am free and able to fully defend myself in courts and protect myself, my family, my relatives and the people of Ukraine, until I can act as a full-fledged Member of Parliament and politician," she wrote on Facebook on April 12.

Read alsoSavchenko loses 15 kg during hunger strike

"My condition as of today, 11.04.2018: the condition has deteriorated because of hunger strike, it's not critical, being within the norm," she added.

As UNIAN reported, the Verkhovna Rada on March 22 green-lighted the arrest of Member of Parliament Nadiia Savchenko, a former Ukrainian pilot released from a Russian prison as part of a prisoner-of-war exchange.

Ukraine's prosecutors charged Savchenko with plotting a coup and an act of terror in Ukraine, following an elaborate sting operation by SBU Security Service agents, who initially targeted former hostage swap negotiator Volodymyr Ruban. The latter is believed to have conspired with Savchenko. Savchenko is suspected of 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.

On March 23, Kyiv's Shevchenkivsky district court ruled that Savchenko be remanded in custody for 59 days without bail. She announced in the courtroom she would go on hunger strike, denying plans to flee Ukraine.

On March 29, Kyiv's Court of Appeals upheld the decision of the first instance court to keep Savchenko behind bars for a period of 59 days until May 20.The president urges foreign partners to review contractual obligations with respect to Russia.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko offers to prepare proposals on the official termination of Ukraine's participation in the statutory bodies of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Read alsoPoroshenko on Russian aggression in Ukraine, Syria: World no longer accepts we are not there claim

"Taking into account that Ukraine has never been a member of the CIS and this structure refuses to condemn Russian aggression, I would ask that we jointly with the government prepare proposals for the official termination of our participation in the statutory bodies of the CIS, as well as the final closure of Ukraine's representation at the relevant institutions in Minsk," Poroshenko said at the opening of the 11th Kyiv Security Forum, an UNIAN correspondent reports.

At the same time, the president said the entire legal framework, concluded by Ukraine within the framework of the CIS, should be examined for compliance with the national interests of the state.

"I would like to take this opportunity to urge our foreign partners to review contractual obligations with respect to Russia, first of all, in sensitive areas of cooperation," Poroshenko added.Unlike Romania, Hungary has been blocking Ukraine's further rapprochement with NATO and the EU over disagreements on the language of instruction in national minority schools.

The Romanian government considers it necessary to continue the dialogue with Ukraine in a multilateral format, particularly within NATO, despite the unresolved dispute under Art. 7 of the education law, according to State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania Danut Neculaescu, who addressed the Kyiv Security Forum Thursday.

Neculaesu reiterated Romania's support for reforms in Ukraine and the need to support these reforms in all possible formats.

In particular, he noted that the changes required also relate to the issue of minority rights.

Read alsoRussia's covert campaign underway to inflame East Europe - mediaThe fact that the Romanian minority in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government have not yet reached an agreement on the language of instruction in schools is not a reason to block the development of Ukraine's relations with international structures, the diplomat believes.

Romania is ready to continue discussions in all formats - NATO, EU and a bilateral format, according to Neculaescu.

On a separate note, the diplomat reaffirmed Bucharest's non-recognition of the annexation of Crimea by Russia.

As reported earlier, unlike Romania, Hungary has been blocking Ukraine's further rapprochement with NATO and the EU over disagreements on the language of instruction in national minority schools.No Ukrainian soldiers were killed or wounded in action.

Russia's hybrid military forces attacked Ukrainian army positions in Donbas 38 times in the past 24 hours.

"In the Donetsk sector, the aggressor used proscribed 120mm and 82mm mortars, as well as grenade launchers of various systems to attack Ukrainian fortified positions near the village of Pisky and Butivka coal mine. The enemy resorted to 82mm mortars near the village of Novotroyitske, while positions near the village of Kamianka were attacked by a tank," the press center of the headquarters of Ukraine's military operations reported on Facebook Thursday morning.

Read alsoFamily of four killed as IED hits car on contact line in Donbas

Grenade launchers were used to attack the defenders of the towns of Avdiyivka and Maryinka, and the villages of Talakivka, Vodiane and Pyshchevyk, while heavy machine guns were used to fire at the defenders of the villages of Kamianka, Hnutove, Opytne, Vodiane, Pisky, Novotroyitske and Pavlopil. Moreover, the defenders of the villages of Hnutove, Pisky, Nevelske and Pyshchevyk were attacked by infantry fighting vehicles, the report says.

In addition, the enemy used small arms to shoot at the Ukrainian positions near Avdiyivka, and the villages of Lebedynske, Kamianka, Talakivka, Vodiane and Hnutove, and Butivka mine. Furthermore, a sniper was active near Maryinka.

In the Luhansk sector, the Russian occupation forces opened fire from 120mm mortars at the Ukrainian fortified positions near the village of Troyitske, as well as small arms were used to shoot at the defenders of the village of Stanytsia Luhanska.

No Ukrainian soldiers were killed or wounded in action, the report said.White House press secretary Sarah Sanders insisted on Wednesday that a missile strike remains one of the many options on the table.

Two U.S. Navy destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles are in position and ready to be called into action, among other assets including jets and submarines should President Donald Trump make good on his threat to order a military strike on targets in Syria.

Trump caught most of his aides and the Pentagon off-guard on Wednesday by declaring on Twitter that "nice and new and 'smart'" missiles would soon be fired toward Syria  an announcement that came before an agreement had been reached between key U.S. allies, multiple American and Western officials said, CNN said.

Read alsoDoomsday grocery set: Russian media prepare citizens for bunker survival

Top military officials were at the White House on Wednesday afternoon to discuss options for Syria, according to senior aides, and a decision on how to respond to the weekend's chemical attack had not yet been made when Trump took to Twitter, people familiar with the discussions said.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders insisted on Wednesday that a missile strike remains one of the many options on the table and said the President's tweet does not complicate the planning of a U.S. response.

Defense Secretary James Mattis said Wednesday that the U.S. is "still assessing the intelligence" on the recent chemical attack but noted that the U.S. military is on standby should Trump give the order for a strike.

"We stand ready to provide military options if they are appropriate as the President determined," he said.

Mattis also ignored a question about whether he was concerned about telegraphing U.S. military moves in Syria, a question appearing to refer to Trump's earlier tweet on Wednesday.Tips on How Homework Help Can Assist Students 12 April, 2018



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Woke Bingo The post was contributed by Domyhomeworkfor.me  leading homework help service.



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In this article, we will present some helpful hints about how homework help can help students who find it difficult to complete these tasks.



Homework Help Tools



Hw Pic



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Wolfram Alpha



For college students who are poor in Math, the struggle is real. They need all the extra help they can get in solving their homework. This is a software app (iOS and android) that helps higher level Math students get the equations done and the formulas solved. No actual solutions are offered in this case, online references serve up step by step solutions, without an actual answer being provided. That still comes from the student who has to complete the homework using Wolfram as a guide.



Slader



Slader is a crowd sourcing app that allows the students from across the word to help each other out in completing their homework. Most common academic and Math questions have already been solved and uploaded to the system for student reference, making the job of completing homework based on any subject easier to solve. It promotes learning by encouraging students to ask each other questions and deliver responses. Information sharing helps the students to complete their homework in a faster period than they normally would without the academic exchange of thoughts. Not all of the service is free for this app though. Some more difficult homework that students have, or if the students require further clarification, may require a small fee to be paid for the service.



Homework Helper



When Baidu, the Chinese owned search company first launched their services in 2016, the company did not think that it would have over 5 million downloads. The concept works on the idea that by posting photos of homework to a crowdsourcing platform, the students will get better help. The best student responses are awarded with e-coins for students to collect. These can be traded for actual items such as an Iphone.



Aside from the freely available apps and crowdsourcing platforms for academic help, there are also other avenues of help that a student can take advantage of. Sometimes, they can look for professionals who are more than happy to guide them in their learning process on a personalized basis.



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While assignment help can also be sought through group study after school, this also creates a problematic way of learning for some students who dont function well in a group setting. The question then becomes, how and where does a student seek homework help that will not create more problems rather than solutions? Is there a place where a student wont waste time in seeking accurate responses to his homework? Where does the help really exist?



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Images:

All photos have a creative common licenseMrs May is likely to make the case for military action on the basis that it is necessary to deter future gas attacks.

Theresa May has cleared the way for Britain to join a US-led military attack on Syria within days after national security advisers presented new evidence blaming President Assad for the "barbaric" gas attack in Douma.

The prime minister is recalling cabinet ministers from their Easter break to seek approval today. She is set to defy calls, including from Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, to follow recent convention and allow MPs a vote, The Times reported.

Polling for The Times indicates that only a fifth of voters believe that Britain should launch missiles on Syrian military targets. More than two fifths oppose action, with the remainder undecided.

Senior ministers summoned to this afternoon's emergency cabinet will be asked to "consider the next steps", according to a Downing Street source. Mrs May is likely to make the case for military action on the basis that it is necessary to deter future gas attacks.

Read alsoCNN: U.S. destroyers, subs, jets could answer Trump's Syria strike call

She readied the country for its first military action against another government since the 2011 Libya campaign by saying that the use of chemical weapons "cannot go unchallenged".

Royal Navy attack submarines, armed with cruise missiles, are understood to be moving into range from this evening to be ready to take part in a strike on Syria. A Type 45 destroyer is also in the Mediterranean on a routine deployment but could be manoeuvred to participate. HMS Duncan is fitted with an air defence missile system able to blast incoming Russian missiles. RAF fast jets operating from Cyprus are also ready for action. "We have planes on the tarmac in Akrotiri," a Whitehall source said. "We are ready."

After repeatedly emphasising the need for more evidence, Mrs May said yesterday that "all the indications" were that the Syrian regime had carried out the "shocking, barbaric" attack in which at least 40 people, including children, died on Saturday.

The prime minister's decision to confirm that Douma had come under gas attack and to lay the blame at Assad's door brings her public position into line with that of President Trump and President Macron. It is understood that she was presented with additional intelligence at a meeting of national security advisers yesterday.Pompeo's remarks touch on the biggest foreign policy issues faced by the U.S., a reflection of how many daunting challenges the administration faces.

President Donald Trump's nominee for secretary of state, CIA director Mike Pompeo, will say at his confirmation hearing Thursday that a milder American policy toward Russia is "now over" and promise that the State Department will find its "swagger once again," according to his prepared remarks.

Read alsoCNN: U.S. destroyers, subs, jets could answer Trump's Syria strike call

"Russia continues to act aggressively, enabled by years of soft policy toward that aggression," Pompeo will tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to the remarks. "That's now over. The list of this administration's actions to raise the cost for Vladimir Putin is long," Bloomberg wrote.

Pompeo will seek to convince skeptical senators that President Donald Trump  who until recently had resisted criticizing Putin directly  is determined to get tough on the Russian leader. Pompeo will also distance himself from the management style of his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, who was accused of weakening morale and de-emphasizing the importance of human rights and U.S. values overseas.

His remarks touch on the biggest foreign policy issues faced by the U.S., a reflection of how many daunting challenges the administration faces. On Iran, he'll tell senators that he will work with U.S. allies to fix the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, which Trump has threatened to withdraw from. He also will say there's "no higher diplomatic task" than resolving the North Korean nuclear threat.A wider strike also would likely require the involvement of more assets, such as aircraft carriers from the United States.

The United States is building a coalition against Syria to respond to an alleged chemical weapons attack on April 7 against civilians and rebel forces in Douma, near Damascus. The primary objective of an operation against Syria will be to deter the further use of chemical weapons, something that a punitive missile strike launched last April by the United States did only temporarily.

This time around, however, a U.S.-led strike against Syria likely would be wider in scope, aiming not only to deter Damascus, but also to impair the Syrian government's ability to carry out chemical weapons attacks. But even with the support of a coalition, and even with a bigger operational scope, the same factors that constrained the United States in April 2017 would also constrain a military operation this time, the U.S.-based private intelligence firm Stratfor wrote.

There are, however, some important differences between last year and now. Last April, the United States acted alone when it launched cruise missiles at Syria's Shayrat air base, which was alleged to be the starting point for a sarin gas attack on the town of Khan Shaykhun. This time, a wider operation could involve multiple strikes across several days and would necessitate significantly more forces, including likely coalition members France and the United Kingdom. It is possible Saudi Arabia, Qatar and/or the United Arab Emirates could be involved in a hosting and facilitation capacity. More remotely, one or any of these states might involve themselves militarily. The Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani visited the White House on April 10. The inclusion within a coalition of Qatar and members of the Gulf Cooperation Council has a chance of creating limited military cooperation between the council's feuding states.

The operation could expand relative to the Shayrat airstrike to focus on degrading the Syrian government's capability to deliver chemical weapons. French President Emmanuel Macron gave greater weight to the possibility of a wider operation when he said on April 10 that France would target Syria's chemical facilities in a strike. The new round of strikes might include Dumeir, Marj Ruhayyil and Mezzeh air bases around Damascus, which have been instrumental to the government's offensive in eastern Ghouta. They also may include a wider range of other locations associated with Syria's chemical weapons program.

Because a coalition strike would include a widened target set, Stratfor is looking closely for the additional deployment of U.S. and allied forces to the Middle East. Regionally, the largest bases for potential use in an operation against Syria are the U.S. base at al-Udeid in Qatar and British military bases in Cyprus; increased military activity at these locations may indicate the scope of an impending attack.

A wider target set could necessitate basing and securing access for attack routes from Turkey, Jordan and Iraq, which would require negotiations to acquire their consent. While the United States is already in conversation with Iraq on the issue of a potential strike, Baghdad's close ties with Iran might force it to deny the United States and its partners a flight path through Iraq. Iraq's need to balance its interests between its ties to Iran and to the United States was clear after the 2017 Khan Shaykhun attack, when Iraq's government condemned the use of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians but questioned whether Damascus was culpable.

A wider strike also would likely require the involvement of more assets, such as aircraft carriers from the United States. The USS Harry S. Truman and its support ships are scheduled to leave Norfolk, Virginia, for the Mediterranean and Middle East on April 11, while the USS Theodore Roosevelt and its fleet may redeploy from the Pacific. It will take the USS Truman a week to arrive in the Mediterranean.

The broader the campaign against Syria the greater the risk to Russian forces in the country. The political fallout of Russian deaths from U.S.-led strikes will depend on if the Russians killed are military members or private military contractors. Private military contractors already have been killed by direct U.S. action in Syria with minimal fallout, leaving open the question of how Russia would react if regulars were to be killed in a U.S.-led campaign. The United States may attempt to mitigate this risk, as it did in April 2017, by warning Russia of impending strikes. The Russian presence in Syria  which is mostly concentrated in Tartous, Latakia and Damascus  also limits U.S. options to a defined set of targets. A more holistic campaign would increase the risk of collision with Russian forces. In contrast, striking Iranian forces in Syria has fewer implications for the United States. This was most recently evinced when Israel struck the T4 air base in Syria on April 8, killing several Iranians, without immediate retaliation from Iran.

Meanwhile, in the diplomatic realm, the United States has called for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to investigate this weekend's attack. The organization has already said it will send investigators to Douma (Russia and Syria are cooperating), but as was clear in 2017, the launch of an investigation will not necessarily delay military action. The longer any potential operation goes on, as well, the more likely that political constraints, such as the U.S. War Powers Act, come into play.Currently, Canada has a small number of special operations forces troops still deployed in northern Iraq to assist local forces in their fight against Daesh, along with Griffon helicopters.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says that Canada's military will not participate in expected strikes against the Syrian regime that are meant as retaliation for a suspected chemical attack against civilians.

Speaking to Radio-Canada, the prime minister said Canadian military personnel are already involved in missions in northern Iraq and Latvia and will be deploying to Mali. "We are not looking to be present in Syria," Trudeau said in an interview, The Star reported.

But he said Canada has been involved in delivering humanitarian assistance and working through diplomatic and political channels to resolve the conflict in Syria that has laid waste to cities, left thousands dead and forced citizens to flee to safety in neighboring countries.

U.S. President Donald Trump warned Wednesday of an imminent strike on Syria, declaring on social media that missiles "will be coming" and taunted Russia for its pledge to shoot them down.

"Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and "smart!" Trump said on Twitter.

Read alsoThe signs, options and risks of a U.S. strike on Syria  Stratfor

The threatened action comes after an attack last weekend in the Syrian town of Douma that possibly involved chemical weapons, which is believed to have killed 40 people. The attack is blamed on the government of President Bashar al-Assad though it has denied responsibility.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland condemned the attack at the time, saying the "repeated and morally reprehensible use of chemical weapons" by the Assad regime has been confirmed by independent observers.

"Canada condemns the Assad regime  and its backers, Russia and Iran  for its repeated, gross violations of human rights and continued, deliberate targeting of civilians," Freeland said in a statement.

Trump has spoken to world leaders and U.S. officials said the U.S., France and Britain discussed the possibility of a military strike, according to a report by The Associated Press.

Canada did have CF-18 fighters jets in the region flying bombing mission against Daesh extremists in Iraq. That mission  launched by the previous Conservative government  was halted by Trudeau's Liberal government after it took office in 2015.

Currently, Canada has a small number of special operations forces troops still deployed in northern Iraq to assist local forces in their fight against Daesh, along with Griffon helicopters. A CC-150 Polaris air-to-air refueller is also still flying missions, refuelling other fighters in their patrol missions.The naval chief said his priority one is boosting the numbers of surface ships.

Sweden, one of the only non-NATO aligned nations on the Baltic Sea, is developing a range of naval assets, the chief of its navy said Monday.

The acquisitions come as Sweden seeks to revitalize its total defense concept  to defend against an unnamed neighboring adversary. Sweden has similar plans during the Cold War, but allowed them to expire as its relationship with Russia improved, according to Defense News.

On Monday, Rear Adm. Jens Nykvist, chief of the Swedish navy, said at the Sea-Air-Space Expo outside Washington, D.C., his nations sea force must be focused on high end and grey zone threats on the Baltic Sea  and be ready for any regional conflicts.

We are the ones who will find the trigger, Nykvist said of such threats. We need to be out there, also there in the grey zone  to be ready to act and also, of course, have the right equipment to be able to stop someone before something happens.

Read alsoSweden sends leaflets to 5 mln homes on how to prepare for war with RussiaNykvist said Swedish naval cooperation with the other non-NATO aligned nation on the Baltic Sea, Finland, is increasing. It reached initial operational capability in December 2017, and is due to reach full operational capability in 2023.

Future development falls under the watchwords of mobility, flexibility, stealth and cooperation, Nykvist said.

The naval chief said his priority one is boosting the numbers of surface ships.

His goals include midlife upgrades to the fleets Visby-class corvettes in the mid-2020s, boosting the numbers of amphibious battalions to place more marines along the Swedish coastlines and boosting the numbers of submarines to six.

Ongoing plans include two next-generation A26 submarines, which are being built Kockums, Saabs shipyard in Malmo.

Theres also a mid-life upgrade on the Gotland-class submarines such that its equipment nearly matches the A26.

Beside a mid-life upgrade of two Gavle-class corvettes, a mid-life upgrade of Swedish amphibious corps combat boats is on tap.

For munitions, the Swedish navy has ordered a new anti-submarine warfare torpedo and the RBS-15 Mk3 anti-ship missile.

Thats very good for me, because I will have the weapons necessary for this environment and for the future to come, Nykvist said.While it must take a good deal of creativity to be able to produce dozens of different disinformation narratives about the Salisbury incident, it would seem almost impossible to provide some justification for the tactics of spreading multiple disinformation narratives.

British authorities are trying to ridicule Russia for spreading 30 versions of what happened [in the Skripal poisoning case]. Yes, there are many explanations for lack of facts and evidence, but in Russia everyone just wants to understand this murky story.

This was the message delivered earlier this week by Russias representative at the United Nations Security Council. Kafka is spinning in his grave, Konstantin Eggert, a news host and commentator from the independent Russian TV Rain (Dozhd), commented on his Twitter account, EUvsDisinformaion task force reports.

While it must take a good deal of creativity to be able to produce dozens of different disinformation narratives about the Salisbury incident, it would seem almost impossible to provide some justification for the tactics of spreading multiple disinformation narratives with the aim to confuse and distract; but now we know the Kremlins line to take: It is in fact a sign of Russian truth-seeking.

Read alsoThe Times: Leaked emails expose Russian dirty tricksAt a second glance, this rhetorical exercise is not that surprising. Indeed, it follows classical lines in the Kremlin propaganda textbook: 1) Use one of your opponents key values (in this case the importance of free public debates); 2) Twist reality to make the situation plausible also in Western terms (in this case by way of ignoring the fact that the disinformation narratives are deliberately pushed by the authorities own media machinery); and 3) use the outcome to disprove your own guilt and accuse your opponent of hypocrisy. In this way, it is also a roundabout form of whataboutism; another classic in pro-Kremlin disinformation. However, at the end of the day, it is also simply a confession that yes, Russias authorities endorse the disinformation campaign; a campaign to which these authorities are themselves very active contributors.Foreign secretary Boris Johnson called the results "conclusive."

Independent chemical weapons scientists have confirmed that "high purity" novichok was used in the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Tests carried out by experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) showed the nerve agent was found in environmental samples collected in Salisbury, according to Sky News.

Blood tests also revealed that the chemical was found in blood samples taken from the Skripals and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, the police officer who first attended the scene.

Read alsoYulia Skripal discharged from hospital, taken to secure location  media

The report from the OPCW says the chemical was "high purity" with a complete absence of contaminants.

Foreign secretary Boris Johnson called the results "conclusive."

"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record," he said.

The tests were carried out by four independent laboratories affiliated with OPCW and samples were transported under a "full chain of custody", the report said.

It did not name novichok directly but said: "The results of the analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirms the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people."

Tests by military experts at the Porton Down laboratories in Wiltshire found that novichok, one of a group of deadly chemical compounds developed by the Soviet government in the 1970s and 1980s, was responsible for the poisoning.

Russia has strongly denied involvement in the Skripal's poisoning and challenged the UK assessment that novichok was to blame.

The OPCW was tasked with identifying the chemical, not with attributing its origin or ascertaining blame for the poisoning.Trump says the United States has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said an attack on Syria "could be very soon or not so soon at all."

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'" he wrote on Twitter on April 12, 2018.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2018

As UNIAN reported earlier, two U.S. Navy destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles are in position and ready to be called into action, among other assets including jets and submarines should President Donald Trump make good on his threat to order a military strike on targets in Syria.The meeting is expected to be held next week.

London insists on holding a UN Security Council meeting in the light of the report published by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the case of Salisbury poisoning of a former GRU officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

"The UK has called for UNSC meeting on the OPCW report on the Salisbury incident," Britain's Permanent Mission to the UN tweeted on Thursday.

"We expect this to be held next week," the diplomats wrote.

As UNIAN reported earlier, independent chemical weapons scientists have confirmed that "high purity" novichok was used in the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Tests carried out by experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) showed the nerve agent was found in environmental samples collected in Salisbury, Sky News reported.

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called the results "conclusive."

"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record," he said.The assault was launched immediately after a base housing U.S.-backed fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces and U.S. military advisers was attacked.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo has said that a "couple hundred Russians" were killed in eastern Syria during U.S. artillery and air strikes in early February, an attack that remains shrouded in mystery.

The comments by Pompeo, which came during his testimony before a Senate committee on April 12, was a rare open acknowledgment by a top U.S. official about the incident, RFE/RL reports.

"In Syria, now, a handful of weeks ago the Russians met their match. A couple hundred Russians were killed. The list of actions that this administration has taken... I'm happy to walk through each of them but I don't want to take up more time," he said.

Read alsoVideo released of U.S. massive airstrike on Russian mercenariesU.S. military commanders had previously said that a massive ground and air assault was launched on February 7 against a column of fighters and weaponry in the eastern Syrian province of Deir al-Zor.

The assault was launched immediately after a base housing U.S.-backed fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces and U.S. military advisers was attacked.

U.S. officials earlier said more than 100 pro-government Syrian fighters had been killed, and that AC-130 gunships, F-15 and F-22 fighter jets, and Apache helicopter gunships had been used in the U.S. assault, along with Marine Corps artillery units.

No U.S. personnel were injured in the attack.

A few days after the attack, U.S. officials revealed that U.S. commanders had utilized a special "hot line" to communicate directly with their Russian counterparts, before, during, and after the attack.

Read alsoRussian military "advised" to quit social networksU.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis later called the attack "perplexing."

In Moscow, Russian officials said no uniformed Russian troops were involved in the attack.

Russian and Western news media, including RFE/RL, have sought out relatives of those killed, trying to tally the casualty figures.Top 5 Best Ways of Generating New Ideas 12 April, 2018



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Woke Bingo Many students find it very difficult to write a simple essay, leave alone a dissertation or a master thesis. This is a common struggle and even worse enough when they receive harsh and awful comments from their examiners about the irrelevance of their essay idea, plagiarized or poorly structured essays. Enthusiastic students are constantly looking for ways to expand their knowledge about essays. But the question remains, how can they generate new ideas for their essay?



Here a reader can find five best ways students can use to write a powerful essay for their mid or final exam.



1. Consulting freelance platforms



Thousands of academic freelancers are available and talented to recommend new ideas for an essay. Okessay has expert essay writers well-acquainted to offer online writing services at affordable prices. Students are only expected to upload clear and detailed instructions about their essay, and expert writers will work on their project. Moreover, consulting freelance platform helps cut on costs. Students will be able to save some funds that would have been used to purchase an expensive textbook or to hire a tuition teacher who might indubitably have demanded a fixed salary. Freelancers offer quality services at pocket-friendly prices hence delivering the quality and useful essay ideas at a fraction of expected costs.



As a college student, you are expected to write extensively and argue your points logically according to what you understood in class. Written assignments ranging from research papers, term papers, dissertations, thesis and coursework require a generation of competent ideas. All these assignments are expected to test your writing competencies, and skills learned in class. All these ideas and skills can be obtained from reliable freelancing companies offering online writing services to students.



2. Extensive reading



Reading intensively is significant, but students will not be confident and critical thinkers compared to if they read extensively. Reading extensively is crucial because students become fluent readers grasping complex concepts and ideas that can be used to formulate an excellent essay. Research shows that reading extensively makes students come across a wide range of empirical information that enhances a general understanding about a particular research topic. In addition to an immediate aim of reading extensively, fluency and speed are attained hence linking an aspect of comprehensive analyses of key issues discussed in their readings.



According to a research conducted by the Alliance for Excellent Education, reading extensively leads to improving comprehension skills of what is being read. It is recommendable that instructors need to increase the complexity of questions and lectures given to a student to set them off to read extensively. This reinforces the skills of thinking comprehensively to submit quality solutions to questions asked during exams.



3. Choose interesting topics



Writing from your point of view and expertise is effective in generating new ideas about an essay topic. This is because essay ideas will be generated promptly hence reducing the time that would have been spent on one research. Researching your area of expertise will only target at expanding your previous knowledge and ideas about the essay topic. In an aim of determining a topic in an area of expertise, students need to imagine preparing an expert speech to an audience who cherish their skills.



Having the full and authoritative understanding of your audience provides an opportunity to communicate efficiently according to stipulated speech ideas. Similarly, being confident about previous knowledge achieved in class proposes some topical ideas that when well-research would yield a high-quality research paper because it is centered on your expertise. Moreover, selecting interesting topic makes it easier to complete an essay paper in time. Most students avoid topic ideas drawn from their perspective of reasoning or due to possibilities of negative comments from their colleagues or instructors. However, this should not be the case, choosing an interesting topic is the beginning of generating best ideas for your essay.



4. Asking lecturers and colleagues



To ensure that essay ideas gained a professional and unique reputation, an extensive discussion between students and teachers must be conducted. Students should be willing to grasp and generate substantial information about the essay topic. Discussions also provide more clarity of advantages and disadvantages of working on a particular essay and the possibilities of achieving course objectives when student work on those essay topics. Moreover, asking questions during discussions is effective to draw precise and in-depth analyses of what you are expected to write. Points and responses are recording and researched further to producing a professional essay paper.



Collaborating with lecturers leads to understanding essay instructions more clearly hence making it easier to come up with new ideas and tuned research explanations about a given topic. Moreover, teachers have expert knowledge about the issue and resources that could be useful to gain the full understanding and instructional details about the problem. Most significantly, collaborating with teachers makes them feel that you are well-planned and consistent in their lectures hence willing to expand on essay instructions and even provide recommended essay ideas. Lastly, teachers are well-versed with a different perspective of reasoning and how students can draw quality ideas about a topic. In that regard, collaboration reveals lecturers sense of accountability.



5. Practice



Practice makes perfect and that why students are advice to uphold the challenge that comes with drafting an expert essay. Students find it difficult to learn new and complex concepts especially those studying hard courses. During the process of learning, students need to accept mistakes and learn from them. Students need to take necessary risks and efforts to invest in learning and implementing new ideas. Challenging yourself is more successful when students reward themselves whenever they achieve certain academic goals like completing a long dissertation paper. Practice makes the process of generating new ideas easier and successful whenever needed.



Final Verdict



When students use the above strategies to formulate their essays, they will develop logical reasoning reflected in a written form. When ideas are recorded and the best writing style determined, it is certain that students will expand their knowledge of critical thinking and talk.(@rukhshanmir)

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Thursday advised the authorized dealers in foreign exchange to adopt the Protection of Economic Reforms (Amendment) Ordinance- 2018.

KARACHI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Thursday advised the authorized dealers in foreign exchange to adopt the Protection of Economic Reforms (Amendment) Ordinance- 2018.

Hence, section 5 of the Protection of Economic Reforms Act- 1992 has been amended.Through a circular dated April12, 2018 addressed to Presidents/Chief Executives of all Authorized Dealers in Foreign Exchange, the Central Bank mentioned that para 1(iv), Chapter 6 of Foreign Exchange Manual-2017 had been revised as under:Now, the foreign Currency accounts can be fed by remittances received from abroad, travelers cheques issued outside Pakistan (whether in the name of account holder or in the name of any other person) and foreign exchange generated by encashment of securities issued by the Government of Pakistan.

A foreign currency account of a citizen of Pakistan resident in Pakistan can also be fed with cash foreign currency only if the account holder is a filer as defined in Income Tax Ordinance, 2001.All other instructions on the subject shall remain unchanged.State Bank also advised the authorized dealers to bring the above instructions to the notice of all their constituents and ensure meticulous compliance.Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are going to shut down the offshore Al-Khafji crude field in their shared Neutral Zone mere five months after its opening in December which is expected to remove 140,000 barrels per day in output from market, industry-specific media reported on Monday

The exchange rate of Pakistani rupee lost 28 paisas against US dollar in the interbank on Friday against US dollar to close at Rs 160.37 compared to the last closing of Rs 160.09

Iran is prepared for the worst-case scenario and has all it takes to respond to any provocation by the United States against its tankers transporting oil to Venezuela, government spokesman Ali Rabiei said on Monday

Records 16901 To 16925 (Total 65727 Records)

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There is much difference between currency rates in Pakistan and foreign currency rates. This site provides you all information about open market currency rates, open market currency rates in Pakistan and currency exchange rates. International currency rates and open market currency rates are found here. Business news contains the information about gold rates, currency rates, foreign currency rates, currency rates Pakistan, bitcoin news and bullion rates in Pakistan. Daily business news and today business news can be read here. Urdu Point provides top business news for the readers. Open market currency rates and foreign currency rates matter in business news. To read all types of business news, top business news, latest business and currency news, bitcoin news and gold rates visit Urdu Point.A six day-long 9th annual book fair organized by the Dawah Academy of the International Islamic University, Islamabad (IIUI) commenced here which was inaugurated by Dr Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri, Director General of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) along with IIUI President, Dr Ahmed Yousif Al-Draiweesh.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Apr, 2018 ) :A six day-long 9th annual book fair organized by the Dawah Academy of the International Islamic University, Islamabad (IIUI) commenced here which was inaugurated by Dr Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri, Director General of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) along with IIUI President, Dr Ahmed Yousif Al-Draiweesh.

The book-fair of the academy is its known tradition which has witnessed a mentionable response as it started on Wednesday where people from all walks of life from the twin cities participated and took keen interest in the books which were being sold with discount.

As many as 50 renowned publishers from across the country have set their book stalls in Dawah Book Fair which will continue till April16 and books are being sold at 50 percent discounted rates. Inaugural ceremony was also attended by Director Dawah Academy Dr Sohail Hassan and other high-ups of university and academy.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Al-Draiweesh said that IIUI would keep working to educate young minds of Ummah according to the Islamic values. He lauded the organizers of the book fair and hoped that this tradition will continue.

He said that such activities are necessary for creating awareness about knowledge in the society. He maintained that IIUI is playing key role in disseminating Islamic values and IIUI's Dawah academy's role is appreciable in regard of preaching true image of islam and discouraging violent attitudes.

The President IIUI also hailed academy's session of Quran and Hadith. He was of the view that Muslim societies have been facing negative propaganda which must be dealt by forming a roadmap to let the world know that Islam is religion of peace and there is no place for terrorism and extremism in Islam.

He also highlighted importance of acquiring education and knowledge in Islam. President IIUI said knowledge is of vital importance in Islam as first revelation even started with the word IQRA. President IIU further said that books play vital role in shaping the society and develop social and cultural values.

He furthered that books are the most important source to disseminate Islam's message to the world. Dr Al-Draiweesh said that Quran and Sunnah are the basic sources of all the branches of knowledge and seeking knowledge is obligatory for Muslims.

He was of the view that contemporary time has diverted the trends towards modern gadgets but such efforts to organize book fairs are good source to promote culture of book reading. Earlier, in his opening remarks, Dr Sohail Hassan welcomed all the representatives of book publishers and briefed the participants about book fair.

He said trend of book reading has declined and such book fairs play vital role to promote reading culture. He also told that academy was also mulling to organize an international book-fair next year.(@FahadShabbir)

The leaders of Movement for Restoration of Bahawalpur Province has rejected the idea to induct Bahawalpur region in the proposed new south Punjab province.

BAHAWALPUR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :The leaders of Movement for Restoration of Bahawalpur Province has rejected the idea to induct Bahawalpur region in the proposed new south Punjab province.

Addressing a news conference here, the leaders of Movement for Restoration of Bahawalpur province including Ajmal Malik, Alama Shafqat-ur-Rehman, Nazir Sonchi, Muhammad Nazar Hussain Kamboh, Jam Muhammad Irshad, Akram Ansari, Raja Shafqat Mahmood, Nawaz Naji, Major (retd) Shabbir, Imran Lodhi, Abdul Qadeer Qureshi and Roman Tariq said that they rejected idea of induction of Bahawalpur region in proposed new south Punjab province.

"We reject the idea furnished by the leaders of recently formed South Punjab Province Front," they said. To a question, they said that Bahawalpur was a princely state that was inducted in newly created country of Pakistan by then rulers of Bahawalpur.

"There was an agreement inked between Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and then Nawab of Bahawalpur that Bahawalpur would enjoy status of a province in the new country," they said. They said that they had been running movement for restoration of Bahawalpur province as earlier; it had been a province, having its chief minister, cabinet and provincial assembly.

"Makhdoom Hassan Mahmood was first chief minister of then province Bahawalpur," they said, adding that the holding of sessions of Bahawalpur provincial assembly was on the record. They said that suggestion was furnished by certain quarters to demarcate new province from Mianwali to Sargodha inducting Multan, Dera Ghazi Khan and Bahawalpur divisions in the name of south Punjab province.

"We are not opposing demarcation of new province but we want restoration of Bahawalpur province," they said. They said that restoration of Bahawalpur province and formation of new provinces would strengthen the federation.

"People of Bahawalpur love Pakistan and they want to see their country economically thriving in the world," they said. They said that assemblies had already adopted resolution in support of demand for restoration of Bahawalpur province. They urged the government and all political stakeholders to ensure restoration of Bahawalpur province.Capital Development Authority(CDA) asked the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to restrain civic body's employees from going abroad without no objection certificate (NOC).

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Capital Development Authority(CDA) asked the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to restrain civic body's employees from going abroad without no objection certificate (NOC).

The letter was written by Human Resource Directorate (HRD) CDA on the directives of Member Administration Muhammad Yasir Perzada.

Member Administration took strict notice of foreign tours of CDA employees without obtaining NOC from the civic agency.

It has came to the notice of authority that several CDA employees were going abroad without NOC from the competent authority to avoid legal procedure. In its letter, HRD wing of CDA asked FIA to check the NOC from CDA before leaving the country. Letter asked FIA to make sure that each employee of CDA must show NOC before leaving the country on all airports(@FahadShabbir)

City District Government has directed the installation of CC TV Cameras during last phase of work on Namak Mandi Food Street and establishment of a special control room in this regard.

PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :City District Government has directed the installation of CC tv Cameras during last phase of work on Namak Mandi Food Street and establishment of a special control room in this regard.

These directives were issued by the District Nazim, Peshawar, Mohammad Asim Khan during a detailed visit to the food street project here Thursday. He was accompanied by the Director (Coordination), Sahibzada Mohammad Tariq, Assistant Director (Properties), Kamran Khan, District Councilor, Taqdir Ali, Engineer Riaz Ahmad and representatives of Namak Mandi Bazaar including Nasir Khan, Haji Khan Baz and other.

On this occasion, the district nazim visited the important sections of the under construction Namak Mandi, Food Street and also collected information from the traders. Speaking to the traders present on the occasion, the district nazim said that mega scheme will prove a historic project for the city where the visitors will be provide safe and secured environment to eat the traditional foods.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

A retired police inspector was shot dead in Mouchh police station limits on Thursday. Police sources said that Anwar Khan, a resident of Mouchh, district Mianwali, was present in a shop of his friend Mujeed Ullah Khan at old Lorri Adda,

SARGODHA, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) ::A retired police inspector was shot dead in Mouchh police station limits on Thursday. Police sources said that Anwar Khan, a resident of Mouchh, district Mianwali, was present in a shop of his friend Mujeed Ullah Khan at old Lorri Adda, when two unidentified armed men riding on a motorcycle opened fire on him, injuring him seriously.

Later on, he succumbed to his injuries on the way to hospital. Police handed over the body to the heirs after legal procedure and registered a case against the attackers.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Governor Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) Engr. Iqbal Zafar Jhagra while taking a revolutionary step in tribal history has instructed to exempt all food items and material used for developmental works for rehabilitation of TDPs from taxes.

PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Governor Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) Engr. Iqbal Zafar Jhagra while taking a revolutionary step in tribal history has instructed to exempt all food items and material used for developmental works for rehabilitation of TDPs from taxes.

He also instructed political agents to resolve problems of the people of Fata through Jirga which is their tribal tradition. He expressed these views while chairing a meeting of political agent's conference here at Governors House Peshawar on Thursday.

ACS FATA Sikandar Qayyum, Political Agents and Deputy Commissioners from FRs were also present in the meeting. Governor KPK said that due to successful operations led by Army, sacrifices by law enforcement agencies and people of FATA, peace has been restored in FATA.

While giving instructions to political agents, Governor said that Political administration should take imperative and concrete steps to maintain peace and resolve problems of the people of FATA on urgent basis.

Governor while identifying various problems has stressed that problems faced by TDPs should be sorted out on priority basis. In this connection political agents should submitted fortnightly report of their respective agencies to Additional Chief Secretary Fata.

Facilitating people of FATA and TDPs is the top most priority of the incumbent government. The KPK Governor Engr. Iqbal Zafar Jhagra while appreciating the tremendous progress of health and political administration of FATA in the fight against Polio has directed all the Political Agents to ensure polio eradication from the entire region in future with consistency as well.

Governor has given instructions to political agents to give field visits to FATA and observe the problems and sorting out solution to various problems.(@FahadShabbir)

The district administration Hyderabad has fixed the prices retail milk and curd after meeting with the concerned organizations here on Thursday.

HYDERABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :The district administration Hyderabad has fixed the prices retail milk and curd after meeting with the concerned organizations here on Thursday.

According to announcement, the Deputy Commissioner Hyderabad Anees Ahmed Dasti held meeting with the representatives of Retailer Milk Association Hyderabad, Milk Farmers Association Cattle Colony and Dairy and Cattle Farms Association.

The Deputy Commissioner ruled out the selling of retail milk and curd on the prices fixed in Karachi adding that there is no issue of transport, labour and utility in Hyderabad as being found in Karachi.

He fixed the official prices of retail milk as Rs. 90 per liters and curd as Rs. 120 per kilogram and asked the milk and curd sellers to avoid charging more than the fixed prices.

In case of violation of the decision, the Deputy Commissioner maintained that strict legal action would be taken against the violators.

The Regional President Dairy and Cattle Farms Association Hadi Bux Jatoi briefed the meeting due to price hike in required commodities including fodder, the owners of 35 farms have closed their business while the remaining have no other way except borrowing to run their business and fulfill the demand of 2,4 million liters milk daily to the citizens of Hyderabad.

In view of above circumstances, he said that the increase in milk and curd prices has become essential, however, the Deputy Commissioner Hyderabad maintained that no injustice has been done with cattle owners while fixing the milk and curd prices.(@FahadShabbir)

Over 1500 Sikh Yatrees arrived at Wahga Railway station here on Thursday from India to celebrate baisakh festival. Evacuee Trust Property Board (ETPB)Secretary Tariq Wazir Khan, Pardhan Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara arbandhak Committee Sardar Tara Singh and other board officers received them warmly

LAHORE, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Over 1500 Sikh Yatrees arrived at Wahga Railway station here on Thursday from India to celebrate baisakh festival. Evacuee Trust Property Board (ETPB)Secretary Tariq Wazir Khan, Pardhan Pakistan Sikh Gurdwara arbandhak Committee Sardar Tara Singh and other board officers received them warmly.

The Pakistan government made foolproof security arrangements besides immigration, customs, bank and medical camp facilities at Wahga railway station to facilitate the pilgrims. Talking to media, sikh yatrees group leaders Sardar Gurmeet Singh and Sardar Charan Singh said that they would remember the warmth welcome of Pakistan government and expressed satisfaction over the arrangements of ETPB for sikh gurdwaras in Pakistan.

They said that land of Pakistan is sacred and Sikh community always received love from here, adding that they wished to come here again and again.

Soon after arrival, the Sikh pilgrims left for Punja Sahib Hassanabdal to celebrate baisakhi celebrations.

They would stay there for three days and perform their religious rituals.The central ceremony of Baisakhi festival will be held there on April 14 and the Sikh yatrees will perform their rituals.

Later, they will visit Janam Asthan, Nankana Sahab, on April 15 and the next day they will visit Sucha Souda Farooqabad and perform their rituals. They will also visit Gurdwara Rohri Sahib Aimonabad and Kartarpur Narowal on April 17. The yatrees will visit Gurdwara Dera Sahib Lahore on April 18. Sikh yatrees will return to their homeland,India,on April 21.The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher,Pakistan People's Party (PPP) Lahore chapter organised a seminar at a local hotel here to pay tribute to PPP founder leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto here on Thursday. PPP Lahore President Haji Aziz-ur-Rehman Chan presided over the seminar while PPP Punjab President Qamar Zaman Kaira was the chief guest

LAHORE, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Pakistan People's Party (PPP) Lahore chapter organised a seminar at a local hotel here to pay tribute to PPP founder leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto here on Thursday.

PPP Lahore President Haji Aziz-ur-Rehman Chan presided over the seminar while PPP Punjab President Qamar Zaman Kaira was the chief guest.

The speakers appreciated the role and sacrifices of ZAB for democracy and struggle against dictatorship.

They also paid homage to ZAB for his efforts to gather Muslim leadership in Pakistan and his contribution to the entire Ummah. Several PPP workers and leaders attended the seminar.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Minister for Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony Sardar Muhammad Yousaf Thursday said the movement for separate Hazara province will be taken to its logical conclusion.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Minister for Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony Sardar Muhammad Yousaf Thursday said the movement for separate Hazara province will be taken to its logical conclusion.

Speaking at a national conference to remember martyrs for Hazara province movement, he said the creation of new provinces on administrative basis was part of manifesto of Pakistan Muslim League(N).

The conference honored the martyrs who laid down their lives for the movement for Hazara province and the participants discussed ways to speed up efforts for creation of the new province. The conference was attended by Deputy Speaker National Assembly Murtaza Javed Abbasi, members of National Assembly Qaiser Sheikh and Azhar Jadoon, member provincial assembly Mian Ziaur Rehman and other political and religious leaders.

Sardar Yousaf said the political situation of the country lessened the pace of the movement for Hazara province, however, there was no oppositition to this movement across the country and a number of political parties and leaders supported the campaign.

"Efforts will be made to develop larger consensus on the issue," he said adding April 12 was the day when supporters of the Hazara province renewed their pledge to make the movement successful.

He said two thirds majority in the Parliament was needed for the constitutional amendment for creation of the Hazara province.

He said, "We support the creation of provinces of South Punjab, Saraiki, Bahawalpur, Potohar and Karachi , on administrative basis. Afghanistan and India also have many provinces." Deputy Speaker Murtaza Javed Abbasi said despite the political differences, leaders of different political parties have came together in support of Hazara province and people of Hazara division will not back down from their demand.

He said, "Sardar Muhammad Yousaf has played an important role in the movement and we are united under his leadership." "The movement for Hazara province should not be turned into a political issue.

People have given their lives for the cause." Sardar Yousaf was the chairman of of the provincial committee which had been supporting the campaign for new provinces on administrative basis, Abbasi said adding the new administrative units will facilitate in better governance.(@rukhshanmir)

DIG Police Dera Murad Jamali, Nazeer Ahmad Kurd on Thursday said protection of lives and property of the public was the prime responsibility of the police which would be ensured at any cost.

QUETTA, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :DIG Police Dera Murad Jamali, Nazeer Ahmad Kurd on Thursday said protection of lives and property of the public was the prime responsibility of the police which would be ensured at any cost.

Talking to the media at Nasirabad Police station, he said the police repute could not be affected by the alleged misconduct of an individual officer. Nasirabad police have rendered sacrifices for protecting the masses, he added.

He said Nasirabad Police had taken abrupt action against the police officer involved in the case of rape of a girl and suspended him.

He was presented before the court today, he added. The DIG said that complete investigation was being carried out not only with the suspected officer, but other police officers were also investigated who were deployed at that police check post.

He said complete justice would be done with the girl and no negligence would be tolerated regarding that matter The DIG said that in future media would also be provided full security during the coverage of rallies and public meetings in all the districts.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

The members of Public Accounts Committee (PAC) led by its Chairman Syed Khursheed Shah on Thursday visited New Islamabad International Airport.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :The members of Public Accounts Committee (PAC) led by its Chairman Syed Khursheed Shah on Thursday visited New Islamabad International Airport.

Senior officials of Civil Aviation briefed the committee about the airport.

Talking to media, Syed Khursheed Shah said the work on the project started in 2007 which had been completed. He expressed the hope that international standard facilities would be availed by local and foreign passengers at the new airport. New Islamabad airport would be inaugurated on April 20.Adviser to Prime Minister on Aviation Division, Sardar Mehtab Ahmad Khan, inaugurated Pakistan's largest and most advanced fuel farm facility at the New Islamabad International Airport (NIIAP) on Thursday.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Adviser to Prime Minister on Aviation Division, Sardar Mehtab Ahmad Khan, inaugurated Pakistan's largest and most advanced fuel farm facility at the New Islamabad International Airport (NIIAP) on Thursday.

The facility is jointly developed by Pakistan State Oil (PSO), the nation's largest oil marketing company and Attock Petroleum Limited (APL), a progressive oil marketing company. Addressing the inauguration ceremony as the chief guest, Sardar Mehtab Ahmad Khan said that the New Islamabad International Airport was the first Greenfield airport of the country and it would be operational for international and domestic flights during the ongoing month.

He said that the Airbus 380, the world's largest passenger jet could easily be landed at the New Islamabad Airport. While acknowledging the leading public sector xompany of Pakistan, he said Pakistan State Oil had been fuelling the needs of the nation and driving the wheels of the national economy.

He said the fuel facility was a big step forward in effectively meeting the growing fuelling needs of the aviation industry and was all set to serve the largest airport in Pakistan. He said this facility would not only set new benchmark for Pakistan's aviation industry but also serve as a backbone to this airport, ushering in a new era of resilience and steadfastness.

"I appreciate the efforts of PSO and APL to serve the aviation industry by setting up this huge, state-of-the-art fuel farm facility. This shows some serious commitment from both players to their mission of ensuring seamless fuel supply to the aviation sector", he added.

While congratulating the PSO and APL on this big achievement he assured that the Government would extend the best of its support to them in all endeavors, meant to positively impact Pakistan's aviation sector and overall economic development.

On this occasion, MD and CEO PSO, Sheikh Imranul Haque, said that for decades, PSO had been fueling the nation adding, "today we have strengthened our leadership position further in responsibly meeting the fueling needs of the Pakistani aviation industry." "We feel extremely delighted and proud in launching the country's largest and most advanced fuel farm facility at the largest and most advanced airport of Pakistan", he said.

He also congratulated the Attock Petroleum Limited for the impressive joint feat where they utilized their own experience of developing state-of-the-art infrastructure for storage, handling, and delivery of petroleum products.

He said PSO stayed committed to its mission of ensuring a seamless supply of quality fuel products to every corner and industry of the country. Group Chief Executive Attock Oil Group of Companies ans CEO APL, Shuaib Anwar Malik, said that the fuel farm facility was a huge step in the direction of efficiently fueling Pakistan's aviation sector.

"We are proud to indigenously set up this state-of-the-art facility that redefines aviation services within Pakistan", he added. Adviser to PM Sardar Mehtab also inspected the different sections of the fuel facility.

A detailed briefing was given to him on this occasion. He was told that the fuel farm facility at NIIAP was equipped with robust storage capacity, maximum product pumping ability to refuel multiple aircraft in minimal time, latest detection, firefighting and alarm systems, which makes this facility most advance and largest fuel farm of the country.

Fuel farm facility at NIIAP will be serving Pakistan's largest airport and ensure smooth and efficient delivery of quality products. He was also apprised that covering an area of 12 acres, the fuel farm facility was compliant with local and international standards including JIG, NFPA, API as well as the CAA for the receiving, storing, filtering, pumping, and testing of aviation fuels.

Furnished with a smart refueling system comprising of automation, safety interlocks, automatic detection and response, and quality control features, the fuel farm supports the hydrant refueling system of NIIAP which is Pakistan's largest airport refueling system with a 14KM hydrant line of 14-inch diameter and 55 hydrant pits to fuel aircraft round-the-clock.

It was also briefed that the facility's smooth operations are ensured by offloading bays equipped with 600 USGPM pumps, a storage capacity of 10,000 Metric Tons with 3 vertical API 650-compliant tanks, a 3,600 USGPM product pumping system, and highly advanced refueling equipment comprising 8 Hydrant Servicers.

The fuel farm also features modern monitoring and control systems such as Motor Control Center (MCC), Human Machine Interface and Digital Control System, Public Address System, main and back-up power supply, API Separator, and a test rig for aviation equipment.The Chairman Senate Sadiq Sanjrani Thursday referred as many as six Bills to concerned Senate Standing Committees for further perusal.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :The Chairman Senate Sadiq Sanjrani Thursday referred as many as six Bills to concerned Senate Standing Committees for further perusal. Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Shaikh Aftab Ahmed introduced the Bill to Further amend the Gas Infrastructure Development Cess Act, 2015 (The Gas Infrastructure Development Cess (Amendment) Bill, 2018.

Chairman referred the Bill to concerned committee. Minister for Law and Justice Chaudhry Mahmood Bashir Virk introduced the Bill to further amend the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 (The Code of Civil Procedure (Amendment) Bill, 2018.

Minister for Law and Justice Chaudhry Mahmood Bashir Virk introduced the Bill further to amend the Specific Relief Act, 1877 (The Specific Relief (Amendment) Bill, 2018.

Minister for Law and Justice introduced the Bill to further amend the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 and the Limitation Act, 1908 (The Limitation Relating to Civil Revisions Bill, 2018).

Minister for Law and Justice introduced the Bill to amend the Federal Ombudsman Institutional Reforms Act , 2013 (The Federal Ombudsman Institutional Reforms (Amendment) Bill, 2018. Minister for Law and Justice Chaudhry Mahmood Bashir Virk introduced the Bill to further amend the Federal Judicial academy Act 1997 (The Federal Judicial Academy (Amendment) Bill, 2018.

All the Bills have been referred to standing committees concerned.UN Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs Morislav Jenca called on Special Secretary (UN&EC/SCO) Ms Tasnim Aslam at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here on Thursday.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :UN Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs Morislav Jenca called on Special Secretary (UN&EC/SCO) Ms Tasnim Aslam at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here on Thursday.

They exchanged views on regional peace and security situation. Special Secretary briefed the UN Assistant Secretary General on Afghanistan, Pakistan's policy of constructive engagement with Afghanistan including the recent visit of the Prime Minister, and Pakistan's support to the Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace and reconciliation process, says a press release.

Special Secretary also briefed Assistant Secretary General Jenca on human rights situation in Indian Occupied Kashmir (IoK), India's continued violations of the ceasefire agreement at the Line of Control (LoC), and emphasized the need for the UN and its related machinery to take cognizance of the gravity of the situation in the IoK.

Assistant Secretary General on behalf of the Secretary General expressed deep appreciation of Pakistan's position and continued engagement at the UN as well as its efforts to promote regional peace and security.

Assistant Secretary General also called on the Foreign Secretary who briefed him in detail about Pakistan's efforts towards regional peace and security with a particular focus on the situation in Afghanistan.UNICEF's Regional Director for South Asia Thursday called on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor here at Governor House along with a delegation.

PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :UNICEF's Regional Director for South Asia Thursday called on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor here at Governor House along with a delegation.

Speaking on the occasion, the governor apprised the delegation about success of anti polio drive in Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) adding that during the last two years no new case of polio was reported from any part of FATA.

He appreciated the cooperation of world community with Pakistan in its efforts to eliminate polio from the country. The delegation informed the governor about UNICEF activities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA. Meanwhile, ambassador of European Union in Pakistan Jean-Franois Cautain also met with KP Governor and discussed measures of welfare of KP and FATA people.An explosives blast killed at least eight Colombian police officers Wednesday in northwest Colombia, where armed drug smugglers are active, officials said.

Bogota, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Apr, 2018 ) :An explosives blast killed at least eight Colombian police officers Wednesday in northwest Colombia, where armed drug smugglers are active, officials said. "The partial toll is eight policemen killed and a vehicle... affected," police command said in a statement. The bomb went off in the town of San Pedro de Uraba, it said.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Although Sudan has vowed to remain in the Saudi-led coalition fighting rebels in Yemen, calls for Khartoum to withdraw its troops from the war-torn country have increased after a deadly ambush.

Khartoum, Sudan, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Although Sudan has vowed to remain in the Saudi-led coalition fighting rebels in Yemen, calls for Khartoum to withdraw its troops from the war-torn country have increased after a deadly ambush.

Dozens of Sudanese soldiers were reportedly killed by Huthi rebels in northern Yemen in an ambush last week, Yemeni military sources said. The insurgents reported the attack on their Al-Masirah website.

The losses are reported to be one of the heaviest suffered by Sudan since deploying hundreds of soldiers in 2015 as part of an Arab coalition fighting on the side of the Yemeni government. Khartoum has neither confirmed nor denied the report.

But photographs, purportedly of soldiers killed in the ambush, have been posted on social media, making opposition leaders and analysts question President Omar al-Bashir's decision to join the Saudi-led coalition.

"People ask... 'What benefit have we got from this major decision?' -- and they have no answer," Ghazi Salaheddin, a former minister of state for foreign affairs turned opposition leader, told AFP.

Before "we didn't have a single drop of bloodshed between them and Sudanese ... Now Sudanese are involved in combat with Yemenis." The ambush has triggered online outrage against the coalition, with activists and citizens taking to Twitter and Facebook urging Khartoum to withdraw its troops.

"Bring back our sons and brothers! Why are we fighting a war that is not ours?" activist islam Saleh wrote on Facebook.Greek judges on Thursday blocked the extradition to Malta of a Russian alleged whistleblower in a Maltese anti-corruption and media murder scandal, a judicial source said. The council of appeals judges also ordered that 36-year-old Maria Efimova be released from police custody, the source said.

Athens, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Greek judges on Thursday blocked the extradition to Malta of a Russian alleged whistleblower in a Maltese anti-corruption and media murder scandal, a judicial source said.

The council of appeals judges also ordered that 36-year-old Maria Efimova be released from police custody, the source said. The subject of two EU arrest warrants, Maria Efimova surrendered at the main police station on Athens' Syntagma Square in March.

Efimova, who worked for Maltese bank Pilatus, feared for her life, reports said at the time. She had fled to the island of Crete with her husband and two children after being accused of embezzlement on Malta and Cyprus.

Efimova is widely believed to be a key source of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed by a car bomb last October as she lifted the lid on widespread corruption in her homeland.

After the killing, for which three suspects are in custody, her sons called on Prime Minister Joseph Muscat to resign, alleging he was overseeing a mafia state. According to the EU Observer site, Efimova informed the European Parliament of her case last December, leading Portuguese lawmaker Ana Gomes to urge EU states to offer her protection.(@FahadShabbir)

Makurdi, Nigeria, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 13th Apr, 2018 ) :Gunmen suspected to be herders killed two people on Thursday in an attack on a farming village in central Nigeria's Benue state, police and a resident said.

The attack is the latest flare-up over grazing rights in the volatile region. The incident which happened in Agboughul, outside Makurdi, the state capital also left several people injured, they said.

"I can confirm that two persons were killed in Agboughul community in the outskirt of Makurdi town by suspected herdsmen who stormed the area this afternoon," state police spokesman Mose Yamu told AFP.

He said armed police had deployed to restore peace in the area. Local resident Terfa Iortyom confirmed the attack, saying that angry youths in the village "almost went on the rampage but for the quick intervention of the police." He said many residents had fled the village following the killings, the latest in a tit-for-tat conflict over water and grazing rights in the region.

Hundreds have died since the start of the year in clashes between local farmers and herders across the deeply divided nation, putting pressure on President Mohammadu Buhari to end the violence.(@rukhshanmir)

Kuwait's national carrier halted flights to Beirut on Thursday citing security concerns, after an air safety watchdog warned of potential military strikes on Syria in the coming days.

Kuwait City, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Kuwait's national carrier halted flights to Beirut on Thursday citing security concerns, after an air safety watchdog warned of potential military strikes on Syria in the coming days.

Kuwait Airways said that it took the decision "on the basis of credible security warnings received from the Cypriot authorities regarding the danger of flying over Lebanon's airspace". The changes would stand "until further notice", the airline said on Twitter.

The move came after the European Aviation Safety Agency alerted airlines on Tuesday of the possible launch of "air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours", urging them to take precautionary measures.

Other international carriers including Air France and Lebanon's middle East Airlines have also modifed their flight plans. US President Donald Trump warned Wednesday that "missiles will be coming" in response to an alleged chemical attack in Syria.

If the US action follows the pattern of a previous punitive strike on Syria last year, it will begin with a salvo of cruise missiles fired from American warships in the Mediterranean. Russia's ambassador to Beirut warned any US missiles would be shot down "as well as the sources they were fired from", raising the stakes of a regional confrontation.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Senior military officials of Lebanon and the United States on Thursday held a meeting and discussed bilateral relations and US support to Lebanon, said an army statement.

BEIRUT, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Senior military officials of Lebanon and the United States on Thursday held a meeting and discussed bilateral relations and US support to Lebanon, said an army statement.

Lebanese Army Commander Gen. Joseph Aoun, US Maj. Gen.

Darsie Rogers, head of US Central Command Special Forces, and US Ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard attended the meeting. The army Guidance Directorate said in the statement that Rogers' current visit to Lebanon is part of an initiative to investigate how US forces can "meet the needs of the Lebanese Army and enhance its military capabilities".

The meeting comes a day after US President Donald Trump threatened via Twitter to launch attacks on Syria, following a suspected chemical use in the Syrian district of Douma.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

South Korea and Sudan held a high-level policy consultation meeting on Thursday to discuss strengthening economic cooperation in the wake of the lifting of American sanctions on Sudan last year, the foreign ministry here said.

SEOUL, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :South Korea and Sudan held a high-level policy consultation meeting on Thursday to discuss strengthening economic cooperation in the wake of the lifting of American sanctions on Sudan last year, the foreign ministry here said.

Deputy Foreign Minister for Economic Affairs Yun Kang-hyeon welcomed the lifting of 20-year-old sanctions and discussed cooperation with Sudan's Undersecretary Abdel-ghani Elnaim, according to the ministry.

In October 2017, the US government dropped the economic sanctions, which were imposed in 1997 for the African country's support for terrorism and violations of human rights. The sanctions, including bans on American oil, finance and other trade with Sudan, had a profound effect on the African nation's economy, Yonhap reported.

Yun said that their economic cooperation would have great potential if Sudan's rich water and mineral resources were matched with Korea's competitive agricultural and dairy industries, as well as its advanced manufacturing sector for mining machinery, the ministry said.

He called on Sudan to improve its investment environment so that more Korean companies can actively invest. He also stressed the need for the speedy ratification of a Korea-Sudan double tax avoidance agreement and the signing of an investment protection agreement.

Elnaim called for the South Korean government's support for Korean companies willing to make inroads to Sudan, indicating that Sudan's forthcoming negotiation to remove the country from the US list of terrorist sponsor nations would further open up business opportunities for Korean companies.

In addition, the two sides discussed ways to heighten bilateral exchanges in sectors like development, culture and education, as well as their partnership on the global stage, the ministry noted. The meeting was held one day before the countries mark the anniversary of the establishment of their formal diplomatic relations on April 13, 1997.(@FahadShabbir)

South Korea's top diplomat will visit two central Asian countries next week to discuss bilateral ties and cooperation, the foreign ministry said Thursday.

SEOUL, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :South Korea's top diplomat will visit two central Asian countries next week to discuss bilateral ties and cooperation, the foreign ministry said Thursday.

Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha will embark upon a three-day trip from Monday that will take her to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, according to the ministry. She is to meet with the Kazak and Uzbek foreign ministers on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.

They are expected to discuss ways to deepen their future-oriented and mutually beneficial relations, while exchanging views on the current situations surrounding the Korean Peninsula.

The ministry said that Kazakhstan is serving as a non-permanent member of the U.N.

Security Council and that the two central Asian countries have supported South Korea on issues related to the peninsula. The trip comes as South Korea plans to hold a summit with North Korea on April 27 to discuss denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula.

The meeting is expected to be followed by summit talks between the U.S. and North Korea, which will likely to take place either in late May or early June.Six ministers quit Sri Lanka's troubled coalition government, forcing Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to patch up his cabinet Thursday ahead of a wider reshuffle.

Colombo, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Six ministers quit Sri Lanka's troubled coalition government, forcing Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to patch up his cabinet Thursday ahead of a wider reshuffle.

Wickremesinghe gave the duties of the six Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) ministers to four other members of his cabinet. The prime minister's United National Party had increased pressure on the followers of President Maithripala Sirisena -- who voted against Wickremesinghe in a recent no-confidence motion -- to resign.

With the help of minority Tamil and Muslim parties, the premier defeated the motion, dealing a blow to Sirisena, who had campaigned for Wickremesinghe to stand down. Those who voted against Wickremesinghe "have no moral right to remain in government", Petroleum Minister Arjuna Ranatunga said.

Relations between the rival groups in the unity government soured after both suffered losses in February's local council elections. Former strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa's party trounced the UNP and SLFP to win control of two-thirds of the 340 local councils at stake.

In the run-up to the election, Sirisena branded the prime minister and his party as more corrupt than the Rajapaksa regime, which Sirisena and Wickremesinghe jointly toppled in 2015. A presidential spokesman said a wider government reshuffle would be announced next week.

The SLFP is to decide later this month if it will remain in government. Rajapaksa is pressing for a 2020 national election to be brought forward.Slovenian Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec said Thursday he did not think a US. military intervention in Syria would improve the situation in the country, and called for a diplomatic and political solution.

LJUBLJANA, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) ::Slovenian Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec said Thursday he did not think a US. military intervention in Syria would improve the situation in the country, and called for a diplomatic and political solution.

According to the Slovenian Press Agency STA, the minister expressed his "grave concern" in a statement to the nation's media in the wake of the U.S. military attacks on some Syrian targets. The minister said that a potential military response to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria would "only escalate the tensions, in particular between the United States and Russia, and between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

" He noted that due to the crisis in Syria, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian cancelled his working visit to Slovenia scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

US President Donald Trump warned Wednesday of a military strike on targets in Syria in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, which the West blames on Syrian President Bashar al Assad, said the STA.LJUBLJANA, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) ::Slovenian Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec said Thursday he did not think a US. military intervention in Syria would improve the situation in the country, and called for a diplomatic and political solution.

According to the Slovenian Press Agency STA, the minister expressed his "grave concern" in a statement to the nation's media in the wake of the U.S. military attacks on some Syrian targets. The minister said that a potential military response to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria would "only escalate the tensions, in particular between the United States and Russia, and between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

" He noted that due to the crisis in Syria, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian cancelled his working visit to Slovenia scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

US President Donald Trump warned Wednesday of a military strike on targets in Syria in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, which the West blames on Syrian President Bashar al Assad, said the STA.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

London, United Kingdom, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :Countries in sub-Saharan Africa have boosted the campaign to abolish the death penalty, contributing to a global drop in executions, Amnesty International said Thursday.

There was a "positive trend recorded globally" according to the rights group, which recorded a four-percent drop in executions from 1,032 in 2016 to 993 last year. Guinea abolished the death penalty for all crimes, while Kenya no longer imposes the mandatory death sentence for murder.

Burkina Faso was also praised by Amnesty for its draft constitution which includes a provision to scrap the death penalty, and Chad for a new penal code which only allows such a sentence in the case of terrorism.

"The progress in sub-Saharan Africa reinforced its position as a beacon of hope for abolition," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty's secretary general. "The leadership of countries in this region gives fresh hope that the abolition of the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment is within reach," she added.

Twenty countries in the region have abolished the death penalty for all crimes, with Somalia and South Sudan being the only countries to record executions last year compared to five states in 2016.

"The world's top executioner" continues to be China, the rights group said, with thousands of executions believed to have been carried out -- but the figure is guarded by Beijing as a state secret.

Iran has the highest known figure despite an 11-percent drop on 2016, executing at least 507 people, with at least 31 death sentences carried out in public. Although Tehran was praised for taking steps last year to reduce the death sentence for drug offences, Amnesty said authorities had breached international law by executing at least five people who were under 18 when their crimes were committed.

Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan were the next highest in terms of executions carried out, while the US moved from seventh to eight place in the global ranking. The US was noted for putting people on death row who have mental or intellectual disabilities, a criticism also levelled against Japan, the Maldives, Pakistan and Singapore.

Mongolia was the second country last year to abolish the death penalty, bringing to 106 the number of abolitionist states. A further 36 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, Amnesty said.General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, has again issued warning on tithes.



He spoke at the April edition of the monthly Holy Ghost Service at the Redemption Camp, along Lagos/Ibadan Expressway.



The cleric said those who still have doubts about tithes should heed his statement.



He advised pastors of the church in attendance to warn their parishioners about the danger of ignoring tithing.



I want to give every one of you pastors an opportunity to repent tonight.



And then to go back, immediately after this convention, to restitute your ways with your congregation.



Make it clear to themAnyone who is not paying his tithe is not going to heaven, full stop, he said.



Meanwhile, Adeboye had revealed that the fate of Moshood Kashimawo Abiola, was settled before he won the June 12, 1993 presidential election.



Adeboye, said God told him that, the winner will be the loser.



His words: Eection was going to take many years back and while I was minding my business just praying and praising God, God suddenly told me that son, the winner will be the loser, the loser will be the winner and Aminu Kano is the most fortunate of them all.

Source: Dailypost.ng









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Featured VideoThe United Nations Security Council will travel to Myanmar and Bangladesh this month to see first-hand the impact of the Rohingya refugee crisis, and to Iraq ahead of elections.

United Nations, United States, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th Apr, 2018 ) :`The United Nations Security Council will travel to Myanmar and Bangladesh this month to see first-hand the impact of the Rohingya refugee crisis, and to Iraq ahead of elections.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said all 15 council ambassadors will make the April 26 to May 2 trip. Nearly 700,000 Rohingya have been driven out of Rakhine state and are living in crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh since a Myanmar army operation in August.

After the council proposed a visit in February, Myanmar's government said it was "not the right time," but it finally gave the green light this month. Myanmar authorities say the operation in Rakhine state is aimed at rooting out extremists, but the Security Council is demanding that the Rohingya be allowed to safely return home.

The council visit to Iraq has been described as a show of support ahead of parliamentary and provincial assembly elections on May 12.Published: April 11, 2018

UT Students Say National Debt Reduction is Up to Us

Its large and looming and talked about every four years or so, and some University of Tampa students want to change that.



The Congressional Budget Office projects that if the current spending is maintained, the federal debt held by the public will climb to 150 percent of the gross domestic product within the next 30 years, wrote Rajul Mehta 18 in an editorial in the Tampa Bay Reporter. That is more than our countrys entire economic output. These dangerously high levels of debt threaten the economy the younger generation of Tampa Bay would inherit.



Mehta is leading a group of three others in the Up to Us challenge, a semester-long competition empowering students to educate their peers on the impacts of the national debt and what their generation can do to mitigate its effects. The competition started in 2012 with previous winners including the University of Virginia and College of William & Mary. Some competitors in this semesters program include the University of South Florida, University of California, Berkeley, Duke University and Northwestern University.



Out of 106 competing schools, UT has made it in the top 10. The team will find out on April 17 if they won, which includes a $10,000 prize and a chance for the whole team to attend the Peter G. Peterson Foundations Fiscal Summit in Washington, D.C. Even if they dont win, one team member will attend the summit for making it into the top 10.



Being at that stage with the people at the summit is actually huge, said Mehta, a triple major in finance, cybersecurity and accounting. Its the first time UT has participated in the event, and if we win its going to be a big benchmark to set the foundation for other students at UT.

Competition was based on their educational efforts as well as the number of signatures they were able to secure on a pledge of students support of Up to Us and their own commitment to prioritize the importance of the nations fiscal future.



One thing I learned about the national debt is that it currently stands at $21.1 trillion in the U.S. Another thing I learned is that over the next 10 years, net interest on the national debt will reach approximately $5.6 trillion, said team member John Vazquez 18, a finance major from New Milford, CT.



I became a part of this competition to raise awareness on the rising national debt and how it can affect us, said team member Ismail Mohammedali 18, also a triple major in finance, cybersecurity and accounting, from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Any kind of impact from rising debt would also impact Saudi Arabia, in a variety of ways including trade.



Mohammedali and Mehta, of Mumbai, have had the same class schedules since their first year at UT, and partnering on Up to Us was a way to leave their mark on UT as they near graduation this December.



Its my senior year, so its like before going you have to do one big thing that youre known for, so this is one of those things, Mehta said. Its a great platform. You get to meet so many people. You get to do something that is so important, and through our events on campus we realized how much it is needed here at UT.



Mehta and team member Shivang Kundu 19, an international business and finance major from West Bengal, India, both commented on how the competition has strengthened their public speaking skills and makes them more confident leaders.



Activities included lots of tabling in Vaughn (50 Shades of Debt was the theme in February), presenting to cybersecurity and accounting classes, and hosting a debate in March between UTs College Republicans and College Democrats. Mehta wants to create an Up to Us student organization in the fall and hopefully recruit another team to compete in next years challenge.



This topic is important to be discussed. Whos going to talk about it if not us, whos going to do something about it in the end, Mehta said. We all know about college debt, but on a more significant level, on a broader level, its the national debt thats more important.





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Read more UT Life storiesA dozen families in Cambodias Koh Rong and Koh Rong Samloem islands have been granted land to live on ahead of the islands development by a prominent tycoon.

The islands in Preah Sihanouk province are part of a new national marine park, the Koh Rong Sea National Park.

Koh Rong, a popular tourist destination, is slated to be turned into a large eco-resort by the Royal Group, headed by Kith Meng, a tycoon with close links to the ruling family.

Yun Min, the provincial governor, declined to comment on the land allocation, saying he was in China.

Chhoeun Chantha, commune chief of Koh Rong Samloem, said the government was doing the right thing, adding that he hoped more land would be made available for those left out.

Cheap Sotheary, a provincial coordinator of local rights group Adhoc, said many of the people living on the islands were families who had migrated there to settle in recent decades.

The Koh Rong National Park was formed by request of Say Sam Al, the environment minister.Two local journalists for the Reuters news agency remain in custody in Myanmar after a court Wednesday refused to drop an espionage case against them. Detained since December, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo each faces the prospect of 14 years in prison unless new Myanmar President Win Myint revives a custom of pardoning political prisoners and detainees following the traditional new year festival of Thingyan, which starts Friday and runs through Tuesday.

There is no plan for a mass pardon, Minn Htun Soe, a spokesperson for the Prisons Department under the military-controlled Ministry of Home Affairs, told VOA. I dont know when there will be, he said. The department is generally tasked with identifying prisoners who are suitable for pardons before those names are forwarded to the president. The presidents office could not be reached for comment.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, or AAPP, a nonprofit advocacy group, has counted 248 political prisoners. The group says in that number, 54 political prisoners are serving sentences, 74 are in pretrial detention, and 120 face charges but are on bail. Restrictive laws have enabled authorities to jail activists and journalists for speech, protest and association.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were accused of violating the colonial-era Official Secrets Act for possession of material relating to security operations in Myanmars troubled Rakhine state. The military campaign against insurgents has driven hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims from predominantly Buddhist Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh. The AAPP considers the reporters political prisoners.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been investigating a massacre of 10 Rohingya in Rakhine at the hands of the security forces. The military has admitted the incident occurred and sentenced seven soldiers to 10 years in prison, according to an official military Facebook post April 10.

Political analysts say that if Win Myint, who took office last month, gives the two journalists a reprieve, it would allow his government to dismiss a case that has attracted widespread international attention.

The journalists are due back in court April 20.

The government has eight more witnesses to present.

One too many

Myanmar political analyst Yan Myo Thein told VOA he thought the president would be eager to make his mark by using his constitutional powers to release prisoners.

He is a former political prisoner, Yan Myo Thein said. As the government is elected by the people and is moving toward democratization, the newly elected president has to consider releasing all the political prisoners as early as possible.

Asked whether Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo would be included in a Thingyan amnesty, their lawyer, Khin Maung Zaw, told VOA it was wishful thinking. He said their release would, in practice, require negotiation with the military, which has a strong interest in their case.

Khin Maung Zaw said that, like Myanmars de facto civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint is in a dilemma. At the front, the people, at the back, the army. They are squeezed tight.

The National League for Democracy, or NLD, a party dominated by those jailed under military rule, pledged to release all political prisoners before coming to power in 2016. In her Nobel lecture in Norway in 2012, Peace Prize winner and party leader Aung San Suu Kyi said, One prisoner of conscience is one too many. Aung San Suu Kyi spent 15 years under house arrest.

But, in February, the Committee to Protect Journalists said it had learned that Myanmars local and foreign media are under heavy assault as security measures used to suppress the press under military rule are reactivated under Aung San Suu Kyis quasi-democratic regime. The CPJ also said authorities are increasingly abusing various Draconian colonial and military era laws to repress reporting on a widening range of topics. The CPJ noted the case involving Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, saying, Nowhere is that backsliding more apparent than in the continued pretrial detention of the two men.

Article 204 of Myanmars 2008 Constitution grants the president the power to grant a public pardon for those already sentenced, as well as the power to grant amnesty for those facing trial. The latter, however, must be in accord with the recommendation of the National Defense and Security Council [NDSC], where the military holds a majority.

Zar Li Aye, a local advocate and legal expert, told VOA that, at the NDSC, Its not quite clear what the criteria is for dropping a case.

In fact, during Thingyan in 2016, the NLD government managed to bypass the NDSC when it released students facing trial for protesting education reforms the previous year. Zar Li Aye, who represented one of the students, recalls a judge unexpectedly delivering the news to her.

Overcrowding

The Myanmar National Human Rights Commission has identified overcrowding as the most severe problem affecting Myanmars prisons. This contributes to unsanitary and inhumane conditions for many inmates, and a lack of adequate medical attention.

The drop in pardons under the NLD has exacerbated the problem. AAPP Joint Secretary Bo Gyi told VOA, Prisons are so crowded. The government must reduce the numbers by releasing prisoners, including political prisoners, as quickly as possible. Otherwise, prisoners are not treated like human beings, because they dont have enough space to sleep and dont get enough medication. Prisoners lose all of their human rights.

The release of prisoners, political or otherwise, on national holidays such as Thingyan and Independence Day on January 4, is a practice that goes back to the days of full military rule. It has allowed governments to both earn goodwill and keep the prison population stable. This years Independence Day and last years Thingyan passed without prisoner releases.

The previous, nominally civilian government of President Thein Sein released thousands of inmates, among them hundreds of political prisoners. The NLD government granted mass amnesties and pardons in its initial months but has held back since, aside from the release last year of nearly 260 inmates, 10 of whom the AAPP said were political prisoners.

Additional reporting by Aung Naing Soe.Thousands of megawatts of wind and solar energy contracts in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia have been signed, seriously challenging the financial viability of major hydropower projects on the river, an energy expert told a water conference last week.

Buoyed by a recent Thai government decision to delay a power purchase deal with a major mainstream Mekong dam, clean-energy proponents and economists told the third Mekong River Commission summit that the regional energy market was on the cusp of a technological revolution.

Brian Eyler, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit in Washington dedicated to enhancing global peace and security, said 6,000 megawatts' worth of wind and solar contracts had been signed in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos in the last six months.

He said that in January 2017, he and his colleagues had suggested that more solar and wind energy projects be incorporated into Cambodia's power development plan, the prospect of which had been "basically off the table" at the time. "In a year's time, Cambodia has entirely restructured its energy sector" to emphasize solar projects in the country, "and if Cambodia's doing it, you can bet that the other countries are doing it as well."

Two gigawatts of wind and solar projects were announced in Vietnam in February and March alone according to a spreadsheet provided by the Stimson Center.

Hyunjung Lee, senior energy economist at the Asian Development Bank's Southeast Asia Energy Division, said technologies such as wind and solar power were "going to hit the region very significantly, in my view."

"The atmosphere in the region has been changed," she said, even in just the past year. "We see a lot of development can happen in solar and wind in the region," though more integrated approaches were needed.

Lee said the ADB was working to set up a Regional Power Coordination Center that would mimic a highly successful project in southern Africa to create an efficient, integrated regional market.

Impact on river system

A six-year Mekong River Commission Council study on development plans for the Mekong, which was the focus of the summit, suggested catastrophic impacts upon the health of the river system if all planned hydropower dams  11 mainstream projects and more than 100 on tributaries  were built.

In a January report, the International Renewable Energy Agency found that the cost of electricity generated by solar facilities that supply utilities had fallen by 73 percent from 2010 to 2017, and the cost was forecast to be cut in half again by 2020.

At that price trajectory, the cost of solar power would fall below that of hydropower by 2020, long before many planned Mekong dams go online.

Global solar capacity grew 32 percent, adding 94 gigawatts in 2017, while renewables across the board increased by 8.3 percent, the IREA survey of 15,000 data points found. Renewables and solar grew faster in Asia than anywhere else in the world, while the amount of hydropower commissioned across the globe was the lowest in a decade.

Wang Wenling, an assistant professor at Yunnan University's Institute of International Rivers and Eco-Security, said she had just seen firsthand how far the price of solar technology had plummeted on a recent trip to North Carolina in the United States.

"I was super surprised how their solar power production cost per unit is actually cheaper than hydropower. I don't know how they make it  it's almost impossible for me  but their cost is only about 15 percent of the cost in China," she said.

"So I think we have a lot of alternatives and it needs to be considered," she said.

Some participants, particularly from Laos and Cambodia, remained skeptical of the technology.

"I think we need some more figures," said a Cambodian member of the audience, raising concerns about stability. "We also think about some figure for the comparison between the occupation of the land of hydropower with solar energy."

Attractive idea for Cambodia

Jake Brunner, program coordinator for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said the figures for solar were particularly attractive in Cambodia, where land remained relatively cheap, while energy demand was high in neighboring southern Vietnam.

"We calculated that if you took one 10,000-hectare economic land concession in Cambodia, for example, and you made some very conservative assumptions, you could generate about 3 gigawatts, which is pretty close to Cambodia's entire national consumption," he said.

Land is a particularly sensitive issue in Cambodia, where rights group Licadho says more than half a million people have been affected by land conflicts.

Gregory Thomas, executive director of the Natural Heritage Institute, told the summit his organization had researched a solar photo-voltaic alternative for Cambodia that didn't require any land at all.

Instead of building the massive planned Sambor dam on the Mekong, a "no dam alternative" study commissioned by the Cambodian government had recommended placing solar cells on the existing reservoir of the Lower Sesan II dam in Stung Treng.

"The advantage of integrating solar arrays on a hydropower reservoir that already exists is that you can use the unoccupied space on the reservoir without any land use conflicts whatsoever," he said. "And, of course, the reservoir storage acts as a battery, essentially, to backstop the intermittent nature of the solar generation."

Such a project could be cost-competitive and go online much more quickly than a hydropower dam, with 100 megwatts deployable in year, he said.

Floating solar projects are being developed around the world, including in China, where an enormous 150-megawatt installation on a lake that used to be a deserted coal mine is expected to go online in May, powering 15,000 homes.A survivor of the suicide attack at the Manchester Arena that killed 22 people last year has received an invitation to the upcoming wedding of Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle. She said initially she thought someone was ''messing'' with her, then later realized it was a genuine invite. VOA's Correspondent Mariama Diallo has more.A new report, released early Thursday in London, from rights group Amnesty International spotlights sub-Saharan Africa as a "beacon of hope" in the fight to abolish the death penalty as the number of state-sanctioned executions and death sentences dropped around the globe in 2017.

"I feel like there's a momentum in sub-Saharan Africa and that's partly because of public pressure around that, and it's partly because judges in some cases can use more discretion," said Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International's Deputy West and Central Africa Regional Director for Research.

In 2017, Guinea became the 20th country in sub-Saharan Africa to abolish the death penalty for all crimes, and Kenya's Supreme Court abolished the mandatory death penalty for murder, a remnant of a colonial-era penal code. Kenya's judiciary must now re-sentence death row inmates convicted of murder.

"For the first time as a country, we are beginning to really confront what death penalty means to us as a nation," Jedida Waruhiu, an official for the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, told VOA.

Amnesty proposes that death sentences be commuted to life imprisonment. However, Waruhiu expressed concern for the plight of inmates, describing life sentences as "degrading" and "inhuman."

Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso is drafting a new constitution that rights activists expect will outlaw the death penalty. The same goes for Gambia, as it continues with a host of reforms following the ouster of President Yahya Jammeh in 2016.

"It's a great thing. I feel so much victorious. Look, here is something I was fighting for, for 40-something years. It's become real," said Baba Leigh, a prominent Gambian activist who was once detained and tortured for his outspoken criticism of the Jammeh government's execution of prison inmates.

While use of the death penalty has been in decline over the last 40 years, Amnesty International is careful to note that the global drop in 2017 was preceded by record highs in executions in 2015 and death sentences in 2016.

Somalia and South Sudan

Just two sub-Saharan African countries  Somalia and South Sudan  carried out executions in 2017, compared to five in 2016, according to the report. Somalia had by far the most for the region, with Amnesty reporting 24 executions there last year.

VOA spoke with Somali activist Abdi Salam Adan, who said the death penalty is needed to fight terrorism.

"In Somalia's case, it happens when they suspect someone who is a member of al-Shabab terror group. They investigate and then they say OK, he is among those people who killed innocent Somali's. They kill. They shoot him. Sometimes they have to kill because he has killed someone and in Islamic law, if you kill you, have to be killed," Adan said.

Numerous studies have shown, however, that the death penalty does not actually deter people from committing crime.

Nigeria

Major cities in Nigeria have reported more cases of armed robbery, theft, sexual assault and kidnapping in the past three years, as the gap between rich and poor has widened. Meanwhile, Nigeria has continued to lead the pack for death sentences in sub-Saharan Africa with 621 death sentences handed down last year and more than 2,000 inmates currently on death row, according to Amnesty.

"What we need to do is to invest in our youth, invest in education, invest in employment, invest in other ways of reducing crime, especially violent crime, in our society and this is what our country has failed to do over the years," said prison reform activist Sylvester Uhaa.

Last year, a joint report by Nigeria's National Bureau of Statistics and the U.N. Office for Drugs and Crime revealed that the Nigerian police force and other agents of the legal systems  including judges, magistrates and prosecutors  are the most corrupt public officials in the country, often extorting bribes for cases.

"If you can't pay bribe, you don't have someone who will immediately come to that police station who commands respect and the police will be afraid; I'm sorry, they'll say, you committed armed robbery, even if you were just found on the streets ... or you were in your house," Uhaa said.

Nigeria last carried out an execution in 2016. An official at the Nigerian Prison Service told VOA that state governors increasingly are reluctant to actually sign death warrants. Instead, a few governors last year commuted dozens of death sentences to life imprisonment.As donors prepare to gather Friday in Geneva for a major aid conference to raise $1.7 billion for humanitarian needs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the government of the central African nation is standing firm on its refusal to attend or cooperate.



The United Nations says more than 13 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance in the sprawling Central African nation, which is full of mineral wealth, but substantially lacking in critical infrastructure and basic government services.



Aid agencies said it is crucial to intervene to alleviate crises in parts of the country the United Nations has put on par with Syria and Yemen.

The United Nations has declared three conflict-ridden regions in Congo, the Kasai, Tanganyika and South Kivu, as Level 3 emergencies, the most severe category. The United Nations says more than two million children are at risk of dying from severe acute malnutrition.

The Congolese government pushed back, saying the emergency classification was "based on facts that are not real."Presidential adviser Patrick Nkanga told VOA the government disagrees with how the conference was organized and must safeguard national sovereignty.



"The government takes issue with how organizers have characterized the situation in the country in such a way that deliberately tarnishes the country's image," he said from Kinshasa. "The government's conditions were not met, and the entire basis for the conference, as it has been presented by the organizers, is not conducive to clear collaboration."



Crisis behind the crisis



But analyst Stephanie Wolters of the Institute for Security Studies said there is more to this situation than meets the eye. Congo has delayed elections for two years after President Joseph Kabila failed to step down in time for a scheduled 2016 poll. That act has been met with increasingly violent protests against his administration.



"It has not only said it's not participating in this conference, but it has in fact sent what really amounts to threatening letters to donor countries that do want to participate, and basically saying, 'Look, you're having a donor conference without our even being involved. We're a sovereign country. What is this?'" she said.

"The context for this," she added, "is of course the ongoing electoral crisis and the increasingly difficult relationship between the Kabila government and the international community about the electoral delays, about the crackdowns on political freedoms, about the strong security service's responses to protests, about the ban on political marches, and the entire repressive political context in which the country now finds itself."



The electoral delay has been met with protests organized by the powerful Catholic Church, which is demanding Kabila's resignation.Last week, the church voiced its opinion of the aid-conference boycott, with Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa saying to his congregation, "We can't refuse help when we have empty hands."



A silly move



Wolters says the government's move is self-defeating if it wants to win over the population in time for promised December elections.



"What you've really done is you've just put yourself out there and said, 'We don't want international support to help our population,'" she said, "It's a silly move, and I don't think it's going to win the government any points."

She said that doesn't mean donors will stop giving aid to the DRC, "but if you have a hostile government ... they can then make it very difficult for those organizations to operate in the Congo."



And that, aid officials say, would be a tragedy.



"The stakes are incredibly high in DR Congo," Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council said this week. "Continued inaction would be measured in loss of civilian lives  There are 13 million reasons to care about DR Congo.Those lives are just as important and just as worthy as the lives anywhere else in the world."

VOA visited the troubled Kasai region last month with the World Food Program and the U.N. Children's Emergency Fund. The impoverished community has for decades been living on a razor-thin edge, where half the children were malnourished before the beginning of the 2016 conflict that forced one million residents to flee their homes, leave their crops behind, and to hide in the jungle where food is scarce.



Nurse Marie Louise Misenga worked at a UNICEF-supported clinic in Kasai that was filled with dozens of desperate mothers and their severely malnourished babies. She was asked what one message she would want to give to the world.



"If the international community brings us some support," she said, "it would make us happy and be a good help."Colombia Hoy



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MARICORI Y OBAMA



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USA TODAY



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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.



OZ1



OZ2



OZ3



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!

Australia is warning Vanuatu against allowing China to build a military base in the South Pacific archipelago.

An Australian newspaper has reported that Vanuatu and China have been in preliminary talks about establishing a military base in the Pacific Island nation. Vanuatus government, however, said the claims were false, and that it was not interested in militarization or hosting foreign military bases.

But the press reports did provoke a reaction at the highest levels of the Australian administration.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said any foreign bases in the Pacific would be unwelcome.

We would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific island countries and neighbors of ours. We put a great effort into the Pacific islands region. This is particularly important that we maintain the Pacific, as its name suggests, a peaceful region.

Last year, Chinese ships visited Vanuatu as part of a broader regional mission, but Australian officials said those visits were part of normal diplomatic practices.



Counterbalance

Analysts believe that any move by the Chinese military to build a base in Vanuatu, which is less than 2,000 kilometers from Australia, would be part of Beijings attempts to counter U.S. power in the region.

Jonathan Holslag, co-founder of the Brussels Institute of Contemporary China Studies, says Beijing has long-term plans in the region.

China has the intention by 2025 to become a resident power in the western Pacific by [means] of its navy, and by 2050 to essentially overtake the United States as an important military player in that region.

Western countries are closely watching China's military expansion after it established its first overseas naval base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa last year. China maintains the base is for peacekeeping missions in Africa.

Academics estimate China had contributed more than $1.7 billion in aid to the Pacific since 2006. Vanuatu, which has a population of just 270,000 people, has backed China's position on the disputed South China Sea.

In January, Australia accused China of so-called checkbook diplomacy in the region by funding what Canberra said were useless infrastructure projects across the South Pacific. In response, China lodged a formal diplomatic protest.Four laboratories linked to the international chemical weapons watchdog have confirmed Britain's findings that a nerve agent was used last month to poison a former Russian spy and his daughter.

The confirmations were in an Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) report released Thursday.

British Ambassador to the U.N. Karen Pierce said OPCW's conclusions "agree explicitly with the U.K.'s analysis" and added the chemical used in the attack was a "military-grade nerve agent of high purity."

British Prime Minister Theresa May said former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned last month in Salisbury, England with a military-grade nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s.

The watchdog did not blame Russia for the attack nor did it name the specific chemical agent used. But British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson said only Russia had the "means, motive, and record" to carry out such an attack.

Russia has denied involvement in the attack and contends Britain has not provided evidence to support its allegation.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday Russia would not accept any of the report's conclusions unless Russian officials were provided access to the ongoing investigation. Zakharova also accused Britain of waging a campaign to discredit Russia.

"We are all simply drowning in a torrent of misinformation that is in one way or another supported by official London," she told reporters. "There are no grounds to believe that all of this is not the continuation of a crude provocation against the Russian Federation on the part of the British special services."

Britain, meanwhile, has called on the U.N. Security Council to convene a meeting to discuss the report, according to a tweet from Britain's mission to the United Nations.

Ambassador Pierce said it would probably be held next Wednesday.

Yulia Skripal was discharged Monday from a British hospital. She said she was still suffering from the effects of the poisoning and her father remains seriously ill.

She lives in Russia but was visiting her father in Britain when they were poisoned. In a statement issued Wednesday night by Britain's Metropolitan Police Service that was attributed to her, she rejected an offer of assistance from the Russian Embassy. Zakharova reiterated that British officials were keeping Yulia Skripal in isolation and said Moscow would continue to demand access to her.California Governor Jerry Brown has agreed to deploy 400 National Guard troops in response to President Donald Trump's request to states that border Mexico.

"Let's be clear on the scope of this mission,'' Brown wrote in a letter to the Trump administration. "This will not be a mission to build a new wall. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life.''

Instead, Brown said, the troops will join an existing program to combat transnational drug crime, firearms smuggling and human trafficking. They will join 250 existing California National Guard troops, including 55 who are at the border.

The California Guard members may be deployed at the border, the coast and elsewhere statewide, Brown said.

Trump has asked border states to send 4.000 troops to the southern border to combat illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Also Wednesday, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told a Southwestern Border Sheriff's Coalition conference that cracking down on illegal crossings and drug smuggling was necessary to build a lawful immigration system.

The coalition includes 31 sheriff's departments from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California that patrol areas within 40 kilometers (25 miles) of the border.

Citing a crisis on the border, Sessions said he had issued an order directing federal prosecutors to put more emphasis on charging people with illegal entry.

He took another swipe at sanctuary cities, telling the sheriffs that it was "illogical and insane'' that people could enter the country illegally on a Monday and make their way to San Francisco by Wednesday and not be deported.

He said he had also set quotas for immigration judges to reduce enormous court backlogs, saying they must complete 700 cases a year to earn a satisfactory job performance grade. The quotas take effect October 1.Defense Secretary Jim Mattis promised Thursday the Pentagon will "notify" Congress before any possible military action in Syria, where the U.S. is considering responding to a suspected chemical weapons attack.



"There will be notification to leadership, of course, prior to the attack," Mattis said in his testimony at the House Armed Services Committee. "We will report to Congress. We will keep open lines of communication."



But notably, Mattis did not indicate the Trump administration would seek congressional approval before the strike, which presumably would target the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Trump says the U.S. will soon launch "nice and new and smart" missiles in response to last week's suspected poison gas attack, which left scores dead in a rebel-held area. Trump blames Assad for the attack.



A U.S. attack is likely to upset a small but growing number of U.S. lawmakers who demand President Donald Trump first ask Congress to authorize any hostilities, citing the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a federal law intended to check the president's ability to wage war.



Executive power



U.S. presidents, both Republican and Democrat, have long argued they have legal authority to order airstrikes and other short-term military campaigns if those engagements fall short of the "hostilities" mentioned in the War Powers Resolution.



Additionally, U.S. presidents have cited a pair of authorizations by Congress following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks as justification for the near-constant U.S. strikes on Islamic militants around the world.



The Trump administration has used those authorizations as justification for its current war in Syria. The U.S. has 2,000 troops in Syria, and helps lead an international coalition against Islamic State in Syria and neighboring Iraq.



The overwhelming majority of U.S. lawmakers have not publicly objected to the administration's legal rationale for those missions. But as Trump considers expanding the U.S. war to include attacks on Syrian government targets, some in Congress are speaking up.



'War by tweet'



"President Trump has no legal authority for broadening the war in Syria," Senator Bernie Sanders said in a statement. "It is Congress, not the president, who determines whether our country goes to war, and Congress must not abdicate that responsibility.



"Trump is a president, not a king  he needs to come to Congress if he wants to initiate military action," said Democratic Senator Tim Kaine. "If he strikes Syria without our approval, what's to stop him from bombing North Korea or Iran?"



Several members of Trump's Republican Party also have criticized a possible attack.

"Promising war by tweet, insults not only the Constitution but every soldier who puts their life on the line," said Republican Senator Rand Paul, a prominent anti-war voice, in a Wednesday tweet.



"The use of chemical weapons absolutely requires a response from the United States," said Republican Senator Mike Lee. "But if that response is going to include military force, the President of the United States should come to Congress and ask for authorization before military force is used."



The issue came up briefly last year when the Trump administration launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air base. But Trump officials said that attack was an isolated incident, and did not need congressional approval.



"Obviously, the administration will follow whatever laws and regulations are necessary for any actions that we take," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday. "Because we haven't laid out any specific actions that we plan to take, I can't tell you exactly what needs we would have to go to Congress with."



Trump's past comments



Trump himself has in the past argued that U.S. presidents need to seek Congress' permission before military action, tweeting this in 2013, as former President Barack Obama considered attacks against the Assad government:

"What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long term conflict? Obama needs Congressional approval." Trump said in another tweet at the time.



Obama eventually decided against the attacks, instead striking a deal to remove some of the Syrian government's chemical weapons. That deal failed to stop poison gas attacks in Syria, as evidenced by the repeated use of chlorine and other chemical agents.



U.N. deadlockSenior British, French and German officials believe they are making headway toward an agreement that would address U.S. President Donald Trump's concerns about the Iran nuclear deal, a European diplomat said on Thursday.

"We came out feeling like we are making good progress towards addressing the president's concerns and coming [up] to an agreement," the diplomat told a small group of reporters on condition of anonymity.

Senior diplomats from the three European nations met Brian Hook, the U.S. State Department's director of policy planning, in Washington on Wednesday to try to find a way to salvage the arms control pact.

The crux of the 2015 agreement between Iran and six major powers  Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States  was that Iran would restrict its nuclear program in return for relief from sanctions that have crippled its economy.

On January 12, Trump delivered an ultimatum to Britain, France and Germany, saying they must agree to "fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal" or he would refuse to extend the U.S. sanctions relief on Iran that it calls for. U.S. sanctions will resume unless Trump issues new "waivers" to suspend them on May 12, although it is unclear how fast they would go into effect.The girl, just 8 years old, was grazing her family's ponies on a chilly January day in the forests of the Himalayan foothills when she was kidnapped. Her raped and mutilated body was found in the woods a week later.

In 2012, the fatal gang rape of a young woman in the heart of India's capital moved hundreds of thousands of Indians to take to the streets to demand stricter rape laws.

But the gang rape, torture and death of a Muslim girl in Indian-controlled Kashmir has seen far different protests: Thousands of members of a radical Hindu group with links to the ruling party have marched to demand the release of the six men accused in the repeated rape and killing of the girl inside a Hindu temple. Hundreds of Hindu lawyers have protested that the men, two of them police officers, are innocent.

The girl, who was savaged in the attacks, had enormous eyes, a quiet smile and one name: Asifa. The Associated Press doesn't usually identify victims of sexual violence but her name has been widely reported in the Indian media.

There have always been differences between India's Muslim minority and Hindu majority in this constitutionally secular nation of 1.3 billion. Violence has flared sporadically over the decades since India gained freedom from Britain in 1947, sparking bloody religious riots as the subcontinent was partitioned to create largely Hindu India and largely Muslim Pakistan.

For the most part, though, day-to-day interactions between Hindus and Muslim have been largely peaceful. But that polite distance has widened into a schism since 2014, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, was swept into power in a decisive election victory. India's religious minorities, especially the Muslims who form 13 percent of the population, have felt increasingly isolated since then, as attacks by Hindu extremist groups have risen.

Rising tensions



So it was in Kathua, the small town in Jammu-Kashmir state where the girl was attacked. Police say the attack had been planned for over a month as a way to terrify the Bakarwals, a Muslim community of nomadic herders, into leaving the area.

Conflict had been brewing in recent years between Muslim nomads and local Hindus over land disputes. Hindus claimed the herders were encroaching on their lands. There had been scuffles after nomadic girls had been allegedly harassed by Hindu men.

Kashmir has over 1 million nomadic herders, including the Bakarwals, who mainly tend flocks of sheep, goats and horses. For centuries they have migrated every summer to highland pastures and forests, and returned to the plains of Jammu in winter to graze their animals, living in temporary shelters.

But over the past 20 years some have begun settling in permanent homes, usually built in forests, sparking conflicts with people already living in those areas.

For some time now the tensions have been high between Muslims and some Hindus in the area around Kathua, said Javaid Rahi, who runs Jammu-Kashmir Tribal Foundation, a nonprofit group studying the state's nomadic people.

The crisis has especially deepened since the BJP has come to the power and some fanatic Hindus in Jammu have communally polarized the atmosphere, he said.

Police say the attack on Asifa was rooted in religious politics, with a group of local men planning to scare away the Bakarwals by simply kidnapping a girl. But once they had Asifa, that plan was quickly forgotten. Forensic reports say she had been drugged with anti-anxiety medication, repeatedly raped, burned, bludgeoned with a rock and strangled. Eventually, her corpse was thrown into the forest where it was found a week later.



While the 2012 New Delhi gang rape galvanized India into taking a hard look at widespread sexual violence, and pressed long-reluctant police and politicians into taking that violence seriously, the attack in Kashmir is mired in the divisive religious politics that have emerged over the last four years.

Soon after the suspects were arrested, members of the extremist Hindu Ekta Manch, or Hindu Unity Platform, marched through the streets of Jammu, the largest city in southern Kashmir, carrying a massive Indian flag, chanting Long Live India! and demanding that police release the men. The group has links to the ruling BJP, and two BJP lawmakers have publicly defended the accused men.

Religious prejudice



On Monday, Hindu lawyers in Kathua tried to block police from filing their investigation report at the local court. They said the police investigation was flawed and claimed the six Hindu men accused in the attack had been framed.

The police were forced to call for backup before handing the report of their investigation to the judge at his home.

Six men, including two police officers, are accused of being directly involved in the attacks on Asifa. One of those policemen also allegedly joined in the search for her body. Two other policemen were arrested for attempts to destroy evidence.

The case has drawn sharp reactions from across the country.

Too many BJP supporters seem willing to abandon their tough stand on sexual violence on the basis of religious prejudice. The police allege Asifa's rape and murder was part of an effort to drive the Muslim community away from the area. Yet, for the local lawyers and other BJP supporters, the Hindu suspects and the Muslim victim were grounds for blocking prosecution of the case, Human Rights Watch said in a statement Wednesday.

The politics over a child's rape and killing has upset many of the area's Hindu residents too.

Politics apart, this is horrible that some people would see this horrendous crime through a religious prism to gain some mileage. It's a new low and I don't know if we can stoop any lower after this, said Girdhari Lal, a retired teacher in Jammu.Iran's central province of Isfahan has seen a second consecutive day of street protests against water shortages, as lawmakers warned that millions of residents will have no tap water as soon as next month.

A social media video monitored by RFE/RL's Radio Farda, a sister network of VOA, and identified as being shot in the city of Isfahan on Wednesday, showed riot police confronting a crowd of protesters on a street. Radio Farda said the police warned the protesters that they could be arrested for chanting antigovernment slogans, but no detentions were reported.

An earlier social media video monitored by RFE/RL and posted Tuesday showed protesters marching peacefully in the same city and denouncing the government for the lack of water.

Iranian state news agency ISNA quoted lawmaker Hasan Kamran telling parliament Tuesday that 5 million people in Isfahan province will not have tap water by late May. ISNA said another lawmaker, Hosein Ali Haji-Deligani, predicted that provincial residents will run out of tap water later, in July.

Iranian state TV said parliament held a closed-door session Wednesday to discuss the nation's water crisis, with the ministers of energy and agriculture in attendance. There was no immediate word on the outcome of the session.

Iranian farmers in Isfahan's rural town of Varzaneh began protesting water shortages in February, angered by authorities diverting local river water to the neighboring province of Yazd for industrial use. Those protests escalated into violent confrontations with security forces last month.

Iranian officials have acknowledged that outdated agricultural and irrigation systems and poor water management policies in the past three decades have contributed to national water shortages. Below-average levels of precipitation in recent months have exacerbated the situation.

Shahram Bahraminejad of VOA's Persian Service contributed to this report.Months after rumors first circulated that U.S. President Donald Trump wanted to put his spy chief in charge of the nations diplomacy, Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo is taking his first steps in making the possible switch to the State Department.

Pompeo, who appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday, brings along a reputation as an energetic and, at times, polarizing figure in the Trump Administration.

When the president announced Pompeos nomination in March, he praised the CIA chiefs energy and intellect, saying, Were always on the same wavelength.



Since joining the Trump administration, the 54-year-old former three-term congressman from the Midwestern state of Kansas has been seen as a strong ally of the president, known for his tough views on terrorism, torture and Iran.



The two men forged a closer relationship, with Pompeo often giving the president the agency's daily intelligence briefings in person at the White House, rather than delegating that responsibility to a staff aide.



He has the grounding for him to be able to grasp this information the way he can ask sophisticated questions that then lead to important policy discussions, Pompeo said of his briefings to the president during an appearance in Washington in January.



Still, the move from leading the U.S. spy agency to leading the U.S. diplomatic corps is unusual.



No other official has made that particular transition before, although a couple of former CIA directors have become secretary of defense, Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA officer now with Georgetown University, told VOA. William Casey [CIA director from 1981 to 1987] wanted to be secretary of state, but [then President Ronald] Reagan did not give him that job.



Pompeo and Russia



And while Pompeo initially won praise from the intelligence community - backing conclusions by U.S. intelligence agencies about the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and its connections to Moscow he has also alienated some of those under his command.

Pompeo specifically garnered criticism for, at times, expressing views that seemed more in line with those of the White House while contradicting the CIAs own findings.



The Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election, Pompeo told an audience in Washington last October, even though an unclassified report by the top U.S. intelligence agencies issued in January 2017 made no such claim.



We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election, the report said.



Later, the CIA sought to clarify Pompeos comments.



The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed, and the director did not intend to suggest that it had, a CIA spokesman said.



At other times, Pompeo has publicly refused to rule out working with Russia in areas such as counterterrorism.



"If Russia has information that can help us fight the CT [counterterror] fight around the world, it's my duty to work with them and "the right thing to do," he said.



Pompeo also was criticized following a report by The Intercept that at the request of the president, he met with a former intelligence official who has been arguing U.S. intelligence officials are unfairly blaming Russia for the leak of Democratic National Committee emails.



Pompeo has been far more of a policy advocate, and a political defender of the president, than is appropriate for an intelligence chief, said Georgetown Universitys Pillar. Whether this move is good or bad for the Department of State or for U.S. diplomacy, it is better that Pompeo be in a policy-making job rather than the CIA job.



But in the days leading up to his hearing on Capitol Hill, Pompeo has sought to address any concerns, making it known he has reached out to former secretaries of state, including reportedly Hillary Clinton, for advice.

Diplomacy first

And in excerpts of his prepared testimony, released in advance, he rejected the notion that he is a defense hawk who would rather fight than negotiate.

"There are few who dread war more than those of us who have served in uniform" Pompeo said in the prepared remarks.

"War is always the last resort, he added. I would prefer achieving the Presidents foreign policy goals with unrelenting diplomacy rather than by sending young men and women to war."

He also indicated that while he intends to take a tough line on both North Korea and Iran, he would put diplomacy first.

"I have read the CIA histories of previous negotiations with the North Koreans, and am confident that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past, Pompeo said of upcoming negotiations with Pyongyang over its nuclear program.

On Trumps threat to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, Pompeo likewise took a more even approach.

The president is prepared to work with our partners to revise the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to fix its most egregious flaws, he said. "If confirmed, it will be an immediate personal priority ... to see if such a fix is achievable."

Still, Pompeo indicated he would be taking an even tougher approach to Russia.

Russia continues to act aggressively, enabled by years of soft policy toward that aggression, he said. Thats now over.

Before his confirmation as CIA director, some critics also voiced concerns about his stance on the use of torture.



Those involved in the CIA interrogation program "are not torturers, they are patriots," Pompeo said in 2014, adding that the programs were "within the law, within the Constitution and conducted with the full knowledge" of appropriate lawmakers.



During his CIA confirmation hearing, Pompeo told senators he would absolutely not bring back such interrogation techniques.



Pompeo, a graduate of Harvard Law School, also drew criticism in 2013 after he suggested Muslim leaders who didn't publicly condemn terror attacks were "potentially complicit" in the attacks.A decision by U.S. President Donald Trump not to renew sanctions relief for Iran on May 12 would not necessarily mean the United States had withdrawn from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday.

It was not immediately clear what Mnuchin meant by his comment, but it appeared to signal the Trump administration believes the agreement will not necessarily collapse if Trump chooses not to extend U.S. sanctions relief to Iran.

The crux of the 2015 agreement between Iran and six major powers  Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States  was that Iran would restrict its nuclear program in return for relief from sanctions that have crippled its economy.

On January 12, Trump delivered an ultimatum to Britain, France and Germany, saying they must agree to fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal or he would refuse to extend the U.S. sanctions relief on Iran that it calls for.

U.S. sanctions will resume unless Trump issues new waivers to suspend them May 12, although it is not clear how quickly they would go into effect.

Negotiations underway

European officials saw Trumps January 12 comments as a threat to kill the deal. They have since been in negotiations with the Trump administration to see if there is a way to salvage it.

Speaking at a congressional hearing, Mnuchin said the Trump administration was in talks with allies and would not do anything abruptly.

If the president decides not to sign that (waiver), it doesnt mean were necessarily pulling out of the deal. What it means is that the primary and secondary sanctions will go back in place, he told the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee.

The political directors of Britain, France and Germany met Brian Hook, the State Departments director of policy planning, in Washington on Wednesday to discuss the future of the pact, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, two sources familiar with the matter said.

It is not immediately clear how Iran might respond to a Trump decision not to renew the sanctions waivers, but Tehran would be within its rights to argue the United States violated its commitments to ease sanctions even as Iran, as verified by international inspectors, had kept its nuclear commitments.

U.S. nuclear experts say if Trump does not waive the sanctions in May, it effectively kills the nuclear deal.

European diplomats have said that even if U.S. allies decide to remain in the agreement, Western companies would withdraw from Iran because of the threat of U.S. sanctions.

All about lifting the sanctions

Democratic Representative David Price pressed Mnuchin on the issue, saying: Are you saying that failing to waive the sanctions would not constitute pulling out of the deal? The deal is all about lifting the sanctions.

Mnuchin did not answer the question directly.

The secretary declined to speculate on what Trump might do, repeatedly emphasizing he could not discuss the issue publicly.

Trump has voiced frustration at having to waive the sanctions again, believing his predecessor, Democratic President Barack Obama, negotiated a bad deal for the United States in agreeing to the accord.

Iran says its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes. It has said it will stick to the accord as long as the other signatories respect it but will shred the deal if Washington pulls out.U.S. President Donald Trump's supporters are mounting an online campaign to try to discredit a forthcoming memoir by former FBI Director James Comey.

The Republican National Committee on Thursday launched a new website, Lyin'Comey.com, which features quotes from prominent Democrats who have criticized the former FBI director in the past. The GOP plans to fact-check Comey's book and use the website for "rapid response" to highlight any "misstatements" or "contradictions," Fox News reported.

Comey's book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, is scheduled to be released April 17. The memoir promises a deep look at Comey's fraught relationship with the U.S. president who fired him, and whom Comey has accused of interfering in the independence of the FBI.

The Associated Press reported that in his book, Comey blasts Trump as unethical and "untethered to truth'' and calls his leadership of the country "ego-driven and about personal loyalty.''

Comey also casts Trump as a Mafia boss-like figure who sought to blur the line between law enforcement and politics and tried to pressure him regarding his investigation into Russian election interference, AP reported.

Fired last May

Trump fired Comey in May 2017, setting off a storm of charges from Democrats that the president sought to hinder an investigation into whether his 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russians. The firing led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation.

Mueller's probe has expanded to include whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey, an idea the president denies. Trump has assailed Comey as a "showboat'' and a "liar.''

The release of the book comes at a particularly sensitive moment for Trump and the White House. Officials there describe Trump as enraged over a recent FBI raid of his personal lawyer's home and office, raising the prospect that he could fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, or try to shut down the probe on his own.Pope Francis has admitted he made grave mistakes in his handling of clergy sexual abuse in Chile, telling the countrys bishops in a letter that he feels pain and shame.

In an extraordinary public letter released Wednesday by the Vatican, Francis summoned all of Chiles bishops to the Vatican for an emergency meeting in the coming weeks to discuss the scandal.

In the three-page letter in Spanish, the head of the Roman Catholic Church also invited the victims he had once doubted to Rome to seek their forgiveness personally.

Francis blamed a lack of truthful and balanced information for his failure in judging the case of Bishop Juan Barros, a protege of Chiles most notorious predator priest, the Reverend Fernando Karadima. Francis strongly defended the bishop during his January visit to Chile despite accusations by victims that Barros had witnessed and ignored their abuse.

In Chile and during an airborne news conference during his return trip to Rome, Francis accused the victims of calumny for pressing their case against Barros, demanded they present proof of their claims and revealed he had twice rejected Barros resignation.

I am convinced he is innocent, the pope insisted.

The change in the popes thinking came after a visit to Chile by one of the Vaticans most experienced sexual abuse investigators, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta.

Francis wrote the letter after receiving Sciclunas 2,300-page report.

The letter makes no mention of Barros future.

In a statement, three victims said they appreciated Francis request for forgiveness and were weighing his invitation to meet. They said they would continue fighting for reparation and forgiveness until zero tolerance about abuse and cover-up in the church becomes a reality.Faced with the threat of a U.S. strike on Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin has a dilemma: Allow U.S. missiles to hit Moscow's ally without a response or risk a military clash with the United States.

If driven into a corner by a U.S. attack, Putin is seen as unlikely to sit back. Inaction would threaten his hard-won gains in Syria, dent Russia's prestige and erode his tough-guy image.

"It's our president who decides the fate of the world!" ultranationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky declared on Russian state television.

During past crises in recent years, Putin has responded by overturning the chessboard.

When Ukraine's Kremlin-friendly leader was driven from power in February 2014 by mass protests, Putin reacted to what he described as a U.S.-driven coup by immediately sending troops to overtake Crimea and then annexing the Black Sea peninsula.

Ready to fight

Commenting later on those developments, he said that he was ready to put Russia's nuclear forces on high alert in case of "the most negative developments" amid tensions with the West over Crimea. He noted that he bluntly warned his Western counterparts that Russia was ready to fight for Crimea.

Moscow followed up on that by supporting separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine, and it didn't budge in the face of several waves of crippling U.S. and European Union sanctions.

When Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government was teetering on the brink of collapse in 2015, it took Putin just a few weeks to mount a military campaign that saved Russia's longtime ally and eventually turned the tide of war in his favor.

In recent documentaries, Putin has shared candid memories of his youth in a working-class neighborhood of St. Petersburg  then known as Leningrad. He said he learned lessons there that have lasted a lifetime.

"The streets of Leningrad taught me 50 years ago that when a fight is inevitable, you must strike first," was one of the recollections.

Another telling episode was an encounter with a rat in a seedy entrance of his crumbling apartment building. After he cornered the rodent, it turned back on him and attacked.

"She ran forward and chased me, jumping from one flight of stairs to another and even tried to leap on my head," he recalled in an interview for a recent documentary. "You shouldn't try to corner anyone."

A year ago, Putin was nurturing hopes for better ties with the U.S. under President Donald Trump. After a purported chemical weapons attack in Syria, he allowed a U.S. missile strike on a Syrian air base to go unanswered, apparently trying to leave the door open for better relations with Washington.

Moscow, which had received a tip from the U.S. to get its servicemen out of harm's way, limited its response to angry statements of protest.

With Kremlin expectations of a cozy relationship with Trump fizzling amid U.S. investigations into allegations of Russia's meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, Putin is unlikely to show such tolerance now.

Warning about false claims

Weeks before a purported chemical attack by the Syrian government on April 7, the Russian military warned the West against what it described as false claims of chemical weapons use to strike Syrian facilities.

The head of the Russian military's General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, warned last month that a U.S. strike would threaten Russian military personnel in Syria and draw a Russian counterstrike against both U.S. missiles and the ships and aircraft launching them.

The statement signaled Moscow's readiness to protect its ally even if it entailed a direct clash with the U.S.

With tensions running high, Russian warships sailed out of their base in the Syrian port of Tartus in what retired General Vladimir Shamanov, the head of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of the Russian parliament, described as a maneuver to avoid a possible U.S. blow.

Russia has several dozen warplanes at Hemeimeem air base in Syria, along with an array of state-of-the-art air missile defense systems and the Bastion missile systems protecting the coast. The missiles have a range of up to 450 kilometers (280 miles).

In case of escalation, Russia could use air bases of its ally Iran to deploy more aircraft closer to Syria.

Russia has used Syria as a testing ground for its new weapons, including some long-range missiles. These included the sea-launched Kalibr and air-launched Kh-101 cruise missiles; both can be fired from the Caspian Sea and other areas in western Russia.

Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said the top priority is to avert war in Syria and didn't rule out the possibility of a U.S.-Russian conflict.

He told reporters after a closed emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Thursday that "the danger of escalation is higher than simply Syria," adding: "We hope that there will be no point of no return  that the U.S. and their allies will refrain from military action against a sovereign state."

Tips for public about attack

Reflecting the mounting tensions, Russian television and other media offered tips for the population in case of a nuclear attack. Prime-time talk shows on Russian state TV featured senior lawmakers and military experts engaging in heated discussions of possible scenarios of a clash between Russia and the U.S., all the way to an all-out nuclear war.

Military expert Mikhail Khodarenok argued that Russia must retaliate against any U.S. strike, saying a failure to do so would badly dent its reputation.

"It will mean geopolitical shame and colossal reputational losses. We can't risk losing our face," he said on Rossiya state television. "America, get ready for our old reliable 10-megaton nuclear warheads."

Alexei Pushkov, the head of the information affairs committee in the upper house of parliament, struck a more moderate tone, saying that Russia has powerful conventional weapons to fend off a U.S. attack in Syria.

"We must avoid a nuclear conflict," Pushkov said. "We must protect our ally Syria without falling off a nuclear precipice."The international chemical watchdog is preparing to release its report on the nerve agent used to poison a former spy and his daughter in southwestern England as Russia continues to deny suggestions that it was behind the attack.

Britain's Foreign Office said it has asked the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to publish a summary of its findings at midday Thursday.



Britain has blamed Russia for the March 4 poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, with a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union. Russia denies any involvement, saying Britain hasn't provided evidence to support its assertion.



The findings come after Yulia Skripal on Wednesday rejected Russian Embassy assistance as she recovers at an undisclosed location. Yulia, 33, was released from the hospital earlier this week, but her father is recovering more slowly.



"I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do," Yulia Skripal said in a statement released by London's Metropolitan Police. "Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves."



The comment came after Yulia's cousin Viktoria gave a series of interviews about a telephone conversation between the two, leading the British government to claim that Russia was using Viktoria Skripal as a ``pawn'' in the dispute between the two sides.



Russia's Embassy in London questioned the authenticity of Yulia's statement, saying it was crafted to support Britain's version of events and increases suspicions that the young woman is being held against her will.



British authorities ``must urgently provide tangible evidence that Yulia is alright and not deprived of her freedom,'' the embassy said in a statement.



"The text has been composed in a special way so as to support official statements made by British authorities and at the same time to exclude every possibility of Yulia's contacts with the outer world _ consuls, journalists and even relatives," the embassy said. "The document only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen."Russia's U.N. ambassador urged the United States and its allies Thursday to avoid a military strike on Syria, saying the goal was to avert a wider war.

Security Council members met privately to discuss the escalating rhetoric and threats of military reprisals after the United States, Britain and France blamed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces for a suspected chlorine gas attack April 7 on the rebel enclave of Douma in eastern Ghouta.

The attack killed at least 40 people and sickened hundreds more. Damascus has denied using chemical weapons.

Russian envoy Vassily Nebenzia told reporters after Thursday's meeting that "aggressive policies" and "preparations" by the three countries were a violation of the U.N. Charter and a threat to international peace and security.

"The immediate priority," he said, "is to avert the danger of war."

When asked whether he meant a war between Russia and the United States, Nebenzia said, "We cannot exclude any possibilities, unfortunately, because we saw the messages coming from Washington. They were very bellicose."

Nebenzia said Moscow was very concerned with the "dangerous escalation" in Syria.

"We hope that there will be no point of no return  that the U.S. and their allies will refrain from military action against a sovereign state," he said.

Russia's military is present in Syria, where it is supporting the Assad government.

President Donald Trump has said a U.S. response to the alleged chemical attack will come "fairly soon." On Wednesday, he warned that "missiles will be coming to Syria."The crown prince of Saudi Arabia was on an official visit Thursday to longtime commercial ally Spain, where activists are criticizing past and possible future sales of military equipment to the kingdom.

Mohammed bin Salman was due to attend a banquet with Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia before meeting with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and with Defense Minister Maria Dolores de Cospedal.



The 32-year-old heir to the Saudi throne and Rajoy were scheduled to preside over the signing of bilateral agreements, according to the visit's official agenda, which provided no further details.



Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam and Spain's FundiPau have criticized a possible contract to build and sell five Navy corvettes, valued at 2 billion euros ($2.47 billion), that Spain is seeking to sign with Saudi Arabia.



In a statement sent by Arms Under Control, which is a coalition of the four nongovernmental organizations, they urged Spain to stop exporting weapons that could be used by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, where the United Nations says thousands of civilians have died.



Now at the center of the Saudi kingdom's power structure, the crown prince has instigated reforms to shed its austere image, though human rights organizations have called the changes "cosmetic."



Prince Mohammed's arrival in Spain came after visits to the United States, Britain and France. Those three countries are the main exporters of military equipment and weapons to Saudi Arabia, according to the independent global security database of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.



The fourth position is held by Spain, which according to data drawn by the four NGOs from official sources, exported to Saudi Arabia 728 million euros' ($901 million) worth of defense-related equipment between 2015, when airstrikes in Yemen began, and mid-2017, the most recent date for which was available.



A consortium of Spanish companies has also built a high-speed railway between Medina and Mecca as part of strong and growing economic ties between the two countries and their royal families.



Since ascending to the throne in 2014, King Felipe VI has continued the frequent visits to Saudi Arabia that his father, Juan Carlos, made during the reign of King Fahd and his brother King Salman.A bipartisan delegation of five U.S. senators has returned from a week-long trip to four African countries to show Americas commitment to the continent.



The four Democrats and one Republican participated in a series of high-level meetings with heads of state and religious, business and military leaders in Burkina Faso, Niger, South Africa and Zimbabwe.



The five of us went there intending to reinforce the significance and the value of U.S.-Africa relationships, and we were very warmly received. And I think we accomplished that goal, Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, told reporters on a conference call Tuesday.



But Senator Coons also acknowledged that the delegation was asked questions about U.S. President Donald Trump and a perceived lack of positive engagement with Africa due to diplomatic vacancies and disparaging remarks.



Bipartisan initiatives



Although no new programs were announced ahead of the trip, the senators pointed to a range of bipartisan initiatives dating back several administrations that has deepened U.S.-Africa ties.



One of the things that has long characterized U.S.-Africa relations is a whole series of initiatives that were taken up by Republican and Democratic administrations, Coons said.



Those initiatives include PEPFAR, an AIDS-relief initiative founded by former president George W. Bush; the Millennium Challenge Compact, a foreign aid agency created by the U.S. Congress in 2004; and Power Africa, former president Barack Obamas 2013 initiative to bring clean energy to the 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africans without access to reliable electricity.

Through the initiatives, millions of lives have been improved. PEPFAR now provides HIV treatment to more than 11.5 million people, and Power Africa has brought electricity to about 60 million people.



Diplomatic vacancies



In a statement this week, Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, and another member of the delegation, said that a rift created by the actions of President Trump and his administration has deepened the need for U.S. diplomacy. He believes the current leadership has undermined American diplomatic leadership in the world, especially in Africa.



The U.S. has no ambassadors to 15 African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt and South Africa. No permanent successor to Acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Donald Yamamoto has been named. And former Secretary of State Rex Tillersons firing immediately upon returning a day early from his first African trip in March was seen by some as a snub against the continent.



Beyond tense relations, however, diplomatic vacancies pose real challenges for the U.S., in light of Africas fast-changing political landscape. Coons and Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona who also joined the delegation, have laid out plans for legislation to remove 18-year-long sanctions against Zimbabwe.



Before normalizing relations, however, the senators said President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who came to power following the forced resignation of his predecessor, Robert Mugabe, must fulfill promises for free and fair elections, along with other political reforms.



For the U.S., that makes monitoring progress within Zimbabwe essential.



We desperately need to make sure that we have an ambassador on the ground when Zimbabwe has its elections, Flake told reporters.



For his part, Booker affirmed his commitment to rebuilding Americas diplomatic and development engagement across Africa. The Senate has a critical role to play in undoing the damage done by President Trumps disparaging comments and the former secretary of states hiring freezes and budget cuts, Booker said.



Security partnerships



Beyond diplomacy and development programs, security partnerships remain a critical tie between the U.S. and Africa. Burkina Faso and Niger have found themselves on the front lines of violent extremism, with the U.S. as a long-term partner.



The multinational, U.S.-led Flintlock military exercise is currently under way in Niger, and the U.S. has committed $60 million to the G5 Sahel, a joint force of soldiers from five West African nations charged with containing terrorist groups operating in the region.



The security partnerships are critical. And we got the sense from both of those host governments in West Africa that they saw us as a reliable partner, Flake told reporters.



Senator Coons cautioned against reducing Americas engagement with Africa to high-profile incidents like the October attack in Niger that resulted in the deaths of four U.S. soldiers.



Our relationship is more complex than that, more sustainable than that and broader than that, Coons said.



Senators Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, and Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, also joined the delegation.*This report originated in VOA's Korean service.

At the upcoming inter-Korean summit slated for late April, South Korea should seek a clear understanding of North Koreas interpretation of what the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula will mean, said former U.S. officials who have dealt with North Korea extensively.

As President Donald Trump appears to be optimistic about the prospects of potential talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the former U.S. officials remain skeptical Washington and Pyongyang share the same meaning of denuclearization.



U.S. officials confirmed on Sunday that North Korea directly told the White House that Kim would be interested in talks and was prepared to discuss denuclearization at a summit with Trump.

On Monday, Trump said, I think therell be great respect paid by both parties, and hopefully well be able to make a deal on the de-nuking of North Korea. Trump said hell meet with Kim in late May or early June, but the date and place have not been confirmed.

Differing interpretations

Mitchell Reiss, director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department during the George W. Bush administration, urged caution until it is better known what Kim means when he says he is willing to talk about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

What North Korea means by denuclearization is very different than what the United States and what South Korea traditionally has meant by denuclearization, said Reiss, who negotiated with the North over the nuclear issue in 1990s. And in my conversations with North Koreans over the years, it is clear that the United States has to take a number of steps first, such as ending the alliance with South Korea, removing all of its military troops off the Korean Peninsula.

Dennis Wilder, senior director for East Asian Affairs at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, said South Korean President Moon Jae-in should seek out North Koreas view of denuclearization during the inter-Korean summit as a way to pave the way for the U.S. to discuss denuclearization at the anticipated U.S.-North Korea summit.

Its a very important question to deal with - [North Koreas] perception of denuclearization - before the president of the United States meets with Kim Jong Un, said Wilder. If the South Korean president could get more specifics as to how the North Koreans are looking at this question, that will help the United States set up the summit.

Other former U.S. officials think that while Seoul should ask Pyongyang to clarify its meaning of denuclearization at the inter-Korean summit, the actual denuclearization talks should be left for the U.S. to discuss with North Korea.

Denuclearization is, no doubt, going to be  a U.S. angle, said William Brown, a former intelligence official who is now an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University. The Moon and Kim summit should be getting ready for the denuclearization talks but not actually doing it for themselves.

The extent of the discussion on denuclearization at the inter-Korean summit, according to Gary Samore, former White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction under president Barack Obama, should be limited to South Korea having a statement, a communique of a North Korean intent to pursue denuclearization.

Samore thinks Pyongyangs written denuclearization intent will be sufficient for the first meeting.

Broad terms

Robert Gallucci, chief U.S. negotiator during the North Korean nuclear crisis in 1994, said the inter-Korean summit should create an atmosphere for future conversations between experts by touching up on a general framework of talks. He said, Its less important that they make a detailed progress in their meeting than it is that they agree on broad terms of what they are trying to accomplish and where they end up.

Christopher Hill, who negotiated with the North as head of the U.S. delegation during the George W. Bush administration, said close coordination and cooperation between Seoul and Washington are critical when discussing security issues in particular.

Its especially important that the South Korean and the U.S. governments continue to have a pattern of close cooperation and an adequate consultation to make sure that theres an agreed pace of progress, Hill said.

Former U.S. officials are concerned that Seoul would get too far ahead in engaging Pyongyang at the inter-Korean summit and offer incentives such as economic and humanitarian aid and the easing of sanctions imposed against North Korea.

They particularly cautioned that Seoul must stay tough on sanctions. Trump has repeatedly credited sanctions imposed on North Korea as the impetus behind the current thaw in relations.

I think it will be a big problem if the South Korean side starts to cut back on sanctions, Brown said.

Wilder voiced similar concerns and warned, Do not lift the sanctions too soon. The past mistake was to get too easy on North Korea too soon. Brown and other experts are worried that if Seoul eases sanctions before Kim agrees to take concrete action toward denuclearization, South Korea will undermine Trumps maximum pressure campaign.

Seoul and Pyongyang will hold their summit on April 27 in the border village of Panmunjom.

Kims intent to discuss denuclearization was initially conveyed by South Korean envoys who traveled to Washington in early March to brief Trump on their meeting with Kim in Pyongyang held a few days earlier.

Christy Lee contributed to this report.Organizers of the Cannes Film Festival say new films by Spike Lee and Jean-Luc Godard will be among the competitors for the Palme d'Or next month.

Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman" will open in theaters on Aug. 10, the one-year anniversary of the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists marched and a protester was killed.



The film is about the real-life story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer in Colorado who went undercover in 1978 to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. John David Washington plays Stallworth in the film and Adam Driver plays his partner.



Godard's movie "Le Livre d'Image" - The Image Book - is described as a "revolutionary song in five chapters."



Organizers announced Thursday the lineup for the May 8-19 festival, now in its 71th year.The United States says it is working on forming an international coalition to respond to last week's suspected chemical weapons attack in a rebel-held Syrian town that left dozens dead. Here's the latest on which countries may take part in possible military action:

Britain:

Prime Minister Theresa May has indicated Britain is willing to participate in U.S.-led strikes against Syria.

May summoned her Cabinet Thursday for an emergency meeting to discuss the issue. Opposition lawmakers want May to seek parliament's approval before Britain joins any military action. Several reports, however, suggest May has no intention of recalling parliament from its Easter recess, which doesn't end until Monday.

This week, May said "all the indications" suggest Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is responsible for the suspected attack in the town of Douma, east of Damascus.

May has spoken with U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly in recent days about what she says is the need to "uphold the worldwide prohibition on the use of chemical weapons."

Downing Street officials told VOA that British intelligence chiefs have been urging May not to seek parliamentary approval for retaliatory action against Syria, arguing that her predecessor, David Cameron, made a mistake doing that in 2013 only to be rebuffed by lawmakers, who were worried about a lack of overall strategy toward the war-wracked country.

Opposition leaders have been calling on May to follow convention and recall parliament before launching any military action. Some senior members of Britain's ruling Conservatives also have called for parliament to be recalled.

A former British intelligence chief, John Sawers, told a British broadcaster that Cameron made an error going to parliament in 2013. "Parliament is there to debate and decide on legislation and to hold the government to account. It is not there to take executive decisions. This would be an executive decision of government and rests with the Prime Minister and the cabinet."

France:

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has vowed a "strong" response to Syria, said Thursday he has evidence that the Assad government is responsible for the attack.

"We have proof that chemical weapons were used last week, at least chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad," Macron told France's TF1 television.

Macron did not say what the evidence is; however, he stressed France is in daily contact with the Trump administration and that they will respond "at a time of our choosing, when we judge it to be the most useful and the most effective."

Macron says any action should send a message that governments cannot use chemical weapons with impunity; but, he cautioned against any action that escalates the Syrian conflict or harms regional stability.

Germany:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday said her country would not participate in any possible military action against Syria.

"But we acknowledge and support that everything has to be done to signal that this use of chemical weapons is unacceptable," Merkel said. That includes, she said, German support for an international fact-finding mission from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which will soon deploy to Douma.

Merkel also concludes there is "strong evidence" Assad carried out the attack.

Turkey:

Turkey has given conflicting messages about a U.S.-led response in Syria.

Initially, a presidential spokesperson said the "Syrian regime will have to pay a price" for the Douma incident; but, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said the U.S. and Russia should end their "street fighting" over Syria.

Turkey, a NATO member, has backed rebels in Syria who are trying to oust Assad. But Turkey also has troops in the northern Syrian region of Afrin, as part of a campaign against Syrian Kurdish militants it views as terrorists. That campaign has created tensions with the U.S., which has relied on Kurdish fighters to help deprive Islamic State of most of its territory.Japan has cautiously welcomed the news that U.S. President Donald Trump wants to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

If this means that President Trump is correctly evaluating the significance and effects of the TPP, its something we want to welcome, Toshimitsu Motegi, Japans trade minister, said Friday. He added that the trade pact is as delicate as something made of glass, making it difficult to renegotiate any part of the agreement.

Trump ordered his top economic and trade advisers Thursday to look into rejoining the Pacific-rim trade pact that he abandoned last year three days after taking power.

Late Thursday night the president tweeted about TPP:

Farm-state lawmakers said after a White House meeting on agricultural trade that Trump told his economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to weigh the benefits of re-entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership  a deal struck by the Obama administration.

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican critic of Trump's trade policies, said that at one point in the meeting, the president turned to Kudlow and said, "Larry, go get it done."

Sasse represents a Midwestern farm state. He called Trump's change of mind on the Pacific trade deal "good news." He said the president has consistently "reaffirmed the idea that TPP would be easier for us to join now."

Early Friday, Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso said he would welcome a move by the United States to rejoin the TPP.

Aso, speaking to reporters after a cabinet meeting, also said that he expected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Trump to discuss TPP at their summit meeting next week.

Trump has often said he prefers bilateral trade deals instead of multinational pacts, believing the U.S. does not fare well in bigger trade deals. It was not immediately clear why he now is open to rejoining the TPP.

Trump said throughout his presidential campaign "The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country, just a continuing rape of our country. That's what it is, too. It's a harsh word: It's a rape of our country."

During opening statements at Thursday's meeting before he shooed out reporters, Trump assured the lawmakers that he intends to negotiate better trade deals for the American farmer in the face of threatened new Chinese tariffs and contentious negotiations with Canada and Mexico.

"It'll be very good when we get it all finished," Trump said. "The farmers will do fantastically well. Agriculture will be taken care of 100 percent."

Trump contended that "China has consistently treated the American farmer very poorly," noting that Beijing had until last year blocked U.S. beef sales for 14 years.

Now, in response to Trump's announced intention to impose new or higher tariffs on $150 billion worth of Chinese imports, China says it will impose new levies on an array of U.S. exports, including wheat, soybeans, corn, cranberries and orange juice, raising fears among U.S. farmers that their livelihoods are threatened.

Administration officials have said China and the United States can negotiate their differences and avoid a trade war.

Trump said Thursday "we're having some great discussions" with China and that he believes the outcome will be "tariffs off and the barriers down."

But a spokesman for China's commerce ministry said the United States is not showing any sincerity and that China will not hesitate to fight back if the U.S. escalates trade tensions.U.S. President Donald Trumps nominee for secretary of state, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, faced intense questioning about the ongoing Russia probe, his relationship with the president, and hotspots around the globe during his confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Pompeo indicated he would not resign in protest if Trump fired Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading an investigation of ties between Russia and Trumps inner circle.



My instincts tell me that my obligation to continue to serve as Americas senior diplomat will be more important at increased times of political domestic turmoil, the nominee said.

WATCH: Pompeo Faces Tough Grilling by Senate





Pompeo refused to say whether he shares Trumps view that the special counsel is on a witch hunt and repeatedly declined to discuss what he has heard the president say about the Russia probe.



Im not going to talk about the conversations the president and I had, Pompeo said. Im with the president an awful lot, and he has never asked me to do anything that I considered remotely improper.



The nominee did, however, distance himself from a Trump tweet blaming the Russia investigation for bad blood between Moscow and Washington.

The historic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union and now Russia is caused by Russian bad behavior, Pompeo said.



Senators of both parties stressed the need for a secretary of state who can navigate an often-stormy White House and stand up to the president, when needed.



You have developed a close relationship with the presidentmany strong voices have been terminated or resigned [under Trump], Chairman Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, said.

The American people are deeply worried by an erratic president who uses schoolboy taunts when talking about nuclear war, the ranking Democrat, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, said. Will you be a voice of reason [in the Trump administration], or will you support the presidents worst instincts?

In his response, Pompeo pointed to his background as a former U.S. military officer.



I know some of you have read the stories  Im [described as] a hawk, a hardliner, the nominee said. Theres no one like someone who has served in uniform who understands the value of diplomacy and the terror and tragedy that is warThe best outcomes are always won at the diplomatic table.



Pompeo rejected regime change in North Korea and said he hoped diplomacy -- including an expected summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un -- would achieve Pyongyangs complete and verifiable denuclearization.



We have a responsibility to achieve a condition where Kim Jong Un is unable to threaten the United States of America with a nuclear weapon, he said.



Pompeo conceded that as CIA director he has seen no evidence that Iran has failed to comply with the international nuclear deal negotiated during the former Obama administration. Even so, the nominee repeatedly spoke of shortcomings in the accord that must be addressed.



I want to fix this deal. Thats the objective. I think thats in the best interests of the United States, Pompeo said. If theres no chance we can fix it, I will recommend to the president that we do our level best to work with our allies to achieve a better outcome and a better deal.



On other matters, Pompeo echoed Trumps criticism of the 2015 Paris climate accord, saying it put an undue burden on the United States.



Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey pressed the nominee on past anti-gay statements. Pompeo said he continues to oppose same-sex marriage but that his personal views do not affect how he treats people.



We have married gay couples at the CIA. I treated them with the exact same respect, Pompeo said.



Youre going to represent this country and its values abroad in countries where gay individuals are under untold persecution, untold violence. Youre views do matter, Booker responded.



Trump nominated Pompeo, a former Republican member of Congress, to be secretary of state after abruptly dismissing Rex Tillerson from the post last month.



With one exception, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Republican senators are expected to back Pompeos nomination. Most Democrats are withholding judgment, but some have expressed concerns about Pompeos hawkish stances and questioned whether he is a good choice to serve as Americas top diplomat.U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing back against a New York Times report that said he had late last year considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller, who is heading the criminal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

"If I wanted to fire Robert Mueller in December, as reported by the Failing New York Times, I would have fired him," Trump said on Twitter. "Just more Fake News from a biased newspaper!"

Trump has regularly vented his ire at Mueller's nearly yearlong probe, especially this week after Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided the New York office and residence of Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen. Agents were searching for financial records and documents related to hefty hush payments shortly before the election to two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied the purported liaisons.

In addition, the investigators were looking for documents about any conversations Cohen might have had with Trump regarding a 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about being able to grope women at will because at the time he was the star of a reality television show. The tape surfaced a month ahead of the November 2016 election, briefly hurting the Trump campaign before he apologized.

WATCH: Bipartisan Push to Prevent Trump From Firing Mueller

Numerous U.S. news outlets have said Trump is considering firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing Mueller's probe and signed off on the FBI seizure of Cohen's files.

Trump's latest complaint about the investigation and media coverage of it came as The New Yorker magazine reported that American Media Inc., the publisher of a Trump-supportive tabloid, the National Enquirer, paid $30,000 in late 2015 to a doorman at one of Trump's New York buildings for exclusive rights to the doorman's claim that Trump had fathered an out-of-wedlock child in the 1980s. American Media, whose chairman is a Trump friend, killed the story, and the doorman, under terms of the payment to him, was required to keep quiet about the claim.

The New Yorker said it had uncovered no evidence the claim about the child was true, but noted that it was the third known payment to people ahead of the election to suppress embarrassing stories about Trump's past from surfacing before voters headed to the polls.

Cohen paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money, while American Media paid $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom claim to have had affairs with Trump a decade ahead of his run for the White House.

Trump's top lawyer dealing with Mueller quit recently. But the president said in a second Mueller-related tweet that he had "full confidence" in another of his lawyers, Ty Cobb, and had been "fully advised throughout each phase of this process."

Trump said he had "agreed with the historically cooperative, disciplined approach that we have engaged in" with Mueller.

President Donald Trump insists he "never said when an attack on Syria would take place" in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack, tweeting that "it could be very soon or not so soon at all."

A day after warning that "missiles will be coming" to Syria, Trump also said Thursday "the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region" of Islamic State.

The White House has said Trump is considering striking Syria with missiles as one option to retaliate for the latest alleged chemical attack blamed on Syrias government forces. Scores of people were killed or sickened in the attack Saturday in the town of Douma, in eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus. Syria has denied using chemical weapons.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday France has "proof" that chemical weapons were used by Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's regime. He said France will respond at the time of its choosing.

Officials and analysts in Washington say a robust, U.S.-led retaliatory military response is expected within days.

Speaking at a House Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis promised communication to Congress prior to any attack on Syria.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said she supports sending a message that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable but her country will not take part in any military action.

After Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said this week Russian forces would shoot down any missiles fired at Syria, Trump said on Twitter Wednesday that the Russians should be ready, "because they will be coming."

Secretary Mattis on Wednesday said while intelligence about the attack in Syria is still being assessed, we stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate as the president determined."



Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Theresa May convened an emergency Cabinet meeting Thursday to discuss what role Britain will play in any response to the situation in Syrian.

The Kremlin has called on all parties involved in Syria to refrain from actions that could destabilize the region.

Syrian rebels claim government forces dropped barrel bombs containing poisonous chemicals on civilians in Douma.

Russias military announced on Thursday that the Syrian government is now in full control of the area.

More than 2,000 U.S. troops are in Syria, where a U.S.-led coalition has launched thousands of airstrikes  mostly on Islamic State and other extremists.

The USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, with about 6,500 sailors, departed Norfolk in Virginia on Wednesday for what the U.S. navy termed a routine deployment to Europe and the Middle East. A U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, the Donald Cook, departed Cyprus on Monday in the Mediterranean Sea.

The Cook and the USS Porter, on April 7 last year, together launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Mediterranean at Syrias Shayrat airbase in response to a chemical attack three days prior that killed at least 74 people and sickened hundreds.

The Porter is also in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations, which includes the Mediterranean.



VOA's Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.President Donald Trump's nominee to be Secretary of State, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, will appear before a Senate Committee for his confirmation hearing Thursday, where he will emphasize a harder line towards Russia.

Russia continues to act aggressively, enabled by years of soft policy toward that aggression. Thats now over, Pompeo will tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to excerpts of his testimony.

North Korea and Iran and are also expected to be topics of discussion Thursday.

WATCH: LIVE Mike Pompeo's confirmation hearing



Differences between President Trump and his former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson led to his dismissal in March.

But Stephen Pomper of the International Crisis Group says if confirmed, Pompeo will not face a similar burden.

"The State Department wants to be at the vanguard of U.S. foreign policy. That was very difficult for Secretary Rex Tillerson to do because it was known that there was distance between him and the president. So when he would go out and have conversations with foreign leaders, it was often questioned whether or not he was really representing President Trump's views. I don't think Secretary Pompeo will have that problem," he said.

Trump said Thursday that Pompeo "will be a great Secretary of State!"

Ariel Cohen of the Atlantic Council said "I think Pompeo is more of a hawk, more of a Trumpian, more of this sort of new wave of what I would call American nationalism, and we see countries becoming more nationalistic all over the world."

On Russia, Pompeo has been far more critical than Trump of Moscow's alleged attempts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Furthering the U.S.-Russia tensions is last week's alleged chemical attack on civilians in Syria, with Moscow and Damascus denying any Syrian role.

Rob Raffaele contributed to this report.Ukraine this week dismissed as unacceptable a natural gas transit proposal by Russian energy giant Gazprom. Kyiv's move will further complicate efforts by Western European governments to persuade their Central European counterparts to withdraw objections to Nord Stream 2, a Kremlin-favored pipeline being built under the Baltic Sea to deliver gas from Russia to Germany without transiting Ukraine and Poland.

The politics of Nord Stream 2 have become increasingly tangled amid heightened tensions between Europe and Russia. Suspicions are growing that the Kremlin wants to develop the new pipeline to reduce the importance of the one running through Ukraine  more for political reasons than commercial ones.

On Monday, Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko dubbed Russia "an extremely unreliable partner" in energy provision. In an interview with a German newspaper, he also said Nord Stream 2 would provide the Kremlin with the opportunity to switch off at will the gas to Ukraine without disrupting supplies to Western Europe. Most of the natural gas Western Europe buys from Russia currently flows through Ukraine.

Nord Stream 2 would replace an older pipeline under the Baltic Sea, and double by next year the amount of Russian gas delivered to Germany, the European Union's most powerful economy.

German authorities have dismissed in the past Ukrainian and Polish objections to Nord Stream 2, and last month they issued the final permits needed for pipeline construction on German territory and in its territorial waters. Finland also has issued construction permits.

Merkel's stance

But after weeks of lobbying by Kyiv, and with growing pressure from within Germany's newly formed governing coalition, Chancellor Angela Merkel has started to harden her language about the proposed pipeline. It will cost billions of dollars to build and is planned to run 1,200 kilometers from Vyborg in Russia to Lubmin in Germany.

Russia currently supplies more than one-third of the natural gas Europe uses, though with demand increasing that could reach closer to 50 percent next decade.

In the past, Merkel hasn't acknowledged a geopolitical dimension when it comes to debating the benefits and drawbacks of Nord Stream 2. She brushed away Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki's objections at a Berlin press conference in February. He warned of the dangers of Europe becoming too dependent on Russian energy and said Russia must "not be allowed to have a monopoly and force its prices on the European Union" or use the gas to blackmail EU governments.

But after a meeting Tuesday with Poroshenko, Merkel acknowledged for the first time allies' concerns over the "political" and "strategic" aspects of the proposed pipeline, saying Nord Stream 2 could proceed only if Ukraine's role as a transit country for Russian gas also was protected.

She said the earnings Ukraine receives for gas transit rights are of strategic importance. "That is why I have made it very clear that the Nord Stream 2 project is not possible without clarity regarding the transit role of Ukraine," she said.

Ukraine and Poland aren't the only European countries objecting to Nord Stream 2. Baltic nations and Slovakia, as well as Sweden and Denmark, have expressed doubts about the project, both out of solidarity with Ukraine, which would lose about $3 billion a year in revenue once the new pipeline was complete, and over fears about Europe's growing dependence on natural gas supplies from Russia.

That dependency, they fear, could make Europe vulnerable to geopolitical blackmail by Russia. It is a view shared by the U.S., which has urged Germany to be cautious about signing up to Nord Stream 2 and has promised to offer more U.S. gas to Europe.

Pipeline critics

NATO's former head, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has described Nord Stream 2 as a "geopolitical mistake" for the EU, saying it would make a mockery of EU sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea.

Last week, the Trump administration included Alexei Miller, the CEO of Gazprom, which is 50 percent owned by the Russian state, on an expanded economic sanctions list.

On Tuesday, Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said that the Baltic states, Nordic countries and Visegrad countries had formed a bloc on Nord Stream 2 inside the EU. "We have always been united in our position regarding Nord Stream 2, and we believe that this is not an economic and business but a political project," he said.

Authorities in Sweden and Denmark are still mulling whether to agree to construction permits. Last year, Denmark's parliament passed legislation that would allow the Danish government to ban the pipeline from going through the country's territorial waters.

Gazprom said in March that it would terminate its gas contracts with Ukraine after a European court ordered the Russian giant to pay more than $2.5 billion to Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz, concluding a long legal battle about prices and obligations.

Gazprom transit

But in a statement this week seemingly aimed at assuaging European doubts about the project, Miller, the Gazprom CEO, said his company had never envisaged stopping all transit through Ukraine and would maintain volumes of 10 billion to 15 billion cubic meters per year.

Ukrainian Energy Minister Igor Nasalyk said Wednesday that those amounts were too small to make Russian gas transit economically viable. "Our country will not accept such volumes," he said.

Ukrainian energy officials say Russia needs to pump at least 40 billion cubic meters of gas per year to make the transit route through Ukraine "economically profitable" for Kyiv. Last year, 93.5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas transited Ukraine to the rest of Europe  about half of the EU bloc's total purchases from Gazprom.

Merkel's shift in language about Nord Stream 2 followed a series of highly critical remarks about Russia from Heiko Maas, Germany's new foreign minister. Ukraine argues the whole project is political, and Poroshenko said this week that his country's transit pipeline could be modernized more cheaply than the cost of building Nord Stream 2.

Russian officials counter that it is European foes who are trying to turn natural gas into a political weapon by throwing up objections to the new pipeline project. They also contend that Europe will face gas shortages and price spikes next decade if the Russian energy giant isn't allowed to boost capacity.The opioid crisis leaves no community in the U.S. untouched. It's nationwide, but it hits small towns and rural states particularly hard.

In tiny Bellevue, Ohio, population 8,000, Koriann Evans had just gotten fentanyl from her dealer. Fentanyl is a drug dozens of times more powerful than heroin, and Evans couldn't wait to get home to take it so she took it in her car and was driving home with her two young children in the back seat when she started to overdose.

One of her daughters asked if she was OK. "Mommy can't breathe," Evans told her. Evans managed to hit the brakes before passing out. She was lucky. She was taken to a hospital where doctors revived her before it was too late.

Evans has since stopped taking opioids.

"I almost killed my kids. I didn't have it (the car) in park. I could have flipped that car and killed them or I could have killed other people," she said.

WATCH: Opioid Deaths Still Rising in the US

Sheriff John Tharp in Lucas County Ohio near Lake Erie, says the number of accidents caused by people overdosing on heroin and other drugs "has just skyrocketed." Tharp says people commonly shoot up in their cars after buying the drugs.

Manchester, with 110,000 residents, is the most populous city in New Hampshire. Its opioid addiction problem is so notorious that President Donald Trump traveled there to announce his plan to combat the country's opioid crisis.

Three years ago, after overdose emergency calls exploded in Manchester, firefighters started a program called "Safe Station," a program that encourages addicts to seek help at every firehouse in the state without judgment. It started when one of the firefighters helped a colleague's brother, addicted to drugs, and on the verge of suicide. In its first month, 80 people sought help. Now the average is almost twice as many.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 40,000 people died from opioid overdoses in 2016, a five-fold increase from 1999. More recent statistics are not yet available.

Rural doctors can feel overwhelmed. Dr. Jennifer Allen practices medicine in Hannibal, Missouri, population 17,000. Allen says she feels alone. The next clinic is a two-hour drive from Hannibal. At her clinic, Allen witnesses first hand how hard families and individuals suffer because of the opioid epidemic.

Hannibal, Manchester and Bellevue, like many small towns across the U.S., don't have the resources to fight this epidemic alone.

"No one agency can do this, no one city can do this," Manchester's Fire Chief Daniel Goonan said. "This is way above my pay grade! It's above any community's pay grade, any state's pay grade. This has got to be an all out, all hands on deck effort to fix this thing, nationwide."

The University of Missouri School of Medicine is making a difference in its state. It started a program that uses video conferencing to help doctors in rural areas.

Inside a secure room at the University of Missouri, doctors from across the state can talk to trained specialists. Dr. Doug Burgess, with the University of Missouri at the Kansas City campus, assists with the program.

"We have therapists, we have pharmacologists, we have primary care doctors and physicians, and as a group there is a lot of expertise there," he said.

Dr. Karen Edison, the medical director at the university's School of Medicine says the doctors become part of a learning collaborative where they can ask their questions, present their patients and come up with a strategy that will help that patient.

One out of every 66 deaths in Missouri is related to opioid or heroin overdoses, higher than the national average.

Doctors, firefighters and police in small towns throughout the U.S. understand it will take a team approach to change the trajectory of this epidemic.

In Hannibal, Allen says the program helps her to understand "that yes, OK, were doing things right or, no, here is something we can change or improve on."

Addicts need help without the fear of being stigmatized or being arrested. The crisis is so widespread that the surgeon general is urging people to carry naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of drug overdoses and saves lives.

Ending the crisis is indeed an all hands on deck effort, and those hands have to be made up of the entire nation.The annual U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises underway have historically been a very public demonstration of force intended, in part, to counter North Korea's aggressive nuclear and missile tests. But with looming diplomatic summits aimed at reaching a deal to end the North's nuclear program, media coverage of the drills has so far been limited. VOA's Brian Padden reports from Seoul.Amid a Russian warning that a military conflict could erupt with the United States over Syria, President Donald Trump convened his National Security Council to discuss the American response to the recent alleged chemical weapons attack blamed on the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"President Trump just finished a meeting with his national security team to discuss the situation in Syria. No final decision has been made," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. "We are continuing to assess intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies. The president will speak with [French] President [Emmanuel] Macron and [British] Prime Minister [Theresa] May this evening."

Before meeting with his top security and military advisers, Trump said a decision would be "made fairly soon."

WATCH: US, Allies Mull Response to Syria's Gas Attack

Focus on military might

Later, during an afternoon event in the White House Rose Garden at which Trump touted an increased defense budget, the president declared that "we're going to have the strongest military we've ever had, and can you think of a better time to have it? Right? This is when we need it."

Amid speculation a U.S.-led strike conducted with several allies on multiple Syrian targets could be imminent, Trump has publicly warned Russia "missiles will be coming to Syria" before insisting on Twitter that he "never said when an attack on Syria would take place."

Russia has called on all parties involved in Syria to refrain from actions that could destabilize the region.

"We hope that there will be no point of no return  that the U.S. and their allies will refrain from military action against a sovereign state. You understand that the danger of escalation is higher than simply just Syria, because our military is there on the invitation of the Syrian government," said Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia.

'Very bellicose'

Asked about the possibility of war between the U.S. and Russia, Nebenzia said, "We cannot exclude any possibilities, unfortunately, because we saw messages coming from Washington. They were very bellicose. They know we are there. I wish there were dialogue through appropriate channels to avert any dangerous development."

U.S. officials are acknowledging the risk of retaliation drawing Washington and Moscow  both of which have troops in Syria  into direct military conflict.

"We're trying to stop the murder of innocent people," U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday. But the question on a strategic level, he said, "is how do we keep this from escalating out of control, if you get my drift on that."

According to Aaron Stein, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a global policy think tank, "It's very clear that the U.S., the French and the British will strike."

Stein predicted in an interview Thursday with VOA's Russian service that "it's probably coming in the next couple of days and will probably last just a night."

In Moscow, political and military leaders are likely asking themselves, "What does the [U.S.] president want, what is he trying to get the Syrians to do or not do, and what is he trying to get the Russians to do or not do?" according to Yuval Weber, a global fellow at the Wilson Center think tank's Kennan Institute, which focuses on Russia and Ukraine policy research.

"That's essentially where we get the chances for miscalculation and actual serious conflict," Weber, also an assistant professor at Russia's National Research University-Higher School of Economics, told VOA's Russian service.

Security Council session

The Russians, backers of Assad's government, have requested that the U.N. Security Council meet Friday to discuss Syria and that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres brief the diplomats.

At least 40 people were killed and hundreds sickened in last Saturday's attack in the town of Douma, in eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus. Syria has denied using chemical weapons.

NBC News reported that the U.S. government had received blood and urine samples from the scene that tested positive for chemical weapons.

Inspectors from the international Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said a fact-finding mission would start work in Douma on Saturday.The White House says the United States and its allies are still considering how to respond to atrocities in Syria and that many options are available. U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday tweeted that missiles "will be coming" in response to Russia's threat to shoot down any U.S. missiles in Syria. But a White House official said the president has set no timetable for such an attack. VOA's Zlatica Hoke reports.The World Health Organization (WHO) says breastfeeding all babies for the first two years would save the lives of more than 820,000 children under the age of five every year. The WHO is issuing a new 10-step guide aimed at promoting breastfeeding in health facilities around the world.



The World Health Organization and U.N. Childrens Fund launched the Baby-friendly Hospital initiative in 1991, a voluntary program that encourages new mothers to breastfeed. The two agencies want to expand this program so that breastfeeding becomes a standard of care for all babies in all hospitals, with the aim of achieving 100-percent coverage.

Technical Officer in WHOs Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, Laurence Grummer-Strawn, says the updated 10-step guidance advises health facilities on how care should be offered to new mothers and babies.

It focuses on issues, such as placing the mother and baby together, skin to skin, immediately post-partum, starting breastfeeding within a few minutes after the birth," he said. "It is about avoiding the use of formula unless there is a medical reason toThe other thing that is new about these 10 steps is that they clearly apply to all babies. The key principles behind the 10 steps also apply to premature infants, low birth weight babies, sick babies.

Grummer-Strawn says globally only about 40 percent of babies under six months old are exclusively breastfed. He tells VOA coverage of baby friendly hospitals in Africa is very low  only four percent. He says that is of concern as fewer women receive the guidance they need regarding the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding.

We totally believe that the lack of breastfeeding contributes significantly to mortality," he said. "Neo-natal mortality rates have not dropped nearly as rapidly as child mortality rates. And, one of the concerns is that we are not adequately providing good nutrition particularly to low-birth babies and so addressing this early care in a better way can prevent some of that.

Health advocates say breastfeeding confers many benefits. They say it protects newborns from acquiring infections and reduces mortality. It improves I-Q, school readiness and attendance. They say children and adolescents who were breastfed as babies are less likely to be overweight or obese. They say breastfeeding also reduces the risk of breast cancer in mothers.Texas Border Crossing Where Migrants Made Camp to Reopen

Officials said no migrants remained at makeshift encampment as of Friday; some were expelled from country, many others were allowed to remain in US, at least temporarily, as they seek asylumMonths after the defeat of the Islamic State in Mosul, Jafaar Subhi, his wife and eight children are the only family that has returned to their district in the Old City. He tells VOA they have no choice but to resettle in their war-torn home. VOA's Kawa Omar reports from Mosul.The Azores are famous for their very pleasant climate, breathtaking green and unspoiled landscapes and nature. Guided by a photographer and volcanologist, discover five islands: Sao Miguel, Faial, Terceira, Pico and Flores - each with its distinct character.This content is expired!

Unfortunely this content is expired and cannot be viewed anymore; if You are the owner of this content please login to our Website, go to our access panel and enable this content again.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.U.S. Embassy in Cambodia warns of alleged bomb plot: The U.S. Embassy in Cambodia issued a security alert over an alleged plot to set off a bomb during the country's traditional new year holiday, which runs through Monday. The alert advises U.S. personnel to exercise caution around Wat Phnom, a temple in Phnom Penh said by Cambodian officials and media to be the target of a plot by the Khmer National Liberation Front, an overseas anti-government group. The alert was posted on the embassy's website and social media outlets.China remains the "world's lead executioner" amid a worldwide drop in executions, according to a new Amnesty International report. There are now 70 people on death row.

The human rights group reported China implemented "more death sentences than the rest of the world combined", but did not provide a figure because executions are considered a state secret in the Asian country.

Besides Guinea, Mongolia also scrapped the death penalty for all crimes, taking the total number of abolitionist countries to 106 in 2017.

Twenty countries in the region have abolished the death penalty for all crimes, with Somalia and South Sudan being the only countries to record executions a year ago compared to five states in 2016. In Iran, 40% of the more than 500 executions were for drugs offences, while similarly 40% of Saudi Arabia's almost 150 executions were for drugs offences. Singapore hanged eight people in 2017 - all for drug-related offences and double the amount in 2016.

While capital punishment in the country has drawn global criticism, a majority of the public supports it. "However, steps taken by Iran and Malaysia to amend their anti-drugs laws go a long way towards showing that cracks are appearing, even in the minority of countries that still execute people", said Salil Shetty. Iran carried out 11 percent fewer executions, according to Amnesty, while Pakistan put 31 percent fewer people to death.

In Iran and Iraq, the report says, "confessions" of guilt reportedly obtained through torture were broadcast on television before the trial took place, in violation of the presumption of innocence.

The US remained the only country in the Americas to carry out executions, with 23 last year, up slightly from the year before.

Russia, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan continued to observe moratoriums on executions, although in Kazakhstan one man remained under sentence of death after being convicted and sentenced in 2016 for terrorism. "It feels as if things are not improving and we see a sort of cruelty in which the death penalty is being used with the government going back on some of its own practices".

Arrestan a policia acusado de violar a su companera

El policia fue presentado a un juez para ser vinculado a proceso por el delito de violacion , por lo pronto fue trasladado al Reclusorio Oriente.

Average Michigan gas prices nearly unchanged

On Sunday , the average was a half-cent more than last week, 13 cents more than a month ago and 28 cents more than past year . Now motorists in the state are paying 16 cents more than one month ago and 30 cents more than this same time past year .

Willian fires warning to Chelsea team-mates after Premier League struggles

The 27-year-old has earned rave reviews for his endless energy and superb desire to constantly win the ball back. However, he's not getting carried away by recent praise and is instead focused on lifting the FA Cup next month.

Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan were the next highest in terms of executions carried out, while the USA moved from seventh to eighth place in the global ranking. Many countries do not release official information on capital punishment and several countries are thought to have executed many more than the minimum figures compiled by Amnesty (indicated by a "+" symbol). Among the countries cited were Iran, Pakistan, Belarus, Iraq, and China. Twenty-three people were executed in the country over the year, an increase from 2016 but historically low for the United States. "The death penalty is barbaric. We know that by galvanizing the support of people worldwide, we can stand up to this cruel punishment and end the death penalty everywhere", Shetty said.

A public execution in the northern city of Nour, Iran.

"We aren't using the death penalty".

For instance, while only Somalia and South Sudan are known to have carried out executions in 2017, Botswana and Sudan have already resumed executions this year. Meanwhile, Gambia signed an worldwide treaty committing the country not to carry out executions and moving to abolish the death penalty (the president established an official moratorium on executions in February this year).

Not one country in the region had abolished the punishment for all crimes. Burkina Faso and Chad also took steps to repeal this punishment with new or proposed laws. The abolitionist movement in sub-Saharan Africa, for now, can not declare total victory against the death penalty.

Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's Secretary General, said: "Strong leaders execute justice, not people".

"The leadership of countries in this region gives fresh hope that the abolition of the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment is within reach", she added.

On 25 January 2017, Kuwait executed seven people - the first death penalty carried out since 2013.A noted Alabama evangelist, author and public speaker was arrested in Hoover, Ala., Tuesday (April 10) on child sex charges, AL.com reported.

Hoover police on Tuesday arrested a 37-year-old minister from Southside in east Alabama, saying he engaged in deviant sexual intercourse with a boy between the ages of 12 and 15.

Bowen's website identifies him as president and founder of Acton Bowen Outreach.

He is charged with second-degree sodomy, enticing a child for immoral purposes and second-degree sexual abuse. He was a "family acquaintance", according to the site. He speaks up to 20 times a month at churches, youth weekend events, citywide crusades, camps, conferences, school assemblies and leadership seminars, before more than 350,000 people each year, according to the bio.

Rebelde: Cacho, ironiza: "Las mujeres siempre tienen razon"

Las risas, entre periodistas, artistas y representantes, estallaron en el recinto. Tuvimos que levantar un par de shows, las chicas estaban violentas, y nada mas.

Maduro anuncia que no asistira a la Cumbre de las Americas

La cancelacion de ultimo minuto de Trump no afecta los planes de su hija Ivanka, asesora especial del mandatario, quien ira a Lima para defender "el lugar de las mujeres en la economia de la region", segun la Casa Blanca .

Atleta transgenero sufre grave lesion que le pondria fin a su carrera

La barra se fue detras de sus hombros, provocandole una dura lesion que la alejara bastante tiempo de la competencia. Ahora, la neozelandesa transgenero Laurel Hubbard vuelve a estar en boca de todos por una escalofriante lesion .

Hoover police Capt. Gregg Rector said his department's Special Victim's Unit first launched an investigation into Bowen three weeks ago. The Jefferson County District Attorney's Office issued warrants for his arrest Monday.

The male victim is a young teenager, but his exact age was not released by police, the website reported.

He's now being held on $90,000 bond.WSU Interior Design Students Restore Chairs for Charity

April 12, 2018

OGDEN, Utah  Architecturally significant chairs, refurbished by Weber State University interior design students, will be available for auction April 20 at 6 p.m. at the Copper Nickel in Ogden (2450 Grant Ave.), during the seventh annual Charitable Chair Event. Proceeds will benefit Catholic Community Services of Northern Utah.

Tickets for the evening are $15 and can be purchased at weberstatetickets.com from March 25 until the night of the event. A silent auction will take place at 6 p.m., with a live auction beginning at 7 p.m. Those who cannot attend the event but wish to bid may contact Kristen Arnold at kristenarnold@weber.edu or 801-690-0809.

Students from five WSU interior design courses participated by designing or refurbishing 24 chairs of historical influence or significance. Though the chairs can be student-built, they cannot be purchased new  the goal of the final project is to design or refurbish the chairs to create pieces that are functional, well-crafted and an accurate representation of a specific time periods style.

Students can go to antique stores, go online or even look in their grandmas attic for chairs, Arnold said. People donate chairs each year as well.

As part of the process, students solicit community sponsors for services, products and funds to aid in the restorations.

One student team, Kelsie Jones and Carter Lenox, teamed up with Heritage Restoration in Kaysville to work on their chair. While the students directed the work and made all creative decisions, they felt they needed the help of an expert to fix the structural issues of the chair.

One of the arms was loose and needed to be reattached to the chair, Jones said. The other arm had bite marks from a dog that needed to be filled in.

After the chair was structurally sound, the team selected a custom-mixed stain that accentuated new upholstery fabric.

Interior design assistant professor Kristen Arnold envisioned the event as a way for students to apply their classroom experience and collaborate with the community.

The project gives students an opportunity to use design skills, learn the design process and network with professionals in the design-build industry as they refurbish the chairs, Arnold said. In addition, students get hands-on experience and contribute to the community at the same time.

The Charitable Chair event has raised $30,000 for local charities and to support Weber State student scholarships.

Visit weber.edu/interiordesign/chair.html for more information about the event and photos of this years chairs.

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.About Me Scott Because prophetic scriptures are found throughout the bible, it is obvious that a comprehensive, systematic approach would be useful, if not necessary, for the understanding of prophecy. Past prophecies have been fulfilled in a literal manner, as confirmed by the dating of these writings and historical records of confirmation. These past prophecies also serve as a model of how to interpret future prophecies. A literal view of prophecy clearly indicates a certain sequence of events will occur within a single generation, concluding with the Tribulation and Second Advent and these events will be obvious. The prophetic signs appear to be present in this generation and we believe these signs are revealed in the news from around the world. View my complete profileBank of America will stop lending to manufacturers of military-style firearms that are sold for civilian use, a bank official revealed this week.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 12/4/2018 (1267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bank of America will stop lending to manufacturers of "military-style firearms" that are sold for civilian use, a bank official revealed this week.

Anne Finucane, a vice-chairwoman at Bank of America, announced the plans Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television, saying the bank had "intense conversations over the last few months" with its gun-manufacturer clients to let them know Bank of America would no longer finance their operations.

"We have just a handful of manufacturers. They know what our intentions are," Finucane told Bloomberg. "Its our intention not to finance these military-style firearms for civilian use."

Finucane did not specify a timeline for when Bank of America would implement its decision  beyond noting it would be on a "go-forward basis"  nor did she state how it would affect any current lending agreements the bank might have with such gun manufacturers.

On Wednesday, a Bank of America representative referred all questions back to Finucanes Bloomberg Television interview.

Bank of America had been one of a number of financial institutions to vow action in the wake of the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Fla., releasing a statement on Feb. 24 that said it would "examine what we can do to help end the tragedy of mass shootings."

"An immediate step were taking is to engage the limited number of clients we have that manufacture assault weapons for nonmilitary use to understand what they can contribute to this shared responsibility," Bank of America said in February.

But Finucanes interview was the first time the bank confirmed it would take concrete steps toward cutting off lending ties with some gun manufacturers.

"We want to contribute in any way we can to reduce these mass shootings," Finucane told Bloomberg. "I mean thats such a tragedy in the United States, so thats No. 1."

When asked what the manufacturers reactions had been to Bank of Americas decision, Finucane simply told Bloomberg it was "mixed."

"Well just leave it at that," Finucane told the news site. "Theyre our clients, and we have enjoyed a relationship, but there are those that I think will reduce their portfolio, and well work with them, and others that will choose to do something else."

The Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School  one of several school attacks in 2018  left 17 students and staff members dead, and it immediately jolted countrywide discussions about school safety and gun control. On one end of the spectrum, in the weeks after the Florida tragedy, U.S. President Donald Trump and others pushed a proposal to arm school teachers.

On the other, the tragedy seemed to galvanize a new generation of activists, including many teenagers from Parkland, in support of stricter gun control. Hundreds of thousands of protesters appeared at March for Our Lives rallies across the country March 24 to call for an end to gun violence.

Meanwhile, the tragedy also prompted a wave of responses by retailers and private companies: Dicks Sporting Goods said it would no longer sell assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, and that it would prohibit gun sales to people under 21. Walmart announced it would raise the minimum age to buy firearms or ammunition from 18 to 21 and stop carrying products resembling assault-style rifles, such as toy guns and Airsoft rifles.

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In March, Delta Air Lines ended a travel discount for National Rifle Association members  one that had apparently only been used by 13 people  which drew outrage from gun owners and Georgia lawmakers, who quickly voted to revoke tax breaks for the Atlanta-based airline.

Its too early to tell how much, if any, backlash Bank of Americas decision will attract. Online, some praised the banks action while others vowed to stop banking with the financial institution.

Citigroup announced last month it would not do business with retail clients if they sold firearms to people under 21. Citi also said it would require its clients to not sell "bump stocks" and not sell firearms to those who did not pass a background check. Citis new policies received an icy reaction by Republican lawmakers, Politico reported.

Several gun-violence prevention groups praised Bank of Americas decision.

"We were heartened to see Bank of America join the list of companies stepping up to keep America safe, especially when Washington politicians are failing to take action," Avery Gardiner, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said in a statement. "Why would anyone want to help finance assault weapons that are regularly used in mass shootings? The gun violence epidemic in this country is a uniquely American problem and its encouraging to see Americas corporate giants take a leading role in this fight."

 Washington PostHey there, time traveller!

This article was published 11/4/2018 (1267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A private members bill introduced Wednesday by a Progressive Conservative MLA aims to ensure timely payment to construction industry contractors.

Reg Helwer (Brandon West), who sponsored the bill, said government has received "several requests" from industry and union representatives alike for such legislation.

"Its become an issue throughout the construction associations in Canada that payment is being delayed," Helwer said.

Contractors, subcontractors and project owners are all affected, he said. "Its delaying construction projects. Its making them more expensive."

Private firms and the provincial government tender projects out to general contractors, who then hire and oversee the sub-contractors who do the actual work.

While there are rules around paying general contractors on time, some subcontractors wait months and years for their cut of the pie.

Under Helwers bill, owners must make periodic payments under a construction contract to their contractors at specified times as the work progresses or when milestones are reached.

They also must make final payments promptly upon the completion of work. Similar obligations apply to contractorss payments to their subcontractors and subcontractorss payments to other subcontractors.

If payment obligations are not met, a contractor or subcontractor may, with notice, suspend work or terminate the contract. An adjudicator may be appointed to resolve any payment disputes.

Helwer said the adjudication process set out in his bill would ensure that work continues on a project while the affected parties are going through a dispute resolution mechanism. The parties dont have to use the courts.

Ontario passed a similar law last December.

In Ottawa, Manitoba Senator Don Plett has been pushing since spring 2016 for a federal prompt-payment law. In a Wednesday interview, Plett said he was "tremendously pleased" to hear about the Manitoba bill.

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His own sons work as contractors and he said provincially regulated companies have left them on the hook for thousands of dollars for months, which is completely legal under existing laws.

"Im very, very happy that my home province is taking a lead on this initiative," the Conservative senator said.

Plett added that Ottawa didnt "step up to the plate as promptly as they should."

The Liberals initially supported Pletts bill, which the Senate passed and sent to the House of Commons.

But in February, the Liberals announced fresh consultations around the issue, suggesting theyll table their own law which would have a small chance of passing before the fall 2019 election. Manitobas law would regulate the vast majority of projects in the province. A federal law would touch on a small number of lucrative government projects.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.cadylan.robertson@freepress.mb.caWelcome Guest! You Are Here:The Canadian Forces School of Aerospace Studies is now named after the most decorated war hero in the countrys history.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 12/4/2018 (1266 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Canadian Forces School of Aerospace Studies is now named after the most decorated war hero in the countrys history.

The school became the RCAF Wing Commander William G. Barker VC Aerospace College  honouring the First World War flying ace  at a ceremony Thursday.

Two plaques were unveiled at the ceremony. One, inscribed by Barkers grandson Ian Mckenzie, will hang in the college. The other will be placed in the legislatures Hall of Honour.

"Billy Barker is a Manitoba hero," Conservative MLA Jon Reyes said in a speech. "His courage, honour and commitment is something we can only aspire to emulate."

Until 1997, few people knew about the man fellow First World War flyer Billy Bishop referred to as "the deadliest air ace who ever lived."

Biographer and aviation author Wayne Ralphs William Barker VC: The Life, Death & Legend of Canadas Most Decorated War Hero was published that year.

Ralph, who was at Thursdays ceremony, said he wrote the book because Canadians are generally reluctant to talk about war heroes.

"Were comfortable talking about victims of war," he said. "Were comfortable talking about (post-traumatic stress disorder) today. But 25, 30 years ago, to talk about someone who was an accomplished killer in war... as Canadians, thats not how we talk about war.

"For me, to see that he could be buried in this circumstance, where he didnt actually have his name on the door of the tomb... the guy thats the most successful at war, ends up buried not even under his own name. How could that be?"

According to RCAF honorary colonel John Wright, Barker was buried under the name Smith  after his father-in-law  in Torontos Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Reporters sought more information about Barker after the book was published.

"It struck a chord," Ralph said.

David, Ian and Alec Mckenzie, three of Barkers grandsons, travelled from B.C. to attend the ceremony.

"Were very proud of our association with this," David said. "It means a lot to the family."

Mckenzie added that his grandfather would likely be thankful and honoured.

Barker died in 1930, so their only memories have come from photographs, stories and books, he said, adding Barkers exploits were "incredible."

Barker was from Dauphin and joined the 1st Canadian Mounted Rifles in 1914 at the age of 20. After a year of trench warfare, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, winning the Military Cross during his time as an observer.

In January 1917, he earned his pilots wings and needed only 55 minutes of instruction before he flew solo. Barker flew a two-seater plane when he returned to France, doing artillery spotting and reconnaissance until he was wounded in August 1917. After his recovery (and many requests for front-line service), he flew as a scout pilot in France and Italy, earning 46 victories in the process.

In October 1918, Barker was flying a solo patrol over the Western Front, when he engaged in a dogfight with German formations. Before crash-landing, he fought through the pain of three leg wounds and a broken elbow to shoot down four enemy aircraft. For that, he earned the Victoria Cross, the highest award in the United Kingdoms honour system.

On top of that, he shot down 50 enemy aircraft and never lost a pilot under his command. During the ceremony, an RCAF lieutenant-colonel also listed several tactics that Barker developed that are still in use, such as using the sun and clouds for concealment.

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After the war, Barker teamed up with Billy Bishop and formed Bishop-Barker Aeroplanes Ltd. The company was unsuccessful and Barker rejoined the Canadian Air Force in 1922, until his retirement in 1926. Barker was the first president of the NHLs Toronto Maple Leafs. He was also the president and general manager of Fairchild Aircraft until his tragic death during a flight demonstration in 1930 at the age of 35.

Barkers funeral was the largest national state event in Torontos history, attended by an estimated 2,000 soldiers. A memorial plaque was mounted at Mount Pleasant in 2011.

According to the armed forces website, the RCAF Wing Commander William G. Barker VC Aerospace College was established in 1987 to meet the professional development needs of the Canadian Air Force.

Each year, the school, which is adjacent to Winnipeg James Armstrong Richardson International Airport, offers advanced education and training in aerospace technology and Air Force officer professional development to about 800 officers and non-commissioned members.

In 2010, the school partnered with the University of Manitoba to give aerospace students the option to complete a masters in art or engineering. In 2013, the partnership went further, introducing the post baccalaureate in aerospace program management.

Wright said the college is the first RCAF building in Canada to be named after Barker.Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 12/4/2018 (1267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Neechi Commons remains open for business despite rumours to the contrary.

The embattled Winnipeg grocery-and-retail complex is looking for creative ways to make a profit as its creditor continues attempts to sell the 50,000-square-foot property.

When Neechi closed its second-floor Bison Berry Restaurant this month for renovations, acting general manager Dennis Lewycky said he heard a familiar but false refrain: Neechi, which has a grocery store, bakery, deli and clothing, arts and crafts sales, must be closing. Or worse, it was already shuttered.

"Many people approach us and say they thought Neechi closed last summer because of the headlines and what was happening," Lewycky said Wednesday, referring to a June 2017 Free Press story.

After it fumbled in debt for more than five years and owed millions in loan payments, Neechis main creditor, Assiniboine Credit Union, put the building and land at 865 Main St. up for auction in July.

The reserve bid was $3.8 million. No one has yet snapped up the property.

Kevin Sitka, president and chief executive officer of the credit union, said: "Theres been some interest in the property, but thats where Ill leave that."

As Neechis co-operative brainstormed about ways to bring in business, Sitka didnt sound ready to pack away the for-sale signs.

"Nothing has changed from our perspective, regarding the sale of the building," he said Wednesday.

Jessica Botelho-Urbanski / Winnipeg Free Press Fresh produce, locally sourced foods such as wild rice and bison meat, and arts and crafts from Indigenous artisans are for sale at Neechi Commons on Main St.

After a strong month of sales last June, Neechi struggled to rebound after news about the buildings possible sale broke, said Louise Champagne, president of the Neechi Foods Co-op board.

"People think were closed. And it really hurt us to have that kind of public presentation of our property for sale," she said. "Its been a challenge to recover.

"So now were looking at making major changes to Neechi Commons and those changes... could be a new partnership, it could be new ownership. We want to see what kind of other uses can be used in the building. So were wide open to exploring," Champagne said.

One option could be a shift to food processing and more focus on sending food shipments the North, Lewycky said.

Neechi Commons already has a partnership with Nutrition North Canada providing meat shipments to some northern First Nations.

"We could really be a significant player in providing nutritious food for northern residents. Now that, to me, sounds very creative, but its a whole new business approach," he said.

"So I think its viable, but it needs research."

Lewycky wouldnt reveal much more about concepts Neechi is pondering, but said the co-op was approached with a new offer this week.

"Im cautious about going public with some of these ideas because none of them have materialized yet or got to the state where we can really say money is on the table. So were optimistic, but well go public  well tell our consumers, customers, investors and the public  when we have something that we feel is pretty tangible," he said.

Since its inception in January 1990 on Dufferin St., Neechi has trumpeted public health and community building, said Champagne. It was a groundbreaker for social enterprise and a grocery game-changer for the North End.

Jessica Botelho-Urbanski / Winnipeg Free Press Dennis Lewycky, acting general manager, and Louise Champagne, president of the Neechi Foods board, say they have a partnership with Nutrition North Canada that could be expanded.

And it has never sold cigarettes, Champagne pointed out.

"When youre selling cigarettes, youre telling young people its OK to use this. We took a stand and weve never gone back on that. Im proud of that," she said. "Thats an example of putting public health over commercial interest."

Promoting social good has long been in Neechis mandate, but becoming financially viable has now reached the do-or-die stage.

Champagne said Neechi isnt stuck on its current worker co-operative model, and would like to find a landlord with compatible moral values.

Competing price-wise with large chains such as Walmart or Save-On-Foods is near-impossible for the grassroots complex, but its 15 or so members hope Winnipeggers still see the value in their locally sourced goods.

Shelves are stocked with bison meat, fresh bannock and wild rice. Wild blueberries are all the rage in August and September. And more than 200 artists (most of them living within a 14-block radius of Neechi) have their goods for sale upstairs.

Dawn Sands, executive director of the North End Community Renewal Corp., said her group does its best to shop and order catering from Neechi. Its a community fixture they would "hate to see disappear," she said.

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"A lot of us actually look to Neechi Commons, those of us that are working in the social enterprise movement, as the groundbreakers, right? The people who really kicked off this movement when they first opened up on Dufferin Street almost 30 years ago," Sands said.

"So theres a lot of respect for the work theyve done in the community, for really kick-starting that movement for us."

Jino Distasio, director of the Institute for Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg, said the complex helped revitalize North Point Douglas, too.

"It was a beacon of hope on Main Street that transformed what would have been seen as an area of neglect into an area of hope," Distasio said. "And that beacon is still there, and I think we just need to find the right mix of supports and services that just meet the needs there."

jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @_jessbuTHE wait for hip and knee replacements in Manitoba continues to grow.

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This article was published 12/4/2018 (1267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE wait for hip and knee replacements in Manitoba continues to grow.

A new report released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information shows 53 per cent of Manitobans awaiting a hip replacement last year got surgery within the recommended six months, compared with 69 per cent in 2015. The wait time grew a little more for those needing a knee replacement: 43 per cent had surgery within six months in 2017, down from 64 per cent in 2015.

BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Head of the WRHAs surgery program Dr. Jack McPherson and Lanette Siragusa of Shared Health Services say the health care system isnt built to respond quickly to patient needs.

"The short answer is, its not a big surprise," said Dr. Jack McPherson, head of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authoritys surgery program and the wait-times reduction task force.

"We are very aware of the fact that theres an ongoing increased demand."

The provinces demographics have shifted considerably in the last decade. Whereas in 2006-07, 12 per cent of Manitobans were between the ages of 60 and 75, as of last year, they made up 14 per cent of the population. Thats an increase of roughly 50,000 people, McPherson said, at the age where they typically need to replace a joint.

"Demand is going up," he said, "so wait times are going to get longer purely because of that."

The growth in wait times, which includes cataract-removal surgery  32 per cent were seen in the accepted 16-week time frame in 2017, compared with 41 per cent in 2015  is fairly consistent with the rest of the country.

"Overall, what weve found is similar to the national trends," said Jennifer DSilva, manager of emerging issues at CIHI, although "we do see that wait times in Manitoba are longer than the rest of the country, generally speaking."

While many are likely to fixate on what the numbers indicate about the provinces massive health-care reorganization, DSilva its hard to know when exactly the numbers might reflect such systemic changes. It should be noted as well CIHIs 2017 numbers are based on data collected only between April 1 and Sept. 30.

"It would depend on how quickly changes could be implemented," she said. "Its not just about the number of people that need the surgery but also about how many surgeries can be done, which is influenced by what else is needed and the number of surgeons."

Other factors include the number of other support staff, the number of post-operative beds and how quickly people are able to move back into the community, she said.

Lanette Siragusa of the newly minted Shared Health provincial organization said the province is looking at ways to become more efficient, in keeping with the December report from the wait-times reduction task force.

She pointed to Misericordia Health Centres embrace of cataract surgery without anesthetic, as well as a hip and knee assessment clinic. That pilot project, which has been operational since January 2017, is an attempt to remove people from the wait lists who dont qualify for surgery. Thus far, Siragusa said, 600 people have been assessed, determining more than half that number dont require surgery.

"Were looking for leading practices that we can adopt that are good for patients and good for the system," she said.

In a statement, Manitoba Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen said CIHIs hip and knee replacement data "validates the work" already done through the task force, and reiterated his governments commitment to following through with its recommendations.

Goertzen also noted hip-fracture repair is one specific area in which Manitobas wait lists have remained consistent.

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More than 90 per cent of Manitobans with a hip fracture were seen for surgery within the recommended 48-hour window, according to the CIHI report. Its a clear indication Manitoba is doing well at managing its urgent services, Siragusa said.

"The problem is those people that have these degenerative, chronic issues that need access," she said. "They are trying to get access in a way that our system isnt really built to respond quickly to."

NDP Leader Wab Kinew said he hoped the early numbers would give the government pause, perhaps even reconsider its plan.

"Just looking at some of the other cuts that they have made it seems like its going to make these situations worse," he said, pointing to last falls decision to axe the bulk of outpatient physiotherapy services, in particular.

"Thats going to make people more likely to re-injure themselves," Kinew said, and "it seems like thats just going to make that wait time worse."

jane.gerster@freepress.mb.caTwo Manitoba students have been suspended  with one being arrested  after threats were reportedly made at one school, and a note referencing to a mass shooting in the United States surfaced at another.

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This article was published 12/4/2018 (1266 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two Manitoba students have been suspended  with one being arrested  after threats were reportedly made at one school, and a note referencing to a mass shooting in the United States surfaced at another.

A 13-year-old student at Gilbert Plains Elementary School was arrested Wednesday, after he allegedly threatened to take a gun to school and shoot teachers and girls.

RCMP spokesman Sgt. Paul Manaigre said Thursday that Dauphin RCMP received a call from the school in Gilbert Plains, which is 30 kilometres west of Dauphin, at about 5:45 p.m. Wednesday.

"A student had made threats to harm other students during an incident that occurred earlier in the day at the school," Manaigre said. "An investigation was started, which led to the arrest of a 13-year-old male youth, who has been suspended from school and will be facing charges of uttering threats."

The youth was released on a promise to appear in provincial court at a later date.

"The Dauphin detachment is continuing to work with the Gilbert Plains Elementary School to ensure the students and staff have a safe work and learning environment," Manaigre said.

A statement on the school website, attributed to principal Chris Fisher, said: "We have taken the appropriate steps to ensure the safety of students and staff of Gilbert Plains Elementary."

A parent of another child at the school said parents have been told the student was suspended for two days.

The parent, who asked not to be named, said the student reportedly threatened to take a firearm to the school to shoot teachers and some girls who had complained to the principal about an earlier incident involving the boy.

Mountain View School Division assistant superintendent Dan Ward said division policy prevents him from saying how long the student is suspended.

Ward said once the principal began investigating the matter, the divisions threat-assessment procedures kicked in.

"In any situation where a threat is made, we enact our threat-assessment procedures," he said. "(The principal) followed up on it, contacted students and parents, and then the RCMP."

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Meanwhile, a 14-year-old male student at Sergeant Tommy Prince School in Brokenhead First Nation was suspended last month, after a note was found on the property stating: "Only 90s kids will remember Columbine."

Manaigre said RCMP investigated after being notified April 4 about the note, which the school discovered March 19. Brokenhead First Nation is 80 km north of Winnipeg.

Columbine High School was the site of one of the United States most notorious mass shootings. On April 20, 1999, two senior students armed with firearms and homemade explosives killed 12 students and one teacher (and injured more than 20 people) at the Colorado school before killing themselves.

Manaigre said the Tommy Prince student was not arrested because "no direct threat was made towards the school or any student or staff... The matter was dealt with by the school where the student was suspended."

No one at the school or the Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre, the organization operated by several First Nations which oversees the school at Brokenhead, could be reached for comment Thursday.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.caNatural Resources Minister Jim Carr again took the microphone this past week as Minister of Pipelines, promoting Kinder Morgan on behalf of his boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

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This article was published 12/4/2018 (1267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr again took the microphone this past week as "Minister of Pipelines," promoting Kinder Morgan on behalf of his boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

We were told, emphatically, that against all common sense, ecological wisdom, economic prudence and foresight, the Trans Mountain pipeline "is in the national interest."

Given that the protests in British Columbia against the pipeline will only become louder and more sustained after such an inflammatory statement  and that Carr has said all options remain open to the federal government  we now have to wonder whether the Canadian military might even be deployed against Canadian citizens on behalf of a foreign multinational corporation to ensure "the pipeline will be built."

After all, the prime minister has tweeted it:

"Canada is a country of the rule of law, and the federal government will act in the national interest. Access to world markets for Canadian resources is a core national interest. The Trans Mountain expansion will be built."

There was grim irony in the timing of Carrs announcement. His news conference took place 101 years to the hour that Canadian troops were preparing in the darkness for their assault on Vimy Ridge in 1917. They did not choose that hill to die on  the government of the day decided that it was in the national interest to attack a stronghold no one else had been able to capture  but we would like to think they died believing they were fighting for freedom.

Afterward, we created the mythology that their sacrifice helped define our nation and have since proudly proclaimed, "The world needs more Canada."

Not this kind of Canada, it doesnt. "The true North strong and free" should not be for sale to oil companies, whatever their apparent influence on our politicians. The credibility of the federal government is on the line, but for entirely other reasons than Carr, Trudeau and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley might claim.

When such dubious claims about the national interest are able to trump ecological concerns, the land rights of First Nations people, negotiated commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the safety of local communities  all while threatening environmental defenders  Canada hardly looks like a country others should emulate.

If, as Manitobas senior minister, Carr wants to do something useful, there are a few things closer to home he should consider: the port of Churchill continues to languish, rail lines unrepaired; meanwhile, Russia seeks to take control of an undefended and inaccessible North even as China buys into the Arctic Council because it sees cross-Arctic shipping as part of its global "belt and road" initiative.

Canada needs a fully functional deep-water port in Churchill, connected to a continent-wide rail system, but Carr and the federal government have done nothing about that for two years.

Similarly, moving last years bumper crop of Canadian grain to market would also be in the national interest, but the Canadian rail system continues to deteriorate and decline and (again) nothing has been done about it.

We hear excuse after excuse about the lack of funds, in order to justify not doing these and many other things that are in the national interest, but when it comes to jamming a pipeline through to the B.C. coast for Kinder Morgan, there is money and energy and commitment, well, to burn.

And burning is the issue. The Alberta oilsands are a made-in-Canada carbon time bomb. We can effectively render futile the rest of the planets efforts to avoid catastrophic temperature rise if we dig up that dirty Alberta crude and ship it out.

What is more, the government refuses to admit that we do not need this pipeline for the transportation to market of current fossil-fuel supplies. The whole project is predicated on an expanded future global demand for oil, at high prices, with markets willing to take this low-quality crude and spend the extra money required to refine it into something usable.

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This Liberal pipeline policy is dangerously delusional at every level. We need to consume fewer fossil fuels, not more, if we want to have a chance to limit global warming. Smart money for years now has been aimed at alternative energy development instead.

If the pipeline is built regardless of opposition, as the prime minister has threatened to do, the Liberals will lose every seat in British Columbia, forever  and so they should.

When the ocean levels rise, it wont be Alberta that floods.

Besides, will todays Canadian Armed Forces, related by profession and self-sacrifice to those who went over the top at Vimy Ridge, follow orders to do to their fellow citizens whatever it takes to get that pipeline built?

Somehow, I doubt it. I dont believe thats their idea of Canada, either.

Peter Denton is a Winnipeg-based writer, environmental activist and scholar.Brookfield Asset Management Inc. is a publicly owned asset management holding company. The firm specializes in early stage, acquisition, distressed investments, short-term financing to mid-market companies, corporate carve-outs, recapitalizations, convertible, senior and mezzanine financings, operational and capital structure restructuring, strategic re-direction, turnaround, and under-performing midmarket companies. The firm invest in attractive businesses through the public debt and equity markets or by providing financing. The firm invest in Business services, Industrials and Residential sectors. Through its subsidiaries, the firm invests in the property, power, and infrastructure sectors. Its property business includes owning and managing office properties, developing master planned residential communities, and offering clients bridge and mezzanine lending, alternative assets funds, and financial and advisory services. Through its subsidiaries, the firm operates hydroelectric power facilities, interconnections and transmission facilities in Northeast North America, and development of wind power in Canada. Through its subsidiaries, it invests in specialty funds including private equity and makes direct investments in real estate, energy, and resource assets. The firm launches and manages equity and fixed income mutual funds. It also manages real estate and hedge funds. The firm invests in equity and fixed income markets across the globe. It also invest in British Columbia, United States, Brazil, Australia, Chile, Uruguay, New Zealand. It prefers to invest between $2 million and $500 million in its portfolio companies. The firm also prefers to take both minority and majority stakes in its companies. It was formerly known as Brascan Corp. Brookfield Asset Management Inc. is based in Toronto, Canada with additional offices in Bogota, Colombia, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Calgary, Canada, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Gatineau, Canada, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, London, United Kingdom, Melbourne, Australia, Montreal, Canada, Mumbai, India, New York City, Perth, Australia, Shanghai, China, and Sydney, Australia.

Read MoreAareal Bank AG, together with its subsidiaries, provides financing, software products, digital solutions, and payment transaction applications for the property sector and related industries in Germany and internationally. The company operates through three segments: Structured Property Financing, Banking & Digital solutions, and Aareon. The Structured Property Financing segment offers property financing and refinancing solutions for office buildings, hotels, and shopping centers, as well as retail, logistics, residential properties, and student apartments. This segment also provides deposits, registered and bearer Pfandbriefe, promissory note loans, medium-term notes, debt securities, private placements, other bonds and subordinated issues, mortgage Pfandbriefe, and public sector Pfandbriefe. The Banking & Digital solutions segment offers various services and products for the housing, commercial property, and energy and waste disposal industries. Its services include specialized banking, payment systems, and optimized business processes. The Aareon segment provides IT systems consultancy and related advisory services, enterprise resource planning systems, software solutions, hosting and software as a service, and in-house services. Aareal Bank AG was founded in 1923 and is headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany.

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Beteiligungs, SAGA SAS, SCWC Corp., STP & DIN Chemicals Sp. Z.o.o., Servicios Indura Limitada, Sociedad Espanola de Carburos Metalicos S.A., Soprogaz SNC, Stravinsky Investments LLC, The Former SR Manufacturers Inc., Tyczka Industrie-Gase GmbH, Union Mobiliere Industrielle S.A.R.L., United Industrial Gases Company LLC, Vitalox Industrial S.L.U., WuXi Hi-Tech Gas Co. Ltd., Yangon Industrial Gas (Thilawa) Company Limited, Zibo Chuangcheng Engineering Design Co. Ltd., and ir Products Israel Ltd..The following companies are subsidiares of AMETEK: AEM Limited, AIP/MPM Funding Inc., AIP/MPM Holdings Inc., AMETEK (Barbados) SRL, AMETEK (Bermuda) Ltd., AMETEK (GB) Limited, AMETEK Aerospace & Defense Grp UK Ltd, AMETEK Aerospace & Power Holdings Inc., AMETEK Aircraft Parts & Accessories Inc., AMETEK Airtechnology Group Ltd., AMETEK Ameron LLC, AMETEK B.V., AMETEK CTS Germany GmbH, AMETEK CTS US Inc., AMETEK Canada 1 ULC, AMETEK Canada 2 ULC., AMETEK Canada 3 ULC, AMETEK Canada LLC, AMETEK Canada Limited Partnership, AMETEK Ceramics Inc., AMETEK Commercial Enterprise Shanghai, AMETEK Creaform Financing L.P., AMETEK Creaform Inc., AMETEK Denmark A/S, AMETEK Do Brasil Ltda., AMETEK EMG Holdings Inc., AMETEK Elektromotory s.r.o, AMETEK Engineered Materials Sdn. 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Inc., Patriot Sensors & Controls Corporation, PennEngineering Motion Technologies, Petrolab L.L.C., Powervar, Powervar Canada Inc., Powervar Deutschland GmbH, Powervar Inc, Powervar Limited, Powervar Mexico S.A. de C.V., Precitech, QM China Holding Inc., Quizix Inc., RAI Enterprises Inc., RETE Holding GmbH, Rauland-Borg, Reading Alloys Inc., Reichert Inc, Reichert Technologies, Rotron Inc., Rotron Incorporated, SCPH Holdings Inc., SPECTRO Analytical Instruments (Asia-Pacific) Ltd., SPECTRO Analytical Instruments (Pty). Ltd., SPECTRO Analytical Instruments GmbH, SPECTRO Analytical Instruments Inc., SPECTRO Analytical UK Limited, SSH Non-Destructive Testing Inc., Sealtron Inc., Seiko EG&G Co. Ltd., Six Brookside Drive Corporation., Solartron Group Ltd., Solartron Metrology Ltd., Solidstate Controls Inc. de Argentina S.R.L., Solidstate Controls LLC, Solidstate Controls LLC, Solidstate Controls Mexico S.A. de C.V., Southern Aero Partners Inc., Southern Aeroparts Inc, Spectro Analytical Instruments Inc., Spectro Scientific, Sterling Ultra Precision Inc., SunPower Inc., Sunpower Inc., Superior Tube Company Inc., TPM Russia Inc., Taylor Hobson Holdings Limited, Taylor Hobson Inc., Taylor Hobson Ltd., Taylor Hobson Trustees Limited, Technical Manufacturing Corp, Technical Manufacturing Corporation, Technical Services for Electronics Inc., Telular Corporation, Teseq AG, Teseq Company Ltd., Teseq GmbH, Teseq Holding AG, Teseq Limited, Thelsha Technical Services, Tritex Corporation, Tubes Holdco Limited, Unispec Marketing Pvt. Ltd., Universal Analyzers Inc., VTI Holdings Inc., VTI Instruments Corporation, VTI Instruments Private Limited, VTI Integrated Systems Private Limited, VXI Acquisition Inc., Vision Research Europe B.V., Vision Research Inc., Vision Research Limited, Vision Research srl, Zemetrics Inc., Zygo, Zygo Canada ULC., Zygo Germany GmbH, Zygo Pte Ltd., Zygo Richmond Corporation, and ZygoLamda Metrology Instrument (Shanghai) Co. Ltd..The following companies are subsidiares of SAP: Abakus, Abakus Europe Limited, Abakus Ukraine Limited Liability Company, Adatfeldolgozasban Informatikai Kft., Altiscale, Ambin Properties Proprietary Limited, AppGyver, Ariba, Ariba Czech s.r.o., Ariba Inc. Palo Alto, Ariba India Private Limited, Ariba International, Ariba International Holdings, Ariba International Singapore Pte Ltd, Ariba Slovak Republic s.r.o., Ariba Software Technology Services (Shanghai) Co., Ariba Technologies India Private Limited, Ariba Technologies Netherlands B.V., Beijing Zhang Zhong Hu Dong Information Technology, Business Objects, Business Objects Holding B.V., Business Objects Option LLC, Business Objects Software Limited, CNQR Operations Mexico S. de. R.L. de. C.V., Callidus Software, CallidusCloud, Christie Partners Holding C.V., Clear Standards, ClearTrip Inc., ClearTrip Inc. (Mauritius), Cleartrip MEA FZ LLC, Cleartrip Private Limited, Coghead, ConTgo Consulting Limited, ConTgo Pty. Ltd., Concur (Austria) GmbH, Concur (Canada), Concur (France) SAS, Concur (Germany) GmbH, Concur (Japan) Ltd., Concur (New Zealand) Limited, Concur (Philippines) Inc., Concur (Switzerland) GmbH, Concur Czech (s.r.o.), Concur Holdings (France) SAS, Concur Holdings (Netherlands) B.V., Concur Technologies (Australia) Pty. Limited, Concur Technologies (Hong Kong) Limited, Concur Technologies (India) Private Limited, Concur Technologies (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Concur Technologies (UK) Limited, Concur Technologies Inc. Bellevue, Contextor, Coresystems, Crystal Decisions (Ireland) Limited, Crystal Decisions Holdings Limited, Crystal Decisions UK Limited, Emarsys, EssCubed Procurement Pty. Ltd., Extended Systems, Factory Logic, Fedem Technology AS, Fieldglass Europe Limited, Financial Fusion, FreeMarkets Ltda., Frictionless Commerce, Gigya, Gigya Australia Pty Ltd, Gigya Ltd., Gigya UK Ltd, GlobalExpense Limited, Highdeal, Hipmunk, Hybris (US) Corp., Hybris GmbH, Inxight Federal Systems Group, KXEN, Khimetrics, LLC "SAP Labs", LLC "SAP Ukraine", LLC SAP CIS, MaXware, Merlin Systems Oy, Multiposting Sp.z o.o., Nihon Ariba K.K., OpTier, OutlookSoft, OutlookSoft Deutschland GmbH, PLAT.ONE, PT SAP Indonesia, PT Sybase 365 Indonesia, Pilot Software Inc., Plat.One Inc., Plat.One Lab Srl, Plateau Systems LLC, Quadrem Africa Pty. Ltd., Quadrem Brazil Ltda., Quadrem Chile Ltda., Quadrem Colombia SAS, Quadrem International Ltd., Quadrem Netherlands B.V., Quadrem Overseas Cooperatief U.A., Quadrem Peru S.A.C., Qualtrics, Recast.AI, Right Hemisphere, Roambi, Ruan Lian Technologies (Beijing) Co., SAF, SAP (Beijing) Software System Co., SAP (Schweiz) AG, SAP (Schweiz) AG Biel, SAP (UK) Limited, SAP (UK) Limited Feltham, SAP AZ LLC, SAP America, SAP America Inc. Newtown Square, SAP Andina y del Caribe, SAP Argentina S.A., SAP Asia (Vietnam) Co., SAP Asia Pte Ltd, SAP Australia Pty Ltd, SAP Australia Pty Ltd. Sydney, SAP Belgium NV/SA, SAP Beteiligungs GmbH, SAP Brasil Ltda, SAP Brasil Ltda Sao Paulo, SAP Bulgaria EOOD, SAP Business Compliance Services GmbH, SAP Business Services Center Nederland B.V., SAP CR, SAP Canada, SAP Chile Limitada, SAP China Co., SAP China Co. Ltd. Shanghai, SAP China Holding Co., SAP Colombia S.A.S., SAP Commercial Services Ltd., SAP Concur, SAP Costa Rica, SAP Customer Experience, SAP Cyprus Limited, SAP Danmark A/S, SAP Deutschland SE & Co. KG, SAP Deutschland SE & Co. KG Walldorf, SAP Dritte Beteiligungs- und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH, SAP EMEA Inside Sales S.L., SAP East Africa Limited, SAP Egypt LLC, SAP Erste Beteiligungs- und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH, SAP Espana - Sistemas Informatica, SAP Estonia OU, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Financial, SAP Finland Oy, SAP Foreign Holdings GmbH, SAP France, SAP France Holding, SAP France Levallois Perret, SAP Global Marketing, SAP Hellas S.A., SAP Holdings (UK) Limited, SAP Hong Kong Co., SAP Hosting Beteiligungs GmbH, SAP Hungary Rendszerek, SAP India (Holding) Pte Ltd, SAP India Private Limited, SAP India Private Limited Bangalore, SAP Industries, SAP Industries Inc. Newtown Square, SAP International, SAP International Panama, SAP Investments, SAP Ireland Limited, SAP Ireland US - Financial Services Designated Activity Company, SAP Israel Ltd., SAP Italia Sistemi Applicazioni Prodotti in Data Processing S.p.A., SAP Italia Sistemi Applicazioni Prodotti in Data Processing S.p.A. Vimercate, SAP Japan Co., SAP Japan Co. Ltd. Tokyo, SAP Kazakhstan LLP, SAP Korea Ltd., SAP Labs, SAP Labs Bulgaria EOOD, SAP Labs Finland Oy, SAP Labs France SAS, SAP Labs India Private Limited, SAP Labs Israel Ltd., SAP Labs Korea, SAP Latvia SIA, SAP MENA FZ L.L.C., SAP Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., SAP Malta Investments Ltd., SAP Mxico S.A. de C.V., SAP National Security Services PA, SAP Nederland B.V., SAP Nederland B.V. s-Hertogenbosch, SAP Service and Support Centre (Ireland) Limited, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP d.o.o., SeeWhy, Signavio, SuccessFactors, SuccessFactors Inc. South San Francisco, Sybase, Syclo, TopTier Software, Triversity, Vimercate, Virsa Systems, Visiprise, Wicom Communications, and conTgo limited.The following companies are subsidiares of BP: 200 PS Overseas Holdings Inc., 563916 Alberta Ltd., ACP (Malaysia) Inc., AE Cedar Creek Holdings LLC, AE Goshen II Holdings LLC, AE Goshen II Wind Farm LLC, AE Power Services LLC, AE Wind PartsCo LLC, AM/PM International Inc., ARCO, ARCO British International, ARCO British Limited, ARCO Coal Australia Inc., ARCO El-Djazair Holdings Inc., ARCO Environmental Remediation L.L.C., ARCO Exploration Inc., ARCO Gaviota Company, ARCO International Investments Inc., ARCO International Services Inc., ARCO Midcon LLC, ARCO Oil Company Nigeria Unlimited, ARCO Oman Inc, ARCO Resources Limited, ARCO Trinidad Exploration and Production Company Limited, ARCO Unimar Holdings LLC, Actomat B.V., Advance Petroleum Holdings Pty Ltd, Advance Petroleum Pty Ltd, Air BP Albania SHA, Air BP Brasil Ltda., Air BP Canada LLC, Air BP Croatia d.o.o., Air BP Finland Oy, Air BP Iceland, Air BP Limited, Air BP Norway AS, Air BP Sales Romania S.R.L., Air BP Sweden AB, Air Refuel Pty Ltd, Allgreen Pty Ltd, AmProp Finance Company, American Oil Company, Amoco (Fiddich) Limited, Amoco (U.K.) Exploration Company LLC., Amoco Bolivia Petroleum Company, Amoco Bolivia Services Company Inc., Amoco Canada International Holdings B.V., Amoco Capline Pipeline Company, Amoco Chemical (Europe) S.A., Amoco Chemicals (FSC) B.V., Amoco Cypress Pipeline Company, Amoco Destin Pipeline Company, Amoco Environmental Services Company, Amoco Exploration Holdings B.V., Amoco Guatemala Petroleum Company, Amoco International Finance Corporation, Amoco International Petroleum Company, Amoco Leasing Corporation, Amoco Louisiana Fractionator Company, Amoco MB Fractionation Company, Amoco MBF Company, Amoco Main Pass Gathering Company, Amoco Marketing Environmental Services Company, Amoco Netherlands Petroleum Company, Amoco Nigeria Exploration Company Limited, Amoco Nigeria Oil Company Limited, Amoco Nigeria Petroleum Company, Amoco Nigeria Petroleum Company Limited, Amoco Norway Oil Company, Amoco Oil Holding Company, Amoco Olefins Corporation, Amoco Overseas Exploration Company, Amoco Pipeline Asset Company, Amoco Pipeline Holding Company, Amoco Properties Incorporated, Amoco Remediation Management Services Corporation, Amoco Research Operating Company, Amoco Rio Grande Pipeline Company, Amoco Somalia Petroleum Company, Amoco Sulfur Recovery Company, Amoco Tri-States NGL Pipeline Company, Amoco Trinidad Gas B.V., Amoco U.K. Petroleum Limited, Amprop Illinois I Limited, Amprop Inc., Anaconda Arizona Inc., Arabian Production And Marketing Lubricants, Aral Aktiengesellschaft, Aral Luxembourg S.A., Aral Services Luxembourg Sarl, Aral Tankstellen Services Sarl, Arco Mediterraneo Inversiones S.L., Areas Noriega S.L., Areas Singulares Reyes S.L., Aspac Lubricants (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Atlantic 2/3 UK Holdings Limited, Atlantic Richfield Company, Atlantic Richfield Companyd, Autino Holdings Limited, Autino Limited, Auwahi Wind Energy Holdings LLC, B2Mobility GmbH, BASS Management Pty Ltd, BP (Abu Dhabi) Limited, BP (Barbados) Holding SRL, BP (Barbican) Limited, BP (China) Holdings Limited, BP (China) Industrial Lubricants Limited, BP (GTA Mauritania) Finance Limited, BP (GTA Senegal) Finance Limited, BP (Gibraltar) Limited, BP (Guangzhou) Advanced Mobility Limited, BP (Hunan) Petroleum Company Limited, BP (Indian Agencies) Limited, BP (Shandong) Petroleum Co. Ltd, BP (Shanghai) Trading Limited, BP - Castrol (Thailand) Limited, BP AMI Leasing Inc., BP Absheron Limited, BP Advanced Mobility Limited, BP Africa Limited, BP Africa Oil Limited, BP Akaryakit Ortakligi, BP Alaska LNG LLC, BP Alternative Energy Holdings Limited, BP Alternative Energy Investments Limited, BP Alternative Energy North America Inc., BP Alternative Energy Trinidad and Tobago Limited, BP America Chembel Holding LLC, BP America Chemicals Company, BP America Foreign Investments Inc., BP America Inc, BP America Inc., BP America Limited, BP America Production Company, BP Amoco Chemical Company, BP Amoco Chemical Holding Company, BP Amoco Chemical Indonesia Limited, BP Amoco Chemical Malaysia Holding Company, BP Amoco Exploration (Faroes) Limited, BP Amoco Exploration (In Amenas) Limited, BP Andaman II Ltd, BP Angola (Block 18) B.V., BP Argentina Exploration Company, BP Argentina Holdings LLC, BP Aromatics Holdings Limited, BP Aromatics Limited, BP Asia Limited, BP Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., BP Asia Pacific Holdings Limited, BP Asia Pacific Pte Ltd, BP Australia Capital Markets Limited, BP Australia Employee Share Plan Proprietary Limited, BP Australia Group Pty Ltde, BP Australia Investments Pty Ltd, BP Australia Nominees Proprietary Limited, BP Australia Pty Ltd, BP Australia Shipping Pty Ltd, BP Australia Swaps Management Limited, BP Aviation A/S, BP Benevolent Fund Trustees Limited, BP Berau Ltd., BP Biocombustiveis S.A., BP Bioenergia Campina Verde Ltda., BP Bioenergia Ituiutaba Ltda., BP Bioenergia Itumbiara S.A., BP Bioenergia Tropical S.A., BP Biofuels Advanced Technology Inc., BP Biofuels Brazil Investments Limited, BP Biofuels Louisiana LLC, BP Biofuels North America LLC, BP Biofuels Trading Comercio Exportacao Ltda., BP Bomberai Ltd., BP Brasil Ltda., BP Brazil Tracking L.L.C., BP Bulwer Island Pty Ltd, BP Business Service Centre Asia Sdn Bhd, BP Business Service Centre KFT, BP CIV Pty Ltd, BP Canada Energy Development Company, BP Canada Energy Group ULC, BP Canada Energy Marketing Corp., BP Canada International Holdings B.V., BP Canada Investments Inc., BP Capellen Sarl, BP Capital Markets, BP Capital Markets America, BP Capital Markets America Inc., BP Capital Markets p.l.c., BP Car Fleet Limited, BP Caribbean Company, BP Castrol KK, BP Castrol Lubricants (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., BP Central Pipelines LLC, BP Chembel, BP Chemicals (Korea) Limited, BP Chemicals East China Investments Limited, BP Chemicals Investments Limited, BP Chemicals Limited, BP China Exploration and Production Company, BP Comercializadora de Energia Ltda., BP Commodities Trading Limited, BP Commodity Supply B.V., BP Company North America, BP Company North America Inc., BP Containment Response Limited, BP Containment Response System Holdings LLC, BP Continental Holdings Limited, BP Corporate Holdings, BP Corporate Holdings Limited, BP Corporation North America, BP Corporation North America Inc., BP D-B Pipeline Company LLC, BP D230 Limited, BP Danmark A/S, BP Developments Australia Pty. Ltd., BP Dogal Gaz Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, BP East Kalimantan CBM Limited, BP Eastern Mediterranean Limited, BP Egypt Company, BP Egypt East Delta Marine Corporation, BP Egypt East Tanka B.V., BP Egypt Production B.V., BP Egypt Ras El Barr B.V., BP Egypt West Mediterranean (Block B) B.V., BP Energy Asia Pte. Limited, BP Energy Colombia Limited, BP Energy Company, BP Energy Europe Limited, BP Energy Solutions B.V., BP Energy do Brasil Ltda., BP Energia Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., BP Espana S.A. Unipersonal, BP Estaciones y Servicios Energeticos Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, BP Europa SE, BP Exploracion de Venezuela S.A., BP Exploration & Production Inc., BP Exploration (Absheron) Limited, BP Exploration (Alaska), BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc., BP Exploration (Algeria) Limited, BP Exploration (Alpha), BP Exploration (Alpha) Limited, BP Exploration (Angola), BP Exploration (Angola) Limited, BP Exploration (Azerbaijan), BP Exploration (Azerbaijan) Limited, BP Exploration (Canada) Limited, BP Exploration (Caspian Sea), BP Exploration (Caspian Sea) Limited, BP Exploration (D230) Limited, BP Exploration (Delta), BP Exploration (Delta) Limited, BP Exploration (El Djazair) Limited, BP Exploration (Epsilon) Limited, BP Exploration (Gambia) Limited, BP Exploration (Greenland) Limited, BP Exploration (Madagascar) Limited, BP Exploration (Morocco) Limited, BP Exploration (Namibia) Limited, BP Exploration (Nigeria Finance) Limited, BP Exploration (Nigeria) Limited, BP Exploration (Psi) Limited, BP Exploration (STP) Limited, BP Exploration (Shafag-Asiman) Limited, BP Exploration (Shah Deniz) Limited, BP Exploration (South Atlantic) Limited, BP Exploration (Xazar) Pte. Ltd., BP Exploration Angola (Kwanza Benguela) Limited, BP Exploration Argentina Limited, BP Exploration Australia Pty Ltd Level 15, BP Exploration Beta Limited, BP Exploration China Limited, BP Exploration Company (Middle East) Limited, BP Exploration Company Limited, BP Exploration Indonesia Limited, BP Exploration Libya Limited, BP Exploration Mexico Limited, BP Exploration Mexico S.A. De C.V., BP Exploration North Africa Limited, BP Exploration Operating Company, BP Exploration Operating Company Limited, BP Exploration Orinoco Limited, BP Exploration Personnel Company Limited, BP Exploration Peru Limited, BP Express Shopping Limited, BP Finance Australia Pty Ltd, BP Finance p.l.c., BP Foundation Incorporated, BP France, BP Fuels & Lubricants AS, BP Fuels Deutschland GmbH, BP GOM Logistics LLC, BP Gas & Power Investments Limited, BP Gas Europe S.A.U., BP Gas Marketing Limited, BP Gas Supply (Angola) LLC, BP Ghana Limited, BP Global Investments, BP Global Investments Limited, BP Global Investments Salalah & Co LLC, BP Global West Africa Limited, BP Greece Limited, BP Guangdong Limited, BP High Density Polyethylene - France, BP Holdings (Thailand) Limited, BP Holdings B.V., BP Holdings Canada, BP Holdings Canada Limited, BP Holdings International B.V., BP Holdings North America, BP Holdings North America Limited, BP Hong Kong Limited, BP India Private Limited, BP Indonesia Investment Limited, BP International, BP International Limited, BP International Services Company, BP Investment Management Limited, BP Investments Asia Limited, BP Iran Limited, BP Iraq N.V., BP Italia SpA, BP Japan K.K., BP Korea Limited, BP Kuwait Limited, BP LNG Shipping Limited, BP Latin America LLC, BP Latin America Upstream Services Inc., BP Lubricants KK, BP Lubricants USA Inc., BP Luxembourg S.A., BP Malaysia Holdings Sdn. Bhd., BP Management International B.V., BP Management Netherlands B.V., BP Marine Limited, BP Mariner Holding Company LLC, BP Maritime Services (Singapore) Pte. Limited, BP Marketing Egypt LLC, BP Mauritania Investments Limited, BP Mauritius Limited (in liquidation), BP Middle East Enterprises Corporation, BP Middle East LLC, BP Middle East Limited, BP Midstream Partners GP LLC, BP Midstream Partners Holdings LLC, BP Midstream Partners LP, BP Midwest Product Pipelines Holdings LLC, BP Mocambique Limitada, BP Mocambique Limited, BP Muturi Holdings B.V., BP Nederland Holdings BV, BP Netherlands Upstream B.V., BP New Ventures Middle East Limited, BP New Zealand Holdings Limited, BP New Zealand Share Scheme Limited, BP Nutrition Inc., BP Offshore Gathering Systems Inc., BP Offshore Pipelines Company LLC, BP Offshore Response Company LLC, BP Oil (Thailand) Limited, BP Oil Australia Pty Ltd, BP Oil Espana S.A., BP Oil Hellenic S.A., BP Oil International, BP Oil International Limited, BP Oil Kent Refinery Limited (in liquidation), BP Oil Llandarcy Refinery Limited, BP Oil Logistics UK Limited, BP Oil New Zealand Limited, BP Oil Pipeline Company, BP Oil Senegal S.A., BP Oil Shipping Company, BP Oil UK Limited, BP Oil Venezuela Limited, BP Oil Vietnam Limited, BP Oil Yemen Limited, BP Olex Fanal Mineralol GmbH, BP One Pipeline Company LLC, BP Pacific Investments Ltd, BP Pakistan (Badin) Inc., BP Pakistan Exploration and Production Inc., BP Pension Escrow Limited, BP Pension Trustees Limited, BP Pensions (Overseas) Limited, BP Pensions Limited, BP Petrochemicals India Investments Limited, BP Petroleo y Gas S.A., BP Petrolleri Anonim Sirketi, BP Pipelines (Alaska) Inc., BP Pipelines (BTC) Limited, BP Pipelines (North America) Inc., BP Pipelines (SCP) Limited, BP Pipelines (TANAP) Limited, BP Pipelines TAP Limited, BP Polska Services Sp. z o.o. Ul., BP Portugal -Comercio de Combustiveis e Lubrificantes SA, BP Poseidon Limited, BP Products North America, BP Products North America Inc., BP Properties Limited, BP Raffinaderij Rotterdam B.V., BP Refinery (Kwinana) Proprietary Limited, BP Regional Australasia Holdings Pty Ltd, BP River Rouge Pipeline Company LLC, BP Russian Investments Limited, BP Russian Ventures Limited, BP SC Holdings LLC, BP Scale Up Factory Limited, BP Senegal Investments Limited, BP Services International Limited, BP Servicios de Combustibles S.A. de C.V., BP Servicios territoriales S.A., BP Shafag-Asiman Limited, BP Shipping Limited, BP Singapore Pte. Limited, BP Solar Energy North America LLC, BP Solar Espana S.A., BP Solar International Inc., BP Solar Pty Ltd, BP South America Holdings Ltd, BP Southern Africa Proprietary Limited, BP Southern Cone Company, BP Subsea Well Response (Brazil) Limited, BP Subsea Well Response Limited, BP Taiwan Marketing Limited, BP Technology Ventures Inc., BP Technology Ventures Limited, BP Train 2/3 Holding SRL, BP Transportation (Alaska) Inc., BP Trinidad Processing Limited, BP Trinidad and Tobago, BP Trinidad and Tobago LLC, BP Turkey Refining Limited, BP Two Pipeline Company LLC, BP UK Retained Holdings Limited, BP Venezuela Investments B.V., BP West Aru I Limited, BP West Aru II Limited, BP West Papua I Limited, BP West Papua III Limited, BP Wind Energy North America Inc., BP Wiriagar Ltd., BP World-Wide Technical Services Limited, BP Zhuhai Chemical Company Limited, BP+Amoco International Limited, BP-AIOC Exploration (TISA) LLC, BPA Investment Holding Company, BPNE International B.V., BPRY Caribbean Ventures LLC, BPX (Eagle Ford) Gathering LLC, BPX (KCS Resources) LLC, BPX (Karnes) Gathering LLC, BPX (Permian) Gathering LLC, BPX (WSF Operating) Inc., BPX Energy Inc., BPX Midstream LLC, BPX Operating Company, BPX Production Company, BPX Properties (GP) LLC, BPX Properties (LP) LLC, BPX Properties (NA) LP, BTC Pipeline Holding Company Limited, BXL Plastics Limitedv, Bahia de Bizkaia Electridad S.L., Baltimore Ennis Land Company Inc., Black Lake Pipe Line Company, Brian Jasper Nominees Pty Ltd, Britannic Energy Trading Limited, Britannic Investments Iraq Limited, Britannic Marketing Limited, Britannic Strategies Limited, Britannic Trading Limited, Britoil Limited, Burmah Castrol, Burmah Castrol Australia Pty Ltd, Burmah Castrol Holdings Inc., Burmah Castrol PLC, Burmah Castrol South Africa (Pty) Limited, Burmah Chile SpA, Butamax Advanced Biofuels, CASTROL Austria GmbHb, CH-Twenty Inc., CNAA, Cadman DBP Limited, Casitas Pipeline Company, Castrol (China) Limited, Castrol (Ireland) Limited, Castrol (Shanghai) Management Co. Ltd., Castrol (Shenzhen) Company Limited, Castrol (Tianjin) Lubricants Co. Ltd., Castrol (U.K.) Limited, Castrol Australia Pty. Limited, Castrol B.V., Castrol BP Petco Limited Liability Company, Castrol Brasil Ltda., Castrol Caribbean & Central America Inc., Castrol Colombia Ltda., Castrol Del Peru S.A., Castrol Egypt Lubricants S.A.E., Castrol India Limited, Castrol Industrie und Service GmbH, Castrol KK, Castrol Limited, Castrol Lubricants RO S.R.L, Castrol Mexico S.A., Castrol Namibia (Pty) Limited, Castrol Offshore Limited, Castrol Pakistan (Private) Limited, Castrol Philippines Inc., Castrol Servicos Ltda., Castrol Ukraine LLC, Castrol Zimbabwe (Private) Limited, Centrel Pty Ltd, Charge Your Car Limitedc, Chargemaster, Chargemaster (Europe) GmbH, Chargemaster Limited, Charging Solutions Limited, Clarisse Holdings Pty Ltd, Coastwise Trading Company Inc., Consolidada de Energia y Lubricantes (CENERLUB) C.A., Conti Cross Keys Inn Inc., Coro Trading NZ Limited, Cuyama Pipeline Company, DHC Solvent Chemie GmbH, Dermody Developments Pty Ltd, Dermody Holdings Pty Ltd, Dermody Investments Pty Ltd, Dermody Petroleum Pty. Ltd., Dome Beaufort Petroleum Limited, Dome Wallis (1980) Limited Partnership, ECM Markets SA (Pty) Ltd, Elektromotive Limited, Elite Customer Solutions Pty Ltd, Elm Holdings Inc., Energy Global Investments (USA) Inc., Enstar LLC, Estacion de Servicio Alto Campoo S.L., Estacion de Servicio Ganzo 10 S.L., Estacion de Servicio Reocin 9 S.L., Estacion de Servicio Santillana II S.L., Estacion de Servicio Sardinero S.L., Estonian Aviation Fuelling Services, Europa Oil NZ Limited, Exomet Inc., Expandite Contract Services Limited, Exploration (Luderitz Basin) Limited, Exploration Service Company Limited, FWK (2017) Limited, FWK Holdings (2017) LTD, Finite Carbon, Flat Ridge 2 Holdings LLC, Flat Ridge Wind Energy LLC, Foseco Holding Inc., Foseco Holding International B.V., Foseco Inc., Fosroc Expandite Limited, Fotech Solutions Ltd, Fowler Ridge Holdings LLC, Fowler Ridge I Land Investments LLC, Fowler Ridge II Holdings LLC, Fowler Ridge III Wind Farm LLC, FreeBees B.V., Fuel & Retail Aviat ion Sweden AB, Fuelplane- Sociedade Abastecedora De Aeronaves Unipessoal Lda, GOAM 1 C.I S. A .S, Gardena Holdings Inc., Gelsenkirchen Raffinerie Netz GmbH, Grampian Aviation Fuelling Services Limited, Guangdong Investments Limited, Highlands Ethanol LLC, Hosteleria Noriega S.L., IGI Resources Inc., Insight Analytics Solutions Holdings Limited, Insight Analytics Solutions Limited, Insight Analytics Solutions USA Inc., International Bunker Supplies Pty Ltd, Iraq Petroleum Company Limited, Jupiter Insurance Limited, Ken-Chas Reserve Company, Kenilworth Oil Company Limited, Kingbook Inversiones Socimi S.A., Latin Energy Argentina S.A., Lebanese Aviation Technical Services S.A.L., Limited Liability Company BP Toplivnaya Kompania, Limited liability company Setra Lubricants, Lubricants UK Limited, Lytt Limited, Manormaker (Nominee No. 1) Limited, Manormaker (Nominee No. 2) Limited, Manormaker GP Limited (99.90%) 11 Black Horse Lane, Mardi Gras Transportation System Company LLC, Markoil S.A., Masana Petroleum Solutions (Pty) Ltd, Mayaro Initiative for Private Enterprise Development, Mehoopany Holdings LLC, Mes Tecnologia En Servicios Y Energia S.A., Minza Pty. Ltd., Mountain City Remediation LLC, No. 1 Riverside Quay Proprietary Limited, Nordic Lubricants A/S, Nordic Lubricants AB, North America Funding Company, OMD87 Inc., OOO BP STL, Omega Oil Company, OnSight Analytics Solutions India Private Ltd., Orion Delaware Mountain Wind Farm LP, Orion Energy Holdings LLC, Orion Energy L.L.C.b, Orion Post Land Investments LLC, Oyambre 1 S.L., PRODUITS METALLURGIE DOITTAU, PT BP Petrochemicals, PT Castrol Indonesia, PT Castrol Manufacturing Indonesia, PT Jasatama Petroindo, Pacroy (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Peaks America Inc., Pearl River Delta Investments Limited, Petrocorner Retail S.L.U., Phoenix Petroleum Services Limited, Pozuelo 4 S.L., Prospect International C.A. (In liquidation), Puente Arce 4 S.L., Remediation Management Services Company, Richfield Oil Corporation, Rio Corvo 2 S.L., Rolling Thunder I Power Partners LLC, Romax Insight Korea Ltd., Ropemaker Deansgate Limited, Ropemaker Properties Limited, Ruhr Oel GmbH, Rusdene GSS Limited, SOFAST Limited, SRHP, Saturn Insurance Inc., Sherbino I Holdings LLC, Sherbino Mesa I Land Investments LLC, Sociedade de Promocao Imobiliaria Quinta do Loureiro SA, Societe de Gestion de Depots d'Hydrocarbures - GDH, South Texas Shale LLC, Southeast Texas Biofuels LLC, Southern Ridge Pipeline Holding Company, Southern Ridge Pipeline LP LLC, Sp/f Decision3 (GreenSteam) Company, Standard Oil Company, Standard Oil Company Inc., Standard Oil of Ohio, Stryde Limited, Sunrise Oil Sands Partnership, TISA Education Complex LLC, TJKK, Taradadis Pty. Ltd., Telcom General Corporation, Terre de Grace Partnership, The Anaconda Company, The BP Share Plans Trustees Limited, The Burmah Oil Company (Pakistan Trading) Limited, The Standard Oil Company, Toledo Refinery Holding Company LLC, Torrelavega 7 S.L., Union Texas International Corporation, Vastar Pipeline LLC, Veba Oel AG Veba Oel, Verenium, Viceroy Investments Limited, Villacarriedo 8 S.L., Warrenville Development Limited, Water Way Trading and Petroleum Services LLC, Welchem Inc., West Kimberley Fuels Pty Ltd, Westlake Houston Development LLC, Whiting Clean Energy Inc., Windpark Energy Nederland B.V., and Winwell Resources L.L.C.China Mobile Limited provides mobile telecommunications and related services in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The company offers local calls; domestic and international long distance calls and roaming services; and value-added services, such as caller identity display, call waiting, conference calls, and others. It also provides wireless Internet service, as well as digital applications comprising music, video, reading, gaming, and animation; wireline broadband services; and wireline voice services. In addition, it offers dedicated line and IDC services to corporate customers in a range of industry sectors; and basic corporate communication products comprising corporate VPMN and SMS, and tailor made solutions. Further, the company provides international telecommunications services, which includes IDD, roaming, Internet, MNC, and value added business services. Additionally, it offers telecommunications network planning, design, and consulting services; roaming clearance, IT system operation, and technology support services; value-added platform development and maintenance services; mobile data, and system integration and development services; network construction and maintenance, network planning and optimizing, and training services; electronic communication products design and sale of related products; and non-banking financial services. It also provides mobile cloud research and development services; call center services; e-payment, e-commerce, and Internet finance services; and mobile Internet digital content services, as well as operates a network and business coordination center. The company serves 950 million mobile customers and 187 million wireline broadband customers. The company was formerly known as China Mobile (Hong Kong) Limited and changed its name to China Mobile Limited in May 2006. The company was incorporated in 1997 and is based in Central, Hong Kong. China Mobile Limited is a subsidiary of China Mobile Hong Kong (BVI) Limited.

Read MoreTravel + Leisure Co. is a membership and leisure travel company, with a portfolio of nearly 20 resort, travel club, and lifestyle travel brands. The company provides outstanding vacation experiences and travel inspiration to millions of owners, members, and subscribers every year through its products and services: Wyndham Destinations, the vacation ownership company with 230 vacation club resort locations across the globe; Panorama, the membership travel business that includes the vacation exchange company, industry travel technology, and subscription travel brands; and Travel + Leisure Group, featuring online and print travel content, online booking platforms and travel clubs, and branded consumer products. Travel + Leisure Co. is a membership and leisure travel company, with a portfolio of nearly 20 resort, travel club, and lifestyle travel brands. Travel + Leisure was founded on July 31, 2006 and is headquartered in Orlando, FL.

Read MoreCantel Medical Corp. provides infection prevention and control products and services for the healthcare market. The company's Medical segment offers automated endoscope reprocessing systems; disinfectants and sterilants; detergents; leak testing and manual cleaning products; storage cabinets and transport systems; manual cleaning products; endoscope process tracking products; other consumables, accessories, and supplies for use in disinfect rigid endoscopes, flexible endoscopes, and other instrumentation; and technical maintenance services. Its Life Sciences segment provides dialysis water purification and bicarbonate mixing systems; hollow fiber filters, and other filtration and separation products; liquid disinfectants and cold sterilization products; dry fog products; room temperature sterilization equipment and services; and clean-room certification and decontamination services for the dialysis and other healthcare, research laboratories, food and beverage, and commercial industrial customers, as well as microbiological testing services. The company's Dental segment offers hand and powered dental instruments, instrument reprocessing and sterility assurance products, towels, bibs, tray liners, sponges, nitrous oxide/oxygen sedation equipment and related single-use disposable nasal masks, face masks, and shields. It also provides hand sanitizers, germicidal wipes, disinfectants, surface disinfectants, waterline treatment products, saliva ejectors, evacuator tips, plastic cups, prophy angles, and prophy paste. The company's Dialysis segment provides hemodialysis concentrates and other ancillary supplies; medical device reprocessing systems; and sterilants and disinfectants. The company sells its products through its direct distribution network in the United States; and directly or under various third-party distribution agreements internationally. Cantel Medical Corp. was founded in 1963 and is headquartered in Little Falls, New Jersey.

Read MoreTexas Pacific Land Corp. operates as a landowner in the State of Texas. Its surface and royalty ownership allow revenue generation through the entire value chain of oil and gas development, including through fixed fee payments for use of the firm's land, revenue for sales of materials used in the construction of infrastructure, providing sourced water and treated produced water, revenue from its oil and gas royalty interests, and revenues related to saltwater disposal on land. The company also generates revenue from pipeline, power line and utility easements, commercial leases, material sales and seismic and temporary permits related to a variety of land uses including midstream infrastructure projects and hydrocarbon processing facilities. The company operates through following segment: Land and Resource Management and Water Services and Operations. The Land and Resource Management segment focuses on managing oil and gas royalty interest and surface. The Water Services and Operations segment offers operators an unparalleled breadth of service across the majority of the Permian Basin. The company was founded in April 2020 and is headquartered in Dallas, TX.

Read MoreLVMH MoAt Hennessy - Louis Vuitton, SociAtA EuropAenne operates as a luxury products company. The company offers champagnes, wines, and spirits under the Ao Yun, Ardbeg, Belvedere, Bodega Numanthia, Cape Mentelle, Chandon, ChAteau Cheval Blanc, ChAteau d'Yquem, Cheval des Andes, Clos des Lambrays, Clos19, Cloudy Bay, Dom PArignon, Glenmorangie, Hennessy, Krug, Mercier, MoAt & Chandon, Newton, Vineyard, Ruinart, Terrazas de los Andes, Veuve Clicquot, Volcan de mi Tierra, and Woodinville brands. It also provides fashion and leather products under the Berluti, Celine, Christian Dior, Emilio Pucci, Fendi, Givenchy, Kenzo, Loewe, Loro Piana, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Moynat, Nicholas Kirkwood, Pink Shirtmaker, and Rimowa brands. In addition, the company offers perfumes and cosmetics under the Acqua di Parma, Benefit Cosmetics, Fenty Beauty by Rihanna, Fresh, Parfums Givenchy, Guerlain, Kat Von D Beauty, Kenzo Parfums, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, Make Up For Ever, Marc Jacobs Beauty, Parfums Christian Dior, and Perfumes Loewe brands; watches and jewelry under the Bvlgari, Chaumet, Fred, Hublot, TAG Heuerand Zenith brands; and custom-designed yachts under the Feadship brand name, as well as designs and builds luxury yachts under the Royal Van Lent brand. Further, it provides daily newspapers under the Les Achos brand; Belmond, a luxury tourism service; home other activities under the Belmond, Cheval Blanc, Connaissance des Arts, Cova, Investir, Jardin d'Acclimatation, La Samaritaine, Le Parisien, and Radio Classique brands; and selective retailing products under the DFS, La Grande Epicerie de Paris, Le Bon MarchA Rive Gauche, Sephora, and Starboard Cruise brands, as well as operates Jardin d'Acclimatation, a leisure and amusement park. The company operates 4,915 stores worldwide. LVMH MoAt Hennessy - Louis Vuitton, SociAtA EuropAenne was incorporated in 1923 and is headquartered in Paris, France.

Read MoreHannover RAck SE, together with its subsidiaries, provides reinsurance products and services worldwide. It operates through Property & Casualty Reinsurance, and Life & Health Reinsurance segments. The Property & Casualty Reinsurance segment offers specialty lines comprising marine, aviation, facultative and direct business, credit, surety, and political risks reinsurance products; and treaty, catastrophe XL, and structured reinsurance, as well as insurance-linked securities. This segment also provides risk solutions for agricultural, livestock, and bloodstock businesses; aviation and space business; and marine and offshore energy business. The Life & Health Reinsurance segment offers group and individual credit life, enhanced annuities, group life and health, and Sharia-compliant Takaful reinsurance products. This segment also provides risk solutions in the areas of critical illness, disability, health, longevity, long term care, and mortality and morbidity, as well as underwriting services. In addition, it offers various financial solutions, including new-business financing; monetization of embedded value; reserve and solvency relief; and divestiture of non-core businesses. The company was formerly known as Hannover RAckversicherung AG and changed its name to Hannover RAck SE in March 2013. The company was founded in 1966 and is headquartered in Hanover, Germany. Hannover RAck SE is a subsidiary of Talanx AG.

Read MoreUnited Technologies Corporation provides technology products and services to building systems and aerospace industries worldwide. Its Otis segment designs, manufactures, sells, and installs passenger and freight elevators, escalators, and moving walkways; and offers modernization products to upgrade elevators and escalators, as well as maintenance and repair services. The company's Carrier segment provides heating, ventilating, air conditioning, refrigeration, fire, security, and building automation products, solutions, and services for commercial, government, infrastructure, residential, and refrigeration and transportation applications. This segment also offers building services, including audit, design, installation, system integration, repair, maintenance, and monitoring. Its Pratt & Whitney segment supplies aircraft engines for commercial, military, business jet, and general aviation markets; and provides aftermarket maintenance, repair, and overhaul, as well as fleet management services. The company's Collins Aerospace Systems segment provides electric power generation, power management, and distribution systems; air data and aircraft sensing systems; engine control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems; engine components; environmental control systems; fire and ice detection, and protection systems; propeller systems; engine nacelle systems; aircraft lighting, seating, and cargo systems; actuation and landing systems; space products and subsystems; avionics systems; flight controls, communications, navigation, oxygen, and training systems; food and beverage preparation, and storage and galley systems; and lavatory and wastewater management systems. The company offers its services through manufacturers' representatives, distributors, wholesalers, dealers, retail outlets, and sales representatives, as well as directly to customers. United Technologies Corporation was founded in 1934 and is headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut.

Read MoreSinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited, together with its subsidiaries, manufactures and sells petrochemical products in the People's Republic of China. It operates through five segments: Synthetic Fibers, Resins and Plastics, Intermediate Petrochemicals, Petroleum Products, and Trading of Petrochemical Products. The Synthetic Fibers segment produces polyesters, acrylic fibers, and carbon fibers that are primarily used in the textile and apparel industries. The Resins and Plastics segment produces polyester chips that are used to produce polyester fibers, coating, and containers; polyethylene resins and plastics, which are used to produce insulated cables and mulching films, as well as molded products, such as housewares and toys; and polypropylene resins that are used for films and sheets, as well as molded products, such as housewares, toys, consumer electronics, and automobile parts; and PVA granules. The Intermediate Petrochemicals segment produces p-xylene, benzene, and ethylene oxide, which are used as raw materials in the production of other petrochemicals, resins, plastics, and synthetic fibers. The Petroleum Products segment operates crude oil refinery facilities used to produce refined gasoline, fuel, diesel oil, heavy oil, and liquefied petroleum gas. The Trading of Petrochemical Products segment is involved in the import and export of petrochemical products. The company was founded in 1972 and is based in Shanghai, the People's Republic of China. Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited is a subsidiary of China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation.

Read MoreIdaho Independent Bank, a state-chartered bank, provides commercial banking services to individual and business customers in Idaho. The company offers checking and savings accounts, certificates of deposit, and individual retirement accounts, as well as credit and debit cards; and loans comprising home mortgage loans, construction loans, home equity lines of credit, auto loans, personal lines of credit, business term loans, operating lines of credit, commercial real estate loans, secured personal loans, commercial real estate loans, and small business loans, as well as agricultural equipment loans, farm acquisition loans, and government guaranteed loans. It also provides cash management services, including express deposit, wire transfers, automated clearing house, sweep accounts, imaging, positive pay, and other payment services, as well as merchant services. In addition, the company offers online banking, bill pay, overdraft opt-in/out, e-statements, cashier's check, safe deposit box, and mobile banking services. It operates through three branches in Boise, as well as branches in Coeur d'Alene, Hayden, Meridian, Nampa, Caldwell, Mountain Home, Ketchum, and Star, Idaho. Idaho Independent Bank was founded in 1993 and is based in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Illinois Tool Works: A V Co 1 Limited, A V Co 2 Limited, A V Co 3 Limited, ACCU-LUBE Manufacturing GmbH - Schmiermittel und -gerate -, AIP/BI Holdings Inc., Accessories Marketing Holding Corp., Advanced Molding Company Inc., Allen Coding GmbH, Allen France SAS, Alpine Automation Limited, Alpine Engineered Products, Alpine Holdings Inc., Alpine Systems Corporation, Anaerobicos S.r.l., AppliChem GmbH, Arylux Hungary Elektromechanikus Alkatreszgyarto Kft, Avery Berkel France, Avery India Limited, Avery Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Avery Weigh Tronix, Avery Weigh-Tronix (Suzhou) Weighing Technology Co. Ltd., Avery Weigh-Tronix Finance Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix Holdings Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix International Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix LLC, Avery Weigh-Tronix Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix Properties Limited, Azon Limited, B.C. Immo, Beijing Miller Electric Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Berkel (Ireland) Limited, Berrington UK, Brapenta Eletronica Ltda., Brooks Instrument (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Brooks Instrument B.V., Brooks Instrument GmbH, Brooks Instrument KFT, Brooks Instrument Korea Ltd., Brooks Instrument LLC, Buell Industries Inc., CAPMAX Logistica S.A. de C.V., CCI Realty Company, CFC Europe GmbH, CS (Australia) Pty Limited, CS (Finance) Europe S.a.r.l., CS Mexico Holding Company S DE RL DE CV, CSMTS LLC, Calvia Spolka z Ograniczona Odpowiedzialnosci, Capital Ventures (Australasia) S.a r.l, Capmax Logistica S.A. de C.V., Celeste Industries Corporation, Coeur, Coeur (Shanghai) Medical Appliance Trading Co. Ltd, Coeur Asia Limited, Coeur Holding Company, Coeur Inc., Compagnie Hobart, Compagnie de Materiel et d'Equipements Techniques-Comet, Constructions Isothermiques Bontami C.I.B., Crane Carrier Company, Despatch Industries, Diagraph Corporation Sdn. Bhd, Diagraph ITW Mexico S. de R.L. De C.V., Diagraph Mexico S.A. DE C.V., Dongguan Ark-Les Electric Components Co. Ltd., Dongguan CK Branding Co. Ltd., Dorbyl U.K. (Holdings) Limited, Duo Fast de Espana S.A.U., Duo-Fast Korea Co. Ltd., Duo-Fast LLC, E.C.S. d.o.o., ECS Cable Protection Sp. Zoo, ELRO (Holding) AG, ELRO Grosskuchen GmbH, ELRO-WERKE AG, Elga Skandinavian AS, Elro Group, Eltex-Elektrostatik-Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, Envases Multipac S.A. de C.V., Eurotec Srl, FEG Investments L.L.C., Fasver, Filtertek, Filtertek De Mexico Holding Inc., Filtertek De Mexico S.A. de C.V., GC Financement SA, Gamko B.V., Gun Hwa Platech (Taicang) Co. Ltd., HOBART Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, Hartness International, Hobart (Japan) K.K., Hobart Andina S.A.S., Hobart Brothers International Chile Limitada, Hobart Brothers LLC, Hobart Dayton Mexicana S. de R.L. de C.V., Hobart Food Equipment Co. Ltd., Hobart Foster Belgium, Hobart International (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Hobart Korea LLC, Hobart LLC, Hobart Nederland B.V., Hobart Sales & Service Inc., Hobart Scandinavia ApS, Hobart Techniek B.V., Horis, ILC Investments Holdings Inc., ITW (China) Investment Company Limited, ITW (Deutschland) GmbH, ITW (EU) Holdings Ltd., ITW (European) Finance Co. Ltd., ITW (European) Finance II Co. Ltd., ITW (European) Finance III Co. Ltd., ITW (Ningbo) Components & Fastenings Systems Co. Ltd., ITW AEP LLC, ITW AOC LLC, ITW Aircraft Investments Inc., ITW Alpha Sarl, ITW Ampang Industries Philippines Inc., ITW Appliance Components EOOD, ITW Appliance Components S.A. de C.V., ITW Appliance Components S.r.l.a, ITW Appliance Components d.o.o., ITW Australia Holdings Pty Ltd, ITW Australia Property Holdings Pty Ltd., ITW Australia Pty Ltd, ITW Automotive Components (Chongqing) Co. Ltd., ITW Automotive Components (Langfang) Co. Ltd., ITW Automotive Japan K.K., ITW Automotive Korea LLC, ITW Automotive Parts (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, ITW Automotive Products GmbH, ITW Automotive Products Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Bailly Comte, ITW Befestigungssysteme GmbH, ITW Belgium, ITW Brazilian Nominee L.L.C., ITW Building Components Group Inc., ITW CER, ITW CP Distribution Center Holland BV, ITW CS (UK) Ltd., ITW Canada Inc., ITW Celeste Inc., ITW Chemical Products Ltda, ITW Chemical Products Scandinavia ApS, ITW Colombia S.A.S., ITW Construction Products (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ITW Construction Products (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., ITW Construction Products AB, ITW Construction Products AS, ITW Construction Products ApS, ITW Construction Products CZ s.r.o., ITW Construction Products Italy Srl, ITW Construction Products OU, ITW Construction Products OY, ITW Contamination Control (Wujiang) Co. Ltd., ITW Contamination Control B.V., ITW Covid Security Group Inc., ITW DS Investments Inc., ITW DelFast do Brasil Ltda., ITW Delta Sarl, ITW Denmark ApS, ITW Dynatec, ITW Dynatec Adhesive Equipment (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., ITW Dynatec GmbH, ITW Dynatec Kabushiki Kaisha, ITW EAE B.V., ITW EAE Mexico S de RL de CV, ITW EF&C France SAS, ITW EF&C Selb GmbH, ITW Electronic Business Asia Co. Limited, ITW Electronic Components/Products (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ITW Electronics (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., ITW Epsilon Sarl, ITW Espana S.A., ITW FEG Hong Kong Limited, ITW FEG do Brasil Industria e Comercio Ltda., ITW Fastener Products GmbH, ITW Finance Designated Activity Company, ITW Finance Europe S.A., ITW Fluids and Hygiene Solutions Ltda., ITW Food Equipment Group LLC, ITW France Finance Alpha S.A.S., ITW GH LLC, ITW GSE ApS, ITW GSE Inc., ITW Gamma Sarl, ITW German Management LLC, ITW Global Investments Holdings LLC, ITW Global Investments Holdings Y Compania Sociedad en Comandita por Acciones, ITW Global Investments II Inc., ITW Global Investments Inc., ITW Global Tire Repair Europe GmbH, ITW Global Tire Repair Inc., ITW Global Tire Repair Japan K.K., ITW Graphics (Thailand) Ltd., ITW Graphics Asia Limited, ITW Graphics Italy S.R.L. in liquidazione, ITW Great Britain Investment & Licensing Holding Company, ITW Group France (Luxembourg) S.ar.l., ITW HLP Thailand Co. Ltd., ITW Holding Quimica B.C. S.L. Sole Shareholder Company, ITW Holdings Australia L.P., ITW Holdings I Limited, ITW Holdings II Limited, ITW Holdings III Limited, ITW Holdings IV Limited, ITW Holdings IX Limited, ITW Holdings Inc., ITW Holdings UK, ITW Holdings V Limited, ITW Holdings VI Limited, ITW Holdings VII Limited, ITW Holdings VIII Limited, ITW Holdings X Limited, ITW Holdings XI Limited, ITW Hungary Finance Beta Kft, ITW ILC Holdings I Inc., ITW IPG Investments LLC, ITW Imaden Industria e Comercio Ltda., ITW India Private Limited, ITW International Holdings LLC, ITW Invest Holding GmbH, ITW Ireland Holdings Unlimited Company, ITW Ireland Unlimited Company, ITW Italy Finance Srl, ITW Italy Holding Srl, ITW Japan Ltd., ITW Korea LLC, ITW LLC & Co. KG, ITW Limited, ITW Lombard Holdings Inc., ITW Lys Fusion S.r.l., ITW M FILMS II LLC, ITW MH LLC, ITW Meritex Sdn. Bhd., ITW Metal Fasteners S.L., ITW Mexico Holding Company S. De R.L. de C.V., ITW Mexico Holdings LLC, ITW Morlock GmbH, ITW Mortgage Investments II Inc., ITW Mortgage Investments III Inc., ITW Mortgage Investments IV Inc., ITW Netherlands Administration BV, ITW Netherlands Beta B.V., ITW Netherlands Finance Alpha BV, ITW New Universal LLC, ITW New Zealand, ITW Novadan Sp. Z.o.o., ITW PPF Brasil Adesivos Ltda., ITW Packaging Technology (China) Co. Ltd., ITW Participations S.a r.l., ITW Pension Funds Trustee Company, ITW Performance Plastic (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ITW Performance Polymers & Fluids Japan Co. Ltd., ITW Performance Polymers & Fluids Korea Limited, ITW Performance Polymers & Fluids OOO, ITW Performance Polymers (Wujiang) Co. Ltd., ITW Performance Polymers ApS, ITW Performance Polymers and Fluids Group FZE, ITW Peru S.A.C., ITW Philippines Holdings LLC, ITW Poly Mex S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Polymers Sealants North America Inc., ITW Pronovia s.r.o., ITW Pte. Ltd., ITW Qufu Automotive Cooling Systems Co. Ltd., ITW Real Estate Germany GmbH, ITW Residuals III L.L.C., ITW Residuals IV L.L.C., ITW Rivex, ITW SMPI, ITW SPG Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Simco-Ion (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., ITW Slovakia s.r.o., ITW Spain Holdings S.L., ITW Specialty Film LLC, ITW Specialty Films France, ITW Specialty Materials (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., ITW Spraytec, ITW Sverige AB, ITW Sweden Holding AB, ITW Test & Measurement Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, ITW Test & Measurement GmbH, ITW Test and Measurement Italia Srl, ITW Test and Measurement Services Industry and Trade Ltd., ITW Texwipe Philippines Inc., ITW Thermal Films (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ITW UK, ITW UK Finance Beta Limited, ITW UK Finance Delta Limited, ITW UK Finance Gamma Limited, ITW UK Finance Limited, ITW UK Finance Zeta Ltd., ITW UK II Limited, ITW Universal II LLC, ITW Welding, ITW Welding AB, ITW Welding GmbH, ITW Welding Products B.V., ITW Welding Products Group FZE, ITW Welding Products Group S. DE R.L. De C.V., ITW Welding Products Italy Srl, ITW Welding Products Limited Liability Company, ITW Welding Produtos Para Solgdagem Ltda., ITW Welding Servicios Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Welding Singapore Pte. Ltd., ITW de France, ITW do Brasil Industrial e Comercial Ltda., Ideal Molding Technologies LLC, Illinois Tool Works (Chile) Limitada, Illinois Tool Works (ITW) Nederland B.V., Illinois Tool Works Norway AS, Impar Comercio E Representacoes Ltda., Industrie Plastic Elsasser GmbH, Inmobiliaria Cit. S.A. de C.F., Innova Temperlite Servicios S.A. de C.V., Innovacion y Transformacion Automotriz S.A. de C.V., Instron (Shanghai) Ltd., Instron (Thailand) Limited, Instron Brasil Equipamentos Cientificos Ltda., Instron Foreign Sales Corp. Limited, Instron France S.A.S., Instron GmbH, Instron Holdings Limited, Instron International Limited, Instron Japan Company Ltd., Instron Korea LLC, International Leasing Company LLC, International Truss Systems Proprietary Limited, Isolenge - ITW Sistemas de Isolamento Termico Ltda., KCPL Mauritius Holdings, Kester, Kester Components (M) Sdn. Bhd., Kleinmann GmbH, Krafft S.L., Loma Systems, Loma Systems (Canada) Inc., Loma Systems BV, Loma Systems sro, Lombard Pressings Limited, Lumex Inc., Lys Fusion Poland Sp. z.o.o., M&C Specialties (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., M&C Specialties Co., MAGNAFLUX GmbH, MEHB Holdings Limited, MGHG Property LLC, MOA Enterprises Inc, Manufacturing Avancee S.A., Meritex Technology (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Meurer Verpackungssysteme GmbH, Miller Electric Mfg. LLC, Miller Insurance Ltd., NDT Holding LLC, NOVADAN APS, Norden Olje AB, North Star Imaging Europe, North Star Imaging Inc., Nova Chimica S.r.l., Orbitalum Tools GmbH, PENTA-91 OOO, PR. A. I. Srl, PT ITW Construction Products Indonesia, Pacific Concept Industries Limited (Enping), Panreac Quimica S.L., Paslode Fasteners (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Peerless Machinery Corp., Penta Dnepr LLC, Penta Sever OOO, Penta Volga OOO, Polyrey, Premark FEG L.L.C., Premark HII Holdings LLC, Premark International, Premark International LLC, Prolex Sociedad Anonima, QSA Global Inc., Quimica Industrial Mediterranea S.L., Ramset Fasteners (Hong Kong) Ltd., Rapid Cook LLC, Refrigeration France, S.E.E. Sistemas Industria E Comercio Ltda., ST Mexico Holdings LLC, Sealant Systems International Inc., Sentinel Asia Yuhan Hoesa, Shanghai ITW Plastic & Metal Co. Ltd, Simco (Nederland) B.V., Simco Japan Inc., Societe de Prospection et dInventions Techniques  SPIT, Speedline Holdings I Inc., Speedline Holdings I LLC, Speedline Technologies GmbH, Speedline Technologies Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Speedline Technologies Mexico Services S. de R.L. de C.V., Stokvis Celix Portugal Unipessoal LDA, Stokvis Danmark ApS, Stokvis Holdings S.A.R.L., Stokvis Promi s.r.o, Stokvis Prostick Tapes Private Limited, Stokvis Tapes (Hong Kong) Co. Limited, Stokvis Tapes (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes (Taiwan) Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes BVBA, Stokvis Tapes Benelux B.V., Stokvis Tapes Deutschland GmbH, Stokvis Tapes France, Stokvis Tapes Italia s.r.l., Stokvis Tapes Limited, Stokvis Tapes Limited Liability Company, Stokvis Tapes Norge AS, Stokvis Tapes Oy, Stokvis Tapes Polska Sp Z.O.O., Stokvis Tapes Sverige AB, Stolvis Holdings II S.A.R.L., Technopack Industria Comercio Consultoria e Representacoes Ltda., Teknek (China) Limited, Teknek (Japan) Limited, Teksaleco Ltd., The Miller Group Ltd, Thirode Grandes Cuisines Poligny, Tien Tai Electrode (Kunshan) Co. Ltd., Tien Tai Electrode Co. Ltd., Unichemicals Industria e Comercio Ltda., VR-Leasing Sarita GmbH & Co. Immobilien KG, VS European Holdco BV, Valeron Strength Films B.V.B.A., Veneta Decalcogomme S.r.l., Versachem Chile S.A., Vesta, Vesta (Guangzhou) Catering Equipment Co. Ltd, Vesta Global Limited, Viltronics Soltec, Vitronics Soltec B.V., Wachs Canada Ltd., Wachs Subsea LLC, Weigh-Tronix Canada ULC, Weigh-Tronix UK Limited, Wilsonart International Holdings LLC, Wynn Oil (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd., Wynn's Automotive France, Wynn's Belgium BVBA, Wynn's Italia Srl, Wynn's Mekuba India Pvt Ltd, ZF TRW (Engineered Fasteners and Components), and Zip-Pak International B.V..The following companies are subsidiares of Lennar: 360 Developers LLC, Alliance Financial Services Inc., Ann Arundel Farms Ltd., Aquaterra Utilities Inc., Arbor Mill Veteran Project 2018 LLC, Asbury Woods L.L.C., Astoria Options LLC, Autumn Creek Development Ltd., Aylon LLC, Azusa Associates LLC, B2 Milpitas LLC, BB Investment Holdings LLC, BCI Properties LLC, BMR Communities LLC, BMR Construction Inc., BMTD LLC, BPH I LLC, Bainebridge 249 LLC, Bay Colony Expansion 369 Ltd., Bellagio Lennar LLC, Belle Meade LEN Holdings LLC, Belle Meade Partners LLC, Black Mountain Ranch LLC, Blue Horizons Estates LLC, Bonterra Lennar LLC, Bramalea California Inc., Bressi Gardenlane LLC, Breton Park Lennar LLC, CAP IL 1 LLC, CL Ventures LLC, CML INACTIVE LLC, CML-MO HAF LLC, CML-MO HAF PARKING LLC, CP Block 6aS LLC, CP Block 8aS LLC, CP Block 9aS LLC, CP Center Apartments LLC, CP Center Garage LLC, CP Red Oak Partners Ltd., CP Vertical Development Co. 1 LLC, CP/HPS Development Co. GP LLC, CP/HPS Development Co.-C LLC, CPFE LLC, CPHP Development LLC, CalAtlantic Financial Services Inc., CalAtlantic Group, CalAtlantic Group Inc., CalAtlantic Homes of Arizona Inc., CalAtlantic Homes of Georgia Inc., CalAtlantic Homes of Texas Inc., CalAtlantic Homes of Washington Inc., CalAtlantic Mortgage Inc., CalAtlantic National Title Solutions LLC, CalAtlantic Title Agency LLC, CalAtlantic Title Group LLC, CalAtlantic Title Inc., CalAtlantic Title LLC, CalAtlantic Title of Maryland Inc., Camarillo Village Park LLC, Cambria L.L.C., Candlestick Retail Member LLC, Cardiovascular Medical Specialists LLC, Carolina Blue LLC, Carson 175 LLC, Cary Woods LLC, Casa Marina Development LLC, Central Park West Holdings LLC, Cherrytree II LLC, Club Bonterra Lennar LLC, Coco Palm 82 LLC, Colonial Heritage LLC, Columbia National Risk Retention Group Inc., Commonwealth Incentive Fee LLC, Concord Station LLP, Coventry L.L.C., Creekside Crossing L.L.C., Crest at Fondren Investor LLC, DBJ Holdings LLC, DCA Financial LLC, DTC Holdings of Florida LLC, Darcy-Joliet L.L.C., Durrell 33 LLC, EL Ventures LLC, EV LLC, Eagle Bend Commercial LLC, Eagle Home Mortgage LLC, Estates Seven LLC, Evergreen Village LLC, F&R QVI Home Investments USA LLC, FLORDADE LLC, Faria Preserve LLC, Fidelity Guaranty and Acceptance Corp., Fidelity Land LLC, Fox-Maple Associates LLC, Friendswood Development Company LLC, GDI MANAGER LLC, Garco Investments LLC, Greystone Construction Inc., Greystone Homes of Nevada Inc., Greystone Nevada Holdings LLC, Greystone Nevada LLC, Greywall Club L.L.C., HCC Investors LLC, HPS Development Co. LP, HPS Vertical Development Co. LLC, HPS Vertical Development Co.-B LP, HPS Vertical Development Co.-D/E LLC, HPS1 Block 1 LLC, HPS1 Block 48-1A LLC, HPS1 Block 48-1B LLC, HPS1 Block 48-2A LLC, HPS1 Block 48-2B LLC, HPS1 Block 48-3A LLC, HPS1 Block 48-3B LLC, HPS1 Block 50 LLC, HPS1 Block 51 LLC, HPS1 Block 52 LLC, HPS1 Block 53 LLC, HPS1 Block 54 LLC, HPS1 Block 55 LLC, HPS1 Block 56/57 LLC, HSP Arizona Inc., HTC Golf Club LLC, Hammocks Lennar LLC, Harbor Highlands Group LLC, Harveston LLC, Haverton L.L.C., Heathcote Commons LLC, Heritage Pkwy East Holdings LLC, Heritage of Auburn Hills L.L.C., Hewitts Landing Trustee LLC, Hingham Properties LLC, Huntley Venture L.L.C., Inactive Companies LLC, Independence L.L.C., Independence Orlando LLC, Isles at Bayshore Club LLC, KMC Real Estate Investors LLC, Kendall Hammocks Commercial LLC, Kentuckiana Medical Center LLC, Kingman Lennar LLC, LB/L  Duc III Antioch 330 LLC, LCD Asante LLC, LCI Downtown Doral Investor LLC, LCI North DeKalb Investor GP LLC, LCI North DeKalb Investor LP LLC, LEN - Belle Meade LLC, LEN - OBS Windemere LLC, LEN - Palm Vista LLC, LEN BPT Investor LLC, LEN Mirada Investor LLC, LEN Notarize Investor LLC, LEN OT Holdings LLC, LEN Paradise Cable LLC, LEN Paradise Operating LLC, LEN-CG South LLC, LEN-Cypress Mill LLC, LEN-Ryan 1 LLC, LEN-Touchstone LLC, LENH I LLC, LENNAR HOMES OF TENNESSEE LLC, LFS Holding Company LLC, LH Eastwind LLC, LHI Renaissance LLC, LMC 10th & Acoma Holdings LP, LMC 144th and Grant Investor LLC, LMC 2401 Blake Street Holdings LLC, LMC 2401 Blake Street Investor LLC, LMC 360 Acoma Holdings LP, LMC 410 S Wabash Holdings LLC, LMC 808 Gateway Holdings LLC, LMC 808 Gateway Investor LLC, LMC 8th Avenue Apartment Investor LLC, LMC 990 Bannock Holdings LLC, LMC Axis Westminster Holdings LLC, LMC Axis Westminster Investor LLC, LMC Berry Hill Lofts Holdings LLC, LMC Berry Hill Lofts Investor LLC, LMC Block 42 Holdings LLC, LMC Build to Core III Investor LLC, LMC Build to Core III LLC, LMC Burnside Holdings LLC, LMC Burnside Investor LLC, LMC Chandler and McClintock Holdings LLC, LMC Charlestowne Holdings LLC, LMC Charlotte Ballpark Developer LLC, LMC Cityville Oak Park Holdings LLC, LMC Cityville Oak Park Investor LLC, LMC Cobalt Holdings LLC, LMC Costa Mesa Holdings LP, LMC Crest at Park West Holdings LP, LMC Denver Gateway I Investor LLC, LMC Denver Gateway II Holdings LLC, LMC Development LLC, LMC Downtown Doral South Holdings LLC, LMC Durham Gateway Holdings LP, LMC Evans School Holdings LLC, LMC Gateway Investor LLC, LMC Gateway Venture LLC, LMC Gilman Square Investor LLC, LMC Horton Street Holdings LLC, LMC Huntington Crossing Holdings LLC, LMC Inactive Companies LLC, LMC Lakeside Holdings LP, LMC Leya Holdings LLC, LMC Living Illinois LLC, LMC Living Inc., LMC Living LLC, LMC Living TRS LP, LMC Millenia Investor II LLC, LMC NE Minneapolis Lot 2 Holdings LLC, LMC New Bern Investor LLC, LMC North Park Holdings LP, LMC Parkfield Holdings LLC, LMC Parkfield Investor LLC, LMC Righters Ferry Holdings LLC, LMC River North Holdings LLC, LMC Spring Street Investor LLC, LMC Stonewall Station Investor LLC, LMC Triangle Square Investor LLC, LMC Venture Developer LLC, LMC Verbena Holdings LLC, LMC West Loop Investor LLC, LMCFX Investor LLC, LMCPNW Marymoor Holdings LLC, LMI - Jacksonville Investor LLC, LMI - South Kings Development Investor LLC, LMI - West Seattle Holdings LLC, LMI - West Seattle Investor LLC, LMI - West Seattle LLC, LMI Cell Tower Investors LLC, LMI City Walk Investor LLC, LMI Collegedale Investor LLC, LMI Collegedale LLC, LMI Contractors LLC, LMI Glencoe Dallas Investor LLC, LMI Lakes West Covina Investor LLC, LMI Largo Park Investor LLC, LMI Las Colinas Station LLC, LMI Naperville Investor LLC, LMI Pacific Tower LLC, LMI Park Central Two LLC, LMI Peachtree Corners Investor LLC, LMI Peachtree Corners LLC, LMI-JC Developer LLC, LMI-JC LLC, LMV 1640 Broadway REIT-DC LP, LMV 1701 Ballard REIT-DC LP, LMV 19H REIT-DC LP, LMV 2026 Madison REIT-DC LP, LMV 85 South Union REIT-DC LP, LMV ATown REIT-DC LP, LMV Annapolis REIT-DC LP, LMV Apache Terrace REIT-DC LP, LMV Block 42 REIT-DC LP, LMV Bloomington REIT-DC LP, LMV Bolingbrook REIT-DC LP (DE), LMV Central at McDowell REIT-DC LP, LMV East Village I REIT-DC LP, LMV Edina REIT-DC LP, LMV Fremont WS I REIT-DC LP, LMV Glisan REIT-DC LP, LMV Grand Bay REIT-DC LP, LMV II Grand Bay Pod V Holdings LP, LMV II Kierland Holdings LP, LMV II NoMo Holdings LP, LMV II Venture Developer LLC, LMV II Wynwood Holdings LP, LMV Kirkland REIT-DC LP, LMV Little Italy REIT-DC LP, LMV M Tower REIT-DC LP, LMV Millenia II REIT-DC LP, LMV Milpitas REIT-DC LP, LMV NE Minneapolis REIT-DC LP, LMV Oak Park REIT-DC LP, LMV One20Fourth REIT-DC LP, LMV QR Build to Core Manager LLC, LMV Rio Bravo REIT-DC LP, LMV Scottsdale Quarter REIT-DC LP, LMV Tysons REIT-DC LP, LMV Vallagio III REIT-DC LP, LMV Victory Block G REIT-DC LP, LMV Warren Street REIT-DC LP, LNC Communities II LLC, LNC Communities IV LLC, LNC Communities V LLC, LNC Communities VI LLC, LNC Communities VII LLC, LNC Communities VIII LLC, LNC Pennsylvania Realty Inc., LNC at Meadowbrook LLC, LNC at Ravenna LLC, LS College Park LLC, LS Terracina LLC, LV Opendoor Investor LLC, LV Opendoor JV LLC, LW D'Andrea LLC, Lagoon Valley Residential LLC, Lakelands at Easton L.L.C., Legends Club LLC, Legends Golf Club LLC, Len - Little Harbor LLC, Len FW Investor LLC, Len Paradise LLC, Len-Angeline LLC, Len-Hawks Point LLC, Len-Land LLC, Len-Land West LLC, Len-MN LLC, Len-Verandahs LLP, LenCom LLC, LenFive LLC, LenFive Opco GP LLC, LenFive Sub III LLC, LenFive Sub LLC, LenFive Sub Opco GP LLC, Lenalto CMBS LLC, Lencraft LLC, Lennar Aircraft I LLC, Lennar Arizona Construction Inc., Lennar Arizona Inc., Lennar Associates Management Holding Company, Lennar Associates Management LLC, Lennar Avenue One LLC, Lennar Berkeley LLC, Lennar Bevard LLC, Lennar Bridges LLC, Lennar Buffington Colorado Crossing L.P., Lennar Buffington Zachary Scott L.P., Lennar Carolinas LLC, Lennar Central Park LLC, Lennar Central Region Sweep Inc., Lennar Chicago Inc., Lennar Cobra LLC, Lennar Colgate Urban Renewal Development LLC, Lennar Colorado LLC, Lennar Colorado Minerals LLC, Lennar Commercial LLC, Lennar Communities Development Inc., Lennar Communities Inc., Lennar Communities Nevada LLC, Lennar Communities of Chicago L.L.C., Lennar Concord LLC, Lennar Construction Inc., Lennar Cory Road LLC, Lennar Courts LLC, Lennar Developers Inc., Lennar Ewing LLC, Lennar Financial Services LLC, Lennar Flamingo LLC, Lennar Fresno Inc., Lennar Gardens LLC, Lennar Georgia Inc., Lennar Greer Ranch Venture LLC, Lennar Heritage Fields LLC, Lennar Hingham Holdings LLC, Lennar Hingham JV LLC, Lennar Homes Holding LLC, Lennar Homes LLC, Lennar Homes NJ LLC, Lennar Homes of Arizona Inc., Lennar Homes of California Inc., Lennar Homes of Indiana Inc., Lennar Homes of Texas Land and Construction Ltd., Lennar Homes of Texas Sales and Marketing Ltd., Lennar Homes of Utah Inc., Lennar International Holding LLC, Lennar International LLC, Lennar Lakeside Investor LLC, Lennar Layton LLC, Lennar Living LLC, Lennar Lytle LLC, Lennar MF Holdings LLC, Lennar MPA LLC, Lennar MPA WIP LLC, Lennar Mare Island LLC, Lennar Marina A Funding LLC, Lennar Massachusetts Properties Inc., Lennar Middletown LLC, Lennar Monmouth Redevelopers LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture GP LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture GP Subsidiary LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture GP Victory Block G Mezz LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture II GP LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture II GP Subsidiary LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture II LP LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture II Manager LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture LP LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture Manager LLC, Lennar Multifamily Builders LLC, Lennar Multifamily Communities LLC, Lennar Multifamily Venture DC LP, Lennar New Jersey Holdings LLC, Lennar New Jersey Properties Inc., Lennar New York LLC, Lennar Northeast Properties LLC, Lennar Northwest Inc., Lennar OHB LLC, Lennar PI Acquisition LLC, Lennar PI Property Acquisition LLC, Lennar PIS Management Company LLC, Lennar Pacific Inc., Lennar Pacific Properties Inc., Lennar Pacific Properties Management Inc., Lennar Plumsted Urban Renewal LLC, Lennar Point LLC, Lennar QR Build to Core GP LLC, Lennar QR Build to Core LP LLC, Lennar Realty Inc., Lennar Reno LLC, Lennar Riverwalk LLC, Lennar Sacramento Inc., Lennar Sales Corp., Lennar Sierra Sunrise LLC, Lennar Spencer's Crossing LLC, Lennar Sun Ridge LLC, Lennar Texas Holding LLC, Lennar Ventures LLC, Lennar West Valley LLC, Lennar Winncrest LLC, Lennar at Franklin LLC, Lennar at Jackson LLC, Lennar at Marlboro 79 LLC, Lennar at Monroe LLC, Lennar.com Inc., Longleaf Acquisition LLC, Lori Gardens Associates II LLC, Lori Gardens Associates III LLC, Lori Gardens Associates L.L.C., Lorton Station LLC, Lyons Lennar Farms LLC, Madrona Ridge L.L.C., Madrona Village L.L.C., Madrona Village Mews L.L.C., Majestic Woods LLC, Maple and Broadway Holdings LLC, Menifee Development LLC, Mid-County Utilities Inc., Miralago West Lennar LLC, Mission Viejo 12S Venture LP, Mission Viejo Holdings Inc., Motomic Diagnostics LLC, Multibank 2009-1 CML-ADC Venture LLC, Multibank 2009-1 RES-ADC Venture LLC, NC Properties I LLC, NC Properties II LLC, North American Asset Development LLC, Northbridge L.L.C., OHC/Ascot Belle Meade LLC, One SR L.P., PD-Len Boca Raton LLC, PG Properties Holding LLC, POMAC LLC, PT Metro LLC, Pace Drive Holdings LLC, Palm Gardens At Doral Clubhouse LLC, Palm Gardens at Doral LLC, Palm Springs Classic LLC, Palm Vista Preserve LLC, Patuxent Infrastructure Inc., Pioneer Meadows Development LLC, Pioneer Meadows Investments LLC, Plaza Condominium Ventures LLC, Portside Marina Developers L.L.C., Portside SM Associates L.L.C., Portside SM Holdings L.L.C., Portside Shipyard Developers L.L.C., Prestonfield L.L.C., Quail Roost Lennar LLC, RCCF GP II LLC, RCCF GP III LLC, RCCF GP IV LLC, RCCF GP LLC, RES-FL EIGHT LLC, RES-FL SEVEN LLC, RES-FL VISION ONE LLC, RES-FL VISION TWO LLC, RES-GA CASCADE LLC, RES-GA DIAMOND MEADOWS LLC, RES-GA KAP LLC, RES-GA SOUTHERN PLANTATION LLC, RES-GA THIRTEEN LLC, RES-GA TWELVE LLC, RES-GA WEST LLC, RES-IL ONE LLC, RES-NC ONE LLC, RES-PA LSJ LLC, RES-PA POM LLC, RES-TX BOULEVARD LLC, RH Insurance Company Inc., RH MOA BBCMS 2017-C1 LLC, RH MOA CF 2017-C8 LLC, RH MOA LLC, RH MOA U 2017-C4 LLC, RH MOA U 2017-C6 LLC, RIAL 2014-LT5 CLASS B LLC, RIAL 2014-LT5 LLC, RL BB FINANCIAL LLC, RL BB INACTIVE LLC, RL BB-AL LLC, RL BB-FL ALHI LLC, RL BB-GA LLC, RL BB-GA RMH LLC, RL BB-IL LLC, RL BB-IN AA LLC, RL BB-IN KRE LLC, RL BB-IN KRE OP LLC, RL BB-IN KRE RE LLC, RL BB-MS LLC, RL BB-NC LLC, RL BB-OH LLC, RL BB-SC BROOKSA LLC, RL BB-SC CLR II LLC, RL BB-SC CLR III LLC, RL BB-SC CLR IV LLC, RL BB-SC CLR LLC, RL BB-SC CRRC LLC, RL BB-SC RACEDAY LLC, RL BB-TN BRISTOL LLC, RL BB-TN LLC, RL BB-TN RACEDAY TOWER LLC, RL BB-TX LLC, RL BB-WV LLC, RL CMBS Holdings LLC, RL CML 2009-1 Investments LLC, RL REGI ARKANSAS LLC, RL REGI Alabama LLC, RL REGI FINANCIAL LLC, RL REGI Florida LLC, RL REGI GEORGIA LLC, RL REGI INACTIVE LLC, RL REGI KANSAS LLC, RL REGI MISSISSIPPI LLC, RL REGI MISSOURI LLC, RL REGI NORTH CAROLINA LLC, RL REGI SOUTH CAROLINA LLC, RL REGI TENNESSEE LLC, RL REGI VIRGINIA LLC, RL REGI-AL HP LLC, RL REGI-AL VRC LLC, RL REGI-FL CRC LLC, RL REGI-FL ESH LLC, RL REGI-FL FT. PIERCE LLC, RL REGI-FL GDL LLC, RL REGI-FL ITALIA LLC, RL REGI-FL MRED LLC, RL REGI-FL RDI LLC, RL REGI-FL SARASOTA LLC, RL REGI-FL TPL LLC, RL REGI-FL VARC LLC, RL REGI-GA DRAD LLC, RL REGI-GA HAY DB LLC, RL REGI-GA MHU LLC, RL REGI-GA MPD LLC, RL REGI-GA RLR LLC, RL REGI-MO GMB LLC, RL REGI-MO MOSCOW MILLS LLC, RL REGI-MS Double H LLC, RL REGI-MS OCEAN SPRINGS LLC, RL REGI-NC CIL LLC, RL REGI-NC LITTLE WING LLC, RL REGI-NC MLD LLC, RL REGI-NC Mland LLC, RL REGI-NC RALEIGH LLC, RL REGI-NC SUGARM LLC, RL REGI-NM LLC, RL REGI-SC CTL LLC, RL REGI-SC LAKE E LLC, RL REGI-SC TDG LLC, RL REGI-SC TIG LLC, RL REGI-TN OAK LLC, RL REGI-TN SEVIERVILLE LLC, RL RES 2009-1 Investments LLC, RMF Alliance LLC, RMF Commercial LLC, RMF PR New York LLC, RMF Partner LLC, RMF SUB 1 LLC, RMF SUB 2 LLC, RMF SUB 3 LLC, RMF SUB 4 LLC, RMF SUB 5 LLC, RMV LLC, Raintree Village II L.L.C., Raintree Village L.L.C., Ral-Len BM LLC, Ral-Len LLC, Rannel Capital WeWork Series D LLC, Rannel Holdings LLC, Rannel Interests LLC, Rannel Investments LLC, Rannel Mortgage Investments LLC, Rannel Proprietary Investments LLC, Renaissance Joint Venture, Reserve @ Pleasant Grove II LLC, Reserve @ Pleasant Grove LLC, Reserve at River Park LLC, Reserve at South Harrison LLC, Rialto Commercial Mortgage Securities LLC, Rialto Credit Partnership GP LLC, Rialto Mezz Partners GP LLC, Rialto Mortgage Finance LLC, Rialto Partners GP II LLC, Rialto Partners GP III - Debt LLC, Rialto Partners GP III - Property LLC, Rialto Partners GP LLC, Rialto RSSF GP LLC, Riverwalk at Lago Mar LLC, Rocking Horse Minerals LLC, Rutenberg Homes Inc. (Florida), Rutenberg Homes of Texas Inc., Rye Hill Company LLC, Ryland Homes Nevada Holdings LLC, Ryland Homes Nevada LLC, Ryland Homes of California Inc., S. Florida Construction II LLC, S. Florida Construction III LLC, S. Florida Construction LLC, SC 521 Indian Land Reserve LLC, SC 521 Indian Land Reserve South LLC, SPIC CPCO Inc., SPIC CPDB Inc., SPIC CPRB Inc., SPIC Del Sur LLC, SPIC Dublin LLC, SPIC Mesa LLC, SPIC NC Fremont LLC, SPIC Otay LLC, SPIC Springs LLC, San Felipe Indemnity Co. Ltd., San Lucia LLC, San Simeon Lennar LLC, Schulz Ranch Developers LLC, Seminole/70th LLC, Siena at Old Orchard L.L.C., Sierra Vista Communities LLC, Silver Springs Lennar LLC, South Development LLC, Southbank Holding LLC, Spanish Springs Development LLC, St. Charles Active Adult Community LLC, St. Charles Community LLC, Standard Pacific 1 Inc., Standard Pacific Investment Corp., Standard Pacific of Colorado Inc., Standard Pacific of Florida, Standard Pacific of Florida GP Inc., Standard Pacific of Las Vegas Inc., Standard Pacific of Orange County Inc., Standard Pacific of Tampa GP, Standard Pacific of Tampa GP Inc., Standard Pacific of Tonner Hills LLC, Standard Pacific of Walnut Hills Inc., Standard Pacific of the Carolinas LLC, Stoney Holdings LLC, Storey Lake Club LLC, Storey Park Club LLC, Strategic Holdings Inc., Strategic Technologies LLC, Summerfield Venture L.L.C., SunStreet Energy Group LLC, SunStreet Manager LLC, TCO QVI LLC, TICD Hold Co. LLC, TIH Hold Co. LLC, Talega Associates LLC, Temecula Valley LLC, Terra Division LLC, Terra/Winding Creek LLC, The Baywinds Land Trust, The Bridges Club at Rancho Santa Fe Inc., The Bridges at Rancho Santa Fe Sales Company Inc., The LNC Northeast Group Inc., The Oasis Club at LEN-CG South LLC, The Preserve at Coconut Creek LLC, The Vistas Club at LEN-CG South LLC, Titlezoom Company, Treasure Island Holdings LLC, Treasure Island Member LLC, Treviso Holding LLC, Two Lakes Lennar LLC, U.S. Home Corporation, U.S. Home Realty Inc., U.S. Home of Arizona Construction Co., U.S. Insurors Inc., U.S.H. Realty Inc., UAMC Holding Company LLC, UB 2018C14 MOA LLC, USH - Flag LLC, USH Equity Corporation, USH LEE LLC, USH Leasing II LLC, USH Leasing LLC, UST Lennar HW Scala SF Joint Venture, VII Crown Farm Investor LLC, Venetian Lennar LLC, Vineyard Land LLC, Vineyard Point 2009 LLC, Vista Palms Clubhouse LLC, WCI Communities, WCI Communities Inc., WCI Communities LLC, WCI Towers Northeast USA Inc., WCI Westshore LLC, WCP LLC, WIP Lennar OHB LLC, Waterview at Hanover LLC, West Lake Village LLC, West Seattle Project X LLC, West Van Buren L.L.C., Westchase Inc., Westchase Ltd., Westfield Homes USA Inc., White Course Lennar LLC, Wild Plum JV LLC, Willowbrook Investors LLC, Winncrest Natomas LLC, Woodbridge Multifamily Developer I LLC, Wright Farm L.L.C., and YLRichards4Acres 2015 LLC.KAZ Minerals PLC, together with its subsidiaries, engages in mining and processing copper and other metals primarily in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. It operates through Bozshakol, Aktogay, East Region and Bozymchak, and Mining Projects segments. The company operates the Aktogay and Bozshakol open pit copper mines in the east region and Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan; three underground mines in the east region of Kazakhstan; and the Bozymchak copper-gold mine in Kyrgyzstan. It also develops greenfield metal deposits; operates Koksay deposit in Kazakhstan, and the Baimskaya licence area in the Chukotka region of Russia; and produces and sells various by-products, such as gold, silver, molybdenum, and zinc. In addition, the company supplies and distributes heat, water, and electricity; and offers construction, project management, financing, management, sales and logistics, and repairs and maintenance services. The company was formerly known as Kazakhmys PLC and changed its name to KAZ Minerals PLC in October 2014. KAZ Minerals PLC was founded in 1930 and is based in London, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreNabors Industries Ltd. engages in the provision of platform work over and drilling rigs. It operates through the following segments: U.S. Drilling, Canada Drilling, International Drilling, Drilling Solutions, and Rig Technologies. The U.S. Drilling segment includes land drilling activities in the lower 48 states and Alaska, as well as offshore operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The Canada segment consists of land-based drilling rigs in Canada. The International segment focuses in maintaining a footprint in the oil and gas market, most notably in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Kazakhstan, and Venezuela. The Drilling Solutions segment offers drilling technologies, such as patented steering systems and rig instrumentation software systems that enhance drilling performance and wellbore placement. The Rig Technologies segment comprises Canrig, which manufactures and sells top drives, catwalks, wrenches, drawworks, and drilling related equipment, such as robotic systems and downhole tools. The company was founded by Clair Nabors in 1952 and is headquartered in Hamilton, Bermuda.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of The Procter & Gamble: "Procter & Gamble Services" LLC, "Procter & Gamble" LLC, Agile Pursuits, Agile Pursuits Franchising, Arbora, Arbora & Ausonia, Arborinvest, Billie, Braun (Shanghai) Co., Braun GmbH, Braun-Gillette Immobilien GmbH & Co. KG, Celtic Insurance Company, Compania Procter & Gamble Mexico, Compania Quimica S.A., Corporativo Procter & Gamble, Cosmetic Products Pty. Ltd., Detergent Products B.V., Detergent Products SARL, Detergenti S.A., Eurocos Cosmetic GmbH, FPG Oleochemicals Sdn. Bhd., Fameccanica Data S.p.A., Fameccanica Industria e Comercio Do Brasil LTDA., Fameccanica Machinery (Shanghai) Co., Fater S.p.A., Fountain Square Music Publishing Co., Gillette (China) Ltd., Gillette (Shanghai) Ltd., Gillette Aesop Ltd., Gillette Australia Pty. Ltd., Gillette Canada Holdings, Gillette Commercial Operations North America, Gillette Diversified Operations Pvt. Ltd., Gillette Egypt S.A.E., Gillette Group UK Ltd, Gillette Gruppe Deutschland GmbH & Co. oHG, Gillette Holding Company LLC, Gillette Holding GmbH, Gillette India Limited, Gillette Industries Ltd., Gillette International B.V., Gillette Latin America Holding B.V., Gillette Management LLC, Gillette Nova Scotia Company, Gillette Pakistan Limited, Gillette Poland International Sp. z.o.o., Gillette Poland S.A., Gillette U.K. Limited, Gillette del Uruguay, Giorgio Beverly Hills Inc., Hyginett KFT, Industries Marocaines Modernes SA, LLC "Procter & Gamble Novomoskovsk", LLL "Procter & Gamble Distributorskaya Compania", Laboratorios Vicks, Liberty Street Music Publishing Company, Limited Liability Company 'Procter & Gamble Trading Ukraine', Limited Liability Company with foreign investments Procter & and Gamble Ukraine, MDVIP, MERCK KGAA NPV, Marcvenca Inversiones, Modern Industries Company - Dammam, Modern Products Company - Jeddah, New Chapter, New Chapter Canada Inc., Olay LLC, Oral-B Laboratories, P&G Distribution Morocco SAS, P&G Hair Care Holding, P&G Industrial Peru S.R.L., P&G Innovation Godo Kaisha, P&G Israel M.D.O. Ltd., P&G K.K., P&G Northeast Asia Pte. Ltd., P&G Prestige Godo Kaisha, P&G Prestige Service GmbH, P&G South African Trading (Pty.) Ltd., PGT Health Care (Zhejiang) Limited, PGT Healthcare LLP, PPI ZAO, PT Procter & Gamble Home Products Indonesia, PT Procter & Gamble Operations Indonesia, Phase II Holdings Corporation, Procter & Gamble (Chengdu) Ltd., Procter & Gamble (China) Ltd., Procter & Gamble (China) Sales Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble (East Africa) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Egypt) Manufacturing Company, Procter & Gamble (Enterprise Fund) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Guangzhou) Consumer Products Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Guangzhou) Enterprise Management Service Company Limited, Procter & Gamble (Guangzhou) Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Health & Beauty Care) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Jiangsu) Ltd. China, Procter & Gamble (L&CP) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Procter & Gamble (Manufacturing) Ireland Limited, Procter & Gamble (Shanghai) International Trade Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Acquisition GmbH, Procter & Gamble Administration GmbH, Procter & Gamble Algeria EURL, Procter & Gamble Amazon Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Amiens S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Argentina SRL, Procter & Gamble Asia Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Australia Proprietary Limited, Procter & Gamble Azerbaijan Services LLC, Procter & Gamble Bangladesh Private Ltd., Procter & Gamble Blois S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Brazil Holdings B.V., Procter & Gamble Bulgaria EOOD, Procter & Gamble Business Services Canada Company, Procter & Gamble Canada Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Chile , Procter & Gamble Chile Limitada, Procter & Gamble Colombia Ltda., Procter & Gamble Commercial LLC, Procter & Gamble Commercial de Cuba S.A., Procter & Gamble Czech Republic s.r.o., Procter & Gamble DS Polska Sp. z o.o., Procter & Gamble Danmark ApS, Procter & Gamble Detergent (Beijing) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Deuttschland GmbH, Procter & Gamble Distributing (Philippines) Inc., Procter & Gamble Distributing New Zealand Limited, Procter & Gamble Distribution Company (Europe) BVBA, Procter & Gamble Distribution S.R.L., Procter & Gamble Eastern Europe, Procter & Gamble Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Procter & Gamble Egypt, Procter & Gamble Egypt Distribution, Procter & Gamble Egypt Holding, Procter & Gamble Egypt Supplies, Procter & Gamble Energy Company LLC, Procter & Gamble Espana, Procter & Gamble Europe SA, Procter & Gamble Export Operations SARL, Procter & Gamble Exportadora e Importadora Ltda., Procter & Gamble Exports, Procter & Gamble Fabricacao e Comercio Ltda., Procter & Gamble Far East, Procter & Gamble Finance (U.K.) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Finance Holding Ltd., Procter & Gamble Finance Management S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Financial Investments LLP, Procter & Gamble Financial Services Ltd., Procter & Gamble Financial Services S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Finland OY, Procter & Gamble France S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Germany GmbH, Procter & Gamble Germany GmbH & Co. Operations oHG, Procter & Gamble GmbH, Procter & Gamble Grundstucks-und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH & Co. KG, Procter & Gamble Gulf FZE, Procter & Gamble Hair Care, Procter & Gamble Hellas Ltd., Procter & Gamble Holding (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Holding France S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Holding GmbH, Procter & Gamble Holding S.r.l., Procter & Gamble Holdings (UK) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Home Products Private Limited, Procter & Gamble Hong Kong Limited, Procter & Gamble Hungary Wholesale Trading Partnership (KKT), Procter & Gamble Hygiene & Health Care Limited, Procter & Gamble Inc., Procter & Gamble India Holdings, Procter & Gamble Indochina Limited Company, Procter & Gamble Industrial - 2012 C.A., Procter & Gamble Industrial Colombia Ltda., Procter & Gamble Industrial S.C.A., Procter & Gamble Industrial e Comercial Ltda., Procter & Gamble Interamericas de Costa Rica, Procter & Gamble Interamericas de Guatemala, Procter & Gamble Interamericas de Panama, Procter & Gamble International Operations Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble International Operations SA, Procter & Gamble International Operations SA-ROHQ, Procter & Gamble International S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Investment Company (UK) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Investment GmbH, Procter & Gamble Italia, Procter & Gamble Japan K.K., Procter & Gamble Kazakhstan Distribution LLP, Procter & Gamble Kazakhstan LLP, Procter & Gamble Korea, Procter & Gamble Korea S&D Co., Procter & Gamble Lanka Private Ltd. Sri Lanka, Procter & Gamble Leasing LLC, Procter & Gamble Levant S.A.L., Procter & Gamble Limited, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Belgium N.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Berlin GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Marketing Romania SRL, Procter & Gamble Marketing and Services doo, Procter & Gamble Maroc SA, Procter & Gamble Mataro, Procter & Gamble Mexico Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Mexico Inc., Procter & Gamble Middle East FZE, Procter & Gamble Nederland B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Investments B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Services B.V., Procter & Gamble Nigeria Limited, Procter & Gamble Nordic, Procter & Gamble Norge AS, Procter & Gamble Operations Polska Sp. z o.o., Procter & Gamble Overseas India B.V., Procter & Gamble Overseas Ltd., Procter & Gamble Pakistan (Private) Limited, Procter & Gamble Partnership LLP, Procter & Gamble Peru S.R.L., Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals France SAS, Procter & Gamble Philippines, Procter & Gamble Polska Sp. z o.o, Procter & Gamble Portugal - Produtos De Consumo, Procter & Gamble Product Supply (U.K.) Limited U.K., Procter & Gamble Production GmbH, Procter & Gamble Productions, Procter & Gamble Productos de Consumo, Procter & Gamble RHD, Procter & Gamble RSC Regional Service Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble Retail Services BVBA, Procter & Gamble S.r.l., Procter & Gamble SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Satis ve Dagitim Ltd. Sti., Procter & Gamble Seine S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Service GmbH, Procter & Gamble Services (Switzerland) SA, Procter & Gamble Services Company N.V., Procter & Gamble Services Ltd., Procter & Gamble Share Incentive Plan Trustee Ltd., Procter & Gamble South America Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Spol. s.r.o. (Ltd.), Procter & Gamble Sports and Social Club Ltd., Procter & Gamble Sverige AB, Procter & Gamble Switzerland SARL, Procter & Gamble Taiwan Limited, Procter & Gamble Taiwan Sales Company Limited, Procter & Gamble Technical Centres Limited, Procter & Gamble Technology (Beijing) Co., Procter & Gamble Trading (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Tuketim Mallari Sanayii A.S., Procter & Gamble UK, Procter & Gamble UK Group Holdings Ltd, Procter & Gamble UK Parent Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble Universal Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Verwaltungs GmbH, Procter & Gamble Vietnam, Procter & Gamble d.o.o. za trgovinu, Procter & Gamble de Venezuela S.C.A., Procter & Gamble de Venezuela S.R.L., Procter & Gamble do Brasil S/A, Procter & Gamble do Brazil, Procter & Gamble do Nordeste S/A, Procter & Gamble-Rakona s.r.o., Progam Realty & Development Corporation, Redmond Products, Richardson-Vicks Real Estate Inc., Richardson-Vicks do Brasil Quimica e Farmaceutica Ltda, Riverfront Music Publishing Co., Rosemount LLC, SPD Development Company Limited, SPD Swiss Precision Diagnostics GmbH, Scannon S.A.S., Series Acquisition B.V., Shulton, Surfac S.R.L., Sycamore Productions, TAOS - FL, TAOS Retail, Tambrands Inc., Temple Trees Impex & Investment Private Limited, The Art of Shaving - FL, The Dover Wipes Company, The Gillette Company, The Gillette Company LLC, The Gillette co., The Procter & Gamble Distributing LLC, The Procter & Gamble GBS Company, The Procter & Gamble Global Finance Company, The Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Company, The Procter & Gamble Paper Products Company, The Procter & Gamble U.S. Business Services Company, This is L., US CD LLC, Vidal Sassoon (Shanghai) Academy, Vidal Sassoon Co., WEBA Betriebsrenten-Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Walker & Company Brands, and iMFLUX Inc..The following companies are subsidiares of Quanta Services: (De) Lazy Q Ranch LLC, 1 Diamond LLC, 1Diamond AS, 618232 Alberta Ltd., 8246408 Canada Inc., Advanced Electric Systems, Advanced Electric Systems LLC, Advanced Utility Testing & Maintenance LLC, Alexander Publications LLC, Allteck GP Ltd., Allteck Limited Partnership, Apprenticeship Programs Inc., Arby Construction, Arcanum Chemicals LLC, Arnett & Burgess Oil Field Construction Limited, Arnett & Burgess Pipeliners (Rockies) LLC, Arnett & Burgess Pipeliners Ltd., B&N Clearing and Environmental LLC, Banister Pipelines Constructors Corp., Banister Pipelines Constructors GP Ltd., Banister Pipelines Limited Partnership, Brent Woodward Inc., Brink Constructors Inc., Brink Constructors Inc. A Corporation Of South Dakota, Brown Engineering and Testing, CAT SPEC Ltd., CAT-SPEC Limited Partnership, CAT-SPEC Limited Partnership (Regd Name) CAT SPEC Ltd., CAT-Spec Limited Partnership, Canadian Utility Construction Corp., Cat Spec Limited LP, Cat Spec Ltd, Cat Spec Ltd. L.P., Cat Spec Ltd. LP, Cat Spec. Ltd. LP, Cat-Spec Ltd (A Domestic limited Partnership), Cat-Spec Ltd LP, Cat-Spec Ltd., Cat-Spec Ltd. L.P., Cat-Spec Ltd. LP, Cat-Spec Ltd. Limited Partnership, Catalyst Changers Inc., Chatham Electric, Citadel Industrial Services L.P., Citadel Industrial Services Ltd., Citadel Industrial Services Ltd. L.P., Citadel Industrial Services Ltd. Limited Partnership, Coe Drilling Pty Ltd., Computapole, Conam Construction Co., Consolidated Power Projects Australia Pty Ltd, Conti Communications Inc., Crux Subsurface Canada Ltd., Crux Subsurface Inc., Cutting Technology - 1 Diamond LLC, DB Utilities Inc., DE Lazy Q Ranch LLC, DNR Pressure Welding Ltd., Dacon Corporation, Dashiell (DE) Corporation (Dashiell Corporation), Dashiell Corporation, Dashiell Corporation DBA Dashiell (DE) Corporation, De Mears Group, De Mears Group Inc., Delaware Quanta Technology LLC, Delaware Underground Construction Co., Didado Utility Company Inc., Digco Utility Construction L.P. Digco Utility Construction Limited Partnership, Dorado Specialty Services L.P., Dorado Specialty Services Ltd., Dorado Specialty Services Ltd. L.P., Dorado Specialty Services Ltd. Limited Partnership, Dorado Specialty Services. Ltd. L.P., Driftwood Electrical Contractors, EHV Power ULC, ELITE PIPING & CIVIL L.P., ELITE TURNAROUND SPECIALISTS LTD, Elite Fabrication Ltd. Elite Fabrication LP, Elite Piping & Civil Limited Partnership, Elite Piping & Civil Limited Partnership, Elite Piping & Civil Lp, Elite Piping & Civil Ltd L.P., Elite Piping & Civil Ltd., Elite Piping & Civil Ltd. L.P., Elite Piping & Civil Ltd. Limited Partnership, Elite Piping and Civil L.P., Elite Turnaround Specialists L.p., Elite Turnaround Specialists Limited Lp, Elite Turnaround Specialists Limited Partnership, Elite Turnaround Specialists Limited Partnership, Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd Lp, Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd., Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd. L.P., Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd. LP, Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd. Limited Partnership, Energy Consulting Group LLC, Enscope, Enscope Pty Ltd, FIC GP LLC, Field Personnel Services LLC, First Infrastructure Capital Advisors LLC, First Infrastructure Capital GP L.P., Five Points Construction Co., G-Tek, G-Vac, GEM Engineering Co., Grand Electric Inc., Great Lakes Line Builders, Grid Creative Inc., Grid Manufacturing Corporation, Grid Training Corporation, H.L. Chapman Pipeline Construction Inc., Haverfield Aviation, Haverfield Aviation Inc., Haverfield International Incorporated, Heritage Midstream LLC, IM Electric Inc., IUC ILLINOIS LLC, IUC Nebraska LLC, InfraSource Construction LLC, InfraSource Field Services LLC, InfraSource Services LLC, InfraSources Construction LLC, Infraestructura ETP de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V, Infrasource Engineering Company PC, Infrasource Iowa Underground LLC, Infrasource Of Pa LLC, Integracion Tecnologica del Peru SAC, Intermountain Electric Inc., Intermountain Electric Inc. A Corporation of Colorado, IonEarth LLC, Irby Construction Company, Irby Construction Company Inc., Iron Mountain M.J. Electric LLC, Island Mechanical Corporation, J.C.R. Construction Co. Inc., J.C.R. Utility Construction Co., J.W. Didado Electric Inc., J.W. Didado Electric LLC, J.w. Didado Electric, JBT Electric LLC, Kingston Contracting Inc., Lazy Q Ranch LLC, Lazy Q Training Center LLC The Lazy Q Lineman School, Legend Foundation Services, Lex Engineering Ltd., Lindsey Electric L.P., Logical Link, Longfellow Drilling, M. G. Dyess Inc., M. J. ELECTRIC LLC IRON MOUNTAIN, M. J. Electric LLC, M. J. Electric LLC - Iron Mountain, M. J. Electric LLC DBA M. J. Electric Iron Mountain LLC, M.J. Electric LLC DBA M.J. Electric Iron Mountain, M.J. Electric LLC Iron Mountain, MTS Field Services, MTS Field Services (Richmond Co), MTS Quanta LLC, Manuel Bros. Inc., Marathon Construction Services, Mears Canada Corp., Mears Equipment Services LLC, Mears Group Inc., Mears Group Pty Ltd, Mears Installation LLC, Mearsmex S. de R.L. de C.V., Mejia Personnel Services LLC, Mercer Technical Services, Microline Technology Corporation, Mid America Energy Services Inc., NACAP Niugini Ltd., NC Northstar Energy Services Inc, NGI Construction, NGI Construction Inc., NGI Construction Inc. (FN), NLC CA. Inc., NLC FL. Inc. Northwest Lineman Center, NLC ID. Inc. Northwest Lineman College, NLC TX. Inc., NPC Energy Services LLC, Nacap Australia, Nacap PNG Limited, Network Communication Services, North Houston Pole Line L.P., North Houston Pole Line Limited Partnership, North Sky Communications, NorthStar Energy Services Inc., Northern Powerline Constructors Inc., Northstar Energy Solutions LLC, Northwest Lineman Center, Northwest Lineman College, Northwest Lineman Training Center, Northwest Lineman Training Center Inc., Nova Constructors LLC, Nova Constructors LTD, Nova Equipment Leasing LLC, Nova Group Inc, Nova Group Inc (CA), Nova Group Inc., Nova Group Inc. DBA NGI Construction, Nova NextGen Solutions LLC, O. J. Pipelines Canada Corporation, O. J. Pipelines Canada Limited Partnership, O.J. Industrial Maintenance, O.J. Pipelines Canada, One Call Locators Canada Ltd., P.D.G. Electric, PAR Electrical Contractors Inc., PDG Electric Co., Par Internacional S. de R.L. de C.V., Performance Energy Services Guyana Ltd., Performance Energy Services L.L.C., Phasor Engineering Inc., Phoenix North Constructors Inc., Phoenix Power Group Inc., Potelco Inc., Potelco Incorporated, Power Delivery Program Inc., Price Gregory International Inc., Price Gregory Services LLC, Probst Construction Inc., Probst Electric Inc., QEPC, QEPC Power Solutions LLC, QES GP LLC, QP Energy Services LLC, QPS Engineering LLC, QPS Engineering LTD., QPS Engineering PLLC, QPS Environmental, QPS Flint Construction, QPS Flint Tank Services, QPS Global, QPS Global Services, QPS Global Services (Richmond Ci), QPS Professional Services, QPSE, QS Mats, QSI Engineering Inc., QSI Finance (Australia) Pty Ltd., QSI Finance (Cayman) Pvt. Ltd., QSI Finance Canada ULC, QSI Finance GP (US) LLC, QSI Finance I (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., QSI Finance I (US) LP, QSI Finance II (Australia) Pty Ltd., QSI Finance II (Lux) S.a r.l, QSI Finance II (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., QSI Finance III (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance III (Lux) SARL, QSI Finance IV (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance IX (Canada) Limited Partnership, QSI Finance V (US) L.P., QSI Finance VI (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance VII (Canada) Limited Partnership, QSI Finance VIII (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance X (Canada) ULC, QSI Inc., QSN Lux Holdings I SCSp, QSN Lux Holdings II SCSp, QSN Lux Holdings III SCSp, QSN Lux Holdings IV SCSp, QTSL LLC, QUANTA FOUNDATION SERVICES, Quanta APL GP II Ltd., Quanta Asset Management LLC, Quanta Associates L.P., Quanta Aviation Services LLC, Quanta Canada GP ULC, Quanta Canada Holdings III Limited Partnership, Quanta Canada Holdings LP, Quanta Canada III GP Ltd., Quanta Capital GP LLC, Quanta Capital LP L.P., Quanta Capital Solutions Inc., Quanta Cares, Quanta EPC Services, Quanta Electric Power Construction LLC, Quanta Electric Power Construction Management Inc., Quanta Electric Power Services LLC, Quanta Electric Power Services West LLC, Quanta Energized Innovations Ltd., Quanta Energized Services U.S. LLC, Quanta Energized Services of Canada Ltd., Quanta Energy Services LLC, Quanta Environmental Solutions, Quanta Equipment Company LLC, Quanta Government Solutions Inc., Quanta Holdings I (Netherlands) B.V., Quanta Holdings II (Netherlands) B.V., Quanta Infraestructura de Chile SpA, Quanta Infrastructure Services LLC, Quanta Infrastructure Services S. de R.L. de C.V., Quanta Inline Devices LLC, Quanta Inspection Services, Quanta Insurance Company Inc., Quanta International Holdings (US) LLC, Quanta International Holdings II Ltd., Quanta International Holdings Ltd., Quanta International Limited, Quanta Kingsvale LP Ltd., Quanta Lines Pty Ltd., Quanta Maine Services LLC, Quanta Middle East LLC, Quanta Pipeline Services Inc., Quanta Power Australia Pty Ltd, Quanta Power Generation Inc., Quanta Power Inc., Quanta Power Solutions India Private Limited, Quanta Resource Development, Quanta Services Africa (PTY) Ltd., Quanta Services Australia Pty Ltd., Quanta Services Chile SpA, Quanta Services Colombia S.A.S., Quanta Services Costa Rica Ltda., Quanta Services Guatemala Ltda., Quanta Services International Holdings II LP, Quanta Services International Holdings LP, Quanta Services Management Partnership L.P., Quanta Services Netherlands B.V., Quanta Services Panama S. de R.L., Quanta Services Peru S.A.C., Quanta Services Puerto Rico LLC, Quanta Services of Canada Ltd., Quanta Subsurface Canada Ltd., Quanta Subsurface LLC, Quanta Tank Services, Quanta Technology Canada ULC, Quanta Technology LLC, Quanta Technology UK Ltd., Quanta Tecnologia do Brasil Ltda., Quanta Telecom, Quanta Telecom Services, Quanta Telecommunication Services, Quanta Telecommunication Services LLC, Quanta Telecommunications Services LLC, Quanta Underground Services, Quanta Underground Services (Culpeper Co), Quanta Underground Services (Spotsylvania Co), Quanta Underground Services Inc., Quanta Utility Engineering Services Inc., Quanta Utility Installation Company Inc., Quanta Utility Operation LLC, Quanta West LLC, Quantecua Cia. Ltda., R. R. Cassidy Inc., RMS Holdings LLC, RMS Holdings LLC (Delaware), RMS Welding Systems, RMS Welding Systems LLC, Ranger Directional, Realtime Engineers Inc., Realtime Utility Engineers Inc., Redes Andinas de Comunicaciones S.R.L., Riggin & Diggin Line Construction, Rms Welding LLC, Rms Welding Systems LLC, Road Bore Corporation, Ryan Company Inc. The, Ryan Company Inc. of Massachusetts, Ryan Company Inc.(The), Seaward, Seaward Corp, Seaward Corporation, Service EC (DE) Inc., Service Electric Company (DE), Service Electric Company Inc., Service Electric Company of Delaware, Servicios Par Electric S. de R.L. de C.V., Servicios de Infraestructura del Peru S.A.C., Southwest Trenching Company Inc., Specialty Tank Services L.P., Specialty Tank Services LP, Specialty Tank Services Limited Partnership, Specialty Tank Services Limited Partnership, Specialty Tank Services Ltd., Specialty Tank Services Ltd. (LP), Specialty Tank Services Ltd. L.P., Specialty Tank Services Ltd. LP, Specialty Tank Services Ltd. LP, Specialty Tank Services Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold General LLC, Stronghold Holdings (BVI) Limited, Stronghold Inspection L.P., Stronghold Inspection Limited Partnership, Stronghold Inspection Limited Partnership, Stronghold Inspection Lp, Stronghold Inspection Ltd L.P., Stronghold Inspection Ltd., Stronghold Inspection Ltd. L.P., Stronghold Inspection Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold Limited Partnership, Stronghold Ltd., Stronghold Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold Management Holdings LP, Stronghold Specialty General LLC, Stronghold Specialty Ltd., Stronghold Specialty Ltd., Stronghold Specialty Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold Tower Group LP, Stronghold Tower Group Ltd LP, Stronghold Tower Group Ltd., Stronghold Tower Group Ltd. LP, Stronghold VI LLC, Subterra Damage Prevention Specialists Ltd., Summit Line Construction, Sumter Utilities Inc., T. G. Mercer Consulting Services Inc., TA Construction, TC Infrastructure Services Ltd., Taylor Built, Texas Specialty Tank Services Ltd. LP, The Aspen Utility Company LLC, The ComTran Group Inc., The Hallen Construction Co. Inc., The Massachusetts Ryan Company Inc., The Ryan Company Inc Of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company Inc., The Ryan Company Inc. (Massachusetts), The Ryan Company Inc. of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company Incorporated of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company Of Massachusetts Inc., The Ryan Company of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company of Massachusetts (FN), Tom Allen Construction Company Inc., Tom Allen Construction Company of Delaware, Trans Tech Electric, TurnKey Automation Limited Partnership, TurnKey Automation Limited Partnership, TurnKey Automation Ltd., TurnKey Automation Ltd. Limited Partnership, TurnKey Automation Ltd. Limited Partnership, TurnKey I&E Ltd., Turnkey Automation Ltd. L.P., Turnkey Automation Ltd. LP., UCC Underground Construction Co. Inc., Ucc - Underground Construction Co., Underground Construction Co. Inc., Underground Construction Co. Inc. (Delaware), Underground Electric Construction Company LLC, Utilco Inc., Utility Fleet Services, Utility Line Management Services Inc., Utility Testing & Maintenance LLC, Utility Training Services Corporation, VALARD Polska sp. Z o.o., Valard, Valard, Valard Construction (Ontario) Ltd., Valard Construction (Quebec) Inc., Valard Construction 2008 Ltd., Valard Construction Australia Pty Ltd, Valard Construction LLC, Valard Equipment (AB) Ltd., Valard Equipment GP Ltd., Valard Equipment Limited Partnership, Valard Geomatics (Ontario) Ltd., Valard Geomatics BC Ltd., Valard Geomatics Ltd., Valard Mechanical Ltd., Valard Norway AS, Valard Sweden AB, Valard Zagreb d. o. o., Wade D. Taylor Inc., West Coast Communications, Winco Helicopters, Winco Inc., Winco Inc. an Oregon Based Corporation, Winco Powerline Services, Winco Powerline Services Inc., Winco Powerline Services Inc., Winco Services Inc., World Fiber Inc., and mmit Line Construction Inc..The following companies are subsidiares of Quest Diagnostics: AmeriPath, AmeriPath Cincinnati Inc. (OH), AmeriPath Cleveland Inc. (OH), AmeriPath Consolidated Labs Inc. (FL), AmeriPath Florida LLC (DE), AmeriPath Hospital Services Florida LLC (DE), AmeriPath Inc. (DE), AmeriPath Indianapolis PC (IN), AmeriPath Kentucky Inc. (KY), AmeriPath Lubbock 5.01(A) Corporation (TX), AmeriPath New York LLC (DE), AmeriPath Texas Inc. (DE), AmeriPath Tucson Inc. (AZ), American Medical Laboratories, American Medical Laboratories Incorporated (DE), Associated Clinical Laboratories L.P. (PA), Associated Clinical Laboratories of Pennsylvania L.L.C. (PA), Athena Diagnostics, Athena Diagnostics Inc. (DE), Blueprint Genetics, Blueprint Genetics FZ-LLC (UAE), Blueprint Genetics Inc. (DE), Blueprint Genetics Oy (Finland), California Laboratory Associates, Cape Cod Healthcare - Business, Celera, ClearPoint Diagnostic, Clearpoint Diagnostic Laboratories LLC (TX), Cleveland HeartLab, Cleveland HeartLab Inc. (DE), Clinical Laboratory Partners, Colorado Pathology Consultants P.C. (CO), ConVerge Diagnostic Services, Consolidated DermPath Inc. (DE), DFW 5.01(a) Corporation (TX), DGXWMT JV LLC (DE), Dermatopathology of Wisconsin S.C. (WI), Diagnostic Laboratory of Oklahoma LLC (OK), Diagnostic Pathology Services Inc. (OK), Diagnostic Reference Services Inc. (MD), ExamOne Canada Inc. (New Brunswick), ExamOne LLC (DE), ExamOne World Wide Inc. (PA), ExamOne World Wide of NJ Inc. (NJ), Focus Diagnostics, HemoCue, Hoffman M.D. Associated Pathologists Chartered (NV), Institute for Dermatopathology Inc. (PA), Isabella Street Urban Renewal LLC (NJ), Kailash B. Sharma M.D. Inc. (GA), Kilpatrick Pathology P.A. (NC), LabOne, LabOne LLC (MO), LabOne of Ohio Inc. (DE), Laboratorio de Analisis Biomedicos S.A. (Mexico), Lancet Labs, MACL, Med Fusion LLC (TX), Med fusion, MedPlus, Mid America Clinical Laboratories LLC (IN), Nomad Massachusetts Inc. (MA), Nuclear Medicine and Pathology Associates (GA), Ocmulgee Medical Pathology Association Inc. (GA), Pathology Building Partnership (MD) (gen. ptnrshp.), PeaceHealth Laboratories, PhenoPath Laboratories, PhenoPath Laboratories PLLC (WA), Q Squared Solutions Holdings LLC (DE), Q Squared Solutions Holdings Limited (UK), Quest Diagnostics (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. (China), Quest Diagnostics Brasil Holdings Ltd. (UK), Quest Diagnostics Clinical Laboratories, Quest Diagnostics Clinical Laboratories Inc. (DE), Quest Diagnostics Domestic Holder LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics HTAS India Private Limited (India), Quest Diagnostics Health & Wellness LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Holdings Incorporated (DE), Quest Diagnostics Holdings Ltd. (UK), Quest Diagnostics Incorporated (MD), Quest Diagnostics Incorporated (NV), Quest Diagnostics India Private Limited (India), Quest Diagnostics Infectious Disease Inc. (DE), Quest Diagnostics International Holdings Limited (UK), Quest Diagnostics International LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Investments LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Ireland Limited (Ireland), Quest Diagnostics LLC (CT), Quest Diagnostics LLC (IL), Quest Diagnostics LLC (MA), Quest Diagnostics Massachusetts LLC (MA), Quest Diagnostics Mexico Holding Company Trust (Mexico), Quest Diagnostics Mexico S de RL de CV (Mexico), Quest Diagnostics Nichols Institute (CA), Quest Diagnostics Nichols Institute Inc. (VA), Quest Diagnostics Receivables Inc. (DE), Quest Diagnostics Subsidiary Holdings Ltd. (UK), Quest Diagnostics TB LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Terracotta LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics Venture LLC (PA), Quest Diagnostics Ventures LLC (DE), Quest Diagnostics do Brasil Ltda. (Brazil), Quest Diagnostics of Pennsylvania Inc. (DE), Quest Diagnostics of Puerto Rico Inc. (PR), Quest HealthConnect LLC (CA), ReproSource, Reprosource Fertility Diagnostics Inc. (MA), Solstas Lab Partners, Sonora Quest Laboratories LLC (AZ), Specialty Laboratories Inc. (CA), Summit Health, UMass Memorial Medical Center - Anatomic Pathology Outreach Laboratory Business, Unilab Corporation, and Unilab Corporation (DE).The following companies are subsidiares of Abbott Laboratories: 3A Nutrition (Vietnam) Company Limited, ABON Biopharm (Hangzhou) Co. Ltd., AGA Medical Belgium, AGA Medical Corporation, AGA Medical Holdings Inc., ALR Holdings, AML Medical LLC, APK Advanced Medical Technologies LLC, ATS Bermuda Holdings Limited, ATS Laboratories Inc., Abbott, Abbott (Jiaxing) Nutrition Co. Ltd., Abbott (UK) Finance Limited, Abbott (UK) Holdings Limited, Abbott AG, Abbott Asia Holdings Limited, Abbott Asia Investments Limited, Abbott Australasia Holdings Limited, Abbott Australasia Pty Ltd, Abbott B.V., Abbott Bahamas Overseas Businesses Corporation, Abbott Belgian Investments, Abbott Bermuda Holding Ltd., Abbott Biologicals B.V., Abbott Biologicals LLC, Abbott Bulgaria Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Capital India Limited, Abbott Cardiovascular Inc., Abbott Cardiovascular Systems Inc., Abbott Delaware LLC, Abbott Diabetes Care Inc., Abbott Diabetes Care Limited, Abbott Diabetes Care Sales Corporation, Abbott Diagnostics GmbH, Abbott Diagnostics International Ltd., Abbott Diagnostics Technologies AS, Abbott Doral Investments S.L., Abbott Equity Holdings Unlimited, Abbott Equity Investments LLC, Abbott Established Products Holdings (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Finance Company SA, Abbott Financial Holdings SRL, Abbott France S.A.S., Abbott Fund Tanzania Limited, Abbott Gesellschaft m.b.H., Abbott GmbH & Co. KG, Abbott Health Products LLC, Abbott Healthcare (Puerto Rico) Ltd., Abbott Healthcare B.V., Abbott Healthcare Costa Rica S.A., Abbott Healthcare LLC, Abbott Healthcare Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Healthcare Private Limited, Abbott Healthcare Products B.V., Abbott Healthcare Products Ltd, Abbott Holding (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding GmbH, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited Luxembourg S.C.S., Abbott Holdings B.V., Abbott Holdings LLC, Abbott Holdings Limited, Abbott Holdings Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Hungary Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Iberian Investments (2) Limited, Abbott Iberian Investments Limited, Abbott India Limited, Abbott Informatics Asia Pacific Limited, Abbott Informatics Canada Inc, Abbott Informatics Corporation, Abbott Informatics Europe Limited, Abbott Informatics France, Abbott Informatics Germany GmbH, Abbott Informatics Netherlands B.V., Abbott Informatics Singapore Pte. Limited, Abbott Informatics Spain S.A., Abbott Informatics Technologies Ltd, Abbott International Corporation, Abbott International Enterprises Ltd., Abbott International Holdings Limited, Abbott International LLC, Abbott International Luxembourg S.ar.l., Abbott Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Ireland, Abbott Ireland Financing Designated Activity Company, Abbott Ireland Limited, Abbott Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Kazakhstan Limited Liability Partnership, Abbott Knoll Investments B.V., Abbott Korea Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Bangladesh) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco (Dos) SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Laboratories (Mozambique) Limitada, Abbott Laboratories (Pakistan) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Philippines), Abbott Laboratories (Puerto Rico) Incorporated, Abbott Laboratories (Singapore) Private Limited, Abbott Laboratories A/S, Abbott Laboratories Argentina Sociedad Anonima, Abbott Laboratories B.V., Abbott Laboratories C.A., Abbott Laboratories Finance B.V., Abbott Laboratories GmbH, Abbott Laboratories Inc., Abbott Laboratories International LLC, Abbott Laboratories Ireland Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited, Abbott Laboratories Limited - Laboratoires Abbott Limitee, Abbott Laboratories NZ Limited, Abbott Laboratories Pacific Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Laboratories Products B.V., Abbott Laboratories Residential Development Fund Inc., Abbott Laboratories S.A., Abbott Laboratories SA, Abbott Laboratories Services Corp., Abbott Laboratories Slovakia s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories South Africa (Pty) Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Laboratories Trustee Company Limited, Abbott Laboratories Uruguay S.A., Abbott Laboratories Vascular Enterprises, Abbott Laboratories d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories de Chile Limitada, Abbott Laboratories de Colombia S.A., Abbott Laboratories de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Abbott Laboratories druzba za farmacijo in diagnostiko d.o.o., Abbott Laboratories s.r.o., Abbott Laboratories(Hellas) Societe Anonyme, Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios S.A., Abbott Laboratorios del Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Abbott Laboratuarlari Ithalat Ihracat ve Ticaret Ltd.Sti, Abbott Laboratorios Lda, Abbott Laboratorios do Brasil Ltda., Abbott Limited Egypt LLC, Abbott Logistics B.V., Abbott Management GmbH, Abbott Management LLC, Abbott Manufacturing Singapore Private Limited, Abbott Mature Products International Unlimited Company, Abbott Mature Products Management Limited, Abbott Medical (Hong Kong) Limited, Abbott Medical (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Abbott Medical (Portugal) Distribuicao de Produtos Medicos Lda, Abbott Medical (Schweiz) AG, Abbott Medical (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Abbott Medical (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Australia Pty. Ltd., Abbott Medical Austria Ges.m.b.H., Abbott Medical Balkan d.o.o. Beograd (Novi Beograd), Abbott Medical Belgium, Abbott Medical Canada Inc./ Medicale Abbott Canada Inc., Abbott Medical Danmark A/S, Abbott Medical Devices Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Espana S.A., Abbott Medical Estonia OU, Abbott Medical Finland Oy, Abbott Medical France SAS, Abbott Medical GmbH, Abbott Medical Hellas Limited Liability Trading Company, Abbott Medical Ireland Limited, Abbott Medical Italia S.p.A., Abbott Medical Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Medical Korea Limited, Abbott Medical Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Medical Laboratories LTD, Abbott Medical Nederland B.V., Abbott Medical New Zealand Limited, Abbott Medical Norway AS, Abbott Medical Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Medical Sweden AB, Abbott Medical Taiwan Co., Abbott Medical U.K. Limited, Abbott Medical spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Middle East S.A.R.L., Abbott Molecular Inc., Abbott Morocco SARL, Abbott Nederland C.V., Abbott Nederland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Netherlands Investments B.V., Abbott Norge AS, Abbott Nutrition Limited, Abbott Nutrition Manufacturing Inc., Abbott Operations Singapore Pte. Ltd., Abbott Operations Uruguay S.R.L., Abbott Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Overseas Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Overseas S.A., Abbott Oy, Abbott Point of Care Canada Limited, Abbott Point of Care Inc., Abbott Poland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Procurement LLC, Abbott Products (Philippines) Inc., Abbott Products (Spain) S.L., Abbott Products Algerie EURL, Abbott Products B.V., Abbott Products Distribution SAS, Abbott Products Egypt LLC, Abbott Products Limited, Abbott Products Limited Liability Company, Abbott Products Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Products Operations AG, Abbott Products Operations LLC, Abbott Products Romania S.R.L., Abbott Products Tunisie S.A.R.L., Abbott Products Unlimited Company, Abbott Resources Inc., Abbott Resources International Inc., Abbott S.r.l., Abbott Saudi Arabia Trading Company, Abbott Scandinavia Aktiebolag, Abbott Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, Abbott South Africa Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Strategic Opportunities Limited, Abbott Trading Company Inc., Abbott Universal LLC, Abbott Vascular Devices (2) Limited, Abbott Vascular Devices Limited, Abbott Vascular Inc., Abbott Vascular Instruments Deutschland GmbH, Abbott Vascular International, Abbott Vascular Japan Co. Ltd, Abbott Vascular Limitada, Abbott Vascular Netherlands B.V., Abbott Vascular Solutions Inc., Abbott Ventures Inc., Abbott West Indies Limited, Abbott drustvo sa ogranicenom odgovornoscu za trgovinu i usluge, Advanced Neuromodulation Systems Inc., Alere, Alere (Shanghai) Diagnostics Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Healthcare Management Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Medical Sales Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Technology Co. Ltd., Alere A/S, Alere AB, Alere AS, Alere AS Holdings Limited, Alere BBI Holdings Limited, Alere Bangladesh Limited, Alere China Co. Ltd., Alere Colombia S.A., Alere Connect LLC, Alere Connected Health Limited, Alere Connected Health Ltd., Alere Diagnostics GmbH, Alere DoA Holding GmbH, Alere GmbH, Alere GmbH (Austria), Alere GmbH (Germany), Alere HK Holdings Ltd., Alere Health B.V., Alere Health BVBA, Alere Health Corp., Alere Health Sdn Bhd, Alere Health Services B.V., Alere Healthcare (Pty) Limited, Alere Healthcare Connections Limited, Alere Healthcare Inc., Alere Healthcare Nigeria Limited, Alere Healthcare S.L., Alere Holdco Inc., Alere Holding GmbH, Alere Holdings Bermuda Limited, Alere Holdings Pty Limited, Alere Home Monitoring Inc., Alere Inc., Alere Informatics Inc., Alere International Holding Corp., Alere International Limited, Alere Lda, Alere Limited, Alere Limited (New Zealand), Alere Medical BVBA, Alere Medical Co. Ltd., Alere Medical Pakistan (Private) Limited, Alere Medical Private Limited, Alere North America LLC, Alere Oy Ab, Alere Philippines Inc., Alere Phoenix ACQ Inc., Alere Pte Ltd, Alere S.A., Alere S.r.l., Alere S/A, Alere SAS, Alere San Diego Inc., Alere Scarborough Inc., Alere Spain S.L., Alere Switzerland GmbH, Alere Technologies GmbH, Alere Technologies Holdings Limited, Alere Technologies Limited, Alere Toxicology AB, Alere Toxicology Inc., Alere Toxicology S.r.l., Alere Toxicology Services Inc., Alere Toxicology plc, Alere UK Holdings Limited, Alere UK Subco Limited, Alere ULC, Alere US Holdings LLC, Alere s.r.o., Alisoc Investment & Co, Amedica Biotech Inc., Ameditech Inc., American Generics S.A.S., American Medical Supplies Inc., American Pharmacist Inc., Antares S.A., Apica Cardiovascular Limited, Aquagestion Capacitacion S.A., Aquagestion S.A., Arriva Medical LLC, Arriva Medical Philippines Inc., Arvis Investments Limited, Atlas Farmaceutica S.A., Avee Laboratories Inc., Axis-Shield AD III AS, Axis-Shield AD IV AS, Axis-Shield AS, Axis-Shield Diagnostics Limited, Axis-Shield Ltd., BBI Animal Health Limited, BBI Diagnostics Group 2 Public Limited Company, Banco de Vida S.A., Bioabsorbable Vascular Solutions Inc., Bioalgae S.A., Biohealth LLC, Biosite Incorporated, Bosque Bonito S.A., Branan Medical Corporation, Brandex Europe C.V., British Colloids Limited, CFR Chile S.A., CFR Interamericas EL Salvador Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, CFR Interamericas Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, CFR Interamericas Panama S.A., CFR Pharmaceuticals, California Property Holdings III LLC, CardioMEMS LLC, Caripharm Inc., Cephea Valve Technologies, Cephea Valve Technologies Inc., Colibri Medical Aktiebolag, Comercializadora y Distribuidora CFR Interamericas Honduras S.A., Concateno South Limited, Concateno UK Limited, Consorcio Tecnologico en Biomedicina Clinico-Molecular S.A., Continuum Services LLC, Cozart Limited, Dextech S.A., Diagnostik Nord GmbH, Distribuciones Uquifa S.A.S., Domesco Medical Import-Export Joint-Stock Corporation, Duphar International Research B.V., Endocardial Solutions, Epocal (US) Inc, Esprit de Vie S.A., European Chemicals & Co, European Drug Testing Service EDTS AB, European Services S.A., Evalve Inc., Evalve International Inc., FARMINDUSTRIA S.A., Fada Pharma Paraguay Sociedad Anonima, Fadapharma del Ecuador S.A., Farmaceutica Mont Blanc S.L., Farmacologia Em Aquicultura Veterinaria Ltda., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV Ecuador S.A., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV S.A., Fernwood Investment S.A., First Check Diagnostics LLC, Focus Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Forensics Limited, Forestcreek Overseas S.A., Fournier Pharma Corp., Fournier Pharma GmbH, Fournier Pharmaceuticals Limited, Framed B.V., Gabmed GmbH, Garden Hills LLC, Global Analytical Development LLC, Globapharm & CO LP, Glomed Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Golnorth Investments S.A., Gynocare Limited, Gynopharm Sociedad Anonima, Gynopharm de Centroamerica S.A., Gynopharm de Venezuela C.A., Hi-Tronics Designs Inc., IDEV Technologies Inc., IG Innovations Limited, IMTC Finance B.V., IMTC Holdings B.V., IMTC Technologies Inc., Ibis Biosciences LLC, Igloo Zone Chile S.A., Igloo Zone S.L., Inmobiliaria Naknek S.A.C., Innovacon Inc., Instant Tech Subsidiary Acquisition Inc., Instant Technologies Inc., Instituto de Criopreservacion de Chile S.A., Integrated Vascular Systems Inc., Inverness Canadian Acquisition Corporation, Inverness Medical (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Australia Pty Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Hong Kong Limited, Inverness Medical Innovations SK LLC, Inverness Medical Investments LLC, Inverness Medical LLC, Inverness Medical Shimla Private Limited, Inversiones K2 SpA, Inversiones Komodo S.R.L., Ionian Technologies LLC, Irvine Biomedical Inc., Kalila Medical, Kangshenyunga S.A., Knoll UK Investments Unlimited, LLC VeroInPharm, Laboratoires Fournier S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano Lafrancol S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano del Ecuador S.A., Laboratorio Internacional Argentino S.A., Laboratorio Synthesis S.A.S., Laboratorios Lafi Limitada, Laboratorios Naturmedik S.A.S., Laboratorios Pauly Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Laboratorios Recalcine S.A., Laboratorios Transpharm S.A., Laboratory Specialists of America Inc., Lafrancol Dominicana S.A.S., Lafrancol Guatemala S.A. Sociedad Anonima, Lafrancol Internacional S.A.S, Lafrancol Peru S.R.L, Lake Forest Investments LLC, Lightlab Imaging Inc., Limited Liability Company Abbott Laboratories, Limited Liability Company Abbott Ukraine, Limited Liability Company VEROPHARM, Lung Fung Hong (China) Limited, Mansbridge Pharmaceuticals Limited, MediGuide LLC, MediGuide Ltd., Medscreen Holdings Limited, Metropolitana Farmaceutica S.A., Midwest Properties LLC, Murex Argentina S.A., Murex Biotech Limited, Murex Biotech South Africa, Murex Diagnostics Inc., Murex Diagnostics International Inc., Natural Supplement Association LLC, Negocios Denia Sociedad Anonima, Neosalud S.A.C., Nether Pharma N.P. C.V., NeuroTherm LLC, Normann Pharma-Handels GmbH, North Shore Properties Inc., Novamedi S.A., Novasalud.com S.A., Nutravida S.A., OJSC Voronezhkhimpharm, Omnilab Iberia Sociedad Limitada, OptiMedica, Orgenics France SAS, Orgenics International Holdings B.V., Orgenics Ltd., PBM-Selfcare LLC, PDD II LLC, PDD LLC, PT Alere Health, PT. Abbott Indonesia, PT. Abbott Products Indonesia, Pacesetter Inc., Pantech (RF) (PTY) LTD, Pembrooke Occupational Health Inc., Penagos S.A., Pharma International Sociedad Anonima, Pharmaceutical Technologies (Pharmatech) S.A., Pharmatech Boliviana S.A., Polygon Labs S.A., Quality Assured Services Inc., RF Medical Holdings LLC, RTL Holdings Inc., Ramses Business Corp., Recben Xenerics Farmaceutica Limitada, Redwood Toxicology Laboratory Inc., Rich Horizons International Limited, SC VEROPHARM, SJ Medical Mexico S de R.L. de C.V., SJM International Inc., SJM Thunder Holding Company, SPDH Inc., Saboya Enterprises Corporation, Salviac Limited, Scanax AS, Sealing Solutions Inc., Selfcare Technology Inc., Shandong Abbott Dairy Product Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Medical Devices Science and Technology Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Shanghai Si Fa Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Sinensix & Co., Spinal Modulation LLC, St. Jude Medical, St. Jude Medical AB, St. Jude Medical ATG Inc., St. Jude Medical Argentina S.A., St. Jude Medical Asia Pacific Holdings GK, St. Jude Medical Atrial Fibrillation Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Brasil Ltda., St. Jude Medical Business Services Inc., St. Jude Medical Cardiology Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Colombia Ltda., St. Jude Medical Coordination Center, St. Jude Medical Costa Rica Limitada, St. Jude Medical Europe Inc., St. Jude Medical Export Ges.m.b.H., St. Jude Medical GVA Sarl, St. Jude Medical Holdings B.V., St. Jude Medical India Private Limited, St. Jude Medical International Holding, St. Jude Medical LLC, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings II, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings NT, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings SMI S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings TC S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Mexico Business Services S. de R.L. de C.V., St. Jude Medical Middle East DMCC, St. Jude Medical Operations (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., St. Jude Medical Puerto Rico LLC, St. Jude Medical S.C. Inc., St. Jude Medical Systems AB, St. Jude Medical Turkey Medikal Urunler Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Standard Diagnostics Inc., Standing Stone LLC, Swan-Myers Incorporated, TC1 LLC, Tendyne Holdings Inc., Tendyne Medical Inc., Thoratec Delaware LLC, Thoratec Europe Limited, Thoratec LLC, Thoratec Switzerland GmbH, Tobal Products Incorporated, Topera GmbH in Liquidation, Topera Inc., Tremora S.A., Tuenir S.A., TwistDx, UAB Abbott Laboratories, UAB Abbott Medical Lithuania, Union-Madison Realty Company Inc., Unipath Limited (dba Alere International/aka Cranfield), Unipath Management Limited, Unipath Pension Trustee Limited, Veropharm, Veropharm Limited Liability Partnership, Vida Cell Inversiones S.A., Vida Cell S.A., Vivalsol, W&R Pharma Handels GmbH, Western Pharmaceuticals S.A., X Technologies Inc., Yissum Holding Limited, ZonePerfect Nutrition Company, eScreen Canada ULC, eScreen Inc.,      ( ), and Abbott Laboratories Baltics.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..Valvoline, Inc. is engaged in producing, marketing and supplying of engine & automotive maintenance products and services. The company operates through three segments: Quick Lubes, Core North America and International. The Quick Lubes segment provides services to passenger car and light truck quick lube market through company-owned and independent franchised retail quick lube service center stores and independent express care stores that service vehicles with valvoline products. The Core North America segment sells engine and automotive maintenance products in the United States and Canada to retailers, installers, and heavy-duty customers to service vehicles and equipment. The International segment sells engine and automotive products in more than 140 countries outside of the United States and Canada for the maintenance of consumer and commercial vehicles and equipment. Its products include motor oil, gear oil, pro-v racing and antifreeze and radiator. Valvoline was founded in 1866 and is headquartered in Lexington, KY.

Read MoreVedanta Resources plc operates as a diversified natural resources company in India, Zambia, South Africa, Namibia, the United Arab Emirates, Ireland, Australia, and Liberia. It primarily produces zinc, lead, silver, copper, iron ore, and aluminum deposits. The company also explores for, extracts, and processes minerals, as well as oil and gas. In addition, it operates as a power producer with an installed capacity of 8.4 gigawatts of thermal based power generation and 274 megawatts of wind power generation. Further, the company engages in the port operations business in India; mining, smelting, and refining copper, aluminum, zinc, and iron ore; and gold and silver processing activity. Additionally, it provides accommodation and catering services; and leases medical equipment, as well as offers related building and conducting services. The company was founded in 1976 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom. Vedanta Resources plc is a subsidiary of Volcan Investments Limited.

Read MoreTurning the ship before it hits the icebergAmazon workers at San Fernando warehouse in Spains capital, Madrid, are calling for renewed strike action and protests against the companys attack on wages and conditions.

The call emerges just weeks after roughly 98 percent of the plants 2,000 workers went on a 48-hour strike in late March.

Amazon was unmoved by the unprecedented display of solidarity and militancy amongst the San Fernando workers and imposed a new agreement on April 1 in which workers are set to lose 2,000 to 4,500 annually and see their wages frozen indefinitely.

Rosa Garcia, representative on the works council for the Socialist Party (PSOE)-aligned General Workers Union (UGT), complained about the companys action: It was the harshest response they could have opted for, and they did it at night, warning at the last minute, when it came into effect on Sunday, they have completely gone from sitting with us and negotiatingall the points we rejected have been implemented.

Amazon took revenge on the 900 temporary workers in the warehouse. According to the union CSIT, 80 percent of temporary contracts that ended after the strike days have not been renewed.

The company has also imposed massive productivity hikes under maximum supervision to compensate for the hours lost during the strike. Workers told El Espanol, If productivity was an obsession before, it has now become an obligation. They are really tightening the screws.

It is critical for workers to understand and consciously assimilate the lessons of the strike, including the role of the trade unions, which sought to prevent it from developing into a broader political mobilisation of the entire working classand then to cover for their betrayal by trumpeting the return to work as a victory.

The Stalinist-led CCOO said the strike had been a complete success. The UGTs Garcia declared, We are very, very happy. The anarcho-syndicalist CGT proclaimed it a complete victory.

A key auxiliary role was played by the pseudo-left groups such as Revolutionary Left (Izquierda Revolucionaria), Class Struggle (Lucha de Clases) and the Morenoite Workers Revolutionary Current (Corriente Revolucionaria de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras), which posted articles uncritically defending the unions strike calls. They glorified the workers militancy as if this were enough to stop the multibillion-dollar global corporation, which is notorious for the super-exploitation of its workforce.

From the start, the unions, with the full support of the pseudo-left groups, ensured the strike remained isolated. Amazon could then minimise the impact by diverting orders to logistics centres in Barcelona and France. This did not come as a surprise. Even before the strike, Marc Blanes, leader of the CGT union in the warehouse told eldiario.es, Amazon has an almost strike-breaking logistic network, with 46 centres in Europe.

During 17 months of negotiations with the company since the collective agreement expired, the unions did not even try to coordinate actions with Amazon strikes in Europe. Instead, when strikes erupted at distribution centres in Germany, France and Italy on last years Black Friday, the Spanish unions not only refused to call out their members but also played the role of strikebreakers.

Now, these same political forces are conspiring against mounting anger of workers and renewed calls for strike action in the aftermath of Amazons attack on conditions and wages. The unions have organised a series of protests to let off steamin front of the warehouse and near the headquarters of ETT Adecco and Manpower, two temporary work agencies, for being accomplices of misinformation and co-responsible for the non-renewal of several colleagues.

On April 20, they have called for another strike in front of Amazons new corporate office in Madrid.

The CGT is considering the possibility of striking on Amazons July 12 Prime Day of exclusive offersa one-day strike in three months, another manoeuvre which is not aimed at uniting workers to fight the company, but to release tension and facilitate the implementation of the corporations policies. Even this fraudulent move is only under discussion, with a CGT spokesman telling RTVE, People want to go on strike today.

The CCOOs representative at the warehouse, Douglas Harper, suggested an indefinite strike if no progress occurs, only to add in the next breath that this type of strike is the last resort.

El Confidencial revealed that other unnamed unions had already rejected an indefinite strike, claiming, Here salaries are very tight, we are not a group that receives a salary that allows us to stop indefinitely.  Of course, the possibility of new strikes is very much alive: the more repression there is, the more the environment will heat up.

Such comments in the aftermath of such a defeat expose the unions as key accomplices of Amazon in the companys global strategy to cut costs through sweatshop conditions involving speed-ups, total surveillance, back-breaking quotas, and minimal toilet and meal breaks.

The unions have no interest in calling for an indefinite strike and appealing to Amazon workers in Spain and Europe precisely because they fear such a confrontation will win broad popular support. They are aware that such actions are explosive and threaten their corporatist partnerships with capitalist enterprises and their own comfortable lifestyles.

The betrayal at Amazon takes place in the context of an upward trend of workers struggles across Europe, which finds expression in Spain in the action taken by subway workers in Malaga, by tramworkers in Madrid and Zaragoza, and in the dairy sector and among teachers.

According to the latest data by the Ministry of Employment and Social Security, the number of strikes is increasing. In 2017, the number of days lost was double that of 2016 and involved 729 work stoppages with 225,687 strikers. In January and February 2018, the hours lost by strikes increased by another 48 percent compared to 2017.

Another significant development is the number of days lost that are defined as not strictly labour-related. In 2017, these made up 2,530,081 days, most of which were in Catalonia on October 3 and November 8 and involved protests against the Spanish governments repression of the Catalan separatists.

This year has already seen major strikes by metal and auto workers in Germany, Turkey, and eastern Europe; railway workers in Britain; and broad layers of teachers in Britain and the United States. In France, a massive confrontation is taking place between the working class and the governments decree privatising the French national railways (SNCF).

Amazon workers must unite against corporate exploitation by constructing committees in their workplaces to defend their rights. These committees must link with workers at other warehouses in the Europe and internationally in a common struggle against Amazon. To learn more, sign up for the International Amazon Workers Voice newsletter and like us on Facebook.Fifteen days after the Ecuadoran Embassy in London cut WikiLeaks founder Julian Assanges Internet access, details of the real motives behind President Lenin Morenos antidemocratic decision are beginning to emerge. Moreno and his Alianza PAIS partyrepresentatives of Latin Americas wave of left bourgeois governments known as the pink tideare proving to US imperialism that they are willing to trade Assanges freedom in exchange for closer ties to Wall Street and the US military.

On April 5, Bloomberg quoted Aristodimis Iliopoulos of the imperialist think tank Economist Intelligence Unit: The back story is that Ecuador wants to grow again by getting back into the good graces of international investors in oil and mining projects. So the wager might be that clamping down on Assange is seen as a sign of good will.

This exposes Ecuadors justification for cutting Assanges Internet accessthat he broke an agreement not to interfere with Ecuadoran politicsas a flat-out lie. It is bound up with the countrys efforts to please the Trump administration and Wall Street, which owns a growing portion of Ecuadors economy and extracts massive interest payments each month. Wall Street is using its clout to impose the American political establishments demands to silence Assange or turn him over to US authorities.

On April 3, less than a week after cutting Assanges Internet, Moreno announced a sweeping austerity plan to slash social spending and facilitate payments to the countrys Wall Street creditors. Citing the deal approvingly, the ratings agency Fitch cited a 42 percent rise in interest expense and a sharply rising debt burden that reached 46 percent of GDP in 2017, up from 29.6 percent in 2014.

On April 4, Spains El Pais wrote that Moreno wants to implement austerity in his new economic program which the Moreno government reached through an agreement with analysts and the private sector.

Fitch noted that if implemented well, Morenos austerity plan means there is potential for the reforms to result in fiscal adjustment over the long term, i.e., more favorable conditions for American and European corporations to exploit the countrys resources and cheap labor.

On March 26, eight days before announcing the austerity plan and two days before cutting Assanges Internet, the Moreno government met with two leading representatives of US Southern Command, the section of the Pentagon responsible for the militarys activity in Latin America. Before the meeting, the US Embassy stated Lt. Gen. Joseph DiSalvo and Ambassador Liliana Ayalde met with defense authorities and civil authorities to reiterate Southern Commands commitment to boost and strengthen the friendship between the two countries.

After the meeting, Southern Commands official twitter account read, In a meeting w/ [the Ecuadoran Armed Forces] Lt. Gen. Joseph DiSalvo & Civilian Deputy to the Commander, Ambassador Liliana Ayalde, expressed gratitude for Ecuadors work w/ intl partners to support stability and peace in the hemisphere. In the weeks before Ecuadors meeting with the US military, Moreno has publicly humiliated himself in his efforts to secure credit lines and military support from Wall Street and the Trump administration.

In an interview with Le Monde Diplomatique conducted March 1 and published in the papers April edition, Moreno shrugged off criticisms of the Trump administrations ruthless attack on immigrants and said, We are not against American citizens, nor American businesses, nor the American government which, even though we may not think the same, we must respect because the American people elected it.

In the same interview, Moreno expressed his hostility to Assange, stating, We did not create the Assange issue, we inherited it from Morenos predecessor Rafael Correa. Moreno then attacked Assange for making statements critical of Ecuadors far-right wing opposition parties: I am not in agreement with what Mr. Assange is doing. We have continued to insist that he not intervene in international politics, nor Ecuadoran politics, including about the opposition I told him no, dont mess with that, he doesnt have the right, that his condition does not permit that.

The Ecuadoran government cut Assanges Internet in the aftermath of a March 26 tweet in which Assange criticized Germanys decision to arrest Catalan ex-President Carlos Puigdemont. Ecuador claimed Assanges tweets threatened the good relations that the country maintains with the United Kingdom, with the rest of the European Union and with other nations. But the interview with Le Monde Diplomatique took place three weeks before Assange tweeted against Puigdemonts arrest, proving that the Ecuadoran government has been looking for a pretext to cut Assange off or to kick him out the Embassy altogether and into the hands of US authorities.

Under the Trump administration, the United States has warmed to Ecuador as part of its effort to diminish the influence of China in the region. In January, the Ecuadoran government allowed the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate a bombing in the city of San Lorenzo in a move that Moreno called the help of a brother country.

US Army War College Professor R. Evan Ellis wrote in 2017 that the US must work with the pink tide governments. The pink tide is not inherently a phenomenon that the US can or should try to defeat. The most viable strategy for the U.S., and in the long term, the best one for the region, is to guard against subversive projects by an anti-U.S., anti-democratic subset of the left, while working to ensure that all regimes, regardless of their ideology, succeed through good governance and strong democratic institutions

In other words, American imperialism recognizes the pro-capitalist, anti-working class character of the Latin American governments that comprise the pink tide and views them as a bulwark against the development of genuinely anti-imperialist movements of the working class.

Twenty years after the 1998 election of Venezuelan ex-President Hugo Chavez inaugurated the pink tide period, Morenos decision to cut Assanges Internet proves that the building of a socialist movement in Latin America requires an appraisal of the right-wing, pro-capitalist character of the pink tide period. All the groups that constitute the international pseudo-left have lent support to these bourgeois governments and now bear responsibility for the urgent danger confronting Assange.The powerful strike by Oklahoma teachers, now in its ninth day, is in danger of being betrayed and shut down by the unions before teachers win their demands for a $10,000 pay increase and the restoration of school funding cuts over the last decade.

Rank-and-file teachers denounced the Oklahoma Education Association (OEA) for collaborating with school officials and the media to encourage a back-to-work movement to end the strike. OEA circulated fliers today saying we are at 95 percent of our demands, which is not true, Ashley, a teacher from Norman, Oklahoma told the World Socialist Web Site Teacher Newsletter. They are ready for it to end, the teachers are not, she said.

From the beginning, the OEA and the smaller Oklahoma City American Federation of Teachers (AFT) opposed the strike, which only occurred because tens of thousands of rank-and-file teachers pushed for it on social media after the nine-day strike by West Virginia teachers. In a last-minute effort to prevent the walkout, the unions hailed as historic an insulting pay and funding bill, passed by Democrats and Republicans, which would have left the state still near the bottom in the US in terms of teacher pay and school funding.

While thousands of teachers, students and their supporters from all over the state have repeatedly turned up at the capitol in Oklahoma City, the unions have sought to wear them down by encouraging false hopes that they could obtain increased funding by appealing to the governor and state legislature. Predictably, Republican Governor Mary Fallin and the state legislators have refused to do so.

After Fallin repealed a motel/hotel tax Tuesday and said she would not even entertain overturning a reduction in capital gains taxes, OEA President Alicia Priest dropped those demands as the prerequisite to end the strike, and said that the only way to improve education was to vote for the Democrats in November.

Then on Tuesday OEA functionaries circulated a leaflet to protesters at the state capitol announcing that virtually all of its demands had been met. The Tulsa World reported that six teachers from Oklahoma Citys Cesar Chavez Elementary School confronted OEA Vice President Katherine Bishop at the union table inside the Capitol rotunda. Were at a standstill with these two chambers, Bishop told the group. Were about $25 million off, so were so close.

Third-grade teacher Molly Jaymes told her, Thats where I think theres a disconnect with OEA. It feels almost celebratory and our standard is so much higher.

On the Facebook page Oklahoma Teacher Walkout-The Time is Now! educators overwhelmingly said they would continue the walkout even if the OEA called it off. They urged teachers to organize sickouts in districts that planned to reopen schools. This is about teachers fighting for funding for students and the funding has not been met, one teacher wrote. Why is the OEA acting half a$$ on its promises of what to fight for and releasing this crazy info?

While the largest districtsOklahoma City, Tulsa, Norman and Broken Arrowannounced they would remain closed today, other districts are reopening, seeking to put pressure on teachers to return. In Tulsa, where teachers completed a 110-mile march to the state capitol and a survey showed 80 percent of its members wanted to continue the strike, the head of the Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association could not call off the strike but said, I believe it is time to focus on November.

The strikebreaking role of the teacher unions underscores the need for Oklahoma educators to break completely with the OEA and AFT and reject its political subordination of teachers to the Democratic Party, which is just as much a corporate-controlled enemy of public education as the Republicans.

Rank-and-file committees should be elected at every school and in every community to take this struggle forward. These committees should fight for the mobilization of every section of workers in Oklahomapublic employees, energy industry workers, health care and other workersand link up with teachers in Arizona, Kentucky, and other states to prepare a general strike to defend the right to public education.

Educators from throughout Kentucky are preparing to converge on the capitol building in Frankfort on Friday to oppose Governor Matt Bevins attack on teacher pensions, which was smuggled into a sewer bill passed last week and signed by the governor. Many teachers are calling for a wildcat strike Friday and for doubling the numbers that participated in the last demonstration at the capitol on April 2, estimated at 5,000.

The bill, passed by the state senate in the middle of the night, just before their 10-day spring recess, includes the destruction of defined-benefit pensions for any future teachers in Kentucky, tying them to a 401(k)-type hybrid plan subject to the gyrations of Wall Street. Most significantly, it removes the inviolability of teachers pensions, which has been embedded in Kentucky statutes since 1993. Removing this clause allows the pensions to be changed, or even rescinded, at any time. Teachers in Kentucky are not eligible for Social Security.

The Kentucky Education Association has repeatedly opposed any strike action and has warned teachers that a walkout is illegal. The KEA acknowledged that its members are eager to attend the rally but has not endorsed anything other than urging those who can legally participate to do so. The KEA is not organizing transportation or logistics, leaving teachers to fend for themselves.

One teacher posted, Remember, Bevin believes cuts to public education do not go far enough and supports privatizing education. He supports establishing private schools where teachers earn lower salaries, reduced benefits, and firing teachers at will. Remember, he supports eliminating tenure in our universities... ask yourself how long will it be until that idea comes to the K-12 level?

Thousands of Arizona teachers and parents took part in protests before the start of the school day Wednesday at more than 1,000 schools across the state. Teachers are demanding a 20 percent pay raise and oppose the budget-cutting attacks of Governor Doug Ducey, who has insisted he will not give them anything more than a one percent pay hike.

A poll on the Facebook page, Arizona Educators United, found that more than 17,000 teachers are in favor of a statewide strike, and many are pressing, despite the opposition of the Arizona Education Association, to set a date for the walkout.

Teachers from Kentucky and Arizona have been vocally supportive of us, Ashley, the teacher from Norman, told the WSWS. This is the time to join together. We have a secretary of education [Betsy DeVos] who is trying to dismantle public education. We have 85 percent support in my state for this walkout; the momentum is there. Those in public education know what is at stake with privatizationschools that can discriminate against special needs children or those who cannot pay.

At the national level, our president has shown that social welfare is at the bottom of his list of concerns. To make us forget the struggles in our own backyard, he wants us to be constantly united against othersimmigrants, Muslims, the Middle East as a whole. There is terrible inequality in the country.

After being forced to report on the wave of teacher strikes and protests, the national news media has remained silent for days on the Oklahoma strike, well aware of the dangers to the corporate and financial elite of this movement, which has emerged outside of the control of the unions. At the same time, the growth of the class struggle in the US and internationally is not a small factor in the drive for war against Syria and Russia.

Asked about the drive to war, a teacher from Phoenix, Arizona said, From the perspective of a teacher, a parent and mother, the concept of war is frightening. I teach world history, and I ask the kids if they see any similarities in aspects of American society with Nazi Germany. The population can be manipulated to back wars. They set up external conflicts to decrease or suppress internal conflicts, like the teachers strikes, she said.On Wednesday, President Donald Trump threatened a major new escalation of the seven-year-old US war for regime change in Syria, declaring in a tweet, Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!

Trumps threat expresses the criminality of the US-led campaign against Syria. The president of the United States is about to launch an unprovoked war of aggression. The US and European governments lie without restraint to justify their predatory war aims and the most incredible statements go unchallenged by the press.

The claims by the United States that its planned attack on Syria is a response to a chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime on April 7 are without any independent substantiation. The only people claiming to have witnessed the attack are US-backed proxy forces in Syria.

The United States humanitarian pretenses do not stand up to any serious scrutiny. The massacres of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza by the Israeli army have been supported by the United States and virtually ignored in the Western media. Saudi Arabia, the United States key Arab ally in the Middle East, is carrying out a genocidal war in Yemen. The rampage of the United States through the Middle East has destroyed entire societies.

Aside from the absence of evidence, no credible explanation has been given as to why the Assad regime would carry out a chemical weapons attack just as it was on the verge of driving out the Al Qaeda-linked insurgents funded by the US and its allies.

But there are plenty of reasons why the United States would instruct its proxies to either stage or fabricate such an incident. Just two days before the alleged attack in Douma, a New York Times editorial complained that Trump was letting Russia take the lead in Syria and allowing Iran to gain a foothold in the country. The Times asked, How does that serve American interests?

Just one hour after Trumps Wednesday morning Twitter outburst, he admitted in a subsequent tweet that the campaign against Russia is being driven by political forces in Washington. Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama, Trump wrote.

Behind the increasingly bitter sectarian warfare gripping Washington lie substantial divisions over foreign policy, centered on the conflict in Syria, which have been simmering for years.

In 2013, the United States was on the brink of a full-scale military assault to carry out regime change against Syrian President Assad, seeking to follow up on the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. But amid overwhelming popular opposition, President Obama was ultimately forced to pull back after the failure of a vote in the UK parliament to authorize British participation in the onslaught. Instead of a direct attack on Syria, the US agreed to a deal brokered by Russia to destroy Syrias chemical weapons stocks.

In a lecture given in September 2013, in the immediate aftermath of the agreement, World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board Chairman David North warned:

But the postponement of war does not lessen the likelihood, indeed, the inevitability, of the outbreak of a major war. As the bellicose statements emanating from Washington make clear, the military option remains on the table. Nor is Syria the only target for military attack. US operations against Syria would set the stage for a clash with Iran. And, still further, the logic of US imperialisms drive for global dominance leads to a confrontation with Russia and China.

This warning has been vindicated. The leaders of American imperialism have never forgotten what they saw as a colossal embarrassment and setback for US imperialism in failing to enforce Obamas red line.

Now, as the US-backed Islamist proxies in Syria face defeat at the hands of the Syrian government, Iran, and Russia, the American intelligence agencies have manufactured a series of pretexts to justify their longstanding war plans.

The accusations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on April 7 followed by only a few days the collapse of claims by the British government that Russia carried out a chemical weapons attack on British soil. The supposed victims of a nerve gas ten times more powerful than Sarin have not only recovered, but are being blocked by British authorities from making public statements. The incidents in Salisbury and Douma, as with the entire anti-Russia campaign, are part of a carefully orchestrated propaganda offensive aimed at legitimizing a military attack on Syria and escalation against Russia.

Fifteen years ago, France opposed the American intervention in Iraq, leading to the denunciation of Old Europe by the Bush administration and calls to change the name of French fries to Freedom fries. Since that time, France has completely reversed its position, anxious to reestablish itself as a colonial power by participating in the carve-up of the Middle East. Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is now declaring that France is ready to do its duty.

No less significant than the geopolitical motivations for the war are pressing domestic considerations. All of the major imperialist powers preparing for war are riven by deep internal crises and a growing movement of the working class.

French President Macron has signaled his support for the US war drive as his government is embroiled in a head-on confrontation with transportation workers over his hated neoliberal policies. Germanys right-wing grand coalition government, cobbled together after months of back-room deals, enjoys minuscule public support.

The British state, thrown into crisis by the Brexit-mandated withdrawal from the European Union, is led by a prime minister who is held in universal contempt, with no authority or legitimacy. Theresa May is so afraid of public opposition to British involvement in Syria and a repeat of Prime Minister David Camerons debacle in 2013 that she has announced plans to proceed with an attack without a vote in Parliament.

And the United States is embroiled in the greatest political crisis since Watergate and the forced resignation of Nixon, exacerbated by a growing strike wave of teachers and mounting opposition throughout the working class.

The rush by NATO to embrace a conflict with Russia leaves the distinct impression that the US and the European powers would welcome a de facto state of war, which they could use as a pretext to intensify their drive to censor the Internet and outlaw domestic political opposition. The NATO powers are in the grip of a war fever as reckless as it is criminal. As their internal crises intensify, their military provocations become all the more naked.

The Putin government, for its part, is caught between elements within the military pushing for Russia to confront the US and powerful oligarchs who, battered by economic sanctions, are desperately seeking an accommodation with the United States. Iran likewise is under pressure from US economic measures that have led to a 35 percent drop in the value of the rial.

While Alexander Zasypkin, the Russian ambassador to Lebanon, said Wednesday, If there is a strike by the Americans, thenthe missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired, President Vladimir Putin has sought to play down tensions, declaring he hoped common sense will prevail.

The Russian government is now facing the consequences of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, whose ultimate logic is the reduction of the country to the status of a semi-colony. Both Moscow and Tehran confront the fact that no concessions they make will satisfy the United States, which is seeking nothing less than their total subjugation. Neither the Russian nor Iranian bourgeoisie can resist the forces of world imperialism.

The escalation of the Syrian crisis demonstrates that the imperialist powers are driving toward a new world war. Whatever the outcome of the latest crisis, the onslaught against Syria is only a precursor to war against Iran, Russia and, ultimately, China, threatening the annihilation of mankind in a nuclear conflagration.

The only way to avert this catastrophe is to link the emerging international movement of the working class with the struggle against imperialist war.The public-sector union Verdi and other trade unions expanded strikes by public service workers in Germany on Tuesday and Wednesday. According to trade union sources, 60,000 workers took strike action in the states of Berlin, Brandenburg, Baden-Wurttemberg, Bavaria, Hesse, North Rhein-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, and Bremen. Many thousands participated in demonstrations and rallies.

Rally on Friedrichstrae in Berlin

The trade unions are calling for a 6 percent wage increase, or at least a raise of 200. The strikes had a particular impact at airports in Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Bremen, with Lufthansa forced to cancel 800 flights. Strikes were also held at state-run kindergartens, public transport, rubbish collection, city services, municipal-owned hospitals, and regional savings banks.

The strikes are part of a broader mobilisation of the working class throughout Europe and internationally. Workers in France are striking against Macrons plans to privatise the public railways, in Britain lecturers are fighting to defend their pensions, and in the US teachers in many states are striking and protesting for better wages and working conditions.

As in the other countries, the strike in Germany is dominated by a glaring contradiction. While workers in all sectors are outraged at never-ending real-wage cuts and deteriorating working conditions, the unions are doing everything in their power to suppress this anger and prevent a genuine struggle.

Verdi collaborates closely with the federal government, which is the employer in the current collective bargaining talks. When the Social Democrats (SPD) and conservative parties presented their coalition agreement in February, Sylvia Buhler, a member of Verdis national executive, praised it as a big step in the right direction and as an important roadmap. Reiner Hoffmann, head of the German Trade Union Association (DGB), spoke out in favour of the grand coalition, which as well as carrying out the largest military spending increases since the Second World War is also planning major social attacks.

The unions are only calling the strikes to allow workers to let off steam and ensure the unions maintain control over the situation. Behind the backs of the workers, they have long since reached a deal with Interior Minister Horst Seehofer. If they get their way, the unions intend to present the agreement after the third round of talks scheduled for April 15-17 in Potsdam. All indications point to a similar result as IG Metall, which at the beginning of the year dropped its demand for a 6 percent pay increase to an effective annual raise of 2.2 percent. The ability of the government and trade unions to carry this off depends on the political development of the working class. The outrage among workers is extremely high.

Regardless of the group of workers one speaks to and irrespective of in which city, the same picture emerges. After the state spent hundreds of billions of euros to bail out the banks, every area of social life is being subjected to spending cuts. However, workers are no longer prepared to accept the domination of the profit motive in every aspect of public life. WSWS reporters spoke with striking workers in Berlin, Cologne, Dortmund, Frankfurt, Munich and Karlsruhe.

Rally at the Heumarkt in Cologne

The largest rally in the country took place at the Heumarkt in Cologne. Valentin, who previously worked in health care and is now employed in the administrative logistics department for Colognes hospitals, was convinced that the turnout would have been even greater if conditions on the wards were not so precarious.

It is often the case that the emergency staffing level is more than what we have as standard staffing levels on many wards, he said. Under these conditions, nurses dont want to leave the wards in the lurch. Nurses, Valentin reported, therefore are not just interested in a pay increase, but also improved working conditions. I am here because the gulf between those at the very top and bottom of society continues to grow, and we have to take to the streets to increase wages accordingly.

Health care workers at the rally in Munich

Striking health care workers in Munich also pointed to terrible working conditions. There is a staff shortage, said one worker. At a certain point, we can no longer adequately care for the patients. Politically something has to change, because the hospitals are totally dependent upon the legal system, and they just enforce this on the workers.

Christian and Stefan at the rally in Berlin

In Berlin, where several hundred gathered on Friedrichstrae, reporters met many workers from the Charite university hospital. Christian and Stefan work there as delivery drivers in material distribution. They are among a small group of non-medical workers whose jobs have not been outsourced to the subcontractor CFM. They therefore have somewhat better pay rates and more job security. Nonetheless, both men came to the demonstration to show solidarity with their CFM colleagues.

Stefan explained that staffing levels are so bad that workers often have to do double shifts. The amount of work done by two workers in the past is now done by one, he said. And even then, responsibilities are often increased further by absences. Things are even worse for health care workers. When I bring medication to the wards at night, there are usually just two nurses there. Red lights are going off everywhere, and often they cant even accept the delivery, he reported.

As Stefan was speaking, Marco, a young nurse who completed his training a year ago, joined the discussion. He immediately agreed with what had been said and explained that it is often impossible to check if the medication delivered is correct. Among other wards, he has worked in the leukaemia ward, where large quantities of medication are delivered.

Every morning when you come to work, youre hoping nobody rings or there is an emergency because then you wont manage your round, said Marco. The round also includes filling drips with medication. If this is not done on time, patients are not only put at risk, but in the case of antibiotics, germs resistant to medication can develop.

We often have to change catheters and put on bandages in the middle of the night, because there is just no time during the day, he said. Very ill patients have to be woken and bothered at three or four in the morning. Colleagues often perform paperwork after their shifts to ensure the patients get care. He also reported of instances where patients were left lying in their own excrement for hours, because, in spite of the nurses best efforts, care could not be provided.

Overburdened and exploited workers are not only to be found in the health sector. Cindy, a semi-governmental staff council chair and trainer at the Office for Canals and Shipping in Brandenburg, explained that trainees are only employed there for a maximum of two one-year contracts. Afterwards, in spite of the highly specialised nature of the job training, the young people have to look for new jobs.

Cindy and Frank at the rally in Berlin

Her colleague, Frank, is 61 and will soon be working part-time. If someone is hired to take his place, his or her starting wage will be two pay brackets below his, equating to some 500 less per month. At the same time, work-related stress has increased dramatically: Three people are now doing what five did before. According to Frank, they are always under pressure and spend their time writing letters of apology. He is particularly concerned that workers on lower pay grades receive a substantial wage increase. They therefore see the demand for an increase of at least 200 as particularly important.

Two workers at the pension insurance agency for Berlin and Brandenburg who did not want to give their names for fear of retribution also detailed a significant increase in responsibilities on the job. A growing number of specialist tasks have been delegated to workers on lower pay grades over recent years, one of the workers reported. In effect, this is an indirect wage cut, because people are getting less money for doing the same job, he added.

His colleague reported that there is a shortage of staff in IT. Workers are therefore put under a lot of pressure. If someone is absent due to sickness, the post remains unoccupied. As a result, many workers are forced to give up holidays and work overtime and at weekends for no extra pay. We took up this career because we had a social conscience. This is being exploited now, because nobody wants someone not to get their pension at the beginning of the month, he added. A 34-year-old colleague suffered physical injuries due to the amount of work, and many others suffered burnout.

At the airport in Frankfurt, Giuseppe, who drives a water tanker on the apron, spoke about massive real-term pay cuts. I compared my paycheck with my wages 10 and 15 years ago, and the truth is that including holiday bonuses, I get around 3,000 less than I did 10 years ago! he said. However, work-related stress and responsibilities have increased during this period.

Abdul at the rally in Frankfurt

Abdul did not only participate in the strike for a wage increase of a few percent, but to draw attention to the unbearable conditions for baggage handlers. He works for FraGround, a subsidiary of Fraport, the airports operator, and he is especially affected by workplace stress. There are practically no regulations for changing shifts. I have to work seven days in a row and then often on my days off an additional shiftits a disaster! Although he is young and strong, he still felt that the way workers are dealt with here is outrageous.

Pre-school workers participated in the rallies in many cities. Magda and Anna attended the rally in Karlsruhe to secure societal recognition for their demanding jobs. It begins with the training, you dont get paid for it. It makes the career very unattractive, they told us. Yet their jobs are crucial.

Fatma, who is also a pre-school teacher, explained, Children need free space and also attention. But although we do our best, we cant give them that under these conditions. Fatmas colleague Anna made clear that a fundamental principle is at stake in the strike, saying, The issue isnt just money, Im here because of the entire system. Stress, illness and overworked staff create a vicious circle for children and pre-school teachers, added Fatma.

Heike at the rally in Dortmund

At the rally in Dortmund, Heike, a pre-school teacher, explained the new responsibilities she has had to assume. The demands made of us have constantly increased over recent years. When children go to school, they should know the language, be able to count, sit still, listen, and concentrate, and they should have a degree of independence. All of this is expected.

We are all happy to do this, but sometimes you just need time for the children. And when I have 25 to 30 children and there are only two of us, that is nowhere near enough, she noted. Absences due to illness, holidays and training leave are not managed well, resulting in frequent staff shortages.

Heike added that she went on strike because the profession of a pre-school teacher is not attractive to young people due to low pay. Yet we have constantly increasing demand. Children come to us younger, both parents often have to work. So we also need full-day places, because the parents work schedules are not really what they would need to be for a couple to raise children. The burdens increase, the demands grow, but pay is not increasing at a corresponding rate, she said.

Heike was well aware that repeated claims over recent years that there is no money has been part of a policy directed against the well-being of society. However, in light of the toothless strikes over the same period, she was unsure what could be done about it. We strike again and again and end up with peanuts, she said. So much has been saved on staffing costs. There is no land in sight.

Verdis deliberate restricting of the strikes was also discussed in Berlin. The trust in the trade unions is declining, said Marco, the nurse. There are no real strikes, like in France, here. But thats what many people want. Christian, the delivery driver, intervened, We all really need to strike together. But first one group strikes, then another.

At the airport in Frankfurt, Michael, who works as a loadmaster, was outraged, stating, It is good that resistance is growing. What I, as a skilled worker, see is the board making a lot of money, theyre stuffing their pockets full. And as a skilled worker, you are told, Theres just no money. I cant accept that anymore. He was in full agreement with French workers, he said. In France, the strike is a much more accepted part of society. Unfortunately, thats much less the case in Germany. I wish things were the same here.

Marcel, Niklas and Felix at the rally in Karlsruhe

In Karlsruhe, industrial mechanics Marcel, Niklas and Felix, who work for the public transport authority in Freiburg, discussed the need for the international unification of workers. If the French can do it, we can do it, too, Felix said enthusiastically. Asked what he thought about teachers in the United States organising independently of the unions in large Facebook groups, Niklas answered, That was brave! I think its important to stand up for your demands, even when the unions dont support you.

You can only agree with that, Marcel added. We all need to act together.

Verdis phony strikes underscore that workers in Germany, France, the United States and around the world confront the same fundamental issues. They are not only faced with reactionary governments that are rearming, waging war, and launching attacks on workers social rights, but also by unions collaborating closely with the government. Workers can only defend their interests in a united socialist movement based on the independent mobilisation of the working class.Country

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Principe, Democratic Republic of Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Senegal, Republic of Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles, Republic of Sierra Leone, Republic of Singapore, Republic of Slovakia (Slovak Republic) Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia, Somali Republic South Africa, Republic of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands Spain, Spanish State Sri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic of St. Helena St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Pierre and Miquelon St. Vincent and the Grenadines Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Suriname, Republic of Svalbard & Jan Mayen Islands Swaziland, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Switzerland, Swiss Confederation Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand, Kingdom of Timor-Leste, Democratic Republic of Togo, Togolese Republic Tokelau (Tokelau Islands) Tonga, Kingdom of Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Tunisia, Republic of Turkey, Republic of Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda, Republic of Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of ZimbabweOn a new episode of Conan Without Borders, Conan OBrien and his producer Jordan Schlansky traveled to Italy, where OBrien attempted to speak Italian to the locals by yelling out different types of pasta. Add that to the many foolish but very funny things OBrien did as an American tourist.

OBriens other silly shenanigans included drawing a large penis on himself in a drawing class, playing farting sounds on a portable speaker in the 1962 Fiat the two were driving, and shaming truffle-hunting dogs. I strongly suspect these guys, because they knew we were coming, hid these ahead of time because theyre finding them very easily, Conan said. Sorry, but weve been scammed.

The two also went wine tasting, overimbibing a little, then headed to a cafe, where Conan consumed too much caffeine, which is probably how he ended up on a balcony singing about being friends with Martin Scorsese.

Despite their constant bickering, OBrien and Schlansky seemed to have a great time, and we cant wait to see where they venture next.

Conan Without Borders airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on TBS.

Check out Conan meeting Magic Johnson on the court and reigniting his rivalry with Larry Bird in a hilarious game of horse:

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.An Oklahoma father is accused of murder in the fatal shooting of his teenage son last weekend, PEOPLE confirms. Authorities and the mans family said he mistook the boy for someone who was stealing the familys truck.

On Saturday, Delaware County deputies responded to the shooting about 1:45 a.m. Upon arrival at the scene, they discovered 13-year-old Kyle Rutherford dead from a gunshot wound outside a grey pickup truck with his mother and father attempting to perform CPR on him, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by PEOPLE.

Kyles mom, who called 911, told police her husband, 47-year-old Tony Rutherford, thought he was shooting a thief at the time their son was killed, the affidavit states.

Rutherford had allegedly pursued the truck while firing on it, not knowing his son was driving, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said, according to the Tulsa World.

A subsequent investigation by the OSBI led to Rutherfords arrest for first-degree murder.

Neighbors told authorities that before the shooting, Rutherford came to check on a vacant home owned by another of his sons after multiple vehicles were seen outside the residence, which raised Rutherfords suspicions, according to the World.

When Rutherford arrived, he saw someone driving his sons pickup, the World reports. The affidavit states he did not know his 13-year-old son was behind the wheel.

 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.

After the shooting, Rutherford declined to speak with investigators and requested a lawyer.

According to the World, defense attorney Winston Connor II, said: Tony and his family are very sorry by the loss of their child and time will reveal the circumstances surrounding this unfortunate incident which does not constitute a crime.

Prosecutor Kenny Wright disagreed, according to the Grove Sun, arguing that Rutherford intended to kill whoever was driving the truck.

Story continues

That it turned out to be his son, is just tragic, Wright said. But it doesnt make it any less of a crime.

It is unclear if Rutherford has entered a plea. His attorney has been unavailable to comment to PEOPLE.

An obituary for Kyle described him as a chatty, outgoing teen who dearly loved his family, the farm, and the freedom of the outdoors.

But most of all, Kyle loved to talk, tease, joke, prank, and share stories with the ones he loved, the obituary continued. Heaven will definitely need to pass out earplugs now, because his contagious laughter will be heard throughout.A Texas couple is accused of strangling a woman with a bungee cord while she was driving before setting her body on fire and dumping it in a wooded area.

Carlton Lamar Grant, 37, and his girlfriend Lindsey Jo McFadden, 29, are accused in the April 1 death of Rachel Rhoads, 24.

Both were arraigned Tuesday on capital murder charges after being arrested last week, Upshur County Sheriff Larry Webb tells PEOPLE.

Neither has entered a plea yet, says Webb. PEOPLE was unable to obtain information about their attorneys.

Rhoads, 24, was reported missing on March 31. Her severely burned body was found the following day in a wooded area in Upshur County, according to a search warrant affidavit obtained by the Longview News-Journal.

According to the affidavit, McFadden and Rhoads had attended drug rehab classes together.

In an interview with police, McFadden allegedly told detectives that she and Grant went to Rhoads house on March 29, and the three of them drove off together in Rhoads car.

McFadden told police that Grant reached from the back-seat area and placed a bungee cord around the victims neck as she was driving and demanded that [McFadden] take the wheel, the affidavit states.

From left: Carlton Grant, Lindsey McFadden

From left: Carlton Grant, Lindsey McFadden

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According to the affidavit, McFadden added that Rhoads was then put in the back seat, where Grant choked her using a zip tie.

McFadden said the couple put Rhoads body in the trunk and then drove around to random places, the affidavit alleges.

The affidavit alleges that the couple set Rhoads body on fire and dumped it near a gas pipeline right of way in Upshur County.

After Rhoads death was determined to be a homicide, police arrested the couple at an apartment complex in Fort Worth.Photo credit: Getty Images

From Esquire

The hinges are all hanging loose and broken.

From the The New York Times:

Inside the White House, Mr. Trump-furious after the F.B.I. raided his longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen-spent much of the day brooding and fearful and near what two people close to the West Wing described as a meltdown. Mr. Trumps public and private wrath about the special counsels investigation into Russias meddling in the 2016 election are nothing new. But the raids on Monday on Mr. Cohens Rockefeller Center office and Park Avenue hotel room have sent the president to new heights of outrage, setting the White House on edge as it faces a national security crisis in Syria and more internal staff churn.

I am fully aware that, more than any other occupant of that office, this president* is capable of creating a sturdy bubble in which he is the indomitable and wise master of the universe, all objective evidence to the contrary. But, ever since the FBI dropped by Michael Cohens office, it seems that this might be the event that shatters the bubble for good.

Photo credit: Getty Images

We can safely speculate that Cohen knows everything: the money, the scams, the women, the Russians. All of it. And in the days since the raid, Cohen has abandoned the truculent public persona that had served him so well in the past in favor of being someone who seems grateful that he wasnt hauled off to Pelican Bay on the spot.

From CNN:

"I am unhappy to have my personal residence and office raided. But I will tell you that members of the FBI that conducted the search and seizure were all extremely professional, courteous and respectful. And I thanked them at the conclusion," Cohen said in a phone conversation on Tuesday with CNN. Asked if he was worried, Cohen said: "I would be lying to you if I told that I am not. Do I need this in my life? No. Do I want to be involved in this? No." The raid was "upsetting to say the least," he added.

Story continues

This would seem to indicate that Cohen has sized up matters and decided that his best move is to flip on the president*. Back in 73, you wouldnt have seen Gordon Liddy complimenting the FBI on his arrest, Ill tell you that. They dont make thuggish apparatchiks like they used to.

Anyway, back at Camp Runamuck, things are going pretty thoroughly haywire. From the Times:

Mr. Trumps mood had begun to sour even before the raids on his lawyer. People close to the White House said that over the weekend, the president engaged in few activities other than dinner at the Trump International Hotel. He tuned into Fox News, they said, watched reports about the so-called deep state looking to sink his presidency and became unglued. Mr. Trump angrily told his advisers that people were trying to undermine him and that he wanted to get rid of three top Justice Department officials - Jeff Sessions, the attorney general; Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who appointed Mr. Mueller; and Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director - according to two people familiar with what took place.

Photo credit: Getty Images

He eventually calmed down and the anger abated. But it was stoked anew on Monday, after the F.B.I. raids on Mr. Cohen. Mr. Rosenstein in particular was a source of Mr. Trumps anger on Monday, and some aides believed the president was seriously considering firing him, to a degree he has not in the past.

Ah, but the strawberries, thats where I had them

Few people still at the White House are able to restrain Mr. Trump from acting on his impulses after the departures of crucial staff members who were once able to join forces with other aides to do so. That included Hope Hicks, his former communications director; Rob Porter, his former staff secretary; and, in 2017, the chief of staff Reince Priebus and the chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon. John F. Kelly, the current chief of staff whose influence over the president has waned for months, appeared beaten down and less hands-on, according to two White House officials. Mr. Kelly has told Mr. Trump it is frustrating for staff members that the president deems most news media stories fake news but believes the ones accusing various advisers of leaking, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Let us sum up, shall we? We have a deeply corrupt and incompetent president*, whos never been entirely on the rails, sensing quite accurately that hes very close to being run to ground by a prosecutor he cant bully or bribe out of his way. And, as this Times story indicates, as the ship continues to list, the traffic down the ratlines is getting awfully heavy.

All these anonymous quotes are coming from people who are clearly immunizing themselves against ever having signed aboard this catastrophe, in the hopes that they will one day have careers in politics again. This has to be stoking the president*s paranoid rage to the point where its melting ice lagoons on Neptune. Meanwhile, theres a genuine crisis brewing over Syria, and theres only one person who can give the national command orders, and he may be unravelling by the hour.

Maybe voting for someone just because he pretended to be pissed at the same people youre pissed at wasnt the best idea in the world.

Related Video: FBI Sought Access Hollywood Tapes in Raid

Watch news, TV and more on Yahoo View.



You Might Also LikeFrance has evidence that Syria used chemical weapons against its own citizens, French President Emmanuel Macron President said this afternoon, five days after a suspected chemical attack there.

We have the proof that last week ... chemical weapons  at least chlorine gas  were used by [President Bashar] Assad's regime," Macron told a French today.

As for a response, "We have to make a decision at the right moment, when we will consider it useful and the most effective, Macron said, adding that he is "working closely" with the United States.

But the international watchdog charged with independently verifying the chemical attack, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), has not yet been given access to the site of the alleged chemical attack in Douma.

PHOTO: French President Emmanuel Macron arrives at an elementary school to attend a one-hour interview with French news channel TF1, in Berd'huis, France, April 12, 2018. (Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters)

The OPCW's inspection team is on its way to Syria and will start work Saturday, the organization tweeted today. But getting access to the site may still be a challenge. The Russian military this morning said it was completely in control of the once rebel-held Douma and had raised a Syrian flag in the suburb just outside of Damascus.

The French president's conclusion confirms an independent analysis published Wednesday by a website called Bellingcat, based on open-source material.

Eliot Higgins, a British researcher and independent journalist, runs Bellingcat, which digs into the digital forensics of events mostly inside Syria, focusing on the weaponry used in attacks, both conventional and chemical.

Story continues

He has become in recent years one of the foremost experts on the munitions used in the Syrian conflict and a vital resource to journalists.

PHOTO: This image released early Sunday, April 8, 2018 by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets, shows a child receiving oxygen through respirators following an alleged poison gas attack in the rebel-held town of Douma, near Damascus, Syria. (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets via AP)

As soon as Higgins saw the reports of a chemical weapons attack rolling in Sunday, he got to work.

"Reports indicated that a significant number of people, including children, had been killed by these attacks," Higgins wrote at the top of his analysis.

Eyewitness accounts from the ground came in the form of disturbing videos showing children frothing at the mouth, unable to breathe.

Frame by frame, Higgins went through the video and photos that emerged, identifying markings on the buildings in order to confirm the video and pictures were from Douma, a suburb outside of Damascus that activists and doctors said was attacked by the Assad regime.

After they had identified the building featured in most of the photos and videos, Higgins' team members were then able to match the video released by the Russian foreign ministry allegedly showing Russian forces visiting the site of the attack to the same building. His team is confident that the videos from activists and the Russian foreign ministry handout video were shot at the same building.

The entrance of the building they're entering was filmed in another video, showing corpses being removed from the building (graphic) https://t.co/xvDkLG7HfN pic.twitter.com/yZl9kiGXLd  Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) April 10, 2018

The same entrance is also visible in this video (graphic), showing bodies inside the apartment building that was hit. It's also possible match corpses filmed inside the building to corpses taken outside. https://t.co/F9lkdZb4z8 pic.twitter.com/hojcBFERE8  Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) April 10, 2018

The Russian foreign ministry said their samples were clean. The Russian specialists who visited the site found no traces of chlorine or any other chemical substance used against civilians," according to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Higgins sees it differently.

"They went into the building and found nothing, he told ABC News, noting his concern the Russians may have tampered with evidence the OPCW will need. We have no idea what they were doing in that building.

PHOTO: A child cries as they have their face wiped following alleged chemical weapons attack, in what is said to be Douma, Syria in this still image from video obtained by Reuters, April 8, 2018. (White Helmets/Reuters TV via Reuters)

Higgins' team was then able to geolocate another video shot by activists showing a yellow gas cylinder on the roof of the same building where the Russians visited and where activists said the attack happened.

This video filmed on the roof top of the apartment building containing 34+ bodies shows a yellow gas cylinder of a type used on multiple occasions in previous aerial chlorine gas attacks https://t.co/VVlE1oK9Nr  Bellingcat (@bellingcat) April 11, 2018

Inside this building, Higgins' team counted in photos 34 dead bodies throughout the immediate area.

There's also a video of a yellow gas cylinder in the roof of the building that we've geolocated to the same apartment building, so it's possible to confirm 100% this building, full of corpses, was hit by a gas cylinder.  Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) April 10, 2018

Additionally an estimated 500 patients presented to health facilities exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals, the World Health Organization said, according to reports from its partners.

"In particular," the WHO statement continued, "there were signs of severe irritation of mucous membranes, respiratory failure and disruption to central nervous systems of those exposed."

ABC News has been unable to independently verify either number but they are consistent with what ABC News has heard from eyewitnesses in Douma. The OPCW will produce the only official report of the incident.

Other video emerged showing the same kind of yellow gas cylinder on a bed in an unknown location.

"The external modifications on the above cylinder are particularly interesting as they are consistent with modifications seen on other gas cylinders used in other reported aerial chlorine attacks, according to Higgins' analysis.

Here's some examples of the same yellow gas cylinders used in other chemical attacks. February 4, 2018, Saraqib, two cylinders dropped on the town https://t.co/3u7WW8amcM pic.twitter.com/9d1dLD4vEG  Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) April 9, 2018

Higgins then cited a Human Rights Watch report that collected pictures of the same yellow gas cylinders used in previous chlorine attacks.

Despite reports that victims in the building displayed signs of organophosphate exposure and Sarin use, these yellow gas cylinders have not been previously documented outside of aerial chlorine attacks pic.twitter.com/u31XUJi27Y  Bellingcat (@bellingcat) April 11, 2018

Left shows the modified chlorine cylinder used in yesterday's Douma attack, the right hand image is from an August 2017 chlorine attack in Khan Al-Assal. Clear similarities, seems they've strengthened the suspension lugs. pic.twitter.com/c1QaNjLzRV  Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) April 8, 2018

Such munitions are dropped by helicopters, Higgins said, and the OPCW has determined that yellow gas cylinders have been dropped by helicopters in previous chemical weapons attacks, according to The Associated Press, which has seen the reports.

But Higgins' team was also able to determine from where the helicopters took off.

"Aircraft observers that are part of the Sentry Syrian network observed two Hip helicopters heading southwest from Dumayr Airbase," Higgins wrote, mentioning a regime airbase, "northeast of Damascus, in the direction of Douma, 30 minutes before the chemical attack in Douma, and two Hip helicopters were observed above Douma shortly before the attack."

But from where Higgins sits, at home in the U.K., there are still unknowns.

"One thing that's confusing," he said, "is that the doctors are all adamant that there are Sarin-like symptoms but this may be because of overexposure to chlorine."

But, he added, "there does seem to be another chemical agent but I don't think it's Sarin."

In the analysis, he wrote "it is important to note that these yellow gas cylinders are not associated with the use of Sarin, and as Sarin is a liquid a compressed gas cylinder seems an unlikely method of delivery for Sarin. Possible explanations for the allegations of Sarin use may be a result of the severity of the symptoms presented, of an undocumented munition being used, or another chemical agent being used that presents symptoms that could be confused with Sarin use."

There are limits to investigating from afar, Higgins acknowledged, which is why it's crucial that the OPCW get to the site and start testing the clothing and blood of victims. Whether they will find another kind of munition that could have carried a different chemical is an open question.

In Higgins opinion, that would be one way to explain an additional chemical and the Sarin-like symptoms.

Higgins' analysis concluded that "based on the available evidence, it is highly likely the 34+ victims killed in the 7:30pm attack on the apartment building near al-Shuhada Square were killed as a result of a gas cylinder filled with what is most likely chlorine gas being dropped from a Hip helicopter originating from Dumayr Airbase."

"The thing is with this," he explained, "there have been constant chemical attacks this year. Five to six already this year. The only thing that's special about this one is that it got noticed.

"If it was dropped just a few meters to the other direction, those people in that building probably wouldn't have died," he added. "A matter of meters between a big news story or just another chemical attack."President Donald Trump met with his national security team Thursday to discuss Syria but no final decision has been made about a U.S. response to a suspected chemical attack by the Syrian regime, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.

"No final decision has been made. We are continuing to asses [sic] intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies," Sanders said.

The president plans to speak with French President Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May Thursday evening, Sanders added.

Defense Secretary James Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford were spotted at the White House Thursday afternoon.

Earlier Thursday, Trump said "further decisions" would be made "fairly soon."

We're having a meeting today on Syria, we're having a number of meetings today," the president said during a morning meeting with governors and lawmakers. We'll see what happens."

It's too bad that the world puts us in a position like that," he said. "We've done a great job with ISIS. We have just absolutely decimated ISIS but now we have to make some further decisions so they'll be made fairly soon."

On Capitol Hill Thursday morning, Mattis said the National Security Council would be meeting and "take forward the various options to the president."

Earlier Thursday morning the president tweeted he "never said when an attack on Syria would take place," referring to possible U.S. action following the suspected chemical attack in Syria, apparently responding to criticism that he was telegraphing military action as he repeatedly has said he would never do.

"Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" Trump wrote.

The president's tweet comes four days after he said in a Cabinet meeting Monday that "major decisions" were coming on Syria within 24 to 48 hours.

Story continues

Trump also appealed for praise in the fight against terrorism.

"In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS, he said. Where is our 'Thank you America?'"

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2018

PHOTO: This image released April 8, 2018 by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets, shows a child receiving oxygen through respirators following an alleged poison gas attack in the rebel-held town of Douma, near Damascus, Syria. (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets via AP)

The president had tweeted Tuesday about missiles "coming," seemingly in response to apparent comments from Russias ambassador to Lebanon, widely reported Wednesday morning, that warned Russia would fire on any U.S. missiles targeting Syria and the units launching them.

Trump tweeted that Russia made a vow to shoot down any and all U.S. missiles targeting Syria.

"Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!" he tweeted Tuesday.

But White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in Wednesday's press briefing that there was no timetable for any punitive strike.

"We're maintaining that we have a number of options and all of those options are still on the table. Final decisions haven't been made yet on that front," Sanders said at the briefing, adding that the president has "not laid out a timetable."In an era where our societys most vulnerable people are under constant attack, some voters in Alaska are saying no to an anti-trans law. The Associated Press reports that Anchorage, Alaska voters have rejected a referendum known as Proposition 1 that would have repealed basic protections for trans people using public bathrooms. The anti-trans bathroom laws defeat in Anchorage marks the very first time US voters have rejected a so-called bathroom bill.

The referendum vote was over an ordinance passed in 2015 that legally allowed people to use the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, and not forcing them to use the bathroom designated for the gender they were assigned at birth. In-person and mail voting on the referendum wrapped up on April 3 and, with the majority of votes already counted, its a clear victory for those opposed to the repeal.

Opposition to the referendum was largely successful thanks to organizing by Fair Anchorage, a bi-partisan campaign dedicated to fighting the anti-trans referendum.

This groundbreaking, first-of-its-kind victory could never have happened without the hard work and courage of transgender people and their families in Anchorage who shared their experiences and stories of how Prop 1 would impact them, Fair Anchorage campaign manager Kati Ward said in a statement. This is a victory not only for transgender people, but for their allies and everyone who is proud to call Anchorage a welcoming place, Ward added.

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund, said of the Anchorage victory in a statement last week that, The voters of Anchorage have clearly seen this proposition for what it wasa direct attack on the civil liberties of city residents. It seems every week makes it clearer that such discriminatory measures are opposed by all but the most fringe elements of our society.

Story continues

The proposition was brought to the table by Alaska Family Action. The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups, reported last year that Alaska Family Action was coordinating with anti-LGBT extremists in order to repeal Anchorages existing bathroom laws. Alaska Family Action and its partners launched a campaign based entirely on false facts and bigoted attacks on trans people, and according to TIME, raised only $140,000 for their efforts compared to the oppositions $826,000.



Eli Erlick, director of Trans Student Educational Resources tells Brit + Co that the intentions of these so-called bathroom bills are to hurt trans people.

Reactionaries use of bathrooms is an attempt to fear-monger against transgender people, Erlick says. Far-right groups such as Alaska Family Action falsely argue that trans people are a risk to cisgender people in bathrooms, but Erlick says that just isnt true.

Transgender people are much more likely to be attacked in restrooms than we are to attack anyone, she says.

The victory in Anchorage is a first for anti-trans bathroom laws that citizens have been able to vote on. Anti-trans groups and politicians started using public bathrooms as a battleground for trans rights after some locales started implementing gender-neutral bathroom policies in 2014.

A 2016 review of trans bathroom laws and policies published in Mother Jones noted that universities around the country started making their bathrooms gender-neutral in between 2012 and 2013; in 2014, the city of Austin began requiring gender-neutral signage for single-occupancy public restrooms. These protections were welcomed by many trans rights activists, but soon after, the backlash started up.

In late 2014, several state legislatures introduced bathroom surveillance laws aimed at forcing trans people to use bathrooms designated for the gender they were assigned at birth. Republicans in various states ranging from Minnesota to North Carolina have introduced similar laws between 2015 and now. In 2016, North Carolina passed the infamous HB2 law, which requires people to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender assigned at birth. The law was overturned in 2017. But in 2017 alone, 16 states considered anti-trans bathroom laws, according to a July report from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Following Anchorage, residents of Massachusetts are being asked to vote in November on a referendum regarding a current state law that prohibits gender discrimination in bathrooms and locker rooms. Trans rights and other progressive groups are encouraging voters to support the referendum while reactionary anti-LGBTQ+ groups such as the Massachusetts Family Institute have advocated for a repeal of the law. Massachusetts is a famously liberal state, making it likely that the referendum will pass.

Keisling noted the ongoing, national fight in her statement about Anchorage, calling for solidarity with trans people around the country. While difficult fights remain, she said, allies and advocates for the equality of transgender people nationwide should take some comfort in the consistent rejection of bigotry and hatred in state legislatures, in the courts, and now at the ballot box.

What do you think? Tell us on Twitter @BritandCo.

(Photos by Spencer Platt + Scott Olson/Getty Images. Illustration by Sarah Tate/Brit + Co)

You Might Also LikePhoto: Getty Images

With the rising cost of college tuition, getting a degree in higher education has become a major financial undertaking  one that the majority of students cannot afford. An estimated 70 percent of students today graduate with loans, according to CNBC, and it takes decades to pay those loans back. Based on the most recent data from the Pew Research Center, Americans currently owe $1.3 trillion in student debt.

As experts continue to debate how to fix the problem of exorbitant higher education, the governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, is offering up a solution  one that he promised on the campaign trail: free community college tuition. This is something were really serious about, Murphy, a Democrat, told a roundtable of constituents at Mercer County Community College last week. I think it might be the best investment that I know of.

Murphys plan involves $50 million in funding, which he intends  if the states Legislature signs off  to roll out over the next three years. He estimates that if the legislation passes in June, 15,000 new students can be enrolled for free at a community college in the state by January. The program would specifically target youth from underprivileged families, with a household income of under $45,000 a year.

Speaking with local press, one student voiced approval of the plan. I feel like everyone should have the chance to go to community college for free, Matthew Williams, a business major at Atlantic Cape Community College, told the Press of Atlantic City. The president of Williamss school, Barbara Gaba, agreed. [This] is the first step toward ensuring that all New Jerseyans will have access to the post-secondary education they need to be successful in todays rapidly changing economy, said Gaba.

Not everyone is enamored with the plan. In order to reach the $50 million needed, Murphy would need the Legislature to pass an increase in taxes, a move that some lawmakers find ridiculous. No government-funded program is free. Taxpayers always pay the price and frankly, people in New Jersey pay far too much already, New Jersey Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr., a Republican, said in a statement on his website. I strongly believe we have to do more to make higher education more accessible and affordable for everyone, but we have to do it in a responsible way.

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On top of a rise in taxes, some people take issue with the demographic that the program targets, claiming that the lower-income group receives enough government assistance already. According to Bloomberg, over half of the 150,000 students currently enrolled in community college in New Jersey receive federal and state financial aid, as do two-thirds of students enrolled at four-year colleges.

For Murphy, this still misses the point. Who died and went to heaven and said public education is free from K to 12 but not before K or after 12? Murphy said earlier this month. There are also kids in that system one could argue [that] dont necessarily need free education, but they get it. Im a big believer that education ought to be a right, not a privilege.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.



Two teachers are being fired for mocking a student with severe autism. (Photo: WBRZ2)

Two teachers in Louisiana have been fired after an audio recording allegedly captured them mocking and saying inappropriate things about a boy with severe autism.

The boys mother, Milissa Davis, sent her 12-year-old son to Hope Academy with a recording device in his backpack after he became aggressive at home and wet the bed, WBRZ2 reports.

At least two adults in a classroom, who have been identified as a teacher and teachers aide, were picked up on the recording apparently saying awful things to the boy and talking about him.

Youre just writing the word. What is hard about it? an adult can be heard saying as the boy grunted in response. The adult then mocked the noise. Later the adult said, Camden, why dont you have anything written down? Thats why you cant sit with everyone. Tell your momma that.

An adult can also be heard saying, Lets see what they do with him in f***ing public school. He was going to go to Live Oak Middle. Uh ah, he wouldnt make it for a minute.

Davis told WBRZ2 that she was extremely upset by what she heard. I just wanted to cry, scream, and do everything I could because it was so bad, she said. To think that I had sent my son there every day, and what had happened before, that I didnt know about.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a group of conditions related to brain development, including autism and Aspergers syndrome, according to the Mayo Clinic. People with autism may have difficulty picking up on social cues and perform repetitive behaviors, the organization says.

Autism is not rare: About one in 68 children has autism, and the disorder is 4.5 times more common in boys than girls, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

Comments like the ones the school employees allegedly made can be upsetting to children with autism, as they can be for children without the condition, Lisa A. Nowinski, director of clinical psychology and training at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. These comments can lead to increased sadness, anxiety, and low self-esteem, she says. These negative comments can impact the way a child with autism interacts with people around them. The child may learn that people are mean, hurtful, or not supportive.

Story continues

Unfortunately, stories like Daviss have happened before. A father in Florida discovered in 2017 that his autistic son, who is nonverbal, was being abused at school after he became scared of water bottles. A school district report alleged that Eddie Perillos son was mistreated by his teacher, who would throw him to the ground and spray a water bottle filled with vinegar in his face, WJLA reports.

A father in New Jersey, Stuart Chaifetz, had his autistic son, Akian, wear a digital recorder to school after he was told that Akian was hitting his teacher and teachers aide, which was out of character for him. Chaifetz heard the teacher and an aide calling his son names, making fun of him, yelling at him, and having inappropriate conversations in front of the children in his classroom, ABC News reports.

The latest incident and others like it are just horrible, Matt Asner, vice president of development for the Autism Society of America, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Asner points out that there will always be bad people in the world, but often proper training can make a big difference in how educators interact with children who have autism. Unfortunately, budgets are almost always an issue, he says, and many teachers may not receive the training they need on autism awareness and how to interact with children who have the condition.

If you have an autistic child, Asner recommends talking to school officials to make sure that your childs teacher is certified to teach children with autism, and that the school has annual sensitivity training. Thats something every teacher should be doing, he says. Again, it wont necessarily stop all negative interactions with autistic children, but it can help.

Nowinski recommends that parents of autistic children maintain a close relationship with their childs school team, ask to meet with the staff who will be working with their child, and check in regularly. Parents should also look out for unexpected changes in behavior, increased social withdrawal, or avoidance of specific people or places, Nowinski says, as this can be a sign that something is off at school.

As for Davis, she says shes hired an attorney because of the situation and plans to file complaints with the Department of Education. Her advice to parents: If theyre special needs, look at the situation as to why your child is acting that way, because no child deserves to go through what my child did, she said.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.Samarra (Iraq) (AFP) - At least 16 people died in a bomb attack Thursday during funerals in a northern Iraqi village for fighters killed by the Islamic State group, the village's mayor said.

"Two bombs exploded as the funeral procession was entering the cemetery" in Asdira, near the town of Sharqat, Salaheddin Shaalan told AFP.

Most of 14 people wounded in the blast were in "critical condition", he said.

Officials said the injured could not be transported to a hospital outside the village as night had fallen and inhabitants feared being ambushed by IS.

The funeral was for five members of the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary units, which fought alongside the army to expel the jihadist group from Iraqi towns last year.

They were killed on Wednesday night in a jihadist attack on a military convoy in the village, 250 kilometres (150 miles) north of Baghdad, a police official said.

The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since a January 16 double suicide bombing in Baghdad that cost 31 lives.

The Iraqi government declared victory over IS in December after pushing the jihadists out of their final holdouts along the border with Syria.

But the group retains the capacity to strike despite losing control of vast swathes of Iraqi territory it seized in 2014.

It still clings to pockets of desert in war-torn Syria and appears to be able to cross the porous border between the two neighbours.

Jihadists sometimes manage to snatch control of roads at night, especially in the Salaheddin province where Thursday's attack took place, and Anbar province along the border with Syria, security experts say.

On Sunday, four people were killed and several wounded in an IS suicide attack on the headquarters of a political party in Anbar.Samarra (Iraq) (AFP) - At least 16 people died in a bomb attack Thursday during funerals in a northern village for Iraqi fighters killed by the Islamic State group, the mayor said.

It was the deadliest attack in Iraq since a January 16 double suicide bombing in Baghdad that cost 31 lives.

"Two bombs exploded as the funeral procession was entering the cemetery" in Asdira, near the town of Sharqat, the mayor, Salaheddin Shaalan, told AFP.

Most of 14 people wounded in the blast were in "critical condition", he said.

The funeral was for five members of the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary units, which fought alongside the army in expelling IS from Iraqi towns last year.

They were killed on Wednesday night in a jihadist attack on a military convoy in the village, 250 kilometres (150 miles) north of Baghdad, a police source said.By Maayan Lubell TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israel is finalizing a deal to deport thousands of African migrants to Uganda under a new scheme after agreements with Rwanda and the U.N.'s refugee agency to find homes for those expelled fell through. About 4,000 migrants have left Israel for Rwanda and Uganda since 2013 under a voluntary program but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under pressure from his right-wing voter base to expel thousands more. In January, Israel started handing out notices to male migrants from Eritrea and Sudan giving them three months to take the voluntary deal with a plane ticket and $3,500 or risk being thrown in jail. The government said from April it would start forced deportations but rights groups challenged the move and Israel's Supreme Court has issued a temporary injunction to give more time for the petitioners to argue against the plan. Government representatives told the court on Tuesday that an envoy was in an African country finalizing a deportation deal after an arrangement with Rwanda to take migrants expelled under the new measures fell through. The representatives did not name the country in court sessions open to the public though Israeli lawmakers have previously said the two countries it was planning to deport migrants to were Rwanda and Uganda. Israeli Deputy Foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely also identified the countries it was seeking to strike new deportation deals with as Uganda and Rwanda in closed-door comments leaked to Israeli Army Radio. After the Rwanda deal fell through, the government struck an agreement with the U.N.'s refugee agency (UNHCR) to relocate 16,250 migrants to Western countries but Netanyahu scrapped it after an outcry from right-wing politicians furious that thousands more would be allowed to stay in Israel. The fate of tens of thousands of migrants who entered Israel illegally through its desert border with Egypt and were granted temporary visas has posed a moral dilemma for a state founded as a national home for Jews and a haven from persecution. Israeli rights groups say the country can absorb the estimated 37,000 migrants still there, or should find them safe destinations such as those agreed under the defunct UNHCR deal. The rights groups have accused Netanyahu, who is under police investigation for corruption, of playing political games to appeal to his right-wing supporters. The government calls the migrants "infiltrators" and says they have come to find work. The migrants and rights groups say they are asylum seekers fleeing persecution. BEHIND CLOSED DOORS The U.N.'s refugee agency and rights groups are also concerned because many of the Africans who left previously for Rwanda and Uganda voluntarily did not get the protection they were promised and some ended up back on the migration trail. Both countries have denied having any deals with Israel to resettle migrants. Uganda, a key Western ally in the fight against Islamist militants in East Africa, also denied there were discussions about accepting deportees under the new scheme. "We are not aware of any Israeli envoy here. Let Israelis tell you who that envoy here is going to sign an agreement with, sign with who? With the foreign affairs, with the president, minister of internal affairs, with who? On what date are they signing?" Okello Oryem, Uganda's junior foreign affairs minister told Reuters on Wednesday. At the Supreme Court hearing in Jerusalem, one of the three judges asked the state representatives why Uganda was denying the deal, if indeed there was one. The state said it would provide the court with an explanation in a closed session. Five migrants interviewed by Reuters said they had been told by immigration officials this year that they could go either to Uganda or Rwanda, if they chose to avoid detention. Ristom Haliesilase, an Eritrean migrant living in Tel Aviv, said he was given until April 15 to decide whether to be deported, or detained. "My mind is full of worries. I don't know what will happen tomorrow. The first thought I have in the morning is what will they do to me today?" said Haliesilase. "It's heartbreaking. It breaks the people. It breaks the community." Many migrants live in cramped apartments in poor parts of Tel Aviv where eateries serve Eritrean food, clothing stores with signs in Tigrinya display traditional garb, and abandoned warehouses have been converted into makeshift churches. 'IT'S ALL A SCAM' Rights groups such as the International Refugee Rights Initiative have been documenting the plight of Eritrean and Sudanese men who have left Israel for Rwanda and Uganda for several years. In the past few months UNHCR has also documented at least 80 cases of Eritreans who found none of the protection promised upon their departure from Israel, prompting them to go on a perilous trail through conflict zones to reach Europe. Along the way they were subjected to arrests, torture and extortion before trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Italy, UNHCR said. Israeli rights groups have documented dozens more such cases. Under the voluntary scheme, asylum seekers say they were given the option of going back to their country of origin, remaining in detention in Israel or flying to a third country where they were promised they could stay and work legally. Sajir, 27, an Eritrean now living in Uganda, told Reuters by telephone that he flew there in January after spending five months in Israeli detention. "They said that my life would be sorted there," Sajir said, speaking in Hebrew. "But it's all a scam." Notices handed out this year to migrants already in detention or those trying to renew their visas have promised residency and work permits in their destination country. "A local team that will meet you at the airport will provide guidance in the first few days," the document says. Sajir said when his flight landed in Uganda, he and 10 other migrants were not taken through passport control. "We were taken out the back. Then someone loaded us onto a bus and took us to a hotel," he said. The group was met by a man who offered to set them up with traffickers to take them to Sudan, Kenya or Ethiopia - for a price, he said. "We got no visa, no papers. There is no work here. It is no good. I cannot stay here. I will try to go to Sudan soon or somewhere, to Libya and then to Europe," Sajir said. Israel's Immigration Authority and the prime minister's office did not respond to requests for comment. (Additional reporting by Elias Biryabarema in Kampala, Steve Scherer in Rome and Corinna Kern in Tel Aviv; writing by Maayan Lubell; editing by David Clarke)Pilots and airlines are being warned of the possibility of cruise missiles in the sky as the US, Britain, France and their allies weigh up their response to a suspected chemical weapon attack in Syria.

The European Aviation Security Agency (EASA) has issued a rapid alert for airlines in the Eastern Mediterranean over the possibility of air strikes into Syria within the next 72 hours.

The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, Eurocontrol, told operators: Please note that EASA has issued Rapid Alert Notification for Eastern Mediterranean/Nicosia FIR (flight information region) area stating that: Due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria with air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours, and the possibility of intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment, due consideration needs to be taken when planning flight operations in the Eastern Mediterranean/Nicosia FIR area.

Attack  the alleged chemical attack in Syria has left 40 people dead, activists say (Picture: AP)

The warning comes as the US, UK, France and their allies weigh up retaliatory action following an alleged chemical attack on the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday, which Syrian activists and rescuers say killed 40 people.

Reports suggested more than 500 people, mostly women and children, were taken to medical centres with difficulty breathing, foaming at the mouth and burning sensations in the eyes.

The Syrian government denies responsibility.

Donald Trumps warning

Mr Trump suggested on Monday that he had little doubt that Syrian government forces were to blame for what he said was a chemical attack.

But in contrast to an incident a year ago involving the use of Sarin gas  which prompted Mr Trump to launch Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield  there does not yet appear to be hard evidence of the use of chemical weapons.

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Story continues

Despite this, on Tuesday he responded to Russias warnings against US military strikes in Syria with a tweet that said missiles will be coming.

The US President tweeted: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!

A year ago the US launched airstrikes on a Syrian military airfield in retaliation for a chemical attack (Picture: Getty)

The tweet went on: You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Mr Trump sent a second tweet shortly after, saying the relationship between the US and Russia was worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War.

He wrote: There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?

Mr Trump had previously said the apparent gas attack would be met forcefully and cancelled a foreign trip to the 8th Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru, and Bogota, Colombia, to manage the crisis.

He also met with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, at the White House.

The emir told reporters that he and Mr Trump see eye to eye on the Syria problem, adding: We cannot tolerate with a war criminal. This matter should end immediately.

Qatar hosts the United States main air operations centre for the Middle East, which would coordinate any American air attack in Syria.

The US, France and Britain are in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week.

French President Emmanuel Macron called for a strong and joint response to the attack and said his country will continue discussing technical and strategic information with US and British allies and in the coming days we will announce our decision.

Members of the Security Council met to discuss the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria (Picture: AP)

Russias response



Russia has urged the US to avoid taking military action.

Moscows ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzia, said: I would once again beseech you to refrain from the plans that youre currently developing, and warned Washington that it would bear responsibility for any illegal military adventure..

The Russian military, which has troops in Syria, said on Monday that its officers had visited the site of the alleged attack and found no evidence to back up reports of poison gas being used.

Reprehensible  Theresa May (pictured here welcoming the Prime Minister of Portugal, Antonio Costa, to Downing Street) has said the reports of a chemical attack in Syria are utterly reprehensible (Picture: AP)

The UKs position

Theresa May has agreed with her American and French counterparts that the international community needs to respond.

The Prime Minister spoke to Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday and Downing Street said the three leaders agreed that the international community needed to respond to uphold the worldwide prohibition on the use of chemical weapons.

A spokeswoman said Mrs May held separate calls with the two leaders on Tuesday and that they agreed the reports of a chemical weapons attack in Syria were utterly reprehensible and that they would continue working closely together.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson criticised Russia after it vetoed a US draft resolution at the United Nations which sought to create a new body to determine responsibility for the attack.

Mr Johnson said the move was hugely disappointing and accused Russia of holding the Syrian people to political ransom by supporting a regime responsible for at least four heinous chemical attacks against its people.

Karen Pierce, the UK ambassador to the UN, said it was a sad day for the Security Council and for the people of Douma, adding that Russias credibility as a member of the council is now in question.

(Top picture: AP)Algiers (Algeria) (AFP) - Algerians on Thursday mourned 257 people killed in a military plane crash the day before, the country's worst-ever aviation catastrophe, with no indication yet of the cause.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced three days of national mourning after the plane slammed into a field near the Boufarik airbase 30 kilometres (19 miles) south of Algiers shortly after it took off on Wednesday.

The aircraft was mostly carrying army personnel and their family members on their way back to their barracks in the country's far south.

Flags flew at half mast on public buildings and foreign embassies in the capital on Thursday as government departments observed a minute's silence.

Armed forces chief General Ahmed Gaid Salah attended a ceremony where the coffins of the first victims to be identified were draped in national colours.

There was no announcement on the number of people identified so far as experts continued work on matching the DNA of the dead.

Several large companies took out advertising space in newspapers to offer condolences to the families of the 10 crew members and 247 passengers who died.

Mosques across the country are set to hold prayers of mourning on Friday.

The Algerian authorities have announced an investigation into the crash, but so far there has been no details of any findings.

The plane, which came down shortly after being refuelled, erupted into flames before it hit the ground, witnesses told AFP.

Hundreds of ambulances and dozens of fire trucks with sirens wailing rushed to the scene of the crash, in an uninhabited area where one person was injured on the ground by debris.

Firefighters took two hours to extinguish the blaze, Algerian media reported.

The Ain Naadja military hospital in Algiers, where the bodies were transported, has set up a psychological support unit for victims' relatives and witnesses of the accident.

Several cultural events planned for the coming days were cancelled.

Story continues

- 'Tragic!' -

Images of the plane's burned-out frame dominated the front pages of Algeria's newspapers.

Francophone daily Liberte led with the headline "Tragic!", while the official Arabic language paper El Moudjahid quoted Bouteflika calling the accident a "painful test" for the country.

Several papers praised the pilot, Smail Doucene, citing witnesses who said he had managed to steer the plane away from nearby homes.

"The pilot saved hundreds of people from certain death," wrote El Khabar.

The Ilyushin IL-76 transport plane was bound for Tindouf in southwest Algeria near the borders with Morocco and Western Sahara.

The North African country has suffered a string of military and civilian aviation disasters, but Wednesday's was Algeria's deadliest ever plane crash and the world's fourth costliest in human lives in 20 years.

Despite no details emerging on the cause of the disaster, several newspapers underlined the poor state of the Algerian military's ageing aircraft.

Several previous accidents were due to "poor maintenance of the military air fleet", said El Khabar.

Liberte said that "to date... very little if nothing has filtered out regarding investigations" into previous accidents.

Two Algerian military planes collided mid-flight in December 2012 during a training exercise in Tlemcen, in the far west of the country, killing the pilots of both planes.

In February 2014, 77 people died when a military plane carrying army personnel and family members crashed between Tamanrasset in southern Algeria and the eastern city of Constantine.Footage shows the devastating scene after a plane crashed in North Africa Wednesday, killing 257 people.

Video taken from the ground in Algeria shows clouds of smoke rising from the wreckage as witnesses run to help.

The Algerian military plane carrying soldiers, their families and some refugees crashed into a field shortly after takeoff from Boufarik military airport.

Algeria's Defense Ministry said 247 passengers and 10 crew died in the nation's worst ever aviation disaster. Victims' bodies have been transported to the Algerian army's central hospital to be identified.

The cause of the crash is unclear and an investigation is underway.

The government has declared three days of national mourning.

The U.S. Embassy in Algiers said it offered its "sincere condolences" to those affected by the tragedy.

"The United States deeply appreciates the continued partnership with the Algerian people and government," it said in a statement. "We stand with you in your time of sorrow."

The previous deadliest crash in Algeria was in 2003, when 102 people were killed after plane crashed on a runway in Tamanrasset. Just one persona soldiersurvived.

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Related Articles:The dark shadow of a war involving America and Russia in Syria is looming large after public threats of missile attacks from President Donald Trump, Moscows warning of devastating counterstrikes in retaliation and hopes of negotiations fading away.

The bellicose rhetoric about a military answer to the crisis over the suspected chemical attack in Douma appears to have made the prospect of conflict almost inevitable, with the timing and scale of it seemingly the only issues yet to be settled.

The era of nations formally declaring war on each other has long gone, but Mr Trumpss tweet threatening Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart means that he will now find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to back down from launching an attack.

The US presidents tweet was apparently made, unsurprisingly, without consulting any military commanders, or even his new superhawk national security advisor, John Bolton. Weary spokesmen at the Pentagon had a standard response to questions about it, saying: I refer you to the White House to characterise the presidents tweet. A key factor in military operations, the element of surprise, has disappeared from the planning equation.

The immediate reaction from the Kremlin was remarkably emollient with the foreign ministry observing that smart missiles should fly towards terrorists and not elected governments. But Mr Trumps eruption had been triggered by Alexander Zasypkin, the Russian ambassador to the Lebanon, declaring: If there is a strike by the Americans ... The missiles will be downed and even the source from which the missiles will be fired. This implicitly stated that US and allied warships and bases from where missile launches had taken place will be hit.

Mr Zasypkins comments were made on al-Minar TV run by the Hezbollah militia, meant for a particular audience, and he qualified his talks of hitting back with the qualification that a conflict should be ruled out and therefore we are ready to hold negotiations.

Story continues

But Mr Trump had seen the initial remarks and fired off his tweets. Moscows further response later was that a US led military strike could be to destroy evidence about the chemical attack, which the Syrian regime claims was staged by rebels, a provocation to justify Western intervention. Maria Zakharova, the foreign ministry spokeswoman asked: Is the whole idea to quickly remove the traces of the provocation [so] the international inspectors will have nothing to look for in terms of evidence?

Mr Trump and his advisors are said to be considering a larger operation than the one in April last year when, in response to another chemical attack, involving sarin on the town of Khan Shekhoun, around 60 Tomahawk missiles were fired into the Sharyat airbase in Homs destroying a handful of regime planes.

The mission this time may target multiple bases and attempt to destroy, as well as chemical facilities, as many of Syrias warplanes as possible  as well as command and control centres. This would also probably mean that the strikes are likely to extend over several days.

US Defence Secretary James Mattis said that the Pentagon stood ready to provide military options to President Trump. However, asked if he had seen enough evidence to blame Syrian President Bashar al-Assads forces for the attack, Mr Mattis said: Were still assessing the intelligence  ourselves and our allies. Were still working on this. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders added later that all options are on the table and that a final decision on action had apparently not yet been made.

The Trump administration has advised allies that it expects support for its actions. But there are doubts about the extent of that forthcoming. Emmanuel Macron was an early drumbeater for military action and Mr Trumps first phone call, after the news came of the Douma attack, was to the French president to discuss punitive measures.

Mr Macron has said on coming to power that if chemical weapons are used on the ground and we know how to find out their provenance, France will launch to destroy the chemical stocks. He said on Tuesday that French action will be sticking to destroying chemical stocks. But these could be hard to locate. The regime of Mr Assad, the Gas Killing Animal ! in Mr Trumps tweet, will have plenty of time to hide and remove stock after the US Presidents telescoping of the attack. It is unclear whether the French government would follow America in prolonged engagement, or drop out after the first round of bombing.

In Syria, regime forces and militias are reported to be evacuating airports and military bases which may be targeted and moving the more modern warplanes and advanced equipment to the Russian airbase in Latakia. Hezbollah fighters, meanwhile, were leaving the Tiyas airbase near Palmyra which was hit in an Israeli air strike on Monday.

Theresa May had to wait to speak to Mr Trump while he had two conversations with President Macron. The British prime minister had been initially against taking the military option before an investigation into the Douma attack, but is said to have come around to joining in during the course of the day.

But the cabinet is said to be divided on the issue, with Boris Johnson leading those who are keen for British forces to take part. Some senior Tories have pressed for Parliament to debate the issue before military action and Jeremy Corbyn warned that bombing would escalate to crisis.

The use of Turkish military facilities, especially the airbase at Incerlik, would be hugely advantageous to the US and its allies in a Syria mission.

The government of President Recep Tayyep Erdogan has taken a strong stance against the Assad regime and had trained and armed rebel forces. Immediately after the Douma attack, Ankara condemned the Douma deaths as a crime against humanity and stressing the Syrian regime will have to pay a price.

But President Erdogan has been keen to build closer ties with Russia and Moscow has allowed Turkish forces to carry out operations against Kurdish groups inside Syria. And, following a phone call from the Kremlin to President Erdogan, Ankara ceased blaming the Assad regime saying, instead, that there should be a careful investigation before blame is apportioned. There will be no Turkish bases for Western forces to use in Syria.

The dynamics of realpolitik have been rapidly altering amid the strife in the Middle East. The impending conflict will change them further, creating further uncertainty and instability in an already combustible region.Sebastien Roblin

Security,

And can it be solved?

The Big Problem the F-35 and the F-4 Phantom Have in Common

To begin with, many modern fighters boast long-range Infrared Red Search and Track Systems, as well as electro-opitcal sensors, with effective ranges of up to fifty or one hundred miles. Of course, designers have done their best to reduce the heat signature of stealth aircraft, but only so much can be done to mask the incredible heat generated by jet engines. On the other hand, heat-seeking missiles are generally much shorter in range. Nonetheless, infrared surely constitutes an Achilles heel of the stealth fighters.

Conventional wisdom can offer contradictory insights. Are we doomed to forget the past, and thus condemned to repeat it? Or are we always preparing to fight the last war while failing to think ahead about how the next one will be fought?

From the standpoint of military strategy, it is at once important to learn from operational experience, without blindly assuming that future conflicts will playout in the same fashion. This brings us to the controversial, thousands of which are set to enter wide-scale service in the three warfighting branches of the U.S. military and at least nine other countries.

Oriented as a multirole platform, the F-35 is slower and less maneuverable than preceding fourth-generation fighters it will eventually replace, or the air-superiority oriented F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. While more focused as an air-to-ground platform, the Lightning is intended to defeat more agile opposing fighters by detecting and engaging them beyond visual range (BVR) with air-to-air missiles, while hopefully avoiding a within-visual range (WVR) dogfight where it may be detected and out-maneuvered.

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However, to some critics this sounds worrisomely similar to how the U.S. military envisioned its F-4 Phantom performing in the Vietnam War. The comparison so natural that you can also check out an earlier article on this by my colleague Michael Peck.

Story continues

The F-4 Phantom (profiled in greater detail in this article) was a huge beast of a plane with two powerful J79 turbojet engines that could propel it up to two times the speed of sound, and a then-powerful radar housed in its nose. The Phantom was armed with new medium-range AIM-7D and E Sparrow medium-range missiles, as well as short-range AIM-9 Sidewinders AIM-4D Falcon heat-seekers.

The Air Force expected the Phantom would detect aerial adversaries from dozens of miles away, swoop down towards them at supersonic speeds and take out its foes with Sparrow missiles from up to twenty-eight miles away. Short-range dogfights were simply not intended or trained for, as the Phantom was not a particularly maneuverable bird.

Needless to say, this was not how things played out when U.S. fighters encountered North Vietnamese MiG-17 and MiG-21 jets over Vietnam. Though the much lighter MiG-21 had only a weak radar, its pilots were guided to intercept American raids by ground controllers, per Soviet doctrine. Also, American rules of engagement forbade opening fire until enemy aircraft had been positively identifiedusually within visual range.

When the U.S. fighters finally did get a chance to open fire, the faulty Falcon and Sparrow missiles achieved kill probabilities below 10 percent. The shorter-range Sidewinders were somewhat more effective with 15 percent kill rates, but getting into an advantageous position to launch the heat-seekers often involved getting into knife-fighting range with the nimble MiGs. The kill-loss ratio of the more expensive U.S. jet fighters in general fell as low as 2:1 in certain phases of the Vietnam War.

Over time, the U.S. Air Force and Navy adjusted by fielding improved Sparrows and Sidewinder missiles, and retiring the older AIM-4 Falcon. Later, cannon-armed F-4E Phantoms were deployed, giving pilots a backup weapon in close range fights. Meanwhile, the Navy responded by forming the Top Gun school to teach naval aviators short-range dogfighting skillslessons which resulted in the Navy Phantom pilots scoring a superior kill-ratio.

Ultimately, designers of the new generation of F-15 and F-16 fighters made sure to incorporate cannon armament and excellent maneuverability, as well as high speed and advanced avionics in the Phantoms successors.

While todays F-35 is intended to operate using long-range missiles and powerful radar, it trades the Phantoms speed (the Lightning is considerably slower, with a maximum speed of Mach 1.6 to 1.8) for a reduced radar cross section that will make it very difficult to detect and engage with long range sensors and weapons. Thus, while the Air Force concedes the F-35 is at a disadvantage in a close encounter with say an Su-35, in theory it should detect that Su-35 from further away, launch missiles at it from dozens of miles away, and then hi-tail it.

So how can we judge whether the air battles of the future will play out similarly or differently the skirmishes fought over Vietnam?

Just How Likely Are Beyond-Visual Range Missiles to Hit a Fighter?

Air-to-air missiles have improved enormously since their first wide-scale employment during the Vietnam War. It doesnt follow then that todays AIM-120D, Meteor or R-77 BVR missiles will perform as poorly as the AIM-7E did in the past.

However, while testing of modern BVR missiles suggests a decent hit rate (around 50 percent is a common estimate) this was also true of preceding aerial missiles. More importantly, despite the increasingly long range of new BVR missiles, the vast majority of air-to-air shootdowns since 1970 have continued to be performed within visual range using both short- and medium-range missiles, as you can see in this detailed history. Many of the BVR hits that were scored in combat were against poorly equipped and trained adversaries that lacked radar-warning receivers to alert them of incoming attacksunlikely to be true of a clash between modern near-peer opponents.

It is important to acknowledge then that the official maximum effective range of a missile is far greater than its practical effective range to guarantee a high probability of kill verses a fast and agile target. After all, a targeted fighter can simply race away from an incoming missile launched from beyond its no-escape zone. So, while the AIM-120D has a nominal range of 110 miles, an F-35 would have to stalk closer to enemies to ensure a good probability of a kill. This bring us to an important follow up question.

Just how close can a stealth fighter approach before it gets detected?

Stealth fighters are not actually invisible after alljust difficult to detect. The question remains just how close they can approach an enemy before they show up on their sensors.

To begin with, many modern fighters boast long-range Infrared Red Search and Track Systems, as well as electro-opitcal sensors, with effective ranges of up to fifty or one hundred miles. Of course, designers have done their best to reduce the heat signature of stealth aircraft, but only so much can be done to mask the incredible heat generated by jet engines. On the other hand, heat-seeking missiles are generally much shorter in range. Nonetheless, infrared surely constitutes an Achilles heel of the stealth fighters.

Another gambit for hunting stealth aircraft is to use low-bandwidth radars, which are capable of plotting the general position of a stealth fighter, though they lack the precision to target them with guided weapons. A ground-based low-bandwidth radar could detect the presence of a stealth jet and direct a flight of high-speed fighters to close in on its general vicinity until they detect the fighter with its IRST, or even X-band targeting radars at shorter ranges.

In this scenario, a stealth jet would still likely get to fire first at such fourth-generation interceptors, though it could be overwhelmed by numerically superior attackers. Disengaging could prove risky as well due to the F-35 being slower than most fourth-generation jets. On the other hand, it will have an easier time slipping out of radar range.

How much does dogfighting matter in an age of short-range High-Off Boresight missiles?

According to U.S. military doctrine, energy (speed, and altitude that can be traded for speed) is more important than maneuverability. A fighter in a high-energy state can dictate the terms of the battle by engaging or disengage from adversaries when it pleases, and outrun incoming missiles. On the other hand, while tight maneuvers may help avoid an incoming missile, they drain away energy, leaving an aircraft a sitting duck for a follow-up attack.

Furthermore, some argue that short-range weapons have become so lethal that dogfighting agility simply wont matter very much in the event of a merge between opposing fighters. This is because of two related new technologies: Helmeted Mounted Sights, which allows a pilot to target enemy aircraft simply by pointing his helmet at any enemy airplane; and highly maneuverable High Off-Boresight (HOBS) missiles which can engage adversaries even when the launching platform is not pointing at them.

First fielded by Russia and later adopted by the United States in the form of the AIM-9X missile, these technologies mean that it is not as necessary for a fighter to out maneuver its opponents to launch effective weapons at them. To be fair, however, a fighter which is pointing at its target will still impart more of its velocity to any missiles launched, and thus increase the chance of a hit.

Nonetheless, modern short-range missiles are generally estimated to have a hit probability of 80% to 90% for WVR engagementssuggesting that two similarly equipped aircraft aware of each others presence would likely destroy each other. To avoid such an outcome, fighter pilots in the future may well prefer to sling missiles from long-range and try to stalk their opponents undetected, rather than close for an aerial knife fight.

Will Rules of Engagement Constrain Fighters to Short-Range Engagements?

The circumstances which forced Phantom pilots over Vietnam to largely forsake taking advantage of their BVR-capable missiles may seem specific to that conflictbut in reality, rules of engagement heavily favoring visual contact with the enemy have remained the rule rather than the exception.

This is both because nobody wants to accidentally shoot down an airliner, but also because opposing fighter jets have often engaged each other in ambiguous circumstances short of total war where the authorization to engage may not be given until the aircraft are relatively close to each other. Think, for example, the downing of a Syrian Su-22 in 2017 by a U.S. Navy FA-18 Super Hornet or two aerial skirmishes involving F-14 Tomcats and Libyan Su-22s and MiG-23s in 1981 and 1989.

Under these circumstances, an F-35 patrolling, say, a no-fly zone might have to approach closer to a hostile aircraft and expose itself to detection and sacrifice its stealth advantage. A faster and more maneuverable fourth-generation jet like an F-15 or Rafale would seem preferable in such a scenario. Of course, that limitation could be solved simply by employing older fourth-generation jets for such air superiority roles, while reserving the F-35s for the deep-penetrating strike roles and intelligence-gathering roles they are optimized for.

Overall, the Vietnam analogy highlights potential vulnerabilities of the F-35, but also cannot definitively account for the different technologies in play when evaluating the Lightnings adaptability to the air superiority role. Key performance parameters concerning the effective range of long-range IRST, radars and missiles used by and against an stealth jet are probably necessary for a fairer evaluation, but are likely to be kept under wraps by anybody in a position to know.

Sebastien Roblin holds a masters degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

This first appeared last month.

Read full articlePrince Harry and Meghan Markle have kept their official royal wedding invite list for their May 19 nuptials top secret. But now we know whos not invited: official guests and heads of state, including former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama and British Prime Minister Theresa May. President Donald Trump and Melania Trump are also not getting the honor of an invite to the royal wedding.

New information shared by Kensington Palace reporters notes that the wedding will exclude an official list of political leaders since Prince Harry, who will be sixth in line to the throne following the impending birth of his new niece or nephew, is far enough from the crown not to need to bother with some of the stricter protocols that have previously applied. His brother Prince William, for instance, did invite all the foreign officials  including royals of a number of European countries  as a matter of state for his 2011 nuptials to Kate Middleton at Westminster Abbey.

This may come as a surprise to some, since Prince Harry and Obama worked together on the Invictus Games and are known to be friendly. But it looks like the Prince and Markle are keeping it casual for their big day and switching things up, whether by their unorthodox choice of wedding cake (no fruitcake!) or by asking for charitable donations in lieu of normal gifts.

Theres still no final word on if the Spice Girls will be in attendance, so perhaps we can keep hope alive for that reunion. Kensington Palace also shared some of the stories of the 1,200 members of the public who have been selected to come to the Windsor Castle grounds to watch the proceedings, including military veterans, mental health workers and special needs educators.

Kensington Palace says there will be no official guests at Harry and Meghans wedding, which includes the Obamas, Donald Trump and the U.K. PM: It has been decided that an official list of political leaders  both UK and international - is not required...  Victoria Murphy (@QueenVicMirror) April 10, 2018

Kensington Palace said: It has been decided that an official list of political leaders  both UK & international - is not required for Prince Harry and Ms. Markle's wedding. Her Majesty's Government was consulted on this decision, which was taken by The Royal Household.  Rebecca English (@RE_DailyMail) April 10, 2018

Sources say Prince Harry is not a direct heir to the throne there is no need to have such a formal guest list.

In additional, St Georges Chapel, where the couple will wed on May 19, is much smaller than Westminster Abbey, where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge tied the knot.  Rebecca English (@RE_DailyMail) April 10, 2018

Philip Gillespie from Ballymena who lost his right leg in an IED incident in Afghanistan and works to raise funds and awareness for ABF The Soldiers' Charity. pic.twitter.com/WadD7gRpRq  Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) April 10, 2018Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla - Getty Images

From Popular Mechanics

Over the course of his two-day testimony in Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly returned to a few particular points, ones that ostensibly serve to quell the rising privacy concerns in the wake of data leaks by Cambridge Analytica.

You control your data . Anything that you upload, you can also delete.

You can control your privacy settings, and restrict access your data .

Facebook is optional. You can delete all your data by deleting your account.

These points are all true, to a degree. They are also carefully designed to obscure the terrifying nature of the actual privacy problem that Facebook poses to all of us, whether we use Facebook or not. A line of questioning from House Representative Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico stuck at the heart of the matter when he addressed the so-called "shadow profiles" that Facebook keeps on people who do not even have Facebook accounts.

The existence of shadow profiles has been repeatedly reported over the years, though Facebook-and today, Mark Zuckerberg himself-are reluctant to confirm their existence. These profiles include all sorts of information that could be used to identify a given person, their name and phone number, email addresses, physical addresses, and so on.

Facebook gets this information not from the people themselves, but from people who know them. Let's say I upload my address book to Facebook in an attempt to find my friends on the service. If I know you, then congratulations, Facebook knows your phone number now.

Whose data is that phone number? It seems blindingly obvious: It's yours! It points to you! But Facebook's version of privacy and data control relies on a different definition: Data belongs to its uploader. Your phone number, uploaded by me, is my data.

This distinction has wide-ranging implications, which Facebook will occasionally acknowledge. For instance, in response to Gizmodo's reporting on shadow profiles and Facebook's creepy "People You May Know" feature, Facebook spokesman Matt Steinfeld alluded to the difficulty of controlling contact information that refers to you. Once a contact is deleted, we remove it from our system-but of course it is possible that the same contact has been uploaded by someone else.

Story continues

In other words: If you really want to remove private information that identifies you from Facebook, your only recourse is to petition everyone who may have uploaded it. Similarly, Facebook would likely argue that "shadow profiles" do not technically exist because there is no explicitcollection of data on you, non-Facebook user! There is merely a decentralized network of other people's data that happens to refer to and identify you.

As a result, Facebook can defend certain privacy infringement by claiming to be protecting the privacy of others. In fact, Facebook will say it can't tell you everything it knows about you because to do that would be a violation of other people's data.

Zuckerberg has spent the past two days playing this game. When he asserts your ability to control your data, he's not talking about protecting your freedom to remove data about you-to banish your name and phone number from Facebook. He's talking instead about your mother's/friend's/boss's/ex-husband's/father-in-law's right to allow that data to live on Facebook as part of their data.

The matter gets even stickier when you bring metadata into the equation. That is Facebook's data about your data. Your data may include the things that you upload: pictures of your cat, your address, status updates that you post. But this is not Facebook's primary interest. Instead, Facebook collects information on how you interact with its platform, things that you share and like, things that you click and don't, when you use it, what devices, where those devices are located and so on.

This information also falls outside the narrow scope of "your data," but it can reveal much more about you than you ever intend to directly reveal. It is not technically the data you upload to the service; it is a record of the way you interact with it. It's not "your data," but is even more valuable because of the breadth of what it can imply.

Where should we draw the line between data you control and data you don't? There's no simple answer. The wide-ranging 'right to be forgotten' that pops up in European law illustrates the potential dangers of extending personal control too broadly, at least for typical American sensibilities. Do you have a blanket right to remove news stories about yourself from Google? Surely not. Do you have the right to remove your phone number from Facebook? Maybe you should!

This vital debate is undermined by the lack of specificity and clarity in the discussion of "your Facebook data," and Facebook benefits from that vagueness. This cloudiness obscures the thorniest questions of 21st century privacy in a way that perfectly suits Facebook's desires and incentives-to collect and keep as much information as possible within its grasp, and maybe give you the illusion of control in the meantime.

You Might Also LikeDonald Trump escalated tensions with Russia Wednesday morning, threatening to attack Syria and chastising the Kremlin for its support of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

Saying our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War, Trump also seemingly criticized Russia for escalating the arms raceless than three months after he called on Congress to modernized and rebuild our nuclear arsenal  making it so strong and powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression, during his State of the Union address.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War. There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

Later in the morning, Trump shifted tone slightly, saying much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigationand renewed his criticism of Democrats, Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, who has found himself in the hot seat recently after the FBI raided the office of Trumps personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama. Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

Trump started the morning name complaining about the Mueller investigation, which he says takes tremendous time and focus away from his presidency. He also commented that the only obstruction he had committed was fighting back against the accusations.

....doing things that nobody thought possible, despite the never ending and corrupt Russia Investigation, which takes tremendous time and focus. No Collusion or Obstruction (other than I fight back), so now they do the Unthinkable, and RAID a lawyers office for information! BAD!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

Critics could contend Trumps other than could be taken as a confession of sorts to obstruction, though supporters of the president will likely interpret that statement differently.Sydney (AFP) - A high-profile Australian author and Muslim activist was refused entry to the United States Thursday and put on a plane home after arriving for a speaking engagement, sparking calls for a re-think by border officials.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied, an advocate for youth, women and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, said she was stopped at immigration and ordered out of the country.

"Roughly three hours since touch down in Minneapolis, Im on a plane back," she tweeted.

"Well, guess that tightening of immigration laws business is working, despite my Australian passport. Were taking off now."

A statement by US Customs and Border Protection, cited by Australian media, said she did not have the right visa.

Abdel-Magied was due to appear in New York to discuss online hate against Muslims and the difficulties of being a young Muslim woman in Western countries at a forum organised by PEN International, a freedom of expression organisation.

PEN America chief Suzanne Nossel said she was dismayed by the decision and understood it was the same type of visa used previously for similar trips without issue.

She said the purpose of the PEN World Voices Festival, founded after the 9/11 attacks, was to sustain links between the US and the wider world.

This, she said, was being jeopardised "by efforts at visa bans and tightened immigration restrictions" which threatened "to choke off vital channels of dialogue that are protected under the First Amendment right to receive and impart information through in-person cultural exchange".

"We call on Customs and Border to admit her to the US so that she can take her rightful place in the urgent international conversation to take place at the festival next week."

Adbel-Magied, 27, said authorities seized her phone and passport before putting her on a plane out.

"Those who say the world is borderless are those who have the right colour passports -- or birthplace," she tweeted.

Story continues

Abdel-Magied, a former Queensland state Young Australian of the Year and mechanical engineer, was born in Sudan but migrated to Australia in 1992. She moved to London last year.

She has worked as a presenter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and formerly served on the government's Council for Australian-Arab Relations.

She sparked an outcry in Australia over an Anzac Day social media post which referred to current global conflicts and the plight of asylum-seekers detained by Australia in offshore camps.

Anzac Day annually marks the ill-fated 1915 landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in modern-day Turkey during World War I.

Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs said it was aware she had been denied entry.

"Like Australia, the United States administers a strict entry regime. The decision on who can enter the United States is a matter solely for the US government," it added.The San Francisco Bay Area housing prices are so extreme, even a torched single-family home is selling for $800,000.

The fire-gutted house is located in the affluent Willow Glen community in San Jose. Pictures of the home appear to show a charred roof partially separated from the remaining structure, while exposed paneling and particle boards cover the fixer-upper's facade.

real estate

Courtesy: Holly Barr

Trending: China Says U.S. Should Give Syria's Assad 'an Opportunity to Explain' Before Trump Attacks

The propertys appeal doesn't lie in the architecture, but in its proximity to the tech industry, the real estate agent representing the property told Newsweek. It's about one hour out from Facebook headquarters, and the YouTube and Google campuses are also nearby. Real estate listings accessed on Wednesday, many of which boast about proximity to the bustling tech industry, showed homes in the same neighborhood selling for twice as much.

To many, however, the Willow Glen house and others like it are emblems of the region's housing crisis. A web of factorsincluding incoming tech companies, overeager speculators, landlords and local governmentshave sent housing prices skyrocketing. Thousands of low-income, working families from the region were displaced within the last decade. That, in turn, has contributed to a homeless crisis so dire that several cities in Northern California have declared a State of Emergency.

Within two years, San Joses homeless population jumped 13 percent, ballooning to more than 4,300 people. In San Francisco, more than 7,499 people reported being homeless, a decrease of .05 percent from 2016.

Michael Rawson, director of the Public Interest Law Project based in the Bay Area, told Newsweek that the Willow Glen house is symptomatic of the whole problem in the Bay Area.

Story continues

Don't miss: Republicans More Likely To Cheat on Spouses Than Democrats, Married Dating Site Survey Suggests

We need to look at it like were looking at climate change, Rawson said. Were at a tipping point. We need to recognize that things are way out of control, or were going to loseor maybe weve already lost and will continue to losean entire generation of people. 

california map

Google Maps

He continued, The way the economy in the Bay Area is right now, its like the demand is on steroids. It drives the land prices through the roof.

The housing bubble doesnt show signs of bursting anytime soon, according to industry forecasters. Real-estate firm Zillow reported earlier this month that San Francisco and San Jose are poised to be among the most expensive markets in the country throughout 2018. The median home value in San Jose is $1,1128,300, besting San Franciscos average $893,000 price tag. To live comfortably in either market, a renter or prospective home buyer would need to be pulling in at least $170,000 per year, HSH.com wrote.

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Scores of coalitions and community groups have sprung up in an effort to ease the displacement and gentrification swallowing up swaths of Oakland, Palo Alto and San Francisco. Among the oldest in the state is SPUR, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, which was founded more than a century ago. Sticker shock is long gone for those familiar with Bay Area housing, Teresa Alvarado, the San Jose director for the group, told Newsweek.

It doesnt surprise me at all. Affordability has become so out of reach for so many who are trying to survive and make it here, Alvarado said. People are now forced to now live in trailers or in tents,cars, RVs, vans. Anything that they can use for shelter.

There aren't any quick fixes to help with the state's homelessness and affordability, Alvarado said.

We have to identify not only solutions for people who dont have housing, but also dramatically increase the housing supply, she said, noting community opposition to building projects. We also need more involvement in housing issues.

Especially, she stressed, from the companies that come here."

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekBitcoin inched forward on Wednesday.

Investing.com - Bitcoin and other virtual coins were higher on Wednesday, as Barclays analysts say the the Bitcoin flu season is over.

Bitcoin was trading at $6,859.60 gaining 1.59% as of 8:28 AM ET (12:28 GMT) the Bitfinex exchange. The virtual currency is far from its peak of $20,000 in December 2017 and has struggled to recover since falling below $6,000 in February.

The speculation or infection of being part of cryptocurrencies is over, Barclays analyst Joseph Abate wrote in a research note.

We believe the speculative froth phase of cryptocurrency investment  and perhaps peak prices  may have passed, Abate said.

Abates model suggests knowledge of virtual currencies is worldwide and people who are susceptible or bought for fear of missing out, make up about 25% of the population. Many people are immune and unlikely to buy, Abate argues.

Meanwhile chief executive of the International Exchange Inc. (ICE) Jeffrey Sprecher said digital currencies are trusted more than the Federal Reserve.

There is a trend here we cant ignore in my mind, so I dont discount it. People put more faith in a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto that no one has ever met than they do in the U.S. (Federal Reserve), Sprecher said.

ICE is considering launching a Bitcoin futures in the second half of 2018, he added.

Japan continues to prove its status as a bitcoin hub, with at least 3.5 million trading cryptocurrencies on the countries 17 exchanges, according to data from Japans Financial Services Agency (FSA). About 84% are between the ages of 20 and 40.

Trading volumes in Japan have also skyrocketed, from $22 million in March 2014 to $97 billion in March 2017.

Other virtual currencies were up, with rival Ethereum, the worlds second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, up 4.46% to $414.16 on the Bitfinex exchange. Ripple, the third largest virtual currency, increased 1.91% to $0.49125 while $$$/LTC was at $114.14 a rise of 0.39%.

Related Articles

Story continues

Bitcoin Rises Despite Australia Moves to Regulate Crypto Providers

Ripple Invests $25 Mln In XRP In Blockchain Venture Fund

J.P. Morgan Chase Sued For Charging Crypto Buyers With Surprise FeesBoeing X-32B. The Boeing Joint Strike Fighter X-32B demonstrator lifts off on its maiden flight from the company's facility in Palmdale, Calif.

Dave Majumdar

Security,

What might have been.

The F-35 Almost Never Happened: The Story of Boeing's X-32 Stealth Fighter

One of the main reasons why Lockheed Martins design was selected over Boeings was because the X-32s direct lift systemwhich uses engine thrust to lift the aircraftis prone to pop stalls. Thats a phenomenon where hot exhaust gases are reingested into the engine causing a power loss. There were also questions as to whether the engine would be powerful enough to lift a fully operational F-32the prototype had to have parts removed to ensure it would fly. It probably didnt help Boeings case that it had to redesign the X-32 to meet the modified JSF requirements. An operational F-32 had a very different configuration from the X-32.

In October 26, 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that Lockheed Martins X-35 had won the Joint Strike Fighter contest over Boeings X-32.

(This first appeared in 2016.)

The win secured Lockheeds future as the manufacturer for all of Americas fifth-generation fighter platforms. But Lockheeds resultant F-35 has suffered myriad delay, technical glitches, unrecoverable technical shortfalls and massive cost overruns. Already the largest ever defense program with an estimated price tag of $233 billion in 2001 for a total of 2,866 aircraft, the F-35 program is now estimated to cost more than $391 billion for 2,457 jets, according to the Government Accountability Office .

Recommended: Why an F-22 Raptor Would Crush an F-35 in a 'Dogfight'

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Recommended: A New Report Reveals Why There Won't Be Any 'New' F-22 Raptors

Moreover, while the short-takeoff vertical landing F-35B was originally projected to achieve initial operational capability with the U.S. Marines in 2010, it only reached that milestone in 2015five years late. Meanwhile, the conventional F-35A and the F-35C carrier variant were both slated to achieve initial operational capability with Block 3 software in 2012but that software block is now scheduled to be delivered for operational testing in 2017 at the earliest.

Story continues

Would Boeing have done any better? Hard to saythe Joint Strike Fighter was always a technically challenging and extraordinarily ambitious program. It is likely that Boeing would have run into similar but different technical and budgetary problems. The fundamental issue with the Joint Strike Fighter was that is was always an overambitious program to replace multiple specialized types with one aircraft in the hope that it could perform every role equally well. The result is predictably a jack-of-all-trades but master of none.

One of the main reasons why Lockheed Martins design was selected over Boeings was because the X-32s direct lift systemwhich uses engine thrust to lift the aircraftis prone to pop stalls. Thats a phenomenon where hot exhaust gases are reingested into the engine causing a power loss. There were also questions as to whether the engine would be powerful enough to lift a fully operational F-32the prototype had to have parts removed to ensure it would fly. It probably didnt help Boeings case that it had to redesign the X-32 to meet the modified JSF requirements. An operational F-32 had a very different configuration from the X-32.

Even if Boeing managed to solve the airframe issue, they would have had to deal with the extremely complex sensor fusion software. The software was always going to be a challenge under the best of circumstances. The only edge Boeing had was that it had developed the Lockheed Martin F-22s avionics packagebut the JSF is much more complex.

Overall, it is very likely the Boeing would have run into the same sort of technical hiccups, cost overruns and delays as Lockheed did on the X-32. Lockheed mismanaged the F-35 program to an extent, but the Pentagons requirements for a all-in-one wonder plane is what caused the programs problems. With either company, the JSF program was almost certainly going to be late and over budgetit just a question of by what margin.

Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for The National Interest. You can follow him on Twitter: @davemajumdar .

Read full articleUnited Nations (United States) (AFP) - The UN Security Council is expected to meet next week to discuss a report by the OPCW chemical watchdog confirming Britain's findings that a nerve agent was used in an attack on an ex-spy, the British ambassador said Thursday.

Britain requested the meeting, which is likely to take place on Wednesday, just a few hours after the executive council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) meets in The Hague.

British Ambassador Karen Pierce said the OPCW experts "agree explicitly with the UK's analysis. This was a military-grade nerve agent of high purity."

Pierce told reporters that the meeting next week would be to inform the council of the latest developments, suggesting no action would be taken.

Britain and its allies have blamed Russia for the March 4 attack that left former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in critical condition. Moscow has denied any involvement.

In an executive summary made public at Britain's request, it said "the toxic chemical was of high purity" but did not name it.

Britain named it as Novichok, a group of powerful and deadly chemical compounds developed by the Soviet government in the 1970s and 1980s.By Guy Faulconbridge and David Milliken LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May won backing from her senior ministers to take unspecified action with the United States and France to deter further use of chemical weapons by Syria after a suspected poison gas attack on civilians. After warning Russia on Wednesday of imminent military action, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was holding meetings on Syria and expected to make decisions "fairly soon." The White House said later that Trump and his national security team were continuing to assess intelligence and speak with allies, and that no final decisions had been made. Russia has warned the West against attacking its Syrian ally President Bashar al-Assad, who is also supported by Iran, and says there is no evidence of a chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma near Damascus. May recalled the ministers from their Easter holiday for the meeting in Downing Street to discuss Britain's response to what she has cast as a barbaric attack that cannot go unchallenged. May told her senior ministers on Thursday that the attack in Douma showed a "deeply concerning" erosion of international legal norms barring the use of chemical weapons. "Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime," a spokeswoman for the prime minister said in a statement after the meeting. Ministers also agreed that May should continue to work with the United States and France to come up with the right response. The statement made no specific reference to military action. Later, May's office said she had spoken with Trump by telephone, and that the two had agreed it was vital to challenge Assad's use of chemical weapons, and that they would continue to work closely together to do so. The rising tension over the Douma attack demonstrates the volatile nature of the Syrian civil war, which started in March 2011 as an anti-Assad uprising but is now a proxy conflict involving a number of world and regional powers and a myriad of insurgent groups. The attack was first reported by Syrian rebel group Jaish al-Islam on Saturday. Inspectors with the global chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, are due to investigate the incident. USA VS RUSSIA? The BBC said May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in action led by the United States without seeking prior approval from parliament. Downing Street spokesmen repeatedly declined to comment on that report. "The chemical weapons attack that took place on Saturday in Douma in Syria was a shocking and barbaric act," May told reporters on Wednesday. "All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible." May is not obliged to win parliament's approval, but a non-binding constitutional convention to do so has been established since a 2003 vote on joining the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It has been observed in subsequent military deployments in Libya and Iraq and many British lawmakers and voters are deeply skeptical of deepening involvement in the Syrian conflict. Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said parliament should be consulted before May approved military action. "Just imagine the scenario if an American missile shoots down a Russian plane, or vice-a-versa - where do we go from there?" Corbyn said. A YouGov poll published on Thursday showed just one in five British voters supported a missile strike on Syria. The poll showed 43 percent of voters opposed such a strike and 34 percent did not know what should be done. Britain has been launching air strikes in Syria from its military base in Cyprus, but only against targets linked to the Islamic State militant group. Parliament voted down British military action against Assad's government in 2013, in an embarrassment for May's predecessor, David Cameron. That then deterred the U.S. administration of Barack Obama from similar action. The war plans of British leaders have been complicated in recent years by the memory of Britain's 2003 decision to invade Iraq after asserting - wrongly, as it later turned out - that President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. But with less than a year to go until Britain leaves the European Union, May wants to deepen its "special relationship" with the United States with a wide-ranging free trade deal that would help cushion the impact of Brexit. (Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and David Milliken, Editing by Toby Chopra and Rosalba O'Brien)By Guy Faulconbridge and David Milliken

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May won backing from her senior ministers to take unspecified action with the United States and France to deter further use of chemical weapons by Syria after a suspected poison gas attack on civilians.

After warning Russia on Wednesday of imminent military action, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was holding meetings on Syria and expected to make decisions "fairly soon."

The White House said later that Trump and his national security team were continuing to assess intelligence and speak with allies, and that no final decisions had been made.

Russia has warned the West against attacking its Syrian ally President Bashar al-Assad, who is also supported by Iran, and says there is no evidence of a chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma near Damascus.

May recalled the ministers from their Easter holiday for the meeting in Downing Street to discuss Britain's response to what she has cast as a barbaric attack that cannot go unchallenged.

May told her senior ministers on Thursday that the attack in Douma showed a "deeply concerning" erosion of international legal norms barring the use of chemical weapons.

"Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime," a spokeswoman for the prime minister said in a statement after the meeting.

Ministers also agreed that May should continue to work with the United States and France to come up with the right response.

The statement made no specific reference to military action.

Later, May's office said she had spoken with Trump by telephone, and that the two had agreed it was vital to challenge Assad's use of chemical weapons, and that they would continue to work closely together to do so.

The rising tension over the Douma attack demonstrates the volatile nature of the Syrian civil war, which started in March 2011 as an anti-Assad uprising but is now a proxy conflict involving a number of world and regional powers and a myriad of insurgent groups.

Story continues

The attack was first reported by Syrian rebel group Jaish al-Islam on Saturday. Inspectors with the global chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, are due to investigate the incident.

USA VS RUSSIA?

The BBC said May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in action led by the United States without seeking prior approval from parliament. Downing Street spokesmen repeatedly declined to comment on that report.

"The chemical weapons attack that took place on Saturday in Douma in Syria was a shocking and barbaric act," May told reporters on Wednesday. "All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible."

May is not obliged to win parliament's approval, but a non-binding constitutional convention to do so has been established since a 2003 vote on joining the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

It has been observed in subsequent military deployments in Libya and Iraq and many British lawmakers and voters are deeply sceptical of deepening involvement in the Syrian conflict.

Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said parliament should be consulted before May approved military action.

"Just imagine the scenario if an American missile shoots down a Russian plane, or vice-a-versa - where do we go from there?" Corbyn said.

A YouGov poll published on Thursday showed just one in five British voters supported a missile strike on Syria. The poll showed 43 percent of voters opposed such a strike and 34 percent did not know what should be done.

Britain has been launching air strikes in Syria from its military base in Cyprus, but only against targets linked to the Islamic State militant group.

Parliament voted down British military action against Assad's government in 2013, in an embarrassment for May's predecessor, David Cameron. That then deterred the U.S. administration of Barack Obama from similar action.

The war plans of British leaders have been complicated in recent years by the memory of Britain's 2003 decision to invade Iraq after asserting - wrongly, as it later turned out - that President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

But with less than a year to go until Britain leaves the European Union, May wants to deepen its "special relationship" with the United States with a wide-ranging free trade deal that would help cushion the impact of Brexit.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and David Milliken, Editing by Toby Chopra and Rosalba O'Brien)Ottawa (Canada) (AFP) - Canada is still "several months" away from deploying peacekeepers to Mali in support of a UN mission, an official said Thursday, rejecting a UN envoy's call to accelerate its plans.

"Details regarding the final structure and chain of command of the Canadian mission in Mali are still to be determined," Byrne Furlong, spokeswoman for Canada's defense minister, told AFP.

Questions over who will command or oversee the Canadian troops and military equipment and other mission details "will be addressed during upcoming reconnaissance and negotiations with the United Nations," she said.

"It is important to keep in mind that preparing for a mission can take several months," she added.

Ottawa said in March that it would send an infantry unit, military trainers and six tactical and transport helicopters to Mali in August.

But UN envoy to Mali Mahamat Saleh Annadif said this week the helicopters are needed in June, when Germany pulls out of the mission.

He urged that Canada speed things up or that Germany delay its departure in order to avoid a vacuum.

The UN envoy also asked Canada to reconsider its objections to having Canadian soldiers join a rapid response force in the region, where conflict has claimed the lives of seven UN peacekeepers this year alone.

However, he said he has not received a reply.

The number of troops and the skill sets to be brought to the mission "will be determined as a result of the planning process and engagement with the UN, partners and the host nation," said Furlong.Havana (Cuba) (AFP) - Cuba is preparing for the end of an era next week when Raul Castro steps down as president, ending his family's six-decade grip on power and paving the way for a younger leader.

But analysts say his replacement, expected to be 57-year-old Miguel Diaz-Canel -- currently Cuba's first vice president -- won't quite be alone at the helm of the communist island.

Castro steps down on April 19th, when the National Assembly will pick Cuba's new leader, but even at the age of 86, he will still have a pivotal role as head of the all-powerful Communist Party of Cuba until its next congress in 2021.

It's a powerful perch from which he can keep a watchful eye on Cuba's restive old guard who, some fear, could try to put the brakes on his more ambitious reforms.

The incoming president "will have less power in his hands than Raul or Fidel Castro," said Jorge Duany, head of the Institute of Cuban Research at the University of Florida.

"He will have to share it with other political figures and high-ranking military."

Cuba watcher Arturo Lopez Levy said the incoming president will "need a collegial style of management" and need to be able to strike a balance between various competing factions in the new government.

Key figures who have risen through the party like 60-year-old Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, or Marino Murillo, the 57-year-old who is a key architect of Cuba's economic reforms, could play important roles in the incoming administration.

Much speculation also surrounds Raul's son, Colonel Alejandro Castro, and his ex-son-in-law Luis Alberto Lopez-Calleias, who heads the powerful military-controlled Business Administration Group (GAE).

- Continued presence -

Cuban political scientist Esteban Morales said Diaz-Canel would benefit from Raul's continued presence at the head of the communist party.

"Raul has the experience, the leadership, and the recognition to advise the government and provide coherence," Morales said.

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Even if Cuba will be without a Castro as leader for the first time since Fidel Castro led the 1959 revolution, little is likely to change immediately with the accession of Diaz-Canel.

Though he faces high expectations of deepening Castro's reforms along a set of guidelines endorsed by the party last year, analysts expect him to take a softly-softly approach.

"It won't be done in two days," said Morales, who said he doesn't see "Diaz-Canel immediately launching into a series of actions."

Having worked his way through the ranks of the party, his key task will be to ensure that the revolution is "maintained," said Morales. For that to happen, "he has to take a series of extraordinarily important measures. Otherwise, we simply don't know what could happen."

Only once since 1959 has Cuba undergone a transition at the top, when Fidel, stricken by illness, passed the baton to Raul in 2006.

"Few transitions in the history of Latin America and communist countries have been so carefully organized," said Lopez-Levy, of the University of Texas Grande Valley.

Fidel died in 2016, and now it falls to Raul, at 86, to hand over power to a new generation, the first not to have participated in the revolution.

Morales believes Diaz-Canel, with Raul looking benevolently over his shoulder, is well equipped for the challenges ahead.

"He is the youngest among the top leaders, he has many years of experience, was leader of the party in two provinces, and has been integrated in a coherent way into public life."Geneva (AFP) - Catalan separatist Marta Rovira, who fled Spain last month to escape charges over the region's breakaway bid, said in an interview published Thursday she planned to settle in Switzerland for good.

"This is a long-term decision," Rovira told Swiss daily Le Temps in an interview published on its website.

"I want to rebuild my life here with my family, and to place myself under the protection of Switzerland," she said, adding that, at this stage, she did not see the need to seek asylum.

The interview, conducted in the Geneva offices of Rovira's lawyer, confirmed reports that she had made her way to Switzerland after announcing in March she was taking "the road to exile".

Rovira, who is the deputy leader of the leftwing separatist ERC party, is one of seven pro-independence leaders who have fled abroad to avoid facing serious charges over their role in Catalonia's independence push in October 2017.

Nine others, including ERC president Oriol Junqueras, are in prison.

Catalonia's pro-independence presidential candidate Jordi Sanchez also remains in jail, after Spain's Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a request for him to be released and sworn in as regional head.

Rovira herself was placed under judicial control in February, but the judge stopped short of putting her behind bars for the duration of an ongoing probe into charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds.

"I came to Switzerland to protect myself against political persecution... If I were still in Spain, I would be behind bars right now," she said.

She pointed out that all of the pro-independence leaders who, like her, were summoned by the Supreme Court in Madrid on March 23, were now in jail.

Asked about criticism that her departure had weakened the independence movement, Rovira insisted that she had had no choice.

"I could not risk spending 20 to 30 years in prison for offences I have not committed, when my daughter is barely seven years old," she said.

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"When I was in Barcelona, I was living in an internal prison. I was constantly being followed by police in the street... I could no longer express my political views openly for fear of facing unfounded criminal charges."

"My daughter also suffered... She worried about me," she said, insisting that "today, I am much more useful since I am free."

Catalonia has been in political limbo since Spain's conservative central government imposed direct rule on the region after it unilaterally declared independence in October.

Fresh regional elections will be triggered if a new leader is not elected by May 22.

Asked what the separatists' main goal was, Rovira told Le Temps they wanted to "reestablish the foundations for the rule of law, freedom of expression, the right to demonstrate..., to reestablish the foundations for democracy."

"We are being attacked on all sides, but we are resisting. I think the future will show we were in the right."Now that so many men are being brought to account for past misbehavior, were all asking questions we never thought to ask before. One that comes up a lot is: What was he thinking? Its early yet, but Chappaquiddick, director John Currans suspenseful, disturbing account of Senator Ted Kennedys involvement in the 1969 drowning death of 28-year-old campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, may be the most What was he thinking? movie of 2018. The fact that Harvey Weinstein had a long list of enablers was bad enough. But in 1969, it wasnt an anomaly for a group of powerful men to close ranks around one of their own, making his behavior seem acceptable to the public. It was business as usual.

Curran, working from a script by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, pieces together what may very well have happened on Chappaquiddick. Jason Clarke plays the Senator from Massachusetts, who, as the movie opens, is checking on the details for a Friday-night party hes hosting on the Marthas Vineyard island. His cousin and chief fixer Joe Gargan (Ed Helms) makes the arrangements. The guests are a group of young women who had worked on the 1968 campaign of the Senators late brother Bobby, who had been assassinated the previous year. Ted was fond of these ambitious, politically astute women and wanted to show his appreciation. Their campaign nickname had been the boiler-room girls, and one of them was Kopechne (played here by a thoughtful, precise Kate Mara).

In the movies vision, theres a mild possible flirtation between Kopechne and the married Kennedy, though theres no evidence of inappropriate behavior. Impulsively, the two leave the party to drive to the beachKopechne leaves her basket-shaped handbag on the table, a small, wrenching detail. Kennedy, clearly driving while drunk, veers off a bridge into a shallow pond, flipping and submerging the car. In a horrifying, split-second shard of a shot, Kopechnes hand reaches out toward Kennedy as the vehicle flies out of his control. Theres terror in her eyes.

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Within seconds, Kennedy surfaces, distraught, calling Kopechnes name. And then, inexplicably, he trundles off the scene and heads back to the housenot to get help for his friend, but to alert the long-suffering Gargan so he can sort things out. Kennedy doesnt report the incident until late the following morning. In between, he has brunch with some friends.

The rest of the movie shows how the devious machine established by family patriarch Joe Kennedyby that point a gnarled, bedridden root vegetable with angry eyes, played here with alarming authenticity by Bruce Dernpulled off, with Teds participation, a highly implausible semi-cover-up of the incident, thus saving the Senators congressional career. (The presidency, of course, remained elusive.)

With Chappaquiddick, Curran (The Painted Veil, Tracks) walks a tricky line, deftly: Should we feel revulsion for Kennedy, the spoiled overgrown kid whose family cleaned up his messes, or sympathy for the man who was left to carry the staggering legacies of his brothers John and Bobby? Clarke makes us feel plenty of things wed rather not. His eyes are shadowed with profound decency one minute, and hollowed out in desperate calculation the next.

Theres plenty of evidence to suggest that Ted Kennedy, who died in 2009, was both haunted and motivated by his dead brothers achievements. His congressional record shows a man who fought hard for things he considered just, like the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. But what if, even more than any supposed family curse, he was haunted by the memory of a womans face, of what she looked like just before she drowned in a submerged car that he had somehow managed to escape? Although Chappaquiddick doesnt address Kennedys subsequent legislative record, its the silver-lining storm cloud that hangs over the movie. Human beings can end up doing good things for terrible reasons. How much more convenient it would be if we could just write them off altogether.Chevrolet reportedly has plans for another off-road-focused pickup in the near future, and it will more than likely wear the Colorado ZR2 Bison name.

Off-Road.com reported on Tuesday that it had uncovered a patent filed by Chevrolet earlier this month for the Colorado ZR2 Bison name. The publication expects it will arrive this year as a 2018 model with plenty of influence from the Colorado ZR2 AEV concept. The concept truck debuted at the 2017 SEMA show with a host of AEV (American Expedition Vehicles) aftermarket parts and accessories. Bison is an AEV logo.

Chevrolet showed the Colorado ZR2 Bison at the brand's dealer meeting in Las Vegas, according to a Chevy dealer. The production truck will look "nearly identical to the concept vehicle with some minor differences," the dealer source added.

The Colorado ZR2 AEV concept boasted plenty of gear to get off-road enthusiasts excited. Included on the concept truck were a new long-travel suspension from Chevrolet Performance, specially tuned Multimatic DSSV dampers, plunging front half-shafts, stiffer high-angle upper ball joints, and stiffer high-angle tie rods. With the upgrades, the concept placed a focus on overlanding, which by definition emphasizes self-reliant, long-term travel.

Upgraded mechanicals seem like the most obvious additions to the Colorado ZR2 Bison, but the ZR2 AEV concept also included underbody protection, larger fender flares, and even a refrigerator. The dealer source said the snorkel, bed rack, and air-compressor access panel from the concept truck were not on the truck shown to dealers. It's possible, however, that either Chevrolet or AEV may offer even more parts for the ZR2 Bison.

Chevrolet didn't confirm the Colorado ZR2 Bison's impending arrival when OffRoad.com reached out for comment, but it did not outright deny the news, either. Stay tuned.China has urged the U.S. not to take military action against the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who some Western governments and their allies have accused of a chemical weapons attack that Beijing said remains inconclusive.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters his government was "regretful" after competing U.N. Security Council resolutions regarding the suspected toxic gas incident in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma failed to pass. He said, however, "the pressing concern for now is to conduct a comprehensive, fair and objective investigation on the suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria to find out the truth."

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Both the U.S. and Russia backed opposing bills that both called for an investigation into the incident, but Washington's would open the door for military intervention against the Syrian military. France, Saudi Arabia and the U.K. may join the U.S. in threatening to attack Syria, despite Russian threats of retaliation and Chinese calls to resolve the matter diplomatically without violating Syrian sovereignty.

"We always believe that political settlement is the only viable way out and military means will lead to nowhere," Geng said. "China always stands for peaceful settlement of disputes, opposes wanton use or threat of use of force in international relations and acts in accordance with the U.N. Charter."

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Syrian Arab News Agency/Reuters

China has joined Russia in defending Assad's government at the U.N. since the early days of a 2011 uprising, which received support from the West, Turkey and Gulf Arab countries. While China has not played a significant military role in Syria's seven-year civil war or the multinational battle against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), it has begun to strike lucrative business deals to invest in the reconstruction of Syria as Assad reclaimed territory with help from Russia and Iran.

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Beijing has enjoyed good relations with Assad's Baathist government. Syria's location at the crossroads of the Middle East and the Mediterranean make it a potentially vital part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's One Belt, One Road initiative to expand Chinese trade routes across the world. Trump's vow to send missiles to Syria in defiance of Russian promises to bomb both U.S. missiles and their delivery vehicles threatened to destabilize already torn by conflict.

China has also cast into doubt claims that Assad was behind the alleged chemical weapons attack, calling for a more comprehensive investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Assad has invited the OPCW to inspect the site of the suspected attack and a Russian military inquiry found no toxic substances.

"Moscow and Damascus repeatedly emphasized that accusations of chemical attacks are 'lies.' The Syrian government also welcomed the U.N. delegation to investigate in Douma. The U.S. should give Bashar al-Assad's regime an opportunity to explain, and wait until the U.N. investigation to act," The Global Times, an official organ of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, wrote Wednesday, adding that the attack had the potential to spark a direct U.S.-Russia conflict.

"Although Russia's comprehensive strength has been weakened, it is seeing its strongest capacity in the Middle East. If the US refuses to respect Russia, a nuclear power, it may face terrible consequences. We hope the Trump administration thinks twice before deciding to attack Syria," it later added.

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China and Russia's militaries have sought stronger relations in recent years, participating in joint drills and exchanging official visits. Newly appointed Chinese Defense Minister Wei Feng offered his support to Moscow earlier this month, saying "the Chinese side has come to show Americans the close ties between the armed forces of China and Russia."

GettyImages-923822138

DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images

The official China Military Online also featured Wednesday an op-ed by state-run Xinhua News Agency editor Shao Jie, who said the U.S. said "it is unlikely that the U.S. will resort to large-scale military operations to try to destroy the Assad regime once and for all" and would likely pursue a more limited attack. Last April, Trump ordered a Tomahawk cruise missile attack against the Al-Shayrat air base where the U.S. suspected the Syrian air force carried out another chemical weapons attack days earlier.

China and the U.S. recently went through a tense period of their own as Trump challenged Xi to a trade war of escalating tariffs that risked devolving into a crisis between the world's two largest economies. Xi sought to calm tensions Tuesday in a speech that sought to open up the economy, but also warned of "a new Cold War and zero-sum mentality." The U.S. and China remain at odds over territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekBy Karen Lema ABOARD THE USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT, South China Sea (Reuters) - In a span of 20 minutes, 20 F-18 fighter jets took off and landed on the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, in a powerful display of military precision and efficiency. The nuclear-powered warship, leading a carrier strike group, was conducting what the U.S. military called routine training in the disputed South China Sea on Tuesday, headed for a port call in the Philippines, a defense treaty ally. The United States is not alone in carrying out naval patrols in the strategic waterway, where Chinese, Japanese and some Southeast Asian navies operate, possibly increasing tensions and risking accidents at sea. "We have seen Chinese ships around us," Rear Admiral Steve Koehler, the strike group commander, told a small group of reporters on board the three-decade-old carrier. "They are one of the navies that operate in the South China Sea but I would tell you that we have seen nothing but professional work out of the ships we have encountered." Navies in the western Pacific, including China and nine Southeast Asian countries, have been working on a code of unexpected encounters (CUES) at sea to avoid conflict. The USS Theodore Roosevelt's presence in the South China Sea comes days after China's massive air and naval drills in the area, in what some analysts described as an unusually large display of Beijing's growing naval might. China's navy on Wednesday also released a warning to other ships on social media that they would be holding drills until Friday in the region south of Sanya city in southwest China's Hainan province, without giving additional details. China's growing military presence in the waters has fueled concern in the West about Beijing's end game. The United States has criticized China's apparent militarization of manmade islands and carried out regular air and naval patrols to assert its right to freedom of navigation in stretches of a sea China claims largely as its own. "This transit in the South China Sea is nothing new in our planning cycle or in a reaction to that. It is probably by happenstance that all that is happening at the same time," said Koehler, who gave a tour of the carrier to Philippine military officials and watched flight operations aboard the 100,000-tonne warship. FUNCTION OF LAW "All of the operations that we do in and around the South China Sea or any of the bodies of water we operate in, there is a function of international law and that is ultimately what we want to recognize," Koehler said. Tension between the United States and China over trade and territory under U.S. President Donald Trump has been stepped up of late, with fear in the region that the South China Sea, vital to global trade, could one day become a battleground between the two rival powers. Philippine ties with China meanwhile have warmed under President Rodrigo Duterte, who has put aside disputes with Beijing and wants it to play a key role in building and funding urgently needed infrastructure, from highways and ports to railways and power plants. China has long objected to U.S. military operations off its coasts, even in areas Washington insists are free to international passage. "They (China) certainly have the right to exercise off their coast like we do, nor are they necessarily in charge of our transit cycle, but our deployment's been planned," Koehler said. As the crew in colour-coded uniforms raced to service dozens of aircraft taking off and landing, "handlers" in the flight deck control made sure the deck had enough room for jets to maneuver and refuel with the help of a "Ouija board". The board has all the models of each aircraft, which are marked with squadron name, model, make, and number of personnel. At any given moment, the flight deck is home to dozens of aircraft and helicopters. "It is a showcase of the capability of the U.S. armed forces," Philippine army chief Rolando Bautista said of the demonstration. "Since Americans are our friends in one way or another, they can help us deter any threat." (Additional reporting by Christian Shepherd in Beijing; Editing by Martin Petty and Nick Macfie)A Chinese baby was born by a surrogate mother four years after his parents were killed in a car accident.

Parents Shen Jie and Liu Xi froze several embryos with the intent of having a child through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 2013. Days before doctors were set to transfer one of the embryos into Liu, the couple died in a car crash in Jiangsu.

Following the incident, the couples parents embarked on a lengthy legal battle to obtain the fertilized eggs, which were being kept at a hospital in Nanjing. The soon-to-be grandparents eventually won custody and baby Tiantian was born by a Laotian surrogate last December, reported The Beijing News.

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Reuters

The legal battle was lenthy due to there being no precedent as to whether the four grandparents were entitled to inherit their childrens fertilized eggs, Chinese media noted at the time.

After a judge granted the embryos, they then encountered several other problems. The eggs were only allowed to be transferred from the Nanjing hospital if another hospital agreed to store them, but with surrogacy being against the law in China, finding an institution to facilitate proved difficult.

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The four grandparents-in-waiting eventually decided to enlist the services of a surrogacy agency in Laos, where it is legal. Due to airlines refusing to transport the small bottle of liquid nitrogen, they then had to drive the embryos down the country to Laos.

The next problem was determining the citizenship of the baby. The surrogate travelled to China on a tourist visa and gave birth on mainland territory.

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After the birth late last year, all four grandparents took DNA blood tests to confirm they were related to the boy. The results came back positive, proving the deceased parents of the boy had both been Chinese.

According to South China Morning Post, the grandparents were overjoyed that Tiantian finally made it into the world after years of stuggle and will continue on their bloodline.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekChris Pratt got his glam on for a good cause.

The actor, who will be seen later this month in Avengers: Infinity War, found himself called upon to make the day of a young fan in need. On Wednesday, he hung out with Jacob Monday, who is a 16-year-old from upstate New York who has terminal cancer. The teen, who has a rare form of bone cancer, has a bucket list hes working through and it included meeting his favorite movie star.

On the agenda for the special hangout was to get their hair and makeup done together  like real movie stars. Pratt shared a photo of them living that glam life, and Monday shared pics as well. Celebrity makeup artist Bridget Brager did the deed and the fellas sure looked pretty. They did their best silly faces too.

Monday, whose story can be found on his GoFundMe page, also wanted to increase his social media following. Yesterday, he had 170 on Instagram and now he has 112,000. The experience was an emotional one for Pratt, a father of one with ex Anna Faris, who noted, Take a moment to hug your kids.

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If it seems that the stars from your favorite superhero movies are often giving back in this way, youre right. Last month, we were touched by several of the Avengers  including Chris Evans, Don Cheadle, Paul Bettany, Mark Ruffalo, and Elizabeth Olsen, as well as Deadpools Ryan Reynolds and others  stepping up to fulfill the dying wish of 11-year-old Emilio Pachon by sending the boy videos and supportive messages. The boy died soon after.

And these arent one-offs. Pratt does a lot of work with his hometown Seattle Childrens Hospital to spread good tidings. He and Evans once had a Super Bowl bet and, as a result, both appeared at that hospital, with Evans in costume as Captain America, to cheer up kids.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:Her name was Marcia L. King, but she was known only as "Buckskin Girl"  or simply Jane Doe  for 37 years.

King was found dead in Ohio in 1981 wearing jeans and a jacket that lent her the moniker that would stick for more than three decades.

It wasn't until just days ago  thanks to new DNA and genealogy technologies  that investigators learned her name.

Law enforcement never forgets," Sheriff Dave Duchak said during the announcement.

Investigators in 1981 determined the victim had suffered blunt force trauma and been strangled before her killer ditched the woman's lifeless body in Miami County on a grisly April day.

At the time of her discovery, fingerprints were obtained and later entered into the FBIs Automated Fingerprint Identification System but the identity remained a mystery, according to a statement from the Miami County Sheriff's Office.

As years passed, identification methods improved. When DNA technology became available, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab generated the victims nuclear DNA profile in 2001.

In December 2008, the profile of Buckskin Girl was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

In 2009, her mitochondrial DNA profile was developed and both the nuclear and mitochondrial genetic profiles were entered into the FBIs Combined DNA Index System.

But as the DNA drifted through these databases, it remained a piece of an unsolved puzzle until it landed at the DNA Doe Project, a recently created nonprofit organization that applies genetic genealogy tools to the identification of unknown persons.

The victim's DNA was obtained from a blood sample that had been in storage since 1981; it was processed using advanced DNA techniques, and uploaded to a public genealogy database. The Miami County Jane Doe case was accepted as one of the first cases for the project.

The DNA Doe Project relies on genetic genealogy tools similar to those used by genealogists for analyzing DNA results normally provided by direct-to-consumer testing companies like 23andMe.

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Now that Marcia has been identified, police say they are a huge step closer to identifying the killer responsible for her untimely death. In the meantime, her family has asked for privacy in the wake of the news.

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It was billed as the downfall of Americas Nerd King, but half an hour into Day Two of Mark Zuckerbergs Capitol Hill interrogation it had become more like watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary of life on an IT helpdesk.

He might have imagined he was there to provide helpful answers to tricky questions. He soon realised he was there to be ranted at.

The format was ridiculous, of course. A vast panel of congressmen and women had assembled, and each had been allotted four minutes, and no more, to ask questions not merely of one of the most powerful and influential people on the planet, but also one who, it is alleged, has provided the platform through which a shadowy company has tricked the American people into putting a baboon in the White House.

With only four minutes to go on, you would think you might not have time to begin your questions with lengthy anecdotes about how your mother-in-law likes to use her iPad to look at photos. Or how youd once booked a hotel room for your family using a targeted advert on a website thats got absolutely nothing to do with Facebook. Or with how much your grandson loves Instagram.

It would hardly have seemed far-fetched if some congressman or other had just come out and said: Mr Zuckerberg, Im sorry to be a nuisance I really am but would you mind just having a look at my phone for me? All I want to do is get on the wifi but it says I need a password and Ive tried typing in the password and it says thats not it and honestly I hate these things I really do.

When youre talking about Facebook to the CEO of Facebook, the knowledge mismatch is always going to be grotesque, so most of his interrogators did the sensible thing and simply refused to let him speak at all.

At one point, a woman called Marsha Blackburn, a congresswoman from Tennessee, asked a 50-second long question, weaving in various complexities of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Zuckerberg got six words into his answer before being told: I wont allow you to filibuster.

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She was far from the only interrogator present to have been In a Relationship with The Sound of My Own Voice since before Facebook was invented.

In the long hours in which Zuckerberg faced questions from this vast panel, it is highly doubtful whether he spoke for an accumulated total of more than 10 minutes.

Several wanted to know why Facebook had censured some of their favourite right-wing bloggers. Another spent his full four minutes trying to extricate a promise to put an African American on Facebooks senior leadership team. An important issue, of course, but its not what hes there for.

Much is said and written about on new subjects like information architecture. How the structure of the platforms on which the modern world communicates influence the nature of that communication. Give people just 140 characters, for example, let them cloak themselves in anonymity and then give them direct access to the worlds rich and famous, and you have built a platform absolutely fine-tuned for vicious personal abuse.

It is imagined these are modern, technological problems. And wrongly so, we now know. The Congressional Committee predates Information Technology itself, and yet it had come up with this ingenious structure, honed to ensure that absolutely no information of any value whatsoever could be extracted at all.

That, in his two days on Capitol Hill, Facebooks once amiable, jocular turbogeek appears to have transmogrified into a paranoid ghostly cyborg version of himself surely cannot be due to the fear of what he might have to face from a political class who showed themselves to know vanishingly small amounts about the topic at hand.

Rather, one gets the sense that Zuckerberg understands better than anyone else the truly terrifying potential of what he has created. That, with the willing help of his algorithms, a smart phone-addicted cretin sits in the Whitehouse, dragging the world towards all-out war in response to what hes watching on breakfast TV.

Either that, or he thinks its all very unfair. After all, here he is carrying the can for all the worlds problems when its not Facebook that Donald Trump is straight on every morning threatening to bomb the Middle East before hes even brushed his teeth. Its Twitter. Whos giving the Twitter guys a hard time? If theres nuclear Armaggedon coming, its on their watch not his.

At the start, he had told them that Facebook was an optimistic and idealistic company, that it took its responsibilities seriously. That he had made a big mistake in not taking seriously enough its responsibility to police the kind of information that was being shared on its network.

My own knowledge of Facebook and data and algorithms and one of the most complex stories in decades is less than encyclopaedic. But I did think it was incredibly obvious a couple of years ago when Facebook launched and aggressively promoted a new feature called Facebook Live, allowing users to broadcast themselves to their friends and the wider world as if they had their own live TV channel, that it would encourage psychopaths into committing and broadcasting horrific acts of violence. And sure enough, someone was arrested in North Carolina and charged with committing murder on Facebook Live in February of this year.

The mere fact that Zuckerberg needs to be dragged to Washington in order to put on the record that he takes his responsibilities seriously is far more revealing of just how seriously he takes them than anything any grandstanding politician allowed him a spare second to utter.

One congresswoman, Jan Schakowsky, simply read a list of all the times, from 2001 onwards, that Zuckerberg has been forced to make grovelling public apologies. It was not a short list, and though she didnt quite go so far as to let him speak, its fair to say it said more than he would have done.About two hours into a Senate hearing on April 10, Mark Zuckerberg was asked if he would like to take a break. He was in the midst of a rare spectacle: two powerful committees, with a total of 44 Senators, were holding a joint hearing to grill a single CEO. So when Zuckerberg responded by saying he wasnt tired yet, the packed room broke into laughter. The levity didnt last long. What happened here was, in effect, willful blindness, said Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, the next at bat, as he pressed the 33-year-old Facebook founder on exactly how a political marketing firm called Cambridge Analytica ended up with data from some 87 million users profiles without their consent. It was heedless, he went on, and reckless.

In Silicon Valley, heedlessness and recklessness have traditionally been seen as virtuesFacebooks early internal rallying cry was move fast and break thingsand necessary precursors for innovation. But a long-simmering reality check is coming to a head across the high-tech industry. While privacy concerns and even large-scale data breaches are nothing new, experts say the fracas at Facebook has brought the dilemma of increasingly powerful technology into better focus. Being these networked citizens of the world, its kind of a struggle, at times, to say why we care about privacy, says Urs Gasser, executive director at Harvards Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. But in this case, there is this element that the data about us is suddenly used to manipulate us in our decisionmaking and somehow mess with our democracy.

The concerns go beyond social networking. Over two days at two hearings in both chambers, members of Congress aired grievances not just about Zuckerbergs company but also the ills of Google and Twitter, the lack of diversity in the industry and the lack of rural fiber-optic cable. In calls for closer scrutiny of firms from Apple to Amazon, some see a coming techlash. And by the time he appeared on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg seemed to have grasped that. As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool for staying connected, he said. But its clear now that we didnt do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.

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During the hearings, Zuckerberg touted changes the company is already making to enhance privacy and transparency. He made promises to root out bad actors, to take responsibility for unsavory content on the platform and to fight meddling in elections that are coming up this year. The unanswered question: Who exactly is going to hold him to it?

Although Congress has been loath to regulate big technology firms, many lawmakers are now arguing that legislation is the answer. Congress has an obligation in this moment to protect American citizens and national security, Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, tells TIME. We cant let that be done, as well-intentioned as they may be, by 30-year-old entrepreneurs.

Legislation was brought up repeatedly at the hearings, but sweeping new laws from Congress remain more of a threat than a promise, especially while the GOP is in charge. The party is deeply allergic to business regulation, and Congress is always playing catch-up to technology, so statutes it writes can quickly become outdated. Many fear that a broad law affecting the tech sector might end up freezing us in time so the Internet cant develop and people dont feel like they can innovate, says Corynne McSherry, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group. Some lawmakers worry that rules dictating whats allowed online could chill free speech and stifle companies that have created thousands of jobs, as well as extremely useful tools.

Behemoths like Google and Facebook also have influential arms in Washington that can try to convince lawmakers that strict rules arent necessary, especially if they might compromise some of their constituents most-used products. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Facebook spent $11.5 million on lobbying in 2017. Alphabet, Googles parent company, spent more than any other single company, at $18 million. The companies and their employees also contributed millions to the campaigns of Democrats and Republicans in 2016. Saying lawmakers should regulate tech, as one Washington veteran put it, is about as simple as saying, Lets legislate on energy.

At the hearings, Zuckerberg expressed some openness to new rules from Congress. My position is not that there should be no regulation, he said, while emphasizing that the U.S. needs to debate the nature of the oversight. Ideas being floated for bills range from requirements for greater disclosure in online political advertising to enhanced protections for minors. Many lawmakers are calling for tech companies to rewrite terms-of-service agreements in plain English, so users have a better idea of what bargains theyre getting into when they sign up for free services. And industry experts want defaults to be opt-in, so users proactively choose when to share their data. Khanna says he plans to introduce an Internet bill of rights. Leaving the difficulties of enforcement aside, those principles might include a right to know which companies have data about you, the right to delete that information and the right to be notified when there is a data breach.

Facebook users were getting alerts that their data had been compromised as Zuckerberg headed to Washington, although the breach of trust occurred years before. The company has said the 87 million user profiles were attained by Cambridge Analytica, which had ties to the 2016 election campaign of Donald Trump, because a researcher improperly sold that information after collecting it in 2013 under the auspices of doing academic work.

The scandal is bad enough that a bipartisan group of 37 state attorneys general has also launched an inquiry into the matterwhich might lead to an update in state laws regarding privacyas has the Federal Trade Commission, the agency charged with protecting Americans from unfair and deceptive business practices. GOP staffers say that many Republican members will be citing the FTC investigation as a key reason to hold off on legislation, with hopes that Americas consumer watchdog will prove it has sufficient authority to keep tech firms in check.

At the hearings, many lawmakers questioned whether Facebook can really change so long as its business model depends on monetizing users data to sell ads. Some suggested that more competition might lead to better options. Zuckerberg, while defending the model as a means of making the product free and therefore affordable to everyone, suggested he would be open to outside experts helping to check up on the companys practices. But the billionaire almost always stopped short of offering support for specific proposals, repeating that the details matter.

The CEOs hedging rubbed some lawmakers the wrong way. I dont want to vote to have to regulate Facebook, but by God I will, said Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana. You can go back home, spend $10 million on lobbyists and fight us. Or you can go back home and help us solve this problem.Cynthia Nixons campaign for governor continues with her latest video about why she supports legalizing the use of recreational marijuana in New York.

There are a lot of good reasons for legalizing marijuana, but for me, it comes down to this: We have to stop putting people of color in jail for something that white people do with impunity, said Nixon in a video posted on Twitter Wednesday.

Nixon, who in March announced her run against incumbent governor Andrew Cuomo in the upcoming Democratic primary, notes in the video that 80 percent of New Yorkers arrested for marijuana are black or Latino.

The simple truth is, for white people, the use of marijuana has effectively been legal for a long time, she says. Isnt it time we legalize it for everybody else?

A lot of you have been asking about my position on marijuana. Here it is. pic.twitter.com/iEKLHgClFN  Cynthia Nixon (@CynthiaNixon) April 11, 2018

While Nixon has spoken out about recreational legalization in New York before, this discussion on how it correlates to the issue of racial inequality is particularly refreshing and needed.

The gubernatorial candidate and former actress goes on to say in her campaign video that white people and people of color use marijuana at roughly the same rates. Yet black people in New York are arrested or detained for marijuana 4.5 times more than white people, according to a report by the ACLU.

The consequences follow people for the rest of their lives, making it harder to get jobs or housing, and for noncitizens, putting them in the crosshairs of deportation, she says.

80% of New Yorkers arrested for marijuana are black or Latino. pic.twitter.com/pAjugEXXum  Cynthia Nixon (@CynthiaNixon) April 11, 2018

The 52-year-old also says that legalizing would generate millions of dollars in tax revenue and create new agricultural opportunities for New Yorks farmers.

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Currently, eight other states and Washington, D.C., have legalized marijuana for recreational use. New York state does have a medical marijuana program, though it is extremely restrictive.

Cynthia Nixon speaks to people at the Bethesda Healing Center in Brooklyn, New York, on March 20, 2018. (Photo: TIMOTHY A. CLARY via Getty Images)

Current New York governor Andrew Cuomo (D) had previously called marijuana a gateway drug in 2017, though his stance has since shifted slightly. In January 2018, Cuomo proposed a study in his 2018 budget plan that explores the potential impacts of recreational marijuana use in New York State.

Of the study, Cuomo said: If it was legalized in Jersey and it was legal in Massachusetts and the federal government allowed it to go ahead, what would that do to New York, because its right in the middle? This is an important topic, its a hotly debated topic, pardon the pun, and itd be nice to have the facts in the middle of the debate once in a while.

The study will now move forward after the states $168 million state budget was approved in March.

Nixon is slated to challenge Cuomo in the Democratic primary on Sept. 13.

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

Also on HuffPost

1969: Little Support For Legalizing Marijuana

1969: Americans Weigh In On The Effects Of Marijuana

1971: Half Of Parents Would Turn In Their Children

1971: Worse Than Middle-Aged Drunks

1974: 38% Think The Younger Generation Will 'Grow Out Of' Marijuana

1978: Narrow Majority Supports Firing Aides Who Smoke

1986: In Retrospect...

1986: Three-Quarters Of Americans Say It'd Be Easy To Buy Marijuana

1987: 'Stoned' or 'High'

1987: Nearly One-Third Of Americans Are Kind Of A Buzzkill

1992: Voters Don't Believe Clinton Didn't Inhale

1999: Half Of Americans Think Smoking Warrants Impeachment

2013: 'Weed' And 'Pot' Beat 'Ganja' And 'Reefer'

2013: A Majority Supports Legalization For The First Time

2015: Few Care About Candidates' Marijuana Usage

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Prague (Czech Republic) (AFP) - The ANO movement of billionaire Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said Thursday it would snub the far-right SPD party for talks on support to its government in a bid to end a drawn-out political crisis.

Instead, ANO, which has 78 seats in the 200-member parliament following a landslide win in last October's general election, will go back to negotiations with the leftwing Social Democrats (CSSD).

"The ANO (leaders) entrust the negotiating team to resume talks with the CSSD," Babis tweeted.

"If ANO wants to resume talks with the CSSD, we will be happy to hear their ideas. The CSSD is always open to serious talks in favour of this country and its people," tweeted for his part CSSD chairman Jan Hamacek.

Talks between ANO and the CSSD failed last week as the parties -- which formed the previous Czech cabinet together with the small centrist Christian Democrats -- were unable to strike a deal on ministerial posts.

With the talks stalled, President Milos Zeman -- a pro-Russian, pro-Chinese, anti-Muslim veteran leftwinger -- advised Babis to turn to the far-right SPD party and the Communists for backing.

But analysts warned cooperation with the SPD, an openly anti-EU, anti-Muslim party led by Tokyo-born entrepreneur Tomio Okamura, might hurt Babis's business interests in western Europe, and quite a few ANO members were against it too.

"The SPD is not a good option, it will hurt ANO, it will hurt the whole country," ANO lawmaker Rostislav Vyzula told reporters before Thursday's talks.

Snubbed by potential partners over his murky past, Babis, the second-wealthiest Czech, formed a minority government last autumn, but his team of ANO members and unaffiliated experts failed to win a confidence vote in January and resigned.

It continues to carry out work until a new cabinet is named.

A coalition government of ANO and the CSSD would likely need the parliamentary support of the Communists as the two parties together muster a mere 93 parliamentary seats and the Communists have said they are willing to support such a cabinet.

Politicians have turned their backs on Babis, a food, chemicals and media tycoon who is facing criminal charges for alleged EU subsidy fraud. He is also dogged by allegations that he served as a Communist secret police agent before the Iron Curtain fell in 1989.

Zeman, who was elected to a second five-year term in January, has two attempts to name a prime minister under the constitution, with the third going to the parliament speaker who is an ANO member.Khartoum (Sudan) (AFP) - Although Sudan has vowed to remain in the Saudi-led coalition fighting rebels in Yemen, calls for Khartoum to withdraw its troops from the war-torn country have increased after a deadly ambush.

Dozens of Sudanese soldiers were reportedly killed by Huthi rebels in northern Yemen in an ambush last week, Yemeni military sources said. The insurgents reported the attack on their Al-Masirah website.

The losses are reported to be one of the heaviest suffered by Sudan since deploying hundreds of soldiers in 2015 as part of an Arab coalition fighting on the side of the Yemeni government.

Khartoum has neither confirmed nor denied the report.

But photographs, purportedly of soldiers killed in the ambush, have been posted on social media, making opposition leaders and analysts question President Omar al-Bashir's decision to join the Saudi-led coalition.

"People ask... 'What benefit have we got from this major decision?' -- and they have no answer," Ghazi Salaheddin, a former minister of state for foreign affairs turned opposition leader, told AFP.

Before "we didn't have a single drop of bloodshed between them and Sudanese ... Now Sudanese are involved in combat with Yemenis."

The ambush has triggered online outrage against the coalition, with activists and citizens taking to Twitter and Facebook urging Khartoum to withdraw its troops.

"Bring back our sons and brothers! Why are we fighting a war that is not ours?" activist Islam Saleh wrote on Facebook.

- Parliament sidelined -

Bashir's decision to deploy troops came after a major foreign policy shift by Sudan that saw Khartoum break its decades-old ties with Shiite Iran and join the Saudi-led coalition.

Deploying troops means casualties and so a decision like this needs parliament's backing, said Salaheddin.

"Which is not the case here," he said, pointing to what he called a "lack of parliamentary support and... no clear political objectives" to the deployment of troops.

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The alliance was launched to push back the Iran-allied Huthis, who seized control of much of Yemen including the capital Sanaa, and to restore the internationally recognised Yemeni government.

Bashir, who came to power in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989, has said that joining the coalition was an "ideological" move.

"From the beginning, they said it was an ideological decision aimed at protecting the holy sites in Saudi Arabia," said Khaled al-Tijani, editor of Elaff newspaper, referring to Mecca and Medina.

"I don't think it's Sudan's job to protect the holy sites."

Sudanese also doubt the intentions of Saudi Arabia, Tijani said, as several high-ranking Saudi officials have visited neighbouring Cairo but not Khartoum.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Cairo last week and agreed on massive investments in Egypt, which is also a member of the coalition but has not deployed troops.

"Saudi Arabia helped Egypt with tens of billions of dollars but Sudan has received peanuts... People feel it's a type of discrimination," said Tijani.

"There is not enough compensation for Sudan from this strategic relationship as it is shedding blood in Yemen for this coalition," he said.

For Tijani, the losses in the Yemen ambush were proof of a foreign policy "failure" by Khartoum.

- Foreign policy failure -

Khartoum has not disclosed how many troops it has deployed but insists it will remain in the coalition.

"I renew my commitment that our troops will continue with their mission within the Arab coalition until it achieves its noble goal," Bashir said last week.

Foreign Minister Ibrahim Ghandour reaffirmed the pledge at a meeting with envoys of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt on Tuesday at which the diplomats offered condolences to families of Sudan's "martyrs" in Yemen.

Some experts say Sudan will ultimately benefit.

"Sudanese troops are guarding borders between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which is why Saudi Arabia is in need of the Sudanese military," said columnist Ahmed Al-Noor.

"In the long term, Sudan will benefit."Over the past two days, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been bombarded with pointed questions and statements about the many missteps of the social media platform. But one thing that seems to be top in the minds of congresspeople is the duo Diamond and Silk.

SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook testimony turned into a lesson of how the internet works

If you had no idea who these two women were before Wednesday's hearing, you'd be forgiven for being confused as to why they seemed to be a bigger deal than Russia's use of Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Diamond and Silk are social media personalities who claim that, last fall, it was getting more difficult to alert fans of new videos. Last week, the pair claimed that Facebook told them their videos were "unsafe" though the company didn't elaborate. And that's put the spotlight on them during Zuckerberg's trip to Capitol Hill.

.@DiamondandSilk have been corresponding since September 7, 2017, with @facebook (owned by Mark Zuckerberg), about their bias censorship and discrimination against D&S brand page. Finally after several emails, chats, phone calls, appeals, beating around the bush, lies, and......  Diamond and Silk (@DiamondandSilk) April 7, 2018

Here's what you need to know about Diamond and Silk and their 15 seconds in the national limelight.

Who are Diamond and Silk?

In Republican circles, Diamond and Silk are a big deal. The North Carolina-based sisters share their videos across multiple platforms, including YouTube and Facebook, and have been vocal supporters of Trump since the earliest days of his presidential campaign.

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They spoke at some of Trump's campaign rallies and even got presidential shoutouts from Trump's Twitter account in summer 2016.

Thank you Diamond and Silk! https://t.co/qdsLUy2hqD  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2016

They're so popular, they recently spoke at Liberty University and were treated like rock stars at the 2016 Republican National Convention where they even shared the stage with the notorious Milo Yiannopoulos.

Perhaps their most infamous appearance so far is their rap video they posted in response to Eminem's much-lauded freestyle slam of Trump that aired at the 2017 BET Hip Hop awards.

That the pair is African-American sets them apart from many of the other Republican talking heads. After all, Trump only garnered 8% of the black vote in 2016. But the sisters insist that it's not about race.

On their website, they say:

That's not to say that the pair have shied away from discussions of race.

Whatever you think of Diamond and Silk's approach  a no-nonsense attitude that eschews political correctness and mixes in humor  they manage to connect with their target audience in a relatable way that's proven to be big-league successful. They even got the Rolling Stone treatment in 2016.

Their outspoken personalities make sense when you learn that their parents were televangelists. They also have mastered the art of the dodge, being able to bat away personal questions or pointed observations about Trump.

A large following rallies support

The pair are hugely popular with a big, vocal following: over 140,000 YouTube subscribers, 642,000 Twitter followers, 1.4 million Facebook followers, and 179,000 followers on Instagram. Of course some of those may be Russians or bots or Russian bots.

But they've become the latest cause celebre amongst the crowd that believes that Zuckerberg and Facebook have long sought to tamp down conservative voices. That Facebook actually did at one point downplay conservative site links on their platform only stiffens the resolve of those who claim censorship.

Four different congresspersons  all four Republican  brought up the censorship of Diamond and Silk's Facebook page on Wednesday. Zuckerberg responded to a question about the alleged censorship by saying, "in that specific case, our team made an enforcement error. And we have already gotten in touch with them to reverse it."

But it's not so easy. With such a large following, the pair have gotten plenty of notice from Fox News and even garnered vocal support this week from Roseanne Barr. And they even made a recent appearance on Trump's favorite television show, Fox and Friends.

They've already proven to have staying power and now they're the new martyrs for the right's cries of censorship, offering a far more palatable, family-friendly narrative than the alt-right trolls that have been swept off Twitter.

With this new controversy, the spotlight on them will only grow and, with it, likely their popularity among conservatives. Whether or not their case will continue to be a thorn in Zuckerberg's side is unknown, but don't be surprised if the pair are able to leverage it to continue their journey into the right-wing stratosphere.Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert has resigned. - Bloomberg

Donald Trump's homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, has resigned amid a shakeup of the administration's foreign policy team.

The resignation comes a day after John Bolton, Mr Trump's new foreign policy hawk, took up his role at the White House.

The hardliner is expected to shake up the national security team, hinting at a change in foreign policy approach.

On Thursday Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, is expected to be sworn in as the new secretary of state.

Both Mr Bolton, who served as George W Bush's UN ambassador, and Mr Pompeo, are known for their hawkish foreign policy views that are more in line with Mr Trump's stances.

The turnover rate of top White House staff under Mr Trump is far higher than any of his recent predecessors, according to academic research.

Just this Sunday Mr Bossert had done a round of media interviews on US television networks to comment on the suspected Syrian chemical attack in his capacity as a White House official.

Appearing on US network ABC, Mr Bossert said no options should be taken "off the table" in response to the attack.

He said: "I would note the timing of this, its the first thing that struck me, this is the one year anniversary of our action the last time they made the mistake of using these weapons and pushing the rest of the world.

"I wouldnt take anything off the table. These are horrible photos".

Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, said: The President is grateful for Toms commitment to the safety and security of our great country.

"Tom led the White Houses efforts to protect the homeland from terrorist threats, strengthen our cyber defenses, and respond to an unprecedented series of natural disasters. President Trump thanks him for his patriotic service and wishes him well.

In recent weeks Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, Gary Cohn, Mr Trump's top economics adviser, and Hope Hicks, his communications director, have all left the administration.

John Dowd, Mr Trump's lawyer, also quit amid reports he feared the president was no longer following his advice.

Mr Trump is thought to have orchestrated the change to his top foreign policy advisers ahead of his face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. The US president has previously said a meeting with the regime may take place as early as May or June.Cairo (Egypt) (AFP) - Egyptian former anti-corruption chief Hisham Geneina will face military trial after saying a presidential candidate he supported had documents damning to state officials, his lawyer said on Thursday.

The military had detained Geneina in February following his remarks in an interview with Huffpost Arabi, the Arabic version of the US news site.

He will stand trial on April 16 on charges of "spreading news that harms the armed forces," his lawyer Ali Taha said.

Geneina had been a top campaign aide to Sami Anan, whom the military also detained after he announced he would stand in last month's presidential election against incumbent Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who won overwhelmingly.

Geneina had said the documents Anan allegedly possessed "revolve around political events and crises Egyptian society has passed through" since the January 2011 uprising which toppled veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak.

He said they were held at a "secure" place abroad and could be released if Anan is harmed.

Moataz Wadnan, the journalist who conducted the interview, has also been arrested.Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Egypt on Thursday opened its largely sealed border with the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip for three days, on the eve of more planned protests against Israel, Palestinian authorities said.

In just the fourth such opening this year, the Rafah crossing to Egypt's Sinai region will be open until Saturday for humanitarian cases, the interior ministry in Gaza said.

An AFP photographer saw a first busload of 70 people, including women and children, crossing on Thursday morning.

The opening comes ahead of a third consecutive Friday of planned mass protests along the Gaza-Israel border.

Israeli media reports have said Egypt, one of only two Arab countries to have signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state, had been negotiating with Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas to seek to calm the crisis.

Thirty-two Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli forces since March 30 as thousands have approached the border fence and clashes have erupted.

Israel says its forces have opened fire to stop attempts to damage the fence, infiltrations, bids to carry out attacks and at those seeking to harm soldiers.

Palestinians say protesters are being shot while posing no threat to soldiers.

The Rafah crossing is the only exit for Gaza residents except into Israel, but Egypt has largely sealed it in recent years, citing security threats.

Egyptian authorities have had a strained relationship with Hamas, which began as an offshoot of Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood.

For more than a decade, Israel has imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza that critics say amounts to collective punishment of the coastal territory's two million Palestinians.

Israel says the blockade is necessary to isolate Hamas, with which it has fought three wars since 2008.

In October, Egypt brokered a reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, that was supposed to see the Islamists give up power in Gaza.

But the deal has collapsed, with the two Palestinian groups trading blame.CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's former anti-corruption chief has been referred to a military court for trial on charges of spreading false news harmful to the military establishment, his lawyer said Thursday. Hisham Genena ran alongside former military chief-of-staff Sami Anan as a member of his short-lived presidential campaign before the latter was detained in January and accused by the army of running for office without permission, bringing his bid to a halt. Genena was arrested and put under investigation by the military prosecutor in February over comments he had allegedly made in an interview with the HuffPost Arabi news website. In the interview, Genena said Anan possessed documents that were damning of senior Egyptian officials. He gave no details. Anan's lawyer criticized Genena and wrote on his Facebook page that statements Genena made were "completely untrue". He did not say which statements he referred to (nL8N1Q34M0). The former auditor was beaten up outside his home shortly after Anan's arrest and has accused the government of being behind his assault. His alleged assailants said his injuries were the result of a fight after a car accident. Genena's lawyer, Ali Taha, gave no further details about the charges he faced. He is due in court on April 16. Family members say he is depressed and in poor physical condition. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was re-elected in April with 97 percent of the vote. (Reporting by Cairo bureau; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress is developing legislation to overhaul the way the government lends money for foreign development projects, something lawmakers said on Wednesday was necessary to counter China's growing influence.

The House of Representatives is expected in the coming weeks to vote on, and likely pass, the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development Act and would create a new organisation - the U.S. Development Finance Institution (DFI) - consolidating the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and other development finance organizations.

They lend money for projects in developing countries such as energy, port and water infrastructure.

A companion bill has also been introduced in the Senate. Both measures have bipartisan support.

Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee told a hearing on Wednesday that OPIC needed to be modernized to keep up with China's increasing investment in Africa and throughout the world.

"The U.S. can't and shouldn't match China's investments dollar for dollar, but we can and should do more to support international economic development with partners who have embraced the private sector-driven development model," Representative Ed Royce, the committee's Republican chairman, said.

Last month, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on a trip to Africa that nations there should be careful not to forfeit their sovereignty when they accept loans from China. The United States is Africa's leading aid donor, but China is the continent's biggest trading partner.

Republican Representative Ted Yoho, an author of the bill, said Washington's relationships needed to shift "from aid to trade."

"We just need a vehicle that we can change the dynamics. And we haven't had a major reform to OPIC, which was started in '71, for the last 40, 50 years," he said.

OPIC, which aims to advance U.S. interests by lending to overseas business ventures, has come under fire from critics who say private banks are best suited to make investment decisions. Last year, President Donald Trump proposed cutting funding for any new OPIC projects, although the agency makes money for the U.S. government.

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This year, his administration has been pushing for the creation of the DFI.

The administration asked Congress for $96 million in administrative expenses and $38 million for credit programming and other tools for the new organisation. However, Ray Washburne, OPIC's president, testified to the committee on Wednesday that it is expected the DFI would make hundreds of millions of dollars for the U.S. Treasury.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 10, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election. (AP Photo, Alex Brandon)

During Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerbergs visit to the Senate on Tuesday, the European Unions General Data Protection Act, known as GDPR, was the elephant in the room.

The landmark legislation, going into effect on May 25, was only mentioned by name once in response to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) asking whether Zuckerberg believed European regulations should be applied here in the U.S.

Zuckerberg gracefully responded some version of no, but added that Facebook would roll out affirmative consent controls required in GDPR. Were doing that around the world, he said, regardless of what the regulatory outcome is.

Anyone familiar with a 10-K, an annual report the SEC requires companies to file, knows that risk factors is one of the most interesting chapters in an otherwise rather dry document. In Facebooks, it plainly references the European regulation, noting its severe penalties for non-compliance. With penalties up to 4% of global revenue, there is no doubt that neither Facebook nor its chief executive enjoys the European regulations.

Throughout his Congressional testimony on Wednesday and Thursday, lawmakers threatened Zuckerberg with a if you dont fix it, well fix it for you approach, with Republicans adding gravitas by reminding the CEO that in general they dont like regulations.

A consensus has emerged in the Beltway based on the lawmakers shaky grasp of Facebook and the lack of a unified vision for regulation: nothing much will happen, probably.

An American GDPR is probably not coming, and Facebook can keep it away

Scott Vernick, a trial lawyer at Fox Rothschild, who deals in tech and privacy law, considers this to be a bit of a reprieve for Big Data, a moment they can have to self-regulate, which Congress showed may actually not be too late.

The grand bargain is being re-examined  free services for your data, Vernick told Yahoo Finance. But for the private sector, he continued, and particularly for data-rich companies and social media platforms, they have a window now to take the initiative to get their house in order. If they dont, I think someone else is going to do it for them.

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The companies of Big Data  Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, to name a few  have already prepared for GDPRs arrival, to fall in compliance with the new law. In February, Yahoo Finance spoke to GDPR experts like Lydia de la Torre, a fellow at Santa Clara University School of Law and former privacy counsel for eBay, who expressed doubt that Facebook or other companies would roll out GDPR-mandated tools for users outside of Europe.

The U.S., for example, would likely not get the tools to take control of data.

But with the Cambridge Analytica scandal rocking Facebooks foundation, the landscape has changed enough for Zuckerberg to say over and over again to lawmakers: were doing some of the stuff in GDPR on our own.

An aide to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg closes a binder of notes left on the table as Zuckerberg takes a short break from testifying before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 10, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Zuckerbergs hearing notes, photographed by an AP photographer, had a few bullet points on GDPR  capped off with (Dont say we already do what GDPR requires) in bold. The rest of the points were essentially what he told the government: the company would be putting in place better consent forms and will revamp the terms of service so the bargain is clear.

Theres a real opportunity right now, not just for Facebook, but for any data-rich company generally to take the initiative, said Vernick. Be very aggressive and very public and transparent putting in place something like GDPR  call it GDPR lite, or whatever  so the company is controlling its destiny.

The initiative, Vernick notes, is important. Regulation would obviously include fines for non-compliance, because why even have regulation otherwise? Even if you dont have fines, Vernick said, when the government tells you to do it, obviously thats different. If this move staves wards off government intervention  and helps rebuild user trust  it have been be worth it.

So when will this GDPR lite happen? One of the more savvy lawmakers, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.), asked Zuckerberg to shine a little light on when exactly American users will have the similar protections to GDPR.

All McNerney was able to get out of the CEO was a were working on it, indicating that it probably wont be in place when the Europeans get it next month. But with Congress watching, un-unified and on their back feet, Facebook probably wont need to be told twice.



Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann. Confidential tip line: FinanceTips[at]oath[.com].

A sweeping regulation will change how Europe uses the internet

GDPR could crush media business modelsMiami (AFP) - Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz wants to donate his inheritance -- which could run to hundreds of thousands of dollars or more -- to the bereaved families and survivors of his attack, his lawyers said Wednesday.

Cruz walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the south Florida city of Parkland on February 14 and opened fire at students and staff with an AR-15-style semi-automatic weapon.

He stands accused of 17 counts of premeditated murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

At a court hearing on Wednesday, Broward County Judge Elizabeth Scherer sought to determine whether Cruz -- who has so far been represented by public defenders -- is able to pay for his own defense.

His lawyers said they have not yet been able to determine the value of the inheritance left to him following the death of his mother Lynda Cruz last November -- though local reports quoting the family which took him in following his mother's death have said he could have a trust fund worth $800,000.

But his legal team suggested any wealth that may be discovered should go to Cruz's victims rather than expensive lawyers.

"Mr. Cruz does not want those funds, whatever money that he is entitled to," said lawyer Melissa McNeill.

"He does not want that money. He would like that money donated to an organization that the victims' family believes would be able to facilitate healing in our community or an opportunity to educate our community about the issues that have ripened over the last four or five months," she added.

Cruz -- who was present for the hearing in Fort Lauderdale, which is near Parkland -- stared blankly at the floor, his hands and feet cuffed.

"Let it go to those who have been hurt, period," another member of his legal team, Howard Finkelstein, asked the judge.

Cruz's wealth currently consists of 24 Microsoft stocks worth about $2,200 from which he receives dividends, and he is entitled to $25,000 from his mother's life insurance, which he has not yet obtained.

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In addition, his mother, who died from a respiratory illness, received an annuity of $3,333 in September to an account she shared with Nikolas. The source of these funds have not been revealed.

But his lawyers have yet to determine whether the installments are paid monthly or yearly and whether Cruz is entitled to it.

If it is monthly, the defendant could have access to "a million dollars," Finkelstein said.

But if it is annual, the amount would be insignificant for what "in this moment right now is the highest profile case of America" with costs expected to run into hundreds of thousands dollars, according to his lawyers, excluding civil suits.

Judge Scherer said she would decide on the matter of Cruz's indigence before April 27, when a hearing is scheduled to set the trial's schedule.

Cruz had told the couple who took him in following his mother's death he would inherit at least $800,000 from his parents, with most of the funds becoming available when he turned 22, according to local press.

The inheritance has not yet been executed, however, and it is unclear what Cruz and his brother Zachary really have.Jupiter's north pole is unsettling, at best. It's comprised of one giant storm encircled by eight spinning cyclones  all of which have larger diameters than the moon.

Fortunately, this nightmarish place orbits as far as 600 million miles away from Earth. But for those willing, NASA scientists have made a 3D tour through the tempestuous clouds.

SEE ALSO: NASA's TESS is going to be your new favorite space mission

Unveiled Wednesday at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, the 1 minute and 20-second plunge through what appears to be hell's inferno is composed of images taken by a camera aboard the Juno spacecraft, which is currently orbiting the planet.

Describing Jupiter's north pole (or atmosphere generally) as hell, however, is misleading, as it's quite cold. The bright yellow clouds are around 9 degrees Fahrenheit, while the dark red clouds plummet down to minus-181 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NASA.

Juno caught these images of Jupiter's north pole during its during its fourth close pass by the planet. The camera used, JIRAM, is an infrared camera, so it can capture clouds 45 miles down from the cloud tops during either day or night (infrared is a non-visible form of light).

Prior to Juno's arrival at Jupiter in 2016, Jupiter largely remained a mystery.

An artist's conception of the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter.

Image: Nasa

"Before Juno, we could only guess what Jupiters poles would look like, Alberto Adriani, Juno co-investigator from the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome, said in a statement.

Now, with Juno flying over the poles at a close distance it permits the collection of infrared imagery on Jupiters polar weather patterns and its massive cyclones in unprecedented spatial resolution.

So far, Juno has mapped about a third of the planet, having travelled some 122 million miles during 11 close passes by Jupiter's roiling clouds.

Story continues

Juno will dive in for its twelfth (terrifying) pass on May 24.Tianjin (China) (AFP) - A former top Chinese Communist Party official who was once tipped for a leadership post pleaded guilty to accepting millions in bribes at his trial Thursday, the latest senior cadre to fall in President Xi Jinping's sweeping anti-corruption crusade.

Sun Zhengcai, a former Politburo member and party chief of the southwestern mega-city of Chongqing, was accused of taking advantage of his position to seek profits for others and illegally accepting money, according to the court's Weibo account.

Sun and his alleged associates were also charged with accepting money and goods worth 170 million yuan ($27 million) in return for providing help to unspecified organisations and individuals with engineering contracts, business operations and other matters, according to the No.1 Intermediate People's Court in the northern city of Tianjin.

Sun pleaded guilty and "expressed penitence", the court said, adding that it would make a ruling at a later date.

The court said more than 130 people attended the trial, including members of the country's top political advisory body and media.

But some 20 plainclothes officers prevented an AFP reporter from entering the court and surrounded the journalist for more than 20 minutes, saying she should have registered to attend the hearing in advance. One officer pushed the journalist and shouted.

Sun, 54, had once been tipped for promotion to the Politburo's elite seven-member standing committee, which rules the country and is presided over by Xi.

As the youngest Politburo member, Sun was even seen in some quarters as a potential successor to Xi.

Sun was the first serving member of the 25-person Politburo to be placed under investigation since Bo Xilai, another former leader of Chongqing, who was jailed for life in 2013.

Xi has presided over a popular anti-graft campaign since coming to power in 2012 that has punished more than one million officials, but critics have compared it to a political purge.

Story continues

Xi, who has become China's most powerful leader since Chairman Mao Zedong, now has a path to rule for life after the country's rubber-stamp legislature lifted presidential term limits last month. Xi's second presidential term expires in 2023.

The National People's Congress also expanded Xi's anti-graft campaign by creating a national supervision commission that will look beyond party officials and scrutinise millions of public servants at all levels of government.

- Plot 'to seize power' -

Sun's case showed that the party had some concerns about potential vulnerabilities to its rule.

In October, senior party official Liu Shiyu congratulated Xi for foiling the efforts of powerful officials who "plotted to usurp the party's leadership and seize state power."

Liu listed former security czar Zhou Yongkang alongside Sun and Bo as part of the conspiracy, which was rumoured to have involved military officials.

All three have been ousted from the ruling Communist party (CCP) and arrested or jailed on corruption charges.

Sun was expelled from the CCP in September after an investigation by the party's disciplinary body found the politician had abused his position by taking bribes and trading power for sex.

Sun was also accused at the time of nepotism, sloth, leaking confidential party information and betraying party principles.

As the country's fourth largest city and an industrial metropolis in the southwest of the country, Chongqing is a major post for ambitious politicians.

When Sun became Chongqing's chief in 2012, he was tasked with erasing Bo's influence on the city.

But last year the party's discipline inspectors publicly rebuked Sun for failing to get the job done, and his downfall came months later.

Sun was replaced in the city by Chen Miner, a former Xi aide whose profile was elevated by the move.

Chen was given a spot on the powerful 25-member Politburo at the Communist Party Congress in October.By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A federal jury in Houston on Thursday found former Republican U.S. Representative Steve Stockman guilty of fraud and siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds for his personal use.

Stockman, 61, who served two terms representing a Houston-area district from 1995 to 1997 and again from 2013 to 2015, was found guilty on all but one of 24 felony charges including fraud, making false statements, money laundering and violating U.S. election laws, court records showed.

"Obviously we are disappointed with the verdict and are working now for preparing for the sentencing proceedings," said Sean Buckley, an attorney for Stockman. He said an appeal was planned.

According to the evidence presented at trial, Stockman from May 2010 to October 2014 solicited and obtained about $1.25 million in donations based on false pretenses, the U.S. Attorney's Office for Houston said.

When public officials use their office to defraud donors and violate federal law, we will hold them accountable," U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick of the Southern District of Texas said in a statement.

Stockman could face up to 20 years in prison for each of the seven fraud count convictions when he is sentenced in August, local media reported.

According to a criminal complaint, Stockman and two of his congressional employees diverted money from a charity in Nevada called "Life Without Limits" for his personal and political use, including one payment of $350,000 in 2013.

When he was in Congress, Stockman, a staunch conservative, gained notoriety for threatening to seek the impeachment of then-President Barack Obama if he tried to implement gun control regulations through executive action.

In 2014, Stockman was trounced in a Republican primary challenge to incumbent John Cornyn for a U.S. Senate seat.

Thomas Dodd, 38, a former special assistant in Stockmans congressional office, and Jason Posey, 46, a former Stockman congressional staffer, previously pleaded guilty to their involvement in the scheme, U.S. prosecutors said.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Peter Cooney)A former Trump World Tower doorman says Donald Trump fathered a child with a former maid and that the parent company of the National Enquirer paid him $30,000 to keep silent about it.

Dino Sajudin, the former doorman, met with a reporter from the publisher of the National Enquirer in 2015, according to the New Yorker, and agreed to detail his claim that the then presidential candidate may have fathered a child with a former housekeeper in the late 1980s.

Sajudin reportedly signed a contract with American Media, Inc., that carried a $1 million penalty for disclosing details of the explosive story without the publishers permission. AMI has been known to purchase the rights to stories in order to keep them from appearing, to avoid embarrassing public figures. In 2016, the publisher paid former Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story of an extramarital affair with Trump, then never published it.

In a statement released Wednesday, Sajudin responded directly to the story published by the New Yorker:

Today I awoke to learn that a confidential agreement I had with AMI (the National Enquirer) with regard to a story about President Trump was leaked to the press. I can confirm that while I was working at Trump World Tower I was instructed not to criticize President Trumps former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump which produced a child.

The reported payment to Sajudin is the latest twist in a pattern of hush money being paid to Trump accusers, and federal investigators have been interested to shine light on the communications between AMI and Trumps personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

An FBI raid on Cohens office and hotel room this week is said to be focused on a $130,000 hush money payment made by Cohen to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.

While National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard said last summer that Sajudins story lacked any credibility, other staffers at the tabloid told the Associated Press that the paper didnt seek to substantiate the claim.

Story continues

Sajudin also passed a polygraph test administered by the National Enquirer, but that doesnt seem to impress his ex-wife, who granted an interview to the New York Daily News.

Hes infamous for making up stories, Nikki Benfatto told the Daily News. Hes seen the chupacabra. Hes seen bigfoot. One of our friends who passed away, he saw him too, walking down the street.

Read more from Yahoo News:Former FBI director James Comey - REUTERS

Donald Trumps lawyers offices were raided on Monday by the FBI seeking all records related to the Access Hollywood tape, in which he is heard saying of women that he likes to grab em by the -----, it was reported last night.

The raid, on the office and hotel of Michael Cohen, sent shockwaves through Washington and New York and infuriated Mr Trump, who sees Mr Cohen  his long-serving lawyer and fixer - as akin to family.

The search warrant also sought evidence of whether Mr Cohen tried to suppress damaging information about Mr Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, the New York Times said. It is not clear what role, if any, Mr Cohen played regarding the tape, which was made public a month before the election.

But the fact that the agents were seeking documents related to the tape reveals a new front in the investigation into Mr Cohen that is being led by the United States attorneys office in Manhattan.

The revelation came as James Comey, the former FBI director, compared the US president to a "mob boss" in an interview ahead of the release of his bombshell new book.

Mr. President, the American people will hear my story very soon. And they can judge for themselves who is honorable and who is not.  James Comey (@Comey) March 17, 2018

Mr Comey was fired by Donald Trump last May and is doing a round of media interviews promoting his book A Higher Loyalty, which is being published on Tuesday.

The sacking of the FBI chief is seen as one of Mr Trump's most controversial decisions in office and led to questions over whether it amounted to obstruction of justice - one of the grounds for impeachment.

Mr Comey's book has already soared up best seller list thanks to pre-orders in anticipation of the revelations it may include about his relationship with Mr Trump. Last month it topped Amazon's overall best-seller list after the president renewed his Twitter attacks on Mr Comey.

Story continues

US network ABC News has released a trailer ahead in which the interviewer ask the former intelligence chief: "How strange is it for you to sit here and compare the president to a mob boss?"

The interview, which airs in the US on Sunday evening, is "going to shock the president and his team", a source told the political website Axios.

The source added that the revelations left people in the room "stunned".

A teaser clip of Mr Comey's interview shows him being questioned on the Russia investigation into possible election meddling, Hillary Clinton and the US president.

The firing of Mr Comey, who was leading the Russia probe at the time, is a key event being looked at by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to take over control of the investigation.

Mr Mueller is reported to have interviewed Mr Comey about the US president's behaviour in the run up to his firing.

Mr Comey's book is due to be released just days after Mr Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had his offices raided by FBI agents.

The federal agents reportedly seized documents pertaining to Mr Cohen's payments to two women who claim they had affairs with Mr Trump - accusations he vehemently denies.

Since the raid, Mr Trump has publicly speculated about firing Mr Mueller, saying: I think its really a sad situation. Many people have said you should fire him [Mueller].

Senior Republicans have warned the president against such a move, as it would raise further questions over whether Mr Trump was attempting to obstruct the Russia investigation.German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday staked out what appears to be a tougher stance on a huge Russian energy project thats tearing Europe apart, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline across the Baltic Sea. But with construction set to begin soon after years of political and legal skirmishes, its not clear what any German change of heart now could ultimately mean for the $12 billion project.

Speaking at a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Merkel said that the controversial project, which would bring natural gas from Russia to Europe, could not go ahead if it left Ukraine in the lurch.

I made very clear that a Nord Stream 2 project is impossible without clarity on the future transit role of Ukraine, Merkel said in Berlin, referring to Kievs lucrative business transshipping Russian gas to countries in Europe.

Whats more, she stressed the political considerations of the project, a contrast from her earlier and repeated insistence that the pipeline was purely a business deal.

Nord Stream is a joint venture between Russias Gazprom and several major energy companies from Germany, Austria, France, and the Netherlands. But many countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the European Union and the Trump administration, worry the project will redouble Russias energy hold over Europe.

Merkels comments seemed an abrupt about-face after the Kremlin said on Monday that Moscow and Berlin were on the same page regarding the pipeline.

The question is whether Merkels statement represents a true shift in policy for Berlin, or whether the chancellor is simply trying to balance competing pressures from Moscow and much of German industry, which support the project, against those from Kiev and other eastern European capitals, as well as Washington, all of which vocally oppose the new pipe.

I think its too early to say its a shift in policy, but theres definitely a shift in tone, says Tim Boersma of Columbia Universitys Center on Global Energy Policy.

Story continues

In the past, Merkel had said she wanted to see some sort of solution for Ukraines future role as a physical middleman in the Russia-Europe energy trade, which is worth $3 billion a year in fees. But shed never been so explicit, Boersma says.

Whats less clear is what Merkel can do about it at this point. Late last month, Germany issued all the permits Nord Stream needs to lay pipe in German waters, and it is close to wrapping up Finnish permitting, too. It just needs permits from Denmark and Sweden.

The European Commission may try to apply European Union law to the offshore pipeline in a bid to derail it, but trying to do so would be a legal and political minefield that could have negative implications for the rest of Europes energy supplies.

How serious is she really about being firm, and what tools does she have to prevent it at any rate? Boersma asks.

Nord Stream is just the latest fight in a decades-long battle among Europe, Ukraine, and Russia over energy supplies, especially natural gas. At times of political tension, such as in 2006 and from 2008 to 2009, Russia cut off gas shipments to Ukraine and Europe, leaving many citizens shivering. Moscow and Kiev have repeatedly battled over energy supplies and transit since the beginning of armed conflict in Ukraine in 2014.

What makes Merkels newfound emphasis on ensuring some sort of future transit role for Ukraine confusing is that the original point of Nord Stream was to cut Ukraine out of the gas trade between Russia and Europe; guaranteeing a place in the middle for Ukraine would seem to be at odds with the logic behind the pipeline.

The underlying rationale of Nord Stream is still to drastically curtail Ukrainian gas transit, Boersma says.

The German and Ukrainian embassies in Washington did not respond to requests for clarification.

But Merkels comments on Tuesday could reflect that Russia and Europe will have to learn to live with a future role for Kiev after all. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin is now talking about continuing to ship Russian gas across Ukraine, rather than bypassing the country entirely by the end of next year. We have nothing against continuing cooperation with Ukraine, he said in late February.

Simple math suggests Putin may have no choice. The new pipeline would be able to ship about 55 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Europe per year, while more than 90 billion cubic meters went through Ukraine last year. Even if Russias new pipeline to Turkey and Southern Europe is built, that will only transport another 16 billion cubic meters.

Since even with Nord Stream 2, transit through Ukraine of some Russian gas into Europe will continue, the statement is just a polite acknowledgement of that fact, says Brenda Shaffer, an energy expert at Georgetown Universitys Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies. (Shes argued that Nord Stream isnt the threat that many in Europe and the United States make it out to be.)

Indeed, European production of natural gas is declining, especially due to the scheduled closure of the continents biggest gas field in 2030. That, plus the need to find more natural gas to replace phased out coal-burning and nuclear power plants, likely spells an even bigger need for imported gas in years to come, Shaffer says.

Then again, it wouldnt be the first time that the long-serving chancellor has turned German policy on a dime. And her comments come at a time of heightened tension between Russia and the West, with Europe irate over the attempted killing of a former Russian spy in Britain, and with Washington levying tougher sanctions on Russian oligarchs.

Merkel has made some major decisions on a whim, such as closing Germanys nuclear power plants and inviting a large refugee flow, so this could signify a new policy, Shaffer says.Gold

Gold spiked to session highs after President Donald Trump warned Russia to "Get ready."

The precious metal has extended its gains over the course of Wednesday morning

It's getting close to its best close in four years.

Gold spiked Wednesday morning after President Donald Trump warned Russia about its cooperation with the Syrian government, and extended its gains over the course of the morning. The precious metal is currently trading up 1.34% near $1,359 an ounce.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," Trump tweeted. "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and "smart!" You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Wednesday's advance has the precious metal on track for its best close since March 2014. It would have to take out $1,366 for its highest print of 2018.

Gold is up more than 3% this year.

NOW WATCH: Wall Street's biggest bull explains why trade war fears are way overblown

See Also:Paris (France) (AFP) - In laying his integrity on the line over Syria's suspected use of chemical weapons, French President Emmanuel Macron might be playing for even higher stakes -- maintaining the landmark Iran nuclear accord, analysts say.

The 40-year-old leader, weighing the first foreign military operation on his own initiative, has made clear he considers Damascus behind a suspected chemical attack in the rebel-held Syrian town of Douma last weekend that killed at least 40 people.

Macron's response is expected to be high on the agenda during a TV interview Thursday afternoon, only his third since the centrist swept to power last year.

For many experts, he has no choice but to enforce his "red line" on the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime, which would prompt French military strikes.

"Unlike previous incidents, alleged or real, in recent months, what happened Saturday in Douma is a huge and evident violation of Western red lines," said Bruno Tertrais, a political scientist at the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS).

"If France doesn't react now that the conditions are met, we would lose all credibility," he said.

The country, victim of the first extensive use of chemical weapons in military history during World War I, has long made combatting chemical weapons a priority.

It worries that allowing such attacks by Syria's President Bashar al-Assad could set a dangerous precedent for other repressive regimes.

Many French officials still bristle over former US president Barack Obama's last-minute pullback on Syria strikes after a chemical attack in 2013.

The decision shocked the French, whose planes were poised for launch to participate in the operation.

"Emmanuel Macron has tied his hands," said Francois Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"He's in the same position as Obama in 2013, and if he decides not to follow through, there will be a political price to pay."

Story continues

- Uphill battle -

Macron has spoken at length with US President Donald Trump about how to react to the Douma attack.

Both men have played up their sound relations since Macron invited the American leader to attend France's Bastille Day festivities last July.

Macron has also taken advantage of weakened leadership in Britain and Germany to carve out a role as Trump's privileged partner in Europe.

But he has been unable to sway the US leader on two crucial issues -- the US decision to exit the 2015 Paris agreement on curbing global warming, and Trump's threat to scupper the deal with Iran to curb its nuclear weapons programme.

Several analysts say ending the deal with Tehran and re-imposing American sanctions could inflame tensions across the Middle East, after years of tensions amid the fight against the Islamic State group.

As Macron prepares for a state visit to Washington later this month, "French military action could earn him some much-needed favour," Benjamin Haddad, a researcher at the Hudson Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine this week.

Decisive joint action could give him leverage in arguing to uphold the deal, which comes up next for Trump's review on May 12.

"At the betting table of international relations, the chances are still 20 to one" against saving the deal, Heisbourg said.

Against such odds, "a show of France-US unity on Syria surely can't do any harm" during Macron's Washington visit, he said.By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican head of the U.S. House of Representative's oversight committee told Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt on Wednesday his agency has not provided requested documents about expensive air travel, including documents related to any threats that had been made on Pruitt. Representative Trey Gowdy, the oversight committee chairman, said in a letter to Pruitt that the EPA had not produced documents showing whether there was an individual waiver or authorization for purchasing first- or business-class air tickets. A copy of the letter was seen by Reuters. Gowdy also said in the letter he had not received documents that referred to "specific, ongoing threats associated with the Administrator's air travel," which the agency had said were the basis for obtaining Pruitt's first-class air tickets in a letter to Gowdy from EPA Associate Administrator Troy Lyons, dated March 20. Gowdy said in Wednesday's letter that the EPA had shared some documents, some of which were shared in private, but did not say what they concerned. Pruitt has been under fire by Democrats and some Republicans for frequent first-class air travel, including a trip to Italy that cost $43,000, not including security detail. [nL1N1R217O] President Donald Trump has supported Pruitt, but said he would take a look into the allegations. [nL2N1RI17B] Gowdy, who had led a high-profile investigation into a 2012 attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, during former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's tenure, requested documents on Pruitt's travel on Feb. 20. Before that request, EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said that Pruitt had a blanket waiver enabling him to fly first class, which Wilcox later amended. [nL2N1QB2BN] Gowdy also asked Pruitt in the letter to provide documents on a lease for a condo that he rented from Vicki Hart, the wife of a lobbyist who works for companies regulated by the EPA, which has been criticized for the low rate of $50 per day charged to Pruitt when he stayed there. The EPA ethics office said this month its recent review of the condo rental cleared Pruitt of accepting a gift from a lobbyist, but it did not address a rule requiring officials to avoid behavior that could result in their impartiality being questioned. [nL2N1RI17B] Gowdy asked the EPA to provide all the documents, including communications relating to the lease with Hart and her husband, Steven Hart, by April 25, to help his committee determine whether federal ethics regulations were followed. "We will respond to Chairman Gowdy through the proper channel," Wilcox said. (Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Leslie Adler)House Speaker Paul Ryan will not seek re-election, leaving both his seat and the most powerful position in the House of Representatives up for grabs in the 2018 midterm elections.

Ryan said he intends to run through the tape and serve out the rest of his term until January 2019 as both a congressman and Speaker of the House. He is the latest senior Republican to retire from Congress in the face of what is expected to be a wave election for Democrats.

However, at a press conference Wednesday morning, the 48-year-old Wisconsin Republican insisted that neither electoral politics, nor tension with President Donald Trump played a role in his decision to leave office. Instead, Ryan repeatedly said he was retiring to focus more on his family.

If I were to serve one more term, my kids will only have ever known me as a weekend dad. I cant let that happen, he said.

The Wisconsin Republican said he fully intends to hand the House Speaker gavel over to another Republican when he retires  though national polls for the 2018 midterm election favor Democrats over Republicans by five to eight percentage points.

Ryan said Republicans have achieved a heck of a lot during his tenure as Speaker of the House. He touted the recent Republican tax bill  the major reform of our tax code for the first time in 26 years  and increased funding and improved readiness for the U.S. military as his two biggest accomplishments.

He was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998 and was reelected nine times by wide margins. In 2018, Ryan may have faced a fringe challenge in the Republican primary and a Democratic field that includes Randy Bryce, who has gained attention for a viral video touting his blue collar roots.

Ryan has served as House Speaker since October 2015, when he was elected to succeed John Boehner after Boehner resigned in the middle of his term. In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney picked Ryan as his vice presidential running mate.

Story continues

Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man, and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question. We are with you Paul!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

President Donald Trump tweeted support for Ryan shortly after the announcement, saying: Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man, and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question. We are with you Paul!

The news of Ryans retirement was immediately greeted with glee from the Democratic Party. Speaker Ryan sees what is coming in November, said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Tyler Law. Stay tuned for more retirements as Republicans increasingly realize that their midterm prospects are doomed.

Read the full statement from Paul Ryans office below:

This morning Speaker Ryan shared with his colleagues that this will be his last year as a member of the House. He will serve out his full term, run through the tape, and then retire in January. After nearly twenty years in the House, the speaker is proud of all that has been accomplished and is ready to devote more of his time to being a husband and a father. While he did not seek the position, he told his colleagues that serving as speaker has been the professional honor of his life, and he thanked them for the trust they placed in him. He will discuss his decision at a press conference immediately following the member meeting. Brendan Buck, Counselor to the SpeakerThe three-year war in Yemen shows no signs of ending. The conflict has so far claimed at least 10,000 lives and displaced more than 3 million people. What began as a civil war between the Yemeni government and the northern Houthi tribe has morphed into a proxy conflict in the Saudi ArabiaIran tussle for regional dominance.

A Saudi Arabianled international coalition is now attempting to reinstall the Yemeni government and crush the Houthi rebels, who are allegedly being funded and armed by Iran.

On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia said it intercepted another three Houthi ballistic missiles fired at its cities. The attack was the latest in increasingly regular strikes launched from across the border in recent months.

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Houthi rebels launch ballistic missile

AFP/Getty Images

The Houthis make up around one-third of Yemens population, and follow a Shiite Islam sect known as Zaydism. The tribe ruled the northern part of the country for 1,000 years, until they were deposed in the early 1960s.

Since then, Houthi regions have been largely ignored and neglected by the Yemeni central government, which carried little authority in the tribes strongholds. Houthi disillusionment boiled over into six unsuccessful uprisings between 2004 and 2009.

The groups founder, Hussein al-Houthi, worked to protect the interests of the Houthis against the central government and Sunni extremist groups. Though he was killed in an uprising in 2004, his vision has been carried forward by his brother Abdul Malik, who currently leads the Houthis.

In 2011, Arab Spring swept through Yemen, forcing longtime authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh to hand over power to deputy Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi. The new president struggled to address economic and security issues, particularly the rise of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in the south of the country.

Story continues

Houthis in Yemen

STRINGER/AFP/Getty Images

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Under Hadi, Houthis felt excluded from the profits of Yemens national resources and sidelined in the political decision-making process. After three years of tension, the Houthis left their northwestern heartland and seized the capital, Sanaa, in September 2014. Fed up with government corruption and ongoing food insecurity, many Yemenis supported the rebels, who forced Hadi to agree to a power-sharing deal in which they secured huge influence over government institutions.

The Houthis clashed with government ministers over plans to federalize the country in January 2015, after which the rebels seized the presidential compound and Hadi resigned. The Houthis were left to announce an interim revolutionary government over which they had full control.

Though he was placed under house arrest, Hadi escaped in February, triggering clashes between loyalist government and Houthi forces, which escalated into all-out civil war.

Saudi Arabia considers the presence of an Iranian-aligned Shiite movement on its southern border an unacceptable strategic risk. The kingdom launched a multinational military interventionmostly in the form of airstrikesto reinstate Hadi and drive the Houthis back in March 2015.

Houthi fighter airstrike Yemen

MOHAMMED HUWAIS/AFP/Getty Images

The Saudi air campaign has been punishing. Coalition planes have targeted ammunition depots, food supplies and vital infrastructure, precipitating the humanitarian crisis facing Yemeni civilians. More than 22 million Yemenis require international aid, with over a third of those close to starvation. The Saudi coalition has recaptured some southern areas of the country, but the Houthis still control northern areas and the capital city.

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The chaos has allowed AQAP and other Sunni extremist groupsincluding ISISto flourish and launch attacks of their own.

The Houthis have been escalating their attacks in recent months, increasing the regularity with which Saudi cities and installations are targeted with ballistic missiles.

On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia said it had intercepted missiles over the capital Riyadh and the cities of Jazan and Najran. The kingdom also claimed to have downed drones targeting airports in Abha and Jazan provinces.

On March 25, Saudi forces claimed to have intercepted seven Houthi ballistic missiles across the country. One person was killed in the attack, allegedly by falling debris after a missile was shot down. In December, a missile fired at the main royal palace in Riyadh during a cabinet meeting was destroyed before it reached its target.

The Houthi-affiliated Al Masirah television network said that Wednesday's attack included a Burkan 2-H missile fired toward the Saudi defense ministry on Wednesday. It followed an announcement by Saleh al-Samadpresident of the Supreme Political Council that runs Sanaa and other rebel-held areasthat said Saudi Arabia would face a year of ballistic missiles in 2018.

Nikki Haley Iran missile Yemen

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Saudi authorities say Houthis have fired 90 ballistic missiles at the country in the past year, and both Riyadh and the U.S. have directly accused Iran of providing the weapons. In December, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley spoke in front of what she said were the remnants of an Iranian-made ballistic missile fired by Houthis. The U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has also said there is evidence that Tehran is supplying missiles.

Iran denied it is arming the Houthis. We categorically reject it as unfounded and, at the same time, irresponsible, provocative and destructive, said Gholamali Khoshroo, Irans ambassador at the U.N., in response to the allegations.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekLt. Chuck Kohler was on his way to the grocery store on Sunday night when his pager began to beep.

There was a medical alarm at the fire station, which means that someone opened the baby box, Kohler, of the Coolspring Volunteer Fire Department, tells PEOPLE. I live right around the corner from the fire station so I was there in about 30 seconds.

Kohler, 37, rushed to the station and, although there had been false alarms in the past, Kohler knew immediately that this call was the real thing.

When I went inside I could heard the baby crying, he says. I opened the door to where the box is and I found the baby in there.

Kohler, a seven-year veteran of the department, found the infant in the Safe Haven Baby Box and immediately put on protective gloves to inspect the newborn.

Lt. Chuck Kohler

Lt. Chuck Kohler

My father instincts kicked in. I wanted to make sure the baby was okay, he tells PEOPLE. I checked to make sure the umbilical cord wasnt bleeding, and that the baby wasnt injured. After I figured out it was okay, I just held it until the paramedics came.

The Indiana Safe Haven Law allows a person to leave an unwanted infant anonymously at a medical facility, police or fire station without fear of arrest or prosecution, according to the states website. As long as there are no signs of intentional abuse on the baby, no information is required of the person leaving the baby.

According to the law, once the baby is examined and given medical treatment (if needed), the Indiana Department of Child Services will take the baby into custody. The child will be ultimately placed with a caregiver.

Officials with Safe Haven Baby Boxes (founded by Monica Kelsey) installed the container at the station about two years ago. The boxes have three alarms that activate and a heating and cooling unit in them for extreme weather, according to the products website.

Kohler says that the box worked flawlessly.

Indiana Safe Haven Baby Box

Indiana Safe Haven Baby Box

There was anxiety and adrenaline. I opened a box and there was a baby in there, the father of five tells PEOPLE. I was holding the baby and rocking back and forth with the baby because it was natural. It felt natural. All I wanted to do was make sure the baby was okay.

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Despite curious residents opening the box every now and then, the box had gone unused since being installed  that changed in November. Five months ago, Chief Mick Pawlik found a baby girl, known as Baby Hope, in the box, Kelsey told the Chicago Tribune.

Lt. Chuck Kohler

Lt. Chuck Kohler

Now, Kohler says the importance of the box is not lost on him.Were prepared for this. Probably 98 percent [of Coolspring firefighters] have medical training, he tells PEOPLE. You cant judge anybody for doing this. This is a wonderful thing. Its a great alternative for what couldve happened to the baby. We want to thank the mother for making this decision as hard as it was.

The state has one other baby box in Woodburn, according to the Tribune.By Agustinus Beo Da Costa and Ed Davies JAKARTA (Reuters) - Former Indonesian general Prabowo Subianto has accepted the endorsement of the main opposition party to stand as a candidate in a presidential election next year, setting the stage for a rematch with President Joko Widodo. Subianto, who narrowly lost the election, in 2014, to Widodo, is chairman of the nationalist Gerindra Party which forms the main opposition alongside two Islamic parties. "We have affirmed that Mr Prabowo is ready to be a presidential candidate and has received the party's mandate to proceed as presidential candidate in 2019," Gerindra deputy chairman Arief Poyuono said by telephone from a party meeting. Gerindra spokesman Irawan Ronodipuro said Subianto had accepted the party's mandate on Wednesday evening. A presidential candidate needs the support of parties that together won 25 percent of the national vote in the previous legislative election or have 20 percent of seats in parliament. Widodo, a former furniture salesman, is Indonesia's first president to come from outside the political and military elite. He has gained the support of five parties and is currently well ahead in most opinion polls. An Indo Barometer Survey conducted in late January gave Widodo 48.8 percent support, with Subianto at 22.3 percent and 28.9 percent undecided. While in office, Widodo has led a push to build infrastructure though annual growth in Southeast Asia's biggest economy, at about 5 percent, has yet to reach the 7 percent he pledged when campaigning in 2014. Subianto appeared to improve his political prospects last year after backing a successful challenge by former education minister Anies Baswedan to win the powerful post of Jakarta governor. But the bitterly fought campaign to unseat the ethnic Chinese, Christian governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a close ally of Widodo, exposed deep religious and ethnic divisions in the world's biggest Muslim-majority country. (Writing by Fergus Jensen; Editing by Nick Macfie, Robert Birsel)Jerusalem (AFP) - A senior Israeli official on Thursday formally complained to Ireland's ambassador after Dublin's mayor slipped past an entry ban to attend a Palestinian conference.

Deputy director general Rodica Radian-Gordon "expressed her amazement and deep disappointment at the fact that the mayor chose to participate in a blatantly anti-Israel event," Israel's foreign ministry said in a statement.

Lord Mayor Micheal Mac Donncha entered Israel on his way to the Israeli-occupied West Bank for a conference Wednesday night on the disputed status of Jerusalem.

Although he was officially barred from entry for alleged anti-Israel activity, he passed unchallenged through immigration at Tel Aviv airport late Tuesday, reportedly due to a clerical error misspelling his name.

Both Israel and the Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital.

Its Palestinian eastern sector was captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and subsequently annexed to the Jewish state.

Palestinians want it as the capital of their future state.

The Israeli statement quoted Radian-Gordon as saying Mac Donncha's Ramallah visit was "particularly jarring" as it took place on Holocaust remembrance day, which Israel marked from sunset Wednesday.

It added that the Jewish state "expects a public and official Irish response to the conduct of the council of its capital city and particularly its head, who are conducting a campaign of discrimination and hatred against the state of Israel".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also foreign minister, wrote on Facebook that he had instructed the ministry to hold a "clarification discussion" with Mac Donncha.

Netanyahu said the Ramallah conference "featured prominent images" of Haj Amin al-Husseini, leader of a 1936 revolt against the British mandate over Palestine and grand mufti of Jerusalem.

To Palestinians he is a national hero, but Israelis remember him as an ally of the Nazis. In 2015 Netanyahu suggested that he gave Hitler the idea to exterminate Jews -- a claim dismissed by historians.

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"I have one message for the mayor," Netanyahu wrote. "You should be ashamed of yourself."

Interviewed by Israeli state-run Kan 11 television outside the conference hall in Ramallah, Mac Donncha appeared never to have heard of al-Husseini.

"I'm not even aware of the individual that you mention. People who have stood up to fascism in all kinds of forms all over the world were here today," he told the interviewer.

"I think that's a distraction, it really is a distraction."

Israel ordered a probe Wednesday into how Mac Donncha was allowed into the country.

Israeli daily Haaretz said the ban order sent to airport immigration officials misspelled Mac Donncha's name, meaning he did not show up on the watch list.

The paper said he has ties with the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which promotes a boycott of Israeli businesses and foreign firms which trade in the country.

Israel's interior ministry and strategic affairs ministry blamed each other for the mixup, it said.

Air and sea passengers travelling to the West Bank must pass through Israel, while the land border between the territory and Jordan is controlled by Israeli security and immigration officials.Lima (Peru) (AFP) - Ivanka Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are stepping in to fill US President Donald Trump's absence at a summit of Latin American leaders taking place in Peru late this week.

But with the US leader a no-show because of a last-minute cancellation to oversee America's response to an alleged poison gas attack in Syria, the blaze of international attention directed at the Friday-Saturday gathering has dimmed.

Instead of the sight of Trump at the center of a group of leaders from several countries he has disparaged or intimidated over perceived trade or migration threats, the once-every-three-year summit will be left to tackle festering regional issues.

Those include a joint response further isolating Venezuela over its moves seen trampling democracy, and whose President Nicolas Maduro has explicitly been not invited.

There is also the worsening relationship between the United States and Mexico over a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Trump's insistence that Mexico pay for a wall to be built along their common border -- and to where he has ordered US National Guard troops to deploy.

Mexico has announced it is reviewing its cooperation with the US over "blatant" tension with Trump's administration.

And there is the issue of corruption, the persistence of which -- and the moves to tackle it -- have roiled Latin American politics, including in Brazil, where ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is now jailed, and Peru itself, which has seen its president step down just ahead of hosting the summit.

- Still 'high-level' -

At a Washington briefing to reporters Wednesday, Ivanka Trump and senior US administration officials insisted that President Trump's absence was not a snub or sign of disinterest in Latin America.

The president had to cancel "given the atrocity that occurred in Syria," which required him to be "engaged in on that topic and related topics," one official said without elaborating.

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However, a "very high-level delegation" would still be representing the US, the officials said.

They listed Ivanka Trump and Pence along with top US officials for trade, foreign aid and investment. Ivanka's husband Jared Kushner -- who, like her, is a senior advisor to the president -- was also to attend.

"I'm extremely excited for my visit," Ivanka Trump said in the briefing, explaining that she would be promoting ways to economically empower women while at the summit.

"Women's economic empowerment in the Americas is a key element of the president's commitment to advance our shared goals and objectives in the hemisphere," a senior administration official added.

One official said that nothing new should be expected at the Lima summit on the NAFTA negotiations.

"We don't have anything to announce on NAFTA at this time. Negotiations continue to be ongoing," the official said.

Prior to President Trump's cancellation, the White House had said the US leader was going to focus on "pursuing fair and reciprocal trade throughout the region" and "push back against external economic aggression" at the summit.

Those comments appeared directed at both the NAFTA negotiations and China's increasing investment in Latin America, which US policy-makers fear signals greater political influence too.

- China's presence -

On Monday Trump said the NAFTA talks were "fairly close" to reaching a deal, but reiterated that "if we don't make the right deal, we'll terminate NAFTA and make the right deal after that."

China's growing investment in Latin America, once considered America's backyard under the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, appears to be the "external economic aggression" Trump's administration is riled up against.

US-China tensions have spiked dramatically in recent weeks with Trump ratcheting up threats of harsh tariffs on Chinese goods and Beijing warning of reciprocal measures. But talk of a possible trade war has cooled somewhat with Chinese President Xi Jinping taking a more emollient tone since Tuesday.

Some Latin American analysts looked askance at Trump's absence.

"For Trump, Latin America, with the possible exception of Mexico, is at the level of his vice president," said Kevin Casas, a former Costa Rican vice president who is now director of the consulting firm Analitica Consultures.

"That's a message everybody has more or less picked up and how the region will read it. Including China," he said.South Korea and Japan on Wednesday vowed to work closely together on North Korea ahead of the looming inter-Korea summit, but their foreign ministers remained divided over long-standing issues of Japan's wartime crimes and disputed islands.

Japanese foreign minister Taro Kono made a rare visit to Seoul armed with a list of issues Tokyo wants to push onto the agenda of the April 27 summit between North and South Korea.

At a time of frenetic diplomatic activity in northeast Asia -- the North's Kim Jong Un is due to meet with the leaders of both South Korea and the US -- Japan has largely remained on the sidelines.

Tokyo has found itself forced to rely on the US and South Korea to tackle its concerns regarding the North, which last year test-fired several missiles that flew over Japan, sparking security fears.

Kono and his South Korean counterpart Kang Kyung-wha vowed "close communication and cooperation" to disarm the North and build peace on the flashpoint peninsula, Seoul's foreign ministry said after their meeting in Seoul.

The Japanese envoy also met with President Moon Jae-in, who said working together on North Korea was "more important than ever" ahead of the summits, the South's Yonhap agency reported.

It was the first visit to South Korea by a Japanese foreign minister in more than two years.

But the top diplomats remained divided on two thorny historical issues still unresolved.

The hugely emotional matter of Korean women forced into sexual slavery for Japanese troops during World War II has soured ties between the South and Japan for years.

Seoul has urged Tokyo to take legal and moral responsibility, while Japan says that the issue was resolved when the two nations reached a deal in 2015 to offer compensations to the victims.

South Korea and Japan have also locked horns over Seoul-controlled islets in the sea between the two countries called Dokdo in the South and Takeshima in Japan.

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"Kono expressed Japan's stance on 'comfort women' and Dokdo, and Kang explained our stance over 'comfort women' and made clear that the South cannot accept any argument by Japan over Dokdo," the ministry said in a statement.

Moon said last month that Japan cannot unilaterally declare the wartime issue "over," while Japan says any attempt to modify or scrap the deal, signed by Moon's predecessor Park Geun-Hye, could hurt relations.

Kono, before the Seoul visit, also said he would try to ensure that the "abduction issue will be talked about in the North-South summit", as well as Pyongyang's "nuclear and missile issues".

He was referring to Japanese citizens abducted by the North's agents in the 1970s and 80s in a bid to train spies in Japanese language and customs before overseas missions.

But a statement on the meeting from Seoul's foreign ministry did not mention the topic -- a key issue in ties between Japan and the North, which habitually spats out angry threats of attack against "Japanese reactionaries."Former Speaker of the House John Boehner appeared to embrace the medical potential of marijuana Wednesday by announcing he was joining a cannabis company. The surprising move gives credibility to the growing marijuana industry and represents a reversal in Boehner's attitude toward the plant since his time in office, when the Ohio Republican once wrote to a constituent that he was unalterably opposed  to marijuana legalization.

But while Boehner has said his new embrace of cannabis is due to his evolving thoughts on the drug, his come-to-Jesus moment could also have been spurred by the prospect of a big payday.

Boehner announced Wednesday that, along with former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, he was joining the advisory board at cannabis company Acreage Holdings, a private company that said last month it was executing a plan to pursue an initial public offering. Boehner and Weld have also committed to joining the companys full board once it is formed, according to the company.

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If Acreage Holdings gave Boehner and Weld equity in the company, a practice experts said is common for advisory board members, then the two men could see a payday if the company does indeed go public.

My expectation is that he would certainly stand to profit. I would be very surprised if he did not, Susan Shultz, founder and CEO of The Board Institute, a creator of board evaluation tools, told Newsweek. His name is significant, he's going to add a lot of credibility and value just by virtue of him sitting on that board...I would think he would participate in equity as the company goes public.

The company could not be reached for comment. A call to a Boehner spokesperson was not immediately returned. But it is not the former speaker's first foray onto a company's board. After he left Congress in 2015, Boehner joined the board at tobacco company Reynolds American.

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As a private company, Acreage has not disclosed any information about the compensation Boehner and Weld will receive in their new roles, or its own financials, making it difficult to estimate how much money an IPO could raise, analysts told Newsweek. But Bloomberg did report that neither Boehner nor Weld has invested their own money in the company.

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Acreage, which changed its name from High Street Capital Partners less than a month ago, says it either operates dispensaries or owns dispensary licenses in 11 states. Last month, the company brought on a new Chief Financial Officer who led a global IPO team at accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers as part of preparations for going public.

Boehner and Weld, a former Republican who ran as the Libertarian Partys vice presidential candidate in the 2016 election, issued a joint statement Wednesday announcing their decision to join the advisory board. They also called for a serious consideration of a shift in federal marijuana policy.

There are still many negative implications of the Federal policy to schedule cannabis as a Class 1 drug, the statement said, referencing the federal drug classification system that deems cannabis to have less medical value than cocaine or methamphetamine. Most notably the lack of research, the ambiguity around financial services and the refusal of the VA to offer it as an alternative to the harmful opioids that are ravishing our communities.

While Boehner and Weld did not call for nationwide legalization of marijuana in their statement, their desire a shift in federal marijuana policy represents a turn for Boehner, who said in an interview that his views have shifted over time. (The Libertarian Party Weld represented called for the repeal of laws against medical or recreational drug use.)

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Over the last 10 or 15 years, the American peoples attitudes have changed dramatically, Boehner told Bloomberg. I find myself in that same position.

GettyImages-494818758 (1)

Getty

It is not just Boehner who stands to benefit from the move. His addition to the companys board is being praised as a watershed moment for the American cannabis industry, which was seen to be in regulatory limbo after Attorney General Jeff Sessions in January rescinded the Cole Memo, an Obama-era policy that advised federal authorities to let states regulate marijuana.

It is difficult to overstate the impact of this monumental event for the U.S. cannabis sector, Vahan Ajamian, a research analyst with Beacon Securities said in a note to investors. We believe the implicit sponsorship of the sector by two influential former politicians, supports what we have been saying for quite some timethat the risk of federal intervention in the U.S. cannabis sector is low. Accordingly, this news should serve to legitimize the sector and further perk up investor interest.

The National Organization For The Reform Of Marijuana Laws (NORML) said Boehners decision to join the companys advisory board should be praised regardless of the reasons for the decision.

Regardless of motive, former Speaker Boehner is still held in high esteem by a large percentage of the GOP membership and voter base and we look forward to his voice joining the growing chorus calling for an end to our failed prohibition, Erik Altieri, NORMLs Executive Director, told Newsweek in an email. Anything that expedites the ability for patients to access this safe and reliable treatment alternative and put an end to the practice of arresting otherwise law-abiding citizens for the possession of a plant should be welcomed with open arms.

Boehners announcement came the same day his successor as speaker of the house, Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, announced he would not seek reelection.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekGetty

A former senior Republican politician, who for many years was unalterably opposed to the legalisation of cannabis, is to join the advisory board of a marijuana company.

John Boehner, who served as Speaker of the House until 2015, announced he will be joining a cannabis company that has operations across 11 states, because his thinking on cannabis has evolved.

Im convinced de-scheduling the drug is needed so we can do research, help our veterans, and reverse the opioid epidemic ravaging our communities, he said.

Im joining the board of #AcreageHoldings because my thinking on cannabis has evolved. Im convinced de-scheduling the drug is needed so we can do research, help our veterans, and reverse the opioid epidemic ravaging our communities. @AcreageCannabis https://t.co/f5i9KcQD0W  John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) April 11, 2018

Mr Boehner, 68, was appointed to the board of Acreage Holdings, a business that aims to make cannabis available to any patient who can benefit from safe and reliable access. Also joining him on the board is former Republican Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, who in 2016 was the vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party and the running mate of Gary Johnson.

In a joint statement, issued by Acreage Holdings, the pair said: While we come at this issue from different perspectives and track records, we both believe the time has come for serious consideration of a shift in federal marijuana policy.

The public perception of cannabis has dramatically shifted, with 94 per cent of Americans currently in favour of some type of access, a shift driven by increased awareness of marijuanas many medical applications.

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They added: We need to look no further than our nations 20 veterans, 20 per cent of whom, according to a 2017 American Legion survey, reportedly use cannabis to self-treat PTSD, chronic pain and other ailments. Yet the [Department of Veterans Affairs] does not allow its doctors to recommend its usage.

Bloomberg News said that both Mr Boehner and Mr Weld said they had never tried the drug, recreational use of which is legal in nine states and Washington DC. That means more than one in five American adults can legally use the substance.

Twenty additional states allow for some form of medical marijuana. The legal market is expected to reach $75bn by 2030, according to the investment bank Cowen & Co, the news agency said.

Mr Boehner, whose successor as House Speaker, Paul Ryan, has announced he is not seeking re-election, said his perspective on the drug altered when he saw its efficacy in helping a close friend deal with debilitating back pain, along with the stories he heard from military veterans. He said he had also been studying the criminal justice system for a number of years.

When you look at the number of people in our state and federal penitentiaries, who are there for possession of small amounts of cannabis, you begin to really scratch your head, said Mr Boehner. We have literally filled up our jails with people who are nonviolent and frankly do not belong there.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been a longtime opponent of legalising cannabis. The Justice Department in January rescinded the Obama-era policies that allowed state legal cannabis markets to flourish.Twenty-five years ago, Steven Spielbergs T. rex-sized blockbuster Jurassic Park became a global phenomenon, earning more than a billion dollars worldwide. Flash-forward to 2018, and the movie is still adored in countries and languages around the globe. For proof, just watch this new 18-minute re-creation of Jurassic Park, consisting entirely of fan-made videos of key sequences submitted from 28 countries. Thats right, folks: These dino-lovers have re-created every moment from Jophery, raise the gate to Ive decided not to endorse your park. (Watch the video above.)

Originally launched in January with a personal invitation from Jurassic World stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard  who will be seen running away from dinosaurs again in this summers Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom  the Universal and Tongal-backed campaign received submissions from 29 different countries. The hundreds of re-creations and testimonials to the enduring power of the Jurassic series were ultimately distilled down into a single video. Theres precedent for homemade fan remakes of popular Spielberg movies, of course. In the 80s, three Mississippi teenagers spent seven years producing a shot-for-shot re-creation of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a story chronicled in a charming 2015 documentary. We cant wait to see the fan-made version of Hook in time for that movies 30th anniversary in 2021.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:(Reuters) - A new Kentucky law aimed at addressing the state's unfunded pension liability is unconstitutional and should be voided, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday by the state's attorney general and groups representing teachers and police officers. Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear said a temporary restraining order was also being sought in Franklin Circuit Court to prevent the law from taking effect. "This bill is bad, it's dangerous and it won't work," he told reporters, adding that the bill's March 29 passage resulted from a "backroom deal" by Republicans, who control the legislature. The lawsuit claims the bill, which was signed into law by Republican Governor Matt Bevin on Tuesday, violates state statutes and constitutional provisions related to public employee contracts and legislative procedures. Elizabeth Kuhn, Bevin's spokeswoman, called the lawsuit a politically motivated move by the son of Kentucky's former governor. "Over eight years, former Governor Steve Beshear underfunded the pension system by billions, recklessly diverting much-needed funds to other causes and allowing the system to become the worst-funded in the country," Kuhn said in a statement. "Now, the attorney general is carrying on the Beshear family legacy by trying to block a law that will strengthen our pension system." The legislation, which puts future teachers into a less-generous retirement plan and restricts the use by all workers of accrued sick days toward retirement eligibility, sparked protests by teachers at the state capitol in Frankfort. According to the lawsuit, pension language was inserted at the last minute in a bill originally dealing with local sewers, public access to legislative meetings on the bill was restricted and no actuarial analysis on the bill was prepared. Kentucky ranks near the bottom among the 50 states in terms of the financial health of its retirement system. Based on 2016 actuarial assumptions, Kentucky's pensions were 52.7 percent funded with an unfunded liability of nearly $33 billion, according to a state website that said more conservative assumptions would increase the liability to at least $64 billion. (Reporting by Karen Pierog; Editing by Dan Grebler)Seoul (South Korea) (AFP) - A South Korean farmer killed and cooked a neighbour's barking dog before inviting its unsuspecting owner to join him for a dog-meat dinner, police said Wednesday, in a case that has sparked online outrage.

The 62-year-old unnamed man confessed to the crime after another neighbour tipped off the pet owner's family.

He claimed he was so irritated by the dog's constant barking that he threw a stone at the two-year-old Welsh Corgi, resulting in the animal losing consciousness.

"Only after the dog passed out, he claims, he strangled the animal and cooked it," a detective in the southern city of Pyeongtaek told AFP.

"The man then invited his neighbours to share the meal, including the father of the dog-owning family", he said.

Dog meat has long been a part of South Korean cuisine. But consumption has declined as South Koreans increasingly embrace the idea of dogs as pets instead of livestock, with eating them now something of a taboo among younger generations.

The case came to light when a daughter of the family this week published an online plea calling for public support to ensure that the offender be punished sternly. A petition has so far gained almost 15,000 signatures.

"We had been all around the town, handing out leaflets containing the dog's picture, phone number and rewards of one million won ($940), in order to find the missing dog", the daughter told AFP by phone, asking for her family's name to be kept anonymous.

"When I reached the man's house, which is just three doors down from ours, he expressed sympathy, promising to let us know if he found the dog".

At that time, however, the farmer was hiding the dog, either alive or dead, in his barn, she said.

The following day, the suspect visited her father, drank with him and consoled him over the missing dog.

"He even invited neighbours to come share the dog meat, including my father who did not accept the invitation as he is a non-dog meat eater", she said.

As many as one million dogs are still consumed in South Korea each year, with the greasy red meat -- which is invariably boiled for tenderness -- believed to increase energy.

Activists have stepped up campaigns to ban dog consumption. Under a newly strengthened law, animal abusers face up to two years in prison or 20 million won ($18,700) in fines.Kuwait City (AFP) - Kuwait's national carrier halted flights to Beirut on Thursday citing security concerns, after an air safety watchdog warned of potential military strikes on Syria in the coming days.

Kuwait Airways said that it took the decision "on the basis of credible security warnings received from the Cypriot authorities regarding the danger of flying over Lebanon's airspace".

The changes would stand "until further notice", the airline said on Twitter.

The move came after the European Aviation Safety Agency alerted airlines on Tuesday of the possible launch of "air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours", urging them to take precautionary measures.

Other international carriers including Air France and Lebanon's Middle East Airlines have also modifed their flight plans.

US President Donald Trump warned Wednesday that "missiles will be coming" in response to an alleged chemical attack in Syria.

If the US action follows the pattern of a previous punitive strike on Syria last year, it will begin with a salvo of cruise missiles fired from American warships in the Mediterranean.

Russia's ambassador to Beirut warned any US missiles would be shot down "as well as the sources they were fired from", raising the stakes of a regional confrontation.SheKnows

Donald Trump had more than his share of infidelity allegations while he was in the White House. For some people in that position, they might be on their best behavior, knowing that America was watching their every move. But for Donald, he reportedly doubled down on his bad behavior by trying to get the attention []MADISON, Wis. (AP)  The Latest on possible candidates for Congress in House Speaker Paul Ryan's district (all times local):

10:45 a.m.

The leader of House Speaker Paul Ryan's campaign team says Ryan has no plans to endorse if there is a Republican primary in the race to replace him.

However, Kevin Seifert says Ryan is committed to keeping the seat that he has held for 20 years in Republican hands. Seifert said Wednesday that Ryan's team "will work tirelessly so Republicans keep this seat."

Numerous Republicans, including several state office holders, are considering running.

The only declared candidate is far-right conservative Paul Nehlen, who has been barred from Twitter for racist and anti-Semitic posts and who Ryan defeated by 68 points in 2016. Seifert says Nehlen isn't qualified for the seat and his "bigoted rhetoric and his reprehensible statements should disqualify him from holding any public office."

___

10:15 a.m.

Possible Republican candidates to run in House Speaker Paul Ryan's southeast Wisconsin congressional district aren't saying much about whether they will jump in.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is praising Ryan as "perhaps the best congressman Wisconsin has ever sent to Washington," but not addressing whether he will run for the spot.

State Rep. Samantha Kerkman isn't ruling it out, saying: "Hey, it's the year of the woman. There's a lot to think about."

Other possible candidates, including state Sen. David Craig, state Rep. Tyler August and attorney Bryan Steil (STYLE), aren't commenting on their plans.

Former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus also used to live in the district. He praised Ryan on Twitter, but didn't say if he's thinking about returning to Wisconsin for a run.

___

9:17 a.m.

With Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan deciding against re-election, the focus turns to other Republicans who could run for his southeast Wisconsin congressional seat.

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Among those mentioned by Republicans as possible candidates are Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, attorney and University of Wisconsin Board of Regents member Bryan Steil and state Sen. David Craig.

None of them have returned messages seeking comment Wednesday.

Former state Republican Party executive director Brandon Scholz says Vos is the most logical choice.

Democrats Randy Bryce, a union iron worker, and Janesville school teacher Cathy Myers are already running. Bryce spokesman Lauren Hitt says "Paul Ryan decided to quit today rather than face Randy Bryce and the voters."Freetown (AFP) - Samura Kamara, the losing candidate in last month's presidential elections in Sierra Leone, has appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the result, just days after he congratulated the declared victor, Julius Maada Bio, according to documents seen by AFP on Thursday.

In a petition to the West African state's top court, Kamara said the electoral process was "fundamentally flawed" and the declaration in favour of Bio "was invalid and cannot be supported in law."

The spokesman for the National Electoral Commission (NEC), Albert Massaquoi, said the petition was filed on Wednesday evening.

"We have informed our legal team and they will take it from there. It is all part of the democratic process," said Massaquoi.

The petition says the NEC acted illegally when on April 4 it issued the final results of the second and final round of the elections, which took place on March 31.

The commission included results of polling stations where there had been "over voting," it alleges. Results from polling stations where "over voting" occurred should thus be stripped out, it says.

The date for a decision by the Supreme Court was not immediately known.

Bio, a former soldier who briefly led a military junta more than two decades ago, was credited with 51.81 percent of vote in the runoff.

Kamara -- champion of the All People's Congress (APC), which had been in power for a decade -- secured 48.19 percent.

Kamara, on the evening of the election results, had said he would contest the outcome.

But last Saturday he went to Bio's residence, congratulated him and vowed to throw the APC's support behind the new administration.

His show of support was widely welcomed as a way to ease post-election tensions.

Bio will need the support of the APC, which has 68 out of 132 parliament seats, to form a workable government majority in what is one of the world's poorest nations despite huge mineral and diamond deposits.

Its economy is still recovering from war and disease and remains fragile with investors slowly returning, while corruption is widespread.

Sierra Leone's neighbours and international observers say the vote was generally conducted peacefully, and Bio has received congratulatory messages from around the world.By John Irish and Sophie Louet PARIS (Reuters) - France has proof the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack last week and will decide whether to strike back when all the necessary information has been gathered, President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday. France is expected to join the United States and Britain in carrying out air strikes or some other form of attack in response to the use of the weapons but it remains unclear when that might happen or even if it definitely will. "We have proof that last week, now 10 days ago, that chemical weapons were used, at least with chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of (President) Bashar al-Assad," Macron said, without giving details on the evidence or how it was acquired. The attack on the town of Douma on April 7 killed dozens of people, including children. "Our teams have been working on this all week and we will need to take decisions in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective," Macron told broadcaster TF1 when asked whether a red line had been crossed. U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday morning: "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" Macron said France wanted to remove the Syrian regime's chemical weapons capabilities. When asked whether those would be the targets of strikes he said: "When we decide it, and once we have verified all the information." The French army is preparing itself for a possible riposte as it waits for the political green light, military sources told Reuters, with several sources underscoring the difficulty of outlining the objectives of such an operation. The sources said if France were to attack, the strikes would most likely come from warplanes rather than its naval frigate off the Lebanese coast, and that they would likely to take off from France rather than its Middle East bases. The subject of chemical weapons' use in Syria has been a thorny issue for Macron. He has warned that he would not accept the use of chemical weapons, which he said was a "red line" that would draw French action, even unilateral. However, after persistent reports of chlorine attacks over the last year, his foreign minister and aides have been more nuanced saying a response would hinge on French intelligence proving both the use of chemicals and fatalities, and a riposte would most likely be in coordination with the United States. "France will not allow any escalation that could harm the stability of the region as a whole, but we can't let regimes that think they can do everything they want, including the worst things that violate international law, to act," Macron said. (Editing by Luke Baker and Matthew Mpoke Bigg)In the wake of The Simpsons attempt to address the stereotyping controversy surrounding Apu, one mans story of growing up with a father similar to the character is going viral.

After Sundays episode of the animated comedy included a scene in which Marge and Lisa discussed political correctness in 2018 before the camera panned to a photo of Apu with the words, Dont have a cow, written on it, the show was criticized by some who saw the response as dismissive.

#TheSimpsons completely toothless response to @harikondabolu #TheProblemWithApu about the racist character Apu:



"Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect... What can you do?" pic.twitter.com/Bj7qE2FXWN  Soham (@soham_burger) April 9, 2018

The problematic nature of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon  an Indian immigrant who is the proprietor of the fictional town of Springfields local Kwik-E-Mart  was cast into the spotlight following the November release of comedian Hari Kondabolus documentary, The Problem With Apu.

Now, Twitter user Amar Shah is making waves with his own personal story of being raised by a father who owned a convenience store. Everybody has an opinion about Apu, but did they ever talk to someone who owned a convenience store or gas station or work in one or grow up in one? You know, like my dad and I? Shah tweeted on Monday.

Everybody has an opinion about Apu, but did they ever talk to someone who owned a convenience store or gas station or work in one or grow up in one? You know, like my dad and I? #simpsons #apu  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

Kondabolu later noted that he and his team had, in fact, interviewed Indian small business owners for the documentary, but the footage didnt make the final cut.

Story continues

Brother, thank you for sharing, he wrote. We interviewed Desi small business owners & it was left on the cutting room floor due to time. This still haunts me. Theres nothing wrong with working in a gas station or store. These stories should be told with the honesty & care you just showed.

Read Shahs full story below.

Everybody has an opinion about Apu, but did they ever talk to someone who owned a convenience store or gas station or work in one or grow up in one? You know, like my dad and I? #simpsons #apu  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

As someone who spent many weekday afternoons after school in the freezing cooler of my dad's Texaco reading or finishing homework while eating Jamaican beef patties and sipping fountain drinks, I have a few stories to tell of how hard my dad and mom worked to make a better life.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

This story starts in 1968, when my dad came here at age 17, the youngest of four brothers who would all emigrate from Nadiad a small town in Gujarat, India. Of course, he barely spoke English. But guess what, he pumped gas during the cold nights in Forest Hills, New York.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

while he got his electrical engineering degree at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He did learn English by listening to Marv Albert broadcast Knicks game during those great Red Holzman teams of Frazier, Bradley and Reed.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

Then he got married in 1975 to my mom who was 19. He was 25. My dad worked for different engineering firms, including Merck. But something was chewing at him. He wanted to be his own man.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

So in the early 80's, while still working he bought his first store called Famous in Scotch Plains, NJ. He learned to make pizza from scratch and operate a cash register. Need I mention I was an infant, toddler during this time.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

Later he bought a pizzeria called "Pizza Land" the same name as the famous Sopranos landmark. I remember listening to Starships's Built This City playing while I learned to master pinball. My mom was pregnant in her third trimester. with my brother and delivering pizzas.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

They had enough of the cold and the snow and decided Florida with its palm trees and sunshine was a better fit. In 1986, in our green station wagon we moved to Deland, Florida where my dad bought a Phillips 66. We lived a mile away on a rural dirt road.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

I remember spending many hours at the store. A sweet old man named Earl lived on the property in his RV. After school, my mom would pick me up from Catholic school and take me there to this surreal place that smelled of gasoline, cigarette smoke and bubble yum.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

My dad and mom worked both shifts. To this day I think we still have cctv tapes of those endless hours of customers drifting in. Truck drivers, bikers, immigrants.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

And oh the food. The pigs feet, the pickeled eggs in the Mason Jars. The moldy hot dogs that tasted so good with relish and ketchup. My dad secretly eating them even as pure vegetarian Vaishnav Hindu.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

I loved the fountain drink dispensers because I could mix all the flavors into a sugary concoction that would have me buzzing for hours while I covertly would open a pack of 88 Topps from a wax box hoping for a Dwight Gooden card.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

We left Deland or Kneeland as I loved to call it and moved to Orlando where my dad bought a Texaco, actually they called it Brett's Texaco. Never found out who Brett was. The gas station was located right off the Kaley Avenue off I-4 next to the old Merita Bread factory  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

with its giant red neon sign. You could smell the fresh yeast from the highway.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

I spent many hours in the cooler. I don't know what it was about it, but I loved sitting on a 12 pack of Busch beer, while wondering what malt liquor or Bartles and James tasted like while I swigged orange slice.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

Oh, I remember incidents. Drunk customers or those that were drugged up asking for cigarettes or more liquor. Occasionally, I'd hear a fucking A-RAB or camel jockey epithet tossed my dad's way. He turned the cheek. Not because he was scared or indifferent. He was after something  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

Something bigger than some dumb ignoramous with a confederate flag chewing skoal could never understand. And I admit I didn't love all those hours in the gas station store doing inventory with the label gun or restocking the shelves of Pepsi.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

I had friends whose parents were doctors or lawyers and peers at school would crack the inevitable Apu joke. Part of me embraced it knowing I had access to things they didn't. I also knew that running a store was hard and blue collar. My mom and dad mopping the floors  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

with that dumbledore beard of a mop. God, that ugly linoleum. Nothing would make a Househunters couple squirm like a gas station floor. There was no task too small they wouldn't do. You know why? Because my brother and I wouldn't have to.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

Gas station life introduced me to America. People I wouldn't see or interact with every day. These were the people who worked for my dad and with him. Mary, the first lesbian woman I ever met, whose partner passed away in a car accident, Don, the wise manager  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

who always offered my dad great advice and succumbed to cancer, or John, the DJ or Herb who became my dad's best friend, a 6'7 former cop who rode a Harley and looked like Samuel Jackson.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

There was also the fear of working behind the counter, the fear of someone stealing candy or cigarettes and running out the door or worse the fear of being stuck up at gun point for a few dollars in the register.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

The saddest day was when one of my dad's closest friends and co-owners was shot in the head by a drugged up, disgruntled customer and my dad had to go to the morgue and identify the body.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

This wasn't a stereotypical depiction of Chester Turley. This was a hard life. I could have followed in my dad's footsteps. He set up everything for my brother and I, but honestly, I was too chickenshit to follow through. I wasn't made of the same mettle that he and my mom are.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

So yeah, I agree with some of your points @harikondabolu, but this is much more than some stereotype. For some of us, we lived this life. It was our story. It's my story.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

The engineer, the pizza man, the gas station owner. Each is a wonderful story that inspires me everyday. pic.twitter.com/L5MI6DRP41  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 9, 2018

Need I mention I will never be as cool as my parents. pic.twitter.com/F7ytLHuBLT  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 10, 2018

Even though George Bluth said there was always money in the banana stand, for my dad making money wasn't in the running the convenience store business. It was in building, developing and flipping them. He went from gas attendant, to owner to builder and contractor.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 10, 2018

My dad's 67 now. He still wakes up at 5 in the morning, still loves WWE, still has that Harrison Ford flintiness which hides charm and kindness I know in no other person. He still goes to work with this same energy he did in his 30s.  Amar Shah (@amarshahism) April 10, 2018The American attention span is short these days, and so youre forgiven if you forgot that as recently as January people thought very seriously that Mark Zuckerberg might run for president in 2020. It wasnt an absurd suggestion: The 33-year-old wunderkind helmed arguably the most important American company since Microsoft, in an industry whose leaders have since the days of Steve Jobs held a revered status in America as forward-thinking arbiters of the future. Zuckerbergs well-publicized stump tour of the countrys heartland last year certainly didnt ease the minds of skeptics.

Things change fast, especially in tech. This week, Zuckerberg arrived in Washington under starkly different circumstances to explain to a scowling tribunal of lawmakers on Capitol Hill why Facebook, a company whose user base amounts to a quarter of the worlds population, had systematically failed to protect the private information of its users and to moderate the information to which they were exposed.

Over a collective nine hours of inquisition, an alternately anxious, defensive, bored, and weather-beaten Zuckerberg  who sat on a thick cushion that made him seem taller than his 5 feet, 7 inches  attempted to convince members of Congress that Facebook was sorry for its lapses, actively working to rectify them for the future and open to new laws that would regulate social media companies. The CEO declined to say much about this last point.

Congress was unimpressed. His testimony before a joint Senate panel the day prior had been a low-kilowatt catastrophe: a demonstration, more than anything else, that lawmakers know very little about the social media platforms they hope to regulate. (At one point, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is 84, asked Zuckerberg how Facebook makes its money. Senator, we run ads, Zuckerberg replied with a mix of reverence and astonishment. A GIF from that moment is one of many memes that have since gone viral.)

Meanwhile the House watched, eager to avoid the mistakes of their colleagues in the upper chamber. On Wednesday, when they had their chance to grill the social media giant, the several dozen members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee pressed him on a loosely confederated array of topics  from the dearth of racial diversity in Facebooks C-suite to the fact that the platform was reportedly being used to traffic Fentanyl and recruit young jihadis to ISIS.

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It was occasionally crackling theater, but the conversation mostly revolved around the issues that had created the storm clouds of public outrage hanging over Zuckerberg in the first place. Last month, media outlets reported that a shady data-mining firm with links to Republican operatives known as Cambridge Analytica had acquired the personal information of approximately 87 million Americans  information that these users had unknowingly supplied by taking an innocuous personality quiz on the site. This, along with the older news that Russian actors had used Facebook pages and ads to sow discord ahead of the 2016 presidential election, fomented the core anxiety of this moment of reckoning: the realization of just how much power sites like Facebook hold in twenty-first-century America.

Facebook has grown so big, so fast, Rep. Bobby Rush, an Illinois Democrat, said in the first hour of the hearing. It is no longer the company that you started in your dorm room. Instead its one of the great American success stories. That much influence comes with enormous social responsibility, on which you have failed to act and to protect and to consider.

Rush, who in the 1960s was active in the civil rights movement, also gave a more damning appraisal. I was personally a victim of COINTELPRO, he told Zuckerberg, referring to the Cold War-era domestic counterintelligence program that illicitly spied on and smeared individuals and groups deemed subversive, among them civil rights leaders. Your organization, your methodology in my opinion is similar Mr. Zuckerberg, what is the difference between Facebooks methodology and the methodology of the American political pariah J. Edgar Hoover?

Its an important question, Zuckerberg responded. It wasnt clear if he was serious.

When Zuckerberg was pressed to explain how the company was responding to address its past oversights, his answers were thin and repetitive. He repeatedly said that Facebook was auditing third-party actors on the site that may have had wrongful access to users private data, but could not or would not elaborate. The members of the House committee, many of whom had watched the Senate hearing, exercised little patience for repetition and were quick to call him out.

Weve all been sitting here for more than four hours, and some things are striking from this conversation, Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, said in the hearings final hour on Wednesday afternoon. As CEO, you didnt know some key facts. You didnt know some court cases against your companys privacy policy. You didnt know how many apps you need to audit.

Heres what I do know, she continued. You have trackers all over the web. Practically on all websites we go to we all see the Facebook share or like button. It doesnt matter whether you have a Facebook account. Through those tools, Facebook is able to collect information on all of us.

Throughout the inquisition, Facebooks stock ticked upwards. When Zuckerberg left the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon, he may have been the pariah du jour in the court of public opinion, but the fact remains that he was departing mostly unscathed. The two days of dialogue between the executive and the lawmakers who could be regulating him had been diffuse and materially unproductive.

Tech watchers noted that Congress limited understanding of the subject at hand meant that any meaningful regulation was still far off. Meanwhile, more cynical political watchers observed that many of the lawmakers who engaged in the more fiery exchanges are up for reelection this November and would need good clips for their campaign ads.

Im encouraged that Facebook is willing to make changes, but I am concerned that you are only acting now out of concern for your brand, Rep. Paul Tonko of New York said to Zuckerberg at one point. Indeed.For the better part of its first two hours, Mark Zuckerbergs testimony before Congress on Tuesday was a tedious affair. The problem, it seemed, were the senators questioning him. Rarely before has the senescence of this Senate  which, with an average age of 63, is the oldest in history  been so apparent. Their queries were clumsy, demonstrating limited fluency in the workings of social media and its jargon. When Zuckerbergs replies were evasive, as they sometimes were, many of these lawmakers seemed ill-equipped to push back. At one point, Sen. Orrin Hatch, the 84-year-old Utah Republican set to retire this year, asked Zuckerberg how Facebook plans to stay free for its users.

Senator, we run ads, Zuckerberg said flatly.

But then Ted Cruz chimed in. The 47-year-old Cruz, who has been known since his Princeton debate team days as a gleefully caustic interlocutor, clearly arrived in the meeting chamber in the Hart Senate Office Building with a plan of attack. Only before the first five-minute bathroom break of Zuckerbergs lengthy hearing did he choose to execute it. And when he did, for a few moments, Zuckerberg appeared on edge.

Does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum? Cruz asked Zuckerberg innocently.

Senator, we consider ourselves to be a platform for ideas, Zuckerberg replied.

It was a canned marketing point, and Cruz  with an air that suggested he knew Zuckerberg had walked into his trap  retorted with a more pointed query. Are you a First Amendment speaker expressing your views or are you a neutral public forum allowing everyone to speak? Cruz demanded.

Its a worthwhile question in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as the internet continues to grow from a mere communications system to a plane on which we conduct our everyday lives, demanding new considerations of speech rights and the privatization of public space.

But it turned out that all Cruz wanted to do was grind an old axe: his belief that Facebook has demonstrated a pervasive pattern of political bias in its monitoring and regulation of the content shared to its platform. He proceeded to rattle off a laundry list of examples: A Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day page that was banned in 2012, around the time that a number of Americans were protesting the fast-food chain after its chief operating officer made comments against same-sex marriage. Palmer Luckey, the virtual reality prodigy who parted ways with Facebooks after it was reported that he backed a pro-Trump conservative group that trafficked in anti-Hillary Clinton content. Diamond and Silk, the outspoken Trump fangirls who were reportedly told by Facebook this month that their content and brand were unsafe to the community.

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There are a great many Americans who I would say are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship, Cruz said.

Zuckerberg conceded that Silicon Valley is an extremely left-leaning place, but denied Cruzs insinuation that the bias had infiltrated the machinations of Facebook. When Cruz asked Zuckerberg if any members of the Facebook team tasked with monitoring users content had ever supported Republican political candidates, Zuckerberg said that he did not know.

It was a telegenic moment for Cruz, who faces a tough reelection in Texas this November and now has a couple more clips for his campaign television ads. But the gambit whiffed slightly of hypocrisy  Cruz accepted $7,500 in donations from Facebook during his 2012 campaign, according to an investigation by the Sunlight Foundation.

But more curious here is Cruzs relationship to Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm that hangs over Zuckerbergs two-day visit to Capitol Hill. Last month, it was reported that the firm had relied on a Facebook personality quiz to access the private data of nearly 90 million of the sites users, precipitating a controversy over Facebooks privacy policies that has culminated in Zuckerbergs testimony. The Trump campaigns work with Cambridge Analytica has at this point been meticulously documented. But before Trump was the Republican frontrunner, it was Ted Cruz who gave the firm nearly $6 million to help his campaign with data-driven advertising.

The topic did not come up in Cruzs inquisition.Bill Hybels founded Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago area 42 years ago. (Photo: Willow Creek Community Church / Screenshot)

A Chicago-area pastor is stepping down from the leadership of one of Americas largest megachurches after allegations emerged that he engaged in inappropriate behavior with female members of his congregation.

The Rev. Bill Hybels, an evangelical pastor who founded Willow Creek Community Church 42 years ago, announced Tuesday that he was retiring six months ahead of schedule.

Hybels, who has repeatedly denied the allegations of sexual misconduct, spoke to church members during a Tuesday night meeting at the churchs main branch in South Barrington, Illinois. (See the video here.) Hybels said he was grieved by how the controversy surrounding him was hindering the churchs ministries. Since May 2012, he had indicated that he planned to retire as lead pastor in October 2018. But he decided to move that date up and step away from other church responsibilities, he said, in order to allow the Willow Creek congregation to flourish.

He also said again that the accusations against him were misleading or entirely false and that an outside investigation had found no evidence of inappropriate behavior. He did acknowledge, however, that he had too often placed himself in situations that would have been far wiser to avoid and had been naive about the dynamics those situations created.

I realize now that in certain settings and circumstances in the past, I communicated things that were perceived in ways I did not intend, at times making people feel uncomfortable, Hybels said. I was blind to this dynamic for far too long. For that, Im very sorry.

In March, the Chicago Tribune published the allegations of several women who accused Hybels of behaving inappropriately with them during encounters that stretched back to the 1990s. The behavior allegedly included lewd comments, extended hugs and, in one case, an unwanted kiss and an invitation to a private hotel room. Another woman told the Tribune that she had a consensual affair with Hybels, although she later retracted the claim.

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Willow Creek Community Church says that it conducted multiple investigations into those allegations, starting in 2014. These included an outside inquiry that the church commissioned from a Chicago law firm. The investigations all cleared Hybels of any inappropriate behavior. But a group of former church members and leaders in the Willow Creek community were dissatisfied and are demanding more scrutiny.

Willow Creek has not made the full report from the law firms investigation public. The church explained on its website that the report was shown only to church elders because the 29 people interviewed had been assured that their conversations would be kept confidential.

Church elders didnt inform the broader congregation that these investigations were taking place. The statement on the website says that since the results were negative, it would have been dishonoring to Hybels if they had shared the false allegations.

Hybels is a prominent leader within American evangelicalism. He helped Willow Creek grow into one of the countrys largest megachurches, with seven satellite sites. The church also has international reach through the Willow Creek Association, a leadership training initiative that has ties to more than 11,000 churches worldwide. More than 25,000 people attend services at the churchs main campus in South Barrington on any given weekend, the Tribune reports.

During the 1990s, Hybels was a close spiritual adviser to President Bill Clinton, including around the time the president was having an affair with Monica Lewinsky, according to The Washington Post.

President Bill Clinton prays with Bill Hybels on the North Portico of the White House after a morning jog on June 6, 1995. (Photo: LUKE FRAZZA via Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Hybels announced that longtime church leader Heather Larson, whom hed nominated as his successor last October, will immediately take over as lead pastor.

Larson told congregants at Tuesdays gathering that she is extremely grateful for Hybels legacy and that the church is working on an appropriate way to honor him and his family in the future.

She also said that some of the women who brought the accusations against Hybels were once her own mentors. And she acknowledged that many of the women in the congregation may feel confused or frustrated by the recent events.

Some of the language you have heard in the media does not resonate with your experience or what you know to be true of our church. I want to assure you we can at the same time respect someones story and stand up for our own, Larson said.

Were all going to need time and space to process.

Also on HuffPost

St. Catherine of Siena

The second-youngest of 25 children, Catherine of Siena is one of only two patron saints of Italy. Catherine believed herself to be spiritually wed to Jesus and committed herself to a monastic life as a teenager. She was a peacemaker during the 1368 revolution in Siena and convinced Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome during a tumultuous time for the Catholic Church. One story from her life tells of Jesus appearing to her with a heart in his hands and saying, Dearest daughter, as I took your heart away from you the other day, now, you see, I am giving you mine, so that you can go on living with it for ever. She was canonized in 1461.

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc grew up a peasant in medieval France and reportedly started hearing the voices of saints from a young age. At the age of 18, Joan believed that God had chosen her to lead France to victory in its ongoing war with England. The precocious Joan convinced crowned prince Charles of Valois to allow her to lead a the countrys army to Orleans, where it defeated the English and their French allies, the Burgundians. She was subsequently captured by Anglo-Burgundian forces, tried for heresy and burned at the stake in 1431. She was just 19 years old when she died. The Catholic Church canonized her in 1920.

Hildegard von Bingen

Hildegard von Bingen was a Benedictine abbess who lived between 1098 and 1179. Hildegard became a nun as a teenager, though she had received divine visions since early childhood. It wasnt until her 40s that Hildegard began writing a record of these visions, which came to be known as Scivias (Know the Ways). She went on to write other texts documenting her philosophy and also composed short works on medicine, natural history, music and more. Bishops, popes, and kings consulted her at a time when few women engaged in the political domain. She was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.

St. Teresa of Avila

Teresa of Avila was born in Spain during the 16th century to a well-to-do family. Teresa was fascinated by stories of the Christian saints and martyrs from a young age and explored these interests through mystical games she played with her brother, Roderigo. Her early efforts to join a convent were interrupted by the disapproval of her father, as well as several bouts of malaria. She turned instead to quiet prayer and contemplation and attained what she described in her autobiography as the "prayer of union," in which she felt her soul absorbed into Gods power. She went on to join a convent and was said to have at one point restored her young nephew to health after he was crushed by a fallen wall. The episode was presented at the process for Teresa's canonization, which took place in 1662.

St. Catherine of Genoa

Born in 1447, Catherine of Genoa is perhaps best known for her visions of and treatise on purgatory. She conceptualized purgatory as an interior, rather than exterior, fire which individuals experience within themselves. The soul presents itself to God still bound to the desires and suffering that derive from sin and this makes it impossible for it to enjoy the beatific vision of God, Catherine wrote in her book of revelations. She developed a deep relationship with God which Pope Benedict XVI described as a unitive life. Catherine also dedicated her life to caring for the sick, which she did at the Pammatone Hospital until her death in 1510. She was canonized in 1737.

St. Clare of Assisi

Clare of Assisi shunned a life of luxury in her wealthy Italian family to devote herself to the burgeoning order of Francis of Assisi. When her parents promised her hand in marriage to a wealthy man in 1211, Clare fled for the Porziuncola Chapel and was taken in by Francis. She took vows dedicating her life to God, and Francis placed Clare provisionally with the Benedictine nuns of San Paolo. Her family, furious at Clares secret flight, went there to try to drag her home by force, but Clare was resolute. Clares piety was so profound that her sister, mother and several other female relatives eventually came to live with her and be her disciples in her convent outside Assisi. The group came to be known as the Poor Clares and walked barefoot, slept on the ground, abstained from meat, and spoke only when necessary. Clare died in 1253 and was canonized two years later by Pope Alexander IV.

Therese of Lisieux

Born in France in 1873, Therese of Lisieux experienced a mystical union with Christ while undergoing study for her First Communion in 1884. She entered the Carmel of Lisieux, a Carmelite hermitage, in 1888 and made a profession of religious devotion in 1890. She became ill and died at the young age of 24, but her writings and revelations formed the basis for widespread veneration after her death. Affectionately called The Little Flower, Therese believed that children have an aptitude for spiritual experience, which adults should model. "What matters in life," she wrote, "is not great deeds, but great love." She was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1925.

Julian of Norwich

Little is known about Julian of Norwich, an English mystic who lived from 1342 until roughly 1430. Information about her comes primarily from her Revelations of Divine Love in Sixteen Showings, the book in which Julian recorded her divine visions. In 1373, she became ill and nearly died within a matter of days. A priest came to her bedside and show her an image of Christ, after which Julian recovered and received the 16 revelations that she recorded in her book. God later revealed to her the meaning of these visions, which she recorded as: Would you learn to see clearly your Lords meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love.... Why did he show it to you? For Love.... Thus I was taught that Love was our Lords meaning. She chose to live a contemplative and reclusive life until her death.

St. Bridget of Sweden

Unlike many of her counterparts, Bridget of Sweden did not devote herself fully to a religious life until her 40s when her husband died in 1344. Reportedly distraught after his death, Bridget spent long hours in prayer beside her husbands grave at the abbey of Alvastra. There she believed God spoke to her, telling her to be my bride and my canal. He gave her the task of founding new religious order, and she went on to start the Brigittines, or the Order of St. Saviour. Both men and women joined the community, with separate cloisters. They lived in poor convents and were instructed to give all surplus income to the poor. In 1350, Bridget braved the plague, which was ravaging Europe, to pilgrimage to Rome in order to obtain authorization for her new order from the pope. It would be 20 years before she received this authorization, but Bridget quickly became known throughout Europe for her piety. She was canonized in 1391, less than 20 years after her death.

St. Beatrice of Silva

Born in 1424, Beatrice of Silva abandoned a court life with Princess Isabel of Portugal to enter a Cistercian convent in Toledo. She lived at the convent until 1484, when she believed God summoned her to found a religious order. She started the Congregation of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where she lived and served as superior until her death circa 1492. Shortly before Beatrices death, Pope Innocent VIII approved a the convents adoption of the Cistercian rule, which consisted of three guidelines: be silent and submissive to Gods direction; strive for a life of obscurity and piety; and love everyone with a holy love. Beatrice reportedly received a vision of the Virgin Mary dressed in a white habit with a white scapular and blue mantle, which formed the basis of the dress for her order. Pope Paul VI canonized St. Beatrice in 1976.

St. Angela of Foligno

Angela of Foligno was a Franciscan mystic who was born into a prestigious family and married at the age of 20. A series of events, which included a violent earthquake in 1279 and an ongoing war against Perugia lead her to call upon St Francis, who appeared to her in a vision and instructed her to go to confession. Three years later, her mother, husband and all of her children died in the span of a few months. Angela then sold her possessions and in 1291 enrolled in the Third Order of St Francis. At 43, Angela had a vision of Gods love while she was making a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Francis of Assisi. She dictated her experiences in The Book of the Experience of the Truly Faithful. Pope Francis canonized Angela of Foligno in 2013.

Mechthild of Magdeburg

Like Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg was part of the Beguine community. The German mystic decided at age 22 to devote her life to God and authored a text entitled The Flowing Light of the Godhead. She entered the convent of Helfta in 1270 and used poetry to express her divine revelations. On the first page of The Flowing Light, Mechthild wrote: I have been put on my guard about this book, and certain people have warned me that, unless I have it buried, it will be burnt. Yet, I in my weakness have written it, because I dared not hide the gift that is in it.

Hadewijch

Hadewijch was a Flemish mystic who was part of the Beguine movement, a network of ascetic and philanthropic communities of women that arose primarily in the Netherlands in the 13th century. Little is known about her life outside of her writings, which include a collection of letters on the spiritual life of the Beguines, as well as a book of visions. According to Dr. Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, a comparative literature professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Hadewijch believed that the soul, created by God in his own image, longs to be one with divine love again, to become God with God.

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.In the past two months, over $25 billion has left passive mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the largest amount since 2008, during the financial crisis.

In a Credit Suisse note, analysts wrote that the domestic outflows were countered by a rise in fixed income investment. Inflows to global stock mutual funds have also remained solid.

By and large, ETFs have been traded hotly in February and March, 35% up from last year at this time. For example, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), saw an average daily trade value of almost $30 billion in March.

The reason why is no big secret. Recent volatility has led many to allocate less to ETFs. BlackRock, for instance, saw a 46% decline into its ETFs in the first quarter. Much of this pullback is a result of institutional investors looking for other bets during uncertain times. But unlike in the past, these outflows in passive index funds and ETFs arent being offset by inflows from retail investors, individuals who are saving for retirement or other life goals.

The first bit of turbulence for many investors

For most of the millennial generation, the markets recent turbulence is the first real hiccup since they opened their 401(k)s or IRAs  and it can be scary. But anxiety from dark headlines often dissipates when investors keep their goals in mind. Too often, though, these goals are thrown out the window when panic over volatility sets in.

Stuart Ritter, certified financial planner for T. Rowe Price, has a good way of putting it. Imagine youre in a plane headed to Los Angeles from New York. As youre flying, the weather in Cincinnati is abysmal, and the plane is being battered about. If youre going to Cincinnati, maybe you worry about this, but you are not. Youre going to Los Angeles.

Or as I said during Februarys stock market tumble, losing your 401(k) password is probably solid investment advice if youre in your 20s.

Since 1926, the S&P 500 has always had a positive return over every 15-calendar-year period, said Ritter. And your time horizon is likely much longer than that.

Story continues

Ritter advises that if you have a plan in place  appropriately allocated stocks, bonds, and cash for your situation and goals  stick with it. And, of course, figure out a plan if you dont have one.

According to Judith Ward, a senior financial planner at T. Rowe Price, any financial goals beyond three to five years probably should have some solid exposure to stocks.

If [a goal] is in 15 years or longer, then a heavy stock percentage is okay, she told Yahoo Finance.

Many financial planners say that for people with far-off goals like a childs college fund, a down payment on a house someday, or retirement, theres something to be said for taking advantage of scary volatility or a dip. Ward, for example, promotes the idea that its good to automate things as much as possible, like regular contributions to 401(k)s in fixed dollar amounts, a technique called dollar cost averaging(this way you purchase more shares of the investment when prices are lower and fewer shares when prices are high).

When the markets down that means theyre buying more shares, Ward said. They are able to accumulate more shares and invest at lower prices.



Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann. Confidential tip line: FinanceTips[at]oath[.com].

How to access the mountain of data Facebook has on you

Heres who is sitting behind Mark Zuckerberg and whyMissouri Gov. Eric Greitens announced Wednesday that hes the target of a political witch hunt as he held a news conference before the release of a state House committees report on its investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct and blackmail.

Here today, a report will make accusations about my personal life. We fully expect the report being released tonight will include lies and falsehoods. I want to say again what I said in the beginning: This is a political witch hunt, Greitens told reporters.

The first-term Republican governor has been under investigation after admitting to an extramarital affair with his hairdresser. The woman claims Greitens took nude photographs of her without her consent and that the governor attempted to blackmail her. The governors accuser claimed on Monday that she may have had a dream or vision of nude photos being taken of her, but her attorney says the governor has admitted taking photos of her more than once.

Greitens, who denies trying to blackmail her, was indicted in February on charges of first-degree felony invasion of privacy over the photographs, according to CNN. He is also the subject of an FBI inquiry and House special investigative committee inquiry in Missouri.

The House committee is expected to release its report Wednesday evening.

The governor, a married father of two children, called his affair a personal mistake and told reporters that the report would be full of false, outlandish and salacious accusations. Greitens continually referred to his court date in 33 days and insisted that he would be exonerated at trial.

Keep in mind how this was written: No standards of evidence were used, no witnesses were cross-examined, no one who was representing me was allowed in the room and no members of the press or the public were allowed in the room, Greitens said. If the committee had waited 33 days, they would have received a full set of facts. Instead, it was decided to publish an incomplete document made in secret.

Story continues

Greitens continued to characterize the allegations against him as an absurd political witch hunt that dates to the beginning of his political career. He went on to compare the investigations into his behavior to those occurring in Washington D.C., alluding to the special counsel investigation into President Donald Trumps 2016 campaign ties to Russia.

This article has been updated with more of Greitens statement.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Thursday, April 12, 2018

What to watch today

On Thursday, markets will be keeping an eye, as always, on President Donald Trumps Twitter feed and the rising tensions in the Middle East. On Wednesday, reports that a missile had been intercepted over Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, sent oil prices to their highest level since 2014, while Trumps early morning tweet that said missiles will be coming to Syria after Russian officials said they would shoot down any missiles fired at the nation. Trumps tweet put stock futures under pressure before the market open, and stocks couldnt get much momentum going during the trading day as each of the major indexes closed in the red.

Read More

Top news

Fed sees GDP hit from trade war outweighing fleeting inflation: A trade war would leave the U.S. Federal Reserve having to decide between battling weaker economic growth or rising prices. Which one it focuses on already looks pretty clear. Minutes of the U.S. central banks March 20-21 policy meeting, published Wednesday, showed a strong majority of participants viewed the prospect of retaliatory trade actions by other countries, as well as other issues and uncertainties associated with trade policies, as downside risks for the U.S. economy. [Bloomberg]

Redstone has a $187M reason not to push CBSs Moonves out: If Leslie Moonvess CBS Corp. (CBS) cant agree on a deal with Viacom Inc. (VIAB), Shari Redstone still has a $187 million reason to keep the media boss around. Thats based on the payout that Moonves would stand to collect if his contract is terminated before it expires. Redstone, the controlling shareholder of both companies and the catalyst for renewed negotiations, has the power to oust management to get the merger she wants. [Bloomberg]

Ryan poised to earn millions: Paul Ryan will easily add to his already considerable net worth if he opts to stray from his native Wisconsin to join a corporate board or dabble in Washington power struggles when he retires next year as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Ryan, 48, who said he was retiring to be more than a weekend dad, could easily follow the path of previous congressional leaders, including Newt Gingrich and Richard Gephardt, who became corporate directors. [Bloomberg]

Story continues

Heres what Zuckerberg had to say on Capitol Hill: Facebook (FB) CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for five more hours of wide-ranging questions, this time from the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committees. The topics were familiar from Tuesday and revolved around the Cambridge Analytica controversy, whether Facebook users own their data, and whether Facebook mishandled user privacy in general over the years. The jabs were slightly harsher, as some lawmakers underscored and outlined Zuckerbergs lack of knowledge as it pertained to certain critical issues and company missteps. [Yahoo Finance]

More Yahoo Finance coverage on Facebook:

For more of the latest news, go to Yahoo Finance

Vehicles travel on photovoltaic lanes developed by Qilu Transportation Development Group Co. on a highway in Jinan, China. About 45,000 vehicles barrel over the 3,540-foot-long section every day, and the solar panels inside generate enough electricity to power highway lights and 800 homes, according to Qilu Transportation. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

Yahoo Finance Originals

How Trump helps German automakers by pushing Chinas tariff cut

More cars are coming from China, whether Trump likes it or not

Americans may owe $25 billion in crypto taxes  but how much will they report?



Like what you just read? Get the Morning Brief sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET. And feel free to share it with a friend!

The Morning Brief provides a quick rundown on what to watch in the markets, top news stories, and the best of Yahoo Finance Originals.United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Russia's UN ambassador said Thursday that the priority in Syria was to avert US-led military strikes that could lead to a dangerous war between Russia and the United States.

"The immediate priority is to avert the danger of war," Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told reporters following a closed-door meeting of the Security Council.

Asked if he was referring to a war between the United States and Russia, he said: "We cannot exclude any possibilities unfortunately because we saw the messages that were coming from Washington. They were very bellicose."

President Donald Trump this week warned on Twitter that "missiles are coming" in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria and that Russia should "get ready."

The ambassador said the United States knows that Russian troops are on the ground in Syria and that he hoped for "dialogue through appropriate channels on this to avert any dangerous developments."

"We hope there will be no point of no-return, that the US and their allies will refrain from military action against a sovereign state," he said.

The Security Council met behind closed doors at the request of Bolivia, a supporter of Russia, to discuss the threat of military action against Syria as Trump was huddled with his national security advisors in Washington.

The United States is consulting with Britain and France about a joint military response to the attack in Douma that medics and rescuers said left at least 40 people dead on Saturday.

Russia has told the United States that it will not allow its troops on the ground in Syria to be put at risk by military action, even though the two countries have contacts to avoid such direct confrontation.

- Sweden proposes UN mission to Syria -

Ahead of the meeting, Sweden circulated a draft resolution on sending a high-level disarmament mission to Syria to deal with all "outstanding issues" of Damascus's chemical weapons program "once and for all."

Story continues

But the proposal appeared to gain little traction, according to diplomats who said the United States, Britain and France felt it fell short of their demands for a panel that would identify perpetrators of chemical attacks.

Asked about the Swedish proposal, Nebenzia said Russia will study it, but that "frankly in the circumstances we are finding ourselves now, this is not an immediate priority."

Russia called for a public meeting of the Security Council for Friday and requested that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres brief the top UN body on the crisis.

After the council failed this week during three votes to agree on a response, Guterres stressed "the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control" in Syria.

The UN chief spoke by phone Wednesday with the ambassadors from the five permanent council members -- Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States -- to express his "deep concern" about the deadlock over Syria.

Syria meanwhile offered its full cooperation to experts from the OPCW chemical arms watchdog who will arrive in Syria on Thursday and Friday to investigate the allegations of an attack in Douma.

"We will facilitate the arrival of the team to anywhere they want, in Douma, to check whether or not there was use of chemical substances," Syrian Ambassador Bashar Jaafari said.

A spokesman for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said the experts will begin work on Saturday.JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a speech at Israel's annual Holocaust commemorations on Wednesday to call for action against Syria following a suspected poison gas attack. The United States has threatened air strikes against Syria over the use of chemical weapons that Syria and its ally Russia deny. "The events of the last days teach that standing up to evil and aggression is a mission that is incumbent upon every generation," Netanyahu said at the Holocaust commemorations' opening ceremony, without explicitly referring to the standoff between Washington and Moscow. "We saw the Syrian children who were slaughtered with chemical weapons. Our hearts were rent by the horrific sights." Netanyahu also invoked the lessons of World War Two and the Holocaust to call for action against Iran, criticizing the nuclear deal Tehran signed with six world powers. "The lack of willingness among the powers of the West to stand firm in the face of the tyrannical regime, their lack of willingness to pay the price of stopping aggression at an early stage, led to humanity paying a much greater price later on," he said. (Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)Riyadh (AFP) - The Gulf crisis, which has seen Qatar isolated by Saudi Arabia and its allies, is not on the table at the upcoming meeting of Arab League states, Riyadh's foreign minister said Thursday.

"The solution of Qatar will be within the GCC," or the six-state Gulf Cooperation Council, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told reporters in Riyadh ahead of the Arab Summit.

He was responding to an AFP question on whether the crisis was on the agenda at the meeting on Sunday, which is hosted by Saudi Arabia and joins 21 of the 22 Arab League member states.

Syria is technically a member of the league but has been suspended from the summit since 2011 over the government's role in the war there.

Qatar has confirmed its attendance at the Saudi summit.

The 10-month Gulf crisis pits Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain against Qatar. It is the worst crisis to ever hit the Gulf, home to both the world's largest exporters of oil and liquified natural gas -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar respectively.

Riyadh and its allies broke off relations with Doha in June, accusing it of fostering close links with Tehran and supporting Islamist extremists. Qatar denies the charges.

The boycott includes the closure of the small Gulf state's only land border with Saudi Arabia.

Saudi media close to the government this week announced the kingdom planned to dig a canal the length of its border with Qatar, to turn its peninsula neighbour into an isolated island.

The planned canal, dubbed "Salwa", is "funded entirely by Saudi and Emirati private sector investment under full Saudi authority," Sabq Online Newspaper reported on Monday.

The Saudi government has not issued a denial.

Kuwait, a member of the GCC, has led mediation efforts in the crisis -- to no avail -- with the support of the United States.

US President Donald Trump had initially supported the Saudi-led economic blockade on Qatar, but aides -- mindful of the pivotal role that the Al Udeid Air Base outside Doha plays in US Middle East operations -- have since convinced him to take a more moderate approach.

Trump met with the Emir of Qatar at the White House on Tuesday, barely one year after alleging Doha funded terrorism at a "high level" and less than two weeks after meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The president on Tuesday dubbed the Qatari emir a "friend" and "great gentleman".Angus Ross, Andrew Savchenko

Security, Eurasia

Servicemen load air-to-ground missiles onto a Sukhoi Su-25 jet fighter during a drill at the Russian southern Stavropol region, March 12, 2015. Russia has started military exercises in the country's south, as well as in Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and in Crimea, annexed from Ukraine last year, news agency RIA reported on Thursday, citing Russia's Defence Ministry. REUTERS/Eduard Korniyenko

Russia reserves the right to pursue its interests in the postSoviet space without Western interference, in any way it sees fit.

The Obvious Question: What Does Russia Want?

With Vladimir Putin now safely back in the Kremlin for another six years, and with a number of crises involving Russian forces still smoldering in the world, the time is ripe to have another look at the vexing question of what exactly Russia might want from the next decade, and what it might be willing to do to achieve these ends.

Russia is one of historys great survivors. In one form or another, it has existed for close to a thousand years; for a large part of that period, particularly in recent centuries, it has counted itself among the greatest land powers on the planet. It does, however, have difficulty with its national identity. Spanning eleven time zones, and with a landmass equal to the surface area of the moon, it is home to an ethnically diverse mixture of creeds and cultures. In many ways, its recent history has been one of self-colonization.

For the last four hundred years or so, elites, based in Moscow and later St. Petersburg, have dictated Russias outlook on the international stage. During this period, it has sought to be a part of Europe but also to remain separate, exhibiting a unique Russian way of balancing the state, society and the individual. Europes peoples are sufficiently near to Russians, and sufficiently similar to them, for their fate to be important. Russians read their literature and enjoy their music and artand yet their societies are, in many ways, exceedingly different. The past still divides Russians as much as the present. In fact, most Russians would not identify the present Russian Federation as what they understand by Russia. Increasingly, they would rather use the term Russian worlda vaguely defined, nebulous entity that transcends the boundaries of the Russian Federation and sometimes even as far as those of the former Soviet Union. The majority of Russians seem to consider it morally justified to use force in pursuit of Russias interests within the Russian world. This has caused Moscows international dealings with others to be defined by an anxiety to prove itself, and to justify such actions. In so doing, the emphasis on this unique Russian way has taken on a life of its own.

Story continues

All nations have interests. National interests are essentially a consensus, made among a nations political elites and their key constituents, about specific goals and ambitions in the international arena. Agreement about these goals guides a countrys relations with other countries and international organizations and, just as importantly, must include acceptable costs for these policies. Such things are usually relatively stable, being shaped and supported by the nations geopolitics, history and culture. However, since national interests are forward-looking statements that deal in a variety of possible future scenarios, their outcomes remain inherently uncertain. It is quite possible, therefore, that the pursuit of any one of them may not always yield the expected benefits. Moreover, the costs of this pursuit may be borne by one social group, while the benefits accrue to another. In other words, the pursuit of even seemingly obvious and safe national interests can carry some risk to political stability, both internally and externally.

In the 1990s, Russias national interests were not exactly a hot topic among scholars, analysts and opinion makers. The prevailing assumption was that post-Soviet elites would, almost by default, adopt something akin to Francis Fukuyamas end of history as the underlying guiding principle of their policy formation. Political and economic liberalization was expected to obviate the sources of national competition in all spheres: diplomatic, economic, geopolitical and even cultural.

In this context, Putins Munich speech of 2007 came as a shock, because it essentially made clear that post-Soviet Russia still maintained a unique set of national interests. This should have come as no surprise. There had been signs all along that Russia was intent on developing a more assertive international stance, even under Yeltsin. Russias opposition to NATOs activities in the Balkans and the Wests expansion into central Europe had taken shape during Yevgeny Primakovs tenures as foreign minister and prime minister. The process culminated in the dramatic cancellation of Primakovs visit to the United States in March of 1999, when, in response to NATOs bombing in Serbia, he ordered his plane, then en route to Washington, to turn back in midair and head back to Moscow. In the course of the Kosovo conflict that followed, Russian forces came to the brink of confrontation with NATO troops at the Pristina airport that same year. Few at the time realized how galvanizing the Kosovo humiliation had been to post-Soviet Russia, although scholars such as George Friedman and Rama Kumar later correctly connected it to Russias logic for the Georgia intervention in 2008.

What also changed between Primakovs about-face over the North Atlantic and Putins speech in Munich was the price of oil. From $12.51 per barrel in March 1999, Brent crude rose to $57.56 per barrel by February 2007 and was projected to continue its march upwards; indeed, the price had again doubled by May 2008. Sales of oil and natural gas (whose price fluctuates with that of crude oil) accounted for 68 percent of Russias export revenue in 2013, the last year before the downward correction of 2014. Russia had therefore enjoyed several years of robust, uninterrupted growth in the price of its main export commodities. Economically secure, and with growing affluence, Russia could announce to all listening its opposition to what it saw as continuing encroachment by the West on its long-standing national interests.

More profoundly, Russia today considers itself the natural inheritor of the status once held by Soviet Union. Thus, beyond the ever-present defense of the homeland, it has the recovery of great-power status as its most important outward-looking national objective. To this end, Russia takes every possible opportunity to divide and weaken what it sees as the pervading influence of the West. The recovery of some of its erstwhile buffer states is an obvious part of this, but today we must be prepared for a far subtler effort than simply the use of armed forces. In the words of the supreme allied commander in Europe, Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, Russia has been very active in eastern Ukraine. . . . And theyre active through many means, not just military but information, work to undermine the political fabric, etcetera. Russias interference in the democratic processes of the West, its energetic hacking of Western institutions and its undermining of authority with covert operations are symptomatic of its disregard for what it sees as disproportionate Western dominance in the international order.

To support this, Russias military strategy has evolved markedly over the last twenty-five years, embracing what some would call unrestricted warfare. This has been described as warfare without rules or using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and nonmilitary, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept ones interests. Other commentators have referred to this as political warfare or the act of fighting in the gray zone. It is important to understand here that the shift in the goal, from imposing ones will by force to the acceptance of ones interests by other means, fundamentally changes what it means to fight such impositions. Since many of these activities do not involve the use of violence, it is not always clear whether a military response is appropriate or not. Worse still, Western democracies largely reject this blurring of military and civilian tactics. Small wonder, then, that our government institutions, including the military, seem poorly equipped to provide an adequate response. Of course, this is precisely what Russia is banking on.

While Putins Munich speech gave a clear indication as to Russias mutually supportive economic and geopolitical goals, his recent speech to the Russian parliament also gave us insight into some of the means whereby he intends to exert influence in the world. Reaffirming Russias national interests, Putin stated that Russia is prepared to go all the way to a nuclear confrontation with the United States in pursuit of these goals. The array of weapons that Putin presented included systems designed to preserve the nuclear deterrent, as well as systems that only make sense if viewed as second tier nuclear weapons: weapons that Russia could use locally, without precipitating an all-out nuclear exchange. More worryingly, it seems that these inherently destabilizing weapons are likely to be the ones to spearhead any military component of Russias overall plans.

In essence, Russia is attempting to recoup its status as a great power by keeping its strategic nuclear deterrent up to date, preventing advances in Western missile defenses from blunting its nuclear sword and developing what have been unimaginatively called super weapons to gain an offensive advantage wherever needed. Although rumored for years, these were officially revealed in the last month, and consist of a series of both nuclear and conventional weapons utilizing advanced technologies like hypersonics to grant an asymmetric advantage against an assumed conventional dominance in forces from the West.

Beyond their pure shock value, it is important to understand that these weapons have been carefully designed to fit Russias unrestricted-warfare ideals. As Steven Blank explains, this is a strategy to demonstrate nuclear capability ostentatiously throughout all the stage [sic] of any crisis to control the escalation processes during that crisis. In other words, the aim is to inhibit any possible Western response by presenting an unacceptable possibility, backed up by just enough credibility to cause momentary paralysis in Western military thinkinga sort of nuclear blackmail. Obviously the West, and more specifically NATO, was the intended audience for this part of the speech. The message was clear: Russia reserved the right to pursue its interests in the post-Soviet space without Western interference, in any way it saw fit.

Geopolitically, Russia wants to maintain a security zone between itself and NATO. This security belt would consist of states whose friendliness is ensured by their status as de facto Russian vassals. Belarus would be an obvious example here, but the Black Sea region is also increasingly important in this regard. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia felt sufficiently secure a year later to flex its newfound regional power by using its military capabilities in this area to springboard into direct military involvement in the Syrian Civil War. The Black Sea fleets warships have been actively involved in this operation since day one.

Ten years of military and political investment in the region are not without design. The area falls squarely within three sectors of Russias national-interest matrix. Economic interests are represented by the Novorossiysk export oil terminal and, more significantly, the planned Turkish Stream natural-gas pipeline. When this is complete, it will be possible for Russia to supply natural gas to southern Europe without passing through Ukrainian territory. Keeping Turkey at arms length as a military and political competitor in the region, or co-opting it as a partner, is another important part of the security belt strategy. Finally, control over Crimea allows the Russian Navy to project power to the eastern Mediterranean, thus putting Russian naval assets in close proximity to the politically volatile, oil-rich Middle East.

If Russian authorities were ready to endure international condemnation, loss of membership in the G-8 and debilitating international economic sanctions while pursuing of national interests in one sensitive region, the likelihood is that they can, and will be willing to, do the same elsewhere. This brings us to the second audience for Putins March message: the Russian people. The message here is that, after years of defying the West, Russia has not only endured the hardships of growing international isolation, but has nevertheless grown strong enough to challenge them militarily. The fact that this message seemed to strike a chord with the Russian electorate demonstrates just how much pride and recognition still matter within their society.

In sum, Russia seems intent on successfully exploiting its democratic opponents transparency with unrestricted warfare, while developing niche asymmetric military capabilities that it hopes will be difficult for them to counter: a classic asymmetric stance. Alliances like NATO, established to provide solely military capabilitieswhich, through consensus, are all the more vulnerable to political blackmailare poorly placed to respond to such hybrid threats, and thus their advantages are somewhat muted. To its credit, NATO has made some early counter-efforts, but much more remains to be done.

In the following weeks, this look at Russias national interests will be further broken down into objectives within key regions and military capability areas, such as its strategic rocket forces and maritime efforts, to better understand what the West are up against. The series will end with a consideration of recommendations for the upcoming NATO summit in Brussels in July.

Angus Ross is a professor of joint military operations at the Naval War College and something of an amateur historian, while Andrew Savchenko writes on political risk in the post-Soviet space and teaches Economy and Society at RISD. The views expressed here are theirs alone.

Image: Servicemen load air-to-ground missiles onto a Sukhoi Su-25 jet fighter during a drill at the Russian southern Stavropol region, March 12, 2015. Russia has started military exercises in the country's south, as well as in Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and in Crimea, annexed from Ukraine last year, news agency RIA reported on Thursday, citing Russia's Defence Ministry. REUTERS/Eduard Korniyenko 

Read full articleBy Heide Brandes OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - Oklahoma's largest teachers union on Thursday called off a nearly two-week walkout that shut public schools statewide, saying it had secured historic gains in education funding after school budgets were devastated by a decade of cuts. The move came after the Republican-dominated legislature passed its first major tax hikes in a quarter century that raised about $450 million in revenue for education. Republican leaders said they had no plans to go as high as the $600 million being sought by educators. "We absolutely have a victory for teachers," Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, told a news conference. "Our members are saying they want to go back to the classroom," said Priest, whose union has about 40,000 members. Some major districts have said they will resume classes on Monday. The strike was part of a wave of actions by teachers in states that have some of the lowest per-student spending in the country. A West Virginia strike ended last month with a pay raise for teachers, and educators in Arizona protested before classes on Wednesday, without skipping work, to seek enhanced education funding. The Oklahoma walkout began on April 2 and affected about 500,000 of the state's 700,000 public school students. Opinion surveys showed it had garnered wide support among Oklahoma voters, many of whom had seen firsthand how students at struggling schools had to share outdated and tattered textbooks and sometimes go to a four-day school week to help save districts money. Oklahoma teachers, who were seeking a $10,000 annual wage hike over three years, will see an average annual pay raise of about $6,100 from the increased funding, lawmakers said. In May 2017, their annual mean wage was $41,880, among the lowest in the country, compared with neighboring states such as Texas at $57,830 and Kansas at $50,470, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. School districts for the most part supported the teacher walk-out. But they began to run out of wiggle room to make up for lost time when the labor action threatened to extend the school year, piling pressure on teachers to return. Low wages have created an exodus of educators, causing a teacher shortage in Oklahoma. As a result, school districts had to cut curricula and deploy nearly 2,000 emergency-certified instructors as a stop-gap measure. (Reporting by Heide Brandes in Oklahoma City and Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton in Tulsa; Writing by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Sandra Maler)One-third of Americans think substantially less than 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, according to a new survey that highlights a worrying lack of basic knowledge about the World War II-era genocide.

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, released the findings of its survey to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day. They show a notable lack of understanding among Americans, especially millennials, the group said.

The Claims Conference said there are critical gaps both in awareness of basic facts as well as detailed knowledge of the Holocaust in American society, stressing that U.S. schools must provide more comprehensive education on the crimes.

Trending: Overwatch Retribution Guide: Expert Tips For: Saving the World

The survey shows that 70 percent of Americans believe people care less about the Holocaust than they used to. A majority, 58 percent, said they believe something like the Holocaust could happen again.

Concentration camp uniform Holocaust

Ian Waldie/Getty Images

Just under a third (31 percent) of those surveyed do not believe that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust and think the real death toll is at least 2 million lower. This was true for 41 percent of millennials.

Adolf Hitler's fascist Nazi regime killed approximately 6 million Jews before and during World War II. The Nazis also murdered millions of Eastern European civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, disabled people, homosexuals and political prisoners. Estimates of the total death toll reach as high at 15 million to 20 million people.

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Almost half (45 percent) of Americans were unable to name a single concentration camp, and the number was even worse for millennials (49 percent). Two-thirds (66 percent) of millennials were unable to explain what Auschwitz was. The death camp is one of the most infamous ones that existed in Nazi-ruled Europe, and its name has become synonymous with the genocide.

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Fifteen percent thought people should be allowed to display Nazi slogans or symbols today, while 11 percent said it is acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views.

These figures are especially concerning given the reported rise in hate group numbers, activity and confidence in recent years. A February report from the Southern Poverty Law Center claimed that the number of hate groups in the U.S. has increased by 20 percent over the past three years. The number of neo-Nazi groups increased from 99 in 2016 to 121 in 2017, the center said.

Around two-thirds (68 percent) of Americans believe there is anti-Semitism in the U.S. today, and a majority (51 percent) think there is either a great deal of (17 percent) or many (34 percent) neo-Nazis in the country today.

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Neo-Nazis Charlottesville

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Despite the worrying figures, 93 percent of those asked think the Holocaust should be taught in schools, while 96 percent believe that the genocide happened.

Claims Conference President Julius Berman said it is vital to open a dialogue on the state of Holocaust awareness so that the lessons learned inform the next generation. We are alarmed that todays generation lacks some of the basic knowledge about these atrocities.

Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference, said, There remain troubling gaps in Holocaust awareness while survivors are still with us; imagine when there are no longer survivors here to tell their stories. We must be committed to ensuring the horrors of the Holocaust and the memory of those who suffered so greatly are remembered, told and taught by future generations.

The Claims Conference said its results are based on a representative sample of 1,350 American adults interviewed by phone and online. Respondents were selected randomly and reflected the demographics of the American adult population, it said.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekUnited Nations (United States) (AFP) - Two groups of experts from the OPCW chemical watchdog will arrive in Syria on Thursday and Friday to investigate allegations of chemical weapons use in a rebel-held town, Syria's UN ambassador Bashar Jaafari said.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons decided to dispatch a fact-finding mission to the rebel-held town of Douma following reports that more than 40 died from exposure to toxic gas at the weekend.

"These two groups will arrive separately to Syria on Thursday as well as tomorrow, on Friday," Jaafari told reporters.

"We will facilitate the arrival of the team to anywhere they want, in Douma, to check wether or not there was use of chemical substances," Jaafari said.

The ambassador said Syria had "denied 1,000 times" reports that its forces had carried out chemical attacks.

He suggested that "terrorists" had acquired chemical weapons from Libya and that Turkish, Saudi, US and French intelligence had a hand in smuggling chemicals to the war zone.

Russia has said it had dispatched experts to Douma who had not found any evidence of chemical weapons use.

Jaafari spoke ahead of a closed-door Security Council meeting called by Bolivia, a strong supporter of Russia, to discuss the threat of military action against Syria.

After warning that "missiles were coming", President Donald Trump was evasive on Thursday, saying "an attack" on Syria "could be very soon or not so soon at all."London (United Kingdom) (AFP) - The world's chemical arms watchdog on Thursday said it had confirmed Britain's findings on a nerve agent used in an attack on a former spy last month, which London said came from Russia.

Samples tested by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) "confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical," according to a summary of the Hague-based group's report.

It added that "the toxic chemical was of high purity".

In a declassified summary of its findings, the OPCW did not make any assessment on who carried out the March 4 attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury that also injured a police officer.

Britain and allies including the United States have blamed Moscow, sparking furious denials and provoking an international row resulting in the expulsions of diplomats from all sides.

The OPCW did not name the chemical, saying that information and its structure would be in a full classified report available to signatory states of the organisation.

Britain named it as Novichok, a group of powerful and deadly chemical compounds reportedly developed by the Soviet government in the 1970s and 1980s.

Prime Minister Theresa May's government has said Russia was known to have used it, and pointed to the country's pattern of "reckless behaviour", including the annexation of Crimea.

Russia has strongly denied any involvement, and insists it has destroyed all of its chemical weapons.

Skripal moved to Britain in a spy swap in 2010 and settled in Salisbury, and his daughter Yulia was visiting from Russia when they were poisoned, possibly on his front door.

Despite initial fears that they would not survive, Yulia Skripal was released from hospital to an undisclosed location earlier this week, while her father is said to be improving rapidly.Over 250 people killed in Algerian military plane crash Rescuers are seen around the wreckage of an Algerian army plane which crashed near the Boufarik airbase from where the plane had taken off on April 11, 2018. (Photo: Farouk Batiche/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

More than 250 people including Western Sahara refugees were killed when a military plane crashed near Algerias capital on Wednesday, state media said, with witnesses saying they saw a wing catch fire shortly after the plane took off.

Dozens of firefighters, rescue workers and military officials worked around the blackened fuselage of the aircraft, which had been ripped open near its wings.

Bits of mangled and smouldering debris were scattered across the field near Boufarik airport southwest of Algiers where people were searching for bodies among the rubble.

Earlier TV images showed flames and smoke billowing from the site of the crash, the countrys worst air disaster. (Reuters)

See more news-related photo galleries and follow us on Yahoo News Photo Twitter and Tumblr.Paige VanZant prepares to enter the Octagon before facing Jessica-Rose Clark of Australia in their womens flyweight bout during the UFC Fight Night event inside the Scottrade Center on Jan. 14, 2018 in St. Louis, Missouri. (Getty Images)

I believe Paige VanZant.

I believe every sad, disgusting, horrifying word she wrote about being gang raped when she was 14 years old.

The UFC womens strawweight fighter dropped the bombshell in her new book, Rise: Surviving the Fight of My Life, which was released on Tuesday. In it, she describes being sexually assaulted by a group of boys at a party.

Born Paige Sletten, she legally changed her last name to VanZant in direct response to the rape. Boys at her school were calling her Paige Slutton, and of course that always brought the horrifying reminder of what had happened to her.

Since coming forward with her story, VanZant has received overwhelming support. But she has also been tagged as an opportunist, and far worse, by many commenters.

Just about the worst place in the world is the comments section on a website. There, with the anonymity the internet provides, people lay bare their worst instincts. Many commenters questioned the veracity of VanZants story, as if she, or any other woman, would willingly put themselves through the storm that is sure to follow such pronouncements.

There were many such comments below the news stories on the rape all over the internet.

Rape is not a crime of sex. It is a crime of power, a crime of domination, of control. Culture has for years made women who have been raped feel they had done something wrong, as if theyd somehow brought this horrible crime come upon themselves by something they did.

Its traumatic and there is often no one for a woman to speak with, so she holds the awful memory in. Its an awful thing to have to live with and it leads to many issues for the victims down the road.

According to a study, The Mental Health Impact of Rape, by Dr. Dean G. Kilpatrick of the National Violence Against Women Prevention Research Center at the Medical University of South Carolina, many victims develop post-traumatic stress disorder after being raped.

Rape victims were 5.5 times more likely to have PTSD than those who had never been the victims of a crime, the study reported. Almost one-third (31 percent) of all rape victims developed PTSD sometime during their lifetime; and more than one in 10 rape victims (11 percent) still have PTSD today, according to the study.

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A full third, or 33 percent, of rape victims admitted to having seriously thought of suicide. According to suicide.org, about 13 percent of rape victims attempt suicide, which can occur years after the rape.

Suicide.org also notes that 44 percent of rape victims are under the age of 18, like VanZant was; and that 66 percent of the rape victims know their assailants, like VanZant did.

And yet men embarrass themselves daily by having attitudes like these crass website commenters who show no human compassion or understanding of rape culture or of its emotional effects on victims.

Some of those who question VanZants integrity point to the length of time between the alleged crime and her reporting it publicly. Women are often afraid to come forward, knowing the reaction that is going to follow.

It would have been perfect if the 14-year-old Sletten had immediately gone to the police and done her best to preserve evidence so that the perpetrators had been arrested, convicted and sent to jail.

That she is coming forward now is bravely heroic, and should provide support to other women who, sadly, will find themselves the victim of a sexual assault at some point in the future.

Hopefully, by having heard from VanZant, or some other woman who has spoken out and lived through the storm, a future victim wont develop PTSD or depression, wont attempt suicide and wont see herself as the one to blame for what happened.

Paige VanZant has been a hero to many for her exploits in the cage.

Never, though, did she stand taller than when she told her story in all of its horrifying and explicit detail. This narrative has to change. We need to stop questioning the victims and instead assail the perpetrators.

I believe Paige VanZant and I hope that she finally understands that she did nothing wrong. She has nothing to be sorry for, and she did the right thing by reporting it at a time that felt right for her.

It takes great courage and she should be commended, not condemned, for coming forward.

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The attorney of Parkland school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz announced Wednesday that the 19-year-old wants any money he may receive as a result of his mothers death donated to a charity chosen by the families of the victims.

"Whatever money he is entitled to, he does not want that money, defense attorney Melisa McNeill said. "He would like that money donated to an organization that the victims' family believes would be able to facilitate healing in our community or an opportunity to educate our community."

Cruz appeared in court for a hearing to determine whether he has too much money to expect taxpayers to pay for his public defenders.

He is currently represented by the Broward Public Defenders Office, which handles clients who cannot afford to hire their own lawyers.

Court records from his late mothers probate case show Nikolas Cruz stands to receive $25,000 from a life insurance policy and up to $800,000 more from her estate, the Sun-Sentinal reported.

Cruz's adoptive mother reportedly died of cancer months before the shooting and another family took him in.

"If you remove our office at this moment right now, in the highest-profile case in America, the defendant is going to be left without a lawyer, Broward County Public Defender Howard Finkelstein said. From that will flow a myriad of legal problems."

Cruz has confessed to the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Valentine's Day.

If convicted of murdering 17 people, Cruz could face the death penalty.

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Related Articles:A Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School teacher was arrested after leaving a gun in a public restroom, the Broward County Sheriffs Office said.

Sean Simpson, who previously said he would be willing to come to school armed after the Parkland shooting that left 17 people dead, was charged with failing to safely store a firearm after leaving his gun at a mens bathroom at the Deerfield Beach Pier.

According to the arrest report, Simpson told police he left he gun behind by accident while using the bathroom on Sunday. As he returned to retrieve the Glock 43 9mm handgun, Simpson heard a gunshot and found that a man had picked up and fired the gun. Simpson was able to take the gun away from the man, Joseph Spataro, who was charged with firing a weapon while intoxicated and trespassing.

Simpson was released after posting a $250 cash bond, the Miami Herald reports.

The arrest comes right after the Broward School Board rejected Floridas new program to arm school staff unanimously, following the Feb. 14 shooting at Parklands Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Simpson told Local 10 he believed carrying a weapon did not violate the school boards rules. A district spokesperson said it was unlikely to pursue disciplinary action against him, according to Local 10.A prominent pastor of the Willow Creek megachurch in the Chicago area, Bill Hybels, has stepped down amid accusations of misconduct from multiple women.

Hybels, founder of the Willow Creek megachurch, announced to his congregation on Tuesday that he would step down following a Chicago Tribune report that detailed the misconduct allegations and revealed that church leaders had inquired into the claims. Hybelss resignation comes six months ahead of his originally planned departure from the Willow Creek church.

According to a March Chicago Tribune report, the allegations against Hybels include suggestive comments, extended hugs, an unwanted kiss and an invite to a staff member to hotel rooms. The claims of inappropriate behavior also included an allegation that Hybels carried on a prolonged consensual affair with a married woman, who later said her claim was untrue, the Tribune reports.

Hybels has denied the allegations and said Tuesday that inquiries by the church into his behavior had found no evidence of misconduct. He said the accusations made him feel attacked at first and that he wished he had reacted differently.

I sincerely wish my initial response had been one of listening and humble reflection. If I could go back, I would have chosen to listen first, and then to seek to learn and understand, he said in the statement Tuesday. I apologize for a response that was defensive, instead of one that invited conversation and learning.

Hybels said the decision to retire early came after watching the controversy continue to be a distraction that is hindering our Elders and church staff.House Speaker Paul Ryans looming retirement buoys the chances of his opponents, and one of them is a notorious white nationalist who is considered to be the first alt-right candidate to run for national office.

Paul Nehlen, a businessman turned politician who lost to Ryan in a 2016 primary challenge, is no longer welcome in the Republican Party, state officials have told Newsweek, but his name will nevertheless appear on the ballot in August during the Wisconsin primary election.

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To better understand what makes Nehlen such a problematic figure for state Republicans, its useful to look at his associations. He appeared on David Dukes radio show earlier this year and described his vision for President Donald Trumps border wall as being a precursor to gunning down women and children. Armed machine gun turrets every 300 yards, he told Duke about his concept for a border wall. And you can automate those. Anyone who approaches that barrier will be treated as an enemy combatant. Man, woman or child.

He frequently interacted with white supremacists and other extremists, including Andrew Anglin of Daily Stormer and Crying Nazi Christopher Cantwell on the social network Gab this yearbut that was before he joined a small group of men who managed to get banned from that white nationalist-happy website last week. Nehlen, who was also banned from Twitter in February for using language that scapegoated Jews and people of color, lost his privileges on the so-called free speech social network because he publically released the identity of a white nationalist troll.

Nehlen was not always shunned by conservatives. In 2016, he became a known quantity after Steve Bannon, then the executive chairman of Breitbart News, offered words of support. (Bannon, who later served as an adviser to Trump and his campaign strategist, disavowed him in 2017.) Trump even mentioned Nehlen in a 2016 tweet during his run for office.

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It's unclear how successful Nehlen's campaign will be in a state that is largely Republican but has in recent years increasingly backed Democratic candidates.

Kevin Seifert, the executive director for Ryans political operation, told Newsweek that Nehlen disqualified himself from public office a long time ago after he posted on Twitter an image of Meghan Markle, a former actress who is engaged to be married to Prince Harry of the British royal family, that was photoshopped to look like Cheddar Man, a dark skinned man believed to be the first modern British person. Governor Scott Walker has called his rhetoric racist. Alec Zimmerman, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin GOP, told Newsweek in February that Nehlen was no longer accepted by other Republicans.

Paul Nehlen is not a member of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, Zimmerman told Newsweek earlier this year. Nehlen and his ideas have no place in the Republican Party.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekWashington (United States) (AFP) - Paul Ryan entered Congress as a wonkish, budget-slashing young conservative and will leave 20 years later atop the Republican heap, an outgoing speaker of the House with possibly grander political ambitions ahead.

Thirty months into a thankless job he never truly wanted, the Wisconsin native announced Wednesday he will not seek re-election in November, as he wanted to spend more time with his family, including three teenage children.

Ryan told rank-and-file members of his party that he will retire at the end of his term in early January, setting up a frenzied leadership scramble.

"You realize that you hold the office for just a small part of our history, so you better make the most of it," he said. "It's fleeting, and that inspires you to do big things."

Ryan led the fractious House through the end of the Barack Obama administration and into a political maelstrom: the 2016 campaign and the unlikely presidency of Donald Trump.

It is the most important job in Congress and one that has placed him second in line to the presidency, after the vice president, should the commander-in-chief be impeached or otherwise vacate the Oval Office.

Ryan's ambition from the start was to slash spending and eliminate the deficit, repeal the health care reforms known as Obamacare, and address his longterm goals of privatizing the Social Security pension system and Medicare public health service for seniors -- both American sacred cows for more than half a century.

In the end, his signature accomplishment will be the massive tax cut bill that he and Trump managed to push through Congress.

Elevated in 2015 as a GOP peacemaker who might somehow reconcile the moderate and conservative wings of the party, Ryan's efforts at maintaining an even keel under a roiling surface has proved exhausting.

"I can imagine after herding those cats that long, you get tired," said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

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- 'Individualism vs collectivism' -

Ryan's meteoric rise took him from House staffer to one of the "young gun" lawmakers in the late 1990s, to the 2012 vice presidential nomination, and ultimately speaker of the House.

Bookish and occasionally cocky, he is an ideologue influenced by neoclassical thinkers and repelled by what he sees as the excesses of modern federal government.

"The fight we are in here -- make no mistake about it -- is a fight of individualism versus collectivism," Ryan said in a 2005 speech to devotees of laissez-faire capitalist philosopher Ayn Rand, according to The New Yorker.

But over his two decades in Congress, Ryan has gradually earned a reputation of "Mr. Budget" among his Republican colleagues -- or "Mr. Austerity," according to Democrats.

He was the lawmaker with sufficient potential for Mitt Romney to choose him to be his running mate in the 2012 White House race, stressing at the time that "with energy and vision, Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party."

- Home boy -

Paul Davis Ryan was born on January 29, 1970 in the small town of Janesville, in the midwestern state of Wisconsin, where his Irish-Catholic family has lived for five generations.

He still lives in the neighborhood where he grew up and returns from Washington every weekend to his wife Janna and their three children.

In high school he became president of his class, winning his first-ever election.

In 1988 he headed to Miami University of Ohio, where he nurtured his passion for economic theory and politics. When he volunteered for a congressional campaign as a student, it was ironically for Ohio's John Boehner -- the man he replaced as House speaker.

From 1992 to 1997, Ryan worked for a Republican senator in Washington and for Empower America, the organization founded by the influential conservative Jack Kemp, who took him under his wing.

Ryan returned to Wisconsin, where he easily won election to the US House in 1998 at the ripe age of 28.

He quickly earned a reputation in conservative circles, and rose to become chair of the powerful House Budget Committee.

Ryan was thrust into the national spotlight when Romney put him on the ticket in 2012.

His biggest challenge after becoming speaker was helming the tumultuous Republicans through the November 2016 election and beyond.

But he had difficulty aligning with Trump when the billionaire New York businessman won the nomination, and pointedly declined to campaign with him after a tape surfaced on which Trump could be heard boasting about groping women.

Ultimately the two men made peace, although Ryan bristled over Trump threats of a trade war with China, and has opposed the president's efforts to oust Robert Mueller as a special counsel investigating Russian interference in the US election.

Prior to Trump's victory, Ryan was seen as a likely frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020.

Leaving Congress might free him to plot his political future.Ottawa (Canada) (AFP) - On the same day Prime Minister Justin Trudeau left for a three-country trip to Peru, France and Britain, his office announced Thursday he would return midway to deal with a pipeline row.

Trudeau was wheels up and headed for Lima to attend the Summit of the Americas when he appeared to bow to criticism over his absence in the midst a political crisis related to the construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

He will now return to Ottawa on Sunday after his trip to Peru to meet with the sparring leaders of Alberta and British Columbia who are at odds over the project.

He will then resume his travels to France on Monday before heading to Britain.

In Canada, Trudeau will meet with British Columbia Premier John Horgan, who he has accused of illegally "obstructing" the project, and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, a proponent of the pipeline who has warned that the standoff risked triggering a constitutional crisis.

Feeling squeezed, US firm Kinder Morgan said Sunday it would suspend most work on the pipeline during the row that is creating undue risk for investors.

The company gave the parties until May 31 to resolve their differences or it would scrap the Can$7.4 billion ($5.9 billion US) project. Trudeau has said the pipeline is in the "national interest."

New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh urged Trudeau to cancel his trip altogether, saying: "This is a crisis which requires the prime minister."

He was echoed by several Conservative MPs.

In 2016, Trudeau's Liberal government approved tripling the 1,150-kilometer (715-mile) Trans Mountain pipeline's capacity to carry 890,000 barrels of oil for shipping overseas from landlocked Alberta's oil sands to the port of Vancouver.

But the project faced continued protests and legal challenges from environmental and indigenous groups as well as municipalities concerned about the risk of oil spills along Canada's pristine Pacific coast impacting fisheries and tourism.

British Columbia's new social democratic government joined the fight against the project late last year when it looked all but lost.

About 97 percent of Canada's oil is currently sold to the United States at a discount. The industry and the federal government say new oil conduits to tidewater are needed in order to diversify exports and get better energy prices.A plus-size blogger shooting bikini photos in an upscale hotel was told to cover up but insists women like her will be seen.

On Wednesday, Anna OBrien, 33, the New York City-based founder of the fashion and lifestyle blog Glitter and Lazers, shared her experience on Instagram, posting a photo of herself wearing a snake skin-print bikini.

Blogger Anna OBrien was told to cover up while posing in a bikini. She said no. (Photo: Instagram/Glitter and Lazers)

I find it ironic that Ive taken photos in swimsuits all over the world and the one place I was told to cover up was Las Vegas, the author of the upcoming book, A Life Full of Glitter, wrote to her 250K followers. Sure, thin girls in thngs and pasties are A-OK but a plus girl in a full coverage suit, trying to take an epic editorial shot- now thats just too much. Jokes on them though, Id already gotten the perfect photo. They cant erase this happened. Im learning as I push myself to do more editorial type concepts, the push back is greater. But thats why I push. Its more than just a girl in the city of sin in a bikini, Its a statement. We will be seen. Were not hiding anymore. And were going to wear whatever we want, wherever we want. Not just in Vegas. EVERYWHERE. Change is coming; the question is are you going to stand in the way or help us push through?

This week, OBrien visited Las Vegas to shoot a lookbook (her selections of the best plus-size swimwear), featuring a variety of bikinis and one-pieces. Before checking in at her upscale hotel (the name of which OBrien chose to keep private) she emailed the companys PR team and received permission to shoot in the extravagant lobby. I asked to shoot swimsuits with a professional photographer and included my media kit, OBrien tells Yahoo Lifestyle. I received a reply stating that I was welcome to shoot anywhere in the hotel except the casino floor, provided I had no large equipment.

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On Tuesday morning, OBrien headed to the lobby to shoot her first look while wearing a bikini, but five minutes after striking a pose, a security guard approached. He told me to cover up, that I needed to put clothes on because I wasnt allowed to be in a swimsuit, she says. I tried talking to him but he wouldnt listen.

OBrien and her photographer returned to her room but an hour later, decided to try again while wearing a one-piece swimsuit. We were shooting in a different part of the lobby and another guard approached us and told us to stop, she says. I showed him the emails from the PR team but it didnt make a difference.

Having traveled to Las Vegas on her own dime, specifically to shoot in the hotel, OBrien says the experience was disappointing. I didnt like the assumption that I was lying about having permission, she says. What did I do to indicate that I wasnt worthy of trust and respect?

But OBrien says a larger issue may be at play. While the guards didnt indicate her size was an issue, Other women were walking around with as much coverage as me and no one said anything to them. I dont want to think the worst of people but in cases like these, I cant help but wonder.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.



CIA Director Mike Pompeo, President Trumps pick for secretary of state, confirmed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that he has been interviewed by Robert Mueller for the special counsels investigation into the Trump campaigns contacts with Russia.

I spoke with special counsel Mueller, who interviewed me, Pompeo said in his testimony before the committee, which is considering his nomination. I cooperated.

NBC News first reported Pompeos interview with the special counsel in January.

Pompeo  who was part of a key meeting during which Trump reportedly asked for help intervening in the investigation  refused to answer questions about his conversations with the president or with Mueller. But Pompeo insisted that Trump never asked him to do anything hed consider improper.

Im not going to talk about the conversations the president and I had, Pompeo said.

The Washington Post reported last year that in March 2017, Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats attended a briefing at the White House with Trump and officials from several government agencies. According to the paper, when the meeting was over, Trump told Pompeo and Coats to stay in the room, and the president proceeded to complain about the Russia investigation, which was being led by then-FBI Director James Comey.

Days earlier, Comey had testified before Congress that Trump himself was a subject of the federal investigation.

Pompeo said the articles suggestion that Trump asked him to do anything improper is false.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo testifies before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be secretary of state on Capitol Hill on Thursday. (Photo: Reuters/Leah Millis)

When asked by Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., whether Trump had asked him to do anything about the Russia probe, Pompeo replied, I dont recall.

I dont recall what he asked me that day, Pompeo said. But I have to tell you, Im with the president an awful lot. He has never asked me to do anything that Id consider remotely improper.

Menendez then asked Pompeo whether Trump had ever discussed the FBI or special counsels investigation with him.

Story continues

Senator, again, Im not going to talk about private conversations Ive had with the president, Pompeo said, insisting that he wasnt asserting executive privilege in refusing to discuss his conversations with Trump.

Later, when pressed by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., about his recollection, Pompeo said, If he asked me to do something inappropriate, Id remember.

Pompeo began the confirmation hearing by declaring that as secretary of state, job No. 1 is to represent the president.

And when asked by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., whether he would resign if Trump were to fire Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Pompeo said he would not.

I havent given that question any thought, and my instincts tell me no, he said. My instincts tell me that my obligation to continue to serve as Americas senior diplomat will be more important at increased times of political domestic turmoil.

After discussing his belief that previous secretaries of state had stayed the course, Pompeo said he was confident that not resigning if there were interference into the special counsels investigation was the path that he would take. Coons urged Pompeo to give it some more thought.

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., pressed him on the same question later in the hearing and Pompeo offered the same answer, stating that administration officials did not resign during President Bill Clintons impeachment.

Pompeo also repeatedly refused to say whether he agrees with Trumps characterization of the Mueller investigation as an attack on our country.

These are complex legal issues the special counsel is involved in, Pompeo said. I have done my best as CIA director to separate each and every element of it. It is a minefield.

 With Yahoo News Christopher Wilson contributing reporting

Read more from Yahoo News:Former US Attorney Preet Bharara: "The likelihood that Michael Cohen is going to be charged is high" https://t.co/Ta7vnpREj9 pic.twitter.com/PHtyNNRNyo  CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) April 11, 2018

Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had grim news for President Donald Trumps personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, whose office was just raided by the FBI: Charges are likely coming.

Getting a search warrant to raid a lawyers office is a big deal  especially if that lawyer is counsel to the sitting president of the United States, he said during his appearance on Anderson Coopers CNN show Tuesday night.

Bharara, who was fired from his post as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York last year, the very office that executed the raid on Cohens home and office, said that if he were the one who had to approve such a move, he would want a lot more evidence than probable cause.

So I predict, as we saw with Paul Manafort, that if they decided they had enough evidence to engage in a very aggressive move, then the likelihood that Michael Cohen is going to be charged is high, he said, without elaborating on what those charges might be.

The Washington Post reported Cohen is under investigation for potential bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations.

The U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York executed the raid, but Bhararas successor, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, was recused from the Cohen investigation. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing Robert Muellers investigation into Russias meddling in the 2016 election, personally signed off on the warrant.

Bharara was fired from his post in March 2017 after he says he refused to return Trumps phone call. Since then, he has taken a contributor position with CNN and has emerged as a vocal critic of the president, often providing sharp responses to Trumps many tweets.

Story continues

Attorneyclient privilege is dead!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2018

Long live the crime-fraud exception https://t.co/1nnqZegqfF  Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) April 10, 2018

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.(WASHINGTON)  The federal agents who raided the office of President Donald Trumps personal attorney, Michael Cohen, were looking for records about payments to a former Playboy playmate and to porn actress Stormy Daniels, who both claim to have had affairs with Trump.

Thats according to a report Tuesday from The New York Times. The newspaper, citing several people briefed on the investigation, reported that FBI agents were looking for records of payments to ex-Playmate Karen McDougal and also information related to the publisher of The National Enquirer.

The raid prompted a new blast Tuesday from the president, who tweeted that Attorney-client privilege is dead! And White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the president thinks he can fire special counsel Robert Mueller, but isnt taking that step now.

Attorneyclient privilege is dead!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 10, 2018

McDougal has said she carried on an affair with Trump in 2006 after the birth of his son. The Enquirers publisher, American Media Inc., paid McDougal $150,000 but never published her story. AMI has said she was paid to become a fitness columnist.

The Associated Press has confirmed that agents on Monday also seized records related to a $130,000 payment made to Daniels, who says she had sex with Trump in 2006.

A furious Trump, who in the past month has escalated his attacks on Muellers Russia investigation, said Monday from the White House that it was a disgrace that the FBI broke into his lawyers office. He called Muellers investigation an attack on our country, prompting new speculation that he might seek the removal of the Justice Departments special counsel.

On Tuesday, Sanders said Trump believes the raid on Cohens office went too far, but she also said that its a separate investigation from Muellers probe. Still, Trump certainly believes that he has the power to directly fire Mueller, she said, and he has been advised that he has that authority. She did not say where the advice came from.

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Justice Department guidelines say only Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller last May, has the authority to fire him and only for specific cause. Rosenstein has repeatedly said that he has not seen any reason to dismiss Mueller

The raid was overseen by the U.S. Attorneys office in Manhattan and was based in part on a referral from Mueller, said Cohens lawyer, Stephen Ryan.

The decision by the U.S. Attorneys Office in New York to conduct their investigation using search warrants is completely inappropriate and unnecessary, Ryan said in a statement. It resulted in the unnecessary seizure of protected attorney client communications between a lawyer and his clients.

The raid creates a new legal headache for Trump as he and his attorneys weigh whether to agree to an interview with Muellers team, which in addition to investigating potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign is also examining whether the presidents actions constitute obstruction of justice.

And the law enforcement action will almost certainly amplify the public scrutiny on the payment to Daniels, who says she had sex with Trump in 2006. The payment was made just days before the 2016 presidential election. Trump told reporters last week that he did not know about it.

Search warrants are a fairly standard, though aggressive, law enforcement tool and are often sought in cases where authorities are concerned someone may hide or withhold evidence. To obtain one, agents must convince a judge they have probable cause of criminal activity and they believe theyll find evidence of wrongdoing in a search. A warrant requires high-level approval within the Justice Department, and agency guidelines impose additional hurdles when the search target is an attorney.

In this case, Mueller opted to refer the matter to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Besides Cohens office, agents also searched a hotel room where hes been staying while his home is under renovation.

Under Justice Department regulations, Mueller must consult with Rosenstein when his investigators uncover new evidence that may fall outside his original mandate. Rosenstein then will determine whether to allow Mueller to proceed or to assign the matter to another U.S. attorney or another part of the Justice Department.

A spokesman for Muellers office did not immediately return a call seeking comment. The U.S. attorneys office had no comment. Mondays raid was first reported by The New York Times.

Ryan did not elaborate on the documents taken from Cohens office but said he has cooperated with investigators, including meeting last fall with lawmakers looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Cohen has more recently attracted attention for his acknowledgment that he paid Daniels out of his own pocket shortly before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen has said neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Daniels and he was not reimbursed for the payment.

Several former officials at the Federal Election Commission have said the payment appears to be a violation of campaign finance laws, and multiple Washington-based groups have filed complaints with the FEC, urging it to investigate.

There have been few signs that Mueller was interested in investigating the payment, though. One Mueller witness, former Trump aide Sam Nunberg, recently connected the special counsel with the payment, saying in an interview on MSNBC last month that prosecutors had asked him about payments to women.

Trump answered questions about Daniels for the first time last week, saying he had no knowledge of the payment made by Cohen and he didnt know where Cohen had gotten the money. The White House has consistently said Trump denies the affair.

Daniels has said she had sex with the president in 2006. She has been suing to invalidate the nondisclosure agreement she signed before the election and has offered to return the money she was paid in order to set the record straight.

Daniels argues the agreement is legally invalid because it was signed by only Daniels and Cohen, and was not signed by Trump.

Last month, Daniels attorney, Michael Avenatti, sent letters to the Trump Organization demanding the business preserve all of its records relating to the $130,000 transaction.

The letter demanded they preserve all emails by Cohen that mention Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, as well as any emails and text messages related to the alleged relationship. He sent similar demand letters to two banks, City National and First Republic, asking they preserve documents connected to the transaction.

Avenatti also enclosed an email showing Cohen had used his Trump Organization email address in correspondence with a representative from First Republic. In the email, the representative said funds had been deposited in Cohens account.(WASHINGTON)  President Donald Trump said Thursday that an attack on Syria could take place very soon or not so soon at all!

The president made the statement in a tweet Thursday morning. Trump on Wednesday had warned Russia to get ready for a missile attack on its ally Syria, suggesting imminent retaliation for last weekends suspected chemical weapons attack. But on Thursday, Trump wrote that he: Never said when an attack on Syria would take place.

At stake in Syria is the potential for confrontation, if not outright conflict, between the U.S. and Russia, former Cold War foes whose relations have deteriorated in recent years over Moscows intervention in Ukraine, its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, most recently, its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russian lawmakers have warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime and that it could trigger a direct U.S-Russian military clash.

Russias ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted  a stark warning of a potential major confrontation.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2018

Trump, who has often said a commander in chief should never telegraph his military intentions, apparently did so himself, tweeting that missiles will be coming in response to the suspected chemical attack that killed at least 40 people near Damascus.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria, Trump wrote. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

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Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, however, indicated that evidence of what happened was still being studied. At a photo-taking session during a Pentagon meeting with his Dutch counterpart, Mattis was asked by a reporter whether he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian government.

Were still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies, Mattis said. Were still working on this.

Trump suggested Monday he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which the U.S. government had video and other evidence of certain aspects of an actual attack by Syrian aircraft, which involved the use of sarin gas.

Trump responded then by launching dozens of Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

Asked whether the U.S. military was ready to conduct an attack in Syria if ordered, Mattis replied, We stand ready to provide military options if theyre appropriate, as the president determined.

In the past, Trump has condemned others for forecasting military plans, repeatedly blistering President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign. During one speech, he said, We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything.

Asked about Trumps tweet about an impending attack on Syria, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who ran the Pentagon for President Bill Clinton, said on CNN that it compromises the mission somewhat.

Trump did not detail what a strike on Syria would look like, or whether these would be U.S. missiles. U.S. officials have been consulting with France, Britain and other allies on a possible joint military operation, but the timing remained in doubt Wednesday. Trump canceled a foreign trip in order to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Assad.

Shortly after his tweeted warning to Russia, Trump took a more conciliatory tone in lamenting that the U.S.-Russia relationship is worse now than it has ever been. There is no reason for this, he wrote, adding that Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together.

Syrias Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Trumps threats to attack are reckless and endanger international peace and security.

Trumps administration has sought to show toughness on Russia, with a series of economic and diplomatic actions, including new sanctions last week against government officials and oligarchs. Trump has largely avoided criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, though he singled him out in a tweet over the weekend for supporting Assad.

The U.S., France and Britain have been in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, U.S. officials have said. A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the U.S. in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syrias political and military support from Russia and Iran.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday called for a strong and joint response to the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday. The Syrian government denies responsibility.

The French president does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the U.S.-led coalition created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Multiple IS terror attacks have targeted France, including one last month.By Jeffrey Heller JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel held top-level security consultations on Wednesday amid concern it could be targeted by Syria or Iran if the United States strikes Syrian government forces over an alleged poison gas assault. A member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security cabinet and Israeli strategic affairs experts voiced doubt that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, embroiled in a protracted civil war, would risk direct conflict with Israel. But they said Israel - which has the region's most powerful military - was taking seriously an Iranian threat to respond to a strike on Monday on an airbase on Syria which Damascus, Tehran and Moscow have blamed on Israel. Seven Iranian military personnel were killed at the T-4 facility, Iran's Tasnim news agency reported. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied carrying out the attack. But it has pledged not to allow Iran, whose allied Shi'ite militias fight in support of Assad, to establish a military foothold in Syria and it has carried out scores of strikes against suspected arms convoys believed destined for Lebanon's Hezbollah group. Netanyahu, Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's armed forces chief and the head of military intelligence met on Wednesday before a security cabinet session got under way, government officials said. "We have to be prepared for any scenario. Iran is a dangerous and serious enemy that should not be underestimated," Zeev Elkin, a member of the security forum, said on Army Radio before it convened. "I won't get into the operational details, but we are constantly in touch with the Americans. They are our strategic partner, and our defence establishment is in constant contact with them," Elkin said. TRUMP WARNING In Washington, U.S. President Donald Trump warned Russia that missiles "will be coming" after Moscow, Assad's most powerful ally, said any fired at Syria would be shot down and launch sites targeted. The Syrian government and Russia say the reports of a poison gas assault on a rebel enclave in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday are bogus. "As for the question whether an American operation will draw a (Syrian) response against Israel: theoretically, it's possible but I'm not sure this is the most likely scenario," Elkin said. "It's possible Iran will attempt a response against us." Yaakov Amidror, a former Israeli national security adviser, said Iran has "an open issue with us" over the air base strike. The same facility was targeted by Israel in an air strike in Syria in February after an Iranian drone was shot down inside Israeli territory. Amidror told reporters a U.S. strike in Syria could be used by Iran as a smokescreen "to do something against Israel". "They have their long arm of Hezbollah, which is controlled by the Iranians," he said. "They have militias in Syria and in Lebanon which they control and they have Iranian military forces in Syria that can be used." Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli military intelligence chief, wrote on Twitter that "the Iranians will probably respond to the strike attributed to Israel, even if not immediately". Tehran, he said, aimed to deter Israel from continuing to strike Iranian forces in Syria. But in a shopping center in an Israeli settlement in the occupied Golan Heights near the Syrian frontier on Wednesday, it was business as usual. "Life goes on here, no matter what - in Israel in general and in the north in particular," said Sheila Wolensky, a Jerusalem resident visiting family in the Golan. "We always feel like we're on the edge of the sword." (Additional reporting by Rami Amichay on the Golan Heights)MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that he plans to hold talks in Russia with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in June, and they will discuss tensions on the Korean peninsula. Putin, who was addressing a group of foreign ambassadors in a speech aired on state television, warned that the situation in the world is worrying, but said he hoped that common sense would prevail. He said Russia would respect all its obligations under international law and it would build constructive relations with foreign partners. (Reporting by Denis Pinchuk; Editing by Christian Lowe)Havana (Cuba) (AFP) - In 2018, a Cuban can run his own business, surf the internet and travel abroad with fewer restrictions.

In 10 years, President Raul Castro has transformed the Cuba he inherited from brother Fidel but his reforms haven't unleashed a hoped-for economic takeoff.

Now 86, Raul Castro will on April 19 hand power to a new generation, a decade after cautiously embarking on a series of reforms.

Although they had a major impact, the government admitted last month there had been "errors" and delays in implementing the plans.

"We have seen that these overly gradual changes haven't worked and that should warrant bolder moves," Cuban economist Pavel Vidal, an expert at the Cali branch of Javeriana University, told AFP.

Here is a summary of some of the tasks awaiting Castro's successor and a list of what he managed to achieve.

- Monetary unification -

"This has taken us too much time and we can't put it off any longer," Castro told parliament in December, referring to Cuba's unique dual currency system.

For more than 20 years, the country has lived with both the convertible peso (CUC), which is worth the equivalent of $1, and the Cuban peso (CUP), is worth less than 4 cents. It also has preferential exchange rates for state companies, a situation which creates distortions, experts say.

- Agricultural reform -

In 2008, Castro declared food production to be "strategic," and in a decade the government turned over more than one million hectares of land to private farmers, while also granting micro-credits and improving producer prices.

But the takeoff has been slow: Cuba still imports 80 percent of the food it consumes, worth some 2 billion dollars.

- Private enterprise -

In 2010 Castro expanded and made the private workforce more flexible. Today 580,000 Cubans -- 12 percent of the work force -- are self-employed, although the government had aimed to remove at least one million employees from its bulky state payroll in the first five years.

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The legalization of small- and medium-sized private businesses and resuming issuing licenses for new ventures are measures still pending.

- Foreign investment -

Castro brought in reforms to provide more incentives to investors and inaugurated a huge port complex at Mariel, 45 kilometers (30 miles) west of Havana -- a duty-free zone described as destined to become Cuba's main industrial hub.

As of the end of 2017, it had lured foreign investment to the tune of $1.2 billion. But that is below the $2.5 billion the country needs per year to shore up its growth, according to official figures.

- Thaw with US -

Raul Castro made his piece of history on December 17, 2014, when he went on TV to tell the Cuban people -- as Barack Obama did with Americans -- that relations between the two countries would be restored after a half century freeze stemming from the Cold War. In March 2016, Castro welcomed Obama in Havana. Things have cooled off since Donald Trump became president in January 2017, however.

- Foreign debt -

Between 2013 and 2016 Cuba restructured its debt by making $23 billion in payments, through which it is expecting new loans. In late 2015, Havana renegotiated its debt with the so-called Paris Club of creditors. That debt had been frozen since 1980, with $8.5 bln forgiven and Cuba committing to paying $2.6 billion over 18 years. Cuba also refinanced debt with Russia and Mexico.

- Immigration -

In 2013 Castro did away with complicated travel restrictions and allowed Cubans to remain away from the island for up to two years, so long as they do it legally, without losing their property or residency rights. The change facilitates visits and repatriation of those who left the island. From January 2013 to December 2016, more than 670,000 Cubans made more than a million trips abroad.

- Sales -

Raul Castro allowed sales and purchases of used cars and homes, which had been banned. Through 2014, this totaled 80,000 vehicles and 40,000 homes, according to official figures.

- Internet-

Cuba allowed internet access from public areas with Wifi. There are also four million cell phone lines in operation and the state phone company hopes to offer 3G service this year. However, Cuba is among the most backward countries in the world when it comes to internet connectivity.Beirut (Lebanon) (AFP) - The remaining rebels in Syria's battered Eastern Ghouta have surrendered their heavy weapons and their leader has left the enclave for the north, a war monitor said on Thursday.

Syria's regime is poised to secure the opposition's onetime bastion on the edge of Damascus, after a negotiated withdrawal for its last holdout of Douma.

"Jaish al-Islam fighters handed over their heavy weapons to Russian military police in the town of Douma on Wednesday," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"Most of Jaish al-Islam's top brass, including their head Issam Buwaydani, left Douma and arrived in northern Syria on Wednesday evening," the Britain-based monitor said.

His departure came under a fraught deal for Douma announced last weekend, just hours after an alleged chemical weapons attack that killed dozens in the town.

Under the agreement, thousands of Jaish al-Islam fighters and civilians have been bussed out of Douma to opposition-controlled parts of Syria's Aleppo province.

It was unclear whether more evacuations would take place Thursday.

Russian military police began patrolling Douma on Thursday as part of the deal, according to the Russian defence ministry.

It also said the Syrian government flag was flying on Thursday in the town, which signalled that the regime was back in control of Ghouta although its forces have not yet entered Douma.

Ghouta was the opposition's main bastion on the edge of the capital and suffered a five-year regime siege before the ferocious assault that Moscow and Damascus began in February.By Lesley Wroughton and Arshad Mohammed WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A decision by U.S. President Donald Trump not to renew sanctions relief for Iran on May 12 would not necessarily mean the United States had withdrawn from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear what Mnuchin meant by his comment but it appeared to signal the Trump administration believes the agreement will not necessarily collapse if Trump chooses not to extend U.S. sanctions relief to Iran. The crux of the 2015 agreement between Iran and six major powers - Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States - was that Iran would restrict its nuclear program in return for relief from sanctions that have crippled its economy. On Jan. 12, Trump delivered an ultimatum to Britain, France and Germany, saying they must agree to "fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal" or he would refuse to extend the U.S. sanctions relief on Iran that it calls for. U.S. sanctions will resume unless Trump issues new "waivers" to suspend them on May 12, although it is not clear how quickly they would go into effect. European officials saw Trump's Jan. 12 comments as a threat to kill the deal. They have since been in negotiations with the Trump administration to see if there is a way to salvage it. Speaking at a congressional hearing, Mnuchin said the Trump administration was in talks with allies and would "not do anything abruptly." "If the president decides not to sign that (waiver), it doesn't mean we're necessarily pulling out of the deal. What it means is that the primary and secondary sanctions will go back in place," he told the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee. The political directors of Britain, France and Germany met Brian Hook, the State Department's director of policy planning, in Washington on Wednesday to discuss the future of the pact, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, two sources familiar with the matter said. It is not immediately clear how Iran might respond to a Trump decision not to renew the sanctions waivers, but Tehran would be within its rights to argue the United States violated its commitments to ease sanctions even as Iran, as verified by international inspectors, had kept its nuclear commitments. U.S. nuclear experts say if Trump does not waive the sanctions in May, it effectively kills the nuclear deal. European diplomats have said that even if U.S. allies decide to remain in the agreement, Western companies would withdraw from Iran because of the threat of U.S. sanctions. 'ALL ABOUT LIFTING THE SANCTIONS' Democratic Representative David Price pressed Mnuchin on the issue, saying: "Are you saying that failing to waive the sanctions would not constitute pulling out of the deal? The deal is all about lifting the sanctions." Mnuchin did not answer the question directly. The secretary declined to speculate on what Trump might do, repeatedly emphasizing he could not discuss the issue publicly. Trump has voiced frustration at having to waive the sanctions again, believing his predecessor, Democratic President Barack Obama, negotiated a bad deal for the United States in agreeing to the accord. Iran says its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes. It has said it will stick to the accord as long as the other signatories respect it but will "shred" the deal if Washington pulls out. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Peter Cooney)Congressional Republicans moved to head off any attempt by President Donald Trump to fire special counsel Robert Mueller as the president continued to attack the Russia investigation and the Justice Department.

Two Republicans and two Democrats have consolidated their separate bills to protect Mueller into a single piece of legislation that would, according to the sponsors, ensure that the special counsel can only be fired for good cause. It would also give the person in that role the ability to seek an expedited judicial review of any dismissal.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa plans to put the bill on the panels agenda tomorrow, according to George Hartmann, a Grassley spokesman, though it could get delayed for a week by an objection from a committee member.

That may force the hand of those Republicans, including members of party leadership, whove insisted such legislation isnt needed because Trump wont go as far as dismissing Mueller, despite his heated rhetoric and public complaints.

That group includes the No. 2 Senate Republican leader, John Cornyn, who also is a member of the Judiciary Committee. He said Wednesday that he continues to view legislation to protect Mueller as unnecessary. He also questioned whether it would get past Trumps desk.

If it did pass, would the president sign it? I dont think he would, Cornyn said.

Asked about legislation designed to protect Mueller, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the administration doesnt yet have a position.

Another potential hurdle is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has suggested the measure is unnecessary and hasnt indicated hed move forward with a vote if it clears committee.

The merged legislation is sponsored by Democratic Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Chris Coons of Delaware and Republicans Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

The integrity and independence of special counsel investigations are vital to reaffirming the American peoples confidence in our nations rule of law, Tillis said in a statement.

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Coons said the legislation is needed to ensure not only that Special Counsel Mueller can complete his work without interference, but that special counsels in future investigations can, too.

Trumps Reaction

Trump erupted angrily after FBI agents raided the offices of his personal lawyer on Monday, calling Muellers investigation disgraceful and an attack on our country. On Wednesday he called it corrupt and said Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the probe, have conflicts of interest.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Trump has privately discussed firing Mueller and CNN reported that hes considered firing Rosenstein.

Grassley said Tuesday that Trump firing Mueller would be political suicide for the president.

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine also questioned whether the legislation would be viable.

I dont know why anyone would think the president would sign the legislation into law, Collins said. And second, there are constitutional issues, legitimate constitutional issues with the bill. I wish there werent, but there are.

Still, with the presidents threats growing, other Republicans said they would be supportive if there are enough votes to get it out of the Judiciary Committee.

If theres any realistic opportunity for appropriate legislation, Im for it, said GOP Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee. Ill vote for it.

Its certainly something I would be looking at, yeah, Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said.Mr Manafort pictured arriving at a federal court house in March: Getty

Special counsel Robert Mueller has petitioned a judge for 35 blank subpoenas as a part of its case against Donald Trump's former presidential campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Mr Mueller, who is leading the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, made the request last week.

In theory, it could mean that federal prosecutors are planning on bringing in as many as 35 witnesses to testify against Mr Manafort.

It is respectfully requested that the Clerk of said Court issue subpoenas as indicated below for appearance before said Court at Alexandria Virginia, in the United States District Court at 10:00 oclock am, on 10th day of July, 2018, then and there to testify on behalf of the United States, the request, filed on April 6 in a federal district court in Virginia, says.

Mr Manafort, who has pleaded not guilty to accusations for crimes including money laundering, tax evasion and fraud, has been deemed "substantial a flight risk" by US District Judge Thomas Selby Elliss III, who will hear the case.

In an order last month, the judge noted that Mr Manaforts has the financial means and international connections to flee and remain at large.

In a court order, Judge Selby wrote: Specifically given the nature of the charges against the defendant and the apparent weight of the evidence against him, defendant faces the very real possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison."

Mr Manafort was charged last October and then indicted with further crimes in February. They stem from Mr Muellers investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, although it is not clear that the current charges filed against Mr Manafort directly relate to his time working on President Donald Trumps election campaign.

Mr Manafort is a well-known political operative with deep connections to Republicans in the United States, and has spent a considerable portion of his career working as a political consultant in Ukraine.

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In response to his charges, Mr Manaforts lawyers have argued that, since they do not relate specifically to the 2016 election, they should be dropped.

The conduct alleged here was not discovered because of the special counsels investigation into alleged coordination; nor was it demonstrably related to that investigation, a filing on behalf of Mr Manafort, which cites several alleged tax violations that would have occurred before Mr Trump even declared his candidacy, reads.A Reddit user who posted a fabricated pornographic video, purported to feature former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has reportedly been traced to a notorious Russia-based troll farm.

According to NBC news, the content-sharing platform revealed Tuesday that the account that touted a GIF of the video is associated with the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a St. Petersburg based disinformation unit. The IRA is known for deploying an army of users and bots that posted divisive political content during the 2016 presidential election.

The offending GIF was posted to Reddit in 2016 and the video to pornographic streaming platform Pornhub, where it has been viewed more than 250,000 times, according to NBC.

A former IRA employee disclosed last October that the firm had fabricated the video, the Daily Beast reported at the time.

Read more: How Russia Spreads Fake News, Explained by a Former Troll

The account, Rubinjer, was active in numerous political messaging channels on Reddit, including r/The_Donald and r/HillaryForPrison, before it was banned from the platform Tuesday. Reddit has banned a total of 944 accounts that had posted a combined total of 14,000 times, according to the statement from company CEO Steve Huffman.

Facebook also recently deleted 135 Facebook and Instagram accounts and 138 Facebook Pages linked to the IRA, while Twitter banned over 1,000 accounts in January.

In March, the IRA was among five Russian firms and 19 individuals targeted with sanctions by the Trump administration for alleged election interference, while a month earlier it was indicted by Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller for seeking to interfere in the United States political system, including the 2016 Presidential election.Theresa May's cabinet has agreed on the need to "take action" to deter use of chemical weapons following an emergency meeting at Downing Street.

The prime minister summoned her senior ministers to No 10 to discuss joining the United States and France in possible military strikes against Syria after saying all the indications were Bashar al-Assad's was responsible for a suspected nerve agent attack on civilians last weekend.

President Donald Trump had warned Russia of imminent military action in Syria, declaring missiles will be coming and denouncing Moscow for standing by Syrias president, but on Thursday night the White House said that "no final decision" had been made about what Washington will do.

Mr Trump, Ms May and French President Emmanuel Macron have been in regular contact as they plot a course of action, with Mr Macron saying France has "proof" the Syrian government carried out the chemical attack which killed potentially doxens.

It followed the Kremlin's insistence that it would shoot down any missiles and attack their source, in developments that have placed the two global and nuclear superpowers closer to open conflict than at any time since the Cold War.

Our live coverage has ended for now - but read a full account of the day's events in the blog below. Please allow a few seconds for it to load.

Russia has repeatedly warned the West against attacking the infrastructure of Syria's government and army, which is also supported by Iran.

Moscow has said there was no chemical attack in Douma, near the capital Damascus.

Ms May recalled the ministers from their Easter holiday for a special cabinet meeting in Downing Street to discuss Britains response to what she has cast as a barbaric attack which cannot go unchallenged.

The chemical weapons attack that took place on Saturday in Douma in Syria was a shocking and barbaric act, Ms May said. All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible.

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The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had said it intends to send investigators to Douma to look for any evidence of a chemical attack.

Ms May has faced calls to wait for unequivocal proof of a chemical attack by the Assad regime before committing British forces to retaliatory action.

The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, joined other opposition parties, as well as some Conservative backbenchers, in insisting MPs must be have a say on any British involvement in military action.

However, Ms May faces growing impatience from Washington, after Mr Trump's tweet to say the missiles will be coming.

The prime minister is not obliged to win parliaments approval, but a non-binding constitutional convention to do so has been established since a 2003 vote on joining the US-led invasion of Iraq.

It has been observed in subsequent military deployments in Libya and Iraq.

Britain has been launching air strikes in Syria from its military base in Cyprus, but only against targets linked to Isis.

Parliament voted down British military action against Mr Assads government in 2013, in an embarrassment for David Cameron.

The vote deterred Barack Obamas administration from similar action.

Additional reporting by agenciesDonald Trump has said he never revealed when an attack on Syria would take place, in what could be a stunning reversal from Wednesday's warning to Russia to "get ready" for US missiles.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" he tweeted on Thursday morning. "In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'."

The latest volley from the US President came as the Kremlin claimed a special hotline for the US and Russian militaries to communicate about their operations in Syria was active and being used by both sides.

President Donald Trump tweeted: "Under my Administration, US has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'." Credit: Hanna Kainulainen for The Telegraph

"This line exists and it's in an active state," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists, adding that the line intended to prevent accidental clashes and midair near misses "is used by both sides."

The hotline's suspension has been announced by Russia several times during periods of tension between the countries carrying out separate bombing campaigns.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2018

The line, set up by a memorandum signed with the US in 2015, is also known as a "deconfliction line" because it is used to maintain a zone of "deconfliction" between the two sides.

The US used the hotline in April last year when it fired its first missile strike at a Syrian airbase.

Meanwhile NBC reported that US officials have found chlorine and a "nerve agent" present in blood and urine samples from victims of the Syria attack.

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The broadcaster quoted two officials who said they were "confident" in the intelligence though not 100 per cent sure.

Russia expert warns of counter-attack on Western ships and planes

A Russian expert has warned that a Russian counter-attack in Syria could involve targeting Western ships or planes.

It is possible that, if Russian planes or military are directly affected, there is a possibility of counter-strike including sinking a ship or hitting an attacking jet, Ivan Timofeev, of the Russian International Affairs Council think tank, told the Today programme this morning.

Even though the probability of such a scenario playing out is not high and we shouldn't be too alarmist, Mr Timofeev said: We are in a quite dangerous position. The problem is that we really lack communication with each other.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

Sir John Sawyer, the former head of MI6 also told the show that there is a danger Russians will think the West is after them by drawing conclusions from a combination of the Wests response to Syria, the response to the nerve agent attack on the Skripals in Salisbury and the extra sanctions on Russian nationals.

Mr Sawyer also highlighted the importance of good communication, adding: But not by tweet, referencing Donald Trumps prefered approach.

The President tweeted a warning to Russia yesterday raised the temperature by tweeting: "Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'."

Emergency Cabinet meeting

Theresa May has called her Cabinet to an emergency meeting in Whitehall this afternoon, amid signs she is preparing to support United States military action in Syria action without seeking a Parliamentary vote.

The prime minister is expected to set out the reasons she believes the Syrian regime is responsible for the chemical attack outside Damascus, and the steps the United States is planning to take.

The cabinet is expected to support Mrs May.

David Davis, who opposed military action in 2013, today suggested he has changed his mind.

Outlining the reasons why he had previously voted against, he told a conference in London: "One was because he [David Cameron] hadn't provided the evidence and intelligence that we knew who it was, and secondly because there was not a proper plan which was thought through properly.

The Cabinet will meet to discuss Syria today Credit: Jay Allen/ 10 Downing Street

"Those two things I am assured we're going to answer today," Mr David said, referring to the upcoming Cabinet meeting this afternoon.

Mr Trump's National Security Council will also gather later today to finalise its recommendations for Syria.

Last night, the White Houses press secretary said no final decisions had been taken and that "all options are on the table".

"The President holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack, she said.

Whitehall sources have told The Telegraph Britain is doing everything necessary to be able to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles from nuclear-powered submarines against military targets in Syria.

Syria flies flag in Douma, signalling full control of Eastern Ghouta

Meanwhile, the Russian defence ministry has said Syrian government forces are now in full control of onetime rebel enclave Eastern Ghouta, with the regime flag now flying in Douma - the last town to fall.

"Today a significant event in the history of Syria took place. The raising of a regime flag over a building in the town of Douma signified control over this town and consequently over Eastern Ghouta as a whole," Major General Yury Yevtushenko, head of the Russian military's centre for reconciliation in Syria, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

President's options | What could military action in Syria look like?

Russian television showed footage of the Syrian government's red, white and black flag with two green stars hanging from an unidentified building, while cheering crowds waved flags in among shell-damaged buildings.

The Russian defence ministry also said Thursday that its military police had begun patrolling Douma, after announcing their planned deployment the day before.

"From today, units of the Russian armed forces' military police are working in the town of Douma. They are a guarantee of the observance of law and order in the town," the defence ministry said in a statement, RIA Novosti news agency reported.

The Russian military said the situation in Douma was normalising and a total of 166,644 people had been evacuated from the city through a humanitarian corridor.

Syria chemical attack | Read more

The Syrian regime, backed by Russian air strikes and troops on the ground, fought a month-long campaign in Eastern Ghouta.

Within weeks they managed to cut the enclave, which had been home to almost 400,000 people, into three.

Rebels in the other two pockets quickly agreed to evacuation deals, under pressure from civilians would could no longer withstand the fierce aerial assault.

Those in Douma held out, with Islamist elements refusing to leave. Saturday's chemical attack brought them back to the negotiating table and a deal was agreed the next day.

The fall of Eastern Ghouta marks a major loss for the opposition, which controls only two other main strongholds in the north in Idlib and Deraa, in the south.

Front Bench promotion - end of articleBEIRUT (Reuters) - Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any U.S. missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted, a step that could trigger a major escalation in the Syrian war. Russian Ambassador Alexander Zasypkin, in comments broadcast on Tuesday evening, said he was referring to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian armed forces chief of staff. The Russian military said on March 13 that it would respond to any U.S. strike on Syria, targeting any missiles and launchers involved in such an attack. Russia is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's most powerful ally. The United States and its allies are considering whether to hit Syria over a suspected poison gas attack that medical relief organizations say killed dozens of people in the rebel-held town of Douma near Damascus on Saturday. "If there is a strike by the Americans, then...the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired," Zasypkin told Hezbollah's al-Manar TV, speaking in Arabic. He also said a clash "should be ruled out and therefore we are ready to hold negotiations". Russia and the United States blocked attempts by each other in the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday to set up international investigations into chemical weapons attacks in Syria. U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday canceled a planned trip to Latin America later this week to focus instead on responding to the Syria incident, the White House said. Trump had on Monday warned of a quick, forceful response once responsibility for the Syria attack was established. (Reporting by Dahlia Nehme; writing by Tom Perry; editing by Mark Heinrich)Military personnel wearing protective suits at work in Salisbury last month after the nerve agent attack - Getty Images Europe

Boris Johnson has said the the Kremlin must give answers after an international watchdog confirmed that Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a "high purity" strain of Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said that it had been able to confirm the findings of British scientists about the nerve agent.

It represents a significant boost to Theresa May, who has said that Russia was directly responsible for the attack. Mr Johnson said that only Russia has the means, motive and record to have carried out the attack.

He said: We will now work tirelessly with our partners to help stamp out the grotesque use of weapons is this kind. The Kremlin must give answers. We must, as a world community, stand up for the rules based order which keeps us all safe. The use of weapons of this kind can never be justified, and must be ended.

The OPCW conducted tests on blood samples from the Skripals and also an analysis on samples of the agent found in Salisbury.

The team also took samples from Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey, who was poisoned after coming into contact with the agent while assisting the Skripals.

Sergei Skripal with his daughter Yulia, who has been released from hospital in Salisbury

The report states: The results of analysis of biomedical samples conducted by OPCW designated laboratories demonstrate the exposure of the three hospitalised individuals to this toxic chemical.

The results of the analysis of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people."

The team notes that the toxic chemical was of "high purity".

British scientists have suggested that only a foreign state would have been capable of producing the nerve agent.

Video: Watchdog Confirms Findings on Former Double-Agent Attack

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It comes as Ms Skripal revealed she has rejected assistance from the Russian embassy, adding: "I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves."

The 33-year-old said she has found herself in a "totally different life" as she continues to recover from the attack.

The Russian embassy said that it doubted the authenticity of the statement and suggested it had been crafted to support Britain's version of events.

It is believed that British authorities immediately spirited Ms Skripal away to a secure location when she was discharged from hospital earlier this week.

The Russian embassy reacted angrily, suggesting in a series of tweets that the Russian national had been taken against her will.

The Kremlin has repeatedly attempted to challenge Britain's claims that it was responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals.

War of words as diplomatic battle continues to rage

The Russian embassy is perturbed by a refusal from UK authorities to grant Ms Skripal's cousin Viktoria a visa to visit her family.

It escalated the war of words on Tuesday, saying in a series of statements posted on social media: "Secret resettlement of Mr and Ms Skripal, barred from any contact with their family will be seen as an abduction or at least as their forced isolation."

But Ms Skripal said in a statement: "I have specially trained officers available to me, who are helping to take care of me and to explain the investigative processes that are being undertaken.

"I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can.

"At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.

"Most importantly, I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do.

"Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

"I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being. Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's."

The Russian embassy later said that the statement "raises new questions rather than gives answers" as it was unable to verify it.

"The text has been composed in a special way so as to support official statements made by British authorities and at the same time to exclude every possibility of Yulia's contacts with the outer world - consuls, journalists and even relatives," the embassy said in a statement.

"The document only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen."

Pair poisoned by Novichok, experts conclude

Theresa May has said that UK military experts at Porton Down found that they were poisoned by Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Russia, and that the only plausible explanation was that the Russian state was responsible.

Despite the denials from Moscow, Britain has received strong diplomatic backing from western allies for its stance, with more than 20 countries expelling in excess of 150 Russian diplomats in protest at the Russian actions.

Last week, a Russian call for a new joint investigation was voted down by 15 votes to six at a meeting of the OPCW executive council in The Hague.

Ex-double agent jailed for selling secrets to MI6

Former double agent Mr Skripal was jailed in Russia for selling secrets to MI6 but was released as part of a spy swap deal in 2010 and settled in the UK.

It is hoped he will soon be fit for release from hospital, despite grave fears that the exposure to military-grade Novichok on March 4 would prove fatal.

Ms Skripal said she was treated with "such kindness" at Salisbury District Hospital, and is missing the staff there.

"I have left my father in their care, and he is still seriously ill. I too am still suffering with the effects of the nerve agent used against us.

"I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me," she said.Moscow (Russia) (AFP) - As the threat of Western military action against the Syrian regime looms, Russia has already deployed thousands of troops in the war-torn country to back President Bashar al-Assad.

President Vladimir Putin first launched a military intervention in Syria in 2015, turning the tables in the multi-front civil war in favour of ally Assad.

The regime and its Iranian and Russian allies increasingly appear to be on the path to victory in Syria's brutal seven-year civil war, while the West has been reluctant to engage militarily.

Here is what you need to know about the Russian army's presence in Syria.

- How many troops? -

The precise number of Russian troops fighting in Syria is not known.

Putin said in December that some 48,000 Russian servicemen have taken part in the campaign.

He has ruled out dispatching ground troops in Syria, making the air force the mainstay of Moscow's Syria campaign.

Officials have acknowledged the presence of Russian advisors and military police in Syria, however.

Independent Russian military expert Pavel Felgenhauer estimated late last year that "up to a thousand" military police and special forces are fighting alongside regime troops.

In March, the defence ministry said a total of 2,954 Russian troops in Syria had voted in presidential polls, giving an idea of current numbers.

In December Putin made a surprise visit to Russia's Hmeimim airbase in Latakia, Syria where he ordered a partial pullout of the country's troops, saying their task had been largely completed.

Russia said the airbase, set up in 2015, would remain in operation permanently, while its naval facility in the Syrian port of Tartus would be expanded.

Three battalions of military police and officers of the Russian Centre for Reconciliation would remain in Syria, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said.

Putin first said in March 2016 that the country's military campaign in Syria was coming to an end.

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Today few believe Russia is leaving the war-torn country any time soon.

- Mercenaries -

Officials and observers also point out the presence of a "shadow army" of Russian mercenaries in Syria, including those working for a private military company called Wagner.

Military expert Felgenhauer last year estimated the number of mercenaries at 2,000 to 3,000.

Moscow in March acknowledged five Russian nationals were killed and "dozens" wounded in US strikes on an area where no official troops were present, saying they all were in Syria "on their own initiative."

Various media reports in Russia and the United States said Wagner was being funded by one of Putin's allies Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Saint Petersburg businessman who previously carried out catering contracts for Russia's military and the Kremlin.

He has been charged by a US court and hit by Washington sanctions over setting up an internet "troll factory" that is accused of attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election in favour of Donald Trump. He has denied involvement.

- How many casualties? -

Russia has officially acknowledged 84 military losses in the Syrian war, including 39 killed in a plane crash at Hmeimim in March that was not caused by military action.

- Fighter planes, bombers -

Russia rules the skies in Syria and the role of its air force there has been celebrated at home.

Bomber planes such as the Tu-22 and Tu-160 have also flown from Russia to hit targets in Syria.

- Navy, aircraft carriers -

Russian warships and submarines have also played a prominent role backing up the bombing campaign in Syria, firing missiles at Islamic State group targets from the Mediterranean.

The Hmeimim airbase on the western coast and the naval facility in Tartus have been protected by S-300 and S-400 air missile defence systems.

Russian ships, such as Moscow's only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, have also completed missions in Syria. The Kuznetsov is now out of action for repairs set to last 2 to 3 years.

Russian ships are passing back and forth through the Bosphorus every couple of days.

The Russian defence ministry has previously said it will fire at any US craft that strikes government areas of Damascus, where Russian officials are also based.Tehran (AFP) - Russia's special envoy on Syria Alexander Lavrentiev visited Iran on Tuesday for an unannounced meeting, Iranian state media reported, with both sides criticising Western reactions to an alleged chemical attack.

Western countries have accused Syria of launching a chemical attack in the rebel-held town of Douma near Damascus on Saturday that killed more than 40 people.

"If there is a claim about the use of chemical weapons, we want this issue to be legally investigated," Hossein Jaberi Ansari, a senior aide in Iran's foreign ministry, said after the meeting according to state news agency IRNA.

Syria and its allies Russia and Iran deny the attack and have called for an investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Lavrentiev reportedly held extensive discussions on the situation in Syria with Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme Council on National Security, and other officials.

Ansari said Western powers were using the alleged chemical attack as "an excuse" to undermine the Syrian regime's recent success on the ground.

"Any time there is an important victory in confronting terrorists in political and field developments, we face a coordinated game and tactic from terrorist groups and foreign players," said Ansari.By Susan Cornwell and Makini Brice WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As President Donald Trump fumed over an FBI raid targeting his personal attorney, U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Wednesday he has been assured Trump does not intend to fire the special counsel investigating Russian election meddling. A Senate panel prepared meanwhile to consider a bill that would ensure the president cannot fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose federal probe includes looking into possible collusion with Russia by Trump's presidential campaign. The measure will be placed on the Senate Judiciary Committee's agenda next week, the panel's top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, said in a statement Wednesday evening. Trump's simmering anger at Mueller erupted again this week after Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided the home and office of Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen on Monday. The searches followed a referral by Mueller. Lawmakers, including senior members of Trump's own Republican Party, have expressed concern after the president suggested he might remove Mueller. "I have no reason to believe that that's going to happen," Ryan said at a news conference. "I have assurances that it's not, because I've been talking to people in the White House about it." On Wednesday, four senators introduced a bill that would protect the office of the special counsel, merging two different proposals. The proposed legislation would add the weight of law to current Justice Department regulations that govern the office of special counsel. The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Charles Grassley, said this week it would be "suicide" for the president to try to fire Mueller. Democrat Feinstein said she was worried about an amendment to the bill that she had not been able to review. "I've discussed this with Chairman Grassley and he has agreed to not take action this week but instead place the bill on the committee's markup calendar next week," she said. However, it was unclear if the proposal would garner the votes needed in the Republican-controlled Congress. Senator John Thune, a junior member of the Senate leadership, said he did not think it could muster the needed 60 votes to clear procedural floor votes in the Senate. Reports have circulated for months that Trump is also considering firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein took over responsibility for the Russia probe and appointed Mueller in May after Sessions, who was a Trump adviser during the 2016 campaign, recused himself. Trump did not answer reporters' shouted questions about the Russia probe during a bill signing on Wednesday. Earlier, he kept up his assault on Mueller in a Twitter message, blaming what he called the "bad blood" between Russia and the United States on the special counsel's investigation. Ryan, speaking at a news conference where he announced his retirement, said Rosenstein and Mueller should be allowed to do their jobs. "We have a rule of law in this country and that's a principle we all uphold." Referring to removing Mueller, Republican Senator Bob Corker said on Tuesday it would be a "massive mistake for the president to do that," adding he had told the president as much. "There would be a significant revolt in the Senate," he told Reuters. UNLIKELY TRUMP WOULD SIGN Senate Democrat Cory Booker, one of the sponsors of the legislation, said lawmakers had grown alarmed with Trump's recent comments about Mueller and the investigation. "There's a need for (the bill) ... People on both sides of the aisle are seeing that," Booker told reporters on Wednesday. A spokesman for the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, declined to comment on the prospects for the bill, and pointed reporters to comments McConnell made on Tuesday. McConnell said then that Mueller should be allowed to continue his work but such legislation was not needed. The Senate's No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn, also said he did not think such legislation was necessary. "And the biggest question I would have is, if it did pass, would the president sign it? ... Its unlikely that he would," Cornyn told reporters. The proposed legislation would allow the special counsel to be fired only "for good cause" by a senior Justice Department official, with a reason given in writing; provide recourse if the special counsel was fired without good cause; and preserve the staffing and materials of a pending investigation. Meanwhile, White House lawyers Ty Cobb and Donald McGahn have been trying to dissuade Trump from taking action against Mueller, two U.S. officials said on Tuesday. The lawyers have told Trump that firing the special counsel would leave the president vulnerable to charges of obstruction of justice, and have said that he must have "good cause" to order Rosenstein to oust Mueller, the officials said. Russia has denied U.S. intelligence agencies' findings that it meddled in the 2016 campaign to try to tilt the vote in Trump's favor. Trump has denied any collusion by his campaign and has long viewed the Mueller probe as a witch hunt. (Reporting by Susan Cornwell, Makini Brice, Patricia Zengerle and Mark Hosenball; Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh, Frances Kerry and Cynthia Osterman)Saudi Arabia is planning to escalate its isolation of regional rival Qatar by using nuclear waste and a 650-foot wide canal to turn its neighbor into an island.

According to reports in the state-linked al-Riyadh and Sabq newspapers, the projectwhich would establish a military zone, nuclear waste dump and canalwould separate the two countries along the entire length of the 37.5-mile border.

The two nations have been locked in a crisis since the imposition of a Saudi-led diplomatic blockade on Qatar in June 2017. Saudi Arabia and its alliesincluding Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egyptaccuse Qatar of supporting terrorism in the Middle East, a charge Doha denies.

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Apparently, Riyadh is not content with traditional isolation. The so-called Salwa Marine Canal Project would establish a military base in one area of the border and a nuclear waste site in another. The waste would come from the nuclear reactors that Saudi Arabia is planning to build. The border would then be clearly demarcated by a wide canal. The UAE would also build a nuclear waste site at its borders closest point to Qatar.

Saudi-Qatar border

KARIM JAAFAR/AFP/Getty Images

Sabq reported that the canal would be dug by Egyptian companies using experience gained in the construction of the Suez Canal and would take around a year to complete. Costing around $750 million, the waterway would be roughly 650 feet wide and 66 feet deep. It would be financed by private Saudi and Emirati investors.

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The newspaper said the newly-created waterfront coastline would offer investment opportunities for resorts, private beaches and cruise liners.

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According to al-Riyadh, the Saudi-Qatar border post has been cleared of customs and immigration personnel to allow border troops to assume management of the region.

Though the plan has not yet received official approval and will need to overcome many hurdles before it does, it is a sign of how far relations between the two Gulf states have deteriorated in the past year.

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Anwar Gargash, the UAEs Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, appeared to confirm the reports on Twitter. He said the proposed true geographical isolation is proof of Qatar's failure to manage and solve its crisis, and that its response to the reports of the plan is proof of their fear and confusion.

Doha

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been vying for favor with President Donald Trump. Qatari leader Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani arrived in Washington, D.C., yesterday for meetings with Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Trump. The visit comes as the State Department approved the sale of 5,000 Advanced Precision Kill Weapon Systems to Qatar for $300 million.

Saudi Arabias Crown Prince and ruler-in-waiting Mohammed Bin Salman al-Saud, known as MBS, recently made a two-week trip to the U.S. While in the country, he met with the president at the White House and convened with business leaders in New York, Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Both Salman and Trump are keen to blunt growing Iranian influence in the Middle East, and the U.S. seems to have doubled down on its controversial alliance with Saudi Arabia. Though Trump initially backed the Saudi-led blockade, he has since encouraged dialogue and offered to host a meeting between the feuding nations at Camp David in September.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekDUBAI (Reuters) - The spokesman for a Saudi-led coalition said on Tuesday that its military campaign in Yemen was not aimed at establishing a permanent presence along the country's West coast but at restoring its internationally recognized government. A Yemeni official had told Reuters that Saudi Arabia and its main ally the United Arab Emirates would likely seek to remain deployed along the country's Red Sea coast, where it is currently fighting an offensive against the Iran-aligned Houthi movement. "Saudi Arabia and UAE are very worried about Iran's influence, so they are seeking to keep some military presence on the Yemeni coasts even if the civil war ends," said the official who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter. In a response to a request for comment, the coalition denied the allegation. "The coalition is working by all means to restore Yemen's legitimacy so it can become stable and secure", spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki said in a statement. "The Yemeni Republic will restore its role in protecting its lands and territorial waters, as well as contributing to the maintenance of regional and international security," he added. The kingdom and its mostly Gulf Arab allies intervened in a civil war in Yemen in 2015 to roll back the Houthis after they had pushed the government into Saudi exile. Coalition and Yemeni forces have been making modest territorial gains in recent months against the group in an armed push moving northward from the Bab al-Mandab strait toward the Houthi-held port city of Hodeidah. Yemen lies beside the southern mouth of the Red Sea, one of the most important trade routes in the world for oil tankers, which pass near Yemen's shores while heading from the Middle East through the Suez Canal to Europe. (Reporting By Aziz El-Yaakoubi; Writing by Noah Browning; Editing by Hugh Lawson)Just when it looked as though things couldnt get any worse for Scott Pruitt, new accusations of misuses of taxpayer funds have been levied against the embattled Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

Five congressional Democrats sent Pruitt a letter on Thursday detailing accusations made against Pruitt by Kevin Chmielewski, former Donald Trump campaign aide who served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations under Pruitt. Chimielewski met with congressional Democrats this week and painted a picture of Pruitt as a feckless manager who wasted taxpayer money and took retribution against employees who tried to stop his reckless spending.

Chmielewski told Democrats that when he first arrived at the EPA to work for Pruitt, EPA Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson told him the nightmare is now yours.

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Mr. Chmielewski said those words turned out to be accurate, the Democrats wrote in their letter to Pruitt, which was also sent to the chairs of Senate and House oversight committees. In the letter, the Democrats asked Pruitt for documents related to the allegations, which built on previous scandals surrounding the former Oklahoma attorney general, including controversies over a $50-a-night Washington D.C. rental from an energy lobbyist, an expensive security detail and first-class travel, the installation of a $43,000 soundproof phone booth in his office, the use of motorcade sirens to get through slow traffic, and pay raises for two aides that were procured by going around the White House. Chmielewski confirmed many of these reports.

Even before the new allegations, the accumulating scandals led members of both parties to call on Pruitt to resign.

Chmielewski, who has been placed on leave, described several other alleged instances of Pruitt abusing his authority. The Democrats who signed the letter, Senators Tom Carper and Sheldon Whitehouse, as well as Representatives Elijah Cummings, Gerald Connolly and Don Beyer, said they found Chmielewski to be a credible professional who continues to express deep loyalty to the President and Vice-President.

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GettyImages-942763796

Getty

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An EPA spokesperson previously said that accusations that Pruitt mismanaged taxpayer funds were from disgruntled employees.

Among the new allegations made by Chmielewski:

Pruitt had one aide act as [his] personal real estate representative, spending weeks improperly using federal government resources and time to contact rental and sellers agents.

He had aides seek to get a $100,000-a-month contract for a private jet rental, a cost that would have greatly exceeded his annual $450,000 annual travel budget. Chmielewski said he was ultimately able to stop the contract.

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Pruitt, according to Chmielewski, designed his schedule around places he wanted to visit, and then would tell staff to justify the destination after the fact. The letter said he would give orders to find me something to do [in those locations] to justify the use of taxpayer funds. This would often involve flying to Pruitts home state of Oklahoma for long weekends, Chmielewski said.

What's more, Chmielewski alleged, Pruitt would make staff book flights on Delta in order to get personal frequent flier miles using government funds.

There are also numerous allegations about the EPA chief's hotel spending. Among them is the charge that Pruitt stayed in the nicest hotels, resulting not only in costs that exceeded the governments per diem limit, but bills that exceeded the 300 percent per diem cap that was only allowed in exceptional circumstances.

Pruitt is also accused of refusing to stay in Australian and Italian hotels that were recommended by the U.S. Embassy because of security concerns, instead demanding to stay at more expensive hotels that required even more taxpayer funds to pay for additional security.

Pruitt is said to have punished his chief of staff for raising concerns about his travel costs by texting him that he was not allowed at meetings in which travel was planned.

Pruitt did share some of the luxury with his staff, Chmielewski said, including flying top aide Samantha Dravis first class on a return flight from Morocco even though there was no legal justification for her to do so.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekMadrid (Spain) (AFP) - Spain's Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a request by Catalonia's pro-independence presidential candidate Jordi Sanchez to be let out of jail and sworn in as regional head.

The Catalan parliament had been scheduled to hold a debate and vote on Sanchez's candidacy on Friday, but after the court's ruling Catalan parliament speaker Roger Torrent announced on Twitter he had suspended the session indefinitely.

Sanchez was remanded in custody in October pending charges over his role in last year's failed Catalan independence bid.

An attempt to appoint him as president failed last month after Spain's Supreme Court turned down a request for his release from jail.

But Torrent put Sanchez's name forward as a candidate again earlier this month after the United Nations Human Rights Committee defended his political rights.

In letters sent last month to Spanish authorities and Sanchez's lawyers, the UN committee requested the state take all steps to ensure he is allowed to exercise his political rights.

Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena once again turned down Sanchez's request, arguing there were signs that he could "move in the direction of a rupture of the constitutional order".

The judge argues it was justified in limiting Sanchez's political rights given the risk that his release would pose to the collective rights "of the rest of the community".

Torrent had appealed earlier on Thursday for the judge to agree to let Sanchez, a former leader of influential grassroots independence group ANC who was elected to the Catalan parliament in snap polls in December, leave jail to be sworn in.

"The court has the opportunity to take note of international law and the protection of political rights or write another dark chapter in the history of the Supreme Court," he said in an interview to news radio station Cadena Ser.

The court ruling comes as Barcelona is gearing up for a huge protest on Sunday to mark the six month anniversary of the jailing of Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, the leader of another separatist organisation.

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- Activist released -

Catalonia has been in political limbo since Spain's conservative central government imposed direct rule on the region after it unilaterally declared independence in October.

Fresh regional elections will be triggered if a new leader is not elected by May 22.

Separately, the National Court, which handles terrorism and other top criminal cases, released a woman who was arrested on Tuesday for "rebellion" and "terrorism" in a probe of pro-independence activists in Catalonia.

National Court judge Diego de Egea dismissed those two charges against her, saying she should instead be prosecuted for the lesser crime of causing public disorder, which carries a possible jail sentence of between six months and six years.

The woman is allegedly a member of the radical pro-independence activist groups called the Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) which formed last year before an independence referendum on October 1.

In recent weeks, the groups have protested against the jailing of pro-independence Catalan leaders and the detention of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont in Germany by blocking major roads in Catalonia, sometimes with burning tires.

At the end of March, the protesters blocked major roads in Catalonia and tried to occupy the central government's representative office, heavily guarded by police, on several occasions. The resulting clashes left dozens injured.By Jesus Aguado and Isla Binnie MADRID (Reuters) - Spain is due to sign a framework deal to sell Saudi Arabia warships worth around 1.8 billion euros ($2.2 billion) on Thursday, a Spanish Defence Ministry source said. Under the agreement, Spanish state-owned shipbuilder Navantia will sell five small warships, Spain's army will train Saudi military personnel and contractors will build a naval construction center in the kingdom, the source said. The deal will be signed in Madrid, where Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is on a state visit, the source added. An industry official confirmed the details of the agreement, though Navantia declined to comment. Campaign groups Amnesty International, Spain's FundiPau, Greenpeace and Oxfam have called on Spain to stop selling military equipment to the Saudis, accusing the kingdom of abusing rights - charges it denies. Prince Mohammed, who serves as defence minister and controls economic and energy policy, was welcomed by Spain's King Felipe VI at the Zarzuela palace on the outskirts of Madrid. He also met Defence Minister Maria Dolores de Cospedal, and lunched at the royal palace with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. The two sides have been negotiating the warship deal since 2015, and the final agreement between the Saudi defence ministry and Navantia would take longer to complete, the ministry source said. (Writing by Isla Binnie; Editing by Julien Toyer and Andrew Heavens)Stockholm (Sweden) (AFP) - Swedish prosecutors on Wednesday charged a 49-year-old Chinese man with espionage for allegedly gathering intelligence on Tibetan refugees in Sweden and Norway for China.

The man, identified in the charge sheet as Dorjee Gyantsan, is accused of infiltrating the Tibetan community to pass information on their personal and political activities to Chinese officials in exchange for money.

His lawyer, Mikael Soderberg, told AFP his client -- who faces up to four years in prison -- denied all charges.

Dorjee acquired resident status as a refugee in Sweden in the early 2000s, and posed as a supporter of Tibetan independence, prosecutors said.

He also attended Tibetan anti-China protests in Norway, and covered a visit of the Dalai Lama to Norway as a reporter for the pro-Tibetan Voice of Tibet, in order to collect information on Tibetan refugees.

The espionage is believed to have taken place from July 2015 to February 2017, when he was arrested.

"This is a very serious crime. The espionage has affected very vulnerable people," prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist told AFP.

"People who have fled to Sweden from totalitarian regimes must be able to feel safe and feel that they can exercise their constitutionally-protected freedom to protest against a regime without fear of persecution or attacks on themselves or their families."

Some 130 Tibetans live in the Scandinavian country, according to the organisation Tibetan Community in Sweden.

Prosecutors believe Dorjee met repeatedly with a Chinese embassy secretary in Poland to pass on information, receiving thousands of dollars (euros) in exchange.

The suspect had also contacts with a person in Finland believed to be connected to the Chinese regime.

The meetings were held outside Sweden "to make it more difficult to uncover the operation", the charge sheet said.

At the time of his arrest, Dorjee had just returned from a trip to Warsaw and was carrying $6,000 in cash, which prosecutors believe was payment for his information.

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The prosecution's evidence includes witness testimonies about his contacts with the Tibetan community, as well as the suspect's phone and travel records.

Beijing says it "peacefully liberated" Tibet in 1951 and considers it an inseparable part of China.

Regimes often spy on refugees to find out who has fled the country, why, and where they are now -- or to put pressure on family members who have stayed behind.Washington (United States) (AFP) - President Donald Trump's threat of action against the Syrian regime places the United States and Russia at perhaps the greatest risk of conflict since the days of the Cold War.

No serious observer thinks Washington or Moscow want to fight each other over Bashar al-Assad's latest alleged use of banned chemical weapons on his country's civil war battlefield.

But the Syria conflict is a complex web of overlapping wars which have drawn in several world powers, and the risk of miscalculation is as high as Trump's Twitter rhetoric is provocative.

"I don't think we're at the Cuban missile crisis level, but we're getting pretty damn close," Russia expert Boris Zilberman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told AFP.

"The immediate priority is to avert the danger of war," Russian's ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told reporters following a closed-door meeting of the Security Council.

Asked if he meant war between the United States and Russia, he said: "We cannot exclude any possibilities unfortunately."

Saturday's attack on the then rebel-held Damascus suburb of Ghouta reportedly left more than 40 people dead, and dramatically raised the stakes for outside powers.

Trump, who unleashed a one-off US cruise missile salvo a year ago in response to a chemical attack blamed on Assad's forces, reacted with fury and threatened a renewed intervention.

President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin has deployed warplanes and troops to Syria to defend Assad's regime, and -- as usual -- issued a series of conflicting denials on his behalf.

- Missile salvo -

By Wednesday, as Russian and Syrian forces took charge of the formerly rebel-held area that was bombed, Trump was explicitly threatening on Twitter to launch more missiles.

The White House said Trump had yet to reach a "final decision" following a Thursday meeting with his national security advisors -- and would confer again with his French and British allies, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May.

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But a strike still seems more than likely after UN talks failed.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, often a more cautious voice than Trump's, pointed towards a US response Thursday when he told lawmakers that "some things are simply inexcusable."

Last April, when US warships in the Mediterranean fired cruise missiles at a Syrian air base, Russian forces were warned in advance and pulled out of the target area, which was rapidly repaired.

Another year into Syria's war, with chemical strikes continuing, most experts suppose any new US response must be broader, with perhaps more targets and more than one night of bombing.

Russia, at least in its public pronouncements, is also more determined not to back down. The Kremlin's ambassador to Beirut vowed that Russian forces would try to shoot down any US missiles.

The Russian military has also made belligerent statements, but Putin himself and the Moscow foreign ministry have instead played the injured party, demanding proof of Assad's culpability.

Meanwhile, the world is holding its breath. Could military action from Washington and its allies trigger an armed confrontation with Putin's Russia, a resentful nuclear-armed foe?

"The big concern here is always mistakes, unintended consequences," said Zilberman. "Especially if they're considering hitting a wider range of targets than they did last time."

- Russian 'red line' -

Trump, after initial reluctance to undermine his hope of warmer ties with Putin, now has imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs and expelled 60 alleged spies under diplomatic cover, partly in retaliation for Moscow's support for the Assad regime.

In February this year, US forces working alongside Kurdish militia in the east of Syria clashed with regime forces and killed scores of Russians working as mercenaries.

"In Syria, a handful of weeks ago, the Russians met their match and a couple hundred Russians were killed," outgoing CIA chief Mike Pompeo boasted Thursday, at a Senate hearing.

Despite the Kremlin's stern words, few expect Russia to seek confrontation in Syria. At the weekend, Israeli jets hit a Syrian airbase housing Iranian forces and Russia did not respond.

Nevertheless, experts say the Russian "red line" would be the safety of its own forces, which are based alongside their Syrian and sometimes Iranian comrades in many areas of western Syria.

"The situation is aggravated by multiple points of tension and repeated similar cases, in Syria as with Skripal," said Boris Toucas of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Sergei Skripal is a former Russian double-agent recovering in Britain after he was poisoned on March 4 by a nerve agent, in what London alleges was a Russian assassination bid.

"Nevertheless, none of the protagonists have any interest in a direct confrontation, as shown by the absence of any Russian reaction to last year's American strikes," Toucas argued.

Trump's response, if and when it comes, will have taken several days to organize and thus Russian forces may have been able to put some space between themselves and likely targets.

- World order eroding -

But, equally, there are reports from Syria that some regime forces may be gathering in Russian-protected bases for shelter.

Putin may also feel the need to react in order to protect his leadership of the Russia-Syria-Iran coalition.

"They've got to look tough, like they're not letting this happen," Zilberman said, predicting that Russia's aggressive attitude would continue and US-Russia ties only degrade further.

"Certainly for domestic consumption they've got to look like they're not rolling over for Israel, for the United States or for France or whoever else."

But both Washington and Moscow suffer from credibility problems that could increase the chances of escalation.

The US administration is in turmoil, with vacancies or very new appointees in major national security positions and policy declared by Trump tweets sent in reaction to cable news segments.

"The resulting confusion is a problematic element of uncertainty, at a time when the post Cold War international order is eroding rapidly," warns Toucas.

Meanwhile, Putin's inner circle of senior officials and allied oligarchs has seen their wealth drop by billions of dollars over the past week since the latest round of US sanctions.Wafideen Checkpoint (Syria) (AFP) - Rebels in Syria's Eastern Ghouta surrendered their heavy weapons and their leader left the enclave, a monitor said Thursday, signalling the end of one of the bloodiest assaults of Syria's seven-year war.

The Syrian flag was raised above the central mosque in Douma, the town where the regime is accused of carrying out a chemical attack that sparked outrage and threats of Western military action.

US President Donald Trump was mulling his options and British Prime Minister Theresa May called an emergency cabinet meeting Thursday, as the Syrian army braced for Western strikes, hiding assets and clearing key buildings.

Jaish al-Islam, which has controlled Eastern Ghouta's main town for years, had balked at a Russian-brokered deal like those that saw other factions bussed to northern Syria.

The group's political chief told AFP it was a chemical attack by the regime that forced them to accept Russia's terms and evacuate their former bastion.

"Of course, the chemical attack is what pushed us to agree" to a withdrawal from Douma, said Yasser Dalwan.

Western powers such as France and the United Nations have alleged the regime used chemical weapons on Douma last Saturday.

Damascus has said the case was entirely fabricated to justify military action against the regime and that international chemical experts would arrive in the country Thursday.

The OPCW global watchdog said the team was "on its way to Syria and will start its work as of Saturday" on a fact-finding mission into the alleged attack.

Regime forces had yet to take over Douma Thursday but, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the rebels gave up their heavy weapons.

"Jaish al-Islam fighters handed over their heavy weapons to Russian military police in the town of Douma on Wednesday," the Britain-based monitoring group said.

Their top leader Issam Buwaydani boarded a convoy out of Ghouta with thousands of other fighters and their relatives, it said.

Story continues

- Flag raised -

Douma residents told AFP that Syria's national red, white and black flag with two green stars was raised on Wednesday above the main mosque, which was also used as the office of the town's opposition-run council.

But a dispute subsequently erupted, shots were fired and the flag was taken down, the residents said.

Russian military police, who had started deploying in the town as part of a deal that would allow some rebels to disarm and stay in Douma, also left after the incident, the residents said.

Simultaneously carrying out air strikes, brokering talks and supervising humanitarian operations, Russia was the key player in an assault that left at least 1,700 civilians dead.

"Today a significant event in the history of Syria took place," Major General Yury Yevtushenko, head of the Russian military's centre for reconciliation in Syria, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

"The raising of a regime flag over a building in the town of Douma signified control over this town and consequently over Eastern Ghouta as a whole," he said.

It was not clear whether he was referring to the flag that was taken down or to another.

- Assad recovery -

Moscow also said Russian military police had returned to the town on Thursday and were in full control.

"From today, units of the Russian armed forces' military police are working in the town of Douma," the defence ministry said.

Yet chaos and confusion prevailed in the streets of Douma, where civilians appeared to have very little information on the latest political developments.

Many residents were preparing to take what should be some of the last buses leaving the region to head to parts of northern Syria still under rebel control.

A military official said around 30 of 80 buses brought to Douma for the evacuations had already left.

According to the Russian military, more than 160,000 people have been evacuated from Eastern Ghouta, which only two months ago was a sprawling rebel enclave within mortar range of central Damascus.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad, which since Russia's military intervention in 2015 has gradually reasserted what was once a very tenuous grip on the country, was keen to secure an area that directly threatened the capital.

"Victory in Ghouta is a critical point," Bouthaina Shaaban, a top Assad adviser, said on the Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen.

"It has sent a message to the whole world that Syria's army and its allies can liberate every inch of Syrian territory," she said.

The Syrian pound has risen significantly as the operation to flush rebels out of Ghouta wrapped up.

Regime and allied forces are next expected to train their sights on areas in southern Damascus that are almost empty of civilians but still controlled by the Islamic State jihadist group (IS).

According to the Observatory, more than 350,000 people have been killed in seven years of conflict, including a proportion of children that has risen sharply over the past year.

While the scramble for Syria that followed the collapse of IS's self-styled "caliphate" last year is winding down in some parts of Syria, the humanitarian emergency is still acute.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 2.9 million people were forced from their homes last year, or nearly 8,000 people every day.The Syrian flag of President Bashar al-Assad once again flew over the town of Douma in Eastern Ghouta, which had been in rebel hands for more than half a decade.

Russia, which backs the regime, said Syrian government forces were now in full control of the onetime opposition enclave and that Russian troops were patrolling the area.

The reported fall of Douma, the last town under opposition control in the Damascus suburb, marked the end of the rebellion against Assad there and one of the biggest defeats to date.

"Today a significant event in the history of Syria took place. The raising of a regime flag over a building in the town of Douma signified control over this town and consequently over Eastern Ghouta as a whole," Major General Yury Yevtushenko, head of the Russian military's centre for reconciliation in Syria.

Syrian Army soldiers gathering in an area on the eastern outskirts of Douma, Credit: AFP

Russian television showed footage of the Syrian government's red, white and black flag with two green stars hanging over the towns central mosque, while cheering crowds waved flags in among shell-damaged buildings.

But a dispute erupted, shots were fired and the flag was quickly taken down, residents said.

"From today, units of the Russian armed forces' military police are working in the town of Douma. They are a guarantee of the observance of law and order in the town," the defence ministry said in a statement.

The Russian military said the situation in Douma was normalising and a total of 166,644 people had been evacuated from the city through a humanitarian corridor.

The Russians presence in Douma raises questions as to whether the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), whose inspectors are expected to carry out tests in the next few days, will be able to work without interference.

Russian forces have already been to the site of the gas attack, and to the hospital patients were treated, but said they found no evidence such a strike too place.

Story continues

The Syrian regime, backed by Russian air strikes and troops on the ground, fought a merciless months-long campaign in Eastern Ghouta which left more than 1,700 dead.

Within weeks they managed to cut the enclave, which had been home to almost 400,000 people, into three.

Rebels in the other two pockets quickly agreed to evacuation deals, under pressure from civilians would could no longer withstand the fierce aerial assault.

Those in Douma held out, with Islamist elements refusing to leave. Saturday's chemical attack brought them back to the negotiating table and a deal was agreed the next day.

A senior member of Jaish al-Islam admitted on Thursday that his faction only agreed to abandon its battered enclave outside Damascus because of the chemical attack.

"Of course, the chemical attack is what pushed us to agree," said Yasser Dalwan.

Some 8,000 rebels and their family members are being sent by bus to areas in northern Syria close to the Turkish border and under the control of Ankara-backed rebels.

Meanwhile Russia claimed some 60,000 who had fled Eastern Ghouta before the governments blockade in 2013 had returned.

The fall of Eastern Ghouta marks a major loss for the opposition, which controls only two other main strongholds in the north in Idlib and Deraa, in the south.

Residents in both areas fear the government will soon turn its attention to them.Most 17-year-old girls going to senior prom have a simple process for finding the perfect dress, typically determined by a standout cut or their favorite color. But for Skyler Branch of White Station High School in Memphis, Tenn., it was actually a loved one who inspired the teens incredible prom dress, which depicts a number of iconic black women.

After the passing of her fathers grandmother, with whom Skyler was particularly close, the teen decided that she wanted to honor her relative on the big night. And as Skyler began to brainstorm, she came up with an homage to multiple inspirational figures.

Skyler in her inspirational prom dress. (Photo: Courtesy of Dayna Branch)

She said, Mom, theres been so many extraordinary African-American women who have done so much for me. I want to show them some respect so that they know that not just the older adults but the younger adults appreciate who paved the way, Skylers mother Dayna tells Yahoo Lifestyle. And she found different pictures of all of the people who she wanted on the dress.

From Michelle Obama and Maya Angelou to Oprah and Taraji P. Henson, Skyler had a clear vision of who she wanted to include. A seamstress named Shannon Pierce made it all happen.

Skyler Branch pays homage to influential black women on her senior prom dress. (Photo: Courtesy of Dayna Branch)

I called Shannon up and told her what concepts Skyler wanted, and what we wanted the dress to look like, Dayna says. We sat down with her, we went over the print and where we wanted everyone to be. She has her great-great grandmothers on there, she has her great grandmothers on there, as well as her grandmothers. She has all of her aunts from Memphis to Houston. Everybodys on there.

With the material picked out, Skyler and Dayna went to a print shop to have the photos printed on the dress. Then the dress was cut and jeweled to perfection by Pierce to become a one-of-a-kind piece that blew everyone at prom, and outside of it, away.

Before the dance, Skyler and Dayna went to see Skylers other great grandmother, whos 87, to show her the dress with her face on it. Pictured right on the front, Dayna says that her grandmother was amazed, while other family members cried.

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We didnt see anything like this before, Dayna explains of Skylers particular design, while making mention of another unique prom dress that made headlines last year: a tribute to Trayvon Martin. The dress worn by Florida teen Milan Bolden-Morris featured photos of Martin, the 17-year-old who was shot to death in 2012, in addition to a number of other individuals killed during police interactions. While Bolden-Morriss design made a powerful statement about the Black Lives Matter movement, Skylers takes a different approach by recognizing black women who beat the odds.

But as the Tennessee teen approaches her start date at college, theres one person in particular on her dress that serves as a major inspiration.

Skyler is actually going to school for pre-vet studies, Dayna says. One of the women on the dress is Dr. Alfreda J. Webb, the first African-American female veterinarian in the U.S.

Although Skyler is striving to follow in the footsteps of these stellar female leaders, its pretty clear that this teen is already a strong leader in her own right.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

 Mom warns teens attending prom to be careful with shocking before and after photos

 This teen is going viral for DIYing a $4 thrift-store dress into her dream prom dress

 This teens sharing of her gorgeous prom dress with a girl in need sparked a movement

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.



Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street in London, Britain, June 20, 2018. REUTERS/Toby Melville

Curt Mills

Security, Europe

Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid loom large. They are sharks in the water just waiting to replace her.

Theresa Mays Government Nears Collapse as She Prepares to Host Trump

Boris has wanted to be British prime minister since he was born in New York, Raheem Kassam, former deputy to Nigel Farage and former editor of Breitbart London, told me Monday morning.

I think [Mays] government falls, Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, says.

Ahead of the already-fraught process of hosting President Donald Trump later this week, the government of Theresa May faces the most serious test of her premiership. David Davis, the Brexit secretary, resigned his post this past weekend.

Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, followed suit Monday.

At issue is the putative raison d'etre of Mays administration: British exit from the European Union.

In recent days, news reports of former Prime Minister David Cameron allegedly complaining that Mays plan for exit was the worst of both worlds have roiled Number 10 Downing Street.

May and her team denied the reports, but the moment of weakness has now been followed by the successive resignations of her Brexit and foreign secretaries.

Mays government could fall.

Boris wouldnt do this, unless hed already consolidated the support of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the popular British gadfly turned serious political contender, says Kassam. Hell be making a go of it.

Johnson salivates over Downing Street, adds Tom Rogan, British-born commentary writer at Washington Examiner and host of The McLaughlin Group. So you never know.

After Davis left, it was obvious Boris was going to quit I think, a source privy to the machinations in Westminster told me Monday, who adds a coup attempt is likely in the works but that his is not sure they can force one.

Rogan agrees: I think May survives because the party knows that it cannot let the DUP withdraw and see Jeremy Corbyn get an election win that leads to an even softer Brexit.

Story continues

Michael Gove, Johnsons frenemy and a Rupert Murdoch favorite, is the kingmaker, says Rogan. May is likely to offer him Johnsons post, replacing one staunch Brexitier with another. Gove is also the mentor of Sajid Javid, who is a far more establishment, but just as relentlessly ambitious rising star in Mays government, recently appointed as home secretary. In a chaotic scrum, Javid, Kassam says, is my greatest fear, a walking, talking embodiment of neoliberalism. Hes our [Emmanuel] Macron. Gove famously betrayed Johnson in 2016, costing him the premiership that year. That will again, ironically, work in Theresa Mays favor, argues Rogan. Gove didnt like being seen as a backstabber. . . . So its likely that hell give May his support.

But for the British, this couldnt have come at a worse time. Trump plans to fly to the United Kingdom for the first time as presidentafter much delayfollowing the announcement of his Supreme Court pick Monday night. The possibility that May might not even be prime minister when he lands is a major embarrassment.

Additionally, Trump, friendly with Farage and a detractor of the European Union (a senior diplomat recently told the National Interest Trump said he views the institution less favorably than China), will likely use the visit to stoke the flames of populist sentiment. As a candidate in June 2016, Trump cheered on Brexit.

He will likely do so again, according to a veteran conservative activist close to the White House. Expect lots of trash talk on the sidelines of Trumps golf course in Scotland.

The NATO summit is also this week. For its part, the Trump administration, publically at least, did not seem as if it expected this environment; as late as last Friday it was partly focusing on the White Houses reinstallation of a bust of Winston Churchill.

The President knows how important the special relationship is firsthand and thats why the bust of Churchill is actually in the Oval Office as we speak. This is not an accident. He knows that he has an opportunity to make this special relationship even stronger, U.S. Ambassador Woody Johnson told reporters Friday, in prepared remarks.

But its unmistakable that the White House will seek to capitalize on the shakeup.

The UK is very preoccupied right now with Brexit. . . . As Americans, we always look at where the opportunities are. Britain has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change direction, Johnson said.

Meanwhile, outside populist forces will also seek to profit.

My source close to Westminster says that if May survives, the United Kingdom Independence Party will regain much of its lost strength. Kassam, associated with UKIP, says it will either way. Brexits voters who supported May in 2017 now feel cheated by her very soft Brexit proposals.

And, meanwhile, Bannon will be making his third trip to Europe on the year, concurrent with Trumps trip.

Kassam, who has been traveling with him, tells me: Oh yeah, were leaving tonight, baby.

Curt Mills is a foreign-affairs reporter at the National Interest. Follow him on Twitter: @CurtMills.

Image: Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street in London, Britain, June 20, 2018. REUTERS/Toby Melville

Read full articleBy David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tesla Inc <TSLA.O> lashed out at the National Transportation Safety Board on Thursday after the agency took the unusual step of removing the automaker as a party to its investigation of a fatal crash in March in which a Tesla vehicle's "Autopilot" system was in use.

The NTSB's action means Tesla may not gain access to some information obtained by the agency's investigators before it is made public, but frees the company to vigorously defend the Autopilot technology.

The war of words on Thursday between the Silicon Valley automaker run by billionaire Elon Musk and the NTSB stood in stark contrast to efforts this week by Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi and Facebook Inc <FB.O> chief Mark Zuckerberg to defuse conflicts with regulators.

Tesla "violated the party agreement by releasing investigative information before it was vetted and confirmed by the NTSB," the safety board said in a statement. Releasing incomplete information often leads "to speculation and incorrect assumptions about the probable cause of a crash, which does a disservice to the investigative process and the travelling public," the agency said.

Tesla in return blasted the NTSB, saying the company chose on Tuesday to withdraw from the agreement as a formal party before the agency revoked its status.

Tesla said it had "been clear in our conversations with the NTSB that theyre more concerned with press headlines than actually promoting safety" and accused the agency of violating its own rules while trying to prevent Tesla from disclosing all the facts.

"We dont believe this is right and we will be making an official complaint to Congress," Tesla added, saying it would make an open records request to "understand the reasoning behind their focus on the safest cars in America while they ignore the cars that are the least safe."

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NTSB spokesman Christopher O'Neil said the agency declined to comment on Tesla's allegations.

The NTSB has three pending probes into Tesla crashes.

Tesla's initial statement announcing its withdrawal did not disclose that the NTSB was revoking its status.

Driver Walter Huang died after a March 23 crash and vehicle fire in a Tesla Model X near Mountain View, California, prompting investigations by the NTSB and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Tesla's announcement late on Wednesday in California came after the company publicly blamed the driver for the crash and made statements about the incident that drew criticism from the NTSB.

Autopilot is a semi-autonomous system that handles some driving tasks. Tesla has said it warns drivers that they are always responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle.

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said in a statement he was "troubled by Tesla's reckless disregard of its legal obligations to NTSB - potentially compromising NTSB's ability to conduct a thorough and robust investigation into the companys flawed Autopilot system."

AUTOPILOT

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt told Reuters on Tuesday the agency had a good working relationship with Tesla but that companies must follow the rules. He and Musk spoke on Friday and again on Wednesday when he told the company it was revoking its status.

"It is unfortunate that Tesla, by its actions, did not abide by the party agreement," Sumwalt said in the NTSB statement on Thursday. Tesla said that "even though we won't be a formal party, we will continue to provide technical assistance to the NTSB."

Huang's family said on Wednesday it had hired law firm Minami Tamaki LLP to explore legal options, adding the firm believed the Autopilot feature probably caused his death. The firm said its preliminary review of the crash suggested Autopilot was defective.

The NTSB has not disclosed any findings.

Tesla has said Huang had activated Autopilot and it was in operation at the time of the crash. Vehicle logs from the accident showed no action was taken by Huang before the crash and that he had received warnings from the system to put his hands on the wheel, the company said.

Tesla said the Autopilot system always reminded drivers to be alert and keep their hands on the wheel.

The NTSB confirmed earlier this week it had two other pending investigations of Tesla crashes, including an August 2017 Tesla battery fire in Lake Forest, California, after an owner lost control and ran the vehicle into his garage. The investigation into that fire was first reported by Reuters on Wednesday.

The agency previously faulted Tesla in a 2016 fatal crash in Florida in which Autopilot was engaged. Sumwalt said in 2017 that "system safeguards were lacking" and "Tesla allowed the driver to use the system outside of the environment for which it was designed and the system gave far too much leeway to the driver to divert his attention." Tesla said it had made improvements in the system since the crash.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Peter Cooney and Matthew Lewis)President Donald Trump's bid to cut funding from states and cities that refuse to fully cooperate with U.S. immigration authorities is set to head to a federal appeals court.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the administration's defense that an executive order threatening to cut funding from so-called "sanctuary states," including California, was legal, the Associated Press has reported.

Trump has long threatened to withhold federal funding from California over its allowance of sanctuary cities, which prevent local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration authorities, previously calling the state "out of control."

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GettyImages-943816298

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty

The administration has already sued California over three laws offering protection for undocumented immigrants.

In November, U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick said that the president did not have the authority to attach such conditions to spending approved by Congress.

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The ruling was handed down as a result of lawsuits filed by California counties San Francisco and Santa Clara. Orrick said that the executive order could risk hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to the two counties.

The Trump administration has argued that its order only applies to a restricted amount of funding that already requires compliance with immigration law.

However, the order could also affect future grants if the administration receives permission to enforce it.

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Read more: This California County Is Joining Jeff Sessions Challenge of Sanctuary Law

In January, the Department of Justice revealed it was considering subjecting state and local officials to criminal charges if they introduce sanctuary policies to stop jurisdictions from cooperating with immigration authorities.

Story continues

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan threw his support behind the idea, telling Fox News's Neil Cavuto: "We gotta take [sanctuary cities] to court, and we gotta start charging some of these politicians with crimes."

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekSeveral airlines have had to reroute their passenger flights after President Donald Trump warned Russia and Syria over Twitter that he is considering a missile strike in retaliation for a suspected chemical attack against Syrian civilians in the opposition-held eastern Ghouta district.

Kuwait Airways was the latest carrier to announce changes to their routes. In a tweet published late on Wednesday in Arabic, the airline said it would stop its flight to the Lebanese capital of Beirut starting Thursday until further notice. The decision, the airline said, was due to security warnings received from Cypriot authorities related to the dangers of flying in Lebanese air space.

The Beirut-based carrier Middle East Airlines made a similar announcement earlier on Wednesday, publishing a list valid until Friday of rescheduled flights. The airline said the decision was a "precautionary measure" taking into account "the recent security situation between US and Syria," and agreed "in coordination with the ministry of Public Works and Transportation."

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GettyImages-71817755

Yasser al-Zayyat/AFP/Getty Images

Airlines have previously avoided flying over Syria due to its seven-year conflict. One Emirates flight departing Dubai and headed to Beirut on Thursday morning can be seen clearly circumnavigating Syrian airspace, flying over Iraq and Turkey instead.

But Trump's recent indications of an imminent strike has forced aviation authorities to alert airlines to reconsider their routes as, ever since the deadly 2014 downing of the MH17 flight by a surface-to-air missile while it was flying over Ukraine, regulators have increased efforts to motinor conflict zones to avoid another disaster.

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04_12_Dubai_Beirut

Screenshot/Flightradar24

"Due to the possible launch of airstrikes into Syria with air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours, and the possibility of intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment, due consideration needs to be taken when planning flight operations in the Eastern Mediterranean/Nicosia FIR area, read a statement from the European Aviation Safety Agency published on the Eurocontrol website, referring to the flight information region (FIR) encompassing Cyprus and the surrounding waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

French carrier Air France told Reuters they were reconsidering their routes, including those invovling Beirut and the Israeli capital Tel Aviva route low-cost British carrier Easyjet is also revising.

The Trump administration is weighting the possibility of a missile strike along with its European allies France and the U.K. British Prime Minister Theresa May called a special cabinet meeting on Thursday to discuss the country's course of action, raising concerns that she might bypass a parliamentary vote on the use of force in Syria, according to the BBC.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekA day after warning Russia in a tweet that missiles will be coming to Syria, President Trump said on Twitter that an airstrike was not necessarily imminent.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place, Trump tweeted early Thursday. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?

Trump has been weighing U.S. military options in Syria in the wake of Saturdays chemical attack that killed at least 40 people. Syrian President Bashar Assad is suspected to have ordered the attack as part of an ongoing war against both the Islamic State group and various antigovernment forces. According to the U.N. envoy for Syria, an estimated 400,000 Syrians have been killed since 2011.

Defense Secretary James Mattis said Wednesday that the U.S. and its allies are mulling how to respond to the attack.

We are still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies, Mattis said. Were still working on this.

But Trumps early morning tweet Wednesday suggested U.S. military action was inevitable.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria, Trump wrote on Twitter. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

The tweet was criticized by some lawmakers and military analysts who questioned the wisdom of the president publicly telegraphing his move  something Trump denounced former President Barack Obama for doing.

President Trump speaks during a meeting with senior military leaders at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Monday. At right is new national security adviser John Bolton. (Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

On Thursday, Trump also pushed back against a New York Times report that he sought to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller, who is leading the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

If I wanted to fire Robert Mueller in December, as reported by the Failing New York Times, I would have fired him, Trump tweeted. Just more Fake News from a biased newspaper!

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Trump has made no secret about his hostility toward Mueller in recent days. Trump has repeatedly assailed Muellers probe as corrupt and fake, while suggesting that it is responsible for much of the bad blood with Russia. He has also attacked the former FBI chief as conflicted.

Earlier this year, the Times reported that Trump ordered Muellers firing last June but ultimately backed down after White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II threatened to resign in protest.

This week, CNN reported that Trump is considering firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees Mueller, after the FBI raided the office and hotel of Trumps longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen. Federal agents were reportedly looking for information related to Cohens hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, as well as any information related to the Access Hollywood tape on which Trump brags on a hot mic about sexually assaulting women.

Trump called the raid a a total witch hunt.

Its a disgraceful situation, Trump told reporters before a meeting of military officials at the White House on Monday night. Its an attack on our country, in a true sense. Its an attack on what we all stand for.

Read more from Yahoo News:

(Cover photo credit: Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Mouneb Taim/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images, Ted Aljibe/AFP/Getty ImagesNicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)A federal judicial nominee refused to say whether she agreed with the outcome of the landmark civil rights ruling Brown v. Board of Education during her confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

Wendy Vitter, a Louisiana lawyer nominated for a federal judgeship by President Donald Trump, would not say if she supported the 1954 Supreme Court decision that famously outlawed racial segregation in schools. During her confirmation hearing to be the district judge for Louisianas Eastern District, Vitter repeatedly said she could not comment on her personal feelings about Supreme Court decisions.

Do you believe that Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided, Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, asked.

I dont mean to be coy, Vitter responded. But I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with. Again, my personal, political or religious views I would set aside. That is Supreme Court precedent. It is binding. If I were honored to be confirmed I would be bound by it, and of course I would uphold it.

WATCH: During her confirmation hearing this morning (yes, this morning  in 2018), judicial nominee Wendy Vitter refused to say whether she agreed with the result in Brown v. Board of Education. #UnfitToJudge pic.twitter.com/RWroh0XUIC  The Leadership Conference (@civilrightsorg) April 11, 2018

After a pause, Blumenthal repeated the question.

Vitter said: Again, I would respectfully not comment on what could be my boss ruling, the Supreme Court. I would be bound by it. And if I start commenting on I agree with this case or dont agree with this case I think we get into a slippery slope.

The six-decade-old unanimous Supreme Court decision declared that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal and led to forced integration of schools across the South.

Vitter evaded other areas of questioning in a similar manner. In another exchange with Blumenthal, the staunchly pro-life judicial nominee would not say if she still agreed with a false statement she made in 2013 that Planned Parenthood kills over 150,000 females a year. When asked if she still stood by the claim, Vitter said, My pro-life stance has been very clear. I have been very upfront with this committee about my views and about how serious I take it, and that I would set aside any personal or religious views if I were to be confirmed.On Twitter, Trump blamed bad blood with Russia on the special counsel investigation and described the atmosphere in the White House as calm and calculated

Donald Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday: Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). He continued: No Collusion, so they go crazy! Photograph: Pool/Getty Images

Judging by six sharply worded tweets starting at sunrise on Wednesday, Donald Trump is edging closer to taking irreversible action against a federal investigation that earlier this week sent FBI agents raiding the office of his longtime personal lawyer and trusted lieutenant, Michael Cohen.

By 9am, as well as threatening missile strikes in Syria, Trump had blamed bad blood with Russia on the special counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller, accused Mueller of a conflict of interest and characterized the atmosphere in the White House as very calm and calculated.

While scattershot in their targets, the tweets together communicated a sense of heightened agitation that Trump has displayed for three days now, ever since agents seized documents from Cohen including records of six-figure payments made to two women who have claimed to have had affairs with Trump before the 2016 election.

Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama, Trump wrote in one tweet, which went on to criticize Mueller and his superior, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who are both in fact Republicans first appointed to federal posts by Republican presidents.

Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter), Trump continued. No Collusion, so they go crazy!

Fisa refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which the FBI conducted surveillance during the presidential campaign of a Trump aide with Russia ties. The Comey letter refers to a May 2017 letter written by Rosenstein that recommended the firing of the former FBI director James Comey.

The Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia has produced indictments of or pleas from 19 individuals, including Trumps former campaign chairman and first national security adviser, as well as three companies based in Russia. The prosecutors have not brought any charges specifically related to collusion so far.

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Speaking to reporters on Wednesday shortly after announcing his retirement, the House speaker, Paul Ryan, said he had gotten assurances from people inside the White House that Trump would not fire either Mueller or Rosenstein. However, the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, refused to address those assurances. When asked about them, she tersely said: I dont have any personnel announcements. Sanders had previously made the same statement earlier in the White House briefing when asked if Trump planned to fire Rosenstein.



Speculation that Trump may be nearing action against Mueller was fueled by a New York Times report on Tuesday night saying that Trump had demanded Muellers firing as recently as December, only to be dissuaded by the White House counsel and other legal advisers.

Perhaps more significantly, for Trumps mood, the tweets also followed the publication of the first excerpts from an ABC News interview with James Comey in which the former FBI director reportedly compared Trump to a mob boss.

Comey is preparing a media blitz in support of a book to be released next week that he has framed as a showdown with Trump. A source present at the ABC interview told Axios that Comey is going to shock the president and his team.

It is not clear that the president could fire Mueller directly, despite a claim on Tuesday by Sanders, that Trump has that power.

The president could, however, assign the task to a justice department official, although several possible candidates, perhaps including Rosenstein, would be likely to resign instead of carrying out the presidents order.

The prospect of firing Mueller was openly mooted on Fox News, which the president watches avidly, in a Tuesday report musing on what might happen if the president decides to pull the plug on the special counsel.

The man who became famous for saying youre fired is facing what could be the most serious and consequential personnel decision of his life tonight, the report said. Mueller is not a member of White House personnel, but rather a justice department appointment under a 1999 law passed by Congress.

The lawyer who drafted that statute, Neal Katyal, now a professor at Georgetown University, wrote on Tuesday on Twitter that Trumps firing Mueller would come at enormous cost, not just to the Justice Department and the Rule of Law, but also to him personally. It should be the end of the Trump presidency.



Perhaps sensing the danger to their coalition, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have declined to echo Trumps characterization of the special counsel investigation as a partisan witch-hunt.

Its still my view that Mueller should be allowed to finish his job, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told the Guardian on Tuesday. I think thats the view of most people in Congress.

As he navigates this sensitive territory, Trump has recently lost the most experienced lawyer advising him on the matter, John Dowd, who resigned from the presidents legal team last month over a disagreement with the Trump about whether he should agree to be interviewed by Mueller.

Trump reportedly favored speaking with Mueller, despite concerns harbored by his counsel that he would make a statement known by Muellers team to be false based on the large body of evidence they have collected, which includes interviews, emails sent by the presidential transition team and documents subpoenaed from the Trump Organization.

None of that collection has so exercised the president as much as the raid on the office of Cohen, who for more than a decade has handled particularly sensitive matters for Trump and his children, including prospective real estate developments in Russia.

In addition to documents relating to payments made to women, the raid sought documents pertaining to an Access Hollywood tape that emerged in October 2016 in which Trump boasted he could grab women by the pussy, the New York Times reported. There have been no previous reports of any Cohen role in the Access Hollywood episode, and the nature of prosecutors interest in the affair was unclear.

Trump described a personal fight against Mueller in a tweet that might read differently if the president does in fact remove the special counsel.

No Collusion or Obstruction (other than I fight back), so now they do the Unthinkable, and RAID a lawyers office for information! Trump wrote. BAD![caption id="attachment_27368" align="alignnone" width="620"]

Michael Cohen

Michael Cohen. (AP photo: Andrew Harnik)[/caption] For many at Squire Patton Boggs, the nature of Michael Cohen's presence in the firm's New York office was a mystery. Cohen, who was given an office on the firms 23rd floor at Rockefeller Center as part of a strategic alliance with his practice, kept a lock on his door. He didnt appear to work on client matters with firm attorneys in New York, and whatever benefit he provided to the firm wasnt apparent to his office colleagues. Some inside the firm also had concerns about the alliance, even before Cohen's legal troubles devolved to the point of FBI agents raiding his office. Sources who spoke to New York Law Journal on Tuesday said Cohen, a longtime aide to President Donald Trump and his private attorney, kept to himself and didnt frequently interact with New York personnel at Squire. Federal agents swept into Squires office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza on Monday morning to seize recordsa highly unusual event for any law office. Im surprised any time FBI agents show up at an office to collect documents, said one attorney tied to the firm when asked for a reaction. On the same day as the raid, Squire announced that the partnership with Cohen had been called off. The firms arrangement with Mr. Cohen reached its conclusion, mutually and in accordance with the terms of the agreement, the firm said in a statement Monday. We have been in contact with federal authorities regarding their execution of a warrant relating to Mr. Cohen. These activities do not relate to the firm and we are in full cooperation. Squires alliance with Cohen, lasting roughly a year, was first announced in April 2017. A press release by the firm said it would partner with Michael D. Cohen & Associates to advance the interests of its clients. The National Law Journal reported at the time that a statement from Squires chairman and global CEO Mark Ruehlmannnow removed from the firms websitesaid the arrangement would benefit clients by bringing together Cohen and the firms lobbyists. Clients worldwide increasingly confront challenges and look to seize business opportunities that intersect with governments worldwide, Ruehlman said in a statement at the time. A spokesman for the firm on Tuesday described the arrangement as a type of referral relationship between Cohen and Squire. But what exactly Squire or Cohen gained from the strategic alliance in the end is unclear. Two attorneys who asked not to be named said the firm kept them in the dark about any client interests Cohen was advancing for the firm, and said they did not observe his work on any firm matter. Some inside Squire were also "concerned" about him being at the firm office and having his connection, one source said. Still, the attorneys said Cohen was not disruptive and was a discreet presence, his door sometimes seen closed. He spoke with other lawyers only in passing to say hello in the elevator or hallway. He didnt go to office meetings, lunches or social events, one source said. The firm gave him a partner-size office with stock furniture, but he wasnt connected to the firms equipment and he didnt have secretarial support, sources said. He was a tenant, said one source, describing the relationship. He had space he was given. I had no idea what he was working on, the source added. News reports on Tuesday said investigators were searching for documents about payments to women who claim they had affairs with Trump. A spokesman for the firm said he had nothing further to add" beyond the firm's comment. Stephen Ryan, Cohens attorney and a partner at McDermott Will & Emery, did not respond to an email message seeking comment.An unproven rumor about President Donald Trump fathering a love child in the 1980s was sold to American Media Inc. for $30,000 while Trump was on the campaign trail in late 2015, according to several media reports.

The money was paid to a former doorman at Trump World Tower, Dino Sajudin, who agreed to give American Media, which owns the National Enquirer, the story exclusively about Trump having an illegitimate child with another tower employee, the Associated Press and The New Yorker reported Thursday morning.

The agreement with Sajudin was struck on November 30, 2015, less than a year before Trump would claim the White House and well after he had announced his candidacy. The timing of the payment was first reported by Radar Online, which is owned by American Media, on Wednesday.

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If Sajudin had shared his story with anyone else he faced a $1 million penalty.

No report was able to confirm Sajudins claims and the woman and child have not been named. The AP did reach the woman in question but she denied the rumor emphatically, claiming it was fake.

American Media opted not to run the story because it, also, could not confirm it after spending a month reporting it out.

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GettyImages-944761296

Getty Images/Chris Kleponis

Hefty payments doled out in order to keep stories about Trumps past have dogged the president for months now, and potentially put his personal attorney and friend Michael Cohen in jeopardy.

Cohens home, hotel room and office were raided Monday by the FBI, which seized documents and other materials. The federal authorities were reportedly looking for information about payments made to adult actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal.

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Cohen has admitted to paying Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, $130,000 less than two weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Though Cohen has not said why he made the payment, Daniels has claimed it was hush money to keep quiet about an alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. As reports surfaced about the funds earlier this year, Clifford has since sued to be released from the non-disclosure agreement she struck, claiming that it was invalid because Trump never signed it.

The president last week denied having knowledge of the payment to Clifford and referred reporters back to Cohen.

McDougal has claimed she had a months-long affair with Trump but that she reached a deal in August 2016 worth $150,000 with American Media for the rights to her story. She, too, had to keep quiet and American Media did not release her story.

American Media has faced a backlash over accusations of obtaining stories about Trump and then killing them off by having the paid-off sources agree not to spread the story at all.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekAmid the fallout from a devastating chemical weapon attack in Syria, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the relationship between the United States and Russia is worse now than it was during the Cold War.

The President launched a verbal attack on both the Syrian government and its Russian allies via Twitter.

"Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War," Trump tweeted. "There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?"

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He added that the Special Counsels investigation into 2016 election meddling has further strained the relationship between the countries. He placed the blame squarely on Obama loyalists, and said attorney Robert Mueller, who is leading the probe, is most conflicted of all.

His remarks were part of a series of early-morning tweets regarding rising tensions between Russia and Syria and the United States. He warned that the Russian government should "get ready" for a missile attack against its ally.

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"You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" the president said, referring to the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

Trump and Putin-810209226

BPA Via Getty Images

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On Monday, the president had vowed to respond "forcefully" within "the next 24 to 48 hours" to the Syrian militarys alleged use of toxic chemical gas in Douma, a rebel-held town that had been resisting government forces amid a 7-year-old civil war. The attack, for which the Syrian government has denied involvement, killed at least 40 people and injured at least 500 more.

In response to the tweet, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said a looming missile strike would be counterproductive and prevent inspectors from investigating the site of the attack..

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Smart missiles should be fired at terrorists and not at the legitimate government which has been fighting terrorists, Zakharova wrote on Facebook. Or is the trick to destroy all the traces with a smart missile strike and then there will be no evidence for international inspectors to look for?

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a watchdog group, said it had asked Assad for permission to enter Douma on a fact-finding mission. The team is preparing to deploy to Syria shortly, the organization said in a Tuesday statement.

Trumps tweet was presumably in response to a threat from Russias ambassador to Lebanon, in which the diplomat said that the Russian military would defend its ally and knock down any incoming missiles.

"If there is a U.S. missile attack, wein line with both Putin and Russia's chief of staff's remarkswill shoot down US rockets and even the sources that launched the missiles, the ambassador told al-Manar TV, a TV station affiliated with Hezbollah.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekIn the immediate aftermath of the poisoning by nerve agent of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, last month, for which Britain and its allies blamed Russia, U.S. President Donald Trump remained conspicuously quiet. Shortly thereafter, as the Kremlin reported that the U.S. president had invited his Russian counterpart to Washington, confusion grew. The United States was effectively inviting the neighborhood brutalizer (dont forget the ongoing bombing of innocent civilians in Syria) over for coffee the day after he attacked its best friend.

Trump did eventually order the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle and the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats over the incident. But during a meeting with U.S. Baltic allies to mark the nations 100 years since independence from the Russian Empire, he continued to assert his belief that cooperation with Russia would be desirable. Meanwhile, Russia was preparing an unnecessarily disruptive missile test over the Baltic Sea, which necessitated the closure of Latvian airspace. The president did not stick up for the United States NATO allies and protest what Latvias prime minister labeled a demonstration of force.

As a matter of national security, Trump must speak clearly about why and how Russia is a threat. If enough of the U.S. population remains willfully ignorant of the danger, Congress and civil society will fail to take sufficient action, perhaps even boosting Kremlin operations rather than blocking them. In this scenario, if the Kremlin is the terrorist organization with a suitcase bomb, the United States is the passenger who thinks nothing of the unattended luggage idling on the metro platform.

True, the administration has finally imposed significant sanctions against Russia, as mandated by Congress last year, and Trump has struck out against Russian President Vladimir Putins complicity in chemical attacks against Syrian civilians. But this unfolded in the context of what appears to be presidential ambivalence about the Russia threat.

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Americans should be shocked by Trumps attempts to dismiss Putins perfidy and play into the hands of U.S. adversaries in the Kremlin. The Russian government wants nothing more than for the United States to ignore Moscows disregard for international rules and move on  to cooperate, work together, drop sanctions, and accept the occupations of Georgia and Ukraine. And Trumps deliberate silence makes it potentially politically possible for him to do all of this. His public stance on Russia bolsters the countrys strategy of plausible deniability.

The Russians rely on plausible deniability each time they do things like shoot down a civilian airliner, killing more than 200 people; poison Kremlin enemies; and steal data from U.S. political parties and then transmit some of it to associates for publication. The deniability makes it harder, even for the motivated, to respond to the offensive acts. And it allows the unmotivated to pretend Russias innocence or to blame others.

When Trump says nothing while his government takes concerted action against the Kremlin, he is also, in a sense, plausibly denying that he supports punishing Putin. He keeps alive the idea that the United States can and should cooperate with Russia without conditions and thereby permits the portion of Americans who constitute his base to ignore the threat Russia poses.

Given the hold Trump has on his base, his stance has also allowed average Americans without interest in obtaining another perspective the ability to live in relative ignorance of the Russia threat. This is dangerous, given the fact that the Russian government is still using social media, money, and business deals to forge useful ties with banks, real estate, think tanks, academics, and organizations such as the National Rifle Association. It is using those ties, as well as cybercriminals and information operations, to spread fake news stories that pit Americans against Americans, spread the Russian talking points, and make U.S. democracy weak and vulnerable to Russian influence, along with political and even military operations.

Any other U.S. president would have long ago given a speech denouncing the Russian government for trying to rewrite the rules of the international order to reassert the old balance of power, called out Putin for his desire to replace international institutions and international law with 19th-century great-power politics, and criticized the Russian president for trying to force his corrupt, autocratic system on neighboring states. Another president would have repudiated a world vision where autocrats abuse their citizens with genocide, chemical weapons, or persecution without fear of international accountability. In order for Putin to achieve his objective  a restored Eurasian sphere of influence for Russia  Putin must have U.S. acquiescence.

The United States is still the strongest economic, military, and diplomatic force in the world. It is still the only country that can counter Russia alone. But it is also perhaps the only country with the power and influence to gather allies and partners from all over the world to act in unison. Indeed, those countries are motivated by their understanding that the current international order forged at the end of World War II serves their interests and that of global peace and prosperity.

Americans need to hear Trump lay out exactly what Russia has done to achieve its objectives: invade and occupy its neighbors, conduct cyberoperations, spread fake news stories through social media on the internet and through its propaganda networks (RT and Sputnik), violate nuclear and conventional arms control agreements, weaponize its near monopoly on energy resources (especially in Europe), pay far-left and far-right political parties to create dissent and increase support for Russia, manipulate refugee flows to destabilize governments, intimidate diplomats and military personnel with saber-rattling and dangerous military flights over ships and foreign aircraft, penetrate the energy grids and other infrastructure, and conduct operations to intimidate local and national officials. This litany of offenses is by no means complete.

Finally, the United States must be clear about what to do, and then must do it, alongside allies, partners, and friends  not just Europe. The country must increase its cyberdefenses  in election systems and in critical infrastructure for starters. Americans must increase their media literacy and push for transparency of paid advertising. The public must hold social media platforms accountable through regulations ensuring they are no longer used as a vehicle for attacks against the citizens of the United States and other democracies. The United States should pass stronger laws and improve enforcement to address foreign agent activities, corruption, and money laundering. And the country should address its economic and social weaknesses and inequalities, including the legacy of slavery and ongoing racism.

Above all, because the United States cannot predict Russias next wave of tactics in its war on democracy, Americans must practice vigilance.President Donald Trump has warned Russia to get ready for missiles to be fired into Syria, in response to an alleged chemical attack over the weekend. In a tweet Wednesday morning, he told the Kremlin it should not partner with Syrian President Bashar Assad, a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

The U.S. believes Assad is behind a suspected attack in the city of Douma on April 7 that left at least 40 people dead, according to activists and rescuers. On Monday, Trump condemned the heinous attack on innocent Syrians, warning he would hold the responsible parties accountable. You dont see things like thatyou just dont see those images, he said. This is about humanity.

Images from Douma, the last rebel-held city in Eastern Ghouta, showed civilians being hosed down in a makeshift hospital. Rescue workers shoved inhalers into mouths of small children. A man vigorously hit the back toddler trying to clear its airways. Later, videos shared by activists appeared to show families, lifeless and piled on top of each other on the floor of their home with white foam creeping from their mouths.

That gruesome footage has prompted Trump to again threaten military action against the Assad regime. Yet nearly four days on, the details of the attack still remain murky.

Whats clear is that something terrible happened on Saturday, says Joost Hiltermann, director of the Middle East & North Africa program at the International Crisis Group. As international condemnation mounts, the Syrian government and its ally Russia have denied using chemical weapons.

When the alleged chemical attack took place on Saturday in Douma, the area had already been under heavy bombardment. In February, the Syrian government launched a ground and air offensive to take back the last rebel held enclave near Damascus. That offensive has killed an estimated 1,600 people and 100,000 more. For weeks people have been hiding in the basements of eastern Ghouta.

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Dr. Ahmad Tarakji, President of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) says that could have been part of what contributed to the high toll of Saturdays attack. The Syrian government has been accused of carrying out dozens of chemical attacks, largely using chlorine. Chlorine, more commonly a respiratory irritant that causes people to run outside, can be deadly. Potent chlorine, being heavier than air, sinks  this time into the basements where families had taken shelter.

The basement becomes almost like a gas chamber, says Dr. Tarakji. He says doctors on the ground reported symptoms consistent with both chlorine gas and nerve agent, particularly as fatalities also occurred above ground. SAMS believes 42 people died in the attack. Other organizations and activists have put the number much higher.

Experts say what needs to happen now is an investigation into Saturdays incident, but it will take time. After the attack on Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017, which killed more 80 people, it took chemical weapons watchdog the OPCW and the U.N. six months to release a report confirming the attack used Sarin and blaming the government. But the U.S. had responded almost immediately after the attack, sending 59 missiles into a Syrian airbase.

This time Dr. Tarakji says the investigation may be even more difficult. Few doctors and civilians have been willing to provide firsthand accounts of Saturdays attack. He says that may be because Douma is now experiencing a transition of authority.

Any retaliation against the Assad regime now would be of little help to Syrian rebels, who have already left the area. As the brutal images of Saturdays attack emerged, so did news that the rebels had struck a deal to surrender in return for safe passage out. The Jaish al-Islam rebel group, which controlled Douma, had been in talks for weeks with Russia but were unable to make a deal.

Two other opposition groups already struck deals to evacuate, but Jaish al-Islam was a hold out. So what they do is basically throw these chemical weapons and that will speed the process of surrender, says Hassan Hassan, a resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

Hours after the alleged chemical attack, Jaish al-Islam finally agreed to surrender Douma in exchange for safe passage out to other rebel-held territory. Buses arrived Sunday to take out the fighters, along with their light weapons and families. By Monday, Russian military police were in the streets of the town. Dr. Tarakji says in this environment, people dont feel free to talk, especially against the government.

They are not going to speak out as they are trying to get on evacuation buses and get through checkpoints, he says, adding that some of the people who aided the victims of the attack are now being evacuated. Civilians inside described chaotic scenes as the evacuation began and others debated whether to leave their homes in Douma or face an uncertain future under the government.

Many, in Syria and abroad, are urging an immediate international investigation and some worry that with the government retaking control of the area the evidence could be diluted or destroyed. The bodies of the victims, possibly the best source of evidence, have been buried in Douma, by their families.

An attack led by the U.S. now seems almost inevitable. In another showdown between Moscow and Washington, Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council Resolution Tuesday calling for a new inquiry into chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Meanwhile, the U.N. and WHO, which both have offices a short drive away in Damascus, have not been able to access the site.

Hiltermann says if Trump carries out attacks now, hell be doing so in a credibility gap, but that if he waits, public domestic support of such an attack may drop. Trumps strong words mean it will be difficult not to take some kind of action now.

Where does this strong action against Bashar Al-Assad come from? says Hassan. He doesnt want to be weak like Obama.He wants to say Im tough.By Daren Butler ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Nearly a quarter of top-performing students entering Turkish upper schools are expected to be placed in religious Imam Hatip schools, the education minister said on Thursday, a level which secular critics say unfairly prioritizes Islamic education. The top 10 percent of students currently in their final year of middle school are set to win places in selected schools under a new entrance exam system in June, part of education reforms drafted on President Tayyip Erdogan's orders. Erdogan has said one of his goals is to forge a "pious generation" in largely Muslim Turkey and the number of pupils at Imam Hatip schools, founded to train future imams and preachers, rose five-fold to 1.3 million students in the last six years. According to the exam system guide posted on the education ministry website, nearly 300 of the 1,367 schools selected to receive students who pass the exam are Imam Hatip schools. Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz told broadcaster CNN Turk in an interview the religious school allocation was low compared to the 62 percent allotment for science and regular high schools. "Is everyone going to Imam Hatips? That's an exaggeration," he said. "We envisage the level going to Imam Hatips will be 23 percent. Twenty-three percent is not bigger than 62." "We are not forcing anyone to do anything," he said, adding parents did not have to send children to particular schools. While Imam Hatip students make up 11 percent of the total upper school population, they were allocated some 23 percent of funding in this year's budget, a Reuters report showed in January. "The government is trying to direct successful pupils towards Imam Hatips by raising their profile, having been unable to achieve the desired success and increase demand for them," main opposition CHP party MP Utku Cakirozer told Reuters. More than one million students will complete middle school this year and the 90 percent who are not placed through exams will make preferences for schools near their homes. Under the previous system, all students took the upper school entrance exam and Yilmaz said the new system was designed to limit the number of students facing the stress of exams. The Egitim-Sen teachers' union said in a statement it was launching a court challenge to the new system. "The AKP continues to insist on a policy of making education religious," it said, referring to Erdogan's ruling AK Party. (Additional reporting by Gulsen Solaker in Ankara; Editing by Dominic Evans and Toby Chopra)By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two men from the New York City borough of Queens were arrested on Thursday and charged with causing roughly $1.1 million of losses in a currency fraud targeting Korean-American investors.

U.S. prosecutors accused Tae Hung "Kevin" Kang, 55, of Bayside, and John Won, 49, of Flushing, of "preying upon the kinship of their target group" by enticing victims to invest in or open accounts with their company, Forexnpower.

Both defendants pleaded not guilty at an afternoon hearing in Brooklyn federal court.

Prosecutors said Kang and Won overstated their trading expertise and falsely touted how their "Aset" and "Super Power-Bot" algorithmic trading methods would generate big returns.

According to the indictment, some investors were enticed by ads in Korean-language newspapers offering "a secret trading method generating more than 10% monthly profit" and the chance "to make $1 million and more within three to five years."

Victims allegedly lost more than $700,000 investing in Forexnpower, which was also known as Safety Capital Investment Inc, and nearly $400,000 in trading accounts, with some money misappropriated to attract new investors.

The alleged schemes ran from 2010 to 2013.

Kang and Won were charged with securities fraud, and conspiracies to commit securities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, while Kang was also charged with wire fraud.

The wire fraud conspiracy charge carries a maximum 20-year prison term.

Both defendants were released on $100,000 bond after entering their pleas. Kang's lawyer Richard Willstatter and Won's lawyer Michael Schneider declined to comment.

In 2015, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed related civil charges against both defendants. That case remains pending, court records show.

The cases are U.S. v. Kang et al, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, No. 18-cr-00184; and CFTC v Kang et al in the same court, No. 15-05551.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and Richard Chang)Updated | A newly released video shows U.S. Border Patrol agents attempting to return an injured man to Mexico, claiming he looks Mexican.

The footage obtained by NBC News depicts an incident on the U.S.-Mexico border in Calexico, California on March 27, 2017.

They are bringing him over here, a Mexican border agent is heard saying in Spanish.

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Responding to repeated warnings that the U.S. agents risked breaking a repatriation agreement, an officer responds, Why would I have to call the consulate. Hes not in my custody? The agent added that he has been doing the job for 20 years.

You dont even know if hes Mexican or not, a Mexican agent adds, to which a U.S. guard replies the man "looks" Mexican. The agent is also heard saying, If I leave him there he was going to kill himself.

Mexican border agents prevented their U.S. counterparts from handing over the man, who appears to be injured and mentally unstable. He then walks into traffic in the U.S.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection sent NBC News the video after the network was alerted to it by a whistleblower. The agency did not reveal the names of those shown in the video for privacy reasons and NBC was unable to verify their identities.

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Mario Tama/Getty Images

An unnamed law enforcement source told NBC News that the man was left in a park and was taken to the Mexican consulate a month later as he tried to enter the U.S. from Mexico. The spokesperson added that the man was later confirmed to be a Mexican national, who had been arrested on 16 prior occasions for entering the U.S. illegally from multiple states. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection launched an investigation after Mexican officials complained.

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A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told Newsweek the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating the incident depicted in the video.

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"The Mexican Consulate notified the U.S. Border Patrols El Centro Sector about the incident at the time, which was March 17, 2017. After a review of the incident based on the information available, the Sectors leadership addressed the agents actions," the spokesperson said.

"CBP is committed to treating everyone with professionalism, dignity and respect while enforcing the laws of the United States. CBP takes all allegations of mistreatment seriously, and does not tolerate actions that are not consistent with our core values of Vigilance, Service to Country and Integrity.

Assistant Chief Patrol Agent David S. Kim told NBC News that the actions in the video were not consistent with the forces normal procedures. Corrective action was taken to ensure all our agents understand their responsibilities of adhering to established processes, practices, and policies, he said. A CBP spokesperson told the network the footage showed an isolated incident.

The video of the standoff follows a 2017 study by the nonprofit advocacy group American Immigration Council (AIC) into the capture, custody and removal process of Mexican migrants from U.S. The survey of 600 migrants found that 43 percent were not told they had the right to contact their consulate, and almost 60 percent did not receive repatriation documents. Almost a quarter reported immigration authorities subjected them to abuse or aggression as they were apprehended.

What emerges from the survey data and testimonies is an alarming portrait of the way Mexican migrants are treated while in U.S. custody and through the deportation process," AIC said in a statement at the time.

"Often, migrants do not receive copies of deportation documents and have little understanding of the processes they have undergone and the related legal ramifications. When U.S. officials prevent migrants from accessing critical information and processes, they further deprive individuals of their possible legal opportunities to present immigration claims, the statement continued.

This piece has been updated with a statement from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekA U.S. Border Patrol agent in Texas was arrested on murder charges after a woman and a 1-year-old child were found dead near the banks of the Rio Grande.

Ronald Anthony Burgos-Aviles, 28, was charged with two counts of capital murder, Laredo Police announced Tuesday. The agent reported finding the bodies of Griselda Hernandez, 27, and her 1-year-old son Dominick Alexander Hernandez about 15 feet apart near Father Charles McNaboe Park around 11:30 a.m. Monday.

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Laredo Police Department

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Authorities said the two bodies had not been at the scene long. Burgos-Aviles became the prime person of interest in the case within an hour of calling 911, the San Antonio Express-News reported.

Laredo Police said Burgos-Aviles and Hernandez had been in a romantic relationship. Specific information about how Hernandez and her son died was not revealed.

The victims had visible signs of violence, which is now part of the official investigation, Laredo Police Chief Claudio Trevino Jr. said during a press conference Tuesday. Due to the sensitivity of the case and the magnitude of the ongoing investigation, were not going to state the exact nature of the matter of death at this time.

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Also speaking at the press conference, acting Chief Patrol Agent Jason Owens of the Border Patrols Laredo sector said that the agency is taking the allegation very seriously and is fully cooperating with the investigation.

We are truly saddened by this horrific tragedy, Owens said. Our heartfelt condolences go out to the victims family and friends.

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Owens, who noted the agency does not usually comment on ongoing investigations, added: The actions of this individual, if true, are both inexcusable and reprehensible. No one is more sickened than we are about someone wearing this uniform committing such a heinous act.

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Police spokesman Joe Baeza told Newsweek that the investigation will determine whether Burgos-Aviles was the childs father and noted that nothing has been confirmed.

Burgos-Aviles, a nine-year Border Patrol veteran, is being held at the Webb County Jail without bail. The investigation continues, Laredo Police said.

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Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekDefense Secretary James Mattis said he was prepared to present President Donald Trump with plans to take military action against the Syrian government, despite warnings of retaliation by Russia.

While the U.S. military and allies were "still assessing" whether or not Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was behind a suspected chemical weapons attack Saturday in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma, Mattis told reporters that "we stand ready to provide military options, if they're appropriate, as the president determined." Mattis was reportedly headed to the White House later this afternoon to discuss the matter with the president.

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The French military presented President Emmanuel Macron with its own potential plans of action, which may include striking Syria from the Saint-Dizier airbase, French daily Le Figaro reported Wednesday. Saudi Arabia and the U.K. have also expressed interest in participating in such an attack.

Iran and China, however, have joined Russia in cautioning against any U.S. strike in Syria pending an investigation into the alleged toxic gas attack, for which Assad has denied responsibility. Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Poznikhir, first deputy chief of the Russian military general staff's main operations directorate, told press Wednesday that a military inquiry "showed the absence of nerve agents and chlorine-containing poisonous substances."

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Omar Sanadiki/Reuters

Poznikhir also said Russia would deploy troops to Douma, where Islamist rebel group Jaysh al-Islam recently surrendered to the Syrian military. The victory returned government control to the restive outskirts of Damascus, which were seized by insurgents and jihadis in the early phases of a 2011 uprising backed by the West, Turkey and Gulf Arab states, leaving some ISIS-held neighborhoods in the south.

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While Russia has long been a supporter of Assad's Baathist government, it did not intervene directly until 2015, a year after the U.S. had already switched its focus to battling the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). ISIS has its origins in a merger of jihadi groups that grew powerful in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and spread to Syria in 2013. Both Russia and the U.S. waged violent air campaigns against the group as their allies battled the militants on the ground.

ISIS was mostly defeated in 2017 and now local, regional and international powers competing over Syria's future have begun to clash. Pentagon-backed Kurds have grown closer to Assad in the wake of a Turkish invasion and disputes have erupted between the remaining, mostly Arab faction of the Syrian Democratic Forces and pro-Syrian government forces in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor.

Recent reports that Assad used chemical weapons to clear out one of the final rebel bastions near Damascus, nevertheless, has prompted perhaps the biggest international escalation of all. Shortly after the T-4 air base in central Homs province was hit Monday by an airstrike blamed by Russia on Israel, Trump said he would respond "forcefully" within "the next 24 or 48 hours" and that not only Syria, but Russia and Iran would "pay a price."

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Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Alyssa Weeks/U.S. Navy/Reuters

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As this deadline expired, Russian and Syrian defenses were put on high alert. The European Aviation Safety Agency told Newsweek it warned member states and the Eurocontrol Network Manager Tuesday of potential and radio disruption and the "possible launch of airstrikes into Syria with air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours."

The Navy announced that the USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group was departing Virginia for the Middle East as part of "a regularly-scheduled deployment." Guided-missile destroyer USS Donald Cook departed Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean Monday, armed with the same Tomahawk cruise missiles that Trump launched against Syria last April in response to previous accusations that Assad used chemical weapons.

Russian officials echoed chief of general staff chair General Valery Gerasimov's threat to not only intercept U.S. missiles but also target their delivery vehicles. Trump took to social media Wednesday to taunt the country with which he had pledged to forge better relations.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and "smart!" You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" Trump tweeted.

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INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WAR/REUTERS

Trump followed up by saying "our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War." Trump, once seen as a close political ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and even accused of collaborating with the Russian government to win the 2016 election, has put the U.S. on a potential collision course with its top military competitor, whose own leader said he expected things to soon return to normal.

"Indeed, the current global situation cannot but cause concern," Putin told foreign ambassadors at a ceremony Wednesday, according to the state-run Tass Russian News Agency. "The situation in the world is becoming more and more chaotic. Nevertheless, we do hope that common sense will eventually prevail and international relations will get back on constructive track and the entire global system will become more stable and predictable."

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekA U.S. aircraft carrier has sailed through the South China Sea on its way to Manila, in the Philippines, amid escalating tensions with China over Beijings military development in the disputed maritime region.

Navy fighter jets, carrying a group of Philippine generals, journalists and officials, flew onto the nuclear-powered USS Theodore Roosevelt in a display of military might as it was conducting routine training on Tuesday, reported The Associated Press.

Its a showcase of the capability of the U.S. armed forces not only by sea but also by air, said Lieutenant General Rolando Bautista of the Philippine army. The Americans are our friends. In one way or another, they can help us to deter any threat.

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Reuters

America has criticized China for their "provocative militarization" of the South China Sea and responded with increasingly frequent air and sea patrols in the disputed region that Beijing claims as their own.

Chinas provocative militarization of the South China Sea is one area where China is contesting international law. They are pushing around smaller states in ways that put a strain on the global system, Brian Hook, a senior Asia policy adviser to former U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, said in January. We are going to back up freedom-of-navigation operations and let them know we will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows.

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This year, the U.S. Navy executed at least two freedom-of-navigation operations near Scarborough Shoal, an area China currently occupies after taking it from the Philippines in 2012, and Mischief Reef, which Beijing occupied in 1995. These recent exercises in the disputed sea have sparked concerns in China of U.S. meddling in the Asian conflict.

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Beijing also frequently sends naval patrols through the waterways. We have seen Chinese ships around us, Rear Admiral Steve Koehler, the strike group commander, said onboard the warship.

They are one of the navies that operate in the South China Sea but I would tell you that we have seen nothing but professional work out of the ships we have encountered.

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Last Wednesday, Chinas navy issued a warning to nearby ships on social media that they were holding extensive military drills in Sanya, a city on the southern end of Chinas Hainan island province, until Friday. Analysts claimed the drills were an unusually large display of Chinas expanding military force, reported Reuters.

This transit in the South China Sea is nothing new in our planning cycle or in a reaction to that. It is probably by happenstance that all that is happening at the same time, Koehler said.

All of the operations that we do in and around the South China Sea or any of the bodies of water we operate in, there is a function of international law and that is ultimately what we want to recognize.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekKiev (AFP) - Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators on Thursday told AFP they were looking into whether former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko took cash from Moamer Kadhafi's regime in Libya for a presidential campaign.

NABU, Ukraine's anti-graft office, said it had started "studying" information potentially linking Tymoshenko to the acquisition of "four million euros and its subsequent use to finance her election campaign" in 2010.

If it finds "any signs of crime", NABU said a judicial investigation would be opened.

Tymoshenko, still a member of parliament, is among the top candidates for Ukraine's 2019 presidential election, ahead of current President Petro Poroshenko according to the latest polls.

She served as prime minister twice between 2005 and 2010 but failed to win the presidential election won that year by pro-Russian candidate Victor Yanukovych.

In a February issue of the Saudi daily Asharq al-Awsat, an "assistant" of Kadhafi's son Seif al-Islam, said he had personally traveled to Ukraine to hand over the funds to Tymoshenko.

"I had them in a briefcase and I travelled to Ukraine on a private jet. I arrived at Kiev airport and delivered the case to the deputy prime minister," he said.

A spokeswoman for Tymoshenko rejected the claims, telling AFP: "This information does not correspond to reality. It is nonsense."

Following the 2010 presidential election, Tymoshenko was imprisoned for abuse of power in a case denounced as selective justice by the West.

She was released after the overthrow of Yanukovych following the pro-Western uprising in February 2014, coming in second in the presidential election three months later.

During a visit to Ukraine in 2008, Kadhafi met Tymoshenko in his Bedouin tent set up in the centre of Kiev. He was killed in Libya in October 2011 by rebels.

In France, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been charged over suspected illegal financing and corruption involving the former Libyan.Last night, Seth Meyers revealed he and wife Alexi Ashe welcomed their second child, son Axel, a day earlier. But this was no ordinary delivery. The newborn made his dramatic entrance in the lobby of the new parents apartment building.

I called 911 and over the course of a minute conversation, I said, Were about to have a baby  were having a baby  we had a baby,  the talk show host recounted.

The couple joins a growing list of parents  including the wife of Midlands Jess Carson who welcomed their son in a parking lot  who first met their babies in the most random, unexpected (read: not in a hospital or at home) places.

Here, we break down those straight-out-of-a-movie moments.

An Orlando Fire Station

In March 2018, Candace Howes and her husband Zack were en route to the hospital when the expectant mom started pushing, prompting the couple to pull over and call 911 when they were a mile away from home. They were told to go to the nearest fire station, which they did.

I was crowning so I stepped out and then within two steps out and then I got on the ground and pushed the baby out and the fire chief caught him and I rolled over and put him on me, the new mom told Orlando, Florida outlet News 6.

A Pensacola Gas Station

Im going into labor and my waters been broke, 23-year-old Kayla told a 911 dispatcher while she was at a Pensacola, Florida gas station at 2 a.m. in March 2018. The Mississippi native was visiting her husband, who works in the Florida town. Kayla went into labor before an ambulance came to her aid, and gave birth to a healthy baby in the gas station parking lot.

In a Hospital Hallway

Jes baby just couldnt wait! The expectant mom barely made it to her Kansas hospital before her sixth child, son Max, made his world wide debut in July 2017. He arrived on the floor just inside the entrance of the emergency room at 3:38 a.m., she wrote on photographer Tammy Karins blog, Little Leapling. Less than 25 minutes from the time my water broke at home, and only a few moments after we stepped inside the hospital.

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In a Wendys Parking Lot

In April 2015, a Pittsburgh woman  who didnt know she was pregnant  gave birth to a baby boy in her car while parked in a Wendys parking lot.

On the Side of the Road

In March 2018, mom-to-be Alyssa Lightner had her doula pull over her truck to deliver her baby. The women were on their way to the hospital, but Lightner couldnt wait any longer. Her baby boy, later named Asher, was on his way. So, they pulled over on the side of the road. The next thing I know, [the doula] was pulling the baby out, Lightner, who also had help from a 911 dispatcher, told The Baltimore Sun.

In the Backseat of a Jeep

Paula DAmore went into labor at home and stuck it out before she and husband Joe decided it was time to make their way to a Boca Raton hospital in Florida. The couples birth photographer, Paulina Splechta, followed them in a separate car. I ran over to their car, camera in hand, and saw Joe holding baby Daniellas head! Splechta, who documented the moment in April 2016, told POPSUGAR of what happened when the trio made it just outside the hospital.

In a Walmart (kind of)

During a shopping trip at a Quebec Walmart, a week before her due date, Annick Lepage-Pichette alerted Walmart employees that she was going into labor. The staff reportedly created a makeshift delivery room with sheets and pillows in the store before an ambulance came to take Lepage-Pichette to the hospital. The Canadian woman ended up welcoming her baby in the ambulance shortly after leaving the Walmart.

In the Red Sea

In March 2018, onlooker Hadia Hosny El Said snapped the moment a Russian tourist delivered her baby in the Red Sea in Dahab, Egypt, with some help from two men  one who is seen holding the newborn, and the other who was snapped with a bucket holding the new moms placenta.

In a Stream

In a video she shared on YouTube, doula Simone Thurber is seen squatting in a stream in the Australian Daintree Rainforest before catching and cuddling her own baby. The process took only 25 minutes.

I am not a hippy drippy mom, but I wanted my fourth child to be born away from beeping machines and a hospital environment, she told the New York Post. Lets face it, women have been giving birth in the wild for thousands of years, but the thought of a modern women squatting in a creek and giving birth horrified many people even before I gave birth and shared the video.President Donald Trumps pick to become a federal judge in Louisiana would not say whether she supported the Supreme Courts decision to desegregate schools and sought to dismiss her past work opposing abortion during a confirmation hearing Wednesday.

Wendy Vitter was nominated by Trump in January to serve as a federal judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana. She is an attorney for the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans.

Last year she received a Proudly Pro-Life Award from the New Orleans Right to Life Educational Foundation. Yet Vitter did not disclose a number of speeches where she has made controversial statements on abortion on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters

In 2013 she attended a rally against construction of a new Planned Parenthood clinic in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and accused the organization of killing over 150,000 females a year.

Did you omit these materials because they would cause you to face difficult questions, like the ones I'm asking, about your judgment and temperament at this confirmation hearing? asked Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii during Vitters confirmation hearing with a panel of other nominees.

At issue, Hirono said, was a panel talk entitled Abortion Hurts Women's Health that Vitter led during a 2013 Right to Life conference.

Hirono said Vitter urged the audience to distribute brochures that claimed abortion causes breast cancer and that birth control causes women to be assaulted and murdered. He asked whether she believes those claims.

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Vitter replied that she had never heard those opinions before and was not a medical professional.

During the 2013 talk she told attendees to go to Dr. Angela's website, Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, download [the brochure], and at your next physical, you walk into your pro-life doctor and say, Have you thought about putting these facts or this brochure in your waiting room?

Vitter said that her pro-life stance has been made very clear and that as a judge she would set aside her personal and religious views when deciding cases.

When Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal asked her if she supported the Supreme Courts decision to allow desegregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education, she hesitated in her reply, stating: I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisionswhich are correctly decided and which I may disagree with. Again, my personal, political, or religious views I would set aside.

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Despite facing tough questions, Vitter was roundly praised by Republicans on the committee in their opening remarks. She also has the backing New Orleanss Democrat Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

The Trump administration has set a record for confirming federal judges.

Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rightsa left-leaning legal advocacy grouptold The Guardian in November he believes the goal is to end the progressive state as we know it.

The president has often railed against federal judges who have opposed controversial policies, like his Muslim travel ban, in their court decisions.

Trumps push to fill empty spaces on the federal bench has led to some controversial picks, and in a few cases nominees have been forced to bow out. A Republican member of the Federal Election Commission, Matthew Petersen, withdrew his name after he failed to answer basic questions pm law during his confirmation hearing in December.

Another, Jeff Mateer, withdrew when his comments calling transgender youth part of Satan's plan and others about gay marriage came to light.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekVienna (AFP) - Throughout most of World War II, Allied bombers tried repeatedly to sink the Tirpitz, Germany's biggest battleship and a bete noir of Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill, who took to calling it 'the beast'.

On Wednesday, tree experts at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union showed why they failed to do so until late 1944

"The story was in the tree rings," said Claudia Hartl, a researcher at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

The unlikely evidence of WWII battles was uncovered during the summer of 2016, when Hartl led students on a routine survey of forests around Kafjord, one of dozens of fjords along the northern coast of Norway.

"We got back to the lab and measured the tree rings, and saw that they were very narrow -- in some cases nearly absent -- for 1945," she told AFP.

The forests, in other words, had been hit by an environmental cataclysm.

"Of course we wondered, why is that?"

The first suspect was insect infestation, which can come suddenly and have severe impacts, especially in high-latitude boreal forests.

Driven north of their historic range by climate change, mountain pine beetles, for example, have recently devastated large swathes of forests in Canada, sometimes in a single year.

But there were no known insect in northern Scandinavia that could have delivered that kind of environmental shock in the middle of the 20th century.

"It wasn't until we spoke to a local scientist based in Tromso that we made the connection to the Tirpitz," said Scott St. George, a geographer at The University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment who took part in the research.

The Tirpitz and its crew of 2500, it turned out, had retreated into northern Norway's watery labyrinth to escape detection. In the pre-satellite era, even a 250-metre (820-foot) behemoth wasn't that easy to spot.

But Allied aerial scouts finally found it, and the attacks began.

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The Germans, however, had a counter-plan: producing vast quantities of artificial fog, enough to hide the ship and surrounding area from aerial view.

And that's where the tree rings come in.

- Arboreal casualties -

"The smoke drifted into the forests surrounding the fjord and damaged nearby pine and birch trees, leaving behind a distinctive and unusual 'fingerprint'," St. George told AFP.

The study of tree rings -- called dendrochronology, literally, "timeline of trees" -- is used by climate scientists to trace changes in temperature, rainfall or river flows reaching back hundreds, even thousands, of years.

The concentric circles found in temperate zone tree trunks can also date the age of buildings, shipwrecks, musical instruments, painting frames or anything else made from temperate-zone wood.

Because trees in the tropics grow continually, they generally do not produce rings, which show growth spurts during spring and summer.

To investigate further, Hartl returned last summer to the scene of the battle, to see how far the damage had spread.

She established five test sites ranging in distance from a few hundred meters from the fjord where the Tirpitz was berthed, to about ten kilometres.

Near where the ship once lay, more than 60 percent of the trees showed virtually no growth in 1945. All of them were affected to some degree.

Gaps in the forest where young trees sprouted up in the 1950s suggest the chemical fog caused arboreal fatalities too.

As far as four kilometres away, more than half the tree were severely affected, taking eight years on average to fully recover.

Pine trees -- which keep their needles for up to seven years -- were hit hardest. "Being stripped bare would have been a more difficult challenge for that species," St. George explained.

The artificial fog that denuded the trees was likely made from chlorosulphuric acid which, when mixed with water, produces a thick, white vapour.

German ships has special teams equipped with gas masks to generate the smoky shroud.

Despite its firepower, the Tirpitz never saw much action.

In October 1944, the German naval command moved it to Tromso, where it served as a moble artillery platform until a squadron of 32 British Lancaster bombers sent it to the bottom of the harbour the following month.President Donald Trump's administration has removed Chad from the list of countries whose citizens are banned from traveling to the United States.

The decision on Tuesday was made almost exactly a month after former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Chad as part of his five-nation trip to Africa in March.

"Chad has improved its identity-management and information sharing practices sufficiently to meet the baseline security standard of the United States," read a White House statement announcing the change.

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The Central African country was seen as the odd one out on the list of countries featured in the September version of Trump's travel ban. Unlike the seven others that were blacklistedIran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, North Korea and VenezuelaChad has had a long history of cooperation with the U.S. on counterterrorism issues.

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BRAHIM ADJI/AFP/Getty Images

The decision to include Chad in the ban received widespread criticism and caused concern over the deterioration of the relations between the two countries. Just a few weeks after the September announcement, Chad removed hundreds of troops it had sent to neighboring Niger to assist with the fight against the Nigerian Islamic militant group Boko Haram.

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One of the major reasons why Chad was blacklisted was a lack of passport paper that prevented it from supplying the Homeland Security Department with a required sample of the document, the Associated Press reported. Homeland Security also pointed out the country failed to adequately share public safety and terrorism-related information.

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The issues have now been resolved. "We welcome Chad's improved identity-management and information sharing practices, which will improve security for the people of Chad and the United States, and look forward to further cooperation," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement on Tuesday.

"Chad is pleased to be removed from the list of countries whose nationals are banned from entering the U.S., and hopes to further strengthen the strategic partnership and cooperation between the two countries," Chads Foreign Minister Cherif Mahamat Zene wrote on Twitterone of the last social media and messaging platforms still accessible in the country since the government recently blocked various services including WhatsApp, Viber and Facebook, local media reported on Monday.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekSpeaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan will not seek re-election in the fall, potentially dealing a massive blow to Republicans fearful of losing control of the House.

Ryan told people close to him Wednesday morning that he intended to announce his decision soon, as first reported by Axios, citing unnamed sources privy to the discussions.

One top Republican described the 48-year-old Ryans decision to leave Washington as a Titanic, tectonic shift, with the midterm elections less than seven months away and many Republicans possibly in danger of losing their seats as Democrats mount an offensive against President Donald Trump around the country.

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Ryans decision has long been a rumor and was first reported by Politico in December, though the report was denied by the speaker. He is still expected to serve out the rest of his term, following suit with a number of Republicans who have similarly decided not to seek another term.

Despite the potentially poor timing, Ryan may have good reasons to move on. Here are five possible factors in the former vice presidential candidate's decision.

Tax Reform Done

One of the main reasons Ryan entered the political sphere was to reform the nations tax policies. And with a major push from Trump, he was able to get such a massive overhaul passed in December. With his primary goal done, Ryan can now call it quits, according to Axios.

Run for President? Someday?

Ryan may be done with the world of politics for now, but he could have more aspirations down the line. Friends of his told Axios that a run for president could be in the future. Ryan was Mitt Romneys running mate in the 2012 race.

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Getty Images/Win McNamee

Story continues

Time Away

Ryan has been in Washington for almost two decades, and he is now ready to devote more of his time to being a husband and a father. Furthermore, he told CBS News in January that he would discuss running again with his family before making a final decision.

Relationship With Trump

While Trump and Ryan managed to get tax reform passed, their relationship has been rocky at times. The president even chastised Ryan publicly for failing to repeal and replace Obamacare. Also, Ryan was caught on tape making jokes during the 2016 campaign about Trump being paid by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

May Have Lost Seat?

Ryan has held down Wisconsins 1st District handily over the years, but he was facing a potentially difficult contest against rising Democrat Randy Bryce, better known as Iron Stache." Trump has further complicated prospects for the GOP across the country. After leaving a meeting with Ryan Wednesday morning, Republican Representative Charlie Dent said the Republicans were in a "no-win" position with Trump, stuck between competing pressures to be both loyal to and critical of the president, according to CNN reporter Manu Raju.

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Leaving the conference, Charlie Dent, the GOP congressman from PA, said that the GOP is in a no-win position with Trump - the right thinks youre not loyal enough and the left says you need to fight him



He also said that Ryan was emotional but composed.  Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 11, 2018







This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekYulia Skripal has turned down an offer of help from the Russian Embassy and told her outspoken cousin not to contact her.

In her first statement since being discharged from hospital following the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, issued by the Met Police on her behalf, the 33-year-old said she did "not wish to avail" herself to the services of the embassy - and warned that nobody speaks for her or her father Sergei other than themselves.

She thanked her cousin Viktoria Skripal "for her concern", but asked her not to try to visit or contact her after a series of media interviews in which she speculated over the nature of the attack and her relatives' recovery.

:: 'Miracle' recovery: How the Skripals survived the novichok attack

Ms Skripal has again thanked staff at Salisbury District Hospital for their "obvious clinical expertise" and "kindness", adding that she has missed the doctors and nurses who looked after her.

She continued: "I have left my father in their care, and he is still seriously ill. I too am still suffering with the effects of the nerve agent used against us.

"I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me.

"I have specially trained officers available to me, who are helping to take care of me and to explain the investigative processes that are being undertaken."

:: 'Our family needs to be together' - Viktoria Skripal

The statement released on Wednesday evening was the first time Ms Skripal had commented on the welfare of her 66-year-old father, a former Russian double agent.

She said that while her own recovery was going well, she was still trying to "come to terms with my current situation".

It has now been more than five weeks since she and her father were found slumped on a bench in central Salisbury on 4 March after they were poisoned, prompting international condemnation of Russia for its alleged involvement.

Story continues

Ms Skripal, who was taken to a secure location after leaving hospital, said she hoped to one day be strong enough to give a full media interview on the incident.

:: Hopes raised Skripals could assist police investigation

But she added: "Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves. I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being.

"Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's.

"For the moment I do not wish to speak to the press or the media, and ask for their understanding and patience whilst I try to come to terms with my current situation."

Regarding the offer from the Russian Embassy, which has previously said it had not been granted consular access to Ms Skripal, she said: "At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them."

:: Russian TV crew kicked out of Salisbury hospital after 'appalling' stunt

Responding to the statement, the Russian embassy in London sounded a sceptical note - describing it as an "interesting read."

It said: "As before, we would like to make sure that the statement really belongs to Yulia." It also referred to the fact that Ms Skripal has yet to be seen in public.

It concluded: "To sum up, the document only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen.

"If British authorities are interested in assuring the public that this is not the case, they must urgently provide tangible evidence that Yulia is alright and not deprived of her freedom."

Ms Skripal's statement comes a day before the chemical weapons watchdog plans to publish its report into the attack.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been investigating since last month, having rejected a request from Moscow for it to be involved.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "In line with established practice they (the OPCW) have now shared a final copy of the report with us, as the requesting state.

"We have asked them to distribute this version to all state parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention, including Russia, [Thursday] and to publish the executive summary for all to see at 12pm.

"This transparent and open approach, which we have pursued from the outset, is in sharp contrast to the Russian state's ongoing tactics of obfuscation and distraction."

Russia has maintained its sceptical stance on the case - which prompted the UK and its allies to impose diplomatic sanctions against the state - and disputes the British explanation that the Skripals were poisoned by novichok.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.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Naftali Bennett clashed Wednesday afternoon in a meeting of coalition heads convened to discuss the possibility of enacting a "notwithstanding clause" aimed at preventing the High Court of Justice (HCJ) from striking down legislation.

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The idea was floated recently in response to the thwarting of a plan to expel illegal African migrants.

The clause was brought up as possible solution to amending a law preventing migrant infiltration into Israel that would allow for the detention and expulsion of illegal mirgants.

While Prime Minister Netanyahu announced his intentions to promote a far-reaching version of the movecontrary the stance of Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, who was absent from the meetinghe was confronted by Bennett regarding the speed with which the notwithstanding clause was to be promoted.

PM Netanyahu (L) and Education Minister Bennett butted heads over the notwithstanding clause as it pertains to African asylum seekers (Photos: Ohad Zwigenberg, Alex Kolomoisky)

"Let's convene the Ministerial Legislation Committee this afternoon to approve the wider notwithstanding clause. It's time to go from words to actions," the education minister said during the meeting,

The premier, however, refused and said alternative options should be reviewed first, to which Bennett retorted, "Years have passed, it's now time to decide. I fear that if we are not determined, it will be sending a wrong message to both infiltrators and the world."

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri then interjected to claim that doing so "may harm the High Court's response on Uganda ," a reference to a deal to deport migrants there against their will.

"That's not worth anything because it will collapse," Bennett replied. "The notwithstanding clause is the solution."

While the prime minister agreed with his education minister's assertion, he nevertheless refused to convene the ministerial committee.

Tourism Minister Levin's British proposal sought to bar the HCJ from striking down legislation, and limiting it to pointing out "constitutional difficulties" (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin then offered to promote a "British solution, regarding the court's inability to strike down laws." When Bennett asked whether such a solution was on the table, Levin and Netanyahu admitted that it was not.

"Okay," Bennett continued, "then let's convene the Ministerial Legislation Committee today and pass the notwithstanding clause. If not today, go figure when it will happen. If the British solution is on the table, I'm announcing my support of it in advance."

According to the British model of the notwithstanding clause, the High Court can bring constitutional difficulties to the attention of the legislature, but it cannot outright strike laws down.

Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit has not yet been required to issue his own opinion on the matter. A source in the Justice Ministry presumed he will only agree to enacting a notwithstanding clause within the framework of Basic Law: Legislation, which will precisely define the interplay between the state's authorities.

In such an eventuality, Mandelblit will indeed support legislation regulating the High Court's authority to strike down any laws for harming rights, but only as long as the Knesset's power to reenact the same law requires at least a 70 MK majorityrather than the 61 MK majority both Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked are pushing for.

Finance Minister Kahlon said his party only supported a notwithstanding clause specific to the migrant issue (Photo: Yair Sagi)

A source close to Kahlon said the minister had spoken with the prime minister's Chief of Staff Yoav Horowitz and communicated to him his position regarding the migrants. Kahlon has reiterated that his Kulanu party will only support a specific notwithstanding clause to urgently deal with the migrant crisis.

The prime minister, for his part, said he supports Levin's proposed British model. The coalition heads will convene again this Sunday to promote legislation in a rapid-fire fashion, a statement on behalf of the prime minister said.

"There's a readymade British model that will be discussed Sunday. None of the coalition heads apart from Bennett asked to convene the Ministerial Legislation Committee today, since Bennett's suggestion is weaker than the one coalition heads are now seeking to promote," a source close to Netanyahu said.

File photo (Photo: EPA)

Levin added, "We may need to reach a compromise later on to pass the law in the plenum, but I believe a wider solution should be sought to engender a wider consensus. Seeking only a specific notwithstanding clause today will only cause harm, because it will not stand up to the court's scrutiny, as the notwithstanding clause in the draft law failed."

Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan tweeted his support of the prime minister on the issue. "We have a historic opportunity to repair the balance between the authorities, which has shifted. We have the opportunity to bring back the ability to decide and govern, which has been damaged due to the 'everything is justiciable' policy. Not everything is justiciable!" he wrote.

"There are national matters on which the people expect their elected officials to decide without the intervention of anyone. Basic Law: Legislation must be enacted, alongside a far-reaching notwithstanding clause," Erdan continued.

A hearing was held in the High Court Tuesday on the possibility of deporting migrants to a "third country" in Africameaning Ugandaafter a similar agreement with Rwanda on the matter collapsed and Netanyahu annulled an agreement reached with the United Nations to transfer half of the migrants to Europe and allow the remainder to stay in Israel.

Migrant freed from the Saharonim facility in the south (Photo: Roee Idan)

The High Court's justices criticizes the state's representatives to the hearing, finally determining that all 207 remaining asylum seekers incarcerated in the southern region Saharonim facility are to be released within five days , unless Attorney General Mandelblit authorizes the agreement reached with Uganda to take them in.

The interim order blocking the expulsion thus remained in place for two additional weeks, during which time the state will be allowed to formulate policy regarding the "third country."

By so doing, the court's justices left an opening for the submission of new appeals the moment such a policy is promulgated.Dublin Mayor Micheal Eamonn Mac Donncha addressed an Palestinian Authority (PA) international conference in Ramallah on Wedneeday, despite Interior Minister Aryeh Deri instructing authorities to stop him from entering Israel.

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Speaking ahead of a speech by President Mahmoud Abbas, he boasted at the conference that his city's council adopted a resolution calling for the expulsion of Israel's ambassador to Ireland.

The symposium focuses on Jerusalem's significance in the eyes of Palestinians and the Islamic religion in general. This year, following US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, the conference was titled, "Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the State of Palestine."





Dublin Mayor Mac Donncha spoke at a Palestinian conference on Jerusalem Wednesday (Photo: AFP)

"As you know, while I was in Ramallah preparing for the conference last night, it was reported that the Israeli Ministry for Strategic Affairs announced I was to be denied entry , but here I am, and I'm very pleased to be here," Donncha said in his opening remarks.

He accepted the Palestinian invitation, he explained, because "Dublin's city council voted to voice solidarity with the people of Palestine, and denounced the disavowal of their rights by successive Israeli governments.

"Dublin called (on the sides) to attain a peaceful solution through negotiations. The city council also denounced Monday the killing of two Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli army, and called to expel the Israeli ambassador form Ireland," he added.

Assuring his listeners that Dublin sends its support to the Palestinian people, Donncha then slammed any attempt by one side to control Jerusalem.

"Jerusalem is of paramount importance in the world. I think an attempt by any one state or religion to exclusively reign supreme over Jerusalem is wrong. The American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital is therefore very wrong," he said.

"We are also aware of reports of intentions to change Israel's basic laws and the ramifications that will have on those of other religions as well as Palestinians. A hundred years ago, these two peoplesthe Irish and the Palestinianswere victims of imperialism when their rights to self determination were taken away," he declared.

Dublin Mayor Mac Donncha (circled) in the conference below Mufti al-Husseini's photo

Later Wednesday, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) Maj.-Gen. Yoav Mordechai wrote on COGAT's Arabic-language Facebook page that, "The mayor of Dublin participated in a Ramallah conference in which the mufti who met with Hitler had a starring turn.

COGAT's post on the Dublin mayor

"I wonder if the honorable Micheal Mac Donncha chose the event and its timing intentionally or not," Mordechai added in reference to Israel's marking of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"Perhaps tomorrow's siren will remind him that (Mufti) Amin al-Husseini met with the mass murderer Adolf Hitler, and then he'll try to come up with things to tell his city's Jewish community," he said.

"Mac Donncha has shown miserable naivete, or perhaps it isn't naivete after all. Factually speaking, he has found himself in a conference glorifying a war criminal," COGAT's post concluded.Since the Polish law prohibiting ascribing culpability to Poles or Poland for the crimes of the Holocaust during World War II was approved in the country's senate, a public argument spanning the globe broke out regarding Poles' conduct during the war.

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For Aliza Landau, the answer is clear: for about five years, her family traveled across Poland while hiding from the Nazis, and Poles in the countryside saved their lives time and again.

"I was born in odz and my family's life was good. My parents were well to do economically, and everything looked fine. When the winds of war started blowing, however, my father decided to leave us and hide out with Polish friends of his, because he thought if we were all together and had to help each other, we couldn't do it," she recounted.

Holocaust survivor Aliza Landau was helped by Polish farmers for 5 years during WWII (Photo: Avihu Shapira)

"It turned out this line of thinking was correct, because the moment the Germans entered, my mother, brother and I were taken to a ghetto," the Holocaust survivor went on to say,

"Dad helped us, smuggled us out of the ghetto and we began wandering around the Polish countryside for about five years. We were only helped by Polish farmers. At first, dad had money and he could pay for the hideouts, but eventually we depended strictly on the kindness and mercy of the Poles who helped us," she added, attesting to the fact with first-hand experience that some Poles acted to save Jews.

Asked about her family's relationship with the Poles who helped them, Landau said, "They truly helped us. They fed us, hid us andwhen things got really hardfound us a new hiding place. We wandered among the Polish villages and they helped us.

"I can say I am truly grateful to these peoplepeople who have not been recognized, most of whom were illiteratewith whom we eventually lost contact," she lamented.

Her family's quest to skirt the Germans' attention, she said, lasted "until the Soviet army crossed the border from the Ukraine into Poland and began moving west. We were among the first to be freed of the Nazis' yoke, in fact, because we wandered until reaching Poland's eastern frontier with the Ukraine."

Landau has since returned to Poland. Upon being asked whether she understood their desire to prove that they too suffered from the Nazi occupation, she said, "I was a girl at the time and can't really analyze it as a grown person might, but I can certainly understandthe Poles are highly nationalistic and when someone dares say something bad about them, it hurts them and they do their best to deny it."

The diplomatic crisis that ensued from the Holocaust law, she suggested, was due to a mistake by the Poles of going too far.

"I think this has been something of a misstep, because they climbed too high a tree that they can't quite figure out how to get down from. Just like there were people who helped, many others ratted out (Jews) and disrupted them," she noted. "Three Poles who were Nazi collaborators and found us hiding in a pit wanted to turn us in. It's hard to find a middle ground, or balance," she concluded.A West Bank military court acquitted a Palestinian resident of Hebron Wednesday of the attempted murder of Israeli woman Nirit Zimora, charging him instead with aggravated assault.

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The court ruled that Hamza Faiz, who stabbed Zimora in the back and seriously wounded her at the Gush Etzion Junction two-and-a-half years ago, only tried to injure her and not kill her.

Hamza rushed at her shouting Allahu Akbar (God is great) then stabbed her once. The military judges, Lt. Col Zvi Heilborn, Lt. Col. Itai Adar and Maj. Chaim Balilti, also convicted him of knife possession, but they ruled that there was no evidence that he planned to kill Nirit.

It is rare that a court convicts a defendant of murder or attempted murder for only one stabbing, even if it killed the victim, the judges wrote. The reason is the difficulty in proving that the intent was to kill. Because the handle of the knife broke, the defendant was unable to further stab the victim."

Nirit Zimora

They also referred to the location of the stab wound saying the fact that it was in the back and not the chest raises doubts regarding the terrorists intent to kill.

In conclusion, the judges wrote, Even in a case of a stabbing on nationalistic grounds, intent to kill must be established and once there is a doubt, it is to the defendants benefit. So this is what we have ruled.

As soon as the ruling was delivered, Zimora and her family began to shout in protest. We feel that Jewish blood has been cheapened, Zimora said. It is clear to all, based on the facts, that the terrorist tried to kill. There is no doubt.

"For two years already I have been walking around with a knife in my back, my family and I are coping with this every day and the consequences are dire. It feels like the judges are holding the knife, the knife which is in all of us, in the hearts of the families of all terror victims, the victim vented.

She said that she had expected the court to be explicitly clear that they do not tolerate the murder of Jews, but that was not the case unfortunately.

Her son Yedidya, also protested the verdict on Facebook. Today, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we commemorate the murder of Jews purely because of their Jewishness, the judges of the Israel Defense Forces do not recognize the attempted murder of a Jewish woman merely because of her Jewishness," he lamented.

"According to witnesses, he ran to my mother with a knife raised, shouting Allahu Akbar. What do you think he intend to do?!" he asked.

Attorney Haim Bleicher of the Honenu organization, which is assisting Zimora and her family in her legal battle, also slammed the court decision.

"It is inconceivable that the judges separate the nationalist intent and the abominable act. A terrorist who stabs a Jewthe mental element is clear. His intention was to murder, the attroney said.

"Acquitting the perpetrator of attempted murder constitutes contempt for the victim and contempt for the existential struggle with which the citizens of Israel cope. We will act so that the military prosecution appeals the verdict and that the injustice is corrected."Israeli fighter jets attacked overnight Wednesday a Hamas terror position in the northern Gaza Strip in retaliation for an explosive device that detonated Wednesday morning near an IDF force on the border.

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After the attack, a terror cell in the strip fired bullets at the aircraft, triggering two Code Red alert sirens in Israeli towns neighboring the northern sector of the Hamas-ruled enclave.

(Photo: Roee Idan)

One bullet fired from the strip hit the roof of a home in an Israeli community. No one was hurt in the incident.

Hamas fires on Israeli military jets

X

The device that detonated in the early hours of Wednesday, which was planted east of Sujjaiya near the Karni Crossing, was the latest in a string of similar incidents as tensions have escalated in recent weeks on the Gaza border. No one was injured in the bombing.

The Israel Air Force (IAF) again responded to the gunfire, killing Mohamed Hajila, a Hamass military operative, and seriously wounding another.

The IDF later confirmed that it had carried out the attack against a Hamas military compound.

After the IDF attack in the Gaza Strip, a cell of terrorists fired at the jets which did not hit or cause damage. The gunfire activated Code Red sirens, an IDF statement said two hours after the sirens blared in the region.

The IDF, using aircraft, attacked the cell. The IDF sees the Hamas terror group as being responsible for all terror activities emanating from the Gaza Strip, and will act firmly against any attempt to carry out terror attacks against the citizens of Israel or IDF forces acting to defend them, the statement continued.

(Photo: Roee Idan)

The first Code Red siren was sounded at 1:33 am, followed by the second at 1:36 am in the Negev and Sdot Negev Regional Councils, an hour after Palestinian reports surfaced about the IAF attack.

Over recent weeks, Hamas has attempted to shoot down Israeli drones using heavy gunfire.UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is stressing the need to prevent the situation in Syria from "spiraling out of control."

The UN chief expressed regret Wednesday that the UN Security Council has been unable to reach agreement on the issue of chemical weapons in Syria.

Guterres says he called the ambassadors of the five veto-wielding permanent council nationsthe US, Russia, China, Britain and France"to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse."

He also renewed his "outrage" at reports of continued chemical weapons use in Syria.

On Tuesday, the council rejected rival US and Russian resolutions for a new body to determine responsibility for chemical weapons attacks in Syria. It also rejected another Russian resolution welcoming an investigation of a suspected weekend chemical attack in the suburbs of Syria's capital that made no mention of assessing blame.Syrian government forces have taken full control over the town of Douma, the last rebel stronghold in the eastern Ghouta enclave outside Damascus, Russian news agencies reported on Thursday, citing a Russian military official.

"The raised state flag over a building in the town of Douma has heralded the control over this location and therefore over the whole of eastern Ghouta," Major-General Yuri Yevtushenko, head of the Russian peace and reconciliation centre in Syria, was quoted as saying.Israel began Thursdays Holocaust Remembrance Day with a two-minute silence across the nation to remember the six million Jews who were systematically murdered in the Nazi Final Solution during World War II.

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Activity ceased at 10:00 am while the two-minute siren blared throughout the country as it observed the silence, with business, daily routine and traffic being brought to a complete standstill.

X Holocaust Memorial Day

A wreath-laying took place after at the memorial monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising at Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and was followed by a name-reading ceremony at the Knesset that began at 11:00 am.

Two-minute silence in Israel (:   ,  )

X

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered remarks at the ceremony , along with Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, Supreme Court Justice Esther Hayut and opposition leader Isaac Herzog.

(Photo: Motti Kimchi)

On the eve of the memorial day in 2018, 215,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel, 130,000 of whom are women and 85,000 of whom are men.

(Photo: Ido Erez)

According to the Finance Ministrys Authority for Holocaust Survivors Rights, in 2017 the budget for survivors stood at NIS 4 billion.

(Photo: Ido Erez)

72,561 of the survivors receive monthly stipends, 6,996 receive compensation for spouses and 140,000 are eligible for annual financial handouts. The average age of a Holocaust survivor id 85, with a dwindling population, and more than a quarter of them (60,000) live below the poverty line.

(Photo: Motti Kimchi)

On Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Netanyahu warned Iran not to test Israels resolve, while speaking at a state ceremony for Holocaust Remembrance Day at Yad Vashem.

PM Netanyahu lays a wreath at memorial ceremony (Photo: Shaul Golan)

Delivering his remarks immediately after President Reuven Rivlin, Netanyahu said that events in recent days, in reference to Syrias attacks in Douma using chemical weapons, show that confronting evil and aggression is a mission that is imposed on every generation.

There is no generation, he said, which is exempt from carrying out the mission, and woe to the generation that evades it.The challenge of preserving the memory of the Holocaust and teaching the next generation about its lessons is becoming increasingly difficult with time. The number of witnesses is, naturally, diminishing.

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With the passage of the decades since the most horrible crime against humanity were carried out, some of us may have become slightly impassive, but the mission, of passing on the memory to the next generation and to those that follow, is more relevant and important than ever.

March of the Living in 2017 (Photo: EPA)

In France, Jewish stores are being torched again; in Eastern European countries, anti-Semitic politicians are gaining power and new laws seek to limit the truth; in the enlightened USA, neo-Nazi shows of force are being held without any sense of shame, and the voices calling for a return to a sovereign, homogenous and fascist nostalgia are growing stronger in the polls.

Reality seems difficult and depressing. The neo-Nazis are rearing their ugly head in places we thought it could never happen until recently. Humanity is repressing and ignoring the use of chemical agents against the Syrian population, and an ethnic war is taking place in Myanmar. All this emphasizes the extent of the growing evil and hatred in the world on a daily basis and how a racist nationalistic wave is sweeping many nations.

When racism is fed by ignorance and hatred is fed by fear, we must not give up on cultivating awareness and solidarity among the young generation. The availability of knowledge isnt enough, and as the global level of shock keeps increasing, our challenge is to spur action and critical thought.

All of us, all human beings sharing planet Earth, have the duty of ensuring that never again is a reality. The preservation and commemoration mission doesnt belong to the Jewish people alone, but to all of humanity, and it isnt enough to just remember the Holocaust. Today, more than ever, its important for all of us, especially the young generation, to internalize the lessons of the Holocaust and remember both the Jewish communities and the minorities and other weakened populations that were murdered by the Nazis.

Its still our responsibility to deal with the horrible ramifications of World War II, constantly asking ourselves in comparative perspective what can be concluded from the dark past about manifestations of racism, oppression and violence in our lives today.

The right way is to connect the past to the present. Passing the memorial torch from the few remaining survivors and testimonies to the youth is critical. That torch contains enormous strength, which teaches important universal values in dark times: Solidarity, humanitarianism, tolerance, acceptance of the other and a war on anti-Semitism and racism.

A study that looked into the March of the Livings effect on hundreds of teenagers from a variety of religions and nationalities found that 90 percent of them felt the project made them understand the need to become more involved when encountering anti-Semitism, and 54 percent said the march made them more tolerant towards other groups. Memory isnt lost if you fight for it.

We need to develop the methods, content and means to convey the stories even when there is no one left to provide a first-hand account. The Holocaust isnt just another historical event, but a monument of human cruelty and the depths of evil people may sink to. The six million murdered Jews, alongside millions of other victims, command us not to let go and not to despair.May 7, 1945the day before the surrender of Nazi Germany took effect. The unit of Dr. Alvin Weinstein, a Jewish officer who serves as a doctor in the American army, recently liberated the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau, Liebenau and Laufen.

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Weinstein, who commanded the last two days after the liberation, wrote to his wife in New Jersey and described the nightmarish scenes he witnessed: "My dear, no one will believe what I saw on the last day of the war. I know you will not believe me, my dear, so I took pictures of everything and when I get home I'll show you."

Following his death last year, Weinstein's letters and pictures were donated in February by his family to the archives of the Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies in Tel Yitzhak. These unique materials document the first days after liberation of the three camps and are not found in any other collection around the world.

Alvin Weinstein (Photo: Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies)

"Tomorrow night, one minute after midnight, the war with Germany will officially end," Weinstein began in his letter to his wife. "I want you to know where I was when the cease-fire order was issued.

"Believe it or not, I was the commander of a concentration camp near the Alps."

Weinstein did not fail to describe the physical condition of the prisoners he met, and said that some of them survived the death marches, but not without harm.

"I saw 243 starved, tortured and disease-stricken bodies that were once human beings. 170 of them were Polish Jews who were the only survivors of the 1,600 who had left the Buchenwald concentration camp.

"They walked 440km barefoot for 28 days. They were given five potatoes a day and no water. Anyone who fell or received food from civilians was shot dead by SS soldiers.

Captured SS soldiers marched through the Dachau concentration camp (Photo: Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies)

"When they reached their new prison, everyone was crammed into barracks together with 73 Russians and Poles in a similar situation. The smell in the shacks made everyone who entered them vomit or at least gag."

Weinstein was appointed commander of the Liebenau camp, which he described as an assortment of "huts without a sewage system or ventilation." A medical doctor, he noted the survivors' physical condition in clear, even clinical detail.

"The men had straw mattresses covered with lice and they were barefoot and half naked, many of them suffering from high fever and hallucinations. I'm sure many of them were infected with typhoid," he attested.

Weinstein's letter (Photo: Photo: Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies)

"When the American soldiers arrived, they cheered and cried as though the Messiah had finally arrived. From a nearby camp, packages were sent to them from the American Red Cross and they enjoyed delicacies they had not known since the war began.

"The packages contained cigarettes and chocolates and meat that they could not chew because of their swollen tongues. The things we think of as ordinary were for them a godsend."

'They beat those Hitlerites until they nearly died'

Dr. Weinstein described not only the physical condition of the liberated survivors, but also the emotional state and moods that included more than anything a strong desire to take revenge on the Nazi guards at the camp.

In one incident, Weinstein said, one of the battalion commanders he served with brought two German soldiers who were without uniforms to "the barracks with those tortured souls" and told them that they were members of an SS unit.

"Suddenly these men's strength returned to them and they beat those Hitlerites until they nearly died," he wrote.

Jewish prisoners taking revenge on SS soldiers (Photo: Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies)

"We went inside and stopped them (from killing the two) and put the beaten Nazis on a jeep that took them outside the camp. They were so scared they jumped out of the jeep and tried to run but a guard killed them both.

"When the prisoners heard the shots, they cheered and begged us to bring them more men. They no longer wanted food, a shower or a bedonly more SS men."

Weinstein, like many others at the time, did not truly believe the stories about the concentration camps, thinking it was more exaggeration then reality. What he saw, though, convinced him otherwise.

"I, too, did not believe my eyes. I, too, thought it was propaganda. But now I know it was all true," he admitted.

"Every SS man should be tormented the same way they tortured these poor refugees. Those peoplewhose greatest sin was being born into a particular religionshould have the right to try and judge these sadistic torturers who murdered four and a half million people of their religion."

Towards the end of the letter, Weinstein spoke of his feelings as a Jewish officer who commanded the release and rescue of his people, the survivors of unimaginable horrors.

"My heart is too full," he wrote. "I fought hard in this war, but as a Jew I fought for my Jewish brethren as well as my country, and on the last day of the war I managed to free 160 of these miserable people.

Dachau concentration camp (Photo: Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies)

"My mission in this war has been accomplished. My country defeated the enemy armies and I managed to liberate some of my people. I ask for nothing more."

"Darling, I'll write more tomorrow. I can think of nothing but the misery I saw," he concluded.

'He gave me his Yellow Patch'

The collection of letters handed by Weinstein's family also contained another letter by a man named Murray Eisenstein of Florida, an infantry sergeant from Weinstein's unit, written some 40 years after the end of the war. In it, Eisenstein depicted a chance meeting with a Jewish survivor during the liberation of the Dachau concentration campa moment he since considered to be the "apex point" of his life.

"We brought down the gate and went into the concentration camp, just in front of us were thousands of people in these striped, grotesque uniforms," he recounted, saying saw in the camp small, shoddy buildings and iron cars on a railroad track at the end of the camp.

He noted they later learned the iron cars contained piles of corpses thrown together with dying people.

Bodies piled in Dachau camp (Photo: Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies)

"A lot of prisoners approached us and asked for rifles so that they could kill the guards who remained in the camp," he echoed Weinstein's testimony. "Many of us had spare weapons that we agreed to give them, and they used them to kill the guards, those who were not the commanders, who had already managed to escape."

Afterwards, Eisenstein wrote, he "saw an elderly man sitting and rocking back and forth as if in prayer or mourning.

"I walked toward him and he asked in Yiddish who I was. I replied that I was a Jewish-American soldier. The man cried and said, 'Everything is over, everything is lost.'

"I put my hand in my pocket and remembered that last night we were chasing SS forces, killing them and rummaging through their pockets. I had 15,000 to 20,000 German Marks in my coat. I took the money out and tried to put it in the pocket of this prisoner's uniform. He looked at me and said in Yiddish, 'I cannot accept this gift ... it's not proper ... I have nothing to give you in return, pointing at his yellow Star of David badge on his uniform."

The Yellow Star received by Eisenstein (Photo: Massuah Institute for Holocaust Studies)

Eisenstein made him a dealthe money he took from the slain SS soldiers for his Yellow Star. "He gave it to me and it's been in my possession for the past 40 years," he said.

"As an infantry sergeant, I had many experiences. But I must point out that when that lost soul told me that he could not accept my gift, because he had nothing to give in return, I broke down completely. That moment of human emotional expression will forever remain the apex point of my life. I always hoped that my gift was useful and gave this man a chance to live, maybe in Israel, where he could live a normal life again."

Massua Director-General Aya Ben Naftali stressed the significance of Weinstein's collection, as it is not only testimony by a Jewish officer who liberated Nazi concentration camps, but also a look through the eyes of a doctor, who took note of "both the physical condition of the survivors and their mental state."

"There are hardly any references to this in writing," she noted. "It really describes the day the war ended and the situation of the Jewish people with great empathy."France says it will decide in the coming days whether to launch a military strike over a suspected chemical attack in Syria.

Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Thursday that President Emmanuel Macron would decide whether to launch an attack over the "non-respect of the international convention against chemical weapons," which is a "red line" for France.

Speaking to reporters in Romania, Le Drian says: "We are very firm...as the president of the Republic said.... this situation can't be tolerated."

Asked about consulting the US, which has also threatened military action, Le Drian said "France is autonomous in taking its decisions."

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday warned of imminent military action in Syria over a suspected poison gas attack near Damascus that Syrian opposition activists and first responders say killed more than 40 people. Syria has denied carrying out such an attack.A fifth of young Americans have never heard of the Holocaust or are unsure as to what it entailed, according to a new survey published on Thursday, as Israel marks Holocaust Remembrance Day.

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Fifty-eight percent of the 1,350 people polled said that they believed that another Holocaust could take place again in the future.

The poll, entitled National Survey of Holocaust Awareness and Knowledge Among Adults in the United States, which was carried out by the Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), also examined the general knowledge of the participants on a variety of other issues about the Holocaust.

Twenty-two percent of people aged 18-24 said they have never heard of the Holocaust, while 11 percent of 25-34 year olds said they were unfamiliar with it.

Auschwitz prisoners (Photo: AP)

Moreover, the poll, which was conducted by a combination of Holocaust survivors as well as representatives from museums, educational institutions, and leading nonprofits in the field of Holocaust education, highlighted a distinction between the age groups regarding knowledge on how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

Forty-one percent of the youths, for example, thought that fewer than two million Jews were murdered, while 31% of the adults believed the same thing.

While there were over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, the Claims Conference website notes, almost half of Americans (45 percent) cannot name a single oneand this percentage is even higher amongst Millennials."

On the other hand, 94% of all of the people polled said that Jews were the victims of the Holocaust.

There were other rays of hope in the survey findings. More than nine out of ten respondents (93 percent) believe all students should learn about the Holocaust in school, the poll says. Eight out of ten respondents (80 percent) say it is important to keep teaching about the Holocaust so it does not happen again.

The survey also examined knowledge of some of the central figures identified with the Holocaust and World War II. 15% had never heard of Anne Frank, a German-born diarist who was eventually captured by the Nazis as a little girl while in hiding and killed in the Final Solution.

March of the Living (Photo: AP)

Forty-four percent had never heard of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved over 1,000 Jews, and 54% had never heard of Eli Wiesel, a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor who went on to become a writer, professor, political activist and Nobel Laureate. 44% percent also did not know who headed the Nazi SS, Heinrich Himmler.

Claims Conference President Julius Berman said that the findings were alarming.

On the occasion of Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), it is vital to open a dialogue on the state of Holocaust awareness so that the lessons learned inform the next generation, Berman said. We are alarmed that todays generation lacks some of the basic knowledge about these atrocities.

Greg Shneider, Executive Vice President of the Claims Conference, said that the statistics highlighted the importance of teaching about the Holocaust in schools.

This study underscores the importance of Holocaust education in our schools, he said. There remain troubling gaps in Holocaust awareness while survivors are still with us; imagine when there are no longer survivors here to tell their stories. We must be committed to ensuring the horrors of the Holocaust and the memory of those who suffered so greatly are remembered, told and taught by future generations.President Donald Trump said Thursday that an attack on Syria could take place "very soon or not so soon at all!"

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The president made the statement in a tweet Thursday morning. Trump on Wednesday had warned Russia to "get ready" for a missile attack on its ally Syria, suggesting imminent retaliation for last weekend's suspected chemical weapons attack. But on Thursday, Trump wrote that he: "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place."

At stake in Syria is the potential for confrontation, if not outright conflict, between the US and Russia, former Cold War foes whose relations have deteriorated in recent years over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine, its interference in the 2016 US presidential election and, most recently, its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Trump, who has often said a commander in chief should never telegraph his military intentions, apparently did so himself, tweeting that missiles "will be coming" in response to the suspected chemical attack that killed at least 40 people near Damascus.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," Trump wrote. "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

President Trump and President Assad (Photo: AP, AFP)

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, however, indicated that evidence of what happened was still being studied. At a photo-taking session during a Pentagon meeting with his Dutch counterpart, Mattis was asked by a reporter whether he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian government.

"We're still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies," Mattis said. "We're still working on this."

Trump suggested Monday he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which the US government had video and other evidence of certain aspects of an actual attack by Syrian aircraft, which involved the use of sarin gas. Trump responded then by launching dozens of Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

President Assad (Photo: AFP)

Asked whether the US military was ready to conduct an attack in Syria if ordered, Mattis replied, "We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the president determined."

In the past, Trump has condemned others for forecasting military plans, repeatedly blistering President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign. During one speech, he said, "We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything."

Asked about Trump's tweet about an impending attack on Syria, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who ran the Pentagon for President Bill Clinton, said on CNN that it "compromises the mission somewhat."

Trump did not detail what a strike on Syria would look like, or whether these would be US missiles. US officials have been consulting with France, Britain and other allies on a possible joint military operation, but the timing remained in doubt Wednesday. Trump canceled a foreign trip in order to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Assad.

Shortly after his tweeted warning to Russia, Trump took a more conciliatory tone in lamenting that the US-Russia relationship "is worse now than it has ever been." There is no reason for this, he wrote, adding that "Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together."

Victims of chemical gas attacks (Photo: AP)

Syria's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Trump's threats to attack are "reckless" and endanger international peace and security.

Trump's administration has sought to show toughness on Russia, with a series of economic and diplomatic actions, including new sanctions last week against government officials and oligarchs. Trump has largely avoided criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, though he singled him out in a tweet over the weekend for supporting Assad.

The US, France and Britain have been in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, US officials have said. A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the US in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syria's political and military support from Russia and Iran.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday called for a "strong and joint response" to the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday. The Syrian government denies responsibility.

The French president does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the US-led coalition created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Multiple IS terror attacks have targeted France, including one last month.F-15s flew Thursday morning in the skies of Tel Aviv and other cities in central Israel, deploying flares, performing aerobatics and alarming residents with sonic booms on the backdrop of mounting tensions with Syria and Iran.

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The flyover, done in preparation for planned aerial demonstration on Israel's 70th Independence Day, was not announced by the IDF Spokesperson Unit ahead of time, as is the norm.

F-15s in the aerial drill (Photo: AFP)

According to the police, many residents called the emergency services number to know the reason for the flyover. So many, in fact, that the police was forced to issue a public announcement to reassure the general public the jets were not deployed for operational activities.

The aerial drill (:  )

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The exercise was scheduled in advance, and the IDF usually updates trainings or exercises that cause heavy movement of military equipment in public spaces.

Earlier this week, Ynet contacted the IDF after residents of Tel Aviv noticed planes flying low over their homes, but the army did not clarify the circumstances of the flights.

IDF announces next week's schedule

In the wake of the Thursday morning panic, the IDF apologized and released the schedule for next weeks aerial practice fly-overs ahead of the Independence Day fly-over.

The schedule is as follows:

Sunday: Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee area between the hours of 9:50-10:15am.

Monday: Tel Aviv (beach) between 10:05 and 10:20am.

The Haifa area between 10:35 and 11:10am.

Tiberias (Kinneret) between the hours of 1:30-1:50pm.

The Jezreel Valley between 1:30 and 2:10pm.

Jerusalem (Sacher Park) between the hours of 2:25-2:45pm.

Beer Sheva between the hours of 4:35-5:00pm.

The IDF also said that there may be additional aerial training activity on Tuesday in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv between the hours of 10:45-11:45am.

Foreign air forces to join air show

The traditional aerial demonstration will also include aircrafts of foreign air forces this year. Representatives of the countries will arrive in Israel next week and take part in the 70th anniversary celebrations of the state alongside dozens of IDF planes, helicopters and ships.

The aircrafts will include a Greek F-16, a Polish C-17 transport aircraft, a Canadian C-295 transport aircraft, a British C-130 transport aircraft, a similar Austrian aircraft and an Italian Eurofighter.

The IDF said the demonstration will showcase Israel's cooperation with the foreign nations and will help "maintain diplomatic relations between the countries."

(Photo: Motti Kimchi)

The demonstration will fly over over 49 cities and towns, from Kiryat Shmona to Eilat, with F-35, F-16, F-16I and the relatively new training plane, the M-346.

Alongside these will be flying Apache helicopters, the CH-53 Sea Stallion and the UH-60 Black Hawk, and a variety of transport planes, from a Boeing 707-based refueling aircraft, the C-130 Hercules and the C-130J Super Hercules, to the B200 King Air and the Gulfstream V, which are mainly used in reconnaissance and intelligence missions.

Jet depoying flares (Photo: Orna Maltinsky)

The aircrafts will also include civilian aircraft: Arkia's Boeing 757, El Al's Boeing 787 Dreamliner, three Air Tractor AT-802 planes belonging to the police fire brigade and three police H125 Airbus helicopters.Shortly after learning the extent of the Holocaust, we launched an effort to convince the world that our unique disaster justifies a unique solutionthe establishment of a Jewish state.

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At the same time, an accompanying voice said that the Holocaust should be seen as a warning against the satanic component in the nature of man and society. The devilishness could reemerge given a combination of rare, but not impossible, conditions. Jews wont be its only victims.

These two messages dont contradict each other, but the awareness of the masses seems to have trouble accepting them without one pushing the other one aside. Zionist PR tends to emphasize the unique message that brings Israel great profits, but the impact of our disaster has been growing weaker with the passage of time and the occurrence of other atrocities. The universal message has pushed the particular message aside. The Holocaust has become yet another genocide, one of many.

Auschwitz prisoners (Photo: AP)

Let me try to describe the process: At first, attention was drawn to the fact that the Nazis murdered not only Jews, by also Gypsies, homosexuals and mentally ill people. Later on, people began wondering about the real difference between the extermination of the Jews and other events termed as genocide.

The questions focused on historical events like the massacre of the indigenous peoples of the Americas by Spanish forces in South and Central America, the massacre of native Americans in North America, the massacre of Aboriginal Australians, the killing of millions of African slaves on their way to slave states in America, the mass annihilation of native Congolese by the Belgians, the massacre of Armenians by the Turks, the killing of at least one million people by the Americans in Vietnam, the extermination of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda, the starving to death of residents of the Biafra district in Nigeria, the systematic killing of minorities in Cambodia, and many other massacres in which the number of victims was far higher than the six million we lost.

Now, many of these events are categorized under the generic term holocaust, which is used in the common popular discourse in the world as an equivalent to genocide. The next stage is applying the term to inhuman things as well. People talk about a cultural holocaust, which is an intentional effort to erase the culture of a specific group, and even about the holocaust of animals slaughtered for food.

In light of the modified meaning of the term Holocaust, persistent historians have been trying to teach us that the annihilation of Jews was a unique act. There was no instance before the Holocaust in which a state had planned and systematically executed the murder of a public for reasons that cannot be rationally explained.

Refugee camp in Rwanda, 1996 (Photo: AFP)

Colonialists eliminated millions of people to take over their lands and their nature resources; followers of one religion violently destroyed the believers of a competing religion; slaves dropped like flies on ships transporting them from Africa; nations slaughtered their neighbors for fear of being attacked by them; and tyrants murdered to secure their rule.

None of these explanations applies to the Nazis actions. The Jews didnt compete with the Nazis over material resources, they werent turned into slaves to make use of their labor force, they werent members of an exploitative class that had to be removed from power, and they didnt hold a shared ideology that jeopardized the governments worldview.

They were annihilated, according to the Nazi perception, to liberate humanity from animals who are not humans, but something between a human being and an ape. Precisely because of its particular resemblance to a human being, this creature, the Jew, can act like a virus, infiltrating the Aryan races healthy tissue. The difference between this creature and man is biological, it is unrepairable, and thats why it has to be annihilated. Everything must be sacrificed for this sacred mission, they explained, even if the effort consumes resources needed to win the war.

Will these scholarly explanations succeed in clarifying to many people why the Holocaust is such a unique event? I doubt it. In a few years time, the details will get lost in the sea of oblivion. Its very distressing. We mustnt give up, but we must be prepared.President Reuven Rivlin told his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda Thursday that his countrys recent ratification of the Holocaust law, which Israel says downplays the Polish role in the Nazis systematic murder of millions of Jews, cannot detract from the fact that people who murdered and inherited.

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The two presidents met as they joined thousands of young Israelis and Jews from elsewhere in the world in their March of the Living to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and remember the former Nazi German death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau.

President Rivlin and President Duda at Auschwitz during March of the Living (Photo: Reuters)

The law imposes prison sentences of up to three years for mentioning the term "Polish death camps" and for suggesting "publicly and against the facts" that the Polish nation or state was complicit in Nazi Germany's crimes.

We greatly appreciate all those who risked their lives to save Jews, but there were other phenomena as well. People who murdered and inherited, Rivlin told Duda, quoting a verse in the Book of Kings.This was a terrain that allowed the Nazis to do whatever they liked not only in Poland but throughout Europe.

Duda needs to understand, Rivlin added, the feelings of the Jewish people in Israel. We see the Holocaust as a result of anti-Semitism which led to the slaughter of the Jewish people, out of the Nazi ideology which flourished on Polish soil, Rivlin explained.

We appreciate the internal examination, and for the soul-searching of Polish society. Yet, there is also great disagreement about which we have spoken, he continued.

Ahead of the march, thousands of young people, many of them wrapped in Israel's white and blue flag, visited the grounds of Auschwitz, including a Death Wall where the Germans executed their prisoners

Israel demanded, Rivlin told Duda that Poland "continue to be committed to comprehensive and unrestricted research on the events of the Holocaust period. As was agreed between the two counties, and as is appropriate.

The Israeli president said that statesmen have a duty to shape the future, while historians have a duty to research and describe the past.

One must not overstep into the field of the other. Cooperation between Israel, Poland, and the Jewish people on remembrance and memorial, in education and research is the way to pass the torch of remembrance and responsibility to the next generations, Rivlin said.

Responding to the remarks, President Duda said that the meeting of the two at the site was a great honor, but also of course a testimony to the enormity of the disaster that happened here.

We are meeting here for the March of the Living as a testimony to memory of the Jewish Holocaust. We say to the worldespecially from here, the place where the terrible disaster was carried outwe say Never Again, Duda began.

We call on the whole world to see where hatred of the other and anti-Semitism can lead. This is a cry for the whole world to remember that all human kind must relate with respect to one another and that Never Again, he added, avoiding a dispute with Rivlin.

So many Jews over the years dedicated their lives to Poland and its independence and their graves are scattered across Poland, not because they were murdered but because they fought for Polands independence, Duda said, before turning to Rivlin directly.

Mr. President, I want to reiterate  there is great disagreement on the issue of amending the law which was passed in the Polish Parliament, which is being examined by the courts, but I want to clarify that at no point did we want to block testimony, on the contrary we wanted to defend the historical truths, and as a leader, I want to do this at any price, even when it is difficult for us.

The Polish president then concluded by saying, "I am not scared to say that there were people whose behavior should be condemned, but there were also people of whose behavior we are proud. There were authorities that tried to defend the Jews, but their leaders were condemned to death. We are not seeking to block testimony, not even the difficult testimony. Mr. President, I think that our marching together here will make clear for the whole world that we mean Never Again."The Foreign Ministry summoned the Irish Ambassador Alison Kelly Thursday over the participation of the Mayor of Dublin Micheal Mac Donncha at an anti-Israel event in Ramallah. A FM official expressed surprise at the mayors decision to attend during the week in which Israel marks Holocaust Memorial Day.President Reuven Rivlin criticized the controversial Polish Holocaust Law during his speech at the March of the Living in Poland Thursday. At the German Concentration Camp Birkenau, Rivlin said to Polish President Andrzej Duda: The truth cannot be denied, the Nazi killing mechanism could not have succeeded in fulfilling its vision without help. Rivlin added: Our people were betrayed by the nations they lived amongst and were killed by Poles as well.The Iranian Supreme Leader's envoy to the elite Quds Force unit said on Thursday that Tehran could destroy Israel and warned it to avoid any "stupid" measure against the Islamic Republic, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

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"If Israel wants to continue its treacherous existence ... it should avoid stupid measures. If they give excuses to Iran, Tel Aviv and Haifa will be destroyed," cleric Ali ShiraziSupreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's representative to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps's Quds Forcewas quoted by Fars as saying. "Iran can destroy Israel."

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's said Israel would be 'foolish' to threaten Iran (Photo: AFP)

The Quds Force is the espionage and paramilitary wing, in charge of overseas operations, of the elite Revolutionary Guards.

Iran has repeatedly predicted Israel's demise, and supports armed groups pledged to its destruction.

PM Netanyahu at Yad Vashem: 'Don't test our resolve'

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Iran Wednesday evening "not to test Israels resolve," while speaking at a state ceremony for Holocaust Memorial Day at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu has said Israel will not tolerate an Iranian military presence in Syria, especially along the border. Iran has sent troops and allied militiamen to support Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces.

Delivering his remarks immediately after President Reuven Rivlin, Netanyahu said that events in recent days, in reference to Syrias attacks in Douma using chemical weapons, "show that confronting evil and aggression is a mission that is imposed on every generation."

There is no generation, he said, which is exempt from carrying out the mission, and "woe to the generation that evades it."

After issuing his warning to Tehran, which is seeking to establish a military presence in war-torn Syria in a bid to threaten Israel, Netanyahu turned to the people of Iran.

Speaking at the Yad Vashem ceremony, PM Netanyahu said Iran should not 'test Israel's resolve' (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

"Israel is not your enemy, but rather the tyrannical regime which represses you is," Netanyahu said. "When it disappears, our two ancient nations will be able to live again in cooperation and in brotherhood."

Israel is not turning a blind eye to the dangers, he continued, and is "not surprised by them most of the time.

"In the Holocaust we were defenseless, with no shield or voice. In truth, our voices were not heard at all. Today, we have a strong country, a strong army, and are voice is heard throughout the nations," the prime minister said.

He reminded his listeners of the fact that a flag with a swastika was waved on the Gaza border, adding that "our hearts are torn at the sight of horror" over Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons.

Alleged chemical attack in Douma (: )

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"One big lesson that has escorted us since the Holocaust is that murderous evil that is not confronted rapidly spreads. Gradually, it threatens all of humanity," Netanyahu warned.

This was his main message, he added, at the Munich Security Conference two months ago.

"I went as the prime minister of Israel to Munich aware of the difficult incidents that had taken place in the city. In Munich, the Nazi oppressor began to spread the terrible race theory," Netanyahu said.

"In Munich, leaders of the free world signed 80 years ago the appeasement agreement with the aggressor. They sought to avoid war, but their concessions only brought it closer, increased its damage and brought about the occupation of the whole of Europe."

Israel, he vowed, will never act in "this mistaken way. We stop the the aggression at the bud, and these are not just empty words. We back them up with action. Attacks against attacks, attacks in defense, for deterrence, attacks against anyone who threatens to destroy us.

"Because today as well, an extremist regime threatens us, threatens peace of the entire worldthis regime explicitly declares its intention to destroy us, the state of the Jewish people," he said.

Drawing the comparison once again with the 1938 Munich Agreement in which UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed a deal with Adolf Hitler believing he had solicited guarantees from the Nazi dictator not to make any more territorial expansions, Netanyahu said that the Iran nuclear deal was similar, in the sense that "it is not worth the paper it is written on."

The T-4 Airbase near Homs hit in the airstrike

Photos show attacked Iranian base

Iranian news agency Tasnim published new photos from the T-4 military base in Syria on Wednesday morning, the first since it was bombed earlier this week in a strike attributed to Israel.

The strike, which apparently destroyed an Iranian drone base, claimed the lives of 14 military personnel, among them at least seven Iranian "military advisers."

The base's exterior

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.After the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said earlier Thursday that the attack on the Tiyas Military Airbase near Syria's Homs "exacerbated the situation in the region," a senior Israeli officially retorted Thursday evening by saying, "What's destabilizing Syria is Iranian aggression and its attempt to militarily entrench itself in Syria to threaten Israel and other countries."

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Earlier in the day, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, "American statements (regarding a retaliatory attack in Syria) were militaristic and the world should comprehend the ramifications of such threats."

Putin (L) and Netanyahu exchanged harsh words regarding Israel's alleged attack in Syria (Photo: EPA)

Zakharova added that following an inquiry by Russian forces stationed in the vicinity, there were no signs of chemical weapons use in the region where such an attack was alleged.

Putin speaks with PM Netanyahu, cautions him against 'destabilizing Syria'

The first Russian statement on the matter was issued by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, when he urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Wednesday not to take any action that could destabilize Syria or put its security in peril.

In the telephone call, the Prime Minister reiterated that Israel will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria, a message by the Prime Minister's Office said.

The Kremlin released word of the two leaders' conversation during Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech at the state ceremony commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum.

"The Syrian matter was discussed, including the recent missile attack on the T-4 Airbase in Homs, which was carried out by the Israeli Air Force," the Russian statement said, adding the call was held at Israel's behest.





Word of the two leaders' call was released during PM Netanyahu's speech at Yad Vashem (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

The Kremlin's statement said Putin "underscored the principal importance of observing the sovereignty of Syria and called for holding back from any actions that would further destabilize the situation in this country and present threats to its security."

The call was held following an Israeli security official saying that, "No memory of the Assad regime will remainor of Assad himselfif a wider war breaks out between Israel and Iran in the Syrian theater." Similar, albeit less direct threats were voiced by Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Putin and Netanyahu's call was also preceded by a series of decisive Russian statements following the attack on the airbase, which claimed the lives of 14 peopleseven of whom were Iranian.

Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov said the attack signified a "dangerous development," whereas a spokesman for the Kremlin said the Russians were not forewarned, adding, "We have communicated our position to Israel."

Defense Secretary Mattis said US still assessing intelligence regarding suspected use of chemical weapons in Syria (Photo: AFP)

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, striking a cautious tone hours after Trump's more pugnacious threat of missile strikes, said the United States was assessing intelligence about the suspected Syrian chemical weapons attack

Asked if he had seen enough evidence to blame Assad, Mattis said, "We're still working on this."

Without elaborating, he added that the US military stood ready to provide military options, if appropriate. It was unclear whether his remarks reflected any unease about Trump's apparent move toward military action.Tamer Abu-Daka, the Palestinian claiming to be the one appearing in a video showing an IDF sniper shooting a protester, while other soldiers whooped and cheered, said, "I don't care they shot me in the leg. All I care about is the soldier mocking me and cursing my mother. It's shameful."

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Abu-Daka, 28, of Khan Yunis, provided Ynet with his own account of the incident, which appeared in a controversial video published earlier this week.

Footage of the shooting incident

X

The Palestinian claimed the shooting took place December, 22, 2017. "It was a non-violent march against (President Donald) Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital," he recounted, adding that he arrived to the border fence's area with his friends.

Tamer Abu-Daka, 28, claimed to be the Palestinian from the video and said he was incensed with the soldiers mocking him

"Protesters were throwing rocks and soldiers returned fire. Some young people stood 20 meters ahead of me. I got near them and began shouting at them to turn back. I stood my ground, and was then shot in the leg," he claimed.

None of the protesters present were armed, Abu-Daka alleged, and he himself was not throwing rocks as he was shot. After falling down, he was taken to hospital and hospitalized. Today he uses crutches to walk, and his right leg is in a cast.

"I saw the video maybe 50 times, and fume every time I hear them laughing as I go down. They're shooting at usbut that's not a solution. They say we're the terrorists, but in fact they are. They behave like animals. They're the terrorists," he accused.

Concluding his remarks, Abu-Daka said he has made it a point to attend to " March of Return " protests on Fridays, but claimed strongly he has kept his distance from the fence out of fear of being shot again.

IDF: 'Palestinian was warned before being shot'

The IDF's probe into the incident showed that, "The video showed only a small portion of (the forces') handling of a protracted violent riot, which included stone throwing and attempts to sabotage the fence, and which lasted some two hours."

The army's statement continued, "Multiple measures were taken to disperse rioters throughout, including using public address to order them to stop, deploying crowd control measures and firing into the air.

"Once these steps proved inefficient, a single bullet was fired at one of the suspects of organizing and spearheading the protest while he was meters away from the fence. As a result, he was struck in the leg and subsequently wounded.

"The video was not filmed from the exact position from which the fire emanated, and was shot by a soldier who is not an organic part of the force that fired. After completion of the full operational inquiry by the relevant chain of command, its findings will be submitted, as is the norm, for inspection by the Military Advocate General.

Defense Minister Lieberman said the sniper deserved promotion (Photo: Effi Sharir)

Lieberman: 'Sniper deserves promotion, cameraman deserves demotion'

Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said regarding the matter Tuesday that, "The sniper deserves promotion, whereas the cameraman deserves demotion. There has to be a clear equation. IDF is the world's most moral army, but when you're on the frontlines and under considerable stress, sometimes aggressions are let loose. That's understandable. At the end of the day, the army, snipers and soldiersthey're the best of us, and the IDF is the most moral army."

Bayit Yehudi chief Naftali Bennett, meanwhile, said that same day in a Ynet studio interview that, "First of all, I'm throwing my support behind the IDF's soldiers. I will not be dragged into a festival of denunciations when people don't know what went on, when it happened and what the circumstances were."

"Since when do we judge soldiers by the elegance of their speech? I prefer a whooping soldier to a grieving father," he stated.

Education Minister Bennett said he supported the soldiers involved (Photo: Marc Israel Sellem)

The minister continued, "You can hear jubilant calls of 'Yes' in the air force's headquarters after a successful mission, even if enemy soldiers were killed. Because they succeeded in their mission.

"We send IDF soldiers to defend our borders from the thousands of terrorists who want to come in and slaughter us, and we mustn't get lost in the bigger picture. Right now, I'm placing my trust with commanders. They will carry out an inquiry, and I won't have that soldier judged in the media's court."WASHINGTON - Senior British, French and German officials believe they are making headway towards an agreement that would address US President Donald Trump's concerns about the Iran nuclear deal, a European diplomat said on Thursday.

"We came out feeling like we are making good progress towards addressing the president's concerns and coming to an agreement," the diplomat told a small group of reporters. Senior diplomats from the three European nations met a senior US State Department official on Wednesday to discuss the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement.The Irish Ambassador to Israel Alison Kelly was summoned to the Foreign Affairs Ministry Thursday after the Mayor of Dublin Lord Micheal Mac Donncha attended an anti-Israel event in Ramallah, also to express Israel's dissatisfaction over two unfavorable resolutions adopted this week by the Dublin city council

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The deputy director General of the European Department at the Foreign Affairs Ministry expressed her astonishment and deep disappointment at the fact that the mayor chose to participate in a blatantly anti-Israeli event, especially in light of the timing of the eventthe week Israel is marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Lord Micheal Mac Donncha (Photo: AP)

It was made clear to the ambassador that the government of Israel expected a public and official Irish response to the conduct of the capital city council in general and its mayor in particular, both of which were conducting a campaign of discrimination and hatred against the State of Israel, it was said.

The Dublin mayor attended an international conference called the "Beit al-Muqadis Conference." The conference convenes every year (this is the ninth year), and its most senior participant is Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The conference deals with the place of Jerusalem for the Palestinians and the Islamic nation in general. The title of the conference this year, following the Trump declaration of Jerusalem as Israels capital is "Jerusalem - the eternal capital of the State of Palestine.

Lord Mac Donncha, who led a decision to expel the Israeli ambassador from his city limits, landed at Ben-Gurion Airport and arrived at a conference in Ramallah as a guest of the Palestinian Authority despite an injunction banning his entry issued at the request of Interior Minister Aryeh Deri. He was admitted, an investigation revealed, due to an error in the spelling of his name.The Real Estate Institute of the Northern Territory (REINT) is concerned by the Northern Territory governments interest in introducing a land tax.

According to Quentin Kilian, CEO of REINT, a land tax would impact every Territorian, not just those that own property.

Renters would be impacted as landlords may try to pass on the tax via higher rents. Commercial tenants and retailers would also be impacted, as their landlords may seek to bypass the tax via increased outgoing costsand that would include all the space currently being rented by government offices.

Elderly people, and those on low or fixed incomes, would be impacted if a tax of 0.5% is imposed on the current Darwin City UCV. The average additional tax bill  every year  would be around $1,825, the REINT said.

Small businesses would also feel the heat, as land taxes have been proven to impact on their cash flows and borrowing capacities, meaning less investment into their businesses.

And bear in mind that the governments discussion paper on this new taxation regime indicated that if a land tax were to be introduced it would be in addition to, not in place of, stamp duty, Kilian said. So a person purchasing property in the Territory would be hit twice for taxation.

In its submission to the Northern Territory Revenue Discussion Paper, the REINT said the imposition of a new tax regime, or increased taxation affecting the property market, is particularly ill-timed at present, given the fragile state of the property market, especially in Greater Darwin.

There is empirical evidence from markets such as New Zealand that have shown a 1 percent land tax led to a fall in land values of 16.7 percent, Kilian said.

The REINT feels that any additional tax measures applied to this fragile property market will have highly detrimental and long term impacts, even to the point that they could increase the population decline. We are therefore calling on the government to absolutely rule out the introduction of a land tax for the Northern Territory in the next budget.

Related stories:News

Washington, DC - Acting Secretary of State John J. Sullivan: "On behalf of the Government of the United States of America, I extend best wishes to the people of the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic as they celebrate Pi Mai Lao on April 14.

"Our bilateral Comprehensive Partnership continues to grow, as exemplified recently by the first-ever visit to Laos by a U.S. Secretary of Commerce and visits by three delegations from the U.S. House of Representatives. The strong and growing people-to-people ties between our two countries, and our continued support for the Lao governments development goals, in particular assistance in clearing unexploded ordnance, further demonstrates our commitment to a lasting and productive friendship with Laos.

"I wish all Lao people a prosperous and joyful Lao New Year."Yuma News

Yuma, Arizona - Today, 18 year old Daniel Molina and a 17 year old male were located and arrested by Yuma Police Officers. Both are the primary suspects in this case. They are being charged with multiple counts of arson and endangerment. A 16 year old male was also arrested and is being charged with conspiracy and witness tampering.

A fourth suspect, 18 year old Devon Munson has not been located. He is being sought and faces multiple charges of arson and endangerment.

This case is still under investigation.

The Yuma Police Department encourages anyone with any information about this case to please call the Yuma Police Department at (928) 373-4700 or 78-CRIME at (928) 782-7463 to remain anonymous.

01/31/2018:

Over 20 properties suffered damage with 5 homes appearing to be a total loss.

The fire has been determined to be Arson. The investigation has revealed two males scaled a construction fence with a lighter and gas can. They utilized the gasoline to initiate the fire. The suspects fled the scene. The investigation is on-going into identifying and locating the suspects.

On Monday, January 29, 2018 at 3:35 a.m., the Yuma Police Department responded to a suspicious fire at Mesa Heights Apartment and several other residential structures, located in the 2100 block of Arizona Avenue, in reference to a fire. The Yuma Fire Department was already on scene.

The initial investigation revealed the fire appears to be intentionally started.

There were no reported injuries.

This is currently under investigation.

The Yuma Police Department encourages anyone with any information about this case to please call Detective E. Fell at (928) 373-4744 or 78-Crime at (928) 782-7463 to remain anonymous. Remember if your information leads to an arrest you may receive up to $1,000 cash reward.Are you a Ghanaian who has a dream of studying their masters degree program at a foreign university? Well, the Graduate Record Examination test is among the requirements for you to get admitted in most of the foreign universities. GRE exams in Ghana are similar to GRE exams in the rest of the world since regardless of where it is taken, the exam is standardized and observes the same format and rules.

Source: Asian Scientist Magazine

What is GRE exams all about? The Educational Testing Services (ETS) coordinates the standardized exams, which is an organization in the United States. Paper-based and computer-based formats are the 2 modes used by the ETS to conduct the test. If you are Ghanaian interested in doing the test, this article is for you. Read on to know everything from Ghana test centers, registration, fees, and test dates.

GRE exams in Ghana

The GRE tests include general tests and a total of 7 additional subjects that will test your understanding of your field. The general tests is meant to measure various skills in the following areas:

1. Verbal reasoning

You will need to be able to complete test questions, fill blanks in 2 separated word sentences, and critical reading. You should prepare well for this test especially on synonyms areas.

1 hour is the timing for the section, but split into tasks half an hour each with 20 questions.

The scores are 130 to 170 points, which is interpreted that you will still attain 130 points even without getting any of the question right.

2. Analytical Writing Assessment

Do you know how write essays? It is a brush for the learned students. Right? Be prepared to write an argument and issue essay.

The timing of the task is split into two 35 minutes each with 20 questions.

It has a 0-6 scale in that you can get a complete zero in this writing section if your not well-prepared.

3. Qualitative Reasoning

Maths gurus will be very comfortable in doing the test that will be on areas like the numeric entry, problem solving, and quantitative comparisons. You should be ready for algebra, statistics, and geometry; do not bother on revising the trigonometry/calculus because they are not included.

The section is split into 2 half an hour sections.

The scores are 130 to 170 points, which is interpreted that you will still attain 130 points even without getting any of the question right.

READ ALSO: WAEC Ghana BECE grading system.

Source: C2 education

How to Register for GRE Exams in Ghana

Before you start off with your GRE test registration in Ghana, you should be aware that not all foreign universities require the scores of this test. You should check first if your dream university requires it. The interesting bit is that there is no 2018 eligibility of the GRE test. This means that apart from being above 18 years and having a degree in a specific field, the chance to apply is open for any Ghanaian student in need of a masters degree. Here are tips on GRE test registration 2018.

Step 1  Create your GRE account which you will use to check your result score, and cancel your registration

Step 2  Register for the test either online, or via email by creating ETS account, GRE 2018 registration.

The online Ghana registration is preferred by most students because it is easier and will take only few minutes. All you need to do is to visit the website and create an account.

Mail Ghana Registration can be done via downloading the form and fill it.

Step 3  which type of the test do want between the GRE general and GRE test subjects? Select it.

Step 4  include the location and the date of the GRE test 2018.

Step 5  fill in all your academic information required.

Step 6  pay for the test via MasterCard/ Visa/ America Empress/ Discover. In simple words, pay at exchange rate.

GRE Examination Centers in Ghana

GRE exams in Ghana have only one Centre that is in Accra, Linear Assessment services. What do you need to prove your identification? Well, carry with a passport that is valid.

Going by recent headlines, the GRE test fee in Ghana is $205/ 905.98 Ghanaian Cedi for the General test and $150 for the other the subject test on your specific field. Keep in mind that if you register late for the paper-based (online) you will incur GRE exams fees amounting to $25; for the paper-based test a fee of $50 is required. The extra cost of GRE exam in Ghana for a student who registered for a subject and they later think of changing, is $50.

World Education Services

GRE exams dates in Ghana 2018

GRE test dates in Accra Ghana are selected by the student from the available dates on the year of registration. The GRE exam dates in Ghana usually fall on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. In 2018, the exams will take 12 months and you need to take the test once in 21 days. Where to write GRE exams in Ghana being in Accra alone, it means that you have to make sure you have a seat during the exam day.

READ ALSO: A no-nonsense guide to BECE placement you'll ever need!

It is important to prepare for the GRE exams because it will win you higher consideration over the students who never wrote it. The Ghanaian students are lucky for having few yet trusted institutions to help them out with preparing for the exams. The good bit is that they will provide you with sample papers and GRE books in Ghana to study. Here are a few GRE examination centres in Ghana

Global Baseline Institution

The Global Baseline has a small class size in order for the teacher to recognize every student's weakness in a particular test. The teachers are more than qualified in that field in that they are capable of giving you quality lessons. If you are a slow learner, they offer a teacher and a student tuition at a very affordable price. Visit and get enrolled there, do your registration there, and you wont regret.

Timeline Trust

Timeline Trust is popular for offering quality tuitions to students in need of an advanced degree. Once you get enrolled at the institution you are sure that the chances for you to get admitted into your dream foreign university are high. A total amount of GH999, is enough to cover most of the things including study materials, your tuition, help you in your application for the university and Visa, to counseling.

Source: Classroom Synonym

GRE Results in Ghana 2018

The Ghanaian students who sat for the GRE exam will be sent an email to notify them to check out their scores. You have your GRE account and that is where you find your scores. Have in mind that scores are valid for two years. Once you have your score report, send your perfect scores to your list of dream foreign universities. In case you failed a test, there is a chance for you to register for a retake. The ETS will offer you 4 foreign universities to select if interested. To send your scores you have to be prepared to spend $20. Choose wisely a business or graduate school that offer your course, find out if they offer scholarships, and also check out their part-time services.

You can use your GRE scores to get scholarship, especially when you have a good score It is likely especially for student with a more than 160 score in sections for the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning to get scholarship. The writing score of about 5 is also perfect for you to increase your chances for that scholarship.

READ ALSO: GES births new website for BECE computerized placement

Source: Yen.com.ghThe Ghanaian artist still manages to release hits that trend worldly in spite of his raps being in his mother language, Twi. Sarkodie songs have elevated Ghana in the world and his fans have a long list and they enjoy his great uniqueness, vocals, and performance. One thing is for sure, Sarkodie does not disappoint.

Source: Pinterest

If you are a good observer, am sure you have noticed that Sarkodie songs video dont have naked women dancing. Right? That is one reason that makes the Ghanaian rapper unique and respected. He sings to motivate or portray a meaningful message with his great lyrics, but not to impress.

Sarkodie songs 2020

Sarkodie songs list is trending because of his awesome collaborations with great and popular musicians. Going by his songs, the musician has vowed to work harder, and this is good news to his fans. It seems 2018 will be a good year, for all of us.

Sarkodie Glory

Sarkodie released this song on 2017 in his Highest album and it was featuring Yung L, a popular artist. It shed light and played in almost every part of the globe. This song has great lyrics, you can never get bored. Its lyrics also motivate people to work hard to achieve their dreams and to put God first because he is always in control.

In the same song, Sarkodie talks of his past about his friends Kwame Boadi in particular, doubting his dream wish of becoming an international artist. Losing hope does not exist to Sarkodie and he has made it, even though this seemed a fairy tale to many. You need to listen to this top trendy song. Download it and it will act as a great inspiration to you.

Sarkodie Mary

Sarkodie released this song on 12th September 2015 and the awing bit is that it is still trending this year, 2018. The song takes the listener to a journey of love, belief, and sorrow. He dedicated this song to his late grandmother Mary who took her rest in 2012, saying how she always wanted his Grandchild Sarkodie to record live music.

Mary is among the Sarkodie songs instrumentals and it portrays Sarkodie's versatility to all his fans and those who criticize his hits. You need to listen to it and you will be in love with the great vocals and lyrics of the song.

Sarkodie Gboza

Sarkodie songs released in 2017 were all amazing, but Gboza hit all music stations with a blow and up to date it is still rocking. His rapping skills and the quality of the video becomes more great to the viewers since Samuel Nana Yaw Dabo, a Ghanaian actor who is popularly known as Dabo, plays in the video as a funny and a mischievous character.

Most people say they also love the way Sarkodie gives a story of hustle. You need to listen and watch this great song if you have not done so. I bet you will not regret it downloading it, but you will enjoy it to the fullest.

READ ALSO: YEN.com.gh readers critically examine Stonebwoys call to local musicians to learn from Nigerian music artistes

Sarkodie Almighty

Almighty was released on 7th November 2017 and it is still trending this year. He dedicates this song to those people trying to throw shades on him so that they can pull him down. Sarkodie even goes ahead to summon his haters before the almighty God. According to him, he has done nothing to deserve that and he even asks the public through his song if he needs to apologize.

The great lyrics indirectly tries to tell everyone that not everybody is happy with your success and they would really love to see you fall. It is true and a big fact. Right? You have to listen to this song and update your playlist with this amazing hit.

Sarkodie Far Away

This amazing song was released in 2017 under the Highest album featuring Koredo Bello. If you have not listened to this song, upload it today; the great vocals and lyrics will take you to a journey of love. Sarkodie and Koredo Bello dedicated this song to their lover s, telling them how much they want to share the good moments with them forever.

Who said you cant dedicate this song to your lover too? Surprise her and she will even love you more and more. The great vocals and lyrics will make your lover feel special and appreciated. Download and also enjoy the great Sarkodie hit.

Sarkodie Overdose

This is among the Sarkodie best songs that I dont think they will never go out of the top listed trendy songs in years to come. This song was released in 2017 under the Highlife album featuring Jesse Jagz, a popular artist. It has amazing lyrics with a message condemning those who talk about the rappers copying Sarkodie's style and he tells them that he is very proud of that, but not mad.

Many would think that he gets mad; now people know he does not give a bother, but feels super excited with the act. Overdose has a quality video and you should add to your playlist to get entertained.

Sarkodie Jennifer Lomotey

The artist of this song is Kurl Songx with Sarkodie featuring it. Sarkodie is known for being a talented artist and his rapping skills in this particular song rock, maybe since its genre is more like an RNB/ Soul. You have to download, watch, and listen to it by subscribing on Sarkodie YouTube videos and you will truly enjoy the music.

Jennifer Lomotey will take to a journey of romance and it will be a great dedication to your life partner to make them feel special and appreciated. Some lack words to express their feelings and I think this is the best song with amazing vocals.

READ ALSO: Sulley Muntari talks music; reveals his top 3 Ghanaian musicians

Sarkodie Come To Me

This song is just amazing and a favorite to many because of its awesome lines with a message that will take its listeners to a journey of romance and laughter. Come To Me was released in 2017 featuring Bobbi Lewis. They dedicate this song to their one and only lover that holds the key to their heart.

Download it and am sure you will fall in love with it. Girls love attention. Right? Why dont you dedicate this song to your girlfriend or wife to make them feel loved. The vocals are on point and you need to listen to this special track.

Sarkodie We No Dey Fear

This trending song has made his fans even think that it is a 2018 song due to its quality. This song was officially released in 2017 under Highest featuring JAYSO. Its lyrics is full of praises of how fearless the artists are and the amazing vocals make it just perfect. You need to upload this song and add it to your playlist.

Sarkodie Highest

Highest song made it to be the title for Songs by Sarkodie album in which a number are trending this year. The album has a total of 19 tracks and it was released on September 8th 2017. Sarkodie took 2 years to do the recordings of this track and he made collaborations with popular talented artists like Runtown, Flavour, Koredo Bello, Victoria Kimani, Yung L, Jesse Jagz, Moelogo, Bobii Lewis, and Jayso.

You need to listen, watch, and download these Sarkodie latest songs of this album and add them to your playlist. Highest a great song with amazing lyrics and vocals will answer you why it made it to be the title of the whole album.

Source: YenA Ghanaian female soldier has died while on peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, YEN.com.gh has gathered.

According to officials, Corporal Mercy Adade, a member of the United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL) passed away after a short illness last week.

Corporal Adade deployed as a medical clerk to UNIFIL on 22 June 2017 for a one-year tour, was considered as one of the dedicated, hardworking and professional soldiers of her time.

Aged 36, she served in the Ghana Army for about 11 years and has been to Cote dIvoire as peacekeeper before.

READ ALSO: Meet the 3 Ghanaian teenage girls who blew their exams and just got admitted into Harvard, Yale and MIT

According to unifil.unmissions.org, on Wednesday, April 11, 2018 UNIFIL and the Lebanese Armed Forces paid their last respects for her service and sacrifice in furthering peace in south Lebanon.

At the ceremony, Cpl. Adade was reportedly honoured posthumously with UNIFIL and LAF Medals.

READ ALSO: PHOTO: Ghanaians mock Shatta Wale over his 'Tiger Head battery' look to Asantehene's palace

The people of Lebanon and UNIFIL are grateful to Mercy for all her sacrifices. We must all strive to work for peace in memory of all our colleagues who did not make it,  UNIFIL Deputy Force Commander Major General Shivaram Kharel said of Corporal Adade.

"On this day, we remember Mercy and the thousands of peacekeepers around the world who have lost their lives in the quest for lasting peace, he said.

READ ALSO: Wiyaala 'challenges' Sister Deborah's nude shots with new wild photos of her own

Major General Kharel added that "the people of Lebanon and UNIFIL are grateful to Mercy for all her sacrifices. We must all strive to work for peace in memory of all our colleagues who did not make it. We honour her selflessness, bravery and service to the United Nations, Lebanon, and Ghana. Although she is no longer with us, her legacy will live on.

The Commanding Officer of the Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel William Nortey, also eulogised Corporal Adade saying, "her loss has left a void in the Ghanaian Battalion and the Ghana Armed Forces that cannot be filled."

"Cpl. Mercy had been the pride of Ghana and was a role model to follow in a UN Peacekeeping operation, Lt. Col. Nortey added.

Corporal Adade is among over 300 peacekeepers who are said to have died in Lebanon since UNIFILs establishment in 1978.

In the video below, the deputy education minister, Mrs Barbara Ayisi, speaks on how President Akufo-Addo inspires her, and how the president's success story must also inspire the youth of Ghana to greater heights:

READ ALSO: PHOTO: Lady sacked from church for 'exposing her body'

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish on YEN.com.gh?

Please contact us on Facebook or Instagram now!

Source: Yen.com.gh-Social media users have taken actress Moesha Boduong to the cleaners over her comments in an international interview

-Many people who reacted to the interview have considered the comments of the actress to be highly unaccpetable

-Moesha Bodoung granted an interview with CNN's Christiane Amnapour and it has gone viral

Ghanaian actress and model, Moesha Babiinoti Boduong has incurred the wrath of many social media users after her recent interview with Cable News Networks Christiane Amanpour about being a mistress in Ghana.

According to the actress who was speaking on CNN's 'Sex and Love around the world', revealed that Ghanas economy was such that it was almost impossible to earn enough as a woman.

READ ALSO: 'I sleep with a married man for money'  Moesha Boduong

She added that as a worker herself who had just landed a job, it was extremely difficult for her to raise money singlehandedly to get an apartment since landlords were asking for too much advance payment.

Moesha Boduong shockingly revealed that she was sleeping with a married man because he was capable of taking care of her financial needs.

The actress indicated that all she had to do was to avail herself whenever the man need her company and insisted she could not turn down his request since it was a sign of cheating.

However, some social media users have not taken kindly to the words of the Asylum is Down actress and have called her out for disgracing women in Ghana.

READ ALSO: Ghanaian journalist orders Chinese to pick up after littering in a drain

Ghanaians on social media are running amok over the actress comments with the view that it was not the true representation of the lives of many Ghanaian women who are putting in effort to better their lives.

The social media users have indicated that the actress who is reported to have graduated from the university, should not have generalized her comments to encompass all Ghanaian ladies.

However, some social media users have sided with the actress and concluded that she was speaking the truth since many unemployed young ladies appear to be in the habit of selling their bodies to survive.

Not too long ago, Moesha announced that she was going to appear on international news network, CNN. It was however not clear the purpose of the appearance.

However, the video with the international journalist which has gone viral, seems to be attracting backlash for the actress.

Here are some of the reactions on social media in response to Moeshas interview:

Naa appears to be dumbfounded by the actress' way of reasoning

Sharkels was of the view that it was a clear case of 'Beauty without brains'

Christian expected her to be getting more than just rent

Solomon called out the actress for degrading Ghanaian women

As for Kwesi, he said that was typical Moesha

Christian has more 'jabs' for the actress

Edem appears to be gutted by the actress' international show of disgrace

I-am-Ofori-Atta has drawn a line between other women and Moesha

Hajia was really pissed about the who;e interview

READ ALSO: Wiyaala releases stunning photos of herself adorned in beads

In the video below, the deputy education minister, Mrs Barbara Ayisi, speaks on how President Akufo-Addo inspires her, and how the president's success story must also inspire the youth of Ghana to greater heights:

YEN is building a platform where Ghanaians can share local news and own experiences with each other. Witnessing an incident?

Want to tell about a local problem? Know someone who is extremely talented and needs recognition?

Your stories and photos are always welcome. Send us a message via YENs official Facebook page.

Source: YenComments and links to reports on science, and its applications.- Some female celebrities have reacted to actress Moesha Boduongs comments in an interview on CNN

- The celebs revealed that not all Ghanaian women were sleeping with men to make ends meet

Some female celebrities in Ghana have taken to their social media handles to respond to a viral video of actress Moesha Bodoung over claims that it is not easy to make it in Ghana on your own as a woman due to the economy.

Their comments and sentiments come on the heels of a viral interview the actress granted to international journalist, Christiane Amanpour about ways of taking care of yourself as a woman in Ghana.

Moesha Bodoung

READ ALSO: 6 celebrities who have been accused of sleeping with men for cash and survival

Musician Eazzy, took to her Twitter account and expressed her shock over the video she was seeing because according to her, it was not the full representation of the life of all women in Ghana.

Her comment read, What the hell did i just watch ! Im burying my face in shame . No we dont have an economy that makes it okay to sleep with men because they will pay your rent n take care of your financial needs ! We have an economy where our mothers worked extremely hard to train us with ... "

Fellow actress Efia Odo, also took to her Twitter account to vehemently refute the claims being made by Moesha.

Efia commented, I wake up at 4am every morning to get to work for 5:45 am leave at 10am to come back for 6pm and leave at 10pm. Not all of US have to depend on a man for financial stability.

READ ALSO: Your daughter would be lucky to have you as her mother - Christiane Amanpor reacts to Moesha's interview

Vicky Zugah, another actress, was seen in a video encouraging young ladies to work hard. She said, S/O to all hardworking and independent women. Keep working your *ss off. Together we can prove them wrong. #NotEveryGhanaianWomanIsLazy#DontBeDeceived #ThisTooShallPass.

Businesswoman and celebrity, Confidence Haugen, also took to her Instagram account to express her disappointment over Moeshas comments. She said, I am very disappointed and heartbroken.

Self-acclaimed queen of comedy in Ghana, Afia Schwarzenegger, also sent a long letter to CNNs Christiane Amanpour over the video that has gone viral on social media.

Social media users in Ghana are up in arms over Moeshas comments with many people calling out the actress for giving off a wrong signal about Ghanaian women.

READ ALSO: Wiyaala releases stunning photos of herself adorned in beads

In the video below, the deputy education minister, Mrs Barbara Ayisi, speaks on how President Akufo-Addo inspires her, and how the president's success story must also inspire the youth of Ghana to greater heights:

YEN is building a platform where Ghanaians can share local news and own experiences with each other. Witnessing an incident?

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Your stories and photos are always welcome. Send us a message via YENs official Facebook page.

Source: Yen.com.gh- Ghanaian actress and model, Moesha Boduong, has reportedly responded to the critics of her CNN interview

- Reports reaching YEN.com.gh shows that she posted a message on Facebook, a social media platform

Ghanaian actress and model. Moesha Boduong, who has been subjected to intense criticisms for her comments during a recent CNN interview, has allegedly responded to the verbal attacks.

According to a report by MyNewsGH.com, she is reported to have taken to social media and wrote: Allow the saints to throw stones at you; gather them and use it to build your house. Good morning.

In the course of an interview with CNN, Moesha allegedly stated that Ghanas economic conditions have forced some ladies to offer themselves to men, in order to live a comfortable life.

Moesha Boduong

READ ALSO: 7 facts about Moesha that may amaze you

Our economy is such that you just need someone to take care of you, because you cant make enough money as a woman here, she said.

She went on to say that the married man takes good care of her by providing her with her basic needs, including paying her rent, buying a car for her and providing her money for her upkeep.

Moesha further noted that getting an apartment is Ghana is also a challenge, as one is expected to pay two years rent in advance.

In that respect, she went on, there is no way she can get settle that, as she has just started working.

READ ALSO: CNN's Christine Amanpour reacts to Moesha viral video

In the video below, the deputy education minister, Mrs Barbara Ayisi, speaks on how President Akufo-Addo inspires her, and how the president's success story must also inspire the youth of Ghana to greater heights.

Use the comments section below to share your views on this story. Do you have a story to share or you have information for us? Get featured on YEN.com.gh. Message us on Facebook or Instagram

Source: Yen.com.gh#15/15 ALABAMA (25-11, 6-6 SEC) at #19/20 ARKANSAS (31-8, 6-6 SEC)

Fayetteville, Ark.  Bogle Park

Friday, April 13  6 p.m. CT

Saturday, April 14  11 a.m. CT *ESPNU*

Sunday, April 15  1 p.m. CT

SCOUTING ALABAMA

Alabama is 25-11 overall and 6-6 in SEC play heading into this weekend after winning one of its three games against Florida last weekend in Tuscaloosa.

For the second-straight week, the Crimson Tide is ranked No. 15 in both the USA Today/NFCA poll and ESPN.com/USA Softball poll. Alabama moved up two spots in the NCAA RPI to No. 18. Twelve SEC teams are ranked or receiving votes in the national polls and all 13 are ranked 32 or higher in the RPI.

Freshman Kaylee Tow leads the offense in batting average (.378), runs scored (26), hits (37), on-base percentage (.496) and slugging percentage (.724). Her eight home runs is tied for the team lead with sophomore Bailey Hemphill , who is 30-for-92 (.326) at the plate with a team-leading 27 walks, reaching base safely in 31 of her 35 games this season including a streak of 18-straight. Elissa Brown is third on the team with a .321 batting average and leads the team with 22 stolen bases. Six of those stolen bases have come in conference play, which leads the SEC.

leads the offense in batting average (.378), runs scored (26), hits (37), on-base percentage (.496) and slugging percentage (.724). Her eight home runs is tied for the team lead with sophomore , who is 30-for-92 (.326) at the plate with a team-leading 27 walks, reaching base safely in 31 of her 35 games this season including a streak of 18-straight. is third on the team with a .321 batting average and leads the team with 22 stolen bases. Six of those stolen bases have come in conference play, which leads the SEC. Senior Alexis Osorio leads the pitching staff with a 1.99 ERA over 91.1 innings, striking out 138 batters for an average of 1.51 per inning. Junior Courtney Gettins leads the bullpen with 10 wins, owning a 2.13 ERA over 15 appearances and 79.0 innings pitched.

LAST TIME OUT: ALABAMA FALLS TO FOURTH-RANKED FLORIDA

GAME ONE: FLORIDA 6, ALABAMA 1: Alabama fell behind in the first inning after Florida scored a pair of runs. The Crimson Tide cut the deficit in half in the bottom of the second after a fielding error allowed an unearned run to cross the plate. The Gators would go on to score four more runs down the stretch to bring the score to its final mark of 6-1. Making her return following a two-week absence with a foot injury, senior Peyton Grantham went 2-for-3 batting sixth.

Alabama fell behind in the first inning after Florida scored a pair of runs. The Crimson Tide cut the deficit in half in the bottom of the second after a fielding error allowed an unearned run to cross the plate. The Gators would go on to score four more runs down the stretch to bring the score to its final mark of 6-1. Making her return following a two-week absence with a foot injury, senior went 2-for-3 batting sixth. GAME TWO: ALABAMA 3, FLORIDA 2: Alabama scored the first run of the game on an RBI single from freshman Kaylee Tow but Florida evened it up in the top of the fourth with a solo home run. The Crimson Tide answered right back in the bottom half with a solo home run from sophomore Bailey Hemphill to retake the lead. An RBI double for UF in the top of the fifth tied it up at 2-2 but a second long ball courtesy of UA senior Sydney Booker made it a 3-2 game, which ultimately proved final. Sophomore Elissa Brown set the tone at the top of the order, going 2-for-3 with a run scored and a pair of stolen bases. Junior Courtney Gettins threw 4.2 innings in the start with senior Alexis Osorio earning the win in relief, allowing just two hits over 2.1 innings pitched with four strikeouts.

Alabama scored the first run of the game on an RBI single from freshman but Florida evened it up in the top of the fourth with a solo home run. The Crimson Tide answered right back in the bottom half with a solo home run from sophomore to retake the lead. An RBI double for UF in the top of the fifth tied it up at 2-2 but a second long ball courtesy of UA senior made it a 3-2 game, which ultimately proved final. Sophomore set the tone at the top of the order, going 2-for-3 with a run scored and a pair of stolen bases. Junior threw 4.2 innings in the start with senior earning the win in relief, allowing just two hits over 2.1 innings pitched with four strikeouts. GAME THREE: FLORIDA 3, ALABAMA 2: Alabama pulled ahead in the bottom of the third on a two-run home run from freshman Kaylee Tow , but Florida answered right back in the next half-inning tying it with a two-run double. The score remained the same until the Gators pulled ahead 3-2 on a solo home run in the top of the sixth, which proved final. The Tide out-hit the Gators, 4-2, while sophomore Bailey Hemphill drew a pair of walks to extend her reached-base streak to 18 games. Alexis Osorio battled in the complete-game effort, throwing a season-high 179 pitches holding Florida to three runs on two hits with nine strikeouts.

ALABAMA BATS AMONG SEC LEADERS

Through four conference series, the Alabama offense is among the league leaders in numerous categories in SEC-only play.

Batting Average - 2nd - .279

Slugging Percentage - 2nd - .442

Home Runs - 2nd - 12

Walks - 2nd - 42

Total Bases - 3rd - 138

On-Base Percentage - 3rd - .371

Runs Scored - 4th - 53

Hits - 4th - 87

Doubles - T4th - 13

Runs Batted In - T4th - 47

TOW TEARING IT UP IN SEC PLAY

Freshman Kaylee Tow has led the Crimson Tide at the plate in SEC play and is among the top-10 league-wide in a number of offensive categories. In five of the six categories, she is the highest ranked freshman. She is second among SEC freshman in conference walks (8), only trailing Florida's Hannah Adams (11).

Kaylee Tow in SEC-Only Games

* = leader among freshmen

*Batting Average - T3rd - .389

*On-Base Percentage - 4th - .511

*Slugging Percentage - 5th - .667

*Home Runs - T5th - 3

*Total Bases - T7th - 24

Walks - T8th - 8

OSORIO APPROACHING 1,000 CAREER STRIKEOUTS

Senior Alexis Osorio is approaching a rare milestone at Alabama, as she is just 28 strikeouts away from the 1,000th of her career. She would be just the fourth player in program history to hit the 1,000 strikeout mark and the first since Kelsi Dunne (2008-11). Currently she sits fifth all-time at Alabama, just five away from passing Jaclyn Traina (2011-14).

Alabama Career Strikeout Leaders

Kelsi Dunne (2008-11): 1,219 Stephanie VanBrakle (2003-06): 1,113 Shelley Laird (1999-2002): 1,045 Jaclyn Traina (2011-14): 976 Alexis Osorio (2015-pres.): 972

BAILEY ON BASE

Sophomore Bailey Hemphill leads the team with a 18-game reached base streak, hitting 17-for-49 (.347) over that stretch with six home runs, 15 RBIs and 16 walks. Overall, she has reached base safely in 31 of the 35 games she has played in so far this season, leading the team with 27 walks. Her 18-game reached base streak is just four shy of her career-best 22, set last season. In her Crimson Tide career, she has reached base safely in 86 of the 98 games she has played in.

SEVEN NATIONALLY TELEVISED GAMES REMAIN FOR ALABAMA

Alabama softball is slated to appear seven more times across ESPN's family of networks during the regular season, playing in at least one televised contest in each of the remaining series.

All Crimson Tide home games and select road contests will also be available to stream online via the SEC Network+ digital platform. Links to watch online will be posted on the softball schedule page at RollTide.com and on Alabama Softball social media platforms.



REMAINING ALABAMA SOFTBALL TELEVISED GAMES

Saturday, April 14 at Arkansas  11 a.m. CT  ESPNU

Wednesday, April 18 vs. Southern Miss  6 p.m. CT  SEC Network

Sunday, April 22 vs. Tennessee  2 p.m. CT  ESPN2

Monday, April 23 vs. Tennessee  6 p.m. CT  SEC Network

Saturday, April 28 at Georgia  5 p.m. CT  SEC Network

Friday, May 4 vs. Texas A&M  7 p.m. CT  SEC Network

Saturday, May 5 vs. Texas A&M  Noon CT  SEC Network

UP NEXT

Alabama plays four home games next week, starting with a midweek matchup against Southern Miss on Wednesday, April 18 at 6 p.m. CT. The Tide then welcomes in Tennessee for a three-game series starting Saturday, April 21 at 4:30 p.m. CT. Game two is set for a 2 p.m. CT start on Sunday, April 22 live on ESPN2 and the series wraps up on Monday, April 23 at 6 p.m. CT live on SEC Network.Intro

Greetings! I am a political scientist , specializing in International Relations , my research and teaching focus on ethnic conflict and civil-military relations . I watch way too much TV, and I like movies as well so I tend to write about both and find IR stuff in pop culture. I rant alot about American politics and sometimes about Canadian politics. I like to take ideas I once learned a long time ago and apply them to whatever strikes my fancy.

Thank you for reading!

Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading.Hundreds of volunteers took to the streets of Santa Maria, Lompoc, Solvang and Nipomo this morning during the fifth annual Day of Hope, a regiNATIONAL HARBOR, Md.  The Navy is pushing out new autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that utilize low-frequency wavelengths to identify objects deep underwater. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) presented data at their Sea-Air-Space booth April 11 showing how this method makes it easier for ships to see mines below the sea bottom.

Zachary Walters, researcher at NRL, noted that every object has a unique acoustic fingerprint, and with the new method, structural acoustic (SA) sonar, AUVs can determine what each individual object is.

The low-frequency wavelengths used in SA also offer the chance to punch into the deeper sediment in the ocean, Walters said.

Of course, there are infinite number of objects potentially hidden in the sea, so NRL is focusing more on target recognition rather than identifying every bit of clutter.

We do know what our targets that we are interested in look like, either through laboratory measurements, at-sea measurements or through forward numerical modeling, Walters explained. And, so, we use those  to build up a library of objects that we are interested in, and we pass this on, along with the data we measure at sea, to our automated classifiers.

According to Waters, SA is currently being transitioned out to the field for testing with Knifefish, a mine-hunting AUV. As it gathers more research, NRL hopes to extend to much larger ranges and higher area of coverage, which will be transitioned to Knighfish in later updates.

The NRLs ultimate goal for SA is to create AUVs that run fully autonomous operations. Walters believes that effort will rely on the continued cooperation of ONR and NRL.CDC Chair Promises Exciting Vincy Mas 2018

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For Vincy Mas 2018, the Hottest Carnival in the Caribbean, organizers are promising an experience that everyone can enjoy, with all-inclusive, energetic events and the availability of early bird tickets.

At the media launch on April 10 at the Cruise Ship Terminal, chair of the Carnival Development Corporation (CDC) Ricardo Adams said whether persons desire hard-core traditional or something ultra risque, Vincy Mas offers both.

He said the all-inclusive packages for CDC events Miss SVG pageant and the EVO 4.1, which were introduced last year, will be retained, as well as a semi inclusive section for the Steel and Glitter event. Adams revealed that e-tickets and hard copy tickets for these, as well as weekend package tickets for Vincy Mas shows, will be available for purchase in time for the launch of Vincy Mas on Saturday, May 5 and are value added.

So, by the time Vincy Mas launches, you will have both physical and online tickets for sale, so that people from overseas can get online tickets and people locally can get the physical tickets. Again this year, we are trying to put together packages, so that people can come and buy a Vincy Mas package that runs from Thursday to Sunday night.

He said T-shirt bands are getting bigger and while traditional costumes are maintained, there will be costumes on the other end of the scale. So, whether you want to go hard-core traditional or ultra risque there is mas here in St Vincent for you, Adams said.

A simultaneous launch of Vincy Mas will be held in New York, as well as a cool down event.

Adams urged everyone to support Vincy Mas because it is financially beneficial to the country. He also made an appeal to persons in the performing arts who are not part of Carnival to come forward as judges for some events.

Vincy Mas will be officially launched on Saturday, May 5, followed by 10 shows: Miss SVG  Saturday, June 2; Soca Semi-finals  Saturday, June 23; Calypso Semi-finals  Friday, June 29; Junior Carnival  Saturday, June 30; Junior Pan Fest  Sunday, July 1; Junior Calypso/Soca  Tuesday, July 3; Steel and Glitter  Thursday, July 5; EVO 4.1  Friday, July 6; Soca Monarch  Saturday, July 7; Dimanche Gras  Sunday, July 8; JOuvert & T-Shirt Band  Monday, July 9 and Mardi Gras  Tuesday, July 10.

Minister of Tourism Cecil McKie said he anticipates more persons visiting SVG for the Carnival season, since the addition of direct flights from Canada and New York.

Vincy Mas 2018 AH TELL YUH! will be held from June 29 to July10.

For more details contact the Carnival development organization at 784-457 2580 or a www.carnivalsvg.com.Parents, guardians abandoning children, elderly at shelters

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A plea has been made by Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves for people to demonstrate greater care to the most vulnerable in the population.

He was referring specifically to the elderly and children who,it is reported, are being simply left at shelters across the green zone.

Speaking this week on radio, Michelle Forbes, Director of the National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO) said that up to 50 pre-primary and primary aged children and teenagers, as well as elderly relatives, had been left at shelters sometimes for days, by parents and relatives. Some have actually been abandoned.

Forbes, who was invited by Gonsalves to provide an update on last Mondays (May 3) Eyeing La Soufriere programme on NBC, explained that these relatives are leaving their children and elderly relatives at the shelters for long periods and, in many instances the officials, including shelter managers, have no idea where the parents, or persons responsible for the elderly have gone.

Forbes said when these parents and relatives return they claim that they had gone back to their homes to clean.

She said while cleaning is understandable, the point is that they must say where they are going, and it is not acceptable to leave children and teenagers unsupervised for days on end. The majority of persons evacuated and in shelters are from the red zone which has been declared to be off limits.

Further responding to the Prime Ministers questions, Forbes pointed out that there are two shelters which house evacuees who are bed-ridden and these shelters have the service of home helpers.

Her fear is that some persons might not want to take their elderly dependent relatives back home after the current crisis is over and an all-clear given for persons to return.

Forbes added that evacuees have made requests for things like wheelchairs and hospital beds, and have threatened to leave their relatives if these items are not provided.

She said some of these things have been provided but people were still going away and leaving their relatives behind.

Noting that it is reasonable for people to ask for wheelchairs for their elderly relatives who have mobility problems, the PM appealed for persons to be more caring, and called on people who are demonstrating this type of behaviour to stop, and be more caring to those who need their help.

He said it is wrong to leave elderly persons and children in the care of strangers and at the mercy of other people you do not know.

Dr. Gonsalves said he is appealing to the caring instincts of people and also asked that they communicate with the shelter managers.

SEARCHLIGHT paid a visit to one of the shelters in Kingstown and found children and elderly evacuees left unsupervised by their caretakers.National Properties To Repay Debt With Ju-C Building

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The Ju-C building at the entrance of Kingstown is to be sold by the state owned company National Properties Ltd to the National Insurance Services (NIS) as payment for part of a debt owed.

This was revealed by Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves in answer to a question posed by the Leader of the Opposition Dr Godwin Friday in Parliament on April 5.

The Government was asked to say how the Ju-C building has been used since it was purchased with much fanfare, for over five million dollars. Friday also asked why, since the Government rents office space in Kingstown, why the Ju-C building was not being used for government offices or other government uses.

The question also asked what the future use of the building would be, to justify the use of millions of dollars of taxpayers money to purchase it.

Firstly, the Prime Minister had some clarifications on the question, intoning, I made the statement that the Government wanted to have, to own this building, because I did not want, the Government did not want, to see a building at the entrance of the city, which doesnt merit the entrance of the city. There is no fanfare.

He also stated that the Government had bought the building for $6.325 million.

The Prime Minister disclosed that the building has been used for most of the time since its purchase, with LIME, Uptown International and the YES campaign being among its occupants over the years.

He said at one time, there had been plans for an overseas commercial bank to lease the building.

A design had in fact been done for the Ju-C building, and one commercial bank, overseas commercial bank, was interested in partnering with us, he stated, continuing, It was going to be a long lease, certainly for one floor, possibly for two floors.

However, in the end, he said that due to the global economic downturn, the agreement did not go through.

Gonsalves said the property is now being purchased from National Properties Ltd by the NIS for $8.4 million. This money will be paid by partial debt relief for National Properties Ltd, as they owe the NIS. The Prime Minister indicated that the National Properties has borrowed the monies in relation to properties where they were selling on an ongoing basis to provide resources for the Argyle International Airport (AIA) as part of the creative funding.

Finally, Gonsalves indicated that, National Insurance Services intends to develop the property, and the Cabinet has given the blessing in this regard.

He further disclosed that the Government hopes to develop the BAICO plot of land to the rear of the Inland Revenue Department. In fact, the Government will be able to go in to the bank and essentially borrow the money, develop it and save on the rental in different places.Hoyte was a tower of strength for Searchlight newspaper (+Videos)

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by Clare Keizer

It is not an overstatement to say that had it not been for Harold Hoyte, SEARCHLIGHT newspaper would not have developed into the institution it is today.

Harold was my mentor and my friend, and before that, he was my mothers rock.

When SEARCHLIGHT was established in 1995, Harold told my mother, Norma Keizer, that she could lean on him, and she leaned hard. At an event held here in St Vincent on May 19, 2008 to honour Mummy , he related that she had the knack of calling him at the most inopportune moments to pass her problems on to him. He however always made the time for her, or found someone else who could give her the benefit of their experience at the Nation.

Harold felt it was his duty, obligation even, to support fledgling newspapers around the region as had been done for the Nation by Ken Gordon and the Express Newspaper of Trinidad, when the Nation was trying to get off its feet. His support of regional newspapers was his way of paying it forward, and he inculcated this philosophy in the staff at the Nation Newspaper and the Nation Publishing Company Limited.

For the past 24 years, the Nation has provided inservice training and support to SEARCHLIGHT in almost every area of the newspaper business that one can imagine. All it takes is a single telephone call.

I first met Harold in 1995, when, during my vacation as a school teacher, I spent a few days at the Nation receiving training in page planning and design. Ten years later, in May 2005, when Harold heard that I was about to join SEARCHLIGHT on a full time basis, he and his wife Noreen invited me to Barbados to spend the weekend with them.

Harold spent much of the time chatting with me about my new role and responsibilities and what I should expect. He also included me in a course on Managing Creative People that had been organized for managers of the Nation. The climax of the weekend was a concert I attended with the Hoytes at the Wildey Gymnasium, ironically, the same venue at which I will say my final goodbyes to him on May 27.

Harold gave freely of his wisdom and experience, and I knew I could always count on him for sound advice.

In 2015, in the aftermath of the General Elections here, there was a storm in a teacup about a photograph SEARCHLIGHT had published showing protesters at Government House road. Some even called for a boycott of our newspaper because of the publication of the photograph.

When I reached out to Harold, he told me to stand firm and reminded me that the mirror does not always flatter us.

People do not like to see themselves in a particular light in the public domain, and fail to realise what they do in the heat of the moment.

We always look worse than we want to in the mirror, he said with a chuckle, adding It is not the mirror that is at fault. It is what is before the mirror. Fix that!

His laughter was infectious, and his humour, wit, wisdom, intelligence and general excitement about life made spending time with him a tremendous pleasure.

Vincentians got first hand experience of Harolds wit and keen sense of humour on May 20, 2008, when he gave the feature address at the opening of SVG Publishers. Nonstop, for the first three and a half minutes of that speech, he had the entire audience in stitches.

Harold knew of our dream to establish a newspaper printery here in St Vincent and keeping true to his promise to support us, he convinced the Nation Publishing Company to invest with us, and some other local companies, to set up the printery. He appointed group financial comptroller Noel Wood to sit on the board of the printery, and the rest is history.

In 1997, when we needed help with designing and laying out our newspaper pages, Harold sent Jude Knight, whom he described as the fastest person on a computer to spend two days a week with us. So Jude worked part time at SEARCHLIGHT, and part time at the Nation. After a few years of shuttling back and forth, Jude resigned his job at the Nation and took up full time employment at SEARCHLIGHT as chief sub editor. Today, he is still with us. Harold often joked that stealing Jude was the one thing he held against my mother.

Jude was joined here in 1998 by Neal Jackman, who, while still a graphic artist at the Nation, designed SEARCHLIGHTs first masthead. Neal is also still a staff member.

For one year, Walter Roberts, an experienced printer at the Nation, travelled to St Vincent on a weekly basis after the printery was set up to train our young press men.

Vincentians also travelled to Barbados for training over the years; our senior reporter Lyf Compton had the longest sojourn there, benefiting from three months in service training in 2001.

Whenever opportunities for regional or international training, or attendance at conferences came up, Harold, and after him, former CEO Vivian-Anne Gittens, ensured that SEARCHLIGHT was always included.

Lest readers get the impression that Harold gave SEARCHLIGHT special attention, as I mentioned earlier, he did it because he felt he had an obligation to stand up for newspapers in particular, and the media in general.

When the Stabroek News of Guyana was being starved of Government advertising, Harold was among a group of respected regional journalists who travelled to St Vincent in February 2007 to intercede with then president of Guyana Bharrat Jagdeo, who was here for the 18th Inter-sessional Meeting of the Heads of Government of CARICOM.

Harold loved politics and kept abreast of developments around the region. Whenever general elections were called in SVG, he would visit on the last weekend before the poll to feel the temperature on the ground. He visited in the days leading up to the 2015 general elections, and before arriving, made his usual telephone call to me to arrange for taximan Kingsley DeFreitas to be his driver for the duration.

He was thrilled about the opening of the Argyle International Airport and accompanied by Noreen, he returned for the grand opening on February 14, 2017.

On behalf of the Chairman, Board of Directors, Management and Staff of Interactive Media Limited and on behalf of the Chairman, Board of Directors, Management and Staff of SVG Publishers Incorporated, I extend my sincere condolences to the entire Hoyte family, especially Noreen, Tracey and Bobby; the entire Nation family and the people of Barbados.

Rest in peace, my friend. Job very well done.Brazilians set to deliver successful Olympic Games  Still hard work to be done

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International Olympic Committee (IOC) Coordination Commission chair Nawal El Moutawakel has backed Brazil and the Brazilians to deliver successful Olympic Games this August at the close of the 10th and final IOC Coordination Commission visit to Rio de Janeiro (April 11-13, 2016).{{more}}

Her statement came after three days of meetings in the Brazilian host city, which included a venue tour of the Olympic Park and Deodoro sites, a meeting with the three levels of Government (Federal, State, and City), and presentations by the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee on the status of the preparations.

Speaking after the meetings, El Moutawakel said, aAs we enter the final 114 days until the opening of the Olympic Games Rio 2016, and despite the complex political and economic context, we are confident that Brazil and the Brazilians are on track to deliver successful Olympic Games with an outstanding legacy. The strong support from the local authorities, as well as the partnership and solidarity shown by the IOC, International Federations, National Olympic Committees, and other Olympic partners, in line with Olympic Agenda 2020, has been invaluable to the Rio organizers, as they finalize their preparations. Iad like to thank all of those involved for their hard work and dedication to this project.a

She continued, aThe last stretch is always the hardest. During the operational phase that we are entering now, there are thousands of details still to manage, and their timely resolution will make the difference between average Games and great Games. The Rio 2016 team is ready to rise to this challenge and deliver Olympic and Paralympic Games that will reflect Braziliansa warmth, hospitality and passion for sports. We believe that Rio 2016 will make the host nation proud.a

Rio 2016 President Carlos Arthur Nuzman commented, aThis last visit of the IOC Coordination Commission has helped us a lot on this journey towards the first Olympic Games in South America. Thanks to the solidarity and support from the IOC, International Federations, and National Olympic Committees during this difficult time for Brazil, we will be ready. We will not be complacent in the last mile. We know that we still have important elements to finalize before the Opening Ceremony on 5 August. We are working hard with all of our partners on each of these points and we are more confident than ever that Brazilians will deliver great Games.a

The Commissionas confidence was reinforced by the fact that many of the venues are finished, with the venues 98 per cent complete overall; that 33 test events had been successfully completed with positive feedback from the competing athletes; and that popular backing for the Games remains strong, with over 70 per cent support in Rio de Janeiro. This final figure underlines that the local citizens see the Games as a positive element in the development of their city and country.

The Olympic flame will be lit on 21 April in Ancient Olympia, and the Olympic Torch Relay will begin in Brazil on 3 May. The Relay will bring the message of the Games to the whole country and underline their important legacy, which will include improved public transport, better waste management, better city operations, job training, state-of-the-art sports facilities and new schools, all of which will provide benefits for generations to come. The Commission congratulated the Rio 2016 team and its Government partners for their work in this important area.

During its meeting, the Commission also received updates from the organizers and their partners in areas such as athlete and National Olympic Committee (NOC) services, sport and International Federation services, media operations, spectators, transport, marketing, technology and the Paralympic Games.

The Olympic Games Rio 2016 will begin on August 5, 2016.SEARCHLIGHT caught up with members of the Junior Chamber International and posed our question to them: What do you think is the cause of the unusual weather patterns we are experiencing here in St Vincent and the Grenadines and worldwide?

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Mandisa Stephens

There could be a lot of things affecting the weather pattern at this point, so we canat really determine, because there are a lot of changes that are going on within the environment.{{more}}

There is air pollution, the melting of the polar ice caps, and the cutting down of trees. There was a time when you could tell when is dry season or wet season, but now itas hard to predict.

Wayne Cadogan

I think itas due to global warming and the way we use our natural resources. Too many times we have been talking about going the greena way, but how many people are actually doing it?

We need to invest in things like solar energy. Although we wonat see the benefits for years down the road, I believe we need to do it. If you look at oil prices, they have been going all over the place, and we are taking the oil from out of the earth and we have places that never got typhoons, they are having typhoons. Places that never had earthquakes are having earthquakes.

Gabriel Glasgow

Factors such as urbanization where persons are packed into an area and polluting that area, things like CFCas and carbon dioxide. As the world population grows, there is more pollution, more cutting down of trees; all these factors can lead to global warming. If you notice, we are getting colder at some times and hotter at other times.

Sharlene

I think it has to with the amount of pollution. Over the years we have been polluting the atmosphere without recognizing that eventually it would affect us.

Our population is growing and the resources are limitedwe donat have enough resources to sustain the amount of people living on the planet, so therefore we have to cut down the trees to build bridges and other infrastructure.

Also we need more food more land space and we have to reclaim the rivers, and after a while the river would reclaim what it once had.

Cuthbert Tucker

From what Iave been seeing, there are a lot of people who are cutting down the forest and burning a lot of bush and other stuff that are giving off carbon emissions, and this carbon emission has increased the world temperature.

Because of the increase of the world temperature, it has changed the weather pattern of the weather systema and this is creating more clouds, it is melting the ice caps and so forth, and all of this is creating unusual weather patterns which has caused tremendous damage all over the world.

Ryan Hazell

It is due to the end time prophecies that must be fulfilled, and all this is a part of bible prophecies being fulfilled.

Physically, the ice caps are melting, but spiritually, because there is a prophetic order that must be fulfilled, it is inevitable. Your reality is not determined by your locality, but rather by your spirituality. It takes place in the spiritual realm before you see it in the physical.Seguin, TX (78155)

Today

Cloudy early with peeks of sunshine expected late. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High around 90F. Winds ESE at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms this evening. A steady rain arriving overnight. Low near 70F. Winds ESE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 70%. Locally heavy rainfall possible.Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang's Regular Press Conference on April 12, 2018

2018/04/12

Q: The Australian Prime Minister has acknowledged that there is tension in the Australian relationship with China. Is that tension at all related to the delaying of visa applications or the refusal of visas for Australian government officials to visit China for the Boao Forum for Asia annual conference and other activities?Do you agree there is tension in the China-Australia relationship? Is it because of Australia's attempted legislation for foreign interference?

A: First of all I shall make a clarification. As I understand, relevant Australian people did attend the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) annual conference 2018. The BFA is an unofficial international conference organization. Its Secretariat is responsible for relevant activities and inviting the representatives from the political, academic and business communities of other countries. You may want to refer to the BFA Secretariat for the attendants' information, including Australia's participation in this BFA annual conference.

You mentioned the China-Australia relations and Australia's ongoing attempt to legislate against foreign interference, my colleagues and I already stated our position on such issue. China stays committed to developing friendly relations with countries around the globe on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, including mutual respect and non-interference in each other's internal affairs. Any accusation against China of so-called "interference" or "infiltration" is totally groundless and out of ulterior motives. We hope the relevant party will respect objective facts and put China's development in perspective.

A sound and steady China-Australia relationship serves the fundamental interests of the two peoples. We hope Australia will work with China on the basis of mutual respect and treating each other as equals to better enhance our mutual trust and cooperation, so as to ensure the China-Australia relations move forward in the right track.

Q: According to reports, Russian officials said that they will deploy military forces in the town of Douma, Syria. If the US strikes Syria, any US missile fired at Syria and its source would be shot down and destroyed. In response, the US said its military is ready to provide the President with military options if appropriate and at the President's request. A military conflict over the suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria becomes more likely. What's your comment?

A: Days ago, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi exchanged in-depth views on the tense situation in Syria with the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Beijing. Recently China has been in close communication with the US, Russia and other members of the UN Security Council and countries in the region on the latest development of the situation in Syria.

China is worried about the possibility of the escalation of tension in Syria. We always stand for peaceful settlement of disputes, oppose wanton use or threat of use of force in international relations and advocate acting in accordance with the UN Charter. As we understand, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will soon send experts for investigation on the ground. We call on parties to remain calm and restrained to ease the tension as soon as possible.

Q: On March 27, a Norwegian citizen was arrested for smuggling salmon into China from Vietnam. This person allegedly has two passports. I wonder if she was arrested as a Norwegian or a Chinese citizen? How serious is the crime from China's point of view? Will it affect China' relationship with Norway and the bilateral trade ties? Do you know if she was acting alone or with a Norwegian company together with her and what are the charges against her?

A: I am not aware of the situation you mentioned, but I can check on it after this press conference.

I can tell you that China-Norway relations are developing smoothly and the two countries are having normal cooperation in various fields.

Q: Has the Chinese side been delaying visas for Australian ministers to visit? According to Australian reports, there have been delays for Australian ministers wishing to come for the Australian Week in China expo and the event is in jeopardy because of the delay in visas.

A: Regarding China-Australia relations, I have taken a similar question about it. So I won't repeat it here.

As for what you asked Australian ministers being denied to participate in the Australian Week in China expo, I have noted relevant reports. I can tell you that such claim is nonsense, because what it describes does not exist at all.Club Jewel Box, a one-night-only experience celebrating queer culture and expression, will take place at 8 p.m. Friday, April 13 at The Jewel Box at the National YoungArts Foundation, 2100 Biscayne Blvd., in downtown Miami.

As part of the O, Miami Poetry Festival, the event is a reclamation of queer spaces that have disappeared in Miami, combining queer avant-garde cinema with poetry and performance. Club Jewel Box pays homage to a 1940s Miami club of the same name, which was one of the citys earliest queer clubs run by Danny Brown and Doc Brenner from 1946 to 1952.

The original Club Jewel Box operated alongside the nationally touring Jewel Box Revue, featuring drag queens and kings in a nightclub show.

Fridays event will present six films punctuated with poetry, read by local poets from Miami and feature performance components from local drag entertainers, including King Femme, Ded Cooter, Kunst and Jupiter Velvet, among others. The films are: Blow Job (Andy Warhol, 1963); Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin, 1963); Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947); Looking for Langston (Isaac Julien, 1989); Mano Destra (Cleo Uebelmann, 1986); and Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971).

Club Jewel Box is the brainchild of Trae DeLellis and Juan Barquin, the curators of Flaming Classics, a film series pairing feature films with live work by local performance artists. Each event, based at the Bill Cosford Cinema, includes an introduction, a screening and a tailored live performance. When the duo started to plan Flaming Classics as a series, DeLellis said they were adamant that it have a kind of disrespect of categories and genres. Instead, they wanted it to showcase the variety of a queer perspective and audience.

DeLellis and Barquin said they had always had in mind to implement more experimental and avant-garde material at Flaming Classics, but they didnt know when it would be the right time or place. When the partners took notice of the O, Miami call for proposals, having attended their events for years, they decided to create an event around experimental queer cinema and poetry and thats how Club Jewel Box was born.

We finally put it together that many of the experimental films we had been considering [at Flaming Classics] had a kind of poetic essence to them, DeLellis said. These films are very much about mood, themes of desire, the relationship between restraint and excess, but most importantly about expressing something that is about feeling. I think in that way, poetry is also a format that attempts to verbalize non-verbal feelings.

Both Flaming Classics and O, Miami are Knight Arts Challenge award winners. As a result of that, DeLellis and Barquin say they were ecstatic to have O, Miami  a fellow winner  accept and collaborate on the project.

Weve watched as [O, Miami] has delivered on their mission statement, solidifying and expanding that mission each year, DeLellis said. Through them, we have been able to connect with the National YoungArts Foundation and secured one of Miamis most beautiful buildings, The Jewel Box, as a venue for the evening.

DeLellis says Club Jewel Box is an event that wouldnt be possible without the resources and aid of O, Miami, YoungArts and others like Obsolete Media Miami, who is helping with the projection; Claire Grossman and Jose Villar-Portela at Reading Queer, who are working on poetry selections and performances; and the entertainers who are crafting special performances for after the films.

Fridays event is open to attendees age 18 and over due to sexual content. Cocktails will be provided by Concrete Brewery and Titos Homemade Vodka for attendees age 21 and up.

We do a call for festival projects every fall, asking for ideas for how poetry can reach more people in Miami, said Scott Cunningham, executive director of O, Miami. This year, we received around 300, and we were thrilled to receive one from Flaming Classics.

O, Miamis mission to expose every citizen in Miami-Dade County to a poem in April. DeLellis said one of his and Barquins goals is to build off that mission and expose people to queer culture and history in some way through Club Jewel Box and all other Flaming Classics events. He adds its also very important to promote and create new queer spaces because he feels there is now a sense that queer spaces, among other safe spaces for minorities, are in danger.

We were inspired by one of Miamis earliest queer spaces, the original Club Jewel Box, and their traveling show the Jewel Box Revue, which featured male and female impersonation, DeLellis said. Its so exciting to celebrate that heritage and reimagine the past in a very contemporary way.

After viewing some footage from The Wolfson Archive that depicted the police raids of queer spaces in the past, DeLellis said he and Barquin decided to nickname their event a pervert roundup. Pervert roundups were when police would invade queer spaces and arrest anyone in the space.

With Club Jewel Box, we wanted to re-appropriate that concept of a pervert roundup as a positive, DeLellis said. Instead of shame, its a proud celebration of queer culture and a choice to embrace the label, pervert.

DeLellis said they will have select images from the old Jewel Box on display for people to see. The night will be documented by photographers and Sooperkool videographers to preserve this for Miamis queer history.

We definitely want the event to reflect the queer past, present and future of Miami, DeLellis said. With Club Jewel Box, we want to expose everyone to something they may not have experienced before.

DeLellis said Flaming Classics is about experiencing something new or re-experiencing something in a new context or with a new community. While planning, he and Barquin are constantly asking each other if weve seen this or that.

Its so easy to limit the LGBTQ experience, both by mainstream culture and even within our own community, DeLellis said. [At Flaming Classics], we are proudly presenting queer content and themes, but the series has always been about inclusion of LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ individuals. That is one of the things we like about the label, queer. It really starts to encompass so many different types of people and perspectives that eventually you realize that being non-queer is the minority.

Flaming Classics is currently finalizing its May series, which will be centered around queer films dealing with mommy issues in honor of Mothers Day. Their June series will feature a selection of four queer films connected to Florida in time for Pride Month and Miami Film Month. Called Florida Focus, the series is supported by the Florida Humanities Council.

While there are other large scale projects in the works similar to Club Jewel Box for the future, DeLellis says he and Barquin enjoy the uniqueness of each Flaming Classics event.

One of our favorite parts of Flaming Classics is that by pairing a film with a performance, it becomes difficult to repeat the events. They are always defined by the performer and the audience, which is an energy that is in constant flux, DeLellis said. This version of Club Jewel Box will definitely be a one-time event, but wed certainly be open to recreating the concept with new films and performers. We like sequels, as long as they are thought out and add something special.

Visit SFGN.com/JewelBox for more information about the original Jewel Box Revue.It was an outside approach that caught fire.

I felt there was something missing in which people could talk about HIV and sexual health in a way that was a little more modern than what we were used to, said Jose Ramos.

Seeking to shake up the dialogue with a new weapon in the war on AIDS, Ramos founded the Impulse Group. Nine years later, the international organization has become a recognized model in effective and modern public health strategies. In a telephone interview from Los Angeles, Ramos discussed the history of his social group and challenges on the horizon.

Trying to go to them instead of them coming to us, thats how this whole concept begin, Ramos said.

Them are sexually active young people -- specifically gay and bisexual men. While overall rates of new HIV infections in the United States have declined, the numbers are rising in self-identified gay and bisexual men ages 25 to 34. Thats where the Impulse Group comes into play.

With the support of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Ramos crafted teams and strategies to educate at risk populations in some of Americas largest cities. He had grown tired of what he called stale conferences and meetings full of bureaucrats reminiscing about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

They keep doing the same things and getting the same results, Ramos lamented.

On the contrary, Impulse Group events feature provocative themes and explosive dialogue.

Maybe its something they will react to because thats how we get them into care, Ramos said.

Volunteers, comprised primarily of young gay and bisexual men, power the organization. Naturally, there are sceptics.

If you go and recruit a bunch of 19 and 20-year-olds and allow them to speak like people are speaking in their communities, people are going to be outraged, Ramos said. Not because they are doing anything wrong, but because they dont understand it.

In 2015, Impulse Group made its biggest wave when it hosted a pool party in Miami. Anyone over the age of 40 was asked to pay $50 to attend. This decision did not go over well with many South Florida seniors. The groups Facebook page was flooded with complaints and negative comments.

The age thing created the most backlash, Ramos admitted. I didnt want people to feel that way again. Weve never done it again. It did not work and it did not put us in a good light.

Other events dealt with hook-up apps, unprotected sex, drug and substance abuse and prevention tools such as PrEP and PEP.

With a global presence in 18 cities, Impulse Group continues to seek solutions with innovative marketing. Ramos was born and raised in Mexico City and is proud of the work his group has done in what he describes as a macho culture.

That has been one of my great satisfactions, Ramos said of the Mexico City chapter. We have done a lot of testing and linkage to care. It is our most successful international chapter.

However, some areas of the map are more challenging than others. In the U.S., African Americans (40 percent) and Hispanics (22 percent) account for the largest numbers of new HIV infections. Ramos said more attention is needed in the South.

Accessibility to resources within cultures plays a huge part, Ramos said. Washington D.C., Atlanta, Houston we have a lot of new infections in the black community. Some of the resources like PrEP (pre-exposure) or PEP (post-exposure) is not as easy to get there.

PrEP is a once-a-day dose of Truvada that blocks transmission of HIV in nearly 99 percent of cases. Ramos said 87 percent of PrEP users are white males over the age of 30.

Its a big tool not reaching the black community, Ramos said.

In South Florida, where new HIV infection rates remain high, Ramos said his team is not as diverse as he would like and change is needed.

The team there is not as diverse when it comes to the black community so there is an opportunity for us to do a better job to target the black community and challenge my teams there to do a better representation of the black community because it is hard to reach a community that you dont really understand, Ramos said.

Substance abuse is also an issue in South Florida, which has a well-documented history as a party culture and base of operations for the illegal drug circuit. Stories of cocaine cowboys and Colombian drug lords have given way to chem sex parties of meth and heroin.

South Florida is having an issue with drugs and addiction especially when it comes to meth, Ramos admitted. It is having an impact within the community there.

Recently, Impulse Groups South Florida chapter hosted an event in Wilton Manors which dealt with substance abuse and drugs. Again, cries of foul were heard across the community.

People were offended because we were talking about drugs in the way that we were, Ramos said. But you have to realize if you listen to everybody around about how to be sensitive to this and that you will never do anything. Somebody will also be offended. Whatever you say in whatever way you say it somebody will always be offended.

Impulse has its share of supporters too. Miik Martorelli, President of Pride Fort Lauderdale, posted this on the groups Facebook page: An incredible group of people educating the youth in our community through exciting events these guys are truly a special organization that enhance our community.

Ramos decided to start Impulse Group after his best friend was diagnosed with AIDS and given only a few weeks to live.

I want to give back but not in the way of giving money or donating food and clothes to some big organization, Ramos said.

Impulse Group is not just shock and awe, Ramos said. A brotherhood has developed and showing compassion is essential, he said. Ramos told a story of receiving a Facebook message from a young man newly diagnosed with HIV and seeking help.

About four years ago I got a message on Facebook from this 18-year-old guy, Ramos said. I met him for coffee. He had moved to L.A. from Ohio and was suicidal so I guided him through the process. I went to his first appointment with him. I remember the kid was so afraid and crying and he held my hand through the whole process.

Creating and sustaining Impulse Group has been quite a process as well, one that Ramos admits is an education in itself.

I do think weve made mistakes because the guys dont come from the field, Ramos said. We have made adjustments through learning and we have been exposed to criticism. That said, I still believe if we take it outside the box and look for ways to reach people that is up to date we have a better chance of promoting healthier sex and life.A Democrat has not won statewide office in Texas in the past 20 years, but a pro-LGBT candidate is looking to change that.

Beto ORourke, a Texas Rep. from El Paso, has been challenging incumbent U.S. Senator Ted Cruz in the run-up to Election Day on Nov. 6, according to PinkNews. At $13 million, ORourke has raised more money than any Democrat ever to run in the state.

That total includes $6.7 million in the past three months. ORourke said that he does not take a single dime from special interests and only asks for money from voters, according to Business Insider.

According to the Texas Tribune, Cruz has not released new fundraising figures yet.

ORourke has also previously sponsored bills fighting against discrimination for LGBT students in school, according to OnTheIssues. He has also fought for equal pay on the basis of gender.

Cruz previously backed Roy Moore in his run for Senate, despite allegations he had molested underage girls and a track record of anti-LGBT behavior.

Judge Moore has a lifelong passion for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and he has the courage of his convictions, Cruz said at the time. In the Senate, we need reinforcements; we desperately need strong conservatives who will stand up to the Washington status quo.Legendary explorers and visionaries, real and fictitious, are among those immortalized in the first set of official surface-feature names for Pluto's largest moon, Charon.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU), the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features, recently approved a dozen names proposed by NASA's New Horizons mission team, which led the first reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons (by the New Horizons spacecraft) in 2015. The New Horizons science team had been using many of the chosen names informally to describe the many valleys, crevices and craters discovered during that first close-up look at the surface Charon.

"Charon is among the 10 largest bodies in the Kuiper Belt, a world unto itself, with a fascinating geological history and many kinds of geological features beyond the craters seen on most moons," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. "Now those features, and some of Charon's most important craters, have official names."

In moving the names through approval, Stern lauded the work of the New Horizons Nomenclature Working Group, which along with Stern included science team members Mark Showalter - the group's chairman and liaison to the IAU - Ross Beyer, Will Grundy, William McKinnon, Jeff Moore, Cathy Olkin, Paul Schenk and Amanda Zangari. The team gathered most of their ideas during the "Our Pluto" (http://www.ourpluto.org) online public naming campaign in 2015.

"The names reflect the diversity of recommendations we received during the Our Pluto campaign," noted Showalter, a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "We are delighted that so many people from all over the world have contributed to the new names on the map of Charon."

Many of the feature names in the Pluto system pay homage to the spirit of human exploration, honoring travelers, explorers and scientists, pioneering journeys, and mysterious destinations. The approved Charon names focus on the literature and mythology of exploration. They are listed here:

Argo Chasma is named for the ship sailed by Jason and the Argonauts, in the epic Latin poem Argonautica, during their quest for the Golden Fleece.

Butler Mons honors Octavia E. Butler, the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur fellowship, and whose Xenogenesis trilogy describes humankind's departure from Earth and subsequent return.

Caleuche Chasma is named for the mythological ghost ship that travels the seas around the small island of Chiloe, off the coast of Chile; according to legend the Caleuche explores the coastline collecting the dead, who then live aboard it forever.

Clarke Montes honors Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the prolific science fiction writer and futurist whose novels and short stories (including "2001: A Space Odyssey") were imaginative depictions of space exploration.

Dorothy Crater recognizes the protagonist in the series of children's novels, by L. Frank Baum, that follows Dorothy Gale's travels to and adventures in the magical world of Oz.

Kubrick Mons honors film director Stanley Kubrick, whose iconic "2001: A Space Odyssey" tells the story of humanity's evolution from tool-using hominids to space explorers and beyond.

Mandjet Chasma is named for one of the boats in Egyptian mythology that carried the sun god Ra (Re) across the sky each day - making it one of the earliest mythological examples of a vessel of space travel.

Nasreddin Crater is named for the protagonist in thousands of humorous folktales told throughout the Middle East, southern Europe and parts of Asia.

Nemo Crater is named for the captain of the Nautilus, the submarine in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874).

Pirx Crater is named for the main character in a series of short stories by Stanislaw Lem, who travels between the Earth, Moon and Mars.

Revati Crater is named for the main character in the Hindu epic narrative Mahabharata -- widely regarded as the first in history (circa 400 BC) to include the concept of time travel.

Sadko Crater recognizes the adventurer who traveled to the bottom of the sea in the medieval Russian epic Bylina.

The New Horizons spacecraft is currently 3.83 billion miles (6.16 billion kilometers) from Earth, speeding toward a New Year's Day 2019 encounter with "Ultima Thule," a Kuiper Belt object orbiting a billion miles (about 1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto. The centerpiece of New Horizons' extended mission through the Kuiper Belt, the Ultima flyby will be the farthest planetary encounter - with the most primitive object ever encountered - in spaceflight history.

For more on the New Horizons mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons and http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.

Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.Before he was a highly respected trainer/driver on the Pennsylvania/Ohio circuit, and before he became the patriarch of one of harness racings most successful families, the late Richard Snyder was a World War II hero with the United States Coast Guard.

To commemorate his service and valour, the Coast Guard has named a cutter for him and will formally commission the Richard Snyder on April 20 at her homeport, Atlantic Beach, NC.

In 1944, Snyder was part of an attack on Japanese ground forces during an amphibious assault on Biak island. He was awarded a Silver Star for his actions.

They cleared the islands out, much of it through hand-to-hand combat, says his son, Doug Snyder, a trainer/driver at the Meadows. When we were kids, we had all kinds of Japanese swords and flags  and there was blood on the flags. We used to tell people he had awards. People thought we were full of it, but we werent.

Dougs older brother, the Meadows-based trainer Dane Snyder, indicates the process of naming the cutter began about three years ago with an ominous-looking communication. As Dane tells it:

You know me  Im always in trouble. So I come home from work one day, and my wife is waiting for me at the door, waving something at me. She says, What the hell did you do to get a registered letter from the Department of Homeland Security? Honestly, I was a little worried because Ive been known to say things I shouldnt say.

From a distance, the Richard Snyder looks like a lovely pleasure craft  but dont be fooled, because shes as tough and versatile as her namesake. A fast-response cutter of the Sentinel class, the Richard Snyder is equipped with a remote-controlled 25 mm autocannon, four crew-operated M2 Browning machine guns and assorted light arms. Moreover, she can house and launch an auxiliary speedboat to help with her principal missions  search-and-rescue operations, port security and interception of smugglers.

An Ohio native, Richard Snyder, who passed away on his 67th birthday in 1989, was a third-generation horseman, as his father, Clare, and grandfather, William, both were blacksmiths. In fact, according to family lore, Clare played a small, off-screen role in the 1944 film Back Home in Indiana, which was partially shot at Ohios Marion County Fairgrounds and still stands as arguably the most famous harness racing movie ever. When the director needed his equine star to appear lame, Clare Snyder attached a block to the animals foot to cause a brief, harmless limp.

When they were done shooting, Doug Snyder says, they had some brown and gold silks left over. Thats how Dad and the rest of us got our brown and gold colours.



The Richard Snyder, pictured out on a journey

Richard Snyder was well known for his ability to shoe and balance trotters  skills he took to all corners of American harness racing, including western New York and Chicagoland. Doug Snyder recalls that his fathers last drive came at Pompano Park in 1983. Because most of his starts occurred before the United States Trotting Association began compiling and archiving such data, his statistical record is lost to posterity. What is known is the success of his offspring. Consider the family of Richard Snyder and his late wife Roselyn:

Doug, who has recorded 6,473 driving wins worth more than $30.4 million in purses as well as 438 training victories; Dougs wife, Jan, a Standardbred owner and force in the erstwhile 2:00 Club at The Meadows; their son, Douglas Snyder, Jr., who works in the business; their daughter, Elizabeth, 14, an avid barrel rider;

Dane, whos compiled 1,834 victories (since 1992) and over $11.6 million in purses; Danes wife, Kathy, longtime race charter for The Meadows; their daughter, Danielle, a Standardbred owner at The Meadows;

Dee Louise, sister of Doug and Dane, who is married to veteran Illinois horseman Perry Smith, he of 1,615 training victories and 711 winning drives.

All are planning to attend the commissioning while Danielle Snyder, who will serve as the ships official sponsor, has already made a pilgrimage to the cutter.

They want a sponsor to keep up with the ship and attend future ceremonies, she says. Ill be giving a speech at the commissioning and presenting a gift  a framed plaque with Grandpa Dicks photograph and all his medals and ribbons.

As many military veterans, Richard Snyder did not speak often of his war experiences. Says Doug Snyder:

When Dane wanted to enlist to go to Vietnam, I remember Dad telling him: I did enough for both of you guys. You don't have to do anything else. But he didnt talk much about it. Some of the things they lived through you never get over.

Now, the Richard Snyder will speak for him.

(The Meadows)If Mackenzie gets a chance to defend her title in the Blue Chip Matchmaker Series final April 21, no one will be able to say she didnt earn it. A streak of outside post positions and an unplanned absence from the fourth leg of the series for open pacing mares means Mackenzie is ranked eighth by points heading into the last preliminary round. Although she drew Post 7 again this week, trainer Pete Tritton is keeping a positive attitude.

My first reaction was, well, if she gets into [the final], thats one more chance shes got to draw [well], so I always try to look on the bright side, he said. Its a great series and youve got to have luck and ability. We knew that when we went in.

After finishing second to Lady Shadow in her lone qualifier March 9, Mackenzie started the 2018 season by finishing last in the opening leg of the Matchmaker from post seven. She overcame the same post in Leg 2, as she circled the field to score a 1:53.1 victory on March 23. In her most recent effort (on March 30), Mackenzie started from Post 6 and sustained a first-over bid from more than eight lengths off the tempo to wear down Newborn Sassy by a measured half-length in 1:54.1 with regular driver Jordan Stratton in the sulky.

I always thought she was a good mare, but she was a bit rank early and Jordan really looked after her when we raced her last year, Tritton said. I think shes a lot stronger this year, a lot more versatile. Im pretty impressed with her. She is staked to all the big races all over America, so Ive got a lot of confidence in her. Shes very strong.

Outside draws arent the only obstacle Mackenzie will have to overcome to make it back to the final of the Matchmaker. A scare in the barn last week caused the daughter of Rock N Roll Heaven to miss a chance to race in the fourth leg of the series. Tritton has trained her since the incident and feels she is ready for this weeks race.

She just got a little bit of a bump on her tendon, which has been looked at and its alright. I think she just must have whacked it in the stall or out in the field. Hopefully that wont come back to haunt her at all, Tritton explained. I didnt plan to take the week off because she didnt get any points the first time. Youve got to deal with the cards youve got and she drew [badly], so we just hope that she can overcome it with her ability and she has no more problems.

Mackenzie is the 5-2 morning line favourite for the first of three $40,000 Matchmaker divisions Friday night (April 13). Motu Moonbeam, who is currently third in the standings, will start from the rail, while series leader Lakeisha Hall drew Post 3. The seventh-ranked Lady Shadow will start from Post 4 and will also look to secure her spot in the final.

Shell be fine for Friday night, shes just probably going to have to do a little work and have a hard run to get it done because it looks like theres a lot of speed inside her, and shes going to have to come from the back again, which does make it hard, Tritton said. Ill leave it to Jordan, whos done a good job from the bad draws to get it done the last two weeks, so Im hoping that everything will work out.

I still dont think shes at her top. I think if we can get her through this week, well have her right at the top for the following week, Tritton continued. Shes the whole package. Shes very strong, she keeps going, but she does have tremendous speed. Jordan tries to look after her and not really ask her for top speed, but when she has to, she can really go fast.

Tritton will also try to qualify Sell A Bit for the Matchmaker final Friday night. Ranked 15th in the standings and in need of a victory to have a chance at making the main event, the eight-year-old daughter of Julius Caesar will start from the rail in Division 2. The 27-time career winner and $746,506-earner has been assessed at odds of 7-2 on the morning line after having posted a wire-to-wire win in Leg 1 and consecutive fourth-place finishes in legs two and three.

I was a little bit disappointed last time. She got a good trip and just battled to the line. Her other runs have been good, but shes had a little bit of an issue in one foot, Tritton explained. I trained her the other day and I thought she worked better than she ever did since Ive had her, so Im quietly confident that shell be right there on Friday night and be a contender to get back into the final. If not, the consolation, but shes really good at the moment and I think that week off has done her a world of good.

While Mackenzie and Sell A Bit are under pressure to make the Matchmaker final, Tritton wont feel the same stress with Bit Of A Legend in the final preliminary leg of the George Morton Levy Series Saturday night (April 14). After posting an impressive 1:53.3 win in Week One and a 1:53.2 win last week, the 2016 series champion is currently ranked second by points.

Im definitely sure hes better than he was at this time last year. I think if he draws [reasonably] and luck goes his way, hell be really, really hard to beat, Tritton said. Im sure theres no better horse in it and youve just got to have luck in the draws and luck in running, but Im fairly confident with him if he draws [well] because hes very versatile. He can sit and sprint, he can do a lot of work, hes got good gate speed.

Im confident that the horse is 100 per cent right and right on his game, he continued. Now weve got to get the other things to fit into place, but thats racing. Its exciting to be involved and to think youre a chance. Hopefully it works out. It doesnt always, like last year, but its good to be a chance.

Tritton is happy to have Bit Of A Legend back in the barn this year. Although retirement to stallion duty was floated for the $1.9 million earning son of Bettors Delight at the end of the 2017 racing season, Tritton and the Vonknoblauch family, who owns Bit Of A Legend, Mackenzie, and Sell A Bit, consider themselves racers first and are happy to keep their star on the track for as long as he continues to enjoy his work.

I think hed be a nice stud horse, particularly because hes so good-gaited and hes got no problems, he wears no boots. I think hed be a good sire for New York to race on the smaller tracks in the stakes races, Tritton said. But he keeps turning up and winning five or six-hundred-thousand every year and he doesnt seem to have any lameness issues and he enjoys his work.

I keep thinking every year well probably retire him, but its a tough business being a stallion, too. Hell keep racing while I think hes going as good as he is now. Were here to race horses, were not really breeders. Same with Mackenzie. We got offered a lot of money for Mackenzie as a broodmare back in New Zealand last year after she won the Matchmaker, but as I say, we race them.

Bit Of A Legend, who will start from Post 7, has been gauged as a 7-2 chance on the morning line for the third and final Levy preliminary Saturday night. Series leader Somewhere In L A will start to his immediate inside, while the fourth-ranked Dr J Hanover drew Post 5.

For Tritton, the prospects of Mackenzie and Bit Of A Legend each earning a chance to win their second titles in Yonkers signature races for older pacers is humbling. Achieving these feats at his home track is made better by his partnership with Stratton.

Its very satisfying and its helped Jordan as well, which is great because hes a great guy and a great driver. These races are not easy. A lot goes into it. Its been very satisfying, and well take it as it comes and hopefully we can get a good result again this year, Tritton said.

Before I lived up here, I used to train in Delaware and Id ship them up. I got a few into the finals over the years, I won a few preliminaries of the Levy, but the final was always beyond me, he continued. It does mean a lot because the main reason I moved up here was to race at Yonkers and these are the two signature races with my horses, so its very satisfying.

First post time Friday and Saturday night at Yonkers is 6:50 p.m.

(SOANY)Trot Insider has compiled all of the April 15 stakes payment reminders that have been sent to Standardbred Canada from the industry.

The contents of Standardbred Canadas own April 15 stakes payment reminder appear below.

Additional stakes payment reminders will be listed when they are received, so please check back with this notice to find the updates.

To consult SC Stakes Online, please click here.

STANDARDBRED CANADAS APRIL 15 PAYMENT REMINDER

Standardbred Canada would like to remind owners and trainers that the April 15 stakes payment due date falls on a Sunday this year.

Envelopes must be clearly postmarked on or before April 15, 2018 to be accepted, despite the inadequacies of the postal system.

Stakes payments can be paid with debit or credit card using SC Stakes Online. A video tutorial is available to help you get started.

Payment information and stakes conditions can be viewed on the Online Stakes Guide by clicking here or on the name of each stakes race.

If you did not receive notification of payment, a generic stakes form can be used to submit payments by mail. It can be located by clicking here.

Yearling Payments

 Alberta Sires Stakes $25

Two-Year-Old Payments

 Carl & Marg Mackenzie Memorial $75

 Donnie & George Turner Memorial $75

 Frank & Beth Stanfield Memorial $175

 Alberta Sires Stakes $100

 ASHA Colt/Gelding $200

 ASHA Filly $200

 Century Bets Pace $300

 Emerald Filly $300

 Horizon Pace $300

 Jim Rogers Memorial $300

Three-Year-Old Payments

 Alberta Sires Stakes $100

 ASHA Colt/Gelding $200

 ASHA Filly $200

 Brad Gunn $350

 Norm Kennedy Memorial $250

 Meridian Farms Breeders $350

 Moores Mile $250

Aged Payments

 Prix d'Ete $1,000

If not paying by Interac (debit) or with a credit card via SC Stakes Online, please mail and make cheques payable to:

Standardbred Canada  Stakes Department

2150 Meadowvale Blvd.

Mississauga, ON

L5N 6R6

For more information, contact Robin McClure at 905-858-3060 (Ext. 247) or [email protected].

WOODBINE STAKES PAYMENTS DUE APRIL 16

Woodbine Entertainment would like to remind owners and trainers of todays stakes payment deadline (April 16) for events in 2018.

A round of sustaining payments for all 2018 Woodbines major stakes, including the $1 million Pepsi North America Cup, are due today (April 16).

The following major stakes require a sustaining fee payment:

Armbro Flight (Fillies & Mares Trot)

Canadian Pacing Derby (Open Pace)

Canadian Trotting Classic (three-year-old Trot)

Casual Breeze (three-year-old Filly Trot)

Elegantimage (three-year-old Filly Trot)

Eternal Camnation (two-year-old Filly Pace)

Fan Hanover (three-year-old Filly Pace)

Goodtimes (three-year-old Trot)

Maple Leaf Trot (Open Trot)

Metro Pace (two-year-old Pace)

Milton (Fillies & Mares Pace)

Nassagaweya (two-year-old Pace)

North America Cup (three-year-old Pace)

Peaceful Way (two-year-old Filly Trot)

Roses Are Red (Fillies & Mares Pace)

Shes A Great Lady (two-year-old Filly Pace)

Somebeachsomewhere (three-year-old Pace)

William Wellwood Memorial (two-year-old Trot)

The SBOA Stakes for Ontario sired three-year-old fillies also requires a sustaining payment today for this years event (foals of 2015) and next years event (foals of 2016).

Woodbine continues to handle stakes administration duties for tracks throughout Ontario.

A sustaining payment is due today for Grand River Raceways Battle of Waterloo, Battle of the Belles (Ontario-sired two-year-old pace) and Flamboro Downs Confederation Cup (four-year-old pace).

For full details regarding stakes payments, including sustaining fee amounts, click here.

Stakes payments can be made online by clicking here.

If sending stakes payments by mail, envelopes must be clearly postmarked no later than April 16, 2018 or payment will not be accepted. Registered mail is recommended.

(Woodbine Entertainment)

APRIL 15 PAYMENT DEADLINE FOR HAMBLETONIAN SOCIETY-SERVICED STAKES

April sustaining and nominating payments for Hambletonian Society stake events are due Sunday, April 15 and per USTA Rule 12 section 2, must be postmarked by midnight on Monday, April 16.

The remaining payments due on April 15 are those races with previous payments in March.

Eligibility lists for races with final payments in February or March of this year have been posted on the website. Race conditions, payment forms and much more information is available online at www.hambletonian.com. For additional information call the Society offices at 609-371-2211.

April 15, 2018 - Two-Year-Olds

 Breeders Crown No. 32

 The Elevation, Two-Year-Old Pacing Colts

 Kentuckiana Stallion Mgt. Filly Pace & Trot (for Two-Year-Old Fillies)

 Madison County, two-year-olds

 Matron Series, two-year-olds

April 15, 2018 - Three-Year-Olds

 Breeders Crown No. 31

 Jenna's Beach Boy

 Matron Series, three-year-olds

 The Carl Erskine (was Oliver Trot), three-year-olds

 Monument Circle, three-year-olds

April 15, 2018  Four-Year-Olds & Up

 Battle of Lake Erie Supplement

 Breeders Crown No. 30

 Dayton Trotting & Pacing Derby

 Miami Valley Distaff

(Hambletonian Society)

SECOND PRIX DETE PAYMENT DUE

The second nomination payment for the 2018 Prix DEte for four-year-old pacers at the Hippodrome 3R is due this weekend.

The second nomination payment for the 2018 Prix DEte for four-year-old pacers at the Hippodrome 3R is due this weekend.

The 2018 Prix DEte, which will feature a $200,000 purse, will be contested on Sunday, August 19.

There are no supplemental payments allowed for the Prix DEte.

The second payment must be postmarked by Monday, April 16 (April 15 is a Sunday).

To make payments, owners and trainers can click here or here to get the necessary payment forms.

(With files from the Quebec Jockey Club)

MEADOWLANDS LATE CLOSERS DUE APRIL 16

The Meadowlands is offering a pair of late closing series for horses of all ages, one on the trot and one on the pace, to be raced in May.

The conditions and other pertinent information for the "Hot Lead" and "Lucky Jim" are listed on the online nomination form.

The nomination fee of $200 is due by April 16.

Call the Racing Office at (201) 842-5130 with questions.

(Meadowlands)

NJSS STAKES PAYMENTS DUE APRIL 16

The deadline for the New Jersey Sire Stakes and Standardbred Development Funds final sustaining payments is approaching on April 16, 2018.

The deadline for the New Jersey Sire Stakes and Standardbred Development Funds final sustaining payments is approaching on April 16, 2018. Normally the deadline would be on the 15th of the month but since that date falls on a Sunday this year, the deadline is extended to Monday, April 16.

The NJSS Premier Divisions second sustaining payment remains $500 for both two-year-olds and three-year-olds. The Standardbred Development Fund second sustaining payment for both two-year-olds and three-year-olds continues at $150.

Sustaining payment and supplemental nomination forms, as well as race dates and other information, may be found on the NJSS website.

All payments must be in U. S. funds. No late payments will be accepted and no billing notices will be mailed. Certified mail is strongly recommended to NJSS, P.O. Box 330, Trenton, NJ 08625.

(NJSS)

STAKES PAYMENTS DUE IN NJ ON APRIL 15

The Standardbred Breeders and Owners Association of New Jersey has issued a reminder in regard to stakes payments which will be due on April 15.

The second payment of the SBOANJ-sponsored Charles Smith Trot and Helen Smith are due April 15 in the amount of $300.

Eliminations for the Charles Smith Trot (for three-year-old colts) will be held at Freehold Raceway on September 1 and the final will be contested on September 8.

Eliminations for the Helen Smith Trot (for three-year-old fillies) will be held at Freehold Raceway on September 21 and the final will be contested on September 28.

Payment forms can be found here.

If you have any questions, please contact the SBOANJ office.

(With files from the SBOANJ)

HAWTHORNE SERIES DETAILS ANNOUNCED

Hawthorne Race Course Racing Secretary Robin Schadt has posted an ambitious late closing series as well as a claiming series to start the upcoming Spring-Summer meet that promises to give pacers and trotters at all levels the chance to race for added money.

The 10 late closers and claiming series will all carry an entry fee of $200. Nominations are due by April 15 for the late closers while the five claiming series must have their entries postmarked no later than May 1.

The complete late closing and claiming series schedules, as well as instructions and nomination forms, can be found at hawthorneracecourse.com.

Standardbred racing is scheduled to begin on Kentucky Derby weekend with the opener on Friday, May 4 and will be conducted through Monday, September 24.

Another reminder that nominations for the Night of Champions ICF two-year-old stake season are due by April 15. That cost is $1,250. Horsemen will also be able to supplement to these stakes for a cost of $2,250 by May 15. Supplemental nominations for the three-year-old crop of state-bred pacers and trotters are also May 15 and the cost is $2,750. Older stakes for the Night of Champions require only a $500 fee at the time of entry for the stake. A complete stakes schedule and nomination forms can be found on the Hawthorne website as well.

Everyone participating at Hawthorne, whether stabled on track or off track, must submit a stall application and/or stable roster. Stall applications are also available at hawthorneracecourse.com. Applications should be sent to Jim Miller, c/o Hawthorne Race Course, 3501 S. Laramie Ave., Cicero, IL 60804, or they can be faxed to his attention at 708.780.3727. Current proof of up to date vaccinations is also required for any horse entering the grounds at Hawthorne Race Course.

Applications are due no later than April 15. Horsemen are reminded that there is a straw only policy in all barns at Hawthorne. No shavings or sawdust will be allowed.

(Hawthorne Race Course)

SUN STAKES PAYMENTS DUE APRIL 16

The second and final sustaining payment for the Sun Stakes events at The Downs at Mohegan Sun Pocono is due on April 16.

The events include the Earl Beal Jr. Memorial three-year-old Open Trot, the Max C. Hempt Memorial three-year-old Open Pace, the James M. Lynch Memorial three-year-old Filly Pace and the Ben Franklin Free-For-All Pace, which will be held on June 30. Eliminations for these events will be held on June 23.

Payment forms can be found here.

For any questions, please contact the Pocono race office.

(The Downs at Mohegan Sun Pocono)Members of the I Love Canadian Harness Racing Fan Club are invited to a tour and lunch at First Line Training Centre, located close to Mohawk, on Saturday, May 5. First Line, owned and operated by former trainer Joe Stutzman, is home to many of the provinces top trainers and champion pacers and trotters. The facility features two tracks, an indoor pool, a one-mile jogging trail, a covered exerciser, 200 stalls, and 35 grass paddocks.

Fan Club members will have a chance to watch horses go training miles, see horses swim in the on-site equine pool, watch a blacksmith demo, and meet some of the provinces top trainers and horses.

Following the tour and lunch, there is the option to visit Orange Snail Brewers for a tour. For those not interested in going on to the Brewery, the bus will stop at Woodbine Mohawk Park to drop them off.

The cost of the package is $30 and includes return transportation from Mohawk to First Line Training Centre and Orange Snail Brewers, lunch, and a Fan Club souvenir.

Heres a look at the agenda:

9:00 a.m. -- Depart Woodbine Mohawk Park for First Line

9:30 a.m. -- Arrive at First Line: Welcome & Overview of facility

9:45 a.m.  10:15 a.m. -- Walking tour & watch horses train

10:15  11:30 a.m. -- Stable visits & visit to swimming pool (for horses)

11:45 a.m. - noon -- Blacksmith Session

Noon  12:30 p.m. -- Lunch

12:30 p.m. -- Depart for Mohawk or Orange Snail Brewery

12:50 p.m. -- Drop off at Mohawk

1:00 p.m. -- Orange Snail Brewery Tour

1:30 p.m. -- Depart for Mohawk

Watch the web in coming weeks for more details about the trainers and horses you will be meeting.

There are a very limited number of spots and you must be over the age of 19 to take part. To register, email [email protected], or contact Kathy Wade Vlaar or Hailey Saunders at 905-858-3060. Payment must be made to reserve your spot.Horseman Keith Goodwin, 66, of Byron, N.Y., passed away at his home on Wednesday (April 11).

Born on November 3, 1951, Goodwin was a member of the United States Trotting Association for a number of years as a trainer and driver. He and his wife Karen, operated Goodwin Farms, where many racehorses were boarded.

To read the full obituary, view visitation hours or leave condolences, click here.

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Keith Goodwin.

(USTA)Life Legal Called in for Legal Backing as Students Stage Pro-Life Walkout

Contact: Alexandra Snyder, Life Legal Defense Foundation , 202-717-7371NAPA, Calif., April 11, 2018 / Standard Newswire / -- Life Legal was at the campus of Rocklin High School in Northern California this morning as students walked out of class to honor the lives of babies killed by abortion. Rocklin student Brandon Gillespie was inspired to organize the Pro-life Walkout after one of his teachers was disciplined for questioning whether pro-life students would be afforded the same rights as students who participated in the National School Walkout for more stringent gun control.History teacher Julianne Benzel was placed on leave after she asked her students whether schools allowing the walkouts would "give the same courtesy to another group of students who wanted to get up and walk out to protest other issueslike abortion?"Rocklin High School facilitated the students' pro-gun control protest by instructing teachers to modify their lesson plans for the walkout and by providing students with a forum to speak about gun legislation in the school's amphitheater. The walkout commemorated the lives of students and teachers who were gunned down at a Parkland, Florida high school as students called for stricter gun-control laws.Gillespie requested the same provisions for the Pro-Life Walkout, which commemorated the lives of hundreds of thousands of children across the country who are killed by abortion each year and called for legislation to protect the unborn. However, school officials denied pro-life students the requested accommodations, saying that the Pro-Life Walkout "associates the school with a position of non-neutrality on a matter that is extremely controversial."Life Legal sent a letter to Rocklin High School Principal Davis Stewart earlier in the week apprising him of his obligations to treat Brandon and his fellow students the same as the National School Walkout students."Brandon Gillespie is going to conduct his activity in the same manner as the previous walkout and expects to be treated in the exact same manner as the students who participated in the gun walkout," wrote Life Legal Senior Staff Counsel Allison K. Aranda. "I am writing to you in order to ensure that Brandon's First Amendment and Equal Protection rights are safeguarded."Courts have held that "once a forum is opened for the expression of views, regardless of how unusual the forum, under the dual mandate of the first amendment and the equal protection clause neither the government nor any private censor may pick and choose between those views which may or may not be expressed." Moreover, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that public officials may not prohibit communication merely because they "disapprove of the speaker's views.""We applaud students who are willing to stand up for the millions of their would-be peers who never had a chance at life," said Life Legal Defense Foundation Executive Director Alexandra Snyder. "Rocklin High School opened the door to protected speech by permitting the March walkout. The school cannot now discriminate against Brandon Gillespie and other pro-life students by based on favoritism toward a particular viewpoint."About Life Legal Defense FoundationLife Legal Defense Foundation was established in 1989, and is a nonprofit organization composed of attorneys and other concerned citizens committed to giving helpless and innocent human beings of any age, and their advocates, a trained and committed voice in the courtrooms of our nation. For more information about the Life Legal Defense Foundation, visit www.lldf.orgWWME's Upcoming 50th Anniversary Convention will be Featured on EWTN's 'Church Universal' TV Program

Contact: Dick & Diane Baumbach, Worldwide Marriage Encounter,

321-544-3440, dickanddiane66@bellsouth.net,

dick.diane.baumbach@wwme.org



SAN BERNARDINO, Calif., April 12, 2018 /Standard Newswire/ -- The focus of an upcoming episode of the Eternal Word Television Network's (EWTN) "Church Universal" television program will be Worldwide Marriage Encounter's 50th Anniversary Convention.



The 30-minute show will air three different dates and times beginning April 29 at 5:00 p.m. ET. Additional airings of the episode, which is shown worldwide, will be on May 1st at 5:00 a.m. ET and May 2nd at 6:30 p.m. ET.



The shows' host, Fr. Joseph Mary, MFVA, will be interviewing Peter & Sheila Oprysko and Fr. Tom Griffith, SVD, the WWME ecclesial chairs of the 50th Anniversary Worldwide Marriage Encounter Convention. The convention leadership will discuss the various aspects of the now sold out convention.



"It was an honor and a blessing to be featured on Church Universal with Fr. Joseph Mary. The show allowed us to provide insights into the various aspects of the upcoming convention," the convention chairs said.



The Opryskos and Fr. Griffith also pointed out that because the convention was sold out four months before the actual conference, it was decided that the convention will be live streamed across the world as a very inexpensive pay per view activity. The convention will be held June 22 to June 24 in Lombard, IL.



The 50th anniversary convention show, which was taped last year in Irondale, AL, the headquarters for the EWTN studios, will focus on various aspects of the upcoming event. EWTN, the original Catholic television network, broadcasts its shows to 140 countries and millions of viewers across the world.



Worldwide Marriage Encounter has been offering weekend experiences for over 50 years and is considered the original faith-based marriage enrichment program. The programs are continually updated to keep abreast of changes in society, and WWME now offers evening and half-day programs that are presented at parishes and other church facilities. The weekend program, traditionally presented as an overnight experience at a hotel or retreat center, can also be presented at facilities where the couples return to their homes in the evenings. WWME has a presence in almost 100 countries, which makes it the largest pro-marriage movement in the world. In North America, the WWME programs are presented in English, Spanish, French, and Korean languages.



Worldwide Marriage Encounter offers married couples the opportunity to spend time together away from the busyness of the world to focus on each other. It offers tools for building and maintaining a strong, Christian marriage in today's world. To learn more about the Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekends online go to wwme.org or contact the WWME Office at (909) 332-7309.



Media inquires should be directed to: Dick & Diane Baumbach

(321) 544-3440 dickanddiane66@bellsouth.net

dick.diane.baumbach@wwme.org

The first meeting between the two schools since 2013, was a classic with Loyola edging Mira Costa in the neighborhood rivalry, despite the schools not being located in the same cityHuawei became the first vendor to pass Chinas 5G non-standalone (NSA) Core Network test. The test, which covers key Core Network technologies and service processes, is the third phase of the 5G R&D trial. The trial was organized by the IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group and conducted at the Beijing lab of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT). The test constitutes an important part of Chinas 5G R&D trials for operators that hope to deploy 5G commercial networks early and quickly.

The test is based on the commercial 5G Core Network solution released by Huawei at the Mobile World Congress 2018. The technologies tested include: gateway selection in control and user plane separation (CUPS) architecture, 5G ultra-high bandwidth, dual-connection to LTE and new radio (NR), independent billing for 5G NR, and terminal access management. The key service processes include: terminal registration, service requests, mobility management, and session management.

The 5G network test was performed by the network technology workgroup of the CAICT and three of Chinas leading operators, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom. In the first and second phases of the 5G R&D trial, Huaweis 5G core network also achieved outstanding results in verification of key technologies and prototypes such as Service-Based Architecture (SBA), Network Slicing, and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC).

Many leading operators hope to use 5G NSA to provide new eMBB (enhanced Mobile Broadband) services, such as AR/VR applications. Huaweis 5G core network can provide ultra-high bandwidth for individual users, ensuring optimal AR/VR service experience. The Huawei 5G core network is based on CUPS architecture, and the user plane can be flexibly deployed at the network edge to ensure ultra-low latency practically anytime and anywhere. Additionally, the Huawei 5G core network is a convergent network that supports 2G/3G/4G/5G, thereby laying the foundation for smooth network evolution and ensuring optimal user experience.

Huawei has worked with industry partners to foster the development of 5G standards, technologies, and industries. At the Mobile World Congress in 2018, the Huawei 5G Core solution received the Best Network Software Breakthrough award. Huawei and Vodafone have jointly completed the worlds first call using the NSA 3GPP 5G NR standard. At year-end 2017, Huawei had built 15 pre-commercial 5G core sites around the globe. In the future, Huawei will continue to invest in 5G R&D and promote formulation of 5G standards. Huawei also plans to strengthen its cooperation with industry partners to prepare for the upcoming 5G era.Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2018, an increase of 6.2 percent from 2017, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc.

Although global IT spending is forecast to grow 6.2 percent this year, the declining U.S. dollar has caused currency tailwinds, which are the main reason for this strong growth, said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. This is the highest annual growth rate that Gartner has forecast since 2007 and would be a sign of a new cycle of IT growth. However, spending on IT around the world is growing at expected levels and is in line with expected global economic growth. Through 2018 and 2019, the U.S. dollar is expected to trend stronger while enduring tremendous volatility due to the uncertain political environment, the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiation and the potential for trade wars.

Enterprise software spending is forecast to experience the highest growth in 2018 with an 11.1 percent increase (see Table 1). Barring unexpected disruption, the software industry is expected to continue capitalizing on the evolution of digital business. Application software spending is expected to continue to rise through 2019, and infrastructure software will also continue to grow, bolstered by modernization initiatives.

Table 1. Worldwide IT Spending Forecast (Billions of U.S. Dollars)

2017 Spending 2017 Growth (%) 2018 Spending 2018 Growth (%) 2019 Spending 2019 Growth (%) Data Center Systems 181 6.3 188 3.7 190 1.1 Enterprise Software 352 8.8 391 11.1 424 8.4 Devices 663 5.1 706 6.6 715 1.3 IT Services 933 4.4 1,003 7.4 1,048 4.6 Communications Services 1,392 1.3 1,452 4.3 1,468 1.1 Overall IT 3,521 3.8 3,740 6.2 3,846 2.8

Source: Gartner (April 2018)

Even with a strong end to 2017, worldwide spending on data center systems is forecast to grow 3.7 percent in 2018, down from 6.3 percent growth in 2017. The longer-term outlook continues to have challenges, particularly for the storage segment. The strength at the end of 2017 was primarily driven by the component shortage for memory components, and prices have increased at a greater rate than previously expected. Whereas previously, component shortages were expected to ease into 2018, the shortages are now expected to continue throughout the year with the supply not expected to ease until the end of the year.

Worldwide spending for devices  PCs, tablets and mobile phones  is forecast to grow in 2018, reaching $706 billion, an increase of 6.6 percent from 2017. The device market continues to see dual dynamics. Some users are holding back from buying, and those that are buying are doing so, on average, at higher price points, said Mr. Lovelock. As a result, end-user spending will increase faster than units through 2022. However, total end-user spending and unit shipments are expected to be lower compared with previous forecasts, as demand for ultramobile premium devices, ultramobile utility devices and basic

phones is expected to be slow.

More detailed analysis on the outlook for the IT industry will be provided in the complimentary webinar IT Spending Forecast Q1 2018: The Digital Storm  Will You Sink or Surf? at 11 a.m. ET on April 10, 2018, and on demand. During the webinar, Gartner analysts will discuss the full IT spending forecast and details on which IT markets are poised to take advantage of the digital storm.

Gartners IT spending forecast methodology relies heavily on rigorous analysis of sales by thousands of vendors across the entire range of IT products and services. Gartner uses primary research techniques, complemented by secondary research sources, to build a comprehensive database of market size data on which to base its forecast.

The Gartner quarterly IT spending forecast delivers a unique perspective on IT spending across the hardware, software, IT services and telecommunications segments. These reports help Gartner clients understand market opportunities and challenges. The most recent IT spending forecast research is available at Gartner Worldwide Spending Forecast. This quarterly IT Spending Forecast page includes links to the latest IT spending reports, webinars, blog posts and press releases.

Mr. Lovelock will provide further analysis on the key drivers of the IT market at the Gartner Tech Growth & Innovation Summit taking place from April 30 through May 2, 2018 in San Diego, CA. The Summit is the premier conference for technology vendors to learn about the latest trends and tools, innovation predictions, positioning and thought leadership.

@Technuter.com News ServiceRansomware attacks are a key cybersecurity threat for global organizations, warns Verizons 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). It is the most common type of malware, found in 39 percent of malware-related data breaches  double that of last years DBIR, and accounts for over 700 incidents. Whats more, Verizons analysis show that attacks are now moving into business critical systems, which encrypt file servers or databases, inflicting more damage and commanding bigger ransom requests.

DBIR analysis also flags a shift in how social attacks, such as financial pretexting and phishing, are used. Attacks such as these, which continue to infiltrate organizations via employees, are now increasingly a departmental issue. Analysis shows that Human Resource (HR) departments across multiple verticals are now being targeted in a bid to extract employee wage and tax data, so criminals can commit tax fraud and divert tax rebates.

Businesses find it difficult to keep abreast of the threat landscape, and continue to put themselves at risk by not adopting dynamic and proactive security strategies, says George Fischer, president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions. Verizon gives businesses data-driven, real-life views on the cyber-threat landscape, not only through the DBIR series but also via our comprehensive range of intelligent security solutions and services. This 11th edition of the DBIR gives in-depth information and analysis on whats really going on in cybercrime, helping organizations to make intelligent decisions on how best to protect themselves.

Major findings in summary

The 11th edition of the DBIR continues to deliver comprehensive data-driven analysis of the cyber threat landscape. Major findings of the 2018 report include:

Ransomware is the most prevalent variety of malicious software : It was found in 39 percent of malware-related cases examined this year, moving up from fourth place in the 2017 DBIR (and 22 nd in 2014). Most importantly, based on Verizons dataset it has started to impact business critical systems rather than just desktops. This is leading to bigger ransom demands, making the life of a cybercriminal more profitable with less work.

: It was found in 39 percent of malware-related cases examined this year, moving up from fourth place in the 2017 DBIR (and 22 in 2014). Most importantly, based on Verizons dataset it has started to impact business critical systems rather than just desktops. This is leading to bigger ransom demands, making the life of a cybercriminal more profitable with less work. The human factor continues to be a key weakness: Employees are still falling victim to social attacks. Financial pretexting and phishing represent 98 percent of social incidents and 93 percent of all breaches investigated  with email continuing to be the main entry point (96 percent of cases). Companies are nearly three times more likely to get breached by social attacks than via actual vulnerabilities, emphasizing the need for ongoing employee cybersecurity education.

Employees are still falling victim to social attacks. Financial pretexting and phishing represent 98 percent of social incidents and 93 percent of all breaches investigated  with email continuing to be the main entry point (96 percent of cases). Companies are nearly three times more likely to get breached by social attacks than via actual vulnerabilities, emphasizing the need for ongoing employee cybersecurity education. Financial pretexting targets HR: Pretexting has increased over five times since the 2017 DBIR, with 170 incidents analyzed this year (compared to just 61 incidents in the 2017 DBIR). Eighty eight of these incidents specifically targeted HR staff to obtain personal data for the filing of file fraudulent tax returns.

Pretexting has increased over five times since the 2017 DBIR, with 170 incidents analyzed this year (compared to just 61 incidents in the 2017 DBIR). Eighty eight of these incidents specifically targeted HR staff to obtain personal data for the filing of file fraudulent tax returns. Phishing attacks cannot be ignored: While on average 78 percent of people did not fail a phishing test last year, 4 percent of people do for any given phishing campaign. A cybercriminal only needs one victim to get access into an organization.

While on average 78 percent of people did not fail a phishing test last year, 4 percent of people do for any given phishing campaign. A cybercriminal only needs one victim to get access into an organization. DDoS attacks are everywhere: DDoS attacks can impact anyone and are often used as camouflage, often being started, stopped and restarted to hide other breaches in progress. They are powerful, but also manageable if the correct DDoS mitigation strategy is in place.

DDoS attacks can impact anyone and are often used as camouflage, often being started, stopped and restarted to hide other breaches in progress. They are powerful, but also manageable if the correct DDoS mitigation strategy is in place. Most attackers are outsiders: One breach can have multiple attackers and we found the following: 72 percent of attacks were perpetrated by outsiders, 27 percent involved internal actors, 2 percent involved partners and 2 percent feature multiple partners. Organized crime groups still account for 50 percent of the attacks analyzed.

Ransomware remains a significant threat for companies of all sizes, says Bryan Sartin, executive director security professional services, Verizon. It is now the most prevalent form of malware, and its use has increased significantly over recent years. What is interesting to us is that businesses are still not investing in appropriate security strategies to combat ransomware, meaning they end up with no option but to pay the ransom  the cybercriminal is the only winner here! As an industry, we have to help our customers take a more proactive approach to their security. Helping them to understand the threats they face is the first step to putting in place solutions to protect themselves.

Sartin continued: Companies also need to continue to invest in employee education about cybercrime and the detrimental effect a breach can have on brand, reputation and the bottom line. Employees should be a businesss first line of defense, rather than the weakest link in the security chain. Ongoing training and education programs are essential. It only takes one person to click on a phishing email to expose an entire organization.

Biggest risks per industries analyzed

This years report highlights the biggest threats faced by individual industries, and also offers guidance on what companies can do to mitigate against these risks. Key industry findings include:

Education  Social engineering targeting personal information is high, which is then used for identity fraud. Highly sensitive research is also at risk, with 20 percent of attacks motivated by espionage. Eleven percent of attacks also have fun as the motive rather than financial gain.

 Social engineering targeting personal information is high, which is then used for identity fraud. Highly sensitive research is also at risk, with 20 percent of attacks motivated by espionage. Eleven percent of attacks also have fun as the motive rather than financial gain. Financial and insurance  Payment card skimmers installed on ATMs are still big business; however, were also now seeing a rise in ATM jackpotting, where fraudulently installed software or hardware instructs the ATMs to release large amounts of cash. DDoS attacks are also a threat.

 Payment card skimmers installed on ATMs are still big business; however, were also now seeing a rise in ATM jackpotting, where fraudulently installed software or hardware instructs the ATMs to release large amounts of cash. DDoS attacks are also a threat. Healthcare  This is the only industry where insider threats are greater than threats from the outside. Human error remains a major contributor to healthcare risks.

 This is the only industry where insider threats are greater than threats from the outside. Human error remains a major contributor to healthcare risks. Information[1]  DDoS attacks account for over half (56 percent) of the incidents within this sector.

 DDoS attacks account for over half (56 percent) of the incidents within this sector. Public sector  Cyber-espionage remains a major concern, with 43 percent of breaches being espionage motivated. However, it is not only state-secrets that are a target  personal data is also at risk.

Other industries examined within the report include accommodation and food services; professional, technical and scientific services; and manufacturing and retail.

The time to act is NOW

Sixty-eight percent of breaches took months or longer to discover, even though 87 percent of the breaches examined had data compromised within minutes or less of the attack taking place. While safety cannot be guaranteed, proactive steps can be taken to help keep organizations from being victims. These are:

Stay vigilant  log files and change management systems can give you early warning of a breach. Make people your first line of defense  train staff to spot the warning signs. Keep data on a need to know basis  only employees that need access to systems to do their jobs should have it. Patch promptly  this could guard against many attacks. Encrypt sensitive data  make your data next to useless if it is stolen. Use two-factor authentication  this can limit the damage that can be done with lost or stolen credentials. Dont forget physical security  not all data theft happens online.

@Technuter.com News ServiceTahsan, Momo`s Boishakhi play Sonali Ilisher Golpo

Sheikh Arif Bulbon :

Both Tahsan Khan and Zakia Bari Momo have little bit experience to work together in the small screen. But their acted all three works became popular among the viewers.

On the occasion of Pahela Boishakh, Sagor Jahan has made a special play titled Sonali Ilisher Golpo to cast Tahsan and Mithila. Shooting of the play was done last week.

Though Tahsan had experience to work under Sagor Jahans direction but for the first time Momo acted under his direction.

While talking about her feelings to work under Sagor Jahans direction National Film Award winner actress Momo told this correspondent, Under Sagor Bhais direction I enjoyed working in this play. Its story was nice. Therefore, I worked with an organised unit as a whole. Worked comfortably and as a director he gave me a lot of space to perform in his play. I believe viewers will also enjoy watching the play.

After finishing shooting of this play actor Tahsan went to USA last week. He will perform in stage show there.

Director Sagor Jahan informed that Sonali Ilisher Golpo will be aired on Rtv on Pahela Boishakh.

It is noted that Tahsan and Momo first worked together in play Nilpori Nilanjona under Shihab Shahins direction. Under this directors direction they last acted in play Mannequin Mumu.

Momo informed that on April 20, her acted and Arun Chowdhury directed movie Altabanu will be released across the country. Momo acted in the title role in this movie.

PM`s decision is welcomed but gazette notification has to be cleared

The students calling for quota reforms to government jobs have postponed their protests following Prime Minister's announcement that quotas will be abolished. Before call-off their protest, the protesters under the banner of Council for the Preservation of Bangladesh General Students' Rights placed a number of demands including quick issuance of a gazette and the withdrawal of cases filed over the demonstrations.

We welcome the decision of Prime Minister that she has accepted the sincere demands of the younger generation. And we think the swift issuing of a gazette notification regarding the PM's announcement can only cool down the students permanently. Besides, the unconditional release of all protesters imprisoned over the past few days should be taken under active consideration of the government high-ups. The government should remember that any future harassment on students would be met with future protests. The student's council also demanded the payment of medical bills of injured persons in police action.

Though the student agitation has stopped getting assurance from top of the government, there is some confusion regarding the abolition of quotas. So, there is no way but to publish a gazette immediately to dispel this confusion. Not only that, the new policy of government job without quota should also be cleared in the notification.

The students had demanded a reformation of quota system; they never demanded its abolition. Now, the government has to clarify how the disadvantage groups-such as disabled persons, women, ethnic community, and others to get an opportunity for government jobs. Even, the issue of freedom fighters should also be explained. Whether these groups will get government jobs through direct competition or special category will be created for them.

We know, the quota system was introduced in the country to encourage the underprivileged people. As per our constitution, every citizen of the country deserves benefit from the state. It is the government's duty to ensure it. Constitution shows no disparity between a student of a Dhaka's famous school and a student of remote village. Now in absence of quota, most of the jobs will be captured by the well-educated students of established universities of major cities. The candidates of rural areas will seldom get a chance by beating them.

So everything must be elaborated in the gazette. Otherwise, the deprived people will again gather to register their protest with demanding special facility for them. We don't want to see another movement for restoring quota again.



Myanmar Minister`s visit and Rohingya repatriation

THE Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Minister of Myanmar Win Myat Aye, who is overseeing repatriation of the Rohingyas, met the refugees in Cox's Bazar on April 11 and assured them to take them back and try to give them citizenship. He made a rare trip to the Rohingya camps along with an 11-member delegation from Naypyidaw, also told the refugees that repatriation is a priority of his government and would start as soon as possible, as per local daily reports.

This is the first time a Myanmar Minister visited the makeshift camps where more than 700,000 forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals are sheltered amid "ethnic cleansing" by Myanmar army. The Myanmar Minister made the visit following the UN Security Council's decision to visit Bangladesh and Myanmar to see firsthand the situation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas and observe the impact of the crisis in Rakhine State. The UN Security Council is expected to pay a two-day visit to Bangladesh on April 29.

The Myanmar Minister along with his delegates was also scheduled to hold a bilateral meeting with Foreign Minister AH Mahmood Ali at the State Guesthouse Padma yesterday. Though Dhaka hopes that the visit will help speed up repatriation process, officials and experts are skeptical about sincerity of the Myanmar government's readiness to start it soon. The Myanmar Minister said both the Bangladesh and Myanmar governments had been working unitedly for the repatriation, adding, the Rohingyas would be given citizenship and brought back with proper honour and dignity. However all of these claims should be taken with a pinch of salt. The true aims of the Myanmar government are still unknown, but their on the ground actions speak of one thing only--the forcible resettlement of thousands of Rohingyas.

It is still too early to decide whether their aims are sincere, especially as their civil administration is subordinate to their army. It is also quite early to assume that the policy of denying the Rohingya citizenship will magically disappear. Aung San Suu Kyi is not a fairy godmother for the Rohingyas.

Taking them back and then resettling them in concentration camps is also not acceptable. The slow strangulation of almost all of the possible lifelines of a society -- educational, economic, communication and medical do not bode well for any of the promises which the Myanmar government have made to the Rohingyas. Only time can tell whether their intentions are genuine or are done to stay the possibility of international sanctions.'Very soon or not so soon at all!'

AFP :

President Donald Trump was evasive Thursday about when the United States might attack Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons assault, saying it could be "very soon or not so soon at all!"

A day after warning starkly that "missiles will be coming," Trump in another early morning tweet storm wrote: "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

He added: "In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'"

Trump's new tweet seemed to backtrack from the bellicose one of Wednesday in which he suggested to Syria and its ally Russia that a US attack over the alleged chemical weapons assault on civilians last weekend was all but imminent.

That one, which came after a warning from Russia, went like this: "Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and "smart!" You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

The tough talk between Trump and Russia has raised fears of the Syria conflict mushroomning into something even more serious involving America and its Western allies on one side and the Russians on the other.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned world powers Wednesday to keep the confict from "spiraling out of control."UN calls urgent meeting after Trump threat

AFP :

The United Nations warned world powers against letting the crisis over an alleged chemical attack against civilians in Syria from "spiraling out of control" after US President Donald Trump said "missiles will be coming."

As tensions mounted over a face-off with Damascus-ally Russia, opponents of unilateral US action called an emergency closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council for Thursday. Britain also scheduled an emergency cabinet meeting. With punitive US military action seemingly imminent, Russia scrambled to deflect blame from Syria's Bashar al-Assad and, according to a monitor group, regime forces evacuated key defense buildings in Damascus.

Trump's bellicose tweets came in response to a warning from Russia's ambassador to Beirut, who took to a television network run by the armed group Hezbollah to declare that any US missiles would be shot down "as well as the sources they were fired from."

If the US action follows the pattern of a previous punitive strike on Syria last year, it will begin with a salvo of cruise missiles fired from US warships in the Mediterranean, as Trump implied when he tweeted they would be "nice, new and 'smart.'"

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis as well as CIA director Mike Pompeo met at the White House on Wednesday to discuss options, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

With the UN Security Council failing thus far to find a diplomatic solution, Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned Wednesday that time was running out. "Today, I called the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the Security Council to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse and stressed the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control," he said, referring to the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain.AL, BNP mayor candidates submit nominations

Staff Reporter :

Mayor candidates of both Awami League's Jahangir Alam and BNP's Hasan Uddin Sarkar submitted their nomination papers for Gazipur City Corporation polls on Thursday.

They submitted their nomination papers along with huge number of supporters at the temporary office of Returning Officer at Bangotaj auditorium.

Awami League candidate Jahangir Alam has submitted the nomination paper at 11:00 am while the BNP's Hasan Uddin Sarker at 1:00 pm on Thursday. Awami League's Local Government Nomination Board has finalised the party's candidature of Jahangir Alam as Gazipur mayor on Monday last.

On the other hand, BNP picked up Hasan Sakker as the mayoral candidate of Gazipur City Corporation polls on Monday night.

After the submission of nomination paper, Jahangir Alam said, "There is no faction in Gazipur Awami League. We all are united. We will make a history that Gazipur city is role model for the practice of democracy."

BNP's Hasan Uddin Sarker, after submitting the nomination paper, said, "The city corporation election will reflect in the next parliament elerctions and release of Begum Khaleda Zia. All the leaders and workers of BNP will work together."

During the submission of Hasan Sarker's nomination, BNP leaders Fazlul Haque Milon, Kazi Sayedul Alam Babul, Sohrab Uddin, Shahiduzzaman, Mir Halimuzzaman Nani, Advocate Siddiqur Rahman, Advocate Mehedi Hasan Alice, among others, were present.Quota reform demo called off until gazette

The protesting students and job seekers over quota reformation system brought out a victory rally on the Dhaka University campus after the press briefing on Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina\'s announcement of abolishing all quota systems for govt jobs carryin

DU Correspondent :

Bangladesh Sadharan Chhatra Adhikar Parishad, which had been waging movement demanding significant reduction in current quota system in government jobs, on Thursday called off their protest programmes until publication of a gazette on quota system.

The leaders of the parishad came up with the decision on Thursday, a day after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina declared in parliament that there would be no quota in public service jobs.

The platform co-convener, Rased Khan, made the announcement yesterday morning while addressing a gathering of students in front of anti-terrorism Raju memorial Sculptor on Dhaka University campus.

Their other demands included release of the students who have been arrested during the protest, withdrawal of cases against them, proper treatment of those who have been injured during the protest and safety of general students.

Later, they brought out a celebration procession on the campus, which paraded several streets on the DU premises.

Earlier in the morning, demonstrators gathered in front of Raju Sculptor to express their reaction over the issue. "We have stopped the demonstrations honouring the Prime Minister's declaration," said Hasan Al Mamun, a convener of the platform.

On Wednesday evening, the Prime Minister announced that there would be no quota system in government jobs.

Bangladesh Sadharan Chhatra Adhikar Sangrakkhan Parishad started the latest round of movement on Sunday. Central leaders on Monday evening, coming out from a meeting with Road Transport and Bridges Minister Obaidul Quader, suspended their protests.

Many protesters, however, rejected the decision and continued the protests.

The agitating students and job seekers have been on the streets since February for the five-point demands, including recruitment of jobseekers in vacant posts on the basis of merit if eligible candidates were not found under the quota, an end to special recruitment tests for quota candidates and a single age limit for all jobseekers.

They were demonstrating on the street as 56 per cent quotas are reserved in government jobs -- 30 per cent for freedom fighters' children and grandchildren, 10 per cent for women, 10 per cent for districts lagging behind, 5 per cent for ethnic minorities and 1 per cent for physically challenged people.Pope acknowledges his 'grave mistakes' in Chile sex abuse crisis

Reuters, Vatican City :

Pope Francis acknowledged on Wednesday that he had made "grave mistakes" in the handling of a sexual abuse crisis in Chile, saying he felt shame and inviting victims he had once doubted to Rome to seek their forgiveness personally.

"I have made grave mistakes in the assessment and my perception of the situation, due in particular to a lack of truthful and balanced information," he wrote in an extraordinary letter to Chilean bishops.

The letter followed a visit to Chile by one of the Vatican's most experienced sexual abuse investigators, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta.

Sciluna was investigating claims surrounding Bishop Juan Barros, appointed by the pope in 2015 despite accusations that Barros had covered up sexual abuse of minors by his mentor Father Fernando Karadima.

Francis wrote the letter after receiving Scicluna's 2,300-page report and in the missive to the bishops he summoned them to Rome for a meeting. He did not say when it would take place.

Such gatherings are rare and usually take place in a period of crisis in a national Church. A similar meeting took place in Rome with American bishops in 2002 during the papacy of Pope John Paul after a sexual abuse crisis exploded in the United States.

In the three-page letter in Spanish, issued simultaneously at the Vatican and in Chile, the head of the Roman Catholic Church said he wanted to "re-establish trust in the Church, trust that was broken by our errors and sins, and heal the wounds that continue to bleed in Chilean society."

Reading Scicluna's report caused him "pain and shame," he added.

Controversy over Barros, bishop of the city of Osorno in Chile's south, dominated a recent trip the Argentine pontiff made to South America. Critics accused the pope of not understanding the depth of the crisis after he initially defended Barros and said he was the victim of slander.

"I apologize to all those I have offended and I hope to be able to do it personally in the coming weeks, in the meetings I will have (with victims)," the pope said in the letter.



Gaza`s hospitals taxed by wounded from Israeli fire

A Palestinian 25-year-old surfer, lies on a bed as his father, mother and brothers visit him, at the Shifa hospital in Gaza.

AP, Gaza City :

Hundreds of Gaza Palestinians wounded by Israeli fire in two weeks of border violence are severely taxing the coastal strip's hospitals.

Palestinian health officials say nearly 1,300 people have been shot and wounded by Israeli soldiers during the mass border protests, called for by the territory's Hamas rulers.

The casualty figures are at the heart of an intensifying debate over the military's open-fire orders. The Israeli military has disputed the Gaza count of wounded, saying that at most dozens were struck by Israeli fire. But it has not offered supporting evidence and did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition, 33 Palestinians have been killed during this period, including 26 in border demonstrations. Israel says its sharpshooters have been careful, aiming only at "instigators" involved in attempted attacks. The on-going protests in Gaza have been a long time coming. They are also a wake-up call for the international community. According to any indicator, conditions in the Strip have become unsustainable. What little hopes Gazans had left have been dashed by failure of the latest round of intra-Palestinian reconciliation talks to deliver any improvements to their daily lives.

For the last eleven years, Gaza's inhabitants have been under a joint air, sea, and land blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt. In addition, they face the legacy of three wars with Israel which have degraded Gaza's infrastructure and killed thousands, and more recently, sanctions imposed by President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority against Hamas and Gazans alike. The consequence is a man-made social, economic, and humanitarian crisis that will make Gaza unliveable by 2020 according to the UN.

Against this backdrop, it can be of little surprise that the anger and frustration felt by average Gazans has driven tens of thousands to protest-largely non-violently-along the border with Israel. While Hamas and other Palestinian factions have played an important supporting role, these protests are driven at the grassroots level by Gazan civil society which remains resilient despite numerous constraints.

Of course, these protests are useful for Hamas, which has allowed the emergence of a carefully controlled space for popular mobilisation. In doing so, Hamas hopes to deflect popular anger over the worsening humanitarian conditions away from it, and towards Israel and the PA. This is partly a means of short term survival, partly an attempt to leverage an easing of restrictions on the Strip. To a certain extent, this also reflects a debate within the Islamist movement about the merits of non-violence in its struggle against Israel.

Hamas's embrace of protests as a political tool could not be more different from Abbas who has sought to constrain and de-mobilize Palestinian civil society in the West Bank. The lack of any large-scale mobilizations by Palestinians there, either in support of Gazans, or against Israeli settlements, has less to do with popular apathy, and more to do with PA restrictions, through the detention of Palestinian activists, restrictions on freedom of expression, and close security cooperation with Israel.

Back in Gaza, results remain mixed two weeks into the protests. Protestors have put Israel on the backfoot, both on the ground and in the international spotlight, momentarily shown-up Abbas, and shifted the plight of Gaza back up the list of urgent crises facing world leaders. But the protests have not yet been a game-changer. Israel has inflicted a high Palestinian casualty rate, and prevented protesters from penetrating its border fence on mass, at a so far manageable cost in its foreign and media relations. Protesters have also done little to convince Abbas to reverse his policy. In fact, he has doubled down on his anti-Hamas rhetoric, and withhold the salaries of the thousands of PA civil servants based in the Strip.



Illusion of Colour

Sheikh Arif Bulbon :

Artist Iskindar Mirza has completed her BFA and MFA from Department of Oriental Art, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka. He has already attended more than thirty group exhibitions. His first solo exhibition was held at Zainul Gallery in 2015.

Artist Iskindar Mirza has dedicated to create illusions of colours through his artworks. There is a kind of sorcerous enticement in artworks - he believes - when colours are present. Iskindar's key paintings depict horses of the Old Dhaka, as well as buffaloes, blacksmith, women, flower, leaves, nature, and many traditional artifacts of Bangladesh.

Through the blending of assorted hues, the artist tries to create a synergy that evokes what he feels and he wants to feel: distant past, lost culture, or tenderness of the nature around him.

The people of Bangladesh, their livelihoods, their beasts of burden, the environment they live in, their lives somewhat harmonious placidity - all have multitude of colours in them that are both parti-coloured and illusive. Artist Iskindar Mirza has only tried to bring that congruity to light.

The inaugural ceremony of the 2nd solo painting exhibition titled Illusion of Colour by artist Iskindar Mirza is to be held at La Galerie of Alliance Francaise de Dhaka (AFD) in the citys Dhanmondi area on April 13 at 6:00pm.

Eminent artist Mustafa Monwar will grace the occasion as the chief guest, while eminent artists Prof Samarjit Roy Chowdhury and Prof Nasreen Begum, Department of Oriental Art, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka will attend the programme as special guests. Dr Malay Bala, Chairman, Department of Oriental Art, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka and Nirupoma Naher, Human Resources Associate, United Nations Development Programme will also attend the opening ceremony as guests of honour. The exhibition will continue till April 24. nAL, BNP candidates submit nominations

Staff Reporter :

Mayor candidates of both Awami League's Jahangir Alam and BNP's Hasan Uddin Sarkar submitted their nomination papers for Gazipur City Corporation polls on Thursday.

They submitted their nomination papers along with huge number of supporters at the temporary office of Returning Officer at Bangotaj auditorium.

Awami League candidate Jahangir Alam has submitted the nomination paper at 11:00 am while the BNP's Hasan Uddin Sarker at 1:00 pm on Thursday.

Awami League's Local Government Nomination Board has finalised the

party's candidature of Jahangir Alam as Gazipur mayor on Monday last.

On the other hand, BNP picked up Hasan Sakker as the mayoral candidate of Gazipur City Corporation polls on Monday night.

After the submission of nomination paper, Jahangir Alam said, "There is no faction in Gazipur Awami League. We all are united. We will make a history that Gazipur city is role model for the practice of democracy."

BNP's Hasan Uddin Sarker, after submitting the nomination paper, said, "The city corporation election will reflect in the next parliament elerctions and release of Begum Khaleda Zia. All the leaders and workers of BNP will work together."

During the submission of Hasan Sarker's nomination, BNP leaders Fazlul Haque Milon, Kazi Sayedul Alam Babul, Sohrab Uddin, Shahiduzzaman, Mir Halimuzzaman Nani, Advocate Siddiqur Rahman, Advocate Mehedi Hasan Alice, among others, were present.



UNHCR, King Salman Centre sign deal to support Rohingyas

UNB, Cox's Bazar :

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and KSRelief have signed a US$3 million agreement to provide emergency assistance to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

The agreement was signed on Thursday during a field visit by a high delegation from King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre (KSRelief) to the Rohingya refugee camps. The agreement was signed by Dr Abdullah Al Rabeeah, Supervisor General of KSRelief, and Khaled Khalifa, UNHCR Regional Representative to the GCC Countries, and it wi0ll help secure much-needed emergency assistance for Rohingya refugees. Speaking on the occasion, Dr Abdullah Al Rabeeah said since its establishment back in 2015, KSRelief has continued the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's long history of providing humanitarian assistance, and has closely cooperated with UNHCR by contributing US$45 million to date in response to a number of major displacement situations. He said following the issuance of the Royal Directives to allocate US$20 million in response to the most recent Rohingya crisis, KSRelief has initiated a number of key projects and has worked closely in coordination with UNHCR and the government of Bangladesh to attend to the most urgent humanitarian needs of the Rohingya refugees. "UNHCR appreciates KSRelief's kind and timely contribution particularly

in light of the pressing need for emergency assistance for thousands of Rohingya refugees who have arrived to Bangladesh in search of refuge and safety. Support from our partners is needed now more than ever," said Khaled Khalifa, Regional Representative of UNHCR to the GCC countries. "With the rainy season a few weeks away, we are working around the clock to avoid a catastrophe that could threaten thousands of Rohingya refugee families in Bangladesh," he added. It is estimated that nearly 150,000 refugees are living in areas that are at high risk of floods and/or landslides. UNHCR and partners are accelerating their efforts to relocate these families to safer parts of the settlements and distribute shelter kits ahead of the rainy season.



Tight security on Pahela Baishakh: DMP

Staff Reporter :

Dhaka Metropolitan Police have taken tight security measures on the occasion of Bangla New Year 'Pahela Baishakh'.

"DMP has taken all out security measures for Pahela Baisakh celebration peacefully in the capital," said DMP Commissioner Asaduzaman Miah on Thursday while briefing journalists at the DMP media center.

He said full proof security measures have been taken to ensure safe and happy celebration of the Pahela Baisakh for the city people.

The DMP Commissioner said, "Police will cordon off important venues in the city like Dhaka University campus, Teachers-Student Centre, Shahbagh intersection, Ramna park, Suhrawardy Udyan areas, Hatirjheel and Dhanmondi Lake areas for ensuring smooth celebration of the first day of Bangla New Year."

"All open venues will be under CCTV coverage and separate watch towers will also be set up in important areas," he said.

People will be happy and they will enjoy the first day of the Bangla New Year in festive mood as the DMP has taken strong and co-ordinated security measures for the important occasion, he said.

The DMP commissioner also said, law enforcers will put barricades in Nilkhet, Palashi and Bangla Motor areas as no vehicles can enter the areas.

He said the police have arranged archway and metal detectors for the general people to go through.

He also adivsed the people to refrain from carrying any vanity bag, bags, trolleys, inflammable things, knives, and sharp weapons.

The DMP commissioner said open areas where people will go for celebration will be swept by dog squad and Special Weapon and Tactics, devices. The bomb disposal units also will be deployed.

A special team would be deployed to prevent eve-teasing during the festival, he said.

He said separate patrol teams of Navy will be deployed in Hatirjheel and Rabindra Sarobar areas and divers and fire service unit-5 will remain standby.

The DMP chief asked to the people to refrain from wearing masks and not to play Vuvuzela on the day to avert any unpleasant incident.

The law enforcers will escort the Mongol Shobhajatra to be brought out by the students of the Institute of Fine Arts of Dhaka University.

The commissioner said all the programmes of Pahela Baishakh must end by 5:00pm while Rabindra Sarobar programme by 7:00pm.Dealer opens fire on cardholders: 100 hurt

Staff Reporter :

At least 100 people, including Kodalkati Union Parishad (UP) Chairman, were injured when the local dealer shot at the cardholders who were protesting for being deprived of getting fair price rice at Tk 10 per kg at Rajibpur upazila in Kurigram district on Thursday noon.

All the injured persons were immediately admitted to Rajibpur Government Health Complex. As the condition of Mahfuzul Haque, Biplob and Mandal deteriorated, they were sent to Mymensingh Medical College Hospital in critical conditions.

The injured, among others, were identified as Kudalkati UP Chairman Humayun Kabir Sakku, 50, Mahfuzul Haque, 40, son of Naib Ali of Charasazi Mandalpara village, Rukan, 45, son of Faruk, Taleb Ali, 46, son of Nasir, Raju, 20, son of Abu Bakar, Naib Ali, son Siddique, 50, son of Lokman, Surman, 35, son of Abdur Rashid of Sajai Sarkarpara village and Dulu, 37, son of Abdur Rashid.

Police sources said, the cardholders who were deprived to get rice in fair price at Tk 10 per kg along with the local UP chairman and members brought out a protest procession against corruption and irregularities of the dealer, Tota Pramanik.

Rajibpur Police Station Officer-in-Charge Md. Rabiul Islam said, "The dealer, Tota Pramanik, has been arrested in this connection. Police are patrolling in the area. A tense situation is now prevailing here."



Don`t you call our children Rajakars: You left for safety leaving others to die

Our people have tolerated enough calling anybody who stayed in the country Rajakar by those who ran for safety defying Bangabandhu's clear direction to fight Pakistan army in the country. He himself refused to go to India.



Those who fled the country to remain alive provoking danger for others to die must not feel free to call the students engaged in the movement against unjust quota system children of Rajakars.



The audacity of Matia Chowdhury to call the students demanding reform in quota system Rajakars explains why some are not yet happy with Bangladesh. They want to make Bangladesh once again an occupied country and already feel like rulers of an occupied country.



According to the government some thirty lakhs of our people died helplessly with no leaders including Matia Chowdhury available in the country to "build fortress of resistance" desired by Bangabandhu against the attacking Pakistan army.



Those who used words of war and provoked Pakistan military for action, must remember their promise to the people. They had no preparations of their own and misled the people as well as Bangabandhu.



The Pakistan army butchered our people freely because those talked bravely deserted our people when risks came. We did not see their heroism.



Thirty lakhs of their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters laid down their lives most pathetically during the liberation war for their unpreparedness. Nobody should think this part of history will remain hidden.



They went to India in the darkness of night without letting our people know of it. Our people did not ask when they returned why they had left them to die without them on their side. Our people did not get much sympathy either for our dead ones as if they were to be condemned to die.



Our people made huge sacrifices attracting international help including from India. Without our people's resistance and sacrifice Matia Chowdhury and her likes who are now too eager to call our people Rajakar would have nothing to boast of. They should know that other people's lives and patriotism matter. Don't feel too easy to condemn others as traitors because you enjoy police protection.



They did not take up arms but left the country. It was not necessary that they would go to India to be armed and seek India's leadership and protection.



They did not wait to build fortresses of resistance as Bangabandhu said from within. They rushed to India forgetting all about us. Our people were butchered finding them without leaders.



Our people were too generous in not being critical of those who promised to fight along with the people but disappeared leaving our people unarmed and alone to face Pakistan army's fury and brutality.



India did not enter into war against Pakistan because of those leaders left for India disobliging Bangabandhu. The last visitors to him that night were Tajuddin Ahmed, Dr Kamal Hossain and Barrister Amir-ul Islam. Bangabandhu's clear advice to them was to spread out in the country.



The international community did not come to support the cause of our independence for the leaders who went to India. The inhuman brutalities of Pakistan occupation army on our people aroused international support. They found in our plight for democracy a noble cause.



Even those freedom fighters will admit they had no preparations for waging war against Pakistan. When our armed forces wanted to revolt before they were stopped. Brig. Majumdar was a suspect and he was immediately bundled off to West Pakistan.



Finally, Indian army directly engaged in war against Pakistan and thus the war became a war between India and Pakistan. When Pakistan army surrendered to Indian army in Dhaka there was no presence of anybody from our freedom fighters. The Pakistan soldiers became war prisoners of India and not of us. We failed to put on trial Pakistani military officers for their crimes against our people.



We are stating these facts about our liberation war not to undermine the hard efforts of our freedom fighters in India but to make clear that the unprepared liberation war turned into a people's war. Those who went to India cannot claim any monopoly for the liberation war.



Those who want to use the freedom fighters as a special class isolated from the people to create a dangerous division among the people for the leftist political class struggle are playing with fire. Fake freedom fighters will be of no use. The genuine freedom fighters are quiet, refusing to be part of any unwelcome political design.



The movement of the students against the government quota system has proved that without political leaders our young ones can rise together in a disciplined way and maintain discipline despite vicious odds.



The police action on the peaceful students call for impartial investigation. The police must not be a political arm of the government. They must preserve their own image as impartial law enforcers.



Our party politics has become deeply conspiratorial and divisive. Our party politics is based on distrust of each other and treat each other as enemy.



Not only the quota system but the system of our politics itself needs reforms badly and urgently. In view of the recent disciplined non-violent student movement we hope to see emergence of new leadership with character and courage from our younger generation.



Richwood, TX (77531)

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An isolated thunderstorm possible this evening, then occasional showers overnight. Low 74F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Jerusalem  Wed, April 11, 2018 22:26 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce25f1c 2 World Jewish,population,Israel,Holocaust Free

The number of Jews around the world is lower than before World War II, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday ahead of the Jewish State's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day.

According to the CBS, there are approximately 14.5 million Jews in the world, compared to 16.6 million in 1939 when World War II began.

The compilation uses census figures from 2016, it said.

Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins Wednesday evening on the Jewish calendar, commemorates the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis during World War II.

Nearly half of the world's Jews -- 6.44 million -- live in Israel, with the United States home to the second largest population of 5.7 million.

Nearly half a million Jews live in France, 390,000 in Canada and 290,000 in Britain.

There are Jewish communities of over 100,000 in Argentina, Russia, Germany and Australia, according to the Hebrew University's Harman Institute of Contemporary Judaism, the source for the CBS data.

The CBS said their definition of a Jew included "persons who define themselves as Jewish, or persons of Jewish parentage with no current religious or ethnic identity".More than 350 exhibitors and expert speakers from across the globe are set to take part in the upcoming Seamless Middle East, a leading exhibition for payments, fintech, ecommerce and retail in Dubai, UAE.



The 19th edition of the event runs on April 15-16 at the Dubai World Trade Centre.



The Middle East region is going through an exciting phase, with the UAE claiming 15th rank in the Euromonitor Internationals Digital Consumer Index 2017 and highest among emerging markets, underlining the governments commitment to transforming the society and the industries digitally and seamlessly for the future, said Joseph Ridley, general manager of Seamless Middle East at Terrapinn.



While Saudi Arabia is also joining the force by claiming a place among the top five emerging markets, he adds, it further shows that the region is fast turning into a hotbed for the latest innovations and evolutions in the field of fintech, blockchain, ecommerce and payment solutions.



Artificial Intelligence (AI), for instance, is expected to be a major game changer in the global economy, with PwC estimating that AI will contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the world economy and $320 million to the Middle East economy in 2030.



The spending on cognitive and AI systems in the Middle East and Africa region is estimated to grow from $37.5 million in 2017 to over $100 million by 2021, representing a growth rate of 32 per cent a year, said professional services firm PwC citing analysis of the International Data Corporation (IDC).



Exhibitors participating from across the globe to showcase wide range of innovative products and solutions from mobile payments, analytics, inventory management and POS, self-service and ATMs to digital marketing with omni-channel retailing, blockchain and AI.



With over 10,000 industry professionals and tech enthusiasts, the event will not only acquaint the attendees with whats new across the globe, but also instigate them to think beyond the obvious and prepare for the future, with a series of thought-provoking keynotes and panels that the top technocrats, disruptors, innovators, and thinkers are going to make over the course of two days, said Ridley.



This years on-floor demo theatres with 60 free sessions will offer insight into various issues that a company faces while taking its business online.



Visitors will get the opportunity to attend the Ecommerce University for a day-long programme, which has been developed to help build, launch and grow a profitable ecommerce business, he noted, adding that the event will also help understand how to create a digital marketing strategy, manage logistics, or develop digital payment and increase customer conversion.



The thought-provoking conferences will cover a wide range of topics under various themes including Payments & Fintech, Retail & Ecommerce, Automation & AI, Blockchain, Mobile Payments & Wallets, Digital ID, Mall of Tomorrow, Omnichannel and delivery & fulfilment.



The event is supported by its title sponsor Dubai CommerCity, a joint venture between the Dubai Airport Freezone Authority (Dafza) and the Wasl Asset Management Group. The region's first 2.1-million-sq-ft ecommerce free zone has been developed to promote Dubai as a regional hub for e-commerce and support its economic diversification process.



The participation of Dubai CommerCity is an important strategic step which shows its key role in supporting Dubai's global position as an ideal destination for global e-commerce. Seamless Middle East 2018 is a key attraction for leading global e-commerce companies and we believe that the event will showcase the opportunities within the sector, said Amna Lootah, assistant director general  Finance, Commercial & Customer Relations Division of Dafza Innovation & Future Unit.



She highlighted the importance of this strategic exhibition as it coincides with the objectives of Dubai CommerCity, which are based on attracting investments in specialized e-commerce, retail and smart payment solutions.



Seamless Middle East 2018 will have many attractions for visitors who will get a chance to learn from the seminars and demos through a series of thought-provoking installations and live interactive launches, showcases and interviews, located within the exhibition floor.



Some of the other interesting things to watch out for include:



Fintech showcase



New for 2018, this fintech showcase will feature an all-star line-up of international and regional fintech companies that are disrupting traditional retail banking, institutional and corporate banking, insurance and lending.



Launch pad



This is where genuine innovation is showcased as the latest products and services never before seen in the Middle East are unleashed.



Its an exciting focal point for press, investors and buyers looking to learn about the newest technologies which are transforming the way we do business and will give you a competitive advantage in a crowded market.



Companies included in this years launch pad are Beijing Wiseasy Technology, Capillary Technologies, DataProm, Intellect Commerce, Invomate, Krish TechnoLabs, Microblink, Network International, Renome-Smart, Software Group, Twixor and V-Count, with more to be announced.



Start-up zone



With the explosion of new and innovative ecommerce companies over the past 12 months, Seamless Middle East presents one of the biggest opportunities in the region. Visit the Start-Up Zone to meet ground breaking start-ups in the regional commerce space.



Pitch-offs



Sponsored by OMA Emirates Group, the Pitch-Off will see fintechs and commerce start-ups from across the world pitching their products or solutions for five minutes to our expert panel made up of VCs, funds and consultants to win a cheque of $5,000 and a potential investment up to $500,000. Companies competing in the pitch off include Point Checkout, Yalla Bargain, Zicon, SAAS coin, PIP IT and Twixor.



Niranj Sangal, Group CEO of OMA Emirates said: The companies that we have shortlisted are based on the ideas that they have put forth and the disruptive technologies that could help consumers with the maximum benefit.  TradeArabia News ServiceSaudi Arabias total cement sales for Q1 2018 stood at 11.8 million tons, down 11 per cent year-on-year (y-o-y) and one per cent quarter-on-quarter (q-o-q) as a result of the continued slowdown in construction activity, a report said.



The combination of weak demand and high inventory levels forced the companies to seek other solutions such as entering other regions within the kingdom as well as exporting with low selling prices  a case in point is Yanbu Cement's export agreement which seeks to lower the inventory and increase cash levels, said Al Rajhi, a leading financial services provider in the kingdom.



Yanbu Cements low cash cost per ton gives the company the ability to export at lower prices, which is likely not possible for other companies to replicate, says Al Rajhi.



Going forward, demand is unlikely to pick up based on the trends witnessed during the first three months of 2018. Al Rajhi says it remains cautious as construction activities are bound to remain weak. It adds that Q2 will witness a material drop in sales volume due to seasonality (Ramadan and the Eid ) which will result in around 20 per cent drop on q-o-q basis to reach 9.6 million tons (-14 per cent y-o-y) based on Al Rajhi's analysis. For now, Al Rajhi remains neutral on the sector given the low demand, high inventories and price war in the sector, the company said in the report.



The overhang of excess inventory remains with a slight increase on a m-o-m basis. Inventory stood at 35.7 million tons (79 per cent of last twelve months - LTM - sales). In this backdrop, reaching the optimal level of inventories (two months dispatches) will take time, the report adds..



Due to the slowdown in construction activity and prevailing high inventory levels, companies started to enter new regions in the kingdom which triggered a price war, the report said.



The central region seems to be an attractive area especially for northern region cement companies due to the relatively bigger market. The sales market share for northern cement companies increased in the last six months. On the other hand, central region companies market share decreased slightly during the same period.



Yanbu Cement signed a one-year agreement to export one million tons of clinker and 0.5 million tons of cement starting April 2018. The deal is estimated to add SR100 million ($26.6 million) revenue in 2018 as per management commentary.



The agreement will help the company to lower its inventory (currently at 76 per cent of LTM sales) and increase cash levels which will support higher payout ratio for the year. On the other hand, lower margins on this deal will not aid material earnings improvement and the company will renew the deal next year if the local demand remains weak, it adds.  TradeArabia News ServiceThe elevator and escalator market in the UAE is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.7 per cent during 2018-24 on the back of mega infrastructure development due to the upcoming World Expo 2020, a report said.



Further, for the upcoming World Expo 2020, more than $200 billion are expected to be spent for the expansion of existing and construction of new public and private infrastructure projects, which would deploy elevators and escalators, added the report titled "UAE Elevator and Escalator Market (2018-2024)" from 6Wresearch, a global market research and consulting firm.



According to Prijo Samuel, assistant research manager, Research and Consulting, 6Wresearch, the elevators segment accounted for majority of the market share.



Growing acceptance of elevators in the residential sector coupled with increasing heights of buildings in the country has propelled the demand for elevators in the UAE; 4 mps and above high-speed elevators are more in demand.



"Moreover, yjr increasing number of foreign tourists has driven the construction of new hotels across the region, especially in Dubai, resulting in an increased deployment of elevators," Samuel added.



Shefali Goel, research analyst, Research and Consulting, 6Wresearch, said: "Commercial vertical which include transportation and retail segments, accounted for the major market share in the overall market. The UAE is registering significant infrastructural development activities in the commercial sector. Increasing construction activities in residential vertical would further stimulate the market growth during the forecast period.



Further, the Northern Region accounted for majority of the revenue share in UAE elevators and escalators market attributed to key construction projects in the commercial, hospitality and retail verticals," Goel concluded.



Over the past four years, UAE elevator and escalator market registered sluggish growth in terms of number of new installations, attributed to the change in government policies pertaining to devaluation of the currency as well as decline in construction market projects, the report said.



However, upcoming new hotels and shopping malls coupled with growing government spending on infrastructural development projects and increasing inflow of FDI in the construction and retail sectors are some of the key factors that would revive growth of the UAE Elevator and Escalator market during the forecast period.



Some of the key players in UAE elevator and escalator market include Kone Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric, Otis Elevator, Schindler, ThyssenKrupp, and Hyundai Elevators, the report said.  TradeArabia News ServiceSaudi-based developer Tanmiyat Group said the work on its $100-million flagship project - The Court Tower - in Dubai, was progressing well, with 83 per cent of the project already completed and set for handover by this October.



The Court Tower, a premium mixed-use community, will comprise residential apartments, shops and offices on the Dubai Water Canal. Once complete, it will offer residents a full view of the 6.4-km man-made water canal and will also offer easy and quick access to Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) water taxis, bus stations and metro, said a statement from Tanmiyat.

Offering panoramic and unobstructed views of the canal, The Court Tower will add 280,000 sq ft of office space, 198 apartments and 28,000 of retail space to the Water Canal, it added.



Since Beijing Emirates Company was appointed as the new contractor for The Court Tower, the project has not only progressed at a fast pace, but is shaping well to be delivered on time.



Located opposite Habtoor City and JW Marriott, The Court Tower is more than 80 per cent sold and is open to offer its final floors of commercial spaces to premium brands that will associate well with the property.



Delta International Real Estate is the exclusive marketing and sales agency for the project, bringing highest possible returns to the developers and investors, it added.



Saleh Tabakh, the spokesman of Tanmiyats management board, and CEO of Delta International Real Estate, said: "We are extremely pleased with the developments made on the project to date. At Tanmiyat Group, we have always been committed to offering impressive and outstanding facilities to our investors. To that end, weve been working closely with our contractor to deliver the project on time as well as support the long-term economic and social development of the country."



Once complete, The Court Tower will be our second successful project in Business Bay after delivering the Exchange Tower in 2016. The UAE has always been a major destination for investors from emerging countries to Russia. The way the market is shaping, we look forward to investing in more emirates across the country, he added.



Tabakh pointed out that the group's investments in the UAE had surged to over Dh7 billion ($1.9 billion).



"Once The Court Tower is ready, we aim to deliver two more buildings at Living Legends to grow our delivered portfolio to 500 villas, 188 offices at Exchange Tower and 600 apartments at Living Legends," he stated.



The Court Tower will not only offer residents tranquillity, but also business spaces, allowing people to live and work in one location.



The aim is to reduce travel time to work and help minimise the UAEs carbon footprint. The Court Tower is one of many mixed-use properties developed by Tanmiyat Group; the company is also developing another mixed-use community called Living Legends at Dubailand, which is spread over 15 million sq ft, said the top official.



"It is a premium project, however, its prices are still extremely competitive, which has led to 80 per cent of the project sold at such an early stage. We are confident that before the delivery, the project will be 100 per cent sold out," remarked Tabakh.



"Once the area is fully functional, investors can expect an estimated rental return of nine per cent for offices and 11 per cent for residential apartments, he added.-TradeArabia News ServiceHyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) has announced the arrival of the first set of tubes designed to move both people and freight to its research and development centre in Toulouse, France.



An innovative transportation and technology company, HyperloopTT focused on realising the Hyperloop, a system that moves people and goods at unprecedented speeds safely, efficiently, and sustainably.



Through the use of unique, patented technology and an advanced business model of lean collaboration, open innovation and integrated partnership, HyperloopTT is creating and licensing technologies.



With an interior diameter of 4 m, the system is optimised both for passenger capsules and shipping containers. The first phase includes a closed 320-m system that will be operational this year. In addition, a second full-scale system of 1 km elevated by pylons at a height of 5.8 m will be completed in 2019.



Both systems are fully upgradeable and will be utilised by both HyperloopTT and partner companies, said a statement from the company.



The full-scale passenger capsule, currently near completion at Carbures in Spain, is scheduled for delivery to the facility this summer for assembly and integration.



Five years ago we set out to solve transportations most pressing problems; efficiency, comfort and speed. Today we take an important step forward to begin to achieve that goal, remarked HyperloopTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn.



"Hyperloop is more than just displays of rapid acceleration and more than just breaking speed records. The real opportunity is to create an efficient and safe system with an unparalleled passenger experience," he stated.



Building in full-scale means were committed to innovation in the long-term, said Bibop Gresta, HyperloopTT Chairman.



"Weve pioneered the technology, proved feasible and insurable by the worlds largest reinsurance company, Munich RE. We have agreements in place in nine countries where were working on feasibility and regulations," explained Gresta.



"We have a research center for freight and logistics in Brazil and a facility in Toulouse where well deliver the first full-scale passenger capsule. Hyperloop is no longer a concept, it has become a commercial industry," he added.



Founded in 2013, HyperloopTT is a global team comprising more than 800 engineers, creatives and technologists in 52 multidisciplinary teams, with 40 corporate and university partners.



Headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, HyperloopTT has offices in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, UAE; Bratislava, Slovakia; Toulouse, France; Contagem, Brazil; and Barcelona, Spain. HyperloopTT has signed agreements in the US, Slovakia, Abu Dhabi, the Czech Republic, France, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Korea.-TradeArabia News ServiceDevery.io, a blockchain based startup focused on supply chain tracking, has partnered with the United Nations World Food Programme and the Tunisian Ministry of Education to implement a blockchain-based tracking system for its school meals programme.



The Tunisian government operates a school meal programme designed to offer one fresh meal a day to underprivileged students in its primary and secondary educational system, said a statement.



The programme is currently managed by the United Nations World Food Programme to ensure that the programme is implemented appropriately and the schools have adequate supply of meals for the students that require them.



In seeking to improve the system and to track the quality of the meals provided, the Ministry of Education is now exploring the utilisation of blockchain-based tracking, it said.



The implementation will involve an initial roll out to a scheme to feed 1500 primary school kids, with the goal of ultimately rolling out to the scheme to all 400,000 Tunisian school children currently receiving food assistance once successfully trialled, it added.



The meal programme currently serves approximately 6000 schools. In recognising the importance of nutrition as part of a broader goal to ensure and improve educational achievements, the Ministry of Educations programme is aimed to ensure that children from underprivileged backgrounds meet their nutritional requirements.



In achieving these goals, the ability to track the delivery of the meals as well as possible aspects on best utilisation of funds are key measures of success for the programme.



Maria Lukyanova, United Nations World Food Programme representative and head of country office for Tunisia, said: This project is allowing us to explore how supporting innovation, through the introduction of solutions based on blockchain technology, can contribute to strengthening the effectiveness and efficiency of the Tunisian national school meals programme.



Devery.io will provide the technical advisory and development capability to build, train and utilise a transparent and more accountable system of tracking the meal deliveries as well as reporting issues direct to the Ministry in real time, said a statement.



Further, Devery will train personnel on the ground to utilise and maintain the technology for the foreseeable future, it said.



Andrew Rasheed, founder and CEO, Devery.io, said: Blockchain technology has the potential to impact billions of people through bridging the gap between the physical and digital world.



Ensuring the safe delivery of the food to children via blockchain technology is a cause we truly believe will impact the lives of many to come, he added.



The World Food Programme expects to use the technology developed for this programme to assist with the delivery of food in other missions around the world, it stated.  TradeArabia News ServiceAudi, a leading automobile manufacturer, announced that it has sold around 463,800 automobiles worldwide between January and March, up 9.8 per cent over the same quarter last year.



In particular, the high demand in China (+41.9 per cent) and North America (+10.2 per cent) drove growth in the first three months, said a statement.



In Europe, however, sales since January came in below the record-breaking level from 2017, down 4.7 per cent, it said.



In March, the company delivered around 183,750 premium automobiles (+6.0 per cent) worldwide, it added.



Bram Schot, board member for sales and marketing at Audi, said: The record-breaking start to the year provides us with important momentum. With the Audi A7, A6, A1 and Q3 models, we will be renewing around a quarter of our sales in Europe alone throughout the year.



In China, Audi also closed the first quarter successfully. Here the company delivered 154,270 cars since January, an increase of 41.9 per cent, said a statement.



In the past month, demand increased by 30.6 per cent; the Ingolstadt-based automaker sold more automobiles in China than ever before in the month of March, delivering 54,031 units.



The Audi A4 proved an important growth engine. The number of deliveries of the midsize model increased by 86.4 per cent year-on-year to more than 13,800 cars. Since the start of the year more than 37,350 Chinese customers received their keys for an Audi A4 (+99.2 per cent). The top seller is following this positive trend worldwide too, achieving growth of 15.3 per cent to around 87,850 A4 models delivered in the period January through March.



With sales down 5.8 per cent in March, Europe is indicative of the complex ramp-up and discontinuation situation of the current model initiative. In Germany and the UK, Audis two largest European markets, deliveries were down on the very strong sales figures from 2017.



In the domestic market, the premium brand delivered 28,247 automobiles (-9.0 per cent) in March, which had less selling day than last year.



In the UK, sales fell 2.9 per cent year-on-year in the past month. In the first quarter, UK sales were on a par with the prior-year level, up 0.1 per cent, and performed far more resiliently than the declining overall market.



Demand in Spain (+11.3 per cent) and Italy (+2.8 per cent) also remained positive in the past month. In both markets, customer interest in the Audi Q5 held up since the start of the year.



A total of 1,618 Spanish customers (+51.5 per cent) and 2,106 Italian buyers (+131.9 per cent) opted for the SUV in the first quarter. Another positive result: In Austria Audi accomplished premium market leadership regarding car registrations between January and March.



On the North American continent, Audi also continued to grow in March, increasing sales by 8.3 per cent to around 24,550 cars.



With around 61,400 deliveries, the company posted growth of 10.2 per cent year-on-year in the region since January. In Canada alone, Audi sold 3,404 units in March, continuing its double-digit sales growth of the past few months (+14.0 per cent).



Since January, around one in three Canadian Audi customers chose an Audi Q5. Audi of America achieved another record-breaking month, with sales up 7.4 per cent to 20,090 units.



The Q family once again contributed largely to this success. The SUV share in the US is currently 52 per cent, i.e. one out of every two Audi models sold in this market is a Q model.



The Audi Q7 is proving popular. In the past month, one out of every three Audi Q7 models delivered went to an American customer. Across all models, cumulative sales are up 9.7 per cent in the US, it stated.  TradeArabia News ServiceThe Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry recently hosted a series of three Best Practice Sharing Sessions at its premises which highlighted a variety of best practices in the areas of employee welfare, waste management, environmental education, Emiratisation, and social inclusion of persons with disabilities, among others.



The event, held at the Chambers premises in Deira, was organised by members of the Dubai Chamber Sustainability Network and led by the networks specialised task forces.



Representatives from leading companies in the UAE participated in the sessions, including Emirates NBD, Chalhoub Group, Cummins Middle East, Empower, RAK Bank, Six Construct, Farnek Services, German Imaging Technologies, Dubai Design District, Veolia, Dulsco, UAE Exchange, Nestle, Axiom Telecom, and Tristar Group.



Dr Belaid Rettab, senior director, Economic Research & Sustainable Business Development Sector, Dubai Chamber, noted that the strong participation in the sessions reflected a growing awareness about important sustainability and CSR matters impacting businesses in Dubai.



He explained that the case studies, best practices, strategies and experiences shared by participating companies provided valuable insights which will help build on progress already achieved by the task forces and identify new areas where businesses can align their efforts to maximise their social impact.



Established by the Chambers Centre for Responsible Business (CRB), the Dubai Chamber Sustainability Network serves as the focal point for the business community to share and exchange best practices in implementing CSR and sustainability. The network provides an opportunity for local companies to network, learn, share experiences and constitute CSR leadership.  TradeArabia News ServiceThe Emirates Intellectual Property Association (EIPA) has partnered with Sader Legal Publishing to promote intellectual property (IPR) rights protection, especially across the fields of training, learning and copyrights.



The memorandum of understanding (MoU) is aimed at highlighting the important role that IP plays, including the adoption of globally accepted best practices in protecting innovation and creativity.



The new partnership between EIPA and Sader Legal Publishing is expected to usher in a new legal culture of IP in the UAE and act as an ideal communication platform for all entities involved in the development and protection of IP in the country. The agreement was signed by Major General Dr Abdel Quduos Alobaidli, assistant commander-in-chief for Quality and Excellence, Dubai Police and Chairman, EIPA and Attorney Rany Sader, managing partner and legal head, Sader Legal Publishing LLC at the EIPA headquarters in Dubai.



The newly signed agreement represents a step forward in EIPA's continuing efforts to play a key role in the promotion of reading and culture and raising awareness on the importance of legal knowledge across society--putting strong focus on the significance of intellectual property protection. The agreement also demonstrates EIPA's strong support for the country's comprehensive development process, particularly in the protection of the rights of innovators coming from various fields of interest.



According to EIPA senior officials, the MoU will help enhance cooperation between the two parties in developing and implementing joint programs and activities that are aimed at increasing awareness on the importance of IP--consolidating its concepts and facilitating key research and studies needed in drafting more local IP-focused legislation.



Under the terms of the agreement, EIPA and Sader Legal Publishing will cooperate and communicate on IPR protection issues, raise community awareness, organize training courses and conduct studies in this field, as well as identify other areas related to joint cooperation between the two parties.



The agreement is expected to result in the development of creative ideas, which includes the establishment of a traditional and digital/online legal library specializing in IP topics and subjects. To help ensure the proper implementation of IP projects, both parties have agreed on forming a steering committee that will be composed of executive managers and a delivery team to be located across support offices in the UAE and Lebanon.



Alobaidli said: This newly signed MoU represents a strategic step in EIPA's mandate to strengthen its ties with IP professionals--a move that will also increase community awareness and help us promote a culture of IP in the UAE. In line with this, EIPA has expressed its commitment in supporting the vision of the country's wise leadership to be at pace with the rapid developments of IP. We remain steadfast in the continuing efforts to foster strong cooperation with all government entities in promoting more awareness on IP rights and how to protect the creations and innovations of the human intellect.



IP protection is one of the UAE's top priorities and represents the cornerstone of a modern economy and the culture of an advanced country, which is ably reflected in the rapid economic development and technological advancement being enjoyed by the UAE.



Our new partnership with Sader Legal Publishing proves to be both timely and strategic as it allows us the opportunity to increase awareness on IP rights and laws and its impact on society. The MoU will help in the creation of a conducive environment that stimulates innovation, creativity, intellectual activities, including the development of independent data and publications, which in turn, will serve as primary references for IP in the UAE, the Arab region and the rest of the world, Alobaidli added.



Rany Sader said: We are confident that the partnership between Sader Legal Publishing and EIPA will serve as a model in the promotion of IP concepts in the region where the UAE is recognized as a pioneer in the efforts to protect and promote IP rights. The project requires the use of professional experience of both parties to develop a solid action plan, achieve all the outputs and attain the inter-related goals. We look forward to strengthening joint cooperation and developing projects in areas related to the protection of intellectual property rights in the UAE. - TradeArabia News ServiceSaudi Aramco is displaying its latest GIS maps and applications at the 12th National Forum for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and exhibition, organised by Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University in Dammam, Saudi Arabia.



Saudi Aramco is also participating as sponsor of the forum which opened today (April 10) and will run until April 12.



The event is being held under the patronage of Prince Saud bin Nayef bin Abdulaziz, Governor of the Eastern Province.



The forum titled Geographical Information Systems in the service of the Public Sector and Society is providing a platform to showcase and discuss state-of-the-art geographical technology applications in health, environment, security and real estate, said a statement.



The forum is being attended by prominent local and international figures, including researchers and specialists as well as students and private and governmental bodies associated with geographical information systems, it said.



Fahad E Al Helal, vice president of project management, said: Saudi Aramco continues its efforts in adopting and developing the latest technologies in geographical information systems, in addition to strengthening our relations and collaborations with associations and experts in the industry.



Al Helal emphasised the importance of measurement and geographical information systems when running critical projects across the kingdom. He also noted the need for investments to ensure the continuous development of these systems, given the important role they play in Saudi Aramcos expanding operations.



Geographical information systems allow us to further enhance our upstream operations, safety procedures, project management, our detection and monitoring capabilities, and the preservation of our wide-ranging assets, he said.



The forum provided access to the latest technological developments and their scientific and practical applications. The goals of the event aligned with the kingdoms efforts to localise this industry and implement essential development projects and programs that employ and invest in geographical technologies to provide investment opportunities for the public and private sectors, it stated.  TradeArabia News ServiceNew Zealands government has announced that it has banned all new offshore oil and gas exploration in an historic climate win thats come after seven years of growing public protests.



By ending new oil and gas exploration, the recently elected Coalition Government has effectively put the fourth-largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ) on the planet  covering more than 4 million sq km  off limits for any new fossil fuel exploitation.



New Zealand has taken an historic step and delivered a massive breakthrough for the climate, spurred on by the tens of thousands of people who have fought for years to protect our coasts from new oil and gas exploration, said Greenpeace New Zealand executive director, Dr Russel Norman.



This sends a powerful message: We are ending the age of oil. Just as New Zealand did in 1987 when it went nuclear-free and stood up to the powerful US military, this has shown bold global leadership on the greatest challenge of our time  putting people ahead of the interests of oil corporations and the hunt for fossil fuels that are driving dangerous climate change, Norman continued.



The announcement comes as a significant blow to global oil companies that have pinned their hopes on finding oil here in future. There will be public discourse in New Zealand over whether to allow companies with existing licenses  including Statoil and OMV  to carry out extraction if oil or gas were discovered.



Over the past decade, some of the world's largest oil companies have sought to search for and exploit fossil fuel reserves off the country's isolated shores. Shell, Anadarko, Petrobras, Statoil, Chevron and OMV are among a list of foreign companies to undertake seismic surveying and exploratory drilling in the countrys deep seas, which threatens marine mammals.



Although welcomed by the previous government, foreign oil companies have met strong resistance from the New Zealand public, Indigenous communities, and environmental NGOs. Over the past seven years, hundreds of thousands of people have marched, petitioned, and blockaded in opposition to oil explorati.



Last month, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made headlines when she personally accepted a Greenpeace petition signed by 50,000 New Zealanders.



The New Zealand government will continue offering the onshore region of Taranaki for exploration, and will also not revoke any existing exploration contracts.



While we will continue to demand a complete end to fossil fuel exploration on land and sea as well as the revoking of existing permits, this has been one of Greenpeace New Zealands longest-running campaigns and it counts as a great success for so many people that this ban is now in place, said Norman.



The challenge for the industry and the government now is to provide a just transition for a clean energy future, which can provide jobs and a big boost to our economy.



New Zealand is among the first countries in the world to make significant moves towards a permanent ban on oil exploration. Over the past few years, public opposition to oil has grown into a global movement, with notable campaigns including opposition to Statoils exploration in the Great Australian Bight, demonstrations against Totals drilling plans near the Amazon Reef, and the ongoing battle against the construction of new tar sands pipelines in North America.



Globally, the writing is on the wall for the oil industry. Its assumption that the world will always want more and more oil, and that they will need to exploit ever more remote new frontiers to supply it, is fatally flawed. New Zealands ban should make any company looking to develop extreme projects like the Canadian tar sands, Arctic or Amazon Reef think twice about whether its a gamble worth taking, said Norman.  TradeArabia News ServiceThousands of hospitality and construction industry professionals have descended on Jeddah for major trade events running together at the Jeddah Centre for Forums and Events till April 12 (4-10pm daily).



The sixth edition of The Hotel Show Saudi Arabia and second annual Stone & Surface Saudi Arabia opened on April 10th and were inaugurated by Faisal Alfadl, secretary general of the King Saud Foundation and founder of the Saudi Green Building Forum.



AlFadl also hosted a full-day Green Building Workshop during the first day of the events at the conference at Stone & Surface Saudi Arabia, detailing the kingdoms position as a world leader in sustainable construction, with an intelligent cities green built environment on its horizon.



The events come at a time of high levels of activity across the kingdom in the hospitality and construction markets. A Tophotelprojects report prepared ahead of The Hotel Show revealed 55,810 new hotel rooms are in the Saudi construction pipeline, the majority of which will open in the next five years.



Meanwhile, according to BNC Network, Knowledge Partner of Stone & Surface Saudi, there are 4,778 construction projects under way across the country, led by urban development and a growing transport network.



Speaking at the opening of the co-located annual tradeshows for 2018, Gary Williams, event director of The Hotel Show Saudi Arabia, said: The hospitality industry in Saudi Arabia is going through its most significant period of change to date, with major hotel and restaurant brands from all over the world recognising its incredible growth potential based on its long-term investment, business and tourism prospects.



Not only does the kingdom have the largest population in the Gulf and a robust domestic tourism market, forecasts by the World Travel & Tourism Council predict international tourist arrivals to grow from 18 million in 2017 to more than 30 million in 2027. Investment in infrastructure, major leisure and culture focused tourist attractions, and new visa rules are all part of the vision to put the kingdom on the global tourism map.



We are bringing to Saudi the ultimate showcase of local and international products dedicated to the hospitality industry from in-room technologies, to interiors, lighting and design, gym equipment, F&B (food and beverage) and much more  bringing the latest innovations and allowing developers of new hotels and restaurants here to stay ahead of the curve.



Major brands taking part in The Hotel Show Saudi Arabia 2018 include: Unilever Food Solutions, KAAS Group, Schneider Electric, RAK Porcelain, Aldar Almadania, CMT Technologies, SecuTronic, Delta Marketing, Sporta, Technogym, alongside many more.



This years event also features the highly-anticipated second edition of the Inter-Hotel Culinary Competition  Mystery Box Challenge where chefs from the countrys leading hotels are set to battle it out in a bid to be crowned the top hotel kitchen in Saudi Arabia.



Meanwhile Stone & Surface Saudi Arabia 2018 is providing a vast international showcase of the latest stone and surface design materials from 12 countries including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, Canada and Italy.



Yan Wang, event director of Stone & Surface Saudi Arabia, said: Saudi Arabia currently has a wealth of cutting-edge, iconic architecture and design projects under construction alongside mega public projects including the new airport in Jeddah and Haramain Rail Line Project  set to connect the country like never before."



The demand for the procurement of surface materials and new designs is at a high, and we aim to connect contracting professionals and the design community. We are pleased to see such overwhelming interest from such visitors in the Saudi market, who are keen to source new technology and products.



A free-to-attend, CPD (Continuing Professional Development)-certified conference is also being introduced to the event line-up this year, featuring expert speakers set to update the kingdoms professionals on the latest developments and trends in the construction industry including experts from JLL and the Saudi Green Building Forum.



Co-located, The Hotel Show Saudi Arabia 2018 and Stone & Surface Saudi Arabia 2018 are free-to-attend events. - TradeArabia News Service

Global air services provider dnata, a part of the Emirates Group, has signed an agreement to acquire Qantas catering businesses.



The agreement is subject to approval from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).



Qantas catering businesses include wholly-owned subsidiaries Q Catering Limited and Snap Fresh. Q Catering has centres in four Australian ports  Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, with its largest airline customer being Qantas.



Snap Fresh is a state-of-the-art meal production plant in Queensland, specialising in Australian-made frozen meals for airlines and customers in the healthcare and food retail industries.



Commenting on the agreement, dnata's divisional senior vice president of catering, Robin Padgett, said: "This agreement reflects our confidence in Australia as a market and the ongoing growth potential into the future.



By combining dnatas network strength and international talent with Qantas domestic catering expertise, this will allow us to further grow our presence and deliver catering excellence to more customers across Australia than ever before. This includes investing in more infrastructure, starting with a new catering facility in Sydney.



We look forward to the opportunity to welcome the employees from Qantas in-flight catering businesses to the dnata team.



Under the agreement, dnata will supply catering for Qantas flights for an initial period of 10 years, and Qantas will continue to work with key suppliers in menu design and development.



Qantas Domestic CEO, Andrew David, added: The catering businesses will benefit significantly from dnatas global footprint, catering expertise, and ability to drive investment and growth for what is a core focus of its operation.



Customers will continue to enjoy Qantas' premium service, including unique Rockpool-designed menus for First and Business passengers, showcasing the best of Australian produce for millions of travellers each year."



Together with dnata, well continue to deliver the in-flight food and beverage experience we know our customers value, just as we work with catering companies in offshore ports for our international flights.



Dubai-headquartered dnata already operates 11 catering facilities in Australia, currently trading under the dnata catering brand (recently rebranded from Alpha Flight Services).



Over the past 12 months, dnata has invested significantly in growing its global catering network. Its most recent milestones include the opening of a catering facility in Dublin, Ireland, the opening of its $50 million Melbourne catering facility and an agreement to acquire New York-based caterer 121 in-flight catering. It is also currently constructing a facility in Vancouver, Canada. - TradeArabia News ServiceHyatt Hotels Corporation has announced plans for the first dual-branded Hyatt Place and Hyatt House hotels in Europe.



An affiliate of leading extended-stay operator Cycas Hospitality has entered into a franchise agreement with a Hyatt affiliate. The hotels are being developed by French real estate company Kaufman & Broad.



The opening of Hyatt Place Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport and Hyatt House Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport will mark the introduction of Hyatts select service brands in France, which will bring the total number of Hyatt-branded hotels in the country to 10.



The Hyatt Place and Hyatt House brands are rooted in extensive consumer research indicating that guests seek stylish, comfortable, seamless experiences that accommodate their lifestyles and familiar routines. To embody this, the two brands offer casual hospitality and purposeful service in a smartly designed, high-tech and contemporary environment.



Hyatt Place Charles De Gaulle Airport will bring the brands intuitive design, casual atmosphere, spacious guestrooms with distinct sleeping and living areas, and practical amenities, such as free wi-fi and 24-hour food offerings, to guests looking for a relaxing and uncomplicated place to pause before beginning the next leg of their journey. Hyatt House Charles De Gaulle Airport will offer apartment-style suites with fully equipped kitchens, providing guests with the spaces and places that help make them feel more like home. Together, the two hotels will offer an array of shared services and amenities that meet the needs of transient and extended-stay guests.



We are delighted to announce the first Hyatt Place and Hyatt House dual-branded hotels in France, which highlights the growing relevance of Hyatts select service brands by way of franchise agreements in Europe, said Felicity Black-Roberts, vice president of development  Europe and North Africa, Hyatt. With this exciting, first of its kind development for Hyatt in Europe, we will be able to cater to a mix of travelers by offering two brands in one location.



Developed by Kaufman & Broad and expected to open in the second half of 2020, the hotels will be located in Paris Nord 2 International Business Park at 241 rue de la Belle Etoile in Roissy, one of the Ile-de-Frances busiest gateways, and home to Europes second largest airport, Paris Charles De Gaulle. With a combined total of 430 rooms, the 309-room Hyatt Place hotel and the 121-room Hyatt House hotel will share conference space, an extensive all-day dining/bar facility, a gym, and a large swimming pool, a rare amenity in this location.



We are proud to continue our relationship with Hyatt. Opening our first properties in France is a major milestone in our international rollout plans, taking advantage of the growing and widely untapped market for select service and extended stay hotel concepts in Europe to bridge the gap between hotels and home, said Asli Kutlucan, partner at Cycas Hospitality.



This realisation demonstrates our expertise in hotel residences and proves our ability to respond to the hotel residences industry demand, said David Laurent, Senior Vice-President Commercial Property and Major Urban Projects of Kaufman & Broad. It also shows the capacity of Kaufman & Broad to develop several complex projects and meet the expectations of the population density and the new customs of the city.



There are eight Hyatt-branded hotels currently open in France, including Park Hyatt Paris-Vendome, Hyatt Regency Paris Etoile, Hyatt Regency Paris Charles de Gaulle, Hyatt Paris Madeleine, Hotel du Louvre, Hotel Martinez, Hyatt Regency Nice Palais de la Mediterranee and Hyatt Centric La Rosiere.



Hyatt Regency Chantilly is currently under development and is expected to open in autumn this year. - TradeArabia News ServiceThe islands of the Bahamas boast a wealth of delicious local cuisine, upscale restaurants and beachside cafes. Travelers looking to get their foodie fix certainly are in for a treat: There's no end in sight to the freshly caught seafood, juicy plantains, homemade bread and delectable juices here. If you want to eat like a local in the Bahamas, it's important to get acquainted with the best homegrown foods and restaurants, as well as the tipping culture and meal customs.

Local Foods and Customs

If you try only one food in the Bahamas, it should be the conch. Locals adore this delicious sea snail, which is often prepared by deep-frying it, a dish called conch fritters. Ceviche-style conch is a popular dish as well; raw conch meat is mixed with bell peppers, onion and cucumbers and dressed with plenty of lime juice. The restaurant Twin Brothers has some of the best conch ceviche in the Bahamas, though it tends to be swarming with people. A rum cocktail helps the wait go by faster.

You can't go wrong with seafood in general, especially fried or seared grouper with grits, a beloved local dish. If it's sweets you're craving, rum cake is a must-try. Wash it all down with a Bahama Mama, a refreshing cocktail made of pineapple and lemon juices, rum and coffee-flavored liquor. To try the best and freshest seafood in town, check out Potter's Cay, an amazing seafood market on the Nassau side of the Paradise Island Bridge.

Foodie Travel Tips

As with anywhere else you go in the world, Bahamas-bound travelers should have an idea of how tipping culture works in restaurants and other places of business. Tipping rules and meal customs can vary widely by country, city and region, so it helps to know that, wherever you go, you're bound to encounter some cultural differences. It's all part of the fun, of course.

Tipping culture in the Bahamas is similar to that of the U.S. First, always check the bill to ensure that gratuity isn't included. If it isn't, standard practice is to tip at least 15 percent; 20 percent is normal in more deluxe restaurants. In bars, travelers should tip 10 to 15 percent to staff members who bring drinks to the table or $1 to $3 per round of drinks to the bartender.

Keep in mind that one great  and affordable  way to get a taste of local cuisine is by visiting supermarkets or small roadside shacks during your trip. Plan to pack a picnic from a local grocer or vendor at least once or twice, being sure to sample different dishes that you might not otherwise try. Finally, though it's tempting to want to bring back food from the Bahamas, note that it's illegal to pack meat, provisions, fruits and vegetables and other food articles in your suitcase.By Siddhant Mohan, TwoCircles.net

A 13-member delegation from India was detained at the Israeli border on Wednesday while on its way to visit Ramallah, the headquarters of Palestinian National Authorities or PLO.

The delegation comprised of Navaid Hamid, the president of All India Majlis-e-Mushawarat; Mohammad Salim, Communist Party leader and the member of parliament from West Bengal; Zikrur Rahman, former Indian Ambassador to Palestine; Niaz Ahmed Farooqui, secretary at Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind; Sufi scholar Shaikh Aboobacker, social activist Swami Agnivesh, Christian scholar John Dayal, Harcharan Singh Josh along with others.

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The Indian delegation was supposed to take part in a conference themed Jerusalem: the eternal capital of Palestine organised in Ramallah by PLO authorities.

However, when the delegation reached the West Bank Border between Jordan and Israel, Israel authorities stopped the delegation at the immigration checkpoint from entering the borders.

Was detained along other delegates of Indian delegation by Israeli security forces at west bank crossing & deported to Jordan inspite of having valid visa to.attend Conference in Ramallah convened by PLO Authorities.  Navaid Hamid (@navaidhamid) April 11, 2018

Navaid Hamid told TwoCircles.net, Israeli authorities told us that our visas were canceled by the Military Tribunal. So we could not enter there. However, the delegation was not informed of their visa cancellation before. According to the claims, the delegation had the valid visa in possession.

Moreover, Israeli authorities told Mohammad Salim  who holds the diplomatic passport as a member of parliament  that he could visit the land but on the condition that he would not go to Ramallah. Salim, who was traveling with his wife and a son, was also advised he could not take his son to Palestinian land.

Mohammad Salim refused to comply with the conditions, consequently, the whole delegation was detained at the West Bank border for more than four hours.

The delegation was boarded on to a bus with their passports confiscated and handed over to the Jordanian authorities.

However, after the intervention of the Ministry of External Affairs, India, Israeli authorities allowed Mohammad Salim and his family to visit Ramallah without any conditions imposed. According to Navaid Hamid, Mohammad Salim is on his way to Ramallah where he will take part in the conference. Rest of the delegation is on its way back to India.

While boarding the bus, Navaid Hamid said he told Israeli officials, We feel honored to be deported because of our commitment to the Palestinian cause.During the Soviet period, the Armenian SSR, which didn't share border with the RSFSR, communicated with the center mainly through the territory of the Azerbaijani SSR. However, due to the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia basically lived in an economic blockade. It's obvious that without this blockade, Armenia would be able to join large-scale economic projects, as a result of which the republic would embark on the path of prosperity. Such scenario would also bring a certain benefit to the largest country in the region - Russia.

Settlement of territorial conflicts will lead to development and implementation of mutually beneficial economic projects, which become particularly relevant in the face of increasing sanctions against the Russian Federation.

Difficult economic situation, consequences of which have a painful effect on the current situation in Armenia, are the obvious result of the Karabakh war. As a result of this conflict, Armenia is basically in a political isolation. The republic shares borders with four states, two of which have bad relations with it. Turkey is a strategic partner of Azerbaijan and still keeps its borders with Armenia closed. Although in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, Turkey was one of the first to recognize Armenia as a sovereign state, it's still impossible to establish diplomatic contacts and sign mutually beneficial trade agreements. Iran pursues friendly policy towards Armenia, but it has hostile relations with the West. The Abkhaz and Ossetian problems create certain restrictions in cooperation between Georgia and Armenia.

Transport isolation is also an important problem of modern Armenia. Closure of borders, as well as escalation of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, led to the fact that communication between Armenia and Russia is possible only through the Georgian Military Road that passes through the territory of Georgia, which severed diplomatic relations with the Russian Federation and withdrew from the CIS. Transport isolation manifested itself in restrictions on railway traffic. As a result of the Karabakh conflict, section of the railway that connected Meghri and Masis settlements was shut down.

In other words, south of Armenia is cut off from railway communication. Armenia hopes to restore its road infrastructure potential by building Armenia-Iran railway, but this project hasn't been implemented yet.

The second promising area associated with development of railway communication is restoration of a part of the Transcaucasian Railway, which passes through the territory of Abkhazia. Russia is also interested in this, but since 1991, due to the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, Tbilisi blocked railway communication on the Sochi-Sukhumi-Tbilisi-Yerevan route. This railway has been in decline for over 24 years.

Economic blockade of Armenia predetermined its participation in integration processes in the post-Soviet space, since it will remain alone, it will be difficult for Armenia not to find itself on the list of countries whose foreign debt is many times higher compared to annual income. But despite Armenia's participation in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, militarization of the republic and, as a consequence, militarization of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic forces Yerevan to actively invest in the army. This leaves an imprint on people's lives and rhetoric of the political elites of Armenia. People live in constant fear, they fear that another escalation of the conflict will begin, which will also lead to migration.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Armenian economy satisfied its needs for resources through imports from the Soviet republics. Azerbaijan supplied Armenia with products of chemical and fuel industry, machine building, vegetables. Armenia mainly exproted finished products - machines, agricultural machines, cars, clothes, dishes. By the end of the 1980s 70% of Armenia's production volume was based on imported products. At the same time, 60% of the produced goods were exported. However, because of the war, Armenia was forced to urgently seek alternative sources of hydrocarbons. Since the mid-1990s, Iran has become the main gas importer and guarantor of Armenia's energy security. And today Armenia depends on Iranian gas supplied, which it gets at high prices.

Finally, economic isolation predetermined forced deindustrialization of the country, which failed to preserve many industrial productions. According to the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, after the war, the number of people employed in production industry decreased from 458,000 to 180,000 (by 2.5 times), which in turn lead to reduction in production and consumption of electricity, as well as natural gas. At the same time, the number of people working in agriculture increased from 389,000 to 567,000 people (by 1.5 times).

Today Armenia relies on information technologies, since it was the center of IT innovations in the USSR. At the same time, just like any emerging industry, start-ups in Armenia face the need to respond to technological changes quickly. In order to produce competitive products, it's necessary to attract wider audience and global investments, which the unresolved Karabakh issue obviously doesn't allow.Not content with an economic and diplomatic blockade, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has revealed a project for a canal that would physically cut off the peninsular Qataris from the Arabian mainland. As Big Think writes in the article Saudi Arabia threatens to turn Qatar into an island, the plan also calls for a Saudi military base and nuclear waste dumpon the Qatari side of the canal.

To isolate usually means to cut off, to place in quarantine. Thats what the Saudis have been doing to the Qataris since June 2017. Coordinating with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt, the KSA imposed a diplomatic and economic boycott on the Qataris, accusing the Emirate of interfering in its domestic affairs, supporting terrorism and generally siding with Iran, the Saudis arch enemy.

Vehemently denying the claims, Qatar sought and received regional support from Turkey, Oman andyesIran. The Saudis turned up the pressure in December, closing the last remaining border post at Salwa. This effectively cut off land access to Qatar.

Qatar, however, is not buckling under the pressure. An IMF report published last March even indicates that the oil- and gas-rich Emirate is recovering from the worst effects of the Saudi-led blockade. A fact which surely informs the revelation of the canal plan last week by Sabq, a Saudi online newspaper.

Ratcheting up the pressure to 11, the KSA aims to add new meaning to the verb to isolate by turning to its root word and literally transform Qatar into an island. Dubbed the Salwa Canal, the project is to be funded entirely by private investors from the KSA and UAE and executed by Egyptian firms, building on their experience widening the Suez Canal.

The canal would run from Salwa in the west to Ras Abu Gamys, 37 miles (60 km) to the east. It would be more than 200 yards (200 m) wide and 50-65 feet (15-20 m) deep, and thus be able to accommodate merchant and passenger ships of up to 968 feet (295 m) long and 108 feet (33 m) wide, with a maximum draught of 40 feet (12 m). The estimated cost would be around 2.8 billion Saudi riyals (app. $747 million).

As it is a unilateral project, the canal would run entirely on KSA territory, less than a mile (about 1 km) south of the Saudi-Qatari border. This would leave a strip of Saudi territory on the new island, which the Kingdom aims to use to install a military base, and a dumping site for waste from a nuclear power plant, yet to be built.

Incongruously, the plan also calls for five hotels, two ports and a free trade zone. Tourists and entrepreneurs would probably think twice before heading off to an Arabian version of the hyper-tense DMZ between North and South Korea. As an improvement to shipping, the canal itself does not make much sense either: ships currently follow well-established routes through the main body of the Persian Gulf.

The canal plan may turn out to be no more than another salvo in the war of nerves between the Saudis and Qataris. If not, please send us a glow-in-the-dark postcard next time youre relaxing in the Salwa Canal Zone.April 11 brought no surprises to Azerbaijan: the current head of the Azerbaijani state, Ilham Aliyev, won a landslide victory in the early election, thereby prolonging his presidency for the next seven years. A high turnout was fixed at the election - according to the CEC, the voter turnout was 74.5%.

Undoubtedly, there will be malcontents and accusations of violations - it's not unusual for the entire post-Soviet space, which still falls short of Western European democratic standards. Such violations, in accordance with procedural requirements, will be investigated and, it cannot be ruled out that votes might be recounted at some polling stations - . such situation had occurred before. The OSCE/ODIHR interim and final reports, whose observers monitored the electoral process throughout the country, with the exception of the territories occupied by Armenia, may not be ideal for the government either - Baku is not one of the West's favorites, and objectively it doesn't pretend to be a democracy of the German or Dutch model.

At the same time, no serious player will put the very fact of Ilham Aliyev's landslide victory in the first round under question. After all, today it was absolutely clear to even most ardent critics of Aliyev that the incumbent president's positions are as strong as possible, even in spite of the economic problems of recent years linked to the decline in global oil prices in the conditions of the under-diversified Azerbaijani economy. People vote for the current government, as it symbolizes the political stability that is vital for improving welfare, and this contrasts sharply with the devastation and arbitrariness of the early 1990s, and the older generation associates the current radical opposition precisely with it. What is important, stability during Ilham Aliyev's rule has not become stagnation - the ruling team demonstrates willingness, will and practical steps for serious economic reforms, especially after the painful lesson of the collapsed oil prices.

Meanwhile, the current opposition, united in the National Council of Democratic Forces(NCDF), categorically refused to recognize the results of the election, which it boycotted. Such a reaction is quite logical and expected, since the bet of traditional opposition parties - the Popular Front and Musavat - on boycotting the election has clearly failed. On the contrary, having withdrawn, the opposition deliberately eased the task to the incumbent president, who, in the absence of competition, gained more than 85%. What did the opposition politicians expect, choosing such a disastrous tactic, which, rather, looks like voluntary surrender? Did Ali Kerimli, Isa Gambar, Arif Hajili or Jamil Hasanli seriously believe that by refusing to participate in the election they would put pressure on Aliyev and provoke a coordinated international reaction? One could expect such a result if the NCFD was supported by real force and strong support of people. But given that the authorized opposition rallies at the Mehsul stadium were attended by no more than a couple of thousands of supporters, according to the numerous videos and photos, the boycott turned out to be a short-sighted step. The opposition's assurances that they brought up to 15 thousand people to the square cannot withstand the most elementary verification - even blatant attempts of operators to find an advantageous angle could not mask the small number of people there.

There are real reasons for which people, having a free and mass access to cable and satellite television, the Internet and social networks, did not go to authorized opposition rallies - and even good spring weather in Baku did not inspire people to go to the Mahsul Stadium. It's not even the absence of discontent - there will always be malcontents, and their numbers are much higher than two thousand people. But the NCDF has no concepts and real political programs that would have been better than those proposed by the current government. The opposition also does not have any intellectual resources for their development, since all high-quality human resources are engaged by the power, whcih left behind the practice of blind regionalism of the 1990s and early 2000s. The opposition also failed to inspire people with speeches, even populist - especially when the traditional opposition voluntarily refuses to participate in the debate on public television and thereby loses access to a huge audience. Finally, there is no confidence in the loyalty of opposition parties to democratic ideals, about which they like to talk - after all, the opposition is led by the same people as 20 years earlier.

Another part of the opposition - the one that turned out to be more mobile and already settled in Europe, conducts its "political struggle" from outside. This struggle has been recently reduced to hanging papers on streets, in which Aliyev is called a "dictator" - in order to take a picture and publish such a testimony of unprecedented "political courage" in social networks. They do not care that missing cat and hamster posters, advertising for housing, burger and sushi ads, which are more important for European residents, will be placed on these papers in a couple of hours. The political mission is to collect likes on Facebook, which fuel the illusion of political influence. Does it make a real difference? According to the April 11 election, which were held without a hint of tension in the society, it is unlikely.

***

P.S.Today, the population's list of concerns are linked to the social and economic sphere, in particular, it concerns the development of industrial infrastructure in the regions of Azerbaijan and creation of new jobs. Experts say that it is possible to resolve such issues with the help of domestic investments, because over the years of sovereignty, thanks to a stable government, a powerful financial elite has developed in Azerbaijan. These people owe their present status to the founder of Azerbaijani statehood Heydar Aliyev and his son Ilham Aliyev, and to maintain the current government they should be interested in attracting competent economists in the development of successful projects in the regions, as well as direct investment in these projects. Thus, on the one hand, business will develop in the regions, generating new revenues, on the other hand, the population that has received jobs and a decent standard of living will continue to support the current government."We have been fully engaged in spring field works. Spring has come in the southern territories: Crimea, Stavropol, Kuban, Don and the North Caucasian republics," Agriculture Minister Alexander Tkachev said at a working meeting with the president Vladimir Putin this week.

According to him, the harvested area has been increased: "There are more than 80 million hectares, which is 200 thousand more then we had last year. We also increased the sowing rate: barley, flax, rapeseed, soybeans, vegetables... We expect a decent crop next year...If weather is good and all goes well, I think that there will be also a decent grain harvest this year - more than 100 million tons."

The president of the Russian Grain Union, Arkady Zlochevsky, told Vestnik Kavkaza about sowing in the North Caucasus Federal District: "To date, a total of 114 thousand hectares were sown in the NCFD, by 85 thousand less than last year. It should be taken into account that 114 out of 418 hectares as a whole, considering the decline from 490,000 hectares in the previous year, is much more optimistic than in other regions. In the Southern Federal District, 285,000 hectares were sown, by 206 thousand hectares less than we had last season, and much less than in the NCFD. Therefore, the North Caucasus is in the lead in sowing now.

In total, more than 52.9 million tons of grain were shipped over these 8 months, which is 5.9 million tons higher than in the last season on those same dates. Over the first 8 months, almost 36.2 million tons of wheat were shipped. This is 5.7 million tons more (18.7%) than during the previous season. A significant role here is played by the North Caucasus region, the growth is very good there, and there was a good harvest last year. We hope that due to higher rates of sowing, there will be a good harvest in the North Caucasus, and the region will keep the leading position. Our outlook is quite optimistic."Member of the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation, Anton Lopatin, speaking at the press conference of the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly's observation mission for the presidential election in Azerbaijan, said that there was a large delegation of CEC members from the Russian side led by the deputy chairman of the Central Election Commission.

"These are also eight chairmen of the regional election commissions," the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza cited him as saying.

"In total, we visited more than 150 precinct commissions," Lopatin specified. "All my colleagues noted the high level of professional training of the precinct commissions' members," he stressed.

"We consider that, given the high voter turnout, the preparation carried out by the Azerbaijani Central Election Commission, played its role," the member of the Russian CEC pointed out.

He said that "this important work, among other things, influenced the fact that there were no violations during this election." Anton Lopatin drew attention to the fact that voters were informed in the best possible way. "Everyone had a deep understanding of the Electoral Code of Azerbaijan," he said.

"The elections were held at a high organizational and professional level," Anton Lopatin concluded.The members of Azerbaijan's precinct election commissions showed extremely high competence in carrying out its activities, chairman of the Central Election Commission of Kazakhstan Berik Imashev, who monitored Azerbaijan's presidential election as part of the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly's observation mission.

"The CIS mission from Kazakhstan included 34 observers in five regions, and all our observers note that the elections organized a high level. We also confirm it. We want to note that members of precinct election commissions showed high competence in carrying out its activities. We associate this with the fact that Azerbaijan attracts professionals for organizing elections not only at the central level but also at the lower levels," he does.

According to Berik Imashev, he would recommend this positive experience to the whole world. "Kazakhstan is carefully studying this Azerbaijani experience of personalization of lower-level electoral commissions. And I think that these elections have once again demonstrated that the republic's success deserves special attention, and, perhaps, we even integrate it into our legislation," the chairman of the CEC of Kazakhstan said.

He also noted the high turnout in the elections. "Perhaps some countries might not understand such a high turnout and our electoral legal culture in general. The people's unity on the day of elections deserves all approval and support .And I agree with other observers that all the necessary conditions for the people's free expression of the will were created," Berik Imashev concluded.US President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed the crisis in Syria yesterday and agreed to stay in close touch, the White House said in a statement.

"President Donald J. Trump spoke today with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to discuss the current crisis in Syria. The two leaders agreed to stay in close contact about the situation," the White House said, providing no further details.

Yesterday, Trump threatened action on Syria in response to last Saturday's alleged chemical attack in the militant-held city of Douma that reportedly killed and injured civilians. He tweeted that Russia should get ready for a strike on Syria after Moscow reportedly vowed to shoot down missiles.Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a telephone call to President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev to congratulate him on his landslide victory in the presidential election, which were held in the republic yesterday.

Erdogan wished him new successes in his presidential activities for the prosperity of the people of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan's presidential website reported.

The head of state expressed gratitude to President Erdogan for his attention and congratulations.

President Aliyev and President Erdogan expressed confidence that friendly and brotherly relations between the two countries will continue to develop in all areas.The European Union extended sanctions on Iran over human rights violations today, the Council of the European Union said.

The EU extended the only remaining sanctions it has against Iran, related to human rights violations, by a year until April 2019, Reuters reported.

They include asset freezes and travel bans against 82 people and one entity, as well as a prohibition of exports of equipment that could be used for internal repression and monitoring telecommunications, the bloc said in a statement.

These sanctions were first imposed by the European Union in 2011 due to what it described as "dramatic increase in executions and the systematic repression of Iranian citizens."A new building of Haji Javad Mosque was opened in Yasamal district of Baku today. The opening ceremony was attended by President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva.

Head of Yasamal District Executive Authority Aziz Azizov briefed them on the carried out work.

Ilham Aliyev recalled that opening of the Haji Javad Mosque as the first event after the presidential election is a clear example of state-religion relations.

"This is a wonderful event, a beautiful mosque. The mosque has been built in the traditional architectural style of Azerbaijan. Its interior design, appearance please the eye," the president said.

He added that the previous building of the mosque wasn't in good condition. "This question arose when construction work began around the mosque, when public zones, road junctions were created; the mosque was in an unusable, emergency situation. After I was informed, I immediately ordered that a new building should be built near the Haji Javad Mosque, and the new building was given the name of Haji Javad, because this mosque is the Haji Javad Mosque, the head of state added.

At the same time, President Aliyev said that the previous mosque didn't have a minaret, while the new one does.

"An administrative building has been constructed, and the adjacent territory has been landscaped. According to information I have, 500, and maybe 600 people can perform a prayer at the same time in the mosque," he stressed.

President Aliyev added that the mosque has been built through state funds.Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that in this election the people of Azerbaijan voted for stability, security, development, prosperity, and highly appreciated what has been done over the past 15 years.

"The people of Azerbaijan have again placed great confidence in me in the presidential election. I would like to express my gratitude to my dear people for this confidence, for this great support," he said, adding that he always feels support of the people.

"This support gives me strength. This support is the primary condition for our development. People-government unity lies at the heart of our development in Azerbaijan," the president noted.

"We should grow stronger. In order to grow stronger we should build a stronger economy. There is not a second country that has developed economically as much as Azerbaijan has in the past 15 years. Our economy has grown 3.2 times and Azerbaijan is today one of the world`s most competitive countries," Aliyev stressed.Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan discussed recent developments in Syria in an telephone call today, a Turkish presidential source said, adding that the two leaders agreed to remain in close contact.

The officials said the two leaders held a telephone conversation hours after Erdogan said he would discuss ways of ending the "chemical massacre" in Syria with Putin.

The officials provided the information on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, the AP reported.

The call with Putin came after Erdogan earlier spoke to US President Donald Trump on the phone and also exchanged views on Syria.Russian President Vladimir Putin has called Ilham Aliyevs convincing victory in Azerbaijans presidential election a clear proof of his authority and recognition of the leaders merits in solving vital tasks.

In his telegram on occasion of Aliyevs re-election, Putin noted that his "convincing victory in the election clearly proves Aliyevs high political authority and shows the appreciation of his merits in solving topical social and economic and foreign policy tasks facing Azerbaijan," the Kremlin press service said.

Vladimir Putin highly assessed Ilham Aliyevs efforts in strengthening friendly and good neighborly relations between Russia and Azerbaijan.

In addition, he expressed confidence that by joint efforts the states will ensure further development of fruitful bilateral cooperation in all areas and also partnership in regional and international affairs, which certainly meets vital interests of the Russian and Azerbaijani people.CIS observers noted Azerbaijan's qualitative preparation for the presidential election, chairman of the Executive Committee - Executive Secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Sergey Lebedev, said today at the press conference of the observation mission of the CIS Interparliamentary Assembly.

"The CIS mission has worked in Azerbaijan since March 20. It includes 221 observers from 8 CIS countries. Fr obvious reasons, it does not include only representatives of Armenia and Ukraine. Other countries sent their representatives of a sufficiently high level: MPs from the CIS countries, members and leaders of the Central Executive Committees, diplomats from the CIS countries, experts from the CIS countries and the CIS Executive Committee," the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza cited Sergei Lebedev as saying.

"We visited all regions of Azerbaijan and the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, and had an opportunity to get a broad picture of the process of preparations for the election and the voting process. We are grateful for the hospitality and openness of all those responsible for the electoral process, because we were provided with all necessary information. Therefore we believe that our picture is rather extensive. The estimates we made on the basis of what we saw are objective. Of course, we stated the good preparation of members of election commissions of all levels, who underwent a lot of preparatory work and training," the head of the CIS mission emphasized.

"We have seen how this is being done, how well the voting process was organized. In addition, we were pleasantly surprised by the large number of local observers: there were more than 20 people in some places. And the fact that the presidential candidates got the right to send their proxies to the sites, who had the opportunity to fully observe the voting process, certainly speaks of the openness of the elections. As a result of the observation we came to the conclusion that the election was conducted strictly in accordance with the legislation of Azerbaijan, in accordance with the Constitution and the Electoral Code, that they were open, democratic, and most importantly, they ensured the citizens' right to free expression of will," Sergey Lebedev said.Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced that the CIS framework signed by Ukraine, as well as the Treaty on Friendship with Russia, should be reassessed taking into account its compliance with the national interests of the country.

"I would like to ask the government to prepare proposals on the official termination of our membership in the constituent bodies of the CIS, as well as on the final closure of the Ukrainian representation at the relevant bodies in Minsk," Poroshenko said at the Kiev security forum.

He added that the legal framework of the CIS, which was signed by Ukraine, should be reassesed taking into account its compliance with the national interests of the country. The Commonwealth of Independent States is a regional organization that was formed by former Soviet Union members in the 1990s. The group aims to promote economic, political and cultural cooperation.

Poroshenko went on saying that he will submit to Ukraine's parliament a draft law on the immediate unilateral termination of certain provisions of the Treaty on Friendship with Russia, since "the treaty is incompatible with the national interests of Ukraine and the realization of its right to self-defense."

The president noted the provisions of the treaty, which state that the parties "respect each other's territorial integrity and confirm the inviolability of the existing borders between them" will remain in force.Armenia's government has approved the release of 170 million cubic meters of water from Lake Sevan for irrigation purposes, the chairman of the State Water Committee Arsen Harutyunyan said.

According to official data, some 267 million cubic meters of water were released from Lake Sevan for irrigation purposes in 2017, by 99.622 million cubic meters more than in 2016 and down from the planned 270 million cubic meters, ARKA reported.

The State Water Committee said earlier that the countrys water reservoirs contained 480.5 million cubic meters of water, which was 30 million cubic meters less than at this time last year and by 115 million cubic meters less than in the same time span of 2016.HCM CITY  HCM City authorities have urged police to investigate a cryptocurrency fraud case involving VN15 trillion (US$666 million) and affecting 32,000 people.

Le Thanh Liem, standing vice chairman of the city Peoples Committee, has sent an urgent letter to the citys police, requesting investigation of the multi-level virtual currency scam related to Modern Tech Joint-Stock Company.

Speaking at a meeting held yesterday in the city, Liem said that virtual currency was not legally recognised in Viet Nam.

Anyone using Ifan and Pincoin for trading will be handled in accordance with the Vietnamese law, he said.

On Sunday afternoon, dozens of people protested at the headquarters of Modern Tech in HCM Citys District 1, carrying banners with the phrase biggest digital money fraud in history.

According to local media, the owner of the office building said the company had moved out in early March.

Modern Tech left and liquidated a contract about one month ago. No one knows where they are now, said the office building owner, who declined to be named.

Operators of two Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have gone silent after multiple reports revealed them as scams.

Ifan and Pincoin, cryptocurrency startups purportedly from Singapore and Dubai, respectively, were allegedly multi-level ponzi schemes under the control of the Viet Nam-based outfit Modern Tech.

Modern Tech advertised the cryptocurrency iFan and Pincoin to potential investors, promising them huge monthly interest of at least 48 per cent in cash and four months as the maximum time for full payback, said the protesters at the office building.

Those who were able to invite others to buy digital currency were told they would have a commission of 8 per cent.

The only condition for the investors was that they buy at least $1,000 worth of digital money.

For many, the lucrative offer was too tempting to decline. More than 32,000 investors poured some VN15 trillion into buying virtual money.

However, Modern Tech changed its policy following a global cryptocurrency crash late last year which caused iFans value to plummet to about 1 US cent per iFan.

The company is no longer paying interest and principal back to the investors in cash, but is using iFan currency instead.

Modern Tech set iFans value at $5, much higher than the market price, causing losses to customers.

Modern Tech said it was only an official representative of both coins in Viet Nam, before media reports confirmed that its seven Vietnamese executives were the masterminds behind the scheme.

The State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV) said it was closely following the alleged cryptocurrency fraud.

The bank will co-operate with police to investigate the case, said Nguyen Hoang Minh, SBVs HCM City Branch deputy director.  VNSAs Viet Nam carries on growing, its firms are faced with ever more challenges in terms of competition and growth models. Tomaso Andreatta, deputy chairman of the European Chamber of Commerce in Viet Nam (Eurocham), told Viet Nam News reporter Phuong Uyen about the countrys green growth perspective, long-term development and labour allocation.

As Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc stressed, this year Viet Nam will focus on stable and inclusive growth directions for both the private and State-owned sectors. Do you think Vietnamese firms are ready for this?

First of all, we need to see if the Vietnamese firms we are talking about are small and medium enterprises, or whether they are one of the few large firms already established on the market, State-owned enterprises, or foreign direct investment (FDI) companies  which are a very important part of the Vietnamese economy.

Now, these last ones are of course prepared, since they are the ones who provide the most of Viet Nams economic growth, and also happen to be already present on the international market, while using Viet Nam both as a base for production and a potential consumption market. Meanwhile, local firms lack management skills, which is one of the most important issues that needs addressing in the future. They still need to acquire an understanding of international standards, as well as ways of doing businesses, and they still have to improve product quality and scale.

Many European economies are supported heavily by small and medium enterprises, and over the years these companies have learned to compete against the big players. In Viet Nam, many businesses are still very small and need to learn how to stay in business. A vast majority of the Vietnamese population now works in small companies, so we would want them to become more competitive, and stronger so that they dont get weeded out by the bigger competitors.

Lack of management skills and better growth models aside, what are the challenges for firms in Viet Nam in terms of sustainability?

Of course, training people to understand quality would be a good idea. For example, in agriculture, many farmers used to think the more chemicals they used in the fields, the better. We had to teach them how to put fewer substances in so they would get a better product. Nowadays, in many countries, younger and more educated generations are doing quite well with newer and more efficient methods of doing agriculture. They choose better crops, and they understand that qualified products are guaranteed to reach end consumers. So while farmers normally sell to wholesalers or exporters, they have to be aware of the people who consume their products in the end, and that their input will have a strong impact on their output.

In this instance, the Vietnamese government can help by setting the rules for product quality control, especially in the case of seafood exports to European markets. So again, it is a question of educating the producers as to not just make the cheapest product in the largest quantity possible. The scale and size of production are not important, rather, they should be opting for quality instead. Selling a bit less at a higher standard will actually create more value and substantially improve their situation.

Do you think that foreign consumers are becoming more accepting of Vietnamese products?

Consumers, especially in Europe, have been accepting products from Viet Nam, but mostly from big brands they can trust. If these particular brands sell something that says Made in Vietnam on it, then people will buy it and be satisfied with it. But do we consider these products to be truly Vietnamese, when they are made by companies that are not Vietnamese, and whose quality control and management are much tighter than most domestic firms can provide?

As such, a majority of local companies in Viet Nam choose to focus on the internal market; they are not worried about exports. Im patiently waiting for them to graduate into thinking beyond just domestic demand.

What can firms improve on to meet green growth and the 4.0 Industrial Revolution? Does it mean abandoning labour intensive production methods in favour of more technologically advanced ones?

The 4.0 Revolution isnt necessary about cutting labour. If labour cannot be afforded, then it can be redeployed in a different way. The new revolution is about information, quality and customer service. Automation should be helping with quality control, instead of making it so that Viet Nam cannot have full employment. Of course, the country should aim to have more knowledgeable workers as opposed to unskilled ones.

There is a misconception that green or sustainable growth may actually be preventing growth rather than encouraging it. It is not that you have to make a choice between do we grow or do we become sustainable?. Sustainability means, for instance, being more efficient, wasting less resources, and using those recourse more effectively. One simple example is that Viet Nam has a plan to invest US$150 billion into electricity production between now and 2030, but perhaps 30 per cent of this amount can be put into doing other things instead.

From a market point of view, European customers are ever more aware of the way goods are produced, so sustainable business, labour and environmental practices are fundamental to selling goods in these sophisticated markets.

Do you suppose there is a niche in the European market that Vietnam can get into right now, with some existing advantages?

Strategic advantage for Viet Nam can be found in its natural resources and potential workforce, though at the moment it isnt making anything that catches the worlds attention.

I can suggest one trend that can change this, which is switching to 100 per cent electric vehicles. This would allow Viet Nam to become a leader in Asia as well as in the world in an industry that is clearly making progress, but the country has to move early.

As it has a smaller number of cars than other countries, and a high turnover of motorbikes, it should be relatively easy to gradually and surely switch to electric vehicles. Viet Nam could also take advantage of the new battery technology for transport and industrial uses, which could possibly alleviate the State from having to provide energy for the whole country.  VNSHA NOI  Many Russian firms are exhibiting their products during the 28th Viet Nam International Trade Fair (Viet Nam Expo 2018), which opened at the International Exhibition Centre in Ha Noi yesterday.

The four-day event, themed Viet Nam Expo - Enhancing Regional and Global Economic Links, features more than 500 booths of 450 businesses from 24 countries and territories.

Enterprises from 16 provinces and cities of Viet Nam and 23 countries and territories, including Russia, the Republic of Korea, China, Nepal, Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia are attending the event.

Russia is the events guest of honour, with a hope that it will promote trade for both sides. With an exhibition area of 520 square metres, Russian companies are showcasing products like mechanical processing, precision mechanics, automation equipment, industrial biotechnology and high-tech electronics.

Attending the expo, Russian Ambassador to Viet Nam Konstantin Vnukov said 2017 marked growth in Viet Nam-Russia ties, with both sides agreeing to push the implementation of the Eurasian Economic Union  Viet Nam free trade agreement and increase bilateral trade to US$20 billion by 2020.

The expo is seen as a significant event to further trade promotion, he said.

VIST Group, a Russian company attending this years expo, told Viet Nam News that it provides solutions for the development of information systems and applications in mining, metallurgy, electricity, scientific and telecommunications.

During this visit, we will introduce many different software systems used in various sectors especially the mining sector. These systems can solve the complicated mining issues currently faced by Russia, Africa, and South America. We hope to meet and co-operate with Vietnamese companies also operating and are interested in this field, said Tatiana Khamanova, marketing director of VIST.

During his remarks, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Quoc Khanh said the annual event, first held in 1991, has become one of the biggest and most important trade promotion activities of the industry and trade sector.

The expo has brought multiple economic values and opportunities helping Vietnamese firms boost exports and develop the domestic market, contributing to the realisation of the Governments commitment to enhancing international economic integration, Khanh said.

Several Vietnamese businesses, from major companies to start-ups, are also present at the expo, including Ha Noi Trade Corporation (Hapro), Ha Noi Beer Alcohol and Beverage Joint Stock Corporation (Habeco), Binh Minh Plastics Joint Stock Company and ien Quang Lamp Joint Stock Company.

Foreign investors and trade promotion agencies can also find the latest information about Viet Nams investment climate at the pavilion on the countrys investment and industrial development promotion, organised by the Viet Nam Trade Promotion Agency (Vietrade). The booth also introduces the strengths, investment attraction policies and investment opportunities of Ha Noi and Hai Phong cities, and the provinces of Yen Bai, Ninh Binh, Thanh Hoa and ong Thap.

Many promotion activities will also take place on the sidelines of the expo such as an export promotion forum, workshops and visits to industrial parks.

Korea-Viet Nam Design Sharing Pavilion

A Korea-Viet Nam Design Sharing Pavilion is also one of the events highlights.

The booth displays designs to serve customers under a programme titled Korea-Viet Nam Design Sharing, co-ordinated by Vietrade and the Korea Institute of Design Promotion, which has been in operation since 2010 and provided support for 3,500 companies.

According to Vu Ba Phu, director of Vietrade, this exercise has provided consultancy for Vietnamese enterprises in enhancing design capability, branding and packaging, researching market demands and developing marketing ideas.

Some 2,500 customers visited the booth in 2017 and more than 650 deals were made.

This years booth showcases the products of the seven companies including three Vietnamese ones, namely VinaTea Kim Anh JSC, Vinasamex JSC and Kona Company Limited, together with four Korean Enterprises of C & D, Mojitok, DesignBusan Co LTd and Megazone.

The booth aims to create creativity in product label and package design among participating businesses, Phu said.  VNSHA NOI  Vietnamese shares yesterday extended losses for a second day on the two national stock exchanges as many large-caps in banking and securities suffered strong selling pressure.

The benchmark VN-Index on the HCM Stock Exchange (HOSE) plunged 2.59 per cent to close at 1,167 points, totaling a two-day fall of 3.1 per cent.

The HNX Index on Ha Noi Stock Exchange fell 2.15 per cent to end at 133.74 points, extending its downtrend from the previous 0.8 per cent decline.

More than 360.3 million shares worth VN10.7 trillion (US$470 million) were traded on the two local exchanges.

Declining stocks dominated the bourses, outnumbering gainers by 330 to 141, showing low investor confidence.

Stocks in the VN30 group faced a strong imbalance in the market with the number of losers three times the number of gainers. The VN30 Index lost 2.64 per cent to reach 1,137 points, with 24 declining stocks against two gainers among the 30 largest stocks by market capitalisation.

Large-cap stocks fell across the board, including dairy firm Vinamilk (VNM), property developer Vingroup (VIC), PetroVietnam Gas Joint Stock Corporation (GAS) and Masan Group Corporation (MSN).

The UPCOM Index on the Unlisted Public Company Market fell 0.93 per cent to stay at 59.86 points, totaling a three-day decline of 1.3 per cent .

Foreign Investors were net sellers of VN282.8 billion on HOSE, focusing on Ho Chi Minh Development Joint Stock Commercial Bank (VN190.4 billion), dairy firm Vinamilk (VN59.9 billion) amd Sai Gon Securities Incorporation (VN55 billion). In addition, they bought a net VN111.33 billion on the HNX.

Securities, real estate, agriculture, finance-banking, insurance and retail sectors were the worst-performing industries.

Their indices declined between 1.05 per cent and 3.58 per cent, according to vietstock.vn.

The worst securities performers included Sai Gon Securities Incorporation (SSI), down 3.9 per cent, Viet Capital Securities Joint Stock Company (VCI), losing 2.6 per cent, Ho Chi Minh City Securities Corporation (HCM), declining 5.9 per cent, VNDirect Securities Corporation (VND), decreasing 2.53 per cent and Bank for Invesment & Development of Vietnam Securities Company (BSI), down 2.55 per cent.

Large-caps in banking also suffered, with JSC Bank For Investment And Development Of Vietnam, Vietcombank, Vietinbank, Military Bank and VP Bank, losing from 2.2 to 4.4 per cent.

According to BIDV Securities JSC (BSC), investors should be cautious in the next trading session as the shakeout will be larger than today and there will be a clearer cash flow division.

Meanwhile, Bao Viet Securities Company (BVSC) said in its daily report that selling pressure increased after an overheating uptrend, bad news for the overall market. However, amid the peak season for AGMs, the market will shift upon each companys results.  VNSHA NOI  State-owned glass and construction ceramic producer Viglacera will develop plans to reduce the State ownership in the firm to 36 per cent in May 2018.

The Government is expected to sell its remaining shares in Viglacera in 2019.

The State ownership ratio in Viglacera is now nearly 54 per cent and the Ministry of Construction is representing the Government to manage the State capital in the company.

The States shares will be sold via competitive bids, and the auction price will be the average of the prices recorded in the last 30 trading sessions prior to the bidding date.

Deputy general director Nguyen Anh Tuan said Viglacera had earned VN1.63 trillion (US$72.7 million) in revenue and VN144.3 billion in pre-tax profit in the first quarter of 2018.

The figures posted huge losses compared to the same period in 2017, Tuan said at a brief meeting on Monday.

Viglacera targets VN9.1 trillion in total revenue this year, down 1 per cent year on year, and VN950 billion in pre-tax profit, up 4 per cent year on year.

According to the companys management board, the market has become tougher in 2018, and the company has already predicted the difficulties it may encounter this year.

Sales of construction glass was good last year but became neutralised in 2018, while sales of ceramics had been affected negatively since the end of 2017 due to growing market supply.

As Viglacera holds a minor market share for these segments (some 5-6 per cent), they will continue to be the hardest for the company this year, the management board said.

The company will invest VN2 trillion in new projects, a yearly increase of 28 per cent, including VN758 billion on housing development and trading, VN617 billion on industrial zones infrastructure and services, VN529 billion on construction material production and VN86 billion on research and development and human resources training.  VNSHA NOI  National mobile network operator Vinaphone targets a pre-tax profit of VN1.4 trillion (US$61.4 million) in 2018, a year-on-year increase of 6.7 per cent.

As a wholly-owned subsidiary of Viet Nam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT), Vinaphone was established for the main business of telecommunication products and services, namely information technology and broadcasting services.

Its development plan for 2017-20 period targets a total revenue of more than VN183.8 trillion and profit of nearly VN5.9 trillion, equivalent to a growth of 8 per cent and 10 per cent per year, respectively.

In terms of business results of 2017, Vinaphone recorded over VN39.8 billion in sales and services and over VN1.3 trillion in pre-tax profit. In addition to this, Vinaphone has contributed approximately VN1.22 trillion to the State budget.

Last year, the corporation hit 34 million telephone subscribers, including 3.1 million fixed-line subscribers and 31.1 million mobile subscribers, besides 4.6 million internet subscribers.

Vinaphones total investment last year was VN646.5 billion.  VNSHCM CITY  To many it may just be youre everyday life, but to others, its art.

An exhibition, featuring 60 photos inspired by daily life in Viet Nam is on a display in HCM City.

Entitled Pot-Au-Pho, the exhibition is a project by co-authors French man Julien Brun, and Nguyen Da Quyen. It is part of a wide range of activities being held to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the establishment of a diplomatic relationship between Viet Nam and France.

The French language is at the source of more than 500 common Vietnamese words such as pate (pa te), poupee (bup be), sandale (xang an), balcon (ban cong), cirque (xiec), etc. This exclusive photo exhibition gives visitors a glimpse into the daily life of Vietnamese people, unveiling the secrets of this unique linguistic connection.

Colourful: One of the photos at Pot-Au-Pho exhibition in HCM City. The black & white photo focuses on banh my colour.

The exhibition title combines French word pot au feu and Vietnamese word pho, according to the organisers.

Although a lot of Vietnamese words originated from French including nouns, verbs, and adjectives but the photos in the exhibition just focus on nouns.

"There are verbs and adjectives like amateur (a ma to) and rodai (roda) which are rarely taken by camera," said Quyen. "We take black and white photos focusing on colour of the object in the photo. We also dont name the photos and we want the exhibition-goers guest the word."

A photo featuring three men wearing shorts (sooc) and vests (may o) was taken on December 31 in 2011 in Nha Trang coastal area in Tran Phu Street, central province of Khanh Hoa and is a big surprise for one woman in Nha Trang.

Linh an was feeding her child while television presenter introduces about the exhibition. an knows French and the curiosity makes her watch the television. Quickly she catches the photo of three men and believes 70 per cent that her father is included. She watches the programme again online and knows that is her father.

She contacts Quyen asking for the photo copy because her father passed away in 2012.

Coastal walk: Three men wearing shorts and vests were taken in Nha Trang coastal in 2011.

Many French visitors like this photo because the scene in Nha Trang coastal area looks like Nice in France. The mens style reminds the exhibition-goers of American actor Al Pacino.

Quyen and Brun are currently working at CEL Consulting. Quyen has won two awards: the works for IMG SRC exhibition and the most favourite works voted by the media when she took part in the Asian Creative Awards organised by Asian Creative Networks (ACN) in order to promote creativity in Asia in 2014.

From an early age, Quyen was full of ideas and desired to portray them through different colours and materials. However, in the 1980s, arts were considered unrealistic, and she did not have many opportunities to pursue her passion. In 2010, she decided to embark on a journey of self-discovery and awaken her forgotten artistic past.

Quyen has several solo and group exhibitions whilst Pot-Au-Pho exhibition is the first Bruns.

Brun was former deputy-chairman of French Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Viet Nam. He has been living and working in Viet Nam for 13 years. He has been interested in music composition and performed playing jazz with French band entitled Banh My Phap (French Baguette).

The exhibition runs until April 30 at TOONG co-working space, 126 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, District 3. VNSHA NOI  Xang Khan, a traditional festival of the Thai ethnic group, where herbalists pay tribute to gods and ancestors who taught them to cure ailments, will be part of an event to celebrate the Viet Nam Ethnic Groups Cultural Day on April 19.

Xang Khan festival was recognised as a national intangible cultural heritage last year. It is an occasion for people to express gratitude for local herbalists who cure them from illness. It is also a rendezvous for young men and women. At the festival, locals and tourists will have an opportunity to enjoy a show of traditional costumes of ethnic groups, gong performances, dances and folk games.

The Xang Khan festival will take place on April 21.

It is part of a wide range of activities organised from April 19-22 at the Culture and Tourism Villages of Vietnamese Ethnic Groups in Son Tay district, 45km west of Ha Nois centre.

About 270 people from 30 ethnic groups across the country will show off their distinctive culture, traditional festivals and worship rituals at the event, according to Lam Van Khang, head of the villages management board.

The cultural event will help honour patriotism, the cultural diversity and national solidarity, he said.

Colourful: Xang Khan, a traditional festival of the Thai ethnic group, where herbalists pay tribute to gods and ancestors who taught them to cure ailments, will be part of an event to celebrate the Viet Nam Ethnic Groups Cultural Day

An art performance to celebrate 10 years since the first Viet Nam Ethnic Groups Cultural Day will be highlight of the event. It will be broadcast live on Viet Nam Television.

The performance will star troupes from the southern province of Soc Trang and the Central Highlands province of Kon Tum as well as of people residing in the village.

The cultural day of the Khmer people on April 20 will recreate the Chol Chnam Thmay, the Khmer New Year festival, and feature du ke, a style of musical theatre created by the Khmer people in Viet Nam in the early 1920s.

Du ke originated from workers in the Mekong Delta. In the early days, it was performed on land, under a simple roof. Actors were peasants who portrayed kings, queens and ogresses. The singing drama uses poetry based on Indian epics, for example, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

On the cultural day of ethnic people from the northwest, the Thai ethnic group in Nghe An Province will present Xang Khan festival and a series of cooking demonstrations of traditional dishes by the Tay of Thai Nguyen Province, the Dao of Ha Noi, the Mong of Ha Giang, the Muong of Hoa Binh, the Kho Mu of ien Bien and the Thai of Son La.

The culture and music of the Central Highlands will be featured on April 22 with the performance of the Gia Rai ethnic people. They will perform a ritual to pray for rain which is practiced in April and May every year to pray for rain and bumper crops. The traditional music of the region will also be played during the day.

A photo exhibition reviewing the activities taking place at the village during the 10 years implementing the Viet Nam Ethnic Groups Cultural Day will be held during the four-day festival.  VNSAt the source: Coffee plants in bloom in Lang Biang mountain, a Lat City, home to most of the Arabica coffee in Viet Nam.

Viet Nam News by Hong Van For Will Frith, born in the US to an American father and Vietnamese mother, a visit to Viet Nam in 2004 ignited a passion for coffee that would change his life. His mission on that first trip was to see his grandmother. But along the way, he had the chance to experience the Vietnamese coffee culture: sitting in the small plastic stool, watching the world go by while slowly sipping the ca phe a (iced coffee), he recalls. He describes the now-familiar flavour as nutty chocolate and caramel ice cream with a bitter aftertaste. Everything I heard, smelled, saw, and tasted was familiar thanks to my early exposure to the sounds of the language, the food and customs. I couldnt quite understand why it was so familiar, but it felt something like home, said Frith. The passion for Vietnamese coffee, combined with his experiences working as a roaster in Washington after graduating from college, led Frith to a career in coffee consultation. While working in the states, he maintained his interest in his mothers country and its coffee. What keeps me engaged in the country [Viet Nam ] is its potential for producing great coffee and a fascinating coffee culture that is growing quickly, said Frith. In 2013 he moved to HCM City on a mission to find high quality arabica in a Lat. With strong coffee-drinking culture and more specialty cafes opening, Viet Nam can be one of few places that grows, processes, and consumes specialty coffee within its own borders - a sustainable, virtuous loop, Frith says. He sees high potential for the countrys growth, predicting that the a Lat region could become a reputable producer of medium- and high-quality Arabica internationally. Most coffee-growing countries export their best products to the US or Europe for consumption, but if someone wants to taste the best Vietnamese Arabica they would have to visit Viet Nam , said Frith. a Lats flavourful Arabica Over the past few years, Frith has worked with specialty cafes and organisations in Viet Nam like La Viet Coffee in a Lat, a family business that produces, roasts and serves their own beans; The Workshop in HCM City, touting itself as Viet Nams first specialty coffee bar; Mach Coffee, a luxury roasting house in Phan Rang since the 1940s; and Filanthrope, a non profit charity that supports indigenous tribal coffee farmers. Frith focused mostly on roaster training, barista training, branding, quality control and product development. Tran Nhat Quang, owner of La Viet Coffee, met Frith at the Coffee Festival in Buon Me Thuot City in ak Lak Province in 2013. With a shared passion for coffee, Quang and Frith became close friends quickly. We talked passionately about the potential of Arabica coffee in Viet Nam . In late 2013 when I opened La Viet cafe, he came to help me with staff training and roasting training as well as quality control and to connect me with the international partners, said Quang. Frith is very knowledgeable about Vietnamese coffee. He and I share the aspiration to bring high quality Vietnamese coffee to the world.

Coffee master: Will Frith (front left) focused mostly on roaster and barista training, branding, quality control and product development.  Photos courtesy of Will Frith

Moving on up: Frith (left) has became part of a small and young community of producers, processors, green coffee buyers and roasters who are trying to "make Vietnamese coffee something legit and worthy of attention".

Frith has become part of a small, young community of producers, processors, green coffee buyers and roasters who are trying to make Vietnamese coffee something legit and worthy of attention.

I consider the work I do with small farmers as my ongoing educationwe learn from each other. I am a proponent of Vietnamese specialty coffee, trying to connect as many people to Viet Nam as I can with the hope of increasing the amount of high quality Arabica that Viet Nam produces, said Frith.

Arabica was introduced to Viet Nam in 1850s and a Lat is an ideal place for growing the bean. The right growing practices and processing methods will increase the countrys Arabica quality, said Frith.

There needs to be a lot of hard work to make it [Arabica] high quality.

Arabica coffee has very complex flavor potential, affected by many factors. It can be delicate, floral and tea-like, or nutty and sweet, or rich and fruity.

The flavours can be affected by a number of factors: soil health and content, arabica type and seed selection, weather patterns, elevation, angle of the sun, surrounding forests or farms, shade, farm management, selective harvesting, clean and careful processing, storage and transport and roasting and brewing, according to Frith.

Coffee evolved in the understories of Ethiopian forests, so it follows that some of the best coffees come from farms that resemble those forests, with healthy, fertile soil and shade trees, plenty of beneficial microbes and fungi, and animals that all work together to create a healthy ecosystem, Frith added.

People must be patient, with the ability to take some risks, because its a slow process requiring a long-term approach. They must have a good attitude, and be willing to collaborate with otherseven their competitors. We all need to work together to grow the high-quality segment of the coffee industry. No single entity can do it alone, said Frith.

Viet Nam has been the worlds second largest coffee producer and exporter since the early 2000s. The Central Highlands region contributes to 90 per cent of the countrys total coffee production.

Frith has now been working for Modbar, a coffee equipment manufacturer in the US, for three years. He still provides consultancy for Viet Nam coffee growers and coffeehouses, traveling back and forth between Viet Nam and the US.

With each visit, my love for Viet Nam grows and becomes more complex. Its no longer as simple as saying I love Viet Nam or I dislike Viet Nam because theres so much diversity of experience and attitudes, said Frith.  VNSPARIS  Two dinosaur skeletons marketed as hip design objects  one of a diplodocus, the other of an allosaurus  sold for more than 1.4 million euros (US$1.7 million) apiece at auction in Paris on Wednesday.

"The same foreign buyer acquired the two dinosaurs," the Drouot auction house said, hailing "exceptional" prices for dinosaurs, though neither was a record.

The diplodocus  a herbivorous giant measuring 12 metres long from nose to tail  fetched 1.44 million euros, compared with 1.41 million for the carnivorous allosaurus, a minnow in dinosaur terms at just 3.8 metres (12.5 feet) long.

The two dinosaurs roamed the Earth during the late Jurassic period, around 150 million years ago.

Only about five dinosaur skeletons are put up for auction around the world every year, mostly snapped up by ultra-rich collectors or museums in Europe or the US.

But auctioneers have noted a surge in interest in China.

"Dinosaurs have become cool, trendy  real objects of decoration, like paintings," fossil sales expert Iacopo Briano told AFP ahead of the auction, citing Hollywood actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage as fans of such outsize prehistoric ornaments.

The nationality of Wednesdays buyer was not revealed.

In 1997, McDonalds and Walt Disney were among donors stumping up $8.36 million to buy Sue -- the most complete and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever found  for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.  AFPHa Noi is...

Ha Noi is a lot of things and we took to the streets to find out what makes this great city tick.

Is it the people? The atmosphere, the style, the passion, or is it something as simple as the food?

With a population of more than 7.5 million, Ha Noi is a melting pot of all things great about Asia.

So Viet Nam News decided to showcase our capital and tell the world exactly what Ha Noi is.

Our dedicated team spent the last week capturing the sights, sounds, colours and characters of Ha Noi to bring you our very special production.

Producer Paul Kennedy said: "To be honest jobs like this are pretty simple when you have a great team working with you and so much beauty and charm to record.

"It's a simple case of pressing red button on the camera and letting Ha Noi do all the work.

"It's alive. The city seems to run at 200 kilometres per hour yet there's an incredible calmness and serenity about the place."  VNSHA NOI  The Friends of Vietnam Heritage (FVH) will organise two interesting activities this weekend.

The first one is a two-day excursion to a hot spring resort in Phu Tho Province on Friday and Saturday. Inside the rejuvenating resort, set on an island in the river, are a number of hot spring baths including some filled with with lemon, tea, and herbs.

This is a local non-tourist experience and the group members will have exclusive use of the resort on Friday while Saturday will be busy as more people come to spend the weekend at the there.

Donation: around VN700,000-850,000/person (includes transport, accommodation). Registration: John at john@fvheritage.org

The second activity is a day trip to Ha Mo historic village and Ba Duong Noi kite-making village on Sunday.

In the morning, after arriving Ha Mo village in an Phuong District, representatives from the local Peoples Committee will show the group around their historic village.

After a picnic lunch in the village, the group will continue their excursion in afternoon in Ba Duong Noi Village  a 1,000 year-old kite making village. The kites are made in the shapes of crescent moons or boats, attached to wooden flutes. The wind passes through the flutes and the sounds of soft melodies can be heard. Ba Duong Noi has a reputation as one of Viet Nams major kite flying centres.

President of the Hong Ha Kite Club Nguyen Huu Kiem will take time out of his busy schedule to host the visit of FVH members to his house. He will also conduct a workshop on how to make a small kite. Attendees will learn about the history and traditions of the village, information on the villages annual kite festival. If the weather is windy enough, the workshop attendees can fly the kites they make.

Donation: VN350,000/adults and VN175,000/children, including kite-making workshop. Excludes refreshments/lunch. Limit: 20 people. Registration: Stella Ciorra at stella@fvheritage.org (01662 979 605).  VNSA startup forum for young farmers.  Photo enternews.vn

am Quang Thang, adviser for the National Start-up programme, tells the newspaper Thoi bao Kinh Viet Nam (Viet Nam Economic Times) that the toughest challenge facing Vietnamese Agritech start ups is the legal requirements they contend with.

What are the factors keeping Vietnamese start-ups in agriculture from catching up with their foreign peers?

As we all know the land area under agriculture production in Viet Nam is quite large, with some 12 million ha, excluding forest land and water space reserved for aquaculture. The majority of some 90 million Vietnamese people are engaged in agricultural production. Thats why the potential for start-ups in agriculture technology for Viet Nam is very big.

On the other hand it is not easy for Vietnamese people to create successful start-ups in healthcare, education and other fields.

In my opinion, Viet Nam has three favourable conditions for start-ups in agriculture technology to develop.

First, agricultural technology (Agritech) products have high value added, high yield and better quality. However, a market for Vietnamese agriculture technology products has not yet been established. There are various reasons for this. The products prices are higher than traditional products or the consumers are not ready to pay for such high prices. Whenever anyone wants to introduce a new product, he or she should conduct a study on its supply and demand in the market. It is undeniable that many consumers want to have safe food. Realising the demand for safe food is increasing, many young people are interested in building start-ups in this field. But there are few people who are successful in this field.

Second, the capital investment in infrastructure and technology in Agritech is huge. In order to have a workable Agritech product, one must invest a lot of time and a long trial period. The first line product may be good on a small scale. But then it must be tested on a larger scale. In real life, some plant species bear fruit only one season in a year. This is a tough issue for start-ups to cope with. In some cases, start-ups fail to become profitable and quickly run out of funding.

And third, many start-ups have faced many legal difficulties with Agritech. However, some start-ups have won prices in international start-up contests, yet their projects cannot be applied in Viet Nam due to some difficulties in administrative procedures, including licensing. A case in point is microbiology or nanotechnology. They have been applied widely in many countries, but it took the Vietnamese start-ups quite a lot of time to complete the required legal documents from the authorities to apply them in their projects.

What is the greatest difficulty that Vietnamese start-ups have to face?

The legal matter is the hardest issue that Vietnamese start-ups have to face in order to win investor support and then enter the market.

Besides, introducing some agricultural technology models into a supply chain requires involvement from various parties, including the local administration and financial investors.

It is almost impossible for a project to be implemented without the support of the local administration and the management agency. It often takes about three years to put a project into a production chain, but sometimes projects have struggled towards implementation for 10 years.

What we need now is a working legal framework to help accelerate the research on agriculture technology and apply them in real life.

So in your opinion, what support do Vietnamese start-ups need?

Agriculture start-ups should receive stronger support from concerned government agencies. The biggest comparative advantage of Agritech start ups is the value added from technology. It is unquestionable that advanced technology application will help cut down the production costs. So agriculture start-ups desperately need a clear legal framework and a transparent supporting mechanism.

Quite a few Agritech start-up models have been applied by Vietnamese start ups, particularly the beta version of Origin Trail for poultry and vegetable products. In your opinion, which model is the most suitable for Viet Nam these days?

These days many Vietnamese consumers want to buy products which are clean and have clear origins. This is a favourable condition for projects in this field to develop.

But, in reality things are not easy at all as they require involvement from the producers and consumers. That means the products must be traced back from farm to fork.

Regarding the application of new technology in agriculture, some projects in Viet Nam have already applied it. But these projects have faced many difficulties during their implementation due to the shortage of funding.

In short, Agritech start-ups are not something that cant be done. But it must start from the application of new technology and a new working model.

I desperately hope that Agritech start-ups using nanotechnology in agriculture will soon be implemented in real life to replace pesticides or the micro-organism projects.

It is undisputable that with a good legal framework, many new Agritech start-ups will be established with a hope to produce many advanced technology products for Vietnamese consumers. VNSLawmakers yesterday weighed in on the draft amendment to the corruption law, debating whether to apply a 45 per cent tax on extra personal income that public servants fail to declare. Photo quochoi.vn

HA NOI  Lawmakers yesterday weighed in on the draft amendment to the corruption law, debating whether to apply a 45 per cent tax on extra personal income that public servants fail to declare.

The National Assembly (NA)s Standing Committee spent the morning looking over the draft law, which is due to be voted on late this year.

The tax in question was one of two main solutions proposed by the Government Inspectorate to aid the fight against corruption. The other was to levy an administrative penalty worth of 45 per cent of the unreported assets.

According to current regulations, all senior public officers and officials have to declare their wealth on a yearly basis.

NA Judicial Committee chairwoman Le Thi Nga, however, said that the Government was unable to track and monitor all sources of income of public servants, partly due to the countrys culture of wealth management.

Money tends to be given or inherited without legal papers, she said, making it almost impossible for receivers to clarify the origin of those assets to authorities. The blurred line between legally and illegally acquired wealth was a huge challenge for inspectors.

Legally speaking, the principle of the presumption of innocence prevents us from assuming one guilty of corruption if they fail to declare all their assets, and stops us confiscating them, Nga said.

One solution was to view unreported income as untaxed income and to start collecting tax from it, with a proposed rate was 45 per cent. Many lawmakers, however, did not agree with the rate.

The NA Ombudsman Committee chairwoman Nguyen Thanh Hai questioned the basis to set such a rate, saying that the tax rate applied should follow the Law on Personal Income Tax. She argued that the rate could be less than 45 per cent or higher, up to 89 or 90 per cent, depending on the amount of income as regulated by the law.

Another NA Standing Committee member Phan Thanh Binh suggested not choosing either taxing undeclared wealth or applying a levy on it, but a combination of both.

It is a common principle to tax all extra personal income. Based on that principle, any undeclared wealth will have to be taxed, Binh said.

Public servants who failed to fully declare their incomes also ignored their responsibility to be transparent about their money, he added, and an administrative penalty was therefore a must.

We should set up a rule combining both tax and administrative penalty procedures to handle the issue, he said.  VNSPrime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc (r) receives Vice President of IFC for Asia and Pacific Snezana Stoiljkovic in Ha Noi on Wednesday.  VNA/VNS Photo T hong Nhat

HA NOI  Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has called on the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to help Viet Nam implementing its national start-up programme, especially projects owned by young people.

During a reception for visiting Vice President of IFC for Asia and Pacific Snezana Stoiljkovic in Ha Noi on Wednesday, Phuc suggested the IFC and other international organisations invest in renewable energy in Viet Nam.

He hoped IFC would work with Vietnamese financial institutions and support Viet Nam in improving its financial management capacity.

For her part, Stoiljkovic congratulated the Vietnamese Government on its effective economic management in recent times, which contributed to stable growth.

She said 2017 was a successful year for the IFCs activities in Viet Nam, especially in supporting the private sector.

The IFC wants to assist Viet Nam in developing new fields, thus helping the country attract foreign direct investment, including in the development of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), agriculture and renewable energy, she stated.

Stoiljkovic said the IFC is co-operating effectively with many Vietnamese enterprises and banks, adding that it wants to support young Vietnamese entrepreneurs in promoting start-ups via partners in Viet Nam.

Agreeing with Stoiljkovic on the importance of the private economic area, PM Phuc said Viet Nam attaches importance to the potential of the area, and aims to have a million enterprises by 2020.

He stressed that Viet Nam appreciates the IFCs support for the country, and hopes the agency will continue to accompany the country on its path of development.  VNSPrime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc (r) receives outgoing RoK Ambassador Lee Hyuk in Ha Noi on Wednesday.  VNA/VNS Photo Thong Nhat

HA NOI  Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has noted the sound development of the Viet Nam-Republic of Korea (RoK) strategic co-operative partnership, with economic co-operation a highlight.

Meeting outgoing RoK Ambassador Lee Hyuk in Ha Noi on Wednesday, the PM said the RoK is one of Viet Nams leading partners, ranking first in terms of direct investment.

Viet Nam wants the RoK to import more Vietnamese agro-forestry-fishery products, receive more Vietnamese workers, help Viet Nam in high-quality human resources development and speed up the transfer of technologies in support, automobile, mechanic, garment-textile and electronic sectors, he said, explaining that Viet Nam has a big trade deficit with the country.

Viet Nam is willing to help RoK businesses increase their investment in the country, thus expanding their operation in Southeast Asia, he said.

He also suggested increasing cultural exchange and the teaching of Vietnamese and Korean languages in the respective countries and simplifying visa procedures.

The PM stressed that Viet Nam backs measures to stablise the Korean Peninsula, aiming to promote dialogues and maintain peace in the region and the world.

For his part, Lee said more RoK businesses want to invest in Viet Nam, voicing his belief that the bilateral relationship will yield more fruits in the future.

The diplomat pledged that he, in any position, will continue to support relations between the Governments and people of the two countries.  VNSHA NOI  Chairwoman of the Vietnamese National Assembly, Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, has been awarded the Solidarity Order of the Cuban State Council.

She has been awarded in recognition of her contributions to the fraternal friendship and special solidarity between the two countries.

The award was presented to the Vietnamese legislator by Fernando Gonzalez Llort, President of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples (ICAP), in Ha Noi on Wednesday.

Expressing her pride and honour to receive the award, Ngan pledged to do her best to consolidate and further develop the bilateral relationship. Llort said the award recognised Ngans contribution to bilateral ties in her capacity as President of the Viet Nam-Cuba Friendship Association (VCFA) as well as in other positions.

As VCFA President, together with the Cuba-Viet Nam Friendship Association, Ngan has carried out a range of exchange activities, Llort said.

He mentioned the time when Ngan led a Vietnamese delegation to pay tribute to (late) Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2016.

Highlighting the strong friendship between Viet Nam and Cuba in the fight against poverty and underdevelopment, Llort promised that he, in the capacity of ICAP President, would make more efforts to foster solidarity between the parties, governments and people of the two countries.

The same day, Ngan hosted a reception for Llort and members of the Cuban delegation, during which they expressed their satisfaction over the successful trip of Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong to Cuba in March.

According to them, the visit served as an impetus to the traditional friendship between the two countries. They said the solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between Viet Nam and Cuba had strengthened in the past six decades.

This is a valuable asset that must be treasured by parties, governments and people of both the countries, they said, adding there was a need to educate the younger generations about it.Praising Cuba on its socio-economic achievements, Ngan hoped the country would successfully carry out the Update of Economic Model.

She said the bilateral relations have been developed through various channels, including party, State and people-to-people diplomacy.

She added that the Viet Nam -Cuba Friendship Association was one of the organisations that had numerous practical activities to promote friendship between the two countries.

Ngan said she believed Llort would do his best to develop the relations between Cuba and other foreign countries, including Viet Nam.  VNSHCM CITY  Public hospitals are facing a brain drain with many doctors and pharmacists moving to private health facilities attracted by their high salaries.

They include many working as department heads and deputy heads at province-level hospitals.

Since last year 131 doctors and pharmacists at public hospitals in ong Nai and Binh Phuoc provinces alone put in their papers.

The ong Nai Health Department said 108 doctors have quite public health units.

Meanwhile, the Binh Phuoc Department of Health said 23 doctors have quit, all because they expected better salaries.

Besides, they were unhappy with the facilities at their hospitals, they said.

A doctor who had been working at the Binh Phuoc General Hospital since 1997 before quitting recently told Tuoi Tre that he had moved because the salary was too low.

He said his salary had been VN7 million (US$307) a month including allowances.

The province had been promising to help him and others buy land for building a house since he had begun to work at the hospital, but it had yet to happen, he said.

Now, at a private hospital, his income has doubled, he added.

According to the department, it has been facing great difficulty in hiring doctors and other health workers, especially well-qualified ones, since 2016. Against a need of 146, it has managed to find only 21.

In ong Nai, 22 doctors and pharmacists have quit just this year.

Last year Thong Nhat General Hospital had lost the largest number of doctors (23) followed by the ong Nai General Hospital (18).

Dr Pham Van Dung, director of Thong Nhat, said the low salaries are blamed for the exodus, with only a few quitting for other reasons.

The hospital has recruited doctors but has been unable to make good the shortage, he said.

It is trying to ensure a better working environment and higher salaries to retain its doctors, he reveal.

Dr Ngo uc Tuan, director of the ong Nai General Hospital, said many of the doctors who quit were young and not financially well-off and so moved to private hospitals for higher salaries.

Dr Phan Huy Anh Vu, deputy head of the province health department, said a doctor gets around VN10 million ($439) at a public hospital compared to VN20VN50 million ($877-$2,192) at private hospitals.

There is a likelihood of more and more doctors quitting public hospitals for private ones because there is a boom in private health facilities in the province, he said.

Dr Huynh Minh Hoan, the department head, told Lao ong ong Nai (ong Nai Labour) newspaper that many of the doctors quitting their jobs are senior people who had been sent for professional training and so the exodus is affecting the quality of healthcare as well as disease prevention.

According to senior health officials in the two provinces, there should be comprehensive policies to attract and keep doctors at public hospitals.

To ensure a steady supply of doctors in ong Nai, a medical university should be built, Vu said.

The province plans to merge the ong Nai Medical College with the ong Nai University, he said, adding that 50 doctors are needed each year to replace retiring ones. VNSA fire broke out across 40ha of pines in Ia Grai protective forest in Ia Chia Commune, Ia Grai District of Central Highlands province of Gia Lai in March.  VNA/VNS Photo Hong iep

HCM CITY  Authorities, including local ones, need to increase patrolling and promote fire safety to ensure there are no major forest fires during the ongoing dry season, a meeting held to review forest protection and fire prevention heard in HCM City yesterday.

Le Thanh Liem, deputy chairman of the city Peoples Committee, said: Forest fires have a severe impact on daily life and the economy and environment.

He instructed related authorities and districts to increase patrols and take severe action against anyone found violating forest protection laws.

Districts, which have forests in small patches, must improve fire prevention.

He said local authorities should liaise closely with households who have been allotted forests and take care of them, he added.

He instructed the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development to enhance propaganda and education on forest protection and safety and forest fire prevention and fighting, and inform local residents about the level of fire threats for them to be prepared.

Relevant authorities must regularly monitor individuals and organisations working in forests to ensure they follow fire safety regulations.

The city Forest Rangers Sub-department should step up patrolling.

The city has 35,600 hectares of forests, in districts 9, Can Gio, Binh Chanh, and Cu Chi.

Around 8,600 hectares face a high risk of fires, Tran Tan Quy, deputy director of the Agriculture and Rural Development Department and deputy head of the citys Steering Committee for Forest Protection, Fire Prevention and Fighting, said.

Quy said many activities like poaching and illegal logging could potentially spark off forest fires.

Fire prevention in forest patches is difficult because their owners do not pay attention. Low awareness of forest fires is another threat.

Last year HCM City suffered two forest fires on an area of 1.8 hectares, but thanks to their immediate discovery they were controlled before they could cause major damage.

Quy said local authorities in Can Gio should strengthen oversight of aquaculture and salt making in protective forests, promote afforestation and increase patrolling, especially in border areas.

Districts 9, Binh Chanh, Cu Chi, and Hoc Mon should educate local communities about forest fire safety, he said.

The irrigation sub-department should work closely with Binh Chanh, Hoc Mon and Cu Chi districts to ensure there is adequate water for agriculture and fire fighting.

Le Minh Dung, chairman of the Can Gio district Peoples Committee, said: Can Gio has over 30,000 hectares of protective forests with mostly inflammable trees.

To prepare for this dry season, the district has cleared 16.5 hectares of dried grass, maintains fire towers, bought more high-pressure pumping systems and other fire-fighting equipment.

The Can Gio Peoples Committee has instructed related authorities to work with their counterparts in neighbouring provinces like ong Nai and Ba Ria  Vung Tau for forest protection and fire safety.  VNSHA NOI - Dialogues on occupational safety and health policies are essential to share information and increase understanding among employers, workers, trade unions and agencies, according to an official.

Le Tan Dung, deputy minister of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, made the comment at a dialogue of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health yesterday on polices and laws on labour safety and hygiene.

He affirmed the dialogue was an opportunity to suggest, amend and supplement policies and laws to match reality.

The meeting aims to discuss difficulties and obstacles in the implementation of the law on labour safety and hygiene.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), about 6,400 workers die each day worldwide as a result of occupational accidents or work-related diseases and 680,000 are injured at work a day.

The burden of injury, sickness and death has led to severe human and economic damage, necessitating investment in occupational safety and health at the international, national and enterprise level.

In Viet Nam, more than one million young workers join the labour market every year. Labourers aged 15-24 account for 15 per cent of the labour force in the country.

Young workers are also 40 per cent more likely to have occupational accidents than older workers.

Chang Hee Lee, director of the ILO Office in Ha Noi, said that education about the dangers and risks and rights of workers should be started at schools, through vocational training programmes to help young people understand risks and their ability to protect themselves.

Enterprises should be more aware of occupational accidents also.

Improving occupational safety and health for young workers could only be achieved through efforts from many sides such as employers, workers and organisations representing employers and workers, he said.

This dialogue is part of activities to respond to World Day for Safety and Health at Work on April 28 to promote the prevention of occupational accidents and diseases globally.

It is an awareness-raising campaign intended to focus attention on emerging trends in occupational safety and health and on the magnitude of work-related injuries, diseases and fatalities.

Ha Noi plans to launch an action-month for occupational safety and health in May as part of the citys efforts to raise public awareness about the issue.

At the dialogue yesterday, delegates also discussed issues related to new policies being introduced and progress achieved after the councils 2017 dialogue.

Organisations, agencies and businesses reported opinions, suggestions and difficulties to the national council in implementing the States policies and regulations in labour safety, especially initiatives on administrative procedure reform, saving time and money for individuals, organisations and enterprises as well as the efficiency of State management. - VNSDeputy Prime Minister Vu uc am speaks at a meeting with r epresentatives of the scientific community yesterday.  Photo VGP

HA NOI  Scattered investment and red tape have held back science and technology research in Viet Nam, scientists said at a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Vu uc am yesterday.

The dialogue between the Deputy PM and representatives of the scientific community aimed to remove hurdles for science and technology research in the country.

According to a report by the Ministry of Science and Technology, although the State has priotitised scientific and technology research, State budget allocation has failed to meet demand.

Investment has remained scattered and failed to focus on fields Viet Nam has strengths in and should be prioritised to build institutions to regional and international standards.

With the current way of investment, it is difficult for Viet Nam to have a science and technology infrastructure, institutions and laboratories of regional and international standards which can effectively support the economy, the report said.

Vice chairman of Viet Nam Academy of Science and Technology Nguyen inh Cong said regulations on management of science and technology research and projects did not meet reality, causing difficulties for executing the work.

It takes too long from executing an idea to project approval and result application," he said.

"Scientific research risks being mired in administrative red tape.

Other problems that affect science and technology research include a lack of trust of management bodies in scientists, complicated processes for project approval, bidding and finalization and shortcomings in regulations to encourage private enterprises in scientific research, the scientist said.

Deputy PM am said he appreciated scientists efforts to overcome difficulties to do their jobs.

He acknowledged the importance of scientists gaining autonomy in professional practice, finance and organisational issues.

He asked State bodies to review mechanisms and regulations to create favourable conditions for scientists, especially in terms of establishing autonomy and securing financial resources.

He emphasised the importance of practical research, asking for transparency in the appraisal process of scientific projects.

The Deputy PM also asked the Ministry of Science and Technology to further study policies on intellectual property and mechanisms to encourage scientists from the non-State sector to carry out scientific research.  VNSHCM CITY  Deputy Prime Minister Trinh inh Dung on Thursday visited the southern province of ong Nai to review land acquisition, compensation and resettlement support for the construction of Long Thanh International Airport.

During his field trip, Dung visited families involved with the project and offered gifts to kindergarten students in Long Thanh Districts Suoi Trau Commune.

The deputy chairman of the ong Nai Province Peoples Committee, Tran Van Vinh, said that the province was ready to implement the project, but was still waiting for the Prime Ministers approval.

He urged the State Appraisal Council to quickly evaluate the feasibility of the project and submit it to the Prime Minister for approval.

The province has received VN4.5 trillion (US$197 million) and plans to allocate a specific amount of capital resources, he said.

If the project is approved within the next month, the provincial Peoples Committee would have 30 months to complete land acquisition of 5,399.35ha and resettle 4,486 households.

The province plans to provide residents whose agricultural land is displaced by the airport project four to five times their monthly minimum salary at the time of land acquisition.

Quality transport infrastructure connecting Long Thanh International Airport to other areas should be emphasised, he said, particularly the expansion of HCM City  Long Thanh  Dau Giay Expressway and construction of Bien Hoa  Vung Tau Expressway.

Dung ordered further coordination between ong Nai Province Peoples Committee and relevant authorities to complete necessary project documents and prepare for implementation.  VNSWASHINGTON  US President Donald Trump claimed ties with Russia are worse than during the Cold War  and angrily blamed special investigator Robert Mueller for fuelling "bad blood" with Moscow on Wednesday.

In a series of Twitter broadsides that coincided with Russia-focused segments on his favoured channel Fox News, Trump opened the door to military attacks against the Kremlins Syrian allies and voiced the toughest anti-Russian rhetoric of his presidency.

"Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War. There is no reason for this," Trump said.

Trump mocked Moscows threat to shoot down any US missiles targeting Syria and pilloried Moscow for its ties to the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," he said.

"Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

His comments came minutes after Fox News featured a commentator talking about Moscows threat to shoot down missiles and of "grave repercussions."

The White House could not confirm which weapons system the president was referring to.

Since coming to office Trump has thumbed his nose at domestic opposition, brushed aside Moscows actions in the United States, Ukraine and Syria and embraced tighter relations with the Kremlin.

The mercurial US leader on Wednesday notably avoided criticising Vladimir Putin personally and -- once more -- held out the prospect of long-promised cooperation with Moscow, including a summit on arms control that was first mooted a year ago.

Like a succession of US presidents -- Republican and Democrat -- Trump has unsuccessfully tried to "reset" relations with Putin, despite his more overt courtship of the former KGB spy.

"Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?" he tweeted on Wednesday.

Bad blood

Amid warnings that firing special counsel Robert Mueller would be "suicide" and could end his presidency, Trump unexpectedly blamed Mueller for preventing better ties with Russia.

"Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama," Trump claimed.

The former FBI director is investigating Russias efforts to tilt the 2016 presidential election in Trumps favour and has charged several of presidents inner circle with various crimes including money laundering and lying under oath.

Mueller is a registered Republican, appointed as FBI director by George W.Bush and named as special counsel during Trumps tenure.

Trump has repeatedly denied colluding with Russia to influence the election, including Wednesday, when he stated there was "No Collusion or Obstruction (other than I fight back)."

Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump did not mean that Mueller was the only reason for bad relations with Russia, but that the Kremlin actions in Syria and Ukraine also played a role.

"Its both of those things. Neither one of those things are good for our country. The presidents been clear that the relationship with Russia is at a new low, and thats due to a number of factors."  AFPJERUSALEM  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday warned Iran not to test Israels resolve, in a speech marking the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Speaking at a ceremony at Jerusalems Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, the Israeli premier spoke of the murderous Nazi aggression that was not sufficiently challenged by Western powers.

"Today, too, theres an extremist regime thats threatening us, threatening the peace of the entire world," Netanyahu said of Iran. "That regime explicitly declares that it intends on destroying us, the Jewish state."

"I have a message to the rulers of Iran - dont test Israels resolve," Netanyahu said.

Russia, Syria and Iran accused Israel of an air strike Monday that hit a regime base in Syria, killing 14 Syrian and Iranian personnel.

Israel has refused to comment on the strike.

Israel has acknowledged carrying out dozens of air strikes in Syria since 2013 to stop what it says are advanced arms deliveries to Iran-backed Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite group fighting alongside Damascus.

Israel has also repeatedly warned it will not accept its arch-foe Iran entrenching itself militarily in neighbouring Syria.

"We nip the aggression in its bud," Netanyahu said without specifying. "These arent empty words, we back them up with action."

The Israeli leader also reiterated his stance on the shortcomings of the 2015 nuclear deal between world powers and Iran, which he believes must be changed.

"Signing the agreement with Iran not only didnt curb their aggression, it increased it," he said.

US President Donald Trump has threatened to walk away from the nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions by May 12 unless tough new restrictions are imposed on Irans nuclear and missile programmes.

Netanyahu also spoke of the duty to stand up to "evil and aggression" throughout generations, citing recent violent protests on the border with Gaza and the alleged chemical attack carried out by the Syrian regime.  AFPBAKU  Azerbaijan strongman Ilham Aliyev on Wednesday secured a fourth consecutive term in a snap election boycotted by the main opposition parties, near-complete results showed.

An Aliyev victory was widely seen as a foregone conclusion with the Caspian states downtrodden opposition unable to mount a serious challenge to his authoritarian rule.

Aliyevs position has been boosted in recent years by the steady influx of petrodollars into his governments coffers.

In power for 15 years, Aliyev received 86 per cent of the vote, with 94 per cent of votes counted, the Central Election Commission said in a statement.

Turnout was 74.5 per cent, the statement added.

Claiming victory in the election, Aliyev addressed the nation, thanking Azerbaijanis for "support and trust".

"Citizens of Azerbaijan have voted for security and progress," he said in a televised address.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first foreign leader to congratulate Aliyev on his electoral win, the Azerbaijani presidency said in a statement.

The main opposition parties in the tightly controlled Caucasus nation boycotted the vote, calling the elections a sham and accusing the authorities of preparing to rig the vote.

They also condemned Aliyevs surprise -- and unexplained -- decision to hold the election six months ahead of schedule, saying it was aimed at shortening the campaign period and hampering efforts to prevent vote-rigging.

"All previous elections in Azerbaijan were falsified and held with blatant violations of the electoral law. These elections will be no exception," the executive secretary of the opposition Republican Alternative Movement, Natig Jafarli, said ahead of the vote.

But authorities rejected the criticism, insisting the vote was free and fair.

"Azerbaijan is on a firm and irreversible path of democratic development. A free, open and transparent environment has been created in Azerbaijan for the presidential elections," foreign ministry spokesman, Hikmet Hajiyev, said.

"All the candidates enjoy equal rights and opportunities," he added.

Unprecedented powers

Earlier in the day at a polling station in the capital Baku, 38-year-old schoolteacher Elmira Balayeva said she had voted for Aliyev because he was the only candidate capable of steering the country towards economic wellbeing and political stability.

"There is no alternative to Aliyev. Only thanks to him is Azerbaijan a stable country with a strong economy," she said.

But for Natig Veliyev, a 27-year-old student who did not turn out to vote, "the elections are pure farce."

"We have never seen free elections in this country. Aliyev simply extends his reign again and again."

Aliyev, 56, was first elected in 2003, after the death of his father Heydar Aliyev.

A former KGB officer and communist-era leader, Aliyev senior had ruled Azerbaijan with an iron fist since 1993.

Ilham Aliyev was re-elected in 2008 and 2013 in polls that were denounced by opposition parties as fraudulent.

In 2009, he amended the countrys constitution so he could run for an unlimited number of presidential terms, a move criticised by rights advocates.

Azerbaijan adopted fresh controversial constitutional amendments in 2016, extending the presidents term in office from five to seven years.

The changes drew criticism from Council of Europe constitutional law experts as "severely upsetting the balance of powers" and giving the president "unprecedented" authority.

Cementing his familys decades-long grip on power, the president last year appointed his wife Mehriban Aliyeva as first vice president.

Apart from the incumbent president, seven candidates ran in the poll  all low-profile figures who barely carried out any campaigning.

Corruption claims

Supporters have praised the Aliyevs for turning a republic once thought of as an ex-Soviet backwater into a flourishing energy supplier to Europe.

But critics argue they have crushed opposition and used their power to fund a lavish lifestyle for themselves and their family. Aliyev has denied accusations of rights abuses and corruption.

Some 5.2 million people were registered to vote in polls monitored by international observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.  AFPShort Belfast Under Resurrection?

by Richard Mallory Allnutt

A rare, British cold-war era transport stirred to life recently after several years of dormancy at Cairns Airport in northern Queensland, Australia. The Short Belfast C.1 is a massive aircraft, even by modern standards, being almost twice as big as a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, and only slightly smaller than its more successful U.S. counterpart, the Douglas C-133 Cargomaster. The Belfast enjoyed only a brief career in Britains Royal Air Force, with the fleet of just ten examples serving from 1964 until 1976. Only two Belfasts currently survive: XR371 nicknamed Enceladus in preservation at RAF Museum Cosford in Shropshire, England, and XR365 Hector, which is the example in Cairns.

The British aircraft manufacturer, Short Brothers, or Shorts for short, dates back to the dawn of powered flight. They are well known for their water-borne aircraft, and probably most famous for their line of large, four-engined Empire Class flying boats which traveled the globe in the days leading up to WWII, and for the designs military offshoot, the Short Sunderland. The latter, a long-range maritime patrol aircraft, gained a reputation for doggedly fending off seemingly overwhelming enemy forces it was so fearsomely festooned with machine guns that it gained the self-ascribed moniker of Flying Porcupine. However, following WWII, with the abundance of high quality airfields for large, land-based transports, the days of the majestic flying boats were numbered. Shorts half century of association with water-borne aircraft was effectively over. In 1948, the company moved their headquarters from their long-time home in Rochester, Kent, to Belfast, Northern Ireland. The company built a succession of prototypes in the postwar years, such as the carrier-based Sturgeon and Semew, as well as the Sperrin four-jet nuclear bomber, which never reached production. Shorts survived mostly on piecemeal work, building other companys designs under sub-contract, like the English Electric Canberra and Bristol Britannia.

Interestingly, it was the companys license-built manufacture of the Britania which led directly to Shorts design of the Belfast. The initial proposal was to build a heavy cargo transport using the Britannias wings and tail grouping around a wholly-new fuselage. The compromise would reduce the types expense and development time, but also compromised the aircrafts performance to some degree, even though the eventual design did evolve significantly from that first concept.

Nevertheless, the RAF ordered ten of them, all of which served with 53 Squadron, based mostly at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

In keeping with its long-standing tradition of naming individual transport aircraft in its fleet, the Royal Air Force chose to name each of its Belfasts after a mythological giant, naming them by RAF serial as follows

XR362 Samson  scrapped Southend, England Feb.94

XR363 Goliath  scrapped Southend, England Feb.94

XR364 Pallas  scrapped Hucknall, England Jun.79

XR365 Hector  in storage at Cairns Airport, Australia

XR366 Atlas  scrapped Hucknall, England Aug.79

XR367 Heracles  scrapped Southend, England 2001

XR368 Theseus  scrapped Southend, England Oct.o4

XR369 Spartacus  scrapped Hucknall Jul.79

XR370 Ajax  scrapped Hucknall Jul.79

XR371 Enceladus  on display RAF Museum Cosford

The type was a success in RAF service, but suffered the axe in 1976 during a massive spate of defense cuts which also saw the withdrawal of the deHavilland Comet and Bristol Britannia fleets. All ten Belfasts made it into civilian hands, but several succumbed quickly to the scrappers torch. Rolls-Royce acquired five Belfasts, flirting briefly with the idea of using the fleet to deliver their massive Trent jet engines around the world, but soon lost interest and demolished the majority at their facility in Hucknall after removing their Rolls-Royce Tyne turboprops for resale. They did at least donate Enceladus to the RAF Museum for preservation (but still took her engines). Eventually, the five remaining survivors joined HeavyLift, a company which became synonymous with the type. HeavyLift used two examples for spare parts (Samson and Goliath), and flew the other three (Hector, Heracles and Theseus) for many years, hauling oversized freight all over the world.

HeavyLift even flew significant contracts with their Belfasts for the RAF, especially during the Falklands War and later in the Gulf War. Ironically, the enormous expense of these contracts would likely have kept the Belfast fleet flying in RAF service until the 1990s, had they not short-sightedly retired them in the 70s!

HeavyLifts contracts began to dwindle following the end of the Cold War, which saw the Russian cargo line Volga-Dnepr dominate the market with their far more capacious, and faster Antonov An-124 Ruslan roughly the size and configuration of a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy. Interestingly, HeavyLift briefly joined forces with Volga-Dnepr, but then folded up their UK operation, with the aim of re-establishing themselves in Australia. Hector relocated to Australia in February, 2003, and Theseus was due to follow. However, those plans fell through, and the giant cargo plane succumbed to the bulldozer in October, 2004. And then there was one. Hector continued to fly successfully from Australia for some years, registered to the newly formed HeavyLift Cargo Airlines Pty. initially as 9L-LDQ (Sierra Leone) and then as RP-C8020 (Philippines), before she too was grounded in January, 2009. Hector has sat at Cairns Airport ever since. Her owners put her up for sale in 2011, but she received no takers, and a legal dispute over parking fees has ensued in more recent years. The Belfast has been living on borrowed time, with the ever-present threat of scrapping hanging over her. But recent reports from the Australian blog Far North Queensland Skies have described a flurry of maintenance activity around Hector, including a number of engine runs in the last few weeks. So perhaps there are positive plans afoot for resurrecting this resilient cargo plane. It will not be an easy task, and certainly not an easy aircraft to maintain, given the types limited production run, and the lack of OEM support for the Rolls-Royce Tyne engines, but hopefully Hector will live to fly again one day, even if it is to a museum somewhere. WarbirdsNews will continue to follow this story, and bring our readers updates as and when they occur.

WarbirdsNews wishes to thank Andrew at fnqskies@blogspot.com for his permission to use the above image in this article.Three arrested on meth charges in PaducahA facially unconstitutional law is under consideration by the California legislature. See analysis here . Under the aegis of the consumer protection powers, the act would ban all exchange of money for "orientation change efforts" with any individual. On its face this would amount to the outright ban on the sale of any books, courses, or other materials that can be seen as trying to help or induce someone to change his sexual orientation or overcome gender confusion. As Robert Gagnon has pointed out , it would also facially ban charging fees for conference attendance or college classes in which such material is presented.

My rather gloomy prediction goes approximately like this:

Step 1: The law passes in California.

Step 2: The law is constitutionally challenged.

Step 3: SCOTUS rules that, one way or another, it shouldn't be applied to ban the sale of books or the content of conferences or college classes, but severability clauses mean that SCOTUS is allowed to uphold a complete ban on personal (one-on-one) therapy or counseling of any kind in exchange for a fee when that counseling is in line with traditional moral views, and SCOTUS does narrowly uphold this ban by a 5-4 majority.

Step 4: The fact that the law was partially reinterpreted or struck down and partially upheld will be hailed by both left and right as a victory.

Step 5: The left will harass sellers of books, conference materials, classes, etc., trying to push as far as they can to widen the definition of "therapy." This will have a chilling effect upon all expression of traditional moral views throughout the state, especially in colleges, despite the partial SCOTUS strikedown.

Step 6: All traditional moral counseling on gender dysphoria and homosexual attraction, for all ages, even if desired by the client, unless done for no fee and probably only by pastors, will be ruthlessly suppressed using the full power of law.

Of course, all of this will take some years to play out, so you'll have to check the accuracy of my crystal ball later on.

Meanwhile, if you're in California or know someone who is, especially anyone running a Christian college, think-tank, or other institution that charges fees for any purpose and addresses these issues, get involved or encourage others to get involved and oppose CA AB 2943, AB 1779, and AB 2119.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 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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)Source: Last Days of Pompey  Une parole franche

Last Days of Pompey: by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

What follows here will surely surprise my loyal readers, who expect detailed argumentation and are not put off by 3,000 or even 5,000 words to get to a conclusion. For the same reason, detractors who complain of my long-winded style may take heart.

However that may be, I do not offer a bed-time story today but a shock to the system.

The overriding issue of war or peace, survival of mankind or its utter destruction, is now being decided in Washington and NYC without so much as a by your leave for the rest of us.

Will Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dunford prevail in warning Trump against any action that will bring a kinetic response from the worlds other nuclear super power. Or will Mad Dog Secretary of Defense Matthis win out in pressing Donald Trump to test the Russians bluff on their red lines in Syria? Will the US launch missiles against Damascus or against Iran, as I suggested yesterday as an alternative scenario? Or will it support Poroshenko in launching a massive attack on Donetsk, as the Russians appear to expect judging by their just putting their entire military on war alert?

Donald Trump has announced very clearly that he will be authorizing some kind of retribution to the CIA-faked chemical attack in Douma, Eastern Goutha in the coming 24 to 48 hours.

So, here we are at Judgment Day, and there surely will not be one soul out on Pennsylvania Avenue to raise an anti-war placard. The tattered remains of the American peace movement is rotten to the core. Even Daniel Ellsberg has been suckered into joining the buffoon Noam Chomsky in a cake-walk demo in NYC under the sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee, once the paragon of pacificism and today just another social action group promoting racial equality. Uncle Joe Gerson sent out invitations to participate in that theater of the absurd last night.

The anti-war movement was a Leftist movement, and we all know where the Left is today, along with the Progressives. In denial and Russia-bashing.

To anyone watching the UN Security Council debate last night it is crystal clear we are in the last days before all hell breaks out. The wall of mutual contempt between Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya and US Ambassador Nikki Haley was on full display. Nebenzya took to pieces the entire argumentation of the US side regarding Douma and the chemical attack. He detailed the rebel caches of chemical weapons and equipment for their manufacture that Russian troops have found in recently liberated territory of Eastern Ghouta and elsewhere. He spoke about the past provocations of faked chemical attacks including the one used to justify the US cruise missile launches on the Syrian air base at Sheirat a year ago. He linked the US training and support for terrorists in fabrication of chemical arms to the faked nerve agent attack on the Skripals in the UK, which he described as a vaudeville act. He heaped scorn on Haley for her denying Russia the status of friend, saying that the US has no friends, only sycophants, whereas Russia has genuine friends, and seeks nothing more in relations with the United States than civilized discourse. In response to this unprecedented denunciation of the USA and its policies of global hegemony, we heard from Nikki Haley the familiar story of how the UN Security Council could now either adopt a US resolution condemning the Assad regime, in effect, or admit its total irrelevance while the US continued on its own unilateral path to resolving the Syrian question.

So, ladies and gents, open the champagne. Last days of Pompey? I was just there last week and I saw the future, not the past.

 Gilbert Doctorow, 2018

* * * *

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. His latest book, Does the United States Have a Future? was published on 12 October 2017. Both paperback and e-book versions are available for purchase on www.amazon.com and all affiliated Amazon websites worldwide. See the recent professional review http://theduran.com/does-the-united-states-have-a-future-a-new-book-by-gilbert-doctorow-review/ For a video of the book presentation made at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. on 7 December 2017 see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciW4yod8upgApr 12, 2018 | By David

European aviation giant Airbus has long been at the forefront of implementing 3D printing technology in manufacturing processes. As well as rapid prototyping, more than 1,000 final production plastic and metal parts have been used on various aircraft including the A350 and A320 since 2015. The company has recently reached another milestone, as it debuted the first 3D printed part that will be visible to passengers. A 3D printed spacer panel was installed in the cabin of a A320 jet, which is being operated by Finnair.

Spacer panels are used when the design of an aircrafts cabin layout is updated. When these modifications occur, gaps can often be left between different parts and components due to the change in dimensions and other issues, so spacer panels help to bridge these gaps. This particular 3D printed spacer panel will be used to fill a gap at the end of a row of overhead storage compartments.

Passengers using Finnairs service will be able to see the new 3D printed spacer panel on the A320, whereas previous 3D printed parts were only installed behind panels, hidden from view. The reason for this is the stringent aesthetic standards Airbus has for its aircraft cabins. The way a cabin looks might seem like a trivial issue compared to something like the engine design. However, a visual environment can have a huge impact on passengers comfort, and their perception of the quality of components will affect their feelings of safety and confidence, in what is often perceived as a risky form of transport. 3D printed plastic parts can sometimes look to be lower quality than they actually are, and Airbus wanted to avoid passengers making this assumption.

The design of the panel was much more sophisticated than ones previously used, due to the advanced capabilities of 3D printing technology. It uses a bio-inspired lattice support structure, which enabled a 15 percent weight reduction. This same structure would have taken significantly longer to produce using injection molding techniques, and wouldve been more costly due to the small quantities that were required. This kind of small-batch production for modifications and replacement parts is a key area where 3D printing can offer huge advantages to aerospace manufacturing and maintenance. After printing, the spacers were painted, and both the print material and paint were highly flame-retardant, for obvious reasons.

(All images, credit: Airbus)

Airbus partnered with Belgian 3D expert Materialise for this 3D printing project, and the two companies have been collaborating for over two years now. Airbus has also collaborated with Minnesota-based giant Stratasys and Dutch 3D printing company Additive Industries in the past, in its efforts to take full advantage of what additive manufacturing has to offer. Some other 3D printing firsts for Airbus from last year include an additively-manufactured titanium bracket and a 3D printed hydraulic component. The companys metal AM subsidiary APWorks has also worked on creating a lighter partition for its aircraft interiors using 3D printing technology and an advanced alloy known as Scalmalloy, and this is the worlds largest 3D printed metal aircraft part.

Posted in 3D Printing Application

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PiRho wrote at 4/19/2018 3:04:08 AM:12 years back. Not the first, so much for groundbreaking. http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2006/june/i_ca2.htmlPiRho wrote at 4/13/2018 7:52:07 AM:Sorry, Airbus. Boeing did interiors detail years back with SLS titanium parts. And they didn't even need paint. Puff-piece.



Constants kids were living with him for the summer, and sometimes he brought them here, to his farm that teems with the organic produce he grows on an easement beneath an electricity transmission tower at the intersection of Fondren and Willowbend in southwest Houston. The land once belonged to Braeswood Church across the street, but they had donated the narrow, unbuildable lot to Plant It Forward, a local nonprofit that trains refugees to become urban farmers. Plant It Forward divided the land into three one-acre plots and allocated these Fondren Farm plots to refugees like Constantall Congoleseafter mentoring them for nearly a year on how to grow in the soil and climate of Houston, and to market their produce to this citys clientele. The goal of Plant It Forward is to offer refugees a path toward economic self-sufficiency through organic farms that have the potential to generate enough income to support a family of four.

More here.Plus new shoes, leggings and skincare to make your week.

Femme Fair conquers Peerspace next Saturday.

The same girl squad that put together last year's first shop-your-favorite-bloggers'-closets event is back at it. And Femme Fair founders Stacey de Leon, Christina Chinn, and Melissa Landestoy have even more tricks up their sleeves on Saturday, April 21 at Peerspace. Along with more than a dozen local style bloggers selling their obviously fashionable fashions (in sizes 028), the cost of admission ($35) includes all-you-can-drink-cocktails and wine, plenty of nibbles, manis, makeovers and hair from Stylebee, and more. For those interested in a mentoring sesh, first dibs on shopping, breakfast and lunch, and a swag bag valued at $300, go the VIP route ($100). A portion of the day's proceeds will be donated to the Global Fund for Women. Note: This is a 21+ and no-cash event (credit and debit cards only). Buy tickets here. General admission hours 1pm5pm; VIP hours 8am5pm. // 470 Alabama St. (Mission), femmefair.com





Meg pop-up hits the Mission.



From Friday, April 13 through Tuesday, April 17, fashion-loving ladyfolk can get their fill of Meg goodies on Capp Street. The New Yorkbased dress-centric slow-fashion brand, named for founder Meghan Kinney, is all about effortless modern dressing for women of all typesclassic button-down lovers to vintage-inspired frock fanatics. (Prices fall in the $175$350 range.) In case you need more reason to shop, Meg focuses on prioritizing sustainability, working with women-owned brands, and impacting local communities through giveback programs. (Plus, jumpsuits!) A special evening of sustainable fashion with Friday Apaliski, bites and bubbles is set for Sunday at 5pm. // Pop-up hours are 11am to 7pm through Monday; 9am to 2pm on Tuesday; appointments recommended (email: web@megshops.com); 964 Capp St. (Mission), megshops.com.





(Courtesy of Bells & Becks)

Bells & Becks has all the (chic) whistles.

Tamar Miller's story may sound familiar: successful professional and mom quits job, reflects on next chapter, and launches direct-to-consumer made-in-Italy shoe biz. Miller's debut Bells & Becks collection, however, is anything but another tired tale. With more than 25 years experience as a shoe merchandiser and digital marketer at brands like Banana Republic, Old Navy and Macy's, the Burlingame resident and veritable one-woman-show knows shoes inside and out. The designer quality of the label's sleek and feminine quintetincluding two flats, two sandals, and a bootieis undeniableand the meticulous details are swoon inducing (truth). We're partial to the oversized tab and metallic heel of the Lia, available in gold, pale pink and gray. Prices fall in the $330 range, except for the sandals that average around $200. // bellsandbecks.com





(Courtesy of Plantioxidants)

Celebrate Earth Day with seriously green beauty.

No surprise that Plantioxidants, a Bay Areabased USDA-approved organic luxury skincare line built on the antioxidant power of plants, is all about Earth Day. To show its commitment to sustainability, CEO Josh Wadinski and cofounder-slash-beauty guru Susie Wang and team have launched a couple of green initiatives. For starters, 100 percent of all product sales on Earth Day (April 22) will go to supporting a (TBD) cause to curb climate change. Plus, it rolled out a new mail-back program this month where customers are encouraged to send back their empty Plantioxidants containers to ensure all of the plastic bottles will be recycled (currently only 10 percent of all plastic is recycled). In exchange, you get a discount on your next purchase. We'll be stocking up on our latest obsessionthe Cucumber & Kale Juice Mask ($85). // Shop plantioxidants.com





(Courtesy of Visakai)

Buy a pair of killer leggings, score a pair for charity.

If you've been plagued by any number of niggly leggings issues (i.e. VPL, friction, bunching), you most def want to check out SF's still-newish activewear brand Visakai. Founded by Hau Greena native SF-er and retail vet with Chanel, Bloomie's and eBay Fashion on her CVthe brand's signature leggings ($69$78) are designed for comfort and style, and feature patent-pending Freeluxe technology made to address the aforementioned annoyances. For every pair of leggings purchased in April, the brand will donate a pair to women-focused charities including SF's Woman Inc. // visakai.com

LPI Responds To Media Coverage

Sydney, April 12, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Lithium Power International Limited ( ASX:LPI ) ("the Company") provides this announcement in response to information contained in a "Mergermarket" article dated 12 April 2018. The article quotes LPI CEO Martin Holland regarding the potential divestment of LPI's Western Australian exploration assets and certain other potential transactions.LPI is pleased to advise that it is considering a range of options regarding its Western Australian assets (Pilbara and Greenbushes), including the potential disposal of the assets, joint venture arrangements or spinning out the assets into a newly listed vehicle. It has recently received approaches from two potential transaction partners with respect to the assets and from time to time engages in confidential discussions with other parties as part of its regular business activities.The article refers to estimated valuations of LPI's Western Australian Projects. LPI advises that there is no basis upon which that valuation was determined and that these statements contained in the article should be disregarded. Investors should not rely on these estimated valuations for their investment decisions.The Company wishes to emphasise that there is currently no actual or proposed transaction with respect to its Western Australian assets and that the Company is considering various options for the development or monetisation of those assets as part of its regular business activities. In any event, no transaction for those assets may eventuate and no determination has been made by the Board with respect to any potential transaction.LPI further updates the market on the progress of the sale of its Centenario project to Albertson Resources (as previously disclosed to ASX). The transaction is currently due to close on or before 30 April 2018. In the event that the transaction does not close by this date, the parties will explore options which may include an extension of the closing date or a joint venture. LPI advises that no agreement has been reached with Albertson Resources with respect to these options and will update the market as and when required.Finally, the Company advises that the non-binding Memorandum of Understanding with Fulin Group that was disclosed to the ASX in November 2017 has recently expired. The Company remains in discussions with Fulin Group and regularly receives unsolicited inquiries from other potential offtake, project funding and/or construction funding partners as part of its normal business operations.However, the Company does not have the present need, or intention, to enter into arrangements with funding joint venture or offtake partners and as previously disclosed to ASX is fully funded through to the final investment decision at Maricunga.Upon making the final investment decision, the Company will seek appropriate project funding to finance the construction of Maricunga. As disclosed in the Preliminary Feasibility Assessment, released in January 2018, the estimated cost of construction for the Maricunga project is US$360m. To date the Company has received several unsolicited informal inquires to fund the construction of the Maricunga, however the Company does not intend to further progress these inquires until the completion of all matters leading to the finalisation of the Definitive Feasibility Study.About Lithium Power International Ltd

Lithium Power International Limited (ASX:LPI) is a pure-play lithium explorer and developer, focusing on developing and fast-tracking to production the high-grade Maricunga lithium brine project in Chile.

LPI has a well-known performing technical team with the experience to take the Maricunga project all the way through the development stages to production.

The regions that LPI is currently focused on are:

1. Maricunga JV (Chile) - Located within the "Lithium Triangle", Maricunga is Chile's highest grade and most advanced lithium project outside the Salar de Atacama. The project lies 170 km northeast of Copiapo and 250 km from the port of Caldera.

2. Pilbara (Western Australia) - LPI has three granted exploration tenements covering 203 km2 in the Pilbara region of northern Western Australia. The largest granted exploration tenement is the Pilgangoora tenement which is 2-3 km west of the Pilbara Minerals (ASX:PLS) and Altura Mining (ASX:AJM) lithium deposits.

3. Greenbushes (Western Australia) - LPI has two granted exploration tenements covering 400 km2 in the Greenbushes area of southern Western Australia. The tenements are adjacent to the world's largest hard rock lithium mine owned and operated by Tianqi/Talison.

4. Centenario (Argentina) - Through its Argentinian subsidiary, Lithium Power holds a total of seven granted tenements in the Centenario lithium brine salar within the Salta province of the Puna Plateau. In total, the seven granted tenements cover an area of 68.46 km2.

With the exception of the Maricunga JV, all tenements are 100% owned by LPI or LPSA (including rights to the Centenario tenements).UPDATE 4/16/2018 11:05 a.m.



LEGGETT, Calif. (AP) - The Latest on the search for a family whose vehicle plunged into Northern California river.

Officials in Northern California say crews found a vehicle that plunged into a rain-swollen Northern California river after noticing a gasoline smell.

The Mendocino County Sheriff's Office said Monday that a boating team searching the Eel River noticed the fuel odor about half a mile downstream from where the crash was reported.

Searchers found the car Sunday and recovered the bodies of 41-year-old Sandeep Thottapilly and 9-year-old Saachi Thottapilly. The body of 38-year-old Soumya Thottapilly was found Friday.

The couple's 12-year-old son, Sidhhanty Thottapilly, remains missing.

The office says 70 searchers combed the area, including more than 20 crew members searching the water in Jet Skis, boats and kayaks.

It says the vehicle was encased in sediment but that divers were able to feel a person inside the car.

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press.)

___

UPDATE 4/12/2018 3:40 p.m.

LEGGETT, Calif. (AP) - The Mendocino County Sheriff's Office says recovered debris and personal items confirm that a vehicle seen plunging into a storm-swollen Northern California river last week belonged to a family that went missing.

A sheriff's office statement Thursday says the vehicle and its occupants haven't been located in the Eel River but searchers have found numerous items from the vehicle's body and interior.

They say the items are consistent with a family on vacation and unspecified items were identified by relatives of the Thottapilly family.

The family of four - two parents and two children - was traveling from Portland, Oregon, to their home in Santa Clarita, California, last week when they stopped communicating with relatives.

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press.)

__________________________________________________

Valencia Calif.-- A missing family mystery possible new clues in the case of a Valencia family of four that vanished while on a road trip.

The family was supposed to drive down from Portland to San Jose before heading home to Valencia. They never made it there.

CBS2's Randy Paige is in Valencia with new clues in the case.

A single candle stands on the driveway where the Thottapilly family lives, while hope for their safe return begins to fade.

This video taken by a security camera mounted on Mat Lemus's house across the street chronicles the last day they were here.

It was March 30th, at 7:40 in the morning, when Soumya Thottapilly pulls out of her garage in the family's red Honda Pilot as she takes her children to school, fifteen minutes later she's back.

At 2:54 p.m. that afternoon, Soumya and her 9 year old daughter Saachi bring in the empty garbage cans.

Six minutes later, the family's off apparently heading for Portland Oregon then, on their way back they planned to stop and see a relative in San Jose. They never arrived.

Consider their route they planned to drive south from Portland and arrive in San Jose on Friday.

That same day Friday the CHP got calls about a red Honda Pilot, the same make and color of the Thottapilly's SUV, that was seen careening off a windy two lane section of the 101 north of Leggett, and disappearing into the swollen Eel River in a pounding rain.

That SUV has not yet been found.

The CHP says there is no way to know if the Honda Pilot seen going into the river belongs to the Thottapilly family because it's been too dangerous for divers to search.

In Valencia, their neighbor has been keeping watch over their home hoping to see some sign of life.

A neighbor says, There are no lights in the house no one comes by, no police no sheriff no family nothing. And when you look at their Facebook picture it's heartbreaking. It is because we see them daily running around playing outside and to think that could be potentially them is upsetting.

According to CHP it has been too dangerous to send divers into the river, so the SUV people say has not been found yet.

San Jose Police say the Thottapilly family is still missing.

DOWNLOAD OUR NEWS APP FOR LATEST UPDATES: iOS | AndroidFor the third successive year, more country risk ratings have increased (17) than decreased (6). This year: 40% of countries are listed as being exposed to terrorism and sabotage risk;

60% to civil unrest risk, and;

33% to insurrection, war or coup risk. Forty-six countries or territories are now rated as high or severe risk, representing 22% of the global total. The likelihood of interstate conflict, even involving major powers, is at the highest point since the end of the Cold War. Growing geopolitical competition and weak leadership in international diplomacy have contributed to sustained or increased risks of armed conflict over the last year. Growing rates of polarisation over political, economic and social issues in mature democracies, and divisions between Western powers in the face of complex threats and risks, has also contributed to worsening global security and greater strategic uncertainty. The number of terrorist attacks in Western countries in 2017 (204) was roughly double that of 2016 (96) but the total number of casualties in both years was broadly the same (1,092 in 2017), meaning that the lethality of attacks has fallen. Notably, the threat posed by Islamic State has stopped spreading  but has not yet receded. IS mounted terrorist attacks in 29 countries on five continents in 2017, the same number of countries as in 2016 and up from 19 countries in 2015, but the global reach of IS appears to have peaked, and it seems likely that the number of countries where it is able to mount attacks, or inspire others to do so, will fall in 2018. In particular, the tourism sector is having to manage the risks posed by increased terrorism, with the sector a highly attractive target for some terrorist organisations. In 2017, there were at least 35 attacks worldwide that directly targeted commercial sectors that are critical components of the tourism industry, such as hotels and resorts, nightclubs, civil aviation and visitor attractions. Political Risk Last year political risk increased in eleven countries, compared to only two countries that saw reduced risk, showing the persistence of political risk across the globe, highlighted by increases in political violence and supply chain disruption. Many countries' risks of supply chain disruption have risen due to both climate shocks and weakening fiscal positions. Notably, over the last year, Asian countries' trade linkages have been shifting away from the US and toward China. This is due to China's economic development, and its rise as a trade giant. Amid China's rise, Asia's exports to the US have edged down from around 23% of total exports in 2000 to stabilize at around 12% in recent years. By the same token, Asia's exports to China have more than doubled over the past decade to around 23% currently. Elsewhere, political risks in Latin America are increasing ahead of a busy election season, delaying major reforms in Brazil and stoking fears of reform reversal in Mexico. Major countries are at risk of electing populist governments, and smaller countries are experiencing their share of political noise. More broadly, the region experiencing most downgrades is Africa. Ongoing conflicts within countries, the erosion of democratic governance and increasingly frequent corruption scandals have led to more political violence. Groups such as IS and Boko Haram are taking advantage of fragile institutions and weak borders. Elsewhere, the Middle East contains some of the highest-risk countries in the world: Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Egypt. Instability and violence in the region have spilled over to neighbouring countries, undermining trade and tourism. Mark Parker, Head of Property, Casualty and Crisis Management, Aon Global Broking Centre, said: "The global geopolitical environment remains volatile. This is reflected in the 2018 Risk Maps, with the interlinked threats posed by Political Violence and Political Risks growing. Given this heightened level of risk, and the rapidly evolving landscape against which businesses are operating, it is essential the companies understand their exposures and the potential for political instability to impact their people, property and supply chains. Ensuring that the right solutions are in place to mitigate and transfer risk is essential for firms operating internationally." Paulina Argudin, Director, Country Risk Model, Continuum Economics, said: "The Aon Political Risk Map 2018 captures changing elements of political risks for businesses across emerging and frontier markets countries. Last year we saw political risk rising in several countries, driven mainly by increases in political violence and supply chain disruption. The persistence and rise of political risk across the globe demonstrates how relevant it is for businesses to identify and monitor specific political risk elements in their countries of operation. Henry Wilkinson, Head of Intelligence & Analysis at The Risk Advisory Group, said: "The Aon Terrorism & Political Violence Map 2018 points to inter-state tensions driving up longer-term political violence risks, as well as diversifying terrorist and extremist threats particularly in the West. The long-term trend of non-state actors being the predominant political violence concern in most regions is shifting towards geopolitical risks. These are more business threatening and demand board-level ownership. In such an unsettled environment, it is imperative that businesses invest in world class crisis and risk management programs that are intelligence-led, anticipatory and adaptive to rapid change."

For more information and to access the interactive maps and full report please click For more information and to access the interactive maps and full report please click hereEstablished in 1965, Clark Thomson is headquartered in Perth and has offices in Dundee, Glasgow, Inverness, Kirkwall, Oban, Elgin, Thurso, and Nairn. With over 200 employees, Clark Thomson provides insurance broking services to small and medium-sized (SME) businesses, with particular expertise in the agriculture, renewable energy, food and drink, and retail sectors across Scotland, as well as providing personal lines insurance for individuals and families. Jelf is one of the UKs leading insurance brokers for mid-size and SME companies, with almost 3,000 colleagues serving over 250,000 clients from over 75 locations. On completion, Jelf will combine its existing Scottish operations and Clark Thomson into a single business unit. The combined business will, subject to regulatory approvals, be led by Ben Bailey, Managing Director of Clark Thomson, and a management team drawn from across Clark Thomson and Jelf. Phil Barton, CEO of Jelf, said: This is a highly significant transaction that underlines Jelfs commitment to building the leading community based advisory business across the whole of the UK. Through the acquisition of Clark Thomson, we are significantly broadening our geographic reach whilst also building on our capabilities in sectors that are vital to the Scottish economy, such as agriculture, food and drink, retail, and hospitality and leisure. The transaction brings together two leading community brokers with well-established offices in complementary locations across Scotland. The combined business will offer clients a compelling proposition across a wide range of insurance, risk management and employee benefits services and solutions. Mr. Bailey commented: This deal is great news for our clients and colleagues alike. Through Jelf, our clients will have access to a wider range of services and solutions, while colleagues will benefit from being part of Marshs wider global network. I look forward to bringing Jelf and Clark Thomsons operations together, and building the leading advisory business in Scotland.These children can be in the care system for a number of reasons including learning and behavioural difficulties, said Natalie.  

Inside, Natalie showed off the sensory room, which is used if a child is anxious and is a place to reassure them.

Stephen Rodgers is head of education at the Eton Dorney Residential School, which has room to house six young people and 18 day spaces for 10 to 18-year-olds. 

 The head of a new school for young people in care says it aims to put each child at the centre of everything it does.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has their own study from 1998 to show that the changes in kids health and behavior are the result of bad parents who expose them to trauma at home. This is what teachers are being taught everywhere. Im sure it will work. The press is already reporting on it as dogma. Schools need to take over and counter what parents are doing. Teachers have learned to ask, What happened to this student and not, Why did the student do this? Every mom and dad whose child has behavior issues should hang their heads in shame.

Here are around 70 stories from the last two weeks. Theyre from all overthe U.S., Canada, and Britain. Theyre about schools adding sensory rooms so kids can calm down and make it through the school day, about more and more schools spending vast sums on mental health services, about schools in Britain so overwhelmed that there arent enough places for all the disabled students, and about increasing incidents of out-of-control kids in the elementary schools attacking teachers.

Numbers mean nothing. Cost is meaningless. NO MATTER HOW BAD THINGS GET IN SCHOOLS, THERE WILL NEVER BE A REAL PROBLEM. Behavior is out-of-control. Special education is exploding at the seams. Mental health concerns are a more critical topic than academics in our schools. STILL, everything is fine. Experts are working on it. Well survive this.

Mar 26, 2018, Lexington, MA Wicked: Winchester to fight mental health stigma, offer resources

Winchester High School Principal Dennis Mahoney told attendees that the social and emotional well-being of students is a major priority of his. He noted that the school has a staff of 12 psychologists, guidance counselors and adjustment counselors, and students are offered individual, small-group, and entire-school programs.

Representatives from several local mental health providers spoke about their services. 

Mar 26, 2018, WTHITV, Terre Haute, IN: Mobile clinic brings health care to students and more

Its a mobile health clinic. It travels to 15 different schools in Parke and Vermillion Counties. One school in Vigo County has just added the list as well.

The bus is equipped with a nurse practitioner, nurse and behavioral health specialist around the clock.

Mar 26, 2018, (UK) Huffington Post: We Need To Understand Why So Many Children Are UnhappyWith such a rapid rise in demand for mental health services, its urgent we understand the causes of poor mental health

 Its thought that as many as one in ten children has a diagnosable mental health condition and referrals to specialist treatment have gone up 44% in the last three years. 

We need to get to the root of the problem. We need to understand what is causing so many children to feel depressed and anxious 

We need to understand what it is about Britain today that is making children unhappy.

But with such a rapid rise in demand for mental health services, its just as urgent that we understand the causes of poor mental health and what can be done to prevent mental illness.

Mar 26, 2018, Toronto Sun: Wynne Liberals promise $300M funding boost for special needs education

Ontarios Liberal government is promising to spend more than $300 million over three years to improve supports for children with special needs and hire more teachers, a pledge that comes just months ahead of the spring election. 

Mar 26, 2018, Energy Institute of AlabamaYellow Hammer News: Alabama mental health commissioner calls to tackle issues in schools

 Beshear said the state must focus on identifying behaviors that trigger school violence and proactively treating mental health. The states school-based mental health services put clinicians into schools to counsel students. Only 36 school systems in Alabama have the services and Beshear advocated for expanding it to the other 106.

One in five U.S. children experience a mental, emotional or behavioral disorder, the American Institutes for Research reported. 

Mar 26, 2018, Glenwood (MN) Tribune: Local schools continue to improve security

 With $15.9 million proposed to enhance safety for students, teachers, parents and staff, and an additional $5 million for school-based grants that would, provide mental health services to students who need added support, the proposal is aimed at reducing the amount of school shootings in Minnesota for the future. 

Mar 26, 2018, Bremerton, WA, Kitsap Sun: Program meets growing demand for mental health services in Mason County

 Behavioral Health Resources has expanded in the last year to Belfair, with a therapist at North Mason Resources three times a week and a full-time therapist available for all five schools in the North Mason School District. 







Mar 26, 2018, (Ireland) Independent: 'I can't keep my child locked away at home' - Boy (5) with autism has no school place for September

 The mainstream school does not have an ASD unit for primary level students and so Linda is desperately searching for a school place for her son for the next school year. 

"There needs to be more schools with basic ASD units for children with autism. The Department

of Education should be ashamed that these kids are left with no schools to go to."

"Ryan has a basic right to education yet there is no school with an available place for him. I'm disgusted by how hard I have to fight for Ryan constantly."

Linda said that six other children in Ryan's class are facing a similar struggle to find a primary school for September.

"It's not just one child that is affected. It's dozens and it happens every year. There is no place for the kids to go.







Mar 26, 2018, West Virginia Public Broadcasting: New Therapy Dog Arrives for First Day of Work at Mary C. Snow Elementary

 Axelle has been trained to specialize in helping children cope with emotional stress and trauma, and to encourage students to enjoy learning. Hell be working with all of the students, but especially with special needs students. 







Mar 26, 2018, NBC6, Idaho Falls, ID: District 93's Special Education Program Struggles to Keep Up with Growth

 But since District 93's special education program started five years ago, the program has grown from just over 1,000 students to almost 1,700 students. 

Mar 27, 2018, Falmouth (ME) Forecaster: Under pressure: Mental, emotional support for Portland students largely 'crisis driven'

 According to School Department records, the city is spending $1.5 million on high school guidance and counseling services in the current fiscal year. Thats over $200,000 more than the district spent in 2016. 







Mar 27, 2018, KOTATV, Pierre, SD: Lawmakers to study mental health, special ed

The panel also approved a study on the increasing need for special education in schools and how to adequately fund it. Republican Sen. Jim Bolin says it's a very important issue that's "not going away."

House Speaker Pro Tempore Steven Haugaard supported the mental health study, saying it's an opportunity to direct state resources in that area and to help counties figure out how to address the "burgeoning problem of mental illness." 







Mar 27, 2018, (UK) Tes: Exclusive: SEND pupils 'being pushed out' of school due to funding squeeze

 And local authorities warn that further funding cuts could make the situation worse

Funding pressures are pushing out children from mainstream education  fuelling the rise in exclusions and home education, local authorities are warning.

The claim was made at an event in central London at which local authority education leaders, headteachers and governors discussed the financial squeeze facing schools. 







Mar 27, 2018, Emporia (KS) Gazette: CrossWinds holds open house at therapeutic preschool

 CrossWinds staff invited guests to take part in an open house and ceremonial ribbon-cutting at the new CrossWinds Pre-K Monday afternoon.

Located on the third floor of the First Christian Church at 202 E. 12th Ave., the therapeutic preschool helps socially and emotionally-troubled students by providing a unique learning experience throughout each three-hour class day. 

Mar 27, 2018, NBC4, Reno, NV: CDC: 1 in 5 children suffer from a mental health disorder

 According to the Center for Disease Contro l, up to 1 in 5 children suffer from a mental health disorder. Mental disorders among children are described as serious changes in the way they typically learn, behave or handle their emotions, which causes distress and problems getting through the day. Symptoms of mental disorders change over time as a child grows, and symptoms can include difficulties with how the child plays, learns, speaks and acts, or how the child handles his or her emotions. 

Mar 27, 2018, Knoxville (TN) Journal Express : School disruption concerns echo back to board

 Parents brought more concerns about behavior and discipline among second graders to the Knoxville school board Monday night.

 Three weeks after a mother and a teacher both spoke about violent classroom outbursts, two more mothers shared their fears during the public comments portion of the board's agenda.

Angeline Blackburn said that outbursts and the classroom evacuations that follow harm education and the students peace of mind.

Its becoming a norm for my son to go to school and expect to be evacuated because some kid is acting bad, she said. Theyre just expecting to see these kids throw desks and for it to be OK. Its really not. 







Mar 28, 2018, Wahoo, NE, Ashland Gazette: Public gives input on school growth options

Currently at least 20 percent of our study body right now is special education, she said. 







Mar 28, 2018, Stockton, MO, Cedar Republican: Stockton Elementary School to be fenced in

A classroom and specially-trained staffer for a room created to handle students with severe behavioral issues at the district's middle and elementary school campus. 

Snow told the board this is not an alternative school situation, but said this is a growing problem in the elementary grades.

Many times these students have to be disciplined and are sent home during a school day or taken off bus routes, she said. 

 there are days when between 10-20 elementary and middle school students at different times may display extreme behavioral actions requiring intervention. 







Mar 29, 2018, Rockland, ME, Courier Publications: RSU 40 budget to tug at taxpayers' consciences, wallets

 She said with the rising cost of special education, if the district's budget remains at its current level, even with the funds added back into the budget, she foresees it being unable to serve the increasing population of students in need of special education, especially with the intensity and duration of services some students require.

She said the special education population in the district is fluid over the course of the school year, and noted that in one month it climbed from 423 to 430 students identified as being in need of services. She further explained that 10 of those 430 students attend out-of-district placements at a cost ranging from $250 to $360 a day.

RSU 40's special needs population is currently at 24 percent. The state average is 15 percent. 







Mar 29, 2018, KQ2St. Joseph, MO: The St. Joseph School District is working to better meet the needs of students who have experienced trauma

The St. Joseph School District is working to better meet the needs of students who have experienced trauma. Teachers, counselors and community members met Wednesday morning at the Troester Media Center for Healing the Experience of Trauma, a seminar hosted by social worker Jean West. 

West said one of the biggest indicators of toxic stress in a childs life is sleeping problems and behavioral outbursts. According to West, children who have experienced trauma or extreme stress often exhibit behavioral signs like irritability, clinginess, aggressiveness and intrusive thoughts.







Mar 29, 2018, Juneau (AK) Empire: School district budget cut another $3.5MSchool Board requests more money from city than ever before

 One point she presented is that there is a higher-than-normal number of special needs students at the district. Therefore, more money is allocated. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 13.4 percent of students are identified as children with disabilities in Alaska. The Juneau School Districts number is at 18 percent according to the districts website. The school district is considered a magnet school  a public school offering special instruction and programs not available elsewhere, designed to attract a more diverse student body from throughout a school district.

We do not have time or a mechanism to determine if we are a magnet school, Weiss said. What we do know is that our number (of special education students) is increasing. 







Mar 29, 2018, (Ireland) Irish Times: Children aged four to six have mental health issues, says FF TDJames Browne claims social media contributing hugely to their difficulties

Children as young as between four and six years are presenting with anxiety, stress and other mental health issues, Fianna Fail TD James Browne has claimed. 

Browne said increasingly teachers and principals were meeting young children who had nothing physically or intellectually wrong with them but who were presenting with speech, language and social developmental issues.

He said there should be an increase in the number of release days for school principals to allow them attend mental health training. 

Mar 29, 2018, KCCITV, Des Moines, IA: 2 bills aimed at mental health signed into law

Parents who have lost children to suicide have fought for the bill to require all Iowa teachers from Kindergarten through High School to be trained in suicide prevention. 

Mar 29, 2018, (Canada) Prince Edward Island Journal : P.E.I. teachers trained in new provincial mental health curriculum

 More than 30 P.E.I. educators received their master training this month in how to deliver a new provincial mental health curriculum to students .







Mar 29, 2018, Norfolk, VirginianPilot: Two Virginia Beach educators cleared of assault charges involving student

Two Rosemont Elementary School educators were cleared Thursday of misdemeanor assault charges that stemmed from incidents involving a student.

A judge quickly found Principal Cari Hall and Alison Williams, a special education teacher, not guilty.

Eric, a first-grader at that time, testified Thursday that hed been dragged and had his head pushed down after he disrupted class a little bit.

First-grade teacher Holly Roth testified that Chapman created issues on two days in early June.

One day, he kicked over boxes, threw a book that hit another student, and hit his own head on a table hed crawled under.

Mar 29, 2018, East Moline (IL) DispatchArgus : Sensory room will aid Winola students

Winola Elementary School on Wednesday unveiled a sensory room designed to help students deal with anxiety.

Ms. Roberts said the room was designed to meet the needs of special education students as well as students with sensory needs or behavioral issues. The room is divided into two spaces  a calming area and an active one. 

"Its amazing what some time in a tent with a weighted blanket can do for some of these students that just need the break," Ms. Roberts said.







Mar 29, 2018, Lewes (DE) Cape Gazette: Children & Families First trains Cape district staff on childhood trauma

 The program helps middle school and high school employees learn how childhood trauma affects students, and how a trauma-informed approach helps adolescents build resilience and move toward thriving, self-sufficient adulthoods.

Defined in the late 1990s by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions ACES Study, adverse childhood experiences are abuse, neglect and household dysfunction which directly correlate to negative life outcomes such as diabetes, depression, asthma, heart disease, lowered educational achievement, unemployment and lower income potentials.

Current data from the National Centers on Child Health report 1 in 10 adolescents has an ACE score of 4 or higher, with the stress in home environments echoing in classrooms through disruptive behavior, social isolation, difficulty in focusing, poor decision-making skills and medical problems interfering with attendance. 







Mar 29, 2018, Rochester (NY) Spectrum: IInInside Rochester City schools, mental health services front and center

 "I can't think of one particular school in which we don't have a mental health professional working there. We take it very seriously," Grasley said.

The Rochester City School District estimates that at least 40 percent of its students have had some kind of Adverse Childhood Experience, or ACE. A recent study estimates that number could be as high as 64 percent for all of Monroe County.







Mar 29, 2018, KXLYTV, Spokane, WA: Mental health experts offer advice at SPS suicide prevention symposium

A NEW special free school will soon be set up in Alveston, following a successful bid from South Gloucestershire Council.

The school, which will be the second of its kind in South, will be based on the Marlwood School site, offering 112 places over a three-year period for children aged two-to-19-years-old with severe learning difficulties, autism spectrum disorder and with profound and multiple learning difficulties.







Mar 29, 2018, Batesville (IN) Herald: Autism in education

 According to the Indiana Department of Education, last year, the state identified 15,210 school-age students whose primary disability was autism spectrum disorder; this year, it is 15,721, an increase of 511 or 3.3 percent. "This has been the trend for the last several years," said Pamela Wright, IDOE director of the office of special education. 

She's been in the field for several decades, and when she started, it was one 10,000 nationally; now it's one in 68. No one really knows why, whether it's increased awareness, better diagnosis or other factors, she said.

And not only is she seeing more children with ASD, "I'm seeing more children who have co-occurring mental health issues as well. We know that anxiety is very common among children on the spectrum, and with anxiety comes depression," Pratt said. "But in addition to that, I also see children who have other co-occurring issues going on. So we have more kids who are coming to us with more complex issues."







Mar 30, 2018, Joplin (MO) Four States Homepage: Legislators approve funding increase for Southeast Kansas schools

 Kansas House Bill 2445 increases funding in several areas, including providing more than $44 million dollars in additional money for special education.







Mar 30, 2018, Wellesley (MA) Wicked: Wellesley Town Meeting covers shortfall in special education tuition

 Town Meeting made relatively quick progress on Monday, the first night of its 2018 session. Among the items taken up was a request from the Board of Selectmen for $776,000 in extra funds to meet unexpected costs for special education out-of-district tuition in fiscal year 2018.

Tuition costs exceeded the budget by $948,794. According to the Advisory Committee, one factor was that seven new students needed out-of-district (OOD) placements arrived. Three of them were so-called unilateral placements with which the School Department did not agree, but reached a settlement with the families of the students. 

As students grow older, their needs and the programs to address them can often become more intensive and costly, according to the Advisory Committee report.

Finally , some of costs of the OOD tuition sky-rocked. during fiscal 2018.

Mar 30, 2018, Montevideo (MN) AmericanNews : New special education school to be built in Montevideo http://www.montenews.com/news/20180330/new-special-education-school-to-be-built-in-montevideo

Like a bolt from the blue, the City of Montevideo announced last Friday that a new special education facility is set to be constructed in Montevideo.

The proposed $4.5 million, 18,000 square foot facility will employ up to 30 special needs education professionals and will serve 30 to 40 students 







Mar 30, 2018, (UK) Lancashire Post: Alerting our young to the dangers of a false reality

This is one of the messages Sam Tyrer wants to pass on to young people as part of his mission to tackle mental health issues and reduce the number of suicides and self harm incidents in Lancashire. 

 We want to get the school talks into the school curriculum at high school age and the aim is to get young people to develop a more resilient mind and develop coping strategies. 



Mar 30, 2018, (UK) Lancaster Evening Post: Rising number of exclusions at Lancashire schools

A report presented to county halls education committee revealed 346 exclusions across primary, secondary and special schools in 2016/17.

The number has risen from 305 the previous year in addition to 6,700 fixed-term exclusions.

6,700 disruptive children excluded from Lancashire school 



Mar 30, 2018, (UK) Swindon Advertiser: Wooden Spoon funds 14,500 sensory room at school

SPECIAL needs school Crowdys Hill opened a new sensory room this week thanks to a 14,500 donation from local charity Wiltshire Wooden Spoon.

The sensory room has been created at Crowdys Hill School, in Jefferies Avenue, whose students are aged between five and 19 years with both moderate and complex learning and medical needs including autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, diabetes, epilepsy, global developmental delay and cerebral palsy. .



Mar 30, 2018, (UK) Get Surrey: Parents secure legal aid funding to take county council to court over 'unlawful' 21m savings to services supporting children with disabilities

 According to SCC, the number of children with a statement of special educational needs or an education, health and care plan (EHCP) has increased by 44% from 2010 to 2018.

In an attempt to tackle the "unprecedented increases in demand", SCC has boosted the overall budget for children, schools and families by 25,377,000 from 454,738,000 (2017/2018) to 480,115,000 (2018/2019).



Mar 30, 2018, Winthrop (MA) Transcript: School Committee Presents Budget for 2018-2019

The Special Education Department is requesting a Board Certified Behavioral Analyst (BCBA), due to the increase in referrals from early intervention and preschool screenings with students that fall within the autism spectrum. 



Mar 31, 2018, (UK) Hartlepool Mail: Government accused of failing to address worries over Hartlepool schools funding

 The council added a 2.6% high needs funding increase for children and young people with special educational needs or disabilities is not enough to meet unprecedented levels of demand and the town faces a shortfall of 825,000 a year.



Mar 31, 2018, Presque Isle, ME, The County: Special education costs a perennial concern for school districts

SAD 1 provides special education to 18.5 percent of its students, more than the state average of 16 percent and national average of 12 percent.

While service center communities like Presque Isle or Bangor often have higher rates of special education needs, its also a concern for smaller districts. At SAD 42 in Mars Hill, 20 percent of students receive special education services, a majority of them for speech and language needs, said superintendent Elaine Boulier.

Special ed costs go up almost every year because we tend to have more kids with needs, Boulier said.







Mar 31, 2018, U.S. News: Idaho Schools Grapple With Special Education Growth

Several south-central Idaho schools  including in Twin Falls, Jerome and Cassia County  are seeing a growing number of special education students, and more of those students have severe needs or behavioral issues. Though they make up a small fraction of the total number of students who need special education services, the number is increasing. 







Mar 31, 2018, Racine (WI) Journal Times: All-inclusive Wadewitz playground finally coming to fruition

Of its nearly 600 students, 22 percent have special needs  including autism, physical limitations and intellectual challenges.







Mar 31, 2018, Athens (AL) News Courier: Major changes coming for Athens City Schools

Increasing the availability of mental health care in the schools was also broached. Dr. Trey Holladay, superintendent of Athens City Schools, said a contract with the Mental Health Center of North Central Alabama gives students access to a traveling mental health counselor, but the schools are looking at hiring additional mental health professionals.







April 1, 2018, (UK) Telegraph: Special needs children 'paying price' for education funding 'crisis'

The National Education Union (NEU) claimed that local councils are being "starved" of the money they need for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), with youngsters forced to stay at home because authorities do not have the cash to provide a suitable education.

Overall, as of January last year, there were 287,290 children and young people, up to the age of 25 in England, that had an Education Health and Care Plan (EHCP), or a statement of special educational needs. 

The year before, there were 256,315 children and young people with an EHCP or statement, and again the vast majority were 19 and under.

Meanwhile, a separate survey by NASUWT union has shown more than a half (59%) of all special educational needs teachers said they had been attacked by their pupils in the last year.

Staff among the 1,615 polled said they had been head-butted, punched, kicked and spat on - including, in a handful of cases, on a daily basis.

Almost three-quarters (74%) said they experienced verbal abuse in addition to physical assault. Some 7% said they were not encouraged to report such incidents to their school.

"Pupils with special needs who exhibit violent and disruptive behaviour need more help and support and all too often their needs are not being met."







April 1, 2018, (UK) Tes: SEN teachers 'are headbutted, spat on and punched  sometimes every day'

Nearly three-fifths (59 per cent) said they had been attacked in the past year, and 74 per cent said they had experienced verbal abuse.

Teachers revealed that they had been headbutted, punched, kicked, bitten and spat on, sometimes on a daily basis, leaving them bruised and injured. One teacher said they had received more abuse than friends who were police and prison officers.







April 1, 2018, CT Mirror: A more common school safety problem: assaults on teachers

Since then, the district has retreated from employing so many security staff to protect students from outside threats and is focusing its efforts and resources on another school safety issue: assaults on teachers by students.

Statewide, there has been a lack of progress in stemming aggressive student behaviors as student suspension and expulsion rates steadily decline. That dynamic has fueled a debate over whether the states push to reduce student suspensions and expulsions  and instead provide students with supports so they can stay in school  actually is working to make schools safer. 

For this Sunday Conversation, we sat down with Tod Couture, a special education teacher from Enfield, to talk about school safety. As the leader of the teachers union in his district, he regularly hears stories from teachers about the issues they face.

How about teachers? Do teachers feel safe at school?

Theres two different things going on with school safety issues: those dealing with threats from the outside coming in and there is a whole other issue of student assaults on teachers. Its a major issue, not only within our district, but across the state and really across the nation.

Where this is happening really is not at the high school level, its not the middle school level, its at the lower elementary level  kindergarten through second grade.

We thought about this a lot as to why has it been a relatively recent phenomenon. It hasnt been around for years and years and years.

I think its a multitude of factors. Youre dealing with probably more instances of substance abuse. Were dealing with learned behavior. 

Every school has a crisis intervention team.

It could lead to some restraints, just to protect everybody,







April 1, 2018, Wichita (KS) Star: Wichita school district has new plan for elementary students with behavior problems

Starting this fall, the Wichita district will have a new option for young students struggling with behavior problems.

Bryant Opportunity Academy  located at the former Bryant Core Knowledge Magnet Elementary near Ninth and West  will serve about 100 kindergarten-through-sixth-grade students "who need a more highly structured, controlled environment," 







April 2, 2018, (UK) Independent: School mental health problems extend to primary-age pupils amid cuts to support

The vast majority (96 per cent) of teachers say they have come into contact with pupils of all ages experiencing mental health issues, according to research from the NASUWT teaching union.

Of these, around one in seven (14 per cent) said that pupils experiencing these difficulties were aged between four and seven, while over a quarter (27 per cent) said they were aged seven to 11. 

April 2, 2018, Chicago Daily Herald: U-46 studying how trauma affects students, revising teaching approach

Officials estimate roughly 30 percent of U-46 students are experiencing multiple ACEs and dealing with such children is "exhausting teachers" who suffer from compassion fatigue.

"We are having trouble with growth as an organization, as a country," Heiderscheidt said. "Kids in toxic stress are operating in fight, flight or fear mode." 

That doesn't mean misbehaving students get a pass, but with training, teachers can be better equipped to understand and meet their social-emotional needs, he added.







April 2, 2018, Bountiful, UT, Davis Clipper: Local principal goes above and beyond

Theres been an increase in children with adverse childhood experiences and it impacts their learning and ability to interact with peers and teachers.







April 2, 2018, (UK) Sun: BAD EDUCATIONTeachers headbutted, spat at and have eyes gouged by kids as young as FOUR

The claims were made at an education conference, where staff have lifted the lid on outrageous and shocking behaviour seen at UK schools.

The extreme violence has even forced some teachers to change the way they dress in order to avoid being harmed by students.

Teaching staff across the country have also reported suffering dangerous levels of anxiety when heading into work. 

She said: "In the last two years behaviour in children has increased to an extremely violent level. 

Kelly, who is the only dedicated SENCO at her school, said she was repeatedly called to deal with a four-year-old boy who "scratched, gouged eyes, and pulled hair".

She said: The last two years have been the worst I've ever had in my [16-year] teaching career.







April 2, 2018, Hornell (NY) Tribune: Committee told space tight at C-G Elementary

 The elementary school could use at least three more classrooms just for special education students, the principal said. 

Brownell said a sensory room for the 22 special needs students plus one additional conference room for the entire building would be useful. 







April 2, 2018, New London (CT) Day: Proposed Norwich budget is up 2.4 percent

But, Superintendent Abby Dolliver said that the school district has lived off grants and cuts for a number of years and now absolutely needs a 9 percent increase to continue.

She added that although enrollment has been stable, the district has seen a serious surge in the number of special education students, as well as English as a Second Language students. In fact, Dolliver said that there are now nearly 600 ESL students in the district, and there have been 100 new special education students since 2016. 







April 3, 2018, San Jose, CA, East Bay Times: Albany [CA]: School district urging residents to lobby state for more funds

Williams has been pushing a second bill, AB 3136, which would reform the states funding mechanism for special education. 

The needs of students with special needs have become much more complex, Williams said. Students on the autism spectrum, students who are visually impaired, students with learning disabilities.







April 3, 2018, (UK) Guardian: Teachers have sounded the alarm  its time to listen

For many children, the Easter holidays are in full swing. But spare a thought for the more than 4,000 children who have learning disabilities. They wont be taking a break from school: theyre stuck at home for the long-term, as no local schools can take them.

The number of children with special educational needs in England without a school place has more than doubled from 1,710 in 2016 to 4,050 in 2017. 

Parents have told me of the battle to gain a diagnosis for their children, who are often written off by teachers as troublesome and disruptive, especially in the case of autism.







April 3, 2018, Fitchburg (MA) Sentinel & Enterprise: Shortage of nurses seen in Leominster school system

A snapshot of student health in local schools that was presented to School Committee members Monday night showed a need for more nurses and a rise in mental health issues. 

"Based on the population, I really should have three-plus nurses at the high school. We have two now and one is usually filled by subs," she said. "I have a sub list of 21, but can never find anyone to work. It's been an extremely challenging year." 

Among mental and behavioral health issues being seen in students, 657 have been diagnosed with ADHD or ADD, 326 with anxiety, 239 with depression, 183 with autism, and 105 with a known history of trauma.







April 3, 2018, (Canada) CBC: Magazine names Channel-Port aux Basques most autism-friendly town in Canada

 Today's Parent has declared Channel-Port aux Basques the most autism-friendly town in Canada.

It helped a local hotel become the first autism-friendly lodging option in the country modifying some units and creating a sensory room.

Autism Involves Me approached Hotel Port Aux Basques owner Cathy Lomond about donating existing space within the facility so it could be transformed into a sensory or quiet room. 

Newfoundland and Labrador has the highest rate of autism spectrum disorder in the country at one in 57 children between ages five and 17, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

According to the Today's Parent article, 14 of the 300 children in Channel-Port aux Basques's elementary school have been diagnosed.







April 3, 2018, (UK) Telegraph and Argus: Protest unsuccessful as Council passes cuts to disabled children's services

A large group of parents protested outside City Hall to no avail today as Bradford Councils executive voted through cuts to specialist teaching support services for children with disabilities.

Dominic Wall, head of Southfield Special School, said there is a growing demand for children with complex needs in Bradford.

He said: In the past three years it has gone up in excess of 25%, but we have not had increased government funding to match the growth, but we get a fixed amount per place.

In the past two years we have had to take 5 million from normal schools to fund the high-need block. 







April 3, 2018, Minocqua, WI, Lakeland Times: Lakeland STAR open house attracts large crowd By Richard Moore

It started with a dream, continued with more than two years of hard work, and this past Wednesday the vision moved into the realm of reality with a large and engaged crowd attending an open house to kick off and celebrate Lakeland's new charter school, Lakeland STAR School/Academy. 

The school is open to all students, and specializes in educating students with autism spectrum disorders.



by John Stone

We are reaching a critical point (and historic moment) which resembles in some ways both WMD and the banking crisis of 2008: the burden of scientific evidence and personal testimony weighs heavily against the industry (everyone has been lied to and the products have been over-sold) and what we are seeing is a pre-emptive strike to stop people talking  to stop them at all cost. The evidence is that the industry and governments are afraid of exposure and are going for broke. This was the message of the industry spokeswoman Heidi Larson on 1 January 2018 in her column Let Freedom Ring. It was a very odd kind of freedom  Larson who works closely with the World Health Organization and Bill and Melinda Gates, as well as Merck and GSK  seemed to be trying to trade vaccine compulsion (distancing herself and the Vaccine Confidence Project from moves around the world towards draconian mandates) for silence on vaccine safety.

The growing challenge in the vaccine landscape is that it is no longer isolated individuals who are thinking twice or refusing vaccination, but that there are growing groups of people who are not only expressing their individual right to question and to choose, but are increasingly connected with others and demanding the right to choose as part of a larger movement. These movements are about principles of freedom and rights, not about specific vaccines, or specific safety concerns.

Larson is not wrong about rights but she is about people not having specific safety concerns: only a few months before she had declared on a Johnson and Johnson website:

Yes, there are potential risksthere will always be potential risks with any medical treatment. And we dont talk enough about that.

Anybody might reasonably be worried about safety of something over which they are being threatened with censorship. And, of course, now there are many people writing and speaking on the web, who want to talk about the risks both from personal experience and published science who are not poorly informed, malicious or engaging in irresponsible talk. Of course, there are clickbait sites that put out deliberately false information but it does not seem likely that they are the ones that industry or government are really scared about.

When the European Parliament balances the bald assertion that vaccines are safe with condemning  the spread of unreliable, misleading and unscientific information on vaccination aggravated by media controversies and calling on Member States and the Commission to take effective steps against the spread of such misinformation and to further develop awareness and information campaigns, especially for parents they are themselves being misleading, naive or worse  and they are trying to forestall public examination of what the industry and surrogate government bureaucracies are doing, and suppress the ever growing body of evidence that vaccines are not safe. They are declaring falsehoods, engaging in innuendo and calling for socially repressive measures. This sadly is all too likely to dovetail with French President Macrons proposed legislation on Fake News, following on his extension vaccine mandates.

Simultaneously, we have the alarming spectacle of Senator Pan who having notoriously piloted the notorious SB277 school vaccine mandates bill through the Californian legislature has now filed SB1424 to censor social media with the appointment of state fact checkers to decide which facts are true.

This bill would require any person who operates a social media, as defined, Internet Web site with a physical presence in California to develop a strategic plan to verify news stories shared on its Web site. The bill would require the plan to include, among other things, a plan to mitigate the spread of false information through news stories, the utilization of fact-checkers to verify news stories, providing outreach to social media users, and placing a warning on a news story containing false information.

(a) Any person who operates a social media Internet Web site with physical presence in California shall develop a strategic plan to verify news stories shared on its Internet Web site.

(b) The strategic plan shall include, but is not limited to, all of the following:

(1) A plan to mitigate the spread of false information through news stories.

(2) The utilization of fact-checkers to verify news stories.

(3) Providing outreach to social media users regarding news stories containing false information.

(4) Placing a warning on a news story containing false information.

(c) As used in this section, social media means an electronic service or account, or electronic content, including, but not limited to, videos, still photographs, blogs, video blogs, podcasts, instant and text messages, email, online services or accounts, or Internet Web site profiles or locations.

Not surprisingly there is already a fine article about this by John Rappoport. The bill does not of course specify vaccine related stories but obviously we can see where this going  of course it is altogether terrifying to envisage the scale and cost of this new bureaucracy, not to mention its potential for arbitrariness, incompetence and vindictiveness: perhaps above all to stop people talking about their own experiences. Is this so mad, grandiose, so Un-American that even Californias legislature might back off? In this brave new world no one could be confident.

These are not of course random events. Our new rulers are the pharmaceutical industry hiding behind men of straw.

John Stone is UK and European Editor of Age of Autism



















American ex-patriot Edward Snowden states that information from a Federal Security Services (FSB) report cited on Whatdoesitmean.com provides incontrovertible proof that an alien intelligence agenda is driving US domestic and international policy, and has been doing so since at least 1945.



Edward Snowden is a computer specialist, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee, and former NSA/CSS contractor who disclosed these classified documents to several media outlets in late 2012 and was granted temporary asylum in Russia in 2013 after his designation by the Obama regime as the most wanted man on earth.



Snowden warns that that there were actually two governments in the US, the one that was elected, and the other, secret regime, governing in the dark.



Former Canadian defence minister Paul Hellyer who was given access to all of Snowdens documents by Russian intelligence services and allegedly stated they were, indeed, accurate.



It is also interesting that on the same day that the whatdoesitmean story was released, we also wired a report, 'PRISM Mining UFO Data, Targets False Flag ET Invasion as Pretext to Space Wars', from the now defunct Examiner.com.



Even though Defense Minister Hellyers exact statements to the FSB in regards to Snowdens documents remain classified, he had shockingly admitted that aliens have been visiting our planet for thousands of years and described several types of these extraterrestrials, including Tall Whites who are working with the political-military-industrial complex.



Of the many explosive revelations in this FSB report, the one most concerning to Russian authorities are the Snowdens documents confirming that the Tall Whites (further revealed by Defense Minister Hellyer as noted above) are the same extraterrestrial alien race behind the stunning rise of Nazi Germany during the 1930s.



Snowdens documents further confirm, this report says, the Tall Whites (Nordic) meetings in 1954 with US President Dwight D. Eisenhower where the secret regime currently ruling over America was established.



Most disturbingly, this FSB report warns, is that the Tall White agenda being implemented by the secret regime ruling the United States calls for the creation of a global electronic surveillance system meant to hide all true information about their presence here on earth as they enter into what one of Snowdens documents calls the final phase of their AI end plan for total assimilation and world rule.



The original wired report further mentioned that former Canadian Defense Minister Paul Hellyer has confirmed Snowden's remarks and expressed his supportive views in an interview with Russia Today after he was given access to all of Snowden's documents by Russian intelligence services.



Paul Hellyer was Canadian Minister of Defence in 1960s, ruling over the country's armed forces during the time of the Cold War  and when he retired he publicly stated that we are not alone in the universe, and some guests from outer space actually live here, on planet Earth.



Original source - Reference

This variant of Airbus A321, which will enter service in 2018, has the longest range of any single-aisle jetliner

The A321LR variant of Airbus A321 jetliner underscored its impressive range with a record-breaking flight from Mahe in the Seychelles islands to Toulouse, France  covering a total distance of 4,750 nautical miles in 11 hours.

This milestone was reached in late March as part of the A321LRs 100-hour flight test and certification programme. To make flight conditions as realistic as possible while evaluating cabin systems, the A321LR carried 162 human heat-replicating dummy passengers in addition to its 16-member test crew.

According to flight test engineer Jim Fawcett, the A321LRs flight characteristics and fuel consumption were as expected throughout the lengthy trip. He added: The A321LR has completed 15 test flights. It is an excellent aircraft that keeps its promises in terms of flight behaviour, passenger comfort and fuel consumption.

Outfitted for superior long-range performance

The A321LR has the longest range of any single-aisle jetliner, with an increased maximum take-off weight of 97 tonnes (compared to 93.5 tonnes for the A321), plus the addition of a third auxiliary centre fuel tank. The jetliner is ideally suited to transatlantic routes, allowing airlines to tap into new long-haul markets that were not previously accessible with current single-aisle aircraft.

The A321LR  which is on track for a 2018 service entry  also features a new door configuration that enables up to 240 passengers to be accommodated in the widest single-aisle fuselage in the sky.

The record-breaking flight followed A321LR hot weather testing performed at Sharjah International Airport in the United Arab Emirates, which was selected by Airbus due to the optimal weather conditions and this locations excellent facilities.

Direct Appeal to Federal Supreme Court against INOC Law

Ahmad Mousa Jiyad

  

Iraq/ Development Consultancy and Research, Norway

Immediately after the Iraqi parliament voted the new INOC Law and after thorough and critical examination and analysis of the law it becomes apparently clear that the law is full of shortcomings, ambiguity, contradictions and above all it contrives the Constitution repeatedly and thus it is unconstitutional. Hence, an appeal to the Federal Supreme Court becomes urgent necessity to revoke this atrocious devastating law.

Due to the importance of the law and its highly likely damaging impacts on the petroleum sector and on the Iraqi economy at large, it is imperative and of vital necessity to adopt inclusive and participatory methodology for combating the law. For this purpose I adopted four phases AMTA approach: Awareness, Mobilization, Teaming-up and Action.

Awareness phase aims at highlighting what is seriously wrong with the law by, first, providing preliminary evaluation of the law. The evaluation, written in Arabic on 8 March, was posted on many websites, such as (http://www.akhbaar.org/home/ 2018/3/241534.html ) and disseminated among my very extensive network of contacts inside and outside Iraq (ca. 2000 contacts). Similarly, an English article was posted on 12 March on IBN website (http://www.iraq-businessnews. com/2018/03/12/inoc-law- dysfunctional- unconstitutional-and- disintegrative/ )

Further article in Arabic was shared, on 20 March, among my network and also published widely provides further specific and with economic evaluation on how this law could violate the constitution, weaken INOC itself and contribute to the disintegration of the country, (http://www.akhbaar.org/home/ 2018/3/242198.html )

Mobilization phase began by calling upon Iraqis, collectively or individually, to protest the law and file "open appeal to the Federal Supreme Court; two articles in Arabic were shared and posted on 26 and 27 March respectively: http://www.akhbaar.org/home/ 2018/3/242229.html and http://www.akhbaar.org/home/ 2018/3/242284.html

The call aims at prompting the citizens to know their constitutional rights and empower them with the knowledge base to act as was enshrined in the constitutional article 93, which says the Federal Supreme Court shall have jurisdiction over the following, among others: "Overseeing the constitutionality of laws and regulations in effect and "The law shall guarantee the right of direct appeal to the Court to the Council of Ministers, those concerned individuals, and others.

Much of my writings were in comparative and structuralist methodology: by comparing this law with first, the constitution, second, with previous INOC laws, third, with other laws of direct relevance to the topic and fourth with lessons learned from INOC history and structural progression since its foundation in early sixties of the last century.

Team working phase began when many oil professionals, lawyers, civil society organization, politicians, parliamentarians and media sources among others supported the idea of appealing to FSC.

Three groups of Iraqi lawyers volunteered to provide legal support on substantive and procedural matters pertaining to the appeal before FSC and a small group of Iraqi oil professionals was assembled in Baghdad to maintain contacts with the lawyers and follow-up the matter inside the country especially with media sources and events organization. The discussion with the lawyers suggests that at this stage, two fundamental steps must be done: the first is to prepare a draft of detailed appeal against the law on article-by-article base and the second is to provide the lawyers with "Power of Attorney by me and other plaintiffs.

Accordingly, a detailed appeal (in Arabic) was drafted and circulated, 4 April 2018, among the wider network and also posted on many websites such as, http://www.akhbaar.org/home/ 2018/4/242627.html . The draft demonstrates that INOC law contravenes ten constitutional articles in addition to other critical flaws; in total there are 29 identified cases for appeal against the law.

Action phase began with many different actions:

- Many of the contacts in my professional network recirculated the articles above mentioned among their own networks;

- One lawyer convened a big gathering in one of Baghdad known hotels attended by active parliamentarians;

- A well-respected journal, Al-Thaqaf al-Jadeda, convened, on 7 April, in Baghdad, a roundtable debate on the law attended by known professionals on both side of the isle, my participation was in absentia and the PowerPoint was presented by one of the supporting group there;

- A report on the debate was published on 8 April on Tareeq Al-Shaab Newspaper, and more elaborated report (part one) was posted http://www.akhbaar.org/home/ 2018/4/242825.html 10 April;

- A group of Iraqis abroad launched on 4 April an online-campaign against the law (http://ehamalat.com/Ar/sign_ petitions.aspx?pid=1002 )- the number of cite visitors exceeds 12689 (at 10:15 AM Norway time today 12 April 2018).

Copy of the "Power of Attorney was circulated among "the willing and like-minded to authorize specified two lawyers to pursue the appeal once the law was published on the Official Gazettes- Al-Waqaee Al-Iraqiya. It is also available for anyone willing to pursue the appeal action.

All components of the AMTA approach are ongoing and continue until this atrocious law is revoked. Increasing number of articles and positions in support of the appeal are evident in the Iraqi media and among the professional networks.

Those willing to see the text of draft appeal in Arabic can access it freely through

        http://www.akhbaar.org/home/ 2018/4/242627.html

For endorsing our campaign against the law one can sign on the electronic appeal through

http://ehamalat.com/Ar/sign_ petitions.aspx?pid=1002

The first version of this brief was posted on IBN 9 April 2018

http://www.iraq-businessnews. com/2018/04/09/direct-appeal- to-federal-supreme-court- against-inoc-law/

Norway

12 April 2018South Moon Under will open its first Alabama location at The Summit in Birmingham on May 9.

The fashion retailer will open in a location near Chuy's Tex-Mex restaurant at 214 Summit Blvd, Suite 150.

To celebrate the opening of South Moon Under's 31st store, the first 25 guests to step inside at 10 a.m. will receive mystery gift card prizes.

South Moon Under, which offers an eclectic mix of in-house brands and well-known designers, had a recent expansion in the South. Last month, a store opened in Raleigh, N.C. and three stores opened in Atlanta last year.

The Summit recently announced that Frutta Bowls, a quick-service eatery offering organic, healthy options, will open soon next door to Kendra Scott. Shake Shack also announced it is opening its first Alabama location there in the summer.

South Moon Under is led by husband-and-wife team, Chief Executive Officer Michael Smith and Chief Creative Officer Patricia Darrow Smith. They both co-founded White House | Black Market. They are working to make the brand a household name by opening many more stores through the country in the coming years.

South Moon Under was founded in 1968 by Frank Gunion as an Ocean City, MD surf shack. Since that time, the store has evolved into an upscale casual e-commerce and brick and mortar retailer known for its mix of brands in women's clothing, swimwear, accessories and beauty products.

Brands carried at South Moon Under locations include Free People, ASTR, Citizens of Humanity, Anna Beck, Jeffrey Campbell, Blank NYC, Kendra Scott, L*Space, Maaji and more.Enough is enough, New York. Stop trying to dump your poop on unsuspecting southerners or we're gonna have to open a can of Ima Pinch Your Head Off, which is the southern version of a can of (whisper) Whoop A**. Better still, we'll have our mamas do it.

Last week, when I read about the "poop train" left sitting for months on the tracks in the small town of Parrish, Alabama, I could feel the pain of those residents. Even though I couldn't smell the stench of the sewer sludge emanating from the cars, I'd experienced this kind of situation before when I was editor of the newspaper in Athens, Alabama. In that case, farmers were using "hu-manure" from a New York company to fertilize their crops. Neighbors protested the aroma emanating from the "doodie farm" so the company, Synagro Technologies, promised to make the excrement more odiferous. As if they could make it smell like something Matthew McConaughey would hawk in a moody black-and-white commercial.

Any-hoo, the recent doodie train had been passed from town to town across Jefferson County, with each community playing a game of elimination, trying to move the poo along. It was headed for a nearby landfill but what I want to know is, why did the multi-car train keep stopping on tracks smack dab in the middle of these towns? It's a train. It moves. And there's a whole lotta rural in Alabama. Of course, then we'd have to worry about the woodland creatures dropping dead from the fumes but that's another story entirely. Was the company hoping to set up a trackside stand to sell eau de toilet? Someone should tell them that's not what that means, y'all.

The poor town of Parrish, bless its heart, almost had to cancel its inaugural Coal Festival, which celebrated the town's coal-mining heritage with barbecue cookoffs, car shows, live music and arts and crafts booths. Thankfully, a cold snap killed some of the smell and the event went on as planned. In a town of 960 folks, a festival is kind of a big deal.

Look, New York, you've got plenty of places to put your poo. Toilets come to mind. Rikers Island. Or the Hudson. You could put it in Times Square as an art installation and no one would know the difference. Your No. 2 choice should be New Jersey. Doodie is not something that was meant to be spread, as any parent of a toddler could tell you. It should stay where its dropped.

I'm just sayin,' New York, you're already pawning off Lipton Lemon Tea Drink Mix as sweet tea. We southerners aren't gonna take any more of your crap.

Kelly Kazek's humor columns appear regularly on AL.com and in The Huntsville Times, The Birmingham News and The Press-Register in Mobile. Find her on Facebook or follow her humor columns on Pinterest here. You can also follow her blog here.A man who has been housed on Alabama's Death Row for four years was resentenced Wednesday, and sent back to death row.

James Osgood, 48, was sent to death row in 2014 after being convicted of two capital murder charges in Chilton County for killing 44-year-old Tracy Brown in 2010 after sexually abusing her. Osgood's girlfriend Tonya Vandyke was also convicted in Brown's death, and was sentenced to life without parole.

She and Brown were cousins.

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals confirmed Osgood's conviction, but remanded the sentencing because of of an error in the judge's instructions to the jury during the penalty phase of the trial. They sent the case back to Chilton County Circuit Court, and asked the court to hold a new sentencing phase.

The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed Osgood's conviction.

The sentencing phase was set to start Monday. Jury selection continued into Tuesday and, according to court records and Chief Deputy District Attorney C.J. Robinson, Osgood told his lawyers he wanted to waive the jury process and be sent back to death row.

Robinson was informed of Osgood's claim, and called the Alabama Attorney General's Office. The AG's Office reviewed the case, and said the sentencing phase did not need to be performed in front of a jury, and Circuit Judge Sibley Reynolds could re-sentence Osgood.

Wednesday, after a brief hearing to ensure Osgood was aware of his rights, Reynolds sentenced Osgood to death. Robinson said when the judge asked why Osgood wanted to again be sent to death row, the inmate replied he believed in "an eye for an eye" and said he deserved to be put to death.

Osgood's attorney declined to comment for this story.

"Thank you to everyone who assisted in the investigation and prosecution of this case. Also thank you to Attorney General Steve Marshall whose office helped sort out this unusual request," Robinson said. "The family knows there will be lengthy appeals that take place before James Osgood is executed many years from now, but there is relief in knowing they will not have to sit in a courtroom and hear about the living hell that was the last hour of Tracy Brown's life again."

Brown was attacked in her mobile home and forced to perform sexual acts at gunpoint. Court records state she was beaten, stabbed in the back, and had her thorat slit. Robinson said, "This dark and disturbing real-life tale of evil began in October 13, 2010. We thought it ended in May of 2014 with the guilty verdict and the first death recommendation from the jury, but it actually did end today--almost eight years later."

He said, "James Osgood didn't get the death penalty because he asked for it, he got the death penalty because he deserved it...he got the death penalty because justice required it."Evangelist Acton Bowen, arrested on multiple child sex charges, said he is hurt, confused and heartbroken over the allegations against him.

The 37-year-old founder and president of Acton Bowen Outreach Ministries was taken into custody midday Tuesday by Hoover police. He is charged with second-degree sodomy, enticing a child to enter a vehicle or house for immoral purposes, and second-degree sex abuse. The victim was a young male, but police did not release his age except to say he is over 12 and under 16.

Bowen is a Gadsden native and still lives in Etowah County with his wife of several years.

"I have not done what I am accused of and have not acted inappropriately in any way,'' Bowen said in a press statement issued Wednesday night. "My family and I trust the legal system and the people who are entrusted with the duty of protecting each of our rights. I believe the truth will stand and I will be vindicated of this false accusation. We ask that each of you keep everyone involved in this process in your prayers."

Hoover police Capt. Gregg Rector said the department's Special Victim's Unit first launched an investigation three weeks ago. The Jefferson County District Attorney's Office issued the warrants on Monday.

"This is certainly one of the more disturbing cases that we've investigated in quite some time,'' Rector said. "Mr. Bowen is in a highly-respected position of influence and he is trusted by many. We believe he betrayed that trust in the worst kind of way."

Bowen was taken into custody in Pelham and transported to the Hoover City Jail. He was moved to the Jefferson County Jail where he was released shortly before 5 a.m. Wednesday on $90,300 bond.

Rector said the victim in this case is an underage family acquaintance, "He is currently doing well and has been in a safe environment since police were first notified,'' Rector said.

According to Alabama law, a person commits the crime of second-sodomy if he or she, being 16 years old or older, engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another person less than 16 and more than 12 years old.

For enticing a child to enter vehicle, house, etc., for immoral purposes, the law says, "It shall be unlawful for any person with lascivious intent to entice, allure, persuade, or invite any child under 16 years of age to enter any vehicle, room, house, office, or other place for the purpose of proposing to such child the performance of an act of sexual intercourse or an act which constitutes the offense of sodomy."

Second-degree sexual abuse occurs, the law says, when a person who is 19 years or older, subjects another person to sexual contact who is less than 16 years old, but more than 12 years old."

According to Bowen's website, which has since been taken down, he is a speaker, best-selling author and visionary. "Many words are used to describe him, but Acton Bowen's only passion has been to connect people with the one, true God,'' the website states. "Once recognized as one of the nation's leading student pastors, God has clearly blessed Acton with the ability to reach today's high tech, attention-lacking culture."

His bio said he served for 12 years in a local church, led a citywide student Bible study in Gadsden and was also the host of xlroads TV, a worldwide broadcast viewed weekly by millions of teens and adults in every city in America and over 170 countries around the world. The website said Bowen is a cohost of Top3 on the JuceTV Network in New York City.

"Everyone associated with JuceTV was shocked and disheartened to hear of the egregious allegations made against Acton Bowen this week. Our prayers go out to those who may have been hurt and victimized," a JuceTV spokesperson said in a Wednesday statement to AL.com. "Mr. Bowen made four appearances on JuceTV, an affiliate of TBN, the most recent last summer, but there are no on-going ties."

The outreach website described Bowen as a regular contributor on Fox News as a correspondent on faith and religion. However, network officials say Bowen has never been employed or paid by Fox News.

Bowen served as a chaplain in the Summer Olympic Games in London and is the author of "Escape the Noise," which reached the New York Times Best Sellers List and the Amazon Top 100 list. At one point, he was on staff at CrossPoint Community Church in Gadsden.

In his first public statement, Bowen said he wanted to say "thank you" to the countless number of people who have prayed for his family. "My wife, Ashley, and I along with our incredible family are so grateful for your prayers,'' he said.

"I'm also thankful for the countless calls of support from those who have walked a lot of life with me and know me best,'' he said. "Your steadfast, unshakable support gives me strength. For almost 20 years (since I was 18) my life has been committed to serving Jesus by serving people."

"When this accusation was made known to me I was hurt, confused, and heartbroken,'' he said. "Prior to the arrest only one side of the story was heard."

Bowen's now-removed website listed evangelist Scott Dawson, a Republican candidate for governor, as being on the board of advisers for Acton Bowen Outreach. Dawson said Wednesday that though he knows Bowen and used him as a speaker in 2014 at one of his evangelistic events, he was not on any board for ABO. "I never noticed anything that caused concern - but I was not on his board," Dawson said in a text message to AL.com.

The state legal documents of incorporation for the ministry were prepared by Gadsden attorney Trenton Garmon, who was listed as a member of the board of directors for Acton Bowen Outreach. Garmon also worked as an attorney for former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore of Etowah County during his failed campaign for U.S. senate last year. Garmon has not commented on any possible affiliation with Bowen or ABO.

Hoover police said the investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information about this case or the suspect is encouraged to call Special Victim's unit Detective Brandon Harris at 205-444-7742.The case of a teenager charged in the killing of Hoover veteran Johnathan "Mike" Gilotti is in the hands of a jury.

Closing arguments were held Thursday morning, on the seventh day of Ahmad Johnson's murder trial. Johnson, 19, is charged with murder, seven counts of unlawful breaking and entering a vehicle, and two counts of receiving stolen property for incidents that occurred during a crime spree in January 2016, which ended with the fatal shooting of Gilotti on Jan. 5.

Jefferson County Bessemer Division Assistant District Attorneys Lane Tolbert and Bill North prosecuted the case, and attorneys Bret and Erica Gray represented Johnson.

"Don't look for something that's not there. Don't look for doubt. Look for truth in this case," Tolbert said in his closing statement.

Tolbert first went through the timeline of events from late December 2015 through Jan. 5, 2016--starting with a string of car break-ins in St. Clair County. The spree continued days later in McCalla, Pelham, and Fultondale, Tolbert said. The crimes continued into the early-morning hours of Jan. 5, with a group of four teenage boys breaking into cars in Tuscaloosa and then moving on to Hoover's Lake Cyrus community. After stealing from unlocked cars, Tolbert said, the group got back in the stolen truck they were riding in and planned to leave the neighborhood.

The four men charged in the murder are Johnson, Charleston Wells, De'Ron Lucas, and another teenager who has a pending application for youthful offender status and will not be named in this report.

At the same time the group was finishing their break-ins, 33-year-old Gilotti was leaving his home to go to the nearby YMCA gym. His wife, Heather, and their two young sons were inside.

The group was about two houses away from Gilotti, but they were alerted to him when he popped his truck to place his gym bag inside, Tolbert said. Not knowing how to get out of the area, Tolbert said Wells and Johnson exited the truck and approached Gilotti. He said Wells asked Gilotti-- an Iraqi war veteran and insurance salesman-- for directions, and Gilotti told Wells how to get back to the main road. Then, the prosecutor said, Wells upped his gun and shot Gilotti once as he ran back towards the house.

Tolbert said Johnson was standing outside with Wells, and was armed with a 9mm. He said Wells and Johnson got back into the truck, and fled.

Heather Gilotti heard Mike's screams and opened the door, attempting CPR on her husband. When first responders arrived, he was pronounced dead in the doorway of their home.

"This is not a game. This is life or death, and Mr. Gilotti has already lost. This is not a game," Tolbert said. "This is about Mike Gilotti, and the truth."

Tolbert said the teenager who testified this week was guilty in the crimes, too. "He's just as dirty as they are... But, sometimes, you have to make a deal with the devil to get more information."

He said, "All these guys are guilty."

Bret Gray made the defense's closing statement. "This is an extremely tragic case," he said. "My heart goes out to [the Gilotti's]. This is a tragedy that should have never occurred."

Gray disagreed with the state's case, saying no evidence put Johnson at the scene of the crime. He said the prosecution is depending on the truthfulness of the teenage co-defendant. "The state has decided to get in bed with [the teen]... that's how they decided to plug their hole."

Gray said the 9mm--which the teen said Johnson was holding when Gilotti was shot--actually belonged to the teenager, not Johnson. Gray said the teen's history of lying to Hoover police in the case shows he isn't a credible witness. "The young man got up on the stand and lied," Gray said. "Of course he is going to lie... He's going to lie and say whatever he has to say to get that deal."

The teen has a pending application for youthful offender status which, if granted, would give him a maximum sentence of three years in jail and would not leave a felony conviction on his record.

"There's no physical evidence that Ahmad Johnson ever stepped foot in Lake Cyrus. Period," Gray said, citing lack of fingerprints and DNA in the neighborhood.

In his closing statement that followed Gray's, Tolbert also talked about fingerprints. He pulled out a glove with Wells' DNA on it, and said gloves could be why no prints were found in the Hoover neighborhood. "Nobody said these guys are stupid," he said.

Tolbert also said the state doesn't think Johnson pulled the trigger. "They all did different things for it to happen," he said. "All four of them... were ready, willing, and able to offer assistance."

Following closing statements, the jury was given instructions by Jefferson County Bessemer Division Circuit Judge David Carpenter. They were allowed a lunch break, and told to come back this afternoon to begin deliberations.Authorities are asking for the public's help identifying a man they say burglarized a west Birmingham store late last month.

The break-in happened about 12:40 a.m. on March 31 at Marino's Grocery Store. The store is located at 2415 Avenue E in Ensley and has been a longtime staple of the community.

Birmingham police spokesman Lt. Pete Williston said the suspect drove up to the business in a white Pontiac that had damage to the front end. The trunk was held closed by a rope.

The unidentified suspect was only able to steal money order printing machine from the store.

Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777 or Birmingham Police Department's Burglary Unit at 205-254-1782.A former Albertville lawyer and municipal judge was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in prison for possessing "thousands of images of child porn," according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Steven Vincent Smith, 54, pleaded guilty in November to one count of receiving child pornography on a computer between January 2015 and March 2016. U.S. District Court Judge Virginia E. Hopkins handed down the sentence Wednesday. The judge also ordered Smith to serve 10 years of supervised release after he is released from prison.

"This defendant swore to honor the law and uphold justice, but instead he committed loathsome crimes on the most vulnerable of victims," U.S. Attorney Jay Town said. "His innocent victims will grow into being survivors while Smith will spend most of his remaining breaths inside of a cell."

According to the sentencing memo, Smith "committed a shocking number of sex crimes." The memo also accused him of distributing child porn on the internet and possessing "thousands" of child porn images, including images of graphic sexual assaults on toddlers. Smith is also accused of molesting a child and teaching other sexual predators on how to groom and molest children.

The memo also claimed Smith's crimes spanned multiple years, and cited forensic evidence showing him "discussing the rape of children and distributing child pornography as early as 2010."

Attorneys for Smith did not immediately respond to emails requesting comments on Smith's sentence.

The FBI investigated the case in conjunction with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. Assistant U.S. Attorney Manu Balachandran prosecuted the case.If you saw a white substance streaming away from your airplane's wing after takeoff, what would you do? Figure it's just a weird air thing and ignore it? Keep an eye on it?

Or would you rely on your background as a NASA aerospace engineer, where safety is an everyday issue, and realize it was time to flag down the flight attendant?

NASA aerospace engineer Rumaasha Maasha made choice No. 3 on a flight out of Huntsville, Ala., and that's why he's being praised for quick action in a bad situation.

Maasha, who works at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, was on a commercial flight out of Huntsville International Airport in January when he noticed the oddity outside. And when you say "noticed" in reference to an engineer, it's an entirely different level of noticing. Listen to Maasha tell the story.

"Normally, if it's a humid day, you'll see vortices, or circular patterns of rotating air, off the wing," Maasha told NASA public affairs staffers, who released his story this week. "About 1,000 feet off the ground, I started seeing something white and thought, 'maybe we're just hitting some humidity.' Well, then we banked to turn cross-wind and it was still doing it, and that's when I knew something was up. I looked closer and immediately realized that we were losing fluid."

Not only did Maasha know what he was seeing, he knew why. A vent valve was malfunctioning, and he also knew what it meant. As the plane flew faster at higher altitudes, the "Venturi effect" would increase suction on the tank. The leak would speed up.

"I quietly motioned to the flight attendant to come over and fortunately she was very attentive," he said. "She called the crew and the key thing is that she did this as we were still climbing out. Within a minute or two, they reduced speed and leveled off. The fuel leak diminished immediately when they slowed down."

The plane returned to Huntsville to the tune of "groans and moans from passengers," NASA said. But when word spread of the situation, Maasha made a lot of new friends.

Maasha is a 14-year NASA veteran, but he goes back even further with airplanes. He lived near an airport in Monrovia, Liberia as a boy and was fascinated by flying. Maasha's father was also an engineer, and both parents were university professors.

Maasha enrolled in Columbia University in New York - at age 15 - to earn a bachelor's degree in engineering mechanics. He followed that with a master's in aerospace engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He worked for airlines while looking for an engineering job and earned another degree and a private pilot's license.

Today, Maasha works on NASA's Space Launch System at Marshall in Huntsville. His specialty is structural dynamics, and he recently helped test a key part of the big, new rocket that will take astronauts back to the moon and into deep space.

"Looking back, I guess I had the perfect sets of circumstances to recognize the issue that day," he said later. "Since I was a kid, I've always tried to sit in a window seat near the wing. That's not the first time I've noticed something. I'm sure it won't be the last."The Alabama Board of Education will learn the names of the seven state superintendent semifinalists at a meeting on Friday morning, according to the national firm overseeing the search. Board members will then whittle that number to three finalists using a scoring method they discussed at a work session on Thursday.

Board members will interview the three finalists on April 20 and vote to select a superintendent that same day.

Search firm President Gary Ray of Ray and Associates told board members they conducted a national search and 41 people applied for the job. Though the seven semifinalists' names will not be revealed until Friday morning, Ray said the candidates are from North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama.

Interim state superintendent Ed Richardson said he was not surprised to see candidates were all from southern states. Big differences among regions, including funding formulas and governance, influence whether candidates are comfortable coming to a place like Alabama, he said, adding Alabama is not as "attractive" as a state like North Carolina.

Richardson said the Montgomery County schools intervention likely impacted the search, too. "They know it's a big problem," he said, "and they're going to have to deal with it."

Hoover Superintendent Kathy Murphy told principals and administrators Wednesday she applied for the state superintendent's job. She told the Hoover Board of Education prior to applying for the position in March, she said.

Murphy has been superintendent in Hoover for three years, and in education for 34 years, she told AL.com on Thursday. She was superintendent in Monroe County for four years prior to going to Hoover, she said, and has worked in education in Alabama a total of 28 years. She taught college in Georgia for six years prior to moving to Alabama.

School Superintendents of Alabama Executive Director Eric Mackey confirmed to AL.com he applied for the state superintendent position. He was superintendent of Jacksonville City Schools for eight years before working for the state superintendent association in 2010 and has been in education in Alabama for the past 25 years.

Jefferson County Superintendent Craig Pouncey told his board in March that he applied for the state superintendent position. Pouncey applied for the position twice previously, in 2011 and in 2016. After anonymous allegations against Pouncey surfaced just prior to the board voted to hire former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Michael Sentance, he filed a lawsuit alleging the complaint was mishandled and cost him the top job.

Pouncey's lawsuit against board member Mary Scott Hunter, R-Huntsville, and Department of Education attorney James Ward is set for trial in December.

At Friday's meeting, Ray said, board members they will receive packets on each semifinalist, in alphabetical order, containing the candidate's letter of interest, resume, application, a summary of what search firm associates learned from the candidate's references, results of an internet check on the candidates, and the candidate's responses to questions asked by the search firm during the vetting process.

Board members will then use a scoring tool developed by the search firm designed to help the board objectively narrow down the semifinalists. The resulting scores could determine which three become finalists, but board members will still have to nominate and vote to name the finalists.

Ray then walked board members through what the interview process will look like, recommending Alabama Department of Education Communications Director Michael Sibley serve as the moderator and ask all questions during the interviews. Board members were asked to bring one to two questions for semifinalists to Friday's meeting.

All candidates will be asked the same questions during the interview in the interest of fairness, Ray said.

The board went through a practice run of how the actual vote to select the superintendent will be conducted. Board Vice President Stephanie Bell, R-Montgomery, said the actual vote is governed by Robert's Rules of Order, requiring board members to consider each candidate as they are nominated.

How the vote was handled was a problem last time, board member Yvette Richardson, D-Birmingham, said. Former Gov. Robert Bentley presided over the vote in 2016, where seven rounds of votes were taken before Sentance was ultimately appointed in a 5 to 4 vote.

Sentance resigned in September after barely a year as superintendent.

"Last time, it was assumed it should have been done differently," board member Jeff Newman, R-Millport, said.

Gov. Kay Ivey, who has said appointing the superintendent is the most important thing this board will do, did not attend Thursday's work session but said she will attend Friday's meeting.

Ivey said she is comfortable with the search firm and the process they have used to conduct the search. "So far, so good," Ivey said.

After the work session, Bell said she has confidence the search process has been conducted fairly and thoroughly. "I believe that we have a great opportunity to select an excellent individual as the next state school superintendent," Bell said.

Ed Richardson said the search firm has done a good job to this point. "I think it has good promise. I think once I see the seven names---I haven't seen any of them---and I see what qualifications they have, I'll feel better."

Friday's meeting starts at 9 a.m. in Montgomery. It will be live-streamed through the Alabama State Department of Education website.

#ALBOE is going through a practice vote to make sure everyone understands how it will be done. [They're voting on which of Jeff Newman's 3 dogs should be the next superintendent.]  Trisha Powell Crain (@Trish_Crain) April 12, 2018

Updated 10:30 a.m., April 13, 2018, to clarify how the scoring method will be incorporated into the selection process.Interim state Superintendent Ed Richardson said today Montgomery Public Schools will have to eliminate about 200 teacher positions and outsource about 400 support jobs to stabilize finances.

Richardson, who is leading a state intervention into Montgomery schools because of financial and academic problems, said the job cuts could have been avoided if the Alabama Education Association had not gone to court to block his plan to sell Georgia Washington Middle School to the town of Pike Road.

"Now here's a system that's already struggling with academic problems," Richardson said. "The original plan, we did not have to cut any teacher nor outsource any employees. And now we're faced with that distasteful task and by the end of this month, April, we will make those decisions."

Richardson called the AEA, which represents teachers and other education employees, the "greatest impediment to the further improvement of Alabama's public schools."

In a statement, the AEA said Richardson had a conflict of interest because he had worked as a consultant for the Pike Road system, a point the organization had raised in its lawsuit. The AEA said consultants hired as part of the intervention into Montgomery schools did more harm than good for the system's finances.

"Anyone paying attention to the matter knows Ed Richardson has a personal issue with AEA," AEA President Sherry Tucker said in a statement. "This is causing him to make decisions that he thinks will hurt AEA, regardless of if they will help the children of Montgomery County."

Richardson said the suggestion he has a conflict of interest because he was a consultant for Pike Road was "totally false."

"Wherever I'm employed is where I give my full attention," Richardson said. "In this case it's trying to get the intervention for Montgomery Public Schools in a position where they have a chance to be released sometime in the near future."

Richardson today acknowledged that mistakes were made early in the intervention, which started under former Superintendent Michael Sentance. Richardson inherited the Montgomery takeover when Sentance resigned in September just ahead of his expected firing by the state Board of Education.

Richardson later announced a plan to sell Georgia Washington to Pike Road for $9.75 million, close three other schools, eliminate some central office positions and take other steps he said were needed to shore up the system's finances.

Richardson said it has been several years since Montgomery schools maintained a required minimum fund balance of one month's expenses, about $18 million.

In February, the AEA backed a lawsuit against Richardson and Pike Road Mayor Gordon Stone to block the sale of Georgia Washington Middle School, which the Montgomery school board opposed.

In March, Montgomery County Circuit Judge Greg Griffin issued an order to maintain the status quo for all school properties pending further orders of the court. Pike Road withdrew its plans to buy the school.

Richardson said today he still expects Georgia Washington and the three other schools to close but said they are in limbo for now.

Richardson said the original plan was to absorb the teachers at the schools slated for closing into other schools to offset the increased enrollment at other schools.

Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange joined Richardson at today's news conference. Strange said although the city has no direct authority over education that quality schools are a necessity for the city's future. Strange said the city expended some time and money studying the possibility of a city school system but determined it was not feasible. (Montgomery Public Schools is the county system.)

Strange acknowledged that Montgomery's magnet schools are among the state's best, but said the overall system is a concern. He said good schools are vital in the competition to recruit industry and are important to military families brought to the city by Maxwell Air Force Base.

Strange and Richardson are worried that financial and academic problems jeopardize Montgomery Public Schools' accreditation.

Richardson said a team from the accreditation agency AdvanceEd has been in Montgomery and he expects a report from the agency in May. Richardson said the failure to have a plan in place to shore up the system's finances bodes poorly for that report.

"We had a chance about two months ago to affect a number of positive changes that would have sent the message to the accrediting body that we have a plan for financial stability and that we have a plan for having additional resources to affect positive academic improvements for the next year," Richardson said. "And because of the delaying tactics of the Montgomery board of education and the Alabama Education Association, those were not possible and so, Advanced Ed came and went without me being able to give them some positive report."

Robert Porterfield, president of the Montgomery Public Schools Board, attended the news conference and told Richardson he was being prematurely negative.

Porterfield said he expects the accrediting agency to point out areas of concern and give the board a chance to address them.

"You have not given the opportunity for the board to, first of all, see what has been identified," Porterfield said. "You have not taken a moment to see how then, when they're identified, what the board is going to do to address those concerns and move forward.

"We were accredited before the state came and we have not been unaccredited and I think you're making a big to-do out of this before the board gets an opportunity to even see what they've come up with."

Allen F. Bowen Jr., pastor at Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church, attended today's news conference and spoke to reporters afterward.

Bowen has two children in Montgomery Public Schools and one who has graduated. His wife teaches in the school system.

Bowen said he thought the plan to close schools to save money was a short-term fix that won't address what he said are fundamental problems, such as with the core curriculum. Bowen said he wants all the politicians to come to the table and figure out a long-range plan.

"As a businessman you're supposed to have a one-year, three-year, five-year and 10-year plan. All I see right now is a right now plan for the moment," Bowen said.Gov. Kay Ivey has requested assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for damage caused by the March 19 storms in Calhoun, Cullman, Etowah and St. Clair counties.

Ivey signed a letter Thursday seeking FEMA assistance for municipal and county governments with debris removal, emergency protective measures and restoring infrastructure. The request also seeks financial or direct assistance for individuals and families whose property was damaged and whose losses were not covered by insurance.

The request comes after damage assessments by local, state and federal personnel. Governments have incurred millions of dollars in costs for debris removal and infrastructure damage, the governor's office said.

"There has been such an incredible partnership between communities, counties, state agencies and FEMA and I know that through this partnership we can get people back in homes, businesses back up and running and get Jacksonville State University back to normal, as quickly as possible," Ivey said in a press release.

The National Weather Service said 17 tornadoes struck Alabama on March 19.

Ivey is also asking for assistance from the Small Business Administration for Morgan County for the April 3 storms that struck Decatur. That would give homeowners, renters and business owners access to low-interest disaster loans. The SBA request also applies to Calhoun, Cullman and Etowah counties.There will thankfully never be another Hurricane Harvey.

Or Irma, Maria or Nate.

Those names were officially retired from storm lists this week by the World Meteorological Organization, after what it called once of the most destructive hurricane seasons on record in the Atlantic.

Each tropical basin has its own list of names.

Tropical storms and hurricanes are named using those lists that repeat every six years, according to the National Hurricane Center.

The WMO retires names for storms that have been particularly deadly or destructive. Otherwise they would come back up in the rotation.

The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was blamed for the deaths of several hundred people across the basin. It also caused more than $250 billion in damage in the U.S. alone, according to the WMO.

There were 17 named storms, 10 hurricanes and six major hurricanes (Category 3 or stronger).

But Harvey, Irma and Maria stood out for their exceptional tolls.

Hurricane Harvey hit Texas as a Category 4 hurricane and dropped record amounts of rain over the state for four days, causing catastrophic flooding in the region and especially the city of Houston.

Harvey was blamed for 68 direct deaths, according to the hurricane center.

On the heels of Harvey was Hurricane Irma, which intensified into a Category 5 monster and caused "near total destruction" on the Caribbean island of Barbuda, according to the WMO.

Irma also struck Saint Martin, Anguilla, St. Kitts and Nevis, the Turks and Caicos, Virgin Islands and Bahamas.

It made another landfall in Cuba as a Category 5 storm and went on to strike Florida twice. The first was as a Category 4 storm in the Keys. The second was a Category 3 in southwest Florida.

Irma caused seven direct deaths in the U.S. and 85 indirect deaths, 80 of which were in Florida, according to the WMO.

Hurricane Maria also became a monster Category 5 hurricane -- just 24 hours after becoming a tropical storm.

It struck the Caribbean island of Dominica at Category 5 intensity and caused catastrophic damage.

It made another landfall in Puerto Rico as a Category 4, becoming the strongest storm to hit the island since 1928.

Maria was blamed for 31 direct deaths in Dominica (with 34 missing), two deaths in Guadeloupe and 65 in Puerto Rico, according to the WMO.

Maria caused an estimated $90 billion in damage in the U.S., according to the hurricane center, making it the third-costliest U.S. storm on record behind Katrina and Harvey.

Also on the new retired storm list is Hurricane Nate, which didn't match the power of Harvey, Irma and Maria but was deadly in its own right.

Nate was a Category 1 hurricane when it made landfall in Mississippi on Oct. 7.

But it was rain from the storm that caused at least 45 deaths in Central America.

According to the hurricane center the flooding and mudslides in Central America damaged or destroyed thousands of homes, especially in Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

The National Centers for Environmental Information said winds, storm surge, freshwater flooding and tornadoes caused $225 million damage to property and agriculture in the U.S.

Including the latest additions there have been 86 names struck from the Atlantic storm list since storms began getting names in 1954, according to the hurricane center.

The 2005 season has the most retired names (Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan and Wilma) for one season, the hurricane center said.

The last names dropped from the list were 2016 storms: Matthew and Otto.

The latest retired names, Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate, will be replaced by Harold, Idalia, Margot and Nigel for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season.

The 2018 storm names are: Alberto, Beryl, Chris, Debby, Ernesto, Florence, Gordon, Helene, Isaac, Joyce, Kirk, Leslie, Michael, Nadine, Oscar, Patty, Rafael, Sara, Tony, Valeria and William.Police are asking the public for help finding the wife of a Moulton city councilman who has been missing since the weekend.

Jennifer Marshell White last was seen in Moulton four days ago. White was in a black 2007 Chevy Tahoe when she was last seen Sunday around 1:30 p.m., according to police. Her vehicle has a pink "Salt Life" sticker on the back window.

Anyone with information is asked to call Moulton police at 256-974-3961 or message the department on Facebook.

White is the wife of City Councilman Brian White.

Moulton is a Lawrence County city in north Alabama.Mark Prater, the chief meteorologist for CBS 42, is no longer with the station, WIAT's news director said today.

Prater and WIAT News Director Rob Martin declined to comment on the circumstances surrounding Prater's departure.

"I'm thankful for the time I had at CBS 42, but now was the time to part ways," Prater told AL.com.

There was no immediate word as to who would replace Prater as chief meteorologist, Martin said.

"Our weather team will cover things until we have a replacement," Martin said.

Prater joined the WIAT staff in 2008. Martin said the departure is effective immediately.

Prater said he did not know yet what his immediate plans are. "I'm just going to keep moving forward," Prater said.

Prater was posting weather forecasts on his station Facebook page as recently as Wednesday.

Prater, who grew up in Prattville, joined ABC 33/40 when it went on the air in 1996 but left after his contract expired in 2004. He then went to work with Independent News Network out of Davenport, Iowa before returning to Birmingham four years later.

"Nationally recognized for his experience and knowledge of severe weather, Prater has been honored to receive the coveted National Edward R. Murrow Award and Emmy Award for his on-air work as a Broadcast Meteorologist," a bio of Prater on the WIAT website states.

"Mark has been named Birmingham's Best News/Weather anchor on a number of occasions. The Associated Press also named him Alabama's Best Weathercaster in 1999.

'In 2010, Prater was awarded the coveted "ABBY" Weather Anchor of the Year Award from the Alabama Broadcasters Association for the entire state of Alabama.

"Mark's a full member of both the NWA (National Weather Association) and the AMS (American Meteorological Society). He also holds the seal of approval for both the NWA and AMS. After 26 years in television and radio, Mark has enjoyed being a meteorologist for markets all over the country, but his heart and home has always been here in Alabama."A leader at Bishop State Community College in Mobile has been hired to head a training program for shipbuilder Huntingdon Ingalls Industries, the company has announced.

According to information released by Huntingdon Ingalls Industries (HII), Latitia D. McCane has been named director of education at the company's Apprentice School at Newport News Shipbuilding. As such she will be "responsible for the overall leadership, vision and strategic direction of craft training, academic delivery, student services, accreditation and recruitment for the school," which provides four- and eight-year apprentice programs in 19 trades for about 800 students. The 100-year-old school also offers eight advanced programs, as well as additional associate's and bachelor's degree programs through partnerships with other institutions.

Previously, according to HII, McCane held a variety of leadership positions at Bishop State, including dean of instructional services. She also previously worked as associate dean of instruction at Jefferson Davis Community College in Brewton, Ala.

"Latitia comes to us at an important time in our company's history when we are focused on people and technology -- transforming the way we do business," , Newport News' vice president of trades operations. "Given Latitia's wealth of experience, I'm confident that she will play an integral role in helping prepare our shipbuilders for the future. We are fortunate to have Latitia on our team."

According to HII, McCane holds degrees in organic chemistry and chemistry from the University of Alabama, Texas Southern University and Alabama State University, as well as doctoral degrees in education administration from Lacrosse University and urban higher education administration from Jackson State University.

HII's operations include the Ingalls shipyard in coastal Mississippi.Alabama's 10th-graders, all 55,000 of them, may have a new standardized test to take before school lets out for the summer if the state Board of Education approves the test at their meeting on Thursday.

The new test is the PreACT, a mini version of the ACT college entrance exam. Currently, the ACT is given to all 11th-graders. State and federal laws require schools to measure student improvement on high school tests. Using measures of improvement from the 10th-grade PreACT to the 11th-grade ACT meets that requirement.

On the newly-created Alabama report cards, that measure of improvement will be used to calculate a grade for the school and for the district.

Meeting the requirements of the law is necessary but cramming in time for a new test for high-schoolers before the end of the school year is no easy task.

Just ask Hoover High School Principal Don Hulin. Hulin, who oversees nearly 2,900 students in the ninth through 12th grade, said adding a new test at this time of the year creates a lot of challenges.

"For me," Hulin said, "the main thing is that it turns into a logistical nightmare because of the amount of people we have to use to test."

"Every time you test, you have to use teachers and staff to administer those tests," Hulin said. "You have to have hall monitors and all the other things that go along with that," he added. Also, teachers and those giving the tests will need to be trained on how to give the test, he said.

In a school the size of Hoover High, Hulin said they basically shut down the school when they test a whole grade. With more than 700 students in the tenth grade, it is hard to find enough uninterrupted space to hold them all during testing, he said. "We'll do an e-learning day," he said, allowing students that aren't taking the test to work on assignments from home.

Interim State Superintendent Ed Richardson discussed the need to adopt the PreACT at the board's March 8 work session. Richardson told board members a statewide task force comprised of teachers, principals, superintendents and other education officials is working to determine kind of testing Alabama needs and recommended using the PreACT as a temporary fix to measure growth.

When the state board voted in June of last year to drop the ACT Aspire for grades three through eight and 10, they kept the ACT college entrance exam for 11th-graders in place.

Since February, Hulin said seniors have taken the ACT WorkKeys exam and juniors have taken the ACT college entrance exam. Juniors who need accommodations on the ACT college entrance exam will take the test this week, and that means no bells can be used to signal time to change classes. "It may not sound like a big deal to move 3,000 students through the hallways with no bells," Hulin said, "but it is."

In an April 4 memo to all superintendents, Richardson said 10th-graders will be expected to take the test, given on paper, during the week of May 8 through 14 if the board approves his recommendation.

A lot of tests are already scheduled for May, Hulin said. Students in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes will take required tests on which high scores earn college credit. The whole district is doing Scantron testing to help track student progress from the start of the school year to the end of the school year. And final exams for high-schoolers are scheduled for next month, too.

All that testing takes a toll, Hulin said. "I worry about test fatigue with kids."

Hulin doesn't have a problem with standardized testing, acknowledging it is a part of the system of checks and balances to ensure students are learning. "If we're doing testing where we're monitoring the movement of kids and we're moving all kids forward," he said, "I think that is of great value."

It's just the unexpected timing of this one that has him concerned.

Impressing on 10th-graders that they need to do well on a test that isn't connected to their grade is tough. "It's very hard to motivate a kid in high school that knows at the end of the day that if I pass classes and all these other things, I'm out of here --- especially at the end of the year like this," he said.

Teachers have to make adjustments, too. Hulin said his teachers understandably reacted to the announcement about the new test with a lot of questions like, "Wow. Another test now? And we're just finding out about it?"

The board meeting begins at 10 a.m.Aren't ready to pay your taxes on April 17? Have no fear - there's a doomsday prophet that says the world will be ending soon anyway.

Christian conspiracy theorist David Meade is back with another apocalyptic prediction, this one suggesting the world's demise will begin later this month. Meade's is predicting the often-discussed-but-never-proven Planet X, also referred to as Nibiru, will show up April 23, signaling the start of the end of days. Planet X will pass the Earth in October, touching off all sorts of mayhem and the eventual expiration of the Earth.

Meade's theory traces its roots back to the Biblical passages of Revelation 12:1-2, which refers to a "great sign appearing in heaven," and a "woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth."

On April 23, the sun, moon and Jupiter will align in Virgo, with the constellation representing the woman in the Biblical passage, Meade said. Planet X's appearance represents the "great sign" prophecy.

"During this time frame, on April 23, 2018 the moon appears under the feet of the Constellation Virgo. The Sun appears to precisely clothe Virgo... Jupiter is birthed on April 08, 2018. The 12 stars at that date include the nine stars of Leo, and the three planetary alignments of Mercury, Venus and Mars - which combine to make a count of 12 stars on the head of Virgo. Thus the constellations Virgo, Leo and Serpens-Ophiuchus represent a unique once-in-a-century sign exactly as depicted in the 12th chapter of Revelation. This is our time marker," Meade said.

Meade first predicted the world would end last spring and then moved that back to September and later October 2017.

While U.S. space agency NASA has avoided end-of-world Biblical discussions, it has weighed in on Planet X/Nibiru.

"Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an internet hoax," NASA said in a Q&A on doomsday theories. "There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth...astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist."

The answer? Check back in on April 24...Six candidates for governor, three Republicans and three Democrats, met for what turned out to be a genial breakfast debate in Birmingham on Thursday morning - without Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who said she had a conflict.

They agreed that Alabama's infrastructure is crumbling and education needs to be improved, but disagreed over ways to pay for it, with former Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb and Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox both calling for lotteries.

"It takes 10 years to build a road," Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said. "We have a crumbling infrastructure."

While Maddox and Battle touted their records supporting business in two of Alabama's strongest economically thriving cities, former State Rep. James Fields of Cullman turned that to his advantage.

"I would like for these mayors to stay in their cities, because they seem to be doing a great job to where they can help cooperate and move our state forward," Fields said, to laughter from the audience. "If we take them out of their cities, then we have to replace them."

Fields, an ordained United Methodist minister, and Evangelist Scott Dawson, an ordained Baptist minister, both emphasized family, moral values and leadership with integrity and downplayed political experience.

"I understand I'm the outsider," Dawson said. Dawson repeated his call for drug testing of students in schools.

State Sen. Bill Hightower said his background as a businessman made him better qualified to lead. "Minimum wage is price control," Hightower said. "It hurts the people you're trying to help. If minimum wage is too high, the poor can't get a job."

Cobb sharply disagreed on that point, saying she supported a higher minimum wage.

Questioned on whether a Democrat could be elected governor in a predominantly Republican state, Cobb noted that she was the only person onstage who won a statewide election and that a Democrat won the special senate election last year. "Doug Jones' victory proved a Democrat can win," Cobb said. "Party labels do not indicate whether you're a good leader or person."

The debate, held at the Harbert Center, was sponsored by Birmingham Business Journal, Fox 6 and WBHM.Democratic gubernatorial candidate and former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb attacked rival and Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox over what she said was his opposition to raising Tuscaloosa's minimum wage during a televised debate Wednesday.

The sparring between Maddox and Cobb was the only contentious part of the debate, which also included former state legislator James Fields.

Maddox accused Cobb of distorting the record, saying he supported a minimum wage increase but couldn't back the proposal because it would have been unlawful. He also noted that only one of 462 city attorneys across the state backed raising the minimum wage to $10.10, and that the consequences for backing the plan could bankrupted Tuscaloosa due to lawsuits.

"I'm not a good politician," Maddox said during a portion of the debate where the candidates asked questions to each other. "It would've been wrong of me to promise the citizens of Tuscaloosa something I couldn't deliver."

But Cobb said Maddox had an opportunity to go on record supporting an increase, but didn't prior to the state legislature prohibiting local governments from increasing the minimum wage.

"The bill had not passed. It had just been filed," she said. "You didn't know if it was going to pass or not, unless you're clairvoyant."

Both Cobb and Maddox touted their plans to institute a lottery in Alabama that they said would bring in $300 million in revenue for education. Cobb said her proposal would fund pre-K, career tech education and close the Pell Grant gap, while Maddox said his plan would fund workforce development, universal pre-K and earmark money for college scholarships.

Meanwhile, Fields cautioned about relying on the lottery to address the state's budget woes.

"If I have to wait and depend on the lottery to fund education, then my education system will falter and fail," he said.

The candidates were largely in agreement on other major issues, with Cobb, Maddox and Fields all saying they favored Medicaid expansion and legalizing medical marijuana.

A fourth contender for the nomination, Doug "New Blue" Smith, who was not invited to the debate, issued a statement Wednesday night suggesting why he was barred from participating.

"The fix is in. The establishment, the boys in the swamp or those that Big Jim Folsom called "The Big Mules: picked the three candidates for the Democratic TV Debate April 11th to insure that a Republican wins," he said.

Smith criticized Cobb for leaving her post as chief justice early and Maddox for being a "creature of the Alabama Education Association." Of Fields, Smith said the state "is still not ready for a black governor in realpolitik."The technical definition of "middle of nowhere" is this: a place that is remote and isolated.

But what if you had to find the exact place that qualified as the middle of nowhere - what would you do?

24/7 WallStreet ventured to do just that by identifying the place in each state that earned the title "middle of nowhere." It made its designation based on the location with the longest estimated travel time to the nearest city. Travel time takes into account all forms of travel, as well as quality of transportation infrastructure, the website notes. You can see the complete methodology here.

In Alabama, the middle of nowhere was the terminus of Carmichael Creek in Choctaw County. The distance to the nearest city from the spot - GPS coordinates 32deg06'15''N, 88deg23'45''W - is 2 hours, 48 minutes, 24/7 WallStreet notes.

The middle of nowhere is harder to find in some parts of the country. Three of the smallest states -- Connecticut, New Jersey, and Rhode Island -- have the shortest travel time from their most remote area to the nearest city, with Connecticut's travel time coming in as the shortest - 52 minutes.

And the most remote place in the U.S.? That would go to Amatignak Island in Aleutian Islands, Alaska. It will take you a whopping 84 hours, 37 minutes to get to the nearest city.Steven Brooks was being sought in Alabama.

Law enforcement still are searching for Steven Brooks, a Florida murder suspect who authorities say they've been chasing since a Wednesday-night police standoff in north Alabama.

Brooks, 45, led Madison County sheriff's deputies on a chase into neighboring Limestone County when he escaped a standoff at a home on Loganberry Lane around 9:30 p.m., authorities said. Brooks is 5 feet and 8 inches, weighs 210 pounds, and was last seen wearing black pants and a black and brown shirt. He is wanted for murder in Pinellas County, Florida.

Lawmen are now ending the perimeter setup Wednesday night, but the lawmen will still be looking for the man while on patrol tonight, officials with the Madison County Sheriff's Office said.

After searches by K9, helicopter, fixed wing and on foot we have stood down the perimeter. USM Fugitive TF will continue searching and LE will still be in the area, surrounding agencies will be looking while on patrol duties. Any contact or info on Steven Brooks call 2567227181.  Donny Shaw  (@LtDonnyShaw263) April 12, 2018

The U.S. Marshal Service is offering a reward up to $3,000 for information leading to his capture, according to local law enforcement.

For north Alabama law enforcement, it started around 4:20 p.m. Wednesday when the U.S. Marshals fugitive apprehension team contacted Madison County SWAT deputies for help capturing Brooks at the Harvest home.

By 6:30 p.m., a standoff was underway and continued for about three hours, with hostage negotiators talking to Brooks by phone, said Madison County Lt. Donny Shaw.

Brooks went into the garage of the home around 9:30 p.m., got in a car and hit U.S. Marshals' vehicles as he fled the scene, Shaw said. Brooks led lawmen on a chase to the corner of Copeland and Love Branch roads in Limestone County. He jumped from the vehicle which caught fire in a field.

Lawmen are looking into reports of a 2016 white Chevrolet Silverado 3500, which was reported stolen about 9 miles west of where Brooks was last seen around 1 a.m. Thursday. Officials are trying to determine if the stolen car has any connection to Brooks.

Since then, state, federal and local law enforcement have been searching woods, creek beds and other rural areas. A helicopter and K9 teams are assisting.

Area of the perimeter where Steven Brooks was last seen after crashing the vehicle he was driving. Smith Vasser to east, County Line west and Yarborough north. If you have contact w/Suspect contact dispatch at 2567227181. pic.twitter.com/Mv3AimsyU7  Donny Shaw  (@LtDonnyShaw263) April 12, 2018

Brooks was last seen at Yarborough Road and Love Branch Road.

As the search continued near campuses, some schools were implementing safety precautions and keeping students inside buildings on Thursday morning.

As a precaution Creekside Primary Creekside Elementary and East Limestone High School have been placed on modified... Posted by Limestone County Schools on Thursday, April 12, 2018

Madison County Schools told AL.com news partner WHNT News-19 that the following schools are keeping students inside at all times:

Sparkman High

Sparkman Ninth

Madison Cross Roads

Monrovia Middle

Monrovia Elementary

Legacy School

Endeavor School

Anyone who sees Brooks should contact law enforcement immediately, Shaw said. Authorities don't know whether he's armed, but they say he's dangerous.

Update from @LtDonnyShaw263 on the search for Steven Brooks, a FL murder suspect who is on the run following a standoff in north Alabama. https://t.co/mrIZSc8BXR  Ashley Remkus (@aremkus1) April 12, 2018

In Florida, Brooks is accused of gunning down Caroline Morton-Hicks, a 59-year-old woman. The killing happened Feb. 12 at Pinellas Park. Pinellas County is near Tampa, more than 600 miles from Madison County, Alabama.

Caroline Morton-Hicks

Morton-Hicks was a musician, originally from England, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

Police told the newspaper she was leaving a rehearsal of the Pinellas Park Civic Orchestra when an altercation happened in the parking lot. The Times reported that she tried to run away but was chased by the shooter.

Updated April 12 at 4:27 p.m. with new information about the stolen truck.

AL.com reporter Anna Beahm contributed to this story.Authorities arrested the associate director of human resources for UFs College of Veterinary Medicine on April 6 on charges of lewd and lascivious behavior.

Daniel Joseph Sanetz, 46, of Gainesville, inappropriately touched a girl between the ages of 12 and 16 about four months ago, according to an arrest report. Sanetz has worked at UFs College of Veterinary Medicine for 21 years, UF spokesperson Margot Winick wrote in an email.

During a Feb. 1 interview with the Child Protection Team, the girl said Sanetz rubbed her hip and later rested his hand on her knee, according to the report. He then got up and left the tent the two were laying in, and returned about 15 or 30 minutes later, according to the report.

He touched her hip again and then began to rub the small of her back, according to the report. Then Sanetz slipped his hands into her pants, according to the report.

She did not move because she was terrified, the report stated.

Sanetz then put his hand into her underwear and touched her intimate areas, according to the report. The girl turned away, forcing his hands out of her pants, according to the report.

During a call set up by Alachua County Sheriffs Office deputies on April 6, Sanetz said he put his hands in the girls pants and touched her inappropriately, according to the report. He apologized multiple times, according to the report.

When deputies tried to interview Sanetz, he asked for a lawyer, according to the report.

He was arrested and taken to the Alachua County Jail where he remains, as of press time, in lieu of a $250,000 bond.

A trespass warning was issued against Sanetz a day after his arrest by UPD, according to its website.

Winick said Sanetz salary is $85,730. UF is aware of Sanetzs arrest, she said, but had no additional comment on his employment status.

Contact Robert Lewis at rlewis@alligator.org. Follow him on Twitter at @Lewis__Robert.

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Daniel Joseph SanetzPosted on: April 12, 2018 1:35 PM

The Primate of the Anglican Church of Kenya, Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit, has said the Church would resist moves to promote polygamy in the country. The subject hit the headlines in Kenya after MP Gathoni Wamuchomba called for men to marry several women to ensure children in single-parent families had a father-figure. We give birth to these children, and we do not want to own up to them, she is reported as saying. If you are a man from the Kikuyu community, and you can sustain five wives, have them; and if you are a man and you are in a position to bring up [many children], do it.

We need to be honest, these children who are raised by single mothers, where are their fathers? And why do we want to pretend that this is not a problem. As much as we are talking about our church and culture, we need to go back to the drawing board to discuss this issue and come up with a solution.

But speaking to reporters outside St Crispins Church in Bungoma town, Archbishop Jackson rejected the call, saying that the Church would not permit marriages involving multiple partners.

The church is very clear through the teachings of the Bible especially the New Testament that one man and one woman make a family, he said. We want to make it clear from the perspective that as a church, a family is one wife and one husband joined together to form a couple and form a family.Posted on: April 12, 2018 9:23 AM

The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, has announced a ban on new permits for offshore oil and gas exploration. In a move that has been welcomed by the Bishop of Wellington, Justin Duckworth, Prime Minister Ardern said that existing exploration and mining rights would be protected; but that the new restriction was part of a just transition to a clean energy future. She said that the coalition parties were striking the right balance for New Zealand  were protecting existing industry, and protecting future generations from climate change.

Anglicans from the Diocese of Wellington had been campaigning for such a move. Last month they took part in a demonstration outside a petroleum conference in the city. The diocese has been campaigning for a ban on new land and sea permits. Todays announcement relates only to offshore permits.

Todays announcement shows the government is listening, Bishop Justin said. We thank them for that and encourage them to take further steps towards a clean economy, including ruling out new coal mines and ending subsidies for the fossil fuel sector.

Following her announcement, the Prime Minister gave a speech in which she said We are anchored in the Pacific. Surrounding us are nations, including ourselves, who will be dramatically impacted by climate change. You cant avoid seeing the impact around us, especially in the Pacific as warmer sea temperatures contribute to more storms, as we see more droughts and fires, and more extreme weather in general. Thats just the obvious impact of climate change. Theres also sea level rise, ocean acidification, the movement of mosquito borne diseases like zika and dengue.

Tens of thousands of New Zealanders and Pacific peoples live on the coastline and will be affected by rising sea levels. That means people may need people to move their homes, breaking up communities and causing stress and hardship. Underground infrastructure and fresh water sources could be inundated with sea water, and crops that have previously been a staple will change or even disappear. For the pacific, this is not just a hypothetical, it is real.

On my recent visit to Samoa and Tonga I saw the damage to homes. It was devastating and wide spread. And it wasnt just homes that were affected. Schools, parliament buildings, businesses and infrastructure like power lines that were taken out by coconut trees. Families struggling to fix their homes were sending children to school where they had to learn in tents supplied by Unicef. The damage from these storms is immense and the reconstruction period is long and hard.

To mitigate the crisis, Prime Minister Ardern announced goals of New Zealand becoming a net zero emission economy by 2050, with a 100 per cent renewably sourced electricity system by 2035. Theyre ambitious goals we should all be proud of, she said. And we have to be ambitious about what we can do to make a difference. Because in this enormous challenge we are facing, also lies opportunity for us.TEL AVIV - After a bomb was set off as a military vehicle was passing along the defensive separation barrier with Gaza on Wednesday night, Israeli aircraft targeted ''military objectives'' in the Gaza Strip. Reports were from a military spokesperson, who said that ''immediately after the airstrike, a terrorist cell used machine guns to shoot at one of the aircraft but did not hit it''. As a result of the exchange of fire, the spokesperson continued, alarm sirens were sounded in the area. ''The Israeli aircraft,'' he said, ''intercepted the terrorist cell.'' A member of the military wing of Hamas was killed in the attack, Muhammad Hajila, sources in Gaza said, adding that he had been near the Palestinian machine gun positions that had shot at the aircraft. Israeli sources said that at least one of the bullets had hit an Israeli home nearby. Israeli analysts added that massive amounts of firing from Hamas machine guns had in recent days ''confused'' the Iron Dome anti-missile alarm system, setting it off severally times and leading to Israelis nearby to flee to shelters. As a result, they said, over the night the Israeli airforce had targeted a machine gun position in Gaza. The incidents occurred while tension is rising on both sides of the line of demarcation between Israel and Gaza ahead of large protests called by Hamas for tomorrow, the third Friday in a row. (ANSAmed).

BRUSSELS2 - The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled on Thursday that unaccompanied refugee minors retain the right to family reunification even if they come of age during the asylum application process.



The reunification request must however be filed within a limited time, set at three months from the day in which they are granted refugee status. This was the court's ruling in a case on an Eritrean girl who requested asylum in the Netherlands in February 2014, turned 18 that June, was granted asylum in October and requested family reunification in December. The request was rejected by the Dutch secretary of state in May 2015, saying that the girl was already age 18. The Luxembourg judges ruled that unaccompanied minors have a right to reunification that "is not at the discretion of the member states''. It added that the right to family reunification should not depend on how long it takes the authorities to reply to asylum requests. (ANSAmed).

'Proof' of chemical weapons in Douma attack  EU Germany rules out intervention. NATO condemns attack.

(ANSAmed) - Brussels, April 12 - The European Commission said Thursday it had "proof" that chemical weapons were used, allegedly by the Assad regime, in an attack on the Syrian town of Douma at the weekend.



"In the report we published Sunday it is written that on the basis of our reports the majority of evidence indicates that chemical weapons were used in Syria in the attack at the weekend," Spokesperson Maja Kocijancic told reporters. On Sunday the European External Action Service (EEAS) said in a statement that "Reports from Douma, under the siege and bombardment by regime forces and its allies, indicate that a high number of civilians were killed yesterday evening, including families who perished in the shelters they were hiding in. The evidence points towards yet another chemical attack by the regime". "Almost a year to the day of the horrific attacks in Khan Sheikhoun, it is a matter of grave concern that chemical weapons continue to be used, especially on civilians," the statement continued.



"The European Union condemns in the strongest terms the use of chemical weapons and calls for an immediate response by the international community." However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that Germany would not be taking part in a military campaign in Syria. "Germany will not take part in possible military action - I want to make clear again that there are no decisions - but we see, and support this, that everything is being done to send a signal that this use of chemical weapons is not acceptable," she said. "NATO considers the use of chemical weapons to be a threat for international peace and security and those responsible will be held accountable," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said.



"The latest attack was horrendous, with dozens of people including many children killed." Consultations are underway between NATO allies on how to respond to the attack, Stoltenberg added. (ANSAmed)The Aviation Africa Summit and Exhibition taking place on 17-18 April 2018 in Cairo, Egypt opens next week to a record audience of aviation industry professionals.

The event will feature an exhibition hall made up of 118 aerospace companies including Gold Sponsors; Airbus, Boeing & GE Aviation and Silver Sponsors; AerCap, Bombardier, Dubai Aerospace Enterprise & Rolls Royce.

The pre-registered attendees reached a new record total for the event of 660 with an expected total audience to reach 750 in Cairo next week. The delegates and visitors to the event span 50 countries and include 220 personnel from 34 airlines and 50 speakers from across Africa and the international sector.

The two day conference has one main aim - securing strategy for Africa's success. Topics that will help to address this include cyber security, infrastructure investment, single skies, harnessing MRO development, women in aviation and how to survive in a competitive marketplace amongst many other sessions.

The event is held under the auspices of the Ministry of Aviation and H.E. Sherif Fathi, Minister of Aviation, Republic of Egypt will deliver the Keynote Welcome speech - Building on Egypt's aviation heritage to make a sustainable future. Egyptair are the Host airline and aerospace group for Aviation Africa 2018 and Safwat Musallam, Chairman, EygptAir Holding Co. will also present a Keynote Address on behalf of the hosts.

Mark Brown from Times Aerospace Events who are organising the event said: "This is the 3rd edition of Aviation Africa and we are delighted that this year's event in Cairo has attracted more participants than previous shows. We have also introduced a networking element to the event to ensure that everyone attending can connect with each other prior to the show to schedule meetings in advance and really capitalise on their time at Aviation Africa."

The Aviation Africa event takes place at the Intercontinental City Stars on April 17-18 2018 and includes a business-to-business exhibition and opportunities to network with airlines, government and manufacturers/service providers.

H.E. Sherif Fathi, Minister of Aviation, Republic of EgyptGlobal air services provider Dnata has signed an agreement to acquire Qantas catering businesses.

The agreement is subject to approval from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

Qantas catering businesses include wholly-owned subsidiaries Q Catering Limited and Snap Fresh Pty Limited. Q Catering has centres in four Australian ports  Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, with its largest airline customer being Qantas.

Snap Fresh is a state-of-the-art meal production plant in Queensland, specialising in Australian-made frozen meals for airlines and customers in the healthcare and food retail industries.

Commenting on the agreement, Dnata's Divisional Senior Vice President of catering, Robin Padgett said:

"This agreement reflects our confidence in Australia as a market and the ongoing growth potential into the future.

By combining dnatas network strength and international talent with Qantas domestic catering expertise, this will allow us to further grow our presence and deliver catering excellence to more customers across Australia than ever before. This includes investing in more infrastructure, starting with a new catering facility in Sydney.

We look forward to the opportunity to welcome the employees from Qantas inflight catering businesses to the Dnata team.

Under the agreement, dnata will supply catering for Qantas flights for an initial period of ten years, and Qantas will continue to work with key suppliers in menu design and development.

Qantas Domestic CEO, Andrew David, added: The catering businesses will benefit significantly from dnatas global footprint, catering expertise, and ability to drive investment and growth for what is a core focus of its operation.

Customers will continue to enjoy Qantas premium service, including unique Rockpool-designed menus for First and Business passengers, showcasing the best of Australian produce for millions of travellers each year."

Together with dnata, well continue to deliver the inflight food and beverage experience we know our customers value, just as we work with catering companies in offshore ports for our international flights.

Dubai-headquartered Dnata already operates 11 catering facilities in Australia, currently trading under the dnata catering brand (recently rebranded from Alpha Flight Services). dnata employs more than 4000 people in Australia across its catering, cargo and ground handling businesses.Emirates has surpassed a staggering one million Wi-Fi sessions in March, powered by SITAONAIRs connected aircraft expertise.

Passengers travelling with Emirates consumed 1,037,016 SITAONAIR Internet ONAIR sessions between 1 and 31 March 2018, across its B777-300ER and A380 aircraft fleet.



In partnership with SITAONAIR, Emirates offers onboard Wi-Fi and mobile connectivity to passengers across its six-continent network and on 98% of its fleet.



David Lavorel, CEO, SITAONAIR, said: We are delighted to share this major inflight connectivity milestone with Emirates. With 43% of global airlines perceiving an enhanced passenger experience as by far the connected aircrafts biggest benefit, SITAONAIR and our long-standing customer is rising to the challenge of meeting passengers desire to stay connected.



As the industry champions of an open platforms approach, we believe all airlines can be empowered to achieve their inflight connectivity ambitions, whatever their fleet or pre-existing avionics. This moment illustrates the success of this strategy, and SITAONAIRs ability to support airlines of all sizes to achieve integrated nose-to-tail connectivity, no matter their technological starting point. This milestone, achieved across the diverse Emirates fleet, validates our approach.Jet Aviation and Hawker Pacific have announced that Jet Aviation has entered into a binding agreement to acquire Hawker Pacific, a leading provider of integrated aviation solutions across Asia Pacific and the Middle East, for US$250 million.

The acquisition of Hawker Pacific represents a significant step in expanding our footprint, capability and customer offer across Asia Pacific and the Middle East, said Rob Smith, president of Jet Aviation. Hawker Pacific has a wide range of services including Civil MRO, Fleet Services, FBO Network and Aircraft Sales, enabling Jet Aviation to further expand its current portfolio, enter new markets, and reinforce the companys position as one of the worlds leading business aviation service providers.

Alan Smith, CEO of Hawker Pacific said: We believe the companys acquisition by Jet Aviation represents an excellent outcome for Hawker Pacifics investors, employees and customers. It builds on our strong values and passion for exceeding our customers expectations and I,on behalf of the management, am confident that the combination of the two companies will create a clear leader in the aviation space.Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia) is to be the launch customer of a new high speed connectivity system launched at the Aircraft Interiors show in Hamburg last night.



The system is called UON and was announced by Taqnia Space Company at AIX. The companys CEO Abdullah Alosaimi, said the system meant all airlines around the world will be able to offer their passengers high-throughput connectivity services that are currently provided in a limited scale by few airlines in North America."

TAqnia is part of the Saudi Arabian Development and Investment Company (SADIC) and worked in collaboration with French satellite operator Eutelsat, Japenese aerospace designer Jamco, US satellite technology company Idirect, content deliverers Axinom and one of the worlds major connectivity specialists SITAONAIR.

According to Alosaimi, UON will give passengers high-speed Internet access across the continents and oceans. Saudia passeners on both long and short haul flights will see the system begin rolled out over the next three months. UON gives passengers access to the Internet, telephone and live TV streaming services using their own mobile devices with all services billed using a simple, easy-to-use payment system.

The international partners in the new UON system launcehd at AIX Hamburg yesterday

Skorba is a small village in the vicinity of Ptuj, Slovenia's oldest town. Once a typical village with a clustered settlement pattern, the passage of years and the proximity of the city caused it to grow out of turn, transforming it into a commuter suburb without a clear structure. The organic growth resulted in a markedly heterogeneous development organised along the access roads, with no public surface layout and without a clearly legible village centre.

Consequently, the first consideration following the decision to erect a village chapel was how to use this opportunity to also lay out a central event and socialising space for the villagers. The site for the new village centre was carefully chosen: the plot once contained the village stream source, and this is also the point where the one river terrace bank rises upwards to the other one. The village centre is sited close to the community centre building, at the crossroads of the main paths through the village.

In discussing the new village centre Skorba, it is remarkable that the entire project, from the initial idea to completion, was driven by the initiative of the inhabitants themselves. They took an active part in raising the funds to purchase the plot as well as in the construction, which required many hours of voluntary work by the villagers. All of this had to be taken into account when drafting the project. Therefore, the design does not hinge upon the perfection of every detail and does not feature any high-tech solutions. Instead, it aims to establish an appropriate relationship with its surroundings and a sufficiently bold appearance chiefly by means of a clearly legible volumetric design and simple materiality.

The first step in defining the space is the siting of the triangular surface of the new square in the centre of the vacant plot. The paved surface, clearly separate from the grassy surroundings, defines the future socialising space. The surface then employs a narrow access path to connect to the road passing by. The central part, created by the section of the geometries of both paved surfaces, is given a slight dip, which shelters the event space from the impacts of the surroundings and directs all users' gazes towards the centre. Next, the volumes of the chapel and the grandstands are raised to create an introverted village square. The final device in designing the new village square is the truncation of the raised volumes by means of a uniform plane which creates an impression of a virtual roof and completes the structure's form.

The entire structure is made of a uniform material - white concrete. The combination of simple materiality and emphasised volumes creates an attractive spatial element, its appearance sufficiently bold to drown the heterogeneous structure of the surroundings and mark the significance of the area.

size 300 m2

gross floor area 300 m2

site 1.430 m2

footprint 300 m2

cost 120.000 EUR

client Hajdina Municipality

location Skorba, Slovenia

coordinates 46o25'13,34''N 15o50'08,51''E

architecture ENOTA

project team Dean Lah, Milan Tomac, Nebojsa Vertovsek, Alja Cerne Mazalin, Nusa Zavrsnik Silec, Tjaz Bauer, Polona Ruparcic

collaborators Elea iC (structural engineering)

photo Miran KambicHonda India has reduced the prices of the CBR1000RR and the CBR1000RR SP by 2.01 lakh and Rs 2.54 lakh.

Honda India has reduced the prices of the CBR1000RR and the CBR1000RR SP by 2.01 lakh and Rs 2.54 lakh and they now retail at Rs 14.78 lakh and Rs 18.68 lakh.

Hondas litre-class offerings get more affordable thanks to the recent revision in custom duties

Planning to buy a Honda superbike? You are in luck. Honda India has reduced the prices of the CBR1000RR and the CBR1000RR SP by 2.01 lakh and Rs 2.54 lakh and they now retail at Rs 14.78 lakh and Rs 18.68 lakh (all prices ex-showroom Mumbai), respectively. This price drop is a result of the reduction in import duties on CBU (completely built unit) imports in the country.

Launched in April 2017 to commemorate 25 years of Honda, over 90 per cent of the components of the new CBR are revised or all-new. For starters, the kerb weight has now been reduced by a massive 15kg, bringing it down to 195kg. This has helped in increasing the power-to-weight ratio by 14 per cent. Powering both motorcycles is a 999cc, inline 4-cylinder engine. It now produces 191PS of power (bumped up by 11PS) and 115Nm of torque.

The Fireblade features a 5-axis IMU (inertial measurement unit) which handles the ABS, 9-level traction control, ride-by-wire, rear lift control and wheelie control. It also gets three different TFT display modes (Street, Circuit and Mechanic), three levels of engine braking control and five riding modes (two customisable). Suspension duties on the standard CBR100RR are handled by Showa 43mm Big Piston Fork at the front and a monoshock unit at the back, while braking is offered by Tokico radially mounted brake calipers.

Along with the addition of the aforementioned goodies, the premium 'SP' variant also gets a quickshifter (auto blip on downshifts), Ohlins 43mm USD forks at the front, an Ohlins monoshock unit at the rear and a lithium-ion battery, which is 50 per cent lighter than a conventional battery. The top-spec Fireblade gets Brembo brakes as standard. Both versions come with all-LED lighting and a TFT instrument cluster.

With the revised prices, the Honda CBR1000RR and the CBR1000RR SP have now become some of the most affordable litre-class superbikes in India. Kawasaki has also announced a price cut on their offerings.

Source: ZigWheels.comA joint venture company would be floated over the next few months.

Boeing India, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and Mahindra Defence Systems on Thursday entered into an agreement to manufacture fighter aircraft F/A-18 Super Hornet in the country. (Photo: PTI)

Chennai: Boeing India, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and Mahindra Defence Systems on Thursday entered into an agreement to manufacture fighter aircraft F/A-18 Super Hornet in the country.

Boeing India, President, Pratyush Kumar, HAL Chairman and Managing Director, T Suvarna Raju and Mahindra Defence Systems, Chairman, S P Shukla exchanged a 'Memorandum of Agreement for 'Make in India fighter' at the on-going 'DefExpo' near here.

Stating that the discussions on the tie-up have been going on for the last 18 months, Kumar said, "The intent of the government and the MoD (Ministry of Defence) for a strategic partnership is to produce 'Make in India' aircraft."

"We scanned across length and breadth of the country. We discussed with over 400 suppliers." Kumar told reporters.

"Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd is the only company that manufactures combat fighters, while Mahindra Defence is the only company that manufactures small commercial planes.It is exciting for us," he said.

To a query, Kumar said a joint venture company would be floated over the next few months and added that investments under the agreement will be "huge."

He however declined to share any figures on the investments to be made. On the agreement, Mahindra Defence Systems, Chairman, S P Shukla said, "This is a combination.. we have three companies that will bring their expertise, domain knowledge and flavour to the alliance."

Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, Chairman and Managing Director, T Suvarna Raju said, under the agreement the existing facilities may be used for manufacturing the fighter aircraft or if required may set up a facility.

The Super Hornet fighter aircraft does not only have a low acquisition cost, but it costs less per flight hour to operate than a tactical aicraft, a company statement said

The F/A-18 Super Hornet will outpace threats, bolster defence capabilities and make India stronger for decades to come, it said.

The partnership would also bring Boeing, HAL and Mahindra Defence System global scale and supply chain, best-in-industry precision manufacturing processes as well as unrivaled experience in designing and optimising aerospace production, the release added.

The 'DefExpo' was formally inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Thiruvidanthai, about 40kms from here today.Ola continues to receive positive response from driver-partners with over 15,000 registrations across Australia.

The companies are already locked in an intense battle for leadership in the Indian market.

New Delhi: Indian cab hailing firm Ola on Thursday said it has started operations in Melbourne, expanding its services in the Australian market. In February, the company had kick-started its services in Australia with Perth.

In January, the SoftBank-backed company had announced its plans to foray into the Australian market Ola continues to receive positive response from driver-partners with over 15,000 registrations across Australia, the company said in a statement.

Ola offers driver-partners in Australia 7.5 per cent introductory commission rate and daily payments, helping them earn more money, it added.

We've been humbled by the response from passengers and drivers alike in Perth and Sydney, and are incredibly excited about launching Ola in Melbourne, Ola Vice President (Head of International) Chandra Nath said.

The company said it is working with local stakeholders to continue its rollout in Australia, with future launch cities including Brisbane and the Gold Coast, Canberra, Adelaide, Darwin and Hobart.

Ola's main competitor in the Australian market is Uber. Interestingly, SoftBank is also an investor in Uber. Uber launched its operations in Australia in 2012 and currently operates in 19 Australian cities including the major cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra.

The companies are already locked in an intense battle for leadership in the Indian market.

They compete not only in the ride-sharing space in India but also food delivery, with Ola acquiring Foodpanda's India business. US-based Uber runs on-demand food delivery app UberEATs in select Indian cities.The PNB in February detected the multi-crore scam, wherein Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi had allegedly cheated the bank.

CBI on Wednesday questioned two Canara Bank officials from the Bahrain branch and one Bank of India official.

New Delhi: In the latest development in the multi-crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam case, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday questioned two Canara Bank officials from the Bahrain branch and one Bank of India official from the Antwerp branch in Belgium.

On a related note, the CBI on Sunday had issued a Non-Bailable Warrant (NBW) against celebrity jeweller Nirav Modi and his uncle and business partner, Mehul Choksi, in connection with the PNB scam.

The PNB in February detected the multi-crore scam, wherein Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi had allegedly cheated the bank to the tune of Rs. 114 billion, with the purported involvement of a few employees of the bank.

The scam, which reportedly began in 2011, was detected in the third week of January this year, after which the PNB officials reported it to the concerned agencies.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) registered a money laundering case against Modi and others on the basis of a CBI First Information Report (FIR).

Currently, the probe agencies are investigating the matter and have also seized many properties of both Modi and Choksi.Reserve Bank of India imposed monetary penalty worth Rs 3 crore on IDBI Bank for not complying with the norms.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) imposed monetary penalty worth Rs 3 crore on IDBI Bank for not complying with the outlined norms related to reporting of bad loans.

Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) imposed monetary penalty worth Rs 3 crore on IDBI Bank for not complying with the outlined norms related to reporting of bad loans.

In an official notice, the RBI said the penalty was imposed on account of non-compliance with the directions issued on Income Recognition and Asset Classification (IRAC) norms.

"This penalty has been imposed in exercise of powers vested in the RBI under the provisions of Section 47A(1)(c) read with Section 46(4)(i) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, taking into account failure of the bank to adhere to the aforesaid directions issued by the RBI," the notice read.

Furthermore, the central bank stated that this action is based on deficiencies in regulatory compliance, and not intended to pronounce upon the validity of any transaction or agreement entered into by the bank with its customers.

In May last year, the RBI had invoked prompt corrective action (PCA) on the state-owned Bank due to its bad loans and return on assets (ROA).

However, IDBI in a regulatory filing had stated that the action would not have any material impact on the performance of the bank, adding that it would contribute to improving internal monitoring and improve its activities.

On a related note, the RBI in May imposed a penalty of Rs 589 million on ICICI Bank Limited for non-compliance with directions issued on direct sale of securities from its Held to Maturity (HTM) portfolio and specified disclosure in this regard.Prabhudheva looks forward to the release of 'Mercury', a silent thriller in which he plays an antagonist.

Mumbai: Director Prabhudeva says it is a myth that only those who play challenging roles are appreciated by the audience.

The key is to entertain the viewers and win their hearts, he says.

"If you are playing a hero you have to connect with the audience. It is not that only if you do challenging roles then people will like you. You don't have to be a NASA scientist to show your acting (skills)," Prabhudeva told PTI.

"Not all those who play tough roles are given the best actor awards, those who manage to entertain the audience also get recognition."

After the success of his Tamil film "Devi", Prabhudeva says he was given similar offers but he prefers directing over acting.

"I like both (acting and directing) as today there are a lot of exciting opportunities for me as an actor. But I love directing more than acting," he says.

Prabhudeva says whether he is working as an actor or as a director, he tries to give his hundred per cent to his craft.

"Once you become popular, it doesn't mean you let go of things. Rather you have to work harder and make sure that you maintain the name that you have made for yourself in the industry. I am in that position that I can do things I like and want to experiment. Today I am an improved actor," he says.

Other than films, Prabhudeva says, he knows nothing.

"In the initial days, I wanted to make a name for myself here. Then I went after money and did some films. Today, I do films for passion," he says.

He is looking forward to the release of "Mercury", a silent thriller in which he plays an antagonist.

"This film looks tough but I never felt it was tough as the director was very good. If I would have made this film, I would not have been able to finish it. I would not have been able to do justice," he says.

"The genre is new, I wonder how you can make a film without dialogues. When you see the film, you will never feel it is a silent film."

Being a director himself, Prabhudeva says he never interferes with the direction process of another person.

"...When I act, I just act, I hear the story and listen to the instructions of the director. At times, I show another take, if the directors like it, they retain it, even if they don't, I am ok," he says.

The film is set to release this Friday.The actress flew down to New Delhi to invite PM Modi for a conference on maternal and child health.

Actress Priyanka Chopra on Wednesday met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi to invite him to an upcoming conference of Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH). She was part of a delegation that included Union health minister J.P. Nadda and former President of Chile and incoming chair of PMNCH Board Michelle Bachelet.

The actress even posted this picture on Instagram saying, Very grateful to the honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi to meet me, Shri J.P. Nadda (Indian Health Minister) and Mrs. Michelle Bachelet, (former President of Chile, incoming #PMNCH Chair) in regards to being a patron for the Partners Forum which is being held in New Delhi in December this year. The aim is very important  the improvement and transformation of access to quality healthcare at every life stage for women, children and adolescents, in an effort to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030. (sic), she wrote.

This year, India will play host to the largest ever Partners Forum, with more than 1,200 delegates from more than 92 countries. It was an insightful, positive conversation, which was very heartening and inspiring because of the personal commitment of everyone at the meeting. We covered a lot of ground from the various efforts being taken by individual countries & partners to building a collective environment that could help propel the change we seek for a better world. We started something important today and I am looking forward to what is being set in motion (sic), she further wrote.

Priyanka, who was shooting in Ireland until a couple of days back, flew down to Delhi only for this UNICEF event. At the event she discussed how one could improve the health of women, children and adolescents.Sonakshis role in Race 3 will be akin to what Salman did in her movie Welcome to New York.

Around 10 per cent of Race 3 is yet to be shot after the Abu Dhabi schedule has been canned and over. And now Salman is due to shoot for the rest of the film in India, after the Jodhpur Sessions Court convicted him in the black buck poaching case and sentenced him to five years imprisonment. Salman and the team of Race 3 also had a closed-door meeting at producer Ramesh Tauranis office on April 9, where they discussed how to proceed with the film.

While Salman is keen on some changes in the film, hes also suggested Sonakshi Sinha do a cameo in the film. This would be akin to what Salman did in Sonas film Welcome to New York.

But thats not all.

Sonakshi is slated to do an item song and a few sequences, but she will be paired opposite Saqib Saleem in those sequences. The film will thus become bigger than what it already is, after Sonas inclusion, says a source.

Sonakshis spokesperson has offered no comments yet.

 Sanskriti MediaSC observed that in absence of robust data protection law it is very difficult to stop information surveillance and sharing of information.

A constitution bench of the Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AK Sikri, AM Khanwilkar, DY Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan is hearing a batch of petitions challenging the legal validity of Aadhaar law. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday expressed serious concern over the magnitude of information surveillance and said gold mine of information and Aadhaar data of 1.3 billion people are available for commercial purposes.

In the absence of a robust data protection law it is very difficult to stop such surveillance and sharing of information particularly by the data collecting and authentication entities, the court orally observed.

The court said, When we mean surveillance it is not real or physical surveillance but commercial surveillance.

A constitution bench of the Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AK Sikri, AM Khanwilkar, DY Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan is hearing a batch of petitions challenging the legal validity of Aadhaar law.

When senior counsel Rakesh Diwedi, appearing for UIDAI and Gujarat government was explaining the rationale of collecting Aadhaar data, Justice Chandrachud quipped, We are now in an area of information surveillance.

The amount of commercial surveillance going on in this country is enormous. Today we stand on a weal track. We dont have a data protection law. You are in the process of enacting such a law.

Justice Chandrachud said, Today commercial information of Aadhaar data which the requesting/authenticating entitles collect is itself a gold mine available for commercial purposes. Even little things we disclose for Aadhaar are available. Take the instance of Cambridge Analytica. The Facebook CEO Zuckerberg has given a statement before US Congress as to how peoples data is shared.

However, counsel Diwedi dispelled the apprehension that the data is being shared by the collecting entities and said these information cannot be shared.

Justice Chandrachud pointed out that the law says information can be further shared on prior consent. People invariably give this consent, which is in the form of a contract. He wondered as to how the government could prevent data from being shared when there is no mechanism to oversee the consent.

Counsel said individual data by itself has no value, unless the data of all the persons are aggregated.

Justice Chandrachud observed, Today all information in Whatsapp or Facebook are commercially sensitive. Why should somebody intrude on my privacy and keep a tap over your conversation when I share a message with my wife. Our concern is it will affect a vast number of populations and the future generation and how are we going to lay down a law.

The judge went on to observe, The concern is not about finger prints. Giving fingerprints for entry into the courtroom or getting access to something is per se not wrong. In South Africa even Judges have to give their fingerprints before they enter the court hall. The problem arises when fingerprints become a means of data for storing and authentication. Then it is liable for sharing by the collecting entities.

The CJI asked Diwedi to inform on April 17 as to how the Aadaar data will be protected and there is no sharing of information as mentioned by the UIDAI CEO.Randeep Singh Surjewala also alleged that the government had disrespected and degenerated the Parliament.

New Delhi: With Prime Minister Narendra Modi set to lead the BJPs day-long fast against Parliament logjam on Thursday, the Congress Party on Thursday described the ruling partys protest as a farce and said that Mr Modi should quit the government if he felt so helpless.

This is a farce of a fast by the Modi government. The BJP should apologise to the nation and hold a fast for disrupting Parliament for over 250 hours. The Lok Sabha, where the BJP has a majority, functioned for only one per cent of its time and the Rajya Sabha functioned for six per cent of its time, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala told the media.

Having sensed defeat, if the Prime Minister and his Cabinet fast, then how can this country run? If the Prime Minister feels so helpless that he has to fast then he should leave the government, he added.

Mr Surjewala also alleged that the government had disrespected and degenerated the Parliament.

The Congress said that the BJP should also apologise to the country for not revealing the details of the Rafale deal and thereby, compromising on issues of national security.

On Thursday, along with Mr Modi and Mr Shah, all BJP MPs will observe the day-long fast in their respective constituencies over disruptions during the Budget Session of the Parliament.

Mr Modi will carry on with his daily routine as usual, meeting officials and clearing files. He will also fly to Chennai to inaugurate the DefExpo.

Union minister like Ravi Shankar Prasad will observe the fast at Gardani Bagh in Patna, while minister for external affairs Sushma Swaraj will be in New Delhi. Culture minister Mahesh Sharma will be fasting in Noida.

Minister of home affairs Rajnath Singh, petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan and railway minister Piyush Goyal will observe the fast while attending to official work in Delhi, while Union health minister J.P. Nadda will be fasting in Varanasi.

The BJP had said in a statement that Mr Modi along with all party MPs will observe a fast on Thursday to reveal the undemocratic and anti-development face of the Congress party, which stalled the proceedings of Parliament during the Budget Session.

Meanwhile, the BJP high command has issued a diktat to its legislators, leaders and ministers to refrain from being seen or photographed eating at public places. The move comes after the Congress was embarrassed on Monday when a photograph of their leaders eating a sumptuous breakfast at a restaurant before sitting for the fast was widely circulated in social media.

Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee chief Ajay Maken, Arvinder Singh Lovely and Haroon Yusuf were photographed eating chhole bhature at Old Delhis Chaina Ram Sweets before heading for Rajghat for the day-long which had been called by the Congress to protest atrocities on dalits.Interestingly, Congress president Rahul Gandhi, during a one day fast for harmony on Monday, had called the Prime Minister as anti-dalit.

BJP president Amit Shah pays floral tribute to the statue of social reformer Jyotiba Phule on his birth anniversary in Lucknow on Wednesday. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath is also seen. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: Sensing unease within dalits, the BJP has decided to reach out to the community with a series of programmes. The Saffron party on Wednesday kicked off a series of programmes aimed at reaching out to dalits and backward sections of society with Prime Minister Narendra Modi asserting that his government is working to realise the visions of dalit icon Bhimrao Ambedkar and social reformer Jyotiba Phule.

Interestingly, Congress president Rahul Gandhi, during a one day fast for harmony on Monday, had called the Prime Minister as anti-dalit. Trying to counter the allegation of the Congress, the BJP observed the birth anniversary of Phule, who is venerated especially by dalits and backwards for his relentless struggle for social reforms, as Samta Diwas (equality day) on Wednesday. It will launch the gram swaraj campaign on Ambedkars birth anniversary on April 14.

Mr Modi, in an audio conference call, told the party leaders in state legislatures and Parliament that his government had been striving to realise the dreams of Mahamta Gandhi, Ambedkar and Phule of empowering villages. The gram swaraj exercise, which will continue till May 5, will be aimed at fulfilling the dreams of these stalwarts, he said, asking the partys representatives to fan out in villages to ensure that people there get benefits of government schemes, an official statement said.

April 20, 24 and 28 will be observed as Ujjwala Diwas, Panchayati Raj Diwas and Gram Shakti Diwas respectively to highlight various government schemes.Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in London in the third week of April to attend the Commonwealth heads of government meeting.

New Delhi: India is set to sign an agreement with the United Kingdom and Ireland on the return of illegal migrants. The Union Cabinet, which met on Wednesday morning, gave its approval to the MoU. The pact will facilitate visa-free travel for holders of diplomatic passports as well as liberalisation of visas for those travelling to the UK legally, an official statement said.

The agreement will help streamline the procedure of the return of nationals caught staying illegally in a specified timeframe. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in London in the third week of April to attend the Commonwealth heads of government meeting.

The Cabinet also approved the revision of the pay and allowances of lieutenant-governors of Union territories, bringing these at par with secretaries to the Government of India. The pay and allowances of L-Gs will go up with effect from January 1, 2016 from the existing Rs 80,000 per month to Rs 2,25,000 per month.The Calcutta High Court has imposed cost of Rs 5 lakh on BJP for misleading the court.

The high court has directed the state election commission to file detailed status report by Monday, April 16. (Photo: File)

Kolkata: While staying the election process, Justice Subrata Talukdar also sought from the State Election Commission (SEC) by Monday, April 16, a comprehensive status report on the poll process, detailing the number of nominations filed and the percentage of nominations rejected, amongst other information.

The court said it would hear on April 16 the pleas challenging the SEC's decision to withdraw its April 9 notification, which had extended the date for filing nominations by a day.

Justice Talukdar had on April 10 stayed the withdrawal of SEC's April 9 notification, directing the Commission to treat its order of cancellation as kept in abeyance.

Justice Talukdar also imposed a cost of Rs five lakh on the BJP for misrepresentation. He held that the BJP had moved both the high court and the Supreme Court on similar pleas and likened its conduct to "forum hopping".

The apex court had on directed the BJP to approach the Calcutta High Court with its grievances over the deadline for filing of nominations for the panchayat polls in West Bengal. Apart from the BJP, the CPI(M) and the Congress, too has moved the high court challenging the SEC's decision.Taking to his Twitter handle, the Makkal Needhi Maiam Chief urged PM Modi to deliver justice to the people of Tamil Nadu.

Kamal Haasan asked Modi to follow the Supreme Court judgement, and also posted an open letter to the Prime minister. (Photo: File)

Chennai: Actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan on Thursday recorded an open message for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking that justice be delivered to Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery water dispute.

Taking to his Twitter handle, the Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) Chief said, "Sir, I am sure you are aware of the crisis that is gripping Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery water. I believe, from your past experience, you could easily deliver justice in the case of Narmada River Water Board."

Haasan further said, people of the state believe that there is a delay in the Cauvery water issue because of the upcoming elections in Karnataka that are scheduled to take place on May 12.

"I want this belief to be dispelled. People are more important than elections," he added.

Also Read: Modi Go Back: Black flags greet PM in Chennai over Cauvery row

Haasan asked Modi to follow the Supreme Court judgement, and also posted an open letter to the Prime minister, in which he wrote, "I am sure you will fulfil your duty towards the people and farmers of Tamil Nadu by constituting the Cauvery water Management Board immediately."

On February 16, the court had ordered the Central government to set up the Cauvery water Management Board (CMB) and Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC) within six weeks, in regards to the Cauvery River water dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

The Centre's failure to constitute CMB led to various protests in Tamil Nadu. Earlier today, opposition parties held a black flag protest against the Prime Minister's visit to the city without constituting the CMB.The counsel had argued that there was a lack of clarity in the law that the woman has to give her consent to the marriage.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to annul a 26-year-old girls marriage solely on the grounds that it was performed without her consent, but directed the Delhi police to grant her protection from her family as she feared honour killing.

The court was told the girls marriage was performed at Gulbarga in Karnataka on March 14 this year without her consent into a politicians family. As she refused to live with her husband, she faced a threat to her life from her family and she had come to Delhi and was staying in the custody of the Delhi Commission for Women.

A three-judge bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.M. Kanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud told senior counsel Indira Jaising, who argued for the girl, that under Hindu law a marriage cannot be annulled for the lack of consent. The petitioner would have to seek remedy in a civil court for divorce, and lack of consent can be a ground for seeking divorce, which is based on facts, the CJI observed.

The bench, while restricting the scope of the petition to providing security, asked the Delhi police to provide her protection during her stay, and asked police officers to serve a copy of the petition to the girls parents, brother and husband for their response.

Referring to the plea by petitioner X (name withheld by the court) that there should be a declaration from the court that a marriage performed without consent was invalid, the CJI noted that any marriage performed with consent obtained by coercion or force or fraud can be a ground for divorce. It cannot be a ground for annulment of marriage and the provision will not become ultra vires.

The CJI, citing the love jihad Hadiya ruling delivered on Monday, told the counsel: Only recently we have held that the Kerala high court entertaining a writ petition cannot annul a marriage. While so, how can we entertain your prayer? We can only grant police protection.

Justice Chandrachud noted that once the law says that if consent is obtained by coercion the marriage becomes void, it is implicit that there must be consent for a marriage. We cant declare a provision unconstitutional merely because you say you did not give consent to the marriage, he said.

The counsel had argued that there was a lack of clarity in the law that the woman has to give her consent to the marriage and the court should clarify this provision. She noted that even prior to the marriage, both the bridegroom and her family were informed that she was not consenting to the marriage. On the date of marriage, she sent SMSes to the additional superintendent of police seeking his intervention. Though the police came, she was threatened by the family not to oppose the marriage. She came out of the matrimonial home within three days of marriage and had taken shelter in Delhi, the counsel submitted.

The CJI told the counsel: If you (petitioner) dont want to go to Bengaluru to stay with your family, nobody can compel you. The court will not be an impediment for her to stay in Delhi... let her go wherever she wants to go.

The petitioner said her fundamental right to choose her life partner had been brazenly trampled upon by her family members, who in connivance with each other had coerced, threatened, blackmailed, harassed, pressured, abused, compelled and tricked her into getting married to Respondent No. 6 (name withheld), against her wishes and free consent.

The petitioner also challenged the constitutional validity of Sections 5(ii) and 7 of Hindu Marriage Act 1955, in as much as valid consent is absent, and the same are in violation of Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution, arbitrary and discriminatory in nature. The petitioner said she had escaped from the clutches of her abusive family in Karnataka and had reached Delhi. She sought a direction to the authorities to provide her adequate security in order to safeguard her life, liberty and limb, which was under threat from her own family members, who are politically active in Karnataka. She said she feared that she might become a victim of honour killing as she wanted to get married to a person outside her caste. The bench posted the matter for further hearing on May 4.Justice Kurian alleges government sitting on Collegiums recommendations on two appointments.

In his letter, Justice Kurian Joseph wrote 'history will not pardon us' if the top court did not respond to the government sitting on the Collegiums recommendation of elevating a senior judge and a senior advocate to the top court. (Photo: PTI)

Mumbai: Concerned with the delay by the government in appointing two senior judges to the Supreme Court, top judge Justice Kurian Joseph has written to Chief Justice Dipak Misra saying the very life and existence of the apex court was under threat.

Justice Kurian wrote history will not pardon us if the top court did not respond to the government sitting on the Collegiums recommendation of elevating a senior judge and a senior advocate to the top court.

The Collegium had recommended in February that senior advocate Indu Malhotra and Chief Justice of Uttarakhand KM Joseph be elected judges to the Supreme Court.

In his appeal, Justice Kurian said: It is the first time in the history of this court where nothing is known as to what has happened to a recommendation after three months.

He appealed that the Chief Justice set up a seven-member bench of senior judges to suo motu take up the matter of this delay, a report in The Indian Expresssaid.

The report said Justice Kurian has demanded urgent intervention by the CJI, saying if there is no normal delivery on completion of the gestation period, what is urgently done is a caesarean section. Unless such a surgical intervention is made at an appropriate time, the child in the womb dies.

Justice Kurian has sent the letter to the other 22 Supreme Court judges. He has said: Government owes a duty to take a call on the recommendation as soon as the same is sent by the Collegium. Failure to discharge their duty by sitting over on the recommendations of the Collegium doing nothing, in administrative law, is abuse of power.

Justice Kurian warned that the judiciary should be independent of the Executive. He wrote: More than anything else, it sends a wrong message which is loud and clear to all judges down the line not to cause any displeasure to the Executive lest they should suffer. Is this not a threat to the independence of the judiciary?

If this demand is accepted, it would mean that seven senior-most SC judges could pass an order asking the government to decide on the pending recommendations of the Collegium.Cleanliness and health are two issues that more or less affect each area and thus it has become a very broad topic.

Lucknow: Regarding the concept of fast development and the welfare of human life in all the countries of the world, the United Nations has set 17 targets to achieve it by 2030. The ultimate goal is to create a global partnership for sustainable development and for this the government, the private sector and civil society organisations have a proposal to work together. The United Nations calls it a global partnership. It is true that only the government and government resources cannot be relied upon to meet the needs of fast growing population, but the other aspect of this truth is that there are areas like education and health which are developed in the private sector. By abandoning trust, their continuous exploitation begins with the continuous development of citizens.

The basic necessities of human life not only include roti, kapda aur makaan (food, clothes and housing), but today education, cleanliness, health and clean drinking water have also been included. Cleanliness and health are two issues that more or less affect each area and thus it has become a very broad topic. Similarly water is not just for drinking and bathing, but today it has become an industry, in which agriculture, horticulture and industry have also been absorbed. For the overall and rapid development of all these, the United Nations has stressed on creating a structured system alongside economic cooperation, including finance, technical, capacity building, business and systematic issues like policy and institutional subjects.

Whenever there is talk of development and systems, we see that there are many countries in the world that are financially prosperous, but they are far behind in the name of development, because that is not a priority of the government. They can be named, especially the oil producing countries. The United States has been the dominant United Nations organisation since its inception, because it provides the highest financial aid (22 per cent). While Indias contribution has only been 0.73 per cent. This is the reason that the American influence on the UNs style of functioning and policy remains direct.

Regarding financial resources under its target chapter, the UN says that with international help domestic resources of the countries should be further strengthened so that their domestic capacity of their tax and other revenue collections could be developed. In India the tax system has been improved by taking a revolutionary step in the development of domestic resources under which a simple and uniform tax has been introduced called Goods and Services Tax. The UN urges the developed countries to continue to cooperate with their promises of providing funds so that the developing countries can be helped.

According to the guidelines of the UN, the Government of India has worked very fast in the field of renewable energy and provided adequate funding, resources and international cooperation for its rapid development. The government aims to get 150 GW of power from renewable energy by 2022. Of course, this will not only be an important achievement, but India will have a special contribution in achieving the goal of sustainable development. On this one side, where dependence on coal will be reduced, Indias commitment to clean the environment will also prove. According to another directive from the UN, one major step of the government is to change the policy of FDI. It is also a part of UNs development programmes.

Cooperation in regional engagement and skill development is also an agenda of the UN. In this direction also India has done commendable work. Launching the South Asia Satellite, India is sharing its space mission-related achievements with neighbouring countries  Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Maldives and Sri Lanka.

The South Asia Cooperative Environment Programme created for environmental protection was established in 1982 by eight South Asian countries. These countries are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives and India. Apart from this, two departments of the Government of India  Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) and Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) coordinate with each other to help fishermen and others working at sea. Similarly, the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO), an international organisation established in the year 1921 which India is a member country along with 87 countries, provides for the protection of the oceans and preparation of surveys and charts, etc, for the coastal countries.

This is not the first time that India has been pushing for global partnership. Earlier, in many international forums, India has been calling for a global partnership on a new level to reliably strengthen weak economic growth through long-term investment and business growth in key areas. Under this situation, a new global partnership is needed to promote long-term investment in important areas like transport, agriculture, energy, and infrastructure and communication technology. But for the success of the goal of sustainable development, improvement in the infrastructure of rural areas is important so that villagers can easily reach the global market, because real India resides in the village.

 Charkha FeaturesAccording to media reports recently, the three men hail from Kangra district and were working for a firm based in Africa.

New Delhi: The government on Wednesday said it had secured the release of three Indian nationals hailing from Himachal Pradesh working in the Merchant Navy who had been abducted by Nigerian pirates last month.

External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj tweeted, We have secured the release of three Indian nationals Sushil Kumar, Pankaj Kumar and Ajay Kumar  all from Himachal Pradesh who were abducted in Nigeria. I appreciate the efforts of Shri B.N.Reddy Indian High Commissioner in Nigeria.

According to media reports recently, the three men hail from Kangra district and were working for a firm based in Africa. According to these reports, one of the man had called up his family last month through a satellite phone to inform them that he had been kidnapped along with the two other men.

Following this, the family apparently contacted the company-owner who informed them that the pirates were seeking a ransom and that he was negotiating with them.

The family-members then appealed to the Government to help them. But details of how the government managed to secure the release of the three men are so far unclear.One of the 6 men, accused of raping minor, was 'invited' to come all the way from Meerut to 'satisfy his lust', police have told a court.

The body of 8-year-old Asifa was found in the forests near her village on January 17. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: In a shocking incident, an eight-year-old girl, who had gone to graze her horses in the nearby forests to her home on January 10, was reportedly gangraped repeatedly inside a village temple premises, kept sedated for hours and then raped again before being killed in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua by six men.

One of the six men, accused of raping the minor, was "invited" to come all the way from Meerut to "satisfy his lust", the police have told a court.

According to a police charge-sheet, the child was held captive for a week in January and was strangled and then hit twice with a large stone by the rapists just to be sure that she was dead.

The 15-page chargesheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir Police in the chief judicial magistrates court on Monday reveal that the kidnapping, rape and killing of the minor girl of the Bakherwal community at the Rassana area of Kathua was part of a planned, chilling strategy to instill fear and drive the nomadic tribe out of the region.

Sanji Ram, the caretaker of the "Devisthan" (small temple), is listed as the main conspirator behind the crime that has left the nation shocked at the sheer depravity of it.

Sanji Ram was allegedly joined by special police officers Deepak Khajuria and Surender Verma, friend Parvesh Kumar or Mannu, Sanji Ram's underage nephew and Sanji Ram's son Vishal Jangotra or "Shamma".

The chargesheet further elaborates that on January 11, Sanji Ram's nephew called up his cousin Vishal Jangotra and asked him to return from Meerut, where he was studying, if he wanted to "satisfy his lust".

Just before the girl was killed in the forests, Deepak Khajuria, a Special Police Officer, told the accused to wait as "he wanted to rape her before she is killed". The girl was once again gang-raped before her head was bashed in.

"The juvenile (Sanji Ram's nephew) hit the girl twice with a stone on her head and later dumped her body in the forest after their plan to throw the body in a canal could not materialise due to the failure to arrange a vehicle," the chargesheet mentioned. The chargesheet also names two more policemen - head constable Tilak Raj and sub-inspector Anand Dutta - who allegedly took Rs 4 lakh from Sanji Ram and destroyed crucial evidence.

The child's body was found in the forests near her village on January 17.

The girl went missing on January 10 while grazing horses in the forest. Investigators said the accused men kidnapped her after pretending to help her find her horses.

A day later, her parents went to the temple and asked Sanji Ram about their daughters whereabouts. He said she may have gone to a relative's house. According to the chargesheet, Sanji Ram gave the girl sedatives while holding her at the Devisthan.

His nephew, a school dropout, turned out to be the main player in the kidnapping and murder. He raped the minor girl repeatedly along with his cousin and police officer Khajuria, says the chargesheet.

The nephew's medical report shows he is not underage but it is yet to be accepted by the court.

The chargesheet further revealed, Khajuria incited the juvenile to kidnap the girl, promising to help him cheat and pass his exams in return. Subsequently, he shared the plan, worked out by Sanji Ram and Khajuria, with Parvesh Kumar alias 'Mannu', his close friend and asked for the juvenile's help in executing the plan.

Vishal Jangotra reached Kathua after his cousin's call and also raped the sedated girl along with two of the accused.

Sanji Ram and his nephew performed the usual temple rituals to avoid suspicion.

It was on Sanji Ram's direction that the child was removed from the temple and taken to a culvert in the forest where the accused planned to kill her.

On January 23, about a week after the body was discovered, the government handed over the case to the Crime Branch, which formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT).

The police learnt that in the first week of January, Sanji Ram decided to act on his plan to dislodge the Bakherwal community; it had been brewing in his mind. "He made the accused Deepak Khajuria and his nephew part of the conspiracy and assigned them tasks separately and individually," the chargesheet said.

Sanji Ram surrendered on March 20 a day after his son was arrested from Meerut.

After the body was recovered, head constable Raj, who was aware of the conspiracy, met Sanji Ram and requested him to "hand over" one of the accused as there was too much anger among the Bakerwals. However, Sanji Ram paid Raj Rs 1 lakh.

The investigation explained in detail how the accused police officials washed the clothes of the girl before sending them to the forensic laboratory and planted false evidence.

Sanji Ram was against the Bakherwals living in the Rassana, Kootah and Dhamyal area and always kept on instigating people of his community against giving them land to graze.

(With inputs from agencies)The victim's family has appealed to SC that the earlier sentence of 3 years, given by Punjab and Haryana High Court, should be enhanced.

The incident dates back to December 27, 1988, when Sidhu allegedly hit one Gurnam Singh in an incident of road rage at Patiala, resulting in his death. (Photo: ANI)

New Delhi: The Punjab government on Thursday sought conviction of minister Navjot Singh Sidhu in a road rage case.

The lawyer appearing for the Punjab government told Supreme Court that the statement given by Sidhu denying his involvement in the case was false.

The incident dates back to December 27, 1988, when Sidhu had allegedly hit one Gurnam Singh, 65, in an incident of road rage at Patiala, Punjab, resulting in the death of Gurnam.

The trial court had acquitted Sidhu, whereas the Punjab and Haryana High Court reversed his acquittal, convicting him under Section 304 Part II, IPC, for culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

The victim's family has appealed to the Supreme Court that earlier imprisonment sentence of three years given by Punjab and Haryana High Court should be enhanced.

However, the Punjab government has appealed the apex court to uphold the three-year imprisonment.Rabri Devi and her Son Tejashwi Yadav also offered to return the security cover provided to them by the state government.

Patna: Hours after former Bihar chief minister Rabri Devis house was raided by the CBI, the Nitish Kumar-led government in Bihar ordered the removal of security cover from her official residence on Tuesday.

Rabri Devi feels that the action was part of a conspiracy to kill her husband Lalu Yadav, who is currently serving jail term in connection with fodder scam cases.

This action prompted her to write a letter to Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar in which she said that the home ministry will be responsible if anything happens to me or my family.

Speaking on the issue, Rabri Devi told reporters, Laluji is very ill and has been admitted to AIIMS for treatment. But I dont know anything about his health condition, whether he is recovering or dying due to disease or which medicines are being given to him. Under such circumstances, how can I trust the government.

However, the state government officials and the ruling party defended the action, saying that the security cover was provided to Lalu Yadav, who enjoys Z category security.

The guards were asked to return as RJD chief Lalu Yadav is currently in jail, ADG HQ S.K. Singhal told reporters in Patna on Wednesday.

She added, If the government today decides to take away my official residence we are ready to vacate it.

Rabri Devi and her Son Tejashwi Yadav also offered to return the security cover provided to them by the state government.

It seems that the chief minister is concentrating more on the Opposition instead of doing some constructive work for the state. We can understand his concern and all of us including our legislators can even return our security cover, Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly Tejashwi Yadav said.The election to 13 seats of the Legislative Council will be held on April 26 and result will be declared the same day.

The SP holds the majority 61 seats in the 100-member UP Legislative Council, while the BSP has nine seats. The ruling party in the state, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has only 13 seats. (Photo: PTI | File)

Lucknow: The Samajwadi Party (SP) will be supporting its new ally, Bahujan Samaj Party's (BSP) candidate in the upcoming Legislative Council elections in Uttar Pradesh, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav announced on Wednesday.

The election to 13 seats of the Legislative Council will be held on April 26 and result will be declared the same day.

The SP holds the majority 61 seats in the 100-member UP Legislative Council, while the BSP has nine seats. The ruling party in the state, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has only 13 seats.

The SP and BSP that set aside their differences to ally during the bypolls for Lok Sabha seats of Gorakhpur and Phulpur, struck gold by defeating BJP in both the seats, the former being the home turf of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and a BJP stronghold.Supporters of the BJP MLA surrounded the SIT and shouted slogan in favour of the MLA.

Lucknow: Sangeeta Sengar, the wife of Kuldeep Sengar, the BJP MLA accused in the Unnao rape case, on Wednesday demanded that the rape victim and her uncle be made to take the narco test even as the SIT began its investigations in the case.

Ms Sengar, who is also the head of the zila panchayat in Unnao, threatened to commit suicide with her two daughters if her husband was proven guilty.

The rape victim also threatened to end her life if justice was not done. I fear a threat to my family and do not be surprised if we all get killed, she told reporters. On a day when the SIT team, headed by ADG Rajiv Krishna, reached Makhi village and recorded statements of the victim and her family for almost three hours, an audio clip of the rape victims 50-year-old father emerged in which he is heard saying that the MLAs brother Atul Sengar (now in jail) had beaten him up along with his security guards. The SIT said that it will take cognisance of the clips related to the case. Mr Krishna also said that the victims family would be provided full security.

They have a relative in Delhi. Now it is their decision if they want to live here in Unnao or in Delhi. We have come here to investigate. I will send the interim report to the state government by this evening. All the angles are being investigated. There is no pressure on the SIT. It is working independently, he said.

Supporters of the BJP MLA surrounded the SIT and shouted slogan in favour of the MLA. They claimed that Kuldeep Sengar was being framed in the case.

In Delhi, Rahul Gandhi, taking a swipe at the Prime Ministers proposed fast over the non-functioning of Parliament tweeted, The barbarism inflicted on a father seeking justice for his daughter in Uttar Pradesh has shamed humanity. Hope the prime minister will soon observe a fast over atrocities against women, failed law and order and increasing anarchy under the BJPs watch.

Sangeeta Sengar met UP DGP O.P. Singh on Wednesday morning. Talking to reporters after the meeting, she said that while her sympathies were with the victim, she was also confident that her husband was innocent.

I want that the girl and her uncle should be made to undergo narco test. Even my husband should be made to go through a similar test. If found guilty, I and my two daughters will end our lives, she said.

She also said that the victim had remained silent for almost nine months after the alleged incident and then suddenly decided to immolate herself.

The girl has not been able to give any evidence against my husband, and yet my husband has been termed as a rapist by the media. The girl has slapped rape charges in the past, too, on one boy in her village, she stated,

The MLAs wife said that a proper investigation should be done, and if the rape charges are found to be false, then the girl and her uncle should be imprisoned.

The rape victim had attempted self-immolation outside the chief ministers residence on Sunday. She claimed that she was raped by BJP MLA Kuldeep Sengar in June 2017 and the police was not taking action on her complaint.

Her father, who was arrested on April 4, died on Monday due to bleeding and perforation in his lower intestines (probably due to injury).

The Allahabad high court, meanwhile, took suo moto cognisance of the case and ordered that if the victims fathers body had not been cremated, the cremation should be stopped. However, the cremation of the body was done on Tuesday itself.

The court has sought a report on the case from the state government and will hear the case on Thursday.Allahabad High Court said it would pronounce its order on the Unnao rape case at 2 pm on Friday.

Allahabad: The Allahabad High Court on Thursday said that it would pronounce its order on the Unnao rape case at 2 pm on Friday, news agency ANI reported.

Earlier on the same day, the high court questioned the Uttar Pradesh government's approach in handling the Unnao rape case, asking its counsel why the accused BJP MLA, Kuldeep Singh Sengar was not arrested even after an FIR.

Read: Unnao: BJP MLA charged with rape, CBI will decide on arrest, says police

The court also asked the counsel to clarify whether or not the government would arrest the MLA, and sought a reply after lunch. It may be noted that the case has been handed over to the CBI, while a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of Lucknow zone police is also investigating it. When the court convened after the lunch, UP government said, "it needs time to collect evidence."

Advocate general Raghvendra Singh, on behalf of the Uttar Pradesh government said there is no evidence against the BJP MLA in the alleged rape case.

The government further told the court that action was taken according to the law. The court has taken suo motu cognisance of the case. On Thursday morning, Uttar Pradesh police said that CBI will decide whether BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, accused of raping the Unnao woman, will be arrested.

On Wednesday, the court had ordered a stay on the cremation of the body of the girls father. The body had, however, already been cremated. The girl has accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his brother of raping her in June 2017.

Also Read: Victim known for filing false cases: BJP MLA defends Unnao rape-accused

On Sunday, the rape victim tried to commit suicide outside Chief Minister Yogi Adityanaths house. Her father, who was in custody since April 4, after getting into a fight with the MLAs brother, died on Monday.

On Tuesday, the police arrested the MLAs brother Atul Sengar and four others for assaulting the man. The postmortem listed multiple abrasions near the abdomen, buttocks, thighs, above and below knee joints and arms  indicating that his death may have been caused by physical assault.

Late Wednesday, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, with a convoy of 20 vehicles full of supporters, went to the official residence of a senior police officer in Lucknow to claim that he neither raped the teenager nor had a role in her fathers death.

I just came here to prove that I have done no wrong and would be here anytime the police wants me, he told reporters, according to Hindustan Times.

The BJP MLA maintained that he was being framed, and told the police, When there is an arrest warrant, call me.Cong chief Rahul Gandhis statement came just hours after Union Minister VK Singh expressed disappointment over the incident.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi tweeted, 'What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?' (Photo: File)

New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday broke silence over the gangrape and murder of an eight-year-old girl from Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir and termed the gory incident as crime against humanity.

How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil?



What happened to Asifa at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished.



What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 12, 2018

Rahuls statement came just hours after Union Minister VK Singh expressed disappointment over the incident and said "we as humans" have failed the victim. However, he added that she will not be denied justice.

Earlier on Thursday, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, assured that the investigation into the rape-and-murder case is on a fast track and law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions.

The J&K polices Crime Branch earlier this week filed two separate chargesheets against eight accused in the case in a court at Kathua in spite of resistance by a group of local lawyers.

Earlier on Thursday, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, assured that the investigation into the rape-and-murder case is on a fast track and law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions.

The J&K polices Crime Branch earlier this week filed two separate chargesheets against eight accused in the case in a court at Kathua in spite of resistance by a group of local lawyers.

The chargesheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir Police said abduction, rape and killing of the girl was part of a carefully planned strategy to remove the minority community from the area.

Also Read: Kathua case: Meerut student went to J&K to rape 8-yr-old, says chargesheet

A special team of the crime branch has made a case of conspiracy, kidnapping, wrongful confinement, gang rape, murder and destruction of evidence against eight accused, which include: Sanjhi Ram, the suspected mastermind, who is a former revenue official and local strongman; his son Vishal Kumar, a college student; Ram's 16-year-old nephew who is the juvenile, and his friend Parvesh Kumar; Special Police Officers (SPOs) of Hiranagar police station Deepak Khajuria and Surinder Kumar; Sub Inspector of Hiranagar police station Anand Dutta, who was also investigating officer in the case, and Head Constable Tilak Raj.

The victim went missing while grazing horses in Rasana village of Hiranagar tehsil of Kathua district on January 17. A week later, her body was found in woods near her village. The alleged rape and murder of the minor evoked widespread outrage in J&K.

(With inputs from agencies)Justice Chandrachud questioned the proportionality of subjecting the entire population to the level of intrusion caused by Aadhaar linkage.

Linking of PAN with Aadhdar was intended to prevent income tax evasion, accumulation, circulation and use of blackmoney and money laundering by imposing a requirement by law for linking Aadhaar for opening bank accounts.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday questioned the Centre as to why it should insist on Aadhaar for all financial transactions as it stigmatises the entire population.

A five-judge bench of Chief justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.K. Sikri, A.M. Kanwilkar, D.Y. Cha-ndrachud and Ashok Bhushan also drew the attention of additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta, who appeared for UIDAI, to the petitioners allegation that such insistence creates a feeling among the public that all are under governments scanner for financial frauds, terrorism and tax evasion.

Refuting the allegation, Mr Mehta told the bench, We want to link Aadhaar not because we see people as criminals, we only want to protect them from crime. We want to link Aadhaar not because we see people as criminals, we only want to protect them from crime.

Drawing an analogy Mr Mehta said, We travel by air and all passengers are frisked... It is to done to protect us from hijacking.

Justice Sikri intervened and pointed out that frisking is done only for those who choose to travel. You cannot compare it with the Aadhaar situation where 128 crore people are mandatorily asked to link their mobile SIMs, bank accounts and PAN cards with their Aadhaar cards.

Mr Mehta said, When a measure is uniformly applied, it does not mean that everyone is guilty... There is no presumption of guilt on everyone.

Justice Chandrachud questioned the proportionality of subjecting the entire population to the level of intrusion caused by Aadhaar linkage. He said such levels of intrusion may be justified in combating terrorism or in a case of national security, but should the public be subjected to such intrusion of their privacy only to prevent any chances of tax evasion.

Mr Mehta said the court was right in thinking why the government should intrude into the privacy of the entire population merely to weed out a few crores, but when tax evasions amount to `33, 000 crore, it is a serious problem which Aadhaar linkage may curb.

Mr Mehta said the government is conscious of the criticism that the entire population is stigmatised as tax evaders and money launderers, but as a welfare state, the gravity of public concern against corruption, blackmoney and money laundering also has to be taken into consideration.

Linking of PAN with Aadhdar was intended to prevent income tax evasion, accumulation, circulation and use of blackmoney and money laundering by imposing a requirement by law for linking Aadhaar for opening bank accounts.Vaid termed the killing of four civilians including a 14-year-old boy in Kulgam on Wednesday as most unfortunate.

Srinagar: A day after four civilians were killed in security forces alleged firing on protesters during a fire fight with a group of holed up militants in Jammu and Kashmirs southern Kulgam district, the States police chief cautioned people that encounter sites were not marriage venues.

Encounter sites, said Director General of Police, Shesh Paul Vaid, are not the venue of marriage of terrorists to be flocked by youngsters as bullets do not differentiate between stone-pelters and militants.

He said as many as 55 civilians were killed in violence in Kashmir Valley in 2017, thirty of them during gun battles between militants and security forces. He added that so far this year 18 people have lost their lives in similar incidents.

Weve been repeatedly asking people not to go closer to the encounter sites. But they refuse to listen to our pleas and continue to push their lives in danger by relocating to encounter sites and even indulge in stone-pelting apparently to help militants to escape, he said.

He said that the district magistrates have already banned assembly of people at or around encounter sites through formal orders issued last year but, unfortunately, people have ignored it too.

He asserted that the bullets fired by security forces or the militants have a huge trajectory and that it is difficult to identify whose bullet hit the civilians at the encounter sites. He termed the killing of four civilians including a 14-year-old boy in Kulgam on Wednesday as most unfortunate.

Mr Vaid said, Nobody wants civilian deaths and the police and security forces are pained at such incidents. He said the civilians who throng the encounter sites are responsible for their deaths. They are responsible for their own deaths. They should not come to encounter sites, he said.

The locals have alleged that the security forces fired their rifles indiscriminately into protesters near the encounter site in Kulgam, killing and injuring civilians. They said that a fourth person was shot dead by the security forces at a place which is about half a kilometre away from Wani Mohalla locality in Kulgams Khudwani area where the encounter was taking place. The two Lashkar-e-Taiba militants who had been holed up in a private house and were engaged by the security forces in a gun battle escaped after killing an Army jawan and wounding two others.

Kashmir Valley and some parts of Chenab valley of Jammu region observed a shutdown on Thursday to mourn and protest the civilian killings in Kulgam. The call had been issued by Joint Resistance Leadership.There was no official comment from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) that is responsible for the maintenance of the Taj Mahal.

Visitors at Taj Mahal, where a minaret crashed down in Wednesdays thunderstorm, in Agra. (Photo: PTI)

Lucknow: In a freak storm that lashed Agra on Wednesday night, stone minarets of the south and royal gates of the Taj Mahal were damaged. One of the minarets at the south gate fell off and one of the small domes were also hit.

There was no official comment from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) that is responsible for the maintenance of the Taj Mahal.

According to reports, a 12-foot minaret with a metal finial, which is part of the main gate, also called Darwaza-e-Rauza, was blown away by high-speed winds.

It is from this royal gate that tourists get their first view of the 17th century monument of love.

Darwaza-a-Rauza, the main gateway, is a structure built of marble and strongly reminiscent of Mughal architecture. Its arches are marked by calligraphy.

Earlier in 2016, when one of the minarets of Taj Mahal was reportedly damaged, the ASI had blamed monkeys. Meanwhile, Wednesdays storm caused considerable damage to the city.

Several electricity poles and trees were uprooted in the storm which killed four persons in Mathura and one in Bijnore. The rain was accompanied by high-speed winds and hailstones.Director general of police O.P. Singh said that the case was being given to CBI to ensure transparency in investigations.

Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh police on Thursday registered an FIR against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged gangrape of a minor girl in Unnao, hours after chief minister Yogi Adityanath said that he was recommending a CBI inquiry into the rape case and the custodial death of the victims father.

A decision on whether to arrest the accused MLA from the ruling party would be taken by the CBI once it takes over the probe, principal secretary (home) Arvind Kumar said. He also said that the SIT would continue its work of gathering evidence till the CBI formally takes over the case.

Mr Kumar said that the government had decided to transfer the case to the CBI after lodging an FIR into the incidents of June 4, 2017, (alleged rape) and since the two other cases of April 3 (cross FIRs on the beating up of the victims father leading to his death) are connected, they would also be transferred to the CBI.

The announcement on handing over the case to CBI came hours after an FIR was registered against Mr Sengar, who represents the Unnao Sadar Assembly constituency, under IPC Sections 363 (kidnapping), 366 (kidnapping, abduction or inducing woman to compel her marriage), 376 (rape), 506 (criminal intimidation) and Section 3 and 4 (penetrative sexual assault) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO Act), 2012, at the Makhi police station.

According to Prakhar Singh, nephew of Mr Sengar, their family has welcomed the state governments move to hand over the probe to the CBI in this case and has also demanded that a narco test be conducted on both the rape survivor and Mr Sengar.

Director general of police O.P. Singh said that the case was being given to CBI to ensure transparency in investigations.

The government has also decided to extend security to the family of the 17-year-old girl, the DGP said.



The government decision to hand over the case to the CBI was taken after a special investigation team submitted its report to the chief minister late on Wednesday night.



An hour after the submission of the SIT report, TV channels started flashing news that Mr Sengar might be arrested soon. The MLA staged a midnight drama when he drove to the SSP office in a convoy of over 20 vehicles.

I have come here to show that I am not on the run and willing to join the probe. I am here to tell the police and the people that I will follow the law and I am not a rapist. I believe in the judiciary. I need protection from false charges against me, he said.

Meanwhile, the 10-page SIT report has shown that the local police had botched up the case to save the MLAs brother in the custodial death of the victims father.

The SIT report said that a deeper probe into the role of jail staff and doctors is needed. Once the matter is clear, more suspensions will follow, ADG (law and order) Anand Kumar said.

The report did not rule out the possibility of the MLAs brother beating up the victims father in police custody.

Principal secretary (home) Kumar said that, in all, three reports had been submitted to the government in the matter on Wednesday. One was the interim report submitted by the SIT team headed by ADG Rajiv Krishna after their Unnao visit on Wednesday.

A separate inquiry report of DIG (prison) Love Kumar on the role of the Unnao jail administration for the period of the detention of the rape victims father was also submitted in which it was found that jail officials did not shift him for medical assistance in time.

A third report had been obtained from Unnao district magistrate on the lapses on the part of district hospital where the deceased was sent for examination before and during his detention.

The DGP continued to refer to the MLA as a manniye (honourable) and when asked, he said that the MLA was not a convict, merely an accused.

Meanwhile, the chief medical superintendent of the Unnao district hospital Dr D.K. Dwivedi and emergency medical officer Dr Prashant Upadhyaya have been placed under suspension.

Disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against three more doctors namely ortho-surgeon Dr Manoj Kumar, surgeon Dr G.P. Sachan and emergency medical officer Dr Gaurav Agarwal for laxity in giving proper medical care and treatment to the rape survivors father, both prior to his judicial custody and on referral from jail while still under judicial custody.

Police circle officer of Safipur, Kunwar Bahadur Singh, has also been suspended for negligence in handling the repeated complaints given by the victim.Forget farcical fast, reconvene Parliament for debate: Cong to BJP.

Union ministers Smriti Irani and Maneka Gandhi sit on a day-long protest in New Delhi on Thursday against the disruption of Parliament proceedings by the Opposition. (Photo: G.N. Jha)

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the top leadership of the BJP in observing a fast on Thursday to protest the washout of the second phase of the Budget Session of Parliament for which it blamed the Congress.

The Congress on its part said instead of indulging in the theatrics of a farcical fast, the government should ensure that Parliament be reconvened to debate and legislate on key issues and said the time had come for the BJP to repent and apologise to the nation.

While Mr Modi and Union home minister Rajnath Singh went on with their work while on fast, several ministers, among them Prakash Javadekar, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Piyush Goyal, travelled to different parts of the country to sit on fast and attack the main Opposition.

BJP president Amit Shah fasted in poll-bound Karnataka.

The Congress knew very well that they cannot debate in any of the Houses so they did not let the Parliament function. The BJP was left with no choice but to go to the people as it is the biggest forum for us, Mr Shah said.

The Lok Sabha members of the party mostly sat on a protest fast in their constituencies, while most of the Rajya Sabha members did so in their states.

The Prime Minister had earlier asked his MPs to expose the Opposition which, he said, had throttled democracy by stalling Parliament proceedings during the Budget Session.

The Congress, meanwhile, asked the Prime Minister to observe fast over rape incidents and register his protest agai-nst Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath over the Unnao rape case. He further questioned the Prime Minister for not fasting when Nirav Modi fled the country, when the CBSE papers were leaked, when the SSC papers were leaked.

Congress senior spokesperson Anand Sharma accused the BJP of orchestrating disruptions in Parliament to avoid a debate on issues such as the multi-crore-rupee bank scam involving Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi, the CBSE paper leak, the SC/ST Act issue and farm distress.

It is time for the Prime Minister and the BJP to reflect, repent and apologise to the people of the country instead of engaging in the theatrics of a farcical fast. Let the government reconvene Parliament to debate and legislate, he told said.Dr Andreas Niederbichler is being probed for giving three more women the drug during sexual encounters.

Police believe the 42-year-old sprinkled the drug on his penis beforehand.

A well known doctor from Germany has been arrested for killing a lover with cocaine while she performed oral sex on him.

According to Police, Dr Andreas Niederbichler is being probed for giving three more women the drug during sexual encounters although they have suffered no serious adverse effects.

Police believe the 42-year-old sprinkled the drug on his penis beforehand.

As a plastic and reconstructive surgery expert he practiced nationwide and detectives say there may be many more victims.

Niederbichler was appointed head doctor in his field at the Harzer Clinic in the state of Saxony-Anhalt in 2016. However, what his superiors did not know was that he used an online dating site to meet women for sex.

Prosecutors say a 38-year-old woman was involved in consensual oral sex with the doctor on February 20 when she collapsed at his home in Halberstadt.

His apartment was within clinic grounds and she was raced to hospital in an ambulance but died soon after being admitted.

Prosecutors say he gave her cocaine without her knowing about it and he has been charged with bodily harm leading to death.

According to Chief prosecutor Hal Roggenbuck, The victims who have been heard so far have all indicated that they have been ill at the meetings. All of them showed reactions due to the use of narcotics.

The women all said they willingly performed oral sex on him.

The suspect is not in prison but in a secure drug dependency unit where he is undergoing treatment for addiction.The wife of the Army officer got the case registered in Delhi Cantt police station on April 8.

The woman approached the jurisdictional police station after recovering and filed her complaint. She stated that the officer had been harassing her for last many years. (Photo: File/Representational)

New Delhi: In an alleged case of domestic violence, a complaint has been registered against a lieutenant colonel, posted at Sena Bhawan, for suspecting his wifes fidelity and beating her up.

According to the police, no arrest has been made so far. The wife of the Army officer got the case registered in Delhi Cantt police station on April 8. According to the complainant, the Army officer has been married for the last 13 years and has two daughters.

The incident took place on April 4. Lt. Col. Ramandeeps wife in her complaint stated that she along with her husband attended a party in the Delhi Cantt area. While returning home, the officer picked a quarrel with her over a text message and then he allegedly beat her up mercilessly. It wasnt the first time that she was beaten up. In a bid to save herself, she left the house at night on April 8. She took the car and went to Rao Tula Marg Hopsital. Seeing her injuries, the doctors informed the police making it a medico-legal case. The woman approached the jurisdictional police station after recovering and filed her complaint. She stated that the officer had been harassing her for last many years.In another case, 56.8 kg of opium and 19.93 kg of poppy straw was seized from Rajasthan's Ajmer district on Wednesday.

This is the second instance of smuggling this year in which high quantity of cocaine, a party drug, was seized. (Photo: File/AFP)

Mumbai: Two Peru nationals, including a woman, were arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) from the Mumbai airport for allegedly smuggling into the country over four kg of cocaine, officials said on Thursday.

Michael (35) and Mariya (25), were intercepted on Wednesday, when they landed in Mumbai from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, they said.

The operation was based on an input provided by the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the officials said. They were arrested under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act and 4.3 kg of "high grade" cocaine was seized from them, they said.

This is the second instance of smuggling this year in which high quantity of cocaine, a party drug, was seized. The NCB had seized about four kg of cocaine in Cochin earlier this year.

In another narcotics case, the agency had arrested three people and seized 56.8 kg of opium and 19.93 kg of poppy straw in Rajasthan's Ajmer district on Wednesday. This is the biggest seizure of opium in the country this year by any agency, they said.

The contraband was seized from the Piplaj Toll plaza on the National Highway-8 and the operation was conducted after surveillance of the area and the accused, they added. The source of the contraband is suspected to be from Jharkhand's Chatra district, the officials said.Sena minister Ramdas Kadam alleged that the law and order situation in Maharashtra is going the way of Uttar Pradesh.

Mumbai: In the backdrop of the murder of two Shiv Sena activists, senior party leader and Member of Parliament Sanjay Raut has alleged the Bharatiya Janata Party, his partys senior partner in the government, is criminalising the states politics.

The allegation of criminalisation of politics was the stick that the late BJP leader Gopinath Munde used to beat the previous Congress government with when the party was in the opposition, he said.

The Sena has been demanding the expulsion of BJP MLA Shivajirao Kardile, who has been arrested in connection with the murder of two Sena activists in Ahmednagar. However, the BJP has not obliged, Mr Raut said. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis is under pressure to expel Kardile to save the partys image.

Republican Party of India leader (RPI) leader Prakash Ambedkar asked the ruling party to start a purification ceremony along with the river Ganga rejuvenation programme.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Fadnavis and some leaders of BJPs ideological mentor Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh keep talking about the need to maintain high values, saying they will never compromise on the principles. Still, Kardile allegedly led an attack on the office of the superintendent of police to rescue his son- in- law and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) MLA Sangram Jagtap, who has been held in the double murder case, claim the sources.

Sena minister Ramdas Kadam alleged that the law and order situation in Maharashtra is going the way of Uttar Pradesh. The Sena has demanded the expulsion of Kardile from the party.

Kardile was arrested on Monday for allegedly vandalising the office of the Ahmednagar superintendent of police on Saturday along with his supporters after police detained Jagtap. Kardile has also been booked on the charge of criminal conspiracy in the murder case.The submissions were made in Bombay high court while hearing four petitions challenging the plastic ban notification.

When the court asked about common people using plastic, advocate Bharucha said that the state would take action against them as per the notification. (Representational image)

Mumbai: The state government has modified its plastic ban notification and given three months time to manufacturers to dispose of their existing plastic products. However, the government was quick to clarify that it would continue with its action against people possessing plastic. The submissions were made in Bombay high court while hearing four petitions challenging the plastic ban notification.

A division bench of ustice Abhay Oka and Justice Riyaz Chagala was hearing the petitions filed by PET Container Manufacturers Association and All India Plastic Manufacturers Association, challenging the state government notification banning manufacture, use, storage, distribution, wholesale, retail sale, import and transportation of all kinds of plastic material.

Special Counsel for the state, advocate E.P. Bharucha informed the court that the state had exempt manufacturers from the ban for a period of three months. When the court asked about common people using plastic, advocate Bharucha said that the state would take action against them as per the notification.

Questioned about giving an extension to manufacturers while denying the same to the aam aadmi, advocate Bharucha replied that manufacturers would not be able to sell their plastic in Maharashtra but would have to sell it in other states.The ideological divide remained unbridged, though, and the tendency to latch on to smear campaigns undiminished.

Last Sunday (April 8), many of the participants in the latest protest in London against the Labour Partys allegedly inadequate response to anti-Semitism are likely to have been buoyed by a report in the Observer about a 50 million project to launch a centrist third force in British politics.

There is no guarantee that such a party will indeed take shape before the next general election, but it does not require much imagination to categorise it as part of the effort to ensure that Jeremy Corbyn never becomes Prime Minister. Whether many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party would be dumb enough to latch on to such an enterprise, given the dire fate of the last concerted effort to break the mould back in the early 1980s, is an open question.

The majority of Labour parliamentarians were discombobulated by a dedicated socialists emergence as party leader three years ago, and moves to unseat him were launched almost immediately. The idea of a dedicated socialist leading a party that had once prided itself on its socialism, but had in the 1990s lapsed into a kind of neoliberalism that made it virtually indistinguishable from the Conservative Party, was anathema to the Blairite diehards.

But Corbyn enjoyed mass support among the party membership, and an attempt to replace him led to his re-election with an even bigger majority. Never mind, the malcontents thought, the next general election will render his leadership untenable after Labour is decimated. But when Theresa May made the mistake of calling an early election last year, the Opposition made substantial gains while the Tories lost their majority.

Corbyns critics were temporarily silenced. A few stepped back, and some opponents even recanted their scepticism about his leadership. The ideological divide remained unbridged, though, and the tendency to latch on to smear campaigns undiminished.

Not long ago, they were heartened by news reports suggesting Corbyn might have been a Communist spy, based on the testimony of a delusional former Czechoslovak diplomat. That mud didnt stick. Corbyns considered response to the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy and his daughter in Salisbury offered another opportunity to malign him, just because the Labour leader sensibly suggested that solid evidence of Russian state complicity in the outrage should precede any action against Moscow.

Reverting to the anti-Semitism trope emerged as the next best option for destabilisation, the latest hook being Corbyns sympathy eight years ago in a Facebook post for an artist deploring the erasure of an anti-capitalist mural he had pained on a wall. Corbyn has apologised for failing to notice the murals anti-Semitic implications at first glance  namely a couple of stereotypical Jewish faces among the bankers sitting around a table that is crushing the rest of humanity.

It has been claimed the depiction echoes Nazi propaganda, although the critics generally fail to mention that in Germany back then it was common for Jewish financiers to be condemned specifically for bankrolling Russias Bolshevik revolution, many of whose stalwarts were in turn targeted by their foes on the basis of their Jewish origins.

There is a long history of virulent anti-Semitism across Europe, which contributed to the Holocaust but also survived the Second World War. Its European manifestations today are found mainly on the continent rather than in Britain, largely on the far right of politics. They are dwarfed, though, by growing anti-Muslim prejudice.

It is perfectly appropriate that even the most passionate critics of the militant Islamic State group or Saudi Arabia, including Corbyn, are seldom branded as Islamophobes. By the same token, it is utterly ridiculous for all critics of Israel, including Jews, to be dubbed anti-Semitic. It is certainly wrong to conflate Jewishness with Israel or with Zionism. But this is a grave error that is routinely compounded by all too many Zionists and most representatives of the Israeli state.

It was in evidence last week when Corbyn was berated for attending a Passover Seder organised by a non-Zionist Jewish collective called Jewdas in his London constituency. To an extent, this particular smear backfired on the Jewish Board of Deputies and other critics. On the other hand, a poll published last Sunday found that half of the British electorate believes  contrary to the evidence, but in keeping with the malign diatribes echoed throughout the mainstream media, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail  that Labour has a bigger anti-Semitism problem than other parties, and that 34 per cent of voters believe Corbyn is among those who hold anti-Semitic views, notwithstanding his unrelenting opposition to all forms of racism.

The latest campaign may have been motivated in part by the May 3 local elections, and its efficacy should be visible in a couple of weeks. It is reassuring, though, that Corbyn has not been cowed into tempering his criticism of the latest atrocities in Gaza.

By arrangement with DawnThe Supreme Court ruling comes in the wake of the increasing atrocities against the dalits under BJP rule.

The Narendra Modi government virtually allowed the dilution of the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. Hoping that the courts will rule on issues which the political executive is shy of addressing directly can be a recipe for disaster.

In the face of the rising dalit anger, however, the government has gone into damage control mode. The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have sent teams to various states to contain the political damage. Prime Minister Modi has asked all BJP MPs to spend two nights each in a dalit village. And there will be a mega-event on Dr B.R. Ambedkars birth anniversary on April 14, with high rhetoric flowing from the Prime Minister himself.

However, the BJP is unlikely to remain unsinged by the dalit anger. The dalits perception seems to be that their fortunes are sliding as the legal and constitutional provisions safeguarding their interests are being systematically dismantled.

The Supreme Court ruling comes in the wake of the increasing atrocities against the dalits under BJP rule. A dalit youngster can be beaten or even killed for daring to ride a horse to his own wedding or for sporting a moustache. The only time upper caste goons forget about untouchability is when they rape dalit women. From Una, Shaharanpur and Bhima-Koregaon to Gwalior more recently, there has been an unprecedented display of arrogance towards dalits by politically emboldened upper caste Hindus. That is why the BJPs protestations about protecting dalit interests lack any credibility.

Given the partys largely upper caste support base, it has in fact been in favour of diluting the provisions of the SC/ST Act. This was one of the critical demands of the Maratha agitation after the rape of a girl from their community in Kopardi village in Maharashtra in 2016. Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had assured the agitators that he would recommend reviewing the provisions of this law to the Centre. Fearful of losing the Maratha vote, the BJP was keen to have a less stringent law.

Some in the Opposition have even suggested that the Central government was complicit in these developments. They point to the government not directing either of its two top law officers  the attorney-general or the solicitor-general  to defend the existing provisions of the law. The government was instead represented by the additional solicitor-general. He admitted that the government had received certain complaints about misuse of the provisions and argued that anticipatory bail should be granted in cases registered under the SC/ST Act.

Not only did the government not mount a vigorous legal defence in the Supreme Court, it also did not move a review petition immediately after the ruling. A senior dalit leader and a minister in the government, Thawar Chand Gahlot, who had immediately alerted the government to the impending trouble, was ignored. Only when the BJPs allies and ministers Ramdas Athawale and Ram Vilas Paswan began speaking out against the court ruling that the government decided to act. The ruling came on March 20 and the review petition was filed two weeks later, on April 2, with the attorney-general himself appearing in court, on the very day dalits across the country had called a Bharat Bandh against the order.

By this time, however, the ground had shifted. Even the dalit leaders of the BJP had started rethinking their future. Five dalit MPs from the party  Ms Savitribai Phule from Bharaich, Mr Chotelal Kanwar from Robertsganj, Mr Ashok Kumar Dohrey from Etawah, Dr Yashwant Singh from Nageen and Mr Udit Raj from North-West Delhi constituencies  raised the red flag about the partys attitude towards dalits. While Mr Udit Raj vented his anger on the social media, the rest wrote angry letters to the Prime Minister. They alleged discrimination in the party against dalits, threats to removing reservations for SCs and STs and police brutality against those who had protested against the Supreme Courts order on April 2.

It is not surprising that four of the five protesting dalit MPs were from Uttar Pradesh, which has 21 per cent dalit population. They reflected the palpable fear in the party that the dalit vote which it had mobilised successfully in 2014 was likely to slip away. Not only could the dalit vote shift, it could also catalyse an alliance with the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and Muslims for the 2019 general election.

The OBCs also think that they are being targeted. The common perception of Yadavs in Bihar is that their leader, Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav, has been singled out for punishment while all upper caste leaders accused in the fodder scam were discharged; and that he continues to be denied bail while Salman Khan was given bail within 48 hours of conviction. These perceptions may not have a legal basis, but they have strong political implications. There is also a strong suspicion that the BJP-RSS combine is keen to do away with OBC and dalit reservations  RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has repeatedly called for a review of the policy. His statements have emboldened the upper castes to mount anti-reservation protests.

As for Muslims, who form 15 per cent of the total population, the Hindutva forces in the past four years have attempted to reduce them to second-class citizens by setting up a series of hoops they must jump through to prove their nationalism. Hate crimes against them have gone up and they have been targets of lynching in the name of cow protection. From 2012 till now, it is estimated that 97 per cent of all cow-terrorism deaths have taken place since the BJP assumed power in 2014  that is 76 people killed, most of them Muslims. And they have been killed mostly in North India.

The ground is fertile for forging political unity among dalits, OBCs and Muslims. In North India, that could make things very tough for the BJP in 2019. Such an alliance is already taking shape in Uttar Pradesh and could soon spread to other Hindi belt states. Its in this alliance of disgruntled communities which have borne the brunt of Mr Modis misgovernance that he may eventually get his comeuppance.Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad is accused of sending money to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was later designated a terrorist and killed.

Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad had studied at the University of Illinois and lived in Toledo since 2006. (Photo: toledoblade.com)

Houston: A 38-year-old Indian engineer in the US state of Ohio, accused of funding a top al-Qaida leader, has pleaded guilty to concealment of financing of terrorism.

Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad, second of the two brothers, is accused of sending money to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was later designated a terrorist and killed by a US drone in 2011.

Mohammad is to receive an agreed-upon prison sentence of 60 months, although he would receive credit for the 30 months he already has spent in the Lucas County jail awaiting trial, The Blade newspaper reported on Wednesday.

US District Judge Jeffrey Helmick told him that due to his plea and conviction, he would be deported to India.

"You ultimately will be removed from this country and told you are not welcome to come back," the judge said.

Mohammad had studied at the University of Illinois and lived in Toledo since 2006.

As part of a plea agreement, the four original charges brought by a federal grand jury in 2015 are to be dismissed at the time of sentencing, which was not scheduled, the report said.

Two co-defendants, Sultane Roome Salim, 43, and his brother, Asif Ahmed Salim, 37, are scheduled for a change of plea hearing before Judge Helmick later on Thursday. Mohammad and the Salims had been set for trial April 23 with jury selection beginning on Monday.

A fourth co-defendant, Mohammad's brother, Yahya Farooq Mohammad, 39, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to provide and conceal material support or resources to terrorists.

He had also pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit a crime of violence for a separate case in which he tried to hire a hitman to kill Judge Jack Zouhary. At the time, Judge Zouhary was presiding over the terrorism case.

Yahya Farooq Mohammad was sentenced to a total of 27 years in prison and ordered deported to India once he completes his prison term.

Michael Freeman, an assistant US attorney, outlined the factual basis for the charge to which Ibrahim Mohammad pleaded guilty.

Freeman said Mohammad's brother and others raised money in 2009 in the United Arab Emirates to deliver to al-Awlaki in Yemen.

Freeman said Farooq raised some funds through credit card fraud, sought funds from others he knew, and enlisted his brother in the United States to help.

Two associates of Farooq delivered USD 7,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki in Yemen in late January, 2009, Freeman said. In July, 2009, Farooq delivered USD 22,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki.

Ibrahim knew, Freeman said, that al-Awlaki had expressed support for the killing of 13 US service personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, by Nidal Hasan on November 5, 2009, and that al-Awlaki had been involved in the attempt to destroy an airliner over Detroit on December 25, 2009.

When interviewed by the FBI in Chicago in 2011, Ibrahim lied about the financial transactions, Freeman said, and later deleted emails that contained words such as Awlaki, jihad, Taliban, and Yemen from his email account.Pope Francis blamed lack of truthful and balanced information for misjudging the case of Bishop Juan Barros and Rev Fernando Karadima.

In an extraordinary public letter, Francis also summoned all of Chiles bishops to the Vatican for an emergency meeting in the coming weeks to discuss repairing the damage from the scandal, which has badly tarnished his reputation and of the Chilean church. (Photo: File/AFP)

Vatican City: Pope Francis has admitted he made grave errors in judgment in Chiles sex abuse scandal and invited the victims he had discredited to Rome to beg their forgiveness.

In an extraordinary public letter, Francis also summoned all of Chiles bishops to the Vatican for an emergency meeting in the coming weeks to discuss repairing the damage from the scandal, which has badly tarnished his reputation and of the Chilean church.

The Vatican orders up such emergency visits only on rare occasions, such as when American bishops were summoned in 2002 after the clerical sex abuse scandal exploded in the US and in 2010 when Irish bishops received the comprehensive Vatican dressing down for their botched handling of abuse cases.

Francis blamed lack of truthful and balanced information for his missteps in judging the case of Bishop Juan Barros, a protege of Chiles most notorious predator priest, the Rev Fernando Karadima.

The Pope had strongly defended the bishop during his January visit to Chile despite accusations by victims that Barros had witnessed and ignored their abuse.

In Chile and during an airborne press conference returning to Rome, Francis accused the victims of calumny for pressing their case against Barros, demanded they present proof of their claims and revealed he had twice rejected Barros resignation.

After causing an outcry, Francis sent the Vaticans most respected sex abuse investigator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, to look into the scandal.

While his letter didnt reveal his ultimate conclusions about Barros, Francis made clear that he and the bishops have a lot of work to do to turn the Chilean church around.

In words that laid bare his simmering anger, Francis said they must re-establish confidence in the church, confidence that was broken by our errors and sins and heal the wounds that continue to bleed in Chilean society.

But the Chilean bishops insisted they had been truthful to Francis about the need to get rid of Barros  they had proposed he resign and take a year sabbatical  and victims advocates said Francis had only himself to blame since the accusations against Barros were well known and well-founded.

Anne Barrett Doyle, of BishopAccountability.org, an online abuse resource, noted an Associated Press report that Francis received a personal letter about Barros misdeeds from a victim in 2015, but seemingly chose to ignore it.

If Francis was misinformed or inadequately informed, it was because he chose to be so, she said.

Karadima was a charismatic preacher who was removed from ministry by the Vatican for sexually abusing minors and sentenced in 2011 to a lifetime of penance and prayer. Karadima had long been a darling of the Chilean hierarchy, and his victims have accused church leaders of covering up his crimes to protect the churchs reputation.

In his letter, Francis thanked the 64 people who testified and had the courage to bare the wounds of their souls for the sake of truth.

After reading the 2,300-page dossier his envoys prepared, Francis affirmed the victims spoke in a stark way, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives.

I confess this caused me pain and shame, he wrote.

For my part, I recognise  and so I want it to be faithfully transmitted  that I have fallen in grave errors of judgment and perception of the situation, especially due to the lack of truthful and balanced information, Francis wrote.

From now on I ask forgiveness of all those I offended and I hope to be able to do it personally in the coming weeks.

In a statement, Barros three main accusers said they appreciated the Pope's request for forgiveness and were weighing his invitation to meet. They said they would continue fighting for reparation and forgiveness until zero tolerance about abuse and cover-up in the church becomes a reality.Moscow and Washington in vitriolic war of words. Western intervention in Syria has not yet been decided. With the Security Council frozen, any aggression against Syria would be "illegal". Putin appeals to common sense and calls the Israeli premier Netanyahu: refrain from acts that would make the situation worse. But Israel replies: we will not allow Iran to settle militarily in Syria.

Damascus (AsiaNews / Agencies) - A Syrian flag stands on top of a Douma building, decreeing government control over the city and, therefore, the entire area of the Eastern Ghouta. This was reported by General Major Yuri Tevtushenko, head of the Russian Center for Peace and Reconciliation in Syria.

Meanwhile, tensions continue to rise in the region, now a geopolitical chessboard reminiscent of the Cold War, while the vitriolic exchanges between Moscow and Washington persist. Yesterday, US President Donald Trump replied with a tweet to Russia's warning that it would take down any rocket heading for Syria and attack the launching bases. "Get ready Russia," wrote Trump. "Because [the rockets] will arrive, beautiful and new and 'smart'". Moscow responded coolly: "Intelligent missiles should be directed against terrorists, not against legitimate governments".

Beyond the US president's statements, the Western response to the chemical attack on the Syrian regime on the city of Douma has not yet been defined. The United States, together with France and England, are evaluating the possibility of a military intervention against Damascus. Yesterday, French President Emmanuel Macron specified that any attack would exclusively target Syrian chemical equipment, ensuring that none of the allies of the Bashar al-Assad regime would be involved.

It should be noted that within the framework of the United Nations, any military action launched without the mandate enshrined in a Security Council resolution is a violation of international law. At the moment, the crossed vetoes of Russia and the US have effectively blocked the UN body. The only way to "legitimize" an attack against a sovereign country like Syria is legitimate defense, pursuant to art. 51 of the UN Charter.

Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed hope that "common sense" would prevail. According to observers, the Kremlin is worried that Russian soldiers will be injured or killed by a possible Western bombardment on Syria. The appeal is to direct "international relations" towards a "constructive path". However, the US president does not seem to have picked it up: Trump yesterday declared that the tensions between the two countries to be "the worst ever, even during the Cold War".

Added to the list of "red lines" - not to cross, on pain of a military attack - is the one being drawn by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the Israeli-Iranian front. The two countries are on a war footing since Israeli jets hit a Syrian base near Homs, killing 14 Iranian soldiers. Putin yesterday called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, asking him to "abstain from all the acts that would destabilize the situation even more". But the Israeli prime minister replied: Israel will not allow Iran to settle militarily in Syria.by Thanh Thuy

In 2017, the country had 235 universities, 170 public and 65 private. Theory prevails over the practical aspects of an education so that students find no jobs once they graduate. Most universities hire recent graduates to meet to teacher shortages, but "Many universities organise programmes in a rather arbitrary way," lament some lecturers.

Ho Chi Minh City (AsiaNews)  Many Vietnamese universities and institutes are unable to guarantee an adequate education despite rising enrolment of new students.

The teaching staff, especially faculty members (giang vien co huu), tend to be underqualified and are unable to meet student needs, this according to an assessment by Vietnams Ministry of Education and Training.

Government figures show that in the 2016-2017 academic year, the country had 235 universities, 170 public and 65 private. In addition, there are 37 scientific research institutes with graduate programmes.

In 2017, with a total of 184 undergraduate degrees, Vietnam trained 105,801 students who obtained specialist bachelors degrees and 15,112 who earned a PhD.

In that same academic year, Vietnamese universities had 72,792 lecturers, including 16,514 with a PhD and 43,050 with a master's degree.

However, according to experts, Vietnams educational system is held back by old problems: Universities are unconnected to the job markets.

Teaching tends to focus only on theory, keeping students away from the real world, uninterested in what businesses need. The net effect is that many new graduates cannot find jobs.

Figures for 2017 show that around 200,000 young graduates with a bachelor's degree remained unemployed.

What is more, most universities tend to hire recent graduates to meet teacher shortages. For Prof Chau, this is a mistake that "has been going on for 40 years".

"Many universities organise programmes in a rather arbitrary way, some lecturers from Ho Chi Minh City told AsiaNews. When rectors or deans cant find a lecturer for an undergraduate course, they remove it from the programme. At the same time, they allow a state lecturer to include his or her.

"The result is that theory prevails over practice and young teachers use outdated teaching methods. The educational system of Vietnamese universities is affected by several complex issues, which we have to solve.

"Whilst the government continues to open universities, colleges, institutes, there are not enough capable and prepared lecturers. As a result, the educational system is becoming weak and less and less competitive."

Many students say they have very little confidence in the countrys education system. "We are not happy to go to class. We do not know what we will do after finishing our studies."

"About a hundred senior students graduated from our programme, bemoaned some female students. Most of them are unemployed or forced to accept work unrelated to their field of studies.

As for our future, we would like to get married first and then figure things out.by Melani Manel Perera

The land is located in the High Security Zone of Myliddy, occupied by the military during the civil war. Major General: "the problem of internally displaced persons living in refugee camps will be solved".

Colombo (AsiaNews) - The Sri Lankan army has announced that it will deliver 700 acres of land confiscated during the civil war to its legitimate owners, in short Tamil fishermen and farmers. The lands are located in the Jaffna peninsula and delivery is scheduled for tomorrow, April 13th.

Anthony Jesudasan, coordinator of the North-South Peace Desk of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement (Nafso), told AsiaNews: "This is really good news. Finally the Tamils are about to return to their territories, just on the eve of the New Year". But, warns the activist, "they must not make false promises yet. It does not have to be a flash in the dark just to satisfy or make fun of the international community".

The land that will be delivered tomorrow is located near Myliddy, in the High Security Zone, in the Vali-North region. They had been occupied by the military during the civil war between the army and the Tamil Tigers. Specifically, the plots are located in Palali, Varuthalaivilan, in Kadduvan Junction, along the Kadduwan-Myliddy road and opposite the port of Myliddy.

Major General and current commander in chief of the security forces (Sf), Darkshana Hettiarachi, reports that at the moment the road Myliddy-Kankesanthurai-Point Pedro can only be travelled by city buses, but from tomorrow it will be open to general transit from 6 am to 18 in the afternoon. "The complete reopening of the road will be evaluated later, after having monitored the present conditions". However, according to the general, "with the return of 700 acres to their legitimate owners, the problem of internally displaced people living in refugee camps will be solved".

Kanagarathnam Ganamalar, an activist from Vavuniya, in the central-northern part of the island, comments: "We are really happy. It is a dream that comes true after a long time. These lands really have value for our Tamil population of fishermen and farmers ". "A promise is a promise," says Jesudasan, "and if [the military] announced that it will return 700 acres of land from the High Security Zone, it must do so without delay."In a telegram sent to the Archbishop of Algiers, Pope Francis expresses solidarity and sorrow for the deaths of 257 people, mostly soldiers and their families. Also 26 members of the Polisario Front died in the disaster. The Algerian government has opened an investigation.

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - Pope Francis expressed his "closeness" to the "Algerian nation" struck "by mourning" following yesterday mornings plane crash which claimed 257 lives.

In a telegram sent last night by Card. Pietro Parolin to Msgr. Paul Lafarge, Archbishop of Algiers, the Pope "joins in prayer to the suffering of the families of all the people affected by this drama, as well as to the pain of the whole Algerian people".

Asking "the Lord to welcome into His peace those who have died and to comfort those who are seriously wounded", the Pope "implores divine assistance for those who are in charge of caring for them".

The incident involved a military aircraft, which crashed immediately after takeoff from the airport of Boufakir, near Algiers. The majority of victims are military and members of their families.

The government has declared three days of mourning for this which is considered the worst air disaster in the country. An investigation into the causes of the accident was also opened.

The Polisario Front declared that among the dead there were 30 people from Western Sahara, including women and children. The Front - supported by Algeria - is a group that fights for the independence of Western Sahara, an area disputed with Morocco. According to official sources, among the killed were 26 members of the Polisario.

The plane, an Ilyushin Il-76, was to arrive at Bechar and Tindouf, in the south-east of the country. The Tindouf region, which borders Western Sahara, and which hosts many refugee camps and serves as a base for the Polisario Front.

Just yesterday, the government gave its approval for the beatification ceremony of the martyrs of Algeria, including the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine, to be held in Oran. There are rumors that Pope Francis himself could go and preside over the ceremony.by Kamel Abderrahmani

Unconfirmed rumors of a possible Papals trip to the North African country on the occasion of the beatification of the seven monks of Tibhirine and of the other 12 martyrs of Algeria. The Algerian Foreign Minister says it is possible. Silence from Vatican. The appreciation of a young Algerian because the Pope sows love, peace, tolerance, as opposed to fundamentalist Islamic preachers, who preach hate.

Paris (AsiaNews) - For several days there have been unconfirmed rumors that Pope Francis could go to Algeria to attend the beatification of the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine and another 12 martyrs killed in the so-called "black period" when the nation was plunged into a war between Gia (Armed Islamic Group) and the army. They are: Brother Henri Verges and Sister Paul-Helene Saint-Raymond, killed on May 8, 1994 in the small library they animated in the qasba of Algiers; two nuns killed in autumn 1994, as they went to mass in the district of Bab el-Oued (Algiers); four White Fathers, killed at Christmas in Tizi Ouzou in 1994; in September and November 1995, three nuns killed in Algiers; the seven monks; and finally Msgr. Pierre Claverie, bishop of Oran, killed on 1 August 1996.

According to the bishop of Oran, Msgr. Jean-Paul Vesco, these martyrs are a small sign of the violence that raged in the black decade and which struck Christians and Muslims: in that period at least 200 thousand people died.

The first to mention a possible visit by the pontiff to the North African country was the French daily "Liberation" (3 April), which was then reported by several Algerian newspapers. Yesterday "Le Monde" quoted a France 24 interview with the foreign minister Abdelkader Messahel: on the one hand he confirms that the beatification of the martyrs will take place in Oran with the permission of the government of Algiers; on the other hand, it does not exclude the possibility of inviting Pope Francis ("We'll see, why not?"). The minister also said that the beatification will take place "in a few months, in a few weeks".

In general, the Algerian Church would like a discreet celebration to avoid controversy with the Islamic world and with the government. The killing of the monks is in fact attributed to militant Islamic terrorists, even if several investigations caste suspicious on the involvement of the Algerian secret services.

The news of a possible visit by the pontiff to Algeria is welcomed with enthusiasm by a young Algerian Muslim, who in the past wrote to the Pope. Here are his considerations.

Pope Francis, you are welcome to my country. According to the Algerian newspaper Observalgerie, the Vatican would like a great beatification of the seven Trappist monks of Tibhirine, beheaded by terrorists in 1996. They have recently been considered and recognized martyrs of the Christian faith by the Catholic Church.

According to the same sources, Pope Francis may come in person to preside over the ceremony that will take place in the Cathedral of Oran. In any case, the Pope's visit has not been confirmed. For its part, the French newspaper "Liberation", states: "What is expected is a return trip of the pope in the day, so that he could preside at the beatification himself". The left-wing newspaper cites Vatican sources who say that the visit is "more than probable".

But if it takes place, it should be more official, with a more diplomatic aspect. This is because Pope Francis, as well as being the head of the Catholic Church, is also a head of state. Moreover, the Vatican has an embassy in Algiers, located near the church of Notre Dame d'Afrique. I would also like to point out that last September "the bishops of Algeria went to Rome and met with Pope Francis. Msgr. Jean-Paul Vesco confirmed that on that occasion the question of a possible visit to Algeria was addressed. With prudence, Pope Francis has not confirmed, or denied his possible coming ", always says our source.

In March 1996, some Trappist monks from Tibhirine, near Medea, were brutally kidnapped by an Islamist group; their heads were found a few months later. But other people of Catholic religion also lost their lives in this martyrdom. This is the case of the Bishop of Oran, Pierre Claverie, who was killed in the same year. In all, during this black decade, 19 Catholic religious were murdered in different regions of the country.

For my part, as an Algerian Muslim, I can only bless, approve and agree entirely with this visit of His Holiness Pope Francis. It is a visit from a man who never ceases to sow love and peace wherever he sets foot. A pious man, who works so that peace may be spread everywhere, a man who through his speeches and homilies does not cease to encourage friendship and tolerance between all peoples. In any case, he is welcome to my country, unlike Saudi, Egyptian, and Qatari Islamist preachers who only come to propagate hatred and division among the different Muslim groups.

We need your help! Please help us improve our content by removing questions that are essentially the same and merging them into this question. Please tell us which questions below are the same as this one:





By Dirk Baur, Professor of Finance, University of Western Australia

Shutterstock

Almost a decade after the introduction of Bitcoin, there is a lot of hype about the blockchain technology on which cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are based. Some claim the technology will revolutionise commerce; others are more critical in their predictions.

But the technology behind blockchain remains a mystery to many people.





Read more:

Why accountants of the future will need to speak blockchain and cryptocurrency if they want your money





A blockchain is a decentralised, distributed and open public ledger made up of a sequence of blocks that are chained via a cryptographic hash.

If that still sounds like gibberish to you, there is a popular application that shares the philosophy of the blockchain technology that can help you understand how it works: Wikipedia.

A decentralised, open public ledger

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that depends on the collaborative effort of decentralised volunteer writers called Wikipedians who add to this constantly increasing repository of information.

Despite being based on a central database, Wikipedia is decentralised in the sense that the ability to add information is completely open and public. This freedom to add information to the database, or ledger, and the freedom to access the full history of all previous changes, is similar to a blockchain.

While traditional encyclopedias rely on scholars to provide information, Wikipedia gives this role to the public, bypassing trusted authorities.

Similarly, Bitcoin gives the role of the intermediary to the public, bypassing traditional central intermediaries such as banks.

Other common features

Consensus

Wikipedians contribute information with the aim of improving the quality of the existing information. If an edit on Wikipedia is not accepted by other contributors it will be changed until a consensus is reached.

If no consensus can be reached, the edit war is settled by an appointed authority.

The consensus in Bitcoin follows the greatest amount of work expended by the Bitcoin network consisting of miners, and is represented by the longest blockchain.

Miners verify transactions and expend resources to complete the proof-of-work. Once the work is complete the network will show their acceptance by linking new blocks to the existing one.

Transparency

Contributions made by Wikipedians are transparent, similar to the open and publicly accessible transaction history of any users Bitcoin wallet stored on the blockchain.

The time-stamped history of all edits made to the Wikipedia page is visible through the View History. Just as each Bitcoin can be traced to its inception, all prior versions and iterations of a Wikipedia entry are publicly available and show the path towards the current consensus.

The dynamic evolution of content within Wikipedia is a major difference from traditional encyclopedias, which offer a more centralised and more static repository of information.





Read more:

Why it would be in everybody's interests to regulate cryptocurrencies





Trust and incentive

Both Wikipedians and bitcoin miners replace the necessity for trusted central authorities.

Interestingly, the incentive to contribute to the network differs. Wikipedians are not financially rewarded, whereas Bitcoin miners receive Bitcoin for their contributions to the blockchain.

If a miner included an invalid transaction in their block, then the cost to complete the proof-of-work would go unrewarded as honest miners would not link new blocks to the chain.

Although the opportunity to vandalise and provide inaccurate information on Wikipedia exists, the transparency of edits makes it straightforward for honest writers to identify and rectify changes.

This discourages devious attempts to discredit the information on Wikipedia since any attempt will be recorded as a time-stamped, unalterable chain of edits. A long chain of edits represents the amount of work Wikipedians have put into developing the topic. Longer chains can signal a higher quality of information.

Points of difference

A feature that Wikipedia does not share with the classical blockchain is encryption. Because ownership and anonymity is an important feature on the Bitcoin blockchain, encryption of information is needed so that coins cannot be stolen or duplicated.

On Wikipedia there is no ownership of information, making encryption redundant.





Read more:

Bitcoin rich kids in Puerto Rico: crypto utopia or crypto-colonialism?





Another key difference is synchronised, simultaneous distribution. Wikipedia is not distributed because the participants of the network do not update and store the information on their computers. If they did, it would be very costly and thus very inefficient  a major drawback of distributed systems.

Decentralisation is also inefficient as it generally takes longer to reach a consensus. But the final outcome may be better compared to a centralised system.

In other words, Wikipedia may be less efficient than a traditional encyclopedia but the final edition may be much better.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Originally published in The Conversation.I am also on a visitors visa and awaiting a more permanent partner migration visa. My tourist visa expires 2nd May. I tried to go onto the Immiaccount to extend and apply for another tourist visa and a big box comes up in the application that says "You have another visa still active, and can not apply online for this application". (I dont have a no further stay rule)



Upon calling the Brisbane Immigration office, they say you must fill in the form to apply for extensions under Tourist stream 600 visitor visa - cant do it online.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.Here is a textbook example of public choice theory, coming from a Norman school teacher, who was complaining that leaders of the Oklahoma Education Association, the state affiliate of the far-left National Educational Association, haven't been listening to teachers and aren't thinking strategically about accomplishing their tax-hike goals.

Norman High School teachers agree that the OEA's demands are not realistic, especially calling for a capital gains tax that could hurt agriculture. They would rather see a repeal of the income tax break. 'They are absolutely being unrealistic, because...agriculture has a great lobbying force,' said Dawn Brockman. 'With income tax, there's not going to be the calls to legislators, so why not go after income tax. It's a cost of an average of $30 per person.'

The concentrated cost to agriculture of a capital gains tax would motivate them to fight effectively, despite the strong motivation of the teachers to secure a concentrated benefit. Why not instead diffuse the cost over the general public? Joe Taxpayer won't feel enough pain to march on the State Capitol. He has no lobbyists; no one at the State Capitol represents his interests.

Legislators are also complaining about the OEA leadership. An OEA handout summarizing the state of play claims that only 95% of the "ask" is funded by tax increases, so more taxes are needed. (Click to enlarge.) OCPA Action's Dave Bond posted this flyer on Facebook, noting that lawmakers "have fully funded teacher pay raises, support staff pay raises, more textbook $, more funding formula $ and more (paid for by raising over $560 million in new revenue)":

The OEA flyer drew a strong reaction from State Sen. A. J. Gay-Griffin, a strong supporter of the tax increases:

This is such crap. I'm just so tired of the lies. STOP LISTENING TO THE OEA!

Chad Warmington, president of the Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association, In response to a question, Sen. Gay-Griffin wrote: I support the current investment funded by well thought out and vetted policy cussed and discussed for over a year. I don't support the current money grab OEA is pushing and the diminishing of the investment secured for education. Having betrayed the taxpayers by voting for a tax increase, these legislators find that they haven't won new friends among the OEA. The legislators passed the pay raise and the tax increase before the strike began, and had the union been negotiating in good faith, there wouldn't have been a walkout at all. The OEA's game, it appears, was all along to have two weeks of disruption and protest at the Capitol leading up to the filing period now underway. No amount of concessions by the Republicans would have sent the teachers home, because the protest was the point. It's all about setting up the Democrats (and RINOs) to win in November, so that taxes can be raised more easily in the future. If only the Republican governor and Republican supermajority in the Legislature had approved performance audits back in 2013 (or earlier), they might have been able to provide raises before now without raising taxes, and the OEA's leverage would have been minimal. MORE: Here is another summary of taxes and allocations that shows $29 million more in new revenue than the "ask": MORE commentary from Oklahoma and elsewhere: Jon Gabriel at Ricochet writes about the teacher strikes across the country: Like most non-government workers, I've gone years at a time without a raise. For the same reason, I have been laid-off due to a bad economy. A pension? As if. Yet I never picketed my various employers, stopped showing up to work, or demanded that my overtaxed neighbors pony up cash. I'm sure that teachers believe they're underpaid; pretty much everyone thinks they're underpaid. But they should remember that the vast majority of taxpayers also are struggling and have been for a long time. These strikes aren't harming politicians, but kids and their parents. And the last thing an angry parent wants to do is to give more money to people making their lives miserable. Meanwhile, all the teachers are showing up at my kids' charter schools here in Arizona. I expect that a lot of new students will be joining them in the fall.

Dave Ruthenberg writes in the Enid News and Eagle about the well-funded OEA leaders and their far-left causes, and he has his suspicions about the reasons behind the strike:

There is little need to rehash the causes of the work stoppage other than to note teachers continue to march upset they were voted a 16 percent (on average) pay raise. The average worker would be quite thrilled with such a pay hike, but that's not enough to appease the OEA, which has steadfastly managed to move the goalposts (first it was all about pay then it was about textbooks, then it was about classroom overcrowding), making it impossible to reach any resolution. If it appears the OEA's objective all along is the Capitol chaos we are witnessing, it's because that's exactly what it's all about. The OEA has been itching for this fight, damn any reasonable discussions.... According to the most recently available filing of IRS form 990, an annual filing requirement for tax exempt organizations, in 2016 OEA President Alicia Priest was pulling down a cool $92,349 (or about three times the average teacher salary). Its executive director, David Duvall, was really living the life, raking in $152,091, above most school superintendents' pay.

Ruthenberg notes the OEA/NEA's outspoken support for illegal immigration and gun control, and their opposition to measures that would protect students from attackers.As Gov. Rick Scott embarks on a deep-pocketed campaign to unseat three-term Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson this fall, he faces the prospect of a splintered right flank, as pro-gun conservatives step up their criticism of him for signing gun control legislation prompted by the school shooting in Parkland.

National Organization for Gun Rights calls out Scott in email

Gubernatorial candidate DeSantis said he would have vetoed Parkland bill

Scott's moderate stance could appeal to pro-gun independents

On the eve of Scott's Senate campaign announcement, the Florida chapter of the National Organization for Gun Rights sent an email to its members titled 'Gov. Gun Control Running for Senate.' The missive called Scott out for approving new restrictions on the sale of assault-style weapons, arguing that "instead of fighting to uphold the gun rights of law-abiding Floridians, he decided to compromise in an attempt to get elected to the U.S. Senate."

And Tuesday, Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis told a crowd of Palm Beach conservatives that he would have vetoed the gun control package, openly breaking with a governor whose policies he has been pledging to continue if elected to the state's top office.

In signing the measure, which was approved by the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature, Scott all but admitted to toeing a line fraught with political peril.

"There are some who are advocating a mass takeaway of Second Amendment rights for all Americans. That is not the answer," Scott told reporters. "Keeping guns away from dangerous people and people with mental illnesses is what we need to do."

While the governor has consistently opposed a more expansive ban on the sale or transfer of assault-style weapons, his endorsement of the post-Parkland package could prove to be an unforgivable sin in the eyes of gun voters whose support - or lack thereof - could be a critical factor in the outcome of the Senate contest.

"The whole guns and NRA situation is very complicated for Rick Scott," said Kevin Cate, a Tallahassee-based Democratic political consultant.

"This is a guy who sprinted far to the right, who's BFFs with Donald Trump, he signed a gun bill that did have some more moderate positions in it, so he's got to be sprinting back and forth, back and forth, and someone as robotic as Rick Scott, that's tough for him to do," Cate explained.

But if Scott's stance alienates some pro-gun Republicans, it could also improve his standing with pro-gun control independents whose votes could play an even more decisive role in November. The challenge for the governor, Cate said, will be in working to appease those two very different constituencies.

"He's got to sprint back and forth to keep that base happy because if they don't turn out, if these Trump folks don't turn out, he doesn't have a chance," Cate said.A manhunt is underway in Alabama for a man suspected of shooting and killing a member of the Pinellas Park Civic Orchestra in February.

Manhunt underway in AL for suspect in fatal Pinellas Park shooting

Siddeeq Ma'Shooq accused of killing Caroline Morton-Hicks

Morton-Hicks was a member of the Pinellas Park Civic Orchestra

Pinellas Park Police have a warrant out for the arrest of Siddeeq Ma'Shooq, 45, also known as Steven Brooks, in the death of Caroline Morton-Hicks.

Morton-Hicks was shot to death on Feb. 12 after she finished an orchestra practice.

Police said as she left practice, there was some kind of altercation in a parking lot between the performing arts center and city hall. Someone with a gun chased Morton-Hicks and shot her on 78th Avenue.

Investigators have been searching for Ma'Shooq since recently issuing an arrest warrant and were able to locate a possible location of Ma'Shooq in Harvest, Alabama Wednesday night.

Law enforcement in Madison County, Alabama and U.S. Marshals attempted to locate and take Ma'Shooq into custody at that location. However, while a crisis negotiator had Ma'Shooq on the phone, he backed a vehicle out of the house's garage, collided with two U.S. Marshal vehicles, and then led authorities on a 6-minute pursuit.

Ma'Shooq was last seen at 9:41 p.m. Central Time when the vehicle he fled authorities in caught fire, prompting him to abandon it and run into a nearby wooded area. The manhunt for Ma'Shooq remains ongoing at this time, and there is a $3,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

Connection between shooter, victim

Court documents revealed Thursday the connection between Ma'Shooq and Morton-Hicks. Morton-Hicks was Ma'Shooq's landlord, and he was past due on his rent.

Morton-Smith's friend Paul Innis said the connection came as a shock.

"She was good to her tenants," Innis explained. "She was. She gave them time if they needed it. I know this for a fact because we used to discuss this sometimes on rides to music events and so on."

Innis told us when he heard the details the only thing on his mind was to get Ma'Shooq into custody.

"I just hope they take him alive, because I think for him the easy way out would be if hes not taken alive, and we deserve more than that," Innis said. "We deserve to know what happened."Like every district across Florida, Polk County has been scrambling to comply with the new school safety law signed by Gov. Rick Scott earlier this year requiring armed security in every school building.

The district's superintendent has proposed a plan to bring the district into compliance, one that involves creating a new job position: "School Safety Specialist."

Having School Resource Officer in every school cost-prohibitive

School Safety Specialists will be trained with help from Sheriff's Office

School board must approve plan

Everybody is trying to figure out what to do,  said Superintendent Jackie Byrd. We would have loved to have a Student Resource Officer, which is very costly.

Instead, Byrd is proposing a cheaper option. If the school board approves her proposal, the district will create a new position: School Safety Specialist.

There will be a trained, armed specialist in every school in Polk County, said Sherriff Grady Judd. That person can respond in seconds, rather than minutes.

These specialists will be trained with the help of the Polk County Sheriffs Office. The district needs to hire 85 Safety Specialists, mostly for elementary schools.

The price tag for this new plan is still being calculated. In fact, just how much a School Safety Specialist will be paid has not been determined.

However, Byrd said it would be less than a teacher. An entry level teacher in Polk County makes $40,700 dollars.

The school board will vote on the plan on April 24. Hiring would begin immediately.

Applicants must go through a background check, a drug screening and a psychological evaluation.With Congressman Dennis Ross announcing hes not running for re-election this fall, the Republican Party is now scrambling to put a big name on the ticket for the District 15 race. The opportunity also has current state lawmakers considering running to represent Florida in Washington D.C.

Candidates have until May 4 to qualify

Republican Party leaders in Polk surprised by Ross's announcement

Six candidates already declared on Democratic side

Theres not much time to make the decision -- all candidates running for the seat have until May 4 to qualify.

Republican Party insiders in Polk County said they were taken by surprise when Ross announced he was not running for re-election.

Florida Southern College Political Science Professor Dr. Bruce Anderson said there are two names at the top of the list for potential candidates on the Republican side: current State Senator Kelli Stargel and Florida Representative Ben Albritton.

Both [Stargel and Albritton] are seasoned legislators that have been in the legislature for quite a long time," Anderson explained. "Theyre both conservatives. Its a conservative district, a conservative Republican district, and it would surprise me if they both werent looking at it very carefully."

Stargel said shes considering a run.

Obviously, Ill consider it, said Stargel, who currently represents Lake and Polk Counties.

I never anticipated being where I am today," she continued. "I never say 'never,' but I have great opportunities in the Senate. I love serving in the Senate. I love the leadership that were seeing in the Senate, so it is a really difficult decision. Im still on the early stages of contemplation on what Im going to do.

Stargel said her entire family will be home this weekend. Shell use that time to discuss it with them and decide.

J.C. Martin, Chairman of the Polk County Republican Party, said hes heard some other names being thrown around, too.

Theres also Senator [Tom] Lee, theres a county commissioner in Hillsborough thats been looking at it, theres Ed Shoemaker in Polk County that already said hes going to run," Martin said. "Other names are being tossed about as well. This is when the back bench moves to the front bench."

Martin expects there will be four to six Republican candidates for the District 15 Congressional house seat, which includes portions of Lake, Hillsborough and Polk counties.

So far, however, only Loretta Miller and Curtis Rogers have already filed to run on the Republican side.

The Democratic side, meanwhile, already has six confirmed candidates, including Andrew Learned, Cameron Magnuson, Raymond Pena, James Pilkington, Jeffrey Rabinowitz, and Greg Williams.For Immediate Release, April 11, 2018 Contact: Kassie Siegel, (951) 961-7972, ksiegel@biologicaldiversity.org 'Governor Brown, Please Step Up': 750 Public Interest Groups Urge Halt to New Oil and Gas Projects in California SAN FRANCISCO More than 750 public interest groups from California and around the world kicked off a campaign today urging Governor Jerry Brown to stop the build-out of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure, keep oil and gas in the ground and take immediate action to protect those most vulnerable to climate change. If Brown doesnt act, the groups say, the governor will lose their support for the global climate action summit that he will host five months from now in San Francisco. The broad coalition sponsored billboards in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento, placed a full-page advertisement in the Sacramento Bee and launched a thermal airship over San Francisco Bay to challenge Brown for falling short on plans to limit fossil fuels in the state. The billboards, ad and airship can be viewed at www.BrownsLastChance.com. We, the undersigned environmental, health, justice, faith, labor, community and consumer organizations from California and around the world, strongly urge you to champion a vision for California that looks beyond the oil and gas industry to a future that is safe and healthy for everyone, todays letter said. The letter asks Brown to lead by announcing no new permits for oil and gas extraction, fossil fuel infrastructure, or petrochemical projects in California.



Brown is hosting the Global Climate Action Summit Sept. 12-14 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The groups unveiled a billboard on Interstate 80, near downtown San Francisco, quoting Browns own words. It reads: Governor Brown, if dirty oil has us 'on the road to hell,' turn us around. See you at the Global Climate Action Summit.



Over the last seven years, the groups note, Governor Brown has stood idly by while companies in California have continued to aggressively drill for dirty oil, maintaining the states position as one of the U.S.s biggest oil-producing states. Without freezing the build-out of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure and new oil and gas drilling permits, California cannot meet its commitments to climate goals outlined in Paris.



Frontline residents have long represented the health burdens of living near oil and we deserve better, said Ashley Hernandez, who lives near the Wilmington oil field, the third-largest oil field in the nation. Living near oil drilling is no sanctuary. Governor Brown is not a champion to our frontline communities and is perpetuating environmental racism. We deserve justice at every level, including environmental justice.



"While Governor Brown presents himself as a climate hero, we understand that he is still in bed with Big Oil and has received millions of dollars in contributions from fossil fuel corporations, said Pennie Opal Plant, co-founder of Idle No More SF Bay and resident living near Richmonds Chevron refinery. During his most recent time as governor, there has been more fracking in the state, 17 percent more offshore oil drilling, toxic wastewater from oil production injected into our aquifers during the drought, and a push for the false solution of carbon trading which continues to allow the fossil fuel industry to pollute and emit greenhouse gases. It's time for Governor Brown's words and actions to align and for him to work for real climate solutions and leave fossil fuels in the ground. We don't have a minute to waste in moving toward a fossil free world."



The people of Californias Central Valley are forced to breathe some of the dirtiest air in the nation, and Kern County has the worst air in the United States, because of oil drilling, said Cesar Aguirre, a community organizer with the Central California Environmental Justice Network. Communities in Central Valley are overburdened by several kinds of contamination, especially that caused by oil and gas drilling. The climate crisis isnt just happening in our atmosphere, its also happening in our lungs when we breathe poisoned air created by dirty oil drilling. The more they drill, the worse the impacts for the health and safety of people in my community. Its time for Governor Brown to step up, stop new drilling and make a plan to get California off of dirty oil.



"Climate change is threatening the future of the planet and humanity, and fossil fuels are a huge part of that problem," said Greenpeace USA executive director Annie Leonard. "We are literally and figuratively digging ourselves into a hole with our addiction to fossil fuels, and the first thing we need to do to address the damage is to stop digging. This is the time for Governor Brown to set an example for all world leaders and phase out fossil fuels in California."



As we look ahead toward the Global Climate Action Summit later this year, its time to take stock of our efforts to address climate change, and what we see is a troubling picture. Here in California, we continue to dig up the very fossil fuels that are destroying our climate at an alarming rate, all while imperiling communities across our state, said David Turnbull, strategic communications director at Oil Change International. Governor Brown has a critical opportunity to show what true climate leadership looks like by putting California on a path to ramp down our oil and gas extraction and ramp up jobs that will move us into a cleaner future. We stand united with impacted communities to call on Governor Brown to embark upon the managed decline of the fossil fuel industry that our public health and climate crises demand.



Californias dirty oil extraction will undercut all the other progress our state makes fighting climate change, said Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversitys Climate Law Institute. Browns global climate summit will be a sham unless he reins in the drilling free-for-all in his own state first. For the full list of the more than 750 groups signing the letter, please visit: brownslastchance.com/signed-orgs.For Immediate Release, April 12, 2018



Contact: Sylvia Wu, (415) 826-2770; swu@centerforfoodsafety.org

Lori Ann Burd, (917) 717-6405, LABurd@biologicaldiversity.org

Jay Feldman, (202) 255-4296, jfeldman@beyondpesticides.org

Paul Towers, (916) 216-1082, ptowers@panna.org Conservation Groups, Farmers Seek Court Decision to Declare Dow Chemical's New Agent Orange-based Pesticide Unlawful, Stop Use Latest Court Filings Allege That Dow's Enlist Duo Harms Endangered Species, Other Crops, Human Health; Was Unlawfully Approved by Pruitt's EPA WASHINGTON Late Wednesday a coalition of environmental organizations and farmers represented by the Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice filed new legal papers in federal court seeking the reversal of Scott Pruitt and the Trump Environmental Protection Agencys approval of Dow Chemicals toxic pesticide, Enlist Duo. The novel pesticide is a combination of glyphosate and 2,4-D, to be sprayed over the top of corn, cotton and soybeans that are genetically engineered by Dow with resistance to both pesticides. Our filing reveals that EPA approved Enlist Duo despite its significant harms to health, environment, farms, water and endangered species, said Sylvia Wu, CFS attorney and counsel for the coalition. EPAs job is protecting the environment, human health, and farmers, not blindly do the bidding of pesticide companies. The court must stop its use. In early 2017 EPA dramatically expanded approval of Enlist Duo use to 34 states and for use on cotton, only one year after a court sent back EPAs previous approval. The two chemicals in Enlist Duo do more damage when used together than the net damage they do when used separately. EPA has put human health, neighboring crops, and the survival and recovery of hundreds of endangered species at risk by recklessly putting a potent and toxic pesticide on the market without the data or expert review the law requires, said Paul Achitoff, Earthjustice attorney and counsel for the coalition. We, and the law, demand much more from the agency created to protect our health and environment than bowing to chemical industry pressure. Dow markets Enlist Duo and its companion Enlist crops as a quick fix for the superweeds epidemic created by prior genetically engineered Roundup Ready crops, genetically engineered to withstand what would otherwise be a toxic dose of the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsantos Roundup. Repeated use of Roundup on these crops has resulted in the proliferation of glyphosate-resistant superweeds which now infest over a hundred million acres of U.S. farmland. These superweeds now require an even more toxic combination of herbicides, like Enlist Duo, to take them out, driving a dangerous spiral of increasing weed resistance and pesticide use. The U.S. Department of Agriculture conservatively estimates that use of Enlist Duo on U.S. corn and soybean will increase the use of 2,4-D by 200 to 600 percent. Said Jim Goodman, an organic dairy and beef rancher from Wisconsin and board president of National Family Farm Coalition, one of the petitioners in the case: 2,4-D is a possible carcinogen, an endocrine-disrupter and a herbicide that is very drift prone and persistent in the environment. The combination of 2,4-D and glyphosate in Enlist Duo is a recipe for disaster. It may control Roundup-resistant weeds, but only for a while, and at what cost to the health of farmworkers, consumers and the environment? Denise OBrien, an Iowa farmer and board president of the Pesticide Action Network, emphasized EPAs responsibility to protect rural communities. By continuing to cave to the pesticide industrys every wish, EPA is shirking its duty to protect the health of our rural communities and our farmers livelihoods from these toxic, drift-prone chemicals, she said. Over half a million people submitted comments to EPA urging the agency to reject Dows plan to sell Enlist Duo. U.S. National Cancer Institute scientists highlighted 2,4-D specifically as associated with a two- to eight-fold increases in non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The International Agency for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization classified 2,4-D as a possible carcinogen to humans and glyphosate as a probable carcinogen to humans. EPAs decision to allow 2,4-D threaten farmers, farmworkers, rural communities, and consumers. With this decision causing a predicted massive increase in use-as much as a seven-fold increase by 2020-the agency is violating any reasonable risk standard, given the productivity and profitability of sustainable organic practices, said Jay Feldman, executive director of Beyond Pesticides. Spraying Enlist Duo over millions of new acres will also contaminate waterways and important wildlife habitats. Monarch butterfly populations have declined due to the loss of their milkweed host plants, which glyphosate kills. The Endangered Species Act requires federal agencies to ensure its actions to not jeopardize the existence of any endangered species. EPA admitted its approval could harm hundreds of endangered species, including the whooping crane and Indiana bat, but still failed to comply with the ESA. EPAs hasty approval of this dangerous pesticide cocktail will cause severe harm to human health and the environment unless we are able to stop it with this lawsuit, said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Its rush to do the bidding of pesticide companies shows that the EPA is prioritizing corporate profits over their duty protect us from harmful toxins. The plaintiff coalition is Center for Food Safety, Center for Biological Diversity, Beyond Pesticides, Pesticide Action Network North America, National Family Farm Coalition, and Family Farm Defenders, jointly represented by legal counsel from Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice.For Immediate Release, April 11, 2018 Contact: Noah Greenwald, (503) 484-7495, ngreenwald@biologicaldiversity.org Endangered Species Act Success: Recovering Kirtland's Warbler Songbird in Michigan Proposed for Delisting WASHINGTON The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today proposed removing Endangered Species Act protections for the Kirtlands warbler based on the rare songbirds growing numbers and ongoing management of its habitat. The warbler declined to a low of just 167 singing males in 1987. But by 2015 more than 2,300 were found in Michigan, Wisconsin and the Canadian province of Ontario. This pretty little songbirds amazing comeback from the brink of extinction is a testament to the success of the Endangered Species Act, said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center. Contrary to the self-interested claims of congressional Republicans, this 45-year-old law is working to save species. Without it, we would have lost the warbler forever. The warbler has one of the smallest breeding ranges of any North American migratory songbird. It is entirely dependent on young jack pine forests that develop after fires, and the birds decline was driven by a combination of fire suppression and urban sprawl that led to lost and fragmented habitat. Its recovery has depended on massive federal and state efforts to recover jack pine forests and trap brown-headed cowbirds, which parasitize the nests of the warblers and benefit from human settlement. Its hard work to recover endangered species like the Kirtlands warbler, but todays decision proves it can be done, said Greenwald. The warbler appears to be secure, but this bird will need continued monitoring to ensure habitat is maintained and threats like climate change dont again drive down populations. Background

Most breeding Kirtlands warblers are found in the lower peninsula of Michigan, but they are also found in the upper peninsula, Wisconsin and Ontario. They are surveyed by counting conspicuous singing males. The warblers overwinter on a number of low-lying islands in the Bahamas. Rising seas related to climate change could present a new threat to the species and necessitates ongoing monitoring.For Immediate Release, April 12, 2018



Contact: Amaroq Weiss, (707) 779-9613, aweiss@biologicaldiversity.org Oregon Orders More Wolf Killing in the Face of Moderate Population Growth State Guns Down Wolves As Predation Declines PORTLAND, Ore. Oregons wolf population increased by just 12 confirmed animals in 2017, according to a report released today by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Despite such modest growth and a nearly 30 percent reduction in wolf-livestock conflicts, the ODFW issued its first wolf kill order of the year two days ago. So far, wildlife managers have killed one member of the Pine Creek pack and have authorized the killing of any second additional wolf, including the packs pregnant female. The estimated increase to 124 wolves in 2017 from 112 in 2016 represents an increase of 11 percent. Until two years ago, the states wolf population gains were around 30 percent annually. In 2016, the population increased by only two wolves, a meager 1.81 percent gain from the prior year. With two years in a row of such little population growth, the last thing Oregons wolves need right now is to have the agency gunning them down, said Amaroq Weiss, West Coast wolf advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. While were glad there were some gains, the population is still small and mostly restricted to one corner of the state. Todays report confirmed 11 breeding pairs compared with last years eight breeding pairs, a 38 percent increase. However, there were 11 breeding pairs in 2015, so 2017s increase simply brings the breeding pairs numbers back to where they were two years ago. Pack numbers increased from 11 packs in 2016 to 12 packs in 2017. But 11 of the 12 packs are in northeastern Oregon, with only one pack so far residing in the southwestern part of the state despite ample suitable wolf habitat there. In addition, the report notes 13 known wolf mortalities in 2017. Twelve were human-caused, including five wolves killed by the agency, one killed by a ranch-hand, one killed by an M-44 cyanide device and four wolves that were poached. In 2015 the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission removed wolves from the state endangered species list  even though Oregons wolves are still absent from nearly 90 percent of the states suitable habitat. A lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and Cascadia Wildlands challenging the state-delisting is pending. Oregons wolf conservation and management plan is supposed to be undergoing a review and update, a process that was to have taken place in 2015 but was delayed by the state. Last spring the state wildlife department finally issued proposed revisions to the state wolf plan but these were met with significant objections from stakeholders. As a result, no plan updates have yet been made. Though the Oregon wolf population is slowly increasing, wolf-livestock conflicts are not. Indeed, todays report indicates that wolf-caused predations on livestock decreased nearly 30 percent in 2017, with confirmed losses in 2016 of 24, but only 17 losses in 2017. Despite this significant decline in losses, the agency is still moving quickly to kill wolves in instances of wolf-livestock conflicts. On Wednesday, the state wildlife agency killed a yearling female wolf from the newly identified Pine Creek wolf pack in Baker County, after authorizing staff and a livestock producer to kill up to two wolves from the pack. This includes killing the packs pregnant breeding female who is due to give birth soon. The kill operation is in response to livestock predations by pack members on privately-leased grazing lands. Its outrageous that the state would kill members of a new wolf pack after its initial brush with livestock, and especially awful that the packs mother wolf wont be spared, Weiss added. Something is very wrong with Oregons wolf management policies to include killing a packs pregnant mother wolf. The Department of Fish and Wildlife will present its annual wolf report and wolf plan update proposals at the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commissions April 20 meeting in Astoria.For Immediate Release, April 12, 2018



Contact: Ryan Shannon, (503) 283-5474 ext 407, rshannon@biologicaldiversity.org Lawsuit Seeks Endangered Species Protection for Imperiled Pacific Island Songbird Military Training, Development Endanger Tinian Monarch WASHINGTON The Center for Biological Diversity today sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to protect the rare Tinian monarch songbird under the Endangered Species Act. Todays lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in D.C., notes that this small bird lives only on Tinian, a 39-square-mile island in the western Pacific Ocean that is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The bird is severely threatened by plans to expand military-training activities in the monarchs last remaining forest habitat. "This dainty little songbird needs Endangered Species Act protections immediately to have a fighting chance at survival," said Ryan Shannon, a staff attorney at the Center. "The Fish and Wildlife Service has already acknowledged the monarchs in trouble, so were going to court to ensure the Trump administration doesnt block lifesaving protections for this rare bird." The Center petitioned for protection of the Tinian monarch in 2013 under the Endangered Species Act, which gives the Fish and Wildlife Service one year to respond. The agency has yet to do so. Even so, it identified the monarch as critically imperiled, meaning its protection should be highest priority. The Service scheduled the decision for fiscal year 2017 in its own workplan, but to date has not moved to protect the species.



The monarch, a type of flycatcher, nearly went extinct from forest clearing for agriculture and military staging during World War II. It was protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1970. Following an increase in forest cover and population size, those protections were removed in 2004. Since then the birds forest habitat has been slowly disappearing. Only 549 acres of native forest remain on Tinian. "The Service has already acknowledged that the monarch is critically imperiled. It needs to stop delaying and provide this unique bird the Endangered Species Act protections it desperately needs," said Shannon. The monarchs population is estimated to have declined by nearly 40 percent in recent years. Beyond the danger of increased military activities, the bird is threatened by development, agriculture, typhoons, disease, predation from rodents and the threat of invasion by exotic brown tree snakes, which have decimated native wildlife on numerous islands.For Immediate Release, April 12, 2018 Contact: Taylor McKinnon, (801) 300-2414, tmckinnon@biologicaldiversity.org Feds' Massive Utah Fracking Plan Threatens Sage Grouse, Public Lands SALT LAKE CITY The Trump administration wants to auction off 388 square miles of public lands for fracking in six Utah counties, including more than 17,000 acres of greater sage-grouse habitat that the governments own science advisors say should be off limits to leasing. Under new Trump administration policies limiting public input, people have only until April 16 to comment on this vast fracking plan. Each new fracking lease in sage-grouse habitat brings this charismatic bird closer to extinction and threatens hundreds of other species, said Taylor McKinnon with the Center for Biological Diversity. The Trump administration wont let protecting Americas imperiled wildlife get in the way of fossil fuel industry profits. Sage-grouse success also benefits pronghorn, elk, golden eagle, native trout and nearly 200 other bird species. Over the past 200 years land conversion, oil and gas drilling, and livestock grazing have cut the grouses range in half, causing steady population declines. In 2011 the Bureau of Land Management convened sage-grouse scientists to create land-management strategies to recover greater sage-grouse populations in 10 western states. The bureau rejected scientists call to completely close priority habitats to oil and gas leasing, opting instead to prioritize leases outside of habitats. That policy was built into nearly 100 federal resource-management plans in 2015. Under Trump the BLM has ignored the policy, offering more than 744,000 acres of priority habitat for oil and gas leasing. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has proposed gutting the 2015 plans already weak protections, opening the door to more fossil fuel development in the imperiled birds habitat. Trumps zeal for fracking and drilling will dramatically industrialize our public lands, making them unrecognizable, said McKinnon. Sage grouse, pronghorn and songbirds will be the victims of this onslaught.



The Utah fracking plan spans a wide swath of the state, from its northern border toward national parks and monuments in the south. It includes wilderness-quality land proposed for protection in Americas Red Rock Wilderness Act and public lands within 10 miles of Canyonlands National Park and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. A Center analysis of federal oil and gas data shows that the public land to be offered in September contains about 3.8 million barrels of oil and 22.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas. Developing those fossil fuels would result in the same amount of greenhouse gas pollution as driving a passenger car 7.4 billion miles  about 300,000 trips around the Earth.Kenyan startup MoBar Delivery is connecting consumers with suppliers via couriers using a mobile app, streamlining and simplifying distribution of goods, starting with alcohol.

Launched late last year and available on iOS, Android or Web, MoBar Delivery has already partnered with major alcohol distributor Jeyfine Wines, built up a monthly user base of 1,500 people, and earned over KES3.5 million ($35,000) in revenue.We are building e-commerce and on-demand delivery logistics software for brick-and-mortar businesses. It connects consumers to suppliers via couriers, each with their own easy-to-use mobile app, co-founder Ian Wanyoike toldWe give consumers the ability to order products they need on-demand from brick and mortar businesses with guaranteed delivery in under an hour.It has started out by delivering alcohol, but plans to expand into other areas as well.The store run is unnecessary in this age of online service delivery. People are looking for more convenient alternatives and no one has effectively availed to consumers a product that allows them to do their day-to-day shopping of food, groceries and other home essentials on a single platform, and have their shopping delivered wherever they are in under an hour, Wanyoike said.Same day and next day deliveries are whats common but there are a lot of products that consumers need more frequently and often spontaneously.The response has been strong, with Wanyoike saying MoBar Delivery was encouraged by the fact most of its customers were referred to it by other users. This lead to a spike in revenue in December and an average month-on-month growth in revenue of 32 per cent so far this year.The startup is currently raising funding to grow its sales, marketing and tech teams as it bids to become the market leader in Kenya for on-demand alcohol delivery, as well as venture into the broader FMCG space. It also plans to expand outside of Nairobi.We are finalising an agreement with an alcohol distributor in Mombasa for us to begin operations in Nyali and Bamburi within the next two months, said Wanyoike. We are also exploring areas with good networks of independent riders, allowing us to partner with brick and mortar businesses to provide consumers in those areas with on-demand delivery of food, groceries and other home essentials.Read the original article onInnovate Ventures Accelerator in Somaliland calls for applications

Applications are now open for the third cycle of the tech accelerator Innovate Ventures Accelerator, based in Hargeisa, Somaliland. This year's programme will accept 12 startups and will invest up to $30,000 in the teams with the highest potential.Cryptococcal antigen for cryptococcal meningitis in Aids

Histoplasma antigen for disseminated histoplasmosis in Aids

Toxoplasma antibody for brain abscess in Aids and infection in pregnancy to avoid brain damaged new-borns

Pneumocystis PCR for pneumonia in adults and children with Aids

Aspergillus antibody to diagnose chronic pulmonary aspergillosis, often confused with tuberculosis

TB LAM, a urine antigen test for rapid diagnosis of disseminated tuberculosis in AIDS that has been shown to save lives

Therapeutic antifungal drug monitoring for the life-saving, Essential Medicines itraconazole, voriconazole and flucytosine, to ensure adequate levels in the blood, often a problem in AIDS and children especially.

These diagnostic tools are:The WHO has a listing of essential medicines for decades and has just launched a process for approving key tests for improved health and public health.The consensus meeting is being held in Uganda, which ranks fourth in Africa in terms of scientific publications and has made enormous contributions to understanding HIV-associated diseases, and fungal meningitis in particular. Like many other African countries fungal diagnostics are limited in scope to cryptococcal antigen (some countries), and microscopy and culture (very few countries). More rapid non-culture tests are not available, and this general neglect contributes to the 1-million Aids deaths annually worldwide.Fast, accurate diagnosis is essential to reduce deaths from Aids. Gaffis modelling suggests that making the key diagnostic tests available for only 60% of needy patients, with treatments, could save over a million lives in the next five years. Our consensus meeting is another key step on that road, with later endorsement of the conclusions required by the WHO, says Professor David Denning of the University of Manchester and President of Gaffi.The demand for macadamia nuts in China is on the rise and has local farmers feeling optimistic. And for good reason. China has increased its nut consumption in recent years and is currently South Africa's fastest growing importer, importing up to 40% of the total haul according to China's National Industry Association (CSNC).

China a nut-eating nation

South Africa is swiftly becoming the worlds leading producer of macadamia nuts with almost 4,000 hectares of new trees added every year.Valley Macadamias Group chairman, Alan Sutton recently visited China to gain more insight. As a leading global exporter, the Valley Macadamia Group has built long-standing relationships with a vast network of buyers in China. Over the years, Sutton has developed a deep understanding of the market, international quality expectations and demand.The demand and consumption of macadamia nuts in China are growing fast and opportunities for the South African macadamia industry are incredible, says Sutton. However, as the market grows, the dynamics change and Valley Macadamia feeds that information to South African farmers to help them meet global demands.In the past when demand outweighed supply, buyers had less choice of style and price. The balance is starting to shift, with the Chinese now producing their own nuts (10,000 tons in 2017) which is leading to a global increase in supply. The market is now a buyers negotiated space. With greater demands for quality and size, South Africas produce ticks these boxes, says Sutton.Culturally, China is a nut-eating nation. Sutton says the demand for dry-nut-in-shell from South Africa is strong due to the perceived higher quality. Chinese buyers are looking for a homogeneous, premium quality product from harvest to end product.One long-term challenge facing South Africas trade with China is that Chinese macadamia farmers could pose a threat to export rates in the long term. But there is still opportunity for growth in speciality nuts and ingredients.South Africas macadamia industry is poised for growth of between 8% and 10% this year. With demand in China set to increase, the boom in South Africa can only continue.The government of Uganda has signed the contract for the construction of the $4bn oil refinery, offering further clarity on how the country's oil resources will be exploited.

Photo: The Observer

Minister of Energy and Mineral Development, Irene Muloni, signed the contract with the Albertine Graben Refinery Consortium, which is led by General Electric after more than a year of negotiations. It also ends a more-than-five-year struggle by Uganda's government to get a company to invest in a refinery, which has a questionable return on investment.The refinery will be built under a public-private partnership, favouring the consortium with a 60% shareholding while the government, through the national oil company, will retain the other 40%.Uganda is expected to invite East African states to buy into its 40% stake, of which Tanzania has already committed to taking up about 7%. The consortium is made up of General Electric, Saipem from Italy, Yaatra Ventures from the United States of America and Intra-continent Asset Holdings.The profile of the consortium looks quite weak and there are some doubts it can pull off a $4bn project. There is little independent publicly-available information about Intra-continent Asset Holdings.Questions are bound to be asked as to how this consortium will be able to attract the capital and expertise to build the refinery. However, in October, the Albertine Graben Refinery consortium had posted a $2m commitment bond with government ahead of the signing of the project framework agreement (PFA).Up to 70% of the financing of the refinery will be through debt with the other 30% coming in as equity from the project partners. In August, the government announced it had "agreed core project terms" for the refinery project.After signing the PFA, the consortium would be required to finance all pre-final investment decision activities up to $100m.The pre-FID activities, according to the terms of the arrangement, include market studies, logistics studies, technology licensing, refinery configuration studies, environmental and social impact assessment, and front end engineering design.These activities are expected to start after the signing of the contract. The major upstream companies operating in Uganda - Total, Tullow and Cnooc - had for long preferred a crude oil export pipeline because they felt the product had a more lucrative market abroad.Uganda's government thought otherwise, throwing its weight behind the construction of a refinery. Government commissioned a Swiss firm, Foster Wheeler, to come up with a report that offered pointers on how an oil refinery made economic sense, especially from the perspective of creating spin-off industries such as those that make bitumen, which is crucial in the construction industry.Compromises needed to be made. To get the three oil companies to commit investments in the country, Uganda's government agreed to the demands of having a crude oil pipeline. However, it never dropped its ambition of building a refinery.The structure of having an oil refinery and a crude oil pipeline led to another important negotiation: how much crude would each take and which infrastructure would take the first call on the oil resources. Government settled for a 30,000-barrels- per-day refinery, which would later be ramped up to 60,000. The refinery, it was agreed, would take the first call.Earlier figures showed that the crude pipeline would carry 120,000 barrels of oil per day, shooting up to 180,000 barrels only after the refinery's demands had been met. Now, current figures show that the crude oil pipeline will carry about 212,000 barrels of oil per day.Lawmakers in Zimbabwe are preparing to summon ex-president Robert Mugabe to answer for his management of the diamond sector, which he nationalised in 2016.

Zimbabwe's ousted president, Robert Mugabe. Photo: Bulawayo24

Mugabe announced the state seizure two years ago on Zimbabwe state TV, saying, "There has been a lot of secrecy  and we have been blinded. We have not received much from the diamond industry at all."Foreign mining companies operating in the country were quick to challenge the stop-work orders in court, and some cases are still pending.But analysts question Mugabe's 2016 assertion that as much as $15 billion in diamond revenue was missing, and it was the fault of the foreign companies.Now, the parliamentary mines committee wants answers."He must be able to tell the country where he got these figures from," the head of the parliamentary committee, Temba Mliswa, said. "It is not witch hunting."If there is anything parliament is doing, [it is] to support the executive to ensure that the economy has to pump through a process where minerals are accounted for. You got to bring closure to this. And you must also understand that it would be unfair for people to say he [Mugabe] is too old, when he could have been the president right now."Mliswa says the committee also plans to summon former vice president Joice Mujuru, as well as current Vice President Kembo Mohadi.Mugabe's 37 years in office came to an abrupt end last November, when he resigned under pressure from the army. Popular anger over the failed economy had been mounting for several years.In 2010, Global Witness began voicing concern about abuses and mismanagement in the country's diamond sector. Last year, the global anti-corruption watchdog presented evidence connecting state security agencies and ruling party elites to diamond mining and smuggling.Alice Harle of Global Witness welcomes parliament's plan to question Mugabe."If he does testify, it will be difficult to see how much he is prepared to reveal," Harle said. "If Zimbabwe's diamond money is to benefit Zimbabwean people in fighting poverty and driving development, it is essential that the sector is open to scrutiny. A lot of the problems around the industry are directly related to how opaque the sector is."Current Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa spent decades by Mugabe's side, serving in various official roles as one of his closest allies. The ruling ZANU-PF has chosen Mnangagwa as its candidate for the July elections.Reacting to the news that parliament would summon Mugabe, presidential spokesman George Charamba said that parliament can summon anyone, except a sitting president.The death of five-year-old Lumka Mthethwa who fell into a pit latrine at her school in the Eastern Cape shook us all. And it was particularly hurtful, and disappointing given that we had seen such a tragic incident before when Micheal Komape, another five year old suffered the same death back in 2014. Clearly, we failed to take lessons back then which could have saved the life of Lumka Mthethwa.

Right to education is compromised

Effective management programme needed

Inadequate resources

Considering user needs, dignity and safety

Management handbook

Recent Water Research Commission (WRC) research outcomes on the state of school sanitation found that failed sanitation is a widespread problem at South Africas rural schools and violates childrens rights to safety, health, and dignity, and those with special needs are inadequately supported.Childrens right to education is compromised at schools with failed sanitation as demonstrated by the range of impacts seen on learning in the study(report TT 699/16): children miss class waiting for toilets or leave school seeking a place to relieve themselves; girls stay home during their menstrual cycles; illnesses are transferred in filthy toilets; degrading conditions and threatening or humiliating experiences in the toilets compromise childrens ability to concentrate and to thrive at school. In some cases, school toilets could be argued to be the most dangerous place on the school grounds.While inadequate and/or inappropriate infrastructure was found to play a role in the failure of sanitation, the following management challenges contributed to failure even when infrastructure was relatively new:Infrastructure that is not accompanied by an effective management programme can be expected to fail. The Department of Education leaves management of school toilets up to the schools, however many schools do not have the capacity to manage toilets effectively. Principals have no clear protocols, expectations, standards or criteria from the department to define their role in sanitation; as a result, the attitudes, awareness and practices of principals towards monitoring, inspecting, reporting, funding, cleaning and maintaining varies enormously and frequently is far from adequate.While some principals never set foot in the toilets, others monitored them personally on a daily basis; however, neither measured their performance against any clearly defined criteria or responsibility defined by the department. Principals had vastly divergent ideas of what their role and the role of the department were in sanitation.Most schools did not have a dedicated cleaner and learners were required to clean toilets without protective equipment. Some schools never cleaned the toilets themselves during cleaning sessions. Principals felt they did not have access to adequate resources to manage sanitation.Principals reported immense frustration over the lack of responsiveness of the department to sanitation needs  including serious health and safety risks, however there is a serious lack of accountability in this regard. Further, they lacked will and vision for managing sanitation and lacked an understanding of and commitment to learners rights and professional ethics as applied to sanitation.Current designs and technologies do not take into account user needs, dignity and safety. Pedestals that do not accommodate children frames; fear of snakes, insects and monsters in the toilets were mentioned; the discomfort described by learners was exacerbated by toilets often being far from the main school buildings and poorly monitored by staff. The impact of the conditions in toilets on learners wellbeing in the learning environment should be acknowledged and addressed in terms of infrastructure design, cleaning and monitoring and support provided to learners.In response, WRC has and is developing several sanitation technology alternatives for schools and have launched tools and guidelines for the design and management of school sanitation grounded in best practice and informed by the perspectives of principals, learners and cleaners.In addition, a management handbook, which includes a training module for a health and safety officer, was developed. A pilot project is underway in demonstrating designed guidelines and the application of the management handbook in schools in order to refine it and improve it based on the participants experiences. This resource, which is first of its kind, is available to all departments officials, principals and learners to tackle the problems associated with school sanitation.It is important to not forget that schools exist only to meet the needs of children: there is no other reason. If we do not carefully articulate and hold to the values that should drive education, these inputs from our environment may result in a school culture where teachers ensure their needs are met but neglect the needs of learners  especially in hidden or "invisible" zones such as the toilets.Educators assume responsibility on behalf of each childs parents during the school day to protect, nurture and develop learners physically, intellectually and emotionally.GEITA, Tanzania - A new maize variety is expected to combat food scarcity in Geita where pests and drought ravage crops.

New maize seeds from the Wema project

New seeds more resilient than local seeds

Cooperating on improving farming and production

The Wema project

Geita District Agriculture officer John Kengele says the plan in 2016/17 was to cultivate 91,045 hectares of cereal crops and 38,500 hectares of leguminous plants. But only 83,862 hectares of cereal crops were grown and 162,626 tonnes were harvested. According to Kengele, 31,088 hectares of leguminous plants were cultivated and 63,826 tonnes. "The demand for cereals is 167,153 tonnes while that of legumes is 64,285 tonnes annually, but in the 2016/17 harvest season we had a shortfall of 4,497 tonnes cereals and 459 tonnes of legumes," he says.That was because an outbreak of fall armyworms and poor rain cut production.The Ministry of Agriculture has been informed so as to tackle pests. "The district council has called on farmers to use pesticides and burn crop residues after harvesting in an effort to wipe out pests. If favourable rain comes, bumper harvests will be guaranteed," he hopes.The Commission for Science and Technology (Costech) in cooperation with Ilonga Agricultural Research Institute have produced water-efficient maize seeds under the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (Wema) project. Trials have been made and Isamilo villagers at Kamwanga Ward in Geita District are happy with results. Their Muungano Group was given Wema 2,109 maize seeds, which were sowed on 30 November 2017 in one acre.Group member Khamisi Kingi says: "We followed instructions including using fertilisers during sowing and for growth periods. Seeds germinated completely, but we had to spray pests until the plants survived. We expect to harvest between 15 and 17 bags in an acre."The crops were attacked by fall armyworms because we sowed the seeds in November and December, the time when most pests emerge. Maize seeds planted before November were not affected."According to Kingi, Wema seeds are resistant to diseases and drought. "Local seeds are more vulnerable to attacks than Wema seeds. We also faced drought but we expect to harvest more than 15 bags from every acre, while previously we harvested three to five bags."Another group member Francis Mwahekela believes Wema seeds can avert famine. "The new maize variety is resistant to diseases and drought, unlike the traditional maize. Had we planted traditional maize seeds, fall armyworms would have gobbled up all of them."According to group secretary Methusela Linti, Muungano started on 20 June 2017 with 30 members: 13 of them being women and 17 men. Their aim is to cooperate in improving farming. "Our intention is acquiring agricultural knowledge to increase production." He speaks of challenges such as poor weather, pests and the scarcity of farm inputs.Costech social science director Joyce Nyoni says the aim of the institution is to disseminate research findings for the community. "Since maize is the staple, we have funded the research to improve its production," Nyoni. "Whatever positive is obtained from this field trial, villagers are going to share for the whole region and finally the whole country to increase maize production."Geita assistant administrative secretary Emil Kasagala hopes the new maize variety will make the region great: food shortages will end and the surplus will be sold to other regions. "Our yields have been low; you produce two or three bags in an acre. Now we expect to produce more within small areas."The Wema project was formed in response to a growing call by African farmers, leaders, and scientists to address the effects of drought and insect-pest pressure in a cost-effective way for smallholder farmers in Africa.Wema uses three breeding approaches: conventional; marker-assisted; and genetic modification. The project focuses on developing, field testing and deploying new maize hybrids in Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.In Tanzania already seeds have produced through the conventional method, while the genetic modification is underway at ARI Makutupora in Dodoma.The Department of Labour says the National Minimum Wage (NMW) Bill and supporting Basic Conditions of Employment and Labour Relations Bills are currently before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Labour, for consideration.

The department is dedicating the month of May (Workers Month) to the National Minimum Wage, which is meant to improve the lives of the workers in South Africa.According to the department, more than six million workers are expected to benefit from the National Minimum Wage when it is introduced. It proposes, among other things, that the National Minimum Wage level be set at R20 per hour and be reviewed annually. However, the minimum wages for domestic and farm workers will initially be set at R15 and R18 an hour respectively.The department says the National Minimum Wage is heralded as one of the progressive policy tools aimed at addressing wage inequalities and start the journey of strengthening collective bargaining that will lead towards a living wage for working people.The NMW Bill is supported by the Labour Relations and the Basic Conditions of Employment Bills.The Labour Relations Bill is aimed at also addressing the often long, protracted and violent strikes by proposing clause that will ultimately see labour market stability, while encouraging collective bargaining.On the other hand, the Basic Conditions of Employment Bill is, among others, responsible for setting up the National Minimum Wage Commission, which will review the NMW on an annual basis, the Department of Labour said in a statement.The Basic Conditions of Employment Bill will also beef up monitoring and enforcement of the National Minimum Wage.The Department of Labour will announce the programme of action for Workers Month, with a specific theme that will focus on monitoring, enforcement and readiness of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA).The programme, which will be circulated to the media, will be characterised by izimbizo that will take place in various provinces.NEWSWATCH: AfriForum filed criminal charges against National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP) Shaun Abrahams and six other senior members of the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) yesterday, 11 April 2018, following the receipt of an anonymous letter containing detailed allegations of serious misconduct.

For more:

Allegations, as reported by, included Abrahams' use of a witness protection vehicle for personal benefit, and a covertly funded, fraudulent travel claim from four other NPA members.Head of AfriForums anti-corruption unit Monique Taute said the grave nature of the allegations warranted investigation and they had therefore requested the police to look into the matter.In a further tweet, Taute called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to remove Abrahams from office...The NPA has since hit back at the civil rights group, calling the charges a desperate campaign to besmirch the NPA.NPA spokesperson Luvuyo Mfaku has vehemently denied all accusations, further stating that, "The Integrity Management Unit (IMU) of the NPA has been conducting investigations since 2017 regarding the allegations of fraudulent subsistence and travel claims.The IMU has a mandate to investigate allegations of alleged misconduct by NPA officials and it is standard practice to refer allegations of criminality to the police.Rolls-Royce employee Rory Clarkson has received a Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) safety award for his ground-breaking work undertaken in the UK to safely reduce the disruption volcanic ash can cause the aviation industry.

About the award

When the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in 2010, Europe's aviation system was severely disrupted. One of the prime reasons for this was the lack of data on the level of volcanic ash that modern jet engines could safely fly in. Since then Clarkson has been researching and developing a new set of higher levels for the UK manufacturer's engines that will influence how the world deals with volcanic ash.For the first time, the industry now has a set of data and a model to use during any ash event. This will ensure aircraft engines don't become damaged by volcanic ash while at the same time allowing airlines to fly as much as possible, safely reducing the disruption to passengers.Commenting on the presentation of the award Dame Deirdre Hutton, chair of the UK Civil Aviation Authority, said: We are delighted to name Rory as the recipient of our Flight Safety Award 2018. He has made a major contribution to the industry's understanding of the volcanic ash risk, which will greatly enhance our collective ability to deal with any future ash cloud event.The inaugural award was presented at a ceremony on 6 February 2018 at the Houses of Parliament, attended by aviation industry leaders and politicians. His Royal Highness Prince Michael of Kent GCVO, alongside Aviation Minister, Baroness Sugg made the presentation to Clarkson. The new flight safety award aims to recognise an individual or organisation's significant contribution to aviation safety.The CAA had previously presented an annual safety award to a member of the general aviation community for a one-off, or sustained contribution to private flying safety standards.The new award is said to broaden the scope of the prize to include any individual or organisation that has made a significant and tangible safety impact - in any area of aviation.There are a number of reasons why mall refurbishments are done - keeping up with current shopping centre trends, retail formats that erode traffic, or it could simply be a strategic need to expand or improve certain aspects of a shopping centre.

Timing dependent on mall performance

Wide range of research topics

Another reason to consider a refurbishment is Reilly's Law of Retail Gravitation , which suggests that customers are willing to travel longer distances to larger retail centres given the higher attraction they present to customers.Moses Mushirivindi, an authority on mall refurbishments, agrees with all the above-mentioned reasoning. Speaking at the eighth annual South African Council of Shopping Centres (SACSC) Research Conference on 9 May, Mushirivindi will be sharing his invaluable case study regarding the optimal time and stage in a malls lifecycle when refurbishments must be done.It was established that the timing of a revamp or refurbishment is dependent on the performance of the shopping centre which is mainly deduced from; property net income trends, tenant turnover trends, foot traffic trends, vacancies and time it takes to fill up vacancies. This will lead to a determination of the lifecycle stage of the centre. The research established that management must plan a refurbishment at the maturity stage of the centre's lifecycle. This is when there is a large number of shopping centres of the same type coupled with sharp competition and declining sales growth. It is important to therefore understand the stages of the lifecycle in order to plan refurbishment, he said.Mushirivindi added that the motive for refurbishment must be established as well, which then indicates which aspect of the centre should be refurbished first. Refurbishment can be undertaken to cure physical obsolescence, functional obsolescence and the order of works is dependent on the aspects requiring refurbishment, he said.Mushirivindi was born in Zimbabwe where he obtained his B.Com Honours Degree in Management and a Graduate Diploma in Marketing. In 2015 he was awarded the MidCity Properties Award for Best Student in Property Management. Upon arriving in South Africa, he enrolled for an MSc in Real Estate with the University of Pretoria which he completed in 2016 and graduated in 2017. He achieved a distinction in his research titled,, under the tutelage of Dr Dirk Prinsloo and Professor Chris Cloete.Commenting on Mushirivindis research, University of Pretorias Professor Cloete, who is also the SACSC chairman of Shopping Centre Studies, said that there has been a number of MSc mini-dissertations on shopping centre topics that had been completed over the past two years.The founding of the Shopping Centre Studies at the University of Pretoria in 2017 was a milestone in university education and research in South Africa. It served as a stimulus for a number of research projects by postgraduate students. The characteristics of shopping centres as complex systems, and the divergent and important role it fulfils in modern society, are being investigated in a wide range of research topics in the Department of Construction Economics. A number of research papers have also emanated from postgraduate research on shopping centres. These outputs contribute to the increasing recognition of the SACSC/University of Pretoria initiative as the major focus of shopping centre research in South Africa and indeed in Africa, he said.Chief executive officer for the SACSC Amanda Stops said that Moses Mushirivindi is just one of the many speakers at the 2018 SACSC Research Conference who will bring many important retail and shopping centre insights to light. We look forward to showcasing Moses, along with our other speakers to delegates next month, it is going to be an enlightening session for all, she said."A clear understanding of the branding process is essential for entrepreneurs, business owners and brand managers when starting a new venture or developing a new product - doing this upfront just makes sense," says branding expert Raymond van Niekerk.

"By following the process of creating a solid brand for your company or product at the outset, you will have a clarity of purpose that will serve your business well," says the man who brought the zebra to the Investec brand. Raymond van Niekerk is former Global Head of Marketing at Investec and convenor of the Brand Creation for New Ventures programme at the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB).Investec had already established their identity as an out of the ordinary financial institution, when van Niekerk was tasked with overhauling the brand. With his team they found the ideal icon in the zebra  each animals stripes are unique, and the association with Africa and its diversity reinforced their South African origins as the company grew globally. Investec had established their core purpose, and the various branding elements fell into place because this fundamental was in place.This clarity of purpose and the naming of a brand, is one of the four fundamentals that van Niekerk suggests needs consideration - all of which form the core parts of the course he teaches at the GSB.You need to start by taking a critical look at the purpose of your business or product and make sure your naming receives the attention it deserves, van Niekerk says. He cites Snapscan as a fine example of a South African brand that has achieved this. The naming of Snapscan is spot on, he says. The name tells you what it is, the functionality of purpose is so astonishingly clear, and the simplicity of their communication reflects the ease of use of the app.Knowing what brand architecture is and the tools used to create it, gives you a big picture view of the role branding plays in your business. The physical aspects of a brand include the logo or the typography, and an understanding of the purpose of iconography and the psychology of branding, provides valuable insight. The toolbox includes your advertising, social media and public relations, and how they fit together.A strong foundation will stand you in good stead when your business grows - the structure created by this process helps you maintain brand integrity when developing new products and it facilitates brand extensions, partnerships and endorsements.Now that Snapscan is associated with Standard Bank for instance, their brand clarity ensures that it is not drowned out by the Standard Bank brand. They appear to be seamlessly maintaining their brand identity while partnering with a powerful brand, says van Niekerk.The visual and verbal language you have developed using the branding toolbox, should then be used to convey the tone that suits who or what you are as a brand.If you create a brand that says informal and open, and your corporate behaviour and messaging is formal and aloof, your clarity of purpose is lost, both for your customers as well as for your employees, who are an integral reflection of a brand, says van Niekerk.If owners, managers and product developers can be involved at the inception of a brand, and have buy-in to everything the brand represents, many potential problems can be avoided. Van Niekerk feels that branding therefore is not just for marketers, but also for top executives at big brands, small and medium sized business owners, as well as for the entrepreneurs who are about to go guns blazing into a new venture.This solid foundation functions as a reference point for all aspects of running and growing the business.Congolese journalists stand in solidarity with imprisoned journalist Eliezer Ntambwe in front of the DRC's Prosecutor General's Office in Kinshasa on April 3, 2018.

Congolese judicial police on the morning of April 2 arrested Ntambwe at Tokomi Wapi's Kinshasa office and took him to the prosecutor general's office in Gombe, a district in the city's northwest, where he is still being held, according to the journalist's lawyer, Herve Diakiese, and the Observatory for Press Freedom in Africa , (OLPA), a local press freedom organization. Ntambwe has not been charged, Diakiese said.Ntambwe was detained after the governor of DRC's central Kasai Oriental province, Ngoyi Kasanji, accused him of defamation and extortion relating to an interview the journalist conducted, according to Diakiese and OLPA."No journalist should be deprived of his liberty simply on accusations by a powerful political figure, and before the facts of the case have been made clear," said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Angela Quintal. "Eliezer Ntambwe should be freed while due process of the law is carried out."Kasanji told CPJ that Ntambwe's detention was fair because the prosecutor general was still investigating accusations he made against the journalist.Diakiese said the investigation could be carried out without arresting the journalist. The lawyer told CPJ that he had submitted a legal request for Ntambwe's release.Diakiese also said Congolese criminal procedure grants the prosecutor general up to five days from Ntambwe's arrest to investigate the claims. After five days, the prosecutor may ask a judge to keep Ntambwe in preventive detention for an additional 15 days, Diakiese told CPJ.The governor told CPJ that Ntambwe sought to extort him and threatened to release a March 8interview Ntambwe conducted with two guests for Tokomi Wapi during which the governor was accused of involvement in violently seizing a diamond from a miner."He [Ntambwe] asked for money [to not broadcast the interview]," Kasanji told CPJ and said he refused to pay.Diakiese and two other Congolese journalists with whom CPJ spoke who did not want to be named for fear of reprisal said they believe Ntambwe's arrest was meant to intimidate the press.Following Ntambwe's arrest, Congolese journalists gathered outside the public prosecutor's offices calling for their colleague's freedom.Over the last year, journalists in the DRC have been repeatedly detained and harassed, according to CPJ research.A Go Fund Me page has been set up to aid Ntambwe:This job expired on 12 May 2018.This job expired on 23 May 2018.Got a question or tip? Contact us at bizmojoidaho@gmail.com.

The LCAs of the Indian Air Force taking part in the ongoing 'Gaganshakti' combat exercise.

JAIPUR (PTI): Air Force stations based in Rajasthan close to Indo-Pak border are participating in the ongoing Indian Air Force's combat exercises, defence officials said.



The two-week long exercise named 'Gaganshakti' started from Sunday to check the force's operational preparedness with a focus on dealing with any possible security challenge from China and Pakistan, the officials said.



The air force stations at Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Uttarlai, Phalodi, Nal and Suratgarh in Rajasthan are also participating in the exercise, they said.



"The aim of this exercise is real time coordination, deployment and employment of air power in a short and intense battle scenario," the IAF said in a statement.



It said concepts of accelerated operations, network centric operations, long range missions with concentrated weapon releases across all air to ground ranges in India and inter valley troop transfer have been planned as part of the exercise.



Special operations employing transport aircraft and helicopter as well as special forces have been planned during the exercise whereas new strategies and tactics, various humanitarian assistance and disaster relief drills will also be validated, the IAF said.



Maj. Gen. Tareq Saad Zaghloul, Chief of the Armed Forces Armament Authority, Egypt, being received by Dr. Sudhir Kumar Mishra, CEO & MD, BrahMos Aerospace, DS & DG (BrahMos), DRDO during his visit to BrahMos pavilion at DefExpo 2018. A Brahmand photo.

THIRUVIDANTHAI, TAMIL NADU (BNS): Major General Tareq Saad Zaghloul, Chief of the Armed Forces Armament Authority, representing the Egyptian Ministry of Defence interacted with Dr. Sudhir Kumar Mishra, CEO & MD, BrahMos Aerospace, DS & DG (BrahMos), DRDO during his visit to BrahMos pavilion on the first-day of DefExpo India in Chennai.



Maj. Gen. Tareq Saad Zaghloul along with a high level delegation from the Arab Republic of Egypt was apprised about the capabilities of the BRAHMOS supersonic cruise missile system which has successfully proved its mettle as the most potent weapon system and a force multiplier in network centric warfare. It can be launched from multiple platforms based on land, sea, sub-sea and air.



The emergence of BRAHMOS has not only strengthened Indias technological base but also elevated its image in the global arena. As a high technology defence product, BrahMos has great potential of becoming India's major weapon export in the coming decades giving the country a share of the arms business.

CHENNAI (PTI): Adani Defence and Aerospace, part of the diversified conglomerate Adani Group, said Wednesday it is collaborating with Punj Lloyd and US-based Rave Gears to manufacture high precision aerospace gears.



Announcing the tie-up during the ongoing DefExpo, organised by the Defence Ministry at Thiruvadanthai, about 40 km from Chennai, Adani Defence and Aerospace Head Ashish Rajvanshi, said the tripartite agreement would leverage on the strengths of the three companies.



Declining to elaborate about the partnership, he said "we are collaborating together to manufacture high-end aerospace gears in India."



The companies would evaluate options of floating a new company under the agreement over the coming months, he said.



"The collaboration intends to manufacture gears and gear assemblies mainly for rotary platforms, currently under production in India," Rajvanshi told reporters.



The collaboration will evaluate for setting up a manufacturing base in India and also look for exporting aerospace gears to global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), he said.



"The agreement furthers the indigenisation agenda under Make in India programme and will bring state-of-the-art technology to the country," he said.



Commenting on the partnership, Rave Gears CEO, Nick Patel, said, "It is an opportunity for Rave to do what its best at; to offer technology which led Rave to conquer NASCAR market in three years."



"We at Rave are excited at the immense potential that offers from this collaboration," he said.



Punj Lloyd, Manufacturing Business President, Ashok Wadhawan, said the collaboration will enable India achieve indigenisation in one of the most critical components in rotary platforms.

CHENNAI (PTI): Cyient, a Hyderabad-based firm, on Wednesday said it has entered into a joint venture with Israels BlueBird Aero Systems to manufacture advanced Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems.



Cyient Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Krishna Bodanapu and BlueBird Aero Systems Founder-CEO, Ronen Nadir, signed the agreement on Wednesday at the ongoing DefExpo, organised by the Defence ministry at Thiruvadanthai, about 40 km from here.



As per the agreement, a joint venture company named  Cyient Solutions and Systems Pvt Ltd  has been floated in which Cyient would hold 51 per cent stake while the remaining 49 per cent with Israel-based BlueBird Aero Systems.



"...the joint venture would offer field-proven UAV systems to Indian defence, paramilitary, security forces," Cyient, Engineering design, manufacturing, geospatial and networks provider, said.



Cyient would manufacture, assemble, integrate and test advanced UAV systems at its facility in Hyderabad by leveraging the technology know-how of BlueBird Aero Systems.



"I am very excited about the joint venture with BlueBird Aero Systems that combines our design and manufacturing expertise to bring the best of UAV technology solutions," Bodanapu said.



"The joint venture also underlines the commitment of both partners to the government's Make in India initiative," he said.



The joint venture enables indigenisation, manufacturing, training and support of UAV systems in India, BlueBird Aero Systems Founder and CEO, Ronen Nadir said.



"Bluebird is pleased to transfer its latest technology know-how to further enhance what we see as a long term partnership with Cyient for the benefit of Indian UAV market," he said.



Under the joint venture, Cyient and BlueBird would also provide aftermarket services, including spares, repairs, maintenance and support across the country.





THIRUVIDANTHAI, TAMIL NADU (PTI): India has approved the technical configuration of the Kamov light-weight multi-role military helicopters which will be supplied to Indian armed forces by an Indo-Russian joint venture, a senior Russian official has said.



In October 2016, India and Russia had finalised a broad agreement for the joint venture between Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) and two Russian defence majors. India is procuring 200 Kamov Ka-226T choppers to replace its ageing Cheetah and Chetak helicopters.



The agreement for the Kamov choppers was signed during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Russia in December 2015.



The Indian side approved the technical configuration of the light utility Ka-226T helicopter developed by Russian Helicopters Holding Company to be assembled by Joint Venture Indo-Russian Helicopters Limited in India, CEO of Russian Helicopters Andrey Boginskiy said.



He was speaking to reporters on Wednesday on the sidelines of Defence Expo, a biennial exhibition of weapons and military platforms.



Boginskiy said a production facility will be set up in India to assemble the helicopters.



India's Defence Ministry has already approved the payment for setting up of the JV. A site in the vicinity of Tumkur near Bangaluru has been identified.



Approval of helicopter configuration to be delivered and assembled in India means that the technical aspects of the project have been finalised. We and our Indian partners shall commence the preparation of contractual documents in the near future, he said.



Boginskiy said the Ka-226T helicopter, featuring a coaxial main rotor system, with maximum take-off weight of 3.6 tons, is capable of transporting up to one ton of payload.



Ka-226T may be equipped with a transport cabin, which allows transporting up to 6 people, or modules fitted with special equipment. Improved flight performance of Ka-226T helicopter, environmental friendliness, cost effectiveness, state-of-the-art avionics suite and additional flight safety solutions make this helicopter one of the best in its class, he said.



The PSLV-C41/IRNSS-1I mission blasted off at 0404 hours IST from the Sathish Dhawan Space Centre on Thursday. An ISRO photo

SRIHARIKOTA (PTI): The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Thursday launched the IRNSS-1I navigation satellite, the eighth such satellite to be a part of a constellation, from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.



PSLV-C41/IRNSS-1I Mission blasted off at 4.04 am from the first launchpad at the Sathish Dhawan Space Centre. It was a normal lift-off, ISRO officials said.



IRNSS-1I is expected to replace IRNSS-1A, the first of the seven navigation satellites, that was rendered ineffective after its three rubidium atomic clocks failed. The seven satellites are part of the NavIC navigation satellite constellation.



The launch is ISRO's second attempt at sending a replacement satellite.



The previous mission of a PSLV carrying IRNSS-1H in August last year failed after the heat shield covering the satellite failed to separate.



The IRNSS-1I mission takes place two weeks after the space agency launched GSAT-6A on board GSLV Mk-II. Though the rocket placed GSAT-6A in orbit, the ISRO lost communication with the satellite within two days.



Manufacturing Technology Transfer Agreement of Small turbo Fan Engine for BATL being received by VAdm (Retd). N N Kumar, Executive Director (Production), BrahMos Aerospace, from Dr. Subhash Bhamre, Minister of State for Defece in the presence of Defence Minister Smt Nirmala Sitharaman at DEFEXPO India 2018.

THIRUVIDANTHAI, TAMIL NADU (BNS): The Manufacturing Technology Transfer Agreement of small turbo-fan engine for BATL was handed over by Union Minister of State for Defence Dr. Subhash Bhamre to VAdm (Retd). N N Kumar, Executive Director (Production), BrahMos Aerospace, Hyderabad, during the ongoing DefExpo 18 exhibition being held near Chennai.



The high-end, state-of-the-art turbo fan engine has been designed for strategic applications with pioneering efforts made by GTRE and BATL.



MoS Defence Dr. Subhash Bhamre being briefed by Dr. Sudhir K Mishra about the BRAHMOS Weapon System on display at Defexpo 2018.

THIRUVIDANTHAI, TAMIL NADU (BNS): Minister of State for Defence Dr. Subhash Bhamre on Thursday visited the BrahMos Aerospace pavilion at DefExpo 2018 and praised the indigenisation efforts being made by the Indo-Russian JV entity.



The Minister was briefed about the formidable BRAHMOS Weapon System and its recent successful achievements by Dr. Sudhir K Mishra, Distinguished Scientist & DG (BrahMos), DRDO & CEO and MD BrahMos Aerospace.



Dr. Bhamre was apprised about the BRAHMOS Land Mobile Complex, Naval Fleet Platform, and the latest successful launch of BRAHMOS air-version weapon.



He congratulated the BrahMos JV on the successful launches and particularly, the indigenisation efforts being taken up by the JV.





THIRUVIDANTHAI (PTI): Tata Sons has said it is in the process of consolidating its various businesses across aerospace and defence sectors under a single entity Tata Aerospace & Defence (Tata A&D).



The necessary statutory and regulatory approvals are in the process of being obtained, the Tata Sons said on Wednesday.



N. Chandrasekaran, Chairman of Tata Sons, said, The formation of Tata A&D, a single unified entity, will allow us to better target emerging opportunities in Aerospace and Defence, and engage holistically with customers both in India and globally.



The company said Tata A&D proposes to leverage its full range of expertise, experience and capabilities from across the Group related to land mobility solutions, aerospace, weapon systems, sensors and command, control, communication, computers and intelligence.



Several companies proposed to be forming part of Tata A&D already have strong, established partnerships with leading aerospace and defence firms and are part of the global supply chain. In some instances, they are also a global single source provider, the company said.



It said Tata A&D will also be deeply invested in the development of indigenous platforms uniquely suited for the Indian defence forces, which is central to Tata A&D's long-term strategy.



In addition to the growing list of joint ventures and collaborations with leading global equipment manufacturers, Tata A&D proposes to bring together over 6,000 employees, and have production facilities in the states of Telangana, Karnataka, Jharkhand, and Maharashtra, the company said.



Banmali Agrawala, President, Infrastructure and Defence & Aerospace, Tata Sons, said, Tata A&D when formed, will be better equipped to execute larger and more complex projects and be more globally competitive as part of the global supply chain.



He said, We have moved beyond providing individual products to develop integrated offerings across Land mobility, airborne platforms and systems, as well as weapons systems and C4I. In India, Tata has built an industrial base in defence intentionally designed to complement and integrate with the efforts of the Defence Research & Development Organization (DRDO) and Defence Public Sector Units (PSU).



The company said post the combination, the full range of integrated solutions by Tata A&D will include multi-axle combat support vehicles, light armoured vehicles, light support vehicles, mine protected vehicles, light armoured multi-role combat vehicles, wheeled armoured amphibious platforms (WHAP) and tracked amphibious platforms like the Futuristic Infantry Combat Vehicle (FICV) and Future Ready Combat Vehicle (FRCV).



It said the airborne platforms and systems of the company will include unmanned systems, rotary platforms, fixed wing platforms, mission systems and avionics, as well as in-house indigenous development of mini and micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and in-house development of safety-critical airborne computer systems and related applications for both manned and unmanned platforms.



Subsequent to the consolidation, Tata A&D will draw synergies from entities across the group, including Tata Motors' Defence Division, TAL Manufacturing Solutions Limited (subsidiary of Tata Motors), Tata Power's Strategic Engineering Division, Tata Advanced Materials Limited, and Tata Advanced Systems Limited, the company said.

Research News

New book co-authored by UB sociologist explores how cities are changing

A new book by UB sociologist Kevin T. Smiley looks at urban trends in Houston (shown here) and Copenhagen, and the different outcomes in the two cities.

By BERT GAMBINI

Sometimes we think about our cities more homogeneously than they actually are. 

Thinking critically about cities and the social mechanisms that underwrite them provides people with the power to influence the places where they live and work.

The possibility for change ultimately rests in recognizing the roots of the system and how each city is comprised of elements that include unique histories, spaces and policies, according to Kevin T. Smiley, assistant professor in UBs Department of Sociology. Smiley is co-author of a new book, Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of our Urban Future (NYU Press), with Michael Oluf Emerson, provost and professor of urban studies at North Park University in Chicago.

We tell people a remarkable story in this book about the kinds of cities they might want to live in, says Smiley, an expert in urban and environment sociology.

The book was born out of the authors time in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Houston, Texas.

Smiley was a graduate student at Rice University in Houston, where Emerson is a Kinder Fellow at Rices Kinder Institute for Urban Research. The authors were studying Houston, and when Emerson went to Copenhagen for additional research, Smiley joined him for a semester abroad that provided insights that helped give rise to the book.

We were witnessing, in Houston, a lot of the same urban trends we knew to be characteristic of cities all across the world, but the outcomes in Copenhagen were dramatically different, says Smiley. We were struck by the differences, by the contrasts that greeted us in everyday life and in our analysis.

Simply put, sometimes we think about our cities more homogeneously than they actually are.

As Smiley and Emerson explain, cities manifest their differences in such a way that puts them into two distinct categories: market cities and people cities.

A free market approach characterizes the market city. Its individualistic-minded in culture and thinking, with an open housing market and less commitment to the environment and greater social and economic inequalities.

A people city has collective-minded policies filtered through regional governance and structured tax systems. Inequalities are narrow and there exists a commitment toward keeping those inequalities attenuated.

Most cities fall somewhere in between those two types and are heading in one direction or the other, but Houston and Copenhagen represent two ends of a spectrum and by highlighting each of them, the authors say theyve come as close to each end of the spectrum as possible.

There is a fight for the soul of the city right now about whether to open it up more to markets or control those forces in favor of the people city model, says Smiley. All cities deal with the pangs of growing inequalities, but market cities and people cities deal with these issues in remarkably different ways.

Houston is taking a free market approach to housing with the idea that by building more housing the sheer supply will help engender a more inexpensive and fair housing market, he says. But Copenhagen has a regulatory approach where it has rent controls for nine out every 10 city apartments combined with other initiatives to keep property values under control.

Environmental concerns also reflect those different mindsets.

Both cities are taking steps to address climate change, but the approaches differ greatly.

Houstons municipal government is energetic about changing the functions of the government itself by building green, but the government is not regulating private industry, Smiley says. In Copenhagen, the governments reach is far wider, not just within itself, but through its encouragement of residential and commercial environmental programs.

But what approach is better? Are market cities or people cities better suited to address the future demands of global realities?

We leave that to the reader, Smiley says. We use the last chapter of our book to highlight the challenges that are facing each type of city and how readers might think about the reforms necessary to meet those challenges.Hotel occupancy in the countrys top two markets, Delhi and Mumbai, has hit 80 per cent in January-March, after over a decade. Occupancy in Delhi in 2016-17 was 70 per cent and around 75 per cent in Mumbai.

Occupancy is the percentage of days for which rooms are booked in a given period. An 80 per cent occupancy implies that rooms were booked for five to six days a week in most branded hotels in these two cities. The increase in occupancy was due to growing demand from business and leisure travellers and a slowdown in addition of new hotel rooms. Supply (addition of ...Over the past few years, this company has not only satiated the hunger of consumers of its products, but also investors who had an appetite for risk. In the past two years, Venkys (India) has jumped nearly 1,100 per cent from Rs 376 levels to around Rs 4,500 levels now, ACE Equity data shows.

In comparison, the S&P BSE Sensex has moved up 36 per cent during this period. In the last one year alone, the stock has gained an impressive 323 per cent. The stock has been one of the top three best performers in terms of returns in the BSE 500 index over the last two years, ...Sources in CIL suggested as the Centre had cleared the grey area which previously stalled CBM extraction by the coal behemoth, it will be on the lookout for service providers which can extract the gas from its mines for commercial sale. However, the tender for this selection will depend on the Centres policy decision. As of now, we have planned to go ahead with a ...

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Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

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As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed.



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Digital EditorHMD Global, which sells handsets under the brand Nokia, is looking to regain the lost glory in India. After setting up its business in 2017, the firm is planning to turn the tables in 2018. Since HMD Global entered the handset business in 2016, it has sold 70 million devices.

India is among its top three global markets. It has better potential than other European markets. After making a mark in the feature phone market within a year, HMD is now eyeing the top spot. The Finnish firm wants to clinch a significant share of the smartphone market that is currently dominated by Asian ...Anglo American Plcs biggest shareholder, billionaire Anil Agarwal, has offered to help the mining giant expand into India. Thats a big market for them, Agarwal said in an interview in Lusaka. I am going to help them if they need to open up that market for them to work there. The mining tycoon wasnt explicit about whether he wanted to assist Anglo with increasing sales to India or to start operating mines there.

Dear Reader,

Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

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As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed.



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Digital EditorThe government on Thursday announced setting up of a 13-member task force, headed by Union minister Jayant Sinha, to prepare a roadmap for the implementation of unmanned aerial vehicle technology.

The task force would develop a roadmap with implementable recommendations for central as well as state governments, industry and research institutions, an official release said.

Headed by Sinha, who is the Minister of State for Civil Aviation, the task force would have Civil Aviation Secretary R N Choubey, Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba, Defence Secretary Sanjay Mitra and DIPP Secretary Ramesh Abhishek as members.

Chief of Integrated Defence Staff Lt Gen Satish Dua, Bureau of Police Research and Development's Director General A P Maheshwari, DGCA Director General B S Bhullar, DRDO Chairman and Secretary S Christopher, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research's Director General and Secretary Girish Sahni, AAI Chairman Guruprasad Mohapatra are in the task force.

S K Mishra, Joint Secretary at the Civil Aviation Ministry, and A K Ghosh, HoD of Aerospace Engineering Department at IIT Kanpur are also part of the panel.

Besides, 20 industry experts would be co-opted as special invitees to the task force on need basis. They include BEL CMD Gowtama M V, Boeing International Corporation India President Pratyush Kumar, HAL CMD T Suvarna Raju and Lockheed Martin India Chief Executive Phil Shaw.

The committee would prepare a roadmap, including "outcomes, timelines, implementation & review mechanism and measurable metrics" for the implementation of UAV technology. Besides, the role of the industry would be clearly delineated, according to the release.

It would also focus on research and development, acquisition and commercialisation, application and adoption in specific sectors, the regulatory framework as well as the preference for Make in India.Credit: Johnny BuzzerioWhen Alice in Chains announced their summer tour dates last month, the band also revealed a new album was coming later this year. The news was a bit surprising, since the grunge vets had been tight-lipped about the potential follow-up to 2013's The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, but guitarist Jerry Cantrell says the band wasn't being purposefully withholding.

"It's not that we were keeping it a secret -- we just didn't want to say a whole lot about it until we had something to say," Cantrell tells Guitar World. "And we certainly have something to say with this one. It's a f***ing strong record."

As for what the album will sound like, though, Cantrell isn't ready to reveal too much. However, he does say that it will mix new elements with the band's signature sound.

"It's a record we havent done yet, I can tell you that," Cantrell explains. "But it's also a record that has all the elements of anything you would expect from us. It's got our fingerprint."

"We're really proud of the material that we wrote and the performances we captured," he adds. "There's some really heavy s***, some really ugly stuff, some real beautiful stuff, some weirdo trippy s***. It's good!"

Cantrell estimates that the new album will arrive "sometime this summer." In the meantime, Alice in Chains kicks off a U.S. tour April 28 in Boston.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Congress chief led a midnight march to the India Gate here tonight to protest the Kathua and Unnao minor rape cases and said it's time for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to walk the talk on 'beti bachao' (save the girl child).

Amid slogans against the BJP and the Prime Minister during the march, Gandhi said the women of the country are afraid to go out today and the government must ensure their safety.

Gandhi was joined by his sister Priyanka and her husband Robert Vadra as also their children, besides scores of Congress leaders, party workers and others, who were seen shouting slogans, carrying candles and some even placards against the BJP governments at the Centre and in Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir while demanding urgent action against the perpetrators of two heinous gangrapes -- one in Unnao (UP) and the other in Kathua (J&K).

"We are here against crimes being committed against women, against rapes, violence and murder and the government must act on this. This is a issue and not a political one," Gandhi said at the march in the heart of the capital.

"This is about our women. Thousands are present here including the common people and people from all parties. This situation is such today that one after another incident of murder, rape and violence is taking place in various parts of the country. We are standing here against that and we want the government to act," he said.

Amid slogans being raised against the government at the protest march, Gandhi said the women of the country are afraid to go out today and the government must ensure their safety and help them live in peace.

On the Modi government's 'Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao' initiative, Gandhi said it was the right slogan and the Prime Minister must start work on 'Beti Bachao'.

"Today, India's women are afraid of coming out in public. Women and girls are being killed and raped. We want that the government should resolve this issue so that the Indian women can come out on the roads and live a life free of fear.

"This is a issue and not a political one. It concerns our women. People of all parties, common people and women are here.

I only want to say that the government should do something about the plight of women and the crimes against them," he said.

ALSO READ: Unnao rape case: Rahul Gandhi leads midnight candlelight protest; updates

Several people were seen having brought their children as well, but at times, the chaotic crowd appeared getting out of control and Priyanka Vadra was shoved by some, prompting her to ask people to maintain calm and remember the "cause" for which they had come there.

Her husband Robert Vadra said the country needs a change where women could feel safe.

Some Congress leaders asked the people in the march to keep it a "silent" protest, even as a few were seen taking selfies as well.

The Congress leaders present at the protest march to the India Gate, which in the past has seen a huge protest in the Nirbhaya rape case, included Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Salman Khurshid, Ashok Gehlot, Ajay Maken, Sushmita Dev, Haroon Yusuf, Randeep Surjewala and Ambika Soni.

Photo: Dalip Kumar

Azad said the Modi government was sleeping and those facing the biggest threat were the daughters of the country during the current regime.

Several Congress leaders also poked fun at the Modi government's Beti Bachao slogan, saying the daughters were not safe in the country.

Announcing the march, Gandhi had tweeted in the evening, "Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does."

Earlier in the day, Gandhi had expressed anguish and shock on the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua, and attacked the BJP government in UP for failing to act against its MLA, who is an accused in the Unnao rape case of a 17-year-old girl.

"How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil? What happened at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished. What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?" he said.

The Kathua girl, who belonged to the nomadic Bakerwal Muslim community, had disappeared from a spot near her house on January 10. A week later, her body was found in the same area.

A Special Investigation Team, formed to probe the incident, has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destroying evidence.

Jammu has been on tenterhooks since the brutal rape and murder. The city's bar association has opposed the action against the accused and alleged that minority Dogras were being targeted.

Gandhi joined the protest near the Man Singh Road at 11.55 pm. The police had barricaded all the routes leading to India Gate.

DPCC President Ajay Maken said, "Atrocities are being committed against women in the country and the government is sleeping. The BJP is not only involved directly, it is also protesting in favour of the culprits and stopping law enforcement agencies from doing their job. It is a sad state of affairs.Almost 18 months after demonetisation was announced, the microfinance sector continues to suffer, as a substantial portion of its loan portfolio in some states remains at risk. At national level, the portfolio at risk (PAR)  value of loans in arrears  for delinquencies of more than 30 days (PAR>30) was almost 6 per cent at the end of December 2017, up from 0.3 per cent at the end of September 2016.

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Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

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As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed.



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Digital EditorThe National Highways Authority of India (NHAI)s project awarding activity touched a new high in the last financial year. While the awarding activity looks impressive, the ministry may be struggling with fresh reports of delays.

In its data shared with the Lok Sabha in March, the road ministry said 107 of its road projects are facing delays and has or will miss the original completion date. Most of these projects were awarded prior to May 2014 when the new government came to power. However, around 19 of these 107 projects are such which were awarded in or after May ...Two of the worlds top three oil consumers, China and India, have decided to jointly draw up a strategy for sourcing crude oil from the international market. This grouping could expand, with South Korea and Japan as the other participants.

India and China have questioned on international platforms the practice of charging an Asian Premium by the oil producing nations. According to the plan, the two countries might source crude oil jointly from the West Asian region. China, India, Japan, and South Korea are the top four consumers in the world other than the US, which is the ...The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday questioned two directors of NuPower Renewables Pvt Ltd in connection with a case related to Rs 32.5 billion loan to the Videocon Group in 2012, a CBI official said.

The agency examined Mahesh Chandra Punglia and Umanath Vainkut Nayak at its headquarters in New Delhi, the official said.

Earlier, the agency had examined Punglia for three days in Mumbai.

According to the CBI official, Punglia is a close aide of Videocon Group chief Venugopal Dhoot. He was previously an employee of the Group and then would offer consultancy services to it.

Punglia is also a Director in NuPower Renewables -- the company formed by ICICI Bank Chief Executive Chanda Kochhar's husband Deepak Kochhar and Dhoot in December 2008.

Punglia was examined about the role of Chanda Kochhar's brother-in-law Rajiv Kochhar's Singapore-based company Avista Advisory in the restructuring of loan.

The NuPower director was also asked about the help he extended to Videocon in securing the loan from the ICICI Bank, which was part of a Rs 400 billion credit given by a consortium of 20 banks, led by the State Bank of India, to the Videocon Group.

The agency had on Sunday also questioned Nayak in Mumbai.

Earlier, the agency had questioned Rajiv Kochhar for five consecutive days. He was on Thursday stopped at Mumbai airport by immigration authorities when he was about to leave for Singapore. Later, he was handed over to the CBI which questioned him as part of its preliminary probe against his brother Deepak Kochhar and Dhoot.

The agency had registered a preliminary inquiry against Deepak Kochhar, Videocon Group officials and others to determine any wrongdoing or otherwise in the sanction of loan to the Group by the ICICI Bank as part of the consortium of in 2012.

Chanda Kochhar, who is facing questions of conflict of interest in the case, has not been named in the preliminary inquiry, which was registered after news reports raised questions about the Videocon Chairman giving loan of Rs 640 milliob to a firm he had jointly promoted with Deepak Kochhar, six months after his group got the Rs 32.5 billion loan.

Sources said Deepak Kochhar and Dhoot could also be called for questioning after examination of documents of the loan and statements.The Chinese military on Thursday held its largest ever maritime drill in the disputed during which it displayed for the first time the country's aircraft carrier strike group and the most advanced weaponry of the People's Liberation Army (PLA).

President Xi Jinping, also the general secretary of the ruling Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), reviewed the drill and addressed the sailors, PLA Daily reported.

CMC is the overall high command of the 2-million strong Chinese military.

Forty-eight warships, 76 aircraft and more than 10,000 sailors and soldiers took part in the drill which was hailed as "the biggest maritime military parade since the foundation of the new China and a heroic display of the PLA Navy in the new era," the PLA Daily reported today.

The drill was held amid frequent forays made by US naval and aircraft into the to assert the freedom of navigation especially around the artificial islands built by China, where it has also established garrisons.

China claims almost all of the Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have counterclaims over the area.

It was the first maritime military parade held in the South China Sea and to be open to the public, state-run Global Times reported.

The PLA's previous four maritime parades were held in Beihai. China's aircraft carrier, Liaoning joined the parade for the first time.

All combat systems of the PLA Navy and 10 air echelons joined the parade.

"The most advanced weaponry, including the Liaoning, type 052D destroyers, type 052C destroyers, type 071 amphibious transport dock and type 093 submarine all appeared on the South China Sea," Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times.

The parade showcased the PLA's aircraft carrier group and its enhanced combat capability in the high seas, Song said, adding that China's upgraded navy signifies the PLA is not afraid of war and is capable of winning any battle.

"China's strength in protecting its national maritime interest has grown. The Thursday parade could also serve as deterrence to maritime hegemony, making adversaries think twice before attempting to harm China's core national interests," Song said.

Holding the parade in the South China Sea was a strategic move as the waters are a potential combat zone, said Li Jie, a Beijing-based naval expert.French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that he had evidence that chemical weapons were used in rebel-held enclave of Douma in Syria and that the regime of Bashar al-Assad was guilty, reiterating that attacking Damascus is necessary.

Macron was one of several Western leaders to enter the diplomatic crisis following last week's attack on Douma, which left 70 people dead, including 40 who showed signs of exposure to chemical toxins, Efe news reported citing a report by the World Health Organization.

"We have evidence chemical weapons were used and that it was the regime who used them," said Macron in a televised interview with TF1 broadcaster. "We will have decision to take in due course."

Last week, an attack on Douma left at least 70 people dead, of which 40 showed signs of exposure to chemical toxins.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged against "any steps which could lead to an escalation of tensions". Also on Thursday, the UN Security Council was to hold an emergency meeting to discuss the crisis, the BBC reported.

One of Macron's closest European Union allies, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, distanced her country from the prospect of joining in any military action against Syria.

"Germany will not take part in possible military action, on which no decisions have yet been taken," she told a press conference alongside Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen.

She also added that Germany would continue to support measures to show that use of chemical weapons was "unacceptable".

British Prime Minister Theresa May was said to be organizing a Cabinet meeting to discuss the steps her country would take if US President Donald Trump followed through on his threats to strike Syria.

Trump warned Syria and Russia on Wednesday that he was readying missile strikes on Syria in retaliation for the attack.

He had also blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as Iran for "backing Animal Assad" and warned they would have a "big price to pay".

Both the Syrian regime and its main backers Russia and Iran have denied responsibility for the alleged chemical attack and insist "there is a Western conspiracy" aimed at justifying military action in Syria.Theres no such thing as a free lunch, but investing in a credit card rewards program can land you pretty close to the mark. Credit card points are generally more valuable than points or miles attached to a specific airline or hotel group. The reason? Flexibility. With a trove of credit card points, you can get flights, hotel rooms or even cruises. While Capital One and Bank of America are coming into their own, the three major players in the travel rewards game are American Express, Chase and Citi. Heres a basic rundown of their current programs. The basic points unit ...CIA Director on Thursday assured American lawmakers that if confirmed as the US Secretary of State, he would execute diligent and firm diplomacy.

Headed to be the top American diplomat in the next few week, as his nomination moves through the legislative process, Pompeo told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that couched in all of global challenges are opportunities.

These are opportunities to promote security, stability, and human rights in key regions, he said. "I also believe we have opportunities for increasingly robust and fair trading relationships that benefit the American people," he said.

While India did not figure even once in his 13-page opening testimony during his confirmation hearing, Pompeo identified China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as the major challenges. In all of these cases, he aligned himself with the new tough policies of President Donald Trump.

However, he said war is the last resort.

"Should I be confirmed as Secretary of State, I will execute diligent and firm diplomacy, working alongside the world's finest diplomatic service, to help our President confront the challenges and seize the opportunities of our time," Pompeo said.

Noting that diplomatic efforts are underway to rid the world of a nuclear North Korea, he said there is no higher diplomatic task for the State Department team than solving this decades-in-the-making threat to the US.

"The stakes are high for everyone, but I believe them to be the highest for the North Korean regime. The State Department has successfully rallied the world to cut ties and impose sanctions that have had a profound impact," he said.

"But there is much diplomatic work left to do, including supporting the President's intent to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. That meeting will take place against a backdrop of commitment by our President to achieve denuclearization and prevent America from being held at risk by a North Korean arsenal of nuclear weapons," Pompeo said.

"I have read the CIA histories of previous negotiations with the North Koreans, and am confident that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past. President Trump isn't one to play games at the negotiating table - and I won't be either," he said.

Russia, he alleged, continues to act aggressively, enabled by years of soft policy toward that aggression. "That's now over. The list of this administration's actions to raise the cost for Vladimir Putin is long. We are rebuilding our already strong military and recapitalizing our nuclear deterrent," he said.

The Trump Administration has imposed tough sanctions and expelled more Russian diplomats and intelligence officers from the US than at any time since the Cold War.

Pompeo said the actions of this administration make clear that President Trump's national security strategy, rightfully, has identified Russia as a danger to US.

Iran, he alleged, has been on the march and has paid too low a price for its dangerous behavior.

"Our administration has developed a strategy to counter Iran that will raise that cost. The issues surrounding Iran's proliferation threat are real and we, along with our allies, must deal with the long-term risk that its capability presents," he said.

"But we cannot let the nuclear file prevent us from acting against Iran's cyber efforts or its attempts to provide missiles to the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia and Americans who travel there. Iran's activities in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon threaten the very existence of Israel, and the global reach of Hezbollah threatens us right here in the homeland," he asserted.

Pompeo said even while America has reestablished a position of strength in its diplomatic relationship, China continues its concerted and coordinated effort to compete with the United States in diplomatic, military, and economic terms.

"For years, through IP theft and coercive technology transfer, China has exploited weak US trade policy and leeched wealth and secrets from our economy. Militarily, it continues its provocation in the South and East China Seas, in cyberspace, and even in outer space. This administration is determined to work diplomatically with the Chinese government in an effort to develop a more productive bilateral partnership," he said.

"We have been pleased with China's support of our efforts to apply pressure on the North Korean regime, but it must do more. We have never advocated change in regime in North Korea. The State Department must be at the center of formulating and executing our China policy," he added.The world's chemical weapons watchdog Thursday confirmed UK's findings that the source of the military-grade deadly nerve agent used in an attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury originally came from Russia.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the chemical used against Sergei and Yulia Skripal was "of high purity", without mentioning the exact name of the substance which will be reserved for the complete classified report it has prepared.

"Today the chemical weapons watchdog have confirmed the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical used in the attempted assassination of Skripal and his daughter, and which also resulted in the hospitalisation of a British police officer. That was a military- grade nerve agent a Novichok," said UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson.

In a declassified summary of its findings, however, the OPCW did not make any assessment on who carried out the March 4 attack on 66-year-old former double agent Sergei and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury that also injured a police officer.

He said the watchdog's findings were based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world, all of which returned the same "conclusive" results.

"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible only Russia has the means, motive and record The Kremlin must give answers," he added.

The minister said the UK had asked the OPCW to publish the executive summary of its findings in the "interest of transparency" and called a session of the OPCW Executive Council next Wednesday to discuss next steps.

"We must, as a world community, stand up for the rules based order which keeps us all safe. The use of weapons of this kind can never be justified, and must be ended," Johnson said.

The UK's finding of a Soviet era Novichok stock of nerve agent used in the attack against the Skripals had been presented before the House of Commons by British Prime Minister Theresa May last month, when she declared that Russia was "culpable".

The UK government has since made several statements pointing the finger of blame of the Kremlin and expelled Russian diplomats in retaliation of the poisoning of the Skripals. The incident has led to a diplomatic crisis between Moscow and the West as Moscow denies any involvement and accuses Britain of inventing a "fake story".

In retaliation, Russia also expelled 60 American diplomats.

The OPCW report comes as Yulia turned down help from the Russian embassy in a statement issued through Scotland Yard on Wednesday to say that she was "safe" and trying to come to terms with her new life.

"I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me," she said.

The 33-year-old Russian citizen has been taken to a secure location after being discharged from Salisbury District Hospital earlier this week. In her statement, she said that she has been made aware of the Russian embassy's attempts to contact her but she did not wish to avail of their services for the moment.

"I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian Embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can. At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them," she said in her statement through the Metropolitan Police.

"Most importantly, I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do. Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves, she added.

Making a specific reference to her Russia-based cousin, Viktoria, she said that "her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's".

Viktoria had been quoted widely in the Russian media following a phone conversation she claimed to have had with Yulia from hospital last week.

The Russian embassy in London immediately raised doubts over the authenticity of the statement, claiming it "only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen".

"With no possibility to verify it, the publication by the Metropolitan Police raises new questions rather than gives answers. As before, we would like to make sure that the statement really belongs to Yulia. So far, we doubt it much," an embassy statement said.

Sergei Skripal remains in hospital as he recovers from the effects of the toxic nerve agent. His daughter thanked the Salisbury hospital staff, adding: "I have left my father in their care, and he is still seriously ill. I too am still suffering with the effects of the nerve agent used against us."



The UK's intelligence officials are believed to be in talks with the CIA over the possible repatriation of the Skripals to the US or another friendly country for their safety.The Ahmadiyya community, who are also known as 'Qadiani', has been living in fear ever since suspected radical groups allegedly attacked a mosque in Bangladesh's Jamalpur last month, leaving more than 20 worshippers injured.

On that note, the Ahmadiyya community in Bangladesh is reportedly marginalised and has come under attack at various times.

Anticipating more 'hate' attacks in the future, many Ahmadiyya families have left Jamalpur; others who are residing in the town, are hiding their religious identities to avoid attention, the Dhaka Tribune reported.

On March 30, a group of people, armed with sharp weapons, launched an alleged attack on an Ahmadiyya mosque after Friday's prayers at Jamalpur's Madarganj Upazila, injuring 20 worshippers in the process.

As per the report, the members of Ahmadiyya community claimed that local Awami League leader Moneer Munshi had instigated the attack. However, this is yet to be ascertained.

A resident named Tayeb Ali was among those who were injured in the mosque ambush. He claimed, though he is not an Ahmadi, he went to the mosque to offer prayers and learn about their faith.

Jamalpur district's Ahmadiyya Jamaat South teacher Asaduzzaman Rajib added that owing to repeated hate attacks on the Ahmadis, people are living in fear and peace is disturbed because of "hardliners such as Khatme Nabuat Bangladesh and Jamaat-e-Islami".

"They have attacked us several times. They are disturbing the peace. We do not have any disputes with others. They (radical groups) are creating the discord," Rajib said, as quoted by the Dhaka Tribune.

Rafiqul Islam Khoka, a member of the Ahmadiyya community who owns a small stationery stop next to his home, said that he is not able to sell products, as people avoid purchasing from his shop for being an Ahmadi.

Speaking about the alleged attack, Sharishabari Ahmadiyya Jamaat President Faridul Islam and several others said that they had gone to offer their prayers at the mosque when the incident happened.

The members of the Ahmadiyya community claimed that the attack happened for no reasons, and said that they did not force anyone to follow their ideology.

On a related note, over 15,000 Ahmadis reside in the country, with 10,000 of them living in Brahmanbaria, 3,500 in Kishoreganj and 3,000 more in Mymensingh.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Congress' Kapil Sibal, on Thursday, asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi if he is trying to give the message 'Betiyaan chuppao' instead of 'Betiyaan padhao', in context of the Kathua and Unnao rape cases.

"Prime Minister, do you want to give the message of 'Betiyaan chuppao' or Beti Bachao'?" asked Sibal.

The statement came a day after the Jammu and Kashmir crime branch submitted a charge sheet on the rape of an 8-year-old girl named Asifa in Kathua, who was allegedly abducted, drugged, raped, and killed on January 17.

The Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, earlier today assured that her government will not allow the law to be obstructed and justice will be delivered to the victim.

As per the latest development of the Unnao rape case, the victim today demanded immediate arrest of the accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, fearing that lest he may get her uncle killed.

On April 8, the victim, along with her family members, had tried to commit suicide in front of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow, alleging that she was raped by Sengar and his fellow accomplices.

On Tuesday, the MLA's brother Atul Singh, along with three others, was arrested from Unnao on the directions of the DGP, by the Lucknow crime branch team.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, Harak Singh Rawat, on Thursday, admitted to his mistake after consuming cashews and fruit juice on a day his leader and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had urged every BJP worker to observe a fast.

In an attempt to expose the Opposition parties for disrupting the Parliament during budget sessions, while interacting with BJP members and other people on the "Gram Swaraj Abhiyan", Modi said it was the responsibility of the party leaders and workers to bring out the sin of those who strangled democracy before the nation by observing a day-long fast.

However, it seems like one of his own party members, Rawat, did not get the memo, as he was photographed eating dry-fruits and drinking juice.

In his defence, Rawat said, "all party leaders had observed a fast today but by mistake, I consumed cashews at an event.'

On Monday, leaders of Congress were photographed eating chole bhature at a restaurant before sitting for the day-long protest at Rajghat, called by the Delhi Congress, against the atrocities on the Dalit community.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Jammu and Kashmir Deputy chief minister Nirmal Singh on Friday requested to not politicise the Kathua rape case.

Singh slammed disgruntled elements trying to spread the wrong message and asserted that criminals don't have any religion.

"Justice should be done to her. There shouldn't be politics on that. Criminals who did it have no religion like terrorists have no religion. All communities, Hindu and Muslims have fought for that girl and only disgruntled elements are trying to give a wrong message," Singh told ANI.

An eight-year-old Muslim nomadic girl was allegedly abducted, drugged, raped, tortured and killed in Kathua district of Jammu and Kashmir. After being missing for a week, her body was found on January 17.

A special team of Jammu and Kashmir crime branch has made a case of conspiracy, kidnapping, wrongful confinement, gang rape, murder and destruction of evidence against eight accused, which include four policemen.

However, the lawyers of Jammu Bar Association have demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into the case. They have questioned the credibility of the Crime Branch officials, who according to them are mostly from Kashmir.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan on Thursday recorded an open message for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking for justice to Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery water dispute.

Taking to his Twitter handle, the Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) Chief said, "Sir, I am sure you are aware of the crisis that is gripping Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery water. I believe, from your past experience, you could easily deliver justice in the case of Narmada River Water Board."

Haasan further said, people of the state believe that there is a delay in Cauvery water issue because of the upcoming elections in Karnataka that are scheduled to take place on May 12.

"I want this belief to be dispelled. People are more important than elections," he added.

Haasan asked Modi to follow the Supreme Court judgement, and also posted an open letter to the Prime minister, in which he wrote "I am sure you will fulfill your duty towards the people and farmers of Tamil Nadu by constituting the Cauvery water Management Board immediately."

On February 16, the court had ordered the Central government to set up the Cauvery water Management Board (CMB) and Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC) within six weeks, in regards to the Cauvery River water dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

The Centre's failure to constitute CMB led to various protests in Tamil Nadu. Earlier today, opposition parties held a black flag protest against the Prime Minister's visit to the city without constituting the CMB.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan on Thursday called for reasonable and transparent pricing of the fuels.

Addressing the International Energy Forum here, Pradhan expressed his gratitude towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi for inaugurating the Ministerial meeting.

"Reasonable and transparent pricing and flexible markets (are required) to ensure growth for both producers and consumers and also establishes a mutually supportive relationship between them.," Pradhan said.

He further said that around 175 meetings have been already held with the Chief Executive Officers of various gas companies at government-to-government and business-to-business level.

He later reiterated the fact that the next International Energy Forum Ministerial meeting is scheduled to be held in China while pointing out that India and China have agreed to cooperate in the energy sector.

Earlier on Thursday External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj underscored that the energy sector is a key engine for the economic growth of the country.

The three-day forum, which concluded today, saw the participation of 92 countries, discussing on the future of global energy.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Testifying before the US senators for the second day in the wake of the data breach scandal and alleged foreign interference in elections, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday said that his company had a 200-member counter-terrorism team to deal with objectionable content.

In the joint hearing of the members of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee at the Capitol Hill here, Zuckerberg was asked questions related to how Facebook was planning to tackle on the opioid crisis, data protection, targeted ad system and curbing of terrorist and malicious activities.

Zuckerberg said, "The team is comprised of 200 people, who are focused on counter-terrorism. The content reviewers also go over flagged information."

"I think we have capacity in 30 languages that we are working on and in addition to that, we have a number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that we are developing like the ones that I mentioned that can proactively go flag the content," he added.

Zuckerberg further noted that the counter-terrorism team had designed systems, which helped to proactively flag terrorist groups' communication, thereby removing their accounts automatically.

It is to be noted that in its blog post last year, Facebook said that its team consisted of academic experts on counter-terrorism, former prosecutors, former law enforcement agents and analysts, and engineers.

The committee members expressed concerns about the company's targetted ad system and how it profited itself from the user's personal data.

Zuckerberg clarified that his company tracked browsing activity to deliver targeted ads, but it did not hold onto the user's data.

"We only store them temporarily and we convert the weblogs into a set of ad interests that you might be interested in those ads, and we put that in the 'download your information' [feature] and you have complete control over that," he said.

Zuckerberg then revealed that his own data was "harvested" among millions of people in regards to the data privacy scandal.

The Facebook CEO further said that his company would verify the identity and location of advertisers, who were running malicious political ads.

Virginia Senator David McKinley grilled the social media mogul over illegal opioid dealers and markets that were using Facebook to promote and distribute drugs, saying that it was "hurting its users".

A member of the committee in the concluding part of the nearly-five hour testimony showed up a copy of the American constitution and offered to give it to Zuckerberg, claiming that Facebook was "anti-conservative in terms of content that is flagged."

Earlier, before the testimony began on Wednesday, the 33-year-old began by apologising to everyone at the Capitol Hill, that he was responsible for the data breach of Facebook users.

"It was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here," he said.

The hearing took place after reports started pouring last month that the social networking site had compromised with the personal data of over 87 million Facebook users to Britain-based Cambridge Analytica which allegedly influenced voters during the 2016 US presidential election.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)At least two militants affiliated with the terror outfit Islamic State (IS), have been killed and two others have been injured by own explosives in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province.

The incident took place in the vicinity of Chapa Dara district in Wach Nawa area when four IS militants were planting an improvised explosive device on a roadside, reported Khaama Press, citing, the Afghan Military, as saying.

According to the report, the anti-government armed militant groups often use explosives materials for the roadside and car bombings to target the government staff and security personnel.

However, in majority of these incidents, civilians are targeted, while in some cases the militants are killed or injured themselves by their own explosives.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)After uproar erupted over Haryana school admission forms seeking to know whether the applicant's parents were engaged in an "unclean occupation, the state's minister Ram Bilas Sharma said on Wednesday that Congress has to be blamed for such forms, as it came out during their regime.

Across schools in Haryana, a question in the SC/ST section of the admission form in particular raised eyebrows as it sought to know whether the applicant's parents were engaged in an "unclean occupation".

"The school admission form which is being discussed by the opposition was published during Congress regime. I will meet senior officials to discuss this matter," said Sharma yesterday.

Senior Congress leader R.S. Surjewala yesterday slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led state government after schools had recently released the controversial admission forms.

Surjewala also called on Haryana Chief Minister M.L. Khattar to clarify the meaning of unclean profession and also termed the 100-question form as another attempt by the BJP government to breach privacy.

The form was introduced on April 7, 2011.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Adding another feather to its cap, India jumped 13 places to achieve the 130th spot in this year's Index of Economic Freedom published by the Heritage Foundation, an American think-tank.

As per the latest edition, India moved up to the 130th spot, up from 143 in 2017, two spots below its neighbour, Pakistan.

With this achievement, India has now surpassed Pakistan by one spot.

India's economic freedom score was 54.5, making its economy the 130th freest in the 2018 Index. The firm noted that India's overall score increased by 1.9 points, led by improvements in judicial effectiveness, freedom, government integrity, and fiscal health.

Among the 43 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, India was ranked 30, and its overall score was below the regional and world averages.

As per the American think tank, India is perceived to be moving into an open-market economy, although traces of its past autarkic policies still remain.

The report further stated that economic liberalisation measures, including industrial deregulation, privatisation of state-owned enterprises and reduced control on foreign trade and investment that began in the early 1990s, has accelerated growth.

However, it noted that in spite of the hike in growth, corruption, underdeveloped infrastructure, a restrictive and burdensome regulatory environment, and poor financial and budget management continue to undermine overall development.

In terms of property rights and judicial effectiveness, the report noted that although land titles in some urban and nearly all rural areas remain unclear, real property rights in large metropolitan areas are generally well enforced. However, the Foundation stated that Indian courts continued to be understaffed and lacked adequate technology to cover for the missing labour.

"The judiciary is independent, but Indian courts are understaffed and lack the technology necessary to clear an enormous backlog. Although officials are often caught accepting bribes, a great deal of corruption goes unnoticed and unpunished," it added.

In terms of trade, the Foundation in its report highlighted that government openness to foreign investment is below average.

"Trade is moderately important to India's economy; the combined value of exports and imports equals 40 percent of GDP. The average applied tariff rate is 6.3 percent. Nontariff barriers significantly impede trade. Government openness to foreign investment is below average. State-owned institutions dominate the financial sector, and foreign participation is limited. In public-sector banks, troubled assets account for about 10 percent of total assets," it added.

On a related note, this year's report saw China move one spot higher to 111, while Pakistan was ranked 131.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Thursday underscored that India is against the use of chemical weapons while dwelling upon the bilateral relationship between Russia and the United Kingdom (UK) which has apparently soured over the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

"India is against the use of chemical weapons anywhere, at any time, by anybody, under any circumstances. We hope that this issue is resolved in accordance with the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention so as to reach evidence based conclusions. India, as all other countries, awaits the outcome of the investigation," MEA's official spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

On April 4, British military facility head Gary Aitkenhead claimed to identify the nerve agent as the military-grade Novichok but they had not proved that it was made in Russia.

He also hinted towards the involvement of the state-actors in the manufacturing of the nerve-agent.

According to the British government, Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia were exposed to a military-grade nerve agent in the British city of Salisbury on March 4.

Yulia was able to recover from the attack after being hospitalised for over a week. She also gave her first public statement to media. She expressed her gratitude towards the people of Salisbury to offer emotional support to her and her family.

Skripal has been admitted to the Salisbury district hospital and has now been declared as out of danger.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)District governor Ali Shams Dost of Afghanistan's Khwaja Omari district, along with seven other policemen, were killed in a Taliban attack on Thursday.

Taliban militants stormed the residence of Governor Ali Shams Dost and later killed the policemen appointed for the former's security, followed by killing the governor himself, as reported by Tolo News.

Further, nine intelligence officers were injured.

As per an official statement, some parts of the governor's compound were torched.

"After the attack, the forces called for air support and 27 Taliban were killed during the airstrikes and clashes", the statement further informed.

The Taliban militant group had claimed to have captured the Khwaja Omari district, though the same has been refuted by the local Afghan police.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti, on Thursday assured that the investigation in regard to the Kathua rape case is on a fast track, adding "law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions".

CM Mufti took to Twitter and said, "The Law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions & statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track & justice will be delivered. #JusticeForAsifa. "

Earlier in January, eight-year-old Asifa, belonging to a nomadic Muslim tribe in Kathua district of Jammu and Kashmir, was allegedly abducted, drugged, raped, and killed. Her body was found a week later.

The Jammu and Kashmir Police filed an FIR against lawyers of Jammu, who tried to prevent Crime Branch officers from filing a charge sheet in a court on Monday in connection with the Kathua rape and murder case.

A special team of the crime branch has made a case of conspiracy, kidnapping, wrongful confinement, gang rape, murder and destruction of evidence against eight accused, which include: Sanjhi Ram, the suspected mastermind, who is a former revenue official and local strongman; his son Vishal Kumar, a college student; Ram's 16-year-old nephew who is the juvenile, and his friend Parvesh Kumar; Special Police Officers (SPOs) of Hiranagar police station Deepak Khajuria and Surinder Kumar; Sub Inspector of Hiranagar police station Anand Dutta, who was also investigating officer in the case, and Head Constable Tilak Raj.

Meanwhile, the family members of the accused and Hindu Ekta Manch members staged protest in Kathua today, demanding a CBI probe into the case.

Earlier, the members of Jammu and Kashmir Panthers Party (JKNPP) and lawyers of Jammu Bar Association also protested with similar demands.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)President Ram Nath Kovind and his Zambian counterpart Edgar Chagwa Lungu on Thursday laid the foundation stone for 93-km long Lusaka Traffic Decongestion Project.

The cost of the road decongestion project is 289 million US dollar, which will be completed within three years. India is providing assistance of 250 million US dollar in the project.

The Lusaka decongestion project will also see the construction of new roads, with dedicated bus lanes and the installation of modern streetlights.

India and Zambia on Wednesday signed four agreements after the delegation-level talks held in the capital city of Lusaka.

The four agreements are signed in the areas of avoidance of double taxation, visa exemption on diplomatic and official passports, judicial cooperation, which seeks collaboration in training and expedition of judicial matters affecting the two countries and their citizens and the establishment of an Entrepreneurship Development Institute in Zambia.

President Kovind, along with First Lady Savita Kovind, on Tuesday reached Lusaka as part of his three-nation Africa tour.

The President is on a three-nation state visit to the African countries - Equatorial Guinea, Swaziland and Zambia - from April 7 to 12.

On Sunday, he wrapped up the first-ever visit of an Indian head to Equatorial Guinea, where, President Kovind announced to open an Indian embassy to strengthen the diplomatic ties between the two countries.

He reached Swaziland on Monday where he met Swaziland's King Mswati III at the Lozitha Palace.

The President addressed the gathering in Swaziland's Mbabane and also underlined the benefits of Ayurveda and the traditional medicines of Swaziland.

Zambia, the current stop of the President's Africa tour, is known for being one of the oldest democracies with an uninterrupted and peaceful transition of power. The country has a multi-party democracy since 1991.

President Kovind is scheduled to return to India today.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) chief Swati Maliwal will sit on an indefinite hunger strike from Friday at the Rajghat to demand for swift capital punishment for child rapists.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Maliwal alleged that the government has not paid any heed in the last 2.5 years on the Commission's request to devise a system that ensures that those who rape minors are punished by death in six months time.

"The DCW has been petitioning you for the last 2.5 years to devise a system that ensures that those who rape minors are punished by death in six months time. We also sent you 5.5 lakh letters of support to back back this demand," Maliwal wrote.

The DCW chief said she was saddened as the Prime Minister did not take any action on this sensitive subject.

Citing Unnao and Kathua rape incidents, Maliwal said, "You are observing one-day fast for strengthening the democracy, but how will it be strengthened if women are not safe?"

An eight-year-old Muslim nomadic girl was allegedly abducted, drugged, raped, tortured and killed Kathua district of Jammu and Kashmir. After being missing for a week, her body was found on January 17.

A special team of Jammu and Kashmir crime branch has made a case of conspiracy, kidnapping, wrongful confinement, gang rape, murder and destruction of evidence against eight accused, which include four policemen.

However, the lawyers of Jammu Bar Association have demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into the case. They have questioned the credibility of the Crime Branch officials, who according to them are mostly from Kashmir.

In Uttar Pradesh's Unnao, an 18-year-old woman has alleged she was raped by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his accomplices last year. Since then, she and her family have been intimidated and threatened for lodging a complaint against the BJP leader. The complainant's father has died in the police custody.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Parliament from Delhi, Manoj Tiwari, was attended by a doctor while observing a day-long fast called by Prime Minister Narendra Modi over issues of disruptions in Parliamentary sessions.

"I had recently undergone a laser operation for (kidney) stone, so there is some pain. But my pain is not bigger than the pain of public," said the former regional actor.

In an attempt to expose the opposition parties for disrupting the Parliament during budget sessions, while interacting with BJP members and other people on the "Gram Swaraj Abhiyan", Prime Minister Modi said it was the responsibility of the party leaders and workers to bring out the sin of those who strangled democracy before the nation by observing a day-long fast.

He appealed the party leaders to observe fast in their respective constituencies along with a large number of people.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Mastercard on Thursday strengthened its commitment to developing world-class and commerce opportunities with the opening of an expanded Centre in Vadodara.

The new campus reinforces the company's support of the government's initiative to enhance India's digital capabilities. Spread across 65,000 square feet, the state-of-the art facility will serve as a natural collaboration centre for more than 700 employees.

"With its incredible pool of talent and opportunities for digitization, India is a strategic market and innovation hub for Mastercard. The expansion of our Centre in Vadodara is an extension of our undertaking to drive the next level of growth and support the government's agenda to shape a digital future and less-cash society in the market," said co-president, Asia Pacific, Mastercard, Ari Sarker.

Mastercard's Vadodara Centre is part of the company's vision to build a world beyond cash in India and beyond. Over the past few years, it has contributed to the "Make in India" and "Digital India" campaigns. In 2017, Mastercard collaborated with the Indian government to launch Bharat QR, an application that provides local, small and medium enterprises with a low-cost way to accept digital payments from any type of mobile phone.

"Every day, our teams are working relentlessly to deliver real-world technology that breaks down barriers and makes people's everyday lives easier, more efficient and secure," said Ed McLaughlin, president, Operations and Technology, Mastercard. "That's what makes this office so important. Our Vadodara team is crucial to the next generation digital services and solutions Mastercard will implement across the world."

As a key enabler of global commerce, Mastercard has rolled out a suite of innovations streamlining and safeguarding the payments process, including QR codes, biometrics and wearables. The company was recently recognized by Fortune as one of world's most forward-looking, innovative companies and ranked fourth globally by Brandwatch for offering the best in customer experiences.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Thursday announced that the state government will bring a new law to make the death penalty mandatory for those who rape minors.

Condemning the incident of rape and murder of eight-year-old in Kathua district, the Chief Minister, in a tweet, said that she will not let another child suffer in this way.

Mehbooba further assured the entire nation that she stands committed to ensure justice in the Kathua case. She also called for exemplary punishment for those responsible for the crime.

The girl, who belonged to the nomadic Muslim Bakarwal community, was abducted on January 10. She was reportedly held captive in a temple, sedated and raped.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, revealed on Wednesday that his own personal data was exposed in the Cambridge Analytica leak among millions of people.

The 33-year-old made the comments in the second and last day of the joint hearing of the members of the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee at the Capitol Hill.

California Senator Anna Eshoo questioned the social media mogul on whether his data was included in the data sold to the malicious third parties, to which he replied 'yes'.

On the first day of the joint hearing, Zuckerberg told the US Senators that Facebook systems did not see the content of messages being transmitted over WhatsApp.

This confirmation has come as a relief to the messaging app's users, who have been concerned over in the aftermath of data breach scandal.

The 33-year-old also said his company will do everything to ensure fair polling takes place in India and other countries that is happening this year.

The CEO and founder of the world's most popular social networking website also said he was "sorry" that Facebook did not take a "broad enough view" of the responsibility when their platform was being used for circulating fake news and was becoming a tool for foreign interference in elections.

Zuckerberg also expressed regret that his company was slow in identifying the Russian operations in 2016, which allegedly benefitted the then-presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who is now USA's 45th president.

The hearing took place after reports started pouring in last month that the social networking site had compromised with the personal data of over 87 million Facebook users to Britain-based Cambridge Analytica, which allegedly influenced voters during the 2016 US presidential election.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)NBCC (India) Ltd., the Navratna Central Public Sector Enterprise (CPSE) under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, on Thursday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Skill Development Institute (SDI) Bhubaneswar, for the construction of the institute.

This will facilitate empowering the youth in Odisha with relevant skill sets and train them in various disciplines.

NBCC has pledged to impart training to 40,000 workers (including both onsite and offsite) in the next five years.

The MoU was signed between Yogesh JP Sharma, executive director (Engg.) on behalf of NBCC and N.N. Rao, CEO, SDI Bhubaneswar in presence of Ranjan Kumar Mohapatra, director (HR), Indian Oil Corporation and chairman, SDI Bhubaneswar.

This tie-up is in line with NBCC's efforts towards empowering youth and supports Prime Minister Narendra Modi's endeavor to create a new India.

"NBCC wants to have skilled and future-ready workforce to be a part of our highly-efficient team," said Dr. Anoop Kumar Mittal hailing this as another step in the fulfilment of 'Skill India' mission.

"We are working towards creating a well-defined system of identifying and training the workforce in the construction sector, which comprises port, irrigation, roads, infrastructures and buildings," he added.

The first phase of the project has a built-up area of approximately 60,000 sqm with an approx. cost of Rs. 300 crores and in the second phase the built-up area will be 1.2 lakh sqm at an approx. cost of Rs. 600 crores.

SDI's key building blocks that NBCC will be developing includes the entire academic block, administrative block, cafeteria, workshops area, hostel with total 1400 rooms capacity, faculty residencies, gymnasiums, indoor and outdoor games, and parking spaces.

In the recent past an MoU between NBCC and Skill Institutes for Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (MoSD&E) was signed for planning, designing and construction of Indian Institute of Skills at Kanpur and other various locations for a total value of approx. Rs 400 crores.

The SDI Institute offers world-class training in industrial welding (six months residential programme), industrial electrician (six months residential programme) and computer data application course (three months non-programme).

Further, SDI Bhubaneswar is a training setup being promoted by eight Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) in the oil and gas sector under joint corporate social responsibility schemes.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi High Court on Thursday directed the Ministry of Home Affairs to file a response in the matter of alleged corruption by the employees of Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

The Delhi High Court received a petition stating that the then Executive Director of NIDM namely Dr. Satendra directed his colleague Professor Santosh Kumar to clarify the factual positions regarding the correctness of his educational qualifications and to provide the original copy of his Ph.D. Degree.

He further claimed to receive some papers through a Whistleblower which supports the above claim made in the petition.

Further, the petitioner claimed that in 2013 Dr. Satendra issued an official order for the physical verification of the mark sheets of all the employees of NIDM but the accused Professor Kumar never submitted his degrees.

Professor Santosh Kumar along with former Executive Director of NIDM RK Singh has also been accused of renting nine BHK flats in the name of operationalising the southern campus bypassing the procedures required to buy the tenders.

Later one of the senior IAS officers who earlier served as the executive director of NIDM and was instrumental in finding the irregularities conducted by the accused was transferred to some other office.

The next date of hearing is scheduled for September 5.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan has deferred signing the second phase of Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with China at the last moment due to strong reservations over the final offer list shared by Beijing, signaling the straining bilateral relationship between the two countries.

"The agreement was almost ready for signing when we conveyed our reservations to the prime minister about the final list of concessions that Beijing shared at 11pm,"reported the Express Tribune, quoting, Minister of State for Finance Rana Muhammad Afzal, as saying.

Both the sides were scheduled to sign official minutes of the meeting at the end of the talks but it could not happen on Monday night.

According to the report, the decision to delay the agreement was taken after the business community of Faisalabad - Pakistan's textile hub - voiced serious reservations about the Chinese final offer list.

Pakistan and China began the 10th round of negotiations on renewal of an FTA in Islamabad on April 2. This was supposed to be the final round following which both sides were to sign the agreement, several media reports stated.

The negotiations were led by Pakistan's Federal Secretary for Commerce Younas Dagha and China's Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen.

Furthermore, Pakistan's Commerce Industry revealed that it would offer zero duty on 75% of imported tariff lines prompting fierce resistance from Federal Board of Revenue.

Under first phase of the FTA, Pakistan granted duty concessions on 35per cent of tariff lines, which resulted in an inundation of the Chinese goods which further crippled the local industries.

Under the second phase, China was seeking certain concessions which Pakistan was not willing to grant.

Pakistan and China started negotiations on the second phase of the Pak-China FTA in 2011 and the first FTA came into force in November 2006.

At the moment, Pakistan's major exports to China include raw materials and semi-finished textile goods like cotton yarn, skin.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Pashtun resistance movement in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which saw a massive participation by the tribal youth, indicates that young Pakistanis are the change they want.

"In order to hold political rallies in Pakistan in general and in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in particular, mainstream political parties depend on the Khans (landlords) and contractors to bring people from their villages and pay for their transport. The PTM organised a successful rally without depending on landlords and contractors and instead ran a fund-raising campaign among the youth and professional class, appealing to the Pashtun diaspora", said an article published on the Samaa TV website.

It has attracted the disillusioned Pashtun youth, including a sizable number of young women - who were mainly associated with the Awami National Party (ANP) and Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP) - across the country and abroad.

It has also become popular among the emerging professional and middle-class of Pashtun society.

The article states that, "In Pakistan, the PTM leaders from the beginning complained about the ignorance of mainstream media to cover their protests and rallies. The formation of the PTM is an outcome of the social media campaign that sought justice for Naqeebullah Mehsud who was murdered in a fake police shootout in Karachi".

"After realising its importance, PTM organisers found social media-especially Facebook and Twitter provided them an opportunity to mobilise and publicise the movement's Peshawar rally", it says.

A new red ethnic cap - popularly known as Mazari cap - and the word 'Pashteen', a pronunciation of Pashtun in Mehsud dialect - became popular among the Pashtun youth - mainly because of PTM founder Manzoor Pastheen.

Men and women from Pakistan and Afghanistan are sharing their images wearing the cap to show solidarity with the PTM movement.

The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement or Pashtun Protection Movement, was started mainly by young Pashtun activists who are demanding an end to what they say are human rights violations by authorities in the country's tribal regions.

They have been calling for the removal of military checkpoints in tribal areas and an end to "enforced disappearances" in which suspects are detained by security forces without due process.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi was greeted with black flags and black balloons upon his arrival in Chennai on Thursday.

The protestors, who have been expressing their rage against the Centre for not constituting the Cauvery Management Board (CMB), reached the airport in Alandur area to protest against the Prime Minister's arrival to the city.

The black flag protests was organised by some opposition parties and Tamil outfits of the state. The idea was poposed by Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) working president MK Stalin.

However, before Prime Minister Modi touched down in Chennai, some of the demonstrators, including Thamizhaga Vazhvurimai Katchi leader Velmurugan, were detained.

The Prime Minister is here to address the 10th edition of Defence Expo in the city.

On February 16, the court had ordered the Central government to set up the CMB and Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC) within six weeks, in regards to the Cauvery River water dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

The non-compliance of the apex court's order has triggered protests across the state.

On Tuesday, some of the protestors were arrested after they tried to stop an IPL match held at Chennai's Chepauk Stadium.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Thursday assured that "all matters of mutual interest" were discussed between India and Russia in a telephonic conversation that took place on Wednesday.

"All matters of mutual interest have been discussed in the telephonic conversation which took place between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday," MEA's official spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin engaged in a phone call, wherein, the two leaders dwelled upon the development of the "exclusive strategic partnership between Russia and India," reported the Kremlin Press Service.

According to the Press Service, the phone call was initiated by the Indian side.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Uttar Pradesh Governor Ram Naik on Thursday dubbed the Unnao rape incident as 'shameful' and refuted allegations of inaction against the state police.

Naik told ANI that action taken by the Uttar Pradesh police will provide a solution and set an example for the future.

"What has happened is shameful. But to say that no action has been taken is wrong. Actions taken by the police till now will provide a solution and will also set an example for the future," Naik said.

Earlier this month, a woman alleged she was raped by the BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his accomplices last year.

On April 8, the rape victim, along with her family members, tried to commit suicide in front of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow. Later, the victim's father was taken into police custody from the location.

The matter intensified after the victim's father allegedly died in the police custody on April 9.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on Thursday backed Britain's findings that "high purity" Novichok was used to poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury.

The Hague-based watchdog, without mentioning Novichok, in a statement says that its experts, "confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people," reported CNN.

On April 4, British military facility head Gary Aitkenhead claimed to identify the nerve agent as the military-grade Novichok but they had not proved that it was made in Russia.

He also hinted towards the involvement of the state-actors in the manufacturing of the nerve-agent.

The OPCW also "notes that the toxic chemical was of high purity. The latter is concluded from the almost complete absence of impurities."

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson described the results as "conclusive".

"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible - only Russia has the means, motive and record," he said.

However, nowhere does the OPCW's report assign blame for the incident or even identify the source of the agent.

In addition to this, the word Novichok is not even mentioned in the part of the report made public, however the report does name the substance in the parts of the findings which remain classified.

"The UK has called for #UNSC meeting on the OPCW report on the Salisbury incident. We expect this to be held next week," the UK mission to the United Nations, wrote in a Twitter post.

According to the British government, Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia were exposed to a military-grade nerve agent in the British city of Salisbury on March 4.

Yulia was able to recover from the attack after being hospitalised for over a week. She also gave her first public statement to media. She expressed her gratitude towards the people of Salisbury to offer emotional support to her and her family.

Skripal has been admitted to the Salisbury district hospital and has now been declared as out of danger.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Over the years, India's airlines sector has proven its credentials through connectivity by bridging the gap between the urban and the far-flung areas of the country.

India is gradually becoming a focal point in the global aviation map- thanks to constant growth in the air traffic, route expansion, and major airport infrastructure development.

Seeing the country's potential in boosting the tourism through air connectivity, a seminar on Incredible India Connectivity -Driving Tourism for Inclusive Growth was held on Thursday at India International Centre in New Delhi.

The mega event was organised by the Foundation for Aviation & Sustainable Tourism with the support of Ministry of Civil Aviation and Ministry of Tourism.

Keeping in mind the rich cultural heritage, which needs to be marketed globally, the aviation and tourism industries have joined hands.

The idea is to invigorate the economic growth by providing air connectivity to regions with a stronghold on tourism.

"We are targeting the foreign tourists, NRIs and domestic tourists because these there are the key drive of tourism sector. And I can assure that if such chopper services or airline connectivity introduce, the viability will no longer a big issue. Very good example is the northeastern states where we find that with better connectivity, now the northeastern destinations are really taking off. And Sikkim is one such state where the number of tourists are double than the population of the state," Rashmi Verma, Secretary, Ministry of Tourism.

The one-day seminar also aimed to cater the stakeholders in Tourism and Aviation industries to address the issues related to critical infrastructure development, particularly the connectivity.

The discussions were also held on ensuring a conducive and safe environment for tourists, so as to promote tourism globally.

The inaugural function was graced by the Union Minister of Commerce & Industry and Civil Aviation, Suresh Prabhu through video conference at the Multi-Purpose Hall.

The Union Minister also said that, "Without connectivity, how will the people visit the tourist places? So we need road, rail and air connectivity. We also need connectivity through waterways. And that could be a one away of adventure tourism.

The event saw delegates from Tourism and Aviation Industry, representatives from Airports Authority of India, Federation of Indian Airlines, Ministry of Civil Aviation, private airport operators, major airlines, Ministry of Tourism department, Tour and Travel Operators, Hospitality Industry etc.

The participants also held discussions and deliberations on ideas and suggestions for long term solutions.

It is noteworthy to mention that India is the 9th largest aviation market in the world with 90 operational airports serving over 300 million passengers a year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Many in Slovenia's 13th-century town of Sevnica have taken offense after the American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel joked about first lady Melania Trump's accent on his show.

Melania Trump grew up in this very town.

"It's very hard to speak English. Melania's been in the US so long and she still has some problems, but Jimmy Kimmel should come to Slovenia and see how hard it is to speak another language," USA Today quoted a meat processing factory worker, Helena Horjak (24), as saying.

Horjak makes the very popular "First Lady" sausages.

Brouhaha broke out on April 8 when Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity asked Kimmel to apologise for his joke on Melania Trump's Slovenian accent.

The brouhaha cooled off on April 10 after Hannity called Kimmel to his news programme where he later vowed to "no name-calling".

A nurse in Sevnica, Maya Kantuzar (24), said it is not fair in regard to the good work she is doing.

"Melania is trying to help everyone. She is doing a really good job for children," USA Today quoted Maya as saying.

Melania Trump, the wife to 45th US President, Donald Trump, left Slovenia more than two decades ago to be a model in the U.S. and hasn't stepped foot in Sevnica for over a decade.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Thursday announced that External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj is scheduled to visit on a two-day visit each to China and neigbouring Mongolia at the end of this month.

"External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj to visit China on April 22 and 23 and Mongolia on April 24 and 25," MEA's official spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

The External Affairs Minister will participate in a ministerial-level meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), where India became a full member in 2017.

India was an 'observer' in the grouping since 2005 and was made full member along with Pakistan last year.

According to the reports, Swaraj is also likely to hold a meeting with her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on the sidelines of the summit.

Her visit to China comes in the backdrop of the efforts made by both India and China to move past the tensions which rose out of last year's Doklam standoff.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A joint press conference of Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police (DGP) OP Singh and Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar over the Unnao rape case on Thursday, ruffled some feathers among the media persons after the accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar was referred to as 'mananiye' (honourable).

On being questioned, DGP Singh responded, "There is no harm in giving respect to an MLA. Even if he is an accused, he is not guilty yet."

"Nobody is defending him, all we are saying is that we have to hear both sides," he added.

The rape case against the BJP MLA from Uttar Pradesh's Bangarmau district in Unnao as well as the case of custodial death of the victim's father were transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The Principal Secretary (Home) confirmed the move during his address.

Elaborating the details of the alleged rape, Kumar said that the incident dates back to June 4, 2017.

According to the Principal Secretary, the victim had gone missing on June 11, 2017, and her mother had registered a missing person complaint on June 12.

"Thereafter, the victim was produced before the court and her statement was recorded under Section 164 of the CrPc. Based on her statement, two accused were arrested but the MLA was not mentioned in the statement," he added.

Meanwhile, the custodial death of the victim's father, who was arrested on April 8, was probed by Deputy Inspector General of Prisons Luv Kumar and a Magisterial Committee.

"Both the reports found that the adequate medical test before admission to the jail was not done. After he was lodged, he was admitted to the jail's clinic and from there he was referred to the district hospital. While referring him, the prison clinic had mentioned of internal injury to the man and that he be admitted and treated at the district hospital, but in spite of that, he was sent back to the jail. Based on this, the doctors' negligence was noted, in which the district hospital's CMS, one of whom was the emergency medical officer. The action is being taken to suspend two and department-level action will be taken against three other doctors who had examined and who knew about the injury," Kumar said.

DGP OP Singh said that the SIT team of the Lucknow zone police constituted for the case would also continue its investigation.

Earlier in the day, an FIR was registered against Sengar.

On April 8, the victim, along with her family members, had tried to commit suicide in front of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow, alleging that she was raped by Sengar and his fellow accomplices.

Prior to this, on April 3, the rape victim's father was thrashed by the accused MLA's brother for refusing to withdraw the FIR over the rape, and on April 5, he died in hospital. However, the family cried foul alleging that he was murdered.

On Tuesday, the MLA's brother Atul Singh, along with three others, was arrested from Unnao on the directions of the DGP, by the Lucknow crime branch team.

The victim's family had alleged that the accused MLA's brother had thrashed the victim's father on April 3 for refusing to withdraw the FIR over the rape.

As many as six police personnel were also suspended for allegedly beating up the victim's father.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Allahabad High Court will on Friday pronounce its order in Unnao rape case at 2

Earlier in the day, the Allahabad High Court questioned the Uttar Pradesh government as to why the accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar was not arrested even after an FIR against him.

Earlier this month, a woman accused the BJP MLA of raping her along with his fellow accomplices.

On April 8, the victim, along with her family members, also tried to commit suicide in front of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow.

Prior to this, on April 3, the rape victim's father was allegedly thrashed by the accused MLA's brother for refusing to withdraw the FIR, and on April 5, he died in hospital. However, the family alleged that he was murdered.

The case has now been handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Commission for Women (NCW) on Thursday issued a notice to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Surendra Singh over his bizarre statement on Unnao rape case.

Singh, while defending BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who is facing rape charges, said no one can rape a mother of three children.

"I am speaking from a psychological point of view; no one can rape a mother of three children. It is not possible, this is a conspiracy against him (Kuldeep Singh Sengar)," Singh told ANI.

Besides Unnao case, NCW also took strong note of the Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua rape case and called for action against the perpetrators in both the cases.

"The Commission for Women strongly condemns the brutal gang-rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir and the rape case in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh. With regards to the comments made by Surendra Singh, BJP MLA from Bairia in Ballia district of Uttar Pradesh on April 11, the Commission has sent a notice to Singh," NCW said in a statement.

"While we strongly condemn the heinous crimes, the Commission in its mandate cannot act or take action in both cases as they involve victims who are minors," the release added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The victim in the Unnao rape case on Thursday demanded immediate arrest of the accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, fearing that lest he may get her uncle killed.

"I just want their arrest first, then CBI probe should be done. Why are they being saved? If they are out, they will not spare my uncle. When they have already killed my father, what doubt is there?" she told ANI.

Unable to speak further, the victim broke down in tears and lost consciousness.

However, after being brought back to her senses, she further said, "I will get justice only if CBI investigates the case with honesty. How will I get justice if they don't investigate honestly?"

On that note, the case was handed over to the CBI on Wednesday, while an SIT of Lucknow zone police is also investigating it.

Earlier in the day, an FIR was registered against Sengar.

On April 8, the victim, along with her family members, had tried to commit suicide in front of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow, alleging that she was raped by Sengar and his fellow accomplices.

Prior to this, on April 3, the rape victim's father was allegedly thrashed by the accused MLA's brother for refusing to withdraw the FIR over the rape, and on April 5, he died in hospital. However, the family cried foul alleging that he was murdered.

On Tuesday, the MLA's brother Atul Singh, along with three others, was arrested from Unnao on the directions of the DGP, by the Lucknow crime branch team.

As many as six police personnel were also suspended for allegedly beating up the victim's father.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Allahabad High Court on Thursday questioned the Uttar Pradesh government's approach in handling the Unnao rape case, asking its counsel why the accused BJP MLA, Kuldeep Singh Sengar was not arrested even after an FIR.

The court also asked the counsel to clarify whether or not the government would arrest the MLA, and sought a reply after lunch.

It may be noted that the case has been handed over to the CBI, while an SIT of Lucknow zone police is also investigating it.

Earlier in the day, an FIR was registered against Sengar.

On April 8, the victim, along with her family members, had tried to commit suicide in front of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow, alleging that she was raped by Sengar and his fellow accomplices.

Prior to this, on April 3, the rape victim's father was allegedly thrashed by the accused MLA's brother for refusing to withdraw the FIR over the rape, and on April 5, he died in hospital. However, the family cried foul alleging that he was murdered.

On Tuesday, the MLA's brother Atul Singh, along with three others, was arrested from Unnao on the directions of the DGP, by the Lucknow crime branch team.

As many as six police personnel were also suspended for allegedly beating up the victim's father.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Aster DM Healthcare has entered into an agreement with Subramanya Constructions & Development Company (SCDC), a leading real estate developer, to construct a new hospital in Chennai.

This 500 bedded, state of the art, multi-specialty hospital is expected to be commissioned in 2020. The hospital, which would be situated at a prime location in Chennai, will provide advanced healthcare services to the residents of Tamil Nadu and customers from other states in India as well as overseas.

Aster DM Healthcare, which was recently listed at NSE and BSE already operates 11 hospitals in South India with 4037 installed beds.

The new facility is in line with Aster DM's strategy of strengthening its presence in India.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The stock is quoting at Rs 1160.5, up 3.22% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. Infosys Ltd is up 24.6% in last one year as compared to a 13.99% gain in NIFTY and a 30.76% gain in the Nifty IT index.

Infosys Ltd rose for a third straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 1160.5, up 3.22% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 0.14% on the day, quoting at 10431.3. The Sensex is at 34033.29, up 0.27%. Infosys Ltd has dropped around 1.97% in last one month.

Meanwhile, Nifty IT index of which Infosys Ltd is a constituent, has dropped around 3.34% in last one month and is currently quoting at 12759.1, up 3.14% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 41.35 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 40.19 lakh shares in last one month.

The benchmark April futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 1159.45, up 2.79% on the day. Infosys Ltd is up 24.6% in last one year as compared to a 13.99% gain in NIFTY and a 30.76% gain in the Nifty IT index.

The PE of the stock is 15 based on TTM earnings ending December 17.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Kalyani Rafael Advanced Systems (step down subsidiary of Bharat Forge), a joint venture between Kalyani Strategic Systems and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems of Israel is all set to expand its product profile. The JV will now venture into the space of Missile systems with the New Generation Precision Guided Munitions (NGPGM), Air Defense systems and capabilities for MRSAM, LLQRM and QRSAM programs.

The expansion will also include the Drone Dome system (Radar and laser beam system for detecting, jamming and destroying drones) and the Naval Remote control Weapon Station Systems Program.

As part of its first phase of expansion in March 2017, KRAS included provision of indigenous solutions to New Generation Precision Guided Munitions (NGPGM) and Long Range Guided Bomb (LRGB) in the company's production facility at Hyderabad.

As part of its second phase of expansion, KRAS will now also provide indigenous solutions for Missiles Systems like MRSAM, LLQRM, QRSAM as well as the Naval Gun Program and Drone Dome System. This expansion will bring-in niche technology in the country for such advanced defence systems and will further boost the JV's commitment to 'Make in India'.

One of the fastest growing defence JVs, KRAS has now also been granted defence industrial license by DIPP for undertaking all its envisioned activities.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Over 100 militants of Hmar People's Convention-Democratic (HPC-D) will surrenders with their weapons in Mizoram on Friday in line with a peace pact signed last week with the state government, an official said on Thursday.

"A total of 103 HPC-D members would surrender and deposit their 48 sophisticated arms and ammunition," a Mizoram Home Department official said.

The "home coming ceremony" would be held at Central Training Institute in Mizoram Home Guard headquarters at Sesawng village, 39 km northeast of Aizawl.

Mizoram Chief Minister Lal Thanhawla and Home minister R. Lalzirliana are expected to attend the function.

The government signed a peace agreement with the Manipur-based outfit on April 2 in Aizawl to end the three-decade-old violence in the northeastern state.

The Hmar tribal people have been living in Mizoram, Manipur and southern Assam.

Mizoram is the only state in India which received Rs 182.45 crore from the Centre in 2000-01 as "Peace Bonus" for maintaining peace after decades of insurgency.

--IANS

sc/ahm/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)At least 12 people, including a district governor, were killed on Thursday in a Taliban attack in Afghanistan's Ghazni province, a police official said.

"A group of Taliban militants attacked security checkpoints in Khawja Omari district at 3 a.m., triggering a fierce gunfight which lasted for hours," the official told Xinhua news agency.

Taliban militants have claimed responsibility and said that they captured the district headquarters.

--IANS

ksk/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Nepal Police have arrested two people here for possessing banned Indian currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination amounting to 49,31,500 rupees.

Police arrested the two Nepali nationals on Wednesday and confiscated 5,451 banned Indian notes of Rs 500 denomination and 2,206 notes of Rs 1,000 denomination.

Senior Superintendent of Police Bishwa Raj Pokharel said the men cheated people and exchanged the scrapped currency saying the ban on these notes was going to be lifted after some time.

Pokharel said the men used to collect the money from the border areas and bring it to Kathmandu.

Billions of demonetized Indian currency notes are lying in various Nepali banks and financial institutions for swapping. The Indian government in November 2016 demonetised high value Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes with an aim to curb black money.

Nepal has become safe haven for trafficking the banned notes from India. Kathmandu has repeatedly requested New Delhi to make arrangements for exchange facilities but there has been no understanding on the issue so far.

The Central Banks of Nepal and India held several rounds of meetings and communication in this regard but the issue has is yet to be settled.

--IANS

giri/soni/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)After the Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project (JNPP), the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was targeted on Thursday by its allies, Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Swabhimana Party (MSP) over the upcoming Nanar refinery project coming up in coastal Ratnagiri.

MSP President Narayan Rane, who recently was elected to the Rajya Sabha as a NDA nominee, made it clear that "we shall not allow the project to come up at any cost".

Shiv Sena President Uddhav Thackeray said in a statement that "we shall not permit the project to happen under any circumstances" and accused Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis of going back on his assurances.

The political heat was generated a day after a consortium comprising three major Indian oil marketing companies - IOCL, BPCL and HPCL signed a MoU with Saudi Arabian Oil Co, (Saudi Aramco), for setting up India's biggest oil refinery and petroleum products complex in the eco-sensitive Ratnagiri.

When completed, the Rs 3 trillion complex at Nanar will be the world's biggest single-location oil refinery project with a capacity to process 60 million tonnes annually.

While Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Fadnavis had earlier assured that the project would be good for Maharashtra, Fadnavis said later it would not be pushed through without the consent of the local population.

"The CM has categorically stated that this destructive project will not come up in the Konkan as the locals are against it. This is not only treachery, but shows that his word has no value in Delhi," Thackeray said sharply.

He said during discussions with Fadnavis, it was made clear to him not to destroy the uniqueness of Konkan under the guise of development and stop the destruction of mango orchards and bamboo plantations.

"He should have firmly declared that he will not sit quiet if injustice is perpetrated on the people. However, he seems to have 'surrendered', but Shiv Sena will not allow this project," Thackeray declared.

This is the second mega-project with international collaboration - JNPP with French and Nanar with Saudi help onn which the Shiv Sena and now also the MSP, has crossed swords with the rulling party.

Besides, several NGOs, villagers, farmers, fisherfolk and anti-nuke activists are also opposed to both projects coming up in the lush green Konkan region renowned for its Alphonso mangoes, cashewnuts and other fruits.

JNPP plans to construct six 1,650-MW nuclear reactors to generate 9,900-MW power at Madhban village in Ratnagiri, which would be the biggest in the world in terms of net electrical power rating.

--IANS

qn/ahm/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India is waiting for the result of the investigation into the chemical attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain last month, a senior official said here on Thursday.

"India is against the use of chemical weapons anywhere, at any time, by anybody, under any circumstances," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told the media here in response to a question on the incident.

"We hope this issue is resolved in accordance with the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention so as to reach evidence based conclusions," Kumar said. "India, like all other countries, awaits the outcome of the investigation."

UK counter-terrorism officers are investigating to uncover the origin of the nerve agent used in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, in Salisbury.

Moscow has repeatedly denied any involvement in the incident that has led to Russia and Western nations expelling each other's diplomats.

--IANS

ab/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has admitted that scenes from its "Human Planet" documentary series were staged by the camera crew.

In its series, an episode of the television documentary depicted the life of the Korowai people of Papua New Guinea and had scenes of tribesmen moving into a treehouse, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

The BBC, in a statement last week, admitted that "the portrayal of the tribe moving into the treehouse as a real home is not accurate".

During the making of the documentary series, a member of the tribe talked about how they have built high treehouses for the benefit of overseas programme-makers.

Fans of BBC expressed their shock and anger on social

This is not the first time that the BBC is embroiled in a fake scandal.

In 2011, BBC filmed shots of a tarantula spider in a studio for an episode about wildlife in the Venezuela jungle.

In the same year, the "Frozen Planet" series featured newborn polar bear cubs in a den with their mother, with many people assuming they were born and filmed in the Arctic.

However, the cubs were actually in a Dutch animal park, as revealed in behind-the-scenes footage on the show's website.

In 2015, the production crew of a documentary about life of Mongolian camel herders used a semi-domesticated wolf after being unable to find a real wild wolf to film on location.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)West Bengal opposition parties on Thursday termed the Calcutta High Court order staying the Panchayat poll process as a "big victory for democracy", but the ruling Trinamool Congress warned its opponents that people would give them a befitting reply for trying to delay a democratic exercise.

"I understand this is the first Election Commission which had to roll back its decision. This happened because of pressure put by the government. When we put these matters before the high court, it stayed the poll process. This is a big victory for democracy," said BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya.

Acting on petitions filed by the BJP, as also the CPI-M and the Congress challenging the SEC's April 10 order withdrawing its April 9 decision to extend the filing of nominations by a day, the high court stayed the ongoing Panchayat election process till further orders.

CPI-M state secretary Surjya Kanta Mishra expressed happiness at the court order and said: "We welcome the high court decision. our demands have been met. But I would like to say that there is no cause for complacency."

State Congress President Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said the court decision had come as a balm to the opposition parties, with the entire election now hanging in balance.

On the other hand, Trinamool Congress secretary general Partha Chatterjee said those who now were jubilant now would have their days of sorrow soon.

"We have confidence in the judiciary. we have no comments to make on the court decision," Chatterjee said.

The Panchayat polls were slated to be held on May 1, 3 and 5, with the counting scheduled for May 5.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bharatiya Janata Party top leaders, including Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, MPs, MLAs, MLCs and others sat on a day-long fast across Maharashtra on Thursday to protest the disruption of Parliament's budget session by opposition parties.

Fadnavis, along with Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar, MP Poonam Mahajan, actor-turned-MP Paresh Rawal and legislator Parag Alvani launched the fast at the local party office in Vile Parle.

Railway Minister Piyush Goyal started a hunger strike at the government hostel in adjoining Thane along with a large number of supporters and party activists.

MP Kirit Somaiya sat on a fast near the Bhandup railway station along with his supporters.

Besides, other state ministers led similar fasts in their respective constituencies or districts where they are appointed Guardian Ministers and were joined by local MPs, MLAs, MLCs and party workers across the state.

At all places, the BJP leaders and hundreds of activists carried banners or placards with slogans critical of the opposition parties and holding them responsible for the washout of the second part of the Parliament session.

The call for a day-long fast by the BJP central leaders and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was given to protest the manner in which the second half of parliament's recently-concluded budget session was stalled by the combined opposition parties.

The BJP has alleged that the Congress did not allow Parliament to function, initially on account of the bank scams. Thereafter, the YSR Congress and TDP created hurdles on the issue of Special Status for Andhra Pradesh by moving a no-confidence motion against the government.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Aerospace major Boeing on Thursday announced a partnership with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Mahindra Defence Systems (MDS) to manufacture its carrier and land based F/A-18 Super Hornet multi-role fighter aircraft in India.

According to the firm, the future production with Indian partners will involve maximising indigenous content and producing the F/A-18 in India for its armed forces.

"Boeing is excited to team up with India's only company that manufactures combat fighters, HAL, and India's only company that manufactures small commercial airplanes, Mahindra," Pratyush Kumar, President, Boeing India was quoted as saying in a statement.

"This partnership brings the best of Indian public and private enterprises together in partnership with the world's largest aerospace company, Boeing, to accelerate a contemporary 21st century ecosystem for aerospace and defence manufacturing in India," he added.

The aerospace major said the "Super Hornet Make in India" proposal is to build an entirely new and state-of-the-art production facility that can be utilised for other programs like India's Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) program.

"This partnership is intended to bring Boeing, HAL and MDS' global scale and supply chain, its best-in-industry precision manufacturing processes, as well as the unrivaled experience designing and optimising aerospace production facilities to both expand India's aerospace ecosystem and help realise the Make in India vision," the company said in a statement.

The firm pointed out that the plan addresses the infrastructure, personnel training, and operational tools and techniques required to produce a next-gen fighter aircraft in the country.

"As the most advanced and least expensive aircraft per flight hour of its kind, the F/A-18 Super Hornet will deliver on India's need for a carrier and land based multi-role fighter," the statement said.

"The Super Hornet does not only have a low acquisition cost, but it costs less per flight hour to operate than any other tactical aircraft in US forces inventory."

The aerspace major noted that the F/A-18 Super Hornet has a long life ahead, with the US Navy making significant investments in the latest evolution, the Block III.

--IANS

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(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 Calcutta High Court on Thursday stayed the ongoing Panchayat election process in West Bengal till further orders and asked the State Election Commission (SEC) to furnish by April 16 a comprehensive status report on the polls.

The state's opposition parties welcomed the decision of the single judge, but the ruling Trinamool Congress said it would move the division bench. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has also filed a caveat in the division bench.

Justice Subrata Talukdar also imposed a fine of Rs 5 lakh on the BJP for misrepresenting facts by moving both the Supreme Court and the high court on the same plea.

Justice Talukdar directed the SEC to include in the status report details like the number of nominations received and rejected.

He said the next hearing on the petitions -- filed by the BJP, as also the CPI-M and the Congress challenging the SEC's April 10 order withdrawing its earlier decision to extend the filing of nominations by a day -- will be held on April 16.

The judge put a number of posers before the SEC, like the number of candidates who expressed their willingness to submit their nominations between 3 p.m on April 9 and 3 p.m on April 10, and how many allegations it came across during this period.

The judge also sought to know the steps the SEC had initiated with regard to the allegations.

The SEC counsel, however, said it had no such information.

When the Trinamool counsel pointed out that the election dates had been announced, the judge said it was the SEC's call and if need be the election dates could be deferred.

While imposing the fine on the BJP, the judge observed that the party's actions were akin to "forum hopping".

The BJP representative tendered an unconditional apology.

Justice Talkukdar had on April 10 granted an interim stay on the SEC's order the same day withdrawing its April 9 decision extending the nomination filing process by a day.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to interfere with the elections and asked the state BJP to approach the Calcutta High Court.

The panchayat elections are scheduled for May 1, 3 and 5, while the counting of votes is due on May 8.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US Governor of California, Jerry Brown, said on Wednesday that the western state will send about 400 US National Guard troops to the border with Mexico to combat transnational crime, but not for enforcing immigration laws.

At the request of the Trump administration, "the California National Guard will accept federal funding to add approximately 400 Guard members statewide to supplement the staffing of its ongoing programme to combat transnational crime," Xinhua quoted Brown as saying in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

The programme is currently staffed by 250 personnel statewide, including 55 at the California border.

The Guard will support operations targeting transnational criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers along the border, according to Brown.

But the governor also said "let's be crystal clear on the scope of this mission."

"This will not be a mission to build a new wall. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking better life," Brown said, noting that the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws.

Trump said last week that he wants to send between 2,000 and 4,000 National Guard members to the southern border of the country.

The Republican Governors of three southwestern border states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas have pledged to send 1,600 Guard members to the US-Mexico border.

As the only southwestern border state led by a Democratic Governor, California is engaged in an all-out war over immigration enforcement with the Trump administration.

The state is suing Trump administration in a bid to stop construction of the border wall.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Chinese court on Thursday began a trial against former Agriculture Minister Sun Zhengcai over graft charges.

Zhengcai, 54, was charged with accepting bribes and abuse of power by the State Attorney's Office on February 13, Efe news reported.

He was an influential Politburo member of the Communist Party of China until 2017.

The anti-corruption wing of the Communist Party of China had initiated investigations against Zhengcai in July 2017, and in September he was expelled from the party and removed from office.

Zhengcai, who has been accused of using his political positions to receive large amounts of money and property, was the first serving member of the Politburo to be probed over corruption charges since Bo Xilai, also a former Chongqing party chief.

In 2017, Sun was abruptly replaced by Chen Miner, former propaganda chief of President Xi Jinping and one of his most trusted aides.

Sun's trial is part of Xi's anti-corruption campaign that he launched after taking office in 2013.The Election Commission (EC) on Thursday told the Supreme Court that the powers to make election rules under the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and 1951 be given to it instead of the existing practice of Central Government framing the rules.

Also seeking that the impeachment procedure for the removal of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) be extended to two other Election Commissioners (ECs) as well, the poll panel has also favoured an independent secretariat and financial powers on the lines of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha.

Under the existing procedure, the Central Government frames the election rules under the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and Representation of the People Act, 1951 in consultation with the Election Commission.

However, seeking the reversal of roles, the Election Commission has said that the task of framing the election rules under the statutes be entrusted to it, which it would do in consultation with the Central government.

The poll panel has given the details of efforts made by it since 1998 for securing the rule-making power, financial powers, independent secretariat with full control over its staff and extending the impeachment process for the removal of two Election Commissioners.

While CEC can be removed only through impeachment, the government can remove the two Election Commissioners on the recommendation of the CEC.

The poll panel has said this in its response to a PIL by a lawyer Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay seeking to put in a place a mechanism for appointment of the Election Commissioners and extending the procedure of impeachment for removal of the CEC to the other two Election Commissioners.

Upadhyay is a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and the spokesperson of its Delhi state unit.

Besides seeking to put in place a mechanism for the selection of ECs and impeachment procedure for removal of Election Commissioners, Upadhyay has sought direction to the Centre to provide an independent secretariat to the poll panel and declare its expenditure as charged on the consolidated fund of India on the lines of the Lok Sabha/Rajya Sabha secretariat.

He has also sought direction to confer on the Election Commission the rule-making authority to make election-related rules and code of conduct on the lines of the authority vested in the Supreme Court to frame its own rules.

In the last hearing of the matter on February 19, 2018, the bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud had sought the government's response on the plea by Upadhyay.

The top court had sought the government's response after Attorney General K.K. Venugopal had told the court that the government's stand could be different from his position on the issue.

Favouring putting in place a procedure and guidelines for the removal of two Election Commissioners as removal could not be arbitrary, Attorney General is of the view that the principle of natural justice has to be followed for their removal.

The court had asked Attorney General's assistance in the hearing of the matter in December 2017.

The matter is likely to come up for hearing on April 16.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Reacting to the BJP's nation-wide fast programme on Thursday, Congress general secretary Ashok Gehlot wondered why the ruling party suddenly felt the need to observe fast though it never did so in the last 70 years.

Addressing a press conference at his residence, Gehlot said the trend of holding fast was started by Mahatma Gandhi, which had been followed by the Congress party leaders over the decades.

"In line with Mahatma Gandhi's principle, we observed fast on April 9 to protest against violence in the state that erupted during a bandh called by Dalit community against the dilution of SC/ST Act by Supreme Court. But now BJP is following Gandhi's principles and it will soon follow Nehru's principles too," he said.

Later in the day, to counter Gehlot's claims, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and state minister Yunus Khan said at a press conference the country's Prime Minister had to observe fast for the first time in the history of India to bring to fore the misconducts of the Congress party, which was a matter of shame for the opposition.

He said that the Congress had always believed in family legacy and one family ruled the nation for many decades.

"Starting with Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi ruled the nation. Even when this family was not ruling the country, they ensured that they were the rulers by enthroning a proxy Prime Minister," he added.

"Now that the country is growing fast under Modi, 'Yuvraj' wants to interrupt the growth and hence he did not allow smooth proceeding of Parliament, following which Modi had to observe fast to bring before the masses his party's activities," Khan added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Slamming the "farcical" fast by the BJP against Parliament's disruption, the Congress on Thursday said the ruling party was enacting an absurd drama of photo-ops and headline management.

"The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leadership, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its President Amit Shah, are enacting an absurd drama. The fast is a lame excuse for the non-functioning of Parliament," Congress spokesman Randeep Singh Surjewala told reporters here.

Accusing the Modi government of denigrating Parliament by obstructing its functioning when it was in opposition till May 2014, Surjewala said the BJP should apologise for engineering disruptions and dishonouring democracy.

"The BJP disrupted Parliament through proxy allies, engineered deafening din and noise and did not permit the no-confidence motions to be deliberated upon or voted," said Surjewala.

The BJP, however, blamed the Congress-led opposition parties for disrupting Parliament's second part of the Budget Session from March 5 to April 6.

"For a party which disrupted 67 per cent of the functioning time of the previous Lok Sabha (2009-14) and wasted 250 hours of the Budget Session, the remorse for failing India can only be through a 'penance upvaas' (fasting)," said Surjewala.

Claiming that Modi lost credibility and that his words had no value, the Congress leader said the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre had no accountability and had lost direction and purpose.

"Modi and Shah came to power riding a 'jumla' boat of fake promises. The boat has its underbelly and the rats are jumping ship!" said Surjewala.

The BJP refused to answer in Parliament how the jewellers accused in Rs 13,540-crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case -- Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi -- were allowed to flee the country and on the other bank frauds, Surjewala said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Charging the Congress with dividing the people over caste, creed and religion, BJP President Amit Shah on Thursday said the ruling party in Karnataka will stoop to any level to retain power but will not succeed this time.

"Though the Congress stoops to any level to retain power, the people who could see through its ploy will teach a lesson in the May 12 state assembly elections and bring the BJP to power again," said Shah at a party rally in the state's northwest region.

Terming the Siddaramaiah government as the most corrupt in the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief said the ruling party had become an ATM (any time money) for its high command in Delhi.

"As the Congress government has gone into slumber, I am sure the BJP will form the next government under the leadership of B.S. Yeddyurappa and put an end to five-year misrule of Siddaramaiah," said Shah on his second visit to the erstwhile Karnataka-Bombay province ahead of the crucial polls.

The BJP, which came to power for the first time in the southern state in 2008, lost to the Congress in the May 2013 assembly elections after Yeddyurappa parted ways and formed the Karnataka Janata Party.

He returned a year later and won from the Shivamogga Lok Sabha seat in May 2014 general elections.

"As the Congress is a broken house and confused, I am confident of our party coming back to power with majority in the state," asserted Yeddyurappa on the occasion.

The party's leader in the assembly Jagadish Shettar, BJP Dharwad Lok Sabha member Prahlad Joshi and Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrashekar also participated in the rally.

Blaming the Congress of fanning hatred in the country and playing divisive politics, Shah said the wise people understood its sinister tactics and defeated its candidates in state after state since 2014.

"It's turn of the Karnataka people to free the state from the Congress and time up for (Chief Minister) Siddaramaiah to go home," said Shah at a party event at a village in Ron local body of Gadag district, about 60 km from here.

Holding the state government responsible for about 3,500 farmers committing suicide due to agrarian crisis over the last 5 years, the BJP chief said though the central government had released funds for irrigation projects, the farmers did not benefit as many of them could not be completed due to delays and graft.

Earlier in the day, Shah visited Siddharoodha mutt at Hubballi and took blessings of its seer Paramarooda for the party's victory at the hustings. He also visited the memorial of Kannada poet Da Ra Bendre at Dharwad.

--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 on Thursday attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah for observing a "fake fast" and termed it as "PM's fast of atonement".

It put out the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders' schedule for the day mentioning breakfast and lunch timings on Twitter.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said: "Mr. Prime Minister, best wishes for your fast."

He attached Modi's travel schedule in Tamil Nadu, that showed that the Prime Minister would be having his breakfast on board the IAF BBJ at 6.40 a.m.

It also said that after his departure from Chennai at 2.25 p.m, he will have lunch on board.

The Congress spokesperson challenged the Prime Minister to prove him otherwise. "Now, tell us that this is a lie."

"Now, jumla fast gets over in an hour and feast after that. Good wishes for your fake fast," he added.

He also attached BJP chief Amit Shah's public programmes in Karnataka. It mentioned Shah will have lunch with farmers at 1.30 p.m in Rona Taluk village in Gadag.

Quoting Mahatma Gandhi, Surjewala said: "Atonement should be there, where a serious and deliberate sin has occurred. Fast can be done only with selflessness, not otherwise."

The Congress leader said that this was, however, something that went beyond the BJP leaders' understanding who observe "fake fast" after having food.

Modi and Shah along with BJP MPs fasted on Thursday across the country to protest against the washout of the second-half of Parliament's Budget Session, for which they blamed the Congress.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Indian consumers are aware and updated about the ingredients used in beauty products and they can't be fooled with wrong information, says Sweden-based global skin care expert Allison Toledano.

"Natural ingredients are in trend," Toledano told IANS here.

"The more transparent we will be about natural ingredients, the better it will be. Now consumers' knowledge is high and they need the right information. It is very easy to go on the Internet and Google, so they will know and you need to be transparent and very sharp while selling the products," added Toledano, the Global Brand Manager of brand Oriflame.

With a 50-year heritage of taking inspiration from Swedish nature, Oriflame has now come up with Optimals, which has botanical ingredients from Sweden. The products in this range contain concentrations of antioxidants, vitamins and essential oils.

Naveen Anand, Senior Director - Regional Marketing - South Asia, Oriflame, said: "Fifty years of being in the skin care industry has taught us that following an uncomplicated beauty routine is the best foundation for naturally beautiful skin. With the Optimals brand and its new product assortments, we have brought the latest and the best in skincare to make healthy and radiant skin achievable by our customers."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Indian wrestler Babita Kumari took silver in the women's 53 kilogram category at the 21st Commonwealth Games (CWG) here on Thursday.

Babita lost 2-5 to Canada's Diana Weicker in her last round robin match which put paid to her chances of winning gold.

Weicker won gold while Bose Samuel of Nigeria got the bronze.

Weicker forced the early advantage by taking a 1-0 lead in the first round.

Although Babita managed to execute a two-point in the second round, the Canadian notched up four more points to wrap up a comfortable win.

Earlier, Babita started off by defeating Bose Samuel of Nigeria in her opening bout. Babita shook off a strong start by the Nigerian to clinch a 3-1 win.

Samuel had taken the early lead but Babita pulled off a two-point move to put her nose ahead. She earned another point with a take down to bolster her lead.

Babita was even more dominant in her next bout, defeating Sri Lanka's Deepika Dilhani by fall early in the first period.

The Haryana wrestler was too good for Carissa Holland of Australia as well, clinching another victory by fall to enter the final.

Meanwhile, Kiran added to the Indian medals tally by bagging bronze in the women's 76kg category.

She outclassed Katouskia Pariadhaven of Mauritius by technical superiority for the bronze medal.

Kiran had built up a 10-0 lead in the first period itself which promped the officials to award her the bout.

Bouts are awarded on the basis of technical superiority when one wrestler takes a lead of 10 or more points.

Canada's Erica Wiebe emerged champion in the category while Blessing Onyebuchi of Nigeria got the silver.

Kiran had lost to Blessing in the semi-finals. Kiran was no match for the Nigerian, conceding a 0-10 deficit in the first round itself to lose by technical superiority.

Kiran had started her campaign by defeating Danielle Sino Guemde of Cameroon by technical superiority.

She taken a 4-1 lead in the first round before scoring seven consecutive points in the second to wrap up the victory.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Indian wrestlers Rahul Aware and Sushil Kumar entered the finals of their respective categories in the men's freestyle competition at the 21st Commonwealth Games (CWG) here on Thursday.

Aware, appearing in his first CWG in the men's 57 kilogram category, did well to qualify for the summit clash in style.

He did face some trouble from a spirited Muhammed Bilal of Pakistan in the semi-finals before taking a thrilling 10-8 victory. He will meet Steven Takahashi of Canada in the final. The Canadian defeated Ebikewenimo Welson of Nigeria in the other semi-final.

Aware's semi-final was a thrilling contest at Bilal came up with a spirited performance.

The Pakistani attacked right from the start but the Indian pulled off an effective counter-attack to take a 3-0 lead. Bilal continued to attack and managed a takedown which earned him two points.

Bilal displayed some excellent counter wrestling techniques to draw level at 4-4 early in the second round.

But the jubilation in the Pakistan camp did not last long as Aware pulled off a takedown before managing an ankle hold and to roll Bilal over several times for a 10-4 lead.

Bilal continued to fight and reduced the gap by two points with a single leg hold.

Aware bolstered his lead with another two-point move and although Bilal managed o score yet again in the final seconds, it was not enough.

Earlier, Aware started his campaign in comprehensive fashion, overpowering George Ramm of England and Australia's Thomas Cichhini by technical superiority.

In the round of 16, Aware powered his way to an 11-0 lead over the English wrestler early in the second round which prompted the judges to award him the bout.

Aware took a 1-0 lead early in the opening period before a takedown earned him another two points towards the end of the round.

The Indian managed an ankle hold on his opponent right at the start of the second round. He then applied the 'fitley' move to roll Ramm over several times and rack up the winning points.

The Indian was even more impressive in the quarter-finals, outclassing Cichhini in the first round.

He brought down the Australian and turned him over for a 4-0 lead in the first minute. He continued to dominate proceedings to notch up a one-sided victory.

In the men's 74kg freestyle category, Sushil overpowered Jevon Balfour of Canada by technical superiority to enter the quarter-finals.

Another technical superiority verdict over Muhammad Asad Butt of Pakistan propelled him into the semi-finals where he overpowered Australia's Connor Evans by fall in the very first round.

--IANS

ajb/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Indian wrestlers Rahul Aware and Sushil Kumar entered the finals of their respective categories in the men's freestyle competition at the 21st Commonwealth Games (CWG) here on Thursday.

Aware, appearing in his first CWG in the men's 57 kilogram category, did well to qualify for the summit clash in style.

He did face some trouble from a spirited Muhammed Bilal of Pakistan in the semi-finals before clinching a thrilling 12-8 victory. He will meet Steven Takahashi of Canada in the final. The Canadian defeated Ebikewenimo Welson of Nigeria in the other semi-final.

Aware's semi-final was a thrilling contest at Bilal came up with a spirited performance.

The Pakistani attacked right from the start but the Indian pulled off an effective counter-attack to take a 3-0 lead. Bilal continued to attack and managed a takedown which earned him two points.

Bilal displayed some excellent counter wrestling techniques to draw level at 4-4 early in the second round.

But the jubilation in the Pakistan camp did not last long as Aware pulled off a takedown before managing an ankle hold and to roll Bilal over several times for a 10-4 lead.

Bilal continued to fight and reduced the gap by two points with a single leg hold.

Aware bolstered his lead with another two-point move and although Bilal managed to score yet again with around 30 seconds to go, the Indian earned another couple of points in the final few seconds.

Earlier, Aware started his campaign in comprehensive fashion, overpowering George Ramm of England and Australia's Thomas Cichhini by technical superiority.

In the round of 16, Aware powered his way to an 11-0 lead over the English wrestler early in the second round which prompted the judges to award him the bout.

Aware took a 1-0 lead early in the opening period before a takedown earned him another two points towards the end of the round.

The Indian managed an ankle hold on his opponent right at the start of the second round. He then applied the 'fitley' move to roll Ramm over several times and rack up the winning points.

The Indian was even more impressive in the quarter-finals, outclassing Cichhini in the first round.

He brought down the Australian and turned him over for a 4-0 lead in the first minute. He continued to dominate proceedings to notch up a one-sided victory.

Meanwhile Sushil, the defending champion in the men's 74kg freestyle category, overpowered Jevon Balfour of Canada by technical superiority to enter the quarter-finals.

Another technical superiority verdict over Muhammad Asad Butt of Pakistan propelled him into the semi-finals where he overpowered Australia's Connor Evans by fall in the very first round.

Sushil thus entered the CWG final for the third consecutive time. He had won gold in the now disbanded 66kg category at the 2010 edition in New Delhi before winning the 74kg title at the 2014 CWG in Glasgow, Scotland.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A number of Dalit organisations on Thursday asked the Narendra Modi government to "restore" through an ordinance the SC/ST Act that has been "diluted" by a Supreme Court order and withdrawal of cases filed against Dalit activists during the countrywide shutdown on April 2.

Addressing a press conference here, they also announced to observe April 14 -- the birth anniversary of B.R. Ambedkar -- as "Protect Constitution" day across the country.

Those addressing the press meet included Ashok Bharti, advisor to the National Confederation of Dalit and Adivasi Organisations; Ramesh Nathan of National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights; Anand Rao of All India Dalit Rights Federation; Srinivasa Rao of Dalit Shoshan Mukti Manch; and Nirmal of Bharat Khet Mazdoor Union.

"The government must bring an ordinance to protect the sanctity of the SC/ST Act. Also, the cases against the Dalit activists who were implicated during the Bharat Bandh on April 2 must be withdrawn," said Bharti.

Accusing the Narendra Modi government of not being "honest" vis-a-vis Dalit icon Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Dalit leaders said that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government could not use the past Congress governments' inaction or deliberate unwillingness to give the Dalits their due as an alibi to deny them their rights now.

The Supreme Court in an order on March 20 said that an accused cannot be mandatorily arrested under the Scheduled Castes and Schedules Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act without an initial probe. The Dalit organisations and various civil society groups see it as "dilution" of the Act and accuse the Modi government of conniving in the case.

"Our Prime Minister claims that he comes from a backward class. Our request to him is that being from the backward background, he should do justice to the backwards. Let's give 52 per cent reservation to the backwards through a legislation," Bharti said.

The Dalit leaders also demanded putting the Scheduled Castes and Schedules Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, under the Schedule IX of the Constitution.

They asked the Modi government to fulfil their demands before August 15 -- Independence Day -- this year.

--IANS

mak/nir

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Delhi Police on Thursday launched a training-cum-skill development centre to benefit school dropouts, juveniles involved in crime or those from families facing dire state due to loss of the bread earner.

"The scheme was inaugurated last year with eight skill centres in eight police stations of Delhi. This year we are targeting 12 more centres," Police Commissioner Amulya Patnaik told reporters.

This year, training would be offered in hospitality and retail sectors, certified by the National Skill Development Corp (NSDC).

As per the scheme, launched under the Yuva programme, Delhi Police in 2017 tied up with the NSDC and the Confederation of Indian Industry to provide the training.

Almost 1,900 youths between the age of 17 and 25 were selected. "Nearly 1,700 youths were imparted training in eight police stations whereas 200 were referred to training centres outside police stations."

Police said 1,014 men and women had got job offers from different companies.

Lt Governor Anil Baijal, who was chief guest at the event in Chittaranjan Park, said: "Police stations can go beyond their traditional role of maintaining law and order and be a community partner of social impact enabler in changing lives."

--IANS

umer/him/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A retired soldier and village head in Haryana has been shot dead by a former National Security Guard (NSG) commando apparently over a financial dispute, police said on Thursday. Two persons have been detained.

Sunder Fauji pumped half-a-dozen bullets into Bahadur Chauhan, the Sarpanch of Kasan village near here.

The incident occurred close to the Delhi-Jaipur-Mumbai highway at Chauhan's office-cum-residence, senior police officer Ravinder Kumar told IANS.

"There was some financial dispute between the two. Both were involved in property business.

"Chauhan, in his mid-40s, allegedly refused to deliver the share of money to Fauji that they had earned after a property deal came through," he added.

Fauji surrendered at the Manesar police station after the killing late on Wednesday, Kumar said.

"The injured man was rushed to a hospital where he succumbed to his injuries," he added.

Police detained Sunder Fauji and Yashpal Master, a teacher, for Chauhan's murder. Police are on the lookout for a third accused, Rampal.

--IANS

pradeep/in/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Yulia Skripal, the daughter of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal who was poisoned in March, has turned down an offer of help from the Russian Embassy, according to a statement from the Metropolitan Police.

In a statement released on Wednesday through police, two days after she was discharged from hospital, Yulia Skripal said she was feeling better, the Independent newspaper reported. Her father is still in a hospital.

"I do not wish to avail myself of their (Russian Embassy) services... I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me," she said.

She also singled out her cousin, Viktoria Skripal, who had appeared on Russian television several times since the attack, once providing a recording of a phone conversation allegedly between herself and Yulia Skripal.

Viktoria Skripal had also applied for a UK visa, which was denied, a CNN report said.

"I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being," Yulia Skripal said. "Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's."

Russia has repeatedly insisted on being granted access to the father and daughter after they were poisoned with the rare military grade agent Novichok, leaving them both in critical condition. Moscow has denied responsibility for the March 4 Salisbury attack.

The statement from Yulia Skripal met with derision by the Russian authorities, who described it as "an interesting read," noting that there was no way to verify the statement.

"We would like to make sure that the statement really belongs to Yulia," the Russian Embassy in Britain said. "So far, we doubt it much."

Yulia Skripal was released from a hospital in southern England earlier this week after receiving treatment for the poisoning, which seriously worsened ties between the UK and Russia. It set off a chain events that led to the expulsions of hundreds of diplomats in Britain, the US, Russia and around the world.

She also confirmed that she had access to family and friends.

--IANS

soni/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The FBI sought communications that Donald Trump had with his personal lawyer Michael Cohen over the "Access Hollywood" tape that captured the President making lewd remarks about women a month before the 2016 election, a media report said.

The communications were sought by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who raided Cohen's home, office and hotel on Monday, informed sources told CNN late Wednesday.

The FBI warrant's specific reference to Trump is the first known direct mention of the President in a search warrant, and the sources said it appeared in connection with "Access Hollywood".

The search warrant sought communications between Trump and his associates regarding efforts to prevent disclosure of the tape.

In addition, investigators wanted records and communications concerning other potential negative information about Trump that the campaign would have wanted to contain ahead of the election.

The warrant is the first indication that investigators suspect there was any effort to suppress the tape. It was not immediately clear if Cohen played any role in the controversy.

The circumstances of the leaked Access Hollywood tape remain a mystery, reports CNN.

NBCUniversal, which produces "Access", has long held that it was about to broadcast the tape when The Washington Post obtained and published it.

According to the network, the tape sat on a shelf for years before being discovered during the late stages of the presidential election.

It is unknown how many people at NBC had access to the tape.

The Washington Post published the video on October 7, 2016. That same day, the Obama administration accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee and meddling in the presidential election.

Soon after, The Post published the Access Hollywood tape and then WikiLeaks began publishing stolen emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta within an hour of the tape's release.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)French consumer brand Thomson on Thursday said it has launched a range of smart televisions (TVs) here in collaboration with the trade section of the Embassy of France -- Business France.

According to the French brand, the smart TVs launched will be exclusively available on e-commerce platform Flipkart starting on Friday.

"In an exclusive licensing agreement with SPPL (Super Plastronics), the brand unveiled its 43 UHD (ultra-high-definition) 4K, 40 smart and 32 smart TVs, which will be exclusively available on Flipkart, starting April 13," the company said in a statement.

The Thomson brand is owned by Technicolor SA, France.

"Technicolor, owner of Thomson brand, is very proud to sign a long-term license with SPPL as a strategic partner to develop Thomson's presence in India," said Claire Villeneuve, Head, Intellectual Property and Licensing, Technicolor, France.

Avneet Singh Marwah, CEO, SPPL -- the Indian Brand Licensee for Thomson -- said: "We are delighted to partner with a leading and historic global brand like Thomson. It is SPPL's endeavour and commitment to promote 'Make in India', generate employment and contribute to the Indian economy."

"With the launch we aim to capture 6-7 per cent of the total TV market share and make Thomson number one online smart TV brand in India. We have already planned to put one more manufacturing line of Led TV by next-quarter in order to offer Indian consumer products that are at par with global Standards...," he added.

The statement said the Thomson 43 UHD 4K Smart TVs come with default APK Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Netflix and runs on Android 4.4.4.0 and Aptoide with the feature to download any app.

"Replicating our strategy for smartphones, this launch marries well into our commitment of driving innovation in the market while we continue to be India's most trusted destination for TVs," said Sandeep Karwa, Head of TV and large appliance, Flipkart.

--IANS

ppg/nks/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)German judicial authorities have accepted an invitation by their Spanish colleagues to discuss the potential extradition of ex-Catalan governor Carles Puigdemont, a spokesperson for the Chief Public Prosecution Office in the state of Schleswig-Holstein confirmed on Wednesday.

A meeting at the European Union (EU) justice agency Eurojust in the Dutch city of Den Haag was planned "shortly", the spokesperson told the press, reports Xinhua.

Media reported that Spanish judicial authorities still hoped to persuade their German counterparts that there was sufficient evidence to justify accusations of "rebellion" and "embezzlement" against the Catalan separatist leader during the high-level meeting.

Earlier, the Higher Regional Court in Schleswig-Holstein rejected a Spanish extradition request for Puigdemont on the grounds of "rebellion".

The court is still assessing whether to deliver the wanted ex-governor to Spain on related embezzlement charges.

Puigdemont has expressed his desire to remain in Germany until the full conclusion of judicial processes involving him there. The 55-year-old was recently released from custody at the Neumuenster prison after posting bail of 75,000 euros ($93,000) and must still regularly report his movements to local police.

Spanish authorities accuse Puigdemont of having acted in breach of the country's constitution by holding a referendum on Catalan independence in October 2017, as well as misappropriating 1.5 million euros ($1.86 million) in public funds to organise the vote before fleeing to Belgium.

Nevertheless, Madrid has announced that it would respect any decision reached by German judicial authorities on the suspect's extradition.

--IANS

sku/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Google has removed the original first-generation Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones from its Google Store, media reported.

First spotted by Android Police, the landing page for the 2016 Pixels on Google Store now redirects to another page with just two links -- Pixel 2 and accessories for the Pixel 2.

"The Pixel had a good run, and it probably wasn't selling a lot of units. Google knocked a bit off the price of the first-gen phone after the Pixel 2 launched, but it still started at $549. The Pixel 2 was just $100 more," the report added.

Google later confirmed this to Digital Trends.

"Some third-party retailers are still selling the phone, though we're not sure how much longer that will last. Currently, Amazon is selling both new and refurbished versions of the Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL," reported Digital Trends.

India was among the first six countries where Pixel was launched in October 2016, starting at Rs 57,000.

Pixel was the first smartphone with Google Assistant -- a built-in AI programme that works as an intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator like Apple's "Siri".

Pixel came pre-installed with Google Duo video calling app and messaging app Allo.

Pixel smartphones were fitted with Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 821 Quad-core (2x2.15 Ghz and 2x1.6 Ghz) processors and 4GB RAM.

Google shipped 3.9 million Pixel and Pixel 2 devices in 2017 which is nearly double the units it sold in 2016.

According to Francisco Jeronimo, Research Director at International Data Corporation (IDC), "#GooglePixel shipments continue to grow, but they still represent a tiny portion of the smartphone market".

Google launched its flagship Pixel 2 smartphone in India in November 2017 at a starting price of Rs 61,000 for the 64GB variant.

According to media reports, the company is set to launch Pixel 3 in 2018.Members of the Indian film fraternity have condemned two rape incidents -- in Kathua and Unnao -- which have sent shockwaves across the country. Celebrities like Javed Akhtar, Farhan Akhtar and Nimrat Kaur and have called it a gut wrenching, horrendous and disgusting act, for which they have demanded justice.

The celebrities have demanded severe punishment for the "blood curdling barbarism".

An eight-year-old girl's body was recovered from Rassana forest in Kathua district of Jammu on January 17, a week after she went missing while grazing horses in the forest area. She was held captive inside a temple, and was sedated before being raped and murdered.

In Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, a case involving the alleged gang rape of a girl by a BJP legislator and others, and the death of her father in police custody, has come to light.

Here's what the celebrities tweeted:

Javed Akhtar: All those who wish justice for women should stand up and raise their voices against the rapists and their protectors in Unnao and Kathua.

Tisca Chopra: So pained to read about Unnao and Kathua rapes... How strongly the government responds will be its true test. At least I won't vote for them coming elections if they don't take action this time.

Farhan Akhtar: Imagine what goes through the mind of an 8-year-old as she is drugged, held captive, gang raped over days and then murdered. If you don't feel her terror, you are not human. If you don't demand Asifa get justice, you belong to nothing.

Tammannah Bhatia: An 8-year-old raped in J&K. A 16-year-old raped and a protesting father beaten to death in order to protect the rapist. Where is this country headed? How many Nirbhayas need to be sacrificed before reforms are made. A country that can't keep its women safe is a country with a rather regressive mentality that needs therapy.

Nimrat Kaur: Equal rights/ gender bias/ pay disparity all seem like such distant, first world concerns. Let's begin with addressing the unmentionable horrors of the absense of humanity. The only way forward, if at all, from this blood curdling barbarism is justice. Heartbroken and aghast. Asifa.

Renuka Shahane: The religion of the victim and the religion of the rapist should never matter! It is of no consequence! Rape is a crime against humanity! Appalled that some people can actually support rapists! Shocked beyond belief! RIP humanity!

Swara Bhasker: Revolting! Kathua.

Vir Das: I can't breathe after reading this. I need to share it. And so do you. Please do. Justice for Asifa. Dear politicians, I'd like to see every one of you miserable scum and your army of slimy sycophants put your parties and your bullshit aside and do something to make sure that no child ever has to face what this girl did. But you won't. Because you don't deserve this country.

Rahul dholakia: Jai Shri Ram, once again the cry of murder, rape, police cover up! Hang them on Red Fort on August 15.

Nikkhil Advani: Asifa... Every day the conscience of this country dies a bit more.

Rahul Bose: Gut wrenching. Unimaginable depravity that is disturbing on so many levels. Our response will decide what we have become as a society.

Ranvir Shorey: If these people had an iota of reverence and respect for Hinduism, they'd be up in arms against the people who used a temple to torture, rape and murder a child! These are slogans to be used when the people who have committed these crimes are hanged! Utterly appalling that slogans like 'Jai Shri Ram' and 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' are being used to defend perpetrators of heinous crimes. These vicious beasts will destroy India and Hinduism. Unnao and Kathua.

Richa Chadha: These men fast on Navratras and pray to Devi Ma, yet they defend a man who plotted the rape, torture and murder of a child inside a temple. Look at them, Shame them. If a stray news report can make credible people. Hindu haters why are these fake Hindus not unemployed.

Sophie Choudry: I can't even read the full report... so angry and ashamed that this horrific crimes keep taking place in our country! What that little eight-year-old went through.. I can't even. These monsters need to tortured and hanged. Nothing less will do.

Atul Kasbekar: Attention famous people with blue ticks. Please look at the face of this eight-year-old angel. She was kidnapped, drugged, tortured, gangraped for days and murdered. It is time to use your clout to say something that pressures justice is swift, sure and as brutal as what this girl went through.

--IANS

dc/rb/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Justice Kurian Joseph -- the fifth senior most judge in the Supreme Court and a member of the collegium -- has told Chief Justice Dipak Misra that "history will not pardon us" for not upholding judicial independence in the face of government sitting on its recommendation for the appointment of top court's judges.

In an April 9 letter, Justice Joseph pointed out that over three months have passed since the Supreme Court collegium had recommended the elevation of Uttarakhand High Court Chief Justice K.M. Joseph and appointment of senior lawyer Indu Malhotra to the top court.

Pointing out that the "government owes a duty to take a call on the recommendation as soon as the same is sent by the collegium", Justice Joseph said: "Failure to discharge their duty by sitting on the recommendations of the collegium doing nothing, in administrative law, is abuse of power.

"The dignity, honour and respect of this institution is going down day by day since we are not able to take recommendations for appointment to this court to their logical conclusion within the normally accepted time," he said.

He asked Chief Justice Misra to deal with the issue on the judicial side by constituting a bench of seven or more senior most judges of the top court.

The Executive (government) sitting over collegium recommendation and not saying anything, Justice Joseph said, sends a "wrong message which is loud and clear to all the judges down the line not to cause any displeasure to the Executive, lest they should suffer.

"It appears your personal efforts have not been fruitful.

"Is this not a threat to the independence of judiciary?" Justice Joseph asked.

"I am more worried about the irreparable injury that is being caused by the wrong message sent to the judges down the line."

The Supreme Court Judge said: "If there is no normal delivery on the completion of the gestation period, what is urgently done is caesarean section. Unless such a surgical intervention is made at the appropriate time, the child in the womb dies.

"... in the interest of this great institution and independence of judiciary, for which all of us have fought so vigorously and tirelessly, to have an appropriate bench forthwith ... otherwise, I feel, history will not pardon us."

Recalling the way the full court met when then Calcutta High Court Judge C.S. Karnan "challenged the dignity of the court", Justice Kurian said: "Is not the present a more grievous situation?"

"In Justice Karnan's case, it was threat to the dignity of the court; the present one is a threat to very life and the existence of the institution."

He said the apex court was reeling under the work pressure by working with 24 judges as against a sanctioned strength of 31.

Recalling the practice of sending the names of judges for elevation to the top court in a phased manner as it may not poses any administrative or other difficulty, Justice Joseph pointed out that "we are not able to sit for the second phase since the fate of the first phase is not yet known."

--IANS

pk/tsb/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US-based Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) on Thursday announced that it will start building the first of two test tracks at its facility in Toulouse, France.

Hyperloop, an idea from Tesla CEO and SpaceX Founder Elon Musk, envisions a transportation system which proposes to propel a pod-like vehicle through a near-vacuum tube at nearly 1,100 km per hour and above.

The first phase includes a closed 320-meter system that will be operational this year.

In addition, a second full-scale system of 1 km elevated by pylons at a height of 5.8 meters will be completed in 2019.

"Five years ago we set out to solve transportation's most pressing problems; efficiency, comfort and speed. Today, we take an important step forward to begin to achieve that goal," said HyperloopTT CEO Dirk Ahlborn.

Both systems are fully upgradeable and will be utilised by both HyperloopTT and partner companies.

"We have pioneered the technology, proved feasible and insurable by the world's largest reinsurance company, Munich RE. We have agreements in place in nine countries where we're working on feasibility and regulations," said Bibop Gresta, HyperloopTT Chairman.

HyperloopTT has signed agreements in the US, India, Slovakia, Abu Dhabi, the Czech Republic, France, Indonesia, Brazil and Korea.

India's first Hyperloop transportation facility is likely to be introduced in Andhra Pradesh, connecting Vijayawada with upcoming state capital Amaravati.

The state government is currently studying the feasibility of the project and if introduced, the 40 km distance between the two cities can be covered in just six minutes.

If the Hyperloop line is completed, people can travel from Bengaluru to Chennai in 20 minutes. The 1,102 km Mumbai to Chennai via Bengaluru line will cover the distance in 50 minutes.

HTT has a research centre for freight and logistics in Brazil and a facility in Toulouse where it will deliver the first full-scale passenger capsule.

"Hyperloop is no longer a concept; it has become a commercial industry," Gresta added.

--IANS

na/qd/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)She is a woman who follows her heart and is an inspiration for other women. Priyanka Chopra, who is effortlessly straddling two worlds and is also a Unicef goodwill ambassador, says women have always been considered second-class citizens globally and she would like to see a change in the mindset of those who devalue a girl child.

"We are living in an extremely patriarchal society, not just in India, but in the whole world. Women have always been second-class citizens. We have to fight to get opportunities, to become a leader (but) the one thing that I have seen is that now women are not willing to settle (for less) any more, and that's the big difference," Priyanka -- a Bollwood star who has now made her mark in Hollywood -- told IANS when asked to comment on the changes she has noticed among people towards women and the girl child in India.

"It's not like the world is going to change in 10 years. Hopefully, I will see it in my lifetime. But if not, (it should change) for the next generation. That's what I am hoping. I love the tenacity... of seeing women supporting each other, of women turning around and telling that 'it's wrong'.

"The fact is we are living in the era of social media, you are not alone. There's good and bad in everything, but in this case, you are not alone and that is the biggest change. You see more men standing up for women and saying 'that's wrong', but there is yet a lot of work to be done globally," she added.

Priyanka was in the capital to attend the curtain-raiser of The Partners' Forum, a platform for learning and exchange between countries and partners to improve the health and well-being of women, children and adolescents.

It was hosted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in collaboration with the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) and support of other partners.

Priyanka's journey in showbiz started at the age of 17 when she was crowned Miss World. It was followed by her Bollywood debut in 2003 with "The Hero: Love Story of a Spy" and she later made headlines when she bagged the lead role in American show "Quantico".

The year 2016 also saw her becoming a presenter at the Academy Awards and the Emmy Awards ceremony, followed by an invitation to the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. She was conferred India's fourth-highest civilian honour, the Padma Shri, and featured in Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of the world.

Priyanka finds it wonderful how women have an innate ability to fulfill different roles.

"Women have the ability to take care, get married, have children and work at the same time. They make sure that the house is taken care of, but at the same time they go out and meet their dreams. All they need is someone to stand with them and say, 'Yes, you can', and that will come when families, husbands, fathers and mothers start teaching their children that it is going to be all right.

"Of course, women should settle down, men should settle down, have babies, but that shouldn't be the end of a girl's life. It should be the beginning. You should marry in a home that allows you to have wings and the parents need to make sure of that," said Priyanka.

Girls need to be valued, stressed the actress who has made a name for herself internationally with the show "Quantico".

"I have a lot of dreams. I don't want any child to go to sleep hungry, but the big change I want to see is girl children should not be treated as a commodity... (used) just for reproduction. I want to see a change where we invest in our girls, where we treat them and give them the opportunity to have merit to prove themselves.

"At least we should give that chance to her. Devaluation of girls is something that I want to see change," she said.

Priyanka is herself as invested in philanthropy as in her showbiz career as an actor and producer. But what is keeping her away from Bollywood films nowadays?

Laughing off the question, she said: "I will do it when I find the right script. It's not like I am not working. I am shooting a TV film which has gone to 64 countries. I have produced seven films this year. I am working. And I will work (in a Bollywood film) when I find the right film to do."

"I am not someone who will compromise or settle for less," she signed off.

(Nivedita can be contacted at nivedita.s@ians.in <mailto:nivedita.s@ians.in>)

--IANS

nv/rb/vm/tb/sac

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Global human rights organisation Amnesty International on Thursday said executions and death sentences worldwide have fallen but several countries have regressed -- like India, where death sentences fell but it expanded the scope of death penalty.

"Positive steps were taken in 2017 and the full impact will be seen in the coming months and years. However, with some countries taking steps backwards - or threatening to - the campaign against the death penalty remains as essential as ever," Amnesty International said in its 2017 global review of the death penalty.

Globally, executions and death sentences are sliding and India has contributed to this trend. Courts in India imposed 109 new death sentences in 2017, while it was 136 in 2016. Fortunately, India observed a hiatus on executions for the second year running with zero executions recorded in 2017.

"However, there is bad news coming out of India too, with new laws being passed that expand the scope of this cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment," said Aakar Patel, Executive Director, Amnesty International India.

India is one of only three countries in the world that expanded the scope of death penalty in 2017 by adopting new laws, the organisation said.

At the national level, the Anti-Hijacking Act added death penalty in its provisions. At the state level, Uttar Pradesh introduced the punishment in cases related to spurious liquor, Madhya Pradesh in rape cases of girls below 12 years of age, and similar new laws in Rajasthan, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh.

"It is high time that India consigns the death penalty to the history books, instead of falsely claiming that it improves public safety," said Patel. "With countries continuing to take steps to reduce and repeal the death penalty well into 2018, the isolation of India and the world's remaining executing governments could not be starker."

After Guatemala became abolitionist for ordinary crimes such as murder, the number of countries to have abolished the death penalty in law or practice now stands at 142. Only 23 countries continue to execute, including India. It was the same number in 2016, despite several states resuming executions after a hiatus.

"The death penalty is a symptom of a culture of violence, not a solution to it," said Salil Shetty, Secretary General, Amnesty International.

Amnesty International recorded a decrease in executions globally by four per cent from 2016 (1,032 executions) and 39 per cent from 2015, when the organisation reported 1,634 executions, the highest number since 1989.

It recorded a 17 per cent decrease in the total number of death sentences imposed globally, down to 2,591 in 2017 from the record-high of 3,117 recorded in 2016.

More than half (51 per cent) of all recorded executions were carried out in Iran, which together with Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan carried out 84 per cent of the global total.

These figures do not include the thousands of death sentences and executions that Amnesty International believes were imposed and implemented in China, where figures remain classified as a state secret, the organisation said in a release.

--IANS

mgu/him/nir

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India on Thursday reiterated its call for reasonable global oil pricing and invited investment in its hydrocarbons sector in line with the country's drive to attaining energy security.

Noting that as the third largest energy consuming country India imports most of its oil and gas needs, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan made the call for "responsible pricing" at the concluding session of the 16th International Energy Forum (IEF) ministerial here.

"India imports most its fossil fuel requirements and, at the same time, the average energy buyer in the country is very price conscious," Pradhan said.

"It is in this context that India has coined the concept of responsible and reasonable energy pricing. I again urge producers to work for a more equitable pricing regime rather than artificially influence the market through output and investment changes.

"India is open to investment and I invite companies to invest in India's upstream and downstream sectors, joint ventures and academic collaborations," he added.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had inaugurated the IEF 16 on Wednesday with the call for "responsible" pricing in the hydrocarbons market so as to balance the interests of oil and gas producers and consumers.

Pradhan said the "neutral" platform of the IEF made it a perfect forum of discussion between producing and consuming countries.

Signalling India's growing global importance as an energy consumer, the IEF was held in India after a gap of 22 years.

The meeting of ministers of the 72-member IEF, hosted by India and co-hosted by China and South Korea, aimed to focus on how global shifts, transition policies and new technologies influence market stability and future investment in the energy sector.

Recognising that universal access to energy is central to economic growth and welfare, the IEF16 concluding statement said: "Noting that energy poverty is one root cause of migration, IEF 16 delegates placing emphasis on affordability and making energy supply chains more affordable and sustainable."

On the oil and gas market, the statement said: "Noting that oil demand growth will not ease the burden on oil and gas producers to mobilise investment in new supply, and that investment needs are exacerbated by the backlog of stalled investments over the last four years, IEF delegates noted that more widely dicerging views on futureenergy policy and market trends further delay investments from moving forward expeditiously."

Among ministers from overseas who attended the meeting this year are those of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Qatar, Nigeria, Japan, China, Russia and the US.

In his address at the inauguration, Saudi Arabian Petroleum Minister Khalid Al-Falih said that the future supply situation of energy sources, particularly of oil, is "not reasssuring", and that producers in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) "remain committed to the long-term market".

"Saudi Arabia and Russia are discussing extending the cooperation and monitoring of the market to extend stability," he said, referring to the crude output cuts agreed last year between OPEC and Russia in a move to stop the slide in oil prices that had fallen to around $25 a barrel two years ago.

Crude currently is averaging around $70 a barrel.

--IANS

bc/ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said India's military aims and preparedness were driven not by a desire to conquer anyone's territory but to protect its own people.

Addressing a gathering of mostly foreign dignitaries and captains of foreign and local military manufacturing companies, Modi said India, the land of Buddha, had always believed in winning hearts and not land.

"Thousands of years of history of India shows that we have never desired anyone's territory. Rather than winning countries through wars, India has believed in winning hearts.

"This is the land from where the message of peace and universal brotherhood has gone out since Vedic times," Modi said in a 30-minute speech at a defence trade fair that projects India as one of the major manufacturers of war machines in the world. The event is taking place in Kancheepuram district, about 40 km from the heart of Chennai.

"This is the land from where the light of Buddhism spread to the world. In fact, from the time of Ashoka The Great and even earlier, India has believed in using strength to protect the highest ideals of humanity."

Modi's remarks come amid China's heavy increasing claims over the South China Sea islands that has major strategic implications and Beijing's military deployment last year at the Doklam tri-junction that also connects India and Bhutan.

The Prime Minister praised Indian armed forces' contribution to world peace and said that in modern times more than 130,000 Indian soldiers sacrificed their lives in the two World Wars.

"India had no claim on territory. But Indian soldiers fought for restoring peace and upholding human values," he said and added that independent India had also sent one of the largest numbers of UN peacekeepers to places all over the world.

He said while maintaining peace was primary, at the same time, the State had an important responsibility to protect its own citizens.

Referring to Kautilya, he said the ancient Indian thinker wrote the 'Arthashastra' treatise more than 2,000 years ago, saying that the ruler must protect his people and that peace is preferable to war.

"India's defence preparedness is guided by these thoughts. Our commitment to peace is just as strong as our commitment to protect our people and our territory. And for this, we are ready to take all steps required to equip our armed forces, including through the establishment of a strategically independent defence industrial complex."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An Indian man has been jailed here for three months for sending pornographic video content over e-mail to his Indian family friends 13-year-old daughter and molesting her during his visits to their home.

The mother of the girl had found several porn clips sent to the latter in August 2017. The teenager told her mother that the 27-year-old man had been constantly groping and sexually abusing her during visits to their home and had emailed her indecent clips.

According to a Gulf News report on Wednesday, the Indian man was ordered to be jailed by the Dubai Court of First Instance in February and deported after he finishes serving his jail term. However, the accused appealed his primary judgement and asked the Appeal Court to acquit him.

Appearing before the Appellate Court this week, the Indian man pleaded not guilty and denied sending any emails to the girl. But the judge rejected his appeal and upheld his three-month imprisonment.

The girl testified that the accused had constantly groped her and sexually abused her in her house. "Every time he came, he would molest and touch me indecently. He started doing so since I was 11. He emailed me indecent clips. I was scared to inform my parents because he constantly threatened and told me that my mother would beat and send me to India," she said.

A policeman said that the man claimed that he had a love affair with the teenager. He also claimed that he constantly hugged and kissed her whenever he visited them during holidays.

The Appellate Court ruling remains subject to appeal before the Cassation Court.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 22-year-old Indian woman has died in a freak accident in her own driveway here while she was assisting her sister to jump-start their car.

According to a New Zealand Punjabi Herald report on Thursday, the woman was identified as Harpreet Kaur.

The Auckland-based Kaur was pursuing higher studies at a local University and had gone to Wellington to attend her sister's graduation ceremony, the Indian Weekender reported. No other details were available.

Kaur's sister was also reported to be injured in the accident which has shocked the Indian community in the country.

--IANS

soni/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Star Indian wrestlers Sushil Kumar and Rahul Aware won gold in their respective categories at the 21st Commonwealth Games (CWG), while women grapplers also finished among the medals here on Thursday.

Sushil defended his crown in the men's 74 kilogram category which he had won at the 2014 edition in Glasgow, Scotland.

Sushil needed just 80 seconds to overpower Johannes Botha of South Africa by technical superiority in the final. Bouts are awarded on the basis of technical superiority when a wrestler takes a lead of 10 or more points.

Sushil thus won gold at the CWG for the third consecutive time. He had won gold in the now disbanded 66kg category at the 2010 edition in New Delhi before winning the 74kg title at the 2014 CWG in Glasgow, Scotland.

Aware, who was appearing in his first CWG, won gold in the men's 57 kilogram category in style. The Maharashtra wrestler outclassed Steven Takahashi of Canada 15-7 in the final.

The women wrestlers added to the Indian medals tally with Babita Kumari taking silver in the 53kg category while Kiran bagged bronze in the 76kg division.

Botha was no match for Sushil, who pulled off a four-point move in the opening seconds of the first round.

The veteran Indian star then executed a series of two-point moves which gave him a 10-0 lead and the gold.

The defending champion had overpowered Jevon Balfour of Canada by technical superiority to enter the quarter-finals.

Another technical superiority verdict over Muhammad Asad Butt of Pakistan propelled him into the semi-finals where he overpowered Australia's Connor Evans by fall in the very first round.

In the men's 57kg final, Aware was dominant right from the start, pulling off three two-points moves in the first round.

Although the Canadian showed excellent technical prowess with a four-point move, it was enough to prevent Aware from taking a two-point lead into the break.

The Maharashtra wrestler showed his true class in the second round. He had increased his lead by one point in the initial stages before the Canadian scored three points to reduce the gap.

Aware however, made an ankle hold to execute the classic 'fitlay' move which saw rack up eight consecutive points.

That gave him a virtually insurmountable eight-point lead which proved too much for Steven to surmount.

Aware did well to qualify for the summit clash in comprehensive fashion.

He did face some trouble from a spirited Muhammed Bilal of Pakistan in the semi-finals before clinching a thrilling 12-8 victory. Aware's semi-final turned out to be a thrilling contest at Bilal came up with a spirited performance.

The Pakistani attacked right from the start but the Indian pulled off an effective counter-attack to take a 3-0 lead. Bilal continued to attack and managed a takedown which earned him two points.

Bilal displayed some excellent counter wrestling techniques to draw level at 4-4 early in the second round.

But the jubilation in the Pakistan camp did not last long as Aware pulled off a takedown before managing an ankle hold and to roll Bilal over several times for a 10-4 lead.

Bilal continued to fight and reduced the gap by two points with a single leg hold.

Aware bolstered his lead with another two-point move and although Bilal managed to score yet again with around 30 seconds to go, the Indian earned another couple of points in the final few seconds.

Earlier, Aware started his campaign by overpowering George Ramm of England and Australia's Thomas Cichhini by technical superiority.

In the round of 16, Aware powered his way to an 11-0 lead over the English wrestler early in the second round which prompted the judges to award him the bout.

Aware took a 1-0 lead early in the opening period before a takedown earned him another two points towards the end of the round.

The Indian managed an ankle hold on his opponent right at the start of the second round. He then applied the 'fitley' move to roll Ramm over several times and rack up the winning points.

The Indian was even more impressive in the quarter-finals, outclassing Cichhini in the first round.

He brought down the Australian and turned him over for a 4-0 lead in the first minute. He continued to dominate proceedings to notch up a one-sided victory.

In the women's section, Babita lost 2-5 to Canada's Diana Weicker in her last round robin match which put paid to her chances of winning gold.

Weicker won gold while Bose Samuel of Nigeria got the bronze.

Weicker forced the early advantage by taking a 1-0 lead in the first round. Although Babita managed to execute a two-point in the second round, the Canadian notched up four more points to wrap up a comfortable win.

Earlier, Babita started off by defeating Samuel in her opening bout. Babita shook off a strong start by the Nigerian to clinch a 3-1 win.

Samuel had taken the early lead but Babita pulled off a two-point move to put her nose ahead. She earned another point with a take down to bolster her lead.

Babita was even more dominant in her next bout, defeating Sri Lanka's Deepika Dilhani by fall early in the first period.

The Haryana wrestler was too good for Carissa Holland of Australia as well, clinching another victory by fall to enter the final.

Later in the day, Kiran outclassed Katouskia Pariadhaven of Mauritius by technical superiority for the bronze medal.

Kiran had built up a 10-0 lead in the first period itself which promped the officials to award her the bout.

Canada's Erica Wiebe emerged champion in the category while Blessing Onyebuchi of Nigeria got the silver.

Kiran had lost to Blessing in the semi-finals. Kiran was no match for the Nigerian, conceding a 0-10 deficit in the first round itself to lose by technical superiority.

Kiran had started her campaign by defeating Danielle Sino Guemde of Cameroon by technical superiority.

She taken a 4-1 lead in the first round before scoring seven consecutive points in the second to wrap up the victory.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Over 200 journalists on Thursday took out a procession against the attack on television journalist Anuj Chaudhary and demanded the suspension of a Station House Office (SHO).

Staging a protest at the office of the Senior Superintendent of Police, the journalists demanded suspension of Kavi Nagar SHO Samarjit Singh for failing to provide security to the journalist.

SSP Vaibhav Krishna agreed to provide security to the victim's family, the complainant and a witness to the attack, Deepak Tomar, but refused to suspend the SHO.

The newsmen argued that the preventive measures taken by the SHO were insufficient and that the crime occurred despite two complaints submitted by the journalist who was shot at.

"We are very close to cracking the case," said Krishna.

Chaudhary, working with Sahara Samay Hindi television news channel, was shot at and seriously wounded by four to five criminals riding two-wheelers at his Ghaziabad residence on Sunday evening.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Justice J. Chelameswar, the second senior-most judge of the Supreme Court, on Thursday refused to hear a case filed by former Law Minister Shanti Bhushan questioning the authority of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) as master of the roster, saying "why should I, let this country decide its own course".

Soon after, advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for his petitioner father, mentioned the plea before a bench headed Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and it agreed to look into the issue.

Bhushan, mentioning the plea before Justice Chelameswar, requested the bench to take up the case seeking allocation of work to be done by a Collegium and argued that he had filed the plea last week but apex court registry was yet to list it.

Justice Chelameswar, refusing to interfere, said: "I would not like to deal with this matter... let this country decide its own course."

Justice Chelameswar said "someone is running a relentless tirade against me that I am up to grab something", adding that two months before (retirement), he doesn't want to hear that he was waiting to grab some office.

"I don't want another reversal of my order in 24 hours (referring to the earlier issue where he ordered setting up of bench that was reversed by the CJI's bench)," Justice Chelameswar added.

When Bhushan told the bench that the petition was filed last week and despite several follow ups, it has not been numbered yet, Justice Chelameswar said " (for) reasons too obvious in the history of the country I would not deal with this matter".

In an unprecedented move, on January 12, four senior Supreme Court judges, including Justice Chelameswar, had called a press conference to express their displeasure with the CJI Dipak Mishra and with the way he was assigning cases.

During the mentioning of the case, Bhushan further said that he has written a letter to the court's Secretary General asking that the PIL be placed before three seniormost judges after the CJI to obtain their instruction on its listing but nothing has been done.

"It's an extraordinary circumstance; I am mentioning an extraordinary petition regarding the master of the roster. This petition should be listed...," Bhushan maintained.

After repeated requests from Bhushan to hear the plea, Justice Chelameswar said: "Let it take its own course of action. It's not my problem anymore. Sorry, I am not taking it up."

Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, sitting on the bench with Justice Chelameswar also asked Bhushan not to urge him to hear the case as "its not fair" for Justice Chelameswar.

On Wednesday, CJI Misra's bench had dismissed another PIL by advocate Asok Pande seeking framing of rules for regulating the constitution of benches and allocation of cases.

The bench said it was the "prerogative" of the Chief Justice of India - a high constitutional functionary - to form the benches and allocate cases and that authority can't be regulated on the mere apprehension of it being exercised arbitrarily.

"... such an entrustment of functions is necessary for the efficient transaction of the administrative and judicial work of the court," bench has said, adding: "There cannot be a presumption of mistrust. The oath of office demands nothing less."

Last week, Shanti Bhushan had moved the apex court seeking direction that the allocation of cases by the Chief Justice of India should be done in consultation with senior judges who are part of top court's collegium.

He said that the authority of Chief Justice of India as a master of the roster is not an "absolute, arbitrary, singular power" which may be exercised in his "sole discretion" and the CJI "must" exercise his authority in consultation with other senior judges who are also part of collegium.

Underlying principle of the collegium is that the collective opinion of a collegium of senior judges is much safer than the opinion of the Chief Justice alone, the PIL said.

Bhushan has contended that the master of roster "cannot be unguided and unbridled discretionary power, exercised arbitrarily by the ... Chief Justice of India by hand-picking benches of select judges or by assigning cases to particular judges".

Any such power or its exercise, the PIL says "would result in a subversion of democracy and the rule of law as guaranteed under Article 14 of the Constitution".

Pointing to "extremely disturbing trend" of listing matters "subjectively and selectively" only before certain benches, the PIL says that trend reflects "serious erosion of independence of the judiciary" by resorting to the method of "favoured listings".

"As a result, justice appears to be skewed and in many cases justice may even stand denied," it said.

--IANS

gt/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Jammu Bar Association on Thursday reiterated its demand for a CBI probe into the Kathua rape and murder case, asserting that it did not support the accused but wanted a fair probe.

B.S. Slathia, president of the bar association, told the media that attempts were being made to project the lawyers as supporters of the accused against whom the state crime branch has produced a damning charge sheet in the court.

"Lawyers of Jammu are being maligned in order to divide the state on communal lines. All we have been saying is that the investigation of the case be transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation. Does anyone say that the CBI is communal," Slathia asked.

He said the Crime Branch that has been investigating the case has brought an officer from the Kashmir Valley to carry out the probe while the organisation had enough staff in the Jammu region.

"The officer in question has faced murder and rape allegations in the past. We have said the association of this officer with the investigation process has put a question mark on the probe.

"Justice should not only be done, but must also be seen as being done. It is unfortunate that communal motives are being attributed to our demand. The media should report events in an honest manner," Slathia said .

He said the bar association had never objected to settlements of Muslims from the Valley or the Chenab region in Jammu.

"We have objected to settlement of Rohingyas in Jammu because their presence here has security implications.

"If opposing those who are involved in posing security threats to the country is being communal, then be it," he added.

In another development state Industries Minister, Chander Prakash Ganga, has accused the media of being unfair in reporting the events.

"We want the culprits to be brought to justice. People were demanding that members of a particular community were being victimised. It was in that context that I spoke to the people there," the minister said.

He, however, admitted that the Crime Branch has fairly investigated the case and he is satisfied with it.

The minister had participated in the Hindu Ekta Manch meeting that demanded the transfer of the case to the CBI.

An eight-year-old girl was gang raped and murdered by several men, who had held her in captivity in a small village temple in Kathua district for a week in January.

The victim, who belonged to the nomadic Bakarwal Muslim community, had disappeared from near her home in the forests next to Rasana village, 90 km from Jammu, on January 10. A week later, her body was found in the same area.

The Jammu and Kashmir police charge sheet has said the main accused Sanji Ram, "the mastermind" of the crime, instigated his minor nephew and six others to execute the ghastly act to drive out the Bakarwal community from Hiranagar tehsil.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Congress President Rahul Gandhi led a midnight protest by the party workers at India Gate here against the "slumber" of Narendra Modi government over the rape incidents in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua and Uttar Pradesh's Unnao and to seek justice for the victims.

The candle-light protest on Thursday midnight was called at a short notice and saw people converging at the India Gate in sizeable numbers to express their support.

Congress leaders including Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ambika Soni, Ashok Gehlot, Randeep Singh Surjewala and Sushmita Dev walked from the party headquarters at 24 Akbar Road to the India Gate along with hundreds of party workers holding candles.

Rahul Gandhi joined the protest around midnight. His sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and her husband Robert Vadra were also present, along with their daughter.

Similar protests had been held at India Gate after the brutal gang-rape of 23-year-old paramedical student Nirbhaya in 2012. Nirbhaya's parents were also present at the mid-night protest on Thursday night.

Congress workers tried to come near Rahul Gandhi, giving hard time to the Special Protection Group (SPG) men protecting him. Gandhi sat atop his vehicle to briefly talk to the media.

He said there were repeated incidents of violence, rape and murder of women in the country.

"We want the government to take action. Today, women are feeling insecure to move out of their houses. Somewhere a child, a woman is raped, killed and we want that the government should resolve this. The women of the country should feel safe," he said.

Gandhi said it was a national issue and not a political issue.

"This is an issue concerning women," he said, adding that people from all parties as well as the common man was at the India Gate.

"I only want to say that the atrocities being committed against women, the government should something about it."

He said Modi's slogan of "Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao" was a correct slogan. "We are saying that Narendra Modi should begin the task of protecting women of the country," he said.

The Congress President had tweeted on late Thursday night about his intention to go on a candle march.

"Like millions of Indians, my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does.

"Join me in a silent, peaceful, candlelight vigil at India Gate at midnight tonight to protest this violence and demand justice," he said.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was apparently caught unawares about the protest, with Congress workers from Delhi and neighbouring areas rushing to the venue on the call of their party leader.

Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said they were protesting to awaken the Modi government from its "slumber".

Surjewala said the BJP-PDP government in Jammu and Kashmir failed to give justice to the minor girl raped in Kathua and the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh did not arrest a party legislator accused of rape of girl in Unnao.

The protest lasted nearly two hours. With the crowds making a rush towards Congress leaders, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra looked a bit miffed with their behaviour.

--IANS

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(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.)Dalit and civil society representatives on Thursday wrote to President Ram Nath Kovind and urged his intervention to ensure an end to suppression of Dalits and an ordinance to nullify a Supreme Court ruling diluting the SC/ST Act.

Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mewani, among the signitories to the letter, said that if the central government believed in the development of the Dalits, it should bring an ordinance before April 14, the birth anniversary of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.

The representative of Dalits and those associated with people's movements drew Kovind's attention to the Supreme Court order pertaining to registration of cases and arrests under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, which protects marginalised communities against discrimination and atrocities.

"The court ruling is the result of poor 'pairvi' (legal handling) and connivance of the government. It has become clear from the court observations during hearing on the review petition filed by the government," the letter read.

"The court has remarked that the government itself had expressed the need for such guidelines to check the misuse of the Act and why is there a need for review now."

The signitaries to the letter include former Bombay High Court Justice Kolse Patil, S.R. Darapuri, Mewani, Bhanwar Meghvanshi, Ratan Lal, Sukhwinder Nara, Dharmender Jadav, and Ashok Arora.

The letter mentioned the April 2 Bharat Bandh organised by Dalit organisations against the court's March 20 ruling.

They said that police and opponents had apparently tried to suppress Dalit processions and anti-social elements from outside triggered violence during the shutdown.

"The State seems to have waged a war against dalits, adivasis and other weaker sections of society. Dalits are being killed by listing them by their opponents," the letter said.

The President was urged to ensure protection of Scheduled Castes and Tribes from the adverse effects of the Supreme Court ruling and withdrawal of cases registered against Dalit leaders during the protest.

The leaders also demanded the releases the Dalit leaders arrested for violence during the bandh. They also demanded Rs 20 lakh each to families of Dalits killed during the shutdown.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire  The African Natural Resources Centre of the African Development Bank will host a high-level West Africa gas competence seminar in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, on April 17-18, 2018.

The seminar will highlight the transformative potential of natural gas for established and new gas producers in West Africa.

Participants will discuss strategies to unlock the natural gas potential for domestic and regional markets. They will gain a better understanding of current downstream developments, conducive policy frameworks and market dynamics.

The African Natural Resources Centre has produced a series of analytic reports and a case study to guide policy decisions to promote natural gas value chains and gas domestication in Africa. The seminar will examine some of the findings of this work. It will bring together policy-makers, industrialists, operators in mid- and downstream natural gas production, investment bankers and members of academia. They will share their experience and devise strategies to harness to the full potential of natural gas value chains.

The South Korean Government is financing the seminar through the Korea Africa Economic Cooperation programme.

Seminar participants will come from Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Mauritania, Nigeria and Senegal.Delhi Assembly Speaker Ram Niwas Goel on Thursday said a letter seeking details of communication over "reserved subjects" was not replied to by Lt. Governor Anil Baijal and asserted the latter is "drunk on power".

Goel said no reply was received in response to a March 27 letter from his office to the office of Lt. Governor.

"It is highly condemnable that he did not found it fit to reply to a constitutional functionary. He is drunk on power," Goel said at a press conference.

The letter from Delhi Assembly was sent to the office of Lt Governor seeking copies of communication over "reserved subjects" between the Central Government and Lt. Governor.

Last month, the Ministry of Law had advised the Lt. Governor's office to communicate to the Speaker that he should not admit questions related to reserved subjects such as public order, police, services and land.

The answers related to these subjects were denied to the Assembly by the concerned department in its budget session.

"LG is protecting the officials. Why cannot Delhi MLAs ask questions over Delhi Police and Delhi Development Authority (DDA) that concern the interests of the people who have voted for them," Goel said.

He said that legal opinion will be sought for a future course of action in this regard.

"We will also pressurise the officers to provide information on the questions asked by the MLAs. We will also take legal opinion on it."

The Speaker also said that the budget session of assembly was disturbed by the opposition members.

"They were given much more time than allotted to them but still they disturbed the House and many important subjects could not be taken. Also, the sitting of House was delayed due to lack of quorum as the ruling party MLAs were not present in required numbers," he said.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has 66 MLAs in the House.

The budget session of Delhi Assembly that lasted 16 days was the longest in past 23 years. Earlier, it had lasted 21 days in 1994 and 18 days in 1995.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)There were red faces in the BJP after two of its legislators were found snacking on sandwiches and chips as the party leaders and cadres led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi observed a day's fast across India on Thursday.

The development came three days after the Bharatiya Janata Party lampooned the Congress when some of its Delhi leaders were seen eating out at a restaurant prior to its fast on Monday.

Two BJP legislators -- Bhimrao Tapkir and Sanjay Bhegade alias Bala -- were filmed while 'breaking' their fast mid-way during an official meeting convened in the Pune Council Hall by Guardian Minister Girish Bapat.

A video clipping of the two chomping on sandwiches and chips went viral on the social media and was broadcast by television channels, even as embarrassed state BJP leaders kept mum.

In a statement, Maharashtra Congress President Ashok Chavan said that the "drama of fasting will not work anymore" as the people are no longer interested in government's false promises.

"In Pune, the BJP leaders were seen enjoying snacks in the middle of the fast... elaborate arrangements were made for serving snacks before launching the 'fast' and after completing it. This 'fast' is just a farce," Chavan said dismissively during a media briefing.

"If somebody eats three hours before a fast, BJP finds it objectionable, but it is okay for them if they eat during the fast. The reason behind today's fasting programme is bogus, the sentiments are bogus and the fast itself is bogus," said state Congress Spokesperson Sachin Sawant.

Incidentally, it is not clear how the video clip of the BJP legislators enjoying the snack during the fast came into the public domain as the party had issued strict instructions against any publicity stunts on social media networks.

The call for a day-long fast by the BJP leaders led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was given to protest the washout of the second half of parliament's budget session.

The BJP alleged that the Congress did not allow parliament to function, initially on account of the bank scams. Thereafter, the YSR Congress and TDP created hurdles on the issue of special status for Andhra Pradesh and moved no-confidence motions against the government.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Delhi BJP President Manoj Tiwari on Thursday said he will convert his day-long fast into an indefinite hunger strike against the Delhi government which according to him neglected the development work in his parliamentary constituency.

"I shall continue my indefinite hunger strike to protest against politically biased denial of development funds by Delhi government to my north-east parliamentary constituency," Tiwari said, who along with six other BJP MPs sat on a day-long fast against the washout of the second part of Parliament's budget session due to continuous disruptions.

Tiwari alleged that the Delhi government was delaying the funds for a link loop at Shastri Park flyover to ease heavy traffic congestion in the area.

"I shall not end my fast until I get assurance for my people on Shastri Park flyover, underpass, signal-free zone and clean water," he said.

Earlier in the day, Tiwari was also attended by a doctor after he complained of pain. He said that he had recently undergone a laser operation for stone, so there is some pain. "But my pain is not bigger than the pain of public."

Slamming the Congress and opposition parties, Tiwari said: "It is sad that even as politically rejected Congress and other opposition parties stalled the working of Parliament in the budget session."

"The government not only managed to complete important business transactions but Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set a precedent by deciding to forego salary of ruling NDA MPs for the 23 lost days of Parliament work.

"From now on this should become a rule that MPs will not get their salary when the House is stalled and the opposition parties need to take a lesson from this," the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader said.

Union Minister Harsh Vardhan, who represents the Chandani Chowk constituency, East Delhi MP Maheish Girri, New Delhi MP Meenakshi Lekhi, West Delhi MP Pravesh Verma, North West Delhi MP Udit Raj, South Delhi MP Ramesh Bidhuri and North East Delhi MP Manoj Tiwari participated in the day-long strike that concluded at 6 p.m.

Union Ministers Suresh Prabhu, Uma Bharti, Smriti Irani, Narender Singh Tomar, Vijay Goel, K.J. Alphons and Anupriya Patel and several senior party leaders visited the venues of these fasting MPs to enthuse the workers.

Modi and BJP President Amit Shah along with BJP MPs fasted across the country to protest against the washout of the second half of Parliament's Budget session.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Thursday said there would be no obstruction of justice in the rape and murder case of an eight-year-old minor in Kathua district.

"The law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions and statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track and justice will be delivered," Mehbooba tweeted.

Her tweet comes after the Jammu Bar Association staged protests against the handling of the case by the Jammu and Kashmir Police Crime Branch. It has also demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe.

Eight people, including the mastermind Sanji Ram, have been charged with abduction, raping and murdering the 'Bakerwal' (nomadic) minor in Kathua's Rasana village in January.

Investigations have revealed that the victim was held in a temple, drugged, repeatedly raped and finally murdered to scare the Bakerwal community out of the village.

Sanji Ram has also been charged with bribing local policemen, including a sub-inspector and a head constable, to destroy vital evidence.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived here on Thursday amid growing political turmoil over the Cauvery water issue and black flag protests by Opposition parties.

Modi, who arrived by a special aircraft from New Delhi, was received at the airport by Union Ministers Nirmala Sitharaman and Pon Radhakrishnan, Governor Banwarilal Purohit, Chief Minister E. Palaniswami, Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam and Chief Secretary Girija Vaidyanathan.

After a brief reception, he left for Mamallapuram, about 55 km from here, from where he would reach the temple town of Tiruvidanthai to formally inaugurate the Defence Expo-2018, which began here on Wednesday.

Later, he would unveil the diamond jubilee plaque at the Adyar Cancer Institute.

Earlier, a press conference was planned with the Prime Minister at the IIT-Madras, adjacent to the Cancer Institute, but it failed to materialise.

The police have made tight security arrangements in view of the visit.

Meanwhile, opposition parties, inclduing the DMK, various fringe outfits and Tamil organisations greeted the Prime Minister with black flag protests to condemn the Centre for its failure to set up the Cauvery Management Board (CMB) and the Cauvery Water Regulatory Committee (CWRC) as directed by the Supreme Court.

The six-week deadline set by the Apex Court ended on March 29 and the Centre, keeping the next month's Assembly elections in Karnataka in mind, filed a clarification plea in the Court at the last minute and sought three months time to implement its order, by which time the polling process in the neighbouring state would have been concluded.

DMK leader M.K. Stalin, along with his party cadres, protested in Sirkazhi, Nagapattinam district, by wearing black shirts.

The DMK has appealed to the people to hoist black flags atop their houses and stage demonstrations against the Prime Minister.

Activsits of fringe parties including the Tamizhaga Vaazhvurimai Katchi (TVK) led by T. Velmurugan, Tamil Nationalist Movement headed by P. Nedumaran also staged demonstration in front of the Alandur Metro station in Chennai.

MLAs Tamimum Ansari and Thaniarasi along with SDPI members were arrested in Tirisoolam near the airport.

Similarly, members of the newly-formed Tamilaga Kalai Illakiya Panpattu Maiyam by noted filmmakers Bharathiraaja, Ameeer, Gouthaman and Thangarbachan, were also arrested as they staged a black flag protest at the airport.

As the political atmosphere in the state remained tense and surcharged following unending protests on the Cauvery issue, the remaining six IPL matches of the Chennai Super Kings were shifted to Pune.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday rejected the allegations of southern states, including Tamil Nadu, that the Terms of Reference (ToR) of the 15th Finance Commission were biased against them and said it would benefit states that took population control measures.

"An issue that has been raised by certain vested interests over the last few days... Baseless allegations are being made about the ToR of the 15th Finance Commission being biased to the states of a particular region," he said after inaugurating a building of the Cancer Institute (WIA) here.

"Let me tell you our critics seem to have missed something. The Union government has suggested to the Finance Commission to consider incentivising states who have worked on population control. By this yardstick, states like Tamil Nadu, which has devoted a lot of efforts, energy and resources towards population control, would certainly benefit."

He said it was not the case earlier.

Southern states have been complaining about the ToR of the Finance Commission saying their interests would be harmed in the matters of resource allocation because of their better performance on population control and economic growth.

The issues was first raised by Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, which was followed by BJP's ally-turned-foe Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu.

On Tuesday, Kerala Finance Minister Thomas Issaac convened a meeting of southern Finance Ministers which was attended by representatives from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry, in which they called the ToR a "threat to federalism".

Modi said the Union government was committed to cooperative federalism.

"Our Mantra is 'Sabka Sath Sabka Vikas'. Let us all work together to build new India, which would make our freedom fighters proud," he said.

Earlier in his speech, he said the Union government had planned setting up 20 state cancer institutes and 50 tertiary care cancer centres in different parts of the country.

"Proposal can be approved for eligible institutional up to Rs 45 crore for tertiary care cancer centres and up to Rs120 crore for setting up of state cancer institutes. I am happy to note that the proposal of 15 states cancer institutes and 50 tertiary care centres have been approved so far," he said.

Modi also said 40 new All India Institute of Medical Sciences were being set up with focus on oncology and its various aspects.

Also, eight existing institutions were being upgraded with provision of oncology services under Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY), Modi added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah along with BJP MPs fasted on Thursday across the country to protest against the washout of the second half of Parliament's Budget session for which the BJP blamed on the Congress.

Modi observed the fast even as he continued with his official work, including inaugurating the 10th edition of Defence Expo at Thiruvidanthai near Chennai.

Shah undertook the hunger strike at Dharwad in election-bound Karnataka along with party's Chief Ministerial candidate B.S. Yeddyurappa and other MPs.

Shah hit out at the Congress for "disrupting" Parliament, saying it happened for the first in independent India's history that the ruling party (BJP) was ready to discuss every issue but the opposition was shying away from discussion.

Bharatiya Janata Party MPs observed fast in thier constituencies while Rajya Sabha MPs protested at various places.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who was present at the DefExpo, also observed a fast.

In Delhi, all seven BJP MPs -- Union Minister Harsh Vardhan, who represents Chandani Chowk constituency, East Delhi MP Maheish Girri, New Delhi MP Meenakshi Lekhi, West Delhi MP Pravesh Verma, North West Delhi MP Udit Raj, South Delhi MP Ramesh Bidhuri and North East Delhi MP Manoj Tiwari -- observed fast, which will end at 5 p.m.

Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu joined them.

Tiwari, also the Delhi BJP President, said he will continue his "indefinite hunger strike" to protest against the continuous neglect of developmental works in his constituency by the Arvind Kejriwal government in Delhi.

The Budget session started on January 29 and went into a break on February 9. The two houses of Parliament met for the second half of the session on March 5, which concluded on Friday.

While the first half of the session -- January 31 to February 9 -- recorded 134 per cent productivity in the Lok Sabha and 96 per cent in the Rajya Sabha, in the second-half, from March 5 to April 6, the lower house recorded just four per cent productivity and the upper house eight per cent.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah on Thursday led their party MPs across the country for a 'save democracy fast and protest' against the washout of the second part of Parliament's Budget Session, which they blamed on the Congress.

During the "Loktantra Bachao Upvaas and Dharna" that begun at 10 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m., the Prime Minister continued with his routine official work, including inaugurating the 10th edition of Defence Expo at Tiruvidanthai near Chennai. He, however, did not join any of the party programmes.

"They (opposition) killed democracy and we will observe the fast to bring their crime in front of world. I will also hold fast. But I will continue my work," a BJP statement quoted Modi as saying on Wednesday.

Shah undertook the party's programme in Dharwad in Karnataka while party's Lok Sabha MPs observed fast at their respective constituencies. He was joined by the party's state unit chief B.S. Yeddyurappa, MPs Rajeev Chandrasekhar and Pralhad Joshi and the party's state leader, Jagadish Shettar, among others.

Union Ministers Prakash Javadekar, Ananth Kumar, D.V. Sadananda Gowda and other BJP workers observed the protest fast in Bengaluru.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis along with party MPs, MLAs, MLCs and others sat on a day-long fast across the state.

Fadnavis, along with Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar, MP Poonam Mahajan, actor-turned-MP Paresh Rawal and legislator Parag Alvani launched the fast at the party office in Vile Parle.

Railway Minister Piyush Goyal started a hunger strike at the government hostel in adjoining Thane along with a large number of supporters and party activists.

Union Health Minister J. P. Nadda joined the fast in Modi's parliamentary constituency Varanasi. Other BJP Rajya Sabha MPs joined the protest in various states.

Addressing a gathering in Dharwad, Shah lambasted the Congress, saying a party which lacks "internal democracy" cannot protect democracy in the country.

Accusing the Congress and its President Rahul Gandhi of promoting "divisive politics" in the name of caste and religion, he said the people of Karnataka will see through their tactics and give them a befitting reply in the upcoming polls.

He said the government was ready to discuss all issues, including the Punjab National Bank fraud and special status demand for Andhra Pradesh, but it was the Congress that used the smaller parties to disrupt the proceedings.

"We were even ready to discuss the bank fraud case. Not a single BJP leader or minister is involved. But if a list of corrupt Congress leaders was to be drawn, the entire party could be found in the roll call," he said.

"Post-independence if there was any government that carried out the maximum developmental work in Andhra Pradesh, it was the Narendra Modi-led NDA government.

"Modi ji, Madam Speaker (Sumitra Mahajan) and (Rajya Sabha) Chairman (M. Venkaiah Naidu) tried their best to persuade the opposition to allow the Budget session to be fruitful, but all went in vein.

"The Congress cannot save democracy in the country as it has no internal democracy," Shah said.

Later, in a blog, Shah repeated the charge against the Congress, saying the country was not going to forgive it for disrupting parliamentary proceedings.

The Congress attacked Modi and Shah for observing a "fake fast" and termed it as "PM's fast of atonement".

It put out the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders' schedule for the day mentioning breakfast and lunch timings on Twitter.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said: "Mr. Prime Minister, best wishes for your fast."

He attached Modi's travel schedule in Tamil Nadu, that showed that the Prime Minister would be having his breakfast on board a IAF BBJ at 6.40 a.m.

The opposition party said that after his departure from Chennai at 2.25 p.m, he will have lunch on board.

The Congress spokesperson challenged the Prime Minister to prove him otherwise. "Now, tell us that this is a lie."

"Now, 'jumla' fast gets over in an hour and feast after that. Good wishes for your fake fast," he added.

He also attached Shah's public programmes in Karnataka, mentioning Shah will have lunch with farmers at 1.30 p.m in Rona Taluk village in Gadag.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Congress leader Kapil Sibal on Thursday took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his fast and said he should rather speak up over violence against women in states where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in power.

"Prime Minister is silent over the incidents of rape in Unnao (in Uttar Pradesh) and Kathua (in Jammu and Kashmir)," Sibal told a press conference here.

Slamming Modi over his day-long fast against the washout of the second part of Parliament's budget session due to disruptions, which the BJP blames on the Congress, Sibal said: "Why don't you fast against incidents of rape? And tell the people that you are feeling bad about the incidents of rape and so you are fasting."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Hero Enterprise promoted by Sunil Munjal and the Burman family on Thursday offered to invest Rs 1,250 crore directly in Fortis Healthcare, to bail out the cash-strapped company.

The two parties in a joint offer letter to the Board of Fortis Healthcare proposed to infuse the funds.

According to Munjal, the fund infusion "will go beyond addressing the urgent liquidity needs of the company and help the operations stabilise with immediate effect".

"Our offer is in the best interests of Fortis Healthcare," Munjal said in the letter.

"In fact, all those connected with the company's ecosystem, its shareholders, patients, their attendants, the community and public at large, in addition to the lenders, suppliers, doctors, medical and non-medical staff will benefit from it. We are investing in the company and our aim is to create value for all stakeholders."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)North Korea held the annual session of the Supreme People's Assembly (SPA) without its leader Kim Jong-un, state media reported on Thursday.

The sixth session of the 13th Supreme People's Assembly took place on Wednesday, ahead of the inter-Korean leader summit on April 27, which generated public expectation that Kim might share his comments on the matter during the meeting, Efe news reported.

The SPA, the country's highest legislative organ, is in charge of endorsing decisions made by the leader of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK). Although Kim's attendance is not mandatory, he has at times given speeches at the event.

The North Korean leader has attended six of the nine SPA sessions since he came to power in 2011.

The state media, however, did not put Kim on the list of the meeting's attendees, among which were Kim Yong-nam, President of the SPA Presidium, and Choe Ryong-hae, the number-two leader of Pyongyang.

The parliamentary session discussed the five-year strategy for the economic development designed by Kim in 2016, to which KCNA commented that "the DPRK made great progress", in implementing the plan.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Anguished over the acute shortage of doctors and lack of proper healthcare facilities in rural areas, Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday called for public-private partnership (PPP) to provide affordable treatment to the needy and poor in the countryside.

"We cannot have two Indias, with cities having state-of-the art facilities and rural areas lagging behind. We need a collaborative public-private partnership to remedy the situation on priority," said Naidu in his address at the 20th convocation of the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences (RGUHS) here.

Regretting that a country of 130-crore people had one doctor for every 1,000 population, Naidu said the rural areas were much less covered by affordable treatment.

"The urban-rural divide in healthcare needs urgent attention and action," said Naidu.

The healthcare sector calls for participation of all stakeholders and use of innovation to bridge intent and execution, he added.

"No single entity in the sector can achieve the health outcomes and deliver results. However, the private sector health facilities must not only be accessible to the needy and poor, but must also be affordable," Naidu said.

Healthcare delivery in India was poised to undergo a change at all its stages -- prevention, diagnosis and treatment, said the Vice President.

The Central government will be soon rolling out the Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission (NHPM), touted to be the world's largest public funded health insurance scheme, expected to benefit over 50 crore poor people in the country.

Noting that the number of people in the country living in poverty had reduced by half over the last 20 years, Naidu pointed that a rise in communicable diseases and lifestyle-related diseases still persisted and needed to be addressed.

With nearly 140 million Indians going to enter higher education institutions in the country by 2030, there was also a need to improve the quality of higher education, Naidu said.

"One in every four graduates in the world will most likely be the product of Indian education system. If we can improve the quality of higher education, we can leverage the demographic dividend for the benefit of the society."

Set up in 1996 by the Karnataka government, the RGUHS is among the largest health sciences universities in the country.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin talked over the phone on Wednesday amid rift between the two countries over Syria.

"The Prime Minister reiterated that Israel will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria," the Israeli Prime Minister's Office said in a statement, without elaborating.

The Kremlin said in a separate statement that Putin urged Netanyahu to avoid actions that might destabilise the situation in Syria and stressed the importance of not violating Syria's sovereignty, reports Xinhua.

Russia accuses Israel of carrying out an airstrike on the T-4 Air Base in Syria, which claimed the lives of 14 people on Monday.

Tensions were mounting in the region after US President Donald Trump threatened military action in Syria as a response to a suspected chemical weapons attack in the war-torn country.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Online streaming giant Netflix has pulled out of the 71st Cannes Film Festival due to a new rule that the fest won't entertain in its competition section any movie that didn't have a theatrical run.

Netflix officials, however, hope the Cannes movie jamboree reconsiders its decision, reports variety.com.

Netflix's chief content officer Ted Sarandos said: "We want our films to be on fair ground with every other filmmaker. There's a risk in us going in this way and having our films and filmmakers treated disrespectfully at the festival. They have set the tone. I don't think it would be good for us to be there."

Last year, Netflix brought "Okja" and "The Meyerowitz Stories", which led to protests from French cinema owners.

French law states that movies cannot be available on home platforms for 36 months after being shown in cinemas. This would directly conflict with Netflix's day-on-date release for their films.

This year, Thierry Fremaux, the festival's artistic director, imposed a ban on movies competing for the main prizes without a theatrical release.

Sarandos called the decision "completely contrary to the spirit of any film festival in the world".

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 8 to 19.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)is at the heart of new digital economy and the digital learning solutions' market in India is currently at $2 billion -- the second largest market for digital after the US, global networking giant Cisco said here on Thursday.

Realising the need to skill students in disruptive technologies like Big Data analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cyber security, Cisco on Thursday announced a "Blueprint for Digital Education" here.

The blueprint will allow colleges and universities to enable students learn anywhere with "Cisco Connected Classroom" solutions which use the Cisco "Digital Network Architecture" (Cisco DNA) and collaboration solutions such as "WebEx" online meetings and Cisco "Spark" all-in-one communications solution.

Currently the Indian industry at $97.8 billion and is set to grow to about $140 billion by 2020.

"Education is at the heart of new digital economy and the digital learning solutions' market in India is currently at $2 billion and outside the US, India is the largest digital education industry," Sudhir Nayar, Managing Director, Commercial Sales, Cisco India and SAARC, told reporters here.

He was speaking at the Cisco "Digital Education Summit" at the Indian School of Business (ISB) here.

"Cisco Connected Campus" provides extensive network analytics to help administrators make data-driven decisions while managing facilities, lighting, parking and transportation.

"We are committed to create environment that enables solutions and tools for digital learning and digital campus in the country," Nayar said.

"Today, we are for the first time launching a complete digital blueprint for education institutions that can help transform the Indian education sector," he noted.

The blueprint aims to help colleges and universities create a completely integrated digital environment that meets the high expectations of the industry.

With approximately 30 per cent of India's current population in the 0-15 age group, the education sector in India is poised to witness significant growth.

However, the education system faces challenges such as capacity, scale and quality.

"At Cisco, we create the infrastructure that can help the education system to transform," Nayar said.

The blueprint is based on Cisco's highly secure core network and unified voice, video and wireless communications, protected by state-of-the-art security solutions and lay the framework for connected campuses, empowered educators, informed administrators and students.

"In terms of affordability the new model would cost Rs 200 per student per month, which includes automated attendance, browsing facilities for the students, among others," Nayar noted.

Currently, 500 institutes and colleges (60 per cent urban and 30 per cent in rural areas) across the country are using Cisco digital education solutions for their digital journey.

It also includes leading institutions such as Manipal University, Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Jamia Hamdard and Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies.

"With smart workspaces that automatically track student attendance and progress, schools and universities can operate efficiently in a rapidly changing environment," Cisco said in a statement.

Digital learning classrooms can support new online learning experiences, worldwide collaboration and rich online media consumption with virtual classrooms.

Cisco "Connected Research" solutions are also helping researchers, faculty and students conduct high-performance computing (HPC) in a secure environment and quickly scale computing resources to fuel innovation.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Thursday a ban on all new offshore oil exploration, describing her decision as a transition towards a zero-carbon economy.

"Transitions have to start somewhere and unless we make decisions today that will essentially take effect in 30 or more years time, we run the risk of acting too late and causing abrupt shocks to communities and our country," Ardern said during a press conference here.

The ban is applied with immediate effect to only new offshore oil exploration permits, and will not affect existing permits and onshore drilling, reports Efe news.

The transition "must start somewhere", said Ardern who vowed to push for environmental measures when she won the elections last September, adding that the government was "taking an important step to address climate change and create a clean, green and sustainable future for New Zealand".

Arden also assured that her policy will not lead to job losses in the country's oil industry, which currently employs at least 11,000 workers and generates about $1.8 billion per year.

"We're striking the right balance for New Zealand... We're protecting existing industry and protecting future generations from climate change," she said.

Opposition leader Simon Bridges said that the measure "doesn't make any environmental sense", and called it "a wrecking ball" for the country's regional economy.

Greenpeace, a non-governmental environmental organisation, hailed Ardern's move in a statement, saying this was a "historic moment" for the country and "a huge win for our climate and people power".

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) on Thursday said it had signed its first international project agreement for upgradation of a highway in Myanmar.

The agreement signed on Wednesday aims to provide seamless vehicular movement for enhancing trade, business, health, education and tourism between India, Myanmar and Thailand. The project would be completed in three years.

Under the agreement, the NHAI would upgrade the Yagyi-Kalewa section of highway (milepost 40/0 to milepost 115/5) in Myanmar to two lanes with earthen shoulder.

"The project has been funded by External Affairs Ministry and would be executed on EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) mode at a cost of Rs 1,177 crore," NHAI said in a statement.

"The project will have three new major bridges and two new minor bridges. Four existing major bridges and nine existing minor bridges will be repaired and strengthened and six existing minor bridges will be reconstructed," 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.)India has requested Hong Kong to arrest fugitive jeweller Nirav Modi and is awaiting for a response from the authorities there, a senior official said on Thursday.

"We have requested the authorities in Hong Kong to surrender Nirav Modi," External Affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said at a media briefing.

"There is an agreement between India and Hong Kong about surrender of fugitive offenders," he said.. "We are still awaiting a response."

Kumar also informed that, according to the Indian mission there, the Department of Justice is examining India's request for provisional order for Modi's arrest.

Diamond jeweller Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi have been accused of defrauding the Punjab National Bank (PNB) of Rs 126 billion, with Rs 13 billion being added to the fraud kitty on February 26.

Parliament was earlier informed that Modi is present in Hong Kong.With the Indian Air Force beginning the process of buying 110 fighter jets, in a deal that could be worth more than $15 billion, Lockheed Martin has expressed its readiness to shift its F-16 fighter aircraft manufacturing unit to India -- and the US government, according to the manufacturer, will allow it to do that.

That apart, the American global aerospace and defence major is also prepared to transfer the technology of its third generation anti-armour Javelin guided missile system to India for its future manufacture.

At least two Lockheed officials at the DefExpo 18 told IANS that if the defence procurement deals were signed with the company that is all geared to bid for the world's biggest fighter jet order, it would walk the extra mile and transfer technology to local partners for sophisticated parts of defence products.

"We are offering a deal that is completely compatible with 'Make in India' -- offering a stand-up production line in India," said Randall L. Howard, who heads International Business Development for aircraft at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics.

He said more than 4,000 F-16s have been sold to countries across the world. "We are offering to shift the manufacturing base and produce all of our F-16s in India; not just for India, but for the whole world -- across South East Asia, across South America, across Middle East."

Asked if the Trump administration would allow it to do so, Howard said the company had "full support of the US government".

He said the single-engine supersonic multirole fighter aircraft that has seen action in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was currently being built around the world, and setting up facilities in India would not impact jobs in the US.

"So whenever we have a situation, we will be able to build the entire aircraft in India. But we will continue to have parts that come from the US. That will continue to create jobs in the US. This absolutely supports American jobs," he said, adding Lockheed was also looking at the possibility of setting up the entire ecosystem, including one with a runway, to produce the fighters in flyaway condition.

Another Lockheed official, Haley Donoho, who is business development head of the shoulder-fired anti-armour Javelin missile, said a possible joint venture for the system "is in good standing with the Indian government".

"Should the Indian government be interested in the third generation missile system, we are ready to sell Javelin under a foreign military sale contract which is the most transparent acquisition contract you can find. You can trace at every step where the money is going."

He said Lockheed has got the US government's nod to transfer its "high-degree" technology to its partners in India for the development of the 22 kg, portable missile system that comes with a combination of "fire and forget" and "man in the loop" capability, with a range of up to four km.

The missile, which automatically guides itself to the target after launch, has been used by US forces in the cold mountains of Afghanistan and in the hot deserts of Iraq. With its arched top-attack profile, Javelin climbs above its target for improved visibility and then strikes where the armour is weakest, he said.

"The US government was ready to transfer high-degree technology under US-India Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI) when the previous deal was done. The US government has indicated to us, and to the Indian Defence Ministry, that we will continue on the discussion with similar levels of transfer of technology.

"I can speak for the US government, and they are interested in the same type of deal for transfer of high-degree technology, specifically for India. We have done this for no other country."

Asked about the future of India's fledgling indigenous defence-building capabilities, the two officials said it was only a matter of time before the country emerges as one of the major military manufacturers in the world.

"I think it is coming. We will see whether it will take off quickly or slowly. But I think it is coming. This is India. Lots of engineers, lots of researchers, people with lots of capabilities. It is only a matter of time. We see it is coming," Donoho said.

(Sarwar Kashani can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in)

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Human rights group Amnesty International on Thursday termed the attempts by some lawyers and a Hindu group to obstruct the investigation and prosecution of the gang-rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir, as "disgraceful".

"It is disgraceful that some lawyers and members of the BJP are trying to introduce religious prejudice into the investigation of this horrific crime, and block its investigation," Zahoor Wani, Senior Campaigner, Amnesty International India, said.

Wani said that the fact that the Chief Justice of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court had to order police protection for the lawyer of the victim's parents showed "how deep the bigotry around this case runs".

The Bar Association of Kathua has opposed the arrest of suspects in the case.

Eight people, including the mastermind Sanji Ram, have been charged with abduction, rape and murder of the "Bakerwal" (nomadic) minor in Kathua's Rasana village in January.

Investigations have revealed that the victim was held in a temple, drugged, repeatedly raped and finally murdered to scare the Bakerwal community out of the village.

Sanji Ram has also been charged with bribing local policemen, including a Sub-Inspector and a Head Constable, to destroy vital evidence.

On Wednesday, lawyers in Kathua staged a protest and attempted to prevent the police from filing a charge-sheet in the case.

The Jammu Bar Association on Thursday reiterated its demand for a CBI probe into the case, asserting that it did not support the accused but wanted a fair probe.

Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Thursday assured that the law "will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions and statements of a group of people".

She said that proper procedures were being followed and investigations were "on the fast track and justice will be delivered".

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Addis Ababa  Executive Secretary, Vera Songwe, recently met with Ethiopian Airlines CEO, Tewolde GebreMariam, and praised the airline for championing regional integration through its flights to over 50 destinations on the continent.

"Ethiopian Airlines flies to over 58 destinations in Africa connecting the continent, moving people and goods, and thus making the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) possible," said Ms. Songwe after a tour of the Ethiopian Aviation facilities in Addis Ababa on 29 March.

The meeting followed the historic signing in March of the AfCFTA by over 40 African leaders, and the launch - in January - of the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM), an African Union initiative to create a single unified air transport market in Africa.

The liberalisation of civil aviation in Africa is expected to steer economic integration on the continent.

Ms. Songwe described the Ethiopian Airlines Aviation facilities as "an outstanding center of excellence," noting that sustainable improvements in the sector require complex changes in a range of policy dimensions in areas such as infrastructure, trade facilitation and services.

Against this backdrop, she underscored the importance of recognizing and showcasing the strides made by Ethiopian Airlines in air logistics, adding that African countries need to do more to improve the efficiency of trade logistics services.

"Understanding the logistics index is very important to better measure the capacity of African countries to efficiently move goods and connect manufacturers and consumers with regional and international markets," said the Executive Secretary.

Mr. GebreMariam concurred with Ms. Songwe, stating that trade logistics required the focus and commitment of all African countries and that it is important to liberalize the market in Africa. Both parties agreed to collaborate in finalizing a study on this topic.

Other areas of partnership discussed during the visit include promoting Addis Ababa as a tourist destination; creating a "conference-friendly environment" in Addis Ababa, which will attract more international and regional conferences and events to Ethiopia, leading to increased use of the U.N. Conference Centre; and how best to work together in servicing the UN family in Addis Ababa better.The Congress on Thursday said the option of moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra is still open and added that it will be a very sad day if the opposition has to take that step.

"We are very very concerned about what is happening in court (in the Supreme Court). The issues, which were raised by four SC judges, have not been addressed yet. We believe the option (impeachment) which is available to us is still open," senior party leader and noted lawyer Kapil Sibal told reporters.

He was asked whether the Congress would move an impeachment motion against the CJI.

Asked why the motion was not moved during the just-ended budget session of Parliament, he said: "Nothing has come in the way. This is not some instant coffee. we are dealing with an institution.

"..And I want to make it very clear that it will be a very sad day if the opposition has to take that step. It will be with a very heavy heart but that does not mean that the opposition has foreclosed that option," Sibal said.

"We are as concerned about the independence of the judiciary as anybody else, but we want to protect the institution. We mean the people of India must protect this institution from the kind of gross interferences by the government and be protected also from within.

"So, we have to wait. This is a serious matter and if we think about it, calmly, coolly, look at all the possible consequences and then come to a conclusion," he added.

Asked about reservations shown by DMK about impeachment, Sibal said: "You require 50 signatures of the Rajya Sabha and 100 signatures in the Lok Sabha. That is all you require. The law does not say that every opposition party must be represented."

During the session, the Congress had initiated a drive collecting more than 50 signatures of the Rajya Sabha members in a bid to table the motion, but there were reservations from parties like the Trinamool Congress. The Congress kept the move on hold, saying it wanted to get as much support as possible from other parties.

Sibal also said judiciary, which had made great contributions in the past, stood at its nadir now.

"The fact that one sitting judge, who is one of the senior most and part of the collegium, has to write to all the judges and say you form a bench of seven distinguished senior-most judges to ensure that our recommendations are implemented, especially in the context of Chief Justice K.M. Joseph and Indu Malhotra," said Sibal.

"...And the fact that the judiciary is not taking action on it is a matter of grave concern. If there is an attempt to block that recommendation, the CJI and the seniormost judges must not only resist it but ensure that their recommendation is implemented," he added.

Sibal also urged the CJI and the entire court to stand together and ensure that their appointments were implemented by using the processes of law.

--IANS

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(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have a packed schedule when he visits Sweden and Britain from April 16 to 21 during which he will attend the first India-Nordic Summit and this year's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), officials said on Thursday.

After reaching Stockholm on the evening of April 16, Modi will first hold a bilateral summit with his Swedish counterpart the next day following which a number of agreements are expected to be signed.

Addressing the media here, Subrata Bhattacharjee, Joint Secretary (Central Europe) in the Ministry of External Affairs, said Modi will also have an audience with Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf.

This apart, Modi and Lofven will attend a round table of Swedish CEOs.

"Around $1.4 billion have been invested in India by over 170 Swedish companies since 2000," Bhattacharjee said.

With Sweden home to a 20,000-strong Indian diaspora, Modi will also interact with members of the Indian community.

Also on April 17, India and Sweden will co-host the first ever India-Nordic Summit in Stockholm which will be attended by the Prime Ministers of the other four Nordic countries -- Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway.

Modi will also hold bilateral meetings with the Prime Ministers of the other four Nordic countries.

"Nordic countries are a good source of clean technologies," Bhattacharjee said.

The Indian leader will leave Stockholm for London on April 17 evening.

On April 18, Modi will hold a bilateral summit with British Prime Minister Theresa May after which several agreements are expected to be signed.

"We are looking at 10 to 12 deliverables and a joint statement," said K. Nagaraj Naidu, Joint Secretary (Europe West) in the Ministry of External Affairs.

Stating that the theme of the visit to Britain was "Living bridge and tech partnership", Naidu said that an India-UK Tech Alliance was likely to be announced.

Modi will also have a meeting with Prince Charles.

A visit to the Francis Crick Institute was on the schedule where the Prime Minister is expected to meet Indian scientists among others.

With economic ties being an important pillar of the India-Britain bilateral relationship, Modi and May will attend a CEOs Forum.

"We are the fourth largest investor and the second largest job creator in the UK," Naidu said.

After ending the bilateral leg of his visit, Modi will attend this year's CHOGM on April 19-20.

While April 19 is the day of the main session of the 53-nation event, the Prime Minister will participate in a leaders' retreat on April 20, which will be an informal affair, according to Rudendra Tandon, Joint Secretary (United Nations Political) in the External Affairs Ministry.

"Over the years, the Commonwealth has occupied a niche position in the development space in the world," Tandon said.

The Prime Minister will return to India on April 21.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Neelum-Jhelum project, one of Pakistan's largest hydropower stations, will see its first generator officially start supplying electricity to the national grid on Friday, the Chinese contractor said.

The project, roughly 200 km northeast of Islamabad, has four generators with a total capacity of 969 MW. The second generator will start trial operation this month, followed by the third and fourth units in the latter half of the year, according to China Gezhouba Group Co. Ltd. (CGGC), Xinhua reported.

Designed to generate 5.15 billion kilowatt-hours of clean energy annually, the project aims to ease power shortages in part of Pakistan and is estimated to generate annual revenues of PKR 45 billion ($442 million) annually, said the Chinese construction giant.

The Neelum-Jhelum project is an engineering marvel as 90 per cent of the project lies underground in high mountainous areas. The project involves constructing a dam on the Neelum River, a waterway system comprising 68-km-long tunnels and an underground powerhouse on the Jhelum River.

Construction of the project began in January 2008 after a Chinese consortium that includes CGGC and China Machinery Engineering Corp. was awarded a 21-billion-yuan contract in 2007. CGGC said the project will provide about 8,000 jobs for locals.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan said on Thursday that it has shared information about hideouts of the militants in the border regions, who routinely launch attacks on check posts, with neighbouring Afghanistan.

"We have shared actionable intelligence with the Afghan side about the hideouts of militants along the Pakistan-Afghan border," Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Faisal said at the weekly news briefing, and urged Afghanistan to take actions on other terrorist-infested areas to fully address the issue of the terrorist sanctuaries.

The spokesman said Pakistani forces have eliminated the Tehrek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and Lashkar-e-Islam and other terrorist organisations from its own soil through the major operation codenamed "Zarb-e-Azb" that was conducted in North Waziristan tribal region in 2014.

"They (terrorists) have relocated themselves in Afghanistan. The Islamic State too has made sanctuaries on the Afghan side of the Pakistan-Afghan border," the Pakistani spokesman said.

He said Pakistan wants Afghanistan to focus on taking effective counter-terrorism actions including plugging of large gaps existing along the Afghan side of Pakistan-Afghanistan border to prevent the targeting of Pakistani civilians and security forces by terrorists from Afghan soil.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the Ambedkar National Memorial at 26, Alipur Road here on Friday, a government release said on Thursday.

This is the place where Dalit icon and Chairman of the committee that wrote India's Constitution B.R. Ambedkar passed away on December 6, 1956.

Modi had laid the foundation stone of the memorial on March 21, 2016.

The memorial has been given the shape of a book.

"The museum at the memorial intends to create an immersive experience into the life of Ambedkar and his contribution to India through extensive use of static media, dynamic media, audio-visual content and multimedia technologies," the release said.

A meditation hall has also been created. A Bodhi Tree, a musical fountain and a facade lighting are the other attractions of the memorial.

Ambedkar's birth anniversary will be observed on April 14 (Saturday).

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the first health and wellness centre under the flagship Ayushman Bharat programme in Chhattisgarh's Bijapur district on Saturday, an official said here.

While the government plans to open 1.5 lakh such centres by 2022, NITI Aayog member V.K. Paul said, of these, 15,000 centres -- equipped to treat a host of communicable and non-communicable diseases -- would be opened by the end of this year.

"The Ayushman Bharat has two pillars. The first is to create a network of health and wellness centres to deliver comprehensive primary healthcare to the community, and the second is to provide insurance cover to 40 per cent of India's population for secondary and tertiary care," he told reporters on Thursday.

Paul said while the first pillar would be formally kicked off on Saturday with the opening of the first comprehensive primary healthcare centre, the government was also working towards expeditious implementation of the second pillar or the National Health Protection Scheme.

NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said Bijapur has made "spectacular progress" in health, nutrition, education and creation of livelihood opportunities.

"This is why the Prime Minister has chosen to visit Bijapur on the birth anniversary of Baba (B.R.) Ambedkar as he had promised earlier."

Modi, while launching the aspirational districts programme in January, promised to visit the district which showed the most noteworthy performance.

As per the incremental performance ranking of aspirational districts, Bahraich (Uttar Pradesh) came on top followed by Bijapur and Mewat (Rajasthan).

Kant said Bijapur was chosen for the Prime Minister's visit over Bahraich because it had a "better action plan for its transformation".

The assembly elections in Chhattisgarh are due later this year.

During his visit, the Prime Minister will interact with people and officials of the district administration who at the epicentre of Left Wing Extremism have performed well.

The aspirational district programme, which covers about 15 per cent of India's population, hinges on expeditiously transforming 115 districts that were identified from 28 states.

There will be a dynamic ranking of performance of districts on objective and measurable indicators.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The CBI on Thursday said it is examining two officials of overseas branches of an Indian bank in connection with its ongoing probe into the Rs 13,500 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case involving diamond jeweller Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi of the Gitanjali Group.

Two Deputy General Manager (DGM)-rank officials of the State Bank of India (SBI)'s Frankfurt and Mauritius branches were asked to join the investigation at its Mumbai's Bandra office.

According to Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials, the bank had issued buyer's credit to exporters of Nirav Modi and Choksi firms on the basis of Letters of Undertakings (LoUs).

On Wednesday, the CBI had examined two officials of Canara Bank's Bahrain Branch and one from Bank of India's Antwerp (Belgium) Branch over the role of these branches in extending credit facilities on the basis of LoUs issued by the PNB to the firms related to Modi and Choksi.

The CBI on Sunday also questioned an officer who dealt with forex transactions in Allahabad Bank's Hong Kong Branch.

The agency's move comes days after a special CBI court here on Sunday issued non-bailable warrants against Modi and Choksi as both diamond traders, who left India in January, refused to join the investigation into the scam.

Modi, a regular on the lists of rich and famous Indians since 2013, along with his group companies -- Diamond R US, Stellar Diamond and Solar Exports, uncle and business partner Choksi and others -- has been named in the mega scam, admitted by the PNB in February that led to a massive upheaval in the country's banking system.

Earlier, a lookout notice was issued by the CBI against Modi and Choksi but they and their associates had fled the country. While Modi and his brother Nishal left India on January 1, his wife Ami, a US citizen, and Choksi left on January 6, all before the CBI received a complaint from the PNB on January 29.

The PNB has claimed in different complaints to the CBI that several LoUs -- issued by one bank to other banks, based on which foreign branches offer credit to buyers -- were fraudulently issued by its officials in connivance with Modi and other accused in the case causing huge losses to the bank.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bollywood actress and Unicef goodwill ambassador Priyanka Chopra met Prime Minister Narendra Modi for an "insightful" and "positive" conversation on making healthcare accessible for women, children and adolescents in the country.

Priyanka on Wednesday tweeted a photograph of herself with Modi, Health Minister J.P. Nadda and former President of Chile Michelle Bachelet.

She sought Modi's support for being a patron for the Partners' Forum, to be held in the capital in December.

"The aim is very important - the improvement and transformation of access to quality healthcare at at every life stage for women, children and adolescents, in an effort to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030," she wrote on Instagram, referring to the Partners' Forum, which will be attended by over 1,200 delegates from more than 92 countries.

Of her discussion with Modi, Priyanka wrote: "It was an insightful, positive conversation which was very heartening and inspiring because of the personal commitment of everyone at the meeting. We covered a lot of ground from the various efforts being taken by individual countries and partners to building a collective environment that could help propel the change we seek for a better world."

She is looking forward to what is being set in motion.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Nobel Foundation on Wednesday warned that the reputation of the Nobel Prize may be at stake after a series of rows that have rocked the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in literature.

In a press release issued on Wednesday, the Nobel Foundation stated that its board members had met to discuss the latest developments, which includes three Academy members announcing on Friday that they would step down -- a move that has shocked the literary and cultural world, reports Xinhua.

"It is unavoidable that a difficult crisis within a prize-awarding institution also damages the Nobel Prize's reputation. We can establish that confidence in the Swedish Academy has been severely broken. The way in which what is now happening will come to harm the Nobel Prize cannot yet be fully assessed," the statement said.

The three Academy members chose to step down after a majority of members voted not to exclude a member whose husband has been accused of sexual harassment and of exerting influence over the Academy as well as of allegedly leaking the names of a number of literature laureates in the past.

On Wednesday, the remaining Academy members held a crisis meeting to decide how to move forward after days of bitter wars of words in the Swedish media, with many literary figures weighing in on the infected debate.

In its statement, the Nobel Foundation mentioned a number of suggested measures that it deems are needed in order both to restore trust in the Swedish Academy, to protect the reputation of the Nobel Prize, and to ensure that the work to select this year's Nobel literature laureate is carried out in a credible way.

Any breaches of secrecy and conflicts of interest must be dealt with in accordance with internal regulations, the statement said, and any suspected crimes should be handled by legal recourse.The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a plea by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) for blocking the release of film "Nanak Shah Fakir". The film based on first Sikh Guru, Guru Nanak, is set for release on Friday. The court will take up the matter on Monday.

The matter was once mentioned again when court assembled in the post-lunch sitting. Senior counsel P.S. Patwalia told the court that hearing the SGPC plea on Monday would be of no consequence as the film was going to be released on Friday.

However, the court refused to advance the date of hearing to Friday (April 13).

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud told petitioner Satinder Singh Gulati that the Central Board of Film Certification had cleared the film for release and it can't be objected to without taking recourse to lawful means.

It also said that outsiders cannot control freedom of expression of an artiste. Gulati told the court that by a 2003 resolution, the SGPC has said that no one can act as any of the 10 Sikh Gurus, their family members and the 'Panj Pyaras' (five beloved of the Guru).

He mentioned the plea for an urgent hearing. The apex court was also told that till date -- in the last 550 years -- no one has portrayed the role of the 10 Sikh Gurus.

Gulati urged the court to hear the matter on Friday, but Chief Justice Misra said: "We will take it up on Monday."

The Supreme Court had directed the states on April 10 to ensure that there was no opposition to the release of "Nanak Shah Fakir", saying "wherever the film is released, the law and order is maintained and no one shall be allowed to create any kind of disturbance".

--IANS

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(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.)BJP President Amit Shah on Thursday lambasted the Congress for the washout of the second half of the Budget Session of Parliament, saying a party which lacks "internal democracy" cannot protect democracy in the country.

Accusing the Congress and its President Rahul Gandhi of promoting "divisive politics" in the name of caste and religion, he said the people of Karnataka will see through their tactics and give them a befitting reply in the upcoming polls.

The Bharatiya Janata Party chief, who undertook the party's day-long hunger strike here along with party's Chief Ministerial candidate B.S. Yeddyurappa and other MPs, said what happened in Parliament in March and April was "unprecedented".

"Parliament could not function due to the stand taken by Rahul Gandhi. Since independence it has always been the ruling party that avoids discussion but it was for the first time that the party in power was ready for debate while the opposition lacked courage," Shah told the gathering.

He said the government was ready to discuss all issues including the multi-thousand crore Punjab National Bank fraud and special status demand for Andhra Pradesh but it was the Congress that used the smaller parties to disrupt the proceedings.

"We were even ready to discuss the bank fraud case. Not a single BJP leader or minister is involved in it. But if a list of corrupt Congress leaders was to be drawn, the entire party could be found in the roll call," he said.

"Post-independence if there was any government that carried out the maximum developmental work in Andhra Pradesh, it was the Narendra Modi-led NDA government.

"Modiji, Madam Speaker (Sumitra Mahajan) and Chairman (M. Venkaiah Naidu) tried their best to persuade the opposition to allow the Budget session to be fruitful, but all went in vein.

"The Congress does not believe in democracy. Rahul Baba, don't preach us on democracy. You have forgotten that your grandmother (Indira Gandhi) imposed Emergency and muzzled people's voices.

"It is you who put democracy in shackles at your home. Nehruji, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and now Rahul Gandhi... I don't know who will be the next Gandhi...

"Congress cannot save democracy in the country as it has no internal democracy," Shah said.

The BJP chief also accused the Congress of promoting divisive in their the lust for power.

"It has been the Congress nature to promote divisive in the name of caste and religion. The people of this country understand all these tactics.

"After winning the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, we won elections in Maharastra, Jharkhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam, Manipur, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya. Now it's Karnataka's turn."

Citing a conversation Shah had with a reporter at the Lucknow airport, he said he was of the view that Rahul Gandhi has been working hard in Karnataka as it was the only state, besides Puducherry, that is left under its rule.

"But you know what the reporter told me... he said Karnataka is ATM of corruption for Congress. He is working hard to save the only ATM left in the country," he said.

Later, in a blog Shah repeated the charge against Congress, saying the country was not going to forgive it for disrupting parliamentary proceedings.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)While the forest department is struggling to confirm the presence of a leopard in the national capital, officials on Thursday said such tasks are becoming increasing difficult given a massive staff crunch, with almost negligible frontline staff.

According to the officials, Delhi's Forest and Wildlife Department has only two wildlife inspectors while nine are required, one wildlife guard against 11 posts and all six posts of forest ranger lying vacant.

While a staff of only two labourers has been posted along with two inspectors, at least 36 labourers per inspectors are needed, around 200 additional labours and over 50 forest guards are also required in the department.

The department also does not have veterinarians and flying squads, or a monitoring unit to check the felling of trees, poaching or smuggling of wildlife contraband and encroachment on forest land, officials said.

The National Green Tribunal has been urging the Delhi government to recruit the officials since 2015.

Officials said in case of an emergency or upon spotting of a carnivore, they mostly rely on the support of non-government organisations like Wildlife SOS and the police.

"One leopard was spotted by some locals on Monday at Bawana (in North Delhi), and we are struggling to confirm its presence. Delhi has a porous border and a leopard can enter from several corridors. If even two or three such spotting occur in different zones, we are helpless," a forest official told IANS on condition of anonymity.

Delhi has a total forest area of 1,483 sqkm of which 192.41 sqkm or 13 per cent is under forest cover, according to India State of Forest Report-2017. Of the 192.41 sqkm, about 6.72 sqkm is very dense forest, 56.24 sqkm is medium dense forest and 129.45 sq km is open forests.

Due to consistent felling and encroachment, Delhi has lost about 0.22 sq km of its very dense forest and around one per cent of medium dense forest.

"In 2015, the department did advertise three vacancies for wildlife inspectors, but the recruitment never happened," said a forest official.

Delhi also has a wildlife that includes civets, jackals, monitor lizards, porcupines, blue bulls, 13 species of snakes of which two -- the common cobra and common krait -- are venomous. It also has about 200 species of birds.

However, marred by the ground staff crunch, active monitoring and conservation is currently on the back foot.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will visit China, where she will attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Ministerial Meeting, and then Mongolia later this month, a senior official said on Thursday.

"First she will go to China for SCO Ministerial Meeting and from there she will be travelling to Mongolia for Foreign Minister-level talks," External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said in his weekly media briefing here.

Kumar said that Sushma Swaraj will be in China on April 22-23 and then in Mongolia on April 24-25 April.

The SCO is a Eurasian intergovernmental organisation, the creation of which was announced in 2001 in Shanghai by Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It was preceded by the Shanghai Five mechanism.

India, along with Pakistan, were granted full member status at the SCO summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, in June last year which was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

According to media reports, Sushma Swaraj is likely to have a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the margins of the SCO meeting.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sweden has charged a 49-year-old Tibetan man living in the country for spying on fellow exiles for the Chinese government, the media reported on Thursday.

Swedish state prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said the man, who was working for the Voice of Tibet daily, is suspected of supplying the Chinese government with information about the families, housing situations and travel plans of "certain people of importance to the Chinese regime", the Guardian reported.

According to Ljungqvist, the man had been in touch with Chinese officials in Poland and Finland.

He had been paid 50,000 krona ($5,980) on one occasion. Ljungqvist said the man had been deeply embedded in the Tibetan community.

The prosecutor did not give the suspect's name.

The arrest comes about two months after Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai was taken from a train in China in the presence of Swedish consular officials, reports the Guardian.

Three weeks later a video surfaced in which Gui expressed his guilt over unspecified offences, an admission that human rights activists said was likely a forced confession.

Sweden is home to about 140 Tibetan exiles.

--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 has said a decision on action in Syria will be made "fairly soon".

He told reporters on Thursday that he and his team were looking "very, very seriously" at the situation, following an alleged chemical attack on the Syrian town of Douma, BBC reported.

The White House said Trump would talk to British and French leaders later on Thursday. Western powers are thought to be preparing for strikes.

Russia, Syria's main military ally, strongly opposes such action.

Russia's envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said he "cannot exclude" the possibility of a war between Russia and the US.

"The immediate priority is to avert the danger of war," he told reporters.

Also on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said he had "proof" that the Syrian government had attacked Douma with chemical weapons.

In the UK, cabinet ministers agreed "on the need to take action" in Syria to "deter the further use of chemical weapons", the office of Prime Minister Theresa May said.

The UN Security Council is to hold an emergency meeting later to discuss the crisis.

On Sunday, the day after the attack, the US President said Russian President Vladimir Putin bore responsibility for the "atrocity" in rebel-held Douma, because of his support for the Syrian government.

Trump, who has cancelled a planned trip abroad, has been canvassing support for strikes from the leaders of France and the UK.

On Wednesday, he said the missiles were "coming", but on Thursday he tweeted that he had "never said when". It "could be very soon or not so soon at all", he said.

He later told reporters at the White House: "We're having a meeting today on Syria... We have to make some further decisions. So they'll be made fairly soon."

Also on Thursday, US Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis told a congressional panel: "I believe there was a chemical attack and we are looking for the actual evidence."

Activists and medics say dozens of people died when government aircraft dropped bombs filled with toxic chemicals on Douma on Saturday.

President Bashar al-Assad's government denies being behind any chemical attack.

The international Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is set to send monitors to Douma to gather evidence.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bouthaina Shabaan, the political and media adviser to President Bashar al-Assad, said on Wednesday that her country is not fearing the US threats of striking Syria.

In an interview with pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV on Wednesday, Shabaan said the US threats of striking Syria aim to practice more pressure to make more gains, Xinhua reported.

She stressed that consultations are ongoing among the allies of Syria and they will not leave things to go Washington's way.

Her remarks come as the US is banging the drums of war on Syria over allegations of toxic gas use by the Syrian army against the rebels in the capital Damascus' Eastern Ghouta countryside.

Last Saturday, the rebels in Douma district of Eastern Ghouta said the Syrian forces used chlorine gas in an attack on Douma, leaving many killed.

The Syrian government has denied the allegations and said the rebels were fabricating the incident to give a pretext to the US and its Western allies to strike Syria.

Shabaan described the US threats as part of a psychological war launched by the West to show strength after their failure in Syria.

She said the Syrian army's victory in Eastern Ghouta constituted a turning point in the course of the Syrian war.

Shabaan said the results of the Syrian war have come against the Western approach in terms of the emergence of the Russian, Syrian and Hezbollah alliance, calling it the "alliance of the future."

The "axis of resistance," referring to the Syrian allies of Iran and Hezbollah, has its choices in dealing with the US threats, Shabaan said, adding that the rule of clashes has changed in favour of the Syrian side.

"The victory of Syria will change the map of the region and the world," she said, adding that Israel is feverishly trying to prolong the Syrian war.

She said that Israel is the main ignitor of the war in Syria, adding the Syrian and Russian sides have made all preparations after the Israeli attack on the T-4 Air Base a couple of days ago.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Six students of Telangana Minorities Residential Educational Institutions Society (TMREIS) have been selected to attend the 2018 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) International Space Development Conference to be held in the US.

The chair of Executive Committee of National Space Society have selected the students of government-run TMREIS schools for submission of "TMREIS Fusion L5" project.

This project was selected in association with Planetary Society of India and got an invitation from the National Space Society to attend the 2018 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) to be held from May 24 to May 27 at Los Angeles, California, according to a statement from the office of Telangana Chief Minister on Thursday.

Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao congratulated the team comprising Syed Ibrahim Ali, Mahaveen Mohammedi, Safa Maheen, Feroz Hussanin, Muskaan Tabassum and Feroz Ahmed, all students of Class 7, 8 and 9.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Amidst statewide protests, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami on Thursday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to immediately set up the Cauvery Management Board.

He presented a memorandum to Modi, who was on a whirlwind visit to inaugurate the DefExpo and a function at the Cancer Institute. Widespread protests in Chennai and several parts of the state greeted the Prime Minister after the Centre failed to set up the CMB despite being told to do so by the Supreme Court.

In the memorandum, Palaniswami recalled the February 16 Supreme Court verdict that said that a scheme be formulated by the Central government within six weeks to "implement the notified final order of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal as modified by its judgment".

On April 9, the apex court clearly stated that the final order of the CWDT had "merged with the judgment of the Supreme Court", he said.

It said that, therefore, constitution of the Cauvery Management Board had become an "integral part of the Supreme Court's judgment".

Delta areas are dependent on Cauvery water for irrigation and they were fervently hoping that the implementation machinery would be constituted by the Centre to enable them to commence the agricultural operations in the next irrigation season which starts on June 1, the memorandum said.

Modi was urged to immediately constitute the Cauvery Management Board and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee "vested with all powers to effectively implement the orders of the Tribunal and the Supreme Court".

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Allahabad High Court on Thursday slammed the Uttar Pradesh government for the delay in arrest of accused BJP MLA of Unnao Kuldeep Singh Sengar despite an FIR against him in a gang rape case, and said if the situation persists, it will be "forced to observe that law and order has collapsed in the state".

While hearing the case on gang rape charges against ruling party MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and the subsequent death of the victim's father, Chief Justice D.B. Bhonsle reserved his decision on the matter.

The judgement will be pronounced after 2.00 p.m on Friday by a bench of the Chief Justice and Justice Suneet Kumar.

The Chief Justice also said that the victim had been running from pillar to post for justice for the last six months but no action was taken, and it was only after the death of her father that the Unnao police woke up.

The Chief Justice also asked Advocate General Raghvendra Singh as to who he was representing -- the Uttar Pradesh government or the accused legislator.

Later, after the hearing resumed post lunch, Singh said there was not enough evidence against the MLA with regard to the gang rape case and assured the court that once concrete evidence was collected, action would be taken as per law.

The high court expressed its displeasure at the submission made by the Advocate General and asked whether the police in all such cases gathered evidence first and then acted.

Amicus curiae G.S. Chaturvedi also presented his side after which the court reserved the judgement till Friday afternoon.

Before this, the court also asked Advocate General Singh whether or not Sengar had been arrested or would he be arrested, and gave him time till 2.00 p.m to revert.

Singh, however, told the court that the state government had recommended the case to the CBI and that now all action would be taken by the premier investigative agency.

The court was also told that the first complaint by the victim's mother was lodged on June 20, 2017, after which three persons -- Avdhesh Tiwari, Shivam and Brajesh Yadav -- were charge-sheeted by the police. They were later released on bail.

The Advocate General also informed the court that on August 17, 2017, the victim petitioned the Chief Minister for the first time. The victim had claimed in her petition that she was raped on June 4, 2017.

He also told the court that a new FIR had been lodged in the matter after the preliminary report was filed by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) formed on the instructions of the Chief Minister. BJP legislator Senger has also been made an accused in this FIR.

--IANS

md/nir

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday assured a fair probe into the alleged gang rape of a girl by a BJP legislator and the custodial death of her father, saying it was not trying to protect anyone.

However, due to a pending Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe, the accused Kuldeep Singh Sengar, the Bharatiya Janata Party legislator from Unnao, has not been arrested, it added.

Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar and Director General of Police (DGP) O.P. Singh said at a joint press conference that a free and fair probe has been initiated but action will be taken only after hearing both the sides.

"Nobody is defending Kuldeep Singh Sengar. What we mean is that we have to hear both sides," DGP Singh said.

Kumar informed that the case has been recommended to the CBI for further probe.

An FIR will also be lodged against Sengar for conspiring to beat up the victim's father, who subsequently died in police custody on Monday, an official informed.

Based on areport submitted on Wednesday night to the state government by a Special Investigation Team (SIT), the Circle Officer (CO) of Safipur Kunwar Bahadur Singh has been suspended for not entertaining the complaint by the gang rape victim.

Three doctors of the Unnao prison have also been suspended for dereliction of duty.

With the Allahabad High Court (HC) taking suo motto cognizance of the incident, the SIT is reportedly set to submit its preliminary report before the court later on Thursday.

The family of the victim, home department officials informed, have been given adequate security also.

Police has suspended six of its personnel, including station house officer of Makhi and five constables, and arrested Senger's brother Atul Singh and four of his aides -- Baua, Vineet, Shailu and Sonu -- for beating the girl's father to death.

The girl tried to set herself on fire outside the Chief Minister's residence on Sunday, claiming inaction in the gang rape case. Later on Sunday, her father was picked up by police and allegedly roughed up by Atul Singh and his aides after which he died.

The incident triggered a political storm and public outrage in the state.

--IANS

md/ksk/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said his "bold action" in meeting the country's critical military requirements were contrary to the Congress-led UPA government's "laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives" that damaged India's defence.

Inaugurating the DefExpo 2018 on East Coast Road near Chennai, he blasted the UPA over stalled defence projects and commended his own government for finalising the procurement of bulletproof jackets for soldiers and setting in a new process to procure 110 fighter planes for the Indian Air Force.

"There was a time when the critical issue of defence preparedness was hampered by policy paralysis. We have seen the damage such laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives can cause to the nation.

"Not now. Not anymore. Never again," Modi said in a 30-minute speech at the defence trade fair that projects India as one of the major defence manufacturing hubs in the world.

"You would have seen how the issue of providing bulletproof jackets to Indian soldiers was kept hanging for years. You would have also seen that we have brought the process to a successful conclusion with a contract that will provide a boost to defence manufacturing in India," the Prime Minister told his audience of international delegates, foreign industry captains and domestic manufacturers.

He was referring to a major defence contract for the procurement of 1.86 lakh bulletproof jackets signed earlier this week after the successful conduct of field evaluation trials.

The Rs 639-crore project has gone to SMPP Pvt Ltd - a Delhi-based company that has a Research and Development centre in the Okhla Industrial Area.

The contract was signed under the "Make in India" initiative nine years after the Indian Army first made a request to acquire body armour for its soldiers.

Modi also referred to the Indian Air Force's long-awaited request for information (RFI) issued last week to global vendors for the procurement of 110 single-engine and twin engine fighters under the Defence Procurement Procedure of 2016 to facilitate indigenous military hardware manufacturing.

"You would also recall the long-drawn process of procurement of fighter aircraft that never reached any conclusion (during the previous government).

"We have not only taken bold action to meet our immediate critical requirements, but have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircraft."

US defence majors Boeing and Lockheed Martin, Swedish aircraft-maker Saab, France's Dassault Aviation, the Eurofighter consortium and Russian jet builder United Aircraft Corporation are expected to bid for the fighter project that could be worth more than $15 billion.

Modi also launched a new scheme "Innovation for Defence Excellence" (IDEX) to link young innovators to defence agencies as part of the government's efforts to boost and modernise India's fledgling military manufacturing sector.

Under the scheme, the government would set up defence innovation hubs throughout the country to provide necessary incubation and infrastructure support to the start-ups in defence sector.

The Prime Minister said he was conscious that defence manufacturing needed government involvement at many stages.

"You need the government to grant a license to manufacture arms and ammunition. Since the government is almost the only buyer, you need the government to grant an order. You need the government even to grant permission to export."

He said to ease the process, his government took many steps and "made a humble beginning on defence manufacturing licenses, offsets, exports clearances, Foreign Direct Investment and on reforming India's defence procurement.

"In all these areas, our regulations, processes and procedures have been made more industry-friendly, more transparent, more predictable and more outcome-oriented.

"The defence procurement procedure has been revised with many specific provisions for stimulating growth of domestic defence industry. We have also de-notified some items earlier made exclusively by Ordnance Factories, so that private sector, especially MSMEs can enter this space."

He recounted that in May 2014, the total number of defence export permission granted stood at 118, for a total value of $577 million.

But, he said, "In less than four years, we have issued 794 more export permissions, for a total value of over $1.3 billion".

He said the government was committed to establishing two defence industrial corridors - one in Tamil Nadu and the other in Uttar Pradesh - which would utilise defence manufacturing ecosystems in the regions and further build upon it.

"The corridors will become engines of economic development and growth of defence industrial base."

(Sarwar Kashani can be contacted at sarwar.k@ians.in)

--IANS

sar/vsc/in/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A youth was arrested on Thursday in connection with an attack on Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha during the Bharat Bandh in Bihar's Vaishali district on April 10, police said.

"A youth has been arrested following an FIR lodged in connection with an attack on Minister Kushwaha by protestors against reservation policies during the Bharat Bandh in Vaishali," a district police official said.

The official said the arrested youth was being interrogated to get more information about other people involved in the attack.

"Police are in the process of identifying more accused with the help of a video footage. Others who were involved in the attack will be arrested soon," police said.

The incident happened during the April 10 Bharat Bandh called by various groups to protest against caste-based reservation policy.

The protestors manhandled and abused OBC leader Kushwaha after forcibly stopping his vehicle near Hajipur in Vaishali while he was on his way to Motihari district to take part in a programme to be addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Kushwaha subsequently could not take part in the Prime Minister's event -- National Convention of Swachhagrahis -- in Motihari.

Kushwaha, Union Minister of State for Human Resource and Development and President of Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) which is part of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) at the Centre, blamed "miscreants who believe in feudalism" for the attack.

Kushwaha later said that he was attacked during the Bharat Bandh for supporting the backwards and Dalits.

"I will continue to fight for backwards and Dalits and will always raise my voice on their behalf," he said.

Soon after the attack on Tuesday, Kushwaha said: "I was going to Motihari to take part in the Prime Minister's programme. Some people with feudal emblematic and those opposed to social equality blocked the road in Loma village of Hajipur. When I tried to persuade them, they manhandled me and used derogatory words against Dalits and backward community," he said in a series of tweets.

Kushwaha had joined other Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) allies in asking the government to file a review plea in the Supreme Court against its order allegedly diluting a law on atrocities against Dalits and tribals.

In a letter to Modi, he said the order would make it difficult for people from these communities to get justice and added that it had caused a lot of anger and discontent among them.

--IANS

ik/qd/dg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A showdown is in the offing between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and several Dalit organisations, as well as opposition parties, on the occasion of the birth anniversary of BR Ambedkar on Saturday.

The BJP on one side and Dalit organisations, as well as opposition parties, on the other, are set to hold competing events to mark the birth anniversary of the architect of the Constitution and Dalit icon Ambedkar. If the BJP has asked its workers and leaders to visit nearly 21,000 villages and spend the night in Dalit homes, Dalit leaders on Thursday said Dalit organisations will ...Around 1,700 Sikh pilgrims from India today arrived in Pakistan to celebrate Baisakhi festival at Gurdwara Panja Sahib in Rawalpindi district.

The Sikhs, who arrived at Wagah railway station by special trains, were greeted by Evacuee Trust Property Board (ETPB) Secretary Tariq Khan, Pakistan Gurdwara Parbandhik Committee president Sardar Tara Singh and other officials.

"Some 1,700 India Sikhs arrived here by special trains to attend festivities and Baisakhi Mela at Gurdwara Panja Sahib in Hasan Abdal in Rawalpindi (some 250 km from Lahore), said Amir Hashmi, a spokesman of ETPB that looks after the holy places of minorities in the country.

He said the main event will be held on April 14 in which a large number of local Sikh and Hindus will also participate.

During their 10-day stay, the Indian pilgrims will also visit their other holy places including Gurudwara Janamesthan Nankana Sahib and Dera Sahib in Lahore.

They will leave for India on April 21.

A visiting Sikh leader Sardar Gurmeet Singh said the yatrees always receive love from the people of Pakistan.

He said there should be peace and more people-to-people contact between the two countries. He also urged both governments for provision of hassle-free visa.

ETPB Secretary Tariq Khan said fool-proof security arrangements have been made for the Sikh pilgrims.

"Rangers and elite force police personnel are deployed for the Sikh pilgrims' security, he said, adding that all other arrangements including accommodation, medical services, trained doctors, currency exchange and free food have been made.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Five more African athletes may have vanished from the Commonwealth Games, organisers said today, after eight competitors from Cameroon were suspected of fleeing a day earlier.

Gold Coast organisers confirmed reports that athletes from Rwanda and Uganda were thought to have gone missing, while they were also looking to verify the whereabouts of two squash players from Sierra Leone.

"We're obviously looking at it very carefully," Commonwealth Games Federation chief executive David Grevemberg told reporters.

"We have a service to people who have legitimate visas to be in this country," he added.

"Until it becomes a true issue and somebody has outstayed their visa, or have formally applied for asylum, we just need to continue to monitor the situations.

"The focus now is to support teams in trying to track down the athletes who are missing." More than 100 athletes overstayed their visas at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Athlete visas for the Commonwealth Games expire on May 15, Grevemberg said.

Eight athletes from conflict-hit Cameroon -- one third of the central African country's 24-strong team -- were said to be missing from the Commonwealth Games on Wednesday, sparking an Australian Border Force manhunt.

As the search continues for Cameroon's five boxers and three weightlifters, Grevemberg insisted the welfare of the athletes came first.

"We obviously have been in close contact with Cameroon officials," he said.

"We share their concern regarding obviously the safety, welfare, whereabouts of these athletes." Cameroon team manager Victor Agbor Nso told local media he had reported the matter to police yesterday.

Australia's Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton warned that athletes would be forcibly removed from the country if they attempted to overstay their visas.

"They aren't going to game the system," he told local radio. "Australian Border Force officers will find these people (and) they'll be held in immigration detention until they can be deported.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)At least 16 people died in a bomb attack today during funerals in a northern village for Iraqi fighters killed by the Islamic State group, the mayor said.

Salaheddin Shaalan told AFP that a bomb targeted a funeral procession in Asdira, near the town of Sharqat, for fighters killed the previous day.

Most of the 14 people wounded in the blast were in "critical condition", he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Nepal police today arrested two persons and recovered from them the banned Indian currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 denomination amounting to Rs 49,31,500.

A police team deployed from the Metropolitan Police Range, Kathmandu, nabbed Sunil Dev Vaishya of Morang and Chet Bahadur Nepali of Nuwakot districts from Lazimpat in Kathmandu, according to the Nepal Police.

The police said that they confiscated 5,451 old currency notes of Rs 500 denomination and 2,206 old currency notes of Rs 1,000 denomination.

According to Bishwo Raj Pokharel, chief of Metropolitan Police Range, Kathmandu, the two men cheated people and exchanged the money saying that the ban on these notes will be lifted after some time.

Pokharel said they collected the money in a big quantity from the border areas and brought to Kathmandu.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A court here today sentenced two Pakistani nationals to ten years of imprisonment for indulging in terror activities.

Special judge P M Tripathi also imposed a penalty of Rs 59,000 each on the convicts--Abdul Wahid Rind alias Murtaza and Fahim alias Sadab Khan, hailing from Karachi.

According to public prosecutor M K Singh, the two were charged for criminal conspiracy, attempting to wage war against the country, collecting fire arms and committing fraud.

Apart from it, they were also charged under the Arms Act and the Foreigners Act.

The Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) had arrested the duo on March 26, 2014 from Gorakhpur. The team had recovered two AK-47 rifles, 70 cartridges, two China-made pistols and 45 cartridges from their possession.

The ATS had claimed that the duo had planned to attack the police force.

The Pakistani nationals were produced before the special court on March 27, 2014.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Three persons, including a woman, have been arrested for their alleged involvement in leaking the CBSE Class 10 mathematics paper in connivance with a teacher arrested earlier from Himachal Pradesh, Delhi Police said today.

Last week, Rakesh Kumar, Amit Sharma and Ashok Kumar, all employees of DAV Centenary Public School in Una town, were arrested by the crime branch. The three men were arrested in connection with the economics paper leak case.

Today, the police said two men and a woman have been arrested in connection with the leak of the mathematics paper.

The woman, from Ferozepur in Punjab, was allegedly sent a copy of the leaked paper by Rakesh Kumar, the police said.

More details about the three arrests were awaited.

The police said Rakesh Kumar, who had been teaching at the DAV school as a PGT economics teacher for eight years, was also found involved with the leaking of the mathematics paper before the scheduled date of the examination on March 28.

During questioning, he confessed about his involvement in leaking the papers, the police said.

The economics paper was leaked on March 23, three days before the examination date in Una town, and was shared on social networking application WhatsApp by at least 40 groups.

Rakesh Kumar was the centre superintendent of Jawahar Navodaya Public School in Una, where the CBSE exams were being held.

Amit Sharma and Ashok Kumar worked at the DAV school as a clerk and a peon.

The economics paper leak was exposed after an envelope containing four images of a hand-written copy of the question paper was delivered to the CBSE headquarters in Delhi on the evening of March 26, the day of the exam.

On March 30, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced it would re-conduct the Class 12 economics exam throughout the country on April 25.

The police has registered two cases in connection with the matter. The first case relating to the leak of the economics paper was filed on March 27, while the other on the mathematics paper leak was registered on March 28.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Four men were arrested in connection with burglaries in computer shops in southeast Delhi's Nehru Place, the police said today.

On April 9, a man informed police that computer parts were burgled from his shop in Nehru Place. The next morning, a police patrol found Ramesh Kumar Mishra (37) roaming suspiciously in the area, they said.

He was inquired about the reason behind his presence in the area and subsequently he confessed to his involvement in the burglary. On further interrogation, he led the police to his accomplices Shiv Kumar (37), Rashid (25) and Neeraj Tyagi (45), an official said.

Mishra and Kumar revealed that they had been working in Nehru Place for almost 18 years and used to sell, and purchase software and CDs. In order to earn quick money, they started stealing laptops and computer parts, and accessories, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southeast) Chinmoy Biswal said.

Rashid and Tyagi used to buy the stolen articles from the duo, he said, adding with their arrest, police have solved three cases of burglaries.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Four more police personnel were suspended today in connection with the alleged custodial death of 26-year old man near Kochi, over which opposition parties have been attacking the LDF government.

The action came on a day when Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said the government will take stringent action in custodial deaths and thoseresponsible will not be spared.

With this, the number of police personnel suspended in connection with the death has risen to seven. Earlier, three police personnel of the armed police camp at Kalamassery in Kochi were suspended on April 10, a day after S R Sreejith died at a hospital.

The decision to suspend the four was taken based on a preliminary report by a special investigation team set up to probe the allegations that the youth from Varappuzha died due to police torture, a senior police official said.

Those suspended are North Paravoor Circle Inspector Chrispin Sam, Sub-Inspector Deepak, Grade Assistant Sub-Inspector Sudheer and civic police officer Santhosh Baby, all attached to Varappuzha police station.

Police in Thiruvananthapuram said a direction had been given to instal CCTV cameras in all 470 police stations in the station.

A report from Kochi, quoting police, said a department-level probe had also been launched against the suspended policemen.

Earlier today, the SIT chief IGP S Sreejit visited the house of the deceased and took statements of his wife, parents and others and submitted his preliminary report to the DGP.

In his first reaction to the incident, Vijayan speaking in Kasaragod said: "In custodial deaths, the government will ensure strict action."



The accused, whoever they may be, will not be allowed to escape, Vijayan said adding the LDF government would ensure that they face action.

Sreejit had died in a hospital with his family alleging that the youth was kicked several times on the stomach and thrashed by the police officials who took him into custody in connection with a case relating to suicide of a 52-year-old CPI(M) sympathiser.

"Those taken into custody should not die. The government's stand is those responsible for such deaths will not be spared. In Sreejith's case a proper investigation is now going on', Vijayan, who holds the home portfolio, said.

The Opposition Congress sought a court monitored probe into the incident while BJP has demanded that Vijayan give up the home portfolio.

Leader of the Opposition in the state assembly Ramesh Chennithala alleged that lockups in the state had become 'killing fields'.

BJP President Kummanam Rajasekharan demanded a CBI probe into the custodial death of Sreejit.

The party would launch an agitation demanding a compensation of Rs.25 lakhs to the family of Sreejit and also a job to his wife, he said.

As the first phase of the stir, BJP General Secretary A N Radhakrishnan would observe a 24-hour fast in front of the Range IG Office at Kochi on April 23, he added.

BJP had earlier observed a hartal in Varappuzha Panchayat, protesting the death of Sreejith, who it claimed was its worker.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 92-old-farmer was allegedly killed by unidentified persons at his farm in the district, the police said today.

The deceased, identified as Mahadeo Jadhav, was sleeping along with other family members in his house at a farm in Mohane village when some persons allegedly barged in and forcible took him away on Wednesday late night, police PRO Sukhada Narkar said.

Yesterday morning, the farmer's body, bearing several wounds on head and face, was found at some distance from his house, she said.

The body was sent for postmortem and a case was registered against unidentified persons under IPC section 302 (murder) at the Khadakpada police station of Kalyan division, Narkar said.

A search was underway to nab the killers, she said.

The police suspect that the killing could be an attempt by some miscreants to grab the farmer's land.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In the backdrop of China's continued efforts to block its entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), India today said it has taken up with Beijing all issues concerning it during the recent Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Dialogue between the two sides.

"Both at the working level and at different interactions, we have, the issues which are of concern to us, taken up with the Chinese side," Raveesh Kumar, Spokesperson, Ministry of External Affairs, said.

He was asked about the fifth round of Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Dialogue between India and China held in Beijing early this week.

The Dialogue is a key platform to discuss international security and disarmament issues. China has been blocking India's entry into the elite Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) in the last two years on the grounds that it is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) even though a majority of its 48 members supported New Delhi's case.

Pakistan, China's all-weather ally, too had applied for NSG membership in 2016.

Barring the NSG, India has gained entry in the remaining three important export control regimes--- Missile Technology Control Regime, Wassenaar Agreement and the Australia Group.

During the talks, India and China exchanged views on various topics of mutual interest, including developments related to disarmament and non-proliferation at multilateral forums, nuclear issues, role of science and technology in the context of international security and disarmament as well as outer space, the Indian Embassy in Beijing had said in a statement after the Dialogue.

"Both sides underlined the importance of the bilateral dialogue as an important mechanism between the two countries for consultations on important issues," it said, but made no reference to India's NSG membership issue.

The Indian delegation at the talks was led by Pankaj Sharma, Joint Secretary (Disarmament and International Security Affairs) in the MEA, while the Chinese side was led by Wang Qun, Director General of Department of Arms Control at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An Anganwadi worker was rescued by the police after she was allegedly assaulted by villagers and locked in a room of the Anganwadi Centre in Balasore district.

The police swung into action after the Child Development Project Officer (CDPO) of Bahanaga block informed them about the incident yesterday.

"After getting the information, police personnel immediately rushed to the spot and rescued the woman," said K C Palei, Inspector In-Charge of Khantapada police station.

The woman has lodged a complaint with the police that some people barged into the Atasapur Anganwadi Centre while she was on duty, manhandled her and locked her in a room.

The woman alleged that she was injured in the incident and her mobile phone, neckless and Rs 5,000 were were snatched away by the culprits, police said.

The IIC said investigation was in progress and necessary action would be taken.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A conference of mayors of cities from the Asia-Pacific region here today resolved to free soil, air and water from contamination.

They were participating in the four-day '8th Regional 3R Forum in Asia and the Pacific' which started here on April 9.

The conference was organised by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Japan's Ministry for and United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD).

The theme of the current conference was "Achieving Clean Water, Clean Land and Clean Air through 3R and Resource Efficiency- A 21st Century Vision for Asia-Pacific Communities", organisers said.

Speaking on the occasion, Deputy Minister of Japan's Environmental Global Affairs Department, Yasuo Takahashi, said that the success of the 3R (reduce, reuse and recyclable) formula in achieving cleanliness of soil, air and water depended on mutual cooperation.

He added that local civic bodies and people had a big role to play to make it a success.

Madhya Pradesh's Urban Administration Minister Maya Singh said, "It is our duty to work with full responsibility to hand over the land, rich with natural resources, to the next generation. Effective use of 3R formula in Asia-Pacific will help in this regard."



Durgashankar Mishra, Secretary, Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, expressed confidence that discussions at the forum would help achieve the goal of "clean land, air and water".

Nearly 300 delegates from 45 countries participated in the conference.

The ninth forum would be in Bangkok in Thailand, organisers said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Global liquid and powder coatings supplier Axalta has formed a three-year partnership with Gurugram-based charitable trust Sehgal Foundation for a proposed soil and water conservation project in the the Alwar district of Rajasthan.

Under the partnership, the US coatings major will develop three water ponds, each having a capacity of 10,000 kilo litre in the region for the storage of rainwater to support local farming, animal husbandry and eco-services, the company said in a release.

The proposed pond development will engage the local community on water and soil conservation. Besides, the project will also provide water management training to ensure that the catchment area can sustain the local community with water available all year round.

The first such pond will come up in a catchment area over of 0.6 sq km in the Bhuriyabas village in the Thanagazi block of the drought-prone district bordering Haryana, it said.

In addition, the project will also carry out tree planting to prevent soil erosion, provide shade and fodder to animals, and revive the area which has a biodiversity of about 12,000 wild species of flora and home to wild animals, the release said.

"We are proud to partner with Sehgal Foundation in this initiative of water and soil conservation in one of the remotest and worst affected areas of India," Axalta Coating Systems' chairman and chief executive Charles Shaver said.

"The project to increase surface water availability in the region will bring a change for the better to the lives of local community," Ajay Pandey, CEO, Sehgal Foundation said.

The construction of one pond is expected to take about six months, after which the Sehgal Foundation will carry out monitoring and evaluation, as per the company.

The New York Stock Exchange-listed Axalta, which began its India operations in 1996, currently has offices and regional training centres in Gurugram, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru.

Besides, it has two manufacturing facilities in Savli near Baroda in Gujarat, including the recently inaugurated one, which produces coatings for refinish, automotive parts, and commercial vehicles.

The combined capacity of the two facilities is 21 million litres per annum, with old unit having a capacity of 10 million litre.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Bangladeshi High Court today banned the derogatory "two-finger test" on rape victims, saying it has no scientific and legal merit.

Issuing the order to settle a five-year-old petition, the court also ruled that lawyers cannot ask any question to rape victims that could hurt their dignity during the trial proceedings, a spokesman of the attorney general's office said.

The court asked authorities to strictly follow the healthcare protocol which the government adopted last year in line with the World Health Organisation (WHO) policies,



The two-judge bench comprising Gobinda Chandra Tagore and AKM Shahidul Huq directed the government to issue a circular so that the lower court judges and investigation officers of rape cases will follow the order.

The bench also ordered a copy of the healthcare protocols be sent to every lower courts and hospitals in the country for their proper compliance.

There is no legal or scientific basis for the 'two-finger test' during the physical examination of women and children rape victims, the court said in its order.

Rights activists have long been insisting that the two-finger test was irrational and tantamount to a second rape of the victim.

The two-finger test or virginity test allows doctors to examine the rape victims' vaginal laxity and decide whether the victim is habituated to sexual intercourse and determine the nature of the victim's character for judicial decision during trials.

In 2013, Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST) moved the High Court challenging the test. In response, the HC in October that year questioned the legality and authenticity of the test. It also issued a rule asking the government to explain why the test will not be declared illegal.

The court also asked the health ministry to form a committee of experts to develop a detailed guideline to provide support to rape victims on examination and treatment, and submit the guideline to the court in three months.

The ministry has submitted the draft guideline, proposing abolishing the two-finger test.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A number of student and women organisations today protested at the Parliament Street against the Kathua and Unnao rape cases and questioned the silence of



The protesters also alleged Prime Minister Narendra Modi of keeping silent on the issue.

"Two gruesome incidents of rape have shocked the nation; not just for the horrific nature of the crime, but also for the ruling party, the BJP trying to shield the accused, with its sitting ministers even going on to support bandhs and rallies against arresting of the rape accused," All India Students Association state secretary Niraj Kumar said.

Organisations like All India Progressive Women's Association, National Federation of Indian Women, JNU Students Union, Students Federation of India among others took part in the protest.

"The PM, known to tweet on every issue, hasn't thought that rape of two women in the BJP ruled states and the shielding of the accused by his party as even an issue to give out a statement. The betis (daughters) of the nation are under threat from the ruling party," Kumar said.

AIPWA national secretary Kavita Krishnan said, If in Unnao rape case, the accused is a sitting BJP MLA and is roaming around freely while the father of the survivor is dead, in eight-year-old's rape and murder case (in Kathua) they are trying to shield the accused by communalising the incident. Will religion of the victim and of the accused determine justice in this country? Why is the BJP saying, the charge-sheet is wrong and thus justifying the way some lawyers of the Bar Association tried to stop the charge-sheet from being filed?



All India Democratic Women's Association general secretary Mariam Dhawale said, Women of this country will not tolerate a regime that defends rape accused and further victimizes complainants.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bhim Sena district chief Upkar Bavra, wanted in a case of violence during the April 2 country-wide bandh, has surrendered in a court here and has been sent to judicial custody.

Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Ankur sharma remanded Bavra today in judicial custody up to April 26, said public prosecutor Yogesh Sagar.

Meanwhile, another court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Ritu Nagar has refused to grant bail to BSP district president Kamal Gautam who had been arrested for allegedly inciting the violence during the bandh.

Gautam was denied bail yesterday.

Dalit groups had called for a Bharat Bandh across the country on April 2 in protest against a recent Supreme Court order which they claimed had diluted the SC/ST Act (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

Protesters turned violent at several places which resulted in death of at least 11 people and destruction of property.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Scientists have created biodegradable shoes using mushrooms, chicken feathers and textile waste, paving the way for more sustainable fashion.

The researchers from University of Delaware (UD) in the US created a bio-composite material - sourced sustainably from common regional products - that forms the sole of their prototype shoe.

"The fashion industry produces a lot of waste, so sustainability is an issue everyone is trying to address," said Jillian Silverman, master's degree student at UD.

"It's hard to believe that people are going to change their consumption habits, but with this shoe, when someone gets tired of it or it wears out, it can go into the compost pile and not the landfill," said Silverman.

The project began in 2015, when researchers made fabric from mushroom mycelium, the interlocking root system from which the part of the mushroom that we eat on our pizza grows.

The researchers then experimented with growing different species of mushrooms and using different materials, known as substrates, in which the mycelium forms its network of roots.

They grew numerous samples, dried them and tested them for potential use as the sole of a shoe.

The nutrients in which the samples grew included chicken feathers and a textile waste product that is most often used as a packing material.

The team hopes to experiment in the future with discarded natural-fibre clothing, perhaps shredding it to create a fluffy addition to the feathers as a growth medium.

"The chicken feathers and the textile products provide the nutrients for the mycelium, and they also are a supporting material for it to grow in. They act like a kind of glue to form a matrix and create a network structure for the mycelium," said Huantian Cao, professor at UD.

Using textile waste from discarded clothing fits with another sustainability project that UD's fashion and apparel studies department has taken on.

Once the mycelium samples grown by the research team were tested and analysed for the best species and composition, work began on a prototype shoe.

Mycelium was grown in a soft mold in the shape of a sole, so that no waste was generated from cutting it into that shape, said Cao. The team used a type of vegan "leather" to cover the sole and make it more durable.

Researchers then designed and made the top of the shoe, using discarded scraps from the muslin fabric that apparel design students use in the clothing they create. She used a sewing technique called smocking, in which she gathered the fabric to give it bulk and shape.

"I used vegetable dyes and 100 percent cotton thread. The design looks like mushrooms look when they're stacked, and everything is completely biodegradable," said Wing Tang, undergraduate student at UD.

More work remains on moving from a prototype to a potentially marketable shoe, but the team is optimistic.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana chief Raju Shetti today said that it was the BJP that had disrupted the functioning of Parliament and termed the party's day-long fast as a "farce".

"The BJP's fast is like "sau chuhe khaake billi haj ko challi" (claiming to be righteous and pious after committing sins). They disrupted the House and now they are blaming the opposition," Shetti said here while attending a meeting of party workers.

Shetti, a Lok Sabha MP from Hatkanangle constituency, asked, "I would like to know how many times the Speaker of the Lok Sabha or the Vice-President (ex-officio Chairperson of the Rajya Sabha) called a meeting of all party leaders to break the deadlock?"



He said that the BJP should learn the meaning of a fast by visiting places like Sevagram (where Gandhiji had his ashram) or Panvar (where Vinoba Bhave had his ashram), both in Wardha.

He demanded that the government call a session of Parliament before monsoon to address issues facing farmers.

Shetti said that his party would carry out a campaign between May 1-9 urging distressed farmers not to commit suicide.

"We will ask them to agitate against the government rather than committing suicide. We will start the campaign from farmer Dharma Patil's village," Shetti said.

Patil (84), a native of Dhule district, had consumed poison in Mantralaya on January 22 and had died, while undergoing treatment, on January 28.

He was unhappy with the compensation he had received after his land was acquired for a solar power project.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Top BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his ministerial colleagues and party MPs and office-bearers, observed fast today to protest the washout of the second phase of Parliament's Budget Session, for which they have blamed the Congress.

While many, including Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh , kept to their work while fasting, several ministers, among them Prakash Javadekar, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Piyush Goyal, travelled to different parts of the country to sit on fast and attack the main opposition party.

BJP president Amit Shah joined his party colleagues in Karnataka to protest against the Congress's "disruptions" of Parliament.

"The Congress knew very well that they cannot debate in any of the Houses so they did not let the Parliament function. The BJP was left with no choice but to go to the people as it is the biggest forum for us," Shah said at a public meeting in the state, which goes to polls month.

The main opposition party, he claimed, does not believe in democracy and it has held democracy "hostage" in its own household. It does not have internal party democracy and cannot save democracy in the country, he said.

The BJP's Lok Sabha members mostly sat on protest fast in their constituencies while most of the Rajya Sabha members did so in their states.

In his interaction with party leaders earlier, Modi had asked them to "expose" opposition parties which, he said, had "throttled" democracy by stalling Parliament proceedings during the Budget Session.

Health Minister J P Nadda travelled to Modi's constituency Varanasi, while Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Minister of State for Rural Development Minister Ram Kripal Yadav were in Patna and Digha in Bihar respectively to sit on a fast.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was in Chennai while Prakash Javadekar was in Benguluru. Union minister Vijay Goel was in Tamil Nadu.

Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh was in Motihari in Bihar while Steel Minister Birender Singh was in Jind. Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu was in Delhi.

BJP general secretaries Bhupender Yadav, Anil Jian and Arun Singh were in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Odisha respectively.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)BJP leaders across Bihar, including Union ministers and members of both Houses of the Parliament, today observed a day long fast in various parts of the state in protest against the recent washout of the Budget session.

Prominent among those who took part in the nationwide "Upvaas" were Union ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad in Patna, Ashwini Choubey in Buxar, R K Singh in Ara and Giriraj Singh in Nawada.

State party president Nityanand Rai observed fast in his Lok Sabha constituency of Ujiyarpur.

Talking to reporters in Gardanibagh locality of Patna where the sit-in demonstration was organised, Ravi Shankar Prasad blamed the opposition for the washout of the parliamentary session.

"We are registering our protest over attempts made by the Congress and its allies to deny the government a chance to apprise the nation about its stand on various issues. On the contrary, the recent fast by Rahul Gandhi and his supporters was just a farce," he said.

Prasad also said the government is making all possible efforts to address the grievances of the Dalits following the recent Supreme Court judgement on SC/ST Act, and demands by parties such as the Telugu Desam Party for grant of special assistance to Andhra Pradesh.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Leaders of BJP's Odisha unit today observed fast here as part of the party's nationwide protest against the recent Parliament washout.

The sit-in, led by BJP's national vice-president and Rajya Sabha member Om Prakash Mathur, was held at Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya park near the state party headquarters here.

Prominent among those who joined the sit-in were BJP's national general secretary Arun Singh, party's Odisha unit president Basant Panda and legislature party leader Kanak Vardhan Singhdeo.

Hitting out at the opposition parties, Mathur said the Congress and other parties, including the BJD, are stalling Parliament as they are scared of the growing popularity of Narendra Modi government and the developmental works and welfare schemes that are being implemented by it.

Accusing the Congress and others of adopting a negative approach, the BJP vice-president said their disruptive methods are not going to affect the people who are convinced that BJP alone is capable of bringing progress in the country.

Slamming Congress for disrupting Parliament, he said the opposition party has always been playing vote bank

It is obstructing the proceedings of Parliament as it is against development, he said.

Senior BJP leader and Union minister Jual Oram also went on a day long fast and organised a sit-in at Sundargarh as a part of the nationwide protest by the party.

Similar protests were organised by the party in different districts of the state.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Boeing India, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and Mahindra Defence Systems today entered into an agreement to manufacture fighter aircraftF/A-18 Super Hornet in the country.

Boeing India, President, Pratyush Kumar, HAL Chairman and Managing Director, T Suvarna Raju and Mahindra Defence Systems, Chairman, S P Shukla exchanged a 'Memorandum of Agreement for 'Make in India fighter' at the on-going 'DefExpo' near here.

Stating that the discussions on the tie-up have been going on for the last 18 months, Kumar said, "The intent of the government and the MoD (Ministry of Defence) for a strategic partnership is to produce 'Make in India' aircraft."



"We scanned across length and breadth of the country. We discussed with over 400 suppliers." Kumar told reporters.

"Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd is the only company that manufactures combat fighters, while Mahindra Defence is the only company that manufactures small commercial planes.It is exciting for us," he said.

To a query, Kumar said a joint venture company would be floated over the next few months and added that investments under the agreement will be "huge."



He however declined to share any figures on the investments to be made.

On the agreement, Mahindra Defence Systems, Chairman, S P Shukla said, "This is a combination.. we have three companies that will bring their expertise, domain knowledge and flavour to the alliance."



Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, Chairman and Managing Director, T Suvarna Raju said, under the agreement the existing facilities may be used for manufacturing the fighter aircraft or if required may set up a facility.

The Super Hornet fighter aircraft does not only have a low acquisition cost, but it costs less per flight hour to operate than a tactical aicraft, a company statement said



The F/A-18 Super Hornet will outpace threats, bolster defence capabilities and make India stronger for decades to come, it said.

The partnership would also bring Boeing, HAL and Mahindra Defence System global scale and supply chain, best-in-industry precision manufacturing processes as well as unrivaled experience in designing and optimising aerospace production, the release added.

The 'DefExpo' was formally inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Thiruvidanthai, about 40kms from here today.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Eying the mega IAF contract for 11o fighter jets, Boeing on Thursday announced a partnership with PSU Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Mahindra Defence Systems (MDS) for manufacturing the F/A-18 Super Hornet in India.

The US aerospace major said the partnership will also work for joint development of future technologies in India, saying it will transform India's aerospace and defence ecosystem.

The Super Hornet 'Make in India' proposal is to build an entirely new and state-of-the-art production facility that can be utilized for other programme like India's Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) programme, the company said in a statement.

"Boeing is excited to team up with India's only company that manufactures combat fighters, HAL, and India's only company that manufactures small commercial airplanes, Mahindra.

"This partnership brings the best of Indian public and private enterprises together in partnership with the world's largest aerospace company, Boeing, to accelerate a contemporary 21st century ecosystem for aerospace & defence manufacturing in India, said Pratyush Kumar, the president of Boeing India.

The announcement was made on the second day of the Defence Expo here.

Boeing is among the leading military aircraft producers like Lockheed Martin, Saab, Dassault and Russian Aircraft Corporation MiG that are likely to vie for the deal to supply 110 fighter jets to the IAF in one of the biggest such procurement in recent years globally which could be worth over USD 15 billion.

An RFI (Request for Information) or initial tender for the mega deal was issued by the Indian Air Force (IAF) on April 6 with officials saying that the procurement would be in sync with the government's 'Make in India' initiative in the defence sector.

Aircraft manufacturers have to send their proposals by July 6. Officials had said the jets will be produced jointly by a foreign aircraft maker along with an Indian company under the recently-launched strategic partnership model which aims to bring in high-end defence technology to India.

Noting that HAL has always been at the forefront of aerospace development in India, its chairman T Suvarna Raju today said the partnership will create an opportunity to strengthen indigenous platforms in India thereby contributing to the Make-in-India activities.

According to the company, the programs under progress at HAL include production of SU-30 MKI, Hawk-AJT, Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), Dhruv-ALH and Cheetah/Chetak helicopters



Boeing said the partnership will for production of an affordable, combat-proven fighter platform for India, while adding it will result growth momentum to the Indian aerospace ecosystem with manufacturing, skill development, innovation and engineering and job creation.

As the most advanced and least expensive aircraft per flight hour of its kind, the F/A-18 Super Hornet will deliver on India's need for a carrier and land based multi-role fighter, the company said, it said.

"The Super Hornet does not only have a low acquisition cost, but it costs less per flight hour to operate than any other tactical aircraft in U.S. forces inventory. And with a plan for constant innovation, the F/A-18 Super Hornet will outpace threats, bolster defence capabilities and make India stronger for decades to come," it said.

The F/A-18 Super Hornet has a long life ahead, with the US Navy making significant investments in the latest evolution, the Block III, Boeing noted.

Kumar said that partnership with HAL and Mahindra will enable Boeing India to optimize the full potential of the country's public and private sector to deliver next-generation F/A-18 fighter capabilities.

Future production with Indian partners will involve maximizing indigenous content and producing the F/A-18 in India for its armed forces to create a 21st century aerospace ecosystem, the statement from Boeing said



The plan addresses the infrastructure, personnel training, and operational tools and techniques required to produce a next gen fighter aircraft right here in India. In addition, Boeing will work closely with India industry to ensure they have the very latest technologies, applying lessons learned from the current Super Hornet production line, it saidBoeing is the world's largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial jetliners, defence, space and security systems, and service provider of aftermarket support.

We are excited about the opportunities that this partnership with Boeing and HAL will provide for us to contribute further to Make in India' for defence, said S P Shukla, Group President, Aerospace & Defence, Mahindra Group, and Chairman, Mahindra Defence Systems.Angry, ashamed and heartbroken is how the Indian film industry personalities described their feelings over the Unnao and Kathua rapes and demanded swift action against the perpetrators.

Celebrities such as Javed Akhtar, Abhishek Bachchan, Swara Bhasker and Hansal Mehta took to social media to condemn the two brutal incidents that have shocked the nation.

In Unnao, a teen rape survivor claimed BJP MP Kuldeep Singh Sengar had raped her and the death of her father in police custody. The Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government has filed a first information report (FIR) against Sengar.

While in Kathua, eight-year-old Asifa was allegedly gangraped by six men who had held her in captivity in a small temple village for a week in January. She was drugged so that she could be sexually assaulted again before being bludgeoned to death.

Noted screenwriter Javed Akhtar said it was high time that people came forward in support of women rights.

All those who wish justice for women should stand up and raise their voices against the rapists and their protectors in Unnao and Kathua.

In Unnao, the brother of the alleged rapist is arrested for beating the father of the rape victim which caused his death. So far police has not taken any action in the rape case. The MLA is walking free and has the audacity to call the victim and her family lowly people', he wrote.

Abhishek Bachchan shared Asifa's picture and hashtagged her name.

Director Hansal Mehta retweeted The New York Times piece which detailed how Asifa's rape and murder led to protests by Hindu nationalists who defended the accused in the case.

Is this nationalism? Mehta wrote alongside the link.

Sonam Kapoor also shared the same article and called out fake nationals and fake Hindus in her tweet.

Ashamed appalled and disgusted by fake nationals and fake Hindus. I cannot believe this is happening in my country, she wrote.

Actor-filmmaker Farhan Akhtar pleaded the case of an eight-year-old who was subjected to unspeakable brutalities.

Imagine what goes through the mind of an 8 yr old as she is drugged, held captive, gang raped over days and then murdered. If you don't feel her terror, you are not human. If you don't demand Asifa get justice, you belong to nothing (sic) Farhan tweeted.

Swara wrote, An 8 year old girl was gangraped & murdered in a temple because she belonged to a Muslim tribe that Hindu right wing goons wanted evicted from their area! #Kathua #India this is on us!!!! If in #Delhi pls join TODAY #JusticeforAsifa (sic).

Actor-comic Vir Das asked the people to set aside political differences and unite to fight the perpetrators of the crime.

I can't breathe after reading this. I need to share it. And so do you. Please do. Justice for Asifa. Dear politicians, I'd like to see every one of you miserable scum and your army of slimy sycophants put your parties and your bullsh*t aside and do something to make sure that no child ever has to face what this girl did. But you won't. Because you don't deserve this country, he tweeted.

Riteish Deshmukh wrote, A 8-year-old is drugged, raped & murdered and another one is fighting for justice for herself and the death of her father in custody. We have a choice either raise your voice or be a silent spectator. Stand up for what is right even if you are standing alone.' #Kathua #Unnao



Filmmaker Shirish Kunder shared a article and wrote, Please read this. If your blood boils, please share it. Because at a time when there's a section of people supporting these monsters, it'll mean some humanity is still alive.

Tisca Chopra also tweeted, So pained to read about #Unnao & #Kathua rapes.. how strongly the government responds will be its true test @PMOIndia... At least I won't vote for them coming elections if they don't take action this time.

Actor Rahul Bose called the incidents gut wrenching.

Unimaginable depravity that is disturbing on so many levels. Our response will decide what we have become as a society, Bose added.

Actors Ranvir Shorey and Richa Chadha attacked the people who defended the accused in the name of religion.

If these people had an iota of reverence and respect for Hinduism, they'd be up in arms against the people who used a temple to torture, rape and murder a child! These are slogans to be used when the people who have committed these crimes are hanged! Utterly appalling that slogans like 'Jai Shri Ram' and 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' are being used to defend perpetrators of heinous crimes. These vicious beasts will destroy India and Hinduism. Unnao and Kathua, Shorey said



These men fast on Navratras and pray to Devi Ma, yet they defend a man who plotted the rape, torture and murder of a child inside a temple. Look at them, Shame them. If a stray report can make credible people. Hindu haters why are these fake Hindus not unemployed, Chadha tweeted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Calcutta High Court today stayed the ongoing panchayat election process in West Bengal, expressing displeasure over the decision of the State Election Commission (SEC) to cancel its own order extending the nomination process by a day.

Opposition parties in the state termed the high court order as a "victory of democracy over dictatorship" and sought the resignation of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, alleging widespread violence during filing of nominations.

Rejecting the SEC's contention that the writ petition of the BJP was not maintainable, the court held that the state poll panel is endowed with powers relating to holding of the elections, but in case of any digression, it needs to be corrected by the court of law.

Passing the order on the petition, Justice Subrata Talukdar stayed till further orders the ongoing panchayat election process in the state.

He observed that the commission had recognised the grievances expressed by different political parties as well as individuals by extending the date.

"However, the order was abruptly withdrawn," he said.

Referring to yesterday's Supreme Court order with regard to a petition by the West Bengal unit of the BJP challenging the SEC's decision to recall the extension order, Justice Talukdar said that the operative part of the apex court order is crucially connected to the cancellation of the notification.

The high court also said that the SEC should have informed it today that it has ensured a level-playing field for all parties.

While staying the panchayat elections, the judge also sought from the SEC by Monday a comprehensive status report on the poll process, detailing the number of nominations filed and the percentage of those rejected, among other issues.

The court said it would hear on April 16 the pleas challenging the SEC's decision to withdraw its April 9 notification, which had extended the date for filing nominations by a day.

The BJP had challenged the cancellation of the April 9 notification.

Justice Talukdar also expressed his displeasure over the conduct of the BJP leader Pratap Banerjee, who appeared in-person before the court, for not disclosing that a similar petition had been moved by the party before the Supreme Court simultaneously.

He also took a very dim view of the conduct of the BJP representative.

"However, in view of the public interest involved, this court is not vacating its directions to the SEC," the judge said.

Likening the BJP's conduct to forum hopping, Justice Talukdar imposed Rs 5 lakh as costs on the party, which would have to be deposited with the registrar general of the high court.

Representing the Trinamool Congress, its vice-president Kalyan Banerjee earlier prayed for vacating the order on the SEC, alleging that the petitioner had suppressed that it had moved both the high court and the apex court with similar petitions.

BJP national general secretary Kailash Viijayvargiya said the judgment was a blow to the ruling TMC.

"The ruling TMC has tried to turn the panchayat polls into farce by not allowing the opposition candidates to file nominations. This high court ruling is a triumph of democracy over dictatorship," Vijayvargiya told reporters.

TMC secretary general Partha Chatterjee, on his part, said the people have "full faith" in Mamata Banerjee.

"We will not comment on the court order. The law will take its own course. The opposition parties do not enjoy popularity among the masses and that is why they are approaching the courts (to stall proceedings)," he said.

Chatterjee said that they (opposition) are insulting the people.

Leader of the Opposition and senior Congress leader, Abdul Mannan also welcomed the judgment and demanded the resignations of the chief minister, besides State Election Commissioner A K Singh.

"The people of Bengal can get justice only by moving courts because the entire state administration has been turned into a back office of the ruling TMC. The chief minister and the (state election) commissioner should immediately tender their resignation as they have turned the poll process into a joke," Mannan told PTI.

Left Front chairman Biman Bose said, "We welcome the high court order. The ruling TMC is trying to murder democracy in Bengal. We have been saying this for a long time that democracy is under threat and opposition parties are not being allowed to file nominations."



The CPI(M)-led Left Front has called a six-hour general strike in the state tomorrow to protest the alleged violence during the filing of the nominations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)California Gov Jerry Brown accepted President Donald Trump's call to send the National Guard to the Mexican border, but rejected the White House's portrait of a burgeoning border crisis and insisted that his troops will have nothing to do with immigration enforcement.

The Democratic governor broke a week of silence yesterday by agreeing to contribute 400 troops, though not all will be on the border. Brown's commitment brought pledges from the four states that border Mexico just shy of the low end of the president's target to marshal 2,000 to 4,000 troops.

Brown cast his decision as a welcome infusion of federal support to fight transnational criminal gangs and drug and firearms smugglers.

"Combating these criminal threats are priorities for all Americans - Republicans and Democrats," Brown wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Federal law, notably the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, sharply limits military involvement in civilian law enforcement, creating a supporting role for the Guard.

The Pentagon said last week that troops won't perform law enforcement functions or interact with people detained by border authorities without its approval.

Brown released a proposed agreement with the federal government that emphasises the widely shared understanding of the Guard's limited role but explicitly bans any support of immigration enforcement. It says troops cannot guard anyone in custody for immigration violations or participate in construction of border barriers.

The White House praised Brown's decision without addressing his comments on immigration enforcement.

"We're also glad to see California Gov Jerry Brown work with the administration and send members of the National Guard to help secure the southern border," White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. Reaction in California was limited, with few of Brown's allies or opponents weighing in.

State Sen Kevin de Leon, a Democratic US Senate candidate and author of California's so-called sanctuary state law, said Guard deployment was unnecessary and not a good use of resources.

But he said more can be done to combat border crime and that he appreciated Brown's design of "a clear and limited mission focused on real public safety threats." "I am confident Governor Brown will not use our National Guard to harass or tear apart immigrant families in California," he said in a statement.

Rob Stutzman, who advised former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, praised the decision on Twitter, calling Brown's decision to accept money for using the Guard to fight drugs and human trafficking "good government."



Immigration advocacy groups were critical, saying Brown's support was a boost for Trump's agenda. Lillian Serrano, chair of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, acknowledged the governor's proposed limits on the Guard's role but said his decision reflected "flawed logic that we need more boots on the ground." Pedro Rios, director for the American Friends Service Committee's U.S.-Mexico border program in San Diego, questioned why Brown would send troops while rejecting Trump's premise that they are needed to help stop illegal immigration.

"If he's in disagreement with Donald Trump about the justifications for having the National Guard on the border, then why would he accept it?" he said.

Unlike Republican governors in other border states, Brown disagreed with Trump's portrayal of a border spiraling out of control, noting that Border Patrol arrests fell to the lowest level last year since 1971 and that California accounted for only 15 per cent of the agency's arrests on the Mexican border.

"Here are the facts: there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California," Brown wrote the Trump Cabinet members.

In contrast, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who is contributing 1,000 troops, embraced Trump's mission the day it was announced, saying it would promote the rule of law and "help ensure we are doing everything we can to stem the flow of illegal immigration."



Brown said California's troops would join an existing program to combat transnational drug crime, firearms smuggling and human trafficking. About 250 California National Guard troops are already participating, including 55 at the border.

The new contingent of California Guard members being deployed could be posted at the border, the coast and elsewhere statewide, Brown said. California deployed troops to the border under former Presidents George W. Bush in 2006 and Barack Obama in 2010.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The lineup of the 71st Cannes Film Festival was today unveiled and Nandita Das' directorial "Manto" has been shortlisted in Un Certain Regard category.

Artistic director Thierry Fremaux and festival president Pierre Lescure announced the lineup of the films in a press conference which also went live on Facebook and Twitter.

Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman", Jean-Luc Godard's "Le Livre d'Image" and Oscar-winning director Pawel Pawlikowski's "Zimna Wojna" are among the 18 films competing for the prestigious Palme d'Or award.

Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi's psychological thriller "Everybody Knows", starring real-life couple Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, will be the opening film at the festival.

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was earlier under house arrest and is still not allowed to leave the country, also features in the competition segment with his "Three Faces".

Two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett was earlier announced as the president of the festival jury. She follows Pedro Almodovar, who headed the jury for the 70th edition of the event.

Das' "Manto", starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui as celebrated short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto, is among the 15 films shortlisted in the Cannes sub section Un Certain Regard.

It will compete with films such as "Angel Face" (Vanessa Filho), "Border" (Ali Abbasi), "El Angel" (Luis Ortega), "Euphoria" (Valeria Golino), "Friend" (Wanuri Kahiu) and others.

Un Certain Regard (A certain glance) was first introduced in section in 1998 and focuses on films with unusual themes or storytelling techniques. It runs parallel to the main competition.

Benicio Del Toro will preside over the jury of Un Certain Regard.

Films announced in the special screenings section includes Gilles Porte's documentary "The State Against Mandela and The Others", "10 Years in Thailand, which has contributions from Aditya Assarat, Wisit Sasanatieng, Chulayarnon Sriphol and Apichatpong Weerasethakul; and Wim Wenders's documentary, "Pope Francis - A Man of his Word".

Ron Howard-directed "Solo: A Star Wars Story", which traces the origins of iconic "Star Wars" character Han Solo, will be screened at the festival as an out of the competition entry. It will be joined by "Le Grand Bain" from Gilles Lellouche.

As was the case with "The Square", which entered late in the competition but went on to bag the Palme d'Or, Fremaux said several more titles may be announced in coming days.

The festival will kick off from May 8 and will conclude on May 19.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The speaker of the Catalan parliament urged today a Spanish judge to free regional presidential candidate Jordi Sanchez from jail so he could be sworn in as regional head.

"That would be normal no? To protect and defend the political rights of a lawmaker in the Catalan parliament who should be able to face an investiture debate," speaker Roger Torrent told Cadena Ser radio.

Parliament is scheduled to hold a debate and vote tomorrow on the jailed pro-independence activist's candidacy to become Catalonia's new regional president despite a failed first attempt.

Sanchez was remanded in custody in October pending charges of sedition over last year's Catalan independence bid.

A previous attempt to appoint him as president failed last month after Spain's Supreme Court turned down a request for him to be released from jail. The court is due to decide shortly on Sanchez's new request to be allowed to leave jail so he can attend tomorrow's debate.

Torrent said the court needed to take into account a message from the United Nations Human Rights Committee in support of Sanchez's political rights.

In letters last month to Spanish authorities and Sanchez's lawyers, the UN committee requested the state take all steps to ensure he be allowed to exercise his right to stand for office.

"What would be inconceivable to me is that the judge in this case ignore international law and the measures which the United Nations calls for," he said.

"The court has the opportunity to take note of international law and the protection of political rights or write another dark chapter in the history of the Supreme Court regarding the repression of the rights of Catalan lawmakers."



Catalonia has been in political limbo since Spain's conservative central government imposed direct rule on the region after it unilaterally declared independence in October.

Fresh regional elections will be triggered if a new leader is not elected by May 22.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pro-Tamil outfits protesting over the Cauvery issue on Thursday showed black flags to Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he arrived to formally inaugurate India's mega defence exhibition, Defexpo, at Thiruvidanthai, about 40 km from Chennai.

The Tamizhar Vazhvuirimai Kootamaippu (TVK), an umbrella outfit of pro-Tamil outfits, and Manithaneya Jananayaga Katchi is led by MLA M Thamimun Ansari were among the organisations that staged protests in the vicinity of the Chennai airport.

Veteran film director Bharathiraja and film-maker Ameer held a demonstration at the airport premises, raising slogans.

Police dispersed some of the protesters and detained others.

DMK cadres release black balloons as they stage a protest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit, in Madurai on Thursday | Photo: PTI

In view of the protests, traffic snarls were witnessed around the airport and in its surrounding areas.

Black flags were hoisted atop the residences of DMK chief M Karunanidhi, party working president M K Stalin, Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi and other leaders, in protest against Modi's visit and for not forming the Cauvery Management Board.

In Erode district, DMK workers released black balloons and about 50 workers were detained.

Some opposition parties and pro-Tamil outfits had on Wednesday said they would hold black flag protest against Modi's visit to Tamil Nadu.The CBI has booked infrastructure major ARSS Infrastructure Private Limited for allegedly cheating Central Bank of India of nearly Rs 62.41 crore in 2011, officials said.

On a complaint from the bank, the agency lodged an FIR against Sunil Agarwal, Soumendra Keshari Pattnaik, Shiv Kumar Singla, all directors of ARSS Damoh Hirapur Tolls Pvt Ltd, Subhash Agarwal, chairman of ARSS infrastructure projects limited and companies ARSS infrastructure projects limited and ARSS Damoh Hirapur Tolls Pvt Ltd.

Sudarshan Raj, the then branch manager of Central Bank of India, Janpath branch in Bhubaneswar has also been booked.

"...a contract work for construction of two lanes of State Highway-37 for a distance of 69.9 km between Damoh and Hirapur in Madhya Pradesh was awarded to ARSS Infrastructure Projects Limited by Madhya Pradesh Road Development Corporation Ltd on built, operate and transfer basis," the FIR alleged.

The bank had sanctioned a term loan of Rs 87 crore to ADHTPL for the said constructions work.

"The term loan was secured, inter alia, by personal guarantee of Subhash Agarwal, chairman of AIPL and Sunil Agarwal, Director ADHTPL...," it alleged.

A total sum of Rs 62.55 crore was disbursed by the said bank during the period from October 27, 2011 to May 2, 2013 for the purpose.

"However, even after disbursement of Rs 62.55 crore neither ADHTPL nor AIPL took any steps to execute the works as per targets given by MPRDCL. As the borrower company failed to achieve the milestones set out by MPRDCL, after giving due notice, MPRDCL terminated the concession agreement," it alleged.

The bank alleged that since the project was terminated, the funds should have been returned to it but they were diverted by the company.

"...the malafide intention of the accused persons is evident from the fact that on termination of contract they should have sold the equipment and machinery purchased out of loan amount and should have deposited the sale proceeds in the loan account, as the same were hypothecated to the bank.," it alleged.

"On the contrary, they removed the equipment and the machinery from the project site and shifted to unknown places without any intimation to the bank," the FIR alleged.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The two bank officials, arrested along with a woman in connection with the Class 10 Mathematics paper leak, were nabbed on charges of criminal negligence, the police said today.

The accused have been identified as Sheru Ram (35), a branch manager of Union Bank of India, Om Prakash (58), head cashier of the bank and the 40-year-old woman, who had circulated hand-written question papers of Class 12 economics and Class 10 mathematics via WhatsApp.

Last week, Rakesh Kumar, Amit Sharma and Ashok Kumar, all employees of DAV Centenary Public School in Una town, were arrested by the Crime Branch. The three men were arrested in connection with the economics paper leak case.

Rakesh was also found to be involved in leaking the Mathematics paper.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Una-based teacher, allegedly involved in leaking Class 12 economics and Class 10 mathematics papers, harboured the ambition of becoming the principal of the school where he taught, and a relative had assured him she would get it done if he helped her get the papers, an official privy to the probe said.

The CBSE Class 10 mathematics question paper was leaked by Rakesh Kumar, an economics teacher at DAV Centenary School in Una in Himachal Pradesh, who was arrested last week along with two other employees of the school - Amit Sharma and Ashok Kumar - in connection with the economics paper leak.

The police said today Rakesh Kumar was found to be also involved with the mathematics paper leak before the March 28 examination.

During intensive questioning by a team led by Rajesh Kumar, assistant commissioner of police (Crime), he confessed his involvement and sending the images of handwritten copy of the papers to his bhabhi in Ferozepur, Punjab, the police said.

The 40-year-old woman, a librarian at a college in Ferozepur, had assured Rakesh Kumar of getting the principal's post at the DAV school, Una.

She had told him she has good contacts with the DAV management in Delhi and if he helped her in getting the economics and mathematics papers for her relatives' children, she would ensure that he becomes the principal soon, said the official.

Rakesh Kumar had filled a form applying for the post and she had told him she would ensure his candidature was given preference over other contenders. It was this greed to become principal that prompted Rakesh Kumar to leak the papers.

Police, however, said there was no monetary transaction involved and Rakesh Kumar did it only to realise his dream.

Today, the police said two men and a woman have been arrested in connection with the leak of the mathematics paper.

The three accused were identified as Sheru Ram (35), branch manager of Union Bank Of India, Om Prakash (58), head cashier of the same bank and the 40-year-old woman who had forwarded the handwritten question papers of Class 12 economics and Class 10 mathematics to others via WhatsApp from her cell-phone which later went viral on social media.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Minister Sushma Swaraj has called for a meeting of all chief ministers of northeastern states on May 4 to discuss the provisions of the 'Act East Policy', Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma told the Assembly today.

The Centre is keen on strengthening the policy for the benefit of the state and the region as a whole, he said.

"When I had met the external affairs minister recently, she mentioned about the May 4 meeting. We need to realise that great opportunities lies in trading with neighbouring nations," Sangma said while participating in a discussion on work permits for Bangladesh nationals.

When people in the northeast traded with neighbouring countries, the region boasted of highest per-capita income in the country, the CM said.

Talking about the export potential of the northeast, Sangma said Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura have to go through Kolkata port to export rubber.

"To import or export products to countries like Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, these states have to go through the chicken neck and all the way to Kolkata as the Chittagong port is inaccessible," he said, adding that Guwahati or Shillong could be the trade hub for the region.

Sangma also said he had taken up the issue of illegal immigration with the external affairs minister during the recent meeting in Delhi.

Defending his proposition of issuing work permits to foreign nationals, the CM said, "Many nations have adopted this mechanism of sanctioning work permits to foreigners, knowing well that such people cannot vote."



The chief minister also invited suggestions from all members of the Assembly on the matter.

Earlier, Leader of Opposition Mukul Sangma staged a walkout of the Assembly, criticising the chief minister's decision to grant work permits to immigrants.

He called the chief minister "a pawn in some people's hand".

The CM, on his part, assured the House that there will be no compromise on the identity, and property of people while implementing the provisions of the Act East Policy.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The international chemical weapons watchdog today confirmed the UK's findings that the source of the military-grade nerve agent used to target the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury originally came from Russia.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the chemical used against Sergei and Yulia Skripal was "of high purity", without mentioning the exact name of the substance which will be reserved for the complete classified report it has prepared.

The Hague-based OPCW said its team "notes that the toxic chemical was of high purity. The latter is concluded from the almost complete absence of impurities."



The OPCW had sent a team of specialists to the UK last month to investigate the March 4 attack.

The experts took samples from several locations as well as biomedical samples from the Skripals and police officer Nick Bailey, who was also exposed to the nerve agent.

In a declassified summary of its findings, the OPCW did not make any assessment on who carried out the attack on 66-year-old Sergei and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said: "There can be no doubt what was used."



"There remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible - only Russia has the means, motive and record," he said.

Johnson said the OPCW's findings were based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world, all of which returned the same "conclusive" results.

"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible only Russia has the means, motive and record...The Kremlin must give answers," he said.

The minister said the UK had asked the OPCW to publish the executive summary of its findings in the "interest of transparency" and called a session of the OPCW Executive Council next Wednesday to discuss next steps.

"We must, as a world community, stand up for the rules based order which keeps us all safe. The use of weapons of this kind can never be justified, and must be ended," he said.

The UK's finding of a Soviet era Novichok stock of nerve agent used in the attack against the Skripals had been presented before the House of Commons by British Prime Minister Theresa May last month, when she declared that Russia was "culpable".

The UK government has since made several statements pointing the finger of blame of the Kremlin and expelled Russian diplomats in retaliation of the poisoning of the Skripals. The incident has led to a diplomatic crisis between Moscow and the West as Moscow denies any involvement and accuses Britain of inventing a "fake story".

In retaliation, Russia also expelled 60 American diplomats.

The OPCW report comes as Yulia turned down help from the Russian embassy in a statement issued through Scotland Yard yesterday to say that she was "safe" and trying to come to terms with her new life.

"I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me," she said.

The 33-year-old Russian citizen has been taken to a secure location after being discharged from Salisbury District Hospital earlier this week. In her statement, she said that she has been made aware of the Russian embassy's attempts to contact her but she did not wish to avail of their services for the moment.

Making a specific reference to her Russia-based cousin, Viktoria, she said that "her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's".

Viktoria had been quoted widely in the Russian media following a phone conversation she claimed to have had with Yulia from hospital last week.

The Russian embassy in London immediately raised doubts over the authenticity of the statement, claiming it "only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen".

"With no possibility to verify it, the publication by the Metropolitan Police raises new questions rather than gives answers. As before, we would like to make sure that the statement really belongs to Yulia. So far, we doubt it much," an embassy statement said.

Sergei Skripal remains in hospital as he recovers from the effects of the toxic nerve agent. His daughter thanked the Salisbury hospital staff, adding: "I have left my father in their care, and he is still seriously ill. I too am still suffering with the effects of the nerve agent used against us."



The UK's intelligence officials are believed to be in talks with the CIA over the possible repatriation of the Skripals to the US or another friendly country for their safety.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)China on Thursday announced live-firing military exercises in the Taiwan Strait amid heightened tensions over increased American support for Taiwan's government.

The announcement by the maritime safety authority in the coastal province of Fujian coincided with a statement from their counterparts in Hainan province that the navy was ending a three-day exercise in the South China Sea one day early.

No explanations were given in either case and the Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to questions. The Fujian authorities said the one-day Taiwan Strait drill will be held next Wednesday.

While Beijing responded mildly to US President Donald Trump's early outreach to Taiwan's independence-leaning government, recent developments have prompted a tougher response. China claims Taiwan, which separated from the mainland during the Chinese civil war in 1949, as its own territory and says the sides must eventually be united, by force if necessary.

Despite the lack of formal ties, Washington is legally bound to respond to threats to Taiwan and is the island's main supplier of imported military hardware.

Chinese officials have denounced the recent passage of a US law encouraging more high-level contacts with Taiwan. China says the Taiwan Travel Act violates US commitments not to restore formal exchanges severed when Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.

An agreement to pass Taiwan submarine manufacturing technology and the appointment of hawkish National Security Adviser John Bolton have also hardened views among anti-American nationalists in China.

Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office on Wednesday warned against additional moves to strengthen relations with Taiwan.

"Any attempt to play the 'Taiwan card' would only be futile," spokesman Ma Xiaoguang said. China, Ma said, would "not hesitate to protect our core interests."



That came after President Xi Jinping last month delivered a strongly nationalistic speech in which he vowed to protect "every inch" of China's territory.

China has also stepped-up air force missions in airspace around Taiwan and has repeatedly sailed its sole operating aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, through the 160 kilometer-wide Taiwan Strait.

The just-completed naval drills off Hainan underscored China's growing capabilities in defending its maritime interests and territorial claims, particularly in the disputed South China Sea.China continues its provocations in the South and East China Seas and is using a coordinated effort to compete with the US in diplomatic, military and economic terms, CIA Director Mike Pompeo has warned while identifying Russia as a "danger" for America.

Pompeo, who is a nominee for the position of the Secretary of State, asserting that the State Department must be at the center of formulating and executing the China policy.

He also called for taking a tough position on a host of foreign policy issues including Russia, Iran and North Korea.

"Even while America has re-established a position of strength in our diplomatic relationship, China continues its concerted and coordinated effort to compete with the United States in diplomatic, military, and economic terms.

"For years, through IP theft and coercive technology transfer, China has exploited weak US trade policy and leeched wealth and secrets from our economy. Militarily, it continues its provocation in the South and East China Seas, in cyberspace, and even in outer space," Pompeo said.

He said this in his prepared remarks for his conformation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, excerpts of which was released by the White House late last night.

He said the current administration was determined to work diplomatically with the Chinese government in an effort to develop a more productive bilateral partnership.

"We have been pleased with China's support of our efforts to apply pressure on the North Korean regime, but it must do more. The State Department must be at the center of formulating and executing our China policy," said Pompeo.

He also alleged that Russia's aggressive behaviour, enabled by years of soft policy toward that aggression, was now over.

The list of this administration's actions to raise the cost for Russian President Vladimir Putin is long, he said.

"We are rebuilding our already strong military and recapitalising our nuclear deterrent. We have imposed tough sanctions and expelled more Russian diplomats and intelligence officers from the US than at any time since the Cold War. We are arming brave young men and women resisting Russian expansionism in Ukraine and Georgia," Pompeo said.

"The actions of this administration make clear that President Trump's national security strategy, rightfully, has identified Russia as a danger to our country. Our diplomatic efforts with Russia will prove challenging, but as in previous confrontations with Moscow, must continue," he said.

Noting that diplomatic efforts are underway to rid the world of a nuclear North Korea, Pompeo said there was no higher diplomatic task for the State Department team than solving this decades-in-the-making threat to the nation.

"The stakes are high for everyone, but I believe them to be the highest for the North Korean regime. The State Department has successfully rallied the world to cut ties and impose sanctions that have had a profound impact.

"But there is much diplomatic work left to do, including supporting the President's intent to meet with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un," he said.

That meeting will take place against a backdrop of commitment by Trump to achieve denuclearisation and prevent America from being held at risk by a North Korean arsenal of nuclear weapons, he said.

"I have read the CIA histories of previous negotiations with the North Koreans, and am confident that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past. President Trump isn't one to play games at the negotiating table and I won't be either," said the outgoing CIA Director.

Pompeo also said that Iran had been on the march and has paid too low a price for its dangerous behaviour.

The Trump Administration has developed a strategy to counter Iran that will raise that cost, he said.

"The issues surrounding Iran's proliferation threat are real and we, along with our allies, must deal with the long-term risk that its capability presents. But we cannot let the nuclear file prevent us from acting against Iran's cyber efforts or its attempts to provide missiles to the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia and Americans who travel there," he said.

"Iran's activities in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon threaten the very existence of Israel, and the global reach of Hezbollah threatens us right here in the homeland. Iran freed American hostages for the sake of a deal and then turned immediately to holding still more," he alleged.

China claims almost all of South China Sea and also laid claims on the Senkaku islands under the control of Japan in East China Sea and resorted to aggressive patrols in the last two years.

Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have counter claims over the over the South China Sea.

The US is periodically deploying its naval ships and fighter planes to assert freedom of navigation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)China received USD 37 billion worth of foreign direct investment in the first quarter of this year, registering a 0.5 per cent growth with investments from 14,340 overseas firms.

FDI inflow edged up 0.4 per cent year-on-year in March to 88.14 billion yuan (USD 14.03 billion), Gao Feng, spokesperson with the ministry of commerce, said at a press conference.

In the first quarter, total FDI inflow rose 0.5 per cent to 227.54 billion yuan (USD 37 billion).

China received USD 122 billion FDI in the first 11 months of the year.

The number of new overseas-funded companies established in the first three months surged 124.7 per cent from a year earlier to 14,340, Gao said.

Investment into high-tech sectors rose 12.8 per cent and accounted for 19.3 per cent of the total FDI, data showed.

The high-tech manufacturing sector continued to see "relatively fast" investment growth, as it attracted 22.5 billion yuan in overseas investment, up 66 per cent.

Central China saw an FDI increase of 46.7 per cent, while western China used 23.4 per cent more investment compared to the same period last year.

Investment from countries along the Belt and Road increased 76 per cent in the first quarter, Gao said.

Earlier this week, Chinese leaders unveiled new measures for expanding reform and opening up, including broadening market access, creating a more attractive investment environment, strengthening protection of intellectual property rights and expanding imports.

Gao said the new pledges showed China's "resolution and confidence to push forward the new round of high-level opening up".

The ministry is working with other departments to draft a series of policies, including those on improving the negative list on foreign investment, expanding opening up and optimising the investment environment, Gao said.

"In the first half, we will work to complete the revision of the negative list on foreign investment," he said.

(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 Maharashtra government's endeavour to make every city "smart" was commendable but it would only be possible when a city's roads, streets and footpaths were in a good condition and free of potholes.

A division bench of justices A S Oka and P N Deshmukh said it was a citizen's fundamental right to have good roads, streets and footpaths and people could not be deprived of their rights.

The remarks were made by the high court in its order after it took up the issue of rising number of potholes and poor condition of roads in Mumbai and other districts of Maharashtra, which was leading to death of motorists.

The court said it was the legal and constitutional obligation of the state government and all other local authorities to ensure good roads.

"We are aware of the state government's endeavour to make every city smart. However, no city can be known as smart unless its roads, streets and footpaths are in good condition and pothole-free," Justice Oka said.

The bench directed the state government to come up with a policy on the terms and conditions in relation to road contracts so as to ensure quality and durability of the work carried out.

"We also direct the state government to set up a centralised grievance redressal mechanism, where citizens can lodge their complaints. A person travelling from one city to another would not know under which authority a particular road falls," the court said.

Once the government receives a complaint, it can then forward it to the local authority concerned for follow-up action and compliance, the court said.

The bench has directed the state government to set up this centralised mechanism by June 15.

The bench also took note of the death of a city-based doctor after falling into an open manhole during the last monsoon.

"Such unfortunate incidents cannot be repeated. Civic bodies shall take all the necessary precautions to ensure that no manhole is left open and if it is (left open), then necessary warning boards shall be placed near it," the court said.

The bench has directed the state government to file a compliance report on its directions and posted the petition for further hearing on July 24.

The bench said it hoped that all the municipal corporations and district councils in the state take all the necessary steps by June to ensure good roads before the onset of monsoon.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court today directed the listing of a case of a portal's scribes, who are facing criminal defamation complaint filed by BJP President Amit Shah's son, before an appropriate bench for final disposal on April 18.

An apex court bench headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra said since it was seized of hearing important cases pending before a constitution bench, there was paucity of time to hear this matter.

It said the petitions, which have challenged the Gujarat High Court's order refusing to quash summons issued against them by a trial court in a defamation complaint filed by Shah's son Jay Shah, be listed before an appropriate bench.

"Let the matters be listed before the appropriate bench for final disposal on April 18. The interim order passed on the earlier occasion to continue till the next date of hearing," the bench, also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, said.

On March 15, the CJI-led bench had heard the pleas filed by portal 'The Wire' and some of its scribes against the Gujarat High Court order. It had also asked the Gujarat trial court not to proceed with the complaint till today.

The high court had on January 8 rejected a plea filed by the portal, seeking quashing of the defamation complaint filed against it by Jay over an article related to his company.

On the last date of hearing before the apex court, senior lawyer Kapil Sibal, appearing for the portal and the scribes, had said that the article contained details from records which were in "public domain electronically".

A five-judge constitution bench headed by the CJI and comprising Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, is currently hearing the crucial matter relating to the validity of the Aadhaar Act.

The same bench is also scheduled to hear several other matters, including the one related to its 2013 judgment re-criminalising gay sex between consenting adults and ban on entry of women between 10 and 50 years of age in Kerala's Sabarimala temple.

Shah had moved the lower court alleging defamation by the petitioners after the article published by the portal claimed his company's turnover grew exponentially after the BJP-led government came to power at the Centre in 2014.

The complaint was filed against the author of the article Rohini Singh, founding editors of the news portal Siddharth Varadarajan, Siddharth Bhatia and M K Venu, managing editor Monobina Gupta, public editor Pamela Philipose and the Foundation for Independent Journalism, which publishes The Wire.

Jay has separately filed a civil defamation suit of Rs 100 crore against the website over the article. He has also rejected the charges made in the article, insisting that the story was "false, derogatory and defamatory".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)American military attach Col Joseph Emanuel Hall at the US embassy in Islamabad, who is facing charges of killing a Pakistani national and injuring other in a road accident, enjoys diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention, the US said today.

"The individual involved is an accredited diplomat," a State Department spokesperson said, responding to a question on Hall, who over the weekend was involved in a fatal road accident in which one Pakistani motorcyclist lost his life while the pillion rider was injured.

Islamabad Police has urged the Pakistani Ministry of Interior that Hall may not be allowed to leave the country.

"In accordance with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the individual, like all diplomats, is immune from the criminal, civil and administrative jurisdiction of Pakistan and cannot be arrested, detained, or banned from leaving the country," the spokesperson said.

"For the safety and security of those involved, we cannot disclose the diplomat's current location. We are in close contact with the appropriate Pakistani officials," the spokesperson said, adding that the US embassy is co-operating with the investigation.

Meanwhile, State-run Voice of America reported that the US has not imposed any restriction on the travel of Pakistani diplomats in the US.

The US State Department has confirmed via email that there are "no restrictions on travel for Pakistani diplomats in the United States", despite reports that they will soon be subjected to new travel restrictions, VOA reported today.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said India's commitment to peace is just as strong as its commitment to protecting its territory and listed his government's efforts in making the country a hub of defence manufacturing and bolstering the armed forces.

His remark, after formally inaugurating the Defence Expo here, comes amid increasing Chinese activities along the nearly 4,000-km-long border with India as well as Beijing's efforts to expand its influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

Spelling out his government's initiatives to promote defence production in India, Modi also accused the previous UPA dispensation of policy paralysis in the sector, which he said affected the country's military preparedness.

"There was a time when the critical issue of defence preparedness was hampered by policy paralysis. We have seen the damage such laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives, can cause to the nation. Not now, not anymore, never again," he said, in presence of top executives of foreign as well as domestic defence firms.

He said issues that should have been long addressed by previous governments are being resolved now.

Though the four-day-long Defence Expo - India's biennial exhibition of military platforms and weapons began yesterday, it was formally inaugurated by the prime minister today. The event was also attended by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam and representatives of a number of countries.

Modi also invoked Indian thinker Kautilya, who wrote the 'Arthshastra' more than 2000 years ago and quoted him to say that "the king, or the ruler, must protect his people".

"Our commitment to peace is just as strong as our commitment to protecting our people and our territory. For this we are ready to take all necessary measures to equip our Armed Forces, he said. His visit to Tamil Nadu comes amid widespread protest in the state over the Cauvery issue.

Talking about modernisation of armed forces, Modi also mentioned about the long-drawn but unsuccessful initiative of the previous UPA regime to procure 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).

"You would recall the long-drawn process of procurement of fighter aircraft that never reached any conclusion. We've not only taken bold action to meet our immediate critical requirements, but have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircraft," he said.

The government last week had kick-started the process to procure around 110 fighter jets by issuing an initial tender. It is the first mega procurement initiative for fighter jets after the government scrapped the process to acquire 126 MMRCA for the IAF around five years ago.

Referring to India's quest for peace and stability, the prime minister talked about sacrifices of Indian soldiers in World War II and said the country has always contributed towards global peace, unity and harmony. "India has believed in winning hearts."



"Thousands of years of history of India show that we have never desired any one's territory. Rather than winning countries through wars, India has believed in winning hearts. This is the land from where the message of peace and universal brotherhood has gone out since Vedic times," he said.

Emphasising his government's focus on military modernisation, Modi said it has launched the 'Innovation for Defence Excellence' scheme under which Defence Innovation Hubs' will be set up across the country to provide necessary incubation and infrastructure support to start-ups in the defence sector.

"We want to move fast. But, we do not want to take short cuts," he said. Referring to delays in taking decisions, he said, "You would have seen how the issue of providing bullet-proof jackets to soldiers was kept hanging for years."



Modi said the government recently awarded the contract for bullet proof jackets which will boost defence manufacturing in India.

"In May 2014, the total number of defence export permission granted stood at 118, for a total value of 577 million dollars. In less than four years, we have issued 794 more export permissions, for a total value of over 1.3 billion dollars," he said.

Modi also said the Defence Procurement Procedure' has been revised with many specific provisions for stimulating growth of domestic defence industry. "We have also de-notified some items earlier made exclusively by ordnance factories so that private sector, especially MSMEs, can enter this space."



He said over the last few years, "we have made a humble beginning. On defence manufacturing licences, on defence offsets, on defence exports clearances, on Foreign Direct Investment in defence manufacturing, and on reforming our defence procurement, we have taken many steps".

He said the government was "conscious" that defence manufacturing is unique in terms of government involvement. "You need the government to grant a licence to manufacture. Since the government is almost the only buyer, you need the government to grant an order. You need the government to even to grant permission to export."



"It is wonderful to see that over 500 Indian companies and over 150 foreign companies are here. More than 40 countries have sent their official delegations as well," he said.

Modi described Thiruvidanthai and the nearby region as the land of India's "glorious maritime legacy". "This is the land from where India looked East and acted East thousands of years ago.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said India's commitment to peace is just as strong as its commitment to protecting the country's territory and asserted that his government is ready to take all necessary measures to equip the armed forces to bolster their strength.

The prime minister's comments, after formally inaugurating the Defence Expo here, comes in the backdrop of increasing Chinese activities along the nearly 4,000 km border with India as well as Beijing's efforts to expand its influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

Listing his government's initiatives to promote defence production in India, Modi also accused the previous UPA government of policy paralysis in the defence sector, which he said affected the country's military preparedness.

There was a time when the critical issue of defence preparedness was hampered by policy paralysis. We have seen the damage such laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives can cause to the nation. Not now, not anymore, never again, Modi said in the presence of top executives of foreign as well as domestic defence firms.

Though the four-day Defence Expo, India's biennial exhibition of military platforms and weapons, began yesterday, it was formally inaugurated by the prime minister today.

The event was also attended by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit, state Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam and representatives of a number of countries.

Our commitment to peace is just as strong as our commitment to protecting our people and our territory. For this we are ready to take all necessary measures to equip our armed forces, the prime minister said.

The prime minister -- whose visit to Tamil Nadu comes amid widespread protests in the state over the Cauvery river waters issue -- also discussed modernisation of the armed forces and the long-drawn but unsuccessful initiative of the previous UPA regime to procure 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).

You would recall the long-drawn process of procurement of fighter aircraft that never reached any conclusion. We've not only taken bold action to meet our immediate critical requirements but have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircrafts, Modi said.

The government last week began the process to procure around 110 fighter jets by issuing an RFI (Request for Information) or initial tender. It is the first mega procurement initiative for fighter jets after the government scrapped the process to acquire 126 MMRCA for the IAF around five years ago.

Referring to India's quest for peace and stability, Modi discussed the sacrifices of Indian soldiers in World War II and said the country had always contributed towards global peace, unity and harmony.

India has believed in winning hearts, he said.

Emphasising the government's focus on military modernisation, Modi said the government has launched the Innovation for Defence Excellence' scheme under which Defence Innovation Hubs' will be set up throughout the country to provide necessary incubation and infrastructure support to start-ups in the defence sector.

In May 2014, the total number of defence export permission granted stood at 118, for a total value of 577 million dollars. In less than four years, we have issued 794 more export permissions, for a total value of over 1.3 billion dollars, he said.

He also said the Defence Procurement Procedure' has been revised with many specific provisions for stimulating growth of the domestic defence industry. We have also de-notified some items earlier made exclusively by ordnance factories, so that the private sector, especially MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) can enter this space, he said.

"Over the last few years, we have made a humble beginning. On defence manufacturing licenses, on defence offsets, on defence exports clearances, on Foreign Direct Investment in defence manufacturing, and on reforming our defence procurement, we have taken many steps, he added.

The prime minister said his government was conscious that defence manufacturing is unique in terms of government involvement.

You need the government to grant a license to manufacture. Since the government is almost the only buyer, you need the government to grant an order. You need the government to even to grant permission to export.

It is wonderful to see that over 500 Indian companies and over 150 foreign companies were participating in the exhibition, he said. More than 40 countries had also sent their official delegations as well, he pointed out.

Modi described Thiruvidanthai and the near-by region as the land of India's glorious maritime legacy.

This is the land from where India Looked East and Acted East thousands of years ago, he said.

I am delighted and overwhelmed to see an enthusiastic gathering in this historic region of Kanchipuram in the great state of Tamil Nadu. I am very happy to be here in the land of the great Cholas who established India's historical civilization links through trade and education, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Dubbing the BJP's protest on Parliament impasse as a "drama", the Congress today attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his "silence" on the Unnao and Kathua rape cases and asked whether he would observe a fast on the rising crimes against women under BJP rule in the country.

The Congress demanded that Parliament be reconvened to discuss key issues, saying time has come for the prime minister and the BJP to "repent and apologise" to the people instead of indulging in "theatrics of a farcical fast (upvaas)", and that the ruling party was on its way to 'sanyaas' (retirement) and later 'vanvaas' (exile) in 2019.

Congress spokesperson Kapil Sibal asked why the accused BJP MLA in the Unnao gangrape case was yet to be arrested, and alleged that the Uttar Pradesh chief minister was "protecting" the lawmaker.

Sibal alleged that Modi was "not serious" about rising crime against women in the country and cited National Crime Records Bureau's numbers to substantiate his charge that atrocities against women, including rapes, were "highest" in BJP-ruled states of Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

He questioned whether the prime minister will observe a fast to register his protest against Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on inaction against the BJP MLA accused in the Unnao rape case.

The BJP held a country-wide fast today to corner the opposition on washout of the Budget session of Parliament.

"At a time when girls in the country are being attacked, the fast is just aa 'jumla' (rhetoric)," he said, adding, "Don't do such This is not the time to stay silent but to speak up. This is not the time to observe a fast, the country wants to hear the 'Mann ki baat' of the prime minister."



He said the prime minister should come forward and "say that he is observing a fast against the BJP-ruled state government over the protection" it is giving to an MLA accused of rape.

"If you remain silent, the public will also remain silent and tell you their 'Mann ki Baat' in 2019 elections," he said.

"The 'Beti Bachao' slogan given by the prime minister now seems like a warning...Do you want to give the message to every family that you should hide girls, not save them. If you don't hide them, this will happen," he said while referring to the rapes in Unnao and Kathua.

Congress communications incharge Randeep Surjewala termed the BJP's fast as "farcical" and wondered when would the prime minister talk of "Jan ki baat (people's talk), instead of jumlas and rhetoric and managing headlines".

"A farcical fast by a fascist BJP. PM Modi remorse for failing India can only be through a 'Penance Upwaas'! (Sic)



"Facing imminent defeat in Karnataka in May 2018 and LS in 2019, PM Modi and Amit Shah, are enacting an absurd drama of 'photo-ops' and 'headline management'," he tweeted.

"Time for 'Upvas Ka Jumla' over! Time for 'Sanyaas' (retirement) from power begins and will culminate into 'Vanvaas' (exile) in 2019!," Surjewala said.

Congress senior spokesperson Anand Sharma demanded that Parliament be reconvened to debate and legislate on key issues



He accused the BJP of "orchestrating" disruptions in Parliament to avoid a debate on issues such as the multi-crore-rupee bank scam involving Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi, the CBSE paper leak, the SC/ST Act issue and farm distress.

"It is time for the prime minister and the BJP to reflect, repent and apologise to the people of the country instead of engaging in the theatrics of a farcical fast. Let the government reconvene Parliament to debate and legislate," he told PTI.

Sibal said people of the country are not interested in knowing about the PM 's fast but his stand on "rising" crime against women in the country.

"Unfortunately the manner in which the prime minister has conducted himself suggests that he is not serious about the kind of things that are happening in this country," he said.

Sibal questioned the prime minister's silence on Kathua and Unnao rape incidents, saying Modi talks of Mahatma Gandhi but the latter never remained silent on such issues.

He also took a dig at Amit Shah, saying "he will only talk about animals and trees and things like that. What will he talk about? He is an animal lover, it is quite clear."



Congress general secretary Mohan Prakash said, "It is the arrogance and hypocrisy of Prime Minister Modi and the BJP that they are observing fast today. The BJP's fast is a copy of the Congress' protest of few days ago."



"Whenever a party (in power) tries to copy programme or protest of any other party, it marks the farewell of the ruling party. It also proves that the BJP-led government is tired. The BJP is not going to win the 2019 general polls," he claimed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Blaming the Congress for the impasse in Parliament's Budget Session, BJP president Amit Shah today said it has proved that the opposition party's priority is " of disruption and instability" and not people's welfare.

As BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, observed a fast to "expose" the Congress over the issue of disruption of Parliament, Shah accused the opposition of working to obstruct the prime minister's pro-poor and development agenda.

In an apparent reference to the Congress' claim that it was the BJP which deliberately sabotaged the session, he said the protest is to expose the "hypocrisy" of the Congress and the people will not "forgive" it for its conduct.

"People should know that those sent by them to Parliament as their representatives are working to obstructing the government's development works instead of working in their interests," Shah, who is in Karnataka today where he joined his party's protest against the Congress, said in a blog.

The government advanced the Budget Session to quicken the pace of development but the opposition, especially the Congress, does not want it and that is why it has become an impediment to this, he said.

He said the opposition's "irresponsible" conduct caused a loss of over Rs 333 crore of public money and the ruling NDA MPs' decision to forgo their salaries was a "call of conscience".

In the post, he noted that Rs 1.57 crore and Rs 1.10 crore are spent in running the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha per hour respectively when they are in session. Rs 200 crore and Rs 133 crore were spent in the two Houses respectively.

"The way the Congress vitiated the atmosphere in the Budget Session's second phase and disrupted it, people in a democracy will not forgive it. The opposition's irresponsible conduct is aimed at obstructing Prime Minister Narendra Modi's efforts for the poor's welfare and the country's all-round development," Shah said.

Parliament meets to discuss the policies for the country's progress but instead of showing concern for the people the Congress has excelled in disrupting it, he said.

"It appeared that the Congress was more interested in making noise outside Parliament than engaging in a constructive debate inside," he said.

While Home Minister Rajnath Singh had assured the House that the government was ready for a debate on various issues, including bank scam, Cauvery row and no-confidence motions, but the Congress began claiming that the government was not keen on a debate, he said.

People expect law-makers to take up issues concerning the country's development but the Congress set aside these concerns and began "lying", he alleged.

It was clear that Congress members were coming to Parliament for creating ruckus and they would do it the moment its proceedings would begin and then they would do the same outside, Shah said.

The Rajya Sabha Chairman and the Lok Sabha Speaker always appealed for order but Conhress MPs would always enter the Well of the two Houses, Shah said, adding that such a conduct does not behove a member.

"The Congress has nothing to do with the people's welfare and it is only interested in creating a ruckus to do of disruption and instability," he said.

The BJP chief in his blog named only the Congress and added that a few opposition parties also joined it.

Noting that Modi in his first speech as prime minister had said that his government was for the poor, backwards, women and youths, he said the BJP was committed to the welfare of people.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Days after a Congress leader in Goa said the party won't hesitate to "take over" in case the ruling BJP dispensation collapses, state unit BJP president Vinay Tendulkar today made light of the claim, saying the Congress had failed to grab that opportunity after the 2017 state polls.

Like their counterparts in rest of the country, BJP ministers and party MLAs in Goa today observed a fast against the non-functioning of Parliament.

Union AYUSH Minister Shripad Naik joined the leaders at Azad Maidan in Panaji to take part in the protest.

Hitting out at the Congress, Tendulkar said the opposition party had been on the slideacross the country.

"The Congress should stop dreaming about forming government in Goa. They had an opportunity to form the government (after the assembly polls) but they failed to grab it. In fact, after the polls, the Congress' strength in the (40-member) House fell to 15 from 16," he said referring to the outcome of the 2017 state polls.

Though the Congress had emerged as the single largest party in Goa polls with 17 seats, it failed to form the government, as the BJP, which won 13 seats, cobbled up an alliance comprising two regional parties and three Independents.

Congress leader Shantaram Naik had last month said that if the Manohar Parrikar-led NDA government collapses on its own, the grand old party "will not shirk from its responsibility of taking over".

Dismissing criticism that the administration has suffered in absence of Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, who is in the US for medical treatment, Tendulkar said the BJP government was doing very well.

"The chief minister had formed a Cabinet Advisory Committee of three ministers to run the administration in his absence. He will return to Goa as soon as possible and take over the reins again," said the BJP leader.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Amid reports of a tough battle in Chamundeshwari segment chosen by him, a delegation of Congress workers from northern Karnataka today met Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and urged him to contest the May 12 assembly polls from Badami in their region.

Responding to the workers, who met him here under the leadership of state Congress Working President S R Patil and sitting MLA Chimmanakalti, the chief minister said he would convey to the party high command their demand, Congress sources said.

The workers and leaders are said to have tried to convince Siddaramaiah to contest from Badami in Bagalkote, stating that it wouldhelp party's prospects in the north Karnataka region.

Badami is dominated by the Kuruba community to which Siddaramaiah belongs.

According to party sources, Siddaramaiah has assured them that he will put forward their demand and opinion before the Congress high command.

The chief minister has already declared that he would contest the assembly polls from Chamundeshwari in Mysuru in south Karnataka.

Speculations are rife for some time now that Siddaramaiah is looking for another constituency amid reports it will not be an easy battle for him in Chamundeshwari.

Siddaramaiah, who represents Varuna in Mysuru after it became a constituency in 2008 following delimitation, has expressed intentions to contest from Chamundeshwari thatgave him "political birth".

Making his debut in the Assembly in 1983, he got elected from Chamundeshwari on a Lok Dal Party ticket, from where he has won five times and tasted defeat twice.

Congress is expected to announce its candidates forall the 224 seats in one go, in a day or two.

BJP, which is going all out to unseat the Congress, has already announced its first list of 72 candidates.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Minister of State for Social Justice and Empowerment Ramdas Athawale today claimed that the Congress, out of power, was "gasping like a fish out of water".

He, along with Union Minister Thawarchand Gehlot, was in Indore today to participate in the day-long fast called by the BJP to protest against the washout of the Budget session of the Parliament.

"The way fish gasp for air when out of water, the Congress is in a similar position now that it is out of power," he said.

Accusing the Congress of disrupting Parliament, he said that the government was ready to talk on issues and termed the Congress' act as an effort to "weaken democracy".

"We are ready to talk on issues but the Congress, having been defeated continuously, is creating a scene in Parliament and wasting people's money," Athawale said.

Gehlot alleged that the disruption was done at the behest of Congress president Rahul Gandhi and opposition parties had extended support.

Gehlot said that the opposition did not allow discussions on several bills and proposals that were brought in the interest of the people of the country.

BJP leaders sat on a fast across the state and hit out at the Congress for the logjam in Parliament.

Observing the fast at Board Office Square in the state capital, Bhopal MP Alok Sanjar told PTI, "Parliament witnessed an unpleasant incident for the first time in its history when the opposition shouted slogans during the Prime Minister's speech. The Congress is responsible for disrupting 23 days of the Session in Parliament."



BJP's national vice president and Rajya Sabha (RS) MP, Prabhat Jha, who was at Guna, called the Congress' act as "injustice to people".

Another RS MP, Satyanarayan Jatia, observed the day-long fast at Ratlam.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The reforms initiated at the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) last year would help the country as well as the ruling party, Consul General of the People's Republic of China in Kolkata, Ma Zhanwu, said.

The Congress, which took place in October, 2017, had also cemented the position of Xi Jingping as President for the second term till 2022.

"The backdrop behind the sweeping changes behind the reform measures taken at the Congress was to fulfill the Chinese dream of a national rejuvenation," Zhanwu said at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) here today.

He said that the targets set was to make China a moderately prosperous country in all aspects and by 2050 a modern socialist nation in every dimension.

The Chinese envoy said that these dreams would not be realised without the reform measures initiated since the country was plagued by insurmountable corruption, environmental pollution of massive proportions and to address the 'principal contradiction in society' of getting rid of poverty totally and lift the quality of lives of the people and usher in a balanced development of the economy.

Besides being the President, Jingping is also the general secretary of the CPC and chairman of Central Military Commission, holding three topmost positions.

"The 19th Congress decisions will help the country to take forward the success of four decades of reforms and opening up further," he said.

He said China would continue to rely on reforms, and be more open to foreign investment and protect intellectual property rights forcefully.

Regarding India's reservations on the One Belt One Road (OBOR) Initiative, Zhanwu said that it was a shared approach with the other Asian nations and not China's solo programme.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Several people were today injured in clashes that broke out between the police and student activists of the CPI(M) outside the office of the State Election Commission (SEC).

The activists had gathered near the SEC office at Rawdon Street, in the central part of the city, to protest against the violence during the filing of nominations for next month's panchayat polls, a police officer said.

Trouble began when the demonstrators, who sought State Election Commissioner A K Singh's resignation, tried to break the police cordon that has been set up outside the SEC office to avert any untoward incident, he said.

The police, after failing to pacify the crowd, resorted to "mild lathicharge" to push back the crowd, he added.

The CPI(M)-led Left Front has called for a six-hour strike in West Bengal tomorrow in protest against the pre-poll violence in the state.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 22 year-old Dalit woman was killed in Nainaha Bartali village under Sangrampur police station area here, the police said today.

The body of the woman, a BA first year student, was found this morning about 100 metres from her house with her throat slit, the police added.

Additional Superintendent of Police BC Dubey said the body has been sent for post mortem examination and a police team has been formed to work out the case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)DCW chief Swati Maliwal today wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, expressing concern over the increasing cases of sexual violence against women, and said she would go on a indefinite hunger strike at the Rajghat from tomorrow to protest the Unnao and Kathua rape incidents.

In her letter, she said sexual violence against women and children in the country had reached critical levels.

Maliwal highlighted the rape of an eight-month-old girl in Delhi, the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir and the Unnao case.

She appealed to the prime minister to "think about these girls" during his fast today and work towards securing justice for them.

Maliwal reiterated her demand that a system be created to "award death penalty to rapists of children within six months".

The DCW chief wrote that taking inspiration from the prime minister's fast, she would go on an indefinite hunger strike from tomorrow until the prime minister comes up with a concrete plan to check the incidents of sexual assault against women in the country.

Maliwal "expressed pain at the silence of the prime minister on the recent rapes and lack of action regarding the same", according to a statement of the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW).

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi High Court today refused to stay the release of movie 'Nanak Shah Fakir', scheduled to hit the theatres from tomorrow, saying the petition was motivated after the Supreme Court refused to grant any relief.

The High Court said it was unbelievable that the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee (DSGMC), which has filed the petition challenging the no objection certificate issued by the Censor Board, was not aware of the making of film till now.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar said the "release of the film cannot be interdicted".

The court directed the Centre to ensure maintenance of law and order and made it clear that it was not granting any ex-parte relief to DSGMC without hearing the film producer.

The petition challenged the release of the movie saying it has characterised the family members of Guru Nank Dev with humans/actors which is against the principles of Sikh religion.

Earlier, Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) today made two unsuccessful attempts in the Supreme Court to stall the film's release tomorrow.

The SGPC made two pleas, one in the morning and then in the afternoon, before the apex court which rejected both of them.

The top court had on April 10 criticised the SGPC, the apex religious body of the Sikhs, for imposing restrictions on the film 'Nanak Shah Fakir' and cleared the decks for its nationwide release scheduled on April 13.

It had said that after the CBFC certification, no group, body, association or individual can create any kind of disturbance in exhibition of the film.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sensing victory, the Democratic Party has rallied behind Indian American candidate in Arizona ahead of a special Congressional election later this month.

"Hiral's running in a district that Democrats haven't contested since 2012. And winning this race would significantly boost our chances of flipping the House in November," the Democratic Party said, throwing its weight behind the Indian American, who is giving a tough fight to her Republican opponent Debbie Lesko for the 8th Congressional District of Arizona.

Tipirneni and Lesko are pitted in a tough fight in the April 24 special election, necessitated after the resignation of Republican Trent Franks following reports of sexual misconduct. Interestingly the seat was represented for three terms by Democrat Gabrielle Gifford, who resigned in 2012, after surviving an assassination attempt. However there were no Democratic candidates running in the last three elections.

Franks had represented the seat since 2013. He resigned on December 8, thus necessitating a special election.

"Hiral's strong campaign is clearly making Republicans nervous. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has already hosted a fundraiser for her opponent, and Paul Ryan is headlining another," the party said.

The opposing Republican Party has poured in USD 322,419 into Lesko's political campaign. This special election has suddenly caught national attention and is considered a litmus test for the ruling Republicans.

Tipirneni's parents came to the US from India when she was three years old. A bout of typhoid fever as a child inspired her to become a doctor specialising in emergency medicine, and she's a powerful advocate for affordable health care coverage for all, her party said.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who is the first ever Indian American women to be elected to the US House of Representatives, also came out in support of Tipirneni.

"Pramila is supporting our incredible Democratic nominee, Dr Hiral Tipirneni, because we need to elect more women to Congress across the country and take back the house," Jayapal's team said in a fund raising email.

"Dr Tipirneni is an emergency room physician and cancer research advocate. She's hardworking and compassionate with a common-sense approach to the issues we care about," it said.

If she wins, it would mean the first woman elected to the House this year, the second Indian American woman ever elected to Congress, another Republican district won by a Democrat and a massive defeat for President Donald Trump's agenda, it said.

The Democratic Party also sent a last minute fundraising email for Tipirneni.

Tipirneni's father was a structural engineer in Ohio, where she and her brother were raised in a working-class suburb of Cleveland. Her mother is a social worker.

Tipirneni exuded confidence in winning the seat.

"Frankly, we're getting a lot of folks who are Republicans and just feeling a little frustrated or maybe disenfranchised and just really want to talk about the issues and possible solutions, which is what my campaign has really been all about," the Indian American said.RBI's former governor Raghuram Rajan has said that he had made it quite clear to the government that the was "not a good idea" and



that its implementation was "not well-planned" since 87.5 per cent of the currency was being demonetised.

On November 8, 2016, the Centre banned Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes to curtail the shadow economy and crack down on the use of illicit and counterfeit cash to fund illegal activities and terrorism.

Speaking at the prestigious Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge on Wednesday, 55-year-old Rajan rejected the claim that the Reserve Bank of India had not been consulted by the government before it went ahead with the

He, however, reiterated that the move to cancel 87.5 per cent of the currency value was "not a good idea".

"I didn't ever say that I wasn't consulted (on demonetisation). In fact, I have made it quite clear that we were consulted and we didn't think it was a good idea," said Rajan who is currently the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

He said "was not a well-planned, well thought-out, useful exercise and I told the government that when the idea was first mooted."



He added that any macro-economist would say that if 87.5 per cent of the currency is being demonetised, then it better be made sure that a similar amount of currency is printed and ready to be put back in circulation.

"India went into it without having done that. It had a negative economic impact but also the idea was that somehow people who had money stored in their basements without having paid taxes on it would overnight see reason and come to the government and say 'sorry we were hiding this stuff, let me pay taxes on it'," Rajan said, calling it a "naive view".

"Anybody who knows India, knows that very quickly we find ways around the system," he said, adding that with "essentially" all the money that was demonetised coming back into the system, the exercise did not have the direct effect that was sought.

While the longer term impact of demonetisation is yet to be seen, its negative economic impact included people not having currency, not being able to pay and economic activity plummeting especially in the informal sector.

"There may be some longer term impact that people think that if this sort of thing happens then the government is serious about collecting taxes. There may be greater tax payments but we still have to see strong evidence that that is true," he said.

Rajan also expressed concern that a lot of people probably lost their jobs due to demonetisation but that has not been counted well as it would be mostly in the informal sector.

"The positive impacts (of demonetisation) are out there in the future. We have no idea whether they will be important. To my mind it was not a policy that was useful at that time," he said while speaking at the 2018 Albert H Gordon Lecture on the topic 'Leverage, Financial Crises, and Policies to Raise Economic Growth'.

To a suggestion that demonetisation could have positively impacted growth, Rajan said "you would have to find a new economic theory to explain how it helped the economy".

He said most estimates of the cost of demonetisation vary between 1.5-2 per cent of the GDP.

"It would be a really die-hard government advocate who would say that the growth benefits of demonetisation were immediate," he said.

"Most of the supporters of the move would say that the benefits of the move are coming by changing the incentive to pay taxes. I would say yes, we will have to wait and see whether that in fact is true," he said.

Rajan, who joined the RBI in September 2013 when the country was facing its worst currency crisis since the 1990s, left the organisation after completing his three-year term in September 2016.The Odisha police has decided to step up operations against the Maoists and bring in necessary changes in the strategy to deal with the Naxalites, a top police police official said.

This was stated by Odisha's Director General of Police (DGP) R P Sharma after reviewing operations with top police officials in Naxalism-hit Rayagada, where a District Voluntary Force personnel was killed in a landmine blast on April 9.

The police chief emphasised the importance of adhering to the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) during anti-Maoist operations to avert any injury or casualty, officials present at the meeting said.

While underlining the need to intensify anti-Maoist operations, Sharma also urged the insurgents to surrender and return to the social mainstream to lead a normal life.

"Maoists who surrender will be rehabilitated according to the prevailing surrender policy," the DGP said.

A cheque of Rs 18 lakh was handed over as ex-gratia to the father of the deceased DVF jawan, Sanjaya Majhi.

The jawan was killed when an improvised explosive device (IED) planted by the Maoists went off near Sakata village under the jurisdiction of Muniguda police station late on April 9 night, police said.

Terming the attack as "an act of cowardice", a senior police official said that such assaults would not be able to demoralise the security personnel.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The United States and Pakistan are engaged in a diplomatic dispute that could lead to strict restrictions on the movement of their diplomats from May 1, according to a media report today.

The Trump administration has notified Pakistan that diplomats at its embassy in Washington and at consulates in other cities will not be able to travel beyond 40-km from their posts without permission, it said.

The notice, shared with the Pakistan Embassy in Washington and sent also to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad, indicates that the restrictions could be imposed from May 1, if certain issues remained unresolved, the Dawn newspaper reported.

However, both the US State Department and the Pakistan Embassy have denied any restriction being imposed on the movement of diplomats, as of now.

In an email response, a US Statement Department spokesperson said "I can confirm that there are no restrictions on the travel for Pakistani diplomats in the United States."



When asked, if the restrictions could be imposed in the near future, the US official said: "Beyond that, we have nothing to announce at this time."



A spokesperson for the Pakistan Embassy in the US also gave almost an identical response, saying that so far, there were no restrictions on the movement of Pakistani diplomats in the US, but the embassy had no information about future restrictions.

The issue was also raised at the State Department's briefing on Tuesday, when spokesperson Heather Nauert said: "I don't have anything for you on that."



The report said that Pakistan had received the notification in mid-March and since then the two sides have had held several discussions on the issue, both in Islamabad and Washington.

The officials from both the countries, the US and Pakistan, however, made it clear that the notice had nothing to do with the case of an American military attache at the US embassy in Islamabad, who is charged with causing the death of a Pakistani national and injuring another in a road accident on Saturday last.

According to the notification, Pakistani diplomats will need to apply for a permission at least five days before an intended travel outside the imposed 4o km (25 miles) radius.

In their discussions with their Pakistani counterparts, US officials also pointed out that Islamabad has already imposed similar restrictions on the US diplomats in Pakistan, who are not allowed to visit the tribal belt or Karachi.

Pakistani officials, however, argue that those are not restrictions but security measures intended to protect American diplomats.

They also pointed out that the State Department too, does not allow its diplomats in Pakistan to visit the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi and certain other places due to security reasons.

Pakistan says that restrictions on travelling to places like FATA can be removed, if Americans are satisfied with the security arrangements in those areas.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Department of Telecom will next week discuss the mobile phone cloning issue with global industry body GSM Association, an official said today.

"A meeting with GSMA is scheduled for April 17 to discuss various issues. The DoT will take up mobile phone cloning issues with them," an official source, who did not wished to be named, told PTI.

The meeting will be a follow-up to the issues raised by telecom minister Manoj Sinha during his visit to Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, Spain, in February.

He had raised challenges posed by cloning of unique identity number of mobile handsets, IMEI as well as SIMs.

IMEI number - a unique 15-digit serial number of mobile devices - is allocated by global industry body GSMA and organisations authorised by it. When a mobile phone is lost, the victim is required to mention the IMEI number of the handset for tracking.

The DoT will also discuss SIM cloning issues with GSMA "but it is not the only body that can help in resolving fake SIMs. The issue of fake SIMs will be taken up with other bodies separately", the source said.

The government through C-DoT is developing a system, Central Equipment Identity Register (CEIR), which will block all services on stolen or lost mobile phones on any network even if the SIM card is removed or IMEI number of the handset is changed.

CEIR is also expected to protect consumer interest and facilitate for law enforcement authorities legal interception.

The government has proposed to allocate Rs 15 crore for setting up CEIR which will bring down the number of counterfeit handsets and discourage theft, according to the Union Budget 2018-19.

"The DoT will seek help of GSMA help in implementation CEIR," the source said.

CEIR will connect the IMEI database of all mobile operators. It will act as a central system for all network operators to share blacklisted mobile terminals so that devices placed under the said category in one network will not work on the other, even if the SIM card in the device is changed, it said.

DoT and GSMA will also discuss the roadmap for capacity building, knowledge and global best practices sharing program.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Encounter sites are are not the venue of "marriages of terrorists" to be flocked by youngsters as bullets do not differentiate between stone pelters and militants, Jammu and Kashmir police chief S P Vaid said today as he asserted his force was as competent as the CBI to probe the Kathua rape and murder case.

In a first, the state Director General of Police (DGP) took to micro-blogging site Twitter to participate in a live broadcast where he took questions directly from people ranging from issues like the Kashmir problem, Islamic State terror group, human rights violations to educated youth joining terrorists and disruption of work in educational institutions.

Asked why the rape and murder case of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district in January was not transferred to CBI, he said we have no objection but the police is as competent as anybody else".

If we can we fight terrorism and stone pelting, why we can't carry out the professional investigation. Our officers are on deputation with CBI, Vaid said expressing confidence in his crime branch team that investigated the case and arrested eight persons.

He termed it a misconception that only officers from Kashmir were part of the special investigation team.

The SIT had officers from all ranks and regions. A police officer is a police officer and not a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Christian. That is what we believe in, he said adding that it was a misconception that no officer from Jammu area was part of the team.

Naming two of the officers, he said SSP, Jammu, Ramesh Jhalla and DSP, S Sharma, were actively involved in the case.

Some Pakistani handlers also appeared to be asking questions during the interaction.

Vaid also asserted that the gun and violence were no solution to the Kashmir problem and favoured a dialogue between the concerned parties for a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir issue.

"I wish the Kashmir problem to be so simple that I could answer it in one reply. So many players are working for decades to find out a solution to Kashmir. But this is not a simple thing. Personally I feel the gun is not the solution, the police chief said in reply to a query.

Let every party concerned including our neighbour (Pakistan) understand that the only way out is to sit together, talk and sort out the problem, he said.

The DGP reiterated his appeal to the youth not to come close to encounter sites.

Let me tell you that no citizen of India would like any civilian killing. We have been repeatedly requesting people not to come near the encounter sites," he said.

He said when bullets fly, whether from the militants, army, paramilitary forces or the police's side, they do it in a trajectory.

"They will not look for a chest of a particular person; it can hit anybody. It is not advisable to come near the encounter sites, he said adding that it pained him and the forces most if a civilian died.

Civilians, he, however, insisted have no business to be present at encounter sites.

"Marriage of the militants is not going on that these boys are coming near the encounter sites, he said.

Vaid said he does not favour snapping of internet to maintain law and order in the valley but is forced to take such a decision.

I am absolutely against snapping of internet. However, the problem is that some mischievous elements resort to misuse of it and spread hatred, false propaganda and even instigate young boys, he said.

He said police was working on various methods to ensure minimum civilian casualties and minimum disruption of work in education institutions besides keeping away educated youth from joining terror ranks.

Referring to the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani and subsequent protests, he said it was the most challenging task of his career. Post Burhan situation when I was given the charge as special DGP law and order was the most challenging task, he said.

Asked why police did not take action against Army personnel, he said cases were registered whenever incidents of human rights violations came to notice.

Army has protection under AFSPA and before starting any criminal proceeding, the sanction of government of India is required under the law of the land. Police since 1990's registered cases where such incidents have happened and come to our notice. We have been taking up with government, he said.

On the presence of terror group Islamic State in Kashmir, he said ISIS is basically a thought and a radical idea adding I wish it doesn't come here.

He agreed with a questioner that national media was not playing a constructive role about the situation in Kashmir.

National media is not playing a very constructive role and efforts are on to counsel them along with the local media not to hurt the sentiments of Kashmiri people, he said.

He said the amnesty given to "first time stone-pelters stands and anyone can even approach now.

He ruled out the use of chemical weapons against holed up militants during operations and said no human force can think of it. These rumours are set from Pakistan.

He termed as frivolous the charges that the youth of interior Srinagar were being harassed by police on the pretext of being stone pelters and hefty amounts of money were being taken from them.

I have also come across such complaints which mostly are frivolous. If there is any genuine complaint let the person come forward, we will take strict action, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Encounter sites are not the venues of "marriages of terrorists" for youngsters to rush as bullets do not differentiate between stone pelters and militants, police chief S P Vaid said on Thursday.

In a first, the state Director General of Police (DGP) took to micro-blogging site Twitter to participate in a live broadcast where he took questions on a range of issues.

During the interaction, held a day after four civilians died in the crossfire during a gunfight in the Kulgam district, Vaid reiterated his appeal to the youth to not flock to encounter sites.

Let me tell you that no citizen of India would like any civilian killing. We have been repeatedly requesting people not to come near the encounter sites," he said.

When bullets fly, whether fired by the militants, Army, paramilitary or the police, they do it in a trajectory, he said.

"They will not look for the chest of a particular person; it can hit anybody. It is not advisable to come near the encounter sites, he said adding that it pained him and the forces most if a civilian died.

Civilians, he, however, insisted had no business to be present at encounter sites.

"Marriage of militants is not going on that these boys are coming near the encounter sites, he said.

Vaid said he did not favour snapping of internet to maintain law and order in the valley but was forced to take such a decision.

I am absolutely against snapping of internet. However, the problem is that some mischievous elements resort to misuse of it and spread hatred, false propaganda and even instigate young boys, he said.

He said police was working on various methods to ensure minimum civilian casualties and minimum disruption of work in education institutions besides keeping away educated youth from joining terror ranks.

Asked about the Kashmir problem, Vaid asserted that the gun and violence were no solution to the issue and favoured a dialogue between the parties involved.

"I wish the Kashmir problem was so simple that I could answer it in one reply. So many players are working for decades to find out a solution to Kashmir. But this is not a simple thing. Personally I feel the gun is not the solution, the police chief said.

Let every party concerned, including our neighbour (Pakistan), understand that the only way out is to sit together, talk and sort out the problem, he said.

Vaid agreed with a questioner that media was not playing a constructive role on the situation in Kashmir.

media is not playing a very constructive role and efforts are on to counsel them along with the local media not to hurt the sentiments of Kashmiri people, he said.

Referring to the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani and subsequent protests, he said it was the most challenging time of his career. Post Burhan situation when I was given the charge as special DGP law and order was the most challenging task, he said.

Asked why police did not act against Army personnel, he said cases were registered whenever incidents of human rights violations came to notice.

Army has protection under AFSPA and before starting any criminal proceeding, the sanction of government of India is required under the law of the land. Police since 1990's registered cases where such incidents happened or came to our notice. We have been taking them up with government, he said.

On the presence of terror group Islamic State in Kashmir, he said ISIS was basically a thought and a radical idea. I wish it doesn't come here, he added.

He said amnesty given to "first time stone-pelters stands and anyone can even approach now.

He ruled out the use of chemical weapons against holed up militants and said no human force can think of it. These rumours are set from Pakistan, Vaid said.

He termed as frivolous the charges that the youth from interior Srinagar were being harassed by police on the pretext of being stone pelters and hefty amounts of money were being taken from them.

I have also come across such complaints which mostly are frivolous. If there is any genuine complaint let the person come forward, we will take strict action, he said.President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today said Turkey was worried by the "arm wrestling" of world powers over Syria, adding he will discuss with Russian President Vladimir Putin how to stop chemical attacks in the country.

"We are extremely worried that some countries confident of their military power are turning Syria into a scene for arm wrestling," Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara after an unprecedented upsurge of tensions between Washington and Moscow.

Erdogan added that he would speak to Putin later on Thursday on "how we stop this chemical massacre" after an alleged chemical attack in Syria reportedly killed dozens.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today said Turkey was worried by the "arm wrestling" of world powers over Syria, as tensions soared between Washington and Moscow after threats of possible US air strikes.

"We are extremely worried that some countries confident of their military power are turning Syria into a scene for arm wrestling," Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara after Washington and Moscow traded accusations.

His comments came after US President Donald Trump warned Moscow on Wednesday that US missiles "will be coming" to Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria which reportedly killed dozens.

Erdogan said he would talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin about "how we stop this chemical massacre" after the suspected attack.

A Turkish presidential source later confirmed the call had taken place but said only that the two men "exchanged views on the latest developments in Syria" and agreed to maintain contact.

Ankara appears keen to keep its distance from one of the worst outbreaks of tensions since the Cold War between its NATO ally Washington and increasingly close partner Moscow.

Erdogan's comments echoed those of his Prime Minister Binali Yildirim who called on Russia and the United States on Wednesday to stop "street fighting" on Syria.

While Russia, alongside Iran, has been supporting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Turkey has repeatedly called for his ouster and supported Syrian rebels.

But Turkey and Russia in recent months have put their differences aside and have been working closely to find a political solution to the conflict.

Last week, Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani were hosted by Erdogan in Ankara for a tripartite summit to discuss the Syrian conflict.

The alleged chemical attack in rebel-held Douma near Damascus on April 7 sparked international outrage and warnings of possible military action.

Turkey's foreign ministry has said it strongly suspects Assad was to blame. "God willing, the (world's) collective conscience will act together to end this crisis for th sake of the innocent children massacred in the chemical attack in Douma," Erdogan vowed.

Erdogan said the Assad regime already had "a black mark on its track record" after seven years of civil war in Syria.

Without naming the countries, he appeared to lash out both at Russia for backing Assad and the United States for helping the Syrian Kurdish group the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Turkey considers a terror group.

"Those who support the regime of murderer Assad are making a mistake. Those who support the PYD terror group are also making a mistake. Until the end, we will fight against both these mistakes.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)There is no alternative to Narendra Modi as prime minister, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said today as he, along with a number of BJP MPs and MLAs, observed a day-long fast here.

The fast was observed by BJP leaders across the country on Modi's call to protest the washout of the recent Budget session of Parliament by opposition parties.

Fadnavis was joined by MPs Poonam Mahajan and Paresh Rawal, local MLAs Parag Alavani, Amit Satam and Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar during the fast at the party office in suburban Vile Parle.

On the occasion, the chief minister hit out at the Congress and charged it with "murdering the democracy" by stalling the Budget session of Parliament.

The Congress has no moral strength to face Parliament when the prime minister counters it, he told reporters.

"People know the contradictions of the opposition parties. They cannot stay together. What is the alternative to Modi in terms of policies, programmes and leadership? The opposition only wants power...," he said.

He said the Congress has no moral strength to face Parliament when the prime minister counters it.

In a scathing attack on the Opposition, he said, "The BJP had to watch the murder of democracy by the Congress during the Budget session. Debate is an important aspect of Parliament. We may agree to disagree, but a discussion should be allowed."



He alleged that it was a conspiracy "by the Congress and their friends" to disrupt Parliament because they are angry that people rejected them in 2014.

"They took out that anger by disrupting Parliament," he said.

He said "the Congress could not face Parliament" and hence was "spreading misinformation" against the BJP.

"The (Congress) party was the first to suspend democracy by imposing Emergency in 1975," he said.

He alleged that most of the atrocities on Dalits took place during the Congress rule while "the Dalit and tribal entrepreneurship is being encouraged by the Modi government."



Fadnavis said Modi is dedicated to the welfare of the people and the country.

"Public hai, public sab jaanti hai (the public knows everything)," Fadnavis said.

Fadnavis, while leaving the venue, said he was going to Nanded district for an official work.

"Don't worry, I will not have 'chole bhature'," he said, in an apparent reference to some Congress leaders who were "seen having food" before their fast on Monday in New Delhi.

"Our struggle to preserve the democratic values will continue," Fadnavis said.

A street play was performed in front of him, highlighting the government's work, like demonetisation, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Jalyukt Shivar campaign (aimed at improving irrigation facilities in Maharashtra) and other welfare programmes for farmers.

On the occasion, Rawal, an MP from Gujarat, said the Congressdidnot allow Parliament to function as it does not have any issue to raise.

"We decided to forgo our salaries as the Congress did not allow Parliament to function. But, the Congress members have taken their salaries," he claimed.

Rawal mocked the Congress's fast on Monday as "farce" over some of its leaders "seen having food" before the protest.

Kirit Somaiya, the BJP MP from North East Mumbai, sat on the protest near the Bhandup railway station.

"The Congress and other opposition parties did not allow Parliament to function for 23 days, and 17 important Bills were passed without debate. We wanted to discuss about the alleged bank scams of Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi, the non-performing assets (NPAs) of Rs 52 lakh crore, among other important issues," he said.

Railway Minister Piyush Goyal observed the fast in neighbouring Thane city.

He alleged that the Congress had "disgraced the Constitution" framed by Dr B R Ambedkar.

"Ambedkar's hard and noble work has been disgraced by the Congress by not allowing Parliament to function," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Finland today granted its final approval for a pipeline dubbed Nord Stream 2, which will be used to pump Russian natural gas to Germany, to go through its waters in the Baltic Sea.

The final green light for the Finnish stretch of the planned pipeline came from the Nordic country's environmental authorities, a week after the government in Helsinki gave its consent for a project that has sparked controversy in the European Union.

"The Regional State Administrative Agency for Southern Finland has granted the permit required under the Finnish Water Act for construction of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipelines between Russia and Germany within the Finnish Exclusive Economic Zone," the agency said in a statement.

But the plan to bring more Russian gas to Western Europe is facing headwind elsewhere in the bloc.

Although German authorities gave Nord Stream 2 their green light at the end of March, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday that the plan could not go forward "without clarity about the Ukrainian transit role".

If completed, the new pipeline would allow Russian gas to bypass its former route via Ukraine and Poland on its way to European markets.

Ukraine and Poland have been critical of the project, which they claim to undermine the EU in the face of Russian aggression.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has urged Germany to abandon plans to build Nord Stream 2, saying it would amount to an "economic and energy blockade" of his crisis-torn country.

Kiev has strongly condemned the approvals the project has been granted so far.

"It is important that Germany and all the other EU countries remember the principles on which the EU was built and understand that their authorisation for the construction of Nord Stream 2 deals a heavy blow to their allies, Ukraine being one of them," speaker of the Ukrainian parliament Andriy Parubiy declared in a speech, quoted by Interfax-Ukraine agency.

Approvals are still needed from Russian, Danish and Swedish authorities. If approved, the pipeline's construction could begin as soon as this year, aiming for a commercial use in the beginning of 2020.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Breast-feeding babies for the first two years would save the lives of more than 8,20, 000 children under five years of age annually, says a new 10-point WHO- UNICEF guidelines, aimed at promoting breast feeding.

"Breastfeeding also improves IQ, school readiness and attendance, and is associated with higher income in adult life (for the babies). It also reduces the risk of breast cancer in the mother," said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta H Fore in a statement entailing the new guidelines, released on Wednesday.

"Breastfeeding within the first hour of birth protects newborn babies from infections and saves lives. Infants are at greater risk of death due to diarrhoea and other infections when they are only partially breastfed or not breastfed at all," he said.

"But breastfeeding requires support, encouragement and guidance. With these basic steps, implemented properly, we can significantly improve breastfeeding rates around the world and give children the best possible start in life," Fore added.

Accordingly, the new ten-point WHO-UNICEF guidelines aim at increasing support for breastfeeding in health facilities across the globe, providing maternity and newborn services, the statement said.

Listing practical steps that countries should take "to protect, promote and support breastfeeding in facilities providing maternity and newborn services," the guidelines seek to encourage new mothers to breastfeed and apprise health workers of steps to support it.

They provide immediate health system platform to help mothers initiate breastfeeding within the first hour and breastfeed exclusively for six months, the WHO-UNICEF statement said.

The guidelines described how hospitals should have a written breastfeeding policy in place, staff competencies, and antenatal and post-birth care, including breastfeeding support for mothers.

The guidelines also recommend limited use of breastmilk substitutes, responsive feeding, educating parents on the use of bottles and pacifiers, and support when mothers and babies are discharged from hospital.

WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that in many hospitals and communities around the world, whether a child can be breastfed or not can make the difference between life and death, and whether a child will develop to reach his or her full potential.

"As part of every country's drive to achieve universal health coverage, there is no better way to start than by ensuring the ten steps to successful breastfeeding as the standard for care of mothers and their babies," Dr Tedros said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Railway Minister Piyush Goyal on Thursday asked caterers to provide quality food on trains -- an instruction he gave while himself observing a fast.

Goyal, who was in Thane as part of the BJP's day-long nationwide fast over the washout of the budget session of Parliament, spoke via-video conference with the representatives of the food and beverage industry to improve catering services on trains.

Speaking from the stage of the protest, he conveyed to them that substandard food being served to train passengers was unacceptable.

The minister, who recently received complaints about over-pricing and quality of food being served to passengers on trains, said that the railways would not make any compromise on quality.

He said that there should be a master plan for rates and concentration should be on quality rather than variety.

"The minister said that even if the caterer was giving less variety it was OK, but the quality should be maintained. He also said that an exit policy should be put in place by the railways in case a caterer wanted to discontinue services," a railway official said.

The minister told the caterers that strict action should be taken against cartels operating in the railways, the official said.

Goyal asked caterers to impress the passengers with the quality of food.

The minister said that the catering staff would now use Point of Sale machines for accounting and if a bill was not given, the meal would be considered free.

The minister also said that service staff found taking tips would be blacklisted and warned that the tip system should be stopped.

"MR (Minister of Railways) has told the caterers that all complaints should be made public and strict action should be taken against corruption, and his office be directly informed of such wrong doings.

"A la carte menu should be laminated and provided in all trains along with approved rate cards," the official said.

Goyal also asked the caterers to create protocols for pantry cars to ensure roaches and other pests are taken care of.

Make a checklist and set standard operating procedures, the minister told the caterers.

The representatives from food and beverage groups requested that all catering items should be priced in multiples of five which will aid the passengers and reduce instances of overcharging. They also suggested that unauthorised hawking on station and in trains should be eradicated.

During the interaction, the introduction of hot food vending machines on platforms and trains and promotion of ready-to-eat meals and e-catering was also discussed.

Food and beverages industry players such as Hindustan Unilever Limited, Cafe Coffee Day, Nestle, Travel Food Services, Bikanerwala, among others took part in the interaction along with senior railway officials and IRCTC.Following are the top foreign stories at 2100 hours:



FGN21 IMF-INDIA-AADHAAR



India should take steps to ensure privacy in biometric identification programmes: IMFWashington: The IMF says India should take necessary measures to ensure privacy and security controls while implementing large identification programmes like the Aadhaar, as the global financial body identified India as a leader in the biometric identification system. By Lalit K JhaFGN19 UK-SPY-LD CHEMICALChemical weapons watchdog confirms UK findings in Russian ex-spy caseLondon: The international chemical weapons watchdog confirms the UK's findings that the source of the military-grade nerve agent used to target the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury originally came from Russia. By Aditi KhannaFGN22 PAK-INDIA-SAARCPak accuses India of 'scuttling' SAARC summitIslamabad: Pakistan accuses India of "scuttling" the process to reconvene the SAARC summit in Islamabad and "holding hostage" the development and economic progress of the whole region. By Sajjad HussainFGN23 BANGLA-COURT-RAPEBangladesh's HC bans two-finger test on rape victimsDhaka: A Bangladeshi High Court bans the derogatory "two-finger test" on rape victims, saying it has no scientific and legal merit. By Anisur RahmanFGN17 US-INDIANS-MISSINGSearch continues on swollen US river for SUV matching missing Indian family's vehicleLos Angeles: Authorities in California have set up a joint incident command centre to trace the occupants of a vehicle that was swept away in flood waters, a week after four members of an Indian family went missing in the area.

FGN16 CHINA-INDIA



Sushma, Sitharaman scheduled to be in Beijing on same day on April 24



Beijing: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are scheduled to be in Beijing on April 24 to attend different meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and interact with their counterparts from the member states. By K J M Varma



FGN13 RAJAN-DEMONETISATION



Demonetisation was 'not a good idea': Raghuram Rajan



New York: RBI's former governor Raghuram Rajan says he had made it quite clear to the government that the demonetisation was "not a good idea" and that its implementation was "not well-planned" since 87.5 per cent of the currency was being demonetised. By Yoshita Singh



FGN11 ZUCKERBERG-HEARING



My data also harvested, sold by Cambridge Analytica: Zuckerberg



Washington: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells US lawmakers that his personal data was also harvested and sold by Cambridge Analytica and he intends to initiate legal action against the British firm accused of stealing personal information and using it for political purposes. By Lalit K Jha



FGN10 US-INDIAN-TERRORISM



Indian engineer in US pleads guilty to raising money for top al-Qaida leader



Houston: A 38-year-old Indian engineer in the US state of Ohio, accused of funding a top al-Qaida leader, pleads guilty to concealment of financing of terrorism.

FGN9 US-CHINA-LD POMPEO



China continues its provocations in South, East China seas: Pompeo



Washington: China continues its provocations in the South and East China seas and is making a "concerted" effort to compete with the US, CIA Director Mike Pompeo has warned while identifying Russia as a "danger" for America. By Lalit K Jha



FGN7 FACEBOOK-ZUCKERBERG-USERS



No significant increase in Facebook users deactivating their account: Zuckerberg



Washington: The Cambridge Analytica scandal in which personal data of over 87 million Facebook users, including 500,000 Indians, was compromised, has not hit the social media platform in a significant way in terms of people deactivating their accounts, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg says. By Lalit K Jha



FGN6 PAK-HINDUS



Act against those who hurt Hindus' religious sentiments: Pak Speaker to Interior Minister



Islamabad: Pakistan's National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq asks the interior ministry to crack down on any individual or groups involved in posting blasphemous material about the Hindu religion, after the minority community leaders protested against a wave of online hate speech hurting their religious sentiments. By Sajjad Hussain



FGN18 LANKA-LD MINISTERS



6 Sri Lankan ministers quit Sirisena-led unity govt



Colombo: Six ministers of President Maithripala Sirisena- led unity government in Sri Lanka resign, days after they voted in favour of a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

FGN20 RUSSIA-SPY-OPCW



Moscow says will not accept conclusions of OPCW on spy poisoning



Moscow: Moscow says it would not accept the conclusions of the world's chemical arms watchdog on the poisoning of a former spy in England unless Russian experts could access the samples used.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Major stakeholders, including foreign and domestic firms, will be consulted on the defence production and procurement policy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said today, asserting that the government was attempting to give a major push to military manufacturing in India.

In his address at the Defence Expo here, Modi, in the presence of top executives of global defence majors, said the government was conscious that creating a defence industrial complex is far from simple but it was sincerely working to achieve it.

We are committed to building a defence industrial complex that has room for everyone -- public sector, private sector, as well as foreign firms, he said.

The government has been projecting the 10th edition of the biennial event here as the first major attempt to transform India into a hub of military manufacturing



We know that a lot needs to be done, and many pieces of this puzzle need to fit together, the prime minister said.

The Defence Ministry last month had come out with a draft policy which envisages achieving a turnover of Rs 1,70,000 crore in military goods and services by 2025 by promoting the domestic defence industry. The policy is likely to be finalised in the next two months.

In the weeks ahead, we will undertake extensive consultations with all stakeholders, including both Indian and foreign companies, about our defence production and defence procurement policy space. I call upon all of you to actively participate in this exercise, he said.

India is expected to spend close to USD 300 billion in the next five years in procuring defence equipment and almost all major global defence firms are eyeing a slice of it.

Our aim is not just to discuss, but to draw the right lessons. Our intention is not to lecture, but to listen. Our goal is not merely to tinker, but to transform, Modi said.

The prime minister also launched an Innovation for Defence Excellence' scheme. Under the scheme, defence innovation hubs will be set up throughout the country to provide necessary incubation and infrastructure support to the start-ups in the defence area.

Modi said the government has made a humble beginning over the last few years to strengthen India's defence industry sector.

On defence manufacturing licenses, on defence offsets, on defence exports clearances, on Foreign Direct Investment in defence manufacturing, and on reforming our defence procurement, we have taken many steps, he said.

In all these areas, Modi said, our regulations, processes and procedures have been made more industry-friendly, more transparent, more predictable and more outcome oriented.

Listing the initiatives, he said the defence products list for the purpose of issuing licences has been revised, and most of the components, parts, sub-systems, testing equipment and production equipment have been removed from the list to reduce entry barriers for the industry.

He said initial validity of industrial licence has been increased from three years to 15 years, with provision to further extend it by three years.

Offset guidelines have been made flexible by allowing changes of Indian Offset Partners and offset components, even in contracts already signed.

"Foreign Original Equipment Manufacturers are now not required to indicate the details of Indian offset partners and products at the time of signing of contracts. We have also re-instated services as an avenue of discharging offsets, he said.

Modi said the standard operating procedure for the issue of export authorisations has been simplified and put in the public domain.

The requirement of government-signed end user certificate for export of parts and components and other non-sensitive military stores, sub-assemblies, and sub-systems has been done away with, he said.

"We have taken a step forward and revised the Foreign Direct Investment cap of 26 per cent to 49 per cent through the automatic route, and even up to 100 per cent on a case-to-case basis," Modi said.

He said the government has also de-notified some items earlier made exclusively by Ordnance Factories, so that the private sector, especially the micro, small and medium enterprises can enter this space.

The prime minister also talked about the proposal to set up two defence industrial corridors -- one right here in Tamil Nadu, and another in Uttar Pradesh.

These defence industrial corridors will utilise the existing defence manufacturing ecosystems in these regions, and further build upon it, he said.

Modi said private venture capital into the defence sector, especially for start-ups will also be encouraged.

New and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics are perhaps the most important determinants of defensive and offensive capabilities for any defence force in the future. India, with its leadership in information technology domain, would strive to use this technology tilt to its advantage, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A former top Chinese Communist Party official who was once tipped for a leadership post pleaded guilty at his bribery trial on Thursday, the latest target of President Xi Jinping's sweeping anti-corruption crusade.

Sun Zhengcai, a former Politburo member and party chief of the southwestern mega-city of Chongqing, was accused by the prosecutor of taking advantage of his position to seek profits for and illegally accepting a large amount of money and goods, according to the court's Weibo account.

Sun pleaded guilty and "expressed penitence", said the No1 Intermediate People's Court in the northern city of Tianjin, adding that it would make a ruling at a later date.

The court said more than 130 people attended the trial, including members of the country's top political advisory board and media reporters.

But some 20 plainclothes officers prevented an AFP reporter from entering the court and surrounded the journalist for more than 20 minutes, saying she should have registered to attend the hearing in advance. One officer pushed the journalist back and shouted.

Sun, 54, had once been tipped for promotion to the Politburo's elite seven-member standing committee, which rules the country and is presided over by Xi. As the youngest Politburo member, Sun was even seen in some quarters as a potential successor to Xi.

Sun was the first serving member of the elite 25-person Politburo to be placed under investigation since Bo Xilai, another former leader of Chongqing, who was jailed for life in 2013.

Government corruption is rampant in China, and Xi has presided over a much-publicised anti-graft campaign since coming to power in 2012, but some have compared it to a political purge.

Xi, who has become China's most powerful leader since Chairman Mao Zedong, now has a path to rule for life after the rubber-stamp legislature lifted presidential term limits last month. Xi's second presidential term expires in 2023.

The National People's Congress also expanded Xi's anti-graft campaign by creating a national supervision commission that will look beyond party officials and scrutinise millions of public servants at all levels of government.

Sun's case showed that the party had some concerns about potential vulnerabilities to its rule.

In October, senior party official Liu Shiyu congratulated Xi for foiling the efforts of powerful officials who "plotted to usurp the party's leadership and seize state power."



Liu listed former security czar Zhou Yongkang alongside Sun and Bo as part of the conspiracy, which was rumoured to have involved military officials. All three have been ousted from the ruling Communist party (CCP) and arrested or jailed on corruption charges.

Sun was expelled from the CCP in September after an investigation by the party's disciplinary body found the politician had abused his position by taking bribes and trading power for sex.

Sun was also accused at the time of nepotism, sloth, leaking confidential party information and betraying party principles. As the country's fourth largest city and an industrial metropolis in the southwest of the country, Chongqing is a major post for ambitious politicians.

When Sun became the Chongqing's chief in 2012, he was tasked with erasing Bo's influence on the city. But last year the party's discipline inspectors publicly rebuked Sun for failing to get the job done, and his downfall came months later. Sun was replaced in the city by Chen Miner, a former Xi aide whose profile was elevated by the move.

Chen was given a spot on the powerful 25-member Politburo at the Communist Party Congress in October.The government today reconstituted the Banks Board Bureau, appointing former DoPT Secretary Bhanu Pratap Sharma as the chairman, replacing Vinod Rai.

The BBB's term under Rai ended on March 31 and the new board has been set up at a time when the banking sector is grappling with mounting bad loans and frauds.

The other members of the reconstituted BBB are: Vedika Bhandarkar (former MD Credit Suisse India), P Pradeep Kumar (former MD SBI) and Pradip P Shah (founder MD Crisil).

The board under Sharma will have a two year tenure. He was serving as the chairman of Recruitment and Assessment Centre at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar said the reconstituted BBB will have the same mandate as was given to the previous one which was led by Rai.

The restructured BBB will "take forward" all the HR related recommendation of the previous board, he said.

In a tweet while announcing the constitution of BBB, Kumar said: "Government renews commitment to not interfere in senior level appointments in PSBs (public sector banks)."



He said all the members of the reconstituted BBB have "diverse experience". Sharma was chosen by the government as he has "wide experience on Human Resource issues", and has served as Secretary Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2016 approved the constitution of BBB as a body of eminent professionals and officials to make recommendations for the appointment of whole-time directors as well as non-executive chairmen of PSBs.

They were also given the task of engaging with the Board of Directors of all the public sector banks to formulate appropriate strategies for their growth and development.

"The Bureau will recommend for selection of heads - Public Sector Banks and Financial Institutions and help Banks in developing strategies and capital raising plans," states the 2016 mandate of the BBB.

Days before his two year term came to an end, Rai, a former CAG, had expressed displeasure over lack of communication between the BBB and the finance ministry. He had said that most of the BBB's recommendations have not received due attention from the government and it has been merely working as an appointment board since inception.

The BBB had also sought wider mandate from the government including advising the government on consolidation of PSBs in the least disruptive manner.

Rai later dismissed the reports of lack of coordination between the BBB and the government saying that the rapport was "total" and he often met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and received guidance from him.

In a 60-page report titled 'Compendium of recommendations' posted on BBB website in March, Rai gave a status update on the work done by the Bureau since 2016.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Minister Nitin Gadkari today urged Korean businesses to invest in India's roads, waterways and other infrastructure segments, saying plans to build 12 expressways at a cost of Rs 1-lakh crore offer huge opportunities for them.

On the fourth day of his visit to Korea, the road transport and shipping minister addressed the Korea-India Infrastructure Cooperation Forum in Seoul today which was participated by leading members from the infrastructure business of both the countries.

"India has plans to construct 12 expressways with an investment of over Rs 1 lakh crore," the minister said in a statement issued by the shipping ministry here.

This, he said, would presents huge opportunities for Korean businesses.

Similarly, developing the national waterways for commercial navigation in India and the plans to develop shipbuilding, fisheries and the port sector will also create investment opportunities, the water resources, river development and Ganga rejuvenation minister said.

Gadkari also reiterated Indian government's commitment to facilitating all foreign businesses that are keen to invest in India.

The minister earlier met with some key Korean financial sector representatives to explore ways of greater involvement in financing projects such as inter-linking of rivers, highway construction, developing logistics parks and shipbuilding in India.

"An important part of the cooperation would be to enhance training and discussions among experts from both sides. Indian highway engineers and shipbuilding engineers can be trained at specialised training institutions of Republic of Korea to expose them to the systems in place there. Korean companies expressed keenness to work on the Nagpur Mumbai expressway project," the statement said.

Gadkari also met Korean Minister for Land and Infrastructure (MOLIT) Kim Mee Hyun in Seoul today.

The two ministers discussed the prospects of cooperation in developing smart highways, the statement said.

"Hyun said that Republic of Korea is committed to enhance cooperation based on the commitments made during the visit of PM Modi in 2015. A draft memorandum of cooperation in the infra sector is likely to be finalised soon. This will provide a sound institutional framework for enhancing bilateral engagement," the statement said.

In a separate meeting with the Korean Minister for Environment Kim Eungyung, Gadkari discussed bilateral cooperation in the area of river cleaning and rejuvenation, it added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)State-owned gas utility GAIL India today said it will bring to India only half of the LNG it has contracted from the US as it has either swapped or sold the remaining volumes.

GAIL has a deal to buy 3.5 million tonne a year of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for 20 years from Cheniere Energy of the US and has also booked capacity for another 2.3 million tonne (MT) at Dominion Energy's Cove Point liquefaction plant.

"Of the volumes contracted, we have already sold 0.5 MT. The remaining volumes translate into 80 cargoes (or shiploads) of LNG in a year. Of this, 50 per cent will come to India," GAIL Chairman and MD B C Tripathi told reporters here.

The first US cargo arrived at the firm's Dabhol LNG import terminal in Maharashtra on March 30.

Also, the firm's renegotiated LNG import deal with Russian supplier Gazprom will kick-in from May, with volumes gradually ramping up to fully contracted quantity of 2.5 MT in 5-6 year, he said.

"This year we will get 8 cargoes or 0.5 MT of LNG from Gazprom," he said.

GAIL, he said, had sold 81-82 million standard cubic meters per day of gas in 2017-18, which would rise to 91-92 mmscmd because of arrival of US and Russian volumes.

He said the company has swapped half of the 5.8 MT per annum of US LNG in a bid to rejig supply portfolio in line with domestic demand.

GAIL sold 3.5 MT of the US LNG via time swaps, destination swaps and shipping optimisation.

Under the time-swap deals, the company got LNG from international companies in 2017 and will sell equivalent amount of Henry Hub-indexed volumes during 2018-19.

Also, it has entered into deals to take deliveries of gas from a nearer location and in exchange given its US volumes to company closer to the origin to cut shipping costs.

The contracted volume from Russia has been lowered from 2.5 MT to 0.5 MT in the first year 2018-19, 0.75 MT in 2019-20, and 1.5 MT in the third year 2020-21. Also, the price indexation has been changed from the Japan Customs-cleared Crude to Brent, and the oil-linked slope of the contract formula lowered, and therefore the final price.

GAIL had contracted LNG from the US and Russia to meet the demand of growing Indian economy with power sector being considered a major buyer. But electricity produced using imported LNG is not finding buyers due to cheaper alternatives including renewables, leading to stranding of significant capacity out of 25,000 MW of installed gas-based power plants.

To mitigate the risks, GAIL explored opportunities to market Henry Hub indexed LNG volumes in the international markets.

GAIL had in May last year signed a first-ever time-swap deal to sell some of its US LNG. Under that agreement, it was to get 15 cargoes or about 0.8 MT of LNG from an unnamed trader in 2017. In return, GAIL will sell 10 cargoes or about 0.6 MT next year from Sabine Pass on the US Gulf coast.

GAIL had separately signed a deal with Royal Dutch Shell to sell about 0.5 MT of its US LNG.

The LNG that GAIL will receive this year between April and December under the time-swap deal will be at oil-linked prices. The sale of US gas next year will be at a premium to its pricing formula on a free-on-board (FOB) basis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An expert panel set up by the Centre to boost farmers income today suggested entrusting the regulation of spot exchanges for commodity trading with a single watchdog like Sebi, removing restriction on farmers to sell their produce through recognised APMC mandies and other reforms.

The committee, headed by Niti Aayog member Ramesh Chand, also said the government should refrain from imposing sudden ban on derivative trading of agri commodities.

States should change their Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Act on the lines of new model law suggested by the Union Agriculture ministry, the panel said, adding that there should not be any market fee on products sold outside the APMC mandie facilities.

It also emphasised the need to promote cooperatives and farmer producer organisations so that farmers can get better prices through collective bargaining power.

"The committee is of a strong view that a number of fundamental reforms are required to be introduced in the spot markets as well as the derivatives markets for commodities to enable them to serve better various stakeholders, like producers, consumers and other market participants," the panel said in its report.

Farmers should be provided multiple modes for selling of farm produce and restrictions on farmers to sell their produce only through recognised APMCs should be waived, said the 'Report of Expert Committee on Integration of Commodity Spot and Derivatives Markets' released by the Finance Ministry today.

"Under the existing APMC regulations, in case the facilities of APMCs are not used, ie if sale is done outside the APMC premises, such as sale on a regulated electronic platform, or regulated private markets etc., APMCs can still levy and collect applicable market fee on sale of such products.

"Such levy of fees on goods sold outside the facilities of APMCs should be removed, because these are in the form of a statutory levy and not a service, for which a service levy is required," the report said.

Further, the panel said pan-India electronic spot exchanges need to be well- regulated under appropriate regulations as is being done in case of commodity derivatives exchanges.

According to the report, dissenting from the opinion of committee members to vest it with the powers to regulate the spot exchanges, Sebi suggested that regulation of commodity spot exchanges should be vested with a separate sectoral regulator.

"However, the committee members are of the view that regulation of such pan-India electronic spot exchanges, which involves attendant risk management, clearing and settlement etc, may be entrusted to a single regulator like Sebi," it noted.

The existing institutional infrastructure of commodity exchanges should also be utilised to create a spot exchange for commodities.

For increased participation, it is required that more hedger centric products be launched in the derivatives markets. At the same time, the "cost of trading in derivatives markets should also be rationalised," the panel said.

On frequent bans imposed by the government on future trading of agri-commodities, the panel said that "there should not be sudden discontinuation or disruption in derivatives trading in agricultural commodities due to reasons (such as production shortage/glut, volatilty in spot prices, imposition of stock control limits etc) which are beyond the control of the derivatives market."



These issues need to be addressed separately to take the necessary policy decisions, it added.

For the purposes of price stabilisation in agri commodities, the central and state agricultural marketing institutions should consider derivatives markets (especially option trading) as one of the avenues for price stabilisation and forward guidance of spot market prices.

The panel recommended a sound institutional mechanism to collect, collate and disseminate the data of spot market transactions, both primary and secondary markets, on a regular basis.

In the Budget for 2017-18 fiscal, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had announced that an expert panel would be constituted to study and promote creation of an operational and legal framework to integrate spot market and derivatives market for commodities trading. e-NAM would be an integral part of such framework.

"The commodities markets require further reforms for the benefits of farmers. An expert committee will be constituted," he had said.

The mandate of the committee was to examine the legal, technical and operational aspects of the commodity spot and derivatives markets with a view to eliminate the gaps and overlaps that exist between these two markets and recommend measures for achieving the desired integration between the commodity spot and derivatives markets in India.

The panel said that a dedicated controlling ministry for base metals could be created. "Ministry of Steel, in this regard, could be entrusted the task of overseeing the markets for all ferrous and non-ferrous base metals." For the growth of domestic metals industry, it is required that Free Trade Agreements, should be reviewed wherever possible.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal today indicated that his ambitious plan to convert Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus into a museum-cum-railway station is still alive.

The proposal was turned down by Prime Minister Narendra Modi a few days back, ministry sources said.

When asked about media reports about the opposition to the proposal from the Railway Board and the prime minister, Goyal said, "It is all speculation."



The Union minister was speaking to reporters after ending his day-long fast over wash-out of the Budget session.

"We want only a part of the CSMT building, the second floor, to house the museum. Already there is a railway museum in the building," he said.

The terminal was built over 10 years, starting in 1878. Designed on late medieval Italian models, it was elevated to the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004.

As per the ministry sources, at a meeting attended by Goyal and senior Railway Board members on March 26, Modi questioned the logic behind the project to convert it into a railway station-cum museum.

Sources said the Railway Board was also against Goyal's proposal, which could displace a lot of employees.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An international crackdown on illegal logging in tropical forests has ensnared the makers of some guitars and other musical instruments, whose top-end products require small amounts of rosewood, a material prized for its rich, multicolored grain and resonant sound.

Since new trade rules took effect in 2017, guitar makers have complained about long delays in getting permits to import rosewood and export finished instruments that contain it.

Warehouses have filled with unsold instruments, and a bagpipe maker in New Hampshire went so far as to ask the governor to intervene after a permit application was lost.

"I'm so annoyed. I'm so distraught by this," said Chris Martin, chairman and CEO of CF Martin and Co., which uses rosewood in 200 models of acoustic guitar, some played by Eric Clapton, Ed Sheeran, Sting and other stars. The company's logistics staff estimates it spends 40 percent of its time dealing with the new regulations.

Fearful that Africa and Asia were losing rosewood forests, governments adopted the rules to stem the flow of smuggled rosewood to China's luxury furniture manufacturers. But the restrictions have also hurt companies that use relatively tiny amounts of the wood in guitars, clarinets and oboes.

Months after the regulations were adopted, acoustic guitar exports from the US fell by about 28 percent, and electric guitar exports declined 23 percent, according to the Music Trades magazine, an industry publication. Music retailers reported losing USD 60 million.

At Martin's Pennsylvania-based company, many transactions are stalled: "We have orders for the guitars. We have customers. The customers have the money to pay for them, and we can't ship them because the paperwork is stuck somewhere," he said.

Instrument makers such as Martin argue that they use a fraction as much rosewood as Chinese furniture makers - about 50 cubic meters each a year compared with nearly 2 million cubic meters. And, the instrument makers say, they get most of it from sustainable plantations in India.

The guitar industry's frustration is focused on the United Nation's Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES , which is responsible for combating wildlife smuggling. The agency has tangled in the past with instrument makers, mostly over restrictions on ivory, tortoiseshell and whale bone.

Agency officials previously placed trade limits on only a few rosewood species, such as Brazilian rosewood, which is especially precious. But the 2016 trade rules covered up to 300 species of the rosewood family known as Dalbergia.

The new regulations also required permits for products made from the wood, including guitars, violins, bagpipes and xylophones. Many companies that had never needed permits had only three months to comply.

"It was a steep learning curve for these companies," said Timothy Van Norman, chief of the permit-granting branch of the US Fish and Wildlife Service , which saw its permit applications double to 40,000 in 2017 mostly from rosewood.

Bigger guitar companies with more sophisticated distribution systems were probably quicker to adapt than smaller companies or individuals making a limited number of instruments. "For them, it probably came out of the blue." Taylor Guitars , based in El Cajon, California, reported losing tens of thousands of dollars from months-long delays and confusion surrounding its shipments to some 30 countries in the world.

"Each country was suddenly responsible for interpreting what this new rule meant," said Scott Paul, Taylor's director of natural resource sustainability.

Governments in Africa and Latin America proposed the regulations to combat increased rosewood smuggling over the past decade that they said had endangered the species, which is also known for its fragrance, a sweet floral aroma that gives the wood its name.

Much of the smuggling was orchestrated by criminal gangs that took advantage of lax rules and widespread corruption to strip away forest in Southeast Asia, Central America and West Africa. The illegal logging also sparked regional conflicts, contributed to desertification and destroyed a key food source for bees, butterflies and other insects.

The United Nations describes the rosewood trade as the world's costliest wildlife crime, with seizures totaling more than almost all other species combined. Between 2005 and 2015, 10,000 metric tons of protected rosewood was seized.

Most of that wood was headed to China, where rosewood imports jumped 2,000 percent from 2005 to 2014, according to the conservation group Forest Trends . Much of the material went into the making of reproduction hongmu furniture from the Ming and Qing dynasties, a style popular with affluent Chinese.

"These countries didn't want to wait until their tree species are on the verge of extinction before acting to control the trade. They saw what happened in Asia. There is almost nothing left," said Susanne Breitkopf, forest campaign policy manager of the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency .

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar today said the Gurgaon city had been divided into four zones for undertaking developmental works in a phased manner.

The chief minister was presiding over a meeting of industrialists and real estate developers in Gurgoan. As many as 61 complaints related to real estate were taken up in the meeting of which maximum were resolved on the spot, an official release said here.

Khattar said the state government had a special focus on Gurgaon and the zoning system had benefited the city.

He alleged there was a total collapse of system in the city during the tenure of the previous government.

"Now, the same has been improved by the present state government by introducing this zoning system," he said.

The chief minister said a number of changes had been made in policies and rules during last three years. Various projects which were lying halted for a long period have been restarted by the present government and these are under the final stages of completion, he said.

Khattar said the constitution of a Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority was a big decision to ensure all round development of the city.

Such a provision would be made applicable in Faridabad also only if residents of Faridabad demand so, he said. He said a separate authority was being constituted for Kundli-Manesar-Palwal Expressway.

He said that it has been decided not to undertake further expansion of Gurgaon and the present form will be improved. This will reduce burden on Delhi, he said, according to the release.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Gurgaon will get a multi-specialty hospital under Public-Private Partnership mode at sector 67, a Haryana government release said today.

For this, in-principle approval was given in the second meeting of Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) held under the chairmanship of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar in Gurgaon today.

The process had been started for establishing Sheetla Mata Medical College, Khattar said according to the release.

In the meeting today, discussion was held on metro extension from Dwarka Sector-21 to Gurgaon railway station and old town, the release said here. For extension of Metro, the chief minister said a special session would be called for holding discussions.

The chief minister said that under the Smart City initiative, CCTV cameras would be installed in Gurgaon for which a survey had already been conducted and a detailed project report would be prepared by the end of this month.

He said under the Smart City Project, optical fibre would also be laid in the city. It has also been decided to construct a multi-level parking at old veterinary hospital by Municipal Corporation and at old jail by GMDA.

Khattar said that it was decided that a six-lane road would be constructed from Umang Bhardwaj Chowk to Dwarka Expressway at a cost of Rs 11 crore. The tender for this project would be floated on April 30.

The tenders for City Bus Project would also be floated on April 30. The construction work of 328 bus queue shelters had been started, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A fighter from the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas was killed today by an Israeli strike in the Gaza Strip, the health ministry in the enclave said.

Mohammed Hijaila was killed and another man seriously wounded early today during the airstrike, the health ministry in the Hamas-controlled enclave said, confirming he was a member of the movement's militant wing.

A security source said he was one of a number of Hamas fighters manning an observation point east of Gaza City when it was struck early today.

Israel confirmed the strikes, saying they were retaliation for gun fire.

The Hamas fighters were apparently shooting at an Israeli jet, which was carrying out strikes in Gaza in response to an explosive device at Israel's border fence yesterday.

"In response to the explosive device that was detonated against an engineering vehicle of the (army) yesterday, Israeli fighter jets struck military targets in the Gaza Strip," the Israeli army said in a statement.

"After the strike, a terror cell fired with machine guns at an (Israeli) aircraft, without actually harming it. (Israeli) aircraft intercepted the terror cell." At least 32 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces since March 30.

Most died during major protests along the border but others have been hit by tank fire.

Islamists Hamas have controlled Gaza since 2007 and have fought three wars with Israel since.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Madras High Court today directed the police to allow AMMK founder TTV Dhinakaran to hold a public meeting demanding closure of the Sterlite plant in Tuticorin district.

A division bench of Justices A Selvam and Basheer Ahamed passed the order on a writ petition filed by Henry Thomas of Tuticorin.

Directing the petitioner to file a fresh application, the bench said it should be considered by the Superintendent of Police, Tuticorin, before April 13 and permission be given to conduct the meeting on April 17.

When the matter came up, the petitioner submitted that a representation was made to the SP seeking permission for the meeting.

However, the SP rejected the same on the ground that law and order would be affected.

The petitioner said they were willing to hold the meeting according to the guidelines of the high court.

Sterlite Copper represents the copper unit of Vedanta Limited which operates a 400,000 tonnes per annum-plant in Tuticorin.

The district has been witnessing several protests by locals and others against the Sterlite Copper plant there and its proposed expansion.

Protesters have alleged that the plant was polluting ground water in their area.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Madras High Court today granted bail to Traffic Inspector Kamaraj, who allegedly kicked a two wheeler for not stopping during a helmet check drive in Tiruchirapalli district, leading to the death of a pregnant woman, last month.

Justice G R Swaminathan granted bail to Kamaraj and ordered him to execute a personal surety bond for Rs 10,000 at sixth Judicial Magistrate Court in Tiruchi.

The Traffic Inspector was also directed to sign at the BHEL police station daily until further orders.

On March 8, the 34-year old woman, Usha was killed and her husband injured when the two-wheeler they were riding was allegedly kicked by Kamaraj for not stopping during a helmet check drive in Thuvakudi in Tiruchirapalli district.

Following the incident, the police official was arrested and placed under suspension.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Madras High Court today dismissed prayers of three family members of former Union Minister P Chidambaram seeking to prohibit the Income Tax department from sanctioning any prosecution against them under the Black Money Act (BMA).

When the petitions filed by Nalini, wife of Chidambaram; Karti Chidambaram and his wife Srinidhi came up, Justice T S Sivagnanam refused to accede to their prayers to prohibit the sanctioning of prosecution by the I-T department for alleged economic offences, against them.

Two petitions were filed separately by Nalini and Srinidhi seeking a direction to the I-T officials not to sanction any prosecution under the Act.

While another petition by Karti sought a direction to the I-T authorities to pass orders pursuant to the notices issued on various dates under the Act and the replies furnished by him thereon.

In his order, the judge said, "The Income Tax department is directed to pass orders in accordance with the provisions of Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and imposition of Tax 2015 (Act 22 of 2015) within the time line fixed under the Act."



So far as the writ petitions seeking prohibition of prosecution is concerned, the prayer cannot be granted and they stand dismissed, he said.

When the matter came up, the counsel for I-T opposed the plea saying the department had initiated the proceedings based on information provided by CBI.

To this the judge said, the petitioners are ready to cooperate with the enquiry, but they apprehend sanctioning of prosecution for economic offences.

I-T's counsel then said, issuing notice under the Black Money Act and sanctioning prosecution are two different aspects.

The department can sanction prosecution notwithstanding pending inquiry on assessment. The Act does not prohibit the department from doing so, the counsel contended.

The Income Tax department had issued notices to all three petitioners seeking details of the documents in respect of the property in Cambridge, UK, and with regard to certain investments in Nano Holdings, LLC USA on various dates.

Stating that they had already filed returns with details for the assessment years 2015-16 and 2016-17, they submitted that despite the explanation and submission of particulars sought by the authorities, no orders have been passed on the notices.

Alleging that they have been subjected to harassment for the last 3 years by the central agencies, the petitioners submitted that multiple searches were conducted by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate, under Foreign Exchange Management Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

Though they have established beyond reasonable doubt that they do not possess black money and have no undisclosed foreign asset, the petitioners apprehended that they may be subjected to malicious prosecution.

As part of the design to harass and humiliate the petitioners the Income Tax Authorities will invoke and launch prosecution proceedings even before orders are passed by the assessing officers under section 10(3) of the Black Money Act, they said.

Hence the petitioner prayed for a direction to prohibit IT authorities from sanctioning any prosecution against them.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The hearing in two separate money laundering cases allegedly involving Virbhadra Singh's wife and daughter and mining baron J Sekar Reddy was today adjourned till September 14 by the Delhi High Court which was informed by the ED that the Supreme Court is seized of the matter relating to the challenge to certain provisions of the money laundering law.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) said its power to arrest an accused under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act has been challenged before the apex court and urged the high court to adjourn the hearing on the batch of petitions which also challenge various provisions of the PMLA.

Justice Rajiv Shakdher listed the matter for hearing on September 14.

Central government standing counsel Vinod Diwakar and Amit Mahajan, appearing for the ED, submitted that the decision of the Supreme Court will have a direct bearing on the cases pending before the high court and it should be heard after the apex court decides the issue.

The high court was to hear the maintainability of a batch of 19 petitions in two separate money laundering cases allegedly involving Virbhadra Singh's wife Pratibha Singh, daughter Aprajita Singh and mining baron and former Tirumala Tirupathi Devasthanams (TTD) Board member J Sekar Reddy and his business associates S Ramachandran and K Rethinam.

The various accused in the two separate cases have challenged the ED's FIR against them, provisional attachment orders regarding their assets and all further proceedings.

A division bench of the high court had earlier referred the matter to the single judge after upholding the validity of a clause in the PMLA which empowers the ED to provisionally attach the properties bought from proceeds of crime.

The bench had rejected the pleas of the accused challenging the constitutional validity of the provision.

While hearing ED's plea challenging the interim relief from arrest granted by the high court to Karti Chidambaram in the INX Media money laundering case, the apex court had said it would clear the "confusion" which has crept in due to divergent views of different high courts on ED's power to arrest.

The apex court also transferred to itself the matters pending before the Delhi High Court relating to the power of the ED to arrest in money laundering cases.

In the money laundering case against Virbhadra and his wife, the ED had attached assets worth nearly Rs 5.8 crore belonging to Pratibha Singh and Rs 1.34 crore of the former Chief Minister.

The ED had registered a case against the sand mining baron Reddy and others soon after the CBI booked them for possessing Rs 33 crore in new denomination of Rs 2,000, barely a month after demonetisation in November 2016.

After the accused were released on bail as the CBI failed to file charge sheet within the mandatory 90-day period, the ED arrested them on charges of money laundering. The Madras High Court had granted conditional bail to Reddy and others.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Following are top at 1715 hours:



NATION



DEL32 PM-2NDLD DEF EXPOCommitment to peace as strong as commitment to safeguarding territory, says PMThiruvidanthai (TN): Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said India's commitment to peace is just as strong as its commitment to protecting its territory and listed his government's efforts in making the country a hub of defence manufacturing and bolstering the armed forces. PM By Manash Pratim BhuyanDEL29 UP-MLA-3RDLD FIRUnnao gangrape case: FIR filed against BJP MLA, no decision on arrestLucknow: The police in Uttar Pradesh today registered an FIR against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged gangrape of a minor girl in Unnao, hours after the government said it would hand the probe over to the CBI.

DEL35 PM-DEFEXPO-LD UPA



UPA's 'policy paralysis' hampered defence preparedness: Modi



Thiruvidanthai (TN): Prime Minister Narendra Modi today hit out at the previous UPA government for policy paralysis in the defence sector and told foreign companies that it will not take a decade to take a decision on procurement of a batch of 110 fighter jets. By Manash Pratim Bhuyan



DEL41 CONG-IMPEACHMENT



Opposition has all options open: Cong on impeachment motion



New Delhi: The Congress today said opposition parties have "all options open" on the issue of moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra



DEL30 CBSE-LEAK-ARRESTS



3, including woman, arrested in CBSE paper leak case



New Delhi: Three persons, including a woman, have been arrested for their alleged involvement in leaking the CBSE Class 10 mathematics paper in connivance with a teacher arrested earlier from Himachal Pradesh, Delhi Police said today.

DEL4 ISRO-2NDLD SATELLITE



ISRO launches IRNSS-1I navigation satellite



Sriharikota (AP): The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) today launched the IRNSS-1I navigation satellite from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Haryana government has decided to carry out a campaign from April 18 to May 5 across the state to generate awareness among people about sanitation, state Urban Local Bodies Minister Kavita Jain said here today.

She said the 'Shahari Swaraj Abhiyan' would be launched by ministers, MPs, MLAs, mayors, deputy commissioners and prominent personalities in all districts of the state on April 18.

The decision was taken in a meeting of Urban Local Bodies Department held under the chairmanship of Jain.

She said that sensitisation drives would be carried out in parks, schools, colleges and Residents Welfare Associations (RWAs) on segregation of waste and significance in waste management.

Besides this, the day would be observed as Plastic-Free Day and city-level entrepreneurs, and manufacturers would be felicitated for making innovative decentralised composting equipment, the minister said.

On April 20, the focus of the campaign would be on 'reduce, reuse and recycle', during which interactive sessions of experts would be organised.

She said on April 21, municipal workers, including outsourced and contractual staff would be honoured for their work, and ideas would be sought from them for improving cleanliness. The best idea would be implemented during the month.

Health check-up camps for sanitation workers would also be conducted on that day, Jain said, adding on April 30 and May 1, Open Defecation Free drive would be conducted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has set up a eight-member committee to study the current operating structure of multi-national audit firms present in the country.

The committee is being headed by ICAI vice president Prafulla Chhajed.

As per the present regulation, no foreign audit firm is allowed to practise in the country. They can operate through network partners only.

"We will be examining the operations of these multinational accounting firms and what kind of arrangements they have with their network partners. Based on that, we will come out with the report," Chhajed said today.

The committee will send its findings to the central council of ICAI.

"If the council feels there are any issues then it will raise it with the government," he said.

ICAI's central council consists of 32 members from ICAI and eight government nominees.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Swedish home furnishings chain IKEA today said it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Gujarat government to set up its stores in the state with an expected investment of up to Rs 3,000 crore in the long term.

IKEA, which received government approval in 2013 for its Rs 10,500-crore proposal to open retail stores under 100 per cent FDI, has earlier signed MoUs with Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana to open retail stores.

The company plans to open 25 stores by 2025 in nine Indian cities.

The MoU with Gujarat government stands for mutual commitment from both parties and intends to provide clarity on working methods and ensure a legally and ethically compliant, corruption free business environment, IKEA said in a statement.

"Gujarat is a prioritised state for IKEA due to its open progressive policies and positive investment climate," IKEA India Country Property & Expansion Manager David McCausland said.

IKEA will soon set up its retail stores and other touch points in Gujarat to bring good quality and affordable home furnishings for the many people in Gujarat, he added.

Ahmedabad and Surat are the priority cities for now and IKEA has started scouting for suitable real estate, the company said.

The approximate investment in the long term will be around Rs 2,000-3,000 crore. This will generate around 2,000 direct and 3,000 indirect employment, it added.

Gujarat Principal Secretary Manoj Kumar Das said, "IKEA will positively contribute to creating more employment, growth of manufacturing sector, sharing best practices, in skill development and in the overall growth of the home furnishings retail sector."



Das also assured support to the company for timely implementation of projects and enable smooth business operations.

IKEA had initially stated that it would open its first store in India in Hyderabad in the second half of 2017, which is now expected to be during the summer this year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Amid spiralling tensions between Russia and the UK following a chemical attack on double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, India today said it is against the use of chemical weapons and the issue should be resolved in accordance with the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

There are reports that the UK is keen on raising the issue at the Commonwealth Heads of the Government Meeting (CHOGM) to be held in London next week.

When Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar was asked about the telephonic conversation between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday, he said he did not have information on what the two leaders talked about.

However, he said, "India is against the use of chemical weapons anywhere, at any time, by anybody, under any circumstances. We hope that this issue is resolved in accordance with the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) so as to reach evidence-based conclusions. India, as all other countries, awaits the outcome of the investigation."



The nerve agent attack on Skripal has led to a diplomatic showdown with both the sides expelling each other's diplomats from their countries.

Amid reports of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, by government forces last week, Kumar said that the use of such weapons anywhere is against the provisions of the CWC and the perpetrators of such acts must be held accountable.

"Any use of chemical weapons anywhere, at any time, by anybody, under any circumstances is in complete disregard of humanity, and is reprehensible and contrary to the provisions of the CWC as well as accepted international norms. The perpetrators of such abhorrent acts must be held accountable," Kumar said.

The chemical weapon attack has attracted widespread criticism against the Assad regime in Syria.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India is beginning to work with the US to find a solution to child abduction cases, a State Department official told lawmakers today, adding that she also pressed upon the Indian government -- during her visit to the country -- to join the Hague Convention.

"India is beginning to work with us to find practical solutions for children who are being abducted between our two countries," Suzanne I Lawrence, Special Advisor, Children's Issues Bureau of Consular Affairs at the Department of State, told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Sub-committee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organisations.

Lawrence said her believe in this regard was based on her recent trips to India and due to persistent engagement on the International Parental Child Abductions or IPCA.

India is not party to the Hague Convention and has demonstrated a pattern of non-compliance as defined in the Act, she alleged.

India is not a signatory to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (Hague Abduction Convention), nor are there any bilateral agreements in force between India and the United States concerning international parental child abduction, according to the US State Department.

"In February of this year, I travelled to India to encourage government officials there to resolve the numerous abduction cases they have, and for India to join the Convention," Lawrence said.

She said the United States in its bilateral meetings with the governments of India, Brazil and Indonesia have been raising the issue of IPCA.

While in the US, it is called abduction, most of such cases are a result of marital dispute wherein one of the parents stays with the child in India and quite often gets a court order in their favour, Lawrence said.

The State Department in its travel advisor for India cautions the US citizens for acting forcefully to get back their kids while in India. "Parental child abduction is not a crime in India. Parents may wish to consult with an attorney in the United States and in the country to which the child has been removed or retained to learn more about how filing criminal charges may impact a custody case in the foreign court," the State Department says in its travel advisor on India.

According to an annual State Department report, the US, in 2016, had as many as 83 alleged cases of abduction of American children. In 2015, the number was 74.

The competent authorities in India persistently failed to work with the Department of State to resolve abduction cases. As a result of this failure, 66 per cent of requests for the return of abducted children have remained unresolved for more than 12 months. India has been cited as non-compliant since 2014," it said.

Without the Hague Abduction Convention or any other protocols intended to resolve abduction cases, parents generally must pursue custody of abducted children in Indian courts, the report said.

It said due to absence of any clear legal procedures for specifically addressing abduction cases under the Indian law, parents efforts to resolve custody disputes in local courts are often unsuccessful.

In June, 2016, when former President Barack Obama met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the US and India in a joint statement committed to renew efforts to address a range of issues affecting their citizens, including issues related to child custody. The issue was also raised by the then Secretary of State John Kerry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India, China, Japan and Korea have agreed to boost cooperation in the energy sector in view of their consumption of hydrocarbons, primarily in business to business segment, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said today.

Speaking at the concluding conference of International Energy Forum (IEF) he said, cooperation among oil-consuming nations is warranted in view of oil-producing countries charging Asian premium from India, China and others for supplying petroleum.

When asked about India joining hands with China to resolve the Asian premium issue he said: "We have assigned this responsibility to IOC Chairman Sanjiv Singh and from their side Chairman of China National Petroleum Corporation will work on the issue. More cooperation is expected."



"In some areas both of us (India and China) are working together. In some parts of Africa, CNPC and OVL (ONGC Videsh Ltd) are natural partners," he said.

Li Fanrong, Deputy Administrator, National Energy Administration, China said the two nations can work together in energy sector as consumer as well as energy producer. The next IEF will be held in China.

About reported government direction to oil marketing companies for not hiking fuel prices, Pradhan said, there is no such direction.

Yesterday, Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil producer entered into an agreement to pick up 50 per cent stake in a planned USD 44-billion refinery-cum-petrochemical project in Maharashtra.

On Shiv Sena's opposition to the deal, the minister said said the deal is in the favour of the people of Maharashtra as the investment will boost state's economy, job creation and industrialisation.

Pradhan informed that more than 1,300 representatives participated in the IEF. As many as 53 representatives from different countries attended the forum and 38 ministers marked their presence.

On the occasion, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said India has deployed USD 8 billion on gas infrastructure across the country and share of natural gas in the energy mix will increase from 6.5 per cent now to 15 per cent by 2020.

She also said LPG penetration in the country has increased from 66 per cent in 2014 to 80 per cent in 2018, but India would be a responsible consumer despite the fact that its per capita consumption is about one tenth of the developing nations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 38-year-old Indian engineer in the US state of Ohio, accused of funding a top al-Qaida leader, has pleaded guilty to concealment of financing of terrorism.

Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad, second of the two brothers, is accused of sending money to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was later designated a terrorist and killed by a US drone in 2011.

Mohammad, is to receive an agreed-upon prison sentence of 60 months, although he would receive credit for the 30 months he already has spent in the Lucas County jail awaiting trial, The Blade newspaper reported yesterday.

US District Judge Jeffrey Helmick told him that due to his plea and conviction, he would be deported to India.

"You ultimately will be removed from this country and told you are not welcome to come back," the judge said.

Mohammad had studied at the University of Illinois and lived in Toledo since 2006.

As part of a plea agreement, the four original charges brought by a federal grand jury in 2015 are to be dismissed at the time of sentencing, which was not scheduled, the report said.

Two co-defendants, Sultane Roome Salim, 43, and his brother, Asif Ahmed Salim, 37, are scheduled for a change of plea hearing before Judge Helmick later today. Mohammad and the Salims had been set for trial April 23 with jury selection beginning on Monday.

A fourth co-defendant, Mohammad's brother, Yahya Farooq Mohammad, 39, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to provide and conceal material support or resources to terrorists.

He had also pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit a crime of violence for a separate case in which he tried to hire a hitman to kill Judge Jack Zouhary. At the time, Judge Zouhary was presiding over the terrorism case.

Yahya Farooq Mohammad was sentenced to a total of 27 years in prison and ordered deported to India once he completes his prison term.

Michael Freeman, an assistant US attorney, outlined the factual basis for the charge to which Ibrahim Mohammad pleaded guilty.

Freeman said Mohammad's brother and others raised money in 2009 in the United Arab Emirates to deliver to al-Awlaki in Yemen.

Freeman said Farooq raised some funds through credit card fraud, sought funds from others he knew, and enlisted his brother in the United States to help.

Two associates of Farooq delivered USD 7,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki in Yemen in late January, 2009, Freeman said. In July, 2009, Farooq delivered USD 22,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki.

Ibrahim knew, Freeman said, that al-Awlaki had expressed support for the killing of 13 US service personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, by Nidal Hasan on November 5, 2009, and that al-Awlaki had been involved in the attempt to destroy an airliner over Detroit on December 25, 2009.

When interviewed by the FBI in Chicago in 2011, Ibrahim lied about the financial transactions, Freeman said, and later deleted emails that contained words such as Awlaki, jihad, Taliban, and Yemen from his email account.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Income Tax department has issued fresh summons to Karti Chidambaram, son of former finance minister P Chidambaram, under criminal sections of the Black Money Act seeking details about a UK-based asset, a move challenged by him.

Officials said Karti was asked to depose before the investigating officer of the case today in Chennai under the provision of the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Act of 2015 that deals with undisclosed assets stashed abroad.

They said the department wants to seek details about the transactions undertaken by Karti for acquiring an immovable property located in Cambridge.

However, Karti refused to join the probe stating that he had already submitted the details of the asset and related transactions undertaken last year to another tax authority and that "parallel proceedings" cannot take place against an individual under the same law.

It is understood that he also moved the Madras High Court seeking its directions to the tax department to complete the assessment in this context initiated by it in August last year.

The order of the court was not immediately known.

Karti, it is understood, has also asked the tax department to "withdraw" the fresh notice on these ground, even as he submitted the details sought by the department about the foreign asset.

However, the sources said that he may be issued fresh summons for appearance soon.

They said the IT notice was issued to Karti and not to any of his family members.

The department had slapped the Black Money Act against Karti last year after it found that assets were created abroad by him, in alleged violation of the law.

The new anti-black money law deals with cases of overseas illegal assets, which till recently were probed under the Income Tax Act, 1961.

The new legislation has provisions for a steep 120 per cent tax and penalty on undisclosed foreign assets and income, besides carrying a jail term of up to 10 years.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Jammu and Kashmir government today appointed two special public prosecutors, both Sikhs, for the trial in the sensitive Kathua rape and murder case to ensure focussed attention and speedy conduct in the matter, a senior official said.

The state police crime branch which probed the alleged rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl belonging to the nomadic Muslim Bakerwal community had filed a main charge sheet against seven accused persons and a separate charge sheet against a juvenile in a court in Kathua district earlier this week.

The government hereby appoint S Bhopinder Singh, Chief Prosecuting Officer, Crime Branch, Jammu and Harinder Singh, Chief Prosecuting Officer, Samba as Special Public Prosecutors to conduct the case titles State Verus Sanji Ram and others and another title (involving the juvenile) in the case pending disposal before principal sessions judge/ court of chief judicial magistrate, Kathua, Law Department Secretary Abdul Majid Bhat said in an order issued here today.

"This was done to ensure speedy conduct and ensure focussed attention to the case," a senior official said.

J&K Police DGP S P Vaid had written to the government in this regard by recommending two officers as SPPs to conduct the case.

"We wanted two officers to pursue the case from police department as others may take the case casually," another official said.

Asked whether two Sikh officers were engaged as SPPs to ensure "neutrality" in view of Hindu-Muslim polarisation over the case, DGP Vaid said "please do not think on religious lines. It has not been done. Police does not think in terms of Hindu or Muslim or Sikh".

The body of the girl, from the Bakerwal community, was recovered from Rassana forest on January 17, a week after she went missing while grazing horses.

On January 23, the government had handed over the case to the crime branch of the state police which formed a Special Investigation Team and arrested eight people including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destruction of evidence.

The Bar Association of Jammu (BAJ) has demanded a CBI probe into the case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)At least two JNU students have been issued "warning letters" for writing texts on walls and roads inside the campus demanding action against professor Atul Johri, who is facing sexual harassment charges, prompting angry reaction from the students union which termed it as "intimidation" tactics.

Chief Proctor of the varsity Kaushal Kumar issued a "warning letter" to the students on April 9 which said, "It has been alleged that you were involved in writing 'Suspend Johri' on road in front of School of Physical Sciences on March 27 at 6 pm. You are hereby warned and advised to be careful in future. You must restrain yourself from such activities that violate norms of discipline."



Strict disciplinary action will be taken against you otherwise, it added.

"This is surprising and highly condemnable. Eight FIRs have been registered against the professor and the varsity has not taken any action. When we are protesting to demand his suspension, we are issued warning letters," Srabani Chakraborty, one of the students who was issued the letter, told PTI.

The letter did not specify which clause of the varsity's rule book was violated and the Chief Proctor could not be reached for his reaction.

JNU's rules of discipline of students says involvement in any of the following would attract punishment, "Use of abusive, defamatory, derogatory or intimidatory language against any member of the varsity community. Damaging or defacing, in any form any property of the university or the property of any member of the varsity community. Any other act which may be considered by the VC or any other competent authority to be an act of violation of discipline and conduct."



However, the students union has decried the varsity action, alleging that it was intimidation of protesting students considering that the JNU culture has a history of students painting and writing texts inside the campus on various issues.

JNU Students Union President Geeta Kumari said, "This is clear case of intimidating students who are standing with eight girl students who have come out to report sexual harassment by the professor. It has been JNU culture to paint and write texts on campus on various issues. Administration issuing warning letter for this case clearly shows how they are protecting him."



Professor Atul Johri was arrested on March 20 for allegedly sexually harassing several women students. He was however granted bail within hours.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Crisis-hit Jaiprakash Associates has deposited Rs 100 crore as per the direction of the Supreme Court in the case related to delays in delivery of flats by its subsidiary, according to sources.

On March 21, the apex court had asked the company to deposit Rs 200 crore in two instalments.

The flagship company of the Jaypee group has now deposited a total of Rs 650 crore in the registry of the Supreme Court.

The bench headed by Chief Justice Deepak Misra had directed the company to deposit Rs 100 crore by April 16 and the rest by May 10.

The Supreme Court had asked it to submit a project-wise chart of home buyers seeking refund so that the amount can be dispersed on pro-rata basis.

"At present we are concerned with the refund and will take later the issue raised by home buyers who want delivery of flats," the top court had said.

Jaiprakash Associates had informed that only 8 per cent of 31,000 home buyers have opted for refund and rest want the possession of flats.

Jaiprakash Associates subsidiary company Jaypee Infratech is developing various projects in Noida and Greater Noida.

Thousands of home buyers are stuck after the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) had last year admitted the IDBI's bank plea to initiate insolvency proceedings against the debt ridden Jaypee Infratech.

Jaypee Group is targeting to complete the construction of pending 24,000 flats in Noida by 2020 at a cost of about Rs 8,000 crore and deliver it to home buyers.

Of the Rs 8,000 crore needed to complete the flats, Rs 6,000 crore would come from home buyers while another Rs 2,000-2,500 crore needs to be infused, Jaypee adviser Ajit Kumar had said earlier this year.

In 2007, Jaypee group started the development of 32,000 flats and plots in its township Wish Town at Noida, of which nearly 8,000 units have been delivered so far.

Of the total flats/plots, Jaypee Infratech, which has already gone into insolvency, began work on 28,000 units while the remaining 4,000 units were with Jaiprakash Associates.

The group is facing huge protest from home buyers due to delays in delivery of real estate projects.

Jaypee Infratech, which is into road construction and real estate business, has constructed the Yamuna Expressway, connecting Delhi and Agra.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Thursday said her government will not allow law to be obstructed and justice will be delivered in the rape-and-murder case of an eight-year-old Bakerwal girl in Kathua district.

The rape-and-murder of the nomadic Muslim Bakerwal community girl has created a controversy after lawyers in Jammu called for a shutdown on Wednesday, demanding the case be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

"The Law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions & statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track & justice will be delivered," Mehbooba said in a tweet.

On Monday, lawyers in Kathua had tried to prevent the Crime Branch from filing the charge sheet in the case. The charge sheet has revealed some chilling details about how the girl was allegedly kidnapped, drugged, raped inside a place of worship before being killed.

Oppositiona Conference leader Omar Abdullah, however, lashed out at the chief minister for not taking any action against two BJP ministers who had attended a rally held in support of the persons accused in the case.

"What rubbish! They are HER ministers, not the Hon(ourable) PM s. The way for her to express her displeasure is to sack them in Jammu not come & leak her alleged displeasure in Delhi," Omar wrote on his twitter handle.

He was responding to tweets by a journalist from a TV channel in which she had said Mehbooba had expressed displeasure over BJP ministers actions in regard with this case.

However, the journalist later pulled down the tweet.

"So even her displeasure wasn't genuine & the tweet has had to be deleted so that a corrected version could be issued," Omar said.From Union minister V K Singh to Congress president Rahul Gandhi, politicians across the divide joined hands with showbiz celebrities and others to speak up for the eight-year-old girl from the minority Bakerwal community who was gangraped and killed in Kathua three months ago.

An enraged nation demanded "exemplary punishment" for the culprits of the crime, even as the politics over the arrest of eight people in connection with the case continued to dominate the discourse in this city of temples.

The support for the eight-year-old girl was growing with politicians, cutting across party lines, seeking justice for her.

Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh said, "we as humans" had failed the eight-year-old girl, but she would not be denied justice.

Congress president Gandhi described the rape and killing of the girl as "unimaginable brutality" that cannot go unpunished, and wondered how anybody can seek to protect the culprits. He also lashed out at the politics being played over the crime.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti said her government would not allow law to be obstructed and ensure justice in the rape-and-murder case.

In a tweet, she said, "The law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions and statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track and justice will be delivered".

Naeem Akthar, a senior minister in the Jammu and Kashmir government, regretted that lawyers, who are the custodians of law, have been fighting on streets and not in the court rooms.

"Government has done whatever is possible and investigations have been concluded. Now it is for the courts to deliver the justice and I am hopeful that the courts would be able to do so," he said.

He said the Bar Council of Jammu has an important role to play in the case.

Jammu and Kashmir police chief S P Vaid, speaking on the case during a live broadcast on Twitter, asserted that his force was as competent as the CBI to probe the Kathua rape and murder case.

"If we can fight terrorism and stone pelting, why we can't carry out the professional investigation. Our officers are on deputation with the CBI," the Director General of Jammu and Kashmir Police said.

Vaid termed as "misconception" that only officers from Kashmir were part of the special investigation team which carried out the probe into the heinous crime.

"The SIT had officers from all ranks and all regions. A police officer is a police officer and not a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Christian. That is what we believe in," he said, citing the example of SSP Jammu Ramesh Jhalla and Deputy SP S Sharma, who were actively involved in the case.

Many celebrities also voiced their outrage over the crime, seeking punishment for those guilty in the case.

Several Bollywood celebrities, including Farhan Akhtar, Sonam Kapoor, Javed Akhtar, Shirish Kunder, asked the public to demand justice for the minor in the wake of the shameful incident.

"Imagine what goes through the mind of an 8-year-old as she is drugged, held captive, gang raped over days and then murdered. If you don't feel her terror, you are not human," Faran Akthar tweeted.

Actor Sonam Kapoor, in a tweet, said, "Ashamed, appalled and disgusted by fake nationals and fake Hindus. I cannot believe this is happening in my country."



Actor Renuka Shahane, in a Facebook post, said that neither the religion of the victim not the religion of rapist should matter.

Meanwhile, Deepika Rajawat, who claimed to be the lawyer representing the family of the victim, appeared on television channels alleging that she had been threatened by Jammu Bar Association president B S Slathia from appearing in the case.

She went on to state that she had filed a complaint with the Jammu and Kashmir High Court as well as the Supreme Court, after which the state High Court directed the security wing to ensure her safety in the court premises.

Bar Council denied the claims made by Rajawat and said since the lawyers are on strike since April 3, she was requested not to appear in any of the cases.

Another lawyers' body, Indian Association of People's Lawyers, in a statement condemned the action of the Jammu Bar Council.

Under pressure from all quarters, Jammu Bar Association president B S Slathia today held a press conference in which he called for justice for the eight-year-old rape victim.

He alleged that the association's agitation for a CBI probe into the case to ensure justice for the victim was being portrayed as communal by those with a "Kashmir-centric mindset".

The minor, who belonged to the nomadic Bakerwal Muslim community, had disappeared from a spot near her house close to Rasana village in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir on January 10. A week later, her body was found in the same area.

A Special Investigation Team, formed to probe the incident, has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destroying evidence.

Jammu has been on tenterhooks since the brutal rape and murder. The city's bar association has opposed the action against the accused and alleged that minority Dogras were being targeted.

While the local local bar association held a bandh, the Valley saw protests demanding justice for the victim.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office is reviewing a sexual assault case against Kevin Spacey.

The case was completed and presented by the LA County Sheriff's Department on April 5, Variety reported.

According to the Sheriff's Dept, the incident, which involved an adult male, allegedly occurred in October 1992 in West Hollywood.

The allegations were investigated by Special Victims Bureau from December 11.

Spacey was sacked from the Netflix hit series "House of Cards" after actor Anthony Rapp accused him of making an unwanted sexual advance towards him when he was a minor after he attended a party at the veteran's (who was 26 at the time) New York apartment in 1986.

The Oscar-winning actor, then, issued a controversial statement in response to Rapp in which he simultaneously came out and said he did not remember behaving inappropriately with him.

In another blow, Spacey was replaced by Christopher Plummer in Ridley Scott's "All the Money in the World".

Allegations of sexual misconduct were levelled against the actor since by numerous men in America and in England.

Scotland Yard is investigating at least three sexual assault complaints against Spacey.

The actor's representatives declined to comment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Authorities today imposed restrictions in parts of Srinagar -- the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir -- and in Kulgam district as a precautionary measure to maintain law and order in view of strike called by separatists to protest the killing of four civilians near an encounter site yesterday.

Restrictions have been imposed in Kulgam district of south Kashmir and parts of Srinagar, a police official said.

He said curbs have been imposed in five police station areas of the city here which include Nowhatta, Khanyar, Rainawari, Safakadal and Maharajgunj.

The restrictions have been imposed as a precautionary measure to maintain law and order, the official said.

Four civilians were killed in clashes with security forces near the encounter site in Khudwani area of Kulgam yesterday. The militants managed to escape from the site and the operation was called off.

Separatists, under the banner of Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL), have called for a strike today to protest the civilian killings.

The JRL, which comprises Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mohammad Yasin Malik, also asked people across the Valley to stage protests in the afternoon and observe a blackout in the evening.

The strike affected normal life elsewhere in the Valley as most of the shops and other business establishments were shut, while public transport was off the roads, officials said.

Authorities also ordered closure of schools and colleges in most parts of the Valley to thwart student protests, the officials said.

The Kashmir University and the Islamic University of Science and Technology have suspended class works for today and postponed all the examinations scheduled for the day as well.

Mobile Internet services remained suspended in south Kashmir areas, while the network speed has been reduced in Srinagar, the officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala today alleged that lock-ups in Kerala have become "killing fields" under CPI(M) rule and sought a judicial probe into the death of a 26-year-old man in police custody in Varappuzha near here.

Chennithala also alleged that Pinarayi Vijayan-led government was 'hesitant' to take action against the Sub-Inspector of Varappuzha police station despite widespread condemnation from various quarters against 'police brutality' towards Sreejith and his brother.

"Lock-ups in Kerala have become killing fields. Sreejith and his brother were subjected to brutal torture in police custody," Chennithala told reporters after meeting Sreejith's family in Varappuzha.

The Leader of Opposition in the Assembly said Sreejith is the sixth victim of custodial torture after the CPI(M)-led LDF came to power in the state.

All those policemen who were responsible for the death of Sreejith should be removed from service and should be tried for murder, Chennithala said.

Seeking a probe by a district judge into the incident, Chennithala criticised the silence of the Chief Minister on the matter.

Due procedures were not followed by the police for taking Sreejith and his brother into custody, he claimed.

Three policemen were suspended on Tuesday in connection with the death of Sreejith in police custody, while a Special Investigation Team (SIT) was formed to probe the case.

Sreejith, who was taken into custody in connection with the death of a person last week, died in a private hospital on Monday evening.

His relatives alleged that he died due to torture.

Police have rejected the allegation of torture, saying Sreejith was suspected to have suffered injuries during a clash allegedly before he was taken into custody.

DGP Loknath Behera has constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to investigate the case following allegations that police harassment and torture caused death of Sreejith.

BJP had observed a dawn-to-dusk hartal on Tuesday in Varappuzha Panchayat, protesting the death of Sreejith, who they claimed was a party worker.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 30-year-old man from Ganjam district, who allegedly threw acid on his wife five months ago, has been arrested from Mumbai, police today said.

The accused, identified as Niranjan Pradhan of Kalamba under Ganjam districts Polasra police station, was nabbed by a team of police from Koparigaon in Navi Mumbai.

Pradhan was working with a private courier company in Mumbai by hiding his identity.

Pradhan had thrown acid on his wife Minati Kumari Pradhan (20), a third year student of DLMT in the medical college on November 16 last year in the administrative block of the medical college. The victim is still undergoing treatment at SCB Medical College and Hospital, Cuttack and her condition was stable.

Pradhan was on the run after committing the crime. He had been to Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh before settling in Mumbai for the past three months, said SP (Berhampur) Pinak Mishra.

"We have sought assistance from different investigation agencies like Odisha Crime Branch, National Investigation Agency (NIA), Mumbai Police and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to nab him," the SP said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A sessions court today convicted a man for killing a 53-year-old woman and her granddaughter and stealing gold ornaments worth Rs 3.60 lakh.

Judge M S Azmi held Vishal Shrivastav (28) guilty of the crime.

The arguments on the sentence is likely to begin from April 16.

On June 3, 2011, the bodies of Ranjana Nagotkar and her granddaughter Vaishali (3) were found, with their throats slit, in their flat in Antop Hill area here.

Gold ornaments worth Rs 3.60 lakh and Rs 3,500 in cash were missing from the flat.

Nagotkar's daughter Sheetal and son-in-law Santosh Railkar were away at work when the incident took place.

Police said Shrivastav, who lived in a rented flat nearby, had killed the two after an earlier plan, of lacing their milk with poison (a dead lizard) on June 2, did not work.

Shrivastav aroused suspicion when he was seen leaving the area in a saree, but he told police that he was a homosexual and was going to CSMT to meet a partner.

He was arrested in October, 2011 from Kanpur following police investigations.

Police said Shrivastav, who has a degree in hotel management, wanted to splurge at bars and buy expensive clothes and jewellery.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Priyanka Chopra says women have the "superpower" to balance career with family and it is high time men understood that their aspirations are equally important.

The 35-year-old actor, who entered the film industry soon after winning the Miss World title at the age of 18, credits her parents, especially her father, for understanding her dreams and helping her achieve them.

"I came from a family where everyone questioned my decision to become an actor. There was a big debate in my house. But my parents, especially my father said, 'I am standing by her in whatever she wants to do. I will make sure nothing wrong happens to her.' He kept his promise. He was with me always till I was 23. He used to be my manager. I had the support of my father," Priyanka told PTI in an interview.

"The men in the world need to understand that as soon as you empower a woman, as soon as you give her the opportunity to be her best, she can handle both family and career. I feel boys can't tackle both. Look at the medals at Commonwealth Games, most of them have been won by women because they had this opportunity," she says.

The actor believes society needs to be more open towards the idea of women being ambitious. She says people have still not warmed up to the idea of a career-oriented woman.

"Girls being ambitious is still like... 'haw kitni ambitious hai!' (she is so ambitious!). Women have the superpower where they can manage their family and their ambition together. Just because a woman is working, it does not mean she won't be able to take care of her family. My mother was a working woman. She is double MD. She raised two children, who seem to be alright. We need to separate the two things," she says.

Priyanka, who has always been upfront about her ideas on issues pertaining to gender equality and women's health, says being an entertainer gives her a platform to spread awareness about various social causes.

"I take my social responsibility very seriously. I know I am an influencer. I know because of being an entertainer, I have the ears of people. They will listen to me. I like to use the platform to be able to make a change. I know what my life would have ended up being had my parents not taught me to be the way I am. So, I like to take that opportunity, especially when I believe in a cause."



The actor, however, does not think working for social welfare is solely a celebrity's job. She believes promoting a cause is a personal decision and celebrities should not be expected to behave like superheroes.

"So many people ask me 'you are celebrity, what do you do for the world?' People never ask themselves what they have done. As an entertainer, it is my job to entertain people and I am doing it. And I don't understand why celebrities are expected to do everything and solve world problems. I am doing this because I want to.

"I am a strong believer that each one of us needs to be socially responsible. But it is an individual's decision. For me, it is important that I will fly down in the middle of my shoot just for 12 hours. But everybody can't be expected to have the same standard. And I do think, we tend to sometimes think that actors should be perfect, but we are not... We are humans," says Priyanka.

Priyanka, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, flew down to Delhi from Dublin, Ireland to formally introduce the 2018 Partners' Forum, a platform which works towards improving the health and well-being of women, children and adolescents.

The actor says despite being a public figure, she does not censor her opinions to fit the popular narrative which sometimes lands her in trouble.

"... I am logical, but not careful. That is why I get into trouble. But I speak from my heart and I know I don't have any malice. I know there are people out there who are waiting with a magnifying glass to see if I speak something wrong. I always hope that I don't say something wrong and if I say I am not shy to apologise. But if I am not wrong, I will defend myself," she says.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Ahead of the Ambedkar Jayanti on April 14, the Centre today asked all states to beef up security and check any possible attempt to inciting violence during the event.

The Ministry of Home Affairs also said that Districts Magistrates and Superintendents of Police should ensure peace and check violence in their respective areas of jurisdiction.

This is the a advisory by the MHA within a fortnight. The first one was sent a day before the April 2 Bharat bandh, which was called to protest against the alleged dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

Another advisory was sent before the April 10 strike calledby people opposed to caste-based reservations in jobs and education.

The latest MHA missive came in the wake of massive violence in different parts of the country during the April 2 Bharat bandh, leading to the death of about a dozen people, and vandalisation of statues in some parts of the country.

An official of the MHA said the ministry has issued the advisory to all states to take necessary precautionary measures on the occasion on Ambedkar Jayanti on April 14.

"The MHA has asked that patrolling should be intensified to ensure that no loss of life and property takes place and prohibitory orders may be issued wherever necessary," the official said.

The advisory stressed that District Magistrates and Superintendents of Police may be asked to take all necessary steps for ensuring that law and order remains firmly under control in the areas of jurisdiction.

The MHA asked the DMs and SPs to activate community policing initiatives to ensure peace and harmony.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) today alleged minorities were being 'hunted' under the BJP-led NDA government's rule and stressed the need for "secular democratic" forces to come together.

The rule of NDA government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi should end, IUML President K M Khader Moideen told reporters after the party's National Executive meet here.

"The life of minorities have become miserable under the BJP rule in the country and they are being hunted repeatedly," he charged.

He also claimed that Dalits in the country were the second victim of the BJP rule.

Moideen also alleged that the NDA government had spoilt the country's relation with neighbouring nations like Manynmar, Bengaladesh, Nepal and Maldives.

"The need for secular democratic forces to come together assumes significance in this present situation in the country," he added.

IUML General Secretary P K Kunhalikutty said the party was a partner in the Congress led-UDF in Kerala and UPA at the national level and hence would not go for any electoral alliance that would weaken the lead partner.

On May 12 assembly elections in Karnataka, he said Congress had better chance to retain power.

The Congress would get a better victory if minorities votes were not divided, he added.

Apparently referring to CPI-M's opposition to any tie-up with Congress, Kunhalikutty said it was very sad that the Left parties had failed to identify the enemy when "secular parties were moving forward together.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Five miscreants looted Rs.9.5 lakh from a Gramin Bank in Moharo under Jama police station of Dumka district today, police said.

The miscreants, two of whom were were wearing helmets, entered the bank and held the staff at gunpoint before looting the cash, Superintendent of Police, Kishore Kaushal said.

After committing the crime, the miscreants escaped in motorcycles, he said.

Kaushal said the incident has been captured on the CCTV installed in the bank.

The police have launched a massive checking drive in the district borders and also alerted the adjacent district police stations including Deoghar (Jharkhand) and Bhagalpur (Bihar), he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Fortis Healthcare today said it has received an "unsolicited binding offer" from Hero Enterprise Investment Office and Burman Family Office to invest Rs 1,250 crore in the company through preferential allotment route.

Group entities of Hero Enterprise Investment Office led by Sunil Kant Munjal and the Burman family of the Dabur Group currently hold around 3 per cent stake in the healthcare chain.

In a regulatory filing, Fortis Healthcare Ltd (FHL) said the offer from Munjals and Burmans includes Rs 500 crore binding offer immediately and Rs 750 crore post diligence to be completed within three weeks.

"The said proposal is under evaluation by the company and we will keep the stock exchanges informed accordingly," it added.

Spelling out the details of their offer, the Munjals and Burmans in a joint letter said,"We are investing an amount of Rs 500 crore based on current business and financial position of the company without doing any due diligence..."



Further, the letter said,"Allotment and pricing shall be as per SEBI ICDR guidelines for preferential issues or Rs 156 per share which is higher."



Utilisation of proceeds from this funding shall only be for the purposes of payment of employee dues, repayment of loans which have matured and payment of pressing creditors and to monitor these a board seat shall be given to investors, it added.

The rest Rs 750 crore shall given after due diligence subject to the satisfaction of the investors which will be completed in three weeks, the letter added.

Their offer comes two days after Manipal Health Enterprises raised its offer for Fortis Healthcare Ltd by valuing the hospital business higher at Rs 6,061 crore which would result in a "more favourable share exchange ratio for shareholders of FHL".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told US lawmakers that his personal data was also harvested and sold by Cambridge Analytica and he intends to initiate legal action against the British firm accused of stealing personal information and using it for political purposes.

Zuckerberg replied "yes" when asked if his personal data was included in the information sold to the "malicious third parties" by the lawmakers during a testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday.

Cambridge Analytica compromised personal information of approximately 87 million users, half a million of whom were from India.

The American people are concerned about how Facebook protects and profits from its users' data, lawmakers said.

Beginning this Monday, Facebook has started to notify those users whose data have been breached.

Responding to a volley of questions, Zuckerberg, 33, said it would take some time to work through all the changes the company needs to make.

"But I am committed to getting this right, and that includes the basic responsibility of protecting people's information, which we failed to do with Cambridge Analytica," he said.

Zuckerberg said he was getting to the bottom of what the UK-based firm did and will tell everyone who may have been affected.

"What we know now is that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained some information about millions of Facebook members by buying it from an app developer that people had shared it with," he said.

"This information was generally information that people share publicly on their profile pages, like their name and profile picture and the list of pages that they follow. When we first contacted Cambridge Analytica, they told us that they had deleted the data. And then, about a month ago, we heard a new report that suggested that this was not true," he said.

Now the Facebook is working with governments in the US, the UK and around the world to do a full audit of what they've done and to make sure that they get rid of any data that they still have.

Responding to a question, he told lawmakers that he intended to initiate legal action against the firm accused of stealing personal data and using it for political purposes in the 2016 US Presidential elections.

To make sure that no other app developers are out there misusing data, Facebook is now investigating every single app that had access to a large amount of people's information on Facebook in the past.

"If we find someone that improperly used data, we're going to ban them from our platform and tell everyone affected," he said.

To prevent this from ever happening again, Facebook is making sure developers can't access as much information, going forward, he said



"The good here is that we made some big changes to our platform in 2014 that would prevent this specific instance with Cambridge Analytica from happening again today. But there's more to do, and you can find more of the details of the other steps we're taking in the written statement I provided," he said.

Zuckerberg told lawmakers that Facebook had now removed the option for advertisers to exclude ethnic groups from targeting.

"Every time, there is a control right there - not buried in settings somewhere, but right there, when they're posting about who they want to share it with," he added.

Zuckerberg asserted that Facebook did not sell data.

"We don't sell data. That's not how advertising works, and I do think we could probably be doing a clearer job explaining that, given the misperceptions that are out there," he said in response to a question.

Facebook is neither a media or a financial institution, he said.

"I consider us to be a technology company, because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build products and services for other people," he said.

"There are certainly other things that we do, too. We do pay to help produce content. We build enterprise software, although I don't consider us an enterprise software company. We build planes to help connect people, and I don't consider ourselves to be an aerospace company," he said.

It is clear now that Facebook didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy, he said.

"We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I am sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and, at the end of the day, I am responsible for what happens here. So, now, we have to go through every part of our relationship with people to make sure that we're taking a broad enough view of our responsibility," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Gyani Gurbachan Singh, jathedar of Akal Takht, the supreme temporal seat of the Sikhs, today announced the decision to excommunicate Harinder Sikka, producer of controversial film Nanak Shah Fakir, from the Sikh Panth.

The decision was taken at a meeting of jathedars of the five Takhts, a day before the release of the film which is based on life of the first Sikh Guru.

The meeting was called after Sikka refused to abide by orders of the Akal Takht to withdraw the movie from cinemas.

The announcement about the excommunication was made later.

Earlier, the Akal Takht had imposed a ban on the release of 'Nanak Shah Fakir', after it contended that showing Sikh gurus in living form cannot be permitted.

"...And the issue relating to human beings playing the role of the Guru and his family has not been addressed in the movie," the Akal Takht jathedar had said earlier.

Meanwhile, all institutions being run by the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), apex religious body of the Sikhs, will remain closed tomorrow as a mark of protest against the film's release.

SGPC chief Gobind Singh Longowal today said that the SGPC was duty bound to comply with the directive of the Sikh clergy on the issue.

"An appeal has been made to the Sikhs to observe a peaceful protest against the movie," he said.

They have also been asked to wear black turbans as a mark of protest.

On April 10, the Supreme Court had criticised SGPC, for imposing restrictions on the film and cleared the decks for its nationwide release.

The top court had said that once the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) grants certification to a movie, there cannot be any kind of obstruction for its exhibition.

Even today, the SGPC made two unsuccessful attempts in the apex court to stall its release.

Sikka, a retired Naval officer, had approached the apex court claiming that the SGPC had recently banned the release of film which is based on the life and teachings of Sikhism's founder Guru Nanak Dev, even after the CBFC cleared it on March 28.

In 2015, the producers of the film had decided to withdraw the movie from cinema halls across the country and other parts of the world after protests from religious Sikh groups.

A month ago, the film producers again announced the movie's release for April 13 after which various Sikh outfits started raising objections seeking a ban on the grounds that depiction of Sikh gurus and other historic Sikh figures in films is considered blasphemous.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Two Sikh bodies today made unsuccessful attempts in the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court to stall the release of the movie 'Nanak Shah Fakir', which would hit theatres across the nation tomorrow.

Both the top court and the high court rejected the respective pleas of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee (DSGMC) to accord urgent hearing. But later, the Supreme Court listed the matter for hearing on April 16 and the high court for April 22.

As the apex court began its proceedings this morning, SGPC mentioned the matter before a bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra seeking modification of its order allowing the release of the film.

However, the bench, also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, refused urgent hearing, saying once a film has been granted certification by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), its release can only be stalled through lawful means.

A few hours later during the post-lunch session, SGPC counsel Satender Singh Gulati again made an attempt to get some relief but the bench stuck to its stand and refused to budge from its morning order.

The SGPC lawyer referred to the 2003 resolution of the apex Sikh body and said that nobody can be allowed to portray the lives of ten Sikh gurus, their families and the 'panj pyare' on screen and otherwise.

However, the court said "the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) has already granted the certification. Outsiders cannot be allowed to curtail the freedom of speech and expression."



During the second attempt, the SGPC said its plea should be either heard today or tomorrow as it would be rendered infructuous as the movie is slated for release tomorrow.

The bench again refused to consider the SGPC submission and said the plea would be heard on April 16.

In a last-ditch effort at the fag end of the day, another Sikh body DSGMC moved a plea before the Delhi High Court challenging the release of the movie saying it has characterised the family members of Guru Nank Dev with humans/actors which is against the principles of Sikh religion.

However, DSGMC also failed to get any reprieve as the High Court refused to stay the release of movie saying the petition was motivated after the Supreme Court refused to grant any relief.

It said it was unbelievable that the DSGMC, which has filed the petition challenging the no-objection certificate issued by the Censor Board, was not aware of the making of film till now.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar, which issued notices and sought responses of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, CBFC and film's producer Harinder S Sikka, said the "release of the film cannot be interdicted"



The High Court directed the Centre to ensure maintenance of law and order and made it clear that it was not granting any ex-parte relief to DSGMC without hearing the film producer. The bench then listed the matter for further hearing on May 22.

The producer of the movie has reportedly said that the movie will not be released in Punjab.

The top court had on April 10 criticised SGPC, the apex religious body of the Sikhs, for imposing restrictions on the film 'Nanak Shah Fakir' and had cleared the decks for its nationwide release scheduled on April 13.

It had said after the CBFC certification, no group, body, association or individuals can create any kind of disturbance in exhibition of the film.

The order had come on a petition by Harinder S Sikka, a retired Naval officer and the producer of the film, who had approached the apex court claiming that the SGPC had recently banned the release of film which is based on the life and teachings of Sikhism founder Guru Nanak Dev, even after the CBFC cleared it on March 28.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Director Nandita Das' Manto, a biopic on celebrated short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto, has been selected in the Cannes sub section Un Certain Regard.

The film, which stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the title role, is Das' second directorial effort after Firaaq in 2008.

The director shared the via Twitter.

We are in Cannes!! #Manto is selected in the official section - Un Certain Regards. Exciting moment for the entire crew & cast, she tweeted.

Official Twitter handle of the French film festival also posted the announcement, which Siddiqui shared with his followers and congratulated his director and the team.

'And it is possible that Saadat Hasan dies, but MANTO remains alive'. Glad to inform that MANTO' is selected for competition at #Cannes2018 in #UnCertainRegard section, the actor wrote.

Das' take on Manto focuses on the writer's life from 1946 to 1950.

Manto, best known for his stories on Partition, was born on May 11, 1912 and migrated to Pakistan after 1947 and died at the age of 55 on January 18, 1955.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)State-owned National Buildings Construction Corporation (NBCC) today signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Skill Development Institute (SDI) Bhubaneswar for developing a construction training institute.

To be built at a cost of 900 crore in two phases, the institute will have a total built up area of 1.8 lakh square meter and will facilitate empowering of youth in Odisha with relevant skill sets and train them in various disciplines, according to a company release.

The SDI Bhubaneswar is a training setup being promoted by eight public sector utilities in the oil and gas sector under joint CSR schemes.

"NBCC wants to have skilled and future-ready workforce to be a part of our team. We are working towards creating a well-defined system of identifying and training the workforce in the construction sector, which comprises port, irrigation, roads, infrastructures and buildings," said Anoop Kumar Mittal, chairman and managing director, NBCC.

He further said the company is embarking to develop SDI Bhubaneswar as the country's most promising skill academy in the line with the government's Skill India Mission.

"It aims to further enhance the skill set and knowledge set of individuals so that they can adapt themselves in the fast-changing business environment. NBCC has pledged to impart training to 40,000 workers (including both onsite and offsite) in next five years," added Mittal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)NCERT has published information about helplines for children in all course books from Class 6-12, giving around 26 crore school children access to them, the Women and Child Development (WCD) Ministry said today.

WCD Minister Maneka Gandhi had suggested the idea to Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar last year during a telephone conversation.

"The National Council Of Educational Research And Training (NCERT) has published the information regarding Childline (1098) 24x7 Helpline for children and POCSO e-box on the back side of the front cover of all course books from Class 6 to Class 12. To equip the children with the information regarding the possible modes of protection/complaints," the ministry said in a statement.

Gandhi had requested her Cabinet colleague to popularise POCSO e-box and Childline 1098 through NCERT publications, screening of educational films on child sexual abuse in schools and having strict norms to employ the support staff.

Today, she thanked the HRD Minister and NCERT for implementing her suggestion and stated that parents, guardians and teachers should remain vigilant about children as well as their behaviour. Any suspected situation should be reported immediately on the Childline No.1098 and the POCSO e-Box, the ministry said.

Through these course books, the information is expected to reach approximately 26 crore students in 15 lakh schools.

NCERT was also advised to include a chapter in social science subject regarding the issues mentioned above.

"The narrative may continue till Class 12 for having a reasonable impact on young minds. The information will not just reach these children, but is about to stay with them on daily basis. As a result, it is expected that the children will be more aware and they may use the Child Helpline or POCSO e-box, in case of any distress. The easy accessibility of this information in the hand of children themselves may also deter the prospective abusers, at least to a reasonable extent," the ministry said.

The information via these books will also be available to 10 lakh teachers along with the family members and care givers of these children.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Streaming giant Netflix has decided to pull out of the Cannes Film Festival following a rule change.

The move came after Cannes artistic director Thierry Fremaux had announced a ban on films from the main competition which do not have a proper theatrical release in France.

The ban came in response to huge controversy that erupted last year, when two Netflix films -- "Okja" and "The Meyerowitz Stories" -- entered the competition for the Palme d'Or without being released in cinemas.

In an interview with Variety, Netflix's content officer Ted Sarandos said the streaming giant will not be a part of the festival this year.

"We want our films to be on fair ground with every other filmmaker. There's a risk in us going in this way and having our films and filmmakers treated disrespectfully at the festival. They've set the tone. I don't think it would be good for us to be there," Sarandos said.

He also called the decision "completely contrary to the spirit of any film festival in the world".

Netflix, however, could still take part in the festival by taking its films out of the competition but Sarandos denied the possibility of it.

"No. I don't think there would be any reason to go out of competition. The rule was implicitly about Netflix, and Thierry made it explicitly about Netflix when he announced the rule," he said.

Netflix was supposed to present five features at the fest that included Alfonso Cuaron's "Roma"; Paul Greengrass' "Norway"; Jeremy Saulnier's "Hold the Dark"; Orson Welles' "The Other Side of the Wind", a newly completed version of the film that Welles shot in the 1970s; and Morgan Neville's "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead", a doc about the Welles film.

"We hope that they do change the rules. We hope that they modernize. But we will continue to support all films and all film-makers. We encourage Cannes to rejoin the world cinema community and welcome them back," Sarandos said.

The 71st edition of the Cannes Film Festival will kick off from May 8.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump today asserted that he has never said when an attack, if at all, on Syria will take place, a day after he warned Damascus that US missiles "will be coming" in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians in the strife-torn Arab country.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" Trump said amidst reports of an imminent American missile attack on Syria.

"In any event, the US, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'," he tweeted.

Two days ago, Trump had said that he would take a decision on Syria within 24-48 hours.

The White House yesterday said that the president is considering all options and no decision has been taken yet.

Former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today told MSNBC that it was not something that the president should have said with regards to the status of American forces.

"Because if we're going to be able to have some kind of influence in Syria, and it is a chaotic situation, it is important for the United States to have a presence there and to indicate that we have a role to play," he said.

"By saying what he said, I think he may have sent a signal that somehow the United States would not care whatever happened in Syria, and I think that was dangerous," Panetta said.

The US, he rued, has really never had a strategy with regards to Syria.

"We've been reactive to the moment and to the crisis without thinking about what is our strategy in Syria, and as a result of that we've been somewhat ambivalent about how to handle that chaos," he said.

"And so, rather than developing that strategy, rather than trying to play a role in forcing Syria to figure out some kind of political settlement there that would get rid of Assad and allow Syrians to decide what their political future is, frankly, we have been hitting ISIS on the side talking about Assad but really don't have an overall strategy," Panetta said.

"If we're going to strike Syria I don't think this ought to be a reflex action without a strategy. That's what this administration has to do, is figure out what is our long-term strategy in Syria going to be," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) today said it is yet to receive information from Punjab National Bank on the nearly Rs 13,000 crore scam involving Nirav Modi.

A high-level group constituted by the institute is studying specifically the systemic issues involved in the PNB fraud and would also suggest remedial measures for strengthening the banking system.

Having failed to get any information from the bank, the group, set up in February, had sought government's intervention to obtain details related to the fraud.

"The Ministry of Corporate Affairs and the Ministry of Finance wrote a letter to PNB and asked it to give information to the ICAI. But, so far we have not received any information from the bank," ICAI Member S B Zaware told reporters here today.

When the group asked for information, PNB officials raised questions about whether the ICAI is statutorily required to find out this information when there is CBI and ED are doing investigations, Zaware, who is also the committee's convenor, said.

He said the group had requested PNB some documents, details of the processes and other information related to the scam.

"We could not get information from PNB. They are not at all co-operating," Zaware said.

According to him, the ICAI has also asked all the statutory auditors of PNB's Brady House branch, where the scam took place, to appear before its Board of Discipline to give their explanation.

In February, the second largest public sector bank PNB detected fraudulent transactions at the Brady House branch in Mumbai.

The biggest ever banking fraud of more than Rs 13,000 crore was allegedly committed by billionaire diamantaire Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi in connivance with some officials of PNB.

Multiple agencies, including the CBI, the ED and the SFIO, are probing the case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump is weighing all options on the table with regard to Syria as he holds the Syrian regime and Russia responsible for the latest chemical weapons attack, the White House said today, adding that no final decision has been taken yet on the military response.

"It sounds like all options are on the table, and a final decision hasn't been made, but we'll keep you posted once it is," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters at her daily conference.

Referring to the allegation of a Russian military official that there was an attack but it was staged by the White Helmets brigade component of the rebels in Syria, she said the intelligence provided "certainly paints" a different picture, and the President holds Syria and Russia responsible for the chemical weapons attack.

In the last few days, Trump has blamed the authoritarian Assad regime for the chemical attack that killed dozens of Syrian civilians, including children and women, in the Damascus suburb of Douma.

"We're maintaining that we have a number of options, and all of those options are still on the table. Final decisions haven't been made yet on that front," Sarah Sanders said, adding that the President has not laid out a timetable.

"In a public sense, certainly the President has made some decisions. He made a decision not to travel to Latin America so that we could focus on this. That was the first step in this process, but we're continuing to look at a number of options," she said.

Russia, she alleged, holds some responsibility in the fact that they had guaranteed that Syria wouldn't use chemical weapons again, which they did. They also hold some responsibility in the fact that they have the six UN resolutions that they vetoed to help protect Assad. Both of those things lie at Russia's feet in terms of responsibility in this process, Sarah Sanders said.

In a statement, Senator Bernie Sanders said Trump has no legal authority for broadening the war in Syria.

"It is Congress, not the President, who determines whether our country goes to war and Congress must not abdicate that responsibility. We have been in Afghanistan for 17 years and Iraq for 15 years. The result has been massive regional instability, terrible loss of life and a cost of trillions of dollars," he said.

"If President Trump believes that expanding the war in Syria will bring stability to the region and protect American interests, he should come to Congress with his ideas," Bernie Sanders.

Senator Edward Markey, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, criticised Trump's warnings that he intends to conduct military strikes in retaliation against Assad's use of chemical weapons.

"Before President Trump conducts military operations, he must come to Congress for authorisation," he demanded.

"Numerous, large-scale attacks on another country without Congressional authorisation are unconstitutional, and they push the US closer to what could be an interminable, all-out conflict in Syria. And announcing military actions over Twitter is the height of irresponsibility and contradicts the President's own previous commitment never to disclose America's plans publicly," Markey said.

Sarah Sanders said the Trump administration will follow whatever laws and regulations were necessary for any actions that it takes.

"Because we haven't laid out any specific actions that we plan to take, I can't tell you exactly what needs we would have to go to Congress with," she said.

Meanwhile, Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana requested a classified hearing for members of Congress on the chemical weapons attack in Syria.

"The images of children struggling to breathe after the chemical attack are unconscionable. Whoever did this is a human butcher," he said. "We need answers to fully understand who is responsible for the attack. We cant let this go unanswered. If we do, our friends won't trust us and our enemies won't respect us," Kennedy added.

Congressman Brad Schneider said the reports from Syria of another major chemical weapons attack against civilians, represent yet one more war crime committed by Bashar al-Assad and his regime.

"Assad must be held to account and the world must clearly demonstrate that chemical weapons are unacceptable anytime, anywhere, and in any context," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Cambridge Analytica scandal in which personal data of over 87 million Facebook users, including 500,000 Indians, was compromised, has not hit the social media platform in a significant way in terms of people deactivating their accounts, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said.

Zuckerberg, 33, also the founder of Facebook, acknowledged this during a Congressional hearing yesterday, his second in two days, on issues related on data privacy and security in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

"Yes," Zuckerberg said when Congresswoman Dana Louise DeGette asked whether Facebook has witnessed no significant increase in users deactivating their accounts.

"Yes, that's correct," he said when DeGette asked since the revelations, Facebook has also not noticed a decrease in user interaction on Facebook.

Zuckerberg said as a result of the scandal, and the questions raised, Facebook is going to put, at the top of everyone's app when they sign in, a tool that walks people through the settings and gives people the choices and asks them to make decisions on how they want their settings be set.

Everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls, he said.

ALSO READ: Zuckerberg tells House panel his own data was shared by Cambridge Analytica

"We have had a lot of these controls in place for years. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requires us to do a few more things, and we're going to extend that to the world, he told lawmakers.

The GDPR is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union.

ALSO READ: Mark Zuckerberg faces sceptical Capitol with panache

Introduced by the European Union, GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation requires that the company's request for user consent in a clear and concise way, using language that is understandable, and be clearly distinguishable from other pieces of information, including terms and conditions.

It is prescription on how companies treat consumer data. And it makes it clear that consumers need to be in control of their own data.

"I think we may be updating it a little bit. But, as you say, we've had the ability to download your information for years now. And people have the ability to see everything that they have in Facebook, to take that out, delete their account and move their data anywhere that they want," he said.

Responding to a question, Zuckerberg acknowledged that a lot of people probably just accept terms of service without taking the time to read through it.

"I view our responsibility not as just legally complying with laying it out and getting that consent, but actually trying to make sure that people understand what's happening throughout the product," he said.

"That's why, every single time that you share something on Facebook or one of our services, right there is a control in line, where you control who you want to share with, because I don't just think that this is about a terms of service. It's contextual," he noted.

"You want to present people with the information about what they might be doing and give them the relevant controls in line, at the time that they're making those decisions, not just have it be in the background sometime, or make a one-time decision," he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has the ability to detect when a foreign entity is attempting to buy a political advertisement. "This is an extremely important area. After we were slow to identify the Russian information operations in 2016, this has become a top priority for our company to prevent that from ever happening again, especially this year, in 2018, which is such an important election year with the US mid-terms, but also major elections in India, Brazil, Mexico, Hungary, Pakistan and a number of other places," he said.

Facebook is working on a number of things, including deploying new Artificial Intelligence tools that can proactively catch fake accounts that Russia or others might create to spread misinformation.

The social media company, he said, is not aware of any specific groups like that, that have engaged in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville last year.

"We are conducting a full investigation of any apps that had access to a large amount of data. And, if we find anything suspicious, we'll tell everyone affected," he said.A notorious interstate criminal carrying a reward of Rs 50,000 and wanted in several cases across Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Mumbai was arrested, police said today.

The accused -- Ansar alias Ansi -- was arrested on April 10 from Nelson Mandela Marg, Vasant Kunj. He was absconding since 2015 and remained active in criminal activities, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) P SKushwah said in a statement.

During interrogation, the officer said, "He disclosed that on June 25, 2015 he along with his associates Mubarik alias Raju, Tarif, Muddassar, Latif and Sadiq had abducted a businessman at gun point from Delhi Airport."



To lure the businessman, the accused had given an advertisement in newspapers for sale of scrap. On seeing the advertisement, the businessman, who is a CEO of a reputed company, had come to Delhi to meet the prospective party to work out a deal.

When he came out from the airport, he was abducted at gun point. They demanded Rs 50 lakhs as ransom from the company owner, the officer said.

"In the meantime, when the Delhi Police raided Hathiya village, where they had held the businessman hostage, the accused ran away from the spot," Kushwah added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today it was now evident that the Syrian regime failed to eradicate its chemical weapons, after a toxic gas attack blamed on Damascus.

"We... must now acknowledge that it is obvious that the destruction was not completely carried out," she said. Damascus narrowly avoided American and French air strikes in 2013 in retaliation for a suspected sarin attack by agreeing to hand over its chemical arsenal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Indian cab hailing firm Ola today said it has started operations in Melbourne, expanding its services in the Australian market.

In February, the company had kick-started its services in Australia with Perth. In January, the SoftBank-backed company had announced its plans to foray into the Australian market



Ola continues to receive positive response from driver-partners with over 15,000 registrations across Australia, the company said in a statement.

Ola offers driver-partners in Australia 7.5 per cent introductory commission rate and daily payments, helping them earn more money, it added.

We've been humbled by the response from passengers and drivers alike in Perth and Sydney, and are incredibly excited about launching Ola in Melbourne, Ola Vice President (Head of International) Chandra Nath said.

The company said it is working with local stakeholders to continue its rollout in Australia, with future launch cities including Brisbane and the Gold Coast, Canberra, Adelaide, Darwin and Hobart.

Ola's main competitor in the Australian market is Uber. Interestingly, SoftBank is also an investor in Uber.

Uber launched its operations in Australia in 2012 and currently operates in 19 Australian cities including the major cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra.

The companies are already locked in an intense battle for leadership in the Indian market.

They compete not only in the ride-sharing space in India but also food delivery, with Ola acquiring Foodpanda's India business. US-based Uber runs on-demand food delivery app UberEATs in select Indian cities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)One person was arrested here today in connection with the heckling of Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha near here during the anti-quota 'Bharat Bandh' called on Tuesday.

Vaishali Superintendent of Police Rakesh Kumar said that Sumit Mishra, a resident of Lona village, was arrested in connection with the heckling of Kushwaha while he was on his way to attend a function of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in East Champaran district.

Kushwaha was unable to reach the venue because of roadblocks at various points by supporters of the "Bharat Bandh", called in protest against caste-based reservations.

"An FIR was lodged by the police at Rajapakar against 60 unknown people for misbehaving with the Union Minister. So far, only Sumit Mishra has been identified and subsequently arrested. He is being interrogated and based on his inputs we hope to identify and nab more people", the SP said.

Kushwaha, who also heads the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party, had yesterday condemned the incident at a press conference in Patna where he had said "a section of the savarn samaj (upper castes) is vitiating the atmosphere while the rest are committed to social harmony".

Kushwaha had also asserted that he would go ahead with the "halla bol darwaza khol" campaign of his party, whereby the demand for adequate representation of SCs, STs and OBCs in the judiciary would be raised.

Meanwhile, in a statement RLSP national tresurer and spokesman Rajesh Yadav said demonstrations were held at all district headquarters of Bihar today in protest against the "insult" of their leader at the "hands of casteist, feudal and anti-reservation elements".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The world's chemical arms watchdog said it will release a statement tomorrow about a probe into last month's alleged poisoning of a former Russian double agent.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons "will be issuing a press release anticipated for 1 PM today and the unclassified executive summary per the request of the UK government," the body said in a brief statement to AFP.

The statement will be released around 1100 GMT today (4.30 AM IST Friday).

At the request of the British government, OPCW experts have carried out an independent investigation into the alleged attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter on March 4 in the town of Salisbury.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today observed fast here along with other BJP MPs and MLAs, and hit out at the opposition saying it does not have any alternative to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The BJP leader across the country are sitting on a day-long fast today to corner the opposition over the recent washout of the Budget session of Parliament.

Fadnavis, along with Lok Sabha members Poonam Mahajan (North Central Mumbai) and Paresh Rawal (Gujarat), local MLAs Parag Alavani, Amit Satam and Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar sat on the day-long fast at the party office in suburban Vile Parle.

The chief minister said, "People know contradictions of the opposition parties. They can't stay together. What is the alternative to Modi in terms of policies, programmes and leadership? The opposition only wants power...(but) they don't have an alternative to Modi."



He said the Congress has no moral strength to face Parliament because when the Prime Minister counters it. "They have no face to show."



He also alleged that most of the atrocities on Dalits took place during the Congress rule.

"The Dalit and tribal entrepreneurship is being encouraged by the Modi government," he pointed out.

Fadnavis said PM Modi is dedicated to the welfare of the people and the country.

"Public hai, public sab jaanti hai (this is the public, it knows everything," Fadnavis said.

Lashing out at the Congress, he said, "People have seen you and tolerated you.

"Until the Congress learns to respect and preserve democracy, don't send their members to Parliament," he appealed to people.

Fadnavis, while leaving the venue, said he was going to Nanded on official work.

"Don't worry, I will not have 'chole bhature'," he said in a dig at the Congress over its leaders "seen having food" before their fast on Monday.

"Our struggle to preserve the democratic values will continue," Fadnavis said.

A street play was performed in front of him, highlighting the government's achievements, like demonetisation, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the Jalyukt Shivar campaign (aimed at improving irrigation facilities in Maharashtra) and other welfare programmes for farmers.

The BJP has accused the opposition Congress of disrupting Parliament during the recent Budget session to prevent debates on various issues.

On the occasion, Rawal said the Congressdidnot allow Parliament to function as it does not have any issue to raise.

"We decided to forgo our salaries as the Congress did not allow Parliament to function. But, the Congress members have taken their salaries," he claimed.

Rawal mocked the Congress' fast on Monday as "farce" over some of its leaders "seen having food" before the protest.

Shelar accused the Congress of "wasting Rs 430 crore of the taxpayers" by disrupting Parliament session.

Kirit Somaiya, the BJP MP from North East Mumbai, sat on the protest near the Bhandup railway station.

He said, "Today around 350 Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members of the BJP are observing the fast against the Congress' unruly behaviour in Parliament because of which the proceedings of Parliament were washed out."



"The Congress and other opposition parties did not allow Parliament to function for 23 days, and 17 important Bills were passed without debate. We wanted to discuss about the alleged bank scams of Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi, the non-performing assets (NPAs) of Rs 52 lakh crore, among other important issues," he said.

Railway Minister Piyush Goyal observed the fast in neighbouring Thane city.

He alleged that the Congress had "disgraced the Constitution" framed by Dr B R Ambedkar.

"Ambedkar's hard and noble work has been disgraced by the Congress by not allowing Parliament to function," he further said.

"Not only the BJP leaders and workers, but I think people across the country are appalled by the opposition parties, specially the Congress," Goyal said.

The social media cell of the BJP also ran a campaign called #FastWithPMModi.

"When the Nation wants us to talk, Congress takes our Democracy for a walk. We stand together with our Hon'ble PM Shri @narendramodi ji to remind them of the duties of the opposition! Join us today at District BJP Office in Vile Parle," Mahajan tweeted.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi today led his party leaders in observing the day-long fast.

Addressing party MPs yesterday through an audio conference call, Modi had said the BJP leaders and its workers will observe the fast to "expose" those handful of people who "throttled" democracy by stalling Parliament proceedings during the budget session.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Opposition parties in West Bengal on Thursday termed the high court order staying the 2018 Panchayat Election process in the state "victory of democracy over dictatorship" and sought the resignation of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee over the alleged violence during filing of nominations.

The polls are scheduled to be held in three phases on May 1, 3 and 5.

The Calcutta High Court on Thursday stayed the process for panchayat elections till further orders and said it would hear on April 16 the pleas challenging the State Election Commission's decision to withdraw its April 9 notification, which had extended the date for filing nominations by a day.

It also asked the SEC to file a comprehensive status report on the poll process, detailing the number of nominations filed and the percentage of nominations rejected, among other information by Monday.

BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, who is in the city to participate in a sit-in demonstration to protest against the alleged violence, said the judgment was a blow to the ruling TMC.

"The ruling TMC has tried to turn the panchayat polls into farce by not allowing the opposition candidates to file nominations. This high court ruling is a triumph of democracy over dictatorship," Vijayvergiya told reporters.

Senior BJP leader Mukul Roy said the order is the "victory for the masses of Bengal".

Leader of the opposition and senior Congress leader, Abdul Mannan, too, welcomed the judgment and demanded the resignations of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and State Election Commissioner A K Singh.

"The people of Bengal can get justice only by moving court because the entire state administration has been turned into a back office of the ruling TMC. The chief minister and the SEC should immediately tender their resignation as they have turned the poll process into a joke," Mannan said.

Senior CPI (M) leader Sujan Chakraborty said "democratic rights were being throttled" in West Bengal under the TMC rule.

The CPI(M)-led Left Front has called for a six-hour strike in West Bengal on Friday in protest against the pre-poll violence in the state.

TMC secretary general Partha Chatterjee, on his part, said people have "full faith" on Mamata Banerjee.

"We will not comment on the court order. Law will take its own course. The opposition parties do not enjoy popularity among the masses and that is why they are approaching the courts (to stall proceedings)," he said.Pakistan today accused India of "scuttling" the process to reconvene the SAARC summit in Islamabad and "holding hostage" the development and economic progress of the whole region.

India has said that it was difficult to proceed with the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) initiative under current circumstances, citing Pakistan's continuing support to cross-border terrorism.

The 2016 SAARC Summit was to be held in Islamabad but after a major terror attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on September 18 that year, India expressed its inability to participate in the summit due to "prevailing circumstances" and stepped up diplomatic pressure on Pakistan.

The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate.

Foreign Office (FO) spokesman Dr Mohammad Faisal, addressing the press briefing through video conferencing from Beijing, said that the SAARC summit was "regrettably scuttled" by India.

He said, "Pakistan condemns the attempt to bring the bilateral issues into multilateral forums. Indian belligerence has brought this multilateral forum to a halt, holding hostage the development and economic progress of the whole region".

Pakistan was committed to hold the already-delayed summit in Islamabad at the earliest, Faisal said.

Pakistan would tirelessly continue to highlight the plight of innocent Kashmiris at all relevant forums, until Indian human rights atrocities come to a complete halt and the dispute was resolved in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolutions and the aspirations of the Kashmiri people, the spokesman said.

He said that Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif spoke to the Foreign Ministers of Iran and Turkey, and Secretary General Organisation of Islamic Cooperation on the Kashmir issue.

SAARC Summits are usually held biennially, hosted by a member state in alphabetical order. The member state hosting the summit assumes the Chair of the Association.

The last SAARC Summit in 2014 was held in Kathmandu.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A senior BJP leader in Madhya Pradesh today claimed a "Pakistani hand" behind the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua region.

BJP state president Nandkumar Singh Chouhan, who was participating in a fast organised here in protest against the washout of parliament's budget session, told reporters, "The act (Kathua rape-murder) must have been committed by Pakistan's agents to divide people by chanting Jai Shriram".

He was responding to reports that slogans of 'Jai Sriram' were raised following the incident.

"If slogans of Jai Shri Ram were shouted on the rape of the girl, it must be the handi work of Pakistan's agents who want to create differences between us," Chouhan said.

"Hindus are less than one per cent in Kashmir. They cannot even open their mouths, then how can they shout these slogans?" he asked.

The BJP leader, however, termed the incident as a "blot on humanity".

The eight-year-old girl was allegedly raped by six men who had held her in captivity in a small temple village for a week in January. She was allegedly drugged so that she could be sexually assaulted again before being bludgeoned to death, according to police.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A parliamentary panel will grill finance ministry officials on April 17 amid rising NPAs, incidents of fraud and governance lapses in the banking sector.

The Standing Committee on Finance, chaired by senior Congress leader M Veerappa Moily, had last met on March 9 in the aftermath of the over Rs 13,000 crore fraud in Punjab National Bank.

It had then asked the ministry to institute a comprehensive enquiry encompassing systemic elements in the case and submit its report within a month.

"The Standing Committee is scheduled to meet finance ministry officials on April 17 and challenges in the banking sector, including NPAs and stressed assets, would be discussed," an official said.

As per RBI's Financial Stability Report, gross non-performing asset (NPA) ratio of public sector banks was at 13.5 per cent at the end of September, 2017, 1 percentage points higher than six months ago.

The government had in February announced a Rs 2.11 lakh crore recapitalisation plan for PSU banks to revive the banking sector.

The meeting assumes significance since the sector is dealing with governance issues also at two private sector banks -- ICICI and Axis.

S&P Global Ratings had earlier in the day said that the recent issues in private sector banks reiterate the need to improve risk management, and maintain strong governance practices.

Chanda Kochhar, the managing director and CEO of the country's leading private sector lender ICICI Bank, is currently under investigation for an alleged conflict of interest associated with the bank's loan to the Videocon group in 2012.

Recently, the board of private sector lender Axis Bank has sought RBI nod for the reappointment of managing director and CEO Shikha Sharma for six months ending December 31, 2018. This is after the central bank declined an earlier proposal to give her a three-year term ending June 30, 2021.

According to reports, the RBI's unwillingness to approve the initial request of three years was due to a number of risk management and governance issues that have emerged at the bank over the past year or so. These include a deterioration in asset quality and underreporting of nonperforming loans, S&P said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Two Peru nationals, including a woman, were arrested by the NCB from the Mumbai airport for allegedly smuggling into the country over four kg of cocaine, officials said today.

Michael (35) and Mariya (25), were intercepted yesterday, when they landed in Mumbai from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, they said.

The operation was based on an input provided by the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the officials said.

They were arrested under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act and 4.3 kg of "high grade" cocaine was seized from them, they said.

This is the second instance of smuggling this year in which high quantity of cocaine, a party drug, was seized.

The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) had seized about four kg of cocaine in Cochin earlier this year.

In an another narcotics case, the agency had arrested three people and seized 56.8 kg of opium and 19.93 kg of poppy straw in Rajasthan's Ajmer district yesterday.

This is the biggest seizure of opium in the country this year by any agency, they said.

The contraband was seized from the Piplaj Toll plaza on the National Highway-8 and the operation was conducted after surveillance of the area and the accused, they added.

The source of the contraband is suspected to be from Jharkhand's Chatra district, the officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Following the ban imposed on manufactruing and use of plastic bags in the state, the Plastic Bag Manufacturers Association of India (PBMAI) today urged the government to provide a seven-year moratorium period to exit the industry.

The association claimed the ban will put its members' investments in jeopardy and make nearly 3 lakh people jobless.

The state government on March 23 had banned the manufacture, use, storage, distribution, sale, import and transportation of all kinds of plastic items. The ban covers a wide range of items made of plastic and thermocol, including, bags, dishes, cups, glasses, bowls, forks, spoon, straw, containers, small PET bottles and decoration items.

"We have urged the state government to provide a seven-year moratorium before we exit the industry. The Rs 15,000-crore platic bag manufacturing industry has nearly 2,500 manufacturers, who have made an investment ranging from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 50 crore each and obtained loans from private as well as public sector banks to set up units in the state," PBMAI general secretary Neemit Punamiya told reporters here.

He said the ban on plastic bags has derailed the production, packaging and supply schedules of grains, bakery and clothing industries.

"Many units are on the verge of closure in the absence of basic packaging material - plastic bags - and we fear that nearly 300,000 people employed may become jobless. We have urged the Maharashtra government to come out with a solution to save the industry," he said.

Punamiya also informed that the association members met and petitioned the state minister for environment, Ramdas Kadam, and sought waiver on packaging material till alternatives are identified and made available.

Meanwhile, another association Maharashtra Plastic Manufacturers Association has urged Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to treat food grains and all food items including fruits and vegetables at par with milk and extend the repository (50 paisa per bag) scheme on them.

"Failure to act immediately will cause untold misery to all. This may not yield commensurate gains to the environment as envisioned by the plastic ban notification," its president Ravi Jasnani said.

In Mumbai alone over 680,000 readymade garments pieces for exports are stuck on account of non-availability of transparent plastic bags for packing, according to the Clothing Manufacturers Association of India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi today hailed Tamil saint-poet Thiruvalluvar as a legend and quoted his couplet which said greater learning brings more wisdom.

Amidst applause, the Prime Minister during his address at the Defence Expo here, quoted Thiruvalluvar's couplet in Tamil extemporaneously, describing him as a celebrated poet-philosopher.

"Thottanaith thoorum manarkeni maandharku, kattranaithu thoorum arivu," he said and explained the essence of the couplet.

"In sand and soil the deep you delve you reach the spring below. The more you learn the freer streams of wisdom flow," he said.

Beginning his address with good morning in Tamil saying "Kaalai Vanakkam," Modi said this was the first time he was participating at a defence expo.

He said, "I am both delighted and overwhelmed to see such a gathering here in the great state of Tamil Nadu."



He said the place where the Defence expo was being held (Thiruvidanthai in Kanchipuram district) is historic.

He lauded Tamil Nadu as the land of our "glorious maritime legacy," in reference to the great Cholas and added "this is the land from where India looked east and acted east 1000s of years ago.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the Dr Ambedkar national memorial here tomorrow on the eve of the Dalit icon's birth anniversary.

The memorial at 26, Alipore Road here was dedicated to the nation by the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in December 2003.

This is the place where Ambedkar had breathed his last on December 6, 1956.

Modi had laid the foundation stone of the memorial on March 21, 2016.

The memorial has been given the shape of a book. The museum at the memorial intends to create a detailed experience of Ambedkar's life and and his contribution to India through extensive use of static media, dynamic media, audio-visual content, and multimedia technologies.

A meditation hall has also been created. Toran Dwars, a Bodhi Tree, a musical fountain, and facade lighting are other important elements of the memorial, a statement said.

Hitting out at political parties for politicising the legacy of B R Ambedkar, Prime Minister Modi had earlier this month said that no regime had honoured the Dalit icon like his government had.

The PM's remarks had come close on the heels of widespread violent protests over a Supreme Court verdict putting in place "safeguards" to prevent the misuse of a law to prevent atrocities against SCs and STs.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Enforcement Directorate has opposed in the Delhi High Court the bail plea of alleged hawala dealer Mohammad Aslam Wani, arrested in a case involving Kashmiri separatist Shabir Shah, saying the money trail has to be established.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED), in its status report, said the investigation in the case was still going on and there was an apprehension that, if released, Wani may flee from justice.

However, when the matter came up for hearing today before Justice S P Garg, it was revealed that the report has not yet reached the court records and the court listed the case for further hearing in July.

The agency has claimed that Wani has not cooperated in the probe and the money trail was yet to be ascertained.

Wani was arrested by the ED from Srinagar on August 6, 2017 with the help of the state police and is currently in judicial custody. Shabir Shah was arrested by the agency from Srinagar on July 26 last year.

A trial court had earlier denied bail to Wani in the decade-old case. Wani was apprehended on August 26, 2005, with the ED claiming that Rs 63 lakh was recovered from him.

Wani, in his bail application filed through advocate M S Khan, sought bail after the Supreme Court set aside all orders by which bail to an accused was denied due to stringent bail condition in money laundering cases and directed that such cases be remanded back to the respective courts to be heard on merit.

The plea had said a 2010 trial court judgement clearing Wani of terror funding charges in 2005 case, based on which the current money laundering case was lodged in 2007, was confirmed by the Delhi High Court on October 31.

The ED had in September last year filed a charge sheet against Wani and Shah, whose bail application in the case was also dismissed on August 22, 2017.

The ED action against the two was in pursuance of an August 2005 case in which the Delhi Police's Special Cell had arrested Wani, who is alleged to have claimed he had passed on Rs 2.25 crore to Shah.

In 2010, a Delhi court had cleared Wani of terror funding charges but convicted him under the Arms Act. The ED had registered a criminal case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act against Shah and Wani.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An inter-agency search and rescue team in California today recovered parts of a vehicle from a river in which a missing Indian family was travelling last week.

Personal belongings of the four members of the Thottapilly family from Santa Clarita in California, who were believed to be travelling through Humboldt and Mendocino County on US-101 while on a vacation, were also found by the team over a two-day period on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Sandeep Thottapilly, 41, vice president of the Union Bank on Santa Clarita, and his wife Soumya Thottapilly, 38, were on a road trip along with their two kids -- Siddhanth, 12 and Saachi, nine -- in the maroon Honda Pilot (No Plate California 7MMX138) from Portland, Oregon to San Jose in Southern California, during which they went missing on April 5.

Later, Mendocino County Sheriff declared them as missing persons.

Between the two search days, the Swift Water Rescue Teams were able to cover approximately 12 miles of the Eel river, just north of the town of Leggett in California. The vehicle is reported to have submerged in the river around 1:10 pm on April 6.

"The teams were unsuccessful in locating the vehicle or any occupants from the vehicle. They were able to locate numerous items that appeared to have come from a vehicle body and interior," the Garberville office of the California Highway Patrol said.

It said several items were identified by the family members of those missing.

"Some of these items were consistent with a Honda vehicle. Also located were various personal items that were consistent with a family travelling on vacation. Several items have been positively identified, by the family members, as belonging to the Thottapilly family," it said.

"These items were of a personal nature and will not be described further at this time, but it does confirm the fact the vehicle that was seen going into the river was that of the Thottapilly family," the California Highway Patrol said.

A joint press conference of the Mendocino County Sheriff and California Highway Patrol has been scheduled to discuss further about the investigation.

The Mendocino County Sheriffs Office has been in contact with numerous other county dive teams and technical rescue responders that can be called upon, when the vehicle is located, to assist with recovery of the vehicle. Once recovered the California Highway Patrol will conduct a complete mechanical inspection of the vehicle as part of the accident investigation.

The Swift Water Rescue Teams conducted a bank search as well as some limited "probing", a technique using a long pole being probed underwater to see if the vehicle or anything metallic could be located.

According to the highway patrol, the teams accessed the river in inflatable boats and on 'River Boards', a small floatation device designed to allow full access under overhanging trees or tight areas not accessible by boat.

The Humboldt County Sheriffs Office also assisted with the use of their jet boat with side scan sonar system.

According to the San Jose Police Department, the Thottapilly family was supposed to have arrived to visit a friend in the San Jose area on April 6 but did not make it as scheduled. The family was last heard from in the town of Klamath, Del Norte County, on April 5.

The California Highway Patrol developed information that the family were travelling in a family vehicle, a 2016 maroon Honda Pilot. The family was officially reported as missing to the San Jose Police Department on April 8.

Sandeep grew up in Surat city in Gujarat and settled down in the US over 15 years ago.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Taliban fighters attacked a government compound in central Afghanistan overnight, killing three district officials and 15 security forces, authorities said today.

The attackers stormed the secure compound in Khuja Omari district last night, setting off hours of fighting with security forces, Ramazan Ali Moseni, a deputy chief police in Ghazni province, said.

He said 25 Taliban were killed. The district is close to the provincial capital, Ghazni city.

Afghan Parliament member Mohammad Arif Rahmani said the district governor, intelligence service director and a deputy police official were killed in the attack, as well as 15 security forces.

Rahmani said the attackers planted mines to stop reinforcements from coming to help the government forces fend off the attack.

Moseni said the government reinforcements later joined the fighting.

He said eight government security forces were wounded.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Portugese Prime Minister Antonio Costa has proposed a "two-in-one" opportunity for Indian companies in the UK to invest in his country as a base in the European Union (EU) post-Brexit.

Indian-origin Prime Minister Costa told a gathering of prominent Indian businesses in London yesterday that the country's highly-skilled workforce and attractive investment climate make it the ideal home for companies that want to continue accessing the benefits of an EU single market.

"Any company wishing to continue its operations in the internal market after Brexit will find in Portugal a safe harbour and fertile ground for business. By opening in Portugal, you can have a two-in-one Brexit in the UK and remain in the European Union with Portugal," said Costa.

"We cannot shy away from challenge of Brexit. We must face it head on...it is time now for India to discover the enormous business opportunities that await in Portugal, he said.

Addressing the Portugal-India Business Roundtable organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the Portuguese leader said he was proud to be the first person of Indian-origin to become the Prime Minister of an EU member-state.

He said that under his leadership, Portugal is strongly committed to fostering the partnership between the EU and India by supporting its expansion into new areas by keeping trade "as free as possible", not only from tariffs but other barriers.

"As the third-largest investor, India will continue to play an important role in the UK economy even after Brexit. We must act responsibly to preserve as much as we can of the prosperity of Britain's participation in the European Union and prepare for the new paradigm of relations that follow," he added.

The Portuguese government delegation comprised of Manuel Caldeira Cabral, Minister of Economy, who highlighted the country's attractive visa and tax provisions for investors and start-ups, as well as Chitra Stern, Executive Committee Member of the country investment facilitation agency in Portugal and a member of Prime Minister Costa's special temporary task force to attract investments into the country.

Among some of the India-headquartered companies represented at the event included Tata Consultancy Services, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, ICICI Bank, Taj Hotels and Zee TV.

The first-of-its-kind roundtable follows Costa's official visit to India early last year, which was followed up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reciprocal visit to Lisbon later in 2017.

This event marks a great vote of confidence in the role of Indian diaspora in the UK, which is set to hit nearly 1.7 million... The ground is fertile to attract investments from Indian companies based in the UK to Portugal, which offers an ideal entry port to the EU and rest of Europe, said India's High Commissioner to the UK Y K Sinha.

Dr David Landsman, Chair of the CII India Business Forum (UK) and Executive Director of Tata Limited, highlighted Portugal's Golden Visa scheme to attract non-European investors, which has facilitated several important Indian investments, especially in the hospitality, renewable energy, IT and food sectors.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The opposition Congress in Madhya Pradesh today claimed that the brother of Preeti Raghuvanshi, who had allegedly committed suicide after her marriage to a state minister's son last month, had gone "missing" and accused Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan of trying to shield his Cabinet colleague.

However, police in Raisen district, from where the Raghuvanshi family hails, clarified that Preeti's brother, Deepak, was not missing and is "moving freely".

On March 17, 28-year-old Preeti, who had allegedly married to state PWD Minister Rampal Singh's son Girjesh Pratap Singh in June 2017, committed suicide at her parents' house in Udaipura.

Her family members alleged that she had ended her life as Rampal Singh was planning to marry off his son to another woman.

"The disappearance of Preeti's brother, Deepak, in a suspicious manner has raised doubts. Rampal Singh's family members are forcing him (Deepak) to give false statements. Police are not trying to locate Deepak. They had not even registered a missing person's information report," Madhya Pradesh unit Congress president Arun Yadav told reporters today.

He said the Congress wanted Deepak's "abductors" traced.

When contacted, Raisen Superintendent of Police, Jagat Singh Rajput said, "The Congress' allegations are baseless. Deepak had met Udaipura's Sub-Divisional Officer of Police (SDOP) on April 9 and had also given his statement to the police on April 10. He is moving freely here".

Yadav claimed that a senior police officer had visited the minister' residence yesterday.

"The visit of the officer shows that CM Chouhan wanted to hush up the matter as it involves the minister who is close to him," Yadav said, adding that police had failed to take any action against Singh and his son into the matter.

The Congress on April 5 launched a 'march for justice', raising the issue of Preeti's suicide.

The opposition party had demanded the minister's resignation on the issue and registration of a case against his son.

The minister had said that if his son had accepted that Preeti was his wife, he too would be ready to accept her as his (late) daughter-in-law.

Police haven't registered any FIR yet.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Makkal Needhi Maiam chief Kamal Haasan today urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to immediately set up the Cauvery Management Board, saying it was his duty to prove wrong the notion that it was being delayed due to the assembly polls in Karnataka.

Setting up the CMB was also the Centre's constitutional duty, he said.

"You must be aware of the agitations that have gripped Tamil Nadu due to the injustice meted out," the actor-turned-politician said in a letter to Modi, a copy of which was released to the media here.

People were dismayed by the delay in setting up the CMB, Haasan said and added that they were holding protests "to get justice".

"The Supreme Court has already performed its constitutional role by delivering its judgment. It is now the turn of your government to perform its constitutional duty and implement the order," he said.

Recalling Modi's earlier stint as Gujarat chief minister, Haasan said he already had the experience of sharing water among four states through the Narmada Control Authority.

"Please do the needful as our prime minister and set up the CMB to ensure implementation of the apex court order in letter and spirit," Haasan said.

"All sections of people have started to believe that the delay (in forming CMB) is due to the ensuing election in Karnataka and your party's interest in it," he claimed.

"It is your duty as the prime minister of our country to prove this wrong by immediately acting as per the Supreme Court order," Haasan said.

The actor said he was sure that Modi would fulfil his duty towards the people and farmers of Tamil Nadu by setting up the CMB immediately.

Kerala and Puducherry should also get their rightful share as per the apex court verdict, he said.

Constituting the CMB was of utmost importance to ensure this, he said, adding, he looked forward to immediate action.

In a video clip of little over one minute, Haasan made the same plea to Modi to set up the CMB and do justice.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Boasting a green, punk hairdo and the unusual ability to breathe through its backside, an Australian turtle has become famous overnight -- but not only for its eccentricity.

Unfortunately, just as many of us are discovering the Mary River Turtle's tantalising traits, it has become the latest creature to join the "EDGE of Existence" list of endangered species compiled by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

A native of Queensland, Australia, the turtle was one of 100 reptiles added to the catalogue this week.

It lives only in the Mary River from which it took its name. The inventory has no shortage of weird and wonderful creatures -- a limbless lizard, the world's largest sea turtle, a blind snake, and a chameleon named after Tarzan.

But the Mary River Turtle might just be the strangest of them all. "The turtle is highly distinctive," states a ZSL description of the species known to scientists as Elusor macrurus.

It can breathe underwater through specialised glands in butt organs known as cloaca -- orifices through which the turtle excretes urine and waste, and lays eggs.

"This turtle is able to spend so much time underwater -- up to three days -- without coming up for air due to its strange ability to breathe through its bum," Rikki Gumbs of the Imperial College London, who helped compile the EDGE reptile list, told AFP.

"They have specialised organs in their cloaca which process oxygen from the surrounding water." But perhaps the computer screen-sized turtle's most distinguishing feature is the bright green, spiky mohawks sprouting on the heads of some.

This is not hair, but algae.

"The Mary River Turtle spends so much time submerged underwater that some individuals become covered in algae -- and can end up with some pretty impressive bright green hairstyles!" said Gumbs.

According to Australia's department of the environment, the Mary River Turtle's rapid decline was sparked by its popularity as a house pet in the 1970s and 80s, known then as the "Penny Turtle".

The creature was only recognised and listed as a distinct species in 1994. "The Mary River Turtle takes an exceptionally long time to reach sexual maturity, with individuals not breeding before the age of 25," said the ZSL.

Destruction of the creatures' natural habitat through the building of dams, as well as the collection of its eggs for the pet trade, piled on the survival pressure.

"Reptiles often receive the short end of the stick in conservation terms, compared with the likes of birds and mammals," added Gumbs.

"Just as with tigers, rhinos and elephants, it is vital we do our utmost to save these unique and too-often overlooked animals. Many EDGE reptiles are the sole survivors of ancient lineages." The EDGE reptile list also includes the Madagascan blindsnake -- a pink, wormlike creature that spends its life burrowing through forest soil-- the freshwater "pig-nosed" turtle which uses its distinctive appendage as a snorkel, and the leatherback turtle which can weigh over 900 kilogrammes.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Congress chief Rahul Gandhi led a midnight candlenight march to the India Gate here to protest the Kathua and Unnao minor rape cases with the party leaders alleging that the daughters of the country were not safe in the Modi regime.

Gandhi was joined by his sister Priyanka and her husband Robert Vadra, as also scores of Congress leaders, party workers and students, who shouted slogans against the Modi government and the state governments in Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir and demanded urgent action against the perpetrators of two heinous gangrapes -- one in Unnao (UP) and the other in Kathua (J&K).

Several Congress leaders, however, asked the people in the march to keep it a "silent" protest.

Some people were seen having brought their children as well.

The Congress leaders present at the protest march to the India Gate, which in the past has seen a huge protest in the Nirbhaya rape case, included Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Salman Khurshid, Ashok Gehlot, Ajay Maken, Sushmita Dev, Haroon Yusuf, Randeep Surjewala and Ambika Soni.

Azad said the Modi government was sleeping and those facing the biggest threat were the daughters of the country during the current regime.

Several Congress leaders also poked fun at the Modi government's Beti Bachao slogan, saying the daughters were not safe in the country.

Announcing the march, Gandhi had tweeted in the evening, "Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does."



Earlier in the day, Gandhi had expressed anguish and shock on the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua, and attacked the BJP government in UP for failing to act against its MLA, who is an accused in the Unnao rape case of a 17-year-old girl.

"How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil? What happened at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished. What have we become if we allow to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?" he said.

The Kathua girl, who belonged to the nomadic Bakerwal Muslim community, had disappeared from a spot near her house on January 10. A week later, her body was found in the same area.

A Special Investigation Team, formed to probe the incident, has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destroying evidence.

Jammu has been on tenterhooks since the brutal rape and murder. The city's bar association has opposed the action against the accused and alleged that minority Dogras were being targeted.

Gandhi joined the protest near the Man Singh Road at 11.55 pm.

The police had barricaded all the routes leading to India Gate.

DPCC President Ajay Maken said, "Atrocities are being committed against women in the country and the government is sleeping. The BJP is not only involved directly, it is also protesting in favour of the culprits and stopping law enforcement agencies from doing their job. It is a sad state of affairs.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Congress chief Rahul Gandhi today said the country cannot continue to treat its women the way it does and that he will hold a candlelight vigil at India Gate at midnight to protest the Kathua and Unnao rape cases.

Delhi Congress workers will join Gandhi in the protest.

"Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does.

"Join me in a silent, peaceful, candlelight vigil at India Gate at midnight tonight to protest this violence and demand justice," he tweeted.

Congress spokesperson Ajay Maken said a candlelight march will be taken out at 12 am from the DPCC office to India Gate.

Earlier in the day, Gandhi expressed anguish and shock on the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua, and attacked the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh for failing to act against its MLA, who is an accused in the Unnao rape case.

"How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil? What happened at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished. What have we become if we allow to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?" he tweeted.

The minor, who belonged to the nomadic Bakerwal Muslim community, had disappeared from a spot near her house close to Rasana village in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir on January 10. A week later, her body was found in the same area.

A Special Investigation Team, formed to probe the incident, has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destroying evidence.

Jammu has been on tenterhooks since the brutal rape and murder. The city's bar association has opposed the action against the accused and alleged that minority Dogras were being targeted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Indian Railways took distinctive trip to yester years of steam era trains to commemorate the 63rd railway week celebrations of the Northern Railways today.

A steam engine brought over from the United States in 1947 -- Azad -- was run to and fro from New Delhi Railway Station to Delhi Junction on the occasion.

Azad has been showcased in various movies including Aamir Khan starrer Rang de Basanti. The engine has a capacity to hold around 25,000 litre of water and 15 tonne of coal and can run at a speed of 100 kmph.

An oppurtunity was given to the children of special needs school Navchetna to ride the steam engine hailed train.

''Indian Railways has a fairly good repository of steam engines, we are trying to resuscitate some of them. Special joy ride trains will be run on dedicated routes. The tickets of these runs will be priced such that everyone can take a ride on them," Chairman Railway Board Ashwani Lohani said after flagging off the train.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Home Minister Rajnath Singh will soon visit the Ajmer Sharif dargah in Rajasthan to promote the spirit of communal harmony, an official statement said.

The Union minister made the announcement at the 21st meeting of the governing council of the National Foundation for Communal Harmony (NFCH) here today.

Singh said that he will soon visit the Sufi shrine with members of NFCH governing council to promote the spirit of communal harmony that the shrine symbolises, an official release said.

Ajmer Sharif Dargah is a shrine of Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti located at Ajmer in Rajasthan. It is venerated by both Muslims and Hindus.

Last month, Union Minister of State for Home Hansraj Gangaram Ahir in Parliament had said that 822 communal incidents took place in the country in 2017, whereas as many as 703 such incidents occurred in 2016 and 751 incidents in 2015.

Among the states where the highest number of such cases took place in 2017 include Uttar Pradesh (195 incidents) followed by Karnataka (100), Rajasthan (91), Bihar (85), Madhya Pradesh (60) besides others, he had said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray today hit out at Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis over the mega-refinery at Nanar in Ratnagiri district by claiming that the Centre did not value the CM's word.

Thackeray said that the Centre had given the go-ahead for the project despite Fadnavis promising that the refinery would not be "imposed" upon local residents if they were opposed to it.

"The Chief Minister had promised that this project will not be imposed upon people. However, that is what has happened. This is cheating. It indicates that the chief minister's word is not valued by the Centre," Thackeray said in a statement issued here today.

A Press Information Bureau release yesterday had stated that a consortium comprising Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum Corporation and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, along with Saudi Aramco, had signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly develop the Ratnagiri Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (RRPCL), an integrated refinery and petrochemicals complex, in Maharashtra.

The release had added that Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, may also seek to include a strategic partner to co-invest in the project.

Thackeray, in his statement today, claimed that the Sena would not allow the project to take off "under any circumstance", adding that the project would destroy the natural splendour of the Konkan region.

It will finish off the region in the name of development and it would destroy mango orchards, bamboo plantations and huge tracts of forests, Thackeray claimed.

"I had explained all these points to the CM when I met him and he too had agreed. The CM should have said without fear that he will not sit quiet if injustice is meted out to his people," Thackeray said.

Meanwhile, former Congress leader and chief of the newly-formed Maharashtra Swabhimaan Paksh, Narayan Rane, also met Fadnavis to convey his opposition to the refinery project.

Rane, currently a Rajya Sabha member, hails from the Konkan region and has been elected to the Legislative Assembly several times from there.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Shiv Sena, which is a partner in the state government, on Thursday vowed that it would not allow the setting up of a mega-refinery in Nanar in Ratnagiri, the go-ahead for which was given by the Union government on Wednesday.

Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, in a statement, said his party would not allow the project to take off "under any circumstance", adding that it would destroy the natural splendour of the Konkan region.

The project will finish off the region in the name of development and would destroy mango orchards, bamboo plantations and huge tracts of forests, Thackeray claimed.

Hitting out at Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis over the setting up of the refinery, Thackeray said that the Centre did not value the CM's word.

Thackeray said that the Centre had given the go-ahead for the project despite Fadnavis promising that the refinery would not be "imposed" upon local residents if they were opposed to it.

"The Chief Minister had promised that this project will not be imposed upon people. However, that is what has happened. This is cheating. It indicates that the chief minister's word is not valued by the Centre," Thackeray said in a statement issued here today.

He said that Fadnavis, without fear, should have opposed the project since it "meted out injustice to his people".

A Press Information Bureau release yesterday had stated that a consortium comprising Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum Corporation and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, along with Saudi Aramco, had signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly develop the Ratnagiri Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (RRPCL), an integrated refinery and petrochemicals complex, in Maharashtra.

The release had added that Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, may also seek to include a strategic partner to co-invest in the project.

Meanwhile, former Congress leader and chief of the newly-formed Maharashtra Swabhimaan Paksh, Narayan Rane, also met Fadnavis to convey his opposition to the refinery project.

Rane, currently a Rajya Sabha member, hails from the Konkan region and has been elected to the Legislative Assembly several times from there.Reliance Jio and employee benefits firm Sodexo today joined hands to integrate Sodexo Meal Cards with JioMoney, the PPI wallet offered by the Jio Payments Bank, to allow mobile-based payments through Sodexo Meal Cards.

The partnership will enable thousands of Sodexo merchants like grocery shops, kiranas, restaurants and cafes across the country, to accept digital payments via Sodexo, a joint statement said.

******************* Cash Suvidha ties up with StoreKing for rural loans *



Cash Suvidha, a trade name of Usha Financial Services has today announced its partnership with rural digitisation and commerce optimisation platform, StoreKing.

This technology-enabled distribution platform is connecting small towns and villages across the country to a range of products and services, via an app. Through this partnership, Cash Suvidha has disbursed loans worth Rs 1 crore in just one month, the company claimed in a release.

Going forward, the company plans to extend loans worth Rs 30-40 crore to over 2,500 retailers per year, it said.

******************* Cox & Kings inks pact to promote Great Britain in India *



Leading tour operator Cox & Kings has collaborated with VisitBritain to promote Great Britain in India.

The joint marketing collaboration will publicise Great Britain through innovative advertisements and contests in the Indian market, according to a company release.

Karan Anand, head - relationships, Cox & Kings said, "Indians love Great Britain for its picturesque countryside and most alluring experiences. The campaign has successfully attracted the attention of the discerning travellers in India. We are glad to promote Great Britain not only as a summer destination but a year-round one."



******************* Lemon Tree expands in Goa, to open 1st Red Fox Hotel in Morjim *



Carnation Hotels, the wholly-owned subsidiary and management arm of Lemon Tree Hotels, today said it has signed an operating agreement with Unicorn Real Estate for the group's first Red Fox Hotel in Morjim, Goa.

With this signing, Lemon Tree Hotels doubles its consolidated inventory in the city, a company release said.

The new Goa property with 111 rooms is expected to open by October.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today ordered restoration of the security arrangements at the residence of former chief minister Rabri Devi, a day after the latter "returned" the state security cover in protest against withdrawal of guards from her residence here.

Rabri, however, refused to accept the restoration of security until she received a suitable explanation for the earlier action.

Kumar directed the state home department to explain "when, why and at what level" was the decision taken for changing the security arrangements in place, at the residence allotted "for life to two former chief ministers" - Rabri Devi and her husband, jailed RJD supremo, Lalu Prasad.

"The letter from Rabri Devi was brought to the notice of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar upon his arrival in Patna today," an official release said.

Rabri had shot off a letter to Kumar yesterday, stating that she wished to "return" the security at her 10, Circular Road residence after recall of some of the guards around Tuesday midnight.

The state government had said that the guards, who were recalled from Rabri's residence, had been deputed for Lalu Prasad Yadav. It clarified that the decision to withdraw the security cover was taken because Prasad has been away since his conviction in a fodder scam case by a CBI court at Ranchi in December last year.

However, RJD leaders had cried foul, alleging that there was a conspiracy to harass, and even eliminate Lalu Prasad's family.

They also pointed out that the withdrawal of security had come within hours of Rabri's interrogation by the CBI in connection with a railway hotels scam.

The chief minister, who is also the national president of Janata Dal (United), was away in Bengaluru yesterday in connection with poll preparations of his party, which is contesting a number of seats in the upcoming Karnataka Assembly elections.

"The chief minister took note of Rabri Devi's letter and asked the home department to explain when, why and what level was the decision taken to change security arrangements in place at 10, Circular Road, which is a government bungalow allotted for life to two former chief ministers," the release said.

"The Chief Minister also issued instructions for restoration of the security arrangements that were in place," it said.

However, reacting to the development, Rabri told reporters, "I need no security. The people of Bihar and workers of my party will take care of my safety. But if anything untoward happens to any member of my family, the state government shall be held responsible".

"I demand an explanation from the government, headed by Nitish Kumar and (Deputy CM) Sushil Kumar Modi as to why and at what level a decision for such a spiteful action was taken in the first place. Only then will I decide whether or not to accept restoration of security arrangements," she said.

When pointed out that security personnel and escort vehicles had already arrived outside her residence, she said, "They are standing on a public road. I have nothing to do with that".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Repatriation of Rohingya refugees would begin "as soon as possible", a Myanmar minister said today, a day after he visited the makeshift camps of the forcibly displaced Muslim refugees in Bangladesh.

According to the UN estimates, more than 600,000 minority Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh to escape violence in Myanmar's Rakhine State since August 25 last year when the army launched a military crackdown.

Myanmar does not recognise Rohingya as an ethnic group and insists that they are Bangladeshi migrants living illegally in the country.

Myanmar's minister for Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Win Myat Aye arrived in Bangladesh yesterday and visited the makeshift Rohingya camps in Cox's Bazar, the first by a Myanmar representative.

He also talked to some 50 representatives of the displaced people of his country.

"We have overcome many difficulties. I am very sure that we can start repatriation of Rogingyas as soon as possible," Aye told reporters after a meeting with Bangladesh's foreign minister A H Mahmod Ali in Dhaka.

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal and concerned officials of both the countries also joined the meeting, which Aye called "very fruitful".

"We work together with Bangladesh government to start repatriation process as soon as possible," Aye said.

He said that he had already discussed the repatriation issue with UN refugee agency the UNHCR and the UNDP during his visit to the makeshift Rohingya abode in Cox's Bazar.

The UNHCR called the Myanmar minister's visit to Bangladesh a confidence-building measure, but said conditions in Myanmar were not ready for their return.

Aye said the returnees would get citizenship according to the law of Myanmar.

"First, they (Rohingyas) have to get National Verification Card to apply for citizenship and the (Myanmar) authority will give them citizenship status after scrutiny," he said.

The Myanmar minister said an "agreed form" to be filled up by the Rohingyas appeared to be a possible difficulty in the repatriation process, adding that if they filled it up "the registration process would be easier".

Ali, on the other hand, said that the meeting discussed the impediments for the safe, dignified and sustainable return of the Rohingys to their homeland in Myanmar.

Myanmar responded positively to a Bangladesh request for rebuilding the burnt down Rphingya villages in Rakhine state, saying they already undertook the rebuilding process with the help of many countries, he said.

The Myanmar delegation, Ali said, also told Bangladesh side that they took many new ideas for improving livelihood of the returnees.

"We, both the sides, have agreed that the returnees should not stay for more than a few days in transit camps," the Bangladeshi foreign minister said.

The UN counted some 700,000 Rohingyas to have taken refuge in Bangladesh since Myanmar army launched a crackdown on their ethnic minority community on August 25 last year.

The UN described the atrocities as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing while the rights groups called it genocide.

Aye, who heads rehabilitation efforts in the troubled Rakhine state, also told the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh that getting the repatriation process moving was a top priority as the refugees were living in cramped camps.

Bangladesh continued to seek sustained global pressure on Myanmar to return the Rohingyas soon, especially with the oncoming monsoons expected to cause devastation at the camps.

The UNHCR, in a statement, questioned Myanmar's readiness for their return, saying "Conditions in Myanmar are not yet conducive for the voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable return of refugees while it simultaneously said the responsibility remains with the Myanmar government to create such conditions.

The UNHCR called on Myanmar to provide the agency unhindered access in Rakhine to assess the situation and monitor the return and reintegration of refugees if and when they voluntarily return.

Aye told the refugee representatives to set aside the past and to prepare to go back, promising new villages would be built with hospitals and schools.

But some refugees have said they are worried about going back, fearing persecution while they escaped the military crackdown amid mass murder, rape and arson incidents by Myanmar troops and Buddhist vigilantes.

Buddhist-majority Myanmar, however, rejects the charge, saying its security forces launched a counter-insurgency operation on August 25 in response to Rohingya militant attacks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Rolls-Royce today said it has inked pact with Goa Shipyard Ltd (GSL) to manufacture technologically-advanced MTU Series 8,000 engines, used in offshore patrol vessels, in India.

"Rolls-Royce and GSL, a premier defence shipbuilding yard in India under the Ministry of Defence, have agreed to cooperate in the local manufacturing of technologically-advanced MTU Series 8,000 engines in India.

"Under the agreement, which was signed today at India's leading defence trade show Defexpo, the companies will assemble the 16-cylinder and 20-cylinder MTU Series 8,000 engines at GSL's new facility in Goa," Rolls-Royce Power Systems said in a statement.

The MTU brand is a worldwide leader in large diesel and gas engines and complete propulsion systems and part of Rolls-Royce Power Systems.

The agreement includes transfer of MTU technology related to localising of engine components, engine assembly, testing, painting and major overhauls, the UK-based company said.

The MTU engines are the largest and most powerful MTU diesel engines with a power output of up to 10 MW, it said, adding that they are fitted onboard all Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPV) recently constructed or currently under-construction in India.

This includes eleven Coast Guard OPVs by GSL (six completed and five under construction), five Naval OPVs under construction at Reliance Defence Engineering and seven Coast Guard OPVs by L&T.

"Since main diesel engines constitute the heart of a ship and are among the major high value imported equipment items onboard ships, the collaboration will aid to significantly increase the indigenous content onboard ships constructed in India," GSL Chairman & MD Shekhar Mital said.

He said it will also provide a strategic edge to Indian defence sector as know-how and infrastructure for such niche technology will now be available with a PSU shipyard, which can be gainfully utilised by the Indian Navy and Indian Coast Guard.

"Under the agreement, we will be catering for marine propulsion requirements within the country in the range of 7 to 10 MW. The new facility being created by GSL will also undertake all major overhauls of these engines," he said.

"The agreement with GSL to manufacture MTU's most-advanced Series 8000 engines in India is a significant milestone and further reinforces our commitment to 'Make in India.' We have been working with the Indian defence sector for several decades and our well-proven MTU engines propel and power many vessels of both the Indian Coast Guard and Indian Navy," MTU India Director & CEO Praveen Mohan said.

These are the top-selling propulsion engines in their power class for naval vessels. They are also proven in ferries and yachts and have altogether completed over one million operating hours, the statement said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and several BJP leaders, including MPs and MLAs, are observing a day-long fast today in parts of the state to protest against the recent washout of the Budget Session of Parliament.

Although Rupani was scheduled to sit on a 'symbolic fast' with other BJP leaders at Lal Darwaja area here between 11 am and 5 pm, he decided to observe the fast while working from Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad city BJP president Jagdish Panchal said.

BJP leaders across the country are observing a day-long fast today to corner the opposition over the Parliament washout.

Gujarat Education Minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama joined the fast at Lal Darwaja along with Jagdish Panchal, city mayor Gautam Shah, Lok Sabha MP Kirit Solanki and other BJP leaders.

"The call for the day-long fast was given by our party after Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to observe a fast today to register a strong protest against the undemocratic ways of the Congress, which led to the washout of all the 23 days of the second part of the session," Solanki said.

Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel joined the protest in his constituency, Mehsana, while Gujarat BJP chief Jitu Vaghani sat on a fast at Vadodara with local MP Ranjanben Bhatt.

Other party leaders, state ministers, MPs and MLAs also observed fast at various places across the state, a BJP release said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court today refused to accord an urgent hearing on the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak's Committee (SGPC) plea, seeking modification of the order allowing the movie "Nanak Shah Fakir" to be released in theatres across India.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra considered the submission of the SGPC's counsel that nobody should be allowed to portray the life of Sikh gurus, their families and the 'punj pyara' on screen.

The bench, also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, said once a film has been granted certification by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), its release can only be stalled through lawful means.

The bench did not agree to the submission of Satender Singh Gulati, counsel for SGPC, that the interim plea be heard either today or tomorrow as the film releases in the theatres on Friday.

The bench said the plea will be listed for hearing on Monday.

The top court had on April 10 criticised SGPC, the apex religious body of the Sikhs, for imposing restrictions on the film 'Nanak Shah Fakir' and had cleared the decks for its nationwide release scheduled on April 13.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The NCP on Thursday made a clear attempt to woo the Shiv Sena as it said the party "does not pose a danger to secularism" and hinted that the BJP's sulking ally could be a part of the opposition coalition for the 2019 polls.

NCP general secretary while addressing a press conference here, talked about the efforts to build a non-BJP coalition to take on the BJP in next year's Lok Sabha elections. On who would be the face of the opposition coalition, he said there was no need to project anyone before the polls.

"People will choose the leader in the polls. The opposition's unity will be issue-based. There is no need to project a face as the leader of the non-BJP alliance before the polls," the NCP leader said.

He, however, said the opposition should put up a common candidate against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Varanasi in the next Lok Sabha polls.

Asked whether the Shiv Sena can be a part of a coalition against the BJP, Tripathi said, "Politics is pregnant with possibilities. There is a difference between the BJP and the Shiv Sena. Shiv Sena is Maharashtra-specific and does not pose a danger to the secularism in the country."



The Shiv Sena, which is a part of the BJP-led Maharashtra government, has been upset with its ally and has declared that it will contest the next Lok Sabha elections alone.

When asked if NCP chief Sharad Pawar will lead the coalition against the BJP and be the Prime Ministerial candidate, Tripathi said, "We (NCP) don't have the strength in Parliament to make any tall claims."



On the coming Assembly polls in Karnataka, the NCP leader said it will be "very decisive" and "If the BJP loses, it will be certain that the Modi government will be defeated in 2019."He said the NCP has decided not to contest the Karnataka polls and unconditionally support the Congress to defeat the BJP. "Last time, we had contested six seats and supported three independents," he said.

Tripathi said the non-BJP alliances will have to be stitched speedily in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Maharashtra as the BJP is in power in these states and is on a stronger footing than elsewhere.

In West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, a majority of the population is firmly behind the respective elected leaders (chief ministers), he said.

While Tamil Nadu has a lot of contenders in the fray, Karnataka is a three-cornered race with the BJP, JD (S) and Congress vying for dominance, Tripathi said.

In Maharashtra, he said, an alliance with the Congress should be finalised expeditiously.

His party had demanded equal number of seats from the Congress ahead of 2014 Assembly elections, Tripathi claimed.

"We broke up, and the electorate gave us the same result. We got 41 and the Congress got 42 seats. In Lok Sabha we got four and the Congress two seats," he said.

When asked if the NCP would seek the same 50-50 seat sharing in the next Lok Sabha and Assembly polls, Tripathi said, "It would be inappropriate to announce a formula at this stage.The number of prosecution witnesses turning hostile during the trial of the Sohrabuddin Shaikh, Tulsi Prajapati alleged fake encounter cases rose to 49 after Manoj Panara, a panch witness, was declared hostile today.

Panara was examined by the CBI before special judge S J Sharma today.

According to the agency, Panara was present when the specimen signature of an accused, Balkrishna Choubey, was obtained by the CBI.

However, in the court, Panara today said that he had signed on some papers but he didn't know what papers they were.

He also told court that he was not introduced to any official there. Later, special public prosecutor BP Raju declared him hostile.

Till now, the CBI has examined 70 witnesses in the case.

The Mumbai court had last October framed charges against 22 people including police officers for murder, abduction and destruction of evidence in connection with the alleged fake encounter of Shaikh near Gandhinagar on November 26, 2005.

Shaikh, an alleged gangster with terror links, and his wife Kausar Bi were allegedly abducted by the Gujarat police's Anti-Terrorism Squad from Hyderabad on their way to Sangli in Maharashtra in November 2005.

According to the prosecution, Shaikh was killed in a fake encounter. Kausar Bi, who disappeared, was also allegedly killed later.

Tulsi Prajapati, an aide of Shaikh who was said to be a witness to the encounter, was allegedly killed by police at Chapri village in Gujarat's Banaskantha district in December 2006.

The case was transferred to Mumbai in September 2012 on the request of the CBI for ensuring a fair trial.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Spain's Supreme Court today rejected a request by Catalonia's pro-independence presidential candidate Jordi Sanchez to be let out of jail and sworn in as regional head.

The Catalan parliament had been scheduled to hold a debate and vote on Sanchez's candidacy on Friday, but after the court's ruling Catalan parliament speaker Roger Torrent announced on Twitter he had suspended the session indefinitely.

Sanchez was remanded in custody in October pending charges over his role in last year's failed Catalan independence bid.

An attempt to appoint him as president failed last month after Spain's Supreme Court turned down a request for his release from jail.

But Torrent put Sanchez's name forward as a candidate again earlier this month after the United Nations Human Rights Committee defended his political rights.

In letters sent last month to Spanish authorities and Sanchez's lawyers, the UN committee requested the state take all steps to ensure he is allowed to exercise his political rights.

Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena once again turned down Sanchez's request, arguing there were signs that he could "move in the direction of a rupture of the constitutional order".

The judge argues it was justified in limiting Sanchez's political rights given the risk that his release would pose to the collective rights "of the rest of the community".

Torrent had appealed earlier on Thursday for the judge to agree to let Sanchez, a former leader of influential grassroots independence group ANC who was elected to the Catalan parliament in snap polls in December, leave jail to be sworn in.

"The court has the opportunity to take note of international law and the protection of political rights or write another dark chapter in the history of the Supreme Court," he said in an interview to radio station Cadena Ser.

The court ruling comes as Barcelona is gearing up for a huge protest on Sunday to mark the six month anniversary of the jailing of Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, the leader of another separatist organisation.

Catalonia has been in political limbo since Spain's conservative central government imposed direct rule on the region after it unilaterally declared independence in October.

Fresh regional elections will be triggered if a new leader is not elected by May 22.

Separately, the National Court, which handles terrorism and other top criminal cases, released a woman who was arrested on Tuesday for "rebellion" and "terrorism" in a probe of pro-independence activists in Catalonia.

National Court judge Diego de Egea dismissed those two charges against her, saying she should instead be prosecuted for the lesser crime of causing public disorder, which carries a possible jail sentence of between six months and six years.

The woman is allegedly a member of the radical pro-independence activist groups called the Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) which formed last year before an independence referendum on October 1.

In recent weeks, the groups have protested against the jailing of pro-independence Catalan leaders and the detention of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont in Germany by blocking major roads in Catalonia, sometimes with burning tires.

At the end of March, the protesters blocked major roads in Catalonia and tried to occupy the central government's representative office, heavily guarded by police, on several occasions. The resulting clashes left dozens injured.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Giving major relief to budding entrepreneurs, the government on Thursday allowed startups to avail tax concession only if total investment including funding from angel investors does not exceed Rs 100 million.

As per a notification by the commerce and industry ministry, an angel investor picking up stakes in a startup should have a minimum net worth of Rs 20 million or should have an average returned income of over Rs 2.5 million in the preceding three financial years.

"With the introduction of amendments through this notification, startups are likely to have an easy access to funding which in turn will ensure ease in starting of new businesses, promoting startup ecosystem, encouraging entrepreneurship, leading to more job creation," the ministry said in a statement.

Several startups have raised concerns to taxation of angel funds under Section 56 of the Income Tax Act, which provides for taxation of funds received by an entity. As many as 18 startups have got notices from tax authorities.

This section provides that where a closely held company issues its shares at a price more than its fair market value, the amount received in excess of the fair market value will be charged to tax the company as income from other sources.

Startups also enjoy income tax benefit for three out of seven consecutive assessment years.

To avail the concessions, startups would have to approach an eight-member inter-ministerial board of certification.

"Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) has issued gazette notification...constituting a broad based inter-ministerial board to consider applications of startups for claim of following incentives of the I-T Act 1961," it added.

A startup set up as a private limited company or limited liability partnership incorporated after April 1, 2016, would be eligible for tax concessions.

The ministry said these amendments are introduced to address key demands of startups with regard to exemptions under the I-T Act.

Startups in the recent past have flagged their grievances to the government regarding angel tax provision, which they considered was not friendly to them.

An angel investor is the one who funds a startup when it is taking baby steps to establish itself in the competitive market.

Normally about 300-400 startups get angel funding in an year.

The government has extended tax benefits to just 88 startups out of 8,765 that have been recognised by DIPP since January 2016.

The government launched the Startup India' initiative on January 16, 2016 to build a strong ecosystem for nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship.An appellate body hearing the Max hospital twin baby death case today extended by a month the stay on a Delhi government order cancelling its licence in December, authorities said.

The stay will be in effect till May 17, the next date of hearing, they said.

Today's hearing was the third in the case by the Financial Commissioner's court, Delhi.

The licence cancellation case pertains to the birth of premature twins at the hospital in Shalimar Bagh on November 30 last year.

Both the babies were declared stillborn by the hospital, one of them wrongly, and handed over to the family allegedly in a polythene bag.

While the family was on its way to perform the final rites, they found that one of them (a baby boy) was still alive.

The case triggered an outrage, prompting the AAP government's Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) to cancel the hospital's licence on December 8 for alleged medical negligence.

The upscale hospital group on December 13 had filed an appeal against the cancellation of the licence in the Financial Commissioner's court, which stayed the order.

"The Max hospital side has raised certain objections to some of the questions raised by our side (DGHS). So, the court has asked us to file a written reply," a top official of the Directorate General of Health Services told PTI.

The DGHS had on February 8, when the last hearing was held, said that the Delhi government would emphasise on two other factors as major grounds for cancellation of its licence.

"From our (DGHS) side, now the main grounds for taking action are the lapses on part of the hospital, involving the EWS (extremely weaker section) quota patients and dengue fever beds. And, we had sent notices to Max for these cases, even before the twin baby case was reported in the media," the Director General in the DGHS, Kirti Bhushan, had said.

The alleged medical negligence in the twin baby case was over and above those two grounds, he had said.

Meanwhile, the Max Healthcare group, in a statement today, said, "The relief granted to Max Hospital, Shalimar Bagh, earlier will continue, as the next date of hearing is fixed for April 17."



Following the initial stay order, the Max hospital had resumed its operation on December 20.

"Max Hospital, Shalimar Bagh, continues to serve over 15,000 patients in its OPD, 3,000 patients in IPD per month including those from the economically weaker sections of the society," the group claimed.

Also, the Delhi Medical Council (DMC), which had sent the Max hospital twins case to its disciplinary committee, has held a couple of hearings in the matter last month, a senior DMC official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are scheduled to be in Beijing on April 24 to attend different meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and interact with their counterparts from the member states.

The eight-member SCO, in which India was a latest entrant along with Pakistan, is due to hold its summit in the Chinese city of Qingdao in June. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to attend the summit and also hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The SCO comprised of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan.

Ahead of the summit, the organisation which is focused on anti-terrorism cooperation is holding a host of ministerial and officials' meetings to work out a firm agenda for the summit to provide a new direction to the grouping.

SCO Foreign and Defence Ministers meetings are scheduled on the same day on April 24 and almost around the same time, according to officials here.

The visits of Swaraj and Sitharaman are the first high-profile visits by Indian ministers after last year's 73-day long standoff at Dokalam.

The two ministers are expected to hold bilateral meetings with their Chinese and other counterparts.

Since December, the two sides are trying to reset the relations and looking to iron out differences on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, India's entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group and China blocking the efforts to designate Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar as a terrorist by the UN.

Besides the two ministers, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval is also expected to visit China in the coming weeks.

Both sides attach a lot of significance to these meetings to reset their ties as they were taking place after President Xi has commenced his second-five-year tenure last month with the prospect of continuing in power for life following the removal of the two-term limit for the president.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A suspected militant who was planning to target security personnel and snatch their weapons has been arrested from Kulgam district of Jammu and Kashmir, the police said today.

Roshan Zameer Bhat, a resident of Nowpora was held based on an information that members of terror outfits --Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Toiba--were planning to carry out attacks on security personnel to snatch their weapons, a police spokesman said.

On being interrogated, the accused disclosed that he had kept the illegally acquired explosive material at his residence, the police said.

A Chinese grenade was found from the house of the accused, they said.

A case has been registered and the investigation is going on, police added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A top Syrian rebel official told AFP today that his faction only agreed to abandon its battered enclave outside Damascus because of an alleged toxic gas attack.

"Of course, the chemical attack is what pushed us to agree" to a withdrawal from Douma, said Yasser Dalwan, a high-ranking member of Jaish al-Islam.

It was the first public acknowledgement by Jaish al-Islam of a deal reached for Douma, their last rebel holdout in the Eastern Ghouta suburb of Damascus.

The agreement was announced on Sunday morning by Syria's government and its ally Russia, just hours after toxic gases were allegedly released on Douma.

First responders there said more than 40 people died Saturday after suffering symptoms consistent with chemical exposure, including wheezing, discoloured skin and foaming at the mouth.

World powers have threatened a strong response, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying today he had "proof" Syria's government was behind the attack.

Syria and its ally Russia have both denied the accusations, and the global chemical watchdog said it would deploy a team to investigate.

Analysts have said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may have used toxic gas to terrify Douma's residents and push rebels to withdraw without a fight. Jaish al-Islam had long insisted that it would refuse to agree to an evacuation deal for Douma.

But since the alleged attack, several thousand rebels and civilians have left Douma for opposition-held territory in the north.

They included Jaish al-Islam's chief Issam Buwaydani, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group. "Not all the leadership has left yet. Departures are ongoing," Dalwan told AFP.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Russian defence ministry today said that the Syrian regime flag is flying in the town of Douma, which it said signified government forces have taken full control over Eastern Ghouta.

"Today a significant event in the history of Syria took place. The raising of a regime flag over a building in the town of Douma signified control over this town and consequently over Eastern Ghouta as a whole," Major General Yury Yevtushenko, head of the Russian military's centre for reconciliation in Syria, was quoted as saying by the Interfax agency.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Taliban have claimed responsibility for a blistering attack on a government compound in Afghanistan's central province of Ghazni that killed at least 15 members of the security forces.

The insurgent group's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told The Associated Press over the telephone that after the attack in the Khuja Omari district, not far from the provincial capital also called Ghazni, all security posts in the district were under Taliban control.

His claim could not be independently confirmed and the government did not immediately respond to it.

Mujahid gave a higher casualty figure among the Afghan forces, which the Taliban often do, and a significantly lower death toll among the insurgent attackers.

He also confirmed the government's statement that the assault killed three top local officials the district's governor, intelligence chief and deputy police chief.

A lawmaker in the Afghan Parliament said three top district officials and several security forces were killed in a Taliban attack on a government compound in Ghazni province.

Lawmaker Mohammad Arif Rahmani said the attack early today morning in Khuja Omari district killed the district governor, intelligence service director and a deputy police official. Fifteen security forces were killed.

Rahmani said the Taliban planted mines to stop reinforcements from coming to help the government forces fend off the attack.

Rahmani said the district is very close to the provincial capital, Ghazni city.

Police say Taliban fighters attacked a district compound in central Afghanistan overnight, killing at least six government security forces in several hours of fighting.

Ramazan Ali Moseni, a deputy chief police in Ghazni province, said 25 Taliban were killed in the gunbattle that started Wednesday night and lasted into the morning.

Moseni said the Taliban fighters stormed the secure compound in Khuja Omari district and the security forces who were there were joined later by government reinforcements.

He said eight government security forces were wounded in the fighting.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The NHRC has sent notices to the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry as well as the Telangana government, seeking detailed reports into a protest by a Telugu actress who stripped in public to highlight her complaint of sexual exploitation of women in the regional film industry.

The NHRC has asked the state government and the ministry to submit its reports within four weeks, it said in a statement today.

Following her protest, the Movie Artistes Association (MAA), an apex body of the Telugu film industry, had said on April 8 the aspiring actress would not be made a member of the organisation.

The police had also booked the actress under Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code (obscene acts in a public place).

"It appears to be an attempt to muzzle the voice of a whistle-blower both from the side of MAA and the state authorities," the apex rights body said.

The NHRC has sent the notices to the chief secretary of the state government and the secretary of the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

The state authorities have to intimate the NHRC about existing or proposed mechanisms to the deal with the issue, it said.

The commission is of the opinion that the "reported prohibitions imposed upon the actress", barring her from acting in films and stopping others from working with her, were a "violation of her right to livelihood and live a life with dignity".

The NHRC in the statement observed that the "issues raised by the actress demand action on the part of the state government in the form of a committee to address and redress the grievances of female actors and women employees, in case of any sexual harassment at the workplace i.e., the Telugu film industry in this case".

The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, has broadly laid down provisions to prevent sexual harassment of women at their workplace. Under the Act, a workplace includes not only government organisations or offices but also private ventures.

"The commission has also observed that reportedly, legal action has been taken against the actress under Section 294 of the IPC, but it is nowhere mentioned, if action on the serious allegations of a casting couch and sexual harassment, levelled by her, has been taken by the authorities," the NHRC said.

The actress had on April 7 staged a semi-nude protest outside the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce. She had also alleged that local artistes were not given enough opportunities in the industry, and that the MAA had denied her membership.

Rejecting her charges a day after the protest, office-bearers of the MAA had said several Telugu actresses had over the years got adequate opportunities in their film careers.

"The MAA, reportedly, has even moved further stating that action will be taken against any artiste who decides to share screen space with her," the NHRC said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An apex body of Telugu film industrywhich denied membership toactressSri Reddy, a day after she caused a flutter by stripping in front of the film chamber's office here,today revoked its decision.

Movie Artistes Association (MAA)presidentSivaji Raja said the bodyalso lifted the restrictions on all its 900 members against working with Sri Reddy.

"We will set up aCommittee Against Sexual Harassment (CASH) to deal with issues relating to sexual harassment. She (Sri Reddy) can apply for membership which will be dealt with as per procedure. We are lifting the ban on her," Raja told reporters.

The actress had on April 7 stripped in public and staged a protest in front of the film chamber office, alleging that local artistes were not being given enough opportunities in the industry.

She also complained of sexual exploitation of women in the regional film industry.

The MAA bearers said they were "emotionally hurt" by Sri Reddy's statementsand approach and hence imposed the ban earlier.

The police had also booked the actress under Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code (obscene acts in a public place).

The NHRCtodaysent notices to the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry as well as the Telangana government, seeking detailed reports into a protest bythe buddingTelugu actress.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)French electronics brand Thomson today announced its re-entry into the Indian market with its range of 'aggressively priced' smart LED TVs that will compete with the likes of Xiaomi and Vu.

The company, whose television sets will be manufactured in India by its brand licensee - Super Plastronics, unveiled three models with prices starting at Rs 13,490 (32-inch TV).

"With the launch, we aim to capture 6-7 per cent of the total TV market share and make Thomson the number one online smart TV brand in India," Super Plastronics CEO Avneet Singh Marwah told reporters here.

He added that the company is investing Rs 150 crore in its three manufacturing units at -- Noida, Una and Jammu to upgrade the facilities.

Apart from Thomson, Super Plastronics holds licence for other brands like Kodak TV, Crown and SVK.

"We have already planned to put one more manufacturing line of LED TV by next quarter in order to offer Indian consumer products that are at par with global standards," he said.

Marwah further said: "We aim to touch Rs 500 crore turnover in FY 2018-19."



In February this year, Chinese tech major Xiaomi had unveiled its 55-inch LED TV for Rs 39,999. Since then, it has added 43-inch and 32-inch TV sets to its portfolio.

Vu, on the other hand, offers TV sets ranging between 24-inch screens to 75-inch, with prices starting around Rs 10,000.

Apart from these new brands, Thomson will also compete with the top three TV brands -- Sony, Samsung and LG that together account for almost 90 per cent of the market.

Thomson has launched two other models of smart TV of 40 inch and 43 inch screen size, priced respectively at Rs 19,990 and Rs 27,999.

It has entered into exclusive sales agreement with Flipkart for Thomson and its sale would be started tomorrow.

Brand Thomson is owned by Technicolor SA, France.

Accoring to Technicolor Head, Intellectual Property and Licensing, Claire Villeneuve, it has five brand licene agreements globally for markets as China, US, Europe and Africa.

Villeneuve did not share the period for which it has granted brand licensing rights to Super Plastronics and said: "We have signed a contract which would be automatically renewed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Bar Association of Jammu (BAJ) today alleged that their agitation for a CBI probe into the Kathua rape and murder case to ensure justice for the eight-year-old-victim was being portrayed as communal by those with a "Kashmir-centric mindset".

Batting strongly for justice for the victim, the BAJ claimed that the probe by the crime branch of Jammu and Kashmir Police was done on questionable line amid threats and coercion by a team of officers from Kashmir Valley including one who served jail term for alleged rape and murder of a minor.

Yesterday, Jammu city wore a deserted look with all major shopping areas, trading markets and schools closed following a bandh call given by Jammu High Court Bar Association (JHCBA) to protest against the growing illegal presence of Rohingyas and Bangladeshi nationals, while also demanding a CBI probe into the Kathua rape-cum-murder.

Jammu has been tense since the brutal rape and murder of the eight-year-old girl belonging to the nomadic Muslim Bakerwal community. The police have arrested eight people in the case, but the Bar Association has opposed the action alleging "targeting of minority Dogras".

Some of the arrested accused belonged to Hindu Ekta Manch, a right wing group.

"Kashmir-centric mindset tried to give our agitation for CBI probe a communal colour. They were trying to divide Jammu on communal lines. It is their conspiracy. It was portrayed as if we are against justice for the girl. We demand CBI probe for justice to the minor, and those involved should be punished," BAJ President B S Salathia said at a press conference here.

He said the BAJ, from the very beginning, called for fair and impartial probe to punish the guilty, "and that is why we demanded a CBI probe".

On April 9, some lawyers had tried to prevent a police team from filing a charge sheet in the case following which another case was registered on Tuesday against those who obstructed the sleuths.

"The manner in which investigation was done is questionable, but the matter is in court now. The call for yesterday's bandh was given to basically to address the issues including deportation of Rohingyas and the directive of the tribal affairs department on the direction of the chief minister (regarding encroachments by Gujjars in Jammu)," Salathia said.

He said the BAJ had told the media repeatedly that yesterday's bandh was not on the Kathua rape-and-murder issue as the case is in court now.

The Bar Association of Jammu still demands a CBI probe as the investigation by the crime branch will "only benefit the accused in the case and deny justice to the girl", Salathia said, adding the government cannot order a probe by the central agency as it is up to the court now.

He claimed that the special investigation team that was probing the case constituted officers from Kashmir wing of the crime branch.

Salathia said the manner in which the special investigation team (SIT) was set up by the government, raised "deep suspicion and fear (in the minds of minority Dogras of the area) that the probe would not be impartial".

"Boys were picked up. They were harassed and tortured by the crime branch to give statements before a judge under Section 166 of CrPC," he said.

Salathia alleged that a member of the probing team was involved in case of rape and murder of a minor girl in Doda, and was in jail for over one-and-a-half years.

The president of the Bar Association of Jammu said if the government can give hand over the case of rape and murder of two women in Shopian to the CBI on public demand, then in this case too it should have done the same.

On chief minister Mehbooba Mufti's statement that protests cannot stop the probe, Salathia said, now the court will decide and not the chief minister.

He said the bar association will hold a meeting to decide on the next course of action.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Anurag Kashyap says he was "scared" when his family received threats for his tweets criticising the ban on Pakistani artistes from working in Bollywood in 2016.

The filmmaker says he now just posts his opinion and does not read the responses to it. This way, he says, he has been able to increase his productivity.

Kashyap had come out in support of his filmmaker friend Karan Johar, who faced protests during the release of "Ae Dil Hai Mushkil" (2016), which featured Pakistani actor Fawad Khan in a pivotal but small role.

In a series of tweets, Kashyap had asked why only Indian filmmakers should be targeted for casting Pakistani actors when Prime Minister Narendra Modi also visited Lahore.

The "Mukkabaaz" director says after he posted the tweets, people started targeting his personal life.

"During the 'Ae Dil Hai Mushkil' controversy, when I tweeted to the prime minister, people went after my personal life, (they) started threatening my parents. My family got scared. That was very, very scary," Kashyap told PTI in an interview.

"The trolling went on for six-eight months," he says.

The filmmaker says his opinion on the controversy over Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film "Padmaavat" also rubbed some people the wrong way.

"Social media has kind of levelled the field. People use it to bring others down, silence others and threaten them. During 'Padmaavat', it had happened, they put out my number on the social media because I had an opinion," he says.

The 45-year-old director, who will be seen in the finale episode of MTV Troll Police, airing this Saturday, has realised that the aim of trolls is to silence those whose opinions differs so he has stopped engaging with them.

"We are dealing with a country which is so over-populated, where there is so much resentment, so much repression, so many mouths to feed, so many people looking for work, so many disillusioned people.

"Sometimes I think when they are frustrated they want to take it out. And they feel better after abusing. So now when I put out a tweet, I don't read the response," he says.

By doing so, Kashyap feels, his productivity has increased since he is not wasting time and energy on people whose aim is to be after him.

"After I stopped engaging, I made 'Mukkabaaz', finished 'Sacred Games', 'Lust Stories' and I am shooting 'Manmarziyan'. Suddenly, the frequency of my work has increased because I have gone off social media," he says.

Kashyap has become a calmer person today, and says he has mastered the art of channelising his anger through work.

"Whatever I want to say, I will say it through my work. I am enjoying this process much more than anything else. I am actually in my best phase. I am only working and I am happy. My anger has found a better way to project itself through my work. I made 'Mukkabaaz' and put it all out there, in a way that is more effective. It says what it wants to say. I don't have to scream and shout.

"I want to reflect, evoke and provoke. I want to put it out there and see how people react to it," he says.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Watch and accessories company, Titan today launched its first integrated format store housing watches, jewellery, eyewear and accessories under one roof in Banjara Hills here.

A press release issued by the company said, the new retail format aims at providing its customers with an enhanced shopping experience.

With an extensive retail network of World of Titan, Tanishq and Titan Eyeplus, the Banjara Hills store is the first integrated store in Telangana, the second after Vizag.

The new Titan flagship store lets customers browse through over 5000+ products including watches, accessories, jewellery, eyewear, before zeroing in, on the perfect choice, Managing Director, Titan Company Limited, Bhaskar Bhat said.

Bhat said by housing Tanishq, World of Titan and Titan Eyeplus under one roof, Titan is looking forward to providing its customers an unmatched shopping experience to the residents of Hyderabad and Telangana.

"We have been celebrating almost 3 decades of excellence and love from our customers, and we aim to make every shopping experience a memorable one for every single customer purchasing a Titan and this integrated store is an example of our unique retail offering to them," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 25-year-old man from Maharashtra died in Uttarkashi while he was returning from a trek, an official said today.

Sumit was part of a 16-member trekking team from Delhi's Youth Hostel Association of India, SDM Purola Puran Singh Rana said.

The team had gone on a trek from Valavat to the Chainsheel meadow on April 7, he said.

The official said while returning from Chainsheel the members of the trekking team lost their way near Tamta Thaat due to heavy snowfall on Tuesday.

They were returning to the base camp at Kasmolti, he said.

The SDM said the team claimed that Sumit had got separated from the group.

One of the group members on Tuesday informed the local police that they had lost their way due to inclement weather, the Rana said.

Rescue teams found Sumit's body yesterday. It seems to he died due to extreme cold, the officer said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump has not yet made his "final decision" on how to respond to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria, the White House said today after he met with his top national security advisors.

Trump was to confer with French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May later in the day on the action the allies might take, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.

"President Trump just finished a meeting with his National Security team to discuss the situation in Syria. No final decision has been made," Sanders said.

"We are continuing to assess intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies. The President will speak with President Macron and Prime Minister May this evening." The White House announcement came after May held an emergency cabinet meeting on the situation in Syria, where dozens of people were killed last weekend in a suspected toxic gas attack on Douma, the largest town in a former rebel stronghold outside Damascus.

Downing Street said May's top ministers had agreed on the "need to take action," despite polls showing the British public remains wary of military intervention.

Moscow has warned against any escalation that could trigger a conflict between the United States and Russia, and has called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting on Friday. In Washington, Trump said earlier today that a decision would come "fairly soon," though he equivocated in his tweets on the timing of any military strikes.

A French frigate, British Royal Navy submarines laden with cruise missiles and the USS Donald Cook, an American destroyer equipped with Tomahawk land attack missiles, have all moved into range of Syria's coast.

US officials have refused to rule out direct military engagement with Russia, with the White House saying "all options are on the table." But a special hotline for the US and Russian militaries to communicate about operations in Syria is active and being used by both sides, Moscow said today.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)President Donald trump has asked his top economic advisors to study the possibility of rejoining the multi-nation Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact he withdrew out the US days after assuming presidency.

"Last year, the President kept his promise to end the TPP deal negotiated by the Obama administration because it was unfair to American workers and farmers. The President has consistently said he would be open to a substantially better deal, including in his speech in Davos earlier this year," White House Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters said.

"To that end, he has asked (US Trade Representative) Amb (Robert) Lighthizer and (White House Economic) Director (Lawrence) Kudlow to take another look at whether or not a better deal could be negotiated," she said.

Trump announced this during a meeting with lawmakers at the White House, Walters said.

In his remarks in Davos on January 26, Trump had said the US was prepared to negotiate mutually beneficial and bilateral trade agreements with all countries.

"This will include the countries in TPP, which are very important. We have agreements with several of them already. We would consider negotiating with the rest, either individually, or perhaps as a group, if it is in the interests of all, he had said in his remarks to the World Economic Forum Congress Centre.

Senator Pat Roberts, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman described, Trump's rethinking on TTP as a "certainly good news".

However, Congressman Brad Sherman opposed the move.

"The Trump administration is reviving the TPP. The idea that the TPP is a counter to China is nonsense. It benefits and was in large part written by multinational corporations seeking to ease outsourcing," he said.

TPP is an ambitious trade agreement involving 12 countries.President Donald Trump's new South Asia Policy has brought in certainty, ending an era of uncertainty in the region, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told lawmakers today.

In his new South Asia Policy unveiled in August last, Trump had called for tougher measure against Pakistan if it did not cooperates the US in its fight against terrorism. He had also called for a greater role for India in Afghanistan.

"In South Asia and Afghanistan, uncertainty in the region has been replaced by the certainty of President Trump's South Asia Strategy," Mattis said in his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.

Concurrently in the Middle East, US has dramatically reduced ISIS' physical caliphate, using a coordinated, whole-of-government approach that works "by, with, and through" its allies and partners to crush ISIS' claim of invincibility and deny them a geographic haven from which to plot murder, he said.

"The budget request supports US forces in Afghanistan as part of the Administration's South Asia Strategy; continues operations to prevent the resurgence of ISIS; and continues our security partnership with Iraqi Security Forces to support Iraq's long-term stability and independence," Mattis said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump said he would meet his top advisors on Syria later today, promising a decision on possible military action "fairly soon."



"We're having a meeting today on Syria," Trump told a gathering of lawmakers and state governors at the White House. "We'll see what happens."



Amid a military build-up in the eastern Mediterranean, spluttering diplomatic efforts at the United Nations and chemical weapons experts deploying on the ground, Trump had appeared to equivocate about a potential strike earlier today.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Indian Consulate in San Franscisco is trying its best to locate the whereabouts of a Los Angeles-based Indian, who has been missing with his wife and two children after a road trip in the US, the External Affairs Ministry said today.

Sandeep Thottappilly, his wife Soumya and their two children -- Siddanth and Saachi -- have been missing since April 6 while on a road trip from Portland, Oregon, to their home in California.

"Our consulate there has been maintaining contact with the family members of the missing people. We are in touch with the state police department. We are also in touch with the highway patrol. We are trying our best to locate the whereabouts of the family," Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told reporters.

Thottappilly is a vice-president at a bank, while his wife is a homemaker. His parents are based in Surat, Gujarat, while his wife's family stays in Kochi.

Earlier this week, reacting to a tweet on the missing family, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had said she asked for a report from the Indian Consulate General in San Francisco.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An air raid struck the set of a rebel TV series in Yemen today, killing at least two people, a security source and a rights activist said.

The strike on Marawiaa district in the western province of Hodeida came as a cast and crew were filming a Ramadan series for Huthi rebel-run Al-Masirah television, they said.

The set was on a farm that had belonged to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, a one-time rebel ally who was gunned down by the Huthis in December after their partnership collapsed.

Multiple military vehicles, including two tanks, were on the property at the time of the attack, the sources told AFP.

A Saudi-led coalition has been battling the Huthis, seen by Riyadh as Iranian proxies, since 2015.

The security source said Thursday's attack was one of a string of strikes in Hodeida province, which he attributed to Saudi-led forces.

"We take this report seriously, it will be investigated," a coalition spokesman told AFP, saying it would be "inappropriate to comment further" while the probe is ongoing.

The coalition had previously targeted Saleh's residence in Sanaa when the strongman was alive and allied with the Huthis.

A Yemeni photographer at the site of Thursday's raids said the victims were the series' set designer and finance director.

The Yemen war has created what the United Nations has called the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

It has killed nearly 10,000 people since 2015, when the coalition joined the government's fight against the Huthis.

While all sides in the war stand accused of failing to protect civilians, the Saudi-led coalition has drawn particularly harsh condemnation from international rights groups over civilian deaths.

It was added to a UN blacklist last year for the killing and maiming of children.

The Huthis have in recent months intensified missile strikes on Saudi Arabia, declaring this week that 2018 would be the "year of ballistics".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Uber COO Barney Hardford is slated to visit India next week during which he will meet government officials as well as business leaders.

Hardford, who took charge last December, will visit Delhi, Hyderabad and Mumbai during his four-day visit from April 17-20.

Confirming the visit, an Uber spokesperson said: "India is one of the core markets for Uber globally, and a focus for our investment in 2018 and beyond.

"Barney is looking forward to meeting business and government leaders in the country and discussing ways Uber can better serve riders, drivers, and cities."



Hardford's visit comes within months of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's India trip in February.

Uber is locked in an intense battle for leadership with SoftBank-backed Ola in India and has a presence in 29 cities.

There have been reports about Uber and rival Ola joining forces in the Indian market. The speculations got stronger after SoftBank - an investor in Ola - joined Uber as well as an investor by committing over USD 1 billion.

Apart from India, the two now also compete in the Australian market with Ola recently launching its services in Perth and Sydney.

According to sources, the two have held multiple rounds of discussions, including one just before Khosrowshahi's visit to India but are yet to strike a deal. Both, Ola and Uber have declined to comment on whether they are engaged in merger discussions.

Uber has been pumping in substantial funds to fuel its growth in India. In 2015, Uber announced an investment of $1 billion in the country to expand its services. It has also set up a response and support centre in Hyderabad with an investment of $50 million.

"India is one of the top three markets outside of the US, accounting for 10% of its trips globally. For me, India is a core market that we are going to really focus on going forward. I'm really excited by the opportunity ahead for Uber in India in the years to come," Khosrowshahi had told PTI in a recent interview.Britain's leading spy chief today revealed that the UK's first major cyberattack was against the dreaded Islamic State which hindered the terrorist group's ability to coordinate attacks and suppressed their propaganda.

Jeremy Fleming, director-general of the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), told a conference in Manchester that the surveillance agency had conducted a "major offensive cyber-campaign" last year against the ISIS.

"In 2017, there were times when (ISIS) found it almost impossible to spread their hate online, to use their normal channels to spread their rhetoric, or trust their publications," Fleming said during the CyberUK event organised by the UK's National Cyber Security Centre.

"This is the first time the UK has systematically and persistently degraded an adversary's online efforts as part of a wider military campaign. Did it work? I think it did This campaign shows how targeted and effective offensive cyber can be," he said.

In his first public speech since taking charge of GCHQ in March 2017, the former MI5 agent also attacked Russia over "unacceptable cyber-behaviour" and warned that the deadly nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia last month demonstrates recklessness on the part of the Russian state.

"It demonstrates how reckless Russia is prepared to be, how little the Kremlin cares of the rules-based order, how comfortable they are at putting ordinary lives at risk They're blurring the boundaries between criminal and state activity," he said.

"The robust response from the UK and from the international community shows the Kremlin that illegal acts have consequences. And it looks like our expertise on Russia will be in increasing demand," he added.

Under his leadership, GCHQ, often referred to as the UK's listening post, has also announced plans to open a new facility in Manchester next year as part of wider measures to expand its network of sites to combat threats that the country faces in a digital age.

"It will create hundreds of high-calibre jobs for people who will have a vital role in keeping this country safe. Our new facility will open up a huge new pool of highly talented, tech-savvy recruits vital to our future success," he said.

In addition to its headquarters in Cheltenham, south-west England, GCHQ currently has offices at Bude in Cornwall and Scarborough in north Yorkshire. Last year, the National Cyber Security Centre, which is part of GCHQ, opened its headquarters in London.

GCHQ, with a workforce of more than 6,000, works alongside MI5 and MI6 intelligence services in the UK.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Several Union ministers today sought to defend the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, facing criticism over its response to the alleged gangrape of a minor girl in Unnao, saying it is committed to protecting women and ensuring that law takes its course.

BJP legislator from Bangarmau, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, was today booked by the UP Police on various charges under the IPC, including rape, kidnapping and criminal intimidation, in connection with the alleged rape of the 17-year-old girl.

The state government said it would hand the probe over to the CBI.

"... When we say Beti Bachao, we really mean that. We are here to safeguard the interests of our daughters and we are committed to their safety. As far as Unnao incident is concerned, the law of justice will prevail," Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma told reporters.

Sharma said whosoever is found responsible for the incident, irrespective of his stature, will be punished.

Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi said action should be taken in every such case against women.

"This is distressing and justice will be done. The case has been given to CBI and law will take its course," she said.

Backing the Yogi Adityanath government, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal said the Uttar Pradesh government is working day and night to maintain law and order in the state.

"The state government will bring to book all the culprits in the state," he said.

The Uttar Pradesh government is facing strong criticism over its response to the case. Opposition political parties have hit out at the BJP government in the state.

Yesterday, Congress president Rahul Gandhi wondered if Prime Minister Narendra Modi would observe a fast on the alleged rape and death of the complainant's father in custody, which he said "has shamed humanity".

The case came into the limelight after the victim tried to immolate herself outside Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence on Sunday alleging police inaction against BJP MLA Sengar.

Last night, an SIT probing the case handed over its report to the government after which it was decided that an FIR would be registered against the MLA and the case would be handed over to the CBI.

A purported video of the alleged rape survivor's father before his death has also gone viral and was aired by several TV channels. In the video, he has alleged that he was mercilessly beaten up, including with rifle butts, by the MLA's brother and others.

It also showed the victim's father - who died on Monday - with serious wounds on his back. The veracity of the video could not be ascertained.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The police in Uttar Pradesh today registered an FIR against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged gangrape of a minor girl in Unnao, hours after the government said it would hand the probe over to the CBI.

Till the premier investigating agency takes over, the local police would continue with the probe, but a decision on whether the accused MLA from the ruling party would be arrested would be taken by the CBI, Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar said.

A letter for handing the probe over to the CBI for maintaining total transparency in the case would be sent to the home department today, he told reporters here.

The Unnao police earlier today registered the case against Sengar under various sections of the IPC and provisions of the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act in the Makhi police station area.

Under POCSO, an accused has to be arrested immediately after a case been filed.

The FIR has been registered under Sections 376 (rape), 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing a woman to compel her into marriage), 363 (kidnapping) and 506 (criminal intimidation).

Principal Secretary (Information) Avanish Awasthi had said in an statement late last night that an FIR would be lodged under appropriate sections against Sengar and others and the investigation would be handed over to CBI.

To a volley of questions on whether Sengar would be arrested now that a case had been registered, Kumar said the CBI would take a decision on this depending on the merit of the case after investigations.

The principal secretary (Home) and state Director General of Police (DGP) O P Singh said the MLA had not been named in the statement given before the magistrate earlier as the minor had said she feared for her life.

Kumar also dismissed allegations that police was trying to shield the MLA, and said it was because of these charges that the probe was being given to the CBI.

The government has also decided to extend security to the family of the 17-year-old girl, the DGP said.

He said no one found guilty would be spared and added that action had already been taken against some policemen and doctors for laxity and negligence.

Two doctors have been suspended and disciplinary proceedings initiated against three others for laxity in providing the victim's father with proper medical care and treatment prior to his judicial custody and at the district hospital, Kumar said.

Safipur Circle Officer Kunwar Bahadur Singh was also suspended for negligence in handling the victim's repeated complaints, he said.

Kumar said the government had decided to transfer the case to the CBI after lodging the case into the incidents of June 4, 2017, (alleged rape) and since the two other cases of April 3 this year (cross FIRs on the beating up of the victim's father leading to his death) are connected, they be also transferred to the CBI.

The officials also clarified why an FIR was not lodged against the MLA earlier saying this was because the teenager had not mentioned his name in the statement given before the magistrate.

Now that the girl and her family have told the SIT, which visited them yesterday, that they had not done so because of fear, a case has been registered against the MLA, they said.

The DGP was asked by the reporters why he continued to refer to the MLA as "vidhaykji" since he was an accused in a rape case.

He was according him respect because Sengar was a people's representative and charges against him had not been proved, the DGP replied.

The alleged rape case had come into the limelight after the victim tried to immolate herself outside Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence alleging police inaction against the BJP MLA.

Last night, the SIT constituted by the government handed over its report to the government after which it was decided an FIR would be lodged against the MLA and the case handed over to the CBI.

The teen rape survivor has alleged that she was confined to a hotel room by the district administration, leaving her "without a phone or water and guards at every corner".

She today demanded the immediate arrest of the MLA, saying that the CBI probe could be conducted later.

"We have no objection to the inquiry but he should be arrested first...why is he being shielded," she told the electronic media.

"If the MLA is allowed to remain out he will not leave my uncle... He had earlier too hatched conspiracies against my kin," she said.

The teenager added, "Only when he is arrested, I will be satisfied and I will be able to say that the BJP government is doing justice."



A purported video of the alleged rape survivor's father before his death has also gone viral and was aired by several TV channels. In the video, he alleged he was mercilessly beaten up, including with rifle butts, by the MLA's brother and others.

It also showed the victim's father -- who died on Monday -- with serious wounds on his back.

The veracity of the video could not be ascertained.

The wife of the accused, Sangeeta Sengar, had yesterday demanded narco-tests of her husband and the 17-year-old girl.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Amid mounting outrage over the alleged gangrape of a minor girl over a year ago, the Allahabad High Court today castigated the UP government for delay in arrest of the accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar despite an FIR against him, warning it may be forced to observe that "law and order has collapsed in the state".

The FIR itself came days after the Unnao girl tried to self-immolate in front of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's house on Sunday accusing authorities of inaction, and death of her father in custody the next day allegedly after being beaten up by the politician's brother and their henchmen in front of policemen.

As the public outcry raged amid growing demands by political parties and civil society for the legislator's arrest, protests were also held outside Adityanath's house while the police put the onus on the CBI to arrest the MLA, who has remained defiant and has dubbed allegations as a political conspiracy.

The FIR was registered against Sengar under various sections of the IPC, including for rape, kidnapping and criminal intimidation as well as under provisions of the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. Under POCSO, an accused has to be arrested immediately.

The case was registered hours before the high court was to hear the matter, and so was the UP government's decision on transferring the case to the CBI late last night.

Police is not ready to register FIR of a minor rape victim. In spite of SIT report, you are repeating that we can only take any action after further investigation, if this is the conduct of the police in state, whom a victim will approach to register a complaint. If this is the stand you repeatedly taking then we will be forced to observe in our order that law and order has collapsed in the state," the court said.

The court, which is expected to pass order tomorrow, took strong objection to the delay in the MLA's arrest as it sought details of the action taken by the government in the matter.

The court was told by the Advocate General that three of the accused in the case were arrested including the MLA's brother but any further action would depend on statements of the complainant and witnesses.

Observing that the Special Investigation Team (SIT) report showed that the medical officers and police officers were hand in glove with the accused to save them, the court said since these officers have been arrested already why further investigation was needed to arrest the main accused.

Senior Advocate G S Chaturvedi, who had moved the court, said the SIT headed by senior police officers conducted preliminary investigation and then filed a report after which the FIR was registered.

When asked when Sengar would be arrested, Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar told reporters here that the CBI would take a decision on this.

State Director General of Police O P Singh said the minor had not named the MLA before the magistrate earlier as she feared for her life. The government has decided to extend security to the family of the 17-year-old girl, he added.

Kumar dismissed allegations that police was trying to shield the MLA.

Strong reactions came from opposition parties, who demanded immediate arrest of the MLA with senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his silence over the Unnao rape case.

Sibal also alleged that Modi was "not serious" about the crimes against women across the country, in an apparent reference to another rape case in Kathua, Jammu & Kashmir, where the BJP is in the ruling alliance with the PDP.

Several Union ministers including Mahesh Sharma, Piyush Goyal and Maneka Gandhi, however, sought to defend the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, saying it is committed to protecting women, and ensuring that law takes its course.

Two doctors have been suspended and disciplinary proceedings initiated against three others for laxity in providing the victim's father with proper medical care and treatment prior to his judicial custody and at the district hospital, officials said.

Kumar said the government decided to transfer the case to the CBI after lodging the case into the incidents of June 4, 2017, (alleged rape) and since the two other cases of April 3 this year (cross FIRs on the beating up of the victim's father leading to his death) are connected, they will also be transferred to the CBI.

The teen rape survivor demanded immediate arrest of the MLA, saying the CBI probe could be conducted later.

"Why is he being shielded? If the MLA is allowed to remain out he will not leave my uncle... He had earlier too hatched conspiracies against my kin," she said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi today hit out at the previous UPA government for policy paralysis in the defence sector and told foreign companies that it will not take a decade to take a decision on procurement of a batch of 110 fighter jets.

In his address after inaugurating the four-day Defence Expo here, Modi said "laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives of the previous government had badly impacted the defence sector.

Policy paralysis in the defence sector during the previous regime had affected the country's military preparedness, the prime minister said, adding that the NDA government's efforts to build a partnership with defence industries will be guided by the highest ideals of integrity and probity.

There was a time when the critical issue of defence preparedness was hampered by policy paralysis. We have seen the damage such laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives can cause to the nation. Not now, not anymore, never, he said.

Modi also took a dig at the UPA regime for failing to conclude a deal to procure 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) after a long-drawn selection process.

You would also recall the long-drawn process of procurement of fighter aircraft that never reached any conclusion. We have not only taken bold action to meet our immediate critical requirements, but have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircraft. We do not want to spend 10 years in discussions without any tangible outcomes, he said.

The government last week began the process to procure around 110 fighter jets by issuing an RFI (Request for Information) or initial tender. It is the first mega procurement initiative for fighter jets after the government scrapped the process to acquire 126 MMRCA for the Indian Air Force about five years ago.

We will work with you with a sense of mission to keep our defence forces equipped with state-of-the-art systems, and to create the necessary domestic manufacturing ecosystem to achieve this. And, in all our efforts to pursue efficiency and effectiveness in partnership with you, we will be guided by the highest ideals of integrity and probity, he said.

Following scrapping of the MMRCA deal, the NDA government in September 2016 signed a Euro 7.87 billion (approx Rs 59,000 crore) deal with the French government for the purchase of 36 Rafale twin-engine fighter jets.

Ramping up its attack on the government over the Rafale issue, the Congress claims that the deal negotiated under its rule was much cheaper than the contract signed by the Modi government to procure the Rafale jets.

The UPA government floated a tender in 2007 for the purchase of 126 MMRCA for the Air Force. After negotiations, only Rafale and Eurofighter Typhoon remained in the reckoning. However, the deal could not be finalised by the UPA regime



Modi said the government was committed to making India a leading manufacturer of defence equipment and building two defence industrial corridors, "with room for everyone".

We are committed to establishing two defence industrial corridors: one in Tamil Nadu and other in Uttar Pradesh. These will utilize defence manufacturing ecosystems in the regions and further build upon it. The corridors will become engines of economic development and growth of defence industrial base, he said.

Modi said venture capital and start-ups in defence sector will be encouraged.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The US today strongly condemned the Houthi missile attack on Riyadh, saying this calls into question their commitment to helping shape a peaceful, prosperous, and secure future for Yemen.

"The United States strongly condemns today's Houthi missile attack on Riyadh," State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said. She said the US supports the right of Saudi Arabia to defend its borders against these threats, which are "fueled by the Iranian regime's dangerous proliferation of weapons and destabilising activities in the region.

"The Houthis continued attacks on Saudi population centres calls into question their commitment to helping shape a peaceful, prosperous, and secure future for Yemen. We continue to call on all parties to return to UN-facilitated political negotiations and move toward ending the war in Yemen," Nauert said.

Saudi media reported that Saudi Arabia's air defence forces intercepted three ballistic missiles over Riyadh today, after at least three blasts were heard in the capital city.

Meanwhile, the US House Foreign Relations Committee today announced a Congressional hearing on the Middle East.

"Growing turmoil in the Middle East poses clear and immediate dangers to the US and our partners. In Syria, Assad is using cover from Iran and Russia to continue abhorrent attacks on civilians that have destabilised the region," Congressman Ed Royce, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said.

"Meanwhile, in Yemen, Iran's malign influence has empowered the Houthis and left millions on the brink of starvation. This hearing will allow members to examine US policy toward the Middle East as we grapple with these conflicts and approach a key deadline for the Iran nuclear agreement," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An American military attache at the US embassy in Islamabad, who is charged with causing the death of a Pakistani national and injuring another in a road accident, enjoys diplomatic immunity and cannot be arrested or detained, the US said today.

"The individual involved is an accredited diplomat," a US State Department spokesperson said, responding to a question on defence air attache Col Joseph Emanuel Hall who was driving a US embassy Land Cruiser that hit a motorcycle in Islamabad on Saturday, killing the motorcyclist on the spot and injuring the pillion rider.

The US official was not arrested owing to their diplomatic immunity, however, the police took custody of the vehicle.

Islamabad Police has urged Pakistan's interior ministry not to allow Hall to leave the country.

"In accordance with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the individual, like all diplomats, is immune from the criminal, civil and administrative jurisdiction of Pakistan and cannot be arrested, detained, or banned from leaving the country," the spokesperson said.

"For the safety and security of those involved, we cannot disclose the diplomat's current location. We are in close contact with the appropriate Pakistani officials," the spokesperson said, adding that the US embassy is cooperating with the investigation.

Meanwhile, Voice of America reported that the US has not imposed any restriction on the travel of Pakistani diplomats in the country.

The State Department has confirmed via email that there are "no restrictions on travel for Pakistani diplomats in the United States", despite reports that they will soon be subjected to new travel restrictions, VOA reported.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The US Embassy in Cambodia has issued a security alert over an alleged plot to set off a bomb during the country's traditional New Year holiday, which runs from Thursday through Monday.

The alert says US government personnel have been advised to exercise caution around Wat Phnom, a temple in Phnom Penh said to be the target of an alleged plot by the overseas anti-government group Khmer National Liberation Front.

The alert, described as based on media reports, was posted on the embassy's website and social media outlets.

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Tuesday publicly warned of the alleged plot, saying strengthened security measures would ensure safety. He has repeatedly said ahead of a general election in July that political opponents seek to cause unrest.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Vice President Venkaiah Naidu will address the 9th convocation of the IIM Shillong here on April 16, officials said today.

The vice president will deliver the convocation address after presentation of medals for the post graduate programme, IIM Shillong spokesman M Mukhim said.

Meghalaya Governor Ganga Prasad and IIM Shillong chairman Shishir Bajoria would also be present, he said.

Earlier this year, the institute concluded its final placement for its students in which 41 recruiters had turned up.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)German auto giant Volkswagen, still battling to move past a long-running scandal over diesel emissions, today named the head of the VW brand, Herbert Diess, as its new chief executive as part of a major management shake-up.

He will replace outgoing CEO Matthias Mueller, who was appointed in 2015 shortly after the so-called "dieselgate" scandal broke and plunged the former paragon of German industry into the biggest crisis in its history.

Originally contracted to serve until 2020, Mueller was stepping down "by mutual agreement, effective immediately," VW said in a statement.

"There will be a number of changes on the board of management," the statement said.

"At its meeting on Thursday, the supervisory board appointed Herbert Diess as his successor." VW also said works council executive Gunnar Kilian would replace Karlheinz Blessing as human resources chief.

And the CEO of subsidiary Porsche, Oliver Blume, will join the VW board.

More details are expected to be revealed at a press conference at VW's Wolfsburg headquarters Friday at 10:30 am (0830 GMT).

Mueller had attempted to right the ship after VW admitted to installing software in 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide designed to cheat regulatory emissions tests.

He steered the mammoth carmaker into a massive restructuring, aiming to offer electric versions of many of its models and slim down its operations, but also landed in prosecutors' sights over suspicions he may have known about the cheating before it became public.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US-based retail giant Walmart is in discussion with Flipkart to buy stake in the e-commerce company, a deal that is expected to value the Indian firm at about $20 billion, sources close to the development said.

According to the sources, Walmart is in talks to buy shares from Flipkart and its investors. The contours of the deal, which is yet to reach a conclusive stage, are still being worked out.

The sources declined to be identified as the matters are private.

The deal, which is likely to be carried out in tranches, will include purchase of primary and secondary shares, one of the sources said.

Another person said, early investors like Tiger Global could look at a complete exit from the e-commerce company post the transaction.

Flipkart declined to comment, while a response could not be elicited from Tiger Global.

Last year, SoftBank Vision Fund had pumped in an estimated $2.5 billion in Flipkart. The Bengaluru-based firm had also raised funds from eBay, Tencent Holdings and Microsoft Corp last year.

The deal, if it goes through, would unlock the booming Indian e-commerce market for the world's largest offline retailer. For Flipkart, it would provide more arsenal to go up against rival, Amazon in the Indian market.

Amazon and Flipkart are locked in an intense battle for leadership in the Indian market and have pumped in billions of dollars towards marketing and setting up infrastructure in the country.

There have been reports of Flipkart being in discussion with the rival for a possible acquisition, though there has been no formal announcement on that.

Industry watchers said a deal between Walmart and Flipkart is more likely since Flipkart-Amazon joining forces would face scrutiny by the competition watchdog, CCI in India.

(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.)Shrinking reservoirs in India, Morocco, Iraq and Spain could result in water taps going completely dry in these four countries, a study based on a new early warning satellite system has warned.

According to the developers of the new satellite early warning system for the world's 500,000 dams, shrinking reservoirs in India, Morocco, Iraq and Spain could spark the next "day zero" water crisis, The Guardian reported.

The system has named countries where shrinking reservoirs could lead to the taps completely drying up, the study said.

Tensions have been apparent in India over the water allocations for two reservoirs connected by the Narmada river, it said.

Poor rains last year left the upstream Indira Sagar dam in Madhya Pradesh a third below its seasonal average.

When some of this shortfall was passed on to the downstream Sardar Sarovar reservoir, it caused an uproar because the latter is a drinking supply for 30 million people.

Last month, the Gujarat state government halted irrigation and appealed to farmers not to sow crops.

Cape Town recently grabbed global headlines by launching a countdown to the day when taps would be cut off to millions of residents as a result of a three-year drought.

Drastic conservation measures have forestalled that moment in South Africa, but dozens of other countries face similar risks from rising demand, mismanagement and climate change, says the (WRI).

The US-based environmental organisation is working with Deltares, the Dutch government and other partners to build a water and security early warning system that aims to anticipate social instability, economic damage and cross-border migration.

A prototype is due to be rolled out later this year, but a snapshot, unveiled on Wednesday, highlighted four of the worst-affected dams and the potential knock-on risks.

The starkest decline is that of Morocco's second-largest reservoir Al Massira which has shrunk by 60 per cent in three years due to recurring drought, expanding irrigation and the increasing thirst of neighbouring cities such as Casablanca.

Spain has suffered a severe drought that has contributed to a 60 per cent shrinking of the surface area of the Buendia dam over the last five years.

In Iraq, the Mosul Dam has seen a more protracted decline but it is also now down 60 per cent from its peak in the 1990s as a result of low rainfall and competing demand from Turkish hydropower projects upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates.The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), an alliance partner of the BJP-led Assam government, today said it would not allow the central government to grant citizenships to Hindu Bangladeshis.

Addressing a press meet here, AGP President and Agriculture Minister Atul Bora said, "The Centre wants to bring Hindu Bangladeshis to India and grant them citizenship. We do not support the idea as it violates the historic Assam Accord, 1985."



All illegal foreigners should be deported from Assam, irrespective of their religion, Bora said.

"The Assamese society is a secular one. We will never allow the segregation of illegal foreigners on the basis of religion," he explained.

The AGP leaders have met the Prime Minister to express their reservation on the matter, he said.

"We won't hesitate to give up our ministerial posts in the state government if Assam's interest is affected."



The regional party would always be sensitive to the needs of the local people, Bora said.

"The AGP will also ensure that no illegal foreigner's name is included in the updated National Register of Citizens in Assam and no genuine Indian citizen's name is left out," he said.

Asked about reports of simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assam assembly polls next year, the AGP president said, "Discussions have to be first held before anything is decided on the matter.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Allahabad High Court came down heavily on the Uttar Pradesh government today on the Unnao rape incident, asking it whether it proposes to arrest accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar.

A bench of Chief Justice D B Bhosale and Justice Suneet Kumar, taking cognisance of the gangrape case on a letter to the court by senior lawyer Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi, heard the matter in detail and will pronounce its order tomorrow.

The court also questioned the conduct of the police in the case, saying whom will a victim approach to register a complaint.

Advocate General Raghvendra Singh, who was present in the court on its direction, informed the bench that on August 17, 2017, an application was sent to the Chief Minister's Office in which allegations of rape was made against the MLA.

The application was forwarded to officers concerned in Unnao to take appropriate action, he said.

To this, the bench questioned what has been done in the case and whether any arrests have been made so far.

Singh replied that three of the accused have been arrested, including the MLA's brother.

The court then asked the Advocate General whether the government proposes to arrest Sengar.

Singh said that he was not in a position to make any statement in this regard and police will proceed in accordance with law only after recording statements of the complainant and witnesses.

The court referred to the SIT report and said, "according to it, medical officers and police officers, all were hand in glove with the accused to save them and you acted on this report against those officers but for arresting rape accused you need to do further investigation."



"Police was not ready to register FIR of the minor rape victim. In spite of the SIT report, you are repeating that we can only take any action after further investigation, if this is the conduct of the police in state, whom will a victim approach to register a complaint. If this is the stand you are repeatedly taking, then we will be forced to observe in our order that law and order has collapsed in the state'," it said.

According to Chaturvedi, the SIT conducted preliminary investigation and then filed a report after which an FIR was registered and still the state government wants to conduct further probe before arresting the accused MLA.

Chaturvedi has demanded a court-monitored investigation of the incident and also death of the victim's father in judicial custody.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The World Trade Organization said on Thursday that it expects strong trade growth through this year and next but warned progress would be "undermined" if governments implement threatened protectionist measures.

The WTO forecast 4.4 percent growth in trade volume this year and a more moderate four percent expansion in 2019.

But the body's director-general Roberto Azevedo cautioned that "this important progress could be quickly undermined if governments resort to restrictive trade policies, especially in a tit-for-tat process that could lead to an unmanageable escalation." "A cycle of retaliation is the last thing the world needs," he added in a statement.

Last year saw the most robust rise in trade volume expansion since 2011, raising hope that the world was finally on a sustained path to recovery following the financial crisis.

In its latest forecast, the WTO said risks "had appeared to be more balanced than at any time since the financial crisis," but noted that uncertainty was rising again. The extent of any protectionist measures that will be implemented by the world's top economies remains uncertain.

US President Donald Trump's administration has announced tariffs on steel and aluminium and targeted China for additional 25 per cent punitive duties on nearly USD 50 billion in goods for its alleged theft of US intellectual property.

China has vowed to defend itself through a series of reciprocal measures. Azevedo reiterated his call for nations to try to resolve their disputes through the multilateral system, instead of via face-to-face standoffs.

"The pressing trade problems confronting WTO members (are) best tackled through collective action," he said.

"I urge governments to show restraint and settle their differences through dialogue and serious engagement.The family members of debt-ridden Yavatmal farmer Shankar Chayare, who allegedly committed suicide on April 10, today accepted his body on an assurance that they will get appropriate compensation soon, a police official said.

The farmer was cremated in his village, Rajurwadi, this evening.

"The body of the farmer was handed over to his family members today," M Rajkumar, Superintendent of Police, Yavatmal, told PTI.

Earlier, Chayare's family members had refused to accept his body, even as the state government offered to pay Rs 8 lakh as compensation.

The body was kept in the morgue of state-run Vasantrao Naik medical college and hospital in Yavatmal for the last two days.

Earlier in the day, Amravati Revenue Commissioner Piyush Singh, District Collector Chandrakant Jajoo, Inspector General (Amravati Range) Chhagan Wakade and the SP persuaded the family members of Chayare, including his wife Alka and daughter Jayashree, to take possession of the body.

The SP said the deceased farmer's family members were told that the state government has agreed to compensate them appropriately in a swift manner.

"The meeting with Chayare's family members was held in presence of former BJP MP and current state vice-president of Congress Nana Patole, and Shetkari Nyaya Hakk Andolan Samiti convener Devanand Pawar," an official said.

After Chayare's family agreed to take possession of the corpse, it was taken to government hospital for postmortem and later handed over to them.

The SP told Chayare's kin that a Supervisor's job would be arranged for one of the daughters of the deceased in an MIDC-based textile mill in the area.

Chayare had allegedly killed himself by consuming a poisonous chemical, apparently upset due to crop-loss, according to the police.

The police had yesterday said Chayare's daughter had given them a purported suicide note of the deceased in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been held responsible for the farmer's extreme step.

Jayashree, the eldest daughter of the deceased, had filed a complaint against Modi in the Ghatanji Police Station.

The note, which the police insists was not recovered from the scene of the death, has been sent to handwriting experts for ascertaining its authenticity.

"In the two-page note, PM Modi's name was written on the second page. Some sentences in the note have been struck out and some letters in the note are not written in a uniform style. Therefore, we have sent this note to the forensic sciences department to the handwriting experts," Ganesh Bhavsar, in-charge of the Ghatanji police station, had told PTI.

The deceased farmer is survived by his wife Alka (47), daughters--Jayashree (21), Bhagyashree (19), and Dhanashree (15), and son Akash (15).

Meanwhile, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today didn't attend the scheduled inauguration of the newly-constructed administrative building of the Yavatmal Urban Co-Operative Bank Ltd.

Yavatmal district Guardian Minister Madan Yerawar said Fadnavis had sent a message to bank chairman Ajay Mundada expressing regret over his inability to attend the event "due to unavoidable engagements in Mumbai".

However, the chief minister visited Umarkhed tehsil in the district via Nanded this afternoon.

As per the earlier schedule, he was supposed to travel to Umarkhed after attending the Yavatmal event.

Meanwhile, Rajkumar said, "There was no untoward incident either in Yavatmal or in Umarkhed. Everything went off peacefully".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Participating in yoga and mindfulness activities at school helps relieve stress and anxiety in young children, improving their wellbeing and emotional health, a study has found.

Researchers from Tulane University in the US worked with a public school to add mindfulness and yoga to the school's existing empathy-based programming for students needing supplementary support.

Third graders who were screened for symptoms of anxiety at the beginning of the school year were randomly assigned to two groups.

A control group of 32 students received care as usual, which included counselling and other activities led by a school social worker.

The intervention group of 20 students participated in small group yoga/mindfulness activities for eight weeks using a Yoga Ed curriculum.

Students attended the small group activities at the beginning of the school day. The sessions included breathing exercises, guided relaxation and several traditional yoga poses appropriate for children.

The study, published in the journal Psychology Research and Behavior Management, evaluated each group's health related quality of life before and after the intervention, using two widely recognised research tools.

"The intervention improved psychosocial and emotional quality of life scores for students, as compared to their peers who received standard care," said Alessandra Bazzano, associate professor at Tulane University.

"We also heard from teachers about the benefits of using yoga in the classroom, and they reported using yoga more often each week, and throughout each day in class, following the professional development component of intervention," Bazzano said.

Researchers targeted third grade because it is a crucial time of transition for elementary students, when academic expectations increase.

"Our initial work found that many kids expressed anxious feelings in third grade as the classroom work becomes more developmentally complex," Bazzano said.

"Even younger children are experiencing a lot of stress and anxiety, especially around test time," she said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Chipmaker Broadcom Inc said on Thursday it would buy back up to $12 billion of its common stock, sending its shares up 4.5 percent to $250 in extended trading. The company, which last month ended its efforts to acquire rival Qualcomm Inc, said the repurchase program is effective immediately until the end of Broadcom's fiscal year 2019. Broadcom moved back to the United States from Singapore earlier this month, following U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to block its $117 billion offer to buy Qualcomm on national security concerns. The San Jose, California based ...BEIJING (Reuters) - China's central bank governor, Yi Gang, said on Thursday that first-quarter Chinese economic data has been a little better than expected. Yi was a speaker at a Belt and Road conference in Beijing. China is due to release its first-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) data on April 17. GDP is expected to have grown around 6.8 percent from a year earlier, according to an ongoing Reuters poll. (Reporting by Elias Glenn; writing by Ryan Woo; editing by Richard Pullin)(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)By John O'Donnell and Tom SimsFRANKFURT (Reuters) - Once one of Germany's chief power brokers in finance, Deutsche Bank Chairman Paul Achleitner's switch of chief executive has triggered criticism that it was rushed through, casting a cloud over his own future. Earlier this week, Achleitner forced out CEO John Cryan after a row that centred on what some describe as Cryan's 'indecisiveness' in cutting jobs and costs, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.Pressure had built as the group's share price tumbled in recent months, with problems further compounded by heavy losses. ...By Nidhi VermaNEW DELHI (Reuters) - Essar Oil has settled about 2 billion euros ($2.5 billion) in dues to Iran to cover previous oil purchases and still owes the country about $616 million, Chief Executive B. Anand said on Thursday.The outstanding payments stem from delays in paying for Iranian oil when the country was under international sanctions over its nuclear programme. The sanctions ended in 2016.The new Rosneft-led management, as part of the $12.9 billion acquisition of Essar Oil, took the decision to repay the dues owed to Iran.Essar Oil aims to buy 120,000 barrels per day (bpd) of ...By Tanvi Mehta and Suvashree ChoudhuryBENGALURU/MUMBAI (Reuters) - India's Fortis Healthcare said on Thursday it had received an investment offer worth 12.5 billion rupees ($191.5 million) from Hero Enterprise Investment Office and the Burman Family Office.Hero Enterprise is an investment company formed by Sunil Munjal, founder of the country's largest motorcycle maker Hero Group. The Burman Family Office is the private investment arm of the family that owns consumer goods company Dabur India.Hero Enterprise and Burman, which own stakes in Fortis, said they had together tried unsuccessfully ...By Libby GeorgeLONDON (Reuters) - Oil markets edged back from highs last reached in late 2014 as ample supplies weighed, but prices were underpinned by worries over military escalation in Syria and trade tensions between the United States and China.Brent crude futures were at $71.70 a barrel at 0902 GMT on Thursday, down 36 cents from their last close. U.S. WTI crude futures were down 20 cents at $66.62.Both Brent and WTI on Wednesday hit their highest since late 2014 at $73.09 and $67.45 a barrel respectively after Saudi Arabia said it intercepted missiles over Riyadh and U.S. President ...By Sheila Dang and Carl O'Donnell(Reuters) - SoftBank Group Corp CEO Masayoshi Son faces a closing window of opportunity to merge the Japanese company's debt-laden U.S. wireless subsidiary Sprint Corp with Deutsche Telekom's U.S. wireless unit, T-Mobile U.S. Inc .Sprint's latest round of merger talks with T-Mobile, reported earlier this week, came just five months after their previous deal negotiations ended. This is the companies' third attempt to clinch a deal in the last four years.While the time window for a deal is not clearly defined, the companies need to act before a U.S. wireless ...By David ShepardsonWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tesla Inc lashed out at the National Transportation Safety Board on Thursday after the agency took the unusual step of removing the automaker as a party to its investigation of a fatal crash in March in which a Tesla vehicle's "Autopilot" system was in use.The NTSB's action means Tesla may not gain access to some information obtained by the agency's investigators before it is made public, but frees the company to vigorously defend the Autopilot technology. The war of words on Thursday between the Silicon Valley automaker run by billionaire Elon Musk ...HYRUM  Deputies have arrested a South Cache Middle School teacher, accused of seducing a student electronically. Duane Behrmann was booked Wednesday morning into the Cache County Jail. The 51-year-old Logan man is being held on $130,000 bail.

Cache County Sheriffs Lt. Brian Locke said detectives received information of an inappropriate relationship between the teacher and a student at the middle school. Behrmann was questioned and later booked on 13 counts of enticing a minor, a second-degree felony.

Cache County School District spokesman, Tim Smith said Behrmann has taught social studies at the middle school since 2009. He has been placed on administrative leave, while officials pursue all aspects of due process, as far as his employment with the district.

Locke said there is no indication of any other victims, but an investigation is continuing.

Smith explained, school officials were not aware of any complaint until deputies arrived at the school to investigate and arrest Behrmann.

will@cvradio.comLOGAN  Republican State Senator Lyle Hillyard said there are too many suicides in Cache Valley and in Utah, in spite of the fact that the legislature has been working hard to decrease that number. Hillyard said two of the legislators that have been working hard on the issue are Senator Dan Thatcher and Representative Steve Elaison.

The legislature is also getting technology involved.

We now have apps that can go on all phones, kids can get them, and they can get in immediate contact with somebody in a counseling department if they feel depressed or other things so they can have immediate contact, Hillyard said. One of the things we did this year is put 24/7 coverage on it. Before, we didnt have that coverage. People were calling and no one was there. So that is the first step we did. In public education, we gave $2.1 million to enhance counseling in schools.

He said in addition to seeking more money we should all do our part in helping people who show signs of problems that could lead to suicide.During January and February, several reports surfaced of a new Chinese military base in Afghanistans Wakhan corridor. According to Afghan officials, China and Kabul discuss building a base in Badakhshan and China will send an expert delegation to Kabul to determine the exact site, and will fund the base and all of its material and technical expenses, including weapons and equipment. China has denied these reports as they contradict its long-standing position that it is not seeking foreign bases or intends to intervene militarily in Central Asia. However, witnesses have reported seeing Chinese and Afghan troops on joint patrols. Moreover, there is a long record of signs of a growing Chinese military interest in Central Asia.

BACKGROUND: It is useful to see the prospect of a Chinese base in Badakhshan in context. First, it is close to neighboring Xinjiang, where China is so perturbed over continuing Islamic unrest that it has instituted a true surveillance state regime in the region. A base in Badakhshan would not only disrupt contacts between Uyghurs in China and their brethren abroad, it is also intended to disrupt ISIS and other similar groups from building links with and acting in Xinjiang. This base would also signify to Central Asian governments the seriousness of Chinas commitment to fight terrorists abroad and use coercive measures against states harboring them to prevent them from getting to China.

These developments also dovetail with Chinas interest in Afghanistans stability and reports of Chinas willingness to assume a mediators role in its war. For years, Beijing has maintained contacts with the Taliban and has supported the idea of a reconstituted Afghanistan with Taliban elements in its new, postwar, government. If Beijing calculates that Chinese mediation, either alone or with other foreign governments, would reduce the terrorist threat from Afghanistan to China, this might actually provide China with a stronger basis for keeping a base in Afghanistan.

A third motive is the fact that China is now investing enormous sums throughout South and Central Asia as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. In Pakistan alone, China has pledged US$ 57 billion to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Both the Pentagon and foreign observers believe that China is or will be building a base in Pakistan, possibly beyond the Gwadar Port. China and Pakistan have both stated that they are considering adding Afghanistan to their joint CPEC projects. Thus, given the level of terrorism in both Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as Xinjiang, a military move to defend such huge investments is not a surprising outcome. This would corroborate the argument that Chinas Central Asian policies are to a large extent outward projection of is domestic policies that have aimed, apparently with little success, to pacify and stabilize Xinjiang.

IMPLICATIONS: However, beyond the immediate context of Xinjiang, Pakistan and Afghanistan, this move should be examined in a broader context. Over the last few years, China has embarked on a general naval and base building thrust across Asia and the Indian Ocean. The declaration that China intends to be a great polar power, its establishment of a base at Djibouti, along with aggressive maritime forays into the East China Sea, the South China Sea, and now the Indian Ocean as China is sending ships to the Maldives to challenge India directly, betoken a general assertiveness.

The growing rivalry with India also encompasses Afghanistan, where Pakistan and India have reengaged in a nasty contest for influence, making Afghanistan the site of what is essentially a proxy war between Delhi and Islamabad. Building a base in Afghanistan, even if one takes the domestic, commercial, and regional imperatives cited above into account, fully comports with the idea that China not only has to protect its foreign investments, it must also project power abroad.

Thus there is no contradiction between seeing this future base as an emanation of the internal and regional security drivers of Chinese foreign policies as well as a simultaneous manifestation of the imperial and great power forces that are also factors driving Chinese foreign and defense policies. Taken in the context of the dispatch of ships to the Maldives and the strengthening ties with Pakistan, we can see this move in the light of the growing Sino-Indian rivalry for influence and leverage across South and Central Asia. Indeed, the base also represents a discreet but tangible example of China placing its thumb upon the scale of the Indo-Pakistani rivalry for influence in Afghanistan.

This Chinese move also has potentially detrimental implications for its relationship with Russia. For several years, analysts have recognized that China has become the preeminent financial and economic foreign power in Central Asia, thereby supplanting Russia. Moscows has displayed concerns about even more Chinese aggrandizement of its economic power at Russias expense in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Yet, Beijing has been extremely careful to show its willingness to work with Russia and, most importantly, to refrain from challenging Moscows military preeminence in Central Asia as a security provider. Indeed, it has largely cooperated with Moscow regarding the Taliban lately and a growing Russian partnership with China is underway where Moscow has even accepted to play second fiddle to the BRI in Eurasia.

However, any hint that China is seriously contemplating to project its own unilateral military power into Central Asia will almost certainly trigger alarm bells in Moscow. Although it will become increasingly difficult for Moscow to sustain and project credible military power in fact rather than in rhetoric to Central Asia, admitting this would represent a major geostrategic defeat. Russias displacement from primacy in Central Asia, even if done with the utmost finesse, will drive a stake through the whole edifice of Putins project to persuade himself, his domestic audience, and the world that Russia is truly a great power that must be consulted on all major international issues.

It would also undercut the comprehensive strategic partnership that now formally exists between Beijing and Moscow and undermine any pretense that it is the West and specifically Washington that threatens Russia. Indeed, the Chinese aspiration to play a significant hard security role in Central Asia represents a vote of no confidence in Russias ability to defend Chinas burgeoning economic and political interests there. That is certainly how Moscow but also Central Asian capitals will see such a program of action. Unless Moscow retaliates, it will de facto have confirmed this prognosis about its Central Asian prospects. Yet its hands vis-a-vis China are clearly tied given the state of its relations with Washington.

Any Chinese base building in Central Asia, like its efforts to undertake naval power projection abroad, is extremely consequential. Therefore, China has good reason to deny that it is seeking a base in Afghanistan or elsewhere in Central Asia. Yet the logic of its expanding global and regional positions across Asia inevitably pushes in that direction, as seen in its naval policies even as far away from its shores as the Arctic. In fact, one way to envision what China has been doing in Central Asia is that it has been building capacity, both its own and that of the states where it is investing so many resources.

CONCLUSIONS: Paradoxically, China is apparently exploring the option of a base in Afghanistan at the same time as its overbearing posture and excessively one-sided gains form the BRI are beginning to make themselves felt in many Asian countries and as the overall Asian opposition to its Central, South, and East Asian policies is coming together. The correlation of these opposing trends not only suggests that the next turn of the so-called new great game will assume a primarily Asian dimension. It also increases the likelihood that the Central Asian security agenda will in the future come closer to the general East and South Asian agendas, largely due to the centrality of China as an actor in all three zones. Chinas efforts to assert its interests, power, and influence on the Asian and world stages will invariably drive a series of countermoves from all those states who are on the receiving end of that assertiveness. There is no guarantee; especially given the dynamism we now see in Central Asia, that those reactions will be favorable to China. China may now be building a base to project military power and influence beyond its borders but there is good reason to suspect that the results will not be an unmixed blessing for Beijing.

AUTHORS BIO: Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow with the American Foreign Policy Council.

Image source: By Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen (USAF), Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons accessed on 4.12. 2018| BY Ricki Green |

Electric Sheep Music composers Adam Spark and Glenn Sarangapany have continued their winning streak at the APRA Awards, picking up the metal for Rock Work of the Year for the third year running with Birds of Tokyo, and cementing their reputation as some of the finest songwriting talent in Australia. Having taken the title in 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017 and now 2018, the awarded song Brace is a complex dystopian sci-fi rock opus blending Vangelis synths with towering guitars.

The win caps off a cracker start to the year, and coincides with EP Kate Stenhouse joining the team.

Says Stenhouse: Im absolutely thrilled to be working with Adam and Glenn. Their songwriting prowess is phenomenal. To have talent and skill of their pedigree available to the advertising industry is incredibly exciting, and I look forward to building new relationships with our creative collaborators. Not to mention a lunch or two while were at it.

Electric Sheep has been making music in the advertising industry since 2015 for agencies including BWM, Ogilvy, JWT and Host Havas.| BY Ricki Green |

Digestive wellness brand Metamucil continues to position itself as Australias number one fibre supplement with the launch of Gutland  a first-of-its-kind Virtual Reality (VR) experience at Darling Harbour in Sydney via Diesel Immersive. The VR pop-up will be live in Darling Harbour this Saturday, April 14.

Gutland, a real world and VR experience, will see users navigate through a highly stylized and gamified digestive system. Whilst moving through the mouth, stomach and intestines, participants will take on a series of challenges before finally exiting out of the proverbial back door.

Metamucil in Gutland seeks to educate participants about the importance of fibre, staying regular and having a healthy gut.

Says Andrew Crowe, brand manager, P&G Healthcare, ANZ: For decades, Metamucil has been in households across the country. Everyone knows why fibre is important but not everyone really knows why. The creation of Metamucil in Gutland is a way of communicating the crucial role of fibre in supporting gut health and regularity in a truly exciting, innovative and interactive way.

Gutland is part of a broader campaign which aims to get people taking about their digestive health and wellness. It launches off the back of the hugely successful creative featuring Nugget, Miss Metamucil and Gutsy, which has already seen over 5 million views and 40,000 clicks, comments and shares across social channels, including by celeb Michael Clarke, Beau Ryan, Tiffany Scanlon and Paul Gallen.

Says Kate Chisnall, associate creative director, McCann Health: The VR experience is a perfect complement to the hugely successful creative featuring Nugget, Miss Metamucil and Gutsy weve just launched.

The 3 minute film has already seen over 5 million views and 40,000 clicks, comments and shares across social channels, including by celeb Michael Clarke, Beau Ryan, Tiffany Scanlon and Paul Gallen.

Created by Diesel Immersive, the branded Gutland Virtual Reality combines new technologies to create a world-first in brand storytelling.

Says Daniel Sim Lind, founder, Diesel Immersive: The VR experiences now possible in the home are extraordinary, but while you can see a 3D world around you, when it comes to touch youre limited to holding game-style controllers. What sets Metamucils Gutland experience apart is that you can physically touch everything you see in the VR world. Everything you place your hands on real world is exactly matched by virtual objects inside Gutland. With P&Gs support we have built the worlds most tactile VR experience, with dozens of touchable and tracked objects.

The Gutland experience is set up as a green-screen stage, allowing adventurers to share videos of their experience inside the virtual world. These Mixed Reality videos show both the real person and the fantasy VR world they are experiencing.

Says Lind: This is the most ambitious live mixed reality video ever attempted. To meet P&Gs brief we have multiple camera angles showing a real person interacting with real things but inside a virtual world. This approach allows us to amplify exposure to an experience that only a limited number of people can get through in a day.

Date: Saturday 14th April

Time: 9  5pm| BY Ricki Green |

Digital experience agency Reprise is adding new strength to its client and agency team management with the appointments of Claudeen Martinez (right) and Andrew Copeland (left) to senior roles in Brisbane and Sydney.

Copeland will be leading Reprises operations in Brisbane. He is formerly head of operations for the UK-based programmatic and high-impact display business Undertone. Prior to that he worked at performance marketing and partnerships business Tradedoubler.

Martinez has been appointed to lead major client portfolios in the Sydney agency and will also be a key collaborator with other IPG Mediabrands agencies UM and Initiative. She was previously integral to managing an SVOD start-up business and had broad duties including investor relations, as well as trade and brand partnerships. She has headed marketing communications at BlueScope Steel and previous agency experience at Mitchell Communications and GroupM.

Both Martinez and Copeland will report to Reprises head of Sydney and Brisbane operations, Richard Conway.

Says Conway: Our two new senior executives have diverse backgrounds and extensive experience in delivering results at a business and individual level. Their capabilities will be of great benefit to our clients and agency teams.| BY Ricki Green |

Sweetshop has announced Edward Pontifex as its new managing director of Australia, following Wilf Sweetlands promotion to chief executive officer as part of a wider global management restructure.

As managing director and executive producer, Pontifex, with the continued support of EP Loren Bradley who is based in its Sydney office, will oversee the Sweetshops international roster of directors, while maintaining the companys commitment to craft, creative storytelling and filmmaking.

Says Sweetland: Edward is hugely respected and well-liked by agencies and Sweetshops family. He is a man who understands our commitment to craft and whose passion for quality complements our clients growing ambitions. Hes an inspiring leader and hes unequivocally the right person to lead our next phase in Australia.

Says Pontifex: To have the opportunity to follow Wilfs firmly established legacy of leadership and work with our talented team of directors, production team and clients is both humbling and exciting.

Pontifex joined Sweetshop in 2013 as executive producer and has worked with many wide-ranging brands, including CUB, ALDI, Tourism Victoria, TAC and agencies, such as Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, The Monkeys, BMF and DDB. He has judged at Award and New York Festivals.| BY Lynchy |

An advertising agency from Nepal has won an Abby award at Goafest 2018. Outreach Nepal has bagged their first Abby award this year.

They have won a Bronze Abby award for travel company Plan My Trip in the Creative Still Print AD  Services category; and has also won three finalists across other categories. Ujaya Shakya, Managing Director, Outreach Nepal said, It is a recognition for the good work that is now happening in the Nepalese advertising fraternity, and of course, this is a remarkable achievement to win beyond the borders.Notice for the Postmedia Network

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The Queensland man who at Summernats last year caused his mate to fall off the back of his flat bed truck and suffer a fatal head injury has not driven the vehicle since that day, a jury heard on Thursday. That day had started with nervous excitement for Alister Spong, who told the court he had driven his 1942 Ford Jailbar 1500 kilometres down from Queensland for Canberras annual car festival. The festival is the be all and end all of the modified car scene, Mr Spong told the jury, and he had a car modification business. The truck had come from a scrap heap but he had since invested in it $40,000, including a turbo engine, and he had brought it to Canberra as the showpiece of his skills. But when he tried that day to spin the truck's wheels the attempt failed. The truck lurched forward, and his friend Luke Newsome, 30, fell from the tray and later died from a head injury. Mr Spong, 33, told the ACT Supreme Court that since the death of his friend Mr Newsome following the fall on January 5, 2017, he had not driven the truck. I cant, he said, choking on his words. He had pleaded guilty to negligent driving. But prosecutors contend Mr Spongs driving that day met the threshold for the more serious charge of culpable driving, to which he has pleaded not guilty. The charge alleges Mr Spong failed "unjustifiably and to a gross degree" to observe the standard of care that a reasonable person would have in all the circumstances. Mr Spong said he was driving about 10 kilometres an hour on the festival's cruise route, a ring road around the festival, when he tried a "chirpie" - or to briefly lose traction - but failed. He said instead of the chirping noise he expected when he released the clutch, the wheels "bit" into the bitumen and the truck suddenly surged forward, causing his friend to fall from the tray. In her closing address to the jury, prosecutor Margaret Jones said it was natural to feel sympathy for Mr Spong or the fate of Mr Newsome after what had happened. But she said Mr Spong was responsible for the safety of his passengers and had experimented with a manoeuvre in new circumstances, with five people sitting on the tray. He tried it for the first time at Summernats and it had tragic results, Ms Jones said. She said the incident was a tragedy, but not an accident, and Mr Spong had intended to spin the wheels. The Crown did not have to prove he intended to hurt anyone, she said. Defence barrister Steven Whybrow said Mr Spong was not a "hoon" and nor was he driving like a "ratbag". He suggested the jury would have difficulty being satisfied Mr Spong's actions met the threshold for culpable driving, or that there had been any real risk of injury or death. He was driving 10 kilometres an hour when he tried a minor wheel spin and it failed, causing Mr Newsome to fall from the 60 centimetre high tray and die, he said. Mr Spong made an error of judgment and had not accounted for the extra weight of the people on the back, he said. Mr Whybrow said it was a tragedy, but "we're not here to convict because of the outcome." The trial continues.

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ACT Treasurer Andrew Barr has left the door open for further refinement of the rating system for units and apartments, after the architect of the ACT's tax reform, Ted Quinlan, called for "a more sophisticated solution". The former treasurer hit out at changes to the way rates and land tax was calculated for multi-unit dwellings in last years budget, after owners in larger complexes were left paying more than those in smaller ones. Before, rates were calculated after the property's unimproved value had been divided between the number of apartments of units there were on site. That meant most apartments fell into the lowest tax bracket. Now the rates are calculated on the entire land value, then divided between the number of units, pushing most unit owners into the top tax tier. However that effect is distorted in larger complexes. A multi-unit complex with an average unimproved value of $750,000 would have a valuation-based charge of $4039 per unit if it only had two units, but a charge of $4506 if it had 300 units. Similarly, a complex with an average unimproved value of $1.05 million would have a valuation-based charge of $6219 per unit if there 10 units, but $6308 if it had 200 units. Mr Quinlan - who is an apartment owner - said the revised system created an "inequity which penalises some owners within larger complexes compared to those in an establishment with a few individual units all other things being equal". Speaking to Fairfax Media, Mr Quinlan said reforming the tax system was a noble pursuit but the changes were a rough and ready solution. Im not telling the current treasurer how to do his job but theyve used a fairly blunt axe, Mr Quinlan said. They need to take it back to the drawing board and rework it from the ground up." In question time on Thursday, Mr Barr said he did not believe the tax system he had created was unequal and that current treasurers did not have to agree with past treasurers. However he did not rule out changes to the rating system when asked if he would rethink the method of calculation. The government of course makes changes to legislation, pertaining to rates and taxes and other matters each year in budget processes and sometime more frequently so I wouldnt necessarily rule anything in or out Mr Speaker and Ill look at the comments of former treasurer Quinlan as I would at comments from anyone else in the community, Mr Barr said. An inquiry is under way into the changes, however the findings will be delayed after the ACT Legislative Assembly voted to set up a privileges committee into the conduct of Canberra Liberals Alistair Coe, Elizabeth Lee and Candice Burch over a flyer they distributed to letterboxes last month. The flyer called on people to file submissions about how increased rates and land taxes had negatively affected their families via a website registered to Mr Coe. Mr Coe said all submissions were automatically forwarded onto the committee unchanged but Labor backbencher Bec Cody said there was no evidence of this, opening up the possibility the inquiry has been "biased" or "corrupted". Ms Cody had suggested the privileges committee be given until the end of the year to investigate the potential breach of parliamentary rules, but Greens crossbencher Caroline Le Couteur put up an amendment to instead set a reporting deadline of July 31. The rates inquiry can continue while the privileges committee conducts its investigation, however it cannot make its recommendations to government until after that date. Ms Cody denied the privileges committee was a way for Labor to scuttle the inquiry. Labor supports all sorts of inquiries into government issues. This is no different. However I think its really important we ensure the committee process is not messed with in anyway shape or form, Ms Cody said. It puts our democracy at risk if government inquiries are fundamentally fiddled with. Mr Quinlan said the delay to the inquiry could be good if the government used the breathing space to come up with something productive, but that the Liberals should have left the committee to do its job. However Mr Coe defended Ms Burch and Ms Lee, saying it was the job of local members to go out, have their say and encourage Canberrans to do the same. The Labor party might not like the Liberal party putting out fliers, the Labor party may not like having their voices heard but were going to keep doing it, were going to keep working hard for Canberrans, for the silent majority of Canberrans who are struggling with the cost of living, struggling with this rates and land tax regime, and they will have their voices heard, Mr Coe said. Ms Le Couteur said she had no problem with Liberal politicians having opinions but she drew the line at them distributing potential misleading material. They should have known better, Ms Le Couteur said. Ms Le Couteur said the privileges committee should examine all third party tools that prompted people to file submissions to Legislative Assembly inquiries, and that the whole system should be overhauled. That would include a Union ACT pro forma used to file submissions to last year's insecure work inquiry.

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Former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer has gifted a "weapon of demoracy" to the Museum of Australian Democracy, handing over an Enfield 303 rifle that has been in his family for more than 70 years. Mr Fischer's gun was one of the first firearms to be handed in for registration under the National Firearms Agreement, which was passed in May 1996 following the Port Arthur massacre that killed 35 people. He said his weapon and the thousands of others registered or surrendered as part of the agreement were game-changers that stopped Australia "going down the USA pathway of guns, guns and more guns". The rifle will be one of the key items on show at the museum in its new exhibition, Democracy: are you in?, which opens on June 26. "It's been in the family for about seven or eight decades," Mr Fischer said as he presented the gun to museum director Daryl Karp at Old Parliament House on Thursday. "It's with great pleasure that I hand over this icon, this weapon of Australian democracy." Mr Fischer said the gun was used to shoot foxes, and originally belonged to his father when he owned a farm at Boree Creek, 82 kilometres west of Wagga Wagga. When Mr Fischer bought the farm, he also took ownership of the gun, which he last fired sometime in the late 1970s, when he was a member of the New South Wales Parliament. "I got terrified of my own weapon," Mr Fischer joked. "It had a bit of a kickback onto your shoulder, so I preferred the .22, which my nephew now owns." Rural voters strongly opposed the gun reforms, which were passed just 12 days after the Port Arthur massacre, putting Mr Fischer at odds with many in his own electorate of Farrer, in southern New South Wales. "It was a good example that even the deputy prime minister had to comply," he said. Mr Fischer registered the gun and took out a shooting licence under the agreement he developed with then-prime minister John Howard, but has now sold the farm and has no use for the weapon anymore, paving the way for him to donate it to the museum. Ms Karp said the new exhibition would feature a selection of objects with ties to events in Australia's history as a democratic world leader. She said the exhibition was not just about looking back on history, but challenging visitors to think about the democratic issues Australia was facing today. "This [rifle] is a wonderful example of how government leadership of the day, and responding to the people, saw a change in legislation and brought about a significant change in the Australia we are today," Ms Karp said.

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The process for resolving building stoushes in the ACT needs a radical overhaul, says a frustrated couple after a boundary dispute with their neighbour. Amit and Reena Ghildyal moved from Melbourne to Canberra in 2010 and late last year moved into their new house in the suburb of Lawson. In recent weeks their neighbour has started building work along their property's boundary, which the Ghildyals say is undermining their fence and has made their deck unsafe. They had tried every avenue available to resolve the dispute, including going to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal (ACAT), but had so far come-up empty handed, they said. "We went to ACAT and asked them to stop construction until this is resolved," Mr Ghildyal said. "ACAT told us to try Legal Aid, and Legal Aid had a look at it and basically said we can't do anything." Neighbour Yijuan Chen said there had been an accidental slippage and all construction work on his property had stopped while it was investigated. "Temporary measures have been taken to prevent further damage to my neighbour's site," he said. "A geotechnical engineer has investigated the incident and the geotechnical report will be available soon. I will take immediate measures following the geotechnical report." Mr Ghildyal said that, compared with Melbourne, the process for resolving disputes in the ACT was much more complicated. "When we built a house in Melbourne it just happened. There were a few issues but they were solved quickly," he said. "Here we've had all sorts of problems. We're just going around in circles." The couple said one easy fix would be to provide greater transparency around the building approval process, so affected parties could easily access information about nearby construction work. In the past nine months the ACT government has received an average of 20 complaints each week regarding building and planning problems in the territory. With three months remaining in the financial year, the numbers already represented a 40 per cent increase on last year's figures. An Access Canberra spokeswoman said common areas of concern related to unapproved structures, the compliance and quality of building work, and incomplete work. "There is no one size fits all when it comes to such matters as each has individual circumstances and complexities," the spokeswoman said. "Due to the nature of building work, what the issue is may determine what support can be provided. "Consumers should take a keen and active interest in building works undertaken and where they sense things may not be going to plan contact Access Canberra."

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If a knock-off Andy Warhol painting from Kmart was hung next to Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles in the National Gallery of Australia, there would be outrage. So how should we feel about knock-off furniture next to Australian-designed originals? Last week Fairfax Media reported the National Gallery of Australia had spent almost $30,000 on armchairs for its members lounge, at the same time as the institution was facing budget cuts and staff losses. Six of the chairs came in at $3702 a chair - but that's not the price tag that has angered members of the Australian furniture design community. The gallery also spent $6246 on 10 chairs from Milan Direct, referred to by the gallery as "red swan chairs". The gallery defended the spending by saying it was supporting Australian designers, but that's not the whole story. While the green chairs with the four-figure price tag have been confirmed as original Grant Featherston contour armchairs, they sit alongside replicas of chairs originally designed by Danish designer Arne Jacobsen. The National Gallery of Australia wouldn't comment on the origins of the chairs, but the supplier of the Grant Featherston chairs has confirmed they were legitimately produced, with royalties going to Featherston's estate. "Curious Grace is a proud supporter of 100 per cent original-design furniture and home interior products. Since inception we have had a strict policy of providing the Australian market with original-design products in an effort to encourage and develop talented designers from around the world," Curious Grace director Wayne Curnuck said. "These furniture pieces are 100 per cent Australian made under an exclusive design licence and royalties are paid to the Featherston estate." Milan Direct, which is now owned by Temple and Webster, is part of the replica or reproduction market, meaning original designers don't get a cut of sales from the products. The gallery paid $624 for each swan chair. Canberra-based business Designcraft is licensed to sell the originals - the price tag is $5000 plus. Authentic Design Alliance director Anne-Maree Sargeant is angered the gallery would buy replicas instead of originals. "It's the role of an institution to show original and authentic work because that's the reason that they exist. It's unfortunate in this instance that it seems budget cuts have led to a short sighted decision," Ms Sargeant said. "I think that it's entirely appropriate that the genuine Grant Featherston chairs were selected given his work and Mary's [Featherston, Grant Featherson's wife and collaborator] work forms part of the collection." Ms Sargeant said it was "unfortunate" the replicas had been bought, but it wasn't a unique case. It's understood the National Gallery of Australia isn't the only cultural institution in Australia to have replica furniture in its public areas. Intellectual property rights that apply to art and music don't apply to furniture design, meaning knock-offs can legally be made. The Authentic Design Alliance is calling for the sale of replica furniture to be criminalised as well as an extension of design protections. "Our Australian furnishing industry is booming, it's never had more recognition globally, there's never been as many Australian businesses investing in developing Australian designed products," Ms Sargeant said, calling for Australian institutions to support the work of contemporary Australian designers. Curious Grace didn't comment on the replica chairs that sit alongside the originals they manufactured, but said the gallery should always be supporting Australian designers. "The NGA in all its endeavours should be supporting Australian design and the talent of designers. Curious Grace is proud to have been part of the NGA's clear intention to provide this iconic designer a rightful place in the heart of art and culture worldwide," Mr Curnuck said. Spending at Australia's galleries and museums is set to face scrutiny with a parliamentary inquiry into the national institutions currently taking submissions.

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Tidbinbilla Sanctuary is a testament to the ability of the Australian landscape to bounce back from devastation, now marking a decade since it reopened after the bushfires. It took five years for the sanctuary to reopen after the devastation of the 2003 Canberra bushfires, and Wednesday marked the 10 year anniversary of its reopening by former chief minister Jon Stanhope in 2008. ACT Parks and Conservation manager Brett McNamara is proud to show the sanctuary in its renewed, robust form, protector and home to thousands of animals, in the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. Authorities have included artworks and design in the sanctuary, with subtle little design elements ... paying homage to the past, Mr McNamara said. Conservation of endangered species is a priority for Tidbinbilla, and the sanctuary has multiple breeding programs attempting to renew populations of different animals. Fewer than 1000 northern corroboree frogs are left in the wild, due to chytrid fungus and climate change. I can remember as a very young ranger back in the 1990s and the ground beneath your feet would erupt from the frog calls of the corroboree frogs. Fast forward some 30 years and theres probably half a dozen or so left, Mr McNamara said. Now, the northern corroboree frog is doing much better due to the Tidbinbilla breeding programs success. Another threatened species included in Tidbinbillas endangered species program is the southern brush-tailed rock wallaby, named for the way their tails smoothed the rocks underfoot as they crashed through the undergrowth of the bush. There are fewer than 40 of the species left in the wild, where they used to be very very common. Conservation of endangered species is not the only success of the Tidbinbilla Sanctuary. The point is about just nature and people. Connecting people back with nature again. This sanctuary just provides people with that opportunity just to sit to relax and to immerse themselves in nature. I think given the lifestyles we lead today being rushed, thats what the sanctuary provides, Mr McNamara said, of what he described as one of Tidbinbillas greatest achievements since it reopened. Its a sanctuary in terms of wildlife but I often think of it as a sanctuary for people to come to in terms of their own personal journeys.

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Thanks to your many letters and phone calls this last month, the Lee County Board of County Commissioners is ready to vote provisionally for placement of a referendum establishing a Childrens Services Council on the November ballot.

The council would greatly benefit all of Lee Countys children and their families.

The initial vote will be held at the commissions meeting on April 17 at 9:30 a.m. in the Board Chambers at the Old Lee County Courthouse, 2120 Main St., Fort Myers. We encourage all of our citizens who care about the future of our children and a more prosperous Lee County to join us at the courthouse.

Established in 1945, Childrens Services Councils already exist in eight Florida counties and serve as umbrellas of leadership, coordination and oversight greatly enhancing the quality of education and health care available to all children. The cost to Lee County citizens will be minimal, most likely very much less than the maximum of $350 per annum ad valorem allowed by state law.

And how do we know the value of a CSC? This is very apparent in all the eight counties with CSCs, which have quickly moved ahead of Lee County in creating economic prosperity for their citizens.

How is this occurring? Because profitable companies seeking to relocate in Florida have discovered a higher ratio of well educated and energetic students ready and willing to join their companies due to years of quality support provided by their CSCs.

Already two of the five commissioners serving Lee County, Frank Mann and John Manning, are eager and ready to vote yes to placing the CSC referendum on the November ballot. As the law stands, we only need one more commissioner to make this happen.

First, your presence at the courthouse on April 17 is vital. In addition, it is hoped that everyone will take the time to phone the three commissioners not yet ready to finalize their positions; past experience has shown emails are not effective. The phone numbers are: Larry Kiker, 239-533-2223; Cecil Pendergrass, 239-533-2227; and Brian Hannan, 239-533-2226. You might also want to call and thank Mann at 239-533-2225 and Manning at 239-533-2224 for their keen understanding of the value of the CSC and the leadership roles they are now playing.

On behalf of Lee County citizens, let us not allow this unique opportunity pass us by as we seek a better more productive life both for our children and ourselves.

Jill Dillon

SanibelIt has been just about six months since Hurricane Irma churned through the center of Lee County, and the start of the 2018 hurricane season is eight weeks away.

Many of Lee Countys employees still work diligently day-to-day at Irma-related tasks and we still remember the long hours worked during the event.

I remain incredibly impressed by how well our employees handled the storm and continue to handle recovery efforts. I am not alone.

Lee County on March 28 accepted the 2018 National Hurricane Conference Outstanding Achievement Award at the NHC Conference. The award recognizes the county for serving as a model for other organizations in its handling of hurricane-related activities. And in early March, Lee County Emergency Management Director Lee Mayfield and the county received state recognition for Irma-related efforts. The Florida Emergency Preparedness Association presented Mayfield with the Chad Reed Emergency Manager of the Year Award, which is awarded to those who show excellence in their profession.

NHC officials recognized the countys achievement in hurricane-related preparedness in past years as well as 2017, including legislation, public awareness programs, financing mechanisms, sheltering plans, engineering research, warning notification systems and prediction techniques.

The key word for this award is innovation. Were looking for individuals or organizations who are doing things in a new or better way and who are worthy of emulation by others around the country. The award is not for someone who is simply doing his or her job well, the NHC said in a statement.

It takes the whole community to respond and recover effectively. No one entity can do it all. From individual citizens to the leadership of the Lee Board of County Commissioners, there were so many who helped. Among them: first responders, human services agencies, nonprofits, volunteers and faith-based organizations, utilities, the school district, hospitals, elected officials, municipalities, special districts, and state and federal agencies. Local media outlets played a role, too.

Irma, which made landfall here on Sept. 10, 2017, was unprecedented in its size and threat, and it was not your typical hurricane.

 More than 100 individuals worked in the Emergency Operations Center during Irma, providing support to responders in the field and determining protective actions, including evacuations and sheltering operations.

 About 300,000 people in Lee County were ordered to evacuate, prompting the largest sheltering operation in the countys history.

 About 35,000 people took refuge in 14 shelters. This was the largest sheltered population of any of Floridas 67 counties. There was no loss of life.

 Sheltering efforts included caring for about 3,550 pets of evacuees  also the largest statewide.

After response operations came to a close, recovery from Hurricane Irma began.

 Contractors and Solid Waste workers have collected 1.75 million cubic yards of horticultural waste and nearly 67,000 cubic yards of construction and demolition debris.

 The county has undertaken an effort, in coordination with partners, to remove impediments from waterways to reduce future flooding.

 Long-term recovery efforts continue today by leveraging partnerships with agencies such as the United Way and many others throughout Lee County.

The fact that Lee County received state and national accolades speaks to a thorough and complete effort by our organization to help our community. There is more to be said here  I know many, many organizations helped in ways that are not reflected in this list of accomplishments. I am grateful for our collective efforts.

And, as we think about the achievements and lessons from Irma, be assured that Lee County governments employees are prepared for whatever challenges the future may bring.

Roger Desjarlais is the manager of Lee County.The other week we were visiting with neighbors. They had recently joined our Sanibel-Captiva chapter of the Americas Boating Club at our Causeway Island potluck gathering. They told us of a few of their boating experiences in Minnesota, reminding us that Minnesota is the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. It was an interesting conversation as they spoke of their efforts to overcome the lack of knowledge in boating the large saltwater body of the Gulf of Mexico.

While having boated on some of the large lakes up north, they never felt so far from their dock that getting back to shore in case of darkness or weather would be a problem. Buoys are not generally used, or at least not paid much attention to, in the lakes of Minnesota. They might point out a submerged rock pile or a swimming beach boundary, but as a travel route? Not there!

Better know the buoy system here, or you may find yourself stuck in the shallows or violating the strict closed throttle areas of our manatee zones. And if you choose to travel to some specific place down here, it is likely to be beyond the horizon! In Minnesota, we could always see the lunch spot at the other end of the lake. Down here, referring to the navigation chart we learned to use, we found the entry channel to Fort Myers Beach is a 90 degree heading taken from the Sanibel Lighthouse, and there is some shallow water to avoid along the way! They reported finding three nice lunch spots over there at the beach.

This couple remarked that even as experienced boaters, they were glad they enrolled in the chapters Americas Boating Course, taught by trained competent instructors using course material promulgated by the national United States Power Squadron  Americas Boating Club. The course has been approved by the U.S. Coast Guard and is also used for the required certification of boaters who were born after Jan. 1, 1988.

Our new members and friends went on to add they look forward to their next learning opportunity when they enroll in our chapters Seamanship Course, a somewhat more advanced course covering boat handling, courtesy and rules of the road. It will be offered in the fall. Look for the schedule of next seasons courses in September.

For more information or to become a member of the Americas Boating Club of Sanibel-Captiva, contact 239-985-9472 or Commander@SanibelCaptivaSPS.org.

Bob Eidsvold is a member of the Sanibel-Captiva chapter of Americas Boating Club.The Sanibel Schools fourth-graders had a chance for some hands-on learning  by mining.

On April 3, the students got to pan for rocks and minerals with the help of BB Brockman, from Diamond Dels Gem Mining. For 30 minutes, the youth swished their screened boxes in a trough of water, hoping to pull up some of the gems listed on the identification charts hung up in the trailer.

Teacher Terrie Kielborn-Jennings explained that it is about learning to identify them.

Were studying rocks and minerals, she said, noting that the students do not score particularly well when it comes to the subject material. When you do something, thats when you understand it.

So, theyre mining like they did back in the day, Kielborn-Jennings said.

Teacher Julie Wappes noted that it is the first time the school has offered the program.

This is just a real enrichment activity that we were able to offer with the curriculum, she said.

The students will later classify the finds based on things like color, hardness and luster.

They get to keep the rocks they find, Wappes said.

She noted that the students will also write about the experience for an assignment.

To make that connection, Wappes said.

A third teacher, Laura Wolf, also participated in setting up the activity.

Kyler Kouril, one fourth-grader, called the opportunity fun.

Its cool seeing all these cool shiny gems, he said.

One of the stones he found was a tigers eye.

Which I really wanted to get, Kyler said, adding that he likes its design and colors.

I learned about a lot of different gems and minerals I didnt know about, he said of the activity.

Fourth-grader Alana Vandenbrink also described the experience as fun.

I liked all the pretty stones you could get, she said.

Alana was hoping to find both a quartz crystal and hematite.

Theyre very pretty, she said, adding that she might make jewelry from of her finds.

Asked about what she learned, Alana named pumice.

Its the only stone that floats, she said.

According to Brockman, Diamond Dels Gem Mining currently operates in six states and visits approximately 90,000 youth per year. Marking its fourth year in Florida, it visits 19,000 annually.

For more information about the program, visit www.diamonddel.com.Photo: Contributed

Each year, the Pantone Colour Institute picks a hue to highlight, and for 2018 the colour is Ultra Violet. Yes, that is two words capitalized.

For those unfamiliar with the company, Pantone has standardized colour palettes and formulas used by graphic designers and artists worldwide. Their Colour Institute forecasts colour trends and advises marketers on the emotional influence of certain shades.

For 2018s Colour of the Year the Institute chose Ultra Violet, as their website states:

A dramatically provocative and thoughtful purple shade, Pantone #18-3838 Ultra Violet communicates originality, ingenuity, and visionary thinking that points us toward the future.

In previous years, Pantone has highlighted such shades as Greenery, a bright grassy green, and Tangerine Tango, a vibrant orange.

A blue-tinged deep purple, Pantone says that Ultra Violet is evocative of the night sky and mysteries of the cosmos, as well as bringing to mind the counterculture individualism of artists such as Prince and Jimi Hendrix.

Personally, Ive always also associated this hue with royalty, like ermine-edged velvet cloaks and crowns.

Whatever Ultra Violet means to you, there are many ways to infuse the colour of the year into your look.

In my opinion, it is too dramatic to use head-to-toe, but packs a punch as a statement piece or accessory. The items in the top picture, all available at TheBay.com, are perfect examples.

This shade of purple is one of those rare colours that can be worn in any season. In spring and summer, pair it with a blush or buttery cream neutral. During fall and winter, it adds a splash of vibrancy against the darker hues of black, charcoal, navy and burgundy.

As a season-less colour, it is a great option for investment accessories such as handbags, shoes and jewelry.

Even if amethyst and tanzanite arent your birthstones, a ring or earrings with these stones will complement almost any outfit. Consider purple for a work tote or small crossbody purse instead of conventional black.

A luxurious silk scarf in violet would also be a great way to celebrate 2018, enhancing a multitude of outfits throughout the year.

As for making a statement, if you have a formal event on your calendar, an Ultra Violet dress or ensemble will ensure you are noticed. However, be careful not to overdo the hue and accessorize with complementary tones instead of matching ones.

Going by the colour wheel, purples opposite is yellow. An Ultra Violet gown would look striking with yellow gold shoes and jewels.

Violet also looks fabulous against green  just like the flower. For those blessed with green-and-hazel eyes, use purple as an eyeliner or lid colour to make your eye colour pop.

Pantone has a solid track record of defining colours of the moment so dont be surprised if you start seeing more of this deep purple shade in fashion and decor stores this year, and consider marking 2018 with an Ultra Violet addition to your closet.

For more information on Pantone, its annual colour picks, and an Ultra Violet shopping guide, visit Pantones Colour of the Year website.Photo: Rod Tribiger Pile of garbage in front of illegal dumping sign near Postill Lake.

There is more evidence of illegal dumping going on in the Postill Lake region near Kelowna.

A picture taken by Rod Tribiger shows a large pile of garbage dumped right in front of an illegal dumping sign.

"It's a photo of a fresh dump of garbage right underneath a stop illegal dumping sign. I don't think it's humour, I think it's a total disregard for the outdoors here  and the law."

Last week there was a truck found in the same area.

"We're just pulling our hair out trying to figure out a way to actually catch these people, signs are obviously not doing anything."

Tribiger says he lives in the area and has seen plenty of illegal dumping over the years.

"This is one of the notorious sites just off the pavement on Postill Lake Road. I always know right away when someone's been in here because there's a fresh pile sitting there."

Tribiger has even tried installing trail cameras to try and catch the dumpers in the act. "I've had them stolen or shot. The people that come back here they'll cut a tree down to get the thing out of there."

The Mill Creek runs through the area and feeds parts of Ellison and Glenmore for their water.

"This is a watershed so it really disturbs us when we see this type of illegal dumping."Photo: Contributed

A 47-year-old male is being kicked out of Penticton and returned to Alberta, following arrest by local RCMP.

The man has 24 outstanding warrants in Alberta, all obtained since 2014. They include multiple driving offences, including driving while impaired, as well as failing to appear in court.

The RCMP's Community Support and Enforcement Team found the man during a routine patrol. Through the Provincial Fugitive Return Program, they discovered the man was wanted in Alberta, and that the province would extend the jurisdiction of the warrants to B.C.

Arrangements have been made to return the man to Alberta.

Penticton RCMP say they plan to continue utilizing the fugitive return program in the future.Photo: File photo

Thousands of students rejected by UBC Vancouver were accidentally sent orientation week invites.

The invite was sent to 31,000 applicants, but only about 7,000 are admitted to first-year programs each year.

One person who received the invitation but wasn't actually accepted told CTV she was heartbroken and had already told her parents she'd been accepted.

This email was sent in error to all UBC applicants rather than students who have accepted an offer of admission from UBC, said Andrew Arida, associate registrar and director of UBC. We apologize for the confusion it caused for prospective students.

The school recommends applicants check their Student Service Centre account online for accurate updates on their admissions.

 with files from CTV VancouverPhoto: Contributed

Cascades Casino served up a by-donation pancake breakfast on Tuesday morning to raise money for local cancer-stricken boy Wills Hodgkinson.

Wills, a seven-year-old from Naramata, is in B.C. Children's Hospital in Vancouver battling a rare form of kidney cancer.

The event raised just over $2,150  all of which will go to Wills' parents, Tim Hodgkinson and Neeley Brimer, to help cover expenses from to travel back and forth from Vancouver.

Cascades general manager Mike Magnusson said in hosting Tuesday's fundraiser, the goal was to keep up momentum in the community to rally for Wills after a fundraiser held last month at the Adidas Sportsplex, which raised $17,000.

"For Neeley and Tim, the bills don't stop after one fundraising endeavour, they keep going. And obviously Wills is in for a bit of a long haul with chemotherapy, surgery and treatments and everything else," Magnusson said.

"I just wanted to make sure they know us at the casino, and the city, didn't forget about them, and even though its been a while we still have their backs."

Magnusson gave credit to the immense support from residents, and Wills' parents did the same.

"We are overwhelmed by everyone's generosity and the time they've given up to make this happen. I truly appreciate it and we thank you deeply," Wills' dad Tim said.Photo: Contributed

Although the House of Commons is not in session, the return of Prime Minister JustinTrudeau and his cabinet for an emergency meeting to discuss a constitutional crisis has been a subject of national attention.

What is the crisis?

As many will know, there has been an emerging conflict between the New Democrat led provincial governments of Alberta and British Columbia related to the Trans-Mountain Pipeline project.

The B.C. NDP has threatened to use every tool possible to stop the project. In response, the Alberta NDP introduced provincial legislation this week that will enable cuts of Alberta fuel that is shipped to British Columbia.

Why is this a constitutional crisis?

When a pipeline project crosses a provincial or international boundary, it is regulated federally.

In this case, Prime Minister Trudeau has approved the pipeline, and has stated his strong support that the pipeline will be built.

From a constitutional perspective, many experts question if B.C. has the legal authority to block the Trans Mountain pipeline. Likewise, the constitutional validity of Albertas intention to reduce gas shipments into B.C. is also being questioned.

Politics are also at play given that both NDP premiers political survival relies heavily on advancing their respective positions.

To add further tension to this challenging issue, the proponent of the Trans-Mountain pipeline, citing opposition from the B.C. NDP government, has set a deadline of May 31 for certainty on the project or it will be potentially abandoned.

Ultimately, this falls onto the shoulders of Prime Minister Trudeau, who has declared this project to be in Canadas national interest and has accused B.C. NDP Premier John Horgan of trying to scuttle our national plan on fighting climate change."

The Trudeau Liberal government, which holds 18 seats in B.C., is aware that many who oppose the Trans Mountain pipeline do not see building it as supporting the fight on climate change.

Many view it as the opposite, a point that Mr. Trudeau and his environment minister do not seem to reconcile.

The problem the prime mnister now faces is that by declaring the Trans-Mountain pipeline to be in Canadas national interest, if the project does not get built under his leadership, both the prime minister and Canada as a confederation will have little credibility in establishing national policy if usurped by regional interests.

For this reason many are suggesting a constitutional crisis is at hand.

What will happen next?

Unfortunately, the prime minister is set to leave Canada again for yet another round of travel to Peru, the U.K. and France.

It could be assumed that his senior advisers and cabinet ministers will continue to explore a course of action ranging from withholding federal transfer funds from B.C. or potentially turning a blind eye in the event Alberta carries out the threat of reducing gasoline flow to B.C.

It is also conceivable that other courses of action may be identified.

From a financial standpoint, the federal, B.C. and Alberta governments will lose close to $47 billion in royalties and taxes over the next 20 years should the project not move forward.

This amount does not include over $400 million in agreements with in excess of 50 First Nations communities who do support the Trans-Mountain pipeline or $922 million to local government in B.C.

As I have previously stated, I believe the prime minister made the right decision to support the Trans-Mountain pipeline and I am hopeful that Mr.Trudeau will demonstrate federal leadership to ensure this project is built.

My question this week:

Do you think the prime minister is doing enough to ensure that this important energy infrastructure gets built?

I can be reached at [email protected] or call toll free 1-800-665-8711.Photo: The Canadian Press

A Kelowna city councillor who cut her teeth in the wine retail business, says the province is making the same mistake with legalized cannabis as it has with alcohol.

Tracy Gray, who owned Discovery Wines before selling the rights to her licence three years ago, is disappointed the provincial government will compete with the private sector in the sale of cannabis, as it does with alcohol.

Read moreAlanna Kelly

Flood protection measures are being taken across the Okanagan Valley creating an impact on salmon.

Shaun Reimer, section head for public safety and protection with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations said both shore spawning kokanee and sockeye salmon are facing challenges.

Certainly there is an issue with some of the shore spawning kokanee because as the lake gets too low it is difficult for them if they havent hatched completely, he said.

He believes most of the salmon are well advanced so they will be able to move out of the way and get out of the gravel.

High flows into the Okanagan River are creating issues for sockeye salmon.

Some of the very high flows in the Okanagan River south of Penticton, that we have to have right now in order to drop the lake are potentially scouring some of the sockeye salmon eggs, said Reimer.

Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development crews are looking closely at the sockeye salmon to asses the impacts.

Reimer said last years flood season was misleading and many people focused on the fisheries piece.

The real issue was the fact that we didnt see it coming, he said. We didnt have a high snowpack.

Currently, snowpack in the Okanagan is at 152 per cent  a tie for the record-high as indicated in the BC Snow Basin Indices from April 1.

Last year at this time it was 105 per cent and leading up to that we had much lower snowpacks in January, February and March of last year, he said.

Last year, he believed the Okanagan was going into drought conditions, resulting in having the lake higher.

We do have these fishery thresholds for flows in the river  but last year all of our modelling and forecasting was indicating if we kept to those fishery thresholds we were still going to be in a good stead, he said.

Following up on low snowpack really it just lead us in the wrong direction.Chelsea Powrie

RCMP Supt. Ted de Jager spoke to a crowd of around 150 people Wednesday night at the second annual community policing forum in Penticton.

Unlike last year, the forum required questions to be submitted in advance of the meeting. A host then read the questions and moderated the answers from the panel of six South Okanagan community leaders.

The complete list was 31 questions long, and to fit within the 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. bracket, some had to be skimmed. They were subdivided into six sections: Police operations, crime statistics, communication and engagement, social order, addictions and mental health, regional policing and traffic enforcement.

Many of the questions seemed to focus on the fact that some feel Penticton is a dangerous city. De Jager pointed to relatively low violent crime rates in response.

"This is an awesome place to live, regardless of any community you're from," De Jager said. "So why do we have this perception that there's some kind of danger when the facts of the matter say that that's almost non-existent?"

De Jager repeatedly mentioned that although a frequent complaint is that RCMP don't respond to all calls, it's because they prioritize serious crimes. He said that a 911 call of a crime in process or one that puts people in immediate danger would always get an immediate response, though.

He also said it's important to phone the police for any crime, because that helps the police keep crime statistics and identify hot spots to tailor their policing,

The superintendent also announced the RCMP's plans to revamp their current website with more up-to-date crime information and statistics.

Penticton's Mayor Andrew Jakubeit was in attendance, as well as South Okanagan-West Kootenay MP Richard Cannings. Cannings praised the event, and called for a need for understanding from citizens about those who commit many of the petty crimes in South Okanagan communities.

"A lot of the crimes people see around town are people with mental health issues," Cannings said. "We need to start treating those more as health issues and not as criminal justice issues."

The evening was scheduled to end with an open mic period, with 30-second questions allowed from the audience. Unfortunately, as the night got later, many in the audience got up and left when it became clear they were well behind the targeted end time of 9 p.m.

Some that left expressed displeasure with the process in general, calling it the same old thing  all talk, and no action.

"They're chasing their own tails. It's a waste of time," said Penticton resident Tim as he left early.

The handful of people who did stick around to utilize the open mic reiterated some of the concerns addressed earlier about petty crimes and homelessness. De Jager said he "prefers engagement" with the latter vulnerable demographic than outright punishment in many cases.

De Jager encouraged the public to continue to engage with the RCMP, mentioning his monthly "coffee with a cop" sessions and inviting all to attend if they had more concerns that were not addressed.Photo: RAPS

An animal shelter in Richmond has been advised to euthanize all 66 rabbits in its care after confirmation that several animals have tested positive for rabbit hemorrhagic disease.

The virus can cause death within hours and the Regional Animal Protection Society, which operates the Richmond Animal Shelter, says it was likely introduced by infected feral rabbits that were found dead on the property.

A news release from the society says the Ministry of Agriculture advised all the rabbits at the shelter should be euthanized after tests confirmed the presence of the illness.

The ministry also ordered the destruction and replacement of all rabbit-related facilities, enclosures, supplies, equipment and anything that came in contact with any of the bunnies.

The current outbreak marks only the third time rabbit hemorrhagic disease has been detected in Canada and the first time it has been reported in B.C., but the virus has already caused the deaths of hundreds of feral rabbits in Nanaimo, Comox and Delta.

The society says it is working with the City of Richmond, the Ministry of Agriculture and the SPCA to ensure that everything possible is done to prevent the continued spread of the disease, which causes hemorrhaging, and attacks the liver and other organs.

Eyal Lichtmann, executive director of the Regional Animal Protection Society, says the shelter has a no-kill policy and staff and volunteers are devastated by the order to euthanize the rabbits, but he says it's the humane thing to do.

"Rabbit hemorrhagic disease is a horrific illness and to see an animal suffer and die from it is an excruciating experience which our staff had to endure in recent days. Sadly, by the time symptoms are evident, RHD is usually too late to treat," Lichtmann says in the release.

A vaccine against the disease is being made available to veterinarians and clinics around B.C. and Lichtmann says the shelter had already placed its order before the outbreak occurred.

When the shipment arrives, the society says it will donate its portion to other animal organizations in B.C.Photo: The Canadian Press

B.C. Environment Minister George Heyman says he doesn't expect the province to back down on its battle against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion during a meeting Sunday with the prime minister and Alberta's premier.

Heyman says the government is trying to defend the B.C. coast, its environment and jobs from the potentially disastrous impacts of an oil products spill.

He says the federal government has rejected B.C.'s invitations to join its attempt to ask the courts to determine who has jurisdiction over the pipeline, which will cross B.C. and Alberta.

The Prime Minister's Office says Justin Trudeau will sit down with Premier John Horgan and Alberta's Rachel Notley on Sunday in an attempt to find a solution to the escalating dispute over the pipeline.

Kinder Morgan turned up the heat last week, announcing it is stopping non-essential spending on the $7.4-billion pipeline expansion because of opposition and delays in B.C., and established a May 31 deadline for action.

Green Party leader Andrew Weaver says Alberta and the Trudeau Liberals are supporting a race to the bottom by backing the Kinder Morgan project when they should at least be talking about building more oil refineries instead of pipelines.Photo: Vic PD

A police officer in Victoria has died after spending 30 years in a coma following an on-duty car crash.

The Victoria Police Department says in a news release that Const. Ian Jordan was racing to the scene of a break-and-enter when his car collided with another police vehicle early on Sept. 22, 1987.

Injuries sustained in the crash left Jordan in a coma.

He remained unconscious until his death last night.

The police department says the accident resulted in the creation of a "trauma team," which helps officers and staff after traumatic incidents.

A funeral with full police honours is being planned.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...Understanding that there are many demands and stressors of motherhood, Chattanooga House of Prayers is offering a retreat whereby mothers can intentionally factor in a pause in their daily routine. This retreat, Pause: A Prayer Retreat for Moms, is designed to give busy moms an opportunity to rest, connect, worship, and experience a spiritual reawakening through guided and individual times of prayer, said officials.

The retreat will take place on Saturday, April 28, from 8:30 a.m.-noon at Chattanooga House of Prayer, 3912 Dayton Blvd, Suite 200 in Red Bank.

The cost to attend is $15 and includes breakfast. Childcare is provided for a nominal fee.

To register, obtain additional information about Pause, or to learn how Chattanooga House of Prayer can design a training or retreat for your church or organization, contact MickiAnn Harris, ChattHOPs Spiritual Formation director, at mickiann@chatthop.org or visit www.chatthop.org.Blog

Chelsea's masked XI

Forget about whos behind the masks in the newest reality TV sensation The Masked Singer  its all about which Blues can make it into our Masked XI! Head coach Frank Lampard confirmed in his pre-match press conference that Andreas Christensen had flown to Milan to be fitted with a protective mask after having his nose broken in a challenge with Anthony Martial against Manchester United on Monday night. Should the Danish centre-back feature against Spurs, hell be in contention for a spot among a team of masked Blues, but until then hell have to sit back and admire what we think would make a fantastic Chelsea team!Ribery and Robben both played in Bayern's goalless draw at home to Sevilla on Wednesday when they reached the semi-finals of the Champions League for the seventh time in nine seasons.Like she does in one of her classroom tests, Wolk-Rogers posited the answers as multiple choice. Choice A is to hold gun manufacturers responsible for the deadliness of their products. That's been made more difficult with the passage in 2005 of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which protects firearms manufacturers and dealers. Choice B is to hold ourselves accountable as voters and as gun owners, and acknowledge how vulnerable we are to mental illness. "If we own a gun we should be rigorously engaged in the upkeep of our emotional well-being, so that we don't pull a trigger in times of illness. Otherwise we should seriously ask ourselves whether we really have the time or attention to own a gun. Perhaps for some of us it's time to lay down our arms."Chief Executive Officer Jennifer Scanlon and Chairman Steven Leer took the helm in November 2016 as the manufacturer turned the corner on past financial struggles. At its first investor day meeting in March, USG laid out a plan for factory automation and new products. The company said the moves would boost profit margins and push free cash flow to at least $450 million by 2020 -- more than double last year's level.In his letter to Calk, Cummings wrote that he had been told by the Defense Department that the Army's chief of staff "had the opportunity to engage Mr. Calk on Nov. 16, 2016, when he provided remarks" at a Chicago business event. The department also reported that Army administrative personnel recalled receiving a telephone call from Calk sometime in November 2016 "regarding the confirmation process in general."Flavin came to the University of Chicago in 2013 and led the Polsky Center through an expansion that began almost two years ago. Once part of the Booth School of Business, the Polsky Center expanded into a free-standing entity, allowing faculty and staff across the university to access its programs, including its technology commercialization and licensing department and its Flavin-founded startup hub, now called the Polsky Exchange."For more than 120 years, Sears has called Illinois home and that is not changing," company spokesman Howard Riefs said in an emailed statement. "Although we are disappointed by this last store closure in Chicago, by no means does this change our commitment to our customers and presence to Chicago's residents."Reentering the TPP would not be easy. The 11 other countries reached their own trade deal this year, and it is unclear what conditions they would set before they restarted the entire process with the United States. The deal would be much stronger with U.S. participation, since it is the world's largest economy. But several countries in the deal have cast a wary eye toward Trump's pendulum swings on trade.1) Head to Navy Pier for "I Heart Halal," a celebration of a halal lifestyle, in keeping with Islamic law. But the festival goes beyond just meat and food standards, celebrating a holistic, ethically sourced and wholesome life. For instance, CoverGirl Ambassador Nura Afia will teach a beauty class, while MasterChef Amanda Saab and My Halal Kitchen's Yvonne Maffei will host cooking and lifestyle demos. There will also be a modest fashion show, a comedy show, panel discussions, a bazaar hawking halal fashion, art, travel and lifestyle products, and a food hall where you can try halal foods. Tickets are $5 online and $10 at the door for the three-day festival. $25 for the fashion show, $25 for the comedy showcase, and $25 for the beauty masterclass. 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. 600 E. Grand Ave., 312-595-7437, ihearthalal.comAfter Luke crashes his X-Wing fighter on the swamp planet of Dagobah in "The Empire Strikes Back," the tiny green Jedi scavenges through his trainee's soggy luggage and locates an interstellar granola bar, takes a bite and spits it out. As I worked my way through Denny's Two Moons Skillet  essentially a scramble, with a couple of eggs  I felt a somewhat similar sense of bewilderment and despair at the alien delicacy inside my mouth: How you NOT get so big, eating food of this kind? And shouldn't the Two Moons Skillet  pictured on the menu with dueling sunny-side-up eggs  be renamed for the twin suns of Tatooine? And the ultra-rich, nacho-cheese-like Gouda sauce swimming between slimy spinach and mushrooms and diced cubes of pale ham  maybe we just rename this thing the Death Star Trash Compactor Skillet?"The decor will be like an exploration, a journey," Robertson said. "As you exit the elevator to the host area, each space will convey a sense of different areas of the world. It's going to be very sophisticated. The architectural elements, the textures  it'll be kind of overwhelming. The renderings I've seen have been remarkable."Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble member who was named the Chicago Tribune's 2017 Chicagoan of the Year in film, stars on HBO's "Divorce," which finished airing its second season last month. It was recently reported that Letts is writing the script for "The Woman in the Window," a big-screen adaptation of A.J. Finn's psychological thriller.It is a reality in which Gul and her daughter were expected to provide sexual favors to the guards at the Qamishli airport in order to fly out of Syria. In which Samir broke his leg while working at a construction site in Beirut, distraught because he had lost contact with his family in Raqqa during bombardments against the Islamic State group, known as ISIS. In which Salma chose to live in Chicago because it is too difficult to be a divorced woman in Kuwait or Jordan, where she grew up. In which Zafir, who speaks Aramaic and used to work for a church in Syria, now lives with his brother in a leaky shack in a parking lot in Beirut, taking care of luxury automobiles. In which Hani, having managed to liberate his brother from an ISIS jail, was locked up for a month by the Syrian Army while trying to re-enter Lebanon. In which Heidi, along with her fellow classmates, was bombed by government forces while writing her business and economics exams at the university in Homs.I did something stupid last year and attempted to predict the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. That I successfully placed the lowest individual odds (3-1) on the winning book  "The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead  does not mitigate the inherent stupidity of trying to predict the winner of a book award. That one of my other favorites, "The Sport of Kings" by C.E. Morgan, was named a finalist shouldn't fool me into believing I have a special insight into something essentially unknowable.The State Department responded by email: "The State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security provides security details to certain foreign dignitaries and official guests while they are in the United States. The security we provide to these visiting dignitaries and guests is based on the level of threat they face in the United States. Extensive planning, analysis, and coordination with local, state, and other federal law enforcement is critical to ensuring that appropriate security measures are in place.We do not provide specific information about protective details.""If you were to go to social media, there are constantly videos and pictures of high schoolers doing 'vape tricks,' " Christiansen, 14, testified. "These are designed to increase the number of high schoolers who wish to use nicotine/tobacco products, and many kids who had no interest in drugs prior to high school have become smokers.""Before the General Assembly is an important piece of legislation  a resolution to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and add women to the U.S. Constitution," Miller wrote in her letter. "The substantive clause of the amendment reads, 'Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.'Most of the folks filling these 38 rooms seem to slide easily into the concept of sharing their space and time with others, whether over yoga and meditation, art events, pitching in with kitchen duties or heading out as a group to dance, drink or kick back on the beach. They also seem to have a lifestyle and the emotional disposition needed to make it work. They're largely digital nomads, most of them millennials not tethered to an office or material goods. Technology has allowed them to do their work anywhere, anytime, anyhow. (But it's not as though older folks aren't allowed; Roam staff members say there have been guests in their 70s.)After eight years of having a Chicagoan in the Oval Office  one who would parachute in and visit the city from time to time  one wonders whether Barack Obama's successor Donald Trump will ever pay a visit during his tenure. It's not like we're not on the sitting president's mind. His Twitter account offers plenty of criticism. But the question comes to mind with former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush scheduled to speak at a downtown health care event this week.I should write on a topic that's easy and clicktastic, declaring that the president is a psycho, or asserting that Melania is a traitor to women for not smacking POTUS with a frying pan. Or maybe delving into the sexual proclivities of some political group  just as long as I put plenty of steamy sex in it, I'd be a success.Raheem D. King, 22, whom police had described as armed and dangerous, was booked into the Winnebago County Jail shortly after 5 p.m. Wednesday. His girlfriend, Lakeacia Kizart, 21, also turned herself in. She was charged with concealing or aiding a fugitive.The boy is accused of shooting three people, two of them fatally, around 1:45 a.m. Sunday at a residence in the 1800 block of West Bradley Avenue, just southwest of Bradley University.But one woman who participated in one of those inquiries said she felt like a victim again during the inquiry and did not believe it proved Hybels' innocence. Still, Hybels' tenure didn't have to end his way, said the woman, who asked not to be identified because she said she had already received calls, texts and visits to her workplace from angry Willow Creek members.March was the lead detective in the shooting's probe; Walsh was Van Dyke's partner on the night of the shooting; and Gaffney was among the first officers on the scene. All were charged in June and have pleaded not guilty.He also asked her what she was wearing that day, to which she replied jeans and a white top. He also noted that Herrera went back to sleep on the floor after the alleged assault and that, in the morning, she walked him out of the dormitory and pointed the way to the "L" station.Police said it appeared the man had broken into the apartment and they did not know why. "At this time, it does not appear they knew each other at all," Alioto said. "The circumstances of how he entered the apartment are still under investigation."Obdulio Lopez-Gomez, 42, who was charged in 2015, had befriended the girls' mother several years before and she had invited him to lease a room in her apartment. The attacks took place when the mother wasn't home, authorities said.Police and prosecutors had alleged that at the time of the fire, Gray was angry with a girl who lived in a two-flat in the 4100 block of South Albany Avenue because she had rejected him. The eighth-grader ignited an accelerant he poured on the enclosed back porch on the second floor and the stairs, according to investigators at the time. While the girl and her parents escaped, the second-floor tenants, Peter McGuiness, 54, and his sister, Margaret Mesa, 74, died."The reality is when we talk about these amazing opportunities, like with Amazon, it's almost like pie-in-the-sky predictions without any concrete proof of what it's going to be like," Cassidy said. "Which is why I talk about relating the incentive to the kinds of jobs that will be created and the kinds of salaries that will be paid by them because otherwise we are buying a pig in a poke." (Monique Garcia)"Now there's been an investigation, and the investigation has brought forth some very distributing, terrible behavior, apparently," Rauner said. "And now Republicans as well as Democrats in Missouri have called for the governor to step down in the best interest of Missourians, and that seems like a reasonable request."According to his lawyers, the biggest asset Cruz has is $25,000 from a life insurance policy taken out by his mother, Lynda Cruz, who died in November. He also has Microsoft stock that was worth $2,227 as of Tuesday and $353 in a Wells Fargo bank account. The bank account contained several thousand dollars more in fall of 2017 but the money apparently was spent, Cruz's lawyers said.The rising deficits don't lay at Ryan's feet alone. Although the 48-year-old lawmaker from Wisconsin was an aggressive salesman for his plans, and was once viewed as the new face of a GOP focused on shrinking the size of government, the party ultimately did not turn his way. President Donald Trump had no interest in Ryan's Medicare proposal and even called it a political loser during the 2016 primary campaign. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has made clear he's not interested in taking on Social Security reforms.President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office at the White House before signing a new law aimed at curbing six trafficking Wednesday, April 11, 2018, in Washington. (Evan Vucci / AP)A Tribune reporter feared that blacks, who earned a pittance in the South, would be willing to work for less than whites did in Chicago. "If that happens to any considerable extent there is certain to be an outbreak of bitter feeling," he predicted in 1916. Two years later, the Hotel La Salle's waiters joined a larger strike, prompting a warning from their union leader. "If the hotels attempt to use women or Negroes to break the strike an interesting time is ahead of them."Blindly following bygone hiring "norms" is not going to impress today's candidates and, most importantly, probably won't reflect well on your culture. As the workforce becomes increasingly populated by millennials, employers are finding they have to adapt to them and their desires, not the other way around. Inquiring about salary history is viewed by many as intrusive, insensitive and mostly irrelevant.This is the understanding that becomes possible when we view Syrians not simply as bodies to be pitied, or threats to be banned from travel, but individuals whose voices demand respect. The least we can do is pay attention. If we do not, perhaps it is because we expect their words to be a painful indictment of Western inaction. They might remind us that we have stayed on the sidelines while they face slaughter. As a doctor told me several years ago, "A Russian plane is able to drop bombs on some human beings because the world has grown accustomed to their deaths. It's as if the blood that circulates in our veins is of lesser value."Trump can blow hot and cold on Putin and Russia in tweets, just as he did in the course of one day on Wednesday, first threatening Russia with "nice and new and 'smart'" missiles and then saying there's "no reason" for the U.S.-Russia relationship to be so bad. But Americans should be used to the low price Trump puts on the meaning of words. He, like many habitual social network users, employs language to communicate emotions rather than precise messages."In Chicago, there is something special happening," Steve Tozer, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Urban Education Leadership, tells us. Last year, a UIC study showed that from 2001 to 2016, CPS students surged from near the bottom to the middle of the academic pack among the state's 55 largest school districts. That is, the CPS students made faster progress than many of their peers in Illinois and nationally, according to Tozer. That holds for all demographic groups and income levels  and across several different standardized tests. "That gives us reason to trust this (upward trend)," he says.But Harvey is only one among hundreds of Illinois municipalities struggling to make payments to its public safety pension funds. The state's Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability in December reported that the unfunded liabilities of public safety pension funds outside Chicago nearly doubled during the last decade. That's in part why property taxes in Illinois remain among the highest nationwide. State and local governments, and especially school boards, have made expensive  and unsustainable  promises to their workers. The bill for all that generosity with taxpayers' money is coming due.Yet awareness of historical events can be fleeting. The facts of Adolf Hitler's systematic plan to exterminate the Jews won't ever be erased  but could be forgotten. Details can recede as time passes, diminishing the power of a universal lesson about man's capacity for evil. A new study released by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that 31 percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, think only 2 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Additionally, 11 percent of U.S. adults, and 22 percent of millennials, said they haven't heard, or are not sure whether they have heard, of the Holocaust. And 40 percent of adults, and 66 percent of millennials, can't identify Auschwitz as a Nazi death camp.We read with fascination your recent article "Growing brain drain: University of Alabama's gain in drawing Illinois students is a loss for Illinois" about the large number of out-of-state students being recruited and educated at the University of Alabama. As the definition implies, brain drain is the departure of highly educated or professional individuals from one place or position for another, usually for better pay or living conditions. With the majority of out-of-state students being recruited to attend the University of Alabama leaving the state following graduation, the real "brain drain" is occurring in Alabama.This newspaper has highlighted the impact of tighter budgets on the ability of school districts to fund these services. To say the "tax credit" is not taking money from public education is at best disingenuous. The net tax payment to the state of Illinois by an individual or corporation will be reduced by 75 cents for each dollar of their contribution to the "scholarship" fund. State Rep. David Harris was and is correct: This tax credit will reduce revenue to the state, which means less money for public education. That's a loss the state of Illinois cannot afford.You might be sick of Kevin Hart. The dude is everywhere! But, somewhere, there is someone  there are many people, in fact  who is not sick of Kevin Hart. He made a ton of money in 2017, and he just came off a starring turn in "Jumanji," which was one of the most popular movies of early 2018. Hart remains one of the top performers in comedy, and he'll bring his wild Irresponsible Tour to the United Center (1901 W. Madison St.) for a pair of shows at 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets: $39.50-$175. unitedcenter.comA: I went to seminary school on the South Side of Chicago, and I absolutely fell in love with the city. My first job was at a small church in Wisconsin, which was great because it felt like the church in the small town where I grew up. I spent eight years there, and it was a great match. But then I blasted off to a church in Houston, where many folks in the congregation worked at NASA, which was pretty much in our backyard. Then, I got a call I was never expecting about working at Our Saviour's. I went on the church's website, and I could see they were an extraordinarily welcoming church that was truly for all people. Every church says that, but I could see from their ministry that they really are that.At the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Phifer will be the deputy executive director of Planning. She said she still would serve Aurora, but also the other 283 Chicago area municipalities as well as the seven counties in the agency's area.When Harms didn't join his friends at the bottom, they went back to look for him and found him on the ground near the end of the run, Ream said.Hernandez-Rivera was driving through the intersection of Lake Cook and Old McHenry roads around 10:30 p.m. when the crash, involving his vehicle and three others, happened, the Buffalo Grove Fire Department said in a statement.Kelly said her office doesn't track how many young people come away from the event with a job  although some firms hire on the spot, others take information that could later lead to employment  although she talks with employers who attend and they find the expo valuable in finding workers." There are many other reasons to make art, but we felt the current timeliness about gun control and gun violence was an ideal fit to end our season," Director Sean Hargadon said. "What excites us about presenting a play like this is that it allows for a timely dialogue about something that is very important across our nation. It lets us live inside the questions that we are all asking right now as we try to understand how to move forward."Raleigh mentioned the Scofield mansion on Spring Street in downtown Elgin, which became the first Gail Borden Public Library in 1894. She reminded her audience the library is named after the man who invented condensed milk. Borden's stepsons, Samuel and Alfred Church, had bought the mansion to be used as the library and wanted it named in perpetuity after their stepfather.The Bears may end up leaving Chicago for a tract of land once graced by the likes of Secretariat, Citation and Whirlaway. What the city and state cannot allow, however, is any arrangement that unloads on the backs of taxpayers yet another payment due notice for a stadium renovation, or a new stadium, that can and should wholly be paid for with private funds.Leah Kimmelman, director of curriculum and instruction, said administrators kicked off the selection process last fall by researching what other school systems were using and identifying district priorities in relation to student achievement and alignment with the Illinois Common Core State Standards. She said the district also was looking for English Language Arts materials that would offer teachers common instructional routines, common pacing and common assessments.LinkedIn: Getting Started: LinkedIn is an essential tool in today's job market. David O'Brien, Global Director of Human Resources with HydraForce, addresses what it is, why it is important and how to get started. He walks attendees through building their profile and how to begin using this powerful professional network. 7 p.m. Tuesday, Career Resource Center, 40 E. Old Mill Road, Lake Forest, free for CRC memmbers, $20 for non-members, 847-295-5626To the Lake County Forest Preserves board: Now the deer have six months to live and enjoy their lives. In October, they will be shot and killed again for another six months. Can't you use the non-lethal birth control instead of killing? Why do humans always kill first? I live by Lyons Woods and you killed so many in the last two years I don't see any of them anymore, and they do not raid my bird-feeders any more. That is very sad to me.A year ago, Sykora said $19 million worth of scholarships were awarded at the exhibit. This year, the number climbed to more than $43 million, he said. Many of the students get multiple offers before selecting one. In 2017, he said approximately 250 students took part and this year it was more than 380."It is an honor and a privilege to be afforded the opportunity to serve in this capacity in the department I have called home for nearly 25 years," Anderson said in the release. "In any leadership role I've held, I have always been committed to teamwork, training and sound decision-making, and I promise to continue to work within those values as deputy chief.""We are ecstatic that our local legislators believe that the time is now for women to be equal under our U.S. Constitution," Welch said. "There is simply no reason for a no vote and we are thrilled that senators Connelly, (John) Curran (R-Woodridge), (Jennifer) Bertino-Tarrant (D-Shorewood) and 40 other state senators agree. Now on to the House of Representatives."Last summer, two Park Ridge boys were taken into police custody after they reportedly appeared in a Snapchat video holding what police said was a real handgun and threatening to use it during summer school that day. Police, who learned about the post through an anonymous tip, said they believed the school referred to in the video was Maine South, because one of the boys was a student there."I wrote 1,200 jingles when I was in Chicago, which meant I wrote a lot. You have to get to the point very quickly. You get 30 seconds worth of film. It is an action and a voice-over or some actors doing a short little play. I look at it, listen to the rhythm of speech and look at what's going to work with that," he said.The district reached a settlement with the Internal Revenue Service, which forgave most of the district's $8.4 million debt. The district paid the IRS $320,000 and paid the accounting firm that negotiated the settlement. The district also made a $186,000 payment to the state for costs cited in a 2014 audit."It was like, a relief for me, I was able to talk with somebody on what I was going through, how my pregnancy started. I didn't know what was going to happen to my body, how my body was going to change," she said. "They practically showed me everything."The jail staff has worked to identify people for the program, Cantrell said, but she and other judges can also do that since they see many cases that aren't necessarily drug related but a defendant might have a substance abuse issue.But Shelton said she did not do so for her own campaign and only looked at campaign items on her work computer "with materials sent to me."Here we stand as a nation with critical issues in Syria, Russian relations, trade war with China and illegal immigration crimes. All of these are very demanding on our nations leadership and critical to our future. So to muddle up the nation's critical decisions, our FBI focuses on political witch hunts focused mainly on an affair that our president had over 11 years ago? Does anyone of substance really care about this affair? I do believe the nation has more real life problems.Bridge at US 50 and Colorado 115 named in honor of slain deputy

The bridge at US Highway 50 and Colorado 115 was named in honor of Fremont County Sheriff Deputy Jason Schwartz 20 years after his death.For multinational corporations operating in China, repatriating cash from their subsidiaries has always been an important but challenging issue.

China maintains a strict system of foreign exchange controls, meaning funds flowing into and out of China are tightly regulated. Other laws and regulations  such as the Company Law, relevant tax regulations, as well as Chinas transfer pricing rules  impose additional barriers to profit repatriation as well.

In this environment, businesspeople need to understand and incorporate a profit repatriation strategy from the very beginning to ensure access the profits earned.

There are several ways to repatriate profits from China. The most obvious method is for the companys China-based entity to pay dividends directly to its foreign parent company. However, this is subject to certain prerequisites.

As an alternative, many multinational corporations use intercompany payments, such as service fees or royalties, to remit cash from China. Other Chinese subsidiaries remit undistributed profits by extending a loan to a foreign related company with which it has an equity relationship.

Below, we introduce and analyze the pros and cons of each method to provide investor some initial references for their planning.

Remitting profits as dividends

Remitting profits as dividends is the most direct and common way to distribute profits. However, this is subject to certain prerequisites, which are usually regarded as constraints.

First, a foreign invested enterprise (FIE) can only repatriate profit after its registered capital has been injected within the time limits as set out in the companys Article of Association.

Second, an FIE generally can only repatriate profit once a year after the annual audit and tax compliance process. This is to ensure a 25 percent Corporate Income Tax (CIT) had been paid up with regard to the profit to be distributed.

Third, no profits can be distributed before the losses accumulated in the previous years have been made up.

The FIE can only distribute dividends out of its accumulated profits, that is to say, the accumulated losses from the previous year must be more than offset by the profits.

According to relevant laws and regulations, the loss incurring in a tax year is deductible from corporate income before tax, and can be carried forward to the subsequent five years to be set off if the current year profit is not enough to make up the losses. After that, the loss still needs to be recovered before profits distribution, but it can only happen after tax clearance.

Fourth, not all profits can be repatriated after tax clearance.

For example, a wholly foreign owned enterprises (WFOE) has to place 10 percent of its annual after-tax profits into a mandatory surplus reserve fund until it reaches 50 percent of the FIEs registered capital. Besides, the investors usually allocate a portion of after-tax profits to the staff welfare and incentives fund, though these are not mandatorily required.

Finally, the dividend is subject to additional 10 percent withholding CIT when repatriating to foreign investors, with limited exceptions.

If a double tax avoidance agreement (DTA) is available, and the parent company qualifies as the beneficial owner, a preferential withholding CIT rate of five percent or even lower may apply.

And if non-resident enterprises decided to re-invest the dividends derived from FIEs into projects encouraged by the country, the withholding CIT on this part of the dividends can enjoy deferral treatments by fulfilling certain conditions.

Below, we take the WFOE as an example to demonstrate the tax implication and reserve requirements of repatriating profits by dividends.



Withholding tax deferral for foreign investment

On September 29, 2018, the Ministry of Finance (MOF), State Administration of Taxation (SAT), National Development and Reform Committee (NDRC), and Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) jointly released The Notice on Widening the Scope of Application Regarding the Provisional Deferral Treatment for Withholding Tax on Distributed Profits used for Direct Re-investment by Foreign Investors (Caishui [2018] No.102, or Circular 102), as one of the measures to further promote foreign investment.

According to Circular 102, qualified non-resident enterprises can defer income tax as long as they reinvest equity investment incomes such as dividends and bonuses derived from resident enterprises directly into projects and sectors not prohibited by the country. Previously, only those re-invested into projects and sectors encouraged by the country are eligible for the deferral treatment.

Projects and sectors not prohibited by the country refer to those not listed as prohibited sectors as specified in the Special Administrative Measures (Negative List) for Foreign Investment.

Dividends and bonuses received by foreign investors on or after January 1, 2018 are eligible for the withholding tax deferral treatment and a refund for the tax already paid could be applied. Eligible foreign investors can also apply for the treatment retrospectively within three years from the date the tax payment was made and claim a refund.

Paying intercompany fees to foreign investors

When confronted with the constraints of remitting dividends, many multinational corporations attempt to repatriate profit from China via intercompany payments.

Often, they attempt to achieve this by charging for supporting services (such as human resources, information technology, or financing) or intangible assets (such as trademark, patent, or know-how) provided to Chinese affiliates.

In comparison with remitting dividends directly, profit repatriation through intercompany payments has some advantages for some investors. Because there are less prerequisites, intercompany payments are often easy way to

repatriate profits.

For example, the FIE can make intercompany payments without going through the annual audit and tax compliance process. Further, the company can make intercompany payments when needed, rather than once per year for dividend remittance.

Remitting money through intercompany payments are more tax efficient as well. Although the intercompany transactions are subject to turnover taxes, surcharges, and possible withholding CIT, these intercompany payments

can be deducted from the CIT taxable income by fulfilling certain requirements.

Despite these many advantages, profit repatriation through intercompany payments bears more risk for tax investigation. Chinese tax authorities put special scrutiny on intercompany service fees, and royalties paid by Chinese enterprises to the overseas related parties, because they regard the practice as a tool for avoiding tax and shifting profits.

This is particularly the case when the payment is lack of business substance, when the payment is large, or when the recipient is located in low profit jurisdictions; the tax authorities are very likely to conduct special anti-avoidance investigations on such transactions.

Separately, the tax efficiency of this method could be further impacted when the provision of service in China by the foreign enterprises is deemed to constitute a permanent establishment (PE). In such case, the service fees will be subject to CIT at 25 percent on the deemed profit rate of 15 to 50 percent, unless a CIT exemption applies under a DTA.

Service fees are subject to VAT, as well as other surcharges, including urban construction and maintenance tax (UCMT), education surcharge (ES), and local education surcharge (LES). Whether it is subject to CIT depends

on whether the provision of service constitutes a PE.

Royalty remittances are subject to a 10 percent withholding CIT and six percent VAT, as well as surcharges (UCMT, ES, and LES). The statutory CIT withholding tax rate of 10 percent can be reduced to a lower rate if a tax treaty is applicable.

Chinas position on intercompany payments

Under Chinas transfer pricing rules, intercompany payments are only deductible when they comply with the arms length principle.

China defines arms length intercompany services as beneficial service transactions that are priced according to business practices and fair prices for transactions conducted between non-related parties under identical or similar circumstances.

There are two issues that need to be analyzed here: first, whether the service is beneficial in nature, which is relevant to the authentication of the service provided; second, whether the service is charged under the arms length principle (that is, the rationality of the pricing mechanism for the service fee paid).

For intra-group royalties, Chinas tax authorities hold the idea that profit derived from transferring or licensing intangible assets should be distributed based on the enterprises contributions to the value of the intangibles.

That is to say, certain overseas related parties might be not qualified to receive royalties at all or can only receive royalties to a limited amount.

Under this condition, companies repatriating profits through intercompany payments have to maintain transaction documents as detailed as possible for demonstrating the authentic and beneficial nature of the intra-group transactions, in the case they are challenged by the tax authorities. This substantially increases the compliance burden to the enterprises.

Extending loans to foreign related company

An FIE may also remit undistributed profits by extending a loan.

In comparison with the other two channels introduced above, this channel is not only subject to various prerequisites, but also confronted with stricter scrutiny from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange

(SAFE) and its local branches.

First, an FIE can only extend loan to a foreign company when the overseas company is a related party with which the FIE has an equity relationship.

Second, an FIE can only start to extending overseas loans after it has been established for one year. Both the FIE and overseas loan recipient should have good record in complying with the foreign exchange rules.

Third, overseas lending is limited to 30 percent of the owners equity as shown in the latest financial report. Within this limit, the FIE can go through a standard registration in SAFE. For offshore lending that is over the limit, a case-by-case SAFE examination and approval will apply. And the FIE will not be allowed to extend any new loans before the loan ratio falls below the limit.

Fourth, the overseas lending should be in line with general business principles. For example, the rate of loan interests must be higher than zero. Further, the overseas shareholding company is generally expected to repay the money within five years.

Beyond that, the FIE who lends the money should report to local branch of peoples bank or SAFE for record-filing. However, the FIE has no tax implications at the time of extending the loans. It is only required to pay 10 percent withholding tax and 6.72 percent VAT and surcharges on the interest income, and the CIT paid in China may be used later to offset tax liability incurred in the foreign country if there is DTA in place.

Accordingly, extending overseas loans can be used to repatriate cash based on the company groups own needs.

Study repatriation channels carefully

Among the above-mentioned channels, remitting profits as dividends is the most straightforward way, but it is subject to many prerequisites. Intercompany payment is a comparatively more convenient and tax efficient alternative, but it is subject to a high level of scrutiny from tax authorities.

An FIE can also achieve cash repatriation by extending loans to the oversea entity. However, the overseas entity must be the FIEs related parties, and the foreign exchange controls for this method is high.

In practice, there exists some other indirect channels, such as remitting cash in the name of outbound direct investment (ODI), remitting cash in the name of qualified domestic limited partner (QDLP), or overseas loan under domestic guarantee.

However, none of these channels can avoid high compliance requirements and corresponding policy risks.

Dezan Shira & Associates advises FIEs to carefully study the cash repatriation channels from the very beginning. Considering no channel is one-size-fits-all, companies should arrange and incorporate the cash repatriation strategy based on its specific characteristics, such as the investment plans, operational goals, financial situation, as well as

shareholders preference to different risks.

Through careful planning and implementation, FIEs can collect required documents efficiently, control for potential risks, and a reasonable arrangement for cash flow.

(Editors Note: This article was originally published in April 2018 and has been updated to include new developments.)A Chinese farmer who found and handed over five 2,000-year-old bronze swords was rewarded with 15,000 yuan (2,400 U.S. dollars) by the city government of Lianyuan Tuesday.

The 56-year-old farmer Li Xinding from central China's Hunan Province discovered the swords in August last year when he was herding sheep in a river bank after a flood.

He brought them home and reported them to the police.

Experts spent months examining the swords before dating them to the Warring States period (475-221 B.C.).

"The bronze swords have a rusty surface and sharp tip. One of the swords was broken, while another four were well preserved," said Gao Chenglin, deputy head of the Hunan archaeological research institute.

Gao estimated that the place where they were found may have been a drill ground in ancient time, or that passerby had buried the swords in the riverbank in an emergency.

"The bronze swords are valuable cultural relics for China and significant to the study of the history and culture of Lianyuan," said Liang Yuqing, head of the city's publicity department.Remarks by H.E. Ambassador Liu Xiaoming at the



Launch of the Multi-language Editions of

'Xi Jinping: The Governance of China (Volume II)'





One Great George Street, London, 11 April 2018





Your Royal Highness,

Minister Jiang Jianguo,

Chairman Zheng Bijian,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Dear Friends,





Good morning!





It is a real pleasure to join you at this special and important event: the launch of the multi-language editions of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China (Volume II)." On behalf of the Chinese Embassy, I would like to extend my warm welcome to everyone present today.





President Xi said, "This is a time that calls for theories and will surely produce theories; this is a time that calls for thoughts and will surely produce thoughts."





In response to the call of the times, last October's 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed the Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. It serves as a guide for China's future development and shares the Chinese wisdom with the world.





The book "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" embodies the essence of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. Its publication is of great importance to both China and the world.





First, this book is a guide to understanding China and China's thoughts.





The first volume of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" was published in 2014. The second volume contains 99 articles and 29 photos of President Xi dated from August 2014 to the 19th Party Congress.





The book has 17 sections, each focusing on a major theoretical or practical issue. The articles include remarks outlining major policies, speeches telling China's story and highlights of discussions regarding implementation of policies. All of them reflect the deep thoughts and the vivid language of the author and far-reaching implications of his thoughts.





These two volumes form a comprehensive system of rich thoughts and theories. They reveal the evolvement and essence of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. For those who are hoping to gain a deep understanding of China's path, ideas and plans in the new era, these books are the most authoritative works to look to.





Second, this book carries the fine traditions of the Chinese civilization and will guide China's development in the new era.





The development path and governance system of a country is closely related to its historical heritage, cultural traditions and economic and social development level.





The second volume of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" carries on the humane spirit and cultural heritage of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. This is particularly reflected in the author's understanding of the ancient Chinese wisdom on the governance of the country and the people.





In this book, President Xi also reflects on China's efforts in a century of revolution, development and reform in modern times.

He captured the new features of China's economic development and the new changes in the principal contradiction facing the Chinese society.

And he designs a grand blueprint for China's development in the new era.





With its root deep in the Chinese civilization and its insights into the trend of times, this book can well serve as a guide for the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people in the pursuit of the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.





Third, this book is a key to understanding China's wisdom and sharing it with the world.





After four extraordinary decades of reform and opening up, China has grown from the tenth largest economy in the world to the second largest economy. Nearly 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty.





Many people call this a miracle and are curious to know China's secret to success.





This "Chinese miracle" did not fall from the sky. It is the result of the relentless efforts of over 1.3 billion Chinese people led by the Communist Party of China.





"Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" tells the stories of the Chinese miracle, the Chinese stories, and the Chinese spirit.





The governance experience of the Communist Party of China, which is the focal point of this book, offers an alternative path for developing countries to achieve modernization. It enriches the governance thoughts of mankind. It embodies the Chinese wisdom and Chinese solution that are important contribution to world peace and development.





Fourth, this book is a call for action and a demonstration of the sincerity of a responsible leader.





The principle of "putting people first" runs through the whole book of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China." Here are a few lines from the book I wish to share with you:

"Always place people above all else in our hearts."

"The people's aspiration for a better life is our goal."

"The biggest political power lies in winning people's hearts."





These plain words reflect a deep love for the people, and a firm determination and strong sense of responsibility to serve the people wholeheartedly.





More importantly, the book reflects the author's global vision in the articles and paragraphs about the future of the entire mankind. He regards the Chinese Dream as part of the larger picture of the World Dream. He points to the direction and gives answers to such major questions as where China should be going, where the world should be going, and what needs to be done.





This is the strategic and global vision of an outstanding leader and statesman for his country and for the world.





Ladies and gentlemen,





Historically, London has provided breeding grounds for thoughts and inspirations for civilizations and ideologies. It was the birth place of "The Communist Manifesto" 170 years ago. Not far from here, the British Museum witnessed the completion of the masterpiece of Karl Marx entitled "Capital, A Critique of Political Economy" over 150 years ago.





Today, London bears witness to the launch of another important work, the second volume of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China." This event is of far-reaching significance to the exchanges and mutual learning between thoughts, cultures and civilizations of the East and the West.





It is also a major event in China-UK relationship. This relationship has been leading the relations between China and other major Western countries, to which cultural and people-to-people exchanges have been an important contributing factor.





At the beginning of this year, Prime Minister May paid a successful visit to China. During the visit, the leaders of our two countries reaffirmed their commitment to the China-UK "Golden Era" and agreed to build a more strategic, practical, global and inclusive relationship.





I sincerely hope that China and the UK will seize the opportunity of today's event to enhance people-to-people exchanges and promote mutual learning between different civilizations. I hope we will work together to set our relationship as an exemplar of major-country relations that feature mutual respect, equality, mutual trust and win-win cooperation. And I hope we will support each other in realizing the Chinese Dream and British Dream respectively.





William Shakespeare once said,

"Books are the nutrient of the whole world. A life without books is like a life without sunlight; wisdom without books is like a wingless bird."





As we are faced with the greatest global changes in a century, the book "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" will bring the nutrient of knowledge, the sunlight of the times and the wings of wisdom to the world.





The book will help the international community gain a full and deeper understanding of China's past, present and future.





And it seeks to urge the international community to come together to build a community with a shared future for mankind and create a more beautiful future for human society.





In conclusion, I wish the launch of the multi-language editions of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China (Volume II)" a great success!





Thank you!



China is one of the few states in the world that produces almost every type of goods and services known to the marketfrom inexpensive synthetic fabrics to household goods and plastics to modern high-tech products. At the same time, dealing with Chinese business people can create a headache for foreigners, especially for those starting in for the first time. Therefore, if you are looking to do business with Chinese partners, it is strongly recommended that you get acquainted with a few elementary Dos and Don'ts to minimize your own entrepreneurial risks and maximize your chances of success.







The essence of negotiation





Each culture has its own norms for communication, and perhaps nowhere are these more essential than in the context of business negotiation. Negotiations are generally considered a method by which people settle differences, where they have: 1. Equal opportunity to monitor the situation and make decisions; 2. Conflict of interests; 3. Dependence on each other; and 4. Desire to achieve results.





The presence of these four factors is inherent to all types of negotiations, regardless of the nationality of the participants. However, due to unique historical development, behavioral manifestations during negotiations in China can differ significantly from those in Western countries. Following are some important rules and principles, which if you internalize and observe can help you conduct successful negotiations with Chinese business people.

Eloquence versus listening

The first thing to be aware of is the fact that in China, greater importance is attached to listening carefully than to speaking beautifully. That is, while in Western countries emphasis is placed on eloquence when speaking to business partners, in China listening attentively to the interlocutor is among the highest priorities. No wonder an old Chinese proverb says that a dog is good not because it barks loudly, just as a person is wise not because he speaks beautifully.





Thus, when negotiating in China, you need to understand that the decisive factor for success will not be how articulate you are, but how closely you can read between the lines. This is because, in an effort to save face, the speaker cannot always say directly what he or she really thinks.

Criticism versus respect

Respect can manifest itself not only in your willingness to listen, but also in your calm rejection of provocation. The one who behaves respectfully, according to the Chinese point of view, radiates intellectual superiority. Proceeding from this, it is advisable to devote more time to favorable conversation and to avoid criticizing your counterpart as much as possible. Ideally, any statement you make should be complimentary, not critical. This is especially important if your Chinese partner is surrounded by his or her colleagues or subordinates.





Argumentation versus prudence

Similarly, in Western culture great importance is attached to argument-based persuasion tactics and expression of critical thoughts and opinions, which, according to Chinese understanding, is not always an appropriate approach. "A good man does not argue; he who argues is not a good man," once stated the great ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, author of the classical Taoist philosophical treatise. That is, while in the Western world the concept of critical thinking lies in expression and debate, and the best decision is born out of precise argumentation and the open exchange of ideas, in China prudent and measured decisions will be a priority. Be aware that in China, preserving the honor of your business partner might be more important than the search for the best solution through a public debate in front of other attendees. In fact, if you really want your Chinese partner to change his mind or to suggest a better solution, talk in private and in a helpful rather than demanding tone.





Body language: differences in perception

Often, the Chinese perceive the body language of Westerners as being obtrusive and impulsive. The Western manner of communicating may be seen as relatively harsh and dominant, while in their view modesty and restraint during negotiations is a sign of good upbringing and prudence.





Likewise, direct eye contact and a strong handshake as is valued in the West do not always find proper reception among Chinese colleagues. If in the West, eye contact with the interlocutor symbolizes openness and frankness, in Asia, including in China, it can be a sign of bad manners. A too-strong handshake is considered a manifestation of excessive aggression or disrespect for one's counterpart.

Manner of speaking

While in Western culture it is usual to constantly demonstrate interest with such interjected sounds as "hmm" or "yes," in China this behavior is less common. Instead, it is customary to listen to the speaker without any accompanying sounds and only to occasionally nod your head. This is why Western partners sometimes interpret the absence of verbal markers as a lack of interest or a problem with the discussion. Moreover, long silences in conversation are typical for Chinese, as for many Asians. These pauses serve to formulate thoughts and are not a sign of slow thinking. Westerners perceive such moments of silence as embarrassing and may try to keep the discussion going, which can lead one's Chinese counterpart to feel overwhelmed by the uninterrupted conversation. Therefore, be patient. Allow your partner time to think.





Praise and modesty

Often during negotiation, Chinese partners will play down their successes and try to appear modest, while even minor successes on your part will be highly praised. That is, concealing their achievements and singing yours can, if you're not careful, lead to your own harmful overestimation of your position, which could mean an inadequate analysis of potential risks. Taking this strategy into account, you will be wise to give up self-praise and pay more attention to your Chinese partners. Speak openly and with respect for their merits and importance, despite the fact that they may respond humbly and deny their own accomplishments.

Negotiations after the contract

This is probably one of the most difficult challenges for foreigners working with Chinese partners, especially when it comes to cooperating with some small enterprises located outside of major cities. The fact is that sometimes business negotiations might begin not before, but after the signing of the contract! Here it is necessary to understand that the modern legal system of the Western format appeared in China just decades ago and is still imperfect. Moreover, among some ordinary Chinese entrepreneurs, a contract is primarily a presentation of intent, and not a binding document. Here's an example. You made a purchase order to a small Chinese company by including all the specifications for the goods in your contract. However, once the product is ready to be delivered, you are surprised to discover that not all the goods were made from the same materials as was stated in the contract. While your blood pressure rises, your Chinese partner declares that the additional material they used is a very similar one and there is no sacrifice in the quality of the goods itself.

Therefore, if you start working with a small Chinese company, you should consider what you will do in such a case or how you can work to avoid misunderstandings with your Chinese business partner. The best way to avoid such a surprise is to monitor the production process closely; and for this you may need a trustworthy local manager who is willing and capable of overseeing the entire process.

At the end of the day, the more familiar you can become with the host culture and its business practices, the greater your chances of fruitful outcomes from your entrepreneurial endeavors in China.

Dr. Konstantin Schamber is an international entrepreneur, expert in intercultural collaboration between China, Central Asia and Germany, and visiting lecturer at several business schools in Europe. He is Managing Director of the Center for strategic intercultural communication GmbH in Germany and Founder of Business Innovation Congress.The third largest Mexican airline Interjet announced on Wednesday it is seeking an alliance with China's Hainan Airlines in the second half of 2018 to attract more tourists from Asia.

Interjet's Executive Director Julio Gamero told the press the two airlines are negotiating details of the alliance, saying the cooperation follows the general trend of globalization in this industry.

"Mexico's economic development will not slow down, and we are going to further connect with the world through business and tourism," Interjet's Director General Jose Luis Garza said, adding that the prospect of Mexico's tourism is positive.

In 2017, Interjet transported 3 million passengers on international flights, a 35 percent increase compared with last year.

Hainan Airlines,a leading airline in China, opened its Beijing-Mexico City route on March 21 under the Mexican and Chinese governments' initiative to improve air connectivity.Trade protectionism worldwide has so far been "more bark than bite," said former director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Wednesday on the sidelines of the 2018 Boao Forum for Asia (BFA).





Pascal Lamy, former director-general of the WTO, speaks with media on Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at this year's Boao Forum for Asia. [Photo by Guo Yiming/China.org.cn]







Pascal Lamy, who is now president emeritus of the Notre Europe-Jacques Delors Institute, told China.org.cn that Asian economies should still push back on protectionism, even if most of it rests only on rhetoric.

"World trade today is more open than it was two years ago," he said, saying that 2017 turned out to be a remarkably good year for world trade with 4.5 percent year-on-year growth.

However, alarming trade protectionism has become one of the biggest concerns for Asian economies and constitutes the biggest uncertainty for emerging economies in 2018, according to several BFA reports released on April 8.

Ten years after the 2008 financial crisis, the propensity for protectionism is still very serious in various countries, and "the negative influence of protectionism on the foreign trade of all countries across the world is still remarkable," says one report.

Asian economies need to push back and further open themselves up to global markets, said Lamy.

He said that Asia will remain the main engine of world growth in the decade to come, and needs to further achieve economic integration either within its own mechanisms like ASEAN or via de facto integration in global supply chains, like those among China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, which are developing under the pressure of changes in technology.

"The more Asia integrates, the better the rest of the world will behave," Lamy added.



Mongolian Prime Minister Ukhnaa Khurelsukh stressed the huge potential of economic and trade cooperation between China and Mongolia on Wednesday, calling for more extensive bilateral cooperation in the areas of mining, energy and environmental protection.





He made the remarks at the China-Mongolia Business Forum which was organized by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT) and the China Chamber of International Commerce (CCOIC) in Beijing.





China has been Mongolia's largest foreign investor and trade partner for years. "Mongolia and China are friendly neighbors connected by common mountains and rivers," Khurelsukh said, adding that companies from the two countries should seize the opportunities to boost imports and exports.





Jiang Zengwei, head of CCPIT, pointed out that China and Mongolia should expand pragmatic cooperation in various fields, and seek deeper economic ties in a bid to achieve mutual benefit and win-win outcomes.





According to data revealed by Jiang, over the past 10 years, the contribution of bilateral trade with China to Mongolian economic growth has reached nearly 50 percent. China's direct investment in Mongolia has surpassed US$4 billion, accounting for one third of Mongolia's foreign investment. Almost 100,000 jobs have been created in Mongolia through Chinese companies' investment in the fields of infrastructure, mining and people's livelihood projects.





Jiang noted that China's complete industrial system can meet Mongolia's increasing demands for funding, technology and management experience brought about by Mongolia's accelerating urbanization and industrialization process.





He pointed out that the two countries have been making efforts to speed up the linking of the Belt and Road Initiative and Mongolia's Prairie Road development initiative so as to promote economic and trade exchanges between the two countries.





China and Mongolia also signed a memorandum of understanding for cooperation on commercial laws at the forum. Moreover, companies from the two countries signed more than 20 cooperation agreements in various fields such as energy, construction and logistics.



Austria has set up a consulate general in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, with Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen attending the opening ceremony Wednesday.

Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl said the consulate general in Chengdu would help deepen cooperation between China and Austria in foreign affairs, economy, science, education and culture, and boost exchanges between people from the two countries.

Chengdu is the economic hub of southwest China, and Sichuan is known as home to giant pandas.

Five cubs have been born in Austria after pandas Yang Yang and Long Hui arrived there in 2003. The father, 16-year-old Long Hui, died in 2016.

Three of the cubs have been returned to Chengdu according to the agreement between the two countries.

Van der Bellen said the giant pandas were very popular in Austria, and they hope a male panda can be sent to Austria to see more cubs born.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz also attended the ceremony.

Chengdu is the last stop for the Austrian delegation to China. On Sunday, leadership of the two countries agreed to establish a Sino-Austrian friendly strategic partnership and advance bilateral pragmatic cooperation.Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with incumbent and incoming members of the Board of Directors of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) in Boao, south China's Hainan Province, April 11, 2018. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei)





When economic multilateralism and free trade is under attacks from the erstwhile proponents, the enthusiasts for globalization have found a new hero to espouse their cause both with words and actions. Chinese President Xi Jinping has stepped forward to side with economic liberalism at a critical juncture in history.

There wasn't a better occasion to present his detailed globalist vision than the Boao Forum for Asia that has emerged as a meeting place for leaders, financial wizards, policymakers and practitioners from Asia and the rest of the world. Dubbed initially as "mini Davos," the platform is poised to outstrip other similar gatherings in the coming years.

Both Davos and Boao provide an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and discussions on economic issues. Xi, in his speech to the Davos conference last year, voiced support for free trade and the removal of unnecessary barriers that hamper unbridled economic activities. He further elaborated his ideas at the inaugural speech at this year's edition of Boao Forum for Asia.

The theme of the four-day event  "An Open and Innovative Asia for a World of Greater Prosperity"  resonated with Xi's speech, which spelled out an elaborate idea for the conference which aims to promote consensus-based cooperation for global trade.

Put simply, Xi made a fervent case for globalization in his speech. He said that humanity has a major choice to make between openness and isolation, and warned that those going for isolation will be left behind and ultimately consigned to the dustbin of history.

He spoke at length on the arduous journey of China from a backward nation to the second biggest economy of the world in the last 40 years. He said China embraced the world by opening up and carved out a place through sheer hard work and determination.

The Chinese leader promised that his people were ready to share their expertise and vision with others and announced measures to further open up the economy. This indirectly addressed some of the recent U.S. concerns related to tariffs imposed by China on imports of certain items including cars.

Xi reiterated that the Chinese experience shows that there is more than one path that can lead a nation to the height of glory and progress. The Chinese nation opted to follow the path of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and it hugely paid off.

Thus, Xi also made a plea for a socialist model of governance practiced in China that is based on democratic centralism and targeted economic liberalism by following the international system and economic norms. Its best example is China's adherence to the WTO regime.

Xi's speech shows that China is an important global player because it has become a key anchor and driver for the world economy. It is also playing role for global peace and development due to a direct link between the progress and growth of China and the rest of world.

He offered a vision for community of shared values based on cooperative structures. China on its part will continue to improve through reform and take steps in innovation to boost development, increase openness, expand cooperation and work with the rest of the world for benefit of all.

For the world visualized by Xi, there is no place for zero sum games and a cold war mentality. When you are aiming for "win-win or all win" goals, then it is only possible through openness and connectivity. Such objectives need a globalist vision that will lead to progress. Conversely, seclusion will result in regression.

When the world is facing profound challenges of readjustments, there is a new round of industrial revolution offering opportunities and challenges. Xi listed threats of war, hunger, poverty, climate change and diseases as formidable obstacles for world cooperation but said that it can be tackled through collective efforts.

Xi didn't forget to highlight the role of 1.3 billion Chinese who have made tremendous progress in the last 40 years since the start of the opening up. The Chinese people have embraced the world with an open heart and played a significant role in contributing to the world growth. China will never shut its door to openness and cooperation with others.

The speech is a plea for coming closer together by shunning differences so that all could live in peace and prosperity. It is a great vision for inclusive model of development and rejection of prevalent exclusive approach that benefits only a handful of the global elite.

Sajjad Malik is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SajjadMalik.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.



 Flash

Beijing and Tokyo have agreed to end the eight-year stall of their high-level economic dialogue with State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi making his first official visit to Japan starting on Sunday.

Since becoming foreign minister in 2013, Wang has yet to pay an official visit to the country in which he once served as China's ambassador.

During the visit from Sunday to Tuesday, Wang will co-chair the fourth China-Japan High-level Economic Dialogue with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang announced on Wednesday.

Experts said the visit and the dialogue's resumption mark major progress in improving the countries' bilateral ties, which fell to a record low in 2012, the year Japan unilaterally decided to "nationalize" China's Diaoyu Islands.

The dialogue, the countries' highest-level bilateral exchange forum in economic affairs, saw its first three rounds in 2007, 2009 and 2010, gathering leading officials from ministries in charge of areas such as commerce, foreign affairs and treasury.

The fourth dialogue will be held in Tokyo on Monday, and "officials in charge of relevant departments under the two governments will attend", the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on Wednesday.

Geng said Wang's official visit serves as a measure to boost high-level exchanges and communication.

The two sides are expected to increase mutual trust, accumulate more consensus, manage and control divergences and consolidate the improving momentum of China-Japan ties, Geng said.

Jiang Ruiping, vice-president of China Foreign Affairs University and an expert on the Japanese economy, said Wang's visit and the dialogue will make it possible for the two sides to address together a range of key economic issues in bilateral, regional and global contexts.

As the world's second-and third-largest economies, China and Japan have both the duty and the ability to boost global economic governance, stabilize world trade, currency and investment, and tackle the impulses that frustrate globalization, Jiang said.

Their bilateral trade ended a five-year decline last year as a result of the recovery of global trade and investment as well as the thawing bilateral political ties, Jiang said. Flash

The allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria seem like a front for settling scores between major powers and that was obvious in the recent tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump against Russia.

In one of his tweets on Wednesday, Trump described the relationship with Russia as the worse ever been.

"Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War," he tweeted, a day after his country and Russia clashed diplomatically in the UN Security Council over the draft resolutions to deal with the allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria by the Syrian forces.

Both powers vetoed each other's draft resolutions, with the Russians accusing the U.S. of prejudging the outcome of the investigation of the chemical weapons use in Douma district east of Damascus while the Americans said the Russians were trying to carry out the investigation their way.

But for many observers, the chemical weapons pretext is just a front behind which the U.S. aims at targeting Russia's interests in Syria, particularly after the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance has almost won the war in Syria, while the U.S. side has been largely marginalized.

For the U.S., undermining the Russian role in Syria is the main goal, while for Israel, eliminating the Iranian role is the main goal.

So the equation is Russia versus U.S. and Israel versus Iran.

Before his tweets on Wednesday, and while commenting on the chemical weapons allegations, Trump said "If it's Russia, if it's Syria, if it's Iran, if it's all of them together, we'll figure it out," he said, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin, "everybody's going to pay a price -- he will, everybody will."

After the U.S. warmongering rhetoric against Syria and its allies, Russia warned the U.S. of striking Syria.

Russia's envoy to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov said his country has warned the U.S. against striking Syria, stating that "Russia has warned U.S. representatives, publicly as well as through proper channels, over the grave consequences that could arise if these strikes happen and whether deliberately or otherwise Russian citizens are hurt."

Also, Russia's ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin said Wednesday that his country would respond to any U.S. missiles fired at Syria by shooting them down and targeting their launch sites.

In another tweet Wednesday, Trump made remarks about Russia's remarks of targeting U.S. missiles.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready, Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!" Trump tweeted.

After taunting Russia in his tweets, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Facebook that "smart" missiles would destroy any evidence of a suspected chemical weapons attack.

"Smart missiles should fly toward terrorists, not the legitimate government that has been fighting international terrorism for several years on its territory," she said.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu official twitter account reported that he spoke by telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin and reiterated that Israel will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria.

"I have a message to the rulers of Iran," Netanyahu said, warning "Do not put to test Israel's resolve."

This comes as Israel targeted the Syrian T-4 airbase in the central province of Homs a couple of days ago, killing 14 soldiers including Iranian fighters amid Iranian warnings.

On Wednesday, Iran vowed to retaliate for the recent attack on the T-4 base in Syria, while blaming Israel for the strike.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Wednesday that Israel's "crimes will not remain unanswered."

Meanwhile, Bouthaina Shabaan, the political and media adviser to President Bashar al-Assad, said Wednesday that her country is not fearing the U.S. threats of striking Syria.

In an interview with pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV late Wednesday, Shabaan said the U.S. threats of striking Syria aim to make more gains, stressing that consultations are ongoing among the allies of Syria and will not leave things to go Washington's way.

Shabaan said the results of the Syrian war have come against the Western approach in terms of the emergence of the Russian, Syrian, and Hezbollah alliance, calling it the "alliance of the future."

The axis of resistance, meaning the Syrian allies of Iran and Hezbollah, has its choices and dealing quietly, Shabaan said, adding that the rule of clashes has changed in favor of the Syrian side.

"The victory of Syria will change the map of the region and the world," she said, adding that Israel is feverishly trying to prolong the Syrian war "because it would be the biggest loser."

She said that Israel is the main ignitor of the war on Syria, adding that the Syrian and Russian sides have made all preparations after the Israeli attack on the T-4 airbase a couple of days ago.

Shaaban concluded by saying that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has always been strong and calm.



 Flash

Bouthaina Shabaan, the political and media adviser to President Bashar al-Assad, said Wednesday that her country is not fearing the U.S. threats of striking Syria.

In an interview with pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV on Wednesday, Shabaan said the U.S. threats of striking Syria aim to practice more pressure to make more gains.

She stressed that consultations are ongoing among the allies of Syria and they will not leave things to go Washington's way.

Her remarks come as the United States is banging the drums of war on Syria over allegations of toxic gas use by the Syrian army against the rebels in the capital Damascus' Eastern Ghouta countryside.

Last Saturday, the rebels in Douma district of Eastern Ghouta said the Syrian forces used chlorine gas in an attack on Douma, leaving many killed.

The Syrian government has denied the allegations and said the rebels were fabricating the incident to give a pretext to the United States and its Western allies to strike Syria.

Shabaan described the U.S. threats as part of a psychological war launched by the West to show strength after their failure in Syria.

She said the Syrian army's victory in Eastern Ghouta constituted a turning point in the course of the Syrian war.

Shabaan said the results of the Syrian war have come against the Western approach in terms of the emergence of the Russian, Syrian and Hezbollah alliance, calling it the "alliance of the future."

The "axis of resistance," referring to the Syrian allies of Iran and Hezbollah, has its choices in dealing with the U.S. threats, Shabaan said, adding that the rule of clashes has changed in favor of the Syrian side.

"The victory of Syria will change the map of the region and the world," she said, adding that Israel is feverishly trying to prolong the Syrian war.

She said that Israel is the main ignitor of the war in Syria, adding the Syrian and Russian sides have made all preparations after the Israeli attack on the T-4 Air Base a couple of days ago.



You are here: World

 Flash

U.S. President Donald Trump taunted Russia on Wednesday that missiles "will be coming" to Syria, as Washington was mulling a response to the suspected chemical weapons attack.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'" said Trump in a tweet on Wednesday morning.

"You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" Trump tweeted.

Trump has accused "President Putin, Russia and Iran" responsible for the attack due to their backing of the Syrian government in a tweet over the weekend.

Rebutting Trump's tweet on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Facebook later in the day that a missile strike could undermine the work of international inspectors who will examine the site of the suspected chemical attack.

The so-called "smart" missiles should be fired at terrorists, not at the legitimate government which has been fighting terrorists, Zakharova wrote.

Trump has been mulling a response to the alleged "chemical attack" on Saturday, with the possibility of U.S. military actions against the Syrian government looming large.

Activists, local rescuers, and rebels in Syria claim that Syrian government forces used chlorine gas on Saturday in an attack in Douma, a rebel-held area near capital Damascus.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry has denied the accusations, calling rebels' claims "premeditated pretexts." Flash

Moscow is considering measures to counter new U.S. sanctions, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday.

The U.S. Treasury announced Friday it had imposed new sanctions on 38 Russian individuals and entities, including seven business leaders and 17 senior officials, for their alleged "malign activities" around the world.

As a result of the punishment, all assets of the designated persons and entities that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction are frozen, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from dealing with them.

The new U.S. sanctions "are an attempt to attack us using unfair competition, to limit our development and to create tension in our economy and on the currency and stock markets," Medvedev said at the State Duma, Russia's lower house of the parliament.

One of the targets of the new U.S. sanction is Oleg Deripaska, the main owner of Rusal, one of the world's leading aluminum producers.

"This is not a fight against a concrete representative of big business. We understand that as we are not children. This is a struggle for markets, struggle against the largest suppliers of aluminum, non-ferrous and other metals," Medvedev said.

Talking about Russia's countermeasures, Medvedev said that possible targets could be U.S. securities as well as "a series of other goods which are supplied to our market or are produced by U.S. businesses on the territory of our country."

"There is no doubt that we will cope with this pressure, as we have already learned how to do this, and ultimately turn all these actions to the benefit of our own economy and our own economic development," Medvedev said. Flash

A senior Iranian Foreign Ministry official said Wednesday that the Western accusations about the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons against its people are fabricated.

The foreign minister's special assistant for political affairs, Hossein Jaberi Ansari, said Iran opposes employing chemical weapons by any party which is totally unacceptable.

The United States and its allies are threatening to carry out military action against the Syrian government under the pretext of chemical weapons use, he said after a meeting with Russia's special envoy on Syria Alexander Lavrentiev in the capital Tehran.

On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said that the allegations against the Syrian government over the use of chlorine gas were fabricated in an attack on Douma district in Eastern Ghouta countryside of Damascus.



You are here: World

 Flash

Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), dismissed his deputy Hwang Pyong So from his post as vice chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the country, official media reported Thursday.

"At the proposal of the chairman of the State Affairs Commission (SAC) of the DPRK, Deputy Hwang Pyong So was dismissed from the post of its vice-chairman," said Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The dismissal was formally made at a full session of the Supreme People's Assembly on Wednesday, according to the report.

From 2014 to 2017, Hwang served as Director of the Korean People's Army General Political Department.

Three other deputies -- Kim Ki Nam, Ri Man Gon and Kim Won Hong -- were also sacked.

The top leader proposed to appoint deputies Kim Jong Gak, Pak Kwang Ho, Thae Jong Su and Jong Kyong Thaek as SAC members. Flash





Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Ms. Carrie Lam (L) meets with Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on the sidelines of BOAO Forum for Asia on April 12, 2018. [Photo provided by Embassy of Pakistan in China]





Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Ms. Carrie Lam called on Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on the sidelines of BOAO Forum for Asia today.





The Chief Executive of Hong Kong commended the economic growth attained by Pakistan under the present Government and expressed the hope to further strengthen economic and people-to-people contacts.





The Prime Minister felicitated Ms. Carrie Lam on assuming office of the Chief Executive through a successful election process that manifested effectiveness of the unique model of "one country, two systems." The PM stated that Hong Kong is home to over 25,000 Pakistan origin residents and commended Hong Kong's policy of tolerance and interfaith harmony that is hallmark of its diversity.





The Prime Minister expressed satisfaction over participation of investors from Hong Kong who attended the 'Pakistan Investment Forum.' The PM said that Pakistan considers Hong Kong as a significant and largest free trade area and a super connector of the Belt and Road Initiative. The PM expressed the hope to organizing investment and trade promotion events, and B2B meetings in collaboration with the Government of Hong Kong.





The Prime Minister invited the Chief Executive of Hong Kong to visit Pakistan and emphasized that Hong Kong businessmen can expect excellent returns on investment in the fields of financial services, technology, logistics and infrastructure.





The Prime Minister said that enhanced people to people contacts is the key to strengthening relations and suggested a more liberal visa regime for Pakistani businessmen & tourists; and increase in scholarships for Pakistani students in universities of Hong Kong.



China Aviation Daily | Apr. 11, 2018

ATR and Mandarin Airlines, a regional subsidiary of Taiwan's flag carrier China Airlines, have signed a Global Maintenance Agreement (GMA). This comprehensive support package covers the repair, overhaul and pooling services of Line Replaceable Units, along with a door-to-door service through which ATR is providing transportation of spares to the airline's facilities.

This GMA covers the entire ATR fleet of the Taiwanese carrier, consisting of nine ATR 72-600s. World's leading turboprop manufacturer ATR hereby reaches a key milestone of more than 300 in-service aircraft under GMAs. Through ATR's flagship maintenance offer, Mandarin Airlines will benefit from an a la carte pay-by-the-hour maintenance package, with a high level of flexibility that makes it possible to meet a wide range of specific needs, depending on the operator's local resources, fleet and expected operations.

Mandarin Airlines' President, Jenny Tsao, declared: "In terms of maintenance and repair, the ATR GMA allows us to minimise our own stock level while maintaining an adequate level of protection. The delivery time for parts is very short, which means easier budget control for us and enhanced efficiency. Most of all, ATR's support is proving extremely useful when it comes to offering recommendations as we phase in our new fleet and learn how to make the most of it."

This maintenance agreement is part of a broader support from ATR who will be providing a full range of technical and engineering maintenance services, along with comprehensive training solutions for the airline's flight crew, mechanics and technicians. ATR is also supporting China Airlines and its subsidiaries to set-up in-house capabilities for ATR heavy maintenance, up to C-checks.

Tom Anderson, Senior Vice-President Programs and Customer Services of ATR stated: "Our partnership with Mandarin Airlines is a great example of ATR's commitment to anticipate and answer the various needs of our operators worldwide. Mandarin Airlines will indeed also benefit from continuous monitoring of the aircraft configuration to enhance safety and reliability even further."

Mandarin Airlines started operating its first ATR 72-600s in February 2018. Taiwan's domestic network counts 1.2 million passengers annually and the airline's aircraft are already providing essential air services within the country.

Contributed by ATR



Time city moved from a gateway to platform Updated: 2018-04-12 07:17 (HK Edition)

HK's traditional role is fading as the mainland opens up, Paul Yeung notes, offering the city new opportunities to facilitate globalization

Hong Kong is no longer China's gateway to the rest of the world; this statement is not a negative comment - it just reflects the new situation of the country's development and highlights the importance of re-positioning Hong Kong.

President Xi Jinping said when opening the Boao Forum for Asia on Tuesday that China will open its doors "wider and wider" to foreign investors. One concrete measure is the removal of caps on foreign equity in banks, securities firms and insurance companies by the end of this year, as had been promised earlier.

Over the years, Hong Kong has successfully played a unique role as China's gateway to the outside world when the Chinese mainland still tightly restricted market access. However, with the mainland accelerating its opening-up and removing more and more restrictions on foreign investment, Hong Kong's gateway role becomes less and less significant.

Times change. Making sense of the timing of Xi's speech is essential. There are three points to be noted. Firstly, the annual Boao Forum is Xi's first opportunity for home-court diplomacy since his unanimous re-election as the president, beginning his second term in office. Secondly, the United States has proposed tariffs on Chinese goods and trade tensions between the world's two biggest economies have rarely been higher. Thirdly and most importantly, China - the world's second-largest economy - is at a critical stage of advancing and deepening the reform and opening-up process launched 40 years ago. Given these circumstances, Xi, on behalf of China, gave the world a clear message as to how China is going to respond to the new era of globalization, as well as grave uncertainties brought by growing protectionism.

So far, local commentators have offered two opposing arguments about Hong Kong's role as the country further opens up. One is quite pessimistic, suggesting Hong Kong is losing its significance; and the other one is slightly confident, arguing Hong Kong can still play the gateway role as the country is unlikely to open completely in all economic aspects over a short time span. However, there should be a third perspective - a neutral and objective one. If Hong Kong can fully understand the vision and mission of Beijing, we will realize that it is a golden opportunity for Hong Kong to change its role from a "gateway" to "platform".

Last year Xi defended globalization at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Earlier this year Liu He - who led the Chinese delegation - told the WEF that China's market liberalization efforts this year would exceed the expectations of the global community. Xi's Boao speech can be read as China's answer to the WEF, as well as presenting to the audience in Hainan the vision for China's place in the new world order, trying to sooth worries about the nation's rise and stressing its emphasis on peaceful development. Xi emphasized that the world had become a global village and any country that closed itself up would go against historical trends. In this global village, China would proactively develop global partnerships and firmly support multilateralism for the sake of a community of shared destiny for humanity.

It is important for Hong Kong to think about what we can do with such a great plan. Instead of a "gateway", we can become a "platform" for globalization. A general plan for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area project is going to be released soon. Just as Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said at Boao: "The principle of 'one country, two systems' is itself an innovation to become a unique advantage of the Bay Area." The point is that Hong Kong can provide an innovative institutional design for the Bay Area to facilitate the flow of people, goods, capital and information and attract talented professionals. Ma Xingrui, governor of Guangdong province who also attended the forum, said Guangdong would enhance cooperation with Hong Kong authorities and focus on removing obstacles to collaboration between the two systems. It is expected the Lok Ma Chau Loop Innovation and Technology Park can be a groundbreaker in such innovation.

The stars have changed position. Stephen Hawking taught us: "Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist." And: "Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change." To adapt to the change, Hong Kong people need to recognize the reality and adjust. We should further open to the world and move closer to the mainland. We should put more efforts into changing the city's role and try to become the new role model for the nation.

(HK Edition 04/12/2018 page8)BOE's patents rank 7th worldwide

( chinadaily.com.cn )

Updated: 2018-04-10

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently released the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) showing that BOE Technology Group Co Ltd (BOE) filed the greatest number of international patent applications in 2017.

Last year, BOE filed 8,678 new-patent applications, 85 percent of which were invention patents. BOE owns more than 3,000 overseas patents in the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea and other countries and regions.

Data from IFI Claims shows that BOE ranked 21st among the Top 50 USPTO Patent Assignees in 2017, with its annual growth rate leading the list for two consecutive years.

"Chinese innovators are looking outward, spreading their ideas into emerging markets as the Chinese economy booms rapidly," said WIPO director general Francis Gurry, "It's a leap from 'Made in China' to 'Created in China'."

In China, the State Intellectual Property Office received about 1.4 million applications for invention patents in 2017, outnumbering the US, Japan, the ROK and Europe combined.

These facts and figures say loudly and clearly that China has nosed out Japan in second position as an international patent application source and will soon overtake the United States.Whats most endearing about Even in Our Darkness, the new memoir from theologian Jack Deere, is also whats most difficult: its rawness. Before picking it up, be warned: You will hold your breath for pages at a time, even to the last page. The reader never really gets any sort of break, which, I suppose, is fitting, seeing as the author has never seemed to get one either.

Deere was born the child of drinkers and drifters. Suicide and substance abuse, violence and anger, were the fabric of his life. And yet this book reads less like a tell-all or Ten Excuses for My Dysfunctions and more like the kind of story that reminds us Jesus came for the sick, not for the well.

Balancing the Scales

Deere grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. He regales us with stories of youthful escapades and sexual conquests; with examples of good discipline by his father and abuse by his mother. He does not shy from coarse language, a fact for which this reader was grateful. In an endnote, he explains, To tell my story any other way would have been to diminish its authenticity and power. (Instead of punishing Deere for calling his mother derogatory names, his father takes a moment to truly explain what these expletives mean, a moment of discipline that becomes more important as the story goes on.).

As Deere endures this whiplashed childhood (literally and figuratively), we can see the internal tension with which he wrestles. He knows there is something innately unjust, something not right, about his family life, yet he lacks a firm example of what is right. Except for the presence of his Nonnie, his maternal grandmother who is married to the wildly abusive Poppa, Deere has no role models of faithfulness or lives marked by the gospelthat is, until Bruce, his childhood friend, turns into a good Christian boy in their teens.

Deere doesnt sugarcoat the sin of others in his formative years: his fathers suicide by shooting, his Poppas foulness, his mothers abuse, the rampant racism, the drinking, the sexual conquests of his mother, or his familys financial struggles. Nor, however, does he sugarcoat his own sin. He writes extensively about struggles with masturbation and sexlong after his encounter with the gospel and his entrance into Christian ministry. He writes about his selfish desire to succeed, to become rich, to dominate others, and to build his own kingdom. He writes about how he neglected his family, sacrificing them on the altar of his success.

Chronicling his salvation narrativefrom his early start in ministry through Young Life, to his mentors and co-laborers, into his time as a student and then teacher at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) in the 1970s, and up through his marriage and childrenDeere never stops leveling his scales of goodness and badness. His sin is peppered throughout his success. He confesses anger at fellow ministers alongside stories of becoming a pastor. He writes of anger at his wife while building his ministry as a professor of Hebrew at DTS. After a conversion out of dispensationalism and into the belief and practice of the gifts of the Spirit, he begins to speak and write prolifically about the giftswhile at the same time feuding with his friends on the speaking circuit and co-laborers at his church. He teaches his congregants about walking with substance abusers while keeping his wifes alcoholism a secret. Every time you feel a surge of hope, Deere brings you back down to reality with another litany of his sins. It is almost as if were not allowed to think of him as better than he knows he is. He admits, Although I loved the poetry of Jesus Sermon on the Mount, I remained oblivious to its truth. People who already feel righteous dont hunger and thirst for it.

Near the conclusion of the book, Deere uses an illustration sure to resonate with his readers: Every time I put my right hand on the doorknob, fear pricks my heart. For this reader, it was what C. S. Lewis called a me too moment: You mean, Im not the only one who has such clear memories of trauma that they still rise within me in the presence of certain scents, sounds, or actions? Mere paragraphs from the conclusion of his story, Deere is not saying, This was something I dealt with, but This is something I deal with.

This rawness is rare in the church today. We are often told by leaders that they sin, but Deeres memoir is refreshingly full of his sin. It is not gratuitous in any form. We never get the sense that he wants to gain our pity or empathy to manipulate us into thinking hes better or worse than he is. He is simply factual (to our knowledge) and unapologetic to his reader, while increasingly more repentant toward those against whom he has sinnedGod foremost among them.

In a world where, all too often, leaders present themselves as one-dimensional characters (primarily speakers, teachers, pastors, musicians, or writers), Deere shows us we are irreducibly complex beings. Our bodies matter. Our souls matter. Our minds matter. Our emotions matter. Our histories matter. These together form the whole of who we are, and any true ministry we do out of the whole is going to be wholly complex. Otherwise, it will be anemic, one-dimensional, and devoid of power. Deere recognizes this now. But it took hell to get him there. I havent even mentioned the half of it in this review.

The Unfinished Feeling

Even in Our Darkness is profoundly readable, accessible to the prodigal son and the older brother alike, and, at your discretion, perhaps even appropriate for teen readers. Deeres years with Young Life shine in his ability to speak to a young audience about sex, lust, masturbation, fitting in, standing out, substance abuse, suicide, and more. All of these are real struggles for teens today, and the story of Deeres life might be helpful for them as they navigate these temptations.

I dont know Jack Deere. I dont know where he is today or what his tenuous relationship with the local church is (he admits a struggle there and never wraps it up nicely). I dont know if hes gone back to reconcile with everyone against whom he sinned. I dont know how his family is doing as a whole or how theyre continuing to walk and to heal. But I do know Even in Our Darkness was a welcome read for me. The unfinished, raw feeling of this bookthis storyis actually the best part of it. It says to every one of us, Were not there yet. We still have further to go, but praise God, hes with us.

As A. W. Tozer once said, Christian literature, to be accepted and approved by evangelical leaders of our times, must follow very closely the same train of thought, a kind of party line of which it is scarcely safe to depart. A half-century of this in America has made us smug and content. We imitate each other with slavish devotion.

I lament with Tozer. There is a dearth of Christian literature willing to escape this slavish devotion. I want to read fewer tell-alls and more tell-mines, fewer heavy-handed theological how-tos and more vulnerable proofs of theological truths. Jack Deere has done that in this book, and he has done it well. He stopped tipping the scales of his good versus bad deeds and simply tipped the scale over completely, finally looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith (Heb. 12:2, KJV).

Lore Ferguson Wilbert is a writer who blogs at Sayable.net.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.Life Legal Called in for Legal Backing as Students Stage Pro-Life Walkout



NAPA, Calif., April 11, 2018 /



History teacher Julianne Benzel was placed on leave after she asked her students whether schools allowing the walkouts would "give the same courtesy to another group of students who wanted to get up and walk out to protest other issueslike abortion?"



Rocklin High School facilitated the students' pro-gun control protest by instructing teachers to modify their lesson plans for the walkout and by providing students with a forum to speak about gun legislation in the school's amphitheater. The walkout commemorated the lives of students and teachers who were gunned down at a Parkland, Florida high school as students called for stricter gun-control laws.



Gillespie requested the same provisions for the Pro-Life Walkout, which commemorated the lives of hundreds of thousands of children across the country who are killed by abortion each year and called for legislation to protect the unborn. However, school officials denied pro-life students the requested accommodations, saying that the Pro-Life Walkout "associates the school with a position of non-neutrality on a matter that is extremely controversial."



Life Legal sent a letter to Rocklin High School Principal Davis Stewart earlier in the week apprising him of his obligations to treat Brandon and his fellow students the same as the National School Walkout students.



"Brandon Gillespie is going to conduct his activity in the same manner as the previous walkout and expects to be treated in the exact same manner as the students who participated in the gun walkout," wrote Life Legal Senior Staff Counsel Allison K. Aranda. "I am writing to you in order to ensure that Brandon's First Amendment and Equal Protection rights are safeguarded."



Courts have held that "once a forum is opened for the expression of views, regardless of how unusual the forum, under the dual mandate of the first amendment and the equal protection clause neither the government nor any private censor may pick and choose between those views which may or may not be expressed." Moreover, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that public officials may not prohibit communication merely because they "disapprove of the speaker's views."



"We applaud students who are willing to stand up for the millions of their would-be peers who never had a chance at life," said Life Legal Defense Foundation Executive Director Alexandra Snyder. "Rocklin High School opened the door to protected speech by permitting the March walkout. The school cannot now discriminate against Brandon Gillespie and other pro-life students by based on favoritism toward a particular viewpoint."



About Life Legal Defense Foundation

Life Legal Defense Foundation was established in 1989, and is a nonprofit organization composed of attorneys and other concerned citizens committed to giving helpless and innocent human beings of any age, and their advocates, a trained and committed voice in the courtrooms of our nation. For more information about the Life Legal Defense Foundation, visit



Share Tweet Contact: Alexandra Snyder, Life Legal Defense Foundation , 202-717-7371NAPA, Calif., April 11, 2018 / Christian Newswire / -- Life Legal was at the campus of Rocklin High School in Northern California this morning as students walked out of class to honor the lives of babies killed by abortion. Rocklin student Brandon Gillespie was inspired to organize the Pro-life Walkout after one of his teachers was disciplined for questioning whether pro-life students would be afforded the same rights as students who participated in the National School Walkout for more stringent gun control.History teacher Julianne Benzel was placed on leave after she asked her students whether schools allowing the walkouts would "give the same courtesy to another group of students who wanted to get up and walk out to protest other issueslike abortion?"Rocklin High School facilitated the students' pro-gun control protest by instructing teachers to modify their lesson plans for the walkout and by providing students with a forum to speak about gun legislation in the school's amphitheater. The walkout commemorated the lives of students and teachers who were gunned down at a Parkland, Florida high school as students called for stricter gun-control laws.Gillespie requested the same provisions for the Pro-Life Walkout, which commemorated the lives of hundreds of thousands of children across the country who are killed by abortion each year and called for legislation to protect the unborn. However, school officials denied pro-life students the requested accommodations, saying that the Pro-Life Walkout "associates the school with a position of non-neutrality on a matter that is extremely controversial."Life Legal sent a letter to Rocklin High School Principal Davis Stewart earlier in the week apprising him of his obligations to treat Brandon and his fellow students the same as the National School Walkout students."Brandon Gillespie is going to conduct his activity in the same manner as the previous walkout and expects to be treated in the exact same manner as the students who participated in the gun walkout," wrote Life Legal Senior Staff Counsel Allison K. Aranda. "I am writing to you in order to ensure that Brandon's First Amendment and Equal Protection rights are safeguarded."Courts have held that "once a forum is opened for the expression of views, regardless of how unusual the forum, under the dual mandate of the first amendment and the equal protection clause neither the government nor any private censor may pick and choose between those views which may or may not be expressed." Moreover, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that public officials may not prohibit communication merely because they "disapprove of the speaker's views.""We applaud students who are willing to stand up for the millions of their would-be peers who never had a chance at life," said Life Legal Defense Foundation Executive Director Alexandra Snyder. "Rocklin High School opened the door to protected speech by permitting the March walkout. The school cannot now discriminate against Brandon Gillespie and other pro-life students by based on favoritism toward a particular viewpoint."About Life Legal Defense FoundationLife Legal Defense Foundation was established in 1989, and is a nonprofit organization composed of attorneys and other concerned citizens committed to giving helpless and innocent human beings of any age, and their advocates, a trained and committed voice in the courtrooms of our nation. For more information about the Life Legal Defense Foundation, visit www.lldf.orgWe're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on!

Go to formThey also committed to a series of measures to ensure the private sector plays its part in curtailing corruption , according to a new report issued on Thursday.

According to him, the Americas Business Dialogue has brought together big and small businesses, working towards a common goal of enhancing trade and investments in our countries.

"We are proud to support the ABD, which since its creation in 2012 has become the leading private-public dialogue mechanism in the Americas," Moreno added.

More than 300 private sector entities worked for over a year to put together the report, Action for Growth: Policy Recommendations and 2018-21 Action Plan for Growth in the Americas, which focuses on five key themes: strengthening transparency and integrity; digitizing growth; trading for tomorrow; powering development; and upskilling for the future.

Among its key recommendations are:





Strengthening transparency and integrity - addressing the ultimate beneficial owners of financial accounts, strengthening public procurement systems, and encouraging the private sector to adopt comprehensive integrity mechanisms, including corporate code of conducts.



Digitizing growth - greater acceptance of digital means of payments, incorporating digital economy in trade negotiations and committing to leverage technology to digitize financial flows, particularly in the public sector, to increase transparency and inclusion.



Trade - better multi-modal and connected infrastructure; smarter land management and usage strategies in cities to improve the flow of passengers and cargo; and ensuring full government support to successfully undertake environmental license and community consultation processes.



Powering for development - recommendations include improvements in the efficiency, cost, reliability, and emissions of electricity production through the physical and regulatory integration of regional markets, enabling more efficient power transactions, and utilizing market-friendly regulations to improve access to renewable energy and natural gas.



Upskilling for the future - improving the quality of education and training programs, and improving the transparency of education in the region, instituting a zero-tolerance approach to corruption in education systems.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 -- The Summit County Medical Examiner's Office identified a man who died Monday in an Akron house fire.

Ben Gulley, 82, died in the fire that broke out just after 9:30 a.m. at a house on Beechwood Drive near Copley Road, the medical examiner's office said.

Firefighters pulled Gulley from the home, the Akron Fire Department said in a news release. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

A resident arrived home and found it full of smoke. He told firefighters another man was inside, the news release says.

The fire's cause remains under investigation.

To comment on this story, visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments page.BEACHWOOD, Ohio -- Hit-skip, Chagrin Boulevard: At 8:55 a.m. April 6, a man went to the police station to report that he had been the victim of a hit-skip driver earlier that day.

The man had dash camera video of the crash and of the suspect vehicle fleeing the scene. Through viewing of the video, police were able to identify the suspect, a Highland Hills man, 45, and to cite him for leaving the scene of an accident, reckless operation and driving with expired plates.

Marijuana possession, Cedar Road: At 1:40 p.m. April 6, police charged a Cleveland man, 28, with marijuana possession. The man was cited in the lot of Beachwood Place mall, 26300 Cedar Road.

Theft, Cedar Road: At 3:10 p.m. April 6, two juveniles were arrested for the theft of goods from Dillard's, Claire's and Victoria's Secret at Beachwood Place. Arrested were two Cleveland girls, ages 16 and 17.

Theft, Cedar Road: At 7:15 p.m. April 6, police arrested a Cleveland man, 27, for stealing merchandise worth $273 from Dillard's.

Driving under suspension, Chagrin Boulevard: At 1:50 a.m. April 7, an officer stopped a car due to a red light violation and for driving left of center. It was subsequently learned that the driver, a Cleveland man, 35, was driving with a suspended license.

Theft, Cedar Road: At 8:50 p.m. April 7, police arrested a Bedford woman, 19, for stealing merchandise worth $120 from Sephora at Beachwood Place. The woman was additionally charged with falsification for lying about her identity.

OVI, Cedar Road: At 1:30 a.m. April 8, police stopped a man's car for committing several traffic violations. Those violations included driving through a red light, not driving within marked lanes, and failure to maintain reasonable control.

It was subsequently found that the man, 49, of Bedford, was intoxicated. He was cited for the traffic violations and charged with OVI.

Disturbance, Village Lane: At 3:40 p.m. April 8, a man reported that his former girlfriend, 32, of Cleveland, entered his home without his permission and went to sleep.

When confronted, the woman took the man's cell phone and left. The man, 37, declined to pursue charges.

Theft, Cedar Road: At 4:40 p.m. April 8, an unidentified man stole merchandise worth $175 from the Sunglass Hut at Beachwood Place.

If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Sears Holdings is going to have an online auction for 16 of its stores, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal.

Two of those stores, which are for sale, are in Northeast Ohio: Great Northern Mall in North Olmsted and at Southpark Center in Strongsville.

Representatives in human resources at both area locations said they were not allowed to comment on a local level. The only thing that they would say is, they want the public to know that they are not closing.

Another Ohio store is at Richland Mall in Mansfield. Here's a complete list from Yahoo finance:

Mishawaka, Ind.

Merrillville, Ind.

Indianapolis, Ind.

Novi, Mich.

Cottleville, Miss.

Springfield, Miss.

Cape Cirardeau, Miss.

Mehlville, Miss.

Strongsville, Ohio

North Olmsted, Ohio

Mansfield, Ohio

San Antonio, Texas

Baytown, Texas

Beaumont, Texas

Humble, Texas

Pasadena, Texas

The majority of the Sears stores locations that are up for auction are inside of malls, according to the Yahoo report.

Sears may sell the buildings then lease the space in order to remain open.

Sears might also reduce the size of its stores when leasing them back from a new owner, reports Fortune.

Those interested in bidding on the stores must register by May 1. A narrowed-down list of bidders will then compete with each other in an online auction hosted by the Real Insight Marketplace. This could happen in late May.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A federal judge expressed displeasure with state and federal agencies in a lawsuit over previous decisions to not designate Lake Erie's open waters as "impaired," despite the presence of harmful algal blooms and its impact on the Toledo area's drinking water.

Senior U.S. District Judge James Carr's scathing 25-page ruling says the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency's 2016 decision to not place the lake's open waters on its list of impaired waterways ran afoul of the Clean Water Act. He noted that this designation came after the 2014 environmental crisis in the lake's western basin that left 400,000 Toledo-area residents without drinking water for three days.

Carr also wrote that he couldn't find a good reason for the U.S. EPA to approve Ohio's list, which was incomplete.

Still, he ruled against the Environmental Law & Policy Center's request to rescind the U.S. EPA's approval of the 2016 Ohio list because the U.S. EPA rescinded its approval in January of this year. Instead, he permitted the federal EPA 30 days to make a final decision on Ohio's 2016 list, which he noted was still incomplete.

If the federal EPA does not follow the order, the agency could find itself back in front of the judge.

However, the order clearly shows the judge would like to both sides to resolve this legal dispute and for the agencies to follow the law in the future, said Howard Learner, executive director of the Chicago-based advocacy group that sued over the decisions by both EPAs.

Lake Erie's most significant pollutants come from fertilizer run off, primarily from the Maumee River in Toledo.

The Environmental Law & Policy Center filed suit in 2017. Environmental advocates say granting the "impaired "designation for Lake Erie's would open up more opportunities for grants and coordinate efforts to abate the algal bloom threat.

While the case was litigated, the U.S. EPA changed its tune. In January, it withdrew its approval of Ohio's 2016 list. The Ohio EPA also said it will include the open waters of the lake's western basin on its 2018 list of impaired waterways.

Carr's ruling makes it clear he was not happy with the "legal maneuvering" by both the state and federal EPAs.

He said he detected a "whiff of bad faith" because the federal EPA did not notify the Environmental Law & Policy Center of its decision to withdraw approval of Ohio's list until one day before a filing deadline. That "whiff" was amplified because the federal government also did not inform Carr of its decision, the judge said.

Instead, the judge said he learned of it when the plaintiffs told him.

Ohio EPA spokesman James Lee said the agency is reviewing Carr's decision.

A spokesperson for the U.S. E.P.A. said the agency "will review the order and will continue to work closely with the states and other stakeholders to ensure that local residents continue to have access to safe drinking water and to promote recreation on Lake Erie."

Learner said in a news release Thursday that "The time for Ohio pollution reduction standards and actions is now,"

"As Judge Carr stated in his Opinion: 'That would mean that much sooner, rather than later, the right of all persons dependent upon a clean, toxic-algae-free Lake Erie for access to safe drinking water could be accomplished and guaranteed,'" Learner said.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Three men with Ohio ties have pleaded guilty to concealing thousands of dollars sent overseas to provide support to a leader of al-Qaida to carry out violent attacks.

Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad, 38; Asif Ahmed Salim, 37; and Sultane Roome Salim, 43, pleaded to concealment of financing of terrorism. The Salims, who are brothers, pleaded guilty on Thursday, while Mohammad pleaded guilty on Wednesday.

The FBI said the men worked in 2009 to conceal supplying money to Anwar Al-Awlaki, the late American-born, radical Muslim cleric whose English language videos and blog posts inspired a number of Western recruits to al-Qaida., as well as acts of terrorism.

When agents began investigating the financial transactions for the money going to Awlaki, the trio lied to investigators and deleted emails related to the transactions, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

All three were charged in 2015. They struck plea agreements as their trial date approached. Jury selection was to begin next week.

Ibrahim Mohammad, who has permanent residency in the U.S., agreed to serve five years in federal prison and to be deported to India once he completes his sentence. The Salims, who are U.S. citizens, have agreed to serve sentences of up to eight years in federal prison.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Helmick in Toledo is expected to sentence them later this year.

Yahya Farooq Mohammad, Ibrahim Mohammad's brother, was sentenced in November to more than 27 years in federal prison after admitting to his role in this case. He also tried to orchestrate a hit on Toledo federal Judge Jack Zouhary, who initially presided over the quartet's case.

Prosecutors say Farooq Mohammad, a former engineering student at Ohio State University, traveled with two other people to Yemen in July 2009 in an attempt to meet with Awlaki.

Mohammad was unable to meet with Awlaki, so he instead gave $22,000 to one of the cleric's associates to be given to Awlaki. The money he gave included $17,000 provided by Asif Salim, who studied at Ohio State between 2000 and 2005, and Sultane Salim, who moved to the Columbus area in 2012.

Ibrahim Mohammad, who moved to Toledo in 2006 and married a U.S. citizen, helped facilitate the transfer of the money to Farooq Mohammad overseas for him to deliver to Awlaki, prosecutors say.

Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in September 2011.

If you would like to comment on this story, please visit Thursday's crime and courts comments section.RICHMOND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Disturbance, Chardon Road: Officers responded to the University Hospitals Healthcare Center April 8 for a report of a patient who had thrown a cup of ice at a nurse.

The woman had left before officers arrived, but was located near Loehmann's Plaza. She said she had not been properly treated for her symptoms and became upset when a nurse told her to "shut up."

The Cleveland woman, 24, was cited for disorderly conduct.

Traffic stop, Richmond Road: A Wickliffe man, 28, was cited for possession of marijuana, full time and attention, and no operator's license after officers found him sleeping behind the wheel of his vehicle at a red light around 4 a.m. April 4.

Fleeing and eluding, Richmond Road: When trying to pull over a vehicle around 11:30 p.m. April 4 for only having one working headlight, the driver accelerated and did not stop. Officers stopped pursuit as the car crossed into Euclid, but the vehicle was subsequently located and the driver, a 20-year-old South Euclid man, was cited for fleeing and eluding.

Impaired driving, Hillary Lane: A Euclid man, 51, was arrested April 5 for OVI, driving under suspension and prohibited blood-alcohol content after officers located his vehicle stopped in the roadway, where it had ran out of gas.

Traffic stop, Chardon Road: Officers stopped a vehicle April 5 for having only one working brake light and found the driver to have an active felony warrant out of the Richland County Sheriff's Office for conveying contraband into a government facility.

The Cleveland man, 23, was arrested on the warrant and was held for extradition. He was also cited for driving under suspension and other traffic violations. No illegal contraband was found in the vehicle.

Theft from auto, Curtiss Wright Parkway: A woman reported April 5 that a window was smashed on her vehicle while she was working at Flex Jet and that her purse was stolen from inside of it. She said the purse contained an iPad Mini and assorted gift cards. No suspects were identified.

Impaired driving, Chardon Road: A Mayfield Heights man, 25, was arrested for OVI after he was pulled over for a traffic violation around 3 a.m. April 8. He refused sobriety tests and was defiant when being booked into jail.

Criminal damage, Pierson Drive: A man reported April 8 that a window was smashed out on his vehicle in his driveway and a gym bag with assorted clothing was missing from it. No suspects were identified.

Stolen vehicle, Chestnut Lane: A woman and her father reported April 8 that their vehicle was stolen from their home. They suspected that a man who was at the home the previous night had stolen it with the keys. The father was able to track the vehicle using GPS, and Euclid police subsequently located the suspect in the vehicle in that city. The East Cleveland man, 18, was charged with theft.

See more Richmond Heights news at Cleveland.com/hillcrest.

If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page.EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Defense attorneys for Cleveland police supervisors charged in a 2012 chase that ended in a deadly shooting asked authorities to review an East Cleveland law director's offer to drop the charges in exchange for $5,000 in restitution.

Attorneys Henry Hilow and Kevin Spellacy, who represent two of the five supervisors charged in the case, contend that East Cleveland Law Director Willa Hemmons acted improperly when she offered to drop dereliction-of-duty charges against the five supervisors charged in the case if they paid the restitution.

Hilow and Spellacy sent letters to Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O'Malley, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office and other authorities to ask them to review the matter "for any potential criminal conduct and/or prosecutorial misconduct."

"Counsel has informed Ms. Hemmons that not only does the charge of dereliction of duty fail on its merits, it would be illegal to acquiesce to the city's offer," Hilow said in a letter dated April 5. "Ms. Hemmons had no itemized statement for restitution nor any legal authority to support her decision."

When the defense attorneys rejected the offer, Hemmons asked them to make a counteroffer and said "justice has a price," Hilow said in the letter, which was provided to cleveland.com.

The letter can be read at the bottom of this post.

Hemmons said Thursday that she has not read the letters. She rejected the suggestion that she did anything wrong and said she has made similar offers to defendants throughout her career.

The $5,000 in restitution would have paid for police overtime and other costs associated with the case, she said.

She also said she is not concerned by the letters sent by Hilow and Spellacy.

"It's their First Amendment right to send a letter to anyone," she said.

Ohio Attorney General's Office spokesman Dan Tierney said Thursday that neither the Special Prosecutions Section nor the Bureau of Criminal Investigation has received the letter or a request to review Hemmons' offer.

A Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The supervisors are charged with dereliction of duty, a first-degree misdemeanor, in the Nov. 29, 2012 chase that began at the Justice Center in Cleveland and ended in the parking lot outside Heritage Middle School in East Cleveland. They are not among the 13 police officers who fired 137 shots at the end of the chase, killing Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.

Supervisors Michael Donegan, 44, of Cleveland; Patricia Coleman, 50, of Brooklyn; Jason Edens, 44, of Avon; Paul Wilson, 51, of Cleveland; and Randolph Dailey, 46, of North Ridgeville all pleaded not guilty during their arraignments Thursday in East Cleveland Municipal Court.

The case moved to East Cleveland in 2015 after then-Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty's office dropped misdemeanor charges against the supervisors. East Cleveland prosecutors then filed charges in that city.

The move to East Cleveland drew criticism from the supervisors' attorneys, who accused McGinty of shopping for a more favorable pool of jurors. McGinty maintained the suburb was the appropriate location to try the case because the chase ended in East Cleveland.

The officers appealed the move all the way up to the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled last year the trial could be held in East Cleveland.

Michael Brelo was the only police officer to be charged in connection with the shooting deaths of Russell and Williams. He was acquitted in May 2015 of voluntary manslaughter.

The five supervisors were called to testify during Brelo's trial, but they invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

To comment on this story, visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page.ELYRIA, Ohio -- A 16-year-old boy is accused of threatening to shoot students at Elyria High School on Thursday.

The boy is now charged with making terroristic threats and inducing panic, Elyria police said. He is a student at Life Skills High School in Elyria, police said.

The threats were made on social media and Elyria police were made aware of them at about 6:40 a.m. Thursday, Elyria police said.

The social media posts said the boy was going to "shoot up E High all my emo's & goth brother's and sister's RUN," according to Elyria police.

Elyria police and school officials worked together to identify the boy, who was arrested at his Elyria home, police said.

The boy has since admitted to posting the threats online, police said.

He is being held in the Lorain County Detention Home.

If you would like to comment on this story, please visit Thursday's crime and courts comments section.EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Five Cleveland police supervisors facing misdemeanor charges in a 2012 chase that ended in a deadly shooting of an unarmed couple pleaded not guilty Thursday morning.

The supervisors are charged with dereliction of duty, a first-degree misdemeanor, in the Nov. 29, 2012 chase that began at the Justice Center in Cleveland and ended in the parking lot outside Heritage Middle School in East Cleveland. Officers fired 137 shots at the end of the chase, killing Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.

The arraignments came after East Cleveland Law Director Willa Hemmons offered to drop the charges if each supervisor paid $5,000, Kevin Spellacy, an attorney representing one of the supervisors, told cleveland.com. Fox 8 was first to report the offer.

Supervisors Michael Donegan, 44, of Cleveland; Patricia Coleman, 50, of Brooklyn; Jason Edens, 44, of Avon; Paul Wilson, 51, of Cleveland; and Randolph Dailey, 46, of North Ridgeville appeared at arraignments Thursday in East Cleveland Municipal Court.

Hemmons asked attorneys for the supervisors before the hearing to agree to a trial date, citing a full caseload complicated by unrelated civil lawsuits against the city. The attorneys asked Hemmons for time to settle any pretrial motions, and instead agreed to a May 10 pretrial conference to further discuss the case.

Hemmons previously filed a motion asking Dawson to set a trial date. She offered four date ranges through the end of 2018.

None of the Cleveland police supervisors spoke during their arraignments.

The case moved to East Cleveland in 2015 after then-Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty's office dropped misdemeanor charges against the supervisors. East Cleveland prosecutors then filed charges in that city.

The move to East Cleveland drew criticism from the supervisors' attorneys, who accused McGinty of shopping for a more favorable pool of jurors. McGinty maintained the suburb was the appropriate location to try the case because the chase ended in East Cleveland.

The officers appealed the move all the way up to the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled last year the trial could be held in East Cleveland.

The five supervisors were among nearly 100 police officers who participated in the 2012 chase, the Ohio Attorney General's Office said. None fired their guns.

Thirteen officers fired shots at the end of the chase, but Michael Brelo was the only one to be charged. He was acquitted in May 2015 of voluntary manslaughter.

The five supervisors were called to testify during Brelo's trial, but they invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

To comment on this story, visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the severity of the charges the supervisors faced in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.WASHINGTON, D. C. - Facebook's Good Friday rejection of an Ohio Catholic school's ad that showed Jesus Christ on the cross was resurrected Wednesday when the House Energy and Commerce Committee grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the social media giant's ad screening policies.

Zuckerberg told Washington GOP Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers that "it sounds like we made a mistake" in deeming the ad for Franciscan University in Steubenville's graduate theology program to be "shocking," "sensational," and "excessively violent" because it contained an image of the San Damiano Cross.

An ad we placed was rejected by Facebook today for content that is shocking, sensational, and excessively violent.



We must agree with them. https://t.co/Jrf4A9W2Tm pic.twitter.com/uiijuSfXgn  Franciscan U (@FranciscanU) March 30, 2018

In addition to the image of Christ on the Cross, the ad contained the words "We teach those who teach the faith."

The University revealed the ad's refusal in a March 30 blog post titled "He was rejected." Although it took a philosophical tone - declaring Christ's crucifixion "the most sensational action in history," as "man executed his God" - conservative media outlets were less stoical, claiming it shows anti-Christian bigotry or cultural illiteracy.

Zuckerberg apologized to McMorris Rodgers for the mistake, adding that even a "relatively small" percentage of mistakes in reviewing ads is too many.

Marietta GOP Rep. Bill Johnson, who represents Steubenville, returned to the issue when it was his turn to question Zuckerberg. Johnson, a software engineer with two degrees in computer science, asked how the company decides what content meets its standards.

"Is there an algorithm that does it, or is there a team of a gazillion people that sit there and look at each and every ad and make that determination?" Johnson asked.

Zuckerberg told him it's a combination of technical systems and humans.

"In order to flag some content quickly, we also build technical systems in order to take things down," Zuckerberg replied. "So, if we see terrorist content for example, we will flag that and we can take that down."

When Johnson asked whether the person who " took down the Franciscan University ad and didn't put it back up until the media started getting involved" was disciplined by the company for that mistake, Zuckerberg said he didn't know and promised to get back to him.

In social media posts, the University has described the error as "a teachable moment." Its web communications director, Thomas Crowe, told LifeZette that the school didn't want to tar Facebook as "anti-Christian or religious bigots or anything like that," and has found its ad representatives to be helpful in improving its campaigns.

"I wrote on our blog not as a 'gotcha' against Facebook in particular, but because of how readily and easily the world rejects Christ on the cross -- and the world, through Facebook's mishap, rejected Christ crucified on Good Friday," Crowe told the publication.CLEVELAND, Ohio - Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish publicly asserted for the first time Wednesday that an ongoing public corruption investigation of his administration is the result of work done by the county's own watchdogs.

"It should be noted that the investigation was triggered by the work of the inspector general and the internal auditor, neither of which existed before the change of government," Budish told a crowd of 700 people during his fourth State of the County address.

A spokesman for County Prosecutor Michael O'Malley declined to comment Wednesday about Budish's statement.

The positions of inspector general and internal auditor were created in 2011, when Cuyahoga County voters approved a new charter form of government in the wake of the largest corruption scandal in the county's history.

During Wednesday's speech, Budish did not elaborate on the current investigation, other than to say that the county is cooperating and will not tolerate "any bad behavior on the part of anyone in my administration."

The county's Internal auditor, Cory Swaisgood, said in an interview with cleveland.com after the speech that he believes a human resources payroll report that he produced last year caught the attention of the County Prosecutor's Office.

Inspector General Mark Griffin, also interviewed after the speech, declined to say whether he went to the Prosecutor's Office with specific concerns. But he said his duties include investigating allegations of wrongdoing by county workers and passing along information to law enforcement if he believes a crime might have been committed.

Griffin also said he believes investigators in this case are trying to determine whether three ethics opinions issued by his office in 2016 were followed.

The opinions had to do with a potential conflict of interest involving Emily McNeeley, who had been an assistant law director for the county and later became general counsel for the IT department, as well as its director of special initiatives. McNeeley had sought the opinions because her spouse deals with contracts for Westlake-based Hyland Software, which does work for the county.

County prosecutors have served eight grand-jury subpoenas on the Budish administration as part of its investigation.

The first subpoena was served on Jan. 24, 2018, and sought, among other things, email communications between McNeeley, her IT boss, Scot Rourke, and representatives of Hyland Software, OneCommunity and offshoots of OneCommunity. Rourke worked for OneCommunity for 10 years, leaving in 2013. He joined the county in late 2015.

Investigators also sought records of any electronic access that Rourke and McNeeley had to contracts related to Hyland and OneCommunity, as well as the ethics opinions and legal opinions related to Rourke and McNeeley "concerning their relationship" with Hyland or OneCommunity.

In response to a request by McNeeley on March 16, 2016, Griffin stated that McNeeley had no conflict as long as the county "does not contract directly with Hyland Software," or that McNeeley's spouse, Lisa McNeeley, does not work on city or county procurement contracts at Hyland. The memo stated that she did not work on county contracts at the time.

Emily McNeeley sought a second opinion on May 17, 2016, because the county's Information Technology Department began receiving direct support form Hyland and Rourke, was "considering expanding the County's business relationship with Hyland," according to Griffin's response to McNeeley.

In his second opinion, Griffin determined that McNeeley did have a conflict, but that it would not prevent her from working on Hyland projects after contracts were awarded.

A third opinion was sent by email to Emily McNeeley from Deputy Inspector General Valissa Howard to McNeeley on Dec. 9, 2016, after McNeeley had become IT general counsel. It said that McNeeley was permitted to "clean up" paperwork related to a contract, but not to negotiate or alter any terms of the contract.CINCINNATI, Ohio -- A teen found dead Tuesday night in a vehicle on a private school campus called 911 at least twice pleading for help, at one point telling a dispatcher "tell my mom I love her if I die."

Kyle Plush, 16, a sophomore at Seven Hills School, died of asphyxia due to chest compression, WLWT Channel 5 reports.

Plush's body was discovered in his Honda Odyssey van by his father in a parking lot near the school, more than six hours after he made his calls to 911, WLWT reports.

The Hamilton County Coroner's Office did not say how Plush was crushed to death but found no evidence of foul play, according to cincinnati.com. Police are continuing to investigate.

In a call to 911 at 3:16 p.m., cincinnati.com reports Plush tells the dispatcher "Help, help, help. I'm in desperate need of help."

Plush tells the dispatcher he's at Seven Hills but she appears to have difficulty determining where he is, reports say.

Cincinnati police and the Hamilton County Sheriff's Department sent patrol cars to canvass the school's parking lot after receiving the 911 calls but did not see the van. A deputy questioned if the call was a prank, WCPO Channel 9 reports.

But Plush called again, telling the dispatcher: "This is not a joke. ... I probably don't have much time left, so tell my mom that I love her if I die. I'm trapped inside my gold Honda Odyssey van. In the (inaudible) parking lot of Seven Hills Hillsdale. ... Send officers immediately. I'm almost dead."

The dispatcher later tried to call Plush's cell phone but it went to voicemail, according to reports.

WLWT reports it appears Plush was unable to hold his phone and was using voice commands to make calls.

Law-enforcement officials did not say why they were unable to locate the van, WCPO reports. Police say they are reviewing how the incident was handled, WKRC Channel 12 reports.

According to cincinnati.com, 800,000 Honda Odyssey vans were recalled in 2017 because second-row seats were accidentally tipping forward. It's unknown if Plush's van was included in the recall.

Plush had been a student at Seven Hills School since the sixth grade.

"He was a young man of keen intelligence, good humor, and great courage, and this whole community feels this loss very deeply," the school said in a statement.

To comment on this story, please visit Wednesday's crime and courts comments page.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Cleveland man accused of killing a man last week was arrested after detectives spotted several people shooting into his East Side apartment in retaliation for the death.

Kevin Bradley Jr., 24, is charged with aggravated murder in the death of 22-year-old Benny Cromity.

Bradley shot Cromity about 9 p.m. April 4 on Holyrood Avenue near Rosalind Avenue in the city's Hough neighborhood, police say.

Cromity was with a 19-year-old man and three other people inside a car when a minivan pulled up next to them, police said. Three people got out of the van and all five people got out of the car. The three men opened fire on the others, shooting Cromity in the chest and the 19-year-old in the leg, police said.

The shooters hopped back into the van and drove away. Cromity died the next morning at Cleveland Clinic.

A homicide detective and an FBI agent were in an open field near Holyrood Avenue investigating Cromity's death at about noon Thursday when they saw three men shooting into Bradley's apartment building, a Cleveland police report says.

Bradley returned fire, but no one was hurt in the exchange, police said.

The detective and agent called dispatchers to let them know about the shooting, then chased after the gunmen on foot, the report says. The shooters ran through a parking lot and between apartments before slipping away, the report says.

Several members of Bradley's family, including a 3-year-old girl and 5-year-old boy, were inside the apartment at the time of the shooting, the report says.

Bradley's sister told police that she received messages on Facebook from people who said they planned to shoot up her apartment in order to get back at her brother, the report says.

Police arrested Bradley in connection with Cromity's death, and seized two guns from the apartment, the report says. He is being held in the city jail on $150,000 bond, and will make his next court appearance on April 17, court records say.

Bradley has no history of felonies in Cuyahoga County, court records show.

To comment on this story, visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments page.AKRON, Ohio - University of Akron President Matthew Wilson has been named a finalist for president of Utah Valley University.

The Utah State Board of Regents, which will appoint the new president, announced Thursday that Wilson is one of four finalists. Utah Valley University is a public university in Orem, with an enrollment of about 37,000 students. It is the largest public university in the state.

Wilson announced in March, shortly after he was passed over for president of Central Florida University, that he would step down as president in Akron and rejoin UA's School of Law, effective July 31.

He said he made the decision because he wanted to spend more time with his family and reflect on his future. He also acknowledged that his interest in another presidency led trustees to question his commitment to Akron.

Wilson had said he sought the UCF presidency due to his family's roots in the Orlando area and the opportunities to lead the largest university in the country.

His current quest for a presidency is in the state where he was raised. Wilson grew up in Salt Lake City and earned bachelor's degrees in political science and asian studies from the University of Utah.

Utah Valley University President Matthew Holland announced last November that he has been called to serve as a mission president for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints starting in July 2018.

The other finalists to succeed Holland are Bradly Cook, provost at Southern Utah University and a history professor; John Rosenberg, the Washington Irving Professor of Spanish and American Relations at Brigham Young University; and Astrid Tuminez, the regional director for corporate, external and legal affairs in southeast Asia for Microsoft.

Wilson and the other finalists will visit the campus on April 19.

"The Board was aware that President Wilson might be included in a different university's search for a president," Roland Bauer, chair of the Unversity of Akron's board of trustees said in a news release. "We wish him well in this current opportunity.

"As we have stated previously, we -- the Board and University of Akron leadership -- are focused on building on our many strengths, addressing our challenges and making UA even more distinctive," Bauer added. "That commitment is shown in our expedited process to select someone to serve as interim president, and it will enable us to have a smooth transition and launch a national search."

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.

During his tenure, Wilson has engaged with constituencies, helped increase enrollment and stabilized a budget that had significant deficits, officials said.HOUSTON, Texas -- A dispute over the price of a Slim Jim beef stick resulted in the owner of a gas station shooting a man in the leg, according to reports.

The store owner was questioned by police but has not been arrested, click2houston.com reports.

The man he shot, Cameron Carson, 25, was taken to a hospital in stable condition.

The lack of an arrest stunned Carson's co-workers, who were with him when the incident occurred.

"I think if I shot you right now, it wouldn't matter what it was about, I would be in handcuffs," Kenny Allen tells KCRA Channel 3. "It's amazing, over a Slim Jim. A $1.99 Slim Jim."

The incident occurred at around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday when Carson, Allen, Kenny White and Travis Johnson stopped at the gas station while driving to a sales job, KCRA reports.

Carson went inside to purchase a Slim Jim, according to KTRK Channel 13. As Carson left, the store owner emerged, saying Carson had only paid $1 and that the Slim Jim actually cost $2.15, click2houston.com reports.

"This guy came running out of the store while I'm pumping gas, saying about the Slim Jim, 'You didn't pay for that Slim Jim,'" Allen tells KCRA. "He said, 'I did pay for the Slim Jim'. I said, 'Hey, man, here's $2, take the $2 and go back into the store."

Allen tells click2houston.com that Carson shoved the owner during the argument and it was then that the owner took out his gun and shot Carson.

KCRA reports the owner was injured during a robbery at his store in November in which he shot and killed one of the suspects. It reportedly has left him on edge ever since.

To comment on this story, please visit Wednesday's crime and courts comments page.CLEVELAND, Ohio - New primary polling shows Richard Cordray leading the Democratic primary for governor and Republicans in the state garnering high disapproval ratings from within their own ranks.

The 1984 Society, a political group of former Ohio Senate employees, commissioned polls for both the Democratic and Republican primary. Neil Clark, a Republican lobbyist and 1984 Society board member, said the poll was the second in a set the group was commissioning to give lobbyists and business people a better sense of where to spend their money or who to support politically.

The 1984 Society is planning two more general election polls, one in the summer and one in the fall.

The group also commissioned a poll in January that included both primary and general election matchups. The April poll looked only at primary matchups and intraparty approval ratings.

The Democratic poll surveyed 500 likely Democratic primary voters and has a margin of error of 4.38 percent, while the Republican poll measured 502 likely Republican primary voters with a margin of error of 4.37 percent. Both polls were taken from April 4-7.

Cordray in the lead

Though the Democratic survey doesn't show Cordray running away with the race just yet with more than half of respondents still undecided, 27.5 percent of respondents said they were voting for Cordray in the Democratic primary. Former U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich came in second with around 13 percent.

The Democratic poll included all of the candidates on the May 8 primary. Kucinich and Cordray were the only two to register in the double digits, with state Sen. Joe Schiavoni at 5 percent and former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Bill O'Neill, Larry Ealy and Paul Ray all having less than 5 percent.

The numbers, if accurate, are welcome news to Cordray in a crowded primary where 35 percent of the vote could grant a candidate the nomination. Recent polling from another firm showed a tied race between Cordray and Kucinich.

Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics and an Ohio native, said perhaps more significantly, the poll showed Cordray leading with voters in Northeast Ohio - which is where Kucinich's base resides.

"Cordray leading in Cleveland is a positive sign for him, if this is accurate," Kondik said. "He should roll in Central Ohio, and Kucinich can't win without winning Northeast Ohio."

It also showed polarizing opinions on Kucinich, which may explain his slip from the other polls. While 42 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion of Kucinich compared with 38 for Cordray, around 24 percent of respondents had an unfavorable opinion of Kucinich compared with just 10 percent for Cordray.

Republican race tightens, but DeWine is still up big

The Republican poll showed Attorney General Mike DeWine leading Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor by a 17-point margin.

But while DeWine still holds a comfortable lead, he did register a significant drop from the results of the January poll - going from 54 percent in January to 43 percent in April. Taylor saw a gain in the same time period from 14 percent to 26 percent.

That may be a result of the negative attack ads run by both DeWine and Taylor, especially Taylor's commercial tying DeWine to Hillary Clinton and his past support for gun control measures such as an assault weapons ban.

"She attacked him in TV tying him to Clinton," Clark said. "Maybe that and guns. That's the only thing I can figure out."

But both candidates registered high unfavorable ratings among primary voters - around 32 percent for DeWine and 16 percent for Taylor.

The poll also showed U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci leading the U.S. Senate race, but with only 21 percent of voters supporting him and 65 percent undecided, consistent with other polling taken on the primary.

The poll also analyzed the treasurer's race between former Ashtabula County Auditor Sandy O'Brien and state Rep. Robert Sprague. O'Brien led with around 17 percent compared with Sprague's roughly 12 percent and more than 71 percent undecided.

Kasich, Trump and angry voters

The Republican poll showed a significant shift in how Republicans view Gov. John Kasich and President Donald Trump. Almost 75 percent of Republicans said they had a favorable opinion of the president while only around 44 percent said they had a favorable opinion on Kasich.

While Trump's numbers are in line with other recent polls, Kasich's numbers were nearly 10 points lower among Republicans.

One possible explanation is Kasich's newfound support for gun control, a stance that is unpopular with much of the Republican base. His continued criticism of Trump and the speculation about a possible 2020 Kasich presidential run may also play a factor.

Clark said the high unfavorable ratings among Kasich, DeWine and Taylor could point to an electorate that is angry and fed up.

"I think it's a snapshot that voters are really upset with what's happening with politics," Clark said. "It's the only way I can explain it. They love Trump, and they barely tolerate Kasich. Both candidates have high negatives."

Read the Democratic primary poll:

1984 Society Democratic Poll by srichardson on Scribd

Read the Republican primary poll:

1984 Society Republican Poll by srichardson on ScribdCorina Kuhn, 50, Twinsburg

Former Mary Kay independent consultant, volunteer, looking to get back into business world in sales, marketing and philanthropy.

Background:

Before going to Mary Kay, I was a financial analyst. I worked in finance my entire life. I graduated from Baldwin Wallace University. My job was terminated three years ago. I met a Mary Kay consultant and I was attracted to the company motto. It is to place faith first, family second and career third. To me, that's going back to the basics. My dad is a priest, so I grew up with strong values and traditions. I came here from Romania 28 years ago, I kind of broke away from traditions. I came to this country wanting to have my own business.

Coming to America:

The original plan was only to come for three months with my aunt to help her sell my uncle's house. I never thought I would never go back. Things happened along the way and I wanted to go to college. I stayed so that I could make a life for me and my family. It was the first time I took my life in my own hands. I remember mailing a letter, asking my parents for their blessing to stay. There was no internet, we wrote letters. It seems like I waited forever, then they gave me their blessing. I took an English as a second language class first. I was the only one who spoke absolutely zero English. I sat in the front row and listened, I finished the class with an A+. I went on to get associates degrees in general business administration and one in accounting. Then I worked in the corporate world where I learned to advance I would need a bachelor's degree, so I took time off and went to Baldwin Wallace.

Volunteerism:

I was just named a Global Goodwill Ambassador (GGA) in the Cleveland/Akron area for providing complimentary skin care classes to the elderly residing in assisted living facilities. I also started an Adopt a Grandparent Program four years ago. I asked the director at Anna Maria of Aurora, a senior living community for a list of the residents who have no family and no visitors. I found friends and sponsors to 'adopt' them through donations. I made baskets of products and useful things for them and I distributed the baskets with a card or note from their new sponsor. We've grown every year and have adopted hundreds of grandparents. I visit them and I'm planning more events for them.

New Direction:

I am passionate about making a difference in people's lives. I want to do so much more. Right now, I'm moving away from my work with Mary Kay and focusing on developing a non-profit organization around the Adopt a Grandparent Program. I want to take it to the next level and work on it full-time.

Your Style:

I'm very conservative in my style but once in a while I like to throw in a splash of funky style, something different. I have my own rule of the three C's. It's comfort, color and cut.

Fashion influences:

My mother is my idol; I get my sense of style from her. I watched her get ready for work. She matched her shoes and accessories and I remember wanting to be like her when I grew up. She was one to buy the same blouse in many colors. She knew what she liked. Today, I read magazines and follow some designers and brands.

Designers and brands:

I love Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein and not just because we share the same initials. I like brands that offer quality and timeless styles that will last more than one season.

Shopping:

When I am stressed, I like to shop. I love to go to festivals, art shows and charitable events and when I see something unique and different at those shows, I want to get it. At the mall, I always look at the mannequins. They will always be dressed in the best, most on-trend looks. I like Macy's, Dillard's Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack. I also go to Stein Mart, Marshalls and TJ Maxx. I like quality and a good price.

Interests:

I like to travel. I have a passion for painting and I like to read. I like music and dancing. I love the gym and I like living a happy and healthy lifestyle.

Cleaning out the closet:

I always say that if you're not going to wear that today, then you probably won't wear it tomorrow, or any day, so give it away. Let it find a happy home and have someone else enjoy it. I give to Goodwill and Salvation Army.

Dream fashion item:

I would get a timeless look like a beautiful black dress and classic bag by Chanel.

Fitness:

I love working out. I go to the gym and I have a mini gym at home. I like to work out with friends because we motivate each other. Zumba and yoga are my favorites.

Pet peeves:

Don't fall into the label trap. Just because something has a high-end label doesn't mean it will be the best piece of clothing for you. Look for what looks good, not who's on the label.

Your dream career:

I would be a painter, painting everyday by the shore. My passion is in the arts but my parents told me to study accounting because I wouldn't have to speak with many people and they wouldn't know I have an accent.

Advice:

Help others as much as you can. It's my mission.

Shopping companion:

When my parents come over to visit, I have a lot of fun shopping with my mom.

Cleveland is:

Cleveland is definitely home.

You can tell a lot about someone:

You can tell so much by a person's actions, they speak louder than words.

FLASH FAVORITES:

Place on Earth: Transylvania, Romania where I was born.

Color: Black and red.

Restaurant: Blue Canyon and Hunan by the Falls

Salty or Sweet: Sweet.

Chocolate or Vanilla: Vanilla, I don't like chocolate.

Makeup: Mary Kay, they care about the environment and they're charitable.

Handbag brand: Louis Vuitton.

Shoe brand: Anne Klein.

Dogs or cats: Both.

Coffee or tea: Coffee in the morning, tea at night.

Can't live without: My phone, my whole life is on it.

Your most precious thing: Family and friends.

Spirit Animal: I'm a free spirit, so it's the eagle.

Morning person or night owl: Night owl.

Guilty pleasure: Cookies.

Junk food: Popcorn and pizza.



Hidden talents: I write poetry.

Playlist: One of my favorites is the Scorpions. I like music across the board.

Fashion Flash is always looking for Clevelanders with a fresh take on style. If you or someone you know has a great fashion sense click here for the submission form or email me at acarey@plaind.com.

Follow me on Twitter and Instagram @AlliArtStyle and at Allison Carey Fashion Reporter/Photographer on Facebook."I'm convinced that micro, small, medium, and large-sized entrepreneurs are the economic development engines in favor of our nations," the statesman expressed.

According to the Head of State, this business meeting will serve to open a productive dialogue between public and private sectors.

President Vizcarra also pointed out the urgency of creating opportunities and conditions for new businesses particularly SMEs which includes a large number of women and young entrepreneurs.

Furthermore, the Peruvian leader deemed necessary to decisively tackle corruption by promoting a culture of integrity in the region.

"This responsibility to fight against corruption has been present since the first summit held in Miami back in 1994, and countries have entered into international commitments such as the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the Inter-American Convention against Corruption ," he noted.He also reaffirmed his wish to hand over a reconciled nation by 2021, which at the same time will rely on sustained growth

"We are giving the message that not even the President of the Republic is saved when it is necessary to punish acts of corruption (...)," he said in this sense.

After having overcome a political crisis, a consensus has been reached to leave differences aside and work together, he concluded.Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

best replica Ulysse Nardin FREAK 2018 Watches

Evolution of Ulysse Nardin Freak Watch

Swiss watchmaker Ulysse Nardin has become a leader in innovation and experimentation because his late owner, Rolf Schnyder, passed away within 10 years of launching a watch called Freak. In addition to the very original design, Freak's controversy was the use of silicon parts in mechanical movements - this is the industry's number one. At the time, anything but the most traditional materials and techniques was banned in the high-end Swiss watchmaking industry.

A review of Freak after 15 years of launch shows that its impact on the watch industry is clearly profound. Compared with traditional watchmaking materials (such as metal), silicon is not only famous for its advantages, but also the watch industry regards the success of the times as the mechanical tradition and status of avant-garde luxury products.nice Rado HyperChrome replica watches

Visually, geeks are strange because most of the movement itself is displayed on the dial, forming the minute hand of the watch. All Freak watches have no crown and are quite fixed and wrapped around the case itself.

This less obvious mechanism means that you twist the back of the notch of the chassis to wrap the movement, and then turn the bezel of the watch (after lifting the small security lock) to set the time. Getting rid of geeks has never been one of Ullsse Nardins major achievements on wristwatches, as the process is embarrassing.

Despite this, although the movement is manually wound, the power reserve of the Freak watch is about one week - which means that the watch's winding does not need to be performed regularly. Ulysse Nardin implemented a clever and simple way to display the power reserve of the watch by having a small porthole on the barrel, revealing the spring itself so that the user can see the winding degree of the mainspring.www.reviewbestselling.com

In the early days of Freak, it was completely unclear to Ulysse Nardin what kind of commercial success it would achieve. After the initial limited production, the brand eventually produced more, and then the new cosmetics version of the freaks began to become the norm. For example, in 2007, Athens Nardin released a limited edition of 28 original Freak diamond suits.

Gradually, Ulysse Nardin also improved the mechanical properties inside the watch. In 2010, when Ulysse Nardin and Freak Diavolo promoted their games together, one of the most important Freak transformations in 2010 was the addition of a flying tourbillon to the existing sport, which has been more or less like a track. The tourbillon works like that. An important element of Freak Diavolo is to eliminate the center pin throughout the movement and keep the sapphire crystal in place. Ultimately, Ulysse Nardin can design stitches even if some collectors like it.sale Hublot Classic Fusion 542.ZP.1180.RX replica watch

Freak Diavolo Ulysse Nardin played with Freak Cruiser.

With each new Freak watch, Ulysse Nardin will provide additional adjustments or design changes aimed at enhancing and diversifying the personality of the Freak timepiece. The freak cruiser means to replace the original freak as the most accessible version of freak. One can easily call Freak Cruiser the most complete Freak in the day complex because of its blended features, aesthetic optimization, and ability to wear daily.

Later in 2015, Ulysse Nardin released the complex FreakLab, which introduced a new double escapement system that many thought was a further bend in the muscles of Athens Nardin. Finally, freaks include features that might take pedestrians into account, such as the date window - and the ability to set the date without a crown.where to buy replica richard mille watches

Recently, Ulysse Nardin chose a Freak watch to celebrate its collaboration with the American Cup's Swedish entrant Artemis, creating a Freakking with black and yellow carbon fiber bezels.

After more than 15 years of service life, Freak has changed from a revolutionary timepiece to a fixture in the state of the art Haute Horlogerie.

Freak timeline

2001  Launch of the Freak

2005  Freak 28,800 V/h and Freak Diamond Heart with synthetic diamond escapement parts unveiled

2007  The Freak DIAMonSIL makes it debut, combining synthetic diamond and silicon in the escapement

2010  First Freak with a flying tourbillon which indicates the seconds, the Diavolo unveiled

2013  Freak Cruiser with clear sapphire parts

2015  FreakLab

2016  FreakWing for Team Artemis

wholesale BELL & ROSS BR-X replica watchesQuesto comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

3D Cell Culture Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2013 to 2017 and Forecast 2018 to 2024

Global 3D Cell Culture Market: By Technology (Scaffold-free platforms, Bioreactors, Microchips, Gels, Others), By Application (Stem cell biology, Drug discovery, Research, Tissue engineering, Others), By End User (Hospitals, Diagnostic centers, Biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, Others), and Geography  Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2013-2017 and Forecast 2018-2024

Global 3D cell Culture market was valued at US $ XX Mn and expected to grow at XX% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over the 2018-2024

Market Outline: 3D Cell Culture Market

Cell culture is the procedure in which cells are grown usually outside their natural environment, under controlled conditions. These cells are isolated from the living tissue cells and are maintained under controlled conditions. The conditions at which cells are grown vary for each type of cell. Earlier, the 2D cell culture was used in the laboratories which were unable to reproduce at the created environment. This lead to the advent of 3D cell culture technology, which replicate at the vivo environment. The 3D technology helps the cell to interact with the 3D dimensional surroundings.

Market Dynamics: 3D Cell Culture Market

The technological advancements is the major factor influencing the growth of the 3D cell culture market. The increasing research activities are also adding aid to the growth of the 3D cell culture market. The increasing number of the organ transplantation incidences and the growing number of the patient population with requirement of the organ transplantation is the one of the key factor driving the growth of the 3D cell Culture market. The increasing investment by biotechnology and the pharmaceutical companies for 3D cell culture is also flourishing the market. The ban on research over the animals is also a factor responsible for the growth of the market. However, the higher investments in the initial stages and dearth of skilled professionals are likely to hamper the growth of the market.

A sample of this report is available upon request @

https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/3d-cell-culture-market/#ulp-4H8Z4LpNMLEuOnnx

Market Scope: 3D Cell Culture Market

3D cell culture market is segmented on the basis of technology, application, and distribution channel

Based on the technology, the market is segmented into the following:

 Scaffold-free Platforms

 Bioreactors

 Microchips

 Gels

 Others

Based on the application, the market is segmented into the following:

 Stem Cell Biology

 Drug Discovery

 Research

 Tissue Engineering

 Others

Based on the end user, the market is segmented into the following:

 Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries

 Hospitals

 Others

To view TOC of this report is available upon request @

https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/3d-cell-culture-market/#ulp-c654SbFYO64MsOhu

Regional Analysis: 3D Cell Culture Market

Geographically, global 3D cell culture market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa. North America 3D cell Culture market is growing at significant rate due to advancement in the technology. The increasing number of the cancer cases affecting the growth of the 3D cell culture market growth positively in the region. The deep-rooted healthcare infrastructure is also adding aid for the growth of the market in this region. The increasing investments for the R&D activities helping the growth of the market in this region. The Asia-Pacific is expected to show growth in the market over the forecast period due to its increasing population rate along with growing health concerns.

Competition Assessment: 3D Cell Culture Market

Some of the players in the global 3D cell Culture market include:

 3D Biomatrix (U.S)

 Reinnervate Ltd (U.K)

 Becton Dickinson and Company (U.S)

 3D Biotek LLC (U.S)

 Thermo Fisher Scientific (U.S)

 Global Cell Solutions Inc (U.S)

 Synthecon (US)

 Kuraray (Japan)

 Hamilton Company (US)

 Mimetas (Netherlands)

 Emulate (US)

 Nano3D Biosciences (US)

 QGel (Switzerland)

Notable Market Developments: 3D Cell Culture Market

 In May 2017, Biotek received FDA approval for 3D Cell Expansion System (3D-CES) as a medical device

Need more information about this report @

https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/3d-cell-culture-market/#ulp-14mlyhjMGhVjZqa3

Key Features of the Report:

 The report covers exhaustive regional information, that includes North America (the USA and Canada), Europe (Germany, France, Italy, UK, Spain, Russia, Poland and Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (Japan, China, India, Australia & New Zealand, ASEAN (Includes Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Others), South Korea, and Rest of Asia-Pacific), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentian, Venezula, and Rest of Latin America), and Middle East and Africa (Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries, Israel, South Africa, and Rest of Middle East and Africa)

 The report provides granular level information about the market size, regional market share, historic market (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2024)

 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 a plethora of information about market entry strategies, regulatory framework and reimbursement scenario

 The report analyses the impact of the socio-political environment through PESTLE Analysis and competition through Porters Five Force Analysis in addition to recent technology advancements and innovations in the market

Get access to full summary @

https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/3d-cell-culture-market/

About Precision Business Insights

Precision 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 2NX

Email: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.com

Toll Free (US): +1-866-598-1553

Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.comQuesto comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

Bakery Ingredients Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2013 to 2017 and Forecast 2018 to 2024

Global Bakery Ingredients Market: By Ingredients Type (Baking Powders, Emulsifiers, Leavening Agents, Enzymes, Oils, Sweeteners, Colors and Flavors, Preservatives, Yeast, Leavening Agents, Others), By Application (Cakes and Pastries, Breads, Rolls and Pies, Biscuits, Others), and Geography  Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2013-2017 and Forecast 2018-2024

Global bakery ingredients market was valued at US $ XX Mn and expected to grow at XX% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over the 2018 to 2024

Market Outline: Bakery Ingredients Market

Bakery ingredients are the food products which improves the quality of the food, improves the shelf-life, and maintains the soft texture, freshness and the taste of the food items that are baked, which includes the bakery products such as pizza, cookie, tarts, pastries, donut etc. The commonly used bakery ingredients include baking soda, butter, honey, eggs, baking powder, color additives etc. The composition of the ingredient plays a major role in determining the texture and flavor of the baked product.

Market Dynamics: Bakery Ingredients Market

Increase in the working population and the changing lifestyles are the major factors driving the growth of the bakery ingredients market. The rising population of the working women is leaving them no time to prepare the food which is attracting them towards the bakery food which is replacing the conventional home cooked food. Furthermore, the consumers preference towards the convenience and packed foods is also likely to enhance the growth of the bakery ingredients market. Rise in the disposable incomes in the emerging countries and affordability of the bakery products are expected to fuel the market revenue growth. However, the stringent government regulations are likely to hamper the growth of the bakery ingredients market over the forecast period.

A sample of this report is available upon request @

https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/bakery-ingredients-market/#ulp-4H8Z4LpNMLEuOnnx

Market Scope: Bakery Ingredients Market

Bakery ingredients market is segmented on the basis of ingredients and applications.

Based on the ingredients type, the market is segmented into the following:

 Baking Powders

 Emulsifiers

 Leavening Agents

 Enzymes

 Oils

 Sweeteners

 Colors and Flavors

 Preservatives

 Yeast

 Leavening Agents

 Others

Based on the application, the market is segmented into the following:

 Cakes and Pastries

 Breads

 Rolls and Pies

 Biscuits

 Others

To view TOC of this report is available upon request @

https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/bakery-ingredients-market/#ulp-c654SbFYO64MsOhu

Regional Analysis: Bakery Ingredients Market

Geographically, global bakery ingredients market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa. North American and European bakery ingredients markets holds dominant share owing to the larger adoption of bakery foods in these regions. The adoption of the westernized lifestyle and increasing demand for the ready-to-eat foods owing to time constraints are aiding the growth of the bakery ingredients market in Asia-Pacific region. The Asia Pacific region is expected to show a rapid growth over the forecasted period owing to its increasing population and disposable income. The rising awareness among the people regarding various bakery products and growing health consciousness are the factors affecting the growth of the bakery ingredients market in the Asian region.

Competition Assessment: Bakery Ingredients Market

Some of the players in the global bakery ingredients market include:

 Cargill Incorporated (U.S)

 Kerry Group Plc (Ireland)

 DuPont (U.S)

 British Bakels Ltd (U.K)

 Associated British Foods plc (U.K)

 Dawn Foods Ltd (U.S)

 DSM (Netherlands)

Notable Market Developments: Bakery Ingredients Market

 In February 2018, DuPont has announced the launch of its PowerBake 6000 product which is based on a new enzyme that acts as a strengthening solution, adding tolerance and consistency in bread and buns.

Need more information about this report @

https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/bakery-ingredients-market/#ulp-14mlyhjMGhVjZqa3

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 The report covers exhaustive regional information, that includes North America (the USA and Canada), Europe (Germany, France, Italy, UK, Spain, Russia, Poland and Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (Japan, China, India, Australia & New Zealand, ASEAN (Includes Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Others), South Korea, and Rest of Asia-Pacific), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentian, Venezula, and Rest of Latin America), and Middle East and Africa (Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Countries, Israel, South Africa, and Rest of Middle East and Africa)

 The report provides granular level information about the market size, regional market share, historic market (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2024)

 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 a plethora of information about market entry strategies, regulatory framework and reimbursement scenario

 The report analyses the impact of the socio-political environment through PESTLE Analysis and competition through Porters Five Force Analysis in addition to recent technology advancements and innovations in the market

Get access to full summary @

https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/bakery-ingredients-market/

About Precision Business Insights

Precision 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 2NX

Email: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.com

Toll Free (US): +1-866-598-1553

Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.comMobile robots: supporting lean objectives

Control Engineering Europe finds out how a new breed of robots  autonomous mobile robots  are supporting lean approaches to production on todays more dynamic plant floors.

As manufacturers embrace lean approaches to their operations, there is continual evaluation of any opportunities to optimise production. executives are evaluating their opportunities to continually optimise productivity. Even in highly automated facilities, material handling often remains a manual, inefficient process and automating material transportation to reduce production bottlenecks and deploy valuable human workers more effectively has been a challenge.



Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are no longer able to provide the flexibility needed in todays agile manufacturing processes. However, new sensor and software technologies are making autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) a good solution for often unpredictable and changing production layouts and dynamic work environments.



Manual transportation

Manual transportation requires workers to leave their stations to push carts loaded with materials between manufacturing processes and the stockroom, and can result in production backlogs and idle workers as they wait for assemblies and parts to be delivered. Plant set-up is often dynamic, with new production cells and processes that must be supported and people, equipment, pallets, and other obstacles can appear in what used to be open passageways. Any automated material transportation approach needs to be flexible and adaptable without additional cost or disruption to processes, not to mention safe for operation around employees. That flexibility also means that automated material handling must be easy to learn, programme, deploy, and redeploy in-house to ensure that the chosen approach can keep up-to-date with requirements cost-effectively.



Traditional automated guided vehicles (AGVs) move materials using fixed routes guided by permanent wires, magnetic strips, or sensors embedded in the plant floor. However, those systems are inflexible and do not fit with the trend for more dynamic manufacturing floors. If manufacturing processes change, the facility must be updated againand if people or material temporarily blocks the AGVs route, it simply stops until the way is cleared. In contrast, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) are designed to work within dynamic and changing environments. They offer the flexibility, safety, and cost-effectiveness that allows companies of any size to automate and optimise material handling.



An AMR navigates via sensors, cameras, and software built into the robot itself, without the need for external sensors or guides. Once the robot has learned its surroundings  either by uploading a facility blueprint or by piloting the robot around the plant to develop its own map  it will recognise its surroundings and can take the most efficient route to its destination autonomously, safely avoiding obstacles and people.



Magna-Power, a US-based manufacturer of power products, deployed two Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) AMRs to move parts and assemblies from the stockroom and through its vertically integrated manufacturing floor. One thing that was pretty astonishing for me is that the MiR robot was delivered and 15 minutes later it was unpacked and on the floor, said Adam Pitel, VP of operations at Magna-Power. In another 15 minutes, Im controlling it with my mobile phone, and within two hours it is travelling from point to point in our building, after uploading a schematic of our facilities, he continued.



The fast and easy integration of AMRs make them capable of adding new efficiencies almost immediately. With low initial costs and fast optimisation of processes, they offer remarkably fast return on investment  often in less than six months.



Efficiency gains

AMRs can bring efficiency gains to a number of operations related to production and material handling. As businesses grow, AMR implementation can expand simultaneously with minimal additional costs. Moreover, the AMR is collaborative and can be used in nearly any situation where employees are currently spending time pushing carts or making deliveries. Automating these low-value tasks means that employees can focus on higher-value activities. At Magna-Power the implementation of the two MiRs has freed the equivalent of three full-time employees, who can now focus all their attention on the tasks they were hired to do. The purpose of the robot is not to replace employees, but to make them more efficient with their time, explains Grant Pitel, VP of engineering at Magna-Power. Now they can focus on the things that we cant get a robot to do.



AMRs can perform the monotonous and repetitive tasks of material transportation without breaks that can disrupt the assembly process. NewForm, a manufacturer of Italian-designed bath taps and fittings, is seeing these benefits with its two MiR robots.



Damiano Marconi, technical assistant at NewForm, said: Now our lines are active on a 24/7 lights out basis, because they are automatically loaded and unloaded. Moreover, the MiRs are integrated with the production planning system and provide a real-time overview of materials. We can guarantee a real-time production control. The very simple integration software can easily communicate with both our machine tools and our data server, so we can easily track every piece, its position and condition in real-time.



Modern manufacturing environments can no longer be dependent on costly, inflexible legacy technologies. Nor can they afford to continue the unproductive manual transportation of materials, especially in todays tight labour market. Autonomous mobile robots now offer an agile alternative to AGVs or manual delivery, providing flexibility, cost-effectiveness, return on investment, and productivity optimisation.



MiR AMRs are available in the UK from RARUK Automation.The Executive Board of the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) has discussed the candidacy of the future prime minister of Armenia and the board members have unilaterally approved the candidacy of the third president of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan to be nominated for the post of prime minister.

April 12, 2018, 09:44 Serzh Sargsyan to be nominated as prime minister of Armenia

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 12, ARTSAKHPRESS:As RPA spokesperson Eduard Sharmazanov stated at the press conference following the board session, the ruling party is expected to officially nominate Sargsyan on Monday.

Parliament, where the ruling party holds majority, will vote on the candidacy of the prime minister on April 17.

In Sharmazanov's words, RPA Executive Board members highly value of Serzh Sargsyan's experience, his vision and approaches of the state development. He added, no names other than Serzh Sargsyan for the post of prime minister have been discussed in the meeting.NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg claims that the alliance members should take decisive action against Russia.

April 12, 2018, 12:07 NATO chief calls for decisive actions against Russia

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 12, ARTSAKHPRESS:It is important to show Moscow that its actions cannot remain without consequences, Stoltenberg told Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper of Germany.

He forewarned that the Russian authorities psychological barrier for using nuclear weapons is decreasing, reported Deutsche Welle (DW) TV and radio company of Germany.

The NATO chief stressed that unless Russia changes its behavior, NATO troops will remain in Eastern Europe, and sanctions on Moscow will not be lifted.

At the same time, however, he said the alliance seeks dialogue with Russia, and they do not want a cold war.1 Surprise, Slavery Still Exists

One of the most popular conspiracy theories out there is that the government / deep state / George Soros are working to strip away all of our rights, lock us in detention camps, and sell us into slavery to corporations. It's a cute idea, but there's one thing these powerful ne'er-do-wells haven't considered: The Constitution of the United States will stop them.

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Except that it won't, and it isn't. As most of us know, slavery was intended to be abolished via the 13th Amendment, which states that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States." In principle, the amendment makes slavery as dead as the Confederacy. In practice, however, it's as alive and kicking as the Confederacy.

It all hinges on this little clause: "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." So while the Constitution makes damn sure no "innocent" soul is taken into bondage, it's a whole different ethics game if you've been convicted of a crime and imprisoned. Then you become a cog in the prison-industrial complex -- a major income stream of for-profit prisons wherein prisoners are forced participate in work programs. Prisoners must either help operate the prison or "participate" in a convict-leasing program through which corporations such as Whole Foods and Victoria's Secret (among others) can borrow inmates to do jobs that most people would ordinarily demand to be paid for. Oh, and the inmates don't get a choice. If they're medically fit, they have to work under the threat of being placed into solitary, and you know that's only because guards aren't allowed to whip people anymore.

Carol M. Highsmith And you thought your cubicle sucked.

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So why should we care about a bunch of criminals having to do tech support and stock shelves? Well, maybe it's because that the 13th Amendment loophole takes away decent blue-collar jobs from regular hardworking people. Or maybe it's because prison is supposed to be about repaying your debt to society, not to AT&T. Or maybe it's because, after they get out, we've made sure those ex-cons aren't allowed to get paying jobs for the same work they've been doing for free for years. Or maybe, just maybe, you don't want to live in a system that incentivizes mass and long-term incarceration to the point where state lawyers have been caught arguing against releasing prisoners because prisons would "lose an important labor pool." Take your pick. Or get a prisoner to do the picking for you. That's what they're there for, apparently.

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Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter about depressing history that you should definitely subscribe to.

On the off chance you're contemplating law school, let us tell you, Constitutional Law is one heck of a class.

Support Cracked's journalism with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more, check out 6 Myths About The US Constitution Too Many People Believe and 4 Constitutional Debates America's Founders Never Saw Coming.

You have the inalienable right to follow us on Facebook.Armenias Ambassador to the Netherlands Garegin Melkonyan on April 11 presented his credentials to King of the Netherlands His Majesty Willem-Alexander, the Armenian foreign ministry reported.

April 12, 2018, 12:53 Armenian Ambassador presents credentials to King of Netherlands

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 12, ARTSAKHPRESS:The ceremony was followed by Ambassador Melkonyans private meeting with the King of the Netherlands which was also attended by minister of foreign affairs Stef Blok.

His Majesty King Willem-Alexander congratulated the Ambassador on his appointment, wished success in his diplomatic mission, stating that his previous experience will be useful for development of relations between the two countries in different spheres.

The Armenian Ambassador thanked for the warm reception and assured that during his mission he will spare no effort to contribute to the further development of the Armenian-Dutch relations. He highlighted the existing potential aimed at boosting the mutually beneficial cooperation and stated that the development of cooperation between the two countries is important for Armenia.

During the talk Ambassador Melkonyan also introduced His Majesty on Armenias main foreign policy priorities, approaches on international and regional issues, the processes on transitioning to a parliamentary system. The meeting also touched upon the Armenian community of the Netherlands, the Netherlands engagement in the Armenia-EU relations, the economic and sectoral partnership and other issues.Documents of Stepanakert dramatic theater building renovation are being elaborated, Artsakh Minister of Culture, Youth Affairs and Tourism, Sergey Shahverdyan, told Artsakhpress.

April 12, 2018, 12:54 Stepanakert theater to be renovated with joint efforts, Artsakh Culture Minister

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 12, ARTSAKHPRESS:He underscored that within the frames of Artsakh, my love: lets support the theater of Stepanakert charitable project being carried out at the initiative of Armenian Ministry of Culture, proceeds from concerts and performances go to restoration of Stepanakert theater.

In the Ministers words the initiative will not be the only and main financial source for the theaters renovation works. It has an objective to later involve the society and other financial sources.

The elaboration process of documents of the Stepanakert theater renovation has been already launched. Renovation of the building is very important for our country and especially for the residents of Stepanakert. When Artsakh was annexed to Azerbaijan, Stepanakert theater was one of the few hearths that was preserving the Armenian soul. The theater was built in 1952 and with nationwide efforts, Sergey Shahverdyan said. He expressed hope that this time also the theater will be revived with joint efforts.The session of the Council of the CSTO Parliamentary Assembly has kicked off in St. PetersburgsTauride Palace on April 12 which was attended by Speaker of the Parliament of Armenia Ara Babloyan, the Parliament said.

April 12, 2018, 16:34 Speaker of Parliament of Armenia participates in CSTO PA Councils session in St. Petersburg

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 12, ARTSAKHPRESS:The session was also attended by CSTO Secretary General Yuri Khachaturov, as well as speakers of the parliaments of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.

By the proposal of Speaker Ara Babloyan, the next plenary sessions of the CSTO PA Council and the Assembly will be held in Yerevan on October 29-30.

During the session a number of issues relating to the CSTO PAs activity, in particular, the results of the CSTO PA Councils Minsk session, as well as issues relating to the situation in the organizations responsibility zone and measures to counter collective security threats and challenges, priorities of Kazakhstans 2018 chairmanship in the CSTO, participation of the CSTO PA delegations in the Russian presidential election with an international observer mission were discussed.David Blunkett (pictured) has joined a string of MPs to try and save the Open University

Anyone who thinks the Open University is any less relevant and any less essential today than it once was should have been with me at its degree ceremony last summer.

I was there to receive an honorary Doctorate of Letters  which was gratifying. But what was truly uplifting was the chance to meet dozens of students who'd come to collect a qualification that had once seemed an impossible dream.

I spoke to many of them. Several had been forced to drop out of full-time education as teenagers, because of family obligations, to care for sick parents or help out with disabled siblings. Others had failed  or been failed  at school.

When they eventually found work, it was usually badly paid, unskilled and on part-time or zero hours contracts.

Much of their potential and talent had been sacrificed or wasted, and once it was gone, there seemed to be no way to get it back.

The Open University (OU), with its opportunity for part-time study while continuing with a day job, changed that. It offered a lifeline back into education  and a chance for people to reboot their prospects.

One lady told me she planned to use her degree to study for a masters in social work  and would then dedicate herself to helping others caught up in circumstances similar to hers that prevented them realising their potential.

The OU had been her ladder out of that chasm. Now she was sending the ladder back down for others.

To me that was an inspiration  and the strongest argument in support of the Mail's admirable campaign to save the OU as it struggles to restructure, modernise and cope with the consequences of rising tuition fees and loss of central funding.

You see, the OU is the unforeseen victim of the Coalition government's decision to withdraw central funding in part of higher education and allow university fees to treble (from 3,000 in 2006 to 9,250 now).

The OU's fees were traditionally low  in the high hundreds of pounds a year  and many students had been eligible for grants. But with a loss of tens of millions from central funding, the OU had to increase fees to around 5,000 per year.

Tragically, as the Mail has reported this week, student numbers have fallen dramatically as a result.

I first heard of the OU as a teenager when the idea was floated by Harold Wilson's government in the mid-Sixties.

The Open University (pictured, its campus in Milton Keynes) offered a lifeline back into education

Wilson saw it as a way to give countless Britons a second chance of an education, and along with his Education Minister, Jennie Lee, saw off the opposition and the sneers of Oxbridge types.

To my mind, it was the first real chance many had ever been offered. Back then, Wilson was talking about the 'white heat of technology' and how the world was changing.

That situation is paralleled today by the rise of robotics in industry, the growth of artificial intelligence and the new energy sources replacing oil.

With all sectors of the economy affected by social media, too, we need to be flexible as never before.

That means embracing change, and celebrating the new technology for the opportunities it brings.

The most effective way to do this, just as it was almost 50 years ago when the OU opened its door in 1969, is to take advantage of education.

I admit I'm biased. My school for the blind in Shropshire didn't enter pupils for public exams, so I didn't have the opportunity to sit O-levels.

I left at 16 with no qualifications, but I used part-time courses and 'life-long learning'  dipping in and out of study just as more than two million OU students have done to date  to change my life.

I signed up for evening classes, and gained basic qualifications that way. I got my first job as a clerk with what was then the gas board, but continued studying for A-levels in economics, law and economic history.

My employer let me attend college one day a week, and that route took me on to a full-time degree course at Sheffield University  and eventually to become Education Secretary.

The ladder of learning is a long one, and you can go as high as you want. My first wife took advantage of the OU after we had our first baby in 1977.

She'd completed the first year of a traditional university course, but wanted to spend more time with our son. So she switched to the OU, which let her pick up where she'd left off.

In this way the 'University of the Air', as the OU was called, because students could access lectures and tutorials via late-night or early morning BBC television and radio broadcasts, offered real equality of opportunity to women with families.

Life-long learning has been badly hit at traditional universities, where many part-time courses have been undermined, as well as at the OU.

This destructive policy began in 2012, when the Coalition government targeted grants and support for part-time study  exactly the kind of courses favoured by mature students who must juggle their day jobs and family commitments with academic work.

Nearly two-thirds of part-timers found they weren't eligible for the new student loans.

The Department of Education has, belatedly, said it will introduce maintenance loans to part-time students equivalent to those available for full-time courses, and that can't come a moment too soon.

The OU's fees were traditionally low  in the high hundreds of pounds a year  and many students had been eligible for grants

Restoring support for this group  which has a wealth of life and work experience to offer  to continue their education is vital. The costs would be a fraction of the education budget, yet the transformation study can bring to people's lives is incalculable.

The Open University is for people who were written off in adolescence, or who lacked the confidence to believe they deserved the benefits of education. Some simply weren't ready for study, but they matured, gaining desire, commitment and the willingness to put in damned hard work.

People needed  and still need  the 'second chance' the OU provided. And Britain needs them. They are our untapped gold. With Brexit less than a year away, we need to be more self-reliant, helping workers step into jobs they never imagined themselves doing. As Education Secretary, I saw how learning can benefit the community. Offenders in prison who take up studying, whether doing a degree with the OU or learning to read, are far less likely to reoffend.

Children do better at school when their parents are also studying: psychologists believe there's a mutual benefit, because the youngsters are inspired by mum and dad, who in turn don't want to fail in their offspring's eyes.

Older people have much to gain, too. As the average national age rises, we need to find ways to encourage people to continue being mentally active. Studies show the beneficial impact on health: mobility and mood improve while degenerative diseases such as arthritis can be slowed.

Mental activity also encourages new friendships among the elderly. So do enhanced computer skills, for example.

Society benefits in unexpected ways. The Centre for the Wider Benefits of Learning at London University published a study that shows structured learning makes students more likely to volunteer for charity work, improves racial tolerance and even helps people give up smoking.

All these changes, I believe, are linked to self-esteem. Learning makes us feel good about ourselves.

The message we need to send to every under-qualified person, every potential university graduate is: 'Do not write yourself off  because we won't write you off.' And we need the OU to help us deliver.You might call it the war of the roses, except I have yet to see a rose.

The war of the cheap garage flowers might be a more accurate description of the tawdry attempt to erect a shrine to a monster here in a very febrile corner of south east London.

As of last night, furious locals had seen off any further attempt to build a mountain of floral tributes to career criminal Henry Vincent, 37, opposite the spot where he was fatally stabbed a week ago while terrorising an elderly couple in their own home.

To general amazement, though, the authorities and local community leaders later issued a request for the public to leave future floral tributes alone, saying that any further removals would inflame the situation further.

A new local vigilante has torn down the floral shrine to the stabbed burglar Henry Vincent - the fourth time in three days

You can imagine how that has gone down with the neighbours.

Lewisham resident Ian Gordon yesterday turned up to down the flowers, cards and balloons in South Park Crescent, Hither Green and said they were left by 'scumbags' in memory of a 'scumbag'

The police and council, we are told, are now working with Vincents family to create an alternative shrine nearby citing, hilariously, appropriate management of floral tributes.

How long it will survive is anyones guess.

Local sympathy is decidedly low for a man who made a living preying on the elderly  or old c**** as he called them.

Most seem delighted that he ended up with an overdose of his own medicine.

No wonder tempers are boiling over here in Hither Green.

Over three days, Vincents friends and family have been smothering this place in balloons, teddy bears, cheap chrysanthemums and fraudulent messages  you was too good for this earth etc.

Mr Gordon kicked some bouquets down the street and later threw them in a passing bin lorry

Over three days, various individuals  what the authorities called vigilantes  have taken it upon themselves to remove them.

Yet now the police are telling people to respect the memory of the dead mugger, burglar and member of the local most wanted list?

That did not deter retired bus driver, Iain Gordon, who arrived yesterday lunchtime.

Tearing down all the remaining bouquets and stamping on them, he then carted them off to a rubbish truck explaining: Im doing this for humanity. Anyone who left home armed and ready to kill a pensioner was scum.

'Now hes dead. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

As he was addressing TV cameras, a passing driver, with two young children in the back, wound down his window and shouted: Well done, son!

Mr Gordon worked himself into quite a rage as he tore down the bouquets.

Oh look, pretty flowers and a teddy bear for a man who thought: I know, lets go out and kill a pensioner!, he jeered.

Hereabouts, the unanimous verdict on Vincents death could be neatly summed up in two words yesterday: Good riddance.

Mr Osborn-Brooks (pictured left) was arrested on suspicion of Henry Vincent's (right) murder after he stabbed him with the screwdriver he used to break into his house. The pensioner was later released without charge, but is still being kept under police guard over safety concerns

Everyone I spoke to had nothing but the deepest sympathy for Richard Osborn-Brooks, the 78-year-old who had suddenly been forced to defend himself, his disabled wife and his home in the early hours of the morning last week as two armed intruders broke in.

One was Vincent, the other an accomplice, now wanted by police.

Instead of grieving in private, however, Vincents family have sought to present him as some sort of heroic family man and victim.

Mr Osborn-Brooks is now a marked man, according to sources within the traveller community from which Vincent hailed.

He and his wife may never return to their home. Its doors and windows are now covered with metal grills.

The entire road was blocked when a fire engine and crew arrived mid-afternoon to install four fire alarms. Now why would you suddenly go about installing fire alarms in an empty house? Unless you were expecting someone to burn it down, of course.

In the circumstances, it might have been more sensible of the Vincent clan to mourn their man elsewhere, perhaps at the hospital where he died, or further down a nearby road where he had finally collapsed.

No one could have objected to that.

But no.

They were determined to lionise this predatory menace to society slap bang opposite the Osborn-Brooks house.

And the police now insist their wishes can trump those of the locals.

As neighbour Clem Williams, 58, observed: Theyre trying to poke us in the eye. Since Mr Williams is also a martial arts instructor, you poke him in the eye at your peril.

There was one bunch of fresh flowers last night, however. A local housing officer, Michael OReilly, who had no connection with any of those involved, had wanted to atone for what had happened earlier.

Mr OReilly, 49, said he was simply distressed to see people stamping on any flowers for a dead person, whoever they might be.

He wanted to respect the grief of the bereaved. No one touched his flowers.

This is not a war zone and there is no confrontation between residents and a grieving family, insisted neighbourhood watch spokesman Sylbourne Sydial last night as he turned up in peacemaker mode with local Labour councillor, Mark Ingleby, urging people to be reasonable and leave any flowers alone.

That, I have to say, is not the view of the local residents I spoke to.

There is nothing reasonable about hero-worshipping a violent potential murderer who specialised in brutalising the elderly.

To do so in a place guaranteed to cause optimum provocation is simply not on.

Mourn him somewhere appropriate, if you must, but not here.Russia rejects the US proposal: a pretext for military intervention. The US promises a harsh response to the chemical attack. The climate of tension in the region is exacerbated: Iran promises that the Israeli attack on its bases in Homs "will not remain unanswered".

New York (AsiaNews / Agencies)  A war of vetoes and of words continue between Washington and Moscow in the UN Security Council, in the context of the escalation of tensions that continues after the chemical attack on Douma, in Syria.

Opponents, doctors and rescuers accuse the government of President Bashar al-Assad of having launched a chemical attack on the city of Douma, in the eastern Ghouta region, injuring 1,000 people and killing more than 60.

The city was controlled by the rebels Jaish al-Islam , who have entered into an evacuation agreement with Syria and Russia.

Supported by the Russian ally, Damascus denies being involved in the episode. A team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) will "soon" confirm or deny the effective use of prohibited weapons on Douma, but the experts cannot determine the author of the attack.

Yesterday, Russia vetoed the American proposal to launch a new independent investigation into the facts and warns: it will consider Washington "responsible" for any "illegal military action" it intends to put into practice.

Alongside Russia, China abstained from voting, while among the 12 votes in favour there were those of France, United Kingdom, Kazakhstan and Kuwait. Previously, Washington, London and Paris rejected the Russian proposal, stating that it would not create an independent investigation commission, because it would have to report the results of its investigations to the Security Council, which would then attribute the responsibility for the attack.

UN Security Council resolutions are passed with a majority of nine out of 15, and no vote against by the five permanent members - the United Kingdom, China, France, Russia and the United States.

The heated discussion between the representatives of Moscow and Washington at the Security Council is just the latest in a series of verbal confrontations between the two superpowers. The Russian representative, Vasily Nebenzia, accused the US of seeking a "pretext" to intervene militarily in Syria.

The statements followed the promise of US President Donald Trump to implement an "incisive" response to the chemical attack and his decision to cancel the first official trip to Latin America, precisely to focus on Syria. Alongside the United States, the United Kingdom and France stand, giving substance to the possibility of coordinated Western military action.

The climate of tension is enveloping the whole region: yesterday, a senior Iranian official visiting Damascus warned that the Israeli attack on Syrian base T4, in the province of Homs, in Syria - where 14 Iranians would have died - "will not remain unanswered ".A few weeks ago I noticed a protest of perhaps 100 angry people outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford (pictured)

When I was at university 40 years ago, students sometimes protested. They risked being rounded up by so-called 'bulldogs'  bossy university police acting on behalf of the authorities.

How times have changed. A few weeks ago I noticed a protest of perhaps 100 angry people outside the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. Were they students? No, they were dons, some of whom evidently acquire their clothes in a local charity shop.

They were demanding an improved pension settlement. Placards were held aloft. Slogans were chanted. Students were discouraged from attending to their studies, and they weren't going to be taught anything while this rabble was on strike.

This incident provides a snapshot into what has happened to our universities over the past few decades. To an extent inconceivable in the Seventies, they have become bastions of Left-wing (sometimes extremely Left-wing) thought.

And this, I submit, is a very big deal. When I was a student, between 5 and 10 per cent of my age group went to university. Now almost 50 per cent of young people attend one of these institutions. So if any cultural brainwashing is going on  as I suggest it is  there are likely to be significant repercussions for our society.

The idea of expanding higher education (which seized the mind of John Major, and was developed by Tony Blair) was on the whole a noble one, offering opportunities to people which had previously been the preserve of a fortunate minority.

Disgruntled

What was not predicted was the way in which these rapidly growing institutions would increasingly become dominated by Leftist dons, not infrequently teaching academic subjects of doubtful merit.

An insight into the nature of our new universities was provided by a letter recently sent by 42 academics to the Guardian newspaper. It defended Jeremy Corbyn from charges of anti-Semitism, and suggested he was being subjected to an 'unfair trial by the media'.

Among the disgruntled signatories was Jane Dipple, a lecturer at Winchester University School of Media and Film, whose special interest is 'zombies in Britain: from cinema to counterculture'.

William Proctor, a senior lecturer in journalism, English and communication at Bournemouth University, also set a hand to the pro-Corbyn missive. So did Dr Peri Bradley, a media studies lecturer who earned her doctorate in film at Southampton University.

Oxford may not yet be specialising in Mickey Mouse courses, but the fact that there is a preponderance of Left-wing dons at the university can't be doubted, writes Stephen Glover

And so on. The list is a long one. Suffice to say, few, if any, of the signatories could be described as distinguished academics teaching what used to be thought of as proper academic subjects. And yet there they are, drawing salaries, and sounding off in support of Jeremy Corbyn.

It could be argued that such people proliferate at lesser universities which are former polytechnics. This may be true. But they, or people like them, are still teaching tens of thousands of students, each of whom is paying a sizeable 9,000 a year in tuition fees.

Oxford may not yet be specialising in Mickey Mouse courses, but the fact that there is a preponderance of Left-wing dons at the university can't be doubted.

A Tory-minded history don tells me that 70 or 80 per cent of his department inclines to the Left.

Another illustrious academic confides that 90 per cent of the dons at his very famous Oxford college are of the Left. On account of his unique pro-Brexit views, he is regarded as something of a freak, indulged by kinder souls, and shunned by others.

And then there is the undoubted fact that, whenever a new head of college is appointed at either Oxford or Cambridge, it is practically certain to be a someone of the Left, who may have cut a figure in the media.

Alan Rusbridger (formerly of the Guardian), Mark Damazer (ex-BBC), Will Hutton (fashionable Left-wing journalist) and Helena Kennedy (Lefty lawyer) are examples of Oxford college heads of such a stamp. There are at least as many at Cambridge from similar backgrounds.

In fact, a distinguished person of the Right, whether or not from the media, can no longer become an Oxbridge head of house.

When a new perfect candidate of the Right exceptionally emerges  such as renowned ex-editor Sir Peter Stothard  his or her eligibility is disregarded.

Connivance

What happens is that increasingly Left-wing dons choose increasingly Left-wing college heads, and a self-perpetuating circle is created from which anyone with even mildly Right-wing sympathies is excluded for the rest of time.

This can't be right. Our public institutions should reflect the society they serve. Our society is not overwhelmingly Left-wing, so why should our universities be?

There used to be a balance. In the Oxford of 40 years ago, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill was Master of Balliol while his Right-wing intellectual adversary on the causes of the English Civil War, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was Regius Professor of modern history.

In the days before monochrome Leftism, it was possible to have a Marxist don teaching you about 19th-century novels, and a Tory don expounding on Shakespeare.

Above all in the humanities, the exchange of ideas is of paramount importance. If those ideas are exclusively vetted though a Left-wing prism, there will be a narrowing of minds.

And I believe evidence for this can be found in the growing intolerance of Right-wing or non-conformist views in many of our universities, often with the connivance of the authorities. Thinkers out-of-step with the new orthodoxy are increasingly being denied a platform.

For example, the feminist writer Germaine Greer has been routinely 'no-platformed' for her allegedly 'transphobic'

And then there is the undoubted fact that, whenever a new head of college is appointed at either Oxford or Cambridge, (pictured) it is practically certain to be a someone of the Left, who may have cut a figure in the media

views. Ms Greer has asserted  incontrovertibly, I would have thought  that it is impossible to truly swap one gender for another.

Others are exposed to insufferable bullying. As a result of suggesting that Empire can have good aspects well as bad  again, a pretty indisputable contention  Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of moral and pastoral philosophy at Oxford, has been subjected to appalling insults, as my colleague Guy Adams describes on page 17.

I fear the real bigots are often to be found on the teaching staff of universities.

We got another whiff of intolerant views when 21 prominent academics wrote to the Guardian complaining that the newspaper had welcomed the Government's decision not to re-open the Leveson Inquiry into (in the words of the signatories) the 'crimes' and 'wrong-doing' of newspapers.

It's much more difficult to imagine Right-wing lecturers writing in support of a free Press, though some brave souls did recently circulate a pro-Brexit letter. If you are a rare Tory don, it's wise to keep your head down lest it be blown off.

The decision dramatically to develop our universities has produced a vast new army of Left-leaning academics  many of them not very bright or scholarly, but no less intolerant of opposing views for that.

Hating as they often do the allegedly 'exploitative' and 'racist' history of this country, they are sustained (if hardly overpaid) by the eye-watering tuition fees which students are now obliged to pay.

What is to be done? Perhaps students will object to being bound in an intellectual strait-jacket. Political propaganda usually backfires. We must pray that our universities don't produce a nation of Corbynistas.

In any event, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the well-intentioned mass expansion of university education by politicians has resulted in the creation of a Left-wing fifth column that is increasingly bitterly opposed to the values of the majority of Britons who pay their salaries.The quest for physical perfection, however vacuous, is an unstoppable multi-billion pound global industry. And the most pioneering cosmetic procedures have just been unveiled at an annual conference in Monte Carlo.

Lip contouring that creates plumpness and definition, ways to defeat the dreaded double chin and LED face-masks that promise to turn back the clock are among the latest innovations showcased to industry professionals.

The conference highlights the latest products to hit the world's cosmetic surgery clinics and predicts the future of enhancement.

Here, Femail identifies the new key treatments arriving on UK shores.

Scroll down for video

Futuristic beauty: The cosmetic enhancement industry is advancing at a pace, with many of the latest treatments showcased at the Aesthetic and Anti-Ageing Medicine World Congress (AMWC) in Monte Carlo

ULTRASONIC NOSE JOB

Offered in the UK by Dr Jag Chana, ultrasonic rhinoplasty offers nasal reshaping with improved accuracy and less abrasive results.

Dr Chana says the treatment, which costs around 8,000, uses an 'ultrasonic tip and water rather than conventional coarse instruments such as rasps and chisels'

The ultrasonic nose job uses an 'ultrasonic tip and water' to alter the shape of the nose, a much less abrasive tool that the chisel traditionally used by surgeons

He adds: 'There is no damage which occurs to the cartilage, soft tissue and delicate mucosal lining of the nose and as a result, there is reduced swelling and bruising resulting in more rapid healing times.'

Consultant Plastic Surgeon and Council member of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons Professor Afshin Mosaheb told Femail the treatment is 'able to cut and trim the nasal bone much more accurately and gently.'

He adds: 'It is not appropriate for every patient but on suitable cases can potentially make the outcome more predictable.'

LESS INVASIVE BREAST AUGMENTATION

A lighter breast implant, made by US company B-Lite, promises the same volume with 30 per cent less weight

While no official long term studies are available on new lighter profile implants, warns BAAP, it's likely they're the future for breast augmentation.

With a lower weight compared to the increase in volume, the implants, currently offered by B-Lite, are 30 per cent lighter than those commonly used for boob jobs.

The science? Tiny hollow spheres are permanently bonded in standard medical grade silicone gel, making the implants less heavy. Expect to pay around 6,000 for them.

TWO STEPS TO KILLER LIPS

Trendy filler brand Belotero, from Merz, launches a new concept this month, of 'contour' to emphasise the natural vermilion border outline and 'shape', which plumps the pout

Definition is the new buzz word literally on lips when it comes to filler.

Merz launches Belotero Lips this month, which focuses on using 'shape' and 'contour' in equal measure, to offer the perfect pout.

The vermilion border, the lips outline, is strengthened using 'contour' and the pout plumped using the 'shape' element.

The brand's website says: 'As we age, our skin inevitably loses its youthful appearance as the production of natural dermal volumisers and moisturisers such as hyaluronic acid (HA) diminish, leaving lines and wrinkles where our skin once was youthful, even and radiant.

'The signs and symptoms of the natural ageing process can be reduced by replacing lost hyaluronic acid.'

NEW WAYS TO BEAT A DOUBLE CHIN

Freezing fat cells from under the chin and draining them away via the lymphatic system is the latest way to keep a sleek facial profile

Banishing a double chin for good is considered one of the trickiest areas for cosmetic practitioners.

However, the industry is hell-bent on helping people improve the way their lower face looks with the latest technology including CoolMini, a device that aims to get rid of 'submental fullness' by freezing fat cells before they leave the area via the lymphatic system.

Belkyra, also dubbed a wonder procedure of the future, aims to directly kill fat cells with the use of deoxycholic acid - and will soon be on UK shores.

NECK LIFT USING INVISIBLE THREADS

This procedure, created by company Silhouette Soft, sees tiny threads of polylactic acid - used in dissolving stitches - gently inserted across the front of the neck to lift skin higher.

Lasting up to two years and costing from around 1,850, the threads are naturally re-absorbed into the body.

The Silhouette Soft thread lift aims to get rid of the 'turkey neck' that occurs with ageing. Left: Before the lift, which uses tiny threads of polylactic acid to pull up skin. Right: The effects of the treatment, which can last beyond 18 months

Professor Afshin Mosaheb explains: 'This technique deals with overhanging excess skin in the neck, a so called 'turkey neck'.

'It aims to improve the contour of the neck and achieve the better jaw angle by removing the excess skin.'

A different kind of cocktail! South Korean brand Caregen has launched a hair filler that hopes to transform thinning hair using seven peptides and hyaluronic acid

A QUICK FIX FOR THINNING HAIR

Forget lengthy and expensive hair transplants, the DR.CYJ Hair Filler elixir, currently not available in the UK, promises to dramatically improve hair growth in just two weeks, via a formula of seven patented peptides and hyaluronic acid.

The 'hair filler', from South Korean brand Caregen, costs around 50 for a 1.5ml 'cocktail', and is injected into the scalp.

LED LIGHT THERAPY BEDS

Tripping the light fantastic? LED beds, with around 20,000 lights, are set to treat everything from back pain to scars when they land in UK clinics later this year

The last ten years has seen LED and laser facials become par for the course in beauty clinics with tighter, firmer skin offered in minutes via light therapy.

The progression of LED treatments is such that full-body 'beds' are now the next big thing, with London clinics looking to bring the product to UK markets in the next year. Sessions are expected to start from around 100.

Lying on a bed featuring 20,000 lights enables the therapy to target different areas of the body, easing muscular conditions including back pain and also targeting the skin's exterior, improving the look of stretch marks or scars.A couple who collectively lost over 200lbs have revealed how their separate weight loss journeys helped them fall in love - even though they lived thousands of miles apart.

Today, Maria and Ben Landers are happily married and living Clearwater, Florida, but back in 2015 Maria was living in her native Sweden and clicking through weight loss videos on YouTube when she came across a clip featuring 'the most handsome guy I had ever seen in my life.'

In her story submitted to Love What Matters, Maria described how her life as a floor nurse in a health care facility saw her on her working hard all day long, but taking every opportunity to sit down and gorge on candy during her breaks.

Love online: Maria and Ben Landers met online in 2015 when Swedish Maria had lost around 80lbs and came across Ben's YouTube video documenting his 100lb weight loss

Quite a difference: Maria was working as a floor nurse in Sweden when she found herself at age 22 having ballooned to 260lbs

As a result of her lifestyle, she soon found herself tipping the scales at 260lbs at the young age of 22.

'Being tired was my daily feeling. At the end of the day, I was ashamed about giving medical advice when I clearly was not a good example of good health', she said.

'I would preach about healthy eating habits and the importance of exercise while I took a bite of my fifth piece of cake.'

One day, she found herself struggling to tie up one of her shoes and knew in that moment that she had to do something. She went ahead and signed up to get gastric bypass surgery.

After first being concerned that she wasn't heavy enough to qualify, she received a call from the doctor telling her she was going under the knife in eight days. The news sent her into a panic and prompted a revelation. Why, as a health professional with all the knowledge required to sort her lift out, was she resorting to this?

The other side of the ocean: Over in Louisiana, Ben had been through a similar journey

Meet-cute: One day, Maria claims she was flipping through YouTube when she spotted Ben's video and thought he was 'the most handsome guy I had ever seen in my life'

Similar story: He was apparently 'stand-offish' at first but opened up when he learned about their shared experiences

'I quickly called the doctor back to cancel the surgery, threw the pamphlets in the trash, undressed and took loads of pictures from every angle.

'I decided that I will NOT be a statistic and I would not remove my organs at the age of 22, all because I would not stop eating.'

Across the ocean, Ben was going through a similar struggle in his native Louisiana, and sharing his progress with the world on YouTube.

One video in particular caught Maria's eye. She had lost nearly 80lbs when she came across handsome Ben speaking into the camera about his more than 100lb weight loss journey.

In the video, he explained having a similar moment of clarity as Maria, saying that 'one morning after drinking tequila I just realized, I dont want to live like this anymore,' adding that he felt as though he was 'merely existing' rather than living life to the full.

On his way: Ben started his journey close to 300lbs and lost more than 100. After becoming 'very skinny' he changed his diet and workout to gain muscle

Staying motivated: Maria has since also lost more than 100lbs, having started at around 260lbs

Hitting the road: Eventually, Maria decided to move to the US to be with Ben, and he responded by proposing

Maria felt inspired and instantly attracted - so much so that she sent him a direct message. He replied the next day.

Although Ben was hesitant to get attached right away, learning about Maria's journey helped him warm up. Soon enough, they were chatting 'for hours' online and on the phone.

Their connection quickly became clear and Maria even changed to the evening shift at work so she could keep up with the time difference.

The phone calls and texts eventually turned into visits, starting with Ben inviting Maria to be his date to a stateside wedding.

'Needless to say, things were getting serious. I had found my soulmate, my other half. Maria and Ben, I liked the sound of that,' she said.

Loved up: The pair have been happily married since September 2016 and live together in Clearwater, Florida

The pair kept up their long distance romance for about a year before Maria decided to take the plunge and move to America. Ben responded by pulling out a ring while the two walked along the river during a trip to New Orleans and asked her to marry him.

They tied the knot on the beach in Florida in September 2016.

Now, the couple life their healthy lifestyles together, motivating each other along the way and producing videos for their separate YouTube channels.

Both have lost more than 100lbs and have each kept off the weight for more than five years - though Ben's journey has also included building up 'an incredible amount of lean muscle' since his initial weight loss.

'He has given me the best support you could ever ask for to make the right choices,' Maria said. 'We lift each other up and now realize what an incredible journey this has been. I would not trade this lifestyle for anything!'A clever mother-of-two has wowed family and friends with an impressive DIY play kitchen for her little girl.

Primary school teacher Claire, 35, from Ballarat, Victoria, has no background in building but wanted to make her little girl, Damaris, something special for her upcoming second birthday.

'One day when I dropped her off at daycare I saw that she liked playing with their wooden play kitchen,' Claire told FEMAIL.

A clever mother-of-two has wowed family and friends with an impressive DIY play kitchen for her little girl

Pictured is the final kitchen which was made using a $50 TV cabinet from online

'She loves helping me with cooking at home and gets out bowls, measuring cups and spoons and pretends to cook.

'I started looking at play kitchens but couldn't find one I liked. Then I saw some play kitchens from Kmart that people had painted and thought they looked pretty good.'

Not long afterwards, Claire was scrolling through Pinterest for ideas when she saw a TV cabinet that had been turned into a kitchen.

She started by removing the doors, undercoating the cabinet, painting it and taking the glass out of the door and using liquid nails to attach plywood to the front

'I didn't think it would be too big a project - just a bit of paint a shelf, a picture, a few knobs and presto - but it's turned into a much bigger project than I anticipated,' she said

'I decided that's what I would do. I found an old TV cabinet on the local buy, swap and sell page and I bought it for $50,' she said.

'I didn't think it would be too big a project - just a bit of paint a shelf, a picture, a few knobs and presto - but it's turned into a much bigger project than I anticipated so I had help from my partner, Brad.

'We don't live together but anytime I needed help with the tricky parts like working out how to attach the stove knobs, attaching the tap, cutting the hole for the sink or making the fridge/freezer doors he would always be there to help.

What are Claire's tips for parents wanting to try DIY projects? * Set a budget but also know that you're probably going to go over it as you go along as the project snowballs and you come up with more ideas * If you're not creative, you can find lots of inspiration online. Pinterest is particularly good to get ideas * If you have young kids, it's best to wait until you have some spare time without them, nap time in the day or bed time in the evening as you can work more productively without them touching everything * Measure twice, cut/drill once * If you're painting always always always sand it back. I was told undercoat would be fine but I've had to paint lots and lots of coats of paint to make sure it's durable enough to withstand kids playing * Repurpose anything you can - placemats make perfect hot plates, a picture frame becomes a window, use old stove knobs and tap to save money * Make something to last. There's no point putting in so much time and effort if it's going to break, scratch, fall off * If you don't have large areas to paint, use sample pots. They are around $7 for .5L and perfect if you have several colours you want to use. The exact same paint would've cost me at least $30 for 1L * Wash your brushes/rollers properly so you can reuse them. If you're using the same colour paint you can wrap them in cling wrap so they don't go hard Advertisement

'It was definitely a team effort and a labour of love.'

Claire worked on the creation whenever her daughter had a nap.

She started by removing the doors, undercoating the cabinet, painting it and taking the glass out of the door and using liquid nails to attach ply wood to the front.

She then cut the door to make a fridge and freezer door, used wood grain vinyl for the bench top from Kmart and used stainless steel vinyl for the stove top which was also from Kmart.

She then cut the door to make a fridge and freezer door, used wood grain vinyl for the bench top from Kmart and used stainless steel vinyl for the stove top which was also from Kmart

To make the hot plates she cut circles from a black place mat from Kmart before attaching stove knobs from an old stove and a tap from an old laundry trough.

'I used a steel mixing bowl for the sink, printed a photo of a backyard and framed it to look like a window, hung a small shelf with fake plants (all from Kmart) and used hooks to hang Kmart cooking utensils,' Claire said.

To finish she painted one side of the cabinet in black chalkboard paint, covered the oven door and fridge/freezer door with silver spray paint and attached new handles from Bunnings.

Again, Claire used toys and accessories from Kmart to bring it to life

'As it was such a sturdy TV cabinet I'm sure it's going to withstand years and years of play,' Claire said.

'All up it was probably around $250-$300 for everything but friends and family are going to be giving Damaris the plastic basket/containers which each have the wooden toys as their gift to her for her birthday.

'We are so happy with the result and have had Damaris out there already so that we were able to get her to use to to make sure everything was positioned at a good height for her.'Looking out across the Welsh valley below, my feet planted on the very spot where my father had placed his own 27 years earlier, I felt a connection with him so profound he might as well have been sitting beside me.

I was taking in a view that only the determined few who find their way up to this precarious peak ever get to see: a verdant landscape that must have taken Dads breath away all those years ago, just as it made me gasp now.

Behind me was the gruelling climb Id just completed up the south side of Snowdonia, called Amphitheatre Buttress, to reach this pinnacle  a challenge Id set myself to mark my 40th birthday.

But my hike had been about so much more than simply reaching the top. It saw me retrace Dads footsteps so that I could recreate a photograph that was taken of him at the very same spot back when I was still a little girl.

That picture had been safely tucked away in my rucksack all the way up; I only had to look at it to be transported back to that long ago day before Alzheimers cruelly robbed Dad of his faculties.

Jenny Rayner (bottom) lost her father Martin (top) to early-onset Alzheimer's when he was just 55. She is now retracing his footsteps, re-creating a picture of her father at Dovedale in the Peak District in 1989

At 52, my father Martin, a brilliant teacher, was just a decade older than I am now when he was first diagnosed with this appalling disease. As is devastatingly common with the early onset form of the condition, he deteriorated rapidly and died just three years later, in 2003.

Fifteen years on, I still carry with me a sense of loss. But I have found a way to lighten its burden. And thats by revisiting the walks that Dad carefully documented in a series of journals, and having my photograph taken at various places where he once posed for the camera, too.

His love for the outdoors; his passion for climbing mountains, trekking across valleys and great swathes of the British countryside, defined my father. It was an interest that grabbed him as a teenager, when he and his friends would go off hiking together  they called themselves the Moorlanders.

As a student at Matlock Teacher Training College in Derbyshire he continued to share this pastime with like-minded pals, trekking with them in the Peak District. He met my mum  also a teacher, but now retired  on one of those walks back in 1967.

Jenny completed a climb up the Amphitheatre Buttress in Snowdonia in 2016, as her father had done in 1989

My older brother, Christopher, joined him on some of the 100-mile treks he arranged for his students in the school holidays.

But as a teenage girl I wasnt remotely interested in strapping on a pair of walking boots and joining them out in the hills. It was an interest that only started to appeal to me in adulthood.

I did go off with Dad once, as a Girl Guide looking to bag my Hiking badge.

I have no memory of that walk, but I know it happened because Dad made a note of it in one of his journals  an unflattering entry mentioning that Jenny was a bit slow.

Since he died Ive pored over the dozens of other notebooks that detailed the walks he made. They remain wonderful records of his life, and have proved my dads great legacy to me, since they contain descriptions of beautiful walks that dont appear in any guidebook. The fact theyre written in his hand makes them all the more precious.

Jenny has been revisiting the walks that her father carefully documented in a series of journals

Dad first started showing signs of his condition in 2000.

His mind was always very sharp, so when he started experiencing episodes of confusion and forgetfulness it was of great concern to him  and of course to Mum, Christopher, and I.

He started forgetting important tasks at work, like putting in exam papers  something hed never normally neglect to do.

He pulled out at a junction in front of other cars, causing a terrifying near miss; became panic-stricken on a station platform, having forgotten why he was there in the first place; out with me he became so disorientated that he grabbed hold of me, sending me flying into a bush. It was devastating to see my strong, dependable father so diminished.

After these episodes hed become completely lucid again, which was just as troubling.

Jenny (pictured with her father) explained how her father Martin was diagnosed with dementia at the age of just 52

I hated seeing the horror on his face as he wondered how he could have lost so much control.

Tests followed, which we all hoped would uncover a simple explanation that might easily be resolved. Instead, he was diagnosed with Alzheimers.

It made no sense: this was an old persons disease, and my dad had only just entered his 50s. Dad cried when he told me; harder still was watching him deteriorate so rapidly that, just 18 months later, we had to help him dress, wash and use the loo.

I live in York, where I then worked as a sales administrator. My parents home is in Shrewsbury. Id come home every couple of months and find Dad so much worse each time. He stopped talking and often didnt seem to know who we were.

Watching him getting upset and frustrated when Mum tried to dress him broke my heart.

Jenny (top) re-created a photograph that showed her father at Malham Cove in North Yorkshire (bottom)

Mum was utterly devoted to Dad, but in the end he needed so much care she simply couldnt cope. So he spent the last six weeks of his life in a home, with specialist carers.

When he passed away, his death felt like a blessed release for the wonderful man wed started to lose three years earlier. I remember in his last few hours thinking everyones dad dies one day, but not like this, and not so young.

Losing Dad had a profound effect on me. I quit my job as I couldnt find meaning in it. I work now in a home for dementia sufferers. My personal experience means I dont just help our residents; I can give support to their loved ones too.

The idea of taking up walking popped into my head about six months after Dad died, when I was looking for a way to get fit.

Losing him relatively early in life, I felt horribly robbed of time we could have spent together. Walking seemed like the next best thing, because I was doing something that meant so much to him.

Jenny (right) also re-created a picture showing her father climbing in the Peak District (left)

Three years ago Mum gave me Dads walking journals. Flicking through them, seeing the detail he went into as he recorded the events of each trek, somehow brought him back to me. Reading what hed written about, the weather, the flora and fauna he saw along the way, I could hear his voice again.

But best of all were the photographs that slipped out of the journals. Pictures of Dad in Scotland, on Welsh mountains, in the Yorkshire Dales and his beloved Peak District.

Hed taped them in, but over time the stickiness had worn off and so many fell out without me being able to see where theyd been taken.

He hadnt written any details on the back of these snaps, so I turned detective, posting them on internet walking forums to see if other hikers could help place them.

At first I saw Dads pictures as inspiration for days out. But as people from all over the country came back with answers, it occurred to me that recreating the images could be a wonderful tribute to him.

Jenny says her three-year project has brought herself, as well as her family, happiness. She is pictured here (right) re-creating a picture of her father (left) at Bonsall Cross in the Peak District

This has turned into a three-year project that hasnt just brought me happiness  its given such pleasure to my mum and brother too.

Its allowed him to take me to places Id never otherwise have seen. I feel him with me when I sit or stand where he did.

Of the 16 photographs I have, there are nine left for me to re-shoot; who knows how long that will take me.

But every walk brings Dad back to me, as he was before he became ill, in my thoughts and in my heart.

None more so than climbing Amphitheatre Buttress on my 40th. It was such a challenge I had to go with a mountaineering instructor.

The experience was deeply emotional as well as physically challenging. I kept thinking Dad saw this and I wonder what he made of that.

At one point I had to jump from one rock to another, with a sheer drop beneath me. It was so high you needed binoculars to see the ground. It took me several minutes to find the courage to leap. The second before I did, I said out loud: Be with me, Dad.

And I like to think that, actually, he was. Just as I feel him with me every time I stand on the exact spot where he smiled for the camera  when he had no way of knowing what a gift for the future he was creating for me in the process.

Visit alzheimersresearchuk.org or call 03001115555.

Interview: Rachel HalliwellSending kids off to school with a leaky lunchbox or too many small containers often means food comes home half eaten or, worse, completely untouched.

One Australian mum, who blogs under Phoodie, has found a solution to this problem by using a $28 lunchbox - and she swears her kids love them.

The blogger recently shared the joys of using the Yumbox in a video she posted to Instagram stories: '[Their lunchboxes] always used to be full until I got a Yumbox.'

Australian mother and blogger, Phoodie, swears by using these $28 compartmentalised lunchboxes (pictured are the lunchboxes she prepared)

Australian mother and blogger, Phoodie, swears by using these $28 compartmentalised lunchboxes

The luxury Bento-style box is one that's been divided up into five sections representing the main food groups.

Each group is explained using colourful graphics that outline the basics of nutrition in understandable and simple ways.

'Turn your meals into a food adventure for you and your child. Offering a healthy variety of foods will instill good eating habits the fun way,' reads a statement on the Yumbox website.

The lunchboxes feature leak-proof lids, easy to open latches and removable trays for making them easier to clean

Each food group is explained using colourful and cute graphics that outline the basics of nutrition in easy to understand and simple way

The lunchboxes also feature leak-proof lids, easy-to-open latches and removable trays for making them easier to clean.

Aside from the fact that using Yumboxes have put an end to Phoodie's problem of her kids' uneaten lunches, the busy mum also said convenience was key.

She packs her kids' lunches the night before, which makes her mornings 'so much less stressful!'

The luxury Bento-style box by Yumbox is one that's been divided up into five sections representing the main food group

Phoodie said she packs her kids' lunches the night before because she's 'not the mum that gets up to make bunny-shaped sushi and muffins at 4am every day'

'I'm just going to confirm that I'm not the mum that gets up to make bunny-shaped sushi and muffins at 4am every day.'

According to Nutrition Australia children need to eat a variety of foods every day to be healthy.

A healthy and well-balanced lunchbox should include a main item such as a sandwich, wrap, roll, or sushi; a fruit or vegetable snack; and another snack such as such as yoghurt, grainy crackers with cheese or plain popcorn.She says people now communicate online when they should be with friends

There is one complaint I have grown so tired of hearing in letters to my Saturday advice column in the Mail.

The writer, sad or angry as a result of falling out with a family member or friend, so often moans: I sent her a text but she never replied . . .

It drives me crazy. Why are you sending a stupid text? Why cant you pick up the phone, so that your mother, sister or friend can hear that note in your voice and realise just how upset you are? Or better still  if possible  pop round?

We are living in an age of mass communication, yet it constantly saddens me to hear how badly people interact. Its as if theyre afraid to talk.

Have you ever watched a young couple failing to interact with their children in the supermarket queue? So often they dont chat, but simply grunt or snap.

Recently, I watched a father and daughter together in the park, clearly on his custody day. Look, Daddy, look! the little girl pleaded from the play area. Indifferent, he stared hard at his phone.

Advice columnist Bel Mooney says it constantly saddens her to hear how badly people interact

The result of this? Well, firstly, nursery and primary teachers are faced with poor little scraps who have not been encouraged to use language well, or dont know how to make friends easily, because mum and dad have always been too busy  or idle. Or too stressed out.

In the longer term, it will hardly be a surprise if these children end up returning their parents seeming indifference.

I found myself wondering if that distracted father  leaving his child so alone at play  perhaps deserved to end up a lonely old man?

The issue couldnt be more pertinent, because we now know that it is true that people die of loneliness.

A major scientific study, published last month, leaves us in no doubt that without human contact, the mind and body can fail.

Of course, the shocking statistics refer to actual physical conditions  for example, the researchers found that social isolation can increase the chance of a stroke by 30 per cent, and premature death by up to 50 per cent.

It is associated, too, with a 43 per cent higher risk of first time heart attack, and those who already have cardiovascular problems are 50 per cent more likely to die if socially isolated, according to scientists who tracked 480,000 Britons for seven years.

But why? I believe it is because chronic loneliness ultimately breaks the human spirit. I once interviewed a distinguished oncologist who told me how often men and women develop cancer soon after losing a partner. After the death of their loved ones, their bodies murmur that there is no point in going on.

Bel says people are sending texts and interacting online, when they should be with friends and learning to read the faces and body language of their peers (file photo)

Like any plant, the human heart needs sustenance and will wither without life-giving food.

Just as some plants need more water than others, so some people are happy loners while others  the majority of us  need people around to give their lives meaning.

Like my three happy dogs, we humans are pack animals, naturally choosing to exist within emotional structures, for mutual support and to keep our society as stable as possible.

If you are fortunate, careful and unselfish enough to keep all your social networks in place, then if the terrible day comes and you are left bereaved, you will not be left feeling isolated. The trouble is, so much of modern life mitigates against sociability.

People are now too busy, they live far away from families and friends, they have learned to be selfish in this self-absorbed age . . . there are many reasons for failing to keep up our vital relationships.

Whats more, I believe that the phenomenon of social media  the long-term effects of which have not been fully examined  is storing up a time-bomb for a frightening future.

Young and old alike now interact online when they should be with friends, and learning to read the faces and body language of their peers.

It is tragic that today we talk about connection and the importance of being connected when we are not talking about real associations, but impersonal links via mere gadgets.

The latest loneliness statistics should be a warning to flex those muscles of empathy and think about how we treat those we meet in our daily lives, Bel says

Charging up a mobile phone in order to type hugs on Facebook, or any other social media site, is not connection. Its pretty meaningless.

More importantly, its likely to make us feel far worse.

Then what about those super-independent middle-aged people who are too busy working or going on cruises and living it up to have much time for family or old friends?

When they become too old to globetrot, their loved ones may have grown too used to them being absent. As the Beatles sang: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

This is the first truth of family life  and a vital clue to remedying loneliness. Which is why it struck me as terribly sad that the clinical advisor to Public Health England should have suggested a couple of months ago that voice-recognition devices for the home could help alleviate loneliness.

Surely, an intelligent personal assistant such as the Amazon Alexa wont really help solitary pensioners? Who can derive comfort from a machine?

It would be more thoughtful to consider adopting a little dog or cat from one of the many overcrowded shelters, especially an older animal for an older person. A pet will respond with affection and reciprocal need  and, I firmly believe, could save a life.

No wonder the Office for National Statistics found three years ago that Britain is the loneliness capital of Europe. It affects all people, of all ages, from all backgrounds  nine million people living in miserable isolation.

The Royal College of General Practitioners is well aware of the knock-on effect on the NHS. Every day, patients seek help for problems that are not just medical but stem from social isolation.

We are living in an age of mass communication, yet it constantly saddens me to hear how badly people interact. Its as if theyre afraid to talk

I welcome, wholeheartedly, the Colleges plan to work with charities and voluntary groups on a manifesto for the Government to tackle loneliness. But this is not a new issue, and no government can devise happiness laws.

Do not expect a newly appointed Minister for Loneliness to save all the lonely people, to quote another Beatles song  when, in fact, some answers to social isolation might be within ourselves to solve.

I refuse to believe its impossible for people to help themselves.

The Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness, set up by the Labour MP before she was murdered by far-right terrorist Thomas Mair in 2016, concluded in a report in January that each and every one of us needs to be aware of the problem.

For my part, the most important lesson of my entire adult life is this: relationships must be worked at.

Within parenthood, school, love affairs, work, marriage  all the little human interactions which gradually build us up as social beings  we have to sweat to sustain them as we focus on the value of empathy.

Its crucial that we all make that leap of imagination into the heart of another, to reach out beyond the stifling circle of self-hood.

Also, this involves forgiving the failings of others, and thinking before we speak.

Above all, put down those ubiquitous bloody electronic gadgets and look, listen, feel and talk.

Try a real hug instead of a virtual one. Visit a person who needs you (the weepy mate whose lover has left, or the gran who rabbits on about her dodgy knees) because even if you dont want to, youll feel better for being good. Its called reaping rewards.

And it all adds up to a personal storehouse to draw on when it is necessary.

Of course, there are countless depressed people consumed by loneliness who have given up hope. They yearn for others to reach out, someone to stop and say: Hello.

Its imperative that society takes this seriously. So never underestimate the importance of holding a hand out to another human being.

Above all, everyone should take the latest loneliness statistics as a warning, and flex those muscles of empathy and think about how we treat those we meet in our daily lives.

Surely, if we work hard at trying to prevent others becoming lonely, it will mean that we, too, are less likely to suffer acute loneliness ourselves.Mother Jennah Maurovic (pictured) has been suffering from excruciating headaches after a cyst on her brain was detected via MRI scan

A 26-year-old mother who suffers excruciating headaches has made a desperate plea for help from medical experts after being repeatedly dismissed by doctors.

Jennah Maurovic, from Queensland, who's convinced the pain stems from a cyst found on her brain, said she has been experiencing agonising headaches, eyesight problems, seizures, numbness and dizzy spells for the past year.

But despite the serious health problems, the frustrated mother-of-three said her symptoms have been misdiagnosed as migraines and earaches.

'We get told we have a migraine, we sit here day after day with headaches, eye problems, blurred vision, doubled vision, black outs, seizures and numbness. We can't drive our cars or look after our children,' she said.

'I went to the doctor and was told it was just a "pregnancy thing".'

But despite her MRI scan detecting a cyst on her brain in the region of her pineal gland, Ms Maurovic claimed doctors have so far dismissed the growth as the cause of her symptoms.

Despite her MRI scan detecting a cyst on her brain in the region of her pineal gland, the 26-year-old claimed doctors have so far dismissed the growth as the cause of her symptoms

The mother has three children - Braxton, aged four, Brycen, three, and 11-month-old Iylah

WHAT IS A PINEAL CYST? A pineal cyst is usually a non malignant mass in a small gland in the brain. The best treatment options depend on many factors, including the size of the cyst. Larger cysts can cause symptoms including headaches, unexpected seizures, visual disturbances, memory loss and cognitive decline. It can be difficult to distinguish a complicated cyst from a pineocytoma, which is a tumour of the pineal gland. Advertisement

'Doctors have told me it is not causing my problems,' she said

Earlier this year, she was driving her children - aged three and four - to a childcare centre and school when she lost her vision completely.

'My eyes just went black and I couldn't see a thing. Luckily I didn't crash. But it scared my kids because I swerved over to the side of the road. It was about 10-15 minutes before I got my eyesight back,' she told nine.com.au.

'This was followed by the worst pain I have ever felt in my head. I was rushed to hospital but was sent home with a diagnosis of mild headache and earache.

'I then went to my GP and he sent me for another MRI still showing the pineal cyst.'

As her debilitating condition worsen, the mother said she has been in and out of hospital as she endures constant pain.

Last week, she was taken to hospital after she suffered what she believed was a four-hour seizure but doctors dismissed it as muscle spasms.

'They are doing lumbar punctures and spinal tests. They are thinking that I might have a spinal fluid leak. But I know the symptoms that I have been having is because of this cyst,' Ms Maurovic told nine.com.au.

'This is constant pain in my head. Every time I try to say it's not a migraine they are looking at me like I am crazy.'

The mother said she has tried everything imaginable to convince doctors her chronic symptoms are the result of the pineal cyst - but to no avail

The mother said she has tried everything imaginable to convince doctors her chronic symptoms are the result of the pineal cyst - but to no avail.

'Doctors don't believe that pineal cysts cause any problems but if you do the research and speak to specialists who actually know about pineal cysts they will tell you that they are in fact do cause problems,' she said.

'I am still to this day in constant pain, constant vision problems. I'm now not sleeping I'm having memory problems I can't be left home on my own in case I black out again.

'Something needs to be done. Pineal cysts are debilitating to many. My children need me... my family needs me. I'm now begging for help I can't live like this any more.'

Ms Maurovic has launched an online petition to raise awareness about pineal cysts.

She also set up a GoFundMe page in a bid to raise money for flights to Sydney so she could meet with internationally renowned neurosurgeon Dr Charlie Teo for a consultation.Prince Harry's biographer has revealed the 'turning point' in his burgeoning romance with Meghan Markle came when the pair jetted to Jamaica for a friend's wedding.

Katie Nicholl said the couple's loved-up trip to the Caribbean isle in March 2017 for the nuptials of Tom Inskip helped cement their relationship.

Speaking on ITV's Lorraine, the author of Harry: Life, Loss, and Love, told how the prince's close friends joked that the couple would be next to walk up the aisle.

Describing Harry as 'the man of the moment', she said: 'The inner circle realised at that point that this was going to do the distance. They'd never seen Harry so happy.'

Just eight months later, their 'drunken prediction' came true when the pair announced their engagement.

Burgeoning romance: The couple jetted out to Jamaica in March 2017 for the wedding of Harry's close friend Tom Inskip. According to biographer Katie Nicholl, this was the moment he knew she was 'the one'

Nicholl also told how Jessica Mulroney (pictured) that had 'hidden' the couple away in her Toronto townhouse when news first broke of their relationship in late 2016

Nicholl, who started writing the book before the couple announced their engagement, also told how friends began hinting that the relationship 'had legs' and was getting more serious by the day towards the end of 2017.

She also revealed the moment Meghan knew that Harry was 'the one', after he bought presents for the children of her close friend Jessica Mulroney.

'It was the moment she fell in love with him,' she said, explaining that the Mulroneys had 'hidden' the couple away in their Toronto townhouse when news first broke of their relationship in late 2016.

'They were very much protectors, two of the few people who knew about their romance in that early stage,' Nicholl said.

'Meghan's flat was under siege. The Mulroneys were very instrumental in hiding them in their townhouse and protecting them.'

Speaking about Harry and Meghan's relationship, Nicholl said: 'He's grown up and he's found himself. Look at him, he's so happy'

Confident: Nicholl believes it is Meghan's ease in front of the cameras that makes her the right partner for her Harry (the couple pictured at a joint engagement in Bath last week)

The couple, who will tie the knot at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on May 19, have already put in a number of joint public appearances ahead of their nuptials

The couple, who will tie the knot at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on May 19, have already put in a number of joint public appearances ahead of their nuptials.

And Nicholl believes it is Meghan's ease in front of the cameras that makes her the right partner for her Harry.

'You only need to watch her on those early engagements that she's done [to see] her confidence.

'She's not as resistant to the cameras. Whereas for [Harry's exes Chelsy Davy and Cressida Bonas] it was a massive issue. They didn't want that life.'

And the writer hinted that babies could soon be on the cards for Harry and Meghan, adding: 'Family is very much on the agenda.

Dishing the dirt: Prince Harry's biographer revealed the 'turning point' in his burgeoning romance with Meghan Markle came when the pair jetted to Jamaica for a friend's wedding

Katie Nicholl said the couple's trip to the Caribbean aisle in March 2017 for the nuptials of Tom Inskip helped cement their relationship

Speaking on Lorraine, the author of Harry: Life, Loss, and Love, told how Harry's close friends joked that the couple would be next to walk up the aisle

'You only need to watch Harry with children to see that he will be a wonderful father. Meghan is 36, shes very maternal. She wants to start a family.'

And speaking of Harry's transition from 'a boy into a man' she added: 'Going to war was the moment that really changed Prince Harry. He came close to death on two occasions

'Serving on the front line helped him to understand the concept of Invictus; he's grown up and he's found himself. Look at him, he's so happy.'

Lorraine continues on weekdays at 8.30am on ITVA student who is almost 30 years younger than her boyfriend - and the same age as his son - is planning to have her first child with him.

Yessenia Mwaniki, 27, a beauty student from Modesto in California, started chatting with former warehouse coworker Hipy Briseno Jr., 56, over Facebook two years ago, and they quickly bonded over their shared passion for Motown music.

Yessenia and Hipy - whose son Titus was born the same year as his now girlfriend - have now been living together for over a year, and are already planning to start a family of their own.

Yessenia says her partner is a 'gentleman' who treats her better than the younger men she dated before, while Hipy says she 'keeps him active' - but the couple admit they're frequently mistaken for father and daughter when they attend church together.

Yessenia Mwaniki, 27, from California is dating Hipy Briseno, 56, after they bonded over their love for 1970s Motown music, and they are now planning to have their first child together

Calling her beau the 'love of her life', Yessenia said she cherishes Hip's way of 'taking care of her' - a quality most of her younger boyfriends lacked.

Meanwhile divorcee Hipy, father to Rebecca, 31, Titus, 27, and Jessica, 25, likes that his girlfriend keeps him active and 'feeling young'.

And while having a baby may cause some family drama, Hip says he deserves to be happy again and that he believes most relatives on both sides will embrace their future child.

He added: 'I gave to my kids, they saw me go through a divorce and ultimately this is my life. I think they'll have a lot of love for that baby.'

The couple say their relationship has gone so well because Yessenia was getting tired of dating men her own age

Opening up about what brought them together, retail worker and student Yessenia said: 'The main thing that drew us together was my music interest.

He didn't expect a woman in her twenties to be into Motown artists and bands like Journey.

'We were both always religious, but this relationship has made us much stronger spiritually.

'I've always gotten along better with older people and he's always gotten along better with younger people, so this works out perfectly.

Although his son Titus was born the same year as Yessenia, Hip has been living with her for more than a year and they are planning their first child together

'People in church always say to me, 'it's so nice of you to come to church with your father' and always say, 'He's not my father. He's my partner in crime.

'He's just such a gentleman. When we go grocery shopping, he tells me to go inside and carries all the grocery bags in himself.

'Men my age don't want to do things like that for me. They expect me to do everything myself.

'I'm going to be with him through the good and the bad, no matter what.'

The duo are frequently mistaken for father and daughter when they attend church, and are forced to defend their unusual relationship

Branding him the 'love of her life', Yessenia admitted she cherishes Hip's way of 'taking care of her,' a quality most of her younger boyfriends lacked

Hip, a warehouse supervisor, added: 'I love how she keeps me active.. We're always going to the park and walking the dog together.

'Most men in their fifties who have partners around the same age start getting lazy and going through depression.'

But Hip admits he was a little surprised when he realized that a woman nearly 30 years his junior was attracted to him.

He said: 'I was actually a little amazed that she was interested in me because I was years apart from her. It was hard for me to grasp, especially since she's quite beautiful.'

Meanwhile divorcee Hipy likes that his girlfriend keeps him active and 'feeling young'

While having a baby may cause some family drama, Hip says he deserves to be happy again and that he believes most relatives on both sides will embrace their future child

But Yessenia says that when she was getting to know her boyfriend, his age was barely noticeable.

She added: 'He had the same qualities as anyone else can, so the gap wasn't really a big deal.'

While they don't consider the difference to be a problem, they have noticed some major contrasts between each other while having conversations.

But the duo say these dissimilarities are what make their everyday talks even more interesting.

Hip said: 'She talks about her job and school and all the excitement going on, while I talk about being in a warehouse all day.

'What's interesting is the amount of things we have to talk about. Now that she's in school, we do miss each other quite a bit.'

While they don't consider the difference to be a problem, they have noticed some major contrasts between each other while having conversationsby Melani Manel Perera

The project was launched yesterday. At least 70 thousand poor fishermen and farmers will benefit from aid. India offers economic assistance for a total of 2.3 billion euros.

Colombo (AsiaNews) - Bicycles, hoes and sewing machines: these are the support tools that the Indian government has donated to the poor fishermen and farmers' communities of Hambantota, in the southern part of Sri Lanka. In all, at least 70 thousand people will receive aid. For their part, the Colombo authorities thanked India for the great help shown to the populations in difficulty.

The delivery ceremony took place yesterday at the "Nonagama Cultural Center" in Ambalantota, in the district of Hambantota. High Commissioner of India Taranjit Singh Sandhu represented the Delhi government; for the Sri Lankan side Mahinda Amaraweera, minister of development of fish and aquatic resources. Together they launched a project to support farmers and fishermen living in the area.

The Ceylon Fisheries Harbors company will distribute the assets offered by India, worth 138 million Sri Lankan rupees [over 720 thousand euros]. In detail, the 70 thousand beneficiaries will receive 7 thousand bicycles, 1000 sewing machines and 60 thousand hoes to plow the fields. The goal of the project is to improve the income and living conditions of the population.

The plan is part of the development agreements of the bilateral partnership of the two neighboring countries. India's total commitment to Sri Lanka amounts to a total of about 2.9 billion US dollars [2.3 billion euros]. Of these, at least 545 million [more than 442 million euros] are allocated in the form of pure donations.

Speaking at the ceremony, High Commissioner Sandhu recalled the numerous projects with which India guarantees assistance. Then he added that his government "will continue to support Sri Lanka in any way and in all circumstances".Queen Maxima of the Netherlands attended the 15th anniversary of a charity founded in honour of her late father-in-law on Thursday.

She was joined by her mother-in-law Princess Beatrix, 80, at the occasion held to celebrate the Prince Claus Leerstoel at Noordeinde Palace.

Prince Claus of the Netherlands, who died in 2002, was Prince consort to the then Queen Beatrix, who abdicated in 2013 to allow their son Willem-Alexander to take the throne.

Maxima, 46, wore a bold red dress - her second outing in the shade this week in as many days - to give a speech at the event in honour of the charity, which helps support artists and cultural organisations.

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Queen Maxima rocked a red pencil dress as she celebrated the 15th anniversary of the Prince Claus Leerstoel at Noordeinde Palace on Thursday (seen sitting alongside mother-in-law Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands)

The palace where the event was held is in the Hague, one of the three official palaces of the Dutch royal family.

Opting for a form-fitting frock that fell to just below the knee, Maxima teamed it with a pair of high-heeled black pumps.

The mother-of-three injected a further touch of glitz with statement diamond earrings, and added a vibrant floral scarf.

Maxima gave the opening speech for the occasion, before taking a seat in the audience.

She later posed for a group picture with her mother-in-law and other attendees.

The royal, 46, turned heads as she took to the stage to give a speech in aid of the charity, which helps support artists and cultural organisations

Maxima made her appearance at the palace which is one of the three official palaces of the Dutch royal family, located in The Hague in the province of South Holland

She was in the company of her mother-in-law and former Queen, Beatrix of the Netherlands, 80, who is mother to Maxima's husband Willem-Alexander, King of the Netherlands (centre)

Maxima gave the opening speech for the occasion, before posing with the congregation

Earlier this week Maxima stepped out in another vibrant all-red ensemble, as she paid a visit to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam on Tuesday.

Maxima is patron of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, which was founded in 1888.

During her visit to the venue, Maxima, the mother-of-three watched musicians in rehearsal and was given a tour of the auditorium.

An international financier by training, Maxima was born in Argentina and married into the Dutch royal family in 2002, three years after meeting her husband-to-be in Seville, Spain.

On Tuesday Maxima stepped out in a vibrant all-red ensemble as she paid a visit to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam

Despite reportedly having no inkling that Willem-Alexander was heir to the throne when the pair first met, she eventually became Queen consort when her husband ascended to the throne.

Willem-Alexander became king after his mother, Beatrix, abdicated in April 2013 after 33 years as reigning monarch.

The couple are parents to Princess Amalia, Alexia and Ariane - affectionately dubbed 'the A team' by their doting father.Chelsea Clinton received an unexpected greeting from a young fan last night when a three-year-old girl jumped onto the stage in the middle of her book reading.

The event, in Toronto, Ontario, saw Chelsea, 38, discuss her newest children's book, She Persisted Around The World, with the CEO of the bookstore chain Indigo Heather Reisman.

Both women were sitting onstage and talking about the new book, which celebrates female trailblazers around the world, when the little girl made her way up onto the stage, according to her mother Holly Fraser, who tweeted about the incident.

Outfit: Chelsea Clinton wore the same dress and tired beige shoes to her book reading on Wednesday night that she also wore a year ago for a gala in New York City in April 2017 (left)

Inspirational figures: The former first daughter read excerpts of her new book, which celebrates female trailblazers from various countries around the world

Surprise! The 38-year-old was later joined on stage by a three-year-old girl whose mother Holly Fraser revealed that she 'hopped' up to join the former first daughter

Support: Chelsea retweeted Holly's post, thanking the pair for attending and encouraging the young girl to 'keep persisting'

In images posted on Holly's Twitter account, the little girl can be seen leaning against the stage and rose her left leg as she pushed herself on top of it, getting close to the duo.

Chelsea and Heather didn't seem to mind the interruption at all and welcomed her onto the stage, letting the toddler make herself at home next to Heather onto her seat.

The girl's mother, Holly Fraser, posted photos of the moment ontoTwitter afterwards, writing in the caption: 'Well, #ShePersisted  my 3yr old hopped on stage w/ @ChelseaClinton & @HeatherReisman.'

She also joked that she would have a talk with her daughter regarding boundaries the next day, presumably to avoid any similar incident in the future.

Pictures of the event show Chelsea, donning a printed A-line dress and her favorite nude stilettos, carrying on with her talk and holding a microphone up to her face while Heather helps her settle next to her.

Chelsea has worn those beige shoes to many other events in the past, causing the pumps to develop tears and scuffs from being worn so often.

Repeat: Chelsea has worn those beige shoes to many other events in the past, including at an awards dinner in New York City back in June last year

Fave: The former first daughter wore the nude stilettos in November 2017 when she took the stage at Glamour magazine's Women of the Year Live Summit at the Brooklyn Museum

Staple: Chelsea also donned her beige shoes with a blue dress and a beige coat in May 2017

Past: In July 2016, she stood in those shoes as she praised her mother, Hillary, at the Democratic National Convention (left). Months later she was seen a day after her mother lost the election wearing the heels alongside her husband Marc (right)

Event: In October 2016, Chelsea wore the pumps to a town hall in Haverford, Pennsylvania

Oops! The shoes (pictured in November 2017) have a damaged heel, indicating that Chelsea's pump got caught in a crack or a sidewalk grate

The former first daughter wore the nude stilettos in November when she took the stage at Glamour magazine's Women of the Year Live Summit at the Brooklyn Museum, pairing them with a simple, black A-line dress.

She slipped on the pumps in June last year for an awards dinner in New York, and that same month she wore them with a pantsuit on the streets of the Big Apple.

Chelsea also donned her cherished beige shoes with a blue dress and a beige coat in May of that same year, and sported them while supporting her mother on the campaign trail throughout 2016.

In July 2016, she stood in those pumps as she praised Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention, and in October 2016, she wore them to a town hall in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

One day after her mother lost the election, in November 2016, Chelsea wore the heels again during an outing with her husband Marc.

Back in 2016, Chelsea also wore the shoes with the same dress as the one she donned at her book reading in Toronto, when she attended a gala in New York City.

After last night's reading, Holly thanked Chelsea and Heather on Twitter for 'being gracious with [her] excited girly' after her daughter hopped onstage.

The mother had received one of 300 wristbands granting people access to the event as well as a chance to meet Chelsea and to get a signed copy of her book.

Outing: Adults got to bring children under 12 to the event for free, and several apparently took advantage of the offer

Talk: The little ones got to chat with Chelsea during the signing segment of the evening

Meeting: Chelsea looked happy to chat with the children in attendance during the signing

Greeting: The former first daughter shook hands with a little girl who came to hear her talk

Adults got to bring children under 12 to the event for free, and several apparently took advantage of the offer, attending the reading with their little ones who got to chat with Chelsea during the signing segment.

Holly and her little girl also posed for a photo with Chelsea while the former first daughter completed her signing.

The little girl can be seen flashing a bright smile at the camera in her mother's pictures, visibly thrilled to be a part of the snap.

Chelsea's newest book, which came out last month, is the companion to her previous title, She Persisted, which celebrated American female trailblazers such as journalist Nellie Bly, Oprah Winfrey, and Sonia Sotomayor.

She Persisted Around The World follows the same concept, but this time features inspirational figures from other countries, such as Polish-French physicist Marie Curie, British novelist JK Rowling, and Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai.

The title is a reference to Senator Elizabeth Warren's and her objections during the confirmation hearing of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General.

She was formally silenced during the hearing, a rare move that came while she read a letter from Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr's widow, in opposition to the Alabama politician.

Senator Mitch McConnell later described her conduct as such: 'Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.'

The expression 'she persisted' quickly became a rallying cry for feminists, and came to celebrate women's perseverance in the face of silencing and adversity.The ex-wife of serial killer Angus Sinclair, who was convicted of murdering four young girls, believes he was responsible for the deaths of even more victims over 'ten years of mayhem' in Glasgow.

According to ITV investigator Mark Williams-Thomas, new evidence suggests that Sinclair - dubbed the 'World's End' killer - murdered at least three more women during a decade-long spree.

Sinclair, 73, was jailed for life and ordered to serve a minimum of 37 years in 2014 after a jury found him guilty of killing Christine Eadie and Helen Scott, both 17, in Edinburgh, in what became known as the World's End murders, because they were last seen leaving a pub by that name in the city's old town. He was previously found guilty of killing Mary Gallacher in Glasgow.

The murderer was already behind bars for killing eight-year-old Catherine Reehill in Glasgow when he was sentenced to life.

In the ITV documentary The Investigator: A British Crime Story, retired police detective Williams-Thomas meets witnesses who recall seeing a vehicle matching the description of decorator Sinclair's van in the same locations where the bodies of three women were dumped within four months of each other in 1977. Their murders have never been solved.

In the documentary the former detective spoke with Sinclair's ex-wife, who was living with him in 1977, in her first TV interview.

It's thought that the World's End serial killer Angus Sinclair (left in recent years and right in 1977), is behind even more murders that he was convicted for

ITV investigator Mark Williams-Thomas spoke to Sinclair's ex-wife who believes that he had 'ten years of mayhem'

The bodies of Miss Scott (left) and Miss Eadie (right) were found six miles apart in East Lothian. They had been raped, strangled and bound with their underwear

'Angus started going back and forward to Edinburgh every weekend. He was going to do extra work painting and decorating,' she said.

She added: 'I don't believe that he ever stopped. They seem to think he had a period of time he went on a spree. I think [it] was 10 years of mayhem in the city of Glasgow.'

Williams-Thomas examines evidence pointing to Sinclair as being behind a trio of further murders in Glasgow.

He says: 'My investigation shows that the manner in which the Glasgow three were killed bears all the hallmarks of the World's End murders in Edinburgh - for which Angus Sinclair was convicted.

'I can place Sinclair or his caravanette at all three Glasgow crime scenes, which means I believe Sinclair could be responsible for the abduction and murder of Anna Kenny, Hilda McCauley and Agnes Cooney.'

Agnes, 23, Hilda, 36, and Anna, 20, were murdered within four months of one another in 1977.

Sinclair was also found guilty of killing Mary Gallacher in Glasgow. The murderer was already behind bars for killing eight-year-old Catherine Reehill

Hilda McCauley (left), Anna Kenny (centre) who were both murdered in Glasgow in August 1977, are believed to have been victims of Sinclair

Eadie and Scott were targeted by Sinclair and his brother-in-law Gordon Hamilton, who died in 1996, on a night-out at Edinburgh's World's End pub on October 15, 1977.

Their bodies were discovered the following day, having been dumped in remote locations in East Lothian. They had been raped, strangled and bound with their underwear.

Sinclair was convicted in November 2014 following a five-week trial at the High Court in Livingston.

In the documentary, Mark Williams-Thomas explored the links between the crimes Sinclair has been convicted for, and those in which the bodies of three women were left near Glasgow in 1977.

Sinclair has long been suspected of having committed these murders, and Mark finds evidence which places him and his vehicle at the crime scenes of all three killings.

The first victim was Anna Kenny, a 20-year-old who vanished on her way home on August 5, 1977.

Her close friend Brenda tells Mark: 'She's taken a lift. And that person's murdered her. It's so sad. I'm just getting emotional now. I just think it's horrible they've never been done for her. I think it's so sad.'

Police questioned Sinclair but in all three cases the forensic evidence was lost, says Tom Wood, the detective who led the investigation into the World's End murders he was found to be responsible for.

Sinclair was jailed for life and told to serve a minimum of 37 years after a jury in 2014 found him guilty of killing Christine Eadie (right) and Helen Scott (left)

WHO IS MURDERER ANGUS SINCLAIR? A TIMELINE OF SERIAL KILLER'S CRIMES Sinclair was first jailed for culpable homicide after sexually assaulting and strangling seven-year-old Catherine Greenhill to death 1961: Sinclair was jailed for culpable homicide after sexually assaulting and strangling seven-year-old Catherine Greenhill to death. He was sentenced to ten years but was free to offend again after just six. 1977: Police fear Sinclair went on a murderous spree between June and December 1977, when he throttled and killed Miss Scott and Miss Eadie. 1978: Sinclair killed again in November 1978, raping, strangling and stabbing Mary Gallacher, 17, in Glasgow. 1978 - 1982: Sinclair raped and indecently assaulted 11 other young girls, some as young as six, over the next four years and was eventually handed a life sentence for his crimes. 1996: Sinclair's brother-in-law Gordon Hamilton dies, meaning he cannot be tried for any involvement in Miss Scott and Miss Eadie's deaths. 2001: It was not until 2001 that improved DNA technology linked him to the body of Miss Gallacher. He was convicted of her murder shortly afterwards. 2007: 30 years after Miss Scott and Miss Eadie were killed, a review of the World's End murders led to a trial, but it collapsed. 2014: Sinclair is jailed for life for the World's End murders. Advertisement

Tom Wood says: 'All the crime scene evidence, all the forensic samples. Everything that could have yielded DNA... the loss of the forensic evidence from the Glasgow cases was catastrophic.'

Mark examined evidence around Sinclair's white caravanette, which he bought to travel around Scotland to carry out his work as a decorator.

A reported sighting of a white van in the same area as one of the murders led Mark to witness Alex McCuish, a shepherd, who confirmed he saw a van of a similar type to Sinclair's close to the date of Anna Kenny's disappearance - in the area where her body was found.

He said: 'Well, it was sitting with the curtains drawn and doors closed. And it was a lovely warm afternoon. And I thought, that's a bit strange.

'Usually folk would be out enjoying the sunshine but there was nobody to be seen at all... I remember it quite clearly. We'd been competing at a sheep dog trial on the Saturday.'

Police search the fields in the mist near the spot where Miss Eadie was found on October 16 1977

Another witness, whose identity is disguised, told Mark he saw a white van in the area where Agnes Cooney's body was found, the night after she was last seen.

He said: 'Looked like a Volkswagen caravanette. And I noticed that the registration number was RGG and finished with R. And that was similar to a registration, my father's at that time, his current car.'

When Mark showed him a picture of Sinclair's caravanette, he said: 'That was the vehicle! I can be sure of that I'm so sure that's the vehicle.'

Mark also visited the Channel Islands to interview another witness about seeing a man near the site where Hilda Macaulay's body was found.

She said: 'It was in a layby. I was in a car. I happen to see a man come out of, and walk up by the lane past me.'

When shown a picture of Angus Sinclair, who she said she has never heard of, she said, 'Yes, that's him.'

Asked by Mark if there was anything noticeable about the man, she said simply: 'His eyes.'

The Investigator: A British Crime Story aired on ITV on ThursdayA transgender model has gone after her dream of becoming the first trans woman of color to walk in a Victoria's Secret fashion show.

Leyna Bloom, 27, took to Twitter earlier this week to share two stunning photos of herself, in which she poses in a black bikini. Next to the snaps, she wrote: 'Trying to be the 1st Trans model of color walk a #VictoriaSecret Fashion show.'

The model, from Chicago, Illinois, has called out Victoria's Secret in the past for the lack of diversity on its catwalks, urging the brand to cast models of all genders and body types in the future.

Ambition: Transgender model Leyna Bloom has gone after her dream of becoming the first trans woman of color to walk in a Victoria's Secret fashion show

Public: The model, 27, took to Twitter earlier this week to share two stunning photos of herself, in which she poses in a black bikini, along with a message detailing her dream

Message: Leyna, from Chicago, Illinois, has called out Victoria's Secret in the past for the lack of diversity on its catwalks, urging the brand to cast models of all genders and body types

Support: Twitter users have been chiming in to encourage Victoria's Secret to feature Leyna in a future show

Her appeal on Twitter has prompted other users to manifest their support, and her initial message has now been shared almost 30,000 times and has received more than 98,000 likes.

Twitter users have been chiming in to encourage Victoria's Secret to feature Leyna in a future show, with one person writing in response to her tweet: 'Well if they don't, it's @VictoriasSecret loss.'

'You are sooo beautiful!! @VictoriasSecret, make it happen,' one person wrote, tagging the brand in their reply.

Someone else pointed out that the brand 'would be damn lucky to have' her, with another user writing: 'If Victoria knows what's good for them you're going to take them by storm.'

Others complimented Leyna's looks, with comments such as 'Wow [you're] beautiful and hope you succeed' and 'Oh my god you're so beautiful.'

Rallying behind her: Leyna's appeal on Twitter has prompted other users to manifest their support, and her initial message has now received more than 98,000 likes

Statement: Back in November last year, Leyna urged Victoria's Secret to hire more diverse models, including transgender and curvy people

Project: The model has long wanted to work with Victoria's Secret, which is what prompted her to discuss her ambitions on Twitter

'Go get it Leyna!' another person wrote in an encouraging response.

Back in November last year, Leyna urged Victoria's Secret to hire more diverse models, including transgender and curvy people.

'All these women of color in the VS fashion show that's amazing right,' she wrote. 'But they still have way more white girls. It's like every time they added a woman of color they added another white girl. Next year they need to cast trans and curve models all colors not just Caucasians.'

The model has long wanted to work with Victoria's Secret, which is what prompted her to discuss her ambitions on Twitter.

'It's always been a dream for me, like so many others, not just transPOC [people of color], all women, and some men even,' she told Yahoo.

'This is a platform that glorifies femininity. I always felt in my most natural state I am heavenly. For my trans sisters, regardless of color, this will be a moment for us all.'

Career: Leyna, who has been a professional model since 2014, has in the past walked for the New-York-City-based labels Chromat and The Blonds

Milestone: The model believes Victoria's Secret has the power to send a strong message and 'set the tone' by hiring her

Movement: Twitter users have been chiming in to encourage Victoria's Secret to feature Leyna in a future show, with one person writing: 'Well if they don't, it's @VictoriasSecret loss'

Suppport: Another person encouraged Leyna by telling her she deserves to see her dream come true

Leyna, who has been a professional model since 2014, has in the past walked for the New-York-City-based labels Chromat and The Blonds. In October last year, she became the first out transgender person of color to grace the pages of Vogue India.

While she has found 'steady' work, Leyna said hiring a trans model of color has been a 'gamble' for larger brands, adding: 'I don't know why it's so hard for them to want to give us a shot. Then again, nothing happens overnight.'

Leyna believes Victoria's Secret has the power to send a strong message and 'set the tone' by hiring her.

'We all have unique stories; we are just different, and we have every right to be,' she added. 'We just want to be represented, and maybe they will want to represent us too.'

Back in October 2015, a Change.org petition urged Victoria's Secret to hire former RuPaul's Drag Race contestant Carmen Carrera as its first openly transgender model.

While the petition received more than 48,000 signatures, the bid was unsuccessful and Carmen has so far not been featured as one of the brand's Angels.Street art that shows Donald Trump turned into the Statue of Liberty raising a gun to the sky has appeared on the streets of London.

The mural was created by graffiti artist Pegasus, a Chicago native, who has described the piece as a response to the 'continued gun violence in America.'

The 34-year-old tells Daily Mail Online: 'Gun control is such a passionate subject leading to fiery debates on both sides of the argument.

Making a statement: London-based artist Pegasus has debuted a mural in the city depicting Donald Trump as the Statue of Liberty

Hitting the mark: The mural was painted over two hours on Tuesday morning in East London

'I grew up in Chicago, a city notorious for its gun violence and high murder rate.

Subject: Pegasus said that he wants Trump to make a 'positive change'

'Ive had a few experiences in which a gun was held to my head, leaving me feeling shaken and scared to leave my front door.'

However, despite such experiences, Pegasus claims that, 'I always held on to the hope that those in power would someday make a change for the better.'

The artist has lived in London for 15 years but keeps a close eye on what is happening back in his native country.

The recently revived gun debate, which was sparked by the horrific Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in February, was enough to inspire the artist to take things to London's streets.

The image, standing in front of a backdrop of a blue sky with white stars, shows the full length of Lady Liberty with Donald Trump's grinning face on her head. Instead of raising a torch, the statue appears to be about to shoot a pistol into the sky.

Looking back: Pegasus, who is originally from Chicago, was inspired by the fun debate in his home country

No change: The artist claims that he took action after becoming frustrated over the president's reaction of offering 'thoughts and prayers' after mass shootings

Hopeful still: Pegasus hopes that Trump will come around and introduce gun control

'Its 2018 and the reality is that there will be another mass shooting in America and all that will be received are thoughts and prayers for the victims and their loved ones from our president instead of taking steps needed to reduce gun violence,' says Pegasus.

The artist, who has previously gained attention for other pop art works featuring the likes of Amy Winehouse and Theresa May, painted the artwork on Great Eastern Street over just two hours on Tuesday morning.

He has previously painted partially undressed depictions of the royal family as well as murals of pop culture icons like David Bowie and Elizabeth Taylor.

As for life back in America, Pegasus hopes that all the attention on guns at the moment will lead to the president making the right decision.

'Im obviously no Trump fan, but I would like to see him take the opportunity and use his new found power to enforce tighter gun control,' he says. 'It could be the only positive change he makes during his presidency.'Television presenter and co-host of The AFL Footy Show Rebecca Maddern has given birth to a baby girl named Ruby Mae.

The 40-year-old and her husband Trent Miller - who have kept the sex of the baby a surprise throughout the pregnancy - welcomed their first child on Thursday night.

Radio presenter Ben Fordham announced the exciting baby news on the Today show on Friday, saying the parents were overjoyed with the latest addition to the family.

Television presenter Rebecca Maddern has given birth to a baby girl named Ruby Mae

The 40-year-old and her husband Trent Miller welcomed their first children on Thursday night

'Can I share some wonderful breaking news with everyone? My beautiful friend Rebecca Maddern gave birth to a beautiful little girl,' Fordham said.

'Little baby girl Ruby Mae Miller was born last night. She weighed 7.5 pounds [3.4kg] and is absolutely beautiful. Mum and baby are fantastic and dad is pretty happy too.

'So to Trent, Rebecca and little Ruby Mae - she's been so excited about this and the delivery has arrived.'

Last month, Rebecca revealed why the couple wanted to keep the sex of the baby a surprise for them.

'I've always maintained that I didn't want to find out. I just felt like it was one of the greatest surprises in life - a true legitimate surprise - there was no cheating,' she told 9Honey last month.

The Geelong-raised journalist, who experienced morning sickness early on in the pregnancy, said that her baby would be a cats supporter.

'My child will be a Cats supporter. There's no debate, no changing, no just going with what your friends do at school. If they like AFL, they will be a Geelong Cats supporter.'

The couple had kept the sex of the baby a surprise throughout the pregnancy

The new mum has been documenting her preparation in the lead up to the arrival of her baby

In the lead up to giving birth, Rebecca shared a photo with her 81,000 followers of the nursery she had set up in her home.

'Love natural light filled rooms EXCEPT when you want a little person to sleep!' she said on Instagram.

'The reoccurring piece of advice from everyone who knew I was expecting was - make the nursery dark.'

She previously expressed her gratitude about falling pregnant at her age and opened up about her struggles to conceive.

The pair kept the sex of the baby secret - and they decorated the nursery with neutral colours

'I have fallen pregnant when I'm 40 and that's an extraordinary thing to happen. It really is a minor miracle. I'm enjoying and relishing every day,' the journalist told the Herald Sun.

The Australian Ninja Warrior co-host also said she and her husband had been trying for a baby for some time but it hadn't been smooth sailing.

'When it happened, that's why there were all these emotions, I was overjoyed and I couldn't believe it until it was real,' she told the publication.

'Until you get to the 12 and 13-week mark you worry, but then when you get to that, there is a collective sigh of relief.'The majority of meat-eating diners will have been served a steak that hasn't been cooked to their liking at some point, and it's often put down to the chef's lack of skill.

However one restaurant critic claims that some chefs deliberately undercook steaks for customers - and it's apparently a money-saving ploy.

Meat experts told New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo that chefs serve up steaks on the rare side of what customers want in order to avoid having to throw away meat should they accidentally overcook it.

If a customer complains about undercooked meat, chefs can rectify the mistake by placing the steak under the grill instead of having to throw it away and waste money, it's said.

Chefs tend to undercook steaks instead of overcook them to avoid wasting money, a critic claims

Restaurateur Stephen Hanson, who used to run steakhouses and now owns Henry at Life Hotel in New York City, told Cuozzo: 'If a customer says their steak is overcooked, it can only be thrown out.'

That's why chefs tend to undercook meat, as they can easily cook the meat a bit more to the customer's liking and won't have to throw away an expensive cut.

Mark Pastore, president of Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors, which sells meat to New York restaurants added that the trend for chefs undercooking steaks has lasted about a year.

Have you ever been served an underdone steak? It may be because the restaurant doesn't want to risk throwing away an expensive cut of meat

He said: 'The norm has become to order by a new term, medium-rare-plus, because people found their steaks were arriving undercooked.'

It's said the trend for undercooking meat is so that restaurants avoid losing money on pricey cuts of steaks, with some experts blaming the cautionary cooking technique on rising beef prices.

Pastore says rib-eye prices have soared from $6 a pound to $8 in the last two years.

Overcooking steaks is also considered a cardinal sin the culinary world, which may be contributing to the new trend for undercooking beef.

Cuozoo visited a dozen New York steak restaurants to test out the theory - and found that only one steakhouse cooked the meat 'medium-rare' as he had asked for and not 'rare'.People of all professions are more politically divided than ever in the US, but party lines do not change the way that doctors treat patients, new Harvard research suggests.

Doctors are taught in medical school to be objective and non-discriminatory in their care for patients, but ideological differences inevitably arise between them.

End-of-life care has sparked heated debates and controversy in both the public health policy and medical fields, with divisions often falling along those party lines.

Previous research even indicated that doctors' politics do influence their treatment choices, but now research from four universities has found that American doctors check their politics at the door when treating terminally ill patients.

Patients can rest assured that doctors' political beliefs - though they may vary widely - do not seem to have any bearing on how they treat patients at the ends of their lives, research reveals

Health and health care  from insurance access to abortion, end-of-life care to gun control  are hot political topics in the US, perhaps now more than ever.

End-of-life care is a particularly divisive subject in the US, whether you consider it a moral, political, medical or personal issue.

The question has become particularly poignant in recent years, as physician-assisted suicide has found its way into national conversation and thFe state legislatures.

Four states  Oregon, Vermont, Washington, DC and California  have passed so-called right to die laws.

All of the states where the practice has been approved are predominantly Democratic, and all of these bills were sponsored by members of that political party.

Yet, nationwide, Americans' views on end-of-life care have shifted in the opposite direction in the last two decades.

In 1990, only 15 percent of Americans said that doctors should do everything possible to save a patient's life, no matter what.

By 2013, that number had doubled: 31 percent of Americans said medical professionals should do everything possible to save a life, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

But the majority of people - 66 percent - still say that patients should sometimes be allowed to die.

As voters who are particularly informed and close to political debates around health policies, observers and scholars have worried that doctors would treat their patients according to their personal beliefs as opposed to best practices.

In fact, a 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the national Academy of Sciences found evidence that doctors' clinical decisions reflected their political leanings, based on questions on both their politics and how they would handle hypothetical treatment scenarios.

The questions in that survey spanned many of politicized questions in medicine, including gun safety, abortion and birth control to name a few.

Physicians seem to be able to look past their politics to determine the best care for each patient's individual situation Dr Anupam Jena, study author and Harvard University professor of health care policy

But authors of the new study  hailing from Harvard, Cornell, Stanford and New York Universities - suspected that previous study's design might have led to results that overstated the degree to which the doctors' beliefs bled over into their medical practices.

So they used a very different methodology, an analysis of treatment data, to assess differences in doctors' treatment decisions.

The researchers collected data on 1.5 million people who were insured through Medicare and died shortly after leaving hospital.

They compared the course of treatment that doctors administered to those patients to data on what, if any, political party the doctors made donations to, searching for patterns.

Potential factors that might indicate different philosophies from the doctors included how much money was spent on the care they gave, whether or not they tried to resuscitate the patients, intubate or use feeding tubes and if the patients were moved to hospice.

But surprisingly, the data revealed that doctors' political affiliations and preferences had no bearing on how they treated their patients at the ends of their lives.

'Our findings are reassuring evidence that the political and ideological opinions of physicians don't seem to have any discernible impact on how they care for patients at the end of life,' said study co-author Dr Anupam Jena, a Harvard professor of health care policy.

'Physicians seem to be able to look past their politics to determine the best care for each patient's individual situation,' he added.Raising the cost of cigarettes to 20 a pack could save more than 60 million lives worldwide, new research suggests.

Increasing cigarette pack prices by 50 percent would cause around 67 million men from the world's poorest countries to quit smoking, a Canadian study found.

Low-income earners would have a 7.7 times greater quit rate than those with the highest salaries, the research adds, which debunks the myth smoking taxes largely affect poor people.

Globally, around 449 million years of life would be gained, while approximately $157 billion (110 billion) would be saved not treating smoking-related diseases, such as heart disease, stroke and cancer, the study found.

According to the researchers, smoking is due to be responsible for one billion deaths in the 21st century, with low-income countries being particularly affected.

Previous research suggests raising taxes on tobacco in the most effective way to encourage people to quit smoking and stop people taking up the habit. In the UK, a pack of 20 cigarettes costing 8 will be more than 80 percent tax.

This comes after a sugar tax was introduced in the UK earlier this month, with manufacturers being forced to raise the prices of some of their best-selling soft drinks.

Raising the cost of cigarettes to 20 a pack could save more than 60 million lives (stock)

WHAT PARENTS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT E-CIGARETTES How they work: E-cigarettes use a mixture of flavored liquids and nicotine to create a vapor. This vapor is then inhaled by the user similarly to how one would smoke a regular cigarette. Are these devices safe? Since these devices don't use traditional smoke, people are under the assumption that they are safe for you. But the liquid in the e-cigarettes can contain harmful toxins and carcinogens including anti-freeze. The nicotine in the e-cigarettes also had addictive components and can lead to other tobacco use. This can hinder brain development in teens. Also, the devices can overheat and explode if defective. The Food and Drug Administration does not certify e-cigarettes as a product to get over smoking regular cigarettes. Advertisement

Poor people would not be more affected

Study author Dr Prabhat Jha, from St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, said: 'Our study debunks the current narrative that higher cigarette prices would negatively impact the poorest among us.

'This analysis shows the opposite - a higher price would encourage cessation, lead to better health, and save money much more strongly for the poor than the rich.'

Co-author Patricio Marquez, who coordinates the Global Tobacco Control Program at the World Bank Group, added: 'The findings of our new analysis will have a far-reaching impact.

'Not only does increasing tobacco taxation reduce smoking and its health consequences, but the study's findings are also relevant to the United Nations sustainable development goals to reduce poverty and improve health.'

How the research was carried out

The researchers analysed 490 million male smokers from 13 countries in Latin America and Asia.

Six of these were low-income regions, such as India and Vietnam, while the remainder were upper-middle income countries, like China and Brazil.

Only males were analysed due to them making up around 90 percent of smokers in these countries.

The researchers used mathematical models to calculate the effect of a 50 percent rise in tobacco prices. This was based on previous studies assessing smoking quit rates in response to changes in tobacco prices.

Past research was also used to determine how altering cigarette costs would likely influence people's health.

The findings were published in the journal BMJ.

Previous research suggests the chemicals that flavour e-cigarettes are toxic (stock)

Chemicals used to flavour e-cigarettes may be toxic

This comes after research released earlier this month suggested the chemicals used to flavour e-cigarettes may be toxic.

Substances that give the tobacco substitute a citrus or floral scent significantly increase the production of free radicals, a study by Pennsylvania State found.

Free radicals are molecules that damage healthy cells and have been linked to inflammation, heart disease and cancer.

Although 43 percent of e-cigarettes on the market contain chemicals that boost free-radical production, for unclear reasons, vanilla flavourings actually reduce their levels by 42 percent, the research adds.

Yet, a study released just last month suggested vanilla-scented e-cigarettes are just as toxic as other flavours.

The previous research also implied many e-liquids contain dangerous chemicals, including vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol, to get their flavours, both of which damage human cells.An Instagram model who underwent a controversial procedure to change the colour of her eyes says she now has the sight of a 90-year-old.

Nadinne Bruna, 32, has lost most of her vision after the treatment, to insert silicone implants in her hazel eyes to turn them light grey, went wrong.

The Argentinian model, who lives in Miami, flew to Bogota, Colombia to have the procedure because it is not approved in the US.

Her vision was constantly blurry and her eyes were left red and painful for months - forcing her to stop taking part in photoshoots, which is how she got her income.

And now, Ms Bruna, who has 198,000 followers on Instagram, has been left with irreversible damage to her eyes that has 'f***** up' her life and left her depressed.

Ms Bruna, who underwent the procedure in September 2016, has today spoken out about her horrifying ordeal for the first time.

Nadinne Bruna, 32, has lost most of her vision after the treatment to insert silicone implants in her hazel eyes to turn them light grey went wrong

She said: 'Before this surgery my eyes were completely healthy. They were in really good condition. I was so naive.

'Ever since this surgery I have had blurry vision. For about a year my eyes were constantly red and itchy.

'My pupils, they cant adjust to light anymore so Im very photosensitive now too. This surgery completely f***ed up my life.

'My vision damage is permanent, and I still have to have a cornea transplant and I have cataracts too.'

Ms Bruna, who was left with glaucoma due to damage to her optic nerve, added: 'After this surgery I went into a deep depression.

'Im a very strong person, usually very brave and very smart, but with this I was completely stupid. I trusted the wrong person.

'Now I have the vision of a 90-year-old lady right but Im hoping I can just keep my glaucoma under control.'

Ms Bruna returned to Colombia twice last year, in March and June, for two further procedures to try and repair the damage to her eye.

The Argentinian model, who lives in Miami, Florida, flew to Bogota, Colombia to have the procedure because it is not approved in the US

Her vision was constantly blurry and her eyes were left red and painful for months - forcing her to stop taking part in photoshoots, which is how she got her income

However, attempts to save her sight were unsuccessful and she was forced to seek medical attention back in the US.

A team of ophthalmologists at Miami's Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, led by Dr Ranya Habash, removed the dangerous implants last September.

Dr Habash has since said procedures to change the colours of eyes like the one Ms Bruna opted for cause 'irreparable' damage to the eyes.

She said: 'The issue with injecting a silicone plate into the eye is that it clogs the drain of the eye, just like as if a sink was blocked.

'The pressure builds and builds inside the eye, causing inflammation and damaging the structures.

'Theres a reason these procedures are not FDA approved and thats because weve seen the long-term and irreparable damage they can cause.

'Nadinnes eye problems are something she will have to deal with for the rest of her life. Shes never going to be done with it.'

Plastic surgery-loving Ms Bruna and her twin sister, Danna, have forged a career on Instagram, where they share images of their cosmetic procedures

Ms Bruna, who has 198,000 followers on Instagram, has been left with irreversible damage to her eyes that has 'f***** up' her life and left her depressed

She said: 'Before this surgery my eyes were completely healthy. They were in really good condition. I was so naive'

Dr Habash and her colleagues were also forced to perform emergency glaucoma surgery in both of her eyes.

As a result of the procedure in Colombia, Ms Bruna has lost 80 per cent of vision in her right eye and 50 per cent in her left eye.

Plastic surgery-loving Ms Bruna and her twin sister, Danna, have forged a career on Instagram, where they share images of their cosmetic procedures.

The twins regularly have their surgeries compensated and are often paid to feature medical practices on their accounts.

Ms Brunna paid a discounted fee of $3,000 (2,116) to undergo the procedure in Bogota with Dr Eugenio Carbera.

In return, she was asked to post about the results of the procedure on her social media account alongside a testimonial video.

She said: 'Because of my Instagram following, I usually approach surgeons about collaborations and advertising.

'I got in touch with them to see if they would be interested in working together.

Ms Bruna returned to Colombia twice last year, in March and June, for two further procedures to try and repair the damage to her eye

Ms Brunna paid a discounted fee of $3,000 (2,116) to undergo the procedure in Bogota with Dr Eugenio Carbera

IS THERE SURGERY TO CHANGE THE COLOURS OF YOUR EYES? Surgery to change the colours of your eyes is permanent - but has repeatedly been slammed by opticians for its dangers. They warn the procedure, which involves inserting a coloured implant silicone implants into the eye, can leave permanent damage. Ophthalmologists claim it can cause glaucoma - damage to the optic nerve, cataracts and corneal problems - all of which can rob someone of their vision. Human Ken Doll Rodrigo Alves jetted off to New Delhi for the procedure last May. It was reported to cost in the region of 8,000. He argued there was 'no money on earth' that would convince a doctor in the UK or US to perform the procedure for 'cosmetic reasons'. The Royal College of Ophthalmologists has previously said that it 'strongly recommended' against the procedure, which also isn't approved by the FDA in the US. Advertisement

'I decided to get in touch with a Colombian doctor - its just three hours from Miami where I live.

The surgery impacted Ms Bruna's career as she was unable to participate in photo shoots for her Instagram page, because of the appearance of her eyes.

The model slipped into a deep depression throughout the past two years, but said she was lucky to have the support of her sister.

Ms Bruna added: 'My sister became like my mom. She had to do everything for me.

'I make most of my money through my Instagram account and I couldnt do photo shoots, not while my eyes were red. Ive been living on my savings.

Dr Carbera, who carried out the initial surgery, told reporters he could not comment on individual cases - but was unaware that Ms Bruna had reparative surgeries.

He said: 'Ms Bruna was our patient. However, I do not know any type of treatments that have been carried out on later dates and the results or diagnoses of them.

'I can not comment and/or disclose information about patients' cases or medical records.'

The surgery impacted Ms Bruna's career as she was unable to participate in photo shoots for her Instagram page, because of the appearance of her eyes

The model slipped into a deep depression throughout the past two years, but said she was lucky to have the support of her sister

Ms Bruna has not taken legal action against Dr Carbera's practice because she said she isnt in the financial position to do so.

Instead, the model has taken to Instagram to warn her followers about the risks involved in the controversial procedure.

Her terrifying experience, however, won't stop her going under the knife in the future.

She said: 'Its crazy, because even though Ive been open about this surgery on Instagram, people are still are asking me where they can do it.

'But I dont think surgeries are bad. I just didnt know the risks and I made a mistake by not doing my research.

'Next month Im going to have a surgery to reduce my boobs because Ive lost a lot of weight this year and its something I have to do.'by Sumon Corraya

In Bangladesh 56 per cent of civil service jobs go to the children and grandchildren of liberation war veterans, women, tribal and disabled people. The current unemployment rate stands at 8 per cent whilst ten million Bangladeshi have left the country seeking their fortune abroad.

Dhaka (AsiaNews)  Hundreds of students have been protesting in Dhaka for four days over the countrys civil service quota system, which they deem unfair and unjust.

Students are demanding changes to the quotas of reserved jobs for the children and grandchildren of those who fought in the War of Liberation and other vulnerable groups.

In Bangladesh 56 per cent of civil service jobs are reserved: 30 per cent for children and grandchildren of the countrys "freedom fighters", 10 per cent for women, 10 per cent for districts lagging behind, 5 per cent for ethnic minorities, and 1 per cent for physically challenged people.

For protesters, the quota system affects the unemployment rate, which is currently more than 8 per cent. At least ten million Bangladeshis have left the country in search of work.

Some government websites were hacked overnight. Some homepages were replaced with pages demanding quota reform and a photo from the current protest.

The protests continue in front of the Dhaka University Central Library. They began peacefully but soon degenerated, with clashes between demonstrators and police.

The opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP) backs the protests. Conversely, the Bangladesh Chhatra League, the student wing of the ruling Awami League, supports police.

"I have applied several times for a government job, but I did not get any, said one protester speaking to AsiaNews. I believe the number of reserved jobs must decrease. This is the only way to be blessed with a civil service job.

"Our protest was peaceful, but the police attacked us, he added. The government must understand our pain."

Students from private universities also joined the protest, boycotting classes lessons and exams.

Protesters pledged that they would not disperse until their demands are met, and demanded an apology from Agriculture Minister Matia Chowdhury, who described them a razakar children". The razakars were an anti-Bangladesh paramilitary force organised by the Pakistani military during the 1971 liberation war.

Meanwhile, some students were responsible for an attack against the residence of the vice chancellor of Dhaka University.

Yesterday, Awami League General Secretary and Road Transport and Bridges Minister Obaidul Quader vowed to bring to justice those responsible for the attack.The illegal party drug ketamine 'cured' a suicidal woman's depression.

Sabrina Misra, 36, a licensed clinical therapist from Chicago, battled with the mental-health disorder for most of her life, with her condition becoming so severe she planned her suicide last summer.

In her dark state, Ms Misra's psychiatrist recommended she try the horse tranquiliser as a last resort, which can be prescribed by doctors in the US 'off label' but is rarely paid for by insurance companies.

Off-label is the prescription of medications for conditions they are not approved for.

After just four drug-infusion sessions, Ms Misra's crippling symptoms finally eased.

She said: 'I went from actively wanting to kill myself to being fine.'

Ms Misra's ketamine treatments have cost her around $4,500 (3,170), which she describes as the best money she has ever spent.

Ketamine is a Schedule III drug in the US and a class B in the UK. It can legally be prescribed by doctors as a general anaesthetic in humans and animals.

The illegal party drug ketamine 'cured' Sabrina Misra of depression that left her suicidal

Ms Misra battled with the mental-health disorder for most of her life. She planned her suicide last summer until her psychiatrist recommend she try ketamine as a last resort

Ketamine is a Schedule III drug in the US and a class B in the UK (stock)

WHAT IS KETAMINE? Ketamine is a powerful general anaesthetic that is used to stop humans and animals experiencing pain during operations. It started being used as a party drug in the late 2000s, with people taking it before raves for a more intense experience. What are the side effects? Ketamine causes a loss of feeling and paralysis of the muscles. It can also lead to people experiencing a distortion of reality, which many call entering the 'k-hole'. This is when people believe they have spoken to God or a higher power, which can lead to addiction as they crave that experience. Ketamine may also cause people to feel incapable of moving, experience hallucinations or lead to panic attacks, confusion and memory loss. Regular users can seriously damage their bladders, which may need to be surgically removed. Other risks include a raised heart rate and blood pressure. Paralysis of the muscles can leave people vulnerable to hurting themselves, while not feeling pain properly can cause them to underestimate any damage. Many claim ketamine withdrawal is worse than any other drug, with some feeling so depressed they contemplate suicide. If you are having suicidal thoughts, contact the Samaritans here. How is it taken and what is the law around it? For medical use ketamine is liquid but the 'street' drug is normally a grainy, white powder, with one gram costing around 20. As a class B drug in the UK, possession of ketamine can result in people facing up to five years in jail, while supplying it could mean up to 14 years in prison. Both cases may result in people facing an unlimited fine. Source: Talk to Frank Advertisement

Ketamine 'gets rid of suicidal thoughts that have been there for 20 years'

Dr Abid Nazeer, who treated Ms Misra at the Advanced Psychiatric Solutions in Oak Brook, told the Chicago Tribune: 'Ive seen it work so quickly that one infusion gets rid of suicidal thoughts that had been there for 20 years.'

Traditional antidepressants, like Prozac, typically take six-to-eight weeks to be effective, according to Dr Carlos Zarate from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Dr Bal Nandra, from the IV Solution Ketamine Centers of Chicago, adds at least 80 percent of people with treatment-resistant depression who have received the drug in his clinic have improved.

Ketamine is thought to relieve depression by limiting the levels of the chemical messenger glutamate in the brain, which lifts depressed patients' moods.

Is ketamine safe to take for depression?

Dr James Murrough, a psychiatrist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, questions ketamine's safety, arguing people who abuse the drug can develop cognitive problems, while high doses have caused toxicities in rats.

Due to ketamine being associated with addiction, Dr Murrough adds doctors should be aware of patients becoming dependent on the drug.

Yet, most treatment sessions involve patients being administered 0.5mg of ketamine per kg of body weight, which is substantially less than what is required to get users 'high'.

Dr Nandra adds most patients receiving ketamine usually enter a dreamy state while it is being infused, which diminishes around 10 minutes later, with patients being able to go home within the hour.

He argues ketamine has demonstrated its safety over its many years of use as an anaesthetic, adding this should encourage the drug's FDA approval for depression.

Ms Misra, who treats mental-health patients herself, said it is 'horrible' people are being denied an effective treatment because insurance companies will not pay up, saying: 'No one should have to die because they can't pay for treatment.'

After just four drug-infusion sessions, Ms Misra's crippling depression symptoms finally eased

Her treatments have cost her $4,500, which she says is as the best money she has ever spent

Depressed patients are more interested in activities after taking ketamine

This comes after research released last August suggested depressed patients who respond to ketamine have greater overall activity levels days after its infusion.

Depressive episodes are partially characterized by a reduced interest in activities.

Responsive patients also sleep better the following day, the research, by the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, adds.

Those who do more activities prior to ketamine's infusion have more favorable outcomes, which suggests doctors can predict patients who will respond to the drug.

Dr John Krystal, editor of the journal Biological Psychiatry, where the study was published, said: 'It would be nice if daily patterns of activity could be used clinically to identify people who might respond to ketamine and to monitor clinical improvement.'

If you are having suicidal thoughts, contact the Samaritans here.A&E waiting times are at their worst level since records began, official figures reveal.

Experts said the NHS was in the grip of an eternal winter and many hospitals are still struggling to cope.

Across England, only 84.5 per cent of patients arriving in A&E were seen within the target four hours.

This is the worst since records began in 2004 and even lower than January and February, which were extremely busy.

A&E waiting times are at their worst level since records began, official figures reveal

The worst waiting times are at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh, in Lancashire where 36 per cent of patients waited four or more hours in March

And at some hospitals more than a third of patients turning up in A&E wait four or more hours to be seen.

The latest monthly data from NHS England also shows that waiting times for routine operations are at their highest since 2004.

More than 15 per cent of patients needing procedures including hip and knee replacements are now waiting longer than 18 weeks.

Many of these patients are in extreme pain and have had operations cancelled several times, as hospitals needed to free up beds.

The figures have prompted concern among healthcare leaders as hospitals normally quieten down in spring, allowing staff to catch up.

But there has been no such let-up this year, partly due to very cold weather and higher-than-normal flu rates.

Dr Nick Scriven, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, which represents hospital staff, said: These stark figures are the clearest indication yet of the eternal winter we now face in the NHS and this should be a turning point in how we approach all planning from now on.

WHAT DID THE NHS FIGURES TODAY SHOW? RECORD LOWS IN A&E The shocking figures show that, across England, just 84.6 cent of patients - 315,000 of them - were seen within four hours of entering A&E. This is lower than the 95 per cent recommended - and lower than the 85 per cent recorded in February, which was the previous worst month. More than 75,000 patients who arrived at A&E last month languished on trolleys for up to 12 hours, according to the NHS England data. Some 850 were stuck on trolleys for longer than 12 hours - an amount only topped during the peak of the winter crisis in January 2017 and in 2018. SOARING WAITS FOR TREATMENT Separate figures also show the number of patients having to wait more than a year for treatment has gone over 2,000 for the first time in six years. Just 87.9 per cent of patients started planned treatment within 18 weeks - meaning 454,000 faced waits longer than recommended. Government targets ask 92 per cent of all patients to begin treatment within 18 weeks - but this has now not been met in two years. Advertisement

'As we settle into spring, hospitals remain under immense pressure and I am unsure how on earth we are going to catch up with elective surgery given some non-urgent operations continue to be cancelled in parts of the country.

Jonathan Ashworth MP, Labours shadow health secretary, said: Its now clearer than ever that we face a year-round crisis in our NHS, which places the very future of our NHS at risk and requires a sustainable long term investment plan.

The figures from NHS England also show that some of the largest hospitals in the country are faring particularly badly.

The worst waiting times are at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh, in Lancashire where 36 per cent of patients waited four or more hours in March.

They were only marginally better at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Harlow, Essex, where 35.5 per cent waited four or more hours.

Many hospitals are having to cancel routine operations to free up beds for patients arriving in A&E.

They include Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, which declared a major incident two weeks ago and postponed cancer surgery.

Ananda Nanu, president of the British Orthopaedic Association, which represents doctors carrying out surgery on the bones, said: Elective surgery is not optional surgery.

'Many patients suffering with arthritis are in significant pain, which severely affects their quality of life and their ability to perform the simple activities of daily living. Leaving patients waiting in pain for treatment longer than is clinically necessary is not acceptable.

The shocking figures show that, across England, just 84.6 cent of patients - 315,000 of them - were seen within four hours of entering A&E in March

Mr Ian Eardley, of the Royal College of Surgeons, said: Despite better planning this winter and staff going above and beyond to help patients, the NHS has once again faced intense pressure.

Having an operation or treatment cancelled is very distressing for patients, who are often in pain or discomfort, and it can cause their condition to deteriorate, potentially making treatment more complicated.Nine medical phrases should be banned because they hurt patients' feelings, a doctor claims.

According to Dr Stephen Hughes, a senior lecturer of medicine at Anglia Ruskin University, words like 'abortion' make women who have lost pregnancies even sadder.

Dr Hughes also believes 'diabetes' is no longer an appropriate term due to the disease having many different forms.

He also wants to do away with abbreviations that cause confusion, with GBS being used as a shortening for both a simple vaginal infection and a crippling neurological condition.

In a piece for The Conversation, Dr Hughes discusses nine medical terms that could cause offence and why medics should no longer use them.

Nine medical phrases should be banned as they hurt patients' feelings, doctor claims (stock)

Why do women have an 'incompetent cervix' and a 'blighted ovum', Justine van der Leun wondered in a recent Guardian feature, while men merely have 'premature ejaculation' and 'erectile dysfunction', not 'inadequate testicles' and 'futile penis'?

Medical language can be sexist, outdated, insensitive and sometimes downright confusing.

I would like to add to van der Leun's list of medical terms that need updating, or retiring.

Here are my candidates:

1. Abortion

'Threatened abortion', 'missed abortion' and 'septic abortion' are alarming terms used in the context of miscarriage.

For example, a missed abortion is when the foetus has died, but a miscarriage hasn't occurred yet.

Loss of a pregnancy is a sad event. Why make patients sadder?

2. Cretinism

Cretinism is a stigmatising term that is still used to describe congenital hypothyroidism.

I doubt that a clinician would use this term in front of a patient, but it is still seen in the books.

3. Diabetes

Diabetes should be retired because it is no longer specific enough to be useful.

Previously, we had diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus.

Then we divided diabetes mellitus into types one and two.

The Norwegians now tell us that in fact there are five different types, each distinct from one another.

'"Diabetes" should be retired as it is no longer specific enough to be useful', Dr Hughes said

4. Dement

Dement is an informal term used by some medical people to refer to a person with dementia.

As with cretinism, it is a stigmatising term. It should be removed from the medical lexicon.

5. Hartnup disease

Hartnup disease was named after the patient, not the doctor who first described it, so it breaks patient confidentiality.

The condition was named in 1956, a more deferential time when it was easier to persuade a patient that having a disease named after oneself was a great honour, even if it means lifelong diarrhoea, skin rashes and psychotic behaviour.

I can see why the discoverer of the disease  Dr Baron  did not wish to have it named after himself, but I doubt that young master Hartnup had any choice in the matter.

6. Bovine cough

This one should be retired because it's not a useful metaphor.

Increasing urbanisation and improved animal health mean that new entrants to the medical profession are unlikely to have heard a cow cough.

Indeed, the non-explosive cough of recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy sounds nothing like a cow coughing.

'Bovine cough' is not useful due to its symptoms not resembling those of cows, he adds

7. Acopia

This ageist term describes the inability of a frail elderly patient to cope at home.

It is a lazy term, often used in lieu of a proper diagnosis, which may include stroke, Parkinson's, dementia or other age-related illnesses.

8. TLAs

I would also like to get rid of all three-letter abbreviations (TLAs) with multiple meanings.

I recall a patient telling me that she had GBS.

She was getting very annoyed because I didn't instantly know that she was referring to her vaginal group B streptococcus infection, rather than Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is a frightful neurological affliction.

Consideration of gay bowel syndrome and the Glasgow-Blatchford score for gastrointestinal bleeding would have inflamed matters.

9. XXXXX!

Finally, I would like to banish informal terms compounded by foul language that insult the worried well or those with whom one's consummate consultation skills have had little effect.

PRATFO (patient reassured and allowed home) and TTFO (told to go home) are two examples that spring to mind.

I know that some people can be frustrating to deal with, but these terms must not appear in the patient's notes under any circumstance for fear of a lawyer getting hold of them.

None of this means that we should lose touch with the richness of our past.

Eponymous conditions, named after the historic figures from whom we have learned so much  Colle's fracture, Parkinson's disease, Cock's peculiar tumour  should be kept to remind us of a past from which so much progress has been made.

Some terms are simply too delightful to lose, such as borborygmi, the gentle gurgling sounds of the bowel, reminiscent of a babbling brook in springtime.

Ah, now that would be a loss to medicine!The mystery behind the dripping candle wax bone disease has been cracked in an exciting study.

Scientists found the genetic mutations behind the rare disorder, known as melorheostosis, only occur in affected bones and do no spread elsewhere in the body, which goes against previous beliefs.

Researchers hope their findings could pave the way for a new treatment for the approximate 400 melorheostosis sufferers worldwide.

Study author Dr Timothy Bhattacharyya, from the National Institutes of Health, Maryland, said: 'The prospect that we could somehow harness this pathway in the future is so exciting.'

Melorheostosis leads to excessive bone formation that resembles dripping candle wax on X-rays and can cause patients to endure agonising pain, bone deformities and restricted movement.

Dr Bhattacharyya explained: 'Most adults have the problem of weakening bones as they grow older.

'These patients have the opposite problem as some of their bones are rock hard and still growing.'

X-ray shows a patient's right shinbone with the classic dripping candle-wax appearance

Image shows a patient suffering from melorheostosis in the lower half of his right leg

WHAT IS MELORHEOSTOSIS? Melorheostosis is a rare skeletal deformity that causes bones to become overly thick and dense. There are around 400 known cases worldwide. Melorheostosis tends to be limited to just one limb. The condition can cause pain, limb stiffness, restricted movement or stunted growth. Pain can vary from dull to penetrating and tends to worsen with activity. Limited movement generally only occurs if a patient's joints are affected. Melorheostosis is thought to occur during foetal development, however, symptoms often do not become clear until late childhood or early adulthood. Evidence suggests its cause may be genetic. Treatment focuses on managing pain. Surgery may benefit bone deformity and any surrounding hardened soft tissues. Melorheostosis patients have normal life expediencies. Source: Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center Advertisement

Mutations only occur in affected bones

The researchers analysed 15 unrelated adults with melorheostosis from around the world.

The study's participants underwent biopsies of both their affected and healthy bones.

Bones were assessed to determine any genetic mutations.

Results suggest that eight out of the study's 15 participants have genetic mutations that affect a specific protein, known as MEK1, in their affected bones only.

This causes abnormal bone growth that does not spread to other parts of the body.

Study author Dr Joan Marini said: 'This is an exciting study of a very rare bone disorder that identified the responsible mutation in half of the patients.

'When we started, we had no preconceived causative pathways, but the participation of the patients has really changed the scientific landscape on this topic.

'Further studies on how this pathway works in both normal and mutant bone cells may have broad implications that could benefit a wider population.'

The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Past research suggests boys with asthma are 30 per cent more likely to break a bone (stock)

Boys with asthma are 30% more likely to break their bones

This comes after research released earlier this month suggests asthma increases the risk of bone fractures in boys.

Moderate-to-severe sufferers of the condition, who experience symptoms daily, are 30 per cent more likely to break a bone than those without the inflammatory lung disease, a study found.

Lead author Dr Sharon Brennan-Olsen, from the University of Melbourne, said: Because asthma is an inflammatory disease it can lead to bone loss by interfering with the mechanisms in the bone formation and resorption.

Girls with asthma are not at a higher risk of fractures, which may be due to them taking part in less risky behaviours, according to the researchers.

The scientists recommend young, male asthma sufferers continue to be active but be aware of the risks.

Around one in 11 children in the UK have asthma.Stomach-churning footage captures the moment a brave doctor used tweezers to pull out wriggling maggots from a boy's head.

The footage, posted to LiveLeak, shows the unnamed medic yanking the revolting larvae out of three holes in the child's skull.

Cruel viewers from across the globe mocked the unidentified child, joking that his head 'looks like the finger holes in a bowling ball'.

Details about the minute-long video are scarce, as the location, names and medical affliction causing the maggots are all unknown.

In the revolting footage, the recorder zooms in on the gaping holes, which appear big enough to put an adult finger in.

Donning white gloves and wearing his silver watch, the unfazed doctor tackles the infestation of maggots one-by-one with his tweezer.

Little effort is needed to pull them out in the footage, which has so far amassed more than 6,300 views on the video sharing website.

In the disgusting clip, others can be heard in the room exclaiming their shock - even though the patient appears to not be bothered.

The revolting footage, titled 'No, that's not a bowling ball', has attracted scores of comments by repulsed viewers.

The footage, posted to LiveLeak, shows the unnamed medic yanking the revolting larvae out of three holes in the child's skull. Cruel viewers from across the globe mocked the unidentified child, joking that his head 'looks like the finger holes in a bowling ball'

WHAT IS MYIASIS? Myiasis comes from the Latin word 'myia' meaning fly and 'iasis' meaning disease. The flies' larvae, usually found in rotting meat, can feed on the host's living or dead tissue, liquid body substance, or ingested food. Those at risk of the rare condition include those from poorer social backgrounds and people who have suffered wounds or other injury to the face. Infestations of the head are dangerous because of the possibility of penetration into the brain, the fatality rate is estimated to be 8 per cent in such cases. Advertisement

According to The Sun, one cruel viewer mocked the boy. He wrote: 'His head looks like the finger holes in a bowling ball.'

Another said: 'Time to change shampoos.' A third commented: 'How in the world do they let it progress that far before seeking medical attention.'

Despite having no official diagnosis, the boy appears to suffer from myiasis - which comes from the Latin word 'myia' meaning fly and 'iasis' meaning disease.

The flies' larvae, usually found in rotting meat, can feed on the host's living or dead tissue, liquid body substance, or ingested food.

Those at risk of the rare condition include those from poorer social backgrounds and people who have suffered wounds or other injury to the face.

Infestations of the head are dangerous because of the possibility of penetration into the brain, the fatality rate is estimated to be 8 per cent in such cases.

The new video follows the revolting story of a homeless Indian woman whose head was also infested with maggots, MailOnline reported in November.

Preeti Devi, from north west India, was nursed back to health thanks to the help of good Samaritans, who the 30-year-old called her 'angels'.

She was sat crying by the road when volunteers from a charitable organisation in Bharatpur, Rajasthan, spotted her and reached out to her.Khloe Kardashian reportedly said she wanted to 'get the hell out' of Cleveland when she heard of the DailyMail.com video of Tristan Thompson's antics.

However, there were concerns about her flying so close to her due date.

Then she went into labor, delivering a baby girl at the world-class Cleveland Clinic on Thursday morning.

As the dramatic cluster of events have unfolded in just a few days, fans have taken to Twitter with questions about how her labor came on at such coincidental timing - despite being due later this month - and whether Khloe can go back to Los Angeles now that she has delivered.

We spoke with a women's health expert to find out.

Khloe Kardashian gave birth to her baby girl on Thursday morning, days after videos emerged on DailyMail.com of the father Tristan Thompson with other women (pictured in March)

CAN STRESS AFFECT LABOR TIMING?

Yes.

'One big stressor or stress over a period of time can induce early labor,' Dr Jessica Shepherd, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Daily Mail Online.

'When you look at stress, we know it plays an important role on a molecular level because it changes the body's ability to respond to external factors.

'So it suppresses the immune system and, yes, can induce early labor.

'Depending on the severity of the stress, hormone levels can rise and can affect the outcome of the pregnancy.'

Fans took to Twitter asking the same burning question: can Khloe and her baby fly out of Ohio?

While many are concerned for the baby, doctors warn Khloe may have the higher risk

CAN A NEW MOTHER FLY STRAIGHT AFTER BIRTH? YES - BUT THERE ARE RISKS

While there are no strict restrictions, medics generally advise no flying within six weeks of the birth.

The risks are higher for the mother than for the baby.

1) Risks for the baby:

The biggest issue (which may not be a concern for a private-jetting Kardashian baby) is the proximity to other people on a plane, exposing them to germs.

However, even on a hyper-clean jet there are germ risks, which is challenging for a newborn baby's immune system.

'A newborn baby's immune system is not fully developed,' Dr Shepherd explained.

'There are pathogens on a plane that could cause pneumonia and other lung infections.'

2) Risks for the mother:

According to Dr Shepherd, flying remains a concern after giving birth.

She explains the mother has the most concerns when it comes to a flight soon after giving birth.

'We recommend a good six weeks to recover from vaginal delivery,' she explained.

'After pregnancy, there's a significant increase in risk for blood clots in the lungs.

'When you're on an airplane, there is an increased risk of infection and bleeding that can't be taken care of in-flight.

'It can really increase risk of blood clots to their leg or their lungs.

'When women are sitting and cannot ambulate easily, this is when clots can develop, and can travel to the lung, which increases the risk of death.'Heather Hendershot's Apple Watch may well have saved her life.

The device started beeping at the 25-year-old mother last month, notifying her that her resting heart rate was abnormally high.

Hendershot had always been healthy, so she figured her watch most be malfunctioning and dismissed the alert.

But when the beeping persisted over the course of the next 24 hours, a trip to the hospital revealed that the Watch was accurately detecting that she had hyperthyroidism which was driving her heart toward a potentially deadly arrhythmia.

Heather Hendershot, 25, thought her Apple Watch must be defective when it said her heart rate was too high, but it correctly identified a symptom of her undiagnosed hyperthyroidism

Like most people, Hendershot bought her Apple Watch in the hopes that it would help her get healthier by tracking her progress, not so it could diagnose anything wrong with her health.

And she had no reason to think it ever would. Hendershot is young, sailed through the birth of her first son with no problems four months ago, and has never had any health issues.

That is the problem with hyperthyroidism, though: it can easily and often masquerade as another condition, and its early symptoms may be subtle things like overactive reflexes, warm, moist skin and slight tremors in extended fingers, according to the Mayo Clinic.

In fact, because a baby relies on its mother's thyroid hormones, pregnancy itself can cause similar symptoms to hyperthyroidism.

The condition - which women are also at risk for for the first year after childbirth - would not necessarily be obvious during pregnancy, and requires a blood test to confirm it as the cause of mild symptoms.

But there was nothing subtle about the Apple Watch's alert.

Last month, Hendershot and her husband at their home in Scranton, Kansas, watching television from their couch one evening when her wrist started blaring.

The Apple Watch Series 3 has sensors that to detect the wearer's heart rate and can notify them when it is higher than it should be for their given activity

The watch alerted her that her heart rate was elevated, but 'I thought, "maybe the watch is a little off or something,"' Hendershot told Today.

She had good reason for thinking that, too.

When Apple announced that the newest iteration of its wearable would come equipped with heart rate sensors and the ability to alert its wearers to abnormalities, many doctors were skeptical.

They worried that the device would be inaccurate, and sound the alarm on false positives, ironically raising heart rate sand posing health risks due to stress.

But a Stanford University study gave the Apple Watch's built-in EKG technology top marks earlier this year, much to the surprise of many experts.

In Hendershot's case, it proved its worth, continuing to alert her three more times, when her heart rate hit 110 beats per minute (bpm), 120 and eventually 140bpm  well about the 40-60bpm range for a healthy adult woman's heart.

Her husband put the watch on his own wrist, to see if it would say he too was in distress.

No alarms went off. Cody wasn't going to take the risk that the watch was wrong when his wife wore it, but right when he did. He persuaded Hendershot to go to the emergency room.

There, doctors ruled out other causes of her heart arrhythmia, called an atrial fibrillation.

After blood tests, they confirmed that Hendershot's thyroid was working overtime, producing too much of its hormone and driving her heart rate through the roof.

Hyperthyroidism is common, affecting about 12 percent of the American population.

When Hendershot's watch kept going off and displaying increasingly higher heart rates, her husband, Cody (left) convinced her to go to the hospital, where her condition was diagnosed

What is uncommon is to go 25 years without noticing a single symptom, according to the physician that treated Hendershot, Dr Alan Wynne.

'Thats what really stood out most strikingly to me. I have been doing this for 27 years  I am pretty sure this is the first time,' he told Today.

Her thyroid condition can also cause unusual sweating, weight and hair loss and diarrhea because the thyroid hormone plays a key role in the body's regulatory system.

So when too much thyroid hormone is pumped into the body, everything goes into overdrive.

Hyperthyroidism is very manageable, but because Hendershot had likely gone a long time without any medication, she was at risk for a so-called thyroid storm.

During a thyroid storm, heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature all soar sky-high.

So the doctors even kept Hendershot in the intensive care unit overnight, carefully tracking her heart rate and blood pressure.

She is now back home with her husband and newborn, but is still untreated.

Hendershot will have to undergo testing to determine the cause of her thyroid condition - which is Graves' Disease in 80 percent of cases, but can also develop within the first year after a woman gives birth.

In order to accurately diagnose Hendershot, doctors will have to wait until she has stopped breast feeding.

In the meantime, Hendershot now trusts her watch to let her know if her thyroid acts up and told local news station CW39 'I will not take it off.'Memoir

THE UNMAPPED MIND

by Christian Donlan (Viking 14.99)

On the same day in September 2014, Christian Donlans baby daughter took her first independent steps and he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

That eventful day, to her parents delight, little Leontine (Leon for short), let go of a coffee table and, frowning with concentration, lurched forward across the room, arms as rigid as Frankensteins monster.

From that point on, Leons locomotion and motor skills would only get more assured, while her daddys would take exactly the opposite direction.

His fascinating, funny, occasionally joyful and often heart-rending memoir chronicles these two life journeys, made, sometimes literally, hand in hand.

Journalist Christian Donlan was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis on the same day his daughter Leontine (pictured together) took her first steps

For most of us, the adventure of first-time parenthood is quite enough without another life-changing experience to accompany it.

Looking back, Donlan can see that his early symptoms of MS began while his wife, Sarah, was pregnant.

It was the excitement of impending fatherhood that distracted him from the tingling in his fingers, the increasing clumsiness. As the due date approached, I fumbled through one day and the next, dropping things, spilling things, spiking myself on pen points and cutlery. When he thought about it at all, he put it down to anxiety about his unborn child.

Unequivocal diagnosis came as a relief. Hed started to think he might have a brain tumour. But then he had to tell his family. His mother was unreadably vague, asking, in a tranquillised way, if MS was what Stephen Hawking had. When Donlan explained the difference, that was enough for her: no questions, which I interpreted, foolishly, as disinterest, rather than swiftly pooling fright.

Christian (pictured with Leontine) has written a heart-rending memoir that chronicles his journey since his diagnosis

Donlan, an award-winning journalist in his mid-30s, tackled his own fright by learning as much as he could about MS, of which his favourite description remains one of the very earliest, coined by a 19th-century French neurologist who summed it up as marked enfeeblement.

That was now his destiny. But he realised, in a way, he was lucky. After centuries of MS ravaging people, he was diagnosed during a period in which a burgeoning number of therapies had become available, even if none amounted to a cure.

The first verifiable MS sufferer, he found, was Augustus dEste, a grandson of King George III. In 1825, he had spots in front of his eyes, followed in 1826 by double vision. Next came numbness, fatigue and impotence.

One doctor prescribed bleeding by leeches. Another suggested steak, twice a day, plus sherry. A third said there was nothing wrong with him. Augustus ended up in a rudimentary wheelchair, but never lost his good humour. He is Donlans hero.

THE UNMAPPED MIND by Christian Donlan

It is impossible to read this book without huge surges of sympathy, yet Donlan does not invite pity. Rather, this is an inspiring tale of a man trying to wrestle an incurable disease into a kind of submission, using intellect and logic and love.

He keeps studying it, perhaps so that he will have the same grip on MS as it has on him.

One morning, Leon alarms him with the cheerful news that her fingers are tingling. Happily, it emerges that shes been testing how long she can sit on her hands without hurting them.

All the same, it prompts him to tackle the most painful question of all: what are Leons chances of inheriting MS from him? In the UK, roughly one person in 600 is a sufferer, yet that increases to one in 67 for those who have a parent with the condition.

Yet it is not a hereditary disease. Leon, like the rest of us, is far more likely to end up with dementia (one in 20 over the age of 65) or a form of cancer (one in three).

This ought to sound a depressing book, but somehow, it isnt. If anything, here is a man counting his blessings, who finds that the joy of fatherhood not only comfortably trumps the blight of MS, but actually makes sense of it.

My daughter sends me out into the world just as my illness is starting to shut that world down, he writes, and concludes: It is astonishing to see the extremes of illness MS can inflict, and astonishing to see how people make a life with the worst of it  and not just make a life, but reach out to help newcomers like me.

When he is no longer a newcomer, that will be his legacy, too, in the form of this marvellous book.Customers have rushed to snap up berths on a new cruise ship being launched by over-50s specialists Saga.

Spirit Of Discovery will carry up to 999 passengers when it takes to the seas in July 2019.

Its first voyage around the UK is fully booked, and there is strong demand for trips to destinations such as the Norwegian fjords and the Mediterranean. The first 19 cruises are now 50 per cent booked, with 9,000 tickets sold.

Calm waters: There is strong demand for trips to destinations such as the Norwegian fjords

It came as Saga unveiled a 7.6 per cent drop in profits to 178.7million for 2017 after the collapse of business partner Monarch Airlines and tough market conditions at its insurance division.

But bosses raised the total annual dividend by 5.9 per cent to 9p per share, and cut debt to 432million. Investors cheered the figures and shares rose 5.7 per cent, or 6.7p, to 123.7p.

Saga is replacing its two old ships to boost income from cruises. Spirit Of Discovery will get a sister ship, Spirit Of Adventure, in 2020.Stock market tracker funds can now ditch firms owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska after a rule change by the London Stock Exchange.

The LSEs FTSE Russell division removed Deripaskas energy firm EN+ and his aluminium company Rusal from its indices of global stocks and bonds, which means they no longer have to be bought by investment funds which seek to mirror the performance of markets by buying every company in an index.

The FTSE Russell division took action after the US government hit the two businesses with sanctions as part of reprisals for the alleged poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury last month.

Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska owns aluminium company Rusal

It also means that both EN+ and Rusal will no longer have easy access to billions of pounds of savers cash.

There is now speculation that the Financial Conduct Authority could force the firms to delist in London. A spokesman declined to comment.

The London Metal Exchange has seen a rush to offload aluminium before the sanctions bite.France has given its full support for the Saudi position on Yemen, slamming Houthi rebels. On Syria, the Saudis are ready to "step up" if requested by its allies. Macron acknowledges Saudi concerns over Iran. Agreements worth US$ 18 billion are signed.

Paris (AsiaNews/Agencies)  As Saudi Arabias Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman flew home he took from his Paris visit a long hug, "full support" for the Saudi position in Yemen and trade deals worth US$ 18 billion.

Prince Mohammads three-day visit ended yesterday with a dinner at the Louvre which included Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri.

The meeting between the three leaders is significant given events in November. During a visit to Riyadh, Hariri resigned as prime minister, slamming Hezbollah and Iran, historical rival of the Saudi kingdom, for their influence in Lebanon.

At the time, Lebanese authorities accused Saudi Arabia of holding Hariri against his will. The diplomatic crisis was eventually settled with Macrons mediation, followed by Hariri rescinding his resignation and a trip of the Lebanese prime minister to Paris.

In recent months, Macron and Prince Mohammad have developed an "excellent" personal relationship, confirmed during the visit - before dinner  by a visit to the Delacroix exhibition at the Louvre.

On this occasion, the Saudi prince, who is trying to promote an image of himself as a reformer and a moderniser, praised the famous painting Liberty leading the people.

The good state of Franco-Saudi relations was also highlighted by the position taken by the French president on sensitive issues like the conflict in Yemen, which has been torn apart by civil war since January 2015 pitting Saudi-backed former president Hadi and Houthi rebels, who are close to Iran and Hezbollah.

Standing next to his guest, the French President Emmanuel Macron announced yesterday that Paris would host a conference over humanitarian the crisis unfolding in Yemen.

Macron used this occasion to express Frances full support for Saudi security, slamming Houthi rocket attacks. He also reiterated support for a political solution to the conflict and the great humanitarian need of the civilian population."

The French president and the Saudi prince also discussed other sensitive topics, like the war in Syria, Lebanons upcoming elections and Iran.

On Syria the two leaders share the same view as US President Donald Trump, condemning the government of Bashar al-Assad, which has been blamed for the Douma chemical attack, in which dozens of people died.

Paris is looking into possible military action coordinated with the United States and the United Kingdom, against Syrian chemical capabilities.

Asked Tuesday in Paris if Riyadh would take part in strikes against the Syrian regime, Prince Mohammad said: "If our alliance with our partners calls for it, we will step up."

Conversely, on Iran, Riyadh has repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with French support for the nuclear agreement.

Yesterday, Macron acknowledged the concerns of his close friend", who for his part admitted that the two sides share a "common vision despite tactical differences".

The two leaders did not forget business. The two countries inked trade agreements worth US$ 18 billion with possibly more to follow.

One includes a US$ 5 billion petrochemical project between the French company Total and Saudi Aramco.The owner of British Airways has snapped up a stake in low-cost rival Norwegian  and may launch a bid to buy the increasingly powerful airline.

International Airlines Group (IAG) has built up a 4.6 per cent holding in Norwegian, worth around 44million.

IAG boss Willie Walsh yesterday said this could lead to a full-blown takeover offer for the airline, which was founded by former fighter pilot and crime writer Bjorn Kjos.

International Airlines Group (IAG) has built up a 4.6 per cent holding in Norwegian

Such a deal would give IAG a major boost in the battle for skies over the Atlantic. But it is feared a takeover could cut competition and push up prices for customers.

Experts said that the acquisition could cost IAG more than 2.5billion, as Norwegian is worth around 952million but a deal would also include its 2billion debt.

Traditional carriers such as BA are facing an onslaught from booming budget airlines.

Until recently these have focused on short-haul flights, but airlines such as Norwegian have applied the model to longer trips, triggering a price war.

Norwegian's take-off  Norwegian was founded in 1993 out of bankrupt regional airline Busy Bee  It was set up by ex-Air Force pilot Bjorn Kjos, 71, who is now chief executive  The firm is the worlds sixth largest low-cost airline, with 500 routes to 150 destinations  It carried 33m people last year, including 5.8m British passengers  It launched the UKs first low-cost, long-haul flights to the US in 2014, and now offers round trips from London to New York for 270 return

The battle is particularly aggressive on transatlantic routes, with Norwegian offering return flights from London to New York for as little as 270.

Norwegian shares soared 48 per cent in Oslo yesterday as IAG unveiled its move.

John Strickland, of airline consultancy JLS Consulting, said airlines feared being caught out as they had been by the rapid growth of short-haul, which saw upstarts such as Ryanair and EasyJet boom.

He said: Low-cost long-haul has really been growing rapidly. I think IAG is testing the water. It is putting itself in position so it can influence the future rather than having to react.

Kjos, 71, turned Norwegian from a small bankrupt operator in the early 1990s into Europes third-largest low-cost airline.

Many doubted cheap fares could work over long-haul flights. But Norwegian is now carrying 33m passengers each year to 150 destinations.

The airlines success in getting more customers has come at a cost, however. It was forced to raise extra cash in March by selling shares, and warned of a larger than expected loss this quarter.

But it has made competitors sit up and take note. Earlier this year BA said it would slash prices.

Norwegian was set up by ex-Air Force pilot Bjorn Kjos, 71, who is now chief executive

IAG has also launched low-cost airline Level, and operates budget flights through its Irish carrier Aer Lingus and Spanish airline Vueling. It also owns Iberia.

But analysts said buying Norwegian was an upfront cost to IAG that could otherwise be spent making life better for customers. Some suggested a partnership might be the best way forward.Co-operative boss Steve Murrells

Bosss pay

The chief executive of Co-operative Group, Steve Murrells, 52, landed just over 2million in pay after only ten months in the job.

He started on March 1 last year, and 1.2million of his earnings came in bonuses. Predecessor Richard Pennycook left the business at the end of March 2017 and was paid 870,000 for his final months.

New role

Former Tesco boss Matt Davies, 46, has been appointed chairman of arts and crafts chain Hobbycraft, replacing Archie Norman. He had quit Tesco earlier this year following its 3.7billion merger with wholesaler Booker.

Cash help

Engineering giants Rolls-Royce and BAE are among backers ploughing a further 26.5million into UK company Reaction Engines, which is developing an engine to revolutionise air and space travel.

Oil partners

Oil titan BP is teaming up with Brazilian state-owned firm Petrobras for joint ventures, which could include drilling, exploration, trading and research.

Profit blow

UK power group National Grid issued a warning over profits after a 140million hit from ferocious US storms.

Annual headline group earnings will be lower than expected, but will be largely offset by 60million from changes to finance costs and a lower US tax charge of 24 per cent.

Bank sued

Wall Street bank JP Morgan is being sued for allegedly charging surprise fees to customers who bought bitcoin by credit card. Angry traders are taking it to court in New York.

Regulation bill

Large investment banks are spending 26billion a year to comply with global regulation introduced since the financial crisis, says lobby group Association for Financial Markets in Europe.

Care buyout

Private healthcare provider Advinia has bought 22 Bupa care homes, increasing its beds more than 500 per cent to 3,250.

Gas find

AIM-listed SDX Energy has found gas at a well in Egypt, after drilling to 9,068ft.

Plane sale

Scandinavian airline SAS has bought an A330-300 from Airbus for its long-haul fleet. The plane, which has a Rolls-Royce Trent engine, will join the network in the second quarter of 2019.

Savings launch

Internet bank Tandem is launching its first savings product this summer  an instant-access account paying 2.3 per cent.Glaxosmithkline has offloaded its rare diseases unit as chief executive Emma Walmsley continues to trim the business.

Britains biggest drug maker sold the portfolio to Orchard Therapeutics, a private biotech firm with bases in London, Boston and California.

It comes after Walmsley said the unit was under review last July, as part of a wider effort to refocus the companys research on the areas of respiratory, HIV and infectious diseases, cancer drugs and immuno-inflammation.

Trimming down the business: Glaxo chief executive Emma Walmsley

The deal is small financially for Glaxo but will see it take a stake of nearly 20 per cent in Orchard.A woman claims that Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens spanked slapped, grabbed, shoved and called her derogatory names while they were involved in 2015

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens initiated a physically aggressive unwanted sexual encounter with his hairdresser and threatened to distribute a partially nude photo of her if she spoke about it, according to testimony from the woman released Wednesday by a House investigatory committee.

The graphic report details multiple instances in which the woman said Greitens spanked, slapped, grabbed, shoved and called her derogatory names during a series of sexual encounters as he was preparing to run for office in 2015. The testimony contradicts Greitens' previous assertions that 'there was no violence' and 'no threat of violence' in what he has described as a consensual extramarital affair.

The report, signed by all five Republicans and two Democrats on the committee, describes the woman's testimony as credible and notes that Greitens has so far declined to testify or provide documents to the panel. It also outlines instances where the Republican governor's public comments appear to run counter to some of her allegations.

The special House investigation was initiated shortly after Greitens was indicted in February on a felony invasion-of-privacy charge for taking a non-consensual photo of the partially nude woman and transmitting it in a way that could be accessed by a computer.

The woman told the committee that Greitens took the photo after manipulating her into a compromising position during an unwanted sexual encounter and that he told her 'everyone will know what a little whore you are' if she told anyone about him.

Greitens, 44, has refused to directly answer media questions about whether he took the photo but he has steadfastly denied any criminal wrongdoing. He said he expects to be proven innocent during this trial, which is scheduled for May 14.

Speaking shortly before the report was released, Greitens told reporters gathered at the Capitol that he expected it to contain 'lies and falsehoods' and reaffirmed his commitment to remaining in office.

'This is a political witch hunt,' Greitens said, later adding: 'This is exactly like what's happening with the witch hunts in Washington, D.C.'

Greitens - pictured with his wife - has so far declined to testify or provide documents to the panel at the House investigatory committee

Greitens has so far declined to testify or provide documents to the panel

The legislative report could serve as a basis for the Republican-led House to initiate impeachment proceedings to try to remove Greitens from office, though it makes no recommendation about what lawmakers should do. Impeachment can occur independently of a criminal case.

Democratic House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty said: 'For the good of the state, Eric Greitens must immediately resign' or else the House must 'restore integrity' to the office. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Gina Walsh also called for the House to impeach Greitens if he doesn't quit.

According to the report, the woman testified that she met Greitens in 2013 as a customer of her hair salon. She said she had a crush on Greitens but was shocked when he ran his hand up her leg and touched her crotch without her consent during a March 2015 hair appointment. He later invited her to his St. Louis home while his wife was out of town.

After she arrived through the back door, the report said that the woman testified Greitens searched her purse and 'patted her down from head-to-toe.' He then asked if she had exercised and had her change into a white T-shirt with a slit on the top and pajama pants, it is claimed/

He was indicted in February on a felony invasion-of-privacy charge for taking a non-consensual photo of the partially nude woman

'I thought, oh, this is going to be some sort of sexy workout,' the woman testified.

But once in his basement, Greitens taped her hands to pull-up rings, blindfolded her, started kissing her, ripped open the shirt and pulled down her pants, the woman testified. She didn't give consent to be disrobed or kissed, the report said. The woman testified that she then heard a click, like of a cellphone picture, and saw a flash.

The woman testified that Greitens told her: 'Don't even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, I'm going to take these pictures, and I'm going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are.'

When she remained silent, the woman said Greitens 'spanked me and said, "Are you going to mention my name?" And I said, I just gritted through my teeth, and I said, "No." And he's like, "Good, now that's a good girl."'

'I was definitely fearful,' the woman testified to the legislative committee.

After telling Greitens, 'I don't want this,' the woman testified that Greitens unbound her hands. She said she started 'uncontrollably crying.' She said Greitens then grabbed her in a hug and laid her down. She said he put his penis near her face and she gave him oral sex. Asked by the committee whether the oral sex was coerced, she responded: 'Coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave.'

The woman testified she returned to Greitens' house later that day because she had forgotten her keys. She said she confronted him about taking a photo and he responded: 'You have to understand, I'm running for office, and people will get me, and I have to have some sort of thing to protect myself.' Then she said Greitens added: 'I felt bad, so I erased it.'

The House committee report said it doesn't possess any physical or electronic evidence of the photo.

The woman testified that she had several additional sexual encounters with Greitens, including one in June 2015 when 'he slapped me across my face' after she acknowledged having slept with her husband. She said she didn't think Greitens was trying to hurt her, but rather 'I felt like he was trying to claim me.'

In another subsequent sexual encounter, the woman testified that Greitens 'out of nowhere just, like kind of smacked me and grabbed me and shoved me down on the ground, and I instantly just started bawling.'

It 'actually hurt, and I know that I actually was really scared and sad when that happened,' she testified.

The woman's account contradicts statements Greitens made previously. Asked in a January interview with The Associated Press if he had ever slapped the woman, Greitens responded: 'Absolutely not.'

Greitens, a Rhodes Scholar and former Navy SEAL officer, was considered a rising GOP star. He went so far as to reserve the web address ericgreitensforpresident.com years ago.

'This is a political witch hunt,' Greitens said. He is pictured with pal Vice President Mike Pence

Greitens first acknowledged having an extramarital affair on January 10, when St. Louis TV station KMOV ran a story revealing that the woman's ex-husband had released a secret audio recording of a 2015 conversation in which she told him about the photo Greitens took at his home.

Greitens' attorneys have asserted that prosecutors have failed to produce evidence that a photo exists. Prosecutors previously acknowledged that they don't have the photo, though they could be trying to obtain it.

On Wednesday, Greitens referenced a recent court filing by his defense attorneys stating that the woman had testified in the criminal case that she's unsure whether her belief that Greitens had a phone came from a dream.

Greitens' attorneys had tried to persuade the Legislature to delay its report until after his criminal trial, arguing that it could include some information that isn't fully accurate and could taint the jury pool.

On Wednesday, Greitens criticized the House report as 'one-sided tabloid, trash gossip that was produced in a secret room.'

In addition to the legislative investigation and the criminal case, Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley is investigating The Mission Continues, the veterans charity founded by Greitens, as it relates to the state's consumer protection and charitable registration and reporting laws.

That probe came after media reports that Greitens' campaign had obtained and used a charity donor list in 2015 as it ramped up fundraising for his gubernatorial bid.For the second time in five months, an infant has been left in a baby box at a northwestern Indiana volunteer fire station.

Indiana's Safe Haven Law allows babies under 30-days-old to be dropped off to any police department, fire station or hospital without any criminal charges.

So-called 'baby boxes' popping up in fire stations are intended to make the difficult decision easier for mothers.

First installed about two years ago, the padded, climate-controlled box allows a mother to relinquish her newborn anonymously.

After a pager alerted Lt. Chuck Kohler, of the Coolspring Township Volunteer Fire Department, near Michigan City, to the presence of a baby in the box on Sunday night - the fireman was on the scene in less than a minute.

Lt. Chuck Kohler shows how a mother can relinquish her newborn using the Safe Haven Baby Box

The girl, named Grace by the firemen, appeared healthy and was taken to a hospital for care.

She will then be placed in the custody of the Indiana Department of Child Services.

The system certainly seems to be having the desired result after another baby girl was safely rescued having been left in the box on November 7.

'There are some mums that will go to the hospital,' Monica Kelsey, the founder and president of Safe Haven Baby Boxes, told KTXS.

'There are some mums that will walk into this fire station and hand that child over.

'But we also know that there are some mums that don't want their faces seen and this box is the reason why it's working.'

Monica Kelsey, founder of the not-for-profit organization Safe Haven Baby Boxes, plans to roll out the scheme to several towns and citiesPope Francis admits he made 'grave mistakes' by disregarding accusers in a child sex abuse scandal that rocked the Chilean church.

The pontiff said he felt shame for not believing victims and invited them to Rome so he could personally beg their forgiveness.

The Catholic leader made the extraordinary admissions in a letter to Chilean bishops and summoned them to the Vatican for a crisis meeting.

Pope Francis admits he made 'grave mistakes' by disregarding accusers in a child sex abuse scandal that rocked the Chilean church

'I made grave mistakes of judgment and perception of the situation, especially due to the lack of truthful and balanced information,' he wrote.

'From now on I ask forgiveness of all those I offended and I hope to be able to do it personally in the coming weeks.'

He also revealed in the letter he twice rejected Barros' resignation.

The letter signalled an about-face in the Pope's position on allegations that a bishop he appointed in 2015 covered up the country's worst paedophile priest.

Pope Francis sent one of his top sexual abuse investigators, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, to Chile to interview victims after long dismissing their claims.

He said he felt shame reading Archbishop Scicluna's 2,300-page report and thanked the 64 people who testified for their courage in bearing the 'wounds of their souls'.

The pontiff said the victims 'spoke in a stark way, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives'.

The letter signalled an about-face in the Pope's position on allegations that Bishop Juan Barros (pictured), who he appointed in 2015, covered up the country's worst paedophile priest

The parishioners claimed Bishop Barros covered up sexual abuse of children by his mentor Father Fernando Karadima.

The parishioners claimed Bishop Juan Barros covered up sexual abuse of children by his mentor Father Fernando Karadima.

Karadima was found guilty in a Vatican investigation in 2011, despite insisting his innocence, and banished to a life of penance and prayer.

Barros said he was unaware of any wrongdoing but the boys his mentor abused insisted he covered it up and were outraged at his promotion to bishop.

Critics accused the Pope of not understanding the depth of the crisis after he initially defended Barros and said he was the victim of slander.

During the pope's trip to South America, including Chile, in January, a Chilean reporter asked a question about Barros.

'The day I see proof against Bishop Barros, then I will talk. There is not a single piece of evidence against him. It is all slander. Is that clear?' the pope replied.

On the plane returning from Chile, Francis told reporters he believed the bishop of the city of Osorno in Chile's south was innocent.

Karadima was found guilty in a Vatican investigation in 2011, despite insisting his innocence, and banished to a life of penance and prayer

Pope Francis sent one of his top sexual abuse investigators, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, to Chile to interview victims after long dismissing their claims

Other clerics more favorable to Barros had Francis' ear, such as the Vatican ambassador, who has long been hostile to Barros' accusers.

The retired archbishop of Santiago also accused victims of being liars and 'serpents', and an old Spanish Jesuit friend evaluated Barros years ago and vouched for him.

However, few days after is trip Pope Francis dispatched Archbishop Scicluna to the country for a two-week investigation.

The head of the Chilean bishops' conference, Monsignor Santiago Silva, insisted the Chilean church had provided only truthful information to Francis about Barros.

However, he admitted 'obviously we didn't do everything we should have done'.

Pope Francis wrote they must now work together to 're-establish confidence in the church, confidence that was broken by our errors and sins, and heal the wounds that continue to bleed in Chilean society'.

Monsignor Santiago Silva (left) and Monsignor Fernando Ramos (right), President and General Secretary of Episcopal Conference of Chile

Osorno parishioners said they appreciated the Pope's change of heart and accepted his plea for forgiveness. Still, they said specific measures, including the resignation of Barros, were needed to restore confidence in the Church.

Osorno parishioners said they appreciated the Pope's change of heart and accepted his plea for forgiveness.

However, they said specific measures, including the resignation of Barros, were needed to restore confidence in the Church.

Pope Francis' letter did not give any clue on Barros' future in the church, and it would likely be discussed at the meeting of Chilean bishops in Rome.

Such gatherings are rare and usually take place in a period of crisis in a national Church, such as when the U.S. paedophile priest scandal broke in 2002.Daughter Willow decided she would arrive early and was born in the back seat

A pregnant woman has given birth in the back seat of the family car while rushing to hospital.

Baby Willow Fleming decided she couldn't wait for her parents to get to the Mona Vale Hospital in Sydney and would arrive early.

Parents Emelie and Ben Fleming were driving from the Northern Beaches when their daughter decided it was time to greet the world, 9News reported.

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Emelie Fleming was forced to give birth in the back seat of the family car while they were driving to hospital

Unable to reach the hospital in time Emelie was given no choice but to give birth in the back seat of their Honda Jazz.

'We got to the end of Mona and she (Emelie) goes "she's here!" and i was just like "no way",' says Ben.

'Everything just went quiet, you could here a pin drop and then Willow starts crying and it was like okay, we've got to get to hospital now.'

The birth took place just as they were passing the Mona Vale BP service station.

The couple were five minutes from hospital so Ben kept driving. When they arrived Emelie and her daughter were whisked away into care.

Staff were a little surprised when the family arrived but despite the unusual birth the baby was in perfect health.

Willow Fleming decided she couldn't wait any longer and entered the world as her parents were driving past the Mona Vale BP

Father Ben Fleming (pictured left) had to keep driving to get his wife and new daughter safely to hospital

'She's sleeping and eating well, she's amazing,' says Emelie.

The couple named her Willow.

The family is now recovering from their ordeal in hospital and have been given the all clear to return home.As a crime writer, I'm delighted, but not surprised, that crime fiction has been declared the most popular of all fictional genres.

I've been an addict since the late Fifties and though I'm pretty broad in my tastes, it is almost always crime books  many by authors I know  that I'll load up with for a holiday.

I'm thrilled, rather than envious, to see my friends doing so well.

Because we crime writers  I've written a dozen crime novels myself  get so fed up with being patronised by literary types, it's hard not to feel triumphalist at the news that last year we represented 36 per cent of book sales and for the first time ever we have beaten general and literary fiction (35 per cent).

And we've also seen off other runners-up such as romance and sagas (10 per cent) and science fiction and fantasy (6 per cent).

As a crime writer, I'm delighted, but not surprised, that crime fiction has been declared the most popular of all fictional genres, writes Ruth Dudley Edwards

Since the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle gripped the public imagination in the 19th century, people have speculated  often disapprovingly  on why stories of mystery and wrongdoing are so popular.

In the early Thirties, as what became known as the Golden Age between the wars was in full swing, the great Dorothy L. Sayers was a giant of the genre.

'Death in particular,' she noted, 'seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject.'

But at the time there were good reasons for it. Millions of people had died in a terrible war that had caused intense suffering to many British families, and there was an acute consciousness of the unfairness of life along with a hunger for order, stability and justice.

There were dark forces of communism and fascism threatening from the east, and people looked back nostalgically to an often mythical pre-war existence of sunshine, peace and security.

The so-called Scandi-noir genre  in which Scandinavian authors such as Stieg Larsson (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) heighten the tension by combining the region's bleak landscapes, lack of sunlight, dour, small-town policemen and hard liquor with grisly homicides  are very much of the modern age

The Golden Age books tended to offer a serene and familiar social setting and then rudely disrupt it with a gun, a knife or a blunt instrument.

Yet you knew that at the end of all the bloody events, suspicions and shocks, the mystery would be solved, the murderer would be unmasked and duly despatched to jail or an early grave. Justice would prevail and order and harmony would be restored.

Perhaps it is the uncertainty of the world we face today that has once again kindled our love of crime fiction.

When faced with news of the terror attacks and bombs of ISIS, the horrors of the war in Syria, the bellicose behaviour of world leaders such as Presidents Putin and Trump  and on a more parochial scale the violent stabbings and shootings on our streets  perhaps our hunger for justice has led us again to these novels.

Of course, many of the books today are more violent, and very often darker, than in the Golden Age.

The so-called Scandi-noir genre  in which Scandinavian authors such as Stieg Larsson (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) and Henning Mankell (Wallander) heighten the tension by combining the region's bleak landscapes, lack of sunlight, dour, small-town policemen and hard liquor with grisly homicides  are very much of the modern age.

But it seems to me the premise remains the same. Crime novels exploit our longing for stability.

They do so by inflicting on us the shock and anarchy of the crime followed by the slow  but unpredictable  restoration of calm as the perpetrator is finally brought to justice.

So bewitched are we in this process that we involuntarily try to help solve the puzzles laid by the best writers as to who the murderer is and how they can be caught.

One of the joys for me as I raided my mother's well-thumbed library was to find how ruthless and egalitarian the writers were in their choice of villains.

I was brought up in the Republic of Ireland, at the time an intensely conservative and religious country where authority was revered and rarely questioned.

But in the books into which I escaped the murderer was more likely to be a judge, a vicar or a professor than the local thug  and since the rule of law was sacrosanct, high social status did not save anyone from justice.

In fact, the more respectable the characters were, the more suspect they were.

What was more, for I was a feminist before the term became synonymous with man-hating and victimhood, I loved the strong female characters one found in so much crime fiction and not just in those written by women.

TEN THRILLERS TO DIE FOR: BY FOYLE'S WAR CREATOR ANTHONY HORROWITZ A Place of Execution,Val McDermid (1999) In 1963, a young girl goes missing in Derbyshire. Thirty-six years later, a journalist re-opens the case and at once a whole series of dark secrets begin to emerge. McDermid is one of Scotland's most accomplished crime writers and this book builds and builds to a terrific conclusion. A Question of Blood, Ian Rankin (2003) There is a long list of novels featuring Rankin's hard-bitted, heavy-drinking DI John Rebus and I could have chosen any one of them. This one, which starts with a shooting in a private school, just happens to be one of my favourites. There's a chance that Rebus could be returning to TV soon. Let's hope so. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale (2008) It was a brilliant idea to revisit a real crime that took place in 1860  the murder of a three-year-old boy in Wiltshire which became a cause celebre in Victorian England. The central character, Jack Whicher, was one of the first Scotland Yard detectives and he's all the more compelling because he was real. Summerscale's book also inspired a popular ITV series. The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, Soji Shimada (1981) If you like your crime stories to be bloody and bizarre, then this one may be for you. The winner of several major awards, it's 'a locked room' mystery . . . almost a genre in itself and the solution is one of the most original that I've ever read. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson (2005) Lisbeth Salander  an abused child who has grown up to become a dangerously unpredictable, borderline sociopathic computer hacker  is without any doubt the most startling and original investigator in 21st-century crime fiction. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the first of three books that Larsson wrote about her before his untimely death in 2004, but she has since been given new life in David Lagercrantz's excellent continuation novels. The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters (2014) I'm a huge fan of all Sarah Waters's work  which blurs the line between literary fiction and crime writing. This one, set in London during the Twenties, is the story of a family forced to take in lodgers and the chaos that ensues as lust gives way to illicit love and finally to murder. It's a profoundly absorbing read. The Darkness, Ragnar Jonasson (2015) I've only recently discovered this extraordinary Icelandic writer who adds several shades of darkness to Nordic noir. This story, which begins with an asylum seeker found dead on a frozen seashore introduces a female detective  Hulda Hermannsdottir  and builds to a deeply shocking climax. Closed Casket, Sophie Hannah (2016) It was clever of the Agatha Christie estate to entrust Hercule Poirot to a safe pair of hands and I particularly enjoyed this mystery  Sophie Hannah's second outing with the Belgian detective, set in a classic Irish country house. The motive for the murder is one of the most peculiar I've ever come across. The Dead House, Harry Bingham (2016) The body of a young woman is found in a 'dead house' beside a Welsh cemetery, surrounded by flickering candles. So begins the fifth outing for Bingham's troubled, dope-smoking detective, DC Fiona Griffiths, a woman with a unique affinity with the dead. Creepy and atmospheric, there are now six books in the series. The Thirst, Jo Nesbo (2017) Two women  both users of the dating app, Tinder  are murdered days apart and there's just one clue. Fragments of rust and paint have been discovered in the wounds. It's enough to bring Nesbo's most famous creation, Harry Hole, out of retirement for another dose of violent, often quite gruesome Nordic noir. The Word Is Murder, the new whodunit by Anthony Horowitz, is published in paperback by Arrow on April 19 Advertisement

Of the first four presidents of the Detection Club  the pre-eminent club of crime writers  it is no coincidence that two (Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie) were women.

I read all the great Agatha's detective novels until in my late teens I decided I was an intellectual and wrote her off as no more than a puzzler.

I sneered at her stereotyping and pedestrian style. But she had the last laugh when as an adult I got bad flu, someone brought me a clutch of Christies and I fell back in love with a genius who outwitted and humbled me in almost every book.

Having forgotten almost all the plots, I was condemned once again to being unable to sleep until I had found out whodunit.

The excellent P.D. James, whom I greatly admired, remained rather sniffy about her, but good though James's books are, my guess is that Agatha will still be read in 100 years though James may not be.

Brilliantly filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, Strangers On A Train (pictured) remains one of the cleverest crime novels ever written with two complete strangers swapping murders when they happen to meet on a train

Agatha Christie was middle class, but in the ensuing decades crime writers emerged from an ever-wider range of backgrounds and began to address every social problem I had heard of and many I hadn't.

I'll never forget the effect on me of Ruth Rendell's 1977 A Judgement In Stone, a whydunit which began: 'Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.'

Rendell's extraordinarily skilful writing has that Scandinavian sparseness, those whiffs of cold air we see from the Nordic noir writers.

Perhaps it is because her mother is a Swede, or simply that she was ahead of her time. Whatever the case, almost none of her 80-plus books is a dud.

The fact is that female crime writers were, and are, as ruthless, adventurous and successful as men.

Patricia Highsmith, a predatory lesbian, invented the spine-chilling psychopath Tom Ripley, and is rightly revered.

What's more, she has an army of female readers. The irony is that, despite so much of crime fiction's unbearable tension, despite descriptions so gruesome they make your flesh creep, more women turn to it than men.

Last summer, a study by the University of Wolverhampton found that more than twice as many women read crime novels as men.

Is it because women are the stronger sex? Or because they have a stronger yearning for justice and order? Possibly both.

...And five classic whodunits THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (1902) Pretty much all crime fiction begins with Sherlock Holmes  the great-grandfather of all modern detectives. Doyle only wrote four novellas, but this is by far the most accomplished, a terrific mystery and a wonderfully atmospheric tale of an ancient family curse and a phantom hound who stalks the moors around Baskerville Hall. THE MALTESE FALCON, DASHIELL HAMMETT (1930) What's not to love in this tangled tale featuring Sam Spade, the first and the greatest of the so-called 'hard-boiled' private detectives? The Maltese Falcon was turned into a famous film starring Humphrey Bogart, but the book is still worth revisiting. Hammett worked as a detective himself and his writing style is still unique. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, PATRICIA HIGHSMITH (1950) Brilliantly filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, Strangers On A Train remains one of the cleverest crime novels ever written with two complete strangers swapping murders when they happen to meet on a train. There are rumours of an impending remake in Hollywood. Count me out. CARDS ON THE TABLE, AGATHA CHRISTIE (1936) Nobody does it like Agatha Christie and this is my favourite of her novels with just four suspects, each one a suspected murderer from a past case. When the host is himself murdered, Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot steps in to investigate. Speaking personally, I always preferred Poirot to Miss Marple and even with so few characters, you won't guess the ending. THE DEADLY PERCHERON, JOHN FRANKLIN BARDIN (1946) You've probably never heard of the book or the author and it's not easy to find, but  trust me  this is most hallucinogenic, extraordinary mystery you'll ever read. The New York Times called it 'a story of murder and mayhem and hideous torture  one which will hold your attention to the last'. A percheron, by the way, is a small horse. Advertisement

Whatever, Patricia Highsmith's books proved too frightening for me, for I inhabit what my late friend, the great crime writer Reginald Hill, christened the Jane Austen end of the crime writing genre.

No one ever suffered a nightmare from reading my books, the last eight of which star a tough woman who says whatever she likes and thumbs her nose at the respectable and the politically correct.

My books are mostly satires on the British establishment, an expression of my urge to make fun of authority, pretension and narrow-mindedness.

I don't do the gore, the heart-stopping suspense and often terrible sexual violence towards women that is so popular at the moment  although I have many female crime-writing friends who do, and whom I love, but whose books I'm afraid to read.

Yet this is the great strength of a literary genre that is, to my mind, way ahead of literary fiction in taking up contemporary issues and scrutinising them mercilessly  it is so impressively wide-ranging.

And as the reading public turn to crime books for reassurance, in these scary and uncertain times, that the baddies won't win, that surely is a cause for celebration.An 80-year-old Missouri businessman who lost a nearly $6million lawsuit to a Kansas City attorney has been charged with murdering the lawyer after inadvertently confessing.

David Jungerman is charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the death of 39-year-old Tom Pickert.

The personal injury attorney and married father-of-two was found dead on the front porch of his family's Brookside home on the morning of October 25, 2017, a day after Jungerman was served with property liens to pay the seven-figure judgment.

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Case closed: David Jungerman, 80 (left), has been charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the death of 39-year-old lawyer Tom Pickert (right)

Pickers was found with a fatal gunshot wound to the head outside him family's home in Brookside, Missouri, a day after Jungerman was served with property liens

A probable cause affidavit reviewed by DailyMail.com alleges that Jungerman accidentally recorded himself saying he killed Pickert. Investigators allege he failed to turn off a recorder he was using during a court hearing in Vernon County.

Pickert, who worked for Fowler Pickert Eisenmenger LLC, had represented a homeless man who was shot by Jungerman 2012, after Jungerman encountered men in a building associated with his baby-furniture business. Jungerman said the men were stealing copper and that he acted in self-defense.

He wasn't criminally charged in those shootings, but he was later sued in civil court. A jury in August 2017 sided with the homeless man, who lost part of his leg in the shooting, awarding $5.75million. Jungerman had said he planned to appeal.

According to the court documents, Pickert told two people that after the verdict, Jungerman came up to him in an aggressive manner and told him, 'None of this matters. I have 186 guns. I did it once before. I will do it again. You can't touch me.'

Pickert was shot two months later, after returning home from walking his two sons to school.

Investigators allege Jungerman, who also is a farmer, shot Pickert with a .17-caliber firearm typically used by farmers and ranchers to kill pests, according to court documents.

Witnesses said the shooter, described as an elderly man with grey hair, sped away from the scene in a white 1997 Chevrolet van registered to Jungerman. Police interviewed the elderly man but initially cleared him as a suspect in the killing.

'We are grieving,' said Pickert's widow, palliative care doctor Emily Riegel. 'We are desperately trying to find our way forward."

Jungerman, who lives in Raytown, was in custody at the Jackson County jail in connection to an unrelated shooting when the charges were announced.

Pickert (left), a personal injury attorney and father-of-two, had successfully sued Jungerman on behalf of a homeless man who was shot by Jungerman in 2012

Emily Riegel (right) was the one who found her husband dead on the front porch of their home after hearing a gunshot

He was being held without bond in a March 8 shooting incident in which he is accused of a shooting at a man he suspected of stealing 780lbs of iron pipe from his building.

A witness told police that he had a conversation with Jungerman in March, during which the suspect allegedly stated he had killed a lawyer with a gun and gotten away with it. He did it because the lawyer stole his money.

When the murder charge was announced, Jungerman was already in jail in connection to a March 8 shooting incident in which he is accused of a shooting at a suspect thief

Police recently executed search warrants at the defendants home and business. At his business, they found a printout from the Jackson County property tax database. It showed the victims home address. Another document indicated that Jungerman had more than $33million in assets.

An Olympus audio recorder with a recording was also recovered. The first part of the audio captured a court hearing that the defendant attended in November 2017. But after the hearing, the recorder continued to run. Later, the defendant talked to his employee about a .17 caliber rifle and about killing the victim.

People, uh, know that I murdered that son of a b*****, he is heard saying on the tape.

Later in the conversation he say: the thing that sort of bothers me about me about is, when I think about it, I grin the mother****er has caused me a lot of problems, you know.A man has been charged over a string of alleged pizza shop robberies across western Sydney - including one in which a worker was shot.

A 28-year-old man allegedly robbed five pizza restaurants across the city's west and inner-west over a seven week period between November and January.

Police say the man threatened staff while holding a gun and demanding money.

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A 28-year-old man allegedly entered five pizza restaurants across the city's west and inner-west over a seven week period between November and January

Police say the man threatened staff while holding a gun and demanding money

After his arrest, investigators executed three search warrants at homes in Old Guildford

During an alleged robbery at Wentworthville, police say a 21-year-old employee was shot twice during a scuffle before the man ran from the store.

The worker had to undergo surgery and suffers permanent injuries as a result of the shooting.

The alleged offender was arrested about 9am on Wednesday at a construction site and taken to Maroubra police station.

The man has been charged with firearm and robbery offences.

After his arrest, investigators executed three search warrants at homes in Old Guildford.

They found firearms, ammunition, clothing and other 'relevant' items, Nine News reported.

One of those discoveries was of a string of bullets stuck to a wall in the shape of the letter 'S'.

The alleged offender was arrested about 9am on Wednesday at a construction site and taken to Maroubra police station

Investigators found firearms, ammunition, clothing and other 'relevant' items

The alleged robberies took place at Canley Vale, Fairfield East, North Strathfield, Strathfield and Wentworthville.

Detectives from the State Crime Command's Robbery and Serious Crime Squad established Strike Force Tintaldra to investigate five armed robberies.

The man will appear at Waverley Local Court on Thursday.by Anna Chiara Filice

Daniel Bashir, who coordinates young lay missionaries, is about to enter the seminary. As a child he could not speak and this gave him pain in the heart. It is in the Bible that we find the answers to our questions. He urges young people to be reconciled with the Lord through the sacrament of confession."

Vatican City (AsiaNews)  Daniel Bashir, 28, is national youth coordinator of Jesus Youth, a movement of the lay missionaries of Pakistan. He was in Rome to represent the young people of his country at the Pre-Synod on young people that was recently held in the Vatican.

A graduate in medicine, he plans to enter the seminary in June to begin his journey towards the priesthood. He spoke to AsiaNews.

"I decided to give my life to serve God because he saved me, he said. "I could not but dedicate my life to the Lord. He saved me when I was alone, without friends, ashamed because I could not speak well and angry with myself.

Things changed in 2003 when my mother took me to church and, in front of Eucharistic Christ, I entrusted myself to him to heal me. And without the help of doctors, little by little I began to speak again."

Daniel says he has had speech problems since birth. "I could not speak well and I communicated with my mother by gestures. With a simple gesture, she understood what I wanted. But in that situation, I had no friends, I was totally hopeless. I felt ashamed and felt pain in my heart.

But One day I went to church and I heard the priest's message. It was before Pentecost and the disciples were alone, but then the Holy Spirit descended upon them and reunited with the Virgin Mary."

At that moment, "I felt I was in the same situation: I had no friends, I was alone and so fearful in my heart. I turned to the Christ of the Eucharist and told him: 'I am an instrument in your hands, please use me'. From that day on I started to improve little by little. It was a great miracle in my life."

The vocational call "came on 2 on December 2012, as I was at a bringing together young people in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. I had to speak in front of an audience of 300 people and I realised how many steps I had taken since I had even spoken.

"I started to cry because I knew it was all Christ's work. I felt God's grace above me and I understood that I wanted to serve him and become a priest. My family supported me in this decision, even though they pushed me to finish my studies first. Now, thank God, I am a doctor and I can be a priest to serve the sick."

For years the young man was active in a group of lay missionaries. The work allowed him to travel to different Asian countries and meet other people like him.

"As a Catholic missionary, I visited several cities in Pakistan and went to Thailand, Sri Lanka and also to the Arab Emirates for a year.

"With the help of the bishops, we organise Bible studies meetings ". The reason, he explained, "is that on earth we have three tasks: to know, to love and to serve God. And it is in the Bible that we find the answers to our questions."

As a Catholic leader, "I urge other young people to come to church, attend mass and be reconciled with the Lord through the sacrament of confession."

In Pakistan, "the Church is very active thanks to the attitude of the bishops, who have great plans for the young. Furthermore, in 2018 we celebrate the Year of the Eucharist, focusing on two aspects: adoration and confession."

As for preaching the Gospel, "this is very easy in the country thanks to the various television channels that spread the Christian message at all hours, showing the celebration of mass, prayers and liturgical services.

I hope young people get more involved in the Church, but also in studies because today, in Pakistani society, professional figures among Catholics are missing.

Lastly, with respect to recent cases of blasphemy, "one must be very careful with the use of social media, Daniel said. As Pakistani Catholics, we must respect the country and the official religion of the nation in which we live. We must respect the religions of others and demand respect for ours."Commonwealth Games bronze medallist Stephen Lavelle has been charged after he allegedly punched a woman and glassed a man at a Gold Coast nightclub.

The Scottish boxer, who won his medal at Glasgow in 2014, was at the Sin City nightclub in Surfers Paradise when police say he approached an 18-year-old man and woman.

According to the Gold Coast Bulletin, the 27-year-old man allegedly hit the woman in the face and threw a glass at the man at 3am on Thursday.

Stephen Lavelle (left) was charged at the Sin City night club at Surfers Paradise on Thursday after he allegedly hit a woman and glassed a man

The Commonwealth Games 2014 bronze medallist has no association with the Gold Coast games

The man was taken to Gold Coast University hospital with non-life threatening injuries to his face and the woman had no injuries.

Lavelle isn't associated with the current games on the Gold Coast.

The boxer, who now lives in Victoria, has been charged with one count of assault occasioning bodily harm and one count of common assault.

The Commonwealth Games medallist has been charged at a Gold Coast nightclub (pictured) after he allegedly punched a woman and glassed a man at Sin City

He is due to face Southport Magistrates Court on April 30.

It is the second incident to hit the well-known Gold Coast club this week after Irish boxer Sean McComb was banned from the party district and fined $756 on the spot.

The Northern Ireland athlete was drinking with friends when bouncers kicked him out on Tuesday morning.

The 25-year-old allegedly took a swing at security and was seen arguing with them as he left the club.

He was removed from the athletes' village at the Commonwealth Games and an investigation was launched by Northern Island officials.A Queensland man has been ordered to undergo testing for hepatitis B and HIV after allegedly drugging and raping a coworker's girlfriend and then bribing the pair to keep quiet.

The 46-year-old man has been accused of giving Rohypnol to the couple after a night out on the Gold Coast and raping the woman twice after dumping her boyfriend at a park.

The accused was denied bail at Southport Magistrates Court on Wednesday and ordered to undergo the testing as the woman, who was a virgin, now faces an excruciating wait for the test results.

A Queenslander is accused of raping a co-worker's girlfriend after drugging the pair and allegedly bribing them to keep quiet (stock image)

Police allege the man offered to pay the woman $100,000 to stay silent after he drugged her and her male partner, before dumping him in a park and returning home to rape her.

After the reported incident, which is claimed to have happened on January 20, the man allegedly told his colleague: 'Maybe I drink a lot and have sex with your girlfriend. I'm willing to work this out without telling the police.'

According to the Gold Coast Bulletin the man said the couple willingly took the drug, which had been prescribed to him, and that the sex was consensual, however, the court was told on Wednesday that the man had been convicted in 2012 of sexual assault.

It is alleged the man put Rohypnol in the couple's wine after they went to his house following dinner out in Surfers Paradise.

The man, who is in custody since his arrest in March, will also face one charge of administering a drug to commit rape as well as two counts of rape.

The woman started to feel tired and he told her to lie down in his bed and then encouraged the boyfriend to take a drive, according to the Gold Coast Bulletin.

The publication reports the man took the boyfriend to a park and ditched him there after falling asleep. He was found by a passer-by who took him to a police station where he appeared extremely dazed and confused.

Police claim the man had returned home to rape his colleague's girlfriend while she slept in the bed.

The man reportedly raped the woman, who was a virgin, twice at his home on the Gold Coast in January

Forensic investigators are taking samples of blood found on the bed sheets and comparing it to the woman's.

Neither said they recalled the incident until after they returned home and slept while the defendant claimed he had slept in the car that night.

The woman's partner later confronted the man, who attempted to bribe them with the money, but the couple reported the alleged incident to police the following day.A hungry driver has been snapped munching on cereal from a bowl while behind the wheel of her car travelling at 100km/h just days after another offender was caught doing the same thing.

A Gympie woman was driving down the Pacific Motorway last Friday when she noticed the cereal offender and asked her daughter to take a picture.

The mother and daughter were shocked to see a young female driver using a spoon to eat out of a bowl.

A hungry driver has been snapped munching on cereal from a bowl while behind the wheel of her car travelling at 100km/h

'I just couldn't believe it,' the Gympie woman, who asked not to be named, told The Gympie Times.

The incident comes just days after a Perth P-Plater was given a $300 fine for doing the same thing.

An image was taken by a 6PR radio listener and appears to show the young woman steering the car with her knees.

In addition to the fine was the loss of three demerit points which came under an infringement for 'driving without due care and attention'.

The listener said he initially believed the silver Hyundai's driver to be texting until spotting the green cereal bowl and snapping the photo.

Police Commissioner Chris Dawson assured listeners when the footage first came to light that the cereal-enthusiast would be brought to justice.

The incident comes just days after a Perth P-Plater was given a $300 fine for doing the same thing

An image was taken by a 6PR radio listener and appears to show the young woman steering the car with her knees

Police Commissioner Chris Dawson issued a warning to would-be eating drivers saying, 'you can't be driving a car and eating your brekkie at the same time. That is just ridiculously dangerous.'

'If we've got the evidence and I think we've got the registration number here now, I'll get my officers to chase that down,' he told 6PR.



A woman whose own mother organised her rape has called for her mum's sentence to be extended as she is set to be released from prison this year.

Peta Butler was raped by an obese man in a hotel room in Toowoomba, east of Brisbane, in 2006 - a horrific case of abuse organised by her mother, Therese.

Twelve years on however, her abuser known only as 'Thommo' remains unidentified, and Therese's four-year sentence, which was suspended after 12 months, will be up.

Peta Butler (right, when she was about 15) was raped by an obese man in a hotel room in Toowoomba, in 2006 - a horrific case of abuse organised by her mother, Therese (left)

Twelve years on however, Peta's (pictured) abuser known only as 'Thommo' remains unidentified, and Therese will be released from prison in October

Ms Butler, now 27 and with children of her own, says she continues to fear for hers and her young family's life, and even more so with her mother's impending release.

Therese was found guilty of taking her daughter on a 'girl's weekend' to the regional town, plying her with alcoholic drinks and forcing her to have sex with a stranger.

She was finally charged in October 2016 after Peta, with the aid of police, recorded a phone call in which her mother admitted to committing the heinous crime.

A petition to the Attorney General has campaigned for Therese to stay behind bars, with her sentence being described as 'inadequate' for her crime.

Ms Butler pictured), now 27 and with children of her own, says she continues to fear for hers and her young family's life, and even more so with her mother's impending release

Therese Butler was jailed in January but is due to be released in October after serving 12 months of her four year sentence

'Australian children who are victims of pain, torture, neglect, malnutrition, emotionally or sexually abused or subject to violence for several minutes, hours or days should automatically have their abuser sentenced to murder charges,' the petition reads.

'These charges should be automatic when there is sufficient evidence to prosecute.

'No child should be left feeling their life was worthless. We need justice for every child.

'We are urging the Attorney-General to appeal this case as a matter of urgency and set a precedent to protect our children.'

Police have renewed an appeal to catch Peta's rapist, known only to officers as Thommo

Peta revealed sickening details of the night she was taken to be raped by 'Thommo' last month, recalling the obese man's scent and feeling of his stubble rubbing her.

She remembered wishing her mother, who was outside smoking a cigarette, would enter the room and save her.

'She knew what was happening. She might as well have murdered me on that day. She took me to that place and premeditated the whole thing. That's not a mother,' she told A Current Affair.

Therese hugged her daughter and told her everything was going to be okay, before forcing Peta to share the hotel room with her and Thommo that night.

The next morning, they were taken to the bus station in Thommo's car - a journey Peta recalls as completely silent.Canada's prime minister says Britain can negotiate an 'even better or larger' trade deal after Brexit.

Justin Trudeau said he would be happy to open talks with Britain 'the day after' Brexit next year and said he believed 'the best trade deals are the win-win trade deals'.

Speaking to the Times, he said the EU's free trade agreement with Canada should be seen as the starting point for negotiations with the UK.

He said: 'The rolled-over or specific Ceta arrangement between Canada and the UK is just the floor, or the first step.

Justin Trudeau (pictured) said he would be happy to open talks with Britain 'the day after' Brexit

'After that, we very much look forward to negotiating an even better or larger or more impactful deal to encourage the deepening of trade ties between Canada and the UK.

'Canada is firmly of the opinion that the best trade deals are the win-win trade deals.'

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta) free-trade agreement between Canada and the EU was signed in 2017.

Through the agreement, which took seven years to draft, Britain and Canada are able to import and export goods tariff-free.

The Canadian prime minister said the the EU's free trade agreement with Canada should be seen as the starting point for negotiations with the UK (pictured, Theresa May in Walsall on Wednesday)

But Mr Trudeau said parts of Ceta may not be beneficial to Britain after it has left the European Union, and the country could negotiate a better deal after March 2019.

Mr Trudeau has also said Ireland and Canada could cash in on Brexit by encouraging people to relocate.

Following talks with Irish leaders, he said: 'There are tremendous opportunities for countries like Canada and Ireland at a time where perhaps our significant allies and trading partners, in the case of the UK and US, are turning inward.'City officials in Los Angles want to help pay homeowners with extra space to put small accommodations in their backyards for homeless people.

Los Angeles county has been facing a growing homeless population, and there are currently nearly 58,000 people without living shelter.

Last month protests called 'Not in my backyard,' blocked new homeless housing in Temple City and delayed it in Boyle Heights.

The protests also killed a project in neighboring Orange County to relocate homeless people living on the streets into shelters.

But now, a project has been approved that will pay people in the county to put up basic homes or units in their backyard that homeless people can then rent at a low cost, the Los Angeles Times reported.

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A project has been approved that will pay people in the county to put up basic homes or units in their backyard that homeless people can then rent at a low cost, the Los Angeles Times reported. Pictured is a blueprint of a similar housing project in Seattle

Los Angeles county has been facing a growing homeless population, and there are currently nearly 58,000 people without living shelter

The first leg of the project was launched in August, 2017, when the board of supervisors approved a $550,000 pilot program.

The homes, referred to as 'granny flats' or 'in-law units', were either built in backyards or constructed out of converted garages on the properties of individuals who agreed to host a homeless person or family.

In February the second leg of the project got kick-started when Bloomberg Philanthropies awarded LA a $100,000 Mayor's Challenge grant.

The grant allows the city to study the feasibility of backyard units for homeless individuals within the city limits.

Tenants of these backyard homes would contribute 30 per cent of their incomes to pay rent, and the rest would be covered by low-income vouchers.

LA County is also sponsoring a design competition, streamlining building permits and providing technical aid and financing options for builders, the Times reported.

Officials are hoping these backyard options provide a fast and inexpensive way to house some of the most stable homeless individuals throughout the county.

The idea for the project came after state legislation in 2016 and 2017 eased local review rules.

The city and county are now experimenting with financing options, low cost-materials and designs to promote these units.

Voters in the city limits of Los Angeles agreed on a total sum tax of $1.2billion to pay for new homeless housing.

Local government could then pay $15,000 annually for three years for each granny flat, roughly the same price as a bed in a homeless shelter.

Units can cost up to $350,000 a piece, and are often built for disabled people.

The goal is currently to build 10,000 new apartments, but that will likely take years. In total, Los Angeles county could handle tens of thousands of homes in unincorporated areas if the project is ever expanded.

The dwellings will come equipped with plumbing and cooking facilities, and tenants will be screened ahead of time and receive social services such as case management, counseling and job training.

The homes, dubbed 'granny flats' or 'in-law' units could help cut down on the homeless epidemic in the county right now. The pilot program will pay between $50K and $75K to build a home in each yard. Pictured is one of the homes built during a similar housing project in Seattle

In total the goal is to eventually build 10,000 new apartments, but that could take a long time because each home is projected to cost roughly $350K. Previously homeless tenants will pay 30 percent of the rent, and the rest will be paid through the government and taxpayers Pictured is the inside of one of the homes as it is being built during a similar housing project in Seattle

And according to the Times, Los Angeles residents are intrigued.

About 100 of the 500 homeowners polled said they would be interested in having one of the granny flats in their backyard.

For the pilot apartment program the county will first narrow that pool down to 27 of the most qualified applicants, then pick six finalists from that number.

The pilot program will then lend homeowners $75,000 each to build a home, or $50,000 for a renovation of an existing project.

The homeowners will then have six months to complete the project in their backyards before a tenant moves in.

Additionally, loan principal will be reduced each year the unit is occupied by a formerly homeless person, and after 10 years will be completely forgiven.

At that time homeowners can do what they'd like with the structures.

Los Angeles is currently up for a $5million grant from Bloomberg, which would fund enough units for 1,750 homeless people in just three years.

Currently one prototype is being built in LA resident Tent Wolbe's backyard. It is being financed and sponsored by Mayor Eric Garcetti's Innovation Team.

Wolbe lives in Highland Park, a rapidly gentrifying part of Los Angeles.

'This is all about adding [housing] stock to a neighborhood that has gotten out of reach for everyone,' the 35-year-old told the Times.

Mayor Garcetti said the homes will ideally going to 'make our neighborhoods more affordable and help more Angelenos find stable places to live.

'That's why [backyard units] are attracting so much interest - they're a relatively low-cost way for homeowners to play a big part in expanding our city's housing stock, and make some extra money while they're at it.'

A similar pilot project has already been started in Multnomah County, Oregon - which includes Portland.

Officials there found that during the project, which is still underway, they ran into more problems than anticipated, including tax, liability and regulatory issues.

County Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury said she doesn't think the model will work on a large scale - but that officials aren't giving up and will look for alternative options.

A similar project was also tested in Seattle by Rex Holbein, a residential architect who founded Facing Homelessness - a spin off of the existing charity Seattle Block Project.

The charity produced these backyard homeless houses without public funds. If a placement doesn't work out the group will relocate the tenant or the house.Night owls - people who like to go to bed late and get up late - have a 10 per cent higher risk of dying than early birds, a study found.

Research based on 50,000 people in the UK found they had the higher chance of death over the six-and-a-half year period they were being studied.

It seems that living in a world geared to early risers damages the health of those who prefer moonlight.

And the switch to British Summer Time - pushing the clocks an hour forward in the Spring - makes things even worse for late risers, the scientists said.

Research based on 500,000 people found they had a higher chance of death over the six-and-a-half year period they were being studied

Kristen Knutson, associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine said: Night owls trying to live in a morning lark world may have health consequences for their bodies.

Previous studies have found that staying up late has bad effects on the heart and metabolism.

But night owls still had a 10 per cent higher risk of death after the effects of health were adjusted for.

Malcolm von Schantz, Professor of Chronobiology at the University of Surrey, said: This is a public health issue that can no longer be ignored.

We should discuss allowing evening types to start and finish work later, where practical.

And we need more research about how we can help evening types cope with the higher effort of keeping their body clock in synchrony with sun time.

Previous studies have found that staying up late has bad effects on the heart and metabolism

It could be that people who are up late have an internal biological clock that doesnt match their external environment.

It could be psychological stress, eating at the wrong time for their body, not exercising enough, not sleeping enough, being awake at night by yourself, maybe drug or alcohol use.

There are a whole variety of unhealthy behaviours related to being up late in the dark by yourself.

The researchers asked 433,268 participants, age 38 to 73 years, if they are a definite morning type a moderate morning type a moderate evening type or a definite evening type.

Deaths in the sample were tracked up to six and half years later - and then it was calculated what type of person was most likely to die.

Professor Knutson said that we are not doomed by our biology as even if we are a definite night owl or early bird, there are things that we can change to benefit our health, such as getting more flexibile working hours.

Deaths in the sample were tracked up to six and half years later - and then it was calculated what type of person was most likely to die

Professor Knutson said: If we can recognize these chronotypes are, in part, genetically determined and not just a character flaw, jobs and work hours could have more flexibility for owls.

They shouldnt be forced to get up for an 8am shift. Make work shifts match peoples chronotypes. Some people may be better suited to night shifts.

The researchers next project is to see if night owls are able to shift their body clocks to adapt to an earlier schedule - to see if there are improvements in blood pressure and overall heatlh.

The switch to daylight savings or summer time is already known to be much more difficult for evening types than for morning types.

Professor von Schantz said pushing the clocks forward in countries that adopt daylight saving time - such as British Summer Time - has negative health effects.

He said: There are already reports of higher incidence of heart attacks following the switch to summer time.

And we have to remember that even a small additional risk is multiplied by more than 1.3 billion people who experience this shift every year.

'I think we need to seriously consider whether the suggested benefits outweigh these risks.Eight police officers in Argentina have been sacked after they claimed that a half a ton of marijuana that disappeared from an evidence locker was eaten by mice.

An inspection of facility near the capital of Buenos Aires revealed how 540kg was missing from the 6,000kg that had been registered two years before.

Police commissioner Javier Specia was dragged before a judge alongside several subordinates, all of whom claimed that rodents were to blame for the missing drugs.

However experts throw doubt on the ability of mice eating their way through the unaccounted stash, as it would have killed the rodents and left behind corpses.

Eight police officers in Argentina have been sacked after they claimed that a half a ton of marijuana that disappeared from an evidence locker was eaten by mice (stock image)

The forensic specialists from Buenos Aires University also testified that mice could not possibly confuse the drugs for food, The Guardian reported.

Suspicion fell on Specia after he left the inventory for the marijuana unsigned before leaving his role in April 2017.

The missing stash was then noticed by his successor, commissioner Emilio Portero, who informed internal affairs.

The police officers are due to appear in court again on May 4, when a judge will rule on whether or not the marijuana was lost due to their 'expedience or negligence'.A Virginia school board has voted not to change names of some schools and mascots that recall the Confederacy, defying trends elsewhere.

Hanover County's school board voted 5-2 Tuesday night to preserve Lee-Davis High School and its Confederate mascot, as well as Stonewall Jackson Middle School and its Rebel mascot, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

More than 75 per cent of more than 13,000 people surveyed wanted no change in names.

State data shows 80 per cent of the student population at each school is white.

Support for keeping the names was overwhelming, according to a survey of 13,000 locals.

Hanover County's school board voted 5-2 Tuesday night to preserve Lee-Davis High School and its Confederate mascot, as well as Stonewall Jackson Middle School (seen above) and its Rebel mascot

State data shows 80 percent of the student population at each school is white. Lee-Davis High School is seen above

The Stonewall Jackson Rebels logo is seen in the above image. Jackson was a famous general for the Confederate army during the Civil War

The image on the left shows the logo of Lee-Davis High School. The image on the right shows another logo depicting the Lee-Davis flag

More than 80 per cent of parents and alumni from both schools said that the names should stay.

'In erasing and replacing the names of these mascots, you erase not simply US history, but Virginia history,' one survey respondent wrote.

Hanover's decision runs counter to that of Petersburg, another community near Richmond, which voted unanimously in February to change the name of three schools named for Confederate leaders.

The Richmond School Board recently declared its intent to change the name of a school named for a Confederate.

Last August, white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest that city's plans to remove statues of Lee. They are seen above near a statue of Thomas Jefferson on the campus of the University of Virginia

The Hanover vote was not much of a surprise since the heads of the school board had been declaring for weeks that they had no intention of changing the name.

A subsequent rally by white nationalists turned deadly when counter-protester Heather Heyer, 32, was killed by a car driven into a crowd

When the results of the vote were announced, many in the standing-room-only crowd erupted in applause.

The board is the only body that has legal authority to change the names of the schools and mascots.

The schools in the district commemorate Confederate heroes including Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson.

Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

Davis was the president of the Confederacy during the war.

Jackson was a famous general widely regarded as the second greatest military figure in the history of the Confederacy.

The hot-button issue of naming schools and other public monuments and buildings after famous Confederate figures has ignited a fierce political debate.

Liberals by and large support the removal of statues and the renaming of public places since the Confederacy is linked with slavery of blacks.

By contrast, conservatives say the Confederate figures are important parts of the history and culture of the Deep South.

Last August, white nationalists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest that city's plans to remove statues of Lee.

A few dozen white nationalists, led by so-called 'alt-right' activist Richard Spencer and carrying torches, gathered at Emancipation Park near a covered statue of Lee, the removal of which was blocked by a court pending the outcome of a legal challenge.

A subsequent rally by white nationalists turned deadly when counter-protester Heather Heyer, 32, was killed by a car driven into a crowd.

The Sydney Tower Skywalk is set to reopen on Thursday, one month after a woman plunged to her death at the famous attraction.

Full-body harnesses and extensive training will take place before the open-air walk to ensure last month's death is an isolated incident at the high-rise attraction.

A 21-year-old woman from Sydney's south fell 268m after she reportedly became agitated and threatened self-harm.

The Sydney Tower Skywalk is set to reopen on Thursday after a woman plunged to her death on March 8

Full-body harnesses and extensive training will take place before the open-air walk to ensure last month's death is an isolated incident at the high-rise attraction

The woman unclipped her belt and fell off the platform in front of a young girl as well as a elderly couple who were left 'frozen' in shock.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the new full-body harness is worn underneath the Skywalk body suit and is fitted over the shoulder of each guest.

'The belt is then safely clipped together by a Skywalk professional,' Sydney Tower Eye divisional director, Rob Smith said.

The woman unclipped her belt and fell off the platform in front of a young girl as well as a elderly couple who were left 'frozen' in shock

The restraint harness is 'to ensure peace of mind' for all staff and guests.

The company has undergone strict safety programs which involved daily safety checks of the equipment, all-staff training and 'comprehensive' schedules by a third party.

Visitors will still sign the declaration to say they will not unclip the harness while doing the 45-minute walk.

All staff who have been directly affected by the death have had on-going counselling since the death.

Police have handed over a brief about the death to the Coroner.

If you are in need of support please contact Lifeline Australia on 13 11 14 or BeyondBlue on 1300 224 636.A cold and windy spring night on the vast landscape of Devon Ice Cap where two subglacial lakes are lurking 750 meters below the surface.

Researchers from the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) have helped discover the first subglacial lakes ever found in the Canadian High Arctic.

The two new lakes are a potential habitat for microbial life and may assist scientists in the search for life beyond Earth. The findings, published in the April 13 edition of Science Advances, were made possible by airborne radar data acquired by UTIG and NASA and represent a new collaboration between Canada and the United States. Lead author Anja Rutishauser is a Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta who will join The University of Texas at Austin as a postdoctoral fellow when she finishes her degree.

While there are more than 400 known subglacial lakes in the world, concentrated primarily in Antarctica with a few in Greenland, these are the first found in the Canadian Arctic. And unlike all the others--which are believed to contain freshwater--these two appear to consist of extremely salty water. All subglacial lakes are good analogues for life beyond Earth, but the hypersaline nature of the Devon lakes makes them particularly tantalizing analogues for ice-covered moons in our solar system, researchers said.

In 2011, researchers from UTIG showed that Jupiter's icy moon Europa, likely contains hypersaline lakes of liquid water within an ice shell that floats atop of a global ocean. The new lakes observed in Canada are very similar to these potential lakes locked inside Europa's icy shell. An analysis of radar data, show that the lakes discovered in Canada are located beneath 550 to 750 meters of ice underneath the Devon Ice Cap, one of the largest ice caps in the Canadian Arctic. They are thought to be the first isolated hypersaline subglacial lakes in the world, having no contact with an outside environment for thousands of years.

"If there is microbial life in these lakes, it has likely been under the ice for at least 120,000 years, so it likely evolved in isolation," Rutishauser said. "If we can collect a sample of the water, we may determine whether microbial life exists, how it evolved, and how it continues to live in this cold environment with no connection to the atmosphere."

By evaluating the airborne survey data and, eventually, samples from the lake, scientists can better prepare for NASA's forthcoming Europa Clipper mission, which plans to deploy similar remote sensing techniques to characterize Europa's ice shell, said co-author Donald Blankenship, a UTIG senior research scientist. Blankenship is leading the development of the ice penetrating radar sounder for the Clipper mission, an instrument very similar to the one used to discover the Canadian lakes.

Researchers with Montana State University, Stanford University, and the Cambridge University Scott Polar Research Institute also worked on the project. In addition to Blankenship, UTIG researchers Jamin Greenbaum, Cyril Grima and Duncan Young worked on the study. UTIG is a research unit of the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. The same research team is currently planning a return to the Canadian Arctic in spring 2018 for additional data acquisition over the lake area and surrounding ice caps with support from Canada's W. Garfield Weston Foundation.

"It's amazing how the trilateral collaboration between Canadian, U.S. and UK universities to understand ice cap response to climate change evolved into a paradigm shift in our perspective on potential terrestrial analogs for extraterrestrial habitats," Blankenship said.

UTIG's data acquisition and processing were supported by NASA's Instrument Concepts for Europa Exploration Program, the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation and the National Science Foundation; additional data used in the research were acquired by NASA's Operation Icebridge Mission. Blankenship was supported by the Fulbright Scholar Program for data interpretation and synthesis activities. The project was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Alberta Innovates Technology Futures, the CRYSYS Program (Environment Canada), and the UK Natural Environment Research Council.



Please follow Astrobiology on Twitter.A senior Nomads motorcycle gang member has agreed to an apprehended violence order made against him by his former wife, the sister of controversial Sydney property developer Salim Mehajer.

Mouhmed Tajjour, the cousin of Sydney identity John Ibrahim, did not face any charges in relation to the 12-month AVO which was granted at Burwood Local Court on Thursday.

It's understood his ex-wife, Sanaa Mehajer, made the application against the 34-year-old this month after they separated in February following a few months of marriage.

Tajjour was pictured entering the Burwood Local Court on Thursday morning wearing jeans, a black t-shirt before leaving in a $400,000 Audi R8.

Former vice-president of the Nomads motorcycle gang, Moudi Tajjour, appeared at a Sydney court on Thursday and agreed to an apprehended violence order taken out on behalf of his ex-wife

Tajjour, the cousin of Sydney identity John Ibrahim, did not face any charges in relation to the 12-month AVO which was granted at Burwood Local Court on Thursday (pictured are Tajjour and Sanaa)

Tajjour was pictured entering the Burwood Local Court on Thursday morning wearing jeans, a black t-shirt before leaving in a $400,000 Audi R8 (pictured)

The AVO application could mark the undoing of the relationship between the Ibrahim and Mehajer families, The Australian has reported.

Sanna Mehajer and Tajjour's marriage was reported to have ended in February, with the pair trading insults on social media.

One comment, posted by Tajjour's account on one of Ms Mehajer's Instagram photos, read 'U f***ing slut' although Tajjour claimed he was hacked.

Tajjour later confirmed the couple had split in a series of live videos on social media, announcing that he was single.

It's understood his ex-wife, Sanaa Mehajer, made the application against the 34-year-old this month after they separated in February following a few months of marriage (Sanaa and Moudi pictured centre)

Sanna Mehajer and Tajjour's marriage was reported to have ended in February, with the pair trading insults on social media

Tajjour later confirmed the couple had split in a series of live videos on social media, announcing that he was single

Tajjour (pictured) is seen leaving Burwood Local Court on Thursday

The Mehajer-Tajjour wedding followed another wedding between the two families a month earlier.

Ms Mehajer's sister Aisha married Hassan 'Sam' Sayour, John Ibrahim's nephew, in mid-November despite a violent incident on the night before the wedding.

John Ibrahim's bodyguard and long-time friend was shot in the back just metres from Ibrahim's mother's suburban home where the wedding was due to take place.

Semi 'Tongan Sam' Ngata allegedly moved in front of the bride to protect her from the bullet.

The shot was described as 'particularly brazen' at the wedding which was attended by a large number of bikies, police and security.

Tajjour and Sanaa are pictured in the early days of their relationshipPeter Dutton has faced increased pressure to allow relatives of Australians dealing with racially charged attacks in South Africa into the country.

A fast-track plan to bring up to 10,000 South African farmers to Australia has been put to the Immigration Minister in a push to remove at-risk families from danger.

The call followed the South African Government's revelation it would be working to transfer farming land back into the hands of black citizens.

Peter Dutton (pictured) has received a letter calling on between 5000 and 10,000 South African farming families to be accepted into the country as part of a fast-track visa regime

Mr Dutton received a written letter requesting he overhauled existing visa rules and provide humanitarian assistance to families still living in South Africa.

Community spokesman, Arno Nel penned the letter, drawing attention to the matter of white South Africans having their land expropriated without compensation.

Mr Nel agreed with Mr Dutton's comments on the plight of farmers who claimed they were suffering targeted and brutal attacks at the hands of black citizens.

'The Australian government should be aware that many Australian citizens with South African heritage have families that are in constant danger,' the letter stated.

'We hope that Australia will extend the privilege of living in Australia to those families of Australian citizens who are facing this danger, by creating a family visa that is low-cost and not subject to age and other conditions.'

Mr Nel, whose parents were attacked in the northern city of Pretoria five years ago, called on the Government to 'fast-track the immigration of South African farmers to Australia on humanitarian and protection visa programs'.

White farmers control 73 percent of arable land compared with 85 percent when apartheid ended in 1994, according to a recent study. Pictured is South African farmer Piet Swanepoel

'We cannot be prescriptive to the Australian government about the type and measure of assistance that should be offered, and we understand that treatment should be fair,' it read.

'However, it is worth pointing out that South African families in Australia have shown self-sufficiency, low maintenance and remarkable integration.'

The letter came after the Government drew criticism from Labor and Greens MPs for contemplating putting an end to the non-discriminatory humanitarian visa regime.

Mr Nel highlighted the struggle of his own parents, who weren't farmers but were attacked in their own home and brutally tortured by intruders.

'These people came into their house. They brutally attacked my dad. They stripped him naked and put a pistol to his head and three times they pulled the trigger and three times the pistol misfired.

Mr Nel agreed with Mr Dutton's comments on the plight of farmers who claimed they were suffering targeted and brutal attacks

'They then tied them up on the floor with a telephone cord. He chewed through this cord eventually. He untied my mum. He couldn't get up because he was hit over his head with a metal pipe.'

A speaker read the poignant letter at Sunday's march to support South African farmers in Perth.

The campaign has gained the support of Liberal MPs, who urged the Australian Government to accept a special intake of between 5000 and 10,000 people.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last month said he wanted the issue of the transfer of land from white to black owners to be resolved 'once and for all'.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (pictured) last month said he wanted the issue of the transfer of land from white to black owners to be resolved 'once and for all'

Ramaphosa said after his inauguration in March he would speed up the transfer of land to black people, providing food production and security was preserved.

'We are going to address this and make sure that we come up with resolutions that resolve this once and for all,' he said.

'This original sin that was committed when our country was colonised must be resolved in a way that will take South Africa forward.'

White farmers control 73 percent of arable land compared with 85 percent, when the apartheid system ended in 1994.A top police officer in Western Australian has admitted that law enforcement can't track all sexual predators as they aren't equipped to.

The statement comes after a 55-year-old was able to move to regional Western Australia where he groomed two 12-year-old boys, raped them and filmed the horrific attacks.

Western Australian Police Deputy Commissioner Stephen Brown said there were more than 3500 sex offenders on police radar, according to West Australian.

A top police officer in Western Australian has admitted that law enforcement can't track all sexual predators as they aren't equipped to (stock image)

However police rely on the criminals to check in with them.

He said: 'We are not watching their every move. We are not able to and we are not legislated to, and we are not resourced to.

'We are not authorised to enter these peoples homes to check on the activities they are undertaking.'

The 55-year-old paedophile who sparked the look into sex offender surveillance raped and abused two young boys despite being deported from Canada for abusing his own stepson.

Relatives of the victims are outraged the man - who was jailed for just 11 years - was able to move to their community without being monitored.

Over 13,000 child exploitation images along with hundreds of videos were found during his arrest, which led to the exposure of a country-wide paedophile ring.

It comes after a 55-year-old man raped and abused two young boys despite being deported from overseas for abusing his own stepson (stock image)

'We'll go to our graves disgusted that a known child sex offender - who'd previously been jailed for three-and-a-half years for raping his own son - was seemingly left to his own devices within our community,' the father of one victim said.

'He groomed everyone, our family, his church, work colleagues, the local media and obviously whoever he had to report to within the police force,' he told The West Australian.

'We are not blaming the local police as they are not allowed to know who they are. But we remain dumbfounded and outraged by a system that allowed this man the freedom to prowl our community and abuse our son.'

The vile abuse, perpetrated over a 14-month period, left the man's son traumatised and suicidal.

The 55-year-old was able to move to regional Western Australia where he groomed two 12-year-old boys, raped them and filmed the horrific attacks (stock image)

As well as videoing and photographing himself rape the boys, the sick predator also shaved the pubic hair of one victim and kept it in a clipseal bag.

In sentencing on Monday Judge Laurie Levy of Busselton District Court questioned how the man was able to return to Australia and not be supervised.

The Adelaide-born man was supposed to have been made known to authorities by the Australian National Child Offender Register.

A friend he asked to join the abuse was also sentenced on Monday, to just four years behind bars.Recording high concentrations of air pollution around Buckingham Palace will come as little surprise.

But a study has found similarly dangerous levels near royal residences outside cities.

The grounds of Windsor Castle, where Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tie the knot next month, are likely to suffer from pollution, according to environmental campaigners.

Friends of the Earth said safe nitrogen dioxide limits were breached near seven royal residences, from Buckingham Palace to the Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

The grounds of Windsor Castle, where Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tie the knot next month, are likely to suffer from pollution

As Harry and Meghan are busy planning their big day, they may want to think about the air theyll be breathing around Windsor Castle, said Aaron Kiely of Friends of the Earth

Windsor, which is in Berkshire, last year exceeded the hourly limit for NO2, which is mainly produced by diesel cars, three times.

As Harry and Meghan are busy planning their big day, they may want to think about the air theyll be breathing around Windsor Castle, said Aaron Kiely of Friends of the Earth.

Windsor and Maidenhead recorded dangerously high levels of air pollution at times in 2017.

While the royals may enjoy an escape to the country in areas such as the Cotswolds and Norfolk, its difficult to escape the issue of air pollution.

'Many people see dirty air as an issue affecting only a few inner-city areas, but the truth is that most areas of the UK are seeing breaches of legal air pollution limits.

Marylebone Road, which has seen NO2 levels reach double the UK limit of 40 micrograms per cubic metre, is close to a number of royal residences.

Windsor, which is in Berkshire, last year exceeded the hourly limit for NO2, which is mainly produced by diesel cars, three times

In Edinburgh, NO2 hit 59 micrograms on Leith Street, less than a mile from the Palace of Holyrood (pictured), where the Queens granddaughter Zara Tindall married in 2011

Air monitoring organisation EarthSense says it is one of the most polluted streets in London.

But Sandringham, the estate where Meghan joined the Royal Family for the traditional Christmas gathering last year, may also have exceeded the limit, with 44.6 micrograms recorded ten miles away.

For Highgrove, Prince Charless Gloucestershire estate, a recording of 61.2 micrograms was taken 18 miles away at Birdlip.

Friends of the Earth said safe nitrogen dioxide limits were breached near seven royal residences, from Buckingham Palace (pictured) to the Sandringham estate in Norfolk

In Edinburgh, NO2 hit 59 micrograms on Leith Street, less than a mile from the Palace of Holyrood, where the Queens granddaughter Zara Tindall married in 2011.

Friends of the Earth is encouraging families to test the air where they live and campaign against air pollution.

Its measurements were taken within 20 miles of all the royal residences.A baby, likely under one-year-old, was found dead in a suitcase near train PATH train tracks in New Jersey on Wednesday.

The horrific discovery was made by PATH Train crews around 1.15pm in Jersey City.

The crews called law enforcement to handle the remains in the suitcase.

Hudson County prosecutors and Port Authority Police are investigating, the spokesman told ABC News.

The suitcase (pictured) was discovered around 1.15pm Wednesday by PATH Train crews

The suitcase with the baby inside was in an area that is inaccessible to pedestrians

Hudson County prosecutors and Port Authority are handing the case

The baby was found off a pedestrian walkway, but within a fenced off area of the PATH Train tracks in Jersey City

Shots from above the scene show the difficult-to-access location where the discovery was made, as it is near a pedestrian walkway but is in a fenced off area.

Not much is known about the baby at this time, and it is unclear how long the suitcase had been sitting near the tracks.

Jersey City is just a few miles away from lower Manhattan.

An autopsy will be conducted.A former Chinese diplomat who was granted a permanent protection visa in Australia has warned the country is 'turning red'.

Yonglin Chen, who risked his life to defect from the Chinese Consulate in Sydney in 2005, said Chinese government influence is growing stronger in Australia.

Mr Chen claims he was the target of a planned assassination attempt after his defection, and said if he is too vocal he and his family could be in danger again.

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A former Chinese diplomat (pictured) who was granted a permanent protection visa in Australia has warned the country is 'turning red'

Mr Chen (pictured in 2005) has claimed he was the target of a planned assassination attempt after his defection, and if he speaks out too much he and his family could be in danger again

'My child will live here, this is our new home, if Chinese influence is here we feel like we are still in China,' Mr Chen said in an interview with China Uncensored.

'This place is turning red, I don't want my child to be brainwashed as I was.

'Now we can see the Chinese propaganda here, and as you can see in the Sam Dastyari case, even the MPs speak for China.'

Mr Chen said China has never given up its Cold War mentality, and are biding their time until they can make an ideological attack on the West.

'My child will live here, this is our new home, if Chinese influence is here we feel like we are still in China,' Mr Chen (pictured in 2005) said

Yonglin Chen, who risked his life to defect from the Chinese Consulate in Sydney (pictured while being shut down ), said Chinese government influence is growing stronger in Australia

He described the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a cult which uses fascist aesthetics to hide the lies and brutality of an evil dictatorship.

'There are many way to silence dissident voices, one is to infiltrate Chinese community organisations via money,' he said.

'They also try to isolate the dissidents' voice, and Falun Gong, from 2001 to 2005 when I was in the Consulate, was the main target, to make the Chinese community resent the Falun Gong practitioners, and it's very effective.'

Mr Chen previously claimed diplomats were required to distribute anti-Falun Gong materials and denounce the group, and said they were less of a cult than the CCP.

Mr Chen previously claimed diplomats were required to distribute anti-Falun Gong materials and denounce the group, and said they were less of a cult than the CCP (pictured are Falun Gong protesters)

After his defection Mr Chen told ABC TV he was scared after being tipped off about a hit squad sent from China to kill him.

During the interview he said he believed it was a team from the Chinese Ministry of State Security - the country's intelligence and security agency.

Poll Are you concerned about Chinese government influence in Australia? Yes No I don't know Are you concerned about Chinese government influence in Australia? Yes 181 votes

No 9 votes

I don't know 8 votes Now share your opinion





His sources inside the Chinese government told him the team were given a mission to target him or his family, and may have been planning to kidnap him and take him back to China.

Mr Chen's comments come as an Australian professor said he faced attempts to have a book critical of the Chinese government pulled from publication.

Charles Sturt University Professor of Public Ethics Clive Hamilton claimed he was followed by Chinese government agents and put under surveillance.

In his book Silent Invasion: How China is Turning Australia into a Puppet State, Mr Hamilton warns Australians to 'wake up' to Chinese influence.

The Chinese Government was influencing 'all of Australia's major institutions, from politics to media, business and universities', he said.

No area of Australian society, politics or culture, is free from influence if there's an opportunity there. They'll infiltrate anything they can.'

Mr Chen (pictured, left, with China Uncensored's Chris Chappell) said China has never given up its Cold War mentality, and are biding their time until they can make an ideological attack the West

Mr Chen appeared alongside Dr Feng Chongyi, Associate Professor in China Studies at the University of Technology Sydney ,and Dr Kevin Carrico from the Department of International Studies at Macquarie University a recent panel discussion in Sydney.

The speakers at the forum, hosted by China Uncensored, discussed Chinese government 'inflitration' of Australia.

China Uncensored is run by New York-based New Tang Dynasty Television (NTD), which was founded in 2001 by Falun Gong practitioners as an independent Chinese-language news media outlet.

The Chinese Communist Party and Chinese embassies overseas have regularly exerted political pressure in efforts to have NTD blocked or shut down.

NTD's Youtube channels are blocked in China.A court has heard a former television executive grabbed his wife on the upper arms and shook her violently during an altercation at the couple's home, which lead to her taking out an AVO.

Rob Raschke, 52, then bombarded his wife Rachel with a series of text messages when he drove away from their Sydney home, on February 23.

The former executive editor at Sky News plead guilty in Central Local Court to the assault on his wife - blaming his high-pressure job and alcohol.

Television news executive Rob Raschke pleaded guilty to assaulting his wife Rachel at Alexandria, in Sydney's inner-city in February

He then bombarded her with a series of text messages calling her 'insane', a court heard

The former Sky News Australia executive editor Robert Raschke must not approach or be in the company of his wife Rachel (pictured) within 12 hours of drinking alcohol or taking illicit drugs

Text messages tendered in court showed Rashcke's tirade - calling his wife of seven years 'insane', and telling her to 'move out', The Australian reported.

'Move out'; 'You are mad'; 'You are insane'; 'I have cancelled every holiday I ever booked with you. You are insane,' the text messages read.

The string of text messages continued - with Raschke noting he had cancelled upcoming trips to Adelaide and Darwin, telling his wife he could not be seen in public with her.

After 2am Mrs Raschke messaged her husband back. She asked where he was.

'As far away as possible ... I want a divorce.'

'Leave me alone ... Stay away from me.'

The text messages show that Mrs Raschke asked if he remembered assaulting her, and explained he had left marks on her arm and described the events of the night as 'terrifying'.

But instead of answering the question her husband asked is she remembered screaming at him when he was asleep, and continued to call him 'insane'.

Rob Raschke is one of the most experienced news television producers in Australia

The text messages were tendered to court - Raschke was not sentenced as the court is waiting for a psychological report

The court also head Raschke has been attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings since the night of the assault.

His wife sat behind him during court.

Raschke resigned last month after consenting to an apprehended violence order in court which states he must not approach or be in the company of his wife for at least 12 hours after drinking alcohol or taking illicit drugs.

The apprehended violence order also states he must also not assault, threaten, stalk, harass or intimidate his wife or 'intentionally or recklessly destroy or damage any property that belongs to or is in the possession of Rachel Mary Raschke.'

The Raschkes, who live in Sydney's inner-city, married at her sister's home in Rose Bay overlooking the harbour in April 2011.

It was the second marriage for both and they honeymooned in Singapore and Thailand during a television non-ratings period.

'I promised her I'd only look at the BlackBerry once a day while on our honeymoon,' Raschke told the Courier-Mail at the time.

Raschke is also the subject of an apprehended violence order that states he must not approach his wife (both pictured) for at least 12 hours after drinking alcohol or taking illicit drugs

Raschke is one of the most experienced television news directors in the country and was executive producer at Sky News when the channel launched in 1996.

He worked for the Seven Network for almost 19 years, including three years as national director of news and 11 years as director of news in Brisbane.

As an ABC foreign correspondent in the early 1990s Raschke won a Walkley Award for his coverage of a township massacre in South Africa.



A full search and rescue operation is underway for a man feared to have been attacked by a crocodile while out crab fishing.

The 61-year-old Cairns man called his wife to tell her he was going to put out some crab pots in Portsmith before he came home but then never arrived.

Police officers have contracted a private helicopter to search the area,The Cairns Post has reported.

A 61-year-old man is feared to have been attacked by a crocodile after he failed to arrive home

It is understood the man finished work nearby on Wednesday afternoon and walked to the creek.

CCTV footage recorded him leaving work on his way towards the popular crabbing spot.

After he failed to return home the man's family and colleagues launched a small hunt for him through Chinaman Creek.

They searched through the dark but were unsuccessful.

His son, who is a keen fisherman, went out early again this morning.

Acting Senior Sergeant Gil Dyett said the man held a senior position with CSF Steel Fabricators and that the police were treating his disappearance as serious.

The man held a senior position with CSF Steel Fabricators (pictured) and his colleagues and family members searched for him when he failed to come home

'Last night there was a small search and then as a result of him not appearing last night, the matter has escalated and we've had to call in some other resources,' he said.

'We are treating the mater as serious, we've got resources coming in, and obviously with the terrain we have to factor in all possibilities and that will include involvement with crocodiles.'

He said that the police were not assuming that it was a crocodile attack and that they were keeping all avenues open.

Sergeant Dyett stressed that the operation remained a search and rescue as opposed to a recovery.

The man's car was found locked at his workplace on Walter St in Portsmith.Malcolm Turnbull was still struggling with the words to John Farnham's classic 'You're the Voice' as he fumbled over the lyrics for the second time in two days during an interview with 3AW radio.

After being filmed mumbling the lyrics at the Commonwealth Games surrounded by the Australian swim team on Tuesday, the Prime Minister was adamant he knew the lyrics despite being criticised on social media.

Mr Turnbull seemed prepared to recite the lines when interviewed by 3AW radio on Thursday morning, but when the moment came, he wriggled uncomfortably in his chair and they escaped him.

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Malcolm Turnbull (left) was still struggling with the words to John Farnham's classic You're the Voice as he fumbled over the lyrics for the second time during an interview with 3AW radio

Host Neil Mitchell asked Mr Turnbull whether he wanted another opportunity to demonstrate he did in fact know the lyrics to the iconic tune.

'There's a good line in there for the treasurer, time to erm, what was it? Time to er, um, cripes ... The bit about balancing the books,' the prime minister stumbled as he folded his arms, looking sheepish and uncomfortable.

'Not the bit about looking down the barrel of the gun?' Mitchell replied.

'Erm, no. No, look. Sons and daughters? There's a good line in there for the treasurer,' Mr Turnbull fumbled.

Host Neil Mitchell (right) asked Mr Turnbull (left) whether he wanted another opportunity to demonstrate he did in fact know the lyrics to the iconic tune

'There's a good line in there for the treasurer, time to erm, what was it? Time to er, um, cripes ... The bit about balancing the books,' the prime minister stumbled as he folded his arms, looking sheepish and uncomfortable (pictured)

After a few attempts, Mr Turnbull never managed to remember the actual line.

Earlier in the week, Mr Turnbull said it would have been the worst thing to inflict his singing on the beautiful and talented young people around him.

But he did eventually speak the words: 'You're the voice try and understand it, make a noise and make it clear'.

'We're all someone's daughter, we're all someone's son. How long can we look at each other down the barrel of a gun?' were the words prime minister Turnbull was searching for.A bumbling drug mule who told customs to check his luggage has been ridiculed by a judge after being caught with five kilograms of illegal drugs at Sydney Airport.

Van No Le, 59, ticked that he had food in his luggage on his customs declaration as he arrived back in Australia on February 27 following a trip to Vietnam.

Customs officers subsequently searched his bags and found 5.4 kilograms of pseudoephedrine concealed in 13 food packages.

A bumbling drug mule who told customs to check his luggage has been caught with five kilograms of illegal drugs at Sydney Airport (stock picture)

According to SMH, in his sentencing remarks Judge Berman made note of the man's baffling tactic saying that, 'His bag was searched, as it was always going to be once he had ticked 'Yes' to the appropriate question.'

The man pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years jail with a non-parole period of 2.5 years for importing a commercial quantity of pseudoephedrine.

During proceedings it was established Mr Le had developed a gambling problem, which led to him owing tens of thousands of dollars, following two divorces and a workplace injury.

It was due to this debt that Mr Le accepted the offer to act as a courier in importing the drug.

'I have little trouble accepting that an unemployed man on Centrelink, with a gambling addiction, is easy prey for more serious criminals who need to find drug couriers,' said Judge Berman.Following her conversation with Stu, Donna goes to Harvey's office. She's upset, and rightfully so. Harvey maintains his position and reminds Donna that she is the reason they are in this situation in the first place. (She kissed him, after all.)

We shift to Paula, who is at her office. There is a knock at the door. It's ... Donna! The plot thickens, as they say. Donna talks about how much the COO job at the law firm means to her and that it's what she worked so hard for all these years. She tried to level with Paula as a professional woman. At first, Paula seems to be warming to changing her mind until she asks Donna if she can promise that (the kiss) won't happen again. Donna hesitates, and that's all Paula needs to maintain her view that for her relationship to work with Harvey, Donna must go.

Fast forward and Harvey returns to his office. There is a letter on his desk from Donna. She is resigning, effective immediately. He's clearly bothered by this development. As Donna is heard reading the letter, we see her leaving the building and entering a cab. Harvey is well behind her. He leaves the building, too, and hails a cab.

Harvey's destination: Paula's house. He is there waiting when she arrives home. He decides to end their relationship. He wishes her well, they hug and he leaves.A Victorian MP has called for Australia to reintroduce capital punishment so drug dealers are executed.

Bernie Finn, a upper house state Liberal politician, said 'we need to go in really, really hard' in the fight against illicit drugs.

'I believe we should reintroduce the capital punishment for drug lords, people who are sitting up there in their mansions making hundreds of millions of dollars from other people's misery,' he told Sky News on Wednesday night.

A Victorian MP has called for Australia to reintroduce capital punishment so drug dealers are executed (Indonesian firing squad pictured)

'They should be disqualified from breathing the same oxygen that we do.'

Sky News host Peta Credlin, who was former prime minister Tony Abbott's chief-of-staff, described it as a 'very big call'.

'There would be a significant element in the community that would support a tough line on these perpetrators,' she said.

Mr Finn, a shadow assistant minister who is based at Ballarat in western Victoria, said two or three executions would see the leaders of drug syndicates 'get the message'.

Bernie Finn, a upper house state Liberal politician, said 'we need to go in really, really hard' in the fight against illicit drugs

Australia hasn't carried out the death penalty since February 1967, when Ronald Ryan was hanged at Melbourne's old Pentridge jail for shooting dead a prison warden

Australia hasn't carried out the death penalty since February 1967, when Ronald Ryan was hanged at Melbourne's old Pentridge jail for shooting dead a prison warden.

Since then, both sides of Australian politics have taken a stand against the death penalty, as Australian drug smugglers have been executed in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.

Bali Nine ring leaders Myuran Sukamaran, 34, and Andrew Chan, 31, were both executed by firing squad on the Indonesia prison island of Nusakambangan in April 2015 for conspiring to bring heroin from Indonesia to Australia a decade earlier.

Federal parliament passed laws in 2010 preventing any state or territory from reintroducing the death penalty.

All states had abolished capital punishment by 1985, with Queensland the first in 1922.A 24-year-old woman gave her newborn baby up for adoption to the woman she met while on a Delta airlines flight to North Carolina just weeks prior.

Samantha Snipes had been eight months pregnant when she booked a flight from Atlanta to Raleigh so that she could escape an unhealthy relationship with her baby's father in 2016.

'I'm still in disbelief when I tell the story, or when I think about it,' said Temple Phipps to WRAL, a woman who was sitting on the plane when the pregnant Snipes took her standby seat next to her.

Samantha Snipes (right) plays with Vaughn (center) and Temple Phipps (left). She was eight months pregnant when she took the last standby seat available on a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Raleigh in 2016

Sitting next to Phipps (right), Snipes (left) shared that she was getting away from an unhealthy relationship with the baby's father

Snipes shared with the Clayton, North Carolina, woman that she planned to either put the baby up for adoption or give him to a family member.

'Through the course of discussion, she shared that she was concerned about what she was going to do,' Phipps added.

The 42-year-old gave her cell number to Snipes in case she could offer her help while she was in Raleigh.

Three days later and three weeks premature, Snipes gave birth to a baby boy.

Three days later and three weeks premature, Snipes gave birth to a baby boy that would eventually be named Vaughn

Once she saw the baby, Phipps knew she needed to be his mother and found herself shaking nonstop when Snipes told her that she agreed

'I ended up calling (Phipps) nervous and scared,' Snipes explained.

'She said, "It's Samantha from the plane,"' Phipps added. 'I said, "Is everything OK?" and she said, "I'm still in Raleigh. I had the baby. Do you want to come see us?"'

Phipps rushed to the hospital, speaking with her mother about the newborn.

But once she saw the baby, Phipps knew she needed to be his mother and found herself shaking nonstop when Snipes told her that she agreed.

Vaughn Preston Phipps was adopted in August 2017

His biological mother moved to North Carolina to help raise him

'He looks so happy. She looks so happy. What do I want to do?' Snipes said of the difficult decision to give her baby to Phipps. 'It's really scary, but it's the best thing I could have done in my life.'

Vaughn Preston Phipps was adopted in August 2017. His biological mother moved to North Carolina to help raise him.

'I had been married, but have been single for quite a while now and always wanted children... but my parents are divorced, and I was very cautious about how I wanted to have a family and with whom,' said Phipps. 'For a variety of reasons, it just never happened for me.'

The duo may write a book about their destined meeting.

In Raleigh, Snipes started a photography business and often takes photos of Vaughn with Phipps.

'We're chosen family for sure,' said the adoptive mother.A dance class at a Sydney upper-north shore school was interrupted by a man masturbating outside.

The class, which was taking place at Normanhurst Public school, was interrupted on Monday around 7.30pm when the man stood behind the teacher outside the window, according to the Daily Telegraph.

It was a class for 13 to 17-year-old girls.

The class, which was at Normanhurst Public School (pictured), was interrupted by a man in his 40s

Police said the man is described as being around 1.75m tall with grey hair.

He is also described as being thin, unshaven and in his 40s.

He was wearing a red T-shirt, a blue cap and blue jeans.

The man allegedly had his pants around his ankles while the class practiced their moves.

One of the girls noticed a man behind the teacher and informed them.

When the teacher turned around and shouted at the man he did not stop what he was doing.

The teacher then banged on the window and the man proceeded to run away on Normanhurst Avenue, where the police searched for him

Police believe this is not the first time the man has done this after a similar incident in October 2017.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted NSW Police and Department of Education for comment.Galmorous: Asher Ruth de Rouffignac

A former bikini model pleaded guilty to trafficking 17 grams of methamphetamine in one month and is facing 28 days behind bars.

Asher Ruth de Rouffignac admitted to supplying a large amount of meth and possessing drugs when the 29-year-old appeared in the NT Supreme Court in Darwin on Wednesday.

The mother-of-one was arrested in August by detectives on a stake-out, according to NT News.

De Rouffignac tried to shove a bag of methamphetamines down her pants as officers approached her.

The court heard the 29-year-old was identified by police after they recorded her discussing drug deals to a friend, whose phone has been tapped by police.

De Rouffignac is facing a mandatory 28 days in jail, but will be formally sentenced later in the month.

The 29-year-old's lawyer, Catherine Voumard, told the court de Rouffignac first tried methamphetamine when she was just 14 years old and had been to rehab twice.

Crown Prosecutor Rebecca Everitt said de Rouffignac has been in and out of court on drug charges since 2008.

'In those 11 years she has been involved in a series of further offences involving the supply of dangerous drugs,' she said, according to the publication.

Asher Ruth de Rouffignac (pictured), a former bikini model from the Northern Territory, pleaded guilty to trafficking 17 grams of methamphetamine in one month on Wednesday

De Rouffignac once modelled for the Sunday Territorian.

In 2011, she told the publication of her dream to travel. 'There's an endless list of places I want to see,' she said.

'Now I'm getting older I've got to grab the bull by the horns.'The airline which made headlines for flying Schapelle Corby (pictured) home after she was released from prison is offering cheap flights to Bali

The airline which made headlines for flying Schapelle Corby home after she was released from prison is offering cheap flights to Bali.

Malindo Air is launching a new daily service flying between Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport and Bali's Denpasar.

The new service is set to start on June 8, and the Malaysian carrier will be offering cheaper flights from Melbourne to Bali's capital than any other airline.

Malindo's direct return flights between the two cities start at $530, according to Skyscanner data.

That deal beats Indonesian carrier Garuda's $624, Jetstar's $695, and Qantas' $735 deals.

Malindo, which is not a budget airline, shot to prominence when it flew Australia's highest profile convicted drug smuggler home in June 2017.

'It [flying Corby from Bali to Australia] has been nothing short of PR gold for the full-service airline,' Luxury Escapes general manager Blake Hutchison told Escape.

'The secret is out that theres another flight option to consider when travelling to Bali.'

Malindo is an Indonesian owned airline with headquarters in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia, and the name is a combination of the names of the two countries.

Malindo Air is launching a new daily service flying between Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport and Bali's Denpasar (stock image)A string of 'misunderstandings' have put strain on Australia's relationship with China amid a tough crack down on foreign interference policies.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull revealed there was 'certainly some tension' between Canberra and Beijing in the wake of Australian legislation being 'mischaracterised' on Chinese media.

His comments followed Australia being described as becoming an 'anti-China pioneer' on state owned media in the East Asian nation.

Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull (pictured) revealed there was 'certainly some tension' between Canberra and Beijing amid a tough crack down on foreign interference policies

Mr Turnbull was this week forced to confront mounting concern Beijing want to establish a military base on nearby Vanuatu, just 1,750km from Australia

'There clearly had been some misunderstandings and mischaracterisations of our foreign interference legislation in some of the Chinese media,' Mr Turnbull said.

Tensions were believed to have arisen following tougher laws on espionage and overseas donations being introduced to parliament.

'There has been a degree of tension in the relationship that has arisen because of criticism in China of our foreign interference laws.'

'But it is very important that the Australian Government that only Australians are influencing our political processes and where foreigners seek to influence they do so openly and transparently'.

Chinese Ambassador, Cheng Jingye, accused Chinese media of trying to stir up 'China Panic' - fueling tensions with Australia in the process.

Mr Turnbull believed Australia's foreign policies had been misrepresented on Chinese state owned media (President Xi Jinping pictured at Boao Forum for Asian Annual Conference)

Major changes to Australia's political donations and foreign interference laws were made after strong links between big political donors and the Chinese Communist Party were revealed.

Mr Turnbull was this week forced to confront mounting concern Beijing want to establish a military base on nearby Vanuatu.

He described the potential defence presence on the Pacific Island nation as being of 'great concern' to regional stability.

Vanuatu's Foreign Minister Ralph Regenvanu quashed reports it planned to allow a foreign military base to be established on its shores.

Chinese Ambassador, Cheng Jingye (pictured), accused Chinese media of trying to stir up 'China Panic' - fueling tensions with Australia in the process

'We are a non-aligned country. We are not interested in militarisation, we are just not interested in any sort of military base in our country,' Mr Regenvanu told ABC News.

America was looking into China approaching Vanuatu in relation to the base, according to a State Department spokeswoman.

'We are aware of media reports that China has approached Vanuatu about eventually establishing a permanent military presence,' she said Wednesday.

'We are seeking to determine the credibility of the reports.'A 21-year-old woman allegedly caught high-range drink driving in a school zone has been ordered to do a traffic offenders program while on bail.

Claire Riordan allegedly had a blood alcohol reading of 0.158 - more than three times the legal limit - when she was stopped by police on Anzac Parade on Friday, March 2.

As parents dropped off children to St Spyridon High School at Maroubra, in Sydney's east, Riordan allegedly crashed her Holden Cruze into the back of a woman's car.

Claire Riordan (pictured) allegedly had a blood alcohol reading of 0.158, more than three times the legal limit, when she was stopped by police driving through a school zone on Friday, March 2

During a brief hearing in Waverley Local Court on Wednesday, the university student (pictured) had her bail continued and was ordered to participate in a Traffic Offenders Program

During a brief hearing in Waverley Local Court on Wednesday, the university student had her bail continued and was ordered to participate in a Traffic Offenders Program.

Court documents state that as Riordan drove past St Spyridon's at 8.35am, peak school drop-off time, she allegedly ran into the rear of a Hyundai Tucson.

She and the driver of the other vehicle both suffered minor injuries in the alleged accident.

Riordan was charged with high-range drink driving and in Waverley Local Court this week was ordered to undergo a traffic offenders program

Riordan, a bartender at the popular Bondi Hotel, was arrested and taken to Maroubra Police Station where she was breath tested and allegedly returned a reading of 0.158

Riordan, a bartender at the popular Bondi Hotel, was arrested and taken to Maroubra Police Station where she was breath tested.

After allegedly returning the high-range reading her licence was suspended on the spot. It was her first drink driving offence.

Riordan had her bailed continued on Wednesday and will reappear in court on May 2.Margaret Atwood, 78, explained that after 9/11, a Danish opera that was based on The Handmaid's Tale had to cut out a scene blowing up the Twin Towers

Margaret Atwood, author behind The Handmaid's Tale, believes Star Wars' influential prowess was responsible for 9/11.

The 78-year-old novelist was featured in Variety on Tuesday, where she spoke about a Danish opera that was based on her novel and set in the dystopian future.

The opera, which premiered in 2000, had to have a reel changed that featured the Twin Towers being blown up 'because it was no longer in the future.'

But Atwood was quick to point out that the the idea for blowing up the New York landmarks did not come from her books.

'They didn't get that idea from my opera, don't worry,' Atwood explained, referencing al-Qaeda. 'They got the idea from Star Wars.'

She continued: 'Remember the first [movie]? Two guys fly a plane in the middle of something and blow that up?

She was quick to discern that the actual attack on 9/11 was not in reference to anything from her book, but actually Star Wars

'They didn't get that idea from my opera, don't worry,' Atwood explained, referencing al-Qaeda and the attack on the Twin Towers (pictured). 'They got the idea from Star Wars'

'The only difference is, in Star Wars, they get away. Right after 9/11, they hired a bunch of Hollywood screenwriters to tell them how the story might go next.

'Sci-fi writers are very good at this stuff, anticipating future events. They don't all come true, but there are interesting "what if" scenarios.'

While the exact reference is unclear, it is speculated that Atwood is referencing when in A New Hope the rebels fire on the Death Star.

While the exact reference is unclear, it is speculated that Atwood is referencing when in A New Hope the rebels fire on the Death Star

But that still didn't stop fans from voicing their confusion and disgust with the assertion.

'Some things flew and some things exploded in Star Wars, just like on 9/11. Open your eyes!' - Margaret Atwood,' said one user in a thread ranting about the comparison.

Ken Parker added: 'This makes me almost positive that Margaret Atwood has never seen Star Wars.'

The sentiment was shared by another who said: 'Also in Margaret Atwood's version of Star Wars, Darth Vader is a tragic figure, unfairly maligned by the Rebellion for "dubious" claims of impropriety made by Princess Leia after he blew up her planet.'

The second season of The Handmaid's Tale will premiere on April 26.

'Some things flew and some things exploded in Star Wars, just like on 9/11. Open your eyes!' - Margaret Atwood,' said one user

Ken Parker added: 'This makes me almost positive that Margaret Atwood has never seen "Star Wars"'The marriage between a former senior Nomads motorcycle gang member and the younger sister of bankrupt former mayor Salim Mehajer crumbled during the couple's honeymoon in Thailand, court documents have revealed.

Mouhmed Tajjour, the cousin of Sydney identity John Ibrahim, and his ex-wife, Sanaa Mehajer, married in December, one month after meeting for the first time and just 48 hours after becoming engaged.

But the whirlwind romance came to a crashing end when the 34-year-old allegedly became aggressive with the 22-year-old while holidaying overseas in January, according to court documents obtained by the Daily Telegraph.

The marriage between former senior Nomads member Mouhmed Tajjour and Sanaa Mehajer, the sister of Salim Mehajer, crumbled during their honeymoon in Thailand, court documents say (Sanaa and Moudi pictured centre)

Tajjour, the cousin of Sydney identity John Ibrahim, and his ex-wife (pictured), married in December, one month after meeting for the first time and just 48 hours after becoming engaged

Tajjour appeared in court on Thursday (pictured) and agreed to an apprehended violence order made against him by his former wife

Documents presented to the Burwood Local Court on Thursday outlined the alleged altercation.

Tajjour appeared in court and agreed to an apprehended violence order made against him by his former wife. He does not face any charges in relation to the 12-month AVO nor has he admitted any of the matters against him.

Mehajer moved out of the couple's hotel room and eventually left the Thailand without her new husband, the documents said.

Court documents state that Tajjour allegedly sent her abusive messages calling her a 'rat' and a 's***'.

The couple's whirlwind romance came to a crashing end when the 34-year-old allegedly became aggressive with the 22-year-old while holidaying overseas in January, according to court documents (pictured together)

Mehajer (pictured) moved out of the couple's hotel room and eventually left the Thailand without her new husband, the documents said

Tajjour does not face any charges in relation to the 12-month AVO (pictured are Tajjour and Sanaa)

The couple reunited once they reached Sydney but the relationship fell apart again and Mehajer moved back into her parents home, where Tajjour allegedly confronted her father weeks later, asking him 'do you want me to shoot her?' documents said.

Following the split, the pair trading insults on social media.

One comment, posted by Tajjour's account on one of Ms Mehajer's Instagram photos, read 'U f***ing slut' although Tajjour claimed he was hacked.

Tajjour later confirmed the couple had parted in a series of live videos on social media, announcing that he was single.

It's understood Mehajer made the AVO application against the 34-year-old this month after they separated in February.

The AVO application could mark the undoing of the relationship between the Ibrahim and Mehajer families, The Australian has reported.

The court order prohibits Tajjour from contacting Mehajer or from coming within 100metres of her parent's home. He's also not allowed to go to her university campus.



The court order prohibits Tajjour (pictured) from contacting Mehajer or from coming within 100metres of her parent's home

Tajjjour is also not allowed to go to Mehajer's (pictured) university campus

Tajjour was pictured leaving court in a $400,000 Audi R8 (pictured)

The Mehajer-Tajjour wedding followed another wedding between the two families a month earlier.

Ms Mehajer's sister Aisha married Hassan 'Sam' Sayour, John Ibrahim's nephew, in mid-November despite a violent incident on the night before the wedding.

John Ibrahim's bodyguard and long-time friend was shot in the back just metres from Ibrahim's mother's suburban home where the wedding was due to take place.

Semi 'Tongan Sam' Ngata allegedly moved in front of the bride to protect her from the bullet.

The shot was described as 'particularly brazen' at the wedding which was attended by a large number of bikies, police and security.Stephen Bannon is allegedly pitching a plan to the White House aimed at crippling Robert Mueller's Russia probe and protecting Donald Trump, it has been revealed.

Bannon has been meeting with aides to discuss Mueller's Special Counsel, which sent shockwaves through the West Wing after raiding the home and offices of Trump's longtime lawyer.

Sources say Bannon first wants Trump to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, according to the Washington Post.

Rosenstein signed off on the warrant to raid Michael Cohen's offices and home, a decision that has enraged the president this week.

Stephen Bannon is allegedly pitching a plan to the White House aimed at crippling Robert Mueller's Russia probe and protecting Donald Trump, it has been revealed

Bannon has been meeting with aides to discuss Mueller's Special Counsel, which sent shockwaves through the West Wing after raiding the home and offices of Trump's longtime lawyer

Bannon also wants aides to encourage Trump to stop cooperating with Mueller's counsel by providing information and allowing staff to sit for interviews.

The former White House chief strategist believes that Trump should assert executive privilege and argue that Mueller's past interviews with his officials are 'null and void'.

'It was a strategic mistake to turn over everything without due process, and executive privilege should be exerted immediately and retroactively,' he told the Post.

Trump has spent much of the last week lashing out at Mueller and his counsel, but it remains unclear if he'd take the advice of Bannon - who he once claimed had 'lost his mind'.

Sources say Bannon first wants Trump to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (pictured)

'If you say his name in front of the president, it's not a pretty sight,' a senior administration official said of Bannon.

'The president really goes off about him.'

Meanwhile, Trump's longtime friend Roger Stone is urging the president to hold off on firing Mueller - although he also believes both Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions needs to go.

'I actually think from a political point of view that the termination of Mr Mueller would probably give the Democrats the firestorm they're looking for,' he told ABC News.

'I'm not recommending the firing of Mr Mueller, but I am recommending a housecleaning at his Justice Department.'

But Trump has also reserved plenty of fury for Mueller and Rosenstein, calling the Russia investigation 'fake and corrupt' in a recent tweet.

The president has also claimed the investigation was headed up by 'Democratic loyalists', despite the fact that many on the counsel are Republican and were appointed personally by him - including Rosenstein.

Trump's anger at Mueller comes after FBI raided Cohen's Rockefeller Center office and a hotel he was staying in.

Cohen paid porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 not to tell her story about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in the press prior to the election.

Bannon also wants aides to encourage Trump to stop cooperating with Mueller's counsel by providing information and allowing staff to sit for interviews

Trump directed his ire right at Mueller, claiming he's the 'most conflicted of all' the senior leaders in the law enforcement division aside from Rosenstein

He says he was not repaid by the president, and Trump told reporters last week he didn't know about the payoff until it was reported in the press.

At a meeting on Monday with military leaders, Trump unloaded on the Department of Justice, special counsel investigators and everyone he felt had treated him unfairly as he commented for the first time on the raid on Cohen.

The president said it was an 'absolute disgrace' and a 'sad situation' after he was asked why he doesn't just fire Mueller if he's unhappy with him.

'Many people have said, 'You should fire him.' Again, they found nothing. And in finding nothing, that's a big statement,' he said, referring to allegations that his campaign colluded with the Russians.

Trump also ripped into Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general he not only appointed but whose advice he relied on to fire former FBI Director James Comey.

Rosenstein signed a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page - an act that the president says was an abuse of power.

'I think it's disgraceful, and so does a lot of other people,' Trump said. 'This is a pure and simple witch hunt.'

At the White House press briefing on Wednesday, Sarah Sanders said that the special counsel investigation and the 'constant focus' that's been on the president's campaign has hurt the United States's relationship with Russia.

She acknowledged that election meddling and other bad actions by Russia had also been unhelpful while backing up the president's claim that Mueller's probe had also played a big part in it.

Trump is angry at Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general he not only appointed but who advice he relied on to fire former FBI Director James Comey, because he approved a FISA warrant to spy on his one-time adviser Carter Page

'This investigation started off as Russia collusion, of which there was none. It has been very clear that nothing has come up over the last year, and the President has spoken at length on this topic,' she at one point said.

The probe actually began because of an intelligence community claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Allegations of a conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign came later.

Trump's claim today that Mueller has overwhelming conflicts of interest hinges on his alleged friendship with Comey.

Mueller was the head of the FBI when Comey was the deputy attorney general under Republican President George W. Bush.

'He's one of the finest people I've ever met,' Comey once said in Senate testimony of Mueller.

Trump's dripping disdain for Comey, who he fired last year in May amid charges that he botched the Hillary Clinton email investigation, have carried over to Mueller.

The president claimed last month that Mueller's investigators consisted of '13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans.'

Politifact rated his claim half-true after it determined that 12 of the 17 people on Mueller's staffer were registered Democrats and another one had claimed to be in a 2012 interview.

Mueller himself was registered at the time as a Republican in Washington, D.C.Hawkins also mentioned Cuomo's push for tuition-free public colleges  another Green position. Even though it didn't go as far as they would've liked, he said Cuomo "moved that way."

"The more votes we get, the more he's gotta move to compete with those votes," Hawkins said.

Cuomo, who is seeking a third term, is facing a serious primary challenge from the left. Cynthia Nixon, a longtime activist and actress, is vying for the Democratic nomination. She has the support of progressive organizations, including Citizen Action of New York and New York Communities for Change.

Republicans, who believe Cuomo is vulnerable, have three candidates of their own. The front-runner for the nomination is Marc Molinaro, a two-term Dutchess County executive and former state assemblyman. Syracuse-area state Sen. John DeFrancisco is also in the race.

Hawkins acknowledged Nixon's effort, especially on raising the issue of education inequality in New York. She has highlighted the funding challenges facing many school districts, but Hawkins believes the problems extend beyond state aid. He wants to eliminate high-stakes testing, which he said the state uses to justify closing public schools and shifting to charter schools.Advertisement

The first images have emerged of National Guard members patrolling along the US-Mexico border following a call from the president to send troops.

The pictures, taken Wednesday, come after several border states pledged to send active National Guard members to help patrol the border.

The Republican governors of three southwestern border states on Monday committed 1,600 National Guard members to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas all made pledges that add up to almost half of the up to 4,000 troops Trump requested. Some Guard members started arriving at the border as states and the federal government officials continued to discuss what they will do.

Meanwhile on Wednesday, California Gov. Jerry Brown accepted Trump's call to send their National Guard to the Mexican border, but rejected the White House's portrait of a burgeoning border crisis and insisted that his troops will have nothing to do with immigration enforcement.

A National Guard troop watches over Rio Grande River on the border in Roma, Texas on Wednesday. The deployment of National Guard members to the U.S.-Mexico border at President Donald Trump's request was underway Tuesday with a gradual ramp-up of troops under orders to help curb illegal immigration

A soldier from the Texas Army National Guard keeps watch on the banks of the Rio Grande on Wednesday in Roma, Texas sits inside of a tank

Soldiers from the Texas Army National Guard keep watch on the banks of the Rio Grande, where some of them will be armed where necessary (pictured Wednesday)

The Democratic governor broke a week of silence Wednesday by agreeing to contribute 400 troops, though not all will be on the border.

Brown's commitment brought pledges from the four states that border Mexico just shy of the low end of the president's target to marshal 2,000 to 4,000 troops.

Brown cast his decision as a welcome infusion of federal support to fight transnational criminal gangs and drug and firearms smugglers.

'Combating these criminal threats are priorities for all Americans - Republicans and Democrats,' Brown wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Brown has repeatedly fought with Trump over immigration policy. Under the federal law Trump invoked in his proclamation calling for National Guard troops, governors who send troops retain command and control over their state's Guard members and the U.S. government picks up the cost.

Trump said last week he wants to send the National Guard members to the border, issuing a proclamation citing 'the lawlessness that continues at our southern border.'

'My administration has no choice but to act,' he wrote.

Administration officials have said that rising numbers of people being caught at the southern border, while in line with seasonal trends in recent years, require an immediate response.

Apprehensions are still well below their historical trends during the terms of former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, both of whom also deployed the Guard to the border.

In Mexico City, a caravan of Central American migrants that had been heading north stopped in the Mexican capital. The caravan had sparked furious criticism from Trump, followed days later by his National Guard border protection deployment plan. Organizers said they never intended to go to the U.S. border.

Mexico's foreign relations secretary said his government is evaluating its cooperation with the United States.

Luis Videgaray said in a Monday interview with local media that he will give results of the analysis to President Enrique Pena Nieto in coming weeks.

The country's Senate passed a resolution last week saying Mexico should suspend cooperation with the U.S. on illegal immigration and drug trafficking in retaliation for Trump's move.

Trump has called for a gradual ramp-up of troops to help curb the flow of illegal immigration (pictured April 10)

The deployment of National Guard members to the US-Mexico border was spurred by President Trump last week, as Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and California have pledged troops

Members of the Texas National Guard watch the Mexico-U.S. border from an outpost along the Rio Grande in Roma, Texas

A member of the Texas National Guard keeps a watchful eye on the US-Mexico border Wednesday using binoculars as members are now deployed, and more waves are expected

Members of the Texas National Guard watch the Mexico-U.S. border from an outpost along the Rio Grande in Roma, Texas

But Videgaray said 'no decision has been taken to reduce or suspend any mechanism or cooperation.'

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey told a group of soldiers preparing to deploy from a Phoenix military base that their 'mission is about providing manpower and resources' to support agencies on the border and denied that there was a political motive.

'I don't think this is a partisan issue or an identity issue,' he said. 'You show me somebody who is for drug cartels or human trafficking or this ammunition that's coming over a wide-open and unprotected border here.'

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told San Antonio radio station KTSA that he would add about 300 troops a week until the total number reaches at least 1,000 troops.

Some Guard members will be armed if they are placed in potential danger, Abbott said, adding he wanted to downplay speculation that 'our National Guard is showing up with military bayonets trying to take on anybody that's coming across the border, because that is not their role.'

There is no end date for the deployment, Abbott said: 'We may be in this for the long haul.'

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez's office said that more than 80 troops would deploy later this week. They will be the first of an expected 250 Guard members from New Mexico to serve on the border.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, offered to send members of his state's Guard as well. South Carolina sent troops to the border during Operation Jump Start, the border deployment ordered by Bush in 2006.

Joel Villarreal, the mayor of Rio Grande City in Texas, said he did not agree with what he characterized as 'the militarization of the border.'

'It's not good for business, to be frank with you,' Villarreal said.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey speaks to Arizona National Guard soldiers prior to deployment to the Mexico border at the Papago Park Military Reservation Monday

Arizona National Guard soldiers receive their reporting paperwork prior to deployment to the Mexico border at the Papago Park Military Reservation, Monday

Arizona National Guard soldiers receive their reporting paperwork prior to deployment to the Mexico border at the Papago Park Military Reservation Monday

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, right, shakes hands with Arizona National Guard soldiers prior to deployment to the Mexico border at the Papago Park Military Reservation Monday

Arizona National Guard soldiers line up as they get ready for a visit from Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey prior their deployment to the Mexico border Monday

Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey speaks to Arizona National Guard soldiers prior to deployment to the Mexico border Monday

Aaron Hull, chief patrol agent of the U. S. Customs and Border Protection's El Paso Sector, speaks where construction on a new segment of the border wall will be built, near Santa Teresa, N.M., MondayMike Pompeo, the current CIA director and the president's nominee for secretary of state, says he's been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Pompeo disclosed the interview during a confirmation hearing Thursday on Capitol Hill.

'I spoke with special counsel Mueller, who interviewed me, requested an interview,' Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 'I cooperated.'

He would not say what they discussed in the interview, because its an ongoing investigation.

Contrasting messages: Mike Pompeo told senators that Russia is 'a danger to our country' and that America has a duty to lead - seen as different in tone from the president

The revelation came as Pompeo was questioned by the committee's ranking Democrat about a report that suggested that President Trump asked Pompeo and the director of national intelligence to interfere in the Russia probe.

Pompeo said the suggestion that 'he [Trump] asked me to do anything that's improper is false.'

He said he could not recall what Trump asked him that day precisely but said, 'I'm with the president an awful lot. He has never asked me to do anything that I considered remotely improper.'

Trump's tweeting about special counsel investigation in the context of U.S.-Russian relations moved Mueller's probe to the top of Democratic lawmakers' list of questions in the confirmation hearing where the Iran nuclear deal, relations with North Korea and Syria's civil war took a backseat questions about Pompeo's involvement with and views on the investigation.

The president on this week blamed the 'bad blood' between Russia and the U.S. on the investigation.

Pompeo rejected that interpretation, telling a lawmaker, 'The historic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union and now Russia is caused by Russian bad behavior.'

The ex-GOP lawmaker also told the Senate panel that years of soft U.S. policy toward Russia are 'now over.'

Drawing a sharp contrast with predecessor Rex Tillerson, Pompeo vowed to promote democracy and human rights while ending 'demoralizing' vacancies at the State Department.

In his prepared remarks, Pompeo also chastised Russia for acting 'aggressively' and emphasized that the Trump administration considers Russia 'a danger to our country.'

But he also said that diplomatic efforts with Moscow, while challenging, 'must continue.'

Not unopposed: As well as Code Pink, the protest group which has a virtual daily presence in Congress, Pompeo can expect a tough time from Democrats and Bernie Sanders

Know your enemies: Mike Pompeo is speaking out against Russia and at a time of rising tensions over Syria, whose two leaders - Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad are now allies

Trump tweeted Thursday: 'Good luck to Mike Pompeo during his Confirmation Hearing today. He will be a great Secretary of State!'

Pompeo, in his opening remarks, also stressed America's 'duty to lead,' despite Trump's vows to put 'America first.'

'If we do not lead the calls for democracy, prosperity and human rights around the world, who will?' Pompeo said, according to prepared remarks. 'No other nation is equipped with the same blend of power and principle.'

The remarks Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were the first chance for lawmakers and the public to hear directly from the former Kansas congressman about his approach to diplomacy and the role of the State Department, should he be confirmed to lead it.

Pompeo's views on global issues are well known - he was questioned extensively by senators for his confirmation to run the CIA - but Democratic senators have raised questions about his fitness to be top diplomat, given his hawkish views and past comments about minorities.

'When journalists, most of whom have never met me, label me - or any of you - as 'hawks,' 'war hardliners,' or worse, I shake my head,' the former Army officer said.

'There are few who dread war more than those of us who have served in uniform.'

He added, 'War is always the last resort.'

Since being nominated last month, Pompeo has spent much of his time at the State Department immersing himself in briefing books and undergoing mock hearings and prep meetings on key issues like Iran, Syria and North Korea, as well as the inner workings of the State Department, a person close to Pompeo said.

He's also spoken to all eight living former secretaries - including Hillary Clinton, whom he famously criticized over the 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

Pompeo's chief goal is to convince senators that he intends to strengthen the State Department and re-establish its relevance as a major player in national security policy, said the individual, who wasn't authorized to comment by name and requested anonymity.

That message is an implicit contrast with Tillerson, who left scores of top positions unfilled and the diplomatic corps dispirited before being unceremoniously fired by Trump on Twitter in March.

Pompeo told senators that as he met with State Department workers recently, every single one told him he or she wanted to be 'empowered in their roles' and clear about Trump's mission.

'That will be my first priority,' Pompeo said. 'They also shared how demoralizing it is to have so many vacancies and frankly, not to feel relevant. I'll do my part to end the vacancies, but I'll need your help.'

Pompeo's questioning by senators comes amid spiraling tensions with Russia over Syria and China over trade; concerns about the planned summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un; and uncertainty over the administration's international agenda.

The U.S. has maintained its threat of rocket attacks in response to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's sickening chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday

He told senators that he's read CIA histories of past talks with North Korea and is confident that Trump won't repeat past mistakes.

'President Trump isn't one to play games at the negotiating table, and I won't be either,' he planned to say.

The Republican also pledged to work with U.S. allies to try to 'fix' the Iran nuclear deal.

Trump has vowed to withdraw the U.S. if agreement with European allies to revamp to deal can't be reached by May 12.

Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat on the committee considering Pompeo's nomination, said after meeting with him Tuesday that he didn't get the impression Pompeo was well-versed in world affairs and seemed unfamiliar with the current status of several issues.

'I assume by Thursday he'll get up to speed,' Cardin told reporters.

Trump announced Pompeo's nomination to become the 70th secretary of state in the same March 13 tweet in which he dumped Tillerson.

'He will do a fantastic job,' Trump said at the time, confirming months of speculation that the largely sidelined Tillerson was out of a job and would be replaced by Pompeo, who is known to have the president's ear and respect and shares his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.

At the State Department, the shake-up was met with a mixture of relief and trepidation.

On the one hand, Tillerson had alienated many with his deeply unpopular bureaucratic reorganization. His overt endorsement of hefty budget cuts and his failure to fill jobs attracted the ire of lawmakers of both political parties.

But many diplomats have privately voiced apprehension about Pompeo's history of sometimes hostile comments toward the gay community and Islam and his fierce criticism of the Obama administration's handling of the aftermath of the Benghazi attacks.

Pompeo, who was confirmed for the CIA job by a 66-32 vote, developed a reputation for being more outwardly political than many past directors of the traditionally apolitical agency.

He developed a visibly close relationship with the president, traveling to the White House on most days to deliver the highly classified President's Daily Brief in person rather than leaving the task to other intelligence officials.

Often Trump would have the CIA director stay in the West Wing after the briefing to accompany him to other meetings.A search is underway for two girls who were last seen at a Sydney train station on Wednesday afternoon.

Audreyha Audreyha, 12, from Lakemba, and Purnima Shrestha, 13, from Burwood, were spotted near Redfern Railway Station about 3.15pm, police said.

NSW police said they were alerted when the girls failed to return home in the evening and are concerned for the girls' welfare.

A search is underway for Audreyha Audreyha (pictured), 12, and Purnima Shrestha, 13, who were last seen at a Sydney train station on Wednesday afternoon

Purnima (pictured) is described as being of Asian appearance with an olive complexion, about 140cm to 150cm tall with a slim build

Audreyha is described as being of Indian appearance with a dark complexion, black hair, 150cm tall and a medium build.

She was last seen wearing a red polo shirt, navy blue shorts and carrying a light-blue back pack.

Purnima is described as being of Asian appearance with an olive complexion, about 140cm to 150cm tall with a slim build.

She was last seen wearing a white top, navy short, black shoes and carrying a black backpack.

Anyone with information is urged to call Crime Stoppers.A man has survived a night in crocodile-infested waters by sleeping in a tree among mangroves after getting lost while out crab fishing near Cairns.

Brian Duncan, 61, was feared to have been fatally attacked by a crocodile in Chinaman Creek when he didn't return home on Wednesday night, sparking a large scale air and ground search.

The 61-year-old finally waved a boat down just after midday on Thursday after two previous passers failed to see him in the mangroves.

'I've apologised to everyone. Yeah I've made a big mess,' he said, speaking to the media after he was found.

Brian Duncan, 61, (pictured) survived a night in crocodile-infested waters by sleeping in a tree among mangroves after getting lost while out crab fishing near Cairns

'The tide was coming in when I was walking back,' Mr Duncan told media after he had been found.

'And I'm not going to walk through water that deep - not when it's starting to get dark - so I went up a tree and spent the night.'

Mr Duncan explained he chose to climb the tree because it had a 'good vantage point' for the rescue helicopter to see him.

'Then just as I got in the canopy the helicopter flew over,' Mr Duncan said.

The man's 30-year-old son, who is also a keen fisherman, went out this morning to the popular crabbing spot to search for his dad.

A 61-year-old man was feared to have been attacked by a crocodile after he failed to return home last night. 'There is a possibility that a crocodile could be involved,' Sergeant Dyett said

'I've apologised to everyone. Yeah I've made a big mess,' he said, speaking to the media after he was found when he waved a boat down just after midday

'He's rung his wife and said he was going to put some crab pots in before he went home,' Acting Senior Sergeant Gil Dyett told the media earlier today.

'He could have been bitten by a snake, he could have been injured,' Sergeant Dyett said.

'But obviously we've got to be real, and there is a possibility that a crocodile could be involved.'

Despite the dangers, Mr Duncan was reunited with his family - uninjured and covered in mud.

'He's got a few mozi bites on him but other than that he's fine,' Sergeant Gil Dyett said.

A large scale air and ground search was launched due to fears Mr Duncan had been attacked by a crocodile in Chinaman Creek when he didn't return home last night

Despite the dangers, Mr Duncan was reunited with his family - uninjured and covered in mud. 'He's got a few mozi bites on him but other than that he's fine,' Sergeant Gil Dyett saidA 12-year-old boy has been found after he wandered in the Western Australian bush for nine hours, travelling 550km.

At 11am on April 11 Noah ran away from a car he was travelling in and ran into bushland off the Great Northern Highway, about 90km south of Mount Magnet.

Police have no idea how the boy managed to travel so far.

Noah (pictured), 12, ran away from a car on April 11 and into bush land off the Great Northern Highway in Western Australia

Acting Sergeant Tino Meinen of Mount Magnet police told Geraldton Times: 'Were not exactly sure how he ended up there, because hes not very talkative.

'We were very concerned because hes 12 years old, he didnt have any water, no food, no protective clothing, and theres all kinds of wild life like dogs out there.'

Police found Noah at 8pm, about 150km north of Meekatharra on the Great Northern Highway.

In a statement police said: 'A member of the public provided information regarding a sighting of the missing person. As a result, police attended a Truck Stop located approximately 150 km north of Meekatharra and located him safe and well.'

Noah had no injuries when he was found.

He was also given clean clothing and food.One of the moms who died when an SUV plunged off a Northern California cliff, killing a family of eight, told a friend days before that she was so sick she might have to go to hospital.

Sarah Hart texted her friend Cheryl Hart, who shares the same last name but is not related to the family, the alarming message at 3am on March 24.

The text came just hours after the family was visited by Child Protective Services. It's unclear exactly what the text said.

When Cheryl did not hear from Sarah for two days, she called a Clark County emergency dispatcher on March 26.

'Nobody has been able to get ahold of her, talk to her or seen her since... or her wife, which is Jen,' Cheryl told the dispatcher at 1.15pm, according to 911 call records obtained by The Oregonian.

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One of the moms who died when an SUV plunged off a Northern California cliff, killing a family of eight, told a friend days before that she was so sick she might have to go to hospital (Pictured is Sarah and Jennifer Hart with some of their adopted children)

Sarah Hart texted her friend Cheryl Hart, who shares the same last name but is not related to the family, the alarming message at 3am on March 24. Cheryl called 911 two days later when she hadn't heard from Sarah - it was the same day the family's SUV was discovered

Cheryl also said she had checked hospitals, but none said they had a record of treating Sarah.

Several hours after she called authorities, the family's SUV was discovered at the bottom of a scenic Mendocino County cliff.

Authorities found the bodies of Sarah and Jennifer Hart and three of their adopted children, Markis, Jeremiah and Abigail.

Three other children, Hannah, Sierra and Devonte, are still missing.

On Saturday, a body was pulled from the surf in that area and authorities are working to determine whether it belongs to one of the children.

The Mendocino County Sheriff's office said in a statement that a couple vacationing along the coast saw a possible body, which was pulled from the surf by a third bystander.

Authorities found the bodies of Sarah and Jennifer Hart and three of their adopted children, Markis, Jeremiah and Abigail

The body appears to be that of an African American female, but the age and identity could not immediately be determined, said Lt Shannon Barney.

While authorities said they believe the body may be that of one of two missing girls from the crash, positive identification will most likely be done by DNA analysis, which could take weeks.

There were no signs of the other two children, officials said Saturday.

Authorities have said that data from the vehicle's software suggested the crash was deliberate.

Investigators believe that Jennifer drove the car off the cliff intentionally as there were no skid marks and evidence shows the speedometer was 'pinned' at 90mph.

Authorities have been scouring the crash site to try and find the bodies of the three other children, Hannah, Sierra and Devonte, who are still missing

They said the SUV had stopped at a coastal highway overlook before speeding straight off the cliff and plummeting 100 feet into the rocky Pacific Ocean below.

The California Highway Patrol also released a photo of Jennifer Hart shopping at a grocery store just a day before the crash, and revealed more details about their movements.

The family appear to have left their home in Woodland, Washington on March 23, after a next-door neighbor called Child Protective Services to report that the couple weren't feeding the kids.

An official went to the family's home, knocked and rang the doorbell and left her card in the front door, records said.

Two officials returned March 26 - the day the Harts' SUV was found - and the card from the Friday before had been removed.

One of the officials left another card and called law enforcement and requested a welfare check.

A deputy went the same day to the residence and no one appeared to be home, records said.

Authorities returned the next day, and no one appeared to be home again.

A family cellphone pinged in Newport, Oregon, around 8.15am on March 25.

CHP believes the family then drove south on Highway 101, and then State Route 1, arriving in the Fort Bragg, California area 12 hours later.

It's believed that the family stayed the night in the area, since Jennifer was seen checking out of a Fort Bragg grocery store around 8.15am on Sunday, March 25.

Authorities say the family stayed in Fort Bragg until 9pm that evening, at which point it seems they turned around and started traveling north again on State Route 1.

Sarah Hart pleaded guilty in 2011 to a domestic assault charge in Minnesota over what she said was a spanking given to one of her children.

Surveillance footage shows Jennifer Hart (right) checking out of a grocery store in Fort Bragg, California just hours before she is believed to have driven off a cliff with her wife and their kids inside

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman revealed on HLN that he is now calling the crash a 'crime' instead of an accident

Records showed that the Hart children were removed from public school in Alexandria, Minnesota the day after Sarah Hart reached a probation agreement stemming from the child abuse case in April.

That came a week after Hart pleaded guilty to physically abusing one of her daughters, who was six at the time.

The kids were taken out of school and moved to Oregon, where they were privately educated from there on out, the Oregonian reported.

Investigators are now examining 'red flags' in the Washington family's past in the hope of explaining why they drove off the cliff in an apparent suicide plunge.

While investigators initially said there was no indication the crash was anything but an accident, data from the vehicle's software now suggested the incident was deliberate.

'This situation may have been an intentional act and not the result of a traffic collision,' the highway patrol said.

The SUV appears to have stopped at a dirt pull-off area about 70 feet from the cliff, according to the vehicle's on-board computer.

It then accelerated over the edge, leaving no skid marks or other indications of a collision. The SUV fell into rocks and was found partially submerged about 100 feet below the highway.

Bruce and Dana DeKalb, the family's next-door neighbors, called child welfare officials last month because the couple's 15-year-old son, Devonte, had been coming to their house almost every day for a week, asking for food.

They said the teen claimed his parents were 'punishing them by withholding food.'

Devonte, an African-American boy who is still missing, drew national attention after he was photographed in tears while hugging a white police officer during a 2014 protest.

The discovery of the body Saturday follows a two-day storm that swept through Northern California.

The sheriff's office noted that it is not uncommon after a significant storm that items would surface or wash onto the beach.

'The Mendocino County Sheriff's Office is monitoring the ocean conditions to see when further searches might be safely conducted,' Barney said. 'This evaluation includes the use of divers if conditions permit.'

Police searched the family's home, which was about 500 miles north of the crash site, but found no suicide note.

Investigators obtained a search warrant for the family's home in Woodland and looked for itineraries, bank and phone records, credit card receipts, journals or other documents that might shed light on the case.MoveOn.org said at least one 'Nobody Is Above The Law' rally will be held in each state across the nation

Trump threatened to fire Mueller after the FBI raided his personal lawyer's office

Trump has been critical of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 US presidential election

A public advocacy group announced that it is planning more than 800 rallies across the country if president Donald Trump fires Mueller or Rosenstein

US progressive groups are gearing up for nationwide protests if President Donald Trump fires the special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, or replaces the Justice Department official overseeing the probe.

An ouster of Special Counsel Robert Mueller would signal that Trump was acting as if he was above the law, said MoveOn.org, which is planning at least 800 demonstrations across the country in cities such as Manhattan, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, DC, Phoenix, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Houston.

Every state will have at least one 'Nobody Is Above The Law' rally and at least 320,000 people have pledged to attend so far, according to MoveOn's website.

More than 800 rallies across the country are being planned if president Donald Trump (pictured) fired special counsel Robert Mueller or Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein

Trump has threatened to fire Mueller (pictured) who is investigating Russia meddling in the 2016 election

Rosenstein is overseeing the Mueller probe. MoveOn.org said rallies will happen if Trump fires Rosenstein too

Trump would also trigger protest if he fired Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is responsible for overseeing the Russia probe, or if he pardoned associates targeted in the investigation, such as former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort, MoveOn said.

Trump has been critical of the Mueller investigation, calling it a 'witch hunt'. He threatened to fire Mueller after the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided his personal lawyer's offices on Monday, based partly on a referral by the special counsel.

US House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Wednesday he had been assured Trump did not intend to fire Mueller.

Other groups behind the planned protests include Friends of the Earth, the American Federation of Teachers, and veterans organizations, MoveOn said.

'We can't have the highest office of the land exempt from abiding by the law,' Friends of the Earth US President Erich Picha said by telephone, adding that his group would support impeachment of Trump should he fire Mueller.

The public advocacy group said the rallies are to show to nobody, including the president, is above the law. Pictured are anti-Trump protestors at a rally in New York on August 14, 2017

MoveOn said Mueller's firing would create a constitutional crisis. Anti-Trump demonstrators are pictured above in DC at a rally on January 29, 2017

MoveOn said Mueller's firing would create a constitutional crisis and compared the action to President Richard Nixon's move to oust officials investigating the Watergate scandal.

The White House said on Tuesday that Trump 'believes he has the power' to fire Mueller, who has widened his probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow.

Russia has denied that it meddled in the election, and Trump has said there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia.

MoveOn is urging US lawmakers to consider impeachment proceedings against Trump should he fire officials involved in the Russia probe, the group's campaign director David Sievers said by phone.An alleged serial dine-and-dasher has proven her taste for ripping people off expands to luxury accommodation as well as lavish restaurants.

New information has emerged in relation to a woman who, along with her partner, allegedly dined at expensive restaurants and left without paying the bill up to a dozen times.

The couple were accused of racking up bills, often in their hundreds, at swanky Perth eatery's and leaving without squaring away their debt.

An alleged serial dine-and-dasher has been accused of leaving a hotel $2000 out-of-pocket across two separate stays in 2016, having used a stolen credit card to make her bookings

New allegations arose after several restaurants came forward with complaints about the couple (pictured) leaving without paying their bills

The female has been accused of leaving a hotel $2000 out-of-pocket across two separate stays in 2016, allegedly having used a stolen credit card to make her bookings.

She allegedly charged expensive meals to her room, and claimed she had left her ID in the car to avoid being caught out.

Lloyd McAuley, the former franchisee of the West Perth hotel, filed a police report after her first visit, and went to the police station after her second.

'She'd say her ID was out in her car, can she just go up to her room and she'll bring it the next time she goes past the desk,' Mr McAuley told Perth Now.

'The hotel gets busy ... and before you know it she's been in your hotel for days.'

The female has been accused of charging expensive meals to her room, and lying about leaving her ID in the car to avoid being caught out

A police report was filed after her first scammed stay at a West Perth hotel, with the operator going to the police station in person after her second (pictured with partner inside a cafe)

The former franchisee, Lloyd McAuley, said the woman only left after he confronted her on her second visit

The businessman said the woman eventually left his establishment after being confronted by him during her second stay.

Mr McAuley believed the same woman had conducted a similar scam at another hotel in the city along with her male partner.

Elmar's in the Valley, in the outer Perth suburb of Henley Brook, claimed the couple tucked into $250 worth of food and drinks before skipping out on the bill.

Several other restaurants also claimed they were targeted, with 12 businesses contacting the West Australian, which says it has been contacted by 12 businesses who have accused the man and woman of theft.

A couple (pictured) who are accused of racking up a $250 bill at Elmar's in the Valley, in Perth, before leaving without paying allegedly performed the same stunt at 12 other businesses

Staff at Elmar's claimed the couple tucked into a three-course meal, drank cocktails and wine over the weekend before driving away in a Holden (pictured)

Anoop Nair, the general manager for The Royal on the Waterfront in East Perth, told the publication the same couple visited his establishment on Thursday, ordered $240 worth of food and drinks and fled (pictured is the accused female)

Anoop Nair, the general manager for The Royal on the Waterfront in East Perth, told the publication the same couple visited his establishment on Thursday, ordered $240 worth of food and drinks and fled.

'It's definitely the same couple,' he said.

'They seemed fine. They were talking to staff normally and then the male got up to go to the toilet. She did the same a minute after and they never returned,' Mr Nair said.

Staff at Tarrazza cafe told the West Australian the couple targeted them in July, ordered two bottles of champagne and left an unpaid bill between $180 to $200.

'I filed a report with the police and heard nothing about it again. I have since been contacted by other venues, not just pubs and cafes but hotels and hairdressers who say she has done the same.'

Hillarys restaurant was left $500 short after the couple allegedly visited the business twice last year.

The Floreat Hotel filed a police report after the man and woman allegedly fled a $290 bill in February, according to the publication.

Elmar's General manager Steffen Hoeer said the pair arrived at around 5pm and regularly stepped outside for cigarettes during the evening and eventually fled in a Holden Astra.

'They didn't eat their dessert, they just went outside again but this time they took their belongings and they never came back,' Mr Hoeer told The West Australian.

A receipt showed the couple ordered a $48 bottle of white wine, four cocktails at a cost of $18 each, a soup dish, an antipasti platter, barramundi, a pasta and desert.

Elmar's General manager Steffen Hoeer said the pair arrived at around 5pm and regularly stepped outside for cigarettes during the evening

Staff released CCTV images of the pair and tried to convince them to settle the bill before the matter was taken any further

'I'm disgusted, it's just not fair. You receive the service, you receive the product, you pay for it. The staff still need to be paid,' Mr Hoeer said.

The restaurant has reported the matter to police.

Earlier, staff released CCTV images of the pair and tried to convince them to settle the bill before the matter was taken any further.

'We are sure it just slipped their mind and was an oversight on their part. When they are ready to settle the bill, we will have the receipt waiting,' they wrote on Facebook.

'We would love for the bill to be paid before the matter is taken to the police.'

Police confirmed they are investigating the reports.Eight months before the company that owns the National Enquirer paid $150,000 to a former Playboy Playmate who claimed she'd had an affair with Donald Trump, the tabloid's parent made a $30,000 payment to a less famous individual: a former doorman at one of the real estate mogul's New York City buildings.

As it did with the ex-Playmate, the Enquirer signed the ex-doorman to a contract that effectively prevented him from going public with a juicy tale that might hurt Trump's campaign for president.

The payout to the former Playmate, Karen McDougal, stayed a secret until the Wall Street Journal published a story about it days before Election Day.

Since then curiosity about that deal has spawned intense media coverage and, this week, helped prompt the FBI to raid the hotel room and offices of Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

The story of the ex-doorman, Dino Sajudin, hasn't been told until now.

The National Enquirer's parents company paid $30,000 to a former doorman at Trump World Tower in New York just before the election. Trump is pictured on April 5 outside the White House

Sajudin got $30,000 in exchange for signing over the rights, 'in perpetuity,' to a rumor he'd heard about Trump's sex life  that the president had fathered an illegitimate child with an employee at Trump World Tower, a skyscraper he owns near the United Nations

The Associated Press confirmed the details of the Enquirer's payment through a review of a confidential contract and interviews with dozens of current and former employees of the Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc.

Sajudin got $30,000 in exchange for signing over the rights, 'in perpetuity,' to a rumor he'd heard about Trump's sex life  that the president had fathered an illegitimate child with an employee at Trump World Tower, a skyscraper he owns near the United Nations.

As it did with ex-Playmate Karen McDougal, the Enquirer signed the ex-doorman to a contract that effectively prevented him from going public with a juicy tale that might hurt Trump's campaign for president

The contract subjected Sajudin to a $1million penalty if he disclosed either the rumor or the terms of the deal to anyone.

Cohen, the longtime Trump attorney, acknowledged to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin's story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it.

He said he was acting as a Trump spokesman when he did so and denied knowing anything beforehand about the Enquirer payment to the ex-doorman.

The parallel between the ex-Playmate's and the ex-doorman's dealings with the Enquirer raises new questions about the roles that the Enquirer and Cohen may have played in protecting Trump's image during a hard-fought presidential election.

Prosecutors are probing whether Cohen broke banking or campaign laws in connection with AMI's payment to McDougal and a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels that Cohen said he paid out of his own pocket.

Federal investigators have sought communications between Cohen, American Media's chief executive and the Enquirer's top editor, the New York Times reported.

Cohen's lawyer has called the raids 'inappropriate and unnecessary.'

American Media hasn't said whether federal authorities have sought information from it, but said this week that it would 'comply with any and all requests that do not jeopardize or violate its protected sources or materials pursuant to our First Amendment rights.'

The White House didn't respond to questions seeking comment.

On Wednesday, an Enquirer sister publication, RadarOnline, published details of the payment and the rumor that Sajudin was peddling.

The website wrote that the Enquirer spent four weeks reporting the story but ultimately decided it wasn't true.

The company only released Sajudin from his contract after the 2016 election amid inquiries from the Journal about the payment.

The site noted that the AP was among a group of publications that had been investigating the ex-doorman's tip.

Michael Cohen (pictured), the longtime Trump attorney, acknowledged to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin's story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it

Prosecutors are probing whether Cohen broke banking or campaign laws in connection with AMI's payment to McDougal and a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels (pictured) that Cohen said he paid out of his own pocket

The White House didn't respond to questions seeking comment from the Associated Press

Trump tweeted his anger after the FBI raided Michael Cohen's law offices



During AP's reporting, AMI threatened legal action over reporters' efforts to interview current and former employees and hired the New York law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, which challenged the accuracy of the AP's reporting.

Asked about the payment last summer, Dylan Howard, the Enquirer's top editor and an AMI executive, said he made the payment to secure the former Trump doorman's exclusive cooperation because the tip, if true, would have sold 'hundreds of thousands' of magazines.

Ultimately, he said the information 'lacked any credibility,' so he spiked the story on those merits.

'Unfortunately... Dino Sajudin is one fish that swam away,' Howard told RadarOnline on Wednesday.

But four longtime Enquirer staffers directly familiar with the episode challenged Howard's version of events.

They said they were ordered by top editors to stop pursuing the story before completing potentially promising reporting threads.

They said the publication didn't pursue standard Enquirer reporting practices, such as exhaustive stake-outs or tabloid tactics designed to prove paternity.

In 2008, the Enquirer helped bring down presidential hopeful John Edwards in part by digging through a dumpster and retrieving material to do a DNA test that indicated he had fathered a child with a mistress, according to a former staffer.

The woman at the center of the rumor about Trump denied emphatically to the AP last August that she'd ever had an affair with Trump, saying she had no idea the Enquirer had paid Sajudin and pursued his tip.

The AP has not been able to determine if the rumor is true and is not naming the woman.

'This is all fake,' she said. 'I think they lost their money.'

Federal investigators have sought communications between Cohen (pictured), American Media's chief executive and the Enquirer's top editor, the New York Times reported. Cohen's lawyer has called the raids 'inappropriate and unnecessary'

The Enquirer staffers, all with years of experience negotiating source contracts, said the abrupt end to reporting combined with a binding, seven-figure penalty to stop the tipster from talking to anyone led them to conclude that this was a so-called 'catch and kill'  a tabloid practice in which a publication pays for a story to never run, either as a favor to the celebrity subject of the tip or as leverage over that person.

One former Enquirer reporter, who was not involved in the Sajudin reporting effort, expressed skepticism that the company would pay for the tip and not publish.

'AMI doesn't go around cutting checks for $30,000 and then not using the information,' said Jerry George, a reporter and senior editor for nearly three decades at AMI before his layoff in 2013.

The company said that AMI's publisher, David Pecker, an unabashed Trump supporter, had not coordinated its coverage with Trump associates or taken direction from Trump.

It acknowledged discussing the former doorman's tip with Trump's representatives, which it described as 'standard operating procedure in stories of this nature.'

The Enquirer staffers, like many of the dozens of other current and former AMI employees interviewed by the AP in the past year, spoke on condition of anonymity.

All said AMI required them to sign nondisclosure agreements barring them from discussing internal editorial policy and decision-making.

Though sometimes dismissed by mainstream publications, the Enquirer's history of breaking legitimate scoops about politicians' personal lives  including its months-long Pulitzer Prize-contending coverage of presidential candidate Edwards' affair  is a point of pride in its newsroom.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Enquirer published a string of allegations against Trump's rivals, such as stories claiming Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was a bisexual 'secret sex freak' and was kept alive only by a 'narcotics cocktail.'

Stories attacking Trump rivals or promoting Trump's campaign often bypassed the paper's normal fact-checking process, according to two people familiar with campaign-era copy.

The company has said it paid McDougal, the former Playboy Playmate, to be a columnist for an AMI-published fitness magazine, not to stay silent. McDougal has since said that she regrets signing the non-disclosure agreement and is currently suing to get out of it

The tabloid made its first-ever endorsement by officially backing Trump for the White House. With just over a week before Election Day, Howard, the top editor, appeared on Alex Jones' InfoWars program by phone, telling listeners that the choice at the ballot box was between 'the Clinton crime family' or someone who will 'break down the borders of the establishment.'

Howard said the paper's coverage was bipartisan, citing negative stories it published about Ben Carson during the Republican presidential primaries.

In a statement last summer, Howard said the company doesn't take editorial direction 'from anyone outside AMI,' and said Trump has never been an Enquirer source.

The company has said reader surveys dictate its coverage and that many of its customers are Trump supporters.

The company has said it paid McDougal, the former Playboy Playmate, to be a columnist for an AMI-published fitness magazine, not to stay silent. McDougal has since said that she regrets signing the non-disclosure agreement and is currently suing to get out of it.

Pecker has denied burying negative stories about Trump, but acknowledged to the New Yorker last summer that McDougal's contract had effectively silenced her.

'Once she's part of the company, then on the outside she can't be bashing Trump and American Media,' Pecker said.

In the tabloid world purchasing information is not uncommon, and the Enquirer routinely pays sources.

As a general practice, however, sources agree to be paid for their tips only upon publication.

George, the longtime former reporter and editor, said the $1 million penalty in Sajudin's agreement was larger than anything he had seen in his Enquirer career.

'If your intent is to get a story from the source, there's no upside to paying upfront,' said George, who sometimes handled catch-and-kill contracts related to other celebrities.

Paying upfront was not the Enquirer's usual practice because it would have been costly and endangered the source's incentive to cooperate, he said.

After initially calling the Enquirer's tip line, Sajudin signed a boilerplate contract with the Enquirer, agreeing to be an anonymous source and be paid upon publication.

The Enquirer dispatched reporters to pursue the story both in New York and in California.

The tabloid also sent a polygraph expert to administer a lie detection test to Sajudin in a hotel near his Pennsylvania home.

Sajudin passed the polygraph, which tested how he learned of the rumor. One week later, Sajudin signed an amended agreement, this one paying him $30,000 immediately and subjecting him to the $1 million penalty if he shopped around his information.

The Enquirer immediately then stopped reporting, said the former staffers.

Cohen, last year, characterized the Enquirer's payment to Sajudin as wasted money for a baseless story.

For his part, Sajudin confirmed he'd been paid to be the tabloid's anonymous source but insisted he would sue the Enquirer if his name appeared in print.

Pressed for more details about his tip and experience with the paper, Sajudin said he would talk only for in exchange for payment.

'If there's no money involved with it,' he said, 'I'm not getting involved.'Scotland Yard has wasted its time and resources looking into some historical sex crimes and must not blindly believe victims, its former chief Lord Stevens (pictured yesterday) has said

Scotland Yard has wasted its time and resources looking into some historical sex crimes, its former chief has said.

Lord Stevens also blasted Operation Midland, the Yard's much-criticised sex crimes investigation into VIPs including Sir Edward Heath, former Army chief Lord Bramall and ex-Home Secretary, Lord Brittan.

The retired commissioner, who ran the Met between 2000 and 2005, suggested that detectives had failed to 'test' star witness 'Nick' who was later branded a fantasist and now faces trial for child sex offences himself.

He said the historical sex crime probes were not always worth it.

'The problem with it all is priorities. Some of these historical offences which have taken place are extremely time-consuming and take a lot of resources away,' he told LBC Radio.

Asked if they all should be pursued: 'Some of them are not, no, and some very strong decisions have got to be taken'.

Operation Midland was sparked by a vulnerable man named as 'Nick' who told police he had been raped and abused for nine years by the VIP gang.

He pointed the finger at famous figures including Ted Heath, Harvey Proctor, Lord Bramall and Lord Brittan and even said the sex gang he described had murdered children at orgies.

Nick's claims led to D-Day veteran Lord Bramall (left) and ex-Tory MP Harvey Proctor (right) having their homes raided and lives ruined

But the 2.5 million Scotland investigation collapsed without any arrests and Nick has appeared in court charged with possession of indecent images of children.

Nick also made wild, unsubstantiated allegations of child sex abuse against former Prime Minister Edward Heath

Police were accused of just accepting what Nick had told them without questioning whether he was a credible witness.

Lord Stevens said: 'I was a detective for long enough and led some of the big inquiries. At the end of the day one of the lessons we learned is that you have to keep an open mind when you are doing investigation.

'That means to say you have to test what the evidence is from a complainant.

'It doesn't mean to say you throw it aside and that leads us back to another problem we have got which is the lack of experienced detectives nationwide.'

Earlier month Scotland Yard Commissioner Cressida Dick urged police to ditch the practice of blindly believing all victims.

She has told her officers to keep an open mind in cases when a victim comes forward, contrary to current guidelines.

Miss Dick said: It is very important to victims to feel that they are going to be believed.

Our default position is we are, of course, likely to believe you, but we are investigators and we have to investigate.

The Commissioner told The Times: I arrived saying very clearly to my people that we should have an open mind, of course, when a person walks in.

We should treat them with dignity and respect and we should listen to them.. From that moment on we are investigators.

National College of Policing guidelines instructing officers to believe alleged victims automatically were put in place following revelations in 2011 that abuse accusations - including those made against Jimmy Savile - had not been investigated properly.

The policy was aimed at encouraging people to come forward with the confidence that their claims would be taken seriously.

Scotland Yard faced fierce criticism, however, after it declared that uncorroborated allegations about a Westminster sex abuse ring from a man known only as Nick were credible and true.

The Crown Prosecution Service is now considering whether to charge Nick for perverting the course of justice after the claims were found to be false.

Retired High Court judge Sir Richard Henriques has called for the policy to be scrapped as his review into the botched Operation Midland inquiry concluded automatically believing victims perverts our system of justice. Anthony L. Wienke, 28, Laurel, Maryland, was charged April 7 with operation of a motor vehicle with blood alcohol content of 0.08 and first-offense driving while intoxicated.

 Jennifer J. Baker, 30, Syracuse, was charged April 7 with fourth-degree criminal possession of marijuana and second-degree aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle.

 William R. Garrigan, 35, Auburn, was charged April 8 with operation of a motor vehicle with a blood alcohol content of 0.08 and first-offense driving while intoxicated

 Mitchell L. Apple, 30, Rochester, was charged April 9 with operating a motor vehicle without valid insurance and driving with a suspended license.

 Shane A. McCaskill, 26, Cortland, was charged April 9 with first-offence driving while intoxicated and aggravated driving while intoxicated.

Love 0 Funny 4 Wow 3 Sad 0 Angry 1A family of five have won a payout after being forced to spend 88,000 of benefits and loans living in Premier Inns for three years after a council kicked them out of their home 'by mistake'.

Luke Burns, 43, and wife Olga, 40, from Bristol, thought they would be in a hotel for just one week after being turfed out of a flood-damaged flat they rented privately in April 2014.

But a series of council faults saw them pay 60-100 a night and moving between 12 Premier Inns - rapidly swallowing their 588 weekly benefits and loans from family.

They were forced to spend a total of 88,000 to live in a series of hotels in and near Bristol.

They have now won a 9,000 payout from Bristol City Council for 'injustice caused'.

Luke and Olga Burns with their children Lolita, Alina, and Nicolas in one of the Premier Inns where they were temporarily homed

Luke Burns, 43, and wife Olga, 40, from Bristol, thought they would be in a hotel for just one week after being turfed out of a flood-damaged flat they rented privately in April 2014

Luke and Olga Burns' children Lolita and Alina in one of the Premier Inns where they were temporarily homed

The couple spent three Christmases in hotels and even saw the birth of their youngest child Nicolas while living in a hotel.

They have finally been given a council home after the Local Government Ombudsman stepped in and said the council had broken the law.

Today, the Local Government Ombudsman said in a report Bristol City Council should pay the family 9,000 for 'injustice caused'.

The highly critical report said the authority illegally blocked untold numbers of families - including the Burns - from registering for housing for 22 months.

It found they ignored the Burns' 'appalling housing conditions' for years, failed to accept his applications for help and wrongly threatening to dump their belongings.

All the while the pair lived in fear they'd be evicted and children - Lolita, 12, Alina, 11, and baby Nicolas, now two - would be taken into care.

Mr Burns said: 'I never understood the council's end game. We were abandoned by the council and repeatedly ignored or blocked. It feels deliberate.

'It's hard not to see the actions - so deliberate and consistent - as a personal vendetta against my family.

'We were living a day-to-day existence, worrying over whether we would be able to pay for the next day's stay, never able to rest or relax.

A a series of council faults saw them pay 60-100 a night and moving between 12 Premier Inns - rapidly swallowing their 588 weekly benefits and loans from family

'We lived in fear that we would be forced to leave the hotel and our children would be taken from us. There was no way out.

'If we were able to go to bed knowing we had money for the following night we had a more restful sleep, but most of the time we didn't.

'To be constantly on edge and thinking about or preparing to move was no way to survive.

'The difference, to be able to just stop and rest, to be able to put down roots as a family, is beyond words.

'For the girls to be able to go to school, have friends and spend birthdays in a home - it's incredible.

'But we were robbed of that for three years, and the 9,000, while it will be incredibly useful in paying off some of the debt, it doesn't even cover half of it.

'And it certainly doesn't give us back the three years we were robbed of by the council's deliberate determination not to help us.'

The couple spent three Christmases in hotels and even saw the birth of their youngest child Nicolas while living in a hotel

The family's problems started when their flat in Bridgwater, Somerset, was flooded in 2012.

They were later evicted after a mix-up in which part of their housing benefit - normally paid directly to the landlord by Sedgemoor District Council - was withheld as the damp flat was deemed unfit to live in.

The family moved into a Premier Inn for the first time as Sedgemoor and Bristol City Council argued over who should look after them.

Bristol Council were deemed responsible for the family, but ruled the Burns had made themselves 'intentionally homeless', in December 2014.

In March 2015 the council unlawfully introduced a block on its website, automatically preventing anyone like them from registering for housing, the report said.

The family's problems started when their flat in Bridgwater, Somerset, was flooded in 2012

The couple met in Moscow, where he was working for the Foreign Office and she was an English language teacher

For the first two years the family moved between Premier Inns as they appealed against Bristol's decision not to offer a council house.

They were unable to find work or afford the 2,000 upfront sum needed to start renting privately.

Mr and Mrs Burns are both qualified teachers and tutored their older children 'at home' - in the hotel room.

They had to pack their belongings into half a dozen carrier bags and travel by bus from one hotel to another as they sought out the cheapest nightly rates.

Many times they waited outside on the pavement until loans from family landed in their bank account.

The Local Government Ombudsman intervened in October 2016, and in March 2017 told the council it had to accept a homelessness and housing application, while it continued to investigate.

Within weeks the family had successful bid on a council house, and moved into a new council home in Bristol in June last year.

'We told the girls straight away and stayed up until the bidding opened online at midnight to bid on a property,' he said.

'Even when we got it, it was empty apart from two single beds and a cooker.'

Mr and Mrs Burns are both qualified teachers and tutored their older children 'at home' - in the hotel room

But even then the council continued to pursue Luke, invoicing him 4,749 for storing their belongings throughout the debacle - a bill the council has since been told to write off.

'Their pursuit of us has been relentless,' said Luke.

The LGO report today told the council to pay Luke 9,000 for the delay in taking action and 'the time, trouble, frustration and distress it has caused'.

The report said: 'There was fault by the Council that caused Mr X injustice.

'Many Departments across the Council knew of Mr X's appalling housing circumstances but did not refer this to the Housing Department for help and advice.'

It added: 'In 2017 the Council told us it was not aware of Mr X's circumstances. It was aware.

'Mr X made many applications for discretionary housing payments to try and resolve his housing problems and explained his circumstances. The Benefits Department knew of Mr X's circumstances.

'Children's Services knew of his circumstances as did Education and the Visual Impairment Team.

'That none of these Departments made a referral to Housing is fault.'

The couple met in Moscow, where he was working for the Foreign Office and she was an English language teacher.

They came back to the UK in 2003 where she continued to teach.

But money became tight when Olga became a full-time mum and Luke was made redundant in 2010.

The couple sold their wedding rings to help get by and at times of absolute desperation they have been bailed out by Olga's family in Russia and Ukraine.

Her parents have taken out loans on their flat in Voronezh, Russia, and could be made homeless themselves if they fail to repay.

Nicolas was conceived in a hotel in Bristol on the only day they had time alone - when the older kids were out with family.

When she went into labour Olga took a taxi to hospital alone and returned the day after Nicolas was born. Premier Inn staff called him their 'first hotel baby'.

Mr Burns said he couldn't get work due to not having an address and constantly moving, and has been turned down at interviews due to the impending LGO report, he claims.

Nicolas was conceived in a hotel in Bristol on the only day they had time alone - when the older kids were out with family

In a joint statement, Councillor Paul Smith, Cabinet Member for Homes and Communities, and Councillor Helen Godwin, Cabinet Member for Women, Children and Families, said: 'We would like to apologise for any hurt caused to the family and for any failures that led to them living in unsuitable conditions for such a long time.

'While we recognise that the situation was unacceptable for a family with young children, we do believe that we tried to do our best for the family on a number of occasions. This includes making discretionary housing payments available on two occasions, to help the family find private rented sector accommodation.

'In March 2017 we took a new homelessness application and accepted the family's application for social housing. In June 2017 the family were allocated a three bedroom council house.

'The welfare of families is a priority for the council and safeguarding the health and wellbeing of vulnerable young people is something we take very seriously. We recognise however that on this occasion we did not live up to our usual high standards.

'This has been a particularly unusual case due to the length of time since the application and the difficulties in being able to make meaningful contact with the family.

'The council will be complying with all recommendations set out in the report, and has already addressed most of the issues raised and learned some valuable lessons from this case.'Pental has been ordered to pay $700,000 in fines after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission proved White King wipes advertised as flushable was misleading

The makers of White King bathroom wipes have been fined $700,000 after it claimed that its wipes were flushable.

Pental Limited and Pental Products Pty Ltd's product packing included claims about the wipes such as 'flushable' and 'White King Toilet Wipes are made from a specially designed material, which will disintegrate in the sewage system when flushed, just like toilet paper'.

It also advertised people could 'simply wipe over the hard surface of the toiletand just flush away'.

Pental admitted the White King Power Clean Flushable Toilet Wipes 40 pack and White King Power Clean Flushable Toilet Wipes 100 pack, which was later renamed, advertised as flushable between 2011 and 2016 were represented as similar to toilet paper.

In a statement the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Sarah Court said: 'The ACCC took action against Pental due to concerns that consumers were being misled into believing that the wipes were suitable to be flushed.

'These White King wipes cant be flushed down the toilet, and Australian wastewater authorities face significant problems if they are because they can cause blockages in household and municipal sewerage systems.'

The ACCC also has proceedings against Kimberly-Clark Australia Pty Ltd in regards to flushable wipes. The ACCC said Pental co-operated.

It made admissions and consented to orders such as implementation a compliance training program. It also agreed to paying the ACCC's costs.A Holtze prison inmate whose tourettes tics annoyed his cellmate to the point he turned violent and broke his jaw will be granted bail.

Michael Stephen Ferguson has been allowed to leave prison on the condition he lives with his mum in Victoria because of concerns for his safety within the prison.

Ferguson was forced to apply for bail on Wednesday because the violent altercations between him and his cellmate could leave him permanently injured, The NT News reported.

A Northern Territory inmate will be released on bail for his safety after his Tourette's tics infuriated his cellmate to the point the man broke his jaw

The man's lawyer, Julie Franz, told Darwin Local Court another blow to his head could result in a complete loss of vision.

She told the court Mr Ferguson's involuntary tics, which were symptoms of his Tourette's syndrome, infuriated his cellmate.

The cellmate had not put in a formal complaint to the police about the noises.

'He has made a statement to police but he's advised it would be in his interest to lay a complaint only when he is out [of custody],' she said.

Mr Ferguson will first have to book flights and post a surety before he is able to be released on bail.An eight-year-old girl was raped and murdered in India by a gang trying to drive away the group of Muslim nomadic herders to which she belonged.

Police say the attack in January in the Kashmir Valley on Asifa Bano had been planned for over a month as a way to terrify the Bakarwals, a Muslim community of nomadic herders, into leaving the area.

The killing has provoked shock and anger across Indian, and exposed the deep cultural divides which still exist between Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir.

Bano was grazing her family's ponies in the forests of the Himalayan foothills when she was kidnapped.

Her raped and mutilated body was found in the woods a week later.

Asifa Bano was grazing her families ponies when she was abducted by the gang

According to investigators, Asifa was confined in a local Hindu temple for several days.

Forensic reports say she had been drugged with anti-anxiety medication, repeatedly raped, burned, bludgeoned with a rock and strangled.

Eventually, her corpse was thrown into the forest.

Asifa went missing on January 10. At the time her family was living in a village around 45 miles east of Jammu city and two days after her disappearance, the family told the police.

Her body was found five days later and her father Muhammad Yusuf Pujwala told the BBC he was sitting outside his home when one of his neighbours came running towards him.

He stopped in front of Mr Pujwala and broke the news that they had found Asifa Bano.

'I knew something horrible had happened to my girl,' Mr Pujwala, the 52-year-old said

His wife Naseema Bii who had rushed to the forest along with her husband to see the body.

'Her nails had turned black and there were blue and red marks on her arm and fingers.'

Students and others participate in a protest against the rape and murder of Asifa

Other demonstrations have taken place in Jammu into the arrest of the six suspects

Conflict had been brewing in recent years between Muslim nomads and local Hindus over land disputes.

Hindus claimed the herders were encroaching on their lands and there had been scuffles after nomadic girls had been allegedly harassed by Hindu men.

Police say the attack on Asifa was rooted in religious politics, with a group of local men planning to scare away the Bakarwals by simply kidnapping a girl.

But once they had Asifa, that plan was quickly forgotten and she was killed as well.

Seven men and one child have been arrested - including retired government official Sanji Ram, 60, and four police officers.

One of those policemen also allegedly joined in the search for her body. Two other policemen were arrested for attempts to destroy evidence.

According to the charge sheet Ram asked his nephew to kidnap the girl who often came to the forests behind their house for grazing her horses.

An Indian activist holds a placard as she participates in a protest against two recent rapes

The nephew saw the girl asking about her horse and he led her into the forest telling her they were there.

But Asifa sensed trouble and tried to flee, the charges say, and the 'juvenile caught her by her neck and covered her mouth with one of his hands as she fell on the ground'.

She was then raped by him and other men joined in before she was taken to the temple, where she was kept her inside a prayer hall under the table, covering her with the plastic mats, the charged sheet reads.

The death and police investigation has promoted fierce protests across Kashmir, India, between Hindus and Muslims.

Soon after the suspects were arrested, members of the extremist Hindu Ekta Manch, or Hindu Unity Platform, marched through the streets of Jammu arrying a massive Indian flag, chanting 'Long Live India!' and demanding that police release the men.

Indian policewomen try to stop a student activist from crossing a police barricade during the protest

On Monday, Hindu lawyers in Kathua tried to block police from filing their investigation report at the local court.

They said the police investigation was flawed and claimed the six Hindu men accused in the attack had been framed.

The police were forced to call for backup before handing the report of their investigation to the judge at his home.

Kashmir has over 1 million nomadic herders, including the Bakarwals, who mainly tend flocks of sheep, goats and horses.

For centuries they have migrated every summer to highland pastures and forests, and returned to the plains of Jammu in winter to graze their animals, living in temporary shelters.

But over the past 20 years some have begun settling in permanent homes, usually built in forests, sparking conflicts with people already living in those areas.Raising the legal smoking age to 21 was tabled at a meeting of the nation's Health Ministers on Thursday.

Western Australia Health Minister Roger Cook is campaigning for the Turnbull Government to take up the proposal introduced by mining magnate Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest.

But the legal smoking age will only be raised to 21 in Western Australia if the rest of the nation agrees to do the same, Premier Mark McGowan says.

But the legal smoking age will only be raised to 21 in Western Australia if the rest of the nation agrees to do the same, Premier Mark McGowan says

Raising the legal smoking age to 21 was tabled at a meeting of the nation's Health Ministers on Thursday (stock image)

WA put the idea on the agenda of the national meeting of health ministers on Thursday.

But Mr McGowan said he was ambivalent about the change and the state would not go it alone.

'I see the arguments both ways. If you're 18 you can go to war, you know, why shouldn't you be able to smoke?' he told reporters on Thursday.

'On the other hand, some of the evidence that I've seen says that if you lift the smoking age, we may well save lives.'

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard made it clear he did not support the proposal.A crocodile has attempted to go where no croc has gone before - up a waterfall.

Video footage shows a saltwater crocodile attempting the climb up a riverbank, which was on a steep incline above the crocodile.

The crocodile struggles to get all the way to the top of the embankment and its tail whips around in the water trying to get support.

A crocodile has attempted to go where no croc has gone before - up a waterfall in the Northern Territory

Video footage shows the saltwater crocodile attempting to climb up the embankment as a group of people watch on

Instead, the reptile crashes dramatically into the water.

The crocodile sits in the water for a moment defeated before swimming towards the people filming the video.

It was uploaded with the caption: 'Some friends, their kids and myself were boating along the Roper River in Northern Territory looking for run offs to have a fish.

'We noticed a crocodile waiting for a feed at the bottom of the waterfall.

'As we got closer, it decided to try and climb up which is very rarely seen so I thought Id start filming.

'We were amazed at its strength. I was surprised when he started climbing rather than swimming away from us.'

In the video a series of voices can be heard in awe of what they witnessed.A drug lord and his sidekick have both been jailed for selling synthetic cannabis out of sex shops, after already being informed of the substance's frightening side-effects.

David Andre Jules Piccinato, 45, ran the synthetic drug operation out of several Love Heart adult stores located throughout regional Queensland - including Rockhampton, Mackay, Bundaberg and Toowoomba.

His right hand man, 38-year-old Ross McGlone, worked as the chain's operations manager, The Courier Mail reports.

A drug lord and his sidekick have both been jailed for selling synthetic cannabis after they were alreday informed of the substance's frightening side-effects

David Andre Jules Piccinato and Ross McGlone ran the synthetic drug operation out of several Love Heart adult stores located throughout regional Queensland

Brisbane District Court heard on Thursday that the synthetic weed was bought in 1kg bags - each worth $5000 - and sold under the counter as 'full moon tea'.

Just days before the drug-dealing duo stopped trafficking, two people allegedly died from using the 'tea'.

Prosecutor David Nardone conceded that there was no suggestion Piccinato or McGlone were aware of these deaths - but insisted the pair must have known that the product they were selling was harmful.

It allegedly reeked of chemicals, an employee packaging it had to wear goggles, gloves and masks to avoid headaches, and one particularly big shipment worth $150,000 caused packagers to develop a rash when handling it, the court heard.

The cannabis, which was sold under the misnomer of 'full moon tea', was allegedly responsible for two people dying and 32 more presenting at hospital

Moreover, Judge Brian Devereaux asserted that 32 people appeared at Mackay Hospital with adverse reactions after smoking the drug.

'Customers complained [to you] about the effects,' he said.

' [some] could not walk or talk for several hours, vomited extensively and went unconscious.'

These complaints did little to deter Piccinato and McGlone from distributing, however - even after being police raided one of their stores in 2015 and warned employees against selling the substance.

McGlone and Piccinato were sentenced to five and six years in prison, respectively, in Brisbane District Court on Thursday

'Instructions were given to staff not to sell to people who asked for synthetic cannabis,' Judge Devereaux said.

'Staff expressed concerns with you and you told them they would lose their jobs if they didn't sell it.'

The pair was arrested in 2016.

Piccinato was sentenced to six years in jail for the commercial sale of the drug, while McGlone was sentenced to five years for packaging it.

The sale of synthetic drugs has been outlawed in Queensland since 2013.Two FBI lovers who were fired from the Mueller investigation after ridiculing President Trump during their affair, still have top secret access to bureau documents - leaked letters reveal.

Senator Rand Paul posted pictures of letters sent between himself and the FBI in January on the subject of whether Peter Strzok and Lisa Page still had security clearances afforded to other agents.

In the letters Gregory Brower, then assistant director of the FBI Office of Congressional Affairs, revealed the two were still employed by the service and said: 'All FBI employees must retain a top level security clearance.'

'Because of security concerns and law enforcement sensitivities, the FBI does not reveal the specific accesses granted to particular employees,' he added.

Peter Strzok called then-candidate Trump an 'idiot' in texts sent to Lisa Page during the campaign and beginning of his Presidency

Lisa Page is former trial attorney on Mueller's investigation team and Strzok was deputy to the assistant director for counterintelligence

Revealing the letters between himself and Brower on Twitter, Paul commented: 'FBI admits that Trump haters still have Top Secret security clearances which allows them to access sensitive private information!'

He later told Fox News: 'So if [Strzok and Page are] still FBI agents, which apparently they are, the [FBI's] non-answer specifically really is an answer, and [it] says they can search our databases.'

'They need to be fired,' he added.

'At the very least, they need to be suspended from any privileges to look at these databases until it's determined whether or not they can still remain at the FBI.'

Strzok was previously deputy to the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, and a key part of the Mueller probe into Russian involvement in the 2016 Presidential election. While Page is a former trial attorney on Mueller's staff.

During their relationship, the pair exchanged some 50,000 text messages throughout the campaign and first year of the Trump administration.

They were both married to other people

Many of the messages ridiculed the President - with Strzok referring to then-candidate Trump as 'an idiot' one occasion. In another, Page described him as 'a loathsome human.'

Strzok also said 'God Hillary should win 100,000,000 - 0' after a Republican debate in March 2016.

Senator Rand Paul revealed the pair still had clearance by posting letters sent between himself and the bureau on TwitterAdvertisement

Satellite pictures have emerged showing how Russian warships appear to have deserted a key naval base in Syria amid fears over possible US airstrikes.

Overhead Images show how at least 11 navy vessels, including the frigate Admiral Grigorovich, appear to have left the Tartus military port on the Syrian coast.

A picture, said to have been taken on Wednesday, shows how only a kilo-class submarine remains in the port, which is understood to be protected by Moscow's fearsome S-300 and S-400 missile defence systems.

It comes after Donald Trump told Russia to 'get ready' for missile strikes in Syria with the Kremlin having threatened to shoot down any rockets - and anything that launched them. Trump and his Western allies are considering action after a horrifying chemical attack on a Syrian rebel-held town killed at least 40.

The exact reason for the ships' movements is not yet clear, but some have speculated that the vessels are simply on a training exercise or that they may have been deployed in readiness to intercept missiles.

Satellite pictures have emerged showing how Russian warships appear to have deserted one of its key naval bases in Syria amid fears of a US airstrike. This image shows some of the vessels recently seen at the base

Overhead Images show how at least 11 navy vessels, including the frigate Admiral Grigorovich, have left the Tartus military base on the Syrian coast. This picture, apparently taken on Wednesday, shows how only a kilo-class submarine remains in the port, which is understood to be protected by Moscow's fearsome S-300 and S-400 missile defence systems

It is not clear when the first of the images - produced by satellite imaging and intelligence firm ISI - was captured, but it is thought to have been taken before the poison gas attack on rebel-held Douma on Saturday.

Moscow was in direct contact with the US joint chiefs of staff about the situation in Syria, Vladimir Shamanov, head of the lower house of parliament's defence committee, said last night.

Yevgeny Serebrennikov, the first deputy chairman of the Russian upper house's defence committee, told Russian media that the Kremlin's troops in Syria were being protected.

He said: 'The Russian military bases in Hmeymim and Tartus are under firm protection.

'At the same time, we expect that in the event of US strikes, if any, the lives of our servicemen will not be in danger.

The base is believed to be protected by a ring of steel of Russia's fearsome S-300 and S-400 missile defence systems (file picture)

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'I think that the United States understands this and will not allow it, because otherwise, Russia's response will be immediate.'

As the threat of Western military action against the Syrian regime looms, Russia has already deployed thousands of troops in the war-torn country to back President Bashar al-Assad.

President Vladimir Putin first launched a military intervention in Syria in 2015, turning the tables in the multi-front civil war in favour of ally Assad.

The regime and its Iranian and Russian allies increasingly appear to be on the path to victory in Syria's brutal seven-year civil war, while the West has been reluctant to engage militarily.

The precise number of Russian troops fighting in Syria is not known. Putin said in December that some 48,000 Russian servicemen have taken part in the campaign.

He has ruled out dispatching ground troops in Syria, making the air force the mainstay of Moscow's Syria campaign.

Officials have acknowledged the presence of Russian advisors and military police in Syria, however.

Independent Russian military expert Pavel Felgenhauer estimated late last year that 'up to a thousand' military police and special forces are fighting alongside regime troops.

In March, the defence ministry said a total of 2,954 Russian troops in Syria had voted in presidential polls, giving an idea of current numbers.

In December Putin made a surprise visit to Russia's Hmeimim airbase in Latakia, Syria where he ordered a partial pullout of the country's troops, saying their task had been largely completed.

Russia said the airbase, set up in 2015, would remain in operation permanently, while its naval facility in the Syrian port of Tartus would be expanded.

Three battalions of military police and officers of the Russian Centre for Reconciliation would remain in Syria, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said.

Putin first said in March 2016 that the country's military campaign in Syria was coming to an end. Today few believe Russia is leaving the war-torn country any time soon.

The U.S. has maintained its threat of rocket attacks in response to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's sickening chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday

Officials and observers also point out the presence of a 'shadow army' of Russian mercenaries in Syria, including those working for a private military company called Wagner.

Military expert Felgenhauer last year estimated the number of mercenaries at 2,000 to 3,000.

Moscow in March acknowledged five Russian nationals were killed and 'dozens' wounded in US strikes on an area where no official troops were present, saying they all were in Syria 'on their own initiative.'

Various media reports in Russia and the United States said Wagner was being funded by one of Putin's allies Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Saint Petersburg businessman who previously carried out catering contracts for Russia's military and the Kremlin.

He has been charged by a US court and hit by Washington sanctions over setting up an internet 'troll factory' that is accused of attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election in favour of Donald Trump. He has denied involvement.

Russia has officially acknowledged 84 military losses in the Syrian war, including 39 killed in a plane crash at Hmeimim in March that was not caused by military action.

Russia rules the skies in Syria and the role of its air force there has been celebrated at home.

Five hundred people poisoned in Syrian gas attack, WHO reveals Up to 500 people were poisoned in the Syrian gas outrage that killed 43 people including children, the World Health Organisation has revealed. WHO demanded 'immediate' access to the victims in rebel-held Douma as it revealed the total number of people who reported to hospital showing 'signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals'. The atrocity, blamed on Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad's forces, has sparked a global outcry with the US and its allies considering taking military action in response. Volunteers give aid to children at a hospital following the chemical attack in Douma While the WHO statement did not confirm outright that a chemical weapons attack had taken place, it said more than 70 people sheltering in basements have died with 43 of those deaths related to symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals. 'We should all be outraged at these horrific reports and images from Douma' where Saturday's attack took place, said Peter Salama, the UN agency's chief of emergency response. 'WHO demands immediate unhindered access to the area to provide care to those affected, to assess the health impacts, and to deliver a comprehensive public health response,' he added. Citing information previously released by local health organizations, WHO said that 'an estimated 500 patients presented to health facilities exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals'. Up to 500 people were poisoned in the Syrian gas attack that killed 43 people including children, the World Health Organisation has revealed 'There were signs of severe irritation of mucous membranes, respiratory failure and disruption to central nervous systems of those exposed,' the statement added. The United States, Britain and France have argued the incident bears all the hallmarks of a strike ordered by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Assad has been blamed for previous attacks by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and UN-backed war crimes investigators. WHO has delivered medicine capable of treating certain types of chemical agents to clinics through a series of humanitarian convoys deployed across the country in recent years. UN officials have also accused Assad's troops of at times removing those treatments from humanitarian vehicles. Advertisement

Bomber planes such as the Tu-22 and Tu-160 have also flown from Russia to hit targets in Syria.

Russian warships and submarines have also played a prominent role backing up the bombing campaign in Syria, firing missiles at Islamic State group targets from the Mediterranean.

The Hmeimim airbase on the western coast and the naval facility in Tartus have been protected by S-300 and S-400 air missile defence systems.

Russian ships, such as Moscow's only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, have also completed missions in Syria. The Kuznetsov is now out of action for repairs set to last 2 to 3 years.

Russian ships are passing back and forth through the Bosphorus every couple of days.

The Russian defence ministry has previously said it will fire at any US craft that strikes government areas of Damascus, where Russian officials are also based.Boris Johnson demanded 'answers' from Russia today as the international chemical weapons watchdog backed Britain's findings over the Salisbury attack.

The Foreign Secretary stepped up the pressure on the Kremlin after the respected agency said an analysis of samples from the scene confirmed the UK's assessment that 'high purity' Novichok was used.

The conclusions about the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia will further increase tensions with Russia, alongside the crisis over Syria.

Moscow has refused to commit to accepting the findings of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and proposed an array of other explanations for the presence of military-grade nerve agent on UK soil.

One of the more outlandish is that it could have been deployed from Britain's own Porton Down laboratory eight miles down the road.

Miss Skripal, the daughter of ex-spy Sergei Skripal (pictured together) has only just been released from hospital after being found critically ill alongside him in Salisbury last month

Yulia's cousin, Viktoria Skripal, 45, protesting outside the British embassy in Moscow and demanding to be issued a visa to visit her stricken relatives in the UK

Theresa May, pictured on a visit to Birmingham yesterday, has said there is no other plausible explanation apart from Russian involvement in the Salisbury attack

An executive summary of the watchdog's report said: 'The results of the analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirms the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people.'

Mr Johnson said the OPCW had confirmed Britain's assessment that the substance was 'a military grade nerve agent  a Novichok'.

'This is based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world. All returned the same conclusive results,' he said.

'There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record.

'We invited the OPCW to test these samples to ensure strict adherence to international chemical weapons protocols. We have never doubted the analysis of our Scientists at Porton Down.

'In the interest of transparency, and because unlike the Russians we have nothing to hide, we have asked the OPCW to publish the executive summary for all to see and to circulate the full report to all state parties of the OPCW, including Russia.

'We will now work tirelessly with our partners to help stamp out the grotesque use of weapons of this kind and we have called a session of the OPCW Executive Council next Wednesday to discuss next steps. The Kremlin must give answers.

'We must, as a world community, stand up for the rules based order which keeps us all safe. The use of weapons of this kind can never be justified, and must be ended.'

The findings come amid a renewed exchange of diplomatic barbs between the UK and Moscow, after Ms Skripal revealed she has refused help from the Russian Embassy.

In a statement issued through the Metropolitan Police, she confirmed that Russia had made contact with her but she did not 'wish to avail myself of their services'.

In the statement, she asked her outspoken cousin Viktoria Skripal, who has suggested Yulia's fiance was involved in the attack, to refrain from making contact and added that her relative's opinions did not reflect her own.

It comes after dramatic claims from Russia that she and her father had been 'abducted' by the UK which was blocking its offers of assistance.

Miss Skripal added: 'I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian Embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can.

'At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.

'Most importantly, I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do.

'Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

'I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being. Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's.'

Police officers pictured on the scene at Sergei Skripal's home yesterday, where it is believed he and his daughter came into contact with the nerve agent

She once again thanked staff at Salisbury District Hospital for their 'kindness' as she revealed her father remained in their care.

'I have left my father in their care, and he is still seriously ill,' she said. 'I too am still suffering with the effects of the nerve agent used against us.

'I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me.

'I have specially trained officers available to me, who are helping to take care of me and to explain the investigative processes that are being undertaken.'

Shortly after the statement was released last night, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in London said they 'doubted much' that it was genuinely from Ms Skripal.

'If everything mentioned there is true we cannot but congratulate our compatriot,' he said.

'However, with no possibility to verify it, the publication by the Metropolitan Police raises new questions rather than gives answers.

'As before, we would like to make sure that the statement really belongs to Yulia. So far, we doubt it much.

'The text has been composed in a special way so as to support official statements made by British authorities and at the same time to exclude every possibility of Yulia's contacts with the outer world  consuls, journalists and even relatives.

'We are surprised by the point about the 'access to friends and family'. Not a single friend or relative quoted by Russian or British media confirms such contacts.

'As far as we know, the Skripals have no relatives closer than Yulia's cousin Viktoria and their grandmother Elena [Sergey's mother], who live together. A question arises: what family is Yulia in contact with?

'We have also noticed the apparent contradiction between the phone conversation in which Yulia says to Viktoria that 'everything is fine' with her and her father, and their health condition as described in today's Met Police statement.

'Particularly amazing is the phrase 'no one speaks for me' appearing in a statement which, instead of being read on camera by Yulia herself, is published at Scotland Yard website.

'To sum up, the document only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen.

'If British authorities are interested in assuring the public that this is not the case, they must urgently provide tangible evidence that Yulia is alright and not deprived of her freedom.'

Miss Skripal, 33, and her 66-year-old father were targeted in a poison plot in Salisbury five weeks ago, but the daughter has now been discharged from hospital.

It is believed that British authorities immediately spirited Miss Skripal away to a secure location when she was discharged from hospital.

The Russian embassy reacted angrily, suggesting in a series of tweets that the Russian national had been taken against her will.

Former double agent Mr Skripal was jailed in Russia for selling secrets to MI6 but was released as part of a spy swap deal in 2010 and settled in the UK.

It is hoped he will soon be fit for release from hospital, despite grave fears that the exposure to military-grade nerve agent Novichok on March 4 would prove fatal.

Britain has said Russian state involvement is the only plausible explanation for the attack and has led a worldwide reaction involving the expulsion of more than 100 diplomats.

Yulia Skripal called for family members, including her cousin Viktoria (pictured), not to speak on behalf of her or her stricken fatherA seven-year power sharing agreement in the state Senate came to an abrupt halt last week when the Independent Democratic Caucus disbanded under mounting pressure to unify the party ahead of a critical election season. The problem is that when party politics come first, constituents come second.

The IDC was formed in 2011 by a group of senators that decided it didn't want to follow the whims of party leaders. They were rewarded with larger offices and high-paying committee chairmanships for agreeing to cooperate with Republicans.

But the eight current members agreed last week to do an about-face and promised to support the Democrats. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who had been pressuring the group to fall in line, reportedly said that the move was necessary "for the good of the party."

And, it turns out, it may also be good for the governor, who is fighting to shore up support in the face of a September primary challenge. Members of the breakaway caucus are facing primaries, as well, and Democrats have a fighting chance of taking control of the Senate in November.Syrian government forces have seized 'full control' of the city of Douma less than a week after the alleged chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of civilians, Russian state news reports.

Russian military police unites were seen joining in celebrations on the streets of Douma, eastern Ghouta, as government soldiers raised the Syrian flag, in video footage published by Kremlin-funded news.

Rebel fighters in Douma surrendered after a series of ferocious assaults by President Bashar al-Assad's forces, aided by Russia under a massive bombardment.

Gathering: Hundreds of people took to the streets in Douma after the surrender of the rebels as Syrian government forces seized control

Syrian and Russian soldiers wait at the entrance of the Wafideen Camp for the arrival of buses carrying Jaish al-Islam fighters and their family members forcibly evacuated from Douma

Loyal: A soldier sits next to a poster of President Bashar al-Assad at the entrance of the Wafideen Camp

'A state flag hoisted on the Douma building heralded control over this settlement and, hence, over entire Eastern Ghouta,' Major-General Yuri Yevtushenko, head of the Russian Peace and Reconciliation Centre in Syria, was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

The Jaish al-Islam group in Douma agreed on Sunday to withdraw, hours after a suspected chemical weapons attack on the town that has raised the prospect of U.S. strikes.

Human rights activists and aid workers in Syria reported that more than 40 people were killed when two bombs, allegedly chemical weapons, were dropped on Douma on Saturday afternoon.

Hospitals allegedly saw more than 500 patients admitted with symptoms of exposure to chemicals such as foaming at the mouth, asphyxiation and blue lips.

The Syrian government and Russia have called reports of the attack bogus.

A vehicle carrying Jaish al-Islam rebel fighters and their family members made to leave Douma as part of the surrender agreement, arrives at the Wafideen Camp

Government control: Russian military police unites were seen joining Douma residents in celebrations on the streets

Local residents held up large Syrian flags and danced in the street on Monday

Russian support: A man looks at a computer screen in Moscow, showing a video with Russian cyrillic script with a man waving what appears to be a Syrian flag over a building in Douma

Russian military police were deployed in Douma on Thursday in accordance with the rebel surrender deal, Russia's RIA news agency reported.

Some 40,000 people, including thousands of rebels and their families, are being forcibly evacuated from Douma and other opposition areas in northern Syria under the agreement.

On Wednesday, a top official from Iran, Assad's other main ally, toured eastern Ghouta and vowed to stand by Syria in the face of 'any foreign aggression'.

'Syria's enemies are angry because of its military advances against terrorist groups,' Ali Akbar Velayati, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's top adviser, told Iranian state TV during his visit to eastern Ghouta's bomb-shattered ruins.

Fleeing: A man evacuated from Douma, holds a child and look out from a bus carrying evacuees upon arrival in Al-Bab district, Aleppo, Syria

Forced out: Some 40,000 people, including thousands of rebels and their families, are being forcibly evacuated from Douma

Got to go: A child from Douma cries as his family arrives in Aleppo last night

On Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump said that American missiles 'will be coming' to Syria as he and other Western countries weigh military action over the suspected chemical attack in Douma.

Both Syria and Russia have said reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers in the town and have accused the U.S. of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the government.

Bouthaina Shaaban, a top adviser to Assad, described the army's recapture of eastern Ghouta as a 'decisive point' in an interview on Wednesday, saying the rebels' defeat had pushed the West to wage 'psychological war' by threatening strikes.

'Consultations are ongoing between the allies and they will not let matters progress as Washington wants,' she told Lebanon's al-Mayadeen channel, referring to the alliance of Assad, Russia, Iran and the Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah.

In his tweet on Wednesday, Trump referred to Assad as a 'gas killing animal'. The Syrian president on Wednesday made a public appearance with a group from an international Muslim body in Damascus.Advertisement

Israelis came to a halt to observe two minutes of solemn silence as a siren blared, marking the annual remembrance of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Drivers exited their vehicles and students at schools stood in ceremonies beginning with the siren at 10am on Wednesday, while outside shops and offices, Israelis stood still, many with heads bowed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended a wreath-laying ceremony at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial that night, alongside dignitaries, survivors and delegations from throughout Israel.

Israelis came to a halt to observe two minutes of solemn silence as a siren blared, marking the annual remembrance of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust

Drivers stop and stand in silence on a highway in Tel Aviv as Israel remembers the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust

They pulled over to the side of the road when a siren sounded at 10am on Wednesday for the time of remembrance

The Israeli leader compared the aggression of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which systematically killed six million Jews, to Iran and said neither were sufficiently challenged by Western powers.

'Today, too, there's an extremist regime that's threatening us, threatening the peace of the entire world. That regime explicitly declares that it intends on destroying us, the Jewish state,' he said of Iran.

'I have a message to the rulers of Iran - don't test Israel's resolve.'

Mr Netanyahu called on world governments to stand up to 'evil and aggression' days after Israeli missiles struck a Syrian airbase in retaliation for its chemical attack on civilians.

'The events of the last days teach that standing up to evil and aggression is a mission that is incumbent upon every generation,' he said.

'We saw the Syrian children who were slaughtered with chemical weapons. Our hearts were rent by the horrific sights... We nip the aggression in its bud. These aren't empty words, we back them up with action.'

Students at schools stood in ceremonies beginning with the siren at 10am on Wednesday, while outside shops and offices, Israelis stood still, many with heads bowed

Restaurants and cafes in the ordinarily bustling streets of Tel Aviv shuttered, and TV and radio stations played Holocaust-themed programs

Through the streets people of all walks of life stood together with their heads bowed for two minutes silence

People stop and stand in silence on a street in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv as sirens wailed across Israel for two minutes

Israel has refused to comment on Monday's airstrike that killed 14 people including several Irainian fighters loyal to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but U.S. officials confirmed it was responsible.

However, it has acknowledged carrying out dozens of air strikes in Syria since 2013 to stop what it said were advanced arms deliveries to Iran-backed Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite group fighting alongside Damascus.

Mr Netanyahu slammed the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers to halt its weapons program in exchange for relaxed sanctions, saying it wouldn't stop them.

'Signing the agreement with Iran not only didn't curb their aggression, it increased it,' he said, before going on to make an on-the-nose comparison to appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s.

'The lack of willingness among the powers of the West to stand firm in the face of the tyrannical regime, their lack of willingness to pay the price of stopping aggression at an early stage, led to humanity paying a much greater price later on.'

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended a wreath-laying ceremony at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial that night

The Israeli leader stood alongside dignitaries, survivors and delegations from throughout Israel to mark the occaison

The Israeli leader compared the aggression of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, which systematically killed six million Jews, to Iran and said neither were sufficiently challenged by Western powers

Elsewhere in the country, restaurants and cafes in the ordinarily bustling streets of Tel Aviv shuttered, and TV and radio stations played Holocaust-themed programs.

Holocaust survivors lit six torches at the Wednesday memorial to mark the six million Jews massacred by the Nazis during World War II.

An hour after the siren, members of the public were to recite names of Holocaust victims in the 'Unto Every Person There Is A Name' ceremony at Yad Vashem as well as in the Israeli parliament, or Knesset.

A third of the world's Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Israel was established afterward in 1948, and hundreds of thousands of survivors fled to the Jewish state.Richard Farnell denied being aware at the time of abuse occurring at the school

A former council leader 'shamefully' claimed he knew nothing about the sexual abuse of young boys in Rochdale, a bombshell report concluded today.

It also found the late politician Cyril Smith used his high standing to put pressure on people to keep quiet about abuse allegations and avoid prosecution.

Pupils at Knowl View residential school were sexually exploited in the town centre, the bus station and at public toilets across the road from the borough council's offices over a 20-year period.

Authorities in the Greater Manchester town showed a 'total lack of urgency' to address the sexual exploitation of boys at the council-run school who were regarded as 'authors of their own abuse'.

Richard Farnell, council leader from 1986 until 1992, denied being aware at the time of abuse occurring at the school for which he was ultimately responsible. But the report found: 'In the light of other evidence we heard, we did not believe him.'

Today, Labour suspended the serving councillor immediately after receiving the investigation's findings, with a party spokesman saying: 'The Labour Party condemns the abuse of children and any attempts to cover up these heinous acts.'

Former Liberal MP Cyril Smith (pictured in 1990) acted as a governor for several schools

He could now face a police probe into allegations that he committed perjury at the inquiry.

The inquiry heard that a paedophile called Roderick Hilton had been admitted to Knowl View in September 1990, where he had sexually abused at least one boy, but Mr Farnell insisted the information was not passed on to him.

The report said Hilton was 'well known to the staff of the school, who did nothing over many years to deter him targeting the school', and that he was imprisoned in 1991 for a series of child sexual offences.

It added: 'Despite this, on his release from prison on licence, he continued to be a malign presence at the school, 'little' was done to stop Hilton's continued access to the grounds and buildings.'

Mr Farnell said he was also unaware of a 1991 report submitted by a health authority worker which detailed claims that boys at Knowl View as young as eight were being sexually targeted by men from as far afield as Sheffield.

Mr Farnell, who regained the position as Labour council leader in 2014, quit his role just weeks after his appearance at the inquiry.

Smith is said to have been among those who preyed on youngsters at Knowl View School

The report said: 'It was shameful that he refused to accept any personal responsibility for the young lives blighted by what happened at the school while he was leader.

'Instead, he laid all blame for what occurred at the door of the senior ocials in education and social services.'

Following publication of the report today, Mr Farnell said he was 'deeply sorry' for the mistakes made by the council, but insisted: 'I told the truth.'

Cyril Smith could have been prosecuted but got a knighthood The late politician Cyril Smith could have prosecuted him but was instead given a knighthood, it emerged today. The child sexual abuse inquiry found a 'valuable opportunity' was missed to prosecute Rochdale's former Liberal MP during his lifetime in the late 1990s. Smith, a prominent councillor before he represented the town in Parliament from 1972 to 1992, acted as a governor for several Rochdale schools - including council-run Knowl View School, where victims were regarded as 'authors of their own abuse'. Before he died aged 82 in 2010 he was the subject of sex abuse accusations and investigations but never faced trial and received a knighthood in 1988. A Lancashire Police investigation into the MP concluded in 1970 - the year he first ran for public office - that he was hiding behind a 'veneer of respectability' and had used his 'unique position' to target eight boys at Cambridge House Boys' Hostel in Rochdale during the 1960s. But the then director of public prosecutions (DPP) Sir Norman Skelhorn chose not to charge him. From 1997 onwards Greater Manchester Police investigated allegations of physical and sexual abuse in residential homes, with the Lancashire Police file concerning Smith and a further witness statement submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service in 1998. Two additional statements were submitted in 1999. The IICSA panel said the CPS branch crown prosecutor advised Smith - the hostel's honorary secretary - should not be charged despite coming to the view there was a 'realistic prospect of conviction'. The panel said: 'His review of that advice in 1999 did not consider that those new complaints were capable of lending further support to the case. A valuable opportunity was, therefore, lost to prosecute Smith during his lifetime, and for the complainants to seek justice.' It also noted that Smith's 'ascent to a position of considerable prominence and respect' was marked in 1988 with a knighthood for his political services. Advertisement

The report also found former Liberal MP Smith sexually abused boys under the guise of 'medical examinations' of a boy's private parts, despite having no medical qualifications.

Smith punished the boys at the Cambridge House hostel in the Greater Manchester town for truancy, illness or absconding by spanking their bare bottom, according to the report.

But his strong interest in children in care went unchallenged by the local council and 'valuable opportunities' to charge him during his lifetime were lost.

Smith was a prominent councillor before he represented the town from 1972 to 1992 in Parliament, and he was awarded a knighthood in 1988 for his political services.

The report found there were 'frank discussions at the highest political level about the rumours in circulation about him, with no obvious concern for alleged victims'.

Instead, fears were raised over 'what would be fair to Smith and whether the honours system might subsequently be brought into disrepute'.

The report concluded: 'This demonstrated a considerable deference to power and an unwillingness to confront the possibility that a person of public prominence might be capable of perpetrating sexual abuse.'

The former Liberal MP is said to have been among those who preyed on youngsters at Cambridge House Boys' Hostel and Knowl View School.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) today released its findings on the claims surrounding the two establishments and others in the town where child placements were arranged or provided by Rochdale Borough Council.

The report declared that 'boys as young as 11 were not seen as victims, but as authors of their own abuse'.

Before he died aged 82 in 2010, 29-stone MP Smith was the subject of sex abuse accusations and investigations but never faced trial.

A Lancashire Police investigation into Smith concluded in 1970 - the year he first ran for public office - that he was hiding behind a 'veneer of respectability' and had used his 'unique position' to target eight boys at Cambridge House during the 1960s.

The boys said Smith spanked their bare bottoms and carried out intrusive medical examinations despite not being qualified to do so.

But the then director of public prosecutions (DPP) Sir Norman Skelhorn chose not to charge him.

Counsel to the inquiry Brian Altman QC said the security services were informed the Rochdale Alternative Press (RAP), which published an investigation into Smith in 1979, had been misled by the DPP's office which told the newspaper it had never received police reports of abuse by Smith.

The boys claimed that Smith (pictured at Rochdale Market in 1992) spanked their bare bottoms

Inquiry chair Professor Alexis Jay said: 'After listening to the evidence presented by a number of victims and survivors in Rochdale at the time, I am deeply disturbed at the evidence of extensive abuse and the institutional responses to that abuse.

'Many of those who testified to their abuse have never had the opportunity to seek justice through the courts. I hope that the public hearings and this report has offered them some measure of acknowledgement for their suffering.'

Before the public hearing sessions, council chief executive, Steve Rumbelow apologised for the authority's 'unforgivable' response to concerns over Knowl View.

Boys were sexually abused at building 'within view of council' Sexual exploitation of children from Knowl View School at a public toilet was known about by the authorities, but social workers did not act  despite being able to see the building from their offices, the report found. The report found workers at Rochdale Council recognised the boys as being in care and were 'deeply suspicious of what was going on, although there was no apparent follow-up'. It added: 'The records of individual children convey a total lack of urgency on the part of the authorities to address the problem and treat the matters involved for what they were  serious sexual assaults.' One boy's file recorded that he had contracted sexually transmitted hepatitis through 'rent boy' activities, and the report said: 'No one in authority viewed any of this as an urgent child protection issue' It also found police 'did not turn a blind eye to the sexual exploitation of boys' in the town centre, but did not obtain sucient evidence to prosecute. The report said there was evidence of a 'willingness on the part of police ocers to investigate', but 'there is no satisfactory answer as to why police did not charge anyone, despite knowing the names of men involved and obtaining some disclosures from the boys who were victims.' Advertisement

Earlier last year, Greater Manchester Police said it had found no evidence of a criminal cover-up of sexual abuse at Knowl View.

Mr Farnell said: 'Failures by Rochdale Council, the police and other agencies in protecting children from abuse should never have happened. The inquiry covered events going back 60 years.

'For the period in which I was leader of Rochdale Council from 1986 to 1992, I am deeply sorry and I apologise to all those who suffered as a result of the grave mistakes made and the unacceptable failings of the Council in respect of the children being cared for at Knowl View.

'However, I am shocked at the findings of the Inquiry. I told the truth. There is clear evidence that I was not informed about Knowl View during my time as leader.'

He added that the three most senior officers of the council responsible for informing and advising the council leader all said in evidence they did not tell him about Knowl View.

Mr Farnell also said that among the 140,000 pages of documents relating to Knowl View, there were no letters, memos, reports, council minutes or briefing notes addressed to him about the events at Knowl View.

He added: 'A two-year police investigation found no evidence whatsoever that I was involved in a cover-up of events at Knowl View. I now need time to consider the report in full before commenting further.'

Mr Farnell's Liberal Democrat successor, Paul Rowen, rejected the report's finding that he had at best been 'insufficiently inquisitive' and at worst 'turned a blind eye' to the abuse.

Mr Rowen, the town's one-time MP and leader of the council in the mid-1990s, said: 'I think that's ridiculous'.

But he went on: 'I have to accept the report's main findings, that over a 25-year period, up to the grooming of girls in 2005, there was a lack of safeguarding procedures`.

He claimed that as an opposition councillor up to 1992 he and his colleagues were 'ignored' by Mr Farnell and his ruling group.

The Rochdale Council offices (right, 1) were in full view of the Smith Street toilets (left, 1) where some of the abuse is said to have happened

'We were told nothing of Knowl View until two months before the election, because that's the way they ran the council.

'The area where we did fail was in not providing support and counselling for those boys who were abused. But on two occasions I asked the police to investigate the complaints, and they came back and said the boys weren't credible witnesses.

'Hindsight is a great thing, but I find it difficult to accept that I turned a blind eye. I acted on the advice I was given by chief officers. You have to understand that as councillors we are not professionals.

Known sex offender gained access to boys and assaulted one A known sex offender gained access to Knowl View School and the boys over two nights, when he indecently assaulted at least one of them, the report found. The incident involving Roderick Hilton, who had previously been convicted of sexually abusing a boy at Knowl View in 1984, happened in 1990. Hilton was well known to the staff of the school, who did nothing over many years to deter him targeting the school, according to the report. He was also found camping by the school's fence. Hilton was imprisoned in 1991 for a series of child sexual offences. The report found added: 'Despite this, on his release from prison on licence, he continued to be a malign presence at the school, 'little' was done to stop Hilton's continued access to the grounds and buildings.' Advertisement

'It was never once suggested to me by any officer that we should have been providing that counselling`.

Mr Rowen acknowledged that in his first week as leader he had the opportunity to read an historical account of what had happened, but had not done so because he was focussed on `the mess` the previous administration had left him in.

'I acted on everything that I was asked to do. If I had ignored advice then I think that would have been even worse.'

Richard Scorer, a specialist abuse lawyer from Slater and Gordon, which represents eight alleged victims, added: 'This report is a devastating indictment of decades of institutional failures to protect children from abuse and sexual exploitation.

'Our clients have waited decades for the truth to come out and this report confirms everything they have been saying for years.

'The report confirms what we said last October. Richard Farnell lied to the inquiry and it is now very clear that the Labour Party should have acted much more quickly to remove him as leader. He is unfit to be in public life.

'The report also confirms that Cyril Smith should have been prosecuted for sex offences and that the honours committee failed his alleged victims in recommending a knighthood.

'In the light of the report, Smith should now be stripped of his knighthood so that those he abused at least have the comfort of knowing that his depravity is now recognised by the establishment which protected him for so many years.'

One of Smith's alleged victims said: 'All this could have been stopped and the lives that were destroyed by this could have been saved. That's unforgivable and those responsible should hang their heads in shame.'

The review looks into the claims surrounding the two establishments and others in the town where child placements were arranged or provided by Rochdale Borough Council (pictured)

Greater Manchester Police assistant chief constable Debbie Ford said: 'GMP welcomed this inquiry from the beginning as it publicly scrutinised these difficult and complex issues.

'We have fully co-operated throughout and, today, we acknowledge its findings.

'This is a comprehensive report and we will now take time to fully understand the outcomes and any potential learnings.'

Rochdale MP 'told PA to destroy evidence of communication with social worker' Evidence from Knowl View social worker Martin Digan revealed how he found a review into sexual abuse at the school in the headteachers office. The report said he was astonished by discovering a difference between the Mellor report he had read during a meeting to present it in March 1992 at which he was present, and what he was now reading, and so he decided to copy the documents. Mr Digan said he had spoken to the sitting Liberal Democrat MP for Rochdale, Liz Lynne, who agreed to meet him, but then cancelled the appointment. Mr Digan said he spoke to Ms Lynnes PA, Deborah Doyle, whom he said had been instructed to destroy the documentation he had given her. He said he did not mean by that destruction of the dossier, but of the evidence of the communications he had had with Ms Lynne. Advertisement

It is understood the force will liaise with the inquiry in relation to any possible offences.

Daniel Wolstencroft, a member of the inquiry's victim and survivor consultative panel and a sexual abuse campaigner, said the publication of the report had been 'momentous' for the survivors and called for Mr Farnell to be held to account.

He said: 'These lads from the age of nine up to 11 came forward, said they were being sexually abused when they were in the care of Rochdale Borough Council, when they were in Knowl View and Cambridge House, and they have been branded liars.

'What we have today is a momentous occasion, a complete 360 turnaround where Richard Farnell has been called out, he's been called a liar, he's been proven to be a liar, the 360 turnaround is that's what happened to these lads.

'A lot of these lads aren't with us any more, a lot of these lads have taken their own lives.'

Steve Rumbelow, chief executive of Rochdale Borough Council, said: 'We acknowledge that, certainly in the case of Knowl View School, there were significant failures of leadership and management, and a failure to investigate concerns in order to protect children.

'While the inquiry found no evidence of cover-ups or political pacts, it is clear from its report that council officers and school staff failed in their most basic duty of care towards children.

'Although the failure to understand the risks at the time was not unique to Rochdale, the consequences of the failures for the children involved were exceptionally serious.

'The council has apologised and acknowledged that children were failed. I repeat that apology today and say again that we are truly sorry.'British Prime Minister Theresa May has met with her Cabinet, who agreed that the West should 'take action' against Syria following Saturday's chemical attack.

May also spoke with President Trump after the meeting, with the two agreeing the US and France must tackle the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad.

The Prime Minister is thought to have ordered Royal Navy submarines carrying cruise missiles into range of Syria.

But President Trump, after meeting with his national security team on Thursday, said he has not yet made a 'final decision' about how to respond to the attack in Douma.



LATEST:

Thursday 23:08 BST: Theresa May has agreed with President Trump that the UK should keep working closely together on the response to the chemical attack in Syria, Downing Street said.

Thursday 21:35 BST: President Trump has emerged from a meeting with his national security team but has not yet made a 'final decision' on how to respond to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, his press secretary said.

Thursday 20:37 BST: SNP defence spokesman Stewart McDonald has called on Theresa May to 'start the process of parliamentary recall' so MPs can sit on Saturday.

President Trump has emerged from a meeting with his national security team but has not yet made a 'final decision' on how to respond to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria

Thursday 19:54 BST: No 10 has said the Cabinet agreed to 'take action' against Syria to 'deter the further use of chemical weapons' after establishing it was 'highly likely' the Assad regime killed up to 75 people with chemical weapons in Douma.

Thursday 19:36 BST: Russia has called for a UN Security Council meeting on Syria for tomorrow, AFP reports.

It is clear that the Prime Minister is awaiting the conclusion of the US National Security Council meeting (understand 9pm). Having agreed the need for military action but with no detail, she should start the process of parliamentary recall to allow us to sit on Saturday. https://t.co/QGtEmM19Zr  Stewart McDonald MP (@StewartMcDonald) April 12, 2018

Thursday 18:42 BST: Russia's ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, has urged the US and its allies not to attack the Syrian regime in retaliation for the chemical attack, adding that its immediate priority is to 'avert the danger of war'.

Trump nominee Pompeo pledges to be tough on Russia, 'fix' Iran deal https://t.co/j0LcZ3Rdb6  Reuters Top News (@Reuters) April 12, 2018

Thursday 18:27 BST: The USA has requested the extradition of five Bulgarian citizens who are accused of breaching the embargo on Syria, Reuters reports.

Thursday 18:15 BST: A spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry has told Sky News that it will protect its people on the ground in Syria in the event of attacks on the country.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said he believes there was a chemical attack in Syria and said is 'looking for the actual evidence'

Thursday 18:14 BST: NBC News reports that US officials have identified the presence of chlorine and a nerve agent in blood and urine samples from victims of the Syrian gas attack.

Thursday 18:01 BST: Sweden has proposed a way for the paralysed UN Security Council to make progress on the Syria crisis by sending a disarmament team to the country to find out about chemical weapons there 'once and for all', AP reports.

Thursday 17:58 BST: US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said he believes there was a chemical attack in Syria and said is 'looking for the actual evidence'. Speaking to Congress, he added: 'As each day goes by  as you know, it is a non-persistent gas  so it becomes more and more difficult to confirm it.'

Thursday 17:30 BST: Reuters reports that Syria will hold the West responsible for any delay in the arrival of a mission from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to investigate the chemical attack.

Mattis says: 'I believe there was a chemical attack in Syria' https://t.co/s7zxzbKSin pic.twitter.com/IKFLFtGuFw  Reuters Top News (@Reuters) April 12, 2018

Thursday 17:10 BST: Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan has said President Trump has 'the authority he needs to do what he may or may not do' - and without congressional approval. He added that the US 'has an obligation' to respond to Assad, Iran and Russia after the 'mass atrocity'.

Thursday 16:56 BST: Sweden has circulated a draft UN resolution on sending a UN mission to Syria to rid the country of chemical weapons 'once and for all'.

US Official to NBC News: Syria samples test positive for chlorine gas, nerve agent  Jesse Rodriguez (@JesseRodriguez) April 12, 2018

Paul Ryan (pictured) said the US 'has an obligation' to respond to Assad, Iran and Russia after the 'mass atrocity'

Thursday 16:48 BST: Donald Trump has confirmed he will hold a meeting on the situation in Syria today. 'We're looking very very seriously very closely at that situation,' he said. 'It's too bad that the world puts us in a position like that.

'As I said this morning we've done a great job with ISIS.

'Now we have to make some more decisions.'

Thursday 16:43 BST: US Defence Secretary James Mattis has said he will discuss options on Syria at a National Security Council meeting today.

Trump says decisions 'fairly soon' on Syria https://t.co/cUJJYorKgL  Reuters Top News (@Reuters) April 12, 2018

Thursday 16:38 BST: CIA Director Mike Pompeo has called for 'more work to be done' in terms of sanctions for Russia, as Putin's fall-out with the West continues to unfold against the backdrop of the Syrian crisis.

Thursday 16:31 BST: Sweden has proposed a United Nations Security Council resolution to ask UN chief Antonio Guterres for a high-level disarmament team to be sent to Syria to address 'all outstanding issues on the use of chemical weapons once and for all'.

Thursday 16:20 BST: Syrian and Russian soldiers have been pictured waiting at the entrance of the Wafideen Camp as buses carrying Jaish al-Islam fighters and their family members approach. The fighters were evacuated from Douma today after Saturday's chemical weapons attack.

The Syrian and Russian military forces waited at the entrance to the camp as opposition fighters arrived following evacuation

Thursday 16:18 BST: Italy has announced it will not take part in any military action against Assad in Syria, but will provide logistical support to its allies. Caretaker Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni had numerous 'international' contacts on Thursday, including with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Thursday 16:16 BST: Conservative deputy chairman James Cleverly MP has told Sky News there is an international consensus that the use of chemical weapons is 'absolutely beyond the pale' as Prime Minister Theresa May decides how Britain will respond to the Syrian situation.

The UK's home secretary, Amber Rudd, is pictured arriving at Downing Street this morning after Theresa May summoned the 'war cabinet'

Thursday 16:03 BST: US Defence Secretary James Mattis said the use of chemical weapons in Syria is 'simply inexcusable, beyond the pale and in the worst interest of not just the chemical weapons convention but of civilization itself'.

Thursday 16:03 BST: The Scottish National Party has warned UK Prime Minister Theresa May not to 'plough ahead' with strikes on Syria, echoing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's and Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable's demands for Parliament to have a say.

.@IanBlackfordMP of @theSNP 's full letter to the PM in advance of Cabinet meeting. Calling for Parliament recall on Saturday. Rash, closed-door decision on military action is not the answer. Parliament must have debate and vote. pic.twitter.com/mrcEyyao3r  Lynsey-anne Marwick (@la_lams) April 12, 2018

Signs that @realDonaldTrump and @EmmanuelMacron may now be holding back as #AssadRegime moves key military assets behind #Russian defences. Very dangerous. Essential for @theresa_may to seek #Parliament approval for any action.  Vince Cable (@vincecable) April 12, 2018

Thursday 16:02 BST: A 'war cabinet' meeting is underway at 10 Downing Street, as Sky News reports it is unlikely the UK Parliament will be consulted on military action against Syria, bucking the convention of recent years.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, Attorney General Jeremy Wright, and Secretary of State for Defence Gavin Williamson arrive for today's 'war cabinet'

Thursday 15:56 BST: US Defence Secretary James Mattis has told Congress that Russia is complicit in Syria's retention of chemical weapons. He confirmed that he believes a chemical attack took place in Douma on Saturday.

Thursday 15:45 BST: US Defence Secretary James Mattis has said that his country is committed to ending the Syrian civil war using the Geneva process. The United Nations ambassador for Syria has announced the chemical weapons watchdog will arrive in his country today.

US Defence Secretary presents White House with military options as Syria crisis deepens https://t.co/HQ0Rw9SKht pic.twitter.com/90aMVtB9lD  The National (@TheNationalUAE) April 11, 2018

Thursday 15:40 BST: Moscow has refused to accept the conclusions of the OPCW report on the Salisbury spy poisoning after the watchdog said Novichok was used against Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. 'Russia won't take on faith any conclusion relating to the Skripal affair until such a time as Russian experts are allowed access to the samples mentioned,' foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

Thursday 15:39 BST: Protesters are interrupting the start of current CIA Director Mike Pompeo's hearing in the Senate to be the next secretary of state by chanting 'no Pompeo' and 'no more war'. In prepared remarks for his confirmation, Pompeo chastised Russia for acting 'aggressively' and said Trump considers Russia 'a danger to our country'. He stressed America's 'duty to lead' but also says diplomatic efforts 'must continue'.

Protesters voice their opposition as CIA Director Mike Pompeo prepares to testify before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing

Thursday 15:23 BST: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia needs to study the OPCW report, TASS news agency reports. The global chemical weapons watchdog concluded on Thursday that the lethal poison that struck Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia last month in England was a highly pure type of Novichok nerve agent, backing Britain's findings. Ryabkov said Russia would not give its view on the report before being able to study it.

Thursday 15:21 BST: The Russian Foreign Ministry says there is reason to believe the OPCW report on the nerve agent used in Salisbury is part of a British operation to discredit Russia.

Thursday 14:59 BST: The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said that the Skripals are being held in isolation. She said no one except British authorities had seen poisoned former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia for over a month, contrasting the situation with the case of Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB agent who died in 2006 in London after drinking green tea laced with radioactive polonium. She said that at least a photograph of Litvinenko had appeared after his poisoning.

Thursday 14:57 BST: Ministers for the British government are entering 10 Downing Street to meet with prime minister Theresa May, who has summoned her 'war cabinet'.

Thursday 14:51 BST: In a press briefing this afternoon, the Russian Foreign Ministry's Maria Zakharova said her country is 'not seeking escalation', and told Western countries considering military action: 'Nobody has authorised Western leaders to take on the role of global police - simultaneously investigator, prosecution, judge and executor.'

The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry (pictured) accused the UK of engaging in 'provocation against the Russian Federation'

Thursday 14:45 BST: The German Foreign Ministry has said Russia must address open questions about the use of a nerve agent in Salisbury, UK.

Thursday 14:28 BST: The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, accused the UK of engaging in 'provocation against the Russian Federation'. Expressing anger that Britain has not shared images of the Sergei Skripal and his daughter, she said Russia is not 'standing aside if London doesn't want to listen to our requests to be involved in the investigation'. She accused UK authorities of 'incoherence' and 'a lot of stupid leakages' as well as 'emotional statements made by Theresa May.

The first question to Maria Zakharova (Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson) at her weekly briefing is about the British "provocation." She says it is linked to Syria, to the general anti-Russian narrative, and the internal narrative in Britain around things like Brexit.  Daniel Sandford (@BBCDanielS) April 12, 2018

Thursday 14:20 BST: Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman has urged the world to consider the consequences of threats made over Syria and called on the World Health Organisation to remain impartial.

Thursday 14:17 BST: Turkish President Erdogan has spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone about the situation in Syria.

BREAKING  President Erdogan, his Russian counterpart Putin speak on the phone regarding latest developments in Syria, agree to maintain dialoguehttps://t.co/q1dIk1tZfK pic.twitter.com/JRGpgwV5OX  DAILY SABAH (@DailySabah) April 12, 2018

Thursday 14:10 BST: Russia's Foreign Ministry had said Putin's troops found no evidence of a chemical attack in Douma on Saturday, referring to it as 'mythical'.

Thursday 14:06 BST: Britain has requested a UN Security Council meeting based on the OPCW report.

Thursday 13:46 BST: The SNP has said Theresa May must recall Parliament to allow MPs to debate on the UK's response to Syria's suspected use of chemical weapons. SNP Westminster Leader Ian Blackford said: 'Theresa May must recall Parliament on Saturday so that MPs can discuss the suspected use of chemical weapons in Syria, and the appropriate response to these abhorrent attacks.'

Thursday 13:26 BST: Rebels in Syria's Eastern Ghouta surrendered their heavy weapons and their leader left the enclave today, signalling the end of the seven-year civil war, AFP reports. British based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said: 'Jaish al-Islam fighters handed over their heavy weapons to Russian military police in the town of Douma on Wednesday.'

Thursday 13:22 BST: Photo confirmation, released by the official Syrian news agency SANA, of Bashar al-Assad meeting with Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Damascus, Syria.

In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian president Bashar Assad, left, meets with Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Damascus, Syria

The pair met as Western forces weigh up military options against Assad following a chemical attack earlier this week

Thursday 13:20 BST: British jets are being prepared in Norfolk today as they get ready to join Syrian air strikes. Engineers were seen checking over the fighter jets at RAF Marham as Theresa May and her cabinet draw up plans for British military action.

A Tornado jet at RAF Marham in Norfolk on Thursday April 12th as they prepare for a possible strike on Syria

The jets in Norfolk are getting ready to join the Syrian air strikes - following today's special cabinet meeting

Thursday 13:12 BST: Italian President Sergio Mattarella sought reassurances from political leaders that they would adhere to Italy's NATO commitments. 'There's no doubt he (Mattarella) is worried,' a source in the president's office told Reuters, adding he wanted guarantees from party chiefs that they backed Italy's well-established Western military allegiances. La Repubblica newspaper reported on Thursday that Mattarella wanted to speed up the coalition talks to give Italy a fully fledged government as soon as possible to deal with Syria.

Thursday 12:51 BST: The top adviser to Iran's supreme leader says he hopes Assad and his allies would 'expel the occupying Americans' out of eastern Syria and take Idlib in the northwest from insurgents. 'Idlib is an important Syrian city, and we hope it will be liberated very soon,' Ali Akbar Velayati said in Damascus.

Thursday 12:46 BST: Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, has claimed there is 'tremendous unity' across the West on how to deal with the situation in Syria.

Thursday 12:38 BST: German Chancellor Angela Merkel says her country will not join any strikes on Syria and called for a whole spectrum of measures to be considered. Speaking Berlin, she said it is 'obvious' that Syria didn't eradicate chemical arsenal.

Thursday 12:25 BST: The UK has called for a meeting with global watchdog on April 18 to discuss nerve agent attack. The government called for a session of the executive council of the OPCW after the body issued a report confirming Britain's findings on the identity of a nerve agent used in an attack last month. The Russian Embassy in London said it also wants talks.

It is precisely Russia and Syria who are urgently inviting @opcw to Douma. Hope UK will not obstruct the visit. pic.twitter.com/5qQx9lsWa9  Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) April 12, 2018

Thursday 12:17 BST: French President Emmanuel Macron said France would respond to 'proof' Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons 'at a time of our choosing, when we judge it to be the most useful and the most effective'.

Nous avons la preuve que des armes chimiques ont ete utilisees par le regime de Bachar el-Assad. #EMacronTF1 pic.twitter.com/CaJJ19wdOp  Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) April 12, 2018

Thursday 12:12 BST: British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says there can be 'no doubt' Novichok was used in Salisbury and has demanded answers from the Kremlin. 'There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible - only Russia has the means, motive and record,' he added, pledging to send the report to Vladimir Putin's government.

Thursday 12:09 BST: French President Emmanuel Macron says he has proof that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on Saturday.

Thursday 12:06 BST: Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable says his party does not rule out military action in Syria, but told Sky News that Prime Minister Theresa May will have to make a compelling case for him to back the action.

Thursday 12:04 BST: The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has said an analysis of samples collected after the Salisbury nerve agent attack confirm the findings of the UK 'relating to the identity of the toxic chemical' used in the incident. The OPCW noted that the chemical was of 'high purity' with an 'almost complete absence' of any impurities.

Thursday 11:47 BST: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told Sky News in Derby, England, that the Syrian regime should be held to account by international law and sanctions if necessary, re-iterating that he did not back military action after Saturday's chemical attack.

Jeremy Corbyn: MPs must authorise Syria action - not May's war cabinet pic.twitter.com/8NFkAQa1Mu  Aubrey Allegretti (@breeallegretti) April 12, 2018

Thursday 11:39 BST: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has warned Western threats will lead to further chaos in the region. 'These voices, and any possible actions, will only contribute to further destabilisation in the region, he said, during a meeting with Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign policy advisor to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Thursday 11:29 BST: Germany's foreign minister says it expects to be consulted before any Western allies conduct an attack on Assad's forces. Heiko Maas says 'it's important at the same time to maintain pressure on Russia', adding 'if we want to do that, we the Western partners cannot diverge in our approaches'. Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke with Emmanuel Macron today to express concerns that the ability to ban chemical weapons was eroding.

Thursday 11:20 BST: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn demanded that MPs should be consulted before the UK joined any attack on Syria, citing 'the lessons of Iraq' regarding evidence used in the case for war. 'Parliament must be consulted on this,' he said. 'The dangers of bombing now, which could escalate the conflict beyond belief. Just imagine the scenario if an American missile shoots down a Russian plane or vice versa. Where do we go from there?'

Thursday 11:18 BST: A top Iranian official is meeting with Bashar al-Assad as the Syrian dictator says threats made against Syria by Western states are based on lies, reports the Syrian Arab News Agency.

Thursday 11:14 BST: Donald Trump has Tweeted saying that he never said when an attack on Assad would take place.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2018

Thursday 11:13 BST: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he will speak with Vladimir Putin about how their countries can stop chemical attacks in Syria. Erdogan says he is 'extremely worried' by the 'arm wrestling' of world powers over Syria. He will speak to Putin later today on 'how we stop this chemical massacre' after Saturday's attack reportedly killed dozens.

Thursday 11:11 BST: French President Emmanuel Macron will give a television interview around midday amid speculation that his country could intervene in Syria.

Thursday 11:06 BST: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has condemned Donald Trump's rhetoric on Syria and said: 'More bombing, more killing, more war will not save life.'

Thursday 10:55 BST: Thousands of Syrians from the city of Douma were seen arriving in Aleppo in pictures that emerged this morning. The 18th convoy brought civilians and opposition fighters as 74 buses carried 3,548 people, including 1,346 children and 877 women, who will be provided with temporary accommodation in Al-Bab's temporary refugee camps.

Children as well as opposition fighters were seen arriving in Aleppo last night following the chemical attack on Saturday

Thousands arrived in Aleppo as 74 buses carried 1,346 children as well as 877 women and transported opposition fighters to safety

Thursday 10:33 BST: Communications between the US and Russian forces in Syria are 'active': The Kremlin announced a special hotline has opened for both military deployments to talk. 'This line exists and it's in an active state,' spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding that the line intended to prevent accidental clashes 'is used by both sides'.

Thursday 10:17 BST: The Kremlin says Russia is paying close attention to statements issued from Washington about the situation in Syria. It says there is currently no planned phone call between presidents Putin and Trump.

Thursday 10:13 BST: GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming has spoken out against the Kremlin at the CyberUK conference in Manchester. Citing the Novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the British intelligence head said the incident demonstrated 'how reckless Russia is prepared to be' and that Assad's biggest ally cares little 'for international rules-based order'.

Thursday 09:48 BST: Brexit secretary David Davis - who opposed action against Assad when David Cameron was the prime minister, has said that he does not have the same concerns about striking Syria as he did then, Mirror Online reports. He said the UK must make 'very careful, very deliberate judgment'.

David Davis says he doesnt have the same concerns about military action in Syria as he did in 2013 when he voted against Camerons strikes  Henry Zeffman (@hzeffman) April 12, 2018

Thursday 09:43 BST: UK former intelligence chief Sir John Sawers has backed retaliation against Bashar al-Assad. But he also told BBC Radio 4's Today show that Donald Trump was wrong to communicate with Moscow over Twitter. Sir John - who led MI6 from 2009 to 2014 - said the president was right that action is needed, adding the international taboo against chemical weapons use must be restored.

Thursday 08:31 BST: Russia has announced Syrian forces have retaken Eastern Ghouta after satellite images appeared to show Putin's warships being deployed. A Syrian flag is flying at the location of the chemical attack on Saturday,The Guardian reports.

Russian military police enters Douma, East Ghouta, from Thursday 12 April. They will secure order and aid distribution, ready to ensure work of OPCW mission pic.twitter.com/rjehhgdrcB  Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) April 11, 2018

Thursday 03.00 BST: Tomahawks, jets and submarines stand ready to punish Syria after Trump promised Russia that missiles are 'coming'. The US navy stands ready to deploy jets and submarines too, should the Americans make good on the president's threat, according to CNN.

Two US Navy destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles are in position and ready to be called into action, among other assets including jets and submarines, should President Trump make good on his threat to order a military strike on targets in Syria https://t.co/XcreDLtf1A pic.twitter.com/Lo5VsoCSu9  CNN (@CNN) April 12, 2018

Wednesday 23:00 BST: UK prime minister Theresa May announces cabinet meeting after declaring that the use of chemical weapons cannot go unpunished. The Prime Minister summoned ministers back to London to seek their support for joining an American-led attack on the Assad regime within days. She said all indications suggested that Bashar Assad's forces were responsible for Saturday's atrocity near Damascus.

Wednesday 06:57 BST: US President Donald Trump Tweets: 'Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!'Britain will be able to negotiate a bigger trade deal with Canada after Brexit, Justin Trudeau has said.

The Canadian Prime Minister said it would be 'fairly easy' to thrash out a new agreement after the UK quits the EU.

His comments are a boost for the Government which has said that Brexit will provide the UK with new opportunities to get bigger and better trade deals globally.

Mr Trudeau Britain's departure will allow Canada to negotiate a larger and 'more impactful' trade deal with the UK than its current one with the EU.

He said: 'Trade deals are always challenging but it should be fairly easy for all of us to get to an improved approach on trade between Canada and the UK.'

The Canadian Prime Minister (pictured last week) said it would be 'fairly easy' to thrash out a new agreement after the UK quits the EU

Canada currently has a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta) with the EU which took seven years to agree.

In an interview with The Times, Mr Trudeau said that agreement 'is obviously a deal that was designed for the entire European Union'.

'There will be things in Ceta that are no longer as necessary between Canada and the UK and there'd be other areas where we would be interested in going further.'

He added: 'The rolled-over or specific Ceta arrangement between Canada and the UK is just the floor, or the first step.'

His comments are a boost for Theresa May (pictured yesterday in Birmingham) which has said that Brexit will provide the UK with new opportunities to get bigger and better trade deals globally

'After that, we very much look forward to negotiating an even better or larger or more impactful deal to encourage the deepening of trade ties between Canada and the UK.'

His comments come ahead of a meeting of the head of the Commonwealth nations next week.

But in gloomier news for Theresa May, India has cast doubt over how easy it will be to strike a post Brexit trade deal.

India's deputy high commissioner said that reaching any trade agreement would be 'a very tedious process'.

Dinesh Patnaik said: 'There are a million small things to decide. It will take a very long time to do.'An American woman whose husband died fighting for ISIS has spoken about life in the 'caliphate capital' in Syria for the first time.

Sam El Hassani claims her husband Moussa tricked her into crossing the Syrian border during a holiday to Turkey in 2015, where he joined ISIS as a jihadist fighter.

She reveals she found herself living with their children in Raqqa, along with two Yazidi girls her husband kept as slaves in their home, which he 'repeatedly raped'.

Speaking out: Sam El Hassani, from Indiana, U.S., spent two years in ISIS's then-capital Raqqa in Syria with her ISIS fighter husband

In a documentary for PBS Frontline and BBC Panorama, Mrs El Hassani details how she went from happily married in Indiana to a widow with four children in a Kurdish prison in Syria.

The couple had been married for five years and were living 'a great life' in Indiana with their two children.

But - she claims - she did not see that her husband, a Moroccan national, was becoming radicalized, and in 2015 he lured her and the children into Syria and to ISIS's now-defeated 'capital'.

'We ended up in Raqqa,' she says in an interview from the upcoming documentary.

'The first thing I say to him is, "Youre crazy and Im leaving," and he said, with a big smile on his face, "Go ahead. You can try, but you wont make it..'

Childhood destroyed: The couple's oldest child Matthew is seen in the U.S. before the move left, and right, as a puppet in an ISIS propaganda video in Raqqa last summer

Happier times: The couple are seen on their wedding day in Indiana in 2011

When asked why she did not take her children and run, she says; 'You have to understand, I was afraid for our lives.'

During their time in Raqqa, Mrs El Hassani had two more children, and was forced to watch her oldest son used in an ISIS propaganda video that shocked the world.

Last July, ten-year-old Matthew could be seen calling U.S. President Donald Trump 'a puppet of the Jews' in a video which saw him threaten terrorist attacks on the West.

'Allah has promised us victory and promised you defeat,' Matthew is seen saying while standing on the rubble of bombed buildings in Raqqa.

'The battle is not going to end in Raqqa or Mosul, its going in your lands. By the will of Allah, we will have victory, so get ready for the fighting has just begun.'

Changed man: Mrs El Hassani claims her husband Moussa, pictured in the U.S. before joining ISIS, became radicalised and tricked her into taking their children to ISIS in Syria

Shocking: Matthew's face was seen around the world in the 2017 propaganda video where he called Trump ' a puppet of the Jews' and threatened terror attacks on the U.S.

Mrs El Hassani says she understands how the video can make it look like her son poses a danger to the U.S., but insists that this is only because this was ISIS's goal.

'Thats the way its meant to look. Its propaganda. But how can you convince somebody that sees something like that? I dont know.'

Moussa died fighting for ISIS last year, and Sam and their now four children were captured by U.S.-backed Kurdish forces when Raqqa fell.

The interviews for the Frontline and BBC film were carried out under supervision from her Kurdish guards, but despite being imprisoned, she told the documentary makers she had no desire to go back to the U.S.

Her family are trying to help them return to the U.S., but in the documentary, even Mrs El Hassani's sister Lori acknowledges that she is likely to be sent to prison.A high school student is suing his principal for putting him an isolated cubicle for wearing T-shirts with guns and grenades on them.

Matthew Schoenecker was told to change or cover weapons depicted on his shirts or spend the day isolated from his classmates at Markesan High School in Wisconsin.

It was two particular shirts  one with a variety of weapons and the words 'Celebrate Diversity' and another that spells out LOVE with a handgun, a grenade, two knives and an assault rifle  that were too deemed 'inappropriate' by principal John Koopman, USA Today reports.

So he decided to defend what he calls First Amendment Right to support the Second Amendment by suing Koopman.

Matthew Schoenecker was told to change or cover weapons depicted on his shirts or spend the day isolated from his classmates at Markesan High School in Wisconsin. Pictured left, the freshman in the offending shirt and right, in the cubicle

The lawsuit, filed in Milwaukee on Monday, names Koopman as the only defendant.

It claims the principal violated Schoenecker's freedom of expression by forbidding him from wearing shirts that show weapons in 'a non-violent, non-threatening manner.'

It alleges that since Koopman determines personally on a case-by-case basic which shirts are appropriate for school and which are not, Schoenecker was denied due process.

Schoenecker told WISN: 'I didn't think it would get this big, this bad.

'I enjoy shooting, and I enjoy the Second Amendment, like the right to keep and bear arms.'

His father, Brian, defended his decision and says he has the right to express himself.

He said: 'It was his choice, whether he wears it or not. He decided "I'm gonna wear this. It's my right."

'When I heard about it, I was a little upset of course, and said we got to get down there and see what's going on.'

The lawsuit comes after Koopman told Schoenecker and his parents at a meeting last month that he can restrict items of clothing at school that he feels are inappropriate.

It was two particular shirts  one with a variety of weapons and the words 'Celebrate Diversity' and another that spells out LOVE with a handgun, a grenade, two knives and an assault rifle  that were too deemed 'inappropriate' by principal John Koopman

Schoenecker (pictured left) decided to defend what he calls First Amendment Right to support the Second Amendment by suing Koopman

The school doesn't have any explicit rules prohibiting shirts with guns.

Koopman said that if Schoenecker wore such a shirt, he would be asked to change, cover it or turn it inside out.

If he refused, he would have to spend the day in a small office space with no instruction from teachers.

On Friday, Schoenecker was sent to Koopman's office after wearing the LOVE shirt to school.

He was sent to the cubicle after refusing to remove it.

His attorney John Monroe has successfully represented many gun owners in the state, according to USA Today.

He was referred the case by advocacy group Wisconsin Carry Inc.  which Schoenecker's parents belong to.

The group's president Nick Clark said Schoenecker's parents said their son was being harassed by teachers in the wake of the Parkland school shooting  but he'd been wearing them without any issues all year.A British Airways air hostess was more than ten times over the alcohol limit after drinking of bottles vodka miniatures while working on a long-haul flight.

Patricia Casey, 51, of Camberley, Surrey, downed eight shots of the spirit while working aboard a BA Boeing 787 flight from Singapore.

But a passenger smelt alcohol on her breath and the divorced mother-of-two was arrested at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5 when it touched down on February 21.

Patricia Casey, 51, of Camberley, Surrey, downed eight shots of the spirit while working aboard a BA Boeing 787 flight from Singapore. But a passenger smelt alcohol on her breath and the divorced mum-of-two was arrested at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5 when it touched down

Initially she lied to police that she had drank while on duty but then admitted she had been 'silly' in having the sneaky drinks.

Tests two hours later showed she had 201mg of alcohol in 100ml of blood - ten times over the legal limit of 20mg allowed for air crews.

At Uxbridge Magistrates' Court she admitted drinking while on duty ending an 'unblemished' 21-year career as a flight attendant.

The softly spoken defendant cried as the court heard she had been self-medicating with alcohol while divorcing her husband of 18 years.

Jasper Kaur, prosecuting, said: 'At 3.27pm officers were patrolling Heathrow Airport when they were requested to attend British Airways Crew Reporting Centre in Terminal 5.

'At this location a member of the cabin crew had been stopped following her flight. Whilst on board a passenger had complained that alcohol could be smelt on that crew member.'

He told the court the flight's Cabin Services Manager spoke to Casey on the flight after being alerted to the complaint.

Ms Kaur added Casey claimed 'she had not had any food or drink' on board the flight.

But once removed to a private room in the terminal Casey admitting guzzling the vodka to police.

Ms Kaur said: 'She then informed one of the officers that she had been very silly and it was her fault and she had drank four Vodka miniatures on duty during the course of the flight.

She was then cautioned and at a police station blew 81mg per 100ml of breath two hours later - over twice the drink drive limit of 35mg per 100ml.

A blood sample was taken and Ms Kaur added it had '201 micrograms per 100ml of blood and the legal limit is 20micrograms, as a result she is now before the courts'.

Shan Yaqub, in mitigation for Casey, said: 'She was reported by one of the passengers however there's no suggestion this affected her behaviour.

'It's simply the case someone had smelt alcohol in her breath and reported her to a member of the crew.

'She is suspended from work, of course following this conviction she will be permanently losing her job.

'She won't be able to work in the industry where she has worked in the last 21 years.

'She has been a flight attendant for over 21 years, she has an unblemished record, she has never had any issues in the past for her behaviour.

'She was going through a messy divorce at the time, she has been in a relationship for 18 years, she has had two children with her partner.

'She decided to self medicate and was drinking more than she should have and on this occasion drank at work. She tells me she is not drinking alcohol now.'

Casey was fined 300 and ordered to pay prosecution costs of 85 and a 30 victim surcharge.

She was convicted of one count of performing an aviation function while impaired by drink under the Railways and Transport Safety Act 2003.The UN has warned Russia and the US against letting the crisis over the Syrian gas attack 'spiral out of control' after Donald Trump warned 'missiles will be coming'.

With tensions mounting in the Middle East this morning, the Kremlin said a crisis hotline with America - designed to avoid an accidental clash in Syria - was 'active' and being used by both sides.

Opponents of unilateral US action have today called an emergency closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council while Britain has scheduled an emergency cabinet meeting over the crisis, sparked by a horrifying gas attack on a rebel-held town in Syria.

With punitive US military action seemingly imminent, Russia scrambled to deflect blame from Syria's Bashar al-Assad. According to a monitor group, regime forces have evacuated key defence buildings in Damascus.

Trump's threat of strikes came in response to a warning from Russia's ambassador to Beirut, who took to a television network run by the armed group Hezbollah to declare that any US missiles would be shot down 'as well as the sources they were fired from.'

The UN has warned world powers against letting the crisis over Syria's latest chemical outrage 'spiral out of control' after US President Donald Trump warned 'missiles will be coming'. Pictured: Russia President Vladimir Putin (left) and his US counterpart Donald Trump (right)

The U.S. has maintained its threat of rocket attacks in response to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's sickening chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday

Russian President Vladimir Putin (centre) is pictured with Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin (left) and Russian Deputy Prime Minister and Head of Roscosmos Supervisory committee, Dmitry Rogozin (right) during a visit to an exhibition centre in Moscow today

In December Putin (pictured today) made a surprise visit to the airbase in Latakia where he ordered a partial pullout of the country's troops, saying their task had been largely completed

If the US action follows the pattern of a previous strike on Syria last year, it will begin with a salvo of cruise missiles fired from American warships in the Mediterranean, as Trump implied when he tweeted they would be 'nice, new and 'smart'.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis as well as CIA director Mike Pompeo met at the White House on Wednesday to discuss options, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

With the UN Security Council failing thus far to find a diplomatic solution, Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that time was running out.

'Today, I called the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the Security Council to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse and stressed the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control,' he said, referring to the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain.

One of Trump's allies, French President Emmanuel Macron, said this morning that he would respond to 'proof' that Assad's regime had used chemical weapons, 'at a time of our choosing'.

'We have proof that... chemical weapons were used, at least chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad,' Macron said during an interview on France's TF1 television.

Macron said that he would respond 'at a time of our choosing, when we judge it to be the most useful and the most effective.'

Russian President Vladimir Putin today visited an exhibition centre as part of Russia's Cosmonautics Day

Russian President Vladimir Putin (left, today) spoke to his Turkish counterpart, Tayyip Erdogan, by phone on Thursday and discussed the situation in Syria

With Donald Trump vowing to launch airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad's regime in the wake of the dictator's latest horrifying gas attack, military chiefs will already have drawn up a list of targets in Syria.

As Trump and his Western allies continue to consider what action to take, here are some of the potential sites that could end up in the firing line:

Chemical weapons factories

Masyaf Scientific Studies and Research Centre

Western powers suspect the site, in the west of the country, produces chlorine gas and the explosive canisters used to drop it on people. Israel launched a missile strike on the site in September last year. A nearby base storing surface-to-surface missiles was also hit, monitors said.

Jamraya Scientific Studies and Research Centre

Western intelligence has claimed this site is one of three used to produce chemical weapons - despite being promoted as a civilian research facility.

Barzeh facility

Believed to specialise in installing chemical weapons on long-range missiles and artillery. In February intelligence from an unnamed UN member state suggested North Korean technicians 'continue to operate at chemical weapons and missile facilities at Barzeh, Adra and Hama'.

Air bases

Khmeimim

The airbase on the western coast is packed with Russian fighter planes, bombers and military hardware and would therefore be seen as a high risk target. It is thought to be protected by Russia's fearsome S-300 and S-400 air missile defence systems and has been strategically important for Moscow as its forces prop up Assad's regime.

In December Putin made a surprise visit to the airbase in Latakia where he ordered a partial pullout of the country's troops, saying their task had been largely completed.

Khmeimim airbase on Syria's western coast is packed with Russian fighter planes, bombers and military hardware - including the S-400 missile defence system (pictured) and would therefore be seen as a high risk target

Russia said, however, that the airbase, set up in 2015, would remain in operation permanently and today few believe Russia is leaving the war-torn country any time soon.

Tiyas

Also known as T-4, this key military outpost is one of Syria's largest airbases consisting of 60 shelters and four squadrons. It is positioned to the west of the ancient city of Palmyra.

Forces from regime allies Russia and Iran, as well as fighters from the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, are known to have a presence at the base.

In December 2016, ISIS fanatics attacked the base a day after overrunning pro-government forces in nearby Palmyra. The terrorists claimed to have destroyed four Syrian military aircraft.

Israel carried out strikes against a Syrian government base in the country's centre in February, with war monitors identifying it at the time as T-4

In February this year, Israel's Air Force launched an attack on the airbase, destroying the main observation tower, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Israel was accused of launching a bombing raid on the same site on April 9 in the wake of a horrifying chemical attack in Douma.

The base was used by the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s for the occasional deployment of naval aircraft.

Al Typhur

Syrian planes have been evacuated from the Damascus base and positioned closer to Russian forces after the chemical attack in Douma.

Al-Dumayr

Base, 25 miles north east of Damascus, from which Assad's planes are believed to have launched Saturday's chemical attack in Douma, according to experts. The facility is home to Syrian Mi-8 helicopters.

Shayrat

In April last year Donald Trump ordered limited missile strikes on the airbase in response to a chemical weapons attack on rebel-held Khan Sheikhun.

Official said at the time he was moved by images brought to him by his daughter Ivanka and other White House officials.

In April last year Donald Trump ordered limited missile strikes on the Shayrat airbase (pictured) in response to a chemical weapons attack on rebel-held Khan Sheikhun

The US President authorised the firing of 59 cruise missiles from the USS Ross and USS Porter in the eastern Mediterranean at around 3.45am local time in an attack lasting for up to four minutes.

Each missile was programmed with a specific target, including the base's control tower, radar installations, fuelling stations and ammunition dumps.

Naval bases

Tartus

Russia's naval headquarters in Syria which Vladimir Putin vowed to expand.

But satellite pictures have emerged this week showing warships appear to have deserted the base amid fears over possible US airstrikes.

Overhead Images show how at least 11 navy vessels, including the frigate Admiral Grigorovich, appear to have left the port on the Syrian coast, which is understood to be protected by Moscow's fearsome S-300 and S-400 missile defence systems.

Satellite pictures have emerged showing how Russian warships appear to have deserted one of its key naval bases in Syria amid fears of a US airstrike. This image shows some of the vessels recently seen at the base

Overhead Images show how at least 11 navy vessels, including the frigate Admiral Grigorovich, have left the Tartus military base on the Syrian coast. This picture, apparently taken on Wednesday, shows how only a kilo-class submarine remains in the port, which is understood to be protected by Moscow's fearsome S-300 and S-400 missile defence systems

The exact reason for the ships' movements is not yet clear, but some have speculated that the vessels are simply on a training exercise or that they may have been deployed in readiness to intercept missiles.

Other sites

El-Kiswah

The Iranian military headquarters in Syria, set up in Syrian army compound eight miles south of Damascus. Tehran is understood to have up to 15,000 troops deployed in Syria.

Presidential Palace

The official residence of President Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus. which is protected by anti aircraft missiles.Cops staked out the gang after the death of a 22-year-old in Bay Ridge in 2016

Four men have been charged arrested charged with sale of a criminal substance

The drug ring was reportedly flooding areas of New York with deadly fentanyl

Police have conducted a major gang bust after nearly a year of surveillance - seizing $600,000 in cash, a Lamborghini, four guns and roughly 22 pounds of narcotics.

Cops managed to bust a drug ring that was allegedly flooding Brooklyn and Queens with deadly prescription painkiller fentanyl.

Raiding buildings in Long Island City, New York City and Jamaica - the narcotics officers recovered a remarkable horde of goods belonging to the gang.

Police raided the hideout at 8pm Tuesday and found Sharrow, Vallecillo and a third man inside the apartment, finding 'drugs and money strewn around,' the Special Narcotics Prosecutor's office said.

The arrests were the result of a year-long wiretap investigation which started after the deaths of a 22-year-old in 2016 a 42-year-old in 2017 both from overdoses.

Police seized a Lamborghini Huracan in the remarkable raid on the peddlers of the deadly narcotics

Dionne Sharrow, aka 'Slay', (pictured) was the drug gang's reported ring leader and organiser

Dionne 'Slay' Sharrow, 35; Pablo 'Cito' Vallecillo, 39; Antonio Lopez, 40; and Jason Keating, 41, were arrested on conspiracy and criminal sale of a controlled substance charges Tuesday night.

The four are accused of supplying heroin, fentanyl, cocaine and marijuana to street-level pushers across New York, according to information from the city's Special Narcotics Prosecutor.

Sharrow, who was alleged to have been the gang's ringleader, kept a drug stash house in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, that the crew dubbed 'The Palace.'

Police raided Sharrow's pad in luxury Long Island City condo The Powerhouse, where they recovered $590,000 in cash, a loaded handgun and a 2015 Lamborghini Huracan belonging to Sharrow.

Police arrested Lopez and Keating at their Queens homes. Investigators found 'hundreds' of glassine envelopes containing heroin, two handguns and a shotgun inside Lopez's Howard Beach pad.

They also recovered thousands of dollars and 'several' pounds of marijuana inside the Jamaica house where Keating lived, according to the SNP's office.

Sharrow has 17 prior arrests - 14 are sealed and three are for driving on a suspended license. His lawyer said in court that he had no prior convictions.

Vallecillo has been collared eight times including for robbery, burglary and weapons possession, police said. State corrections records show he did five-year stint in prison for robbery - then went back inside for eight years less than two years after his release.

Cops also found a vast haul of dollar bills and paperwork when they raided the gang's buildings

The gang has a chequered history with the law - each member having been arrested for several offences

Cops have also picked up Lopez seven times, including for robbery, larceny and a 2000 murder, according to cops. He did four years on a robbery charge, according to state prison records.

And Keating has been cuffed six times, including for robbery, grand larceny, and sale of a controlled substance, police said. He served nine years for robbery and attempted murder, prison records show.

'B******t, b******t, this is trash,' Lopez said outside court, wiping tears on his jeans with his hands cuffed behind his back.

The accused men's wives and girlfriends also sobbed in court, including Sharrow's 8-months-pregnant wife.

All four pleaded not guilty, and Justice Abraham Clott ordered them all remanded.

They return to court April 19.Shanghai (Gasgoo)- China's electric vehicle (EV) startup WM Motor officially signed a cooperation agreement with Hainan Province Transport Investment Holding Company Limited to deploy layout in tourism rental area. Both parties will build a joint venture that will launch 2000 NEVs in Hainan Province in the next three years.

In the meantime, WM Motor released its "three-step" development strategy dubbed "intelligence, sharing and globalization" at the signing ceremony. The strategy will be executed in three stages. The first is to realize vehicle mass production and the second and third steps are to deliver smart travelling services and achieve global strategy, according to Lu Bin, the startup's co-founder and vice president of strategic planning.

Besides, WM Motor wishes to offer a better travelling rental service to tourists based on big data analysis. What's more, the company aims to own 15 thousand operation vehicles in Hainan Province by the end of 2020 and strives to increase this number to 30 thousand after that.

Moreover, WM Motor showed that "GETnGO" will cooperate with the joint venture to develop tourism-focused travelling businesses. The "GETnGO" is the company's independent smart travelling service brand that had been unveiled in September, 2017.

Additionally, WM Motor will unveil its second model EX6 at Auto China 2018 in Beijing, Lu Bin said to local media. This new model is planned to go on sale in 2019, which will be positioned above the current EX5 with a higher class and larger size. In the future, the company will release a new model each year.A drunk man was caught on camera viciously attacked a woman in the street in east China last week.

Footage showed the man body-slammed a woman onto the floor and kicked her in the face numerous times.

The assailant was detained by local police and was found to have records of similar offences in the past.

A drunk man chased after a woman on the street in east China before launching an attack

According to The Paper, the man, surnamed Lv, was chasing a woman on the street of Yangzhou in Jiangsu Province at night on April 7.

It was believed that the two people did not know each other.

Footage emerged capturing the moment the woman was thrown to the street by the drunk man.

She can be seen sitting on the floor and looking up at the man.

However, the drunk man suddenly kicked her in the face three to four times.

The woman reported the police immediately.

Police officer Tang Fuyuan of Hangji Bureau told The Paper that the woman was bleeding in the face when he arrived the scene.

Mr Lv body slammed the woman on the ground and kicked her in the face several times

The unnamed woman, who was bleeding in the face, reported the police immediately

Mr Lv was found to have four records of provoking trouble in public in the past

'She said the assailant was at the front,' said police officer Tang.

Mr Lv denied the accusation when he was taken onto the police car.

'I didn't do it, it's not me!' Mr Lv told the police.

However, the police reviewed the security camera footage and confirmed Mr Lv as the assailant.

They also found Mr Lv had four records of detention due to 'picking quarrels and provoking trouble' in public in the past years.

Mr Lv is now detained in the police station.Theresa May's Cabinet today agreed to 'take action' to 'deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime'.

Britain will also act to alleviate 'humanitarian' suffering in Syria.

A Downing Street spokesman did not state what taking action would mean or on what what timescale it would happen.

Last night, Theresa May and Donald Trump spoke and agreed to work 'closely together' on a response.

Mrs May met her most senior ministers for two hours today and the new statement will raise expectations Britain will join coalition strikes against President Assad.

A Downing Street spokesman said: 'Following a discussion in which every member present made a contribution, Cabinet agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged.

'Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

Tornado jets were being fuelled at RAF Marham in Norfolk today as preparations mounted for reprisals against Syria

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson is thought to have been pushing for action against the Syrian regime

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling and Northern ireland Secretary Karen Bradley attended the Cabinet meeting today

Theresa May, pictured in Birmingham yesterday, is poised to defy calls for a Commons vote on military action in Syria

Attorney General Jeremy Wright (pictured centre left) and Home Secretary Amber Rudd were also at Downing Street for the meeting today

'Cabinet agreed the Prime Minister should continue to work with allies in the United States and France to coordinate an international response.'

Mrs May told her Cabinet that Saturday's gas attack in Douma was a 'shocking and barbaric act which killed up to 75 people, including children'.

The language is a new escalation from Mrs May, who yesterday said 'all indications' were the Assad regime is to blame.

Mrs May is thought to have ordered Royal Navy submarines carrying cruise missiles into range of Syria.

Britain also has squadrons of Tornado and Typhoon jets stationed Cyprus for the war against ISIS.

As expectation of strikes grows, the Cabinet agreed that the Assad regime has a 'track record of the use of chemical weapons' and after a two hour meeting concluded ' it is highly likely that the regime is responsible for Saturday's attack'.

No 10 later said Theresa May and President Trump agreed the use of the weapons should not go unchallenged, and that their future use should be deterred.

A Downing Street spokesman said: 'The Prime Minister spoke to President Trump about Syria this evening.

'They agreed that the Assad regime had established a pattern of dangerous behaviour in relation to the use of chemical weapons.

'They agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged, and on the need to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

'They agreed to keep working closely together on the international response..'

The Times, meanwhile, has reported that the biggest US air and naval task force since the Iraq War in 2003 is heading towards Syria.

It consists of ten warships and two submarines, with the USS Donald Cook - a destroyer equipped with up to 60 Tomahawk missiles - already in range.

The paper also reported that Russian anti-submarine planes were ready to deploy from the Russian airbase in Syria's west.

Before summoning her ministers, Mrs May insisted the use of chemical weapons must not go unchallenged as calls for reprisals over the atrocity in Douma escalated.

Military chiefs are believed to have ordered British submarines armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles to move within range of Syria.

But a poll has suggested that the public is far from convinced about the military action - with just 22 per cent saying they are in favour and 43 per cent against.

And Mrs May is facing a mounting clamour from Jeremy Corbyn and other opposition parties to bring the issue before MPs. Some Tories including former chancellor Ken Clarke have also demanded a vote.

The situation took another dramatic turn today as Donald Trump appeared to soften his stance on military reprisals.

A hug for his wife as US sends more warships Tenderly holding each other, an American sailor says goodbye to his wife in a scene reminiscent of wartime farewells. Thousands of naval personnel were waved off by their loved ones on Wednesday as they were deployed on a mission to Europe amid preparations for a military assault on Syria. The 6,500 US servicemen and women were part of the USS Harry S Truman battle group that set sail from a naval base in Norfolk, Virginia. The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and strike force is on its way for a regularly scheduled deployment to Europe. US Navy Fire Controlman 1st Class Nathaniel Miller hugs his wife goodbye before boarding the guided-missile destroyer USS Bulkeley It is armed with cruise missiles and an array of warplanes. The ship, which can accommodate 90 aircraft and is as high as a 24-storey building, will take more than a week to cross the Atlantic. The USS Harry S Trumans most recent deployment ended in July 2016, when it carried out an eight-month air operation against Islamic State. Its planes dropped more than 800 tons of bombs on targets from its base in the eastern Mediterranean. On Monday the USS Donald Cook, a destroyer which is armed with more than 50 missiles, was in the eastern Mediterranean within striking distance of Syria. Advertisement

The US president took to Twitter yesterday urging Russia to 'get ready' because 'nice and new and smart' cruise missiles would be coming.

He warned Vladimir Putin not to stand by President Assad, whom he described as a 'gas killing animal'.

But Mr Trump seemed to reel back the rhetoric today, tweeting: 'Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!'

Russia's ambassador to Lebanon has said his country is ready to target US planes and ships if they fire at Syrian regime forces.

That would effectively lead to a state of war, according to Sir Richard Barrons, a senior former military commander.

Labour, the SNP and the Lib Dems have insisted Mrs May must stage a Commons vote before getting involved in military action - even though as PM she is not obliged to do so in advance.

Some Tories have also urged the premier to put the matter to MPs and warned against reprisals, meaning the government's slender majority would be at serious risk.

But there are no plans to recall the Commons from its Easter recess, and No 10 believes approval is not needed to launch a one-off, punitive strike.

Tornado jets at RAF Marham in Norfolk were prepared for a sortie this afternoon as ministers gathered in Downing Street

Air crews at the Norfolk base could be deployed to join RAF colleagues already based in Cyprus if the Government launches military action

One of the jets was pictured returning to the runway this afternoon after a flight in the skies over Britain

Fuel tanks for the Tornado jets were also visible being prepared on the airfield today

The premier has been bolstered by Brexit Secretary David Davis.

Despite voting against military action in Syria in 2013, when David Cameron wanted to respond to another chemical weapons outrage, Mr Davis hinted that he was ready to support it this time.

Asked at a conference in London why he had previously opposed strikes, Mr Davis said: 'One was because he (Mr Cameron) hadn't provided the evidence and intelligence that we knew who it was, and secondly because there was not a proper plan which was thought through properly.

'Those two things I am assured we're going to answer today.'

Mr Davis stressed that no final decision had been taken.

'It is a very, very delicate circumstance, and we've got to make this judgment on a very careful, very deliberate, very well thought-through basis, knowing exactly ... how strong the evidence is,' he said.

The U.S. has maintained its threat of rocket attacks in response to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's sickening chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday

General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of Joint Forces Command, said Russia's warnings that launch platforms could be targeted in response to air strikes meant 'they are going to try and sink ships, sink submarines and shoot aircraft out of the sky - that's war'

David Davis today suggested he is ready to support reprisals on the Syrian regime, despite voting against them in 2013

British officials have been in in talks with their counterparts in France and the US about which military assets should be deployed for military action.

President Donald Trump said that an airstrike on Syria could be 'very soon or not so soon at all' as he took to Twitter this morning

It comes after Trump dramatically escalated the rhetoric yesterday by telling Russia to 'get ready' for military action, adding that 'nice and new and smart' cruise missiles 'will be coming'

'We are committed to deter and prevent the use of chemical weapons,' said a government source.

'We now have to establish the best way of getting there, and those conversations are carrying on, officials are speaking to their counterparts in France and America right now. In terms of precisely what happens next, that is still to be confirmed.'

Some senior ministers have privately been urging the PM to act.

Speaking on a visit to Birmingham yesterday, Mrs May said: 'The continued use of chemical weapons cannot go unchallenged.'

Asked whether she was concerned by Mr Trump's tweet, she replied: 'We are working with our allies, we have been working to get an understanding of what happened on the ground. We are rapidly reaching that understanding. All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible.

'We will be working with our closest allies on how we can ensure that those who are responsible are held to account and how we can prevent and deter the humanitarian catastrophe that comes from the use of chemical weapons in the future.'

The poll, conducted on Tuesday and yesterday, underlines the problems faced by Theresa May if she pushes ahead with military strikes

Mr Corbyn raised the spectre of Iraq as he made clear he would not back any kind of military action in Syria. In 2015 he defied much of his own shadow cabinet to vote against aistrikes against Isis in the country.

'Surely the lessons of Iraq, the lessons that came there from the Chilcot Report, are that there's got to be, there has to be, a proper process of consultation,' he said.

'We elect Parliament, we elect members of Parliament. They should have a voice in this. Cabinet on its own should not be making this decision.

'The dangers of bombing now, which could escalate the conflict beyond belief. Just imagine the scenario if an American missile shoots down a Russian plane or vice versa. Where do we go from there?'

Tory former chancellor Mr Clarke called for a parliamentary vote on any military action, telling BBC Radio 4's World at One: 'In a modern, parliamentary democracy, I think you have got to have parliamentary approval if you have a planned, policy decision to launch a military attack of any significant size.

'To say that Parliament is just sidelined before you take such a serious decision is a very retrograde step. It makes parliamentary accountability fairly pathetic.'

Julian Lewis, a Tory MP and chair of the Defence Select Committee, insisted there should be a vote before the UK took action.

'There is a real danger that what starts out as justified punishment for the use of chemical weapons ends up with the Royal Air Force serving as the air arm of the jihadi extremist rebels in Syria,' he said.

'It sends a very bad signal to the country that they don't submit themselves to parliamentary scrutiny before involving in taking military action by choice in the context of a civil war where both sides equally atrocious.'

Mrs May has said Britain will co-ordinate its response to the incident in the rebel-held town of Douma - where at least 40 people are reported to have been killed - with the US and France

Tory colleague Bob Seely said: 'Trump is declaring war on Twitter. Both Trump and Putin need to remember what the stakes are.

'This crisis could escalate very quickly into a shooting war in Syria. If Russians are injured, the Kremlin will hit back. The most important thing our generation can achieve is to avoid actual conflict with Russia.

'If we are reckless or thoughtless in our actions, it will make conflict now or in future more likely to happen.'

Russia's ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, said any US missiles fired at Syria would be shot down along with the ships or planes that fired them.

He told Hezbollah's Al Manar TV: 'If there is a strike by the Americans then ... the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired.'

Then, in the early hours of yesterday morning, Mr Trump responded on Twitter, saying: 'Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it.'

In a further tweet 40 minutes later, he said: 'Our relationship with Russia is worse now that it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War.

'There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy.'

Russia's foreign ministry spokesman responded by saying 'smart missiles should fly towards terrorists, not lawful government'.

General Barrons, who led the UK's joint forces command until 2016, said of the Russian ambassador's warning: 'He is saying not only are they going to shoot down the missiles in flight, but by saying launch sites, he is saying they are going to try and sink ships, sink submarines and shoot aircraft out of the sky. That's war.'

Charles Crawford, former British Ambassador to Bosnia, warned the range of options for dealing with the crisis varied between 'terrible and catastrophic'.

Britons nervous about joining strikes on Syria, poll finds Britons do not support getting involved in air strikes against Syria, according to a poll. Some 43 per cent are against the UK joining in the reprisals over the apparent chemical weapons attack in Douma. The idea was backed by 22 per cent, the research by YouGov for The Times found. A further 34 per cent said they were unsure of the best course of action. The poll, conducted on Tuesday and yesterday, underlines the problems faced by Theresa May if she pushes ahead with military strikes. YouGov interviewed 1,600 people. The level of support was lower than the 25 per cent who endorsed David Cameron's desire to launch airstrikes in 2013 - when he lost a Commons vote on the issue. AdvertisementMeghan Markle's estranged half sister has accused the actress and Prince Harry of 'inviting complete strangers' to the Royal wedding in a furious Twitter rant.

Samantha Grant, who shares a father with half-sister Meghan, said the former Suits actress should have invited several family members 'out of respect'.

'At issue is not a matter of closeness as more than 1,000 complete strangers are invited,' she tweeted.

'Family is family. I have an uncle I have only seen once by I would never say he is not family because we are not close. Humanitarians move forward with love and kindness especially to family.'

Scroll down for video

Samantha Grant changed her profile picture on Twitter to this image, along with the caption 'All time favourite pic of her'

Ms Grant initially expressed excitement at the prospect of being invited the the Royal wedding

Ms Grant, who uses a wheelchair after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, later changed her profile picture to a snap of her and Meghan together when they were younger.

She then added: 'Smoke and mirrors cannot hide the elephant in the room. Out of respect, tradition and humanitarianism, the #Markles should be invited if 2,000 complete strangers are invited.

'Our uncle who got her the internship, brother, me, best friend of 30 years Nikki Priddy, nephews. Fact.'

In the past, Ms Grant has claimed to have raised Meghan for 12 years when she was growing up in California.

But other sources speculate that the pair had little to do with one another.

Ms Grant, who is writing a book on Meghan, shared the photo of them together alongside the caption: 'All time favourite pic of her'.

She claimed that no-one had been invited to the Royal wedding so far from the Markle family

Ms Grant called the decision to not invite members of the extended family the 'elephant in the room'

Samantha Grant requires use of a wheelchair after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis

The Palace announced on Wednesday that world leaders and politicians would not be included on the list of those attending the wedding.

US President Donald Trump, UK Prime Minister Theresa May and the Obamas have not been invited to the wedding.

Although the couple did decide recently to invite an extra 1,200 members of the public to the castle for the celebrations as reward for their community work.

Among those includes Amelia Thompson, 12, a schoolgirl who survived the Manchester bombing.

Speaking to ITV's Good Morning Britain today, Amelia said she was 'very, very, very, very, very excited - I'm really excited to go', adding that she 'didn't have a clue' until receiving an email to tell her that she was going.

She added: 'I was speechless, at first I didn't think that it was real. But then when we started to read it and got into further detail, we was like 'this is genuine'.

Her mother Lisa Newton said: 'She's had a rough couple of years, and just to see her face smile, I'm just really proud of her, and she's been so brave and so inspiration that she deserves it.'

Asked about her plus one, Amelia added: 'It's a lady called Sharon and her granddaughter died at Manchester Arena, so I decided to take her.

Kensington Palace announced in March that members of the public would be among the crowds allowed into the grounds of the castle to share in the atmosphere of the wedding.

Her father Thomas was recently pictured reading a book entitled 'Images of Britain' in an apparent revision exercise prior to the wedding.

MailOnline contacted the Royal Household who declined to comment.

Manchester Arena attack survivor Amelia Thompson, 12, sat with her mother Lisa Newton as she told ITV's Good Morning Britain how excited she was to attend the royal wedding

Afghanistan veteran Philip Gillespie, pictured, who lost a leg to a bomb in 2010, is one of the 1,200 members of the public invited to the Royal Wedding thanks to his work supporting the ABF The Soldiers' Charity

Schoolboy Reuben Litherland, 14, has been invited for teaching his classmates sign language after he was born deaf

The lucky group were nominated by the nine regional Lord Lieutenant offices after Harry and Meghan asked for those picked to come from a broad range of backgrounds and ages, including young people who have shown strong leadership, and those who have served their communities.

Kensington Palace announced the group would be among the crowds allowed into the grounds of Windsor Castle to share in the atmosphere of the May 19 wedding at St George's Chapel.

Among those chosen are Philip Gillespie, 30, of Ballymena, Northern Ireland, who was a former section commander in the Royal Irish Regiment.

The solider lost his right leg in 2010 aged just 22 four months into his third tour of Afghanistan when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED), needing three operations at Camp Bastion before he was airlifted to hospital in the UK for further treatment.

Since then he has dedicated his life to charity, raising cash and awareness for ABG The Soldiers' Charity and has recently competed in team trials for rowing, swimming and archery at the next Invictus Games, set up by Prince Harry.

Mr Gillespie said it is 'a wee bit surreal' to think he will be there next month with his girlfriend Kirsty Crawford. 'It's a massive privilege, it will be a huge spectacle,' he added.

Jorja Furze, left and right, 12, was born without a left leg and has gone on to work an ambassador for amputee charity Steel Bones despite her young age

Former homeless teenager Kai Fletcher, 18, pictured, is going to the wedding after turning his life around and now works with a charity to help rough sleepers

Others invited to attend include Reuben Litherland, 14, from Derby. The Saint Benedict Catholic Academy pupil, who is deaf, has set up a lunchtime sign language club at school.

Jorja Furze, 12, has also been chosen for her work as ambassador for the Steel Bones charity which works with the amputee community.

Charity worker Zoe Arundell has met Harry and Meghan before

Jorja is an amputee from birth, having lost her left leg, but has overcome adversity to help others in similar situations.

She has also set up an anxiety group for new students at her school in Ely, Wales, to help them cope with the adjustment to higher education.

Teenager Kai Fletcher, who found himself homeless at 15, has also been invited to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding.

Kai had a difficult childhood growing up in a household troubled by alcohol and domestic violence, and later found himself homeless.

After turning to Bath-based charity Southside for help, the 18-year-old now works for the organisation as a young advocate team leader having turned his life around.

'It was a bit surprising. I am looking forward to going, really excited,' he said.

Mr Fletcher, who lives in Bath, said he would be taking his sister Louise with him to the wedding at Windsor Castle next month.

Zoe Arundell, 20, from Penygraig in Wales, will be lucky enough to see the couple for a second time, having met them during a recent visit to Cardiff Castle.

She said Harry told her she was 'definitely a role model' for her work with the Valley Kids charity which helps disadvantaged children and families.

The ceremony is just a few short weeks away and is due to take place in St George's chapel at Windsor castle on May 19

The couple recently decided to invite another 1,200 members of the public to the castle to celebrate in the groundsBudget airline Scoot is offering one-way tickets from Perth to Athens for just $309.

The Singaporean airline is also offering flights to the Greek capital from Sydney and the Gold Coast for $329 and from Melbourne for $339.

The price does not include food or luggage and comes to around $500 when these are added. All flights are via Singapore.

Budget airline Scoot is offering one-way tickets from Perth to Athens for just $309

Scoot also plans to launch a route to Berlin for $349 from the Gold Coast for $359 from Sydney and $369 from Melbourne.

Flights from Perth to Singapore start at $115, Ho Chi Minh City at $139, Phuket in Thailand or Langkawi in Malaysia at $149.

Lee Lik Hsin, CEO of Scoot's parent company Budget Aviation Holdings, said the route to Athens was introduced to meet passenger demand.

He added: 'Scoot has devoted much thought to configuring our cabin product and services to elevate and transform the low-cost ravel experience enabled by our world-first, all 787 Dreamliner fleet.

'This has positioned us well to mount our first ever long-haul flight between Asia Pacific and Europe.'

The sale for flights on certain days this winter continues until 15 April.Britain's spy chief today tore into Russia for 'endangering lives' around the world amid growing expectation the UK will join in military action against Syria.

Jeremy Fleming, the head of intelligence agency GCHQ, stepped out of the shadows to launch the blistering attack on the Kremlin in his first public speech.

He branded the country 'reckless' and warned it is 'blurring the boundaries between criminal and state activity'.

He said the attempted murder of Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a nerve agent on UK soil shows the 'shocking' actions Russia is willing to take.

Scroll down for video

Jeremy Fleming, the head of intelligence agency GCHQ, (pictured in MAnchester today) stepped out of the shadows to launch the blistering attack on the Kremlin in his first public speech

Theresa May (pictured in Birmingham yesterday) has summoned her Cabinet back to London or a meeting today where they will discuss options to join the US and France in strikes against Assad's regime

Mr Fleming delivered his outspoken attack as the countdown to war in Syria - which is backed by Russia - intensifies.

Britain launched major cyber attack on IS propaganda machine, spy chief reveals Jeremy Fleming, head of GCHQ, said the attack landed a major blow against the extremist group's sleek propaganda machine Britain carried out a 'major offensive cyber-campaign' against the Islamic State, Britain's spy chief today revealed. Jeremy Fleming, head of GCHQ, said the attack landed a major blow against the extremist group's sleek propaganda machine. It is the first time the UK has systematically degraded an adversary's online efforts in a military campaign. He said: 'The outcomes of these operations are wide-ranging. 'In 2017 there were times when Daesh [an alternative name for Islamic State] found it almost impossible to spread their hate online, to use their normal channels to spread their rhetoric, or trust their publications.' Mr Fleming said much of the cyber-operation was 'too sensitive to talk about', but had disrupted the group's online activities and even destroyed equipment and networks. 'This campaign shows how targeted and effective offensive cyber can be,' he added. But Mr Fleming said the fight against IS is not over, as the group continues to 'seek to carry out or inspire further attacks in the UK' and find new 'ungoverned spaces to base their operations'. Advertisement

Theresa May has summoned her Cabinet back to London or a meeting today where they will discuss options to join the US and France in strikes against Assad's regime.

But Russia has threatened to shoot down Western missiles and the ships and submarines they are launched from.

Mr Fleming, an ex MI5 agent, told a security conference in Manchester the attempted murder of the Skripals was 'stark and shocking'.

He said: 'It demonstrates how reckless Russia is prepared to be.

'How little the Kremlin cares for the international rules-based order. How comfortable they are at putting ordinary lives at risk.

'The robust response from the UK and from the international community shows the Kremlin that illegal acts have consequences. And it looks like our expertise on Russia will be in increasing demand.

'We'll continue to expose Russia's unacceptable cyber behaviour, so they're held accountable for what they do, and to help Government and industry protect themselves.'

He warned that the UK will work with its allies like the US to hit back at 'malicious cyber activity' launched by Russia.

And he also warned that the politics of the Middle East - where Iran, Russia, Israel, Turkey, and an array of militant groups and proxies are bogged down in a bloody conflict in Syria - are changing.

He said: 'We will attribute where we can. And whilst we face an emboldened Russia, we also see the tectonic plates in the Middle East moving.

'We see Iran and its proxies meddling throughout the region. The use of chemical weapons in Syria. We're watching the dispersal of Daesh fighters.'

The U.S. has maintained its threat of rocket attacks in response to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's sickening chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday

General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of Joint Forces Command, said Russia's warnings that launch platforms could be targeted in response to air strikes meant 'they are going to try and sink ships, sink submarines and shoot aircraft out of the sky - that's war'

He added: 'The Russian Government widely uses its cyber capabilities.

'Whether that's NotPetya against the Ukraine's financial, energy and government sectors, which eventually spread across the world, or the use of industrial scale disinformation to sway public opinion.

'They're not playing to the same rules ... they're blurring the boundaries between criminal and state activity. And they're not alone.

'We've seen state-sponsored hackers conducting cyber-attacks to avoid sanctions - the release of WannaCry by North Korean cyber actors last year, is a good example.

'Some of their malware tools are highly complex, using extensive infrastructure and advanced tradecraft.'

Mr Fleming said the challenges facing Britain today are 'vast' and the country must be prepared to meet them.The humble singlet is causing controversy and splitting clubs in half over a 'sexist' ban.

Clubs Queensland allows women to wear the revealing clothing garment into surf clubs however men are banned from wearing the same thing.

The ban, which has been in place since the club established in the early 1900s, has been reconsidered over discrimination complaints earlier this month.

The humble singlet is causing controversy and splitting clubs in half over a 'sexist' ban (pictured Tony Abbott donning a singlet right)

Clubs Queensland allows women to wear the revealing clothing garment (Sophie Monk pictured) into surf clubs however men are banned from wearing the same thing

Coolum Beach Surf Club (pictured) general manager Mal Wright said the rules were 'sexist' and meant they had to turn men wearing singlets away, but could say yes to the women

In some clubs across the sunshine state, women are allowed to don a singlet but men are often asked to wear a shirt to cover up.

Coolum Beach Surf Club general manager Mal Wright told ABC News the rules were 'sexist'.

'We'd have a couple come in, they'd both be wearing singlets, we'd say yes to her and no to him,' he said.

'At the end of the day we're a beach club, we're situated right on Coolum Beach, it's a beautiful spot and people spend their time, whether it be locals or tourists, on Coolum Beach dressed in a singlet with a hat on.'

An email was sent out by the organisation asking clubs to reconsider their dress rules, not only with singlets but with footwear and hats as well.

'A surf club on the Gold Coast may have a much more relaxed dress code than an RSL or inner-city Brisbane club,' the website stated.

An email was sent out by the organisation asking clubs to reconsider their dress rules, not only with singlets but with footwear and hats as well (Shannon Noll pictured)

A complaint against a surf club could potentially see it front the Australian Human Rights Commission (pictured musician Shannon Noll)

'Some clubs may strictly enforce their dress codes, while others may view it as more of a suggested guide as to acceptable dress standards.'

The organisation suggested many of the dress codes were 'long vested in the tradition of the Club or cultural standards', however it was 'discriminating on the basis of gender'.

'While some people may consider this as political correctness gone mad ... like it or lump it, discrimination laws in Australia exist for good reason - to protect people,' the website read.

While many of the surf clubs have lifted the ban some, including Kurrawa Surf Club and Broadbeach, enforce the dated rule, ABC News reported.

A complaint against a surf club could potentially see it front the Australian Human Rights Commission.A King's College student, who threatened to chop off her lecturer's penis and shove it up his behind after she believed he'd mocked her sexual inexperience with a cartoon, has avoided a jail sentence.

Stephanie Christol, 30, was sent a cartoon called The Virgin Snail as part of a reading list at the London college and blamed Dr Christopher Dillon.

He had not in fact sent the list, but Christol embarked on a campaign of harassment against him, Westminster Magistrates Court heard.

She also sent a series of emails and Facebook messages calling Dr Dillons partner a dog and ugly as f**k.

Stephanie Christol, 30, was sent a reading list by Dr Christopher Dillon which featured a cartoon called The Virgin Snail

Christol also threatened to slice off his member and insert it up his bottom.

Judge Timothy Gascoyne sentenced Christol to a 12 month community order and banned her from stepping foot in Kings College.

I do not see why he should have to step out his office and see your face, he said

You do not contact him. You are an intelligent young lady, you have got a degree, you know what you are doing. If you contact him you go to prison.

Dr Dillon who has written several books including Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence and had been helping Christol with her dissertation on films of the First World War

One message threatened me with violence. Between April to 25 September there were dozens of emails, he said.

One of them threatened to cut off my penis and shove it up my bottom. They were threatening I was concerned they may spread over to my partner.

The defendant, from Islington in London, also sent a series of emails and offensive Facebook messages about Dr Dillons partner's appearance

Two of the messages said: I am going to get you and, I am going to find a way to make you apologise.

Christol sent her letters on pink and blue writing paper with the lecturers name on the envelope.

Ed Cohen, prosecuting, said: Starting with the emails. They were extremely abusive in their nature- saying Doctor Dillons partner was a dog and ugly as f**k.

This caused some real issues between him and his partner.

The lecturer went to the police in September 2016 who issued the student with a harassment warning.

But the bombardment continued and Christol sent five letters, and a framed picture to the lecturers pigeon hole when he was in Munich on research leave.

The picture showed a woman with masking over her mouth with the scrawled caption: Ask the children of the UK who are grown up if contact denial was in their best interest?

Dr Dillon did not open the letters but had a friend check what they were about.

Many of the letters told of Christols feelings about her traumatic upbringing and a sense of alienation from her parents.

Christol attended Kings College London where she studied history and is believed to have met Dr Dillon in her final year when she was writing her dissertation

Christol told the court: They sent me articles and one of them I reacted badly to. It was at the end of a stage of articles which had been sent.

I was first angry because I thought he was laughing at me for being sexually inexperienced. I was a paranoid about it and I was trying to deal with my paranoia.

The letters were an explanation of my traumatic parental background. I write a lot to my relatives.

I want to be a screen writer. I would like those letters which the prosecution has back, so I can send them to my relatives.

I wanted to use that letter for writing a book and I want that letter back.

Christol pictured on the set of Grantchester with James Norton and Robson Green

Furious at the perceived slight she emailed Dr Dillon, who worked at the universitys Strand Campus, threatening to chop of his penis and stick it up his bottom

Christol, from Islington, north London, denied but was convicted of harassment without violence and was sentenced to a 12 month community order.

She was given a 10-year restraining order in relation to Dr Christopher Dillon and told she could not enter Kings College London.

She was also order to pay 100 in compensation to the doctor and 620 prosecution costs.An Army sergeant accused of killing his wife by sabotaging her parachute asked his ex to 'christen' his spouse's new car by having sex in it, a court heard today.

Emile Cilliers, 38, of Aldershot, Hampshire, allegedly sent messages to an escort asking how much unprotected sex would be with her and if he could film it.

Just before, he had sent a message to his ex-wife Carly to arrange to meet her for sex in his 'new car' - which the prosecutor said was actually Victoria Cilliers's vehicle.

Emile Cilliers (left), 38, of the Royal Army Physical Training Corps, allegedly tried to kill Victoria Cilliers, 40, with a gas leak and later on a parachute jump over Easter 2015

Michael Bowes QC, prosecuting, said: 'On March 13, 2015, there is contact with an escort and the defendant is in touch with Carly Cilliers - he is arranging to have sex.

'In a message to Carly, the defendant says "you can see the new car, we can take it for a spin. Maybe christen it".

'He is then in touch with a prostitute in relation to sex with her. He says to the escort, 'bareback for 100. Can I film it?' She replies 'yes'.

'Bareback is a widely known term for no form of protection. Now, there is nothing wrong with going to prostitutes, but it is indicative of a man who just does what he wants, when he wants.

'He has his life in compartments and it is all about him. We have his relationship with Victoria, he is telling Stefanie he loves her, and he has sex arranged with Carly and then unprotected sex arranged with a prostitute.

'We say here's a man who cared not for Victoria, he treated her with contempt - he did not care about her in any way at all.'

In other messages, read to Winchester Crown Court, it was heard Cilliers had been messaging lover Stefanie Goller as his wife went in to labour, telling her he loved her.

He also claimed his newborn son was not his, lying to Miss Goller, who he met in Austria, saying only a few people knew about it.

Cilliers had two affairs including with extreme sports enthusiast Stefanie Goller (pictured) and had also contacted 'a number of prostitutes' before allegedly trying to kill his wife

Mr Bowes QC told the court Cilliers had damaged a gas fitting at the home he shared with Victoria, deliberately loosening a nut and leaving traces of blood behind.

The prosecutor said Victoria became concerned when she smelled gas in their kitchen and she sent him a message.

Cilliers had also been having an affair with his ex-wife Carly Cilliers at the time, the court heard

Reading her message to the court, Mr Bowes QC said: 'Victoria said to the defendant 'did you alter the gas lever into the cooker this am and there is dry blood around the lever' (sic).

'The defendant replied to her, 'that is weird. Is the stove working?'. She answered, 'no, I did not want to try. I've opened the door'. She then said to him, jokingly, 'are you trying to kill me?'.

'The defendant replies to that saying, 'hey you cannot be serious about the comment you made, you have been saying that a lot recently. Why?'.

'She says to him, 'I read in a mag recently, brought it to the front of my mind. True life stories - my husband tried to kill me'.

'He said 'seriously?' and she said back 'was only making a joke because of the blood on the handle, did not realise I was saying it a lot.''

Mr Bowes QC added that the blood on the gas fitting had been matched to his after being tested.

Cilliers allegedly damaged the gas fitting at the home he shared with his wife in a bid to cause an explosion and kill her.

When this failed, it is claimed her removed vital links from his wife's reserve parachute, which should have connected it to the harness she was wearing as she performed a skydive.

Cilliers (pictured with Victoria), who still serves in the Army, is said to have had debts and wanted to get his hands on her 120,000 life insurance, the prosecution has said

When the parachute failed, Victoria, 40, spun 4,000ft helplessly to the ground, suffering a broken leg, ribs, pelvis and spinal injuries - spending three weeks in hospital.

Judge Mr Justice Sweeney began today's hearing by telling jurors Cilliers had already stood trial once, with no verdicts being returned by the original jury.

Mr Bowes QC then told jurors at Cilliers's re-trial that the South African had racked up debts of 22,000 and had started an affair with Austrian Ms Goller.

The court heard the sergeant, of the Royal Army Physical Training Corps, had tried twice to kill his wife, a physiotherapist, so he could claim her life insurance money and start a new life with his lover.

Mr Bowes QC said Cilliers had also been having an affair with his ex-wife Carly Cilliers at the time, as well as being in contact with prostitutes before his wife's fall at Netheravon airfield on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.

The prosecutor said: 'On April 5, 2015, Victoria Cilliers, a highly experienced parachutist and parachute instructor, was involved in a near fatal parachuting fall.

'When she jumped out of the plane at 4,000ft, both the main and reserve parachute failed, causing her to spiral to the ground.

'Those attending the scene expected to find her dead, but, although badly injured, she survived that fall.

'Those at the scene immediately realised something was seriously wrong with her reserve parachute. Two vital pieces of equipment were missing.

'The circumstances were such that the police began a criminal investigation into the possibility the defendant, Emile Cilliers, had attempted to murder Victoria.

'Subsequently the police investigation widened to incorporate circumstances surrounding a gas fitting at their marital home in Amesbury, Wilts.

'The prosecution case it that Emile Cilliers had deliberately caused a gas leak just before he left the house to stay elsewhere.'

Mr Bowes QC said Cilliers had been having an affair with Ms Goller at the time of the murder attempts and had even been contacting prostitutes.

The prosecutor said: 'Emile Cilliers was having an extra marital relationship with Stefanie Goller.

'There are a substantial amount of Whatsapp messages between them. It is clear Emile Cilliers was saying repeatedly that he wanted to leave Victoria and be with Stefanie.

'He was having a sexual relationship with his ex-wife Carly Cilliers and he was also making contact with a number of prostitutes.

'We will be going into intimate detail about his life, which would usually be no one else's business.

'He is not on trial for having an affair or for visiting prostitutes - that is his business - but I tell you these things so you can understand the background.'

The prosecutor said Cilliers had an insurance policy which would pay him 120,000 in the event of Victoria, now aged 42, dying.

He said: 'Emile Cilliers had his own insurance policy which covered Victoria as well in the event of accidental death.

'The defendant believed he would receive the 120,000 in the event of her death. He had debts of around 22,000 at the time.'

Cilliers denies two counts of attempted murder and one of damaging property being reckless as to the endangerment of life.

The trial, which is due to last five weeks, continues.A one-year-old boy has died after being run over by a family member.

Police in San Bernardino, California, received a report of an incident in the 1800 block of Home Avenue at about 6.30pm on Tuesday.

The boy was transported to a nearby hospital after he was backed over by a relative, Lt. Mike Madden told KTLA5.

But he was pronounced dead shortly after arriving.

Police in San Bernardino, California, received a report of an incident in the 1800 block of Home Avenue (above, file photo) at about 6.30pm on Tuesday

Authorities are investigating, but they did not initially think drugs or alcohol were a factor.

Lt. Madden said the incident is the second time a child has died after being backed over by a family member in nine days.

He warned drivers to be wary of children who may be playing in driveways or yards.Hug an Australian Day, in a similar fashion to National Pet Day, Siblings Day and Valentines Day, encourages us all to give a little extra love and affection to those who are special to us and in this case, its Australians!

In Australia, the event marks the start of the holiday season and many travel sites will offer cheap flights or holiday deals, or Australians may celebrate by sending cards and gifts to their nearest and dearest.

As well as Easter, some Australians will also mark Anzac Day in April 2018, but when and what exactly is Hug an Australian Day?

Hug an Australian Day encourages us all to give a little extra love and affection to Australians

What is Hug an Australian Day?

It is not certain what the origins of Hug an Australian Day are but the day was founded by Thomas and Ruth Roy, known for their Wellcat Holidays & Herbs.

The duo have created over 80 imaginative new holidays which include Bifocals At The Monitor Liberation Day, Answer Your Cats Question Day, For The Love of Mike Day, No Socks Day, Yell Fudge at the Cobras in North America Day, Take Your Houseplants for a Walk Day and Haunted Refrigerator Night.

When is Hug an Australian Day?

Hug an Australian is held on April 26 every year and in 2018, the day will fall on Thursday.

In addition to Easter, some Australians will also remember those lost on Anzac Day in April

How to celebrate Hug an Australian Day

According to Days of the Year, Hug an Australian Day can be celebrated by sending cards to friends and family or by listening to famous Australian stars like Kylie Minogue with a can of Fosters.

Some may even opt to put on an Australian movie night and watch classics like Crocodile Dundee and those overseas can be sent presents, like a toy koala bear or kangaroo, to remind them of home.

As well as hugging your favourite Australians, the day provides an opportunity to improve international relationships and those wanting to travel to Sydney, Brisbane or Adelaide may be able to get a good offer on travel sites.

Social media users can also use #HuganAustralianDay to share photos and thoughts during the day. As the American cartoonist Bil Keane once said: A hug is like a boomerang - you get it back right away.Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Bosch China and Changjiang EV recently signed a strategic cooperation agreement in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, aiming to conduct overall strategic cooperation in such areas as intelligent driving, connected vehicles, intelligent transportation and EV parts. Both parties will jointly promote the application and popularization of vehicles' electrification, intellectualization and interconnection as well as future intelligent transportation.

Taking the advantages of new energy vehicle industry and regarding intelligent connected vehicles as the core, both parties will secure a strategic cooperation goal of establishing a smart city with marvelous intelligent transportation, on the basis of vehicles.

Bosch, the world's largest parts manufacturer, showed off its cutting-edge technologies in such areas as artificial intelligence and internet connection at CES 2018 Las Vegas. For Changjiang EV, Bosch is the fittest partner thanks to its technological advantages in the abovementioned areas. In the future, Changjiang EV will continue to seek world-leading partners to develop intelligent connected vehicles.A quick-thinking fisherman delivered 98 baby sharks by c-section after their mother was fatally attacked by another predator.

Mathew Orlov, 46 claims that the sevengill shark was already dead when he pulled it onto his boat off the coast of Victoria, Australia.

However when Matthew lay the shark on the deck of his boat he realised that its stomach was still moving.

Mathew Orlov cut open the stomach of a dead sevengills shark to save the pups who were inside

He then performed an impromptu c-section on the mother shark in a bid to save the babies inside.

Mathew, from Geelong, can be seen in the clip removing each young shark from inside the mother and into the wild during the operation which lasted nine minutes.

Mathew, said: 'As soon as she was on the boat we saw the seven bite marks from another shark.

As Mathew continued the c-section more babies appeared as he pulled them out and threw them back into the sea

'I could feel threw the line when she was being attacked. As soon as we pulled it up I knew was mauled by another shark.

'When I saw the belly moving, instinct kicked in. I've never done anything like this before, but I've fishing long enough to know we needed to get the pups out as quickly as possible.

Mathew held the shark as he pulled more of its young from inside

'It was a very overwhelming feeling when they started popping out, I got this adrenaline rush. I was just dumbfounded there was so many, we counted 98.'

Although Mathew had never performed a c-section before he had heard stories from fellow fisherman.

After rescuing the young Matthew cooked and ate the shark however he added that he didn't feel bad about doing so as he didn't want the body to go to waste.

Mathew, who initially thought he had rescued 76 pups in total before discovering 12 more, said: 'As a fisherman, I catch fish to eat. The meat from this shark fed lots of my family members.

'I love the ocean and respect they're an important part of the ecosystem.

'I think the pups chance of survival are high - they swam off quite healthily.

'Some people online have said I should have just thrown it back, but they don't understand how sharks work.'

Mathew Orlov, 46 is an experienced fisherman but has never performed a shark c-section before

Sevengill sharks generally give birth to 70 to 90 live pups after a pregnancy lasting approximately 12 months.

The babies' chances of survival rests largely on how close their mother was to full term.

But shark expert Jane Williamson, associate professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, cast doubt over whether the premature pups would have survived on their own.

The fisherman searched for more babies inside the mother shark as he continued the operation

Jane said: 'It is difficult to see what developmental stage the pups are at - I can't tell if they are developed enough to cope alone.

'But I can see the pups don't have a yolk sac, which is a good sign and indicates that they have a chance of survival.'

Barbara Wueringer, director at Sharks And Rays Australia, added: 'Sharks and rays are known to sometimes abort upon capture, with the abortion likely induced by the stress of capture.

'So it is likely that this shark, if she had not been bitten by other sharks while hooked, might have aborted her embryos anyway.'Advertisement

The White House said late Thursday afternoon that a 'final decision' had not been made on Syria.

Donald Trump said earlier in the day that Americans won't have to wait long for a response to Saturday's horrifying chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town that left at least 40 dead and others gasping for air.

But at least two of his top advisers couldn't agree on whether there's sufficient proof to blame the atrocity on dictator Bashar al-Assad's government, leaving the possibility of a retaliatory attack an open-ended question.

America's allies and adversaries alike were awaiting a signal from the White House about whether Trump will follow through on his warning that missiles 'will be coming,' potentially putting Russian troops in harm's way.

At close of business, the White House said that Trump had just concluded a meeting with his national security team and would be speaking again later to the heads of government in France and the U.K.

'No final decision has been made,' press secretary Sarah Sanders said. 'We are continuing to asses intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies.'

Trump suggested this afternoon that he'd have an answer in hours, telling reporters, 'It's too bad that the world puts us in a position like that, but as I said this morning we've done a great job with ISIS. We have just absolutely decimated ISIS. But now we have to make some further decisions, so they'll be made fairly soon.'

President Donald Trump told reporters Thursday before a meeting with Republican senators and governors that he would decide 'fairly soon' on an American response to Saturday's deadly poison gas attack in Syria

Trump had softened his stance on airstrikes in Syria, tweeting that he 'never said when an attack on Syria would take place'

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley (right), talking to MSNBC outside the confirmation hearing for secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo, said America has enough evidence of a chemical weapons attack to dismiss Syrian claims that it never happened

But James Mattis, the U.S. secretary of defense, said Thursday in a congressional hearing that America is still 'looking for the actual evidence' of chemical weapons

In London, Theresa May's Cabinet agreed to 'take action' to 'deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.' Britain will also act to alleviate 'humanitarian' suffering in Syria.

Syria and Russia both claim reports of a chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Douma are inaccurate, and one Russian official said it was 'staged' by The White Helmets, an aid group that searched for survivors.

In Washington Nikki Haley the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in an MSNBC interview that Americans 'definitely have enough proof, but now we just have to be thoughtful in our action.'

'The national security team is trying to give him as many options as we can,' she said of Trump, 'and well be thoughtful about it and see what happens.'

But on Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary James Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. hasn't reached any conclusions.

'I believe there was a chemical attack,' Mattis told lawmakers, 'and we are looking for the actual evidence.' He said he wanted to see inspectors on the ground in Syria 'within the week.'

'It's too bad that the world puts us in a position like that,' Trump said Thursday, referring to the collective breath-holding among other heads of state while he decides whether to flex America's military muscle

'As each day goes by  as you know, it is a non-persistent gas, so it becomes more and more difficult to confirm it.'

Separately, NBC News reported in the afternoon that U.S. officials have detected chemical weapons compounds in blood and urine samples taken from the area of the attack.

The samples tested positive for chlorine gas and an unnamed nerve agent.

Trump appeared to soften his stance on airstrikes earlier in the day, tweeting Thursday morning that he had 'never said when' an attack on the war-torn country would take place.

The president's full message said: 'Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our "Thank you America?"'

Trump dramatically escalated the rhetoric over the crisis on Wednesday by telling Russia to 'get ready' for military action, adding that 'nice and new and smart' cruise missiles 'will be coming.'

He warned Russian leader Vladimir Putin not to partner with Assad, who he described as a 'gas killing animal.'

But Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said his country was ready to target U.S. planes and ships if they fire at Syrian regime forces.

Mattis struck a more cautious tone later on Wednesday, saying that Washington was still assessing intelligence on the suspected toxic gas attack.

It comes after Trump dramatically escalated the rhetoric yesterday by telling Russia to 'get ready' for military action, adding that 'nice and new and smart' cruise missiles 'will be coming'

Trump repeatedly condemned his predecessor Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign for forecasting his military plans. During one speech, he said, 'We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything.'

Sanders insisted Wednesday that Trump had stayed true to the principle, given that he has not laid out a timetable for action.

'And we're considering all of those options and a number of different timetables of what any action we may or may not take would look like,' the Trump spokeswoman said.

In Europe, the two key allies in any potential action moved ahead of the Trump administration,

French President Emmanuel Macron said this morning that he would respond to 'proof' that Assad's regime had used chemical weapons, 'at a time of our choosing.'

'We have proof that ... chemical weapons were used, at least chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad,' Macron said during an interview with France's TF1 television.

'France will in no way allow an escalation or anything that would harm regional stability, but we cannot allow regimes that believe they can act with impunity to violate international law in the worst possible way,' he added.

Macron said that he would respond 'at a time of our choosing, when we judge it to be the most useful and the most effective.'

And in London, May's Cabinet agreed to 'take action' to 'deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime'.

But a spokesman for the British prime minister did not state what taking action would mean or on what what timescale it would happen.

May met her most senior ministers for two hours and the new statement will raise expectations Britain will join coalition strikes against Assad - if they happen.

A Downing Street spokesman said: 'Following a discussion in which every member present made a contribution, Cabinet agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged.

'Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

'Cabinet agreed the Prime Minister should continue to work with allies in the United States and France to coordinate an international response.'

The Kremlin said Thursday that a crisis hotline with the U.S., designed to avoid an accidental clash over Syria, was being used by both sides as tensions mount over a possible American strike on Moscow's key Middle East ally.

British ministers planned to gather Thursday to discuss whether to join America and France in a possible military attack on Syria that threatens to bring Western and Russian forces into direct confrontation.

Asked whether the so-called deconfliction line between the Russian and U.S. military forces was being used to avoid potential Russian casualties in the event of a U.S. strike in Syria, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: 'The line is used and it is active. In general the line is used by both sides.'

Peskov said the Kremlin was closely following Syria-related announcements from Washington and reiterated a Kremlin call for restraint.

'We continue to consider it extremely important to avoid any steps that could lead to more tension in Syria. We believe that would have an extremely destructive impact on the whole Syria settlement process,' said Peskov.

The UN has warned Russia and the US against letting the crisis over the Syrian gas attack 'spiral out of control.'

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (pictured today with Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) warned on Thursday that threats of Western military action in response to an alleged chemical attack would only lead to further chaos in the region

Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that time was running out.

'Today, I called the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the Security Council to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse and stressed the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control,' he said, referring to the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain.

Meanwhile, Assad said Thursday that threats from Western military action in response to an alleged chemical attack would only lead to further chaos in the region.

'These voices, and any possible actions, will only contribute to further destabilization in the region,' Syria's strongman proclaimed.

His comments, made as he received Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign policy advisor to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were posted on the Syrian president's social media accounts.

He said Western threats were based on 'lies' and seek to undermine his forces' recent advances near Damascus.

The U.S. and its allies threatened military action after a gas attack by government forces over the weekend that Syrian opposition activists and medics say killed more than 40 people. The Syrian government has denied the allegations.

Russia, a key ally of Assad, says government forces have taken full control of the town of Douma, the last rebel holdout in the region and the scene of Saturday's alleged attack. Pictured: People being evacuated from the town overnight amid reports 85 buses and vehicles carrying 3,860 militants and civilians have arrived in Aleppo

Assad said Thursday that Western countries were lashing out after they lost their 'bet' on opposition forces in the eastern Ghouta suburbs of the capital.

Russia, a key ally of Assad, says government forces have taken full control of the town of Douma, the last rebel holdout in the region and the scene of Saturday's alleged attack.

Kremlin-backed news agency Tass reported a Moscow official saying that Russian military police will be deployed to the city to maintain law and order.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had said it intended to send investigators to Douma to look for evidence of a chemical attack.

Both Syria and Russia have said reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers in the town and have accused the U.S. of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the government.

Bouthaina Shaaban, a top adviser to Assad, described the army's recapture of eastern Ghouta as a 'decisive point' in an interview on Wednesday, saying the rebels' defeat had pushed the West to wage 'psychological war' by threatening strikes.

'Consultations are ongoing between the allies and they will not let matters progress as Washington wants,' she told Lebanon's al-Mayadeen channel, referring to the alliance of Assad, Russia, Iran and the Lebanese Shi'ite group Hezbollah.This musician wasn't horsing around when he look his bagpipes out into an equine field in the Highlands to play a version of the Scotland the Brave.

The bagpiper went into a field in Aboyne, a village on the edge of the Highlands in Aberdeenshire, Scotland to play to the horses.

Initially, the horses don't seemed bothered by the music and continue their daily business, but by the end of the two-minute clip they all gather around to listen to the bagpipes.

Slowly, the music enchants the horses and they move closer and closer to the bagpiper.

One horse is particularly interested and inspects the bagpiper up close, before wandering off again.

Charity HorseBack UK captured the footage and shared it to their Facebook page.

In less than a week, the post has been viewed more than 700,000 times, liked nearly 9,000 times and shared 20,000 times.

The clip was filmed by John 'Jocky' Johnstone, a veteran and mentor of the charity.

Hundreds of people have commented on the video sharing their own stories about horses and bagpipes.

Jackie Dean said: 'When my uncle died they had a piper playing as he was being buried because he had been in The Black Watch, the grave yard was next to a field full of horses and when the piper started they all made their way over and all lined up and silently just stood there listening- he always loved horses so it was incredibly moving and just amazing to see'.

A bagpiper went into a field in Aberdeenshire to play Scotland the Brave to a troop of horses

One horse seemed particularly curious and approached the musician

Paul MacDonald said: 'This happened to me while playing just outside Kingsbarns in Scotland, but it happened with about 40 head of highland cattle.

'Had my back to the farm ground looking over the shore to the sea, playing my pipes. Next thing I know, there are 40 cattle right behind me, standing silent listening to the Highland Pipes!'

Sheila Margaret Hope said: 'What a wonderful response to that beautiful music from those beautiful animals. Brings tears to my eyes.'

The horses all gathered around to listen to the music play

At first the field of horses seemed uninterested, but by the end of the clip they were mesmerised by the bagpipes playing

Horseback UK are a charity that work with ex-serviceman.

They help veterans through working with horses in the hope to get them to build confidence.

A spokesperson for Horseback UK said: 'We aim to help people find purpose and reconnect them with the world through chivalry-the art of horsemanship.

'The vast majority of people we work with are military veterans but now there is a lot more mental health we are dealing with.'Jeremy Corbyn vowed to oppose any military action against the Syrian regime today - as he stepped up demands for a Commons vote.

The Labour leader said he was 'alarmed' at sabre-rattling by US president Donald Trump and insisted: 'More bombing, more killing, more war will not save life.'

The comments came amid signs that Theresa May is prepared to join reprisals against the Assad regime without getting backing from MPs in advance.

The PM is gathering her Cabinet today to discuss the response to the apparent chemical weapons atrocity in Douma.

Jeremy Corbyn (pictured in London this week) said he was 'alarmed' at sabre-rattling by US president Donald Trump and insisted: 'More bombing, more killing, more war will not save life.'

Theresa May, pictured in Birmingham yesterday, is poised to defy calls for a Commons vote on military action in Syria

The U.S. has maintained its threat of rocket attacks in response to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's sickening chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday

Downing Street has made clear it believes a one-off, punitive strike can be launched without consulting Parliament.

Labour, the Lib Dem and the SNP have insisted Mrs May must stage a Commons vote.

Some Tories have also urged the premier to put the matter to MPs and warned against reprisals, meaning the government's slender majority would be at serious risk.

Does May need to call a Commons vote on striking Syria? Theresa May was constitutionally entitled to order British forces into action in Syria without a Commons vote. The Prime Minister has the power to deploy troops under the Royal Prerogative. There are no hard and fast rules obliging the government to involve rank-and-file MPs in the decision. But a vote on prolonged deployment of UK forces would be almost impossible to avoid. Commons divisions have been held on almost all military action by British forces since the Iraq War in 2003, establishing what many see as a firm convention. Advertisement

Speaking on a visit to Derby today, Mr Corbyn said of Mr Trump's warning that 'missiles are coming': 'I think the whole world should be alarmed at that sort of instant reaction - sending stuff out on social media to make policy.'

He said he condemned 'any use of chemical weapons by anybody against anybody else is clearly illegal as well as immoral and wrong'.

'The United Nations has a duty and a function to ensure there's a proper investigation undertaken as the inspectors are now in Douma doing just that and, when we've got the results of that, decide what action to take.

'But, I would just say this. Hundreds of thousands have died and lost their lives in Syria.

'Millions have been forced into refuge. Many are living in terrible poverty and desperation. There has to be a political solution.

'Russia, America, the European Union, all the neighbouring countries, Iran, Saudia Arabia have got to be involved in ensuring there is a real ceasefire and a political process that does give hope to the people of Syria in the future.

'More bombing, more killing, more war will not save life. It will just take more lives and spawn the war elsewhere.'

The SNP leader at Westminster, Ian Blackford, also demanded parliament be given the chance to voice its opinion.

'There is no mandate for the Government to take this action,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

'And, I would simply say to the Prime Minister: Be very careful, because you do not have a majority in Parliament.

'You are a minority Government, and you need to seek the consent of Parliament before you commit the United Kingdom to any action.'A pervert who wanted to take a 14-year-old 'girl's' virginity after setting up a fake Facebook profile has been thrown behind bars.

James Phillips, described as a 'dangerous sexual predator', was caught by 'paedophile hunters' after he set up a fake profile under the alias 'Anthony Moss' to contact the 'girl'.

The 28-year-old was already on licence for sexual offences involving an underage girl when he set up the fake profile and spoke to 'Becky', which was actually a decoy set up by members of the Predator Exposure group.

James Phillips, 28, was jailed for eight years after he was exposed by an online vigilante group who had evidence he planned to have sex with a 14-year-old girl

Phillips, pictured, was on licence for earlier child sex offences when he planned to meet up with the girl on February 2, at the Sainsbury's supermarket in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire

Using his new alias, Phillips then arranged to meet the 'girl' on February 2 this year at a supermarket with the intention of taking her virginity, Leeds Crown Court heard.

When he went to meet her at Sainsbury's in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire he was instead confronted by members of the group.

Leeds Crown Court heard how Phillips had tried to run away but was detained by members of the group until police arrived, which was streamed live on the Predator Exposure group site.

Prosecutor Christopher Dunn said Phillips had been jailed for two years in July 2014 when he was convicted of inciting a girl aged under 16 to engage in sexual activity.

He received a further 15-month jail term in May 2017 when he breached the terms of his sexual offences prevention order by sending indecent images to an underage girl.

Chris Aspinall, mitigating, said Phillips had pleaded guilty, admitted his offences to police from the start and fully accepted his intention was to have sex with 'Becky'.

He said this level of acceptance marked a change in behaviour and might be a sign of 'light at the end of the tunnel'.

Phillips had been jailed for two years in July 2014 having been convicted of inciting a girl younger than 16 to have sex. He was then jailed for 15-months in May 2017 when he breached the terms of his sexual offences prevention order by sending indecent images to a girl

Phillips, from Heckmondwike, West Yorkshire admitted attempting to incite a child to engage in sexual activity, attempting to meet a child following sexual grooming, attempting to have penetrative sex with a child and breaching a sexual offences prevention order.

Leeds Recorder Paul Greaney QC said: 'I have no doubt at all that there is a significant risk to members of the public.

'You are a dangerous sexual predator.

'You have, it is quite plain, a complete inability to control your sexual impulses to have sex with girls.'

Phillips was jailed for six years, with an extended term of eight years due to the high risk of harm he presents, bringing the total sentence to 14 years.

The sentence includes 18 months in prison to be served concurrently for breaching the sexual offences order, which he will remain subject to indefinitely.Longstanding lifeboatman Coxswain Tom Clark, who was awarded the MBE by the Queen, was 'unjustly' dismissed by the RNLI

A seaside town is in revolt after a longstanding lifeboatman awarded the MBE by the Queen was 'unjustly' dismissed by the RNLI.

Coxswain Tom Clark has received a wave of support, including from several local businesses which say they will remove all pictures of the RNLI in a show of solidarity.

It comes after the voluntary coxswain was permanently stood down by the charity for leading what it called an 'unauthorised training exercise' in October last year.

Mr Clark, who joined Scarborough RNLI 34 years ago, says the all-weather training exercise was originally meant to be held for the benefit of two trainee coxswains.

He said the exercise, launched from Scarborough lifeboat station, had the 'blessing and clearance' of the operations manager and several others.

The RNLI said it was 'crucial' volunteers complied with safety rules but Mr Clark claims the reason for his dismissal was 'rubbish'.

Mr Clark, who was made Coxswain in 2002, said in a statement that he believed the decision to dismiss him for the 'unauthorised training exercise' was unjust

The coxswain, who was awarded an MBE by the Queen in 2016, claims the RNLI has turned into a 'massive corporate giant that has lost its focus in saving lives at sea'.

Mr Clark, who was made Coxswain in 2002, said in a statement posted online that he believed the decision was unjust. A coxswain is the title of the most senior officer or skipper on a boat.

Mr Clark said: 'To say that the launch was not authorised is rubbish.

'I informed the lifeboat operations manager, deputy launch authority, second coxswain, deputy second coxswain, station mechanic, head launcher, tractor driver and the crew I was taking to sea, including the two trainee coxswains that the exercise was aimed at. All gave their blessing and clearance.

'It turned out that two other crew gave back word at the last minute and so I took two passengers, something that has happened for years, one of them being an RNLI representative. They are now saying I should not have taken people to sea.'

Mr Clark added it was also claimed the sea was 'too rough' for the exercise which he disputes, saying his 34 years of experience meant few people were in a better position to judge the conditions.

Mr Clark, who joined Scarborough RNLI 34 years ago, says the all-weather training exercise was originally meant to be held for the benefit of two trainee coxswains

He added: 'The only reason I can think of that would make them go to such lengths in getting me out, is over the last two years or so, they have bombarded us with new ways of doing things, new rules, acronyms, forms, health and safety, and my view is that they feel that I'm being left behind with it all.

'I have 34 years of service with not one disciplinary mark against my name, and skill, experience and knowledge. The sacrifices that I've made count for nothing.

'In my opinion, the RNLI has turned into something that doesn't resemble what the public sees it as.

'It has turned into a massive corporate giant that has lost its focus in saving lives at sea and all these messages are sending a very negative message to all sea goers.'

There has been an outpouring of support for Mr Clark on social media following his recent dismissal.

Tony Viney said: 'There is little doubt that this is a sad day for Scarborough RNLI. A living legend steps away. But we must remember that the RNLI is bigger than one man.

'Thank you for your service Tom. Godspeed team Scarborough, stay safe and keep doing what you do. You are a truly amazing bunch that do an outstanding job. Long may you continue.'

His daughter Jenny Clark added: 'I am heartbroken! The lifeboat has been part of my dad since before I was born. How could an organisation he dedicated his life to betray him this way!?'

The RNLI, however, has defended its decision and said it was not acceptable that Scarborough's all-weather lifeboat had been taken out under the circumstances.

An RNLI spokesperson said: 'An internal RNLI investigation has recently been concluded into an incident at Scarborough lifeboat station and, as a result, the volunteer coxswain involved has been permanently stood down.

'Subsequent evidence found during the investigation contributed to the decision to stand him down. The RNLI does not make the decision to stand a volunteer down lightly, and we recognise the long service dedicated to the charity.

'However, it is crucial that all volunteers comply with agreed safety and operational standards, as well as support a positive and inclusive culture. A major breach of policy can cause unnecessary risk to life and, therefore, cannot be ignored.

'Such actions could also result in a delayed rescue launch or impact the lifeboat crew's ability to respond to a launch request. The RNLI is 100 per cent committed to saving lives at sea and would never consider standing someone down unless there was due cause and reason.'

Mr Clark's dismissal comes a year after all 25 members of a lifeboat crew resigned in protest at the sacking of their coxswain.

Volunteers at St Helier Lifeboat Station in Jersey walked out amid claims Andy Hibbs was 'bullied' by senior management at the RNLI.Drivers could be slapped with a 100 fine and points on their licence by reversing too far up the road.

Motorists in the UK already face a maximum 2,500 fine and three penalty points if they reverse on a motorway or dual carriageway.

But the legalities of driving backwards is determined by traffic police officers, who can charge you for driving without due care and attention.

Drivers could be slapped with a fine and points on their licence by reversing too far up the road

If found guilty, this offence carries a 100 fine and three penalty points.

The Highway Code states that 'you must not reverse your vehicle further than necessary', which is also backed up in the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986.

Section 106 of the law reads: 'No person shall drive... a motor vehicle backwards on a road further than may be requisite for the safety or reasonable convenience of the occupants of the vehicle or other traffic.'

Therefore, if a police officers feels a driver has reversed too far up a street, they could charge the motorist.Russians have been advised on the best foods to take into 'World War III bomb shelters' as concern grows in the country that the tension in Syria may spill over into global conflict.

Kremlin-owned Rossiya-24news broadcast a segment suggesting the ideal supplies for survival - and packing iodine to protect the body from radiation.

Viewers were told to pack rice - 'it can be stored for up to eight years, oatmeal for three to seven years' - but to forego Russian favourite buckwheat which only lasts a year.

Pasta propaganda: Kremlin-owned Rossiya-24news suggested the ideal supplies for surviving a global nuclear conflict

'Obviously, you can survive on tinned meat for quite a while - up to five years, while canned fish keeps for not more than two years.

'Of course it is hard to do without milk, at least powdered, sugar and salt. Russian tradition suggests we should buy pasta in times of cataclysms.

'But professional survivors do not recommend taking this product into bomb shelters.'

TV presenter Alexey Kazakov said: 'Life in the underground world will be particularly hard for the sweet toothed. Chocolates, sweets, condensed milk, all this will have to be left behind.

'Yes, glucose is a great source of energy but sweets cause thirst, and water will become the most precious source for residents of bomb shelters.'

Prepare for nuclear war: The bizarre segment suggested Russians should bulk buy rice and pasta and forego buckwheat

Experts intervieweed also suggested 'take supplies of medicines with iodine that help body deal with radiation'

An 'expert' called Eduard Khalilov - interviewed on Skype - said: 'The more water, the better. Because you can survive for two to three weeks without food, but it gets really hard without water after three days only.

'Water is needed to digest food too. And water is the first thing one should think of.'

Experts 'say that it is also necessary to take supplies of medicines with iodine that help body deal with radiation'.

The report also claimed that 'the panic is worse in America', stating that the 'business of bomb shelters is booming' following the election of Donald Trump.

The Rossiya-24 segment came amid deep tension over Syria and as a top military analyst warned that the world already has the Cuban Missile Crisis Mark Two.

Alexander Golts told Rain TV in Moscow: 'A year ago when I said we had entered a new Cold War, nobody agreed with me.

'Now everyone agrees but it has become clear that events in this second Cold War develop a lot quicker.

'It's only just started and, here you go, we already have Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0.'Spiro Colaitis (pictured) was arrested for voting twice in the 2016 presidential election

The commander of the New York Naval Militia has been arrested for voting twice in the 2016 presidential election.

Spiro Colaitis, 57, of Manhasset, New York, voted in the polls in Nassau County but also by mail-in ballot in Escambia County in Florida, the Office of the State Attorney in Pensacola said.

He turned himself into the Escambia County Sheriff's Office on Thursday, according to Newsday.

Colaitis was charged with casting more than one ballot in an election  a felony - and released that day on $2,500 bail.

The state attorney's office found Colaitis had not lived in Pensacola for 13 years and had sold his property there before 2010.

Despite this, he requested an Escambia County mail-in ballot which was processed on October 25, 2016, an affidavit says.

The Escambia County Supervisor of Elections contacted its counterpart in Nassau County a few months ago asking for Colaitis' voter information.

They were told he wasn't being investigated for voting twice.

Colaitis was charged with casting more than one ballot in an election  which is a felony

A spokesman for the Nassau district attorney's office said they will look into the case.

Colaitis has taken a leave from absence from his role at the New York Naval Militia.

He is also the assistant superintendent for district operations for the Malverne school district.

His arraignment is set for April 26.A woman's body that was discovered in a ditch along an Ohio roadway 37 years ago and dubbed 'Buckskin Girl' has been identified as a 21-year-old from Arkansas.

The woman had been known as the 'Buckskin Girl' because of the distinctive buckskin jacket she was wearing. Her body was found in Troy in 1981.

On Wednesday, the Miami County Sheriff's Office said the body was identified by using DNA. Marcia King, of Arkansas, died of strangulation and blunt force trauma to the head.

'Jane Doe' named: A woman's body that was discovered in a ditch along an Ohio roadway in 1981 has now been identified as 21-year-old Marcia King, from Arkansas (left). Pictured right: An artist's rendition of the victim dubbed 'Buckskin Girl' from 2016

Police say King was never reported as a missing person by her family. Her killer was never arrested or charged.

The sheriffs office recounted in a statement how on April 24, 1981, the fully-clothed body of a female homicide victim was discovered on Greenlee Road in Troy. She was wearing bell-bottom jeans, a brown turtleneck sweater and a fringed buckskin jacket with a Native American design, and was estimated to have been dead for only a few hours.

The autopsy concluded the victim was killed by strangulation and blunt force trauma, and also suffered a laceration to her liver. The case has always remained an active investigation.

Justice for Marcia: The sheriff's office is now focused on finding the person who murdered King, who was never reported as missing by her family

The womans identity could not be determined at the time, though fingerprints were obtained and later entered into the FBIs Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

With the advent of DNA technology, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab generated the victims nuclear DNA profile in 2001. Seven years later, the profile of Buckskin Girl was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

In 2009, her mitochondrial DNA profile was developed at the NamUs DNA lab at the University of North Texas. Both the nuclear and mitochondrial genetic profiles of the victim were entered into the FBIs Combined DNA Index System.

Throughout the years, identification efforts included a new facial image generated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in February 2016; pollen studies on the victims clothing by the US Customs and Border Protection Agency in April 2016; and stable isotope studies on her hair in June 2016 in an effort to trace the victims location and geographic movements in the last year of life.

On April 9, the Miami Valley Regional Crime confirmed the victims identity as Marcia L. King.

The scientific assistance that finally led to the victims identification was conducted by the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization created in 2017 to apply genetic genealogy tools to the identification of unknown persons. The Buckskin Girl case was accepted as one of the first cases for the project.

TIMELINE OF 'BUCKSKIN GIRL' MURDER INVESTIGATION April 24, 1981: The fully-clothed body of an unnamed female homicide victim is discovered in a ditch alongside Greenlee Road in Troy, Ohio. 2001: The Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab generates the victims nuclear DNA profile. 2008: The profile of Buckskin Girl is entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. 2009: Victims mitochondrial DNA profile is developed at the NamUs DNA lab at the University of North Texas. Both the nuclear and mitochondrial genetic profiles are then entered into the FBIs Combined DNA Index System. 2010: NamUs case management is assigned to Dr. Elizabeth Murray, a forensic anthropologist and Professor of Biology at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati. February 2016: A new facial image is generated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. April 2016: Pollen studies are conducted on the victims clothing by the US Customs and Border Protection Agency. June 2016: Stable isotope studies are conducted on victims hair in an effort to trace the victims location and geographic movements in the last year of life. April 9, 2018: The Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab makes DNA confirmation and positively identifies victim as Marcia King, 21, from Arkansas. Advertisement

'Jane Doe' no more: King's mother now plans to update the headstone marking her grave site at Riverside Cemetery in Troy, Ohio (pictured)

Kings DNA was obtained from a blood sample that had been in storage since 1981; it was processed using advanced DNA techniques, and uploaded to a public genealogy database.

The slain womans family have requested that their privacy be respected by the media and public.

Miami County Sheriffs Office Chief Deputy Steve Lord tells Piqua Daily Call that King's mother now plans to update the headstone marking her grave site at Riverside Cemetery in Troy, which currently bears the name 'Jane Doe' and the date April 22, 1981, which was the day she was believed to have been killed during the initial investigation.

Anyone with information can contact the Miami County Sheriffs Office Tip Line at (937) 440-3990.A Syrian man has been stranded in Kuala Lumpur airport for more than a month in constant fear he will be forced to fight for Assad's army.

Hassan al-Kontar survives on chicken and rice meals from AirAsia and the occasional McDonald's burger, and showers in a disabled toilet.

He has no clean clothes left, is dangerously close to running out of cash, and can' leave the transit terminal for fear of being deported to Syria.

Hassan al-Kontar has been stranded in Kuala Lumpur airport for more than a month in constant fear he will be forced to fight for Assad's army

The 36-year-old got stuck there 37 days ago after a series of failed attempts to find asylum somewhere to avoid mandatory military service.

'I'm desperate for help. I can't live in this airport any longer, the uncertainty is driving me crazy. It feels like my life hit a new low,' he told the BBC.

'I don't know what to do. I have no-one to advise me on where I can go. I really need help because I believe the worst is yet to come.'

Mr al-Kontar was working as a general manager and marketing lead for energy companies in the United Arab Emirates until he was deported in 2016.

The UAE revoked his work permit and visa when the Syrian civil war intensified and he was sent to Malaysia as it was one of few companies to give Syrians a visa on arrival.

He overstayed his three-month tourist visa and saved up enough money to fly to Ecuador and seek asylum, but wasn't allowed to board the flight.

He survives on chicken and rice meals from AirAsia and the occasional McDonald's burger, and showers in a disabled toilet, posting this photo of his 'bed' to Twitter

Instead he went to Cambodia in the hope of flying to South America from there, but was again sent back to Malaysia.

Mr al-Kontar claimed he was interrogated about his finances by several immigration officers and his passport confiscated.

'They took my passport. They humiliated me actually  they took a photo of me standing against the wall like a criminal,' he told the Phnom Penh Post.

Cambodian officials said Syrians could be turned away if they failed to meet 'requirements' like having enough money or a return ticket.

'Anyone can apply for the visa on arrival. But we need to check what their purpose is,' they said.

Now an illegal immigrant in Malaysia, Mr al-Kontar has been trapped in the airport with no idea how he could escape.

A member of the Druze minority from Swaida in Syria, he blamed his situation on racism and took to posting daily videos in Arabic on his Twitter page.

'Lonely, weak, unwanted, rejected. No one is accepting us,' he said of being Syrian in one of them.

'In the end I can't blame anyone, this is our fate. We caused this problem to ourselves,' he said of the outbreak of the civil war.

Mr al-Kontar was working as a general manager and marketing lead for energy companies in the United Arab Emirates until he was deported in 2016

The 36-year-old got stuck there 37 days ago after a series of failed attempts to find asylum somewhere to avoid mandatory military service

He also hasn't seen his mother, sister, and brother since his last visit to Syria in 2008 and feared he would never seen them again.

Mr al-Kontar said there was an arrest warrant for him in Syria since 2011 for dodging his military service, but he refused to fight even if he never left the airport.

'I am a human being and I don't consider it right to participate in war. It was not my decision,' he said.

'I'm not a killing machine and I don't want any part in destroying Syria. I don't want blood on my hands. War is never the solution but unfortunately, even from where I am now, I am paying the price of its actions.'

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said it was 'aware of this case' and had 'reached out to the individual and the authorities'.The British recipient (pictured left) of a 28-year-old man's lungs flew halfway across the world to spend his donor's 30th birthday with family in Dapto, NSW, this week

Gavin Roberts was on the trip of a lifetime. A talented electrical engineer, the 28-year-old had been scouted to work in the UK - which funded his travels all around Europe.

But in 2016, the 28-year-old man was killed in a head on collision with a driver who was texting at the wheel.

With an uncle who had undergone a life saving kidney transplant, being an organ donor had been an easy choice for Gavin, and his body parts went on to save many others.

On Wednesday, which would have been his 30th birthday, the man who received his lungs, who has asked not to be named, flew halfway across the world, from the UK to Dapto, NSW, where he helped Gavin's family and friends celebrate - and used his new lungs to blow out the candles on the chocolate-hazelnut cake.

'He wasn't here just to blow out the candles,' Gavin's brother, Nathan, told Daily Mail Australia.

'He wouldn't be here at all if it wasn't for the fact he could get the lung transplant - he wasn't able to travel before because he was so sick.'

Gavin Roberts, 28 (centre right), was killed in a horrific car crash in Oxfordshire in 2016 because another driver was texting at the wheel

Gavin was rushed to hospital, and his family rushed over to England, but the man was pronounced brain dead

'He was really grateful Gav's lungs could help him so much, so he came to Australia to holiday and meet some of Gav's family and trace his footsteps.'

Gavin's death was a hard pill to swallow for Nathan, who described his younger brother as his 'best mate'.

'He was really a pretty special person,' he said. 'He was really charismatic, genuine and authentic. He was able to built rapport with people within like a minute.'

When his brother died, Nathan and the rest of the family flew over to see Gavin.

The family said they would be happy to be contacted by anyone who received one of Gavin's organs, and the man who received his lungs was one of the first to reach out.

His family celebrate their youngest son's birthday at Dapto Leagues Club with friends of the man every year, but this year they were joined by a special guest - and part of Gavin

Nathan's family said they would be happy to hear from recipients of Gavin's organs, and the man who was given his lungs was one of the first to reach out

Gavin had been in the UK for only five months before he was killed, and had met the family of his girlfriend Meg (right) just one night earlier

'He and my mum Facetime and all of that, and have exchanged a few messages over the course of the past two years,' Nathan said.

'I only found out he was over here on Tuesday - it was sort of that morning, I was in the shower and I thought it would be really funny to get him to help blow out a candle, like Gav would have done.'

The recipient agreed to attend - and to help blow out the candles.

'I called him - he was pretty nervous, but I think he was looking forward to meeting us and some other friends and family,' Nathan said.

Gavin had been scouted to work as an engineer in the UK, and spent his weekends travelling Europe, his brother Nathan said

Nathan said it was an incredible feeling to know part of Gavin (bottom centre) was with them on his 30th birthday

The Roberts family all reacted in different ways to meeting the man breathing air through Gavin's lungs, but Nathan said it made the night to have his brother, even if it was just one organ, there with them.

'I think [seeing the recipient] was different for everybody. I thought it was pretty special, pretty incredible,' Nathan said.

'It's nice to say "he's here in spirit" and all that, but it's next level to be able to say literally a part of him was there.'

Nathan said it took meeting the man to truly understand what a special thing his brother had done by signing up to be an organ donor.

Nathan said he didn't know Gavin's lung recipient was in Australia until the day before his brother's birthday, but thought it would be funny to invite him along and get him to blow out the candles like Gavin would have done

'I know earlier on, it probably meant a lot more to my brother and my mum - for myself, I thought it was great that several people's lives had changed for the better, but it didn't give me a whole lot of solace,' he said.

'But seeing [the recipient] there yesterday and talking to him, and seeing the impact the transplant had on his life was incredible.

'I think it didn't have much impact on me because it seemed like the standard thing to do - but when I met the man it just all hit home.'

Nathan wants to see organ donation be the standard, with an opt out system instead of an opt-in one.

To become an organ donor, register here.A man who launched a foul-mouthed rant at a black woman on a train after she asked him to stop swearing is being hunted by police.

The passenger hurled verbal abuse at the unidentified woman who was travelling with her children towards Essex when she politely asked him to watch his language.

The dark-haired man, who appears to be in his 20s, also claimed he was carrying a knife during the incident between Fenchurch Street station and Shoeburyness station last week.

British Transport Police are appealing for help in tracing this man, who launched a foul-mouthed rant at a black woman on a train between Fenchurch Street and Shoeburyness station after she asked him to stop swearing

In a video taken by another commuter, the man can be heard shouting: 'Some silly f***ing black bird trying to f***ing tell me to shut up.

The woman replied: 'There's no need to be so aggressive. I'm not shouting at you. I wasn't shouting at you.'

He shouts to the same woman who was sitting down: 'Why have you got up shouting at me?

In a video taken by another commuter, the man can be heard shouting: 'Some silly f***ing black bird trying to f***ing tell me to shut up'

'Shut your f***ing mouth. Shut up. Shut up. You're moaning about the way that I'm talking, you shut up. Shut up, silly c**t.'

The man threatened two other men on board the c2c train and said he was in possession of a knife, the British Transport Police posted in an appeal.

However, a knife was not seen during the incident, which happened at around 2:45pm on April 6.

British Transport Police are appealing for help in tracing the man who got off the train at Leigh-on-Sea, Essex.Sean Simpson, 43, teaches chemistry at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

A chemistry teacher at the Florida school where 17 people were shot to death has been arrested for leaving a loaded gun in a public restroom.

Authorities say 43-year-old Sean Simpson, who carries a concealed weapons permit, left his Glock 9 mm in a restroom at the Deerfield Beach Pier on Sunday.

The teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School told deputies he was returning to get it when he heard a gunshot, and found a drunk 69-year-old homeless man holding the pistol.

Simpson was able to snatch the gun from the homeless man and no one was injured by the single bullet, which hit a wall, according to a Broward Sheriff's report cited by ABC10.

He was arrested and charged with failing to safely store his weapon but was released on $250 bond.

During an MSNBC appearance shortly after Nicolas Cruz went on a rampage at the Florida high school, Simpson said he would be open to being armed on the job.

'I know there are some of us that are willing to take the training if it was offered and probably be another line of defense,' he said.

However, Simpson has also supported the gun-control efforts of the school's student activists.

He added: 'But again that is a complicated subject and I'm not sure if it's the answer. I think it's easier to get these types of weapons out of the hands of people that aren't meant to do anything but kill.'

The teacher was arrested after he left a loaded gun in a public restroom at the beach in Florida. He has said he'd be willing to be trained to carry a weapon at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 were killed in a shooting in February

Vagrant Joseph Spataro has been charged with firing a weapon while intoxicated and trespassing. He allegedly told cops he fired the gun to see if it was loaded.

'There was a reasonable likelihood that the firearm could have ended up in the hands of a child or the discharge of the firearm could have wounded another person or child,' deputies wrote in the arrest report.

Simpson told ABC10 that he did not think his offense violated school boar rules and he continues to teach at Stoneman Douglas.

A spokesperson for the Broward County School Board said no action is expected against Simpson.A criminology student, accused of killing her teenage sister in a horrific car smash, denied causing death by dangerous driving today.

Meliha Kaya, 21, allegedly careered her Mini Cooper over a 3ft wall into a tree in South Woodford, east London.

Her 16-year-old sister Elif Kaya, an aspiring barrister and star A-level student, was sat in the front passenger seat and died at the scene in Chigwell Road in the early hours of 13 February 2016.

Meliha Kaya, 21, allegedly careered her Mini Cooper over a 3ft wall into a tree in South Woodford, east London

Kaya's 16-year-old sister Elif Kaya (left), an aspiring barrister and star A-level student, was sat in the front passenger seat and died at the scene in Chigwell Road in the early hours of 13 February 2016

Meliha, a criminology student at Middlesex University, suffered life threatening injuries and underwent plastic surgery to her face after the accident, and her friend Ayla Osman, 21, was also seriously injured.

She appeared at the Old Bailey to deny causing death by dangerous driving and causing serious injury by dangerous driving.

Meliha will stand trial with Jordash Graham, 24, who denies driving a Ford Focus dangerously in High Road and Chigwell Road before the crash.

They will be back at the Old Bailey for a pre-trial hearing on 25 April.

Judge Wendy Joseph QC said: 'Ms Kaya and Mr Graham, at the moment the trial is fixed for 18 June.

'I am going to release you on bail to be back at this court for a pre trial hearing which is called a plea and trial preparation hearing on the 25 April.

'There are no conditions to your bail other than the implicit condition you are back here in good time on that day.'

Elif was studying her A Levels at Epping Forest College and dreamed of becoming a barrister.

Elif was studying her A Levels at Epping Forest College and dreamed of becoming a barrister

Meliha, a criminology student at Middlesex University, suffered life threatening injuries and underwent plastic surgery to her face after the accident, and her friend Ayla Osman (pictured), 21, was also seriously injured

Her mother Demet Kaya, 36, said after the accident: 'She was an angel. She was a lovely daughter. She wanted to be a barrister and was doing so well.

'This is just so unfair. She was a very fair child, very confident and strong character. She was so intelligent and worked very hard.'

Meliha Kaya, of Finchingfield Avenue, Woodford, east London, denies causing death by dangerous driving and serious injury by dangerous driving.

Graham, from Leytonstone, east London, denies driving dangerously.A 21-year-old Oklahoma City father is facing murder charges after admitting that he threw his three-month-old son against a wall because he would not stop crying.

Deion Reed said he was frustrated that his son Dexter was so tearful and would not settle down, newsok.com reported.

At one point he confessed to running the boy's head head into the door in an effort to quieten him.

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Deion Reed has been arrested and is being held without bail at the Oklahoma County jail on complaints of murder and child abuse

Reed said during an interview with police that he was the only one in the apartment with Dexter, according to KWTV.

He is reported to have told different stories about how the injuries occurred, later telling an investigator he would soon tell 'the truth,' about what happened, according to an affidavit.

Dexter died in hospital on Monday - doctors told police he had 'non-accidental impact to the front and back of his head' and bruising could be seen.

Reed said that after the door incident, he did not notice any marks on the boy's head and continued to grow more frustrated as the infant kept crying.

Demonstrating with a doll during an interview, Reed said he 'tossed' Dexter across a bed and into a wall.

An investigator said the doll hit the wall 'with a significant amount of force', according to the affidavit.

Deion Reed was arrested and is being held without bail at the Oklahoma County jail on complaints of murder and child abuse.

Dexter's death is the fourth child abuse related homicide in Oklahoma City involving children less than a year old this year and the sixth for the city in less than a year.A gang member involved in an airport luggage switching scam that saw tens of millions of pounds of cocaine being smuggled into the UK was caught when he tried to pass drugs under a table in Burger King.

Mark Agoro was part of a 12 strong gang based in the UK involved in a 'phenomenally lucrative' plot that saw hundreds of kilos of cocaine pass through Heathrow Airport.

Drug laden suitcases were flown into Heathrow Airport from Brazil and were moved from the international arrivals carousel to the domestic arrivals hall to avoid security checks.

The group are all being sentenced at a hearing taking place at Southwark Crown Court this week.

Corrupt staff in Brazil loaded bricks of unadulterated cocaine into ordinary bags stored in the planes hold

They were then flown into Heathrow Airport from Brazil and were moved from the international arrivals carousel to the domestic arrivals hall to avoid security checks.

Agoro, 51, of Chafford Hundred, Essex, who was one of the men who managed the couriers and got them to the correct airports and tell them what time the luggage would be expected.

He was arrested in 2015 in connection with a separate conspiracy when he was caught handing across 141 grams of cocaine underneath a table at a Burger King in King's Cross.

The court heard one of the ringleaders Joysen Jhurry, 41, was a baggage handler working at Heathrow and was helped by his brother-in-law, Preetam Mungrah, 44, and other crooked handlers at Terminal 5 including Damion Goodhall, 30, and Wilfred Owusu, 30.

Owusu organised couriers including Danovan Bull, 45, and Moses Awopetu, 38, and Agoro to fly in and collect the luggage and walk away without any customs checks, Southwark Crown Court heard.

How they did it: The drug smuggling ring's operation transporting cocaine from Brazil to the UK

Mark Agoro, left and Joysen Jhurry (right) were part of the 12 strong gang being sentenced at Southwark Crown Court

Michael Sutherland, 48, was also 'high up' in the plot, organising couriers and 'therefore involved in the onward distribution of cocaine'.

Leiona Townshend-Bartley, 32, Francisca Archer, 26, Aziz Abdul, 37, and Mohammad Ali, 41, had lesser roles as couriers or helpers.

Tim Probert-Wood, prosecuting, said: 'It is proper organised crime. And when it works it is phenomenally lucrative.

'High purity cocaine from Rio went through Terminal 5 at Heathrow, the drugs were concealed on British Airways flights in normal luggage.

Danovan Ball (left) who admitted possession of class A drugs with intent to supply in 2016 and was sentenced to six years in prison and Damion Goodhall (right)

'The importation both in Brazil and this country was facilitated by the use of corrupt baggage handlers.

'It was on the most serious and commercial scale and despite continual disruption when bags were lost, the conspiracy prospered for some 15 months and was still going strong at the time of arrests.'

Cocaine was intercepted on six occasions by the National Crime Agency and a total of 101 kilos of cocaine was seized.

The street value was 16m but 'there were undoubtedly other occasions when it is reasonable to infer and believe that cocaine was successfully smuggled into the country,' the prosecutor said.

Moses Awopetu (left) who admitted conspiracy to import Class A drugs, and Preetam Mungrah (right)

These other occasions mean the cash flow would have 'run into the tens of millions of pounds.'

Corrupt staff in Brazil loaded bricks of 'unadulterated cocaine' into ordinary bags stored in the plane's hold.

Crooked workers in the UK were then sent photos and descriptions of thr bags to look out for through Blackberry Messenger.

Rather than join the rest of the luggage going through security on the international arrivals carousel, bags were 'ripped off' and placed on the domestic arrivals carousel before being collected.

Wilfred Owusu (left) Aziz Abdul (right)

'If you think about it, the obvious reason for doing this is because security at domestic arrivals is far, far less,' said Mr Probert-Wood.

'There is no customs, no immigration, you just pick up your bag and there you go.

'It was far, far less and so much easier to do that.

'Mr Jhurry and his crew would be waiting as a result of the information that had been communicated to them,' Mr Probert-Wood said.

'They would identify the relevant container and remove the relevant bag from the container and take it to the domestic arrivals carousel.'

There were couriers who would arrive from Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen into Terminal 5 at the same time as the Rio flights and pick up bags in the arrivals hall.

Surveillance showing Joysen Jhurry (right) and Damion Goodhall (left)

Jhurry and Ali, along with a team of other BA baggage handlers, were ready to 'rip off' luggage from planes and take them to the domestic carousels.

They had fobs which granted them access to air-side and they were also able to get into baggage trucks and drive across the runways.

Townshend-Bartley and Awopetu worked as couriers, disembarking from domestic flights at the right time and picking up the luggage in arrivals.

Agoro, Goodhall, Owusu, Sutherland and Abdul managed the couriers and their job was to get them to the correct airports and tell them what time the luggage would be expected.

When consignments were intercepted the gang held meetings to discuss what went wrong.

Jhurry called Mungrah after police intercepted a bag filled with 129 packages of coke and said 'Big f-k up, big f-k up.'

The police swooped on 15 December 2016 and were able to catch almost all of the gang in coordinated strikes that day.

When Jhurry was arrested by police they asked if he was expecting them, he replied, 'No, but I'm glad you have come, it's a relief to be honest - I am glad it's all over.'

He claimed to be in fear of his life after a cartel in South America threatened to kill him.

But Jhurry, of Banstead, Surrey, along with Goodhall, of Tooting, south London, admitted conspiracy to import class A drugs.

Agoro, 51, of Chafford Hundred, Essex, Aziz Abdul, 37, and Awopetu, of no fixed address, also admitted the charge.

Danovan Bull, of Clapham, admitted possession of class A drugs with intent to supply at Isleworth Crown Court in January 2016 and was sentenced to six years in prison

Sutherland, of South Norwood, Croydon, Archer, of Stamford Hill, north London, Townsend-Bartley, of Camberwell, Ali, of Slough and Kufour, of Bedford, all denied conspiring to import cocaine but were convicted in February after a three month trial at Southwark Crown Court.

Mungrah, of Thornton Heath, south London, and Wilfred Owusu, 30, of Stoke Newington, north London, were convicted of organising the importation of consignments after an eight week trial at Kingston Crown Court last October.

Judge Michael Hopmeier is due to hand down a sentence to the 12 strong gang by the end of this week.Emmanuel Macron has claimed he has 'proof' that the regime of Bashar al-Assad launched a horrifying gas attack in Syria.

The French President suggested chlorine may have been used in the atrocity on Saturday that left at least 40 dead in the rebel-held town of Douma and prompted Donald Trump to consider launching airstrikes.

Assad denies carrying out the attack and Russia has accused aid workers of faking the incident.

But Macron said today: 'We have proof that chemical weapons were used last week, at least chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad.'

Emmanuel Macron has claimed he has 'proof' that the regime of Bashar al-Assad launched a horrifying gas attack in Syria

The U.S. has maintained its threat of rocket attacks in response to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's sickening chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday

Macron added that he was in daily contact with US President Donald Trump and that they would decide on their response 'at a time of our choosing, when we judge it to be the most useful and the most effective.'

The French leader, who had made the use of chemical weapons in Syria a 'red line', said one of his aims in Syria was to 'remove the regime's chemical attack capabilities'.

But he repeated that he wanted to also avoid 'an escalation'.

'France will in no way allow an escalation or anything that would harm regional stability, but we cannot allow regimes that believe they can act with impunity to violate international law in the worst possible way.'

Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned on Thursday that threats of Western military action in response to an alleged chemical attack would only lead to further chaos in the region.

'These voices, and any possible actions, will only contribute to further destabilisation in the region,' Assad said.

It comes as US President Donald Trump said an attack on Syria could take place 'very soon or not so soon at all!'

The president made the comments a day after he had warned Russia to 'get ready' for a missile attack on its ally Syria, suggesting imminent retaliation for last weekend's chemical weapons attack.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (pictured today with Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) warned on Thursday that threats of Western military action in response to an alleged chemical attack would only lead to further chaos in the region

But on Thursday, Trump wrote that he: 'Never said when an attack on Syria would take place.'

Russian lawmakers have warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime and that it could trigger a direct U.S-Russian military clash.

Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted - a stark warning of a potential major confrontation.

Trump suggested Monday he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence.

This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which the U.S. government had video and other evidence of certain aspects of an actual attack by Syrian aircraft, which involved the use of sarin gas. Trump responded then by launching dozens of Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

The U.S., France and Britain have been in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, U.S. officials have said.

Russia celebrates as Assad takes control of rebel town Syrian government forces have seized 'full control' of the city of Douma less than a week after the alleged chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of civilians, Russian state news reports. Russian military police unites were seen joining in celebrations on the streets of Douma, eastern Ghouta, as government soldiers raised the Syrian flag, in video footage published by Kremlin-funded news. Rebel fighters in Douma surrendered after a series of ferocious assaults by President Bashar al-Assad's forces, aided by Russia under a massive bombardment. Gathering: Hundreds of people took to the streets in Douma after the surrender of the rebels as Syrian government forces seized control 'A state flag hoisted on the Douma building heralded control over this settlement and, hence, over entire Eastern Ghouta,' Major-General Yuri Yevtushenko, head of the Russian Peace and Reconciliation Centre in Syria, was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies. The Jaish al-Islam group in Douma agreed on Sunday to withdraw, hours after a suspected chemical weapons attack on the town that has raised the prospect of U.S. strikes. Human rights activists and aid workers in Syria reported that more than 40 people were killed when two bombs, allegedly chemical weapons, were dropped on Douma on Saturday afternoon. Hospitals allegedly saw more than 500 patients admitted with symptoms of exposure to chemicals such as foaming at the mouth, asphyxiation and blue lips. The Syrian government and Russia have called reports of the attack bogus. Government control: Russian military police unites were seen joining Douma residents in celebrations on the streets Local residents held up large Syrian flags and danced in the street on Monday Got to go: A child from Douma cries as his family arrives in Aleppo last night Russian military police were deployed in Douma on Thursday in accordance with the rebel surrender deal, Russia's RIA news agency reported. Some 40,000 people, including thousands of rebels and their families, are being forcibly evacuated from Douma and other opposition areas in northern Syria under the agreement. On Wednesday, a top official from Iran, Assad's other main ally, toured eastern Ghouta and vowed to stand by Syria in the face of 'any foreign aggression'. 'Syria's enemies are angry because of its military advances against terrorist groups,' Ali Akbar Velayati, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's top adviser, told Iranian state TV during his visit to eastern Ghouta's bomb-shattered ruins. Advertisement

A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the U.S. in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syria's political and military support from Russia and Iran.

Macron on Tuesday called for a 'strong and joint response' to the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday. The Syrian government denies responsibility.

The French president does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the U.S.-led coalition created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Multiple IS terror attacks have targeted France, including one last month.A Greek air force plane has crashed into the eastern Aegean Sea after returning from a mission to intercept Turkish aircraft, killing its pilot.

Officials said the Mirage 2000-5 crashed Thursday north of the island of Skyros but gave information about the possible cause of the crash.

The Hellenic Air Force said in a statement that authorities lost contact with the jet some 9 miles northeast of the island at 12.15 p.m.

A Greek air force Mirage 2000-5 of the type that crashed. Navy vessels and army helicopters are searching for the pilot

Patrolling has intensified in recent weeks amid a spike in tensions between Greece and Turkey and near-daily mock dogfights in disputed airspace.

Greek navy ships and army helicopters are searching for the missing pilot.

Greek soldiers fired warning shots at a Turkish helicopter after it approached a tiny Greek island of Ro in the eastern Aegean on Monday.

The Turkish coastguard helicopteer, flew along the outer limit of the air control identification zone between the two countries, both members of Nato.

The air craft came down near the island of Skyros (pictured)

Tensions between Greece and Turkey have been rising in recent weeks.

A Turkish court rejected requests for two Greek soldiers arrested in Turkey to be released from custody.

The two were arrested last week for allegedly entering a Turkish military zone and on suspicion of attempted espionage.

Greece said the two soldiers, a lieutenant and a sergeant, accidentally strayed into Turkey due to bad weather during a patrol of the Greek-Turkish border.

In February Greek coast guard vessel was rammed by a Turkish patrol boat off disputed islets in the east Aegean, and Turkish warships prevented an exploratory gas rig from drilling near Cyprus.

Turkey meanwhile, is angered by court decisions in Greece rejecting the extradition of eight Turkish servicemen wanted by Ankara for their alleged involvement in a failed military coup in 2016.A 1million campaign to stop Brexit by forcing a second referendum will be launched this weekend.

Dubbed 'The People's Vote' the campaign brings together nine different Remain groups and MPs from across the political divide.

Tory Anna Soubry and Labour's Chuka Umunna are figureheads of the new campaign, which was revealed today by the Telegraph.

Arch Brexiteer Sir Bill Cash, chairman of the influential European Scrutiny Committee accused the group of defying the referendum.

Tory Anna Soubry and Labour's Chuka Umunna are figureheads of the new campaign, which was revealed today

Arch Brexiteer Sir Bill Cash, chairman of the influential European Scrutiny Committee accused the group of defying the referendum

He told the paper: 'They are completely defying the British people who made a decision which was given to them by parliament itself.

'The latest polling says 65 per cent of the British people do not want a second referendum; they are living in a parallel universe.'

Unveiling the campaign, James McGrory, the executive director of Open Britain, said: 'The various pro-European groups have never hidden the fact that their co-location in Millbank Tower was a precursor to the launch of a new overarching campaign.

'We're publicly organising over 300 grassroots events on Saturday and a launch event on Sunday.'

The campaign launch comes as the Brexit talks enter a new phase, focused on future trading relationships.

Britain will send hundreds of civil servants to Brussels to hammer out a trade deal by October after David Davis won a battle inside Whitehall.

Britain will send hundreds of civil servants to Brussels to hammer out a trade deal by October after David Davis (pictured left last month with Michel Barnier) won a battle inside Whitehall

The Brexit Secretary has been wrestling with civil servant Olly Robbins, Theresa May's chief Brexit adviser, over what can be achieved in trade talks.

Mr Robbins had agreed with the EU's position that the best Britain can hope for this year is a broad statement of principles that can be turned into a trade deal later.

The dispute centred on whether sending hundreds of officials to fight for a more ambitious conclusion would endanger the chances of getting a deal at all.A white Democrat running for a state House seat in North Carolina has ruffled feathers after claiming he's a 'member of the African-American community'.

Gary Shipman, who is running in the Democratic primary and hoping to challenge Republican incumbent Holly Grange in the District 20 race in November, was attending a campaign event in Wilmington on Sunday.

He was asked at the event how he would promote inclusion and diversity and 'enthuse African-Americans' about his campaign.

Gary Shipman (pictured), a white Democrat running for a state House seat in North Carolina, has ruffled feathers after claiming he's a 'member of the African-American community'

He was asked at a campaign event in Wilmington (pictured) on Sunday how he would promote inclusion and diversity and 'enthuse African-Americans' about his campaign

'I'm a member of the African-American community,' Shipman said. 'I've been where you are. I've been in your communities.'

He then tried to clarify his comment, saying that he had spent time among his African-American constituents and felt confident that he knows them, reported the News & Observer of Raleigh.

'I've eaten at many a fish fry held by my "brothers" and "sisters", "aunts" and "uncles" in that community,' he wrote in an email to the newspaper.

'I've celebrated birthdays, births, marriages, graduations, Christmas, Thanksgiving, July 4, etc., with many members of the African-American community.

He then tried to clarify his comment, saying that he had had spent time among his African-American constituents and had 'eaten at many a fish fry'

Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of North Carolina's Republican Party, said that Shipman's remarks were 'off-putting' (Pictured, Shipman speaks with constituents)

'There are people within that community and elsewhere that refer to me (and treat me) like their "brother" or "pops" or "uncle", and I refer to them (and treat them) like my "brothers", "sisters" and children,' he wrote.

Shipman also told the News & Observer that he took in an 'African American kid' he had known for years after the teenager's parents died.

The attorney said he helped the teenager prepare for college and 'pushed him out into the world' as if he was his biological child. just as he would one of his own children.

'I don't see color, I see people; and not because I'm running for the NC House either - I've talked the talk and walked the walk for many, many years,' Shipman wrote.

Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of North Carolina's Republican Party, said that Shipman's remarks were 'off-putting' but added that ultimately voters would decide which candidate represented their values and the community.Donald Trump insisted on Thursday that a New York Times report about his December plans to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller was entirely wrong.

It's the second day in a row he has taken issue with the newspaper he has branded with a derogatory nickname, although Wednesday's installment was factually incorrect.

Trump tweeted Thursday morning that '[i]If I wanted to fire Robert Mueller in December, as reported by the Failing New York Times, I would have fired him. Just more Fake News from a biased newspaper!'

Mueller has been tasked with investigating allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. American intelligence agencies have concluded such interference took place, but Moscow denies it.

President Donald Trump lashed out at the 'biased' New York Times for the second day in a row, saying reporters were wrong about a story claiming he wanted to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller in December

If I wanted to do it, I would have done it, Trump insisted in a tweet, calling the Times story 'Fake News'

Mueller is also investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, which Trump has denied forcefully more than two dozen times.

Robert Mueller is =investigating whether the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia, which Trump has denied forcefully more than two dozen times

The president has repeatedly attacked the special counsel investigation, and on Wednesday he blamed it for Washington's frosty relationship with Moscow.

A bipartisan group of senators put forward legislation on Wednesday to protect Mueller and his investigation, which the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider next week.

In addition to December's episode, Trump made a move to get rid of Mueller in June 2017. White House Counsel Don McGahn reportedly threatened to quit over the idea and the president backed off.

Republican and Democratic senators, meanwhile, are urging Trump to let the special counsel process run its course without any political bloodletting.

And a bipartisan group of lawmakers has proposed a bill that would protect Mueller's office from any White House interference.

But House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday that it's unnecessary to pursue that route because Trump isn't actually pondering Mueller's forced exit.

'I don't think that's necessary ... I don't think it's under consideration, because of the kind of conversations I've had with people in the White House,' he said.

Mueller 'should be left to do his job,' Ryan added. 'We have a system based upon the rule of law.'

Still, the president vented Monday evening, saying a 'witch hunt' had been 'going on for over 12 months now  and actually ... you could say it was right after I won the nomination, it started.'

The president has become more and more dismissive of Mueller in recent days

He called Mueller's evolving criminal probe, which led to an FBI raid on his personal lawyer's office , 'a real disgrace' and 'an attack on our country, in a true sense. It's an attack on what we all stand for.'

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders insisted Tuesday that Trump has the legal authority to fire Mueller, even though the Justice Department's own rules say otherwise.

The president 'certainly believes he has the power to do so,' Sanders told reporters.

She said she knows 'a number of individuals in the legal community, and including at the Department of Justice, [who say] he has the power' to fire the special counsel.

'We've been advised that the president certainly has the power to make that decision.'

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday morning that Mueller should be allowed to finish his job, and that White House officials have told him Trump doesn't plan to stop him

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Wednesday that legal 'experts' have told the White House that the president has the authority to send Mueller packing

Trump's tweet on Thursday morning followed a Wednesday episode in which he tried to correct a 'phony' story that was correct when it was published.

It was written by the same two New York Times reporters who wrote the piece about Trump's former plan to fire Mueller.

The pair had separately reported that Mueller's office was investigating a $150,000 donation that a Ukrainian billionaire made to Trump's family charity three years ago in exchange for a 20-minute appearance in a conference via video.

'The Failing New York Times wrote another phony story. It was political pundit Doug Schoen, not a Ukrainian businessman, who asked me to do a short speech by phone (Skype), hosted by Doug, in Ukraine. I was very positive about Ukraine-another negative to the Fake Russia C[ollusion] story!' Trump tweeted Wednesday, in an attempt to pick the story apart.

The Times had already correctly reported that the long-distance speech 'was set up by Doug Schoen, a veteran political consultant and pollster.'

Citing 'a person familiar with how the speech was arranged,' the paper's reporters wrote that 'Mr. Schoen, a frequent Fox News guest, has known Mr. Trump for years and contacted him personally to set it up.'Tara Wolf, pictured, denies assaulting Maria MacLachlan during a demonstration at Speaker's Corner on September 13 last year

A radical feminist who claims she was attacked by a transgender activist during a protest denies she was filming her in order to 'out' her as transgender online.

Tara Wolf, 26, is accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, 61, during a demonstration at Speaker's Corner, Hyde Park on September 13, last year.

Under cross examination from Ms Wolf's defense counsel Jodie Anderson, Ms McLachlan denied a suggestion she was seeking to 'out' Ms Wolf as transgender online.

She claimed she had pulled out the camera and started filming because she thought she would get some 'amusing footage'.

But Jodie Anderson, defending, argued she was deliberately trying to antagonise the protesters and intended to post the footage on her blog, Facebook page and Twitter in a bid to out them as trans.

Wolf, who faces one charge of assault by beating, admits being involved in the fracas but insists she was acting in self-defence.

Ms Maclachlan, who is active on social media, said: 'I thought it would make some very amusing footage - it didn't really occur to me that someone standing several feet away with a camera would be antagonising when they themselves had voluntarily gone along to this event.'

Ms Anderson said: 'As an active tweeter no doubt you are aware that quite often people who identify as trans are targeted and attacked by virtue of their identification.'

The 26-year-old (pictured outside cour t today) is accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, 61, during a demonstration at Speaker's Corner, Hyde Park on September 13, last year

Ms Maclachlan said she was not even aware the group were trans, saying she thought they were all male.

'They were not easily perceived as trans. I don't mind going through them face-by-face if you want to argue the toss,' she said.

Ms Anderson said: 'I'm going to suggest that when making that footage of the protesters, but particularly of Tara Wolf, your intention was to post it online.'

Ms Maclachlan replied: 'When I started filming I didn't have any particular intention of what I might do with the footage. I might have shown it to my husband, I might have posted it on my Facebook page, or I might have uploaded it on my blog.'

She denied Ms Anderson's suggestion that by filming them she was trying to make the protesters feel 'scared, uncomfortable or unsafe'.

Ms Maclachlan admitted grabbing the protester she believed had snatched her camera, but denied shaking her or lifting her off the floor.

She admitted following the event she had sent out an abusive tweet featuring a close-up of the defendant's face with the words: 'Hiya, got any hair restorer while I'm in hiding? Love Tara.'

Later, Hendon Magistrates' Court heard from Dr Julia Long - a 'Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist' who witnessed the alleged assault.

She told the court Tara Wolf, 26, was part of a group who attacked feminist Maria MacLachlan.

She told a trial Ms MacLachlan's camera was also wrecked during the flashpoint in Hyde Park, central London, last September.

Maria MacLachaln, left, claims she was assaulted by Ms Wolf during the demonstration at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park on September 13, 2017

The atmosphere had quickly turned 'hostile' as trans activists huddled around Ms MacLachlan and attacked her, magistrates heard.

Dr Long told Hendon Magistrates' Court: 'At one point I started singing into the megaphone which one of my friends had brought.

'It was quite jovial, it was not hostile on my part. I was not chanting or shouting.

'While I was doing that one of the trans activists came and shouted into the megaphone. That was quite harassing for me to have that intrusion into my space.

'I was singing into it, I was singing a humorous song.'

Protesters erected a banner outside Hendon Magistrates' Court earlier today

A group of demonstrators waited outside the court during the trial of Tara Wolf

She described spotting a 'huddle' of people surrounding Ms MacLachlan before Wolf, who Dr Long initially mistook for a man, punched her.

Dr Long said: 'It all happened quite quickly.

'I remember hearing this chanting, which as I remember was something like 'when TERFs attack we fight back'.

'I became aware of that, I was looking around because there was the group of people there and as I looked to my right I saw what happened next.

'I saw one group huddled together, about three or four people in this group, and that's when I saw the incident occur.

'There was a woman in the centre of it. I know her now but I didn't know her at the time.'

Dr Long said the woman, who the court heard was Ms MacLachlan, was trying to pull a hood or headscarf from one of her attackers to reveal their face.

She added: 'It all happened very, very quickly between what looked to me like a young, slender male wearing a grey and white camouflage hoodie.'

Carly Loftus, prosecuting, said: 'I think it's accepted that's the defendant?'

Dr Long said: 'I saw the defendant, I think with his [sic] right fist, strike the woman who had been holding the scarf of the other - strike her twice from what I could see, to her side.

'I think it was the side of her, but it could have been lower down her body.

'It was a tight group of people but what I saw was the defendant strike twice and it looked to me the blows landed on the woman in the middle.'

The prosecutor asked: 'What did the defendant do after striking?'

Dr Long said: 'It looked like he just struck her and then ran off, but at that point I must admit I was so shocked to see the woman being hit that I'm not so sure about what happened after.

'The main thing I remember was feeling really shocked because up to that point I knew there had been threats made and had seen some things on social media.

'But I really didn't expect any of it to materialise so I was really taken aback.'

She said she thought she also saw another woman being attacked so phoned 999.

A person then handed her Ms MacLachlan's camera, which had been damaged in the struggle.

Dr Long said: 'The bottom of it was broken and the cover where the memory card goes was broken because I was trying to put it back in but it would not fit back in.

'By then I think the police had arrived and I went over to the police to say I had witnessed the incident.

'A woman came over to where the police were and a group of people were and I think she was saying she had lost her camera.

'It turns out the camera belonged to her

'She was so relieved that someone had her camera.'

Earlier, District Judge Kenneth Grant warned Ms MacLachlan about her use of pronouns during her evidence at Hendon Magistrates' Court .

Judge Grant said: 'The defendant wished to be referred to as a woman, so perhaps you could refer to her as 'she' for the purpose of the proceedings.'

Ms MacLachlan replied: 'I'm used to thinking of this person who is a male as male.'

The court heard Ms MacLachlan had started to film transgender activists who were holding a counter demonstration when she was attacked.

She said those on the counter-demonstration were 'predominantly middle class university types'.

She told the court: 'I really only became aware of them when they started to make a noise.

'At one point I heard them shout 'kill all TERFs'. I think they shouted it once or twice.'

Miss MacLachlan said the brawl broke out shortly after TERF organiser Dr Julia Long tried to sing through a megaphone.

She said: 'As soon as she put it to her lips there was a huge chorus of chanting starting behind us.

'It was the protesters shouting 'when the TERFs attack we fight back'.

'They were obviously trying to drown out voices and intimidating us.

'At one point I said 'who's attacking who?' I asked them that a couple of times, but they didn't answer: they just shouted louder.

'They didn't ask me not to film, they didn't hide their faces in any way.'

Miss MacLachlan said transgender activists then approached her, before a scuffle broke out and she was punched several times.

She said: 'A hooded figure suddenly ran at me, ran past me from left to right, knocking the camera from my hand.

'They swatted it. Although it was knocked out of my hand it was caught by the strap so it didn't hit the ground, which I thought was the intention.'

Describing the alleged attempt to knock the camera from her hand, she added: 'I was extremely shocked it had happened.

'It was a split second it happened in, and very, very angry.

'I retrieved my camera and was intent on getting footage of the person who had just tried to knock my camera out of my hand.

'I straightened the camera up and walked towards where the defendant was now hiding behind the other protesters and raised it above their heads to try and get footage of the defendant.'

Ms MacLachlan was told by a district judge at Hendon Magistrates' Court, pictured, to refer to her alleged attacker using the correct pronoun while giving evidence against Ms Wolf

Referring to placards held by the counter-demonstrators, she added: 'They pushed them into my face.

'One or two physically started to push my away and at that point I was probably in danger, so I turned away.

'A couple of them came after me.

'I remember one guy with a ponytail and another who was hooded. That one in particular came to my front and tried to push the camera from my hands.'

The prosecutor asked: 'What was the person with the ponytail doing?'

She replied: 'I think he was holding on to me trying to assist the other one, but more by physically restraining me and stopping me from getting away.

'He held onto me.

;They managed to rip the camera from the strap so he had it and that's when I got hold of him. I wanted to stop him running off with my property.

'He had it then he smashed it to the ground.

'As I was holding the one who had my camera to stop them getting away I suddenly saw the defendant and man with the ponytail running at me and started thumping me.

'They were closed fists. It was more of a side, rather than a forward, punch.'

She said she felt blows to her right cheek and neck.

A photo was shown to the court of a bruise which Ms MacLachlan allegedly suffered to her leg during the fracas.

She said: 'I remember being hit when I was on the ground and kicked, but I didn't see who did it.

'I had bruises to my legs. I believe I sustained them when the person I was holding on to was kicking me and when I fell to the ground I had some grazes on my knees.'

She added: 'They just looked so silly.

'These are what appear to me to be predominantly middle class university types, as far as I could see, talking about being attacked. By who?

'There were a peaceful group of women chatting in a park. Nobody wanted any trouble, and if they had not followed us to the venue there would not have been trouble.'

Wolf, who told the court she was of no fixed abode, denies one count of assault by beating.

The trial continues.Police say the mother of a six-year-old girl found dead in their Massachusetts home banned her nine-year-old son from calling 911 and used super glue to close a wound on his neck.

Shana Pedroso, 37, and the children's father Marvin Brito, 38, were charged after police found their daughter dead and their son severely injured at their Fitchburg home on Tuesday.

The horrifying details of the case emerged on Wednesday when both parents appeared emotionless in Fitchburg District Court charged with abusing the two children.

Shana Pedroso, 37, was charged on Wednesday after her six-year-old daughter Sophia was found dead with 'extensive bruising' at their home in Fitchburg, Massachusetts

Police said they found the little girl, Sophia, unresponsive with 'extensive bruising', while her brother Julian had bruising and a neck wound when they responded to a 911 call at the home.

It is not clear who at the home eventually called 911.

The children were taken to UMass HealthAlliance Hospital where Sophia was pronounced dead. Her brother's injuries, while severe, are not believed to be life-threatening.

While in the emergency room, the boy told police he had gotten his injuries on Monday when 'bullies' attacked him and his sister when they were left alone during a walk outside.

He told police his mother had glued a wound on his neck with super glue, but it is not known when or how the boy suffered in the injury.

Sophia was found unresponsive and her nine-year-old brother Julian had bruising and a neck wound, which he told police had been glued together by his mother Shana Pedroso

Pedroso (left) and Brito (right) were arrested and charged with reckless endangerment. Pedroso was also charged with assault and battery

The little boy told police Pedroso had gotten mad on Tuesday morning when his sister wouldn't drink any water. She is being held without bail pending a court appearance next week

According to court documents, Julian said his mother had gotten mad earlier on Tuesday when his sister wouldn't drink any water.

The boy told police his mother had instructed him not to call 911.

Police said when the children's mother was arrested, they found notes that she had written on Monday saying the children were 'bad' so they were 'beaten'.

The Department of Children and Families, who have taken custody of the boy, said they had not had any previous interactions with the family.

The parents were arrested and charged with reckless endangerment. Pedroso was also charged with assault and battery.

The couple have both pleaded not guilty on Wednesday.

Pedroso and Brito were held without bail pending a court appearance next week.The Cannes Film Festival will 'never be the same' after Harvey Weinstein and subsequent scandals forced an internal evaluation.

Artistic director Thierry Fremaux said the renowned festival was discussing equal pay and more women on the jury and competing in competitions.

He described the first Cannes without the disgraced Hollywood producer as an 'earthquake' ahead of its launch next month.

The Cannes Film Festival will 'never be the same' after Harvey Weinstein (right) and subsequent scandals forced an internal evaluation, artistic director Thierry Fremaux (left) said

He described the first Cannes without the disgraced Hollywood producer as an 'earthquake' ahead of its launch next month

'The world will never be the same again, the Cannes Film Festival will never be the same again,' he told the Hollywood Reporter.

'We will discuss our own practices with the festival team. We will discuss equality of salary, we want to question our own process about the parity of the juries.'

Mr Fremaux said here were more women working for the festival than ever before and the its top awards juries were headed by women.

Swiss film director Ursula Meier would lead the best overall Golden Camera award jury and dual-Oscar winner Cate Blanchett the slate of film competitions.

Only three films by female filmmakers were up for consideration this year, with a possible late entrant, and Mr Fremaux would like to see more.

Swiss film director Ursula Meier would lead the best overall Golden Camera award jury and dual-Oscar winner Cate Blanchett (pictured) the slate of film competitions

Eva Husson's Girls of the Sun will compete for Cannes feature film awards on May 8

He said the festival could only admit films that were submitted, the usual defence to questions about few female entrants.

Capernaum by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, Eva Husson's Girls of the Sun and Lazzaro Felice by Alice Rohrwacher would compete for feature film awards on May 8.

Four Asian films are in the running, led by Ash is Purest White from Chinese creator Jia Zhangke and Shoplifters by Japan's Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexually assaulting at least two woman and harassing another five during Cannes parties since 1996.

Actress Kadian Noble alleged he invited her to his hotel room in Cannes in 2004 on the pretense of discussing a potential role in one of his films.

Capernaum by Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki (left) and Lazzaro Felice by Alice Rohrwacher (right) are also contenders

She claimed he then groped her before trapping her in the bathroom and forcing her to perform a sex act on him. Weinstein denied 'non-consensual sex'.

Model Samantha Panagrosso claimed he in 2003 made sexual comments to her over dinner, then came into her room, pushed her on the bed, and groped her.

French actress Judith Godreche, models Zoe Brock and Angie Everhart, and actresses Daryl Hannah and Alice Evans all claimed harassment.

Weinstein's alleged harassment at Cannes included graphic sexual comments, masturbating in front of women, chasing them around rooms, and banging on doors.House Speaker Paul Ryan says he does not believe congressional legislation to protect the special counsel is needed because he does not believe that President Trump plans to fire Robert Mueller.

Ryan told CBS on Thursday that his belief was based on conversations he's had with people in the White House about Mueller.

'I don't think that's necessary,' he said of congressional action, 'because I don't think it's under consideration.'

House Speaker Paul Ryan says he does not believe congressional legislation to protect the special counsel is needed because he does not believe that President Trump plans to fire Robert Mueller

The interview came on the heels of a report that ousted Trump aide Steve Bannon had been circulating a plan among current White House staffers to undermine Mueller.

According to the Washington Post, the ex-White House official suggested firing Mueller's supervisor, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and ceasing cooperation with the special counsel that was tasked with investigating Russian election meddling.

Trump did not directly address the report in a morning tweet laying out his thinking on retaining the special counsel.

He said, in response to speculation that he would fire Mueller, that if he'd wanted to do so, he'd have done so already. Trump referenced a New York Times article from Tuesday claimed the action was under consideration in December.

'If I wanted to fire Robert Mueller in December, as reported by the Failing New York Times, I would have fired him. Just more Fake News from a biased newspaper!' he tweeted.

A tirade against Mueller and the Department of Justice last week following a raid on Trump's personal attorney's office and hotel room had a bipartisan group of lawmakers rushing to introduce legislation to give Mueller the right to challenge his possible dismissal in court

A tirade against Mueller and the Department of Justice last week following a raid on Trump's personal attorney's office and hotel room had a bipartisan group of lawmakers rushing to introduce legislation to give Mueller the right to challenge his possible dismissal in court.

The bill will come to a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ryan, who said yesterday that he would quit Congress at the end of his term, told CBS 'This Morning' that the legislative branch doesn't need to interfere with Mueller's probe in anyway.

'He should be left to do his job. We have a system based upon the rule of law. We need to respect that system, and I think we should just leave these guys to do their jobs,' he said.

When asked about the possibility that President Trump would fire Mueller yesterday, Ryan also invoked the 'rule of law' in America as the existing protection against that lawmakers and legal scholars have said would create a constitutional crisis.

'We have a rule of law in this country, and it's a principle we all uphold,' Ryan said during a press conference where he announced his retirement next year.

His statement was tied to revelations Trump that is considering the dismissal of Rosenstein  and that he made moves to fire Mueller late last year following reports of a subpoena of his financial records.

'I think they should be allowed to do their jobs,' Ryan said.

When asked about the possibility that President Trump would fire Mueller yesterday, Ryan invoked the 'rule of law' in America as the existing protection against that lawmakers and legal scholars have said would create a constitutional crisis

He added: 'I have no reason to believe that's going to happen' and said 'I have assurances that it's not.'

Ryan said he was confident 'because I have been talking to people in the White House about it.'

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders declined to say who Ryan had been talking to when the topic came up at her news conference later in the day.

A range of other Republican lawmakers have said they don't believe Trump will fire Mueller, despite constant reports of his rage about the Russia probe.

North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, a Trump ally, said Wednesday that he also doesn't think it will happen.

Ryan's confident response on Wednesday came two hours after Trump branded the Russia probe headed by Mueller 'Fake & Corrupt,' called Mueller ' conflicted,' and bashed Rosenstein for signing a FISA warrant to surveil one of his advisors in addition to the letter recommending the firing of former FBI director James Comey.

Trump tweeted: 'Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama. Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!'

Behind closed doors, President Trump (left) is fuming over Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's (right) decision to sign off on a warrant of Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen's office, home and hotel room

Michael Cohen, a personal attorney for President Trump, had his hotel room and office both raided by the FBI acting on the instructions of the deputy attorney general. He was exclusively photographed by DailyMail.com entering the Loews Hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan where his room was raided

CNN reported Trump is considering firing Rosenstein, who oversees the Mueller probe as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions's recusal. The report called Rosenstein Trump's most likely target, although firing Sessions is also a possibility. It cited people familiar with the discussions.

Advisors believe Rosenstein crossed a 'red line' by signing off on the Cohen raid  an action that reportedly included targeting documents relating to a porn star and a former Playboy model who each received payoffs after claiming they had affairs with Trump.

At two different periods Trump was prepared to make moves against Mueller, the New York Times reported.

Over the summer, White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit over the issue, ultimately putting down an earlier attempt to fire Mueller.

The Times now says that Trump considered taking action against Mueller months later in December.A tradesman has been left devastated after the government ruled his South African daughter cannot live with him in Australia.

Air-conditioning repairman Dion Smith, an Australian citizen born in Zimbabwe, hadn't seen his daughter Danielle since he broke up with her South African mother when she was a child.

Three years ago, when she was 16, Danielle contacted him on Facebook and decided to move to Quakers Hill, west Sydney to live with him.

Devastation: Air-conditioning repairman Dion Smith is fighting to get his daughter into Australia

Loving daughter: Three years ago, when she was 16, Danielle (pictured) contacted her father on Facebook and decided to move to Quakers Hill, west Sydney to live with him

Happy family: Danielle and Dion in happier times when she came to stay with him in Australia

But after three months, her holiday visa ran out and her application for residency was rejected because the department for immigration did not believe she was Mr Smith's daughter.

A recent DNA test returned a 99.9 per cent chance that they are related but now the government is still not letting Danielle into the country because she is no longer a dependent child.

Expressing his frustration on A Current Affair, a devastated Mr Smith said to the government: 'Why do you have to be so horrible?'

A recent DNA test (pictured are the results) returned a 99.9 per cent chance that they are related but now the government is still not letting Danielle into the country because she is no longer a dependent child

In an interview with the program from her home in South Africa, Danielle (pictured with her father) said being denied entry to Australia makes her feel like a criminal

'It's my daughter you are stopping coming to Australia and I don't like that.'

He broke down in tears and sobbed: 'Why are they stopping me from seeing my daughter?'

In an interview with the program from her home in South Africa, Danielle said being denied entry to Australia makes her feel 'like some sort of criminal'.

She said she formed a very strong bond with her father, adding: 'I feel like I can tell him anything,' and that she wanted him to be a part of her future children's lives.

Mr Smith and his daughter are now taking their case to a government appeals hearing.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the Department of Home Affairs for comment.Conservative video bloggers Diamond and Silk said Thursday that Facebook has gotten in touch with them, a day after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers a situation with the Trump-supporting sisters had been remedied.

'Facebook has finally reached out to us through Twitter, we will keep you posted!' Diamond and Silk posted to their Facebook page Thursday morning.

For the last two days on Capitol Hill, the sisters were brought up by a number of Republican lawmakers who wanted to question Zuckerberg about censorship on his platform and anti-conservative bias.

Diamond and Silk said Thursday that Facebook had gotten in touch with them over Twitter, after the company's CEO had suggested a situation involving their conservative content had been remedied

Rep. Joe Barton asked a constituent question to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: 'Why is Facebook censoring conservative bloggers such as Diamond and Silk?'

Rep. Billy Long, a Missouri Republican, brought up perceived bias against Trump-supporting sisters, Diamond and Silk

Rep. Billy Long even went as far as to have an aide hold up a picture of the two women and asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who they were. 'I believe that, is that Diamond and Silk?' the 33-year-old CEO answered

The video bloggers, who served as an occasional warm-up act to President Trump during the 2016 campaign, claimed that Facebook slowed down the reach of their content.

On Tuesday Washington Post published an email they received from Facebook, which said, 'The policy team has come to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community.'

'This decision is final and it is non-appeal-able in any way,' the email read.

Facebook acknowledged sending the message, but said its contents were 'inaccurate.'

'We have communicated directly with Diamond And Silk about this issue. The message they received last week was inaccurate and not reflective of the way we communicate with our community and the people who run Pages on our platform,' Facebook's spokeswoman Sarah Pollack said. 'We have provided them with more information about our policies and the tools that are applicable to their Page and look forward to the opportunity to speak with them.'

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the warning given to Diamond and Silk was 'an enforcement error'

Sen. Ted Cruz slammed Facebook for its perceived political bias against conservatives and asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about it on Tuesday

On Twitter, Facebook pointed out how the social network's team had been trying to reach the conservative bloggers for days, as Facebook's CEO got pummeled by Republican lawmakers for censoring Diamond and Silk

Zuckerberg, too, said that Facebook had reached out to Diamond and Silk, suggesting that the issue had been handled.

But as of Wednesday night, Diamond and Silk said they hadn't heard from the social network.

That prompted a Facebook representative to respond to the video bloggers on Twitter.

'A member of our team emailed you Monday and we commented on your Facebook post yesterday. Wed love the chance to speak with you about this issue and answer any questions you may have,' the company said. 'Additionally, we tried to reach you by phone on Tuesday and left a voicemail. Would love to talk when youre available,' a second tweet read.

The tweets included a screenshot that showed that Facebook had also reached out publicly on Diamond and Silk's Facebook page. The company had apologized and referenced several emails they had sent to the conservative bloggers in recent days.

But during the hearings, it was still an unresolved matter.

Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, held up his phone on Wednesday and told Zuckerberg he was going to ask him a question that someone had submitted to the congressman's Facebook account.

'First question: Please ask Mr. Zuckerberg, why is Facebook censoring conservative bloggers such as Diamond and Silk? Facebook called them "unsafe" to the community. That is absurd. They hold conservative views. That isn't unsafe,' Barton said reading the question, and adding his own, 'What's your response?'

Zuckerberg explained that his team had made 'an enforcement error.'

'And we've already gotten in touch with them to reverse it,' he said.

Later Wednesday, another Republican, Rep. Billy Long, hauled out a picture of the two women and asked Zuckerberg to identify them.

'I believe that, is that Diamond and Silk?' Zuckerberg asked.

Long said it was.

'That is Diamond and Silk, two biological sisters from North Carolina, I might point out they're African-American, and their content was deemed by your folks to be "unsafe,"' Long said.

'Diamond and Silk have a question for you. And that question is, "What is unsafe about two black women supporting President Donald J. Trump?"' he continued.

The Facebook CEO responded, 'Well, Congressman, nothing is unsafe about that.'

Another Congressman, Rep. Fred Upton, a Republican from Michigan referred to the video bloggers as 'Silk and Diamond' and then asked about an incident involving a GOP political candidate from his state who expressed pro-life views, and whose message was deemed a 'threat' by Facebook.

'I'm not sure what the threat was when I read the post,' Upton said.

Zuckerberg said he was unfamiliar with that particular case.

'Unfortunately, we don't always get these things right,' the CEO told the lawmakers, adding that Facebook has 20,000 people to review content posted.

Later on in the hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican running for Senate, asked whether free speech is being censored by the site.

Zuckerberg brought up terrorism as an example of content that would be banned.

'Let me tell you right now, Diamond and Silk is not terrorism,' Blackburn muttered at the end of her time.

On Tuesday it was Sen. Ted Cruz who slammed Zuckerberg, accusing the social media platform of being politically biased.

'There are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship,' Cruz said. 'There have been numerous instances with Facebook.'

Cruz, a former GOP presidential candidate, then brought up Diamond and Silk.

Cruz's criticism went beyond this recent incident, as he cited a Gizmodo article that said that Facebook had routinely suppressed conservative stories from its trending news section, including articles on the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mitt Romney, the Lois Lerner scandal and Glenn Beck.

Facebook, Cruz charged, 'initially shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page,' as well as a post from a Fox News reporter, along with some Catholic pages.

'To a great many Americans that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias,' Cruz said. 'Do you agree with that assessment?'

Zuckerberg responded by acknowledging that Silicon Valley, located in bright blue California, is an 'extremely left-leaning place.'

However, adding to the list of things he wanted to improve, the Facebook CEO told the senator that one of his priorities was making sure 'we don't have any bias in the work that we do.'Dennis Alexander accidentally fired a gun in his classroom on March 13

A California teacher and reserve police officer who accidentally fired a gun during a gun safety lesson, injuring students, has resigned.

Dennis Alexander has been on administrative leave since the incident on March 13 and his resignation will take effect at the end of the school year, Monterey Peninsula Unified School District officials said.

He was teaching students at Seaside High School about gun safety for his Administration of Justice class when his weapon went off on March 13.

The Glock 21 .45-caliber handgun was pointed towards the ceiling when it fired, causing pieces to fall on the ground and injure three students.

Fermin Gonzales said his 17-year-old son was injured during the incident and had to be taken to the hospital for bullet fragments in his neck. He told KSBW that Alexander had told the class that he wanted to make sure the gun wasn't loaded when it accidentally discharged.

'I want to apologize from the bottom of my heart to this community, to Seaside High School, to students, to everybody in the whole community for the incident that happened the other day,' the teacher said at a Seaside City Council meeting shortly after incident, as reported by KSBW.

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The teacher said: 'I can't find the words to say how sorry I am for the incident, and I also want to thank those who showed support. It helps a lot, it gets me through the day'

An attorney for one of the injured students claims the teacher let students handle his gun more than once. A video shows a student handling the gun at his desk and pointing it at the camera

'I can't find the words to say how sorry I am for the incident, and I also want to thank those who showed support. It helps a lot, it gets me through the day.'

According to Gonzales, school officials did not check to make sure students were uninjured after the incident. Gonzales said his son came home with blood on his shirt and fragments of the bullet in his neck.

But Seaside Police Chief Abdul Pridgen told The Montreal County Weekly that although student was struck in the neck by 'debris or fragmentation', it was not a bullet.

Teachers are legally not allowed to have firearms in California classrooms, even if they have a permit. Sand City Police Chief Brian Ferrante told KSBW that he's concerned about why Alexander, a reserve officer with the department, had a loaded gun in the classroom.

'We will be looking into that,' he said. 'My first concern was that no one was hurt'.

Alexander was a beloved teacher at the school and since the incident students have advocated for him to keep his job, organizing rallies and starting a petition

One of Alexander's students showed support for him, saying: 'I'm learning about different weaponry, forensics, arson... it's just amazing, I love his class'

But it appears the teacher brought the weapon to class more than once.

A video obtained by KSBW shows a student posing with Alexander's gun at his desk and pointing it at the camera, according to attorneys representing one of three injured students.

'We do have information that, in past years, he passed his firearm around for children to take photographs with,' attorney Connell Dunnion told KSBW.

In a rally held in support for Alexander, students confirmed to the local news outlet that the teacher had a habit of passing his gun around the classroom.

A girl reportedly told KSBW she picked up the gun in Alexander's class when she was a freshman.

Alexander was a beloved teacher at the school and since the incident students have advocated for him to keep his job, organizing rallies and starting a petition.

Alexander was teaching a firearm safety class when the weapon discharged, sending a bullet into the ceiling of the classroom and injuring at least three students

'We are here to vocalize that we care about Mr Alexander, that he is one of the most respected teachers on our campus and that he's one of the most influential teachers on campus,' one of his students, Cleve Waters, said during the March City Council meeting.

'I've only had him for this year but for the year that I've had him, it's been some of the most fun stuff. I'm learning about different weaponry, forensics, arson... it's just amazing, I love his class.'

The teachers has also resigned from his post at the Sand City Police Department.

While police investigators are not recommending any criminal charges, the Monterey County District Attorney's Office will make the final decision.

Alexander has been a reserve officer with the Sand City Police Department for 11 years. In 2013, he was awarded Reserve Officer of the Year. He also serves as a Seaside City Council member and a Red Cross volunteer.This is the nail-biting moment a motorist makes a near-death escape when a lorry topples on road in east China.

The scooter driver was said to be running red lights at a junction. A white lorry swerved tightly to avoid hitting the driver and eventually toppled.

The motorist was inches away from being buried by the container. He suffered minor injuries in the incident.

A scooter driver runs red light at a junction in Nantong of east China on March 21 (left). A white lorry drove in and immediately swerved right to avoid hitting the motorist (right)

CCTV footage captured the moment the lorry toppled sideways and knocked the motorist off

Surveillance camera footage emerged online showing two scooters crossing a large junction at Nantong of Jiangsu Province on March 21.

A white lorry can be seen coming in from the left and immediately swerves to the right in attempt to avoid hitting the scooter.

The back of the truck knocked off the motorist as the lorry toppled.

The lorry driver was believed to be unhurt.

The unnamed motorist sustained minor injuries and was treated at a hospital.

Local traffic police officers fined the motorist for violating traffic rules.

As the lorry slid across the junction, the scooter driver was almost buried under the container

Luckily he narrowly avoided the hit as the lorry crashed over the opposite side of the lanesThe American Conservative, by Scot Ritter. Excerpt Trump's Rush to Judgment on Syria Chemical Attack

We need hard evidence about what happened in Douma before threatening war .

There are two versions of what happened in Douma, a suburb of Damascus home to between 80,000 and 150,000 people. The one relied upon by the United States is provided by rebel forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. According to the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), a non-profit organization comprised of various Syrian opposition groups funded by the Asfari Foundation and George Soros Open Societies Foundation, at approximately 12 p.m. the Syrian Air Force attacked the vicinity of the Saada Bakery using munitions believed to contain poisonous gas. The VDC cited eyewitness accounts from members of the Syrian Civil Defense, or White Helmets, who described the smell of chlorine and the presence of numerous bodies assessed to have succumbed from gas sourced to a Syrian rocket. Later, at 7 p.m., a second air strike struck an area near Martyrs Square, again using munitions assessed by eyewitnesses to contain poisonous gas. Doctors from the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) described symptoms that indicated that a nerve agent had been used. Images of victims in the locations allegedly attacked were released by a rebel-affiliated social media entity known as the Douma Revolution and the White Helmets.

Douma is part of a larger district known as Eastern Ghouta which has, since 2012, been under the control of various militant organizations opposed to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In early February 2018, the Syrian Army, supported by the Russian Air Force, began operations to recapture the Eastern Ghouta district. The joint Syrian-Russian offensive was as brutal as it was effectiveby March, Eastern Ghouta had been split into three pockets of resistance at a cost of more than 1,600 civilian dead. Two of the pockets capitulated under terms which had the opposition fighters and their families evacuated to rebel-held territory in the northern Syrian province of Idlib. Only Douma held out, where Salafist fighters from the Army of Islam (Jaish al-Islam) refused to surrender. On April 5, the situation had deteriorated inside Douma to the point that the rebel defenders had agreed to negotiations that would lead to their evacuation of Douma; the very next day, however, these discussions had broken down, and the Syrian military resumed its offensive. The air attacks described by the VDC occurred on the second day of the resumption of hostilities.

There is a competing narrative, however, provided by the Russian government and those sympathetic to its position. After the breakdown of negotiations between the Douma rebels and the Russian government on April 6, the story goes, the Syrian government offensive to liberate Douma resumed. The Douma rebels, faced with imminent defeat, fabricated the allegations of a chemical attack.

Shortly after the Syrian government resumed its offensive against Douma (and after the opposition forces publicized their allegations of Syrian government chemical weapons attacks), the rebel resistance inside Douma collapsed, with the fighters agreeing to be evacuated to Idlib. The Russian military was able to dispatch units to the sites of the alleged chemical weapons attacks and conduct a survey. According to the state-run Russian news, no evidence of a chemical weapons attack was discovered. Representatives of the Syrian Red Crescent who claim to have worked in Douma stated that they have seen no evidence of any chemical weapons use there, either.

Beyond providing a competing narrative, however, Russia has offered to open up Douma to inspectors from the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, for a full investigation. This offer was echoed by the Syrian government, which extended an official invitation for the OPCW to come to Douma. On April 10, the OPCW announced that it would be dispatching an inspection team shortly to carry out this work. The forensic technical investigatory capabilities of an OPCW inspection team are such that it would be able to detect the presence of any chemical agent used in Douma. While the investigation itself would take days to conduct and weeks to process, its conclusions would, under these circumstances, be conclusive as to the presence of any prohibited substance.

One major drawback to any OPCW investigation is its inability to assess responsibility for the presence of any banned substances detected. In prior investigations inside Syria, the OPCW was able to operate as part of the United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), an entity specifically empowered by Security Council resolution to make such determinations. The mandate of the JIM was not extended, however, after Russia expressed its displeasure over what it deemed to be the inaccurate and politicized findings regarding previous allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government. The United States has submitted a resolution to the Security Council demanding that a new investigatory body be formed that would be able to provide attribution for any chemical weapons attack inside Syria; whether Russia would veto such a resolution or allow it to be passed has yet to be seen.

The bottom line, however, is that the United States is threatening to go to war in Syria over allegations of chemical weapons usage for which no factual evidence has been provided. This act is occurring even as the possibility remains that verifiable forensic investigations would, at a minimum, confirm the presence of chemical weapons (thereby contradicting the Russian claims that no such evidence was detected by its troops), and if the Security Council passes a resolution allowing for a properly mandated investigation team, actual attribution could be assigned.

Moreover, President Trumps rush to judgment on Syrian guilt is being done in a highly politicized environment, coming as it does on the heels of an FBI raid on the offices of the presidents personal attorney. In times such as this, a president is often attracted by the prospect of looking presidential in order to offset personal problems (one only need to look at President Clintons decision in August 1998, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, to launch cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan.)

If America is to place its military in harms way, it needs to be in support of a cause worthy of the sacrifice being asked of those who serve. Giving the OPCW time to carry out its investigation in Syria would allow a fact-based case to be made whether military force was justified or not, as well as support a determination of whether or not the risks associated with the use of force were warranted. Pulling the trigger void of such information, especially when Trump is distracted by personal political issues, is not something the American people, nor their representatives in Congress, should tolerate.A 29-year-old Russian woman was murdered by a one-night stand - after she joked about the size of his penis.

Marina Kovalenko, a mother-of-three, had met her killer at a cafe in her village in Volgograd region in Russia, and he offered to walk her home afterwards.

The unnamed 25-year-old man told police they ended up going to a lock-up garage he rents, where they had sex.

Murdered: Marina Kovalenko, 29, had sex with the unnamed 25-year-old man after meeting him in a cafe in Volgograd, Russia,

Killer: The unnamed 25-year-old, pictured with police, confessed to the murder, telling officers Ms Kovalenko had mocked the size of his manhood

'Afterwards the woman laughed at the small size of his penis,' a police source said.

This made him 'insane' and 'humiliated', he told officers.

'He strangled the woman and then took the body to forest and buried her there,' said the source.

When friends reported the woman missing, police soon traced the man she had met in the cafe in Yerzovka village.

At first he said they had parted at a crossroads and she had gone home alone.

Shocking: The killer said the 29-year-old had 'laughed at the small size of his penis', which made him 'insane' and 'humiliated'

Tragedy: Although he initially denied causing any injury to the 29-year-old, CCTV showed that they had both entered the storage unit - and only he had come out alive

Mother: Ms Kovalenko has two daughters and one son - all under the age of 11

But CCTV cameras proved they both went in to the garage - and that the woman did not leave it.

'Under the pressure of evidence, the suspect confessed how he killed the woman and also showed where he had buried her body,' said a spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee, which probes serious crime.

'He dug her corpse into the ground on the outskirts of the village, in the forest.'

The woman's children, two girls and a boy, all believed to be under 11, are being looked after by their father.

The self-confessed man is unmarried and has no previous conviction.

He faces up to 15 years in jail if convicted.The daughter of the deputy speaker of the House of Commons who hanged herself in her bedroom had been in a 'toxic relationship' an inquest heard today.

Natalie Lewis-Hoyle was attacked a month before she was found dead at her home in Heybridge, Essex in December last year.

The hearing was told she had received a phone call the night before that her father, deputy speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, believed could have affected her state of mind.

The identity of the caller was not disclosed at the hearing in Chelmsford, Essex.

However the young women had made plans with her family for the whole year ahead and had never indicated she planned to take her own life.

Lindsay Hoyle, the daughter of the deputy speaker of the House of Commons, had been in a 'toxic relationship'

Her tearful parents including father Sir Hoyle, a Labour MP attended the inquest and described her as "full of life, kind and generous.'

Her mother Miriam Lewis, Sir Hoyle's ex partner, said her daughter had been in 'psychological torment' although she had been planning her future and looking forward to Christmas.

The inquest heard Miss Lewis-Hoyle, a parish councillor, was struggling with a relationship that was ending and an assault had been reported to cops a month before her death - although no-one was arrested.

She had been out in London and had been drinking before her loving mother Miriam Lewis tragically discovered her dead on the morning of December 15, 2017.

The inquest heard Miss Lewis-Hoyle, (pictured) a parish councillor, was struggling with a relationship

(L-R) Commons Deputy Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, with wife Catherine Swindley and ex wife (and mother of Natalie) Miriam Lewis leaving Coroners court in Chelmsford Essex today

Mrs Lewis, who sits on Maldon District Council, had picked up her daughter from the station and driven her to their shared home in Heybridge, Essex.

A toxicology report revealed she was more twice the drink drive limit at the time of death.

The Tory councillor called the ambulance service after finding her daughter.

She said: 'It's my firm conviction there was an assault which was as the relationship was really deteriorating.

Commons Deputy Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle leaving Coroners court in Chelmsford, Essex today

'It was a very toxic relationship.'

She added: 'I know that is the conclusion the police have had to draw and there's a lack of evidence.

'When someone is in psychological torment you don't get the bruises and fat lips and black eyes.

'Other than the conversations with that person there was nothing between her and her death other than the conversations with that person.

Miriam Lewis (right) ex wife of Commons Deputy Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle at Coroners court in Chelmsford, Essex today after hearing inquest into the death of daughter

'I accept that within the law as it stands at the moment there is no third-party involvement, it is not something I'm going to be able to put out of my head.'

Her father Sir Lindsay, a Labour MP, also disputed the police's conclusion that there was no third-party involvement.

He said: 'Obviously no one can judge what was in that phone call, we know there was a reaction to that phone call, that something happened following that.

'I don't know where that takes us with third party involvement.

'We know there was third party involvement with that phone call that left them in a different state of mind.'

Detective Inspector Gary Biddle however told the inquest: 'There's no suspicious circumstances as far as Essex Police are involved.'

After the parents paid tribute to their 'pocket rocket' daughter who 'lit up the room' senior Coroner Caroline Beasley-Murray recorded an open verdict.

She said: 'I'm going to record an open conclusion, we don't have all the bits of the jigsaw.

'We'll never quite know what was going through her mind.

'She clearly was much loved.

'I hope you will be able to think back on all the happy positive memories.'

For confidential support in the UK, call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch. Click here for detailsThe family of the career criminal killed by a homeowner he was trying to burgle could get taxpayers' cash towards his funeral, it was revealed today.

Henry Vincent, 37, was stabbed to death by Richard Osborn-Brooks, 78, who was defending his home and wife Maureen in Hither Green last Wednesday.

Vincent, who came armed with a screwdriver and later died at University Hospital Lewisham, had said he was jobless and single at the time of the burglary, his inquest heard.

Families who are out of work and on benefits usually get around 1,300 towards funeral costs but in some cases the Government grant can be much higher.

Henry Vincent, 37, said he was unemployed when he was stabbed to death by burglary victim Richard Osborn-Brooks in Hither Green so his family could be eligible for a taxpayer-funded funeral

Vincent was stabbed in Mr Osborn-Brooks' house and died later at University Hospital Lewisham. He had said he was jobless and single at the time of the burglary

What can the unemployed claim towards a funeral? The Government runs the 'Funeral Payment' scheme for people on a low income who are receiving certain benefits to help them pay for a funeral. If you get a Funeral Payment, youll usually have to pay the government back from any money you get from the persons estate, such as their savings. The average payment is around 1,300 but can be up to two-thirds of the cost of a funeral. It can help to pay for: Death certificates or other documents

Dremation fees, including the cost of the doctors certificate

Travel to arrange or go to the funeral

The cost of moving the body within the UK, if its being moved more than 50 miles

Burial fees for a particular plot

You can also get up to 700 for any other funeral expenses, such as funeral directors fees, flowers or the coffin. Advertisement

The potential taxpayer-funded payout has outraged locals in Hither Green, where a shrine in Vincent's honour appeared this week.

One 44-year-old who lives in a neighbouring street to Mr Osborn-Brooks told the Daily Star: 'He has got a family so why should the taxpayer pay for it?"

'Look at all those floral tributes to him. His family has got money so they can pay for it'

Another said: 'It stinks. He was milking the system for decades. He doesnt deserve a penny off the taxpayer'.

Vincent's body was released back to his family this week ahead of his funeral, which has not yet been announced but is likely to be in the next week.

The event is likely to require a heavy police presence with potential road closures in the Orpington area of north Kent where the traveller's family is based.

Sources have said that the funeral is likely involve a procession of the coffin in a traditional horse-drawn carriage through the Star Lane area and could take place at a church in St Paul's Cray and then on to the nearby St Mary's cemetery.

MailOnline understands the funeral details have not yet been shared with Scotland Yard.

Vincent, who was a serial burglar, was classed as unemployed at his inquest this week and is likely to have been paid benefits.

Henry Vincent's family have repeatedly returned to restore the shrine after it was ripped down repeatedly. Critics have suggested that the array of flowers suggests they could afford to pay for the funeral without state help

The family of Henry Vincent (pictured) insist that he was murdered by the man he was burgling - Billy Jeeves, 28, (right) is on the run following a botched raid at the south east London home of Richard Osborn-Brooks last Wednesday

After his death his family may be able to claim up to two thirds of the cost of the funeral plus another 700 towards other costs such as burial fees and and funeral director fees.

It is not known if Vincent's family will claim state help, which needs to be applied for within three months of his death.

The average payment made is between 1,200 and 1,300, according to the Government.Advertisement

Thousands of people gathered at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp today, to take part in a solemn march in memory of the the six million Jews killed by German Nazis during World War II.

The March of the Living is an an annual educational event held at the former Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, southern Poland, marking Yom HaShoah, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The march was led by the presidents of Poland and Israel, who both made efforts to calm bitter feelings that have flared between their nations in recent months.

Leading the way: Polish President Andrzej Duda and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin take part in the annual 'March of the Living' to commemorate the Holocaust at the former Nazi death camp Auschwitz

Presidents Reuven Rivlin of Israel and Andrzej Duda of Poland lit candles, bowed their heads and pressed their hands on the Death Wall at Auschwitz, the site where inmates, chiefly Polish resistance fighters, were executed by Nazi German forces during World War II.

They then took their places at the head of the march, where a majority of participants were young Israelis or other Jews learning about the tragedy of their people, who walked along some of those who survived the Holocaust.

The solemn march began by the main gate and watchtowers of Auschwitz and led two miles to Birkenau, where Jews from across Europe were transported to be murdered in gas chambers.

'Our common presence here shows the world: never again anti-Semitism, never again genocide, never again Holocaust,' Duda said during a joint news conference ahead of the commemorations.

Rivlin recalled how Jews had flourished for centuries in Poland before three million of them were killed during World War II.

In memory: Thousands take part in the annual two-mile remembrance march between the former death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, in Oswiecim, Poland

Hero: Holocaust survivor Zoltan Matyah shows the number tattooed on his arm by Nazi concentration camp guards as he stands in front of the gate at Auschwitz

Learning to never forget: Many participants were young Israelis or other Jews learning about the tragedy of their people

We will remember: Polish President Andrzej Duda, left, and President of Israel Reuven Rivlin, right, stand at the Death Wallat Auschwitz, the site where inmates, chiefly Polish resistance fighters, were executed by Nazi forces during World War II

Educating: The March of the Living is an an annual event held at the former Nazi death camp marking Yom HaShoah, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day

'This country, Poland, was the cradle of Jewish history but it also became the largest cemetery in the world for Jews,' Rivlin said.

The leaders' participation comes as their countries seek to heal a rift that opened up earlier this year with the Polish passage of a Holocaust speech law.

The legislation penalises statements attributing Nazi German crimes to the Polish state with fines or a jail term of up to three years.

But Israel has expressed deep concern that the law could open the door to prosecuting Holocaust survivors for their testimony, should it concern the involvement of individual Poles for allegedly killing or giving up Jews to the Germans.

The legislation came into effect last month, but Duda also asked Poland's constitutional tribunal to rule on its constitutionality.

Rivlin on Thursday also insisted that politicians should not meddle in history.

The solemn march, held every year, begins by the main gate and watchtowers of Auschwitz and led two miles to Birkenau

A group of Israeli youth visit the former Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz ahead of the yearly March of the Living

First steps: The Presidents led the way as thousands marched, aiming to keep the memory of the atrocities alive

Jews from around the world joined Holocaust survivors and Presidents Reuven Rivlin of Israel and Andrzej Duda of Poland

'Politicians have the responsibility to create the future, their states and nations, but historians have the responsibility and the duty to write about the past and to study it,' Rivlin said, adding that 'you can't mix these two professions up'.

Duda assured Rivlin that Polish lawmakers had no intention of silencing Holocaust survivors over WWII-era crimes against Jews that were 'worthy only of condemnation'.

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews, one million of whom were killed at the camp between 1940 to 1945.

More than 100,000 others including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters also died there, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.

An estimated 232,000 of Auschwitz's victims were children.

Poland was once home to Europe's largest Jewish population, numbering around three million people, or 10 percent of the population in 1939.

But only about 300,000 survived WWII after Nazi Germany occupied Poland.You might remember Nick Nolte's infamous mug shot from 2002, the one where the three-time Oscar nominee wears his hair wild and his shirt Hawaiian. But did you know he has another one from many years before that arrest?

In 1961 Nolte was busted for selling fake draft cards, fined $75,000 and sentenced to 75 years in prison, later suspended. In that booking photo, a pre-famous Nolte wears his hair short and a button-down shirt.

Both embarrassing incidents are heartily discussed in his new memoir, Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines.

Nolte, 77, is now ready to tell his story - warts and all. The arrests act almost like bookends to a sometimes crazy life.

Three-time Oscar nominee Nick Nolte, 77, has taken a look back on his movie roles, drug use and mug shots in his new memoir, Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines

'I've had two mug shots in my lifetime. It's hard to get those. And if you get them, you better make sure you examine the circumstances that you got them,' Nolte said.

'The best way to deal with the biggest mistakes in your life is to discuss them. With everybody, including God.'

Nolte also spoke of his infamous 2002 mugshot (pictured above), saying it resembled 'an asylum inmate out for a lark'

The autobiography traces the rise of the headstrong Nolte - literally, because he had the bizarre habit of head-butting parked cars.

He was a Midwestern boy, a natural jock, who found fame later in life when he traded in performing on the stage to movies.

'Acting always appealed to me a lot because it's risk taking. And it's something I don't do naturally. I mean when I'm standing backstage and that curtain is about to open I say, 'Why would you do this to yourself? Are you really that much of an idiot to just expose yourself to a thousand people?'' he said.

'And then the curtain opens and, if it goes all right, you don't remember opening night - there's too much adrenaline. Actors are risk takers. And they're taking the risks for their own sanity.'

Nolte, whose hits include The Prince of Tides, Cape Fear, Lorenzo's Oil, The Good Thief, The Thin Red Line and 48 Hrs., said he self-medicated to quell his inner demons.

'A little chaos around keeps me sane,' he writes.

Nolte admitted to sleeping with co-star Jacqueline Bisset during filming of The Deep but it was short-lived and over before they finished shooting after Bisset accused him of sleeping with every girl on Peter Island

Nolte revealed he ate real dog food in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and he took real heroin during the eight-week shoot of The Good Thief to better portray a heroin addict

The book recounts his amazing appetite for drugs - including coke, LSD, HGH and GHB - and the time he single-handedly saved the movie Under Fire by smuggling the film canisters out of Mexico - one step ahead of the law.

He also revealed he ate real dog food in Down and Out in Beverly Hills, and he took real heroin during the eight-week shoot of The Good Thief to better portray a heroin addict.

Nolte admitted to sleeping with co-star Jacqueline Bisset during filming of The Deep but it was short-lived and over before they finished shooting after Bisset accused him of sleeping with every girl on Peter Island.

He revealed that his inability to skate lost him a part in Slap Shot and that he was offered Superman but saw nothing super about the role.

He has nice things to say about co-stars Eddie Murphy, Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand. But he has less than nice things to say about Debra Winger ('hellfire') and Edward Norton (Nolte vowed to 'slit his throat').

In his book, he also recounts a spectacular prank pulled by Woody Harrelson on Sean Penn in Australia that involved real cops and gunshots.

Nick Nolte also dishes on how Barbra Streisand fell in love with him and begged him to move in while filming The Prince of Tides (above)

Nolte poses with wife British actress Clytie Lane (left) and their family when was honored with a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2017

May Chen, his editor at HarperCollins, said Nolte wrote some of the book by telling his stories out loud. Those anecdotes were later stitched together, alongside journal entries and his own longhand writings. She called him a 'very self-aware' author who was not afraid to delve into his own darkness.

In 1961 Nolte was busted for selling fake draft cards, fined $75,000 and sentenced to 75 years in prison, later suspended. In that booking photo, a pre-famous Nolte wears his hair short and a button-down shirt

'He's not embarrassed about it. This is his life. Obviously, I sure he's regretful of some of these things but he's not embarrassed by it. He owns up to it,' she said.

'Now with hindsight, all these decades later, he can look back and I think he realizes how often things could have really gone wrong for him.'

Nolte describes his own #MeToo moment when, at 21, a Hollywood agent invited him to his Bel Air home for dinner. After the man excused himself, he returned wearing only a silk dressing gown and announced: 'Hello, cuddle bunny.' Nolte was out the door quick. 'That would be a casting couch. But I was not an actor at that time at all,' he said.

Nolte also has a dim view of Harvey Weinstein, the one-time Miramax company head who had a reputation as a ruthless film editor. Nolte recounts how his film The Golden Bowl was 'reduced to shreds' by Weinstein's cut before it was sold back to the filmmakers.

Nolte, above with Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours, has nice things to say about co-stars like Murphy in his book. But he has less than nice things to say about Debra Winger and Edward Norton

Nolte said Weinstein tried to 'bully me into a couple of roles' - including Copland - and was 'manipulative' during awards season.

'I never had much admiration for Miramax or Harvey primarily because I had friends who made movies that were shelved,' he said.

And, of course, there's the story of his infamous arrest on September 11, 2002. That day he'd gone to the gym for a GHB-enhanced workout but felt too messed up. So he headed toward an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting but didn't go in, instead weaving down the Pacific Coast Highway.

'I needed help,' he wrote.

He says his booking photo resembles 'an asylum inmate out for a lark in his flower-print Hawaiian shirt.'

Now sober, Nolte can chuckle: 'I take full responsibility for that one'.Security cameras captured the moment two thieves congratulated each other after ripping a flat screen TV off the wall of a home they were burgling.

The pair entered the Ashton Woods model home in Drovers View Trail in north Fort Worth, Texas, in the early hours of April 2.

The suspects stole a flat screen television from the upstairs living room of the home, police said.

The men entered the Ashton Woods model home in Fort Worth, Texas, in the early hours of April 2

The Fort Worth Police Department released the security camera footage in a bid to catch the suspects.

One of the thieves is seen entering the room at 5.27am and struggling to remove the television from the wall.

After he calls for his accomplice to help, they work together to remove the television.

And as they're carrying it off, the pair stop for a moment to celebrate - by slapping each other's hands.

The suspects congratulated each other after they managed to remove a flat screen television from the wall of the upstairs living room

The Fort Worth Police Department released the security camera footage in a bid to catch the suspects

Police said the pair were seen in a white sedan with a sunroof.

'Do you recognize these tv crooks?' the police department wrote alongside the video on Facebook.

'They walk into a model home, go upstairs, and steal a flat-screen tv....and 'hand slap' after stealing the television. Stay classy, fellas.'

Anyone who recognizes them is asked to call 817-392-3183.The boss of Goldman Sachs today admitted his prediction about Brexit's impact on the City of London was wrong but insisted the worst was still to come.

Lloyd Blankfein had warned banks would abandon London in favour of continental cities like Frankfurt.

He said today he was surprised there had not been 'more of a dramatic effect' since the vote to leave the EU in June 2016.

Mr Blankfein's admission comes a day after the boss of Germany's national bank admitted London will remain Europe's biggest financial hub after Brexit.

The boss of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein today admitted his prediction about Brexit's impact on the City of London was wrong but insisted the worst was still to come

The Goldman CEO insisted his bank would not have decided to build a new headquarters in London if the decision had been made after the referendum.

Mr Blankfein told Politico: 'Therefore, there are decisions made today, and people who are building buildings four years from now won't be.

'So far what's evident is that we would've thought decision-making would've been altered by now [due to Brexit].'

'Maybe there's been a lag but certainly, there hasn't been a dramatic fall-off.'

Bundesbank leader Andreas Dombret yesterday said there is widespread 'reluctance' among bankers living in London to move abroad.

And he said the Square Mile will remain the continent's 'eminent financial centre' after Britain quits the bloc.

His words come as political leaders across Europe compete to try to lure London's lucrative financial services away.

Bundesbank leader Andreas Dombret said there is widespread 'reluctance' among bankers living in the capital to move abroad (file pic)

French President Emmanuel Macron has launched a glittering offensive - dubbed Operation Le Seduction - to move bankers to Paris.

While Frankfurt, Dublin and Amsterdam are all also in the race to convince bankers to decamp from the UK.

But speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme this morning, Mr Dombret said: 'I'm sure other cities are seeing CEOs too, it's not only Frankfurt.

'We are just talking to those CEOs planning to move should they want to but we don't advertise the financial centre.

'I believe London will continue to stay an eminent financial centre of this region.

'I hear that there is quite some reluctance in the City of London  of people working there, of bankers working there  to move.

The French President (pictured at the 'choose France' summit) spoke in English as he schmoozed with bosses from firms including JP Morgan, Google and Facebook at the famous chateau. Emmanuel Macron wants to lure business away from Britain to France after Brexit

'We got this, whether they moved to Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Dublin or Paris.

'There is a big willingness to stay in London and some of those who have been asked to go would rather take a cheque and stay than move.'

His words are a boost to Theresa May who has said that London is so strong as a financial capital it will be able to fully weather whatever uncertainty Brexit may bring.

Former chancellor George Osborne had campaigned for Remain in the EU referendum by warning that Brexit would harm the economy.

But his warnings - dubbed Project fear by critics - have failed to materialise as the UK's economy has defied critics to remain strong.This is the shocking moment a man pulls out a handgun at a party and fires it simply to show off for his friends.

The terrifying scene was caught on a gang member's phone and is thought to have been taken at a house party in Birmingham.

Images were seized from the phone of Yusupha Sarr - a member of West Midlands gang 23 Drillas - and show a worrying recklessness and disregard for other people's lives.

Police are now trying to trace the man seen in the disturbing footage.

Officials found disturbing footage of a man pulling out a handgun and firing it to show off for his friends at the house party in Birmingham last August

Police said: 'We believe the individual was showing off rather than firing at anyone. It's suspected the clip was filmed in Birmingham'

Sarr, 19, was jailed for 15 years for other firearms offences on Thursday.

Just hours after the gun footage was taken on his phone, he fired a sawn-off shotgun at a rival gang member in the street in Smethick, West Midlands.

Sarr, from Church Green in Handsworth, was jailed for possessing a banned firearm with intent to endanger life while associate Christ Lidiu - caught on CCTV dumping a bag of shotgun cartridges - was jailed for three years for perverting the course of justice.

Both men are linked to a violent Birmingham street gang known as '23 Drillas'.

Armed officers in unmarked vehicles had been positioned near Pine Avenue, Smethwick, in the early hours of August 24 last year in response to intelligence suggesting men linked to gangs were attending an 18th birthday party.

Just before 1am the units moved in after hearing gunfire and an hour later intercepted a taxi in Aston Lane where 19-year-old Sarr and 18-year-old Lidiu were detained.

A sawn-off shotgun was recovered nearby and CCTV from Aston Lane showed Lidiu, from Bridglands Way in Perry Barr, discarding a bag that was later found to contain 49 shotgun cartridges matching those loaded in the weapon.

Yusupha Sarr, 19, was jailed for 15 years on Thursday. Surr's associate Christ Lidiu (right) was caught on CCTV dumping a bag of shotgun cartridges. He was jailed for three years for perverting the course of justice

Forensics experts identified Sarr's fingerprints and DNA on the bag, while tests showed both men had high levels of gunshot residue on their hair and clothing.

And an extensive CCTV trawl uncovered more footage of a man matching Sarr's description discharging a shotgun in Woodland Drive, near Pine Avenue, at the time.

Both men previously admitted the offences and were sentenced at Wolverhampton Crown Court.

Detective Constable Nick Taylor from West Midlands Police Force CID, said: 'Both Sarr and Lidiu are young men, still in their teens, but are now paying a heavy price for getting drawn into gangs.

'They can expect to spend much of their lives locked away from society unless they change their ways.

'Sarr showed a blatant disregard for the law in discharging an illegal firearm in a residential street.

'We don't believe anyone was injured - but clearly this kind of reckless behaviour can have catastrophic consequences and innocent members of the public could have been hurt.'

A sawn-off shotgun was recovered nearby and police said Surr shot the weapon

CCTV from Aston Lane showed Lidiu, from Bridglands Way in Perry Barr, discarding a bag that was later found to contain 49 shotgun cartridges matching those loaded in the weapon

Mr Taylor continued: 'While analysing Sarr's mobile phone we came across a short video clip of a man firing a handgun.

'We believe the individual was showing off rather than firing at anyone. It's suspected the clip was filmed at a property in Birmingham on the evening before Sarr was arrested.'

'The information can be passed to us in confidence - we don't need to know the names of anyone providing information - we just want to get what appears to be a dangerous individual off the streets.'

The sentencing comes a week after the drive-by shooting of London teen Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, 17, who was gunned down in Tottenham, north London.

The shooting is thought to be linked to a tit for tat war between rival gangs in the area.

Anyone with information is urged to call the Birmingham Gangs & Organised Crime Unit at West Midlands Police on the 101 number - or the charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.Corporal Mikko Vehvilainen, who collected a host of legally-held weaponry, pleaded guilty to having a banned canister of CS gas, which he kept in the drawer of a home he was renovating

A serving British soldier and self-confessed racist who kept a photograph of himself performing a Nazi salute has been cleared of inciting racial hatred.

Corporal Mikko Vehvilainen, 33, kept swastika bunting, an SS ceremonial dagger and a 'crudely made' electromagnetic pulse (EMP) device. Police officers also discovered a swastika flag, Adolf Hitler stickers, and a CD containing Third Reich music at his homes in Brecon and Llansilin, Powys.

Machetes, knuckledusters, a crossbow with arrows, a large knife and a hammer were also recovered from the properties.

He had a picture at the property in Llansilin, which showed him giving a Nazi-type salute at a memorial to his native Finland's independence, in 1917.

But a Birmingham Crown Court jury today cleared him of possession of a terrorism document - the Anders Breivik manifesto. Breivik killed 77 people in two attacks in Norway in 2011.

He was also found not guilty on two counts of stirring up racial hatred relating to forum posts on a white nationalist website.

At an earlier hearing, he admitted to one count of possessing a CS gas canister.

Vehvilainen, wearing a brown zip-up jacket, looked emotionless as the verdict was delivered.

Licensed firearms holder Vehvilainen, of the Royal Anglian Regiment, was an Afghan veteran, Army boxer and a well-regarded non-commissioned officer.

Vehvilainen lived at barracks with his family at Sennybridge Camp, Brecon, where he kept a homemade target dummy in his garage, a container filled with 11 knives, knuckle-dusters, and a face mask and a box of Nazi flags - all legally-held.

He also customised Army-issue body armour, spray-painting it black, and had wiring and electrical parts capable of being made into a crude EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) device.

Vehvilainen had a picture at the property in Llansilin, Powys, Wales, which showed him giving a Nazi-type salute at a memorial to his native Finland's independence, in 1917

Further searches revealed a Hitler Youth knife and a ceremonial SS dagger, in the vein of the feared Second World War German paramilitary organisation.

Vehvilainen, who kept a licensed shotgun, a crossbow and bow and homemade arrows, had also written to two men jailed for race crimes, including a man convicted of making anti-Semitic remarks to Labour MP Luciana Berger, telling them 'there is still hope'.

The married father penned a draft of an extreme right-wing magazine he entitled Extinction, railing against inter-race relationships, 'unnatural' homosexuality and 'non-whites'.

Vehvilainen lived at barracks with his family at Sennybridge Camp, Brecon, where he kept a homemade target dummy in his garage, a container filled with 11 knives, knuckle-dusters, and a face mask and a box of Nazi flags - all legally-held

These were some of the weapons recovered at Vehvilainen's address

Vehvilainen's barrister Pavlos Panayi QC told jurors, at the start of the trial, it was 'not in dispute that he (Vehvilainen) is a racist', but that it was not a crime simply to hold such views.

Vehvilainen's phone also showed 900 visits to white nationalist website Cristogenea.org. He had also posted 'profoundly racist' messages on the site.

Vehvilainen kept lists of weaponry and added to his collection, which prosecutor Duncan Atkinson QC told jurors was 'putting into effect his repeated call, quite literally, to arms on the part of those who, like him, wanted to create a white-only society'.

An entry in a notebook found at Vehvilainen's address, read: 'Be prepared to fight and die for your race in a possible last stand for our survival.'

Mr Atkinson said: 'The lists - and indeed the substantial quantity of weaponry recovered from his address - reveal and speak to his intention to stockpile weapons and other equipment in preparation for the 'race war' that he spoke of.'

In Vehvilainen's wardrobe, where he kept his uniform, police found a Nazi flag pinned to the inside of the door.

When he opened its door, he turned to officers, saying: 'That's what this is about, isn't it?'

On his arrest on September 5 last year, Vehvilainen told his wife: 'I'm being arrested for being a patriot.'

Machetes, knuckledusters, a crossbow with arrows, a large knife and a hammer were also recovered from the properties

He was on trial alongside 25-year-old Private Mark Barrett, also of the Royal Anglians, and formerly of Kendrew barracks, Cottesmore, Rutland.

Barrett was acquitted of a separate charge of membership of the proscribed far right organisation National Action, on Thursday.

Also on trial was a 23-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, who was also cleared of having Breivik's manifesto, but convicted of three other terrorism offences.

A tin foil dummy used by Lance Corporal Mikko Vehvilainen to practice knife throwing

The male was found guilty of possession of a laptop 'mega folder' which prosecutors said contained 'step-by-step instructions' for killing people and the manufacture of explosives.

He was also convicted of having terrorism document the White Resistance Manual, which had entries on 'arson, sabotage and selective assassinations', and of distributing a terrorist publication, called Ethnic Cleansing Operations.

When the jury delivered their verdicts, the male shouted: 'It's a complete sham.'

Vehvilainen and the other male, who are both in custody, will be sentenced on Friday.A couple killed their baby by drowning and shaking him to death - after the father Googled 'Can I squeeze my baby?' and 'Can babies feel pain?', a court heard.

Alistair Walker, 27, and Hannah Henry, 22, are jointly accused of causing or allowing the death of their three-month-old son, Ah'Kiell Walker, in July 2016.

A jury has heard on Thursday that the infant was found by paramedics naked, soaking wet and freezing cold at the family home.

A CT scan taken after baby Ah'Kiell was rushed to hospital showed bleeding within his eyes 'consistent with shaking a baby'.

A jury at Bristol Crown Court was told just weeks before Ah'Kiell's death his father had Googled a number of search terms about baby constipation and how to deal with it.

Alistair Walker, 27, and Hannah Henry, 22, are jointly accused of causing or allowing the death of their three-month-old son, Ah'Kiell Walker, in July of 2016

Walker had also searched 'baby broken ribs' and 'jailed father locked up as baby's ribs broken', a court heard.

A post-mortem examination found the baby had suffered a brain injury shortly before his death, as well as four broken ribs and a fractured shoulder in the weeks before it.

Walker, of Sheldon Court, London, and Henry, of Gloucester, are on trial at Bristol Crown Court.

The couple are charged with manslaughter, causing or allowing the death of a child, and cruelty to a person under 16. Both deny the charges.

Opening the trial on Thursday morning, prosecutor Andrew Langden said: 'This case concerns the short life and death of a baby.

'His name is Ah'Kiell Walker. He was born on April 3, 2016. Had he lived he would have just had his second birthday.

'But sadly he did not live - he died on July 31, 2016, nearly four months old and this case will concentrate on the reasons for his death.'

He added: 'Drowning cannot be excluded as a cause. You will have to consider whether Ah'Kiell was deliberately submerged in water or whether water was poured down his throat.

'Mr Walker was obsessed with the baby's constipation. You will need to consider whether the fatal event was part of a wholly inappropriate reaction to the obsession.'

A 999 call was played to the court, made from Henry's home in Archdeacon Street in Gloucester on July 30, 2016 - the day before baby Ah'Kiell died.

Bristol Crown Court (pictured) heard on Thursday that Walker Googled 'Can I squeeze my baby?' and 'Can babies feel pain?'

Henry could be heard sobbing to the operator as she described how her son was coughing up blood and was barely breathing. Her partner could also be heard speaking in the background.

A short time later, paramedics arrived to find Ah'Kiell naked, wet, and freezing cold - and began urgent medical treatment.

When he was rushed to hospital, Ah'Kiell's temperature was not recordable, and there was an 18-minute period where his heart rate stopped entirely, Mr Langden said.

He told the court a CT scan taken after the child was admitted showed bleeding within the eyes 'consistent with shaking a baby.'

The next day he was declared brain dead and the decision was made to remove his breathing tube. He died shortly after.

Mr Langden went on to explain to the jury that Henry had told police her boyfriend would take her benefits and she was scared of him.

In a text message to her mother, Henry wrote: 'He's so horrible to Ah'Kiell', adding that he 'couldn't handle Ah'Kiell crying'.

On July 24, a neighbour heard 'terrible screaming' coming from the family home, followed by a female voice shouting 'what have you done, what have you done?'.

The couple were short on money and visited shops trying to sell a gold chain and a phone to get money.

Walker accepted he was violent on occasion. His phone was discovered in the police investigation, and the Google searches were found to have been made in mid-June, it was said.A former campaign aide to President Donald Trump who went on to endure the 'nightmare' of serving as a top deputy to Scott Pruitt is spilling the beans and telling congressional Democrats and investigators what he knows.

Kevin Chmielewski, who Trump lauded as a 'champ' on the campaign trail, served as a Trump campaign aide and got installed as a top political appointee at EPA, serving as the deputy chief of staff for operations at EPA.

Now, he is telling all about the array of inappropriate conduct he says he witnessed while serving under Pruitt  including his approval for a longtime female aide to accompany him first class on an international trip 'without legal justification,' travel destinations dictated by a 'desire to visit particular cities,' excessive security spending, and lavish hotels that weren't recommended by embassies.

Oversight Committee Democrats, led by Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, Reps. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, and Don Beyer of Virginia, Sens. Tom Carper of Delaware and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, laid out the full range on his charges in a letter to President Trump and a separate to Pruitt himself.

A former top EPA official Scott Pruitt is cooperating with Democratic lawmakers and their investigative staff and spilling the beans on excessive spending he says occurred at the agency

According to their summary of their meeting with Chmielewski, he directly contradicts Pruitt's claim that he didn't know about the big raises that went to top Pruitt staffers from Oklahoma. It was '100 per cent Pruitt himself,' Chmielewski said.

He said for 'a period of weeks' he did not see senior Pruitt aide Samantha Dravis, who announced she was resigning this month.

Dravis also accompanied Pruitt on international trips, including one to Morrocco with a layover in Paris after a flight delay.

Pruitt gave approval to fly first class on the trip 'even though there was no legal justification to do so.'

Chmielewski refused to justify the trip by signing paperwork retroactively 'because it violated federal travel regulations.' He said Dravis and Millan Hupp each told him that Pruitt had approved the decision, and 'asked him to reconsider,' but he did not. Another employee then agreed to give approval.

Pruitt authorized aide Samantha Dravis for a first class ticket on a trip where she accompanied him to Morocco, according to Chmielewski

Chmielewski believes 'his refusal to retroactively approve Ms. Dravis' first-class return flight from Morocco appears to him to have been the final straw that caused you to remove him,' the lawmakers wrote Pruitt.

He says following his refusal, chief of staff Ryan Jackson told him Pruitt wanted to fire or reassign him.

Following his own trip to Japan with Vice President Pence, Chmielewski claims Pruitt's head of security, Nino Perrotta, threatened him, prompting him to call the police.

Former Trump campaign aide Kevin Chmielewski, who was hailed as a 'champ' by Trump on the campaign trail, met with congressional Democrats to pull the lid off what he says is a series of misconduct by EPA chief Scott Pruitt

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) is among a group of lawmakers who wrote Trump and Pruitt about the incendiary charges

Perrotta sought to confiscate his credentialsand said he was going to go to his home to 'forcibly remove' his EPA parking pass, and said he 'didn't give a f*** who is on this call.'

He found the statements 'threatening' and reported them to local police, the White House, and 'numerous EPA officials.'

'We will respond to Members of Congress through the proper channel,' said EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox, asked for comment on the range of charges.

Chmielewski told the Democrats Pruitt had aide Millan Hupp act as his 'personal real estate representative' spending weeks to contact agents and tour properties where Pruitt might live.

He is also talking about the origins of the $50-a-night lease Pruitt obtained from a house co-owned by an energy lobbyist.

Samantha Dravis, right, at the annual CPAC conference in 2016

Dravis followed Pruitt to Washington and worked for him in two other posts

The lease is already under investigation and is one of a flurry of issues that have put Pruitt's job in jeopardy. President Trump has defended Pruitt, even while acknowledging it was below market.

He says he was in the office of Pruitt's chief of staff 'when he heard a conversation on speakerphone in which your landlord, energy lobbist J. Steven Hart, was complaining that you had never paid any rent to him, and that your daghter damanged his hardwood floors by repeatedly rolling her luggage across the unit when she was staying there.

UNDER FIRE: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is facing scrutiny on a number of fronts

Among Chmielewski's other stunning revelations:

- Pruitt picked travel destinations for official trips were 'dictated' by his desire to visit locales  'find me something to do [in these locations]'

- He told staff to find him reasons to go to Oklahoma

-When his chief of staff complained about travel, Pruitt told him his 'presence was no longer welcome' at planning meetings

- Sometimes stayed at hotels three times the government per diem

- 'Refused' to stay at hotels recommended by the U.S. embassies in Australia and Italy

- He preferred 'more expensive' hotels with fewer U.S. resources and 'to bring your security team with you, at taxpayer expense'

The lawmakers are asking Pruitt to turn over new documents after learning of 'wasteful spending' by him

Chmielewski was deputy chief of staff for operations, but got put on administrative leave.

Trump hailed him on the campaign trail as a 'champ.'

'Where the hell is Kevin? Get him out here,' Trump said at a campaign event in Berlin, Maryland, bringing him on stage, the Dispatch, an Ocean City paper, reported.

'He's tough as hell,' Trump said. 'Whenever there is a problem, he runs right in like full blast, runs in, he is a wild man.'

'We write with grave concerns regarding information we received during t ameeting with Mr. Kevin Chmielewski, a former campaign aide of yours,' the wrote President Trump. 'While Mr. Chmielewski described himself as a lifelong Republican and a strong supporter of ours and the Vice President, he painted an extremely troubling picture of wasteful spending, unethical behavior, and improper retaliation against EPA staff on the part of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt,' they wrote.A bust of Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin in the Serbian capital of Belgrade has been removed just days after its erection - due to the size of its head.

The bust of the first man in space had been ordered by Belgrade officials to stand on a street named after Yuri Gagarin in the city, and was erected a few days ago.

It comprised a huge stone plinth with a normal-sized bust of Gagarin, making the astronaut's head seem quite out of proportion.

The bust of Yuri Gagarin had been erected in Belgrade, Serbia, just a few days ago, but had already caused to much mockery online due to the size of the head, officials removed it

The monument was soon mocked online, with a number of people pointing out that the head could barely be seen on top of the plinth.

One Belgrade-based tweeter called the monument 'a scandal and an insult,' according to the BBC.

Another wrote: 'I think the reasons were practical, to stop someone from stealing it'.

The monument was due to be officially unveiled at a ceremony today, on the anniversary of Gagarin's space flight.

But following the criticism - and social media memes - Belgrade officials ordered that Gagarin's head be removed.

Belgrade City Manager Goran Vesic told a local news website that city officials had not had prior knowledge of the appearance of the monument, and said a new one would be commissioned.

Pioneer: Gagarin, pictured before the launch, became the first man in space on April 12, 1961

'Gagarin will have a memorial in Belgrade worthy of the contribution that he has made to humanity,' Vesic said in a statement to news website B92.net

Yuri Gagarin, from Smolensk Oblast in modern-day Russia became the first man in space on April 12, 1961, when he completed an orbit of the Earth in a spacecraft.

He became a a Soviet national hero for being the first man in space, but seven years later he was killed in a mystery plane crash, aged just 34.

On March 27, 1968, Gagarin was undertaking a training flight in his MiG-15 plane at the Chkalovsky aerodrome near Moscow.

The wreckage and the bodies of Gagarin and his co-pilot Vladimir Seryogi were found 40 miles away.

For the first time in Soviet history, a day of national mourning was declared for someone who was not a head of state.

In 2011, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Gagarin's historic 1961 flight into space, the Kremlin released some fresh information on his death.

Newly declassified documents said 'one of the probable reasons' for the crash was a sharp manoeuvre made to avoid a weather balloon after which Gagarin and Seryogin lost control of the aircraft.The daughter of the ruler of Dubai will be 'drugged and held against her will' after a failed escape attempt, her best friend told a London press conference.

Princess Latifa Maktoum will be kept hidden away and medicated so that she is not able to communicate with the outside world, it was claimed.

Finnish martial arts instructor Tiina Jauhiainem, who says she was seized by special forces along with Latifa and a former French spy involved with her failed escape bid, said the Princess will not be allowed to speak to anyone.

'She will be drugged as that is the common practice in Dubai when they do not want people to speak out,' said Miss Jauhiainem.

Scroll down for video

Princess Latifa Maktoum, the daughter of the ruler of Dubai, will be 'drugged and being held against her will' after a failed escape attempt, her best friend Tiina Jauhiainem (above) told a London press conference

'She will be drugged as that is the common practice in Dubai when they do not want people to speak out,' Miss Jauhiainem said

Miss Jauhiainem, who says she was seized by special forces along with Latifa and former French spy Herve Jaubert (above) involved with her failed escape bid, said the Princess will not be allowed to speak to anyone

'She will not be allowed to speak out and will be given medication to keep her quiet and under control.

'It will be the same as what happened to her sister who also tried to escape and was jailed.

MailOnline has revealed how Latifa - daughter of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai  enlisted the help of Tiina and ex-French spy Herve Jaubert to flee her homeland

'I am here speaking about my friend because we have to get her freed. The international community must take action and she must not be left with no help.'

Mail Online has revealed how 33 year old Latifa had enlisted the help of Tiina, 41, and former French counter intelligence officer Herve Jaubert to flee from her homeland.

In an emotional video posted online before she was seized in a US registered yacht off the coast of India Latifa claimed she had been previously jailed for three years while attempting to flee Dubai.

She also claimed despite living the life of luxury she was a virtual prisoner and not allowed to drive and placed under a curfew by her father, the billionaire ruler of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Maktoum.

Miss Jauhiainem appealed for global help: 'I am here speaking about my friend because we have to get her freed. The international community must take action and she must not be left with no help.'

Both Miss Jauhiainem and Jaubert, 62, recounted their harrowing ordeal when they said Indian special forces boarded their yacht and threatened to shoot them. The pair said they last saw Latifa shouting out that she was seeking political asylum before being spirited away

David Haigh, from Detained in Dubai, (right) said criminal and legal proceedings had been launched over the illegal detention of Miss Jauhiainem and Herve after they were allegedly imprisoned for almost two weeks and interrogated for up to 20 hours

After boarding a yacht in Oman she was hoping to reach India and travel to the US where she planned to seek political asylum.

When the yacht was 50 miles from Goa Indian special forces boarded the yacht and seized all three, it has been claimed.

Tiina, Jaubert and the founders of the non profit group Detained in Dubai held a press conference in London to highlight the plight of Princess Latifa.

Both Tiina and Jaubert, 62, recounted their harrowing ordeal when they said Indian special forces boarded their yacht and threatened to shoot them.

The pair said they last saw Latifa shouting out that she was seeking political asylum before being spirited away.

She has not been heard from since and the Dubai authorities have refused to comment about her alleged claims and attempt to seek political asylum in the US.

Latifa has not been heard from since and the Dubai authorities have refused to comment about her alleged claims and attempt to seek political asylum in the US

The Nostromo sailing yacht aboard which the failed escape attempt took place. Lawyer Toby Cadman, head of the Guernica 77 Justice Chambers in London, said the seizure of Herve's yacht took place in international waters in violation of international law

Jaubert, who mounted the bold rescue operation, posing at the wheel of the Nostromo

David Haigh, from Detained in Dubai, said criminal and legal proceedings had been launched over the illegal detention of Tiina and Herve after they were allegedly imprisoned for almost two weeks and interrogated for up to 20 hours.

Haigh said: 'The various Governments must see the seriousness of what has happened and cannot turn a blind eye to what has gone on.'

As Herve is a US citizen the FBI has been contacted and is compiling a report. The Finnish Police have also been informed and a missing persons report filed with Scotland Yard.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also expressed their support for the growing campaign for Latifa to be freed.

The press conference was briefly disrupted by Arab journalists (above) questioning the integrity of Detained in Dubai and were removed by security from the London hotel where it was held

As Herve is a US citizen the FBI has been contacted and is compiling a report. The Finnish Police have also been informed and a missing persons report filed with Scotland Yard

Former French spy Jean-Pierre Herve Jaubert who says he helped a 'runaway princess' escape from Dubai in a luxury yacht claims they were 'blindfolded, handcuffed and beaten' by soldiers before being sent back to the UAE

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also expressed their support for the growing campaign for Latifa to be freed. Latifa - who sent MailOnline a copy of her passport - is trying to seek political asylum in the US

Latifa sent a photo of her UAE identity card (pictured). She claims she was jailed for three years in Dubai and drugged in hospital by doctors to stop her rebelling and causing trouble

Lawyer Toby Cadman, head of the Guernica 77 Justice Chambers in London, said the seizure of Herve's yacht took place in international waters in violation of international law.

He said every avenue to criminal and civil proceedings was being explored.

The press conference was briefly disrupted by Arab journalists questioning the integrity of Detained in Dubai and were removed by security from the London hotel where it was held.

The United Arab Emirates Embassy refused to comment.



A jealous ex set fire to his former boyfriend's house while he was inside with his new lover, who was trapped and then had to be resuscitated on the sidewalk, it has been claimed.

The homeowner and his ex-lover escaped the blaze in Houston early on Thursday morning with two dogs but the new boyfriend had to be pulled out of the inferno by firefighters.

Dramatic TV news footage showed him being rushed out onto the sidewalk and revived by medics.

A jealous ex set fire to his former boyfriend's Houston home while he was inside with his new lover, it has been claimed. The house is pictured early on Thursday morning

Firefighters were called to the house on the 3000 block of Bringhurst Street just after 1am on Thursday, and have now brought the fire under control.

The homeowner told Click2Houston his former boyfriend came over because he was having a 'mental breakdown'.

A fight broke out and the jealous ex poured gas on the floor of his bathroom and set it on fire, he claimed.

They were able to restart the man's breathing and he was taken to the Memorial Hermann Hospital, where he is expected to recover.

Dramatic TV news footage showed the man being rushed out onto the sidewalk and revived by medics

They were able to restart the man's breathing and he was taken to the Memorial Hermann Hospital, where he is expected to recover

The ex-boyfriend was also taken to hospital and is in a stable condition.

Footage filmed early this morning showed the house a gutted wreck, although still structurally intact.

Ladders that had been used to access the roof could still be seen leaning on the outside wall.

Dailymail.com has contacted Houston Fire Department to ask if they are treating the blaze as arson.A dentist who admitted plotting to date rape his unfaithful wife has avoided jail despite police launching a murder probe after she went missing.

Majid Mustafa wept in the dock as a court heard he had spent six months in prison awaiting trial for administering a noxious substance to Renata Antzcak.

Renata, 49, disappeared almost a year ago, when she was last spotted at home after going on the school run in Hull, East Yorkshire, with her 12-year-old daughter.

Mustafa, 48, had claimed at the time his estranged wife had fled the UK to join a cult.

Majid Mustafa (left, seen arrivgin at an earlier hearing) wept as a court heard he had spent six months in prison awaiting trial for administering a noxious substance to Renata Antzcak (right)

Renata Antczak (left) told Majid Mustafa (right) she wanted a divorce as he waited for her to return for a birthday meal on January 28 last year, transcripts from a police interview revealed

However the court heard Mustafa wanted to obtain a date rape drug so he could use his wife's finger print to access her phone to find proof of an affair.

Doncaster Crown Court heard this week that Mustafa had been told Renata wanted a divorce on his birthday after he thought the pair were heading out for a meal.

Following the mother-of-two's disappearance, the court was told messages and calls were intercepted from Mustafa and his 50-year-old pal Robert Lipinski.

They detailed conversations about obtaining a 'rape drug' from Poland so Mustafa could search Renata's phone using her finger print when she was incapacitated.

Renata disappeared almost a year ago, when she was last spotted at home after going on the school run with her 12-year-old daughter (left). Shown right is Mustafa

Mr Mustafa (pictured) and Mr Lipinski had their charges dropped and were released from custody

Mustafa then became hell-bent and 'obsessed' over Renata having an affair and wanted his pal Lipinski to fly to Poland to get hold of GHB, the court heard.

A jury of nine women and three men heard Mustafa had used covert devices to also film his wife in her car to see if she was meeting another man.

However, the case was stopped on the third day and Mustafa pleaded guilty to the charge of encouraging a person to obtain GHB so he could unlawfully administer it to his wife.

Sentencing Mustafa to a 12 month conditional discharge, Judge Mark Bury told him: 'These are exceptionally circumstances.

'Many partners are unhappily unfaithful in their relationships but they're very few that would want to drug them with GHB to find out what was going on.

Posters were put up in English and Polish across Hull and police appealed for anyone who saw her between 8.30am and 1pm on April 25 to contact them

'For reasons connected to Renata's disappearance, and on offences you have pleaded guilty to here today, is that you spent five-and-a-half-months in custody.

'You are not charged with, still less convicted, in connection with her disappearance.'

Judge Bury told the jury before dismissing them: 'It is a very unusual case and these are very unusual circumstances.

'On the 25th of April last year your wife was reported missing and she is still a missing person.

'I make it plain to you and everybody else connected with this case, the fact your wife is a missing person has no relevance to this sentencing exercise.'

Mustafa, of Hull, East Yorkshire, was first arrested on May 22, 2017 and was remanded in custody until October 6, 2017.

The defendant's barrister Michael Bromley-Martin, QC, told the court Mustafa had been with his wife over 20 years and had two children together.

He said that after pleading guilty to the offence Mustafa 'would lose his licence to practice'.

Before being charged with this offence, Mustafa had previously claimed his wife had fled to Poland to join a cult with another man.

Upon leaving court at the end of the four day trial in Doncaster, Mustafa said: 'I don't have much to say I want to go back to Hull and go back to my family.

'I want to go back to being a dentist and my patients and doing the job I love.'Connor Ward, from Banff, Aberdeenshire, was caught with a terrifying arms cache and bomb making equipment

A Neo-Nazi convicted of planning terror attacks against Muslims and mosques in Aberdeen has been jailed for life.

Connor Ward, from Banff, Aberdeenshire, was caught with a terrifying arms cache and bomb making equipment.

The 25-year-old also kept a list of mosques and pledged the 'demise' of Islam, heard the High Court in Glasgow.

After searching his home police found hundreds of ball bearings, which could be used in pipe bombs, and rocket tubes capable of firing projectiles.

A stun gun, hundreds of knuckle dusters, knives and metal bars and deactivated bullets were also discovered.

Judge Lord Burns told Ward: 'The jury found you guilty and must have been satisfied you were in the course of preparing acts of terrorism.

'The jury's view was that you formed an intention to attack a Mosque or Mosques in Aberdeen and would have acted alone. You had reached the stage of identifying your targets and expressed threats against Muslims.'

Lord Burns said that if Ward had carried out the acts of terrorism 'it would have had catastrophic results.'

The judge added: 'You had reached the stage of buying materials and you planned to cause serious injury at the least. Your obsession with weapons and explosives and your extreme right-wing attitudes presents serious risk to the public.'

Ward will have to serve at least six years before he is eligible for parole. It will be up to the parole board to decide when, or if, he is released.

Ward showed no emotion as he was led away to begin his sentence.

Horrified officers discovered Ward's lethal hoard after receiving a tip-off that he had broken strict firearms legislation by buying a stun gun from abroad.

They also found Ward had acquired a mobile phone signal jamming device and a machine for picking up hidden bugs and downloaded tens of thousands of documents from the internet on firearms and survival techniques.

The files also contained extreme right-wing propaganda and documents about military tactics.

A map showing the addresses of five Mosques in the Aberdeen area was discovered on Ward's computer.

The 25-year-old also kept a list of mosques and pledged the 'demise' of Islam, heard the High Court in Glasgow

They also found that Ward, who told jurors he thought Hitler had made mistakes, had started to compile a book called 'Combat 18 British Mosque Address Book.'

Combat 18 is the name of an extreme British right-wing paramilitary group

On the title page of the book, Ward had written : 'This book is dedicated to all that follow Mohammed and the Islamic faith. You will all soon suffer your demise.'

Ward, a former psychiatric patient, claimed he was suffering from mental illness at the time

He said he believed the world was going to end in 2012 and he wanted to survive the apocalypse.

But jurors did not believe him and returned guilty verdicts on two charges of breaching the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Terrorism Act 2006 between February 26, 2011, and November 21, 2014.

Ward was jailed for three years in October 30, 2012, on a charge of contravening the 1883 explosives act by collecting the chemical components of a bomb with the intention of harming his father

He also received a 22 month jail sentence in April 2015 for possessing a stun gun.

Ward was also convicted in July 2016 of having an 'improvised' knife while in jail and given an 18-month sentence.

Defence counsel Drew McKenzie said that Ward was a man with an interest in weapons and had been trying to sell weapons. He added that Ward had sent a stun gun to Amnesty International.Six abandoned dogs were found with broken bones and covered in cuts at a medical university campus in southeast China.

This is the moment animal activists rescue the dogs that are allegedly used as experiments for students to practice. One dog was found to have a six-inch deep cut on the body.

Two of the six dogs died shortly after being taken to a veterinarian for emergency treatment. It's believed that the stray dogs were used as experiments and practices by the medical students.

A dog was found strangled by bandages and left in a bush at a medical university campus in Jiangsu (left). Five more dogs were found locked in a cage with cuts on the bodies (right)

MailOnline has obtained exclusive videos of the rescue as PETA activists rescued the alleged 'lab test' dogs today at Jiangxi Medical College in Shangrao of Jiangxi Province.

An unnamed activist found a white pooch abandoned in a bush at the campus yesterday.

The dog had its limbs tied by bandages with cuts on its stomach and a bleeding hole in its head.

The pooch was breathing in pain before it was sent to a veterinarian for treatment.

Unfortunately, the dog died shortly after the rescue.

Some students told the activist through messages that more dogs were kept in block A of the medical building in the campus.

Five 'lab test' dogs were found covered in cuts and bloods at a university campus in east China.

Mobile phone footage showed a few activists busted into the campus and found a cage of five dogs at the staircase.

They were all severely injured with cuts and fractures. Their limbs were tied with metal wires.

One brown dog had a flesh wound 15 centimetres (6 inches) deep on its body. Local veterinarian found serious fractures in the chest.

A brown dog was found to have a six-inch deep cut on its back while being locked in a cage (left). Other dogs had their legs tied with metal wires and cut through its flesh (right)

The dog was taken to a veterinarian for emergency treatment but it died of excessive bleeding (left). Students believed that medical students used the dogs to practise (right)

Activists also found several stitches around the abdomen.

Footage shows a veterinarian shaved the hair around the wound before treating the pooch. However, the dog died of excessive bleeding.

One unnamed student told the activists that some dogs would be cook as meat after the experiments during winter.

PETA Asia contacted Jiangxi Medical College in response to the alleged dog abuse and is still awaiting for reply.

Jason Baker, vice president of PETA Asia told MailOnline that their scientists 'stand ready to help the school change to modern animal-free test'.

'This is cruel, callous and unimaginably painful for dogs and it's not teaching respect for life when animals are being thrown onto the street and left lying slowly,' he added.The current CIA Director Mike Pompeo says he has never advocated for regime change in North Korea.

Pompeo was speaking Thursday at his Senate confirmation hearing to become President Trump's second secretary of state.

Pompeo says the administration has a responsibility to prevent North Korean leader Kim Jong Un from being able to threaten the U.S. with a nuclear weapon.

Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo, who is currently the CIA director, said Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he doesn't support regime change in North Korea

A Code Pink protester is seen behind Mike Pompeo, currently the nation's CIA director who President Trump wants as his next secretary of state, after firing Rex Tillerson

But he says he's not advocating regime change.

He says his role as a diplomat is to avoid a confrontation.

After a year of escalating tensions over North Korea's progress in its weapons development, President Donald Trump has pivoted to diplomacy and plans to meet Kim in May or early June.

With Pompeo in the position of currently leading the CIA, but likely taking the helm of the State Department, it's been the top spy's team that has made preparations for the summit, between Trump and the North Korean leader.

The CIA has used intelligence back-channels to speak to the North Koreans, as they settle on a location for the talks, the New York Times first reported.

The North Koreans would like to host Trump in their capital, Pyongyang.

Another location that's been discussed is the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar.

With the meeting with Kim approaching, Trump wanted a secretary of state in lockstep with him, and found that in Pompeo.

Beyond dealing with the North Koreans through the channel that runs between the CIA and the Reconnaissance General Burea, Pompeo has also been in close touch with the director of South Korea's National Intelligence Service, Suh Hoon, who was the individual who brokered Kim's invitation to Trump, the Times said.

The U.S. State Department has been communicating with the North Koreans through their mission at the United Nations, CNN also said.

And incoming National Security Adviser John Bolton, who starts his job Monday  replacing the president's second National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster  is expected to join Pompeo in planning the meeting.

At the hearing Thursday, Pompeo was asked a number of questions about the forthcoming meeting, telling Colorado Sen Cory Gardner what he thought the main goal was.

'But the purpose of the meeting is to address the nuclear threat to the United States,' Pompeo said.

He also said that no matter how the meeting goes, he assumes there will be more diplomatic work ahead.

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat, explained that he was worried that if the meeting between the two leaders goes badly, new Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton will encourage a U.S. military strike.

'The president has made clear, and I agree with him, there may come the day that we see an arsenal of nuclear weapons capable of striking the United State of America, Pompeo pointed out. 'The precedent has made clear his intention to prevent that from happening.'

Markey said he believed that 30,000 to 300,000 Americans could be killed in a conflict in which U.S. troops have to invade the peninsula, and said that would be 'catastrophic.'

'Senator, I agree with that,' Pompeo said.Family and friends of a murdered mother-of-two yelled and cursed at her killer as he was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday.

Jason Black, 27, apologized to the parents, sister and husband of Natalia Casagrande, 24, who he shot and killed before trying to smother her daughter in Magna, Utah, in May 2016.

'Words can never begin to express how sorry I am,' he told the family in court.

But his apology was met with an obscenity-laden attack from the public gallery.

'F**" you! Were you sorry when you beat her?!' shouted Casagrande's husband, Steven Arceo, from the front row of the courtroom gallery.

The family and friends of Natalia Casagrande, 24 (left), cursed and yelled as Jason Black, 27 (right), apologized for killing her in May 2016 in Magna, Utah

'F*** you! Were you sorry when you beat her?!' shouted her husband, Steven Arceo, from the front row of the courtroom gallery (Pictured, Arceo at a vigil for Casagrande, June 2016)

Black was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for a number of charges including aggravated murder. He will be eligible for parole after serving 36 years (Pictured, Casagrande)

Courtesy of Good4Utah

Arceo was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of his late wife.

Other friends and family of Casagrande wept as Black was led out of the courtroom.

Black was sentenced to 25 years to life for aggravated murder, as well as additional sentences for felony attempted aggravated murder, aggravated burglary, aggravated robbery and obstructing justice.

He will be eligible for parole after serving 36 years, Utah's Third District Judge Adam Mow said during the proceedings.

'You've ruined many lives through the actions that you've taken,' Mow told Black.

Black was potentially facing the death penalty until he agreed to plead guilty in October to charges stemming from Casagrande's killing.

Authorities say that on the day of the murder, May 31, 2016, Black went to Casagrande and Arceo's home in Magna to buy marijuana, something he had done many times before when an argument broke out.

Authorities say that on the day of the murder, May 31, 2016, Black went to Casagrande and Arceo's home in Magna (pictured) to buy marijuana, something he had done many times before when an argument broke out

Police say Black beat Casagrande, cut her with a knife or glass and shot her in the head while her two children, ages one and five (pictured), were at the home.

Then, he attempted to smother her five-year-old daughter (pictured) by putting a pillow over her face. He fled the home with guns, cash and marijuana.

Police say Black beat Casagrande, cut her with a knife or glass and shot her in the head while her two children, ages one and five, were at the home.

Then, he attempted to smother her five-year-old daughter by putting a pillow over her face.

He fled the home with guns, cash and marijuana.

The young girl recognized Black from his previous visits to the house. He was tracked down to his parents' home in South Jordan on June 2.

Casagrande's sister, Stephanie Sanchez, told the judge that her niece has emotional trauma from that day.

'She can't even hear fireworks now because she remembers the day that her mother go shot in the head,' Sanchez said. 'She's traumatized for life from what he did.'

Casagrande's family remembered as a loving wife and mother and a loyal friend.

'[S]he had [a] beautiful soul,' her sister-in-law Nena Arceo told FOX 13 at the time of her deathm.

'You never ever seen that woman sad. She was always smiling from ear-to-ear.'CIA Director Mike Pompeo says that 'a couple hundred Russians' were killed in an air assault carried out by U.S.-backed forces in Syria in February.

Previous reporting on the topic indicated that dozens of Russian military contractors had been killed or injured in the onslaught. But Pompeo told senators during a confirmation hearing that the body count was much higher than that.

Pompeo, the nominee for secretary of state, took a hardline against Vladimir Putin's government in the testimony that followed President Trump's warning to Russia this week that the U.S. would soon rain missiles down on Syria.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo says that 'a couple hundred Russians' were killed in an air assault carried out by U.S.-backed forces in Syria

Trump pivoted on Russia this week as tensions mounted over a chemical weapons attack the U.S. has linked to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's army.

The U.S. president said that Russia, Iran and Assad would pay a 'big price' for the attack on innocent civilians that killed and injured scores of adulds and some children.

His White House press secretary said yesterday when asked about a possible military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia that 'all options' are on the table.

Sarah Sanders told reporters that the U.S. considers Russia a 'bad actor' at this point.

She stopped short of calling Russia an enemy of America, however, saying it would be up to the country that's aligned itself with 'gas killing animal' Assad, in the president's words, to determine what kind of relationship it wants to have with the U.S.

The CIA director, in his opening remarks to lawmakers today, said the Trump administration considers Russia 'a danger to our country.'

Responding to a complaint from Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen today that the Trump administration has not done enough to deter Russia - she pointed out that it had not enacted a slew of congressionally-approved sanctions - Pompeo agreed.

'I readily concede that Vladimir Putin has not yet received the message sufficiently,' he said. 'And we need to continue to work at that.'

Continuing, Pompeo said that Trump has been tough on Russia.

'It hasn't just been sanctions, the largest expulsion of 60 folks was from this administration. This administration announced a nuclear posture review that has put Russia on notice that we are going to recapitalize our deterrent force.

Pompeo, the nominee for secretary of state, took a hardline against Vladimir Putin's government in the testimony that followed President Trump's warning to Russia this week that the U.S. would soon reign missiles down on Syria

'In Syria, now, a handful of weeks ago, the Russians met their match. A couple hundred Russians were killed,' Pompeo revealed. 'The list of actions that this administration has taken, I'm happy to walk through each of them, but I don't want to take up more time. The list is pretty long, ma'am.'

Shaheen said she appreciates the actions 'but they get undermined by a president who consistently refuses to hold Vladimir Putin accountable' for election meddling in 2016 and 'that presents a challenge as we go into the 2018 elections and it presents a challenge as we work with other democracies around the world.'

Earlier in the exchange, she asked Pompeo about a tweet that she also found concerning, in which the president blamed the 'bad blood' between Russia and the U.S. on the investigation.

Pompeo rejected Trump's casting of the relationship, telling a lawmaker, 'The historic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union and now Russia is caused by Russian bad behavior.'

After Shaheen had finished questioning Pompeo, the panel's chairman, Republican Sen. Bob Corker, returned to the topic of the air raid in Syria.

'I just wanted to highlight that I don't think enough has been said or made of the fact that Russia crossed the Euphrates with their own troops and were annihilated, and it was really a strong statement that I don't think many are paying as much attention to as should,' he said. 'And I appreciate you highlighting that. Incredible steps by our Pentagon.'

The Feb. 7 air raid came after a 500-person force of Russian contractors and militia loyal to Assad crossed the River Euphrates and advanced on an oil and gas field controlled by a U.S.-aligned militia group.

According to a CNN report at the time, the militia group responded to the advance with airstrikes and artillery fire.

Helicopters and an AC-130 were used in conflict, the report said.

Russia's government has been unwilling to identify exactly how many of its mercenaries died in the clash.Former nurse William Davis is being held on a murder charge after he allegedly tampered with the IV of seven hospital patients, killing two of them

New details have emerged concerning the arrest of a former nurse at a Texas hospital, who is now accused of killing two patients and injuring five others by intentionally causing strokes to the victims.

According to an arrest warrant, William Davis, 34, is seen on security video entering patients rooms at Christus Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler. He leaves a short time later and then the patients suffered 'unexpected medical emergencies.'

Davis was working the night shift when each of the seven patients - six men and a woman - suffered an emergency, and authorities say in at least some cases he introduced air into their circulatory systems, leading to an air embolism.

Davis was fired in February and arrested on Tuesday on a murder charge. He was being held Thursday on $2million bond.

Tyler police Chief Jimmy Toler said Wednesday that Davis is now facing additional charges.

He is being held for the August 6, 2017, death of 47-year-old Christopher Greenaway who, according to his obituary, was a pilot and decorated US Army veteran.

Victims: Perry Frank (left), 61, died in June 2017. Christopher Greenaway (right), 47, passed away in August 2017. Both weere veterans recovering from heart surgery

Davis was fired from CHRISTUS Mother Frances Hospital on February 15 and had his nursing license suspended in March by the Texas Board of Nursing

Family members of the second patient who died on June 22, 2017, identified him as Perry Frank, 61, a married father-of-two from Palestine, Texas, who died while recovering from heart surgery.

Frank was a US Navy veteran who served as the band director of Grapeland High School since 2006, according to his obituary. Its not immediately clear if Davis could be charged with a second count of murder in Frank's death.

Davis (pictured) entered three patients' rooms starting in August 2017 and 'performed an intervention', killing one patient after inducing a stroke and leaving two others in vegetative states

The seven cases connected to Davis date back to June and all took place at the hospital where he worked, Toler said.

Patients identified as Joseph Kalina, 58, and Pamela Henderson, 63, both suffered severe injuries, rendering the former in a vegetative state and the latter with limited vision and mobility.

Christus Trinity Mother Frances Health System said in a statement that Davis began working for the system in 2013. Toler said that prior to coming to Christus, Davis had worked at another hospital for two years.

According to his online obituary, Chris Greenaway was a native of South Carolina who lived in Tyler with his partner and worked as a pilot for medical transport.

He achieved the US Coast Guard Captain's License, PADI Open Water Diver Certificate and National Eagle Scouts. He served in the US Army and was awarded multiple medals, inclduing the US Army Aviator Badge, US Army Aircraft Crewman Badge, US Army Accommodation Medal and National Defense Service Medal with Bronze Star.

As an organ donor, in his death Greenaway saved the lives of four people directly and countless others indirectly through tissue donations.

The Texas Board of Nursing suspended Davis's license in March for allegedly harming or killing patients.

Davis entered the patients' rooms with unauthorized access in August, November and January.

Greenaway lived in Tyler, Texas, with his partner and worked as a pilot for medical transport

The 47-year-old (center) was a highly decorated US Army veteran who also achieved the US Coast Guard Captain's License

The nursing board said he then proceeded to perform 'unnecessary or inappropriate interventions' on each patient.

In August, Davis's intervention caused a patient to whom he was not assigned to suffer a stroke and die after the nurse tampered with the IV and did not communicate what he was doing to the patient's assigned nurse.

According to the nursing board, Davis performed the same action in November 2017, causing another patient to suffer from a stroke five minutes later. Court documents say the patient was left in a vegetative state.

Davis once more entered a patient's room in January 2018, leaving that patient in a vegetative state as well.

Tyler Police Chief Jimmy Toler speaks during a press conference Wednesday regarding DAvis' arrest

According to the Tyler Paper, Davis later admitted to management that he reset a beeping IV, flushed the arterial line - a thin catheter inserted into an artery - a few times and pumped up the pressure bag, according to the charges.

Davis was fired from Christus Mother Frances Hospital on February 15 due to 'related to his falsification of care events' and his 'unethical practice related to failure to disclose interventions provided that may have impacted the outcome of (a) patient', according to the temporary suspension order.

Davis started a GoFundMe account more than two weeks ago and wrote on the page that his license was temporarily suspended 'for misunderstandings'. The fund was to pay for attorneys' fees. The campaign has since been deleted.Surgeons have successfully re-attached a three-year-old boy's arm after it was ripped off when he climbed into a tumble drier in a caravan at a holiday park.

The child lost his arm after apparently reaching into the spinning drum whilst on holiday with his family on Monday.

Holiday camp staff rushed to the private caravan at the Eastchurch site on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, where the accident happened and were shocked by the horrific sight which greeted them.

The three-year-old had become entangled in the drier in a caravan after trying to climb into it at the site at Eastchurch (file picture) on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent

Paramedics, doctors and the crew of an air ambulance scrambled to the holiday park and the youngster was taken to the specialist King's College Hospital, along with the severed arm which was packed in ice to try to preserve it.

Surgeons who had been put on stand-by at the hospital immediately took the youngster into the operating theatre and later carried out a lengthy procedure using micro-surgery to re-attach the severed limb.

Tonight a spokesperson for the holiday park confirmed that the operation to sew back on the arm had been successful.

'We have been told that things went well which is excellent news. Obviously the young boy has to undergo a series of further operations but so far things have gone well,' said the spokesman.

It was understood that the youngster, who has not yet been named, had his arm ripped off as he tried to climb into a spin drier which was installed in the family-owned caravan to dry clothes.

The holiday park overlooks the Thames estuary from Sheppey and was abuzz with families taking advantage of the Easter holidays when the incident happened.

Holiday camp staff rushed to the private caravan at the Eastchurch (pictured) site on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent

The spokesperson for the Eastchurch Holiday Camp said that the staff who had rushed to help the boy and his mother had been very shocked by what they saw and at least one of them had been advised to take time off from work because of having to deal with the aftermath of the accident.

'All at Eastchurch Holiday Centre were deeply saddened to hear of the tragic accident involving the little boy on Monday. They extend their sympathies and best wishes to him and his family at what must be a very difficult time for them all,' she said in a statement.

'The owners of Eastchurch would like to thank their staff who got to the scene of the accident (the family's caravan) so promptly upon hearing about it. In distressing circumstances, they were able to use their first-aid training to do their best to help the child, pending the arrival of the emergency services.

'The accident was a deeply upsetting incident to everyone concerned. The boy is receiving the best treatment in hospital.

The lost limb was taken to King's College Hospital (pictured) in London, packed in ice

'Eastchurch wishes to make clear that the accident did not take place in the laundrette at the park - as early reports indicated - which is a facility available to park users. Eastchurch would like to reassure everyone that the safety of children is of paramount importance at the park.'

A Health and Safety Executive spokesman said that it had been decided that the incident did not need an investigation by HSE because it happened on private property and did not involve a work practice.

A spokesman for King's College Hospital said that it did not discuss individual cases of patients.

Police were also called to the incident and a Kent Police spokesman said: 'We were called to Eastchurch Holiday Camp in Sheerness at 1.13pm on Monday after a young child suffered a serious arm injury.

'The South East Coast Ambulance Service also attended. The child, a three-year-old boy, was taken to a hospital in London where he remains in a serious but stable condition.'First, let me be very clear: I believe Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons to kill dozens of his own people earlier this week.

Hes done it with savage impunity throughout this hideous conflict, as befits a disgusting, vicious and murderous monster.

And all the evidence points to him now having done so again.

French president Emmanuel Macron, seen here today, now says he has seen proof Assads forces used chlorine gas to commit last weekend's atrocity

Indeed, French president Emmanuel Macron today said he has seen proof Assads forces used chlorine gas to commit the atrocity.

Like many people, my initial gut instinct was that Id like to see Assad severely punished for this despicable act, wrought predominantly on so many innocent women and children.

I watched the videos of those poor people gasping for breath, foaming at the mouth, and dying before our eyes and every sinew inside me screamed for vengeance.

Ive no doubt that President Trump watched the same images with the same horror, and his first instincts were exactly the same as mine  especially when Russia, Assads closest ally, arrogantly warned of strong action against any revenge attack.

Id like to see Assad severely punished for this. I watched the videos of those poor people gasping for breath, foaming at the mouth, and dying AND every sinew inside me screamed for vengeance. I think Trump felt the same when he saw the images

Yesterday morning, Trump tweeted: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia because they will be coming, nice, new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it.!

I found the first half of that tweet to be as dumb as everyone else who read it, not least because Trumps always vowed never to give prior warning of any military action, to avoid alerting an enemy.

However, I whole-heartedly endorse the sentiment contained in the second half. Assads willingness to annihilate his own people with illegal chemical weapons marks him out as one of the worst monsters of modern times.

He has shown himself to be a man with a callous disregard for both human life and the rules of war.

BUT I have also concluded it would be pointless and wrong for America, and its allies including Britain and France, to now bomb Syria.

The sad, unpalatable truth is that Assads all but won the 7-year civil war that has seen half a million people killed and twelve million drove from their homes.

He has done so mainly through the support of Vladimir Putins Russia, aided and abetted by Iran and Hezbollah.

These ruthless accomplices swept in to fill a power vacuum created by Americas dithering.

At the start of the Syrian war in 2011, the US harboured hopes of helping to kick Assad and his despotic government out of power as part of the Arab Spring uprisings that swept across the Middle East.

But he proved to be more resilient than other dictators like Gaddafi and Mubarak.

The tipping point came in August 2013, when President Obama failed to act on his chemical weapons red line after Assad brazenly used sarin gas to murder nearly 1500 civilians including over 400 children.

It was clear then that America had abandoned any pretence of trying to effect regime change, perhaps mindful of how badly that strategy has played out in places like Iraq, Egypt and Libya.

Since then America has approached Syria as a counter-terrorism operation, with a specific purpose to defeat ISIS.

And that mission, as President Trump rightly pointed out today, has proven to be very successful.

At the start of the Syrian war in 2011, the US harboured hopes of helping to kick Assad, but by 2013 it was clear then that America had abandoned any pretence of trying to effect regime change. Since then America has approached Syria as a counter-terrorism operation, with a specific purpose to defeat ISIS. As President Trump rightly pointed out, it's proven successful

ISIS has almost been completely driven out of Syria, as it has too from Iraq.

Yet now, America risks being sucked back into the wider, bigger Syrian conflict in a way that I cannot see ending in anything but ignominious failure.

In any war, the most essential thing for a participant to have is a clear, unequivocal 4-point sense of purpose:

1) Why are we fighting?

2) What is our strategy?

3) How does it end?

4) What can be categorised as victory?

Until the chemical weapons attack this week, Americas answers to those questions had become straightforward:

1) To defeat ISIS on the battlefield in Syria, and drive them out of the country.

2) To support the Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of Arabs and Kurds, to fight ISIS on the ground, and pulverise them from the air with relentless bombing of their strongholds.

3) When ISIS no longer has any meaningful presence in Syria.

4) With a stabilised Syria, free from ISIS terrorists.

Of course, the wider Syrian civil war is much more complex than that.

It will surely end, sooner rather than later, with a win for President Assad and that will stick in the craw of all right-minded people.

His day of reckoning, as with all war criminals, will come - but not, unfortunately, any time soon.

For America, victory in Syria will currently be defined as specific to the defeat of ISIS in that country  delivering a big blow to a terror group that represents a major ongoing threat to the security of the US.

That is no mean achievement, and President Trump deserves credit for his role in it.

But he risks a far worse legacy if he now decides to attack Assad, and by association, Russia.

The time to take out Assad has long since passed.

As for Putin, Im all for coming down hard on this global thug  as Trumps been rightly doing with his oligarch cronies and diplomats - but not in Syria.

Trump risks a terrible legacy if he decides to attack Assad, and by association, Russia. The time to take out Assad has long since passed. As for Putin, Im all for coming down hard on this global thug  but not in Syria

The time to help end this war, facilitate peace, and stop the suffering of the Syrian people, is here.

The bottom line is this, Mr Trump: yes, you can unleash another load of tomahawk missiles as you did a year ago, but to what purpose?

The previous response clearly presented no deterrent to Assad.

Another similar one wont stop him and Putin from continuing to bomb and barrage their way through to the end of this war.

To engage with them now in a more major military conflict could prove to be catastrophic  for Syria, America and the world.

As all military experts will tell you, any kind of ground war there involving US troops would make Vietnam look like a tea party.

So Mr President, I know youre itching to give Assad, and Putin, a bloody nose for their disgusting use of chemical weapons.

I share your fury.

But you must hold your nerve, and your nose.

Dont bomb.President Donald Trump has asked trade officials to explore the possibility of the United States rejoining negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership after he pulled out last year as part of his 'America first' agenda.

A year ago Trump boasted about yanking the U.S. out of the pact, saying it 'would have been a catastrophe for our businesses and for our workers. I'm very proud of that withdrawal.'

'Some people say, oh, gee, I wish you didnt do that, but the smart people say, thank you, thank you, thank you. That would have been another NAFTA disaster,' he said at the White House on April 20, 2017.

Farm-state lawmakers said Thursday after a White House meeting with Trump that he had tasked his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, and his new chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, with considering how to get back in. The Pacific Rim agreement would open more overseas markets for American farmers.

The White House confirmed it hours later.

President Trump told a group of senators and governors on Thursday that he has asked his top trade advisers to explore ways of rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership

The TPP is a 12-nation economic bloc that includes Japan and Australia, but not China  which could be why Trump is seeking new trade leverage there

The president held up an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his fourth day in office

'Last year, the President kept his promise to end the TPP deal negotiated by the Obama Administration because it was unfair to American workers and farmers. The President has consistently said he would be open to a substantially better deal, including in his speech in Davos earlier this year,' White House Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters said in a statement.

'To that end, he has asked Amb. Lighthizer and Director Kudlow to take another look at whether or not a better deal could be negotiated.'

Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse said following the earlier meeting with Trump: 'I'm sure there are lots of particulars that they'd want to negotiate, but the president multiple times reaffirmed in general to all of us and looked right at Larry Kudlow and said, "Larry, go get it done".'

Eleven countries signed the TPP agreement last month. Trump's rejection of the deal has rattled allies and raised questions at home about whether protectionism will impede U.S. economic growth.

Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, said he was 'very impressed' that Trump had assigned Kudlow and Lighthizer 'the task to see if we couldn't take another look at TPP. And that certainly would be good news all throughout farm country.'

Trump hosted governors and lawmakers in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Thursday. From left, Gov. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., Trump, and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa

The discussions came during a meeting in which Trump told farm-state governors and lawmakers that he was pressing China to treat the American agriculture industry fairly. Midwest farmers fear becoming caught up in a trade war as Beijing threatens to impose tariffs on soybeans and other U.S. crops, a big blow to Midwestern farmers, many of whom are strong Trump supporters.

Trump has mused about re-joining TPP negotiations in the past but his request to his top aides show a greater level of interest in rejoining the pact he railed against during his 2016 campaign.

During a February news conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump raised the possibility of rejoining TPP if the negotiators offered more favorable terms.

In a CNBC interview in January, Trump said, 'I would do TPP if we were able to make a substantially better deal. The deal was terrible.'

The White House meeting was aimed at appealing to the Midwest lawmakers at a time of high anxiety because of the China trade dispute.

The United States dominated the weight of the TPP before Trump withdrew in 2017

Pulling the U.S> out of the TPP was a frequent crowd-pleaser at campaign rallies in 2016 but now farm-rich states are worried about shrinking overseas markets for agricultural commodities

During the exchange, Trump suggested the possibility of directing the Environmental Protection Agency to allow year-round sales of renewable fuel with blends of 15 percent ethanol.

The EPA currently bans the 15-percent blend, called E15, during the summer because of concerns that it contributes to smog on hot days. Gasoline typically contains 10 percent ethanol. Farm state lawmakers have pushed for greater sales of the higher ethanol blend to boost demand for the corn-based fuel.

The oil and natural gas industries have pressed Trump to waive some of the requirements in the federal Renewable Fuel Standard law that would ease gasoline and diesel refiners' volume mandates.

Farm state lawmakers fear that would reduce demand for the biofuels and violate the RFS law.

North Dakota's Republican governor Doug Burgum said Trump made some 'pretty positive statements' about allowing the year-round use of E-15 ethanol, which could help corn growers.

The administration is also considering the possibility of the federal government aiding farmers harmed by retaliatory tariffs from China, according to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and advocacy groups.

But some key senators oppose the approach. 'We don't need that. We do not want another subsidy program. What we want is a market,' Roberts said during a congressional hearing this week.

Protesters objected to the TPP during a demonstration in Washington on November 14, 2016, less than a week after Trump was elected

Trade ministers and delegates from the remaining members of the TPP attended a meeting ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam five months ago, but Trump wasn't there even though he was in the same city

The meetings came as an array of business executives and trade groups expressed alarm to federal lawmakers Thursday about the impact that tariffs will have on their business.

Kevin Kennedy, president of a steel fabrication business in Texas, said tariffs on steel and aluminum imports have led U.S. steel producers to raise their prices by 40 percent. He said that's shifting work to competitors outside the U.S. including in Canada and Mexico because they now enjoy a big edge on material costs.

Representatives for chemical manufacturers and soybean farmers also expressed their concerns to the House Ways and Means Committee, which is examining the impact of the tariffs.

The U.S. and China are in the early stages of what could be the biggest trade battle in more than a half century. 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 practices by U.S. trading partners.

Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, urged lawmakers and the administration to stay the course in getting tough on China. He said China's theft of intellectual property has inflicted serious damage to U.S. companies and threatens the country's future economic outlook.Last month Cape Town was saved from reaching 'Day Zero' - the point at which water shortages are expected to force city officials to turn off the supply - but the danger has not passed.

It had been predicted that the threshold would be crossed by July in South Africa's capital - but a dramatic 60 per cent reduction in consumption warded off disaster.

Now, however, a series of other cities around the world have been warned of the possibility that they will face a 'Day Zero' of their own.

It had been predicted that the threshold would be crossed by July in South Africa's capital - but a dramatic 60 per cent reduction in consumption warded off disaster. Pictured: Residents fill plastic water bottles and containers from a natural water spring in St James, Cape Town

In Cape Town last month, Mmusi Maimane, who leads the Democratic Alliance controlling both the city council and the wider Western Cape province, said that a 60 per cent reduction in consumption averted 'Day Zero'. Pictured: A resident fills a plastic container with water from a communal tap in the Khayelitsha township in Cape Town

Among them are Jakarta, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and even Melbourne, according to National Geographic.

It comes as human populations increase to unprecedented levels, alongside increasing urbanisation and climate change.

In Mexico's capital, many of the 21 million residents have running water for only a part of the day.

A fifth of the population, meanwhile, gets only a few hours of water from their taps a week.

In Melbourne, water managers reported last year that the city could run out of water within just over a decade.

Indonesia's capital Jakarta is sinking as residents take groundwater - often illegally - from below the surface to make up for shortages.

In 2015, Sao Paulo's water levels dropped so low that supply to taps was cut to a few hours a week and emergency water trucks were looted.

Betsy Otto, the director of the World Resources Institute's water programme, told NBC News that most cities around the world are not at risk of drought.

In Mexico's capital, many of the 21 million residents have running water for only a part of the day

In 2015, Sao Paulo's water levels dropped so low that supply to taps was cut to a few hours a week and emergency water trucks were looted

Indonesia's capital Jakarta is sinking as residents take groundwater - often illegally - from below the surface to make up for shortages

But Rebecca Keller, a science analyst at statistical and intelligence firm Stratfor, said cities around the world should still be concerned.

'It won't be the same exact scenario that Cape Town is facing,' she said.

'It might be pollution, drought, drier climates or significant population growth.'

Earth is roughly 70 per cent covered in water, but only 1 per cent of that is accessible fresh water.

The future could see poorer citizens fighting over increasingly scarce water resources.

In Cape Town last month, Mmusi Maimane, who leads the Democratic Alliance controlling both the city council and the wider Western Cape province, said that a 60 per cent reduction in consumption averted 'Day Zero'.

'Provided we continue consuming water at current levels, and we receive decent winter rainfall this year, "Day Zero" will not occur in 2018. This means the taps will stay open in 2018,' he said in a statement.

However, Mr Maimane warned that this did not mean that Cape Town residents could return to frivolous water use as the risk of a Day Zero in future is still very real.

In Melbourne, water managers reported last year that the city could run out of water within just over a decade

'While it is now unlikely to occur in 2018, Day Zero is still a very real possibility during the 2019 summer months if we do not have significant rainfall this winter,' said Maimane.

'I want to reiterate, and cannot stress enough, that we need to keep at current consumptions levels until at least after the winter rainfall.'

It was previously forecast that 'Day Zero' - when normal water supply would be disconnected and people would have to queue at 200 standpipes for daily rations of 25 litres (6.6 US gallons) - would be as soon as July 9.

'Consumption now sits at between 510 and 520 million litres per day - down from almost 1.2 billion litres in February 2015,' said Maimane.

'This 60 percent reduction in consumption is an incredible achievement, and outperforms many other cities across the world which faced severe droughts.'

Cape Town, which attracts millions of tourists every year, has enforced strict waste controls including prosecuting homeowners who use significantly more than the current 50-litre daily limit.

The city has published a name-and-shame list of the worst water offenders in Cape Town, and it says it is issuing fines for the heaviest water users.

But officials have been criticised for failing to implement usage restrictions sooner, and accused of ignoring warnings by experts in the years before the drought.

Strong summer rains saw much of southern Africa recover from a drought induced by the El Nino weather phenomenon.

But Mediterranean-like Cape Town receives most of its rain in the southern hemisphere's winter -- and scientists warn there is no guarantee of a good rainy season.Bernie Madoff reportedly enjoys his 'special celebrity' status behind bars, personally picked his Mexican drug runner cellmate and spends time watching rap videos with other inmates, a new book has claimed.

Ralph Griffith, 66, who served seven years of his prison sentence in the same unit as Madoff, detailed his time with the fraudster in his self-published memoir, Monkey House.

Madoff, 79, is currently serving a 150-year prison sentence for orchestrating the world's largest Ponzi scheme, which bilked investors of an estimated $65billion when principal and lost interest are counted.

New York fraudster Bernie Madoff (pictured in 2009) reportedly enjoys his 'special celebrity' status behind bars and personally picked his Mexican drug runner cellmate, a new book claims

Ralph Griffith (pictured), 66, who served seven years of his prison sentence in the same unit as Madoff, detailed his time with Madoff in his self-published memoir, Monkey House

Griffith said he was serving time for bank robbery when he met Madoff at North Carolina's Federal Medical Center, a special health needs facility, in August 2010.

'We both were there because of heart conditions,' Griffith told The Hollywood Reporter.

The pair met in the prison's library where Griffith worked. He claims that Madoff hand-picked his own cellmate by the name of 'Bulldog'.

Bulldog, a Mexican drug runner from Texas, 'wasn't that intellectual' Griffith said.

Griffith, who met Madoff in 2010, details his claims in his book, Monkey House (pictured)

'Bernie didn't want anyone trying to pick his brain. That gets old after a while.'

It took some time for Madoff to warm up to Griffith, but when he did, they reportedly had a long talk 'about his son committing suicide'.

His son, Mark Madoff committed suicide on December 11, 2010. His body was found hanging from a ceiling beam while his son slept in the other room.

'He said, "I have no idea why he did that." That was his exact quote,' Griffith recalled the financier saying.

Bernie Madoff's other son, Andrew, died in 2014 after a battle with cancer.

Madoff's wife, Ruth, was allowed to keep $2.5million of her assets and disappeared amid the fallout.

She was spotted last June out shopping the day after the government recovered $23million from her late sons' estates over the Ponzi scheme.

Griffith told the Hollywood Reporter that he believes Bernie Madoff enjoyed his 'special celebrity' status, which allowed him freedom to roam the halls of Butner Prison beyond the allowed 15 minutes per day.

Madoff's daughter-in-law, Stephanie Madoff Mack, made a similar claim in 2010.

She said the convicted fraudster sent her letters from prison in which he spoke of his 'celebrity status' and being respected 'like a mafia don'.

The repulsive boasts also described his life at Butner Prison - where he was sentenced to 150 years in June 2009 for orchestrating the largest Ponzi scheme in American history - as having a 'college campus feel'.

According to Griffith's book, Madoff also spent time with a group of African-Americans 'watching rap videos'.

He also claims that Madoff also resented sharing a bathroom with transgender prisoners.

It took some time for Madoff (left in 2009) to warm up to Griffith, but when he did, they reportedly had a long talk 'about his son committing suicide'. His son, Mark Madoff (right, with his family) committed suicide on December 11, 2010

According to Griffith's book, Madoff (pictured in March 2009) also spent time with a group of African-Americans 'watching rap videos'. He claims that Madoff also resented sharing a bathroom with transgender prisoners

Madoff is currently serving his prison sentence at North Carolina's Federal Medical Center, a special health needs facility (pictured)

'With four or five queens in front of two little sinks, it was tough for Bernie to brush his teeth.' Griffith says Madoff's nemesis was Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who was released in 2015.

'You'd think they'd have gotten along,' Griffith told the Hollywood Reporter, but it seemed to him that 'Bernie thought Pollard was a whiny son of a b**ch'.

He also claims that 'Pollard thought Bernie was evil personified.'

The Madoff scheme was revealed during the financial crisis in 2008 when he was unable to satisfy growing client demands to withdraw their investments.

Victims of Madoff's multi-billion-dollar fraud, who lost their savings and were ruined when the investment scheme collapsed in 2008, are receiving additional compensation, US officials announced Thursday.

The Madoff Victim Fund paid out another $504million to 21,000 victims of the scam, bringing the total payout so far to $1.2billion of the $4billion expected, the Justice Department said in a statement.

'In one of the most notorious and unconscionable financial crimes in history, Bernie Madoff robbed tens of thousands of individuals, pension plans, charitable organizations and others, all the while funding a lavish personal lifestyle,' Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in the statement.

The fund, established by the Justice Department to handle victim complaints, was tasked with returning $4billion seized by authorities.

It has received 65,000 complaints from investors in 136 countries who lost a total of $40billion to Madoff.

'We cannot undo the damage that Bernie Madoff has done, but today's distribution will provide significant relief to many of the victims of one of the worst frauds of all time,' Sessions said.

The Madoff scheme was revealed during the financial crisis in 2008 when he was unable to satisfy growing client demands to withdraw their investments.The BBC has said listeners should 'wait to hear the programme before they judge it', after receiving a wave of criticism for their scheduled broadcast of Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech.

Lord Andrew Adonis led the calls for the broadcaster not to transmit the 'incendiary and racist' speech, which is to be discussed by a panel to mark its 50th anniversary.

The anti-immigration speech, which will be read out in segments by actor Ian McDiarmid, was first delivered to local Conservative party members in Birmingham, ahead of a second reading of the 1968 race relations bill.

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The BBC has said listeners should 'wait to hear the programme before they judge it', after receiving a wave of criticism for their scheduled broadcast of Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech

Powell attacked the government's immigration policy, called for less immigration and urged those already in the UK to return to their country of origin.

The speech referred to a white constituent who feared 'the black man having the whip hand over the white man' and ended by ominously predicting rivers of blood.

It divided a nation and defined Powell's political legacy, serving as inspiration for right wing political movements such as the BNP, EDL and Britain First to follow.

But journalist and programme maker Sathnam Sanghera, whose parents moved from India to Wolverhampton at the time of Powell's speech, said it was intended as a retrospective discussion on why Powell had been proved wrong.

The anti-immigration speech, which will be read out in segments by actor Ian McDiarmid, was first delivered to local Conservative party members in Birmingham, ahead of a second reading of the 1968 race relations bill (Enoch Powell, pictured in 1979)

The speech, will be broken up into segments, and critiqued by a panel, including by BBC media editor Amol Rajan, who will examine the influence of the speech since it was first delivered.

It will be read out on Saturday for the first time ever, on Radio 4's Archive On 4 programme.

In a letter to Ofcom chief executive Sharon White, Labour peer Lord Adonis called on the media regulator to 'instruct the BBC to cancel the proposed broadcast.

He wrote: 'It seems extraordinary that one should have to make the argument in today's Britain that Powell's speech is an incitement to racial hatred and violence which should not be broadcast.

The speech, will be broken up into segments, and critiqued by a panel, including by BBC media editor Amol Rajan, who will examine the influence of the speech since it was first delivered

'If a contemporary politician made such a speech they would almost certainly be arrested and charged with serious offences.'

Lord Adonis added that the BBC's stance 'that this is some kind of artistic enterprise' is an 'unsustainable' argument, 'particularly in context of the BBC's boast that the broadcast provides a unique opportunity to hear the speech in full'.

He said the decision to broadcast the entire speech is 'a special tribute to the 50th anniversary of 'rivers of blood'', which he said was 'the most incendiary racist speech of modern Britain that was not even broadcast at the time'.

Lord Adonis said the matter will be raised in Parliament if the speech is not pulled from the schedule.

In a letter to Ofcom chief executive Sharon White, Labour peer Lord Adonis called on the media regulator to 'instruct the BBC to cancel the proposed broadcast

The BBC said in a statement: 'This is a rigorous journalistic analysis of a historical political speech.

'It's not an endorsement of the controversial views and people should wait to hear the programme before they judge it.'

A spokeswoman for Ofcom said: 'Ofcom's powers, granted by Parliament, are as a post-broadcast regulator.

'This means that we wouldn't check or approve any broadcaster's editorial content before transmission.'Malcolm Turnbull has at least $1 million of his own money invested in a hedge fund notorious for profiting off failing Australian companies.

Amalthea Fund made millions this year despite a flat stock market by betting the share prices of 'Australian mining and retail' would fall.

The fund is run by colourful trader John Hempton, a friend of the Prime Minister's son Alex, through his Bronte Capital firm.

Malcolm Turnbull has at least $1 million of his own money invested in a hedge fund notorious for profiting off failing Australian companies

Bronte Capital Amalthea Fund, run by John Hempton (pictured) made millions this year despite a flat stock market by betting the share prices of 'Australian mining and retail' would fall

Mr Hempton was last week accused of bullying the head of asset manager Blue Sky Alternative Investments by bombarding her with 80 late-night text messages.

Days later Blue Sky's value dived $600 million amid fears of market manipulation and Mr Hempton profited handsomely from shorting it.

Mr Turnbull invested in Amalthea Fund in May 2013 and has investments in 21 other funds, according to his register of pecuniary interests lodged with Parliament.

The fund's February market update to investors bragged that its investments grew 4.15 per cent that month while the global index fell 1 per cent.

'Australian mining and retail shorts proved useful and a USA medical technology firm, the fund held a short position in declined by more than 50 per cent,' it read.

Amalthea produced a 27 per cent return over the previous year and was up 14.3 per cent since Bronte Capital created it.

Mr Hempton is a friend of the Prime Minister's son Alex (third from left)

Myer is the company most investors want to fail on the ASX with 11.37 per cent of its stock shorted, and Amalthea mentioned it targeted Australian retail companies

Mr Hempton previously said his company could manage a fund of up to $700 million with $500 million in the usual 'long' investments and $150 to 200 million in shorts.

The fund refused to say what companies it shorts but it was known to bet a few million against Harvey Norman.

Myer is the company most investors want to fail on the ASX with 11.37 per cent of its stock shorted, and JB Hi-Fi, Myer, Webber, Domino's Pizza, and Flight Centre all favourites to bet against.

Mr Hempton last year played down the size of Mr Turnbull's investments when questions were raised about his holdings in banks.

'Malcolm owns a low, seven-digit position in our funds and I am short 30 basis points of the banks so if the banks halve he will probably make about $15,000,' he said.

'If you want to beat that story up I will mercilessly patronise you. Malcolm is long property like the rest of us Aussies.'

Mr Turnbull refused to comment about the size of his dividends from his Amalthea investment.

'The Prime Minister's investments are managed by an independent investment manager,' his office told the Daily Telegraph.

Mr Hempton was last week accused of bullying the head of asset manager Blue Sky Alternative Investments by bombarding her with 80 late-night text messages

Mr Turnbull invested in Amalthea Fund in May 2013 and has investments in 21 other funds, according to his register of pecuniary interests lodged with Parliament

The newspaper reported that Blue Sky would on Friday ask the corporate watchdog ASIC to investigate whether market manipulation of its shares caused the $600 million plunge.

The company's executive director Dr Elaine Stead claimed the messages Mr Hempton sent urged her to seek personal legal advice and talked down Blue Sky.

But he insisted he was merely offering advice, not harassing her.

'There were not 80 messages  rather a sequence of several long private messages which are broken into shorter messages because of the mechanics of the messaging platform,' he said.

'The intent of the messages was to provide advice and it was not intended to bully or intimidate and we regret if it was perceived as such.

'Bronte Capital uses short -positions as a legitimate strategy to generate returns.'

The company said in 2015 it targeted companies it suspected of fraudulently inflating their price, which Mr Hempton frequently railed against, or were 'being destroyed, typically by technological change'.Michael Brennan was recorded CCTV rummaging around Lifford Garda station in Co Donegal, Ireland in September 2015

A man who broke into a police station and defecated on the front counter was wearing a police officer's hat when he was caught.

Michael Brennan was recorded CCTV rummaging around Lifford Garda station in Co Donegal, Ireland in September 2015.

Brennan, 21, broke into the building through a side window just before 5am before going on the bizarre rampage.

Footage showed him defecating on the counter of the station before leaving while wearing a Garda hat.

He was tracked down after officers took a swab from his faeces.

Appearing at Letterkenny District Crown Court, Brennan pleaded guilty to causing criminal damage during the burglary.

Garda Inspector Goretti Sheridan said Brennan was filmed on CCTV entering the unmanned station at 4.55am before spending 25 minutes in the building.

After defecating on the front counter he stole two Garda caps, a pocket diary, handcuffs, a car key, a Garda vest, a torch and two Garda radios.

Footage also showed Brennan walking along a street towards the nearby town of Strabane while wearing a Garda cap.

Brennan, 21, broke into the police station (pictured) through a side window just before 5am before going on the bizarre rampage

When he was eventually arrested by Police Service Northern Ireland, Brenna, of Lifford, was still wearing some of the stolen police items.

Members of his family helped to recover some of the other items he had taken, excluding the police torch.

Mitigating, Donagh Cleary said: 'It was a fair cop in every sense of the word', reports the Belfast Telegraph.

Appearing at Letterkenny District Crown Court (pictured), Brennan pleaded guilty to causing criminal damage during the burglary

He said Brennan suffered from drink and drug addiction but was now living again with his father in Lifford.

He said that he was punished in Northern Ireland for the crime and there was no loss apart from the cleaning of the Garda Station.

Judge Paul Kelly said the defendant's behaviour had been 'disgusting'.

He was told the cost to clean up a damaged police cell is 225 (195) and that it would cost a similar amount to have cleaned the front counter of the police station.

Judge Kelly added: 'There was a repulsive message in what he did and a clear message was sent to the authorities and also by the way he paraded around.'

The case was adjourned until June 22 to allow for the 225 (195) to be paid to the Gardai.An Oklahoma prisoner who has been on the run for 37 years has finally been captured in Texas.

Stephen Michael Paris, 58, was arrested on Thursday at an office in Houston where he had been working under a pseudonym.

The US Marshals Service said fingerprints confirmed his identity.

Stephen Michael Paris, 58, was arrested on Thursday at an office in Houston where he had been working under a pseudonym

Paris had escaped from the Jess Dunn Correctional Center in Muskogee, Oklahoma back in October 1981 when he was just 22 years old.

He went on the run after serving about 19 months of a nine-year sentence for drug possession and distribution.

Paris had been featured on the Oklahoma Department of Corrections' 'Most Wanted' list during his three decades on the run.

US Marshals investigators started looking into his cold case again about six weeks ago.

Paris went on the run for 37 years after escaping from the Jess Dunn Correctional Center in Muskogee, Oklahoma back in October 1981 when he was 22

Paris had escaped from the Jess Dunn Correctional Center in Muskogee, Oklahoma (pictured above) after serving 19 months of a nine-year sentence for drug possession and distribution

Authorities had found a newspaper obituary for his mother that listed a son in Houston named Stephen Michael Chavez.

Authorities managed to track the name and found that Paris had been working and living in Houston with the surname Chavez.

Paris was arrested without incident, according to authorities.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Keaton Emery, 23, slipped after deciding to go it alone during a walking excursion with fellow volunteers up Monte Legnoncino near Lake Como

An adventure-loving university graduate fell up to 60 feet to his death whilst hiking in the Italian Alps during a gap-year backpacking trip, an inquest heard today.

Keaton Emery, 23, slipped after deciding to go it alone during a walking excursion with fellow volunteers up Monte Legnoncino near Lake Como.

Mountain rescue teams spent two days searching the area where the former Nottingham University student was last seen.

The tragedy occurred in September last year just days before Keaton's 24th birthday whilst he was doing voluntary work at the Fuori de Vela sailing school, in Dorio, northern Italy.

His body was recovered from what was thought to be a 60 ft drop close to the summit of the 5,500 feet high mountain.

The youngster had been in Italy as part of a 10,000 mile journey across Europe and Asia ahead of him applying for a masters degree in the hope of pursuing a career as a college lecturer.

He had set off from the UK in March 2017 - ultimately aiming to reach Australia without taking a plane.

With just a backpack and hammock in his possession Keaton cycled 270 miles from his home in Adlington, Cheshire to Plymouth where he caught a ferry to France. He then cycled to Spain and hitchhiked to Italy taking buses and trains along the way.

His father Peter, 67, a planning consultant told the Macclesfield hearing: 'After graduating in 2015, Keaton qualified as a teacher in English as a foreign language and was looking to apply for a Masters degree in politics and international relations.

The youngster had been in Italy as part of a 10,000 mile journey across Europe and Asia ahead of him applying for a masters degree in the hope of pursuing a career as a college lecturer

'We travelled widely as a family and Keaton had been travelling alone. Whilst at university he hitched-hiked across Eastern Europe and at school he had completed the Duke of Edinburgh award.

'Keaton wanted to travel before going on to start his career and had been interested in sustainable living and exploring different cultures. In March he had the intention of getting to Australia by bike and got as far as Northern Spain.

'We last saw Keaton for three days at our apartment in Spain and in those four months he had demonstrated to himself that he could live without much money and live completely independently.

'He had planned to travel from Lake Como town to Greece to teach English and then was going to come home in time for Christmas and to apply for his masters. The night before he had called us to say that York university had expressed an interest in him.

'He was in a very happy place at the time and he was very upbeat about his plans and future career. Keaton was a beautiful person inside and out with an inquisitive mind. He wanted to make a difference to people's life and was compassionate and caring.

His father (pictured) Peter, 67, a planning consultant told the Macclesfield hearing: 'After graduating in 2015, Keaton qualified as a teacher in English as a foreign language and was looking to apply for a Masters degree in politics and international relations'

'He had aspired to be a lecturer and a writer.'

Keaton's parents have since set up a charity the Keaton Emery Memorial Foundation in his memory to raise money for the under privileged.

His mother Denise said: 'Keaton was a very special person to us as his parents but also to so many others. We feel that a memorial charity would be a positive way in which to acknowledge the contribution he has made to so many lives.

'Keaton was very conscious that his privileged upbringing had financially and emotionally given him enormous opportunities and options for the way he could live his life and that very many youngsters do not have any such options open to them.

'He was particularly keen to promote education and training that would help youngsters make their way in the world that will be shortly dominated by Artificial Intelligence.

'There are unfortunately many youngsters in care or who are homeless that cannot access further education. For this reason we have set up The Keaton Emery Memorial Foundation to help finance such young people in the North of England.'

With just a backpack and hammock in his possession Keaton cycled 270 miles from his home in Adlington, Cheshire to Plymouth where he caught a ferry to France. He then cycled to Spain and hitchhiked to Italy taking buses and trains along the way

'The intention is to invest capital and donate the revenue to established charities working for underprivileged young adults. This will enable the Foundation to fund further education and training in perpetuity.'

In a statement read to the Macclesfield inquest, an unnamed worker for the Fuori de Vela sailing school said: 'On the 15th of August 2017 a boy aged 23 arrived as an assistant instructor.

'On the 7th of September the entire sailing course went to Monte Legnoncino for a walking trip together. Keaton decided to go off alone and had with him back pack and mobile phone. His Whatsapp messenger showed that he had last been active at 12.15 that day.'

A report from the Italian authorities said: 'On the 9th of September a 23 year-old man was reported as missing by a member of staff and a missing person's search began. It was suggested that the man's hiking boots were missing from his room.

The tragedy occurred in September last year just days before Keaton's 24th birthday whilst he was doing voluntary work at the Fuori de Vela sailing school, in Dorio, northern Italy

'On the 11th of September his body was identified.His family travelled from the UK a few days later.'

Pathologist, Dr David Butterworth conducted a post-Mortimer on Keaton's body which revealed he had sustained an extensive skull fracture and the cause of death was noted as a head injury.

Recording a conclusion of accidental death, Coroner Adam Fulwood said: 'Keaton was a bright and inquisitive young man from school where he was not only successful but demonstrated great compassion to individuals and developed an awareness of society as a whole.

'He had always travelled and clearly enjoyed this. He had a great interest in reading which he was trying to balance with all his other interests. He was thinking very careful about the next stages of his life.

'He was living life to the full throughout. He got a position at a sailing school in Lake Como and was described as someone who was always smiling.

'On the 7th of September he went on a walking trip and he decided to go for a walk on his own. It appears that Keaton slipped or tripped sometime during and he fell probably not from a great height but sufficient still to inflict the injuries described.

'He was reported missing and there was a mountain rescue and he was found. There were no signs of life when discovered.'In a tweet Thursday, President Trump gave a backhanded slap to his former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who had suggested a plan to strangle Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe.

'I have agreed with the historically cooperative, disciplined approach that we have engaged in with Robert Mueller (Unlike the Clintons!),' Trump wrote. 'I have full confidence in Ty Cobb, my Special Counsel, and have been fully advised throughout each phase of this process.'

Trump's assurances to Cobb came after Bannon told the Washington Post that the lawyer should be 'fired immediately,' as part of a bigger plan to scuttle the Russia investigation.

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has been trying to telegraph a legal strategy to President Trump in order to scuttle the Russia probe

President Trump slapped back at Bannon, saying he's cooperated with Mueller and that he has confidence in his lawyer Ty Cobb

Part of Steve Bannon's scheme involved President Trump axing his lawyer Ty Cobb, with Bannon suggesting that Cobb shouldn't have allowed White House officials to talk to Special Counsel Robert Mueller

Steve Bannon also suggested that President Trump fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (left), the individual who appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller (right) in the first place

Bannon left the White House in August and was further pushed out of Trump's orbit in the aftermath of the publication of Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury book, in which he was a source.

Aiding the Republican Party in losing a Senate seat in deep red Alabama in December also didn't help matters.

But as the Post reported Wednesday, Bannon has tried to telegraph strategies to Trump through White House aides and Congressional allies.

Bannon's latest scheme starts with the idea that President Trump should fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the man responsible for appointing Mueller to the Russia probe.

More recently, Rosenstein green-lit the FBI raid on the law offices and hotel room of Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

Beyond axing Rosenstein, Bannon advised that Trump no longer play ball with Mueller, and he suggested that by throwing Cobb  the White House attorney handling all Mueller-related stuff  under the bus the president may improve his legal situation.

'The president wasn't fully briefed by his lawyers on the implications' of not invoking executive privilege,' Bannon told the Post Wednesday. 'It was a strategic mistake to run over everything without due process, and executive privilege should be exerted immediately and retroactively.'

Bannon suggested that Trump should now invoke that executive privilege, making Mueller's interviews with various White House officials null and void.

Even if Trump is tempted to fire Rosenstein, his tweet Thursday indicates he'll give Bannon zero credit for the idea, as sources told the Post there is still bad blood.

'If you say his name in front of the president, it's not a pretty sight,' a senior administration official told the newspaper. 'The president really goes off about him.'Advertisement

A brand new incarnation of the official limo dubbed 'the Beast', built especially for President Trump, is set to be unveiled in a matter of months.

The armored $1.5 million Cadillac - which comes complete with eight-inch thick doors, a bomb-proof exterior, and an oxygen supply in case of a chemical attack - has been handed over to the Secret Service for final tests.

It was meant to be ready for Trump's inauguration last year, but the completion date was repeatedly pushed back until officials announced on Thursday it would be unveiled in 'late summer'.

The armored $1.5 million Cadillac - which comes complete with eight-inch thick doors, a bomb-proof exterior, and an oxygen supply in case of a chemical attack - has been handed over to the Secret Service for final tests

'We've completed our task and we've handed over the vehicle to the customer,' Cadillac President Johann de Nysschen told Fox News.

A spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service confirmed the news, and added: 'The program to build and deploy the next generation of Presidential limousines is on track and on schedule  both in terms of vendor production and internal Secret Service post production requirements.

'The public can expect to see the new vehicles put into operational use late summer of this year.'

The sedan is longer than two large SUVs and, for the moment, remains in white and black camouflage designed to make it more difficult to identify new features aboard the vehicle.

For the moment, President Trump has to make do with an earlier model of the Beast which was built for President Obama.

Leaked photos from November 2016 showed a prototype of the new vehicle being driven on public roads.

The final version will be painted black and silver just like the current version, once it is given the final approval.

It will be part of a fleet of 12 which cost around $15.8 million and is arguably the safest vehicle in the world, as befits the President of the United States.

The Beast weighs eight tonnes and has eight-inch thick steel doors that weigh the same as those on a Boeing 757 - and are sealed to withstand biological and chemical attacks.

The sedan is longer than two large SUVs and, for the moment, remains in white and black camouflage designed to make it more difficult to identify new features aboard the vehicle. It is pictured here, middle, in March

Leaked photos from November 2016 showed a prototype of the vehicle being driven on public road, complete with its camouflage

The front windscreen can withstand armour piercing bullets or a .44 magnum and the bodywork is military grade and five inches thick.

The reinforced undercarriage with withstand going over a roadside bomb and the fuel tank is explosive resistant.

Only the driver's side window can open in case he needs to pay a toll - and in the boot are cases of the President's blood for an emergency transfusion.

Among the other features are shotguns on board in case an attack breaks out, Kevlar tyres that run even if they are flat and an oxygen system in the trunk in case of a chemical attack.

A number of guns are hidden in the front grille of the vehicle which can be used to fire on an attacker.

But while the appearance of the car might be mundane from the outside, under the skin it is anything but ordinary.

The current state car is thought to weigh eight tons due to the huge amount of armor plating built into the frame.

The doors are around eight inches thick, each weigh the same as the door of a Boeing 747 jet, and completely seal the cabin to protect it from a chemical or biological attack.

President Trump gestures though the window of the Beast after a Friends of Ireland luncheon with Enda Kenny, Ireland's prime minister, on March 16. The model he is riding in dates back to the Obama presidency

The President leaves his Obama-era Beast as he arrives in front of the White House as the presidential inaugural parade winds through the nation's capital to the White House on January 20

Concealed in the trunk is an oxygen supply that allows fresh air to be pumped into the cabin in the event that the air outside becomes toxic.

All of the windows are completely sealed and unable to roll down, except for the driver's side to allow him to pay tolls, and are able to withstand armor-piercing bullets and explosions.

The tires are coated in Kevlar to protect them from bursting, but even if they do, the metal rims are strong enough to hold up the vehicle and keep it rolling in case the outer layer is blown away.

The fuel tank is coated with armor plating and contains a special foam which expands on impact and prevents it from exploding, even if it suffers a direct hit.

The vehicle is also fitted with night vision cameras, GPS tracking and a satellite communication system to allow it to run in any conditions and make sure the President is always in contact.

There are even two pints of blood matching the President's type on board in case an emergency transfusion needs to be carried out at the roadside.

Concealed within the bodywork is a full range of firefighting equipment, shotguns, night vision goggles and even tear gas launchers to help the vehicle get out of trouble.

While few details are known about the devices fitted to the new car, it is likely that all of these safety features will be transferred over, along with technology upgrades to make it even safer.Donald Trump had a love child with his housekeeper, a former doorman sensationally claimed Thursday - doubling down on claims he made to the National Enquirer which paid him $30,000 in 2016 but never ran his story.

Dino Sajudin, 46, who was a doorman at a Trump property in Manhattan, came forward with a statement to CNN hours after both the Associated Press and the New Yorker revealed the payment to him.

They said American Media Inc (AMI) which publishes the magazine paid him $30,000 for the claim but imposed a $1 million penalty if he told anyone else - then spiked the story.

Sajudin said: 'Today I awoke to learn that a confidential agreement that I had with AMI (The National Enquirer) with regard to President Trump was leaked to the press.

'I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower I was instructed not to criticize President Trump's former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump which produced a child.'

The woman has not been named but spoke to the Associated Press to deny having any relationship with Trump.

And Sajudin's ex-wife, Nikki Benfatto, a fitness trainer in Brooklyn, accused him of being a serial liar.

Don't call me a liar: Dino Sajudin, the former Trump doorman who claimed the president had a love child said Thursday he was standing by his story

The National Enquirer's parents company paid $30,000 to a former doorman at Trump World Tower in New York just before the election. Trump is pictured on April 5 outside the White House

He's a liar: Dino Sajudin's ex-wife, Nikki Benfatto, a fitness trainer in Brooklyn, accused him of being a serial liar. She told the New York Daily News : 'He's infamous for making up stories.'

Sajudin got $30,000 in exchange for signing over the rights, 'in perpetuity,' to a rumor he'd heard about Trump's sex life  that the president had fathered an illegitimate child with an employee at Trump World Tower, a skyscraper he owns near the United Nations

She told the New York Daily News: 'He's infamous for making up stories.

'He's seen the chupacabra. He's seen Bigfoot. One of our friends who passed away, he saw him too, walking down the street.'

The Associated Press and the New Yorker said Wednesday that Sajudin got $30,000 in exchange for signing over the rights, 'in perpetuity,' to the claim that the president had fathered an illegitimate child with an employee at Trump World Tower, a skyscraper he owns near the United Nations.

CNN said it understood that he was released from the contract in December 2016, after Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton.

The contract subjected Sajudin to a $1million penalty if he disclosed either the rumor or the terms of the deal to anyone.

Michael Cohen, the longtime Trump attorney, acknowledged to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin's story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it.

As it did with the ex-Playmate, the Enquirer signed the ex-doorman to a contract that effectively prevented him from going public with a juicy tale that might hurt Trump's campaign for president.

The payout to the former Playmate, Karen McDougal, stayed a secret until the Wall Street Journal published a story about it days before Election Day.

Since then curiosity about that deal has spawned intense media coverage and, this week, helped prompt the FBI to raid the hotel room and offices of Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

The story of the ex-doorman, Sajudin, emerged in parallel Associated Press and New Yorker investigations, the magazines led by Ronan Farrow.

The Associated Press confirmed the details of the Enquirer's payment through a review of a confidential contract and interviews with dozens of current and former employees of the Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc.

Sajudin got $30,000 in exchange for signing over the rights, 'in perpetuity,' to a rumor he'd heard about Trump's sex life  that the president had fathered an illegitimate child with an employee at Trump World Tower, a skyscraper he owns near the United Nations.

As it did with ex-Playmate Karen McDougal, the Enquirer signed the ex-doorman to a contract that effectively prevented him from going public with a juicy tale that might hurt Trump's campaign for president

The contract subjected Sajudin to a $1million penalty if he disclosed either the rumor or the terms of the deal to anyone.

Cohen, the longtime Trump attorney, acknowledged to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin's story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it.

He said he was acting as a Trump spokesman when he did so and denied knowing anything beforehand about the Enquirer payment to the ex-doorman.

The parallel between the ex-Playmate's and the ex-doorman's dealings with the Enquirer raises new questions about the roles that the Enquirer and Cohen may have played in protecting Trump's image during a hard-fought presidential election.

Prosecutors are probing whether Cohen broke banking or campaign laws in connection with AMI's payment to McDougal and a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels that Cohen said he paid out of his own pocket.

Federal investigators have sought communications between Cohen, American Media's chief executive and the Enquirer's top editor, the New York Times reported.

Cohen's lawyer has called the raids 'inappropriate and unnecessary.'

American Media hasn't said whether federal authorities have sought information from it, but said this week that it would 'comply with any and all requests that do not jeopardize or violate its protected sources or materials pursuant to our First Amendment rights.'

The White House didn't respond to questions seeking comment.

On Wednesday, an Enquirer sister publication, RadarOnline, published details of the payment and the rumor that Sajudin was peddling.

The website wrote that the Enquirer spent four weeks reporting the story but ultimately decided it wasn't true.

The company only released Sajudin from his contract after the 2016 election amid inquiries from the Journal about the payment.

The site noted that the AP was among a group of publications that had been investigating the ex-doorman's tip.

Michael Cohen (pictured), the longtime Trump attorney, acknowledged to the AP that he had discussed Sajudin's story with the magazine when the tabloid was working on it

Prosecutors are probing whether Cohen broke banking or campaign laws in connection with AMI's payment to McDougal and a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels (pictured) that Cohen said he paid out of his own pocket

The White House didn't respond to questions seeking comment from the Associated Press

Trump tweeted his anger after the FBI raided Michael Cohen's law offices



During AP's reporting, AMI threatened legal action over reporters' efforts to interview current and former employees and hired the New York law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, which challenged the accuracy of the AP's reporting.

Asked about the payment last summer, Dylan Howard, the Enquirer's top editor and an AMI executive, said he made the payment to secure the former Trump doorman's exclusive cooperation because the tip, if true, would have sold 'hundreds of thousands' of magazines.

Ultimately, he said the information 'lacked any credibility,' so he spiked the story on those merits.

'Unfortunately... Dino Sajudin is one fish that swam away,' Howard told RadarOnline on Wednesday.

But four longtime Enquirer staffers directly familiar with the episode challenged Howard's version of events.

They said they were ordered by top editors to stop pursuing the story before completing potentially promising reporting threads.

They said the publication didn't pursue standard Enquirer reporting practices, such as exhaustive stake-outs or tabloid tactics designed to prove paternity.

In 2008, the Enquirer helped bring down presidential hopeful John Edwards in part by digging through a dumpster and retrieving material to do a DNA test that indicated he had fathered a child with a mistress, according to a former staffer.

The woman at the center of the rumor about Trump denied emphatically to the AP last August that she'd ever had an affair with Trump, saying she had no idea the Enquirer had paid Sajudin and pursued his tip.

The AP has not been able to determine if the rumor is true and is not naming the woman.

'This is all fake,' she said. 'I think they lost their money.'

Federal investigators have sought communications between Cohen (pictured), American Media's chief executive and the Enquirer's top editor, the New York Times reported. Cohen's lawyer has called the raids 'inappropriate and unnecessary'

The Enquirer staffers, all with years of experience negotiating source contracts, said the abrupt end to reporting combined with a binding, seven-figure penalty to stop the tipster from talking to anyone led them to conclude that this was a so-called 'catch and kill'  a tabloid practice in which a publication pays for a story to never run, either as a favor to the celebrity subject of the tip or as leverage over that person.

One former Enquirer reporter, who was not involved in the Sajudin reporting effort, expressed skepticism that the company would pay for the tip and not publish.

'AMI doesn't go around cutting checks for $30,000 and then not using the information,' said Jerry George, a reporter and senior editor for nearly three decades at AMI before his layoff in 2013.

The company said that AMI's publisher, David Pecker, an unabashed Trump supporter, had not coordinated its coverage with Trump associates or taken direction from Trump.

It acknowledged discussing the former doorman's tip with Trump's representatives, which it described as 'standard operating procedure in stories of this nature.'

The Enquirer staffers, like many of the dozens of other current and former AMI employees interviewed by the AP in the past year, spoke on condition of anonymity.

All said AMI required them to sign nondisclosure agreements barring them from discussing internal editorial policy and decision-making.

Though sometimes dismissed by mainstream publications, the Enquirer's history of breaking legitimate scoops about politicians' personal lives  including its months-long Pulitzer Prize-contending coverage of presidential candidate Edwards' affair  is a point of pride in its newsroom.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Enquirer published a string of allegations against Trump's rivals, such as stories claiming Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was a bisexual 'secret sex freak' and was kept alive only by a 'narcotics cocktail.'

Stories attacking Trump rivals or promoting Trump's campaign often bypassed the paper's normal fact-checking process, according to two people familiar with campaign-era copy.

The company has said it paid McDougal, the former Playboy Playmate, to be a columnist for an AMI-published fitness magazine, not to stay silent. McDougal has since said that she regrets signing the non-disclosure agreement and is currently suing to get out of it

The tabloid made its first-ever endorsement by officially backing Trump for the White House. With just over a week before Election Day, Howard, the top editor, appeared on Alex Jones' InfoWars program by phone, telling listeners that the choice at the ballot box was between 'the Clinton crime family' or someone who will 'break down the borders of the establishment.'

Howard said the paper's coverage was bipartisan, citing negative stories it published about Ben Carson during the Republican presidential primaries.

In a statement last summer, Howard said the company doesn't take editorial direction 'from anyone outside AMI,' and said Trump has never been an Enquirer source.

The company has said reader surveys dictate its coverage and that many of its customers are Trump supporters.

The company has said it paid McDougal, the former Playboy Playmate, to be a columnist for an AMI-published fitness magazine, not to stay silent. McDougal has since said that she regrets signing the non-disclosure agreement and is currently suing to get out of it.

Pecker has denied burying negative stories about Trump, but acknowledged to the New Yorker last summer that McDougal's contract had effectively silenced her.

'Once she's part of the company, then on the outside she can't be bashing Trump and American Media,' Pecker said.

In the tabloid world purchasing information is not uncommon, and the Enquirer routinely pays sources.

As a general practice, however, sources agree to be paid for their tips only upon publication.

George, the longtime former reporter and editor, said the $1 million penalty in Sajudin's agreement was larger than anything he had seen in his Enquirer career.

'If your intent is to get a story from the source, there's no upside to paying upfront,' said George, who sometimes handled catch-and-kill contracts related to other celebrities.

Paying upfront was not the Enquirer's usual practice because it would have been costly and endangered the source's incentive to cooperate, he said.

After initially calling the Enquirer's tip line, Sajudin signed a boilerplate contract with the Enquirer, agreeing to be an anonymous source and be paid upon publication.

The Enquirer dispatched reporters to pursue the story both in New York and in California.

The tabloid also sent a polygraph expert to administer a lie detection test to Sajudin in a hotel near his Pennsylvania home.

Sajudin passed the polygraph, which tested how he learned of the rumor. One week later, Sajudin signed an amended agreement, this one paying him $30,000 immediately and subjecting him to the $1 million penalty if he shopped around his information.

The Enquirer immediately then stopped reporting, said the former staffers.

Cohen, last year, characterized the Enquirer's payment to Sajudin as wasted money for a baseless story.

For his part, Sajudin confirmed he'd been paid to be the tabloid's anonymous source but insisted he would sue the Enquirer if his name appeared in print.

Pressed for more details about his tip and experience with the paper, Sajudin said he would talk only for in exchange for payment.

'If there's no money involved with it,' he said, 'I'm not getting involved.'An oil painting by Belarusian artist Marc Chagall has been recovered by the FBI after it was stolen from a New York City apartment 30 years ago.

Agents found the 1911 painting titled 'Othello and Desdemona' at the home of a Maryland man who was the middle man for a thief who stole it in 1988 from the home of Ernest and Rose Heller while they were on vacation in Aspen, Colorado.

Also looted from the East 57th Street apartment were 13 other works of art - including paintings and sculptures - china, jewelry and carpets valued at $600,000 then, or $1.3million today.

A 1911 oil painting by Belarusian artist Marc Chagall titled 'Othello and Desdemona' (pictured) has been recovered by the FBI after it was stolen from a New York City apartment 30 years ago

A thief stole it in 1988 from the home of Ernest and Rose Heller (pictured) while they were on vacation in Aspen, Colorado and sold it to a man in Maryland either in the late 1980s or the early 1990s

According to Washington Field Office Special Agent Marc Hess, the robbery was 'an inside job' committed by a temporary employee who worked in the building.

The FBI said he sold the Chagall painting to the man in Maryland either in the late 1980s or the early 1990s.

The man kept the painting in a wooden box in his attic for years and tried to sell the painting to a gallery in Washington, DC twice, first in 2010 and then in 2017, but was unsuccessful after he failed to prove ownership.

According to The Washington Post, the gallery suggested the man call law enforcement, which he did, asking if there was any reward for the return of the stolen painting - which there was not.

The Hellers, who bought the painting in the 1920s when Chagall was living in Paris, have both passed away - Ernest in 1998 and Rose in 2003.

Featured in the painting are characters from William Shakespeare's 'Othello' in which the titular character holds a sword and gazes upon his bride, Desdemona, as she lies on a bed.

The man tried to sell the painting to a gallery in Washington, DC twice, first in 2010 and then in 2017, but was unsuccessful after he failed to prove ownership (Pictured, artist Marc Chagall)

The artwork will be put up for auction. Proceeds will first repay the insurance company that reimbursed the Hellers after the painting was stolen and then distributed to various charities by Rose Heller's estate (Pictured, artist Marc Chagall, July 1977)

'I liked them all, but the Chagall was a very interesting one because it was a 1911 painting,' Ernest told UPI in 1988.

The artwork will be put up for auction. Experts told ArtNet News that the painting is exacted to sell for between $500,000 to $900,000.

The proceeds will first repay the insurance company that reimbursed the Hellers after the painting was stolen. Any remaining money will be distributed to various charities by Rose Heller's estate.

Because the statute of limitations for the theft has expired, neither the thief nor the Maryland man will face charges.

However, according to the FBI, the burglar was convicted and sentenced for selling property, including art, that was stolen from other apartment buildings.

The other 13 works of art taken from the Hellers' apartment remain missing.Machete attacks are taking place every 90 minutes on our streets, figures reveal.

Criminals are increasingly picking the jungle blades as their weapons of choice to instill terror in victims and rival gang members.

Police forces are dealing with rising numbers of machete-wielding thugs carrying out murders, rapes, robberies and burglaries.

In February, 20-year-old Sadiq Aadam was hacked to death in Belsize Park, north London, by a gang carrying the blades. A teenager has since appeared in court charged with murdering two young men.

Machete attacks are taking place every 90 minutes on our streets. Pictured is a man being led away from a property in Northolt, north west London that was raided this month

Days earlier, father-of-two David Pugh suffered serious injuries after fighting off four machete-wielding robbers who broke into his home and started beating his 17-year-old son in Solihull, West Midlands.

And in March, a man was left with life-changing injuries after a 'chilling' machete attack at a bar in Manchester.

The victim, in his 30s, had been at the nightspot with his friends when another man walked past him and shouted abuse at a group of people in the bar.

Police said when the victim asked him to calm down, the offender turned to his friend and asked for a machete before striking the victim's hand.

Police forces are dealing with rising numbers of machete-wielding thugs carrying out murders, rapes, robberies and burglaries. Guns are also being used. Pictured is a Czech-made Skorpion found in a raid in London

The shocking statistics come after Home Secretary Amber Rudd launched the Government's long-awaited Serious Violence Strategy, which aims to tackle knife crime, earlier this week.

It came amid a shooting and stabbing spree that has claimed 56 lives in London so far this year.

Figures uncovered using freedom of information requests show that in the last two months of 2017 police dealt with 928 crimes involving machetes. This is an average of 15 a day  or one every 90 minutes.

Gangsters, drugs and guns seized in raid by 200 police By Chris Greenwood, Chief crime correspondent for The Daily Mail This fearsome sub-machine gun was seized by police yesterday as they rounded up suspected leaders of one of the countrys most feared gangs. The Czech-made Skorpion is said to be capable of unleashing carnage on a terrifying scale. They are highly prized by gangsters desperate to enforce lucrative drug dealing operations in London. It was uncovered during raids across west London as more than 200 officers swooped on the homes of leaders of the MDP gang, short for Money Drugs Power. Also found was a handgun, 40 rounds of ammunition, a kilo of suspected class A drugs and 50,000 in cash. It followed a six month sting by the Metropolitan Polices Trident unit. Six men and three woman, aged between 14 and 49, were arrested for drugs and firearms offences.

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London saw 425 of the attacks, with 99 in Greater Manchester, 77 in the West Midlands and 29 each in Merseyside and West Yorkshire.

It represents a dramatic rise from just three years before, when the deadly blades were used in only 100 crimes a month over the same period.

The machete was originally intended as a tool used to cut undergrowth or sugar cane in Latin America and Africa.

Critics say they have little legitimate use in the UK, but they are not on a list of banned blades such as butterfly or flick-knives.

Gangsters are increasingly carrying the fearsome blades as status symbols and to spread fear with gruesome attacks.

Machetes came to public prominence in May 2013 when British soldier Lee Rigby was butchered in broad daylight by two Islamist fanatics.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that in the year to September 2017 the police recorded 37,443 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument  a 21 per cent increase on the previous year, and the highest since records began seven years ago.

On Monday, Miss Rudd promised an Offensive Weapons Bill, which will ban online knife sales to under-18s and make it illegal to possess so-called zombie knives, with long, serrated blades with a maximum four-year jail penalty.A tech billionaire has successfully gathered enough signatures to enable the voters of California to decide whether to break up the Golden State into three.

Tim Draper, the venture capitalist who made his fortune as an early investor in Skype and Hotmail, says he has amassed more than 600,000 signatures to enable his plan to be put before voters in November.

The minimum threshold of signatures needed to put a proposal on the ballot is 365,880 registered voters  or 5 percent of the total votes cast for governor in the last election in 2014.

Draper, 59, launched the CAL 3 initiative in October.

It calls for Americas most populous state to be partitioned into three  Northern California, Southern California, and California.

The central state of California would consist of the counties of Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey and San Benito.

A tech billionaire has successfully gathered enough signatures to enable voters of California to decide whether to break up the Golden State into three. Tim Draper says he has amassed more than 600,000 signatures to enable his plan to be put before voters in November

Draper, 59, launched the CAL 3 initiative in October. It calls for Americas most populous state to be partitioned into three  Northern California, Southern California, and California

The southern state would comprise Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Imperial, Kern, Kings, Fresno, Tulare, Inyo, Madera, and Mono.

The northern state would include the other 40 counties.

This is an unprecedented show of support on behalf of every corner of California to create three state governments that emphasize representation, responsiveness, reliability and regional identity, Draper told CBS Los Angeles.

If voters do decide to support the initiative, it would still require approval from Congress.

Draper believes that the citizens of the whole state would be better served by three smaller state governments while preserving the historical boundaries of the various counties, cities and towns.

CAL 3 is not a pro-secession movement. It would seek to have all three California states remain in the Union.

Draper says his vision for partitioning California would be parallel to other states that have been partitioned, including the Dakotas, the Carolinas, and the Virginias.

This isnt the first time that Draper has put forward a ballot initiative in favor of breaking up California.

Earlier this year, Robert Preston and Tom Reed put forward their own proposal calling for splitting California into two because the state had become ungovernable because of taxes

Co-founder of the 'New California' movement Robert Preston (pictured) wants a new 'free, independent state'

In 2013, he launched Six Californias, a plan that would divide up the Golden State into six states.

The question was never put on the ballot because it failed to gain enough signatures.

Earlier this year, Robert Preston and Tom Reed put forward their own proposal calling for splitting California into two because the state had become ungovernable because of high taxes.

The proposal would see California shrunk down to its coastal areas between Los Angeles and Sonoma Counties.

A new state, New California, would encompass the rural areas.

Preston and Reed called for a 'free and Independent State' with 'full power to establish and maintain law and order, to promote general prosperity.'

They said they are motivated by what they call 'a decline in essential basic services such as education, law enforcement, fire protection, transportation, housing, health care, taxation, voter rights, banking, state pension systems, prisons, state parks, water resource management, home ownership and infrastructure.'

CAL 3 and 'New California' are just the latest proposals to divvy up the nation's most populous state. But like efforts before them, theyre highly unlikely to gain significant traction.

A consensus would have to be reached by the state legislatures of California as well as Congress.Forget the champagne, Patrick Reed is celebrating his Masters win with chicken.

Three days after scoring the biggest win of his life in Augusta, Georgia, Reed was spotted at a Chick-fil-A in The Woodlands, Texas.

The 27-year-old wore the green jacket he earned in the tournament as he picked up his humble meal at the drive-thru window, with his wife Justine in the passenger's seat.

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Patrick Reed wore his Masters green jacket to pick up Chick-fil-A fast food on Wednesday in The Woodlands, Texas

Excited workers at this Chick-fil-A took pictures of the Masters champ paying them a visit

Excited workers took pictures of Reed and his wife picking up their order, who both beamed for the cameras.

The restaurant posted a picture of Reed to their Twitter page, writing: 'Look who we had the pleasure of serving today at our Sawdust Road Chick-fil-A Drive Thru!! Welcome home to the 2018 Masters Winner- Patrick Reed with his beautiful wife! Green jacket [check] Chick-fil-A [check].'

In one video of the exchange, a worker in a blue polo tells Reed: 'I was there Friday!'

He then leans in to get a picture with Reed in the background.

Seeing a green jacket out in the wild is rare, since only current Masters champions are allowed to wear them off the course. Next year, Reed will have to turn his in, where it will have a permanent space in the locker room.

Right after his win on Sunday, Reed jetted up to New York City where he did the usual round of talk show appearances and interviews.

He returned to Texas on Wednesday, when he was seen grabbing a bite to eat.

The 27-year-old snatched the biggest win of his career on Sunday, when he won the Masters in Augusta, Georgia

After his win, Reed jetted to New York where he visited the Empire State Building (above)

Reed (second from left) and his wife (left) also took in a Knicks game on Monday with the likes of Chris Rock (fourth from right) and Aziz Ansari (third from right) and rapper 2 Chainz (second from right

And though Reed has been enjoying his newfound glory and fame - many have taken the opportunity to dwell on his past following Sunday's win.

In fact - the cheers on Sunday mainly went to rivals Speith and McIlroy - underlining Reed's reputation as one of the most controversial men in golf.

His reputation goes back to his university days when the Texas native was tarred with allegations of cheating and theft amid sanctions for drinking and bad behavior.A couple didn't let a bomb scare stop them from saying 'I Do' outside of a courthouse in Texas Wednesday morning.

Matthew and Andrea Smith had just arrived to the Tarrant County sub-courthouse when Arlington authorities evacuated the facility after a report of a suspicious package.

Police said the package was suspicious because of it's placement. Tarrant County Constable David Woodruff said it 'was sitting almost like it was placed behind the trashcan, which raised our suspicion level a little bit more'.

Matthew and Andrea Smith didn't let a bomb scare at a courthouse in Texas stop them from saying 'I Do'. The couple (pictured) married under a tree in the courthouse parking lot

Police said the green suitcase (pictured) was suspicious because of it's placement. Tarrant County Constable David Woodruff said it 'was sitting almost like it was placed behind the trashcan, which raised our suspicion level a little bit more'

When police checked out the package they found an empty suitcase.

Authorities said they didn't want to take any chances, especially after the deadly bombings that occurred in Austin between March 2 and 20.

And the Smiths didn't let the incident stand in their way.

'We wanted to get married today, April 11, because the day is important to us because it's our three-year anniversary,' Andrea explained to FOX 4.

Matthew said they had no idea what was going on but they just thought that they would 'stay here until midnight and kind of see what happens'.

Though the day started out scary, the couple got their happy ending when they were married outside the courthouse in the parking lot by the Justice of the Peace Mary Curnutt.

Though the day started out scary, the couple (pictured) got their happy ending when they were married outside the courthouse in the parking lot by the Justice of the Peace Mary Curnutt

The incident took place at the Tarrant County sub-courthouse (pictured)

'We are thankful for the judge who agreed to be spontaneous and impromptu,' Andrea told the station.

Curnutt told Fox that 'it was great seeing two people having so much fun with a very unique situation'.

'And I think they actually enjoyed it more than they would have in a very quiet courtroom.'

Andrea said the moment just added more memories to their love story.

'We look at life as we roll with the punches. Making memories,' she said.Disney CEO Bob Iger has revealed that he was 'seriously exploring' a 2020 presidential run and that his good friend Oprah was pushing him to do it.

The 67-year-old told Vogue this week that he had considered entering the presidential race until Disney's acquisition of Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox stopped him.

The Fox deal, which was announced in December, pushed back Iger's retirement from Disney until at least 2021, ending any plans for a 2020 White House run.

Prior to the $52 billion deal, Oprah - one of Iger's longtime friends - had even offered to hand out leaflets for him if he ran for president.

Disney CEO Bob Iger has revealed that he was 'seriously exploring' a 2020 presidential run last year and that his good friend Oprah was pushing him to do it (above in July 2017)

'Bob is one of the people I respect most in the world. That's a very short list,' she said.

'He is infinitely capable of multiple categories of expertise, and he has created an environment where you can disagree with him - and that's not just because I'm Oprah.

'I really, really pushed him to run for president, so much so that I said to him, 'Gee, if you ever decide to run for office, I will go door to door carrying leaflets. I will go sit and have tea with people'.'

She even said she would have been 'happy to be in his Cabinet'.

Iger said his wife Willow Bay hated the idea but had agreed to let him explore the possibility of running for the president.

'Willow initially not only hated the idea but put her foot down because she thought it would be highly destructive to our family and to our lives,' he said.

Iger said he had considered entering the presidential race until Disney's acquisition of Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox stopped him

Iger said his wife Willow Bay (above at the Academy Awards in March) hated the idea but had agreed to let him explore the possibility of running for the president

She eventually gave her 'reluctant permission' and Iger was in the process of looking at a future run when the Fox deal came through.

Iger said he had been considering a run even before the last election.

'The thought I had was coming from the patriot in me, growing up at a time when we respected our politicians not only for what they stood for but because of what they accomplished,' he said.

'I am horrified at the state of politics in America today, and I will throw stones in multiple directions. Dialogue has given way to disdain.

'I, maybe a bit naively, believed that there was a need for someone in high elected office to be more open-minded and willing to not only govern from the middle but to try to shame everyone else into going to the middle.'

While a 2020 bid has been ruled out, Iger still has spoken publicly about politics in the past year.

He left Donald Trump's Advisory Council in June when he withdrew from the Paris climate deal.

Iger has also spoken out previously about Trump's move to end DACA and supported the athletes who took a knee during the national anthem in protest.iStock/Thinkstock(CINCINNATI) -- A 16-year-old boy in Cincinnati, Ohio, was mysteriously found dead in his car this week, hours after he called 911 pleading for help.



Now the local police chief has directed an internal investigation into the actions of all employees involved in Kyle Plush's two desperate calls to 911 before he died from asphyxia due to chest compression.



One of the 911 dispatchers has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation, Cincinnati Police Chief Eliot Isaac said.



"This young man was crying out for help" when he spoke to that dispatcher, Isaac said at a news conference this afternoon. "We weren't able to get that information to the officers on the scene. We need to find out why."



But Plush, trapped in a 2002 Honda Odyssey, could not hear the dispatcher, police said.



An operator repeatedly asked Plush where he was. The teen said several times he was at "Seven Hills," which is the name of the Cincinnati school he attended.



The terrified teen is heard screaming and later said on the call, "I'm in desperate need of help!"



The call lasted nearly three minutes before it disconnected, police said. Dispatchers tried to call Plush back but reached his voicemail, police said.



Officers responded to the area and tried to find the car, but "based on the information relayed to the officers, efforts to locate the caller were unsuccessful," police said.



In another call to 911, Plush said, "I probably don't have much time left. Tell my mom I love her if I die."



"This is not a joke," Plush said. "I'm trapped inside my gold Honda Odyssey van in the ... parking lot of Seven Hills."



"Send officers immediately. I'm almost dead," he said.



In another heartbreaking 911 call, the teens mother told a dispatcher, We don't know where he is. He's 16 years old. He was driving a gold Honda van. He goes to Seven Hills School. I'm not sure what to do.



At about 9 p.m., someone called 911 to say Plush's car was found, police said. The teen was found inside and declared dead, police said.



On Tuesday afternoon, in a call to 911, Plush said, "Help! I'm stuck in my van. ... I need help!"



The police chief called Plush's death a "horrific tragedy."



Mercy Montessori, where Plush was a student from kindergarten to sixth grade, said in a statement, "He was an inspiration to many children and teachers at Mercy Montessori. Kyles gentle spirit made it a joy for others to be around him. We lovingly remember Kyle as creative, vibrant, and kind."



The school is holding a vigil tonight.



The teen died from "asphyxia due to chest compression," a preliminary autopsy determined, according to the Hamilton County Coroner's Office. The manner of death was accidental, the coroner's office said. There was no evidence of foul play or a drug overdose, the coroner's office said.



Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters said he is reviewing Plush's death with help from the coroner's office.



"This young man was trapped in the third row bench seat, and it is called asphyxia due to chest compression," Deters said. "We are actively working to identify experts to assist us in this investigation."



A Honda spokesperson told ABC News "there have been no recalls affecting the seats of the 2002 Honda Odyssey in the United States."



The spokesperson added, "Without further details about the incident, Im not in a position to speculate about what happened, but, in the absence of any recalls that could be related to this sort of incident, it would be premature to speculate that a vehicle defect was involved."



The police said "a further review of all communications records has prompted the Cincinnati Police Department to initiate a full procedural and technical review of all calls received by the Emergency Communications Section and associated dispatch recordings related to this incident."



City officials, who run the 911 center, also are investigating, City Manager Harry Black said, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.



"This matter is very disturbing," Black said. "If there are deficiencies on the part of the 911 center operations, my mandate is to fix whatever needs to be fixed.



Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Advertisement

The family of terminally-ill Alfie Evans were in a standoff with Alder Hey Hospital medics last night as they attempted to discharge their son before his life-support is turned off.

Police were called to the Liverpool Hospital as 'thousands' of protesters arrived to demand the two-year-old be released.

Broadcasting from his son's bedside, father Tom Evans said he was legally entitled to take Alfie from hospital - based on a letter he received from the Christian Legal Centre - adding 'he is waiting for his flight out to Italy'.

Mr Evans said a jet was waiting at John Lennon airport and it is understood he plans to take his son to the Vatican-linked Bambino Gesu Paediatric Hospital in Rome for diagnosis and possible treatment.

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Alfie Evan's parents Tom Evans and Kate James join hundreds of people taking part in a protest outside Alder Hey Hopsital in Liverpool

Addressing supporters, Mr Evans said he had 'removed all duty of care' from doctors and that Alfie is 'waiting for his flight out to Italy'

Tom Evans holds three passports up for the cameras after saying Alfie was waiting to fly out to Italy. The protest is blocking a major road outside the hospital causing large traffic tailbacks

Police were called to the Liverpool Hospital last night as 'thousands' of protesters arrived to demand the two-year-old be released

It is understood that the family's lawyers were last night in mediation with Alder Hey Hospital. Protesters were chanting and singing in support of the desperately-ill youngster and his family

Alfie's parents Mr Evans and Kate James walked hand-in-hand surrounded by hundreds of supporters and well-wishers who demonstrated outside the hospital

Mr Evans used a megaphone to address crowds of well-wishers, telling them that they hoped Alfie would be released by the hospital tomorrow

The protests has taken place on a main road close to the Liverpool Hospital and police have said the demonstration has caused significant disruption to traffic

Merseyside Police appealed for the protesters to be peaceful as 'Alfie's Army' demanded his release from the hospital, chanting 'Let him go' and 'While Alfie keeps fighting we'll keep fighting'

A High Court judge yesterday endorsed an end-of-life care plan for the 23-month-old, but Tom Evans said he had 'removed all duty of care' from doctors at Alder Hey Children's Hospital

Alfie Evans' father Tom hugs Kate James after speaking to the huge crowd outside Alder Hey hospital

Police officers hold a protester outside the hospital. Merseyside Police Assistant Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said the protest had caused significant traffic disruption

Protesters and well-wishers demanded the hospital release Alfie. It is understood his father wants to take his son to the Vatican-linked Bambino Gesu Paediatric Hospital in Rome for diagnosis and possible treatment

Assistant Chief Constable Serena Kennedy thanked Alfie's parents 'for the way in which Alfies family were later able to speak to the crowd and offer assurance and calm'

In a video he posted to Facebook, Mr Evans claims he is legally entitled to remove Alfie from the hospital's care, based on a letter he received from the Christian Legal Centre

But he claimed that medics were blocking his son's release and that a police officer told him he would be arrested for 'assault' if he tried.

Addressing supporters, Mr Evans said he and Alfie's mother had their passports in their pockets and were ready to fly to wherever would help to treat Alfie.

'Alfie wont be going anywhere tonight unfortunately but theres tomorrow,' he said.

'Theres about six police officers outside his bedroom. I Have asked them to reduce it to two and respect our privacy.

They said until they get told they can stand down they cant. Ive told them dont go in the room, respect my decisions and thats what theyve done.

'YOU ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO REMOVE ALFIE FROM ALDER HEY': CHRISTIAN LEGAL CENTRE'S LETTER TO TODDLER'S PARENTS Dear Tom, A letter from the Christian Legal Centre to Alfie's father, stating that the parents were legally entitled to remove the youngster from the Alder Hey's care You have asked me to clarify whether it would be legal for you to remove your son Alfie from Alder Hey Hospital without the Hospital's consent. In Alfie's situation, that would be practical with the support of a team of medical professionals with the necessary life support equipment. Subject to that, I can confirm that such a removal would be lawful under English law. Alfie is only in hospital because you, his parents, voluntarily sought its healthcare services. Alfie retains the right to self-discharge from hospital. He is not imprisoned there. Because of his minority, it is for you, as his parents, to make a decision to self-discharge or to stay at hospital. The effect of the declaratory orders made by Mr Justice Hayden in the High Court is to make it lawful for Alder Hey to withdraw his artificial ventilation treatment, and to protect Alder Hey and its staff from legal liability for that step. It is not the intention or effect of the order to circumvent Alfie's personal liberty or your parental rights. It remains lawful for an alternative team of medical professionals, with your parental consent, to provide such medical treatment to Alfie as they professionally deem to be appropriate. As you know, today Mr Justice Hayden made a further order scheduling the withdrawal of ventilation from Alfie [REDACTED]. The legal position may arguably become more complicated if someone within the High Court's jurisdiction continues to provide ventilation after that point. However, there is no doubt that, until that point in time, it remains entirely lawful to provide ventilation to Alfie; and that can be done by a medical service provider of your choice. For these reasons, as a matter of law it is your right to come to Alder Hey Hospital with a team of medical professionals with their own life-support equipment, and move Alfie to such other place you consider is best for him. You do not need any permission from Alder Hey Hospital or the Court to do so. Hope this clarifies the matter. Christian Legal Centre Advertisement

Hes content, hes comfortable and hes waiting for his flight out to Italy, so lets get Alfie out.

It is understood that the family's lawyers were last night in mediation with Alder Hey Hospital.

Speaking to protesters earlier in the night, Mr Evans said: 'There's no order that says Alfie can't leave.

'In reality I could walk upstairs, pick Alfie up right now and take him out the hospital.

'I was told by a police officer if I take Alfie I was going to get arrested for assault.

'If I pick Alfie up, with legal responsibilities and parental responsibilities, I'm getting told that I'm going to get done for assaulting my son. Where's that real?

Addressing supporters outside Alder Hey, Mr Evans said: 'Legally we can go. The doctors are doing their best now to stop us from doing that

Mr Evans said that he and Alfie's mother have 'removed all duty of care from the doctors here' and that he was told he would be arrested for 'assault' if he tried to remove his son from Alder Hey

Crows of supporters and well-wishers turned out to demonstrate in front of Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool tonight

Cars were honking their horns in support of the two-year-old and his parents who say the hospital is stopping them from taking Alfie

Protesters gathered under the banner of 'Alfie's Army' to demand Alder Hey Hospital release the tragic toddler into the care of his parents

Supporters chanted 'release Alfie Evans' and 'we shall not be moved' at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool

'The truth is of the matter is me and Kate hold full responsibility and we can take him to our transportation van with full equipment, with doctors who have got full duty of care, and they're not allowing it.

'We're hoping now that my solicitor is going to get us out. We might not leave tonight because apparently the floor's on lockdown.

'But at the end of the day what we know is Alfie is stable, Alfie is ready to go, we've got full responsibility, we've removed all duty of care from the doctors here.

'There's not one doctor in this hospital now who has any say over my son, apart from the air ambulance.'

As he made his way to the hospital after the finished speaking, he made his way back inside the hospital and urged supporters to stay outside and protest peacefully.

Supporters chanted 'release Alfie Evans' and 'we shall not be moved' at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool, where the youngster is being kept.

A spokesman for Merseyside Police said: 'We can confirm that officers are at to monitor a peaceful protest tonight, Thursday 12 April'

The protest tonight comes after a judge ruled Alfie's treatment should be withdrawn

The Alfies Army Official Facebook page said the family's lawyers were currently in mediation with Alder Hey Hospital.

Mr Evans earlier claimed in a video on Facebook that medics 'phoned the police to murder my son... Alder Hey phoned the police to stop me taking my son out of the hospital'.

Merseyside Police Assistant Chief Constable Serena Kennedy: 'We were present at Alder Hey Hospital tonight while the hospital and family of Alfie Evans sought clarity from Mr Justice Hayden in relation to the treatment of Alfie.

'Although peaceful, the large protest that took place tonight did cause significant traffic disruption and inconvenience for other people trying to access the hospital.

'I want to remind people to please consider other hospital users, as these delays could have caused serious problems for staff and patients alike.

'We fully understand what a sensitive and emotional time this is for everyone involved and I would also therefore like to pass on our appreciation for the way in which Alfies family were later able to speak to the crowd and offer assurance and calm.'

In a video he posted to Facebook, Mr Evans claimed he held the legal right to remove Alfie from the hospital's care.

He said: 'Alder Hey have phoned the police to stop me from taking my son out of the hospital.

'This is my son. Look at my healthy, healthy young boy who is undiagnosed, who is certainly not dying.'

During the nearly two-and-a-half minute clip he also encouraged people to come to the hospital to stand outside and 'tell them to release our son' in a 'quiet protest'.

He added: 'They have phoned the police over a child... Look how innocent the boy is, look at him, he lies there eagerly waiting for his trip home.

'How can this come to this?'

Merseyside Police said officers were called to the hospital to 'supervise a peaceful protest tonight'

Christian Legal Centre has written to the parents to tell them they would be legally entitled to remove Alfie from Alder Hey Hospital's care

In a video he posted to Facebook, Mr Evans claims he is legally entitled to remove Alfie from the hospital's care

Bosses at Alder Hay Hospital in Liverpool took the case back to the High Court to ask the judge to determine when Alfie's treatment should officially be withdrawn, after the Court of Appeal last month ruled it should be stopped rather than the boy be taken to hospital abroad

The parents said the fear their toddler's life could end 'within hours' in a High Court case that echoes the tragic death of Charlie Gard.

Alfie has a rare degenerative brain disease which doctors have been unable to diagnose and is being kept alive on a ventilator.

Bosses at Alder Hay Hospital in Liverpool took the case back to the High Court to ask the judge to determine when Alfie's treatment should officially be withdrawn, after the Court of Appeal last month ruled it should be stopped rather than the boy be taken to hospital abroad.

Presiding, Mr Justice Hayden told the court Alfie's brain was 'almost entirely water' and added what the parents see in the footage 'is not the same as what others might see'.

He agreed to review the footage before making any decision but did not change his mind about treatment being withdrawn. He then set a date for Alfie's life support to be turned off, which cannot be published for legal reasons.

Presiding over the case, Mr Justice Hayden agreed to watch new video footage of Alfie, pictured, before making a decision on when his treatment should be stopped

The judge said he was not able to give a medical opinion and was watching them out of 'courtesy and kindness'.

Mr Justice Hayden said: 'Lady Justice King in the Court of Appeal on 8 March circumscribed my role today as to help broker if possible or to determine if necessary the terms of the end of life plan and the date for withdrawal of artificial ventilation.

'Every word of this case so far has been in the public domain but this aspect seems to me to now be so exquisitely personal and private that the public interest must give way on these matters to Alfie's privacy.'

The family's barrister Paul Diamond asked Mr Justice Hayden to look at the videos in a last minute bid to get a new independent assessment of Alfie's condition.

Mr Diamond said: 'Mr Evans says the last three weeks, the reducing of drug intake, he thinks his son is showing signs of cognitive improvement.

'We do think there's scope for negotiation. Tom Evans is entirely shocked by this progressive consultation, they thought as reasonable people it should be explored, this offer by the Italian hospital. They think there's undue haste being taken on this for some reasons they don't understand.'

Mr Justice Hayden watched the videos in private out of what he described as 'courtesy and kindness'.

He said: 'Alfie is a little boy with a neuro-degenerative condition and that condition has degenerated his brain and it is irreparable. All doctors here, in Germany and in Italy agreed on this - the brain can not regenerate itself.

'I ask myself if I were in a bed in a hospital in that condition, would I want video of myself in the public domain? And I dont have any difficulty answering that in the negative, so I find myself wondering why it's right for Alfie.

'I'm not in any way qualified to gainsay a medical opinion. It would be entirely inappropriate to do so. But out of courtesy and, I hope, kindness to Tom and Kate, I will watch it.'

The videos were said to show Alfie's mother Kate putting chocolate in his mouth from the tip of her finger, which Mr Michael Mylonas QC, representing Alder Hey, said was 'dangerous'.

'We are concerned that one of the videos shows Kate providing Alfie with food by mouth. There's a significant risk of aspiration', he said.

Mr Mylonas said Alfie now had 'bilateral pneumonia' which may be as a result of trying to give Alfie the 'taste stimulus'.

The High Court ruled Alfie Evans will be taken off life support on a date and location that cannot be reported.

Earlier today Mr Justice Hayden warned that Evans 'may come to regret' posting the videos he filmed of his son on the hospital ward.

Mr Justice Hayden said it would not be possible for Alfie's parents to make 'further applications'.

He said he was concerned that images of the little boy were continuing to be posted online.

'It is impossible to escape images of Alfie on the internet,' said the judge.

'Alfie's brain as we know is almost entirely water. He has no say on whether these photos are taken.'

Mr Justice Hayden said he was concerned that the images were 'intrusive' and suggested that in the 'fullness of time' Alfie's family might regret their publication.

Alfie's parents were not at the hearing, which is continuing.

Last week bosses at Alder Hey said they had been unable to reach agreement with Alfie's parents about exactly when treatment should stop.

WHAT THE DOCTORS SAY ABOUT ALFIE'S MOVEMENTS Professor Maria Fitzgerald, from the Developmental Neurobiology at University College London, said: 'It is possible for touching the skin to trigger reflex movements even when an individual has no perception or 'sense' of the touch. 'This is because reflexes are mediated at the level of the spinal cord which can continue to operate even if the brain itself is no longer functional.' Dr Joe Brierley, Consultant in Paediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care at Great Ormond Street Hospital, said: 'The rooting reflex described is one of what are called 'primitive reflexes.' 'It is present when babies are born (at term) and helps the newborn baby feed and bond with its mother/others. 'It makes the baby turn its head towards anything that strokes its cheek or mouth, and as the baby then moves its head in decreasing movements it looks to be searching for what has stimulated it. 'Trained child-health assessment can easily distinguish between these two types movements (voluntary and involuntary) and parents and families can then be helped to understand that this is not a voluntary conscious movement but a reflex action to a stimulus.' Advertisement

They said they would ask the judge for 'guidance' .

Judges have heard that Alfie, who was born on May 9 2016, is in a 'semi-vegetative state' and has a degenerative neurological condition doctors had not definitively diagnosed.

Specialists at Alder Hey said life-support treatment should stop and Mr Justice Hayden said he accepted medical evidence which showed that further treatment was futile.

Court of Appeal judges upheld Mr Justice Hayden's ruling.

Supreme Court justices and European Court of Human Rights judges have refused to intervene.

The couple have complained that 'the state' is wrongly interfering with their parental choice.

They want to move Alfie to a hospital in Rome or Germany.

His parents confirmed on the Alfie's Army Official Facebook page last night that today's hearing would go ahead despite their plea for an extra week for lawyers to consider the paperwork.

Mr Evans said today 'could be the day [Alfie] is executed' and his family is still determined to take his son to Germany or Italy for treatment.

The case has drawn interventions from the Pope and the White House has been contacted by North West England MEP Steven Woolfe, who is supporting Alfie's family.

In a video recorded today, Mr Woolfe said he had met Alfie and seen him respond positively to other members of his family.

He said: 'When I went to see them [Alfie's parents] I saw Alfie. He's a wonderful little boy. When his uncle walked in the room and started talking you could see reactions in his eyes and his face and his arms and that has pushed me on more to try to fight for him.'

Last week, at a meeting with hospital officials and Mr Woolfe, Alfie's father Tom Evans presented what he believed was fresh evidence showing his son's condition was improving.

Mr Evans understood that a decision on ending life support was on hold for the hospital to reconsider the case, including 'alternative options', such as taking Alfie to a hospital at The Vatican for treatment.

But Miss James said they had been given them 'false hope' as, within an hour of the meeting, Alder Hey's lawyers were contacting the High Court to arrange for a judge to rule on a date for withdrawing life support.

Speaking about the meeting in his video, Mr Woolfe added: 'We have sent a further letter to the hospital clarifying our version of the meeting and I have sent a further letter to the Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt asking him to intervene. I wrote to the European MEPs asking them to support this and many of them are starting to do so. Yesterday I was communicating with the Christian community in the US seeking further support.

'There have been 250,000-plus signatures seeking a petition to help give Alfie the opportunity of a second opinion in Italy.

'There is ample evidence that Tom and Kate and their family can show that Alfie should be given a chance and everything should be given to them to help them save their son.

'Alder Hay should listen. They are in the business of caring; they're in the business of looking after the health of people and children and if they believe that they should at least look beyond the narrow ramifications of the legal interests and costs of the hospital and simply say 'perhaps we may have been wrong', just as some doctors were wrong in the Aysha King case, and allow Alfie and his family the chance of a second opinion in Italy and give that family the option.

'I beg them to give them the option of saving Alfie rather than pursuing this case today to end his life in the next few days.

'We're doing what we can, we are here today and I hope you all hope and pray that we get a positive result.'

Pope Francis has spoken about Alfie and his family's struggle to keep the youngster alive

In a statement, Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust said there was no choice after attempts to reach an agreement with Alfie's parents broke down.

'We understand that this is an incredibly difficult time for Alfie's family and we continue to support them in every way we can,' said a spokesman.

'Despite reports, at no point has a date for withdrawal of treatment for Alfie been agreed. After a long and difficult legal process, the courts have ruled that Alfie's condition is irreversible and untreatable and that continued active treatment is not in his best interests.

'We always aim to reach agreement with parents about the most appropriate palliative care plan for their child but sadly, in this case, we have not been able to do this.

'Consequently, we must return to the High Court, as we are legally required to do, for guidance about a date on which to withdraw treatment from Alfie..'

Mr Woolfe said Alfie's family believed his physical condition had improved since the court order to end his treatment was issued six weeks ago.

'He's showing more activity, smiling, lifting his eyelids,' he said. 'I'm not a doctor but I've seen him myself, you can see physical signs of life. He's a beautiful little boy.

'They believe there are possible physical changes with Alfie to enable him to be safely transported to Italy and an Air Ambulance that would carry him that would satisfy Alder Hey's concerns.'

Pope Francis tweeted his support, saying: 'It is my sincere hope that everything necessary may be done in order to continue compassionately accompanying little Alfie Evans, and that the deep suffering of his parents may be heard.'Neil Acourt, 42, of Eltham, south-east London, was arrested in relation to the racist attack on 18-year-old Mr Lawrence, who was stabbed to death by a gang of white men at a bus stop in 1993

A suspect in the murder of Stephen Lawrence has been ordered to repay 6,000 reaped from a drug ring or face a further four months behind bars.

Neil Acourt was jailed for six years and three months last February for conspiracy to supply Class B drugs as part of a 750,000 criminal scheme.

He was said to have been the 'man at the top' of a two-year conspiracy which involved dozens of 600-mile round trips from London to County Durham, ferrying drugs up and taking cash back.

The 42-year-old, of Eltham, south-east London, was arrested in relation to the racist attack on 18-year-old Mr Lawrence, who was stabbed to death by a gang of white men at a bus stop in Eltham in 1993.

But the Crown Prosecution Service formally discontinued the case against him after a meeting with the senior investigating officer.

Acourt, a father of one who is also known as Neil Stuart, was brought from HMP Standford Hill for a confiscation hearing at Kingston Crown Court on Thursday.

Judge Susan Tapping found, on the balance of probabilities, the plot saw ten trips involving 55kg (120lbs) of cannabis and two involving 100kg (220lbs).

The case against Acourt in relation to Stephen Lawrence's (pictured) murder was discontinued by the Crown Prosecution Service, but he was jailed again last February in relation to a drugs racket

Each kilogram was worth 1,000. She said: 'The total benefit figure for this conspiracy is 750,000.'

Acourt, who appeared wearing a grey prison tracksuit, and two of his co-conspirators were found to each be liable for the full amount.

He was said to have 6,000 of realisable assets to his name and was told to repay that sum under the Proceeds of Crime Act, along with a victim surcharge of 120.

He will have three months to pay and if he defaults will receive a further four months in jail, the judge ruled.

A Serious Crime Prevention Order was also put in place, effective from the day of his release, which requires him to keep police informed of the vehicles he uses and his financial affairs. He will also be prohibited from associating with six unnamed people.

James Botton, 46, of Greenwich, south-east London, and Acourt's father-in-law Jack Vose, 64, of Bexley, Kent, were each jailed for four years and nine months.

Both were said to have 1 available to them and were told to pay it within seven days or face an extra day in jail. They were also told to pay victim surcharges of 120.

Daniel Thompson, 30, of South Shields, Tyne and Wear, was jailed for four years and two months. It was agreed he should repay 11 months worth of the two-year conspiracy, matching the time of his involvement, which was calculated at 343,750.

He will pay the 25,457 currently available to him, the court ruled, along with a 120 victim surcharge.

Earlier, prosecutor Sarah Przybylska said: 'Two hundred kilos were seized across two shipments, there were 37 journeys during the course of this conspiracy that was movement between London and South Shields that the prosecution say was for the movement of drugs and money.'

All defendants previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply a Class B drug between January 2014 and February 2016.

In 2012, Gary Dobson and David Norris were convicted of murdering Stephen Lawrence and jailed for life.Kathleen Ann Hollingworth, the wife of former Governor-General Peter Hollingworth, was found safe by police after she went missing on Thursday night.

Ms Hollingworth, who goes by the name Ann, 81, disappeared from Malvern in Melbourne's south-east about 9.30pm after being dropped off outside her home.

Police found Ms Hollingsworth safe at a neighbour's house after a search operation on Friday morning.

Police found Ann Hollingworth (pictured with police) after she went missing on Thursday night

Police found Ms Hollingsworth safe at a neighbour's house after a search operation on Friday morning

'The 81-year-old was located safe and well shortly after 7am this morning at an address in Malvern,' a police spokesperson said.

'Police would like to thank the media and public for their assistance.'

Peter Hollingworth was Governor-General of Australia between 2001 and 2003.

'The 81-year-old was located safe and well shortly after 7am this morning at an address in Malvern,' a police spokesperson saidJill Blackstone was taken into custody in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital on Tuesday and is pictured in this mug shot provided by Los Angeles Police Department

A former producer for Jerry Springer has been arrested for murdering her deaf and partially blind sister in what was initially thought to be a suicide pact gone wrong.

Jill Blackstone is pictured in her mugshot taken on Wednesday by the Los Angeles Police Department after she was taken into custody in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital on Tuesday.

She is expected to be extradited to Los Angeles, where she will stand trial, TMZ reported on Thursday.

Blackstone's sister Wendy and three of her dogs were found dead in her garage in March 2015 after inhaling carbon monoxide fumes, believed to have come from a barbecue grill.

Coroners also found traces of Xanax in her blood.

Jill Blackstone also suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning, which required her to be treated in a hospital for two days.

She will likely face charges of murder as well as three counts of animal cruelty.

At first it appeared that Wendy - who was deaf and partially blind - had killed herself, but now police believe that Jill assisted her sister, according to TMZ.

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Blackstone (pictured) lied about her disabled sister's suicide, which was actually a mercy killing, it has been reported

Wendy (pictured) was found dead in a garage in March after inhaling carbon monoxide fumes, believed to have come from a barbecue grill

An unnamed police source reportedly said that Jill - who was arrested after her sister's death but was subsequently released without charge - originally denied knowing Wendy was suicidal.

However investigators are now said to believe that Jill wrote a suicide note left by Wendy, and that the producer may have helped her sister kill herself out of mercy for her condition.

It was previously reported that Jill, 52, had allegedly made a suicide pact with her sister, but got cold feet at the last minute and called a friend for help - who then told the police.

When paramedics arrived at the home in Los Angeles Wendy and three of her dogs were dead, while Jill was suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Jill was initially charged with Wendys murder, but the case was dropped by Los Angeles District Attorney.

Daily Mail Online reported in 2015 that Jill owed Wendy $122,000 and was in $1.4million of debt.

Investigators are now said to believe that Jill (pictured) wrote a note left by Wendy, and that the producer may have helped her sister kill herself out of mercy for her condition

After Jill's release, the LAPD confirmed that Wendy's death was still 'an ongoing murder investigation'.

Neighbors speculated that the sisters  who ran the Thumping Tails Animal Rescue Center together out of their home  had entered into a suicide pact.

Stephanie Cohen, 60, who lived across the street from the sisters, said at the time: The police were here for 12 to 14 hours on Saturday. We were told they were investigating a double suicide, an attempt, and one of the people died.'

She added: [Jill and Wendy] were having a hard time finding a new home because the sister that died was very ill - she couldnt see, she couldnt hear, she was housebound, she was very ill. So she needed to find a house that could accommodate her sister with the illness and the dogs.

'Evidently the pressure was intense on them, but nobody expected this to happen.

As a producer, Jill worked on Jerry Springer, Sally Jessy Raphael, The Rosie O'Donnell Show, Dr. Drew On Call, The Real, and The Osbournes.

For confidential support in the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255.A jailed pedophile has been named as a person of interest in the 2000 disappearance of one of his victim's mother, a Washington Post copy editor who vanished after confronting him about his treatment of her daughter.

Alison Thresher, 45, disappeared in May 2000 after confronting Fernando Asturizaga over his treatment of her daughter Hannah in Maryland.

Asturizaga was a teacher at the school Hannah attended and had also been employed by her father to babysit occasionally. When Alison disappeared, police did not outrightly deem it suspicious, despite the fact she was excited about a new position at the newspaper.

In 2010, her daughter Hannah, now 31, came forward to tell police that years earlier, before her mother went missing, Asturizaga had raped her repeatedly.

She said the abuse began in 1999, when she was 12, and went on until after her mother vanished but that she did not connect the dots that he may have been involved in her disappearance until recently.

Asturizaga was jailed on child sex offences in 2012 but now faces a murder charge if police take their investigation into his role in Alison's disappearance any further.

Now, authorities say Alison was murdered, even though they have not found her body.

Alison Thresher vanished from her Maryland home in 2000 aged 45. She was a copy editor for the Washington Post

On Thursday, police named Fernando Asturizaga, 51, who is in jail for raping Thresher's teenage daughter between 1999 and 2001, as a person of interest in Alison's disappearance. He will not say where she is or if he even knows

It is not clear if Montgomery County police, which investigated the woman's disappearance in 2000, looked into Asturizaga at the time.

Not only had she confronted him about it, but she went to the school where he worked and described her concerns in journals.

It is not known if the school ever told police what Alison had warned them of.

Montgomery County Police were not available for comment on Thursday afternoon.

At a press conference on Thursday where Hannah Thresher spoke and where police named Asturizaga as a person of interest, they did not indicate if it had ever been explored.

Asturizaga is refusing to cooperate with their investigation and will not speak about Alison Thresher's disappearance.

'We're hoping through this announcement that anyone with information about the case will come forward.

'Were seeking information about Asturizagas activities at the time of Alisons murder, any additional instances of inappropriate behavior by Asturizaga, anyone who knew Asturizaga when he taught at the Friends School and any information about places that Asturizaga may have frequented and any information about the case in general,' Montgomery County Police Chief Tom Manger said.

At a press conference on Thursday, Hannah Thresher (pictured left) spoke and police named Asturizaga as a person of interest

Thresher's daughter Hannah (above together) reported the rapes to police in 2010 and says she now wants the full truth about her mother's disappearance. Hannah spoke at a press conference on Thursday and

In a diary entry from March 18, 2000, two months before she vanished, Alison said she was worried about the babysitter being around her daughter

In a journal entry before she vanished, Alison expressed her worries about the man.

'Mad about my thoughts re F. He is a teacher. Many people have concern about male babysitters. Sometimes teenage too stimulating for them,' she wrote on March 18, 2000, almost two months to the day before she disappeared after dinner with her family in Georgetown.

Alison and her husband James were going through a divorce at the time of her disappearance.

On May 23, she returned to her home after having dinner with her family and wrote a final email at midnight. It is not clear if her children were there at the time or if they were with their father.

Alison is pictured with her son Sam and daughter Hannah. Both appeared at a press conference on Thursday demanding answers over her disappearance

A neighbor later reported that they heard screaming coming from her apartment between 4am and 5am that morning. Another call from someone else reported a suspicious man running through the area at around 6am.

Her Volvo was found later around a mile from the home but there was no sign of her.

For a year, police investigated without great urgency, saying there were no signs of foul play.

In 2001, they began treating it as a homicide but turfed up no leads.

The abuse was still going on of her daughter and Asturizaga relished the fact that Alison was no longer around to stop him, Hannah said.

'Soon after she made her suspicions known, my mother disappeared.

'A few months later, when I expressed frustration at his lack of empathy towards my grief over the loss of my mother, Mr. Asturizaga said to me: "I thought things would be easier for us now that shes gone."

'At the time I didnt think anything of it. But after nine or 10 years of reflection I started to question if his words meant something more,' Hannah, said on Thursday.A Mexican drug lord who kidnapped, tortured and murdered a DEA agent and was then mistakenly released from prison has joined the FBI's top ten most wanted list with a $20million reward for his capture, officials announced on Thursday.

Rafael Caro Quintero, 65, has controlled the notorious Sinaloa Cartel alongside Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada Garcia since the arrest of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman in 2016, who is due to stand trial in New York this April.

He was released from a Mexican prison in 2013 while serving a 40-year sentence for the 1985 killing of DEA agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena, 37, who had a hole drilled in his skull while being injected with amphetamines to keep him alive.

Rafael Caro Quintero, 65, (pictured left in 2016) is wanted over the kidnap and murder of DEA agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena, 37 (pictured right in an undated photo)

Caro Quintero, known as the 'narco of narcos', is considered as one of the godfathers of Mexican drug trafficking and was one of the primary suppliers of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana to the United States in the late 1970s.

In 1984, Mexican authorities raided Caro Quintero's 2,500-acre marijuana plantation, depriving him of an estimated annual production of $8 billion. Furious, the drug baron, then a member of the Guadalajara cartel, blamed Kiki for the raid.

The following year, when the DEA agent was close to uncovering a million-dollar drug pipeline from Mexico to the United States, he was kidnapped in daylight while on the way to meet his wife, allegedly on direct orders from Caro-Quintero.

Kiki's body was found a month later dumped in a rural area outside the town of La Angostura in the state of Michoacan. His ribs, nose, jaw, cheekbones and skull had been crushed, and a hole drilled into his head.

Quintero alongside heavily-armed police officers in Guadalajara, western Mexico, on January 29, 2005. He was arrested in April 1985 for overseeing Kiko's murder

The presence of amphetamines and other drugs in his system suggested he had been injected with them by his captives in order to keep him alive and prolong the torture.

Also on Thursday, federal officials unsealed an additional indictment against Caro Quintero - also known as RCQ - accusing him of trafficking in methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine and marijuana from 1980 until 2017.

Caro Quintero was released from a Mexican prison in 2013 after serving 28 years of a 40-year sentence for the torture and murder of Camarena, whose Mexican pilot, Alfredo Zavala, was also killed.

A judge freed Caro Quintero on a legal technicality, angering US authorities, which have requested his extradition to answer charges filed in a California court in 1991, including for Kikis murder and kidnapping.

The Mexican government also slammed the ruling, which was later overturned by the Supreme Court. Two other drug capos remain in prison over the murder.

Caro Quintero has been in hiding since his release, but has surfaced several times to deny involvement in Kiki's murder and insist he has abandoned criminal activity.

Kiki was kidnapped in daylight while on the way to meet his wife, Mika, allegedly on direct orders from Caro-Quintero. He is pictured with Mika on their wedding day, and in another undated photo, right

Marine Corps pallbearers carry the casket holding Kiki's body as it arrived at North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego on March 8, 1985

'I was a drug trafficker 31 years ago, and from that moment I am telling you that when I lost the crops from... there I ended that activity,' he told Mexican magazine Proceso in 2016.

'Never have I exercised it [since] and I'm not going to do it. I stopped being a drug trafficker and I say to you again: Please, leave me in peace.'

FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich said the most-wanted list is 'one of our most valuable tools,' and that 484 of the 518 fugitives who have been on the list have been captured.

Russ Ellersick, an FBI agent who is tasked with dismantling the Sinaloa Cartel, said: 'Caro-Quintero had tremendous power three decades ago, and he still has power today.

'Our objective all along has been to investigate RCQ's current activities but also to hold him accountable for Special Agent Camarena's murder.'

Caro Quintero, pictured in his youth, has been in hiding since his release, but has surfaced several times to deny involvement in Kiki's murder

Caro Quintero (pictured in undated photos released by the FBI) is believed to be in hiding in Mexico. He should be considered armed and extremely dangerous

FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich said: 'Special Agent Camarena was devoted to stopping drug trafficking and breaking the cycle of drug-related crime.

'He showed tremendous courage to pursue the most violent drug traffickers, and it is because of his courage and his selflessness that we're not going to stop looking for Caro-Quintero until we find him and put him back behind bars where he belongs.'

The announcement to add Caro-Quintero to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list was made today during a press conference at DEA Headquarters near Washington, D.C.

The reward in this case represents a serious amount of money,' noted FBI Special Agent Mike Rollins, another Seattle-based agent involved in the investigation.

Caro Quintero is pictured speaking to the Huff Post in 2016, and in another undated file photo released by the FBI

'Together with the significant publicity that always surrounds a Top Ten fugitive announcement, the $20 million reward will put RCQ on notice, along with his inner circle and others who might be helping him: The United States government is committed to his capture and won't rest until he is in custody.'

Ellersick added that US investigators have received strong support from Mexican law enforcement authorities. 'Drug dealers are destroying their country,' he said, 'and the Mexican authorities are motivated to help bring RCQ in.'

Caro-Quintero is believed to be in hiding in Mexico. He should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.

If you have information regarding the fugitive, call 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324), contact the nearest US Embassy or Consulate, or submit a tip online at https://tips.fbi.gov.Suzanne Owens, 35, was arrested for allegedly having sex with one of her male students in early April

A teacher at a Christian high school in Florida was arrested for allegedly engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a student.

Suzanne Lea Owens, who has now been fired from her role at the private Evangelical Christian School in Fort Myers, is accused of having sex with one of her male students in early April.

The Lee County Sheriff's Office said Owens had sex with the unidentified student once and the incident happened off-campus.

An investigation also uncovered text messages the 35-year-old married educator had sent the student in the weeks leading up to their sexual encounter, according to a press release.

Owens was arrested Wednesday and has been charged with custodial sexual battery on a victim between 12 and 18 years old, a first-degree felony.

The headmaster of Evangelical Christian School released a statement to students and parents asking for prayers for 'all the families involved'.

'We are deeply saddened and express sincere sympathy to any and all victims of sexual assault,' John Hunte said, according to the News-Press.

Owens was a teacher at Evangelical Christian School, a high school in Fort Myers, Florida

Owens, who is married and has children, was charged with custodial sexual battery on a victim between 12 and 18 years old, a first-degree felony

'We have and will continue to cooperate with law enforcement during this investigation. ECS was not aware of the report of the incident until late today. I wanted you to be aware of this as I anticipate it will be reported by the news media.'

According to NBC2, Owens was a finalist for the Golden Halo teacher award, which is given for excellence in the classroom. She was fired from her job on Wednesday.

As of Thursday she remains in jail. Upon her release, she will have to wear a GPS monitor and is barred from having any contact with minors.

The outlet reports she can only have supervised contact with her own children and cannot contact employees at the school, except for her husband.Britain's last lion tamer has been refused a licence in a move that is likely to spell the end for performances starring big cats.

Thomas Chipperfield has been told that he cannot use his three big cats in circus performances. The move follows the Governments commitment to banning wild animals in circuses by 2020.

That pledge came after the Mail helped rescue Britains last circus elephant, Anne, who was abused at another organisation.

Thomas Chipperfield, Britain's last lion tamer, with one of his lions, Tsavo, pictured in 2014

Mr Chipperfield, 28, who comes from a long line of animal tamers, has been told he cannot perform with the two lions and a tiger he keeps in a field in Staffordshire.

Three centuries of animals in the big top The Chipperfields history of animal training goes back more than 300 years. Thomass ancestor James Chipperfield introduced performing exotic animals to Britain, exhibiting them on the frozen Thames at the Frost Fair in 1684. In the 1950s, Chipperfields Circus was the biggest in Europe, with a tent that seated 6,000 and animals including polar bears and chimps. Thomass great-uncle Jimmy Chipperfield created safari parks including Longleat in Wiltshire, Woburn in Bedfordshire and Knowsley, Merseyside. He last performed with big cats in 2015 in Wales at An Evening with Lions and Tigers. He told the Daily Telegraph: You cant afford to mistreat a lion or tiger, because eventually they will turn. They will realise they are a lot stronger, faster and more dangerous than you, and it can only end very badly. Advertisement

Only two circuses still perform in England with wild animals  Circus Mondao and Peter Jollys Circus  but they do not have big cats. Scotland prohibited wild animals in circuses last year and Wales is looking to do the same. A Government consultation found 94.5 per cent of the public favour a ban.

Welfare campaigners Animal Defenders International (ADI) said Mr Chipperfield has been off the road for more than two years after withdrawing his first licence application when a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) inspection found his animals accommodation was not big enough. A 2015 tour of Wales, where regulations do not apply, sparked a public outcry.

ADI claimed the big cats were confined to cages on the back of a truck with restricted access to an exercise area. The groups footage has allegedly shown the animals displaying abnormal behaviour, indicating they were not coping with their environment, but Mr Chipperfield denies wrongdoing.

The lion tamer, of Winchester, Hampshire, said no welfare concerns had been raised and he planned to appeal. He had already appealed the original decision from July, but his defence was dismissed.

Mr Chipperfield has been told he cannot use his three big cats in circus performances, he has two lions and a tiger

Licences to ensure animal welfare were brought in while a ban was making its passage through Parliament. Defra said it remained absolute in its commitment to ban wild animals in circuses.

Mr Chipperfield told the BBC his second appeal limited what he could say but he had consistently acted in good faith with my team on the advice given by the circus licensing panel and their inspectors, adding: This advice was often conflicting. ADI president Jan Creamer said the decision was a victory for common sense.

Anne the elephant, who was abused by staff at Bobby Roberts Super Circus, has been rehomed at Longleat Safari Park in a 1million enclosure that generous Daily Mail readers helped to fund.A cyber crackdown on internet pedophilia has led to the shocking revelation of which Melbourne suburbs have the highest rates of people accessing child pornography online.

The most surprising revelation is that it was 'leafy, upmarket' suburbs where the rates were highest 7 News reported.

Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police Graham Ashton said they plan to employ more online investigators to tackle the worrying online trend.

Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police Graham Ashton said they plan to employ more online investigators to tackle the worrying online trend of child pornography

'To me personally I think it's one of the great shames of this country, one of the great black marks of this country,' he told 7 News.

The new initiative will be funded by the next State Budget in the amount of $115 million and will also target organised crime with a clear focus on the 'dark net' and illegal bitcoin transactions.

Mr Ashton said he was shocked by what the online figures revealed and especially the suburbs where people were most accessing child pornography.

Mr Ashton said he was shocked by what the online figures revealed and especially the suburbs where people were most accessing child pornography, '...it seems to be the leafy east and north east, when you look at the west, there's hardly anything,' he said

'When I look at the geo maps of this material it seems to be the leafy east and north east, when you look at the west, there's hardly anything,' he said.

Police under the new initiative will also be better equipped to spearhead the crackdown including more firepower and more funding for crime prevention and mobile police stations.

Laws will also be changed and amended to keep up with the changes and ensure those caught will be prosecuted harshly.

'We don't like the look of that, we don't want to go down that path, but it's important that we have police specially trained to use this equipment,' Mr Ashton said.A former Labour council leader was last night facing the threat of perjury charges after lying to an inquiry into depraved sexual abuse involving Cyril Smith.

Richard Farnell was slammed for his 'shameful' attempt to evade responsibility for the failure to protect generations of youngsters.

The 59-year-old councillor was branded 'unfit to be in public life' and yesterday suspended from the Labour Party.

He is facing a police probe after an official report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse said his testimony that no one had told him about the abuse 'defies belief'.

He is one of a string of ex-MPs, councillors and senior officers named and shamed in the devastating report for failing to protect boys or turning a blind eye to reports of abuse.

Former Labour leader of Rochdale Council Richard Farnell, 59 (pictured) was slammed for his 'shameful' attempt to evade responsibility for the failure to protect generations of youngsters from prolific sex abuse in the area

They also included his successor, Paul Rowen, later a Lib Dem MP, who was branded 'insufficiently inquisitive', and senior managers who commissioned 'flawed' reports and matters were left to 'drift'.

The inquiry laid bare the horrific abuse to which 40 or more boys were subjected as a result of the 'indefensible' failures of those charged with protecting them.

The hard-hitting report, only the second published by the troubled inquiry, was set up after revelations emerged about how the town's notorious former Liberal MP Smith, who died in 2010, had preyed on boys in hostels and residential schools.

They were detailed when the Daily Mail serialised former Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk's book Smile For The Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith.

The report is just one strand of a wider inquiry into historic abuse at public and private institutions in England and Wales.

The report concluded that Mr Farnell had lied in his affirmed public evidence to the inquiry that he had not known about abuse at Knowl View residential school while he was leader from 1986-1992, branding his attempt to blame council officers 'shameful'.

Mr Rowen barely fared better, told he had at best been 'insufficiently inquisitive' and at worst 'turned a blind eye'.

It also slammed a string of highly-paid council managers for their flawed decision-making and failure to properly treat the boys  many of them from deeply troubled upbringings  as victims.

He faces the threat of perjury charges after lying to an inquiry into depraved sexual abuse involving Cyril Smith (pictured)

The report concluded that from 1989 onwards the police, council departments and staff at Knowl View knew youngsters were being sexually exploited by men from as far away as Sheffield.

The panel said: 'The records of individual children convey a total lack of urgency on the part of the relevant authorities to address the problem and treat the matters involved for what they were  serious sexual assaults.

'We concluded that no-one in authority viewed child sexual exploitation as an urgent child protection issue.

'Rather, boys as young as 11 were not seen as victims but as authors of their own abuse.'

It ruled there was no 'deliberate cover-up' by the authorities involved but instead a 'careless and wholly inadequate response'.

Cyril Smith is pictured with former Liberal leader Lord Steel in 1993

One former resident of Knowl View who was abused there by Smith told the Daily Mail: 'I was betrayed by the system that was meant to protect me, and so were a generation of boys.

'This has ruined people's lives  several of the former residents have killed themselves. That place was hell for us.'

Another of Smith's victims rejected the conclusion that there had been no cover-up, accusing Mr Farnell of 'desperately trying to save his own skin'.

'It's disgusting and it is a cover-up in my eyes,' he added. 'Those behind it are as guilty as Smith himself.'

Richard Scorer, a specialist abuse lawyer from Slater and Gordon, which represents eight victims of the abuse, said: 'Richard Farnell lied to the inquiry and it is now very clear that the Labour Party should have acted much more quickly to remove him as leader. He is unfit to be in public life.'

Professor Alexis Jay, chairman of the inquiry, said: 'I am deeply disturbed at the evidence of extensive abuse and the institutional responses to that abuse.'

THOSE WHO TURNED A BLIND EYE 'Told lies to inquiry' Pictured: Richard Farnell Rochdale council leader from 1986 to 1992, Richard Farnell suffered an excruciating cross-examination when giving evidence to the child inquiry last year. The Labour councillor repeatedly denied knowing anything about the abuse at Knowl View  despite it being detailed in many internal reports. The report's conclusion is damning  Mr Farnell, 59, 'lied' to the inquiry and that it 'defies belief' he was unaware of concerns about abuse. It concluded 'it was shameful that he refused to accept any personal responsibility for the lives blighted'. Yesterday he remained defiant, saying he was 'shocked' by the findings and insisting he told the truth. He apologised to those who suffered as a result of 'council failings'. 'Turned a blind eye' Pictured: Paul Rowen Successor to Richard Farnell as leader of Rochdale council after the Lib Dems gained control in 1992, Paul Rowen  later the town's Lib Dem MP  also denied knowledge of the abuse at Knowl View. However, the report states he bore considerable responsibility for the failure to tackle the scandal and was also 'prepared to blame others without acknowledging his own failures of leadership'. It concludes. 'At best, he was insufficiently inquisitive about Knowl View School, despite having knowledge of the serious problems that persisted at the school; at worst, he turned a blind eye to these problems.' Yesterday Mr Rowen, 62, branded criticism of him 'ridiculous' and added: 'I acted on everything I was asked to do.' Advertisement

Mr Farnell  who resigned as council leader after a bruising cross-examination at the inquiry hearings  last night insisted he was 'shocked' by the findings. 'I told the truth,' he said.

Mr Farnell, who is still a councillor, added: 'There is not one single letter, memo, report, council minute or briefing note addressed to me informing me about the events at Knowl View.'

Continuing to refuse to accept any personal responsibility, he said he was 'deeply sorry' for those who had suffered because of the 'unacceptable failings of the council'.

However he was immediately suspended by the Labour Party, which said in a statement that it 'condemns the abuse of children and any attempts to cover up these heinous acts'.

As the hearings were part of a statutory inquiry, Mr Farnell could potentially face perjury charges.

Last night Greater Manchester Police said it would 'look to consult with the Inquiry in relation to any possible offences'.

It carried out its own 750,000 inquiry which last year found no evidence to support claims of a cover-up.

Last night Rochdale council chief executive Steve Rumbelow said: 'While the inquiry found no evidence of cover-ups or political pacts, it is clear from its report that council officers and school staff failed in their most basic duty of care towards children.'Dong-Hyun Huh, who teaches anthropology at Grace Mission University in Fulllerton, has been charged with two misdemeanor counts of indecent exposure

A professor has been charged with indecent exposure after allegedly showing his genitals to two women last year, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.

Dong-Hyun Huh, 46, has been charged with two misdemeanor counts of indecent exposure, KTLA reports.

He is said to have pulled his pants down and showed off his genitals both in Cerritos and Asteria on September 15.

Huh is an anthropology professor at Grace Mission University in Fullerton, California.

The professor faces up to two years in jail and will have to register as a sex offender if convicted.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies are reaching out to the public to see if anyone else was victim of his alleged indecent exposure, KTLA reported.

The first alleged incident happened in Cerritos as the victim, a 34-year-old woman, was walking along the road and Huh called out to her.

She said he was sitting in his car, a white Lexus SUV, when he yelled to get her attention and then said he was lost and needed directions.

The first alleged incident happened in Cerritos as the victim, a 34-year-old woman, was walking along the road and Huh called out to her and asked for directions before exposing himself. The second allegedly happened within hours of the first when he asked a second woman for directions and masturbated in front of her

Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies are reaching out to the public to see if anyone else was victim of his alleged indecent exposure, KTLA reported

The woman said she stopped and walked over to him, at which time she claims Huh had his pants down and his genitals fully exposed.

The victims said she immediately ran off.

Within a few hours Huh allegedly exposed himself to a second woman, 19, and masturbated in front of her, deputies said.

He teaches at Grace Mission University and was described as a 'good Christian'

In both incidents the 46-year-old was sitting inside his white 2017 Lexus NX 200t, police said.

'He lured two victims to his car and asked for a certain direction,' Captain Joseph Nunez told KTLA.

The professor faces up to two years in jail and will have to register as a sex offender if convicted

'That's when he exposed himself to them.'

The professor was arrested Tuesday and is awaiting arraignment on two counts of indecent exposure. He is currently out on a $30,000 bond.

Authorities are now looking for potential additional victims, which they said is likely because he works at a school.

Nunez said he is concerned Huh became more bold over time as 'he was allowed to continue down this pathway.'

'The fact that he works in a school profession, they need to know if there was anything similar to this that they report it,' he explained.

Grace Mission University's website lists Huh as a full-time member who teaches church planting, evangelism, music and intercultural studies.

A staffer at the college told CBS Los Angeles Huh quit on Wednesday morning, but said they did not believe the allegations against him because he is a 'good Christian.'

Anyone with information is asked to contact the department at 562-860-0044 or Crime Stoppers at 800-222-8477Cyril Smith's knighthood should be annulled after the inquiry branded the decision to award him it in the first place as 'remarkable', the victims' lawyer has said.

The former Liberal MP was handed the honour in 1988 despite rumours he was a paedophile  because officials thought he should be given the 'benefit of the doubt'.

The independent report found that senior civil servants were 'unwilling' to consider that someone of his status might be a sexual predator.

Smith was recommended for the honour by David Steel  now Lord Steel  the former Liberal leader. On the disgraced MP's 80th birthday, Nick Clegg called Smith a 'beacon' and an 'inspiration'.

The Cabinet Office, which is in charge of honours policies, said it was not possible to strip a dead person of a knighthood.

The lawyer of victims of disgraced former Liberal MP Cyril Smith (pictured with Lord Steel in 1983) has called for his knighthood to be stripped from beyond the grave

The report highlights a memo written to Margaret Thatcher's then principal private secretary Sir Robin Butler.

It stated that the political honours select committee wanted to know if there was 'fire under this smoke' in relation to sexual assault allegations made against Smith in a 1979 magazine article.

Documents reveal that having been told of the 1970 decision by the Director of Public Prosecutions not to take the case forward, Sir Robin felt Smith should be given the benefit of the doubt. Mrs Thatcher duly agreed to the award.

The report adds: 'What is remarkable is the extent to which Smith was given the benefit of the doubt, a phrase that is repeated in the documents and appears to have been a general policy.'

It also expresses surprise that Smith's political career is cited as a reason for not believing victims.

'This demonstrates a significant deference to power and an unwillingness to consider that someone in a position of public prominence might be capable of perpetrating abuse,' it said.

The former Liberal MP (pictured in 1975) was handed the honour in 1988 despite rumours he was a paedophile  because officials thought he should be given the 'benefit of the doubt

'This matters because the conferring of a knighthood on Smith was to make him even more powerful.'

Lord Steel has refused to admit he made a mistake by recommending Smith for a knighthood  despite hearing allegations nine years earlier that he abused children in the 1960s.

His office had reportedly then dismissed the allegations, adding: 'All he seems to have done is spank a few bare bottoms.' Three years ago Lord Steel defended his inaction.

He said he had challenged Smith in 1979, but did not widen the probe because he led a political party and 'not a detective agency'.

He said: 'Not a single story emerged, not even a rumour emerged, about him misbehaving as an MP. If that had happened of course we would have enquired.'

Last night Lord Steel was unavailable for comment.

Last night Lord David Steel (pictured) was unavailable for comment

Richard Scorer, from Slater and Gordon, a law firm which represents eight victims, called for Smith's knighthood to be annulled.

He said: 'In the light of the report Smith should now be stripped of his knighthood so that those he abused at least have the comfort of knowing that his depravity is now recognised by the establishment which protected him for so many years.'

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: 'It's all very well for civil servants to say the knighthood died with him, but the fact is that he will be remembered in perpetuity as a knight of the realm.'

Last night Labour MP John Mann, said: 'It is extraordinary that Smith was knighted and it should be removed immediately.'

A Liberal Democrat spokesman said: 'His actions were not known to or condoned by the Liberal Party or the Liberal Democrats.'The RAF Bomber Command controlled the RAF's bomber forces from 1936 to 1968, including Squadron XV, and was responsible for the strategic bombing of Germany during the Second World War.

When the command was founded in 1936 it was only intended to be a deterrent, but the reality when war broke out three years later was very different.

Bomber command crews suffered incredibly high casualty rates. A total of 55,573 died out of 125,000 (44.4 per cent mortality rate), 8,403 were injured and 9,838 became prisoners of war.

Most who flew were very young and the vast majority were still in their late teens. Crews came from across the globe  from the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and all corners of the Commonwealth, as well as from occupied nations including Poland, France and Czechoslovakia.

It took astonishing courage to endure the conditions they faced. Flying at night over occupied Europe, running the gauntlet of German night fighters, anti-aircraft fire and mid-air collisions.

The RAF Bomber Command controlled the RAF's bomber forces from 1936 to 1968 and was responsible for the strategic bombing of Germany during the Second World War

But it was not until 1942 that the Bomber Command gained a real sense of direction, with the introduction of Air Marshal Arthur 'Bomber' Harris.

Harris was appointed as commander in chief of Bomber Command in February 1942, with instructions to start attacking German industry, much of which was located in large cities.

His objective was to destroy Germany's industrial might and create a collapse in the morale of the civilian workforce, breaking Germany's will to fight on.

Times were hard. Victory seemed distant, and chivalric notions of war fighting had been burned away in the fire of the Blitz. U-Boats were roaming the Atlantic, sinking merchant shipping in an effort to starve Britain into submission.

The prospects of success were uncertain. Morale among British workers had largely held firm in the teeth of prolonged attacks by the German Air Force.

Harris, however, firmly believed that through a combination of improved aircraft like the Lancaster and Halifax, better training and navigational aids, and a ruthless will to press the attack, Bomber Command could knock Germany out of the war.

Bomber command crews suffered incredibly high casualty rates. A total of 55,573 died out of 125,000 (44.4 per cent mortality rate), 8,403 were injured and 9,838 became prisoners of war. Pictured: Wellington Bomber air crew who took part in the raid on Heligoland

In May 1942, Harris launched his first 'thousand bomber raid' against Cologne.

The scale of the attacks shocked Germany, but the country continued to fight. Further attacks did have a devastating effect on the Nazi war economy.

Albert Speer, the German armaments minister, believed that a series of raids like that on Hamburg in August 1943, repeated in quick succession, might well have compelled Germany to surrender. But that wasn't the case.

Other more specialised operations also took place. The famous 'Dam Busters' raid of May 1943 shocked the world with its audacity, as Guy Gibson's 617 Squadron launched a daring raid on the dams surrounding the Ruhr Valley.

Other attacks, like that on the battleship Tirpitz the following year, eliminated the German navy's last major surface ship.

Raids in 1944 and 1945 against German 'V weapon' launch sites were also a crucial defensive measure, helping to limit attacks from flying bombs and rockets on British cities.

Bomber Command switched its attentions to tactical objectives in early 1944, helping to pave the way for D-Day, the allied invasion of occupied Europe.

It played a vital and highly effective role attacking infrastructure around the invasion beaches. Attacking railways, roads and other transport links created chaos behind German lines, preventing the defending forces from massing to repel the landings.

The closing months of the war saw arguably the most controversial operations, such as the raid on Dresden in February 1945.

In four huge raids by the RAF and United States Army Air Force, a firestorm destroyed the city centre and killed thousands of civilians.

It took astonishing courage to endure the conditions they faced. Flying at night over occupied Europe, running the gauntlet of German night fighters, anti-aircraft fire and mid-air collisions. Pictured: Bomber Command crews prepare for the raid on Heligoland

The planners of the raid argued the city was a vital communications hub and needed to be targeted. The critics said that Germany was well beaten and the bombing was needless.

The truth is that it was a time of total war, and ideas about the boundaries of conflict were very different than those we have today.

Bomber Command did not win the Second World War independently - but the war could not have been won without their efforts.

The RAF's attacks forced Germany to divert invaluable men, guns, aircraft and equipment to defend its airspace, effectively opening a second front long before D-Day.

The young men of Bomber Command faced dangers that today we can barely imagine, all in defence of our freedom. Their sacrifice and extraordinary courage should never be forgotten.

Source: Bomber Command MemorialMark Zuckerberg has admitted that his personal data was handed over to election consultants Cambridge Analytica.

The British company is accused of helping politicians use Facebook data to manipulate users' voting intentions around the world.

The Facebook founder made the admission on his second day appearing before the US Congress over the data scandal.

Latest estimates suggest more than 87 million users may have had their data mined by the Trump affiliated consultancy firm through 'vampire apps' like the 'This Is Your Digital Life' quiz.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that his personal data was handed over to election consultants Cambridge Analytica. The British company is accused of helping politicians use Facebook data to manipulate users' voting intentions around the world

Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, reading questions from her constituents at a hearing of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, asked Zuckerberg whether his data was 'included in the data sold to the malicious third parties'.

With a slight hesitation, Zuckerberg replied: 'Yes.'

The 33-year-old founder and CEO of Facebook, the social media giant at the centre of a number of overlapping scandals relating to how private information from its users is shared, is in Washington to face questioning from politicians.

On Tuesday, Facebook began notifying millions of people around the world, including one million Britons, that their private information may have been given to Cambridge Analytica by an app developer from Cambridge University.

A class action lawsuit filed against the firm that same day is seeking compensation for the roughly 70 million US users who were affected as 'Facebook stood idly by' while Cambridge Analytica 'sucked down' their data.

Representatives have grilled Zuckerberg on a wide range of issues around privacy, surveillance, censorship and politics, regularly asking for yes or no answers which the Facebook founder struggled to provide.

Representative Eshoo called Facebook's terms and conditions around privacy a 'minefield' and repeatedly asked Mr Zuckerberg whether he was 'aware of other data mishandlings which have not been disclosed'.

In response, he initially said no, but reiterated Facebook's new investigation into other third-party 'vampire apps' on the platform was seeking to discover if there had been any other cases of misuse.

On the topic of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, Zuckerberg admitted it would be difficult to completely eradicate such behaviour for 'as long as Russia employs people for the activity'.

Facebook will have AI tools to automatically flag and remove hate speech before it appears within five to ten years, said Zuckerberg on Tuesday (pictured). He has appeared before Congress to address mounting concerns in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal

WHAT HAS MARK ZUCKERBERG DISCUSSED WITH CONGRESS IN THE WAKE OF DATA CRISIS? Mark Zuckerberg has appeared before Congress to address mounting concerns raised in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A number of topics were discussed, from the firm's business model, user privacy and targeted ads to extremist content and hate speech. Day One During testimony before a joint hearing with the Senate judiciary and commerce committees, Zuckerberg was grilled on a range of subjects. This included: Robert Mueller Zuckerberg confirmed Facebook is 'working with' special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators as lawmakers demand answers on how Cambridge Analytica got access to 87 million users's data. He also at first revealed that Facebook had received subpoenas from Mueller's investigators - only to walk back the account under questioning, over fears he could reveal information confidential to the inquiry. Data security Lawmakers went after Facebook for recent security breakdowns, saying 'there was clearly a breach of consumer trust and a likely improper transfer of consumer data.' Zuckerberg tried to reassure Congress, saying Facebook would investigate 'every single app that had access to a large amount of information' on the site. Senators pushed the point by asking Zuckerberg where he had stayed the previous night and who had messaged during the past week, which he refused to answer. Russian exploitation Zuckerberg was asked what Facebook is doing to prevent foreign actors from interfering in US elections. The 33-year-old said Facebook was in a constant struggle to guard against Russian manipulation of the Facebook platform to influence elections in the US and elsewhere. He responded that this was one of his top priorities for 2018. Political bias Senator Ted Cruz of Texas accused Facebook of bias shutting out conservative voices, saying the firm had 'blocked' Trump-loving performers Diamond & Silk from its site. Last year Facebook limited distribution of their content, but did not shut down their page, the Wall Street Journal reported. Business model The Facebook CEO confirmed that the social network isn't planning on charging its users for the service just yet. Rumours were sparked by COO Sheryl Sandberg's comments last week, made during an interview withToday, that an ad-free Facebook 'would be a paid product.' According to Zuckerberg, Facebook will always be free  or at least, some version of it will. Hate speech Facebook will have AI tools to automatically flag and remove hate speech before it appears within five to ten years, Zuckerberg says. The company has already developed intelligent software tools to root out terrorist propaganda and will continue to develop them for hate speech, he told Congress. The company hopes to have 20,000 employees working to review security and content issues by the end of 2018, he added. Day Two Zuckerburg's data The Facebook CEO revealed that his own personal data had been included when 87 million or so Facebook users had their information improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Shadow profiles Zuckerberg said he had never heard of the term 'shadow profiles,' but admitted that Facebook collected information on non-users. Members of Congress took issue with the practice because non-users currently had to sign up for Facebook if they wanted to see what data of theirs the social network collected. Anti-conservative bias Republican lawmakers continued to grumble over Facebook's treatment of Trump-supporting sisters Diamond and Silk. Zuckerberg was asked 'What is unsafe about two black women supporting President Donald J. Trump?'. Facebook acknowledged sending a message to the sisters, prominent conservative video bloggers, deeming their content 'unsafe,' but the social network said the contents of the message were 'inaccurate.' Regulation Zuckerberg told lawmakers that regulation of his company is 'inevitable,' but that he came to Capitol Hill prepared to defend against proposals he thought went too far. New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the panel and a 30-year veteran of the House, said at the beginning of the hearing that he plans to work on legislation but is pessimistic that Congress will pass anything. Advertisement

'It's an arms race and I think we're making ground,' he said.

Politicians in the US and UK are weighing up the possibility of legislation to regulate large technology companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter which are accused of failing to regulate themselves.

In his opening statement committee chair Greg Walden quoted the company's early motto to 'move fast and break things', asking whether the company had 'moved too fast and broken too many things'.

Mr Zuckerberg said that he believes regulation of his industry is 'inevitable'.

He also told Senators on Tuesday, his first day before Congress, that Facebook will have AI tools to automatically flag and remove hate speech before it appears within five to ten years.

Zuckerberg made the comments during testimony before a joint hearing with the Senate judiciary and commerce committees.

Representatives have grilled Zuckerberg on a wide range of issues around privacy, surveillance, censorship and politics, regularly asking for yes or no answers which the Facebook (logo pictured) founder struggled to provide

Nearly all ISIS and al Qaeda content that is removed from Facebook is flagged before 'any human sees it', he claimed.

'Thats a success in terms of rolling out AI tools that can proactively police and enforce safety across the community,' Zuckerberg added.

'Hate speech, I am optimistic that over a five to ten year period we'll have AI tools that can get into some of the nuances, the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate in flagging things for our systems, but today is just not there on that.'

Commerce committee chairman John Thune asked the billionaire about the difficulties facing his firm in distinguishing between legitimate debate and hate speech.

The Menlo Park company's boss said that creating technology to tackle hate speech is more of a challenge than other forms of problematic content.

'Some problems lend themselves more easily to AI solutions than others,' Zuckerberg said.

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

The Facebook CEO also confirmed that the social network isn't planning on charging its users for the service just yet.

Among the many issues discussed in the hearing, senators hounded Zuckerberg on the possibility that the firm might require users to pay if they wish to use an ad-free Facebook.

The rumours were sparked by COO Sheryl Sandberg's comments last week, made during an interview with Today, that an ad-free Facebook 'would be a paid product.'

But, according to Zuckerberg, Facebook will always be free  or at least, some version of it will.

'There will always be a version of Facebook that is free,' Zuckerberg said during the hearing.

'It is our mission to try to help connect everyone around the world and bring everyone around the world closer together.

Zuckerberg also told Senators on Tuesday, his first day before Congress, that Facebook will have AI tools to automatically flag and remove hate speech before it appears within five to ten years

'In order to do that, we believe we need to offer a version that everyone can afford.'

During the hearing, Zuckerberg was asked repeatedly about the firm's business model, and what it might mean for users who do not want have their data shared or see targeted ads.

'Are you considering having Facebook users pay for you not to use that information?' Senator Bill Nelson asked the CEO.

But for now, Zuckerberg says this is not the firm's plan, insisting 'We want to offer a free service.'

Currently, the Facebook CEO pointed out, users have 'control over how their information is used,' with the option to turn off third-party information.

But, this means the ads it shows you may no longer be relevant to your interests.

Based on 'overwhelming feedback from community,' however, Zuckerberg says the firm found that 'people would rather have ads that are relevant than not.'

When pressed on what the business model would be in an entirely ad-free scenario, though, the Facebook CEO confirmed that this would mean users have to pay for that experience

'What Sheryl was saying is that in order to not run ads at all, we would still need some sort of business model,' Zuckerberg added.

When pressed on what the business model would be in an entirely ad-free scenario, though, the Facebook CEO confirmed that this would mean users have to pay for that experience.

'So I'm going to have to pay you' not to share information with advertisers, the senator clarified.

'Yes that's correct,' Zuckerberg said.

'But to be clear we don't offer an option today to pay to not be shown ads.'

In a later grilling by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, Zuckerberg doubled down on his statement.

When asked by Hatch how the firm could maintain a free service moving forward, the Facebook CEO said curtly: 'We run ads.'

In the hours-long hearing, Zuckerberg insisted that the firm will be stepping up its efforts to protect users' personal data.

The Facebook CEO said he is 'committed to getting this right,' after acknowledging that it was a mistake not to notify the millions of affected users back in 2015 that their data had been compromised when the firm first learned of Cambridge Analytica's activity.

According to Zuckerberg, the firm had 'considered it a closed case' after it first took action against Cambridge Analytica and 'demanded' both they and the 'vampire app' developer delete the data.

'They told us that they had,' Zuckerberg said.

'In retrospect it was a mistake that we didn't audit them,' the Facebook CEO added, when pressed on the issue.Instead of booking a plane ticket to travel, we could soon all be booking a ride on a rocket.

Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, claims rockets that allow people to travel anywhere in the world within 60 minutes will be a reality in a decade.

She made the comments during a recent Ted Talk in Vancouver where she also described Mars as a 'fixer-upper planet' and the first step to exploring more distant solar systems.

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Instead of booking a plane ticket to travel, we could soon all booking a ride on a rocket. Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, claims rockets that allow people to travel anywhere in the world in 60 minutes will be a reality within a decade

SpaceX founder Elon Musk last year annouced the latest addition to his company SpaceX's arsenal - the 'Big F***ing Rocket' (BFR) - which he said could revolutionise transport on Earth as well as in space.

The vessel would both take off and land vertically, like a space rocket, and for Earth travel, will take off from floating launchpads moored outside major cities.

It would fly most routes - New York to Tokyo, for example - in about 30 minutes, and anywhere in under an hour, and Musk says the 'cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft.'

A trip from Bangkok to Dubai would take 27 minutes, and from Tokyo to Delhi in 30 minutes, according to his calculations.

It could even take people on rapid trips around Earth, with a flight from London to Dubai taking 29 minutes, while passengers will spend just half an hour in the air on flights from London to New York.

The technology will be ready and operational 'within a decade, for sure', said Shotwell.

Gwynne Shotwell is one of the top minds behind SpaceX and she spoke at a TED conference yesterday in Vancouver. She said SpaceX will take humans to Mars 'within a decade' and they intend to explore planets further afield and outside of our solar system (file photo)

'It's definitely going to happen,' she said, interviewed onstage by TED's Chris Anderson.

'I'm personally invested in this one,' she added.

'I travel a lot, and I do not love to travel. And I would love to get to see my customers in Riyadh, leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner.'

The rocket will be bigger than any other in existence, and will take satellites to orbit, crew and cargo to the International Space Station and even lead manned missions to the moon.

Reaching speeds of 18,000 miles per hour (29,000 kmh), the BFR could carry between 80 and 200 people per trip on flights to Mars, with the rocket's first manned trip planned for 2024.

As well as terrestrial plans, Ms Shotwell said SpaceX will take humans to Mars 'within a decade'.

Whilst having a human colony on Mars in less than ten years is still remarkable, this is a far more conservative estimate than was provided by Elon Musk - a fact not unknown to Ms Shotwell.

'That's Gwynne time. I'm sure Elon wants to go faster,' she said.

WHAT IS SPACEX'S BFR? The BFR (Big Falcon Rocket) is SpaceX's newest rocket, a super powerful launch vehicle with 31 engines and the capacity to lift 150 tons into space. It has jokingly been called the 'Big F***ing rocket' by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The top part of the BFR rocket has 40 cabins, which could hold up to six passengers. The rocket would be partially reusable and capable of flight directly from Earth to Mars. Once built, Musk believes the rocket could be used for travel on Earth - saying that passengers would be able to get anywhere in under an hour. This image shows the main body tool of SpaceX's BFR (Big F***ing Rocket) next to a Tesla Model 3 saloon. The tool will be used to build the rocket's fuselage The BFR will eventually complete all missions for SpaceX, replacing its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. Musk said in 2017 he was hopeful that the BFR would be able to launch and land at last two cargo ships on Mars by 2022. 'I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and launch in about five years,' Musk said. The billionaire plans a manned mission in 2024 and claims other SpaceX's products will be 'cannibalised' to pay for it. The enormous rocket has a fuel tank that can hold 1,200 tons of liquid oxygen. At nearly 348 feet (106 metres) tall, the BFR is a truly gigantic spaceship, towering over the 229-feet-tall (70 metres) Falcon Heavy rocket. The spaceship will take off and land vertically, powered by 37 'raptor' engines, to produce a liftoff thrust of 5,400 tons, lifting a total mass of 4,400 tons. Advertisement

As well as SpaceX, Musk is also the founder and CEO of Tesla and The Boring Company. Musk has been very open about his intentions for Mars and publicly declared his plan to colonise the planet in less than five years

Agreeing with previous comments made by Musk, Ms Shotwell has ear-marked Mars as an essential route for ensuring long-term human survival.

'If something were to happen on Earth, you need humans living somewhere else,' she said. 'I think you need multiple paths to survival, and this is one of them.'

With regards to Mars as a human-occupying space, she didn't appear too enthralled by the living conditions.

'Mars is fine, but it's a fixer-upper planet,' Shotwell said.

With minimal atmosphere, reduced gravity and surface temperatures of -63C (81F) it is easy to see why living on Mars may present difficulties.

As a result, Ms Shotwell intends to continue exploring other regions of space and travelling further from Earth.

She said: 'This is the first time I might out-vision Elon.'

Musk has been very open about his intentions for Mars and publicly declared his plan to colonise the planet in less than five years.

At a symposium last month, he said: 'It's important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it's far enough away from earth that [in the event of a war] it's more likely to survive than a moon base.'

'If there's a third world war we want to make sure there's enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages.'

THE BILLIONAIRE SPACE RACE: HOW BRANSON, MUSK AND BEZOS ARE VYING FOR GALACTIC SUPREMACY Jeff Bezos in front of Blue Origin's space capsule Dubbed the 'NewSpace' set, Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk all say they were inspired by the first moon landing in 1969, when the US beat the Soviet Union in the space race, and there is no doubt how much it would mean to each of them to win the 'new space race'. Amazon founder Bezos had looked set to be the first of the three to fly to space, having announced plans to launch aboard his space company Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft on July 20, but Branson beat him to the punch. The British billionaire became Virgin Galactic Astronaut 001 when he made it to space on a suborbital flight nine days before Bezos - on July 11 in a test flight. Bezos travelled to space on July 20 with his younger brother Mark, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old physics student whose dad purchased his ticket, and pioneering female astronaut Wally Funk, 82. Although SpaceX and Tesla founder Musk has said he wants to go into space, and even 'die on Mars', he has not said when he might blast into orbit - but has purchased a ticket with Virgin Galactic for a suborbital flight. SpaceX became the first of the 'space tourism' operators to send a fully civilian crew into orbit, with the Inspiration4 mission funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman. His flight was on a Dragon capsule and SpaceX rocket built by space-obsessed billionaire, Elon Musk and took off for the three day orbital trip on September 16 - going higher than the International Space Station. SpaceX appears to be leading the way in the broader billionaire space race with numerous launches carrying NASA equipment to the ISS and partnerships to send tourists to space by 2021. On February 6 2018, SpaceX sent rocket towards the orbit of Mars, 140 million miles away, with Musk's own red Tesla roadster attached. Elon Musk with his Dragon Crew capsule SpaceX has also taken two groups of astronauts to the |International Space Station, with crew from NASA, ESA and JAXA, the Japanese space agency. SpaceX has been sending batches of 60 satellites into space to help form its Starlink network, which is already in beta and providing fast internet to rural areas. Branson and Virgin Galactic are taking a different approach to conquering space. It has repeatedly, and successfully, conducted test flights of the Virgin Galactic's Unity space plane. The first took place in December 2018 and the latest on May 22, with the flight accelerating to more than 2,000 miles per hour (Mach 2.7). More than 600 affluent customers to date, including celebrities Brad Pitt and Katy Perry, have reserved a $250,000 (200,000) seat on one of Virgin's space trips. The final tickets are expected to cost $350,000. Branson has previously said he expects Elon Musk to win the race to Mars with his private rocket firm SpaceX. Richard Branson with the Virgin Galactic craft SpaceShipTwo can carry six passengers and two pilots. Each passenger gets the same seating position with two large windows - one to the side and one overhead. The space ship is 60ft long with a 90inch diameter cabin allowing maximum room for the astronauts to float in zero gravity. It climbs to 50,000ft before the rocket engine ignites. SpaceShipTwo separates from its carrier craft, White Knight II, once it has passed the 50-mile mark. Passengers become 'astronauts' when they reach the Karman line, the boundary of Earth's atmosphere. The spaceship will then make a suborbital journey with approximately six minutes of weightlessness, with the entire flight lasting approximately 1.5 hours. Bezos revealed in April 2017 that he finances Blue Origin with around $1 billion (720 million) of Amazon stock each year. The system consists of a pressurised crew capsule atop a reusable 'New Shepard' booster rocket. At its peak, the capsule reached 65 miles (104 kilometres), just above the official threshold for space and landed vertically seven minutes after liftoff. Blue Origin are working on New Glenn, the next generation heavy lift rocket, that will compete with the SpaceX Falcon 9. Advertisement

The space exploration firm already has lucrative contracts with Nasa and other space agencies around the world.

In February, the company successfully launched the Falcon heavy rocket, which also featured Elon Musk's 2008 cherry red Tesla Roadster.

SpaceX is not the only private company aiming to make use of the last frontier.

Blue Origin, owned by Amazon owner and business tycoon Jess Bezos, is also trying to reach space.

The richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos is pursuing Blue Origin with vigour as he tries to launch his 'New Glenn' rocket into low-Earth orbit by 2020.

As well as Musk and Bezos, fellow billionaire Richard Branson has long been trying to commercialise space.

Despite his own success, the Virgin founder has conceded that Mars and its colonisation will likely belong to Musk.

'[Getting to Mars] is an incredible challenge, and I suspect Elon [Musk] will get there first.

'He's more interested in big rockets going big distances. We've been more interested in taking people to space, and satellites, slightly closer to Earth.'Apple may begin shutting down iTunes Store music downloads on March 31, 2019.

That's according to industry insiders who claim a phase-out of the service may help the firm keep up with a subscription-based streaming platforms such as Spotify.

Apple has since denied the claims, saying that they have no immediate plans to shut down the service.

However, the firm has admitted it will stop taking new iTunes LP submissions - and rumours remain that this comes ahead of a more widespread shut down of downloads in the future.

The firm's own streaming service, Apple Music, has enjoyed growing popularity with around 40 million paid subscribers.

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Apple will begin shutting down iTunes Store music downloads on March 31, 2019., according to industry insiders. They claim a phase-out of the service may help the firm keep up with a subscription-based streaming platforms such as Spotify

The sources, speaking to Digital Music News, said users would be given 'ample warning' of the upcoming phase-out.

The source also stressed that existing music downloads will always work on all Apple devices and the iTunes platform.

An Apple Music executive has previously confirmed that music downloads would be terminated, although an exact date wasn't given.

'If I'm honest, it's when people stop buying,' the executive, Jimmy Iovine, told the BBC. 'It's very simple.'

Last month, an internal e-mail, titled 'The End of iTunes LPs' was leaked to the Metro.

The email was sent two weeks ago from an address at 'The iTunes Store,' and was signed by 'The Apple Music Team.'

The email said that 'Apple will no longer accept new submissions of iTunes LPs after March 2018.

'Existing LPs will be deprecated from the store during the remainder of 2018.

'Customers who have previously purchased an album containing an iTunes LP will still be able to download the additional content using iTunes Match', the email read.

The anonymous source who leaked the email to Metro told the publication: 'It's clear that streaming is the future. Apple wants to push people to take out subscriptions.'

The news follows a leaked e-mail last month that revealed Apple will stop taking new iTunes LP submissions ahead of more widespread changes

Industry experts believe this could indicate Apple will pursue a subscription-based outlet similar to the business model of Spotify (pictured), the largest online music streaming platform in the world

While Metro reported that LPs would be removed from iTunes, Apple confirmed to tech site The Verge that existing LPs will continue to be available.

At the time, Mark Mulligan, an analyst at MIDiA Research and music industry blogger, told the Metro that the announcement was 'potential evidence' of Apple's future plans.

'This could show Apple will turn off its download store at some point,' he said.

'At some stage in the future, Apple having an iTunes music store will be as incongruous as Currys selling black and white TVs.'Advertisement

A revolutionary spaceplane that could take tourists into orbit at five times the speed of sound could be ready by 2025 thanks to a funding boost.

Dubbed Skylon, the plane will use an 'air-breathing' jet engine capable of sending it to the edge of the Earths atmosphere in just 15 minutes.

It will then switch to rocket power to stay in orbit, according to Reaction Engines Limited (REL), which is hoping to beat the likes of Nasa in building the world's first 'hypersonic' engine.

In a statement today, Oxfordshire-based REL announced a major new joint 26.5 million ($37m) investment in the technology, with contributions from Boeing and Rolls Royce.

The investment puts the aircraft's first flight on track for 2025 provided ground tests of REL's engine - set to begin in 2020 - are successful.

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The firm hopes to eventually load its engine into 'Skylon', a reusable hypersonic spaceplane that could take tourists into orbit at five times the speed of sound. The aircraft's first flight is planned for 2025 provided ground tests of REL's innovative engine are successful

REL's latest funding boost takes the total capital it has raised over the past three years to 100 million ($140m).

'Rolls Royce and Boeing - these are really big names, and it's fantastic to be in this position,' REL CEO Mark Thomas told BBC News.

'Rolls are super-positive about the technology. They want us to be independent and innovative, and to push our technology as hard as possible.

'And Boeing - that's amazing. They are the world's biggest aerospace company, have decades of expertise and future plans that, for us I'm sure, will be really exciting.'

REL is developing what it calls the Sabre engine, a turbine designed to fire aircraft from the runway to orbit in a single step.

It would work like a jet engine up to Mach 5.5 (5.5 times the speed of sound or 1.9 km per second) before switching to a rocket mode for the rest of the ascent.

REL has a number of testing milestones ahead, including further testing of Sabre's pre-cooler technology in Colorado this summer. It hopes to eventually load the hypersonic engine (top) into a spaceplane (bottom)

A revolutionary engine (artist's impression) that could power jets halfway around the world in just four hours has taken a major step forward with a new 26.5 million investment. Reaction Engines is working on a turbine that combines both jet and rocket technologies

HOW DOES REACTION ENGINES' 'SABRE' ENGINE WORK? Reaction Engines Limited (REL), based at Culham in Oxfordshire, is working on a turbine that combines both jet and rocket technologies. The Sabre engine works by burning atmospheric air in combustion chambers. It then uses the heat to turbo-charge the engine. The Sabre engine (artist's impression) works by burning atmospheric air in combustion chambers. It then uses the heat to turbo-charge the engine At the moment, rockets have to carry liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen to power them and the cost of carrying this heavy fuel is expensive. The new engine creates its own liquid oxygen by cooling air entering the engine from 1,000C to minus 150C in a hundredth of a second  six times faster than the blink of an eye  without creating ice blockages. This new class of aerospace engine is designed to enable aircraft to operate from standstill on the runway to speeds of over five times the speed of sound in the atmosphere. It can then transition to a rocket flight mode, allowing spaceflight at speeds up to orbital velocity, equivalent to 25 times the speed of sound. Advertisement

In its rocket flight configuration the aircraft could reach speeds of Mach 25, or around 5.3 miles per second (8.5 km per second).

Sabre works by burning atmospheric air in combustion chambers, creating heat that then turbo-charges the engine.

At the moment, rockets and spaceplanes have to carry liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen to power them, a heavy and therefore expensive burden.

The new engine creates its own liquid oxygen by cooling air entering the engine from 1,000C to minus 150C in a hundredth of a second  six times faster than the blink of an eye  without creating ice blockages.

The new engine creates its own liquid oxygen by cooling air entering the engine via specialised ducts (artist's impression). The air's temperature drops from 1,000C to minus 150C in a hundredth of a second  six times faster than the blink of an eye

The technology could be used in vehicles designed to deliver communications satellites or tourists to orbit at rapid speeds before returning to Earth. Pictured is an artist's impression of the Skylon hypersonic craft

The technology could be used in vehicles designed to deliver communications satellites or tourists to orbit at rapid speeds before returning to Earth.

Aircraft that fly at hypersonic speeds from point to point on Earth's surface may also employ the technology - an application that clearly interests Boeing.

The firm's investment arm, Horizon X Ventures, is fronting the new joint fund in what is its first investment in a UK-based company.

'As Reaction Engines unlocks advanced propulsion that could change the future of air and space travel, we expect to leverage their revolutionary technology to support Boeing's pursuit of hypersonic flight,' said HorizonX vice president, Steve Nordlund.

The Sabre engine works by burning atmospheric air (red) in combustion chambers (blue). It then uses the heat to turbo-charge the engine

Rolls-Royce has invested in the project before, part-funding research into an air-breathing rocket engine for Sabre's precursor - a 1980s spaceplane known as Hotol.

When the concept hit technical difficulties Rolls Royce pulled out but the company is now back as part of the new joint investment.

'We are delighted to become a strategic investor in Reaction Engines Limited, an innovative UK company that is helping push the boundaries of aviation technology,' Rolls' CTO Paul Stein said in a statement.

Aircraft that fly at hypersonic speeds from point to point on Earth's surface may also employ the technology - an application that clearly interests Boeing

'We look forward to working with REL and assisting with the development of their technology, and we plan to incorporate this technology into our own future products.'

REL has a number of testing milestones ahead, including further testing of Sabre's pre-cooler technology in Colorado this summer.

The firm will carry these out under contract with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Construction of a new test facility in Westcott, Buckinghamshire, for Sabre testing should be completed this summer, according to the company.

It is here that the company will test full Sabre cycles in 2020 with an eye to mount it onto some kind of flight vehicle in future.

The new investments will allow REL to expand its headquarters in Culham, where it already employs 160 people.

'The team here is outstanding. We have some of the most talented engineers I've ever worked with, a high percentage of whom are women engineers; and we have a great apprenticeship programme. It feels like we're a good-news story and I want to keep it that way,' said Mr Thomas.Getting depressed might seem a strange affliction for a robot, but artificially intelligent brains may also suffer from similar mental health problems to people.

That's the claim put forward by an American neuroscientist, who says that machines could even hallucinate, if not monitored correctly.

Developers will need to create software equivalents to anti-depressants, which help to control levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain, he recommends.

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Artificial intelligence and robotic brains may suffer from some of the mental health issues traditionally associated with humans. If not monitored correctly, machines could become depressed and even hallucinate, claims an American neuroscientist

Zachary Mainen works at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon and studies how the brain makes decisions.

Previously specialising in machine intelligence, he revealed his unusual theory at the Canonical Computations in Brains and Machines conference in New York.

Dr Mainen claimed that the traditional school of thought regarding the role of serotonin is misguided.

Instead of being involved in happiness and depression, he claims that people who have too little serotonin in their brains struggle to change their view of the world.

'People think of serotonin as related to happiness, but serotonin neurons appear to send a message that is not good or bad but more 'oops' or surprise,' Dr Mainen told Science.

'Treating depression through pharmacology is not so much about improving mood, but rather as helping to cope with change.

'Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, such as Prozac, can facilitate brain plasticity.'

AI will need to have its own interests and its own goals in the future. If truly autonomous machines become a reality, they will need to set their own rate of learning. They will do this by developing a serotonin substitute which depends on the rate of flow of information

WHAT IS THE NEUROTRANSMITTER SEROTONIN AND WHAT DOES IT DO? Serotonin, also known as 5-hydroxytryptamine, is a neurotransmitter - a chemical substance that transmits nerve impulses across the space between nerve cells or neurons - known as a synapse. It plays an important part in the regulation of learning, mood, sleep and helps control blood vessels. It has also been linked to anxiety, migraine, vomiting and appetite. Serotonin is the chemical which can help with feelings of low-self esteem as well as a sense of not belonging. As a neurotransmitter, once the first molecule makes its way across the synapse, the cell stops accepting any further chemicals or signals. Once the process is completed, the remaining serotonin is reabsorbed into the original neuron. Chemicals and tablets, such as Prozac, tackle depression by stopping the cell fromshutting off and not accepting any more serotonin. By keeping the avenues open for more of the neurotransmitter to pass through, it increases the strength and duration of the signal. This, at least theoretically, increases happiness. Advertisement

It is this ability to change and avoid getting stuck in a rut that is essential for both human and android mental health.

Dr Mainen explained how this can lead to depression in both humans and future robots.

He said: 'It may be that serotonin is just a biological quirk.

'But if serotonin is helping solve a more general problem for intelligent systems, then machines might implement a similar function, and if serotonin goes wrong in humans, the equivalent in a machine could also go wrong.'

This leads to people getting stuck in a rut. It is this rut that leads to depression, and which could also be an issue for robots in the future, he claims.

'Humans or machines with low serotonin or its equivalent may fail to rewire themselves adequately, getting stuck in the rut that we call depression,' said Dr Mainen.

He claims that if truly autonomous machines become a reality, they will need to set their own rate of learning.

They will do this by developing a serotonin substitute, which alters the rate of flow of information.

If the 'serotonin' rate drops too low, then the machines will experience something analogous to depression.

If the rate is too high, the AI will 'hallucinate' because it is trying to process too much new data and cannot form consistent models.

Whilst the idea of hallucinating and depressed robots sounds like science-fiction, the logic is based in human neurological processes.

'An emotional response in my view is... something that's quite central to intelligence,' Dr Mainen said.

'An autonomous AI will need to have its own interests and its own goals, and if those are thwarted it will be angry or sad in the sense of the same type of reactions that animals and people have.'The three men lived in Abusir el-Meleq, an ancient Egyptian city on a floodplain to the south of Cairo, and are estimated to have been buried some time between 780 BC and 5 AD. Their DNA was first sequenced in 2017 by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Tubingen, Germany. That genome reconstruction has now enabled researchers at Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology firm based in the US state of Virginia, to create 3D models of the mummies' faces with the help of a process known as forensic DNA phenotyping. Researchers also used heat maps (inset) to highlight the differences between the trio so they could refine the details of each individual.Pop-ups appearing in Facebook Messenger are asking European users to review their privacy settings to continue using the app.

The notification has been prompted by the strict new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ahead of laws taking force on 25 May.

GDPR is designed to bring tech firms like Google and Facebook into line amid mounting concerns over the way they collect and share private user data.

It comes as Mark Zuckerberg sat down before Congress to address issues surrounding the Cambridge Analytica scandal this week.

Latest estimates suggest more than 87 million users may have had their data mined by the firm through the 'This Is Your Digital Life' quiz.

In recent days, it also emerged that private conversations on Messenger may have fallen into the hands of the British consultancy firm - a claim the company denies.

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Pop-ups appearing in Facebook Messenger (pictured) are asking people to review their privacy settings to continue using the app, ahead of laws taking force on May 25. The notifications were prompted by the strict new General Data Protection Regulation

Initial reports of the pop-up began appearing online yesterday via Business Insider, with the notification opening when the Messenger app was accessed via smartphones and tablets.

It reads: 'Important Updates to Review. Please review your data settings by 25 May to continue using Messenger.'

Clicking on the 'Review Now' button redirects users to the settings section for the app, although some consumers claim that this didn't work.

This could suggest that, much like the 'Protecting Your Information' app launched for Facebook itself in recent days, the firm may be testing it out with a limited release before a full global roll-out.

GPDR aims to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union.

This means cracking down on how companies use and sell the data they collect on their users.

The law will mark the biggest overhaul of personal data privacy rules since the birth of the internet.

Under GDPR, companies will be required to report data breaches within 72 hours, as well as to allow customers to export their data and delete it.

The laws will be welcome news to anyone affected by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

A previously unknown disclosure about Messenger messages was buried in the fine print of a Protecting Your Information' app, created to address user concerns about the data leak.

WHAT IS THE EU'S GENERAL DATA PROTECTION REGULATION? The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a data protection law that entered into force on May 25, 2018. It aims to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). This means cracking down on how companies like Google and Facebook use and sell the data they collect on their users. The law will mark the biggest overhaul of personal data privacy rules since the birth of the internet. Under GDPR, companies are required to report data breaches within 72 hours, as well as to allow customers to export their data and delete it. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new data protection law that entered into force on May 25 Part of the expanded rights of data subjects outlined by the GDPR is the right for data subjects to obtain from the data controller confirmation as to whether or not personal data concerning them is being processed, where and for what purpose. Further, the controller must provide a copy of the personal data, free of charge, in an electronic format. This change is a dramatic shift to data transparency and empowerment of data subjects. Under the right to be forgotten, also known as Data Erasure, are entitled to have the data controller erase their personal data, cease further dissemination of the data, and potentially have third parties halt processing of the data. The conditions for erasure include the data no longer being relevant to original purposes for processing, or a data subject withdrawing their consent. This right requires controllers to compare the subjects' rights to 'the public interest in the availability of the data' when considering such requests. Advertisement

It checks whether you or your friends logged into the 'This Is Your Digital Life' quiz responsible for the data grab.

Some of the social network's 2.2 billion users have already begun to receive automatic notifications on their newsfeed as part of a gradual global rollout.

Privacy concerned Facebook users who have yet to receive the message can also access this information manually from a new section in its Help Centre site.

The messenger disclosure was buried in a new 'Protecting Your Information' (pictured) tool on the social network

Facebook slipped the previously unknown information into the fine print (highlighted in red) of the app created to address concerns over the scandal. MailOnline reporter Joe Pinkstone is among those to have had personal information shared with Cambridge Analytica

'This Is Your Digital Life' was designed by Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan's Global Science Research in 2014 to collect data on Americans.

Users who gave permission for the quiz to run also granted it permission to mine their profile for additional information, including their page 'likes', their birthday and the city they live in.

Thanks to a quirk in the way Facebook worked at the time, the app was also able to harvest similar data on a user's friends.

This was then passed on to Cambridge Analytica through its parent firm Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL).

Small print in the new 'Protecting Your Information' and related Help Centre page, which went largely unnoticed upon release, hinted at the inclusion of data from private messages in this process.

Writing in it, a Facebook spokesman said: 'A small number of people who logged into "This Is Your Digital Life" also shared their own News Feed, timeline, posts and messages which may have included posts and messages from you.'

Menlo Park firm Facebook has now confirmed to Wired that the quiz requested access to user's Messenger inboxes through a read_mailbox permission contained in its coding.

Friends that used the app 'This Is Your Digital Life' before it was removed in 2015 could have jeopardised the information of their friends to Cambridge Analytica. Many users have taken to social media in recent days after receiving automatic notifications

The ability for apps to collect information on a user's friends was phased out in April 2015, unless both people had the same app installed.

However, the read_mailbox permission didn't go out of operation until that October.

Facebook estimates that a total of 1,500 people granted This Is Your Digital Life this permission in that time.

Anyone who messaged those people or received messages from them on Facebook may be caught up in the leak, so the true number could be far higher.

However, Cambridge Analytica denies having accessed this data.

A spokesman added: 'GSR did not share the content of any private messages with Cambridge Analytica or SCL Elections.

'Neither company has ever handled such data.'

Affected users are now being automatically presented with a notice that says: 'We have banned the website 'This Is Your Digital Life,' which one of your friends used Facebook to log into.

HOW TO CHECK IF YOUR DATA WAS SHARED WITH CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA All 2.2 billion Facebook users began to receive a notification automatically at the top their newsfeed after it was launched on Tuesday, April 10, a day later than expected. Titled 'Protecting Your Information,' it contains a link to let you see what apps you use and what information you have shared with them. Affected users are automatically presented with a notice that says: 'We have banned the website "This Is Your Digital Life," which one of your friends used Facebook to log into. 'We did this because the website may have misused some of your Facebook information by sharing it with a company called Cambridge Analytica.' Users can then click on a 'See how you're affected' button to find out more as well as to remove permission for apps and websites you've logged into via Facebook to have access to your profile. For those not affected by the Cambridge Analytica incident the message reads: 'You can go to the Apps and Websites section of your settings anytime to see the apps and websites you've used Facebook to log into.' The 'Go to apps and websites' button will provide quick access to review and amend these permissions. A separate 'How can I tell if my info was shared with Cambridge Analytica?' tool will also resolve the question for you. To manually access this tool, click the link here. Users not believed to be affected will see the message 'Based on our available records, neither you nor your friends logged into "This Is Your Digital Life." 'As a result, it doesn't appear your Facebook information was shared with Cambridge Analytica by "This Is Your Digital Life".' Affected users will see a different message and they will be asked to to change their app settings, available here. This is something that is still advisable for the security conscious, removing permissions for apps you no longer need or don't recognise. Facebook is not notifying individual users of the identify of friends who may have used the 'This Is Your Digital Life' app. Advertisement

'We did this because the website may have misused some of your Facebook information by sharing it with a company called Cambridge Analytica.'

For those not affected by the Cambridge Analytica incident the message reads: 'You can go to the Apps and Websites section of your settings anytime to see the apps and websites you've used Facebook to log into.'

A separate webpage, 'How can I tell if my info was shared with Cambridge Analytica?', will also resolve the question for you.

To manually access this site, click the link here.

Users not believed to be affected will see the message 'Based on our available records, neither you nor your friends logged into "This Is Your Digital Life".

Journalist Andrew Nathanson was not impressed by the revelation that Cambridge Analytica may have his personal infromation. He said his data was shared 'because a friend used a trash app'

'As a result, it doesn't appear your Facebook information was shared with Cambridge Analytica by "This Is Your Digital Life".'

Affected users will see a different message and they will be asked to to change their app settings, available here.

This is something that is still advisable for the security conscious, removing permissions for apps you no longer need or don't recognise.

Facebook is not notifying individual users of the identify of friends who may have used the 'This Is Your Digital Life' app.

Facebook is still reeling from its worst privacy crisis in history, which saw Trump -affiliated company Cambridge Analytica use the data mined to try and influence the US presidential election.

A separate 'How can I tell if my info was shared with Cambridge Analytica?' webpage will also resolve the question for you. Affected users will see a different message to the one displayed and they will be asked to to change their app settings

The whistleblower behind the revelations about the consultancy firm says the true number affected by the scandal could be far higher than estimated.

The new tools came a day later than expected, with many criticising Facebook for a lack of communication.

In a written statement yesterday, Mike Schroepfer, chief technology officer at Facebook said: 'Starting on Monday, April 9, we'll show people a link at the top of their News Feed so they can see what apps they use  and the information they have shared with those apps.

'People will also be able to remove apps that they no longer want. As part of this process we will also tell people if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

'Overall, we believe these changes will better protect people's information while still enabling developers to create useful experiences. We know we have more work to do  and we'll keep you updated as we make more changes.'

Experts say the revelations may trigger a wave of lawsuits.

A class action lawsuit filed against the firm is now seeking compensation for the roughly 70 million US users who were affected as 'Facebook stood idly by' while Cambridge Analytica 'sucked down' their data.

Facebook says most of the users caught up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal are in the US, with more than a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and the UK.

After finding out personal information was shared without their consent, some users blamed certain types of friends

US law firm Hagens Berman filed the class-action suit with the US District Court for the Northern District of California on April 9 to represent the millions of Americans whose data were shared improperly.

Damages in this case include both the dissemination of personal information and the loss of its sales value.

It's not yet clear how much money the affected users could be compensated, though lawyers in the UK have estimated it could be upwards of 10,000 to 12,500 ($14,000 to $17,000) for some.

The amounts, however, will ultimately be determined at trial, Hagens Berman says.

In March, three users of the Facebook Messenger app sued Facebook, saying the social network violated their privacy by collecting logs of their phone calls and text messages, in the latest legal challenge facing the company.

The US lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of California seeks status as a class action on behalf of all affected users and asks for unspecified damages.

It's not clear yet if Facebook users in the US could claim similar compensation for having their data compromised as part of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

However, dispute resolution lawyer Jonathan Compton has said those affected in the UK could complain to the Information Commissioner's Office or make a claim through the civil courts on the grounds that losing their data had been 'distressing'.

WHAT IS THE LEGAL IMPACT OF THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SCANDAL? News that Trump-affiliated company Cambridge Analytica used data mined from Facebook user's to try and influence the US presidential election may trigger a wave of lawsuits, according to experts. Vanessa Barnett, a commercial lawyer and data protection expert at Keystone Law, believes it's 'very likely' we will see a slew of legal cases against the firms in the wake of the scandal. Speaking to MailOnline, she said: 'In the UK, users can take direct action for damages caused to them by a data breach  and that includes damages for distress. 'How that translates into a "pounds, shillings, pence" type number for each person would depend on the nature of the damage.' 'We have case law where the Home Office revealed personal data of asylum seekers, including potentially where they lived. Some of those individuals were awarded 12,500 ($14,000) in damages. 'It remains to be seen if the damage caused by the Cambridge Analytica scandal is comparable.' Ms Barnett says that a number of consumer rights focused groups are looking at the possibility of a class action lawsuit, a more regular feature of the US legal system than in the UK. A class action lawsuit filed against the firm in America is now seeking compensation for the roughly 70 million US users who were affected. Ms Barnett added: 'Years ago we just had Max Schrems vs Facebook, and he didnt do too bad, but now its much more in the public consciousness. 'If the mechanics to participate in a class action are easy, I can see many users joining in.' Advertisement

Mr Compton, a partner at DMH Stallard, said: 'The start point for any award might be between 10,000 and 12,500. This will vary of course if the personal information is comparatively trivial or very serious and damaging.'

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie revealed in March that the political firm had improperly collected the data of millions of Facebook users without their consent.

He previously estimated that more than 50 million people were compromised by a personality quiz that collected their data and that of their friends.

Mr Schroepfer last week upped this to around 87 million users.

And in an interview aired Sunday on NBC's 'Meet the Press,' Mr Wylie revised this number saying that it could actually be larger than 87 million.

'I think that it could be higher, absolutely,' he said.

Wylie revealed in March that Cambridge Analytical had improperly collected the data of millions of Facebook users without their consent. In an interview aired Sunday, he revised this number saying that it could be larger than 87 million

WHO ARE THE DATA VAMPIRES MINING FOR INFO ON FACEBOOK? Facebooks latest scandal involving communications firm Cambridge Analytica has served as a startling wake-up call for many users on the countless companies mining our social data. Through a feature that meant apps could ask for permission not only to your data, but that of your Facebook friends as well, the firm was able to mine the information of million of users. And, only 270,000 had given them permission to do so. In 2014, Facebook changed its rules so that apps could no longer obtain data about a persons friends unless those users had also authorized the app. Still, Cambridge Analytica is far from the only firm to have access to Facebook users data. By connecting your Facebook profile to a third-party app, youre typically also granting that app permission to access your data. You can check which apps your Facebook account is sharing data with by clicking here. To view the apps you've given permission to (as shown above), go to Settings > Apps That includes your name, profile picture, cover photo, gender, networks, username and user ID. These apps can also access your friends list, and any other public data. Once the outside parties have access to your data, they can then use it to track different types of activity. Many popular apps such as Instagram, Spotify, Airbnb, and Tinder can be connected to your Facebook account. Just weeks ago, for example, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe bragged that the company stores 'an enormous amount of information' about users, and even tracks where they go after the movies. MoviePass is also among the many apps that can be connected to your Facebook. And, it doesnt stop there. Facebook users are waking up to just how much of their private information they have accidentally handed over to third-party apps. Social media users are sharing their shock at discovering thousands of software plugins have been gathering their data Taking Facebook quizzes from third-party services, or doing image generators (such as the ever-popular What Would Your Baby Look Like, or What Would You Look Like As The Opposite Sex), also often gives outside firms access to your data. While these are usually preceded by a pop-up asking permission to access certain parts of your profile, many users have taken to clicking through without thoroughly reading what theyve just agreed to. Some users are now expressing their horror upon realizing theyve granted permission to hundreds of third-party apps. Other apps that have experienced viral popularity over the last few years, such as Facetune and Meitu, can access your Facebook data as well. Advertisement

The initial conservative estimate, Mr Wylie explained, was made based on evidence in his possession at the time, adding that The Guardian, who broke the story, published only what could be verified at the time.

Cambridge Analytica, run by former White House senior adviser Steve Bannon and billionaire campaign benefactor Robert Mercer, was hired by the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Facebook is in full damage-control mode, with Mark Zuckerberg acknowledging he's made a 'huge mistake' in failing to take a broad enough view of what Facebook's responsibility is in the world.

Zuckerberg testified before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday in two-high profile public hearings.

A number of topics were discussed, from the firm's business model, user privacy and targeted ads to extremist content and hate speech.

Zuckerberg testified before Congress (pictured) on Tuesday and Wednesday in two-high profile public hearings. A number of topics were discussed, from the firm's business model, user privacy and targeted ads to extremist content and hate speech

Around 87 million users who may have had their information shared with Cambridge Analytica will get a more detailed message explaining this, according to Facebook. According to the firm, most of the affected users were in the United States, as shown in the graph abov

During testimony before a joint hearing with the Senate judiciary and commerce committees, Zuckerberg was grilled on a range of subjects.

This included special counsel Robert Mueller's investigations, data privacy , Russian exploitation , political bias, the firm's business model and hate speech on the social network.

Zuckerberg has said Facebook came up with the 87 million figure by calculating the maximum number of friends that users could have had while Kogan's app was collecting data.

The company doesn't have logs going back that far, he said, so it can't know exactly how many people may have been affected.

Cambridge Analytica previously said in a statement that it had data for only 30 million people.

Zuckerberg took out full-page adverts in nine major US and British newspapers in late March to apologise for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In the ads, the Facebook founder vowed to clamp down on allowing third parties access to data which can be sold on.

The ads, done in simple black text against a plain white background, were headlined: 'We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can't, we don't deserve it.'

'You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014,' the apology begins.

'This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time. We're now taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again.'

'We've already stopped apps like this from getting so much information. Now we're limiting the data apps get when you sign in using Facebook.'

'We're also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected.

'Finally, we'll remind you which apps you've given access to your information - so you can shut off the ones you don't want anymore.'

'Thank you for believing in this community. I promise to do better for you.'

The apology was formally signed off by the Facebook chief.

WHAT HAS FACEBOOK DONE TO ADDRESS PRIVACY CONCERNS? Facebook is giving its privacy tools a makeover as it reels from criticisms over its data practices and faces tighter European regulations in the coming months. The changes won't affect Facebook's privacy policies or the types of data it gathers about its users. But the company hopes its 2.2 billion users will have an easier time navigating its complex and often confusing privacy and security settings. Facebook is giving its privacy tools a makeover as it reels from criticisms over its data practices and faces tighter European regulations in the coming months. This image shows how the settings will appear before (left) and after (right) the redesign Facebook says it's trying to make the controls easier to find and to give users a simpler way to access and download the data it collects on them. The announcement follows revelations that Trump-affiliated consulting firm got data on millions of unsuspecting Facebook users. Facebook is also facing criticism for collecting years of data on call and text histories from Android users. In a written statement, Erin Egan, vice president and chief privacy officer, policy, and Ashlie Beringer, vice president and deputy general counsel, said: 'Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data. This image shows a redesign of Facebook's privacy tools. The changes won't affect Facebook's privacy policies or the types of data it gathers on users, but the company hopes users will have an easier time navigating its complex settings menus Among the changes, Facebook is making data settings and tools easier to find, is introducing a new privacy shortcuts menu, and is adding tools to find, download and delete your Facebook data 'Weve heard loud and clear that privacy settings and other important tools are too hard to find and that we must do more to keep people informed. 'Were taking additional steps in the coming weeks to put people more in control of their privacy. 'Most of these updates have been in the works for some time, but the events of the past several days underscore their importance.' Among the changes, Facebook is making data settings and tools easier to find, is introducing a new privacy shortcuts menu, and is adding tools to find, download and delete your Facebook data. Advertisement

The Facebook data scandal deepened after users found the social network had harvested information including call logs and text messages.

Some users discovered the firm had been storing complete logs of incoming and outgoing calls and text messages.

Others reported that data such as contacts in their address books, social events in their calendars and even friends' birthdays had been stored.

The company says an opt-out for uploading contacts is available and users can delete all uploaded contacts by turning off the continuous uploading setting in Facebook's Messenger app.

All previously uploaded contacts are deleted when a user permanently removes their profile. Contacts will also no longer continue to be uploaded.Turtles return to the same place every year to lay their eggs by sensing the specific magnetic field of the beach where they were born, research has found.

Each beach has a distinct magnetic pattern which becomes imprinted on a turtle's brain to help them find their way back.

The findings explain how loggerhead turtles find their way back to their home nesting spot after travelling hundreds of miles out to sea.

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Turtles return to the same place every year to lay their eggs by sensing the individual magnetic field of the beach where they were born. Each beach has a distinct magnetic pattern which becomes imprinted on a turtle's brain to help them find their way back (stock)

Scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studied loggerhead turtle colonies in Florida.

They found that the marine reptiles are able to sense their 'home' beach on the Florida peninsula to lay their eggs by detecting how far north or south their beach is.

They do this by looking at the relation of the strength of the Earth's magnetic field in relation to any particular beach.

But the incredible super-power to sense the beach and its relationship to the Earth's magnetic field is not foolproof, researchers said.

Scientists found that turtles from one of the Floridian beaches were genetically more closely related to turtles hundreds of miles away, compared with animals a mere mile or two north or south.

To explain this finding, the researchers said the explanation must be that loggerhead turtles have laid their eggs on a beach that has a similar magnetic pattern.

The researchers said that 'magnetic fields are the strongest predictor of genetic similarity among nesting loggerhead sea turtles, regardless of the geographic proximity or environmental traits of nesting beaches.'

Kenneth Lohmann, professor of biology at UNC Chapel Hill said: 'Loggerhead sea turtles are fascinating creatures that begin their lives by migrating alone across the Atlantic Ocean and back.

The incredible super-power to sense the beach and its relationship to the Earth's magnetic field is not foolproof. Some turtles were more closely related to a distant population than their local neighbours. Indicating some distant beaches have similar magnetic patterns (stock)

'Eventually they return to nest on the beach where they hatched - or else, as it turns out, on a beach with a very similar magnetic field,' he said.

'This is an important new insight into how sea turtles navigate during their long-distance migrations.

'It might have important applications for the conservation of sea turtles, as well as other migratory animals such as salmon, sharks and certain birds.'

The authors of the paper, published in Current Biology, warn that their findings also suggest humans need to be careful with building anything on a beach that might confuse a turtle's magnetic sense.

Structures such as power lines, sea walls and large beachfront buildings could disrupt the magnetic field.

The findings may also have implications for other animals that sense the earth's magnetic field to navigate.It seems the #deletefacebook momentum is building.

As Facebook continues to deal with the fallout from its massive privacy scandal, more and more users are flocking from the platform.

A new survey of 1,000 American Facebook users found that 9% deleted their account due to privacy concerns in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to a study from tech research firm Techpinions.

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As Facebook continues to deal with the fallout from its massive privacy scandal, which revealed that 87 milllion users information had been shared without their knowledge, more and more users are flocking the platform

Meanwhile, 17% said they deleted the Facebook app from their phone, while 11% deleted it from other devices.

What's more, about 59% of respondents said they would not be willing to pay for an ad-free version of Facebook like the firm's executives have suggested in recent days.

'[Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg went on the record to say that thus far the #deletefacebook meme did not have much impact,' Techpinions analyst Carolina Milanesi wrote in the study.

'...These numbers might not worry Facebook too much, but there are less drastic steps users are taking that should be worrying, as they directly impact Facebook's business model'.

Zuckerberg answered questions from legislators in a pair of high-stress hearings on Capitol Hill this week.

So far, he has claimed that there's been no major drop off in users since the Cambridge Analytica scandal first erupted.

A new survey by tech research firm Techpinions reveals that about 9% of users have deleted their Facebook account. Others said they plan to use the platform less due to privacy concerns

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered questions from legislators in a pair of high-stress hearings this week. He claims the privacy scandal hasn't pushed users away from the platform

Last month, it was revealed that data from 87 million users' was harvested with their knowledge from the platform and shared with political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, which had ties to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The techpinions study reveals that many Facebook users feel that their privacy has been exploited on the site and are now taking action.

Approximately 35% of respondents said they're using Facebook less in the wake of the privacy scandal.

And 21% of those surveyed said they plan to use Facebook 'much less' in the future.

As Milanesi points out, these numbers should matter to Facebook, because if fewer people are logging into the site, that could threaten their business model.

The study also showed that it's not just the media or industry experts who are paying attention to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Roughly 40% of respondents said they were 'very aware' of the scandal, while men seemed to be more aware of it than women.

The survey showed that user trust in Facebook is waning, while 28% of users revealed that they never trusted Facebook to begin with.

WHAT HAS MARK ZUCKERBERG DISCUSSED WITH CONGRESS IN THE WAKE OF DATA CRISIS? Mark Zuckerberg has appeared before Congress to address mounting concerns raised in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A number of topics were discussed, from the firm's business model, user privacy and targeted ads to extremist content and hate speech. Day One During testimony before a joint hearing with the Senate judiciary and commerce committees, Zuckerberg was grilled on a range of subjects. This included: Robert Mueller Zuckerberg confirmed Facebook is 'working with' special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators as lawmakers demand answers on how Cambridge Analytica got access to 87 million users's data. He also at first revealed that Facebook had received subpoenas from Mueller's investigators - only to walk back the account under questioning, over fears he could reveal information confidential to the inquiry. Data security Lawmakers went after Facebook for recent security breakdowns, saying 'there was clearly a breach of consumer trust and a likely improper transfer of consumer data.' Zuckerberg tried to reassure Congress, saying Facebook would investigate 'every single app that had access to a large amount of information' on the site. Senators pushed the point by asking Zuckerberg where he had stayed the previous night and who had messaged during the past week, which he refused to answer. Russian exploitation Zuckerberg was asked what Facebook is doing to prevent foreign actors from interfering in US elections. The 33-year-old said Facebook was in a constant struggle to guard against Russian manipulation of the Facebook platform to influence elections in the US and elsewhere. He responded that this was one of his top priorities for 2018. Political bias Senator Ted Cruz of Texas accused Facebook of bias shutting out conservative voices, saying the firm had 'blocked' Trump-loving performers Diamond & Silk from its site. Last year Facebook limited distribution of their content, but did not shut down their page, the Wall Street Journal reported. Business model The Facebook CEO confirmed that the social network isn't planning on charging its users for the service just yet. Rumours were sparked by COO Sheryl Sandberg's comments last week, made during an interview withToday, that an ad-free Facebook 'would be a paid product.' According to Zuckerberg, Facebook will always be free  or at least, some version of it will. Hate speech Facebook will have AI tools to automatically flag and remove hate speech before it appears within five to ten years, Zuckerberg says. The company has already developed intelligent software tools to root out terrorist propaganda and will continue to develop them for hate speech, he told Congress. The company hopes to have 20,000 employees working to review security and content issues by the end of 2018, he added. Day Two Zuckerburg's data The Facebook CEO revealed that his own personal data had been included when 87 million or so Facebook users had their information improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Shadow profiles Zuckerberg said he had never heard of the term 'shadow profiles,' but admitted that Facebook collected information on non-users. Members of Congress took issue with the practice because non-users currently had to sign up for Facebook if they wanted to see what data of theirs the social network collected. Anti-conservative bias Republican lawmakers continued to grumble over Facebook's treatment of Trump-supporting sisters Diamond and Silk. Zuckerberg was asked 'What is unsafe about two black women supporting President Donald J. Trump?'. Facebook acknowledged sending a message to the sisters, prominent conservative video bloggers, deeming their content 'unsafe,' but the social network said the contents of the message were 'inaccurate.' Regulation Zuckerberg told lawmakers that regulation of his company is 'inevitable,' but that he came to Capitol Hill prepared to defend against proposals he thought went too far. New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the panel and a 30-year veteran of the House, said at the beginning of the hearing that he plans to work on legislation but is pessimistic that Congress will pass anything. Advertisement

When asked what it would take to regain their trust, users said they wanted to gain a better understanding of the personal data Facebook had collected and shared from them.

They also want to have more power to control what kinds of personal data is being shared with third parties like advertisers and researchers.

'It seems to me that what users are asking for is more transparency rather than more tools to manage their settings, which makes a lot of sense,' Milanesi explained in the study.

The results come as a separate survey, conducted by SurveyMonkey and Recode, revealed that Facebook is now the least-trusted major tech company.

Approximately 56% of Americans say they trust Facebook the least with handling their personal information out of all big tech firms, the study found.

Survey respondents were given the option to choose from Facebook, Google, Uber, Twitter, Snap, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Lyft, Tesla and Netflix, Recode said.

The Techpinions study also asked respondents what Facebook could do to regain the trust of its users. They said they want a better understanding of what kinds of personal data it shares

During Zuckerberg's testimony, many legislators raised doubts that the average Facebook user actually understands how their personal data is collected and shared on and off the website.

In turn, many said that users are unsure how to manage their information and change their privacy settings, making Zuckerberg's solution of introducing more 'tools' a moot point.

'Zuckerberg's response was that things are not as complicated as they seem, Facebook users know that what they share can be used by Facebook,' Milanesi explained.

'Unfortunately, it is not as simple as that as the ramifications of how the data users share is used is quite complicated and even if you understand the Facebook business model, you would be hard pushed to know how far your data goes,' she added.

Even Zuckerberg admitted that his own personal data was shared with Cambridge Analytica.

During Zuckerberg's testimony, many legislators raised doubts that the average Facebook user actually understands how their personal data is collected and shared on and off the website

Earlier this week, Facebook launched the Data Abuse Bounty program in order to find the next Cambridge Analytica. The firm is awarding up to $40,000 to people who can spot bad apps

The Facebook founder made the admission on his second day appearing before the US Congress over the data scandal.

Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, reading questions from her constituents at a hearing of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, asked Zuckerberg whether his data was 'included in the data sold to the malicious third parties'.

With a slight hesitation, Zuckerberg replied: 'Yes.'

Representatives have grilled Zuckerberg on a wide range of issues around privacy, surveillance, censorship and politics, regularly asking for yes or no answers which the Facebook founder struggled to provide.

Representative Eshoo called Facebook's terms and conditions around privacy a 'minefield' and repeatedly asked Mr Zuckerberg whether he was 'aware of other data mishandlings which have not been disclosed'.

In response, he initially said no, but reiterated Facebook's new investigation into other third-party 'vampire apps' on the platform was seeking to discover if there had been any other cases of misuse.

On the topic of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election, Zuckerberg admitted it would be difficult to completely eradicate such behaviour for 'as long as Russia employs people for the activity'.

Last month, it was revealed that data from 87 million users' was harvested with their knowledge from the platform and shared with political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, which had ties to Donald Trump's presidential campaign

WHAT ARE FACEBOOK'S 'SHADOW PROFILES'? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrived in Washington, DC on Tuesday for a pair of high-stakes hearings around the social media giant's ongoing privacy scandal. On Wednesday, the Facebook boss appeared in front of the House Energy and Commerce committee, where he was asked a variety of questions about the firm's data collection practices. Among them was a question about Facebook's so-called 'shadow profiles'. Shadow profiles refer to a library of data that the firm collects on internet users who've never had a Facebook account. It may also refer to the data that Facebook stores but doesn't make publicly available for users to see. Facebook's 'shadow profiles' have been written about extensively over the past few years. Even if you don't have a Facebook profile, the firm may still have a rough idea of who you are based on information it has gathered from Facebook users who have contacted you and have their messaging or email apps connected to Facebook. Despite shadow profiles being widely reported on, Zuckerberg initially said he had no knowledge of the existence of shadow profiles when a representative asked him about them. Despite this, the Facebook boss did admit that the firm 'collects data on people who have not signed up for Facebook for security purposes'. He added that the firm does this to 'prevent the kind of [data] scraping you were just referring to,' such as reverse searches based on information like phone numbers. New Mexico Representative Ben Lujan went on to note that if non-Facebook users want to download the data the firm has collected on them, they are directed to make an account. 'So you're directing people that don't even have a Facebook page to sign up for a Facebook page to access their data,' Lujan said. 'We've got to change that,' he added. Advertisement

'It's an arms race and I think we're making ground,' he said.

Politicians in the US and UK are weighing up the possibility of legislation to regulate large technology companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter which are accused of failing to regulate themselves.

In his opening statement committee chair Greg Walden quoted the company's early motto to 'move fast and break things', asking whether the company had 'moved too fast and broken too many things'.

Mr Zuckerberg said that he believes regulation of his industry is 'inevitable'.

He also told Senators on Tuesday, his first day before Congress, that Facebook will have AI tools to automatically flag and remove hate speech before it appears within five to ten years.Researchers at the University of Liverpool have revealed new information about the formation of Giant's Causeway.

Geoscientists identified the temperature required for geometric columns to form from cooling magma cracks.

Such columns can be seen at Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland and Devils Postpile in the US.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have revealed new information about how hot the rocks at Giant's Causeway and Devil's Postpile were when the geometric pillars that compose them were formed

Geometric columns are formed from a variety of volcanic rock types.

They take shape while the rocks contract and cool, the result of which is regular arrays of prisms or columns.

A report on the new research said: 'Columnar joints are amongst the most amazing geological features on earth, and in many areas, including Giant's Causeway, they have inspired mythologies and legends.

'One of the most enduring and intriguing questions facing geologists is the temperature at which cooling magma forms these columnar joints.'

This was the question the University of Liverpool researchers answered in a new analysis, which was published in Nature Communications.

The scientists undertook the research to learn the temperature of the rocks when they cracked apart and formed the stepping stones people can observe today.

To address this question the scientists designed an experiment to demonstrate the process of magma cooling.

As it cools, magma accumulates stress and contracts. This happens until it eventually cracks.

The researchers said in a report that the rocks at Giant's Causeway were 840 to 890 degrees Celsius when they formed the creations people observe today

The researchers used basaltic columns that were from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano for the study.

The report said: '[The scientists] designed a novel apparatus to permit cooling lava, gripped in a press, to contract and crack to form a column.

'These new experiments demonstrated that the rocks fracture when they cool about 90 to 140 degrees Celsius below the temperature at which magma crystallizes into a rock, which is about 980 degrees Celsius for basalts.

'This means that columnar joints exposed to basaltic rocks, as observed at the Giant's Causeway and Devils Postpile amongst others, were formed around 840 to 890 degrees Celsius.'

HOW OLD IS GIANT'S CAUSEWAY? Giant's Causeway takes up about four miles of the coast of Northern Ireland. About 40,000 stone pillars make up the tourist attraction, and these pillars typically include five to seven sides. According to Britannica, the site was formed 50 to 60 million years ago. It was formed during the Paleogene Period and was the result of lava creeping toward the coast but cooling after making contact with the sea. Giant's Causeway was first recorded in 1693, and it has been a point of intrigue for geologists. It is managed by the National Trust, which is a British organization in charge of preserving natural wonders. In 1986 it became a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the protected area is home to about 50 species of birds and upwards of 200 plant species. Advertisement

The report explained that the new research is central to scientists' understanding of how stable volcanic constructs are.

Additionally, the report adds to what researchers know about heat transferals within the earth.

Volcanology professor Yan Lavallee said: 'The temperature at which magma cools to form these columnar joints is a question that has fascinated the world of geology for a very long time.

'We have been wanting to know whether the temperature of the lava that causes the fractures was hot, warm or cold.

'I have spent over a decade pondering how to address this question and construct the right experiment to find the answer to this question.

'Now, with this study, we have found that the answer is hot, but after it solidified.'Apple has turned Siri into a real comedienne.

Siri has always been able to tell a joke or two, but it appears that Apple has programmed the voice assistant to be able to serve up a whole slew of new puns.

The new jokes recently started rolling out to Siri-equipped devices, according to MacRumors.

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Siri has always been able to tell a joke or two, but it appears that Apple has programmed the voice assistant to be able to serve up a whole slew of new puns

Most of the jokes are pretty cringe-worthy, but they're still likely to summon a chuckle.

To try it out yourself, say: 'Siri, tell me a joke'.

She might serve up any number of jokes, including: 'How should you address an alligator in a vest? In-vest-a-gator'.

Another example of a joke: 'What's the difference between roast beef and pea soup? Anyone can roast beef'.

Some are quite clever, such as: 'Here comes a groaner: I'm not a big fan of nesting dolls. They're so full of themselves'.

Siri also has a whole new library of knock knock jokes, which can be accessed by asking Siri 'knock knock'.

The new jokes recently started rolling out to Siri-equipped devices, according to MacRumors

Apple regularly issues updates to Siri to give the digital assistant more personality and capabilities, MacRumors noted.

She's also known to have quite the comical side, however.

Users have been known to jokingly ask Siri questions like 'What is zero divided by zero?', 'When is the world going to end?' and 'Siri, are you real?'

Siri has also been known to be a good sport when users try to address her by a competitor's name.

For example, if a user says 'OK glass' -- the term used to wake up Google's smart glasses -- Siri will respond by saying, 'very funny. I mean, not funny 'ha-ha' but funny'.

Siri may be getting even more jokes in the future, too.

Apple recently scooped up Google's former head of artificial intelligence John Giannandrea to improve the voice assistant.

Mr Giannandrea, a machine learning expert who joined Google in 2010, will report directly to CEO Tim Cook, it has emerged.

The Scottish born specialist announced that he would be stepping down from his role at the search engine earlier this month.

It is hoped his expertise can be used to make Siri smarter, as the pioneering software continues to lag behind newcomers from rivals Google and Amazon.

Apple has struggled in the AI market as of late, as competitors have surged ahead.

To try out the voice assistant's jokes, say: 'Siri, tell me a joke'. She might serve up any number of jokes, including: 'How should you address an alligator in a vest? In-vest-a-gator'.

WHAT APPLE DEVICES HAVE SIRI ON THEM? Siri can create reminders, schedule calendar events and retrieve information on restaurants and weather. Siri was launched alongside the iPhone 4s in 2011. The digital assistant can create reminders, schedule calendar events and retrieve information on restaurants and weather. Since then, Apple's digital assistant has been added to a slew of products, ranging from smartphones to tablets It was also included in Apple's first smart home speaker, the HomePod Here are some Apple products that have Siri: The iPhone X and all its predecessors

Some iPad Pro versions and the iPad Mini

The 5th generation iPod Touch

The Apple TV

Some Apple Watch versions Advertisement

Part of the reason for this is the lack of a large data pool to draw on to improve its self-learning algorithims.

This a benefit particularly enjoyed by Google, the world's largest search engine, which can use what it learns from online activity to refine it's Home assistant.

Industry sources believe that Apples ethical approach to data collection, which focuses on protecting user privacy, may be part of the problem.

Recruiting Mr Giannandrea may be a step in the right direction for improving the firm's algorithms while remaining true to this ethos.Mary River turtles, also known as the 'penny turtle', are a freshwater turtle that's indigenous to the Mary River, which is in southeast Queensland, Australia.

It was first identified by scientists in 1994 but has quickly become one of the world's most endangered species.

This, despite the fact that it was a popular pet in the 1960s and 1970s.

The short-necked turtle is quite large, with some adult specimens growing to be more than 50cm.

One of the Mary River turtle's most outstanding features is its Mohican-like hairdo that's actually just green algae.

It also has long fleshy barbels, or feelers, under its chin.

But perhaps one of its most distinctive features is that it breathes through its genitals.

The Mary River turtle is able to breathe through its bum thanks to gill-like organs in its cloaca.

The cloaca is used for both excretion and mating.

This enables the Mary River turtle to breathe under water for up to three days at a time.

Little else is known about the species' ecology and behavior, aside from its appetite.

The Mary River turtle is omnivorous, feasting on plant matter like algae, mollusks and other small creatures.55BC - Julius Caesar crossed the channel with around 10,000 soldiers. They landed at a Pegwell Bay on the Isle of Thanet and were met by a force of Britons. Caesar was forced to withdraw.

54BC - Caesar crossed the channel again in his second attempt to conquer Britain. He came with with 27,000 infantry and cavalry and landed at Deal but were unopposed. They marched inland and after hard battles they defeated the Britons and key tribal leaders surrendered.

However, later that year, Caesar was forced to return to Gaul to deal with problems there and the Romans left.

54BC - 43BC - Although there were no Romans present in Britain during these years, their influence increased due to trade links.

43AD - A Roman force of 40,000 led by Aulus Plautius landed in Kent and took the south east. The emperor Claudius appointed Plautius as Governor of Britain and returned to Rome.

47AD - Londinium (London) was founded and Britain was declared part of the Roman empire. Networks of roads were built across the country.

50AD - Romans arrived in the southwest and made their mark in the form of a wooden fort on a hill near the river Exe. A town was created at the site of the fort decades later and names Isca.

When Romans let and Saxons ruled, all ex-Roman towns were called a 'ceaster'. this was called 'Exe ceaster' and a merger of this eventually gave rise to Exeter.

75 - 77AD - Romans defeated the last resistant tribes, making all Britain Roman. Many Britons started adopting Roman customs and law.

122AD - Emperor Hadrian ordered that a wall be built between England and Scotland to keep Scottish tribes out.

312AD - Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal throughout the Roman empire.

228AD - The Romans were being attacked by barbarian tribes and soldiers stationed in the country started to be recalled to Rome.

410AD - All Romans were recalled to Rome and Emperor Honorious told Britons they no longer had a connection to Rome.

Source: History on the netPrague is the perfect choice for a weekend break, whether youre visiting as a couple, as a group of friends or with the family. The city is served by direct flights from most major airports in the UK, getting around is a breeze, and there is a fantastic array of places to stay and eat catering to all budgets.

Straddling the wide Vltava River, Prague is one of Europes most charismatic capitals. Having suffered much less damage in World War II than other cities in the region, it has an abundance of well-preserved Baroque, Gothic, Rococo and Art Nouveau architecture lining its medieval streets, as well as a number of striking modern structures. Its long outgrown its old reputation for stag weekends and average food, and with new five-star hotels and an array of fancy restaurants is now the sixth most-visited city in Europe. Whatever kind of trip youre looking for, Prague delivers.

Our top tips ahead of your trip to the Czech capital

Getting to Prague and getting around

Pragues Vaclav Havel Airport is served by direct flights from most major airports in the UK. Low-cost carriers include Ryanair, easyJet, Wizzair, jet2.com and Flybe, or theres also British Airways and Czech Airlines. Theres no train or metro service into the city; the Airport Express bus runs to Hlavni nadrazi (Central Station) every half hour, alongside cheaper public buses.

The city has an integrated metro, tram and bus system, with timed tickets allowing you to transfer between modes of transport as needed. Visit the public transport authority website DPP to help plan a trip. You can also buy 24-hour and 72-hour tickets, but if youre only planning on making a few journeys, the basic one-hour ticket will probably suffice. Buy them from Tabak stores, from the yellow vending machines near metro entrances and bus/tram stops, or via the SEJF mobile app.

Take a ride on the no. 22 tram for a quick and easy way to see the sights. The tram follows a route past several famous landmarks  including Namesti Miru (Peace Square), Karlovo namesti (Charles Square) and Prazsky hrad (Prague Castle)  and you can hop on and off as you please. The no. 9 tram is also useful for visitors, as it links the main railway station to Wenceslas Square and intersects with the no. 22 tram at the National Theatre.

The top places to stay

For a slice of romance mixed with contemporary style, check yourself into the design-focused Emblem Hotel in the city centre. If you can drag yourself away from the rooftop Jacuzzi, youre only a three-minute walk from the Old Town Square and around the corner from the Jewish Quarter.

Many of the big luxury brands are in evidence here too; the Mandarin Oriental occupies several historic buildings in the handsome Mala Strana district, and the swish Four Seasons has views of Charles Bridge and Prague Castle.

One of the top hotels in Prague is the five-star Augustine, also in Mala Strana. This former monastery is still home to a community of Augustinian friars, as well as boasting a double-height cocktail bar, a cellar brewery bar featuring original 17th-century stalactites, and Cubist-inspired rooms. The lovely spa includes treatments based on some of the monks ancient recipes.

At the other end of the scale, Prague is awash with quirky guesthouses and good-value hostels and hotels for those travelling on a budget. The U Medviku-Brewery Hotel has vast beamed guest rooms and its own microbrewery, as well as a restaurant dating back to 1466. Other good options include eco-friendly Mosaic House  which has both shared and private rooms  and the charming 16-room Pension U Lilie, set on a peaceful street just a few moments from the 16th-century Klementium and its spectacular Baroque library.

Relax and unwind in the haven that is the Emblem Hotel

The best places to eat and drink

If you came to Prague in the early 1990s, you may well have come away thinking that the citys dining scene consists of little more than pork, dumplings and sauerkraut. But things have changed dramatically. Today Prague is influenced by global food trends as much as any other city, with new restaurants, speciality coffee shops, delis and bars opening all the time.

Head to La Degustation Boheme Bourgeoise for a special-occasion meal. Serving traditional Czech cuisine including a seven-course tasting menu, its one of only two Michelin-starred restaurants in the city. The other is Field in the Old Town, where chef Radek Kasparek offers uncompromising modern food based on seasonal ingredients amidst rural-chic decor, whether a la carte or as part of four-course lunch or 10-course dinner tasting menus.

For more down-to-earth dining, options are plentiful. The Lokal pub chain has five funky locations throughout the city, offering freshly prepared Czech classics made with regional ingredients, alongside draught beers straight from the tank.

Speaking of beer, you cant come to Prague and not sample some of the best craft brews in the world. In the lively Zizkov neighbourhood, BeerGeek Bar & Pivoteka boasts 32 beers on tap as well as the largest collection of bottled beers in Prague.

But the nightlife scene encompasses more than just stouts, sour ales and dark lagers. Try the stylish Bankers Bar, a speakeasy-style venue within Hotel Hastal Prague on Hastalska in the Old Town, with cocktails inspired by famous bank robbers.

The Charles Bridge in Prague at sunrise

The sights you mustnt miss

Get your bearings by starting your Prague explorations in the Old Town. This part of the city dates back to the 9th century CE and is home to some of Pragues must-see attractions, including the Old Town Hall and the iconic Astronomical Clock. The atmospheric Jewish Quarter, or Josefov, sits between the Old Town Square and the Vltava River. Home to six synagogues and several monuments, it can be discovered on an Old Town and Jewish Quarter Walking Tour.

Charles Bridge connects the Old Town to the Mala Strana district, and along with Prague Castle its the citys most recognisable icon. Spanning the Vltava River, the 14th-century cobblestoned structure with its 16 arches and 30 Baroque statues of religious figures is pedestrianised and thronged with tourists in daylight hours, as well as painters and street-food vendors. The best time to visit is at dawn, to catch the sunrise. But if you cant bear to drag yourself out of bed that early, the Charles Bridge is also particularly beautiful at night, when the illuminated outline of Prague Castle forms a stunning backdrop.

Prague Castle is the largest medieval castle in the world and the most important monument in the Czech Republic. Comprised of several different buildings, it includes churches, state apartments, viewing towers, art galleries and courtyards.

Take the funicular to Petrin Hill, the highest point in Prague, then climb 299 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower-inspired observation tower for top-notch views of the city. The hill itself is one of Pragues largest green spaces, and a great spot for a picnic on a summers day. You can also take a river cruise under Charles Bridge and through the city lock, passing famous attractions including the National Theatre and Prague Parliament along the way.British Airways owner International Airlines Group (IAG) has confirmed that it is exploring a potential acquisition of low-cost carrier Norwegian Air Shuttle.

IAG said in a stock market announcement that it has acquired a 4.61 per cent stake in the airline, which is 'intended to establish a position from which to initiate discussions with Norwegian', including the possibility of a full offer for the firm.

IAG added, however, that 'no such discussions have taken place', and the company hasn't decided whether it will make an offer.

British Airways owner International Airlines Group (IAG) has confirmed that it is exploring a potential acquisition of low-cost carrier Norwegian Air Shuttle

In a statement, the Oslo, Norway, based company said it had 'no prior knowledge of this acquisition', adding it had 'not been in any discussions or dialogue with IAG about the matter'.

'Norwegian believes that interest from one of the largest international aviation groups demonstrates the sustainability and potential of our business model and global growth,' it said.

Norwegian Air has expanded rapidly over the last 12 months, ordering new aircraft to serve a raft of new routes.

The firm has shaken up the long-haul market by offering flights at knockdown prices.

Some of its most popular deals have included 69 flights to New York, Providence and Hartford in the United States, though its cheapest U.S fare at the moment is around 120.

As well as British Airways, IAG also owns Spanish low-cost airline Vueling and recently launched a budget long-haul operator dubbed Level.

As well as British Airways, IAG also owns Spanish low-cost airline Vueling and recently launched a budget long-haul operator dubbed Level

Shares in Norwegian Air rocketed 18 per cent in Oslo following news of IAG's interest. IAG shares were flat.

Norwegian Air carries over 30 million passengers a year and last year struck an agreement so easyJet customers could access its long-haul routes.

It has also explored a long-haul flight deal with Ryanair, but talks between the airlines collapsed.

The firm put its hat in the ring to pick up bust rival Monarch's landing slots at Gatwick.Advertisement

Its not easy to reach the former silver mining town of Real de Catorce, but if youre a fan of isolated, Wild West-style ghost towns, then its worth the effort.

The tiny Mexican village, which sits 2,743 metres (9,000ft) up in the Sierra de Catorce range in San Luis Potosi state, attracts hardy travellers keen to experience its eerie energy and Westworld ambience.

To reach it means a drive up a hair-raisingly steep 17-mile cobblestone road and a journey along a narrow 1.5-mile-long tunnel. Austrian student Georg Kirchtag went there recently to live out his childhood dream of being a cowboy and told MailOnline Travel all about the time-warp experience.

Real de Catorce sits 2,743 metres (9,000ft) up in the Sierra de Catorce range in San Luis Potosi state

The town attracts hardy travellers keen to experience its eerie energy and Westworld ambience

The only way to access the village is along a 17-mile cobblestone road and then through a long tunnel, pictured

The 23-year-old, a student at the University of Innsbruck School of Management, said: It was just incredible.

You go through the tunnel and its just like an opening to another world. You just feel like you are going back in time.

You feel really isolated there. There is no real way to get out there quickly.

There are no chain stores like 7-Eleven because there is no possibility for a big truck to get to the town and actually bring products.

There are just small little stores that sell what they have brought in themselves.

You dont see any branding or big signs, everything is privately owned and you kind of feel like you go there and its yours to explore.

You feel the rich history and in every corner there is a small story for you to find.

Austrian student Georg Kirchtag went to Real de Catorce to live out his childhood dream of being a cowboy and he told MailOnline Travel all about the time-warp experience. The best way of getting around is on horseback and Georg saddled up for a tour of the mysterious village, pictured

The Wild West of Mexico: The village has over 1,000 residents, but many parts of it lie in ruins

On the way out of the city centre to Pueblo Fantasma, Georg saw houses in ruins. In the distance is the Church of the Immaculate Conception

Georg said: 'You feel really isolated there. There is no real way to get out there quickly'

Georg continued: You go around the town and you see a lot of ruins, fallen-down buildings and some buildings that are still kind of intact but they are empty and nobody is living there anymore.

There is just this small main square around the church where everything happens but still around there are ruins. You can definitely feel that there are not a lot of people there.

With transport around the semi-abandoned village virtually non-existent, Georg and his friends sought the help of a tour guide and embarked on an exploration of the ghost-town on horses.

He said: We took a car to get there but the roads are really steep and like cobble-stone and they were really slippery.

If you dont have an SUV or something pray that you will get to your hotel or Airbnb.

The best thing to do would be to leave your car at the parking lot near the exit of the tunnel and from there just walk.

Georgs first destination was the deserted settlement of Pueblo Fantasma, which translates as ghost-town in Spanish, and lies around a mine to the south-east of Real.

He said: Its half an hour by horse and its a really steep trail.

Its actually kind of scary because the horses are slipping sometimes even though they are used to it and you go up there and there is this really small settlement that is completely deserted. It looks like the set of a western movie.

Real de Catorce isn't necessarily easy to find, but the rewards for lovers of ghost towns are huge

Real de Catorce was once a silver-mining town but when the price of silver plummeted, mines closed, and the city became something akin to a ghost town

Neigh-sayers: Georg's tour group looks down upon Real from their trusty steeds

You cant believe that its really there.

You can either go there by yourself of you can get a guide from the centre of town and they will take you there with their horses.

The following day Georg rode to Cerro del Quemado, a spiritual settlement believed by the local indigenous people, the Huichols, to be the birth place of the sun.

The location is marked by three concentric stone circles and in the middle of the circle is a fireplace where people give offerings to the sun.

The ghost-town experience did not end there, however, because five minutes from the circles up on a hill, Georg encountered a Huichol shaman at a chapel, who offered to give him and his friends a cleansing ritual.

Georg rode to Cerro del Quemado, pictured, a spiritual settlement believed by the local indigenous people, the Huichols, to be the birth place of the sun. The location is marked by three concentric stone circles and in the middle of the circle is a fireplace where people give offerings to the sun

A very bumpy ride down to the Chihuahuan Desert on the roof of a Willy, old jeeps that were used to transport the miners from the train station to the city

Georg said: You are inside the chapel looking at the altar and you have the shaman right next to you.

He had a stick with feathers on it and he was chanting.

He always touched the altar with the end of the stick and then he touched a part of your body.

There was a small chapel near Cerro del Quemado where a shaman, pictured, offered Georg and his friends a cleansing ritual

At first he did a general cleansing and then at the end he asked us to make a wish and concentrate on what we wanted or needed to get rid of.

It felt like he touched you with the end of the stick and then moved the stick away from you to get rid of the energy.

Georg added: I had no idea before coming here how beautiful the country is and how lovely the people are.Holiday searches for Peru have surged after the South American country featured in one of the final episodes of the latest series of Masterchef.

Last night's episode on BBC1 saw Greg Wallace, John Torrode and the remaining contestants head to the capital city, Lima.

There, the final four discovered the essence of local Peruvian food, immersed themselves in Lima's culinary scene and then worked at one of the worlds best restaurants, Virgilio Martinezs 'Central', located in Lima.

The ancient ruins of Machu Picchu, one of the most visited tourist attractions in Peru. Holiday searches to Peru have surged after it featured in one of the final episodes of Masterchef

Following the show, tailor-made holiday specialist Travelbag reported a massive 1,204 per cent increase in searches on its Peru web page when compared to the daily average.

And marketing director of the travel company Paul Hopkinson wasn't surprised people had been captured by the destination.

He said: 'With more people than ever prioritising the incredible cuisine on offer in a destination as a deal breaker when planning their next holiday, its no surprise to see that MasterChef viewers of the show have been inspired to go online to search for the perfect tailor-made destination experience at an affordable price.

'Peru has over 5,000 years of culinary history, and the wealth of its lands and cultural diversity gives the country a tremendously varied palate.

The four Masterchef finalists travelled to Lima to learn more about the city's diverse culinary scene

Lima's main square and cathedral church. Will the city see an increase in British holidaymakers?

THE TOP TOURIST ATTRACTIONS IN PERU Machu Picchu

The Inca Trail

Historic Cusco

The Nazca lines

Plaza de Armas

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'With the destination firmly on the gastronomic map, along with direct flights from the UK to Lima, there are more reasons than ever to visit this incredible country.'

However, Masterchef isn't the only show to influence tourism trends.

Holiday price comparison website TravelSupermarket saw an 84 per cent increase in visitors looking for trips to the Maldives following the latest installment of reality show Sam and Billie Faiers: The Mummy Diaries.

The episode saw the former Towie favourites take their partners and children to the tropical destination to explore the sandy beaches and crystal clear waters.

And earlier this month Kiwi.com saw a 529 per cent increase in flight searches to Barcelona from the UK following a one-off Towie special, which saw the Essex clan visit the Spanish city.

A World Travel Market survey, meanwhile, said TV hits such as Love Island, filmed in Majorca, and Ex On The Beach, set in Crete, have fuelled a rise in traditional European package holidays.

The popularity of Sir David Attenborough's programme Blue Planet II is thought to have led to an increased demand for 'sustainable' holidays in 2018.He's the hunky Australian comedian and star of The Project, who has just tried his hand at modelling.

And Tommy Little sent fans wild with his steamy shots after he posted them on his Instagram account this week.

In the steamy snaps, the 33-year-old is seen stripping down to his underwear to reveal his toned torso.

Scroll down for video

Does Tommy Little have a belly button? Fans go wild over The Project star's steamy underwear snap...but notice something unusual about his toned torso

Causing a stir: Fans immediately gushed about how good the TV star looked in the images, however some bizarrely questioned whether Tommy actually had a belly button

Belly button mystery! Others asked the same question, with another joking: 'Where is the belly button, was he born in a test tube laboratory'

Fans immediately gushed about how good the TV star looked in the images, however some bizarrely questioned whether Tommy actually had a belly button.

'Where's your belly button?,' one fan remarked under a snap of Tommy in his underwear.

Others asked the same question, with another joking: 'Where is the belly button, was he born in a test tube laboratory.'

Most comments about the incredibly hot shots were unsurprisingly positive.

'I mean you were already gorgeous but damn! Looking great,' one fan gushed.

Lucky for fans, Tommy shared several of his modelling snaps, including a black and white image of himself sitting on a car bonnet wearing in jeans and an open shirt.

He is also seen shirtless and wearing spectacles in another, as well as melting hearts while posing with a puppy.

Hot: Tommy shared several of the modelling snaps on his social media page, including a black and white image of himself sitting on a car bonnet wearing in jeans and an open shirt

Steamy: He is also seen shirtless and wearing spectacles in another

Puppy love: He also poses with an adorable puppy in another

Meanwhile, Tommy's Project co-stars also spoke about his 'missing' belly button live on air this week, with Carrie Bickmore commenting on the show on Tuesday, 'It's weirding me out!'

She added that 'everyone is asking' if Tommy has a belly button.

Baffled: Meanwhile, Tommy's Project co-stars also spoke about his 'missing' belly button live on air this week, with Carrie Bickmore commenting on the show on Tuesday, 'It's weirding me out!

Meanwhile earlier this month, single star Tommy claimed he had a 'cheeky pash' with Davina Rankin from Married At First Sight, when she was filming the show and still 'married' to Ryan Gallagher.

Tommy revealed on Today Extra that bikini model Davina has blocked him on Instagram.Hugh Jackman has sent a heartfelt message of support to a 10-year-old girl who pleaded for help after getting death threats from school bullies.

The Hollywood superstar told Cassidy Warner she is 'strong, funny and beautiful inside and out' in response to a now-viral video she posted detailing her harrowing ordeal in school.

'Hi Cassidy... I'm Hugh. I want you to know you're loved, special & smart,' the father-of-two, 49, wrote on Facebook on Wednesday.

'I want you to know you're loved, special and smart': Hugh Jackman sent a heartfelt message to a bullied schoolgirl, 10, who pleaded for help after getting death threats

He added: 'You're strong, funny & beautiful both inside and out. BULLYING IS NOT OK.

'Please never stop asking for help. You will find it from people and places you never thought possible. I'm your friend.'

The video first appeared on Cassidy's Facebook page last month, when the fourth-grader, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, held up signs describing her experience at her elementary school.

Cassidy says she's been bullied since first grade in the heartwrenching selfie video.

'One day during recess, a group of kids grabbed my purse off a teacher, and spit on it and me,' one sign read.

Devastating: The Hollywood superstar told Cassidy Warner she is 'strong, funny and beautiful inside and out' in response to a now-viral video she posted detailing her harrowing ordeal in school

Horrifying: Cassidy revealed in the video that she's been spat on, hit and had her hair pulled

Horrifying: The brave student added that the group of bullies made death threats

Support: After watching the video, Hugh wrote: 'You're strong, funny & beautiful both inside and out. BULLYING IS NOT OK. Please never stop asking for help'

She goes on to say she's been spat on, hit and had her hair pulled. She says whenever she sits at a lunch table other kids leave.

'The group of kids always come up to me during recess, trying to fight me. They hit me, kick me, pull my hair, push me, step on me, spit on me,' she said.

'Kids dont even want to go near me. Whenever I sit at a lunch table, the kids get up. They threaten to kill me and they tell me to kill myself.

'Theres four of them and only one of me. I feel so alone, I feel like I have no-one, it hurts.'

Anti-bullying stance: He continued in the emotional post: 'You will find it from people and places you never thought possible. I'm your friend'

Family man: Cassidy's appeal no doubt struck a chord with Hugh, who has two adopted children - Ava, 12, and Oscar, 17 - with his wife Deborra-Lee Furness (all pictured in 2009)

Cassidy's mother reposted the video after her Facebook account was shut down this month.

Her father tells the Scranton Times-Tribune that John Adams Elementary School has changed her lunch period and recess in response.

He added that he first saw the video on Facebook, telling ABC News: 'It just devastated me. I don't know how to explain how it made me feel... even talking about it I get choked up.'

Cassidy's appeal no doubt struck a chord with Hugh, who has two adopted children - Ava, 12, and Oscar, 17 - with his wife Deborra-Lee Furness.

He gushed over Deborra-Lee on Wednesday as he took to Instagram to share a celebratory post on their 22nd wedding anniversary.

The actor shared a beach-side selfie of him and Deborra, 62, on the special day, as he declared he loved her a 'gazillion times around the world.'

United: It comes after Hugh wrote a gushing tribute to wife Deborra-Lee Furness on Wednesday as they celebrated their 22nd wedding anniversary with an ageless throwback snap

Happy pair: In the post the Greatest Showman star admitted he loves his wife 'a gazillion times around the world', after tying the knot 22 years ago (above in 1998)

Hugh and Deborra were inundated with congratulatory messages from the star's 17m followers, with the snap showing the couple have barely aged a day since tying the knot in 1996.

In the caption, Hugh declared his love for Deborra has only gotten stronger over the years, admitting it was love at first sight when they first met on-set of the ABC drama Correlli in 1995.

He wrote: 'I believe in life we need to see and truly be seen by the most important people in our lives.

'Deb, from day one, we had that. 22 years later it only gets deeper. You and the kids are the greatest gift I will ever receive. I love you a gazillion times around the world.'

Since marrying 22 years ago, the couple went onto adopt two children, son Oscar and daughter Ava.The alfresco Stella McCartney H.E.A.R.T. Brunch 2018 was held at a private Los Angeles residence this Wednesday.

One of the guests was Isla Fisher, who exuded cowgirl chic while holding a straw hat and slipping into a frilly white knee-length dress with a high collar.

The 42-year-old, who once dished to Movies Online about how she 'rode horses and had a very outdoorsy life' as a child in Perth, popped on platform sneakers.

Posing up a storm: The alfresco Stella McCartney H.E.A.R.T. Brunch 2018 was held at a private Los Angeles residence this Wednesday, welcoming such guests as Isla Fisher

Accessorizing with cat-eye shades, the Confessions Of A Shopaholic star posed amid a display of clothes and bags by Paul McCartney's daughter.

Isla was stag at this event, but when she swung by the Vanity Pair Oscar Party last month she had been accompanied by her husband Sacha Baron Cohen.

The couple married in Paris in 2010 and have three children - daughters Olive, 10, and Eula, seven, as well as son Montgomery, three.

Isla's forthcoming movie releases include Tag, a comedy that also stars Ed Helms, Hannibal Burress, Jon Hamm, Rashida Jones and the scrumptious Jeremy Renner.

The Confessions Of A Shopaholic actress exuded cowgirl chic, holding a straw hat and slipping into a frilly white knee-length dress with a high collar

Helmed by Jeff Tomsic, who also directed last year's TV special T.J. Miller: Meticulously Ridiculous, the film is due for a theatrical release June 15.

This year will also see the release of The Beach Bum, which is written and directed by Spring Breakers' Harmony Korine and stars Isla opposite Matthew McConaughey.

She is also due to star opposite Keanu Reeves in a comedy-drama called The Starling, in which they play a married couple whose infant daughter has died.

Up-and-coming Mark Harris' screenplay was featured on The Black List, according to a Deadline article announcing that Keanue and Isla were in talks to be in the film.

The movie, which IMDb lists as in pre-production, is helmed by Dome Karukoski, the Finnish director of a forthcoming J.R.R. Tolkien biopic.

Entitled Tolkien, the movie stars Nicholas Hoult as the author and Lily Collins as his wife Edith, whom he was married to for 55 years until her death in 1971.She rose to fame on Australia's Dancing With The Stars before building her profile on the US version of the show.

But Kym Herjavec (nee Johnson) is now facing a new challenge: motherhood.

The 41-year-old is expecting twins with Canadian Shark Tank investor Robert Herjavec, 55, and is ready to give birth at any moment.

'We're so blessed it happened to us': Dancing With The Stars pro Kym Johnson (left) has discussed first-time motherhood as she awaits the birth of her twins with Robert Herjavec

'I feel like a walking belly at the moment,' the Sydney-born dancer told Who.

'I've only got a couple more weeks and I could go at any time now. I'm feeling great and it's just very exciting.'

For Kym, becoming a first-time mother at 41 is a 'blessing' she has waited a long time for.

'I feel like a walking belly at the moment': Kym told Who magazine on Thursday, 'I've only got a couple more weeks and I could go at any time now. I'm feeling great and it's just very exciting'

The Los Angeles-based mum-to-be explained meeting her husband Robert later in life makes her baby joy all the more special.

'I think it's the most beautiful thing and I was always hoping that it would happen for me,' Kym said. 'We're so blessed that it actually happened to us.'

Kym and Robert are expecting a pigeon pair - a boy and a girl - and are planning to bring them home to Australia for holidays.

'I was always hoping that it would happen for me': Kym revealed that meeting her businessman husband Robert Herjavec (left) later in life makes her baby joy all the more special

Kym told News Corp earlier this year she wants her children to be educated Down Under.

'I'm going to have my hands full. We were talking about possibly coming back when they start school,' she said. 'I want my kids to know they're Australian.'

The twins will join Robert's three children from his previous marriage - Skye, Caprice and Brendan.She was crowned Queen of the Jungle on I'm A Celebrity last year.

And Georgia Toffolo, 23, made sure she stayed in the spotlight as she led the glamour at Avenues Myths & Legends Cocktail launch party in London on Wednesday evening.

The Made In Chelsea star showed off her slender figure in a pair of chic white flares as she teamed them with a wild ruffled leopard print blouse.

Wild thing!: Georgia Toffolo, 23, made sure she stayed in the spotlight as she led the glamour at Avenues Myths & Legends Cocktail launch party in London on Wednesday evening

Georgia accessorised her look with a pair of heels, which were hidden under the long trousers, as well as a mini leather crocodile patterned briefcase.

The This Morning presenter styled her blonde locks into a voluminous curly blow-dry.

While she opted for a glamorous slick of make-up, which included eye shadow, plenty of bronzer and a glossy pink lipstick.

Stylish: The Made In Chelsea star showed off her slender figure in a pair of chic white flares as she teamed them with a wild ruffled leopard print blouse

Cute: Georgia accessorised her look with a pair of heels, which were hidden under the long trousers, as well as a mini leather crocodile patterned briefcase

Volume: The This Morning presenter styled her long blonde locks into a voluminous curly blow-dry for the star-studded cocktail event

Glowing: She opted for a glamorous slick of make-up, which included eye shadow, plenty of bronzer and a glossy pink lipstick

The bubbly blonde appeared in her usual cheery spirit as she strutted down the pavement and beamed for photographers.

Georgia was joined by the likes of Britain's Next Top Model star Victoria Clay, presenter Charli Fisher, MIC co-star Oliver Proudlock and Chris Hughes' reported 'girlfriend' Emily Blackwell.

Victoria showed off her enviable curves in a VERY busty display as she wore a plunging black bodysuit teamed with yellow culottes.

Star-studded: Georgia was joined by the likes of Victoria Clay, Charli Fisher, Oliver Proudlock and Emily Blackwell at the glamorous event

Happy: The bubbly blonde appeared in her usual cheery spirit as she strutted down the pavement and beamed for photographers

Beaming: Georgia smiled with Fae Williams at the bash

Taxi! The blonde beauty stepped into her taxi at the end of the night

Stylish: Victoria teamed the plunging black bodysuit with a pair of mustard yellow cullotes, with slits at the sides

Adding height to her frame, the model added a pair of black platform heeled boots and a bright orange fur coat.

Victoria styled her signature red locks into a curly and chic hairdo.

Meanwhile, Emily - who has been linked to Chris recently, left little to the imagination in a sheer top with flowers on it and a revealing black bra.

Sky-high: Adding height to her frame, the model added a pair of black platform heeled boots and a gold chained handbag

Stylish: Victoria dressed for the unpredictable April weather as she layered her outfit with a bright orange fur coat

Gorgeous: Victoria styled her signature flame-haired red locks into a curly and chic hairdo for the swanky cocktail event

Chris Hughes' new girlfriend?: Emily Blackwell - who has been linked to Chris Hughes recently, left little to the imagination in a sheer top with flowers on it and a revealing black bra

Stylish: The Instagram sensation teamed the ensemble with a pair of black slit trousers, matching tuxedo-style jacket, silver jewellery and heeled sandals

Elegant: Emily completed her look by styling her brunette locks into a sleek swept back hairdo and a rose gold themed slick of make-up

Bed time? Nicola Hughes stepped out in a pyjama-inspired ensemble

Walk this way: She added inches to her petite frame as she slipped on a pair of pointed nude heels

Style savvy: Fae (L) and Sophie Habboo showcased their signature style at the event

The Instagram sensation teamed the ensemble with a pair of black slit trousers, matching tuxedo-style jacket, silver jewellery and heeled sandals.

Emily completed her look by styling her brunette locks into a sleek swept back hairdo and a rose gold themed slick of make-up.

Meanwhile, Charli cut a more casual figure in denim dungarees, an oversized camel coat and black trainers.

While Oliver also opted for a relaxed look in white jeans, an oversized white t-shirt and a black aviator jacket.

Casual: Charli cut a more casual figure in denim dungarees, an oversized camel coat and black trainers for the London cocktail event

Picture perfect: Emily posed with Proudlock and Toff

Chilled: Oliver also opted for a relaxed look in white jeans, an oversized white t-shirt and a black aviator jacket

He completed his look with his trademark necklace and glasses, while he added a pair of stylish trainers.

Both Emily and Victoria have been in the headlines recently as they continue to mix in the showbiz circuit.

Emily's reported romance with Love Island star Chris appeared to be confirmed by Lottie Moss on Wednesday.

The half-sister of veteran model Kate Moss admitted the pair were in regular contact after looking close in an Instagram post shared by Chris on April 4.

Moving on: Chris Hughes, 25, is reportedly 'seeing' Made In Chelsea star Emily Blackwell after his explosive Olivia Attwood split (pictured far left)

Heating up: Emily's reported romance with Love Island star Chris appeared to be confirmed by Lottie Moss on Wednesday who revealed he was 'speaking' to her friend

Talking to The Sun Online, she said: 'He is speaking to my friend. He was in London, he was passing through, so he just came and said can I get a drink with you guys, so it was nice to meet him and speak to him.'

While Victoria was pictured partying with Marcel Somerville at Nobu Hotel, East Shoreditch, London last Sunday, while his girlfriend Gabby worked away in Japan.

The former Blazin' Squad rapper, 32, cracked a beaming smile as he chatted to the flame-haired stunner, before wrapping an arm around her as they posed for a friendly group shot with DJs JJ and Coco at their Orange Soda Sundays event.

Marcel and Victoria arrived and left separately with their individual groups of friends, while a representative for Marcel told MailOnline: 'She (Victoria) just grabbed a photo with him last night. Gabby and Marcel are still strong and in love.'The blossoming romance between Bachelor In Paradise stars Tara Pavlovic and Sam Cochrane has caught everyone by surprise.

And the 28-year-old nanny has hinted that her boyfriend may even propose during the final Rose Ceremony.

Speaking to OK! magazine, Tara said: 'I'm just really enjoying getting to know Sam and I really like him. I quite possibly am falling in love.'

'I'm falling in love anything is possible!' Bachelor In Paradise's Tara Pavlovic (pictured) has dropped a MAJOR hint that Sam Cochrane proposes during the final Rose Ceremony

As their on-screen relationship gets stronger by the episode and rumours of an end-of-season proposal intensify, the Gold Coast local hinted that 'anything is possible'.

She explained that a Rose Ceremony proposal from Sam is certainly a possibility, adding that they both want the same things in life.

'It's such early days for anyone to be making these decisions, but who knows what people are going to be feeling in the moment,' she teased.

Falling in love: The 28-year-old nanny has hinted that her boyfriend Sam (pictured) may even propose during the final Rose Ceremony

Don't call it a comeback! After his less-than-favourable portrayal on The Bachelorette last year, Sam's quirky romance with Tara has made him an unlikely fan favourite on Bachelor in Paradise

On Sunday's episode of Bachelor In Paradise, Tara and Sam took their friendly banter to the next level with a passionate kiss.

Tara even jokingly suggested: 'Wanna go back to my hut? No! I'm kidding. I'm so joking.... No, you can come!'

Earlier this week, a 'source' told Woman's Day that reality TV lovebirds were 'at it like rabbits' during filming at the Mango Bay Resort in Fiji.

Locking lips: On Sunday's episode of Bachelor In Paradise, Tara and Sam took their friendly banter to the next level with a passionate kiss

'Both Sam and Tara would openly brag to the others about what they'd got up to the night before and didn't hold back on the details,' claimed the source.

'Tara would joke she and Sam had been 'clapping' in the shower the night before.'

Bachelor In Paradise continues Sunday at 7:30pm on Network TenIt was promoted as 'the most dramatic Rose Ceremony ever seen in paradise'.

And Wednesday's episode of Bachelor In Paradise didn't disappoint, with Michael Turnbull giving his rose to Lisa Hyde, despite his friend Luke McLeod courting her.

Michael, 37, made the shock decision and instantly burst into tears afterwards, with the camera crew rushing after him in a dramatic moment.

Better run, boys! The moment Bachelor In Paradise's camera crew frantically chase a tearful Michael Turnbull after he storms out of the 'trainwreck' Rose Ceremony

'I'm not going to play the safe option anymore, I've done it for too long,' Michael announced as he made his controversial decision to confirm his feelings for Lisa.

'I almost feel like I'd be selling out, if I didn't do what I wanted to do. The last couple of Rose Ceremonies I've given roses to girls I've had sort of a connection with.

'I'm not gonna do that anymore. I'm aware of repercussions, I get it,' he dramatically declared as he handed the rose to Lisa, who instantly accepted it.

Shock betrayal: Wednesday's episode of Bachelor In Paradise didn't disappoint, with Michael Turnbull (left) giving his rose to Lisa Hyde - despite his friend Luke McLeod (right) courting her

As the camera panned to a shocked Luke, who had been building a bond with Lisa, Michael ran out of the ceremony in tears, realising what he had done to his 'friend'.

'Oh, I'm a dog, mate. I f**ing dogged my mate,' he exclaimed, with his concerned co-star Jarrod Woodgate offering him a shoulder to cry on.

With Sam Cochrane describing the situation as 'an absolute trainwreck', the Paradise camera crew quickly followed after Michael to film his breakdown.

Drama! With Sam Cochrane describing the situation as 'a trainwreck', the Paradise camera crew quickly followed after Michael to film his breakdown. Pictured with Jarrod Woodgate

'Osh, I just need a minute mate,' Michael was heard saying to host Osher Gunsberg, as Jarrod left him to mope outside.

'Oh my God, this is intense,' offered a shocked Keira Maguire - who, due to Michael's decision, was given Luke's rose and in turn survived another day on the show.

Meanwhile, a stunned Lisa burst into tears as she watched her former flame Luke choose Keira and her new admirer Michael flee the ceremony.Jesse Williams' estranged wife Aryn Drake-Lee filed court documents for more child support on Wednesday.

The Grey's Anatomy star had been ordered to pay $50,695 per month in January, but Aryn's documents claim the amount 'falls way short of covering expenses' for their daughter Sadie, four and son Maceo, two, according to TMZ.

Aryn claims 'she's paying 100% of the kids' bills right now' and needs the amount to be pushed to $73,369 per month.

Legal woes: Jesse Williams' estranged wife Aryn Drake-Lee filed for more child support; (pictured February)

The documents also state that Jesse can afford the support increase 'since he makes at least $250k per Grey's Anatomy episode'.

Aryn is also asking for '$200k to cover her legal fees' after Jesse agreed to pay $60,000 in January for her lawyers.

The January ruling had granted Jesse joint physical custody of the children, but increased the actor's child support from $33,000 to the $50,695.

Jesse was gven custody of his children every other weekend, two days each week, as well as on Father's Day.

Needs more dough: Aryn claims 'she's paying 100% of the kids' bills right now' and needs the amount to be pushed to $73,369 per month; (pictured January)

The former couple called it quits last April after five years of marriage and were granted joint legal custody of their children last summer.

In January the actor was accused of introducing his children to his new girlfriend before the agreed upon time by his ex according to a report from TMZ.

Drake-Lee had stipulations that laid out parenting procedures she wanted Williams to adhere to, including agreed-upon nap times, agreeing to 'age appropriate viewing content,' and that 'neither parent will introduce a new intimate partner until the relationship has endured at least six months.'

Real estate broker Drake-Lee says that Williams has been taking their two children to his new girlfriend's house since October and that they are so familiar with her that they call her 'Mama C.'

Lawyer price: Aryn is also asking for '$200k to cover her legal fees' after Jesse agreed to pay $60,000 in January for her lawyers; (pictured in 2013)

She also claims that the actor had taken the youngsters on a short vacation to Big Bear Mountain in California with his new ladylove who has yet to be named.

Drake-Lee believes this is all a violation of their custody agreement in which it states that each of them have to wait at least six months into a new relationship before the significant other can be introduced to the children.

Williams was dating his Grey's Anatomy co-star, 37-year-old Minka Kelly but they reportedly split in January. Kelly repeatedly denied she had anything to do with the split.She filed for divorce from her husband of 14 years, Eric Dane, in February.

But on Wednesday, Rebecca Gayheart was all smiles as she attended the Stella McCartney H.E.A.R.T Brunch at a private residence in Los Angeles.

The brunette beauty looked ready for spring in a pale pink floor length gown that featured a low V-cut in the front.

Stepping into spring: Rebecca Gayheart was all smiles at the Stella McCartney H.E.A.R.T Brunch in Los Angeles on Wednesday

The 46-year-old actress stepped forward in floral slip-on shoes on the sunny Southern California day.

Showing off her natural beauty, the stunner wore barely-there makeup complemented with a pink-tinted lipstick.

She kept her personal belongings close as she held on to a large brown leather tote and kept mirrored circle-rimmed sunglasses over her eyes.

Pretty in pink: The brunette beauty rocked a pale pink floor length gown that featured a low V-cut in the front

Opting for bohemian accessories, Rebecca sported an assortment of colorful beaded bracelets and gold pendant earrings.

Her outing comes two months after news that she and 45-year-old husband Eric Dane had filed for divorce, wrapping up a 14-year marriage that produced two daughters.

Gayheart is seeking spousal support  according to The Blast at the time  and joint legal and physical custody of their two daughters, Billie, eight, and Georgia, six.

Dazzling: Opting for bohemian accessories, Rebecca sported an assortment of colorful beaded bracelets and gold pendant earrings

Fun with friends: The actress took to Instagram to share some snaps with her gals during the designer brunch

The split came as a surprise, as they were seen on a romantic holiday getaway in late December in Hawaii.

The actress took to Instagram to share some fun snaps with friends during the designer brunch.

But later in the day, it seems she swapped fashionable outfits and changed into a black-and-white gingham dress.

Rebecca shared the post on social media, writing: 'Checkered @seavees @thehopibag #mood #checkedout #humpday.'

'Checkered': Later in the day, the starlet swapped looks, choosing to wear a black-and-white gingham dress

While at the Stella McCartney event, the actress was joined by an A-list crowd.

Friday Night Lights alum, Minka Kelly, donned Stella McCartney denim shoes at the midday event.

The Jane the Virgin guest star also flashed her toned midriff in a knotted white T-shirt paired with high-waisted, cuffed khakis for the fashionable festivities.

Star-studded: Friday Night Lights alum, Minka Kelly, attended the event in Stella McCartney denim shoes and a white crop top

Confessions of a Shopaholic alum: Isla Fisher looked summery in a white Victorian-necked dress, matching Stella McCartney creepers, and a chic straw hat

Confessions of a Shopaholic alum Isla Fisher looked summery in a white Victorian-necked dress, matching Stella McCartney creepers, and a chic straw hat.

The 42-year-old SAG Award nominee - who's married to Sacha Baron Cohen - was joined at the brunch by her gal pals Love actress Liz Carey and event planner Jo Gartin.

The flame-haired funnywoman will next play the role of Anna in Jeff Tomsic's star-studded comedy Tag, which hits US theaters June 15 and UK theaters July 6.

Nineties queen: Saved by the Bell alum Elizabeth Berkley also dazzled the event in a white blazer and strappy black heels

Saved by the Bell alum Elizabeth Berkley dazzled at the outdoor event in a white blazer and strappy black heels.

Whole Beauty author and lifestyle blogger Shiva Rose defied her 49 years in a leopard-print shirt dress and black sandals.

Also enjoying the sun-filled soiree was designer Jenny Chase wearing a coral eyelet maxi-dress with a striking turquoise necklace.When it comes to talking about the bedroom, Prue Leith is no prude.

The 78-year-old Great British Bake Off judge has been open about her active sex life with her 'toyboy' husband  aged 71.

But even she was stunned by the goings-on she saw while on holiday in Gambia, which she said was like a 'Tinder dream for geriatrics'.

Miss Leith has also made no secret of the colourful love life she enjoys with her husband Mr Playfair

After visiting the West African country with husband John Playfair this year, she revealed they were shocked when they arrived to find singles 'offering to be a 'friend'.

Writing in today's Spectator magazine, she said: 'It's a kind of real-life Tinder dream for geriatrics.

'The beach was full of elderly white European women happily strolling along hand in hand with beautiful young Gambian men.

'And triumphant 70-something white men living the dream, cocktails or beer glass in hand, lounging about with glamorous black girls on the double beach beds.

'If John or I walked alone on the beach, within seconds a charming if over- eager 'beach bumster' of the opposite sex would tag along, offering to be a 'friend'.'

Prue's fellow Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood has told how she used a dancer's pole at a nightclub

However, she added: 'There were some geriatrics who, like us, hadn't come in search of sex.

'Many had been going to the country for years and loved it.

'But those faithful returners mostly thought they wouldn't be doing so for much longer.

'Since British Airways stopped flying there, most of the tourists are on all-in holiday packages, and the hotels are going down market, attracting customers in search of the all-you-can-eat-three-times-a-day deal.'

The television cookery presenter, pictured, has often spoken about dating, revealing last month that she often receives requests on Twitter, as well as other 'strange' messages.

Miss Leith has also made no secret of the colourful love life she enjoys with Mr Playfair. Last summer, she revealed how she and her husband were still very active in the bedroom.

And her fellow Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood has told how she used a dancer's pole at a nightclub.

Unconventional from a young age, at 21 she began an affair with Rayne Kruger, the husband of her mum's best friend. After a 13-year fling, they wed and stayed together until his death at 80 in 2002.Ferne McCann was reportedly forced to take her baby on an eight-hour trip to visit her acid attacker ex Arthur Collins in prison, after he asserted his legal right to see his daughter Sunday.

The Mirror reports the former TOWIE star, 27, made the 440 mile round-trip with her five-month-old baby from Essex to maximum security prison Full Sutton, in York, where Collins is serving a 20 year sentence for throwing acid at nightclubbers.

Ferne had previously visited Collins at Belmarsh Prison, South-East London when Sunday was two weeks old, telling him he would never see either of them again.

Claim: Ferne McCann was reportedly forced to take her baby on an eight-hour trip to visit her acid attacker ex Arthur Collins in prison, after he asserted his legal right to see his daughter Sunday

Jailed: The Mirror reports the former TOWIE star, 27, made the 440 mile round-trip with her five-month-old baby from Essex to maximum security prison Full Sutton, in York, where Collins (above) is serving a 20 year sentence for throwing acid at nightclubbers

But it was claimed her ex took legal action to get access to Sunday.

A source told the website: 'Ferne sought legal and professional advice, and it was a difficult decision she had to make.

'It has been a bitter pill for her to swallow. But she knows this is what her life will be like now, whether she likes it or not.'

MailOnline has contacted Ferne's representative for comment.

Devoted mother: Ferne had previously visited Collins at Belmarsh Prison, South-East London when Sunday was two weeks old, telling him he would never see either of them again, but it was claimed her ex took legal action to get access to Sunday

Collins, 25, was convicted of GBH and ABH against 14 people after he sprayed party-goers with acid following an argument at the Mangle E8 nightclub in east London during the Easter weekend last April.

The attack left 22 clubbers hospitalised and scarred for life, with most requiring skin grafts and one recalling the moment she felt her skin 'come off' in court.

Ferne has since embraced life as a single mother.

Speaking to Fabulous last year, she admitted the situation surrounding her pregnancy had been 'completely out of her control' - and that she is already concerned about how she will tell her little girl of the attack in the future.

Going it alone: A source said: 'It has been a bitter pill for her to swallow. But she knows this is what her life will be like now, whether she likes it or not'

Over: Collins, 25, was convicted of GBH and ABH against 14 people after he sprayed party-goers with acid following an argument at the Mangle E8 nightclub in east London during the Easter weekend last April

Looking back at the horrific incident, she said: 'It's been the most difficult chapter of my life to date and the hardest thing I hope I'll ever have to face.

'It was all completely out of my control. The only thing I can control now is how I raise my daughter.'

While Ferne has remained silent about her relationship with Arthur, it was recently claimed she finally feels ready to talk about her devastation in the second series of her reality show, First Time Mum.They're always ready to party up a storm, as neither of them are afraid to flaunt their incredible physiques in an array of risque ensembles.

And Sophie Kasaei, 28, and Bianca Gascoigne, 31, were sure to turn heads in their form-fitting attire as they braved the rain and headed to Sheesh Restaurant in Essex on Wednesday.

The Geordie Shore star slipped on a two-tone pink and purple minidress, while her fellow reality star opted for a more daring ensemble as she showed off her ample cleavage in a lace bralet.

Racy display: Bianca Gascoigne flaunted her ample assets in a lace bralet and blazer as she headed to a restaurant with Geordie Shore's Sophie Kasaei

Bianca's stylish all-black ensemble fitted her lithe frame well, as she wrapped a chic blazer over her racy top and black shorts.

The Celebrity Love Island star styled her long blonde locks into loose waves, and she enhanced her pretty features by brushing on a rich palette of make-up.

She added a pop of colour to her look as she accessorised with an aqua blue handbag, and she stepped out in black heels to give her some extra height.

Looking good: Bianca's stylish all-black ensemble fitted her lithe frame well, as she wrapped a chic blazer over her racy top and black shorts

Night out: Sophie, 28, and Bianca, 31, were sure to turn heads in their form-fitting attire as they braved the rain and headed to Sheesh Restaurant in Essex

Sophie was sure to make a statement with her bright purple boots, which perfectly matched her outfit of the day.

Her brunette tresses were brushed to the side, and she highlighted her features with dark brows and smokey eye shadow.

The reality star offset her ensemble with a black bag, and she kept her accessories to a minimum to ensure that all eyes were on her figure-hugging outfit.

Standing out: Sophie was sure to make a statement as she slipped on a two-tone pink and purple minidress

Stunning: Bianca styled her long blonde locks in loose waves, and she enhanced her pretty features by brushing on a rich palette of make-up

Sophie put on a cosy display with Pauly D earlier this month, as the pair were spotted leaving a star-studded cast dinner holding hands.

Paul draped his arm affectionately over Sophie's shoulder which showed the pair had already struck up a close connection.

They left in high spirits as they enjoyed some alone time away from their glamorous co-stars following their night out.

Glam: Sophie offset her ensemble with a black bag, and she kept her accessories to a minimum to ensure that all eyes were on her figure-hugging outfit

Meanwhile, last month Bianca's picturesque holiday in Dubai was met with complications as she was struck down with a rare case of tonsillitis.

Bianca was rushed to hospital after she was diagnosed with the uncommon illness, known as Quinsy, during her sun-soaked getaway.

Luckily she had a speedy recovery, and was then able to treat her fans to a series of racy snaps as she shared photos of her glamorous bikinis.She recently hosted her annual star-studded Easter lunch.

And on Wednesday, Discovery Networks announced that Martha Stewart, 76, will be joining the cast of their Food Network show Chopped.

'The returning iconic competition series ups the ante this year, when the one-and-only Martha Stewart joins the cast as a judge,' said the network in a statement.

Domestic goddess: On Wednesday, Discovery Networks announced that Martha Stewart will be joining the cast of their Food Network show Chopped; pictured on the network's other series The Kitchen

The lifestyle network's statement went on to say that Stewart would be 'bringing her food expertise, impeccable credentials and discerning critique to the judges table.'

According to PEOPLE, it's not yet known if Stewart will be replacing one of the show's current group of judges, which consist of Alex Guarnaschelli, Amanda Freitag, Georffrey Zakarian, Aaron Sanchez, Maneet Chauhan, and Marc Murphy.

The lifestyle mogul has previously appeared on Chopped spinoff show, Chopped Junior.

Best buds: 'The returning iconic competition series ups the ante this year, when the one-and-only Martha Stewart joins the cast as a judge,' said the network in a statement. Seen here with Snoop Dogg in 2016

The Martha host held her annual lunch on Easter Sunday, at her Bedford, New York residence.

Among the guests present at the event was Blake Lively, who was accompanied by daughter James.

Her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and the couple's youngest child, Ines, one, did not appear to be present of the holiday party.They got engaged during a screening of his latest film Yardie at Rio cinema, Dalston, in February.

And Idris Elba, 45, and his new fiancee Sabrina Dhowre, 29, proved they're still smitten as they attended the launch of the transformed BBC Television Centre for Soho House White City in London on Wednesday evening.

The stylish couple cut a casual display as they made their way to the star-studded party linking arms.

Smitten: Idris Elba, 45, and his new fiancee Sabrina Dhowre, 29, attended the launch of the transformed BBC Television Centre for Soho House White City in London on Wednesday

Idris looked dapper in a pair of navy blue trousers with a matching v-neck buttoned up shirt.

The Luther star layered his stylish ensemble with a tartan-collared quilted vest and a navy blue jacket.

Idris accessorised his chic look with a pair of bottle green Adidas trainers and a simple chain necklace.

Loved-up: The stylish couple cut a casual display as they tried to keep a low profile as they made their way to the star-studded party linking arms

Stylish: Idris looked dapper in a pair of navy blue trousers with a matching v-neck buttoned up shirt, as he accessorised his chic look with a pair of bottle green Adidas trainers

Meanwhile, Sabrina put on an elegant display in a black sheer shirt with a cami dress underneath.

The model layered her look with a white 3/4 length sleeved jacket over the top.

While she accessorised the entire ensemble with thigh-high black heeled boots, silver jewellery and a detailed clutch bag.

Sabrina showed off her impressive engagement ring as she linked her husband-to-be's arm in sweet snaps.

Gorgeous: Meanwhile, Sabrina put on an elegant display in a black sheer shirt with a cami dress underneath as she showed off her impressive engagement ring

The loved-up couple joined the likes of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Davina McCall, Alan Carr and Jemima Goldsmith for the star-studded bash.

Idris and Sabrina, who won Miss Vancouver in 2014, made their red carpet debut as a couple in September 2017.

But the newly engaged lovebirds were said to have been dating for seven months before going public with the throes of their love.

The wedding bells may come as a surprise to many as Idris got down on one knee just six months after he vowed he would never walk down the aisle again.

Romantic: They recently got engaged during a screening of his latest film Yardie at Rio cinema, Dalston, in February

He told ESSENCE magazine in July 2017: Am I ever gonna get remarried? I dont think so. Yeah, I dont think so. Marriage is an institution of sorts. And Ive done it. Its not for everybody. Its not my lifes calling.

The director gave a rare glimmer into his private life when he confessed falling in love while making a movie was 'pretty special' in recent months.

He was filming The Mountain Between Us alongside Titanic's Kate Winslet in Canada when he found himself smitten with beauty queen Sabrina.

Of their romance, he told People's 'The Jess Cagle Interview': 'Falling in love while making a movie about falling in love is pretty special.

'It definitely got noticed because I try to keep my personal life different. I think it's an interesting space, especially for her. She'd never done a red carpet before and I tend not to do that. It was nice actually.'He was dumped by Sophie Monk on The Bachelorette because he was 'too young' for her.

But despite his age, incoming Bachelor In Paradise star Apollo Jackson has his heart set on finding a 'life partner'.

The 25-year-old told OK magazine he is 'prepared to propose' to a lucky lady from the reality series, should he form a bond with them.

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Looking for love! Bachelor In Paradise star Apollo Jackson, 25, has his heart set on finding a 'life partner'

The hunky magician, who will make his Paradise debut during Sunday's episode, said his failed experience on The Bachelorette confirmed he was ready to settle down.

'I learnt so much about myself and what I really want and what I'm looking for,' he described.

'And I realised I do really want that life partner, so that made it easier and cleaner in my head going into Paradise with what I was looking for,' he continued.

'I learnt so much about myself and what I really want and what I'm looking for,' he described of his time on The Bachelorette

Although he is one of the younger contestants looking for love, Apollo is adamant he is 'ready and willing to take it all the way' if he finds 'the one' on the Fijian resort set.

When asked if he would consider popping the question to a female co-star, he confirmed he 'would be prepared to propose.'

'I am looking for someone I can marry, buy our first house together and then become a young dad,' he affirmed.

Prepared: The hunky magician, who will make his Paradise debut during Sunday's episode, said his failed experience on The Bachelorette confirmed he was ready to settle down

'I am looking for someone I can marry, buy our first house together and then become a young dad,' he affirmed

Apollo is already proving a hit with the ladies on the show, with co-star Elora Murger reportedly infatuated with him from the moment he stepped into 'paradise'.

The stud's arrival marked a split between former friends Elora and Simone Ormesher, with Elora claiming Simone was 'very jealous' of the chemistry between the pair.

And while she may have already left the program, co-star Laurina Fleure said she was 'spewing' she didn't 'get to have a flirt' with Apollo during her time on set.

Ready: When asked if he would consider popping the question to a female co-star, he confirmed he 'would be prepared to propose'

He's a hit! Apollo is already proving a hit with the ladies on the show, with co-star Elora Murger (pictured right) reportedly infatuated with him from the moment he stepped into 'paradise'She recently returned from filming her new movie Paradise Hills in Barcelona.

And Eiza Gonzalez looked happy to be back in Los Angeles as she was spotted running errands in a revealing ensemble on Wednesday.

The Mexican actress, 27, opted for a bra free excursion as she showcased her taut tummy in a skimpy white halter top.

Stunner: Eiza Gonzalez was spotted running errands in Los Angeles on Wednesday

Daring to impress, the Baby Driver star flaunted her toned arms and enviable abs in the barely-there top.

Her gorgeous gams were wrapped in loose camouflage leggings as they hung low off her lithe waist.

She kept her trademark brunette tresses long and relatively loose with a simple pin back drop knot.

The brunette beauty is set to star with Emma Roberts and Danielle Macdonald in Paradise Hills, the directorial debut of Spanish helmer Alice Waddington.

Flaunt it: Daring to impress, the Baby Driver star flaunted her toned arms and enviable abs in the barely-there top

The project is a sci-fi thriller written by Brian DeLeeuw, Nacho Vigalondo and Sofia Cuenca.

Eiza will play Amarna, a tough Paradise Hills resident who might be Emma Robert's character Uma's only hope in escaping the nightmare.

The Mexican beauty returned from Barcelona filming the new project amid rumours she is dating actor Josh Duhamel, 45.

Leggy lady: Her gorgeous gams were wrapped in loose camouflage leggings as they hung low off her lithe waist

According to Us Weekly, the pair met in early February after Jennifer Lopez's pre-Super Bowl concert, and hit it off.

An insider said: 'They drank and partied together until very late. After, Josh reached out to a mutual friend and asked for Eiza's number.'

The new couple have apparently been secretly dating ever since, and have tried to keep it 'on the down-low.'

'They definitely have a connection because theyve been FaceTiming and texting nonstop while she was in England working,' the source added. 'He's telling her hes never met anyone like her before.'

Josh, who is best known for his role in Transformers, was previously married to pop star Fergie, but the pair announced they were splitting after eight years in September 2017.Carson Kressley and Thom Filicia will be back on Bravo more than a decade after Queer Eye aired its last episode.

The 48-year-old fashion expert and interior designer Thom, 48, will reunite for a new home design series with the working title Thom And Carson Project, the Bravo cable network announced on Wednesday.

Carson and Thom starred with fellow Fab Five members Ted Allen, Kyan Douglas and Jai Rodriguez on Bravo's Queer Eye from 2003 to 2007.

Bravo star: Carson Kressley, shown in February in Los Angeles, will return to Bravo on a new show with fellow Queer Eye star Thom Filicia

Queer Eye was revived by Netflix with a new Fab Five and it premiered in February to positive reviews.

Their new show was among 10 new series that will be joining Bravo's lineup.

The new shows include a docuseries set in Mexico City with the working title Mexican Dynasties; an untitled San Antonio project; Married To Medicine: Los Angeles; Welcome To Waverly, working titled Unanchored, working title Backyard Envy, Buying It Blind, Flipping Exes and Sweet Home.

The 10 new series will join 20 shows that were renewed including: Vanderpump Rules, Married to Medicine, Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles, Don't Be Tardy, Flipping Out, Shahs of Sunsent, Southern Charm Savannah, Million Dollar Listing New York and The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Beverly Hills, Orange County, New Jersey and Dallas.

Home design: Thom, shown in February at the Queer Eye revival premiere in Los Angeles, will team up with Carson for a new home design series

Fashion cares: Carson was spotted on Wednesday at the Fashion Cares show in NYC

They will join the scripted drama anthology Dirty John that Bravo ordered in January.

The series based on the Los Angeles Times podcast stars Eric Bana as the late John Meehan and Connie Britton as Debra Newell.

Bravo with the new programs was expanding its original programming to seven nights, according to an article by The Hollywood Reporter.

Scripted anthology: Eric Bana, shown last month in Los Angeles, will star in Bravo's new scripted anthology series Dirty John that will join 10 new programs and 20 renewals

The cable network owned by NBCUniversal finished last quarter as the fifth-highest advertising-supported network among the coveted 18-49 demographic.

'Our brand offers a unique environment for our viewers to escape with drama that is fun and funny, yet far from their normal reality,' said Jerry Leo, exec vice-president program strategy, lifestyle networks and production at Bravo.

'By doubling down on noisy formats and big characters, expanding our lifestyle programming in the design and home space, and offering seven nights a week of originals, well be able to serve our fans more of what they crave while also attracting new viewers with our wide scope of programming,' he added.Mother's Day is just around the corner.

So it's no surprise fashion blogger and business owner Rozalia Russian is getting nostalgic about her firstborn son Kingston.

The stunning social media star posted a throwback photograph of her cradling her gorgeous baby boy during a photo shoot for Kookai's 2017 Mother's Day campaign, which she took part in last year.

'Can't believe this was almost 12 months ago!' Fashion blogger Rozalia Russian shares throwback photo of her cradling her baby boy in stunning photo shoot for Mother's Day

'Mother's Day 2017 campaign! Can't believe this was almost 12 months ago!' she wrote in the caption, along with the hashtag '#lifeismovingtoofast'.

In the images, Rozalina stuns in a cream off the shoulder dress from the French label as she cuddles and looks lovingly at her second child.

She also flashes her giant diamond engagement ring from husband, Melbourne entrepreneur Nick Russian.

A dream in cream: In the images, Rozalina stuns in a cream off the shoulder dress from the French label as she cuddles and looks lovingly at her second child

The brunette beauty had welcomed her son into the world just weeks before the shoot.

Rozalina had documented her second pregnancy on Instagram, and at the time of Kingston's birth she shared a precious shot of her newborn, adding in her caption that it was 'love at first sight.'

Nick - who owns nightclubs in Melbourne - also shared a snap to his public account from the delivery room, showing Rozalia cradling their baby after a C-section and him standing over the pair.

The couple also share a daughter called Willow.She's a former Victoria's Secret Angel and one of the world's most in demand models.

And on Wednesday night, Doutzen Kroes stepped out in New York City with her husband, DJ Sunnery James at her side.

The 33-year-old Dutch beauty put on a very stylish show in a loose-fitting black shirt tucked into baggy fawn slacks.

Stylish: Former Victoria's secret Angel Doutzen Kroes stepped out in New York City with her husband, DJ Sunnery James at her side

The blonde strolled along in white lace-up shoes with her hands in her trouser pockets and wearing a pale yellow raincoat over her outfit.

Her husband, whom she wed in 2010, wore skinny blue trousers with a long gray t-shirt and a black overcoat and white trainers.

The couple have two children together whom they are raising at the home in their native Netherlands.

Model look: The 33-year-old Dutch beauty put on a very stylish show in a loose-fitting black shirt tucked into baggy fawn slacks

Laid back: The blonde strolled along in white lace-up shoes with her hands in her trouser pockets and wearing a pale yellow raincoat over her outfit

Back in the Big Apple: Her husband, whom she wed in 2010, wore skinny blue trousers with a long gray t-shirt and a black overcoat and white trainers. The couple share two children

Doutzen first came to prominence after being chosen as Vogue.com's 'Model Of The Year' in 2005.

She became a Victoria's secret Angel in 2008 and represented the lingerie brand until 2015.

She recently spoke with Fashion magazine for it's May issue about her rise to the top of the modeling world.

'I'm very lucky I was born a certain way,' she said.

Trans-Atlantic flight: Doutzen shared this snap to her Instagram showing the couple wearing hoodies on an airplane

She also opined on how the industry has changed since she hit the spotlight saying it used to be 'more playful and not as calculated.'

'Now, because of social media, everyone knows everything - there's all these 15-year-old girls who know all the big photographers and fashion designers,' Doutzen explained.

The 'Ordinary to Extraordinary' issue of the fashion magazine also hails Doutzen's work as the face of the Elephant Crisis Fund and themed the photo shoot after her work with the campaign.

'I love all animals, of course, but it was devastating to hear about the crisis,' said the model, speaking about the statistic that 30,000 elephants are killed each year for their ivory.Geordie Shore's Vicky Pattinson recently spoke about how she's made a conscious effort to change her reputation as a party girl.

And on Wednesday - the last night of her trip to Australia - the 30-year-old enjoyed a low key night out with friends.

Ahead of her long haul flight from Australia to the UK, the reality TV star enjoyed food, drinks and laughs at Raw Bar in Sydney's Bondi.

Geordie Shore's Vicky Pattison leaves Australia on a high note as she enjoys a night out with friends in Sydney's Bondi

Out on the town: The 30-year-old had a fun night enjoying food and drinks in Sydney's Bondi on Wednesday

She appeared to be having a great time chatting to her pals, scrolling through social media and making exaggerated facial expressions.

But eventually it was time for the brunette beauty to get head back to her hotel to prepare for her flight.

As Vicky and her entourage prepared to leave, Vicky seemingly suffered a wardrobe mishap and a gal pal helped her by fixing the back of her trousers.

Animated: The reality TV star had a fun night a night out on the town enjoying food and drinks at Raw Bar

Funny face: Vicky appeared to be having a great time chatting to her pals, scrolling through social media and making exaggerated facial expressions

Friends: Eeventually it was time for the brunette beauty to leave her mates and head back to her hotel to prepare for her flight

As Vicky walked out of the establishment with her friends she pulled an animated face.

Wearing a black spaghetti strap top and pants in a matching hue, she added a pop of colour to her outfit with a pair of fuchsia heels and patterned headband.

Vicky completed the look with a light blue Prada tote.

A little help: As Vicky and her entourage prepared to leave, Vicky seemingly suffered a wardrobe mishap and a gal pal helped her by fixing the back of her trousers

Pop of colour: Wearing a black spaghetti strap top and pants in a matching hue, she added a pop of colour to her outfit with a pair of fuchsia heels and patterned headband

Handy accessory: Vicky completed the look with a light blue Prada tote

Earlier in the evening, Vicky enjoyed a drink with the same group of friends at Opera Bar overlooking the Sydney Harbour at sunset.

The stunner is returning home to her native Newcastle upon Tyne where she lives with her businessman fiance John Noble.

Making the most of the view: Earlier in the evening Vicky enjoyed a drink with the same group of friends at Opera Bar overlooking the Sydney Harbour at sunset

Heading home: The stunner is returning home to Newcastle to be with her businessman fiance John Noble (pictured)Her swipe card may have been swiftly confiscated by Channel Nine.

But Lisa Wilkinson still has access to her good friend Sonia Kruger, with the Today Extra host confirming the pair are still close on Thursday.

Speaking to The Kyle & Jackie O Show, Sonia, 52, said: 'she texts me, because we bump into each other at Chargrill Charlie's and IGA, along with Justin Bieber.'

'We bump into each other at IGA, along with Justin Bieber': Today Extra's Sonia Kruger reveals she's still good friends with Lisa Wilkinson after her defection to Channel 10

In response, shock-jock Kyle Sandilands joked: 'really, you still speak of her after the defection (from Nine's Today, to Ten's The Project)?'

Sonia laughed and noted that the former colleagues both still live in Mosman and remain in contact.

Last year, The Voice host revealed she had plans to catch up with Lisa over the New Year.

'We've been texting each other and the plan is to have a glass of champagne in the new year,' Sonia told The Sun Herald.

'You still speak to her?' In response, shock-jock Kyle Sandilands joked: 'really, you still speak of her after the defection (from Nine's Today, to Ten's The Project)?'

'Lisa literally lives about five minutes away from me. We will no doubt head to the beach... and have a good old catch up.'

On Thursday, Kyle said that he too was a Mosman resident, adding in jest that the property value has 'gone down' since he moved in with girlfriend Imogen Anthony.

Neighbourhood watch: Sonia laughed, and noted that the former colleagues both still live in Mosman and remain in contact

Sonia revealed she had already become acquainted with Imogen.

'I took the dog out to go do a wee (the other night) and I heard this car coming down the street with this doof-doof music playing,' she began.

'And I turned around and it was this matte black Range Rover with this blonde driving and I'm like "there's Kyle's girlfriend!" '

Down, down! On Thursday, Kyle said that he too was a Mosman resident, adding in jest that the property value has 'gone down' since he moved in with girlfriend Imogen AnthonyLast month, a promotional image of Keira Maguire was mysteriously deleted from the Bachelor In Paradise Instagram page after she complained it was unflattering.

And it appears the reality TV star, 31, is still unhappy with the network's choice of photos.

On Thursday, Keira took to the show's official Instagram account again to criticise a gallery of photos from the previous night's episode.

'Worst photos ever': Bachelor In Paradise's Keira Maguire lashed out at Channel Ten AGAIN on Thursday, complaining about unflattering photos being used on social media

In the photos, the female contestants - including Keira, Tara Pavlovic, Elora Murger and Lisa Hyde - react to the drama-filled Rose Ceremony.

Their facial expressions reveal shock, surprise and distress as the roller-coaster events of the episode unfold.

Keira was not impressed, however, and commented below the gallery: 'Worst photos ever'.

Keira took to the show's official Instagram account to comment below a gallery of photos from the previous night's episode. Pictured (L-R): Elora Murger, Lisa Hyde and Simone Ormesher

'They are the worst action shots. Swipe to look, everyone looks bad': Keira was not impressed by the episode stills, which showed the contestants reacting to Wednesday's Rose Ceremony

Later, when a fan asked what was wrong with the pictures, she explained: 'They are the worst action shots. Swipe to look, everyone looks bad.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Network Ten for comment.

It comes after Keira asked Channel Ten to remove a promo shot from the Bachelor In Paradise Instagram page because she was unhappy with her appearance.

What's wrong? It comes after Keira asked Ten to remove a promotional photo (pictured) from the Bachelor In Paradise Instagram page because she was unhappy with her appearance

Last month, she commented below the photo of herself: 'I hate this pic of me'.

Shortly afterwards, the image - which showed her posing in a low-cut pink dress - was mysteriously deleted.

Bachelor In Paradise continues Sunday at 7:30pm on Network TenThey're both scream queens, having starred in iconic horror franchises like Final Destination and the Wrong Turn series.

But on Wednesday, Ali Larter and Emmanuelle Chriqui took a night off, daring to impress on the red carpet for the premiere of Super Troopers 2 in Los Angeles.

Both 42-year-old Larter and 42-year-old Chriqui dazzled in white ensembles for their respective red carpet turns.

Blonde bombshell: On Wednesday, Ali Larter, 42, dared to impress on the red carpet for the premiere of Super Troopers 2

Model/actress Larter slipped into a lacy white dress adorned with colorful flower designs and an above-the-knee hem that showed plenty of her slim pins.

The New Jersey native wore her straight, shoulder-length blonde tresses loose and the centerpiece of her impeccable makeup was a slash of bright pink lip liner.

A pair of tan heels added inches to the Legally Blonde star's 5ft8 frame.

Flower power: Model/actress Larter slipped into a lacy white dress adorned with colorful flower designs and an above-the-knee hem that showed plenty of her slim pins

White on! Canadian actress Emmanuelle Chriqui, 42, meanwhile, flaunted her enviable physique in a white jumpsuit

Canadian actress Chriqui, meanwhile, flaunted her enviable physique in a white jumpsuit.

The Entourage star wore her raven tresses pulled back in a bun.

The You Don't Mess With The Zohan actress shimmered in sparkling silver heels and diamond tear drop earrings.

All that glitters: The You Don't Mess With The Zohan actress shimmered in sparkling silver heels and diamond tear drop earrings

Alright in white: Chriqui poses with co-star Marisa Coughlan

Shimmering: Coughlan plays Ursula in the comedy sequel

Brat: 80s icon Rob Lowe was also at the event

Funny man: Keegan-Michael Key posed with fiance Elisa Pugliese

The original Super Troopers grossed over $18million off a $3million budget.

The comedy sequel follows the former Vermont Highway Patrol officers from the first film as they provide law enforcement for a French Canadian town that's transitioning to U.S. sovereignty.

It stars Jay Chandrasekhar, Marisa Coughlan and Brian Cox.

Super Troopers 2 is distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures and is the theaters on April 20.Sophia Bush was honored with the Nelson Mandela Changemaker Award at the PTTOW! Summit in Ojia, California on Wednesday night.

The 35-year-old activist took the stage in an Oxford-chic ensemble that included a striped blouse and high waisted mom jeans.

PTTOW is an invite-only network that brings together influential leaders and cultural icons for 'high level discussions on culture, media, and marketing.'

Activist: Sophia Bush was honored with the Nelson Mandela Changemaker Award at the PTTOW! Summit in Ojia, California on Wednesday night

Nerd alert: The 35-year-old activist took the stage in an Oxford-chic ensemble that included a striped blouse and high waisted mom jeans

The One Tree Hill vet paired her nerdy ensemble with a pair of white and black heels.

She wore her hair in her signature stylesleek and parted down the middle.

Later that evening, Bush slipped into a dress for happy hour.

Invite only: PTTOW is a network that brings together influential leaders and cultural icons for 'high level discussions on culture, media, and marketing'

She was giving off major retro vibes in white patent leather ankle boots and a funky patterned orange and white frock.

Underneath her dress, Sophia rocked a long sleeve black turtleneck.

She was one of three people to be presented with the Nelson Mandela award during the two-day summit.

Casually clad: The One Tree Hill vet paired her nerdy ensemble with a pair of white and black heels. She wore her hair in her signature stylesleek and parted down the middle

Bush is currently focused on her #NoHormonesPlz initiative that focuses on educating women about their birth control options.

'I'm pretty passionate about all things having to do with women's rights and empowerment and with politics,' she told BUILD.

'I'm not shy about fighting for women, representing women, and wanting women to have whatever access to anything they need,' she continued. 'Stand up, show up, speak up for your fellow women.'She's no stranger to flashing the flesh on Instagram to her 75,000 followers.

And Kiki Morris didn't disappoint on Thursday as she soaked up the sun in Sydney topless and dressed only in a pair skimpy bikini bottoms.

The 28-year-old, who rose to fame as a contestant on The Bachelor in 2016, shared the sizzling snap as she celebrated the city's unusually high temperatures.

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Cheeky Kiki! Saucy Bachelor star Morris SIZZLES in the sun as she goes topless and flaunts her pert derriere in G-string bikini bottoms

With her long blonde hair cascading down her back, the glamour model expertly posed on a giant rock overlooking the pristine Pacific Ocean.

'Safe to say, these last cheeky glimpses of summer are fabulous,' she gushed in the photo.

'Looking fantastic and stunning babe,' fawned one of the former reality star's supporters in the comments section.

'Safe to say, these last cheeky glimpses of summer are fabulous,' she gushed in the photo

The animal rights activist initially built a modelling portfolio that extends to racy men's magazines such as Ralph and Zoo.

She has remained in the spotlight since her stint on The Bachelor with Richie Strahan, largely thanks to her dedicated following on Instagram.

In February, the former contestant took to the app to inform fans she had stopped by her local plastic surgeon's office in Darling Point.

She's a pro! The self-confessed animal rights activist initially built a modelling portfolio that extends to racy men's magazines such as Ralph and Zoo

The revelation came a year after she admitted to getting a 'slight facelift', which followed a previous breast augmentation.

In a 2016 interview with OK magazine, she revealed she had gotten implants after being bullied in school.

'I used to get teased for being so flat-chested,' she recalled.She's known for her bold makeup choices.

So Vanessa Hudgens was the perfect choice of face for nail polish brand SinfulColors' first ever cosmetics range.

The 29-year-old actress posed in a floral print dress with a deep plunging neckline at the range's launch in Hollywood on Wednesday.

Picture perfect: Vanessa Hudgens was the perfect choice of face for nail polish brand SinfulColors' first ever cosmetics range

The Spring Breakers actress paired the summery garment with a pair of gold platform heels that added inches to the diminutive starlet's frame.

She wore an abundance of jewelry on both wrists, as well as several gold necklaces.

Her dark tresses were pinned up in a high, loose bun and the High School Musical breakout star sported bangs.

Taking the plunge: The 29-year-old actress posed in a floral print dress with a deep plunging neckline at the range's launch in Hollywood on Wednesday

Summer daze: The Spring Breakers actress paired the summery garment with a pair of gold platform heels that added inches to the diminutive starlet's frame

The Beastly actress recently starred in a production of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In The Heights at the at the Eisenhower Theatre at the Kennedy Center.

The screen star undertook the role of Vanessa, the most beautiful girl in her neighborhood, who has big dreams of making it outside her small community.

While lyrics and music composition are by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, it was written by Quiara Alegria Hudes. The original 2008 Broadway production won two Tony Awards and a Grammy.

The bling ring: She wore an abundance of jewelry on both wrists, as well as several gold necklaces

Great hair day: Hudgens' dark tresses were pinned up in a high, loose bun and the High School Musical breakout star sported bangs

Elsewhere, Vanessa is set to appear in Second Act and Dog Days, which are scheduled to be released this year.

Second Act, directed by 50 First Dates helmsman Peter Segal, also stars Milo Ventimiglia, Jennifer Lopez, and Leah Remini.

Directed by Ken Marinowho helmed this year's How To Be A Latin LoverDog Days also stars Finn Wolfhard, Nina Dobrev, and Eva Longoria.They were eye candy for a nation full of women when they appeared on Georgia Love's season of The Bachelorette in 2016.

And hunks Cameron Cranley and Courtney Dober turned up the heat again on Thursday, as they hiked Los Angeles' Runyon Canyon topless.

Both men showed off their incredibly buff physiques and rippling abs as they posed for playful photos above the famous city.

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Double the hunk! The Bachelorette's Cameron Cranley and Courtney Dober turn up the heat as they flaunt buff physiques and rippling abs hiking topless in Los Angeles with Bachelor star Noni Janur

Fireman Cam, 28, flaunted his impressive strength as he held his pal on his shoulder for totem-style snaps.

Both going shirtless for the outdoor workout under the searing sun, they appeared to barely break a sweat as they joked around.

Cameron uploaded a snap, writing: 'Taking the kid for a walk.'

'Taking the kid for a walk': Both going shirtless for the outdoor workout under the searing sun, they appeared to barely break a sweat as they joked around

The gang is back together! In a video shared by Courtney, the TV presenter put on an American accent as she narrated their journey, with ex Bachelor star Noni Janur also appearing in frame

Courtney also shared a similar picture, captioning it: 'Just a couple of straight dudes having topless piggy back rides at the top of the mountain... what of it.'

In a video shared by Courtney, the TV presenter put on an American accent as she narrated their journey, with former Bachelor star Noni Janur also appearing in frame.

Noni, who was on Matty J's season, wore a crop top and shorts as she kept up with the boys throughout the difficult terrain.

Not missing out on her own photo opportunity, she also had a turn posing on Cameron's shoulder before they made the trip back down the trail.

All smiles! Noni, who was on Matty J's season, wore a crop top and shorts as she kept up with the boys throughout the difficult terrain

Noni flew into Los Angeles last month as her boyfriend Samuel Johnston's 'personal butt wiper' after he injured both his hands in a motorcycle accident.

While he is on his way to recovery, he did not appear to join the trio for the hike.

The pair debuted their romance in February, 2017.She revealed she has broken two toes on her right foot for the fourth time in a pained Instagram post on Wednesday.

And Tziporah Malkah, 44, seemed to be feeling the strain of the injury as she hobbled down the street while running errands in Sydney a day later.

The ex-fiancee of billionaire James Packer, who broke the same two toes last summer after a '75 kilogram iron gate' landed on her foot, winced as she stepped out of her car.

Oh dear: Tziporah Malkah looked strained as she hobbled in Sydney after breaking two toes for the FOURTH time

Sharing a snap of her right foot on Instagram, Tziporah - who has been linked to Kabbalah - claimed the injury was God's way of 'reminding' her of her 'destiny

'Ive broken the right toe/s on my right foot AGAIN! The 4th time!' she raged in the caption.

'According to Kabbalah this has to do with leadership issues. Well I dont want to lead and I dont want to be led.

'I just want to do my own thing, so please just bugger off God, Im tired of being reminded of my so- called destiny. Gimme a break already.'

Injury: The ex-fiancee of billionaire James Packer, who broke the same two toes last summer after a '75 kilogram iron gate' landed on her foot, winced as she limped down the street on Thursday

Not impressed: Sharing a snap of her right foot on Instagram, Tziporah - who has been linked to Kabbalah - claimed the injury was God's way of 'reminding' her of her 'destiny''

The former model's injury certainly looked like it was getting her down on Thursday, as she stepped out looking decidedly downcast.

Tziporah couldn't help but grimace as she eased herself out of the car, before walking with difficulty down the street.

She was dressed casually for the relaxed outing, donning a simple black shift dress and two-tone sandals - with her two toes wrapped in bandages clearly visible.

Injecting a dose of glamour into the look, Malkah also carried a leather tote and shielded her eyes behind gold aviator sunglasses.

Venting: 'Ive broken the right toe/s on my right foot AGAIN! The 4th time!' she raged in the caption

Not great: She added: 'According to Kabbalah this has to do with leadership issues. Well I dont want to lead and I dont want to be led'

Rant: 'I just want to do my own thing, so please just bugger off God, Im tired of being reminded of my so- called destiny. Gimme a break already,' she continued

Malkah previously broke her toes last August, announcing the injury to fans with a snap of her foot encased in a cast.

She wrote: '75kilo iron front gate landed on foot over w/e. Boot is v sexy (You should see the gate- a MESS.'

Tziporah showed no signs of slowing down however, and showed off a series of bruises on her legs, which she divulged had been a result of her vigorous dance moves over the Mardi Gras weekend.

Down in the dumps: The former model's injury certainly looked like it was getting her down on Thursday, as she stepped out looking decidedly downcast

Low-key look: She was dressed casually for the relaxed outing, donning a simple black shift dress and two-tone sandals - with her two toes wrapped in bandages clearly visible

Monochrome maven: Injecting a dose of glamour into the look, Malkah also carried a leather tote and shielded her eyes behind gold aviator sunglasses

'When youre too old, fat & unfit to pull off your classic dance moves without bruising,' Tziporah joked in the caption.

The brunette went on to explain that the painful-looking injury occurred when she was busting a move at Sydney's Mardi Gras over the weekend.

'I was twerking but had to balance myself out by putting all my weight on my knees. Fell over a million times anyway Best night ever! Mardi Gras,' Tziporah elaborated in the comments section.

Tziporah was among the thousands of Mardi Gras attendees who flocked Oxford Street to celebrate the inclusive event's 40th anniversary.

Ouch: Tziporah couldn't help but grimace as she eased herself out of the car, before walking with difficulty down the streetVictoria Beckham has come under fire from her social media followers after uploading a picture of her daughter riding a horse with a crown design on its rear.

The fashion designer, 43, took to her Instagram on Wednesday to gush over six-year-old Harper's equestrian skills - and was promptly met with confusion over fans who couldn't work out whether the detailing was 'shaved on the horse' or was 'branding.'

Many commenters jumped to conclusions as they slammed the former Spice Girl for bringing the horse 'pain' - and Victoria is now also risking the wrath of animal rights activists including PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).

Backlash: Victoria Beckham has come under fire from her social media followers after uploading a picture of her daughter Harper, 6, riding a horse with a crown design on its rear

In a similar instance two years ago, former glamour model Katie Price was also criticised for clipping intricate designs on her horses - forcing her to hit back at the criticism.

And on Wednesday, Victoria was spending quality time with her youngest and couldn't resist the urge to document the day on social media.

Harper was seen sitting on the horse, with Victoria capturing the snap from the back which put focus on the crown design.

'Riding in the sunshine  kisses from Harper and her prince xx,' she proudly captioned the snap.

Slammed: The fashion designer, 43, was gushing over Harper's equestrian skills - but was met with confusion over fans who couldn't work out whether the detailing was 'shaved on the horse' or was 'branding'

Not happy: Many commenters jumped to conclusions as they slammed the former Spice Girl for bringing the horse 'pain' and Victoria is also risking the wrath of animal right activists including PETA

However her enthusiasm wasn't shared with some of her 19.4million followers, who shared their concerns:

'Did u really brand ur bourse with a crown?!? That pain for what?.'

'Was it a must to burn/engrave a crown on the horses back?.'

'It's a pretty good picture but that crown is cruel. And it's not like a haircut, they use very hot iron to make this "tattoo" on the horse. It's really sad!'

'How cruel to brand that on a horse!' and 'That crown most have hurt a lot #animalkindness.'

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Victoria Beckham and PETA for further comment.

'Painful, so sad': Victoria's enthusiasm wasn't shared with some of her 19.4million followers, who shared their concerns

Proud mum: Victoria was keen on spending some quality time with her youngest and couldn't resist the urge to document the day on social media

Certain that the design was 'branding', animal lovers continued to leave comments of disgust under the snap.

'Is this horse branded with hot iron?! I dont know if is the case, but if it is this is so cruel!'

'Don't mark the horse's. Idiotaaaaaassssssss' and 'That had better be a haircut. Brands are cruel and disgusting.'

'Is it a mark in the horse skin? I hope not... It would be such a cruelty with the horse.'

'That branding must has been very painful.'

'Kisses from the sunshine': Harper looked adorable as she rode along on the horse

'Cruel': Certain that the design was 'branding', animal lovers continued to leave comments of disgust under the snap

'Poor horse... This crown scar is absolutely unnecessary. It's no natural, it's not loving, it's not kissing, and of course it's not for any "prince".'

Meanwhile, other fans jumped to Victoria's defence as they confirmed it was a shaving and didn't cause the animal any harm.

'Comments are hilarious. but Im sure she was expecting the backlash. Some people will think its a brand not a haircut.'

'What a beautiful photo. The comments are hilarious. People just Google horse clipping designs. Are you going to give thousands of those your cruelty comments. It's a hair cut get off your high horses lol.'

'Gorgeous photo. I love harpers plait and her handsome princes hair cut is fabulous.'

'Guys this is probably the happiest horse on earth. Eating organic food and stuff...you know the good life :D.'

'It's a haircut people': Meanwhile, other fans jumped to Victoria's defence as they confirmed it was a shaving and didn't cause the animal any harm

'Lol omg Its a haircut people, this is not Branded' and 'How do you fools seriously think that's a brand..'

'I understand the concern but she just posted a video where they wouldnt kill a spider found in the house but took it outside instead. If she wouldnt kill a spider she is certainly not branding a horse.'

Two years ago Katie Price hit back at her adversaries posting a series of angered posts on Instagram, one of which saw her demand that PETA 'bind their beaks'.

The star shared a number of snaps of groomers clipping patterns on to their horses and attempted to shut down any suggestion that her actions were cruel or inhumane.

Previously: In a similar instance two years ago, former glamour model Katie Price was also criticised for clipping intricate designs on her horses

Defiant: At the time Katie hit back at her adversaries posting a series of angered posts on Instagram, one of which saw her demand that PETA 'bind their beaks'

Proving she wasn't alone in her decision to clip her horses, the Loose Women presenter even posted a grab from a video of British equestrian Mary King showing other horse fanatics how to successfully shave their stallions.

'Even Mary King clips and dies lessons so #peta bine your beak and anybody else get your facts right before calling me cruel, (sic)' Katie raged alongside the shot.

But it wasn't only PETA that Katie attempted to silence as another image - which depicted a horse that had been clipped to create another ornate design - also saw the businesswoman dish out some more feisty words alongside it.

'See people will now see clipping a horse is very normal so bind your beaks in,' she slammed.Reese Witherspoon, 42, and Nicole Kidman, 50, were spotted on set for the first time with Meryl Streep, 68, to film the hotly-anticipated second season of Big Little Lies.

The beautiful Hollywood actresses descended on Lovers Point in Monterey, California as they get to work on intriguing scenes for the upcoming HBO series.

Reese slipped into her character's pumps with ease as she made a glamorous arrival on Thursday to reprise her role of the fiery, loyal yet stylish mother Madeleine.

Big Little Lies filming: Reese Witherspoon looked lovely as she descended on Lovers Point in Monterey, California with Nicole Kidman to film with Meryl Streep for the first time

In Madeleine's typical fashion, Reese pulled off a fuming expression when she left her vehicle.

The Legally Blonde star teamed her fuchsia frilled blouse with a pretty floral skirt and pink handbag with a delicate neckerchief tied to the handle.

Ahead of filming, the Walk The Line star kept her adrenaline levels up with a hot beverage and a spot of breakfast.

Gone with the wind: Age-defying Nicole, 50, was on set to reprise her school mother friend and domestic violence victim role of Celeste

Friendly face! New cast member Meryl will join the star-studded line-up for series two as Mary Louise Wright, the mother of the late Perry (Alexander Skarsgard)

The Big Little Lies star was delighted to reunite with Nicole, who will reprise her role of school mother and domestic violence victim Celeste.

New cast member Meryl will join the star-studded line-up for series two as Mary Louise Wright, the mother of the late Perry (Alexander Skarsgard).

The It's Complicated star's character arrives in Monterey, California, looking for answers surrounding the mystery of her son's death.

No surprises: Reese slipped into her character's stilettos with ease as she made a glamorous arrival on Thursday to reprise her role of the fiery, loyal yet stylish mother Madeleine

Wow: The Legally Blonde star teamed her fuchsia frilled blouse with a pretty floral skirt and pink handbag with a delicate neckerchief tied to the handle

Delicious: Ahead of filming, the Walk The Line star kept her adrenaline levels up with a hot beverage and a spot of breakfast

Big Little Lies series one climaxed with the school mums and close friends covering up the murder of Celeste's abusive husband and rapist Perry (Alexander Skarsgard).

The series followed the seemingly perfect lives of school mums Madeline, Celeste, Jane (Shailene Woodley) and Bonnie (Zoe Kravitz) in the lead up to the murder.

For filming season two, Meryl is transformed into the grandmother character as she can be seen sat confidently in her sophisticated beige mac.

Awkward: Tense scenes shot on set reveal Reese's Madeleine being probed by Meryl's Mary as they engage in a heated private conversation

Group shot: Reese and Meryl's characters come to blows aside from the rest of the group during their coffee meet-up

Staying together: Nicole, who plays Mary's daughter-in-law, is also on the scene and she can be seen whispering to Reese during the intriguing scene

Looking for answers about what happened to the late Perry, her character Mary joins the mothers of Monterey for a discussion.

Tense scenes shot on set reveal Reese's Madeleine being probed by Meryl's Mary as they engage in a heated private conversation.

Reese and Meryl's characters come to blows aside from the rest of the group during their coffee meet-up.

She's chic: For filming, Meryl is transformed into the grandmother character as she can be seen sat confidently in her sophisticated beige mac

Quizzing: Looking for answers about what happened to the late Perry, her character Mary joins the mothers of Monterey for a discussion

Detective work: The It's Complicated star's character arrives in Monterey, California, looking for answers surrounding the mystery of her son's death

Nicole, who plays Mary's daughter-in-law, is also on the scene and she can be seen whispering to Reese during the intriguing scene.

Reese's Madeleine appears to leave the coffee shop meet-up with Nicole's Celeste as the pair are spotted filming a low-key stroll.

To ensure they nailed the lines, Reese spent some time practicing her bit as she toted her script while she walked with her co-star.

Together: The trio were spotted filming the hotly-anticipated second season of Big Little Lies for the first time on set, aside from their Instagram posts

Staying strong: Reese's Madeleine appears to leave the coffee shop meet-up with Nicole's Celeste as the pair are spotted filming a low-key stroll

Giving her a hand: To ensure they nailed the lines, Reese spent some time practicing her bit as she toted her script while she walked with her co-star

Shocking: The gorgeous actresses then threw themselves into the action as their characters spent time catching up after their tense meet-up with the late Perry's mum

Going strong: Reese places a tender hand on Nicole's forearm which shows their characters remain their ever-growing close friendship bond

So silly: But proving their friendship extends off set, Reese amused Nicole when she pulled a funny face during a hilarious out-take moment

Who could it be? Nicole takes a phone call during her low-key stroll with Reese

The gorgeous actresses then threw themselves into the action as their characters spent time catching up after their tense meet-up with the late Perry's mum.

Reese places a tender hand on Nicole's forearm which shows their characters remain their ever-growing close friendship bond.

But proving their friendship extends off set, Reese amused Nicole when she pulled a funny face during a hilarious out-take moment.

Explained: While few details are known about the second series, Big Little Lies promises more lies that threaten to destroy friendships and marriages as well as parenting

Top work: Production on season two of Big Little Lies has been underway since March 2018 and the actors got to work on shooting scenes in the spring

Amazing: While the whole cast are returning to filming, fans are particularly excited about the involvement of Meryl

Beautiful as ever: Nicole looked radiant on set as she continued to showcase her age-defying figure with her sensational winter wardrobe

Behind the scenes, make-up artists transformed the beautiful Nicole as they defined her eyebrows and touched up her age-defying features.

According to Deadline, the second series will explore Bonnie's guilt as she struggles with murdering Perry after the Audrey Hepburn or Elvis Presley-themed trivia night.

While few details are known about the second series, Big Little Lies promises more lies that threaten to destroy friendships and marriages as well as parenting.

Keeping it glamorous: The flame-haired beauty readjusted her pretty sapphire blue hat which she wore over her glossy tresses

Comfort time! During filming, Nicole had two pairs of shoes to hand as she swapped her stylish brogues for comfortable boots over the course of the day

Preparation: Make-up artists transformed the beautiful Nicole as they defined her eyebrows and touched up her age-defying features

Looking good: The Australian actress looked incredible as she showcased her stunning features, with deftly touches of make-up

Best hair of the cast! The ladies posed with their canine co-star Jolly

The official log reads: 'The subversive, darkly comedic drama Big Little Lies will explore the malignancy of lies, the durability of friendships, the fragility of marriage and, of course, the vicious ferocity of sound parenting.

'Relationships will fray, loyalties will erode...the potential for emotional and bodily injury shall loom.'

Production on season two of Big Little Lies has been underway since March 2018 and the actors got to work on shooting scenes in the spring.

Friendly nature: Although she was having her make-up done, the actress showed she was every inch the social butterfly when she waved to her on-screen stars

Beaming beauty: The A-list star showed off her good sense of fun as she laughed and smiled at the cameras

Kisses! Nicole blew a kiss to her co-stars as she made her way home after a busy day of filming

HBO's series Big Little Lies started out as a seven-episode series based on Liane Moriarty's book with the same title.

As a result of the first season's sky-rocketing success, the producers renewed the series for a second run in December 2017.

While the whole cast are returning to filming, fans are particularly excited about the involvement of Meryl.

Winning: As a result of the first season's sky-rocketing success, the producers renewed the series for a second run in December 2017

Success story: HBO's series Big Little Lies started out as a seven-episode series based on Liane Moriarty's book with the same title

In mid-March, Reese appeared on Lorraine to promote the show ahead of filming the second series with her co-stars.

The actress candidly confessed she felt nervous when she began working with Meryl for the first time as she said it was 'really overwhelming'.

'I got to rehearse with her (Meryl) last week it was really overwhelming. I think we are all nervous in front of her but after working with Oprah I'm not nervous,' she laughed.

Blast from past! The first series followed the seemingly perfect lives of school mums Madeline, Celeste, Jane (Shailene Woodley) and Bonnie (Zoe Kravitz) in the lead up to the murder

Second series promises: An official log, 'The subversive, darkly comedic drama Big Little Lies will explore the malignancy of lies, the durability of friendships, the fragility of marriage'

Wrapped up: 'Relationships will fray, loyalties will erode...the potential for emotional and bodily injury shall loom'

Amazing: The first season has won a string of envy-inducing awards for its incredible characters and outstanding storyline

Revealed: Recently, Reese candidly confessed she felt nervous when she began working with Meryl for the first time as she said it was 'really overwhelming'He was forced to pull out of two X Factor live shows last autumn when he suffered a fall down the stairs at his London home.

And Simon Cowell has discussed his health scare six months on from the incident, revealing he found it all 'a bit embarrassing' and blaming the accident on his relentless work schedule.

The 58-year-old TV mogul - who is set to return to our screens on Britain's Got Talent this Saturday - said he's going into this year focused on leading a more balanced lifestyle and spending more time with his son Eric, four.

Speaking out: Simon Cowell has discussed his health scare six months on from the incident, revealing he found it all 'a bit embarrassing' and blaming the accident on his relentless work schedule

Speaking to Dan Wootton on Thusday's edition of Lorraine, Simon discussed his ordeal, which he previously blamed on fainting due to 'low blood pressure'.

He said: 'I'm alright. In a weird way it was a wake up call because it wasn't the end of the world. It was a bit embarrassing...

'I will never hear a bad word about the NHS. Its like having an MOT, they do every possible test. I was probably overtired, to be honest.

'I feel much better this year, I'm not having so many meetings or late night calls, it's a bit more of a balance.'

Doting dad: The 58-year-old TV mogul said he's going into this year focused on leading a more balanced lifestyle and spending more time with his son Eric, four

The straight-talking star revealed he was prioritising his girlfriend Lauren Silverman and their young son Eric.

He said: 'I look at things through Eric's eyes, I want to spend more time with him, luckily he loves the shows so he comes down all the time.'

Quizzed whether he'd like Eric to take over his music and television empire in future, Simon's eyes lit up.

'One million percent, I would love him to take over. He's really confident! When he comes down he loves being in the gallery.'

Health woes: Speaking to Dan Wootton on Thusday's edition of Lorraine, Simon discussed his ordeal, which he previously blamed on fainting due to 'low blood pressure'

Future mogul: Quizzed whether he'd like Eric to take over his music and television empire in future, Simon's eyes lit up

The star also talked about the new series of BGT and his love/hate relationship with his fellow judges Amanda Holden, Alesha Dixon and especially David Walliams.

Simon sighed: 'I've learned one thing with David, don't tell him to calm down. It's like a red flag to a bull. You can't stop him, he's 10 times worse. He's always been unsackable.

'The first time I ever sat down with him we actually had one of the worst meetings I've ever had... One year later he agreed to it. He and the show are a perfect match.'

Discussing the fan favourite line-up, Simon added: 'All three of them are absolutely focused on the talent - but they're hard work!'

Of Amanda and Alesha, he joked: 'They're both sloshed, don't talk to each other off camera but that's just the way it is!'

Back for another series: The star also discussed the new series of BGT and his love/hate relationship with his fellow judges Amanda Holden, Alesha Dixon and David Walliams

Last October, Simon left fans concerned when he was rushed to hospital after his late night fall.

The music mogul had been going to get a cup of milk to help him sleep when he fell - leading him to be stretchered out of his home in a neck brace.

It was believed Simon was at home alone, as his girlfriend Lauren had been over in the US.

The Syco owner was then forced to pull out of The X Factor live shows, with Alesha taking his place on the panel.She was unceremoniously dumped by Kiwi hunk Eden Schwencke on Wednesday's Bachelor In Paradise.

And it seems that Nina Rolleston has supporters in her corner with co-star Tara Pavlovic offering some kind words to the reality reject.

Taking to Instagram on Thursday, Tara shared a photo of her and Nina looking as though they were ready for a night on the town.

'You are beautiful don't let anyone tell you otherwise': Tara Pavlovic offers words of support to Bachelor in Paradise co-star Nina Rolleston after she was unceremoniously dumped by Eden Schwencke

Nina looked much happier than she did on Wednesday's episode.

Wearing a cleavage flaunting top, she also wore a huge grin.

Tara also showed off her decolletage in the photo, as she wore a white singlet that barely covered a black lace bra.

In the caption for the photo, Tara told Nina to keep her chin up after her rejection, adding that she is a 'beautiful person.'

Happy snap: Taking to Instagram on Thursday, Tara shared a photo that showed her and Nina looking as though they were ready for a night on the town

'Love you @ninarolleston,' Tara wrote. Everything happens for a reason. You are a beautiful person - don't let anyone tell you otherwise.'

Tara continued: 'Can't wait to see you on Saturday for a beautiful arvo at the Society Autumn Series in Brissy.'

Clearly taken with the sentiment, Nina replied to the post with: 'Thank you so much beautiful girl. I cannot wait for lady dates this weekend! My first official weekend as a single lady spent with my beautiful friend.'

'Love you @ninarolleston,' Tara captioned the post. 'Everything happens for a reason. You are a beautiful person - don;t let anyone tell you otherwise'

Tara's sentiment was echoed by fans who also urged Nina to keep a stiff upper lip after the feted rose ceremony.

'@ninarolleston Cant imagine how revisiting last nights episode would make you feel. Chin up, power through it & just refer to @tarapavlovic for some light hearted banter!!,'one fan wrote.

Nina was sent home from Fiji on Wednesday's episode of Bachelor In Paradise after her 'love interest' Eden Schweneke opted to give his rose to Elora Murger instead of her.

Thanks: Clearly taken with the sentiment, Nina replied to the post with: 'Thank you so much beautiful girl. I cannot wait for lady dates this weekend! My first official weekend as a single lady spent with my beautiful friend.'

The pair found themselves at odds earlier in the episode after Eden called Nina 'self centred,' and telling her he needed more affection.

In a piece to camera, Nina concluded that the reason she was sent packing was because of her refusal to sleep with Eden.

'I've been nothing but open and honest to Eden and I've made it really clear about my values, and I thought he respected those, but it's very clear that he doesn't,'she said.

Nina continued: 'I'm super pissed off, and I think at the end of the day that just proves the type of guy Eden is. If you're not gonna put out, he's sending you home.'She's a huge fan of going au naturel when it comes to her beauty regime.

And Scarlett Moffatt showed off her glamorous makeover when she headed to the London BBC studios on Thursday.

The 27-year-old beamed as she headed into the offices, wrapping up in a chic white coat and wearing her raven locks up in a chic chignon.

Glam: Scarlett Moffatt showcased her glamorous makeover with a perfectly groomed look as she headed to the BBC Radio 1 studios on Thursday

Just hours before, the Saturday Night Takeaway star was pictured arriving at King's Cross station where she showed off her natural beauty, going make-up free.

Wearing the same white coat, the Gogglebox star left her long locks down, so that they framed her pretty features.

She wore a white jumper and black skinny jeans and added a pop of colour to her ensemble with a pair of bright red trainers.

Going into the weekend like... The 27-year-old beamed as she headed into the offices, wrapping up in a chic white coat and wearing her raven locks up in a chic chignon

A cute little Louis Vuitton bag sat on one arm as she wheeled a matching white suitcase behind her.

Scarlett was heading to the BBC to be interviewed by Nick Grimshaw on the Breakfast Show, so no doubt she had to set her alarm early.

She tweeted on her train journey that she was keeping herself entertained.

'Just realised Ive spent two hours on the train watching old strictly come dancing clips,' she said.

Golden glow: She showed off her tan from her trip to Florida where she filmed Saturday Night Takeaway with Declan Donnelly and Stephen Mulhern - in Ant McPartlin's absence

'Ive watched that many Ive choreographed a Charleston in my head.'

The photos come after Scarlett hilariously revealed to her fans that she missed the Saturday Night Takeaway wrap party because she fell asleep after the final episode, which saw Declan Donnelly host solo following Ant McPartlin's return to rehab.

Taking to Twitter on Sunday, the bubbly star shared to her 660K followers that she had gone for a quick nap, but hilariously woke up 12 hours later.

She tweeted: 'When you go to bed for 7pm for a nap and wake up 12 hours late [crying laughing emoji] well think Ive definitely missed the wrap party [upset emoji].' (sic)

Scarlett's fans were quick to reply to her unfortunate blunder as they shared their amusement and thoughts to the I'm A Celebrity winner.

She had been in Florida, where, along with Stephen Mulhern, she had been supporting Declan Donnelly in hosting the show, in the wake of Ant's absence.Naomie Harris has praised the film industry for its 'colourblind casting'.

The British actress, 41, appeared on Thursday's installment of ITV1's Lorraine, where she discussed the positive change in attitude towards race and gender in movies.

The former Bond Girl joyfully suggested nowadays it was all about 'character qualities' as she appeared on the daytime show to discuss her latest project, action film Rampage.

Speaking out: Naomie Harris praised the film industry for its 'colourblind casting' as she promoted her her new movie Rampage in London on Thursday

Naomie revealed a lot has changed in the industry, saying: 'There are more opportunities now. A lot of time its colourblind casting... what you want from a character is their qualities.

'It doesnt matter what race or gender they are,' she continued, before adding: 'A lot of roles are written for men and are then changed for females.

'Its a lot more of an open environment, which I'm loving,' she stated.

Naomie is currently hot on the promotional trail for her new movie Rampage, in which she stars alongside Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, heading to the BBC Radio 2 studios later in the day.

The Cambridge-educated star turned heads as she arrived for her second appearance, dazzling in an elegant blush-coloured midi-dress with black, white, yellow and caramel fringing.

Elegant: The British actress, 41, dazzled in an elegant blush-coloured midi-dress with black, white, yellow and caramel fringing as she arrived at the BBC Radio 2 studios

Chic: The Cambridge-educated star completed her ensemble with a matching box clutch and maroon stiletto heels

'There are more opportunities now': The former Bond girl appeared on Thursday's Lorraine, where she discussed a positive change in attitude towards race and gender in movies

Naomie completed her ensemble with a matching box clutch and maroon stiletto heels.

Her enthusiasm for the industry change stemmed from her acclaimed performance in 2016's Moonlight.

'After I finished Moonlight, it was a fantastic time in my career. But I suddenly started getting all these offers which were basically to play a character like Paula again

'I didnt want to be typecast. If youre going to do an action movie you do them with the king of that genre  The Rock!'

Speaking of her new flick Rampage, Naomie happily revealed: 'Its a fun action adventure and is a rollercoaster type of movie - a true popcorn movie!

'Roles are written for men, then changed for females': As she appeared on the popular ITV talk show, talk quickly turned to the battles the film industry has faced over the years

'I was getting offers to play a character like Paula again': Her enthusiasm for the change stemmed from her acclaimed performance in 2016's Moonlight

Speaking of her new flick Rampage, Naomie happily revealed: 'Its a fun action adventure and is a rollercoaster type of movie - a true popcorn movie!'

Naomie plays Dr. Kate Caldwell in the film, a discredited genetic engineer who teams up with Dwayne's primatologist character Davis Okoye.

Rampage - out in cinemas on April 13 - tells the story of primatologist Davis Okoye (Dwayne) who shares a deep connection with the intelligent gorilla George.

The once gentle creature begins to cause chaos in North America after a genetic experiment goes wrong and Davis takes it upon himself to save the monkey he loves.

Naomie also couldn't help but sing the praises of her co-star Dwayne: 'Hes just incredible and so charismatic.

'Youre working with green screen, I was completely lost yet he showed me how it all worked and was so helpfulHe's shaved his head in order to play Al Capone in upcoming biopic, Chasing Fonzo.

Yet Tom Hardy revealed the transformation hasn't stopped there as he shared snaps of his incredible make-over behind the scenes of the film.

Taking to Instagram on Wednesday after what must have been hours in the hair and make-up department, the 40-year-old actor snapped selfies dressed as the American mobster.

Who's that guy? Tom Hardy revealed the transformation he has undertaken to play Al Capone as he shared snaps of his incredible make-over behind the scenes of biopic, Chasing Fonzo

Tom looked virtually unrecognisable in the images, with a scraggly wig on and prosthetics to alter his appearance.

He captioned one shot: 'Mega awkward character misstep', before posing with the people behind his transformation and lauding: 'Audrey and Jay Make up legends'.

Once the most feared gangster in America, the Josh Trunk movie will follow Al Capone at the age of 47, as he battles dementia.

Usual style: For the project, Tom had to once again alter his appearance, however, he claimed it wouldn't be as drastic as his muscular roles

Look familiar? Taking to Instagram on Wednesday after what must have been hours in make-up department, the 40-year-old actor (right) snapped selfies dressed as Al Capone (left)

According to production notes, the story will show how 'his past becomes present as harrowing memories of his violent and brutal origins melt into his waking life'.

The Dark Knight Rises star, who beefed up considerably to play Bane in the Batman film and MMA fight Tommy Conlon in Warrior, previously spoke about his fears for his health now he's 40.

For the project, Tom had to once again alter his appearance, however, he claimed it wouldn't be as drastic as his muscular roles.

The Taboo star previously told the Daily Beast: 'It's not the classic Al Capone that you necessarily envision with the silhouette. I don't want to give too much away about it, but there's definitely a transformation with that role.

'I don't know if it's as drastic as Bane. I've probably damaged my body too much. I'm only little!

'If I keep putting on weight I'll collapse like a house of cards under too much pressure.'

In character: Tom looked virtually unrecognisable in the images, with a scraggly wig on and prosthetics to drastically alter his appearance

The star added that he has aches and pains in places that he shouldn't and admitted he now struggles lifting his children Louis, nine, and the two-year-old he shares with wife Charlotte Riley.

According to iMDB, the Academy Award nominee was once slated to play the role of Capone in a David Yates-directed movie called Cicero, but the film never materialized.

Whilst Tom is currently busy playing Capone, he recently teased fans he was set to step into Daniel Craig's role of James Bond.

Behind the scenes: Tom also posed with the people behind his transformation and lauding: 'Audrey and Jay Make up legends'

Wading in on an April Fools' joke that Daniel had sensationally had pulled out of the next 007 movie, the actor told his followers he was already in his 'tux and on the runway'.

Sharing a snap of an article saying the Batman star was cast to replace Daniel, he wrote: 'Dammit I was in my tux and on the runway Gtg no drama GB RTB headed back to NOLA stood down 19.'

The Taboo star has made no secret about wanting to be the next 007 - but has previously refused to talk about the part in fear it will get him blacklisted.She was rumoured to have recently broke off a whirlwind engagement to billionaire James Stunt, shortly before he was spotted with a mystery blonde.

And former Hollyoaks actress Samantha Rowley was determined to maintain a steely expression in light of her alleged newly-single status as she stepped out in London while sporting a barely-there mini skirt on Wednesday evening.

The blonde beauty was chatting on her phone as she emerged a day seen on Tuesday night when billionaire James Stunt, 36, headed out to C London restaurant in Mayfair with a mystery blonde on his arm.

Strutting her stuff: Former Hollyoaks actress Samantha Rowley was determined to maintain a steely expression in light of her alleged newly-single status as she stepped out in London while sporting a barely-there mini skirt on Wednesday evening

Samantha remained straight-faced as she emerged for the night out, in which she was showing off her endless legs in the ruffled mini.

On Tuesday night her former flame, billionaire James, 36, headed out to C London restaurant in Mayfair with a mystery blonde on his arm.

While their relationship status is unknown, it's rumoured that James ended his rumoured engagement to Samantha, 30, two weeks ago.

The pair appeared rather close to one another as they headed towards the eatery, where James notably handed over a wad over 20 notes to a doorman there.

Moving on: The blonde beauty was chatting on her phone as she emerged a day seen on Tuesday night when billionaire James Stunt, 36, headed out to C London restaurant in Mayfair with a mystery blonde on his arm

Meanwhile, Samantha is currently in Miami where she was pictured at her friend Laura Zilli's wedding, cut a casual figure in denim jeans and a black leather jacket.

The ex-husband of Petra Ecclestone layered the jacket atop of a black jumper and crisp white shirt.

The businessman, who is estimated to be worth around 4billion, attempted to go incognito as he handed over the generous amount of cash to the porter.

She was first photographed on James' arm just days after the final court hearing in his divorce from Petra in February, wearing a 1.5 million engagement ring.

Way back when: On Tuesday night her former flame billionaire James, 36, headed out to C London restaurant in Mayfair with a mystery blonde on his arm

The high-flying couple are rumoured to have been dating for several months, after being first spotted together in January.

James and Petra tied the knot in at lavish 12 million wedding at a castle in Rome, Italy, in 2011.

The couple enjoyed an extraordinary life together, splashing out 100 million on a Chelsea mansion and 158 million on a 123-room home in Los Angeles, and went on to have three children.The former Geordie Shore lass will soon be a beautiful bride when she ties the knot with Newcastle businessman fiancee John Noble next year.

And despite her former Geordie Shore co-stars not being on the guest list, Vicky Pattison has asked one I'm A Celebrity jungle campmate to save the date.

The 30-year-old revealed to Daily Mail Australia that she's asked lingerie model Simone Holtzangel to be in attendance at her impending nuptials.

'Can you imagine if Josh and Simone came?' Vicky Pattison has invited I'm A Celebrity co-star Simone Holtznagel to UK wedding while Geordie Shore alumni remain off the guest list

The pair both became close in the South African jungle over their 25-day stint together and have caught up since the series crowned its winner in March.

Vicky explained that after she left the show, she spoke to her fiance John about extending an extra invite.

'I said, 'Can you imagine if Josh and Simone (who she hoped would become a couple) came to the wedding and Fiona and Pete?'' the reality star said.

She added that the logistics of inviting Australian guests to her UK wedding would be a nightmare, but she had 'talked to Simone about coming'.

Fast friends! The pair both became close in the South African jungle over their 25-day stint together, with Vicky (centre) catching up with Simone (right) since the series crowned its winner in March

'I said "Can you imagine if Josh and Simone came to the wedding?''': Vicky revealed she hoped Josh and Simone would become a couple and attend her UK nuptials, but at this stage she's only talked Simone about being a guest

When asked if she would also be reconsidering her Geordie Shore cast mates that she spent three years working with, she said: 'It's not on my radar and no disrespect but I wouldn't be on theirs.'

Explaining her decision, she continued: 'I've got nothing against any of them, but we just don't talk. It's nothing personal, it's just in the past.'

'At the moment I'm having palpitations about the wedding guest list as it is, and they're like old work colleagues to me.'

'It's nothing personal, it's just in the past': When asked if she would also be reconsidering her Geordie Shore cast mates, that she spent three years working with, she said they weren't on her radar

Happy couple! The fashionista announced her engagement to long-term love John in July last year after the pair had known each other for almost a decade

Vicky and John will say 'I do' in Newcastle during the English summer of 2019.

They previously postponed their wedding because Vicky reportedly didn't want to steal the thunder from her sister Laura's big day.

The fashionista announced her engagement to long-term love John in July last year after the pair had known each other for almost a decade.It was announced last year that the novel, which is one of the best-selling sci-fi works of all time, was being adapted for a British television.

And filming well and truly got under way for War Of The Worlds on Wednesday, as stars Eleanor Tomlinson and Rafe Spall were spotted on set in Cheshire.

The Poldark actress, 25, slipped into Victorian garb to transform into her character Amy, while her on-screen husband Rafe, 35, shot a number of more dramatic scenes, surrounded by fire and smoke.

Kicking off: Filming well and truly got under way for War Of The Worlds on Wednesday, as stars Eleanor Tomlinson (above) and Rafe Spall were spotted on set in Cheshire

Action-packed: The Poldark actress, 25, slipped into Victorian garb while her on-screen husband Rafe, 35, shot a number of more dramatic scenes, surrounded by fire (above)

The British stars looked ready and raring to go as they joined forces on the elaborate Victorian set in Great Budworth.

Eleanor cut an elegant figure in her brown suit, formed of a short tailored blazer and floor-length A-line skirt.

Maintaining the smart feel from head to toe, she swept her curls into an elegant up-do, which showcased her naturally striking features - going mostly make-up free on set to keep in touch with the era.

Transformed: Eleanor cut an elegant figure in her brown suit, formed of a short tailored blazer and floor-length A-line skirt

Smart: Maintaining the smart feel from head to toe, she swept her curls into an elegant up-do, which showcased her naturally striking features

Suited and booted: Meanwhile Rafe somewhat matched his co-star in a co-ordinating suit of charcoal, complete with crisp shirt and waistcoat underneath, adorned with a gold chain

Ready to go: Slicking his hair back and adding smart, brown shoes, the actor cut a formal figure as he shot seemingly tense scenes with Eleanor

Meanwhile Rafe somewhat matched his co-star in a co-ordinating suit of charcoal, complete with crisp shirt and waistcoat underneath, adorned with a gold chain.

Slicking his hair back and adding smart, brown shoes, the actor cut a formal figure as he shot seemingly tense scenes with Eleanor, with his hands in his pockets.

The pair started their day by filming in front of an old brick house, before the redhead filmed later shots on a horse.

Clearly keen to rest after her busy morning, the actress was then spotted wrapping up warm in a vibrant purple dressing gown as she took her break.

Having a ball: The actor was later seen sharing a joke with crew members inbetween takes

Giddy up: The pair started their day by filming in front of an old brick house, before the redhead filmed later shots on a horse

Cosy: Clearly keen to rest after her busy morning, the actress was then spotted wrapping up warm in a vibrant purple dressing gown as she took her break

Chilling out: The Poldark star chatted with the cast and crew as she took a break from filming

Pumped up: She was later seen running lines to a producer, with her glowing complexion clear for all to see - going mostly make-up free to keep in touch with the era

On the other side of set, Rafe then embarked on more dramatic scenes - which saw him tear around the smoky scene as a fire broke out before him.

War Of The Worlds, which was published more than 120 years ago, will be imagined in a three-part BBC adaptation, which tells the story of a catastrophic alien invasion.

Whilst previous big screen adaptations have been set in the US, this version will stay true to the original book and unfold in London and Surrey - where marauding Martians are attacking humans.

The tentacled aliens use sophisticated fighting machines known as tripods and chemical weapons dubbed Black Smoke to lay waste to as many people as possible, in order that they can suck their blood.

Gearing up: On the other side of set, Rafe embarked on more dramatic scenes

Run! He was seen tearing around the smoky scene as a fire broke out before him

Despondent: A later shot saw him stare down at the rubble before him

Quick change: Eleanor was then seen changing into another suit and hat, and conversing with a soldier at a church on set

The novel has been adapted by Peter Harness, the screenwriter behind Wallander and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and is set to be broadcast later this year.

Damien Timmer, head of Mammoth Screen - the production company which will make the show  said that his adaptation will remain faithful to the original.

This huge title - the original alien invasion story  has been loosely adapted and riffed on countless times, but no one has ever attempted to follow Wells and locate the story in Dorking at the turn of the last century.

We hope Peters adaptation will be the definitive adaptation of one of the great classic novels.'

The War Of The Worlds has been dramatised numerous times over the years  but it has almost always been set in America.

Dangerous: War Of The Worlds, which was published more than 120 years ago, will be imagined in a three-part BBC adaptation, which tells the story of a catastrophic alien invasionThey were previously spotted filming their upcoming BBC spy drama The Little Drummer Girl on Thursday.

And now Alexander Skarsgard, 41, and Florence Pugh, 22, were pictured getting close as they shot some of the show's romantic scene at the Temple of Poseidon in Sounio, Greece.

The pair were in full costume flexing their acting muscles while seated in a red car with Swedish actor Alexandra taking the wheel.

Filming: Alexandra Skarsgard, 41, and Florence Pugh, 22, were pictured getting close as they shot some of the show's romantic scene at the Temple of Poseidon in Sounio, Greece

Channeling his character Becker, Alexander was seen walking around set in a vibrant knitted orange top, equipped with a deep v-neckline.

The Hollywood star donned a pair of gradient lens aviator shades and wrapped a long silver chain around his neck.

Complementing his eye-catching appearance, Florence was seen sheathed in a cobalt blue seventies-inspired dress while they shot the cosy scene which saw them coyly smiling and hugging as they cameras rolled.

Eye-catching: Channeling his character Becker, Alexander was seen walking around set in a vibrant knitted orange top, equipped with a deep v-neckline

No shade: The Hollywood star donned a pair of gradient lens aviator shades and wrapped a long silver chain around his neck

In character: They Smiled while they shot a romantic scene

Yesteryear: Florence was seen sheathed in a cobalt blue seventies-inspired dress

There had been doubt over whether The Little Drummer Girl could be filmed on an ancient site near Athens and after an access ban to the 2,500-year-old Temple of Poseidon was reversed it seems the cast didn't waste any time getting down to work.

Alexander will play Israeli intelligence officer Becker in the television adaptation of the John le Carre novel.

Florence - best known for her work in Lady Macbeth - takes on the leading role of radical left-wing actress Charlie and plays Alexandra's lover in the upcoming series.

In the moment: The pair giggled during the scene together

Peering out: Alexander peered out of the window

Relaxed: The actors appeared relaxed in each other's company

Close-up: Alexander and Florence were ready for their close-up

Fixing up: Florence appeared to pick something up from the ground in the middle of the scene

The six-part series, set in the late 1970s, is based on a book by John Le Carre, who also wrote The Night Manager, which proved to be a popular BBC adaptation.

The Little Drummer Girl follows the tale of young actress Charlie (Pugh) as she strikes up an acquaintance with an intriguing stranger while on holiday in Greece, but it rapidly becomes apparent that his intentions are far from romantic.

The man is Becker (Skarsgard), an Israeli intelligence officer, who entangles her in a complex and high stakes plot orchestrated by Spymaster, Kurtz ( Michael Shannon).

Chit chat: Alexander chatted to a crew member in between scenes

Back to work: There had been doubt over whether The Little Drummer Girl could be filmed on an ancient site near Athens and after an access ban to the 2,500-year-old Temple of Poseidon was reversed it seems the cast didn't waste any time getting down to work

View: The shoot took place at the edge of a road with the idyllic backdrop in view

Going nowhere: Their vintage Mercedes sportscar was rigged to a trailer

Ready: Director Park Chan-wook was wrapped up for filming

The Little Drummer Girl will be directed by Park Chan-wook and is expected to hit screens later this year.

Meanwhile, filming for the series almost came to a halt earlier this month after a panel of archaeologists turned down an access request by the BBC and US-based cable network AMC.

Greeces powerful Central Archaeological Council denied the one-day access request to the 2,500-year-old Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion next month, saying the site would be closed to visitors for too many hours and the production team would be too large.

Fun in the sun: Filming The Little Drummer Girl in Greece on Friday, Alexander Skarsgard, 41, and Florence Pugh, 22, looked in good spirits as they larked around on the historical site

Bold: Alexander will play Israeli intelligence officer Becker in the television adaptation of the John le Carre novel and was seen walking around set in a green cardigan and orange top

Vibrant: Florence - best known for her work in Lady Macbeth - takes on the leading role of radical left-wing actress Charlie and was seen sheathed in a cobalt blue coat

Two's company: They will play lovers in the upcoming series

One to watch: The six-part series, set in the late 1970s, is based on a book by John Le Carre, who also wrote The Night Manager, which proved to be a popular BBC adaptation

The decision triggered a furious reaction from Greeces government, which launched a campaign three days ago to attract film productions to the country with a series of incentives.

The government said overseas productions could be a key growth area in the country, which is emerging from eight years of crippling financial crisis.

A week later, the decision was overturned following the backlash.

Interesting: The Little Drummer Girl follows the tale of young actress Charlie (Pugh) as she strikes up an acquaintance with an intriguing stranger while on holiday in Greece

Intriguing: The man is Becker (Skarsgard), an Israeli intelligence officer, who entangles her in a complex and high stakes plot orchestrated by Spymaster, Kurtz ( Michael Shannon)Kim Kardashian has deleted all the pictures she uploaded on Instagram after news emerged of Tristan Thompson cheating on her sister Khloe.

The reality star, 37, was met with significant backlash after she continued to chronicle her sun-drenched holiday to Turks and Caicos with a series of sizzling bikini clad snaps - however, there now appears to be no trace of those images on her platform.

Meanwhile, members of the Kardashian family have appeared to block the words 'Khloe Kardashian, Tristan Thompson and cheating' from their Instagram comments feed.

No trace: Kim Kardashian, 37, has deleted all the pictures she uploaded on Instagram after news emerged of Tristan Thompson cheating on her sister Khloe

After news emerged that Tristan had cheated on heavily pregnant Khloe, her two sisters Kim and Kourtney proved determined to continue their holiday.

Kim took to Instagram with saucy bikini-clad snaps which put focus on her famous curves and also shared a close-up image of her feet in the sand.

However on Thursday, those snaps proved to be missing from her Instagram account, which boasts 110million followers, with the last image shared two days ago.

Meanwhile, sister Kourtney has decided to keep her sexy holiday Instagram pictures, with the last snap she shared showing her relaxing on a sun-lounger with Kim.

Betrayal: On Wednesday morning reports emerged that Tristan cheated on heavily pregnant Khloe with three women

'Khloe is struggling at home!' Kim was met with significant backlash after she continued to chronicle her sun-drenched holiday to Turks & Caicos with a series of sizzling bikini clad snaps

Deleted: Following significant fan backlash, there now appears to be no trace of those holiday images on her platform

Doing what she does best! Kim initially took to Instagram with saucy bikini-clad snaps which put focus on her famous curves

Kim's shock move comes after she came under fire for sharing the saucy images after Tristan's cheating scandal emerged.

Fans were not impressed as they pleaded with the brunette twosome to check in on their sister rather than focus on Instagram.

Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton was also quick to add his disgust: 'How is Khloe doing today?' and another penned: 'Speaking of ride or die. Is Khloe OK today?'

While the girls may have not wanting to wade into Khloe's personal life, the timing of the image seemed a little insensitive given the latest news.

Bikini fun: Kim posted a photo of herself stand-up paddling in a bright orange bikini during her Turks and Caicos getaway to her website

Surf's up: The reality star laid flat on the board as she floated on the water

Finding her feet: The wife of Kanye West also shared a close-up snap of her feet in the sand, proving she was having a fantastic time on holiday

'Is Khloe okay?' Kim's shock move comes after she came under fire for sharing the saucy images after Tristan's cheating scandal emerged

And in light of all the social media backlash, Kim, half-sister Kylie and Kendall Jenner have all appeared to block certain key words from their Instagram comments which references the cheating scandal.

A racy bikini snap of Kim shared two days ago proved no mention of Khloe and Tristan.

Kylie, 20, flaunted her posterior in a luxury brown tracksuit on Wednesday, with her fans being more concerned about a 'LB (like back) than Khloe's heartbreak.

Making no reference of her sister's turmoil, model Kendall, 22, took to Instagram with a snap of her going sky-diving with Scott Disick.

Barred words? In light of all the social media backlash, Kim has appeared to block certain key words from her Instagram comments which references the cheating scandal

The show must go on! Kylie, 20, flaunted her posterior in a luxury tracksuit on Wednesday, with her fans being more concerned about a 'LB (like back) than Khloe's heartbreak

Khloe who? Making no reference of her sister's turmoil, model Kendall, 22, took to Instagram with a snap of her going sky-diving with Scott Disick

Controlling comments: In 2016, Taylor Swift was reportedly given an Instagram tool to block out abusive fan comments on her account following a spat with Kim and Kanye West

If the sisters have used a blocking tool, they probably sourced inspiration from Kim's frenemy Taylor Swift.

The singer was reportedly given an Instagram tool in 2016 to block out abusive fan comments on her social media account.

The Bad Blood singer was inundated with comments and 'snake' emojis as fans turned on her following her recent spat with Kim and husband Kanye West.

This follows on from reports Tristan Thompson has allegedly cheated on Khloe with three women.

Khloe is due to give birth any day now, while also dealing with the fact that her longtime boyfriend allegedly cheated on her with multiple women.

Surveillance video surfaced Tuesday night of Thompson at a hookah lounge in Washington, DC with two women. The video is from October when Khloe was three months pregnant.

Stressful time: Heavily pregnant Khloe is due to give birth any day now

Caught on camera: Tristan spent the weekend hitting up a number of New York City hotspots and holing up in his hotel room with a strip club worker who has been identified as Lani Blair

Happier times: The couple confirmed they were dating in September 2016 and announced they were expecting a baby in December 2017 (pictured in June that year)

In the footage, Thompson is seen sitting on a couch with the two women. The athlete appears to kiss one, identified only as Marie, and grabs her hand.

Thompson also puts his face in the second woman's chest as she laughs. Marie then reaches over and rubs her hand across Thompson's crotch.

A woman by the name of Stephanie is also claiming now that she is pregnant, possibly with Thompson's child.

Thompson's cheating scandal started early Tuesday when the DailyMail.com exclusively reported that the athlete was seen kissing a woman Saturday night at the Penthouse at Dream Downtown in New York.Laura Whitmore has candidly revealed she has been the victim of sexual assault after a stranger put his hand up her skirt in a nightclub and laughed.

The 32-year-old reflected on the harrowing incident, which took place last year, and explained she initially believed her boyfriend Iain Stirling or a pal was 'messing around' when she felt a hand on her leg.

Writing for an essay on 'the routine abuse of women' following the #MeToo movement for Irish publication Hot Press, the presenter admitted she wanted to share her shocking experience but feared 'what people might say' if she spoke out.

Candid: Laura Whitmore has candidly revealed she has been the victim of sexual assault after a stranger put his hand up her skirt in a nightclub and laughed

She shared: 'I could feel a hand on the back of my leg. Initially I thought it was my boyfriend messing or a mate about to pinch my bottom  but the hand went under my skirt, between my legs, and firmly touched me.

'As I turned, I saw it was a guy who I did not know. He was laughing. I pushed him away and told him to get his "f***ing hands off me". It was dark and I was shocked by what had just happened.

Adding: 'I couldnt recognise his face under the strobing lights and, then, he was gone. I was a bit tipsy and I was wearing a short skirt. Did I deserve that to happen? I told the manager but what could I do? What was the point?'

The former Strictly Come Dancing star also spoke in about other incidents she's faced including a man smacking her bum getting of a bus in London, being groped when she was a teenager and having lewd comments shouted at her in the street.

Shock: The 32-year-old reflected on the harrowing incident, which took place last year, and explained she initially believed her boyfriend Iain Stirling or a pal was 'messing around' when she felt a hand on her leg

Terror: Writing for an essay on 'the routine abuse of women' following the #MeToo movement for Irish publication Hot Press, the presenter admitted she wanted to share her shocking experience but feared 'what people might say' if she spoke out

The Bray native added in her essay that the #MeToo movement was just the tip of the iceberg and discussed how a well-known Hollywood producer tried to coerce her into meeting him after finding out her hotel and room number at a BAFTAs after-party.

Speaking about her unwanted admirer, Laura explained she had met the producer over the years at film events and then again at an after-party for the 2016 awards when he complimented her TV work while introducing her to his colleagues and wife.

However, the Irish host admitted 'alarm bells rang' when the 'well-respected' producer began telling her she was 'very pretty girl' and although she had only met him in a professional manner, he had invited her to the theatre and for dinner.

Fear: She shared: 'I could feel a hand on the back of my leg. Initially I thought it was my boyfriend messing or a mate about to pinch my bottom  but the hand went under my skirt, between my legs, and firmly touched me' (Pictured with boyfriend Iain Stirling)

Fury: She added: 'As I turned, I saw it was a guy who I did not know. He was laughing. I pushed him away and told him to get his "f***ing hands off me". It was dark and I was shocked by what had just happened'

And while she politely declined his offers, she revealed things took a turn after he found out her hotel and room number following the cinematic awards and unexpectedly rang to ask if she would meet him at his hotel as he wanted to help her career.

But Laura admitted she knew better and was coincidentally working so was able to pawn him off.

Although she never 'felt cornered' by the producer, the TV star added that she never went public with it until now for fear people would think 'Why would he be bothered talking to her?' and cited how many women and years it took for anyone to take the allegations seriously against the producer in question.

In the wake of her eye-opening article, Laura has been supported by her boyfriend and comedian Iain Stirling for coming forward with her story.

Situations: The former Strictly Come Dancing star also spoke in about other incidents she's faced including a man smacking her bum getting of a bus in London, being groped when she was a teenager and having lewd comments shouted at her in the street

Pressure: The Bray native added in her essay that the #MeToo movement was just the tip of the iceberg and discussed how a well-known Hollywood producer tried to coerce her into meeting him after finding out her hotel and room number at a BAFTAs after-party

Speaking about how they met, she told the MailOnline in February: 'I think the first time I met him was at the Children's BAFTAs. I was presenting an award and he won an award, so I met him there.'

'I don't know if we were in other relationships but I was just friendly with him. That was before the last series of Love Island.

Continuing: 'So we were just mates, and we were friendly for a while before it developed into something more, but we didn't tell anyone for ages.

'Again, you don't really know until you decide and you don't want everyone knowing your business so we decided to keep it quiet as much as possible.'

Light: In the wake of her eye-opening article, Laura has been supported by her boyfriend and comedian Iain Stirling

Flourishing: But the flourishing relationship was initially hindered by work commitments, with Laura engaged in a six month theatrical tour with Peter James play Not Dead Enough and Iain filming Love Island in Majorca

But the flourishing relationship was initially hindered by work commitments, with Laura engaged in a six month theatrical tour with Peter James play Not Dead Enough and Iain filming Love Island in Majorca.

'It's quite hard when you're back and forth and you try and see each other as much as you can,' she said. 'It was slowly, it wasn't a rush. It was a slowly developing thing. We kept it very quiet.'

After weeks of speculation the couple finally confirmed their relationship via social media, and with hindsight Laura admits the decision ultimately worked in her favour.

I think with me and Iain we kept it quiet for as long as we could, then one day we both decided lets do one Instagram thing and its out there, she said. But I realised that once its out there people dont care as much.W1A star Alex Beckett has passed away aged 36, his agent confirmed on Thursday.

The Welsh actor, who was renowned for his role as Barney Lumsden on BBC comedies W1A and Twenty Twelve, was lauded by Gavin Denton-Jones in the announcement. The cause of death is yet to be announced.

Denton-Jones' statement read: 'Were deeply saddened by the loss of Alex  a wonderful man and a hugely talented actor. Our thoughts are with his family and we kindly ask that their privacy be respected at this difficult time.'

Devastating: W1A star Alex Beckett has passed away aged 36, his agent confirmed on Thursday. The late star is pictured just last week, at the after-party of his play The Way of the World play at Donmar Warehouse

Alex was starring in The Way of the World at the Donmar Warehouse prior to his death, however theatre officials confirmed the rest of the week's performances would be cancelled in honour of the esteemed actor.

A statement from Donmar's artistic director Josie Rourke and executive director Kate Pakenham read: 'We are deeply shocked by the tragic loss of our dear friend and brilliant actor Alex Beckett, a much-loved member of The Way of the World company.

'Our thoughts are with his family and close friends at this incredibly sad time. Everyone at the Donmar and The Way of the World company are completely devastated by this terribly sad news.

'We have taken the decision to cancel the remaining performances this week, as a mark of respect to Alex, and to give some time to the company, who all loved Alex as a fellow actor, and a friend.

Heartbreaking: Alex was starring in The Way of the World at the Donmar Warehouse prior to his death, however theatre bosses confirmed the rest of the week's performances would be cancelled (pictured in a publicity shot for W1A's third and final season last year)

Devastating: A statement from Donmar artistic director Josie Rourke and executive director Kate Pakenham read: 'We are deeply shocked by the tragic loss of our dear friend and brilliant actor Alex Beckett' (pictured during his 2016 run in Caryl Churchill's Blue Heart)

His W1A co-star Jessica Hynes, who starred as his boss Siobhan, took to Twitter to honour her colleague as she penned: 'Alex Beckett was a wonderful, clever, kind, brilliant person  so glad to have known him, so sad he is gone.

Another tribute came from co-star Rufus Jones: 'Just hearing this awful news about Alex Beckett. He was such a warm-hearted and funny, funny guy. W1A felt like a big family and he was a face you couldnt wait to see. My thoughts with his family xx.'

Jeremy Herrin, the Artistic Director at the Headlong Theatre where he starred in Pygmalion last year, wrote: 'Heartfelt condolences to Alex Becketts family. We are shocked and devastated at Headlong. He was such a vital Higgins in our production of Pygmalion: its very difficult to imagine him gone.'

Heartbreaking: His W1A co-star Jessica Hynes, who starred as his boss Siobhan, took to Twitter to honour her colleague as she penned: 'Alex Beckett was a wonderful, clever, kind, brilliant person  so glad to have known him, so sad he is gone'

Way back when: Alex is pictured starring in The Death Of Cool alongside Olivia Grant in 2007

Theatre critic Mark Shenton wrote: 'Sad farewell to actor ALEX BECKETT, who has died suddenly. All performances of THE WAY OF THE WORLD at Donmar', in which he was appearing, have been cancelled this week in respect, & "to give some time to the company, who all loved Alex as a fellow actor, and a friend.

Off-West End theatre The Orange Tree shared a tribute reading: 'All at the Orange Tree are shocked and saddened by the sudden death of Alex Beckett.

'A superb actor of great range, charm, intelligence and wit, he shone in Caryl Churchills Blue Heart at the OT in 2016. An enormously warm, kind man: he will be much missed.'

Tough times: Alex (second right, pictured with his W1A co-stars in 2012), who was born in Carmarthenshire, South Wales in 1982, trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, London, before graduating in 2003

Another honour came from writer Kate Maltby, as she penned: 'Terrible, terrible news about Alex Beckett. Deeply committed to the theatre world as a whole, always asking new questions, always warm and friendly. My thoughts are with all the company'.

Alex, who was born in Carmarthenshire, South Wales in 1982, trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, London, before graduating in 2003.

Aside from his esteemed role in the BBC comedy, he also starred in an episode of Emmerdale as PC Tony Read in 2006 and also appeared in The Bill in 2008.They are blazing the promo trail with the latest Avengers movie.

So the cast of Avengers: Infinity War, including Tom Holland, Pom Klementieff, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch, were naturally keen to look their best at every turn - this time during the South Korea premiere of the movie.

The trio of British heartthrobs looked dashing in well-tailored ensembles as they were joined by their uber glam co-star at the event held at the COEX mall's Special Outdoor Stage in Seoul on Thursday.

Here they are! The cast of Avengers: Infinity War, including Pom Klementieff, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Holland (left-right), were naturally keen to look their best at every turn - this time during the South Korea premiere of the movie

Proving just why they have heartthrob status, Tom and Benedict looked extremely handsome in their sharp suits.

The Night Manager star, who plays Loki in the Marvel movie, was showing off an unkempt beard while sporting stylish glasses to compliment his three piece suit.

Benedict meanwhile, who stars as Doctor Strange in the superhero universe, went for a burgundy ensemble with a black tie.

Tom was more dressed down than his co-stars as he sported a white crew-neck T-shirt tucked into tight jeans while rocking a long-line grey coat.

Handsome: The trio of British heartthrobs looked dashing in well-tailored ensembles as they were joined by their uber glam co-star at the event held at the COEX mall's Special Outdoor Stage in Seoul on Thursday

Happy days: Pom, who plays Mantis in the film, looked sensational in a lilac ensemble complete with a bejewelled skirt, silk shirt and suedette over-sized jacket on top

Pom, who plays Mantis in the film, looked sensational in a lilac ensemble complete with a bejewelled skirt, silk shirt and suedette over-sized jacket on top.

Speaking of her turn in the film, she said: 'Acting was something that I wanted to do when I was little, but I never really tried and thought that it wasnt possible.

'But I thought, Id rather try and do things, because anything can happen in life. I didnt want to have any regrets'.

Hey there! Tom was more dressed down than his co-stars as he sported a white crew-neck T-shirt tucked into tight jeans while rocking a long-line grey coat

Avengers: Infinity War is the sequel to 2012's The Avengers and 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Two years after the Avengers were ripped apart during the events of Captain America: Civil War, evil Thanos arrives on earth to collect the Infinity Stones for a gauntlet which will allow him to bend reality.

The Avengers must unite with the Guardians of the Galaxy to stop him before he destroys half the universe.

Avengers: Infinity War hits theatres on April 27, 2018.She's been travelling round the country with her Evil Queen tour.

And Em Rusciano embodied her inner showgirl on Thursday as she prepared for her debut performance at the Sydney Opera House.

The 39-year-old comedienne put on a sassy display in the Instagram snap showing off her glamorous look, donning a sequinned bodysuit as she confidently posed on a piano.

Sensational: Em Rusciano embraced her inner showgirl on Thursday as she sported a gorgeous sequinned leotard ahead of her debut performance at the Sydney Opera House

Em teamed her pink and silver one-piece with thigh-high gold boots and fuchsia feathered sleeves, with her eye makeup appropriately dramatic for the outlandish look.

The 2DAY FM host certainly appeared to be taking inspiration for some of media's most famous Evil Queens, posting an on-stage snap with the caption: 'Four. More. Sleeps. Sydney you slinky minx its nearly time.

'Brisbane youre next and finally Perth. Five comedy concerts to go, then the Evil Queen will retire to her Gin Palace, man servants and 57 dogs.'

Showstopping: The 39-year-old comedienne was getting into character ahead of the latest leg of her Evil Queen tour

Lavish: Em also took to Instagram to share a snap of the grand stage she was set to perform on

Em also posted a video ahead of her Sydney gig, as it slowly revealed the grand stage she is set to perform on.

The mother-of-two captioned the post: 'Sydney Opera House - I AM HERE! 40 years of Mardi Gras, but Sydneys never seen an explosion of glitter and sequins like this! So excited, you guys!'

But despite her tour success, Em recently came under fire from fans for promoting an all-women event, with some accusing her of only targeting white, straight women.

Taking to Instagram to promote the event 'Business, Boobs and Bubbles', a follower of the Melbourne-born beauty rushed to comment: 'Um no thanks. You don't have to be a white cis woman to be a woman. Where are the WoC? Trans/NB people?

'This event is clearly being held for women who already have immense privilege and ready access to these resources,' she wrote.

Grand: With the band ready, Em gushed in the caption: 'Sydneys never seen an explosion of glitter and sequins like this!'

Em was quick to defend her honour, telling the angry Instagram user she 'supports all women' and had no say in which females were booked for the event.

'Rach, I support all women. All of them,' she said. 'No one is saying you have to be a white cis woman to be a woman.'

'At no point, anywhere, was this even stated for the event. I got asked if I wanted to do something to support women in business and said yes. As far as the other guests, I don't book them.'Natalie Roser got a teaser of some of the latest beauty trends on Thursday as she attended Mecca Beauty's Meccaland VIP Preview in Kensington.

The 27-year-old model showed off her summer style in a red sundress as she documented the day on Instagram with fellow model Brooke Hogan.

Natalie posted an array of videos and snaps while visiting some of the stalls, giving fans a first look at the event before its official opening on Friday.

Beautiful girl: Model Natalie Roser was beaming with excitement on Thursday as she attended Mecca Beauty's Meccaland VIP Preview in Kensington, sharing her day with fans on Instagram

Natalie gushed to her fans that the beauty event was like attending a mini-festival, as she got to try out some of the newest products and trends.

The Maxim star posted a snap of her pretty red bandeau dress with her blonde hair styled into simple waves, although nothing could upstage her beaming smile and flawless complexion.

She captioned the post: 'Like a kid in a candy store today #meccaland @meccamaxima created beauty heaven.'

Taking to her Instagram stories Natalie posted an array of videos with fellow model beauty Brooke.

The Australia's Next Top Model star donned a similarly casual ensemble, teaming denim co-ords with a dark red top and converse trainers.

Girls day out: The Maxim cover girl enjoyed the day out with fellow fashion star Brooke Hogan as they explored the festival's various displays

Chic: Brooke showed off her trim physique in denim co-ords and a red top, posting her own snap of the look on social media

Sparkling: In true festival style, Natalie took to her Instagram stories to share a video of her applying stick-on diamantes to Brooke's face

In one of the earlier videos, Natalie got Brooke festival-ready by sticking diamante stars on the side of her face, as the fashion star also shared some panoramic shots of the festival and its array of stalls.

Adding another pop of colour to her look, the Miss Universe Australia finalist tried out a coral lipstick on show at the festival, posting a selfie of the look on her social media.

Brooke and Natalie put on a hilarious display for their followers at the event, joking that there '27,000 of them' as they danced inside a hall of mirrors.

Exciting: Natalie couldn't stop smiling in the array of snaps and videos from throughout the day

Transformed: The Miss Universe Australia finalist showed off her summer style in a strapless red sundress with heart-shaped sunglasses

Natalie also posted some videos of her and Brooke watching models sporting all the latest beauty trends, as well as messing around with some of the festival's displays.

On the same day Natalie announced to fans that she would be selling her old bikinis in a garage sale, with the proceeds going to charity.

Taking to her Instagram the Newcastle-born stunner wrote: 'Lets recycle and prevent fashion landfill (and have fun in the process!)  SATURDAY 14th (this Saturday) MELBOURNE ONLY @theprincehotel 9-5 ,'

Joining her at the sale will be other social media stars, including Hannah Orval, Chloe Ting, Ruby Brownless and Jordan Simek.She's hoping to sing to victory as the Australian candidate for the Eurovision Song Contest in Portugal next month.

And Jessica Mauboy looked more than ready to steal the limelight as she stormed the stage for a pre-Contest performance in Tel Aviv, Israel on Tuesday.

The former Australian Idol star, 28, looked every inch the singing sensation in a scarlet ruffled jumpsuit as she showcased her killer vocals.

Scarlet siren: Jessica Mauboy dazzled in a red ruffled jumpsuit as she stormed the stage with a passionate pre-Eurovision Song Contest performance in Israel

The brunette beauty certainly turned heads in the sizzling garment, which featured a one-shoulder neckline and 80s-inspired ruffles.

Letting the statement one-piece do all the talking, she accessorised with simple layered gold jewellery.

Sweeping her hair back, she framed her striking features with a bold slick of pillarbox red lipstick and a sweep of mascara.

Chic: Letting the statement one-piece do all the talking, she accessorised with simple layered gold jewellery

Jessica's Eurovision song We Got Love has been met by a wave of praise on Twitter and is even tipped for victory.

Jessica was confirmed late last year as Australia's 2018 entry for the talent show.

She had previously performed as Eurovision's interval act in 2014 and has high hopes to win the top prize.

'I'm going to bring it home,' she told The Project last December.

Representing the country: Jessica was confirmed late last year as Australia's 2018 entry for the Europe talent quest

'I'm ready to compete and I've just got this fire in my gut! There's unfinished business to be honest!'

Coming runner-up to Damien Leith in the 2006 season of Australian Idol, Jessica's career has gone from strength to strength ever since.

She has released three albums, including the hit songs Running Back, Fallin' and Pop a Bottle (Fill Me Up).

Jessica is also an accomplished actress, appearing in films The Sapphires and Bran Nue Dae and Channel Seven's The Secret Daughter.Brooke Burke is not crying over a pint of ice cream on her couch at home after filing for divorce from Dave Charvet last week.

Instead the 46-year-old is posting inspirational messages to Instagram while flashing her toned body.

On Thursday the brunette bombshell was at it again as she declared that she was 'in the best shape of her life.'

No tears here: Brooke Burke put her body on display yet again on Thursday; last week she filed for divorce from Dave Charvet

The Playboy cover girl wore a maroon outfit as she shook her hair.

The siren's muscle tone was astounding, proving that she must spend at least two hours a day in the gym.

The caption began: 'BODY OF EVIDENCE. Yes You can get into the best shape of your life at any age.

Feeling good: The looker posed in a yellow bikini in this Instagram post shared on Wednesday

'Im sharing all my workouts, programs, tips & fitness inspiration. Lets work out together.

'Today is the perfect day to start stepping into your best self! #getmyfitnessapp lets do this together. BrookeBurkeBody community.'

On Tuesday the TV host posted three alluring images, one in which she is wearing a yellow bikini as she sits on a boat.

So fit it's crazy: She told her followers to work out with her as she showed off her lean shape

Brooke also talked about 'stepping out of my comfort zone.'

In her first post she has clothes on and looks radiant. Her caption reads, 'Here comes the sun.'

The pinup then posts her bikini photo. Her full caption reads, 'Good morning Tuesday  2nd episode of I Dare You youre not gonna believe this one @tvland OMG!!! Stepping out of my comfort zone, and jumping in.'

Giggle time: In her first post she has clothes on and looks radiant. Her caption reads, 'Here comes the sun'

Good girl: In her most recent Instagram post she is doing yoga. 'Dusk moments in yoga to stretch, breathe, play the pause & reset my body'

In her most recent Instagram post she is doing yoga.

'Dusk moments in yoga to stretch, breathe, play the pause & reset my body. I just posted a fun flow with @laynadakinyoga. Join us on my app Any morning to start your day right. Ill take you to @sweatyoga & help stretch into the best space. #brookeburkebody link in bio lets start today. Yoga, BootyBurn, sexy abs, cardio parties, bikini body,' she wrote.

The star is only seen in silhouette.

And on Monday the 46-year-old Playboy cover girl broke her silence on ending her marriage of seven years.

The brunette beauty took to the site ModernMoms to say she is 'deeply saddened' but needs to do this for her family.

The model began: 'You may have heard that David and I are divorcing. We have tried to keep our separation private for some time out of respect for our children and family. Although I believe this is a positive change, I am deeply saddened because I loved being married.'

The TV star then said: 'It took me a long time to differentiate between giving up and letting go, and even longer to recognize when it was time to do so.

'We are still a family full of love, simply redefining our dynamics. I believe this is a necessary decision for my entire family unit.'

They used to have fun: The nude model said, 'We are still a family full of love, simply redefining our dynamics. I believe this is a necessary decision for my entire family unit'; seen in 2013

The kids: She has two children with Dave. Here she is seen with all four of her children - Shaya, Heaven, Neriah and Sierra - in 2011

The Rock Star and Wild On! host then said: 'There was nothing sensational that caused this divorce and nothing scandalous will surface, please believe that we are just finding new ways to remain a loving family.

'Big life decisions are hardest when made for the right reasons. It is sometimes painful to be strong and embrace change. I believe in letting go of ideas and dreams when the time is right.

' I am in that space right now as a woman and a mother, listening to my heart. Iam approaching this with gratitude and unconditional love.'

She ended with: 'Thank you for the outpouring of love and support in the last days.'

Burke listed their date of separation as January 23, 2018 in court documents obtained by E! News.

She cited 'irreconcilable differences' as the reason for their split.

All good here: Their last red carpet event together was on March 10 in Park City, Utah. They took Sierra, Shaya and Rain to the Operation Smile's 7th Annual Park City Ski Challenge at The St. Regis Deer Valley

They wed in St Barts in August, 2011 and went on to have two children together - Shaya, aged 10, and Heaven rain, 11.

Burke already has Neriah, aged 18, and Sierra, aged 16, with plastic surgeon Garth Fisher, 59, of Extreme Makeover fame.

Their last red carpet event together was on March 10 in Park City, Utah.

They took Sierra, Shaya and Rain to the Operation Smile's 7th Annual Park City Ski Challenge at The St. Regis Deer Valley and Deer Valley Resort.

She is best known for her shoots with Maxim and Playboy as well as for starring on Dancing With The Stars then co-hosting the show; she was replaced by Erin Andrews after a few years.

She told The Hype magazine last year she and David were happy homebodies: 'When I'm at home, being a chef is my passion. I love long hours in the kitchen mixing up family meals. And my husband and I love to entertain It's always the more the merrier at our house.'

Often she poses in bikinis while working out on the beach in Instagram snaps.

In January she said: 'Some days when you want to pull your hair out...  In with yourself, take a deep breath & let it all go.She's a hard-working star always working on a new project.

And Elyse Knowles put on a leggy display on Thursday as she posed for a brand new Instagram selfie, teasing that she was on-set working on a new project.

The 25-year-old model - who rose to fame as a star of the 13th season of The Block last year - showed off her endless pins in Daisy Dukes and a white striped blouse.

Amazing: The Block star Elyse Knowles showed off her endless pins in tiny denim shorts on Thursday as she shared an Instagram post from her break on set

Elyse went barefoot for the stylish snap as she perched on a stool during a break from her work on-set, showing just a glimpse of her tiny denim shorts.

The beauty teamed the Daisy Dukes with a plunging white striped blouse, wearing no other accessories to let the simple look make a statement.

Elyse kept her blonde hair styled into loose natural waves as she highlighted her flawless complexion with a dramatic smoky eye and nude lip.

Despite her usually glamorous appearance, Elyse recently stunned fans after ditching the makeup for a candid selfie, with the au naturelle look stunning fans.

Simply writing the caption: 'This is ME' her naturally freckled complexion was on full display in the post.

'This is me': Elyse Knowles recently stunned fans with a rare makeup-free selfie (left) she posted to Instagram on Monday

Elyse tagged a hairstylist and makeup artist in the photo, hinting she was about to prepare for a photo shoot.

Soon the post was inundated with praise from fans who gushed about the model's natural appearance, with one commenting: 'Wow you look so beautiful without any makeup on'.

Back in February, the Bras N Things model admitted she's reduced the amount she shares on social media.

Glam squad! Elyse tagged a hairstylist and makeup artist in the photo, hinting she was about to prepare for a photo shoot

In an interview with Stellar magazine, Elyse said: 'These days I don't need to showcase every element of my life.

'And I'm happy I'm at that stage, because I'm so sick of proving myself to everyone: proving you have to be this kind of person or you have to look like this or you have to be in a bikini in every shot.'

Elyse was a successful model with major campaigns on her resume when she appeared on The Block last year.

Multi-talented: Elyse was a successful model with major campaigns on her resume when she appeared on The Block last year with her long-term boyfriend Josh Barker (right)

Teaming up with her long-term boyfriend Josh Barker, the celebrity couple eventually won the competition.

They sold their renovated home in Elsternwick, Melbourne to comedian Dave Hughes for an eye-watering $3.067 million.

The funnyman, 47, later admitted he paid 'too much' for the property, which he now rents out.She is one of the most recognizable Victoria's Secret Angels in the world.

And on Thursday, Adriana Lima worked on her sensational figure as the model was spotted making her way to a workout in Miami.

Dressed casually, the brunette beauty, 36, showed off her slender legs in tight black Beyond Yoga pants.

Fitness fashion: Adriana Lima wore all black she headed to a workout in Miami on Thursday morning

She teamed her sporty look up with a black tank top and silver sandals.

Checking her phone on her walk, Adriana kept her eyes covered in mirrored aviator sunglasses.

The mother-of-two had her hands full as she carried a shiny silver jacket and a water bottle.

Natural beauty: The mother-of-two, who was wearing black Beyond Yoga pants, had her hands full as she carried a shiny silver jacket and a water bottle

Keeping her personal belongings close, Adriana carried a black workout bag along with a designer purse.

The Brazilian beauty kept her long brown tresses messily down and went au naturel for the outing.

Not one to shy away from her body, the international supermodel took to Instagram earlier in the day to show off her impeccable abs.

All hands on deck: Adriana carried a black workout bag along with a designer purse as she walked in silver sandals

The catwalk queen posed in front of a mirror and lifted up her grey sweatshirt, writing: 'Morning abs check prior to gym.'

The stunner had her hair tied up in a messy bun and sported matching grey sweats for the sultry snap, shared with her 11.6 million followers.

The cover girl also posted some fun videos of her singing in the car.

Sensational: The Victoria's Secret Angel took to Instagram just hours before to flaunt her toned abs

'I just love this song,' said Adriana. 'This is how I drive to the gym. Loud music. Enjoying myself.'

The natural beauty proceeded to stick out her tongue and sing along to What A Feeling from the movie Flashdance.

The 5ft 10in beauty has been a Victoria's Secret Angel since 1999 and has walked in 18 Victoria's Secret Fashions Shows.

Carpool karaoke: The stunner sang along to What A Feeling from the movie Flashdance in a series of fun videos she shared on her Instagram Story

And just last year, she was named 'the most valuable Victoria's Secret Angel'.

Last month she told People that she wouldn't retire from the brand until her 20th VS Fashion Show but was realistic about her age being a factor in her decision.

'I plan to be at 20. Two more years. Maybe more, I dont know,' she said.

'Its nature. I'm working out, Im being healthy, so lets see how the body is going to turn out. But I enjoy it. So lets say 20.'

Lima has two children, Valentina and Sienna, with ex husband Marko Jaric.She stunned at promotional appearances in Japan over the past few days.

But it seems the trip has come to an end. Bella Hadid was spotted landing at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday.

The 21-year-old model was a vision in an all white get-up as she made her way out of the busy terminal.

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Angelic: Bella Hadid was a vision in white as she landed at LAX on Thursday after a busy trip in Tokyo

The youngest Hadid sister donned a satin white jacket that was kept unzipped over a cotton T-shirt.

She paired her look with matching white sweats adorned with silver zippers and mesh detailing, along with lace-up ankle boots.

The fashionista added a pop of color with her pink-tinted sunglasses and silver hoop earrings.

Jet setting: The youngest Hadid sister donned a satin white jacket that was kept unzipped over a cotton T-shirt

Chatty: The fashionista added a pop of color with her pink-tinted sunglasses and silver hoop earrings

Her brown tresses were tied back in a tight ponytail and her flawless skin was on display as the stunner wore fresh-faced makeup.

The Weeknd's ex kept her cellphone in silver-ring adorned hands and was all smiles after the lengthy trip.

At one point, the model talked on the phone in what appeared to be an amusing conversation and crouched down to fix her shoes.

Busy bee: At one point, the model talked on the phone in what appeared to be an amusing conversation and crouched down to fix her shoes

Bella took to Instagram earlier in the day to share a fun video during her flight.

'A month later she's coming home. Bless up,' wrote the model, as she opted to put a filter that placed a sleeping mask on her face.

The model posted the fun snap of her posing and bundling up in her jacket while she kept large black headphones over her ears.

Touched down: Her brown tresses were tied back in a tight ponytail and her flawless skin was on display as the stunner wore fresh-faced makeup

Bella also kept her 17.4 million followers updated with her envy-inducing trip to Japan's capital.

On Tuesday, the model turned heads at a Dior Addict Lacquer Plump Party at 1 OAK in the city.

The 21-year-old flashed cleavage in a sheer bandeau top worn under a baggy tailored black jacket with matching wide-legged trousers.

Passing time: Bella took to Instagram earlier in the day to share a fun video during her flight

Just one day before, she was the center of attention at the TAG Heuer Ginza Boutique opening in Tokyo.

The brunette beauty displayed her enviably slender frame in a tight-fitting checked dress as she playfully posed for cameras.

And while it seems she had the time of her life in Tokyo, Bella seemed excited to be home and see her older sister, Gigi.

Head turner: On Tuesday, the model was the center of attention at a Dior Addict Lacquer Plump Party at 1 OAK in the city

On her Instagram Story, the fashion star posted a picture of the blonde supermodel, writing: 'I can't wait to see this face.'

The supportive sister couldn't stop gushing about Gigi's new Harper's Bazaar cover.

Bella took to Twitter on Wednesday to write: 'Guys I am completely unwell looking at Gigis new harpers cover and story.'

She continued: 'I mean I am starstruck. And what the kids call it these days.. I am SHOOK!!!!!!!!!'

But it didn't stop there. A few hours later, she added: 'At dinner in tears. I mean I am so proud. There is nothing like seeing your sister smile like that. Nothing. @GigiHadid.'She wowed her fans at the star-studded UK premiere of her latest movie, Rampage, in London on Wednesday.

And Malin Akerman, 39, made sure all eyes were on her again as she showed off her slender figure in a plunging red dress at the British Academy Games Awards in London on Thursday evening.

The Billions actress oozed Hollywood glamour as she attended yet another star-studded event during her stay in England's capital.

Gorgeous!: Malin Akerman, 39, showed off her slender figure in a plunging red dress at the British Academy Games Awards in London on Thursday

Malin dressed her enviable figure in a floor-length red dress, with a plunging neckline and two pieces of fabric draped in front.

The 27 Dresses star simply accessorised her look with a black Emm Kuo clutch bag, silver earrings and a matching bracelet.

Malin styled her blonde locks into a sleek centre parting and low ponytail, which showed off her facial features.

Classic: The Billions actress oozed Hollywood glamour as she attended yet another star-studded event during her stay in England capital

Chic: The Hollywood star styled her blonde locks into a sleek centre parting and low ponytail, which showed off her facial features

Wow!: Malin - toting a black Emm Kuo clutch - dressed her enviable figure in a floor-length red dress, with a plunging neckline and two pieces of fabric draped in front

The mother-of-one, who has son Sebastian, nearly five, with ex-husband Roberto Zincone, opted for a glamorous slick of make-up to complete her look.

Malin joined the likes of Professor Green, Jonathan Ross and his talented screenwriter wife Jane Goldman at the glamorous event.

Professor Green, 34, cut a casual figure for the BAFTA Games Awards as he showed off his new blonde hairdo.

New look: Professor Green, 34, cut a casual figure for the BAFTA Games Awards as he showed off his new blonde hairdo

Stylish: The Just Be Good to Green star accessorised his ensemble with a watch and pair of black trainers

Casual: Professor Green, real name Stephen Manderson, wore a pair of khaki green combat trousers, a denim shirt jacket and a black padded vest body warmer over the top

The rapper wore a pair of khaki green combat trousers, a denim shirt jacket and a black padded vest body warmer over the top.

Professor Green, real name Stephen Manderson, accessorised his ensemble with a watch and pair of black trainers.

Meanwhile, Jonathan and Jane dressed to impress as they cut a rather glamorous figure at the event.

Glamorous duo: Jonathan and his talented screenwriter wife Jane dressed to impress as they cut a rather glamorous figure at the event

Jonathan opted for a black tuxedo and white shirt combination, ditching the bowtie for a long black tie instead.

While Jane looked gorgeous in an off-the-shoulder embroidered and lace black dress.

The X-Men screenwriter accessorised her look with a pink fluffy keyring on her black clutch bag with a matching pink flower in her hairdo.

While Jane added height to her frame with a pair of chunky black heeled sandals.She recently starred in the Darkest Hour and Baby Driver.

And Lily James, 29, has once again showed off her acting skills in her latest film The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society as she attended a photocall in Guernsey, which is part of the British Isles, on Thursday.

The Cinderella star put on an elegant display as she dressed her slender figure in an oversized chequered coat.

Stunning: Lily James, 29, attended a photocall for her new film, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society in Guernsey on Thursday

Lily teamed the look with a dramatic high-neck white shirt, with a silver and diamond star-shaped brooch attached on the collar.

The star accessorised her look with a pair of black polka dot tights and chunky mustard yellow heeled sandals.

Lily styled her blonde locks into a high ponytail, with a few curly strands left loose at the front.

Classic: The Cinderella star put on an elegant display as she dressed her slender figure in an oversized chequered coat with four brass buttons

Stylish: Lily teamed the look with a dramatic high-neck white shirt, with a silver and diamond star-shaped brooch attached on the collar

The actress added a slick of make-up to complete her glamorous and elegant look.

Lily knew how to work her best angles as she posed up a storm on the beach.

The photocall comes after the starlet attended the Curzon Mayfair Cinema, London, on Tuesday evening.

Lily dressed to impress for the outing as she styled her slender figure in a stunning striped dress, which cinched in at the waist.

Busy-bee: The photocall comes after the starlet attended the Curzon Mayfair Cinema, London, on Tuesday evening

Glamorous: Lily dressed to impress for the outing as she styled her slender figure in a stunning striped dress, which cinched in at the waist

The Downton Abbey star layered her look and dressed for the unpredictable April weather with an oversized black coat, as she signed autographs for fans.

While she added a pair of black heels and a handbag, as she styled her blonde locks into a loose hairdo.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, is a book adaptation, which is set after the Second World War.

Sensible: The Downton Abbey star layered her look and dressed for the unpredictable April weather with an oversized black coat

The film follows the story of journalist Juliet, played by Lily, who decides to document the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club formed on Guernsey Island in the English Channel during the wartime.

She then receives a letter from a farmer Dawsey, and after becoming pen pals, travels to the island to meet the members and write a book about the group.

The film is based on the 2008 best-selling novel of the same name by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer, which was a New York Times bestseller.

The film will be released on April 20.The National Lottery will make its grand comeback to ITV this weekend, after the channel snapped up the rights from the BBC to air the show.

Saturday Night Takeaway star Stephen Mulhern has been unveiled as the new host for the show, which will be shown in a trimmed-down 90 second version during the Britain's Got Talent ad breaks.

Stephen, 41, is celebrating his latest TV triumph after it was announced his In For A Penny sketch on Saturday Night Takeaway has been given its own spin-off.

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Comeback;The National Lottery will make its grand comeback to ITV this weekend, after the channel snapped up the rights from the BBC to air the show, with Stephen Mulhern as host

New gig: Saturday Night Takeaway star Stephen Mulhern has been unveiled as the new host for the show, which will be shown in a trimmed-down 90 second version during the Britain's Got Talent ad breaks

He said: 'The National Lottery is an iconic institution and I'm hugely excited to be part of its return to primetime Saturday night TV.

'When you think about The National Lottery you think of people winning life-changing prizes but sometimes you forget that players raise around 30 million every week for Good Causes across the UK.

He continued: 'I feel privileged to be bringing those lucky numbers to the nation but also being able to show players how the money they've helped raise has made a difference to communities across the UK.'

In its heyday, the lottery draw attracted more than 20m viewers and ran on the BBC from 1994-2016.

The TV draw was last broadcast on New Year's Eve 2016-17.

Lucky day: Stephen, 41, is celebrating his latest TV triumph after it was announced his In For A Penny sketch on Saturday Night Takeaway has been given its own spin-off

Anticipation: He said: 'The National Lottery is an iconic institution and I'm hugely excited to be part of its return to primetime Saturday night TV'

Wow factor: In its heyday, the lottery draw attracted more than 20m viewers and ran on the BBC from 1994-2016 (pictured above Mollie King, Rochelle Humes and Jenny Falconer)

Legend; TV icon Noel Edmonds posed with the lucky numbers during the November 1994 draw

Stephen has recently been lending his presenting skills to Saturday Night Takeaway where he and Scarlett Moffatt supported Declan Donnelly as he hosted without Ant McPartlin.

This week it was announced Dec will also host the live shows of Britain's Got Talent alone, as Ant McPartlin steps down from his TV commitments following his admission to rehab.

A spokesman for ITV said: 'Declan Donnelly will host Britains Got Talent live shows on his own while Ant McPartlin steps down from his TV commitments for now.'

Stephen is the current host of spin-off, Britain's Got More Talent.Malcolm Turnbull admits there is tension in Australia's relationship with China but a colleague insists an annual trade expo hasn't been cancelled.

The prime minister was responding to reports the country has been put in a deep chill with China, which is refusing visas to Australian ministers.

Repeatedly asked if that was the case, Mr Turnbull said: "I wouldn't say they've been declined."

But he did admit there had been concerns aired in Chinese media about the federal government's new foreign interference laws.

"There's clearly been some tension in the relationship," he told 3AW radio on Thursday.

"I'm very confident that any misunderstandings will be resolved."

Mr Turnbull insisted he is in regular contact with Chinese leaders and the relationship is "very deep and extensive".

"But from time to time there are differences of perception," he acknowledged.

The Australian Financial Review reports the annual Australia Week in China expo was scheduled for May but that's now not the case.

Treasurer Scott Morrison said the dates had not been settled.

"There will be further discussions about those," he told ABC radio.

"I don't think it is helpful to talk down the relationship with China, we certainly don't. We have an outstanding relationship with China."

He confirmed Trade Minister Steven Ciobo will be in China at the end of the year leading a trade delegation.

Last month, DFAT chief Frances Adamson conceded her plans to visit China had been deferred several times.

She denied there was a diplomatic freeze, but said there were some complex and difficult issues to overcome.As the third anniversary of the execution of Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran approaches, the federal government is being urged to ramp up pressure on Asia-Pacific nations still using the death penalty.

A new Amnesty International report released on Thursday shows signs of progress in the region, with Indonesia executing no one last year.

There was also a decrease in the number of death sentences imposed for drug crime in the Asian nation.

Late last year, Malaysia scrapped mandatory death sentencing for drug offences.

Despite some improvements, Amnesty International Australia's Rose Kulak said the government must live up to its promise to use its UN Human Rights Council seat to push for abolition.

"A world without the death penalty is possible, with these new figures showing 142 countries have ended the death penalty in law or practice," Ms Kulak said.

She called on the government to release its death penalty strategy.

"We have reached the tipping point. Most countries won't have a bar of this horrendous form of punishment and those countries still executing are increasingly isolated," Mr Kulak said.

The report found 93 people were executed throughout the Asia-Pacific region last year, a 28 per cent decline from 2016.

But the figures don't include China - which Amnesty believes carried out thousands of executions last year - North Korea or Vietnam.

Those countries don't publish death penalty statistics.

Asia-Pacific has the highest proportion of countries (10) which have the death penalty available for drug offences.

Globally, the report recorded at least 993 executions in 23 countries in 2017, down four per cent from 2016.

Last year's figures were 39 per cent less than 2015 when 1634 executions were recorded, the highest number since 1989.

Chan and Sukumaran were executed on April 29, 2015.When Sylvester finally opened his eyes, the first things the baby cheetah saw were his new human family and his soon-to-be best mate - a house cat named Spook.

Sylvester was orphaned at three days old after a lion attacked his mother and siblings.

The ranger who found him waited patiently for five days for his mother to return, and when she didn't he made the decision to save the tiny cat's life.

Sylvester made himself at home, but it wasn't long before he outgrew his position.

He started scratching the furniture and spraying everywhere, marking his territory.

He became too big to play with his much smaller feline friend.

"Spook started spending a lot of time on the roof," says Gift, who is now one of his handlers.

His family, knowing they couldn't provide a cheetah with the kind of life he needed, made the decision to give him up.

That's where The Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust and The Elephant Camp stepped in.

Overlooking the Masuwe River and Zambezi gorges, with views of the billowy spray from Victoria Falls in the distance, The Elephant Camp is a small network of canvas tents, with a communal restaurant, lounge and bar.

My tent has a four-poster bed, a fully stocked mini bar, an outdoor shower and a private deck and plunge pool - which the managers affectionately refer to as a "cuddle puddle" - with views of the surrounding national park.

It is camping for those who hate camping.

When Sylvester arrived, the camp already ran an elephant orphanage, providing refuge and care for sick and injured pachyderms.

There is a laboratory on site, through which vets from the trust conduct forensic and preventative work to protect animals and investigate wildlife crimes like poaching, which is still a problem in northern Zimbabwe.

It seemed the perfect new home for a now not-so-tiny cheetah with growing needs.

The Elephant Camp has a rescue, rehabilitate and release policy. But despite several release attempts, Sylvester will never return to the wild.

"He has never been taught to hunt, so he would have died of starvation or predation," Gift says.

Twice a day he is given the run of the bush surrounding the camp. His natural instinct is to give chase to animals like buffalo or antelope. "But when he gets close, he doesn't know what to do," Gift says.

"He chases the animals for a few minutes,and then sometimes the animal might turn around and stand its ground or chase him back and he runs straight back to us for safety."

A small group of us are escorted down into the bush to meet Sylvester.

He is magnificently sleek, and much larger than I expected.

He is on a lead, and wears a collar with a tracking device.

This is a relatively new addition after Sylvester failed to return from his run one afternoon, and stayed out all night playing.

"It's for his safety, in case of poachers," Gift says.

We stand a respectful distance from Sylvester - he might have grown up with humans and we are assured of his friendly nature, but we are wary.

Nobody makes any sudden movements, and we speak quietly.

I am mindful during this encounter that humans have historically had a tendency to exploit exotic animals for tourism purposes.

Tigers are sedated, monkeys are trained to dance, and wild cobras are defanged or have their venom ducts blocked, all so tourists can pay to have a selfie with them.

I ask them about this.

Sylvester has become a wildlife ambassador, Gift tells me.

The trust runs an educational program to raise awareness about the perils facing cheetahs, which are an endangered species.

Only local school students and guests of the camp may meet him; other tourists in Victoria Falls are unable to pay to come and see him and take photos.

Humans other than his handlers are not permitted to touch him, and he is not allowed to lick the guests or students in case they are wearing sunscreen or other cosmetics that might cause problems with his internal organs.

I crouch down slowly to take a photo, and as I do, Sylvester's other handler unclips his lead without warning.

Sylvester slinks towards me and I hold my breath, as the other four guests behind me audibly draw theirs in.

He sniffs in my direction, but then wanders off, having spotted a nice looking log.

He sharpens his claws, then lazily flops down in the grass and begins to wash.

The tiny ophaned cub has found his place in the world.

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE: South African Airways flies to Victoria Falls from Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne with stopovers in Perth and Johannesburg. African Wildlife Safaris can organise a three day / two night adventure in Zimbabwe. Prices start from $1224 per person and includes scheduled return airport transfers, suite accommodation, all meals and local drinks and camp activities. Visit https://www.africanwildlifesafaris.com.au/destinations/africa/zimbabwe/

STAYING THERE: The Elephant Camp features eco-friendly luxury tent suites, with a personal plunge pool and outdoor shower. It is nestled on a ridge between the Masuwe River and the Zambezi gorges, with an uninterrupted view of the spray from the Victoria Falls. Visit: http://www.theelephantcamp.com/

PLAYING THERE: Guests at The Elephant Camp can meet the orphaned elephants and Sylvester the Cheetah. The camp can arrange sunset picnics near the gorge, or can drive you into town to walk along the stunning Falls.

The writer travelled as a guest of South African Airways (SAA) and African Wildlife Safaris.Two fishermen who may have seen a boat capsize on the NSW south coast last month, which led to the drowning of a teenage girl from the ACT, have been urged to contact police.

Georgia Vizovitis, 13, was caught under a 6.3-metre vessel as it overturned during an attempt to cross the Moruya River bar around 7am on Saturday, March 24.

Three men - aged 46, 29 and 18 - and two 13-year-old children were thrown from the boat when it was hit by waves, and rescued a short time later after nearby vessels raised the alarm.

The body of Georgia, from Canberra, was later found in the upturned boat.

It's believed no one in the boat was wearing a life jacket, police previously said.

On Thursday police re-appealed for witnesses of the incident to come forward.

In particular, they want to speak to two people they believe were fishing near the eastern end of the break wall when the boat capsized.

Following the tragedy, friends and family took to social media to pay tribute to Georgia remembering her as a "beautiful soul".Muslim activist and author Yassmin Abdel-Magied claims she has been deported from the United States after being refused entry by immigration officials at an airport.

The 27-year-old Sudanese-Australian, who recently moved to London, flew into Minneapolis on Wednesday night, local time, but just three hours later was ordered onto another plane out of the US.

She had been due to deliver a speech about fighting online hate at the Pen America World Voices Festival in New York on April 21.

Ms Abdel-Magied took to Twitter while being detained by immigration officials at Minneapolis airport, saying they had "taken my phone, cancelled my visa and are deporting me".

"Interesting facts: within a few min of looking at my case the border security person - Officer Herberg looking at my case she announces: 'we're sending you back!'," she tweeted.

"Well, guess that tightening of immigration laws business is working, despite my Australian passport. We're taking off now. What a time..."

Ms Abdel-Magied said the airport officials also took her passport.

"Apparently I can't be trusted with it until I'm in a foreign country because, as Officer Blees said, 'planes get turned away back way too often and then...," she tweeted.

Ms Abdel-Magied did not say which country she had been in before flying into the US or where she was now headed.

She moved to London in 2017 after making a series of controversial claims including that "Islam to me is the most feminist religion".

She also suffered a public backlash after her Anzac Day post on social media which said: "Lest We Forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine ...)".

The post was deleted from her Facebook page a few hours later, with Ms Abdel-Magied apologising and acknowledging "that the timing and nature of the post was disrespectful'.

Her apparent deportation from the US comes after the US Supreme Court last December gave the green light to President Donald Trump's controversial travel ban that targets people from six Muslim-majority countries.

The ban was subject to several legal challenges after opponents said it was in violation of the US Constitution because it discriminates against Muslims.

Asked to comment.Australia's Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Minister Alan Tudge said US visas were a decision for the American government.

"At the end of the day it is unusual for an Australian citizen to not be granted a visa to go into the United States, but I simply don't know the details behind this particular case," he said.

"I just don't know the details underpinning this and whether or not it was that she had a tourist visa, that perhaps there was evidence she was planning to do other things other than being a tourist there."A pedophile who sexually abused two boys in Western Australia after being deported from Canada for raping his stepson was able to commit his crimes due to a "failure of the system", the premier says.

Mark McGowan said a review was examining the powers police and other authorities might need to better monitor pedophiles following a public outcry over the case, which saw a 55-year-old man jailed for 11 years.

"(Police) can't have round-the-clock watching of each of those individuals (on the register), but obviously for the most extreme individuals that we're most worried about, like that individual, there needed to be better monitoring and better control of his actions," Mr McGowan told reporters on Thursday.Shocking footage exposing cruelty to Australian sheep on a live export voyage to the Middle East has caught the attention of Israel's first lady who says her heart has been broken by the "awful conditions" on board the ship.

Israel is one of Australia's major live export partners, but in a video posted on the Israeli Prime Minister's Facebook page, Sara Netanyahu said she was appalled to see sheep dying in their own filth during a trip from Fremantle to the Middle East in August 2017.

"I turned to the PM, my husband, who will do all he can to stop the tremendous cruelty," Ms Netanyahu said after it emerged 2400 animals died on board the Emanuel Exports live export ship.The widow of a Melbourne magistrate who died last month has spoken of the "unrelenting" workload and pressures of the job.

Jo Duncan, the widow of magistrate Stephen Myall, said the law was his life and he saw the importance of how courts could turn people's lives around.

"What people should understand is the increased workload that magistrates are now facing," she told ABC Radio on Thursday.

"Even the weekend before he died, he had spent two of the three days weekend writing a decision. Much of it was done at home and (it's) just an unrelenting workload."

Ms Duncan, a former state MP, said her late husband lamented the fact media would only report on the outcome of cases, and not the reasons for a decision.

Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467.Bystanders have helped save a woman who was left semi-conscious in the yard of a unit block in Sydney's inner west after being choked by a man with a bike chain.

The attacker followed the 27-year-old woman into the front of the complex in Ashfield on Wednesday night, police said.

It's believed the man - described as having a long pony tail and wearing a hi-vis vest - wrapped a bike chain around her neck before pushing her to the ground.

A woman sitting in a parked car nearby heard a scream and went to investigate, while her friend confronted the man, who punched him in the face before running away, police said.

The victim was found semi-conscious with injuries to her neck before she was taken to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital for treatment.

The man who was punched was not injured.

Detectives are appealing for anyone with information to come forward.The Queensland government has slammed the federal coalition for offering Victoria funding for a major rail project while denying funding for Brisbane's Cross River Rail.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has offered $5 billion to build a Melbourne Airport rail link, and wants the Victorian government to get on board with a 50-50 funding split.

Queensland Treasurer Jackie Trad said that was outrageous, given the sunshine state had been denied federal funding for Cross River Rail despite it having a business case, while the Melbourne project is still in the early planning stages.Opposition leader Luke Foley should refer his deputy to the NSW Electoral Commission over allegations he received a donation from a property developer, the premier says.

The NSW ALP received a $11,000 donation in 2010 from a company that possesses a property development "sister company", while Labor MP Michael Daley was given $1980 in 2011, News Corp Australia reported on Thursday.

"These are serious allegations and the people of NSW deserve answers to them," Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters.

"Absolutely they should be referred to the Electoral Commission. I would hope that the leader of the opposition would take action in that regard."

NSW Labor and Mr Daley have been contacted for comment.Mark Zuckerberg's admission he was among those caught up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal shows Facebook lost control of users' data, an Australian privacy expert says.

During a second, extended round of questions from US lawmakers overnight, the billionaire founder of the social media giant revealed his own personal information may have been shared with the controversial British political consultancy agency.

Anna Johnston, director of Sydney legal firm Salinger Privacy, says it is absurd the man running the company didn't organise his own privacy settings to protect his personal data.

"(It) suggests that a: users are not in control, and b: Facebook itself has lost control of the data," the former NSW deputy privacy commissioner told AAP on Thursday.

Facebook has blamed a company co-founded by Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan for improperly collecting data on up to 87 million people around the world, including 311,127 Australians.

Some or all of the information was then licensed to Cambridge Analytica, which is based in Britain.

The scandal has prompted privacy commissioners in Australia, the UK and Canada to open investigations into Facebook.

Mr Zuckerberg has insisted users have control of the information they post on Facebook.

He told the congressional inquiry giving people control of their information and how they want to set their privacy was "foundational to the whole service".

"The difference between surveillance and what we do... is extremely clear, which is that, on Facebook, you have control over your information," he said.

However, he acknowledged regulation of social media companies is "inevitable" to help protect users.

Some US lawmakers were particularly concerned about the way Facebook tracks users around the web with the use of like and share buttons, and a hidden script called Facebook Pixel.

Zuckerberg estimated more than 100 million web pages had at one stage contained a like button, and promised to provide more information on the matter at a later stage.

Many web pages are riddled with Facebook and Google trackers, according to a report released last year from German-owned web privacy company Ghostery.

Google's tools were present in three in every five pages loaded, while Facebook's trackers were in a quarter of all page loads.

"When Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg keep talking about users being in control, sure, that true," Ms Johnston said.

"But that's not the only information that Facebook has about you.

"The rest of it you have no control over it and that's actually the part that is most likely to be damaging.

"The Cambridge Analytica scandal has simply exposed in a dramatic way what many people have been pointing out for many years - that this is Facebook's business model."Five mentally impaired people have allegedly been sexually assaulted and indecently recorded by a man in Western Australia.

During an investigation into the alleged sexual assault of a woman aged in her 20s, Kalgoorlie detectives identified four other victims aged in their 30s, resulting in a search of the man's Lamington home on Wednesday.

Police say he has been targeting and grooming vulnerable people since last year, and he has been charged with 10 offences including sexual penetration of an incapable person and indecently recording an incapable person.An ice user has admitted raping and choking a German au pair after she stopped to go to the toilet at a Melbourne reserve.

Michael Dempsey pleaded guilty in the Victorian County Court on Thursday to raping the 19-year-old at Seaford North Reserve in April 2017, as she was returning from a night out.

During the assault, Dempsey shoved his hand inside her mouth and against the back of her throat, making her gag, prosecutor Diana Piekusis told the court.

The 26-year-old also pleaded guilty to assaulting and intentionally causing injury to two other women during separate incidents at Hawthorn in July.

He dragged his second victim, aged 25, by her hair from a train stopped at Hawthorn station before being chased away by other commuters.

On the same night Dempsey dragged another woman, 34, along a road and into nearby bushes, where he choked her and punched her in the face and head.

"I'm going to f***ing kill you," he said repeatedly, according to Ms Piekusis.

The court was told Dempsey had a history of watching violent pornography, including simulated rape scenes, and that his crimes were linked to use of the drug ice.

His mother was led weeping from the court as her son's offending was detailed to Judge Paul Lacava.

In statements to the court, all three woman said the attacks had left them frightened of being out alone after dark.

"I just can't talk about it. I feel emotionally cold, like an ice block," the German woman, who has since returned home, wrote.

"I am sad because I no longer feel strong. I'm sad because I should feel safe but I don't," the statement from the 34-year-old woman read.

Dempsey's lawyer Danielle Lamovie accepted her client faced a significant prison term but said he was remorseful and understood his behaviour.

Forensic psychologist Dr Dion Gee said Dempsey was "someone who got that he's made a horrible decision that has actually hurt people".

Judge Lacava reserved his decision, with Dempsey to be sentenced at a later date.One of the world's rarest fish could have a new lease of life in Tasmania thanks to an interstate breeding program.

The tiny spotted handfish, that prefers to 'walk' on modified fins across the seabed rather than swim, is found at only nine spots in the Apple Isle's southeast.

But a joint breeding program at Tasmanian and Melbourne aquariums assisted by the federal and state government and CSIRO is aiming to boost that number.

In 2017, an "ambassador" population of adult spotted handfish and eggs was collected from the River Derwent and brought into captivity.

Since then, 73 handfish have hatched.

Thirty of those hatchlings were on Thursday put on public display at Seahorse World at Tasmania's Beauty Point.

"More people can now see these animals and understand more about them," CSIRO senior research scientist Tim Lynch told AAP.

"It's a great milestone. When we were doing (captive breeding) trials back in the '90s, we had a high death rate. But they've manage to overcome that."

Dr Lynch said new technology at the Beauty Point aquarium can keep water temperatures stable, which is what the unique fish wants.

The next goal is to get the fish reproducing in captivity this spring so they can then be released in the wild.

"If we have a successful breeding event this year we'll look to stock a couple of sites where the fish have gone locally extinct," Dr Lynch said.

Handfish, closely related to the deep-sea angler fish, once populated the world but are now only found in south-east Australia, with most species restricted to Tasmania.

"Most fish have a swim bladder which allows them to float but these guys don't have that," Dr Lynch said.

"Instead of swimming they walk around on the bottom of the sea and hide behind things and ambush things to eat them

"They can swim, but about as well as a chicken can fly."

In 1996, the spotted handfish was the first marine fish to be listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.MELBOURNE AIRPORT PASSENGER RAIL PROJECT:

WHAT: A heavy-rail train link to connect inner Melbourne to Tullamarine Airport

ROUTE: Four alternatives provided by the federal government, but yet to be determined

COST: Estimated at about $10 billion according to Treasurer Scott Morrison

START DATE: As early as 2020, the prime minister says. But still to be confirmed.

REACTION:

* "The time for putting this in the too-hard basket is over." - Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

* "This is a project of national significance." - Treasurer Scott Morrison told ABC Radio.

* "What we now need to do is belt and brace it with some proper planning and detail." - Federal Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

* "It's good the prime minister has finally found Victoria on a map." - Victorian Public Transport Minister Jacinta Allan.

* "Just build it. This is a lot of money ... it's real, it's a lot and we can get on with it." - Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy told Triple M.

* "Melbourne has been crying out for a rail link to the airport for decades." - Greens transport spokesperson Victorian Senator Janet Rice.

* "Only one (proposed route) really has that regional rail link and connection." - Regional Minister Jaala Pulford.

* "It is foolish to expend $15 billion in rail development if we then also build major roads." - RMIT University planning expert Professor Jago Dodson.

* "I suppose we'll believe it when we see bulldozers on the ground." - Public Transport Users Association spokesman Daniel Bowen.Detectives will test whether a gun, found in bushland next to a burning stolen car, is linked to the murder of Wollongong career criminal Nathan Costello.

Costello, 33, was gunned down on the nature strip outside his Unaderra home on Valentine's Day in what police, at the time, believed was a targeted attack.

He was known to police for an extensive criminal history and a manhunt was launched to find his killer.

While the investigation has continued, police were called on Monday afternoon to a report of another shooting in the neighbouring suburb of Berkeley.

A shot had allegedly been fired from inside a stolen Toyota RAV4, hitting the inside of the vehicle's passenger door, police said in a statement on Thursday.

The vehicle then sped away.

Police launched an investigation which ended in the arrest of a 19-year-old man before midday on Wednesday.

Emergency services, later that afternoon, responded to a report of a vehicle fire in bushland in Berkeley.

The stolen RAV4 had been set ablaze.

Police seized the vehicle and, while searching surrounding bushland, found a firearm.

It will be tested to see if it is linked to Costello's murder, NSW Police said on Thursday.

Costello's friends and relatives continued to grieve online in the wake of his death.

"You will never be forgotten soldja (sic)," one wrote.

"You're not gone my uncle your still here within us all and your spirit is WAYY too strong."

The 19-year-old has been charged and will be remanded in custody until he appears at Wollongong Local Court on June 13.

Local detectives appealed for anyone with information about the events to come forward as the manhunt for Costello's murderer continues.Today's Birthday, April 13: Australian author and actress Judy Nunn (1945 - ).

From an early age Judy Nunn would attempt to hide her short-sightedness by pretending she could see things and making up the finer details - starting what would be a long career as a lifelong storyteller.

The Australian actress and author became a staple of the nation's screens and bookshelves, a huge step for the home-grown girl from Perth who spent her childhood scrambling about on the banks of the Swan River with brother Rob.

Born on April 13, 1945, Nunn was a self-professed "tomboy" growing up - describing her childhood as brimming with adventure and discovery.

Her father was an agriculturist and her mother was a teacher whose "great love" was the theatre, a love she instilled in her daughter.

As a teenager Nunn began acting classes, taking the plunge and moving to Sydney to seriously pursue a career as an actress at just 19.

A five-year stint in London followed where Nunn appeared in BBC Radio plays, on television, and in Shakespeare productions.

On her return home, Nunn slipped seamlessly into the role of Jodie in the new play Don's Party by Australian playwright David Williamson - from there going on to star in shows like Sons and Daughters and The Box and then participating in Australian television's first ever lesbian kiss.

In 1988 Nunn would land a role on the iconic long-running TV soap Home and Away playing Summer Bay's much-loved maternal figure Ailsa Stewart, wife of show stalwart Alf, for 13 years.

It was during her downtime while on Home and Away - that Nunn began writing books, publishing five successful novels while simultaneously working on the show.

It was this writing that Nunn once said brought her the greatest sense of achievement in her work, and saw her appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2015 - an honour she also earned for her extensive charity work.

Nunn met husband ex-cop Bruce Venables on a blind date in 1985. The pair were married in 1987 and remain happily together.Israel Folau's comments that homosexuals are "going to hell" would not be accepted in rugby league, NRL boss Todd Greenberg has told Fairfax Media.

The Wallabies superstar made the comments in a response on Instagram last week, saying that God's plan for gay people was "hell".

"No, it would not (be acceptable)," Greenberg told The Sydney Morning Herald. "Being inclusive can't just be a word on a wall. You have to live and breathe it every day.

"All our athletes have to be careful. There are people who will read that and it will be quite damaging to them ... That would not have been his intent, but it is very damaging to some people."

Folau is off-contract at the end of the year and is due for further meetings with rugby powerbrokers after an initial sit-down this week failed to produce an outcome.

The 29-year-old first made his name with Melbourne in the NRL before a move to Brisbane prior to a stint with AFL's GWS Giants.

He has been linked with a return to rugby league next season.A woman is missing after she fell overboard from a P&O ship during a week-long cruise in the Pacific.

Rough conditions are hampering the search after a Pacific Dawn crew member raised the alarm around 4pm on Thursday, about 150 nautical miles west of New Caledonia.

"A crew member notified the bridge straight away and the 'man overboard' incident response was activated immediately," Carnival Australia spokesman David Jones said in a statement.

"In line with this response, Pacific Dawn turned around to follow the course it was on at the time of the incident."

It's believed the woman went on to the deck to be sick when a freak wave knocked her overboard,Nine Network reported on Friday.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority and New Caledonian authorities issued a call for nearby vessels to assist in the search.

An AMSA spokeswoman told AAP on Friday morning there was no further update yet on the search.

"We are still continuing our search at this time," she said.

A ship passenger, who asked not to be named, described the atmosphere onboard as "very sad, solemn and quiet".

A Brisbane man holidaying on the ship with his family, who also asked not to be identified, told AAP conditions in the search area were rough, with three-to-four metre swells.

He said little information was being given to passengers about the situation other than they were searching for the missing woman.

Another passenger, Jonathan Trevithick, posted an image on Twitter of a ring buoy floating in the ocean and said the situation was "horrendous".

The had ship departed from Brisbane on Saturday.NSW Labor has withdrawn bipartisan support for the relocation of Sydney's Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta.

Instead, Labor will propose a multi-purpose performance and cultural exhibition space at the Parramatta site and increased funding for arts and cultural activity, ongoing programs and infrastructure across Western Sydney.

The move comes after a NSW Greens motion for the release of documents on the relocation passed the upper house on Thursday with support from Liberal MP Matthew Mason-Cox who crossed the floor.

The motion will force the government to produce the business case for moving the museum to Parramatta at a projected cost of more than $1 billion.

Mr Mason-Cox, who has publicly criticised the coalition government's relocation plan, said his decision to cross the floor was "a matter of public conscience".

"I ask my party for their understanding in that regard," Mr Mason-Cox told parliament on Thursday.

Opposition Leader Luke Foley says the Berejiklian government's actions bear little resemblance to the original promise made by the former premier Mike Baird in February 2015.

He says the government is dismembering the Powerhouse - not moving it.

"I fear that Ms Berejiklian will announce a pale imitation of the original promise, which was an entire relocation of the Powerhouse Museum to Parramatta," Mr Foley said in a statement on Friday.

"Chopping the Powerhouse up into small pieces, strewn across Ultimo, Parramatta and Castle Hill, will deliver the worst of all worlds.

"Labor will not support the dismembering of the Powerhouse Museum. Either move it entirely to Western Sydney, or leave it where it is."South Australian Premier Steven Marshall will discuss job creation opportunities and infrastructure funding in a meeting with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

The premier says he's optimistic about South Australia's relationship with the federal government and is looking forward to a productive and constructive meeting with Mr Turnbull on Friday in Sydney.

"Job creation and infrastructure are the two priority issues that I look forward to discussing with the prime minister, as well as ensuring that South Australia has a key role to play in the rapidly growing space industry," Mr Marshall said.Alcohol consumption should be limited to less than 10 standard drinks per week to lower the risk of premature death, new research suggests.

This is significantly less than the 'two-a-day' currently recommended under the national alcohol consumption guidelines.

A landmark study, published in The Lancet, found drinking more than 100g of alcohol per week lowered people's life expectancy at age 40 by between six months to five years.

The more people drank, the higher the risk of a range of life-threatening illnesses, including stroke and heart failure, according to the analysis of nearly 600,000 drinkers from across the globe.

"The key message of this research for public health is that, if you already drink alcohol, drinking less may help you live longer and lower your risk of several cardiovascular conditions," said lead author Dr Angela Wood, University of Cambridge.

A team of international researchers analysed data taken from 83 studies in 19 high-income countries. The researchers also had access to data on participants' age, sex, history of diabetes, smoking status and several other factors known to be related to cardiovascular disease. None of the participants had a known history of cardiovascular disease.

The study included data from 599,912 current drinkers. About 50 per cent reported drinking more than 100 g/week, and 8.4 per cent drank more than 350 g/week.

The study found an increase in all causes of death among those who consumed more than 100 grams of alcohol per week, supporting calls to reduce alcohol consumption limits.

The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) said on Friday that the Australian guidelines on alcohol consumption were currently under review.

"Evidence reviews on the health effects of alcohol consumption are currently underway, which will help inform the recommendations in the revised guidelines. Until then, the 2009 Alcohol Guidelines remain NHMRC's current advice," a NHMRC statement said.Police believe one person is behind the suspected murder of a Melbourne mother, who lay undiscovered in her bathtub for eight months.

Sarah Gatt's body was found by police in her Kensington unit on January 3, and they believe the one-time aspiring model died in the four days to April 24, 2017, following a prolonged assault in her home.

Following a public appeal in March, police on Friday revealed the 40-year-old suffered trauma to her head and face, and believe the injuries are connected to her death.

Investigators believe one person is behind the mother-of-four's murder, with several others involved in hiding the incident and obtaining financial advantage from her death.Nikolas Cruz appears in court for the first time on February 15 in the US city of Fort Lauderdale (Florida)

Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz wants to donate his inheritance -- which could run to hundreds of thousands of dollars or more -- to the bereaved families and survivors of his attack, his lawyers said Wednesday.

Cruz walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the south Florida city of Parkland on February 14 and opened fire at students and staff with an AR-15-style semi-automatic weapon.

He stands accused of 17 counts of premeditated murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.

At a court hearing on Wednesday, Broward County Judge Elizabeth Scherer sought to determine whether Cruz -- who has so far been represented by public defenders -- is able to pay for his own defense.

His lawyers said they have not yet been able to determine the value of the inheritance left to him following the death of his mother Lynda Cruz last November -- though local reports quoting the family which took him in following his mother's death have said he could have a trust fund worth $800,000.

But his legal team suggested any wealth that may be discovered should go to Cruz's victims rather than expensive lawyers.

"Mr. Cruz does not want those funds, whatever money that he is entitled to," said lawyer Melissa McNeill.

"He does not want that money. He would like that money donated to an organization that the victims' family believes would be able to facilitate healing in our community or an opportunity to educate our community about the issues that have ripened over the last four or five months," she added.

Cruz -- who was present for the hearing in Fort Lauderdale, which is near Parkland -- stared blankly at the floor, his hands and feet cuffed.

"Let it go to those who have been hurt, period," another member of his legal team, Howard Finkelstein, asked the judge.

Cruz's wealth currently consists of 24 Microsoft stocks worth about $2,200 from which he receives dividends, and he is entitled to $25,000 from his mother's life insurance, which he has not yet obtained.

In addition, his mother, who died from a respiratory illness, received an annuity of $3,333 in September to an account she shared with Nikolas. The source of these funds have not been revealed.

But his lawyers have yet to determine whether the installments are paid monthly or yearly and whether Cruz is entitled to it.

If it is monthly, the defendant could have access to "a million dollars," Finkelstein said.

But if it is annual, the amount would be insignificant for what "in this moment right now is the highest profile case of America" with costs expected to run into hundreds of thousands dollars, according to his lawyers, excluding civil suits.

Judge Scherer said she would decide on the matter of Cruz's indigence before April 27, when a hearing is scheduled to set the trial's schedule.

Cruz had told the couple who took him in following his mother's death he would inherit at least $800,000 from his parents, with most of the funds becoming available when he turned 22, according to local press.

The inheritance has not yet been executed, however, and it is unclear what Cruz and his brother Zachary really have.North Korea's Kim has been present at six out of eight previous Supreme People's Assembly sessions since he became party head six years ago but he appeared to skip Wednesday's meeting

North Korea's parliament has met to rubber-stamp Kim Jong Un's policies, but the leader himself was conspicuously absent as he prepares for two key summits with South Korea and the US.

Kim had been present at six out of eight previous Supreme People's Assembly (SPA) sessions held since he officially became party head six years ago, according to the South's Unification Ministry.

But he appeared to skip Wednesday's meeting, with the official KCNA news agency failing to mention his attendance in its report of the meeting Thursday.

Photos carried by the North's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper showed an empty seat at the centre of the head table in Pyongyang's cavernous Mansudae Assembly Hall, presumed to be Kim's.

Instead, the session focussed on North Korea's budget and changes in leadership personnel.

Kim is due to meet with the South's Moon Jae-in later this month, and is expected to meet US President Donald Trump weeks later.

On Monday he briefed party members on talks with the South and the "prospect" of dialogue with the US, in an unusually well-publicised politburo meeting.

Officials in the South had earlier said they were watching the SPA closely for "any changes to policy directions".

But KCNA reports on the meeting focussed on budgetary matters, with the nuclear-armed state's national defence allocation remaining almost unchanged at 15.9 percent.

"It appears Kim did not attend because he can't issue a special message given the current volatile situation," Koh Yu-hwan, professor of North Korean Studies at Dongguk University, told AFP, referring to the upcoming summits.

But the detailed state media reports of Monday's politburo meeting mean North Koreans "will assume their leader is trying to improve external relations", he added.

At the SPA, the North also confirmed that Hwang Pyong So -- once seen as one of Kim's closest aides -- had been "dismissed" from his post as the vice chairman of the State Affairs Commission along with three other officials.

Seoul's spy agency said last year that Hwang and Kim Won Hong, the head and deputy head of the military's powerful General Political Bureau, had been punished for showing "impudence" towards the party.

All of the dismissals were made "at the proposal of the chairman of the State Affairs Commission", a post held by Kim Jong Un.

The SPA is technically North Korea's highest state institution.

But votes at the rubber-stamp institution are invariably unanimous, with delegates from across the country travelling to Pyongyang simply to listen to speeches and wave through decisions by a show of hands.Ivanka Trump will join Vice President Mike Pence as part of the US delegation to a summit of Latin American leaders, which President Donald Trump will no longer attend

Ivanka Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are stepping in to fill US President Donald Trump's absence at a summit of Latin American leaders taking place in Peru late this week.

But with the US leader a no-show because of a last-minute cancellation to oversee America's response to an alleged poison gas attack in Syria, the blaze of international attention directed at the Friday-Saturday gathering has dimmed.

Instead of the sight of Trump at the center of a group of leaders from several countries he has disparaged or intimidated over perceived trade or migration threats, the once-every-three-year summit will be left to tackle festering regional issues.

Those include a joint response further isolating Venezuela over its moves seen trampling democracy, and whose President Nicolas Maduro has explicitly been not invited.

There is also the worsening relationship between the United States and Mexico over a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Trump's insistence that Mexico pay for a wall to be built along their common border -- and to where he has ordered US National Guard troops to deploy.

Mexico has announced it is reviewing its cooperation with the US over "blatant" tension with Trump's administration.

And there is the issue of corruption, the persistence of which -- and the moves to tackle it -- have roiled Latin American politics, including in Brazil, where ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is now jailed, and Peru itself, which has seen its president step down just ahead of hosting the summit.

- Still 'high-level' -

El Centro de Convenciones de Lima, que acogera la Cumbre de las Americas, en una imagen del 10 de abril de 2018

At a Washington briefing to reporters Wednesday, Ivanka Trump and senior US administration officials insisted that President Trump's absence was not a snub or sign of disinterest in Latin America.

The president had to cancel "given the atrocity that occurred in Syria," which required him to be "engaged in on that topic and related topics," one official said without elaborating.

However, a "very high-level delegation" would still be representing the US, the officials said.

They listed Ivanka Trump and Pence along with top US officials for trade, foreign aid and investment. Ivanka's husband Jared Kushner -- who, like her, is a senior advisor to the president -- was also to attend.

"I'm extremely excited for my visit," Ivanka Trump said in the briefing, explaining that she would be promoting ways to economically empower women while at the summit.

"Women's economic empowerment in the Americas is a key element of the president's commitment to advance our shared goals and objectives in the hemisphere," a senior administration official added.

One official said that nothing new should be expected at the Lima summit on the NAFTA negotiations.

"We don't have anything to announce on NAFTA at this time. Negotiations continue to be ongoing," the official said.

Prior to President Trump's cancellation, the White House had said the US leader was going to focus on "pursuing fair and reciprocal trade throughout the region" and "push back against external economic aggression" at the summit.

Those comments appeared directed at both the NAFTA negotiations and China's increasing investment in Latin America, which US policy-makers fear signals greater political influence too.

- China's presence -

On Monday Trump said the NAFTA talks were "fairly close" to reaching a deal, but reiterated that "if we don't make the right deal, we'll terminate NAFTA and make the right deal after that."

China's growing investment in Latin America, once considered America's backyard under the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, appears to be the "external economic aggression" Trump's administration is riled up against.

US-China tensions have spiked dramatically in recent weeks with Trump ratcheting up threats of harsh tariffs on Chinese goods and Beijing warning of reciprocal measures. But talk of a possible trade war has cooled somewhat with Chinese President Xi Jinping taking a more emollient tone since Tuesday.

Some Latin American analysts looked askance at Trump's absence.

"For Trump, Latin America, with the possible exception of Mexico, is at the level of his vice president," said Kevin Casas, a former Costa Rican vice president who is now director of the consulting firm Analitica Consultures.

"That's a message everybody has more or less picked up and how the region will read it. Including China," he said.Missouri Governor Eric Greitens has been criminally charged with invasion of privacy and scheduled to stand trial in May

A woman who had an extramarital affair with the governor of the US state of Missouri claimed he "coerced," threatened, and struck her, according to an explosive report released Wednesday.

The report was the result of an investigation by a bipartisan committee of the state's legislature, set up to probe allegations that Republican Governor Eric Greitens had blackmailed his former mistress with a photograph of her in a state of undress.

Greitens has been criminally charged with invasion of privacy and scheduled to stand trial in May.

The committee report -- which detailed allegations of behavior that was at times abusive and coercive -- could be a precursor to impeachment and was separate from the criminal case.

Shortly before the report's release, the governor shot back that the committee's findings were "full of more false, outlandish and salacious accusations."

"Over three years ago, I made a personal mistake," the governor said at a news conference. "But people are turning that personal mistake into a political spectacle and telling new lies about it."

- 'Coerced' -

The report -- filled with graphic details and strong language -- relied heavily on the testimony of the woman with whom Greitens had the affair.

She has not been publicly identified, except as his former hairdresser.

The woman testified she had multiple sexual encounters with Greitens over several months in 2015. Some of the governor's sexual conduct -- such as groping her during one haircut appointment -- was not consensual, she claimed.

The governor was sometimes physically aggressive to the point of once striking her in the face and, during another occasion, shoving her to the ground, according to her testimony.

She also repeated her claim that Greitens took a photo of her without permission while she was bound and nude in the basement of his home during the initial encounter of their affair.

According to her testimony, he told her: "You're not going to mention my name... because if you do, I'm going to take these pictures, and I'm going to put them everywhere I can... and then everyone will know what a little whore you are."

The woman claimed Greitens then began touching her sexually and she performed oral sex on the governor, explaining to the committee that she felt "coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave."

The woman claimed Greitens later regretted the threat, told her he had erased the photo, and she entered into a consensual affair following his contrition.

Greitens has repeatedly denied blackmailing and insisted the affair was consensual.

"This is a political witch hunt," he claimed Wednesday.

- 'Beyond disturbing' -

There were bipartisan calls in the report's aftermath for the governor to resign or be impeached.

The speaker of the state house, also a Republican, said he would call a special session of the legislature to consider disciplinary action, including impeachment.

"This is not a witch hunt and the committee had no political agenda," Speaker Todd Richardson said. "The testimony outlined in the report is beyond disturbing."

Claire McCaskill, a Democratic US senator representing Missouri, called on Greitens to resign, as did the state's top law enforcement officer, Attorney General Josh Hawley.CIA director Mike Pompeo (L) is President Donald Trump's pick to be the next secretary of state. His Senate confirmation hearing is set for March 12, 2018

President Donald Trump's pick for top US diplomat will tell senators Thursday that if confirmed he will get tough on Russia, address flagging morale and fill vacancies at the State Department -- in addition to helping the agency revive its "swagger."

Mike Pompeo, currently the CIA director, faces a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that could not come sooner, as tensions soar with Russia and Syria and a trade spat with China threatens to snowball.

"Russia continues to act aggressively, enabled by years of soft policy toward that aggression," Pompeo says in his prepared remarks. "That's now over."

He has been tapped to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, in what could be one of the more consequential of many personnel shakeups since Trump took office 14 months ago.

Pompeo is a known entity for Trump, someone who briefed the president almost daily and shares a gung-ho attitude towards Iran.

But in excerpts released Wednesday by the White House, Pompeo says that while Tehran has paid "too low a price" for its behavior, Pompeo and Trump are prepared to revise the nuclear deal "to fix its most egregious flaws."

Mindful of Tillerson's reputation as a disengaged leader whose failure to fill critical positions at State alarmed lawmakers, Pompeo acknowledges he has heard firsthand from US diplomats about "how demoralizing it is to have so many vacancies and, frankly, not to feel relevant."

"I'll do my part to end the vacancies," he says in the remarks.

The renewed sense of teamwork "will become the fabric of a State Department culture that finds its swagger once again."

- 'High bar' -

As head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Pompeo has already been vetted by the US Senate, where 14 Democrats joined Republicans in confirming him to that post.

It appears at least one Democrat will be needed to get Pompeo successfully through the foreign relations committee with a positive recommendation.

The panel has 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats, and Republican Rand Paul has already expressed his opposition to Pompeo, for the latter's support of the Iraq war and his aggressive posture against Iran.

But Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican hawk on foreign policy, said Pompeo is "the right guy at the right time" to lead State through a "dangerous" global period.

Trump has gone without a top US diplomat for nearly a month.

In that time he has threatened a trade war with China, blamed Russia and Syria for a suspected chemical attack that killed more than 40 people, and ratcheted up anti-Russia rhetoric on Twitter, including Wednesday's warning that "missiles will be coming" in response to the chemical atrocity in Syria.

And on May 12, exactly one month from the hearing, Trump is to pronounce on the fate of the Iran nuclear deal, a pact Pompeo strenuously opposed in 2015 when he was a member of Congress.

Democrats have said they want to see a new secretary of state considerably more engaged with the agency he oversees.

"He's got a high bar for a lot of us. He's got to commit to ending this assault on the State Department personnel that Tillerson began," Senator Chris Murphy, who is the foreign relations committee, said before Pompeo's excerpts were released.

And with Trump recently appointing hawkish conservative John Bolton as his national security advisor, Murphy said he wanted to scrutinize Pompeo over potential flashpoints like North Korea and Syria.

"A lot of us are worried about the combination of Pompeo and Bolton putting a set of military options on the table for the president that could do real damage to our national security," Murphy said.Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has played down tensions with Beijing

Australia's prime minister admitted Thursday bubbling tensions with China over allegations of Beijing meddling in domestic politics, but denied there was a "deep chill" in relations after reports ministers were being refused visas.

Bilateral ties took a dive late last year when Canberra announced wide-ranging reforms to espionage and foreign interference legislation, singling out China as a focus of concern.

It sparked a furious response from Beijing, which summoned Australia's ambassador and attacked local media stories about infiltration, describing them as fabrications based on hysteria and paranoia.

The ice has yet to thaw, with another spat in January prompting Beijing to lodge a formal diplomatic protest after a senior Australian minister called Chinese infrastructure projects in the Pacific "white elephants".

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has not visited China in more than two years.

The Australian Financial Review said Thursday China's leadership was so incensed by Canberra's rhetoric that it was regularly refusing visas to ministers and a major annual showcase of Australian trade and business in China looked certain to be abandoned this year.

The newspaper characterised it as a deep chill with the country's top trading partner, but Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was keen to play the story down.

"There has certainly has been a degree of tension in the relationship that has arisen because of criticism in China about our foreign interference laws," he told the radio station 3AW in Melbourne.

"All I would say is there has clearly been some misunderstandings and mischaracterisations of our foreign interference legislation in the Chinese media."

He added that while his government had "a very strong and respectful relationship" with China, "we do everything we can to ensure any foreign interference in our politics is open and declared".

Reforms to espionage and foreign interference laws were proposed after Australia's spy agency raised concerns that China was interfering in local institutions and using the political donations system to gain access.

The frosty relations were highlighted by Australia not sending a minister to the recent Boao Forum -- dubbed the Asian Davos -- which Chinese President Xi Jinping attended and where Canberra usually has high-level representation.

The Financial Review noted that Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had not visited China for more than two years and Turnbull was last on the Chinese mainland to attend the G20 summit in September 2016.

When pressed on whether ministers had been declined visas to visit China, Turnbull replied: "I wouldn't go that far", while declining to give a yes or no answer.South Africa's Luvo Manyonga set a new Commonwealth Games record to win the men's long jump.

South African long jumper Luvo Manyonga said he aimed to go another season unbeaten and set his sights on the world record after snatching a brilliant victory at the Commonwealth Games.

The former crystal meth addict, who shook off his problems to claim Olympic silver in 2016, underlined his growing status with a final leap of 8.41m to set a new Games record and grab gold from Australia's Henry Frayne.

Manyonga said that with more time to acclimatise he could have challenged Mike Powell's world record of 8.95m set in 1991 -- the year he was born.

"If I could get some more time, I could give it a try," he said of the damp and slippery Gold Coast track. "Anything can happen. I just have to focus on the run-up and technique, the rest will do itself."

Such confidence underlines the heady rise of Manyonga, who was banned after testing positive for methamphetamine in 2012 and struggled with addiction before his triumphant return.

Now, a first Commonwealth Games title is all in a day's work for the 27-year-old as he targets staying unbeaten for a second straight season, with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics approaching.

"It was on my bucket list of the major competitions and now I've ticked off the Commonwealth Games. I'm looking for the Intercontinental (Cup) and there's still more to tick," he said.

"It's a medal in the bag, I'm just going to go home and start working again," added Munyonga. "It's the same as a normal person going to the office: you just tick the box and go back home."

Manyonga set what was then his personal best in winning Olympic silver in 2016, and he will be looking for another breakthrough in 2020 in Tokyo -- where Powell set the existing world record in his famous duel with Carl Lewis.

A year ago, he leapt 8.65m in South Africa's Potchefstroom -- the longest jump recorded since American Dwight Phillips soared 8.74m in 2009.

Even after his latest victory, Manyonga had a word of advice for drug-users in Australia, which has the world's highest per capita consumption of crystal meth.

"I just want to tell everyone who's struggling with drug addiction or whatever, it doesn't matter what addiction they have, just accept that you're powerless over it, you have a problem. And ask for help," he said.

"Because when you're in it, you think that you can beat it by yourself but it's not easy like that. You have to get a team, work with a team and be honest with yourself. It helped me, so I think everyone can get help from that."Australia's Yassmin Abdel-Magied says she was denied entry into the US ahead of a planned speaking engagement in New York

A high-profile Australian author and Muslim activist was refused entry to the United States Thursday and put on a plane home after arriving for a speaking engagement, sparking calls for a re-think by border officials.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied, an advocate for youth, women and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, said she was stopped at immigration and ordered out of the country.

"Roughly three hours since touch down in Minneapolis, Im on a plane back," she tweeted.

"Well, guess that tightening of immigration laws business is working, despite my Australian passport. Were taking off now."

A statement by US Customs and Border Protection, cited by Australian media, said she did not have the right visa.

Abdel-Magied was due to appear in New York to discuss online hate against Muslims and the difficulties of being a young Muslim woman in Western countries at a forum organised by PEN International, a freedom of expression organisation.

PEN America chief Suzanne Nossel said she was dismayed by the decision and understood it was the same type of visa used previously for similar trips without issue.

She said the purpose of the PEN World Voices Festival, founded after the 9/11 attacks, was to sustain links between the US and the wider world.

This, she said, was being jeopardised "by efforts at visa bans and tightened immigration restrictions" which threatened "to choke off vital channels of dialogue that are protected under the First Amendment right to receive and impart information through in-person cultural exchange".

"We call on Customs and Border to admit her to the US so that she can take her rightful place in the urgent international conversation to take place at the festival next week."

Adbel-Magied, 27, said authorities seized her phone and passport before putting her on a plane out.

"Those who say the world is borderless are those who have the right colour passports -- or birthplace," she tweeted.

Abdel-Magied, a former Queensland state Young Australian of the Year and mechanical engineer, was born in Sudan but migrated to Australia in 1992. She moved to London last year.

She has worked as a presenter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and formerly served on the government's Council for Australian-Arab Relations.

She sparked an outcry in Australia over an Anzac Day social media post which referred to current global conflicts and the plight of asylum-seekers detained by Australia in offshore camps.

Anzac Day annually marks the ill-fated 1915 landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps in modern-day Turkey during World War I.

Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs said it was aware she had been denied entry.

"Like Australia, the United States administers a strict entry regime. The decision on who can enter the United States is a matter solely for the US government," it added.The National People's Congress, China's rubber-stamp legislature, has expanded President Xi Jinping's anti-graft campaign to scrutinise millions of public servants at all levels of government

A former top Chinese Communist Party official who was once tipped for a leadership post pleaded guilty at his bribery trial on Thursday, the latest target of President Xi Jinping's sweeping anti-corruption crusade.

Sun Zhengcai, a former Politburo member and party chief of the southwestern mega-city of Chongqing, was accused by the prosecutor of taking advantage of his position to seek profits for others and illegally accepting a large amount of money and goods, according to the court's Weibo account.

Sun pleaded guilty and "expressed penitence", said the No.1 Intermediate People's Court in the northern city of Tianjin, adding that it would make a ruling at a later date.

The court said more than 130 people attended the trial, including members of the country's top political advisory board and media reporters.

But some 20 plainclothes officers prevented an AFP reporter from entering the court and surrounded the journalist for more than 20 minutes, saying she should have registered to attend the hearing in advance. One officer pushed the journalist back and shouted.

Sun, 54, had once been tipped for promotion to the Politburo's elite seven-member standing committee, which rules the country and is presided over by Xi.

As the youngest Politburo member, Sun was even seen in some quarters as a potential successor to Xi.

Sun was the first serving member of the elite 25-person Politburo to be placed under investigation since Bo Xilai, another former leader of Chongqing, who was jailed for life in 2013.

Government corruption is rampant in China, and Xi has presided over a much-publicised anti-graft campaign since coming to power in 2012, but some have compared it to a political purge.

Xi, who has become China's most powerful leader since Chairman Mao Zedong, now has a path to rule for life after the rubber-stamp legislature lifted presidential term limits last month. Xi's second presidential term expires in 2023.

The National People's Congress also expanded Xi's anti-graft campaign by creating a national supervision commission that will look beyond party officials and scrutinise millions of public servants at all levels of government.

- Plot 'to seize power' -

Sun's case showed that the party had some concerns about potential vulnerabilities to its rule.

In October, senior party official Liu Shiyu congratulated Xi for foiling the efforts of powerful officials who "plotted to usurp the party's leadership and seize state power."

Liu listed former security czar Zhou Yongkang alongside Sun and Bo as part of the conspiracy, which was rumoured to have involved military officials.

All three have been ousted from the ruling Communist party (CCP) and arrested or jailed on corruption charges.

Sun was expelled from the CCP in September after an investigation by the party's disciplinary body found the politician had abused his position by taking bribes and trading power for sex.

Sun was also accused at the time of nepotism, sloth, leaking confidential party information and betraying party principles.

As the country's fourth largest city and an industrial metropolis in the southwest of the country, Chongqing is a major post for ambitious politicians.

When Sun became the Chongqing's chief in 2012, he was tasked with erasing Bo's influence on the city.

But last year the party's discipline inspectors publicly rebuked Sun for failing to get the job done, and his downfall came months later.

Sun was replaced in the city by Chen Miner, a former Xi aide whose profile was elevated by the move.

Chen was given a spot on the powerful 25-member Politburo at the Communist Party Congress in October.Robert and Grace: Carol Magenga and Khetani Banda lampoon Zimbabwe's once-mighty presidential couple in 'Operation Restore Regasi'

"The president is in charge and that means me too," says Zimbabwe's "former first lady Grace Mugabe" to howls of laughter from the theatre audience.

"Everyone must rally behind me, the mother of the nation. I am the wife of the president."

"Grace" was on the stage of Harare's Theatre in the Park, brought to life by actress Carol Magenga in a recent three-day run of a production called "Operation Restore Regasi".

The play, which chronicles the final days of former president Robert Mugabe's rule, marked a watershed in Zimbabwe, where satirical productions that mocked Mugabe used to be ruthlessly suppressed.

It has been a resounding hit with audiences starved for decades of incisive and topical humour -- and so far, there has been no official backlash.

Trevor Chisvo, a 26-year-old teacher, called the dialogue, a mix of English and Shona, "hilarious".

"It is funny that we're enjoying events in our country that could have turned violent," he said. "The guys did very well."

The play was sold out and extended its run for three further performances.

The production and its reception are a far cry from the recent past when artists were intimidated by security forces if their work was deemed to insult Mugabe or his government.

In the early 1990s, playwright Denford Magora was forced into hiding after state security agents went to his home to confront him about his work, "Dr. Government".

The script portrayed the government as an incompetent doctor asked to make way for a better-trained nurse in the effort to resuscitate a critically-ill patient called Zimbabwe.

Another production which portrayed Mugabe surrounded by sycophantic "yes men" was banned.

But the tide turned against Mugabe dramatically in November last year when the army took control of key sites across Harare including the state broadcaster and parliament.

Satire: Zimbabwe's former army commander General Costantino Chiwenga, played by Charles Munganasa, stuns the Mugabes by announcing the military intervention

Zimbabwe's top military commander Constantino Chiwenga denied staging a coup d'etat, insisting they were conducting an operation against "criminals" around Mugabe which was widely accepted to mean his wife Grace and her supporters.

Mugabe finally resigned when his own ZANU-PF party began impeachment proceedings against him and tens of thousands of ordinary Zimbabweans took to the streets.

- 'We are finished, Grace' -

"Operation Restore Regasi", set at Mugabe's opulent Blue Roof private residence in Harare, depicts the mounting tensions between Grace and the military in the run-up to the momentous events of November.

"Bring your guns and your soldiers to shoot me," says a cackling Grace in one scene.

"Even if we give some of you guns, you will not dare shoot but you will shoot yourselves," she adds, capturing the shrill egoism that defined Grace's reputation as first lady.

The plot follows the real-life drama when the military puts Mugabe and Grace under house arrest prompting her to demand that the president intervenes.

"I can't do anything -- even the police have been arrested," a suddenly helpless President Mugabe, played by Khetani Banda, responds meekly.

Throughout the play Mugabe, who is now aged 94, is often shown asleep, only stirring to parrot party slogans.

"Who fired Mnangagwa?" Mugabe wonders aloud in one scene, forgetting that it was he who sacked his deputy Emmerson Mnangagwa, who later succeeds him as president.

"We are finished, Grace," says a broken Mugabe to his wife, prompting her to accuse him of failing to protect their family. Mugabe retorts that the situation is down to her provocative actions.

Director Charles Munganasa, who also played the part of Chiwenga, said that he sought to achieve a form of documentary storytelling with the play.

- 'A parasite to progress' -

"The Robert Mugabe story is going to be told for generations and generations to come. It's a form of documentary theatre," he told AFP following a packed performance.

"I was very terrified and I was wondering what is going to be the future of Zimbabwe and the people.

"Every Zimbabwean was happy when Mugabe decided to resign. He was not just a parasite to the people of Zimbabwe -- but also a parasite to progress and to the world."

Prominent playwright and actor Daves Guzha, who runs Theatre in the Park, said that the response of the authorities to the play "bodes well for the future of Zimbabwe".

Even the play's title is a pun, as Chiwenga struggles to pronounce "Ls" -- and so "Legacy" became "Regasi" (pronounced "Regasy") in the "Operation Restore Legacy" that triggered Mugabe's fall.

In their pomp: The Mugabes, seen among supporters last November after Grace Mugabe engineered the dismissal of Emmerson Mnangagwa as vice president. The move was politically fatal for the Mugabes, for it triggered the army intervention

The new production coincides with hopes of freer expression after Mugabe's downfall, and with the advent of elections due in July.

But whether artists will regain full liberty over time remains unclear.

"Maybe there is now more freedom of expression that is beginning to build up and we need to keep the momentum," suggested Guzha.

"We need to keep on pushing the boundaries before these guys in power start actually saying 'it's enough'."President Emmanuel Macron has spoken with length with his US counterpart Donald Trump over their two countries' response to an alleged chemical attack in Syria

In laying his integrity on the line over Syria's suspected use of chemical weapons, French President Emmanuel Macron might be playing for even higher stakes -- maintaining the landmark Iran nuclear accord, analysts say.

The 40-year-old leader, weighing the first foreign military operation on his own initiative, has made clear he considers Damascus behind a suspected chemical attack in the rebel-held Syrian town of Douma last weekend that killed at least 40 people.

Macron's response is expected to be high on the agenda during a TV interview Thursday afternoon, only his third since the centrist swept to power last year.

For many experts, he has no choice but to enforce his "red line" on the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime, which would prompt French military strikes.

"Unlike previous incidents, alleged or real, in recent months, what happened Saturday in Douma is a huge and evident violation of Western red lines," said Bruno Tertrais, a political scientist at the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS).

Armed forces in the Middle East

"If France doesn't react now that the conditions are met, we would lose all credibility," he said.

The country, victim of the first extensive use of chemical weapons in military history during World War I, has long made combatting chemical weapons a priority.

It worries that allowing such attacks by Syria's President Bashar al-Assad could set a dangerous precedent for other repressive regimes.

Many French officials still bristle over former US president Barack Obama's last-minute pullback on Syria strikes after a chemical attack in 2013.

The decision shocked the French, whose planes were poised for launch to participate in the operation.

"Emmanuel Macron has tied his hands," said Francois Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"He's in the same position as Obama in 2013, and if he decides not to follow through, there will be a political price to pay."

- Uphill battle -

Macron has spoken at length with US President Donald Trump about how to react to the Douma attack.

Both men have played up their sound relations since Macron invited the American leader to attend France's Bastille Day festivities last July.

Macron has also taken advantage of weakened leadership in Britain and Germany to carve out a role as Trump's privileged partner in Europe.

But he has been unable to sway the US leader on two crucial issues -- the US decision to exit the 2015 Paris agreement on curbing global warming, and Trump's threat to scupper the deal with Iran to curb its nuclear weapons programme.

Several analysts say ending the deal with Tehran and re-imposing American sanctions could inflame tensions across the Middle East, after years of tensions amid the fight against the Islamic State group.

As Macron prepares for a state visit to Washington later this month, "French military action could earn him some much-needed favour," Benjamin Haddad, a researcher at the Hudson Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine this week.

Decisive joint action could give him leverage in arguing to uphold the deal, which comes up next for Trump's review on May 12.

"At the betting table of international relations, the chances are still 20 to one" against saving the deal, Heisbourg said.

Against such odds, "a show of France-US unity on Syria surely can't do any harm" during Macron's Washington visit, he said.South Korean National Security Director Chung Eui-yong is due to meet his US counterpart John Bolton -- a courtesy call aimed at 'coordinating opinions ahead of the inter-Korean and US-North Korea summits'

South Korea's national security adviser has flown to Washington to meet his newly appointed US counterpart John Bolton, an official said Thursday in Seoul, where concerns are growing over the American's hardline stance on the nuclear-armed North.

Chung Eui-yong, who personally delivered Kim's summit offer to Trump last month, returned to the US capital unannounced Wednesday as the two allies plan their upcoming summits with North Korea's Kim Jong Un.

Chung is due to meet Bolton on Thursday, the official at the South's presidential Blue House told reporters.

He added the meeting was a courtesy call aimed at "coordinating opinions ahead of the inter-Korean and US-North Korea summits".

The rare inter-Korean summit is scheduled to take place in just over two weeks, while the second meeting between US President Donald Trump and Kim is expected as early as May.

The appointment this week of Bolton -- a mustachioed former UN ambassador and strong defender of a US first strike option against North Korea -- has raised concerns in Seoul over the prospects of the diplomatic thaw on the Korean peninsula.

Bolton's stance on Pyongyang diverges sharply from the more dovish South Korean government, which had pushed hard for an early meeting with him, the South's Yonhap agency reported.

"Bolton does not even mention the possibility of a peace treaty with Pyongyang" which is sought by the South, said Koo Kab-woo, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

"If Bolton intervenes in the current diplomatic process (with North Korea), the need for coordination becomes much bigger," Koo added.

In a growing rapprochement on the Korean peninsula kick-started by the South's Winter Olympics, Kim is set to meet the South's Moon Jae-in on April 27.

Trump has agreed to meet Kim to discuss denuclearisation as soon as next month, though no venue or specific date is agreed.

The South Korean embassy in Washington and the US State Department have agreed to set up a hotline in the build-up to the summits, Yonhap reported.

The South's presidential office is also set to launch a new situation room to monitor the preparations for its upcoming summit on a daily basis, it said Thursday.Sri Lanka had to hand back control of the Chinese-built Hambantota Port to Beijing after struggling to repay its debts from the project

IMF chief Christine Lagarde warned China on Thursday about saddling other countries with a "problematic increase in debt" through its ambitious global trade infrastructure project.

Lagarde made the comments at a Beijing forum on Chinese President Xi Jinping's signature Belt and Road initiative, a $1 trillion road, rail and construction project spanning dozens of countries -- from Asia to Africa and Europe.

But many of the colossal projects are being built by state-owned Chinese companies and financed by loans from China, leaving states billions of dollars in debt to Beijing.

"These ventures can also lead to a problematic increase in debt, potentially limiting other spending as debt service rises, and creating balance of payment challenges," Lagarde told the crowd of Chinese and foreign officials.

"In countries where public debt is already high, careful management of financing terms is critical," she said.

Some countries like Sri Lanka have already ended up deeply in debt and been left with little choice but to turn over crucial assets to Beijing as way to restructure the loans.

In Sri Lanka's case, the island nation handed over a long term lease on the strategically located and bustling Hambantota Port to pay down debt.

Lagarde advocated greater transparency and cooperation to get all stakeholders on the same page to avoid such problems.

"It's not a free lunch, it's something where everybody chips in, it's not just honey for bees," she said, warning that the large scale spending projects also come with corruption temptations for officials.

"Projects can always present the risk of potentially failed projects and the misuse of funds. In some corners, it's even called corruption," Lagarde told the officials, many of whom preside over Belt and Road projects.

The speech may ruffle feathers in Beijing where leaders have heaped praise on the project and been loathe to acknowledge any risks or pitfalls in the initiative, which is often described as a revival of the ancient Silk Road trade routes.

Speaking before Lagarde, China's central bank chief Yi Gang said Chinese banks had "achieved great successes" providing low cost financing to Belt and Road countries.

Yi said the banks do not rely on government subsidies but at the same time are "not purely commercial lending".

Xi struck back at criticism of his key initiative on Wednesday at the Boao Forum for Asia, a Davos-like meeting of international leaders held on the southern island of Hainan.

The Belt and Road "is neither the Marshall Plan after World War II nor an intrigue of China. It is, if anything, a plan in the sunshine," Xi said, according to the Xinhua state news agency.Outgoing CIA director Mike Pompeo testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at his confirmation hearing to be secretary of state

President Donald Trump's pick to become Washington's top diplomat pledged Thursday to work with US allies to strengthen the Iran deal and played down fears he is bent on regime change in North Korea.

Mike Pompeo, the outgoing director of the Central Intelligence Agency, disavowed his reputation as a "war hawk" and an anti-Muslim hardliner as he sought to woo support from senators to become the next US secretary of state.

He told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he would restore "swagger" to a State Department left in tatters by Rex Tillerson, and strengthen relations with US partners left ragged after the tumultuous first year of President Donald Trump's administration.

Pompeo, a former congressman, emphasized his close relationship with Trump -- something Tillerson never had -- and his time at the CIA, which he said had given him a strong appreciation for the necessity to work closely with foreign partners.

He promised to fill scores of unoccupied diplomatic posts, to spend time with the staff and delegate authority, saying current state department staff are "demoralized" and "do not feel relevant."

"All of this -- listening, leveraging differences, unleashing talent, teamwork -- will become the fabric of a State Department culture that finds its swagger once again," he said.

- Reputation as hardliner -

With a series of tough foreign policy challenges looming, Trump has made the 54-year-old West Point and Harvard Law graduate a key aide for his second year in office, along with fellow arch-conservative John Bolton, who joined the White House this week as the president's national security advisor.

Bolton later lavished praise on Pompeo, describing him as a "talented and experienced public servant" as well as a "good friend."

"We need him as secretary of state as we support the president and take on some of the toughest foreign policy issues of our time," he said in a statement.

In his CIA post, Pompeo has already taken the lead in arranging a potentially breakthrough summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un on denuclearization.

The Trump administration also faces crucial decisions on how to react to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, more sanctions on Russia, and a deadline to confirm the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Mike Pompeo

With a history of provocative statements against Iran, Pompeo's nomination was seen as a sign that Trump's administration intends to rip up the accord.

But on Thursday, he strove to emphasize that he would work to "fix" the deal with skeptical European allies by a May 12 deadline.

Both France's President Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel are due to visit Washington on separate official visits before May 12, in part to lobby Trump to preserve a deal they see as the best way to stop Tehran getting a nuclear bomb.

Pompeo confirmed that as CIA director, he had seen no evidence that Iran had broken its side of the bargain, and believes that Tehran would not be able to quickly develop nuclear weapons should the agreement fail.

"I've seen no evidence that they are not in compliance today," he told the committee.

"I want to fix this deal. That's the objective."

"If there is no chance to fix it, I'll recommend to the president we do our level best to work with our allies to achieve a better outcome and better deal. Even after May 12th, even after May 12th, there's still much diplomatic work to be done."

Pompeo -- who once hinted he would not be bothered if North Korea's Kim were assassinated -- was also asked whether he favors US military action to overthrow the nuclear weapon-armed regime in Pyongyang.

"I'm not advocating for regime change," he stressed.

"I lean more closely to the president's view, which is to continue to pressure the country, to build a diplomatic coalition around the world to put pressure on Kim Jong Un so that we can achieve the United States' goals without ever having to put one of our men or women in harm's way."

He was also quizzed on former statements, when he was a congressman from Kansas, that have led him to be cast as anti-Muslim and anti-gay.

But he cited his record in the CIA as supporting a diverse workforce, "focusing on mission and demanding that every team member be treated equally and with dignity and respect."

- Confirmation not certain -

After five hours of testimony, though, Pompeo's confirmation by the committee, and then the entire Senate, was not assured, even though his nomination in early 2017 as CIA director passed easily.

One Republican senator on the committee, Rand Paul, has declared himself opposed, meaning at least one Democrat will have to cross party lines and support him to see the nomination through to a full vote.

But Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican hawk on foreign policy, has said Pompeo would be taking over during a "dangerous" period globally, and that "I think he's the right guy at the right time."

A committee vote is expected sometime later this month.Tens of thousands have died since the late 1980s when rebel groups began waging an armed insurgency against Indian rule in the divided region

Police on Thursday were hunting three gunmen in Indian Kashmir thought killed in a shootout with the army but who turned up later in a marketplace celebrating their escape.

Officials had declared the shooters dead after Indian forces surrounded a home in Kulgam area in southern Kashmir on Wednesday and exchanged fire with its occupants.

The battle ended with five homes being completely destroyed by heavy explosives. But when soldiers searched the wreckage the bodies of the three gunmen were nowhere to be found.

Witnesses said the alleged militants turned up later at a market on the back of motorbikes, firing celebratory rounds in the air. One had suffered a gunshot wound to the leg.

It is rare for gunmen to escape an army siege unscathed in Indian-administered Kashmir, where half a million soldiers have been deployed.

Sixty-one suspected militants have been killed since the start of the year in the restive region. More than 200 died over the course of 2017, one of the bloodiest years of the decade.

In a statement, police alleged the shooters managed to escape by mingling with a large crowd of civilians who gathered at the scene chanting and throwing stones at Indian forces.

"We request general public not to come close to encounter sites as it is a considerable threat," the police said in the statement issued late Wednesday.

"Efforts have been intensified to nab the escaped militants."

Four civilians died and 21 others were injured after security personnel opened fire on the crowd that gathered near the shootout. A soldier was also killed in the earlier firefight with the gunmen.

Civilians often gather in large numbers at locations where soldiers are fighting suspected militants in the Kashmir, chanting slogans against Indian rule and hurling projectiles.

Tens of thousands have died since the late 1980s when rebel groups began waging an armed insurgency against Indian rule in the divided region.

Some fight for independence and others for a merger with Pakistan.

Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since the end of British colonial rule of the subcontinent in 1947. Both claim the territory in its entirety.A Syrian regime soldier walks over rubble in the former rebel-held town of Zamalka in Eastern Ghouta on April 11, 2018

The remaining rebels in Syria's battered Eastern Ghouta have surrendered their heavy weapons and their leader has left the enclave for the north, a war monitor said on Thursday.

Syria's regime is poised to secure the opposition's onetime bastion on the edge of Damascus, after a negotiated withdrawal for its last holdout of Douma.

"Jaish al-Islam fighters handed over their heavy weapons to Russian military police in the town of Douma on Wednesday," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"Most of Jaish al-Islam's top brass, including their head Issam Buwaydani, left Douma and arrived in northern Syria on Wednesday evening," the Britain-based monitor said.

His departure came under a fraught deal for Douma announced last weekend, just hours after an alleged chemical weapons attack that killed dozens in the town.

Under the agreement, thousands of Jaish al-Islam fighters and civilians have been bussed out of Douma to opposition-controlled parts of Syria's Aleppo province.

It was unclear whether more evacuations would take place Thursday.

Russian military police began patrolling Douma on Thursday as part of the deal, according to the Russian defence ministry.

It also said the Syrian government flag was flying on Thursday in the town, which signalled that the regime was back in control of Ghouta although its forces have not yet entered Douma.

Ghouta was the opposition's main bastion on the edge of the capital and suffered a five-year regime siege before the ferocious assault that Moscow and Damascus began in February.The militants used a ladder to climb into the compound in the early hours of Thursday

Taliban militants launched a pre-dawn raid on a district government compound in Afghanistan on Thursday, killing at least seven people including the local governor, officials said.

Six police also died and 10 intelligence officers were wounded in the attack on the Khwaja Omari district headquarters in the southeastern province of Ghazni, the provincial governor's spokesman Aref Noori told AFP.

The militants used a ladder to climb into the compound in the early hours of Thursday, deputy provincial police chief Ramazan Ali Mohsini told AFP.

Mohsini put the death toll at 13, including the governor, police and intelligence officers, adding scores of Taliban fighters were also killed but that could not be immediately confirmed.

Afghan officials often give conflicting casualty figures immediately after an attack.

"The attack is over and the district is under the control of Afghan security forces after reinforcement forces rushed to the scene following the Taliban attack," Mohsini added.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the raid in a WhatsApp message to journalists, saying "more than 20 police" were killed and several others wounded.

The attack was one of the deadliest by the Taliban in several weeks and comes as the militants prepare to launch their annual spring offensive

"Our mujahideen have confiscated weapons and ammunition," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.

"In the attack three mujahideen were martyred and four others were wounded."

The attack was one of the deadliest by the Taliban in several weeks and comes as the militants prepare to launch their annual spring offensive, which marks the beginning of the traditional fighting season.

The Taliban are under pressure to take up President Ashraf Ghani's offer of peace talks but so far they have not responded directly to the proposal.

The militants had vowed to take revenge over an Afghan air strike last week in an area controlled by the group in the northern province of Kunduz.

Dozens of people, many of them children, were killed or wounded after Afghan Air Force helicopters struck a madrassa in Dashte Archi district, security sources and witnesses told AFP.A Syrian soldier walks over the rubble of buildings in the former rebel-held town of Zamalka in Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on April 11, 2018

Rebels in Syria's Eastern Ghouta surrendered their heavy weapons and their leader left the enclave, a monitor said Thursday, signalling the end of one of the bloodiest assaults of Syria's seven-year war.

The Syrian flag was raised above the central mosque in Douma, the town where the regime is accused of carrying out a chemical attack that sparked outrage and threats of Western military action.

US President Donald Trump was mulling his options and British Prime Minister Theresa May called an emergency cabinet meeting Thursday, as the Syrian army braced for Western strikes, hiding assets and clearing key buildings.

Jaish al-Islam, which has controlled Eastern Ghouta's main town for years, had balked at a Russian-brokered deal like those that saw other factions bussed to northern Syria.

The group's political chief told AFP it was a chemical attack by the regime that forced them to accept Russia's terms and evacuate their former bastion.

"Of course, the chemical attack is what pushed us to agree" to a withdrawal from Douma, said Yasser Dalwan.

Western powers such as France and the United Nations have alleged the regime used chemical weapons on Douma last Saturday.

Damascus has said the case was entirely fabricated to justify military action against the regime and that international chemical experts would arrive in the country Thursday.

The OPCW global watchdog said the team was "on its way to Syria and will start its work as of Saturday" on a fact-finding mission into the alleged attack.

Regime forces had yet to take over Douma Thursday but, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the rebels gave up their heavy weapons.

"Jaish al-Islam fighters handed over their heavy weapons to Russian military police in the town of Douma on Wednesday," the Britain-based monitoring group said.

Their top leader Issam Buwaydani boarded a convoy out of Ghouta with thousands of other fighters and their relatives, it said.

- Flag raised -

Douma residents told AFP that Syria's national red, white and black flag with two green stars was raised on Wednesday above the main mosque, which was also used as the office of the town's opposition-run council.

But a dispute subsequently erupted, shots were fired and the flag was taken down, the residents said.

Eastern Ghouta

Russian military police, who had started deploying in the town as part of a deal that would allow some rebels to disarm and stay in Douma, also left after the incident, the residents said.

Simultaneously carrying out air strikes, brokering talks and supervising humanitarian operations, Russia was the key player in an assault that left at least 1,700 civilians dead.

"Today a significant event in the history of Syria took place," Major General Yury Yevtushenko, head of the Russian military's centre for reconciliation in Syria, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

"The raising of a regime flag over a building in the town of Douma signified control over this town and consequently over Eastern Ghouta as a whole," he said.

It was not clear whether he was referring to the flag that was taken down or to another.

- Assad recovery -

Moscow also said Russian military police had returned to the town on Thursday and were in full control.

"From today, units of the Russian armed forces' military police are working in the town of Douma," the defence ministry said.

Yet chaos and confusion prevailed in the streets of Douma, where civilians appeared to have very little information on the latest political developments.

Many residents were preparing to take what should be some of the last buses leaving the region to head to parts of northern Syria still under rebel control.

A military official said around 30 of 80 buses brought to Douma for the evacuations had already left.

A member of Syrian government forces looks at materials they say were used by opposition fighters to make weapons in the former rebel-held town of Zamalka in Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on April 11, 2018

According to the Russian military, more than 160,000 people have been evacuated from Eastern Ghouta, which only two months ago was a sprawling rebel enclave within mortar range of central Damascus.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad, which since Russia's military intervention in 2015 has gradually reasserted what was once a very tenuous grip on the country, was keen to secure an area that directly threatened the capital.

"Victory in Ghouta is a critical point," Bouthaina Shaaban, a top Assad adviser, said on the Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen.

"It has sent a message to the whole world that Syria's army and its allies can liberate every inch of Syrian territory," she said.

The Syrian pound has risen significantly as the operation to flush rebels out of Ghouta wrapped up.

Regime and allied forces are next expected to train their sights on areas in southern Damascus that are almost empty of civilians but still controlled by the Islamic State jihadist group (IS).

According to the Observatory, more than 350,000 people have been killed in seven years of conflict, including a proportion of children that has risen sharply over the past year.

While the scramble for Syria that followed the collapse of IS's self-styled "caliphate" last year is winding down in some parts of Syria, the humanitarian emergency is still acute.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 2.9 million people were forced from their homes last year, or nearly 8,000 people every day.Boys only at the sumo

Japan's sumo association came under fire for sexism again on Thursday after requesting girls be prevented from participating in events showcasing the traditional sport.

Sumo has been in the headlines in recent weeks after women providing medical assistance were asked to leave a sumo ring, and a female politician was barred from giving a speech from the ring.

In the past, girls and boys have both been allowed to get in the ring and grapple with the sport's famously hefty stars at the outreach events.

But an official told AFP that the Japan Sumo Association last week requested girls be barred from participating in a programme for children in Shizuoka prefecture, part of an event designed to showcase the sport to local fans.

The event was held Sunday.

"It is out of safety concerns," a spokeswoman for sumo's governing body told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

She said the safety of boys was just as important, but that the association felt there was a "difference" between the effect that possible scars and injuries could have on girls, compared to boys.

"You must understand the nuances," she said.

"This was not an abrupt decision. For a long time, we have received reports of injuries to children."

The request to exclude girls will be made at showcase events in other regions, she added.

The decision made headlines in Japan Thursday, and comes as the sumo association faces allegations of sexism.

The rings where sumo is practised, known as the dohyo, are seen as sacred places in the native Shinto faith.

Women, who are considered to be ritually unclean, are barred from stepping into them.

Last week, several women rushed to perform CPR on a male mayor who collapsed in a sumo ring in Kyoto prefecture while giving a speech.

But multiple announcements were made over loudspeakers asking the women to leave the ring.

The incident made international headlines and the head of the sumo association apologised, calling the announcements inappropriate.

Days later, a female mayor from the western city of Takarazuka was barred from delivering a speech inside a sumo ring.

"I'm a female mayor but I am a human being," she said in a speech delivered from a podium outside the ring.

"But because I am a woman, despite being a mayor, I cannot make a speech in the ring."

The association's decision to bar girls from the showcase events was widely slammed on social media.With a population of just three million, Mongolia is believed to be sitting on an estimated $1 trillion of natural resources

Two former Mongolian prime ministers have been arrested in connection with an investigation into allegations of corruption and misuse of power in mining deals with Anglo-Australian resources giant Rio Tinto, authorities said Thursday.

The pair were detained Wednesday as authorities investigate their handling of two agreements related to the massive Oyu Tolgoi gold-copper mine, which has been mired in controversy for years.

At the request of the nation's anti-corruption agency, two courts on Thursday ordered that both be held for 30 days in a detention centre.

Sanj Bayar, prime minister from 2007 to 2009, resigned for health reasons weeks after Mongolia signed an agreement with Canada's Ivanhoe Mines and Rio Tinto to develop the mine near the Chinese border.

The court ordered his arrest after a warrant was issued over fears that he might destroy evidence -- claims that his lawyer rejected, saying that the documents related to the deal were kept in government archives.

Chimed Saikhanbileg, who served between 2014 and 2016, was detained after returning to Mongolia from the United States to cooperate with the investigation.

He wrote an open letter saying he "didn't violate the law" or take bribes in a 2015 deal with Rio Tinto for multi-billion-dollar expansion of the mine.

"I'm not afraid or ashamed," he wrote.

A former finance minister and a former chief executive of Erdenes Oyutolgoi, the Mongolian state-owned company that controls a third of the mine, have been arrested in connection with the investigation.North Koreans struggle for basic access to facilities and more than a quarter of children are stunted due to inadequate nutritious food, the UN says

The United Nations was able to help barely 15 percent of the North Koreans it aimed to support with basic food needs last year, its top official in Pyongyang said Thursday, as donor funding dried up in the face of political tensions.

The implementation of UN Security Council sanctions also hit humanitarian work in the country, with aid supplies and financial transfers delayed or stopped, UN resident coordinator Tapan Mishra told AFP.

"We have roughly 40 percent of the population that are in need of humanitarian assistance," Mishra told AFP. "10.3 million people in this country need help."

The isolated North industrialised rapidly following the end of the Korean War and for a time was wealthier than the South. But funding from Moscow came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was followed by a crippling famine and chronic economic mismanagement.

Under current leader Kim Jong Un it has made rapid progress in its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, earning itself multiple sets of UN Security Council sanctions, with more measures imposed unilaterally by the US, EU, South Korea and others.

The impoverished North has been frequently condemned by the international community for decades of prioritising the military and its nuclear weapons programme over adequately providing for its people -- an imbalance some critics say the UN's aid programme encourages.

The latest sanctions remain in place despite a rapid diplomatic rapprochement on the peninsula, with a North-South summit due later this month ahead of talks between Kim and US President Donald Trump.

Kim has also quietly introduced some market reforms under a policy of simultaneously developing the economy and the military, with its estimated growth rate rising -- the North itself does not publish the statistic -- but it remains deeply poverty-stricken.

"Undernutrition continues to be a serious concern with more than one quarter of the children stunted due to inadequate nutritious food, people struggling to have basic access to facilities including health, a large proportion of the population lives without a reliable source of safe drinking water, almost a quarter without basic sanitary facilities," Mishra said.

- 'Delink geopolitics' -

The UN sought $114 million from donors last year for food security, nutrition, health, and water and hygiene, but received only $31 million.

Out of 4.3 million people it targeted for food assistance, only 660,000 received help -- just over 15 percent.

"We did not have the funding to support all the need, so we were only able to provide this," Mishra said, adding he had not previously seen a similar statistic during his career.

A higher proportion, two million out of a targeted 2.5 million, received nutritional support, which is cheaper to provide.

But he urged donors to delink geopolitical considerations from humanitarian decision-making, saying that "even in war", humanitarian principles have always sought to prioritise those in need.

"Humanitarian considerations should be separate," he said, "regardless of all the geopolitical issues".

The UN this week launched its "Needs and Priorities" assessment for North Korea this year, seeking $111 million in funding.

In the foreword to the document, Mishra, who is Indian, wrote: "The geopolitical environment has meant that the situation for many people in the country has been largely forgotten by the rest of the world."

- Tractors stopped -

The sanctions imposed on the North were not intended to affect civilians or restrict humanitarian activities, he added, but in practice aid supplies and payments were "often significantly delayed and disrupted, notably due to the perception of risk of violating the sanctions by banks, suppliers and officials".

Even hand-driven tractors provided by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization had been held up at the border, he told AFP.

Experts say that North Korea needs to produce around 6.5-6.7 million tonnes of food to feed its population, but usually grows around one million tonnes less than that, leading to chronic shortfalls.

Aid agencies used to class all those who relied on the country's Public Distribution System -- 18 million people -- as facing food insecurity.

The state-controlled ration usually provides far less than its goal of 573 grammes of food a day. But North Koreans also have access to other sources of food, such as private markets and land plots.

Under the international standards of the FAO's State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, 10.3 million North Koreans are now considered to be undernourished.

The North faces geographical challenges -- less than 20 percent of its land is suitable for agriculture, with most of the rest made up of mountains and forest, and it is sometimes hit by droughts and floods.

But its agriculture is officially still run on a co-operative farm system and crop yields are relatively low.

It has benefited from few of the global advances in agricultural technology, fertilisers and seeds of recent decades. Such assistance would be considered development aid rather than humanitarian, and so is not possible under sanctions.Syrian President Bashar al-Assad talks with government troops in Eastern Ghouta on March 18, 2018

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned on Thursday that threats of Western military action in response to an alleged chemical attack would only lead to further chaos in the region.

"With every victory on the ground, some Western countries raise their voices and intensify their activities in an effort to change the trajectory of events," said Assad.

"These voices, and any possible actions, will only contribute to further destabilisation in the region," he said in comments posted on the Syrian presidency's social media accounts.

Assad spoke during a meeting with Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign policy advisor to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other officials.

Assad and Velayati criticised Western threats to carry out strikes on Syria in response to the alleged use of toxic weapons at the weekend, the presidency said.

"The threats of some Western countries to attack Syria is based on lies that these countries fabricated along with terrorist organisations," Assad's office said.

Syrian troops have braced for Western strikes across the country, hiding assets and deserting key buildings.

A potential attack was looming on Thursday, with US President Donald Trump mulling over military options and British Prime Minister Theresa May holding an emergency cabinet meeting.A Syrian soldier from the government forces talks with a woman searching to find her home in a destroyed neighbourhood in the former rebel-held town of Zamalka in Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of the capital Damascus

Syrians displaced from the bombed-out Eastern Ghouta suburb are eager to return home, but fighting has destroyed so much of their hometowns that they can barely recognise their own neighbourhoods.

Eyebrows furrowed, Umm Mohammad examined a row of homes in Zamalka, trying to find a spark of familiarity in the heavily-damaged town.

"I haven't found my home yet. The neighbourhood's features have all changed and I lost all the main landmarks," said the 50-year-old, who left Zamalka in 2012 after having lived there for more than a decade.

"My house is near the high school on Al-Qabun street, but I couldn't find the high school or even the street."

Row after row of apartment blocks lie gutted, blocked off by berms of debris and twisted metal. Many of the remaining buildings are missing roofs, balconies or entire walls.

President Bashar al-Assad's Russian-backed forces on Thursday finally secured Eastern Ghouta, once the opposition's main bastion on the edge of Damascus.

Rockets, air strikes, and mortar fire rained down on Ghouta since mid-February during a fierce assault that prompted tens of thousands to flee into government-held territory.

Some have cautiously returned but are finding their neighbourhoods utterly pulverised.

"Zamalka was paradise. But now it's full of barricades and dirt, and doorways are sealed off with mines," Umm Mohammad said.

With the help of a Syrian soldier, Umm Mohammad clambered over rubble to enter one house after the other, hoping to find her own.

"I risked my life to come here and I won't leave until I find my home and go inside," she told AFP. "I just want one look, even if it's the last."

- 'Nothing but dirt' -

Hundreds were gathered on Wednesday on the edge of Ghouta, impatiently waiting for rubble to be cleared from the main entrances.

A bulldozer dismantled barricades and sand berms to allow emotional residents and a press convoy organised by Syria's government to enter.

Umm Rateb was ready for the wait. She had brought with her a small chair and a blanket to pull over her head to protect her from the searing sun.

She looked over the shrinking sand berms into the ravaged scene beyond.

"I came alone to see my house in Kafr Batna, without knowing if it's still standing or if it's been turned to ruins," the 65-year-old said.

"Even if it's nothing but dirt, I'll put down this blanket and sit in my home."

Syrians sell goods on the street in the former rebel-held town of Zamalka in Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of the capital Damascus

Once the roads were open, residents and journalist vehicles entered Ghouta, struggling to make out the paved road under a blanket of debris.

Passing through Arbin, another devastated Ghouta town, a young girl peeked out from a damaged home.

"My daughter is not used to seeing cars, so this sight was very strange for her," said Abu Aziza, 34, as his eight-year-old daughter looked on.

Before the assault that brought most of Ghouta under government control, the area was under a brutal five-year siege that made food, medicine, and other basic goods nearly impossible to come by.

"It's not just cars -- my daughter doesn't know what apples are. She saw a banana for the first time two days ago and ate the whole thing with the peel," Abu Aziza told AFP.

"She didn't know you're supposed to peel a banana."

And 63-year-old Fuad Mahjub was eager to reach his family home and sewing workshop in the district of Ain Terma.

"I left everything just a few meters (yards) away from here," Mahjub said, standing with his young granddaughter Khadija by his side.

"She has never been to my home and only knows Ain Terma from the photographs -- but if we go back, it'll make up for all the hard years."Egypt's former anti-corruption chief Hisham Geneina speaks with AFP in Cairo on June 23, 2016

Egyptian former anti-corruption chief Hisham Geneina will face military trial after saying a presidential candidate he supported had documents damning to state officials, his lawyer said on Thursday.

The military had detained Geneina in February following his remarks in an interview with Huffpost Arabi, the Arabic version of the US news site.

He will stand trial on April 16 on charges of "spreading news that harms the armed forces," his lawyer Ali Taha said.

Geneina had been a top campaign aide to Sami Anan, whom the military also detained after he announced he would stand in last month's presidential election against incumbent Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who won overwhelmingly.

Geneina had said the documents Anan allegedly possessed "revolve around political events and crises Egyptian society has passed through" since the January 2011 uprising which toppled veteran strongman Hosni Mubarak.

He said they were held at a "secure" place abroad and could be released if Anan is harmed.

Moataz Wadnan, the journalist who conducted the interview, has also been arrested.President Donald Trump was evasive about when the United States might attack Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons assault, saying it could be "very soon or not so soon at all!"

President Donald Trump was evasive Thursday about when the United States might attack Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons assault, saying it could be "very soon or not so soon at all!"

A day after warning starkly that "missiles will be coming," Trump in another early morning tweet storm wrote: "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

He added: "In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'"

Trump's new tweet seemed to backtrack from the bellicose one of Wednesday in which he suggested to Syria and its ally Russia that a US attack over the alleged chemical weapons assault on civilians last weekend was all but imminent.

That one, which came after a warning from Russia, went like this: "Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and "smart!" You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

The tough talk between Trump and Russia has raised fears of the Syria conflict mushroomning into something even more serious involving America and its Western allies on one side and the Russians on the other.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned world powers Wednesday to keep the confict from "spiraling out of control."China's sole aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, passed through the Taiwan Strait last month, according to authorities in Taipei

Chinese President Xi Jinping Thursday stressed the "urgent" need to build a powerful navy during a surprise visit to observe naval exercises in the disputed South China Sea, state media reported as the country prepares for live-fire drills in the Taiwan Strait.

The region has become a potential flashpoint, with the US saying China's activities in the area pose a threat to freedom of navigation in the strategically vital waterway, where Beijing has built an archipelago of artificial islands capable of hosting military equipment.

Footage of Xi's visit on state broadcaster CCTV showed the president watching jets taking off from China's sole aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, and joining sailors for a meal.

In a speech to the assembled troops, Xi said China's task to build a powerful navy "has never been as urgent as it is today".

His visit comes as Washington engages in its own muscle flexing in the region, where the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt gave a demonstration Tuesday for members of the Philippine government.

China's own naval drill -- involving the Liaoning and dozens of other vessels -- began at the end of March, with US officials saying the two exercises are separated by several hundred kilometres (miles).

Some 48 warships, 76 fighter jets, and more than 10,000 navy personnel took part in the drill at an undisclosed location, said China Military, a newspaper affiliated to the People's Liberation Army.

Beijing asserts sovereignty over almost all of the resource-rich South China Sea despite rival claims from several of its Southeast Asian neighbours.

China regularly protests when US warships' carry out "freedom of navigation" operations near its islands.

- Live-fire exercise -

Xi's visit came as China announced plans to hold live-fire naval drills next week in the narrow strait separating the mainland from Taiwan, an act that could ratchet up tensions with the island.

"Live-fire military manoeuvres will take place... in the Taiwan Strait on (Wednesday) April 18, 2018 between 8am and midnight," the maritime safety administration of Fujian, the province that lies opposite Taiwan, said in a statement.

China, which regards self-ruled Taiwan as its territory -- to be reunited by force if necessary -- has stepped up air and naval patrols around the island since Beijing-sceptic President Tsai Ing-wen came to power in May 2016.

She refuses publicly to accept the "One China" formula agreed between Beijing and Taiwan's previous government.

Chinese warplanes conducted 25 drills around Taiwan between August 2016 and mid-December last year, according to Taipei.

The Liaoning and other vessels passed through the Taiwan Strait on March 20 -- the day Xi warned against any attempts to divide China.

Taiwan's defence ministry said it would keep a close eye on the upcoming exercise.

"The defence ministry stresses that the military can comprehensively monitor and respond to the regional situation to ensure national security. We ask the public to rest assured," it said in a statement.One of Mugabe's last public appearances as president was on November 8. He tried to shore up support among party members during a power struggle between his wife, Grace, and his then deputy -- later successor -- Emmerson Mnangagwa

Zimbabwe's former president Robert Mugabe has yet to move out of an official residence in Harare five months after he was ousted from power, an official said Thursday.

Presidential spokesman George Charamba said Mugabe had still had not removed his belongings from Zimbabwe House, a residential wing next to the presidential offices at State House.

"We are already using State House, but what he failed to do since November (is move out of Zimbabwe House)," Charamba told AFP, confirming that Mugabe had kept his books, computers and other belongings at the premises.

Mugabe and his family actually lived in the "Blue Roof " mansion, a lavish private house in the suburbs during the later years of his presidency.

"We don't want to create the impression that we are chasing him away," Charamba said, adding that Mugabe, 94, was currently in Singapore for one of his regular health checks.

Mugabe, who ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years after independence from Britain, complained last month that he was thrown out of office by a coup.

His claim drew a dismissive response from his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa, who said the country had "moved on" from the Mugabe era.

The army briefly took over before Mugabe resigned when once-loyal ZANU-PF lawmakers started impeachment proceedings against him.

Mugabe's authoritarian reign left the country in dire economic decline, triggering mass emigration and widespread collapse of public services.Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (R) met Spain's king Felipe VI at La Zarzuela palace in Madrid amid reports of a possible deal over warship sales

Saudi Arabia's crown prince held talks with Spain's King Felipe VI on Thursday during an official visit to the country which coincides with negotiations to sell Spanish warships to the oil-rich kingdom.

The king met with Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who serves as defence minister and also controls economic policy for the world's top oil exporter, at the Zarzuela Palace on the outskirts of Madrid, before hosting a lunch there in his honour.

He is expected to sign five memorandums of understanding in the areas of culture, science, employment, air transport and defence when he meets with Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy later on Thursday.

Prince Mohammed arrived in Spain late on Wednesday hot on the heels of a three-day official visit to France and after a tour lasting several weeks of Egypt, the United States and Britain that saw the self-styled moderniser sign multimillion-dollar deals.

Madrid is the last stop of his global diplomatic charm offensive in a bid to project a new liberal image of his conservative kingdom.

Top-selling daily newspaper El Pais reported earlier this week that Spain would likely make progress during his visit on a deal to sell five corvettes warships to Saudi Arabia for around two billion euros ($2.5 billion).

"The signing of this memorandum of understanding (on defence) can be a step in that direction," a Spanish government source told AFP.

A coalition of NGOs including Amnesty International and Greenpeace urged Madrid not to go ahead with the deal because the corvettes could be used in Saudi Arabia's military campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, where thousands of civilians have been killed.

But Spain's loss-making shipbuilder Navantia is placing a lot of hope on the deal, which has reportedly been under negotiation for two years.

Spanish firms have already won two major infrastructure contracts in Saudi Arabia in recent years.

A Spanish consortium, Al-Shoula, is building a high-speed railway across the desert to link the holy cities of Mecca and Medina while Spanish construction group FCC leads one of three consortia building a rapid transit system in the Saudi capital.

Spain's public works ministry has identified Saudi Arabia as one a "nation of interest".

Under Prince Mohammed's "Vision 2030", a package of economic and social policies designed to free the kingdom from dependence on oil exports, Riyadh plans to spend 32 billion euros in transportation infrastructure in the next decade.

Spain and Saudi Arabia's royal families are very close as King Felipe VI's father Juan Carlos was a close friend of the kingdom's late King Fahd, who reigned from 1982 to 2005, and is close to his brother King Salman.Syrian Hassan al-Kontar says he has been stuck in Kuala Lumpur airport terminal since March 7

A Syrian man said he has been stranded at the main airport serving the Malaysian capital for over a month after being denied entry to several countries, and begged for help to escape.

Hassan al-Kontar has posted videos on YouTube describing his plight, which began when he arrived at the budget terminal of Kuala Lumpur International Airport 37 days ago.

He had planned to travel from Malaysia to Ecuador, where he hoped he would be allowed in without a visa, but was turned away from the flight to the South American country despite having a ticket.

The 36-year-old was also barred from entering Cambodia, and neither has he been allowed back into Malaysia -- leaving him stuck in the terminal's transit lounge.

"I feel lonely, weak, unwanted and rejected. No one is accepting me," he said in a YouTube post.

"I do not know what to do. I contacted almost all the human rights organisations. They came back to me and they said they are unable to help.

"They do not have a solution. I do not have a solution."

Kontar added that he was unable to return to Syria as he was wanted by authorities for having refused to serve in the military.

A civil war has been raging in Syria for the past seven years, leaving more than 350,000 people dead.

His case is reminiscent of the 2004 film "The Terminal," in which Tom Hanks plays a man who finds himself stuck in a New York airport after his government collapses, rendering his papers useless.

Reports said Kontar had been working in the United Arab Emirates but was deported to Malaysia in January 2017.

However he overstayed a three-month tourist visa and is now blacklisted, so cannot re-enter the country.

He reportedly flew to Cambodia but was refused entry before being sent back to Kuala Lumpur airport on March 7.

He has been stuck in the budget terminal ever since, surviving on donated airline meals and washing in the airport toilets.

A spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency said the body was "aware of this case and have reached out to the individual and the authorities".

Immigration authorities declined to comment.The UN mission in Central African Republic, known as MINUSCA, plays a crucial role in supporting President Faustin-Archange Touadera's government

UN forces in the Central African Republic (CAR) said they helped prevent a prison breakout in the capital on Tuesday as deadly clashes unfolded in a flashpoint district between peacekeepers and militia.

Two inmates were killed and a third was injured after the violence erupted in Bangui's Ngaragba central prison on Tuesday, the UN mission in CAR, known as MINUSCA, said in a statement on Wednesday. No detainee escaped.

The incident happened after the justice ministry received a tipoff that the prison was going to be attacked from outside in an operation coordinated with inmates, it said.

Guards carried out a snap search of the cells, which led to a fight that then spread into a full-blown riot and attempted jailbreak.

"As the prisoners were determined to take over the jail and break out, and after attempts at negotiation failed, the domestic security forces, supported by MINUSCA, had to use force to restore order," it said.

Gunfire was heard from inside the prison, witnesses told AFP.

In a separate incident, 19 people, including a UN soldier, were killed and more than 100 wounded in clashes on Tuesday between peacekeepers and armed men in the volatile PK5 Muslim enclave of the capital.

The violence occurred two days after MINUSCA troops entered the PK5 district in a security sweep against gangs.

MINUSCA had wanted "to protect itself and protect the population" its spokesman Vladimir Monteiro, told AFP on Thursday.

"The Rwandan (blue helmets) were targeted by heavily armed people," he added.

Tuesday's clashes marked the bloodiest incident in Bangui since President Faustin-Archange Touadera was elected in 2016.

It was an event showcased as a turning-point in one of the world's poorest and most chronically unstable countries.

The former French colony of 4.5 million people spiralled into bloodshed after longtime leader Francois Bozize was overthrown in 2013 by the mainly Muslim Seleka rebel alliance.

France intervened militarily from 2013 to 2016 to push out the Seleka alliance but wound down the operation after Touadera came to power.

The country remains plagued by violence between ex-rebels and vigilante militia2s.

MINUSCA plays a crucial role in supporting Touadera's government, which can claim to control just a fifth of the country, with the rest in the hands of militias.Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe recently defeated a no-confidence motion

Six ministers quit Sri Lanka's troubled coalition government, forcing Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to patch up his cabinet Thursday ahead of a wider reshuffle.

Wickremesinghe gave the duties of the six Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) ministers to four other members of his cabinet.

The prime minister's United National Party had increased pressure on the followers of President Maithripala Sirisena -- who voted against Wickremesinghe in a recent no-confidence motion -- to resign.

With the help of minority Tamil and Muslim parties, the premier defeated the motion, dealing a blow to Sirisena, who had campaigned for Wickremesinghe to stand down.

Those who voted against Wickremesinghe "have no moral right to remain in government", Petroleum Minister Arjuna Ranatunga said.

Relations between the rival groups in the unity government soured after both suffered losses in February's local council elections.

Former strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa's party trounced the UNP and SLFP to win control of two-thirds of the 340 local councils at stake.

In the run-up to the election, Sirisena branded the prime minister and his party as more corrupt than the Rajapaksa regime, which Sirisena and Wickremesinghe jointly toppled in 2015.

A presidential spokesman said a wider government reshuffle would be announced next week.

The SLFP is to decide later this month if it will remain in government. Rajapaksa is pressing for a 2020 national election to be brought forward.Poland's President Andrzej Duda, right, and his Israeli counterpart Reuven Rivlin, second from the right, lead the March of the Living at the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German death camp

Israel's president on Thursday said there was "deep disagreement" between his country and Poland over the Holocaust and called on Warsaw to study its history -- an allusion to the responsibility of some Poles for the deaths of Jews.

Reuven Rivlin's remarks were aimed at a controversial new Polish law that was meant to protect Poland from false accusations of complicity in the Holocaust, but has drawn strong criticism from Israel, Ukraine and the United States.

He made the comments near the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German death camp in Oswiecim, southern Poland, speaking alongside his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda.

Rivlin and Duda on Thursday led the March of the Living, an annual educational event held at Auschwitz-Birkenau marking Yom HaShoah, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day, dedicated to the six million Jews killed by Nazi Germans during World War II.

"Despite the exceptional relationship between our two peoples, we demand Poland take responsibility for the comprehensive study of the Holocaust," Rivlin told reporters.

The legislation penalises statements attributing Nazi German crimes to the Polish state with fines or a jail term of up to three years.

The main aim is to prevent people from erroneously describing Nazi German death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau as Polish, simply because they were set up on Polish soil.

"There were no Polish extermination camps, nor a Polish Holocaust," 92-year-old Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg said at the closing ceremony.

But Israel has expressed deep concern that the law could open the door to prosecuting Holocaust survivors for their testimony, should it concern the involvement of individual Poles for allegedly killing or giving up Jews to the Germans.

The legislation came into effect last month, but Duda also asked Poland's constitutional tribunal to rule on its constitutionality.

Rivlin on Thursday also insisted that politicians should not meddle in history.

"Politicians have the responsibility to create the future, their states and nations, but historians have the responsibility and the duty to write about the past and to study it," Rivlin said, adding that "you can't mix these two professions up".

Duda assured Rivlin that Polish lawmakers had no intention of silencing Holocaust survivors over WWII-era crimes against Jews that were "worthy only of condemnation".

Rivlin again alluded to the subject at the closing ceremony.

"The Nazi death machine would not have been able to achieve its terrible vision if it had not received help. If it had not found a fertile ground of hatred for Jews in which to take root," he said.

"True, it was Germany that established the camps, but our people were not murdered only in the camps. The members of our nation were betrayed by the people amongst whom they lived. In France, in Holland, and in Belgium. They were murdered by Ukrainians, Lithuanians and yes, also by Poles."

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews, one million of whom were killed at the camp between 1940 to 1945.

More than 100,000 others including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters also died there, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.

An estimated 232,000 of Auschwitz's victims were children.

Poland was once home to Europe's largest Jewish population, numbering around three million people, or 10 percent of the population in 1939.

But only about 300,000 survived WWII after Nazi Germany occupied Poland.Samura Kamara, seen here during a campaign rally on March 24, says the election count was flawed

Samura Kamara, the losing candidate in last month's presidential elections in Sierra Leone, has appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the result, just days after he congratulated the declared victor, Julius Maada Bio, according to documents seen by AFP on Thursday.

In a petition to the West African state's top court, Kamara said the electoral process was "fundamentally flawed" and the declaration in favour of Bio "was invalid and cannot be supported in law."

The spokesman for the National Electoral Commission (NEC), Albert Massaquoi, said the petition was filed on Wednesday evening.

"We have informed our legal team and they will take it from there. It is all part of the democratic process," said Massaquoi.

The petition says the NEC acted illegally when on April 4 it issued the final results of the second and final round of the elections, which took place on March 31.

The commission included results of polling stations where there had been "over voting," it alleges. Results from polling stations where "over voting" occurred should thus be stripped out, it says.

The date for a decision by the Supreme Court was not immediately known.

Bio, a former soldier who briefly led a military junta more than two decades ago, was credited with 51.81 percent of vote in the runoff.

Kamara -- champion of the All People's Congress (APC), which had been in power for a decade -- secured 48.19 percent.

Kamara, on the evening of the election results, had said he would contest the outcome.

But last Saturday he went to Bio's residence, congratulated him and vowed to throw the APC's support behind the new administration.

His show of support was widely welcomed as a way to ease post-election tensions.

Bio will need the support of the APC, which has 68 out of 132 parliament seats, to form a workable government majority in what is one of the world's poorest nations despite huge mineral and diamond deposits.

Its economy is still recovering from war and disease and remains fragile with investors slowly returning, while corruption is widespread.

Sierra Leone's neighbours and international observers say the vote was generally conducted peacefully, and Bio has received congratulatory messages from around the world.US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis (L) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford appear on Capitol Hill on Thursday

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday the use of chemical weapons in Syria is "simply inexcusable," after a suspected poison gas attack that left more than 40 people dead.

The United States, France and Britain are finalizing plans for an expected strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They blame Damascus for the alleged chemical attack on the town of Douma in the devastated Eastern Ghouta suburb of the capital.

"Some things are simply inexcusable, beyond the pale and in the worst interest of not just the chemical weapons convention but of civilization itself," Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee.

He said a chemical attack had likely occurred and hoped inspectors would be in place within a week to prove it.

"I believe there was a chemical attack and we are looking for the actual evidence," Mattis said.

World powers have threatened a strong response to Saturday's attack, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying Thursday he had "proof" Syria's government was behind it.

Syria and Russia have both denied the accusations, and the global chemical weapons watchdog said its team would begin its investigation on Saturday.

Lawmakers quizzed Mattis on what he made of President Donald Trump's muddled messaging over Syria.

Last week, Trump said he wanted to pull out of the war-torn nation, but this week he has taunted Assad ally Russia with boasts of an impending missile strike.

The recognition of Syria's complexities "means you are at times ... going to see contrary impulses," Mattis said.

Mattis insisted that Trump has not yet made a decision to strike Syria, after the president earlier had tweeted that action "could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

The Pentagon chief and other top security officials were due to head to the National Security Council later Thursday, where he said he would present "various options to the president."

"We're trying to stop the murder of innocent people. But on a strategic level, it's (about) how do we keep this from escalating out of control," Mattis said.

- Buildup -

Since Saturday's attack in Douma, there has been a sustained military buildup in the eastern Mediterranean.

A French frigate, British Royal Navy submarines laden with cruise missiles and the USS Donald Cook, an American destroyer equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles, have all moved into striking range.

Several lawmakers grilled the Pentagon chief on the legal authorities the military has for action in Syria beyond the remit of its current mission, which is to work to destroy the Islamic State group.

The Pentagon is currently working under war powers granted in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, even though operations across the Middle East have morphed broadly since those early days of seeking to destroy Al-Qaeda.

Mattis said a strike on the Assad regime in Syria would be authorized under Constitutional powers granted to the president, and would not require Congressional permission.

But Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard disagreed, and said last year's strike on a Syrian airfield following a chemical attack in Khan Sheikhun was illegal.

"This is a complex area, I'll be the first to admit it," Mattis said.US Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearing

CIA director and secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo said Thursday that he had been interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.

Pompeo, who reportedly had been asked by President Donald Trump to intervene in the Russia probe, confirmed the Mueller interview during a hearing into his nomination to become US secretary of state.

"I spoke with Special Counsel Mueller who interviewed me, requested an interview," he said. "I cooperated."

But he refused to give details.

Last year, The Washington Post reported that in a March 2017 White House meeting, Trump asked Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to try to get the FBI to back off of an investigation into Trump's former national security advisor Mike Flynn.

Flynn has since been indicted by Mueller for lying about his contacts with Russians.

Coats later reported that conversation with other officials, and decided that it would be improper to intervene with the FBI, according to the Post.

According to separate reports, Pompeo was later among several senior administration officials asked by Trump to contact media on his behalf to defend his image.

Pompeo, who after 15 months at the Central intelligence Agency was nominated by Trump to replace secretary of state Rex Tillerson, declined to give details of his conversations with Mueller investigators, or confirm any discussions with Trump on the Russia probe.

"I have cooperated with multiple investigations," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"I think it's most important that while these investigations continue, I not speak to the conversations I have had with the various investigative bodies."Outgoing CIA director Mike Pompeo, at a Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination as secretary of state, says a "couple of hundred" Russians were killed in a clash in February with US-led forces in Syria

The outgoing head of the CIA appeared to confirm Thursday reports that around 200 Russian mercenaries were killed in February during a clash with US-led forces in Syria.

"In Syria, a handful of weeks ago, the Russians met their match and a couple hundred Russians were killed," Mike Pompeo said, during a Senate hearing on his nomination to become US secretary of state.

Pompeo did not go into more detail, but media reports have suggested that Russian mercenaries working for the so-called "Wagner Group" were involved in the February battle.

Russia acknowledged at the time that five of its citizens had died when US-led coalition forces working alongside Kurdish militia called in air support to repulse an attack by Syrian regime forces.

Washington said the coalition had killed at least 100 "pro-regime" forces and a group of Russian investigative bloggers established the identity of dozens of named Russian fatalities.

Multiple reports have suggested Wagner operates a shadowy private army in Syria with the tacit assent of the Kremlin, which has also deployed Russian regulars to back Bashar al-Assad's regime.

President Donald Trump has nominated Pompeo to become Washington's top diplomat and his confirmation hearing came just as the White House mulls a strike to punish Assad for an alleged chemical attack.Prime Minister Theresa May was holding an emergency cabinet to discuss joining mooted strikes by the US and allies, as rival politicians and some Conservative colleagues called for a parliamentary vote before any British involvement

Britain's government weighed the possibility of military action against Syria on Thursday, agreeing the "need to take action" despite polls showing the public remains wary of military intervention.

Prime Minister Theresa May held an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss joining mooted strikes by the US and allies, with ministers agreeing "on the need to take action", her Downing Street office said in a statement.

Her office said that May had talked with US President Donald Trump by telephone on Thursday evening to discuss Syria.

In the call, the two leaders had agreed that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad "had established a pattern of dangerous behaviour in relation to the use of chemical weapons", Downing Street said.

May and Trump had also "agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged, and on the need to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

"They agreed to keep working closely together on the international response," the statement concluded.

Trump is considering his military options in Syria after Saturday's alleged chemical attack against the rebel-held town of Douma.

His French counterpart Emmanuel Macron said he was in daily contact with Trump, stating France has evidence that Assad's regime was behind the attack.

But British involvement in further military intervention is controversial at home, in a country still haunted by its role in the US-led invasion of Iraq.

The government said it is "highly likely" that Assad is responsible for the Douma attack, with ministers agreeing "it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged".

But rival politicians and some Conservative colleagues have called for a parliamentary vote before any British involvement.

Opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said it is "vital that parliament has the chance to debate and decide in advance" of any military action, which he warned "risks a dangerous escalation of the conflict".

Corbyn has also evoked memories of the Iraq War, when lawmakers approved joining in the face of strong public opposition.

A YouGov poll in The Times conducted this week found that 43 percent of voters oppose strikes in Syria, with 34 percent unsure and only 22 percent supportive.

- Calls for parliament vote -

Formally, the prime minister has the right to go to war without approval from parliament, but a convention has been established in previous conflicts where MPs have a vote either before or shortly after military action begins.

Formally, the prime minister has the right to go to war without approval from parliament, but a convention has been established in previous conflicts where MPs have a vote either before or shortly after military action begins

A separate YouGov survey on Thursday found 61 percent of people think it would be necessary for parliament to vote on military action against Syria, with just 18 percent saying it was not necessary and 21 percent undecided.

British lawmakers voted down taking military action against Damascus in 2013, in what was widely viewed as an assertion of parliamentary sovereignty on the use of force.

But they backed action in Iraq the following year, and again in Syria in 2015, strictly limiting strikes to Islamic State (IS) group targets.

Britain continues to support the US-led coalition targeting IS jihadists in Iraq and Syria, and has conducted more than 1,700 strikes.

Opposition Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable told the BBC that parliament "can and should be recalled immediately" to hold a vote on the latest possible action.

"The position is a very dangerous one because of Russian involvement, also because we have an erratic president of the United States."

Anti-conflict coalition Stop the War called on Britons to lobby their lawmakers to prevent an "escalation of the war" and planned a Friday protest outside Downing Street.

Some MPs have backed Britain acting against Syria, warning that the use of chemical weapons was in breach of international law and could not be allowed to go unpunished.

Conservative former London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith tweeted: "We need a clear response to the Syrian chemical outrage".

Other members of May's Conservative party have urged restraint in a highly fraught situation.

"What we've got here in Syria is a choice between monsters on the one hand and maniacs on the other," Julian Lewis, the chairman of the House of Commons defence committee, told the BBC.US President Donald Trump at a White House meeting on agriculture with governors and members of Congress

President Donald Trump said Thursday that talks with Mexico and Canada on revamping the 24-year-old trade pact are progressing but there is no deadline for completion.

"It's coming along great," Trump said in a meeting with legislators and governors when asked about the North American Free Trade Agreement. "We're getting pretty close to a deal."

But he added, "It could be two weeks, it could be three months, it could be five months, I don't care."

Officials in recent weeks have sounded more optimistic, raising hopes for a quick deal, possibly early next month, but Trump's comments seemed to cast doubt on that accelerated timeline.

Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said Monday the odds of reaching a deal by early May were as high as 80 percent. Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland also has touted the progress in the talks.

But Trump said "there is no timeline" for reaching a deal. "We can negotiate forever."

And he said that while NAFTA is in flux, no US companies will be building plants in Mexico.

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer also said negotiators were making progress but reiterated that there is "no hurry" to finalized an agreement.

Lighthizer cancelled his trip to the Summit for the Americas in Lima this week, according to media reports.

Trump also cancelled his trip to Latin America, to deal with the response to Syria's alleged chemical attack on civilians.

However, speaking at the summit, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross suggested a new NAFTA deal should ideally be reached within the next weeks due to upcoming elections.

"It is somewhat limited by the political calendar," Ross said of the timeframe to reach a new agreement.

"If we get much beyond the next several weeks, it's going to be very difficult as a practical matter to get a deal done until the elections are out of the way."

Canadians will vote in provincial elections in June, while the Mexican presidential election is on July 1.

Trump's repeated threats to exit NAFTA have unnerved US industry and members of his own Republican party who say the country has benefited from the pact.

But Trump rose to the White House on a tide of economic nationalism and has called NAFTA a "disaster" that has destroyed US jobs.

Canadian and Mexican officials have balked at American demands to raise US content requirements in auto-manufacturing, scrap a dispute resolution mechanism and put a five-year "sunset" clause on the trade agreement.Turkey in January launched an operation into Syria to root out the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia in the Afrin enclave and drove the group from the city on March 18

Civilian representatives from Kurd, Arab and Turkmen communities have set up a council in the northern Syrian town of Afrin, which was taken by the Turkish army and allied rebels from Kurdish militia last month, state media said Thursday.

Turkey in January launched an operation into Syria to root out the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia in the Afrin enclave and drove the group from the city on March 18.

Turkey has branded the YPG a terrorist group linked to outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) which has waged an armed rebellion against the state since 1984.

Eleven of the 20-member interim council were elected by the Kurds, eight by Arabs, and one by Turkmens, the Anadolu news agency reported.

Zuheyr Haidar, a Kurdish representative, was elected president of the council, it added. Haidar, quoted by Anadolu, said the local council would defend Syria's territorial integrity.

Turkey has always argued the YPG disrupted the ethnic balance of northern Syria and insisted its fight is against the militia group and not Kurds themselves.

The future of Afrin after the Turkish campaign has already become a source of tension.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, whose country allowed Turkish air force to enter Syrian air space for the Afrin operation, said this week that Afrin should be "returned to the control of the Syrian government."

In response, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticised Lavrov's "wrong approach."

"We will give Afrin back to its inhabitants when the time comes but we will determine the time, not Mr Lavrov," Erdogan retorted.

The comments were the toughest yet by Erdogan targeting Russia after Ankara forged a close alliance with Moscow in recent months to find a political solution to the Syria crisis.

Turkey and Russia are on opposite sides in Syria, with Moscow remaining the chief ally of President Bashar al-Assad's regime and Ankara backing rebels seeking his ouster.

However they have put differences aside to work closely on ending the conflict, in what analysts say is partly a bid to outflank the United States at a time of tension with the West.Tycoon Stanley Ho, seen here in 2008, is known as known as the 'godfather' of Macau casinos

Macau gambling tycoon Stanley Ho will step down from his flagship casino empire SJM Holdings, the company said late Thursday, as the 96-year-old magnate hands over the reins to his daughter.

Known as the "godfather" of Macau casinos, Ho has been instrumental in turning the former Portuguese colony on China's southern coast into a gambling boomtown, with gaming revenue surpassing Las Vegas.

His retirement will take effect on June 12 at the end of SJM's annual general meeting, after which he will take on the new title of "chairman emeritus", the company said.

Daisy Ho, his daughter, will take over as chairman and executive director, while his fourth wife Angela Leong and Timothy Fok, son of Stanley Ho's former business partner Henry Fok, will be appointed co-chairmen and executive directors.

Gaming revenues in Macau were hit hard by a corruption crackdown launched by China's President Xi Jinping in 2012, but SJM is trying to lure visitors back to Macau with the sprawling new Grand Lisboa Palace complex, reportedly due to open in 2019.

Ho is the great-nephew of one of Asia's first tycoons, Robert Hotung, who was among Hong Kong's wealthiest individuals at the turn of the 20th century.

He made his fortune smuggling luxury goods into China from Macau during World War II, before securing the only gaming licence in the then-Portuguese colony in 1962.

The billionaire monopolised the gaming industry until 2002, when the government introduced foreign investors, sparking a boom which saw casino takings contribute around 80 percent of the city's annual revenue.

He stepped down as chairman from his Hong Kong-based conglomerate Shun Tak Holdings last year with his daughter Pansy Ho succeeding him.

A flamboyant entrepreneur, Ho first married in 1942 but has subsequently had three other partners, though it is unclear whether or not he married all the women he called wives.

The keen ballroom dancer cultivated a playboy lifestyle, fathering at least 17 children, one of whom, Lawrence, runs rival casino and hotel operator Melco Crown in Macau.A bomb attack on Asdira was the deadliest attack in Iraq since a January 16

At least 16 people died in a bomb attack Thursday during funerals in a northern village for Iraqi fighters killed by the Islamic State group, the mayor said.

It was the deadliest attack in Iraq since a January 16 double suicide bombing in Baghdad that cost 31 lives.

"Two bombs exploded as the funeral procession was entering the cemetery" in Asdira, near the town of Sharqat, the mayor, Salaheddin Shaalan, told AFP.

Most of 14 people wounded in the blast were in "critical condition", he said.

The funeral was for five members of the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary units, which fought alongside the army in expelling IS from Iraqi towns last year.

They were killed on Wednesday night in a jihadist attack on a military convoy in the village, 250 kilometres (150 miles) north of Baghdad, a police source said.Results in the local elections are expected on April 13

Gambians voted on Thursday in the first local elections since longtime former ruler Yahya Jammeh left the country more than a year ago.

Local councils in the country's 120 constituencies are currently dominated by Jammeh's former party, the APRC, but supporters of President Adama Barrow expect to make big gains.

"Our predictions are that we are going to win 84 out of the 113 wards," said Alagie Darboe, a deputy from the United Democratic Party (UDP).

He said the party would not challenge in seven wards as they were "pessimistic" they could win.

The UDP, formerly Gambia's longtime opposition, won an absolute majority in parliamentary elections in April, easily defeating Jammeh's party which has been cast into the electoral wilderness by his departure.

That came after the ousting of Jammeh by President Adama Barrow in a December 2016 presidential election, a result which the defeated leader fought for weeks until the threat of a regional military intervention.

Jammeh, who ruled the west African country for 22 years and was accused of rampant corruption and human rights abuses, is currently in exile in Equatorial Guinea.

Results in the local elections are expected on Friday and members of Jammeh's former party insist it will not be a whitewash.

"We have fielded 63 candidates throughout the country and we are confident that we are going to defeat our opponents in those wards", said Yankuba Colley, an official from the APRC.

The last local elections, in 2013, were largely boycotted by the opposition.The now frail and isolated 80-year-old Bill Cosby could spend the rest of his life behind bars if convicted of drugging and molesting Andrea Constand

Bill Cosby's defense lawyer ferociously attacked Thursday the credibility of a celebrity model who says the disgraced megastar raped her in 1982, sent her roses in rehab and made her want to punch him.

The now frail and isolated 80-year-old Cosby could spend the rest of his life behind bars if convicted of drugging and molesting Andrea Constand, 45, at his Philadelphia home in 2004.

The case has besmirched the legacy of the actor once adored by millions as "America's Dad" for his role as lovable father and obstetrician Cliff Huxtable on the hit 1984-92 television series "The Cosby Show."

The admission of testimony from five other accusers presents the biggest challenge for the defense. On Thursday, Janice Dickinson became the fourth of those accusers to testify at Cosby's retrial.

Dickinson says that Cosby flew her first class from Bali, Indonesia, where she was modeling, to a ritzy ski resort in the Sierra Nevada for what she thought would be talks about her career.

Over dinner, he allegedly handed her a blue pill, which she thought would ease menstrual cramps, but left her dizzy and "out of it."

She says Cosby then raped her, leaving her "very, very sore... in shock and humiliated."

"I didn't fly to Tahoe to have sex with Mr Cosby," she testified.

"I remember the taste of his kiss, it smelt like cigars and espresso... Here's 'America's Dad' on top of me, a happily married man with five children... I remember thinking how very, very wrong it was.

"I wanted to hit him, I wanted to punch him in the face," she said.

Cosby's lawyer Tom Mesereau, famous for getting Michael Jackson acquitted of child molestation, has dismissed the accusers as "prosecution by distraction" and claims they are money grabbing.

- 'My true story' -

Janice Dickinson, 63, recounted that Cosby raped her in 1982

He brandished Dickinson's memoir, "No Lifeguard On Duty" from 2002 that was ghost-written by the same writer who worked for O.J. Simpson. It makes no mention of the rape.

Instead, it says each went to their separate rooms, where she drank, took sedatives and went to sleep.

"You lied to get a paycheck?" Mesereau hectored.

"I don't lie, sir, don't call me a liar," Dickinson said. "You take poetic license in what you do. Today, I'm on a sworn Bible... to tell my true story."

Dickinson claimed she told her ghost writer the "entire horrific, catastrophic" experience to publish the truth, but was advised it "would never get past Cosby's legal team."

"He's a powerful guy and they told me he could ruin my career... I knew he could ruin my career if I ever came out and said something against him," she added.

"It's all a fabrication there because I wanted the paycheck from the book," Dickinson said, repeatedly calling the book "poetic license" done to feed and educate her children, under attack from the defense.

Mesereau then accused her of misleading Sylvester Stallone by telling him she was pregnant with his child while the couple dated, before trying to paint her as a serial user of cocaine and pills.

"I had sex with two men that month. He wasn't the only contender," Dickinson replied of Stallone. "I told him I was pregnant."

"He stayed with me throughout the entire pregnancy," she said. The DNA test confirmed he was not the father.

"Thank God," she said. "I told the father of the child he was the father of my daughter."

Cosby's first trial in Norristown, a Philadelphia suburb, ended in a hung jury in June, with a sequestered panel hopelessly deadlocked after six days of testimony and 52 hours of deliberations.Fighters from the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary group, seen advancing on Islamic State-held Iraqi villages on October 6, 2017, played a key role in a vast operation to oust the jihadists from swathes of northern Iraq

At least 16 people died in a bomb attack Thursday during funerals in a northern Iraqi village for fighters killed by the Islamic State group, the village's mayor said.

"Two bombs exploded as the funeral procession was entering the cemetery" in Asdira, near the town of Sharqat, Salaheddin Shaalan told AFP.

Most of 14 people wounded in the blast were in "critical condition", he said.

Officials said the injured could not be transported to a hospital outside the village as night had fallen and inhabitants feared being ambushed by IS.

The funeral was for five members of the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary units, which fought alongside the army to expel the jihadist group from Iraqi towns last year.

They were killed on Wednesday night in a jihadist attack on a military convoy in the village, 250 kilometres (150 miles) north of Baghdad, a police official said.

The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since a January 16 double suicide bombing in Baghdad that cost 31 lives.

The Iraqi government declared victory over IS in December after pushing the jihadists out of their final holdouts along the border with Syria.

But the group retains the capacity to strike despite losing control of vast swathes of Iraqi territory it seized in 2014.

It still clings to pockets of desert in war-torn Syria and appears to be able to cross the porous border between the two neighbours.

Jihadists sometimes manage to snatch control of roads at night, especially in the Salaheddin province where Thursday's attack took place, and Anbar province along the border with Syria, security experts say.

On Sunday, four people were killed and several wounded in an IS suicide attack on the headquarters of a political party in Anbar.US President Donald Trump's threat of military retaliation in Syria have raised risks of a direct confrontation with Russia

President Donald Trump's threat of action against the Syrian regime places the United States and Russia at perhaps the greatest risk of conflict since the days of the Cold War.

No serious observer thinks Washington or Moscow want to fight each other over Bashar al-Assad's latest alleged use of banned chemical weapons on his country's civil war battlefield.

But the Syria conflict is a complex web of overlapping wars which have drawn in several world powers, and the risk of miscalculation is as high as Trump's Twitter rhetoric is provocative.

"I don't think we're at the Cuban missile crisis level, but we're getting pretty damn close," Russia expert Boris Zilberman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told AFP.

"The immediate priority is to avert the danger of war," Russian's ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told reporters following a closed-door meeting of the Security Council.

Asked if he meant war between the United States and Russia, he said: "We cannot exclude any possibilities unfortunately."

Saturday's attack on the then rebel-held Damascus suburb of Ghouta reportedly left more than 40 people dead, and dramatically raised the stakes for outside powers.

Trump, who unleashed a one-off US cruise missile salvo a year ago in response to a chemical attack blamed on Assad's forces, reacted with fury and threatened a renewed intervention.

President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin has deployed warplanes and troops to Syria to defend Assad's regime, and -- as usual -- issued a series of conflicting denials on his behalf.

- Missile salvo -

By Wednesday, as Russian and Syrian forces took charge of the formerly rebel-held area that was bombed, Trump was explicitly threatening on Twitter to launch more missiles.

The White House said Trump had yet to reach a "final decision" following a Thursday meeting with his national security advisors -- and would confer again with his French and British allies, Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May.

But a strike still seems more than likely after UN talks failed.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, often a more cautious voice than Trump's, pointed towards a US response Thursday when he told lawmakers that "some things are simply inexcusable."

Last April, when US warships in the Mediterranean fired cruise missiles at a Syrian air base, Russian forces were warned in advance and pulled out of the target area, which was rapidly repaired.

Another year into Syria's war, with chemical strikes continuing, most experts suppose any new US response must be broader, with perhaps more targets and more than one night of bombing.

Russia, at least in its public pronouncements, is also more determined not to back down. The Kremlin's ambassador to Beirut vowed that Russian forces would try to shoot down any US missiles.

The Russian military has also made belligerent statements, but Putin himself and the Moscow foreign ministry have instead played the injured party, demanding proof of Assad's culpability.

Meanwhile, the world is holding its breath. Could military action from Washington and its allies trigger an armed confrontation with Putin's Russia, a resentful nuclear-armed foe?

"The big concern here is always mistakes, unintended consequences," said Zilberman. "Especially if they're considering hitting a wider range of targets than they did last time."

- Russian 'red line' -

Trump, after initial reluctance to undermine his hope of warmer ties with Putin, now has imposed sanctions on Russian oligarchs and expelled 60 alleged spies under diplomatic cover, partly in retaliation for Moscow's support for the Assad regime.

In February this year, US forces working alongside Kurdish militia in the east of Syria clashed with regime forces and killed scores of Russians working as mercenaries.

"In Syria, a handful of weeks ago, the Russians met their match and a couple hundred Russians were killed," outgoing CIA chief Mike Pompeo boasted Thursday, at a Senate hearing.

Despite the Kremlin's stern words, few expect Russia to seek confrontation in Syria. At the weekend, Israeli jets hit a Syrian airbase housing Iranian forces and Russia did not respond.

Nevertheless, experts say the Russian "red line" would be the safety of its own forces, which are based alongside their Syrian and sometimes Iranian comrades in many areas of western Syria.

"The situation is aggravated by multiple points of tension and repeated similar cases, in Syria as with Skripal," said Boris Toucas of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Sergei Skripal is a former Russian double-agent recovering in Britain after he was poisoned on March 4 by a nerve agent, in what London alleges was a Russian assassination bid.

"Nevertheless, none of the protagonists have any interest in a direct confrontation, as shown by the absence of any Russian reaction to last year's American strikes," Toucas argued.

Trump's response, if and when it comes, will have taken several days to organize and thus Russian forces may have been able to put some space between themselves and likely targets.

- World order eroding -

But, equally, there are reports from Syria that some regime forces may be gathering in Russian-protected bases for shelter.

Putin may also feel the need to react in order to protect his leadership of the Russia-Syria-Iran coalition.

"They've got to look tough, like they're not letting this happen," Zilberman said, predicting that Russia's aggressive attitude would continue and US-Russia ties only degrade further.

"Certainly for domestic consumption they've got to look like they're not rolling over for Israel, for the United States or for France or whoever else."

But both Washington and Moscow suffer from credibility problems that could increase the chances of escalation.

The US administration is in turmoil, with vacancies or very new appointees in major national security positions and policy declared by Trump tweets sent in reaction to cable news segments.

"The resulting confusion is a problematic element of uncertainty, at a time when the post Cold War international order is eroding rapidly," warns Toucas.

Meanwhile, Putin's inner circle of senior officials and allied oligarchs has seen their wealth drop by billions of dollars over the past week since the latest round of US sanctions.A Sri Lanka government decree quoted the president as stating that he had halted parliament's meetings "with effect from midnight" Thursday under article 70 of the constitution, a move scheduled to last until May 6

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena on Thursday suspended parliament until next month in a shock move amid a deepening power struggle between him and his unity government's prime minister.

A government decree quoted the president as stating that he had halted parliaments meetings "with effect from midnight" Thursday under article 70 of the constitution.

The move, scheduled to last until May 8, came hours after at least 16 Sirisena loyalists, including six cabinet ministers, said they would leave the troubled coalition.

Relations between the rival groups in the unity government have soured after both suffered losses in February's local council elections.

In recent weeks, Sirisena has reduced the powers of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, removing from his control the central bank, the policy-making National Operations Room and several other institutions.

Parliament had been expected to meet again next Thursday.

Presidential officials declined to comment on the reason for the suspension.

"We have been surprised by the announcement," one government legislator who requested anonymity told AFP.

Just hours before he announced the suspension of parliament, Sirisena had appointed acting ministers to the positions of those who quit the Cabinet.

Wickremesinghe last week won a motion of no confidence moved by the joint opposition and backed by Sirisena's ministers as bickering grew between the two leaders.

Sirisena had demanded Wickremesinghe's resignation to allow him to appoint a prime minister of his choice.Irish nationalist Lord Mayor Micheal Mac Donncha (C) attends a press conference on Jerusalem, in the West Bank city of Ramallah on April 11, 2018

A senior Israeli official on Thursday formally complained to Ireland's ambassador after Dublin's mayor slipped past an entry ban to attend a Palestinian conference.

Deputy director general Rodica Radian-Gordon "expressed her amazement and deep disappointment at the fact that the mayor chose to participate in a blatantly anti-Israel event," Israel's foreign ministry said in a statement.

Lord Mayor Micheal Mac Donncha entered Israel on his way to the Israeli-occupied West Bank for a conference Wednesday night on the disputed status of Jerusalem.

Although he was officially barred from entry for alleged anti-Israel activity, he passed unchallenged through immigration at Tel Aviv airport late Tuesday, reportedly due to a clerical error misspelling his name.

Both Israel and the Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital.

Its Palestinian eastern sector was captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and subsequently annexed to the Jewish state.

Palestinians want it as the capital of their future state.

The Israeli statement quoted Radian-Gordon as saying Mac Donncha's Ramallah visit was "particularly jarring" as it took place on Holocaust remembrance day, which Israel marked from sunset Wednesday.

It added that the Jewish state "expects a public and official Irish response to the conduct of the council of its capital city and particularly its head, who are conducting a campaign of discrimination and hatred against the state of Israel".

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also foreign minister, wrote on Facebook that he had instructed the ministry to hold a "clarification discussion" with Mac Donncha.

Netanyahu said the Ramallah conference "featured prominent images" of Haj Amin al-Husseini, leader of a 1936 revolt against the British mandate over Palestine and grand mufti of Jerusalem.

To Palestinians he is a national hero, but Israelis remember him as an ally of the Nazis. In 2015 Netanyahu suggested that he gave Hitler the idea to exterminate Jews -- a claim dismissed by historians.

"I have one message for the mayor," Netanyahu wrote. "You should be ashamed of yourself."

Interviewed by Israeli state-run Kan 11 television outside the conference hall in Ramallah, Mac Donncha appeared never to have heard of al-Husseini.

"I'm not even aware of the individual that you mention. People who have stood up to fascism in all kinds of forms all over the world were here today," he told the interviewer.

"I think that's a distraction, it really is a distraction."

Israel ordered a probe Wednesday into how Mac Donncha was allowed into the country.

Israeli daily Haaretz said the ban order sent to airport immigration officials misspelled Mac Donncha's name, meaning he did not show up on the watch list.

The paper said he has ties with the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which promotes a boycott of Israeli businesses and foreign firms which trade in the country.

Israel's interior ministry and strategic affairs ministry blamed each other for the mixup, it said.

Air and sea passengers travelling to the West Bank must pass through Israel, while the land border between the territory and Jordan is controlled by Israeli security and immigration officials.Relations between the rival groups in Sri Lanka's unity government have soured

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena on Thursday suspended parliament until next month in a shock move amid a deepening power struggle between him and his unity government's prime minister.

A government decree quoted the president as stating that he had halted parliament's meetings "with effect from midnight" Thursday under article 70 of the constitution.

The move, scheduled to last until May 8, came hours after at least 16 Sirisena loyalists, including six cabinet ministers, said they would leave the troubled coalition.

Relations between the rival groups in the unity government have soured after both suffered losses in February's local council elections.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's United National Party (UNP) had increased pressure on the followers of Sirisena -- who voted against Wickremesinghe in a recent no-confidence motion -- to resign.

Parliament had been expected to meet again next Thursday and presidential officials declined to comment on the reason for the suspension.

"We have been surprised by the announcement," one government legislator who requested anonymity told AFP.

Just hours before he announced the suspension of parliament, Sirisena had appointed acting ministers to the positions of those who quit the Cabinet.

Wickremesinghe last week won the motion of no confidence moved by the joint opposition and backed by Sirisena's ministers.

With the help of minority Tamil and Muslim parties, the premier defeated the motion -- dealing a blow to Sirisena, who had campaigned for Wickremesinghe to stand down to allow him to appoint a prime minister of his choice.

In recent weeks, Sirisena has reduced Wickremesinghe's powers, removing from his control the central bank, the policy-making National Operations Room and several other institutions.

Former strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa's party trounced the UNP and Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) in the February polls to win control of two-thirds of the 340 local councils at stake.

In the run-up to the election, Sirisena branded the prime minister and his party as more corrupt than the Rajapaksa regime, which Sirisena and Wickremesinghe jointly toppled in 2015.

Earlier Thursday, a presidential spokesman said a wider government reshuffle would be announced next week.

The SLFP is to decide later this month if it will remain in government. Rajapaksa is pressing for a 2020 national election to be brought forward."The solution of Qatar will be within the GCC," or the six-state Gulf Cooperation Council, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told reporters in Riyadh ahead of the Arab Summit

The Gulf crisis, which has seen Qatar isolated by Saudi Arabia and its allies, is not on the table at the upcoming meeting of Arab League states, Riyadh's foreign minister said Thursday.

"The solution of Qatar will be within the GCC," or the six-state Gulf Cooperation Council, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told reporters in Riyadh ahead of the Arab Summit.

He was responding to an AFP question on whether the crisis was on the agenda at the meeting on Sunday, which is hosted by Saudi Arabia and joins 21 of the 22 Arab League member states.

Syria is technically a member of the league but has been suspended from the summit since 2011 over the government's role in the war there.

Qatar has confirmed its attendance at the Saudi summit.

The 10-month Gulf crisis pits Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain against Qatar. It is the worst crisis to ever hit the Gulf, home to both the world's largest exporters of oil and liquified natural gas -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar respectively.

Riyadh and its allies broke off relations with Doha in June, accusing it of fostering close links with Tehran and supporting Islamist extremists. Qatar denies the charges.

The boycott includes the closure of the small Gulf state's only land border with Saudi Arabia.

Saudi media close to the government this week announced the kingdom planned to dig a canal the length of its border with Qatar, to turn its peninsula neighbour into an isolated island.

The planned canal, dubbed "Salwa", is "funded entirely by Saudi and Emirati private sector investment under full Saudi authority," Sabq Online Newspaper reported on Monday.

The Saudi government has not issued a denial.

Kuwait, a member of the GCC, has led mediation efforts in the crisis -- to no avail -- with the support of the United States.

US President Donald Trump had initially supported the Saudi-led economic blockade on Qatar, but aides -- mindful of the pivotal role that the Al Udeid Air Base outside Doha plays in US Middle East operations -- have since convinced him to take a more moderate approach.

Trump met with the Emir of Qatar at the White House on Tuesday, barely one year after alleging Doha funded terrorism at a "high level" and less than two weeks after meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The president on Tuesday dubbed the Qatari emir a "friend" and "great gentleman".President Donald Trump holds up an executive order withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership after signing it in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, January 23, 2017

President Donald Trump said Thursday the US could re-enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership if it could get a "better" deal, potentially marking an abrupt about-face for a president who campaigned against the deal and swiftly withdrew from it after taking office last year.

"Would only join TPP if the deal were substantially better than the deal offered to Pres. Obama," he wrote in a late night tweet.

"We already have BILATERAL deals with six of the eleven nations in TPP, and are working to make a deal with the biggest of those nations, Japan, who has hit us hard on trade for years!"

The statement came after the White House announced that US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and top economic adviser Larry Kudlow were re-examining Washington's position.

Trump has frequently disparaged multilateral trade deals, calling the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement a "disaster."

The news was welcomed by lawmakers from agricultural states.

But his most hawkish trade advisers, who now dominate his cabinet after high-level departures, have expressed a strong preference for negotiating bilateral agreements, which they say play to US advantages.

The White House was quick to stress that Trump's decision was consistent with earlier statements not a flip-flop.

"Last year, the President kept his promise to end the TPP deal... because it was unfair to American workers and farmers," Deputy White House Press Secretary Lindsay Walters said in a statement.

However, he "has consistently said he would be open to a substantially better deal, including in his speech in Davos earlier this year."

To that end, he has asked Lighthizer and Kudlow "to take another look at whether or not a better deal could be negotiated," she said.

At the World Economic Forum in January Trump said he was prepared to enter talks with the TPP countries "either individually or perhaps as a group."

It remained unclear, however, how enthusiastically the other 11 TPP economies would welcome an American return to the bargaining table.

Japan's top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Friday Tokyo would "welcome it if the president's remark was a recognition of the TPP's significance and effect."

But he added that Japan was committed to proceeding with the TPP in its current form.

"The TPP is a high-standard, well-balanced framework developed after meticulously weighing various interests," he said.

"It is an accord like a glass sculpture. It would be extremely difficult to take out part of it for renegotiation," he said.

But he said that Japan hoped Washington would see that the deal would benefit the US economy and added that Tokyo was eager to hear the administration's views.

Trans-Pacific Partnership

Trump's new comments on the trade pact, which was negotiated under former president Barack Obama, were a further sign his positions may not be as tough as his rhetoric.

After taking office, Trump decided not to withdraw from NAFTA and from a free trade pact with South Korea, despite his threats to do so, preferring to renegotiate those deals. He also has so far exempted the largest US trading partners from his harshest new tariffs on steel and aluminum.

- A damaging flip-flop? -

The TPP members, including Canada, Mexico and Japan, proceeded without the United States after Trump pulled out, and signed the sweeping new agreement last month.

Some experts have said joining the trade pact could strengthen the US position in their current trade spat with China, which is not a party to the agreement.

Country representatives sign the rebranded 11-nation Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in Santiago, on March 8, 2018

Critics said exiting the agreement had been a strategic gift to Beijing, which stood to strengthen its regional trade dominance as the United States retreated.

Farm groups and political leaders from US agricultural states have been most outspoken in denouncing Trump's trade confrontations with Europe and China, which until recently appeared ready to boil over into all-out trade war.

Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican from the corn-growing state of Nebraska, said in a statement Thursday she was "encouraged" by Trump's move "to reengage with TPP nations."

TPP opponents, however, were quick to warn Trump risked of backsliding on a central tenet of the economic nationalism which helped sweep him to power.

Lori Wallach of the left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen said in a statement that the developments "signal that Trump does not give a crap about working people and cannot be trusted on anything."

Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of US trade unions, said on Twitter that the TPP "should remain dead."

"There is no conceivable way to revive it without totally betraying working people," he said.Former FBI director James Comey says in a new book that President Donald Trump is a congenital liar who demands personal loyalty like a mafia boss

Former FBI director James Comey says in a new book that President Donald Trump reminded him of a mafia boss who demanded absolute loyalty, saw the entire world against him, and lied about everything.

According to excerpts of the book leaked by US media on Thursday, Trump was also obsessed with the alleged existence of a video in which Russian prostitutes said to be hired by Trump urinated on the bed in a Moscow hotel room.

In the book to be released officially next Tuesday, Comey, whom Trump fired in May 2017, says the US president lives in "a cocoon of alternative reality" that he tried to pull others around him into, according to The Washington Post.

Meetings with Trump gave Comey "flashbacks to my earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob," he writes.

"The silent circle of assent. The boss in complete control. The loyalty oaths. The us-versus-them worldview. The lying about all things, large and small, in service to some code of loyalty that put the organization above morality and above the truth."

According to the New York Post, Comey says Trump was obsessed with the "pee tape", the existence of which was first reported by a former British intelligence agent, who researched alleged links between Trump's campaign and Russia.

Trump asked Comey to investigate "what he called the 'golden showers thing'" Comey writes, saying Trump was determined to prove to his wife Melania that it did not exist.

"He just rolled on, unprompted, explaining why it couldn't possibly be true, ending by saying he was thinking of asking me to investigate the allegation to prove it was a lie."

The book, entitled "A higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership," has sparked worries through the White House and Republican establishment over the kind of damage it might do to the Trump presidency.

Last year Comey revealed that Trump had pressured him to drop an investigation into Mike Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor, and also demanded Comey promise his loyalty.

Trump fired Comey on May 9, complaining of the ongoing investigation into possible Trump campaign-Russia ties.

That firing led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, who continues to probe the issue as well as possible obstruction of justice and has issued 19 indictments so far, including of top Trump lieutenants.

Comey says in the book that Trump has no sense of what is true and what is not.

"This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values," he writes, according to The New York Times.

"His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty."US Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (L) is leaving his post at the end of this year, when mid-term elections have the potential for returning Nancy Pelosi's Democrats back to power in the chamber

US House Speaker Paul Ryan's shock retirement announcement marks the latest victory in a populist, anti-establishment revolution that brought its champion Donald Trump to power and is remaking the Republican Party.

Whether that spells longterm GOP success in policymaking, diplomacy and at the ballot box remains unclear. Trumpism is ascendant in Washington, but is a permanent Republican shift away from conservative orthodoxy and the establishment underway -- or is the party makeover temporary?

Ryan, 48, is the traditional conservative who over a two-decade political career came to symbolize Republican power on Capitol Hill.

But if Ryan had the party in his hands, Donald Trump pulled it away.

A wonkish budget hawk early on, Ryan chaired the all-important Ways and Means Committee, was plucked as the party's vice presidential nominee in 2012, and rose to become speaker in 2015, in part to serve as a bridge between feuding moderates and tea party conservatives.

His announced departure after just 30 months as the most powerful Republican in Congress suggests that what once belonged to establishment Republicans -- those buoyed by the conservative revolution of Ronald Reagan -- is now up for grabs.

"It's no longer firmly in their control," history professor Michelle Nickerson, of Loyola University in Chicago, told AFP.

"And I think that with the departure of Ryan, what we're seeing is that we're not going back," she added. "There's a willingness" to embrace populism.

That theory was tested -- and proven -- in 2016 by political rabble-rouser Steve Bannon, who helped Trump win the presidency and became his chief strategist in the White House.

And while Bannon's ouster last year suggested the establishment was striking back, other signals defied that narrative.

Ryan and other prominent pro-trade, inclusive lawmakers warned against Trump's trade war threats and his saber-rattling, but their concerns appear to have been swept aside.

Immigration reform has failed and "build the wall" remains a common refrain at Trump events.

Some critics see Ryan as a Trump enabler, denying his own fiscal austerity convictions to lead the charge on a $1.3 trillion Trump-backed spending bill that passed Congress last month.

In a daring speech on the Senate floor last October, Republican Senator Jeff Flake warned that the coarseness of the Trump era was becoming the "new normal" -- a flash of "destructive politics" that could set the conservative cause back a generation.

Flake has announced he is retiring this year, acknowledging he would not be able to win his own primary in the current anti-establishment environment.

- 'Brain drain' -

Ryan and Flake join a record number of other congressional Republicans heading for the exits, retiring in part because of a potential Democratic takeover in the upcoming midterm elections in November.

They include prominent traditionalists like Senator Bob Corker, congressmen Ed Royce, Bob Goodlatte, and centrists Charlie Dent and Dave Reichert.

"They're middle of the road in temperament, and I think that no matter what happens in November that's a big brain drain and loss of experience in Congress for the Republican Party," said Matthew Green, a Catholic University professor who has taught on politics in the age of Trump.

"I think we're in a really interesting zone of uncertainty," he added.

"If there are successful candidates modeling themselves after Trump, that's a sign that the party is moving in Trump's direction.... November is going to be really telling."

Equally important might be who the party chooses as its new leader in the House.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is the clear frontrunner, and the Republican number three, Steve Scalise, may also seek the gavel. Trump is said to be close to both of them.

But a Republican leader built in Trump's own image -- a political bomb-thrower, ruled by impulse -- is unlikely, Green said. "I don't see a Trump acolyte becoming speaker."

Trumpism has its work cut out to show the world it is a viable political brand that can hold its own against likely Democratic advances in November -- and can survive after Trump himself steps off the stage in either three or seven years.

But if change is the only constant, Trumpism itself might soon be under threat.

Green, the Catholic University professor, said it is not uncommon for a party to support its president "pretty much on anything."

"Then, when he leaves the White House, they revert back."Thousands gathered outside the Oklahoma state Capitol building during the third day of a statewide education walkout on April 4, 2018 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Teachers in the Midwestern US state of Oklahoma called off their historic demonstration at the state Capitol Thursday, with their demands for additional public school funding only partially met.

Tens of thousands of teachers, students and other supporters had rallied in Oklahoma City and swarmed the state Capitol building since April 2.

The protesters shut down schools across the state and demanded that the Republican-controlled legislature pass funding measures to restore a decade worth of public school budget cuts.

The funding demands were in addition to a recently-approved average salary increase of $6,100, causing some Republican lawmakers to balk at the teachers' demands.

But the teachers argued that while they were grateful for the pay raises, they also needed money for classroom repairs, new supplies and updated textbooks.

"We were seeking $200 million in additional classroom funding over three years," Carrie Jacobs of the Oklahoma Education Association, the teachers' union, told AFP.

The state legislature only approved a fraction of that funding demand and teachers made no further progress since last Friday.

"Our goal for this year was $75 million, and we ended up with $70 million this year and $22 million additional next year," Jacobs said.

The union's president Alicia Priest acknowledged that teachers fell short of their total goal, but declared victory and promised to hold legislators accountable at the ballot box during the midterm elections this year.

"We must support candidates who have helped us achieve our goals and vote out those who have not," Priest said.

A record 582 people, including teachers, have filed for their candidacy to run for elected office since the strike began, she said.

The demonstrations over the last two weeks brought attention to dire conditions in some Oklahoma public schools -- left to wither in disrepair and lacking basic supplies.

They also shined a spotlight on low teacher pay that forced some educators to take on extra jobs such as daycare and lawn mowing.

The Oklahoma protest follows similar teacher revolts in West Virginia, Kentucky and Arizona -- all Republican-dominated states.

West Virginia teachers got their first pay raise in four years last month after a nine-day strike.JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) - Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens initiated a physically aggressive unwanted sexual encounter with his hairdresser and threatened to distribute a partially nude photo of her if she spoke about it, according to testimony from the woman released Wednesday by a House investigatory committee.

The graphic report details multiple instances in which the woman said Greitens spanked, slapped, grabbed, shoved and called her derogatory names during a series of sexual encounters as he was preparing to run for office in 2015. The testimony contradicts Greitens' previous assertions that "there was no violence" and "no threat of violence" in what he has described as a consensual extramarital affair.

The report, signed by all five Republicans and two Democrats on the committee, describes the woman's testimony as credible and notes that Greitens has so far declined to testify or provide documents to the panel. But it outlines some of the Republican governor's public comments that appear to run counter to her allegations.

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens speaks at a news conference about allegations related to his extramarital affair with his hairdresser, in Jefferson City, Mo., Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Greitens initiated a physically aggressive unwanted sexual encounter with his hairdresser and threatened to distribute a partially nude photo of her if she spoke about it, according to testimony from the woman released Wednesday by a House investigatory committee. (Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune via AP)

Flanked by other top Republican legislative leaders, House Speaker Todd Richardson announced that the special committee will expand its mission and make recommendations after the May 18 end of the regular legislative session on whether to pursue impeachment proceedings seeking to remove Greitens from office.

The special House investigation was initiated shortly after Greitens was indicted in February on a felony invasion-of-privacy charge for taking a nonconsensual photo of the partially nude woman and transmitting it in a way that could be accessed by a computer. The woman told the committee that Greitens took the photo after manipulating her into a compromising position during an unwanted sexual encounter and that he told her "everyone will know what a little whore you are" if she told anyone about him.

Greitens, 44, has refused to directly answer media questions about whether he took the photo, but he has steadfastly denied any criminal wrongdoing. He said he expects to be proven innocent during this trial, which is scheduled for May 14.

Greitens said in a statement Wednesday night that "this was an entirely consensual relationship, and any allegation of violence or sexual assault is false."

Earlier in the day, Greitens told reporters: "This is a political witch hunt," invoking one of President Donald Trump's favored criticisms of unwanted investigations. He added: "This is exactly like what's happening with the witch hunts in Washington, D.C."

Richardson called the woman's testimony "beyond disturbing" and defended the integrity of the investigation. He said: "Let me be very clear about this: This is not a witch hunt, and the committee had no political agenda."

If the House were to impeach Greitens, the Senate then would choose seven jurists to conduct a trial on whether Greitens should be ousted. The impeachment process can occur independently of a criminal case.

The report prompted Republican U.S. Senate candidate Josh Hawley to call for Greitens' resignation. Hawley, the state's attorney general, said the report contains "shocking, substantial, and corroborated evidence of wrongdoing by Governor Greitens."

Hawley is seeking Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill's seat, and she and Democratic state legislative leaders also called for Greitens' resignation. Democrats have been running TV ads linking Greitens to Hawley.

According to the report, the woman testified that she met Greitens in 2013 as a customer of her hair salon. She said she had a crush on Greitens but was shocked when he ran his hand up her leg and touched her crotch without her consent during a March 2015 hair appointment. He later invited her to his St. Louis home while his wife was out of town.

After she arrived through the back door, the report said that the woman testified Greitens searched her purse and "patted her down from head-to-toe." He then asked if she had exercised and had her change into a white T-shirt with a slit on the top and pajama pants.

"I thought, oh, this is going to be some sort of sexy workout," the woman testified.

But once in his basement, Greitens taped her hands to pull-up rings, blindfolded her, started kissing her, ripped open the shirt and pulled down her pants, the woman testified. She didn't give consent to be disrobed or kissed, the report said. The woman testified that she then heard a click, like of a cellphone picture, and saw a flash.

The woman testified that Greitens told her: "Don't even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, I'm going to take these pictures, and I'm going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are."

When she remained silent, the woman said Greitens "spanked me and said, 'Are you going to mention my name?' And I said, I just gritted through my teeth, and I said, 'No.' And he's like, 'Good, now that's a good girl.'"

"I was definitely fearful," the woman testified to the legislative committee.

After telling Greitens, "I don't want this," the woman testified that Greitens unbound her hands. She said she started "uncontrollably crying." She said Greitens then grabbed her in a hug and laid her down. She said he put his penis near her face and she gave him oral sex. Asked by the committee whether the oral sex was coerced, she responded: "Coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave."

The woman testified that she confronted him later that day about the photo and he responded: "You have to understand, I'm running for office, and people will get me, and I have to have some sort of thing to protect myself." Then she said Greitens added: "I felt bad, so I erased it."

The House committee report said it doesn't possess any physical or electronic evidence of the photo. Prosecutors in his criminal case previously acknowledged that they don't have the photo, though they could be trying to obtain it.

The woman's name never has been officially released; it is redacted from the legislative documents and she is identified only by her initials in court filings. Her attorney has repeatedly sought anonymity on her behalf.

The woman testified to the committee that she had several additional sexual encounters with Greitens, including one in June 2015 when "he slapped me across my face" after she acknowledged having slept with her husband. She said she "felt like he was trying to claim me."

In another subsequent sexual encounter, the woman testified that Greitens "out of nowhere just, like kind of smacked me and grabbed me and shoved me down on the ground, and I instantly just started bawling."

It "actually hurt, and I know that I actually was really scared and sad when that happened," she testified.

The woman's account contradicts statements Greitens made previously. Asked in a January interview with The Associated Press if he had ever slapped the woman, Greitens responded: "Absolutely not."

Greitens, a Rhodes Scholar and former Navy SEAL officer who was once considered a rising GOP star, first acknowledged having an extramarital affair on Jan. 10, when St. Louis TV station KMOV ran a story revealing that the woman's ex-husband had released a secret audio recording of a 2015 conversation in which she told him about the photo Greitens took at his home.

The woman testified to the House committee that her husband had said: "I'm going to ruin this guy."

Greitens on Wednesday criticized the House report as "one-sided tabloid, trash gossip that was produced in a secret room."

He also referenced a comment the woman made during a lengthy deposition in his criminal case when she was asked if she saw what she believed to be a phone. A court filing from Greitens' attorneys quoted her as saying, "I haven't talked about it because I don't know if it's because I'm remembering it through a dream or I - I'm not sure, but yes, I feel like I saw it after that happened."

Greitens and his defense team have seized on the "dream" comment to attack the credibility of her testimony. But the prosecutor in the case says the defense "cherry picked bits and pieces" of her nine-hour deposition and the woman's attorney says the comment referred to one particular instance concerning the photo.

In addition to the legislative investigation and the criminal case, Hawley is investigating The Mission Continues, the veterans charity founded by Greitens, as it relates to the state's consumer protection and charitable registration and reporting laws. That probe came after media reports that Greitens' campaign had obtained and used a charity donor list in 2015 as it ramped up fundraising for his gubernatorial bid.

___

Associated Press reporters Blake Nelson in Jefferson City, Jim Salter in St. Louis and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens speaks at a news conference about allegations related to his extramarital affair with his hairdresser, in Jefferson City, Mo., Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Greitens initiated a physically aggressive unwanted sexual encounter with his hairdresser and threatened to distribute a partially nude photo of her if she spoke about it, according to testimony from the woman released Wednesday by a House investigatory committee. (J.B. Forbes/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens speaks at a news conference about allegations related to his extramarital affair with his hairdresser, in Jefferson City, Mo., Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Greitens initiated a physically aggressive unwanted sexual encounter with his hairdresser and threatened to distribute a partially nude photo of her if she spoke about it, according to testimony from the woman released Wednesday by a House investigatory committee. (J.B. Forbes/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens speaks at a news conference about allegations related to his extramarital affair with his hairdresser, in Jefferson City, Mo., Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Greitens initiated a physically aggressive unwanted sexual encounter with his hairdresser and threatened to distribute a partially nude photo of her if she spoke about it, according to testimony from the woman released Wednesday by a House investigatory committee. (J.B. Forbes/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens speaks at a news conference about allegations related to his extramarital affair with his hairdresser, in Jefferson City, Mo., Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Greitens initiated a physically aggressive unwanted sexual encounter with his hairdresser and threatened to distribute a partially nude photo of her if she spoke about it, according to testimony from the woman released Wednesday by a House investigatory committee. (J.B. Forbes/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)Murder suspect Andre Jeru Bernard Bigby, 30, was arrested in Slab City, California, on Friday

A man wanted in Virginia for the shooting death of a teen has been found in a California desert town known for its lawlessness.

Andre Jeru Bernard Bigby, 30, was arrested in Slab City on Friday, nearly two months after 19-year-old Jayln Devon Harris was killed in a moving car.

The Virginia Beach native was found after the U.S. Marshals Office in San Diego received a tip from Virginia Beach police telling them Bigby was believed to be in the Slab City area.

Federal agents and a California Highway Patrol helicopter crew unsuccessfully searched for Bigby for days, until they got another tip saying the suspect was living in Slab City in a green and orange tent he bought on Amazon, The Virginian-Pilot reported.

Bigby had allegedly cut off his dreadlocks in an attempt to hide his identity.

Slab City is a former World War II Marine base southeast of Joshua Tree National Park - around 40 miles from the Mexican border. It got its name for the concrete pieces left behind by the Marines that are now ruins.

Jayln Devon Harris was shot dead while he was in a moving car in Virginia in February

Authorities say Bigby had cut off his dreadlocks in an attempt to hide his identity on the run

It's become a place where those who wish to stay off-the-radar go to live without running water or electricity. During the winter months, particularly, the place is filled with wanderers and squatters, as the summer months can get as hot as 120 degrees.

There is no law enforcement, and the nearest civilized town is Niland, four miles away.

Steve Jurman with the U.S. Marshals Office in San Diego said marshals often pull fugitives out of the so-called lawless town, making it 'not such a great place to hide.'

Bigby is charged with murder and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Slab City is known for its lack of law enforcement, running water and electricity

Wanderers, squatters and people on the run find a safe-heaven in the California desert town known for its lawlessness

Alexander Smith III, 33, was arrested shortly after Harris' murder and charged with being an accessory after the fact.

Police had been searching for Bigby since a warrant was issued for his arrest on February 21.

He has a long criminal record that includes charges of robbery and kidnapping, according to The Virginian-Pilot.

Bigby had reportedly been staying in a tent in Slab City, 40 miles from the Mexico borderHOOVER, Ala. (AP) - An Alabama youth evangelist has been arrested on child sex charges.

Media outlets report that police in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover arrested Paul Edward Acton Bowen, 37, of Southside on multiple charges involving a boy between the ages of 12 and 16.

Police Capt. Gregg Rector calls the case "disturbing" because of the man's position with Acton Bowen Outreach. Bowen is a public speaker who has written three books for sale online.

Records show Bowen was freed on bond early Wednesday.

Court records don't list an attorney for Bowen, and no one responded to a message sent to a phone number listed for him on a court docket.

Bowen is charged with offenses including second-degree sodomy and second-degree sex abuse. Rector said the victim is a family acquaintance.

Al.com reports Bowen denied the allegations in a statement issued late Wednesday.

"I have not done what I am accused of and have not acted inappropriately in any way," Bowen said. "My family and I trust the legal system and the people who are entrusted with the duty of protecting each of our rights. I believe the truth will stand and I will be vindicated of this false accusation. We ask that each of you keep everyone involved in this process in your prayers."

In his statement, Bowen thanked "the countless number of people who have prayed for his family."

"I'm also thankful for the countless calls of support from those who have walked a lot of life with me and know me best," he said. "Your steadfast, unshakable support gives me strength. For almost 20 years (since I was 18) my life has been committed to serving Jesus by serving people."

"When this accusation was made known to me I was hurt, confused, and heartbroken," he said.

___

Information from: The Birmingham News, http://www.al.com/birminghamnewsBALTIMORE (AP) - On a Baltimore street corner, public health workers hand out a life-saving overdose antidote to residents painfully familiar with the ravages of America's opioid epidemic. But the training wraps up quickly; all the naloxone inhalers are claimed within 20 minutes.

"We could've easily handed out hundreds of doses today. But we only had 24 kits. That goes fast," said Kelleigh Eastman, a health department worker assisting the city's bluntly dubbed "Don't Die" anti-overdose campaign.

Cities like Baltimore are feeling the financial squeeze as they rely on naloxone to try and counteract rising overdose rates. Some hard-hit communities across the country are struggling to pay for dosages even at reduced prices.

In this Jan. 23, 2018 photo, Leah Hill, a behavioral health fellow with the Baltimore City Health Department, displays a sample of Narcan nasal spray in Baltimore. The overdose-reversal drug is a critical tool to easing America's coast-to-coast opioid epidemic. But not everyone on the front lines has all they need. Baltimore's health department is rationing its supplies of naloxone because it says it can't afford an adequate stockpile. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

With more overdoses driven by synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil - so potent it's used as an elephant tranquilizer - naloxone remains pricy enough that Baltimore's health department is rationing supplies, stretching a dwindling stockpile of inhalers. Last year, the city distributed more than 25,000 doses, up from about 19,000 in 2016.

"Every week, we count the doses we have left and make hard decisions about who will receive the medication and who will have to go without," said Baltimore Health Commissioner Dr. Leana Wen, who issued the city's innovative blanket prescription for the drug in 2015.

Numerous states have since passed laws - including bypassing prescription requirements and establishing community training programs - aimed at expanding use of the medication that restores a person's breathing while temporarily blocking the brain's opioid receptors.

"It's a bit of a pressure-cooker environment for Baltimore but also places in many other states that have been on the front lines of the overdose crisis and where the toll keeps rising. The challenge, on a structural level, is that there's no clear sustainable funding source for naloxone," according to Daniel Raymond, policy director for the National Harm Reduction Coalition.

In Charleston, West Virginia, the health department reported Monday that it has only 159 doses remaining, most allocated for community classes in coming days. Kanawha-Charlestown Health Department spokesman John Law said they've requested more naloxone auto-injectors from the company that's donated to them in the past "but we have had no response."

Last week, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams issued the office's first national public health advisory in 13 years, calling on more Americans to start carrying naloxone and urging more federal funds be dedicated to increasing local antidote access.

"Costs should not and, in the near future, will not be a barrier to accessing naloxone for anyone in America," Adams pledged.

A two-dose carton of Narcan - a brand name for naloxone inhalers - has list prices of about $125. First responders and community organizations can purchase Narcan at discounts of $75 per two-dose carton, according to manufacturer Adapt Pharma. The Evzio auto-injector from Virginia-based drugmaker Kaleo currently has list prices of roughly $3,800 for a box with two doses, up from about $690 in 2014. Last week, Kaleo announced a new initiative that will allow federal and state government agencies to make direct purchases of two-pack Evzio kits for $360 each.

The surgeon general's advisory was welcome in Philadelphia, where health officials have debated internally whether "rationing" accurately describes their naloxone situation. The city has one of the highest opioid death rates of any large U.S. metropolis and distributed 25,000 doses from July through December last year.

"Given the tremendous scope of the opioid epidemic and (our) anticipated 1,200 overdoses deaths in 2017, easier - and cheaper - access to naloxone for the general public and public safety agencies has the potential to save hundreds of lives," Philadelphia Health Department spokesman James Garrow said.

The stakes couldn't be higher. Growing anecdotal evidence shows that multiple naloxone doses are needed to reverse an overdose caused by synthetic opioids - more than the single dose to reverse a heroin overdose.

Baltimore Fire Deputy Chief Mark Fletcher said first responders have found it takes "two doses or maybe even three doses" to restore respiration if a person used heroin laced with fentanyl or carfentanil.

It's not yet clear how naloxone saturation is affecting overdose deaths overall. One 2017 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that laws boosting naloxone access are linked to as much as an 11 percent drop in fatalities.

In a gritty Baltimore neighborhood, Shane Shortt, who is addicted to heroin, said he's been able to revive five drug companions with Narcan over the past year and swears he never goes anyplace without an inhaler.

"You never know when you're going to have to use it. It was actually used on me like last week," Shortt said outside a Baltimore needle-exchange van where about a dozen people showing the ravages of long-term drug use lined up with a few younger people.

An addictions and recovery expert with the National Council for Behavioral Health, Tom Hill, said the bottom line is naloxone is just about "all we have" to battle overdoses.

"Anything to lower the costs of a life-saving drug is a very welcome thing," he said from Washington.

Wen, who is among the many officials calling on the Trump administration to directly negotiate the price of naloxone with manufacturers, was more blunt: "We are in the middle of a national epidemic. We should not be priced out of the ability to save lives."

___

David McFadden on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dmcfadd

In this Jan. 23, 2018 photo, Leah Hill, a behavioral health fellow with the Baltimore City Health Department, wears a shirt advertising the health department's opioid overdose awareness efforts as she demonstrates how to administer Narcan nasal spray in Baltimore. The overdose-reversal drug is a critical tool to easing America's coast-to-coast opioid epidemic. But not everyone on the front lines has all they need. Baltimore's health department is rationing its supplies of naloxone because it says it can't afford an adequate stockpile. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

In this Jan. 23, 2018 photo, Kelleigh Eastman, a special projects director with the Baltimore City Health Department, reaches for a package of Narcan nasal spray in Baltimore. The overdose-reversal drug is a critical tool to easing America's coast-to-coast opioid epidemic. But not everyone on the front lines has all they need. Baltimore's health department is rationing its supplies of naloxone because it says it can't afford an adequate stockpile. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

In this Jan. 18, 2018 photo, Darryl Mack, a health educator with the Baltimore City Health Department, places tourniquets into a bag containing clean needles for a client inside the health department's Needle Exchange Team van in Baltimore. An overdose-reversal drug is a critical tool to easing America's coast-to-coast opioid epidemic. But not everyone on the front lines has all they need. Baltimore's health department is rationing its supplies of naloxone because it says it can't afford an adequate stockpile. C (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

In this Jan. 23, 2018 photo, Leah Hill, a behavioral health fellow with the Baltimore City Health Department, demonstrates how to administer Narcan nasal spray in the event of a possible opioid overdose in Baltimore. The overdose-reversal drug is a critical tool to easing America's coast-to-coast opioid epidemic. But not everyone on the front lines has all they need. Baltimore's health department is rationing its supplies of naloxone because it says it can't afford an adequate stockpile. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

In this Jan. 18, 2018 photo, used needles sit in a container inside the Baltimore City Health Department's Needle Exchange Team van in Baltimore. The overdose-reversal drug is a critical tool to easing America's coast-to-coast opioid epidemic. But not everyone on the front lines has all they need. Baltimore's health department is rationing its supplies of naloxone because it says it can't afford an adequate stockpile. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - An international crackdown on illegal logging in tropical forests has ensnared the makers of some guitars and other musical instruments, whose top-end products require small amounts of rosewood, a material prized for its rich, multicolored grain and resonant sound.

Since new trade rules took effect in 2017, guitar makers have complained about long delays in getting permits to import rosewood and export finished instruments that contain it. Warehouses have filled with unsold instruments, and a bagpipe maker in New Hampshire went so far as to ask the governor to intervene after a permit application was lost.

"I'm so annoyed. I'm so distraught by this," said Chris Martin, chairman and CEO of C.F. Martin and Co., which uses rosewood in 200 models of acoustic guitar, some played by Eric Clapton, Ed Sheeran, Sting and other stars. The company's logistics staff estimates it spends 40 percent of its time dealing with the new regulations.

In this Friday, March 23, 2018 photo, a worker handles sheets of rosewood at C. F. Martin and Co., in Nazareth, Pa. Guitar makers and other instrument makers are being hit hard by regulations aimed at preventing the world's rosewood species from disappearing. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

Fearful that Africa and Asia were losing rosewood forests, governments adopted the rules to stem the flow of smuggled rosewood to China's luxury furniture manufacturers. But the restrictions have also hurt companies that use relatively tiny amounts of the wood in guitars, clarinets and oboes.

Months after the regulations were adopted, acoustic guitar exports from the U.S. fell by about 28 percent, and electric guitar exports declined 23 percent, according to the Music Trades magazine, an industry publication. Music retailers reported losing $60 million.

At Martin's Pennsylvania-based company, many transactions are stalled: "We have orders for the guitars. We have customers. The customers have the money to pay for them, and we can't ship them because the paperwork is stuck somewhere," he said.

The guitar industry's frustration is focused on the United Nation's Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES , which is responsible for combating wildlife smuggling. The agency has tangled in the past with instrument makers, mostly over restrictions on ivory, tortoiseshell and whale bone.

Agency officials previously placed trade limits on only a few rosewood species, such as Brazilian rosewood, which is especially precious. But the 2016 trade rules covered up to 300 species of the rosewood family known as Dalbergia. The new regulations also required permits for products made from the wood, including guitars, violins, bagpipes and xylophones. Many companies that had never needed permits had only three months to comply.

"It was a steep learning curve for these companies," said Timothy Van Norman, chief of the permit-granting branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service , which saw its permit applications double to 40,000 in 2017 mostly from rosewood. Bigger guitar companies with more sophisticated distribution systems were probably quicker to adapt than smaller companies or individuals making a limited number of instruments. "For them, it probably came out of the blue."

Taylor Guitars , based in El Cajon, California, reported losing tens of thousands of dollars from months-long delays and confusion surrounding its shipments to some 30 countries in the world.

"Each country was suddenly responsible for interpreting what this new rule meant," said Scott Paul, Taylor's director of natural resource sustainability.

Governments in Africa and Latin America proposed the regulations to combat increased rosewood smuggling over the past decade that they said had endangered the species, which is also known for its fragrance, a sweet floral aroma that gives the wood its name.

Much of the smuggling was orchestrated by criminal gangs that took advantage of lax rules and widespread corruption to strip away forest in Southeast Asia, Central America and West Africa. The illegal logging also sparked regional conflicts, contributed to desertification and destroyed a key food source for bees, butterflies and other insects.

The United Nations describes the rosewood trade as the world's costliest wildlife crime, with seizures totaling more than almost all other species combined. Between 2005 and 2015, 10,000 metric tons of protected rosewood was seized.

Most of that wood was headed to China, where rosewood imports jumped 2,000 percent from 2005 to 2014, according to the conservation group Forest Trends . Much of the material went into the making of reproduction hongmu furniture from the Ming and Qing dynasties, a style popular with affluent Chinese.

"These countries didn't want to wait until their tree species are on the verge of extinction before acting to control the trade. They saw what happened in Asia. There is almost nothing left," said Susanne Breitkopf, forest campaign policy manager of the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency .

A spokesman for China's forest administration did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls from The Associated Press.

Jiang Hengfu, secretary general of Traditional Furniture Specialty Committee, which is part of the China National Furniture Association, said he did not know much about the industry's role in the destruction of rosewood forests or the use of illegal wood in furniture. But he acknowledged that trade restrictions and increased environmental awareness in China had increased rosewood prices and would force furniture companies to become more innovative.

Meanwhile, guitar makers find themselves defending the crackdown and highlighting their sustainability efforts while also lobbying to exclude musical instruments from the regulations - a debate to take place when CITES meets in 2019.

Instrument makers such as Martin argue that they use a fraction as much rosewood as Chinese furniture makers - about 50 cubic meters each a year compared with nearly 2 million cubic meters. And, the instrument makers say, they get most of it from sustainable plantations in India.

CITES officials say they are open to considering exemptions for certain types of instruments but fear broad exemptions would let smugglers game the system.

"It is something that needs to be revisited and how far do we need to go with the regulation to make sure there are not loopholes," the outgoing CITES Secretary-General John Scanlon told the AP.

The cost and hassle of the new regulations have caused some guitar makers to shift away from rosewood. Martin stopped using it on most guitars produced in Mexico and the models made in the U.S. that cost less than $3,000. Taylor has rolled out several models without rosewood for overseas customers.

But the companies have no plans to abandon rosewood altogether.

"There are other woods that work," Martin said. But guitar builders and players know there is "something very special" about rosewood's depth and richness of sound. "No one has found ... a wood that works better."

___

Associated Press researcher Shanshan Wang in Beijing contributed to this report.

In this Friday, March 23, 2018 photo, a luthier assembles the rosewood sides of a guitar at C. F. Martin and Co., in Nazareth, Pa. Instrument makers argue that they use a fraction as much rosewood as Chinese furniture makers _ about 50 cubic meters a year compared with nearly 2 million cubic meters. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

In this Friday, March 23, 2018 photo, rosewood is stacked in storage slots at C. F. Martin and Co., in Nazareth, Pa. Since new trade rules took effect in 2017, guitar makers have complained about long delays in getting permits to import rosewood and export finished instruments that contain it. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

In this Friday, March 23, 2018 photo, a C. F. Martin and Co. logo adorns a rosewood headstock on a guitar on the factory floor at C. F. Martin and Co., in Nazareth, Pa. Fearful that parts of Africa and Asia were losing their rosewood forests to illegal loggers, governments in 2016 banded together to slap international trade regulations on hundreds of species of the trees. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

This 2009 photo provided by the Environmental Investigation Agency shows a freshly cut Malagasy rosewood tree illegally harvested in Madagascar's Masoala National Park. The United Nations describes the rosewood trade as the world's costliest wildlife crime, with seizures totaling more than almost all other species combined. (Toby Smith/Environmental Investigation Agency via AP)

This 2009 photo provided by the Environmental Investigation Agency shows a logger illegally chopping down a rosewood tree with an axe in Madagascar's Masoala National Park. The United Nations describes the rosewood trade as the world's costliest wildlife crime, with seizures totaling more than almost all other species combined. (Toby Smith/Environmental Investigation Agency via AP)

FILE - In this Oct. 23, 2012 file photo, a couple shops for furniture near Chinese style chairs made from Vietnamese rosewood in a furniture shop in Beijing. To help stem the loss of rosewood forests in Africa and Asia, governments adopted rules to stem the flow of smuggled rosewood to China's luxury furniture manufacturers. But the restrictions have also hurt companies that use relatively tiny amounts of the wood in guitars, clarinets and oboes. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 23, 2012, file photo, a salesperson adjusts a table made from Hainan rosewood at a furniture shop in Beijing. To help stem the loss of rosewood forests in Africa and Asia, governments adopted rules to stem the flow of smuggled rosewood to China's luxury furniture manufacturers. But the restrictions have also hurt companies that use relatively tiny amounts of the wood in guitars, clarinets and oboes. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

In this Friday, March 23, 2018 photo, a photo of Johnny Cash hangs near a luthier assembling the rosewood sides of a guitar at C. F. Martin and Co., in Nazareth, Pa. The cost and hassle of the new regulations on rosewood have caused some guitar makers to shift away from it. Martin stopped using it on most guitars produced in Mexico and the models made in the U.S. that cost less than $3,000. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

In this Friday, March 23, 2018 photo, employee Emily Meixell plays a guitar made with rosewood at C. F. Martin and Co., in Nazareth, Pa. Fearful that parts of Africa and Asia were losing their rosewood forests to illegal loggers, governments in 2016 banded together to slap international trade regulations on hundreds of species of the trees. Among the hardest hit has been the music industry, many who depend on rosewood for parts of their guitars, clarinets and oboes. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

In this March 23, 2018 photo, workers buff guitars at C. F. Martin and Co., in Nazareth, Pa. Fearful that parts of Africa and Asia were losing their rosewood forests to illegal loggers, governments in 2016 banded together to slap international trade regulations on hundreds of species of the trees. Among the hardest hit has been the music industry, many who depend on rosewood for parts of their guitars, clarinets and oboes. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

In this Friday, March 23, 2018 photo, a worker inspects a guitar at C. F. Martin and Co., in Nazareth, Pa. Guitar makers and other instrument makers are being hit hard by regulations aimed at preventing the world's rosewood species from disappearing. The international rules, which went into effect last year, regulated the trade in nearly 300 species of rosewood over concerns about widespread illegal logging in Asia and Africa. But guitar makers complain they are facing shipping delays and lost business from the new rules. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)

In this Friday, March 23, 2018 photo, a guitar rests at a workstation at C. F. Martin and Co. in Nazareth, Pa. Fearful that parts of Africa and Asia were losing their rosewood forests to illegal loggers, governments in 2016 banded together to slap international trade regulations on hundreds of species of the trees. Among the hardest hit has been the music industry, many who depend on rosewood for parts of their guitars, clarinets and oboes. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma)NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) - The day before Bill Cosby's chief accuser was to take the witness stand at his sexual assault retrial, a former model and TV personality on Thursday gave jurors her own harrowing account of being drugged and raped by the comedy star in 1982.

Janice Dickinson, one of five other accusers who testified against Cosby, told jurors that the comedian gave her a pill he claimed would ease her menstrual cramps but instead left her immobilized and unable to stop an assault she called "gross."

"I didn't consent to this. Here was 'America's Dad,' on top of me. A married man, father of five kids, on top of me," Dickinson said. "I was thinking how wrong it was. How very wrong it was."

Bill Cosby leaves his sexual assault trial for the day, Thursday, April 12, 2018, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Dickinson's testimony helped prosecutors tee up a climactic courtroom appearance by Andrea Constand, the former Temple University women's basketball administrator whom Cosby is charged with drugging and molesting at his suburban Philadelphia mansion in 2004. Constand was expected to testify Friday - the second time she will face a jury after Cosby's first trial ended without a verdict.

Cosby says his sexual encounter with Constand was consensual, asserting through his lawyers that she set him up to score a big payday. Cosby settled her civil suit for $3.4 million in 2006.

On Thursday, it was Dickinson's turn to tell jurors that Cosby had taken advantage of her after knocking her out with drugs. She said he smelled of cigars and espresso as he got on top of her in his Lake Tahoe, Nevada, hotel room.

Dickinson, 27 at the time, testified she felt vaginal pain and, after waking up the next morning, noticed semen between her legs. She said Cosby looked at her "like I was crazy" when she confronted him about what had happened.

"I wanted to hit him. I wanted to punch him in the face," she said.

A former reality TV personality who has called herself the "world's first supermodel," Dickinson became one of the first women to go public with her allegations against Cosby when she told her story on "Entertainment Tonight" in 2014.

She testified that she got to know Cosby after he called her agent and said he wanted to meet and possibly mentor her as she looked to expand her career into singing and acting.

She said Cosby invited her to Lake Tahoe after an initial meeting at his New York City townhouse, where he had given her an acting manual. Cosby tracked her down to Bali, where she was modeling for an oil company calendar, and asked her to Lake Tahoe "to further talk about my career."

In Tahoe, she tested out her vocal range with Cosby's musical director, watched Cosby perform and then joined the two men for dinner at the hotel. She said that's where she started to get cramps, and that's when Cosby produced a little blue pill. She took it and soon became woozy and "slightly out of it."

Cosby's musical director left, Dickinson said, and Cosby told her, "We'll continue this conversation upstairs."

Dickinson had a Polaroid camera with her, she said, and snapped photos of Cosby in the room wearing a colorful robe and talking on the telephone. Then Cosby pounced.

"Shortly after I took the pictures and he finished the conversation, he got on top of me," Dickinson said. "His robe opened up. ... I couldn't move.

"I didn't fly to Tahoe to have sex with Mr. Cosby," she said.

Dickinson, the only celebrity accuser to testify against Cosby, parried with defense attorneys who seized on discrepancies between her testimony Thursday and what she wrote about their encounter in her 2002 autobiography.

She told jurors she wanted to include details about the assault, but wound up telling a highly sanitized version in which there was no sex at all, let alone a rape, because her publisher told her the legal department would never let the allegations against Cosby make it to print.

Dickinson said she went along because she needed the money - and feared Cosby would ruin her career.

"It's all a fabrication there. It was written by ghostwriters. I wanted a paycheck," she said.

Another accuser, taking the witness stand after Dickinson, said Cosby prodded her to drink two shots in his Las Vegas hotel suite, then had her sit between his knees and started petting her head.

Lise-Lotte Lublin told jurors she lost consciousness and doesn't remember anything else about that night in 1989 - a time when Cosby was at the height of his fame starring as sweater-wearing father-of-five Dr. Cliff Huxtable on America's top-rated TV show, "The Cosby Show."

"I trusted him because he's 'America's Dad,'" Lublin said. "I trusted him because he's a figure people trusted for many years, including myself."

Dickinson and Lublin were among five additional accusers whom prosecutors called to the stand to show Cosby had a history of drugging and molesting women long before he was charged with violating Constand.

The defense has dismissed the other women's testimony as "prosecution by distraction."

"These women proved that they were here to back up their sister - they got their sister's back," Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt said Thursday outside court.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand and the other women have done.

___

This story has been corrected to show the alleged assault of Dickinson took place in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, not California.

___

Follow Mike Sisak at www.twitter.com/mikesisak .

___

For more coverage visit www.apnews.com/tag/CosbyonTrial .

Bill Cosby leaves his sexual assault trial for the day, Thursday, April 12, 2018, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Janice Dickinson walks through the Montgomery County Courthouse during Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Janice Dickinson walks through the Montgomery County Courthouse during Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Janice Dickinson walks through Montgomery County Courthouse during a break in Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Bill Cosby's spokesman Andrew Wyatt arrives to talk with the media during a break in Cosby's sexual assault trial, Thursday, April 12, 2018, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Janice Baker-Kinney walks towards the courtroom to testify in the Montgomery County Courthouse during his sexual assault retrial on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Janice Baker-Kinney exits the courtroom after testifying during Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial at the Montgomery County Courthouse on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Attorneys Gloria Allred, left, and Lisa Bloom talk with the media during a break in Bill Cosby's sexual assault trial, Thursday, April 12, 2018, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The Taliban stormed a government compound in central Afghanistan early Thursday, triggering an hours-long gunbattle that killed 15, including three top local officials, police and government officials said.

The blistering attack in the Khuja Omari district was the latest insurgent assault in Ghazni province, which is now largely under Taliban control. The Taliban planted mines to prevent government reinforcements from coming to help and quickly took responsibility for the attack, said Mohammad Arif Rahmani, a lawmaker in the Afghan Parliament.

The insurgent group's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told The Associated Press by telephone that after the attack in Khuja Omari - not far from the provincial capital also called Ghazni - all security posts in the district were under Taliban control. The district center, however, was still in government hands.

People stand near the bodies of district officials inside the Khuja Omari district compound after a deadly attack in Ghazni, Afghanistan, Thursday, April 12, 2018. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the blistering attack early Thursday morning on a government compound in Afghanistan's central province of Ghazni that killed at least 15 members of the security forces. (AP Photos/Rahmatullah Nikzad)

The province of Ghazni is located south of Kabul province, the seat of the country's capital, Kabul, and lies along a key route. Travel by road between the capital and southern Kandahar province, a traditional Taliban heartland, is considered dangerous because of large swaths that are now under insurgent control.

Mujahid gave a higher casualty figure among the Afghan forces, which the Taliban often do, exaggerating their achievements on the battlefield, and a significantly lower death toll among the insurgent attackers.

Rahmani said the district governor, intelligence service director and a deputy police official were among those killed in Thursday's attack. He said the fighting began around 2 a.m. with the Taliban storming the highly secure compound in Khuja Omari district.

President Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack and the killing of Ali Dost Shams, the district governor, and the others in the assault, which he said was carried out by "Afghanistan's enemy" - a reference to the Taliban.

Ramazan Ali Moseni, deputy chief police in Ghazni province, said seven killed were police officers and five were members of the country's intelligence agency known by the acronym NDS were also killed. Moseni also said 45 Taliban were killed and eight members of the Afghan security forces were wounded.

The casualty figures are impossible to independently verify because of the remoteness of the area.

In a separate incident north of Kabul, a sticky bomb destroyed an oil tanker outside the Bagram military base, where U.S. forces are stationed.

Bagram District Gov. Abdul Shukoor Qudusi said the driver was wounded in the explosion late Wednesday night, which set several shops in the area on fire.

There were no injuries at the base, which is heavily fortified. No immediately took responsibility for the bombing.

Also on Thursday, the United Nations' Afghanistan assistance mission urged warring factions in the country to protect civilians, saying the civilian death toll in the first three months of this year was a staggering 763 people.

Most civilians were killed by insurgents, and fewer people were killed by pro-government security forces than previously, said the U.N. quarterly report noting that suicide bombings accounted for most of the fatalities as well as injuries, which numbered 1,495.

"Afghan civilians continue to suffer, caught in the conflict, in ways that are preventable; this must stop now," said Ingrid Hayden, the secretary-general's deputy special representative for Afghanistan.

A general view of Khuja Omari district compound is seen after a deadly Taliban attack in Ghazni, Afghanistan, Thursday, April 12, 2018. The Taliban claimed responsibility for a blistering attack early Thursday morning on a government compound in Afghanistan's central province of Ghazni that killed at least 15 members of the security forces. (AP Photos/Rahmatullah Nikzad)WASHINGTON (AP) - A police officer defended his partner's decision to shoot a black motorcyclist in Washington, D.C., and said that he believed the man drove directly at his partner.

Officer Jordan Palmer's account of the 2016 fatal shooting came during an administrative hearing that centered on whether Officer Brian Trainer feared for his safety when he fired at Terrence Sterling, 31, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The Metropolitan Police Department has ruled the shooting unjustified and recommended Trainer be fired, which he has challenged. The appeal is being heard by an administrative panel known as a trial board. The board will rule on Trainer's action and could recommend discipline.

Ryan Donaldson, assistant attorney general for the district, told the panel during the first day of proceedings Wednesday that Trainer had "undermined the very public trust" that allows the police department to "effectively function."

In August, federal prosecutors determined there was not enough evidence to file criminal charges against Trainer. However, the district has reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with Sterling's family. Palmer was suspended for 20 days without pay in connection with the shooting.

An internal police review continued, and officials ultimately concluded that Trainer and Palmer violated departmental policies as they pursued and attempted to arrest Sterling.

The incident started about 4:20 a.m. in the Adams Morgan neighborhood with reports of a motorcyclist who had run red lights and was speeding more than 100 mph, news outlets reported.

At least two supervisors ordered officers not to pursue the motorcycle over traffic violations. However, Trainer later told investigators that he and Palmer believed the motorcycle posed a threat and were "aggressively canvassing" for it, according to the internal report.

Palmer said he and Trainer had pulled their cruiser into an intersection ahead of the biker, who had been driving recklessly, when Trainer began climbing out the passenger's door to make a traffic stop.

Palmer said the motorcyclist looked at the officers, revved his engine and drove toward them. "I felt and heard the impact" of the motorcycle hitting the passenger door, Palmer said, and then heard gunshots.

Trainer said that Sterling ignored commands to stop before the officer fired.

However, the assistant attorney general for the district noted that police had concluded that Sterling appeared to be trying to clear the cruiser and almost was able to, saying the driver "had a means of escape until Officer Trainer opened his door."

The shooting came amid concern nationwide over police use of force and had sparked protests in parts of the city. On Wednesday, several people with signs demanding Trainer be fired gathered outside the police building where the hearing was held.

The trial board, made up of one commander and two captains, will continue Thursday. Police Chief Peter Newsham has said the board's decision could take several weeks.BERLIN (AP) - A strong storm in the Alps is hampering efforts to find a German billionaire who has been missing on the famed Matterhorn peak for days.

The dpa news agency reported Thursday that the head of the rescue effort, Anjan Truffer, said the weather has meant teams have not been able to move out in the morning as planned.

Truffer says rescue crews remain in close contact with the family of Karl-Erivan Haub, who was last seen on Saturday morning as he headed up a mountain lift.

FILE - In this Aug 13, 2009 file photo CEO of German Tengelmann Group Karl-Erivan W. Haub talks at a press conference in Muelheim, western Germany. Authorities in Switzerland and Italy are searching for the German billionaire who has been missing in the Alps since the weekend. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, file)

Haub, the 58-year-old heir to the Tengelmann retail empire, was training for a ski mountaineering race when he disappeared.

Rescuers say it's not clear where he went missing and they're searching an area of over 240 square kilometers (93 sq. miles).BEIJING (AP) - Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Thursday there is "some tension" in relations with Beijing, following accusations of Chinese meddling in the country's politics and concerns over China's influence in the South Pacific.

In an Australian radio interview, Turnbull said ties remained positive overall and declined to say whether Australian officials had been refused visas to China for political reasons.

Yet, while he said he was confident that "any misunderstandings" would be resolved, he conceded that not all was well in the relationship.

FILE - In this Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016, file photo, Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, left, shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping before a group photo session for the G20 Summit held at the Hangzhou International Expo Center in Hangzhou in eastern China's Zhejiang province. Turnbull has said there is "some tension" in relations with Beijing, following accusations of Chinese meddling in the country's politics and concerns over China's influence in the South Pacific. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

"I would say that there's obviously been, there's clearly been some tension in the relationship following the introduction of our legislation about foreign interference," Turnbull said.

Beijing has been angered by planned legal changes aimed at blocking foreign influence in Australian politics, issuing stern protests against accusations that it is seeking to manipulate the government and public opinion.

Chinese diplomats and agents of the ruling Communist Party have also been accused of controlling Chinese-language media in Australia and the large population of Chinese students at its universities. Influential Australian opposition lawmaker Sam Dastyari recently quit the Senate after coming under fire over his close links to wealthy Chinese political donors.

In Beijing, Geng Shuang, a foreign ministry spokesman, denied that China is refusing to grant visas to Australian officials. Geng told reporters at a regular briefing that China hopes Australia will work together with it in "doing something conducive to enhancing bilateral cooperation and mutual trust."

He also said suggestions that China is interfering in the domestic politics of other countries were "totally groundless."

Without citing China, Turnbull on Thursday indicated he would continue to push the new legislation, saying it was incumbent on the government to ensure that only Australians determine their country's political fate.

"We don't accept foreign interference in our political or governmental processes. That is not directed at any one at any one nation," he told 3AW Radio Melbourne.

China's growing South Pacific presence has also raised concerns among Australian politicians and media, especially following reports that the island nation of Vanuatu, about 1,750 kilometers (1,090 miles) from Australia, was in talks with Beijing on potentially hosting a Chinese military base.

While Vanuatu and China have denied the reports, Turnbull on Tuesday said any kind of a foreign base would be unwelcome.

Australian politicians have also attacked Chinese development projects in South Pacific countries, saying they added little value while locking such governments into dependency on Beijing.LONDON (AP) - The international chemical weapons watchdog on Thursday confirmed Britain's finding that a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent, as Russia continued to deny suggestions that it was behind the attack.

Investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, said the nerve agent was "of high purity." Britain says that means only a state with a sophisticated laboratory could have manufactured it.

The watchdog's report does not say who was responsible for the attack, since that was outside the scope of its mission. The OPCW's job was to identify the poison, not to trace its origins or assign blame.

This is an image of the daughter of former Russian Spy Sergei Skripal, Yulia Skripal taken from Yulia Skipal's Facebook account on Tuesday March 6, 2018. Britain's Foreign Office says it has asked the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to publish a summary of its findings at midday on Thursday April 12, 2018, on the nerve agent used to poison a former spy and his daughter in southwestern England.(Yulia Skripal/Facebook via AP)

Britain blames Russia for the March 4 poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury. Russia denies involvement, saying Britain hasn't provided any evidence for its assertion. Britain has called for an OPCW meeting next week to discuss the results of the organization's report.

In a published summary of its findings, the OPCW did not name Novichok, the type of nerve agent previously cited by British Prime Minister Theresa May. But it confirmed "the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury." It said the name and structure of the toxin were included in the full classified report, distributed to 192 member states of the organization.

The Novichok class of nerve agents was developed in the Soviet Union toward the end of the Cold War, and Britain says it has evidence Russia has continued to manufacture Novichok agents in the last decade. Russia denies this and says the nerve agent used on the Skripals could easily have been manufactured in another country.

The OPCW report said the nerve agent used on the Skripals was "of high purity." The purity makes it hard to tell when the agent was manufactured, since without impurities it does not degrade over time.

Britain says scientific analysis of the poison is only one of the factors that has led it to blame Russia.

Others include intelligence that Russia has made nerve agents and studied how to use them for assassinations, and the view of Russian President Vladimir Putin's government that traitors are legitimate targets.

But the U.K. does not possess a scientific smoking gun - a sample of Novichok from a Russian lab to compare with the Salisbury samples.

Georgy Kalamanov, Russia's deputy minister of industry and trade, told the Interfax news agency Thursday it's impossible to pinpoint the agent's origin and reaffirmed Moscow's demand for a probe that would involve Russia.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson welcomed the OPCW's report, saying tests in four independent laboratories around the world all returned the same results.

"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible - only Russia has the means, motive and record," he said.

The findings come after Yulia Skripal rejected Russian Embassy assistance as she recovers at an undisclosed location. Yulia, 33, was released from the hospital earlier this week, but her 66-year-old father is recovering more slowly.

"I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do," Yulia Skripal said in a statement released Wednesday by London's Metropolitan Police. "Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves."

The comment came after Yulia's cousin Viktoria gave a series of interviews about a telephone conversation between the two, leading the British government to claim that Russia was using Viktoria Skripal as a "pawn" in the poisoning dispute.

Russia's Embassy in London questioned the authenticity of Yulia's statement, saying it was crafted to support Britain's version of events and increases suspicions that she is being held against her will.

British authorities "must urgently provide tangible evidence that Yulia is alright and not deprived of her freedom," the Russian embassy said.

"The text has been composed in a special way so as to support official statements made by British authorities and at the same time to exclude every possibility of Yulia's contacts with the outer world - consuls, journalists and even relatives," the embassy said. "The document only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen."

The poisoning dispute has led to severe tensions between Russia and the West, and to the expulsions of hundreds of diplomats between them.LONDON (AP) - Britain's Cabinet gave Prime Minister Theresa May the green light Thursday to join the United States and France in planning possible military strikes in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.

But the Cabinet's call for "action" to prevent further use of chemical weapons included no details on the method or timing of such strikes, while leaving open the possibility of other responses.

Senior government ministers were summoned back from a spring break to discuss the attack last week in Douma, which has sparked a tense confrontation between Western nations and Syria and its allies, led by Russia.

FILE - In this March 14, 2018 file photo Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street to attend the weekly Prime Minister's Questions session, in parliament in London. May has summoned her Cabinet back from vacation on Thursday April 12, 2018, to discuss possible military action against Syria over an alleged chemical weapons attack. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, file)

After meeting for more than two hours, the Cabinet backed May's plan to work with the U.S. and France "to coordinate an international response."

May's office said in a statement that the Cabinet judged it "highly likely" the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad was behind the chemical attack last weekend in the town of Douma. Syrian opposition activists and rescuers said more than 40 people were killed.

The British leader's office said Cabinet ministers "agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime."

The U.S., France and Britain have been consulting about launching a military strike, but the timing and scale of any action remain unclear.

President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday that missiles "will be coming." On Thursday, Trump tweeted that an attack "could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

Britain's Ministry of Defense refused to comment on reports that Royal Navy submarines armed with cruise missiles have been dispatched into range of Syria.

British opposition lawmakers have called on May to give Parliament a vote before any military action. May isn't legally required to do that, though it has become conventional since the 2003 invasion of Iraq for lawmakers to be given the chance to vote before British forces are deployed.

Parliament is in recess until Monday, though it could be called back early for an emergency debate.

Ian Blackford, who heads the Scottish National Party group in Parliament, said May "presides over a minority government that has no majority or mandate for military action, and there must be no attempt to bypass Parliament."

There is no guarantee lawmakers would rubber-stamp a decision for military strikes. In 2013, Parliament defeated a call by then-Prime Minister David Cameron for airstrikes in response to an earlier chemical attack in Syria.

In 2015 lawmakers approved U.K. strikes on Islamic State group targets in Syria, but not on government forces.

Brexit Secretary David Davis, who voted against military action in 2013, said "we've got to make this judgment on a very careful, very deliberate, very well thought-through basis, knowing exactly ... how strong the evidence is."

A plane takes off from the British Royal Air Force base in Akrotiri, near the coastal city of Limassol in the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, Thursday, April 12, 2018. British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her Cabinet back from vacation to discuss possible military action against Syria over an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

Britain's Secretary of State for International Development Penny Mordaunt leaves after attending an emergency cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street in London, Thursday, April 12, 2018. British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her Cabinet back from vacation Thursday to discuss military action against Syria over an alleged chemical weapons attack. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Britain's Attorney General Jeremy Wright, leaves after attending an emergency cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street in London, Thursday, April 12, 2018. British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her Cabinet back from vacation Thursday to discuss military action against Syria over an alleged chemical weapons attack. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)ATLANTA (AP) - A 15-year-old is accused of fatally shooting a 3-year-old who was asleep in his car seat on Easter Sunday.

DeKalb County Police say the unidentified Georgia teen has been charged with murder in the death of T'Rhigi Craig. News outlets have reported T'Rhigi's last name is Diggs. T'Rhigi was shot in the chest as his mother drove past a Texaco station in Atlanta.

Police initially suspected the toddler was a drive-by shooting victim, but learned through witnesses that the shot was fired from the gas station.

Police have said the boy's mom had heard a gunshot but didn't think anything of it until she realized he was unresponsive. She pulled over and called police. He later died at a hospital.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports investigators were still looking for another witness.LONDON (AP) - Kensington Palace has announced that politicians and world leaders won't be attending Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding. But 1,200 members of the public - many involved with charities or community groups - have been invited to the grounds of Windsor Castle for the May 19 celebration. That will give them a chance to see the royals arrive at the chapel and to see the carriage procession after the wedding ceremony.

Here's a look at some of the people invited:

- Pamela Anomneze, 52, who works with 306 Collective in London, which helps people with mental health issues by teaching them to create mugs, jewelry, textiles and other items.

Pamela Anomneze, 52, reacts as she poses at Studio 360 Collective in Haringey, north London Tuesday April 10, 2018, after she received an invitation to the upcoming royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle next month. Anomneze works with 306 Collective in London, which helps people with mental health issues by teaching them to create mugs, jewellery, textiles and other items. It will be friends and family along with members of the public on the guest list, rather than politicians and world leaders, at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding on May 19. (Isabel Infantes/PA via AP)

- Catherine Cooke, 53, and her daughter Julie-Ann Coll, 35, of Northern Ireland. Cooke was chosen for her involvement with a network of women's groups across the country and Coll for her work with Life After Loss, a child bereavement support group she joined after her 22-week-old son died.

- Kai Fletcher, 18, who was homeless at 15 and now works with a charity called Southside in the English city of Bath.

- Jorja Furze, 12, who was born with only one leg and is an ambassador for Steel Bones, a charity in England that supports civilian amputees.

- Phillip Gillespie, 30, a former soldier from Northern Ireland who lost his right leg in a combat incident in Afghanistan, where Harry also served.

- David Gregory, 28, a teacher in northeastern England who is a driving force behind efforts to get students more engaged with science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

- Reuben Litherland, 14, who was born deaf and has started giving sign language lessons at his school in England.

- Amelia Thompson, 12, who was caught up in the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester that killed 22 people last year. As her guest she's taking Sharon Goodman, the grandmother of 15-year-old Olivia Campbell-Hardy, who died in the attack.

- Amy Wright, 26, from Scotland, chairwoman of the board of directors for The Usual Place, a cafe that provides training opportunities for young adults who need support.

Catherine Cooke, left, and her daughter Julie-Ann Coll pose for a photo in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Tuesday April 10, 2018, after they received an invitation to the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle next month. Cooke was chosen for her involvement with a network of women's groups across the country and Coll for her work with Life After Loss, a child bereavement support group she joined after her 22-week-old son died. It will be friends and family along with members of the public on the guest list, rather than politicians and world leaders, at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding on May 19. (Michael Cooper/PA via AP)

Eighteen-year old Kai Fletcher, poses in Bath, England, Tuesday April 10, 2018, after receiving an invitation to the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle next month. Kai Fletcher was homeless at 15 and now works with Southside Family Project a charity that helps children and young people. It will be friends and family along with members of the public on the guest list, rather than politicians and world leaders, at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding on May 19.(Andrew Matthews/PA via AP)

12-year old Jorja Furze, poses for a photo Tuesday April 10, 2018, in Isleham near Ely, England, after she received an invitation to the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle next month. Jorja Furze is an amputee from birth who is ambassador for the Steel Bones charity that supports civilian amputees. It will be friends and family along with members of the public on the guest list, rather than politicians and world leaders, at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding on May 19. (Joe Giddens/PA via AP)

Phillip Gillespie from Ballymena, Northern Ireland, poses for a photo Tuesday April 10, 2018, after he received an invitation to the wedding of Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle next month, among the 1,200 members of the public invited. An announcement from Kensington Palace says it will be friends and family, rather than politicians and world leaders, at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding. (Michael Cooper/PA via AP)

David Gregory, 28, poses for a photo in Blyth, England, Tuesday April 10, 2018, after he received an invitation to the upcoming royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle next month. Gregory is a driving force behind efforts to get students more engaged with science, technology, engineering and mathematics in his local community in Blyth. It will be friends and family along with members of the public on the guest list, rather than politicians and world leaders, at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding on May 19. (Scott Heppell/PA via AP)

14-year old Reuben Litherland, Tuesday April 10, 2018, who was born deaf and has started lunchtime lessons to teach sign language at his school, is amongst those who have received an invitation to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle next month. It will be friends and family along with members of the public on the guest list, rather than politicians and world leaders, at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding on May 19. (Aaron Chown/PA via AP)

12-year old Amelia Thompson, from Woodhouse in Sheffield, Tuesday April 10, 2018, who has received an invitation to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at Windsor Castle next month. Amelia Thompson was caught up in the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester that killed 22 people last year, and she is taking the grandmother of a 15-year-old who died in the attack as her guest. It will be friends and family along with members of the public on the guest list, rather than politicians and world leaders, at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding on May 19. (Peter Byrne/PA via AP)ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Greece's conservative opposition leader says his party will not be bound by the terms of a post-bailout agreement being negotiated between the government and international creditors, arguing he would implement more aggressive cost cuts.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis made the remarks Thursday as Greek officials were in Brussels to meet European creditor representatives to discuss the terms of Greece's exit from the multi-billion rescue program in August. A draft Greek proposal for post-bailout reforms - promised in return for debt relief - is to be presented at a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Sofia, Bulgaria, on April 27.

Mitsotakis' center-right New Democracy party leads in the polls over Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' left-wing Syriza party ahead of general elections, which must be held by the fall of 2019.

Kyriakos Mitsotakis leader of center-right New Democracy party leaves from the Foreign Press Association offices in Athens, Thursday, April 12, 2018. Greece's conservative opposition leader says his party would not be bound by the terms of a post-bailout agreement currently being negotiated between the government and international creditors, arguing that he would implement more aggressive cost-cutting reforms. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)

"New Democracy will not be bound by a program that is based on outdated ideas," Mitsotakis told a briefing with foreign correspondents in Athens.

Failure to honor commitments made by previous governments has been a frequent source of friction between Greece and leaders during three successive bailouts that started in 2010.

But Mitsotakis indicated his party's program would be more closely aligned with policies favored by creditors.

"No one can accuse us of not being pro-reform ... Our reforms will be bold."

Greece is expected to achieve this year another high budget surplus when not counting debt costs and economic growth of 2.5 percent. But it will remain reliant on bailout creditors who hold most of the country's whopping national debt, which has reached 365 billion euros ($450 billion), or 180 percent of gross domestic product.

Creditors have promised more generous repayment terms, including a protection mechanism for periods of low-growth or recession, in exchange for continued reforms and the further privatization of state enterprises and public utilities.

The government says it wants to abolish minimum wage restrictions, reform collective salary-bargaining agreement between labor unions and employers, and create cooperative banks to boost growth. It is unclear whether creditors would endorse the proposals.

___

Follow Gatopoulos at http://www.twitter.com/dgatopoulosNIAMEY, Niger (AP) - An aid organization says one of its German workers has been kidnapped by armed men in Niger's western Tillaberi region near the border with Mali.

German news agency dpa cites Help organization's deputy manager Bianca Kaltschmitt as saying a colleague in Niger was kidnapped on Wednesday.

An organization staffer in Niger's capital, Niamey, says the attackers came on motorcycles and seized the worker, burning the vehicle in which he was traveling. The staffer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to speak to the press.

The staffer says the aid worker and his Nigerien colleagues did not have a military escort.

Several extremist groups are active in the region where four U.S. soldiers and five Nigerien ones were killed in October.PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) - The U.S. Embassy in Cambodia has issued a security alert over an alleged plot to set off a bomb during the country's traditional New Year holiday, which runs from Thursday through Monday.

The alert advises U.S. personnel to exercise caution around Wat Phnom, a temple in Phnom Penh said by Cambodian officials and media to be the target of a plot by the Khmer National Liberation Front, an overseas anti-government group.

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Tuesday publicly warned of the alleged plot, saying strengthened security measures would ensure safety. He has repeatedly charged before a general election in July that his political opponents seek to cause unrest, in what is generally seen as an effort to disrupt their ability to organize and function freely.

The alert was posted on the embassy's website and social media outlets. "Exercise caution in areas with large crowds. If you see an unattended object, leave the area immediately. Monitor local media for updates. Be aware of your surroundings," it said.

Embassies for the U.S. and other Western nations tend to err on the side of caution in issuing such warnings.

Cambodia's Interior Ministry and a pro-government newspaper released details of the alleged plot. They said the northwestern town of Siem Reap, the site of the famous Angkor temple complex, was also an alleged target.

Hun Sen's government has used a combination of threats, accusations of conspiracies and legal action to attack his opponents. Almost all critical news media have been shut down and the opposition political party has been banned. The courts are widely regarded as being under the influence of Hun Sen's ruling Cambodian People's Party.

Hun Sen has held power for more than three decades and declared his intention to remain for at least two more five-year terms.

The website of the independent Phnom Penh Post newspaper quoted Sam Serey, the Denmark-based head of the Khmer National Liberation Front, as denying the alleged bomb plot.WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump said Thursday that an attack on Syria could take place "very soon or not so soon at all," arguing he had never signaled the timing of retaliation for a suspected chemical weapons attack that he had suggested was imminent a day earlier.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats grilled Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on the legality and constitutionality of Trump ordering an attack on Syria without explicit authorization from Congress. Mattis insisted it would be justified as an act of self-defense; he insisted he could not talk about military plans because an attack "is not yet in the offing."

Mattis said the president's National Security Council would be meeting later Thursday to "take forward the various options" for Trump. He said the president has not yet decided whether military force would be part of a U.S. response in Syria.

FILE - In this April 10, 2018, file photo, President Donald Trump listens as he meets in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington. Trump said Thursday, April 12, that an attack on Syria could take place "very soon or not so soon at all!" (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

Trump made his latest statement in a tweet Thursday morning. Trump on Wednesday had warned Russia to "get ready" for a missile attack on its ally Syria. But on Thursday, Trump tweeted: "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place."

At a House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Pentagon's 2019 budget request, Mattis said that because the U.S. had no one at the site of the suspected chemical attack in Syria last Saturday, the U.S. has no hard evidence of what happened. But he said he personally believes it was an "inexcusable" use of chemical weapons.

Asked about the risks of U.S. military retaliation, Mattis cited two concerns, starting with avoiding civilian casualties.

"On a strategic level, it's how do we keep this from escalating out of control, if you get my drift on that," he said.

At stake in Syria is the potential for confrontation, if not outright conflict, between the U.S. and Russia, former Cold War foes whose relations have deteriorated in recent years over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine, its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, most recently, its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russian lawmakers have warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime and that it could trigger a direct U.S-Russian military clash. Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted - a stark warning of a potential major confrontation.

At the House hearing, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat of Hawaii, disputed Trump's legal authority to act without congressional authority and suggested that a U.S. strike would lead to war with Russia.

"I'm not ready to speculate that that would happen," Mattis said, referring to the prospect of open conflict with Russia.

Trump, who has often said a commander in chief should never telegraph his military intentions, apparently did so himself, tweeting that missiles "will be coming" in response to the suspected chemical attack that killed at least 40 people near Damascus.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," Trump wrote. "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Mattis, however, indicated on Wednesday that evidence of what happened was still being studied. At a photo-taking session during a Pentagon meeting with his Dutch counterpart, Mattis was asked by a reporter whether he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian government.

"We're still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies," Mattis said. "We're still working on this."

Trump suggested Monday he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which the U.S. government had video and other evidence of certain aspects of an actual attack by Syrian aircraft, which involved the use of sarin gas. Trump responded then by launching dozens of Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

Asked whether the U.S. military was ready to conduct an attack in Syria if ordered, Mattis replied, "We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the president determined."

In the past, Trump has condemned others for forecasting military plans, repeatedly blistering President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign. During one speech, he said, "We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything."

Asked about Trump's tweet about an impending attack on Syria, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who ran the Pentagon for President Bill Clinton, said on CNN that it "compromises the mission somewhat."

Trump did not detail what a strike on Syria would look like, or whether these would be U.S. missiles. U.S. officials have been consulting with France, Britain and other allies on a possible joint military operation, but the timing remained in doubt Wednesday. Trump canceled a foreign trip in order to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Assad.

Shortly after his tweeted warning to Russia, Trump took a more conciliatory tone in lamenting that the U.S.-Russia relationship "is worse now than it has ever been." There is no reason for this, he wrote, adding that "Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together."

Syria's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Trump's threats to attack are "reckless" and endanger international peace and security.

The U.S., France and Britain have been in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, U.S. officials have said. A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the U.S. in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syria's political and military support from Russia and Iran.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that France has proof that the Syrian government launched chlorine gas attacks and that France would not tolerate "regimes that think everything is permitted."

The Syrian government denies responsibility.DETROIT (AP) - Uber will start doing annual criminal background checks on U.S. drivers and hire a company that constantly monitors criminal arrests as it tries to do a better job of keeping riders safe.

The move announced Thursday is one of several actions taken by the ride-hailing company under new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who said that the changes aren't just being done to polish the company's image, which has been tarnished by driver misbehavior and a long string of other embarrassing failings.

"The first thing that we want to do is really change Uber's substance, and the image may follow," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. "The announcements that we're making are just a step along the way of making Uber fundamentally safer for drivers and riders."

FILE - This June 21, 2017, file photo shows the building that houses the headquarters of Uber, in San Francisco. Uber will start doing annual criminal background checks on U.S. drivers and hire a company that constantly monitors criminal arrests as it tries to do a better job of keeping riders safe, the company announced Thursday, April 12, 2018. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Other safety features include buttons in the Uber app that allow riders to call 911 in an emergency, as well as app refinements that make it easier for riders to share their whereabouts with friends or loved ones.

Since it began operating in 2009, Uber has been dogged by reports of drivers accosting passengers, including lawsuits alleging sexual assaults. Last year the company was fined $8.9 million by the state of Colorado for allowing people with serious criminal or motor vehicle offenses to work as drivers. The Public Utilities Commission said it found nearly 60 people were allowed to drive in the state despite having previous felony convictions or major traffic violations including drunken driving.

Khosrowshahi, formerly CEO of the Expedia travel booking site, replaced hard-charging co-founder Travis Kalanick in August and faced problems almost from the start. Most recently, he has had to grapple with his company's autonomous vehicle program after one of its SUVs struck and killed a pedestrian last month in Tempe, Arizona.

Khosrowshahi said the company's exponentially fast growth prevented steps like the annual background checks from being done sooner. "I can't change the past, but I can change the things that we do going forward," he said.

Uber does 15 million trips per day worldwide, and its drivers "reflect the good and the bad and the random events of the world," Khosrowshahi said.

It was bad policy for Uber to do just one background check for drivers and never follow up, said Thomas Mauriello, a senior lecturer of forensic science at the University of Maryland and former defense department agent who was involved in background checks. But he sees the changes as positive, potentially catching bad behavior after a driver is hired on.

"Any check is better than no check," he said. "Nobody should think that any check they do is going to be 100 percent foolproof and get all information."

Some governments now require background checks after drivers are hired, but the company's policy makes it uniform nationwide, Uber said.

Uber will conduct its annual background checks through a company called Checkr starting in the next few weeks. It still does not intend to do FBI fingerprint background checks, saying its check of court records and other databases is robust, fair and "stacks up well against the alternatives."

A company, which Uber would not identify, has been hired to continually check arrest data, and that also will begin in a few weeks, Uber said.

Most governments do not require annual background checks on taxi drivers, but they continually monitor arrest records and check them against drivers' names, said John Boit, spokesman for the Taxicab, Limousine and Paratransit Association.

Mauriello says that may be true because the FBI database includes only felonies. Many sex crimes and traffic violations that could disqualify driver candidates are misdemeanors and not in the database, he said.

The app changes, which will take several weeks to become active, will roll out first in the U.S., then move to other countries. Riders will see a shield that they can touch, sending the app to another screen with safety tips, instructions on how to easily share ride information with others, and a button to call 911. When the 911 button is pressed, riders will immediately get their location to relay to dispatchers, helping riders traveling in unfamiliar areas.

Uber has been testing its new features with Denver's 911 system, which automatically sends the rider's location, as well as driver and car information, to the dispatch center. Uber says location information from smartphones is better than what's used by 911 centers, which rely on triangulation off multiple cellular telephone towers.

Evelyn Bailey, executive director of the National Association of State 911 Administrators, said there's no proof yet that smartphones provide closer location information than wireless carriers, but it's under study by the Federal Communications Commission. She said Uber's two-step calling through the app may not be intuitive for people, and she would prefer they call 911 with the keypad.

She also said Uber's system has great potential, although she would like to see test results before passing judgment. "If in fact it does deliver what it promises, then that could be very beneficial to the calling public," she said. "But if it doesn't, then I think that's a problem."

Uber says people can always call 911 from the keypad.KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The Latest on a Taliban attack in Afghanistan (all times local):

5 p.m.

The United Nations' Afghanistan assistance mission is urging warring factions in the country to protect civilians, saying the civilian death toll in the first three months of this year is a staggering 763 people.

Most civilians were killed by insurgents, and fewer people were killed by pro-government security forces than previously, said the U.N. quarterly report.

The report comes as Afghans prepare to bury Ali Dost Shams, the district governor killed in an overnight attack by Taliban fighters in central Ghazni province.

"Afghan civilians continue to suffer, caught in the conflict, in ways that are preventable; this must stop now," said Ingrid Hayden, the Secretary-General's Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan.

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9:50 a.m.

The Taliban have claimed responsibility for a blistering attack on a government compound in Afghanistan's central province of Ghazni that killed at least 15 members of the security forces.

The insurgent group's spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told The Associated Press over the telephone that after the attack in the Khuja Omari district, not far from the provincial capital also called Ghazni, all security posts in the district were under Taliban control.

His claim could not be independently confirmed and the government did not immediately respond to it.

Mujahid gave a higher casualty figure among the Afghan forces, which the Taliban often do, and a significantly lower death toll among the insurgent attackers.

He also confirmed the government's statement that the assault killed three top local officials - the district's governor, intelligence chief and deputy police chief.

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9 a.m.

A lawmaker in the Afghan Parliament said three top district officials and several security forces were killed in a Taliban attack on a government compound in Ghazni province.

Lawmaker Mohammad Arif Rahmani said the attack early Thursday morning in Khuja Omari district killed the district governor, intelligence service director and a deputy police official. Fifteen security forces were killed.

Rahmani said the Taliban planted mines to stop reinforcements from coming to help the government forces fend off the attack.

Rahmani said the district is very close to the provincial capital, Ghazni city.

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8 a.m.

Police say Taliban fighters attacked a district compound in central Afghanistan overnight, killing at least six government security forces in several hours of fighting.

Ramazan Ali Moseni, a deputy chief police in Ghazni province, said 25 Taliban were killed in the gunbattle that started Wednesday night and lasted into the morning.

Moseni said the Taliban fighters stormed the secure compound in Khuja Omari district and the security forces who were there were joined later by government reinforcements.

He said eight government security forces were wounded in the fighting.NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP) - The Latest on the Bill Cosby sexual-assault retrial (all times local):

6 p.m.

The chief accuser at Bill Cosby's sex assault retrial is set to testify.

Bill Cosby, center, walks towards the courtroom after a break in the Montgomery County Courthouse during his sexual assault retrial on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Andrea Constand says the 80-year-old comedian drugged and molested her during an encounter at his home in 2004. He says their encounter was consensual.

The trial judge says Constand is due to take the stand Friday.

On Thursday, a woman who alleges Cosby had her drink two shots that knocked her out told the jury she didn't realize until years later what he might have done to her.

Lise-Lotte Lublin was a 23-year-old model and aspiring actress when she says Cosby prodded her to drink two shots in his Las Vegas hotel suite. She says she lost consciousness and doesn't remember anything else about that night in 1989.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Lublin and Constand have done.

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4:05 p.m.

The fifth and final additional accuser testifying at Bill Cosby's sex assault retrial says she trusted him because he was "America's Dad."

Lise-Lotte Lublin was a 23-year-old model and aspiring actress when she says the comedian prodded her to drink two shots in his Las Vegas hotel suite.

She said during testimony at a courthouse in suburban Philadelphia Thursday that Cosby told her to sit between his knees and started petting her head.

She says she lost consciousness and doesn't remember anything else about that night in 1989.

Cosby is charged with drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. He says it was consensual.

Prosecutors called five other accusers to the witness stand to show that Cosby had a history of similar behavior with women.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Lublin has done.

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1 p.m.

Bill Cosby's defense lawyers are challenging model Janice Dickinson over her testimony that the comedian raped her in 1982.

Defense attorney Tom Mesereau seized on discrepancies between Dickinson's testimony Thursday and what she wrote in her 2002 autobiography about the encounter with Cosby in a hotel room in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

Dickinson says she wrote about the assault in her book, but Cosby and his lawyers pressured her and the publisher to remove the details. She says she went along because she needed the money.

Dickinson told Cosby's lawyer she "wasn't under oath" when she wrote the book like she is now.

Cosby is charged with sexually assaulting a woman at his home in 2004. He says it was consensual.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Dickinson has done.

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This item has been corrected to show that the alleged encounter happened in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, not California.

___

12:15 p.m.

Model Janice Dickinson is telling a jury that Bill Cosby raped her after giving her a pill he claimed would help her with menstrual cramps.

Dickinson is the fourth accuser to take the witness stand at Cosby's sex assault retrial in suburban Philadelphia. She told jurors Thursday she was "rendered motionless" by the pill as Cosby got on top of her in his Lake Tahoe, Nevada, hotel room.

Dickinson was 27 at the time and says she felt vaginal pain. After waking up the next morning, she says she noticed semen between her legs.

Prosecutors are calling Dickinson and other accusers to the witness stand to show the 80-year-old comedian has a history of drugging and molesting women.

Cosby is charged with sexually assaulting a woman at his home in 2004. He says it was consensual. His first trial ended in a hung jury.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Dickinson has done.

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This item has been corrected to show that the alleged assault of Dickinson happened in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, not California.

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11:10 a.m.

Bill Cosby's lawyer is trying to raise doubts about a woman's allegation that he knocked her out with pills and raped her in 1982.

Janice Baker-Kinney testified at Cosby's sexual assault retrial outside Philadelphia.

During cross examination Thursday, defense lawyer Tom Mesereau suggested she was motivated to distort the facts of a fun evening when she heard about a possible $100 million windfall from Cosby.

Baker-Kinney is one of five additional accusers prosecutors are calling to the stand to show that Cosby had a history of drugging and molesting women. He's charged with sexually assaulting a woman at his home in 2004. He says it was consensual.

Model Janice Dickinson is the next Cosby accuser to take the stand.

___

This item has been corrected to fix model Janice Dickinson's first name.

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8:40 a.m.

Comedian Bill Cosby has arrived for the fourth day of his sexual assault retrial.

Cosby walked into the suburban Philadelphia courthouse on Thursday morning.

Women who say Cosby knocked them out with intoxicants and sexually assaulted them decades ago are getting a chance to confront him.

Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt described the women as the supporting cast for chief accuser Andrea Constand.

Janice Baker-Kinney is expected to return to the witness stand Thursday after punctuating her first two hours of testimony at Cosby's sexual assault retrial with a firm declaration: "I was raped."

One woman testifying on Wednesday pointedly called Cosby a "serial rapist."

The charged rhetoric has irritated Cosby's lawyers, who have lost two bids for a mistrial.

Asked how Cosby was holding up, Wyatt said, "Mr. Cosby's great."

___

12:25 a.m.

Women who say comedian Bill Cosby knocked them out with intoxicants and sexually assaulted them decades ago are finally getting a chance to confront him - and they aren't holding back.

Janice Baker-Kinney will return to the witness stand on Thursday after punctuating her first two hours of testimony at Cosby's sexual assault retrial in suburban Philadelphia with a firm declaration: "I was raped."

One woman testifying on Wednesday pointedly called Cosby a "serial rapist," while another choked back tears as she asked him, "You remember, don't you, Mr. Cosby?"

The charged rhetoric has irritated Cosby's lawyers, who have lost two bids for a mistrial.

Prosecutors are building a case that the man once revered as "America's Dad" was one of Hollywood's biggest predators long before he met the chief accuser in his retrial.

Janice Dickinson walks through Montgomery County Courthouse during a break in Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Kathleen Bliss, lawyer for actor and comedian Bill Cosby, leaves the courtroom on lunch recess during the third day of Cosby's retrial of his sexual assault case at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., Wednesday, April 11, 2018. The first accuser to testify at Cosby's retrial described the comedian Wednesday as "a serial rapist" as she parried with his lawyers, while a second accuser tearfully confronted the comedian over a 32-year-old assault allegation: "You remember, don't you, Mr. Cosby?" (Dominick Reuter/Pool Photo via AP)

Chelan Lasha weeps as she returns to the courtroom after recess to testify against Bill Cosby during Cosby's sexual assault retrial at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. (Dominick Reuter/Pool Photo via AP)

Chelan Lasha weeps as she returns to the courtroom after recess to testify against Bill Cosby during Cosby's sexual assault retrial at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. (Dominick Reuter/Pool Photo via AP)

Chelan Lasha weeps as she returns to the courtroom after recess to testify against Bill Cosby during Cosby's sexual assault retrial at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. (Dominick Reuter/Pool Photo via AP)

Prosecutor Kevin Steele walks from the courtroom for lunch recess during Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. (Dominick Reuter/Pool Photo via AP)

Tom Mesereau, lawyer for actor and comedian Bill Cosby, leaves the courtroom on lunch recess during Cosby's sexual assault retrial at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa., on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. (Dominick Reuter/Pool Photo via AP)

Janice Dickinson walks through the Montgomery County Courthouse during a break in Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Attorney Lisa Bloom speaks to the media during a break in Bill Cosby's sexual assault trial, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Attorney Gloria Allred speaks to the media during a break in Bill Cosby's sexual assault trial, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Janice Dickinson waits outside a courtroom in the Montgomery County Courthouse before testifying during Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Janice Dickinson waits outside a courtroom in the Montgomery County Courthouse before testifying during Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Janice Baker-Kinney, right, walks towards the courtroom to testify during Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial in the Montgomery County Courthouse on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)

Janice Baker-Kinney walks towards the courtroom to testify during Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial in the Montgomery County Courthouse on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Norristown, Pa. (Mark Makela/Pool Photo via AP)NEWARK, Del. (AP) - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is accusing an award-winning University of Delaware professor of abusing lab rats.

The News Journal of Wilmington reports PETA filed complaints Wednesday with the school's president and a federal agency that helps fund the professor's research. They say an associate professor in the school's psychology and brain sciences department, Tania Roth, has subjected rats to "psychologically distressing and painful experiments" for nearly 18 years.

Roth's research focuses on how early life stressors can alter the brain and affect genetic behavior and expression. University spokesman Peter Bothum says the university follows federal animal welfare guidelines. Roth declined the Journal's request for comment.

PETA will host a meeting on Roth's research Thursday, marking the first time it has targeted a researcher at a Delaware university.

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Information from: The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., http://www.delawareonline.comCHERRY HILL, N.J. (AP) - A public employee pension crisis for state governments has deepened to a record level even after nearly nine years of economic recovery for the nation, according to a study released Thursday, leaving many states especially vulnerable if the economy hits a downturn.

The massive unfunded pension liabilities are becoming a real problem not just for public-sector retirees and workers concerned about their future but for everyone else, too. As states try to prop up their pension systems, it means less money is available for core government services such as education, public safety and parks.

The annual report from the Pew Charitable Trusts finds public worker pension funds with heavy state government involvement owed retirees and current workers $4 trillion as of 2016. They had about $2.6 trillion in assets, creating a gap of about one-third, or a record $1.4 trillion.

While the study looks only at pension funds with major state-government involvement, systems run by cities, counties, school districts and other local entities have had similar problems. Just this week, the Chicago suburb of Harvey, a city with a history of underpaying its pension obligations, announced deep layoffs in its police and fire departments . Officials blamed their rising pension obligations.

Larger cities and school districts across the country also have had service cuts or freezes over the years to pay for rising costs for their retirees.

Pew says that pension funds were well-funded until about 2000. Around that time, many states increased pension benefits without a way to pay for them. In some states, such as California and Illinois, courts usually find that the government must honor those commitments.

Also in the early 2000s, the tech stock bubble burst, spiraling investment returns downward. Some states, such as New Jersey, made things worse by skimping on their contributions.

Many pension funds had not recovered from the dot-com bust by the time the Great Recession hit less than a decade later. And many haven't recovered from that, either.

"When the next downturn comes, there will be additional pressures," David Draine, a senior officer at Pew, told The Associated Press.

Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky and New Jersey had less than half the assets they needed to meet their obligations, according to the report.

Just four states - New York, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wisconsin - had at least 90 percent funding. Draine said those states and some others that have repaired pension shortfalls since the Great Recession will be in better shape the next time the economy slides.

The Pew report found that lackluster investment returns in 2016 explained most of why the condition of pensions declined from the previous year. Pension administrators were counting on median returns of 7.5 percent that year. Instead, they made just 1 percent.

But the study says that even if the investments had met expectations, the overall position of pension funds still would have declined because state governments were not contributing enough. Only Kansas contributed more to its pension system in 2016 than it paid out, Pew found.

In New Jersey, actuaries say it will take around $6 billion a year in contributions from the state to shore up its pension system. It's taken years to get to less than half that amount in the current budget. Maintaining that progress makes it difficult to pay for other priorities, such as boosting school funding.

The study finds that states increasingly rely on investment returns in an attempt to stabilize their finances, which makes them more vulnerable to market fluctuations.

Because of a strong market last year, next year's report, which will assess the state of pensions as of 2017, is expected to look better. But market slides so far this year have not been encouraging, Draine said.

___

Follow Mulvihill at http://www.twitter.com/geoffmulvihill

__

This story has been corrected to show that South Dakota, not South Carolina, is among the four states with at least 90 percent pension funding. The study finds South Carolina's pension system is 54 percent funded.JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's Foreign Ministry has summoned Ireland's ambassador to express dismay over Dublin's mayor attending an "anti-Israel" event in Ramallah.

The ministry said in a statement Thursday that Israel expresses its "deep disappointment and shock" over the incident. It said the event in the Palestinian city of Ramallah was "explicitly" against Israel and occurred as Israel commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day. Israel expects a "public and formal" response from Ireland to his conduct, it said.

Micheal Mac Donncha participated in an Islamic conference about Jerusalem in Ramallah organized by the religious affairs adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The fate of the holy city is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mac Donncha is a supporter of the movement to boycott the Jewish state.

Israel had tried to block his entry though its airport.WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate on Thursday confirmed a former coal industry lobbyist as the second-highest official at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting him next in line to run the agency if embattled administrator Scott Pruitt is forced out or resigns.

Senators approved Andrew Wheeler as the agency's deputy administrator despite complaints from Democrats that Wheeler helped lead a fight by the coal industry to block regulations that protect Americans' health and begin to address climate change.

The Senate confirmed Wheeler Thursday 53-45. Three Democrats - Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia - joined with Republicans to support Wheeler.

Until his nomination by President Donald Trump last fall, Wheeler worked as a lobbyist with a client list that included Murray Energy, one of the nation's largest coal mining companies. He accompanied Murray CEO Robert "Bob" Murray during a series of closed-door meetings to lobby the Trump administration to kill environmental regulations affecting coal mines.

"Andrew Wheeler's coal credentials are without equal. He is, without question, a member of the coal industry's Hall of Fame," said Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

"Sadly, I am concerned that Andrew Wheeler's background means that he will never understand that saving coal is not the job of the EPA," Markey added. "It is the EPA's job to regulate coal to protect public health and the environment."

Republicans countered that Wheeler, 53, is well-qualified to lead the agency, having worked at the EPA early in his career and serving as Republican staff chief of the Senate Environment Committee before becoming a lobbyist nine years ago.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, chairman of the Senate environment panel, said Wheeler has demonstrated his commitment to sound environmental policies and has "exemplified excellence in his professional endeavors," both in government and in the private sector.

Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico had called for the vote to be delayed while lawmakers review Wheeler's credentials, citing Pruitt's uncertain status amid damaging ethics disclosures. His request was denied.

"The problem with the Wheeler nomination is if (Pruitt) goes tomorrow, Wheeler is in fact the administrator. And that's a very, very serious problem," Udall said Wednesday. "And so what we're going to ask ... is that he go through a vetting process similar to taking over the Environmental Protection Agency."

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., said the circumstances surrounding Wheeler have changed since the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted along party lines in February to advance Wheeler's nomination.

"I think it would be best advised to hold off on this vote to see if we are voting on the acting administrator or the deputy administrator," Cardin said, citing a "cloud over Administrator Pruitt."

Heitkamp, who faces a tough re-election in a state won easily by President Donald Trump, said she is confident that Wheeler will "be open to working on issues important to North Dakota in a pragmatic and fair way. And I'll hold him accountable to make sure he implements the mission of the EPA in a way that works for my state."

Heitkamp and Manchin, who also faces a tough race in state Trump won easily, broke last year with their party's leaders to vote in favor of confirming Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general aligned with the oil and gas industry. Since arriving at EPA in February 2017, Pruitt has worked relentlessly to scrap, roll back and rewrite pollution regulations opposed by the fossil-fuel industry.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the sole Republican to oppose Pruitt, also said she intends to support Wheeler's nomination.

"Mr. Wheeler has demonstrated that he understands the mission of the EPA and the role of Congress when it comes to oversight and accountability," Collins said in a statement.

Senators asked Wheeler about meeting with the Trump administration on behalf of Murray Energy during a November hearing. Wheeler acknowledged he attended but said he couldn't remember any details.

Photos later emerged that showed Wheeler sitting at the table during an undisclosed meeting where Murray handed Energy Secretary Rick Perry a four-page "action plan" to revive the nation's struggling coal industry. The Trump administration later carried out several of the recommended actions.

Like Pruitt, Wheeler has expressed public skepticism about the consensus of climate scientists that the continued burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming.

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Associated Press writer Michael Biesecker contributed to this story.

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Follow Matthew Daly: http://twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDCNEW YORK (AP) - Portraying a heroic sex crimes detective on television has provided Mariska Hargitay with a platform to help sexual assault victims in real life.

Hargitay, who stars as Detective Olivia Benson in the police procedural "Law and Order: SVU," has turned her clout as an advocate for victims into the upcoming HBO documentary, "I Am Evidence," where she also serves as producer.

"I feel like I was given a gift with this role. I was given a platform. It was a way for me to respond. I've had the privilege of having had so many survivors share their stories with me, and I feel a responsibility to that," Hargitay said.

FILE - In this May 27, 2017 file photo, actress Mariska Hargitay attends the Hamptons Magazine Memorial Day Soiree in Southampton, N.Y. Hargitay, who stars as Detective Olivia Benson in the police procedural "Law and Order: SVU" for the past 19 seasons, has turned her clout as an advocate for victims in the upcoming HBO documentary, "I Am Evidence," where she also serves as producer. It premieres Monday on HBO. (Photo by Scott Roth/Invision/AP, File)

She admits backing the documentary was driven by her "own outrage" of the way victims of sexual assault are treated by the system. "People say, 'why did you make this movie?' I said because I was really mad," Hargitay said.

The film, which premieres Monday on HBO, focuses on four survivors whose rape kits went untested for years. Part of the problem is that many states have no legislation that demands testing within a reasonable period. As a result, hundreds of thousands of kits are backlogged, with many never tested.

"I just couldn't comprehend that in this country this was going on. That they were stockpiling rape kits," Hargitay said.

The documentary also examines the victim blaming that some rape survivors encounter from law enforcement officers who aren't properly trained.

Hargitay started the Joyful Heart Foundation in 2004 as a means to help victims of sexual assault heal from their emotional trauma.

She said sexual assault survivors have reached out to her through letters and emails. Over time, she realized that Benson serves as a role model for their unheard voices, and want to make sure they are heard.

While the film deals with how rape victims are treated, Hargitay envisions a world where sexual assault never happens again. Hargitay feels fixing these problems are more basic than we realize.

"Compassion and empathy would heal so much, and it's so simple. Women have carried this burden for so long, and it's men that need to engage," Hargitay said. "Everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten."

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Follow John Carucci at http://www.twitter.com/jacarucciMILWAUKEE (AP) - Newspaper publishers across the U.S. already strapped by years of declining revenue say they're dealing with an existential threat: Recently imposed tariffs on Canadian newsprint driving up their business costs.

The tariffs are a response to a complaint to the U.S. Department of Commerce from a hedge fund-owned paper producer in Washington state, which argues that its Canadian competitors are taking advantage of government subsidies to sell their product at unfairly low prices. The tariffs, imposed in January and increased in March, are not permanent yet. But newspaper publishers are bracing for another blow to an industry that has shrunk with the loss of advertising revenue to the internet.

Critics of the paper tariffs say the businesses that will ultimately be harmed are not Canadian paper producers, but U.S. newspapers that will have to cut staff and reduce publication days to afford higher prices of newsprint - the sheets newspapers are printed on. The newspaper industry employs just over 150,000 Americans, which is about 276,000, or 65 percent, fewer than two decades ago.

In this April 11, 2018, photo, production handler Pat Breidenbach straightens out a stack of newspapers while working at the Janesville Gazette Printing & Distribution plant in Janesville, Wis. Newspaper publishers across the U.S. already strapped by years of declining revenue say they're dealing with an existential threat: Recently imposed tariffs on Canadian newsprint driving up their business costs. (Angela Major/The Janesville Gazette via AP)

"To get an unbudgeted increase of this magnitude will be for many publishers very, very serious to catastrophic," said Tom Slaughter, the executive director of the Inland Press Association, which represents about 1,500 daily and non-daily newspapers in every state.

A large metro newspaper can expect annual increases of about $3 million in printing costs, according to Paul Boyle, senior vice president for the News Media Alliance. While larger papers might be able to survive the increase, Boyle said smaller publications might not.

"I've heard from small publishers who've said, 'I'm worried about shutting my doors,'" he said.

Boyle said his organization - formerly called the Newspaper Association of America - is compiling a survey from its member and nearly every publisher is exploring layoffs and scaling back news coverage.

Steve Stewart, publisher of The State Journal in Frankfort, Kentucky, told readers in a March 30 column that the newspaper they were reading cost 10 percent more to produce than a few weeks earlier and could cost as much as 40 percent more in a few months. He said this will result in fewer pages, higher subscription costs and less non-local content.

The newsprint tariffs reflect President Donald Trump's tough new approach to U.S. trade relations. Trump is engaged in a tense standoff with China over Beijing's sharp-elbowed attempts to gain access to U.S. technology. He's trying to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. And his administration has wrangled with Canada directly over low-priced Canadian timber imports, Canadian barriers to U.S. dairy farmers, and now cheap Canadian newsprint.

The International Trade Commission is expected to make a final determination on the tariffs in August or September.

Canadian newsprint producers began paying an average of 6.53 percent more to export their products to the U.S. in January, when the Commerce Department concluded that would help offset the foreign paper mills' advantage over American companies. In March, the department increased the cost by another 22 percent after its preliminary investigation concluded that one Canadian company, British Columbia-based Catalyst, was underselling the uncoated groundwood paper newspapers use by that much less.

In response to the second increase, Catalyst said the tariff was "without merit" and that it "will continue to vigorously defend itself against an unwarranted and onerous U.S. trade action."

The North Pacific Paper Company, which New York hedge fund One Rock Capital Partners bought in 2016, petitioned for the tariffs, arguing that Canadian companies had an unfair advantage. NORPAC, which employs about 300 people, is the only U.S. paper producer making that argument.

"While our company understands the concerns recently surfaced by some newspaper publishers, which also face a challenging marketplace, we strongly disagree with the notion that their industry requires low-priced, subsidized newsprint from Canada to sustain their own business model," Craig Annenberg, the CEO of NORPAC, said in a statement. The statement went on to say that "high-quality journalism in communities across the country should not depend on unfairly traded inputs that cause material injury to a U.S. industry and American jobs."

The U.S. currently has five operating mills, including NORPAC. Three are in Washington state, with one of them partly owned by a Canadian company. Canada owns the remaining two in Georgia and Mississippi.

Publishers say Canadian imports are not the reason for the decline of U.S.-based paper mills, but rather a 75 percent drop in newsprint consumption over the last two decades. That has led mills to switch to more profitable products such as the boxes Amazon uses for shipping, said Tony Smithson, vice president of printing operations at Bliss Communications, which owns multiple newspapers and radio stations in Wisconsin. The newsprint the company buys all comes from Canada.

Smithson said that even if every paper mill in the U.S. operated at full capacity, they still would only be able to produce about 60 percent of the newsprint consumed in the country. He said that raises another concern: A scarcity of available newsprint if Canadian producers decide to ship to other countries to avoid the new tariffs.

"The hidden danger isn't just in the price. ... The hidden danger is in availability," he said.

China, for example, doesn't accept mixed-waste paper from the U.S. or elsewhere to produce recycled newsprint, so Chines publishers buy their product from Canada and Chinese demand is high, Boyle said.

Before a final decision on tariffs is made, publishers can still make their case with the International Trade Commission, which has scheduled a hearing on July 17. Boyle said the ITC has the power to reject the tariffs, but Smithson isn't optimistic.

"If you think about it politically, once tariffs are in place, they're essentially permanent," he said. "There's no political capital in making a tariff go away, because then you put a target on yourself that says, 'Hey, this politician is getting rid of American jobs.'"

___

This story has been corrected to reflect that the publisher of The State Journal warned that the tariffs would lead to less non-local news content, not less local content.

___

Follow Ivan Moreno on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ivanjourno

In this April 11, 2018, photo, production workers print and sort newspapers at the Janesville Gazette Printing & Distribution plant in Janesville, Wis. Newspaper publishers across the U.S. already strapped by years of declining revenue say they're dealing with an existential threat: Recently imposed tariffs on Canadian newsprint driving up their business costs. (Angela Major/The Janesville Gazette via AP)

In this April 11, 2018, photo, production workers stack newspapers onto a cart at the Janesville Gazette Printing & Distribution plant in Janesville, Wis. Newspaper publishers across the U.S. already strapped by years of declining revenue say they're dealing with an existential threat: Recently imposed tariffs on Canadian newsprint driving up their business costs. (Angela Major/The Janesville Gazette via AP)HOUSTON (AP) - A federal jury convicted a former Texas congressman of fraud and conspiracy on Thursday for misusing charitable donations to pay for personal and political expenses.

Steve Stockman, a Republican, was accused of conspiring with two staffers to bilk conservative foundations out of at least $775,000 that was meant for charitable purposes and voter education. A campaign worker and an aide have pleaded guilty to various charges.

Stockman, 61, showed no emotion as the verdict was read in a Houston courtroom: Jurors found him guilty of 23 of the 24 counts he faced, including mail and wire fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. He was found not guilty on one count of wire fraud.

FILE - In this Jan. 3, 2013, file photo, Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, right, participates in a mock swearing-in ceremony in Washington. A federal jury has convicted the former Texas congressman of fraud and conspiracy for misusing charitable donations to pay for personal and political expenses. Stockman was found guilty Thursday, April 12, 2018, following a three-week trial in Houston. Prosecutors say Stockman conspired with two staffers to bilk conservative foundations out of at least $775,000 that was meant for charitable purposes and voter education. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

The judge deemed the former congressman a flight risk and ordered him into federal custody. Stockman could face decades in prison when sentenced in August.

"When public officials use their office to defraud donors and violate federal law, we will hold them accountable," Houston-based U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick said. "Corrupt officials like former congressman Stockman make it harder for the honest ones to do their jobs."

Stockman "abused his position as a congressman," Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Justice Department's Criminal Division said.

An FBI affidavit alleged that shortly after beginning his second term in the U.S. House in 2013, Stockman solicited $350,000 in charitable donations from an unidentified wealthy businessman on behalf of Life Without Limits. The Nevada-based nonprofit had been set up to help people through traumatic events.

The donation was solicited for the purpose of renovating a house in Washington called the Freedom House. But the check was deposited at a bank branch in Webster, Texas, into an account set up by Stockman doing business as Life Without Limits, according to the affidavit.

Financial records show that Stockman made no significant expenditures toward the purchase, renovation or operation of Freedom House, which never opened. According to the affidavit, Stockman secretly diverted the money to pay for a variety of personal expenses and to funnel contributions to his campaign under the guise that they were from other people.

Stockman's attorney, Sean Buckley, has said Stockman committed no crime in using the money as he did. Following his arrest in March 2017, Stockman said a "deep state" shadow government was targeting him. He called the verdicts Thursday "really an unfair situation."

"Our theory is that these mega-donors who donated to Mr. Stockman were donating not because they wanted Mr. Stockman to use the funds on particular projects as the government has claimed but because they wanted to finance Mr. Stockman as a politician, to finance his political activities and to finance his projects," Buckley said Thursday.

His three-week trial included testimony from a conservative operative who said Stockman also hired people to spy on three Republican state lawmakers. Benjamin Wetmore told jurors that shortly after Stockman took office in 2013, he became concerned that one of the lawmakers, Rep. James White of Woodville, was considering a primary challenge to Stockman.

Stockman said in a text to Wetmore that White, who is black, worried him.

"Republicans love black conservatives," Stockman wrote.

Wetmore said he was hired by Stockman to oversee the surveillance. He told the court that three months of trailing White yielded nothing incriminating.

Stockman served a term in the U.S. House from 1995 until 1997, and then another from 2013 until 2015, representing an area east of Houston. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014 but lost in the Republican primary to incumbent John Cornyn, who went on to win re-election.Image of European buckthorn, which is the overwintering host for soybean aphid

(photo credit: Paul Wray, Iowa State Univ., Bugwood.org).

by Marcella Windmuller-Campione (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Forest Resources) and Robert Koch (Assistant Professor, Dept. of Entomology)While there are several options for managing the destructive soybean aphid, including insecticidesand aphid-resistant soybean varieties, these options focus solely on the soybean field. However, it is very likely that buckthorn is lurking (and reproducing!) in your woodland or an adjacent publicly own forest, proving the required overwintering habitat for soybean aphid. Research in Ontario, as well as in Minnesota, has observed the relationship between proximity of buckthorn and early seasonsoybean aphid population levels. What has been little explored is if this relationship varies with buckthorn density  Does higher density buckthorn result in higher early season soybean aphid populations? If so, are there management techniques that we can implement to reduce buckthorn density, which could possibly reduce soybean aphid populations, thus improving quality and yield for soybean growers? These questions require an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together researchfaculty, Extension educators, and soybean growers with expertise in forestry, entomology, and agriculture.We are looking for soybean growers in central and southern Minnesota who havethat they own and/or are publicly owned and. Our request is for cooperators to allow field crews from the U of MN to sample in both the woodland and the soybean fields. Field crews will set-up forest inventory plots in the woodlands to gain information on the overstory, regenerating seedlings and saplings, and buckthorn density once during the summer growing season. This information will be shared with the landowner. Field crews will use transects to sample soybean aphid populations 2 to 3 times during the growing season to quantify how soybean aphid levels change. This information will be used to test the relationships between buckthorn density, buckthorn proximity, and soybean aphid populations through the growing season.If you are interested and/or would like additional information on participating in this study please contact Dr. Marcella Windmuller-Campione at 612-624-3699 (office) or 847-772-5458 (cell) or by email ( mwind@umn.edu ) or website (https://www.forestry.umn.edu/marcella-windmuller-campione)We are planning toWASHINGTON (AP) - Do not ask the "resistance warriors" to water down their message.

No, with control of Congress and statehouses across the nation at stake, the liberal candidates who packed into a Washington hotel ballroom Thursday are convinced they will win in this fall's midterm elections only by embracing the passions and policies of the Democratic Party's far left flank.

"In this moment in American history, our job together is to stand up. It is to fight back," Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders declared in an afternoon speech. He added, "The majority of the American people are on our side."

FILE - In this April 4, 2018, file photo, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a rally commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn. Hundreds of liberal candidates are streaming into Washington this week as the Democratic Party's far left flank intensifies in its push to seize control of Congress, statehouses and local governments across the country this fall. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)

The message was cheered by an estimated 450 like-minded Democrats, most running in state and local elections this fall, who gathered for a four-day conference that offered a fresh window into intraparty tensions over how to capitalize on the surge in grassroots enthusiasm in the age of President Donald Trump.

"Any old blue just won't do," they chanted before Sanders took the stage, a knock on their party's centrists.

Earlier in the day, progressive strategist Joel Silberman shared this piece of advice for candidates appearing on television: "Dress like a conservative and talk like a socialist."

They are unapologetic supporters of policies like "Medicare for all," universal preschool, "debt-free" college and a $15-per-hour minimum wage. Animated by opposition to the Republican president, the self-described "resistance warriors" are aggressively fighting any calls to moderate their liberal passions.

Privately, at least, Democrats elsewhere are reluctant to embrace a midterm strategy aimed at the Democratic Party's most liberal voters, particularly when some of the most competitive races this fall will take place in regions Trump won two years ago.

Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who worked for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, suggested that tension within the party can be healthy.

"Competitive primaries help organize and help fuel the enthusiasm that'll help us take control," he said. "Candidates don't need to move all to the left or all to the center. They need to come across as running for what they genuinely believe."

Republicans, meanwhile, encouraged Democratic efforts to celebrate their most liberal elements, certain that candidates who emulate progressive icons like Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren will alienate moderate Democrats and disaffected Trump supporters who might otherwise back Democrats this fall or sit out the midterm elections altogether.

"It'll be tough to fight that winning message that Elizabeth Warren sends out to the world: socialism," said a sarcastic Doug Deason, a prominent Texas donor who is helping fund the GOP's midterm efforts. "That's great. That's what they should embrace."

They did just that at the liberal conference, which was designed to give lesser-known Democratic candidates at all levels a crash course on winning in the Trump era.

It's not enough to simply oppose the Republican president, said organizers, which included the Progressive Change Candidate Committee and the Sanders-backed group Our Revolution.

Participants were learning how to look good on television, find donors, design websites and, perhaps most importantly, develop a message around progressive economic priorities. The progressive movement's most aggressive allies were on hand: groups such as Indivisible, Planned Parenthood and the AFL-CIO.

Attendees represented at least 47 states, with the largest delegations coming from an assortment of red and blue states, including New Jersey, Texas, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York.

Organizers report that 64 percent of the candidates are running in districts Trump won in 2016. More than 80 percent have never held office; 40 percent are people of color; 71 percent are under the age of 44; and 20 percent come from the LGBTQ community.

The Democratic Party will lose this fall if it doesn't embrace a broad slate of uncompromising progressive candidates who deliver "an Elizabeth Warren-style economic populist message," said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

"Not only can you run on your values and win, but it is necessary to do so in some of these red districts," Green said.ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - Two western senators are proposing to expand access to a $4 billion federal program that has allowed public schools and libraries throughout the U.S. to obtain high-speed internet at affordable rates as one way to close the digital divide that persists across American Indian communities and other rural areas.

Librarians, policymakers and other experts gathered Thursday in Washington, D.C., for a panel discussion on the legislation and the needs of tribal communities.

Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn told the group that investing in broadband infrastructure is critical because those investments increasingly determine which cities, towns and tribal nations thrive.

FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2015, FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, takes her seat before the start of an FCC open hearing and vote on Net Neutrality in Washington, D.C. Clyburn addressed a gathering of librarians and other experts Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Washington, D.C., as the group discussed challenges to providing high-speed internet in American Indian communities. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, file)

"Just like water, roads, railways and electricity, broadband is now fundamental when it comes to our community development," Clyburn said.

The commissioner also ticked off a number of statistics, saying they can't be shared enough given the lack of disparity between the nation's urban and rural populations.

In 2016, more than 92 percent of the overall population had broadband service at levels deemed by the FCC as enough for advanced telecommunication. Clyburn said the numbers were less positive for rural and tribal areas, where about one-third of people lack access.

She also said 14 million Americans living in rural areas and more than 1 million living in tribal communities lack access to mobile broadband.

"We're talking about 5G," she said. "There are some people who are trying to figure out what G is. I'm serious."

Clyburn and others said society has become increasingly digital dependent and pointed to the social and economic development that comes from being able to access resources, services and even health care online.

While touting the success of the federal government's E-rate program, which provides discounts to assist most schools and libraries obtain high-speed internet access at affordable rates, they said more needs to be done for tribes to tap the funding.

Most of the nation's public libraries have received E-rate funding, but officials estimate only 15 percent of tribal libraries have received it.

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, and Republican Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada are sponsoring legislation that would improve and increase access to the universal service support program and establish a $100 million pilot program for broadband access in Indian Country for tribes without libraries.

The senators say over 80 percent of rural tribal communities in New Mexico and 70 percent of those in Nevada lack access to broadband.

Heinrich said the legislation has the potential to benefit remote Alaskan villages, pueblos throughout New Mexico, chapter houses across the vast Navajo Nation and many other tribal communities.

The bill has the support of Clyburn and the American Library Association.

In New Mexico, some pueblos formed a consortium and won federal funding to build their own network, which is now nearly complete. The project marked the largest federal investment in broadband deployment in Indian Country.

Cynthia Aguilar, a librarian with Santo Domingo Pueblo in northern New Mexico, described bringing more broadband capacity to her tribe as an innovation as large as establishing the railroad more than a century ago in what was then the territory of New Mexico.

She described the one internet connection that currently feeds the community center where the library is located. With more than 100 tribal employees using the internet, business is sometimes left undone at the end of the day due to a lack of connectivity.

"Once the fiber optics are lit, it will be black and white," she said of the difference. "It will be so spectacular. I'm even speechless to say the words right now."

Clyburn likened libraries like the one run by Aguilar as life lines for their communities because they are often the only places where rural residents can access the internet. Without changes, she said the U.S. runs the risk of having an entire generation of rural residents left offline.COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - The Latest on the scheduling of trials for local governments suing over the opioid epidemic (all times local):

4:15 p.m.

A lawyer for local governments suing over the opioid epidemic is applauding a judge's decision this week to schedule trials in the case.

Paul Hanly says the trial schedule is important to the case because it means the sides can start exchanging more information and the judge's rulings on pretrial motions can help set the direction of the case.

The co-lead counsel for plaintiffs in the case says that can help lead to a settlement.

Judge Aaron Polster says he wants to try three cases from northern Ohio in March 2019.

A spokeswoman for one plaintiff, Summit County, says the county is disappointed drugmakers were reluctant to settle but ready to go to trial.

___

10 a.m.

A judge with an audacious plan to settle hundreds of lawsuits filed by government entities over the opioid crisis has changed course slightly.

Federal Judge Dan Polster has set a schedule to start trying some of the cases in March 2019 as settlement talks continue.

His goal remains reaching a massive deal quickly. But Cleveland-based Polster said in an order issued Wednesday that the parties should exchange evidence and hold bellwether trials on issues important to the cases.

The first cases in line for trial are those filed by Cleveland and Ohio's Cuyahoga and Summit counties.

Polster is presiding over lawsuits filed by nearly 500 local and county governments over the opioid crisis that killed 42,000 Americans in 2016.WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on Andrew Wheeler, President Donald Trump's nominee for the No. 2 post at the Environmental Protection Agency (all times local):

4:30 p.m.

The Senate has confirmed a former coal industry lobbyist to be the second-highest official at the Environmental Protection Agency.

As the EPA's deputy administrator, Andrew Wheeler will be next in line to lead the agency if embattled administrator Scott Pruitt is forced out or resigns.

The Senate confirmed Wheeler Thursday 53-45. Three Democrats - Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia - joined with Republicans to approve Wheeler.

Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico had called for the vote to be delayed while lawmakers review Wheeler's credentials, citing Pruitt's uncertain status amid damaging ethics disclosures. His request was denied.

Wheeler worked at the EPA in the early 1990s and was staff chief of the Senate Environment Committee before becoming a lobbyist.

____

10:50 a.m.

Republicans have cleared a procedural hurdle to confirm a former coal industry lobbyist as the No. 2 official at the Environmental Protection Agency.

If confirmed as deputy administrator, Andrew Wheeler would be next in line to lead if embattled administrator Scott Pruitt is forced out or resigns.

The Senate voted 53-45 Thursday to limit debate on Wheeler's nomination, clearing a final vote as soon as Thursday afternoon. Three Democrats joined with Republicans to move the nomination forward. They are Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico called for the vote to be delayed while lawmakers review Wheeler's credentials to run the agency, citing Pruitt's uncertain status amid damaging ethics disclosures.

___

12:11 a.m.

Senate Republicans are moving to confirm a former coal industry lobbyist as the second-highest official at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting him next in line if embattled administrator Scott Pruitt were forced out.

A Senate vote could come as soon as Thursday on the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to serve as the EPA's deputy administrator.

The push comes as Democrats and a few Republicans are calling on President Donald Trump to replace Pruitt, whose tenure has been threatened by a series of damaging ethics disclosures. If confirmed, Wheeler would be poised to become the agency's active chief, at least temporarily, if Pruitt were to leave.

Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico called on Republicans to delay a vote on Wheeler while lawmakers review his credentials to run the agency, citing Pruitt's uncertain status.TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) - Two brothers admitted in federal court on Thursday that they sent $17,000 to an al-Qaida leader who they knew was planning terrorist attacks.

They are the last of four defendants to plead guilty in what prosecutors say was a scheme to collect money through fake credit card transactions and other means to support terrorism.

Asif Salim, 37, and Sultane Salim, 43, both pleaded guilty in federal court in Toledo to concealing the financing of terrorism.

Prosecutors agreed to drop more serious charges, including conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, against the pair in exchange for the pleas. Both face sentences of up to eight years in prison, according to the plea deal.

Federal prosecutors have said in court documents that the four men raised nearly $30,000 for Anwar al-Awlaki, considered an inspirational leader of al-Qaida before he was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.

U.S. officials linked him to the planning and execution of several attacks targeting American and Western interests.

Michael Freeman, an assistant U.S. attorney, said Sultane Salim, who lived in the Columbus area, provided $15,000, while Asif Salim, who had attended Ohio State University, gave $2,000 that was eventually delivered to Awlaki.

Sultane Salim's attorney, Cherrefe Kadri, said she could not say much about the case until sentencing is completed.

On Wednesday, Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad, an Indian citizen, also pleaded guilty to concealing the financing of terrorism.

He collected the money from the Salim brothers, Freeman said, and then deposited it in his brother's bank account in the Toledo area.

Mohammad's brother, Yahya Farooq Mohammad, then arranged for the money to get to Awlaki, Freeman said.

Yahya Farooq Mohammad, also an Indian citizen, was sentenced in November to 27 years in prison after pleading guilty to supporting terrorism and trying to arrange the killing of a federal judge overseeing his case.INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Senate candidate Todd Rokita likely violated ethics laws as Indiana's secretary of state by repeatedly accessing a Republican donor database from his government office, prompting party officials to lock him out of the system until he angrily complained, three former GOP officials told The Associated Press.

Rokita, currently a congressman, is in a bitter primary fight for the right to challenge Joe Donnelly, who is considered one of the Senate's most vulnerable Democrats. The alleged ethics flap over Rokita's use of the Indiana Republican Party's Salesforce database during work hours occurred in 2009, as he was wrapping up a second term as the state's chief elections official and angling for higher office.

Indiana law prohibits state employees from engaging in political activity while on duty or acting in an official capacity. It also prohibits work on anything outside official duties while on the clock, or ordering others to do so, and from using state resources for political purposes.

FILE - In this Aug. 9, 2017, file photo, Indiana Rep. Todd Rokita speaks during a news conference outside of the Indiana Statehouse in Indianapolis. Rokita likely violated ethics laws as Indiana's secretary of state by repeatedly accessing a Republican donor database from his government office, prompting party officials to lock him out of the system until he angrily complained, three former GOP officials told The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)

The former officials, who have direct knowledge of the situation, spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk about it publicly. They did not report Rokita's activity to authorities at the time.

Rokita's campaign spokesman Nathan Brand said Thursday that Rokita used the database to keep his personal rolodex, which Brand said was allowed under state ethics guidance the office received. However, Rokita's campaign could not produce documents outlining the guidance, and the office of current Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson said it could not locate any such records.

"This is a baseless and unsubstantiated hit job. There has been no evidence of wrongdoing provided beside the word of anonymous sources with ties to political opponents," Brand said.

State party officials were alarmed when they discovered that a computer in Rokita's Statehouse office frequently logged in to the database containing detailed campaign information on activists and donors. They froze his access to the system but restored it after Rokita complained.

His government use of the database violated the party's user agreement, which is intended to prevent officeholders from violating state ethics law, one of the officials said.

The secretary of state's office later asked for a list of GOP county chairmen and their contact info, according to the officials and emails obtained by the AP. But after Rokita's office was denied a copy, an IP address tied to his government office again accessed the database, according to an email exchange between a state party official and a county party chairman.

Soon thereafter, county party chairmen began receiving mailers from the secretary of state's office promoting Rokita's "Rethinking Redistricting" initiative, the emails state.

Rokita's redistricting plan, which he championed while running for Congress in 2010, would have made it a felony for lawmakers to take into account political considerations during the once-in-a-decade redrawing of legislative and congressional districts. As secretary of state, his office had no authority to enact the plan, which would have required approval from the Legislature and governor. He did, however, receive considerable recognition for the initiative, which boosted his public profile.

Indiana law allows for minor "de minimis" crossover between public and political business. But David Orentlicher, a University of Nevada Las Vegas law school professor who specializes in government ethics issues, said Rokita's actions were "clearly a 'no-no.'"

"Using your government staff (for political business) during their work day, while they are using government resources? This is well across the line and not a hard call," said Orentlicher, who was formerly a Democratic state representative in Indiana and also taught at Indiana University law school.

It's not the first time Rokita has drawn scrutiny for mixing official business with politics. The AP previously reported that congressional staffers often felt obligated to do political work to help their boss' campaigns. And a February analysis of state and congressional spending records revealed Rokita has spent more than $3 million in public money on ad campaigns that often coincide with his bids for office.

Democratic elections attorney Bill Groth said he believes that Rokita or his employees were "engaging in unlawful political activity, the unlawful use of state property, and ghost employment."

"Indiana law strictly requires elected state officials to wall off their public duties from political activities," Groth said.

Though prosecutions are rare, penalties for breaking state ethics laws range from a monetary fine, firing or impeachment, on up to a felony offense. In any event, charges can no longer be brought because Indiana's statute of limitations requires they be filed within two years for a misdemeanor, and five years for a felony.

Former Indiana schools Superintendent Tony Bennett's use of the Republican database also attracted scrutiny. He was forced to resign as Florida's schools chief in 2013 after a series of AP investigative stories revealed, among other things, that his staffers had similarly accessed the GOP database during working hours and downloaded lists of prominent Republican donors.

The AP's investigation revealed Bennett and his staff had been doing political work on state time during his losing campaign against former Democratic Indiana schools Superintendent Glenda Ritz.WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump on Thursday credited himself with a steady hand in dealing with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, despite publicly toying with the idea of firing Mueller and denouncing the probe repeatedly as a "witch hunt."

At one level, the White House indeed appears to have been "cooperative," as Trump stated.

A look at his tweet on the matter and the complexities behind it:

President Donald Trump walks into the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, Thursday, April 12, 2018, to speak about tax policy. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

TRUMP: "I have agreed with the historically cooperative, disciplined approach that we have engaged in with Robert Mueller (Unlike the Clintons!). I have full confidence in Ty Cobb, my Special Counsel, and have been fully advised throughout each phase of this process."

THE FACTS: Despite Trump's insults and fury with the process, there has been a degree of cooperation. More than 20 White House employees have been made available for interviews with Mueller's team. The White House has turned over more than 20,000 pages of records; Trump's campaign has given Mueller more than 1.4 million pages.

Trump, though, has been far from agreeable in his public statements and some of his actions.

He repeatedly has assailed intelligence and law enforcement agencies, most recently calling Mueller's inquiry "an attack on our country." He has worked in tandem with some conservatives to lay the groundwork either to dismiss or discredit Mueller.

Mueller is investigating potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016, and whether the president's actions constitute obstruction of justice.

In tweets dating to last May, when Mueller was appointed special counsel by Trump's Justice Department, Trump has branded the investigation a "witch hunt" and accused it of being tainted by Democrats, even though Mueller is a Republican.

Trump has derided the FBI's reputation as being the "worst in history" and retweeted a post saying new FBI Director Christopher Wray "needs to clean house."

In a barrage of tweets last month, for instance, Trump said the investigation never should have started, claimed it was based on "fraudulent activities" and was a "WITCH HUNT," and contended it was being led by "13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters."

In February, Trump blessed the release of a classified memo on FBI surveillance powers that was assembled by Republicans on the House intelligence committee and that he said vindicated him.

Trump dismissed pleas from his FBI director and the second-ranking Justice official, Trump-nominated Rod Rosenstein, to keep the memo under wraps because it was inaccurate and lacked critical context.

Committee Democrats later released their own memo to counter the argument that Republicans had promoted in their document - that the FBI and Justice Department conspired against Trump as they investigated his ties to Russia.

The White House had objected to the Democratic memo's release, citing national security concerns. That sent the Democrats back to negotiations with the FBI, which then approved a version with material blacked out.

Trump had no such concerns about the GOP memo, which he declassified in full over strong objections from the FBI.

___

Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

___

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheckLOS ANGELES (AP) - A federal judge issued a nationwide injunction Thursday barring the U.S. Justice Department from giving priority status for multimillion-dollar community policing grants to departments that agree to cooperate with immigration officials.

The ruling came after Los Angeles - a sanctuary city - filed a request for the injunction.

"This is yet another dagger in the heart of the administration's efforts to use federal funds as a weapon to make local jurisdictions complicit in its civil immigration enforcement policies," Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer said.

Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer, middle, is flanked by Police Chief Charlie Beck, right, and Mayor Eric Garcetti during a press conference in Los Angeles Thursday, April 12, 2018. A federal judge in Los Angeles has issued a nationwide injunction barring the Justice Department from awarding priority consideration for a community policing grant if they agreed to cooperate with immigration officials. Feuer said the ruling was a "complete victory." (AP Photo/Mike Balsamo)

The Justice Department called the ruling "overbroad and inconsistent with the rule of law" and vowed to defend its position.

The federal COPS Hiring Program awards more than $98 million to police departments across the U.S. to hire more officers for community policing.

In September, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said departments could receive additional points in the application process by agreeing to fully cooperate with immigration authorities.

Los Angeles was not awarded one of the grants in 2017.

It alleged in seeking the injunction that the Justice Department has overstepped its authority and violated the constitution by linking the money to cooperating with immigration authorizes.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Manuel Real said the conditions would "upset the constitutional balance" by forcing police to participate in immigration enforcement.

The Los Angeles Police Department has routinely applied for the grant. The department was awarded $3.1 million in 2016 and $16.8 million between 2009 and 2012, Chief Charlie Beck said.

The Justice Department wanted Los Angeles police to provide access to city jails, share technical information about investigations and allow access to information about arrestees, Beck said.

Justice Department spokesman Devin O'Malley said the agency has the "lawful discretion" to give additional consideration to police departments that agree to cooperate with federal immigration officials, especially those that provide information about people who are in the U.S. illegally and may have committed crimes.

Many cities in the U.S. have implemented sanctuary laws as a way to focus law enforcement officers on local crime rather than detaining people suspected of being in the country illegally. Sessions has said that cities that don't help enforce immigration law are endangering public safety.

___

Follow Balsamo on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MikeBalsamo1 .SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) - A 15-year-old boy is challenging a policy that prevents high school boys from competing on girls' dance teams in South Dakota.

Attorneys on Thursday filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the South Dakota High School Activities Association on behalf of Freddie Linden and his mother.

Linden tried to join the program at Dakota Valley High School in North Sioux City, South Dakota, after he graduated from middle school but was told he couldn't.

According to the lawsuit, the association's policy allows girls to participate on boys' teams when there is no girls' team. But the policy does not allow boys to participate on girls' teams if the school does not field a team for boys.

Linden's attorneys contend the policy is discriminatory and unconstitutional, the Argus Leader reported.

Executive director Dan Swartos said the association has not been served with paperwork and had no comment.

Linden began dancing at the age of 7, according to the lawsuit. His mother, Stephanie, recognized that he had talent and when he turned 9, she rented an apartment in Los Angeles where he trained extensively, often with adults and older children.

After two years, he moved back to South Dakota and continued to take private lessons at a studio in McCook Lake, South Dakota. After he was told he could not dance on the high school team, Linden became the team manager.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, based in Sacramento, California, filed the lawsuit along with a Sioux Falls law firm. The nonprofit organization also filed a complaint in November with the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education on behalf of Kaiden Johnson, a Wisconsin boy who was told he could not compete with his dance team in Minnesota because that state does not allow boys on high school dance teams.

Johnson, who is now a sophomore at Superior High School, is dancing with his team in Wisconsin, and the Office for Civil Rights is still reviewing the complaint, Pacific League Foundation spokesman Collin Callahan said Thursday.

___

Information from: Argus Leader, http://www.argusleader.comDonald Trump has warned that military action is imminent in Syria, declaring missiles will be coming.

Bashar Assads regime has called the threats reckless and Moscow said air strikes would destroy evidence of a chemical attack.

The US president has been in talks with Britain and France to secure a joint response to the suspected chemical weapons attack in the rebel-held town of Douma.

US President Donald Trump (Niall Carson/PA)

Russia has warned against military action and said it will shoot down rockets fired at its ally.

In a tweet responding to the threat, President Trump said: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria.

Get ready, Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart. You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Soon afterwards, however, he suggested it was time to stop the arms race and said there was no reason for the low in relations between Russia and the US.

He tweeted: Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War. There is no reason for this.

Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?

Russias ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkinhad, warned that the federations military will shoot down US rockets and even the sources that launched the missiles.

Mr Trumps decision to announce in highly inflammatory language on Twitter that missile strikes are imminent, rather than retaining an element of surprise, will raise eyebrows among military chiefs.

Soon after the tweets, Russias Foreign Ministry said that smart missiles should fly towards terrorists, not legal government.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova questioned whether the idea behind military action was to use the smart missiles to sweep the traces of the provocation under the rug.

Russia vetoed a draft resolution at the United Nations which sought to create a new body to determine responsibility for the attack.

Theresa May agreed with President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday that the international community needed to respond to the attack.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly refused so far to be drawn on whether the UK would be involved in any military response.

If Russia shoots down US missiles, 'that's war' - retired Gen Sir Richard Barrons in response to Russia's ambassador to Lebanon saying any US missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted #r4today pic.twitter.com/e5X6qvAdcu  BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) April 11, 2018

She faces pressure to secure support from the Commons, which is currently in recess for Easter, for involving Britain in air strikes but has the power to take the decision without the backing of MPs.

General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of Joint Forces Command, said Russias warnings that launch platforms could be targeted in response to air strikes meant they are going to try and sink ships, sink submarines and shoot aircraft out of the sky  thats war.

Former soldier Johnny Mercer, who sits on the Commons Defence Select Committee, said Britain played a calming role as he criticised the unhelpful rhetoric tweeted by the US president.

The attack in Douma happened late on Saturday amid a resumed offensive by Syrian government forces after the collapse of a truce with the Army of Islam rebel group.

This is the reason why we must build, influence, and yes, lead coalitions. To make a calm but very robust stand for what we believe in, whilst tempering unhelpful rhetoric so we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. There is a balance; and therein lies Britain's role in this. https://t.co/3RLtOul9RG  Johnny Mercer (@JohnnyMercerUK) April 11, 2018

Syrian opposition activists and rescuers said poison gas was used on the rebel-held town near the capital, an allegation strongly denied by the Assad government.

Families were reportedly found suffocated in their homes and shelters, with foam on their mouths.

Reports suggested that more than 500 people, mostly women and children, were taken to medical centres with breathing problems, foaming at the mouth and burning sensations in the eyes.

The attack comes almost exactly a year after a chemical atrocity in the northern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun killed dozens of people.

That attack prompted the US to launch several dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air base.What just happened?

On Tuesday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave testimony (though not officially under oath) before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committees. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg testified at a second hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He was asked to appear before Congress to discuss such issues as data privacy and Russian use of his social network to meddle in the 2016 election.

Why is Facebook and Zuckerberg now under scrutiny?

Facebook has been at the center of recent data privacy scandals and concerns. The Senate hearings were particularly interested in learning about the connection between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Last month the New York Times reported that British data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission. As law professor Andrew Keane Woods explains,

The data that Cambridge Analytica obtained seems to have come from Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher at Cambridge University who convinced hundreds of thousands of Facebook users to take a Facebook-linked personality quizthereby granting Kogan access, through Facebooks developer platform, to a treasure trove of user data. Kogan then shared this information with Cambridge Analytica. . . .

Kogan was able to collect such data because Facebook offers a popular feature called Facebook Login, which lets people simply log in to a website or app using their Facebook account instead of creating new credentials. In 2015, developers who created apps that used Facebook Login were allowedwith Facebooks permissionto collect some information on the users network of friends. According to the Times, Kogan was able to use the data gleaned from the friends profiles to match users to other records and build psychographic profiles.

Facebook had also reportedly been collecting call records and text-messaging data from Android devices. The company denies it was collecting the data without permission, that it was an opt-in feature, that it helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provides you with a better experience across Facebook. Still, the concerns have led the Federal Trade Commission to launch a nonpublic investigation into the Facebooks privacy practices.

How did Zuckerberg say Facebook would address the Cambridge Analytica data breach?

Zuckerberg identified three steps his company would be taking:

1) Learning exactly what Cambridge Analytica did, and telling everyone affected.

2) Making sure no other app developers are misusing data and investigating every app that had access to a large amount of information in the past. If a developer is improperly using data, Facebook will ban them from their platform and notifiy everyone affected.

3) To prevent similar data breaches, Facebook will be making sure developers cant access as much information.

Zuckerberg says thatas explained in the first line of Facebooks Terms of Servicethe user controls and owns the information and content they put on the platform.

How does Facebook deal with screening content?

Zuckerberg punted on specific cases and controversies involving content being removed or censored on his platform. But he says by the end of 2018, Facebook will have more than 20,000 people working on security and content review so that when content gets flagged, they can determine if it violates their policies and, if necessary, take it down.

The long-term goal, said Zuckerberg, is to have such content review conducted by artificial intelligence. He notes that 99 percent of the ISIS and Al Qaida content that we take down on Facebook is done by artificial intelligence systems before any human sees it. But such review for hate speech is difficult, he says, because determining if something is hate speech is very linguistically nuanced. He believes it will take between 5 to 10-years to have artificial intelligence tools that can get into some of the nuances of hate speech.

What is Facebook doing to prevent foreign actors from interfering in U.S. elections?

Zuckerberg said they are disallowing fake accounts on Facebook and deploying new artificial intelligence tools that do a better job of identifying fake accounts that may be trying to interfere in elections or spread misinformation.

Is Zuckerberg opposed to new regulations to address the data privacy problems?

Not really. When asked, he said, I think that there are a few categories of legislation thatthat make sense to consider. Around privacy specifically, there are a few principles that I think it would be useful toto discuss and potentially codified into law. He gave three examples: explain what you are doing with data, give people complete control, and enable innovation

When asked if Facebook would as a company, welcome regulation Zuckerberg also said that I think, if its the right regulation, then yes.

Is Facebook involved with Special Counsel Muellers investigation into Russian election interference?

Yes, Zuckerberg confirmed that Facebook has been interviewed by and is working with the Special Counsels Office.

What other key points did Zuckerberg reveal during the hearing?

Some other highlights from the hearings:

 Zuckerberg says Facebook is responsible for the content on its platform.

 He also says he is very committed to making sure that Facebook is a platform for all ideas but when asked was unable to define what his company would prohibit under the rubric of hate speech.

 When asked if his company was a monopoly, he said, It certainly doesnt feel like that to me,

What did we not learn from the hearing?

There are dozens of issues that Zuckerberg said hes check with his team about and provide answers to the Senators. The Senate members can also submit follow-up written questions that will be entered into the record.

Senator Kamala Harris, for example, told Zuckerberg there are several critical questions for which you dont have answers, adding, Those questions have included whether Facebook can track a users browsing activity even after the user has logged off of Facebook. Whether Facebook can track your activity across devices even when you are not logged into Facebook. Who is Facebooks biggest competition? Whether Facebook may store up to 96 categories of users information. Whether you knew [about Cambridge Analytica researcher Aleksandr] Kogans terms of service and whether you knew if Kogan could sell or transfer data.

Image Source: (CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.usThe Syrian government has said US threats to attack it are reckless and endanger international peace and security.

The foreign ministry said that Washington is using an alleged chemical attack near the capital to target Syria, and that the threats are hindering the governments efforts to fight terrorism.

Syria and its ally Russia have rejected allegations by activists and rescuers that a chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Douma over the weekend killed more than 40 people.

A medical worker gives a toddler oxygen following an alleged poison gas attack (Syrian Civil Defence White Helmets via AP)

US President Donald Trump blamed the suspected attack on Syrian government forces and has threatened to respond militarily, tweeting that missiles will be coming.

It prompted a slew of Russian comments that warned that US strikes could trigger a direct military clash between the two former Cold War adversaries.

Syrias foreign ministry said Washington is using the alleged chemical attack as a pretext to target Syria.

We are not surprised by this reckless escalation from a regime like the one in the United States, which has and continues to sponsor terrorism in Syria, said the statement, carried by state media.

It added that recent statements from Washington show (the Trump administration) lacks not only principles and values but also wisdom and logic and that in itself endangers international peace and security.

The Syrian government calls all opposition groups terrorists, and has accused Washington of backing terrorism, including Islamic State militants.

The pretext of a chemical attack has become well known to everybody and is a flimsy and unsubstantiated excuse to target Syria, the ministry statement said.

If such threats from the US and its allies, France and Britain, are intended to stop Damascus from fighting terrorism, they are delusional, the statement also said.

The Syrian state will continue to fight terrorism no matter what their reaction is.

The Syrian government said its invitation to the international chemical weapons watchdog to send a fact-finding mission to the country is proof that Damascus is innocent and has not used chemical weapons.

Russian politicians said Moscow would view a US air strike on Syria as a war crime that could trigger a direct military clash between the two powers.

Russias ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin went even further.

In an interview with Hezbollahs Al-Manar TV station, Mr Zasypkin said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted.

He said he was referring to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian armed forces chief of staff.

If there is a strike by the Americans, then  the missiles will be downed and the source of the missiles targeted, Mr Zasypkin said.

Meanwhile, Europes airspace authorities warned aircraft to be careful over the coming days when flying close to Syria because of possible military action against President Bashar Assads forces.

The Eurocontrol airspace organisation said that the European Aviation Safety Agency had sent a Rapid Alert Notification that flight operators needed to consider the possibility of air or missile strikes on Syria.

In a notice posted to Eurocontrols website, EASA said: Due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria with air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours, and the possibility of intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment, due consideration needs to be taken.The US ambassador has described Prince Harry and Meghan Markles wedding as a symbol of the special relationship between Britain and America.

Speaking after Harry launched the Walk of America expedition, a 1,000 mile trek by UK and US military veterans, Robert Wood Johnson hailed the close bonds between his homeland and Britain.

During the launch at an exclusive London hotel, the ambassador joked that the prince would be forming his own bond when he marries Ms Markle.

Harry and Meghan will wed on May 19 (Victoria Jones/PA)

He said: His Royal Highness isnt going on this particular journey, hell be embarking on his own special relationship.

But on behalf of the American people I want to wish Prince Harry and Meghan the happiest of lives together.

With Harrys bride-to-be an American-born actress, the marriage will see the British monarchy form strong links with the US, mirroring the political, cultural and economic ties that already exist between the two nations.

Speaking after the event, the ambassador  known as Woody Johnson  said about the couples big day on May 19, likely to have a global televised audience in the tens of millions: Its going to big, just (on) logistics this is a major, major event, a marriage, and its going to be exciting for all of us to watch.

Asked about the special relationship between the UK and US, he replied: Its about as close as you can get, its like a family. You can have squabbles here and there, but then at the end of the day youre all family  you come back and you agree on the important things.

Mr Johnson gave Harry his best wishes ahead of the wedding (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

So this marriage is going to be another symbol of that.

Asked if he had been invited to the wedding, he joked I cant say. His comment follows the announcement on Tuesday that politicians from the US and UK would not be invited to the royal nuptials.

During his speech to officially launch the expedition  the latest adventure by armed forces charity Walking With The Wounded  Harry also spoke of the special bond between the UK and US.

The prince, patron of the 1,000-mile trek, told invited guests, who included some of the veterans taking part: I have always felt that the experiences we share in conflict provide a stronger support system in recovery  this is especially true of our trans-Atlantic partnership.

There is much more that we can learn from one another, and in doing so we hope to improve support now and into the future.

The expedition we are launching today, Walking With The Woundeds 2018 Walk of America, reinforces that bond.

Starting in Los Angeles  Meghans home city  on June 2 and finishing in New York on September 6, the team taking part in the trek will walk past some of Americas most famous cities and landmarks.

Expectations will be raised that Harry and his American bride-to-be will choose the US as the destination for their first joint official overseas tour.

During the launch event the prince joked that only fictional characters like Forrest Gump got shot and carried on regardless when he chatted about the importance of raising mental health issues with a veteran taking part in the challenge.

Harry spoke to John Mayhead, 46, a former army major who had serious mental health problems that caused him to leave the forces.

His problems began after a harrowing tour of Afghanistan more than 10 years ago when a number of his men were seriously injured or killed.

Speaking about his battle against mental health problems, Mr Mayhead said: I had a series of breakdowns effectively and it needed me to go right the way to the bottom to pick it back up again.

And the reason Im doing this is because I really want to get it out there its OK to come forward.

He went on to say: I can remember saying to one of my soldiers if youd been shot, you wouldnt just man up and deal with this yourself, youd go and get professional help  and I couldnt follow my own advice, it took me years and years to hit effectively rock bottom before I went I do need help here.

Harry joked about his comment, saying: Youre right, I think Forrest Gump is the only person who got shot and carried on.

The prince, a former army officer who served in the forces for 10 years and was deployed twice to Afghanistan, added: I think one of the hardest things is noticing it in yourself.

Some people will come to you and say you need to go and get help other people will never be able to recognise it.

If youre able to recognise it in yourself thats stage one but stage two is being strong enough to go and get help.A London Underground worker was pushed onto the tracks at one of the networks busiest stations.

British Transport Police released a CCTV image of a man they want to speak to in connection with the incident at Victoria station.

A customer service assistant (CSA) was pushed from a District line platform onto the tracks shortly after 10am on Tuesday.

The incident happened on Tuesday morning (Nick Ansell/PA)

The victim did not sustain any injuries but was left understandably shaken, according to BTP.

London Underground managing director Mark Wild said: This was an appalling and dangerous attack on a member of our staff.

Everyone has the right to go about their day without fear or intimidation and we do not tolerate any form of physical or verbal assault on our staff or customers.

We are working closely with British Transport Police to bring the perpetrator to justice.

CSAs work inside Tube stations to help manage the flow of passengers on and off trains, oversee ticket barriers and provide help at ticket machines.

Inspector Paula Jones from BTP said: This was a very serious incident and we have a number of urgent inquiries under way to find the person responsible.

I would like to hear from anyone who was at Victoria station at the time of the incident and saw what happened.

Thankfully, incidents such as this are very rare and I am grateful the victim was not injured. We police a CCTV-rich environment which helps us identify offenders and bring them before the courts.

Anyone with information is asked to contact BTP on 0800 405040 or text 61016 quoting reference 146 of April 10. Alternatively they can contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.Andrew Tyrie, the former chairman of the influential Treasury Select Committee, has been appointed the boss of Britains competition watchdog.

The Government has announced that the much-respected interrogator and ex-Conservative MP for Chichester will become chairman of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

Mr Tyrie, who gained notoriety for his select committee grillings of prime ministers, Bank of England officials and industry bosses, will take over from current CMA chairman David Currie.

Andrew Tyrie, ex-chairman of the Treasury Select Committee (PA)

His appointment comes at a crucial moment for the body, as officials scrutinise a string of high-profile deals and prepare for Britains divorce from the European Union.

Among the tie-ups being probed are 21st Century Foxs bid for broadcaster Sky, Trinity Mirrors takeover of the Daily Express and other Northern & Shell brands, and the Co-operative Groups swoop for convenience store chain Nisa.

Mr Tyrie said: Subject to Parliamentary support, Im delighted to accept this post and look forward to working with the CMAs high-quality board and staff.

Making markets work for the benefit of millions of people is what the CMA is all about.

In the years ahead, competition can and should be put even closer to the centre of British economic life, reaching to every sector, rooting out monopoly and unfair trading practices, and enhancing Britains global competitiveness into the bargain.

Mr Tyrie served under Michael Howard as a shadow Treasury spokesman in opposition from 2003-05, but was not appointed to the front bench by David Cameron.

For the bulk of his Commons career, he was a prominent member of the backbench select committees which scrutinise Government activities.

He sat as chairman of both the Parliamentary Commission on banking standards and the Liaison Committee. He was the chairman of the Treasury Select Committee from 2010 to 2017.

Business Secretary Greg Clark said: Andrew Tyrie is a proven consumer champion and competition advocate, with a strong record of independence as select committee chair, ideally suited to leading the CMA at this critical time.

I have no doubt he will make good use of his extensive policy, economic and financial experience to entrench the CMA post-Brexit as one of the worlds leading regulatory and enforcement bodies.

Ahead of his appointment, Mr Tyrie will have to face a pre-appointment hearing with the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee (BEIS).

CMA chief executive Andrea Coscelli said: I look forward to welcoming and working with Andrew Tyrie as the CMA prepares for its increased role after the UK exits the EU.

His distinguished career will bring valuable experience to our work.Roma president James Pallotta has donated 230,000 euros (200,647) to fix a famous fountain after he jumped into another to celebrate his teams remarkable Champions League victory over Barcelona.

Pallotta took to the streets of Rome to celebrate along with fans after the Serie A side followed a 4-1 quarter-final first leg deficit with a 3-0 home success against the LaLiga leaders.

Roma went through on the away goals rule after the tie ended 4-4 on aggregate thanks to second leg goals from Edin Dzeko, Daniele Di Rossi and Kostas Manolas.

Roma president James Pallotta, right, shakes hands with Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi after donating 230,000 euros to pay for the restoration of a fountain in the city (Alessandro Di Meo/AP)

00:00: #ASRoma President Pallotta celebrates 3-0 win by jumping in Piazza del Popolo fountain.



09:00: Pallotta fined 450 for jumping in fountain.



15:00: Pallotta apologises, pays fine & donates 230,000 to fix fountain in front of Pantheon.



Dont jump in fountains kids!  pic.twitter.com/IBHwylgw82  AS Roma English (@ASRomaEN) April 11, 2018

American businessman Pallotta took part in an impromptu celebration which saw him jump into the Piazza del Popolo fountain, near the traditional northern gate to Rome. But city authorities did not take kindly to Pallottas celebration and fined him 450 euros (392).

Following a meeting with Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi the New York-based property tycoon made his generous offer to pay for restoration work on the Fontana del Pantheon, the fountain in front of Romes world renowned tourist attraction.

In a video filmed and posted on the clubs Twitter account Palotta talked of his decision to donate the money and also warned others not to follow his example of jumping into a fountain.

Palotta said: I certainly got caught up in the excitement, I think it was a great night for all of us in Rome.

I also dont want to encourage other people to jump into fountains except if they want to fix the fountain so Ive decided that I think it will be a great personal gesture to fix the fountain in front of the Pantheon so Im going to donate 230,000 euros to it.

As I said, you know, trying not to encourage people (to jump into fountains). (I) love this city, if someone does want to jump into it fix the fountain.Oscar-winning actor Cuba Gooding Jr has admitted he endured sleepless nights in the lead up to his West End debut.

The Jerry Maguire star received a standing ovation with the rest of the cast on the opening night of Chicago at Londons Phoenix Theatre.

Gooding Jr plays fast-talking lawyer Billy Flynn in the musical, which is returning to the capital after a five-year absence, and said he had struggled through the previews ahead of the official opening, attended by stars including Terry Gilliam, John Barrowman and Kate Garraway.

Cuba Gooding Jr is starring in Chicago on Londons West End (Isabel Infantes/PA)

Speaking at the after-party at London restaurant LEscargot, he told the Press Association: I was horrified for show after show after show, swearing buckets, nervous, not sleeping until four in the morning and then sleeping until 7pm.

Now Im finally starting to feel normal. If you had talked to me a week ago I would have had all kinds of anxiety to talk about but Im feeling good now. Im starting to ease into the task that is Billy Flynn.

The actor added he would be endeavouring to avoid reading the verdicts of the critics.

He said: I never read reviews, period.

There is no getting around it, if you have bad reviews everyone goes oh whatever but if you have good ones everyone wants to tell you what they say, but if I dont read the bad ones I cant read the good ones.

Hopefully people will want to talk to me tomorrow, thats all I care about.

At the same time too, the review on theatre is the audience and we have been so welcomed.

That could end tomorrow but the people are really vibing it. Its felt so good up there.

Chicago, starring Ruthie Henshall as Mama Morton, is booking up until June 30 at the Phoenix Theatre.As Britain edges closer to joint action with the US over chemical weapons in Syria, the crisis leads most papers on Thursday.

Tensions between the West and Russia ratcheted up on Wednesday after Donald Trump tweeted that strikes with nice and new and smart!' missiles were coming.

The Times says Theresa May has recalled her Cabinet to seek approval for joining the US military action, which suggests she will defy calls led by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to consult Parliament.

What the papers say - April 12

Tomorrow's front page: May prepares Britain to launch assault on Assad #tomorrowspapertoday pic.twitter.com/QAo1bIuKII  The Times (@thetimes) April 11, 2018

The Daily Mail says choosing to back the US without seeking MPs consent is Mays great gamble.

The PM has already ordered some of the Navys submarines to move within missile range of Syria, the Daily Telegraph reports.

The front page of tomorrow's Daily Telegraph: 'Trump warns missiles are coming' #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/JPU0e12yTY  The Telegraph (@Telegraph) April 11, 2018

The Guardian warns the standoff has spiralled into the most dangerous confrontation between the nuclear-armed powers since the height of the Cold War.

Thursdays GUARDIAN: Trump tells Russia to get ready for US missile strikes in Syria #bbcpapers #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/74AWPeBCTG  Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) April 11, 2018

On Brink reads the Daily Mirrors front page, while the Daily Express asks if the crisis is one tweet from war.

The i and the Metro also lead with Mr Trumps Twitter threat.

Alongside a report on Syria, the Financial Times leads with Tescos 1 billion comeback from crisis three years ago after the grocer posted a sharp rise in profits.

Just published: front page of the Financial Times, London edition, Thursday 12 Aprilhttps://t.co/4LW7jnKyEh pic.twitter.com/U1b85bQySS  Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) April 11, 2018

The Sun carries a report on ITVs Full Monty: Ladies Night programme.A former Catalan minister is due to return to court as her battle against extradition to Spain continues.

Professor Clara Ponsati will attend a preliminary extradition hearing at Edinburgh Sheriff Court on Thursday morning in the next step in her legal fight against political motivated charges.

Scotland-based Prof Ponsati, the ex-Catalan education minister, is being sought by the authorities in Madrid on charges of violent rebellion and misappropriation of public funds over her role in Catalonias controversial independence referendum last year.

Her solicitor Aamer Anwar said she utterly refutes the charges, which could result in a sentence of up to 25 years  and eight years respectively if she were to be extradited and convicted.

Supporters of Prof Ponsati gathered outside Edinburgh Sheriff Court at a hearing last month (Jane Barlow/PA)

The charges are contained in an extradition warrant from the Spanish Supreme Court issued last month.

Speaking before the hearing, Mr Anwar said: Clara views the charges as a political motivated prosecution and submits that her extradition would be unjust, oppressive and incompatible with her human rights.

Clara challenges the validity of the arrest warrant which accuses her of orchestrating violence at over 2,259 polling booths, yet fails to specify a single act of violence or incitement attributable to her.

We will submit that the warrant is not valid and should be dismissed. It will also be submitted that the crime of rebellion does not constitute an offence in Scotland.

Clara believes that the Spanish authorities in their eagerness to criminalise the desire of the Catalan people for independence are abusing the process of the European arrest warrant.

Prof Ponsati and Mr Anwar address the media outside Edinburgh Sheriff Court last month (Jane Barlow/PA)

Mr Anwar said if the warrant was not dismissed then a full extradition hearing would take place at a later date.

The academic appeared from custody at the court last month and was released on bail hours after she voluntarily handed herself in to Scottish police.

The case has attracted a huge amount of public support with more than 230,000 raised through an online crowdfunder set up to help her fight the extradition.

Prof Ponsati returned to Scotland earlier in March and resumed working at the University of St Andrews in Fife.

She had been in Belgium since fleeing Spain with Catalonias ex-leader Carles Puigdemont and three other former cabinet members, following an unsuccessful bid to declare independence from Spain in October.

Last week a German court rejected rebellion as grounds for Mr Puigdemonts extradition from the country and released him on bail.Theresa May faces calls in Britains papers both for and against joining possible near-term US-led military action in Syria.

The Prime Minister has also been urged to consult Parliament before committing British armed forces to strikes by American and French forces.

According to reports, Mrs May is set to defy calls to give the Commons a say over retaliatory action for a suspected gas attack.

Lets take a look at what the paper say (Andrew Matthews/PA)

The Daily Mail says that Britain should support the US in all but the most exceptional circumstances, although the case case for joining strikes has not yet been made.

Nor has the case for justifying the Prime Ministers apparent willingness to intervene in a conflict that doesnt affect this country without involving Parliament, the paper says.

If she is to do this, she must convince Britain we are not on the brink of repeating Tony Blairs calamitous mistake in Iraq.

The Daily Mirror says that Donald Trump is out of control and Mrs May must not let him call the shots, favouring quiet resolve instead to turn the tables on the Assad regime.

May must not be Trumps support act, the paper says.

We detect no public appetite for entering war when it probably wont make a difference.

Tomorrow's front page: May prepares Britain to launch assault on Assad #tomorrowspapertoday pic.twitter.com/QAo1bIuKII  The Times (@thetimes) April 11, 2018

In contrast, The Times says the atrocity in Douma cannot go unpunished and military action is necessary to prevent further attacks in Syria or elsewhere.

That is why Theresa May is right to have pledged British support for a joint military response with the US and France, the paper says.

However, it cautions that strikes should only be carried out with a reasonable expectation that they will undermine Assads chemical weapon capabilities.

On Wednesday, The Guardian firmly objected to Mrs May blindly following Mr Trump into war, and called for Britain to replace mindless confrontation with common sense and courage.

To make some headway in resolving the conundrum of the Syrian civil war there must an articulation of a clear strategy in public, the paper said.

This would allow the risks and benefits to be aired and a plan sanctioned by parliament.

The Sun also warned against rushing into action without evidence confirming an attack, but said the country should not be hung up on mistakes made in previous conflicts.

We cant stand idly by when innocent children are dying on the cold, hard floor of a Syrian hospital, the paper said.

That might not necessarily mean a traditional military strike, though if an international coalition were formed and firm intelligence suggested that targeted, limited action would destroy Bashar al-Assads chemical weapon stocks, this newspaper would support Britains involvement.

And the Daily Express said that, while Assad and backer Vladimir Putin should be held accountable, the West must not risk starting World War Three.

Some form of military action will probably be needed in Syria but when it comes to dealing with the Russian bear itself, we should be cautious, the paper said.

Mr Putin has clearly been goading the West in any way he can for some time now, as we in Britain have particular cause to know, but the best way of dealing with Russia is through sanctions.A series of police raids in the capital have struck a massive blow to a notorious and violent gang, with a Skorpion machine gun and ammunition, cash, and suspected class A drugs seized.

Some 200 officers smashed in doors across west London overnight, arresting nine people, including some believed to be senior figures in the lucrative crack cocaine and heroin-dealing outfit, Scotland Yard said.

An alleged drug-running boy, aged 14, arrested at his family home, was among those detained in eight raids in the Northolt, Greenford, Fulham and Brentford areas.

The arrests were connected to the established MDP gang, police said, which has been linked with several murders.

Those detained were held over offences such as conspiracy to supply drugs and possession of firearms.

At a house in Dorchester Close, Northolt, young children could be heard crying as dozens of officers flooded inside shouting: Police.

Elsewhere, as a police squad crept up to one seemingly empty address in Stephendale Road, Fulham, officers noticed a 30-year-old suspect sitting in a car.

During a search officers found a Skorpion machine pistol along with another handgun, 40 rounds of ammunition, and a kilo of suspected class A drugs, Scotland Yard said.

Officers secure a man in a police van (John Stillwell/PA)

Detective Inspector Driss Hayoukane said: This is a massive blow to an established gang.

What weve taken out is probably a line which has been supplying the Earls Court and Fulham areas. This gang have been running that line for quite a while and making a lot of money.

These gangs have corrupted children and are using them to ferry drugs.

If you look across London these are the kids that are getting involved in violence and stabbings because they are generally on the streets while the suppliers are removed from it, collecting the cash.

Key gangsters drove flashy cars and showed off their wealth online with luxury holidays to places like Dubai, he added.

One address in Earls Court had been cuckooed, which happens when criminals take over a vulnerable persons or drug addicts flat to sell drugs from it  named after the parasitic practice of the cuckoo bird which lays its eggs in other birds nests.

Overall, six males and three females, aged between 14 and 49, were arrested in the early hours of Thursday and are now in custody.

The operation was the result of about six months of planning by the Mets anti-gang Trident unit.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick had been on patrol in Hackney, inner London, on Wednesday evening, where she said gang tensions were high after a spate of stabbings in recent weeks, including the killing of 18-year-old Israel Ogunsola.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick briefs the media ahead of the raids (John Stillwell/PA)

Speaking to reporters shortly before the raids, she said the suspects had been causing devastation and fear in communities.

She said: They are very violent, several of them have a history of serious violence, at least one is suspected of regularly using a firearm.

They will be arrested  not only have they been, as it appears to us, supplying crack cocaine and heroin, theyve been making a huge amount of money.

Theyve been exploiting vulnerable people and very young people have been engaged in the drug-dealing operation. So they need to be locked up.

She added: When I arrived just over a year ago weve been stepping up our anti-violence operations, weve been learning along the way.

In the last two weeks or so, and in particular since last weekend, weve been doing more and more. The Met is working very hard.

Asked if raids had been stepped up following a recent rise in violent crime in London, DI Hayoukane said: Its business as usual for us, our unit works to capacity all the time.

Since the start of the year, there have been more than 50 suspected murders in London. Moderate Fatah Names Childrens Summer Camp After Murderer | Main | New York Times Bias on Full Display in Editorial 

April 12, 2018

Official Palestinian TV Broadcasts Holocaust Denial



Two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, an official Palestinian Authority (PA) TV channel broadcasted claims that Jews colluded with Hitler.?

On April 10, 2018, PA TV aired an interview with Hani Abu Zeid, a Palestinian political analyst and commentator. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a non-profit that translates Arabic, Persian and Russian media, reported on the incident:

Hani Abu Zeid: "The [Israeli] soldier, the officers behind him, and even the Israeli war [sic] minister, and above him, Netanyahu should stand trial as war criminals. The accumulation of cases, one after the other... The Israelis will end up shedding tears of blood [out of regret] for their current conduct. They used to cry about the false Holocaust in the days of Hitler, the scope of which was not that large. I'd like to point out..."

Interviewer: "The [Holocaust] is a lie that they spread worldwide."

Hani Abu Zeid: "Yes, it was a lie, and many Israelis, or many Jews, colluded with Hitler, so that he would facilitate the bringing of settlers to Palestine."

As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has noted: Holocaust denial and minimization or distortion of the facts of the Holocaust is a form of antisemitism.?

Yet, Holocaust denial remains commonplace in much of the Arab world, including in Palestinian society and culture. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, for example, claimed in his doctoral dissertationdone under Soviet auspicesthat the Holocaust was exaggerated.

PA TV itself often broadcasts Holocaust denial and revisionism. As Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a non-profit organization that monitors Arab media in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, detailed in an April 11, 2018 report. PMW noted that recent PA TV broadcasts edited out pictures of American soldiers liberating concentration camps and erased the images of corpses in striped concentration camp uniformsand presented photos of the remaining dead bodies as Arab victims of Jews in 1948.? PA TV also claimed that the Jewish fighters burned Arabs in ovens in? Israels 1948 War of Independence.

These lies and attempts to appropriate the Jewish peoples suffering in the Holocaust demean the historical record. They also obscure an important fact: Palestinian Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, actively colluded with Hitler and sought the destruction of worldwide Jewry.

As CAMERA noted in a Dec. 27, 2017 Washington Jewish Week Op-Ed, Abbas has called al-Husseini a pioneer.?

Posted by SD at April 12, 2018 03:25 PM

Guidelines for posting

This is a moderated blog. We will not post comments that include racism, bigotry, threats, or factually inaccurate material.

Post a commentLaura Whitmore has opened up about her own experience of sexual assault.

The Irish presenter and model said she was assaulted in a nightclub while she was dancing with friends last year.

In an article for Irish magazine Hot Press, Whitmore wrote that now was the right time to talk about it because personally I feel stronger and in a better position  and on a wider scale, the truth is that weve all had enough.

Initially I thought it was my boyfriend messing or a mate about to pinch my bottom  but the hand went under my skirt, between my legs, and firmly touched me, Whitmore wrote.

As I turned, I saw it was a guy who I did not know. He was laughing.

The former Strictly Come Dancing presenter also hit out at the portrayal of women in the media and said she was thrown into the lions den during her time on the programme.

Away from allegations of rape, and flawed judicial systems, what has really hit me is how women are portrayed in general. All this shaming and degrading. In a sense, the Me Too movement is just the tip of the iceberg.

Laura Whitmore on Strictly in 2016 (Guy Levy/BBC)

Her professional partner on Strictly, Giovanni Pernice, had split from Whitmores friend, Georgia May Foote, prior to the series and Whitmore said she ended up in the middle of someones break-up.

Whitmore wrote: Once again, I was a rumoured love interest.

The media saw me as blonde bait in a sequined dress, she added. How have we sunk to this situation, where women are routinely reduced, and demeaned, in this way? It is impossible to understand, when everything about it is so wrong, so misguided and so vile.

She added: I know that compared to many people I have been fortunate. I love this life and Ive been blessed with wonderful opportunities  but Ive had enough of being trivialised and gossiped about. Women are not playthings  either of men or of the media  and should not be treated as such.FirstGroup shares shot up nearly 10% after the transport giant confirmed it had rejected a takeover approach by American private equity firm Apollo Management.

The company  which runs the South Western Railway franchise along with MTR  said it had received a preliminary and highly conditional indicative proposal related to a possible all-cash offer for the business, though the financial details of the potential deal were not disclosed.

The board of FirstGroup has considered the proposal in detail and believes that it fundamentally undervalues the company and is opportunistic in nature, the transport firm said in a statement.

Accordingly, the board of FirstGroup has unanimously rejected the proposal.

Apollo has until 5pm on May 9 to make a firm offer for the business.

FirstGroup shares rose as much as 9.7% on Thursday following the news, making it one of the best performers on the FTSE 250.

FirstGroup shares were one of the best performers on the FTSE 250 (PA)

Liberum transport analyst Gerald Khoo said: We have long considered FirstGroup to be undervalued as recent poor performance has caused the market to overlook its leading or near-leading positions in all of its main markets.

However, he cautioned that FirstGroups UK rail assets could complicate the deal.

A takeover of the group would be far from straightforward, with UK Government approval required for change of control of rail franchises and pension deficits to navigate around, Mr Khoo said.

Nonetheless, the approach ought to act as a catalyst for more urgent action by the board to crystallise value and/or for more credit for the potential value of the group being reflected in the share price.

The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) stands opposed to a potential takeover.

RMT General Secretary Mick Cash said: This looks like yet another bunch of speculators and asset strippers homing in on the British transport sector.

First have been propped up by the Government on the Great Western routes for many years now and are currently in dispute with this trade union over the threat to axe guards on South Western Railway.

Where this hostile bid leaves their UK bus and rail operations in anyones guess.

The only solution to this kind of uncertainty and instability is public ownership and the threat of a US-based hostile takeover of First Group just reinforces that core message.

FirstGroup in February reported a 10.7% rise in year-to-date revenue, though when stripped of currency effects and excluding the South Western Railway franchise that increase was just 1.1%.

It said all three of its North American divisions struggled with extremely challenging weather conditions in January, while its Greyhound bus long-haul business in North America was hit by intensifying competition with low-cost airlines.

Like-for-like revenues for Greyhound bus operations slumped 0.4% for the year to date and fell 2.8% between September and January.

However, it recorded a 3.2% rise in like-for-like passenger revenue across its First Rail division, notwithstanding ongoing infrastructure challenges.

Its First Bus business is said to have had a strong start to the academic year for its student-focused services, though year-to-date figures showed like-for-like passenger revenue rose just 0.9%.The lawyer for a former Catalan education minister battling extradition to Spain has said he will robustly defend the Scottish-based academic.

Solicitor Aamer Anwar spoke out as he arrived at court for a preliminary hearing with Professor Clara Ponsati.

She faces charges of violent rebellion and misappropriation of public funds over her role in Catalonias controversial independence referendum last year.

Former Catalan Minister Professor Clara Ponsati, who is facing extradition to Spain, arrives at Edinburgh Sheriff Court for an extradition hearing (Jane Barlow/PA)

Prof Ponsati utterly refutes the charges, which could result in a sentence of up to 25 years and eight years respectively if she were to be extradited and convicted.

Arriving at court, Prof Ponsati was greeted by a crowd of supporters.

Supporters of Professor @ClaraPonsati gathering opposite Edinburgh Sheriff Court ahead of her extradition hearing this morning pic.twitter.com/Wl0TAC0sVl  Cat Webster (@cat_webster) April 12, 2018

Making a short statement to the press, her lawyer Mr Anwar said: We intend to robustly defend Clara Ponsati against the extradition attempts by the Spanish authorities.

European extradition warrants were never set up to be used as a tool of political oppression.

The hearing was held after Prof Ponsati voluntarily handed herself in to Scottish police last month. After an initial court appearance then she was released on bail.

The academic returned to Scotland earlier in March and resumed working at the University of St Andrews in Fife.

The charges against her are contained in an extradition warrant from the Spanish Supreme Court issued last month.

The case has attracted a huge amount of public support with more than 230,000 raised through an online crowdfunder set up to help her fight the extradition.

Prior to her return to Scotland Prof Ponsati had been in Belgium since fleeing Spain with Catalonias ex-leader Carles Puigdemont and three other former cabinet members, following an unsuccessful bid to declare independence from Spain in October.

Last week a German court rejected rebellion as grounds for Mr Puigdemonts extradition from the country and released him on bail.The head of the GCHQ intelligence agency has said the Salisbury nerve agent attack shows how reckless Russia is as international watchdogs release a report into the incident.

Ex-MI5 agent Jeremy Fleming described recent actions by Moscow as particularly stark and shocking.

The comments came as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is to issue an executive summary of its findings relating to the Salisbury poisonings.

GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming (Owen Humphreys/PA)

Speaking at a conference in Manchester hosted by the National Cyber Security Centre, Mr Fleming said of the Salisbury attack: It demonstrates how reckless Russia is prepared to be.

How little the Kremlin cares for the international rules-based order. How comfortable they are at putting ordinary lives at risk.

The robust response from the UK and from the international community shows the Kremlin that illegal acts have consequences.

And it looks like our expertise on Russia will be in increasing demand.

Former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent thought to have been ordered by Moscow more than a month ago, leaving the pair seriously ill in hospital.

The release of the OPCWs report comes as Ms Skripal, 33, revealed she has rejected assistance from the Russian embassy, adding: I want to stress that no-one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

She said she has found herself in a totally different life as she continues to recover from the attack.

The Russian embassy said that it doubted the authenticity of the statement and suggested it had been crafted to support Britains version of events.

It is believed that British authorities immediately spirited Ms Skripal away to a secure location when she was discharged from hospital earlier this week.

The Russian embassy reacted angrily, suggesting in a series of tweets that the Russian national had been taken against her will.

Statement issued on behalf of Yulia Skripal who continues to receive police support following her release from hospital https://t.co/uIhxQPUbSw pic.twitter.com/0rIyWkPRgI  Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) April 11, 2018

The embassy is perturbed by a refusal from UK authorities to grant Ms Skripals cousin Viktoria a visa to visit her family.

It escalated the war of words on Tuesday, saying in a series of statements posted on social media: Secret resettlement of Mr and Ms Skripal, barred from any contact with their family will be seen as an abduction or at least as their forced isolation.

But Ms Skripal said in a statement: I have specially trained officers available to me, who are helping to take care of me and to explain the investigative processes that are being undertaken.

I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can.

At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.

Most importantly, I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do.

Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being.

Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my fathers.

Embassy Press Officer's comment on interaction with the @foreignoffice on the investigation of the Salisbury incident: urge UK authorities to act in a transparent way and try fixing the damage they have caused to the international image of their country.https://t.co/B4Q17IGl7x pic.twitter.com/7oPIhtyALl  Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) April 10, 2018

The Russian embassy later said that the statement raises new questions rather than gives answers as it was unable to verify it.

The text has been composed in a special way so as to support official statements made by British authorities and at the same time to exclude every possibility of Yulias contacts with the outer world  consuls, journalists and even relatives, the embassy said in a statement.

The document only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen.

A Foreign Office spokesman said it had asked the OPCW to distribute the report to all state parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention, including Russia.

This transparent and open approach, which we have pursued from the outset, is in sharp contrast to the Russian states ongoing tactics of obfuscation and distraction, the spokesman said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly attempted to challenge Britains claims that it was responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals.

Prime Minister Theresa May has said that UK military experts at Porton Down found that they were poisoned by Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Russia, and that the only plausible explanation was that the Russian state was responsible.

Despite the denials from Moscow, Britain has received strong diplomatic backing from western allies for its stance, with more than 20 countries expelling in excess of 150 Russian diplomats in protest at the Russian actions.

Last week, a Russian call for a new joint investigation was voted down by 15 votes to six at a meeting of the OPCW executive council in The Hague.New films by Spike Lee and Jean-Luc Godard will be among the competitors for the Palme dOr next month, organisers of the Cannes Film Festival said.

Spike Lees BlacKkKlansman will open in US cinemas on August 10, the one-year anniversary of the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists marched and a protester was killed.

The film is about the real-life story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer in Colorado who went undercover in 1978 to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan.

Spike Lees film is in the running for the prestigious prize (Ian West/PA)

John David Washington plays Stallworth in the film and Adam Driver plays his partner.

Godards movie Le Livre dImage (The Image Book) is described as a revolutionary song in five chapters.

Organisers announced the line-up on Thursday for the May 8-19 festival, now in its 71th year.A deputy leader of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party has apologised for incorrectly blaming a fatal van attack in Munster on Islamic extremists, saying that she leapt to conclusions too quickly.

Beatrix von Storch said on her Facebook page: I made a mistake with my tweet about Munster and Im sorry.

She added that she should have waited until the facts were clear.

Beatrix von Storch said she should have waited `until the facts were clear (Markus Schreiber/AP)

Like millions of Germans I assumed that it was an Islamic attack, she said.

The apology came after widespread criticism, including from within her own party, of her tweet suggesting Chancellor Angela Merkels open-door refugee policy was to blame after a man drove into a crowd on Saturday.

Two people were killed and many more injured.

When authorities revealed the vans driver to be a German with no known extremist links, Ms von Storch initially doubled down, tweeting that the suspect was an imitator of Islamist terror.

The online reaction to the attack prompted German interior minister Horst Seehofer earlier this week to call for an end to the mood of hate on social media, saying that society cannot accept that some abused this terrible event for their own perfidious purposes.

Despite the apology, in her Facebook post Ms von Storch took one more swipe at the chancellor, saying I dont ever want to be like Angela Merkel, who doesnt admit her mistakes.

Party co-leader Alexander Gauland said Ms von Storch had made a mistake with her tweet, but that he accepted her apology.

For me the matter is resolved, he said.A former suspect in the murder of Stephen Lawrence should repay 960,000 reaped from a lucrative cannabis plot, a court has heard.

Neil Acourt was jailed for six years and three months last February for conspiracy to supply Class B drugs as part of a criminal network.

He was said to have been the man at the top of a two-year conspiracy which involved dozens of 600-mile round trips from London to the South Shields area, ferrying drugs up and taking cash back.

Neil Acourt, a former suspect in the murder of Stephen Lawrence (Metropolitan Police/PA)

The 42-year-old, of Eltham, south-east London, was arrested in relation to the racist attack on 18-year-old Mr Lawrence, who was stabbed to death by a gang of white men at a bus stop in Eltham in 1993.

But the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) formally discontinued the case against him after a meeting with the senior investigating officer.

Acourt, a father of one who is also known as Neil Stuart, was due to appear for a confiscation hearing at Kingston Crown Court on Thursday.

Before his arrival, prosecutor Sarah Przybylska told the court that Acourt and two of his co-defendants were liable for the estimated 960,000 value of the plot and should each have to pay that full amount.

She said: This was a two-year conspiracy to supply cannabis.

Two hundred kilos were seized across two shipments, there were 37 journeys during the course of this conspiracy that was movement between London and South Shields that the prosecution say was for the movement of drugs and money.

The defence accepted that there must have been more than 200 kilos of cannabis moved during this time, she added.

The proposed figure now is 12 shipments over the course of two years, 80 kilos per shipment, giving a total of 960 kilos at 1,000 per kilo, resulting in a value of 960,000, she said.

Lawyers for the defendants suggested the figure was speculation and asked Judge Susan Tapping to make a lower valuation.

Acourts childhood friend, James Botton, 46, of Greenwich, south-east London, and father-in-law Jack Vose, 64, of Bexley, Kent, were each jailed for four years and nine months over the plot.

Both were said to currently have 1 to their names and should be ordered to pay 960,000 each.

Daniel Thompson, 30, of South Shields, Tyne and Wear, was jailed for four years and two months.

It was agreed he should repay 11 months worth of the two-year conspiracy, matching the time of his involvement, when the figure is eventually settled.

He was said to have 25,457.97 to his name.

All previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply a Class B drug between January 2014 and February 2016.

In 2012, Gary Dobson and David Norris were convicted at the Old Bailey of murdering Mr Lawrence and jailed for life.

Norris and Acourt were jailed for 18 months in 2002 for a racist attack on off-duty black policeman Gareth Reid.The number one suspect in the death of a wealthy Russian whistleblower is seafood he ate during a romantic meal with his lover in Paris, an inquest heard.

But a malignant poisoner at the smart Japanese restaurant could also be to blame, it was claimed.

Alexander Perepilichnyy, 44, collapsed while out jogging near his home in Weybridge, Surrey, in November 2012.

Alexander Perepilichnyy (PA)

The married father had spent the night before with his ex-model girlfriend Elmira Medynska, 28, at the Buddha Bar in Paris.

The Old Bailey has heard he sent back bad tempura prawn and ate either sushi or sashimi then vomited repeatedly when he got back to his hotel.

Giving evidence on Wednesday, Ms Medynska said: I think maybe he vomited because it was not good food in the restaurant.

Coroner Nicholas Hilliard QC is examining how Mr Perepilichnyy died, whether he was poisoned and who might have had a motive for murder.

The inquest heard from a cardiologist on the effects of fish poisoning on the heart.

Dr Peter Wilmshurst said histamine or scombroid poisoning could result from eating long distance fish, such as salmon, tuna and mackerel.

Symptoms include rashes, hives cramps, vomiting, a peppery taste and itching.

Dr Wilmshurst, who had suffered fish poisoning himself, said: Its rarely fatal. There are cases of people who have died of it.

On the effect on the heart, he said: It can do all sorts of things to the heart.

It often causes the heart rate to go fast. Histamine has direct effects on the heart.

The cardiologist said he was aware of a case of an Australian mother and daughter who died in Bali.

Peter Skelton QC, counsel for the coroner, said: Ms Medynskas evidence was he may have eaten some kind of fish on the night of November 9.

She could not be clear about it. They did not share their food. He said at the time some of the food tasted bad and sent it back. It could have been prawns rather than fish.

What she was clear about was that he vomited three times during the course of an hour and she also said that afterwards when he returned from the bathroom he had a red face and red eyes.

He said he felt better afterwards and did not want to go to see a doctor.

Dr Wilmshurst said there was a more than 50% chance it was poisoning, if he ate fish at the Japanese restaurant.

Asked if that contributed to his death, he said: If one accepts he had scombroid fish poisoning that night then dies the next day having had a condition 18 hours earlier.

If you cannot find any other reason, that becomes the number one suspect.

But he added: The big problem is there are so many unknowns.

Bob Moxon Browne QC, for Legal and General Assurance, suggested there were three possibilities, including malign intent.

He said: It seems likely that Mr Perepilichnyy ate something that disagreed with him on the night before his death.

That could have been because someone malignantly put poison in his food.

The expert said he could not say as he was not a toxicologist.

Mr Moxon Browne went on: Another is, he had scombroid fish poisoning and there is a further possibility which is he simply contracted some form of food poisoning that did not have a histamine base.

John Beggs QC, for the family, suggested that Mr Perepilichnyy was used to fine dining and would know if food was not right.

He pointed out that he did not make love with the former model at the five-star Bristol hotel that night, which would be consistent with him having fish poisoning.

The witness said: Its sufficiently like it  I thought I ought to raise it as a possibility for the court to consider.

Mr Beggs asked if a Viagra-like substance, which was found in Mr Perepilichnyys body, could affect the heart.

Dr Wilmshurst said it could.

Professor Robin Ferner said he first thought of the plant alkaloid Colchicine when he looked for a delayed-action poison which causes vomiting in the way described by Ms Medynska, although none was identified in the body.

The toxicologist did not agree that fish poisoning caused Mr Perepilichnyy to suffer a fatal cardiac arrhythmia, although nothing could be ruled out.

He told the court that while tests for poisons had been extensive they had not been exhaustive.

Fiona Barton QC, for Surrey Police, said: You have posited a number of possibilities that arise from the evidence that is available and none of those possibilities are in your view likely.

Prof Ferner said: Thats true. The question is not whether they are likely, its whether they are more likely than an independent cardiac cause.

He refused to say if a heart problem was more likely than not the cause of death, and there was laughter in court as he added: If I could, that would be helpful to proceedings.

Dr Geoffrey Kite, from Kew, first raised the possibility that an unknown compound in Mr Perepilichnyys body could be the poisonous plant gelsemium  otherwise known as heartbreak grass.

But testing ruled it out beyond reasonable doubt, he said.Meghan Markle is a very different kind of royal bride who has brought millions of followers to the royal family, a biographer of Diana, Princess of Wales has said.

Andrew Morton said the American star is joining the Windsors fully formed, with her own successful career.

In his new book, Meghan  A Hollywood Princess, published on Thursday, Morton charts Ms Markles rise to stardom.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at the 2017 Invictus Games in Toronto, Canada (Danny Lawson/PA)

Shes a very different kind of bride. Shes coming to the royal family fully formed, with a successful career, with successful work as a blogger, Instagram-er, social media and also of course her humanitarian work with World Vision Canada and the United Nations, he told the BBCs Victoria Derbyshire show.

Shes the full package shes brought these millions of followers as a dowry to the royal family.

Prince Harrys mother Diana secretly collaborated with Morton on his controversial book Diana: Her True Story, which revealed the princesss inner turmoil, in 1992.

Andrew Morton in 1992 with his controversial biography of Diana (PA)

Morton hailed Ms Markles activism, which began at an early age, suggesting: Her royal crest is going to be Make The Change, because thats always been her motto.

He also claimed that former friends of Ms Markle had experienced what he called the Meghan chill.

Its the sense that when youre out, youre out, the writer said.

Shes had a life where shes been very mobile. Shes moved from Los Angeles to Toronto, and not all of her friends have stayed with her, and those whove dropped by the wayside have felt what they call the Meghan chill.

Harry and Ms Markle, who became engaged after a whirlwind 16-month romance, will wed in a high-profile, televised ceremony in just over a months time at St Georges Chapel, Windsor Castle on May 19.A new edition of Muriel Sparks classic novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is being published in China with a foreword penned by Scotlands First Minister.

Nicola Sturgeon announced the publication of the new Chinese edition of the novel  saying it highlights the global appeal of the author.

Arts chiefs say the foreword by Ms Sturgeon could make the new book a collectors edition.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has written the foreword for a new Chinese edition of the classic Muriel Spark novel (Scottish Government/PA)

Dame Muriel Spark, who died in Italy at the age of 88, wrote more than 20 novels over her lifetime, including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie  her most famous work which was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Maggie Smith.

The publication of the new Mandarin translation is part of a series of special events marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Edinburgh born writer.

It was announced by the First Minister at a special event at Fudan University in Shanghai to celebrate both the authors centenary and Chinas year-long Inspiring Women in the Arts programme.

#MurielSparks centenary was celebrated at Fudan University in China, where FM @NicolaSturgeon announced new Mandarin translation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and discussed her work with author Louise Welsh and Jenny Niven of @CreativeScots #FMChina18 https://t.co/1hlUHT0vxV pic.twitter.com/AEm81ayDe9  First Minister (@ScotGovFM) April 12, 2018

Ms Sturgeon said: I am delighted that Chinese readers will be soon able to enjoy a new edition of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and as a huge admirer of Muriel Sparks work I am honoured to be given the opportunity to write the foreword.

This publication highlights the global appeal of Muriel Spark, and underlines her status as one of Scotlands best-loved writers. She has inspired countless female authors to take up writing, and Im confident she will continue to do so.

Scotlands creative industries are vital for the economy, and publishing plays an important role in that. The global programme of events being held to mark the 100th anniversary of Muriel Spark can only help to promote the spread and popularity of Scottish authors.

Nick Marchand, the British Councils arts director for China and North East Asia, added: In a year of Inspiring Women in the Arts in China, were delighted to support Scotlands celebrations of the Centenary Year of Muriel Spark.

Jenny Niven, the head of literature, languages and publishing at arts body Creative Scotland, said: It is just fantastic that Muriel Sparks centenary is being honoured in China in this way.

As a true internationalist herself Id like to think Muriel would be delighted too that her work is being introduced to new audiences around the world.

The First Ministers contribution of the foreword to the new translation of Miss Jean Brodie is a clear testament to the value that she places on reading and on literature  and will no doubt make the book a collectors edition.An independent inquiry is being launched into allegations of misconduct and sexual harassment at the Prime Ministers former Oxford college.

St Hughs has confirmed that its governing body commissioned the investigation following claims about the behaviour of a now-deceased Fellow.

It is understood the Fellow is Professor David Robertson, who died in August last year.

An investigation has been launched following claims about the behaviour of a now-deceased Fellow (William Conran/PA)

The inquiry was set up after author Mel McGrath wrote an article on the website The Pool, accusing Professor Robertson of doing a Weinstein on me  a reference to Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein  when she was an undergraduate in the 1980s.

The inquiry will be chaired by Alison Levitt QC, who carried out a review into the crimes of the late Jimmy Savile and who has been tipped to become the new director of public prosecutions.

Ms McGrath wrote: David, who was my tutor, held tutorials in his flat on college grounds and had an uncanny knack for scheduling a shower, at whatever time of day, just before I arrived.

Hed open the door  as if innocently  dressed in his bathrobe and, one time, in a tiny towel.

For the next hour I would have to undergo the humiliating experience of reading my essay, on which I had laboured hard and with serious intent, while David sat opposite, half-naked and man spreading, often smelling of alcohol and sipping from a mug of what was never tea or coffee.

Ms McGrath was also critical of St Hughs, saying that if the authorities at the time had not heard the rumours about Prof Robertsons alleged behaviour they couldnt have been listening very hard.

The college confirmed that an investigation had been launched and released its terms of reference, but a spokeswoman said it would be inappropriate to comment until the investigation was complete.

The terms of reference given to Ms Levitt read: The College has recently received allegations of historic misconduct and sexual harassment about a now deceased Fellow from two former students.

The College requests you to carry out an independent investigation about these allegations and whether the circumstances of these or of similar allegations were known to the members of governing body or management staff of the College.

If so, to report on the adequacy and appropriateness of the Colleges responses and any action taken in respect of such allegations or circumstances, with any recommendations for action.

St Hughs was founded in 1886 to open up the opportunities of an Oxford education to poorer women. It accepted its first male students in 1987.

Former students include the Prime Minister Theresa May, Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi, Amal Clooney and suffragette Emily Davison.Spanish authorities are guilty of an abuse of process in their attempts to extradite a former Catalan education minister, her lawyer has said.

Solicitor Aamer Anwar said the European arrest warrant issued for his client Professor Clara Ponsati was a grotesque distortion of the truth following a court hearing on her extradition.

Prof Ponsati faces charges of violent rebellion and misappropriation of public funds over her role in Catalonias controversial independence referendum last year.

Her legal team told Edinburgh Sheriff Court the extradition would be fought on several grounds including the validly of the warrant and Prof Ponsatis human rights.

A further procedural hearing has been fixed for May 15 with a full two-week hearing to follow on July 30.

Professor Clara Ponsati outside Edinburgh Sheriff Court with her lawyer Aamer Anwar after the extradition hearing (Jane Barlow/PA)

Speaking outside the court, Mr Anwar said: We advised the court that we intend to fight the extradition on many grounds including fundamentally that the Spanish authorities are guilty of an abuse of process.

We seek to challenge the validity of the warrant as the facts do not show that any offence has been committed by Clara Ponsati.

The crime of violent rebellion does not exist in the law of Scotland. We will argue that the warrant has been issued for the purpose of prosecuting Clara for her political opinions.

If extradited Clara will be prejudiced at trial or punished or detained or restricted in her personal liberty because of her political opinions.

We will argue that Claras extradition would be unjust and oppressive and incompatible with her human rights, which will include her rights not to be subjected to pre-trial detention without time limit, right to a fair trial, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association.

Finally we will submit that Spain has systematically abused the process of the extradition treaty to set out allegations which they know can not amount to crimes in their own courts.

Statement following court for @ClaraPonsati as Spanish authorities r accused of abuse of arrest warrant & grotesque distortion of the truth by blaming peaceful Catalans 4violence rather than Spanish Police #Catalonia https://t.co/vmiYV6iNfW via @GrayInGlasgow  Aamer Anwar#BlackLivesMatter (@AamerAnwar) April 12, 2018

Referring to the widespread use of force by Spanish police during the referendum on October 1, he added: To date not one single Spanish police officer has been arrested or prosecuted for their violent actions against a defenceless population and we submit that this warrant is a grotesque distortion of the truth.

Mr Anwar said Prof Ponsatis legal team was working with lawyers in Belgium, Spain, Catalonia and Germany, where last week a court rejected rebellion as grounds for the extradition of Catalonias ex-leader Carles Puigdemont from the country.

The conduct of Spain will once more be subjected to the full glare of international scrutiny, he added.

Earlier Gordon Jackson QC told Sheriff Nigel Ross: The fundamental position which is taken here is the abuse of process.

This is wrapping up in legalistic form something which is purely a political decision.

It is an attempt to squeeze it into some legal formulae and we intend to show thats exactly what is happening here.

A supporter of Prof Ponsati outside Edinburgh Sheriff Court (Jane Barlow/PA)

The hearing took place after Prof Ponsati voluntarily handed herself in to Scottish police last month and was released on bail after an initial court appearance.

The case has attracted a huge amount of public interest with a large crowd turning out to show their support opposite the court building.

Prof Ponsati returned to Scotland in March and resumed working at the University of St Andrews in Fife.

She had been in Belgium since fleeing Spain with Mr Puigdemont and three other former cabinet members, following an unsuccessful bid to declare independence from Spain in October.Metro Bank chairman Vernon Hill is facing the prospect of an embarrassing shareholder rebellion after an investor hit out at more than 21 million of payments from the lender to his wifes architecture firm.

Royal London Asset Management has warned it will vote against a raft of resolutions at Metro Banks annual general meeting (AGM) on April 24, including the re-election of founder and chairman Mr Hill and the lenders remuneration report.

The fund manager, which holds a 0.44% stake in Metro Bank worth 13.6 million, said it would also vote against the re-election of the heads of both the remuneration and audit committees.

Shirley Hills firm InterArch was paid 4.6 million in 2017 alone, linked to architectural design services for Metro Bank, as well as a branding, marketing and advertising agreement that was renewed in January.

It brings the total amount paid to InterArch to 21 million, based on accounts filed between 2010 and 2017.

Royal Londons head of responsible investment Ashley Hamilton Claxton said: In a year when large corporate failures dominate the headlines, boardrooms should pay especially close attention to related party transactions such as the payments by Metro Bank to InterArch, owned by the wife of the banks chairman, for design and branding services.

Metro Banks audit committee said in its annual report that contracts with InterArch were at arms length and were at least as beneficial as those which could be obtained in the market from an alternative supplier.

But Royal London claimed the payments were particularly concerning given Mr Hills history of family business dealings.

We question whether Metro Banks audit committee has been sufficiently rigorous in its scrutiny of the payments made to InterArch, Royal London said.

Our concerns about these transactions is heightened by the history of related party transactions between the chairman and members of his family, while he was serving as a director in the US.

In light of this, well be voting against the reappointment of both the chairman and the chair of the audit committee at Metro Banks AGM this year.

In 2007, Mr Hill resigned from US-based Commerce Bancorp after the lender faced scrutiny by regulators over allegations of business deals with the chairmans family members.

Royal London also raised concerns about transparency around performance targets for executive pay.

Metro Banks annual report detailed a remuneration package totalling 496,667 for Mr Hill in 2017, up from 405,000 a year earlier, while chief executive Craig Donaldson took home 1.5 million, an increase on 1.3 million for 2016.

Metro Banks attitude towards pay looks opaque at best, Royal London said.

The company has failed to disclose performance measures on which executives are being judged by, and thus remunerated on, despite a previous commitment to disclose these.

Well therefore be voting against the firms advisory remuneration report, along with the chairman of the firms remuneration committee.

Metro Bank has expanded rapidly since its launch in the UK and plans to open 12 branches in 2018, expanding its branch network further west to Bristol and Cardiff and north to Birmingham and the Midlands.

Metro Bank said in an emailed statement: InterArch provides architecture, design and branding services to the bank. The audit committee has strong review and benchmarking processes in place conducted by authoritative independent third parties to ensure that the terms are favourable for the bank. This process has been in place since Metro Banks inception and is disclosed in our annual report.

We consulted with shareholders ahead of setting out our remuneration policy and believe the performance measures used to calculate the executive directors variable rewards are transparent and clearly articulated.

The balanced scorecard used to calculate variable rewards for executive directors, as well as all colleagues, includes: Financial, Risk Management, Customer outcomes and People & Culture.France has proof that the Syrian government launched chlorine gas attacks, President Emmanuel Macron said.

Mr Macron said France would not tolerate regimes that think everything is permitted.

Speaking on TF1 television, Mr Macron said we have proof that chemical weapons were used, at least chlorine in recent days by Syrian President Bashar Assads government.

He did not say whether France is planning military action against Assads government.

Mr Macron said he has been talking regularly this week with US President Donald Trump about the most effective response.

Emmanuel Macron in a classroom before a televised interview in Berdhuis, south of Paris (Yoan Valat, Pool via AP)

With increasing concerns about a US-Russia proxy war in Syria, Mr Macron insisted that France will not allow an escalation or something that could damage the stability of the region.

On Tuesday, Mr Macron said any French action would target Syrias chemical weapons abilities.

Syrian opposition activists and medics say a suspected gas attack last week in Douma killed more than 40 people.

The Syrian government has denied the allegations.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany will not participate in possible military action in Syria, but supports sending a message that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable.

She said she spoke on Thursday with Mr Macron.

Mrs Merkel said in Berlin: Germany will not take part in possible military action  I want to make clear again that there are no decisions  but we see, and support this, that everything is being done to send a signal that this use of chemical weapons is not acceptable.Irelands insistence that the Brexit treaty includes a backstop to preserve the islands open border enjoys the full support of Germany, the countrys foreign minister has insisted.

Germanys new federal foreign minister, Heiko Maas, made the pledge as he met Irish Deputy Premier Simon Coveney in Dublin.

The discussions happened ahead of Mr Maass scheduled meeting with UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnston.

Irish Deputy Prime Minister Simon Coveney welcomed German minister Heiko Mass to Iveagh House in Dublin (Brian Lawless/PA)

The minister said Germans understood the emotional sensitivities around the border, given his countrys own experience of division.

I do understand the need that we do whatever we can in order to avoid a flaring up of a historic conflict, he said.

We have to do everything we can to avoid the glimmer of seeing something like a hard border become reality.

Mr Coveney said the solidarity shown by Germany was very, very reassuring.

German Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas offered Ireland his countrys `full support over an open border after Brexit Brian Lawless/PA Wire

We have got unambiguous solidarity today from the largest country in the European Union and that is hugely appreciated on the Irish border issue, he said.

I think the Germans do understand actually the significance of borders and barriers and the emotions that get stirred up by that type of imagery.

He added: The idea that anybody could be talking about the re-emergence of physical border infrastructure on the island of Ireland is something that we simply cant allow to go unchallenged or unchecked.

Mr Coveney reiterated his view that the backstop agreement struck between the UK and the EU in December, which would see Northern Ireland align with much of the EUs regulatory framework, was only a fall-back position and that the preferred option was for both parties to agree a wide-ranging post-Brexit trading agreement.

But he warned: There will be no withdrawal treaty if there is no a backstop on Irish border in that treaty.

Mr Maas added: We dont want to see anything close to a hard border, its not going to be a beneficial development for anyone, so he (Mr Coveney) enjoys our full support.

We believe that to be a question with regard to which Great Britain has to take a decision.The international chemical weapons watchdog has backed Britains findings about the identity of the chemical used in the Salisbury nerve agent attack

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said an analysis of samples taken from former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia and a British police officer affected in the incident last month confirmed the assessment of the UK Government.

An executive summary released by the OPCW does not directly name Novichok  the military grade agent developed by Russia which Britain has said was used  or identify the source of the chemical.

The OPCW has backed Britains finding over the chemical used in the Salisbury nerve agent attack (Ben Birchall/PA)

The findings were welcomed by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson who said they backed Britains assertion that only Russia could have carried out the attack.

The OPCW has completed its independent analysis of the chemical substance used in the Salisbury attack. The report confirms the UKs findings. pic.twitter.com/4JAGJjJcYt  Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (@FCDOGovUK) April 12, 2018

This is based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world. All returned the same conclusive results, Mr Johnson said in a statement.

There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record.

We invited the OPCW to test these samples to ensure strict adherence to international chemical weapons protocols. We never doubted the analysis of our scientists at Porton Down.

He said Britain has called a meeting of the OPCW executive council in The Hague for Wednesday to discuss next steps, adding; The Kremlin must give answers.

In its executive summary, the OPCW said: The results of the analysis by the OPCW-designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirms the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people.

Salisbury incident: Foreign Secretary @BorisJohnson statement on OPCW report.



Full statement here: https://t.co/2Dsxgy6kbs pic.twitter.com/MyXFW5VOwT  Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (@FCDOGovUK) April 12, 2018

The OPCW said the name and structure of the chemical was included in the full classified report issued to the governments of member states.

It noted that the chemical was of high purity with an almost complete absence of impurities, seen as backing Britains assertion that a state actor was involved.

The head of the GCHQ intelligence agency, former MI5 officer Jeremy Fleming, described Moscows actions as particularly stark and shocking.

Speaking at a conference in Manchester hosted by the National Cyber Security Centre, he said: It demonstrates how reckless Russia is prepared to be. How little the Kremlin cares for the international rules-based order. How comfortable they are at putting ordinary lives at risk.

The UK invited the OPCW to carry out a technical investigation after Moscow strongly challenged its assertion that responsibility for the attack lay with the Kremlin.

 #OPCW issues report on technical assistance requested by the #UnitedKingdom #UK in regard to the #Salisbury incident on 4 March 2018. Find the executive summary here: https://t.co/N43P0trUiK pic.twitter.com/0LRNP7afza  OPCW (@OPCW) April 12, 2018

The OPCW said it had taken blood samples from the three affected individuals under full chain of custody for analysis at its laboratories, as well as checking their identities against official photo ID documents.

It also conducted on-site sampling from hot spots of contamination in Salisbury.

Samples taken by the British authorities were supplied to OPCW laboratories in Rijswijk in the Netherlands for comparative analysis to verify the UKs findings.

The release of the report came as Ms Skripal, 33, revealed she has rejected assistance from the Russian embassy, adding: I want to stress that no-one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

In a statement released through the Metropolitan Police, she said she has found herself in a totally different life as she continues to recover from the attack.

The Russian embassy said it doubted the authenticity of the statement and suggested it had been crafted to support Britains version of events.Senior Labour politicians and union officials were among hundreds of people who attended a memorial service to celebrate the life of former union leader Rodney Bickerstaffe.

Speakers paying tribute in Westminster Central Hall on Thursday included former deputy prime minister John Prescott, who described Mr Bickerstaffe as a giant of the labour movement in the UK and abroad.

He stood for social justice and peace  and everyone knew he was on their side, he said.

Maxine Peake paid tribute to the former union leader (Ian West/PA)

Unison general secretary Dave Prentis said Mr Bickerstaffe was widely admired and respected, adding: If you knew him, you loved him. He always had time to listen to the people he represented. He gave a voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.

Actress Maxine Peake said Mr Bickerstaffes skills as an orator were unrivalled, while Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said if the former Unison leader was still alive, he would be campaigning to bring peace to Syria.

Music at the service was provided by the Dodworth Colliery Band and the choir of Unison, the union he led from 1996 to 2001.

Mr Bickerstaffe, who died last October aged 72, was general secretary of the public sector union NUPE before it became Unison and was a former president of the TUC.

He also served as president of the National Pensioners Convention for four years from 2001.A man has pleaded guilty to hacking into the iCloud accounts of Hollywood stars and others so he could steal personal information, including private photographs and videos.

George Garofano, 26, of North Branford, Connecticut, pleaded guilty to unauthorised access to a protected computer to obtain information, federal prosecutors said.

The charge stemmed from the investigation into the 2014 scandal in which the private photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, Kate Upton and others were made public.

Kirsten Dunst (Ian West/PA)

Prosecutors said Garofano sent emails that appeared to be from Apple encouraging victims to disclose usernames and passwords.

He then used the information to illegally access nearly 250 iCloud accounts.

Garofano, who remains free on 50,000 dollar (35,000) bail, faces up to five years in prison at sentencing at a date to be determined.The Princess Royal has visited her father, the Duke of Edinburgh, in hospital as he recovers from a hip operation.

Philip, 96, has been recuperating in the King Edward VII Hospital after arriving for a hip operation last Tuesday.

Anne arrived at the private hospital in central London at around 4.10pm on Thursday  the dukes 10th day in hospital.

She is believed to be the first member of the Royal Family to visit the duke in hospital after his operation.

After its completion, Buckingham Palace said the duke was in good spirits and progressing satisfactorily.

The Duke of Edinburgh (Joe Giddens/PA)

A hip replacement usually takes around 60 to 90 minutes and is carried out under general anaesthetic, although an epidural, where the lower body is numbed, can be used, according to the website NHS Choices.

Philips damaged hip would have been replaced with an artificial joint made of a metal alloy or possibly ceramic, designed to last 15 years.

The duke will have to undergo extensive rehabilitation and will need the support of crutches for the next four to six weeks.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markles wedding is on May 19 and the major family occasion is likely to be the first public appearance by the Queens consort.The husband of a lawyer who has been missing for almost a year has walked free from court after a judge heard how he wanted to drug her with GHB to find out about an affair.

A jury has heard how Majid Mustafa, 48, encouraged a man called Robert Lipinski to obtain the drug, which is usually associated with date-rape, to help him find out about a relationship his wife Renata Antczak was conducting.

Prosecutors at Doncaster Crown Court said he wanted to incapacitate Ms Antczak so he could use her fingerprint to access her mobile phone but he never got hold of any GHB.

The jury was not told during the trial on a charge of intentionally encouraging an offence that Ms Antczak was reported missing a year ago in Hull and has not been seen since.

On Thursday, the jury was discharged after Mustafa changed his plea to guilty and was then given a conditional discharge for 12 months by Judge Mark Bury.

Majid Mustafa leaving Doncaster Crown Court (Dave Higgens/PA)

The court heard how he used various surveillance methods to try and find out what was happening with his wife.

But he also encouraged Mr Lipinski to get hold of GHB from Poland. The court heard that Mr Lipinski was already trying to get hold of the drug in order to use it on his own wife.

The judge stressed that Mustafa never obtained the drug.

Sentencing him, Judge Bury made it clear that the offence he was convicted of on Thursday had nothing to do with his wifes disappearance.

He said: You are not charged with, still less convicted, in connection with her disappearance.

Judge Bury also said: There are many people whose partners, unhappily, are unfaithful. There are very few people who would want to drug them with GHB to try and find out what was going on.

The judge said that he was taking the unusual step of imposing a conditional discharge partly because there had been no actual harm done to anyone and also because Mustafa had already spent

five-and-a-half months in custody on remand last year.

But the judge said that period of remand could only have been imposed due to ongoing inquiries relating to Ms Antczaks disappearance.

Ms Antczak, 49, was last seen in the Kingswood area of Hull and was reported missing on April 25 last year.

Police have made a number of appeals to try and find her and the search continues to be a major inquiry for Humberside Police who launched a murder investigation.

Mustafa, of Beamsley Way, Kingswood, Hull, admitted one count of intentionally encouraging an offence.

The charge states that between March 30 and April 25 last year, he encouraged Robert Lipinski to obtain a noxious substance so that it could be unlawfully administered to Renata Antczak with the intent to injure, aggrieve or annoy.

Mustafa left court saying he just wanted to go back to Hull and see his family.This site

provides information about genealogy-related online meetings, classes, hangouts, seminars and webinars, where there is a visual slide share, website or software demo.

There are currently over 35 hosts and speakers with posting access to this calendar and blog, and over 200 hours of scheduled instruction for genealogists wishing to hone their research skills during the coming year. If you'd like to join the calendar to post your organization's events, contact to this calendar and blog, and over 200 hours of scheduled instruction for genealogists wishing to hone their research skills during the coming year. If you'd like to join the calendar to post your organization's events, contact Myrt@DearMYRTLE.com

, add this feed code, without the square brackets:

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of Google Calendars, click the "+Google" button in the lower right portion of the calendar.

including Adobe Connect, AnyMeeting, Captera, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, Live Meeting, Skype, Web-Ex, and Wiggio, to name a few.Lord Andrew Adonis has asked Ofcom to intervene and instruct the BBC not to broadcast Enoch Powells rivers of blood speech, which he describes as incendiary and racist.

The BBC announced the controversial anti-immigration speech from 1968 will be read in full on Saturday for the first time ever, on Radio 4s Archive on 4 programme.

In a letter to Ofcom chief executive Sharon White, Labour peer Lord Adonis called on the media regulator to instruct the BBC to cancel its proposed broadcast on Saturday of Enoch Powells infamous 1968 speech predicting rivers of blood and the black man having the whip hand over the white man because of immigration.

Lord Adonis asks Ofcom to cancel BBCs Enoch Powell `rivers of blood broadcast (PA)

My letter to Sharon White, head of Ofcom, asking her to instruct the BBC not to broadcast Enoch Powells incendiary & racist rivers of blood speech on Saturday pic.twitter.com/QXOZwR99bP  Andrew Adonis (@Andrew_Adonis) April 12, 2018

It seems extraordinary that one should have to make the argument in todays Britain that Powells speech is an incitement to racial hatred and violence which should not be broadcast.

If a contemporary politician made such a speech they would almost certainly be arrested and charged with serious offences.

Lord Adonis added that the BBCs stance that this is some kind of artistic enterprise is an unsustainable argument, particularly in context of the BBCs boast that the broadcast provides a unique opportunity to hear the speech in full.

He said the decision to broadcast the entire speech is a special tribute to the 50th anniversary of rivers of blood', which he said was the most incendiary racist speech of modern Britain that was not even broadcast at the time.

Lord Adonis said the matter will be raised in Parliament if the speech is not pulled from the schedule.

The BBC had previously defended its decision to broadcast the speech, saying in a statement: Many people know of this controversial speech but few have heard it beyond soundbites.

On Saturday, for 1st time EVER, Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech will be read in full on UK radio (by actor Ian McDiarmid). Please join us @BBCRadio4 8pm. Super-brains Nathan Gower + David Prest have done an amazing production job. Great guests too: https://t.co/3XvDMSH16d  Amol Rajan (@amolrajan) April 12, 2018

Radio 4s well established programme Archive on 4 reflects in detail on historical events and, in order to assess the speech fully and its impact on the immigration debate, it will be analysed by a wide range of contributors including many anti-racism campaigners.

The broadcast sees actor Ian McDiarmid read the speech in its entirety, while the BBCs media editor Amol Rajan examines the influence the speech had since it was first delivered to Conservative Party members in Birmingham 50 years ago.

A spokeswoman for Ofcom said: Ofcoms powers, granted by Parliament, are as a post-broadcast regulator.

This means that we wouldnt check or approve any broadcasters editorial content before transmission.MasterChef will have an all-male finale as contestants Kenny Tutt, Nawamin Pinpathomrat and David Crichton will go head to head to be crowned champion.

The penultimate episode of the series saw Portuguese-born Alex Jorge knocked out at the final hurdle, after the amateur cooks faced a tricky fine dining challenge.

They each had five hours to recreate an iconic dish from Michelin-starred London restaurant Dinner by Heston Blumenthal  some of which have more than 100 steps  while mentored by its chef Ashley Palmer-Watts, who has worked alongside Blumenthal for 18 years.

MasterChef judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace (BBC)

They also had to cook one exceptional dish for MasterChef judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace, as well as Palmer-Watts, and it was Jorge who was eventually eliminated from the competition.

Tutt, a bank manager, and Crichton, an airline pilot, both admitted to being really surprised to have made the final.

Tutt told the Press Association: Id done some really good cooking throughout the competition, but because Id made mistakes here and there to get this far was an absolute dream.

He added: I did feel I definitely earned my place to stand in line with the other guys, though.

Tutt said his stand-out dish was an Italian-inspired dessert he cooked for renowned chef Theo Randall in a previous round.

Asked what he feels makes him stand out from the others, Crichton said: My technical ability. I dont make many mistakes.

Crichton said an inventive guinea fowl dish he produced, and the praise he got from the judges, was a high point for him during the series.

Pinpathomrat, a doctor from Thailand who stunned the judges in another episode when he served up a dish of piranha heads, said he thinks he has got as far as the final because he sticks to my guns when cooking his bold dishes.

Nawamin's 'Waters of Nanay' - inspired by the Amazon River  #MasterChefUK pic.twitter.com/c8KHquZC9f  MasterChef UK  (@MasterChefUK) April 11, 2018

He added that working as a medical scientist has helped him with precision needed to be a successful chef, and that the turning point for him was when he created the coconut-flavoured swan lake dish with blue custard earlier in the competition.

He said that cooking for Torode and Wallace has not been scary, adding: I think Im lucky, I have a positive-thinking mind It is a real honour.

Each of the three finalists said they hope to continue in the food industry after the show ends, in different ways.

Pinpathomrat said he wants to combine food with charity, and to open a restaurant that can help others, while Crichton hopes to pen a cookbook that can help people create fine food at home on a budget.

Tutt said he is unsure what the future may hold, and added: Ive got to see how things pan out Im going to keep cooking, and see if there are any offers.

If something comes through, that would be amazing.

MasterChef: The Final airs on BBC One at 8.30pm, Friday.Police are at a protest outside the hospital where terminally-ill Liverpool boy Alfie Evans is being cared for.

It comes a day after a High Court judge expressed his sympathy for the parents of the 23-month-old who is approaching death after being at the centre of a life-support treatment battle.

Merseyside Police said they were in attendance at a protest outside Alder Hey Childrens Hospital and appealed to protesters to be respectful.

The force said on Twitter: We can confirm that officers are at @AlderHey to monitor a peaceful protest tonight, Thursday 12 April.

Please note that access to the hospital is currently being disrupted and protesters are asked to be respectful of other patients and visitors trying to access the location.

Tom Evans outside the High Court after a judge ruled doctors can stop providing life-support treatment to son Alfie (John Stillwell/PA)

On Wednesday, Mr Justice Hayden described what had happened to Alfie as profoundly unfair as he endorsed an end-of-life care plan drawn up by specialists.

Alfies parents Tom Evans and Kate James, who are both in their 20s and from Liverpool, have lost treatment fights in the High Court, Court of Appeal, Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights.

In February, Mr Justice Hayden ruled that doctors at Alder Hey Childrens Hospital in Liverpool could stop treating Alfie against the wishes of his parents following hearings in the Family Division of the High Court in London and Liverpool.

On Wednesday, during a follow-up hearing in London, he endorsed a plan put forward by Alder Hey doctors for withdrawing life support treatment.

The judge said detail of that plan could not be revealed because Alfie was entitled to privacy at the end of his life.

A video posted on Facebook features Alfies father Tom filming his son in the hospital and holding a letter which he says states he has the right to leave with his child.

The words Christian Legal Centre can be seen at the top of the letter.

I have documentation that says I have the right to take my son out of the hospital, I have the right to take my son out of this hospital, he says in the video.

Mr Evans said the documentation says he is allowed to leave legally, and that he has removed the duty of care and given it to their air ambulance company.

Alder Hey phoned the police to murder my son, he said.

Alder Hey have phoned the police to stop me from taking my son out of the hospital. This is my son. Look at my healthy, healthy young boy who is undiagnosed, who is certainly not dying.

During the nearly two-and-a-half minute clip he also encouraged people to come to the hospital to stand outside and tell them to release our son in a quiet protest.

He added: They have phoned the police over a child Look how innocent the boy is, look at him, he lies there eagerly waiting for his trip home.

How can this come to this?Britain has moved a step closer to potential military action against Syrian President Bashar Assad after Theresa May won the backing of senior ministers for action to deter any further use of chemical weapons by the regime.

Following a two-hour emergency cabinet meeting, Downing Street said ministers had agreed it was highly likely Assad was responsible for the attack on Saturday on the rebel-held town of Douma which reportedly left dozens dead.

In a statement issued following the meeting, it said there had been agreement around the cabinet table that such actions should not go unchallenged and that the UK would continue to work with the US and France to co-ordinate an international response.

Theresa May has won Cabinet support for action to deter Syrian chemical attacks (Steve Parsons/PA)

The statement made no direct reference to military action, but will be seen as a signal Britain would be prepared to join any US-led air strikes against the regime should the Americans decide to go ahead  putting it on a potential collision course with Assads principal backer, Russia.

Earlier US President Donald Trump appeared to row back from a suggestion on Wednesday that missile strikes were imminent, insisting in his latest tweet that he had never set out a timetable for military action.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! he wrote.

At a congressional hearing in Washington, defence secretary General James Mattis also signalled caution, saying the the president had not yet decided whether military force would be part of the US response in Syria.

He said that because the US had no personnel at the site of the suspected chemical attack on Saturday, it has no hard evidence of what happened, although he personally believed it was an inexcusable use of chemical weapons.

However the US broadcaster NBC later quoted US officials familiar with the intelligence as saying they had now obtained blood and urine samples which had tested positive for chemical weapons.

It is vital that parliament has the chance to debate and decide in advance on any government proposals to support a new US-led military intervention in Syria, which risks a dangerous escalation of the conflict.  Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) April 12, 2018

The samples were said to have suggested the presence of both chlorine gas and an unnamed nerve agent, with the officials saying they were confident in the intelligence, although not 100% sure.

That assessment appeared to echo French President Emmanuel Macron who said they had proof that at least chlorine was used in the attack by the regime.

Asked in a TV interview whether France would join strikes on Syria, he said: We will need to take decisions in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective.

The No 10 statement issued following the Cabinet meeting said Mrs May had again described the attack on Douma as a shocking and barbaric act which represented a further erosion of international law.

Cabinet agreed that the Assad regime has a track record of the use of chemical weapons and it is highly likely that the regime is responsible for Saturdays attack, the statement said.

Following a discussion in which every member present made a contribution, Cabinet agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged.

Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

The statement made no reference to whether Parliament would be given a say on military action  prompting renewed concerns among opposition parties and some Tory MPs that Mrs May is prepared to go ahead without a Commons vote.

Signs that @realDonaldTrump and @EmmanuelMacron may now be holding back as #AssadRegime moves key military assets behind #Russian defences. Very dangerous. Essential for @theresa_may to seek #Parliament approval for any action.  Vince Cable (@vincecable) April 12, 2018

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn insisted that MPs were entitled to a vote, saying Parliament must be consulted.

We elect Parliament, we elect members of Parliament. They should have a voice in this. Cabinet on its own should not be making this decision, he said.

The dangers of bombing now, which could escalate the conflict beyond belief. Just imagine the scenario if an American missile shoots down a Russian plane or vice versa. Where do we go from there?

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable said Parliament can and should be recalled immediately while the SNP leader at Westminster Ian Blackford said Mrs May needed to be very careful as she had no Commons majority.

Speaking before the Cabinet met, Brexit Secretary David Davis acknowledged that they faced a very, very delicate circumstance.

Weve got to make this judgment on a very careful, very deliberate, very well thought-through basis, knowing exactly  how strong the evidence is, he said.

Russia meanwhile continued to warn against any use of military force against its Syrian ally.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: The threat to use force against a UN member state is, in itself, a blatant violation of the organisations charter.President Donald Trump has emerged from a meeting with his national security team without a final decision on how to respond to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Mr Trump held a meeting on Thursday afternoon with his team to discuss the situation.

But she said no final decision has been made.

She said that US officials are continuing to assess intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies.

Mr Trump said earlier that an attack on Syria could take place very soon or not so soon at all, arguing he had never signalled the timing of retaliation for the suspected chemical weapons attack that he had suggested was imminent a day earlier.

A Kremlin spokesman warned the US and its allies against any steps that could destabilise the situation in Syria.

Asked about possible US strikes on Syria, President Vladimir Putins spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that its necessary to avoid any steps that may fuel tensions in Syria. He added that it would have an utterly destructive impact on the Syrian settlement.

(PA Graphics)

Mr Peskov would not say if Moscow could use a Russia-US military hotline to avoid casualties in a case of a US strike, saying only that the hotline exists and has remained active.

Mr Trump warned Russia on Wednesday to get ready for a missile attack on its ally Syria.Michael van Gerwen extended his lead at the top of the Premier League with an emphatic display on a night when tributes were paid to Eric Bristow.

A minutes applause took place ahead of the action in Sheffield in memory of former five-time world champion Bristow, who died of a heart attack last week at the age of 60.

A brilliant minute's applause to Eric Bristow MBE here in Sheffield!  pic.twitter.com/pxPrPrnfRA  PDC Darts (@OfficialPDC) April 12, 2018

Players past and present lined up on the stage as the crowd sang There is only one Eric Bristow in emotional scenes.

Michael Van Gerwen has a four-point cushion at the top (Adam Davy/PA)

Van Gerwen took advantage of nearest challenger Michael Smith losing to Rob Cross by hammering Simon Whitlock 7-1 and moving four points clear at the summit.

World champion Cross beat Smith for a second time this campaign, averaging 106.26 in a 7-5 victory which moved him joint-second with his opponent.

Daryl Gurney and Gary Anderson bolstered their top-four aspirations with victories over Raymond van Barneveld and Peter Wright respectively.

A few sleepless nights since Daryl Junior was born a week ago and Ive had no practice.

Its great looking after my wee boy and helping Aine. But that was a big win for me.

Just pleased to get the job done and go for the top four place.

Thanks for all the messages  pic.twitter.com/t6c4dI7Gsw  Daryl Gurney (@Superchin180) April 12, 2018

Gurney extended his unbeaten streak to six matches, beating the struggling Dutchman 7-3, while Anderson won the battle of the Scots with a 7-2 trouncing of Wright.

Wright redeemed himself in the final match of the evening, heaping more misery on Van Barneveld with a 7-2 win.Theresa May and Donald Trump have agreed that the use of chemical weapons must not go unchallenged after the Prime Minister won the backing of her Cabinet for action to prevent their further use in Syria.

The two leaders also said there was a need to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, as they pledged to work together on the international response to the suspected chemical weapons attack.

Meanwhile, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has accused the Government of waiting for instructions from the US and that military intervention risks escalating an already devastating conflict.

(PA Graphics)

Ministers have said it is highly likely Syrian President Bashar Assad was responsible for the attack on Saturday on the rebel-held town of Douma which reportedly left dozens dead and that there was agreement around the Cabinet table that such actions should not go unchallenged.

Mrs May and President Trump spoke hours after this meeting and reiterated the use of chemical weapons should not be tolerated.

The largest US air and naval strike force since the 2003 Iraq war was said to be heading towards Syria, according to reports in The Times, paving the way for strikes within the next three days.

Russia has been granted a request for the United Nations Security Council to meet on Friday for fresh discussions on the threat to international peace from air strikes on Syria.

The statement released by Downing Street after Thursdays Cabinet meeting made no direct reference to military action, but will be seen as a signal Britain would be prepared to join any US-led air strikes against the regime should the Americans decide to go ahead  putting it on a potential collision course with Assads principal backer, Russia.

In a statement released on Thursday night, a Downing Street spokeswoman said: The Prime Minister spoke to President Trump about Syria this evening.

They agreed that the Assad regime had established a pattern of dangerous behaviour in relation to the use of chemical weapons.

They agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged, and on the need to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

They agreed to keep working closely together on the international response.

It is vital that parliament has the chance to debate and decide in advance on any government proposals to support a new US-led military intervention in Syria, which risks a dangerous escalation of the conflict.  Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) April 12, 2018

But Mr Corbyn said: Further UK military intervention in Syrias appalling multi-sided war risks escalating an already devastating conflict.

The Government appears to be waiting for instructions from President Donald Trump on how to proceed. But the US administration is giving alarmingly contradictory signals.

Even US defence secretary James Mattis has said we dont have evidence and warned further military action could escalate out of control.

Earlier, President Trump appeared to row back from a suggestion on Wednesday that missile strikes were imminent, insisting in his latest tweet that he had never set out a timetable for military action.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! he wrote.

US broadcaster NBC quoted US officials familiar with the intelligence as saying they had now obtained blood and urine samples which had tested positive for chemical weapons.

That assessment appeared to echo President Macron, who said they had proof that at least chlorine was used in the attack by the regime.

The White House said it was still assessing the evidence after its security council meeting on Thursday.

The No 10 statement issued following the Cabinet meeting said Mrs May had again described the attack on Douma as a shocking and barbaric act which represented a further erosion of international law.

Cabinet agreed that the Assad regime has a track record of the use of chemical weapons and it is highly likely that the regime is responsible for Saturdays attack, it said.

Signs that @realDonaldTrump and @EmmanuelMacron may now be holding back as #AssadRegime moves key military assets behind #Russian defences. Very dangerous. Essential for @theresa_may to seek #Parliament approval for any action.  Vince Cable (@vincecable) April 12, 2018

Following a discussion in which every member present made a contribution, Cabinet agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged.

Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

The statement made no reference to whether Parliament would be given a say on military action  prompting renewed concerns among opposition parties and some Tory MPs that Mrs May is prepared to go ahead without a Commons vote.

Mr Corbyn insisted that MPs were entitled to a vote, saying Parliament must be consulted.

(PA Graphics)

Ken Clarke, the Conservative former chancellor, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable and Ian Blackford, leader of the SNP in Westminster, also urged Mrs May to give MPs a vote on military action.

A team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is due to start its investigation in Syria on Saturday.

On Friday campaigners from the Stop the War Coalition will hand in a letter signed by MPs, trade unionists, celebrities and academics to Downing Street urging Mrs May to not take military action in Syria.The war rhetoric the United States and Russia are firing at each other over allegations that the Bashar al-Assad regime regularly uses chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war has brought into question the efficacy of the campaign to eliminate the use of chemical weapons.



In 2013, Syria declared that it had ratified the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) banning the production, storage and use of chemical weapons. The declaration came as the Syrian regime faced a military response from the US and its allies for the alleged use of chemical weapons on civilian targets. The declaration, together with Russias diplomatic power and the US governments vacillation, averted the attack by Western powers.



Yet, time and again, the Syrian regime is accused of using chemical weapons on civilian centres. Often the allegations lack concrete evidence, though the anti-government forces make available to the international media footage showing in gruesome detail how the victims of the chemical weapon attack suffer.

When, in April last year, the Syrian government came under international censure for allegedly using chemical weapons on a rebel stronghold, the US defence Secretary James Mattis was asked whether he had any evidence to back the allegations. He said the US had no evidence that the Syrian government used the banned nerve agent Sarin against its own people, but acknowledged that the US was going by the evidence provided by aid groups and others. By the way, the others probably referred to rebels linked to ISIS and al-Qaeda. Despite the lack of evidence, United States President Donald Trump later ordered a Tomahawk missile attack on Syria.



However, United Nations investigators have said that in the Syrian conflict both the regime and the rebels have used chemical weapons. There is another counter narration, according to which civilians become victims when explosions, accidental or otherwise, go off in stores where rebels have haphazardly stockpiled chemical weapons.



This week, in the face of allegations that Syria had once again used chemical weapons on Douma, the last rebel stronghold in Eastern Ghouta, President Trump rushed to tweet, blaming Russia, Iran and Syria, once again going by the so-called evidence provided by the West-backed aid groups and others. On Monday, he warned that the alleged incident would be met forcefully. Russia responded by threatening not only to shoot down incoming US missiles but to attack the base from where the missiles were fired.



On Wednesday, the US President dared Russia to do what it could. In a tweet, he said: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Scoffing at the US, Russia said missiles should target terrorists, not a legitimate government. Some analysts say by regularly attacking Syrian military targets, the US and Israel act like the air force of the terrorists.



At the United Nations Security Council on Monday, US envoy Nikki Haley told Russia that whether the UN Security Council acted or not, either way, the United States will respond. Unmoved, Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia said the incident was staged and warned that any military response by the West could have grave repercussions. He invited investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to visit Syria, promising them that Russia would guarantee their safety. On Tuesday, Russia vetoed the US-backed resolution that called for an investigation and follow up action.



But, once again, the controversy rages, while the hawks make little effort to sift the evidence. Why should Syria use chemical weapons when it was in the final stages of scoring an overwhelming victory against the rebels? Under a deal negotiated by Russia, the rebels have been provided safe passage out of their last stronghold in Douma, a suburb of Damascus. If so, why should Assad commit hara-kiri and court the wrath of the world community, unless he also had a plan to eliminate the rebels so that they would not reappear from another place?



Russian experts who visited Douma claim that there was no evidence of any chemical weapon being used. The OPCW also has no clue as to who did it. It is still investigating the case.



One may say the Russians were biased and they fabricated the story to exonerate Assad. For arguments sake, lets assume that Assad and his Russian backers were rogues. But does this make those who bring the allegations saints? On many occasions, the pictures and footage provided by aid groups and others to pin war crimes allegations on the Syrian regime have turned out to be fake.



There appears to be a parallel between the Syrian story and the ongoing diplomatic spat between Russia and Britain over the alleged poisoning of a Russian spy-turned British double agent and his daughter. Britain is yet to provide the evidence to back the allegation that Russia carried out the poison attack. Rendering the British position weak, Britains defence laboratory Porton Down said it could not verify the precise source of the Novichok nerve agent used in the attack.



With the British case still wide open, reason dictates that suspicion cannot be on Russia alone. One cannot rule out the possibility of other state actors carrying out the attack and then joining in the chorus to blame Russia. Even Britain is a possible suspect, given the Wests dire need to check Russias ambitious drive to regain its superpower status to be on par with the US.



The alleged chemical attacks in Syria, the mysterious poison attack on the British double agent and last years death of a prominent North Korean dissident after a nerve agent attack at the Kuala Lumpur airport point to the failure of international efforts to eliminate chemical weapons, though 20 years have passed since the Chemical Weapons Convention came into force.



The OPCW, though it has won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work, has a long way to go in bringing about a world without chemical weapons. The biggest impediment to achieve this goal is power politics characterized by big powers subjugating small powers.



Sovereignty of small states is a myth. If small states attempt to defy a big state, it is inevitable that they will become a target for hostile activity by the big state scorned. It is also inevitable that Middle powers, or emerging powers, would resort to chemical, nuclear or biological weapons or weapons of mass destruction to deter attacks from a hostile big power. If anyone needs proof, look at North Korea. It has averted a US invasion or attack because it has chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.The use of polythene, which had become a threat and a nuisance to the country, is considerably less now. This is the result of a ban imposed on the production, sale and consumption of selected polythene items like grocery bags, shopping bags, lunch sheets and regiform lunch boxes from September 1, 2017. This ban came into effect from January 1, 2018. Although, at the beginning, the general public and polythene manufacturers found it difficult to adapt themselves to the conditions imposed by the Central Environment Authority(CEA), they gradually cooperated with the ban.



The ban was initially not fully implemented due to the agitation from the community, largely polythene manufactures. They claimed that they could not fall in line with new guidelines when using polythene in the country. Its also fitting to note that the CEA has used all its tricks to promulgate the ban on polythene. It seems that all the hard work of the CEA and the Government, has produced results. There is a substantial decline in the consumption of polythene by the society.



Director of Waste Management at Central Environment Authority (CEA) Ajith Weerasundara told the Daily Mirror that the attempt to restrict the use of selected banned items had become successful thanks to President Maithripala Sirisena, polythene manufactures, general public and the crew at the CEA.



Once we ban the production and consumption of selected polythene items, it is important to raid the places where such banned items are still sold. Therefore, the raids on the production of banned polythene items were commenced from Pettah on January 1, 2018 with the assistance of the Police. Accordingly, the CEA has conducted more than 770 raids islandwide since January, Weerasundara said.

The way the Government approached the issue and found solutions should be appreciated. We see that there is a drastic change in the society in the consuming of polythene items Jagath Gunawardena



Weerasundara told the Daily Mirror that Budget 2018 had proposed to offer a total tax relief when importing machines and raw-materials from abroad to produce biodegradable products. The authorities had also proposed that the Government bear 50% of the cost that needs to be incurred when transforming the existing polythene manufacturing machines to the production of biodegradable items.



Loan scheme



Nevertheless, he said that the Budget had also proposed to introduce a loan scheme through Divisional Development Banks for new entrepreneurs in order to motivate them to produce biodegradable polythene items with material like banana leafs, reeds and coir materials etc.

In order to obtain the mentioned concessions, the biodegradable polythene manufactures are supposed to register with the CEA, he added.

It is not easy to ban something to which people have been accustomed to. The decision by the CEA itself to ban some selected polythene items, is commendable and effective. Besides, people have shown much enthusiasm in adapting to proposed polythene alternatives after considering the fact that the banned polythene items are harmful and not environment friendly.



Speaking with the Daily Mirror, Environmental lawyer and Attorney-at-law Jagath Gunawardena told that a substantial decline could be observed in the society in terms of the consumption of banned polythene items thanks to the alternatives introduced by the CEA.



The reason behind the success of the move was that they were very keen on introducing substitutes unlike last time when they banned some polythene items. The way the Government approached the issue and found solutions should be appreciated. As the outcome, we see that there is a drastic change in the society in the consuming of polythene items, Gunawardena said.

In order to obtain the mentioned concessions, the biodegradable polythene manufactures are supposed to register with the CEA Ajith Weerasundara



It is notable that an issue like the ban of polythene can only be done by changing the mindset of the general public. Otherwise, it would not be effective in the long-run. As it is visible, I feel that the mindset of the people has changed to a certain extent and it is observed that the use of banned polythene items has considerably declined, he added.



He further said that it was important to maintain the trend of consuming biodegradable items in the long-run too so that an environment friendly atmosphere could be established in the society.



We have also got positive feedback from the general public on the Governments move to ban polythene. At the same time, people have shown huge interest in adapting themselves to new polythene items made of by materials like oil papers, wax paper bags and sugarcane.



The Chairman of All Ceylon Polythene Manufacturers and Recyclers Association (ACPMRA) Anura Wijetunge when contacted said that although there was a decline in the usage of the banned polythene items, the ban on lunch sheets is not observed properly.



We still find many shops filled with banned lunch sheets and hardly find shops using biodegradable lunch sheets. Lunch sheets are severely harmful to nature and the survival of human beings. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to take stringent actions against wholesalers who still attempt to sell banned lunch sheets, Wijetunge said.

Therefore, it is absolutely essential to take stringent actions against wholesalers who still attempt to sell banned lunch sheets Anura Wijethunga



We as the polythene manufactures association supported the move to ban selected polythene items irrespective of the initial loss that had to be incurred, because of the environmental menace caused due to the use of polythene. However, we have observed that the CEA is not as active as when the ban was initially imposed. We noticed a monotonous approach by the CEA in the way they have taken legal steps against the possession of banned polythene items. However, we suggest that the Government should take strict action against illegal polythene manufactures, Wijetunge added.



He further said that they would not hesitate to register with the CEA and had already informed their other polythene manufactures to register with the CEA in order to obtain the respective concessions that the Government had promised to grant manufacturers of biodegradable polythene products.



It is the duty of the general public to co-operate with the state officials to do away with the usage of polythene, which is highly harmful to the human being. As it is evident, the Government has taken measures to undertake the elimination of polythene from the society. It cant be done overnight. We have to wait and see how the efforts of the Government would bear fruit.UNP had 106 members in Parliament when NCM handed over to Speaker

SLPP came first in 232 out of 340 local councils in February 10 elections

The President first demanded the resignation of Prime Minister

TNA had 16 members in the House came to rescue the PM at the NCM

The 16 rebel MPs might soon join hands with former President Mahinda Rajapaksa

It goes without saying that the Joint Opposition (JO) somewhat spoiled the local government election victory of its official political party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) with its no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. However, the subsequent events unfolding within the ruling coalition point that the motion was not totally defeated.

The morale boost that was gained by the SLPP after it came first in 232 out of 340 local councils at the February 10 elections was such that their demand for the so-called Yahapalana [National Unity Government] to resign forthwith was seen by many as legitimate. Later they demanded that the PM step down from the post. However, with the defeat of the no-faith motion they seem to have rescinded those demands.



It was President Maithripala Sirisena who first demanded the resignation of his coalition partner Premier Wickremesinghe in the wake of the local council polls, despite his party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) having suffered even more at the same elections. He even reportedly sought the opinion of the Attorney General on his powers for the dismissal of the Prime Minister. Yet, he too seem to have meekly submitted to the new situation after the defeat of the no-faith motion.



The Joint Opposition should have expected this outcome of their no-confidence motion in the light of the ground situation. There were no considerable dissension within the Prime Ministers party, the United National Party (UNP) which had 106 members in the Parliament when the motion was handed over to the Speaker of the Parliament, except for a few Parliamentarians challenging the party leadership.



State Minister Palitha Range Bandara had challenged his party leader, Wickremesinghe with a warning to bring in a no-confidence motion even before the Joint Opposition announced its decision to bring in one. Deputy Minister Palitha Thewarapperuma had resigned from his post. Ven. Athureliye Rathana Thera who contested under the UNP symbol had distanced himself from the party while Deputy Minister Wasantha Senanayake was also grumbling against the leadership. That means there have not been any major splits or dissensions within the UNP except for the frustration among these few individuals when the Joint Opposition attempted to oust the Premier.



With the Tamil National Alliance which had 16 members in the House seeming to come forward to defend the Prime Minister it was an obvious fact that the Joint Oppositions no-faith motion was doomed to fail, even if all parliamentarians of the SLFP had joined hands with them. There wouldnt have such a morale setback for the Mahinda Rajapaksa loyalists in the Parliament as well as at the grass root level, hadnt the Joint Opposition created an unrealistic frenzy among the masses over the success of the motion. They should have used the motion only to strengthen the public opinion against the government.

The President who was openly criticizing the UNP over Bond scam during the election campaign calling for the PM to quit after the election, the SLPP became encouraged and their demand also took a twist to hunt down Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe



The local government election victory had created an unusual haste among the Joint Opposition and the SLPP to come back to power and hence they demanded the governments resignation. With President Sirisena who had been openly criticizing the UNP over the Central Bank bond fraud during the election campaign calling for the resignation of the PM after the election, they were encouraged and their demand also took a twist to hunt down the Premier.



There are no specific provisions in the Constitution for the removal of the PM in spite of the matter being mentioned in passing. However, if it is proved that the Prime Minister does not command the confidence of the Parliament, he would logically be disqualified to hold the post as the Constitution says the President shall appoint as Prime Minister the Member of Parliament, who, in the Presidents opinion, is most likely to command the confidence of Parliament.



Nevertheless, the effort by the joint Opposition to prove that the PM does not command the confidence of the Parliament ended in a flop, demoralizing its rank and file. And now the UNP has started to hit back. The party is now hell bent to take the 15 SLFP ministers and Deputy Speaker of the Parliament Thilanga Sumathipala to task. While calling them to resign their posts the backbenchers of the party had submitted no-confidence motions against six of them. However, Premier Wickremesinghe had advised them to withdraw the motions on the grounds that they were not approved by the Party. Yet, it is doubtful whether the backbenchers would resort to such a move without the party leadership giving its nod.

The 16 SLFP MPs who voted in favour of the no confidence motion are relieved of their portfolios it would be a shot in the arm of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, at the expense of President Sirisena



Despite their being a moral issue with respect to the SLFP ministers who have to work with the UNP as a team if they are continue to be a part of the government, the demand by the UNP for the Deputy Speaker to step down from the post seems to be illogical and against the tradition. Unlike the Speaker who does not take part in debates or voting in the Parliament, the Deputy Speaker and the Deputy Chairman of Committees who chair the House in the absence of the Speaker take part in debates and voting, unless they are at the Chair.



This is not against the law or the tradition. Hence, the Deputy Speaker or the Deputy Chairman of Committees would not be disqualified to hold their respective posts on the grounds that they had taken a side during a particular matter debated in the House. Even the Speaker is allowed to use his vote in case of both parties getting an equal number of votes on a particular matter.



However, can a Cabinet minister continue as a member of the Cabinet without the consent of the PM when the Constitution stipulates the President shall, on the advice of the Prime Minister, appoint from among Members of Parliament, Ministers, to be in charge of the Ministries so determined?



In respect of the other ministers such as the deputy ministers and the State ministers the Constitutional provision is the President may, on the advice of the Prime Minister, appoint from among Members of Parliament, Ministers who shall not be members of the Cabinet of Ministers.

Whatever the legal provisions on the removal of the ministers are, if the 16 SLFP MPs who voted in favour of the no confidence motion are relieved of their portfolios it would be a shot in the arm of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, at the expense of President Sirisena. Those 16 MPs might soon join hands with Rajapaksa as they would not stay any longer without the luxuries of portfolios, on a possible losing side.

Rajapaksa too had invited them to team up with him while some of them might have been longing to cross over after the dismal performance by the two ruling parties at the LG polls. If they join the Rajapaksa camp as a group it would offset the setback suffered by the Joint Opposition after the defeat of the no-confidence motion.



Their possible exit from the government would make the UNP more dependent on the TNA, giving an added advantage to Rajapaksa camp to exploit the Sinhalese vote bank at the future elections. Therefore, notwithstanding the Joint Oppositions immediate setback in the no-faith motion issue, the motion has yielded to the group by way of dividing the two ruling parties as well as the SLFP.OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi --There were tears and smiles as local and state officials, school employees, family and other community members came out to Little Children's Park in Ocean Springs Wednesday afternoon for the dedication of a park bench in memory of Sophia Myers -- a 7-year-old Ocean Springs girl who died in October after an 8-month battle with a rare form of brain cancer.

"Thank you for doing this for our little girl," said Sophia's father, Josh Myers, to the Ocean Springs city officials who assisted in the project.

"In my heart, when I come out here, I can see Sophia out here, playing in the stream, climbing the trees, running to her favorite swing before someone else took it," Josh said, with Sophia's mother, Angel Myers McIlrath, at his side. "I loved pushing my baby on that swing."

The bench memorial project took several months and was planned as a surprise for Angel, who only learned of it a couple of weeks ago, she said. The metal bench is fashioned in the shape of a butterfly, with a plaque with a photo of Sophia and a butterfly underneath.

"Sophia loved the insectarium in New Orleans," Josh explained. "The picture of her on the plaque with the butterfly was taken there. She loved nature. I wanted to do something to surprise Angel. It turned out nice."

"It was a surprise to me," Angel said prior to the ceremony. "Josh has been working on it with the City. Josh and Sophia spent so much time here. He's an amazing dad. He would bring Sophia here before school, after school -- this was kind of like Sophia's second home. So he did this bench in honor of her."

On hand were State Sen. Brice Wiggins and Rep. Charles Busby, along with Ocean Springs Mayor Shea Dobson, aldermen Rob Blackman and Rickey Authement, Jackson County District Attorney Tony Lawrence and members of his staff who work with Angel, Ocean Springs Parks & Recreation Director Geri Straight and City Clerk Shelly Ferguson. Also present was former Ocean Springs mayor Connie Moran.

Wiggins opened the ceremony, calling Josh and Angel "two special people" and presented them with a resolution passed by both houses of the legislature declaring May 17 "DIPG Awareness Day" in Mississippi.

DIPG -- diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma -- is a very rare, incurable cancer which has claimed the life of three Ocean Springs children over the past several years, with Sophia Myers the most recent.

"I don't need to tell everybody here what a light she has been to Ocean Springs and really to the entire state of Mississippi," Wiggins said of Sophia.

He said the designation of a DIPG Awareness Day would not have happened without Sophia and the efforts of her parents.

Dobson thanked Josh and Angel for their efforts in promoting DIPG awareness.

"It's a tragedy, but we can take this and move forward and make sure we find a cure," the mayor said.

Choking back tears, Josh said he never thought he'd be planning a memorial for his 7-year-old daughter, that she should have been the one to plan his memorial one day.

He also noted Sophia's bench is similar to the one dedicated to Sophia Mohler, another Ocean Springs girl who died from DIPG, which is located on Front Beach.

"Sophia and I would go down there and I'd talk to her about Sophia Mohler, about what had happened," Josh said. "In my heart, our Sophias are in heaven how playing in a park more beautiful than this one.

"They have a special bond," he said afterward. "It's a sad bond, but it's special."

Lawrence recalled Sophia running the hallways of the district attorney's office, where Angel is an assistant DA, and how Sophia's illness affected not only Josh and Angel, but the "entire DA office family and community."

"We miss her," Lawrence said. "We miss her running through our office. We miss her sassy personality. But we're going to make sure -- and I know Angel and Josh are going to continue the fight -- to make sure we find a cure."

Angel said she and Josh continue to be grateful for the outpouring of community support.

"It's an amazing turnout," she said. "Our community continues to embrace us and support us in ways that just blow our minds. We're grateful and we're thankful. We've got big things coming in Sophia's memory and we just hope everybody will continue to stand with us."

She said the kickoff for the Sophia Myers Foundation will be held in conjunction with DIPG Awareness Day May 17, with details on the kickoff to be announced soon.The National Joint Committee (NJC) yesterday made a public statement requesting parliamentarians to vote against the proposed Sri Lanka-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (SLSFTA), describing it as a blow to national economic interests.

At a press conference, Mr Nalaka Jayaweera of the NJC was critical of numerous provisions which put the Sri Lankan market at risk of exploitation and expressed concern that the government entered into the trade liberalisation agreement without the endorsement or agreement of a single Sri Lankan institute or professional organisation.

Mr. Jayaweera also pointed out that there were marked differences in the allowances made for Sri Lanka by Singapore in contrast to those made for Singapore by Sri Lanka.

One of the key concerns raised was the move to liberalise the services sector without putting proper national registration mechanisms and relevant regulations in place first, a move which would subject Sri Lankas services industry to unchecked encroachment.

Mr Jayaweera argued that the number of service sectors (including architecture, engineering, legal, computing, construction, management consultancy and financial) which are on the FTAs positive list but do not have registration mechanisms paves the way for non-nationals with sub-standard qualifications to enter and practise, compromising the positions held by Sri Lankan professionals and also putting consumers of the industries at risk.

In contrast, Mr. Jayaweera pointed out that Singapore boasts a highly regulated framework for almost all sectors listed for liberalisation as well as a highly saturated market for most industries. As a result, he argued that opening Sri Lankas service sectors without national regulation would open up a single traffic corridor in favour of Singapore.

Dr. Lalithasiri Gunaruwan of the NJC also raised that in contrast to the FTAs narrow territorial definition for Singapore, Sri Lankan territory is defined broadly in the agreement to include Sri Lankas exclusive economic zone and continental shelf, opening up the opportunity for exploitation of Sri Lankas valuable oceanic resources.

The FTA was further criticised for enabling access to Sri Lanka for citizens and permanent residents of Singapore, while Singapore would only enable access to citizens of Sri Lanka under it.

The NJC urged all parliamentarians to vote against the agreement, stating it would not hesitate to publicly denounce members of parliament who would vote in favour of the anti-patriotic and nationally detrimental international agreement.

The future will hold those bureaucrats, professionals and politicians who were instrumental in signing this agreement liable for its negative implications on the Sri Lankan economy, Mr. Jayaweera said. (Tilini Rajapaksa and Thilanka Kanakarathna)Sri Lanka and Vietnam reaffirmed the commitment to further consolidate and advance bilateral political and economic cooperation during the third meeting of Sri Lanka -Vietnam Political Consultations, the Foreign Affairs Ministry said.

It said the Sri Lanka delegation was led by Foreign Affairs Ministry Additional Secretary, Sumith Nekandala and the Vietnam delegation by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dang Dinh Quy.

A wide range of matters in the areas of mutual interest and ongoing programmes in the fields of agriculture, fisheries, education and training, trade and investment, culture and tourism were reviewed and discussed. The two sides stressed the significance of continuing to work together at regional and multilateral fora for advancing shared interests and on mutually-important issues. Also, Mr. Quy called on Foreign Minister Tilak Marapana on April 11. An MoU between the Foreign Ministries of Sri Lanka and Vietnam, inked in October 2011, paved the way for enhancing bilateral cooperation through political consultations, it said.Decades ago, the main sources of information were mass media including newspapers, radio and television. However, the digital age and easy access to information via social media: Facebook, Twitter, You tube, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. tend to threaten the mainstream mass media. These novel sources of information make us opinionated, often rendering a platform where opinions, be it positive or negative, go viral. One could argue that any individual has the right to showcase any idea or opinion in his or her private account in any social media platform. Nevertheless, it is not legitimate to fabricate any morphed or distorted news which would generate hatred and unnecessary social unrest in the country. In hindsight, the unprecedented spread of hate speech and distorted news in social media relating to the recent communal unrest, led the Telecom Regulatory Commission (TRC) to monitor all social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp etc., for the first time in Sri Lanka. Following the repercussions, not only was the Kandy Administrative District under curfew, but the masses were also subjected to the digital surveillance. It goes without saying that in social media anything and everything can go viral, without any control. Various groups would prefer to take the benefit from this uncontrollable flow of information, in order to spread distorted, morphed news.



Hype about the sterilization pills



The March 4th edition of the Sunday Observer states that the video which made rounds in social media, on the uproar of the so-called sterilization pills, which are claimed to be found in an Ampara restaurant, is fraudulent. The newspaper emphasizes that the issue came to the forefront as a customer had found a dough in food thinking that it was sterilization pill. Consequently, few mosques and other property were damaged as a cause of the ferocity of the residents of that area, which got heightened after seeing the so-called video. At this juncture, there are several pressing issues that need to be tackled. Firstly, the mass media has the ability to tackle these rumors which are doing rounds and to educate the masses.



Video on the Throat-cutting gesture



Similarly, the recent video of the throat-slinging gesture by Brigadier Priyanka Fernando, Minister Counsellor (Defence) in the Sri Lanka mission in London, went viral in social media either for positive or negative reasons. Nevertheless, the burgeoning issue is that the video that went viral could have been taken out of proportion. The part where he had initially negotiated with diaspora was not visible in many of the videos that the masses initially came across. Social media makes the mass aware of some hideous topics that the mainstream mass media fails to report on. But, the concern is that, sometimes social media puts unnecessary pressure on state affairs, even before the affairs are acknowledged under an inquiry. Even the Military Spokesman Brigadier Sumith Atapattu said that Brigadier Fernando cannot be punished based on a video clip alone.



Interests of political and social groups



Moreover, different interests of political and social groups give momentum to the overflow of such news. Sometimes different groups which have prejudices on other groups give consent for such petty ethnic rivals. The situation in Ampara and the clash in Digana should not be intertwined with so- called religious or racist misinterpretations. It is the arrogance and prejudice towards the other group. In social psychology there is a theory called in-group and out-group mentality. In-group is a social identity which an individual imbibe thinking he or she belongs to it. Such social groups can be based on race, ethnicity, gender etc.



Every coin has two sides



Hence, are we to blame social media? Every coin has two sides. One should not let go its positive consequences. The controversial laptop dance which was scheduled to be performed at the Independence Parade 2018, was removed by the relevant authorities, after it was ridiculed in social media. The launch of Yahapalana Government mainly came into being with the fuel of the social media. In the global stage, the Arab Spring would not have sprung if not for the social media force. Thus, one should know how to use social media with conscience. One should be wise enough to filter information from opinions, because, information in social media can be loaded with opinions and sensationalism, since it aims to get the highest number of views. Let us not forget that we have a sound literacy rate in Sri Lanka which is above 95%, and it is high time to question the true meaning of our literacy and intelligence. Education would be wholesome if individuals can think rationally and feed the humanity with sympathy and empathy. Susan Krauss Whitbournein further mentions that we can eliminate the ingroup or outdoor group psychological condition if we,



1. Recognize the arbitrary nature of many ingroup-outgroup distinctions.



2. Put yourself in the place of the outgroup member.



3. Look for commonalities between opposing groups. -



4. Work on building your inner sense of security.



5. Pass along the lesson.



These reconciliation tips can be passed via social media, the same tool which tends to divide people, if we put its rightful purpose at the right place; connection.



(Savindrie Jayawardane is a graduate of International Relations from the University of London. She is currently reading for her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Degree in English from the University of Peradeniya)

The sun is slated to pass from House of Pisces to the House of Aries in the celestial sphere in a few days time heralding another Sinhala and Hindu New Year. By the time of this years New Year, the sun certainly seems to be shining on Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, having defeated the No-Faith Motion against him despite all the initial hiccups. His victory, it appeared, brought some semblance of sanity and stability after two months of uncertainty that rocked the country since February 10th Local Government polls.



However, not everything in the UNP will be honky-dory till the leadership delivers the promised reforms. The chaos that reigned in the party in the run-up to the no-confidence vote spoke of nothing else but the urgent need for party reforms.



The call was for better party democracy and an opportunity for the youth. The first Litmus Test for the degree of commitment by the UNP leadership in delivering these would be his choice of party General Secretary.



Among the slew of names proposed for the vacancy are the so-called inner-circle members of the party leader. It would be only prudent that Prime Minister Wickremesinghe picks someone who is politically seasoned and unanimously accepted, both by the seniors and the backbenchers, for this post avoiding any

more bitterness.



Such a gesture would raise hope among party members that a genuine move is underway to put the party on a progressive track after all previous setbacks.

Bringing in authentic reforms after a convincing victory at the No-Confidence Motion vote certainly would garner greater glory for the party leader since he would be introducing the reforms from a point of strength than the weakness.



As John Kennedy declared in his annual address to the Congress in 1962 The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining and the leaky roof of the UNP is certainly in need of good repair.



While the NCM stabilised Ranil Wickremesinghe as UNP leader the other fallouts of the vote have created chaos in the country thus fulfilling the aspirations of the movers of the motion, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP). The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) which sharply divided over the NCM boycotted Cabinet and finally decided to quit the Government ending the UNP-SLFP Yahapalana marriage.



The bulk of the SLFP members have moved to side with former President Mahinda Rajapaksas SLPP, weakening the clout of incumbent President

Maithripala Sirisena.



The April 4th vote also opened new fissures within Parliaments official main Opposition, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA). The TNAs decision to back the Prime Minister came at a time the Tamil electorate was showing impatience over the Governments delay in bringing in Constitutional reforms.



Notwithstanding the role the international players have played in the TNA decision to back the premier the TNA support to Wickremesinghe is likely to have estranged an active section of the Tamils especially among the diaspora. It would be near impossible for the UNP leader to deliver the demands of the TNA at a time the nation is riding on a strong Sinhala nationalist wave.



After all, there are less than two years for the next Presidential Election and the UNP leader is unlikely to antagonise the Sinhalese to be in the good books of the Tamil community this time.



The Muslim parties and MPs who played hard to get with the Prime Minister over Ampara and Teldeniya riots fell in line at the last minute despite the growing hostility by the Muslim community towards the Government.



With their decision to side with the Prime Minister, the Muslim parties and Parliamentarians are now under obligation to the community to make sure that a repeat of the incidents would not take place under the UNP-led Government.



The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), which continues with its winning mood even after its defeat at the NCM against the Prime Minister, is displaying all signs that it is out to make the Government bleed.



This means more chaos in the country with ordinary citizens, instead of politicians, being ultimate victims. The best way to void more political disasters would be to strengthen the UNP with the expected reforms. Time certainly is up for the UNP leader to repair the party roof, which has been leaking for too long.* Namibia: June 2018  Sold Out

* Botswana: July 2018  2 spots left

* Costa Rica: August 2018  Sold Out (Waiting list)

* Croatia / Slovenia: September 2018 - 6 spots left

* Tanzania: January 2019  Sold Out (Waiting list)

* Tanzania: February 2019 - 4 spots left

* Costa Rica: May 2019 - 7 spots left

* Costa Rica: July 2019 - New

* Tanzania (Migration): August 2019 - New

* India: January / February 2020 - New

__________________________________________________________________________Two big topics in education politics this election seasonunion power and gun controlwere at the center of a clash this week between the American Federation of Teachers and the National Rifle Association.

At a time when teachers have walked out of schools to protest their pay and funding for schools in general in states like Oklahoma and West Virginia, the ability of teachers unions to influence elections is one major political story to watch in 2018, when 36 states will hold races for governor and thousands of state legislative seats will be up . At the same time, the NRAs power over state capitals could be tested in some places if the student-driven March for Our Lives movement, formed after the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. , is able to turn dissatisfication about current gun-control laws into power at the ballot box.

Heres some background: The AFT has begun a campaign in recent weeks taking Wells Fargo bank to task for providing loans to firearms manufacturers$431 million worth of loans since 2012, according to a Bloomberg reportas well as managing accounts for the NRA. Last year, about 1,600 families with AFT members benefited from Wells Fargos Union Privilege program for home mortgages, and 20,000 AFT members benefit from the program.



On March 29, AFT President Randi Weingarten wrote to Wells Fargo CEO and President Tim Sloan asking for specifics about its relationships with the NRA , saying she hoped the bank would join other responsible corporate leaders and take a stand to protect children from gun violence.

, saying she hoped the bank would join other responsible corporate leaders and take a stand to protect children from gun violence. On April 3, Sloan responded by highlighting the banks various activities involving the AFT and education philanthropy . But he declined to specify its relationship with the NRA or firearms companies. Sloan said hed be happy to meet with AFT leaders to discuss the matter further.

. But he declined to specify its relationship with the NRA or firearms companies. Sloan said hed be happy to meet with AFT leaders to discuss the matter further. On April 6, Weingarten said shed be interested in a meeting with Sloan, but also signaled the unions position wasnt open to negotiation . She also said she would release the unions correspondence with the bank.

. She also said she would release the unions correspondence with the bank. On April 7 Weingarten said in a statement that, If Tim doesnt ditch his guns business, well ditch Wells Fargo. We are glad Tim wants to meet; but no words will dissuade us from our view that our society must value people over profits. Weingarten is ready to encourage the AFL-CIO and other groups to drop their relationships with the bank as well.

Then on Tuesday, the NRAs video channel, NRATV, weighed in on the AFT-Wells Fargo dispute. Host Grant Stinchfield blasted the AFT as a radical tool of government overreach that was trying to strong-arm Wells Fargo into doing its bidding and, by extension, attack the NRA. Stinchfield said. Ill put this bluntly: Randi Weingarten and the AFT are one of the greatest threats to our children. NRA also tweeted this out about the union, showing Weingarten with Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts:

"@AFTunion sees #NRA as an obstacle to pushing a radical agenda. One where lazy progressives can sit all day in a classroom while students languish...The AFT prefers a boot on throat of these low income kids, to keep them down, to be dependent on government. -@stinchfield1776 pic.twitter.com/1NyDuOhJmW  NRATV (@NRATV) April 10, 2018

You can watch Stinchfields video at the top of this blog post.

In response, Weingarten asked incredulously if the host had called teachers lazy, then added this tweet:

Last time I looked it was teachers shielding kids...and taking $$ out of their pockets for supplies for kids...

Stop bullying .. and why are you so afraid of us asking Wells Fargo to make a choice..... children or guns????  Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) April 11, 2018

She stressed that it is the unions right not to do business with a company that supports the NRA. Since the back-and-forth between the NRA and Weingarten, the union president has touted not just the unions support for the teachers whove walked out in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, but also highlighted how teachers in Oklahoma are interested in running for office . (See our colleague Daarel Burnette IIs story about a similar phenomenon in Oklahoma two years ago .)

Conflicts between teacher politics and financial investments involving the gun industry isnt new.

In February, a Forbes analysis found that teacher pension funds in 12 states have investments in gun manufacturers stocks , including Arizona, California, Florida, and New York. Mike Antonucci at the 74 has also detailed how California teacher pension funds investments in things like firearms dont necessarily match union leaders political stances .



Getting more candidates elected who are more inclined to take the AFTs point of view in states like Oklahoma or West Virginia wont be easy. But this weeks social-media rumble between the union and the NRA might not be the last time the two groups square off very publicly in what promises to be a very volatile election season.

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .CORRECTED

New Mexicos education chief has decided not to renew the charter contract of the states largest online charter school, and a spokeswoman for the New Mexico Public Education Department told the Santa Fe New Mexican that the school will close in June.

This is notable because online charter schools, most of which are run by one of two national companies based on the East Coast, rarely shut down even when plagued with poor performance or financial mismanagement Education Weekfound in an analysis of more than 10 years of news stories, state reports, and research.

New Mexico Public Education Secretary-designate Christopher Ruszkowski said that after receiving two years of F grades from the states accountability system, the New Mexico Connections Academy, which has around 1,300 students, had failed to live up to its potential, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican .

The school, which opened in 2013, had appealed to the states top education official after its authorizer, the Public Education Commission, also refused to renew its charter back in December.

Around the same time, a report put together by two nonpartisan legislative committees for state lawmakers found that all three of the states virtual schools have struggled to provide acceptable outcomes, demonstrate fiscal responsibility, and comply with state law.

The prospects look grim for the New Mexico Connections Academy, which is run by Connections Education, the second-largest for-profit charter school operating company in the country. The school may still find a way to stay open, however. The nonrenewal decision could be appealed to a district court, as the Santa Fe New Mexican says some supportive lawmakers hope it will, or the school could potentially switch to another oversight group or authorizer, if it can find a local school district to sponsor it.

As I wrote in December, the legislative report raised the alarm that local school districts could be tempted to take on struggling cyber charters to increase revenue. It also found that virtual school students in the state performed on average worse in reading and math and had less academic growth than their peers in traditional, brick-and-mortar schools. Thats even though virtual schools serve fewer students who are learning English, have disabilities, or are from low-income families. There are a little over 2,000 students total enrolled in the states cyber charters.

The report also raised concerns over whether the companies that the three cyber charters contract with for services play too large a role in running the schools. Although public schools can contract with for-profit providers for some services such as curriculum, state law bans for-profit companies from making staffing decisions or operating schools entirely.

Finally, the report said that there is a concerning lack of financial transparency in New Mexicos online schools. For example, monthly invoices from the operating companies to the schools at times surpassed six figures but lacked detail on the services they were charging schools for. (For the reports recommendadtions, see this story .)

Many of these same issues have cropped up with virtual schools across the country, as Education Week detailed in a 2016 investigation . As part of that work, we compiled reports of trouble in cyber charters from local media outlets, state agencies, and researchers over the past decade into an interactive map, which you can explore here:

The map is updated through 2017.

Related stories:

Correction: This story has been corrected to attribute the statement that New Mexico Connections Academy will close in June to a spokewoman for the New Mexico Public Education Department.The annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association starts today in New York City, with some 17,000 researchers and education watchers gathering in Times Square.

It may be a record attendance this year, said Tony Pals, AERA communications director.

The 2018 conference is dedicated to exploring The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Public Education, with more than 2,500 symposia, lectures, and paper discussions on topics including teacher compensation, research partnerships for school improvement, and student mobility between charter and district schools, among many others.

The conference comes amid wild swings in planned federal funding for education research, ongoing soul-searching over problems of replication and transparency in education research, and debates about the role of researchers in public policy. Jack Buckley, senior vice president for research at the American Institutes for Research, said he expects hot discussions of research on education policy in the current administration, as well as studies of school discipline, civil rights, and gun violence.

In fact, in response to the countrywide student protests following the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., this year AERA will live-stream a town hall discussion Friday evening on the state of research on school gun violence and its implications for schools and communities. It will include a discussion with David Adams of the Urban Assembly, Ron Avi Astor of the University of Southern California, Matthew Mayer of Rutgers University, Katherine Newman of the University of Massachusetts, AIRs David Osher, and Pedro Noguera of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Its one of 15 town halls and symposiums to be streamed live online this year, including discussions on school segregation and the evolution of the 50-year-old Bilingual Education Act, as well as a town hall discussion of #MeToo and sexual harassment in academia .

At Inside School Research, Ill also be exploring new approaches into how to teach students critical thinking and self-motivated learning and what educators can learn from long-standing research partnerships in the wake of the Every Student Succeeds Act, among other issues.

Education Week at AERA 2018

By the way, if researchers are interested in discussing emerging research trends and partnerships with Education Week, they can chat with Debbie Viadero, Education Weeks assistant managing editor (and former Inside School Research writer!) and Commentary Editor Elizabeth Rich about whats involved at a roundtable discussion on Saturday from 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. in the Speakers Corner of the Exhibit Hall. And Ill be moderating a live-streamed panel on Monday on the evolution of nonprofit education journalism and how it affects researchers.

Well be live-blogging and tweeting through the weekend and next week. For live coverage, follow me at

and Ben Herold, our education technology and digital privacy reporter, at

Photo Source: Getty

See Also:The Oklahoma Education Association is ending the nine-day statewide teacher walkout, calling the work stoppage a historic victory despite not achieving all of its goals.

We recognize that our formal efforts to lobby elected leaders have achieved all that we will be able to accomplish this legislative session, OEA President Alicia Priest said in a statement. OEA is a member-driven, representative organization, and while we are shifting our focus and efforts, we are supporting educators who decide to continue the walkout or those who decide to return to their classrooms. We want every school district to continue sending lobby teams to the capitol.

Several districts, including Oklahoma City, have already canceled classes for Friday, and Priest said teachers in those districts should use the day as a day of action, although the legislature will not be in session. The Tulsa school district has announced it will resume classes on Tuesday and teachers will return to work on Monday.

In a Facebook poll last night, almost 7,000 people said they would not consider the walkout to be over if OEA said it was, without securing additional school funding. Much of this walkout has been driven by teachers on social media , so its unclear if all educators will immediately heed OEAs call to return to the classroom.

But in a news conference, Priest said 70 percent of OEA members are unsure if continuing a walkout will gain additional funding for public schools. Lawmakers, Priest said, are unwilling to consider any additional revenue bills.

We need to face reality, she said. We have seen no significant legislative movement since last Friday.

The union estimates that the effort has secured $479 million in education funding for the next school year. That includes a $6,100 pay raise for teachers. Still, thats less than what the union had initially asked for, which included a $10,000 pay raise over three years.

Meanwhile, the Oklahoma City American Federation of Teachers will hold a vote to see whether its members will return to the classroom.

We are proud of what we have accomplished, but truthfully theres no one left to negotiate with in the statehouse, said Oklahoma City AFT President Ed Allen in a statement.

Image: Kara Walk, left, assistant principal in the Putnam City district, and Ivana Beatty, assistant principal in the Oklahoma City district, gather protest signs to dispose of outside the state capitol after the Oklahoma Education Association called for an end to the school walkout. Sue Ogrocki/APBattling perception that BJP is anti-Dalit and anti-poor, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday announced a 22-day 'Gram Swaraj Abhiyan' from April 14 to "realise the dreams" of Mahatma Gandhi and Dalit icons B R Ambedkar and Jyotirao Phule.

The Abhiyan is starting two days after all BJP MPs, including Modi, undertake a day-long fast on Thursday against the "obstructionist" attitude of the Opposition towards functioning of Parliament. It also comes as the government is on the backfoot with MPs raising their voice against the handling of Dalit issues and the violent clashes during the April 2 Bharat Bandh called by Dalit groups to protest the dilution of the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act.

The Abhiyan, which will go on till May 5, was announced during Modi's audio bridge call with party's elected representatives - MPs, MLAs and local body representatives. Participants will spread out to the villages to create awareness about various central schemes and dispel notions that the Modi government acts against the interests of Dalits and other marginalised communities.

Modi will take part in the outreach programme in Chhattisgarh's Bijapur on April 14, the birth anniversary of Ambedkar.

Pep talk to partymen

During his interaction, Modi emphasised the need for countering the charges made by Congress and other Opposition parties after a Supreme Court verdict diluted the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act.

"BJP will expose the mindset of a handful of people who are frustrated after being out of power, and constantly conspiring to murder democracy by not letting Parliament to function," Modi said, adding he would have another round of interaction with BJP party workers through Narendra Modi App on April 22.

During his bridge call on Wednesday, the birth anniversary of Phule, Modi sought to emphasise his government's credentials in addressing the concerns of Dalits. He also emphasised the contributions of Phule.

As part of the Abhiyan, BJP will celebrate April 17 as Swachh Bharat Parv, April 20 as Ujwala Diwas, April 24 as Panchayati Raj Diwas, April 28 as Gram Shakti Abhiyan, April 30 as Ayushman Bharat Diwas, May 2 as Kisan Kalyan Karyashala and May 5 as Kaushal Vikas Mela.

Modi later addressed his Council of Ministers, where a presentation was made on the seven flagship programmes, including Swachch Bharat, Ujwala and Ujala schemes. Here also, he emphasised that the ministers should talk more about the programmes even as some senior ministers had indicated that they were not able to highlight it among Dalit communities as the nomenclature had a general ring.Two dacoits struck at Ashraya Colony on the outskirts of Kalaburagi city early Thursday morning and were fired upon by the police.

The two dacoits are identified as Shekhar and Azeem, both residents of Alanda checkpost. They attempted to attack the police in a bid to escape.

At this point, PSIs Parashurama and Waheed Kotwal shot the dacoits in the leg. The accused who were injured are now being treated at the district hospital.

Constables Bande Nawaz and Bhima Naik were also injured in the operation. They are being treated at the Basaveshwara Hospital.

The accused duo are wanted in many dacoity, murder and other cases. The case is registered at the Kalaburagi Rural police station.The Supreme Court today refused to accord an urgent hearing on the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak's Committee (SGPC) plea, seeking modification of the order allowing the movie "Nanak Shah Fakir" to be released in theatres across India.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra considered the submission of the SGPC's counsel that nobody should be allowed to portray the life of Sikh gurus, their families and the 'punj pyara' on screen.

The bench, also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, said once a film has been granted certification by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), its release can only be stalled through lawful means.

The bench did not agree to the submission of Satender Singh Gulati, counsel for SGPC, that the interim plea be heard either today or tomorrow as the film releases in the theatres on Friday.

The bench said the plea will be listed for hearing on Monday.

The top court had on April 10 criticised SGPC, the apex religious body of the Sikhs, for imposing restrictions on the film 'Nanak Shah Fakir' and had cleared the decks for its nationwide release scheduled on April 13.Authorities today imposed restrictions in parts of Srinagar -- the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir -- and in Kulgam district as a precautionary measure to maintain law and order in view of a strike called by separatists to protest the killing of four civilians near an encounter site yesterday.

Restrictions have been imposed in Kulgam district of south Kashmir and parts of Srinagar, a police official said.

He said curbs have been imposed in five police station areas of the city here which include Nowhatta, Khanyar, Rainawari, Safakadal and Maharajgunj.

The restrictions have been imposed as a precautionary measure to maintain law and order, the official said.

Four civilians were killed in clashes with security forces near the encounter site in Khudwani area of Kulgam yesterday. The militants managed to escape from the site and the operation was called off.

Separatists, under the banner of Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL), have called for a strike today to protest the civilian killings.

The JRL, which comprises Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mohammad Yasin Malik, also asked people across the Valley to stage protests in the afternoon and observe a blackout in the evening.

The strike affected normal life elsewhere in the Valley as most of the shops and other business establishments were shut, while public transport was off the roads, officials said.

Authorities also ordered the closure of schools and colleges in most parts of the Valley to thwart student protests, the officials said.

The Kashmir University and the Islamic University of Science and Technology have suspended class works for today and postponed all the examinations scheduled for the day as well.

Mobile Internet services remained suspended in south Kashmir areas, while the network speed has been reduced in Srinagar, the officials said.Walmart Inc is likely to reach a deal to buy a majority stake in Indian e-commerce player Flipkart by the end of June in what could be the U.S. retail giant's biggest acquisition of an online business, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Reuters reported last week that Walmart completed its due diligence on Flipkart and had made a proposal to buy 51 percent or more of the Indian company for between $10 billion to $12 billion.

A deal with Flipkart would step up Walmart's battle with Amazon.com for a bigger share of India's fledgling e-commerce market, which Morgan Stanley estimates will be worth $200 billion in a decade. Local media have reported that Amazon is exploring a possible counter offer for Flipkart.

Both sources declined to be named as the talks are private.

Walmart will buy both new and existing Flipkart shares, with the new shares expected to value the Bengaluru-based firm at at least $18 billion, the sources said. The price for existing shares would value the firm at about $12 billion, one of the people said.

Japan's SoftBank Group, which owns roughly one-fifth of Flipkart via its Vision Fund, is unlikely to sell any of its shares due to the low price being offered for the existing shares, this source said.

Reuters has previously reported that early investors such as Tiger Global, Accel and Naspers will likely sell their entire stakes in Flipkart to Walmart if a deal is reached.

A deal is not yet finalised, and talks between Walmart, Flipkart and its investors are ongoing, one of the people said.

Flipkart also counts eBay, Tencent Holdings and Microsoft Corp among its investors.

Flipkart did not respond to a request for comment, a representative for Walmart in India declined comment while SoftBank said it doesn't comment on speculation.

BIG INDIAN BATTLE

For Walmart, the world's largest retailer known for its superstores, a deal with Flipkart would open up the vast Indian market.

Walmart has for years tried to enter India but has remained confined to a 'cash-and-carry' wholesale business amid tough restrictions on foreign investment. It currently operates 21 such stores in India.

By comparison, Amazon closely trails Flipkart, which along with its fashion units controls nearly 40 percent of India's online retail market, according to estimates by researcher Forrester.

Flipkart's investors are concerned that any deal with Amazon would run into regulatory hurdles as a combination would have more than 70 percent of India's online retail market, one of the sources said.

Walmart's push into e-commerce comes as Amazon has embraced offline retail, with an affiliate of the Seattle-based company picking up a $27.6 million stake in Indian retailer Shopper's Stop Ltd.

In the United States, Amazon also bought high-end grocer Whole Foods Market Inc for $13.7 billion last year.

Walmart's investment would give Flipkart not just additional funds to fight Amazon, but also arm it with a formidable ally with extensive experience in retailing, logistics and supply chain management.

Former Amazon employees Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal founded Flipkart in 2007 in India's tech hub of Bengaluru.

Like Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos, they began by selling books, but have diversified rapidly, including by selling smartphones, such as those made by China's Xiaomi, through exclusive flash sales, and now compete with Amazon in almost all product categories.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told US lawmakers that his personal data was also harvested and sold by Cambridge Analytica and he intends to initiate legal action against the British firm accused of stealing personal information and using it for political purposes.

Zuckerberg replied "yes" when asked if his personal data was included in the information sold to the "malicious third parties" by the lawmakers during a testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday.

Cambridge Analytica compromised personal information of approximately 87 million users, half a million of whom were from India.

The American people are concerned about how Facebook protects and profits from its users' data, lawmakers said.

Beginning this Monday, Facebook has started to notify those users whose data have been breached.

Responding to a volley of questions, Zuckerberg, 33, said it would take some time to work through all the changes the company needs to make.

"But I am committed to getting this right, and that includes the basic responsibility of protecting people's information, which we failed to do with Cambridge Analytica," he said.

Zuckerberg said he was getting to the bottom of what the UK-based firm did and will tell everyone who may have been affected.

"What we know now is that Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained some information about millions of Facebook members by buying it from an app developer that people had shared it with," he said.

"This information was generally information that people share publicly on their profile pages, like their name and profile picture and the list of pages that they follow. When we first contacted Cambridge Analytica, they told us that they had deleted the data. And then, about a month ago, we heard a new report that suggested that this was not true," he said.

Now the Facebook is working with governments in the US, the UK and around the world to do a full audit of what they've done and to make sure that they get rid of any data that they still have.

Responding to a question, he told lawmakers that he intended to initiate legal action against the firm accused of stealing personal data and using it for political purposes in the 2016 US Presidential elections.

To make sure that no other app developers are out there misusing data, Facebook is now investigating every single app that had access to a large amount of people's information on Facebook in the past.

"If we find someone that improperly used data, we're going to ban them from our platform and tell everyone affected," he said.

To prevent this from ever happening again, Facebook is making sure developers can't access as much information, going forward, he said

"The good news here is that we made some big changes to our platform in 2014 that would prevent this specific instance with Cambridge Analytica from happening again today. But there's more to do, and you can find more of the details of the other steps we're taking in the written statement I provided," he said.

Zuckerberg told lawmakers that Facebook had now removed the option for advertisers to exclude ethnic groups from targeting.

"Every time, there is a control right there - not buried in settings somewhere, but right there, when they're posting about who they want to share it with," he added.

Zuckerberg asserted that Facebook did not sell data.

"We don't sell data. That's not how advertising works, and I do think we could probably be doing a clearer job explaining that, given the misperceptions that are out there," he said in response to a question.

Facebook is neither a media or a financial institution, he said.

"I consider us to be a technology company, because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build products and services for other people," he said.

"There are certainly other things that we do, too. We do pay to help produce content. We build enterprise software, although I don't consider us an enterprise software company. We build planes to help connect people, and I don't consider ourselves to be an aerospace company," he said.

It is clear now that Facebook didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy, he said.

"We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I am sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and, at the end of the day, I am responsible for what happens here. So, now, we have to go through every part of our relationship with people to make sure that we're taking a broad enough view of our responsibility," he said.Today, the ninth day of the Oklahoma teacher walkout, several school districts reopened their doors and the state teachers union began signaling an end to the walkout. But many teachers say theyre not ready to return to the classroom.

While most of the states 20 largest school districts remained closed today, two called teachers and students back to the classroom: Bartlesville (a suburban district outside of Tulsa) and Moore (outside of Oklahoma City). But hundreds of Moore teachers called out to protest the districts decision to reopen. The district needed more than 300 substitute teachers on Thursday, according to local news.

Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Education Association has issued a primer on the state of education funding that says 95 percent of teachers asks have been met. And according to local news station KOCO 5, the union is working on a deal with house Republicans to take $100 million from growth revenue next year and appropriate it to education in 2020s budget. Legislators could vote on that resolution this week. The news frustrated many educators, who want an immediate boost of funding to public education.

On the Facebook group, Oklahoma Teacher Walkoutthe Time Is Now!, which has over 76,000 members, organizer Alberto Morejon added a poll on Wednesday night: If OEA says the walkout is over (without additional school funding for Year 1), will you consider the walkout to be over?

More than 6,800 people voted no. About 300 people voted yes.

As I reported last month, this walkout has been largely teacher-driven, with a bulk of the organizing happening on social media . In Oklahoma, a right-to-work state, the teachers union doesnt have a stronghold over educators there, and its largely been playing a supportive role to teachers during the walkout.

OEA doesnt speak for all of us, one teacher wrote on the Facebook poll. Another added: It is not over until we all decide it is over.

Still, Oklahoman reporter Ben Felder tweeted that the crowd at the capitol on Thursday was the smallest it had been during the nine-day walkout. Many school districts had called their teachers back to work because of concerns about state testingpublic schools have until April 27 to administer paper tests and until May 4 to administer tests online.

So far, teachers have experienced both legislative victories and defeats. The legislature passed a $6,100 teacher pay raise, as well as several revenue-raising bills that the OEA estimates will add $70 million in school funding in fiscal year 2019 and an additional $22 million the next year. But despite teachers demands, the state house has repeatedly refused to hear a measure that would reinstate the capital gains tax and provide more money to schools, and Gov. Mary Fallin signed a bill to repeal a tax on hotel and motel stays that would have generated about $42 million in education funding.

According to the Tulsa World, teachers now want the legislature to come up with at least $50 million in new operational funding for schools.

This movement was never started by OEA, it was started by the collective voices of teachers, teacher Molly Jaymes told the Tulsa World. We dont want it to end anti-climatically, but even if this thing fizzles out in a manner we are not satisfied with, weve very encouraged to go into November and campaign season as a collective, motivated group.

Meanwhile in Kentucky, the governor vetoed an education budget that would have provided around $4,000 per student and signed a controversial pension-reform bill into law. Teachers are outraged and plan to storm the state capitol on Friday to urge the legislature to override the budget veto.

See also:

Image: Benita Boone, right, an educator who joined a 110-mile trip from Tulsa to the state capitol, shouts as the walkers rally with other teachers as protests continue over school funding in Oklahoma City on April 10.Sue Ogrocki/APA 25-year-old man set himself ablaze here today allegedly over the Central and state governments' "inaction" on the Cauvery issue, police said.

Dharmalingam has sustained 90 per cent burn injuries and he has been admitted to the Erode Government Hospital, where his condition is critical, police and doctors said.

Police said the man was said to be in a disturbed state of mind for the past couple of days.

The man's self-immolation bid comes on a day Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in the state to formally inaugurate the country's mega defence exhibition, Defexpo, at Thiruvidanthai.

"Cauvery water is the lifeline for the people of Tamil Nadu. Yet, Chief Minister K Palaniswami and Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi have not take any action to form a Cauvery Management Board. Also, I oppose Modi's visit to Tamil Nadu," reads a message on the wall of his house.

He poured kerosene and set himself ablaze, police said. Doctors said the man has sustained 90 per cent burns and his condition is critical.

The state has been witnessing protests by political parties, pro-Tamil outfits, voluntary organisations and student groups Since April 1, seeking setting up of a Cauvery Management Board.

On February 16, the Supreme Court had raised the 270 tmcft share of Cauvery water for Karnataka by 14.75 tmcft and reduced Tamil Nadu's share while compensating it by allowing extraction of 10 tmcft groundwater from the river basin.

The court had granted six weeks time to the Centre to formulate a scheme to ensure compliance of its 465-page judgement on the decades-old Cauvery dispute, which modified the CWDT award of 2007.

The six-week period ended on March 29.Two policemen were injured in a grenade attack by militants in south Kashmir's Pulwama district on Thursday.

Reports said unidentified militants lobbed a grenade on Pulwama Police Station at around 10:40 am.

SSP Pulwama Aslam Choudhary while confirming the incident said two policemen sustained minor splinter injuries in the blast.

Reports said immediately after the attack security forces cordoned off the area and launched a hunt to nab the attackers.

Since last year militants have been using grenade attacks frequently against the security forces in the Valley. On January 19, eight policemen were injured in a similar attack in the same district. On September 7, a civilian was killed while over a dozen others were injured when militants lobbed a grenade on a CRPF vehicle in Jehangir Chowk.

On June 13, a series of five grenade attacks rocked southern Kashmir in which eight CRPF personnel and four policemen were injured.The Congress today attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged silence over the Unnao rape case and questioned why the accused BJP MLA was yet to be arrested.

Speaking to reporters here, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal also alleged that Modi was not serious about the crime against women across the country.

Sibal also asked the Prime Minister to observe fast over rape incidents and register his protest against Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over the Unnao rape case.

The BJP is holding a country-wide fast today to corner opposition over the recent washout of the Budget session of Parliament.

Sibal, referring to National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report for 2016, also said that the BJP-ruled states have the highest crime rate against women.

The Uttar Pradesh police today registered an FIR against ruling BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged gangrape of a minor girl in Unnao, hours after the government said it would hand over the investigation into the case to the CBI.

The victim did not name him (the MLA) because she was afraid. Why then was he not arrested? We charge he would never be arrested, said Sibal.

The former Union minister added that once the case is transferred to the CBI, the investigation agency would take its own time to conduct the probe and the MLA concerned would go absconding meanwhile.

After some months, the CBI would give a report that he had no role. Some people would again threaten the family (of the victim). We are seeing what's happening in the country, he said.

Sibal also referred to the reports on the Adityanath government's decision to withdraw a rape and kidnapping case against former Union minister Swami Chinmayananda.

The chief minister wants to withdraw a case against a rape accused former minister this is their mindset the Prime Minister is silent, Sibal said without naming Chinmayanand.

Alleging Modi to be not serious over such incidents, Sibal cited NCRB statistics to suggest that the BJP-ruled Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh reported highest crime against women in 2016.For the Dalit community in India, April is truly a festive season. The birth anniversary of two great leaders - Dr B R Ambedkar and Jyotirao Phule - is celebrated this month. Around 'Ambedkar Jayanti', which is on April 14, the Dalit community purchases new clothes and prepares good food. Moreover, the occasion motivates them to carry on their fight for social equality in a caste-based society.

But this April began with the uprising of about 25 percent of India's population - the Dalits. They called for a 'Bharat Bandh' to protest against the dilution of the atrocities law on April 2.

"This is not the first time that Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has been attacked," said Dr Karthik Navayan, a human rights activist. "There has always been an aversion to laws that have provisions to protects Dalits and Adivasis," he added.

The protest on April 2 had turned violent and claimed about 11 lives, most of whom were Dalits. This triggered more protests across the country.

"Right now, the impunity rate under the Act is very high," said Sanghapalli Aruna, one of the founding members of the Dalit History Month.

"Once the Act get diluted, there would be a sharp increase in the atrocities against the communities. The BJP, on one hand, claims that they are the only party which honoured Ambedkar more than others and in another way, they are getting rid of the constitutional rights of Dalits. If they are trying to break the Constitution, we determined to break the government," Sanghapalli told DH.

"A strong legal battle and a pan India mass movement will surely create an atmosphere where all stakeholders will recognise the importance of PoA and hopefully, the judicial system and their attempt to dilute a legislation will be dropped," Karthik claimed.

Dalit filmmaker Somnath Waghmare points out that "the movement against the Supreme Court's curtailment of the power of SC/ST PoA Act is a movement in the ongoing struggle for social justice and equality."

Dalit History Month

The life of the most backward community has seen several such events throughout history. The new generation of Ambedkartites has been challenging the academic community for ignoring the community's contribution to nation-building.

"We have always witnessed the appropriation of history that dismisses and distorts the history of the Dalits and the marginalised," said Karthik. "Therefore, it is essential for the Dalits to narrate their own history," he added.

It was three years ago that a group in the US started celebrating 'Ambedkar's month' - April - as 'Dalit History Month'. The recent movement for a strong SC/ST PoA Act would be the latest addition to the celebration of the History Month.

The 'Dalit History Month' is dedicated to historical events, movements and personalities of backward communities with the motive of regaining strength by remembering their historical contributions.

"During my childhood, we had only 'Ambedkar Jayanti' to celebrate," said Sanghapalli Aruna. "We got new clothes and good food to eat as part of the celebration. Since April has so much significance in our life, we planned to celebrate the entire month aiming to bring the community together," Sanghapalli added.

The Manifestation of Dalit contribution

The 'Black History Month' is the inspiration for celebrating the 'Dalit History Month'. The first attempt was made in Boston in 2015. A group of like-minded people gathered at the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and decided to emphasise the Dalit contribution in the history of India. They began collecting the writings of Dalit historians in order to edit the Wikipedia articles related to the community. A new category 'Dalit History' was added along with the general Indian history articles.

"For thousands of years, the knowledge production has been with the upper caste, hence the contribution of our community was always ignored or misrepresented," said Sanghapalli. "In the digital era, the Wikipedia is the primary source of knowledge. Therefore, we thought of editing existing articles and producing more content on the online encyclopedia."

According to Karthik, the 'Dalit History Month' celebration is an attempt to 'deconstruct the 'savarna' narratives'.

This group designed posters portraying the contribution of various backward caste leaders and movements. The social media helped them promote these posters and that garnered much attention.

[One of the posts on the Facebook page of Dalit History Month]

"The celebration of the history during the birth anniversary month of Babasaheb is giving positive energy to backward communities," said Somnath who is the director of the documentary 'The Battle of Bhima Koregaon - an Unending Journey.'

Alternative media reflect the Dalit voice

With mainstream media ignoring the community, Dalit History Month Collective and others are highly dependent on social media and independent online platforms to articulate their voice. Their activities are finding a space on social media. Sanghapalli said the social media is forcing the mainstream media to take up some of the Dalit-related items.

The 'Dalit History Month Collective' uses the website Medium to populate content and share it on social media. This year, they have also created a timeline featuring all the events in Dalit history including the birthdays of individuals, movements, tragedies, atrocities etc.

"The internet has opened a window for marginalised people to articulate their histories and contributions to a wider audience, which have been ignored by the mainstream media," said Waghmare. "The celebration of 'Dalit History Month' is one such attempt to overcome the 'savarna' (upper caste) history narration. This will be of great help for the coming generation," he said.

Diversity in programmes

This year, several Dalit and backward groups are organising programmes across the globe to observe important historical events like birthdays of Mahatma Phule (April 11) and Ambedkar. The 'Project Mukti', an organisation that aims to give digital security training to vulnerable communities, has collected mini-grants to help interested people organise programmes. They have invited proposals from groups, movements and individuals to conduct various events.

You can see a diversity in programmes happening around the globe, especially in India. "We make sure that lessons of Dalit history would be imparted along with 'Ambedkar Jayanti' celebrations," said Sanghapalli who is also the executive director of 'Project Mukti'.

The history month also focuses on school children and women to make them aware of the community's history. "Most importantly, this has provided a larger space to Dalit women that have led to the construction of an alternative discourse on intersection, caste and gender through Dalit women's lens," said Karthik.

Among the scheduled events, there will be a programme for women in Saharanpur which would talk about Dalit Women's History, photo exhibitions in Delhi and Chennai and Buddha statue installation.

There are also those who are trying to promote Dalit literature. One such book is 'Karukku', written in Tamil. It is the first autobiography of a Dalit woman and the book is celebrating 25 years of publication.

Creating awareness about atrocities

According to Karthik Navayan, an awareness drive about the atrocities and PoA law would be possible under the platform of history month. "'Dalit History Month' can create a transnational space through its platform and highlight factual errors and misinterpretation of POA," argued Karthik Navayan.

"Often legalities pertaining to Dalits and marginalised are misinterpreted or remains uninformed to the people from the community. 'Dalit History Month' can facilitate in building a strong narrative and awareness on the legal framework that Dalits are entitled to," said Karthik.

Somnath asks the progressive people from upper castes to create awareness among their respective communities. "Dalits have been fighting for a better India in non-violently," claims Somnath. "They (the progressive people) have the responsibility to educate their people not to resort to violence against the marginalised communities," he said.

"Our story may have begun in violence but we continue forward by emphasizing our assertion and resistance," concludes the dalithistory.com description about themselves.With the Supreme Court in throes of a controversy yet again, Congress on Thursday said the judiciary was at its nadir and asserted that the option to impeach the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra is "still open".

"We are very concerned about what is happening in the court. The issues, which were raised by the four Supreme Court judges, have not been addressed yet. The option (impeachment of CJI) that is available to us is still open," senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal said here.

He was responding to questions on the differences amongst the top judiciary and the status of the impeachment petition against Justice Dipak Misra that was piloted by the Congress.

During the recently concluded Budget Session, the Congress had taken the leadership role in moving the impeachment petition against the CJI and was holding deliberations with other political parties. However, the issue went into cold storage as a section of the Congress leaders were not convinced about the arguments in favour of the petition against the CJI.

"Nothing has come in the way. This is not instant coffee. We are dealing with an institution. It will be a very sad thing if the Opposition has to take that step," Sibal said to questions on why the impeachment petition was not submitted to Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu.

Sibal's said it was a matter of grave concern that the judiciary was taking no action on the issues raised by Supreme Court judges J Chelameshwar and Kurian Joseph over judicial appointments.

"No party should be allowed to interfere in the appointment of judges. If there is any attempt to block the recommendations, the Chief Justice of India and the senior-most judges must not only resist it but also ensure that the recommendations are implemented," Sibal said.

"If such steps are not taken, then it would amount to capitulating to the executive," the former Law Minister said referring to the delay in elevating Chief Justice of Uttarakhand High Court K M Joseph to the Supreme Court.Ahead of the Ambedkar Jayanti on April 14, the Centre today asked all states to beef up security and check any possible attempt to inciting violence during the event.

The Ministry of Home Affairs also said that Districts Magistrates and Superintendents of Police should ensure peace and check violence in their respective areas of jurisdiction.

This is the second advisory by the MHA within a fortnight. The first one was sent a day before the April 2 Bharat bandh, which was called to protest against the alleged dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

Another advisory was sent before the April 10 strike called by people opposed to caste-based reservations in jobs and education.

The latest MHA missive came in the wake of massive violence in different parts of the country during the April 2 Bharat bandh, leading to the death of about a dozen people, and vandalisation of statues in some parts of the country.

An official of the MHA said the ministry has issued the advisory to all states to take necessary precautionary measures on the occasion on Ambedkar Jayanti on April 14.

"The MHA has asked that patrolling should be intensified to ensure that no loss of life and property takes place and prohibitory orders may be issued wherever necessary," the official said.

The advisory stressed that District Magistrates and Superintendents of Police may be asked to take all necessary steps for ensuring that law and order remains firmly under control in the areas of jurisdiction.

The MHA asked the DMs and SPs to activate community policing initiatives to ensure peace and harmony.Amid reports of a tough battle in Chamundeshwari segment chosen by him, a delegation of Congress workers from northern Karnataka today met Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and urged him to contest the May 12 assembly polls from Badami in their region.

Responding to the workers, who met him here under the leadership of state Congress Working President S R Patil and sitting MLA Chimmanakalti, the chief minister said he would convey to the party high command their demand, Congress sources said.

The workers and leaders are said to have tried to convince Siddaramaiah to contest from Badami in Bagalkote, stating that it would help party's prospects in the north Karnataka region. Badami is dominated by the Kuruba community to which Siddaramaiah belongs. According to party sources, Siddaramaiah has assured them that he will put forward their demand and opinion before the Congress high command.

The chief minister has already declared that he would contest the assembly polls from Chamundeshwari in Mysuru in south Karnataka. Speculations are rife for some time now that Siddaramaiah is looking for another constituency amid reports it will not be an easy battle for him in Chamundeshwari. Siddaramaiah, who represents Varuna in Mysuru after it became a constituency in 2008 following delimitation, has expressed intentions to contest from Chamundeshwari that gave him "political birth".

Making his debut in the Assembly in 1983, he got elected from Chamundeshwari on a Lok Dal Party ticket, from where he has won five times and tasted defeat twice.

Congress is expected to announce its candidates for all the 224 seats in one go, in a day or two. BJP, which is going all out to unseat the Congress, has already announced its first list of 72 candidates.Continuing his attack on the Congress, BJP national president Amit Shah on Thursday charged that the party was trying to strangulate democracy in the country by stalling the functioning of parliament.

The BJP president was speaking at a protest staged in front of the deputy commissioner's office, as part of the party's nationwide agitation.

He said the NDA government was willing to debate on the bank scam, row on the special status to Andhra Pradesh and the no-confidence motion moved by a few parties. He said the disruption of parliament had caused the exchequer a loss of Rs 225 crore.

Issues like border security, farmers' suicide, loan waiver and development of the states cannot be discussed if parliament is not allowed to function, he said.

This style of functioning of the Congress party has been there since the days of Indira Gandhi, who had imprisoned Opposition leaders and imposed emergency on the country.

"The Congress has chained democracy in its house. We have come to the people's court to tell them about the anti-democratic polices of the Congress and to save the hard-earned democracy," Shah said.

He said the BJP had continued its winning streak in 21 states, and on May 12, Karnataka too would be freed of the Congress.

The Siddaramaiah-led government is the most corrupt government in the country, he said and added that it has become an ATM for the Congress high command.

On the Lingayat-Veerashaiva issue, Shah said the objective of all partymen should be to unite the people rather than divide them on the basis of caste and religion. This move of the Congress would boomerang in the elections, he added.

Shah sat in the protest for about 30 minutes before proceeding to Gadag district. The BJP president was accompanied by the party's state president B S Yeddyurappa, leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Jagadish Shettar, MP Pralhad Joshi, Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrashekhar, MLA Arvind Bellad and others were present.Congress president Rahul Gandhi today described the rape and killing of an 8-year-old girl in Kathua as "unimaginable brutality" that cannot go unpunished, and wondered how anybody can seek to protect the culprits.

He also lashed out at the politics being played over the crime.

"How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil," he asked, adding that the violence against the child was a crime against humanity.

"It cannot go unpunished," he said on Twitter.

"What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child," he tweeted.

The minor, who belonged to the nomadic Bakerwal Muslim community, had disappeared from a spot near her house close to Rasana village in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir on January 10.

A week later, her body was found in the same area.

A Special Investigation Team formed to probe the incident has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destroying evidence.

Jammu has been on tenterhooks since the brutal rape and murder.

The city's bar association has opposed the action against the accused and alleged that minority Dogras were being targeted.

While the local local bar association held a bandh, the Valley saw protests demanding justice for the victim.A day after the Samajwadi Party decided to extend support to the BSP in the biennial Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council polls, B R Ambedkar of Mayawati's party filed his nomination papers here today.

Accompanied by senior BSP leaders, including its national general secretary S C Misra, Ambedkar filed two sets of papers, returning officer and Joint Secretary in the Legislative Assembly Ashok Kumar Chaubey told PTI.

Ambedkar's is the only nomination paper filed so far for the polls to 13 seats of the Legislative Council, he said.

Filing of nomination will continue till April 16 and scrutiny will be done the next day. The last date of withdrawal of nomination paper is April 19. The election will be held on April 26 and counting of votes will take place the same day.

Ambedkar had contested the Rajya Sabha polls as a joint opposition candidate of the BSP-SP last month, but lost to the BJP's Anil Agarwal in second preferential vote.

Today, Misra exuded confidence that his party's candidate will make it to the Upper House of the state legislature with the support of the Samajwadi Party.

In a move signalling further consolidation of the new found friendship, the Samajwadi Party yesterday said it will extend support to the BSP on one seat of the Legislative Council.

The SP-BSP combine struck gold in the 'saffron' bastion of Gorakhpur, associated with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and Phulpur, earlier represented by his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya, in the recent bypolls to these two Lok Sabha seats. With the BSP's support, the SP wrested the two seats from the BJP.

To ensure victory in the Upper House of the state legislature, a candidate needs 29 first preference votes. Arithmetically, the BJP and its allies are likely to win 11 out of 13 seats comfortably and will still be left with five additional votes. Opposition parties can get two seats.

In the 100-member UP Legislative Council, the BJP has just 13 members. The Samajwadi Party has 61 members, the BSP nine, the Congress two, the RLD one and others 12. Two seats are vacant.

The tenures of 13 MLCs, including SP national president Akhilesh Yadav and two ministers in the Yogi Adityanath government -- Mahendra Kumar Singh and Mohsin Raza -- will end on May 5.

Of the 13 seats falling vacant, seven were held by the SP, two each by the BJP and the BSP, and one by the RLD. The thirteenth seat was held by former SP minister Ambika Chaudhary. His seat fell vacant when he switched over from the SP to the BSP.

Apart from the Samajwadi Party president, six other MLCs from the party whose term is coming to an end are state SP chief Naresh Chandra Uttam, senior party spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary, Umar Ali Khan, Madhu Gupta, Ramsakal Gurjar and Vijay Yadav.

MLCs from other parties whose term ends on May 5 are Vijay Pratap and Sunil Kumar Chittor (both BSP) and Chaudhary Mushtaq -- the lone RLD member.

Though the BJP and its allies have 324 MLAs in the 403-member state Assembly, it may not get the required strength in the Upper House to get the bills passed even after winning 11 of the 13 seats by dint of its strength.

During the winter session of the state legislature last year, the Yogi Aditynanath government had suffered embarrassment, when it failed to ensure the passage of the Uttar Pradesh Control of Organised Crime (UPCOC) Bill in the Legislative Council.The Uttar Pradesh Police on Thursday virtually gave a clean chit to rape-accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger despite booking him for rape saying that there is not "enough evidence" against him even as the victim apprehended a threat to her life and demanded immediate arrest of the MLA.

The state government recommended a CBI probe into the matter and said that it is now up to the central investigating agency to decide about arresting the MLA on the basis of evidence it might gather.

"At present there is not enough evidence against the honorable MLA to warrant his arrest... the victim had not named the MLA in her statement before the magistrate," said Arvind Kumar, Uttar principal secretary (home).

He said that the special investigation team (SIT)had submitted its interim report late on Wednesday night in which it had pointed out at the laxity of police and doctors in the matter.

Three doctors and a circle officer were suspended after the report.

The official drew flak for calling the rape-accused MLA "mananiya" (honorable) though he justified the prefix saying that his guilt was yet to be proven.

The victim, however, rejected the government's clean chit to the MLA and apprehended that she and her family members might be targeted if the lawmaker remained free.

"We want justice...the MLA must be sent to jail...we will not be safe if he remains free," she said.

The Allahabad High Court, which had taken suo moto cognizance of the matter, reserved his order till Friday after hearing the concerned parties. The court slammed the government for not arresting the MLA.

Five people, including the MLA's brother and the goons of the lawmaker, had been arrested by the police after the victim's father died under mysterious circumstances in the district hospital, where he was taken for treatment from jail.

The victim has said that the MLA, his brother and their some other supporters had gang-raped her after she had approached the lawmaker for a job.A senior Uttar Pradesh BJP leader's claim that a top saffron party leader had "intervened" to prevent the arrest of rape-accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger has triggered a huge political storm.



Opposition parties accused BJP of "shielding" the lawmaker.

State BJP leader I P Singh leader said in a tweet that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had decided to get Senger arrested following the rape allegation when the latter had gone to meet him to put forth his side of the story on Tuesday.

"Yogiji had decided to get the MLA arrested inside the chief minister's office... a decision to suspend the district police was also taken... but suddenly everything came to a halt following the intervention of a senior leader and the party had to suffer the humiliation," the leader claimed.

Singh, however, did not reveal the identity of the senior leader, who had intervened.

The state BJP leaders, however, sought to distance themselves from Singh's remarks saying that the party had nothing to do with his claims.

"I P Singh is not supposed to be told about the decisions taken by the chief minister... he does not hold any post in the party... this is his personal opinion," BJP spokesman Rakesh Tripathi said here.

The Opposition parties, however, pounced on the remarks saying that they proved that the rape-accused MLA was being shielded by the saffron party leaders.

"We do not expect that this government will do justice with the rape victim... the ruling party is protecting the accused," said a Samajwadi Party leader.The Allahabad High Court came down heavily on the Uttar Pradesh government today on the Unnao rape incident, asking it whether it proposes to arrest accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar.



A bench of Chief Justice D B Bhosale and Justice Suneet Kumar, taking cognisance of the gangrape case on a letter to the court by senior lawyer Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi, heard the matter in detail and will pronounce its order tomorrow.

The court also questioned the conduct of the police in the case, saying whom will a victim approach to register a complaint.

Advocate General Raghvendra Singh, who was present in the court on its direction, informed the bench that on August 17, 2017, an application was sent to the Chief Minister's Office in which allegations of rape was made against the MLA.

The application was forwarded to officers concerned in Unnao to take appropriate action, he said.

To this, the bench questioned what has been done in the case and whether any arrests have been made so far.

Singh replied that three of the accused have been arrested, including the MLA's brother.

The court then asked the Advocate General whether the government proposes to arrest Sengar.

Singh said that he was not in a position to make any statement in this regard and police will proceed in accordance with law only after recording statements of the complainant and witnesses.

The court referred to the SIT report and said, "according to it, medical officers and police officers, all were hand in glove with the accused to save them and you acted on this report against those officers but for arresting rape accused you need to do further investigation."

"Police was not ready to register FIR of the minor rape victim. In spite of the SIT report, you are repeating that we can only take any action after further investigation if this is the conduct of the police in state, whom will a victim approach to register a complaint. If this is the stand you are repeatedly taking, then we will be forced to observe in our order that law and order has collapsed in the state'," it said.

According to Chaturvedi, the SIT conducted preliminary investigation and then filed a report after which an FIR was registered and still the state government wants to conduct further probe before arresting the accused MLA.

Chaturvedi has demanded a court-monitored investigation of the incident and also death of the victim's father in judicial custody.Activists led by Left parties and the Special Category Status Sadhana Samithi protested against the day-long fast undertaken by BJP leaders across Andhra Pradesh on Thursday.



In Vijayawada, Eluru, Bhimavaram and Visakhapatnam, the agitators were taken into police custody as they came into blows with the BJP activists.

In several places, TDP legislators and workers undertook padayatras (march) protesting against BJP leaders' hunger strike.

Alleging the ruling TDP's hand in these attacks, BJP spokesperson G V L Narasimha Rao, who sat on a fast in Vijayawada Dharna Chowk, has said that permission to hold the day-long fast in Lenin Centre was denied on the behest of the TDP.

State BJP president Kambhampati Haribabu in Visakhapatnam has said that Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu and Police Commissioner Yoganand have provided moral support to the attackers.

"The fascist nature of left parties has once again came into fore," he said.

Meanwhile, Naidu while speaking with the party ministers in Amaravati and later at the inaugural ceremony of Andhra Pradesh Police Technology Centre, has warned the prime minister that the war has just begun.

"I don't see any difference between the British rulers and BJP. Have you ever seen a prime minister going on hunger strike, holding people responsible for his inability to run the Parliament," Naidu said.

He called upon the people of the state to teach Modi a lesson.

"The fight for SCS will go on. But strikes and agitations will hurt the state," he said.

Meanwhile, the SCS Sadhana Samithi gave a call for a state-wide bandh on April 16 to protests against the BJP government's stand on granting special status.

The Samithi, which has found support in YSRCP and Left Parties, has however said that all emergency services will run as usual.Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday issued orders to restore security cover to former chief minister Rabri Devi, barely 48 hours after police personnel were withdrawn from her official residence.



Nitish, who also holds the home portfolio, issued the directive soon after he returned from Bengaluru on Thursday.

An angry Rabri, who had protested on Wednesday over downsizing of her security cover, refused to accept the security till the government replied as to on whose instructions her security was withdrawn.

Even though Rabri made a brouhaha over the downgraded security cover, the Additional Director General of Police (ADG), Headquarters, S K Singhal on Wednesday evening denied that there was any withdrawal of cops from the former chief minister's residence 10, Circular Road.

"Only 16 personnel of Bihar Military Police (BMP), deployed as house guards and sanctioned for Lalu Prasad, had been removed as the RJD chief was in judicial custody," the ADG clarified.

But a miffed Rabri was unsparing in slamming the Nitish dispensation.

"If security for Lalu has been withdrawn, where are my security personnel. Being a former chief minister, I am also entitled to security cover as per the established norms," said Rabri, who enjoys Z security ever since she demitted office in 2005.

"I have heard that Nitish has ordered to restore security for me. But I will not accept it till the state government answers my queries I raised in the letter to Nitish on Wednesday. I want to know on whose instructions it was done so. I also want to know from ADG (Headquarters) where are the 106 cops which, he claimed, have been deployed for me, Tejashwi and Tej Pratap. I cannot allow a senior IPS officer to spread canard about my family's security cover," a visibly angry Rabri said.India has echoed a global trend of decline in death sentences in 2017 with an international report showing that the country sent 109 people to the condemned cells last year.



The Amnesty International's 'Death Sentence and Executions 2017' report showed that at least 2,591 death sentences were recorded in 53 countries in 2017, which was a significant decrease from the record-high of 3,117 recorded in 2016. In 2015, it was 1,998.

Executions also came down by 4% to 993 executions in 23 countries from 1,032 executions and 1,634 (the highest number since 1989) in 2015.

India also went with the global trend though it could not bring the numbers down to the 2015 level when it recorded 75 death sentences. In 2016, 136 death sentences were reported.

There are 371 people with the noose around their neck in Indian jails at the end of 2017. Globally, at least 21,919 people are known to be under the death.

"Globally, executions and death sentences are sliding and India has contributed to this trend. However, there is bad news coming out of India too, with new laws being passed that expand the scope of this cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment... It is high time that the government of India consigns the death penalty to the history books, instead of falsely claiming that it improves public safety," Amnesty International India Executive Director Aakar Patel said.

The report noted that India was the third country that expanded the scope of death penalty by introduced Anti-Hijacking Act, that provides for death penalty for hijacking resulting in death.

Singapore and Thailand are the two other countries that expanded the scope.

The state governments in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh also enacted laws to impose death penalty for causing deaths by selling spurious liquor and raping girls below the age of 12 years, respectively.

Subsequently, states like Rajasthan, Haryana, and Arunachal Pradesh have also enacted laws to impose death penalty for rape.

The report said China tops the list though there is no official count, followed by Nigeria at 621 death sentences and Egypt 402.

India is ranked seventh in this list and its neighbours Bangladesh (273+), Sri Lanka (218) and Pakistan (200+) are ahead of it in sentencing people to death.Prime Minister Narendra Modi will leave for a six-day tour to Sweden and the UK next week to participate in two multilateral conferences besides furthering India's bilateral interest with half a dozen European nations.

Modi will first fly to Stockholm on April 16 where he would take part in the first India-Nordic summit, to be attended by the prime ministers of all the five Nordic nations - Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland.

There would also be bilateral engagement with Sweden as Modi would be the first Indian prime minister to land in Stockholm since 1988, Subrata Bhattacharaya, joint secretary, central Europe, in the Ministry of External Affairs said here on Thursday.

With India opening a fresh tender to 110 fighter jets for the Indian Air Force, defence relations are likely to figure prominently in bilateral talks.

Swedish arms major Saab is likely to take part in the tender with its Grippen fighter jets that lost to a French fighter aircraft in the previous attempt of combat jet purchase, which ultimately didn't materialise.

Modi would also have bilateral talks with each of the four other prime ministers attending the India-Nordic summit with an aim of expanding bilateral trade between India and these countries. Taken together, India's bilateral trade with Nordic countries stands at $5.3 billion whereas these five nations contribute $2.5 billion FDI to India.

From Sweden, Modi will travel to London for Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on April 19-20.

While there is no conformation on the possibility of a bilateral talk between Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Shahid K Abbasi on the sidelines of CHOGM, Modi would meet the heads of small island nations on the sidelines of the Commonwealth summit, said Nagraj Naidu, joint secretary, west Europe, in the MEA.

The summit will be in London on April 19. Next day, the leaders would travel to the royal family's Windsor Castle for a retreat.

Indian Prime Ministers were not attending the CHOGM summits since 2007. Modi skipped the last gathering in Malta in 2015, and his prdecessor Manmohan Singh didn't the previous two editions in 2011 and 2013 in Australia and Sri Lanka.

But this time India is likely to play a key role in the summit as Britain was discussing with Modi government on how to revamp the Commonwealth a block of 52 nations.

On the return on illegal immigrants, India and the UK may also renew an old pact that expired in 2014.The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has axed a full-grown tree after an influential person wanted the tree pruned.

Residents of Rajarajeshwari Nagar say that since January, the BBMP has felled at least 34 trees in the area to please some influential people. They claim that since the area is home to many influential people, the Palike has mercilessly felled trees for providing entrances, road widening and parking spaces.

Dhruv Kiran, the personal assistant to Bengaluru Development Minister K J George, on March 23 applied to the BBMP Forest Cell for pruning of branches of a 30-year-old tree.



Residents of Rajarajeshwari Nagar say that since January, the BBMP has felled at least 34 trees in the area to please some influential people.



The application was made for site number 414 on 3rd Cross Ideal Homes Colony. But the workers pruned it so badly that the tree had to be fully axed.

A BBMP Forest Cell official said the tree was axed following an application from Dhruv Kiran and after getting permission from the assistant conservator of forests (ACF).

Shantha Kumar, ACF, BBMP Forest Cell said permission was given only to prune the branches. "But during the process, the tree became unstable and had to be axed. There are over 2,000 applications pending with me and there are 198 wards to manage, it is not possible for me to inspect every spot. The application was from George's PA and it was speeded up," he said.

BBMP DCF Chola Raj blamed the workers for botching up the work and said it will be investigated.

Kiran said he had applied for pruning 30% of the branches for drilling a borewell.

When contacted, George, however, was quick to distance himself from the controversy saying he had nothing to do with the tree felling. "Kiran should answer and law should be obeyed,'' he said.

Police Refuse To Register FIR

On Wednesday, the locals approached the R R Nagar police to file a complaint. But when the police learnt that the case pertained to George's PA, no FIR was registered, said members of Save R R Nagar Environment Group.

The agitated residents staged a protest on Thursday outside the police station demanding an FIR be filed against the erring BBMP official and the workers.

"We want to know why the police are not filing an FIR. We have been taking care of the trees and an officer who has not visited the spot cannot give permission for felling trees. Locals should be consulted," said Priti N, member of Save R R Nagar Environment Group.The Parappana Agrahara police on Thursday rescued a 52-year-old mechanical engineer who was kidnapped for a ransom of Rs 1 crore and nabbed a gang of six.

The victim, Shivakumar, is the brother-in-law of veteran Kannada film actor Vajramuni.

The arrested are Satyavelachari (24), a resident of Taverekere and his five associates including Yeshwanth Yadav (20), Vinod Kumar (21), Sanjay Reddy (20), Shekhar (20) and Jagannath (23).

According to the police, Shivakumar, working with Bosch and a resident of Singasandra was kidnapped on the pretext of seeking a private consultation on Sunday from his house. The gang took him in a car to the outskirts of the city and then called Shivakumar's wife demanding a ransom of Rs 1 crore for his safe release.

The gang threatened to kill Shivakumar if his family approached the police. However, the family members lodged a complaint with the Parappana Agrahara police, based on which they formed a special team to track kidnappers.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southeast division) Boralingaiah said they had analysed mobile tower locations and went through CCTV footage to identify the car used for abduction.

The police then tracked the car and arrested the kidnappers and rescued Shivakumar, who was kept under house arrest at an isolated place on the outskirts of the city.

Investigations revealed that Satyavelachar was working as an interior decorator and was an acquaintance of Shivakumar. The suspect knew that Shivakumar had sold his ancestral property. Satyavelachari had asked Shivakumar a loan, but it did not happen. Enraged over this, they planned to kidnap him.Eying the mega IAF contract for 110 fighter jets, Boeing on Thursday announced a partnership with PSU Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) and Mahindra Defence Systems (MDS) for manufacturing the F/A-18 Super Hornet in India.

The US aerospace major said the partnership will also work for joint development of future technologies in India, saying it will transform India's aerospace and defence ecosystem.

The Super Hornet 'Make in India' proposal is to build an entirely new and state-of-the-art production facility that can be utilised for other programmes like India's Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) programme, the company said in a statement.

"Boeing is excited to team up with India's only company that manufactures combat fighters, HAL, and India's only company that manufactures small commercial airplanes, Mahindra.

"This partnership brings the best of Indian public and private enterprises together in partnership with the world's largest aerospace company, Boeing, to accelerate a contemporary 21st century ecosystem for aerospace & defence manufacturing in India," said Pratyush Kumar, the president of Boeing India.

The announcement was made on the second day of the Defence Expo here. Boeing is among the leading military aircraft producers like Lockheed Martin, Saab, Dassault and Russian Aircraft Corporation MiG that are likely to vie for the deal to supply 110 fighter jets to the IAF in one of the biggest such procurements in recent years globally which could be worth over $15 billion.

An RFI (Request for Information) or initial tender for the mega deal was issued by the Indian Air Force (IAF) on April 6 with officials saying that the procurement would be in sync with the government's 'Make in India' initiative in the defence sector.

Aircraft manufacturers have to send their proposals by July 6. Officials had said the jets will be produced jointly by a foreign aircraft maker along with an Indian company under the recently-launched strategic partnership model which aims to bring in high-end defence technology to India.

Noting that HAL has always been at the forefront of aerospace development in India, its chairman T Suvarna Raju today said the partnership will create an opportunity to strengthen indigenous platforms in India thereby contributing to the Make-in-India activities.

According to the company, the programmes under progress at HAL include production of SU-30 MKI, Hawk-AJT, Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), Dhruv-ALH and Cheetah/Chetak helicopters

"We are excited about the opportunities that this partnership with Boeing and HAL will provide for us to contribute further to Make in India' for defence," said S P Shukla, group president, Aerospace & Defence, Mahindra Group, and chairman, Mahindra Defence Systems.

Boeing said the partnership will aid production of an affordable, combat-proven fighter platform for India, while adding it will result growth momentum to the Indian aerospace ecosystem with manufacturing, skill development, innovation and engineering and job creation.

As the most advanced and least expensive aircraft per flight hour of its kind, the F/A-18 Super Hornet will deliver on India's need for a carrier and land based multi-role fighter, the company said, it said.

"The Super Hornet does not only have a low acquisition cost, but it costs less per flight hour to operate than any other tactical aircraft in US forces inventory. And with a plan for constant innovation, the F/A-18 Super Hornet will outpace threats, bolster defence capabilities and make India stronger for decades to come," it said.

The F/A-18 Super Hornet has a long life ahead, with the US Navy making significant investments in the latest evolution, the Block III, Boeing noted.

Kumar said that partnership with HAL and Mahindra will enable Boeing India to optimise the full potential of the country's public and private sector to deliver next-generation F/A-18 fighter capabilities.

Future production with Indian partners will involve maximising indigenous content and producing the F/A-18 in India for its armed forces to create a 21st century aerospace ecosystem, the statement from Boeing said

The plan addresses the infrastructure, personnel training, and operational tools and techniques required to produce a next gen fighter aircraft right here in India. In addition, Boeing will work closely with Indian industry to ensure they have the very latest technologies, applying lessons learned from the current Super Hornet production line, it said.

Boeing is the world's largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial jetliners, defence, space and security systems, and service provider of aftermarket support.Lockheed F-16V, Saab Gripen Compete for Slovakian Order



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The administrator has been notified and will resolve the problem ASAP.Del Mar resident Emilie Hafner-Burton, Ph.D. and Solana Beach resident Pamela Radcliff, Ph.D. are among six UC San Diego faculty members who were honored April 11 at the 44th annual Chancellors Associates Faculty Excellence Awards for going above and beyond to make a positive difference in their teaching, research and service, according to a news release.

I applaud the outstanding contributions of these faculty members whose research and teaching powerfully resonates across our campus and around the globe, said Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. They are bold changemakers and tireless student advocates who see the classroomand the worlddifferently, full of boundless potential for positive impact.

Each year, faculty members across campus are nominated by their academic peers for their exemplary contributions to the university. Final selections are made by a committee of Chancellors Associates donors. Each honoree receives a commendation and an honorarium of $2,500.

Emilie Hafner-Burton, Ph.D. Courtesy

Hafner-Burton, a professor of international justice and human rights, was honored for Excellence in Research in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Hafner-Burton conducts groundbreaking research on protecting human rights and accelerating international compliance. She is lauded for pioneering innovative global-conflict strategies, as imparted in her book, Making Human Rights a Reality. Hafner-Burton also launched the universitys Laboratory on International Law and Regulation, serves on the Committee on the Status of Women, and contributes to the Women Going Global student organization as a steadfast advocate of diversity.

Professor Hafner-Burton is recognized by her peers in political science as one of the top scholars in the world working on international politics and human rights; she is a foremost scholar on the subject, said Dean of the School of Global Policy and Strategy, Peter F. Cowhey. Since receiving her doctorate in 2003, Professor Hafner-Burtons research has been both prolific and groundbreaking, challenging much of the conventional wisdom in policy debates. For example, she has shown how international trade agreements can strengthen the protection of rights. She truly personifies UC San Diegos excellence.

Pamela Radcliff, Ph.D. Courtesy

Radcliff, a professor of history, was honored for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

Radcliff has cultivated the nations premier graduate program on modern Spanish history at UC San Diego. Each year she organizes a symposium that provides opportunity for scholars to present their work to peers and engage with field specialists. Radcliff is a devoted mentor for graduate students, encouraging learners to explore evolutionary arcs and seek thought-provoking connections. She has also authored an interpretive synthesis, A History of Spain: 1808 to the Present, regarded by peers as a magisterial work.

Professor Radcliff is dedicated to her graduate students, providing the necessary leadership to develop them as professional historians and for academic careers, said Dean of the Division of Arts and Humanities Cristina Della Coletta. She has worked with dozens of history graduate students in formal and informal settings. Her outstanding accomplishment is her dedication to developing a top-notch graduate program in modern Spanish history. There is no doubt that she should receive credit for attracting high-level graduate students in this field to UC San Diego.Marty the Robot - a new educational robot produced by Robotical in Edinburgh, has just won a huge contract from the Wise Club in South Korea.

Over 2000 Martys will now be going over to help teach Korean children about coding.

Since Martys launch in 2017 Robotical has increase production to macth demand, now available on Amazon for the first time.

The demand for Marty is global, highlighted by the recent order from the Wise Club in Korea.

The Wise Club is a South Korean education company, which provides extra tuition after the school day has ended. The Wise Clubs headquarters are in Seoul, but it has 50 offices and over 1000 contracted teachers who work across the country. The Wise Club is the number one provider of extracurricular coding education in South Korea, with the demand for its coding courses increasingly dramatically in recent years. They have ordered over 2,000 Marty the Robots to assist with teaching its students to code.

Myles Bax, Business Development at Robotical,who recently visited Korea to finalise the deal, explains: The contract with the Wise Club is very exciting for us, and were looking forward to developing our ongoing partnership. The initial order will be used to demonstrate what Marty can do and then Wise Club will be developing coding classes using Marty.

Marty the Robot has also been named a finalist in the Best New Product category in the 2018 Made in Scotland Awards which celebrate Scottish innovation.

Robotical founder, Dr Alexander (Sandy) Enoch, comments: We have had an excellent response to Marty since the launch, and being named a finalist in the Made in Scotland Awards is just further evidence that hopefully what we are doing is making a difference in educating the next generation of coders and engineers.

Marty the Robot is all about taking the technology I used during my PhD in robotics, and making it accessible. Im happy were able to offer Marty more widely, and give more young people a chance to get some hands on experience of physical computing and robotics. I really hope well inspire a few to consider STEM careers, as well as encourgaing those who are already engaged to progress faster.

Usable from primary school to university  Marty is a real walking robot for the price of a smart toy. For kids, makers, educators, and anybody who just wants a cute robot Marty makes learning about programming, electronics, and mechanical engineering a fun and engaging process. With its unique leg mechanism, Marty can walk, turn, dance and even kick a ball. Its easier to use than most walking robots, and unlike a smart toy its a serious platform for learning.

Robotical is an Edinburgh based start-up which aims to inspire, engage, and educate the next generation of engineers and scientists by letting them get hands on experience with their very own actual walking robot.

Robotical recently raised its first round of seed funding, securing investment totalling 285,000. Investors include Rob Dobson, Gareth Williams from SkyScanner and Professor David Lane from the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.

Marty has won several awards since its creation, including: a Scottish EDGE Award 2016, Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellowship, 2nd Prize in the EU Robotics Forum entrepreneurship award, and the Converge Challenge Design and Creativity award.



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By KEN SWEET

AP Business Writer

NEW YORK  Equifax announced last month that Mark Begor, a long-time financial industry executive, would take over as CEO of the company on April 16.

Begor joins Equifax at a time when it's still recovering from last year's massive data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans. The stolen information included Social Security numbers, birthdates and addresses, which can be used for identity theft. It was the largest breach of crucial personal information in history, and led to Equifax's previous CEO stepping down, as well as several other executives.





. . .Fresh from partnering with VC firm Hatcher+ to produce 240 early-stage startups over three years, tech accelerator BlueChilli has teamed with Coca-Cola Amatil to help budding entrepreneurs launch scalable, global tech companies.

[Related: Investors in BlueChilli startups automatically qualify for tax deduction after ATO ruling and Why the startup ecosystem needs more non-technical entrepreneurs, not stereotypes]

Up to 15 founders, from across Australia and New Zealand, will be selected to participate in the six-month Xcelerate program, following a bootcamp to determine the best ideas. Specifically, BlueChilli and Coca-Cola Amatil are looking to fund and accelerate ideas that support one of the following three themes  creating a more sustainable future, reimagining the customer experience and getting people what they want, when and where they want it.

In addition to securing $38,000 in funding (in exchange for 15% equity), participants will receive mentoring, training and workspace plus access to a technology team, including a dedicated Product Manager, to help validate and build their product. Founders who go on to raise funding at the completion of the program will have an opportunity to receive up to $500,000 in follow-up funding from BlueChillis venture partners and up to $200,000 from Coca-Cola Amatil, which has allocated $10m to invest in startups.

Alison Watkins, Group Managing Director of Coca-Cola Amatil said beverage company will be leveraging BlueChillis unrivalled start-up expertise to turn napkin-stage ideas into successful businesses that generate revenue streams for their start-up founders. She added, We picked BlueChilli because they demonstrate the same passion and drive as the start-up community they work with, and we are aligned around our strategic goals. With BlueChilli, were confident well be finding and bringing life to some world-class innovations and ideas.

BlueChilli CEO Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin told Dynamic Business that Coca-Cola Amatil is aligned with BlueChillis mission and values, and that he and his team have been really impressed by Coca-Cola Amatils speed and genuine desire to work with the broader startup ecosystem.

Regarding the selection processes for the Xcelerate program, Eckersley-Maslin said BlueChilli and Coca-Cola Amatil are looking for entrepreneurs who are most likely to gain traction and customers  in other words, entrepreneurs who understand the industry, whose unique background and experiences give them an edge, and who know how to solve a real problem and are passionate about doing so.

In addition, he said the Xcelerate program solves the difficult problem of product-market fit for startups. He explained, Mid-way through the program, for example, well host a trade show demo day, where we bring Coca-Cola Amatil, as well as their network of partners and suppliers, into a room with our founders. In this way, were bringing the market to our startups, and helping them get their first customers.

Megan Flamer, the Program Director for Xcelerate at BlueChilli said that while the program will be producing scalable tech startups, participants dont need to be technologically savvy.

Were breaking down barriers for non-technical founders, which is a big part of BlueChillis vision, she said. Over the six months, the Xcelerate participants will become investor-ready. Theyll learn how to pitch, how to develop their businesses, how to market their products and, going through several sprints, how to build their product-market fit. By the time they come out the other end, theyll pitch and present and be exposed to massive investment opportunities.

Commenting on the fact that Xcelerate program coincides with the of BlueChilli in New Zealand, Flamer said: I just got back from San Francisco, following a four-year stint, and there were so many Kiwis and Aussies over there forging ahead, creating amazing products and working on awesome products. New Zealand, which is part of the same startup ecosystem as Australia in some ways, boasts a wealth of talent, so were very excited about launching there.

Applications for Xcelerate close on 14 May 2018. For more information, visit https://amatilxcelerate.com/.Posted 4/11/18

This week in Dallas County history, as recorded in the Buffalo Reflex.April 10, 1958The third in a series of polio vaccines was offered to children who received the first two. The county Posted 4/12/18

PH woman in crashA Pleasant Hope woman was involved in a two-vehicle crash Saturday, April 7, north of Springfield, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol.Lorri J. Sheets, 53, of Pleasant Posted 4/12/18

Buffalo High School students witnessed a drunk driving car accident reenactment on Friday, April 6, thanks to collaboration among the student council, Buffalo Police Department, Buffalo Fire Posted 4/6/18

Dallas County 911 is celebrating National Public Safety Telecommunicator Week. Every year, the second full week of April (April 8-14) is recognized as a time to honor hardworking telecommunicators Last week, 550 gallons of coolant containing toxic organic solvents (alkyl derivatives of benzene, specifically) were released into Lake Michigan from an electrical transmission cable running under the Straits of Mackinac. It happened because a ship went through the Straits dragging its anchor. (UPDATE: It appears that it was a tugboat owned by VanEnkevort Tug & Barge.)

Enbridge Energy clearly had an oh shit! moment since the twin gas pipelines they own that run under the Straits were just a few hundred yards away. Sure enough, after an inspection, they found three dents in the two pipelines which carry nearly 1 million gallons of petroleum per hour. The pipelines, part of Enbridges Line 5, are 65 years old.

Heres where the pipeline runs:

As I wrote in 2015, it doesnt take much imagination to understand the utter catastrophe that would result if this pipeline, like the Enbridge pipeline that dumped over a million gallons of tar sands crude into the Kalamazoo River in 2010, were to rupture. Imagine the scenario of this happening in February when the Straits of Mackinac are covered in eight feet of solid ice and when the only ship traffic is through a narrow channel created by a Great Lakes icebreaker. Its no wonder that University of Michigan researchers called the Straits the worst possible place for an oil spill in the Great Lakes.

Its worth noting that the Line 6B spill cost well over $1,000,000,000 (yes, thats a BILLION dollars) to clean up.

Heres a bit more information to freak you out, again from my 2015 essay:

For their part, Enbridge says that Line 5 is one of the most inspected pipelines in America. However, there is literally no plan in place to deal with a pipeline rupture that will adequately protect the Great Lakes so essentially what they are telling us is that they will know they exact moment when they begin to destroy this precious and valuable ecosystem and fresh water supply. Nearly a million gallons of oil would erupt into Lake Michigan per hour until they could get it under control. Given that it took them 17 hours after the Kalamazoo pipeline ruptured before they notified anyone, we have no way of knowing when they would actually tell the world that they had created the most catastrophic man-made disaster in Michigan history.

This is apparently what nearly happened last week when the dragging ship anchor kertwanged off both pipelines.

In response, Gov. Rick Snyder quickly issued a sternly-worded press release demanding that its own experts verify Enbridges contention that all is well and that there is nothing to see here. He also asks could they please hurry up with the study that he demanded last fall from Enbridge investigating other alternatives to Line 5.

The fact is, Line 5 is simply a shortcut for moving Canadian oil to another part of Canada. Instead of going through Canada, it detours through Michigan:



Image courtesy of For Love of Water (FLOW)

A 2015 report from For Love of Water (FLOW) details that alternatives DO exist and that Line 5 is not vital energy infrastructure, despite claims otherwise. According to a fact sheet published by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Line 5, which transports synthetic crude, natural gas liquids, sweet crude, and light sour crude, does not have a federally approved emergency response plan at the Straits. It has already leaked over 1 million gallons of oil in the past 50 years.

The time is over for sternly-worded press releases from our states leaders. Its time to shut down Line 5 and end the practice of pumping almost a million gallons of oil per hour under the Great Lakes which contain fully one-fifth of the worlds freshwater (or, as they call it in Europe, sweet water.)

But our corporatist governor will never do that and neither will his Lt. Gov. Brian Calley who stopped short of calling for Line 5 to be decommissioned at a townhall at Michigan State University this week. It didnt stop Calley from bossing around his gubernatorial primary opponent, Attorney General Bill Schuette, though. While Gov. Snyder is out of the state, Calley asked Schuette to initiate legal action on behalf of the State of Michigan against the ships owners and operators or other potential responsible parties.

All four Democratic candidates for governor have said they will shut down Line 5.Blog Archive June 2021 (1) May 2021 (77) April 2021 (77) March 2021 (82) February 2021 (68) January 2021 (64) December 2020 (67) November 2020 (66) October 2020 (66) September 2020 (67) August 2020 (74) July 2020 (83) June 2020 (92) May 2020 (86) April 2020 (104) March 2020 (105) February 2020 (74) January 2020 (75) December 2019 (75) November 2019 (70) October 2019 (89) September 2019 (69) August 2019 (81) July 2019 (77) June 2019 (73) May 2019 (110) April 2019 (110) March 2019 (102) February 2019 (85) January 2019 (123) December 2018 (116) November 2018 (112) October 2018 (121) September 2018 (107) August 2018 (150) July 2018 (163) June 2018 (190) May 2018 (145) April 2018 (112) March 2018 (124) February 2018 (113) January 2018 (164) December 2017 (150) November 2017 (144) October 2017 (169) September 2017 (171) August 2017 (135) July 2017 (131) June 2017 (147) May 2017 (160) April 2017 (138) March 2017 (156) February 2017 (143) January 2017 (203) December 2016 (208) November 2016 (185) October 2016 (173) September 2016 (194) August 2016 (232) July 2016 (225) June 2016 (238) May 2016 (231) April 2016 (215) March 2016 (246) February 2016 (226) January 2016 (252) December 2015 (230) November 2015 (250) October 2015 (234) September 2015 (222) August 2015 (253) July 2015 (275) June 2015 (279) May 2015 (223) April 2015 (226) March 2015 (243) February 2015 (258) January 2015 (281) December 2014 (292) November 2014 (296) October 2014 (413) September 2014 (472) August 2014 (506) July 2014 (483) June 2014 (488) May 2014 (512) April 2014 (497) March 2014 (531) February 2014 (482) January 2014 (535) December 2013 (482) November 2013 (441) October 2013 (416) September 2013 (491) August 2013 (521) July 2013 (491) June 2013 (470) May 2013 (457) April 2013 (426) March 2013 (420) February 2013 (414) January 2013 (489) December 2012 (433) November 2012 (504) October 2012 (469) September 2012 (430) August 2012 (427) July 2012 (360) June 2012 (336) May 2012 (362) April 2012 (322) March 2012 (263) February 2012 (224) January 2012 (291) December 2011 (295) November 2011 (325) October 2011 (330) September 2011 (319) August 2011 (333) July 2011 (318) June 2011 (387) May 2011 (373) April 2011 (389) March 2011 (375) February 2011 (335) January 2011 (400) December 2010 (445) November 2010 (395) October 2010 (312) September 2010 (262) August 2010 (277) July 2010 (323) June 2010 (386) May 2010 (360) April 2010 (333) March 2010 (351) February 2010 (336) January 2010 (384) December 2009 (353) November 2009 (300) October 2009 (308) September 2009 (350) August 2009 (298) July 2009 (255) June 2009 (203) May 2009 (193) April 2009 (186) March 2009 (197) February 2009 (173) January 2009 (148) December 2008 (181) November 2008 (197) October 2008 (236) September 2008 (304) August 2008 (314) July 2008 (273) June 2008 (27) May 2008 (1) April 2008 (6) October 2007 (1) May 2007 (1) April 2007 (6) March 2007 (2) February 2007 (1) October 2006 (1) September 2006 (1) August 2006 (4) July 2006 (4) June 2006 (1) July 2005 (1) May 2005 (2) March 2005 (1) June 2004 (2) May 2004 (1) April 2004 (4) March 2004 (2) February 2004 (2) July 2003 (2) June 2003 (5)Not all who wander are lost If youre a fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (like I am), then youre probably familiar with one...

Remember When  How America was settled is a passion of mine, since part of my family got here in the 1600s from...

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...Yossi Vardi, the "godfather of Israel's high-tech industry", said he is amazed by the innovations achieved in Guangzhou, where promising startups surge every year. He made the remarks at a roadshow for the 2018 Conversation between Guangzhou and the World held at the ongoing Bo'ao Forum for Asia on April 9.

Themed "New Era, New Guangzhou, New Opportunities", the 2018 Conversation between Guangzhou and the World is a series of global promotional events, with roadshows previously held in Davos, Paris, Beijing, and Guangzhou. This time, Guangzhou chose to make a presentation at the Bo'ao Forum for Asia, a China-hosted high-end dialogue platform that convenes business leaders worldwide.

Present at the roadshow were executives of multinational companies, superior Chinese entrepreneurs, government officials and global mainstream media correspondents.

Vardi is one of Israel's first high-tech entrepreneurs with over 49 years' experience founding or helping build over 60 high-tech companies. He made a keynote speech at the roadshow in which he expressed great admiration for Guangzhou's business prospects and the government's efforts to attract entrepreneurial talents.

Guangzhou has always been China's gateway, a world hub, and one of the very few places that boast huge strategic advantages, Vardi remarked. He has been to Guangzhou four times over the past two years seeking cooperation opportunities and called on members of the audience to join him.

A roadshow for the 2018 Conversation between Guangzhou and the World is held at the ongoing Bo'ao Forum for Asia on April 9. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Yossi Vardi makes a keynote speech at the Bo'ao roadshow for 2018 Conversation between Guangzhou and the World on April 9. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]To build the largest and most complete Amateur Radio community site on the Internet - a "portal" that hams think of as the first place to go for information, to exchange ideas, and be part of whats happening with ham radio on the Internet. eHam.net provides recognition and enjoyment to the people who use, contribute, and build the site. This project involves a management team of volunteers who each take a topic of interest and manage it with passion. The site will stand above all other ham radio sites by employing the latest technology and professional design/programming standards, developed by a team of community programmers who contribute their skills to the effort. The site will be something of which everyone involved can be proud to say they were a part. We welcome your comments. The eHam.net Team, Revision 07/2020.

By Washington Examiner , April. 09, 2018





The Trump administration's move to slap stiff tariffs on Chinese goods is supported by about two-thirds of Americans despite strong partisan differences on the issue.





But while they supported the gesture of standing up to China, they were less confident that it would work.

Read More:



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By Politico , April . 11, 2018





LOS ANGELES  In an apparent de-escalation of the raging conflict between California and President Donald Trump over immigration, Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday agreed to increase California National Guard operations along the states border with Mexico, while insisting personnel will not be used to support any immigration enforcement or to build a border wall.





The announcement comes less than a week after Trump called for National Guard deployments along the U.S.-Mexico border until a border wall is built. The Republican governors of Texas and Arizona already committed to participate.

Read More:



Join us - become an Elderado today at: LarryElder.com

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- T. S. Eliot

Thoughts After Lambeth

"The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide."Jessica Capshaw's final day on Grey's Anatomy as Dr. Arizona Robbins is fast approaching, and she can't help but reminisce.

Looking Back With Love

The 41-year-old portrayed Dr. Robbins from season 5 onwards. She shared an Instagram story on Tuesday to mark her last day on the soundstages, where the show is predominantly shot, in Los Angeles. Capshaw has been with the show for ten years.

"OK, ready for some bananas information? Today is my last day filming at Prospect Studios. Not my last day filming on Grey's Anatomy, but my last day filming at Prospect Studios. Full of lots of nostalgia," she gushed.

Capshaw also took to Twitter on Tuesday to share her emotional last drive from her house to the studio.

Last drive from home to the studios this morning...TEN YEARS of commuting to reflect upon in 35 mins...wooaaahhh... Jessica Capshaw (@JessicaCapshaw) April 10, 2018

Finally, the actress posted an Instagram photo looking forward to the blue skies ahead. Back in March, Capshaw and fellow longtime cast-member Sarah Drew confirmed that they would be leaving the ABC medical drama at the beginning of its 14th season. Fans will have to wait and see how the show writes out their characters. Capshaw also took to Twitter in the wake of the announcement to thank her followers for their ongoing support over the past decade.

A Difficult Time

Drew, meanwhile, took to social media to admit that she wasn't expecting to be let go from the show and that the decision had hurt her just as much as the fans.

"I know you're sad. I'm sad too. ... I love you, and I love April, and her story isn't over yet. And the really good news (for me, at least) is that I'm here on set shadowing one of my favorite people, Kevin McKidd, with my beloved Grey's family all this week and next," she wrote at the time.

Drew plays Dr. April Kepner and has been on the show since its sixth season.

Grateful For Their Contributions

Co-showrunner and executive producer Krista Vernoff gushed about the two women's contribution to the show in a lengthy statement at the time.

"The characters of Arizona and April are permanently woven into the fabric of Grey's Anatomy thanks to the extraordinary work of Jessica Capshaw and Sarah Drew. ... It has been a joy and a privilege to work with these phenomenally talented actresses," she gushed.

Shonda Rhimes, creator and fellow exec-producer, added that both characters were iconic in their own ways, thanks to the lack of LGBTQ and Christian representation on television.

"I will be forever grateful to both Jessica and Sarah for bringing these characters to life with such vibrant performance and for inspiring women around the globe," she said.

Grey's Anatomy airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on ABC.All eyes are focused on the United Kingdom. Millions of Royal Watchers are awaiting the arrival of Prince William and Kate Middleton's latest child.

Baby Name Predictions

As royal baby excitement continues to build up, bets have been starting to find out about the identity of the royal couple's third child. United Kingdom bookies have revealed to People Magazine that if Kate Middleton gives birth to another girl, there is a robust 5-to-1 possibility that the names Alice and Mary might be incorporated into the child's name. Meanwhile, bookies have also noted that if Prince George is going to have a baby brother, the names Albert and Arthur, are tied at the top of the leaderboard with the odds set each at 12-to-1.

Announcing The Royal Baby

Fashion magazine Marie Claire has suggested that Prince William and Kate will announce the Royal Baby's arrival on social media. The magazine believes that Kensington Palace might post when the birth takes place. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have previously used Instagram to announce Princess Charlotte's arrival in 2015.

St. Mary's Update

The Royal Baby's upcoming arrival had roused interest when St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington, West London posted signs surrounding the Lindo Wing. The signs stated to drivers that there is absolutely no parking in that area as it is 'reserved' for an event that is scheduled to take place anytime between April 9 and April 30. In addition, when it is time for the Duchess to give birth to their third child, there will be a birthing team of 23 specialists assisting the couple. The couple has previous experience using the Lindo Wing as their birthing center, as Kate gave birth to both Prince George in 2013 and Princess Charlotte in 2015. Also, Princess Diana gave birth to both Prince William and Prince Harry at the location.

Still 'In The Dark'

As of publication, both the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have no idea regarding their baby's gender. Due to the couple not knowing if they are going to have another boy or girl has hampered final preparations. However, the couple does know the proper titles that Prince George and Princess Charlotte's little sibling will receive. The child's Royal Title is expected to be His/Her Royal Highness Prince/Princess of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The soon-to-be-born baby is also expected to stand behind big sister Princess Charlotte in the throne succession line. Their older brother, Prince George, their father, Prince William, and their grandfather, Prince Charles, are ahead of them.Donnie Yen has bagged a role in the upcoming live-action adaptation of Disney's Mulan. The international star will play a major character in the film.

New Character

A source with knowledge about the movie revealed that Yen has nabbed the role of Commander Tung. Mulan fans may not be familiar with the character and that is because he is brand new. He is created for the adaptation.

Yen plays a key role in the movie as Mulan's teacher and mentor. Fans may remember that in the 1998 animated film, the female warrior only had one mentor and that is the dragon Mushu. Casting for the voice role of the character has yet to be announced.

Details remain scarce about how Yen landed the role and how his character looks like in live-action Mulan. However, his addition to the film brings homage to the Chinese characters in the original 1998 animated movie. Yen's casting also helps bring the film to international audience given that he is one of the known Chinese stars in Hollywood.

Portraying the role of Commander Tung in the live-action Mulan might be a walk in the park for Yen. After all, he is an experienced and exceptional martial artist. He was the martial arts choreographer as well as an actor in the 2000 film Highlander: Endgame and in the 2002 movie Blade II. He has also acted opposite Jackie Chan in the 2003 film Shanghai Knights. Currently, Yen is busy filming for the action-packed Ip Man 4.

Yen's scenes in the modern take of Disney's Mulan are bound to be among the memorable moments in the film. It is a wonder though if he will play the fallen mentor that is prevalent in most heroic movies.

Cast And Crew

The live-action Mulan will be Yen's second project under Disney. He was also in the Disney-produced movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, where he played the blind character Chirrut Imwe.

Niki Caro will direct the movie set for theater release on March 27, 2020. Chris Bender, Jake Weiner, and Jason Reed will produce opposite Chinese producer Bill Kong (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) as executive producer.

Yen is the latest addition to the still-expanding cast of the live-action Mulan. He will star in the film opposite fellow Chinese star Liu Yifei who was cast in November for the title role.The Brangelina split shocked the world, but it seems like Brad Pitt is happier than ever following his divorce with Angelina Jolie.

In A Much Better Place

A source revealed to People magazine that Pitt is better than ever and that he's getting back to his old self since the separation.

"Separating was very sad and shocking to him, but he started taking care of himself again. He seems much, much happier," the source explained.

Jolie, whom Pitt was involved with for 12 years, filed for divorce in September 2016. The terms of their divorce, as well as custody of their six children, are still being ironed out.

Pitt has been easing himself back into the spotlight, following the announcement of his divorce. He nabbed a couple of acting roles, including in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming film about the Manson Family murders, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Pitt also made a series of low-key public appearances, including at Sena Penn's Haiti Rising benefit back in January. At the event, someone outbid the actor for the chance to watch a Game of Thrones episode with star Emilia Clarke at the event.

The Fight Club star also showed up unexpectedly at a pre-Oscars party, and at an L.A. Dodgers game just a couple of days ago, where he looked happy and healthy.

Looking For That Special Someone

Just recently, the 54-year-old actor started dating again, albeit casually. He may have even found somebody special if rumors are to be believed.

"It took him a long time to date, but he is now," the insider confirmed.

Reports hinted a romantic link between Pitt and renowned academic Neri Oxman, with whom the actor worked with on a project at MIT, where she lectures on media arts and sciences.

A source assured reporters that the two are just professional friends, but it later came out that Pitt had visited Oxman as early as November of last year. He even posed for photos with students to mark the event.

Has He Already Found Her?

Rumors also swirled earlier this week that Pitt has a key to Oxman's apartment in Boston and that he's glowing with happiness whenever he's around her.

The fact that Pitt was spotted woodworking also appeared to be a dead giveaway of their romantic involvement.

Meanwhile, an insider revealed to US Weekly that Pitt is smitten.

"Their chemistry is off the charts. Brad has been spotted going into her apartment building on multiple occasions late at night and emerging the next morning after she leaves to teach," the source gushed.

Although it may seem like an odd match, Pitt is a self-confessed architecture nerd and even toyed with the idea of becoming an architect at one point.The man who allegedly killed 17 students and teachers in Parkland wants to give back. Reports say he wants to donate his inheritance to victims.

Alleged Parkland Shooter To Donate Inheritance

A lawyer spoke on Nicholas Cruzs behalf and revealed that Cruz, who opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, wants those impacted to receive his inheritance and any other money he receives.

Mr. Cruz does not want those funds, whatever money that he is entitled to, said the head of his legal team, Melissa McNeill, in front of a Broward County judge Wednesday, April 11. He would like that money donated to an organization that the victims family believes would be able to facilitate healing in our community or an opportunity to educate our community about the issues that have ripened over the last four or five months.

As for how much money Cruz will get in his inheritance, its just shy of $1 million as hes slated to receive $800,000 from a trust fund following his biological mothers passing last November. Another lawyer for Cruz, Howard Finkelstein, said the money will go to those who have been hurt by Cruzs actions.

Still, it isnt certain how the payout will happen. Theres a question of whether it will be a lump sum or monthly or yearly payments. Theres also uncertainty of how much Cruz will truly get.

Finkelstein said if the inheritance is paid monthly, Cruz could have a million dollars to use at his discretion.

The Fight For Gun Reform Continues

One of the issues that McNeill was likely referring to is gun reform. Since the shooting shook the nation earlier this year, students around the country have been taking steps to push for gun reform, especially when it comes to automatic weapons like the one Cruz allegedly used in the tragic shooting.

Thousands gathered to march on Washington last month in the March For Our Lives protest. They called out lawmakers and reminded them that before long, they will be old enough to vote if they arent already, and theyll be sure to vote for a legislation that supports their views on gun reform. Celebrities have also stood with the students in the fight for gun reform.

The National Rifle Association has also been under attack since the shooting. Major airlines such as Delta Airlines and United Airlines have pulled their advertisements for the NRA since the shooting. Car rental companies Hertz and Enterprise, as well as Allied Van Lines, MetLife, Symantec, and Best Western, are just a handful of other companies who took similar actions.

Be sure to keep up with Enstars for the latest news and updates.Savannah Guthrie possibly threw shade at Matt Lauer while Hoda Kotb says she still communicates with him. Lauer was fired from Today after sexual misconduct allegations.

Savannah On NBC Post-Lauer

NBCs Guthrie and Kotb sat down with The Hollywood Reporter for a candid interview that included a conversation about Lauer.

Guthrie first reassured viewers and readers that there are no creeps left on the Today show. She defended the male hosts who are still there: Carson Daly, Craig Melvin, and Al Roker.

Were all married, were all pretty boring and theres a presumption of good faith, said Guthrie.

Kotb chimed in and gave a rundown of what the working dynamics are like for the remaining male television hosts. She said Roker is like the uncle of the group, Daly is known as the BFF, and Melvin is a friend whom she still feels comfortable hugging despite accusations against Lauer.

We dont feel like theres a new set of rules that we cannot be ourselves, added Kotb.

Hoda Holds Matt Down

Kotb revealed that she still communicates with Lauer on a regular basis. She defended her closeness with Lauer and explained why shes friends with him.

I mean look, this is one of those complex situations, said Kotb. Ive known him since I started working at NBC [in 1998]. When I was sick with breast cancer, he was the first to call. He helps and helped in ways that you know, he was incredible in that way.

She said that version of Lauer is completely different than the one his accusers describe. Still, she said she doesnt take their claims lightly.

Kotb replaced Lauer on Today as Guthries new co-host in January. It was just weeks after Lauer was fired from the show in November 2017. Since then, ratings for the morning show have reportedly increased.

Gayle King Still Friends With Charlie Rose

Kotb isnt the only television host that is still friends with a co-host accused of sexual misconduct. Gayle King revealed she is still close with news veteran Charlie Rose after he was fired from CBS This Morning in November as well. Eight women came forward and accused Rose of sexual misconduct on the set of his PBS interview show.

King said she often tells Rose, 76, that she is really concerned for him. She credits him as being a key portion of her career. She said she cant simply turn that off amid the allegations. Still, she added she cant ignore the accusations either.

Be sure to keep up with Enstars for the latest news and updates.European leaders are going to focus more attention to the alleged chemical attack in Syria. The issue will be discussed at the EU Councils meeting by foreign ministers. The ministers are also planning on discussing the repercussions of the poisoning episode of former Russian military intelligence (GRU) spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England.

The recent chemical attack occurred in the besieged suburbs of Damascus  Douma. Nonprofit organizations, including the White Helmets, pointed out to the potential use of chlorine bombs that had been dropped on the area, killings dozens and poisoning many locals. Russia rejected the reports and described the alleged chemical attack carried out by the government forces as false news. Bashar al-Assad, Syrian President and Commander-in-Chief of the Syrian Armed Forces also rejected the allegations of the chemical weapons being used. His government also added that this false news is meant to justify external military strikes, just like the one recently performed by Israel, which targeted the T-4 airbase near Homs.

European leaders  Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May  discussed the situation in Syria with the US President Donald Trump, who cancelled his trip to South America to monitor the developments in the Middle East and oversee the US response. Some analysts assume that the White House will coordinate further steps, including a potential military involvement, with France rather than the UK since there are concerns that Prime Minister May would not receive approval from the UK Parliament for strikes. In the meantime, the United Nations Security Council failed to establish an independent investigation into the suspected use of chemical weapons due to the veto by Russia.The Chattanooga Mocs softball team continued its winning ways after claiming a 3-1 win over UAB in a non-conference showdown at Frost Stadium on Wednesday evening.After the win, the Mocs have now won six of their last seven and improve to 20-22 overall this season. UAB fell to 15-26-1 on the year.Both teams were held scoreless for the first three and a half innings before Chattanooga got on the board in the bottom of the fourth. Ashley Conner started the inning off with a lead-off double and advanced to third on a Brook Womack single.Emma Sturdivant reached on a fielder's choice to load the bases with no outs.Katie Corum drove in Conner with a one-out RBI single to left field ahead of a pinch-hit RBI single from Morgan Kazerooni to give the Mocs a 2-0 lead. UAB answered back in the top of the fifth with an unearned run after a fielding error and fielder's choice to cut their deficit in half to 2-1.The Mocs added a run in the home half of the fifth after Alyssa Coppinger beat a throw to the plate on an attempted safety squeeze bunt from Sturdivant to take a 3-1 lead.That two-run lead would be all that they needed as starting pitcher Celie Hudson(9-10) cruised from start to end to pick up her third-straight win in the circle. She tossed a complete game and allowed just three hits and no earned runs while striking out three.Seven different Mocs recorded one hit in a 7-3 hit advantage over UAB. Sturdivant, Corum and Kazerooni all picked up RBI singles in the win. Conner roped the only extra-base hit, a double, in a 1-for-2 performance.Chattanooga plays hosts to Furman (29-10, 3-3 SoCon) this weekend for a three-game SoCon series on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday will feature a doubleheader beginning at 1 p.m. while Sunday's series finale is slated for 2 p.m. Tickets can be purchased on GoMocs.com by visiting the schedule page.The reputation of the European Union has once again been tarnished. This time the blow to the EUs image was caused by the remarks of the European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, on account of Vladimir Putin winning the sham presidential election. Congratulations on your re-election, were his words to the re-elected Russian president and he continued his tweet by saying that I have always argued that positive relations between the EU and Russia are crucial to the security of our continent.

As if this were not enough, Mr. Juncker also expressed his enthusiasm for the Kremlins demands for a new Europe-wide security architecture. This proposal was arguably designed to ultimately split Europe from the US and weaken the stability of NATO as well. Just like President Trump, who was also criticized for congratulating Vladimir Putin on winning the election, Mr. Juncker was also censured for keeping his mouth shut about the brazen ballot stuffing, the intimidation of independent candidates, the unexplained deaths of activists, the role of state media, and a number of other strange occurrences leading up to the poll.

This once again shows how the EU is losing its courage to do the morally right thing  to stand against the oppression of human rights. Even though the US seems reluctant to promote democracy overseas, the EU should still be the forefront as a shining beacon of hope for anyone who is willing to stand by the principles of democracy and the protection of human rights. Thus it does not come as a surprise that Mr. Junckers statement infuriated British officials, with Ashley Fox, the leader of Britains Conservative Party in the European Parliament, describing the European Commission Presidents letter to Putin as disgraceful. She emphasized that congratulating Mr. Putin on the outcome without even mentioning the horrible things that had contributed to his reelection was a horrible gesture.

The sad thing is that the EU doesnt view this as a cowardly approach. Brussels thinks that this is just a next step to the stabilization of the blocs international relationships. European leaders are purposefully avoiding sharing any negative opinions about their trade partners publicly, in fear that it might be counter-intuitive to the stabilization movement. Throughout the whole Europe, we can find cases where the EU kept its mouth shut about its partners and didnt uphold its original values. Thus, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have both welcomed the Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi with open arms, despite the fact that the Egyptian election was just as much of a sham as the Russian election.

China is yet another great example. The country has been criticized for the Communist partys actions. Yet, despite mass surveillance of its citizens, harassment and imprisonment take place every day, the EU still conducts business with Beijing. What is even worse is the fact that European leaders distance themselves from any further comments. And even if they finally decide to act and comment on the situation in China, their voice isnt unanimous. For example, Greece refrained from any criticism against China, claiming that it was unconstructive. While it is understandable why Athens took this stance, since China is a major investor in Greeces biggest port, if the EU wants to be taken seriously, it must be unanimous in its statements. All in all, the EU is now facing a shameful reality. The Union has lost its backbone just to preserve the false idea of stability, which will come back and haunt it one day.

The EU Has Decided That Its Time to Cuddle Up to Dictators  Op-Ed by Judy Dempsey  Carnegie Europe.

(The Op-Ed can be downloaded here)Without the union, I probably would have never been hired by the Chicago Sun-Times.

It was 1987, and I had been freelancing for the paper for two years.

It was a perfect arrangement, as far as the newspaper and myself were concernedthe paper needed reporters who could quickly and accurately bat out stories. And I needed the $125 that such stories paid. If you wrote five a weekand I could, easilyit almost constituted a kind of living.

Left to our own devices, we'd have continued that way. I was freelancing for other places, heading down to Haiti to study voodoo for the Atlantic. I was in no rush to tie myself to any particular publication.

But there was a fly in the ointment. The world did not consist solely of the newspaper and myself. There was also the Chicago Newspaper Guild, an entity that looked askance at the regular freelancing of news. It tolerated it for a while, then told the Sun-Times management: This guy is basically a scab, undercutting union reporters. Hire him full time or stop using him.

Thus a job was offered to me. I took one look at that princely salary$33,000 a year in 1987and felt I really had no choice. "I have to give this a chance," I told my girlfriend Edie.

I will admit, it was not the ideal work environment to be flung into. I was unpopular walking in the door, not quite seen as an anti-union thug, but not a fresh-from-the-box new hire either. More of a kind of patsy, a semi-scab, someone dubious and tainted and taken advantage of, not to mention sullied by my magazine work. Real Chicago newspaper reporters were annealed in the low-wage furnace of City News. I was hired by features, to write for The Adviser, a weekly publication telling readers how to keep Japanese beetles off their lawns.

As my career unfolded, I kept the union at an arm's length. My philosophy was, I'm unpopular enough with management as it is, for my habit of speaking frankly, sometimes in print about them. Let's not make it worse. I spent five years on the night shift, and was the last 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. reporter the paper employed. I had a boss tell me that, if it weren't for the union, he'd have fired me on the spot, on general principles.

Working nights got me an extra 10 percent pay, as stipulated in the union contract. The contract was filled with other protections and rights. In 1995, I invoked a line in the contract that allowed male workers to take up to a year unpaid paternity leave. I would have certainly never have done it otherwisethe contract not only granted permission, but it gave me the idea. There was no reason not to. I had been on staff for eight years. I was a night shift grind with no future, at least not one here. I had written three books, and with money from the latest, I could step away, take a break from deadline reporting, look at my options and, oh yes, help raise this newborn.

So I walked away. Thank you Samuel Gompers. Thank you John L. Lewis. The paper didn't miss mein fact, I'm certain I was given a column while I was gone because I was the Man Who Walked Away. It gave me an appeal that my actually being there would have dissipated.

Another union perk.

I paid my dues, accepted benefits with both hands, and left the organizing to others. Having a contract made the job better. It prevented abuse. I remember, living on Logan Boulevard, closing the door to my apartment on a Friday, my day off since I worked Sundays, hearing the phone ring inside. "Leave it," I thought, hand on the doorknob. Instead I went back in, and picked up. An editor telling me to get to Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn and spend 24 hours in its ERwe wanted to scoop a pending Trib story on trauma centers.

So I did. Some businesses would require a low level employee to work 24 hours on a moment's notice and then say "Thanks." If that. Being a union business, that meant I could take time and a half off for the weekend overtime. So in working 24 hours on my day off, I earned a week's paid vacation. Seemed fair to me. More than fair. I've always viewed working at the Sun-Times as a sweet job, and the union was the spoon that stirred the sugar.

That is what unionism is about. Taking the buckets of benefits that pour over owners and re-directing a few tablespoons to workers. If that week off seems generous, it pales next to the millions that owners sucked out of the paper without ever having to gingerly watch large, howling men who had been shot at a street corner dice game being catheterized.

Without a union, you're naked. The reporters at the Tribune certainly were. People assumed Trib staffers did better than Sun-Times reportersI think the Tower, and its fancy aura, and the Tribune's general tone of hauteur threw them off. But whenever I actually compared specifics with my colleagues at the Tribune, to my vast surprise, they were doing worse: worse pay, worse benefits, worse health care, worse job security.

They didn't have a union because their bosses had always been paternalistic mini-Col. McCormick's who convinced their underlings to trust them. What unions they had were brutally repressed. The Tribune was the place where pressmen picketed for years, to no avail. Those miserably marching pressmen are why I'd never subscribe; I don't think I've ever bought a copy of the Tribune at a newsstand, ever, to this day.

So now the Tribune newsroom is organizing. About time. And congratulations.

As momentous as this is, I hope they rememberwith those pressmen in mindthe union is a means, not an end. Forming the union is only the beginning; you have to stick together, hang tough, make it work. There's still a fight ahead. Many fights.

Sure, there are downsides to unions, as there are to any organization or human activity. I've never met a coworker so deficient or crazy that the union wouldn't go to bat for them. So you'd hear some doorjamb-gnawing lunatic you couldn't believe was ever hired has finally been called on his or her particular madness. Then you'd inevitably hear that the union is fighting it.

That said, the management claim that the union made it impossible to fire people was not truethe procedures made it difficult, but there are procedures, and though often management was often too slipshod and lazy to actually go through it, to build the paper trail. Under the proper motivation, it was possible, and they did do it.

Sometimes we did find ourselves picketing the company picnic, to get a point across. That sucks. Picketing sucks. As does leafleting. But I do it, when called upon, because you have to. Otherwise, you're a parasite, living off the blood of others.

The union was weakened by the financial crisis of 2008. In 2009, when Jim Tyree bought the paper, he had three stipulations: we had to take a 15 percent pay cut. We had to freeze our pension plan. And senioritythe requirement that people be fired in the reverse order they were hiredwas done away with.

The union resistedthe first vote turned the offer down. In my memoryand I might be over-dramatizing my roleI remember being one of the few who supported taking a deal. "I'm a Jew and we survive," I remember saying. "The purpose of the union is to protect our jobs at the newspaper. But if there is no newspaper and no jobs, I'm not really concerned whether the union is strong or not."

So the union undercut itself, to protect what was important. We muddled through. Now the union is trying to recover what we surrendered. I don't know of anyone who regrets that decisionit's been a good job this past decade, still.

It's encouraging to see our colleagues at the Tribune moving to unionize. Given how they have been manhandled by a series of cash-sodden jerks: grave dancer Sam Zell, tech toddler Michael Ferrothey need something strong on their side, protecting them against the whims of whoever can muster the cash.

This resistance is happening all over. Last Sunday, the Denver Post ran an extraordinary editorial denouncing their own owners as "venture vultures" and calling for someone who cares about the city to buy the Post. Newspapers, having been beaten up for a decade, and under a president who prefers fascism to a free press, they are finally fighting back.

Fighting back is good. There is a New Yorker cartoon that shows two explorers up to their necks and sinking. "Quicksand or not, Barclay," one says to the other, "I have half mind to struggle."

That's where longtime newspaper employees have been for a dozen years. Struggling. Fighting. Not giving up. Samuel Johnson said it best.

"I will be conquered. I will not capitulate."

That's the spirit. If victory is the opposite of defeat, then forming a union is the opposite of surrender. I don't often wish the Tribune well, but I wish them well now. We are all cooking in the same pot. So much of the economy is pushing workers toward the piecemeal home workers who were so abused a hundred years ago. Success for one means improvement for all. Forming a union is a step in the right direction. Not victory. But a step toward it.



This Page Is Under Construction - Coming Soon!

Why am I seeing this 'Under Construction' page?The city of Cleveland will be paving a section of Georgetown Road from Guthrie Drive to Harrison Pike beginning Thursday, from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Weather pending, crews will continue paving along Georgetown Road on Monday and Tuesday, from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

The additional funding for this project was approved by the Cleveland Council as a part of the councils transportation and infrastructure initiative for the city.

Lane closures are expected for this project. Non-local traffic is advised to use an alternative route.When you applied for CSV were these documents waivered for you or did you apply for professional body ?



A certificate of registration with the professional body, council or board recognised by SAQA in terms of Section 13(1)(i) of the National Qualification Framework Act or the relevant Department confirming the skills or qualifications of the applicant, if required by law.. Not applicable to graduates from South African Institutions.



Proof of qualifications evaluated by the South African Qualification Authority Not applicable to graduates from South African Institutions.



Proof of post qualification experience of at least five years. Not applicable to graduates from South African Institutions.



Testimonials from previous employers



Comprehensive curriculum vitaeThe Chair of the Canadian Pork Council says the confidence Japanese customers have in the quality of Canadian pork combined with greater freedom to move product into that country creates new opportunities for growth in that market.

Last month, in recognition of Canada and Japan's participation in the Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, a delegation representing the Canadian pork sector travelled to Japan.

Rick Bergmann, the Chair of the Canadian Pork Council, told those on hand last week for Manitoba Pork's 2018 Annual General Meeting Japan has extremely high standards for pork focusing on the firmness of the meat, the color of the meat and what goes into the production of the meat on farm.

Rick Bergmann-Canadian Pork Council:

It was to celebrate the TPP, the success of the TPP and the target mission was also to understand more of what our customers are requiring because we want to ensure that we are providing what they are looking for.

We also met our federal Minister of Agriculture Lawrence MacAulay there.

We had opportunity to have meetings with the Japanese meat importers to talk about continued business and increased business from country to country.

Source : FarmscapeMr Weidemann said growers remained unhappy with the situation where barley delivered as feed quality was later sold by grain marketers internationally as food grade.

It has been going on for years, but farmers have become fed up with seeing grain they are being paid feed values for being used for food or malting purposes, Mr Weidemann said.

He said if the situation did not change farmers may look to other cereal options.

Barley is a good rotational choice in many farming zones but the farmers are jack of not getting the full return for their product, he said.

However, Grain Trade Australia (GTA) chief executive Pat OShannassy said pricing already reflected the potential for higher value usages.

The price on offer for what farmers deliver as feed includes a premium which acknowledges the grain could be used either as food grade or as malt barley in some less quality conscious markets, Mr OShannassy said.

He said GTA was discussing renaming feed barley as general purpose barley to better reflect usage patterns.

Mr Weidemann said the issue was more than just semantics around the name and said vagaries of standards made it difficult for farmers to maximise returns.

There is no doubt there is money to be made in blending barley which is virtually of malt quality but just fails one standard and other grain and selling that as malt, we feel there are opportunities in the food grade barley space that growers are missing out on, he said.

The trade says the Feed One price is reflective of the food market but we dont feel it is.

At least we would like to see more classifications for food/high quality feed lines that allow us to store that higher grade grain on-farm and market it as such rather than simply having to sell it at feed values.

Mr Weidemann said his organisation was also looking at inconsistencies between in-turn and out-turn specifications.

The standards we deliver against are different when the marketers out-turn the grain, which of course reflects what their customers want, but we want to be closer to what those customers want in order to better market our own grain.Northern Australia remains a land of great opportunity, but 2016 Nuffield Scholar and Queensland grazier, Adam Coffey, is recommending in his recently-released research report that the industry take a closer look at historical land practices to determine their suitability and sustainability.

The vast majority of northern grazing businesses have traditionally relied on economies of scale to remain viable, but bigger doesnt necessarily mean better, Mr Coffey said.

When it comes to intensification, its about investing in the land you have, to improve its performance, rather than necessarily acquiring more land.

Supported by the Northern Territory Government, Mr Coffey received a Nuffield Scholarship to investigate the development potential of tropical and sub-tropical cattle producing regions.

The vast majority of northern grazing businesses have traditionally relied on economies of scale to remain viable, but bigger doesnt necessarily mean better, he said.

When it comes to intensification its about investing in the land you have to improve its performance, rather than necessarily acquiring more land.

Mr Coffey, who owns and manage 2500 hectares near Miriam Vale, Queensland, with wife Jacynta and their two boys, is redeveloping the property as a beef enterprise after it was previously used as a timber plantation.

As a relatively new land owner he has become increasingly focused on maximising land assets in a context where the high capital cost of entry means making any significant return on investment a constant challenge.

Having spent years in the Kimberley and Northern Territory, Ive always been drawn back to Northern Australia and inspired by the sheer size of numbers, both in regard to cattle herd and the land itself, Mr Coffey said.

But as a first-generation entrant into agriculture, its vital to get it right in the initial years of investment.

We, like so many others, recognise the need to leverage what we have in a way that ensures ongoing sustainability and the opportunity of growth.

Ive realised that greater productivity comes back to how we use, manage and care for our land.

Weve had to take a holistic view of the business and, because of that, are starting to see a much bigger picture than just simple performance measures.

According to Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), the Northern Australian cattle industry utilised around 75 per cent of total farming land in Australia in 2015-16, but accounts for less than half of the national beef herd, a global trend seen across tropical and sub-tropical growing regions.

A key part of Mr Coffeys research has been to understand how problems have arisen from historical management and how these practices affect soil and vegetation in extensive rangeland environments.

Graziers in Northern Australia are becoming increasingly exposed to vegetation issues such as woody encroachment and thickening, perennial pasture dieback, and increasing populations of undesirable pasture species, he said.

On my Nuffield program, I visited farmers faced with similar scenarios such as graziers in southern Texas, who are experiencing the rapid spread of Mesquite and Huisache in regions which have always been relatively treeless, sought after grazing land.

Graziers in these areas are becoming less focused on constant mechanical or chemical intervention and more on grass production, due to a better understanding around how historical practices have often impacted soil moisture and nutrient infiltration, to the benefit of undesirable plants.

Looking back to European settlement, Mr Coffey explored the impact of fencing and artificial water infrastructure.

Previously, animals would have to move on as watering holes dried up, helping to protect what available feed there was from over grazing, he said.

The basic functions of intensity and timing of grazing, rest periods and nutrient replacement are key factors in any successful farming operation, with evidence suggesting the lack of application of these early grazing principles is contributing to woody thickening through a lack of plant diversity.

Its also clear that producers are left open to the risk of particular diseases affecting a single species of grass, if that is the only one they are relying on for production, which means diversification is important.

Mr Coffey said a combination of conventional and biological tools can be utilised by beef producers to help combat some of the problems caused by historical land use, with various findings and case studies available at nuffieldinternational.org/live/Report/AU/2016.adam-coffeyPOOR returns and frustrating business conditions have convinced Elders to cut its last investment ties with the live export sector in Indonesia, selling its 8200-head feedlot and abattoir, near Jakarta.

However, the farm services business will retain cattle supply relationships to source northern Australian steers for the new Indonesia-Australian joint venture owners.

The abattoir at Bogor on Java will also continue to supply Bos indicus beef cuts for Elders Fine Foods Indonesian hotel and restaurant customers.

No price details have been released, but the sale to the agribusiness and resources sector consortium, PT Pramana Austindo Mahardika (PAM), is expected to be concluded by June 30, 2018.

It also frees up about $10 million a year in working capital which Elders has had tied to livestock held in its Lampung feedlot on Sumatra, plus running costs associated with its Indonesian interests.

Back in Australia, meanwhile, Elders has moved to absorb the farm chemical and animal health products business of its house brand supplier, Titan Ag.

By the end of this month Titan Ag will be 70 per cent owned by Elders, with two more payments to be made in the next two years.

Titan is owned by one-time Elders ag chemical buyer, Andrew Ericsson, and Martin Cayzer, whose agricultural scientist father, Paul, was one of the early players in the generic farm chemical market.

He teamed up with Mr Ericson in 2006 to establish Titan specifically to build a house brand line for Elders, initially sourcing product from China.

Its been a busy start to the year for Elders, which recently purchased independent Victorian Western District stock and station agency company, Kerr and Company Livestock, and expanded its Western Australian footprint in Bunbury, and has been mooted as a possible interested party in any ownership restructure of New Zealands big PGG Wrightson agribusiness network.

The Indonesian asset sale follows Elders quitting the live export shipping game mid last year, selling its North Australia Cattle Company (NACC) to a management-led partnership with Chinese investors.

Elders still has commercial arrangements to supply cattle to NACCs export trade, which includes the Lampung feedlot.

Elders managing director Mark Allison confirmed the high cost of sourcing Australian cattle, combined with government-enforced beef price ceilings and changing Indonesian government policies for livestock imports had adversely affected the performance of our Indonesian business.

While its PT Elders Indonesia business was profitable, return on capital invested was less than five per cent compared with the Australian companys overall return of 26pc last year.

As with our decision to sell the live export business, return on capital was the primary driver, but weve also have found it increasingly difficult to do business in Indonesia, Mr Allison said.

Competition from buffalo beef imports from India, changing rules on livestock imports and the beef price cap mean that if your costs rise there arent many options to protect your margins from being squeezed.

Elders puts priority on investing and growing business units which generate a consistent return on capital at a level which creates wealth for our shareholders.

It became appropriate last year to look at divesting these assets.

The new ownership group, Pramana Austindo Mahardika, includes private Indonesian investors, financial investors and an Australian livestock exporter, the Brisbane-based, Austrex.

Elders will continue to have a presence in Indonesia through its retail meat distribution businesses which it established in China and has since expanded to service high end restaurants and hotels in Vietnam and Indonesia.

The Indonesian operation supplies imported red meat cuts under the Killara and Kooyong beef and Marlee lamb brands to restaurants in Jakarta and Bali.

Kooyong branded lot-fed Bos indicus beef is sourced via the Indonesian feedlot and meatworks and will continue to be supplied by the new owners, although Elders will move its meat portion processing operations to new premises after the sale.

Mr Allison said the food service business in Indonesia, Vietnam and China continued to expand and would be the focus of future business growth.

Exiting the feedlot and processing facilities in Indonesia would allow Elders to direct more attention and capital to its retail meat distribution business in Indonesia, and other initiatives.

We have a clear resolve to realise our objective of continuing the consistent and high quality growth which has underpinned Elders achievements, Mr Allison said.

We now have a solid and stable platform to capitalise on the many opportunities that lie ahead for Elders and Australian agribusiness.

Immediate opportunities include the Titan Ag deal, which Elders expects to generate an extra $6.5m to $7.5m in earnings before interest and tax next financial year.

Titan is an Australian-based producer and supplier of crop protection and animal health chemicals and fertiliser, with product formulated locally in Australia through toll manufacturers.

It also sources from China and India.

The Titan acquisition, which includes products spanning 163 Australian-registered lines, is expected to grow to absorb Elders own private label, the Agsure crop protection and fertiliser range.

Current Titan Ag principals, Mr Ericsson and Mr Crayzer will join the Elders business next month, with Mr Allison looking forward to them being long-term employees with our business.

Theyve built up a strong supply business with good credentials and relationships in China and elsewhere, Mr Allison said.

The Titan product range has achieved good market recognition and acceptance, initially in southern Australia, and more recently particularly in Western Australia and northern New South Wales.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.The Board of Parole (BOP), the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), the Department of Correction (TDOC) and the Tennessee Rehabilitative Initiative in Correction (TRICOR) will observe National Crime Victims Rights Week with a ceremony Friday in Chattanooga.

During the event, organizers will also honor a Southeast Tennessee advocate who assists crime victims.

The event will be at 10 a.m. in Coolidge Park, Walker Pavilion 1250 Market Street, Chattanooga.

This event is one of 10 that are taking place across the state this week.

Additional events are scheduled for Nashville, Knoxville, Memphis, Cookeville, Jackson, Johnson City, Columbia, Clarksville and Murfreesboro.Heather Locklear has pleaded not guilty to allegedly attacking police officers during a domestic violence arrest at her home in February.

Heather Locklear

The 56-year-old actress was arrested on suspicion of felony domestic battery for allegedly assaulting boyfriend, Chris Heisser, at her California home on February 25, and at the time was also arrested on four counts of misdemeanor battery on a police officer and one charge of resisting or obstructing a police officer after she was said to have lashed out at the cops who were called to attend the incident.

Last month, the domestic battery case against Heather were dropped but it was reported she would still face the other charges brought against her, and according to TMZ, the star has now pleaded not guilty.

The publication reports that the 'Melrose Place' star was not present at her court hearing on Thursday (12.04.18), but her attorneys entered the plea on her behalf.

Previously, documents that were written by Senior Deputy Sheriff Keith Hall claimed Heather bit one of the officers, and was "agitated and uncooperative".

The documents stated: "Locklear walked to her bedroom and began to close the door. Deputy Alldredge put his foot in the doorway to prevent her from closing it, and to continue the investigation. Heather attempted to push Deputy Alldredge out of the doorway, and screamed, 'Get the f**k out of my house!'

"She battered Deputy Alldredge by kicking him in his shin in an attempt to get his foot out of the doorway. The source was strong enough to force Deputy Alldredge's leg out of the doorway."

Documentation also alleges Heather threatened to "shoot" the officers if they stepped foot on her property again, which lead to a search of the Thousand Oaks home for a firearm, although officers didn't find anything in the search.Los Angeles County prosecutors are allegedly reviewing a "sex crimes case" against disgraced actor Kevin Spacey.

Kevin Spacey

The 58-year-old actor faced numerous allegations of sexual harassment last year, including one from fellow actor Anthony Rapp who was the first to come forward with his allegations against the star, claiming he had made a pass at him when he was 14 years old during a party in 1986.

And now, NBC News Los Angeles has confirmed that prosecutors were presented with a sex crimes case against Spacey by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department on April 5, which is now under review by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office's Sex Crimes Task Force.

At the time of writing, no further information is known about the case, but it comes after the former 'House of Cards' star - who was fired from his role in the wake of the claims against him - is already under investigation in England by Scotland Yard for three separate sexual assault allegations.

Spacey has been accused of sexually assaulting a man in Lambeth, South London, and another man in Westminster, both in 2005, as well as a third instance three years later in 2008.

In addition to the police complaints, the Old Vic theatre - where Spacey was creative director from 2004-2013 - previously revealed they had had more than 20 people come forward to make allegations about the 'American Beauty' actor during his tenure there.

The theatre claimed a "cult of personality" had existed around Spacey, and his status and stardom had stopped people, in particular young actors and junior staff, from speaking out about his alleged actions.

They said in a statement: "Despite having the appropriate escalation processes in place, it was claimed that those affected felt unable to raise concerns and that Kevin Spacey operated without sufficient accountability.

"This is clearly unacceptable and the Old Vic truly apologises for not creating an environment or culture where people felt able to speak freely."Donnie Yen is to star in Disney's live-action 'Mulan' movie.

Donnie Yen

The 54-year-old actor - who has previously appeared in 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' and the 'Ip Man' franchise - has been cast in the role of Commander Tung, a mentor and teacher to Mulan, Deadline reports.

The much-anticipated Disney remake will see Chinese actress Liu Yifei star in the titular role, with Donnie becoming the first major addition to the cast since that original announcement.

But before the film can head into production, there are a number of key roles that still need to be filled, including the male lead Shang, Mulan's dragon Mushu and the villain Shan-Yu.

Despite his recent appearances in high-profile movies, Donnie previously bemoaned the lack of opportunities for Asian men in Hollywood.

Donnie suggested that movie studios are sometimes reluctant to hire people like himself because they are considered to be "threatening and intimidating".

The Hong Kong actor said: "If you're a minority in this industry, the job opportunities are given to you ratio-wise. That doesn't mean Hollywood is giving Asian men equal opportunities, especially considering China's world status today and the development of other Asian countries too.

"We're influencing the rest of the world. But when you have an industry basically run by white people for decades, it's not going to change overnight. I do see a part that's changing. We see more Asian females, mostly females, because they're less threatening and intimidating."Frankie Essex is looking for love online.

Frankie Essex

The former 'The Only Way is Essex' star - who is the sister of Joey Essex - has been spotted on the dating app Tinder as she's desperate to meet the man of her dreams.

However, the 29-year-old beauty has a strict criteria when it comes to who she will allow to contact her on the site - they have to be taller than her at 5ft7.

Her bio reads: "I'm 5ft 7 so someone taller than me please."

According to The Sun Online, Frankie has uploaded a number of pictures of herself - and some with friends - to her account in a bid to impress potential suitors.

The blonde star's new quest for love comes less than two years after she said she wasn't looking for a man because she wanted to focus on herself, but she had noticed she'd been getting more attention since losing an impressive 29lbs.

She said at the time: "I'm not going to lie, I've had a lot more male attention. Men look at me in a different way. It's nice, but I don't want a fella. I just want to go to the gym."

Frankie's last public relationship was with John Lyons in 2015 but she claimed he was the reason she piled on the pounds because she wasn't happy with him.

She explained: "I was depressed when I was with him. I felt s**t, I ate a lot ...

"I'd lost all my confidence. I had a really sh** year, probably the worst year I've ever had, and I was really down. I lived with my boyfriend John and I had to move out."

Frankie - who lost her mother to suicide when she was just 13 years old - even contemplated taking her own life after her relationship with John turned toxic.

She said shortly after they split: "I did think about killing myself, like my mum. She was depressed and I'm scared I'll fall into that hole. But I'm on antidepressants now and they're helping me feel happier. I want to be the old Frankie again."Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release

SubCategory Select Sub-CategoryBradley County Sheriff Eric Watson on Wednesday received endorsements from Bradley County Commissioners Mike Hughes and Howard Thompson who released the following joint statement:

Over the past four years while serving as Bradley County Commissioners, we have personally witnessed Sheriff Eric Watson be a good steward with Bradley County Sheriffs Office fiscal budget. Not only has Sheriff Watson been conservative with taxpayers monies, but has returned over $700,000 back to the countys General Fund. While managing a multi-million dollar budget brings many challenges, Sheriff Watson has been presented with four consecutive No Findings audits by the State of Tennessee Comptrollers Office which confirms every dollar was accounted for in the sheriffs office fiscal budgets. Sheriff Watsons leadership is trusted and proven, and we are proud to endorse Eric Watson for re-election as Sheriff of Bradley County.

Commissioner Howard Thompson currently represents the 4th District of Bradley County, while Commissioner Mike Hughes represents the 1st District of Bradley County.

Sheriff Watson expressed his appreciation stating, During my first term as Sheriff of Bradley County I have worked alongside professional, experienced, and dedicated public servants who are dedicated to representing their districts well, and Commissioner Hughes and Commissioner Thompson fit that mold. Im truly honored to receive their endorsements and look forward to working beside them for another four years.RECELL Device presentations include data from pivotal trial and health economic results showing 44 percent reduction in total treatment costs compared to standard of care

AVITA Medical (ASX: AVH) (OTCQX: AVMXY) announced today that results from a pivotal clinical trial demonstrating the effectiveness and clinical benefits of the RECELL Autologous Cell Harvesting Device in the treatment of deep partial-thickness (second-degree) burns were presented in the Top-Five Abstract plenary session of the American Burn Association (ABA) 50th Annual Meeting in Chicago. In the randomized, controlled clinical trial, burn sites treated with the RECELL Device required 97.5 percent less donor skin than burn sites treated with the standard of care, resulting in a statistically significant reduction in patient-reported pain, increased patient satisfaction and improved donor scar outcomes. The results were presented by William Hickerson, MD, FACS, Firefighter Burn Center, Memphis, Tenn., and University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis, Tenn.

"The RECELL Device requires significantly less skin for definitive closure of deep partial-thickness burns without any compromise to healing or safety outcome," said Dr. Hickerson. "These results are an important advancement in the treatment of burns. As a result of the significant reduction in donor skin with the RECELL Device, the trial results showed increased donor-site healing, reduced pain and increased patient satisfaction."

The RECELL Device is an investigational medical device in the U.S. that is designed to enable medical professionals to produce, at the point-of-care, a REGENERATIVE EPIDERMAL SUSPENSION (RES) using a small sample of the patient's own skin. The autologous suspension contains cells necessary to regenerate epidermis and provides a new way to achieve permanent closure in burns and other wounds while reducing the amount of skin harvested at the time of surgery. Reduction in donor-site skin requirements has important benefits from both clinical and health economic perspectives. The trial served as one of two pivotal trials used to support AVITA Medical's U.S. PreMarket Approval (PMA) application for the treatment of burn injuries.

Also presented at the ABA meeting were results of a health economic model in which treatment with the RECELL Device was found to reduce total treatment costs compared to the standard of care. A third presentation provided a review of clinical outcomes obtained in the treatment of patients with extensive burn injuries with the RECELL Device under the Compassionate Use Investigational Device program. Patients in this study were severely injured with burns ranging from 43 percent to 95 percent of their total body surface areas (TBSA), and the RECELL Device was successfully added to each patient's treatment to achieve definitive wound closures.

Pivotal Trial in Deep Partial-Thickness Burns; Treatment with the RECELL Device Required 97 Percent Less Donor Skin than Standard of Care

The presentation by Dr. Hickerson, "A Comparative Study of RECELL Device and Autologous Split-Thickness Meshed Skin Graft in the Treatment of Acute Burn Injuries," described outcomes from the controlled trial conducted at 12 U.S. burn centers. The pivotal trial evaluating 101 adult patients with thermal, partial-thickness burns covering 1 percent to 20 percent of their total body surface area. Patients served as their own control, and two comparable burn sites were selected for comparative testing on each patient. One burn site was treated with the RECELL Device, while the other burn site was treated with the standard treatment, 2:1 meshed autograft.

During the pivotal trial, the patient donor skin required to be harvested to treat burn sites with the RECELL Device was 97.5 percent less than the amount harvested to treat burn sites with the standard of care (p<0.001). Despite the statistically significantly reduction in donor skin required to treat with the RECELL Device, burn sites treated with the RECELL Device achieved definitive closure comparable to the burn sites treated with standard of care (four subjects were excluded from the analysis because they were treated with silver sulfadiazine, a contra-indicated cytotoxic agent). Clinical benefits of the significant reduction in donor skin harvested for RECELL treatment included:

Significantly less donor-site pain (p=0.0025).

Significantly higher patient satisfaction with donor-site appearance (p=0.0025)

Significantly better donor-site scarring results (p=0.0025)

Significantly greater incidence of donor-site healing at two weeks (p<0.001)

At two weeks after treatment, a 4.4 greater rate of healing compared with conventional autograft donor sites

Consistent with the results of more than 7,000 uses of the RECELL Device worldwide, use of the RECELL Device in the trial was safe and well tolerated with adverse experiences typical for the type of burn injury sustained.

RECELL Device Could Reduce Cost of Treating Large Burns by 44 Percent or More

Kevin Foster, MD, of the Arizona Burn Center presented the results of a health economic model in "Cost-Effectiveness of an Autologous Cell Harvesting Device (ACHD) Versus Standard of Care (SOC) for Treatment of Severe Burns in the United States." Treatment with the RECELL Device was found to reduce total treatment costs compared to the standard of care, particularly for large burns and burns initially of indeterminate depth. The model determined that the RECELL Device could reduce the cost of treatment by 44 percent or greater for large burns.

"Management of severe burns is costly due to complex, individualized treatment, and the requirement for hospitalization and multiple procedures," said Dr. Foster. "The model discussed today highlights the potential of the RECELL Device to improve patient care in the treatment of severe burns, while also providing a technique for reducing the total cost of treatment."

The presentation described how a hospital-perspective cost-effectiveness model was developed, which uses sequential decision trees to depict the acute care pathway for burn patients, and then predicts how the RECELL Device would modify treatment for patients with burns ranging from 10 percent to 40 percent TBSA. Clinical inputs were derived from randomized controlled trials, burn surgeon surveys and interviews and the ABA National Burn Repository. An accompanying budget impact model builds on the cost-effectiveness calculations to evaluate overall cost impact to a burn center associated with incorporation of the RECELL Device into patient care. This enables the model to be tailored to patient populations relevant to individual hospitals, healthcare systems and other organizations engaged in the treatment of burn patients around the world.

The model determined that treatment with the RECELL Device for deep partial-thickness burns reduced total treatment costs by an average of 33 percent, or approximately $33,000, for patients with 10 percent TBSA and 44 percent, or approximately $203,000, for patients with 40 percent TBSA. For full-thickness burns, treatment with the RECELL Device reduced total treatment cost by 7 percent, or approximately $11,000, for patients with 10 percent TBSA, and by 20 percent or approximately $154,000, for patients with 40 percent TBSA. The cost reductions are due to decreasing the length of hospital stay, the number of procedures required to close the burn wound, the donor site size and associated wound care, and number of downstream contracture release procedures. The cost reductions could be higher for patients with larger TBSAs.

The budget impact model was also used to calculate the annual budget impact of current management of burn treatment versus treatment with the RECELL Device for a burn center with 200 patients. The model determined that treatment with the RECELL Device would reduce annual total treatment costs from $43.3 million to $30.3 million, saving 30 percent or $13.0 million.

The model was developed by AVITA Medical, IQVIA and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), under the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Funding provided by BARDA, under Contract No. HHSO100201500028C, to support the development of the RECELL Device by AVITA Medical has included support of the health economic model, the pivotal clinical trial in partial-thickness burns and the Compassionate Use program encompassed by the three presentations from today.

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 Medical'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, 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 the United States, the RECELL Device is an investigational device limited by federal law to investigational use. In September 2017, AVITA Medical submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a PreMarket Approval (PMA) application for the RECELL Device for the treatment of burn injuries.

In all countries outside of Europe, our portfolio is marketed under the RECELL Device brand to promote skin healing in a wide range of applications including burns, chronic wounds and aesthetics. The RECELL Device 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. The RECELL Device is designed for the treatment of burns and plastic reconstructive procedures; REGENERCELL Autologous Cell Harvesting Device has been formulated for chronic wounds including leg and foot ulcers; and RENOVACELL Autologous Cell Harvesting Device 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/20180411006476/en/

Contacts:

OUS Media

Monsoon Communications

Sarah Kemter

Phone: +61 (0)3 9620 3333

Mobile: +61 (0)407 162 530

sarahk@monsoon.com.au

or

US Media

Syneos Health Public Relations

David Polk

Phone: +1 (310) 309 1029

Mobile: +1 (805) 428 5775

david.polk@syneoshealth.com

or

Investors:

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

EVRY (dpa-AFX) - French grocery retailer Carrefour Group (CRERF, CRRFY, 0NPH.L) reported that its first-quarter 2018 sales were 20.78 billion, up 2.6% at constant exchange rates. Taking into account an unfavorable currency effect of -5.0%, principally due to the depreciation of the Brazilian Real, the total variation of sales at current exchange rates was down 2.4%.



On a like-for-like basis, first-quarter 2018 sales were up 0.4%, impacted by less dynamic markets in Europe, continued food deflation in Brazil, strong competitive pressure in the Group's main markets, but also by operational disruptions in France and Belgium.



In France, sales were up 0.9% in total or down 0.1% like-for-like in a less favorable market than in the previous quarter and in a persistently competitive environment. Supermarkets and convenience posted solid sales momentum with like-for-like growth over the quarter. Hypermarket sales were affected by adverse weather conditions and operational disruptions.



Europe posted a 2.8% increase in total sales at constant exchange rates (and a 0.8% decrease like-for-like) with contrasting performance in food between countries, reflecting divergent market dynamics.



In Latin America, total sales rose by 9.1% at constant exchange rates and by 4.5% on a like-for-like basis.



In Asia, sales were down by 4.5% at constant exchange rates and -3.9% like-for-like, in line with trends in previous quarters. Like-for-like sales in China decreased by 6.6% in a competitive environment marked by the increasing share of the e-commerce channel, notably during the Chinese New Year celebrations. Positive trends continued in Taiwan, where like-for-like sales grew for the thirteenth consecutive quarter, by +3.3%.



The Group confirmed the outlook presented on February 28. The Group's 2018 results will remain closely linked to the evolution of foreign exchange rates, particularly the Brazilian Real. The spot rate on April 10, 2018 stood at 4.21 Reais to the euro vs an average rate in 2017 of 3.61 Reais; Given the investment levels of the past years, the Group should continue to see in 2018 an increase in depreciation; The Capex target for 2018 is 2 billion euros, excluding Cargo.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.deJAKARTA, Indonesia, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --PT.Erajaya Swasembada Tbk, PT ITC Auto Multi Finance, a division of ITOCHU, and PayJoy have announced the launch of their next-generation smartphone financing in Indonesia. ITOCHU will use PayJoy's proprietary Checkout software platform to qualify and approve Indonesian customers for monthly payment plans in Erajaya's Erafone stores across Indonesia, requiring only a national ID, Facebook account and an active phone number. This new financing option represents a breakthrough in Indonesia, where according to the GSMA there are 1.4 mobile connections per adult, but less than half the adult population has a smartphone and credit card penetration is only 5 percent.

This expansion of global connectivity and mobile internet adoption, otherwise known as Digital Inclusion, extends both economic and social benefits to unconnected populations, fueling a cycle that reduces poverty, improves infrastructure and services, and further increases internet access and usage.

"Today's announcement with ITOCHU and Erajaya is another step towards fulfilling our mission to make smartphones accessible to more people," said PayJoy's CEO and co-founder, Doug Ricket. "Our technology enables distributors to offer installment financing options to customers who have no access to credit and may not be able to afford a smartphone. This deal will put the internet and all the tools smartphones offer in the hands of more people in Indonesia, enabling growth that comes with having a more connected population."

Atsushi Hashimoto, General Manager of Communication & Mobile Business Dept. at ITOCHU, said, "We are pleased to be a part of this deal that will put more smartphones into more people's hands in Indonesia. ITOCHU is proud of the work we have done to create a more connected world and this is one more example of bringing together technology, distribution and capital to create a winning solution."

The smartphone, with its improved availability and affordability, is quickly becoming a fundamental tool for accessing mobile internet, in developed and developing countries alike. The opportunity for companies in the mobile space to shape the future of this rapidly growing market - and the lives of consumers in Indonesia - is enormous.

About PayJoy

PayJoy was founded in 2015 in San Francisco with the mission of making smartphone technology and financial services affordable to everyone worldwide. PayJoy's patented technology for locking smartphones and proprietary data science for underwriting customers enables people who lack credit to qualify for an installment plan to purchase their first smartphone. Today, PayJoy offers finance to millions of customers in the US and Mexico, and is expanding throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa in 2018. PayJoy's team of 60 professionals bring premier fintech experience from Google, Facebook, Amazon, PIMCO, McKinsey, Oportun, and Merrill Lynch. PayJoy is funded with over $30M of equity and debt from top fintech investors including Union Square Ventures.

About ITOCHU

ITOCHU, based in Japan, is one of the leading general trading companies. ITOCHU engages in domestic trading, import/export, and overseas trading of various products such as textile, machinery, metals, minerals, energy, chemicals, food, general products, realty, information and communications technology, and finance, as well as business investment in Japan and overseas. ITOCHU was originally founded in 1858, and has approximately 120 bases in 63 countries.

About Erajaya

Established in 1996, Erajaya conduct of business activities importer, distribution and retail trade of telecommunications equipment such as mobile cellular phones and tablets, subscriber identity module card (SIM card),vouchersmobile network operator, accessories, andgadgetssuch as computers and other electronic devices .In 2011, Erajaya officially became an open company and sold its shares on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, making Erajaya the largest and most trusted company in its business in Indonesia.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/665447/PayJoy_Logo.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/665446/erafone_Logo.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/676036/itochu_20logo_ID_d5894bbc7320_Logo.jpgCHICAGO (dpa-AFX) - Boeing Co. (BA) announced its investment in Reaction Engines Limited, a leader in advanced propulsion systems based in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. Reaction Engines' technology will contribute to the next generation of hypersonic flight and space access vehicles. Reaction Engines is known for its Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE), a hybrid engine blending jet and rocket technology that is capable of Mach 5 in air-breathing mode and Mach 25 in rocket mode for space flight. As part of the SABRE program, Reaction Engines developed an ultra-lightweight heat exchanger that stops engine components from overheating at high speeds, thus improving access to hypersonic flight and space. Founded by three propulsion engineers in 1989, Reaction Engines produces robust technical designs for advanced heat exchangers, air-breathing engines, and the vehicles they could power. These capabilities may lead to high-speed point-to-point transport that is cost-effective and sustainable. Boeing HorizonX Ventures participated in this $37.3 million Series B funding round alongside Rolls-Royce Plc and BAE Systems. The Boeing HorizonX Ventures investment portfolio is made up of companies specializing in technologies for aerospace and manufacturing innovations, including autonomous systems, energy storage, advanced materials, augmented reality systems and software, machine learning, hybrid-electric propulsion and Internet of Things connectivity. 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.PARIS, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Dental Monitoring SAS ("DM") is proud to announce a strategic investment by the Straumann Group (SIX: STMN) ("Straumann"), one of the world's largest dental companies.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/675696/Dental_Monitoring_Logo.jpg )



The two companies have signed an agreement that provides Straumann with global distribution rights to DM's technology in return for an injection of capital and a minor stake in DM. Straumann will integrate DM's technology into its portfolio of orthodontic and digital solutions and the two companies will collaborate to develop further applications for artificial intelligence in the dental field. DM will continue to support and sell to orthodontic customers through its own network.

Remote Monitoring - Transforming orthodontics

DM is the first company to enable orthodontists and dentists to remotely monitor treatment progress in their patients. Together with the introduction of virtual check-ups to supplement chairside appointments, this offers a significant improvement to patient care. After downloading the DM application on their smartphones, patients use the proprietary DM self-scanning process, usually on a weekly basis from the comfort and convenience of their home. DM's proprietary artificial intelligence technology extracts information from the collected data and combines it with the digital impression data acquired when treatment began.

The software uses highly accurate clinical measurement tools and photo-simulations that record actual tooth movement over the course of treatment and monitors any relapse during the post-treatment retention phase. The system communicates with the orthodontist whenever necessary or required, allowing for timely intervention and adjustments that make the treatment more efficient. The DM web-based dashboard allows the orthodontist to communicate effortlessly with the patient, to support compliance and motivation.

Artificial Intelligence ("AI") - next generation of dental products

The use of machine-learning algorithms to transform medicine and dentistry is an important technological innovation to improve treatment outcomes and patient engagement.

DM's engineering team based in Paris, has spent the last 4 years developing the DM proprietary technology to make remote monitoring a reality. The company has invested millions of dollars gathering and tagging clinically relevant data to enable the development of highly accurate artificial intelligence algorithms. Today its technology can detect over 170 different clinical situations from images taken by patients using their smartphones. These results are constantly clinically validated by DM's panel of orthodontists, prior to being communicated back to the treating orthodontist or dentist. In just a few years, DM has validated nearly 2 million clinical records from patients and the number is growing exponentially.

Integrating DM technologies into other dental products

DM's artificial intelligence technology will support Straumann's orthodontic and intraoral scanning businesses and could be extended to applications in implant and preventative dentistry. A significant part of Straumann's investment will be used to fund these developments and the Group will be represented in DM's Strategic Management and Development Board.

Marco Gadola, CEO of Straumann Group

"Enabling dentists to offer patients a reliable, easy-to-use mobile application for checking their teeth and treatment progress will change dentistry. Our investment in DM provides us with a proven orthodontics tracking system, which is commercially-available in addition to securing a partner with the expertise to develop further artificial intelligence solutions in our field".

Philippe Salah, CEO of Dental Monitoring

"In 2017, DM commenced a search for a strategic investor in the dental industry to provide funding and access to large global dental markets and to accompany us beyond our current position in orthodontic monitoring. Straumann is an ideal partner for many reasons: they are a truly global company and are investing significantly in digital dentistry as a core business. They are renowned for clinical excellence and brand leadership and share our passion for pioneering innovation and entrepreneurism. With their scientific heritage and strength in digital, they are our partner of choice for developing and establishing remote monitoring coupled with AI as the new standard of care".

Other DM Investors

In March 2018, DM completed a US$9.5m investment round with over 50 individual investors - mainly orthodontists who see the opportunity that DM has to transform not only orthodontics but also dentistry. DM is also backed by Naxicap Partners, one of France's largest private equity and venture capital firms who were DM's first external investors in 2016. The remainder of the shares are held by the founders and employees.

Use of Funds

DM will use the funds raised to invest in additional engineering resources and in the development of other dental fields beyond orthodontics. The funds will also be used by DM to invest in sales and marketing in core markets such as the USA, Europe and Asia Pacific countries.

About Dental Monitoring

Dental Monitoring SAS developed and launched the world's first remote monitoring orthodontic system and pioneered the use of AI in the field of dentistry. DM has applied for over 40 patents to protect its intellectual property developed in the remote dental monitoring field. Founded in 2013, DM launched its product in the French market in 2015 initially to acquire sufficient clinical data and develop proprietary dental algorithms to the required accuracy. In 2017, commercial sales commenced; DM products are now sold in the USA, France, the UK, Germany, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. With headquarters in Paris, France, and offices in the USA, Australia and Hong Kong, DM has nearly 100 employees.

About Straumann

The Straumann Group (SIX: STMN) is a global leader in tooth replacement and orthodontic solutions that restore smiles and confidence. It unites global and international brands that stand for excellence, innovation and quality in replacement, corrective and digital dentistry, including Straumann, Neodent, Medentika, ClearCorrect, Dental Wings, and other fully/partly owned companies and partners. In collaboration with leading clinics, institutes and universities, the Group researches, develops, manufactures and supplies dental implants, instruments, CADCAM prosthetics, biomaterials and digital solutions for use in tooth replacement and restoration or to prevent tooth loss.

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, the Group currently employs 4881 people worldwide and its products, solutions and services are available in more than 100 countries through a broad network of distribution subsidiaries and partners.

Dental Monitoring SAS, 47 avenue Hoche, 75008 Paris, France

Phone: +33-(0)-186-95-01-01

Homepage: dental-monitoring.com



Contacts:

Corporate Communication

Alexe Espiand: +33-(0)-659-32-37-78

E-mail: a.espiand@dental-monitoring.com



Investor Relations

Mark Van Weelde: +61-418-236-848

E-mail: m.vanweelde@dental-monitoring.com

WISeKey International Holding SA / WISeKey launches an updated version of the WISeID App, its flagship Digital Identity Security Solution, including new features for Secure Email and Strong Authentication . Processed and transmitted by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

WISeKey launches an updated version of the WISeID App, its flagship Digital Identity Security Solution, including new features for Secure Email and Strong Authentication

WISeID protects Digital Identities against Social Media abuses

Geneva, April 12, 2018 - WISeKey International Holding Ltd ("WISeKey", SIX: WIHN), a leading cybersecurity and IoT company today announced the launch of a new version of its WISeID App, which includes new features for secure email communication and stronger authentication.

Following the recent news about the misuse of people's personal information from a data-mining firm, social media companies are working to upgrade their platforms to give users more control over their Digital Identity, although this is not enough to protect user's personal information as the social network platform remains in control of the user's Digital Identities.

Technologies like WISeID.com provide consumers with the power to control their privacy, so the right to understand what information is being collected, the right to be forgotten and the right to be deleted is always under the control of the user. A Digital Identity is like a Birth Certificate, it belongs to and it is always under the control of the user. Social media companies are creating pseudo Digital Identities with the data provided by the user, without their consent. In contrast to Social Network Credentials and Identities where social media companies provide users with ID credentials to access their services, WISeIDs are built to empower individuals who control the formalization of their identity, manage their digital personas, and actively monetize their personal data. These WISeIDs are used by global institutions, governments and other service providers to collaborate and share sensitive information outside of their internal, trusted ecosystems.

For almost two decades, WISeKey has contributed to the design and implementation of global standards for the internet's long-missing identity layer: decentralized, point-to-point exchange of information about people, organizations, or things - enabled by blockchain and certified by cryptographic Root of Trust. WISeKey's technology, products and services are used by individuals and organizations to facilitate this control and as consequence to be in compliance with the new European General Data Protection Regulation (Directive 95/46/EC), known as GDPR (approved by the European Parliament in April 2016; will take effect on May 25, 2018), the primary law regulating how companies protect EU citizens' personal data.

To that effect, WISekey has launched an enhanced version of WISeID, adding easy to use strong authentication and email security capabilities that can remediate threats like phishing, ransomware or identity theft. The use of passwords implies risks, as it's a simple security factor that can be stolen using phishing techniques (e.g. a fake email from the bank asking the user to log into a rogue web page using eBanking credentials) or it can be simply guessed if not complex enough (many users prefer to use simple passwords, by fear of forgetting it).

Strong Authentication is a mechanism able to enhance security by complementing the traditional username/password access to online services with additional security factors, like biometry, hardware tokens and one-time-passwords. Additionally, secure eMail techniques allow confidential messages to be exchanged encrypted, and to affix a "digital signature" to the outgoing email, ensuring the recipient that the message comes from a genuine person and that has not been manipulated in the way.

Nevertheless, the above techniques haven been always cumbersome and expensive to adopt for non-technical users, which aren't necessarily high-tech experts, willing to secure their digital life with easy-to-use applications and mobile devices.

WISeKey's WISeID is a mobile suite of applications that bring security to consumers and professional users when storing confidential information and communicating with their mobile devices. The main App in this suite, WISeID Personal Vault, has been just enhanced to include two main features:

WISeID Authenticator: a secure login feature, based in the HMAC standard and compatible with Google Authenticator, which works with many existing online services like Gmail, Facebook and others. When login in one of the compatible websites, the user can generate an "one-time password" directly from WISeID and use it to reinforce its regular password, making very hard for a hacker to steal user credentials and get access to important resources like confidential information, eBanking services, etc.

Free Digital Certificate: the new WISeID simplifies the steps to generate a digital certificate and integrate it with the device system applications like email, making thus easy to secure email with encryption and digital signatures. This service is based in standards like X.509 and S/MIME, so compatible with any device and operating system.

WISeID uses a "freemium" business model, so users can use most features for free, while some enhanced capabilities, like the backup of confidential information in WISeKey's hyper-secure cloud systems hosted in a secure datacenter in Switzerland, are paid-for features.

It is critical to ensure that personal data is managed for legitimate purposes and with user consent. The recent user data scandal, is just one example on how personal data can be captured, exploited and misused. Managing consent appropriately is a challenge for many organizations, and WISeID solutions for electronic signatures can provide a highly secured mechanism to process these consents in a way which is both legally binding and convenient, by reducing the need to manage paper documents. The entire debate to protect users against social media abuses should focus on the need to force these social media platforms to offer their users a secured platform and ability to protect their personally identifiable information (PII). Protecting users PII is important to avoid impersonation and identity theft and to data mine their personal data. WISeID give users the ability to control and protect their confidential data as the PII is encrypted before leaving the user's device, with strong keys derived from a password that users choose and which is never communicated to WISeKey or third parties. Also, the rationale and the purpose for collecting user's data is transparent and the consent of the subject is obtained in advance, making sure that users are always in control of their PII. "Basically, users don't mind providing social media companies with their personal data if that data cannot be used by third parties to track them and their identity," noted Carlos Moreira, Chief Executive Officer and founder of WISeKey.

To download WISeID App please visit www.wiseid.com (http://www.wiseid.com)

About WISeKey:

WISeKey (SIX Swiss Exchange: WIHN) is a leading global cybersecurity company currently deploying large scale digital identity ecosystems with a patented process. WISeKey's Swiss based cryptographic Root of Trust ("RoT") provides secure authentication and identification, in both physical and virtual environments, for the Internet of Things, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. The WISeKey RoT serves as a common trust anchor to ensure the integrity of online transactions among objects and between objects and people. For more information, visit www.wisekey.com (http://www.wisekey.com/) .

To receive WISeKey's latest news, subscribe to our Newsletter (https://www.wisekey.com/investors/newsletter/) or visit the WISeKey Investors Corner (https://www.wisekey.com/investors/).

Press and investor contacts:

WISeKey International Holding Ltd

Company Contact: Carlos Moreira

Chairman & CEO

Tel: +41 22 594 3000

info@wisekey.com (mailto:info@wisekey.com) WISeKey Investor Relations (US)

Contact: Lena Cati

The Equity Group Inc.

Tel: +1 212 836-9611

lcati@equityny.com (mailto:lcati@equityny.com)

Disclaimer:

This communication expressly or implicitly contains certain forward-looking statements concerning WISeKey International Holding Ltd and its business. Such statements involve certain known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which could cause the actual results, financial condition, performance or achievements of WISeKey International Holding Ltd to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. WISeKey International Holding Ltd is providing this communication as of this date and does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements contained herein as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities, and it does not constitute an offering prospectus within the meaning of article 652a or article 1156 of the Swiss Code of Obligations or a listing prospectus within the meaning of the listing rules of the SIX Swiss Exchange. Investors must rely on their own evaluation of WISeKey and its securities, including the merits and risks involved. Nothing contained herein is, or shall be relied on as, a promise or representation as to the future performance of WISeKey.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

NetCents Technology Inc.("NetCents" or the "Company") (CSE: NC) (Frankfurt: 26N), announces a true game changer for the cryptocurrency market. NetCents announces the launch of Instant Settlements, providing merchants guaranteed protection against market-volatility and liquidity issues associated with processing cryptocurrency transactions.

Volatility and merchant risk have been the real gating item preventing cryptocurrencies to truly become mainstream and be used for everyday payment. NetCents will initially offer instant settlement for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin [and the NetCents Coin]. Additional cryptocurrencies will be added over time.

Despite the technological advances cryptocurrencies provides for payment processing, exposure to crypto-market volatility has deterred merchants from accepting cryptocurrencies from a growing segment, the holders of these cryptocurrencies. Through Instant Settlements, merchants will now be able to take advantage of all the benefits of lower fees, faster processing, and leverage the liquidity of 'crypto-to-fiat or crypto-to-crypto' settlement without being exposed to the risks or the price fluctuations inherent with cryptocurrencies.

With the NetCents Merchant Gateway, volatility within the price of digital currencies such as Bitcoin, Ether, or Litecoin will have no impact on the merchants. It will enable cryptocurrencies to, in essence, mirror traditional payment methods in convenience and usability. Merchants will be in a secure position to ultimately be indifferent to the form payment used by their customers, be it traditional or crypto currency. A first in the industry.

"I am proud to say that we have broken the largest objection to cryptocurrency processing with absolutely zero currency risk to the merchant. This is a game-changer for the cryptocurrency payments industry," said Clayton Moore, CEO of NetCents Technology. "Through this development, merchants can now expand their products and services to an untapped $270+ billion dollar cryptocurrency market, increase sales with ease, convenience and security. Cryptocurrency's promise was always one day. NetCents has made it today."1

In addition to the economic benefits of integrating digital payments with NetCents Technology as a partner, merchants and payment processors will also benefit from being an industry leader in blockchain technology adoption. This development further streamlines merchant processing and consumer payments into one secure frictionless process.Consumers benefit from lower transaction fees, a variety of digital payment options, fraud protection, and freedom to spend their cryptocurrency on everyday transactions at their favourite retailers.

Over the last year, NetCents has introduced the various pieces to its product offering to become the backbone of crypto processing worldwide. Unlike other companies in the space, NetCents has adopted a strategy to partner with leading merchant acquirers and payment processors to rapidly grow its user base. With the most advanced and complete product offering, NetCents is rapidly becoming the go-to solution provider for crypto processing. Today's announcement of Instant Settlements was the last missing piece to allowing mass adoption and use of cryptocurrencies. NetCents has positioned itself to be at the epicenter of this crypto revolution.

"Our technology is the missing puzzle piece that provides a stepping stone for emerging and existing companies to evolve with little to no risk to their current business and payment model," added Clayton Moore. "With our risk-free platform, merchants and payment processors will be able to accept these next-generation cryptocurrencies while behind-the-scenes, seamlessly and instantly settle of the purchase amount in the local fiat or digital currency of their choice. NetCents Technology removes all liability and merchant risk of cryptocurrency transactions."

If your company or organization wishes to integrate the NetCents platform into your website, visithttps://net-cents.com/business/register and sign up for a business account to complete the online form to get the digital integration and application processes started.

If you are a merchant acquirer or payment processor looking to offer seamless and risk-free payment processors to your merchants, please contactclaytonmoore@net-cents.com.

About NetCents

NetCents is a next-generation online payment processing platform, offering consumers and merchants online services for managing electronic payments. The Company is focused on capturing the migration from cash to digital currency by utilizing innovative blockchain technology to provide payment solutions that are simple to use, secure and worry-free. NetCents works with its financial partners, mobile operators, exchanges, etc., to streamline the user experience of transacting online.

NetCents Technology is integrated into the Automated Clearing House ("ACH") and is registered as a Money Services Business (MSB) with FINTRAC, which ensures our consumer's security and privacy. NetCents is available for deposits from 194 Countries around the World, providing you with the freedom to choose to Pay. Your Way. '

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

NetCents Technology Inc.

"Clayton Moore"

Clayton Moore, CEO, Founder and Director

NetCents Technology Inc.

Suite 880, 505 Burrard St (Bentall 1),

Vancouver, BC, V7X 1M4

_________________________________________

1Cryptocurrency market cap as of April 11, 2018https://coinmarketcap.com/

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that the Company expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include regulatory actions, market prices, and continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates, and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by applicable securities laws, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change.

Please visit the corporate website at www.net-cents.com , +1(604)895-7423; or

Contact

Gord Jessop

President

gord.jessop@net-cents.com

LINKOPING, Sweden, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

International medical imaging IT and cybersecurity company Sectra(STO: SECT B) announces that the nationwide telepathology solution in the Netherlands is now ready for use by the country's pathology labs. The solution aims to make images and reports digitally available for consultations, revisions and expert panels.This allows for faster diagnosis to be made by the right expert with greater quality, regardless of time and place. The unique nationwide telepathology solution will thus play a key role in improving cancer care in the Netherlands.

"The nationwide telepathology solution makes it easy to consult with other pathologists around the country and facilitates digital and remote panel meetings," says Dr. S.L. Meijer, Pathologist at the Academic Medical Center and Chairman of the LANS panel (National Advisory Board of Neoplasia Esophagus).

The project is the first of its kind in the world and was initiated last year by the Dutch Society for Pathology (NVVP) and the nationwide network, Foundation PALGA. It has been implemented by Sectra, together with the subcontractors Deutsche Telecom Healthcare and RAM Infotechnology.

Sectra's cloud-based solution will enable pathologists to efficiently share digital pathology images on a national scale and make patient images easily available. The platform is developed to facilitate sub-specialization and thereby reduce lead times, decrease inter-observer variation and improve the overall quality of diagnosis.

The two laboratories, Pal Dordrecht and Erasmus MC, were involved in testing the module for choosing images to upload for consultations and revisions, which now has been approved. "This is the future," says Dr. K.H. Lam, pathologist at Erasmus MC. The module for panel discussions has also been accepted by the LANS panel. The two modules have now been released for further roll-out. An additional feature enabling all images connected to a case to be uploaded automatically is scheduled to be released later in the spring.

Sectra's digital pathology solution

Sectra provides a complete solution for primary diagnostics in pathology, including archiving and an advanced review workstation. The solution allows pathologists to make their diagnoses and carry out reporting with higher precision and less time spent per case, thereby improving cancer care. Sectra's high-end review workstation provides pathologists with the right environment and tools to perform their work in a digital system and to reduce the pain-points associated with time-consuming and labor-intensive manual workflow. Sectra's digital pathology solution also allows for seamless sharing of digital slides and patient data in multi-hospital environments, enhancing the workflows around consultations, frozen sections and second opinions. In the US, digital pathology for primary diagnostics is still pending FDA approval. Read more about Sectra's digital pathology solution.

Meet Sectra at Dag van de Pathologie 2018

Discuss the project and experience Sectra's digital pathology solution at the Pathology congress at Van de Valk Veenendaal in the Netherlands on April 13. Book a meeting with Sectra at the congress to learn more.

For further information, please contact:

Dr. Torbjorn Kronander,

CEO and President Sectra AB

+46(0)705-23-52-27

Marie Ekstrom Tragardh

Executive Vice President Sectra AB and President Sectra Imaging IT Solutions

+46(0)708-23-56-10

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/sectra/r/dutch-pathology-labs-can-now-communicate-through-nationwide-telepathology-solution,c2493858

The following files are available for download:Enterprise South Nature Park and SORBA will hold a grand opening of the new mountain bike trail, Atlas, this Saturday at 1 p.m.

Atlas is a 5.5 mile advanced trail. Atlas is located at GATE 1 on Still Hollow Loop.





DUBLIN, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

FlowForma, the leading provider of BPM tools for Microsoft Office 365 is pleased to announce its upcoming webinar entitled "How to Transform Processes to Drive Positive Customer Experiences," featuring Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst,Rob Koplowitz, taking place on Thursday, April 19th 2018.

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/675589/Forrester_Webinar.jpg )

(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/523210/FlowForma_Logo.jpg )



Conscious that automating business processes is crucial to customer experiences that drive business success. FlowForma has invited guest speaker, Rob Koplowitz, to provide insights from his research and upcoming report about the emerging middle ground between low code and traditional BPM. Rob will also share examples of how organizations are radically changing processes to support digital transformation.

Furthermore, attendees will hear from FlowForma CEO, Neil Young, as he discusses how companies such as Aon are using no code digital process automation, to power processes that drive positive customer experiences. Join FlowForma for this webinar to chart your firm's process transformation journey.

Attendees of this webinar will:

learn how organizations are regarding digital transformation as part of their customer journey

understand Forrester's latest research re the market split for business process solutions

learn from Neil Young , on how companies like Aon are using no code digital processes to drive efficiency and transparency across processes

Webinar Details

When:April 19, 2018 @ 11am EDT / 4pm GMT+1

Where:Online - Register for free today

Who:COOs, CIOs, CTOs, IT Managers, Transformation Managers, Business Analysts, Business Managers, Operations Managers, Process Analysts, Delivery Managers.

Secure your complimentary place at this upcoming webinar.

Supporting Resources

To learn more about FlowForma ' s upcoming webinar featuring Rob Koplowitz visit : www.flowforma.com/webinar-how-to-transform-processes-to-drive-positive-customer-experiences

To find out how the FlowForma BPM tool works visit: www.flowforma.com/how-it-works

To download a free trial of FlowForma BPM visit: www.flowforma.com/start-your-flowforma-trial

About FlowForma

FlowForma, the leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM) tools for Microsoft Office 365 has been revolutionizing the traditional BPM space with an innovative approach to developing BPM products that empower users to get work done, smarter and faster, on the familiar SharePoint platform, without any coding.

An award-winning Microsoft Office 365 App, the FlowForma BPM tool enables business users and Heads of Departments to quickly implement processes such as HR on-boarding, new product development and clinical trials as well as many others, increasing organizational efficiency and productivity.

Recognised by Microsoft and trusted by over 150,000 users, this Microsoft Gold Partner is headquartered in Dublin with offices in London and Boston.

For further information or a 30-day free trial, visit www.flowforma.comBRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/PARIS (dpa-AFX) - U.K. shares were fluctuating on Thursday as escalating tensions surrounding Syria and disappointing house price data offset investor excitement over a fresh round of corporate dealmaking. Meanwhile, media reports suggest that British Prime Minister Theresa May has called an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the U.K.'s involvement in possible military action against Bashar Assad's regime. The benchmark FTSE 100 was virtually unchanged at 7,257 in late opening deals after closing 0.1 percent lower the previous day. Shire Plc shares advanced 3 percent amid reports that Takeda Pharmaceutical Co is moving closer to making a bid for the company. Rail and bus operator FirstGroup soared 6 percent after rejecting a takeover offer from U.S. private equity firm Apollo Management. Similarly, gambling software development company Playtech rallied 7 percent after it agreed to buy Italy's SNAITech SpA for 846 million euros. Over 50s insurer and travel agent Saga rose over 5 percent as it reported a rise in annual underlying pretax profit despite challenging trading conditions. 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.Robust alternative to GRE or VPN tunnels provides a more secure connection for transferring data

Neustar, Inc., a trusted, neutral provider of real-time information services, today announced the release of Neustar NetProtect, a direct connect Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) defense solution that is currently available in 61 data centres located across ten countries. In complement to Neustar SiteProtect NG, a DDoS mitigation solution that protects against web application attacks, the NetProtect network is strategically situated directly inside data centres in order to address and mitigate or entirely avoid the concerns of latency, complexity and other anomalies which are commonly associated with legacy Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) and Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel systems.

Created specifically for demanding and advanced network requirements that require support beyond basic proxy or VPN services, NetProtect is focused on transmitting sensitive data quickly and securely. Neustar's strategic fortification of a vast data centre ecosystem in combination with Neustar's design and implementation of the new NetProtect solution decreases system complexity. Such system simplification has traditionally presented a technical challenge because of the need to overlay networks on top of physical networks in order to transfer data between multiple locations.

"DDoS defense technology is constantly improving and as a result Neustar is focused on creating solutions that provide our clients with a secure infrastructure built on a foundation of unmatched stability, resiliency and performance," said Barrett Lyon, General Manager, DDoS Defense at Neustar. "I am very bullish about the DDoS evolution and, without a doubt, connecting directly to defense networks rather than routing through tunnels will become the norm. This will allow for greater security and less intrusive protection in order to mitigate attacks consistently and effectively, without introducing unnecessary volatility."

Unlike legacy tunneling services, NetProtect does not require additional software or hardware to transfer data across networks. By connecting directly within the data centre, NetProtect removes the introduction of unnecessary additional entry points on the network and eliminates the associated risk that can lead to an increase of malicious traffic or impair or complicate a customer's ability to define its routing policies. As well, by reducing susceptibility to variances and vulnerabilities derived from traversing external locations allows Neustar to decrease associated issues such as network connection latency and fragmentation.

With plans to expand into 14 countries and over 80 data centres within the next six months, the NetProtect solution will be one of the most robust and always-on direct-connect DDoS defense services in the industry. NetProtect is unparalleled in its ability to connect mission critical network applications directly across global facilities in order to provide advanced defenses across any application. More information on Neustar SiteProtect NG or Neustar NetProtect is available at security.neustar.

About Neustar Security Solutions

Neustar Security Solutions defend against network threats, inform users of potential network vulnerabilities, accelerate online asset performance and monitor user website performance through multiple services and offerings. Neustar's industry leading SiteProtect NG DDoS defense service ensures full-layered coverage in an attack. Neustar UltraDNS service manages 10% of all internet traffic, routes over 1 trillion queries a month and provides industry leading uptime with 100% availability. Neustar IP Intelligence is the authoritative source of IP decisioning data on 99.99% of routable IP addresses worldwide. Neustar's nearly 20 years of unparalleled expertise ensures that our customers are protected and optimised during normal business practices and when unsolicited events occur. Our services ensure that customers' network connectivity are protected and optimised whether in crisis or just business as usual. Neustar is trusted by many of the world's largest brands to keep their mission critical systems up and running.

About Neustar

Neustar, Inc. is a leading global information services provider driving the connected world forward with trusted, holistic identity resolution. As the only company capable of understanding who is on the other end of every interaction, Neustar is trusted by the world's great brands to grow and guard their businesses with the most complete understanding of how to connect people, places and things. The combination of Neustar's unique, accurate, and real-time identity system and our cloud-based workflow solutions empower our clients to make actionable, precise and valuable decisions across marketing, risk, IT/security, network and operations departments. More information is available at https://www.home.neustar.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005554/en/

Contacts:

Media contact:

Hannah Lock

Hotwire for Neustar

neustar@hotwirepr.comWerbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.By the initiative and decision of the Board of the company the Annual General Meeting of Vilniaus Degtine AB (company code 120057287) to be held on April 26th, 2018 at 10.00 a.m. at the company's premises in Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius is convened. Registration of shareholders starts at 9.00 a.m. The shareholders attending the meeting must provide an identification document. The representatives of the shareholders must additionally posses a proxy approved by the procedure prescribed by law. A shareholder may, by means of electronic communications, authorize a natural or legal person to participate and vote in his name at the General Meeting of Shareholders. Such a power of attorney of the shareholder need not be certified by a notary. The power of attorney issued through electronic communication channels must be confirmed by the shareholder by a safe electronic signature developed by safe signature equipment and approved by a qualified certificate effective in the Republic of Lithuania. The shareholder shall inform the company on the power of attorney issued through electronic communication channels by e-mail vd@degtine.lt no later than last business day before the meeting at 4 p.m. The power of attorney and notification shall be issued in writing. The power of attorney and notification to the company shall be signed with the Electronic Signature but not the letters sent via the e-mail. By submitting the notification to the company the shareholder shall include the Internet address from which it would be possible to download the software to verify an Electronics Signature of the shareholder. The Meeting's accounting day - April 19th, 2018. The persons who are shareholders of the company at the end of accounting day of the General Meeting of Shareholders shall have the right to attend and vote at the General Meeting of Shareholders. The rights accounting day - May 11th, 2018. The shareholders will use property rights arising from the resolutions accepted during the General Meeting of Shareholders on a ratio basis of number of shares at the end of the rights accounting day. On the Agenda: 1. Auditor's opinion on the set of company's financial statements and on the company's yearly report. 2. Proposals and comments of the Supervisory Board. 3. Approval of the company's yearly report for the year 2017. 4. Approval of the set of company's financial statements for the year 2017. 5. Appropriation of the year's 2017 profit of the Company 6. Election of the firm of auditors and establishment of terms of remuneration for audit services. 7. Revocation of chairman of Supervisory Board and election of new member of Supervisory Board. 8. Other questions. The agenda of the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders may be supplemented by initiative of shareholders who own shares no less than 1/20 of all the votes. Proposals to the agenda of the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders may be submitted by e-mail vd@degtine.lt or delivered to the Company's office at Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius, no later than the April 12th, 2018. Please be informed that along with a proposal to supplement the agenda of the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders must be submitted the drafts of proposed decisions, or if the decisions shall not be adopted, explanations on each of the proposed issue. Shareholders who own shares no less than 1/20 of all votes own the right at any time before the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders or during the meeting in writing (delivering proposals to the company at Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius) or by e-mail vd@degtine.lt propose new draft decisions related to the questions included into agenda, additional candidates of the company's organs, propose an audit company. Shareholders own the right to ask the questions concerning the agenda of the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders. Questions may be submitted by e-mail vd@degtine.lt or delivered directly to the Company's office at Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius, not later than 3 working days till General Meeting. The Company may refuse to answer to shareholder's questions if they are concerned to the commercial (industrial) secrets or other confidential information. If it is possible to set the shareholder's identity, the Company shall inform the shareholder on the refusal to provide asked information. Each shareholder or representative thereof shall have the right to cast his/her vote in advance in writing by filling in a general ballot paper. The general ballot paper form shall be announced in the company's website http://www.degtine.lt. no later than 21 days before the Meeting. Upon the shareholder's request in writing, the company no later than 10 days before the Meeting shall send a general ballot paper by registered mail free of charge or hand it in person against signature. The general ballot paper filled shall be signed by the shareholder or his/her representative. In case the ballot paper is signed by the shareholder's authorized representative, such person along with the filled ballot paper shall submit the document to confirm the voting right corresponding to the requirements set by the laws. The ballot paper filled and the document confirming the voting right (if required) shall be submitted in a written form to the company's head office Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius, by registered mail or by handing against signature no later than on the last business day before the Meeting. The following information and documents during the whole period are available on the website of the company http://www.degtine.lt starting no later than 21 days before the Meeting: - report on the convening of the Meeting; - the total number of the company's shares and the number of shares with voting rights on the convening day of the Meeting; - draft resolutions on each agenda issue and other documents to be submitted to the Meeting; - general ballot paper form. Attachments: 1. Draft Resolutions of the General Shareholder Meeting; 2. Set of company's financial statements for the year 2017; 3. Ballot Paper. Authorized to provide additional information - General Manager Raimonda Pilke 8 5 233 0819 Raimonda Pilke General Manager 8 5 233 0819 Attachment: https://cns.omxgroup.com/cds/DisclosureAttachmentServlet?messageAttachmentId=673328LUXEMBOURG, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Millicom will announce its first quarter results for the period ending 31 March 2018, on 24 April 2018 at approximately 22:00 (Stockholm) / 21:00 (London) / 16:00 (New York) via a press release.

The company will host a conference call for the global financial community on 25 April 2018 at 14:00 (Stockholm) / 13:00 (London) / 08:00 (New York).

The conference call will be webcast at www.millicom.com

Dial-in information:

Please dial in 5-10 minutes before the scheduled start time to register your attendance. Dial-in numbers for the call are as follows:

Sweden: +46(0)8-5065-3942 Luxembourg: +352-2787-0187

UK: +44(0)330-336-9411 US: +1-646-828-8143

The access code is: 6273539

Replay information:

A replay of the call will be available for 7 days from 25 April 2018 at:

Sweden: +46(0)-8-5199-3077 UK: +44(0)207-660-0134 US: +1-719-457-0820

Replay passcode is: 6273539

For further information, please contact

Press:

Vivian Kobeh, Corporate Communications Director

+1-305-476-7352 / +1-305-302-2858

press@millicom.com



Investors:

Michel Morin, VP Investor Relations

+352-277-59094

investors@millicom.com

Mauricio Pinzon, Investor Relations Manager

Tel: +44-20-3249-2460

investors@millicom.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/millicom-international-cellular/r/notice-of-first-quarter-2018-results-and-conference-call,c2494350

The following files are available for download:VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Body and Mind Inc. (CSE: BAMM) (US OTC: BMMJ), (the "Company" or "BAM") is pleased to announce the Company has teamed up with GPEN, a company which is at the forefront of engineering the most advanced, user-friendly portable vaporizers in the world. The Company has entered into a one-year, renewable contract with GPEN and will be one of only two companies currently supplying the GPEN Gio cartridges in the State of Nevada. The Company intends to capitalize on the market by incorporating BAM's recognized flavors into the cartridges.

BAM President Robert Hasman commented, "We're delighted to have signed this collaboration with GPEN, a leader in the vaporizer market. This is further affirmation of the brand strength of BAM as a supplier of premium products, as well as our distribution system throughout the State."

Chris Folkerts, Founder and CEO of GPEN commented, "Our success to date has been choosing the right deployment partners in new markets. As a result, the GPEN products will be available in over 500 dispensaries in the US by calendar year end.Our partnership with BAM has been excellent.Not only do they cultivate premium flower under a quality brand but they have an extensive distribution network that will see our products become more available in Nevada. We are happy to report exceptional reviews so far and we look forward to expanding our relationship with BAM further."

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.

Notice regarding Forward Looking Statements: This news release contains forward-looking statements. The use of any of the words "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "may", "will", "project", "should", "believe" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. These statements speak only as of the date of this news release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks including the inability of the Company to obtain shareholder and exchange approval, or to raise additional equity as well as the various risk factors discussed in the Company's disclosure documents, which can be found under the Company's profile on http://www.sedar.com. Body and Mind Inc. undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law or the Canadian Securities Exchange.

We seek safe harbour.

For further information regarding Body and Mind Inc. please contact:

Darren Tindale

+604-376-3567

stonerockltd@gmail.com



WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Essendant (ESND) and Genuine Parts Co. (GPC) announced Thursday that they have agreed to combine Essendant with Genuine Parts' S.P. Richards business.



The companies said Essendant and S.P. Richards will form a stronger, more competitive business products distributor with greater scale and service capabilities and an enhanced ability to support customers.



The deal creates a company with pro forma 2017 net sales of about $7 billion, $300 million in adjusted EBITDA, 4.2 percent adjusted EBITDA margins.



The combined company is expected to unlock more than $75 million in annual run-rate cost synergies and more than $100 million in working capital improvements.



The combined company expects 90 percent of the cost synergies to be realized within two years post-closing and to incur less than $50 million in one-time cash costs to realize the synergies.



The deal, unanimously approved by the Boards of Essendant and Genuine Parts, is expected to close by the end of 2018, primarily subject to regulatory and Essendant shareholder approvals. The deal is expected to be tax free to the companies' respective shareholders.



The deal is structured as a Reverse Morris Trust, in which Genuine Parts will separate S.P. Richards into a standalone company and spin off that standalone company to Genuine Parts shareholders, immediately followed by the merger.



The deal implies a valuation of S.P. Richards of about $680 million, reflecting the value of the Essendant shares to be issued at closing plus one-time cash payments to Genuine Parts of about $347 million, subject to adjustments at closing.



Ric Phillips, Essendant President and CEO, will lead the combined company, and Janet Zelenka will serve as CFO. S.P. Richards President and CEO Rick Toppin will be appointed Chief Operating Officer of the combined company to be named Essendant.



Essendant Chairman Charles Crovitz will serve as Chairman of the Board of the combined company. He will be joined by three Essendant-appointed Directors, four Genuine Parts Company-appointed Directors, and four Directors appointed by mutual agreement.



Upon closing, Genuine Parts shareholders will own about 51% and Essendant shareholders will own about 49% of the combined company on a diluted basis.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.deLOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 12, 2018 / Crypto Invest Summit, one of the largest cryptocurrency and blockchain investment conferences in the U.S., today announced famed crypto influencer and host of CNBC's "Crypto Trader," Ran Neu-Ner, will broadcast his show live from its main stage on May 1-2.

The news was announced during Neu-Ner's interview with Crypto Invest Summit co-founders Alon Goren and Josef Holm on "Crypto Trader" earlier today.

Regarded as a key insider to the global cryptocurrency markets, South African-based Neu-Ner is slated to interview high-profile event speakers and sponsors for "Crypto Trader," which appears on CNBC Africa and is syndicated worldwide.

"We are thrilled for the opportunity to extend our valuable content and high-profile speakers to Ran's Crypto Trader audience," said Alon Goren, co-founder of Crypto Invest Summit and Principal at Los Angeles-based cryptocurrency fund Wavemaker Genesis.

The summit will bring out some of the biggest investors and entrepreneurs in the crypto space, including Tim Draper, David Siemer, Scott Walker, Jeremy Gardner, Adam Draper, Malcolm CasSelle, Apolo Ohno, Crystal Rose, Carlos Domingo, Bill Barhydt, Vinny Lingham, Kathleen Breitman, James Glasscock and Amy Wan.

"The impressive lineup of speakers and sponsors Alon and Josef have assembled make Crypto Invest Summit one of the best investment conferences on the blockchain and cryptocurrency circuit," said Neu-Ner. "I'm looking forward to this unique opportunity to broadcast to my audience live from their main stage."

Crypto Invest Summit sponsors include Hashgraph, Securitize, Dreamteam, Abra, American Airlines, SpiceVC, Hybridblock, MG Capital, Park Capital, Verify Investor and many more.

About Crypto Invest Summit

Crypto Invest Summit is the preeminent conference and exposition for blockchain investing and features the world's foremost innovators, change makers and prominent leaders in the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystem. The Summit will be held April 30 - May 2 at the Los Angeles Convention Center and will feature an expo floor and two stages of fireside chats and keynote presentations, ICO pitches and panel discussions with a wide range of accomplished industry thought leaders. Founded by cryptocurrency experts Josef Holm and Alon Goren, the Summit brings together every facet of the crypto industry from angel investors, venture capital investors, retail investors and family offices, to startups, entrepreneurs, exchanges, broker-dealers, press, marketing and PR firms and other blockchain industry service providers. For more information visit us https://cryptoinvestsummit.io

About Ran Neu-Ner

Ran Neu-Ner is the host of "Crypto Trader" on CNBC Africa and one of the top global influencers in cryptocurrency and blockchain. An investor and entrepreneur, he was co-founder of The Creative Counsel, one of South Africa's largest advertising agencies which was acquired by Publicis in 2015. He holds a B.Com and a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) qualification. He is a member of the global Young Presidents Organisation (YPO) as well as the Young Entrepreneurs Organisation (YEO).









SOURCE: Crypto Invest SummitLONDON, April 12,2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AKQA is positioned the highest for ability to execute in the Leaders quadrant in Gartner's 2018 independent evaluation that compares business transformation capabilities across consulting firms, agencies and systems integrators.[1] The 2018 report provides insights that guide agency selection to help organisations seeking a partner for strategy and execution.

Gartner, the world's leading research authority, includes client testimonials in its assessment criteria. It defines Leaders as possessing "deep, broad capabilities across all competencies, most notably related to strategic services (which include business strategy and digital business transformation skills). Leaders implement comprehensive, effective solutions that leverage sizable investments in creative talent and marketing technology. They invest their own R&D dollars to set market direction. As a result, Leaders are the providers to watch in the ongoing evolution and transformation of marketing in a digital world."

AKQA employs 2,000 professionals in 23 studios across the USA, Latin America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

About the Magic Quadrant

[1] Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Agencies" by Jay B. Wilson, Lizzy Foo Kune, Christopher Ross, and Ewan McIntyre [March 2018]

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About AKQA

AKQA is an innovation agency. The future inspires us. We work to inspire.Sixty-two students will represent Tennessee at the National History Day competition this summer. The students are advancing after placing first or second in various categories at Tennessee History Day.

These students represent Hamilton County:

Senior Individual Performance

2nd

Annie Thrash

The Elizabethton Textile Mill Factory Strikes

Girls Preparatory School, Chattanooga

Teacher: Ralph Covino

Senior Individual Website

1st

Pi Eager

Winters v. United States: Native Americans, Water, and the Unintended Consequences of Compromise

McCallie School, Chattanooga

Teacher: Duke Richey

Participants entered documentaries, exhibits, performances, websites and papers all based on this years theme, Conflict and Compromise in History. Out of 162 submitted projects, 92 students received medals for their efforts, 15 students were awarded special prizes and two educators were recognized as educators of the year.

We have a terrific group of students who will be representing Tennessee on the national stage," Secretary of State Tre Hargett said. "I know they will have a great experience there. With students like these, Tennessee's future is bright.

National History Day will be June 10-14 on the University of Maryland campus in College Park, Md., with top finishers earning prestigious awards and scholarships.

I am proud of all our students, said Tennessee History Day coordinator Jennifer C. Core. I'm impressed by how they turn themselves into experts on their selected topics and how they incorporate constructive feedback into each revision of their projects. They are learning how to examine sources critically and how to present their findings to a sophisticated audience.

A full list of 2018 Tennessee History Day medal winners is available here.

The Tennessee Historical Society has sponsored Tennessee History Day since 2009 with grant support from the Secretary of States office, Humanities Tennessee, the Memorial Foundation and the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. For more information, please visit tennesseehistory.org/tennessee-history-day.NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

NetworkNewsWire Editorial Coverage

The freelance employment market now comprises 34 percent of the United States workforce, according to a recent report, with freelance workers contributing approximately $1.4 trillion to the nation's economy (http://nnw.fm/ZLkg1). Intrinsically connected with today's freelance market, digital services has a compound annual growth rate of 6 percent and may be poised to become one of the next global economic drivers. Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that has the potential to fuel the growth of the digital freelance services market by enabling secure, transparent and rapid transactions. Companies bringing "Blockchain" to new industries include Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTC: GBTC), MGT Capital Investments, Inc. (OTC: MGTI), HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. (OTC: HVBTF) (TSX-V: HIVE), Global Blockchain Technologies Corp. (OTC: BLKCF) (CSE: BLOC) and Victory Square Technologies, Inc. (OTC: VSQTF) (CSE: VST) (VSQTF Profile)

Forbes reported that the next great area of blockchain disruption in 2018 could be the online freelancing business (http://nnw.fm/iJ6DM). Blockchain startups that spot this potentially profitable market gap are already popping up on the digital map. Capaciti, the professional services marketplace of parent company Howyl Ventures - which was recently acquired in part by Victory Square Technologies (OTC: VSQTF) (CSE: VST) - is poised to potentially be a big disruptor in the digital freelance space (http://nnw.fm/92N0u).

Targeting launch in Q3 of this year, Capaciti will be the world's first blockchain-based, enterprise-grade marketplace for digital design and technology development services. With platform transactions projected to reach $36.9 million in 2019 and to surge to over $495 million by 2022, Capaciti looks like it is setting the stage for a billion-dollar show.

Capaciti's application of blockchain technology upgrades an online marketplace from a manual, analog process to a decentralized, automated marketplace. This innovation could create the foundation for the next evolution of connecting talent and clients in the digital marketplace.

The market for Victory Square Technologies' Capaciti's initial service offering is substantial. In the United States alone, the software development market is estimated at over $235 billion per year, with 70 percent of that spend flowing to outsourced partners or freelance professionals.

The world's workforce has become decentralized, and digital services business connections are now mostly made in online marketplaces. Freelancing is predicted to become the workforce majority within a decade (http://nnw.fm/zVJ6d). Upwork', arguably the world's largest and most successful online marketplace for freelance services, generates $1.5 billion per year in revenues and is targeting $10 billion in annual revenue by 2022. 99Designs reports a design upload occurs every second, and designers have made over $200 million on the site from over 444,000 clients.

Capaciti's incubator, Victory Square Technologies, has a management team of established leaders in blockchain technology and digital marketplaces. The company was named one of the top 14 blockchain companies to watch in 2018 by Entrepreneur.com (http://nnw.fm/9xCil). CEO Shafin Diamond Tejani was named Canadian Angel Investor of the Year in 2017. Tejani has also launched more than 40 startups and has generated over $100 million in revenues per year.

Capaciti co-founders Marc Low, Steve Davis and Gary Bode have a successful track record of delivering projects using a distributed workforce model for big brands such as HCL Technology, Barclays Bank, Sotheby's, Pacific Union International and Estee Lauder. They have collectively launched the global talent crowdsourcing platform Deloitte Pixel, held a senior marketing role at Apple and grown the team at Chimp Technology from five people to more than 70.

Victory Square Technologies' Capaciti could potentially disrupt this trillion-dollar market that is in serious need of a technology upgrade.

Major Money Markets Ripe for Disruption

Capaciti's freelance software development platform alone breaks into a $237 billion market. With plans to expand into additional service verticals, Victory Square Technologies new acquisition may have spotted a massive untapped reservoir of enterprise-grade business. Marketplaces such as Upwork, 99designs and Fiverr service some of the need but remain challenged in areas that can create a price squeeze in a hypercompetitive environment. Price squeezes can drive down profit margins to unsustainable levels for vendors.

Small-business clients often mine these sites to find workers for the lowest possible rate.

Business relationships in online project marketplaces can start off well but end badly, with losses being cut on both sides. Workers pressure clients into payment for incomplete or insufficient work or want to move off the contracting platform to communicate and transact.

These markets, then, are arguably ripe for disruption.

Decluttering and De-risking the Online Marketplace

Victory Square Technologies' Capaciti's model pairs top-tier enterprise clients with top-tier talent to effectively deliver projects, creating an exchange that removes many risk elements.

Capaciti's business model moderates business relationships in the online marketplace.Rather than just creating a job board on which to post and pitch, participants on the platform vet the profiles and reputations of both freelancers and clients. Capaciti solves the mystery of who the clients and vendors are and what they do best. The company has designed a system for executing enterprise-level projects in a way that avoids the pitfalls of overpricing and delivery disagreements.

A blockchain-based reputation management protocol empowers vendors to earn a transparent and auditable "reputation score." Blockchain smart contracts are used to manage contractual obligations between client and vendor and increase the speed and efficiency with which freelancers get paid for work performed, as payment settlements are transferred instantly upon successful completion.

With blockchain technology, a global reach and a laser focus on user retention, Victory Square Technologies' Capaciti could potentially upstage companies such as Upwork, 99designs and Fiverr.

A Tech Vertical Fueled for Hypergrowth

The Capaciti platform is already being used internally by Victory Square Technologiesto service existing client work and, once launched publicly, could be well-positioned to scale rapidly. First launching in the North American market, Capaciti will begin expansion into key markets in Europe and Asia next year. Victory Square Technologies' investment in Capaciti sets the stage for success for this technology-driven vertical, already poised for growth and slated to launch soon with transactions projected in the millions straight out of the gate.

Potential Comparables:

Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCQX: GBTC) is a traditional investment vehicle with shares titled in the investors' names, providing a familiar structure for financial and tax advisors and easy transferability to beneficiaries under estate laws. Shares of the Bitcoin Investment Trust are eligible to be held in certain IRA, Roth IRA, and other brokerage and investor accounts.

MGT Capital Investments, Inc. (OTCQB: MGTI) is based in Durham, North Carolina, and ranks as one of the largest United States-based bitcoin miners. The company also has expanded facilities in Washington State and in Sweden.

HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. (OTC: HVBTF) (TSX-V: HIVE) is building a bridge from the blockchain sector to traditional capital markets. HIVE is strategically partnered with Genesis Mining Ltd., the world's leading cryptocurrency mining hashrate provider, to build the next generation of blockchain infrastructure. HIVE also owns a state-of-the-art GPU-based cryptocurrency mining facility in Iceland.

Global Blockchain Technologies Corp. (OTC: BLKCF) (CSE: BLOC) provides investors access to a mixture of assets in the blockchain space, strategically chosen to balance stability and growth. Blue chip holdings such as Ethereum and Bitcoin are complemented by best-of-breed "smaller cap" crypto holdings, many of which are not yet available to other investors.

Big Opportunities in Online Project Network

The over-trillion-dollar digital services market is clearly on an upward trajectory, and the online project-based network represents an opportunity for blockchain incubators such as Victory Square Technologies.

For more information on Victory Square Technologies Inc. (OTC:VSQTF) (CSE:VST), please visit StreetSignals.com for the FULL report.

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PALM BEACH, Florida, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

MarketNewsUpdates.com News Commentary

As the cannabis industry continues to mature and develop on a global scale, particularly in across North America, competition is increasing and leaders are leveraging unique product development to diversify offerings and stand out from the crowd. The sector has quickly asserted itself as a multi-billion dollar space both globally and abroad with advancing legalization and with the growth has come a variety of new niches for companies to play in. A recent study by New Frontier Data illustrates the potential for $132 billion in tax revenues when it comes to legal cannabis, displaying just how formidable the industry figures to be in coming years. Companies are capitalizing on this swelling market through product diversification as previously mentioned, as well as expansion into new markets. Active companies today include: Body and Mind Inc. (CSE: BAMM) (OTC: BMMJ), mCig Ing. (OTC: MCIG), The Hydropothecary Corporation (OTC: HYYDF) (TSX-V: THCX), Canopy Growth Corporation (OTC: TWMJF) (TSX: WEED), Aphria Inc (OTC: APHQF) (TSX:APH) and LeafBuyer Technologies Inc. (OTC: LBUY).

Body and Mind Inc. (CSE: BAMM.CN) (OTC: BMMJ) BREAKING NEWS: Body and Mind Inc. is pleased to announce the Company has teamed up with GPEN, a company which is at the forefront of engineering the most advanced, user-friendly portable vaporizers in the world. The Company has entered into a one-year, renewable contract with GPEN and will be one of only two companies currently supplying the GPEN Gio cartridges in the State of Nevada. The Company intends to capitalize on the market by incorporating BAM's recognized flavors into the cartridges.

BAM President Robert Hasman commented, "We're delighted to have signed this collaboration with GPEN, a leader in the vaporizer market. This is further affirmation of the brand strength of BAM as a supplier of premium products, as well as our distribution system throughout the State."

Chris Folkerts, Founder and CEO of GPEN commented, "Our success to date has been choosing the right deployment partners in new markets. As a result, the GPEN products will be available in over 500 dispensaries in the US by calendar year end. Our partnership with BAM has been excellent. Not only do they cultivate premium flower under a quality brand but they have an extensive distribution network that will see our products become more available in Nevada. We are happy to report exceptional reviews so far and we look forward to expanding our relationship with BAM further." Read this and more news for Body and Mind Inc. at: http://www.marketnewsupdates.com/news/bamm.html





In other industry news and developments:



According to an article published by Reuters yesterday, The Hydropothecary Corporation (OTC: HYYDF) (TSX-V: THCX.V), Canopy Growth Corporation (OTC: TWMJF) (TSX: WEED.TO) and Aphria Inc (OTC: APHQF) (TSX:APH) are among six companies that have signed agreements with Quebec's liquor board to supply the province with marijuana when Canada legalizes its recreational use this year, the companies said in separate statements on Wednesday. MedReleaf Corp, Aurora Cannabis and private equity firm Privateer Holdings-backed Tilray Canada are the other companies to sign the deal to supply the province's cannabis board, which will be created as a subsidiary of the liquor board to oversee marijuana sales. The companies will supply as much as 62,000 kg (136,687 pounds) of marijuana in total to the province in the first year. Most of the agreements are for at least three years.



mCig Ing. (OTC: MCIG) recently announced its strategy for 2018. Paul Rosenberg, MCIG CEO, begins the announcement by stating, "With the recent growth in our business over the past couple of years we want to take this opportunity to thank our investors and shareholders for your investment and ongoing support in our Company. I feel it is important for us to continue to keep the market aware of our current projects and our strategic agenda for 2018 and well into the future." MCIG expects to release its third-quarter numbers within the next couple days. The Company has been in the process of three audits with its subsidiaries requiring additional time in meeting its quarterly obligations which typically go unaudited. Read the full release here:



LeafBuyer Technologies Inc. (OTCQB: LBUY) recently announced its new partnership with DOPE Media, a highly-respected media veteran in the legal cannabis industry. This new partnership will expand the reach of Leafbuyer's deals platform to millions of new cannabis users across North America. Leafbuyer, known as the leading cannabis deals network, drives business to dispensaries and product clients through its online platform and network of sites. The announced partnership is expected to capitalize on DOPE Media's website traffic and industry reputation. Kurt Rossner, CEO of Leafbuyer, says the primary purpose of this partnership is to expand Leafbuyer's reach and better serve their clients and consumers. "We are always seeking valuable partnerships with consumer-facing content producers, so forming a long-term relationship with DOPEMagazine.com was a perfect fit. We believe this deal complements our existing array of partnerships with websites like Grasscity.com and Voice Media Group.



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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Gold futures were lower Thursday morning, trimming recent gains as U.S. stocks were poised for another decent performance. Still, gold's safe haven appeal has put a floor under gold prices amid geopolitical tensions and a possible trade war between the U.S. and China. This morning the European Central Bank warned of the risks to the eurozone economy posed by high tariffs. 'There was widespread concern that the risk of trade conflicts, which could be expected to have an adverse impact on activity for all countries involved, had increased,' the ECB said. 'It was also cautioned that negative confidence effects could arise.' Gold was down $14 at $1345 an ounce. In U.S. economic news, jobless claims dropped 9,000 to 233,000, staying near a 45-year low. 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.STO Stock: This Wave Structure is Exceptionally Large2018 is turning out to be a completely different trading environment than the one that characterized all of 2017. So far, 2018 has been characterized with high volatility, wild market swings, and the market indices having not made a new high in what feels like an eternity. These characteristics are the complete opposite of the characteristics that defined the trading environment in 2017.One might come to the conclusion that this market action is the beginning of worse things to come, and this may be a legitimate possibility. But as long the major market indices stay perched above key levels of price support, I can only.

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.Infiniti Research, a global competitive intelligence solutions provider, has announced the completion of their new brand strategy study on the personal grooming industry. A leading personal grooming kit manufacturer wanted to understand the emotions of the customers better and build relationships with them to foster customer loyalty.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005708/en/

Brand Strategy Helps A Personal Grooming Kit Manufacturer Improve Customer Reach and Assess Their Perception of the Brand. (Graphic: Business Wire)

According to the brand strategy experts at Infiniti, "Brand strategy solutions help firms to reach out to the target customers and gain a better understanding of consumers' demands and their buying behavior."

The personal grooming industry is one which makes consumer products that are used for beautification and personal hygiene. The global market for personal grooming is predicted to witness considerable growth in the coming years due to the growing disposable income of individuals globally, which allows them to spend big on luxury personal care products.

Request a free proposal to see how Infiniti Research's solutions can help you.

The brand strategy solution offered by Infiniti helped the client to develop new strategies to create interest amid the customers about the products being offered. The client was able to reach out to a bigger group of audience and improve brand awareness.

This brand strategy solution provided benefits that helped the client to:

Devise effective brand strategies

Create a superior brand image

To know more, ask an analyst

This brand strategy solution provided predictive insights on:

Improving the interaction with the customers

Capturing a substantial share of the market

To read more, request a free proposal

View the complete brand strategy study here:

https://www.infinitiresearch.com/casestudy/personal-grooming-brand-strategy

About Infiniti Research

Established in 2003, Infiniti Research is a leading market intelligence company providing smart solutions to address your business challenges. Infiniti Research studies markets in more than 100 countries to help analyze competitive activity, see beyond market disruptions, and develop intelligent business strategies.

With 15+ years of experience and offices across three continents, Infiniti Research has been instrumental in providing a complete range of competitive intelligence, strategy, and research services for over 550 companies across the globe.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005708/en/

Contacts:

Infiniti Research

Anirban Choudhury

Marketing Consultant

US: +1 844 778 0600

UK: +44 203 893 3400

hello@infinitiresearch.com

https://www.infinitiresearch.com/contact-usLarger-than-Life, Eye-Popping Peanuts-Inspired Murals By Seven Acclaimed, Contemporary Artists-Mr. A, Nina Chanel Abney, AVAF, FriendsWithYou, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Rob Pruitt and Kenny Scharf- To Enliven the Streets of the Vibrant Hudson Square Neighborhood

Peanuts Worldwide:

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005383/en/

Happiness is Peanuts Public Art on the Streets of New York City! On April 16, the Peanuts Global Artist Collective, featuring wildly-imaginative, larger-than-life murals, will pop up unexpectedly in the Hudson Square neighborhood. Here's a sneak peek of those murals, created by the following acclaimed contemporary artists (from top to bottom/left to right): Rob Pruitt, Kenny Scharf, AVAF, Nina Chanel Abney, Tomokazu Matsuyama, FriendsWithYou, and Mr. A. (Graphic: Business Wire)

What

Millions of New York City Peanuts fans and public arts supporters will be treated to wildly imaginative, larger-than-life murals-created by seven acclaimed contemporary artists as they honor and riff on the iconic work of Charles Schulz-when the works pop up in unexpected places on the streets of the Hudson Square neighborhood on Manhattan's lower west side.

The murals, which will be on display for three months, kick off the US leg of Phase One of the Peanuts Global Artist Collective: A groundbreaking, worldwide, public art initiative designed to bring communities together through the universal themes ingrained in Peanuts, including hope, resilience, unrequited love, and so much more.

The artists are all famed figures on New York's contemporary art scene: Mr. A, Nina Chanel Abney, AVAF, FriendsWithYou, Tomokazu Matsuyama, Rob Pruitt, and Kenny Scharf

When

Monday, April 16, 2018

Daytime: Interviews and walking tours available upon request.

Evening: 5:00 - 6:30pm Private party featuring interviews, walking tours and photo ops with Snoopy.

Where/Starting Point

Children's Museum of the Arts

103 Charlton Street, NY 10014

Who

Leading public art evangelist and curator Yvonne Force Villareal

Lindsey Schulz , granddaughter of Schulz and an artist in her own right.

, granddaughter of Schulz and an artist in her own right. One of the renowned artists involved, all of whom share an affinity for Peanuts and a passion for public art.

Fast Facts

Other cities include Paris , Seoul , San Francisco , Berlin , Tokyo and Mexico City

, , , , and The Peanuts Global Artist Collective's New York launch is presented by Peanuts Worldwide in collaboration with the Children's Museum of the Arts and the Hudson Square Connection.

Charles M. Schulz once said: "If I were a better artist, I'd be a painter, and if I were a better writer, I'd write books but I'm not, so I draw cartoons!"

Where to Find/Follow the Peanuts Global Artist Collective

SnoopyGlobalArt

peanutsglobalartistcollective.com

IG: @SnoopyGrams

Twitter: @Snoopy

Facebook: @Snoopy

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005383/en/

Contacts:

Peanuts Worldwide

Hannah Guy, 212-293-8524

hannah.guy@peanuts.com

or

Alison Hill, 714-287-2015

alison@currentpr.comExploration company African Battery Metals announced on Thursday that the auger programme on its Kisinka property in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been extended to investigate some additional soil anomalies. The AIM-traded firm said two lines of augering had so far been completed on the 70%-owned Kisinka licence in the DRC - one across the southeastern part of the 7 km-8 km long licence and the second towards the north western part of the property. It said the augering did not ...

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.Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 12, 2018) - Generic Gold Corp. (CSE: GGC) ("Generic Gold" or the "Company") is pleased to announce results of exploration activities completed at the Livingstone Gold Project ("Livingstone" or "the Project"), approximately 85 kilometres northeast of Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.

President and CEO, Kelly Malcolm commented: "I am very pleased to report the first ever drill results from the Livingstone area. We have definitively identified a large-scale mineralized fault system that covers the headwaters of five of the six high energy placer creeks on the property, which are characterized by very coarse gold nuggets. We look forward to continued exploration work along the Big Salmon fault in the coming field seasons."

The 2017 work program was the first time that core drilling was completed to test for gold in bedrock along the Livingstone Project's 14 kilometre length. In addition, new claims were staked, soil sampling and prospecting were completed, and a comprehensive compilation and interpretation of existing company and government geophysical and geochemical data was completed.

The Livingstone Project covers an area of roughly 14 x 4 kilometres, located 85 kilometres northeast of Whitehorse, and is accessible by a winter road, fixed wing aircraft, and helicopter. Five west-draining creeks, all of which have their headwaters on the Livingstone property, are known for having produced numerous multi-ounce gold nuggets, some of which still contain primary quartz vein and accessory mineral material. Placer mining has been occurring sporadically in the Livingstone area since 1898. In 2016, the Yukon Geological Survey flew a 4,226 kilometre airborne VTEM survey, which identified several target areas that the government (Colpron et al., 2017) indicates "define potential exploration targets for the source of placer gold in the centre of the Livingstone Creek area." These target areas were further defined and refined through geological, geochemical, and geophysical work completed by Nevada Zinc's geologists over the past 6 years.

The 2017 Livingstone Project work program consisted of:

Core Drilling

Completion of 8 diamond drill holes, ranging in depth from 81 to 212 metres, on three targets for a total of 1,315 metres. Assay results are described below. Mineralization is hosted within hydrothermally altered and intensely deformed sedimentary rocks within a large-scale structure. This mineralized structure, interpreted from geophysics and confirmed through drilling, is at least 9 kilometres in length and covers the headwaters of of five of the six current and past-producing placer mining creeks in the Livingstone area. Gold mineralization exhibits a geochemical signature of Au-Ag-As-Co-Mo-Pb-S-Te-W, indicative of an intrusion-related system. This chemical signature matches that of very large gold nuggets (individual nuggets reaching up to 20 ounces) that were extracted from various creeks that drain off of the Livingstone property. Highlights of the 2017 exploration program are shown in Figure 1.

o King zone: Five holes were drilled along the Big Salmon trend on a multiparameter target defined by gold-in-soil geochemical anomalies, ground-based IP geophysics, airborne VTEM geophysics, and prospecting. These holes were targeting a graphitic fault horizon from which bedrock grab samples returned values of up to 10 g/t gold and 4.9 oz/t silver from quartz vein material.





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o Chinook zone: Two holes were drilled along the Big Salmon trend on a multiparameter target defined by gold-in-soil geochemistry, ground-based IP geophysics, and airborne VTEM geophysics. These holes were targeting silicified metasediments that had returned anomalous precious metal values.





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o Kokanee zone: One hole was drilled on a target which was defined by goldn-soil geochemistry and airborne VTEM geophysics. This hole was targeting an area of increased resistivity along a regional EM conductor.





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Figure 1. Livingstone 2017 highlights



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Soil Sampling and Prospecting

Soil sampling was undertaken in the Kokanee zone area that had been identified as anomalous during previous work campaigns, which coincided with a strong and structurally kinked EM anomaly. Results were positive and show a broad trend of elevated gold-in-soils, with a geochemical signature of Au-As-Co-Cr-Cu-Ni-Pb-Te-W-Zn which may be indicative of ultramafic-related gold mineralization. In addition, very large quartz vein boulders were identified which further indicates the abundance of hydrothermal activity on the Property.

Claim Staking

A total of 36 claims were added to the Livingstone Project claim package, expanding the total land holding to 192 mineral claims, or roughly 4,013 hectares. Two of the new claim blocks were staked at the headwaters of historical placer creeks, while one was staked along the extension of the Big Salmon trend EM anomaly.

Geophysical Modelling

A common Earth model was generated through inversion and interpretation of all existing geophysical and geochemical data in the Livingstone area. This interpretation work was done by consultant Alan King of Geoscience North, a globally renowned geophysicist who was previously Chief Geophysicist for Vale Global Exploration. The Earth model assisted with drill targeting for the summer program, and also provided numerous targets for future exploration programs.

References

Colpron, M., Carr, S., Hildes, D. and Piercey, S., 2017. Geophysical, geochemical and geochronological constraints on the geology and mineral potential of the Livingstone Creek area, south-central Yukon (NTS 105E/8). In: Yukon Exploration and Geology 2016, K.E. MacFarlane and L.H. Weston (eds.), Yukon Geological Survey, p. 47-86.

Kelly Malcolm, P.Geo, President and CEO of Generic Gold, a Qualified Person as that term is defined by Canadian regulatory guidelines under National Instrument 43-101, supervised the exploration program and has read and approved the technical information contained in this press release. Diamond drilling was completed with BQ2 and NQ2 core size. Drill core was logged, photographed, and marked for samples on site at the Livingstone exploration camp. Drill core was cut and sampled at Aurora Geoscience's Whitehorse office under the supervision of Carl Schulze, P.Geo. Analyses were completed at ALS Minerals, an ISO Certified lab, using industry standard methods and analytical packages including Au-ICP21, Au-ICP22, ME-ICP61, and AuME-TL43. The Company's quality control checks include the insertion of standard reference materials and blank samples to monitor the precision and accuracy of the assay data.

About Generic Gold

Generic Gold is a Canadian mineral exploration company focused on gold projects in the Tintina Gold Belt in the Yukon Territory of Canada. The Company's exploration portfolio consists of ten projects with a total land position of 39,820 hectares, all of which are 100% owned by Generic Gold. Several of these projects are in close proximity to significant gold deposits with multi-million ounce NI 43-101-compliant resources, including Goldcorp's Coffee project, Victoria Gold's Eagle Gold project, White Gold's Golden Saddle project, and Western Copper & Gold's Casino project. Generic Gold's board of directors and management team is led by experienced mining industry professionals, with expertise in exploration, finance, capital markets, and mine development. For information on the Company's property portfolio, visit the Company's website at genericgold.ca.

For further information contact:

Kelly Malcolm, President and CEO

Tel: 647-299-1153

kmalcolm@genericgold.ca

NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR THEIR REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDERS ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

Certain statements in this press release are "forward-looking" statements within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein are forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon the current belief, opinions and expectations of management that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and other contingencies. Many factors could cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward looking statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements or forward-looking information that are incorporated by reference herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein. We seek safe harbour.PUNE, India, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new market research report "Orthodontic Supplies Market by Product (Removable, Fixed Braces (Brackets (Self Ligating, Lingual), Archwire (Ni-Ti, Stainless Steel), Anchorage (Buccal Tube, Band), Ligature (Elastomeric, Wire)), Retainers), Patient, and Region - Global Forecast to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets', the global market is expected to reach USD 6.63 Billion by 2023 from USD 4.32 Billion in 2018, at a CAGR of 8.9%.

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Browse120 market data Tables and28 Figures spread through170 Pages and in-depth TOC on"Orthodontic Supplies Market"

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The major factors driving the growth of the Orthodontic Supplies Market include the growing number of patients with malocclusions, and jaw disorders; increasing disposable incomes and the expanding middle-class population in developing countries; increasing awareness about the availability of advanced orthodontic treatments; and ongoing research and technological advancements related to orthodontic products.

Fixed braces are expected to hold the largest share of the Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018

The Orthodontic Supplies Market is segmented on the basis of products into fixed braces, removable braces, adhesives, and accessories.The fixed braces products segment is expected to command the largest share of the global Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018. Factors such as affordability (compared to removable braces), increasing adoption of fixed braces among adolescents as well as adults, effective outcomes, and the huge demand for these braces in emerging countries such as India, China, and Brazil are propelling growth in this segment.

Children and teenagers are expected to be the largest patient group in Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018

By patient,the market is segmented into children and teenagers and adults. The children and teenager's patient segment is expected to account for the largest share of the Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018. The large market share of this segment can be attributed to the high prevalence of malocclusions and jaw disorders coupled with the increased adoption of fixed braces among adolescent children and teenagers.

Ask for PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=236529189

North America is expected to dominate theOrthodontic Supplies Market in 2018

Geographically, the market is segmented into North America (the US and Canada), Europe (Germany, the UK, France, and the Rest of Europe), Asia Pacific (Japan, China, India, and the Rest of APAC), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, and Rest of Latin America), and the Middle East and Africa. North America is expected to account for the largest share of the global Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018. The dominant share of North America can be accounted to the growing acceptance of orthodontic treatment among children as well as adults, rising per capita disposable income, growing focus on appearance enhancement and aesthetics, and the presence of major orthodontic product manufacturers in North America.

The major players operating in the Orthodontic Supplies Market includeAlign Technology, Inc. (US), 3M Company (US), Danaher Corporation (US), Henry Schien, Inc. (US), DENTSPLY SIRONA, Inc. (US), American Orthodontics (US), Rocky Mountain Orthodontics (US), G&H Orthodontics (US), DENTAURUM GmbH & Co. (Germany), TP Orthodontics, Inc. (US), ClearCorrect (a subsidiary of Straumann Holding AG, Switzerland), Ultradent Products, Inc. (US), Great Lakes Orthodontics, Ltd. (US), DB Orthodontics (UK), and Dental Morelli Ltda. (Brazil), among others.

Know more about the Orthodontic Supplies Market:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/orthodontic-supplies-market-236529189.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.

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Connect with us on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarketsA School Safety and Security Town Hall open to the public will be held Monday at East Hamilton Middle High School to continue a day focused on school safety in Hamilton County.



Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond and Professional Educators of Tennessee are partnering to stage the Town Hall, which will take place from 4-5:30 p.m. at the school complex in Ooltewah.

In addition to Sheriff Hammond, Chattanooga Police Chief David Roddy, Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Dr. Bryan Johnson, National School Security Expert Michael Yorio, and Dr. J.C. Bowman, executive director of Professional Educators of Tennessee, will serve as panelists. Businessman and radio host Weston Wamp will facilitate the Town Hall.

The Town Hall will give parents, teachers and other stakeholders in public education the chance to offer their views on school safety, said Sheriff Hammond. Also, we will be able to share information about the Monday morning discussion with elected and community leaders.

Dr. Bowman said teachers from counties surrounding Hamilton County will be informed of the timely event. He will also discuss research on school safety which the Professional Educators of Tennessee has completed with its membership.

We are grateful to join with Sheriff Hammond and other strong leaders in Hamilton County to have timely, orderly discussion about an issue front and center in Hamilton County, the state and the nation, said Dr. Bowman. This is a wonderful opportunity for teachers, including our members in Southeast Tennessee."

Mr. Yorio serves as president of SSI Guardian, LLC, and is senior vice president of security for School Specialty, Inc. As he will do in the morning meeting with area leaders, Mr. Yorio will bring a national perspective on school safety.

Mr. Wamp said the event will be recorded and made available to Professional Educators of Tennessees 8,000 members and others. Mr. Wamp, a Chattanooga businessman, will facilitate the forum. After brief opening remarks, questions will begin. Partisan, political speech will be stopped from stage, and Mr. Wamp urges attendees attending to have prepared, concise questions. Questions will end promptly at 5:30 p.m. The theater at East Hamilton has an estimated seating capacity of 300.

WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - With US President Donald Trump weighing 'all options on the table' in response to the deadly chemical-weapons attack that he blames on the Syrian government forces, top Democratic leaders have questioned his legal authority to order a military attack on Syria.



Sen. Bernie Sanders asserted that President Trump has no legal authority to deepen U.S. military involvement in Syria.



'It is Congress, not the president, who determines whether our country goes to war, and Congress must not abdicate that responsibility,' Sanders said in a statement.



According to Rep Adam Schiff, the Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, the legal basis for any military action should be 'a primary consideration, not an afterthought'. He noted that the Trump Administration has still not explained the basis for the 2017 missile strike on Syria.



The President's authority is not unlimited, said the top Democrat lawmaker representing California.



The series of war rhetorics were triggered by Trump putting the blame for Saturday's chemical-weapons attack in the rebel-held eastern city of Douma on the Syrian regime and its ally Russia, which provides military backing to Damascus.



The governments of Syria and Russia denied any responsibility, but Trump warned that his government is mulling several options for striking Syria.



Russia responded to it by warning Washington that it will 'bear responsibility' for any 'illegal military adventure' it carries out.



The head of the Russian military said that US missiles would be shot down and their launch sites targeted.



Trump replied to it by saying, 'Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'.



But in a tweet Thursday, diluting his previous statement, Trump said he never said when an attack on Syria would take place. 'Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS.'



Russia took a strong and serious stand amid a report that the chemical attack was carried out not by Syrian forces, but a rebel group fighting them in Eastern Ghouta.



Top Russian military officer, Lt. General Viktor Poznikhir, told reporters on Wednesday, 'On April 7, the notorious White Helmets, who operate as part of terrorist groups, staged and filmed a chemical weapons attack on civilians in the town of Douma'.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.deWASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Top US Defense officials told lawmakers that as threats in cyberspace constantly evolve, the United States is facing adversaries that are increasingly sophisticated, capable and emboldened in that domain. The cyberspace domain has 'evolved dramatically' in the eight years since U.S. Cyber Command was established, Navy Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of Cybercom, said at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities. The United States has concerns about activities by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, Rogers said. 'Russia and China, which we see as peer or near-peer competitors, respectively, in cyberspace, remain our greatest concern,' Rogers said. 'But rogue nations like Iran and North Korea have grown growing capabilities and are using aggressive methods to conduct malicious cyberspace activities.' Further, Rogers said several states have mounted sustained campaigns against U.S. defense contractors to identify and steal key enabling technologies, capabilities, platforms and systems. 'Our adversaries have grown more emboldened, conducting increasingly aggressive activities to extend their influence with limited fear of consequences,' he said. He called for a change in US approaches and responses 'if we are to change that dynamic.' Kenneth P. Rapuano, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and global security, testified alongside Rogers at the hearing on the fiscal year 2019 cyber budget, strategy, policy and programs. 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.=------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Public Payment transmitted by euro adhoc with the aim of a Europe-wide distribution. The issuer is responsible for the content of this announcement. =------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Consolidated Report on the Payments Made to Governments Section 267c of the Austrian Commercial Code Section 267c of the Austrian Commercial Code (UGB) requires that large undertakings and public interest entities that are active in the extractive industry or logging of primary forests prepare the following consolidated report on payments to governments. This section implements Chapter 10 of EU Accounting Directive (2013/34/EU). The "Basis of preparation" paragraph provides information to the reader about the contents of the report. This also includes information on the type of payment for which disclosure is required and how OMV has implemented the regulations in the preparation of the report. Basis of preparation Reporting entities Under the requirements of the regulation, OMV Aktiengesellschaft is required to prepare a consolidated report covering payments made to governments for each financial year in relation to extractive activities by itself and any subsidiary undertakings included in the consolidated Group financial statements. Activities within the scope of the report Payments made by the OMV Group (hereafter OMV)to governments that arose from exploration, prospection, discovery, development and extraction of minerals, oils and natural gas deposits or other materials within extractive activities are presented in this report. Government A "government" is defined as any national, regional or local authority of a country and includes a department agency or entity undertaking that is controlled by the government authority and includes national oil companies. In cases where a state-owned entity engages in activities outside of its designated home jurisdiction,then it is not deemed to be a reportable governmental body for these purposes and thus payments made to such an entity in these circumstances are not reportable. Project definition The regulation also requires payments to be reported on a "project" basis as well as on a government and governmental body basis. A project is defined as the operational activities that are governed by a single contract, license, lease, concession or similar legal agreement and form the basis for payment liabilities to the government. Where these agreements as per the aforementioned definition are substantially interconnected, these agreements are treated for the purpose of these regulations as a single project. "Substantially interconnected" is defined as a set of operationally and geographically integrated contracts, licenses, leases or concessions or related agreements with substantially similar terms that are signed with a government, giving rise to paymentl iabilities. Such agreements can be governed by a single contract, joint venture agreement, production sharing agreement or other overarching legal agreement. There may be instances - for example, corporate income taxes, where it is not possible to attribute the payment to a single project and therefore these payments are shown at the country level. Cash and payments in kind In accordance with the regulation, payments have to be reported on a cash basis. This means that they are reported in the period in which they are paid and not in the period in which they are accounted for on an accruals basis. Refunds are also reported in the period in which they are received and will either be offset against payments made in the period or be shown as negative amounts in the report. Payments in kind made to a government are converted to an equivalent cash value based on the most appropriate and relevant valuation method for each payment type. This can be at cost or market value and an explanation is provided in the report to help explain the valuation method.Where applicable, the related volumes are also included in the report. Payment reporting methodology The regulations require that payments are to be reported where they are made to governments by OMV. It is required that the report reflect the substance of each transaction and activity. Based on these requirements, OMV has considered its reporting obligation as: - Where OMV makes a payment directly to the government, these payments will be reported in full, irrespective of whether this is made i n the sole capacity of OMV or in OMV's capacity as the operator of a joint operation. -In cases where OMV is a member of a joint operation for which the operator is a state-owned entity (i.e. a government), payments made to that state-owned entity will be disclosed where it is possible to identify the reportable payment from other cost recovery items. - For host government production entitlements,the terms of the agreement have to be considered;for the purpose of reporting in this report, OMV will disclose host government entitlements in their entirety where it is the operator. Materiality Payments made as a single payment or a series of related payments that are below EUR 100,000 within a financial year are excluded from this report. Reporting currency Payments made in currencies other than euros are translated for the purposes of this report at the average rate of the reporting period. Payment types disclosed Production entitlements Under production sharing agreements (PSAs), the host government is entitled to a share of the oil and gas produced and these entitlements are often paid in kind. The report will show both the value and volume of the government's production entitlement for the relevant period in barrels of oil equivalent(boe). The government share of any production entitlement will also include any entitlements arising from an interest held by a state-owned entity as an investor in projects within its sovereign jurisdiction.Production entitlements arising from activitie sor interests outside of a state-owned entity's sovereign jurisdiction are excluded. Taxes Taxes levied on income, production or profits of companies are reported. Refunds will be netted against payments and shown accordingly. Consumption taxes, personal income taxes, sales taxes,property taxes and environmental taxes are not reported under the regulations. Although there is a tax group in place, the reported corporate income taxes for Austria relate entirely to the extractive activities in Austria of OMV's subsidiaries, with no amounts being reported relating to OMV's non-extractive activities in Austria. Royalties Royalties relating to the extraction of oil, gas and minerals paid to a government are to be disclosed.Where royalties are paid in kind, the value and volume are reported. Dividends In accordance with the regulations, dividends are reported when paid to a government in lieu of production entitlements or royalties. Dividends that are paid to a government as an ordinary shareholder are not reported, as long as the dividends are paid on the same terms as that of other shareholders. For the year that ended December 31, 2017, OMV had no such reportable dividend payments to agovernment. Bonuses Bonuses include signature, discovery and production bonuses in each case to the extent paid in relation to the relevant activities. Fees These include license fees, rental fees, entry fees and all other payments that are paid in consideration for access to the area where extractive activities are performed. The report excludes fees paid to a government that are not specifically related to extractive activities or access to extractive resources. In addition payments paid in return for services provided by a government are also excluded. Infrastructure improvements The report includes payments made by OMV for infrastructural improvements, such as the building of a road or bridge that serves the community,irrespective of whether OMV pays the amounts to non-government entities. These are reported in the period during which the infrastructure is made available for use by the local community. Payments overview The overview table below shows the relevant payments to governments that were made by OMV inthe year that ended December 31, 2017. Of the seven payment types that are required by the Austrian regulations to be reported upon, OMV did not pay any dividends, production entitlements,bonuses or infrastructure improvements that met the defined accounting directive definition and therefore these categories are not shown. Payments overview In EUR 1,000 Taxes Royalties Fees Total Country Austria 1,264 69,993 71,257 Kazakhstan 13,759 949 14,708 Madagascar 292 292 Norway 9,718 9,718 New Zealand 10,184 31,435 112 41,731 Pakistan 5,177 3,899 863 9,939 Romania 146,122 123,836 13,428 283,386 Tunisia 13,376 5,840 19,216 Total 199,600 235,003 15,644 450,247 No payments have been reported for Libya for the year 2017 as OMV was not the operator. On January 13, 2017, OMV divested its interest in OMV (U.K.) Limited and there were no material payments in 2017 prior to this date. On November 30, 2017, OMV completed the acquisition of an interest in the Yuzhno Russkoye natural gas field located in Western Siberia from Uniper SE. On November 30, 2017, OMV completed the acquisition of an interest in the Yuzhno Russkoye natural gas field located in Western Siberia from Uniper SE.

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April 12, 2018 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)DJ EANS-Public Payment: OMV Aktiengesellschaft / Report on payment to government agencies according to art. 128 Stock Exchange Act

=------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Public Payment transmitted by euro adhoc with the aim of a Europe-wide distribution. The issuer is responsible for the content of this announcement. =------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Consolidated Report on the Payments Made to Governments Section 267c of the Austrian Commercial Code Section 267c of the Austrian Commercial Code (UGB) requires that large undertakings and public interest entities that are active in the extractive industry or logging of primary forests prepare the following consolidated report on payments to governments. This section implements Chapter 10 of EU Accounting Directive (2013/34/EU). The "Basis of preparation" paragraph provides information to the reader about the contents of the report. This also includes information on the type of payment for which disclosure is required and how OMV has implemented the regulations in the preparation of the report. Basis of preparation Reporting entities Under the requirements of the regulation, OMV Aktiengesellschaft is required to prepare a consolidated report covering payments made to governments for each financial year in relation to extractive activities by itself and any subsidiary undertakings included in the consolidated Group financial statements. Activities within the scope of the report Payments made by the OMV Group (hereafter OMV)to governments that arose from exploration, prospection, discovery, development and extraction of minerals, oils and natural gas deposits or other materials within extractive activities are presented in this report. Government A "government" is defined as any national, regional or local authority of a country and includes a department agency or entity undertaking that is controlled by the government authority and includes national oil companies. In cases where a state-owned entity engages in activities outside of its designated home jurisdiction,then it is not deemed to be a reportable governmental body for these purposes and thus payments made to such an entity in these circumstances are not reportable. Project definition The regulation also requires payments to be reported on a "project" basis as well as on a government and governmental body basis. A project is defined as the operational activities that are governed by a single contract, license, lease, concession or similar legal agreement and form the basis for payment liabilities to the government. Where these agreements as per the aforementioned definition are substantially interconnected, these agreements are treated for the purpose of these regulations as a single project. "Substantially interconnected" is defined as a set of operationally and geographically integrated contracts, licenses, leases or concessions or related agreements with substantially similar terms that are signed with a government, giving rise to paymentl iabilities. Such agreements can be governed by a single contract, joint venture agreement, production sharing agreement or other overarching legal agreement. There may be instances - for example, corporate income taxes, where it is not possible to attribute the payment to a single project and therefore these payments are shown at the country level. Cash and payments in kind In accordance with the regulation, payments have to be reported on a cash basis. This means that they are reported in the period in which they are paid and not in the period in which they are accounted for on an accruals basis. Refunds are also reported in the period in which they are received and will either be offset against payments made in the period or be shown as negative amounts in the report. Payments in kind made to a government are converted to an equivalent cash value based on the most appropriate and relevant valuation method for each payment type. This can be at cost or market value and an explanation is provided in the report to help explain the valuation method.Where applicable, the related volumes are also included in the report. Payment reporting methodology The regulations require that payments are to be reported where they are made to governments by OMV. It is required that the report reflect the substance of each transaction and activity. Based on these requirements, OMV has considered its reporting obligation as: - Where OMV makes a payment directly to the government, these payments will be reported in full, irrespective of whether this is made i n the sole capacity of OMV or in OMV's capacity as the operator of a joint operation. -In cases where OMV is a member of a joint operation for which the operator is a state-owned entity (i.e. a government), payments made to that state-owned entity will be disclosed where it is possible to identify the reportable payment from other cost recovery items. - For host government production entitlements,the terms of the agreement have to be considered;for the purpose of reporting in this report, OMV will disclose host government entitlements in their entirety where it is the operator. Materiality Payments made as a single payment or a series of related payments that are below EUR 100,000 within a financial year are excluded from this report. Reporting currency Payments made in currencies other than euros are translated for the purposes of this report at the average rate of the reporting period. Payment types disclosed Production entitlements Under production sharing agreements (PSAs), the host government is entitled to a share of the oil and gas produced and these entitlements are often paid in kind. The report will show both the value and volume of the government's production entitlement for the relevant period in barrels of oil equivalent(boe). The government share of any production entitlement will also include any entitlements arising from an interest held by a state-owned entity as an investor in projects within its sovereign jurisdiction.Production entitlements arising from activitie sor interests outside of a state-owned entity's sovereign jurisdiction are excluded. Taxes Taxes levied on income, production or profits of companies are reported. Refunds will be netted against payments and shown accordingly. Consumption taxes, personal income taxes, sales taxes,property taxes and environmental taxes are not reported under the regulations. Although there is a tax group in place, the reported corporate income taxes for Austria relate entirely to the extractive activities in Austria of OMV's subsidiaries, with no amounts being reported relating to OMV's non-extractive activities in Austria. Royalties Royalties relating to the extraction of oil, gas and minerals paid to a government are to be disclosed.Where royalties are paid in kind, the value and volume are reported. Dividends In accordance with the regulations, dividends are reported when paid to a government in lieu of production entitlements or royalties. Dividends that are paid to a government as an ordinary shareholder are not reported, as long as the dividends are paid on the same terms as that of other shareholders. For the year that ended December 31, 2017, OMV had no such reportable dividend payments to agovernment. Bonuses Bonuses include signature, discovery and production bonuses in each case to the extent paid in relation to the relevant activities. Fees These include license fees, rental fees, entry fees and all other payments that are paid in consideration for access to the area where extractive activities are performed. The report excludes fees paid to a government that are not specifically related to extractive activities or access to extractive resources. In addition payments paid in return for services provided by a government are also excluded. Infrastructure improvements The report includes payments made by OMV for infrastructural improvements, such as the building of a road or bridge that serves the community,irrespective of whether OMV pays the amounts to non-government entities. These are reported in the period during which the infrastructure is made available for use by the local community. Payments overview The overview table below shows the relevant payments to governments that were made by OMV inthe year that ended December 31, 2017. Of the seven payment types that are required by the Austrian regulations to be reported upon, OMV did not pay any dividends, production entitlements,bonuses or infrastructure improvements that met the defined accounting directive definition and therefore these categories are not shown. Payments overview In EUR 1,000 Taxes Royalties Fees Total Country Austria 1,264 69,993 71,257 Kazakhstan 13,759 949 14,708 Madagascar 292 292 Norway 9,718 9,718 New Zealand 10,184 31,435 112 41,731 Pakistan 5,177 3,899 863 9,939 Romania 146,122 123,836 13,428 283,386 Tunisia 13,376 5,840 19,216 Total 199,600 235,003 15,644 450,247 No payments have been reported for Libya for the year 2017 as OMV was not the operator. On January 13, 2017, OMV divested its interest in OMV (U.K.) Limited and there were no material payments in 2017 prior to this date. On November 30, 2017, OMV completed the acquisition of an interest in the Yuzhno Russkoye natural gas field located in Western Siberia from Uniper SE. On November 30, 2017, OMV completed the acquisition of an interest in the Yuzhno Russkoye natural gas field located in Western Siberia from Uniper SE.

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April 12, 2018 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)

The interest in the natural gas field was obtained by acquiring a stake of 24.99% in OJSC Severneftegazprom(SNGP), which holds the production license to the Yuzhno Russkoye field. As SNGP is an associated company and therefore accounted for using the equity method in OMV Group Consolidated Financial Statements it does not meet the definition of a reporting entity in the context of the Austrian Commercial Code. Payments by country Payments by country In EUR 1,000 Taxes Royalties Fees Total Austria Governments Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs 69,993 69,993 Federal Ministry of Finance 1,264 1,264 Total 1,264 69,993 71,257 Projects Lower Austria 1,264 69,993 71,257 Total 1,264 69,993 71,257 Kazakhstan Governments State Revenue Committee 13,759 13,759 Akimat of Mangistau Region 427 1 427 Training centers universities 522 2 522 Total 13,759 949 14,708 Projects Tasbulat 6,374 544 6,918 Komsomolskoe 7,385 405 7,790 Total 13,759 949 14,708 1 Financing of various projects under the joint control of the Akimat of Mangistau Region and OMV within the concession agreement and spentas per the agreed projects 2 Financing of various expenses with regard to university training centers as agreed within the concession agreement Payments by country In EUR 1,000 Taxes Royalties Fees Total Madagascar Governments Office des Mines Nationales et des 292 292 Industries Strategiques Total 292 292 Projects Explorations 292 292 Total 292 292 Norway Governments Skatteetaten 9,718 9,718 Total 9,718 9,718 Projects Gulfaks 54 54 Gudrun 54 54 Payments not attributable to 9,610 9,610 projects Total 9,718 9,718 Payments by country In EUR 1,000 Taxes Royalties Fees Total New Zealand Governments Crown Minerals 31,435 31,435 Inland Revenue 9,998 9,998 Ministry of Business 186 6 192 and Innovation Environmental 106 106 Protection Authority Total 10,184 31,435 112 41,731 Projects Maari 14 5,139 106 5,259 Maui 237 237 Pohokura 26,059 26,059 New Zealand 172 172 exploration projects Payments not attributable to 9,998 6 10,004 projects Total 10,184 31,435 112 41,731 Pakistan Governments Federal Board of Revenue Government 5,177 5,177 of Pakistan Director General of Petroleum 3,899 480 4,379 Concessions Local Government, 132 132 District Khairpur Local Government, 251 251 District Sukker Total 5,177 3,899 863 9,939 Projects Mehar 207 182 389 Miano 915 415 1,330 Sawan 2,777 234 3,011 Pakistan exploration 32 32 projects Payments not attributable to 5,177 5,177 projects Total 5,177 3,899 863 9,939 Romania Governments State budget 146,122 123,836 269,958 Local councils 3,154 3,154 National Agency for Mineral Resources 676 676 (ANRM) National Company of 9,500 9,500 Forests CONPET SA 98 98 Total 146,122 123,836 13,428 283,386 Projects Onshore production 94,200 13,391 107,591 zones Onshore Joint 700 13 713 Ventures Offshore Black Sea 28,936 24 28,960 Payments not attributable to 146,122 146,122 projects Total 146,122 123,836 13,428 283,386 Payments by country In EUR 1,000 Taxes Royalties Fees Total Tunisia Governments Receveur des Finances 12,117 12,117 Receveur des Douanes 1,259 1,259 Entreprise Tunisienne d'Activites 4,988 3 4,988 Petrolieres Tresorerie Generale 852 852 de Tunisie Total 13,376 5,840 19,216 Projects Ashtart 244 244 TPS 5,931 5,931 South Tunisia 7,201 5,840 3 13,041 Total 13,376 5,840 19,216 3 Includes payments in kind for 102,268 bbl of crude oil valued using the average monthly price per boe In Tunisia where OMV is not the operator, its proportional contribution to the host government's royalties for 2017 would have been EUR 8.9 mn for 195,257 bbl of crude oil valued using the average monthly price per boe. Vienna, March 14, 2018 The Executive Board Rainer Seele m.p. Johann Pleininger m.p. Reinhard Florey m.p. Manfred Leitner m.p. Further inquiry note: OMV Aktiengesellschaft Andreas Rinofner, Public Relations Tel.: +43 (1) 40 440-21472; e-mail: public.relations@omv.com Florian Greger, Investor Relations Tel.: +43 (1) 40 440-22421; e-mail: investor.relations@omv.com end of announcement euro adhoc =-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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April 12, 2018 11:00 ET (15:00 GMT)Dominique Costantini, MD, Appointed as Chairman of Company's Board of Directors, Alexis Peyroles Appointed as Chief Executive Officer

Natural, Seamless Evolution Follows Three Structuring License Agreements to Drive Next Step of Company's Growth

Regulatory News:

OSE Immunotherapeutics (Paris:OSE) (ISIN: FR0012127173; Mnemo: OSE) today announces a new organization within its Board of Directors with the appointment of Dominique Costantini as Chairman of the Board and the appointment of Alexis Peyroles as Chief Executive Officer. These changes, effective immediately, are based on the recommendation of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee with the aim of positioning the Company for growth given the recent developments.

Dominique Costantini, Company's co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer, is appointed as Chairman of the Board of Directors, and also will serve as Director of Early Development.

Alexis Peyroles, former Chief Operating Officer, Operations, is appointed as Chief Executive Officer.

Dominique Costantini succeeds Gerard Tardy who will not run for a mandate of Board member at the next shareholders' general meeting.

Dominique Costantini, Chairman of the Company, said: "I thank the Board of Directors for their support and for their confidence. I thank also Gerard Tardy for his support during this pivotal period. The major agreement signed with Boehringer Ingelheim is the culmination of more than a year of teamwork involving the entire company. Alexis Peyroles has succeeded in forging this collaboration and significant agreement by integrating all the company's businesses in this partnership. His international managerial experience of more than 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry (Sanofi-Guerbet) and in biotechnology, in Europe, Japan and South America, developed his talents in strategy, finance, pharmaceutical marketing and in agreements and licenses. Since the founding of OSE, his strategic and operational skills have been critical in the company's development, its IPO, its external growth and in its meaningful partnerships driving the future of OSE, all key steps to value creation."

Alexis Peyroles, CEO, said "The Board of Directors and Dominique Costantini have trusted me to steer a new step in the Company's growth and I thank them warmly. Together, with the entire OSE team, we will actively pursue the development of new immunotherapies to meet the patients' unmet medical needs. I salute the outstanding expertise of our researchers and clinicians able to anticipate and identify targets of major interest and turn them into first-in-class immunotherapies."

The management team around Alexis Peyroles has recently been strengthened with the additions of Berangere Vasseur, MD, Chief Medical Officer Immuno-Oncology (broad experience in oncology development while at Roche and at several biotechnology companies) and Emilienne Soma, PharmD, Ph.D., Director of Pharmaceutical Program Development (experience in R&D management and in alliances in several biotechnology companies) who have recently joined the company. The team also includes Bernard Vanhove Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer and Director of R&D and International Scientific Collaborations; Nicolas Poirier, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer; Frederique Corallo, MD, Chief Medical Officer Immunotherapies and Autoimmune Diseases; Jean-Pascal Conduzorgues, PhamD, Qualified Person; and Anne-Laure Autret-Cornet, Chief Financial Officer.

Maryvonne Hiance, Director of Strategy and Dominique Costantini, in her additional role as Director of Early Development, bring their expertise to this team.

Combining strong implementation in leading academic research, an impressive know-how in conceiving and developing innovative immunotherapies, and rich experience in medical and pharmaceutical development, the OSE Immunotherapeutics team is now ideally positioned to enlarge its presence in this promising sector of growth.

OSE Immunotherapeutics has three key strategic partnerships potentially generating more than 1.5 billion euros in revenues, assuming all pre-specified milestones are met. They will support the development of the Company's product portfolio, including both a product close to market with orphan status designation (Tedopi) and breakthrough clinical innovations conducted in partnership (in 2018 with Boehringer Ingelheim for OSE-172, end of 2016 with Servier for OSE-127 and in 2016 with Janssen Biotech for FR104).

Alexis Peyroles' appointment as Chief Executive Officer supports the Company's strategic growth steps, serving in the best interest of patients, employees, shareholders and other stakeholders.

ABOUT OSE Immunotherapeutics

OSE Immunotherapeutics is a biotechnology company focused on the development of innovative immunotherapies for immune activation and regulation in the fields of immuno-oncology and autoimmune diseases. Neoepitopes innovation (Tedopi) is today in Phase 3 in advanced lung cancers (NSCLC) after checkpoint inhibitors failure (anti PD-1 and anti PD-L1). A global license and collaboration agreement was signed in April 2018 with Boehringer Ingelheim to develop checkpoint inhibitor OSE-172 (anti-SIRPa monoclonal antibody), for the treatment of advanced solid tumors. An option to license was exercised in July 2016 by Janssen Biotech to continue clinical development of FR104 (an anti CD28 mAb) in auto-immune diseases after positive phase 1 results. A 2-step license option was signed in 2016 with Servier Laboratories to develop OSE-127 (monoclonal antibody targeting the CD127 receptor, the alpha chain of the interleukin-7 receptor) to develop the product up to the completion of a phase 2 clinical trial planned in autoimmune bowel disease and Sjogren disease. The company has several scientific and technological platforms: neoepitopes, agonist or antagonist monoclonal antibodies, ideally positioned to fight cancer and autoimmune diseases. Its first-in-class clinical portfolio offers a diversified risk profile.

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Forward-looking statements

This press release contains express or implied information and statements that might be deemed forward-looking information and statements in respect of OSE Immunotherapeutics. They do not constitute historical facts. These information and statements include financial projections that are based upon certain assumptions and assessments made by OSE Immunotherapeutics' management in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current economic and industry conditions, expected future developments and other factors they believe to be appropriate.

These forward-looking statements include statements typically using conditional and containing verbs such as "expect", "anticipate", "believe", "target", "plan", or "estimate", their declensions and conjugations and words of similar import.

Although the OSE Immunotherapeutics management believes that the forward-looking statements and information are reasonable, the OSE Immunotherapeutics' shareholders and other investors are cautioned that the completion of such expectations is by nature subject to various risks, known or not, and uncertainties which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of OSE Immunotherapeutics. These risks could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in or implied or projected by the forward-looking statements. These risks include those discussed or identified in the public filings made by OSE Immunotherapeutics with the AMF. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance.

This press release includes only summary information and should be read with the OSE Immunotherapeutics Reference Document filed with the AMF on 28 April 2017 under the number R.17-038, including the annual financial report for the fiscal year 2016, available on the OSE Immunotherapeutics' website.

Other than as required by applicable law, OSE Immunotherapeutics issues this press release at the date hereof and does not undertake any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking information or statements.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005732/en/

Contacts:

OSE Immunotherapeutics

Sylvie Detry

Sylvie.detry@ose-immuno.com

+33 143 297 857

or

French Media: FP2COM

Florence Portejoie

fportejoie@fp2com.fr

+33 607 768 283

or

U.S. Media: LifeSci Public Relations

Matt Middleman, M.D.

matt@lifescipublicrelations.com

+1 646 627 8384

or

U.S. and European Investors

Chris Maggos

chris@lifesciadvisors.com

+41 79 367 6254Growth driven 'digital transformation solutions' in Israel

Regulatory News:

Prodware (Paris:ALPRO):

Cities around the world face many challenges, such as global competition for talent and business investment, rapidly growing and aging populations, economic inequality and the digital divide.

Keeping peace with technology innovations that have changed resident expectations for personalized, mobile government services led Jerusalem municipality to adopt a Smart City initiative to connect disparate operations and siloed processes towards to a unified city ecosystem.

Prodware was chosen by the municipality of Jerusalem to empower the city to be more sustainable, prosperous, and inclusive. Bringing the world-class technology portfolio by Microsoft, including safe and secure cloud computing, and the vast expertise of implementing a dedicated set of 'Smart-City' solution in the Israeli market empowering municipalities to infuse intelligence throughout their civic systems and services and connect various areas of their governance, so they can improve the urban experiences of the citizens they serve.

As part of the implementation project, Prodware will supply the municipality of Jerusalem with new web site, Omni channel solutions, a modified CRM solution and call center solutions, all delivered within Microsoft's cloud services.

Jerusalem is the third municipality in Israel choosing to implement D365 with Prodware, after Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan.

"We are very happy that Jerusalem municipality decided to implement digital transformation with Prodware. In the last 12 months, we experience a fantastic momentum in the market, for Microsoft Prodware digital solutions." said Yossi Haimov, Country Manager of Prodware Israel.

Next publication: Revenue for Q1 2018: May 15th, 2018, after close of trading.

About Prodware

Prodware (www.prodware.fr) is an international group specializing in the integration, publishing and hosting of IT solutions for sectors and businesses.

The Group brings customers its technical expertise and knowledge of new uses and business lines to support them in their digital transformation processes.

Drawing on the strength of its partnerships with Microsoft and Sage in particular, Prodware is one of the only players capable of supporting businesses across their entire information system, both in France and abroad.

The Prodware group has more around 1300 employees across 15 countries and 4 continents. It generated revenues of 167.7 million in 2017.

Listed on Euronext Growth, Prodware SA is eligible for FCPIs (mutual funds for investment in innovation) and the PEA-PME (SME equity savings plan).

EURONEXT GROWTH (formerly ALTERNEXT)

ISIN FR0010313486 ALPRO FTSE 972 IT services

Prodware is eligible for inclusion in FCPIs Prodware is a responsible company and is a signatory to the UN Global Compact

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005870/en/

Contacts:

PRODWARE

Stephane Conrard

Chief Financial Officer

T: +33 (0)9 79 99 90 00

investisseurs@prodware.fr

or

PRESS

Gilles Broquelet

CAP VALUE

T: +33 (0)1 80 81 50 01

gbroquelet@capvalue.frDisclosure made according to the requirements of Article 14 of the law of 2 May 2007

Regulatory News:

Ontex Group NV ("Ontex") discloses the notifications of significant shareholdings that it has received according to the Belgian Law of 2 May 2007 on the disclosure of significant shareholdings in listed companies.

On 9 April 2018, Sycomore Asset Management SA notified Ontex that it holds, as a result of the acquisition of voting securities or voting rights, 2,471,793 shares in Ontex and so has crossed the threshold of 3.00% of the total number of voting rights in Ontex to 3.00%.

According to its obligation Ontex publishes the content of the notifications that it has received.

Date of Notification: 9 April 2018

Date Threshold Crossed: 5 April 2018

Threshold Crossed: 3.00%

Notification by:

Sycomore Asset Management SA 14 avenue Hoche 75008 Paris France

Denominator on the date of notification: 82,347,218 shares

Voting rights and assimilated financial instruments:

(A) Voting rights Previous Notification After the transaction # voting rights # voting rights % of voting rights Holders of voting rights Linked to securities Not linked to securities Linked to securities Not linked to securities Sycomore Asset Management SA 2,471,793 0 3.00% 0.00% Total 2,471,793 0 3.00% 0.00%

(B) Equivalent financial instruments After the transaction Holders of equivalent

financial instruments Type of financial instrument Expiration date Exercise period or date # of voting rights that may be acquired if the instrument is exercised % of voting rights Settlement TOTAL 0 0.00%

# of voting rights % of voting rights TOTAL (A B) 2,471,793 3.00%

Chain of controlled entities through which the shareholding is effectively owned:

The holdings mentioned in this notification are held by the OPCVM managed by Sycomore Asset Management SA, which is not a controlled entity.

Additional information

Notifications of significant shareholdings to be made according to the Law of 2 May 2007 should be sent to: investorrelations@ontexglobal.com

This notification will be posted on: http://www.ontexglobal.com/press-room

About Ontex

Ontex is a leading international provider of personal hygiene solutions, with expertise in baby care, feminine care and adult care. Ontex's innovative products are distributed in more than 110 countries through Ontex brands such as BBTips, BioBaby, Pompom, Bigfral, Canbebe, Canped, ID and Serenity, as well as leading retailer brands.

Employing 11,000 passionate people all over the world, Ontex has a presence in 22 countries, with its headquarters in Aalst, Belgium. Ontex is part of the Bel20 and STOXX Europe 600.

To keep up with the latest news, visit www.ontexglobal.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412006028/en/

Contacts:

Ontex Group NV

INVESTOR ENQUIRIES

Philip Ludwig

+32 53 333 730

investorrelations@ontexglobal.com

or

PRESS ENQUIRIES

Gaelle Vilatte

+32 53 333 708

gaelle.vilatte@ontexglobal.comBH Global Limited (the "Company")

(a closed-ended investment scheme established as a company with limited liability under the laws of Guernsey with registered number 48555)

LEI: 549300BIIO4DTKEMXV14

Director Dealing

12 April 2018

Pursuant to Disclosure Rule 3.1, the Company is obliged to notify the market of Director's holdings or interests of the Directors or their connected persons in shares of the Company.

The Company was notifiedon12 April 2018 that the followingholding of Ordinary Shares was acquired and is beneficially held byJulia Chapman, a Director of the Company:

Purchased:

1,081 Ordinary Shares of no par value in the Capital of the Company designated as Sterling Shares at a price of atGBP 13.80 per share.

Following this purchase, Julia Chapman now holds a total of 1,081 GBP class Ordinary Shares in the Capital of the Company.

Enquiries:

The Company Secretary

Northern Trust International Fund Administration Services (Guernsey) Limited

Tel: 01481 745736Cavotec SA ("the Company") today held its Ordinary General Meeting ("OGM") in Lugano, Switzerland, chaired by Stefan Widegren. 1. Annual report, financial statements and consolidated financial statements for the year 2017, report of the Statutory Auditors The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal that the annual report, the financial statements and the consolidated financial statement for the year 2017 be approved. 1. Appropriation of available earnings The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal for the following appropriation: CHF Carried forward from previous year (19,612,363) Net gain/ (loss) for the financial year 2017 (22,135,641) Total earnings available (41,748,004) Appropriation to general statutory reserves 0 Appropriation to other reserves 0 Proposed balance to be carried forward (41,748,004) 1. Grant of Discharge from Liability to the Board of Directors and Persons entrusted with the Management from Activities during Business Year 2017 The OGM granted discharge to all members of the Board of Directors as well as the other persons entrusted with the management. 1. Capital reduction through partial nominal value repayment The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal: a) to reduce the current share capital of 102'096'800.00 by CHF 1,570,720.00 to CHF 100,526,080.00 by way of reducing the nominal value of the registered shares from CHF 1.30 by CHF 0.02 to CHF 1.28 and to use the nominal value reduction amount for repayment to the shareholders; b) to confirm as a result of the report of the auditors, that the claims of the creditors are fully covered notwithstanding the capital reduction; c) to amend article 4, article 4ter, article 4quater para. 1, article 4quinquies, article 4sexies, article 4septies and article 4octies of the Articles of Association according to the following wording as per the date of the entry of the capital reduction in the commercial register (the proposed amendments are in italics): Article 4 "The share capital of the Company is CHF 100,526,080.00 and is divided into 78,536,000 fully paid registered shares. Each share has a par value of CHF 1.28." Article 4ter "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 913,884.16 through the issuance of up to 713,972 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time." Article 4quater para. 1 "The Board of Directors shall be authorized to increase the share capital in an amount not to exceed CHF 20,105,216.00 through the issuance of up to 15,707,200 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by not later than April 22, 2018." Article 4quinquies "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 913,884.16 through the issuance of up to 713,972 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2013 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time." Article 4sexies "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 913,884.16 through the issuance of up to 713,972 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2014 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time." Article 4septies "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 1,005,260.80 through the issuance of up to 785,360 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2015 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time." Article 4octies "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 1,005,260.80 through the issuance of up to 785,360 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2016 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at a 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange at that time." Explanatory notes: In the event of approval of the proposed capital reduction, the nominal value reduction amount shall be repaid to shareholders. The capital reduction will be implemented after publication of the general meeting resolution in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce in accordance with Art. 733 Swiss Code of Obligations and the expiration of the 2 months notice period provided therein. Subject to approval by the general shareholders' meeting and to entry of the reduction in the Commercial Register, CHF 0.02 per share will be repaid to the shareholders, holding shares on July 6, 2018 prospectively on July 13, 2018. The capital reduction amount is paid out without deduction of Swiss withholding tax. 1. Creation of authorized share capital The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal to create authorized share capital in an amount not to exceed CHF 20,105,216.00, enabling the issuance of up to 15,707,200 Cavotec SA shares by not later than April 12, 2020, by amending article 4quater, para. 1 of the Articles of Association with the following wording: "The Board of Directors shall be authorized to increase the share capital in an amount not to exceed CHF 20,105,216.00 through the issuance of up to 15,707,200 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by not later than April 12, 2020. Increases in partial amounts shall be permitted." The decision referred to the agenda item 4 concerning the amendments to the art. 4quater para. 1 is therefore superseded by this motion. 1. Approval of Remuneration The OGM approved the maximum aggregate amount (covering fixed and variable remuneration) each of: -- the remuneration for the Board of Directors for the next business year -- the remuneration for the CEO for the next business year. 6.1 Approval of Remuneration for the Board of Directors The OGM approved the aggregate amount of EUR 1,000,000 for the remuneration for the Board of Directors for the business year 2019. 6.2 Approval of Remuneration of the CEO The OGM approved the aggregate amount of EUR 1,500,000 for the remuneration for the CEO for the business year 2019. 7. Re-election of five Directors, election of one new Director, nomination of the Chairman of the Board of Directors In accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal, Fabio Cannavale, Erik Lautmann, Patrik Tigerschiold, Helena Thrap-Olsen, Helene Mellquist were re-elected as Directors for a further one-year term of office expiring at the OGM to be held in 2019. Patrik Tigerschiold was elected as Chairman of the Board of Directors for one-year term of office at the OGM to be held in 2019. Roberto Italia was elected as Director for a one-year term of office expiring at the Ordinary General Meeting to be held in 2019. 1. Nominations for the Remuneration Committee In accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal Erik Lautmann, Helena Thrap-Olsen and Patrik Tigerschiold were elected as members of the Remuneration Committee. With respect to the requirements in the Code that all members of the Remuneration Committee, apart from the chairman of the Remuneration Committee, are to be independent of the company and its executive management, the Nomination Committee has come to the conclusion that all candidates proposed by the Board of Directors are independent of the company and its executive management. 1. Re-election of Independent Auditor In accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal, PricewaterhouseCoopers SA, Lugano, Switzerland was re-elected as Cavotec's independent auditor for the business year 2018.

(MORE TO FOLLOW) Dow Jones Newswires

April 12, 2018 12:46 ET (16:46 GMT)Press Release: Report from Cavotec SA Ordinary General Meeting 2018

Cavotec SA ("the Company") today held its Ordinary General Meeting ("OGM") in Lugano, Switzerland, chaired by Stefan Widegren. 1. Annual report, financial statements and consolidated financial statements for the year 2017, report of the Statutory Auditors The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal that the annual report, the financial statements and the consolidated financial statement for the year 2017 be approved. 1. Appropriation of available earnings The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal for the following appropriation: CHF Carried forward from previous year (19,612,363) Net gain/ (loss) for the financial year 2017 (22,135,641) Total earnings available (41,748,004) Appropriation to general statutory reserves 0 Appropriation to other reserves 0 Proposed balance to be carried forward (41,748,004) 1. Grant of Discharge from Liability to the Board of Directors and Persons entrusted with the Management from Activities during Business Year 2017 The OGM granted discharge to all members of the Board of Directors as well as the other persons entrusted with the management. 1. Capital reduction through partial nominal value repayment The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal: a) to reduce the current share capital of 102'096'800.00 by CHF 1,570,720.00 to CHF 100,526,080.00 by way of reducing the nominal value of the registered shares from CHF 1.30 by CHF 0.02 to CHF 1.28 and to use the nominal value reduction amount for repayment to the shareholders; b) to confirm as a result of the report of the auditors, that the claims of the creditors are fully covered notwithstanding the capital reduction; c) to amend article 4, article 4ter, article 4quater para. 1, article 4quinquies, article 4sexies, article 4septies and article 4octies of the Articles of Association according to the following wording as per the date of the entry of the capital reduction in the commercial register (the proposed amendments are in italics): Article 4 "The share capital of the Company is CHF 100,526,080.00 and is divided into 78,536,000 fully paid registered shares. Each share has a par value of CHF 1.28." Article 4ter "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 913,884.16 through the issuance of up to 713,972 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time." Article 4quater para. 1 "The Board of Directors shall be authorized to increase the share capital in an amount not to exceed CHF 20,105,216.00 through the issuance of up to 15,707,200 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by not later than April 22, 2018." Article 4quinquies "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 913,884.16 through the issuance of up to 713,972 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2013 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time." Article 4sexies "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 913,884.16 through the issuance of up to 713,972 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2014 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time." Article 4septies "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 1,005,260.80 through the issuance of up to 785,360 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2015 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time." Article 4octies "The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 1,005,260.80 through the issuance of up to 785,360 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2016 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at a 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange at that time." Explanatory notes: In the event of approval of the proposed capital reduction, the nominal value reduction amount shall be repaid to shareholders. The capital reduction will be implemented after publication of the general meeting resolution in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce in accordance with Art. 733 Swiss Code of Obligations and the expiration of the 2 months notice period provided therein. Subject to approval by the general shareholders' meeting and to entry of the reduction in the Commercial Register, CHF 0.02 per share will be repaid to the shareholders, holding shares on July 6, 2018 prospectively on July 13, 2018. The capital reduction amount is paid out without deduction of Swiss withholding tax. 1. Creation of authorized share capital The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal to create authorized share capital in an amount not to exceed CHF 20,105,216.00, enabling the issuance of up to 15,707,200 Cavotec SA shares by not later than April 12, 2020, by amending article 4quater, para. 1 of the Articles of Association with the following wording: "The Board of Directors shall be authorized to increase the share capital in an amount not to exceed CHF 20,105,216.00 through the issuance of up to 15,707,200 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by not later than April 12, 2020. Increases in partial amounts shall be permitted." The decision referred to the agenda item 4 concerning the amendments to the art. 4quater para. 1 is therefore superseded by this motion. 1. Approval of Remuneration The OGM approved the maximum aggregate amount (covering fixed and variable remuneration) each of: -- the remuneration for the Board of Directors for the next business year -- the remuneration for the CEO for the next business year. 6.1 Approval of Remuneration for the Board of Directors The OGM approved the aggregate amount of EUR 1,000,000 for the remuneration for the Board of Directors for the business year 2019. 6.2 Approval of Remuneration of the CEO The OGM approved the aggregate amount of EUR 1,500,000 for the remuneration for the CEO for the business year 2019. 7. Re-election of five Directors, election of one new Director, nomination of the Chairman of the Board of Directors In accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal, Fabio Cannavale, Erik Lautmann, Patrik Tigerschiold, Helena Thrap-Olsen, Helene Mellquist were re-elected as Directors for a further one-year term of office expiring at the OGM to be held in 2019. Patrik Tigerschiold was elected as Chairman of the Board of Directors for one-year term of office at the OGM to be held in 2019. Roberto Italia was elected as Director for a one-year term of office expiring at the Ordinary General Meeting to be held in 2019. 1. Nominations for the Remuneration Committee In accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal Erik Lautmann, Helena Thrap-Olsen and Patrik Tigerschiold were elected as members of the Remuneration Committee. With respect to the requirements in the Code that all members of the Remuneration Committee, apart from the chairman of the Remuneration Committee, are to be independent of the company and its executive management, the Nomination Committee has come to the conclusion that all candidates proposed by the Board of Directors are independent of the company and its executive management. 1. Re-election of Independent Auditor In accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal, PricewaterhouseCoopers SA, Lugano, Switzerland was re-elected as Cavotec's independent auditor for the business year 2018.

(MORE TO FOLLOW) Dow Jones Newswires

April 12, 2018 12:46 ET (16:46 GMT)

1. Election of an Independent Proxy In accordance with the Board of Directors' proposal, Mr. Franco Brusa, Attorney-at-law, Via G.B. Pioda 5, Lugano, Switzerland was elected as Cavotec's independent proxy for the OGM 2019. ENDS For further details please contact: Johan Hahnel Investor Relations Manager Telephone: +46 70 605 63 34 - Email: investor@cavotec.com https://www.globenewswire.com/Tracker?data=jO4ZsIxRiKtcy__h3z3YoxewtAyw_6GceZqVYFiLRQ8763ZbMhuR892uzHTh3i55DVI64dAtZDJANZMfmpD30Z6jFopgnpxlErRBMeL8Luc= About Cavotec Cavotec is a leading engineering group that designs and manufactures automated connection and electrification systems for ports, airports and industrial applications worldwide. Cavotec innovative technologies ensure safe, efficient and sustainable operations. To find out more about Cavotec, visit our website at https://www.globenewswire.com/Tracker?data=NRS99yyqXakTAFqxvntCKJmsPwKd4TcAVn4AKjgs1TfUy8-hJBY1Pd_KSfeXXP5B8w0znzGSjFvAMariPRdjDA== cavotec.com. The information in this release is subject to the disclosure requirements of Cavotec SA under the Swedish Securities Market Act and/or the Swedish Financial Instruments Trading Act. This information was publicly communicated on 12 April 2018, 18:45 CEST.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 12, 2018 12:46 ET (16:46 GMT)What all the fuss is about with Future Ready Institutes will be revealed to eighth-graders and parents at an event planned at Unum for 6 p.m. on Tuesday. Middle school students and their parents interested in knowing more about the innovative new program are welcome to attend the information session that will feature representatives from each Future Ready Institute.

The new schools within a school will have a career theme and connect lessons learned in the classroom with skills needed to be successful after graduation. Future Ready Institutes will challenge the traditional approach to education in high schools by developing career-themed small learning communities. Themes will include medicine, robotics, forensic science, engineering, hospitality, technology and more. Teachers of all content areas including English, math, science and social studies will work closely with the career theme teacher to provide classroom instruction through the lens of a career. The goal is for students to understand why a classroom lesson is important and how they will use the information in the future.

Major community partnerships will be a key component of the success of Future Ready Institutes, said officials. Erlanger will partner to offer the Erlanger Institute for Healthcare and Innovation, Unum will provide training for teachers and a grant from J.P. Morgan Chase has helped to fund the director position for Future Ready Institutes to get the program off the ground and into our schools. The district anticipates the announcement of additional institutes and community partnerships before the fall.

Currently, 11 schools will host 17 Future Ready Institutes that will be open to students across the district. The list of new programs and the schools to host them include:

Brainerd High School

 The Institute of First Responders and Forensic Science

 The Institute of Aviation

East Hamilton High School

 The TIE Institute: Tinker, Innovate, Engineer

 The CLIMB Institute: The Canes Leadership Institute of Marketing and Business

East Ridge High School

 The Institute of Building and Design

Hixson High School

 The Institute for Integrative Agriculture, Food, Natural Resources, and Technology

 The Institute for Health Careers and Medical Advancement

The Howard School

 Erlanger Institute for Healthcare and Innovation

 The Institute of Hospitality and Tourism

Ooltewah High School

 The Institute of International Baccalaureate Studies

Red Bank High School

 The Institute of Computer Sciences and Engineering

Sequoyah High School

 The Institute of Industrial Manufacturing

 The Institute of Digital Arts, Design, and Production

Tyner High School

 The Institute of Technology and Security

 The Institute of Teaching and Learning

Signal Mountain High School

 The Institute of International Baccalaureate Studies

Soddy-Daisy High School

 The Institute of Tech Start-Ups and Web Design

Future Ready Institutes will begin with current eighth-graders who will be a freshman in the fall. Schools began accepting applications April 2 with the deadline for applying coming up on May 4. Applicants accepted to an institute will be notified between May 16-22. The Institutes will add another class each of the following three years to fill out a full four-year program in each school.

The information session at Unum will be at 500 Walnut St. Parking will be available at the intersection of 5th Street and Walnut Street. Information about Future Ready Institutes is available at www.hcde.org/futureready.



Government Action Spurred by Whistleblower Lawsuit

PHOENIX, AZ / ACCESSWIRE / April 12, 2018 / Due to the persistence of a former employee's refusal to accept the routine submission of false Medicare claims by Arizona's largest private employer and one of the nation's largest nonprofit hospital systems, the U.S. Government has recovered $18.7 million (including interest) in taxpayer dollars. The current recovery resolves allegations that Banner Health routinely overcharged Medicare for short-stay inpatient and observation claims.

The case, filed in 2013 in the U.S. District Court for Arizona, is styled United States ex rel. Cecilia Guardiola v. Banner Health and NCMC, Inc., No. 2:13-cv-02443. Attorney Mitch Kreindler of Kreindler & Associates in Houston, Texas and his co-counsel, Edmundo Robaina of Robaina & Kresin PLLC in Phoenix, represented Guardiola, during the legal proceedings The settlement covers a period of nine years, from November 1, 2007 through December 31, 2016. Guardiola estimates that the incorrect claims were filed on behalf of thousands of patients.

The $18,300,000 settlement is among the largest ever in the District of Arizona under the False Claims Act. Suits filed nationwide under the False Claims Act in fiscal year 2017 yielded more than $1.0 billion in recoveries to the federal government, according to statistics maintained by the Department of Justice.

Guardiola is a registered nurse, compliance professional and law school graduate with extensive nursing and compliance experience. She was hired by Banner Health in October 2012 as its Corporate Director, Clinical Documentation. Her role was to improve the quality of medical documentation to support improved billing with the goal of identifying positive revenue for Banner hospitals. The position required Ms. Guardiola to observe and evaluate compliance efforts at multiple Banner hospitals and throughout the Banner Health corporate system. Quickly recognizing that her efforts to bring ethical compliance efforts to Banner were and would continue to be ineffective, Ms. Guardiola resigned her position in December 2012.

Once hired, Ms. Guardiola's first priority was to evaluate Banner's existing clinical documentation program and identify opportunities for improvement. She assessed randomly chosen medical records to develop baseline measurements from which to evaluate the quality of existing medical documentation efforts. Upon completing her assessment, Ms. Guardiola identified many ways in which Banner could improve its revenue streams.

When senior Banner administrators repeatedly expressed concerns that Banner was failing to capture inpatient stays properly, Ms. Guardiola expanded her evaluation to include short-stay inpatient claims, an effort which led her to uncover Banner's wrongdoing. Ms. Guardiola discovered that all Banner hospitals were billing an inordinate and improper number of short-stay claims, particularly those for expensive cardiac procedures. In her complaint, Ms. Guardiola identified over 650 instances where Banner billed Medicare for an inpatient claim, even though the patient was admitted to and discharged from the hospital on the same calendar day.

Ms. Guardiola discovered that two Banner hospitals, Boswell and Del Webb, intentionally falsified documentation to ensure payment of fraudulent claims. She found that they devised a means of circumventing the Medicare Administrative Contractor's (MAC's) review process by mischaracterizing certain claims for cardiac procedures (such as implantable defibrillators, pacemakers and stents) as "urgent" on Medicare claim forms when the claims should have been characterized as "elective," which is what was done by all of Banner's other hospitals. By labeling the claims as "urgent," Boswell and Del Webb were able to prevent a large number of financially lucrative claims from being denied.

Ms. Guardiola also found that Banner systematically inflated the number of hours for which patients received outpatient observation care. Because Medicare reimburses such care on a per-hour basis, the inflated figures caused Banner to receive payments higher than it was entitled to claim.

When she raised her concerns with Banner administrators, she was met with resistance to change and an undue emphasis on revenue enhancement through inpatient admissions. Compliance was treated as an afterthought. "Banner provides quality healthcare to many residents of Arizona and other states, and I wanted them to focus on the long-term benefits of acting with integrity. But they were unwilling to do that," said Guardiola.

"Thanks to Ms. Guardiola's honesty and courage, taxpayers have been reimbursed for the misconduct alleged in her Complaint," Guardiola's attorney, Mitch Kreindler said. "Ms. Guardiola recognized the wrongdoing and called it to the attention of Banner's most senior management. She pursued the fight for what she knew was right." Said Guardiola, "I can only hope that this settlement is the 'change agent' that allows Banner to bring its focus back to where it belongs."

"While Banner will likely try to downplay these allegations as 'technical billing issues,' the fact is that Ms. Guardiola encountered resistance to fixing systemic problems that caused the billings to regularly recur," said Kreindler. He added, "Everyone knows the difference between right and wrong. But it takes a person of integrity, like Ms. Guardiola, to stand up and say, 'I'm not going to allow this to happen.' She is the true hero in this story."

Guardiola's case was formally filed on November 27, 2013 under the False Claims Act and its qui tam provisions. The law allows any person with evidence of fraud against federal programs or contracts to sue the wrongdoer on behalf of the government. The Act provides for the whistleblower, or relator, to receive between 15 and 30 percent of the amount recovered by the government. Under this provision, the federal government will pay 18% of its recovery to Guardiola for her assistance.

Kreindler & Associates was founded in November 2000 and is dedicated almost exclusively to the representation of whistleblowers under the False Claims Act and other whistleblower statues. The firm provides an uncommon degree of client service and support to whistleblowers that have made the difficult decision to do what is right, often at significant personal hardship. With a practice that is national in scope, Kreindler's offices are located in Houston and Philadelphia areas.

For more information about Kreindler & Associates and the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, visit www.blowthewhistle.com or call (713) 647-8888.

CONTACT: Mitch Kreindler | 713-647-8888 | mkreindler@blowthewhistle.com

Note to media: Copies of the complaint, settlement agreement and other materials are available upon request

SOURCE: Kreindler & Associates.Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 12, 2018) - TerraX Minerals Inc. (TSXV: TXR) (FSE: TX0) (OTC Pink: TRXXF) ("TerraX" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the successful closing of the bought deal financing announced on 23 March, 2018 and on April 3, 2018 (the "Offering"), which was led by PI Financial Corp. (the "Underwriter"), and that the overallotment option granted to the Underwriter was exercised in full.

Pursuant to the Offering, the Company issued an aggregate of 4,312,500 units of the Company ("Units") at a price of C$0.40 per Unit and 4,107,143 flow-through units of the Company ("FT Units") at a price of $0.56 per FT Unit, for aggregate gross proceeds of $4,025,000. Each Unit is comprised of one common share and one half of one transferable non-flow-through common share purchase warrant (each whole such common share purchase warrant, a "Warrant"). Each FT Unit is comprised of one flow-through common share and one half of one Warrant (issued on a non-flow-through basis). Each Warrant is exercisable into one additional non flow-through common share of the Company for a period of three years from closing, subject to an exercise acceleration trigger, at an exercise price of $0.60.

In connection with the Offering, the Underwriter received a cash fee and 420,982 compensation warrants. Each compensation warrant is exercisable into one common share of the Company at a price of $0.40 per common share for a period of 24 months from closing.

The net proceeds from the sale of the Units are anticipated to be used to fund drilling and exploration expenditures on the Company's Yellowknife City Gold Project and for working capital purposes. The gross proceeds from the sale of the FT Units will be used for general exploration expenditures on the Company's Yellowknife City Gold Project located in the Northwest Territories.

The Units and FT Units are subject to a statutory hold period in Canada expiring four months and one day from the closing date of the Offering, being August 13, 2018.

This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to U.S. Persons unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available.

About the Yellowknife City Gold Project

The Yellowknife City Gold ("YCG") project encompasses 772 sq km of contiguous land immediately north, south and east of the City of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Through a series of acquisitions, TerraX controls one of the six major high-grade gold camps in Canada. Being within 10 km of the City of Yellowknife, the YCG is close to vital infrastructure, including all-season roads, air transportation, service providers, hydro-electric power and skilled tradespeople.

The YCG lies on the prolific Yellowknife greenstone belt, covering 67 km of strike length along the main mineralized break in the Yellowknife gold district, including the southern and northern extensions of the shear system that hosted the high-grade Con and Giant gold mines. The project area contains multiple shears that are the recognized hosts for gold deposits in the Yellowknife gold district, with innumerable gold showings and recent high-grade drill results that serve to indicate the project's potential as a world-class gold district.

For more information on the YCG project, please visit our web site at www.terraxminerals.com.



On behalf of the Board of Directors



"JOSEPH CAMPBELL"



Joe Campbell

CEO

For more information, please contact:

Samuel Vella

Manager of Corporate Communications

Phone: 604-689-1749

Toll-Free: 1-855-737-2684

svella@terraxminerals.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, which involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual events to differ materially from current expectation. Important factors - including the availability of funds, the results of financing efforts, the completion of due diligence and the results of exploration activities - that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations are disclosed in the Company's documents filed from time to time on SEDAR (see www.sedar.com). Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. The company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, events or otherwise.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR DISEMMINATION IN THE UNITED STATESMONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 04/12/18 -- Today, Cogeco Inc. (TSX: CGO) ("Cogeco" or the "Corporation") announced its financial results for the second quarter ended February 28, 2018, in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS").

For the second quarter of fiscal 2018:

-- Revenue increased by $36.8 million, or 6.3%, to reach $623.2 million driven by growth of 6.8% in the Communications segment, partly offset by a decrease of 4.9% in the Other segment. On constant currency basis, revenue increased by 8.2% driven by growth of 8.8% in the Communications segment as result of the acquisition of substantially all the assets of Harron Communications, L.P. cable systems operating under the MetroCast brand name ("MetroCast") on January 4, 2018, partly offset by a decrease of 4.9% in the Other segment resulting mainly from a less favorable advertising market in the media activities; -- Adjusted EBITDA increased by $14.4 million, or 5.6%, to reach $272.5 million compared to the same period of fiscal 2017. On a constant currency basis, adjusted EBITDA increased by 7.4% mostly attributable the improvement in the Communications segment as a result of the MetroCast acquisition; -- Profit for the period amounted to $143.8 million of which $46.0 million, or $2.81 per share, was attributable to owners of the Corporation compared to $78.2 million for the second quarter of fiscal 2017 of which $25.9 million, or $1.55 per share, was attributable to owners of the Corporation. The increase is mainly due to the $89 million (US$70 million) reduction in deferred income taxes related to the recent US tax reform and the improvement of adjusted EBITDA, partly offset by increases in depreciation and amortization, integration, restructuring and acquisition costs and financial expense mainly as a result of the MetroCast acquisition; -- Free cash flow(1) decreased by $54.5 million, or 45.6%, to reach $64.9 million compared to the same quarter of the prior year. In constant currency basis, free cash flow decreased by 47.2% as a result of the increase in acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets mainly attributable to the acquisition for $21.2 million (US $16.8 million) of several dark fibres from FiberLight, LLC combined with $16.0 million primarily in acquisitions costs as well as additional financial expense resulting from the MetroCast acquisition in the Communications segment. The decrease was partly offset by the increase of adjusted EBITDA; -- Cash flow from operating activities decreased by $35.7 million, or 14.0%, to reach $218.2 million compared to fiscal 2017 second-quarter mainly due to increases in income taxes paid, integration, restructuring and acquisition costs and financial expenses paid, partly offset by the increase in changes in non-cash operating activities primarily due to changes in working capital and the improvement in adjusted EBITDA; and -- At its April 12, 2018 meeting, the Board of Directors of Cogeco declared a quarterly eligible dividend of $0.39 compared to $0.34 per share paid in the comparable period of fiscal 2017. (1) The indicated terms do not have standardized definitions prescribed by IFRS and, therefore, may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. For more details, please consult the "Non-IFRS financial measures" section of the MD&A.

For the six-month period ended February 28, 2018:

-- Revenue increased by $39.8 million, or 3.4%, to reach $1.21 billion. On constant currency basis, revenue increased by 5.3% driven by growth of 5.8% in the Communications segment mainly as a result of the MetroCast acquisition, partly offset by a decrease of 4.7% in the Other segment resulting mainly from a less favorable advertising market in the media activities; -- Adjusted EBITDA increased by $9.6 million, or 1.8%, to reach $528.9 million compared to the same period of fiscal 2017. On a constant currency basis, adjusted EBITDA increased by 3.4% mostly attributable to the improvement in the Communications segment as a result of the MetroCast acquisition; -- Profit for the period amounted to $225.5 million of which $75.5 million, or $4.60 per share, was attributable to owners of the Corporation compared to $160.2 million for the same period of fiscal 2017 of which $56.6 million, or $3.39 per share, was attributable to owners of the Corporation. The increase is mainly due to the $89 million (US$70 million) reduction in deferred income taxes related to the recent US tax reform and the improvement of adjusted EBITDA, partly offset by increases in depreciation and amortization, integration, restructuring and acquisition costs and financial expense mainly as a result of the MetroCast acquisition; -- Free cash flow decreased by $54.8 million, or 24.0% to reach $174.0 million compared to the same period of the prior year. In constant currency basis, free cash flow decreased by 25.4% as a result of the increase in acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets mainly attributable to the acquisition for $21.2 million (US$16.8 million) of several dark fibres from FiberLight, LLC combined with $16.4 million primarily in acquisitions costs as well as additional financial expense resulting from the MetroCast acquisition in the Communications segment. The decrease was partly offset by the increase of adjusted EBITDA; and -- Cash flow from operating activities decreased by $156.2 million, or 41.5%, to reach $220.5 million compared to the same period of the prior year mainly due to the increases in income taxes paid, integration, restructuring and acquisition costs and financial expenses paid and changes in non-cash operating activities primarily due to changes in working capital, partly offset by the improvement in adjusted EBITDA.

"Our results overall for the second quarter of 2018, which is also our first quarter since closing the acquisition of the MetroCast cable systems, are stable and in line with expectations," declared Louis Audet, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cogeco Inc. "Results for Cogeco Connexion, our Canadian broadband subsidiary, remained steady despite the highly competitive market environment."

"At Atlantic Broadband, results are aligned with our forecasts and we are satisfied with the current direction of our strategy in the United States," stated Mr. Audet. "We are very pleased with the work being done to ensure the smooth integration of the MetroCast acquisition which is progressing according to plan. In addition, our American broadband subsidiary has seen an increase in primary service units in the last quarter most notably thanks to our successful expansion in Florida."

"Our Business ICT subsidiary, Cogeco Peer 1, remains focused on building and offering a relevant suite of solutions and providing expert advice in a constantly evolving and intensely competitive market," added Mr. Audet.

"Finally, in our radio business, we are witnessing an advertising market that is increasingly under pressure. Despite this, Cogeco Media remains competitive in large part thanks to the excellent ratings many of our stations continue to enjoy," concluded Louis Audet.

ABOUT COGECO

Cogeco Inc. is a diversified holding corporation which operates in the communications and media sectors. Through its Cogeco Communications Inc. subsidiary, Cogeco provides its residential and business customers with Internet, video and telephony services through its two-way broadband fibre networks. Cogeco Communications Inc. operates in Canada under the Cogeco Connexion name in Quebec and Ontario, and in the United States under the Atlantic Broadband name in 11 states along the East Coast, from Maine to Florida. Through Cogeco Peer 1, Cogeco Communications Inc. provides its business customers with a suite of information technology services (colocation, network connectivity, hosting, cloud and managed services), through its 16 data centres, extensive FastFiber Network and more than 50 points of presence in North America and Europe. Through its subsidiary Cogeco Media, Cogeco owns and operates 13 radio stations across most of Quebec with complementary radio formats serving a wide range of audiences as well as Cogeco News, its news agency. Cogeco's subordinate voting shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: CGO). The subordinate voting shares of Cogeco Communications Inc. are also listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: CCA).

Analyst Conference Friday, April 13, 2018 at 11:00 a.m. (Eastern Daylight Call: Time) Media representatives may attend as listeners only. Please use the following dial-in number to have access to the conference call by dialing five minutes before the start of the conference: Canada/United States Access Number: 1-877-291-4570 International Access Number: + 1-647-788-4919 In order to join this conference, participants are only required to provide the operator with the company name, that is, Cogeco Inc. or Cogeco Communications Inc. By Internet at http://corpo.cogeco.com/cgo/en/investors/investor- relations/

SHAREHOLDERS' REPORT

Three and six-month periods ended February 28, 2018

FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Three-months ended February February Change Foreign 28, 28, in constant exchange 2018 2017 Change currency (1) impact (2) (in thousands of dollars, except percentages, per share data and number of shares) $ $ % % $ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Operations ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revenue 623,226 586,417 6.3 8.2 (11,159) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adjusted EBITDA(1) 272,492 258,043 5.6 7.4 (4,603) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Integration, restructuring and acquisition costs(3) 15,999 - - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Profit for the period 143,765 78,232 83.8 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Profit for the period attributable to owners of the Corporation 45,974 25,865 77.7 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash Flow ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash flow from operating activities 218,156 253,808 (14.0) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets(4) 127,772 87,036 46.8 51.6 (4,133) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Free cash flow(1) 64,946 119,461 (45.6) (47.2) 1,868 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Financial condition(5) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash and cash equivalents ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Short-term investments ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total assets ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indebtedness(6))) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Equity attributable to owners of the Corporation ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Per Share Data(7) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Earnings per share ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Basic 2.81 1.55 81.3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Diluted 2.79 1.54 81.2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dividends 0.39 0.34 14.7 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Weighted average number of multiple and subordinate voting shares 16,369,823 16,660,147 (1.7 outstanding ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Six-months ended February February Change Foreign 28, 28, in constant exchange 2018 2017 Change currency (1) impact (2) (in thousands of dollars, except percentages, per share data and number of shares) $ $ % % $ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Operations ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revenue 1,209,298 1,169,505 3.4 5.3 (21,800) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adjusted EBITDA(1) 528,862 519,310 1.8 3.4 (8,078) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Integration, restructuring and acquisition costs(3) 16,391 - - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Profit for the period 225,543 160,191 40.8 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Profit for the period attributable to owners of the Corporation 75,499 56,630 33.3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash Flow ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash flow from operating activities 220,485 376,683 (41.5) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets(4) 224,081 184,380 21.5 25.8 (7,865) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Free cash flow(1) 173,960 228,794 (24.0) (25.4) 3,184 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Financial condition(5) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash and cash equivalents 174,272 212,283 (17.9) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Short-term investments 34,000 54,000 (37.0) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total assets 7,342,242 5,499,376 33.5 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indebtedness(6))) 4,133,918 2,633,159 57.0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Equity attributable to owners of the Corporation 665,334 578,556 15.0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Per Share Data(7) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Earnings per share ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Basic 4.60 3.39 35.7 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Diluted 4.57 3.37 35.6 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dividends 0.39 0.34 14.7 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Weighted average number of multiple and subordinate voting shares 16,400,378 16,690,737 (1.7 outstanding ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (1) The indicated terms do not have standardized definitions prescribed by the International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS") and, therefore, may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. For more details, please consult the "Non-IFRS financial measures" section of the MD&A. (2) Key performance indicators presented on a constant currency basis are obtained by translating financial results of the current periods denominated in US dollars and GBP currency at the foreign exchange rates of the comparable periods of the prior year. For the three and the six-months periods ending February 28, 2017, the average foreign exchange rates used for translation were 1.3210 USD/CDN and 1.6439 GBP/CDN and 1.3238 USD/CDN and 1.6597 GBP/CDN, respectively. (3) For the three and six-month periods ended February 28, 2018, integration, restructuring and acquisitions costs were related to the MetroCast acquisition completed on January 4, 2018. (4) For the three and six-month periods ended February 28, 2018, acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets in constant currency amounted to $131.9 million and $231.9 million, respectively. (5) At February 28, 2018 and August 31, 2017. (6) Indebtedness is defined as the aggregate of bank indebtedness, balance due on a business combination and principal on long-term debt. (7) Per multiple and subordinate voting shares. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contacts:

Source:

Cogeco Inc.

Patrice Ouimet

Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Tel.: 514-764-4700



Information:

Media

Rene Guimond

Senior Vice-President, Public Affairs and Communications

Tel.: 514-764-4700



MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 04/12/18 -- Today, Cogeco Communications Inc. (TSX: CCA) ("Cogeco Communications" or the "Corporation") announced its financial results for the second quarter ended February 28, 2018, in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS").

For the second quarter of fiscal 2018:

-- Revenue increased by $38.1 million, or 6.8%, to reach $598.9 million mainly driven by growth of 28.8% in the American broadband services segment and stable revenue in the Canadian broadband services segment, partly offset by a decrease of 7.8% in the Business information and communications technology ("Business ICT") services segment. On a constant currency basis, revenue increased by 8.8%, mainly explained as follows: -- American broadband services revenue increased by 35.2% in constant currency mainly as a result of the acquisition of substantially all the assets of Harron Communications, L.P. cable systems operating under the MetroCast brand name ("MetroCast") on January 4, 2018. The increase was also attributable to organic growth from rate increases implemented in September 2017, the continued growth in Internet and telephony services customers combined with a smaller decrease in video service customers; -- Canadian broadband services revenue remained stable resulting from promotional pricing provided to customers and a decline in video and telephony services customers, offset by rate increases implemented in September 2017 and November 2017 in Ontario and Quebec, respectively; -- Business ICT services revenue decreased by 6.5% in constant currency primarily as a result of higher churn and competitive pricing pressures on the hosting and network connectivity services and prior year's non- recurring revenue of $2 million related to an Indefeasible rights of use ("IRU") agreement concluded in the second quarter of fiscal 2017 (4.0% decrease excluding prior year's non- recurring revenue of $2 million); -- Adjusted EBITDA increased by $14.2 million, or 5.6%, to reach $268.1 million. On a constant currency basis, adjusted EBITDA increased by 7.4%, mainly as a result of the following: -- American broadband services adjusted EBITDA increased by 41.7% in constant currency mainly as a result of the MetroCast acquisition; partly offset by -- Canadian broadband services adjusted EBITDA decreased by 1.7% in constant currency as a result of operating expenses growth and stable revenue; -- Business ICT services adjusted EBITDA decreased by 13.8% in constant currency resulting mainly from a decline in revenue (6.2% decrease excluding prior year's non-recurring revenue of $2 million); -- Profit for the period amounted to $141.8 million, of which $138.9 million, or $2.82 per share, was attributable to the owners of the Corporation compared to $76.7 million, or $1.56 per share, in the comparable period of fiscal 2017 mainly as a result of the $89 million (US$70 million) reduction in deferred income taxes related to the recent US tax reform and the improvement of adjusted EBITDA, partly offset by the increases in depreciation and amortization, integration, restructuring and acquisition costs and financial expense as a result of the MetroCast acquisition; -- Free cash flow(1) amounted to $64.0 million, a decrease of $52.8 million, or 45.2% compared to the same period of the prior year. On a constant currency basis, free cash flow decreased by 46.8% as a result of the increase in acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets mainly attributable to the acquisition for $21.2 million (US$16.8 million) of several dark fibres from FiberLight, LLC combined with $16.0 million primarily in acquisitions costs as well as additional financial expense resulting from the MetroCast acquisition. The decrease was partly offset by the increase of adjusted EBITDA; -- Cash flow from operating activities decreased by $31.0 million, or 12.6%, to reach $214.5 million mainly due to increases in income taxes paid, integration, restructuring and acquisition costs and financial expenses paid, partly offset by the increase in changes in non-cash operating activities primarily due to changes in working capital and the improvement in adjusted EBITDA; and -- At its April 12, 2018 meeting, the Board of Directors of Cogeco Communications declared a quarterly eligible dividend of $0.475 compared to $0.43 per share paid in the comparable period of fiscal 2017.

For the six-month period ended February 28, 2018 :

-- Revenue increased by $42.6 million, or 3.8%, to reach $1.15 billion mainly driven by growths of 13.7% in the American broadband and of 1.3% in the Canadian broadband services segments, partly offset by the decrease of 6.2% in the Business ICT services segment. On a constant currency basis, revenue increased by 5.8%, mainly explained as follows: -- American broadband services revenue increased by 19.7% in constant currency mainly as a result of the MetroCast acquisition. The increase was also attributable to rate increases implemented in September 2017, the continued growth in Internet and telephony services customers combined with a lower decrease in video service customers; -- Canadian broadband services revenue increased by 1.3% due to rate increases implemented in September 2017 and November 2017 in Ontario and Quebec, respectively, combined with continued growth in Internet service customers, partly offset by promotional pricing provided to customers and a decline in video and telephony services customers; -- Business ICT services revenue decreased by 4.4% in constant currency primarily as a result of higher churn, competitive pricing pressures on the hosting and network connectivity services and of $2 million in non- recurring revenue related to an IRU agreement in the prior year (3.1% decrease excluding prior year's non- recurring revenue of $2 million);

(1) The indicated terms do not have standardized definitions prescribed by IFRS and, therefore, may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. For more details, please consult the "Non-IFRS financial measures" section of the MD&A.

-- Adjusted EBITDA increased by $12.0 million, or 2.4%, to reach $515.6 million. On a constant currency basis, adjusted EBITDA increased by 4.0%, mainly as a result of the following: -- American broadband services adjusted EBITDA increased by 17.7% in constant currency mainly as a result of the MetroCast acquisition; -- Canadian broadband services adjusted EBITDA increased by 1.1% in constant currency mainly due to revenue growth exceeding operating expenses growth; partly offset by -- Business ICT services adjusted EBITDA decreased by 9.7% in constant currency resulting mainly from a decline in revenue, partly offset by a decline in operating expenses (1.9% decrease excluding prior year's non-recurring revenue of $2 million recognized in the second quarter of fiscal 2017 and a non-recurring gain on disposal of property, plant and equipment of $1.8 million recognized as a reduction of operating expenses in the first quarter of fiscal 2017); -- Profit for the period amounted to $218.2 million, of which $215.4 million, or $4.37 per share, was attributable to the owners of the Corporation, compared to $151.7 million, or $3.09 per share, in the comparable period of fiscal 2017 mainly as a result of the $89 million (US$70 million) reduction in deferred income taxes related to the recent US tax reform and the improvement of adjusted EBITDA, partly offset by increases in depreciation and amortization, integration, restructuring and acquisition costs and financial expense as a result of the MetroCast acquisition; -- Free cash flow amounted to $166.3 million, a decrease of $51.8 million, or 23.8% compared to the same period of the prior year. On a constant currency basis, free cash flow decreased by 25.2% as a result of the increase in acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets mainly attributable to the acquisition for $21.2 million (US$16.8 million) of several dark fibres from FiberLight, LLC combined with $16.4 million primarily in acquisitions costs as well as additional financial expense resulting from the MetroCast acquisition. The decrease was partly offset by the increase of adjusted EBITDA; and -- Cash flow from operating activities decreased by $148.2 million, or 40.2%, to reach $220.8 million mainly due to increases in income taxes paid, integration, restructuring and acquisition costs and financial expenses paid, partly offset by the improvement in adjusted EBITDA.

"Our results overall for the second quarter of 2018, which is also our first quarter since closing the acquisition of the MetroCast cable systems, are stable and in line with expectations," declared Louis Audet, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cogeco Communications Inc. "Results for Cogeco Connexion, our Canadian broadband subsidiary, remained steady despite the highly competitive market environment."

"At Atlantic Broadband, results are aligned with our forecasts and we are satisfied with the current direction of our strategy in the United States," stated Mr. Audet. "We are very pleased with the work being done to ensure the smooth integration of the MetroCast acquisition which is progressing according to plan. In addition, our American broadband subsidiary has seen an increase in primary service units in the last quarter most notably thanks to our successful expansion in Florida."

"Our Business ICT subsidiary, Cogeco Peer 1, remains focused on building and offering a relevant suite of solutions and providing expert advice in a constantly evolving and intensely competitive market," concluded Mr. Audet.

ABOUT COGECO COMMUNICATIONS

Cogeco Communications Inc. is a communications corporation. It is the 8th largest cable operator in North America, operating in Canada under the Cogeco Connexion name in Quebec and Ontario, and in the United States under the Atlantic Broadband name in 11 states along the East Coast, from Maine to Florida. Cogeco Communications Inc. provides its residential and business customers with Internet, video and telephony services through its two-way broadband fibre networks. Through its subsidiary Cogeco Peer 1, Cogeco Communications Inc. provides its business customers with a suite of information technology services (colocation, network connectivity, hosting, cloud and managed services), through its 16 data centres, extensive FastFiber Network and more than 50 points of presence in North America and Europe. Cogeco Communications Inc.'s subordinate voting shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: CCA).

Analyst Conference Call: Friday, April 13, 2018 at 11:00 a.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) Media representatives may attend as listeners only. Please use the following dial-in number to have access to the conference call by dialing five minutes before the start of the conference: Canada/United States Access Number: 1-877-291-4570 International Access Number: + 1-647-788-4919 In order to join this conference, participants are only required to provide the operator with the company name, that is, Cogeco Inc. or Cogeco Communications Inc. By Internet at http://corpo.cogeco.com/cca/en/investors/investor- relations

SHAREHOLDERS' REPORT

Three and six-month periods ended February 28, 2018

FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS

------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Three-months ended Change Foreign February February in constant exchange 28, 28, currency impact 2018 2017 Change (1) (2) (in thousands of dollars, except percentages, per share data and the number of shares) $ $ % % $ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Operations ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Revenue 598,938 560,875 6.8 8.8 (11,159) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Adjusted EBITDA(1) 268,083 253,839 5.6 7.4 (4,603) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Adjusted EBITDA margin(1) 44.8% 45.3% ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Integration, restructuring and acquisition costs(3) 15,999 - - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Profit for the period 141,763 76,663 84.9 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Profit for the period attributable to the owners of the Corporation 138,887 76,663 81.2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cash flow ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cash flow from operating activities 214,514 245,550 (12.6) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets(4) 127,264 86,199 47.6 52.4 (4,133) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free cash flow(1) 64,017 116,787 (45.2) (46.8) 1,868 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Financial condition(5) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Cash and cash equivalents ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Short-term investments ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Total assets ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Indebtedness(6) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Equity attributable to owners of the Corporation ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Capital intensity(1) 21.2% 15.4% ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Per Share Data(7) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Earnings per share ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Basic 2.82 1.56 80.8 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Diluted 2.79 1.55 80.0 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dividends 0.475 0.43 10.5 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Weighted average number of multiple and subordinate voting shares outstanding 49,285,885 49,190,249 0.2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Six-months ended Change Foreign February February in constant exchange 28, 28, currency impact 2018 2017 Change (1) (2) (in thousands of dollars, except percentages, per share data and the number of shares) $ $ % % $ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Operations ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revenue 1,152,563 1,109,965 3.8 5.8 (21,800) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adjusted EBITDA(1) 515,565 503,542 2.4 4.0 (8,078) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adjusted EBITDA margin(1) 44.7% 45.4% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Integration, restructuring and acquisition costs(3) 16,391 - - ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Profit for the period 218,232 151,687 43.9 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Profit for the period attributable to the owners of the Corporation 215,356 151,687 42.0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash flow ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash flow from operating activities 220,781 369,011 (40.2) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets(4) 223,422 182,693 22.3 26.6 (7,865) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Free cash flow(1) 166,317 218,166 (23.8) (25.2) 3,184 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Financial condition(5) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cash and cash equivalents 173,650 211,185 (17.8) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Short-term investments 34,000 54,000 (37.0) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total assets 7,185,645 5,348,380 34.4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indebtedness(6) 4,087,502 2,598,058 57.3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Equity attributable to owners of the Corporation 1,869,746 1,599,267 16.9 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Capital intensity(1) 19.4% 16.5% ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Per Share Data(7) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Earnings per share ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Basic 4.37 3.09 41.4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Diluted 4.33 3.06 41.5 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dividends 0.95 0.86 10.5 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Weighted average number of multiple and subordinate voting shares outstanding 49,287,026 49,167,153 0.2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (1) The indicated terms do not have standardized definitions prescribed by the International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS") and, therefore, may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. For more details, please consult the "Non-IFRS financial measures" section of the MD&A. (2) Key performance indicators presented on a constant currency basis are obtained by translating financial results of the current periods denominated in US dollars and GBP currency at the foreign exchange rates of the comparable periods of the prior year. For the three and the six-months periods ending February 28, 2017, the average foreign exchange rates used for translation were 1.3210 USD/CDN and 1.6439 GBP/CDN and 1.3238 USD/CDN and 1.6597 GBP/CDN, respectively. (3) For the three and six-month periods ended February 28, 2018, integration, restructuring and acquisitions costs were related to the MetroCast acquisition completed on January 4, 2018. (4) For the three and six-month periods ended February 28, 2018, acquisitions of property, plant and equipment, intangible and other assets in constant currency amounted to $131.4 million and $231.3 million, respectively. (5) At February 28, 2018 and August 31, 2017. (6) Indebtedness is defined as the aggregate of bank indebtedness, balance due on a business combination and principal on long-term debt. (7) Per multiple and subordinate voting share. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contacts:

Source:

Cogeco Communications Inc.

Patrice Ouimet

Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

514-764-4700



Information:

Media

Rene Guimond

Senior Vice-President, Public Affairs and Communications

514-764-4700



QUEBEC, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 04/12/18 -- Nemaska Lithium Inc. ("Nemaska Lithium" or the "Corporation") (TSX: NMX)(OTCQX: NMKEF)(FRANKFURT: N0T) is pleased to update its project financing plans and confirm that it has entered into a USD 150M streaming agreement (the "Streaming Agreement") with Orion Mine Finance II LP ("Orion").

In a press release dated March 28, 2018, Nemaska Lithium outlined the components of its overall USD 775 - 825M financing structure to fund the construction, commissioning, working capital and reserve funds for its Whabouchi lithium mine and Shawinigan electrochemical plant (the "Project Financing") and also for general corporate working capital. Since that time, the Corporation has made steady progress on the following:

-- Streaming facility for USD 150M - the Corporation: -- Signed the Streaming Agreement with Orion for same amount; -- Equity offerings through private and/or public offerings - the Corporation: -- Obtained, on March 29, 2018, a receipt from Canadian securities regulatory authorities for its final base shelf prospectus (filed on Sedar the same day); -- Issued, on April 5, 2018, a press release outlining the agreed terms of a private placement for up to CAD 99M with SoftBank Group Corp. to hold no more than 9.9% of the shares outstanding once the project financing is completed; and -- Expects to provide further details in the short-term on current discussions for the additional equity financing required; -- Debt financing aggregating USD 300-350M - the Corporation: -- Expects to provide further details in the short-term as regards its continuing debt financing endeavours.

"We have made solid progress in our project financing endeavours over the past couple of weeks, firstly with a private placement with SoftBank, a global technology leader, and now with the signing of this agreement with Orion, a leading and well-regarded financier in the mining industry," said Guy Bourassa, President & C.E.O. of Nemaska Lithium. "This Streaming Agreement is a financing tool which limits shareholder dilution, lowers Nemaska Lithium's cost of capital, and is under terms which are both competitive and flexible," Bourassa continued.

Michael Barton, Portfolio Manager at Orion Resource Partners (UK) LLP said, "Orion is delighted to become a major investor in one of the most exciting lithium projects globally. We look forward to supporting Nemaska Lithium as Whabouchi and Shawinigan enter the next phase of development."

The Streaming Agreement provides for the sale and delivery to Orion of 14.5% on all lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate produced at the Shawinigan plant and sold to third parties (collectively, "Stream Products"). Orion's purchase price paid to Nemaska Lithium under the Streaming Agreement will be 40% of the sales proceeds of such Stream Products. Nemaska Lithium will act as Orion's agent in the sale of the Stream Products to third-party off-takers. Through this arrangement, Orion will receive 60% of the sales proceeds from such Stream Products, which will result in Orion receiving a net portion of approximately 8.7% of the Stream Products sales. The maximum amount of Stream Products deliverable per year will not exceed the equivalent of 5,000 tonnes of refined lithium products.

In consideration of the Streaming Agreement, Orion will make an advance payment equal to USD 150M to Nemaska Lithium Shawinigan Transformation Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nemaska Lithium. The advance payment will be released in two equal tranches of USD 75M with the first tranche expected to be payable once the Project Financing is in place and once Nemaska Lithium has satisfied certain customary conditions which it expects to satisfy soon after the Project Financing completion. The second tranche will be payable upon the satisfaction of certain technical and other customary conditions that must be satisfied no later than December 31, 2019. In the event that these latter conditions are not satisfied, the second tranche will not be released and the percentage of Stream Products will be reduced from 14.5% to 7.5%.

About Nemaska Lithium

Nemaska Lithium is a developing chemical company whose activities will be vertically integrated, from spodumene mining to the commercialization of high-purity lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate. These lithium salts are mainly destined for the fast-growing lithium-ion battery market, which is driven by the increasing demand for electric vehicles and energy storage worldwide. With its products and processes, Nemaska Lithium intends to facilitate access to green energy, for the benefit of humanity.

The Corporation will be operating the Whabouchi mine in Quebec, Canada, one of the richest lithium spodumene deposits in the world, both in volume and grade. The spodumene concentrate produced at the Whabouchi mine will be processed at the Shawinigan plant using a unique membrane electrolysis process for which the Corporation holds several patents.

Nemaska Lithium is a member of the S&P/TSX SmallCap Index, S&P/TSX Global Mining Index, S&P/TSX Global Base Metals Index, S&P/TSX Equal Weight Global Base Metals Index, and the MSCI Canada Small Cap Index. For more information, visit nemaskalithium.com or twitter.com/Nemaska_Lithium.

About Orion

The Orion Mine Finance Group is a mining-focused investment business with USD 4.5 billion under management (as of January 31, 2018). Orion specializes in providing comprehensive and customized capital investment solutions to mining companies.

Cautionary Statement on Forward-Looking Information

All statements, other than statements of historical fact, contained in this press release including, but not limited to, those relating to the Corporation receiving the USD 150M advance payment under the Streaming Agreement and to the completion of the Project Financing (or any component thereof) in general, constitute "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of certain securities laws and are based on expectations and projections as of the date of this press release. Certain important assumptions by the Corporation in making forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, (a) the satisfaction, in a timely manner, by the Corporation of conditions precedent to the payment of each USD 75M tranche of the advance payment, (b) the receipt by the Corporation of proceeds therefrom, and from all other components of the Project Financing, and (c) the Corporation having raised a sufficient amount under all components of the Project Financing to bring the Whabouchi mine and the Shawinigan plant to commercial production.

Forward-looking statements contained in this press release include, without limitation, those related to (i) the sale and delivery to Orion of the above-mentioned percentages (14.5% and 8.7% net) of Stream Products, (ii) the eventual sharing of proceeds from Stream Products between Orion and the Corporation, (iii) the Streaming Agreement being a financing tool that limits shareholder dilution and lowers cost of capital, (iv) the satisfaction of conditions no later than December 31, 2019 for the second tranche payment, (v) the Corporation's project being one of the most exciting globally and entering in its next phase of development, (vi) the Corporation providing further details regarding the equity and debt components of the Project Financing in the short-term, and (vii) generally, the above "About Nemaska Lithium" paragraph which essentially describe the Corporation's outlook, 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 a comprehensive USD 775M to USD 825M Project and general corporate working capital financing package will be put in place and that any component of the Project Financing will be completed, as the next steps and, eventually, the actual results of financing endeavors, in particular as regards the debt financing and the equity offerings, and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

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. Forward-looking statements are provided for the purpose of providing information about management's endeavors to complete its project financing and, more generally, its expectations and plans relating to the future. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as a number of important risk factors and future events 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. All of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements and those made in our other filings with the securities regulators of Canada including, but not limited to, the cautionary statements made in the "Risk Factors" section of the Corporation's Annual Information Form dated October 5, 2017 and the "Risk Exposure and Management" section of the Corporation's quarterly Management Discussion & Analysis. The Corporation cautions that the foregoing list of factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive, and new, unforeseeable risks may arise from time to time. 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 Nemaska Lithium is available in the SEDAR database (www.sedar.com) and on the Corporation's website at: www.nemaskalithium.com.

Contacts:

Victor Cantore

Investor Relations

514 831-3809

victor.cantore@nemaskalithium.com



Wanda Cutler

Investor Relations

416 303-6460

wanda.cutler@nemaskalithium.com



Fanny-Eve Tapp

Media Relations

B. 514 935 2777 # 204

C. 514 442 0445

fanny-eve.tapp@nemaskalithium.com

www.nemaskalithium.com



Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 12, 2018) - Highvista Gold Inc. ("Highvista" or the "Company") (TSXV: HVV) wishes to announce that its asset purchase agreement (the "Asset Purchase Agreement") with Prince Arthur Capital Corporation ("PAC") has been amended to reflect the extended closing of the transaction to June 29, 2018. PAC is an "affiliated entity" used to facilitate the acquisition of two leased properties and one development property located in Windsor, Ontario (collectively, the "Windsor Properties"). The transaction will constitute a Change of Business from mineral exploration to an investment company and a Reverse Takeover transaction under the rules of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "TSXV")(the "Transaction").

The Company has also determined to let lapse the previously announced option on an additional development property located in St. Catharines and the Company is no longer considering acquiring the property.

As part of its previously announced Change of Business, the primary areas of the investment focus of Highvista will be providing investment solutions for government-funded entities, such as hospitals and legions, regarding their facilities and related services and infrastructure. The Company will be making medically-oriented property and other infrastructure and healthcare-oriented "social infrastructure investments" its main focus.

Highvista also announces that Dr. Ruben Shiffman, BBA, MBA, PhD, has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the Company. Dr. Shiffman is currently founder and principal of 1885683 Alberta a light oil producer in Manitoba, Canada and of Greenland Resources Inc., a mining company with assets in Greenland. He was the co-founder and Executive Chairman of the mining company Calvista Gold (TSX:CVZ), successfully sold to Eike Batista AUX group. Previously, Ruben was the Managing Director of emerging markets trading at Scotia Capital, VP trading at TD Securities and represented Mexico MOF at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel. He is currently Governor of the International Board of Governors of Tel-Aviv University.

To the knowledge of the directors and officers of Highvista and PAC, as of the Closing of the Transaction, PAC is the only person who is anticipated to own of record or beneficially, directly or indirectly, or exercise control or direction over the common shares of Highvista carrying more than 10% of the votes attached to such common shares.

The trading of common shares of Highvista has been halted and will remain halted pending receipt by the TSXV of certain required materials from Highvista and until Highvista engages a sponsor or a sponsorship exemption is granted. The Company intends to apply for an exemption from the sponsorship requirements of the TSXV in connection with the Transaction. There is no assurance that such sponsorship exemption will be granted or be granted on terms satisfactory to the parties.

The Transaction is a "related party transaction" within the meaning of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 Protection of Minority Shareholders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101") as Gerry McCarvill, a director, officer and shareholder of the Company, is also a director, officer and sole shareholder of PAC. As a consequence, the Transaction is subject to minority shareholder approval requirements.

Further details of the Transaction will be provided in the Company's information circular which it plans to deliver to Shareholders of the Company for its upcoming next Annual and Special Meeting.

About Highvista

Highvista indirectly owns 100% of a Mexican subsidiary that controls various mining properties in Sonora, Mexico. Its properties are located in the Sonoran Gold Belt, with the Canasta Dorada Gold Project located immediately adjacent to Alamos Gold's El Chanate Mine ("Alamos"). Details of Highvista's Canasta Dorada Project can be viewed at the Company's website at www.highvistagold.com.

Reader Advisory

Completion of the transaction described herein is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to, TSX Venture Exchange acceptance and if applicable, disinterested shareholder approval.

Where applicable, the transaction cannot close until the required shareholder approval is obtained. There can be no assurance that the transaction will be completed as proposed or at all.

This news release may contain forward-looking statements based on assumptions, uncertainties and management's best estimate of future events. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations and projections. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. When used herein, words such as "anticipate", "will", "intend" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. For a more detailed discussion of such risks and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, refer to Highvista Gold Inc.'s filings with Canadian securities regulators available on www.sedar.com or the Company's website at www.highvistagold.com

For further information, please contact:

Highvista Gold Inc.

Paul Crath, President and Chief Executive Officer

Tel: (416) 504-4128

Fax: (416) 504-4129

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 PRESS RELEASE.Ardian, a Paris, France-based private investment firm, raised 230m for its latest growth equity fund.

Ardian Growth Fund II was raised in four months from both institutional investors such as the European Investment Fund (FEI) and Bpifrance  which invests on its own account and within the framework of the Investments for the Future Programme via the MultiCap Croissance fund  and as well as from more than 50 European entrepreneurs in the digital sector.

Led by Laurent Foata, Ardian Growth takes both minority and majority positions, investing up to 25m in fast growing and profitable companies that want to accelerate their international development and external growth. Active in France, Italy, Spain and Benelux, Ardian Growth pursues a pan-European investment strategy.

Since 1998, Ardian Growth has supported more than 100 companies in the digital sector (software, internet, etc.), most recently including Bricoprive and Ivalua in France, Lastminute.com in Italy and T2O in Spain. During the last twelve months, Ardian Growth has been particularly active with more than 9 exits, 5 investments and 9 build-ups.

FinSMEs

12/04/2018Go-Jek, a Jakarta, Indonesia-based ride-hailing platform, secured $35m in funding.

The investor was Allianz X, Allianz Groups digital investment unit.

The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations.

Go-Jek is an is an on-demand service provider that provides a variety of complete services starting from transportation, logistics, payment, food delivery, and other on-demand services, by connecting users to more than 1 million driver partners, more than 150.000 food vendors, and more than 30.000 other services.

The company now operates in 50 cities in Indonesia.

Go-Jek app is now available for iOS and Android and can be downloaded through www.GO-JEK.com/app.

FinSMEs

12/04/2018Liberis, a UK-based provider of innovative business cash advance solutions, secured 57.5m in combined funding.

Backers included British Business Investments, Paragon Bank, BCI Finance, and Blenheim Chalcot.

The new facility and equity investment will accelerate growth and expansion of its product offering both in the UK and internationally.

Led by Rob Straathof, CEO, Liberis provides funding from 1,000 to 500,000 to small businesses based on their future credit and debit card sales. The funding is paid back via a pre-agreed percentage of the business digital transactions.

To date, the company has helped over 7,000 small businesses, advanced 210m in funding and supported over 35,000 jobs in the UK. Liberis has also entered a new venture with Newable Business Finance, a designated Responsible Finance Provider, which provides business loans over 2 to 5 years to enable longer term capital for its customers.

FinSMEs

12/04/2018Blockchain based fintech company Ripple has invested $25m in XRP to Blockchain Capitals most recent $150m fund, specifically Blockchain Capital Parallel IV, LP.

Based in San Francisco, Blockchain Capital is the first fund dedicated solely to the blockchain space and accepts capital calls in digital assets. It will focus on investing in entrepreneurial teams that are building businesses on blockchain technology.

Given Ripples focus on payments, the investment in Blockchain Capital allows the company to connect and develop inroads with entrepreneurs and companies focused on other use cases, including those that use the XRP Ledger and Interledger Protocol.

With offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Singapore and Sydney, Ripple operates a global network that gives financial institutions the power to process their customers payments anywhere in the world instantly.

Banks and payment providers can use the digital asset XRP to further reduce their costs and access new markets.

The company has more than 100 customers around the world.

FinSMEs

12/04/2018Guest Commentary Audio Article This is a short history of the Morgan family farm before the possible development of the remaining 49 acres east of Chesterton. Jesse and Jane Morgan arrived in Northwest Indiana in 1833 after traveling through Ohio, northern Indiana, stopping off in LaPorte County for a...

Echoes of the Past Audio Article 10 Years Ago Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2011  Bethlehem Lutheran Church will host a wellness screening event. . . CHS girls soccer team beats LaPorte 5-0 and clinches a share of the DAC title. Scoring goals are Rosie Biehl (2), Hannah Kollar (2), and Sam...

Voice of the People I can drive on the left lane of Ind. 49 and not have to deal with the truck traffic any more. I dont think I know you Jim Ton but apparently youre the one that made this happen. My life is a little better now....

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...Sensoro, a Seattle, WA-based Internet of Things technology service provider, completed a multi-million dollar Series C round of financing.

Backers included Baidu Ventures, Northern Light Venture Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital and Chaos Investment, among other institutions.

The company intends to use the funds to continue developing IoT technology, accelerate the global expansion of its IoT products and gain competitiveness.

Co-founded in 2013 as part of Microsoft Ventures, Sensoro has developed a small Internet of Things LPWAN chip, and has a wide range of products that include communication modules, sensors, communication base stations and cloud services.

The company has provided IoT solutions and services to more than 700 brands all over the world, including companies and organizations such as Microsoft, Google, Real Madrid FC, Bosch or Sumitomo.

FinSMEs

12/04/2018.      ,          (0:1)   .  ,           ,             . "               .          - ...The death toll of an Algerian military plane that crashed early on Wednesday in the military airport of Boufarik, 30 km south of Algiers, has risen to 257, local media reported.

Algerian soldiers watch the military plane after it crashed in Boufarik, near the Algerian capital, Algiers, April 11, 2018. [Photo: AP/Anis Belghoul]

An Ilyushin I-76 troop carrier belonging to the Algerian Air Force crashed Wednesday morning in the perimeter of the military airbase of Boufarik, Defense Ministry confirmed in a statement.

Ennahar private television channel said the plane carried more than 250 troops and was departing for the southwest province of Bechar, before crashing in an unpopulated green field near the airport.

Photo taken on April 11, 2018 and posted by Algerian news agency ALG24, shows firefighters and soldiers at the scene of a fatal military plane crash near Boufarik military base near the Algerian capital, Algiers. [Photo: ALG24 via AP]

Army Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Gaid Salah, has extended condolences to the families of the victims and ordered to open an investigation into the incident.

Fire-fighting Department said in a statement that 300 fire-fighters, equipped with 40 ambulances and 40 fire trucks, have rushed to the crash site to extinguish fire and conduct rescue operations.Xiaomi introduced its Mi MIX 2S smartphone in China last month. Now the has scheduled an event on April 25th to introduced a new Mi series smartphone, which could be Mi 6X that was certified by TENAA recently. The event takes place at Wuhan University, the alma mater of the Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun in Hubei province Wuhan, China.

Xiaomi Mi 6X rumored specifications

5.99-inch (21601080 pixels) Full HD+ 2.5D curved glass display

2.2GHz Octa-Core Snapdragon 626 Mobile Platform with Adreno 506 GPU

4GB RAM, 64GB storage, expandable memory up to 128GB with microSD

Android 8.1 (Oreo)

Hybrid Dual SIM (micro + nano/microSD)

20MP rear camera with LED flash, f/2.0 aperture, secondary 8MP camera with f/1.8 aperture

20MP front-facing camera with f/2.0 aperture

Fingerprint sensor, Infrared sensor

Dimensions: 158.8875.547.3mm; Weight: 166g

3.5mm audio jack

4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 ac (2.4GHz / 5GHz), Bluetooth 5 LE, GPS + GLONASS, USB Type-C

2910mAh battery

The Xiaomi Mi 6X is expected to come in Black, Rose Gold, Gold, White, Blue, Red, Pink, Gray and Silver colors. We should know more details when the phone goes official in a couple of weeks.

SourceThomson (owned by Technicolor SA, France), the leading French consumer brand today launched a range of its smart TVs in collaboration with Business France (Trade Section of the Embassy of France) and in an exclusive licensing agreement with SPPL (Super Plastronics Pvt. Ltd.), in India as it had promised.

The list of TVs include 43 UHD 4K, 40 Full HD and 32-in HD smart TVs. The Smart TVs come with Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Netflix, run on Android 4.4 and have Aptoide store to download any app.

Thomson LED Smart TV 32-inch (32M3277) specifications

32-inch (1366768 pixels) HD LED display with 178-degree viewing angle, 6.5ms dynamic response, 200000:1 dynamic contrast, 450 cd/m brightness

ARM Cortex A53 64-bit Processor with Mali-450MP3 GPU

1GB RAM, 8GB internal memory

Android 4.4.4 (KitKat)

WiFi 802.11 b/g/n (2.4 GHz), 3 x HDMI, USB 2.0 x 2, Ethernet

Supports AVI, MPG, DAT, VOB, DIV, MOV, MKV, RM video formats

2 x 10W speaker

Thomson LED Smart TV 40-inch (40TM4099) specifications

40-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) Full HD LED display with 178-degree viewing angle, 6.5ms dynamic response, 300000:1 dynamic contrast, 450 cd/m brightness

ARM Cortex A53 64-bit Processor with Mali-450MP3 GPU

1GB RAM, 8GB internal memory

Android 4.4.4 (KitKat)

WiFi 802.11 b/g/n (2.4 GHz), 3 x HDMI, USB 2.0 x 2, Ethernet

Supports AVI, MPG, DAT, VOB, DIV, MOV, MKV, RM video formats

2 x 10W speaker

Thomson LED Smart TV 43-inch (43TM4377) specifications

43-inch (3840 x 2160 pixels) Ultra HD LED display with 178-degree viewing angle, 6.5ms dynamic response, 300000:1 dynamic contrast, 550 cd/m

brightness

brightness ARM Cortex A53 64-bitProcessor with Multi Core Mali-T720 GPU

1GB RAM, 8GB internal memory

Android 4.4.4 (KitKat)

WiFi 802.11 b/g/n (2.4 GHz), 3 x HDMI, USB 2.0 x 2, Ethernet

Supports AVI, MPG, DAT, VOB, DIV, MOV, MKV, RM video formats

2 x 10W speaker

These TVs will be available exclusively from Flipkart tomorrow, April 13th at 12 noon. Pricing as follows.

32 HD SMART (32M3277)  Rs. 13,490

40 Full HD SMART (40TM4099)  Rs. 19,990

43 UHD 4K (43TM4377)  Rs. 27,999

Commenting on the launch, Claire Villeneuve, Head, Intellectual Property and Licensing, Technicolor, France, said:

Technicolor, owner of Thomson brand is very proud to sign a long-term license with SPPL as a strategic partner to develop Thomsons presence in India.

Avneet Singh Marwah, CEO, Super Plastronics Pvt. Ltd., the Indian Brand Licensee for Thomson, said:

We are delighted to partner up with a leading and historic global brand like Thomson. It is SPPLs endeavor and commitment to promote Make in India, generate employment and contribute to the Indian economy. With the launch we aim to capture 6%  7% of total TV market share and make Thomson, No. 1 Online smart TV brand in India. We have already planned to put one more manufacturing line of Led TV by next-quarter in order to offer Indian consumer products that are at par with global Standards i.e. quality, innovation and elegance, at a competitive price. While technology and innovation remains the core of it, we have worked on many aspects of TV keeping in mind the Indian palate for aesthetics, color and sound.

Sandeep Karwa, Head of TV & Large Appliance Flipkart said:

Flipkart ensures a shopping experience for customers that is driven by a diverse selection, offering them with best in class technology at affordable prices. Thomson, a trusted brand worldwide, comes with a global legacy in technology and innovation. Our exclusive partnership with Thomson offers our shoppers a complete package of smart technology and great features at an aggressive price, making it a compelling offer and we are confident this would be another best seller on Flipkart. Replicating our strategy for smartphones, this launch marries well into our commitment of driving innovation in the market while we continue to be Indias most trusted destination for TVsABC News star Joy Behar caused an uproar on The View Thursday when she said President Trump is more hostile than North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

We have gotten to a point in the world now where we have to rely on the sanity of Kim Jong Un and Putin over the president of the United States, Behar said when discussing recent tweets sent by Trump that threatened military action against Syria.

Thats where were at, Behar said before praising a Russian official who condemned diplomacy via Twitter.

Co-host Sunny Hostin chimed in, saying she doesnt think Trump is able to compartmentalize things the way a president should, and therefore gets easily agitated.

Bill Clinton was famous for being able to compartmentalize, Behar responded.

Conservative co-host Meghan McCain disagreed, saying there is no way for Trump to win because people would get angry regardless of whether or not he made threats over social media.

I know its like, sort of, funny to laugh at this but we are talking about genocide in Syria, McCain said, noting that she has an issue with her colleagues invoking a moral relativism between someone like Kim Jong Un and Putin and President Trump.

The reliably liberal Behar jumped in, Do you think Kim Jong Un is less moral than Trump?

Oh my God chemical gassing of children, McCain fired back. Last time I checked, America isnt doing that to anyone.

Behar then defended the North Korean dictator, saying Kim Jong Un doesnt do that. What are you talking about?

McCain said that while she often disagrees with Trump, anyone who compares him to evil murderous dictators loses all arguments in her eyes.

What Im saying is I see the two of them with backing off of war, and I see President Trump provoking war, Behar fired back.

Behar has mocked Trump on a regular basis since the former real estate mogul joined the political world. She was recently forced to apologize after coming under fire for mocking the Christian faith of Vice President Mike Pence. Her frequent anti-Trump outbursts have even resulted in watchdogs questioning if The View should fall under ABCs news division.Patti LuPone wants Hollywood stars to say in Hollywood, specifically Uma Thurman.

I dont necessarily need to see film actors on stage, because they cant. Not in my country they cant, LuPone said at the launch of a revival of Stephen Sondheims Company, per iNews. Can I just say, Uma Thurman in The Parisian Woman, anybody see it? Holy s-! Im sorry, Im sorry.

Thurman received mixed reviews for her role in last years The Parisian Woman. LuPone said while there might not be a stigma against film actors appearing on Broadway anymore, perhaps there should be.'

Its hard work, so I want you to understand that I have nothing against Uma Thurman, said Tony Award-winning LuPone, who starred in Evita and Sunset Boulevard. But you want those people to come to the stage for the right reason and that is to honor the stage, honor the theatre and not be in for themselves, and Im not saying that Uma was.

She added, You also lower the standard, and that seems to be happening in the world with everything.

A rep for LuPone had no further comment. Thurmans rep didnt immediately return a request for comment.

This story originally appeared in the New York Post.One Tree Hill star Chad Michael Murray was told by a Hollywood medium that his grandmother was not murdered like he originally thought.

Murray, 36, appeared on E!'s Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry Wednesday in hopes of getting some closure with his grandmothers death.

Murrays grandfather was accused of killing his grandmother, but Henry, 22, said that did not appear to be the case.

Theres this feeling that grandpa wouldve said or verbalized something to people before he died and after he died, his words were changed. Hes like, No, Im not taking accountability for this. This isnt right. Theres something wrong here with the narrative thats put after, Henry told Murray.

HANDMAIDS TALE WRITER SAYS STAR WARS INSPIRED 9/11 TERRORISTS

For some reason, theyre having me talk about grandma. Theyre having me talk about a fall for some reason. I dont know what this is, the medium continued.

Murray said he heard that his grandfather was arrested for the murder of his grandmother.

He said she was found with her hands tied behind her back, hung in the basement. So there was a fall, just in a different way.

Murray explained his grandfather was cleared because of lack of evidence.

Henry told the Sun Records star that his grandmother was not murdered, but died after taking her own life.

MEGHAN MARKLES ESTRANGED SISTER FURIOUS FUTURE ROYAL DIDNT EXTEND INVITATION TO MANY FAMILY MEMBERS

Before I got here, there was this woman who came through who I acknowledged passing away tragically. But it came through in a way of like, taking accountability to some extent for her actions, Henry told Murray. But Im thinking that it might have been even her way of kinda trying to come through and say, Hey, this is something that Im putting more on myself. So, I dont think he killed your grandmother.

Murray was shocked by the revelations and said he believed Henry.

I am, without a doubt, a believer, Murray said. Hes pretty damn good at it.The revelation that federal prosecutors are seeking documents related to the notorious Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump saying demeaning things about women has cast a harsh new spotlight on NBC News, which mysteriously sat on the tape for weeks or months  until it had been leaked to The Washington Post.

The feds who raided the offices of Trump attorney Michael Cohen were reportedly seeking information about the tape  but anti-Trump NBC has so far evaded scrutiny. Instead, its the pro-Trump National Enquirer which is now facing the brunt of media shaming over its alleged suppression of negative Trump stories.

Conservative columnist Britt McHenry told Fox News the FBI investigation has gone off the rails, giving the appearance that Trump and his supporters are being targeted. As the FBI continues to probe Trumps past, liberal media members are scolding the National Enquirer for allegedly sitting on a story while NBC gets a pass.

Only time will tell how this proceeding plays out, but it begs the question why NBC, vocal in its dislike of a Trump, has yet to face similar scrutiny for sitting on the Access Hollywood tape, McHenry said.

Federalist contributor Joseph Wulfsohn told Fox News that he doesnt see why investigators are looking at the Enquirers decision, as it is a private company, unless Cohen paid to keep material under wraps. However, he says, NBC did the opposite and kept the Access Hollywood tape in its back pocket until it could do the most political damage to Trump.

Wulfsohn said NBCs move was journalistically unethical, but shouldnt warrant an FBI investigation, either, unless there is criminal wrongdoing that the public isnt aware of.

NBC News has never given a coherent explanation of why it didnt broadcast the tape. Now, the effort to obtain records related to the tape has sparked renewed interest in how NBC News botched the situation, and in the mystery of NBCs motivations for delaying action to air the audio.

Mediaite columnist John Ziegler wrote on Wednesday that it was a highly unethical political decision by someone at NBC not to release the tape itself before it was eventually leaked.

The tape of Trump  a dominating storyline in the news cycle preceding the 2016 election -- was recorded on a hot mic during the taping of NBCUniversal-owned Access Hollywood in 2005 and reportedly landed on NBC News chairman Andy Lacks desk days or weeks before the incendiary contents were finally aired in October 2016.

Just how long NBC knew about the tape is an open question. NBC sources tell Fox News that NBC staffers were openly discussing the existence of the tape in August 2016 in Rio, where star Billy Bush was providing Olympics coverage. Bush could be heard egging Trump on in the "Access Hollywood" recording.

Eventually, just weeks before the 2016 election, the tape was leaked to The Washington Posts David Fahrenthold, who is a close friend of NBC News executive Noah Oppenheim from prestigious Harvard University, where the men were editors together at the storied Crimson student newspaper.

Apparently NBC has no hard feelings toward Fahrenthold over his scoop  the network recently signed the anti-Trump newsman to a paid consultancy.

While NBC claimed it was slow to air the tape because the process was gummed up by lawyers, The Post was able to publish it within hours. With the leaked version published, NBC aired the tape a few minutes later  suggesting that it really was ready for broadcast from a legal standpoint.

The fact that no one has ever even gotten an answer from NBC about how this could have happened is equally unfathomable, Mediaite's Ziegler wrote.

NBC doesnt look good here, and no amount of finessing will make it look any prettier, Politico wrote at the time.

Following the release of the tape, NBC fired Bush. Shortly thereafter, Oppenheim was promoted to NBC News president.

While NBC has never publicly revealed who leaked the tape and why nobody was held accountable, its notable the same executives had no problem quickly figuring out who leaked a tape of MSNBC star Lawrence ODonnells on-camera meltdown. It reportedly took only six days for an NBC News employee to be fired for the incident.

NBC did not respond when asked if the FBI has contacted the network regarding its role in the Access Hollywood tape. NBCUniversal did not respond when asked if it ever investigated who leaked the Access Hollywood tape.

There is this expectation that places like NBC are constantly working in good faith. They like using outlets like the Enquirer to contrast themselves with but their behavior a lot of the times isnt that different, Daily Caller media reporter Joe Simonson told Fox News.

NBC has also faced criticisms over the last six months for sitting on another explosive story on sex harassment -- Ronan Farrows expose on Harvey Weinstein. Farrow would later take the piece to the prestigious New Yorker magazine, which published his work to great acclaim.

NBC claimed that Farrows story as theyd seen it did not meet their editorial standards. Ironically, Farrow, who left NBC after it spiked his Weinstein story, has gone on to report for The New Yorker on allegations that The Enquirer engaged in the tabloid practice called catch and kill related to Trump -- buying rights to a damaging story about an ally, then suppressing it rather than publishing.

NBC did not respond when asked if it investigated why Farrows reporting was spiked.

As for the Access Hollywood tape, some speculate that Lack didnt want to air the video to protect Bush, whod been tapped as a potential heir to Matt Lauer. Some feel that the network wanted to wait until as close to Election Day as possible, and some simply feel it was a glass house situation.

Ziegler opined that NBC may have wanted The Post to break the story, as it would have taken the focus off why Lacks network didnt release it during the Republican primaries. The Mediaite columnist notes that releasing the tape when the GOP had other options would have killed the medias golden goose, which was Trumps ratings-friendly campaign.

NBC News has a long history of sitting on damaging stories -- dating back to period in 1998 and 1999 when the network sat on an interview with Juanita Broaddrick accusing Bill Clinton of rape.

Back in 1999, while Lack was on his first tour as president of NBC News, the network's Dateline program conducted an interview in which Broaddrick gave a lengthy account of her alleged rape, but NBC didnt air it until after Clintons impeachment hearing ended with acquittal.

Broaddrick has accused the network of editing out a portion of her interview in which she discussed Hillary Clintons role in silencing her and other victims. She has since called for Lack to re-air the interview in its entirety, to no avail.

Its notable that both stories NBC sat on involve mistreatment of women.

Industry insiders have pondered for months whether NBC News had been wary of running the Weinstein scoop due to its own problems inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza. A few weeks after Weinstein was outed, NBC News was forced to fire its biggest star, "Today" co-host Lauer, for his own sexual misconduct.

Shortly after Lauer was fired for sexual misconduct last year, Lack announced a culture assessment of the division he oversees. He installed an assortment of other bureaucratic efforts to combat sex harassment, such as focus groups and mandatory training on workplace behavior.

None of the steps taken by NBC News place any blame on Lack or Oppenheim, who are responsible for spiking two of the biggest sex harassment stories in recent memory.

NBCUniversal has claimed that its corporate human resources department is investigating internally to see who knew about Lauers pervy behavior, and when it was known, but there have been no public indications that an investigation is actually underway.

Lack and Lauer were extremely close, even taking luxury vacations together, but Lack has emerged unscathed, as has Oppenheim, who has a long history as an executive at Today. In fact, Oppenheim told NBC producers after Lauers firing that all he knew about the co-host's reputedly pervy ways was what he saw on the covers of supermarket tabloids when he was on the grocery line.

A source close to NBC says that the investigation, if it was ever really underway, now appears to be dead. Over the past five months, NBCs parent company has repeatedly told Fox News that it doesnt have an update on the alleged internal investigation. It did not respond to the latest inquiry.Khloe Kardashian's friend Khadijah Haqq McCray -- Malika Haqq's twin sister -- is sticking by the reality star's side as cheating rumors about her current beau and soon-to-be father to her child swirl. The 35-year-old posted a cryptic Instagram post Tuesday, the day TMZ released videos of Thompson appearing to cheat on a pregnant Kardashian.

"The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother," McCray's post read, attributing the quote to John Wooden. She captioned the graphic with a first bump emoji.

But both Kardashian and McCray fans knew exactly who the quote was targeting, with several Instagram users responding with the same two words: "Shots fired!" More than 1,500 people commented on the post, weighing in on Thompson's alleged "betrayal."

PREGNANT KHLOE KARDASHIAN'S BOYFRIEND TRISTAN THOMPSON APPARENTLY SEEN CHEATING IN NEW VIDEO

"Honestly everything thats going on with your friend Khloe and what that guy did to her is disgusting!" one Instagram user replied. "Khloe really wanted a family and to be in love. You can tell how happy she was from looking at the videos and posts. This is beyond betrayal."

"I feel so bad for Khloe, shes my favorite Kardashian, shes true to herself and gives her man 110%," another added.

"The shade. I feel so sorry for Khloe," one woman wrote.

The rumors of Thompson's cheating came just one day after the star posted an image of the two of them kissing on Instagram while he holds her baby bump.

As of Thursday morning, Kardashian had yet to post anything on social media nor had she commented publicly on videos that reportedly show Thompson cheating on her with other women back in October 2017, though reports say she went ballistic when she heard the news.

Fans came to Kardashian's defense Wednesday night, booing the Cleveland Cavaliers player as he entered a game at his home court, the Quicken Loans Arena. Signs in support of the 9-months-pregnant Kardashian were also spotted among the crowd -- a move that was heavily praised on social media.

FANS BOO TRISTAN THOMPSON IN FIRST GAME SINCE ALLEGEDLY CHEATING ON PREGNANT KHLOE KARDASHIAN

"Its what he deserves! Kudos to the crowd," one Twitter user posted.

"What an absolute atrocious pig he is!! Love Khloe. She will be fine with her supportive family and friends around her. I hope he gets booed every time he hits the court!" another added.

The Keeping Up with the Kardashians star is still expected to give birth in Ohio -- where Thompson is based.

Fox News' Stephen Sorace and Tyler McCarthy contributed to this report.next Image 1 of 2

prev Image 2 of 2

Savannah Guthrie promises that the "Today" show has been purged of all "creeps" since the NBC morning show fired Matt Lauer after multiple women accused him of sexual assault and harassment.

Lauer's former co-host told The Hollywood Reporter "there are no creeps" at "Today."

"We're all married, we're all pretty boring and there's a presumption of good faith, you know?" Guthrie said in defense of the remaining NBC hosts, a group that includes Carson Daly, Al Roker and Craig Melvin.

Guthrie's new co-host, Hoda Kotb, also defended the male "Today" reporters saying, "Al's like your crazy uncle, Carson's your best guy friend. I hug Craig when I see him. We don't feel like there's a new set of rules that we cannot be ourselves."

While the female hosts may not have to face "creeps" on the set of "Today," Kotb revealed she's still in touch with disgraced Lauer, even after one woman accused the 60-year-old of sexually assaulting her in his office until she passed out.

"We keep in touch with him," Kotb said of her current relationship with Lauer. "I mean look, this is one of those complex situations. Ive known him since I started working at NBC [in 1998]. When I was sick with breast cancer, he was the first to call. He helps and helped in ways that  you know, he was incredible in that way."

She added, "There is that Matt and then theres the Matt that the accusers speak of. And those accusers voices matter and that story matters."

To Guthrie, Kotb added, "Its still tough, right?"

Guthrie replied, "Yes."

Lauer was fired from the show in November 2017 after it was revealed he had allegedly violated NBCs workplace harassment policies on several occasions with different women working at the show.

Kotb was announced as Lauer's replacement on January 2.Many of Americas public schools are teaching youths pornographic subject matter these days, some parents argue, so theyre planning a Sex Ed Sit Out on April 23.

They want like-minded parents to keep their children at home that Monday, to send a message to local school boards and elected officials.

Cities planning to participate include Charlotte, N.C.; Sacramento, Calif.; Bloomington, Ind.; Austin and San Antonio, Texas; Spokane, Wash.; and Martinsburg, W.Va., the Washington Times reported.

The effort is being run in partnership with socially conservative groups such as the Family Research Council, the American Life League and the Liberty Counsel, the Times reported.

One of the sit-out organizers is Elizabeth Johnston, a North Carolina blogger who calls herself The Activist Mommy. She first revealed plans for the sit-out during a radio interview April 4, the Christian Post reported.

Johnson contends that sexual content in some schools classes goes beyond the sex education class and into other subjects, such as history, science and math.

"We send our kids to school to learn reading and writing and science and history, not how to question whether they really are a boy or a girl, Johnston told CBN News.

"We send our kids to school to learn reading and writing and science and history, not how to question whether they really are a boy or a girl."  Elizabeth Johnston, "The Activist Mommy"

She asserts that a group called the Human Rights Campaign is behind many of the efforts to shape school curricula.

The Human Rights Campaign, based in Washington, D.C., operates its Welcoming Schools program, through which it says it provides training and resources to create LGBTQ and gender inclusive schools, prevent bias-based bullying, and support transgender and non-binary students.

The HRCs efforts include integrating school books that reflect diversity, and creating inclusive spaces within schools to allow all students to thrive regardless of gender identity or expression.

Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, operates a program called Get Real that is offered to school boards across the U.S. It covers topics such as anatomy, puberty, sexually transmitted diseases and sexual identity, the Times reported.

The U.S. has no federal standard on sex education, the newspaper added. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia require their public schools to teach sex ed, the report said.

More information about "Sex Ed Sit Out" can be found on the event's Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/SitOutProtest/A woman in Illinois is suing a local restaurant over their lasagna, which she claims scalded her left hand. Theresa Thomas is currently seeking $50,000 plus lawyer fees from Osteria Ottimo Ristorante in Orland Park.

According to the lawsuit, Thomas was served an impossibly hot lasagna by the eatery, and when she touched it with her fork, without warning, piping hot marinara sauce shot from the lasagna and onto Theresas left hand, scalding the skin and causing a large burn.

The Chicago Tribune reports that the lawsuit alleges Osteria Ottimo Ristorante was careless and negligent in preparing unreasonably hot and/or dangerous food, serving such food, failing to cool the food, failing to train staff members to serve cooler food, and failing to warn Thomas and others that their food was hot or dangerous.

Thomass lawyer David S. Petrich claims that since the incident, Thomas has continued to suffer great physical pain and mental anguish. The Daily Meal has reached out to Petrich and Osteria Ottimo for further comment on the matter.Bottoms up?

A British explorer who lost his toes to frostbite has decided to donate the detached digits to a bar in the Yukon Territory  where theyll be used to garnish the establishments signature (and gruesome) Sourtoe Cocktail.

Nick Griffiths, who hails from Bolton, Greater Manchester, was a participant in the Yukon Arctic Race in February, when extreme temperatures forced the 46-year-old to abandon the race and seek treatment for frostbite at a hospital.

Doctors informed Griffiths they would need to amputate three of his toes  but instead of lamenting the loss, he asked if he might be able to keep his dismembered digits so he could send them off to the Downtown Hotel in Dawson City, Yukon.

AIRLINE PASSENGER HID STASH OF COCAINE IN LIQUOR BOTTLE

When I was going into the [operating room] I asked the surgeon if I could save my toes and told him what it was for. He found it quite amusing, Griffiths told The Mirror.

I wrote to the Downtown Hotel to tell them about my toes and what had happened, and they said theyd love to have them.

The hospital granted Griffiths wishes and gave him back his toes  in three small jars  which Griffiths says he now plans to send off to the Downtown Hotel, if he can figure out how to do so.

The only problem is Im not sure you can just send amputated toes through the post, he told the Mirror.

These wont be the Downtown Hotels first amputated toes, either. The hotels bar has been serving up its signature Sourtoe Cocktail  basically just a shot of whiskey with a shrunken human toe in it  since 1973.

The bar has reportedly collected about 10 dismembered toes in total, and proudly displays the legend behind each on the bars Wall of Fame. Over the years, the bar claims that over 100,000 patrons have ordered its Sourtoe Cocktail, making them members of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club.

BUDWEISER TEAMING UP WITH JIM BEAM FOR SPECIALTY BEER

The Downtown Hotel has only a few rules for joining the club, too: For starters, patrons are not allowed to swallow the toe  which has happened, twice  lest they be charged a $500 fine. And secondly, customers are told you can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips must touch the toe.

The bars first toe, according to The Independent, came from a man named Louie Linken, who lost the toe to frostbite while transporting alcohol from Yukon to Alaska in the 1920s. A man named Captain Dick Stevenson found Linkens toe preserved in a jar of alcohol in 1973, and decided to create the Downtown Hotels Sourtoe Cocktail on the spot.

The bars current Toe Master, Terry Lee, is now responsible for preserving the bars current collection of toes, which are said to be sterilized by the drying and storage process, The New York Post reports.

"When the toes arrive we put them in medical fluid, Lee told the Mirror. Then we drain that and chop off any fat or veins that might be hanging out.

"We then sit them in rock salt for six weeks and they become preserved. We remove the toes from the salt each time we use them and try to rotate them each week, he said.

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Lee further added that Griffiths offer of three new toes is amazing, and said he hopes the Brit has no trouble sending the toes across the pond.

"I hope he'll be able to visit and enjoy his own toe in our Sourtoe Cocktail one day."Girl Scout Troop 6000 of New York City is celebrating an extra special cookie season this year. The regions first homeless shelter- based troop has surpassed its goal of selling 6,000 boxes of the beloved treats in their inaugural year of cookie sales.

Troop 6000 is a Girl Scout troop specially designed to serve girls in the New York City shelter system.

A lot of people ask us, whats the difference between us and traditional troops, and there really isnt a difference. Theyre exactly the same, just that they dont have a home, troop leader Giselle Burgess told Fox 5.

Burgess founded the troop in 2016, and her four daughters are now thriving alongside 290 fellow scouts.

TSA DENIES CLAIM THAT THEY ARE RANDOMLY SCREENING TRAVELERS' SNACKS

Im very excited because its the first time and I want to know the feeling of actually selling something, a Girl Scout named Sinai told Fox 5 of their entrepreneurial endeavor. Selling Tagalongs, Thin Mints and America's favorite Girl Scout cookie, Samoas, out of the Kelloggs Cafe in Union Square, their booming business shows no signs of slowing down.

The biggest impact that we see  and when you talk to the girls youll hear them say [it]  is that they belong to something, they have a sisterhood within the other Girl Scouts, Meredith Maskara, CEO of the Girl Scouts of Greater New York, told ABC News. They talk to other girls who may be in their same situation who feel alone, and they feel like they have a stronger sense of community and belonging overall.

5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT GIRL SCOUT COOKIES

Shelter resident Ruby Cornelio told Refinery29 that she is thankful her daughters Jasmine, 8, and Juwanda, 6, have the opportunity to get involved with the cause. "It's a big step to take because it teaches them responsibility, it's a good skill to learn at a young age, she said.

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They have been wanting to do this for so long, Corinthia Fludd, the troop's recruiting specialist, shared with AM New York. Its the number one thing they ask.

Though the Girl Scouts have been selling cookies for 101 years, the first year of sales are especially sweet for Troop 6000.

"Girl Scouts has taught me I can be whoever I want to be, no matter what age, what gender," Troop member Karina told Refinery29. "I can be whatever what I want to be. I don't have to be a boy [to do that], I can be a girl."

Troop 6000s cookies are available for purchase through their online page.next Image 1 of 2

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A couples plans to wed before their welcoming their unborn son nearly went awry when the bride-to-bes water broke the morning of their planned nuptials. Alex and Jakob Cockriel, of Washington, were set to say I do at the Thurston County Courthouse on March 20, which was a week before their sons due date, King 5 News reported.

But instead, the couple rushed to Providence St. Peter Hospital, where they were met by sympathetic nurses who planned a special surprise after hearing their story. Nurse Saisha Rebelez got ordained online and searched for wedding vows online. Rebelez then pitched the idea to the couple, while Alex labored in a hospital bathtub.

TODDLER WITH DAIRY ALLERGY LEFT FIGHTING FOR LIFE AFTER PIZZA HUT MIX-UP

Next thing I know they came in with a veil and flowers, and somebody brought cake, Alex told King 5 News. There was a whole room full of people, theyre like Hey, lets go!

The couple exchanged vows and about an hour later, they welcomed their son, Huxton.

I would so much rather do that over again than get married at the courthouse, the newlywed mom told the news outlet.A 2-year-old boy with a dairy allergy was allegedly left fighting for his life after eating a pizza that was described as vegan at a Pizza Hut in the U.K.

Sajid Hussain claims his son, Zayaan, went into anaphylactic shock on Sunday after eating a margherita pizza, that was later found to contain cheese.

Hussain claims that he and his wife were repeatedly reassured by employees at the Blackpool Pizza Hut location that the pizza was safe for his son to eat.

Even when we received the pizza, I wouldnt let him eat it before reconfirming that it was definitely dairy-free. They said it was, so he ate the pizza, Hussain told SWNS.

INSTAGRAM MODEL LEFT PARTIALLY BLIND AFTER SEEKING SURGERY TO CHANGE EYE COLOR

Minutes later, Zayaan stopped responding to his parents and began vomiting and struggling to breathe.

While I was on the phone, Zayaan was violently sick everywhere and when the paramedics arrived his oxygen levels were really low, Hussain told SWNS. It actually got worse as we got to the hospital. There were talks of him having to be resuscitated.

The boy was rushed to Blackpool Victoria Hospital, where he was treated for two days.

A Pizza Hut spokesman reportedly told SWNS that the company is in touch with the family about the incident.

We realize it was an unacceptable situation and have already completed an internal investigation with the Hut, which found that the wrong pizza was given to the family as a result of human error," the spokesman reportedly told SWNS.

We will share the full investigation findings with the Hussain family and are taking appropriate action at this restaurant to make sure it doesnt happen again, the spokesman said.

Hussain said in addition to speaking with Pizza Hut executives, he informed Environmental Health of the incident.Talk about indigestion.

A woman who took to a parenting blog to ask if she was in the wrong for allowing her 4-year-old daughter to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at Target was criticized for her 'obnoxious' move.

The woman asked the question on a New York blog called UrbanBaby, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. She set up the question by telling readers that she was lectured by a woman who noticed the child eating the sandwich in a shopping cart.

"Your total disdain for the safety of other kids is awful, one post read. Feeding your kid a PB&J in a Target shopping cart is the epitome of low brow. For the love of God at least feed her in the car if you absolutely can't feed her at home! Everything about your post is vile."

Millions of children are allergic to peanuts, and some may have life-threatening reactions if accidentally exposed to them.

Last year, the National Institutes of Health issued new advice, saying most babies should get peanut-containing foods starting around 6 months, in age-appropriate forms like watered-down peanut butter or peanut puffs  not whole peanuts, because those are a choking hazard.

The Chronicle's report pointed out that blog readers took issue with the mom simply allowing her daughter to eat a sandwich in the store, and pointed out the amount of germs in shopping carts.

"You're the worst kind of person, another post read. Just understand that raising a child with an I don't care about others attitude means they will be obnoxious insufferable kids just like their mom. A grown up would tell their kids we can't eat that right now because it may cause another child to get sick. Period. Why do we need to explain this to you?"

The Associated Press contributed to this report.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee got their turn Wednesday to grill Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as several asked about charges that the social media site suppresses conservative voices.

But Zuckerbergs testimony did nothing to convince conservatives or anyone interested in fairness that he was sincere in his desire to root out anti-conservative bias.

Censorship questions focused on the outspoken, pro-Trump duo, Diamond and Silk, who Facebook recently labeled unsafe to the community. With 1.4 million followers on their Facebook page, its more likely that Facebook finds the outspoken activists to be a threat to liberals than unsafe to the community.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, pressed Zuckerberg about why holding conservative views is unsafe. Zuckerberg continued his grandstanding from his Tuesday testimony before two Senate committees about the importance of free speech and said: In that specific case, our team made an enforcement error. And we have already gotten in touch with them to reverse it.

Interestingly, Diamond and Silk have repeatedly denied ever hearing from Facebook. Perhaps Zuckerberg is confused?

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., also addressed Diamond and Silk, saying that while Facebook uses algorithms to identify terrorists, the duo are not terrorists.

Zuckerberg was asked by Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., if there were any disciplinary actions taken against whoever on his team was responsible for suppressing Diamond and Silks Facebook presence. Zuckerberg said he couldnt answer that question because hes been busy getting ready to testify before Congress.

Apparently, nobody thought the head of a multibillion-dollar company that provides news to many millions of people around the world would be asked questions about censorship during a congressional hearing. So why bother with details?

Whats becoming more and more apparent is that theres a lot Zuckerberg doesnt seem to know about his own company.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also pulled no punches when he unapologetically confronted Zuckerberg during Tuesdays Senate hearing. Cruz also focused on censorship of conservative voices on Facebook.

The lawyer in Cruz came out and the cross-examination was a sight to behold. Cruz forced Zuckerberg to answer questions that many were hoping he would be forced to face. They werent disappointed.

Zuckerberg had nowhere to pivot and his explanation was perfectly rehearsed and weak at best; and so inconceivable that it was insulting at worst.

Referencing a Gizmodo report from 2016, Cruz ticked off a laundry list of examples in which conservatives have been censored on Facebook, including: blocking a Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page; suppressing posts from Catholic pages; blocking a Fox News reporter: and blocking posts relating to former Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, political commentator Glenn Beck, and the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Also included in Cruzs list of examples were censored posts about the Internal Revenue Service scandal that targeted conservatives, and the labeling of Diamond and Silks page as unsafe to the community.

When asked if he knew if any posts by Planned Parenthood, MoveOn.org or Democrat candidates were removed, Zuckerberg wouldnt give a straight answer, saying he wasnt specifically aware.

Translation: No.

Zuckerberg responded to the many examples of conservative censorship by saying: I understand where that concern is coming from, because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place. This is actually a concern that I have and that I try to root out in the company, is making sure that we dont have any bias in the work that we do.

Cruz just finished obliterating Zuckerberg with facts in the form of a string of examples of censorship of conservatives, many of them high profile people or organizations. And Zuckerberg said he tries to root out the bias in the company?

Whos driving this ship? This man supposedly runs the company  at least thats what were told.

One of two things is going on. Either Zuckerberg is not really in charge and just acts as the face of Facebook, or he thinks were all just really dumb. Whos to say conservative views wont end up being targeted  and removed  as hate speech on Facebook? Zuckerberg certainly didnt.

In fact, while Zuckerberg testified that hate speech will likely be able to be removed from Facebook before its posted within the next 5 to 10 years, when Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., asked him to actually define hate speech the founder of Facebook couldnt do so.

I think this is a really hard question, he said, conceding that even now its impossible for him to define what speech Facebook will ban and what it will permit.

Its no secret that conservatives are targets. Hollywood mocks us, the mainstream media thinks were enemy No. 1, and former candidates for office insult us because we didnt vote for them. Thats just become a lot of noise at this point. Same players, same song, different day.

However, what Facebook is doing is far more dangerous. When you censor speech and silence voices to fit a political narrative, freedoms get stripped away. If Facebook does it and gets away with it, others will follow.

In the short term, Facebook will likely tread carefully in dealing with conservatives because the company is under the microscope of Congress right now. However, when the current furor over Facebooks actions dies down, will the company go back to business as usual?NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

In the midst of worrying about North Korea, Syria and Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives this fall, President Donald Trump is now worrying about a government assault on his own business, which targeted his own lawyer.

Michael Cohen has been the personal lawyer for Trump and for the Trump Organization -- the umbrella corporation through which Trump owns or manages nearly all entities that bear his name -- for many years. Cohen is so closely connected to the Trump Organization that one of his two law offices is located on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, just a few doors from the corner office formerly occupied by Trump himself.

On Monday, shortly before dawn, a team of FBI agents bearing a search warrant from a federal judge broke in to the offices of the Trump Organization and removed computers, files, tax returns and telephones from Cohens office. At about the same time, three other teams of FBI agents performed raids. One was at another of Cohens offices a few blocks away, and his vacant New York City apartment and hotel rooms he had been occupying were searched, too; and agents also seized personal and professional files and equipment from those venues.

Did the FBI lawfully break in to the headquarters of the presidents family business and cart away files and equipment from his lawyer, as well as legal and financial files of the president himself? The short answer is: yes.

Here is the back story.

In October 2016, when the federal government began its investigation of alleged attempts by the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch managed the work.

After Trump became president and Jeff Sessions became attorney general and Sessions recused himself from this investigation, the No. 2 person in the Department of Justice appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel in charge of the Russia investigation. The investigation in Washington is 18 months old and has been run by Mueller for about 11 months.

If a criminal investigation stumbles upon evidence of crimes substantially removed by geography or subject matter from the location and principal responsibilities of the investigation, it is the prosecutors duty either to prosecute those crimes if feasible or to pass whatever evidence has been found on to another prosecutor closer to the place of the alleged crime.

Sometimes, keeping that evidence is a temptation too great to resist. Thats because one of the techniques that prosecutors in America use to gather evidence about a crime is to indict those at the fringes of the behavior they are investigating and then attempt, by coercion and bribery, to turn those indicted individuals into cooperating witnesses. Sometimes the indicted crime is truly at the fringes, both rationally and geographically. But the targets of these fringe prosecutions are rarely attorneys who are representing a person who is a subject of the investigation.

Until now.

Though Cohen does not represent Trump in the Mueller investigation, he does represent him in nearly all other legal matters, and his files contain a treasure-trove of confidential and financial materials from and about Trump. Judges are very reluctant to sign search warrants authorizing the seizure of legal files, with two exceptions.

The first is the so-called crime/fraud exception. Under this rule, if the client is using his confidential communications with his lawyer to further an ongoing crime, fraud or tort, the communications are not privileged, and evidence of them may be seized.

The other exception is the independent criminal activity of the lawyer. That appears to be the case here. It seems that Cohen -- who claims he borrowed $130,000 from a bank to pay an adult-film actress to remain silent about her relationship to Trump, which Trump denies was sexual -- did not tell the bank from which he borrowed the funds the true purpose of the loan.

If so, that may be evidence of bank fraud on Cohens part. If he wired those funds over interstate lines, that is evidence of wire fraud. If he used the U.S. Postal Service to facilitate a material part of the deal with the actress, that would be considered mail fraud. Each of these fraud charges carries a prison term of five years.

When FBI agents arrive for a raid, they rarely take the time to examine fully all the documents they have seized -- even if the documents are protected by the attorney-client privilege and even if the client is the president of the United States. Needless to say, there are safeguards in place to prevent the prosecutors who dispatched the agents from viewing the privileged materials.

When Mueller in Washington came upon evidence of Cohens bank fraud in Manhattan, he passed it along to the U.S. attorneys office in Manhattan. That office -- not Mueller -- examined the evidence and obtained the search warrants for Cohens personal and professional premises, authorized the raids of those premises and received the fruits of the raids.

What will become of Cohen? Federal prosecutors in Manhattan will now decide whether to ask a grand jury to indict him on the fraud charges, and if he is indicted, Mueller will enter the picture looking to make a deal.

Trumps lawyer was Muellers bait.

All of this has understandably infuriated Trump. His rights as a client were violated. His attorney of many years and on many matters will soon be a defendant. Can Trump restrain himself from offering to pardon those who could harm him or firing those who are tormenting him or waging war against real or imagined enemies? Will his anger, frustration and disgust at the violation of his financial and personal privacy push him and America into what even congressional Republicans fear would be a constitutional crisis?

The potential failure of self-restraint is the real threat he now faces.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

On Holocaust Remembrance Day on Thursday, we recall the two pillars of the Holocaust: Never Forget and Never Again.

But have we as Americans forgotten?

Though prior research has been conducted on baseline Holocaust awareness and denial, there had been no scientific study to date that zeroed in on what specific knowledge Americans have about the Holocaust, as well as attitudes that Americans have towards the current state of Holocaust education in the U.S.

To fill this research void, our firm, Schoen Consulting, was commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany  an organization that works to secure grants from the German government to protect survivors and support Holocaust education and research  to conduct a comprehensive survey of Holocaust knowledge, awareness and education in the U.S.

Our findings were both encouraging and troubling.

While there is a near universal appreciation of the importance of Holocaust education (93 percent), detailed knowledge about the Holocaust is alarmingly low, especially among millennials  22 percent of whom have never even heard of the Holocaust.

There was a time when the phrase 6 million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust were essentially synonymous with the Holocaust itself. Yet, we found that many Americans today vastly underestimate the number of Jewish people that were murdered during the Holocaust.

Our survey found that nearly one-third of Americans (31 percent) and over four-in-ten millennials (41 percent) believe that just 2 million Jews or fewer were killed during the Holocaust.

Further, though there were over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos throughout Europe during the Holocaust, the survey found that nearly half of respondents could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto (45 percent of U.S. adults and 49 percent of millennials).

And at a time when the last remaining Holocaust survivors are dying off, we see that Americans have become detached from this painful, unspeakable period in history. Eight-in-ten Americans have never visited a Holocaust museum, while two-thirds (66 percent) do not even know of a Holocaust survivor.

It is worth noting that most Americans are aware of this progressive detachment  70 percent of U.S. adults believe fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust than they used to.

With a majority of Americans (59 percent) having first learned about the Holocaust at school, it is clear that we need a decisive upgrade in the quality of Holocaust education at the high school and collegiate level.

It is clear that without proper education, the low level of current Holocaust knowledge will inevitably only depreciate further going forward when there are fewer and fewer survivors who are able to tell their stories.

But importantly, a silver lining emerged from our findings: there is a clear desire for Holocaust education among Americans.

In fact, our research revealed that 93 percent of Americans believe that all students should be required to learn about the Holocaust while in school.

Moreover, the majority of Americans understand the importance of promoting Holocaust education, as 80 percent of respondents said that it is important to educate younger generations about the Holocaust in order to ensure that it does not happen again.

Ultimately, it is crucial that we strengthen and amplify Holocaust education in the U.S.

Specifically, we must focus on encouraging education at the high school and college levels to effectively combat Holocaust ignorance among younger generations.

Right now, only nine states  New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Florida, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and California  require some measure of Holocaust or genocide education. Kentucky will soon also make Holocaust lessons mandatory for all public middle and high schools.

It is imperative that states across the country begin to take similar action, as state legislation not only combats Holocaust ignorance among young people, but also standardizes and improves core school curricula.

The sentiment those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it is timeless saying with immense relevance to Holocaust education. As we gather together to remember this Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), it is imperative that we as Americans, and as citizens of the world, work to ensure that the crucial lessons from the Holocaust are not forgotten.

Arielle Confino is a senior vice president at Schoen Consulting.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Thursday is Holocaust Remembrance Day  Yom HaShoah in Hebrew. Each year we at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews take this opportunity not only to pause and memorialize the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, but also to turn commemoration into action.

We bring food, medical care and other support to more than 110,000 impoverished Holocaust survivors and elderly Jews across the former Soviet Union, and to tens of thousands more survivors in Israel. And we urge others to help us reach other aging, struggling survivors around the world.

With 40 survivors dying daily worldwide, were racing against the clock to ensure that all poor survivors can live their final days in dignity, without being forced to decide each day between eating or paying for life-saving medicine or between electricity and home care.

Yet Yom HaShoah this year seems markedly different. While we have seen radical nationalism and xenophobia make inroads across Europe for years, most decent-minded people everywhere have condemned such extremism, along with the rise of violence against Jews, Muslims and other minorities.

This year, though, we are seeing a new normalization and acceptability of anti-Semitism  or at least a new permissiveness, where outright anti-Semitism is poisoning the public sphere. Its surely no coincidence that at the same time, fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors are still alive to speak out against this re-emerging evil, thereby emboldening the haters to re-emerge.

In llinois 3rd Congressional District, near where our U.S. office is based, a onetime figure from the lunatic fringe, Holocaust denier and former American Nazi Party member Arthur Jones, 70, is running unopposed as the Republican candidate in a district that is historically so Democratic that no legitimate Republican bothered to run.

To its credit, the Illinois Republican Party is opposing Jones. State Republican Party Chairman Tim Schneider said: Arthur Jones is not a real Republican  he is a Nazi whose disgusting bigoted views have no place in our nations discourse.

At the same time, the legislature in Poland supported a new law that went into effect in early March making it illegal to say that Poland or Poles were in any way responsible or co-responsible for the Holocaust. Israel has officially protested the move, and many have denounced it as an attempt to whitewash history  the fact that 3 million Polish Jews (and another 3 million Polish non-Jews) were murdered in six death camps on German-occupied Polish soil.

While Polands president and others have denied the charge of whitewashing, this new law has given way to rank anti-Semitic rhetoric.

A leading TV commentator called Jews kikes on Twitter, later deleting the post. The director of a state-run TV station said, on-air, that Nazi death camps should actually be called Jewish because who managed the crematoria there? The Associated Press reported.

Polish journalist Bogdan Zalewski declared on Facebook: Poles, we are at war! We are at war with the Jews! Not for the first time in our history.

All of this underscores the sense that we are entering a new era of open anti-Semitism, where it is not just camouflaged in the guise of anti-Zionism, but one in which heads of state, elected officials, media and political candidates frame the parameters of public dialogue, and hate speech against Jews is normalized.

Sadly, as history has shown us, this is just the first step in what often leads to something much worse.

This Holocaust Remembrance Day, as we continue to deliver life-saving assistance to needy aging survivors as part of our mission to act and remember, we do so with the bitter knowledge that fewer and fewer survivors are here today to speak out against this revived anti-Semitism. The newly vocal anti-Semites are freed to spew their poison.

And on Holocaust Remembrance Day this year, we ought to move from commemorating to acting: speaking out, advocating, organizing, and helping the few survivors remaining with us today, many of whom are still struggling to survive. Their survival is a blatant reminder to the world of what happens when hate speech goes unchallenged and when apathy becomes the norm.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

No wonder disgraced former FBI Director James Comey was so bad at running the bureau: He can't tell a mob boss from a duly elected leader of the free world.

Comey showed his confusion in his first stop on the tour to promote his new book: A sit-down with Clinton sycophant-turned ABC so-called news journalist George Stephanopoulos. It hasnt aired, but a promo they are breathlessly running tells you all you need to know.

How strange is it for you to sit here and compare the president to a mob boss? Stephanopoulos asks a stone-faced Comey, who you may remember admitted leaking FBI documents long after he purposely botched the probe of Hillary Clintons illegal email server.

Are there things that you know but haven't said that could damage President Trump? Stephanopoulos asks.

Was President Trump obstructing justice? Should Donald Trump be impeached? he continues.

Since Comey cant distinguish between homicidal criminals and a politician he disagrees with, it is worth reminding him what an actual mob boss looks like.

Hard questions between a couple of guys who hate President Trump. But mob boss? Of all people, shouldnt the former head of the FBI - the person responsible for taking down actual deadly criminal gangs - know better to make an outrageous comparison like that?

Since Comey cant distinguish between homicidal criminals and a politician he disagrees with, it is worth reminding him what an actual mob boss looks like. Al Capone plagued society with illicit gambling, prostitution, tax evasion and an untold number of murders. Lucky Luciano was responsible for widespread extortion, prostitution rings, bootlegging and murder. John Gotti was convicted of 13 murders, and also profited from racketeering, tax evasion and gambling.

What does Donald Trump have to do with any of them? If Comey is really looking for mobsters at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., he missed one - the Clinton crime family.

Bill Clinton was accused of severe sexual misconduct, harassment and even rape by Juanita Broaddrick. We know he lied under oath and we know he paid Paula Jones. We know he was impeached. Hillary Clinton surely committed crimes, and would have been charged if we had equal justice under the law. She mishandled national secrets on that illicit private server, obstructed justice and destroyed evidence.

The Clinton crime family included numerous associates  Cheryl Mills, the Hillary consigliere to whom Comey granted immunity in exchange for nothing. Huma Abedin, her underboss, who also mishandled national secrets, even handing them over to her pervert husband, former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner.

Theres sketchy Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia. He directed his political action committee to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the state senate campaign of Jill McCabe, the wife of, then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. Fortunately for Americans, McCabe is now off the federal payroll. But when McAuliffe was bankrolling his wifes failed campaign, he was supposed to be investigating Hillary.

Loretta Lynch qualifies as a made member of the Clinton Crime Family, too. The former attorney general had a secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Bill Clinton in Phoenix just days before Comey cleared Clinton. One wonders what kind of order Bill issued as Lynch kissed his ring.

The Clinton Crime Family includes enforcers, like Sid 'Vicious' Blumenthal, who shopped the bogus anti-Trump dossier around to spark a phony investigation. And Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who helped rig the primary for Hillary Clinton while she ran the Democratic National Committee.

Comey, who was at best oblivious to the Clinton Crime Family as it ran wild in Washington, has operated a bit like a gangland don himself, if were allowed to use the same license he does. During his tenure at the FBI, he agreed to Lynchs order to soft-pedal the Clinton email investigation by calling it a matter. He and Trump-hating FBI agent Peter Strzok wrote an exoneration of Clinton in May, months before they even interviewed her or other witnesses for their investigation. In the parlance of La Cosa Nostra, they fixed the case.

We also know Comey signed off on multiple FISA warrants to spy on a Trump campaign associate. To do that, he worked with loyal soldiers Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates and others.

Since James Comey is so loose with his mafia analogies, let me make him an offer he shouldnt be able to refuse: Come on my show to promote your book. I'll ask tough, but fair questions to which the American people deserve answers.

With apologies to Don Corleone, come on my show, Jim. Act like a man!

Adapted from Sean Hannity's monologue on "Hannity," April 11, 2018Mike Pompeo, whom President Trump chose for his next secretary of state, is expected to tell the Senate during his confirmation hearing Thursday that years of soft policy toward Russian aggression are now over.

According to his prepared remarks obtained Wednesday by Fox News from a senior Trump administration official, Pompeo will chastise Russia for acting aggressively and emphasize that the national security strategy of the Trump administration considers Russia a danger to our country.

He also will say that diplomatic efforts with Moscow, while challenging, must continue.

Pompeo, currently the CIA director, will vow to promote democracy and human rights while stressing Americas duty to lead, according to the remarks, despite Trumps vows to put America first.

If we do not lead the calls for democracy, prosperity and human rights around the world, who will? Pompeo plans to say. No other nation is equipped with the same blend of power and principle.

Pompeos remarks Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be the first chance for lawmakers and the public to hear directly from the former Kansas congressman about his approach to diplomacy and the role of the State Department, should he be confirmed to replace Rex Tillerson.

Pompeos views on global issues are well known  he was questioned extensively by senators for his confirmation to run the CIA  but Democratic senators have raised questions about his fitness to be the top American diplomat, given some of his past comments.

When journalists, most of whom have never met me, label me  or any of you  as hawks, war hardliners, or worse, I shake my head, the former Army officer is expected to say. There are few who dread war more than those of us who have served in uniform.

The remarks continue, War is always the last resort.

GEN. ZINNI, ADM. STAVRIDIS: WHAT POMPEO MUST DO FIRST IF CONFIRMED

Pompeos chief goal Thursday is said to be convincing senators that he intends to strengthen the State Department.

Pompeo wants to ensure the State Department is a relevant player in national security policy, a source close to him told Fox News. The source, who wasnt authorized to comment by name and requested anonymity, said Pompeo promises a relevant State Department that will find its swagger once again.

Pompeo is expected to say that as he met with State Department workers recently, they all said they wanted to be empowered in their roles and clear about Trumps mission.

They also shared how demoralizing it is to have so many vacancies and frankly, not to feel relevant. Ill do my part to end the vacancies, but Ill need your help.

Since being nominated last month, Pompeo has spent much of his time at the State Department immersing himself in briefing books and undergoing mock hearings and prep meetings on key issues like Iran, Syria and North Korea, as well as the inner workings of the State Department, a person close to Pompeo said.

Hes also spoken to all eight living former secretaries  including Hillary Clinton, whom he famously criticized over the deadly 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

Pompeos questioning by senators comes amid spiraling tensions with Russia over Syria and China over trade; concerns about the planned summit between Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un; and uncertainty over the administrations international agenda.

Hell tell the Senate that hes read CIA histories of past talks with North Korea and is confident that Trump wont repeat past mistakes, according to the remarks.

President Trump isnt one to play games at the negotiating table, and I wont be either, he plans to say.

The Republican also is expected to pledge to make it an immediate personal priority to work with U.S. allies to try to fix the Iran nuclear deal.

Pompeo plans to say: The stakes are high for everyone, but especially Tehran. If confirmed in time, I look forward to engaging key Allies on this crucial and time-sensitive topic at the G7 Ministerial Meeting on April 22, and the NATO Ministerial Meeting later that week.

Trump has vowed to withdraw from the accord if agreement with European allies to revamp the deal cant be reached by May 12.

Trump announced Pompeos nomination to become the 70th secretary of state in the same March 13 tweet in which he dumped Tillerson. He will do a fantastic job, Trump said at the time, confirming months of speculation that the largely sidelined Tillerson was out of a job and would be replaced by Pompeo, who is known to have the presidents ear and respect and shares his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal.

Pompeo, who was confirmed for the CIA job by a 66-32 vote, developed a reputation for being more outwardly political than many past directors of the traditionally apolitical agency. He developed a visibly close relationship with the president, traveling to the White House on most days to deliver the highly classified Presidents Daily Brief in person rather than leaving the task to other intelligence officials. Often Trump would have the CIA director stay in the West Wing after the briefing to accompany him to other meetings.

Fox News Rich Edson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.A woman who had an affair with Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens in 2015 told lawmakers that he spanked, slapped, grabbed and shoved her during a series of sexual encounters -- some of which were nonconsensual, according to an official report released Wednesday.

After the report went public, the state's Republican House Speaker Todd Richardson said a House investigatory committee would expand its investigation into Greitens and would make recommendations as early as May about whether to pursue impeachment.

WARNING: GRAPHIC DETAILS BELOW

The woman, known only as "K.S.", told the committee Greitens, a Republican, took a partially nude photo of her after tying her to exercise equipment and ripping off clothes that he had made her change into for what she initially thought would be a "sexy workout." She then claimed Greitens told her that "everyone will know what a little wh--- you are" if she told anyone about the encounter.

The woman's claims contradicted Greitens' contention that "there was no violence" and "no threat of violence" in what the governor has described as a consensual extramarital affair.

In its report, the committee -- made up of five Republicans and two Democrats -- described the woman as an "overall credible witness" and noted that Greitens so far has declined to testify or provide documents to the panel.

Shortly before the report was released, Greitens gave a brief statement to reporters describing the investigation as "a political witch hunt... exactly like what's happening with the witch hunts in Washington, D.C." He went on to call the report "one-sided tabloid, trash gossip that was produced in a secret room."

Hours later, Greitens issued a new statement, insisting that the affair "was an entirely consensual relationship, and any allegation of violence or sexual assault is false."

The House investigation began shortly after Greitens was indicted in February on a felony invasion-of-privacy charge for allegedly taking the photo of the woman and transmitting it in a way that could be accessed by a computer. The report said lawmakers did not possess any physical or electronic evidence of the photo.

"The accusations published in the House Committee's report will be directly contradicted by the facts that emerge in court," said Greitens, whose trial is due to begin May 14. "In just 33 days, a court of law and a jury of my peers will let every person in Missouri know the truth and prove my innocence.



"This was an unfortunate process, in which good people, including some on the committee, were left to try and do the right thing and sort through lies and falsehoods without access to the full facts," Greitens added. "In the court of law, everyone will have the facts, and these allegations will be proven false."



Greitens' attorneys had tried to persuade the Legislature to delay its report until after his criminal trial, arguing that it could include some information that isn't fully accurate and could taint the jury pool.

According to the report, the woman testified that she met Greitens in 2013 as a customer of her hair salon. She said she had a crush on Greitens but was shocked when he ran his hand up her leg and touched her crotch without her consent during a March 2015 hair appointment. She added that he later invited her to his St. Louis home while his wife was out of town.

After she arrived through the back door, the woman testified, Greitens searched her purse and "patted her down from head-to-toe." He then allegedly asked if she had exercised and had her change into a white T-shirt with a slit on the top and pajama pants.

"I thought, oh, this is going to be some sort of sexy workout," the woman testified.

But once in his basement, Greitens taped her hands to pull-up rings, blindfolded her, started kissing her, ripped open the shirt and pulled down her pants, the woman testified. She didn't give consent to be disrobed or kissed, the report said. The woman testified that she then heard a click, like of a cellphone picture, and saw a flash.

The woman testified that Greitens told her: "Don't even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, I'm going to take these pictures, and I'm going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little wh--- you are."

When she remained silent, the woman said Greitens "spanked me and said, 'Are you going to mention my name?' And I said, I just gritted through my teeth, and I said, 'No.' And he's like, 'Good, now that's a good girl.'"

"I was definitely fearful," the woman testified to the legislative committee.

After telling Greitens, "I don't want this," the woman testified that Greitens unbound her hands. She said she started "uncontrollably crying." She said Greitens then grabbed her in a hug and laid her down. She said he put his penis near her face and she gave him oral sex. Asked by the committee whether the oral sex was coerced, she responded: "Coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave."

The woman testified she returned to Greitens' house later that day because she had forgotten her keys. She said she confronted him about taking a photo and he responded: "You have to understand, I'm running for office, and people will get me, and I have to have some sort of thing to protect myself." Then she said Greitens added: "I felt bad, so I erased it."

The woman testified that she had several additional sexual encounters with Greitens, including one in June 2015 when "he slapped me across my face" after she acknowledged having slept with her husband. She said she didn't think Greitens was trying to hurt her, but rather, "I felt like he was trying to claim me."

She testified that in another sexual encounter, Greitens "out of nowhere just, like kind of smacked me and grabbed me and shoved me down on the ground, and I instantly just started bawling."

It "actually hurt, and I know that I actually was really scared and sad when that happened," she said.

The report prompted Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley to call for Greitens to resign, saying it contains "shocking, substantial, and corroborated evidence of wrongdoing by Governor Greitens."



The state's House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty, a Democrat, said: "For the good of the state, Eric Greitens must immediately resign" or else the House must "restore integrity" to the office.

Late Wednesday, Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, whose seat Hawley is seeking in November's midterm election, tweeted that Greitens "should resign."

Greitens, a Rhodes Scholar and former Navy SEAL officer, was considered a rising GOP star. He went so far as to reserve the web address ericgreitensforpresident.com years ago. Initially a Democrat, he switched parties in 2015.

Greitens first acknowledged having an extramarital affair on Jan. 10, when St. Louis TV station KMOV ran a story revealing that the woman's ex-husband had released a secret audio recording of a 2015 conversation in which she told him about the photo Greitens took at his home.

Greitens' attorneys have asserted that prosecutors have failed to produce evidence that a photo exists. Prosecutors previously acknowledged that they didn't have the photo, though they could be trying to obtain it.

Hawley is also investigating The Mission Continues, the veterans charity founded by Greitens, as it related to the state's consumer protection and charitable registration and reporting laws. That probe followed media reports that Greitens' campaign had obtained and used a charity donor list in 2015 as it ramped up fundraising for his gubernatorial bid.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Facing legal action, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein allowed House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., to view the FBI memo that instigated the bureau's counterintelligence investigation of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign, Nunes confirmed on Wednesday.

The meeting came a day after Nunes threatened to take legal action -- including contempt proceedings and impeachment -- against Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray for failing to produce a clean copy of the memo, known as an electronic communication or EC, that was responsive to an August 2017 committee subpoena.

"Although the subpoenas issued by this Committee in August 2017 remain in effect, Id like to thank Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein for his cooperation today," Nunes responded.

When asked on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" Tuesday if he would hold the officials in contempt of Congress, Nunes said, "we're not going to just hold in contempt. We will have a plan to hold in contempt and to impeach ... we're not messing around here."

A government source told Fox News that Nunes, Gowdy and committee Republican staff were able to view the two-page memo with relatively few redactions. The source described those redactions as "minimal and justified."

Fox News has previously reported that the memo was either drafted by or had significant input from FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller's probe after the discovery of anti-Trump text messages between him and another FBI official, Lisa Page.

Despite Rosenstein making the minimally redacted version of the memo available, the government source said committee Republicans remained concerned about the memos underlying intelligence and the credibility of the sources which would require further investigation.

A Justice Department official told Fox News that the memo's redactions had been "narrowly tailored to protect the name of a foreign country and the name of a foreign agent... These words must remain redacted after determining that revealing the words could harm the national security of the American people by undermining the trust we have with this foreign nation."

The official added that the words "appear only a limited number of times, and do no [sic] obstruct the underlying meaning of the document."

"With this production, in conjunction with the 1,000 pages of classified materialsmuch of which is now being provided to entire [House Intelligence] committee membershipwe believe we have substantially satisfied Chairman Nunes August subpoena in an appropriate fashion," said the official. "The Department will be pleased to continue to work with the Committee on other, related requests for information."

Fox News' Jake Gibson and Samuel Chamberlain contributed to this report.Another member of the White House's National Security Council resigned Thursday, as newly-installed national security adviser Ambassador John Bolton cleans house during his first week in the administration.

Deputy national security adviser Ricky Waddell resigned from his post Thursday, the White House said.

Rick will be leaving and his departure date has yet to be confirmed, a White House official said in a statement.

Waddell, an Army reserve major general, joined the NSC in May 2017, following President Trumps first deputy national security advisor K.T. McFarlands exit.

Waddell reported directly to H.R. McMaster, who resigned as national security adviser last month.

DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER NADIA SCHADLOW RESIGNS ON BOLTON'S THIRD DAY AT WHITE HOUSE

Waddells resignation follows a slew of other departures this week: NSC spokesman Michael Anton resigned Sunday, White House homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert resigned Monday, and deputy national security adviser Nadia Schadlow resigned Tuesday.

Bolton, who was appointed last month and had his first day at the White House Monday, is said to be cleaning house at the NSC, according to a White House source.

A national security source also told Fox News that Bolton is considering a merger of the NSC and Homeland Security Council (HSC) within the White House. Currently, the NSC and HSC staff function as separate bodies, with their own meetings and policy issues, but share a staff.

HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISER TOM BOSSERT RESIGNS, WHITE HOUSE SAYS

Under the George W. Bush administration, the HSC and NSC worked as separate staffs. During the early years of the Obama administration, HSC and NSC merged, but later split.

The NSC primarily focuses on U.S. foreign policy and nuclear proliferation, while the HSC focuses on national defense-related issues like terrorism and border security.

If Bolton does merge the HSC and NSC, the bodies would hold joint meetings on mutually-agreed upon issues, and provide joint policy recommendations to the president, a national security source told Fox News.

JOHN BOLTON TO REPLACE H.R. MCMASTER AS WHITE HOUSE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, TRUMP SAYS

Bolton has previously served in the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and served as a Bush lawyer during the 2000 Florida recount. Bolton served as a U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security from 2001 to 2005.

The position of White House national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation. Bolton has been a controversial pick for Trump, who has drawn criticism from Democrats since his appointment.

Bolton is now Trumps third national security adviserreplacing McMaster, who replaced Michael Flynn.

Fox News Jennifer Bowman, John Roberts and Gillian Turner contributed to this report.Defending his July 2016 public statement about the Hillary Clinton email case, then-FBI Director James Comey told senior agents later that year he worried the Justice Department would "screw around" with a decision on whether to prosecute her, and he said that regardless of what happened, "we knew it was going to suck in a huge way," according to an FBI transcript reviewed by Fox News.

In October 2016, Michael Kortan, who was serving as the FBI's public affairs chief but has since retired, shared the transcript of Comey's comments on the Clinton case delivered behind closed doors to special agents in charge. Based on the email date and time stamps, it appears the comments were made three weeks before the presidential election. With Comey now launching a media tour to promote his book, "A Higher Loyalty," the transcript provides a window into his thinking and decisions during a critical period before the election.

According to the transcript, Comey told agents he went back and forth on how to handle the recommendation against criminal charges, after then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton on an Arizona airport tarmac in June 2016.

"The decision that there wasn't a prosecutable case here was not a hard one. The hard one, as I've told you, was how do we communicate about it. I decided to do something unprecedented that I was very nervous about at the time, and I've asked myself a thousand times since, was it the right decision. I still believe it was."

Comey's decision to deviate from standard procedures is central to the Justice Department inspector general's investigation into the FBI's and DOJ's handling of the Clinton email case.

Comey said he thought the FBI should have taken the lead because following standard procedures was not an option. "...what will happen to us is the Department of Justice will screw around it for Lord knows how long, issue probably a one sentence declination, and then the world will catch on fire, and then the cry in the public will be where on the earth is the FBI, how could the FBI be part of some corrupt political bargain like this, there's no transparency whatsoever..."

He continued, "We knew it was going to suck in a huge way. I knew. Nothing's (sic) that's happened, by the way, the storm has been outside my expectations. I knew what was going to happen, but I also knew after a lot of reflection that we would do far more damage to our beloved institution if we did the normal thing."

Comey also relayed to agents a conversation he said he had with Lynch before the July 2016 announcement. "'Madam Attorney General, I'm about to do a press conference, and I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to say.' She asked some question. I don't remember what it was, and I said, 'I'm sorry. I'm not going to answer approximately (sic) questions. I hope someday you'll understand why, but I think it's very, very important that I do this independently.'"

Using colorful language, Comey also said agents would likely be fired for using a personal unsecured server like Secretary of State Clinton did for government business, and pushed back on criticism of the FBI's handling of the case.

Comey responded to emails from FBI employees who said, "if I did what Hillary Clinton did I'd be in huge trouble." He replied, "My response is you bet your a-- you'd be in huge trouble. If you used a personal email, Gmail or if you (had) the capabilities to set up your own email domain, if you used an unclassified personal email system to do our business in the course of doing our business even though you were communicating with people with clearances and doing work you discussed classified matters in that, in those communications, TSSCI (Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information), special access program (SAP), you would be in huge trouble in the FBI. You would not be able to say to us, 'The people I was emailing with were cleared. It was all in the course of the work.'"

Comey continued, "You might well get fired from the FBI. You would surely be disciplined in some severe way if you didn't get fired. Of that I am highly confident." He then seemed to reinforce his controversial recommendation against criminal charges in the Clinton case for the mishandling of classified information, that under the criminal statute, does not require intent.

"I'm also highly confident, in fact, certain you would not be criminally prosecuted for that conduct. Why do I say that? Because I have personally gone back through every case in the last 50 years that was prosecuted. Nothing close to these facts was ever prosecuted. You would be in trouble. You would not be prosecuted."

Comey referred to the FBI investigators as an "all star team" but many have since been demoted, fired, or re-assigned as a result of the IG investigation. These individuals included deputy director Andy McCabe, who was fired; Peter Strzok, who was deputy assistant director of the counterintelligence division before he was demoted to Human Resources; and Strzoks mistress and FBI attorney Lisa Page, who was reassigned. Kortan announced his retirement this past February.

In a portion of the transcript, which was redacted, Comey spoke of the challenge in "trying to get a lawyer to give you their laptop that you use for all of their legal work. Huge concerns there about attorney-client privilege, attorney work product. He had a few options there." It was unclear who "he" was. Comey said, Near the end of this Investigation, we knew that two of Secretary Clintons lawyers had done a culling where they went through the emails and decided which ones were work related and which ones werent, which ones could be deleted, which ones would be kept and produced. 

FBI interviews known as 302s revealed that only 12 of 14 bankers boxes of Clinton's emails were picked up from the law firm Williams & Connolly. David Kendall, an attorney at the firm, has represented Bill and Hillary Clinton together and separately, from the former presidents sex scandals to the missing billing records reflecting Hillary Clintons work as a partner in the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas.

Comey told agents they could "ask me more questions about this (and) obviously Bill Priestap knows this case (very) well. Andy (McCabe) knows this case very well."

This comment is striking because Comey testified in 2017 that Priestap -- who reported to Comey as the assistant director of counterintelligence -- told him not to inform Congressional leadership about the bureau's investigation into alleged contacts between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

"It is silly. Silly is the right word to suggest the FBI did anything other than our usual professional work here. Im very proud of the work we did."

Based on Kortans email, that was the end of Comeys speech to senior agents about the Clinton case.

Fox News provided the FBI with the email date, time, sender and subject line, as well as lengthy quotes, to locate the record for comment, but the FBI gave no comment. Many lawmakers questioned why the record was not provided more promptly to Congress.

Fox News also sent a series of questions to the publisher of Comeys book. They included a request for comment from Comey on his statements to FBI agents, whether it was standard for FBI public affairs to share transcripts from closed-door sessions outside the bureau, whether Comey authorized it and for what law enforcement purpose. There was no immediate response.A former Obama administration national security spokesman apologized Wednesday after mocking U.S. Sen. Rand Paul for being assaulted by a neighbor in an attack that left Paul seriously injured.

Tommy Vietor lashed out at the Kentucky Republican after the senator shared a letter from the FBI confirming that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the love couple removed from Robert Muellers Russia investigation over bias against President Donald Trump, still have top security clearances.

"You are a shameless hack and an idiot. Stop attacking public servants. Start doing a better job not getting beat up by your neighbor," Vietor wrote to Paul in a since-deleted tweet.

The former official, who now co-hosts the Pod Save America podcast with other former Obama administration staffers, was referring to the incident last year when the senators neighbor entered his property and tackled him from behind, forcing him to the ground. Paul had problems breathing as the incident left him with six broken ribs.

Backlash shortly followed Vietors distasteful remark, with many criticizing him for blaming the senator for being assaulted.

Really bad look for @TVietor08, and almost inexplicably so -- how is it Rand Paul's fault that his crazed neighbor brutally assaulted and injured him? one Twitter user wrote.

Is it cool for a former Obama national security spokesman to taunt a senator about getting attacked, or nah? The internet is forever, seconded James Hasson, a contributor to the Federalist.

In the wake of the criticism, Vietor deleted the comment and issued an apology to the senator, reading: I shouldn't have made fun of you getting assaulted by your neighbor. It was classless and I apologize.

But the second part of the half-hearted apology that called Paul pathetic and hackish made people question whether Vietor actually meant to apologize, prompting another round of backlash.

Once you use the word but it confirms this is not an apology, wrote a Twitter user, slamming Vietor.

A sincere apology does not include any rationalization for the incident requiring said apology, wrote another.The Republican National Committee launched an aggressive campaign to paint fired FBI Director James Comey as a liar, just days before the airing of his first interview since he was cut loose and shortly before the release next week of his tell-all memoir.

The RNC borrowed a term, coined by then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential primaries for Lyin Ted Cruz, and pegged it to the embattled former chief of the FBI.

The RNCs new website is www.LyinComey.com, where the GOP plans to fact check Comeys book and use rapid response to highlight any misstatements or contradictions in it, according to an RNC official.

James Comeys publicity tour is a self-serving attempt to make money and rehabilitate his own image, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said. Comey is a liar and a leaker, and his misconduct led both Republicans and Democrats to call for his firing. If Comey wants the spotlight back on him, well make sure the American people understand why he has no one but himself to blame for his complete lack of credibility.

The official told Fox News that the RNC has prepared a rapid response team to respond to claims made in Comeys book, compiled a research team to fact check, and created a war room to monitor his appearances.

The website, at first glance, highlights in bold LYIN COMEY, with a cropped image of Comeys eyes. The homepage features a cycle of quotes from prominent Democrats questioning Comeys tenure.

The FBI has no credibility, the website quotes Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., as saying in January 2017.

Maybe hes not in the right job, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is quoted as saying in November 2016.

badly overstepped his bounds, the site quotes Hillary Clinton as saying in September 2017.

I do not have confidence in [Comey] any longer, the site quotes Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., as saying in November 2016.

The website highlights Comeys claim, during his testimony on Capitol Hill last year, that he had never leaked to the media, but the GOP gives the truth, and states that Comey, instead, asked a friend of [his] to share the content of one of his memos from a meeting with President Trump to the New York Times.

That memo shared by Columbia University Law Professor Daniel Richman allegedly was in order to spur the appointment of a special counsel.

Richman told Fox News on Thursday he had no comment on the RNCs new website.

The website also highlights the claim that Comey was wrongly terminated from his post at the FBI, and gives the truth that Democrats long questioned Comeys ability to lead the FBI and even called for him to be fired.

Another section of the site claims that Comey wants to portray himself as a non-partisan, by-the-book Boy Scout rather than a politically motivated Washington insider.

The RNC, again, paints the truth, noting that even Democrats and members of the liberal media have slammed Comey as a partisan, political leaker.

The site, again, quotes Hillary Clinton, who once reportedly said that Comey bowed to partisan pressure.

At the bottom of the homepage, the RNC trumpets Obstruction? noting that Comey may use his book tour to push the phony narrative that Trump obstructed the Russia investigation.

The RNC, again, attempts to correct the record, noting that Comey has confirmed multiple times under oath that neither President Trump nor his staff asked him to stop the Russia investigation.

The RNC has also launched two digital video campaign attack ads against Comeyone titled Comey Not Credible, Just Ask Democrats, and another Comey: A Leaker and Washington Insider.

The Democratic National Committee did not immediately respond to Fox News request for comment on the RNCs strategy.

Comeys memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, which will be officially released on April 17, is expected to share never-before-told experience from some of the highest-stakes situations of his career.

A preview of his book on iTunes.com states: His journey provides an unprecedented entry into the corridors of power, and a remarkable lesson in what makes an effective leader.

Comey is expected to address his firing from the FBI in May 2017, and controversial issues that arose during his tenure as director of the bureau.

Comey served as FBI director from 2013 to 2017, a former President Barack Obama appointee. He previously served as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration.

From prosecuting the Mafia and Martha Stewart to helping change the Bush administrations policies on torture and electronic surveillance, overseeing the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation as well as ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Comey has been involved in some of the most consequential cases and policies of recent history, the books description reads.

Comeys first stop in promoting his book will be on ABC News with George Stephanopoulos. ABC released excerpts of the pre-taped interview, where Comey likens President Trump to a mob boss.

An ABC News spokesperson told Fox News in a statement that the interview will speak for itselfwe expect it [to be] revealing, tough and fair.

The interview airs on ABC News Sunday night at 10:00 p.m. EST.

Fox News Brian Flood contributed to this report.A California man was expected to plead guilty this week to threatening to kill U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., over her vocal opposition to President Donald Trump.

Anthony Scott Lloyd, 45, faces a single count of threatening a U.S. government official and could get up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The man allegedly left a voicemail last year at Waters office in Washington, D.C., referring to the congresswoman with a racial epithet and anti-gay slur.

If you continue to make threats towards the president, youre going to wind up dead, Maxine, cause well kill you, he allegedly said in the voicemail.

Waters office personnel reported the threat to the police, who referred the case to the FBI.

Lloyd told the investigators that the threat was just a spur of the moment remark after he heard on the radio a report about Waters criticizing Trump. He insisted he had no intentions of actually harming the congresswoman, according to the Times.

Waters has become among the fiercest opponents of Trump. Since the president's inauguration in January 2017, the California Democrat has insisted Trump is colluding with the Russian government and will soon be removed from office.

She said in February that the Democrats Party should prepare to impeach the president as Special Counsel Robert Mueller will soon determine which people were and are involved in collusion with the Russians.

I say it is time to get ready for impeachment, Waters said at the California Democratic Partys annual convention this year. I cannot wait, and Im counting on Special Counsel Mueller to connect the dots.

But Waters anti-Trump rhetoric also got out of hand last year when she told a New York audience that she would take out the president.

Im sitting here listening, watching, absorbing, thinking about Ali [Forney] even though I never met him. And with this kind of inspiration, I will go and take Trump out tonight, Waters told an audience during an event at the Ali Forney Center in New York City.

Forney was a transgender prostitute and LGBT-rights activist who was fatally shot in New York City in 1997 at age 22. The case has not been solved.During his secretary of state confirmation hearing, CIA Director Mike Pompeo refused to say whether he thinks same-sex relationships are a perversion when pressed multiple times and said he stood by his earlier views against gay marriage.

Referencing a past speech Pompeo gave, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., asked the former Kansas congressman point blank, Is being gay a perversion?

When I was a politician, I had a very clear view on whether it was appropriate for two same-sex persons to marry. I stand by that, Pompeo, vying to be the nations top diplomat, responded during the Thursday hearing.

As a congressman, Pompeo opposed the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage in 2015.

Booker also asked if Pompeo believes its appropriate for same-sex couples to marry.

Senator, I continue to hold that view, Pompeo said.

Pompeo was also questioned about his beliefs on same-sex marriage in January 2017 during his Senate confirmation hearing to become the CIA director. Then, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., asked Pompeo if he would treat every CIA employee in a way that is appropriate and equal to which Pompeo agreed.

He assured Booker during his secretary of state confirmation hearing that his respect for every individual, regardless of their sexual orientation, is the same.

Youre going to be representing this country and their values abroad in nations where gay individuals are under untold persecution, untold violence. Your views do matter, Booker said.

Earlier, Booker pressed Pompeo on if he saw people who worshipped other gods, particularly Muslims, as negative. Pompeo pointed to his exquisite record of treating people with respect, despite their religious beliefs.

Pompeo also told Booker Muslims have a special opportunity with how they respond to terrorist attacks. He said some people are better positioned to respond to certain types of violence.

Trump nominated Pompeo to be secretary of state in March to replace Rex Tillerson.Mike Pompeo was selected by the White House earlier this year to leave his post as CIA director and take over as secretary of state.

He was confirmed in a 57 to 42 vote by the Senate on April 26 after facing a rocky Foreign Relations Committee vote. All Republicans present voted aye. Seven senators who caucus with the Democrats voted yes.

Pompeo, is the first CIA director to lead the State Department. He replaces Rex Tillerson, a former ExxonMobil chief, as the nation's top diplomat.

I have gotten to know Mike very well over the past 14 months, and I am confident he is the right person for the job at this critical juncture, Trump said when he nominated Pompeo. He will continue our program of restoring Americas standing in the world, strengthening our alliances, confronting our adversaries, and seeking the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Trump sent Pompeo to North Korea over Easter weekend to meet with the rogue nations leader, Kim Jong Un, according to the White House. Trump said on social media a good relationship was formed during the meeting, and the two men reportedly discussed the release of three Americans being held in the Asian nation.

Pompeo, 54, said he is deeply grateful to the president for the job and said he looks forward to representing him and the American people to the rest of the world to further Americas prosperity.

During his Senate confirmation hearing on April 12, Pompeo confirmed for the first time publicly to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he has been interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating potential ties between Russia and Trump's presidential campaign and possible obstruction of justice issues.

Read on for a look at the Trump administration's newest secretary of state.

What is Pompeos background?

Pompeo graduated first in his class at West Point, where he served with distinction in the U.S. Army, Trump said after promoting him.

He is a former cavalry officer, who patrolled the Iron Curtain prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, according to his CIA biography. He served in the Army from 1986 to 1991.

Pompeo later received a law degree from Harvard University in 1994.

After college, Pompeo started Thayer Aerospace, an specialized machine firm that was reportedly backed by conservative mega-donors David and Charles Koch. Pompeo served as its chief executive officer for more than 10 years.

The Wichita Business Journal heaped praise on Pompeo and Thayer for securing a $124 million contract with Vought Aircraft Industries in 2000. It said Thayer is a great example of the entrepreneurial spirit that drives the Wichita economy.

Pompeo stepped aside from Thayer in 2006, according to the Wichita Business Journal.

Pompeo would eventually become president of Sentry International, a company that sold equipment for oil fields and manufacturing.

He is married with one son.

What about his political career?

As a Republican, Pompeo represented the 4th congressional district of Kansas from January 2011 to January 2017, when he was sworn in as CIA director. He was elected to Congress during the Tea Party movement.

While in Congress, Pompeo was part of the contentious House Select Benghazi Committee, which probed the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya. The committee sharply criticized the Obama administration  particularly former secretary of state Hillary Clinton  for the handling of the attack and its aftermath.

Pompeo called Clinton morally reprehensible.

Additionally, Pompeo has often lambasted the Obama administrations nuclear deal with Iran, which granted Tehran sanctions relief for rolling back its nuclear weapons program.

Pompeo was confirmed as the CIA director by the Senate with a 66 to 32 vote on January 23, 2017. Two Democrats, Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy  both from Connecticut  did not vote. Murphy's office said he opposed Pompeo leading the CIA but could not make it to the vote due to weather-related travel delays.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican who voted against Pompeo. He told Fox News at the time he was worried Pompeos desire for security will trump his defense of liberty.

The White House announced its intention for Pompeo to take over as secretary of state on March 13.

As Director of the CIA, Mike has earned the praise of members in both parties by strengthening our intelligence gathering, modernizing our defensive and offensive capabilities, and building close ties with our friends and allies in the international intelligence community, Trump said.

Fox News Chad Pergram, Zoe Szathmary, Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.CIA Director Mike Pompeo, President Trumps pick to be the next secretary of state, told his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday that he wanted to continue to push back against aggressive moves by Russia.

Pompeo told lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that if he was confirmed he would continue the administration's work to re-set policy on Russia -- an apparent jab at the Obama administrations troubled re-set policy in regards to Russia.

If I am confirmed as secretary of state I can assure you this administration will continue as it has for the past 15 months to take real actions, to push back, to re-set the deterrence relationship with respect to Russia, he said.

Pompeo cited sanctions and the expulsion of diplomats as proof of the administration's tougher stance on Russia.

In his prepared remarks, he had warned that Russia has been acting aggressively and represents a danger to the U.S.

At the hearing, Pompeo also rejected reports that he was a hardliner or a hawk, saying that theres no one like someone who has served in uniform who understands the value of diplomacy and the terror and tragedy that is war. Pompeo's military career included serving as a cavalry officer patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to his White House biography.

It is the last resort, it must always be so. I intend to achieve the president's policy by diplomacy rather than by sending our young men and women to war, he said. I know I'm serving a president who feels the same way.

Pompeos entrance to the committee room was met by anti-war protesters, who wielded signs and yelled No Pompeo, no more war. One protester was removed from the hearing when she interrupted the procedure.

On Russia, Pompeo was grilled by Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., on conversations he was reported to have had with Trump about FBI Special Counsel Robert Muellers Russia probe.

Pompeo declined to be drawn into discussing what he had discussed with Trump, but said the president had never asked him to do anything improper. He did say that he had met and spoken with Mueller but declined to talk about the investigation and other questions related to the probe.

Pompeo said he would also prioritize filling what he described as demoralizing vacancies that festered under former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Trump fired last month.

On the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Pompeo said he wants to fix this deal.

Pompeo wouldn't say explicitly if he'd advocate a withdrawal if there's no fix by Trump's May 12 deadline, suggesting there could be an extension if significant progress was being made by then. Still, he affirmed that he won't support staying in over the long term unless more restrictions are placed on Tehran.

"If there's no chance that we can fix it, I will recommend to the president that we work with our allies to achieve a better outcome and to achieve a better deal," Pompeo said.

Still, he acknowledged that Iran, technically speaking, is not violating the terms of the 2015 accord between the U.S., Iran and other world powers, adding: "I have seen no evidence that they are not in compliance."

As the hearing wrapped up, Menendez recited a series of contradictory statements from Pompeo on issues ranging from the Iran deal to gay marriage before wondering aloud: "Which of the Mike Pompeos am I being asked to vote on?"

By contrast, committee chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., praised Pompeo as a "person of high intellect" and vowed "avidly support" his nomination.

Fox News' Samuel Chamberlain and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Gov. Eric Greitens said he will resign this week following a report that an affair he had was at times violent and non-consensual and allegations of misuse of a charity donor list.

"The time has come, though, to tend to those who have been wounded and to care for those who need us most," Greitens, a Republican, said on May 29. "So for the moment, let us walk off the battlefield with our heads held high."

Greitens' last day in office will be June 1. His resignation allows him to avoid the potentially dubious distinction of becoming the first Missouri governor ever impeached.

Earlier in May, prosecutors dropped the felony invasion-of-privacy charges against Greitens but said they planned to re-file the case. After he resigned, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner said her office is dropping another charge of computer data tampering, related to allegations that he misused a charity donor list.

Missouri lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had been asking Greitens to step down ever since the sexual misconduct scandal surfaced. He's been accused of taking and transmitting a non-consensual -- partially nude -- photo of a woman with whom he was having the affair.

Heres a look at the allegations and what the Republican governor has said about it.

Why was Greitens on trial?

Greitens was indicted in February on a felony invasion-of-privacy charge. He was booked at the St. Louis Justice Center before he was released on his own recognizance, according to a circuit attorney spokeswoman.

The charges came after a man secretly recorded his wife admitting to having an extramarital affair with Greitens in March 2015. In the recording, she alleged that Greitens took a photo of her when she was partially nude without her permission and threatened to release photos of her if she told anyone about the affair, KMOV-TV reported.

The couple, not publicly identified, have since divorced.

Greitens admitted to the affair in February in a joint statement with his wife, Sheena. He said he'd made a deeply personal mistake before he was elected, and that the family had dealt with this together honestly and privately.

However, his attorney told KMOV-TV that there was no blackmail.

In a Facebook post, Greitens slammed the reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points. He said that while he'd made a personal mistake before becoming governor, he did not commit a crime.

If convicted, Greitens could have face up to four years in prison. He has declined to directly answer questions about whether he took the photo.

What was in the accusers testimony?

WARNING: GRAPHIC DETAILS BELOW

A Missouri House investigative committee was assembled shortly after Greitens was indicted on the felony charge.

After speaking to the accuser and other witnesses, it released a report  signed by five Republicans and two Democrats  that included a sensitive-content warning. The lawmakers said they found the woman to be an overall credible witness.

The meeting

The woman said she met Greitens in 2013 when he became a client at the hair salon where she worked, according to the report. She said that she developed a crush on Greitens, but when she saw him in the salon in March 2015, he moved his hand up her leg all the way up to [her] crotch without her consent."

Sexy workout

Later that month, she said Greitens asked her to come to his house when his wife was out of town. She said he did not want to be seen in public with her because he was running for office.

At his house, she testified that Greitens told her he thought she hadnt been treated good in so long and wanted her to exercise. She said for whatever reason, I trusted him.

Greitens then gave her mens pajama pants and a mans white T-shirt with a slit at the top and instructed her to change into them, she said. After she changed, she claimed he told her he was going to teach her how to do a proper pull-up. She said she thought this is going to be some sort of sexy workout.

I still really thought he was perfect, the woman testified, adding that Greitens knew she had not cheated on her husband in the past, and she didnt want to do anything physical with him. So I think I was just confused, kind of shocked. And I was curious enough  he likes me this much that he has something planned for our workout?

The photo

When the two got to the basement, the woman alleged, Greitens taped her hands to the pull-up rings and blindfolded her. She said the items he used were already on a workout bench nearby.

He then spit water into her mouth, telling her she needed to be hydrated, she testified. She said it was his way of trying to kiss her, but she did not want to be kissed.

Greitens began to kiss her, and he tore off the white shirt, she testified. During this time, he was also pull[ing] down [her] pants, but she did not give consent, she said.

[T]hen I hear him kind of, like, step back  take a step back and I hear  I can hear like a, like a cell phone  like a picture, and I can see a flash through the blindfold, she added.

Greitens said: Youre not going to mention my name. Dont even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, Im going to take these pictures, and Im going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are, she testified.

She alleged he spanked her after she didnt respond.

I was definitely fearful. I was so embarrassed and ashamed, because I really felt like a whore because I had let him get me in this position before weve even kissed. I felt really used, she said.

A photo has not been obtained by lawmakers on the committee nor by the prosecutor in the criminal case.

The aftermath

As she was trying to leave, Greitens gave her a hug and laid her on the floor while she wept, the woman testified. On the floor, the woman testified, she performed oral sex on Greitens because she felt that she had no other choice if she were going to get out of the basement, according to the report.

She said Greitens didnt prevent her from leaving after that, but she forgot her keys at the house. When she went back to get them, she said she confronted Greitens about the picture.

You have to understand, Im running for office, and people will get me and I have to have some sort of thing to protect myself, she claimed he told her.

The woman testified that Greitens told her he had deleted the photo, but that she didnt believe him.

How has Greitens responded?

Greitens has called the accusations a political witch hunt.

He did not testify before the House committee and said the report was one-sided tabloid, trash gossip that was produced in a secret room.

He also highlighted a comment the woman made during a deposition in his criminal case in which she was asked if she saw what she believed to be a phone used to take the photo. A court filing from Greitens attorneys quoted her as saying, I havent talked about it because I dont know if its because Im remembering it through a dream or I  Im not sure, but yes, I feel like I saw it after that happened.

Additionally, Sheena claimed in a letter to the Missouri lawmakers investigating the allegations that she was stalked by the accusers ex-husband, The Washington Examiner reported.

When I didnt respond to his anonymous emails, he sent me a letter, Sheena said. When a letter to me didnt produce the desired response, he contacted my parents. When letters didnt satisfy him, he made his accusations public on Twitter. And finally, when targeting our family on social media didnt fulfill his agenda, he secretly recorded his wife admitting to the affair and began shopping the audio tape to news outlets.

How have lawmakers responded?

House Speaker Todd Richardson called the woman's testimony beyond disturbing and defended the integrity of the investigation. He said, Let me be very clear about this: This is not a witch hunt, and the committee had no political agenda.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called on Greitens to resign. They include the states Republican Attorney Gen. Josh Hawley, who is also a U.S. Senate candidate.

The conduct the report details is certainly impeachable, in my judgment, and the House is well within its rights to proceed on that front, Hawley said in a statement. But the people of Missouri should not be put through that ordeal. Governor Greitens should resign immediately.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said she read the House investigators report and believes it is clearly time to put the interests of the people of Missouri first in calling for Greitens to resign.

This is a sad chapter in our history that should never have come to pass, Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner, a Republican, said on social media. The transcripts paint the picture of a vulnerable woman and a man who preyed on that vulnerability. I am disgusted, disheartened and I believe Governor Greitens is unfit to lead our state.

State Rep. Jean Evans also called on Greitens to resign, saying, Violence against women is always wrong.

State Senate Majority Leader Mike Kehoe is the highest-ranking member of the legislature to call on Greitens to resign. He said the governor has lost the "moral authority and the ability to lead," KMBC-TV reported.

What is Greitens background?

A onetime Navy SEAL, Greitens assumed office in January 2017. He beat Democrat and former Attorney General Chris Koster.

Hawley is also investigating The Mission Continues, a veterans charity founded by Greitens, as it relates to the state's consumer protection and charitable registration and reporting laws. That probe came after media reports alleged Greitens' campaign had obtained and used a charity donor list in 2015 as it ramped up fundraising for his gubernatorial bid.

Greitens married Sheena in August 2011, and the pair have two children. He was married once before, but it ended in divorce in 2003, according to The Kansas City Star.

Fox News Samuel Chamberlain and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Paul Ryan is one of those rare politicians who really does want to spend more time with his family. But there's more to his decision to relinquish power than that.

His frustration in trying to work with President Trump, despite their clashing agendas, was in my view a significant factor in yesterday's announcement that he isn't running for reelection, essentially abdicating as House speaker.

Ryan never wanted the job, as he made clear to reporters. He was drafted by his colleagues. And with little prospect of being able to achieve more of his agenda, Ryan decided to declare victory after helping to pass the tax cuts and stop being a "weekend dad" back in Janesville, Wis.

The pundits raced to read a whole lot more into his decision.

Ryan was "signaling the peril that the Republican majority faces in the midterm elections," The New York Times says.

Ryan is "adding further uncertainty about whether embattled Republicans can maintain control of the House," says The Washington Post.

Now I'm sure the GOP's challenging prospects in the midterms crossed the congressman's mind, despite his demurral yesterday. But hes not the typical power-hungry pol, so I don't think that's his main motivation. Nor do I believe Ryan's absence on the ballot will hurt other Republican candidates, except perhaps for the loss of his fundraising prowess.

CNBC's John Harwood goes a step further. "Ryans retirement from the House increases the chance that President Donald Trump will be impeached," he says.

Because "there's little doubt that a Democratic-controlled House would seek to impeach the president."

Wait, so Nancy Pelosi and company are lying when they say theyre not pursuing impeachment?

Harwood sees it as a runaway train. Still, a pretty sweeping conclusion based on one lawmaker giving up his seat.

It became awkward watching Ryan at his news conferences, deflecting reporters' questions about the latest Trump scandal or tweet and struggling to talk about policy.

What strikes me is how some Trump loyalists are trashing Ryan online, even calling him a RINO. That shows how much the party's center of gravity has shifted.

Ryan was long viewed as a dogged crusader for smaller government. When Mitt Romney picked him as his running mate, the right cheered at such a conservative choice.

But Ryan's devotion to entitlement reform was utterly at odds with Trump's vow to protect Medicare and Social Security. And the $1.3-trillion bill that Trump signed (after briefly threatening to veto it) was the epitome of the bloated, out-of-control federal spending that Ryan had vowed to stop.

Some commentators, stepping away from the horse race, are branding Ryan a failure:

"Who can blame him for not wanting to be the man standing between a volatile caucus, and a president whom he doesn't like, who doesn't respect him, and who doesn't care a whit for the kind of conservatism that has motivated Ryan throughout his long career in government?" The Atlantic asks.

"Faced with an out-of-control president of his own party, the speaker has decided he'd rather quit than deal with it"

And Politico points out that "Paul Ryan Deficit Hawk has never behaved like a deficit hawk. In his two decades in Washington, Ryan has consistently supported tax cuts and spending hikes that have boosted deficits, while consistently trashing Democrats for failing to cut deficits."

But National Reviews Jim Geraghty gives Ryan a respectful sendoff: "He was civil, well-informed, polite, and firm, the opposite of a table-pounding, demagogic extremist, and that probably just aggravated his critics on the left even more."

The larger question is whether anyone can run the fractious House GOP. Three years ago, John Boehner quit in frustration. Now Paul Ryan is quitting in frustration. The party's divide is so deep that speakeror if they lose, minority leadermay be the ultimate thankless job.Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein -- in President Donald Trump's crosshairs -- was summoned to the White House for a meeting with the president on Thursday, amid recent calls from some of Trumps supporters for his ouster over his role in the expanding Russia investigation.

Rosenstein, who is Attorney General Jeff Sessions deputy and who was appointed by Trump, was spotted leaving the West Wing on Thursday afternoon, though a White House official played down the meeting's significance.

Rod Rosenstein met with the president at the White House regarding routine department business, the official said.

The meeting, though, seemed to have been arranged quickly. Rosenstein had been scheduled to introduce Sessions during an afternoon event at the Justice Department. But the emcee of that event announced that Rosenstein had been called away on another matter.

Justice Department officials said Rosenstein was at the White House for about an hour. He was accompanied by FBI officials and discussed document production to Congress, they said. Rosenstein also met with White House Counsel Don McGahn.

The meeting comes at a sensitive time for Rosenstein. Trump, outraged over the FBIs raid of personal lawyer Michael Cohens office this week, has been publicly venting his frustration with Rosenstein, Sessions and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter), the president tweeted Wednesday.

TRUMP LASHES OUT AT MUELLER, ROSENSTEIN

Trumps attack on Rosenstein is in reference to how the deputy attorney general signed a FISA surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The president has repeatedly decried the DOJ and FBIs efforts to obtain that surveillance warrant.

Trump has long been public about his frustration with how Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, setting in motion the series of events that led Rosenstein to appoint Mueller as special counsel.

"The attorney general made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself or he certainly should have let us know if he was going to recuse himself and we would have put a different attorney general in, Trump said Monday after news of the Cohen raid broke. So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country.

Some Trump supporters have been urging him to get rid of Rosenstein.

"Rod Rosenstein is so incompetent, compromised and conflicted that he can no longer serve as the deputy attorney general," former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova told Fox News Hannity on Wednesday.

But despite this pressure, Trump on Thursday tweeted that he agrees with his legal team in cooperating with Muellers probe.

I have agreed with the historically cooperative, disciplined approach that we have engaged in with Robert Mueller (Unlike the Clintons!), the president tweeted Thursday.

Other supporters  including former adviser Stephen Bannon  have publicly encouraged Trump to stop cooperating with Muellers requests.

The president wasnt fully briefed by his lawyers on the implications of not invoking executive privilege, Bannon told The Washington Post. It was a strategic mistake to turn over everything without due process, and executive privilege should be exerted immediately and retroactively.

Earlier Thursday, Trump denied seeking to shut down Muellers Russia probe, saying he would have fired the special counsel months ago if he'd wanted him gone.

If I wanted to fire Robert Mueller in December, as reported by the Failing New York Times, I would have fired him, the president tweeted. Just more Fake News from a biased newspaper!

Fox News Jake Gibson, Jennifer Bowman and Serafin Gomez contributed to this report.The director of Iowa's Department of Human Services brought Democrats and Republicans together this week -- but in a bad way.

Jerry Foxhoven angered constituents and lawmakers alike after comparing Medicaid patients complaints to airline passengers' gripes about losing their luggage.

Foxhoven reportedly made the comment while criticizing an April 2 report from Iowa's ombudsman, the Des Moines Register reported.

The report, released Monday, claimed that disabled Iowans were systematically being denied medical services.

During an interview with Iowa Public Radio, Foxhoven claimed the report made broad generalizations and he defended the states privatized Medicaid system.

He said his Department of Human Services takes all complaints seriously, insisting that the number of people denied care pales in comparison with the number of people treated.

Remember, all you hear is complaints, Foxhoven said. You dont hear all the good stories. And the example I like to use is, I doubt the airlines get very many people calling saying, Hey, I just want to let you know my flight came on time and my luggage was there.'

Remember, all you hear is complaints. You dont hear all the good stories. And the example I like to use is, I doubt the airlines get very many people calling saying, Hey, I just want to let you know my flight came on time and my luggage was there.'  Jerry Foxhoven, director, Iowa Department of Human Services

He added that the 225 complaints recorded by the ombudsman's office for 2017 represents only .0003 percent of the Medicaid programs participants.

Nevertheless, his comments were not well-received.

I dont care if .0003 or 10 percent, its about the people. Its about these individual cases, said state Rep. Dave Heaton, R-Mount Pleasant.

Added state Rep. Lisa Hiddens, D-Ames, I would guess the family of the disabled child who has had to go without a walker for six months would not look highly upon about being equated to luggage.

Foxhoven did stress that a small number of complaints does not warrant inaction in cases where service have been inadequate.

According to the Register, Iowas Medicaid system provides services to a fifth of the states population of about 3.1 million.Backing the Republican Party's tax law could have been one of the worst votes of his career, retiring U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., reportedly said after a Congressional Budget Office estimate released Tuesday showed the bill will add $1.9 trillion to deficits over a decade.

At the time Corker cast his vote, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the bill would cost about $1.1 trillion over a decade, the Hill reported.

But the CBO said the larger figure includes interest costs for servicing the debt and accounts for more recent economic data.

If it ends up costing what has been laid out here, it could well be one of the worst votes Ive made, Corker said at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on the new CBO estimate, according to the Hill.

In early December, Corker voted against a version of the GOP tax-cut bill, making him the only Republican senator to do so, the report said.

At one point, he reportedly vowed to vote no for any tax bill that added a cent to the deficit. But he ultimately voted yes for the final bill.

After that vote Corker blasted critics who asserted he backed the plan only after the addition of a last-minute provision that stood to benefit him personally. The provision allows owners of large commercial real estate holdings -- such as Corker -- to deduct a percentage of their pass through income from their taxes.

The Tennessee Republican also criticized the omnibus funding bill Congress passed in March, Business Insider reported.

None of us have covered ourselves in glory. This Congress and this administration likely will go down as one of the most fiscally irresponsible administrations and congresses that weve had, Corker said.

The new CBO estimate also showed the U.S. will reach an annual budget deficit of more than $1 trillion beginning 2019, Business Insider reported.The U.S. Justice Department sued California over its alleged interference with federal immigration policies  and its gotten some support from the states own municipalities.

Multiple local city or county councils have voted to join the Trump administrations lawsuit or fight the state's policies in some way.

Californias so-called sanctuary laws limit police cooperation with federal immigration authorities  a move passed by the nations largest state to resist increased efforts to deport people living in the country illegally and to stop President Trumps plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The sanctuary policy, pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown and the states Democratic-controlled legislature, has received some backlash at the local level.

Read on for a look at some of the cities and counties that have joined the Trump administrations efforts to deem Californias law unconstitutional.

Los Alamitos

The Los Alamitos City Council voted 4-1 in March to opt out of Californias sanctuary law. It voted again in April to opt out as the city's law requires the council to have a second reading of the measure before approving it.

The adopted ordinance said state laws may be in direct conflict with federal laws and the Constitution. It said it finds that it is impossible to honor our oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States if it did not opt out of the policy.

Mayor Troy Edgar, a Republican, told Fox News the policy is a huge overreach.

Los Alamitos is able to opt out of the law because it is a charter city.

Hesperia

With a 3-1 vote, the Hesperia city council voted in March to join an amicus brief with the Trump administrations lawsuit against California, the Desert Dispatch reported.

We are not anti-immigrant  there is no one on this Council thats anti-immigrant, Councilman Paul Russ said, according to the newspaper. But for immigrants, wed like to see it done legally. I can also say without a doubt that we are anti-criminal. Its not about the immigrants, its about the criminals in the community.

Orange County

With a unanimous vote of 3-0, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted in March to join the Justice Departments lawsuit against California.

This legislation prevents law enforcement from removing criminals from our community and is a threat to public safety, Supervisor Shawn Nelson said.

The county previously made efforts to further comply with federal immigration authorities by publishing the release dates of inmates online.

Mission Viejo

In March, the Mission Viejo City Council voted to support the Los Alamitos City Councils decision to opt out of the states sanctuary policies and join an amicus brief in support of the federal governments lawsuit against the state.

Of the sanctuary laws, the city council said it believes this legislation is a threat to both local control of businesses in the state and the individual liberty and public safety because it prevents law enforcement from performing their duties as necessitated by local circumstances.

Huntington Beach

Huntington Beach City Council voted 6-1 in April to file its own lawsuit against the state of California over its sanctuary laws, calling the policies a constitutional overreach.

Mayor Mike Posey said his could become the first city to sue the state itself.

Escondido

After a heated meeting, the Escondido City Council voted 4-1 in April to support the Justice Departments lawsuit with a legal brief.

This is the right thing to do. I was elected mayor to keep the Constitution, uphold the Constitution and keep our community safe," Escondido mayor Sam Abed told Fox News. I am committed to do that and that is what the council did today.

The county Board of Supervisors will vote on a similar brief later in April, according to KSWB-TV.

Fountain Valley

After an assist from U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., the Fountain Valley City Council voted 3-1, with one abstention, to file an amicus brief in support of the Trump administrations challenge to Californias law, the Orange County Register reported.

The council voted to support a legal brief after Rohrabacher offered to raise or provide the funds to do so.

Aliso Viejo

The Aliso Viejo City Council voted 4-1 on April 4 to join a lawsuit against the state of California over its sanctuary laws, KCBS-TV reported.

We had a robust discussion and Im proud of my colleagues for their stamina and attention through 6.5 hours of testimony, Aliso Viejo Mayor Dave Harrington said in a statement. We did the right thing.

Orange

After a heated meeting, the Orange City Council voted in April not to comply with the states sanctuary laws, KCBS-TV reported.

Newport Beach

In a unanimous vote, the Newport Beach City Council decided to join the Trump administrations lawsuit.

The vote, held in a closed session, allows the city to support the lawsuit, including, but not limited to an amicus brief, said Deputy City Manager Tara Finnigan, KCBS-TV reported.

Councilman Scott Peotter told Fox News the vote wasnt about immigration but illegal alien criminals.

Westminster

In April, the Westminster City Council voted 3-1 to join the Trump administrations lawsuit against the state, KABC-TV reported.

San Juan Capistrano

The San Juan Capistrano City Council voted 4-1 to condemn California's sanctuary laws, the Orange County Register reported.

Mayor Sergio Farias, who voted against it, said that he is the "mayor of everyone who calls San Juan Capistrano home, regardless of their legal status."

San Diego County

The all-Republican San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted in April to support the Trump administration's lawsuit against California, 3-1. The county is expected to file an amicus brief soon.

It is the biggest county thus far to back the lawsuit.

Santa Clarita

After debating until 1 a.m., the Santa Clarita City Council voted in May to join the Trump administration's legal fight against the state's sanctuary policies.

All five of the city council members voted to create a brief in support of the federal government, KHTS radio station reported.

Carlsbad

In a 4-1 vote, Carlsbad's City Council voted in May to support the Trump administration's lawsuit.

Our laws are becoming more difficult to enforce, said Mayor Matt Hall. It takes many agencies working together to keep us safe.

Fox News Paulina Dedaj, Lukas Mikelionis and The Associated Press contributed to this report.President Trump on Thursday pushed back at critics who accused him of telegraphing a U.S. strike on Syria and wondered when the world would thank the U.S. for routing ISIS.

Trump denied saying when - or even if - the U.S. would strike the Assad regime over suspicion is used chemical weapoins to attack its own people.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place, the president tweeted. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!

Trump also talked up the United States efforts to eradicate ISIS in the Middle East, suggesting countries should be more appreciative of America.

In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS, Trump said. Where is our Thank you America?

The president on Wednesday seemed to confirm future U.S. strikes in Syria when he tweeted that missiles fired at Syria will be coming, nice and new and smart!

TRUMP WARNS KREMLIN ABOUT COUNTERING A US STRIKE IN SYRIA

Trumps threat followed remarks from Russia's ambassador to Lebanon, who reportedly said told a Hezbollah television station this week that Russia would shoot down American missiles fired at Syrian government targets.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria, Trump tweeted Wednesday. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Saturday's suspected poison gas attack took place in a rebel-held town near Damascus amid a resumed offensive by Syrian government forces after the collapse of a truce. Syrian activists, rescuers and medics said the attack in Douma killed at least 40 people, with families found suffocated in their houses and shelters.President Trump is directing his top economic advisers to negotiate re-entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership, after pulling out of the trade agreement just one year ago.

During a meeting at the White House on Thursday, Trump told a group of Republican senators that he would assign National Economic Council Chairman Larry Kudlow and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to get it done.

"Last year, the President kept his promise to end the TPP deal negotiated by the Obama Administration because it was unfair to American workers and farmers. The President has consistently said he would be open to a substantially better deal, including in his speech in Davos earlier this year," White House Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters said in a statement.

"To that end, he has asked Amb. Lighthizer and Director Kudlow to take another look at whether or not a better deal could be negotiated," Walters said.

Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., who attended the meeting at the White House Thursday, told Fox News of the president's plan to move forward to weigh whether to re-join the TPP.

President Trump said he was deputizing Kudlow and Lighthizer to look at reentering TPP negotiations, Sasse told Fox News as he was leaving the White House. President Trump looked at Larry Kudlow and said, Get it done.

Sasse released a formal statement following the meeting with the president.

The best thing the United States can do to push back against Chinese cheating now is to lead the other eleven Pacific nations that believe in free trade and the rule of law, Sasse said in the statement. It is good news that today, the President directed Larry Kudlow and Ambassador Lighthizer to negotiate U.S. entry into TPP.

Trumps announcement to re-visit TPP came during a meeting with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, Republican governors and Republican lawmakers to discuss issues impacting the agricultural community, including trade, according to Walters.

But just days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing from the TPP, a 12-member free-trade agreement advocated by the Obama administration. The deal was aimed to strengthen economic ties between the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Rim nations, cut taxes, and foster trade to boost economic growth.

Trump, at the time, called the administrations withdrawal from the TPP a great thing for the American worker.

Trump argued throughout the 2016 presidential campaign that TPP was harmful to the American workforce, robbing the manufacturing sector of jobs for Americans.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster, done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country, Trump said in June 2016.

But Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who attended the meeting, said Trump wants "to see if we couldn't take another look at TPP."

Roberts said it would be "good news all throughout farm country."

Eleven other Pacific Rim countries signed a sweeping trade agreement last month that came together after the U.S. pulled out. The countries involved in the agreement are: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.

The move to consider reentry comes just one month after the president imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to the U.S.

Sasse, who has been a critic of the tariffs, said Thursday that Trump reaffirmed the idea that TPP would be easier for us to join now.

Trump floated the idea to re-negotiate terms and reenter the TPP in January, noting that he would consider signing back on if he could make a substantially better deal.

"As I have said, the United States is prepared to negotiate mutually beneficial, bilateral trade agreements with all countries. This will include the countries in TPP, which are very important," Trump said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January. "We would consider negotiating with the rest, either individually, or perhaps as a group, if it is in the interests of all."

Fox News' Jennifer Bowman and Barnini Chakraborty and The Associated Press contributed to this report.As part of his plan to curtail immigrants from illegally coming into the U.S. through the countrys southern border, President Trump has requested National Guard troops to be deployed to the area.

Trumps move is not totally unusual: both former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush also deployed the Guard to the border in 2010 and 2006, respectively.

Trump has said he wants to send between 2,000 and 4,000 National Guard troops to the southern border to crack down at the lawlessness that continues there.

Trumps order invoked a federal law called Title 32, under which governors retain command and control of Guard members from their states, with the federal government paying for the deployment.

Heres a look at how states have responded to the administrations request.

Arizona

Arizona sent about 338 Guard troops to the border, Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, said on Twitter.

He praised the administrations request for troops to the border, saying its a public safety issue for Arizona.

Anything we can do to further bolster these efforts is good news for Arizona and for our national security, Ducey said.

According to an Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs release, the troops will provide air support, reconnaissance support, operational support, construction of the border infrastructure and logistical support.

California

California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, agreed to send about 400 Guard troops "to supplement the staffing of its ongoing program to combat transnational crime," he said in a letter to the heads of the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

He said the state already has about 250 personnel for that mission across the state, including 55 at the border.

THESE CITIES, COUNTIES HAVE BACKED THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION'S LAWSUIT AGAINST CALIFORNIA'S SANCTUARY POLICIES

But Brown's compliance with the request came with a caveat.

"But let's be crystal clear on the scope of this mission. This will not be a mission to build a new wall. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life," Brown said. "And the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws."

New Mexico

New Mexico is sending 80 troops to the border but 250 are expected to eventually serve, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.

The safety of all New Mexicans is our first and foremost concern which is why our soldiers will participate in this operation, Larry Behrens, a spokesman for Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, said in a statement, according to the newspaper.

Texas

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, told San Antonio radio station KTSA in April that he plans to send as many as 1,000 troops to the border, though he will start with 250.

TRUMP'S IMMIGRATION DEMANDS AND WHAT'S AT STAKE FOR 2018

Going forward, Texas will continue to implement robust border security efforts, and this partnership will help ensure we are doing everything we can to stem the flow of illegal immigration, Abbott said in a statement.

Abbott said the Guard will be armed but wanted to downplay any notion that would be misinformed that our National Guard are showing up with military bayonets, trying to take on anybody whos coming across the border because that is not their role, according to KTSA.

Missouri

Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, has sent four Army National Guard soldiers and a UH-72 Lakota helicopter to the border to aid U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

"Missourians are grateful to the President for recognizing the need to secure our borders," the governor's office stated. "We are proud that Missouri troops will play a support role in guarding against terrorism, protecting Americans from cartel violence, and enforcing our immigration laws."

Fox News' Nicole Darrah and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Despite having pulled out of the trade deal last year, President Trump has reportedly asked his top trade officials to negotiate re-entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

He told a group of Republican senators at the White House he would ask Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, and Larry Kudlow, his national economic council chairman, to get it done, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., told Fox News.

In a tweet, Trump said he would consider joining TPP "if the deal were substantially better" than the one former President Barack Obama had negotiated.

Trump has been highly critical of the 2016 trade deal, especially when he was a presidential candidate.

Read on for a look at what the deal is and what the president has said about it.

What is the TPP?

The trade deal was a massive free-trade agreement pushed by the Obama administration. The deal included the U.S. and 11 other countries along the Pacific Ocean, including: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

At the time, Obama said the deal puts American workers first.

Right now, the rules of global trade too often undermine our values and put our workers and businesses at a disadvantage, he said in a statement. TPP allows America  and not countries like China  to write the rules of the road in the 21st century, which is especially important in a region as dynamic as the Asia-Pacific."

Signed in February 2016, the deal was supposed to provoke investment among the 12 regions, which together make up about 40 percent of the global economy, the BBC reported at the time.

However, the countries involved needed to ratify the agreement in order for it to actually go into effect. Trumps presidency, which began less than a year later, complicated that.

Trump withdrew the U.S. from the trade deal through an executive order in January 2017. Last month, the remaining 11 countries signed a deal without the U.S.

What were the criticisms against it?

Opponents of the deal, including labor unions, argued it would be a threat to manufacturing jobs and encourage exports of jobs to lower-wage countries overseas.

If TPP would be enacted, the U.S. would lose 448,000 jobs, according to a study from Tufts Universitys Global and Environment Institute. In comparison, the study found a total job loss of 771,000 across all 12 nations involved in the deal combined.

Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, broke with the Obama administration in opposing the deal. She expressed concern that it would benefit drug countries and wouldnt combat currency manipulation, Time magazine reported.

What has Trump said about it?

Trump has been critical of TPP, not holding back.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country, just a continuing rape of our country, Trump, then a presidential candidate, said in 2016. Thats what it is, too. Its a harsh word: Its a rape of our country.

Trump also railed against the deal  and Republicans who supported it  on social media.

Upon withdrawing the U.S. from the deal in 2017, Trump said his move was a great thing for the American worker.

But in January 2018, Trump floated the possibility of re-negotiating terms and re-entering the TPP, noting that he would consider signing back on only if he could make a substantially better deal.

"As I have said, the United States is prepared to negotiate mutually beneficial, bilateral trade agreements with all countries. This will include the countries in TPP, which are very important," Trump said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "We would consider negotiating with the rest, either individually, or perhaps as a group, if it is in the interests of all."

Fox News Barnini Chakraborty and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.Is the Rapture finally here? One Christian numerologist says a biblical sign strongly suggests it.

David Meade tells the U.K.'s Daily Express newspaper that on April 23, the sun and moon will be in Virgo, as will Jupiter, which represents the Messiah.

For a certain branch of evangelical Christianity, Revelation 12:12 describes the beginning of what is known as the Rapture and the second coming of Christ.

The passage reads: And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of 12 stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth.

In the passage, the woman is represented as Virgo.

According to Meade, the alignment represents the Lion of the tribe of Judah, marking the Rapture, the belief that Christ will bring the faithful into paradise prior to a period of tribulation on earth that precedes the end of time.

Meade said he believes the so-called Planet X, which is also known as Nibiru, will appear above the sky on the April date, causing volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes.

NASA repeatedly has said Planet X is a hoax.

Speaking to the Express, Meade described it as a unique once-in-a-century sign exactly as depicted in the 12th chapter of Revelation. This is our time marker.

However, author Jonathan Sarfati remains skeptical.

He told the Express: As usual with any astrology (or Christian adaptations of it), one cherry-picks the stars that fit the desired conclusion.

There is nothing to suggest that April 23 is a momentous date for biblical prophecy, and Christians need to be careful about being drawn into such sensationalist claims.

We wont know the day or the hour  so we should be prepared at all times!

The Associated Press contributed to this report.A 3,000-year old bronze vessel that was looted by a British soldier from an imperial palace in Beijing fetched $581,600 at auction this week despite objections from the Chinese government.

The vessel, referred to as Tiger Ying because of its tiger decorations, was auctioned at Canterbury Auction Galleries in England on Wednesday, reports the South China Morning Post.

The teapot, which reportedly dates to the Western Zhou dynasty, is believed to be one of only seven similar vessels to even exist. Five of them are housed in museums.

RARE TITANIC LOVE LETTER OFFERS INSIGHT INTO LIFE ON THE DOOMED OCEAN LINER

The buyers identity is a mystery.

According to documents discovered by the auction house, the vessel was looted by Harry Lewis Evans, a Royal Marines captain who fought in the Second Opium War in the 1850s.

Chinese authorities are not happy about the auction.

Chinas State Administration of Cultural Heritage denounced the auction, saying it strongly opposes and condemns Canterbury Auction Galleries insistence on auctioning the suspected illegally discharged cultural artifact despite solemn protests from China.

The government agency also accused the house of conducting commercial hype around looted cultural relics, reports the South China Morning Post.

Dr Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Chinas Renmin University, said the issue is important to the Chinese people because the burning of Yuanmingyuan has been a symbol of shame for Chinese people for many years.

The destruction of the palace, which involved 3,000 British troops and a fire that raged for three days, also resulted over 300 deaths.

Xiaohe told the Straits Times: The Tiger Ying was taken by the British soldier, who is a real historical figure. Therefore, this act of plunder is an eternal pain in the hearts of the Chinese people.A group of fishermen searching for clams and quahog off the coast of Massachusetts instead came across an unexploded military shell, police said.

On Wednesday morning, a fishing dragger from the Rock Harbor fleet brought ashore an unexploded military shell that was picked up in their nets," the Orleans Police Department wrote on Facebook.

After making the discovery, the fishermen brought the shell to Rock Harbor pier and contacted local authorities.

After the Massachusetts State Police Bomb Squad and the Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal arrived at the scene, the shell was taken by a pickup truck to the jetty just off of Rock Harbor. It was then buried in a roughly 4-foot deep hole in the beach sandbar and detonated, Lt. Kevin Higgins with the Orleans Police Department told Fox News on Thursday.

The Orleans Police Department later posted videos of the explosion.

Higgins said the shell was most likely used by the Air Force for target practice on the SS James Longstreet, a defunct WWII ship in Cape Cod Bay.

While there were no identifiable features on the rocket, its dimensions led the Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal team to believe the shell was most likely a Zuni missile.

The U.S. Navy Zuni is an improved version of the HVAR (High Velocity Aircraft Rocket), also called the Holy Moses, which was used during World War II as an air-to-surface weapon, according to the National Air and Space Museum. It was first introduced in the late 1950s.WWME's Upcoming 50th Anniversary Convention will be Featured on EWTN's 'Church Universal' TV Program Contact: Dick & Diane Baumbach, Worldwide Marriage Encounter,

321-544-3440, dickanddiane66@bellsouth.net,

dick.diane.baumbach@wwme.org



SAN BERNARDINO, Calif., April 12, 2018 /Christian Newswire/ -- The focus of an upcoming episode of the Eternal Word Television Network's (EWTN) "Church Universal" television program will be Worldwide Marriage Encounter's 50th Anniversary Convention.



The 30-minute show will air three different dates and times beginning April 29 at 5:00 p.m. ET. Additional airings of the episode, which is shown worldwide, will be on May 1st at 5:00 a.m. ET and May 2nd at 6:30 p.m. ET.



The shows' host, Fr. Joseph Mary, MFVA, will be interviewing Peter & Sheila Oprysko and Fr. Tom Griffith, SVD, the WWME ecclesial chairs of the 50th Anniversary Worldwide Marriage Encounter Convention. The convention leadership will discuss the various aspects of the now sold out convention.



"It was an honor and a blessing to be featured on Church Universal with Fr. Joseph Mary. The show allowed us to provide insights into the various aspects of the upcoming convention," the convention chairs said.



The Opryskos and Fr. Griffith also pointed out that because the convention was sold out four months before the actual conference, it was decided that the convention will be live streamed across the world as a very inexpensive pay per view activity. The convention will be held June 22 to June 24 in Lombard, IL.



The 50th anniversary convention show, which was taped last year in Irondale, AL, the headquarters for the EWTN studios, will focus on various aspects of the upcoming event. EWTN, the original Catholic television network, broadcasts its shows to 140 countries and millions of viewers across the world.



Worldwide Marriage Encounter has been offering weekend experiences for over 50 years and is considered the original faith-based marriage enrichment program. The programs are continually updated to keep abreast of changes in society, and WWME now offers evening and half-day programs that are presented at parishes and other church facilities. The weekend program, traditionally presented as an overnight experience at a hotel or retreat center, can also be presented at facilities where the couples return to their homes in the evenings. WWME has a presence in almost 100 countries, which makes it the largest pro-marriage movement in the world. In North America, the WWME programs are presented in English, Spanish, French, and Korean languages.



Worldwide Marriage Encounter offers married couples the opportunity to spend time together away from the busyness of the world to focus on each other. It offers tools for building and maintaining a strong, Christian marriage in today's world. To learn more about the Worldwide Marriage Encounter weekends online go to wwme.org or contact the WWME Office at (909) 332-7309.



Media inquires should be directed to: Dick & Diane Baumbach

(321) 544-3440 dickanddiane66@bellsouth.net

dick.diane.baumbach@wwme.org



Share TweetA contrite Mark Zuckerberg has been in damage control mode this week in Washington, D.C. as Facebook's future remains under a cloud of uncertainty following revelations Facebook data from up to 87 million users may have been improperly accessed by data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica.

"We didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm," the CEO and co-founder said in his remarks before a rare joint hearing of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Tuesday. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I'm sorry."

Zuckerberg, who said he "didn't know" or would have "his team" follow up dozens of times during the two hearings, did not announce any new initiatives that would fundamentally alter the network's business model, nor was he able to explain why users weren't notified that their data was misused in December of 2015.

HOW TO CHECK IF FACEBOOK SHARED YOUR DATA WITH CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

His own testimony showcased the many reasons the 33-year-old billionaire's creation has a long way to go before it is once again viewed not as an enemy, but as a place where you spend time with your friends.

Privacy problems persist

British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica did work for the 2016 U.S. presidential campaigns of both Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and accessed the data thanks to Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogans third-party app, "This Is Your Digital Life." His app was a personality quiz that 270,000 Facebook users took without knowing it would vacuum up all their data and all of their friends' data. Facebook learned about the incident in 2015, but didnt publicly acknowledge it until articles were printed last month on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Cambridge Analytica has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the matter.

Fallout from the growing data security scandal has knocked roughly $80 billion from the social giants market value, led to a class-action lawsuit and prompted fierce questioning from some lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

The tech company now faces a new FTC investigation into allegations that it may have violated a 2011 consent order requiring Facebook to establish and maintain a comprehensive privacy program and get users affirmative express consent before enacting changes that override their privacy preferences. It also prohibited the social network from misrepresenting the privacy or security of its users data.

FACEBOOK MIGHT HAVE 29,000 DATA POINTS ON YOU, BUT MARK ZUCKERBERG DOESN'T REALLY KNOW

This was an institutional failure on the part of American regulators, said Sam Lester, a consumer privacy fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

Although Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently said the company was "too idealistic" in its handling of privacy issues and abuse, an examination of the company's growth and previous run-ins with regulators shows that both she and Zuckerberg might have known better.

EPIC has warned the federal government since 2009 that Facebook was playing fast and loose with its users data and that strong regulatory oversight was needed. That oversight may be coming, thanks in part to the efforts of regulators in Europe, where the stringent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect on May 25, will empower users with new control over their data in four key areas and impose stiff fines on Facebook or any company that violates the rules.

Among other features, the GDPR will give users a fully inclusive right to be forgotten that not only includes deleting your data but also preventing it from being further disseminated or used by third parties; it requires users to be notified of any data breach within 72 hours of a company learning about it; and would impose a fine of up to 4 percent of annual revenue for each violation. In Facebooks case, that would mean a fine of approximately $1.6 billion per violation in Europe.

FACEBOOK RECONSIDERS 'UNSAFE FOR COMMUNITY' TAG ON PRO-TRUMP DIAMOND AND SILK VIDEOS AFTER FOX & FRIENDS APPEARANCE

Beleaguered behemoth

If the FTC finds that Facebook violated the 2011 consent order, the agency could fine it up to $41,484 per user that was impacted: meaning a total fine in the trillions of dollars. It's unlikely Facebook would be fined anywhere near that amount, but some industry watchers have speculated a potential FTC penalty could be in the billions of dollars.

A coalition of consumer groups, in an open letter on Monday to Zuckerberg, urged Facebooks co-founder and CEO to adopt GDPR as the baseline standard for all Facebook services globally. In recent comments to reporters, the Facebook chief executive said that he would like to make GDPR protections available to users in North America and non-EU regions, but he hedged by not providing exact details about how that would look.

Forty-six percent of U.S. adults want to see more regulation of how the tech industry handles user privacy, according to a recent Reuters poll.

Steven Berman, managing partner of Hagens Berman, which on Monday filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of those whose data was allegedly harvested by Cambridge Analytica, said in a statement that Facebook has repeatedly failed to uphold its privacy agreements and brazenly neglected the security of the billions of those who use its social media service.

The lawsuit seeks compensation and injunctive relief.

In addition, advocacy groups for Muslims and African-Americans have called for a "civil rights audit" of the social network to ensure it is free from discrimination and hate speech.

Governments have a responsibility to protect peoples privacy and security by solving problems any tech company and industry cant alonethats when regulation comes into play, Denelle Dixon, COO of Mozilla, told Fox News.

Her company, which makes the web browser Firefox, was the first brand to pull its advertising from Facebook when the data scandal first broke.

The fine print

Although Facebook has said repeatedly that users freely share a multitude of information and are aware of its privacy rules listed online, many people do not pay attention to the fine print or get discouraged by having to click through multiple screens. The data scandal could change user behavior.

Facebook, for its part, has recently revamped its privacy settings pages to make them more user-friendly.

Consumers need to use the privacy tools and controls they have today. Those controls dont solve all of our privacy and security challenges, said Dixon. If the existing tools and controls dont meet your needs, then people have to demand what they need.

At Mozilla, where privacy has been a core principle for years, the company has long maintained a policy of no surprises and only collect what you need.

Facebooks sheer scale is undeniable. For countless people outside of Europe and North America, Facebook is the Internet. The tech giant owns Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, which have over 800 million, 1 billion and 1.5 billion monthly active users, respectively. It's incorporated features from competitors like Snapchat, seemingly dampening their growth and along with Google, controlled more than 80 percent of the global digital advertising market in 2017, according to a report in the Financial Times.

Some lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Wyden, (D.-OR.), have even floated the idea that Facebook could be broken up for antitrust violations if it does not handle the burgeoning scandal.

I dont see there being a Bell/AT&T-like breakup for Facebook, Instagram, et al. There is plenty of competition to go around online. Breaking it up would only hurt the future of social networks, Jason Mollica, a lecturer at American Universitys School of Communication, told Fox News.

HOW MUCH DOES FACEBOOK MAKE OFF YOU? THE AMOUNT MAY SURPRISE YOU

Customers, not products

Mozilla's Dixon believes that the pressure from users and advertisers is having an impact on Facebook.

To be clear, Facebook can and will still monetize user data, as will other companies, but events like this hopefully will force companies to have a more clear, transparent value exchange with users and to curtail activity that doesnt really put users first, Dixon added.

However, this isnt the tech giants first time in the spotlight, nor is it the first time it has promised to do better. Lester said that users should be skeptical when Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives say they'll take care of things.

We dont want to leave everything in the hands of Facebook, Lester, who worked as a law clerk with the FTCs Bureau of Consumer Protection while at Georgetown University, told Fox News. Their business model relies on collecting all this info and developing these secret profiles.

"Its not just Facebooktime and time again, the companies with whom we trust with our most sensitive data have shown that privacy and security are optional.  Denelle Dixon, COO of Mozilla

A SurveyMonkey poll in the wake of the privacy scandal found that 56 percent of users who know about the topic do not trust the social network to protect user privacy, and 60 percent plan to share less personal information with Facebook.

Facebook offers a service people value, otherwise so many people wouldnt continue to use it. Theres nothing inherently wrong with that, said Dixon. The problem is that users dont see or understand what they are giving up in exchange for that service. Theres something out of balance with the value exchange. Users are being last rather than first.

Regulators are paying attention.

In addition to the FTCs probe confirmed on March 26, the Federal Election Commission recently announced that political advertisements online will soon have to identify their sponsors. This happened in the wake of Russias disinformation campaign, which harnessed Facebook and other platforms.

Facebook executives have said this week that they will implement the requirements of the Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill that would improve transparency and increase regulations around online political ads.

Cambridge Analytica sparked a moment because people are looking more broadly at the power that Facebook has in many areas, said Lester. We need public oversight and accountability.

Cambridge Analytica said in a Monday statement that it did not illegally or inappropriately collect or share Facebook data with anyone else, that it has not broken FEC regulations and that it did not use the Facebook data during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The company also launched a new site to dispel what it claims are falsehoods surrounding its role in the data scandal.

Its not just Facebooktime and time again, the companies with whom we trust with our most sensitive data have shown that privacy and security are optional, Dixon said.

Indeed, Google collects a gigantic amount of data from you through search, Gmail, Maps and more. This week, the company was accused by a coalition of privacy groups of illegally obtaining data from underage children on YouTube.

The dismay of users around the world has really underlined that such an approach is untenable, and we, as a technology community, need to build products and services that put the user at the center, that empower them to make informed choices, that meet their expectations around privacy, she continued, where they are the customer, not the product.This is a rush transcript from "Your World," April 12, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: All right, the meeting is over, but so far, far from done when it comes to addressing what to do about Syria.

This just coming in from Press Secretary Sarah Sanders on that powwow with top defense officials meeting with the president. "Trump just finished a meeting with his national security team to discuss the situation in Syria. No final decision has been made. We're continuing to assess intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies. The president will speak with President Macron of France and Prime Minister Theresa May of England this evening."

All right, so, close to something, but what?

Let's get the read from Missouri Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver.

Congressman, always good to have you. Thank you for taking the time.

REP. EMANUEL CLEAVER, D-MISSOURI: Sure. It's good to be here with you.

CAVUTO: How do you feel, sir, about if we take action in response to apparent chemical weapons used on the part of the Assad regime against its own people last week?

CLEAVER: Let me preface my answer to you by saying that I think something has to be done military, hopefully with some diplomacy as well.

But, look, I opposed President Obama when he sought to do something very similar. My position is that our Congress is systematically handing off its constitutional responsibility to the president.

All of these undeclared wars have killed tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of other people. And so while I think we have got to respond some kind of way, look, Congress ought to have a say in what happens.

And we ought to ask questions. What is the plan? How long are we going to fly strikes? Are we going to have a no-fly zone? Whatever, we need to know that, because the Constitution gives us the power to declare war.

And we haven't done it. The War Powers Act needs to be reexamined.

CAVUTO: Now, I remember very well your opposition to what President Obama was considering at the time. Some argued him that compelled him to say, all right, I'm going to throw this back in Congress' lap after his famous red line comment.

Do you think, as critics have said since, that that limits a presidents' ability or a country's ability to respond immediately to a problem that has to be addressed immediately, that if we had to wait for you guys to come to a vote, make a decision, for all we know, Assad could be gassing his people again and again and again, and we do nothing.

CLEAVER: No, I think there are instances where the president must act immediately after conferring with the Army chiefs, the national security adviser, and so forth.

CAVUTO: Well, Director Pompeo, in his confirmation hearing, today seemed -- and I don't want to mistake his words, sir -- seemed to intimate this is an example of that, a one-time response, talking to top military leaders and allies, and that he would be justified for an immediate response that was much more involved, obviously involving Congress.

You say what?

CLEAVER: Well, I think that, in a case like this, because we have waited now, what, almost a week since we discovered that Assad was using chemicals on his own people, perhaps with the help of Vladimir Putin, I think we could have had a meeting, even if the -- someone from the administration would come over.

We could have a closed session and talk things out, and just so we would feel like we are involved, and get information about whether this is in fact going to be a one-time-only hit.

Look, I don't care who is president is, if it's my cousin. If they are trying to exclude Congress from something as critical as war or using the machinery of war, we need to know something about it.

CAVUTO: So, when the president talks, as he has, sir, lately about his tweet being misinterpreted about taking action or telegraphing his next move, that the attack could be soon or not so soon at all, that it might not be as we expect, what did you think of that?

(LAUGHTER)

CLEAVER: Well, the president is sending mixed signals and mixed messages.

I'm hoping that we don't end up having some confusion on the other end, where we have an accidental war. I think we have essentially warned Russia. Russian troops are in the area. They may call themselves advisers or whatever, but they're -- Russian troops are there in Syria.

What happens if we kill 200 or 300 Russian soldiers? I think we have got to be very strategic. And I think the president has got to rely heavily on the military and on the civilian leadership, with the secretary of state -- well, without a secretary of state, but individuals who are in those positions.

Look, what Assad did, we need to respond. I would throw a rock over there if I could, but we need to -- there ought to be a plan. And I don't think that we can do anything external to diplomacy.

CAVUTO: Congressman, thank you. You have been very consistent on this, with a Democratic president, a Republican president. No one can fault you on that front.

Thank you, sir. Very good seeing you again.

CLEAVER: Sure. Good to talk with you.

CAVUTO: All right.

END

Content and Programming Copyright 2018 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2018 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.This is a rush transcript from "Your World," April 12, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: Into my next guest, Senator Rand Paul, I want to focus on the markets for a quick second here. They were up on the day, largely on the belief here that we're not going to do anything rash or certainly immediate there, or the prospect for, you know, an immediate interference in Syria was not necessarily in the offing.

They could be wrong. They often are.

To Senator Rand Paul.

Senator, are the markets right? No immediate incursion?

SEN. RAND PAUL, R-KENTUCKY: You know, I think the markets are reacting to a lot of things.

Foreign policy is one. I think the threat of a trade war is another. Massive, chronic deficit spending is another. Maybe more immediately to threats of war. But I think that there's still a great deal of potential for hostilities.

That's what some call it. That's when they don't want to use the word war. But, yes, I think we're -- I think something is going to happen in Syria. And I have been very clear that the Constitution doesn't allow the president to do this without first asking Congress.

CAVUTO: I noticed today, senator, following the hearing closely with Director Pompeo, that you were very tough on him, and not so much interested in his conversation he might or might have had with Bob Mueller, but more to the point on this Syrian issue and whether he or we should be going in there.

Could you explain?

PAUL: Well, one of the points I have been making is that one of the things I liked about President Trump is he said the Iraq War was one of our single biggest mistakes, geopolitical mistakes.

And I think President Trump deserves to have people around him who understand that and believe that. I, frankly, that Pompeo doesn't believe the Iraq War was a mistake. I asked him whether we should stay in Afghanistan. He says we should stay in Afghanistan.

And yet the president really since 2012 has been adamant that we have stayed too long, that we have been building roads for people who hate us over there, and that it's time to come home and start thinking about America first.

So I'm not so sure that Pompeo is the best representative of what the president actually believes.

CAVUTO: So, you would not respond to Syria's chemical attack on its people?

PAUL: I think the first thing we need to determine is who did this.

There's still some question whether or not it was the Syrians or whether there was an accidental bombing of a depot of chemical weapons.

One question you might want to ask is, to whose benefit is this? The only thing that can unify the world to actually go in -- Assad has been winning everything. We have been leaving Assad alone. Why would he want the entire world to come after him for doing something the entire world rejects, chemical weapons?

So, there is something here that doesn't fit and doesn't make sense. All Assad has to do is lay quiet. He's winning. We're not planning on decapitating Assad from Syria, other than what gets the U.S. and the world motivated? A chemical attack.

You can kill more people with semiautomatic gunfire with five shooters than they kill with chemical weapons. Something doesn't make sense here.

CAVUTO: Yes. All right.

Others have expressed that concern that maybe we're leaping on something that doesn't quite smell right. But the French president, Macron, had indicated French intelligence had confirmed that it was indeed a Syrian- inspired attack.

Now...

PAUL: The hard part is this, Neil.

CAVUTO: Go ahead.

PAUL: You can confirm and see ships or airships or helicopters going and dropping bombs, but the question is, is there a possibility that they're exploding depots of weapons that are already on the ground?

Because there's something just strange about the way this is done and that it really gets the whole world united to do something about Assad, when the whole world is sort of saying, well, Assad is who he's going to be and we're going after ISIS.

This changes the whole perception of that war. Why would Assad want to do that?

CAVUTO: Yes. It sounds like you're a no vote on Pompeo.

PAUL: I don't think he represents President Trump's vision for America.

Millions of Americans voted for Trump because he said we would come home from Afghanistan. He said that the Iraq War was a mistake. He seemed to understand that we shouldn't be everywhere all the time.

Even Pompeo in his remarks said, oh, it's not longer -- there's no military solution to Afghanistan.

Well, if there's no military solution, do you want to be the last soldier sent in for a war that is trying to get a negotiating tool for diplomacy, and it's not going to be a victory?

Who wants to send their kid to that? So, if there's no military solution, let's declare victory and come home.

CAVUTO: All right, so if they want to bypass the committee and go straight to Senate to vote on his nomination, would you try to block that?

PAUL: I don't think I can in any way.

So, traditionally, you have to be voted out of committee. But I have a feeling that if he's not voted out of committee, they will bring him to floor anyway. And then it's really up to the Democrats. If Democrats believe that they're not too concerned with the rule of constitutional law in foreign policy, then he may well win. But we will see.

CAVUTO: Switching gears very slightly, Senator, some of your colleagues, including some Republicans, are trying to push a measure that would prevent the president from firing Bob Mueller.

What do you think of that?

PAUL: I'm not for Congress getting involved in this.

I don't like that idea of special prosecutors. I think they have way too much latitude. I think the indictments and all of the accusations so far have had nothing really to do with Russia or Russia collusion.

So I think we have gone far afield of what they were supposed to do. And I just don't like the idea of having so much prosecutorial power to look through everybody's bank records, to go to your personal lawyer and rummage through the office and look at this stuff.

It just is unseemly. And I worry that if you can do this to the president, can you imagine what these intelligence agencies could do to an ordinary American? So, I'm very worried about it.

CAVUTO: So if the president were to fire him, would he be justified, thinking that, to your point, it's gone way far afield from what it was supposed to be?

PAUL: I think it's one of these things where we never should have had a special prosecutor, but now that we do, it's hard to fire them, for many reasons.

I think the public perception of trying to cover something up by firing them is almost insurmountable. It's hard to imagine doing that.

But the one thing the president could do -- and if were the president were asking, what I would say is, he needs to declassify more of the shenanigans that have gone on over there.

See, there's a lot of stuff that is kept secret. And the Department of Justice wants to keep it secret from the Congress and from the people, but he should declassify reams and reams of this stuff, put it out all there.

Let's know about James Clapper and his lying to the Congress and that it was a felony. Are we going to investigate that? Should he have a lifelong pension for lying to Congress? Should Peter Strzok still work there? Should Lisa Page still work there?

Should they have top-secret authority? I asked the FBI head this. Do Peter Strzok and Lisa Page still have top-secret authority? And he said, all agents have top-secret authority. He wouldn't tell me specifically, but he said all agents do, which leads me to believe that these people who hate Trump so viscerally could still be sitting over there doing that.

CAVUTO: How long do they have that authority, when they're repositioned or even dumped?

PAUL: Their response to me is, they wouldn't tell me and yet they would tell me that all FBI agents have top-secret clearance, which means they can access the databases.

So my worry all along -- and even before Peter Strzok, before Trump, before the whole presidency -- is that our intelligence agencies need to be restrained by calling a judge and that check and balance where the police or the FBI always have to call a judge.

You should not be allowed to search an American in any database, IRS, any of this other stuff, without first presenting proof or probable cause that they have committed a crime to a judge.

CAVUTO: The reason why the president gets exasperated by this, we're told, Senator, he thinks these agencies, most notably the Justice Department and the FBI, have it out for them, that they are gunning for him.

Do you agree with that?

PAUL: Clearly, some do. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page have been found out by hundreds and hundreds of texts that they were trying to do what they could to prevent him from being president and that they had some sort of insurance policy.

That should be in public forum. Should we not ask these two agents, what was their insurance policy? Should Andy McCabe be forced to testify under law?

So, really it does look like two sets of justice. They go after the president's lawyer with a raid to all of his houses. They really go against the precedent of not invading the attorney-client privilege. Did anybody invade Hillary Clinton's lawyer? Is anybody doing anything about Peter Strzok?

It looks like two sets of justice here. And I'm for absolutely Peter Strzok and Lisa Page shouldn't work at the FBI. If they do, they should be on restricted duty and they shouldn't be allowed to search Americans' databases, because I'm afraid they're so biased, that they bring that bias to work and they could well be abusing that power.

CAVUTO: Senator Rand Paul, good seeing you again. Thank you very much.

PAUL: Thank you.

CAVUTO: All right.

END

Content and Programming Copyright 2018 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2018 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.When youve made it to 112 years old, theres probably not much that surprises you.

But Richard Overton, the countrys oldest WWII veteran and possibly third oldest man in the world, was given an early birthday present last week that hell never forget.

MASTERS CHAMP PATRICK REED VISITS CHICK-FIL-A DRIVE-THRU IN HIS GREEN JACKET

On Saturday, Overton got to fly from his home in Austin, Texas to the nations capital by private jet to tour the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The trip came together after Overton mentioned to billionaire businessman and philanthropist friend Robert F. Smith how hed like to visit the museum someday. Smith, whos donated $20 million to the museum, asked Overton, What are you all doing this weekend? and the next morning, the men were on their way, The Washington Post reports.

During his visit, Overton received a surprise call from retired four-star general and former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, whos on the museums board and checked out the exhibit featuring Barack Obama, whom Overton has met a couple times.

The grandson of a slave, Overton served in the Army during WWII and fought in a segregated unit, according to Dallas News. He spent the remainder of his career working in furniture stores and later worked as a courier before retiring at 85.

He now spends most of his time hanging out on his throne, what his cousin calls his front porch, where he meets with the regular stream of visitors who want to meet him.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

As he approaches his 112th birthday on May 11, Overton told The Post the secret to his longevity is smoking cigars and drinking whiskey, which he still does to this day.A British Airways flight attendant has been terminated and fined after she was found to be more than 10 times the legal alcohol limit while working on a flight from Singapore to England in February. Patricia Casey, 51, reportedly had eight shots of vodka during the 13-and-a-half hour flight.

BRITISH AIRWAYS EMPLOYEE ACCUSED OF RAPING SENIOR FLIGHT ATTENDANT DURING STOPOVER

During the trip, a passenger smelled alcohol on her breath and she was arrested once the flight touched down at Heathrow Airport, SWNS reported.

Prosecutor Jasper Kaur said, London Evening Standard reported, Officers were requested to attend British Airways crew reporting centre in Terminal 5. At this location a member of the cabin crew had been stopped following her flight. Whilst on board a passenger had complained that alcohol could be smelled on that crew member.

At first, Casey denied having any food or drink on board the flight, but eventually admitted to being silly and having indulged in four miniature bottles of vodka, the outlet reported. Tests were taken of Casey that showed she had 201mg of alcohol in 100ml of blood  10 times the limit of 20mg allowed for air crews.

In court, the flight attendant of 21 years admitted to drinking while on duty and claimed it was because she was using alcohol to cope with her divorce from her husband of 18 years.

Her defense attorney argued that the alcohol did not affect her work.

Shan Yaqub, defending Casey, said, SWNS reported, She was reported by one of the passengers, however theres no suggestion this affected her behavior.

She has been a flight attendant for over 21 years, she has an unblemished record, she has never had any issues in the past for her behavior. She was going through a messy divorce. She decided to self-medicate and on this occasion drank at work. She tells me she is not drinking alcohol now, Yaqub continued.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

In addition to losing her job, Casey was fined $427 and ordered to pay prosecution costs of $121 and a $42 victim surcharge, the London Standard reported.WARNING: IMAGES BELOW MAY BE GRAPHIC FOR SOME

Authorities in Texas on Tuesday discovered 50 dead horses on a self-described sanctuary in Canton, Texas, and seized custody of 87 allegedly mistreated animals.

It was just a sea of dead horses, Victoria Albrecht, a spokeswoman for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. It was just heartbreaking.

The allegedly mistreated animals included 70 horses, nine donkeys, six pigs and one longhorn, authorities said. The dead horses were found scattered and decomposing along a creek on the property.

The malnourished horses resorted to eating trees clean of their bark, while the pigs were confined to a single pen without access to food, authorities said.

Most of the animals were found roaming the fenced-in property with varying health problems, including overgrown and cracked hooves and open sores.

The agency said it first visited the property on March 3 after receiving a complaint of suspected animal cruelty. Officials then began to work with the owners, educating them on proper animal care and entering into an agreement with them to bring the animals conditions up to Texas' health and safety code.

Officials didnt know about the dead horses at that time, the statement said.

SPCA investigators checked on the animals two more times before receiving a second complaint on March 30this time of more than 50 dead horses on that same property.

Police and SPCA officials then worked together to gather evidence and take custody of the animals.

A deceased horse was taken so its cause of death could be determined by a necropsy, the statement said. The living animals were examined by a medical staff and will receive care until a custody hearing on April 19.

The owners have not been charged.The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky filed a suit late Tuesday to block a state law that bans a common second-trimester abortion procedure, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.

Elizabeth Kuhn, a communications director for Kentuckys Republican governor Matt Bevin, called the lawsuit disturbing, and said House Bill 454 was overwhelmingly backed by Kentuckys legislature.

The law bans a common abortion procedure known as "dilation and evacuation," for women who are 11 weeks or more pregnant except in cases of emergencies, the paper reported.

The ACLU lawsuit was filed shortly after Bevin signed the measure late Tuesday, which took effect immediately. The group had repeatedly threatened to challenge the law as it made its way through the legislature.

Few issues should be as commonsense as protecting the most vulnerable among us from the horrific act of being torn from limb to limb while still alive.  Elizabeth Kuhn, communications director for Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin

Kentuckys elected representatives voted overwhelmingly this session to safeguard unborn children against the gruesome practice of live dismemberment abortion, Kuhn said. Few issues should be as commonsense as protecting the most vulnerable among us from the horrific act of being torn from limb to limb while still alive.

According to state statistics cited by the Herald-Leader, the procedure was used in 537 of 3,312 abortions performed in Kentucky in 2016.

The ACLU said the law disregards a woman's private medical decisions "in favor of a narrow, ideological agenda." It says the law forces women to either leave the state to undergo the procedure or forego the care.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.An Arizona woman accused of killing her toddler son and infant daughter said Wednesday she feels "betrayed" by the children's babysitter, who she claims was watching them the day they died.

Brittany Velasquez, 20, contacted the FOX10 Phoenix newsroom from jail and denied murdering her two children.

"I haven't been showing too much emotion to everything that's going on, because I don't know how to feel. I'm just very hurt. My pride and joy were taken from me, and it makes me really mad," she said.

Velasquez also told FOX10 she felt betrayed by the babysitter, and that she had worked a 12-hour shift at a restaurant the day the two children were found dead.

"It makes me very mad," she said. "I feel betrayed. I really feel betrayed."

ARIZONA MOM TRIED TO BLAME SOMEONE ELSE AFTER KIDS FOUND DEAD IN CAR SEATS, POLICE SAY

Authorities, however, said that she never left her children with a babysitter but instead left them in the car for the entire day, which led to their deaths. The two children were found cold to the touch in a vehicle, still strapped into their car seats, according to court documents filed last month.

The 20-year-old at one point also blamed the children's death on her grandparents, who denied knowing any arrangement about caring for the children.

In another point during the 10-minute phone conversation with FOX10, Velasquez said her daughter was "very, very happy," adding "there's not a moment I'd never seen her smile."

ARIZONA MOTHER ARRESTED AFTER TODDLER, BABY FOUND DEAD IN CAR SEATS, POLICE SAY

On the day Velasquez was charged, her brother described the 20-year-old to FOX10 as a woman who is "very manipulative."

The 20-year-old is scheduled to appear in court again on Friday.

Fox News' Katherine Lam contributed to this report.Police were investigating a shooting at a Houston gas station on Wednesday where the owner allegedly shot a customer during an argument over a Slim Jim beef snack.

The gas station owner, identified as Mohammed Kahloon, accused the male customer, Cameron Carson, 25, of stealing the $1.99 beef stick and shot him in the leg during the ensuing argument, police said.

"This guy came running out of the store while I'm pumping gas yelling, 'You didn't pay for that Slim Jim,' witness Kenny Allen told KTRK-TV. (Carson) said, 'I did pay for the Slim Jim.' The next thing you know, this guy reaches in his back, pulls out his gun and shoots him.

Allen, who was traveling with Carson, told KPRC-TV his friend pushed Kahloon when the store owner got in his face for paying about $1 for the dried sausage snack, arguing he should have been paid $2.15.

Carson underwent surgery at Ben Taub Hospital and was expected to survive, police said.

Kahloon was taken in to talk with investigators, KTRK-TV reported. It wasnt clear if he will face charges.

Police said last November that Kahloon had been injured when three suspects tried to rob his store and he fired his gun multiple times, killing one suspect. Store employees told KCRA-TV that Khaloon has been uneasy working in the store since then.

Reports said police had placed an evidence marker over a Slim Jim in the gas stations parking lot.

"It's amazing, over a Slim Jim, Allen told KCRA-TV. A $1.99 Slim Jim."The Buckskin Girl has finally been identified.

A 21-year-old woman who received the nickname after being found dead in Ohio in 1981, wearing jeans and a buckskin jacket with a Native American design, was revealed Wednesday to be Marcia L. King of Arkansas.

The identification of the victim is critical in advancing the investigation towards finding the person or persons responsible for this crime, the Miami County Sheriffs Office said.

Police said Kings body was found on Greenlee Road in Miami County, Ohio on April 24, 1981. Its not clear what brought the Arkansas native to the state, but she was known to have ties to the Pittsburgh and Louisville areas, according to Fox 19 Now.

An autopsy done at the time concluded she was killed by strangulation and blunt force trauma in the hours before the discovery.

The case remained unsolved for decades, but it has remained assigned to a detective as an active investigation since the victim was discovered, the Miami County Sheriffs Office said.

Efforts to identify King over the years included pollen studies on her clothing and analysis of hair samples. The breakthrough came on April 9 during DNA testing.

The scientific assistance that finally led to the victims identification was conducted by the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization recently created to apply genetic genealogy tools to the identification of unknown persons, the Miami County Sheriffs Office said.

Miami County Chief Deputy Steve Lord told the Dayton Daily News that the ongoing investigation is focusing on the last month of Kings life.

He added that the womans mother, who held out hope for decades that Marcia would eventually return home, is now looking at replacing the Jane Doe inscription on her headstone.The US and Russian Federation moved closer to direct confrontation over the alleged chemical attack in Syria as Donald Trump said a decision was imminent, and Moscow warned that any US military action would have "grave repercussions".

Mr Johnson discussed the situation with acting U.S. secretary of state John Sullivan twice on Monday.

Earlier in the day, Trump held a meeting with members of his Cabinet, where he told reporters that his administration would be making "some major decisions over the next 24 to 48 hours" regarding the response to Syria. Dozens of civilians are believed to have died in the suspected poison gas attack over the weekend.

Syria and its ally Russian Federation have dismissed allegations that the attack was carried out by Syrian forces as "fabrications" and have warned against using them to justify military action.Perhaps the biggest risk for Pentagon planners is Russian Federation, and its large presence which since late 2015 has been deeply enmeshed with Assad's military. If he does, it's going to be very tough. "He'll pay a price". "He will, everybody will", Mr Trump added.

Moscow said it warned the United States of "grave repercussions" if it carried out an attack against Syrian government forces.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the strike on the T-4 base was a unsafe development. Syria and Russian Federation accused Israel of carrying out the attack.

"We are making a decision as to what we do with respect to the terrible attack that was made near Damascus, and it will be met forcefully, and when I'm not saying because I don't like to talk about timing". "I don't rule out anything right now", Mr Mattis said while hosting Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, at the Pentagon. It's armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, the weapon of choice in a US attack one year ago on an airfield in Syria following an alleged sarin gas attack on civilians.

Syria's official Sana news agency denied the reports, saying Assad's rapidly advancing army "doesn't need to use any chemical weapons as the media channels that support the terrorists are fabricating".

The commander in chief and his advisers are deciding on a response to the Syrian government's most recent chemical weapons attack on its own people.

Prime Minister Theresa May said that the United Kingdom was considering what action was necessary in response to the "barbaric" attack which has left at least 40 people, including children, dead. "There will be consequences for this unacceptable atrocity", it said.

The Syrian government and Russian Federation said that there was no evidence that a gas attack had taken place and the claim was bogus.

The Trump Administration ordered a targeted air strike on a military base in Syria after a chemical weapons attack that took the lives of at least 90 in Syria a year ago. Trump has vowed to respond "forcefully", warning that Russian Federation or any other nation found to share responsibility will "pay a price". The UK and several other states blamed Moscow, and alleged Russian interference in the 2016 usa election. Their discussion followed Mr Johnson's conversation with French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian this morning.

Britain and the United States agreed on Monday that the attack bore the hallmarks of previous chemical weapons attacks by Assad's government, but neither country gave details of what kind of chemical might have been used or how the attack was staged. "They reiterated their commitment to standing up for the Chemical Weapons Convention and to ensuring that those responsible for this horrific attack are held to account. They underlined the importance of the United Kingdom, the U.S., and France remaining in close touch".The headmaster of a Florida Christian school is calling for prayer for all of the families involved as one of their teachers is accused of having a sexual relationship with a student.

Suzanne Lea Owen, a 35-year-old high school teacher at the private Evangelical Christian School in Fort Myers, allegedly had a sexual encounter with a male student off-campus in early April, the Lee County Sheriffs Office said.

"We are deeply saddened and express sincere sympathy to any and all victims of sexual assault," headmaster John Hunte said in a statement to parents and students, announcing that Owen has been fired. "Please be in prayer for all of the families involved."

Owen was arrested Wednesday and police said she had been exchanging text messages with the student in the weeks leading up to the alleged sexual encounter.

"We have and will continue to cooperate with law enforcement during this investigation," Hunte said.

The victims age has not been revealed, but Owen has been charged with custodial sexual battery on a victim between 12 and 18 years old, a first-degree felony, according to the Miami Herald.

As of Thursday, she remains in Lee County Jail.A conservative group is claiming a Texas university banned them after posting fliers allegedly exposing anti-Semitism on campus.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center, a think tank that targets the left and any affiliation it may have with radical Islam, posted fliers at the University of Texas at San Antonio campus in late March that sought to expose an anti-Israel student group.

The fliers labeled Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) as the Neo-Nazis on campus with quotes allegedly from a university member like: How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough.

CampusReform.org reported the fliers were part of the Freedom Centers nationwide Stop University Support for Terrorists campaign.

Earlier this month, the universitys chief legal officer threatened the think tank with a criminal trespass warning cease-and-desist letter telling the group it is barred and forbidden from entering or remaining on any UTSA properties for posting unauthorized fliers while not being affiliated with the university.

David Horowitz, the groups president, however, believes it is a matter of free speech rights, especially at a publicly funded institution that is bound by the First Amendment.

UTSA spokesman Joe Izbrand told Fox News the universitys actions were strictly in response to a posting policy violation.

University policy prohibits groups and individuals unaffiliated with the university from engaging in expressive activities at UTSA, including the placement of flyers on campus, regardless of their political association or point of view, Izbrand said.

The UTSA Campus Climate Team put the Freedom Centers fliers on its bias incident list.

The SJP and Muslim Students Association chapters at UTSA called the fliers repulsive, racist intimidation tactics. The two groups said they are viciously targeted for taking a stance against Israeli injustices, which include apartheid and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

None of the alleged authors of the anti-Semitic quotes posted on the flyer are members of our SJP, the groups wrote. The purpose of fliers like these is to intimidate people into silence as Israel continues its terror against Palestinians.Not even a bomb scare could keep this Texas couple from saying I Do on their wedding day.

Andrea and Matthew Smith exchanged vows in the parking lot of a sub-courthouse in Arlington after it was evacuated Wednesday over a suspicious package.

"We look at life as we roll with the punches, Andrea Smith told Fox 4 News. So this just this just adds to our story. Making memories.

The couple was scheduled to be married by a justice of the peace inside the building, but when they arrived on April 11, which Andrea said was their three-year anniversary, they noticed people streaming out its doors.

"We didn't know if they were jurors or if they were employees. We didn't know if it was a bomb threat or a fire. We didn't know, Matthew Smith told Fox 4 News. We just thought we'd stay here until midnight and kind of see what happens."

A green suitcase that was placed behind a trash can on the property was determined by police to be no threat, but they didnt want to take any chances following a string of recent package bombings in Austin.

The couple ended up getting married under a tree outside, and the bonus, according to Andrea, was that all of the people who were out here in the parking lot became our family and friends and witnesses.

"It was great seeing two people having so much fun with a very unique situation, Justice of the Peace Judge Mary Curnutt told Fox 4 News. And I think they actually enjoyed it more than they would have in a very quiet courtroom."Just months away from when drug lord Joaquin El Chapo Guzman is expected to stand trial, prosecutors have revealed some of the evidence they have against the notorious Mexican kingpin, including an attempt to smuggle seven tons of cocaine in cans of jalapenos, torture, kidnappings and an infamous shootout at a Puerto Vallarta nightclub.

A 90-page government memo, filed Tuesday and obtained by Fox News, details the crimes Guzman  who has been sitting in a New York City prison since he was extradited in January 2017  is believed to have committed in his decades-long career in alleged cross-border drug trafficking.

Prosecutors said some of their evidence points to El Chapo being involved in a shootout at a crowded Puerto Vallarta nightclub in 1992 that left six dead. About 300 people were in the nightclub at the time of the drug-gang shooting. Guzman has been believed to be connected with the shooting because he was settling a score with the leaders of the Arellano Felix gang.

YouTube videos also have been downloaded as part of evidence, including one called "1993 Chili Can Seizure."

The video features news footage of Guzmans Sinaloa cartel alleged attempt to smuggle 7.3 tons of cocaine stashed in jalapeno cans to the U.S., prosecutors said. Mexican authorities foiled the plot in Tecate, a Mexican city that borders California.

In 2001, right after he escaped from prison, Guzman ordered his pistoleros  gunmen  to capture and torture members of the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas. Some were brought to him bound and helpless, according to the memo.

"Indeed, in at least one instance, the defendant himself shot the rivals at point-blank range and ordered his lackeys to dispose of the bodies," the memo stated.

Guzman in 2006 also shot two Zetas members with a long gun after they were beaten, according to the memo.

[Guzman] then ordered his workers to dig a hole in the ground, throw the bodies in the hole and light the bodies on fire, the memo stated.

Prosecutors said they have obtained satellite photos, drug ledgers, dozens of videos, records of intercepted phone calls and emails and more than 300,000 pages of documents against Guzman and his cartel operation.

Prosecutors, however, want some details to be left out of the trial set for September, including any charitable works Guzman was involved in Mexico and how the captured kingpin planned to run for the Mexican Senate while he was imprisoned.

The U.S. government also asked for Judge Brian Cogan to bar references to actor Sean Penns 2016 Rolling Stone interview with Guzman.

"In it, Penn casts the defendants drug trafficking activities in various exculpatory lights. Among other things, he implies that the defendant was the true 'president of Mexico,' a 'Robin Hood-like figure and a businessman,' who 'unlike many of his counterparts [does not] engage in gratuitous kidnapping and murder,'" the memo stated.

On Monday, the defense requested the criminal histories of drug lords, couriers, enforcers and accountants that prosecutors may put on the stand. The list includes about 40 witnesses, including some who might be allowed to testify under aliases.

Guzmans lawyer also said his client couldnt get a fair trial. He cited the sensational media coverage and the restrictions placed on Guzman in prison as reasons, The New York Times reported. Guzman also complained about the small, windowless cell hes being held in thats causing him to lose his sanity.

The Brooklyn conspiracy trial starts in September. Guzman has pleaded not guilty on charges including operating a continuing criminal enterprise. He could face life in prison if convicted.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.A Florida police department is blasting one of its former officers after firing him for posting a racially-charged image on social media during Black History Month.

Matthew Moriarty, a 24-year-old who had served as an officer for around two-and-half years in Daytona Beach Shores, was terminated Wednesday. Two months earlier, police say they received a Snapchat image of him with black hair and a beard drawn over his face, along with graphics of a police car, a toy gun, a syringe and text saying This is how I celebrate Black History Month.

It was terrible thing to do. It was reprehensible. How do you defend that? Daytona Beach Shores Public Safety Department Director Stephan Dembinsky told Fox 35 Orlando. How do you stay a police officer, when you go to court and testify against the people that you put in jail, and they hold up this picture and ask how can we believe this is unbiased policing?".

Dembinsky said Moriarty was immediately suspended once they received the photo and an internal investigation is ongoing into all of his arrests and traffic stops to determine any incidents of bias.

"Every chief in America is going through the same thing, and we have to weed these people out, Dembinsky told Fox 35 Orlando.

Moriartys attorney told the Daytona Beach News-Journal that his clients creation of the image was a 15-second lapse of judgment.Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz wants to donate his inheritance to victims of the massacre and help heal the community.

A lawyer for Cruz  who killed 17 people with a semi-automatic weapon at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School  said that any wealth his client receives would go to survivors of the gunmans rampage.

Mr. Cruz does not want those funds, whatever money that he is entitled to, lawyer Melissa McNeill told a Broward County judge Wednesday.

He would like that money donated to an organization that the victims family believes would be able to facilitate healing in our community or an opportunity to educate our community about the issues that have ripened over the last four or five months.

Cruzs mother died last November and he is set to inherit $800,000 from a trust fund when he turns 22, reports said.

Let it go to those who have been hurt, period, another member of his legal team, Howard Finkelstein, asked the judge.

But his lawyers have yet to determine whether the installments are paid monthly or yearly and whether Cruz is entitled to it.

If it is monthly, the defendant could have access to a million dollars, Finkelstein said.

Click for more from The New York PostWelcome to Fox News First. Not signed up yet? Click here.

Developing now, Thursday, April 12, 2018

House Speaker Paul Ryan's retirement announcement sets off a frenzy over wholl succeed him  and his decisions impact on the 2018 midterms

House Intel Chair Devin Nunes and Rep. Trey Gowdy gain access from the FBI to the memo that started the Russia investigation

Years of soft policy against Russia are over, Mike Pompeo, President Trump's pick for secretary of state, is expected to tell senators at his confirmation hearing

Regulation of social media companies is 'inevitable,' Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says during his second day of congressional testimony

The Parkland, Fla., shooting suspect wants to give his inheritance to massacre victims, his lawyer told a judge Wednesday

THE LEAD STORY - SHADOW CAMPAIGNS FOR HOUSE SPEAKER, PELOSI LOOKING TO REGAIN POWER: House Speaker Paul Ryans retirement plans, announced Wednesday, expose what appears to be an already-existing behind-the-scenes battle among his top lieutenants to replace him ... Ryan and his staff had for weeks denied rumors that the Wisconsin Republican planned to leave office, as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise appeared to be increasing their respective national profiles and positioning for the job. But as signs of the shadow campaigns emerge, the Democratic Party could play spoiler. If the Democrats retake the House in November, current Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi  the self-described master legislator from California -- could be in an ideal position to regain power. Pelosi served as House speaker from 2007-2011.

ACCESS NO LONGER DENIED: Facing possible legal action, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein allowed House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., to view the FBI memo that sparked the bureau's counterintelligence investigation of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign ... The meeting came a day after Nunes threatened to take legal action -- including contempt proceedings and impeachment -- against Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray for failing to produce a clean copy of the memo, known as an electronic communication, or EC, that was responsive to an August 2017 committee subpoena. "Although the subpoenas issued by this Committee in August 2017 remain in effect, Id like to thank Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein for his cooperation today," Nunes responded. A government source told Fox News that Nunes, Gowdy and committee Republican staff were able to view the two-page memo with relatively few redactions. The source described those redactions as "minimal and justified."

GETTING TOUGH ON RUSSIA: Mike Pompeo, President Trump's nominee to be the next secretary of state, is expected to tell the Senate during his confirmation hearing Thursday that years of soft policy toward Russian aggression are now over" ... According to his prepared remarks, Pompeo will chastise Russia for acting aggressively and emphasize that the national security strategy of the Trump administration considers Russia a danger to our country. However, he also will say that diplomatic efforts with Moscow, while challenging, must continue. Pompeo, currently the CIA director, will vow to promote democracy and human rights while stressing Americas duty to lead, according to the remarks, despite Trumps vows to put America first. His remarks come as President Trump and U.S. allies weigh options against Syria and the Assad regime for its suspected poison gas attack on its own people last weekend. Trump has warned Russia against countering any potential U.S. strike on Syria.

FACEBOOK SAVES FACE: House members took turns Wednesday grilling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the social networking sites failure to protect the personal information of 87 million users, calling on the billionaire to explain the alarming reports about data security issues and urging him to help fix the industrys problems ... Statements from representatives facing re-election this year ranged from complaints of anti-conservative bias to questions about whether Facebook could improve broadband speeds in their state. Zuckerberg testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on his final day on Capitol Hill  after five hours on Tuesday before a joint hearing of the Senates commerce and judiciary committees. The internet is growing in importance around the world in peoples lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation, Zuckerberg said during testimony Wednesday. So my position is not that there should be no regulation, but I also think that you have to be careful about regulation you put in place.

If lawmakers sought to humble Zuckerberg during his two days of testimony, they may have fallen short. Facebook shares rose more than 1 percent Wednesday after climbing 4.5 percent on Tuesday. Two days of unfocused questioning helped Zuckerberg restore more than $25 billion in market value that the company has lost since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in mid-March.

BLOOD MONEY: Parkland, Fla., school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz wants to donate his inheritance to victims of the massacre and help heal the community ... A lawyer for Cruz  who is accused of killing 17 people with a semi-automatic weapon Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School  said that any wealth his client receives would go to survivors of the gunmans rampage. Mr. Cruz does not want those funds, whatever money that he is entitled to, lawyer Melissa McNeill told a Broward County judge Wednesday. He would like that money donated to an organization that the victims family believes would be able to facilitate healing in our community or an opportunity to educate our community about the issues that have ripened over the last four or five months. Cruzs mother died last November and the 19-year-old is set to inherit $800,000 from a trust fund when he turns 22, reports said.

AS SEEN ON FOX NEWS

QUESTIONING SYRIA: "You accused me of 'defending a blood-soaked regime.' I am questioning anyone who states as fact what he doesn't know [to be] fact."  Tucker Carlson, on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," challenging Commentary Magazine associate editor Noah Rothman, who claimed the host "willfully misled his audience and advanced Russian geopolitical narratives" by cautioning against anti-Assad actions in Syria following the chemical attack on civilians there. WATCH

'FOREIGN POLICY BY TWEETS': "It can't just be a one-off. I think there really has to be some kind of a strategic approach to it and a plan, and I am worried about it."  Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on "The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino," saying she is concerned President Trump acts as though he is "above the law" and is concerned Trump doesn't have a real strategy for a potential attack on Syria. WATCH

#CohenRaid

Alan Dershowitz: Why the FBI raid on Trump's lawyer hurts all of us.

Judge Andrew Napolitano: The real threat to Donald Trump.

Michael Goodwin: When it comes to Mueller, Trump needs to play the long game.

TRENDING

Biblical prophecy claims the Rapture is coming April 23, numerologist says.

Fans boo Tristan Thompson in first game since allegedly cheating on pregnant Khloe Kardashian.

Stranger on plane adopts struggling woman's baby after 'chance encounter.'

THE SWAMP

Jerry Brown bolsters National Guard but defends California's sanctuary status.

Ex-lover of Missouri Gov. Greitens says 'sexy workout' encounter was nonconsensual.

White House mulls letting states require drug tests for some food stamp recipients.

ACROSS THE NATION

I'm 'a member of the African-American community,' says white Dem seeking state House seat.

Virginia man followed woman across three states in fake police car, authorities say.

Suspect's sketches released in Washington cold-case murder of young couple.

MINDING YOUR BUSINESS

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sleeping on factory floor during Model 3 rollout.

Sears to sell 16 stores in online auction.

JP Morgan's Dimon says U.S. economy still looks 'pretty good.'

HOLLYWOOD SQUARED

'Roseanne' star Emma Kenney is 'seeking treatment' for her 'illegal' behavior.

Kevin Spacey sexual assault case reviewed by Los Angeles DA.

Bill Cosby accuser calls fallen comedian 'a serial rapist' on the witness stand.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS?

Heinz releases new Mayochup condiment.

PHOTO: Optical illusion that makes colors 'vanish' before your eyes goes viral.

Massive 205-million-year-old ichthyosaur fossil discovered, 'one of the largest animals ever.'

STAY TUNED

On Fox News:

Fox & Friends, 6 a.m. ET: House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy reacts to Paul Ryan's retirement announcement; Judge Andrew Napolitano on the latest in the Mueller investigation; an Army veteran who was recently in Syria discusses rising tension in the region; and the "Pitbull of Personal Development" Larry Winget has some advice for soon-to-be college graduates.

Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8 p.m. ET: Author and radio host Mark Steyn, "Tucker Carlson's Final Exam" and more.

On Fox Business:

Mornings with Maria, 6 a.m. ET: Guests include: Walid Phares, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser; Chris Swecker, former assistant FBI director; Rep. Claudia Tenney; Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer.

Varney & Co., 9 a.m. ET: Mike Huckabee; Gene Munster, managing partner at Loup Ventures; Apollo Ohno, Olympics champion; RNC spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany; State Sen. Jim Brulte, California Republican Party chairman.

The Intelligence Report, 2 p.m. ET: Mike Murphy, founder of Rosecliff Ventures; Keith Fitz-Gerald, Money Map Press chief investment strategist; Ford OConnell, GOP strategist.

On Fox News Radio:

The Fox News Rundown podcast: House Speaker Paul Ryan announced he would not be seeking re-election in November. Fox News Jared Halpern discusses Ryans 20-year career in politics and the effect his retirement may have on the GOP. Plus, National Guard troops have started gathering at the southern border. Fox News' Eben Brown is at the McAllen, Texas border, where he spoke to one nun who is helping the migrants. Also, commentary from "Fox & Friends" co-host Brian Kilmeade.

Want the Fox News Rundown sent straight to your mobile device? Subscribe through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher.

The Brian Kilmeade Show, 9 a.m. ET: Adm. James Stavridis on the possibility of a U.S.-led strike on Syria and its impact on Russia relations; Chris Wallace on the latest in the Mueller investigation; Gerri Willis on the takeaway from Mark Zuckerberg's testimony on Capitol Hill; Dana Perino on Paul Ryan's retirement and who could be the next House speaker; Jenna Lee on the top headlines of the day.

#OnThisDay

2008: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama concedes that comments he'd made privately during a fundraiser about bitter working class voters who "cling to guns or religion" were poorly-worded.

1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man to fly in space, orbiting Earth once before making a safe landing.

1861: The Civil War begins as Confederate forces open fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

Fox News First is compiled by Fox News' Bryan Robinson. Thank you for joining us! Enjoy your day! We'll see you in your inbox first thing Friday morning.A 15-year-old is accused of fatally shooting a 3-year-old who was asleep in his car seat on Easter Sunday.

DeKalb County Police say the unidentified Georgia teen has been charged with murder in the death of T'Rhigi Craig. News outlets have reported T'Rhigi's last name is Diggs. T'Rhigi was shot in the chest as his mother drove past a Texaco station in Atlanta.

Police initially suspected the toddler was a drive-by shooting victim, but learned through witnesses that the shot was fired from the gas station.

Police have said the boy's mom had heard a gunshot but didn't think anything of it until she realized he was unresponsive. She pulled over and called police. He later died at a hospital.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports investigators were still looking for another witness.A man who had been accused of marrying and having a child with his biological daughter killed her, the baby and the womans adoptive father before fatally shooting himself in his vehicle, officials said on Thursday.

Steven Pladl was found dead in his vehicle in Dover, N.Y., several miles from the New Milford, Conn., murder scene of his daughter, Katie, and her adoptive father, officials told ABC 7. Katie and her adoptive father were found dead in a separate vehicle.

Police reportedly responded to reports of gunfire around 8:40 a.m. when they found the two victims in a truck at an intersection on Route 7, New Milford Police Lt. Lawrence Ash told FOX 61. A window in the vehicle had been shot out, officials said. They then began searching for Pladls Honda minivan before finding him dead in the vehicle in Dover.

Those deaths came after Pladl reportedly killed a 7-month-old child in a North Carolina home. The child was found inside the home Thursday, officials said, but they would not specify where the body was found or the exact cause of death. Katie and Steven reportedly lived in the home before authorities discovered their incestuous relationship.

My understanding is that when Katie Pladl and Steven Pladl were arrested, that my clients mother moved into that house to take care of their biological son, Rick A. Friedman II, Steven's lawyer, told CBS 6.

Friedman said there wasn't a suspicion that the child was in peril. If any judge or any prosecutor or defense attorney involved in any of these cases believed that the Pladl child would be in harms way, there would not have been any bond, he said.

EX-WIFE AND MOM OF NORTH CAROLINA COUPLE ACCUSED OF INCEST -- AND PARENTING A LOVE CHILD -- BREAKS SILENCE

Steven, 42, of Knightdale, N.C., and Katie, 20, were arrested Jan. 27 and charged with adultery and contributing to delinquency. The arrests came after the couple reportedly got married. The baby boy was born in September.

Following their January arrest, the father was let go on a $1 million bond but his daughter remained at the Wake County Detention Center until late February, when she posted a $12,000 secured bond, the Daily Mail reported. According to the terms of her release she was prohibited from contacting Steven and was mandated to reside in New York with her adoptive parents.

Pladl and his wife, Alyssa, reportedly gave up Katie for adoption as an infant in the 1990s but they all reunited in 2016 after Katie tracked down her biological parents via social media.

Pladl and Alyssa divorced in 2017.

There are no words to describe the sense of betrayal and disgust I'm feeling, Alyssa told the Daily Mail in February. I waited 18 long years to have a relationship with my daughter -- and now he's completely destroyed it.

The exact motive for the shooting is under investigation, Ash said.An off-duty firefighter in Maryland risked his life Monday to save a man from jumping off a roughly 180-foot bridge.

Ryan Glenn with the Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services was driving across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge when traffic began to slow. Up ahead, Glenn noticed a stopped vehicle and a crowd of people gathered near the bridges railing.

Thats when he saw a man standing on what was maybe the highest point of the bridge, Maria Hogg, a digital media specialist with the Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services, told Fox News on Thursday. The man, who is currently unnamed, was threatening to commit suicide.

I said hey, theres a lot of people who care about you. Let's not do this, come down and talk. Im here for you, I care about you, Glenn told WMAR-TV.

Just as Glenn was within arms reach of the man, he looked down at the water and then back up at Glenn.

Thats when he did the unthinkable, Glenn told the station.

The man then jumped from the railing to a different part of the bridge.

He was just holding on by his grip and his feet were dangling over the water, Glenn said.

But before the man could let go, Glenn and two other men -- one of whom was an off-duty U.S. Capitol police officer and the other an off-duty Montgomery County Fire Department member, according to Hogg -- reached over the railing, grabbed the man and pulled him back over.

They didnt even think, said Hogg.

Glenn echoed this sentiment while speaking to Fox News on Thursday.

"At that point, the true rescue mode kicked in for all three of us," Glenn recalled. "At the same time, all three of us grabbed him over the railing and pinned him down to the ground."

Shortly after, the man, who Glenn said was "inconsolable," was taken to a local hospital.

"It was a pretty tense situation; I was extremely nervous. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, Glenn added.

"[Glenn] is a lifesaver. He did what he thought was right."  Maria Hogg

Hogg said both Glenn and the fire department had received a crazy outpouring of support from all over the region after sharing the news of the heroic act on Wednesday.

This isnt the first time an off-duty firefighter with the Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services has saved someones life. Hogg recalled a time a couple of years ago one of their firefighters saved a child from drowning in a frozen lake.

This is just a part of their lifestyle, she said.

While that may be true, he [Glenn] is a lifesaver, Hogg added. "He did what he thought was right.

Saving the man has been "a humbling experience," the firefighter said.

The three of us were just lucky to be in the right place at the right time, he said. I believe any good person wouldve done the same.Some of the most ferocious storms of the planet develop in our backyard: the Gulf of Alaska. Storms that are not hurricanes or typhoons but...Investigators on Thursday caught a Texas man almost 40 years after he broke out of prison in Oklahoma -- using his mother's obituary as a major clue.

Stephen Michael Paris, 58, was arrested in Houston after detectives said the obituary for his mother in Houston listed a son named Stephen Chavez, the same alias he used while living and working in the Houston area. Fingerprints confirmed his identity.

Once featured on the Oklahoma Department of Corrections Most Wanted list, Paris broke out of the Jess Dunn Correctional Center in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in October 1981.

He had served roughly 19 months of a nine-year sentence for drug possession and distribution.

Paris also was featured on the Oklahoma Department of Corrections' "Most Wanted" list.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

After nine days, the Oklahoma teacher walkout, with educators demanding more money for salaries and classroom needs, came to an end Thursday.

Instead of continuing to strike, the largest teachers union called for its members to shift focus to electing educators in November who are more in-line with their demands.

Oklahomas Republican governor has already signed legislation to increase teacher salaries in the state, but the union said it was not enough.

The average teacher starting salary for the 2016-2017 school year was $38,617, according to the National Education Association. In comparison, the average starting salaries for teachers in Oklahoma that same year was $31,919.

Heres a look at what Oklahoma educators demanded.

What do the teachers want?

The Oklahoma Education Association (OEA) demanded $10,000 in raises for teachers over the next three years, KOKH-TV reported. The union also asked for a $5,000 pay increase for other school officials, such as bus drivers, food service workers and custodians, according to KOKH.

At rallies in front of the state Capitol, teachers asked for newer and updated textbooks, more arts classes and smaller class sizes, according to the OEA.

Arent they already getting a raise?

Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican, already signed legislation that would up teacher pay by about $6,100 through an increase in taxes on certain goods, such as cigarettes and fuel.

The state legislature approved $2.9 billion for public schools, an increase of nearly 20 percent over last year's spending. Much of the new money was earmarked for the teacher raises.

Oklahomas new revenue measures are expected to generate about $450 million, with the bulk going to teacher raises and about $50 million going to general education funding. The teachers union has called for an additional classroom funding of $75 million. It has also criticized the governor for passing a measure repealing a $5-per-night hotel and motel tax that was part of the original education package. Repeal of the hotel tax reduces the total package by about $45 million.

In the midst of the walkout, Rep. John Pfeiffer, a House majority floor leader, said lawmakers are unlikely to consider any other major revenue bills this session.

How does the state budget look?

State funding for Oklahomas public schools has decreased by about 9 percent since 2008, The Oklahoman reported. In contrast, student enrollment has increased by more than 8 percent.

But Jonathan Small, president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, pointed to a growth in non-teacher employment in Oklahomas public education that could drain the education budget.

Schools, largely driven by the perverse incentive by unions to get more members and memberships, have focused dollars on things other than whats most important to Oklahomans which is a direct teacher in the classroom, Small told Fox News.

We need to see a greater focus on teachers with the current dollars that we have already  now that [the legislature] passed one of the highest tax increases in Oklahoma history, Small said. With the actions of the legislature  its not going to be argued that more additional funds havent been pumped into education at a time when Oklahoma is still recovering from a massive economic decline.

His organization also warned comparing teacher salaries in Oklahoma to Texas can be misleading because of a difference in the economic makeup of both states.

Fallin, too, warned the budget is tight and there are other critical needs in the state as well.

We must be responsible not to neglect other areas of need in the state, such as corrections and health and human services, as we continue to consider additional education funding measures, the Republican said.

Are Oklahoma teachers alone?

There has been a surge of teacher coalitions nationwide striking and rallying to demand more money in recent months.

Hundreds of teachers in Kentucky called in sick in April to protest last-minute changes to their pension system. And thousands have descended upon the state Capitol in Frankfurt to rally for additional education funding multiple times this month.

Teachers in Arizona staged what organizers called a walk-in to demand more funding. The walk-in occurred before school and gave teachers and parents an opportunity to show unity for their demands, according to organizers.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, caved to the demands and moved a planned 1 percent raise proposal to a 9 percent wage hike starting in the fall. He also granted an additional 5 percent increase in the 2019 and 2020 school years.

West Virginia teachers went on strike for two weeks earlier this year until Republican Gov. Jim Justice signed a bill that included a 5 percent pay increase.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Authorities say a six-hour standoff between Atlanta police and a man who fired at officers has ended, with the man being shot.

Police Lt. Jeff Cantin tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that officers tried to reach a peaceful resolution by talking at length with the man and his family. The newspaper reports the standoff started just before 2 a.m. Thursday when the man called police and reported shots had been fired. The lieutenant says police were knocking on the man's front door when he began shooting at them. The condition of one officer who was injured in the forehead and arm hasn't been released.

Reporters near the scene heard multiple rounds of intense gunfire during the standoff. Nearby houses were evacuated as police called in reinforcements.

Police said the man's family told them he had a history of mental illness and was apparently alone inside the home. Cantin tells WSB-TV that the man may have broken up with his girlfriend, though no motive has been released.

Atlanta Police Officer Donald Hannah said medics were working to determine the extent of the man's injuries. Cantin says the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is investing.

___

Information from: WGCL-TV, http://www.cbs46.comOne of the Hart moms who died when an SUV fatally plunged off a Northern California cliff last month had sent a text two days before the crash was discovered, saying she was so sick she might need to go to a hospital, 911 call records from Washington state say.

Hart family friend Cheryl Hart  who is not related to the family  of Vancouver, Wash., said she received Sarah Harts text at 3 a.m. March 24, Fox 12 Oregon reported Wednesday.

On March 26, Cheryl Hart called 911 to report that she had not heard back from Sarah since then, the Statesman Journal of Salem, Ore., reported.

"Nobody has been able to get ahold of her, talk to her or seen her since ... or her wife, which is Jen," Cheryl Hart told the dispatcher at 1:15 p.m. March 26. She also said she had checked hospitals, but none said they had a record of treating Sarah Hart.

Several hours after Cheryl Hart alerted authorities, the Hart family's SUV was discovered at the bottom of a Mendocino County cliff, about 100 feet below the Pacific Coast Highway. Authorities found the bodies of Sarah and Jennifer Hart and three of their six adopted children.

The other three children remain missing, although on Saturday a body was pulled from the surf in that area and authorities are working to determine if it is one of the missing children.

Records released this week show Child Protective Services in Washington state tried to contact the Harts on March 23 after abuse allegations were made against them. An official had gone to the Harts residence in rural Woodland, Wash., but nobody was home, records said. The official left a card.

Two officials returned March 26  the day the Harts' SUV was found  and the card from the Friday before had been removed. One of the officials left another card and called law enforcement to request a welfare check.

That same day, a deputy went to check on the family and no one appeared to be home, records said. Authorities returned the next day, and no one appeared to be home again.

In 2011, Sarah Hart was convicted of domestic assault in Minnesota for physical abuse involving one of the children, according to court records. The Harts were also investigated in 2013 when they lived in Oregon after a family friend reported witnessing abuse toward the children.

According to three friends who knew the Harts when they lived in Minnesota in the mid-2000s, the couple fostered a teenage girl who was not among the six who died in the fatal crash, the Seattle Times reported Tuesday. According to the report, the accounts the Minnesota friends gave of the Harts are at odds with the allegations of abuse that have followed the Harts. But accounts do differ on how long they fostered the girl.

Authorities said previously that evidence suggested the fatal crash was deliberate. They said the SUV had stopped at a coastal highway overlook before speeding straight off the cliff and plummeting into the rocky ocean below.

Deputies will continue to search the county's Pacific coastline for the missing children, the Mendocino County Sheriffs Office said Wednesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.A South Carolina man was indicted Wednesday on a dozen federal gun and explosives charges for allegedly planting devices  even one in a teddy bear  with notes referencing ISIS near his home over the last few months.

Wesley Dallas Ayers, 27, of Anderson County, was charged with transportation of explosive materials with the intent to injure, possession and use of destructive devices during the commission of a violent crime and use of a destructive device during the commission of a felony, according to Fox Carolina.

Ayers was arrested in March on a federal charge of possession of an unregistered firearm, according to the station. The FBI linked him to a more sinister plot after conducting a search warrant on his home.

FBI agents said Ayers made and planted several explosive devices within a 2-mile radius around his home, according to WYFF-TV. At least four of the devices were deemed to be destructive devices or bombs and three others were identified as hoaxes, the station reported.

Federal agents added that some of the boxes Ayers left around his neighborhood contained notes pledging his allegiance to the Islamic State, WSPA-TV reported. Agents said that a picture of Usama bin Laden standing in front of the White House with the message war has been declared was found at one of the scenes and was matched to a photo found at Ayers home.

In January, one of the devices Ayers allegedly planted detonated and injured a mans leg causing minor injuries, according to WYFF-TV. The man told federal agents that he heard a hissing sound coming from a wicker basket and when he opened it, flames shot out of a box and exploded, the station reported.

A month later, a teddy bear laden with explosives was left on the side of a road and FBI agents said the device was how they linked the bombs to Ayers, according to Fox Carolina. FBI agents said Ayers had a tattoo of a teddy bear with glowing red eyes and it was similar to the stuffed animal that was left on the side of the road, according to the station.

The FBI also said Ayers fingerprints were left on some of the devices.

Ayers, who has no previous criminal history, was being held without bond. He faces life in prison if convicted.A Louisiana teacher was fired and an aide will be let go at the end of the school year after an audio recording appeared to capture the two mocking and teasing an autistic student.

Milissa Davis, the students mother, told WBRZ-TV on Tuesday she caught the Hope Academy teacher and teachers aide making fun of her 12-year-old son Camden on a recording device she placed in his backpack after his over aggressiveness led to him wetting the bed.

Davis said she was shocked to hear what the two employees said to her son at the Baton Rouge school.

"I just wanted to cry, scream and do everything I could because it was so bad," Davis told the station. "To think that I had sent my son there every day, and what had happened before, that I didn't know about."

YIANNOPOULOS SPEECH AT LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY CANCELED

In the recording, which Davis shared with WBRZ-TV, one of the teachers is heard saying to the boy, Youre just writing the word. What is hard about it?

The student is heard grunting before one of the educators is heard mocking him.

Camden, why dont you have anything written down? Thats why you cant sit with everyone. Tell your momma that, one of the teachers said.

Lets see what they do with him in f---ing public school. He was going to go to Live Oak Middle. Uh ah, he wouldnt make it for a minute, the other said.

"I just wanted to cry, scream and do everything I could because it was so bad."  Milissa Davis

Linda Stone, the principal of the school which advertises that it specializes in teaching young students with autism spectrum disorders, Down syndrome and other disabilities, said in a statement last month that the clip was brought to the schools attention after it was posted on social media.

The recording appears to be a compilation of audio clips, many of which involve private conversations between two adults with no other persons/children present. The recording contains regretful conversations between these adults, Stone said.

AS LOUISIANA SHRINKS, STATE PAYING TO MOVE RESIDENTS

Stone said Davis never brought it to her attention and refused to meet with school officials about rectifying the matter.

Davis said she hired a lawyer and wanted to tell other parents of the situation and how to detect if their child is being tormented by their educators.

Davis attorney, Charlotte McGehee, told WBRZ said she was horrified by the recording.

"One of the worst possible things you can do is take advantage of the infirm, or a disadvantaged child," McGehee said. "They need the extra protection, and he didn't get it. When I heard the treatment of this child through the recording his mother made, I was horrified."

McGehee said she plans to file a complaint with the Department of Education and explore legal solutions.A trailer full of thousands of dead or nearly dead chickens was found abandoned in an Arkansas neighborhood, local authorities said Wednesday.

Roughly 3,000 chickens were left to die inside the trailer, which was located in a secluded part of a Pine Bluff neighborhood, Jefferson County Sheriffs Major Lafayette Woods told Fox News on Thursday.

Woods said this is one of the worst cases of animal cruelty hes ever seen. Its inhumane, he added.

An unnamed man called the Jefferson County Sheriffs Office after seeing someone abandon the trailer Tuesday evening.

Authorities have identified the driver of the trailer and said the birds came from Summit Poultry Inc., located in Pine Bluff. Officials believe the chickens were sent to Oklahoma to be euthanized before they were brought back to Pine Bluff and found in the neighborhood. It's not currently clear why the birds were euthanized out-of-state.

Were still trying to find out why the chickens were left in the neighborhood, Woods said, adding that whoever left the trailer "chose the location for coverage and concealment."

Since some of the chickens were still alive when the trailer was found -- those responsible could face animal cruelty charges.

More specifically, they could face a misdemeanor charge that could result in jail time and a $1,000 fine, Woods told Fox 16. Hes also researching potential federal charges that could be brought against the culprit.

Local investigators are working with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to prosecute anyone responsible. According to Woods, the USDA was made aware of the trailer before Jefferson County Sheriffs Office contacted the organization about the chickens. A representative with USDA was not available for comment when contacted by Fox News on Thursday.

"This is probably the most inhumane way Ive seen poultry or chicken processed, Woods told Fox16.

Summit Poultry Inc. could not be reached for comment when contacted by Fox News.President Donald Trump said Thursday that an attack on Syria could take place "very soon or not so soon at all," arguing he had never signaled the timing of retaliation for a suspected chemical weapons attack that he had suggested was imminent a day earlier.

The president made his latest statement in a tweet Thursday morning. Trump on Wednesday had warned Russia to "get ready" for a missile attack on its ally Syria. But on Thursday, Trump tweeted: "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place."

At a congressional hearing on the Pentagon's 2019 budget request, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis declined to discuss military plans but said legislative leaders would be notified before any attack was undertaken. He said that because the U.S. had no one at the site of the suspected chemical attack last Saturday, the U.S. has no hard evidence of what happened. But he said he personally believes it was an "inexcusable" use of chemical weapons.

Asked about the risks of U.S. military retaliation, Mattis cited two concerns, starting with avoiding civilian casualties.

"On a strategic level, it's how do we keep this from escalating out of control, if you get my drift on that," he said.

At stake in Syria is the potential for confrontation, if not outright conflict, between the U.S. and Russia, former Cold War foes whose relations have deteriorated in recent years over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine, its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, most recently, its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russian lawmakers have warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime and that it could trigger a direct U.S-Russian military clash. Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted  a stark warning of a potential major confrontation.

Trump, who has often said a commander in chief should never telegraph his military intentions, apparently did so himself, tweeting that missiles "will be coming" in response to the suspected chemical attack that killed at least 40 people near Damascus.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," Trump wrote. "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, however, indicated that evidence of what happened was still being studied. At a photo-taking session during a Pentagon meeting with his Dutch counterpart, Mattis was asked by a reporter whether he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian government.

"We're still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies," Mattis said. "We're still working on this."

Trump suggested Monday he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which the U.S. government had video and other evidence of certain aspects of an actual attack by Syrian aircraft, which involved the use of sarin gas. Trump responded then by launching dozens of Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

Asked whether the U.S. military was ready to conduct an attack in Syria if ordered, Mattis replied, "We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the president determined."

In the past, Trump has condemned others for forecasting military plans, repeatedly blistering President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign. During one speech, he said, "We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything."

Asked about Trump's tweet about an impending attack on Syria, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who ran the Pentagon for President Bill Clinton, said on CNN that it "compromises the mission somewhat."

Trump did not detail what a strike on Syria would look like, or whether these would be U.S. missiles. U.S. officials have been consulting with France, Britain and other allies on a possible joint military operation, but the timing remained in doubt Wednesday. Trump canceled a foreign trip in order to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Assad.

Shortly after his tweeted warning to Russia, Trump took a more conciliatory tone in lamenting that the U.S.-Russia relationship "is worse now than it has ever been." There is no reason for this, he wrote, adding that "Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together."

Syria's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Trump's threats to attack are "reckless" and endanger international peace and security.

Trump's administration has sought to show toughness on Russia, with a series of economic and diplomatic actions, including new sanctions last week against government officials and oligarchs. Trump has largely avoided criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, though he singled him out in a tweet over the weekend for supporting Assad.

The U.S., France and Britain have been in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, U.S. officials have said. A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the U.S. in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syria's political and military support from Russia and Iran.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday that France has proof that the Syrian government launched chlorine gas attacks and that France would not tolerate "regimes that think everything is permitted."

The Syrian government denies responsibility.

The French president does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the U.S.-led coalition created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Multiple IS terror attacks have targeted France, including one last month.Eight police officers in Argentina, including a former town police commissioner, have been dismissed from their posts after four of them claimed that more than half a ton of missing marijuana was carried off by mice, The Guardian reported Wednesday.

The paper reported that police in the town of Pilar, about 35 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, impounded 6,000 kilograms (13,228 pounds) of marijuana. But when police inspected the evidence warehouse sometime later, they found that 540 kilograms (1,190 pounds) were missing.

During their investigation, officers found that former police commissioner Javier Specia had not signed the inventory for the pot before he left his post in April 2017.

Specia and three of his subordinates were called before a judge, and all of them told the same story: the missing marijuana had been "eaten by mice."

That explanation didn't fly with forensics experts, who testified that mice wouldn't have mistaken marijuana for food -- and if they had done so, "a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse," a spokesperson for Judge Adrian Gonzalez Charvay told The Guardian.

Specia and three of his officers must testify before the judge next month to help determine whether the weed vanished, in the spokesperson's words, "by connivance of negligence."

Click for more from The Guardian.Manila (CNN Philippines Life)  This weekend, check out local talent at a comic convention, learn about the history of dance music at a pop-up vinyl event, scout for affordable art in a yearly outdoor exhibit, attend a zero-waste party and learn eco-friendly practices, celebrate national literature month with writers and bookworms, and rock out at two anniversary celebrations featuring some of the best names in local music.

Summer Komikon 2018

Spend an entire day surrounded by Filipino talent at the biggest and longest running Filipino komiks convention this Saturday, April 14 at the Summer Komikon. Headlining the event are comics creators Francis Martellino, Rob Cham, and Rian Gonzales. New releases of over 100 locally-published comic books will also be launched at the convention. The event will run from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Summer Komikon 2018 is happening at the Unilab Bayanihan Center, 8008 Pioneer St., Pasig City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Back 2 Mono

This weekend, go back to mono with a vinyl pop-up experience at The Alley at Karrivin. The two-day event will highlight Dance Music History with a pop-up record store, where collectors can dig through vinyl collections from Manila, Japan, and Hong Kong to find dance music from the 70s to the 90s, a music market, where music equipment and gadgets previously owned by musicians are up for grabs, and finally, a dance party featuring DJs Toti Dalmacion, Shigeki Fukuda, and Johnny Hiller.

The Alley at Karrivin is located at Karrivin Plaza, 2316 Pasong Tamo Ext., Makati City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Art in the Park 2018

Spend this Sunday, April 15, surrounded by art at this years Art in the Park, the annual art event organized for the benefit of the Museum Foundation of the Philippines. Art in the Park is dubbed as an affordable art fair with all pieces priced at 50,000 and below. It will be open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Art in the Park 2018 will be held at the Jaime Velasquez Park, Salcedo Village, Makati City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

ECOlta Fair

Anyone interested in eco-conscious and sustainable living can head down to Escolta this weekend for a fair focused on the basics of eco-living and waste management in Manila. The fair will feature an Eco Future Market, talks and discussions, zero-waste workshops, and a zero-waste party.

The fair, happening from April 14 to April 15, is hosted by HUB:Make Lab, located at 413 Escolta St., First United Building, Manila. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

South Lit Fest 2018

April is Literature Month. Celebrate the occasion with the first ever South Literary Festival, a gathering of writers groups that hail from the south of Metro Manila. Festival-goers can expect talks on the art of monologue, the collaborative process, writing graphic novels, writing poetry and much more at the event. Books and other works by local authors will also be available for sale. Admission is free.

The South Literary Festival is happening on Saturday, April 14, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Green Sun, 2285 Chino Roces Ave. Ext., Makati City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Red Ninja Year 9

Music production Red Ninja celebrates its ninth year this Saturday with Red Ninja Fest Year 9. The event, happening at B Side, The Collective, boasts a lineup of indie favorites, such as Ben&Ben, Clara Benin, Lions & Acrobats. Oh, Flamingo!, Shes Only Sixteen, and Toms Story, as well as seasoned acts like Assembly Generals, Dicta License, Ebe Dancel, Hale, Imago, and Pedicab.

B Side, The Collective is located at 7274 Malugay St., Makati City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Sandwich 20th Anniversary Concert

Rock icon Sandwich turns 20 this year and will be celebrating with an anniversary concert this Friday, April 13. Expect to hear favorites like Sugod, Betamax, Butterfly Carnival, and DVDX at the Under the Glow of the Satellite Anniversary Concert.

The concert will be held at the Metrotent Convention Center, Metrowalk Commercial Complex, Meralco Ave., Pasig City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.A new annual report on the death penalty calls sub-Saharan Africa a "beacon of hope" amid a decline in executions worldwide.

Twenty countries across sub-Saharan Africa have now abolished the death penalty for all crimes, Amnesty International says in the report released early Thursday. Just two countries in the region, Somalia and South Sudan, carried out executions last year.

Executions worldwide dropped again in 2017, with at least 993 recorded in 23 countries. That's down 4 percent from the year before and down 39 percent from 2015.

At least 2,591 death sentences were recorded in 53 countries last year, down from a record high of 3,117 the year before, the London-based human rights organization said.

The numbers don't include the thousands of executions and death sentences that Amnesty International believes have occurred in China, where they are considered a state secret.

China remained the "world's top executioner, the report said. Excluding China, 84 percent of the reported executions last year were carried out in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan. Countries resuming executions in 2017 were Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The United States remained the only country in the Americas to carry out executions, with 23 last year, up slightly from the year before.

With the progress in Africa, "the isolation of the world's remaining executing countries could not be starker," said the organization's secretary general, Salil Shetty.

Even among those countries some "significant steps" were seen. In Iran, executions were down 11 percent and drug-related executions were reduced to 40 percent. In Malaysia, changes to anti-drug laws now allow discretion in sentencing for drug trafficking crimes.

But Amnesty International called "distressing" the continued use of the death penalty for drug-related offences, with 15 countries last year imposing death sentences or carrying out executions. Drug-related executions were recorded in China, Iran, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, where "drug-related beheadings rocketed from 16 percent of total executions in 2016 to 40 percent in 2017."

The rights group also expressed concern that at least five people in Iran were executed last year for crimes committed when they were under the age of 18, with another 80 people with similar pasts still on death row.

People with "mental or intellectual disabilities" were executed or faced a death sentence in the United States, Japan, Pakistan, Singapore and the Maldives.

Worldwide at least 21,919 people are known to be under a death sentence, Amnesty International said: "Now is not the time to let up the pressure."

Other challenges remain, the report says, including in sub-Saharan Africa: Both Botswana and Sudan reportedly resumed executions this year.

And early this year, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni said he will sign the first death warrants in nearly two decades to create fear among criminals, vowing to "hang a few."

___

Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africanext Image 1 of 2

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A Paraguayan court has sentenced a man to 12 years in prison for the 2015 murder of a teenage U.S. citizen, whose death originally was ruled a suicide.

In a case closely followed by the U.S. government, Rene Hofstetter, 21, was sentenced late Tuesday in the killing of his friend Alejandro Villamayor, a 16-year-old native of Rockville, Maryland, who moved to Paraguay at age 6.

Villamayor was found dead June 27, 2015, with a bullet in his temple during a trip with friends to a ranch about 250 miles (400 kilometers) south of the capital, Asuncion.

Hofstetter's fingerprints were found on the murder weapon and his father owned the ranch where Villamayor was killed. A separate court sentenced ranch worker Mathias Wilbs to two years and 10 months in jail for his role in covering up the crime to make it look like a suicide.

"We've followed the case of the youngster Alex Villamayor," U.S. Ambassador Lee McClenny said on his Twitter account. "And it's gratifying that after a long period, the case has reached closure that in some way can comfort and strengthen the Villamayor family."

His family and friends remember "Alex," as he was known to his loved ones, as a happy teen who enjoyed training at a local gym and excelled at school.

The U.S. government had expressed its concern over the initial investigation's lack of results and the case became a test of Paraguay's endemically corrupt justice system.

Villamayor's body was found with a gun in its hand and defense lawyers and prosecutors at first said his death was a suicide. But Villamayor's family always believed it was murder.

Paraguay's public ministry was forced to reclassify the case as a homicide and change the investigating team after forensic tests contradicted the prosecutors' initial suicide conclusion.

Investigators found Villamayor was holding the gun in his left hand although he was right-handed, and the weapon was not the same one that fired the bullet that killed him.

Wilbs, the ranch worker, later confessed to helping cover up the crime and placing the weapon in the teenager's hand on the orders of Hofstetter's father.

In addition, blood stains on the body indicated Villamayor's body had been turned around, and he had been dressed in clothes that did not belong to him.

A medical examiner discovered injuries on his body. Three forensic doctors said during the trial that he had suffered these injuries just a few minutes before his death.

Hofstetter traveled to Germany and only returned to Paraguay when the newly appointed prosecutors demanded an international arrest order.German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that Germany would not participate in any military action in Syria, although she did say she wanted to unite with allies and support a message that chemical weapons use is not acceptable.

According to Die Welt, Merkel made the remarks during a press conference with Danish Prime Minister Lars Lkke Rasmussen, saying she wanted to present a united front against suspected chemical weapons attacks by President Bashar Assad.

"Germany will not take part in possible military action  I want to make clear again that there are no decisions  but we see, and support this, that everything is being done to send a signal that this use of chemical weapons is not acceptable," she said.

Merkel controversially opened Germanys borders to refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war in 2015, a move that still remains a contentious political topic across Europe today, and was widely seen to have damaged her partys performance in last years federal elections.

Saturday's suspected chemical attack took place in a rebel-held town near Damascus amid a resumed offensive by Syrian government forces after the collapse of a truce. Syrian activists, rescuers and medics said the attack in Douma killed at least 40 people, with families found suffocated in their houses and shelters.

President Trump has been predicting possible action in Syria, but appeared to backtrack Thursday when he tweeted that that an attack could be very soon or not so soon at all.

The president on Wednesday had seemed to confirm future U.S. strikes in Syria when he tweeted that missiles fired at Syria will be coming, nice and new and smart!

At the press conference on Thursday, Merkel refused to be drawn into commenting on Trumps tweets.

Trump spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday about coordinating a response to the attack, and on Tuesday with British Prime Minister Theresa May. The White House said that Trump and May condemned Assads vicious disregard for human life and agreed not to allow the use of chemical weapons to continue.

Macron said Thursday that France has proof that Assad was behind the attacks and did not rule out military action. He said on Tuesday that any French action would target Syrias chemical weapons abilities.

Die Welt reported that a spokesman for Merkel said that she and Macron had expressed their "common concern about the recent use of toxic gas and about a threat of erosion of the international ban on chemical weapons.

The BBC reported Thursday that May has called an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the UKs response to the attack, and that she is prepared to take action without first seeking approval from Parliament -- a move that would likely anger opposition lawmakers and some in her own Conservative Party.

Fox News Serafin Gomez, Jenny Bucholz, Alex Pappas and The Associated Press contributed to this report.The sweaty mechanic tossed aside the used jeans one by one, digging deep through the pile of secondhand clothes that are at the center of another, if little-noticed, Trump administration trade war.

The used clothes cast off by Americans and sold in bulk in African nations, a multimillion-dollar business, have been blamed in part for undermining local textile industries. Now Rwanda has taken action, raising tariffs on the clothing in defiance of U.S. pressure. In response, the U.S. says it will suspend duty-free status for clothing manufactured in Rwanda under the trade program known as the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

Similar U.S. action against neighboring countries could follow; Uganda and Tanzania have pledged to raise tariffs and phase in a ban on used clothing imports by 2019.An alleged drug queen and her gang  who have ties to El Chapos Sinaloa cartel  are believed to be responsible in part for the surge in violence that has ravaged Cancun over the past year, according to a report.

Leticia Rodriguez Lara  who goes by Dona Lety and La 40  and her alleged gunrunners have wrested control of narcotics sales in the tourist hotspot and nearby resort Playa del Carmen from rival cartel Los Zetas following a murderous turf war, Nine News in Australia reported Wednesday.

The murder rates in Cancun have doubled in a year, with 113 people killed so far in 2018.

The opioid crisis in the US has also had an indirect role in the staggering stats.

MEXICO JUDGE ORDERS TRIAL FOR ALLEGED DRUG QUEEN OF CANCUN

The cartels, seeing opportunity in a hungry US market, have started to switch from growing marijuana to harvesting opium poppies to manufacture heroin, according to USA Today.

Deadly battles have erupted between competing cartels over the valuable poppy-producing territories in these once-bucolic seaside regions.

And the cartels, such as Laras, have also been extorting local bar and restaurant owners for large amounts of cash, Nine News said.

Lara was a former federal police officer before she became one of the only women in Mexico to run her own drug gang.

The 48-year-old druglord has been wanted by authorities since 2012 and was arrested in August. Her son was also charged.

Read more from the New York Post.Chinese President Xi Jinping's decision this week to cut import tariffs on cars and open China's markets wider wasn't prompted by President Trump's tough trade rhetoric, the Chinese government claimed Thursday.

Xi's announcement was seen by some as a win for Trump, who has railed against what he says are China's systematically unfair, restrictive trade practices.

But Xi was only looking at improving China's economy, and was not reacting in any way to the White House, Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Fen insisted.

The official Xinhua News Agency paraphrased Gao as saying Xi's pledges "have nothing to do with Chinese-U.S. trade frictions."

Bilateral negotiation is not possible as long as the White House attempts "unilateral coercion," Gao said Thursday.

China has pledged to "counterattack with great strength" if Trump follows through on his latest threat to impose tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese goods -- after an earlier announcement that targeted $50 billion.

WATCH: CHINA PROMISES TARIFFS ON US AGRICULTURAL GOODS

Xi seemed to skirt the tensions during his keynote address at the opening of the Boao Forum for Asia on Tuesday.

"President Xi and I will always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade."  President Trump

We will take the initiative to expand imports, Xi said. "China does not seek trade surplus; we have a genuine desire to increase imports and achieve greater balance of international payments under the current account."

Xi added Beijing will "significantly lower" tariffs on auto imports this year and ease restrictions on foreign ownership in the auto industry as soon as possible. He said that "China's door of opening up will not be closed, and will only open wider."

For his part, Trump on Sunday reiterated that it's nothing personal.

"President Xi and I will always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade," Trump tweeted. "China will take down its Trade Barriers because it is the right thing to do. Taxes will become Reciprocal & a deal will be made on Intellectual Property. Great future for both countries!"

But in a tweet on Monday morning, Trump noted that when a Chinese-made vehicle is sent to the U.S., the tariff is only 2.5 percent, while American cars exported to China are slapped with a 25 percent tariff.

"Does that sound like free or fair trade?" Trump asked on Twitter, before answering his own question: "No, it sounds like STUPID TRADE."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.next Image 1 of 2

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France has proof that the Syrian government launched chlorine gas attacks and has crossed a line that could prompt French airstrikes, President Emmanuel Macron said Thursday.

Macron did not specify whether France is planning military action against Syrian President Bashar Assad's government. He said he has been talking regularly this week with U.S. President Donald Trump about the most effective response.

The U.S., France and Britain have been consulting about launching a military strike. Trump tweeted Wednesday that missiles "will be coming" and on Thursday tweeted that an attack "could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

Speaking on TF1 television, Macron said that France would not tolerate "regimes that think everything is permitted."

He previously said any French action would target Syria's chemical weapons abilities.

Syrian opposition activists and medics say a suspected gas attack last week in Douma killed more than 40 people. The Syrian government has denied the allegations.

Macron's office and the French military aren't commenting on pending plans. A military operation would be a big deal for Macron, his first military action as president, at a time of heightened domestic tensions over labor law changes.

Macron doesn't need parliamentary permission to launch an operation.

French forces have not directly targeted Syrian government sites before, but France has supported rebel forces since early in the fighting that began in 2011.

Geopolitics specialist Dominique Moisi, a senior adviser at the Montaigne Institute think tank in Paris, said "we have said that we were not allowing the use of chemical weapons, that this was a red line ... Not to react is to prove to the rest of the world that what we say does not matter."

Moisi stressed the "risk of escalation" of the conflict amid increasing concerns about a U.S.-Russia proxy war.

"So striking at Syria is not a good solution, but doing nothing after the use of chemical weapons is even worse," he said.

In London, British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her Cabinet back from vacation Thursday to discuss military action against Syria.

May has indicated she wants Britain to join in any U.S.-led strikes in response to the attack in Douma. She has said all the indications" are that Assad's forces were responsible and the use of chemical weapons "cannot go unchallenged."

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany won't participate in possible military action in Syria, but supports sending a message that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable, following a phone call Thursday with Macron.

France already has some 1,100 troops involved in its Operation Chammal, created in 2014 to fight Islamic State extremists in Iraq and extended in 2015 to Syria, as part of the U.S.-led coalition. Multiple Islamic State retaliatory attacks have targeted French soil, including just last month.

French warplanes operate out of French bases in Jordan and Al Dhafra in United Arab Emirates. France also has a naval base in Abu Dhabi, and an aviation center in Qatar at the U.S. air base at Al Udeid. France has 650 troops based in the United Arab Emirates overall.

In addition, a French frigate is stationed off of Lebanon in international waters.

In Syria, French warplanes carried out 23 sorties in late March and early April but fired no strikes, as part of support for Syrian opposition forces fighting in the last pockets of IS control.

___

Chris Den Hond in Paris, Jill Lawless in London, Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to the story;Defense ministry officials in Greece say an air force fighter jet has crashed into the eastern Aegean Sea after returning from a patrol, and it is unclear whether the pilot survived.

The officials told state-run television that the Mirage 2000-5 crashed Thursday north of the island of Skyros. They gave no information about the possible cause of the crash.

Patrolling has intensified in recent weeks amid a spike in tensions between Greece and Turkey and near-daily mock dogfights in disputed airspace.

Greek navy ships and army helicopters are searching for the missing pilot.Japanese authorities launched a dragnet Thursday on a quiet island for a convicted thief who escaped from prison.

Tatsuma Hirao, 27, was being pursued by hundreds of Japanese police since he escaped jail in Ehime prefecture Sunday while he was serving 5 1/2 years for theft.

Police believe Hirao drove a stolen car and crossed a bridge to the nearby island of Mukaishima, located 58 miles east of Hiroshima. The tiny island contains about 1,000 possible hideouts due to the abundance of vacant homes left by an aging and shrinking population.

The island itself has a population of about 16,000.

The Japan Times reported Hirao began his sentence in December at Matsuyama Prisons Oi shipyard  one of the countys prisons that doesnt contain perimeter walls. Japans Justice Ministry said that at least 19 others have escaped the shipyard prison since 1961.

Police suspect Hirao may have escaped through an unlocked window on the prisons first floor Sunday night, according to the Japan Times. A car and money was found later to be stolen from a nearby house and the vehicle was later discovered near a bridge in Onomichi, according to the newspaper.

TV footage showed police scouring every home and searching empty houses and huts. Vehicles stopped at checkpoints caused rare traffic jams on the mostly quiet island.

Several robberies have been reported since Hiraos jailbreak, police said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Catholic authorities in Bavaria say the Vatican has granted their request to close Germany's last Bridgettine Order abbey.

The Munich-Freising diocese in a statement Wednesday did not describe plans for the abbey and its expansive property near Munich.

Altomuenster Abbey had housed the female Bridgettine Order since 1496. It was ordered closed in 2015 after the number of nuns fell below the three needed to train novices.

Scholars feared the abbey's precious book collection might be sold, but the diocese decided to keep it intact and digitize it.

The last nun who lived in the abbey fought unsuccessfully to keep it open. The last novice says she's been given 14 days to leave.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 11)  Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno had a right to ask about President Rodrigo Duterte's involvement in moves to oust her, according to her camp Wednesday.

"It's a question. Ngayon kung nagalit si Presidente, parang admission tuloy... Doesn't that tell you na kayang kaya niyang utusan ang mga tao sa Congress?" Sereno's spokesperson Jojo Lacanilao told CNN Philippines' The Source.

[Translation: If the President got angry, it's like an admission... Doesn't that tell you he's perfectly capable of giving orders to people in Congress?]

The President declared himself an enemy of the Chief Justice on Monday, after she asked how he was involved in the petition to unseat her or the quo warranto.

Sereno had pointed out that the country's principal lawyer, Solicitor General Jose Calida, filed the petition against her at the Supreme Court. This comes on top of an impeachment case at the House of Representatives, which is expected to bring the case to Senate for trial.

"Ikaw Sereno, sinabi ko na sa'yo, hindi ako nakialam. If you are insisting then count me in, and I will egg Calida to do his best," said Duterte. "Ako na mismo ang maglakad rin, kalaban sa'yo."

[Translation: Sereno, I already told you that I don't meddle. If you are insisting, then count me in, and I will egg Calida to do his best. I will handle this myself, against you.]

When asked if Sereno was sorry for her remarks, Lacanilao answered, "It's not her problem. She has the right to say what she did."

"She's asking a fair question," he added. "If you look at what happened before, SolGen Calida is his alter ego....You can presume whatever he does, may approval naman ng Presidente [has the approval of the President]."

The Solicitor General maintained on Tuesday he did not consult Duterte when he filed the petition.

Lacanilao's statement also comes a day after Sereno appeared at the Supreme Court as they heard arguments for the quo warranto case.

Her camp argued the high court has no business in the proceedings, as the law provides that a Chief Justice can only be tried in the Senate.

Related: CJ Sereno, Justice De Castro clash in ouster proceedings

Quo warranto a bad precedent?

Sereno further asserted that the issue raised against her Statements of Assets, Liabilities, and Net worth (SALNs) was not an impeachable offense  and the quo warranto case set a dangerous precedent for everyone else.

Related: Sereno: JBC rules of integrity do not require SALN

"Can I also have your assurance that if a quo warranto is filed against you, you would under oath answer all the questions [about] your SALN?" Sereno asked her colleagues on Tuesday.

Sereno maintained that, to her recollection, she submitted the necessary SALNs. Lacanilao said about 11 copies of the total SALNs were submitted to the Supreme Court. Their camp admitted the rest were lost.

While some judges wanted complete proof, Lacanilao pointed out the burden of proving the SALNs were not filed was still on the prosecutor.

"If anyone of them did not file their SALNs, they should be in the same situation as she was....It opens up the gate for everybody else who did not file their SALNs," said Lacanilao.

He added what was important in SALNs was the baseline wealth of an official was disclosed. "There's nothing in the case of the Chief Justice alleging she has illegal wealth," he said.

Sereno needs eight votes for the Supreme Court to junk the petition.

Lacanilao said while their camp is "not expecting any miracles," they are still hoping the magistrates would listen.

"Let's give credit to many constitutionalists in the court right now," said Lacanilao. "There's a line of cases na cinite ni Alex Poblador kahapon where the Court itself said hindi puwede tanggalin ang impeachable officials other than (through) impeachment."

[Translation:There's a line of cases cited by Sereno's lead counsel Alex Poblador yesterday where the Court itself said impeachable officials cannot be removed other than (through) impeachment.]

He added the move to impeach Sereno through a quo warranto endangers democratic institutions.

Associate Justice Benjamin Caguioa noted on Tuesday: "If I follow the theory of the [Office of the Solicitor General] that quo warranto is available, the SolGen would have a sword over all our collective heads [and] therefore impair the integrity of the whole Court."

Watch the full interview with Lacanilao here.When presidents gather this week in Peru at the Summit of the Americas, they may be tempted to walk past Vice President Mike Pence and make a beeline for the person who has President Donald Trump's ear on Latin America: Sen. Marco Rubio.

In Trump's absence from the meeting, the Florida Republican is playing an even more prominent role. He began the week presiding over a Senate hearing on the summit, lunched Wednesday at the White House to brief Pence for the trip and starting Friday, when he arrives in Lima, will meet one-on-one with a half-dozen heads of state  about the same number as Pence himself.

The American president cancelled what would've been his first presidential visit to Latin America as he weighs a possible U.S. military strike in Syria in retaliation for an apparent chemical attack on civilians.

Rubio, in a phone interview from Washington, called Trump's absence understandable but a nonetheless disappointing example of how Latin America often takes a backseat to more pressing national security challenges. In his absence, he said he and Pence, who visited Latin America in August, would work with leaders to take tougher action on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who at the U.S. administration's urging was the only Western Hemisphere leader barred from the gathering.

For the region's leaders, many of whom were dreading shaking hands with the American president as he pushes forward with plans to build a wall on the Mexican border and renegotiate trade deals, there couldn't be a better stand-in.

Since Trump's election, Rubio has exerted outside influence over U.S. policy toward Latin America. He drafted a list of Venezuelan officials accused of human rights abuses that became the basis for U.S. sanctions. He also urged Trump to roll back the U.S.' opening to communist Cuba that led to President Raul Castro's historic handshake with Obama at the last Summit of the Americas three years ago. Castro is again expected to attend this year, a farewell tour as he prepares to step down later this month.

In addition, several friend and political allies occupy key positions inside the administration. Among them are CIA Director and Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo, who endorsed him in the 2015 presidential race, and former Miami Rep. Carlos Trujillo, who is the new U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States and whose kids study at the same school as Rubio's.

Now as Trump threatens crippling oil sanctions on Venezuela in retaliation for Maduro's plowing ahead with what is widely seen as a sham presidential election, his insight is once against being sought. Rubio said that while the White House shouldn't rule out such a dramatic escalation, he's yet to conclude himself that's the right course of action.

"There are no sanctions off the table but I'm certainly not going to telegraph what's coming," he said.

Rubio, 46, downplays his pull on Trump but says the two are "instinctively aligned" on the need to promote democracy in the Western Hemisphere. In Rubio's case, he credits his Cuban heritage  he considers his parents exiles even though they migrated to the U.S. before Fidel Castro took power  in teaching him to combat Venezuela's "dictatorship" with strength. Growing up in Miami, he had many close Venezuelan friends.

More recently, though, he's seen his hard-line stance challenged.

Last week Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic whip, and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, made separate trips to Caracas, where they met with Maduro in what observers saw as an attempt to ease hostilities between the two countries.

"Lots of people in Congress oftentimes want to play the role of special envoy," Rubio said while urging fellow lawmakers to avoid getting burned trying to open a backchannel to Maduro. "They think they are going to travel abroad, meet some leader, cut a deal and come back. But the bottom line is that U.S. policy toward Venezuela is directed by the administration and there's no member of Congress who can cut a deal on its behalf, myself included."

Rubio's reputation as a Trump whisperer hasn't gone unnoticed in Caracas, where he' regularly mocked as "Narco Rubio," for his obsession with exposing drug running by top Chavista officials. Much of the venom is spewed by the socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello, whom Rubio has dubbed the "Pablo Escobar of Venezuela." While Cabello is not among the many Venezuelan officials charged with crimes in the U.S., "we've got something special for him," Rubio said.

Last year, Rubio took on extra security after reportedly receiving death threat originating from Venezuela.

As a member of the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees, he's taken a deep interest in Venezuela's vast criminal underworld and its potential links to Middle Eastern terrorist groups. Venezuelans who fear taking public explosive information about corruption in their own country often turn to Rubio instead, communicating sometimes through secret channels.

"I doubt anyone in Washington has more accurate information on Venezuelan than him," said Martin Rodil, head of the Venezuelan-American Leadership Council, who has introduced Rubio's office to several Venezuelan defectors looking to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement.

Even critics on the left acknowledge his importance.

"Though Trump hasn't always gone as far as Rubio would like, the president clearly listens to him," said Matt Clausen, head of the Washington Office on Latin America.

But the president's anti-immigrant bluster is an obstacle, said Clausen.

Rubio said while the president's rhetoric doesn't advance the U.S.' policy goals, beyond the headlines real progress is being made on critical issues like trade and migration.

"If I'm the president of a country and the United States is bashing me, I have to respond in kind just to save face domestically," Rubio said. "So what I encourage people to do in the administration, and when I talk to the president, is to put yourself in their position and understand that they have an interest as well in dealing with this migration problem and not to back them in a corner."

___

Associated Press writer Christine Armario reported this story in Lima and AP writer Joshua Goodman reported from Bogota, Colombia.

___

Joshua Goodman on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APjoshgoodmanThe international chemical weapons watchdog on Thursday confirmed Britains finding that a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned last month with a nerve agent, as Russia continues to deny it was behind the attack.

The report by investigators at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirms "the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury."

The organization said the chemical was of high purity but did not identify its source. The agency also did not name Novichok as the nerve agent, unlike British Prime Minister Theresa May who cited the Soviet-engineered chemical as the one used in the attack.

Russia has denied all involvement of the attack, arguing Britain has not provided any evidence for its assertion.

POISONED FORMER RUSSIAN SPY SERGEI SKRIPAL NO LONGER IN CRITICAL CONDITION, HOSPITAL SAYS

U.K. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said OPCW's report proves Britains claim that Russia is responsible for the attack.

"This is based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world. All returned the same conclusive results," Johnson said. "There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record."

The findings come after Yulia Skripal on Wednesday rejected Russian Embassy assistance as she recovers at an undisclosed location. Yulia, 33, was released from the hospital earlier this week, but her father Sergei, 66, is still recovering. He was upgraded from critical condition to stable last week and is said to be responding to treatment.

"I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do," Yulia Skripal said in a statement released by London's Metropolitan Police. "Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves."

DAUGHTER OF POISONED SPY SERGEI SKRIPAL TURNS DOWN RUSSIAN HELP

Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious on a public bench in the southwestern English city of Salisbury on March 4.

In 2004, Sergei Skripal was arrested in Moscow and later confessed to having been recruited by British intelligence in 1995. He also said at the time that he provided information about GRU (Russian intelligence) agents in Europe, receiving over $100,000 in return.

At the time of Skripals trial, the Russian media quoted the country's FSB domestic security agency as saying that the damage from his activities could be compared to harm inflicted by Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU colonel who spied for the United States and Britain. Penkovsky was executed in 1963.

In 2006, Skripal was convicted on charges of spying for Britain and sentenced to 13 years. However, he later was pardoned and released in July 2010 as part of a U.S.-Russian spy swap, which followed the exposure of a ring of Russian sleeper agents in the U.S.

Skripals wife and son have both died in recent years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.next Image 1 of 2

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A strong storm in the Alps is hampering efforts to find a German billionaire who has been missing on the famed Matterhorn peak for days.

The dpa news agency reported Thursday that the head of the rescue effort, Anjan Truffer, said the weather has meant teams have not been able to move out in the morning as planned.

Truffer says rescue crews remain in close contact with the family of Karl-Erivan Haub, who was last seen on Saturday morning as he headed up a mountain lift.

Haub, the 58-year-old heir to the Tengelmann retail empire, was training for a ski mountaineering race when he disappeared.

Rescuers say it's not clear where he went missing and they're searching an area of over 240 square kilometers (93 sq. miles).After another suspected chemical attack in Syria, President Trump promised the U.S. would respond forcefully but so far has not given specifics.

We're making a decision as to what we do with respect to the horrible attack that was made near Damascus, and it will be met and it will be met forcefully, Trump said as he met with top military leaders at the White House, adding that we have a lot of options militarily.

He later warned that missiles "will be coming" at Syria, cautioning the Kremlin on social media against shooting them down. But he also added to speculation about an attack and its timing in a tweet, saying, "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

The president canceled a planned trip to South America this week, instead choosing to stay in the U.S. to oversee the American response to Syria and to monitor developments around the world, according to press secretary Sarah Sanders.

The government of Syrian President Bashar Assad has denied responsibility for the alleged attack.

Heres a look at some options Trump has in responding to the reported attack  and what experts say are the consequences of those actions.

Airstrikes  again

Trump ordered airstrikes in Syria in 2017 to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons, the president said at the time.

Luke Coffey, director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said a quick response thats very punitive in nature is the best route for the Trump administration to take after the latest purported chemical attack  opposed to working for a regime change.

Theres no doubt that we have very smart people with high tech equipment who can figure out how the attack was carried out and who was in charge, Coffey told Fox News. Theres a whole chain that they could construct for targeting, and I think that needs to be done.

Speaking to Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Assad and his inner circle should be considered war criminals and legitimate military targets.

If you have the opportunity to take him out, you should. You should ground his air force, you should destroy his air force, Graham said.

But Trevor Thrall, a senior fellow at the more libertarian-leaning Cato Institutes Defense and Foreign Policy Department, said there arent any good options when it comes to responding to Syria, calling the use of chemical weapons a distraction.

Trump already sent bombs away for this once before, Thrall, also an associate professor at George Mason Universitys Schar School of Policy and Government, told Fox News. A few cruise missiles isnt going to do anything to change the course of the war in Syria or stop Assad.

The problem Trump has, now that hes punished Assad once for this, I think he might feel like he has to do something again to save face, Thrall continued, adding that he expects the administration to use "harsh, but not too serious of airstrikes again.

The problem with airstrikes, according to Thrall, include the possibility of accidentally causing causalities among innocent civilians and creating a future problem for the U.S.

The more the United States engages in Syria, the angrier certain Syrians are going to be at the United States, he said. To me, it seems like borrowing trouble.

Another issue is the congressional authorization of strikes, according to to Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Unions National Security Project, who harshly criticized the Trump administration for lacking congressional approval in the 2017 air strikes.

No one disputes that Bashar al-Assads use of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians is illegal, immoral, and unacceptable, Shamsi wrote. But Assads illegality does not excuse illegality in response.

Finding partners

A U.S. official told The Associated Press that the U.S. was discussing whether they would participate in a retaliatory strike. If Trump decides to proceed quickly, the most likely partner would be France, rather than Britain, because of concerns about obtaining permission from Parliament, said the official.

Coffey said its important for the international community to participate in a strike this time around, adding that it would fit into Trumps message of burden-sharing on the international stage.

It cant be the U.S. alone firing off 50 cruise missiles, Coffey said. Other countries who have similar capabilities should also participate.

He also added that a Middle Eastern country  such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates  could also join the coalition.

I think it would be worth the diplomatic legwork that it would require. It would send a very strong message if Arab countries participated, Coffey said.

When it comes to airstrikes, Thrall questioned why its the sole responsibility of the U.S. to retaliate to the suspected use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Why is it magically, uniquely [the United States job]? We dont live next to Syria, we didnt start the war, we are not Assads keeper, he said. Why, without any vote at the United Nations Security Council or without deliberation with allies, why should we take it on ourselves?

The U.S. had called on the Security Council to vote on a resolution that would condemn the continuing use of chemical weapons in Syria in the strongest terms and establish a new body to determine responsibility for the chemical attacks.

Targeting Assad backers

Trump also said Monday that everybody involved in the alleged attack "is going to pay a price," including Russian President Vladimir Putin.

If its Russia, if its Syria, if its Iran, if its all of them together, well figure it, out and well know the answers quite soon, Trump told reporters ahead of a Cabinet meeting.

Rep. Michael McCaul, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Iran and Russia must not be left off the hook as both nations have blood on their hands as they have been partners in carrying out these atrocities in Syria.

Both countries need to be subject to additional economic and diplomatic penalties for propping up Assad, sponsoring terror, and supporting other destabilizing actions in the Middle East, McCaul, a Republican, wrote in an opinion column for Fox News.

Coffey said the U.S. could target Iranian enablers of Assad but doubted that Russia would be a target.

I dont think the U.S. wants to go to World War III over Syria, he said.

Thrall, too, expressed concern about the U.S. possibly going after other nations.

My deep concern is every time you do something that you think is limited inside a conflict zone like Syria, you end up getting more deeply engaged, he warned.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her Cabinet back from vacation Thursday to discuss military action against Syria over an alleged chemical weapons attack.

May has indicated she wants Britain to join in any U.S.-led strikes in response to the attack in Douma. She has said all the indications" are that President Bashar Assad's forces were responsible, and the use of chemical weapons "cannot go unchallenged."

The U.S., France and Britain have been consulting about launching a military strike, and President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday that missiles "will be coming."

Britain's Ministry of Defense refused to comment on reports that Royal Navy submarines armed with cruise missiles have been dispatched into range of Syria.

British opposition lawmakers are calling for Parliament to be given a vote before any military action. May isn't legally required to do that, though it is conventional for lawmakers to be given the chance to vote.

Parliament is in recess until Monday, though it could be called back early for an emergency debate.

In 2013, Parliament defeated a call by then-Prime Minister David Cameron for airstrikes in response to an earlier chemical attack in Syria.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 12)  The Justice Department has reopened its investigation on the cases against alleged drug lords earlier cleared by its panel of prosecutors.

During Thursday's preliminary investigation, the Philippine National Police's Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (PNP-CIDG), said it needed more time, until April 30, to present additional documentary evidence and witnesses.

The Office of the Solicitor General now serves as the complainant's lead counsel in the cases against self-confessed drug dealer Kerwin Espinosa, Cebu-based businessman Peter Lim, and several other suspects.

READ: Suspected drug lords Peter Lim, Kerwin Espinosa: What we know so far

Solicitor General Jose Calida said in March that his office "will be taking up the cudgels for PNP-CIDG in seeking to overturn the dismissal of the charges" against the alleged drug lords.

Government prosecutors earlier dropped the charges against the suspects for lack of evidence.

But President Rodrigo Duterte himself questioned why the case against Espinosa was dismissed by state prosecutors when Espinosa personally admitted he was involved in the Eastern Visayas drug trade.

Resigned Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre ordered the reinvestigation of the case to give both the police and the suspects a chance to present new evidence. He stepped down from his post in April.

Lim's camp on Thursday slammed Aguirre's decision to reopen the probe, saying it "vacated" the original resolution, and that it violates his right to due process and speedy trial. They also asked for a separate preliminary investigation to spare him from prejudice and confusion arising from "muddled issues and irrelevant pieces of evidence."

The panel gave PNP-CIDG until April 17 to file its comment on Lim's motion.

Newly appointed Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra in a text message said he will "surely act" to resolve the cases.

CNN Philippines' Anjo Alimario and Eimor Santos contributed to this report.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 12)  President Rodrigo Duterte said sorry for a 2010 hostage where eight tourists from Hong Kong died.

In a speech at a meeting with members of the Filipino community in Hong Kong, Duterte said, "May I address myself to Chinese people who are here who are with us; who joined us. From the bottom of my heart, as a President of the Republic of the Philippines, and in behalf of the people of the Philippines, may I apologize formally to you now we are sorry that the incident happened and as humanly possible, I would like to make this guarantee also that it will never, never happen again."

Duterte's statement was welcomed with cheers by those in attendance.

He added, "I hope this would go a long way to really assuage the feelings of the Chinese people and government."

On August 23, 2010, a disgruntled former police officer held 25 people hostage, including 21 tourists, at the Quirino Grandstand.

Days after the incident, then-President Benigno Aquino III said he was taking responsibility for the incident.

Hong Kong imposed sanctions over the incident  issuing a travel ban against the Philippines, ordering its nationals who were in the country to return home, and revoking visa-free privileges for Manila's government officials.

At a meeting with former Hong Kong Chief Executive C.Y. Leung in 2013, Aquino said the country would not issue an apology over the incident.

After almost four years of deadlock, the diplomatic row was finally resolved in 2014 after Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada and Cabinet Secretary Rene Almendras flew to Hong Kong and expressed "most sorrowful regret and profound sympathy" to the victims and their families.

All sanctions against the Philippines were then lifted.

Apart from the apology, the President also revealed he received a 500-million yuan grant. While it was not clear how the funds would be used, Duterte said the government's priority spending would be on hospitals and the Marawi rehab.

The President was in Hong Kong after attending the Boao forum in Hainan, China.

There, he and Chinese President Xi Jinping discussed the possibility of joint exploration in the South China Sea.

Over P500 billion worth of investment pledges were signed between the country and China covering agriculture, technology, pharmaceuticals, land development, and infrastructure among others.

CNN Philippines' Theresa Martelino-Reyes contributed to this report.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 12)  President Rodrigo Duterte and Chinese President Xi Jinping held talks for possible joint exploration in the South China Sea, said Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano.

According to Cayetano, Xi said issues surrounding disputed waters in the South China Sea were complex, but that if they were handled properly, it could make the South China Sea an area of peace and stability.

Duterte then said that it was important that people see the benefit of the friendship between the Philippines and China.

"How important was that statement made by the two leaders? Very important, because it's basically the go signal to come up with a framework, and if it's acceptable to both sides, we could see the joint exploration done soon," Cayetano said in a press briefing in Hong Kong, Wednesday.

According to Cayetano, Xi said that "China, if that's what the Philippines wants, is willing to discuss and find a solution in that area."

Duterte met with Xi on the sidelines of Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan, China before leaving for Hong Kong on Tuesday evening.

The Philippines and China have competing claims in the South China Sea, but an International Arbitral ruling in July 2016 affirmed that the Philippines has exclusive sovereign rights over the West Philippine Sea (in the South China Sea).

Cayetano said it was "clear to both sides that we will stick to our guns, we'll stick to our claims. And let's see how we can get anything from there."

And while it wasn't discussed, Cayetano said the first exploration could involve finding out availability of resources in the area.

"It's research work to see how much gas, if any, is there. Now when we see the amounts and everything, then we can go to the next step. Is it viable? Is there a commercial quantity? What's the quality of the oil that's there. And from there, that's the only time you think about development," he said.

Cayetano added he has also talked to other claimants and has assured them the country would only talk to China in areas where the dispute was only between the Philippines and China.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.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 12)  Former president and Pampanga 2nd District Representative Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was appointed to the Board of Directors of an Asian regional forum Tuesday.

Arroyo is one of the 12 newly-elected members of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) Board of directors, according to the forum's website.

In a statement Wednesday, Arroyo said she was honored by the appointment as she had been a participant of the BFA for "a long time."

"I'm very honored to be a member of the Board.I'm happy to be here at this time because with a very good relations between the Philippines and China now and under the leadership of Pres. Xi Jinping and Pres. Rodrigo Duterte, I would like to add what I can to contribute to that very good relationship," she said.

Former Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon was elected as the chair of the BFA Board, while Zhou Xiaochuan  vice chair of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference  is China's new chief representative to the forum, and the board's vice chair.

Arroyo said Asia should move forward with issues that are "less prickly," given closer and friendlier relations among BFA's member-countries, amid the ongoing trade tiff between U.S. and China.

"I think that given the trade wars that you are talking about, even us we are trying to sort out the difference between the West and the East. I think among us in the East, we should forge ahead because the issues are less contentious and we are closer and more friendly with one another," she stated.

The lawmaker also said she looks forward to Xi's trade and economic policies for China in the future.

"I am looking forward to whatever he has to say. He is a very important person in a very important country and we are all very eager and we look forward to the continuing leadership of China in the region's economy and the world's economy," she said.

In an April 9 press briefing, Philippine Ambassador to China Chito Sta. Romana said Arroyo may assume a seat in the Board, replacing former President Fidel Ramos.

Ramos was one of the founding members of the Board in 1998, who proposed the idea of an Asian forum in response to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Established in 1971, the Davos forum is the international organization for public-private cooperation 'committed to improving the state of the world.'

The BFA forum is an annual economic summit "dedicated to promoting Asian countries to achieve common development through further integration of regional economy."

As an outgoing member of the BFA's Council of Advisors, Ramos and eight other members were honored with the title of BFA Honorary Member for their contributions to the forum.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 12) - A global group of 60 judges and lawyers condemned President Rodrigo Duterte's open animosity with embattled Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, whom he has declared as his enemy.

In a statement, Emerlynne Gil, senior international legal adviser of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), said that it is "absolutely unacceptable" for Duterte to make such a statement.

"Not only because it constitutes direct intimidation of the Chief Justice, but the chilling effect it may have on other independent judges who carry out their professional duties," Gil said.

On Monday, Sereno dared Duterte to disprove claims he was the behind the quo warranto petition filed by Solicitor General Jose Calida to nullify her appointment. On the same day, Duterte declared Sereno his enemy.

"Ikaw Sereno, sinabi ko na sa'yo, hindi ako nakialam. If you are insisting then count me in, and I will egg Calida to do his best. Ako na mismo ang maglakad rin, kalaban sa'yo," Duterte said.

[Translation: Sereno, I already told you that I don't meddle. If you are insisting, then count me in, and I will egg Calida to do his best. I will handle this myself, against you.]

The President also called on the lower house to fast-track impeachment proceedings presently underway against Sereno.

The ICJ asked Duterte to "retract his comments and to refrain in the future from making any statements attacking individual judges or in any way interfering with the independence of the judiciary."

It added that through these remarks, "the President is actively influencing and interfering with the functions of other co-equal branches of government."

Sereno is battling two ouster moves against her - the aforementioned quo warranto petition and the looming impeachment trial.

She faces accusations of enjoying a lavish lifestyle, bypassing colleagues in the issuance of court orders, failing to pay about P2 million in taxes, and misdeclaring her wealth. Sereno has denied the allegations.Galveston, TX (77553)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms this morning, then mainly cloudy during the afternoon with thunderstorms likely. High near 85F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall may reach one inch..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms this evening followed by occasional showers overnight. Low 78F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 12)  An officer in the campaign team of President Rodrigo Duterte maintained political data firm Cambridge Analytica was not involved in the 2016 national elections.

Social Media Campaign Director Jose Gabriel "Pompee" La Vina explained on Thursday the photo circulating on social media showing some members of the Duterte campaign team meeting with Cambridge Analytica Chief Executive Officer Alexander Nix.

"The NPC (National Press Club) invited us to go. We were reaching out to the NPC because Mayor Duterte then was weighing a run for presidency, and we were in the media, and Peter La Vina was Head of Media so he wanted to connect and renew his membership to the NPC," La Vina told CNN Philippines' On The Record.

The photo shows Nix sharing a meal with Duterte campaign team members Pompee and Peter La Vina, then NPC President Joel Egco, and Atty. Taipan Millan. La Vina said the NPC paid for the meal.

He also said the photo was taken at the NPC Building in Manila on March 14, 2015, over a year before the May 2016 national elections.

La Vina added he just tagged along with his cousin Peter La Vina, who was the one who got invited. He also said he didn't know who Nix was before the event.

"When we got there, there was a press conference. It was open[Nix] made a presentation there, then there were two or three questions. I wanted to ask a question but I was too shy. After the press conference, they fed us," he said.

La Vina also said during the time, Duterte's campaign team was not focusing on social media.

"The mind of the campaign was on traditional media, not even social media. Peter was more interested in broadsheets and networks of course," he said.

Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque earlier said Duterte's campaign team did not pay for Cambridge Analytica's services during the 2016 national elections.

Cambridge Analytica involved in elections?

The South China Morning Post reported on April 4 the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), wrote on its website that it helped get an unnamed Philippine presidential candidate elected in 2016 by presenting him as a "strong, no-nonsense man of action" to appeal to the voters.

The SCL website page has been taken down, but the international news site was able to retrieve its archived versions.

The SCL web content read, "In the run up to national elections the incumbent client was widely perceived as both kind and honorable, qualities his campaign team thought were potentially election-winning. But SCL's research showed that many groups within the electorate were more likely to be swayed by qualities such as toughness and decisiveness. SCL used the cross-cutting issue of crime to rebrand the client as a strong, no-nonsense man of action, who would appeal to the true values of the voters."

Duterte is known for his tough stance against illegal drugs, corruption, and terrorist, among other issues. The clenched iron-fist hand gesture quickly became a symbol to show support for the President.

In a separate report, South China Morning Post also revealed that in May 2015 a board director of Strategic Communications Laboratories dined with men who will become key figures in Duterte's presidential campaign.

It said Nix who met with Pompee La Vina and Peter La Vina, who became Duterte's social media director and campaign spokesperson respectively during the 2016 national elections.

Cambridge Analytica is in hot water for its alleged improper harvesting of over 87 million Facebook data worldwide. In the Philippines, the personal data of 1.2 million Facebook users have been compromised, the National Privacy Commission said.

The controversial data firm also worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The New York Times reported Cambridge Analytica was working to develop techniques that could be used to influence voters.

CNN Philippines' Senior Digital Producer Lara Tan contributed to this story.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 12)  Authorities arrested a group of Chinese and Filipino nationals suspected of running a shabu laboratory in Batangas Thursday.

The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) said its agents, along with some members of the military and police, discovered the "clandestine shabu laboratory" in a farm in Barangay Sto. Nino in Ibaan town at 6 a.m.

Chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine hydrochloride or shabu and ecstasy were seized from the operation, PDEA said, but it did not mention the amount.

"The shabu laboratory has the capacity to produce 25 kilos or P125 million worth of shabu in one day," PDEA Director General Aaron Aquino said in a statement.

Two Chinese chemists identified as Tian Baoquan and Guo Zixing and three Filipino cohorts were nabbed during the shabu laboratory search, PDEA said. The Filipinos were Eduardo Lorenzo, 59, an electrician; Rosaleo Cesar (alias Leo), 49, driver; and Amancio Gallarde, 40, errand boy.

In another operation in Lipa town, authorities arrested Hong Dy and his driver Nestor Baguio.

Xie Jiansheng, whom PDEA described as "the Chinese organizer and handler of the arrested chemists," was nabbed later in Tagaytay City. Five hundred grams of suspected shabu worth P2.5 million were seized from him.

The Chinese chemists are accused of putting up the shabu facility with the help of Filipino cohorts.

PDEA noted that China's Office of the National Narcotics Control Commission tipped the government off about "Chinese chemists flying in and out of the country from September to October 2017."

Intelligence reports showed a Hong Kong-based drug kingpin was behind the shabu laboratory, PDEA said.

The raid is an offshoot of President Rodrigo Duterte's state visit to China in October 2016, PDEA said, where representatives of the two countries signed a protocol on cooperation and intelligence sharing and joint anti-drug operations.

Duterte was back in China this week, where he said China and the Philippines "stand together in the war on criminality and illegal drug trade."Subtle. Very subtle.

Eight police officers in Argentina have lost their jobs after claiming mice ate half a tonne of confiscated marijuana that had gone missing.

Six tonnes of marijuana was being stored in a warehouse in Pilar, 60km from Beunos Aires, the Guardian reports.

But when it was weighed recently, only 5.5 tonnes were found.

Former Police Commissioner Javier Specia told a judge mice had eaten it, and so did three of his subordinates. But the judge had his doubts, as did forensic experts called in to examine the shrinking stash.

"Mice wouldn't mistake the drug for food, and that if a large group of mice had eaten it, a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse," a spokesperson for the judge said.

It's not clear yet if the weed went walkabouts through "expedience or negligence", and the officers will be called to testify in May, hopefully coming up with a better explanation than "mice ate it".

Newshub.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 12)  The Presidential Electoral Tribunal has issued a show cause order against Vice President Leni Robredo and former Senator Ferdiand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. for disclosing to the public sensitive information regarding the revision of ballots.

The tribunal gave both parties 10 days to explain why they should not be cited in contempt for violating its resolutions.

The Court ordered them to strictly observe the sub judice rule pending the recount.

The sub judice rule prohibits parties from discussing the merits of a case pending a court resolution.

It also junked Robredo's motion to direct head revisors to apply the correct threshold percentage as set by the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) in the revision, recount, and re-appreciation of ballots.

Robredo claimed the threshold percentage in determining the validity of votes was 25 percent and not 50 percent.

But the tribunal said it was not aware of any COMELEC resolution that states the applicability of a 25-percent threshold.

It cannot also treat the "random manual audit guidelines and report" as proof of threshold used by COMELEC.

It added, her claim of a "systematic reduction" of her votes is without basis and shows a misunderstanding of the revision process.

Robredo and Marcos were issued a gag order in February, telling them to stop discussing the poll protest in public.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 13)  President Rodrigo Duterte is not letting up on his call to impeach Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, saying she should have resigned a long ago.

"I am directing my party-mates," he said upon arriving in Davao City early Friday morning. "I am asking you to impeach the Chief Justice."

But the President clarified he was not directing Senate to remove Sereno from office, only appealing to the lawmakers in the House of Representatives who are set to decide on the chief magistrate's impeachment.

"So I'm asking my party-mates in Congress. Who am I to direct the Senate? 'Yung Congress, ang ibigay sa representatives because we were talking of impeachment. We are not talking of conviction," he said.

On March 8, the House Justice Committee found probable cause to impeach Sereno. When session resumes on May 14, the articles of impeachment will be included in the agenda of the House plenary  where Duterte enjoys the support of the supermajority.

The President also called Sereno an "ignorant" Chief Justice  adding that if she were smart, no one would go against her and she would not make mistakes in her declarations.

"If you are that ignorant, you better go. You are just risking the country into a chaos. Umalis ka na, at hindi ka dapat diyan in the first place. And that term of yours, until what...2030? That's too long for an ignorant Chief Justice," he explained.

The President then said if he were the Chief Justice, he would resign.

"And so talagang dapat paalisin ka noon pa. Bobo ka," he said.

The Duterte-Sereno spat began anew when the Chief Justice insisted that the President was behind the petition seeking to unseat her. Duterte then tagged her as his number one enemy, just before he left for China.

The President arrived from Hongkong after attending Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan, China, where he was able to secure over 9 billion in investment deals with the eastern giant.President Buhari Blames Slain Libyan Leader, Muammar Gadaffi For Killer Herdsmen in Nigeria

kacylee at 12-04-2018 08:16 AM (3 years ago) (f)

President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday said the herdsmen wreaking havoc across the country are gunmen trained by the late Libyan President Muammar Gadaffi.

President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday said the herdsmen wreaking havoc across the country are gunmen trained by the late Libyan President Muammar Gadaffi.

Speaking with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby at the Abuja House in London, Buhari said the gunmen escaped into Nigeria and other West African countries after Gadaffis death.



The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region, he said in response to Archbishop Welbys question on the herdsmen crisis.



They were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram.



Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons. The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions.



The President said irresponsible politics had been brought into the farmers/herders crisis, promising that enduring solutions would be found, and justice done to all concerned.



He said he declared his second-term bid on Monday before his London trip because many Nigerians were talking too much about whether he was going to run or not.



On Leah Sharibu, the Dapchi schoolgirl still being held by insurgents for refusing to renounce Christianity, the President said: We are managing the matter quietly. Making noise would not help. We are collecting as much intelligence as possible, working with the Red Cross and other international organisations.



There are too many fraudulent people around, who claim they can do this and that. We wont deal with them. That was how we got the Dapchi girls back, and the Chibok girls.



Archbishop Welby said it was always a delight to see President Buhari, adding that he would pray for him on his decision to seek a second term.



He later presented President Buhari with a copy of his recent book: Reimagining Britain. Foundations for Hope. Speaking with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby at the Abuja House in London, Buhari said the gunmen escaped into Nigeria and other West African countries after Gadaffis death.The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region, he said in response to Archbishop Welbys question on the herdsmen crisis.They were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram.Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons. The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions.The President said irresponsible politics had been brought into the farmers/herders crisis, promising that enduring solutions would be found, and justice done to all concerned.He said he declared his second-term bid on Monday before his London trip because many Nigerians were talking too much about whether he was going to run or not.On Leah Sharibu, the Dapchi schoolgirl still being held by insurgents for refusing to renounce Christianity, the President said: We are managing the matter quietly. Making noise would not help. We are collecting as much intelligence as possible, working with the Red Cross and other international organisations.There are too many fraudulent people around, who claim they can do this and that. We wont deal with them. That was how we got the Dapchi girls back, and the Chibok girls.Archbishop Welby said it was always a delight to see President Buhari, adding that he would pray for him on his decision to seek a second term.He later presented President Buhari with a copy of his recent book: Reimagining Britain. Foundations for Hope.

Post Reply I have been reporting for several years now and I am very interested in visual news reportage with strong inclusion of photos and video multimedia. Posted: at 12-04-2018 08:16 AM (3 years ago) | Addicted Hero

Vistolyn at 12-04-2018 08:22 AM (3 years ago)

(f) he likes blaming others for his failures, y ? pls learn to own up to ur responsibilities Mr President haba Posted: at 12-04-2018 08:22 AM (3 years ago) | Newbie he likes blaming others for his failures, y ? pls learn to own up to ur responsibilities Mr President haba Reply

Zaki68 at 12-04-2018 08:58 AM (3 years ago)

(m) Quote from: Vistolyn on 12-04-2018 08:22 AM he likes blaming others for his failures, y ? pls learn to own up to ur responsibilities Mr President haba

CLOSE YOUR MOUTH IF ITS A WHITE PRESIDENT THAT SAID THIS NOW YOU GUYS WILL ACCEPT IT, AFRICANS!!!!!!!!! GO AND RESEARCH ABOUT LIBYAN CRISIS I KNOW IGBOS IN THIS FORUM WILL A JOY FULL DAY TO ABUSE THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF NIGERIA SO FAR. Posted: at 12-04-2018 08:58 AM (3 years ago) | Upcoming CLOSE YOUR MOUTH IF ITS A WHITE PRESIDENT THAT SAID THIS NOW YOU GUYS WILL ACCEPT IT, AFRICANS!!!!!!!!! GO AND RESEARCH ABOUT LIBYAN CRISIS I KNOW IGBOS IN THIS FORUM WILL A JOY FULL DAY TO ABUSE THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF NIGERIA SO FAR. Reply

Torbem at 12-04-2018 09:00 AM (3 years ago)

(m) My brothers and sisters were killed in benue state yesterday and that's how it's been happening, they invade kill and displace people from there homes. Miyetti Allah have been out publicly and accepted their actions that's it's because our governor enforced the anti-grazing law and you here spieling rubish. Igbo people carry sticks protest only you declare them terrorists how long is it going to take to declare the one walking around with guns, maiming and killing people both women and children, old and young Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:00 AM (3 years ago) | Upcoming My brothers and sisters were killed in benue state yesterday and that's how it's been happening, they invade kill and displace people from there homes. Miyetti Allah have been out publicly and accepted their actions that's it's because our governor enforced the anti-grazing law and you here spieling rubish. Igbo people carry sticks protest only you declare them terrorists how long is it going to take to declare the one walking around with guns, maiming and killing people both women and children, old and young Reply

Torbem at 12-04-2018 09:01 AM (3 years ago)

(m) If you're interested on how to make 24k with N1,500 in a very short time check out this site, this ain't a scam please it works.

https://fivebuckx.com/?invite=MTYwMTE2Y2hyaXN0 Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:01 AM (3 years ago) | Upcoming If you're interested on how to make 24k with N1,500 in a very short time check out this site, this ain't a scam please it works. Reply

ruthie at 12-04-2018 09:11 AM (3 years ago)

(f) get it right, this did not start under his administration....

Quote from: Vistolyn on 12-04-2018 08:22 AM he likes blaming others for his failures, y ? pls learn to own up to ur responsibilities Mr President haba

Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:11 AM (3 years ago) | Hero get it right, this did not start under his administration.... Reply

ruthie at 12-04-2018 09:12 AM (3 years ago)

(f) get ir right...it didnt start with this administration..

Quote from: Vistolyn on 12-04-2018 08:22 AM he likes blaming others for his failures, y ? pls learn to own up to ur responsibilities Mr President haba

Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:12 AM (3 years ago) | Hero get ir right...it didnt start with this administration.. Reply

ruthie at 12-04-2018 09:13 AM (3 years ago)

(f) solutions solutions solutions!!! is what we need ! Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:13 AM (3 years ago) | Hero solutions solutions solutions!!! is what we need ! Reply

EDDYPRINCE at 12-04-2018 09:29 AM (3 years ago)

(m) Buhari for once take responsibility and stop this blame game.... In your grave u become Naija President again. Which mouth u wan take campaign Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:29 AM (3 years ago) | Addicted Hero Buhari for once take responsibility and stop this blame game.... In your grave u become Naija President again. Which mouth u wan take campaign Reply

fineboy77 at 12-04-2018 09:31 AM (3 years ago)

(m) Gaddafi,sorry What is the color beneath your skin? Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:31 AM (3 years ago) | Hero Gaddafi,sorry Reply

warribimboye at 12-04-2018 09:50 AM (3 years ago)

(m) This time we must see debates Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:50 AM (3 years ago) | Upcoming This time we must see debates Reply

dareper at 12-04-2018 09:59 AM (3 years ago)

(m) Laughable!. So foreigners all the way from Libya came to Nigeria and have killed over 10000 Nigeria and at the same time threatened the security of this country for over 3yrs now and u don't regard them as " terrorist " but u were quick to label your fellow countrymen (ipob) who were not armed not alone being a threat to Nigerians as "terrorist" . it's unfortunate ghadafi is not alive if not he would have had enough to say about this accusation and how u armed ur Fulani brothers to kill Nigerians and try to shift it on him. Bloody fool. Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:59 AM (3 years ago) | Addicted Hero Laughable!. So foreigners all the way from Libya came to Nigeria and have killed over 10000 Nigeria and at the same time threatened the security of this country for over 3yrs now and u don't regard them as " terrorist " but u were quick to label your fellow countrymen (ipob) who were not armed not alone being a threat to Nigerians as "terrorist" . it's unfortunate ghadafi is not alive if not he would have had enough to say about this accusation and how u armed ur Fulani brothers to kill Nigerians and try to shift it on him. Bloody fool. Reply

gogoman at 12-04-2018 10:08 AM (3 years ago)

(m) BUHARI OF LIFE Posted: at 12-04-2018 10:08 AM (3 years ago) | Addicted Hero BUHARI OF LIFE Reply

Mashbol at 12-04-2018 11:05 AM (3 years ago)

(m) You are there to attend to any issue bordering the nation Posted: at 12-04-2018 11:05 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac You are there to attend to any issue bordering the nation Reply

nature7888 at 12-04-2018 11:14 AM (3 years ago)

(m) This guy funny sha.. Posted: at 12-04-2018 11:14 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac This guy funny sha.. Reply

blowout at 12-04-2018 11:41 AM (3 years ago)

(m) and this man wants to continue as president in 2019 Posted: at 12-04-2018 11:41 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac and this man wants to continue as president in 2019 Reply

crocatum at 12-04-2018 12:19 PM (3 years ago)

(m) highly insensible trash. Posted: at 12-04-2018 12:19 PM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac highly insensible trash. Reply

kaposky at 12-04-2018 12:45 PM (3 years ago)

(m) Quote from: Zaki68 on 12-04-2018 08:58 AM CLOSE YOUR MOUTH IF ITS A WHITE PRESIDENT THAT SAID THIS NOW YOU GUYS WILL ACCEPT IT, AFRICANS!!!!!!!!! GO AND RESEARCH ABOUT LIBYAN CRISIS I KNOW IGBOS IN THIS FORUM WILL A JOY FULL DAY TO ABUSE THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF NIGERIA SO FAR.

U ARE THE BIGGEST IDIOT EVER. U ANIMALLISTIC SUPPORTER OF AN EVIL PRESIDENT Posted: at 12-04-2018 12:45 PM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac U ARE THE BIGGEST IDIOT EVER. U ANIMALLISTIC SUPPORTER OF AN EVIL PRESIDENT Reply

philnel at 12-04-2018 12:58 PM (3 years ago)

(m) Whoever mentioned Ghadafis name in Nigeria mess is a useless idiot . OLUWA HOLDS THE ACE Posted: at 12-04-2018 12:58 PM (3 years ago) | Upcoming Whoever mentioned Ghadafis name in Nigeria mess is a useless idiot . OLUWA HOLDS THE ACE ReplyI Sleep With Married Men To Pay My Bills -Curvy Ghanaian Actress Moesha Boduong Reveals On CNN (VID)

kacylee at 12-04-2018 09:35 AM (3 years ago) (f)

Ghanaian curvy actress and model, Moesha Boduong, in an interview with CNNs Christiane Amanpour made a stunning revelation on why Ghanaian women depend on men to pay their bills. This came after she was featured on an episode of CNNs Sx & Love Around the World. According to Moesha Boduong who admitted she sleeps with a married man, the economy of the country is so bad that women are compelled to have sexual affairs with men, just to make a living.

Ghanaian curvy actress and model, Moesha Boduong, in an interview with CNNs Christiane Amanpour made a stunning revelation on why Ghanaian women depend on men to pay their bills. This came after she was featured on an episode of CNNs Sx & Love Around the World. According to Moesha Boduong who admitted she sleeps with a married man, the economy of the country is so bad that women are compelled to have sexual affairs with men, just to make a living.

CNNs Christiane Amanpour talked with Moesha Bodoung on the topic When being a mistress is a financial decision. Here are excerpts from the interview;



Moesha Boduong: In Ghana our economy is such that you just need someone to take care of you because you cant make enough money as a woman here



Amanpour : Why because you cant make enough money?



Moesha Boduong: You cant make enough money as a woman here. Because if you want an apartment, you have to pay for two years in advance and i just started workingwhere will i get money to pay



Amanpour: Are you basically telling me you are having sex with this guy essentially to pay your rent? (Shock in her eyes)



Moesha Boduong: Because he can afford to take care of me



Amanpour: OKkkkkayhhrrrrrrrh



Moesha Boduong : He takes care of me, my financial stuff, my car, my rent, etc



She added that in exchange for the money she receives from her lover/benefactor, she is expected to stay loyal to him and yield to his sexual desires whenever he demands.



He expects me to be loyal and just to date him only and give him sex when he wants.You cant say no.You have to give him what he wants otherwise he is going to think you are cheating on him,  she added.



Watch video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ0bO2bRJ4Y CNNs Christiane Amanpour talked with Moesha Bodoung on the topic When being a mistress is a financial decision. Here are excerpts from the interview;: In Ghana our economy is such that you just need someone to take care of you because you cant make enough money as a woman here: Why because you cant make enough money?: You cant make enough money as a woman here. Because if you want an apartment, you have to pay for two years in advance and i just started workingwhere will i get money to pay: Are you basically telling me you are having sex with this guy essentially to pay your rent? (Shock in her eyes): Because he can afford to take care of meOKkkkkayhhrrrrrrrhMoesha Boduong : He takes care of me, my financial stuff, my car, my rent, etcShe added that in exchange for the money she receives from her lover/benefactor, she is expected to stay loyal to him and yield to his sexual desires whenever he demands.,  she added.Watch video below:

Post Reply I have been reporting for several years now and I am very interested in visual news reportage with strong inclusion of photos and video multimedia. Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:35 AM (3 years ago) | Addicted Hero

Torbem at 12-04-2018 09:42 AM (3 years ago)

(m) If you're interested on how to make 24k with N1,500 in a very short time check out this site, this ain't a scam please it works.

https://fivebuckx.com/?invite=MTYwMTE2Y2hyaXN0 Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:42 AM (3 years ago) | Upcoming If you're interested on how to make 24k with N1,500 in a very short time check out this site, this ain't a scam please it works. Reply

warribimboye at 12-04-2018 09:48 AM (3 years ago)

(m) Truth is bitter but naija actresses need to come out as well to say it Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:48 AM (3 years ago) | Upcoming Truth is bitter but naija actresses need to come out as well to say it Reply

ruthie at 12-04-2018 09:56 AM (3 years ago)

(f) THIS IS WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU ARE INTERESTED IN LIVING A LAVISH LIFESTYLE...NO EVERYONE NEEDS TO SLEEP WITH A MAN FOR SHIT...THE QUESTION, SHE SHOULD ASK HERSELF...CAN SHE DO THIS FOREVER? HELL NO...SILLY EXCUSES IS ALL I HEAR Posted: at 12-04-2018 09:56 AM (3 years ago) | Hero THIS IS WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU ARE INTERESTED IN LIVING A LAVISH LIFESTYLE...NO EVERYONE NEEDS TO SLEEP WITH A MAN FOR SHIT...THE QUESTION, SHE SHOULD ASK HERSELF...CAN SHE DO THIS FOREVER? HELL NO...SILLY EXCUSES IS ALL I HEAR Reply

gogoman at 12-04-2018 10:03 AM (3 years ago)

(m) GOOD GIRL Posted: at 12-04-2018 10:03 AM (3 years ago) | Addicted Hero GOOD GIRL Reply

NOJOKEMUANLE at 12-04-2018 10:03 AM (3 years ago)

(m) Jesus Christ. Anyway, You are now free of this sin as well as u have confess. Stop it and ask the LORD to forgive u. Posted: at 12-04-2018 10:03 AM (3 years ago) | Newbie Jesus Christ. Anyway, You are now free of this sin as well as u have confess. Stop it and ask the LORD to forgive u. Reply

favourita at 12-04-2018 10:36 AM (3 years ago)

(f) Am not surprised, becos dis is what 90% of actress does becos they want to belong Posted: at 12-04-2018 10:36 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac Am not surprised, becos dis is what 90% of actress does becos they want to belong Reply

chukkychukky at 12-04-2018 10:37 AM (3 years ago)

(m) wetin women get to offer for dis life apart frm sex? Joramentity aka chukkychukky Posted: at 12-04-2018 10:37 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac wetin women get to offer for dis life apart frm sex? Reply

Wazubia at 12-04-2018 10:41 AM (3 years ago)

(m) NA TODAY NYASH BEGIN DEY BACK.

IT IS WELL. Posted: at 12-04-2018 10:41 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac NA TODAY NYASH BEGIN DEY BACK.IT IS WELL. Reply

nature7888 at 12-04-2018 10:56 AM (3 years ago)

(m) Quote from: Torbem on 12-04-2018 09:42 AM

https://fivebuckx.com/?invite=MTYwMTE2Y2hyaXN0

If you're interested on how to make 24k with N1,500 in a very short time check out this site, this ain't a scam please it works. Posted: at 12-04-2018 10:56 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac Respect your self Reply

Mashbol at 12-04-2018 11:13 AM (3 years ago)

(m) Shame Posted: at 12-04-2018 11:13 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac Shame Reply

Haso112 at 12-04-2018 11:17 AM (3 years ago)

(m) SHE ACTUALLY SAID IT AS IT IS AND THAT'S IT..... GOOD GIRL.... BUT THEN, FOR HOW LONG? GHANA BABES AND THESE THEIR BIG BIG THINGS NO GO KILL PERSON.... Posted: at 12-04-2018 11:17 AM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac SHE ACTUALLY SAID IT AS IT IS AND THAT'S IT..... GOOD GIRL.... BUT THEN, FOR HOW LONG? GHANA BABES AND THESE THEIR BIG BIG THINGS NO GO KILL PERSON.... Reply

ruthie at 12-04-2018 11:44 AM (3 years ago)

(f) IS LIKE YOU KNOW THIS ONE?

Quote from: Haso112 on 12-04-2018 11:17 AM SHE ACTUALLY SAID IT AS IT IS AND THAT'S IT..... GOOD GIRL.... BUT THEN, FOR HOW LONG? GHANA BABES AND THESE THEIR BIG BIG THINGS NO GO KILL PERSON....

Posted: at 12-04-2018 11:44 AM (3 years ago) | Hero IS LIKE YOU KNOW THIS ONE? Reply

Haso112 at 12-04-2018 12:08 PM (3 years ago)

(m) Quote from: ruthie on 12-04-2018 11:44 AM IS LIKE YOU KNOW THIS ONE?



HA...! IT'S IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO KNOW HER HERE NA... BIG MEN MEAT..... Posted: at 12-04-2018 12:08 PM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac HA...! IT'S IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO KNOW HER HERE NA... BIG MEN MEAT..... Reply

EDDYPRINCE at 12-04-2018 12:15 PM (3 years ago)

(m) She just said the truth Posted: at 12-04-2018 12:15 PM (3 years ago) | Addicted Hero She just said the truth Reply

slimber at 12-04-2018 02:41 PM (3 years ago)

(f) Hmmm.mm okooo Posted: at 12-04-2018 02:41 PM (3 years ago) | Hero Hmmm.mm okooo Reply

fineboy77 at 12-04-2018 03:45 PM (3 years ago)

(m) this girl dey talk,shame dey catch me,why? What is the color beneath your skin? Posted: at 12-04-2018 03:45 PM (3 years ago) | Hero this girl dey talk,shame dey catch me,why? Reply

fineboy77 at 12-04-2018 03:47 PM (3 years ago)

(m) Quote from: Haso112 on 12-04-2018 11:17 AM SHE ACTUALLY SAID IT AS IT IS AND THAT'S IT..... GOOD GIRL.... BUT THEN, FOR HOW LONG? GHANA BABES AND THESE THEIR BIG BIG THINGS NO GO KILL PERSON....

na wetin u go come look here finish go dey beat your innocent wife for house,ode What is the color beneath your skin? Posted: at 12-04-2018 03:47 PM (3 years ago) | Hero na wetin u go come look here finish go dey beat your innocent wife for house,ode Reply

Sniper101 at 12-04-2018 05:01 PM (3 years ago)

(m) must it be married men?



aren't there some well-to-do young over there in Ghana?



you're into the business of prostitution...plain & simple )



...or maybe you just take pleasure in creating havoc in the homes of married people. Posted: at 12-04-2018 05:01 PM (3 years ago) | Gistmaniac must it be married men?aren't there some well-to-do young over there in Ghana?you're into the business of prostitution...plain & simple...or maybe you just take pleasure in creating havoc in the homes of married people. ReplyThe content you are looking for has either been removed or requires you to login to view

Please login below or register for an account With Naijapals.comHSINCHU, Taiwan, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwans largest applied research institution, won Silver in the Applied Technology/Commercial Safety category at 2018 Edison Awards with its Fluid-Driven Emergency Rescuer (FDER) technology. ITRI representatives accepted the award in New York, NY on April 11, 2018. The Edison Awards have been honoring and fostering innovation and innovators to create a positive impact in the world in the spirit of Thomas Edison since 1987. Being recognized with an Edison Award is one of the highest accolades a company can receive in the name of innovation and business success. Other winners this year include Adobe Systems, GE Healthcare, NVIDIA, and 3M.



FDER technology is an innovation of micro-hydropower harvesting which can provide thermal images, LED lighting, and laser indication of evacuation routes in the dark. It was developed to address the safety issue of fire sites, with an attempt to enhance visibility to protect firefighters and save lives. FDER is applied to form two unique devices, Fluid-Driven Tactical Nozzle (FDTN) and Fluid-Driven Sprinkler Light (FDSL). The lightweight FDTN mounted on a fire nozzle ensures sufficient illumination without external electricity supply, while the FDSL installed in buildings is designed to shine laser beams to guide people to escape routes in thick smoke. FDER, with 30 granted patents, also won the 2015 R&D 100 Award and 2016 NASA Tech Briefs Award.

The application that youve created in Taiwan for ITRI can be applied throughout the world. It really makes firefighters lives much safer and I hope that you make the connections here in the United States to actually grow this technology, making peoples lives much safer, commented Frank Bonafilia, Executive Director of Edison Awards.

FDER is a technological breakthrough to the evolution of firefighting equipment and can be used to improve the safety of fire sites and elevate the efficiency of fire rescue, said Dr. Robert Yie-Zu Hu, ITRIs Vice President and General Director of Green Energy and Environment Research Laboratories. He stressed that the FDTN device, with its thermal image camera and LED lamp, is superior to conventional firefighting equipment in reliability, illumination and duration. The design eliminates the need of battery supply, reduces the weight of firefighters gear, and can identify fire spots and victim location. For its part, FDSL is expected to improve fire safety in buildings by projecting laser indication for evacuation.

Were thrilled that FDER has been recognized by the Edison Awards, said Dr. Jung-Huang Liao, Manager of ITRIs Green Energy and Environment Research Laboratories. We will continue to refine its design based on user demands and expand its commercialization efforts, making it applicable in practical apparatuses that can save more lives in the world.

FDTN has been licensed in 2016 and adopted by several firefighting squads in Taiwan to help them see better and move faster during rescue missions. In addition to firefighting, the FDER technology may also extend its applications to environmental sensing or indicators. A video of FDER demo is available here: https://youtu.be/SbJJztGeMlo.

About ITRI

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is one of the worlds leading technology R&D institutions aiming to innovate a better future for society. Founded in 1973, ITRI has played a vital role in transforming Taiwan's industries from labor-intensive into innovation-driven. It focuses on the fields of Smart Living, Quality Health, and Sustainable Environment.

Over the years, ITRI has incubated over 270 innovative companies, including well-known names such as UMC and TSMC. In addition to its headquarters in Taiwan, ITRI has branch offices in the U.S., Europe, and Japan in an effort to extend its R&D scope and promote opportunities for international cooperation around the world. For more information, please visit https://www.itri.org/eng.

Media Contact

Irene Shih

Office of Marketing Communications, ITRI

chenyishih@itri.org.tw, +886-(0)3-5912542

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/f0865692-b0ac-4e50-8d49-17db9c8d3f69

http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/db8f5f3a-0376-4e1a-ac9f-77f3f5b03357MIRAMAR, Fla., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Amazing beaches and amazing people are waiting to greet you as Spirit Airlines (NYSE:SAVE) grows in the Caribbean once again! On April 12, 2018, Spirit will connect Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL) to Cap-Haitien International Airport (CAP) in Haitis second largest city. This new flight marks the second destination for Spirit in Haiti, complementing existing service to Port-au-Prince (PAP).



Additionally, low fare flights to St. Maartens Princess Juliana International Airport (SXM) resume on May 5, 2018 as recovery continues and tourism opportunities grow after the impact of last years hurricanes. Spirit will also connect South Florida to St. Croixs Henry E. Rohlsen Airport (STX), Spirits second destination in the U.S. Virgin Islands, starting on May 24, 2018.

Spirits commitment to expansion in the Caribbean also includes expanded seasonal daily service from Fort Lauderdale to Norman Manley International Airport (KIN) in Kingston, Jamaica.

These new and expanded services are a growing part of Spirits commitment to making air travel more affordable to the Caribbean for years to come.

Caribbean service expansion / resumption:

Routes: Start Date Frequency Fort Lauderdale (FLL) to/from Cap-Haitien, Haiti (CAP) April 12, 2018 3x weekly, year-round Kingston, Jamaica (KIN) April 12, 2018 Daily, seasonal St. Maarten (SXM) May 5, 2018 Saturdays, year-round St. Croix (STX) May 24, 2018 3x weekly, year-round

Spirit is proud to support the Caribbean with its recovery, having provided relief flights for more than 3,000 people and transported more than 120,000 pounds of relief supplies to date, said Mark Kopczak, Spirit Vice President of Network Planning. The courage and dedication of the people of the Caribbean has been more than impressive, and we are excited to bring more of our Guests there to enjoy all the islands have to offer.

Spirit Airlines has expanded greatly in the past several years while significantly improving on its operational performance. Recent Department of Transportation data shows Spirit Airlines among the top carriers for on-time performance. Guests can check out the crazy-low fares and vacation packages available to all of Spirit's destinations at spirit.com, where they can also sign up to receive alerts on Spirit's email deals and offers.

About Spirit Airlines:

Spirit Airlines (NYSE:SAVE) is committed to offering the lowest total price to the places we fly, on average more than 30% lower than other airlines*. Our customers start with an unbundled Bare Fare and get Frill Control which allows them to pay only for the options they choose  like bags, seat assignments and refreshments  the things other airlines bake right into their ticket prices. We help people save money and travel more often, create new jobs and stimulate business growth in the communities we serve. Our Fit Fleet is one of the youngest and most fuel-efficient in the U.S. We operate more than 500 daily flights to 65 destinations in the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean. Come save with us at spirit.com.

Contact:

Derek Dombrowski

(305) 916-6065

derek.dombrowski@spirit.com

*U.S. Department of Transportation StatisticsOfficials in Michigan release fish consumption advisories after three lakes found to contain cancer-causing chemicals

The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has issued a fish consumption advisory for three lakes in three separate Michigan counties. Multiple samples of fish taken from these sites are testing positive for mercury and cancer-causing polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs).

Bluegill, sunfish, largemouth and smallmouth bass taken from Freska and Versluis Lake tested high for mercury and PFAs. Multiple fish samples taken from Lake Margrethe in Crawford County and a section of the Au Sable River between Grayling and Mio also tested positive for these carcinogens.

The department has issued Eat Safe Fish guidelines this year for all fish caught in these waterways. The department warns that residents should not eat more than two servings of northern pike, carp, and walleye in one month, and no more than one serving of largemouth and smallmouth bass measuring over eighteen inches long. Statewide fish guidelines are now in place for the public to view.

PFAs, persistent carcinogen and thyroid disrupters, often go untested

PFAs originate primarily from non-stick cookware, food wrappers, and firefighting foam. These chemicals pollute groundwater and are associated with hormone disruption, obesity, thyroid disorders, and increased risk of cancer. The highest levels are detected near military sites, wastewater treatment plants, and industrial areas. Not every municipality tests for these chemicals. A study from Harvard found that 66 water samples from 33 different states had tested higher than the EPAs limit of 70 parts of PFASs per trillion (ng/L). This negatively impacts the health of an estimated six million people across the U.S.

The power of the elements: Discover Colloidal Silver Mouthwash with quality, natural ingredients like Sangre de Drago sap, black walnut hulls, menthol crystals and more. Zero artificial sweeteners, colors or alcohol. Learn more at the Health Ranger Store and help support this news site.

PFA contamination is pervasive throughout Michigan

Michigan officials have now confirmed specific sites with elevated levels of PFAs. As you can see, the problem is pervasive.

These contaminated sites include the following: The Alpena Combat Readiness Center, the Alpena Hide and Leather, the Municipal Water Treatment Plant in Ann Arbor, the Escanaba Defense Fuel Supply Point in Escanaba, the Coldwater landfill in Flint, the Grayling Army Airfield and Grayling Municipal Wells in Grayling, the KI Sawyer Air Force Base in Gwinn, the M-60/Pine Lake St. Gas Tanker Spill in Howard Township, Adams Plating in Lansing, Lapeer Plating in Lapeer, Clinton River and Lake St. Clair in Mt. Clemens, the Roosevelt Refinery in Mt. Pleasant, Colbath Road and Oscoda Area Schools in Oscoda, the State Disposal Facility in Plainfield Township, the Wurtsmith Air Force Base and Van Etten Lake in Oscoda, the Rockford Tannery in Rockford, and the Huron Shores Regional Water Authority in Tawas.

The now shuttered footwear manufacturer Wolverine World Wide is a major source of PFA environmental contamination near Rockford. Neighboring homes have found elevated levels of PFAs in their well water. PFA contamination here comes from the compounds that were used to waterproof the footwear. The contamination still affects Rogue River and surrounding areas. The most recent 2017 fish samples show that PFA contamination reaches north and south of the dam. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services is planning a large fish study in Rogue River over the spring and summer of 2018.

The 60-acre Freska Lake near the northwestern corner of the area will also be studied further. The 50-acre Versluis Lake sits nearby a gravel pit where toxic tannery waste was dumped many years ago. The 1,920-acre Margrethe Lake in Crawford County is under investigation as well due to firefighting foam contamination from the National Guard base. The other waterway under investigation is the Au Sable River, which runs 138 miles through the Huron-Manistee National Forest. The river, a popular route for kayakers and nature enthusiasts, passes by Camp Grayling and opens up near Wurtsmith Air Force Base, another site of contamination.

For more on water quality concerns, visit Chemicals.News.

Sources include:

MLive.com

HSPH.Harvard.edu

Michigan.gov

Michigan.govThe wife of an imprisoned human rights lawyer has been placed under house arrest and threatened with death after attempting a march from Beijing to Tianjin in defense of her husband.



China Aid reports that Li Wenzu organized a march from Beijing to Tianjin, a 71-mile trek, in search of her husband, Wang Quanzhang, who disappeared more than 1,000 days ago. At the time, he was seized as part of a nationwide crackdown on human rights lawyers. However, his current location is unknown, and he has not been allowed contact with his legal representation and loved ones for the entire duration of his imprisonment.



Li, who believes her husband is being held in Tianjin, was followed by reporters and friends as she set out from the Supreme People's Court in Beijing a week ago, holding their young child. A week into her trip, officers wearing street clothes seized Li and returned her to Beijing, where they have sequestered her in her home and not permitted her to leave, according to Reuters.



Wang Qiaoling, the wife of human rights lawyer Li Heping, who was also taken in the 2015 crackdown but has since been released, confirmed the arrest, telling Reuters, "Li Wenzu has been placed under house arrest, with state security blocking the door."



On Twitter, Li revealed she was "being controlled" by state security officers and threatened with death.



"On April 11, 2018, trapped at home by 40 or 50 people. A friend who came to visit was stopped and beaten. I can only climb out the window to shout," she wrote. "Wang Quanzhang has been disappeared for 1,006 days, and I've been under house arrest for two days. They even blocked our caretaker and our son from leaving the house, and said: if you come out, we'll kill you. It was only after I called the police that the guards allowed them to leave the house. But a gang of Aunties hurled insults at them, calling them traitors, and made them cry. If we-mother and son-are disappeared, are killed, we hope our friends everywhere will help us write this tragic episode into history.



Wang Quanzhang took on sensitive cases of complaints of police torture and defended practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, according to the Japan Times. He was one of more than 200 Chinese human rights lawyers and activists who were detained or questioned in the summer of 2015, the largest clampdown on the legal profession in recent history.



Wang has been charged with "subversion of state power" but authorities have blocked family-appointed lawyers from visiting him. The outlet notes that Wang's case is unusual because no trial date has even been announced. He is the last person in the so-called "709 crackdown" to remain in legal limbo.

One Girl Scout in California came up with an ingenious plan to sell cookies this year. She set up shop outside a San Diego marijuana dispensary and peddled 312 boxes of cookies in just six hours.She had some help from the dispensary. The store posted a photo on Instagram of the Girl Scout proudly wearing Samoa glasses -- and then tagged it #tagalong. The cleverness of the whole scheme rattled some parents, but a spokeswoman for Girl Scouts USA said that it was up to local councils to decide how the cookie campaign would be run. The Girl Scouts national office was handing off the job of ruling on the appropriateness of selling cookies outside a pot shop -- just as California was seizing the national agenda on recreational marijuana policy.Its hard to overestimate just how much national dust California kicked up when it launched statewide recreational marijuana sales back on Jan. 1. In Berkeley, Mayor Jesse Arreguin came to a ribbon-cutting at a city dispensary. Analysts projected that the state was on its way to a $5 billion (or more) legalized cannabis industry.Legalized by California standards, that is, and by the standards of a few other states. Eight states plus the District of Columbia have now legalized marijuana for recreational use. Twenty-two others have legalized it for medical treatment. The federal government, however, still outlaws the purchase, possession or use of marijuana for any purpose. And Attorney General Jeff Sessions has rescinded the Obama-era policy of turning a blind eye to individuals who light up in states where marijuana is legal. Sessions insists that U.S. attorneys enforce federal laws as written.In practice, however, federal prosecutors still have to decide how much energy to spend chasing down pot smokers in the states where marijuana use is legal. In one of those states, Colorado, U.S. Attorney Bob Troyer has said his office would focus on identifying and prosecuting those who create the greatest safety threats to our communities around the state, a subtle jab at Sessions announcement. Most U.S. attorneys say they have bigger crimes to investigate than the use of marijuana -- and better trial strategies than attempting to convince jurors to convict marijuana users on federal charges who were complying with state law.That has led to a feud between Sessions and Colorados junior U.S. senator, Republican Cory Gardner. Gardner says that Sessions, in his confirmation hearings, pledged that the Justice Department would not focus on marijuana enforcement. When Sessions reversed that position, Gardner put a hold on White House nominees for unfilled Justice posts, and vowed not to allow confirmation votes on any of them in the Senate until Sessions promised not to pursue his marijuana policy change. Gardner has a reputation as a law-and-order Republican, but he has no interest in bucking his Colorado constituents, 55 percent of whom voted in 2012 to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.Since legal sales of cannabis began in Colorado, the state has seen a growth in the number of businesses supplying dispensaries with armored cars, security cameras and big safes. Because marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and because most banks operate under federal regulations, it is hard for dispensaries to open checking accounts or take credit cards. In the eyes of federal regulators, marijuana money is drug money, and legalized pot dealers worry the feds might seize on traceable payments to shut them down. So they stick with cash. But no one wants to attract robbers with piles of hundred-dollar bills in the back room, or risk getting hijacked while driving cash around in the trunk of a car. Hence the safes and other precautions.California faces the same problem on a much bigger scale. Whereas Colorados cannabis industry took in about $1.5 billion last year, California is trying to figure out what to do with $5 billion in marijuana cash sloshing around in the state economy. Californias state treasurer and attorney general are studying whether the state could charter its own bank to process marijuana transactions, avoiding the credit card and check problem.What happens in California is worth watching closely. For decades, from the introduction of catalytic converters in automobiles to its cap-and-trade program for reducing air pollution, the nations most populous state has brought about changes in national policy just on the strength and scale of its own initiatives. If there is to be a reworking of federal drug policy, theres a good chance that it will start in Sacramento. In that case, Girl Scout cookie sales might never be the same, should young entrepreneurs discover that business is better in front of dispensaries than at supermarket doors.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.The farm bill released on Thursday by House Republicans would reshape the nation's food stamp program by imposing stricter work requirements on more people and guaranteeing job training for every person who wants it.While the proposed changes to one of the nation's largest anti-poverty programs are still controversial, they are more moderate than what the Trump administration had proposed earlier in the year and have something that could appease conservatives and liberals.For example, the bill does not reduce overall spending on the program, which is in stark contrast to the White House budget that called for $26.9 billion in cuts over 10 years. The bill in fact drastically boosts funding for work training. The Trump administration also sought to impose work requirements for adults in their early 60s, wanted to send Blue Apron-style boxes of food to SNAP households -- rather than letting people purchase their choice of groceries -- and is reportedly considering state waivers to drug test people on food assistance.The Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee did not include any of those ideas in their bill, and specifically cite the high costs and relatively low return on investment of drug testing."I think in general, the approach theyre taking is right," says Rus Sykes, an expert on food stamps for the American Public Human Services Association. "Some of our states may have problems with the mandatory nature of the program, but every one of them agrees that increasing those [training] resources -- if youre really serious about having a program about work -- is really essential."Some left-leaning think tanks and advocacy groups, such as the Center for American Progress and the Food Research and Action Center, still framed the package of proposals as "draconian" and "unnecessary burdens on low-income people."The food stamps programs is officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).The bill calls for a new SNAP work requirement that mandates adults between 18 and 59 years old to complete 80 hours a month of work or government-approved job training. It would increase enforcement of existing work requirements, especially for parents of school-age children and adults in their 50s.The new work requirement would still provide exemptions for adults with disabilities, adults 60 years or older, pregnant mothers and parents with children under 6. States could also still exempt up to 15 percent of their caseload for people who face barriers to employment, such as criminal records. And counties with an unemployment rate above 10 percent could still seek a temporary waiver from work requirements.If enacted, the House Agriculture Committee estimates that roughly 1 million people would leave the program over the next decade either because they would earn too much to qualify or because they would not meet the revised work requirement. Today about 42 million people participate in the food stamp program.House Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike Conaway has tried to head off criticism that the broader work requirements would kick people off SNAP by increasing funding for training programs and expanding the list of activities that would meet that training requirement.Over three years, the farm bill would increase federal investment in employment and training from $90 million a year to $1 billion a year. States would also be required to provide training slots for everySNAP participantwho needs one. As of 2017, only five states -- Colorado, Delaware, Michigan, South Dakota, and Texas -- have made a similar commitment.Sykes saysthe American Public Human Services Association is still mulling over whether three years is enough time to ramp up their training programs. The group's members also aren't sure if even $1 billion a year would be sufficient to provide work training to every SNAP recipient who needs it, but "I think it's close to being sufficient," he says.The farm bill also makes several changes to eligibility requirements beyond the work provisions -- some of which would make it easier to access benefits.For example, the bill would raise asset limits for households applying for SNAP and make allowances for up to $12,000 of a vehicle and up to $2,000 in a savings account.Some households would see a slight boost in benefits because government offices would now subtract a larger percentage of their earned income when calculating people's benefits.The bill would also require states to provide five months of SNAP benefits for households whose increased earnings disqualify them from the federal-state family cash welfare program TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families).However, some states are likely to raise concerns about the elimination of two policies that make it easier to sign people up for SNAP and to boost their benefits.The bill would nix a little-known rule in SNAP that increases a household's food stamps if they participate in LIHEAP, which helps low-income households pay their energy bills.The bill would also strike so-called broad-based categorical eligibility, which allows states to enroll people in SNAP if they use a government brochure, pamphlet or other document to prove that they qualify for other income-based public assistance programs. Forty-two states currently use broad-based categorical eligibility.The release of the farm bill comes the same week that President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to promote work in welfare programs and the same week GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, perhaps Washingtons most influential proponent of work requirements, announced his retirement. The Trump administration has sought to add work requirements, either through waivers or legislation, for other programs, such as Medicaid and federal housing assistance.The farm bill, which needs to be reauthorized or extended in September, faces an uncertain future in Congress.U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, has decried the changes to SNAP as extreme, partisan policies. While Republicans in the House dont need Democratic votes to pass the bill, Republicans in the Senate do. U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, has already told reporters that he will not consider major changes to SNAP.In its latest health care move this week, the Trump administration is offering states the power to loosen federal regulations for health insurance plans sold on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace.The 523-page final rule from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services allows states to develop their own version of essential health benefits, starting in 2020. State officials will still have to offer the 10 essential health benefits established by the ACA-- including coverage formaternity care and mental health services -- but theyll be able to pick and choose new benchmarks -- such as fewer covered doctors visits or prescription drugs -- for those services.Under the current rules adopted by the Obama administration, states have one benchmark plan that defines how essential health benefits are covered in every plan.The new rule also lets states loosen regulations on insurers' spending. The ACArequired insurers to spend 80 percent of their profitson patient health care and quality improvement. Starting in 2020, states can request permission from the feds to allow insurers to spend moreon their overhead costs -- like travel expenses and salaries -- if officials can prove it will stabilize premiums.This is all in an effort to reduce premiums, which have risen sharplyin recent years. Premiums rose 34 percenton average this year from 2017, and in 2017, they jumped 25 percent from 2016 rates.But most health policy experts say Trump's actions are not likely to stunt that growth.Andy Slavitt, a health official during the Obama administration, told The Washington Post that the new rule is a gift to the insurance companies by finding lots of ways for them to get around the standards Americans have come to expect.Nevertheless, some states are likely to take the Trump administration up on this offer.Idaho and Iowa, for instance, were already barreling ahead with plans to skirt some ACA rules before Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar signed off on this new rule. Iowa passed a law earlier this month that would allow some health insurance plans soldthe ACA exchangeto not comply with ACA requirements. It still needs federal approval. But even if it is rejected, Trump's new rule means the state can skirt some ACA rules for plansthe exchange.Idaho is another state that recently tried to skirt ACA rules. But in a surprise to some, its attempt was rejected by the Trump administration last month. This new rule, however, gives the state a way to skirt at least some ACA regulations.It's usually conservative states seeking the power to tweak ACA rules to their liking. But in Oklahoma, one of the 18 states that refused to expand Medicaid under the ACA, state insurance officials say they don't intend to make use of Trump's latest rule.We did extensive consumer surveys, and we learned that the essential health benefits are really valued by consumers. That high approval gives us indication on where we need to be, says Mike Rhoades, Oklahoma's deputy insurance commissioner.In Colorado, a purple state that did expand Medicaid and has a relatively stable marketplace, Vincent Plymell, a spokesperson for the state's Department of Insurance, said they wouldnt rule out trying some of these new provisions.Its a wait and see for us. We have no immediate plans to revamp the essential health benefits, but well evaluate things as they come up, he says.But whether states take advantage of this new rule or not, health policy experts agree that it won't make a big difference.The markets going forward will be shaped more from things like the end of the individual mandate, association health plans and low enrollment [than Trump's new rule], says Elizabeth Carpenter, vice president of Avalere, a health care consulting firm.Congress eliminated the mandate requiring people to have health insurance as part of its tax overhaul in December. Without it, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, over the next decade, premiums will rise by 10 percent a year in most years and the uninsured population will increase by 13 million.A handful of states are considering bills to restore the mandate for their residents, but most of them have stalled Meanwhile, the Trump administration is speeding up the impending death of the individual mandate, which Congress didn't set to expire until 2019. This year, the feds will allow people who live in a county with only one insurer to apply for a hardship exemption from the tax penalty. Americans can also apply for an exemption if the only plans offered cover abortion services.Tim Jost, professor emeritus of health care law at Washington and Lee University, argues that there are several other steps the federal government could take to help stabilize the marketplace, such as allowing states to pass so-called reinsurance programs.The federal government must confront a basic question of fairness. It subsidizes the purchase of insurance for the vast majority of Americans ... but not for middle-income Americans who must purchase insurance on their own. There are a number of options the government could consider to reduce the cost of insurance for this remaining group. For example, reinsurance for the entire individual market significantly reduced premiums for all during the first three years of the ACA and could be reinstated, Jost wrote.In reinsurance programs, the government pays for high-cost claims from the sickest patients in an effort to lower insurers' costs and the premiums they charge. Almost 10 states have launched their own, and several -- including Oklahoma -- have asked the Trump administration for help funding them. But so far, only Alaska and Minnesota have been granted any federal reinsurance money. In Alaska, reinsurance led what was supposed to be a 42 percent hike in premiums to just a 7 percent hike last year.Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday signed new limits on welfare programs into law, committing state and federal taxpayers to nearly $80 million in spending to draw more people into the labor force."Our ... welfare reform bills ensure help to those who truly need it, while providing the training and assistance they need to re-enter the workforce and regain independence," Walker said in a statement.Supporters have said that, with the state's unemployment rate at an all-time low of 2.9%, it's the ideal time to shift more people from food stamps and other public benefits to jobs. Though these measures could cost state taxpayers in the short run, they could save money for the federal taxpayers who cover that program's benefits, they say.Critics say there are more cost-effective ways to get the unemployed into jobs such as public transit and education programs. Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling (D-La Crosse) said Walker was spending "millions of taxpayer dollars making it harder for working families to put food on the table.""Rather than creating barriers and driving more Wisconsin families into poverty, Democrats want to expand economic opportunities, grow our middle class and support strong communities," Shilling said.Post-Primary Campaigns

Tim Pawlenty will have a lot to answer for during his recently launched campaign to once again serve as Minnesota's governor. There's his work running a banking industry association, his faltering bid for president in 2012 and his record running a state that was in recession when he left office.But Pawlenty's biggest problem might be that the Republican Party has changed dramatically since he led the state eight years ago.Pawlenty stepped down after the 2010 elections, when the Tea Party wave was just starting to crest -- and long before Donald Trump reshaped the party. Loyalty to Trump has become a touchstone in GOP primaries for governor around the country. While Trump's overall approval ratings remain low, around 40 percent, he enjoys continued backing from 80 to 85 percent of Republicans."Trump remains quite strong with Republicans at a time when Republican voters remain skeptical of their leaders outside of the White House," says Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball, a political newsletter published by the University of Virginia."Indeed, GOP base voters' anger at their own leaders helps explain the Trump nomination in the first place," Kondik continues. "So it makes sense that candidates who might be skeptical of Trump may draw the ire of Republican voters."That creates a dilemma for Pawlenty.After the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape emerged, in which Trump made lewd comments about women, Pawlenty declared that Trump was "unsound, uninformed, unhinged and unfit." He said at the time, just before the 2016 election, that he was withdrawing his support.Pawlenty now insists that he voted for Trump, but Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson, the GOP frontrunner before Pawlenty entered the race, attacked him for his lack of loyalty."He publicly trashed Donald Trump a month before Election Day," Johnson wrote on his campaign Facebook page. "He's the last person Republicans should want at the top of the ticket in 2018."Pawlenty is a Rip Van Winkle candidate, finding himself reawakened in a wholly new political environment."Some people think being more supportive of Trump means being more conservative," says Chris Baylor, a fellow at the American Political Science Association and author of, a new book about how parties change. "As long as conservative activists think like that, people like Tim Pawlenty are going to be seen as RINOs [Republicans in name only]."Not all GOP gubernatorial candidates are pledging their allegiance to Trump. Popular Republican governors in blue states like Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont seem to be getting a pass on pledging loyalty to the president.But in states like Idaho, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, Republican candidates repeatedly hail the president while sometimes accusing their opponents of being insufficiently supportive of Trump -- or of having been too slow to get on board his bandwagon in 2016.In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Scott Wagner, who earned the party's official endorsement, has called Trump a "visionary" while sending out fundraising appeals adorned with a Trumpian promise to "drain the swamp.""Support for Trump is definitely a litmus test for candidates in the Republican primary," says Gibbs Knotts, a political scientist at the College of Charleston, about the South Carolina race.South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster was the first statewide elected official in the country to endorse Trump. That credential -- along with an endorsement from Trump himself -- is why he has a sizable polling lead."McMaster has a huge advantage because he endorsed Trump when other South Carolina politicians supported other candidates," says Knotts.McMaster has attacked his chief rival, former state health official Catherine Templeton, for having the support of American Future Fund, an outside group that sponsored "Never Trump" ads in 2016.In states where Democrats have a chance of winning the general election, Republican candidates will have to be more careful about expressing support for Trump while trying to appeal to a broader electorate that is more skeptical of him. It's a delicate tightrope to walk.After nearly losing the GOP nomination for governor of Virginia last year, Ed Gillespie ran on some Trumpian themes in the fall, stressing his opposition to criminal gangs and undocumented immigrants. He lost, and exit polls suggested that Trump had been a drag on his campaign. Nearly half of Virginia voters -- 47 percent -- said they strongly disapproved of Trump, and 95 percent of those voters supported Democrat Ralph Northam, who won easily.Nevertheless, after Gillespie lost, Trump tweeted that "Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for."Winning over Trump supporters in the primary without putting off independents in the fall may be a difficult task.In Colorado, the two frontrunners in the June GOP primary, state Treasurer Walker Stapleton and Attorney General Cynthia Coffman, have ducked the question of whether they would welcome Trump's endorsement."There is a significant cadre of the activist Republican Party for whom allegiance to Trump is a litmus test," says Eric Sondermann, an independent political analyst in Colorado. "But Stapleton and Coffman both figure they have the luxury of being far enough ahead in their primary contest to play this game quite as much."Minnesota is a purple state that Trump lost by 2 percentage points in 2016. He retains considerable support among Republicans there but is unpopular among its voters as a whole."Pawlenty's in a bind because he can't win the nomination without mending fences with Trump supporters," says Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. "As he does that, he risks losing the general electorate that is decidedly disappointed in the president's performance."To win the party's official endorsement, one of the candidates must win support from 40 percent of the delegates to the GOP's state convention in June. That might be tricky for Pawlenty. Jacobs says he's a smart and capable politician, and he certainly has name recognition and experience, but Pawlenty launched his campaign late and hasn't inspired much passion among the activists who will dominate the convention.If anything, Jacobs says he inspires some antipathy among them."You have this intense group of anyone-but-Pawlenty folks," he says. "He kind of embodies everything they don't like about the Republican Party. He's corporate, he governed but didn't really transform government, and he came out and savaged Trump during the campaign."A growing number of Missouri lawmakers are calling on Gov. Eric Greitens to step down over "horrendous" and "disgraceful" allegations of abuse detailed in an investigative report released Wednesday.After more than a month of investigation, the special House committee deemed "credible" the testimony of the woman with whom Greitens had an affair in 2015.The report detailed her claims that Greitens on multiple occasions hit her. She said he bound her to exercise equipment, put a blindfold on her, undressed her and took a photo of her without consent in order to keep her silent. She felt coerced to give him oral sex on his basement floor while she cried.Greitens has admitted to the affair but denied other allegations contained in the report.In the moments before and after the report was released, both Republican and Democratic members of the Missouri General Assembly said they thought Greitens should resign."I said earlier, I think for the best for him, his family and the state he should, but that's his decision," said Rep. Kevin Engler, R-Farmington.Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, said she felt sorry for Greitens' wife, Sheena Greitens, and their children."It just saddened me -- I mean, just made me angry to think that this is the man who prides himself on being a family man and having these family values," Nasheed said. "And then to have to put his family through this. I just think the best thing for him to do is to resign."Rep. Jean Evans, R-Manchester, said she believed the woman's claims and called for Greitens to step down, but she said it was too early to make any judgments about impeaching the governor if he doesn't step down."Violence against women is never acceptable," Evans said. "I'm overwhelmed with sadness for the state."Some members of the General Assembly doubted Greitens' ability to lead under the circumstances."This report confirms that legislative business is not going to return to normal until the governor resigns or is removed," said Rep. Mark Ellebracht, D-Liberty. "I have no confidence in our governor's ability to lead our state right now and the information that has come to light is beyond distracting, it's completely disgusting. My constituents certainly don't deserve this."Rep. Shamed Dogan, R-St. Louis County, called the allegations "extremely distrubing" and said Greitens has "been been distracted and has not been an effective governor" as he fights off the investigation and his criminal indictment for invasion of privacy."And now he's out attacking the integrity of the committee, which on a bipartisan basis found the allegations to be credible and the witness to be credible," Dogan said. "So my heart breaks for his family and the woman's family and everybody involved, but I think he needs to resign."Rep. Greg Razer, D-Kansas City, said there would be "no question" Greitens needs to resign when Missourians see the contents of the report. He said he felt for the woman with whom Greitens had the affair, calling her a victim."Feelings are with her, for anyone who has been a victim of a situation like this, and also with the first lady and the children," Razer said. "So this affects a lot of people. The governor should absolutely resign today."In a press conference an hour before the report's release, Greitens was defiant against calls for his resignation and said the report signed by five Republicans and two Democrats would include "lies and falsehoods." He repeatedly called it a "political witch hunt," mimicking President Donald Trump's complaints about the ongoing investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 campaign.Greitens wanted lawmakers to wait for the conclusion of his May trial for felony invasion of privacy to conduct their investigation.If Greitens refuses to step down, Senate Minority Leader Gina Walsh, D-St. Louis County, said the Missouri House should move forward with impeachment."Based on the shocking and unsettling events detailed in this report, we have no faith in Eric Greitens' ability to effectively govern," Walsh said. "He must resign immediately. If he refuses to do the right thing, the Missouri House of Representatives should move forward with the impeachment process."House Minority Floor Leader Gail McCann Beatty, D-Kansas City, called on Greitens to "immediately resign." If he doesn't, she said it will be up to the House to "restore integrity to the executive branch.""This duty must be conducted with careful deliberation following a thorough review of the evidence gathered to date," McCann Beatty said. "Once House members have had the opportunity to digest the special committee's report and accompanying documentation, it is our hope that leadership in both parties can agree on the appropriate next step."The Capitol was quiet In the hours before the special House committee released the findings of its investigation. The House had adjourned early for the weekend.Republicans in both chambers discussed the report at caucus meetings across town at the headquarters of the Missouri Farm Bureau. Many didn't return to the Statehouse or respond to requests for comment. Democrats gathered in the basement of the capitol building.Nearly a dozen Democrats and four Republicans called for Greitens' resignation immediately after the report was released. Republican leaders were expected to hold a press conference Wednesday evening.Rep. Dan Stacy, R-Blue Springs, declined to comment on the contents of the report."There is a process, and I trust it," Stacy said.Rep. Nate Walker, R-Kirksville, said Greitens should resign.Nasheed said with the affair dominating conversations in Jefferson City, there's little focus on policy."Those are not even the conversations that people are having right in this building. Or the fact that our infrastructure is crumbling and the roads and bridges need to be repaired," Nasheed said. "They're not talking about the high unemployment rate of poor people -- black and white -- throughout the state. The only thing that's being talked about right now is a scandal."Rep. Kip Kendrick, D-Columbia, the House minority whip, called the details of the affair "pretty horrendous.""We reviewed a little bit, but it was hard to read, so I think at this point we need to all go back and review the report," Kendrick said. "Read it thoroughly and determine at that point how we should proceed, but he definitely needs to resign from office immediately."On Twitter, Kendrick called Greitens "scum."Rep. Gina Mitten, D-St. Louis, assistant House minority leader, said it would be "inappropriate" for her to comment on the report because she was one of the members of the investigative committee. In a statement with Rep. Tommie Pierson Jr., D-St. Louis, the other Democratic member of the committee, she said the committee needed to extend its investigation to finish examining issues beyond those contained in the report."Our committee remains dedicated to its task and will not be deterred by Eric Greitens' baseless attacks on our witnesses, our integrity or our common sense," Mitten said. "And as we move forward, we remain sympathetic to the victim and the governor's family for what they are being forced to endure as a result of the governor's actions and choices."Tuesday night's debate among the four Democratic Party candidates for Ohio governor may have been informative and policy-driven, but none of the candidates gained a clear advantage at the end of the night.Guns and infrastructure were among key issues the four Democrats discussed in the final debate before the May 8 primary. The Journal-News and WLWT-TV sponsored the debate hosted by Miami University Regionals in Middletown.The Democrats running for governor are former federal consumer protection chief and former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray; former Congressman Dennis Kucinich; former Ohio Supreme Court Justice William O'Neill; and state Sen. Joe Schiavoni.Cordray tried to establish himself as the most experienced candidate, having won two statewide elections as treasurer and attorney general. He said the next governor has to "stand proudly on progressive issues," including moving forward on workforce development and small-business support.O'Neill focused a lot of attention during the debate on legalizing marijuana and reopening mental health hospitals but made one of the biggest mistakes of the night when asked about the long-troubled Brent Spence Bridge project, which carries Interstates 75 and 71 over the Ohio River in Cincinnati."I don't know about your bridge," he flatly told moderator Sheree Paolello. "I'm sure I've been over it many times ... but I don't know about your bridge."Kucinich, a former Cleveland mayor, said the state needs to focus on rebuilding infrastructure -- and said his first act as governor would be to break ground on rebuilding the Western Hills Viaduct in Cincinnati -- and health care for all. Kucinich also said while he disagrees with President Donald Trump on most things, he agrees with him on trade issues, such as getting out of NAFTA.Kucinich also bragged about his "F" rating with the National Rifle Association, separating himself from Cordray, who holds an "A" rating from the organization. Asked if he would support an assault rifle ban, Cordray didn't directly answer but said there needs to be a comprehensive approach to curbing gun violence. Kucinich said he supported such a ban.Schiavoni would also back a bill banning on assault weapons if he became governor. The youngest of the candidates, the 38-year-old Schiavoni said he was tired of Democrats putting up the same candidates."We need a candidate who is fresh, passionate," he said.The candidates also spent time talking about the opioid crisis that's arguably hit Ohio harder than any other state in the country. The number of people dying from opioid overdose has increased statewide year-over-year for the past several, just as it has in many counties, such as Butler and Hamilton counties.Schiavoni said he would allocate 10 percent of the $2 billion rainy day fund to education, law enforcement, and addiction services and mental health. He also said this is a personal issue as the sister of his running mate, State Board of Education member Stephanie Dodd, died because of an opioid overdose."This isn't about throwing away people," Schiavoni said. "Most of the people dealing with addiction took the drug exactly like the doctor told them to."Kucinich said the opioid epidemic "is the one issue that is devastating families," and there has to be support. He's also in favor of sending non-violent, low-level drug offenders to treatment over prison."We have to be compassionate with this, and also wise," he said.Cordray puts a lot of the blame for the rising death tolls on Republicans in office, saying "they've done nothing effective to address this crisis.""They ignored it for a number of years and wished it to go away, so it's on their watch," he saidHe also said Ohio cannot "arrest its way out of the crisis" and needs "robust" prevention and treatment programs."That's the only way we will solve this problem in Ohio," Cordray said.O'Neill, a former emergency room nurse, said the state needs more psychiatric hospitals and fewer prisons. He also said legalizing marijuana is also important to fight this epidemic."We need to legalize marijuana which will, by the Colorado model, reduce heroin use by 25 percent, will reduce heroin deaths by 25 percent. That's 1,000 people a year that don't die," he said.Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper said Tuesday's debate was a win for Democratic Party voters."I'm proud that we have candidates who are willing to stand in front of the voters and answer questions that are unscripted, and it's a real contrast to the other side where Mike DeWine has spent years ducking debates which I think is a disservice," he said.On the Republican side, Attorney General Mike DeWine is seeking his party's nomination against Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, who has also criticized the former U.S. senator for not praticipating in debates.The two did talk to reporters at Miami University Regionals campus in Hamilton last week, and the video from that discussion will air Wednesday evening on Journal-News.com.California Gov. Jerry Brown agreed Wednesday to take money, but not marching orders, from President Donald Trump in deploying 400 National Guard troops to various locations around the state, insisting that any service members near the border would not enforce federal immigration law."Your funding for new staffing will allow the Guard to do what it does best: support operations targeting transnational criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers along the border, the coast and throughout the state," Brown wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Defense Secretary James N. Mattis.Brown was the last of the nation's border governors to respond to Trump's request for a beefed-up presence. In his letter, he said that he wanted to be "crystal clear" in what he was agreeing to provide."This will not be a mission to build a new wall," Brown wrote. "It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life. And the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws."Although Brown may have taken longer to act than governors in the other border states _ Texas, New Mexico and Arizona all pledged assistance earlier in the week _ only eight days passed between the California Democratic governor's decision and the president's off-the-cuff remark about assisting with border duties. Last week, Trump told reporters that his administration would be "guarding our border with the military," a statement his staff later amended to focus instead on help from the National Guard.By the weekend, Mattis had signed an order to send up to 4,000 National Guard troops from various states to the border, but barred them from interacting with migrants detained by the U.S. Border Patrol in most cases. At the time, a spokesman for Brown said the request was still under consideration.Less than one-tenth of the United States' 1,933-mile border with Mexico is in California. And the decision Wednesday does not guarantee that California's 400 additional Guard personnel will be in any specific location. The state's current efforts on transnational crimes include 250 troops, with 55 of them stationed at the border. A spokesman for Brown said Wednesday that decisions on staffing would be made based on needs as they are identified.There was no immediate estimate of the amount in federal funds California would receive to cover the costs of the California deployment. A copy of the agreement signed by Brown says the operation will end Sept. 30 unless federal and state officials agree to extend it. The agreement also says that Brown or the Trump administration can cancel the effort at any time.Trump is the third consecutive president to ask for National Guard assistance along the U.S.-Mexico border. Former President George W. Bush used assistance from the states to deploy 6,400 troops for a two-year period beginning in 2006, while former President Barack Obama authorized 1,200 troops in 2010. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger approved the use of Guard troops in both instances, though he rejected one request from Bush, citing the need to keep the service members available for potential wildfires or earthquakes.But in the Bush and Obama requests, the circumstances along the southern boundary with Mexico were different _ they were in conjunction with efforts to get sweeping immigration reform through Congress. Trump administration officials have pointed to a surge last month in the number of unlawful border crossings, but immigrant rights groups have suggested the action is based more on political fear-mongering than a provable crisis.Brown, who only occasionally pushes back on the president's rhetoric, made it clear in his letter Wednesday where he stands on the current situation."Here are the facts: there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California," the governor wrote to Nielsen and Mattis. "Overall immigrant apprehensions on the border last year were as low as they've been in nearly 50 years (and 85 percent of the apprehensions occurred outside of California)."White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that the administration is glad to see cooperation from Brown, but did not address the specifics of the governor's letter.Seen in the context of Trump's insistence on "sealing up our Southern Border," as the president wrote on Twitter, Brown's announcement was hardly a vote of confidence. In comparison, the governors of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona were more enthusiastic. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pledged to ultimately send as many as 1,000 troops to aid in the effort.California officials, in contrast, have found little to applaud in Trump's approach to illegal immigration. The state has gone to federal court to block construction of a new border wall, and no state officials welcomed the president to Southern California last month as he toured prototypes of the barrier. Last year, Brown signed a state law to limit local law enforcement's cooperation with federal immigration agents _ a law the Trump administration is now challenging in court.Vermont

Louisiana

Rhode Island

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This week, lawmakers from the Northeast to the Deep South have been debating and voting on gun control legislation, with mixed results. Here's a snapshot of what has been happening with these measures in recent days.Over the objection of gun rights advocates, Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed three bills Wednesday that will ban high-capacity magazines and the rapid-fire devices known as "bump stocks," expand background checks for gun purchases, and increase the legal age for purchasing assault weapons from 18 to 21.Scott also signed into law a "red flag" policy to make it easier for police to take guns from potentially dangerous people. Under such a law, police report to a court anyone who may pose a significant or imminent danger to themselves or others. Threats of violence made on social media can constitute a red flag.If a court finds the person to be a threat, a person can have their guns confiscated."If we are at a point when our kids are afraid to go to school and parents are afraid to put their kids on a bus, who are we?" Scott said in a statement.These legislative changes come after police arrested Jack Swayer, 18, in February on suspicion of plotting a mass shooting at a Vermont high school. Sawyer pleaded not guilty to first-degree attempted murder, aggravated assault with a weapon and two counts of aggravated attempted murder after being accused of bringing a gun onto the campus of Fair Haven Union High School.A number of states, including Massachusetts and New Jersey, have passed laws to ban bump stocks. Last month the Trump administration said the Justice Department would move to ban the devices, which essentially turn semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons.Gun rights enthusiasts protested Vermont's legislation last month, gathering outside the Statehouse and passing out 30-round magazines of ammunition. On Wednesday, demonstrators for and against the measures gathered for the bill-signing ceremony on the steps of the Statehouse in Montepelier.Protesters wearing orange hunting vests and caps carried signs saying #NotMyGovernor. One supporter of the bills carried a sign reading, "Thank you Gov. Scott!"A bill prohibiting the sale of assault weapons to people under 21 was defeated in the state Legislature on Tuesday.Current state law allows people 18 or older to purchase assault weapons. Democratic state Sen. Troy Carter proposed Senate Bill 274 to raise the age from 18 to 21 after the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla."Everyone would acknowledge that the shootings in Florida were a tipping point. We've had numbers of shootings in theaters and churches ... at some point we have to start doing something about these things," Carter said in a phone interview Wednesday.Senators voted 26 to 9 against the bill. Carter also sponsored Senate Bill 491, which would prohibit the sale of bump stocks. It is scheduled for a vote next week.Carter said that the defeated bill may be brought back for reconsideration at a later date and that he hopes other lawmakers change their stance."I'm a gun enthusiast. I would never try to deny anyone the right to bear arms," he said. "Do you need an AK-47 to hunt or protect your home? The answer for those who want to be realistic about it is no."A pair of gun control bills are swiftly moving through the General Assembly in the New England state.The Rhode Island House Judiciary Committee passed two bills Tuesday that would ban the purchase of bump stocks and implement a red flag policy.Tuesday's vote was a unanimous 12 to 0, said House spokesman Larry Berman. The bills will go before the full House for a vote Thursday afternoon.The measures are expected to pass, Berman said, with House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, a Democrat, strongly supporting them. They will next head to the state Senate. The red flag measure has enjoyed support from various senators for months. "Too often, after a mass shooting we learn about all the warning signs people saw from the shooter and wonder why they still had guns," Senate Majority Whip Maryellen Goodwin, also a Democrat, said in a statement.Republican Gov. John Kasich was joined this week by the father of a victim from the Florida mass school shooting to voice support for gun control legislation pending in the Legislature.Fred Guttenberg testified Tuesday at a meeting with Kasich and sponsors of House Bill 585, urging them to implement the six proposed policy changes.Guttenberg's daughter, Jaime, was one of the 17 people killed in the Parkland shooting.The bill seeks to implement a red flag policy as well as ban bump stocks, armor-piercing ammunition and the purchase of guns by people convicted of domestic violence.Guttenberg, whose family is from Ohio, has been campaigning across the state for gun control legislation.The gun policy recommendations were made by a bipartisan panel created by Kasich. A date for lawmakers to vote on the bill has not been determined.Courts throughout the nation are considering President Trump's efforts to compel unwilling cities and states to help carry out his hard-line immigration policies. But his most far-reaching decree, a January 2017 order to cut off federal funds to San Francisco and other sanctuary cities, received an apparently chilly reception from a federal appeals court Wednesday.Trump issued the executive order five days after taking office, telling Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that "sanctuary jurisdictions" are "not eligible to receive" any federal grants.U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco issued a nationwide injunction blocking the order in April 2017. Attorneys in Sessions' office had argued that Trump was referring only to a few federal grants, but Orrick said the president's words, and his later statement on Fox News that a funding cutoff would be "a weapon" to force a change in sanctuary policies, showed that he was threatening local governments with losses of huge sums that he had no legal authority to withdraw.The federal government funds a wide range of state and local programs, including schools, transportation, health care and social services. San Francisco receives about $2 billion a year in federal aid, one-fifth of its overall budget, and Santa Clara County, the other plaintiff in the suit against the Trump administration, receives $1.7 billion, more than one-third of its revenue.On Wednesday, a high-ranking Justice Department lawyer, Assistant Attorney General Chad Readler, told the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that Trump hadn't made any threats or withdrawn any funding and had merely directed Sessions to carry out the law. Members of the three-judge panel seemed skeptical.Chief Judge Sidney Thomas said Trump had made statements about withholding money from sanctuary cities, and the actions he took threatened their funding. Thomas also said the Trump administration appeared to be claiming authority that goes beyond federal law by seeking to require cities and counties to cooperate with immigration officers or lose their funding.If Orrick's interpretation of Trump's order was accurate, Thomas asked Readler, "would you agree that the executive order was unconstitutional?"Perhaps, Readler replied, but Trump's order was actually much narrower and applied only to specific Justice Department and Homeland Security grants.In that case, Thomas asked, why does the administration object to an injunction against withdrawing other categories of federal funding?Judge Ronald Gould asked Readler whether Sessions, at Trump's directive, would have the constitutional authority to strip sanctuary cities of funding for education, health care and disaster relief. Readler said no such order had been issued.Gould, however, also asked San Francisco's lawyer, Deputy City Attorney Christine Van Aken, why the city and Santa Clara County needed a nationwide injunction to protect their funding. Van Aken replied that Trump's order had nationwide impact.The third panel member, Judge Ferdinand Fernandez, asked no questions during the 40-minute hearing.More than 300 cities and counties nationwide have limited the cooperation their law enforcement agencies are allowed to extend to federal immigration officials seeking to detain and deport immigrants for crimes or illegal entry.In a separate case before Orrick, the Trump administration is seeking to withdraw several million dollars from San Francisco and Santa Clara County for refusing to notify immigration officials of the planned release of undocumented immigrants in local custody. Orrick refused to dismiss the local governments' case last month and has scheduled a hearing for September on whether the administration has the power to revoke the grants. A federal judge in Chicago has ruled in a similar case that no such advance notice to immigration officials is required by federal law.The Trump administration has also sued the state of California, in federal court in Sacramento, seeking to overturn state laws that limit local governments' authority to cooperate with immigration agents or allow them access to local jails and prohibit employers from allowing federal agents to enter private workplaces without a judicial warrant.At Wednesday's hearing, lawyers for San Francisco and Santa Clara County urged the court to reject the administration's attempt to interpret Trump's order as merely a directive to the Justice Department to target a few federal grants.San Francisco has had to set aside substantial funds as a hedge against the prospect of federal withdrawal, and "shouldn't be required simply to trust the federal government on this continuing threat," said Van Aken, the city's lawyer.Danielle Goldstein, a deputy Santa Clara County counsel, noted that Trump had commended the city of Miami for revoking its sanctuary policy because it feared the loss of federal funds.Trump's executive order, Goldstein said, forces her county to decide whether to follow its own policy or "risk financial ruin."An Uber autonomous vehicle killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz., last month. Its the first time a driverless car has killed a pedestrian. But the incident raised questions not only about the capabilities of autonomous vehicles, but also about Ubers safety culture.

Cities are increasingly turning to taxes on Uber and other ride-hailing services to shore up their financially strapped transit systems. In fact, Bowser wants to raise Washingtons taxes on Uber as part of a regional effort to better fund the Metro subway and bus system.

The Seattle city council is currently considering raising the base fare for Uber and Lyft rides, as a way to boost driver pay. Uber responded with a petition drive that quickly garnered thousands of signatures opposing the move.

Several recent studies suggest that Uber and its competitors create more congestion, rather than reducing it, in cities. If true, it would undercut many cities traffic and environmental goals, and it may be one reason for widespread drops in transit ridership.

1. The company is getting into bike-sharing.

2. It wants to integrate with city transit systems.

3. You'll be able to use Uber to rent out your car or rent somebody else's.

4. Uber will share more of its data with cities.

For years, Uber has fought with cities and resisted regulations by insisting that it was a technology company, not a transportation company.But the companys top officials on Wednesday signaled a major shift in approach: Uber wants better relationships with cities, and it is most definitely focusing on transportation.We are starting a strategy where we are going to double down on Uber becoming more than just a ridesharing company.  Our view is we are going to be the predominant Point A to Point B transportation platform, said Jahan Khanna, Ubers head of product for mobility, at an event in Washington, D.C. In order to be successful in doing this, we can only do it in a spirit of true partnership with cities, a spirit of true partnership with transit agencies.Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over as Ubers CEO last August, said the company was making many moves to offer more services to residents in metro regions across the globe.We have to have a solution for car ownership, and we have to work together to make sure that living in a city, living in an urban destination, doesnt require you to own a car, he said.Khosrowshahi highlighted several moves that Uber is making to reach that goal, including the purchase of a dockless bikeshare company, the launch of a carshare service, the integration of transit planning and payment in the Uber app and better data sharing with city governments and transit agencies.The Uber CEO joined Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser at the event. Together, they announced that the company would open a new service center for Uber drivers in an often-overlooked part of the city across the Anacostia River from the U.S. Capitol. But the company also used it as an opportunity to burnish its reputation with local officials as it tries to weather a host of recent controversies.Khosrowshahi, the former head of Expedia, came to Uber last year after several scandals forced his predecessor to step aside. But even under new leadership, the company is facing criticism from state and local officials for many unrelated events. For example:Khosrowshahi could not completely avoid those topics Wednesday. He didnt offer any more details about the Tempe crash, but he insisted that autonomous vehicles would be necessary to reduce car usage and to make streets safer. He also seemed open to the idea of some additional taxes being used to improve city transit systems, but he pushed back against certain taxes, especially on multiple-rider services like UberPool, which ferries up to three different passengers at once.The overarching theme from Khosrowshahi and the other executives is that they want to make it easier for customers to avoid buying cars by using Uber services instead. Here's what that entails in the near future:Earlier this week, Uber announced it would directly compete in the dockless bikeshare market by buying Jump, a provider that uses electrically assisted bikes. Uber is already integrating the bikesharing service in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and it plans to expand it much further.Having e-bikes, on a dockless basis, available in cities in a responsible way is going to allow more and more people to move around in cities, Khosrowshahi said, but move around in ways that are efficient, that dont cause traffic, that dont cause issues with the environment.Another company official said Uber was excited to take the Jump service to every major city in the world.That could be a big change for cities and states that are not prepared for dockless services. They were virtually unheard of in U.S. cities a year ago, but now they are rapidly expanding in cities such as Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The introduction of dockless bikes  and, more recently, dockless scooters  raises questions about how many of the devices should be allowed in each city, where they should be allowed to park, who should clean up illegally parked bikes and whether cities should tax the services.The fact that Jump uses e-bikes adds another wrinkle to all of that, because, in many states, electrically powered bikes are regulated as motorcycles or motor vehicles. That means they require license, registration and insurance, even if state agencies aren't equipped to handle them.But Ubers ownership of Jump could make it a more popular option at a time when several dockless companies are clawing for market share. Other Jump competitors, like Ofo and LimeBike, are, like Uber, heavily backed by venture capital firms.Ubers purchase of Jump is also significant because it means the company will actually own transportation assets for the first time, rather than connecting third-party contractors who own their own cars.Uber announced Wednesday that it would be partnering with Masabi, a software company that works with transit companies, to integrate transit planning and fare payment in the Uber app. Ubers Khanna cautioned that the process was still in its early stages.This represents the beginning of a sustained investment on behalf of Uber into making mass transit and public transit real first-class services, Khanna said.Uber riders will not only be able to see transit routes, see transit information, but youll also be able to use the Uber app as a ticket onto these transit agencies themselves. And youll be able to pay for the services in your Uber app, he added.Masabis software allows transit agencies to partner with a number of different third-party apps. It has worked with transit systems in Boston, Los Angeles and New York, along with cities around the world.Again, though, Uber would join a crowded field of vendors hoping to help riders pay their fares electronically. Moovel, for example, is a subsidiary of Daimler that is already integrating transit fare payment, bike sharing and car sharing (Daimler also owns the car-sharing service car2go.) The Transit app allows travelers in 125 cities to plan trips using buses, subway, bikeshare (docked and dockless), carsharing and Uber. It also works with Masabi to let users make payments and receive mobile tickets. Other cities and transit agencies have been working on their own systems, as well.Even with all the attention, though, it can be very expensive and time-consuming for transit agencies to broadcast real-time travel information and to accept the new forms of payment.Uber is getting set to take on car-sharing competitors and traditional rental cars with its plans to integrate GetAround into its app. GetAround is a peer-to-peer carsharing company, which means it lets car owners rent out their vehicles to other people. GetAround installs electronic locks in the vehicles, so that renters can access the cars with their smartphones.Uber announced it would be participating in Shared Streets , an effort by the National Association of City Transportation Officials that lets cities get a better grasp of how their streets and curb spaces are being used by taxis, ridesharing companies and transit.The company also said it was expanding its Uber Movement traffic data site to include 12 new cities globally. It now offers detailed information on Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, plus cities in other countries.Description

GIS 12 April, 2018: Lord David Neuberger, judge and President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2012 to 2017, paid a courtesy call on the Prime Minister, Minister of Home Affairs, External Communications and National Development Unit and Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr. Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, yesterday afternoon at the New Treasury Building in Port Louis. Lord David Neuberger, judge and President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2012 to 2017, paid a courtesy call on the Prime Minister, Minister of Home Affairs, External Communications and National Development Unit and Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr. Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, yesterday afternoon at the New Treasury Building in Port Louis.

In a statement, Lord Neuberger indicated that discussions focused on the international arbitration system of Mauritius. He pointed out that Mauritius already has a good arbitration system supported by notable arbitration institutions such as the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Council for Commercial Arbitration.

He further underlined that the country wields various attributes to be a centre for international arbitration. Its geographical location with respect to Africa and Asia as well as its time zone for London are considerable advantages, he said.

Moreover, Lord Neuberger added that the country has the advantage of possessing a strong legal system which is anchored in civil law and combines both the French and English law systems. He also spoke about the multilingual aspect of the country, wherein the mastery of French and English increases the scope for Mauritius to position itself as an international arbitration centre.Description

GIS 12 April, 2018: Government is committed to give a boost to Government is committed to give a boost to pig breeders cooperatives in the drive to increase local production and meet the growing demand for pork. Although the sector still seems to be lagging behind, several facilities are being provided to pig breeders cooperatives to empower them and enable them to carry out their activities in a professional manner.

The Minister of Business, Enterprise and Cooperatives, Mr Soomilduth Bholah, made this statement yesterday during a site visit at the Pig Credit and Marketing Cooperative Society Ltd at Bassin Requin in Poste de Flacq.

He highlighted that Government recognises the potential in further developing the local pig industry and will provide the necessary facilities and support to ease the problems faced by pig breeders cooperatives . C ooperatives play a significant role in the socio-economic development of the country and contribute to poverty reduction and job creation, he added.

Furthermore, the Minister observed that the pig breeders cooperatives have not modernised their operations to deal with upcoming challenges and that access to markets, and water supply are their main recurrent problems. He pointed out that adopting innovative approaches and practices will lead to business transformation, productivity improvement and easier access to markets. On this score, Mr Bholah underlined that Government will put at their avail several incentives and support services to consolidate the sector.

The Pig Credit and Marketing Cooperative Society Ltd in Poste de Flacq was set up on 26 May 1983 and consists of 28 members. Currently, some 18 pig breeders are working at Bassin Requin where the livestock is estimated at 1700.(TNS) - A likely change in federal reimbursement policy for local governments' disaster-related costs could impose a new financial burden on county governments.Currently, school districts and county governments submit their costs associated with hurricanes or other natural disasters separately to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.The Manatee County School District  which opened 24 campuses as shelters prior to Hurricane Irma in September  submitted to FEMA documentation for more than $1 million just in labor costs. It has yet to be reimbursed and is still calculating other expenses associated with its feeding and housing more than 25,000 evacuees.Yet FEMA has reportedly notified state emergency officials that it now wants school districts to submit their shelter-related costs to the county government to include with its reimbursement invoices.In a joint meeting of Manatee County's School Board and County Commission on Wednesday, school and county administrators said they have yet to get any formal policy change in writing. Yet they expect the notification to be forthcoming."This is probably going to be a mandate we'll have to deal with," County Commissioner Carol Whitmore said.School Board Chairman Scott Hopes said that getting reimbursement requests from school districts and counties causes confusion for FEMA and can delay reimbursements because the agency becomes unsure if it is getting billed twice for the same expense.County Administrator Ed Hunzeker said that, if the School Board bills the county for its shelter expenses, the county would be expected to pay those costs and wait for FEMA's reimbursement."If FEMA denies any cost, it would be at the risk of the county," Hunzeker said.Commissioner Betsy Benac said she understands if FEMA would prefer to deal with "one (countywide) entity collecting the bills."By submitting invoices to the county instead, "you might expect payment quicker," Benac told school district officials. "... What are the implications for our budget?"In a related discussion, school district leaders say they disagree with a recent finding by state emergency officials that the Tampa Bay region (Manatee, Hernando, Citrus, Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties) now has a 15,000-space deficit in its hurricane shelters.Deputy School Superintendent Ron Ciranna called the study "flawed" because it overlooked 15 schools in Manatee already designated as shelters. "Currently there is no deficit," Ciranna said.Yet county commissioners said the school district needs to ensure future schools are "hardened" to create more shelter capacity  and not just for the county's growing population.The state's count of regional shelter space does not take into account that, prior to a storm, Manatee becomes a destination for many Floridians evacuating from counties to the south, commissioners said."We are going to need more shelters," Benac said.2018 Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Fla.Visit Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Fla. at www.heraldtribune.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.A burning car, a dollhouse simulating a burning house in the parking lot, a course called Hoarding Fires: Piles of Danger, and one very important course on how firefighters can keep themselves healthy. Those were just a few of the 30 classes offered at the annual Minnesota State Fire School.The two day-event was held in Rochester and attracted 370 firefighters from 112 different agencies, some from Northern Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.Fire in a Small Box, the course that used the dollhouses to simulate a burning house was a new one and very popular, said Wanda Staska, program manager for Riverland Community Colleges Emergency Medical Services and Training Program and coordinator of the event. That one we offered twice, and it was a four-hour course and filled up, she said.We used the dollhouse and showed [smoke] flow path. Two different houses, one we had sealed up pretty tight and the other one where more air could get in and we introduced a leaf blower. We had the doors on it to show how smoke flows when ventilated in a different direction.The burning car prop was provided by the state she said, and the hoarding course, on the dangers of entering a house that might have been occupied by a hoarder, was a classroom lecture. The burning household materials from the piles of stuff in a hoarders house can be dangerous to firefighters. There is a lot of fuel, and todays synthetic furniture and other accumulations in homes burn more quickly and dirtier and present a health risk.The firefighter cancer awareness class was one that hit too close to home for a lot of locals. We really stressed taking care of yourself, washing your gear, cleaning off afterward, making sure the trucks are clean, Staska said. She offered that a lot of firefighters have succumbed to cancer recently, including her husband, Brian, who used to run the annual exercise with her. Everybody knows Brian and his story, she said.Riverland Community College offers continuing education for firefighters and offers two-year degrees and a certificate program that fast-tracks you to becoming a firefighter, Staska said.The college offers everything from Emergency Medical Response, Emergency Medical Technician and basic firefighter courses all the way up through the leadership courses.The school is well-equipped with props, including search and rescue trailers and a full-scale house inside the fire center where students can conduct search and rescue.But the two-day annual event is much different for firefighters than going to a school for learning. When they go to an event like this with 100-plus fire departments, they are learning from each other and thats the biggest thing, Staska said. My department does it this way, how does your department do it? These exercises generate a lot of discussion and they learn a lot from each other.(TNS) - Officials from the city, state, Kamehameha Schools and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration unveiled a dramatic, 10-foot high banner at the steps of Honolulu Hale Wednesday to hammer home the threat that tsunamis can wreak across the islands at any moment.The banner includes a map of Oahu that pinpoints just six of the more than 100 tsunamis that have hit Oahu since tsunamis have been recorded. Its 10-foot height is just a third of the 30-foot wave that pounded Kaena Point in 1952, Mayor Kirk Caldwell said.But the tsunami threat to Oahu and all of the neighbor islands never ends, Caldwell said, as tsunami information brochures are going out in 13 non-English languages, including Hawaiian, for the first time.Paul F. Nahoa Lucas, senior counsel of Kamehameha Schools education legal division, reiterated Caldwells warning to never to turn your back to the ocean and then recited a Hawaiian proverb that he interpreted as:The person who fails to watch out, often loses, Lucas said. Never turn your back on the sea. Unlike hurricanes, a tsunami has no season. It can strike at any time, both day and night, without warning, or little warning.Kamehameha Schools translated tsunami information into Hawaiian, Lucas said, in order to empower the Hawaiian speaking communities that we serve to better prepare and respond in the event of a tsunami.No island is immune and each one has been struck by tsunamis dozens of times, said Laura Kong, director of NOAAs International Tsunami Information Center.The tsunami triggered by the 2011 Japanese earthquake that hit Hawaii caused more than $30 million in damage across the state, she said.In addition to Hawaiian, the updated tsunami preparedness brochures are being translated into 12 other languages and dialects: Spanish, Tagalog, Ilokano, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, Chuukese, Marshallese, Samoan, Tongan and Vietnamese. The languages are aimed at residents who represent 5 percent or more of Hawaiis non-English speaking populations.The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency spent $15,000 to $20,000 for this months tsunami preparedness and awareness month that included nearly 13,000 brochures and 10-foot tall banners for each of the neighbor island counties, with individual island maps that identify significant tsunamis for each island, said Kevin Richards, HI-EMAs natural hazards officer.The brochures are being offered to schools across the state and are also available at tsunamihawaii.org, with the non-English translations expected to be unveiled as they become available.The new brochures offer plenty of tips about what to do if an earthquake hits far away  or as close as Hawaii island  that could trigger a tsunami.But Caldwell repeated the fundamental warning he learned as a boy fishing along the shores of Hawaii island:Dont wait, he said. Just head mauka.Caldwell does not want anyone to repeat the disastrous mistake on April Fools Day 1946 when people ran down to the receding shoreline of his hometown of Hilo to gather fish that were flopping around, only to be struck by an incoming wave.The April 1st tsunami killed 159 people because they didnt know, Caldwell said. They werent aware. Were aware today.But Caldwell then added moments later, My fear is people grow complacent with these warnings.For more information, visit: tsunamihawaii.org2018 The Honolulu Star-AdvertiserVisit The Honolulu Star-Advertiser at www.staradvertiser.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.(TNS)  NEW HAVEN  Portions of five of New Haven, Conn.'s neighborhoods will be getting access to ultra-fast broadband Internet service starting in June, officials with a Rochester-based company announced Wednesday. GoNetspeed is also working on bringing its broadband Internet to neighborhoods in Bridgeport and Hartford, a company spokeswoman said. The New Haven neighborhoods that initially will have access to the broadband service, which includes a gig-speed component, are portions of the citys Beaver Hills, Dixwell, Dwight, Edgewood and West River sections, according to Jodie Snook, a GoNetspeed spokeswoman.Snook said the prices for the companys broadband service start at $50 per month for 100 megabits per second, $70 a month for 500 megabits per second and 1 gigabit speed for $90 per month. Work has already gotten underway for the service the company is bringing to New Haven, she said, and the company has already begun network planning and investment in a multi-year, multimillion-dollar private venture build-out of its network.Were extremely excited to help bring the technological and economic benefits of a 100 percent fiber-optic Internet connection to residents in Connecticut, Frank Chiaino, chairman of GoNetspeed, said in a statement. Consumer demand for high-speed Internet access is at an all-time high. With more and more devices connected to the Internet, and cord cutting becoming a larger, national trend, we offer gigabit speeds that allow us to exceed consumer expectations for broadband access.Before joining GoNetspeed, Chiaino was the founder of Fibertech Networks, which built a nearly statewide fiber optic network in Connecticut, and nearly 14,000 miles of metro fiber networks across the Northeast. GoNetspeed Chief Operating Officer Tom Perrone previously was vice president of engineering and planning for Fibertech Networks.The companys plans to build out its fiber optic network call for it to expand into additional Connecticut communities as it reaches at least a 10 percent expression of interest from residents.New Haven Mayor Toni N. Harp said her administration has been working toward faster and more reliable Internet access for the city for several years.(The) digital information highway is necessary to fuel the states booming research and technology sectors, as well as other economic drivers, particularly in light of how the federal government seems intent on limiting Internet access, Harp said in a statement. Connecticut must do all it can to embrace it (ultra-fast Internet service) as the emerging public utility of the 21st century, and make it as universally available to residents, businesses, schools, and governments as running water and electricity are.Laurence Grotheer, Harps spokesman, acknowledged that some of the citys residents may not be able to afford GoNetspeeds monthly charges for service. But he said that every effort to bring ultra-high speed access to the city is a step in the right direction.The mayor continues working with the (states) Office of Consumer Counsel to bring more comprehensive access across the state, Grotheer said.Consumer Counsel Elin Swanson-Katz said concerns that the company might focus on more well-to-do customers rather than residents of more modest means is a legitmate concern.Its something weve seen with the rollout of Google Fiber, Katz said. The good news is that one more company has seen Connecticut as a viable market and competition will bring prices down. I dont think well ever get to a perfect solution absent a regulatory mandate.(TNS)  Composer Sean Beeson's clients are coastal, but he chooses to live in the serenity and quietude of Crestline, Ohio, which is about 60 miles north of Columbus, in Richland and Crawford counties.Collaborating online and composing pieces for everything from documentaries to video games, commercials and amusement park rides, requires reliable, high-speed Internet, he said.Without it, it can sometimes be impossible for Beeson to reach clients or it can take weeks for him to upload and download large files."There's a lot of great things about living in the country  the Internet is not one of them," he said. "For my business, it probably would be beneficial to move."More than 1 million Ohioans have no access to fast, reliable broadband at home. Almost a third of Ohio's rural residents lack at-home broadband, compared with just 2 percent of urban dwellers.That could change soon. The Ohio House approved a bill, 79-11, Wednesday aimed at addressing the state's digital divide.The measure, which would establish the Ohio Broadband Development Grant Program, now will go to the Senate, where an identical bill is pending in committee.Stu Johnson, a rural-connectivity advocate and executive director of broadband technology nonprofit group Connect Ohio, said he hopes the Senate can fit in a vote on the bill before it adjourns for the summer."Everybody's in favor of it, it's just a calendar issue," he said.House Bill 378, sponsored by Reps. Ryan Smith, R-Bidwell, and Jack Cera, D-Bellaire, would create a program to provide $50 million each year in grants to private businesses, political subdivisions, nonprofit organizations and phone and Internet cooperatives.It would expand coverage to about 14,000 Ohio households annually without raising taxes or using money from the state's General Revenue Fund. Instead, it would use existing funding from Ohio Third Frontier bond revenue, an economic-development initiative administered by the state.Advocates say lack of affordable, reliable high-speed Internet has rippling effects on health care, local commerce and education in rural communities."People have to drive to the library or McDonald's to get on their Wi-Fi," said Cera. "I realize not everybody wants to be connected all the time, but our world has become so interconnected with the Internet that it's become basic infrastructure along with water, electric and everything else."Beeson, the Crestline-based composer, said closing the digital gap would place rural Ohio on a level economic playing field, but it would require concerted effort."We treat the Internet like a sacred commodity around my house. When it goes out, we lose everything," he said. "There's no way rural areas will get high-speed broadband on their own. It just won't happen."Ransomware, email-borne malware and phishing remained significant online threats to state, county and local governments last year according to two reports on Internet security and data breach investigation. But the threats dont end there  the public sector is also at risk from cyberespionage, elicit cryptomining and software supply chain attacks.Verizons 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report , released April 10, and Symantecs 2018 Internet Security Threat Report , launched the week of March 19, both identify worrisome trends on the rise, many of which have already impacted the public sector and others believed to carry the same potential.Symantec, a cybersecurity company active in more than 150 countries, scans about 30 percent of the worlds email traffic daily. Verizon, a major telecommunications provider to U.S. state and local governments and public safety, founded this years report on reports from 67 contributing agencies in 65 countries.Of the more than 1 billion Web requests analyzed daily in 2017, Symantec noted that 1 in 13 of these requests led end users to malware, a 3 percent rise from 2016.Significantly, the company also identified an 8,500 percent increase overall in the detection of so-called cryptominers; and a 600 percent increase in Internet of Things-related (IoT) attacks, up from around 6,000 in 2016 to around 50,000 in 2017. The United States ranked second only to China in IoT attacks by country, at nearly 11 percent  an improvement from nearly 19 percent in 2016.Prior to a cryptominer surge that began in September, detections of mining software were not particularly notable, authors said, and numbered in the tens of thousands, and peaked at 1.6 million detections in December 2017.In 2017, Symantec identified a 46 percent increase in ransomware, pointing out that 5.4 billion WannaCry attacks had been blocked. But Thomas MacLellan, Symantecs director of policy and government affairs, said the ransomware market has become so crowded it has blunted creation of new ransomware families and sent demands lower.Market corrections aside, ransomware remains a significant concern for state and local governments, MacLellan said, particularly following the recent attacks on Atlanta and Baltimore State of Missouri Chief Information Security Officer Michael Roling said he sees no sign that it will slow down anytime soon and described the far-reaching attacks as impressive in how they have impacted so many organizations so quickly, leveraging a previously-fixed exploit rather than entering via a phishing campaign.These attacks proved the value of a disciplined patch management program and strong network security controls, Roling said.State of Minnesota CISO Aaron Call said his agency has deployed a new anti-virus technology that has proven effective in keeping ransomware malware at bay. Like Roling, Call said its possible bad actors are making use of recent patches to enable an entry point  but he linked this tactic to co-opting computing power for use in illegal cryptomining.Public administration figured prominently in its ranking of email-borne malware by industry, placing first out of 11 with an incidence of 1 in 120. The public sector also ranked first out of 11 in an examination of email malware per user by industry, at roughly 53 email malware per user. Public administration ranked third out of 11 in a rating of phishing rates by industry, reflecting an incidence of 1 in 2,418.Software supply chain attacks are also on the rise, posting a 200 percent increase in 2017, and are well-positioned to target governments, MacLellan said, because users say Oh, this is coming from whoever the software provider is, this is an update.It all kind of ties into this notion of getting folks to think about what it is that theyre doing, making sure the organization has the proper safeguards to limit people from doing significant harm to themselves and to their network, he said, noting spear phishing remains the top way criminals gain access.In its report, Verizon identified more than 53,000 incidents, or security events compromising an information asset, and 2,216 confirmed data breaches, an incident resulting in a confirmed data disclosure, in 2017.The public sector, or public administration, was responsible for 22,788 incidents or at least 43 percent, a high number according to authors in part because governmental entities are often required to report incidents the private sector would not disclose. Of these incidents, 304 resulted in confirmed data disclosure.So-called social attacks accounted for 93 percent of all security incidents. The public sector was by far the top industry impacted by social breaches, registering 92 breaches, with health care registering at 62 breaches.Cyberespionage, defined to include unauthorized network or system access linked to state-affiliated actors and/or with an espionage motive, was the top recognized pattern for the public sector, identified as being behind 10,311 incidents and 77 breaches.Sixty-seven percent of all public-sector incidents and breaches came from external bad actors, with exactly half of that subset being state-affiliated criminals. Nearly half of all bad actors targeting the public sector, or 44 percent, were motivated by espionage, but 36 percent were financially motivated.The government is kind of [between] Scylla and Charybdis in that because they are at once both one of the countrys largest employers and they have tons of information about the public at large and they store a great deal of sensitive strategic and military data, said David Hylender, a Verizon senior risk analyst and report co-author.Ransomware ranked fifth among 20 action varieties in incidents across industries, but despite its fearsome reputation, phishing was the No. 1 tactic used in public-sector breaches, followed by the use of a back door.Hylender called it a huge threat across nearly every vertical, but said almost all espionage cases begin with phishing, which can lead to pretexting  and move from email to telephone and even personal dialogue.The Verizon official suggested agencies may want to clamp down on privilege access, implement better security awareness training, and improve monitoring and security audits, given the large nexus between cyberespionage and phishing.Roling said Missouri continues to push out targeted monthly lessons to 40,000 users, along with fake phishing campaigns for end users, and also offers online education for IT professionals.When over 90 percent of significant breaches involve phishing attacks, elevating awareness and end-user best practices becomes paramount. Strengthening our IT staff in various disciplines will give us the ability to harden our infrastructure and services even further, he said.Call said Minnesota creatively uses its tools to knock out cyberespionage, and is working with the legislature on funding increases. His organization does annual awareness training for staffers and has recently begun to send its own fake phishing emails  but the CISO identified a pro-cybersecurity mindset as equally important.Organizations that dont do that, where users arent acclimated to that, are much more likely to fight and resist or circumvent those security controls, Call said.Mika Hakkinen has backed the investigation into the sort of pitstop incidents seen so far in 2018.

In Australia, both Haas cars were released from the pits with loose wheels, and in Bahrain a Ferrari mechanic's leg was badly broken in a sickening incident.

Hakkinen, the 1998 and 1999 world champion, said the speed of the sub-3 second pitstops seen today means the risks are high.

"No one should underestimate the challenge faced by the pit crew mechanics," the Finn told his Unibet column.

Hakkinen said F1 has changed since his day, with automatic 'traffic light' systems now in the place of the traditional 'lollipop man'.

"Considering how important safety is in F1, including the introduction of the Halo this year, it is important for the teams and the FIA to look again at the pitstops," he said.

Following Bahrain, top official Charlie Whiting has said the FIA will look closely into the recent incidents.

Hakkinen said of pitstops: "They are a really important part of the spectacle, so I would not want to see that disappear, but maybe the time has come to consider whether the automated systems are the right way to go.

"When you have people's lives at stake, maybe humans should be making the final decision."

(GMM)Exxon Mobil Corporation announced that the size of the natural gas resource at the Pnyang field in Papua New Guinea has increased by 2 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) to 4.36 Tcf of gas, an 84% increase from a previous assessment completed in 2012. The increase supports a potential significant expansion of operations in the country.





The independent recertification study by Netherland Sewell and Associates follows the successful completion in January of the Pnyang South-2 well, located in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea.

The results support ExxonMobils discussions with its joint venture partners on a three-train expansion concept for the PNG LNG liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant near Port Moresby, with one new train dedicated to gas from the Pnyang and PNG LNG fields and two trains dedicated to gas associated with the Papua LNG project.

The development concept, which would add approximately 8 million tons of LNG annually, would double the capacity of the existing LNG plant operated by ExxonMobil.

The Pnyang field is located within petroleum retention license 3, which covers 105,000 acres (425 square kilometers). ExxonMobil affiliates operate the license with a 49% interest in the block. Affiliates of Oil Search have a 38.5% interest and JX Nippon has 12.5% interest.

Papua LNG is seeking to commercialize the Elk-Antelope fields located in petroleum retention license 15 in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea. An ExxonMobil affiliate holds 37.1% interest, and affiliates of operator Total S.A. and Oil Search Limited have 40.1% and 22.8% interest, respectively.Boeing has invested in Reaction Engines Limited, a UK-based developer of advanced propulsion systems, as part of the companys $37.3-million Series B funding round alongside Rolls-Royce Plc and BAE Systems. BAE also participated in a 2015 funding round.(Earlier post.)

Reaction Engines technology will contribute to the next generation of hypersonic flight and space access vehicles.

Reaction Engines is known for advanced combined cycle air-breathing rocket engine called SABRE (Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine). The SABRE hybrid engine blends jet and rocket technology and is capable of Mach 5 in air-breathing mode and Mach 25 in rocket mode for space flight.

There are three core building blocks to the SABRE engine: the pre-cooler, the engine core and the thrust chamber. Each of these systems can be developed and validated using ground based demonstrations which saves cost and time relative to flight test, a design feature that benefitted the development of the propeller and jet engine,

As part of the SABRE program, Reaction Engines developed an ultra-lightweight heat exchanger that stops engine components from overheating at high speeds, thus improving access to hypersonic flight and space.

Founded by three propulsion engineers in 1989, Reaction Engines produces robust technical designs for advanced heat exchangers, air-breathing engines, and the vehicles they could power. These capabilities may lead to high-speed point-to-point transport that is cost-effective and sustainable.

Boeing HorizonX Ventures participated in this BAE also participated in a 2015 funding round.BP signed a memorandum of understanding to explore areas of cooperation with Petroleo Brasileiro S.A. (Petrobras). The MOU complements and reaffirms the commitments contained in a Letter of Intent (LOI), signed by the companies on 18 October 2017.

The MOU confirms the intention of the parties to combine efforts to discuss and negotiate investment opportunities in the oil and gas chain, in projects in Brazil and abroad, for cooperation in upstream, downstream and trading activities, among others, on a non-exclusive basis.

In addition to the scope of the LOI, the parties have agreed to cooperate in areas of common interest such as risk sharing, technology exchange, strengthening of corporate governance and joint training and research.

BP has been present in Brazil for more than 60 years, supplying fuels and lubricants, exploring for oil and gas, and developing biofuels. BP and Petrobras currently partner in 16 exploration blocks in Brazil and are both members of the Oil & Gas Climate Initiative, a voluntary, CEO-led initiative which aims to lead the oil and gas industry response to climate change.Volkswagen Braunschweig has been awarded the contract to further the development and production of battery systems for the Modular Electric Drive Modular System (MEB). In the future, the plant will produce up to half a million battery systems per year for the electric vehicles of the Volkswagen brand and other Group brands.

The Volkswagen brand is doing its utmost to develop and produce the electric cars of the future in Germany. The battery system is an elementary part of the value chain, and we bundle the expertise for this important technology for the whole of Europe in Braunschweig. Dr. Herbert Diess, CEO of the Volkswagen brand

This latest development was announced at a symposium at the site with the Management Board, plant management and works council.





At the symposium, numerous ideas and solutions for better processes and higher assembly and plant efficiency were presented. The Braunschweig team will also develop components for the vehicles of the future, including vibration dampers and steering systems for autonomous vehicles.

The Braunschweig site has built up extensive know-how in the development and production of battery systems in recent years. The team around Otto Joos has already successfully accompanied the MQB models into the series. With this order for the Modular E-drive modular system, the location continues to establish itself as the central driver of Volkswagens electromobility strategy. Volkswagen Board member Thomas Schmall

Volkswagen Braunschweig is consistently implementing the Future Pact. In addition to the improvement of processes in production, the focus is also on the consistent introduction of shop floor managementa working method that ensures a uniform flow of communication between management, department heads, masters and employees.

Braunschweig is Volkswagen AGs oldest site, established in 1938. It is one of the biggest world-leading producers of chassis components; production and development take place under one roof.

The Braunschweig plant is developing into a competence center for battery systems. The knowledge developed in Braunschweig is used internationally and thus guarantees low-cost, high-quality battery systems worldwide. The experts from Braunschweig are supporting the start-ups of battery system production in China and the US.The Colorado Energy Office (CEO) has released a request for applications (RFA) inviting private sector partners to build fast-charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) along most major highway corridors in Colorado, including I-25, I-70, US 36, US 40, US 50, US 160, US 285 and US 550. The state is investing approximately $10 million in this program: the ALT Fuels Colorado Electric Vehicle Direct Current Fast Charging Corridor Grant Program.





The plan will add 33 direct-current fast-charging locations, with 50 to 70 miles between stations. Each Fast-Charger will be capable of delivering 150 kW to a single vehicle, recharging the battery to full capacity in approximately 20 minutes.

This RFA directly addresses Action N 1 in the Colorado Electric Vehicle Plan: Build out Colorados EV fast-charging infrastructure through public-private partnerships and in coordination with other programs.

The Colorado Electric Vehicle Plan was released in January 2018 in support of Executive Order D 2017-015, Supporting Colorados Clean Energy Transition. The plan states that lack of EV fast-charging stations along major transportation corridors limits the ability of EV drivers to engage in intra-and interstate travel and is a major barrier for current and prospective EV owners.

According to the US Department of Energy (DOE) Alternative Fuels Data Center, Colorado currently has 53 EV fast-charging stations (138 EV fast-charging ports). The Colorado Electric Vehicle Plan estimates that to support the medium-growth scenario of 302,429 EVs in Colorado by 2030 as projected in the Colorado EV Market Implementation Study, a total of 204 stations (817 EV fast-charging ports) will be required, with many installed along Colorados transportation corridors.

Under the high-growth scenario of 940,000 EVs by 2030, as many as 632 stations (2,530 ports) will be needed. To help address this barrier, the State of Colorado envisions a network of EV fast-charging stations along major transportation corridors that provide quick, convenient, and reliable charging and allow a driver in an EV to travel from one side of the state to the other without experiencing range anxiety.

The plan also meets the states commitment to electrifying interstate highways as part of the eight-state REV West MOU.Durr is building a paint shop in Mexico for the BMW Group that meets the requirements for connected Industry 4.0 production. This plant, featuring the first integrated smart factory concept from Durr, is being built at the San Luis Potosi site. San Luis Potosi will build the BMW brands best-selling model series, the BMW 3 Series Sedan. Start of production is scheduled for 2019, with an annual production capacity of up to 150,000 units. The BMW Group is investing around $1 billion in the new plant and creating at least 1,500 new jobs.

The BMW Group Plant San Luis Potosi will be a full plant, comprising body shop, paint shop and assembly, characterized by an innovative production system and comprehensive sustainability standards. From the first full year of production, the plant will be the BMW Groups most resource-efficient production location worldwide.





The use of renewable energy sources will ensure that the plant is supplied with 100% CO 2 -free electricity. Most of the electricity comes from a solar system on the plants grounds.

Responsible use of water resources is a particular sustainability goal in San Luis Potosi. The facility will have the lowest water consumption per vehicle produced in the production network. This will be the BMW Groups first paint shop to produce zero process wastewater. The water needed for the painting process is reconditioned and recycled.

Durr is supplying the complete paint shop: from pretreatment (PT) and electrocoating (EC) processes all the way through to the spray booths with application technology and the ovens. The waste water treatment plant, the deionization system of the water (DI plant), and the shop ventilation are also included in the scope of services. The respective processes are designed around the consistent integration of smart solutions.

In the first stage, the paint shop is designed for a capacity of 35 vehicles per hour, with the option to increase the throughput to twice this capacity later. The PT/EC area is designed to accommodate 60 vehicles per hour from the outset. BMW will use its tried-and-tested, fully automatic Integrated Paint Process (IPP) in this plant, which eliminates the primer and a drying phase.

In terms of the paint shop layout, Durr relies on a simple industrial building without intermediate levels in conjunction with multi-functional body stores with high-bay storage technology. This concept offers the advantage of sorting the vehicles with elective access which eliminates the need for an additional, conventional painted body store.

The focus on sustainability starts in the PT/EC area. The RoDip rotational dip process is used in pretreatment and electrocoating. Since the bodies are fully rotated in the tank, RoDip does not need entry and exit inclines. The smaller volume of this shorter tank reduces the quantity of water and chemicals required as well as the energy consumption for tank conditioning. The use of membrane technology in PT/EC and the wastewater treatment plant reduces water consumption and the volume of wastewater even more.





A total of 30 EcoRP E/L133i robots from the third and latest generation ensure efficient paint application at the San Luis Potosi facility. The robots can be operated on a rail running either above or below in the top coat and clear coat lines. They are used as trunk openers and for exterior and interior painting. For the first time in North America, the new Durr painting robot with cloud-enabled control is being used.





The newly developed EcoRCMP2 process and motion controller controls the third-generation robots from Durr. An example of the smart factory concept is illustrated by the integrated safety controller for monitoring the workspace and speed of the robots. A multitude of sensors ensure networking of the robot data with the higher-level maintenance software and control system.

The EcoScreen Maintenance Assistant software from the digital@DURR range, which is being used for the first time, determines the plant condition based on the number of switching cycles of the valves or the load profiles of the servo motors in the robots. This enables preventive maintenance planning and increases the plant availability. Service activities are based on up-to-date plant data and no longer oriented to predefined maintenance intervals.

In the application technology, the interaction of the dosing pump, color changer, EcoBell3 atomizer generation, and the award-winning cleaning device EcoBell Cleaner D2 combine to minimize paint loss and detergent consumption when changing colors. The scope of delivery also includes the paint and high-viscosity material supply as well as 25 sealing robots from the EcoRS series. These robots automatically seal seams on the bodies, apply sound insulating mats and underbody protection, and draw delicate seam lines in the visible parts of the door area.

For paint overspray separation in the spray booth, BMW Group chose dry separation using the EcoDryScrubber. BMW was the first OEM to use this technology in its plant in Regensburg in 2010, and it is now in use in more than 75 painting lines worldwide. The reason for its popularity is the energy saving of up to 60% in the spray booth. By completely eliminating water and chemicals, up to 90% recirculated air can be used in production.





This reduces the cost of conditioning fresh air and is a major factor in the outstanding energy efficiency of the spray booth. The new V5.X system software is being used for the first time. It improves the performance of the EcoDryScrubber by enabling the system to be self-regulating. As a result, optimum use is made of the limestone powder for binding the overspray, thereby reducing consumption.

BMW is also using a product from the digital@DURR range for the ovens. The fully automatic EcoSmart VEC fresh and exhaust air control ensures air management by leveraging energy on demand: the ovens energy use is optimally adapted to its workload at any given time. Instead of a constant volumetric flow rate, the fresh and exhaust air is controlled as a function of the number of vehicles currently in the oven and their position.

Another measure to save energy is the recovery of waste heat from the thermal exhaust air purification systems (Ecopure TAR) of the ovens. The waste heat is made available to the production plants as hot water using a waste heat boiler. To reduce solvent emissions the exhaust air flow from the clear coat booths is purified using an Ecopure KPR adsorptive concentration system before it leaves the plant.Hino Motors, Ltd. and Volkswagen Truck & Bus GmbH signed a Strategic Cooperation Framework Agreement (SCFA) aiming to build a mutually beneficial strategic long-term partnership. Both companies will further explore each others capabilities to cooperate in logistics and traffic solution research, existing and new technologies as well as in procurement. The evaluation of technology cooperation will focus on conventional powertrains, hybrid and electric powertrains, as well as connectivity and autonomous driving systems.

Both partners aim to enhance their respective market positions in the global transportation business and will jointly develop innovative technologies.

The partners have established a joint Alliance Board based on the SCFA to discuss the direction of the long-term and eye-level partnership. The Alliance Board will pursue a pragmatic approach with a lean organization and balanced rights for both companies that remain independent. It comprises the CEOs from both companies as well as additional senior management representatives.

Inter alia, the Alliance Board will explore and evaluate cooperation in existing technologies, e.g. whether there is room for jointly utilizing conventional powertrains, to offer better products for customers. Furthermore, it will also evaluate initiatives for future transportation technologies.

We are delighted to enter into the SCFA with Hino Motors as we are teaming up with one of the leading truck and bus companies, whose presence is especially strong in Asia. It is an excellent fit in terms of regional footprints and products, but also concerning common ideas on how to shape the future of transportation together. The cooperation with Hino Motors will also contribute to our strategy to become Global Champion in the transportation industry by providing the highest value to our customers. Andreas Renschler, member of the Board of Management of Volkswagen AG and CEO of Volkswagen Truck & Bus

Hino Motors invented the company slogan Trucks and Busses that do more. To do justice to that, Hino Motors will pursue regional business cooperation and joint utilization of technologies with Volkswagen Truck and Bus to offer customers better products and ultimately customized total support. It will also be a strong tie-up at times of new challenges in the field of transportation due to the rapid growth of e-commerce. Yoshio Shimo, President & CEO of Hino Motors, Ltd.

Hino is a leading commercial vehicle manufacturer that has a strong presence in Asia and the Japanese markets and provides products to more than 80 countries and regions including the USA. Volkswagen Truck & Bus features leading market positions in Europe and Brazil through its strong brands MAN, Scania, Volkswagen Caminhoes e Onibus and RIO. The company has also established partnerships with Navistar in North America and Sinotruk in China.



1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.Biddeford-Saco-OOB Courier

The School Committee has given BRCOT officials the go-ahead to apply to the Maine Department of Education for approval.Both said they want to recognize the significant achievements accomplished together. Photo: Getty Images

John Beshs serial harassing may have cost him his executive-chef job, but it wont keep him from getting full control of Shaya, the Besh Restaurant Group Israeli joint run by Beshs protege Alon Shaya that was named James Beards Best New Restaurant in 2016.

Since Beshs misconduct allegations surfaced, he and Shaya have been locked in a bitter legal feud over who owns the restaurant itself, and also which side can keep using the name. In a trademark-infringement complaint, Shaya charged that he was being forced to fight in court for the rights to my own name. Beshs lawyers countered that Shaya never had the naming rights in the first place, and that his relations with the company had been fraying for some time.

Things continued getting uglier, with the company essentially accusing Shaya of being an absentee chef, but yesterday the two sides reached a settlement, ending the battle: The since-renamed BRG Hospitality (to remove that in-your-face Besh) will retain full control over the restaurant, and also receive the rights to its name. Chef Shaya will also have no further involvement or affiliation with Shaya or the other two Besh restaurants with which he was involved, Domenica and Pizza Domenica.

Given that agreement, it sounds like the settlement didnt work out that great for Shaya, but the complete terms werent disclosed. The New Orleans Advocate notes that both parties ultimately issued statements that struck a conciliatory tone. Besh and business partner Octavio Mantilla praised Shaya for his services and partnership over the past decade, adding that they look forward to seeing where his many talents will lead him. Shayas statement was equally boilerplate: I am thankful for all the support and opportunities the BRG team has provided over the years. Im looking forward to the next stage in my career with an appreciation for the hard work and great team it took to get here.

Whats funny is, we already know what that next stage is: Shaya recently announced that later this spring, hes opening his own Israeli restaurant, called Saba. It will also be on Magazine Street, about a mile from Shaya.Grinberg in the company of Atelier Crenn chef Dominique Crenn. Photo: Courtesy of Paul Grinberg

Paul Grinberg is a Bay Area finance-industry exec who heads his companys international operations and travels for roughly two-thirds of the year. This means he (a) has some disposable income, and (b) gets to stay in cities with superb dining scenes. This has given Grinberg a near obsession with experiences you can only have eating the food that comes from kitchens the caliber of a Le Bernardin, Mugaritz, or El Celler de Can Roca.

So it may not surprise you to learn that Grinberg is a fan of the Worlds 50 Best Restaurants list, which has spawned his new, seemingly full-time hobby: trying to eat at every single place on that list (which  as you may know  actually means visiting the 100 restaurants, not 50, the comprise the full list). Hes been hard at work since last year, and gets an A++ for effort because hes managed to knock off 99 of the lists spots.

Thats no small feat: The 2017 list spans 30 countries on five continents. Checking off Australias entries alone would require a trip of almost a thousand miles, and eating through New Yorks  Eleven Madison Park, Le Bernardin, Cosme, Momofuku Ko, Estela, Chefs Table at Brooklyn Fare, and Per Se  would take an average person many thousands of dollars and many, many weeks. Needless to say, Grinberg is committed. Among the most intense plans hes made to complete his mission are flying 12 hours to eat one meal, and booking two dinners on the same night: I was only in Adelaide for one day, so I had no option but to have two dinners.

He also runs an Instagram where hell do swipeable gallery posts that contain his apparently trademark Pauls Culinary Adventures sign, as well as shots of the high-end tasting menus as they get staged before him:

That last post is from Singapores Burnt Ends, the lists No. 53 spot and the 99th in total that Grinberg has visited.

This leaves him just one more meal to eat before he actually accomplishes his goal: sushi at Tokyos Sushi Saito, which landed at No. 97 overall. That may seem simple enough, but the clock is ticking: This years edition of the list gets released in two months, and so far, Grinberg cant get a table at Saito. He says he tried recruiting 16 people the day reservations opened to harass Sushi Saito on his behalf, but was unsuccessful. Dont they accept walk-ins?The government announced in a press conference yesterday it will relax the criteria for laying off employees on personal grounds for businesses with a maximum of 20 employees in a bid to reduce the risks small businesses take when recruiting.

The Finnish government has decided to make it easier for small businesses to lay off employees in an attempt to encourage recruitment.

It said it will also promote the employment of young people by allowing employers to hire under 30-year-old job seekers who have been jobless for at least three months on fixed-term employment contracts without having to provide justification for the recruitment decision. Finlands employment contracts act currently stipulates that employers must provide justification for hiring employees on fixed-term contracts.

The government also announced it will launch a review of the act on co-operation with undertakings to, for example, re-examine the grounds for collective lay-offs.

Petteri Orpo (NCP), the Minister of Finance, assured in the press conference that the government has no intention whatsoever to make any surprise announcements after the review process.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Heikki Saukkomaa  Lehtikuva

Source: Uusi SuomiBefore I begin my analysis of Saturday's $1 million Arkansas Derby (gr. I) at Oaklawn Park, let me say now that I'm going a bit outside the box with my selection and don't necessarily advise you to follow suit.

Once in a while, a race comes along in which I can make a case against all of the favorites, at which point I feel as though I should look for a live longshot rather than accept a short price on a horse that I feel has questions to answer. Such is the case in the nine-furlong Arkansas Derby, which offers 100 Kentucky Derby qualification points to the winner.

On paper, the horse to beat is Magnum Moon, who boasts a perfect 3-for-3 record. Trained by Todd Pletcher, the well-bred son of Malibu Moon opened his career with a couple of easy victories at Gulfstream Park and Tampa Bay Downs, after which he stepped up sharply in class and prevailed again in the 8.5-furlong Rebel Stakes (gr. II) at Oaklawn Park.

Suffice to say, there was a lot to like about Magnum Moon's performance in the Rebel. Despite racing wide throughout while vying for the lead with three other horses, Magnum Moon pulled away with authority leaving the far turn and drew off to beat a quality field by 3  lengths, earning a 97 Beyer speed figure that is the highest posted by any horse in the Arkansas Derby field.

But will Magnum Moon repeat that effort on Saturday? Though he won the Rebel decisively, I got the impression that Magnum Moon had to work hard for that victory, and the way he drifted around down the homestretch suggests to me that he didn't have a lot left in the tank. Now he's stepping up in distance, facing an arguably deeper field, and making his fourth start since January 13th. Part of me wonders if his busy racing schedule and hard run in the Rebel Stakes could leave him vulnerable to regression in the Arkansas Derby.

If Magnum Moon doesn't fire his best shot, then Solomini could certainly take advantage. Trained by Bob Baffert, who has enjoyed remarkable success in stakes races at Oaklawn Park, Solomini ran well against the likes of Good Magic, Bolt d'Oro, McKinzie, and Instilled Regard last season while placing in such significant races as the Breeders' Cup Juvenile (gr. I), FrontRunner Stakes (gr. I), and Los Alamitos Futurity (gr. I).

But although Solomini has kept better company than anyone, his grinding style tends to leave him at a disadvantage against horses with superior early speed or a better turn-of-foot in the homestretch. He has also had issues with changing leads, both during morning training and in his races. He was favored to win the Rebel Stakes while making his first start in three months, but wound up getting a tough trip racing inside and behind horses--which he didn't seem to care for--and when he finally got in the clear he failed to change leads and couldn't gain any significant ground on Magnum Moon, who was long gone by that point.

Drawing post five should help Solomini work out a better trip on Saturday, and with a clear run I think he can turn the tables on Magnum Moon. But given the issues he's had changing leads, I don't think he's unbeatable, and at 2-1 on the morning line he doesn't offer much value.

Combatant had a rough run to the first turn in the Rebel Stakes, but subsequently put in a big late run to finish third, beaten just a head for second by Solomini. But that effort was preceded by runner-up efforts in the Springboard Mile, Smarty Jones Stakes, and Southwest Stakes (gr. III), and while Combatant had somewhat difficult trips in all three races, I'm starting to get the impression that Combatant is more of a "pick up the pieces" type more likely to hit the board than reach the winner's circle. In addition, I wonder if he might be at his best going shorter than nine furlongs; he had an advantage over Solomini in the homestretch of the Rebel, but subsequently flattened out and lost the runner-up spot close to home.

Another logical contender is Quip, who recently returned from a layoff to post an upset victory in the Tampa Bay Derby (gr. II). He beat some quality horses in that race, including subsequent Blue Grass Stakes (gr. II) runner-up Flameaway and Wood Memorial Stakes (gr. II) winner Vino Rosso, but I think it's important to note that Quip got a very easy trip in the Tampa Bay Derby, stalking slow fractions of :24.54, :49.48, and 1:13.78. He could face more challenging circumstances in the Arkansas Derby, especially while drawn wide in post position eight with a few speedy rivals to his inside.

What I'm leading up to here is that I'm going to take a shot in the Arkansas Derby with Beautiful Shot, who is 30-1 on the morning line. I'll be the first to admit that on paper you can't really make a case for him, and in terms of pedigree he's bred like a sprinter and might not want to run this far.

But at the same time, Beautiful Shot has shown enough talent to make me think he could be a player on Saturday. He opened his career last year with late-running wins in a maiden race at Del Mar and the Speakeasy Stakes at Santa Anita, in the process defeating the talented Bob Baffert-trained colts Nero and Mourinho. Now granted, Beautiful Shot got ideal setups in both races--for example, in the maiden race, Nero lost focus and essentially stopped in front of Beautiful Shot, while in the Speakeasy, Mourinho dueled through a :21.31 opening quarter-mile that gave closers like Beautiful Shot an advantage.

However, I also believe that Beautiful Shot's last two efforts were better than they appear at first glance. Though he could only finish a distant third in Del Mar's seven-furlong Bob Hope Stakes (gr. III) behind the next-out stakes winners Greyvitos and Mourinho, the Daily Racing Form subsequently reported that Beautiful Shot came out of the races with ulcers, which may have affected his performance.

Given some time off, Beautiful Shot returned to action in the March 10th Gotham Stakes (gr. III) at Aqueduct, a race that was pretty much a disaster from start to finish. Beautiful Shot showed speed from the gate and tried to establish a forward position, but soon found himself racing in tight quarters in between horses, an uncomfortable position that Beautiful Shot didn't seem to relish. Rounding the turn, he was shuffled back in traffic and forced to steady, even appearing to stumble briefly while losing a lot of ground. At that point, he wasn't asked for much and was essentially eased to the finish.

I don't know if Beautiful Shot can step up enough to be competitive in the Arkansas Derby, but I feel strongly that he shouldn't be dismissed strictly off of his Gotham effort. Trainer Keith Desormeaux has done well shipping horses to Oaklawn over the last couple of years, winning the Southwest Stakes (gr. III) with My Boy Jack and the Fifth Season Stakes with Sonneteer, with the latter also being noteworthy for finishing second in the 2017 Rebel Stakes (gr. II) as a 112-1 maiden.

In addition, there is some hope that Beautiful Shot's pedigree can carry him nine furlongs. His sire, Trappe Shot, did run second behind champion Lookin at Lucky in the 2010 Haskell Invitational (gr. I) over this distance and has sired a couple of stakes horses that have excelled in route races, including Oklahoma Derby (gr. III) winner Untrapped and Blue Grass Stakes (gr. I) runner-up My Man Sam. Furthermore, Beautiful Shot's dam--Beauty for Ashes--was stakes-placed going a mile and has produced a couple of foals that were successful around two turns, including Putyourdreamsaway (third in the Millions Distaff Preview Stakes going 8.5 furlongs) and Sylvia's Warrior (a maiden winner going a mile).

Beautiful Shot is far from being my most confident selection on the Derby trail this winter, but at 30-1 on the morning line I think he's higher than he should be and is worth some small plays. He doesn't even have to win to make playing him worthwhile--finishing second or third at a huge price could sharply boost the payoffs in the exotics. And if he does win, the reward will be significant.

Now it's your turn! Who do you like in the Arkansas Derby?

*****

Want to test your handicapping skills against fellow Unlocking Winners readers? Check out the Unlocking Winners contests page--there's a new challenge every week!



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The Unlocking Winners Road to the Kentucky Derby Handicapping Challenge is back for the fourth consecutive year! Please be sure to post all entries, prime horses, and stable additions on the contest page. Thanks, and enjoy the racing!

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J. Keeler Johnson (also known as "Keelerman") is a writer, blogger, videographer, handicapper, and all-around horse racing enthusiast. A great fan of racing history, he considers Dr. Fager to be the greatest racehorse ever produced in America, but counts Zenyatta as his all-time favorite. He is the founder of the horse racing website www.theturfboard.com.Videos

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos.The striking battle of wits and ingenuity that kept about half of the wars choppers flyingand got about half of them shot down.

All of us who fought on the ground in Vietnam, we rode to war in the Huey, and that whup, whup, whup, is burned into our brains, says retired Lieutenant General Hal Moore, the first commander of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in Vietnam. Indeed, Vietnam is rightly regarded as the helicopter war, and the lessons learned there forever changed the way war is waged.

Rotary wing aircraft first saw use in World War II, and the Korean War and Frances Indochina War had seen them mature into invaluable transports, especially in the vital task of expediting wounded soldiers from the battlefield directly to a hospital. It was in Vietnam, however, that the chopper truly came into its own, expanding its military role with unprecedented versatility. Helicopters transported soldiers, conducted armed reconnaissance, provided fire support, evacuated wounded soldiers and performed a myriad of other missions in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

As the chopper became a ubiquitous component of the American arsenal, the Vietnamese Communist forces turned their ingenuity to the task of driving it from the sky. That in turn compelled the American copter crews to adopt weapons and tactics to counter the threat. Like the Vietnam War itself, this escalated into an ongoing struggle between guerrillas and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regular forces in the jungle, and rotors in the air.

Out of the 12,054 American helicopters that served during the Vietnam War, 5,602 were destroyed during combat operations a loss rate of 46 percent. More than 4,900 pilots and crewmen perished in these aircraft losses. Obviously, over time, the enemy had significant success with their anti-helicopter tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP).

From crude anti-helicopter ground obstacles used by the Viet Cong (VC) early in the war to the use of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) by the North Vietnamese during the later stages of the conflict, anti-helicopter weapons and tactics evolved over the breadth of the Vietnam War. The helicopters they confronted also changed over the course of the war as the U.S. Army constantly adapted its aircraft and tactics to counter the anti-helicopter TTP it confronted on the battlefield.

Early in the war, the Viet Cong normally fled when helicopters arrived on the scene. Using the canopy of the jungle or the cover of darkness for protection, they melted away into the vegetation and patiently waited to fight later, on their own terms. The VC were extremely adaptable and soon recognized vulnerability in the helicopter and began to gradually take advantage of it.

Three helicopters dominated the Vietnamese battlefields from 1961 to 1963: the CH-21B Shawnee, UH-1A/B Iroquois and the CH-34B Choctaw. Each had design problems that made it vulnerable to enemy ground fire.

The U.S. Armys Shawnee, a tandem-rotor helicopter nicknamed the Flying Banana, was already considered outdated when deployed to Vietnam. A piston-powered aircraft, it had only one engine that drove two rotors and long, exposed control and hydraulic lines that made it easy to shoot down. Regardless, the Shawnee could carry 21 fully equipped troops and became the workhorse of the airmobile war during Americas early advisory period of the conflict. The Army also fielded a limited number of the UH-1A/B Iroquois, nicknamed the Huey, which normally functioned as an armed escort for the vulnerable Shawnee because it was faster, more nimble and could carry only a small number of troops. During this period, the Marine Corps deployed the CH-34 Choctaw, a more rugged aircraft than the Shawnee, but nonetheless possessing weaknesses that the enemy quickly learned to attack.

The turbine-powered UH-1 Huey proved much sturdier than the Shawnee, but it still only had the one enginealways a survivability issue for an aircraft flying low-to-the-deck in a heavy small-arms environment. Like the Shawnee, the Marine Choctaw was also piston-powered. Its single engine was in the nose, making it easy to maintain but also easy to target and hit; the cockpit sat high above the engine, making it another easy target; and its lightened magnesium alloy airframe, while more capable, was far too easy to set afire.

The Viet Cong employed simple tactics at first. One of their favorites involved booby-trapping landing zones. Because a limited number of landing zones (LZ) existed in the jungle, the enemy knew that sooner or later a helicopter would use these fields to land or extract personnel or supplies. Just as they booby-trapped areas where they knew enemy ground troops would walk, they laid anti-helicopter traps where they knew American choppers would land.

Using a hand grenade, mortar shell or similar explosive device with a trip wire rigged for detonation, the VC would run the wire across the landing zone and then loosely thrust a pole into the ground near the trip wire. The landing helicopters rotor wash would push the pole across the trip wire and set off the explosive devicecrude in design, but effective. The Viet Cong emplaced these booby traps in areas with high grass that helped to hide the device until the targeted helicopter would flare to land. Many variations of these booby traps existed, but they all worked on the principle of the choppers rotor wash triggering the device.

American pilots quickly found the solution to this tactic: Helicopter gunships raked LZs with machine gun and rocket fire to eliminate any booby traps before troop-carrying choppers arrived. Once gunships became commonplace on the battlefield, the explosive booby traps only posed a danger to lone helicopters landing special operations troops in places where gunship prep fires would have exposed the covert insertion.

Another very basic enemy tactic proved effective for a time. When a helicopter flew low overhead, the VC would simply fall on their backs and fire straight up without aiming. They knew they had no chance of hitting the lead helicopter, but second and third helicopters following in trail of the first would take hits, flying into the wall of lead. To foil this, American helicopter pilots began flying staggered formations.

The Viet Cong quickly learned that the insertion of an American combat unit into an area would often entail multiple airlifts, giving them time to move their heavy machine guns and mortars near the active landing zone. They then would target the follow-on choppers at their most vulnerable positionwhile slowing and flaring for landing or while on the ground.

An early success of the tactic occurred during the battle of Ap Bac on January 2, 1963. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) 7th Division had been ordered to clear a suspected Viet Cong command center from the area, but rather than withdrawing from a large fightas was their customthe VC held their ground and fought. The ARVN and their American advisers, stymied by withering fire from about 350 well-armed guerrillas, asked for reinforcement. The 93rd Transportation Company (Light Helicopter) flying Shawnees airlifted the South Vietnamese reinforcements to the battle site while the Utility Tactical Transport Helicopter Co. (UTT), flying armed Hueys, provided aerial fire support. On the fourth lift of the day, the 93rd landed its Shawnees within 200 meters of an enemy bunker complex hidden in a tree line. Heavy and accurate fire from the bunker line immediately brought down one Shawnee and then a second as it struggled to rescue the crew of the first downed helicopter. A Huey then tried to rescue both downed crews and was also shot down. Two more Shawnees, badly shot up, made forced landings farther away in the same field. In all, five U.S Army helicopters fell to enemy gunfire, with two crew members dead and several wounded. The Viet Cong then slipped away into the night, leaving snipers behind to harass the maintenance crews they knew would arrive the next day to recover the downed choppers. While that tactic would remain successful throughout the war, in 1964 the more capable Huey completely replaced the Shawnee in the troop-carrying role, greatly reducing similar helicopter losses.

The early American and North Vietnamese troop buildup phase of the war began in earnest in 1965, and the nature of the antihelicopter war began to change as well. Increased NVA involvement in the South brought with it growing numbers of what became the most universally dreaded nemesis to the American and ARVN helicopter crews: The Soviet 12.7mm machine gun, also known as the .51-caliber. Improved training accounted for much of the enemys success. Anti-aircraft training manuals were usually found among the documents captured by Americans at enemy base camps, and North Vietnamese Army cadre devoted a great deal of time using drawings to show troops exactly where to aim to bring down specific American helicopters. The effectiveness of this training proved itself as the war progressed and helicopter losses increased.

Most helicopter losses occurred when pilots had to fly into landing zones that were hotdirectly under fireto pick up wounded or deliver badly needed ammunition in the middle of a firefight.

After the hot LZ, the second most hazardous situation was in what crews called a hover hole. American troops in thick jungle would cut out small landing zones just big enough for a helicopter to hover down into, with its blades just feet away from tree limbs. The chopper pilots would skillfully lower themselves down into these hover holes but, unable to maneuver horizontally in the small confines, they were extremely vulnerable to small-arms fire should an intrepid guerrilla creep up on the makeshift landing zone. Even if the enemy fire did not strike the helicopter, it could so unnerve the pilot that he might crash his aircraft anyway. Helicopter crews grew to hate these death traps.

The North Vietnamese often tried to bait a helicopter into landing on an LZ they had rigged with an ambush. They would place sought-after weapons or dead enemy soldiers in plain sight. American commanders would then order troops in helicopters to land and search and secure the area; when the chopper landed, the enemy would spring the ambush.

The NVA also used target identification to their advantage. The American infantryman had a very limited view of the battlefield in Vietnam. While he could see a single tree line to his front, an attack helicopter pilot arriving on the scene to provide fire support might see three tree lines and would have to ascertain which held friendly and which harbored enemy forces. Finding the target took time, and the pilot was forced to linger at low altitude, orienting himself to the battle area before firing at the enemy. The North Vietnamese took advantage of this by engaging the aircraft while the pilot tried to discern the target area. Ground forces countered this enemy tactic by marking their own locations with colored smoke and using M-79 grenade launchers and mortars to place another color of smoke on enemy locations.

The North Vietnamese countered that by monitoring American units radio transmissionswhich were usually transmitted in the clearand throwing out the same colored smoke as the Americans. This trick worked for a while, until the Americans changed their tactics once again. The American unit would throw out a colored smoke at its location but not identify the color. When the supporting helicopter arrived on scene, it would ask the friendly unit to identify the color of its smoke. If the American unit stated Green and the pilot saw a green smoke and a red smoke, he knew the red smoke belonged to an enemy unit and rolled in for an attack run.

Crashed helicopterswhether taken down by enemy action, an accident or mechanical failureneeded recovery. Typically, a team would arrive on the scene to secure the crash site and protect the arriving heavy lift recovery helicopter. The recovery chopper would sling load the disabled helicopter out of the crash site, and then the security force would withdraw by helicopter as well.

The North Vietnamese learned the routine and turned it to their advantage by timing their ambushes to strike at the recovery forces most vulnerable times. They rarely struck the security force when it arrived by Huey. Instead the NVA patiently waited for the heavy lift helicopter to arrive and start its recovery operation. Low to the ground and in a hover with a disabled helicopter hanging by a sling underneath its belly, the recovery helicopter made a relatively easy target and the enemy would spring their ambush at this time. Should the heavy lift helicopter make good its escape, the Communists would cease fire and withdraw. Only when the security force boarded its own helicopters would the enemy reengage. To counter this measure, U.S. attack helicopters patrolled the perimeter of recovery operations. Still, a heavy lift helicopter in a vulnerable condition low to the ground made such an inviting target that not even attack helicopter protection could always stop NVA attempts to carry out these ambushes.

The U.S. Air Force used the CH-53 Sea Stallion for long-range search-and-rescue (SAR) operations in inhospitable places like North Vietnam and Laos, while fixed-wing aircraft such as the A-1 Skyraider provided air cover. The NVA gunners would often remain hidden and not fire on the fixed-wing aircraft, waiting instead for the CH-53 to go into a hover with the downed pilot on the res  cue hoist before suddenly and unexpectedly opening fire. The North Vietnamese also realized that by remaining close to the targeted helicopter, they could make fixed-wing air support more difficult.

Habits die hard, and the North Vietnamese depended on helicopter pilots new in country to retain some of their stateside flying habits to successfully engage and shoot them down. The two most common deadly mistakes were taking off on course and slowly climbing to an altitude safe from small-arms firenormally around 2,500 to 3,000 feet. The second was beginning a letdown well short of the intended landing area. Such noncombat area maneuvers put the helicopter in a low and slow position over enemy territory.

Experienced combat pilots varied their flying based on intelligence reports of enemy activity in an area. For example, they would use a spiraling climb on takeoff that entailed a rapid climb in a tight spiral over the protected landing area. Once they were around 1,000 feet, the pilots would turn on course. To land, pilots would descend to 1,500 feet and begin a spiraling descent over protected terrain to land.

An after-action report from the 3rd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, operating in Quang Ngai Province from May to July 1967, noted the enemys efforts to target helicopters using the same course to approach and depart a landing zone and early letdown: U.S. units are almost entirely dependent upon the helicopter for resupply; therefore the volume of helicopter traffic in enemy infected areas is quite heavy. Numerous documents captured by this organization have contained extensive training material on techniques for shooting down helicopters with small arms. The enemy will watch as the helicopter goes into a U.S. position and will move to a good firing position along the final approach to the LZ. He will then select a position that will allow him a good shot when the helicopter is on its final approach and is most vulnerable to ground fire. The enemy position is often several hundred meters from the LZ, making counter fire by small arms difficult. The helicopter usually delivers its resupply to units during the afternoon hours and returns to pick up empty marmite containers before sundown. Observation: The enemy tactics mentioned above can be effectively countered by saturating the approach to the LZ with fire team size patrols. This technique effectively interdicts enemy movement and provides a quick reaction force when the enemy fires on the approaching helicopter.

Many U.S. helicopter pilots chose to counter this NVA tactic by flying close to the groundbut at a very high speed. In a sense, the pilots used the jungle to their advantage because the enemy could hear but not see the helicopter. If the helicopter did fly over a North Vietnamese gun position, it appeared suddenly and just as suddenly disappeared.

A 1968 report on the statistical success of enemy ground fire hitting helicopters found that 55 percent of all helicopters struck by ground fire were flying at an altitude of between 100 and 500 feet. Some 30 percent of ground fire hits struck helicopters flying between 1,000 feet and 500 feet. Helicopters flying between 2,000 feet and 1,000 feet took 13 percent of the ground fire hits; and helicopters flying above 2,000 feet took only 2 percent. The report also noted that helicopters flying below 100 feet rarely took hits because enemy gunners had little time to react to a helicopter sighting. The reports recommendations were clear: Fly above 2,000 feet or below 100 feet to avoid enemy ground fire.

North Vietnam launched its Easter Offensive of 1972 with a largescale, Soviet-style conventional attack on multiple fronts. Supplied with modern air defense weapons by the Soviets, the NVA units pouring into South Vietnam also changed their anti-helicopter TTP to that of a modern, conventional army. North Vietnamese armored units that were headed south had tracked anti-aircraft gun systems, ZSU-57s, that provided air defense from low-level threats such as helicopters and slower fixed-wing aircraft like the OV-10 and A-1. For the first time, too, North Vietnamese infantry units were armed with the SA-7 Grail, a man-portable, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile similar to the U.S. Armys FIM-43 Redeye missile.

AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters and American fixed-wing attack aircraft quickly destroyed the ZSU-57s and any vehicle-towed air defense weapons the NVA had deployed, but the SA-7 posed a harder threat to defeat. Since the weapon was man portable and rarely detected before launch, American aircrews normally only saw the smoking rocket motor as it pushed the missiles one-pound HE warhead toward them. Also, the SA-7 could climb to nearly 15,000 feet, so American and South Vietnamese helicopters could no longer depend on flying above 2,000 feet for protection against ground fire. Hugging the terrain still provided protection to the chopper, however, since the SA-7s infrared seeker needed a few seconds to acquire the target, and the gunner then had to elevate the weapon before firing. After launch, the warhead of the SA-7 did not arm until it had flown at least 60 feet.

While a few helicopters fell to the SA-7, American commanders quickly fielded effective countermeasures. Exhaust deflectors were installed that channeled the engine exhaust up into the rotor blades, where it was dissipated. Also, crewmen carried flares and when they saw the smoking rockets streaking up at them, they tossed them out of the helicopter. The SA-7 seeker followed the much hotter flare rather than the targeted aircraft. Although simple in design and concept, these countermeasures worked, and the SA-7 threat became manageable for the remainder of the war.

Even though the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army had some significant success with their anti-helicopter tactics, they never came close to denying the skies of Vietnam to American helicopter pilots. The men who flew those aircraft were far too intrepid and flexible for that. Still the Communists did exact a heavy toll in aircraft and crewmen. The lessons learned from those low and slow aerial combats of so long ago remain with us today in such technological advancements as choppers designed to protect vital flight systems and crew from ground fire, two-engine combat helicopters, low-visibility goggles and sighting systems that allow helicopters to fly and fight at night.

But above all, the evolution and use of helicopters during the war helped transform the U.S. Army. The Army has always preferred rapid maneuver and shock as vital components of its war fighting, and the helicopter and the units that employ it on a grand scale such as the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)gave it a deep thrust capability that no other army in the world could match. Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom revealed the deadly effectiveness of having air assault units that could jump far ahead of the forward edge of the battle area to cut off a retreating enemy.

Despite all this, the cat and mouse game of enemy anti-helicopter tactics, techniques and procedures, and U.S. helicopter crew counter-measures, continues unabated today in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan. When, on occasion, the enemy fields a new weapon or device or tactic that makes itself felt with an increase in downed helicopters and dead or wounded crewmen, rotary-wing aviators quickly devise a tactical counter-measure. Therefore, the true legacy of the Vietnam-era helicopter war might not be the technical achievements it inspired, but the brave and innovative spirit and determination it infused in the helicopter warriors to never give up control of the sky to the enemy no matter what the cost. They never have.

David F. Crosby is a defense and aerospace writer, and a doctrine developer for the U.S. Army Air Defense School. His book A Guide to Airborne Weapons was a 2003 Military Book Club selection. He is currently working on a book on al Qaedas strategic doctrine.

Originally published in the August 2009 issue of Vietnam Magazine. To subscribe, click here.The Minister's remarks about the possibility of Fine Gael one day going into coalition with Sinn Fein in our exclusive interview have been described as "inappropriate" by a spokesperson for the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar.

In the latest edition of Hot Press, the Cork South West Minister has been causing "ructions", as one Fine Gael member told us, by officially becoming the highest-ranking member of the leading party in the country to publicly acknowledge the possibility of them one day going into coalition with Sinn Fein.

In the past, Enda Kenny was forced to strenuously deny that he would do a deal with Sinn Fein. And a senior political advisor once actually lost his high ranking post after publicly stating it was a possibility So, it's a sensitive subject for Fine Gael.

But Minister Daly's honest and, some would say realistic, comments to a straightforward question has been met with huge backlash from within the Fine Gael parliamentary party.

Jim Daly's comments land him in trouble again via @RTENewsNow https://t.co/3U8Hz9AkOk  Micheal Lehane (@MichealLehane) April 11, 2018



The interview has been picked up by all the national media outlets who are reporting that a huge number of senior Fine Gael-ers fear the party would end up losing votes if the electorate believes they'd even think about cozying up to Mary Lou and co.

Bit of a kerfuffle over comments by Fine Gael minister Jim Daly to Hot Press magazine: I have no ideological objection to Sinn Fein being part of a government."



Taoiseach's spokesman says it's "not an appropriate thing to say" and rules out coalition with SF after next election  Hugh O'Connell (@oconnellhugh) April 11, 2018



Running with the headline "FG minister faces backlash over talk of Sinn Fein deal", it's reported in this morning's Irish Independent that "sources indicated Mr Daly is likely to be privately reprimanded for straying from the party line".

It is important to understand that this is just a small part of a long and wide-ranging interview, Hot Press editor Niall Stokes reflects.

There is  as we said in the press release which was issued by Hot Press this afternoon  a real honesty and straightforwardness about what Jim Daly has to say throughout that interview.

"He is not in any way trying to be controversial. On the contrary. He is answering questions without putting on any kind of act. What you see is what you get. That may be a rarity in politics. But it is really refreshing."

The Taoiseach says he has full confidence Jim Daly's abilities as a minister https://t.co/UiD22VN0dI  TheJournal.ie (@thejournal_ie) April 11, 2018

Advertisement



In the controversial interview with Hot Press senior editor Jason O'Toole, Minister Daly said: "I have no ideological objection to Sinn Fein being part of a government. I just think, on a policy platform, it would be very difficult to agree a programme for government between Fine Gael and Sinn Fein. But, look, politics is the art of doing  and who knows?"

Government spokesman reacts to Fine Gael minister Jim Daly saying in a Hot Press interview that he would be willing to go into government with Sinn Fein." "Minister Daly was not speaking on behalf of the government". Rules out FG-SF because the two are "radically different"  Michael Brennan (@obraonain) April 11, 2018



One high ranking Fine Gael member told Hot Press that their TDs and ministers were shocked by Daly's candid comments. While another Fine Gael member told the Irish Independent that party members are "fuming".

Speaking to the website thejournal.ie, Noel Rock TD said: "Based on the comments I have seen, and I have spoken to him since, I think he is going to have to clarify what he said. He has left people with the impression that Fine Gael are not against going into coalition with Sinn Fein  that isnt the case."

A government spokesperson last night said, He certainly was not speaking on behalf of the government or anybody else when he made those comments."

Jim Daly is being upfront and honest. It could happen. Formation of next government will be a numbers game, https://t.co/zRYbs6Ek49  Michael O'Regan (@MOReganIT) April 11, 2018



The full interview with Minister Jim Daly is published in the new Hot Press 42-05, with Hudson Taylor on the cover and available below.An hypnotic journey into the musical mind of Beckett by master interpreters, Gare St Lazare Ireland will be performed at The Pavilion Theatre on 27th and 28th April.

'Here All Night: The Sound of Beckett' is being staged in celebration of Beckett's birthday on Friday 27th & Saturday 28th April 2018.

First presented at Brighton Festival in 2013, and since performed at Lincoln Center, New York, and in Boston and London, Here All Night returns home for its Irish premiere. A performance of music, theatre and visual art.

In exploring the use of music in Becketts work, Gare St Lazare Ireland has created an entirely original performance that defies easy description.

A meditation, a celebration, an interpretation; it's absence of linear narrative frees us to go where the words and music take us, and offers another way to access both Becketts world and our own.

With an original score by UK composer Paul Clark, and improvised fiddle by Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, the work has evolved to include a collaboration with distinguished Irish artist Brian ODoherty (fomerly aka Patrick Scott) as well as movement by Irish choreographer John Scott.

Here All Night features:

Soprano - Melanie Pappenheim

Actor - Conor Lovett

Hardanger d'amore - Caoimhin O Raghallaigh

Cello - Chris Allan

Piano - John Paul Gandy

As well as an all-female choir from the USA and UK in a truly international collaboration.

Fri 27 & Sat 28 Apr, 8pm

Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire, Co.Dublin

Tickets: 22/20 | 18 students

Booking: paviliontheatre.ie (free booking online) / 01 231 2929iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) -- Two teenagers with a natural affinity for the sea assisted in rescuing two families -- including a 4-year-old boy and 3-month-old baby -- after the boat they were in capsized near the Florida Keys over the weekend.



Mason Baker, 17, Will Coffin, 18, and Will's uncle, Dave Tolhurst, 54, were fishing for Yellowtail just north of the Conch Reef Sanctuary Preservation Area in the upper Keys on Saturday when Tolhurst noticed the 23-foot boat overturned about 500 yards away, Baker told ABC News.



"He asked us, 'Is that boat upside down?'" Baker said, referring to Tolhurst's comment after seeing the overturned boat.



Once they determined that the boat was in distress, the group decided to "go do something" about it and pulled up their anchor, calling the U.S. Coast Guard as they made their way to the scene.



Once they got there, they saw six people in the water, with the captain of the boat trying to climb on top of his capsized vessel, Coffin told ABC News.



The good Samaritans pulled five of the stranded passengers from the water -- including the two young children but minus the captain -- onto their own boat, Coffin explained. The teens were also able to retrieve the group's three coolers, which still had food intact, so they handed out juice and grapes to the 4-year-old boy, who was concerned about his father who was still in the water.



Baker said he gave the "soaking wet" 3-month-old his shirt, and the Coast Guard arrived about 30 minutes later. The Coast Guard then airlifted the baby to a local hospital for the possible ingestion of salt water, officials said.



Baker, whose father is a professional captain, hypothesized that the boat overturned because the six passengers, plus three coolers were too much weight for the small boat to handle. Additionally, conditions on the water were choppier than what was initially predicted that day, he said.



Both families were from out of town, Baker said, and the boat was fairly new.



Both teens have spent extensive time out on the water and often fish on their own, their mothers told ABC News. They were both born and raised in the Florida Keys.



"I've been out on the water my whole life," Baker said.



Tolhurst commended the teens for their boating expertise and for staying calm during the traumatic ordeal, Bonnie Coffin, Will's mom, told ABC News. Bonnie added that one of the victims got hit in the head when the boat overturned and told her son that "five more minutes," and he may not have made it.



The man was "rattled," she said.



The teens' mothers explained the rescue posed a valuable lesson for the boys, who are set to graduate from Coral Shores High School in Tavernier and will attend Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton in the fall.



"You can see how quickly things can go wrong out there, and you need to be aware -- always -- of your surroundings and always pay attention," Bonnie said, adding that her son is "very cautious" and has good common sense.



Duane Baker, Mason's father, taught him how to "respect the water" and understand the risks involved, his mother, Jill Miranda-Baker, said adding that he plans on taking his boat with him to college.



"His first love is being on the water," Miranda-Baker said of her son.



Mason said he plans on studying criminal justice and hopes to become an officer for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, while Will said that he plans on majoring in ocean engineering.



Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Peter Buck and Joseph Arthur have just shared the first track from their exciting joint project.

"My first thought was, Hey, Ill get Peter to play acoustic guitar on some of the stuff Im working! Arthur said about the new album entitled Arthur Buck.

"So, I started showing him songs. But he was like, Thats cool. Now check this out. And he started playing chords and whatnot. So I put my guitar down and began singing over his changes, and it was magical. It was easy. And these great songs just started popping out.

Buck added: It was all new songs, and it was spontaneous. And the great thing about working that way was that it didnt have to be anything in particular. It was liberated from any expectation. It was free.

Top 10 House GOP farm bill highlights

1. Farm policy

The Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018 works to address the five-year, 52 percent decline in the farm economy by providing certainty that an extension of current policy cannot provide. The bill reauthorizes and strengthens the Agriculture Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage options through 2023. Producers are given an opportunity to make a new election between ARC and PLC with several improvements, including allowing a new yield update opportunity for producers who were facing severe drought during the previous yield update, allowing reference prices to adjust to improved market conditions, and prioritizing the use of Risk Management Agency data for administering ARC to minimize disparities between counties.

2. Nutrition

Over 35 improvements are made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the nations flagship nutrition program. Most notably, existing work requirements are strengthened, streamlined and paired with a variety of options to increase opportunities for SNAP recipients, including participating in a fully-funded, guaranteed Employment And Training slot. Individuals may choose not to participate, but they will no longer be eligible for SNAP. The farm bill maintains vital nutrition assistance for those in need while making a historic commitment to helping recipients improve their outlook in life.

3. Trade

Given escalating use of illegal trade actions by foreign countries, the farm bill stands by the nations farmers and ranchers, providing a strengthened safety net and authorizing and restoring funding for vital tools for trade promotion and market development. The farm bill also maintains long-standing legal authority for the secretary to provide assistance to farmers and ranchers affected by unfair foreign trading practices.

4. Conservation

The farm bill prioritizes working-lands conservation by retaining and folding the best features of the Conservation Stewardship Program into the nations flagship incentive-based program for voluntary conservationthe Environmental Quality Incentives Program. This supports and enables a significant investment in emerging conservation practices like the use of cover crops.

5. Crop insurance

At the request of virtually every farmer, rural banker and rural business in the country, the farm bill protects crop insurance. Some improvements are made, but overall the farm bill doesnt fix what isnt broken.

6. Regulatory reform

One of the most consistent complaints policymakers hear from farmers and ranchers is about burdensome regulations. The farm bill streamlines and reduces regulatory burdens. For example, the bill includes commonsense reforms to the onerous and conflicting Endangered Species Act consultation process regarding pesticide registration activities to ensure agricultural producers have access to the safest and most efficient modern crop protection tools. And the bill cuts red tape across the conservation programs, eliminating unnecessary and burdensome Data Universal Numbering System and System for Award Management registration requirements for producers.

7. Rural development

Rural areas of the U.S. should have the same access to broadband and infrastructure that urban areas do. The bill authorizes substantial annual appropriations for rural broadband and requires USDA to establish forward-looking broadband standards. The farm bill also strengthens the suite of rural development initiatives to promote jobs and economic activity in rural America where employment is suffering due to the sharp downturn in the farm economy. Finally, the farm bill provides the secretary the authority to prioritize projects that help communities meet the challenges of the opioid crisis.

8. Animal health

The Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018 establishes a new National Animal Disease Preparedness and Response Program, designed to protect the health of the nations livestock sector. The program is modeled on the highly successful Plant Pest and Disease Management and Disaster Prevention Program that has strengthened USDAs ability to protect U.S. agriculture and natural resources from foreign plant pest threats. The bill also establishes a new U.S.-only vaccine bank with priority for stockpiling Foot-and-Mouth Disease vaccine and provides for the enhancement of the National Animal Health Laboratory Network.

9. Specialty and organic crops

Specialty crops play an important role in the success of U.S. agriculture and are an essential component of national food policy. The farm bill restores funding for Technical Assistance for Specialty Crops under the new International Market Development Program. It also seeks to expand and improve crop insurance policies for specialty crops. The bill reauthorizes several programs that support marketing and promotion of these crops. It also makes key improvements to the Specialty Crop Research Initiative and the Specialty Crop Block Grant program, while maintaining funding. Finally, the bill increases funding for the Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative and provides resources for combatting fraudulent imports of organic products coming into the U.S.

10. Beginning farmers and ranchers

The bill maintains several provisions to help beginning farmers and ranchers establish themselves in agriculture. The bill enhances access to crop insurance and establishes a scholarship program at 1890 Land Grant Institutions designed to assist students interested in careers in agriculture. Many of the challenges faced by beginning farmers and ranchers are intrinsically linked to those retiring producers. The 2018 farm bill establishes the Commission on Farm TransitionsNeeds for 2050 to examine additional policy changes needed to ensure that the U.S. maintains the safest, most abundant and most affordable food and fiber supply in the world.

Source:House Agriculture Committee Republicans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.As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content.

When you click get started below it will walk you through creating an online account to attach your print subscription number to.

After your account is created it will ask you to either add a subscription for online access or click on the print subscriber button. Click the print subscriber button header and it will open a dropdown, now click on get started. The page will reload and you will be prompted to enter an account number and a zip code.

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO USE THE NUMBER OFF OF THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OR ANYTHING AFTER JANUARY 28, 2019 TO GAIN ACCESS!

OLD ACCOUNT NUMBERS WILL NOT WORK

The account number and zip code are easily available on your most recent issue of the High Plains Journal or Midwest Ag Journal in the address fields as is shown here. Sometimes the account number has extra zero's in front of it, just ignore those.Promote Your Music With Spotify Ads: An Artists How To

In this piece Brian Hazard of Color Theory walks us through the process of securing a Spotify ad and his experience attempting to boost his streams via advertising directly on the platform.

_______________________

Guest post by Brian Hazard of Passive Promotion

Ive been looking for ways to boost my Spotify streams. What could be better than advertising directly on Spotify with an audio ad? That way people will hear my music without needing to click on anything first. And if they hear it, theyll like it and want to hear more, right? RIGHT?

Heres how its done:

First, go to Spotify Ad Studio and sign up for the waitlist if there still is one. As of this writing Ad Studio is in beta. I didnt encounter any bugs, but the functionality is minimal compared to Facebook Ads or Google Adwords.

Once youre accepted and able to create an ad, youre given two options:

Obviously well go with the latter. After that you narrow down your audience by location, age, and gender. Then comes the key piece:

It would be wonderful if we could promote to fans of other bands, or even followers of a particular playlist. But, no. You can only choose the artist youre promoting i.e. you. Assuming your artist name appears in the drop down menu, that is. Mine doesnt, presumably because I only have 1868 followers.

My next best option was to target by genre, and the genre selections are pretty broad. I went with Electronica.

Next you can narrow your targeting to iOS, Android, or desktop, then select start and end dates.

After that comes the truly scary part

Those are some big numbers, but Ive got good news and better news. Lets start with the good news. You can enter a custom budget as low as $250.

Now, $250 is still a solid chunk of change, but its relatively tame compared to my $500 Deezer splurge. Even if it were a total fail, it would be worth it to save you from making the same mistake.

The better news is, you can stop your ad at any time and only pay for what youve spent.

In other words, theres no reason not to launch a campaign and stop at $20 if youre not seeing the results you want.

I didnt know that going in, and figured my $250 was forfeit the moment I submitted the campaign. My discovery to the contrary foreshadows my results, but more on that later

And with that, the campaign is set up! Theres really not much to it.

The more cynical among us might note that the cost per ad served is more than the artist payout per stream, but lets not go there.

Once thats done, you upload your audio file to their specifications, which can be 15 or 30 seconds. Why someone would opt for 15 when it costs the same for 30 is beyond me!

This doesnt apply to us, but Spotify will record the ad for you if you supply voiceover text and choose a song for background music  for free! Flipping that on its head, theres no discount for providing a ready-made ad over having them create one for you.

Last but not least, you upload a 640 x 640 image, enter a headline for the ad, and provide a target URL that listeners can click through to.

Once you submit your ad, theyll review it and email you back once its approved, which in my case was a matter of hours.

And thats how to promote your music with Spotify ads! But should you?

Lets talk about my campaigns, plural.

My Spotify Ad Studio results

My campaign objective was to get more streams on my new single, In Motion. The song scored a 7.5 on Crowd Review (which I review here), which placed it in the 91st percentile, earning it an automatic feature on the ReverbNation home page. I was optimistic.

I started by emailing Ad Studio support to ask if I should target by genre or by Color Theory fans, not knowing at the time that the latter wasnt an option. After a couple days with no response (I never got a reply), I bravely forged ahead.

I used Google Trends to see where in the US people were searching for the terms synthwave and synthpop, and targeted males 25-54 in those locations. As much as I want more female fans, I know from experience that they dont click on my ads.

IMPORTANT: Spotify free users cant listen to specific songs on mobile.

Therefore, I used my official playlist as the target URL, with In Motion at the top.

Heres the ad, with an unmistakable play button smack dab in the middle of my album art (it might not show up if youre running an ad blocker):

And heres the audio:

http://passivepromotion.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/In-Motion-Spotify-Ad1.mp3

Its super cringey, I know. But I wanted it to be memorable, in case people hear the same ad over and over again like on Hulu or YouTube. I was destined to be the big beautiful play button guy.

At first, I restricted my ads to desktop users, who can play individual tracks on-demand.

After 355 impressions, I had zero clicks, so I changed my targeting from desktop to iOS.

After 607 more impressions, I had 4 clicks, so I opened it up to Android users as well, and emailed support for suggestions.

After 340 more impressions, I only got one more click, but I did get a reply to my email:

Within a half hour, I emailed back a new voiceover to swap in.

The next morning the voiceover hadnt been swapped, so I emailed to ask if I should stop the campaign until it was:

I was worried that if I stopped the campaign, Id lose the rest of my money. So I didnt.

After two more days the voiceover still hadnt been swapped, and my results were hideous:

Unwilling to continue paying $6 per click, I stopped the ad. Honestly, Id think more people than that would touch their screens during my ad by accident!

I never received any acknowledgement or apology about the audio swap, but I did receive this email:

So of course I emailed back, explaining my predicament in full, being sure to point out that I would be writing an article about my experience. No reply.

No joke, I was considering investing some of my 401k money in Spotify stock when it opened, but if this is how they treat their advertisers, forget it.

UPDATE: I just heard back from Kristina, who never received my email. Apparently they dont know how to set up MailChimp so replies go back to the sender (hey guys, its under Lists  Settings  List Name and Defaults  Campaign Defaults).

Spotify ads, take two

When my email receipt for the ad only showed $30.29 instead of $250, I decided to give it one last shot.

This time I went with what I considered slam dunk targeting: male electronica fans in LA that likely grew up listening to Depeche Mode on KROQ like I did. I spread out my dates to slow down the ad delivery, giving me ample opportunity to bail.

For the image I chose my most eye-catching cover art, despite the fact that its from a 2010 album and not the single I was promoting:

Heres the slightly less cringey audio:

http://passivepromotion.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/In-Motion-Spotify-Ad2.mp3

My results were even worse:

Should you advertise on Spotify?

Needless to say, there are better options.

Heres a Facebook ad I ran for the same song (I hope to write about Facebook ads soon):

Obviously a 2.71% clickthrough rate beats 0.32%, and $0.17 per click beats $6.

In my mind, it all comes down to targeting. On Facebook, I targeted US men 18-34 who had an interest in Stranger Things, Drive (the 2011 film), and Spotify.

I dont think its just a matter of audio versus display ads, as my Pandora AMP messages see clickthroughs in the 5-10% range.

Until Spotify allows you to target your own followers, or better yet, your followers plus a broader lookalike audience, I wont be running another campaign.

The question remains as to whether Spotify free users are valuable targets in the first place. Most listening is done on mobile, and free users cant pick the tracks they want to listen to.

Its a safe bet that the most passionate music fans, or at least the ones willing to spend money on music, are premium subscribers. Since they dont hear ads, you cant reach them through Ad Studio.

Put another way, how likely is it that someone unwilling to spend $9.99 per month for unlimited on-demand music will pay that much to buy one of your albums?

Have you tried Spotify ads? Thinking about it? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

If youd like to hear more of my promotional escapades, be sure to subscribe to my How Im Promoting My Music This Month email newsletter.

Share on:The billion-dollar Lucas Museum in Los Angeles will be the future home of Rockwell's 'Shuffleton.'

George Lucas Buys Rockwell's 'Shuffleton's Barbershop'



The Lucas Museum will loan the painting to the Norman Rockwell Museum for up to two years. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  The under-construction $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has identified itself as the buyer of "Shuffleton's Barbershop."

Don Bacigalupi, director of the nonprofit museum, founded by George Lucas, told the The New York Times on Tuesday that the Norman Rockwell painting will be "one of the anchor works of our museum."

"As a museum dedicated to celebrating visual storytelling, we are honored to become the public steward of this major work," Bacigalupi said in a press statement. "Norman Rockwell is one of our nation's most important storytellers, and this cultural treasure will continue to be seen and enjoyed by the public in an American museum, where it will be a source of inspiration for generations to come."

The work is one of 40 pieces of art the Berkshire Museum is being allowed to sell under conditions hammered out with the attorney general's office. A Supreme Judicial Court ruling Thursday paved the way for the sales to begin after months of controversy and court battles.

The museum is seeking to sell the artwork at auction through Sotheby's and raise some $55 million to reinvest into the 100-year-old museum. The museum had been financially struggling and looks to renovate and create an endowment for long-term sustainability.

"Shuffleton's," donated by Rockwell himself to the museum in 1958, was expected to fetch $20 million to $30 million at auction. Lucas stepped in to offer an option that would keep the painting publicly accessible.

"One of the speculations and fears with a situation like this is that the painting could go into private hands and never be seen again," Bacigalupi told The Times. "Our commitment is really making this painting available to the public in perpetuity."

The agreement with the attorney general's office included the private sale of "Shuffleton's" to a then-unnamed U.S. museum. Bacigalupi said the Lucas Museum would abide by the agreement and the painting will be held at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge for 18 to 24 months, then be lent to an unknown number of other Massachusetts museums before finally being prominently displayed in Los Angeles.

The 300,000 square-foot Lucas Museum broke ground last month and is expected to take four years to complete. The institution will feature both fine and popular art and include cinema and digital mediums.

"Visitors who might be less inclined to visit a traditional fine art museum will be invited to engage with and relate to art forms they recognize and love," the museum's website states. It already has works by such prominent artists like Degas and Renoir, along with works by Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish.

The entire project is being underwritten by Lucas, who vaulted to pop culture fame with the iconic "Star Wars" and its expanding universe. The writer and director will settle at least a $400 million endowment on the institution and it will house most of his large collection of Rockwell works:"Shuffleton's" will join "Saying Grace" and After the Prom" in the collection.

"We are immensely grateful to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art for ensuring that Norman Rockwell's masterpiece 'Shuffleton's Barbershop' will continue to be available to and enjoyed by the public," said Rockwell Museum's Director and CEO Laurie Norton Moffatt. "It is especially meaningful for the people of Berkshire County who will have the opportunity to enjoy this masterpiece for a few more years, knowing that it will remain in the public realm. We look forward to continuing to work with our friends at the Lucas Museum to create educational opportunities and appreciation of the narrative art of illustration, including ongoing collection-sharing."

Thirteen other Berkshire Museum works will be auctioned in May by Sotheby's, including another Rockwell piece, "Blacksmith's Boy  Heel and Toe."

Museum officials say they hope to retain the other 26 works approved for sale, which include Albert Bierstadt's "Giant Redwood Trees of California," Alexander Calder's "Dancing Torpedo Shape," and Thomas Moran's "The Last Arrow."

"We now hope we can raise what the museum needs by offering for sale fewer than half of the works originally anticipated," said Elizabeth McGraw, president of the museum's board of trustees in a statement. "That's good for the museum and the community we serve."The Hill Side Cemetery Restoration members introduce themselves to the City Council on Tuesday. At the microphone is the youngest volunteer, Lily Marceau. With her are members Jim Roberts, Ed Marino, Randy Andrews Larry Burdick. Roger Eurbin explains what the funds from the Tinker account will go toward at Hill Side Cemetery. PreviousNext

North Adams Council Sets Clerk Committee, OKs Fund Transfers



A City Council committee will make recommendations on the replacement of City Clerk Marilyn Gomeau, who is retiring at the beginning of next year. NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  An ad hoc committee appointed by City Council President Keith Bona will be reviewing operations at the city clerk's office because of the coming retirement of City Clerk Marilyn Gomeau.

"Our current city clerk has unfortunately announced her retirement at the beginning of next year so we need to put some thought into the process of ... what's going to happen with the position," Bona said at Tuesday's council meeting. "The city clerk's office is the only office in City Hall that the council oversees hiring of the positions."

Gomeau has worked in the city clerk's office for nearly 20 years and succeeded longtime City Clerk Mary Ann Abuisi, who retired in 2003.

Bona appointed himself and Councilors Marie Harpin, Paul Hopkins and Joshua Moran, who was absent, to the ad hoc committee. The committee will make recommendations for Gomeau's replacement and determine if changes in staffing are required in terms of training.

"It would be wise to have a trained [assistant] clerk in place before the city clerk leaves," Bona wrote in an email last week.

The city clerk's budget for fiscal 2019 includes $5,400 for two months salary in case someone has to be brought in during a training period.

Assistant City Clerk Deborah Pedercini joined the office in January 2017. Should she be considered for promotion, she would still require more training, Bona wrote. "She hasn't been with us that long, and still learning the office herself."

Gomeau, speaking at Wednesday's budget hearing at the Finance Committee was concerned that two months' training would be too little.

"This person coming in for two months won't see an election," she said, advocating for longer, part-time period of training. Bona said that was something the ad hoc committee can take up. The council may hire the replacement and recommend training, but the budget for that comes from the mayor's office, he said.

Also at Tuesday's meeting, the City Council approved appropriations and transfers for voting machines and the Hill Side Cemetery Restoration.

Some $25,500 was appropriated from certified free cash for five new optical scanner voting machines. The current machines were purchased in 2007 but are now outdated and important parts are no longer available. The new machines would be similar but have updated security controls and be more user-friendly with a larger screen that will tell voters when their ballot is excepted and if they over voted.

The optical scanning machines, which read ballot cards but are not connected the internet, would be purchased from the same company, LHS Associates, as the current machines. Gomeau is recommending this purchase, saying that LHS would also provide training and have representatives on site the first time they are used.

The machines are being purchased in concert with several other communities so the city will get a rebate for the bulk purchase and will also get a $2,500 credit for returning the old machines and stands. Their lifespan is expected at 20 years. In response to questions about security, Gomeau said LHS did a recent audit of 48 random precincts and found the machines' counts were 100 percent accurate to the paper ballots.

The vote was unanimous for the appropriation but the council will have to make a separate vote on purchasing these particular machines.

The $4,000 was transferred from the Tinker Fund, set up by New York banker Edward R. Tinker in 1957 to maintain the Tinker mausoleum and surrounding cemetery. Mayor Thomas Bernard said the fund currently has $40,611. The volunteer Hill Side Restoration group has dipped into the fund several times over recent years for support in restoring the more than 200-year-old cemetery, including the purchase of a custom-made tripod for lifting heavy stones. Gravestones have been cleaned and righted, deteriorated bases repaired and broken and shattered stones restored.

Serious work in the cemetery began about three years ago and has been spearheaded by Roger Eurbin, who said the funds will be used for materials such as concrete, wood for building forums for bases and tools as needed. He anticipated completing the north side of the graveyard by early summer and moving across the street to the south side.

"In 2012, the town of Lenox determined that they had 49 headstones that were in a dangerous situation, 49, they allocated $45,000 to fix these 49 stones," he told the council. "We have done over 300 stones."

The mayor called the effort "really a labor of community investment."

In other business, the council gave final approval to the retail marijuana ordinances related to public consumption and fines.

 The mayor also provided the council with amendments to the ordinance on licensed marijuana facilities to take into account medical marijuana. The original passed by the council did not have that included and city officials declined at that point to reopen the ordinance so as to have a law in place by April 1, when the state began accepting applications. The changes were referred to the Planning Board and the Public Safety Committee.

 The council also authorized the mayor to lift the winter parking ban effective Monday, April 16, and approved a secondhand dealer license for Mary Ann George of Maryann-Tiques & Gifts on Ashland Street.Everyone eligible should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of long-distance travel or employment.

Vaccination should be voluntary but those who don't get vaccinated should be frequently tested for COVID-19 as a condition of long-distance travel and employment.

Both vaccination and testing should be voluntary and not required as a condition of long-distance travel or employment.

I defer to the judgment of lawmakers as long as they base their decisions on a consensus of medical professionals.

Vote

View ResultsOil Production1,2

Total OECD annual production of crude oil, NGL3, and refinery feedstocks increased by 2.6% in 2017 compared to 2016. This trend was driven by the OECD Americas (+3.5%), whilst production decreased in OECD Asia Oceania (-8.7%) and OECD Europe (-1.1%).

The United States experienced the highest growth, in absolute terms, despite the effects of Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, increasing production by 4.7% or 25 million metric tons (Mt). Canadian production also grew (+7.8%) on an annual basis, partially due to the recovery from the 2016 wildfires in Alberta. Meanwhile, Mexico experienced the largest decline (-9.6%) in production amongst OECD countries.

OECD Europes production decline was driven by Norway (-0.8%) and the United Kingdom (-2.0%). Italys production recovered by 8.6% as the Val d'Agri field restarted production.

The decline in OECD Asia Oceanias production was primarily due to Australia, where production fell by 9.6% or 1.5 Mt.

The OECD Americas was responsible for 83% of the crude oil and NGL produced within the total OECD, as seen below. Over half the total OECD production came from the United States alone which hit a new production record in 2017.

Refinery Gross Output (Production)

Refinery gross output of total products within the OECD increased by 1.2% or 23.2 Mt in 2017 with all OECD regions contributing to this growth.

OECD Europes output grew (+1.9%) despite the fire incidents at the Pernis refinery in the Netherlands and the Leuna refinery in Germany. Total gasoline was the only product category experiencing a decline (-1.2%) in the region.

The OECD Americas growth (+0.8%) was led by the United States (+1.4%), in absolute terms, followed by Canada (+6.4%). Mexican output declined (-19.0%), partially due to the fire incident at the Salina Cruz refinery, while Chiles output remained relatively flat (+0.3%).

Growth in OECD Asia (+0.8%) was driven by Korea (+5.2%), where notably the output of naphtha increased by 15.7%. Japans reduced output (-2.5%) was primarily due to a 15.9% decline in residual fuel oil output.

The ratio of refinery gross output to net deliveries (to the domestic market) for the OECD regions in total remained unchanged at 105.9% in 2017 compared to 2016. As seen in the figure below, OECD Europes refinery gross output of gasoline was much higher than the net deliveries of gasoline. The OECD Americas had the same excess output for middle distillates. Meanwhile, OECD Asia Oceanias refinery gross output was higher than net deliveries for both gasoline and middle distillates.

Oil Trade4

Total imports of crude oil, NGL, and refinery feedstocks to individual OECD countries were 1.6% higher in 2017 compared to 2016. OECD Europe and OECD Asia Oceania increased their imports by 3.6% and 0.8%, respectively, while the OECD Americas imports remained approximately unchanged (-0.2%).

Overall OECD imports of crude oil, NGL, and refinery feedstocks from Iran and Libya increased significantly by 43.4% and 30.3%, respectively, while imports from Angola decreased by 37.4%. Imports from Saudi Arabia and the Russian Federation declined by 4.5% and 1.6%, respectively, however they remained the largest exporters to the OECD regions.

Total imports of total products to individual OECD countries increased by 2.2% in 2017 compared to 2016. Growth in absolute terms was led by OECD Europe (+1.3%) followed by the OECD Americas (+3.5%) and OECD Asia Oceania (+3.8%). Notably, imports of residual fuel oil decreased across all OECD regions, by 19.9% in total.

Overall, the OECD continues to be a net exporter of refined products with exports increasing by 5.4% in 2017 compared to the previous year. Exports of crude oil, NGL, and feedstocks increased by 10.3% in 2017 with the largest volumes destined for the United States, mainly from Canada and the Far East.5

Oil Net Deliveries6

Net deliveries of refined products in the OECD grew by 1.2% in 2017 reflecting strong growth in OECD Europe (+2.6%) followed by the OECD Americas (+0.7%) and OECD Asia Oceania (+0.3%).

The increase in net deliveries in OECD Europe can be attributed to naphtha (+8.1%) and total kerosene (+5.3%). Gas/diesel oil net deliveries, the largest refined product category in the region, grew by 2.8% on average, but Turkey experienced an 8.8% growth.

In the OECD Americas, net deliveries of total kerosene and residual fuel oil grew by 4.8% and 14.8%, respectively. LPG net deliveries in the region declined by 7.7% in 2017, mainly driven by the United States (-7.9%).

In OECD Asia Oceania, net deliveries of residual fuel oil fell by 25.8% in 2017 as Japanese deliveries declined (-20.6%). Naphtha net deliveries in the region increased by 6.4%, mainly due to Korea (+9.2%). Gas/diesel oil net delivery growth was also notable in the region at 6.4% where Australia saw a 16.7% increase.

Oil Stocks

Total stocks of total oil on national territories within the OECD decreased by 4.6% in 2017 reaching 533 Mt. The stocks drawdown was highest in the OECD Americas (-7.4%) followed by OECD Europe (-3.0%) and OECD Asia Oceania (-0.7%).

The OECD Americas drop in stocks of crude oil, NGL, and feedstocks was the largest in magnitude at 14.8 Mt. This trend was driven by the start of the United States multi-year plan in 2017 to reduce crude oil stocks within their Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

In OECD Europe, total products stocks decreased by 5.2 Mt while crude oil, NGL and feedstocks stocks decreased by 0.5 Mt.

Stocks in OECD Asia Oceania were relatively stable in 2017 across all the regions countries. Stocks of crude oil, NGL and feedstocks were reduced by 1.1 Mt while refined products stocks increased by 0.4 Mt.

Key Oil Trends 2017 is also available as a PDF download.

1 - All annual comparisons are based on monthly data in 2017 compared to monthly data in 2016.

2- Includes crude oil, NGL, refinery feedstocks, additives and other hydrocarbons

3- Natural Gas Liquids

4- Trade amounts include intra-regional trade

5- Peoples Republic of China and Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Thailand, Viet Nam, Non-listed Far East

6- Gross inland deliveries observed minus backflows

For any questions or comments, please contact mos@iea.org. Please note that all IEA data are subject to the following Terms and Conditions.

Political prisoner, activist, journalist, hymn-writer, emerging think tanker, aspiring novelist, hanger on of academia, parliamentary candidate for North West Durham, Shadow Leader of the Opposition, Speedboat, proudly banned from Twitter so officially more dangerous than the Taliban, eagerly awaiting the second (or possibly third) attempt to murder me.Imperial Valley News Center

Troops on the Border

Washington, DC - Many years ago my two sons and I took a few days and traveled to Southern California. We enjoyed seeing some sights in Los Angeles and San Diego. It's was one of those fun things we did I'll always remember.

One thing not so fun was our decision to cross the border into Tijuana, Mexico. We had never been to Mexico and thought it would be interesting to visit and then we could say we had been there. We drove to a parking lot just on the border and left our car and took a designated walkway path that led us right into Mexico. We were greeted by lots of taxi drivers who offered us a ride. We climbed into a cab and got our ears full on into the town of Tijuana. The taxi driver was full of expletives about what Tijuana was all about which was mostly drunkenness and prostitution. It felt like the taxi ride from hell. I was embarrassed for our family and was glad when we could get out of the car.

I felt like we had stepped into a scum hole. There was nothing really worth seeing in Tijuana and every other building was a loud bar with lots of men on the street begging us to come in to see the prostitutes. We probably survived our visit maybe an hour hoping to see something worth seeing before we finally found a taxi to take us back to the border. The driver on the way back laughed and said, "We have nothing here worth seeing or losing. We are not like the United States. We have nothing to lose." When we got out of the taxi there was a long line of people waiting to get through customs back into the United States. What took only a minute to cross into Mexico took us almost two hours that day to get back into our country. We were so glad to cross back into California.

I don't have anything against Mexico. There are lots of beautiful vacation spots and lovely people in that country. I eat breakfast at a place in our town operated by wonderful people from Mexico. However, the taxi driver was right in one point of his comparison between Mexico and America. We are worth something and have plenty to lose in this country.

A friend of mine just moved from a Texas border community and was irritated because someone from Mexico came across the border and stole his motorcycle. "I'll never see it again," He said. He also told about families he knew close to the border who would never let their children play outside alone. "Those families are terrified of their children being kidnapped and taken across the border. They know if that happens they will never see their children again."

Utilize our national guard on the border. Drugs are flowing into our nation from Mexico. People are still crossing illegally. We need to protect our people. Our borders should be crossed legally and people should abide in our country legally. America is worth protecting.

Dr. Glenn Mollette is the author of 12 books. His syndicated column is read in all 50 states.

Books By Glenn MolletteImperial Valley News Center

Kicking Up Its Heels: A Somali Wild Ass Calf Explores Her Habitat at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park

Escondido, California - An almost 1-month-old Somali wild ass foal kicked up her heels and nuzzled her mom as she explored her exhibit at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park earlier today (Wednesday, April 11, 2018). The little foal, yet to be named, was born March 17. While the majority of her day is spent hanging with and nursing from mom, she also spends time frolicking with four yearlings and six other adults in her herd.

The Somali wild assin the same family as horses and zebrasis the smallest of the African equid species. They are recognizable by their soft gray body, white belly, spiky black-and-gray mane and, more notably, their black-and-white striped legs.

Native to the desert regions of eastern Africa, the Somali wild ass is listed as Endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species. The San Diego Zoo Safari Park is one of three facilities in North America with Somali wild ass, stated Justin Kranz, keeper, San Diego Zoo Safari Park. It is important to breed these endangered animals in managed care to keep the population as genetically diverse as possible. We are hoping to save them from the brink of extinction. It is estimated there are fewer than 1,000 Somali wild asses remaining in the wild. Since 1986, 49 foals have been born at the Safari Park.

Visitors to the Safari Park may see the young foal and her herd from an Africa Tram tour. In addition, Safari Park guests wont want to miss Butterfly Jungle presented by San Diego METRO Credit Union, which remains open through April 15. Butterfly Jungle features more than 30 species of colorful butterflies fluttering lightly through a beautiful aviary filled with lush greenery and 18 species of exotic birds. Butterfly Jungle is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is included with Safari Park admission.

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 Zoo Institute for Conservation Research, as well as international field programs on six continents. The work of these entities is made accessible to children through the San Diego Zoo Kids network, reaching out through the internet and in childrens 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.

courtesy of San Diego NewscapeImperial Valley News Center

Vice President Mike Pence on Speaker Ryans Decision to Not Seek Re-Election

Washington, DC - Vice President Mike Pence: "Few Americans have done more to advance the conservative agenda over the last 20 years than Paul Ryan and I will miss his leadership and friendship when he leaves Congress at the end of this year.

"Paul is my friend, a former colleague, a true patriot, and I congratulate him on his long service to Wisconsin and to the American people.

"As Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan was instrumental in enacting President Trumps agenda and we will be always be grateful for his partnership and support.

"Under his leadership, House Republicans delivered for the American people. Paul Ryan has been a fierce defender of our military, a leader in ushering historic tax reform through Congress, and a public servant with a heart for helping lift up the less fortunate.

"I know Paul will continue to be a great representative for the people of Wisconsin through the rest of his term and we will continue to work every day with him to keep our promises to the American people.

"Thank you Paul Ryan for your decades of service to our country. God bless you, Janna, and your three wonderful children, Liza, Charlie, and Sam."Imperial Valley News Center

Fighting Climate Change on the Farm

Washington, DC - Our food system contributes about 30 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other sector except energy production. At the same time, agriculture is the human endeavor most threatened by drought, increased rainfall, higher temperatures, and other impacts of climate change.

But agriculture can also be the solutionadapting to, mitigating, and even reversing the effects of climate change. It is time to innovate, says U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva, This time, innovation means increasing the resilience and sustainability of our food systems, especially in the face of climate change. Agroecology, for example, could be key to helping our global food system weather the challenges of a changing climate in more socially and environmentally sustainable ways. For instance, in Niger farmers are using agroforestry to improve crop yields and soil health while protecting trees on farmland. And the Kansas-based Land Institute is helping farmers all over the world discover the value of perennial grain crops for battling food insecurity and climate change.

Researchers and other organizations are also seeking ways to improve agricultures effects on climate change, and vice versa; for example, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS) has laid out three pillars of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), while TEEBAgriFood has developed a framework to estimate the real costs and benefitsincluding environmental and social costs and benefitsof different food and agriculture systems. Moreover, organizations like the West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development (CORAF) and the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) are working to develop and spread technologies and crop varieties to help farmers adapt to climate change.

These possibilitiesand the stories of hopeare what Food Tank is excited about, and we want to know from our readers: What agricultural innovations do you think work best as a way to combat climate change? We want to know from you whats working and why!Imperial Valley News Center

FTC addresses Ubers undisclosed data breach in new proposed order

Washington, DC - In its August 2017 proposed consent agreement with Uber, the FTC alleged, among other things, that the companys unreasonable security practices resulted in a May 2014 data breach. But theres more to the story now. According to the FTC, Uber experienced another breach in the fall of 2016  right in the middle of the FTCs nonpublic investigation  but didnt disclose it to the FTC until November 2017. To address that issue, the FTC has withdrawn from its original settlement with Uber and announced a new proposed settlement. Its the story behind that story that your company will want to know about.

In addition to a count about deceptive assurances Uber made to consumers in response to reports that employees were accessing riders personal information, the FTCs August 2017 complaint included a second count related to security lapses in Ubers use of a third-party cloud storage service. Despite the companys expansive security claims, the FTC charged that a series of Uber decisions and omissions  when taken together  resulted in unreasonable security for personal data Uber stored on that service.

Among the lapses the FTC challenged, one proved particularly damaging: Ubers policy of allowing its staff to use a single access key that provided full admin privileges over the sensitive data Uber stored in clear, unencrypted text on that cloud service. Why was that decision so fateful? Because when an Uber engineer publicly posted an access key on GitHub, a code-sharing site popular with software developers, an intruder used that all-access backstage pass to grab personal data about more than 100,000 people.

That May 2014 breach was cited in the FTCs original action against Uber. However, Uber experienced another breach in the fall of 2016 also stemming from lax security choices Uber made in its use of the third-party cloud storage service. Once again, intruders used an access key that an Uber engineer had posted on GitHub. This time, the key was posted to a private GitHub repository. However, Uber let its engineers access the companys GitHub repositories through engineers individual accounts, which were generally tied to personal email addresses. Uber didnt prohibit its engineers from reusing credentials and didnt require them to enable multi-factor authentication when accessing the companys GitHub repositories. The intruders said they got access by using passwords that were exposed in other big data breaches. In a one-month period, intruders used that plain-text access key to download 25.6 million names and email addresses, 22.1 million names and mobile phone numbers, and 607,000 names and drivers license numbers of U.S. Uber riders and drivers.

Uber learned of the breach on November 14, 2016, when an attacker contacted the company, demanding a six-figure payout. Uber paid $100,000 through the third party that administers Ubers bug bounty program. Many companies have bug bounty programs to offer rewards for the responsible disclosure of serious security vulnerabilities. But unlike a legitimate bug bounty, this was an Uber pay-out to the same attackers who maliciously exploited the vulnerability to steal personal information about millions of people.

Uber failed to disclose the breach to affected consumers until November 21, 2017, more than a year after the company learned about it. Furthermore, the fall 2016 breach occurred while Uber was in discussions with the FTC about its investigation of the May 2014 breach, which also related to the companys practices for securing consumer data stored on the third-party cloud service. Despite the pendency of that probe, Uber didnt tell the FTC about the second breach until November 2017.

Whats the upshot of this revelation? When the FTC announces an administrative settlement, the proposed consent agreement is put on the record for 30 days for public comment. After considering the comments, the FTC either accepts the order as final or doesnt. In this instance, the FTC has withdrawn its proposed settlement with Uber and is entering into a new agreement that also will be on the record for 30 days for public comment beginning today through May 14, 2018. The FTC will then decide whether it should withdraw from the new agreement or accept it as final.

Whats different about the new proposed complaint and order? The complaint includes an additional section describing the allegations related to the fall 2016 data breach. The proposed order features a number of additional provisions designed to address what happened in this case and protect consumers in the future. Youll want to read the order for the specifics, but here are some ways that its notably broader.

The order proposed in August 2017 would have required Uber to implement a comprehensive privacy program. The new order requires the program also to address: 1) secure software design, development, and testing, including access key management and secure cloud storage; 2) how Uber reviews and responds to third-party security vulnerability reports, including its bug bounty program; and 3) prevention, detection, and response to attacks, intrusions, or systems failures. Under a new provision, Uber will have to submit a report to the FTC about any episode where the company has to notify any U.S. federal, state, or local government entity about the unauthorized access of any consumers information. And the reporting and recordkeeping provisions have been expanded to keep a closer eye on what Uber is up to, including the operation of its bug bounty program and communications with other law enforcers.Scrumptious California Tour

Sacramento, California - Get your foodie passport ready to tour scrumptious California veggie country!

With over 970 thousand acres of harvested vegetables, melons, and strawberries, the just released USDA NASS Vegetables 2017 Summary places California at a whopping $7.85 billion in vegetable production  over half of the U.S. total of $13.8 billion. Where are all of these amazing crops grown? Lets take a trip through some of the most delicious and prosperous rural regions in the Golden State.

Just as the treasured garlic clove rests behind pale, papery covers, the small farming community of Gilroy waits to be discovered off the 101 and 152 travel corridors. Gilroy is centrally located at the southern gateway to Silicon Valley, about 30 miles south of San Jose. California produced over $322 million worth of fresh market garlic. Wowzers! Gilroy may not be in the largest garlic-producing county, but its farmers might claim to be the proudest. Look closer to discover an amazing world-class garlic community touting the internationally renowned Gilroy Garlic Festival and continual celebration of all things garlicky.

The NASS Vegetables 2017 Summary positions California as a leading example of rural prosperity. The Golden State is the top producer of artichokes, head lettuce, leaf lettuce (yeah, its different from head lettuce), romaine, broccoli, spinach and more. Weather, alternating between a moist marine layer from the nearby ocean and cool sunny days, provides the perfect climate to grow everyones favorite smoothie superfoods in its verdant valleys.

Lettuce head over the 152 to Highway 101 for more tasty fun in Monterey County, an area often referred to as the Salad Bowl of the World. First stop is a Fibonacci favorite, the butter-loving artichoke (it grows according to the mathematical sequence discovered by  you guessed it  Fibonacci). Northern Monterey County features the U.S. artichoke capital in the prosperous rural town of Castroville. From bold artichoke sculptures to daring recipes, the annual Artichoke Festival celebrates Californias official state vegetable. According to the Vegetables Summary, California is the sole U.S. producer of artichokes, with production valued at more than $65.5 million in 2017.

Monterey County boasts some of the most beautiful farmland east of Highway 1. Literary aficionados may know Salinas for the annual Steinbeck Festival (you may have heard of John, great American author and all that), but did you know the Salinas Valley is also recognized as one of the top leafy green producing areas in California? Some of your favorite green superfoods grew up the Salinas Valley of Monterey County. California produced over $850 million of the nations $926 million broccoli crop and more than half, $242 million, of the nations $401 million spinach crop. What a vegetable delight!

Scrumptious strawberries make salads, cakes, and even the annual NASS Vegetables Summary more delicious. Take Highway 101 down the coast to Ventura County in May for the California Strawberry Festival held in Oxnard. The festival celebrates the $3.1 billion California strawberry industry (out of the U.S. total of $3.5 billion).

As you complete your culinary loop back north, consider a drive up Highway 5 or 99. This is the famous Central Valley, where California farmers work hard to feed the country and the world the best foods. If its tomato harvesting season, dont be surprised to see a few tomatoes strewn along the roadside. Sometimes they fall out of the steady stream of overflowing trucks on their way to the processing plants. The Vegetables Summary suggests everyone loves tomatoes  its a billion-dollar crop for California and the United States.

No matter which direction you drive in California, you will see a great variety of vegetable crops and a range growing conditions and seasons. You may see small organic farms supporting the burgeoning farm to fork movement. Down the road, you may come across larger farms that grow vegetables that end up on peoples plates across America and the world. No matter which way you turn, you will be amazed at what California farmers can grow and thankful for their bounty.U.S. schoolchildren suffer from a history deficit

Washington, DC - The Department of Education conducts periodic assessments of the proficiency of Americas Elementary, Middle School and High School students. Their findings have been alarmingly dismal as they relate to the knowledge our children have of our countrys history and that does not bode well for the future. Without knowing the past  who we are as a nation -- future generations will not be able to function responsibly, says education advocate David Bruce Smith.

Smith says that parents understandably want whats best for their children by giving them a good education that will lead to a good job when they leave school. In fact, he points out, the mission of our schools is to teach them how to become educated and conscientious citizens and he cites Devin Foley, CEO of IntellectualTakeout, an organization focused on education: you can have an opinion and you can vote, but you have no real understanding of the lessons of the past, both good and bad. Indeed, if you dont know your history, you have no idea where we have come from and how it formed the present. The future is not yours to shape, but merely to stumble blindly into.

Is history such a daunting subject and is that why students lack proficiency in the subject? No, says Smith. But, it can be boring. Ask students about history class, and youre likely to hear that word, over and over. Lets face it: the textbooks and handouts can be pretty dull and, as a result, it may be hard for youngsters to make a connection with their lives today.

It was the late Dr. Bruce Cole, former chairman of the Endowment for the Humanities, who inspired Smith to create the Grateful American Book Prize. Together they established the Prize in 2015 to confront the history deficit in our schools.

The idea was to get more authors and their publishers to put out more engaging works of historically accurate fiction and nonfiction for young learners. And, it would appear that there are now more well researched books based on the events and personalities of U.S. history being published each year.

Over the three years since the Prize was established weve received hundreds of books that fulfill our mission. And they all stir up a desire among teen and preteen readers to learn more about our countrys past, according to Smith.

Author Jonathan Stokes had this to say when he submitted his book, The Thrifty Guide to the American Revolution, for the 2018 Prize: I love the mission of The Grateful American Book Prize. When I was in public school, the American Revolution was taught as the driest, dustiest topic imaginable. It was only as an adult that I discovered the Revolution is one of the most incredible underdog stories of all time. My goal in writing my guide to the American Revolution is to make the history as exciting and accessible as possible to kids.With less than a month before the May 8 primary election, the race for Marion County Sheriff is heating up.

Former U.S. Marshal Kerry Forestal and former IMPD Deputy Chief William Bill Benjamin are running for the Democratic nomination.

This contest is important because the winner of the primary is also likely to win the general election in November and replace outgoing Sheriff John Layton, a Democrat who cannot run again because of term limits. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Marion County.

Indy Politics analyst Abdul-Hakim Shabazz summed up the campaign by saying, While Forrestal enjoys much establishment support, Benjamin is well known in the African-American community and has much of their support.

Forestal, who was most recently a lieutenant colonel with the Sheriffs Office, is endorsed by the powerful Marion County Democratic organization and supported by officials such as Mayor Joe Hogsett and retired Sheriff Frank Anderson, the first African-American elected to the position.

Benjamin, a 28-year IMPD veteran who is now director of security for Tindley Schools, has built an energetic grassroots campaign.

However, a key factor of success for both candidates is the financial strength of their campaigns. Campaign finance reports filed in January with the Marion County Clerks Office show Forestal raised $227,647 while Benjamin raised $9,915. The finance reports offer a clear view of who is powering the candidates for sheriff.

Democratic numbers

Forestal received individual contributions ranging from $50 to $2,000 from influential Democrats such as former state party chair Ann Delaney, former county chairmen Kip Tew and Ed Treacy, and prominent attorney Lacy Johnson.

A political action committee funded by the local Sikh community provided $5,000. Last Chance Wrecker and Sales, a company that won city contracts to tow vehicles, gave $500 to Forestals campaign. He also received hefty sums from corporate donors such as Monarch Beverage and Barnes and Thornburg law firm. Unions such as AFSCME, Firefighters Local 416, the IBEW and Teamsters Local 135 also offer solid support.

Benjamin received donations ranging between $1,000 and $3,000 from State Sen. Greg Taylor, cleaning company owners Mike and Lynn Montgomery and Sgt. Todd Lapin, an IMPD investigator and member of the Task Force on Human Trafficking.

State Rep. John Bartlett and former City-County Council members Paul Bateman and Sherron Freeman also donated to Benjamins campaign.

Republican numbers

Marion County has become solidly Democratic over the last decade, but three Republicans are running for the GOP nomination. They include IMPD detective Brian Durham, Sheriffs deputy Jim Grimes and Southport Police Chief Tom Vaughn.

Durham is backed by the Marion County Republican Party and raised $21,449 during the last reporting period. More than half of Durhams individual contributions that period came from people who live outside Marion County. His major donors include Pathfinder CPA Group and Stables Banquet Barn, an event center.

Grimes has mostly self funded his campaign and raised $31,670. State Sen. Brent Waltz contributed $250 to his campaign. Vaughn raised $6,981, with his largest contribution being $1,000 from Zores Towing.

Fascinating findings

Former Public Safety Director Robert Turner made $500 contributions to both the Benjamin and Forestal campaigns.

Grimes campaign gave a $250 donation to the Ten Point Coalition, a predominantly African-American crime reduction organization.

Retired Sheriff Joe McAtee, the last living Republican to serve in the position, did not endorse any of the GOP candidates. He has contributed $1,200 to Democrat Forestal.

Security companies such as Stalnaker Security Services, Protection Plus and Home Security Specialist contributed to Forestals campaign.

Durham has the backing of bail-bonding enterprises such as American Bonding Co. and Judge Bail Bonding.

Contact Brandon Perry at (317) 924-5143 ext. 308. Follow him on Twitter

@BrandonPerry117.

Campaign finance reports explainedTaranjit Parmar, an Indian American student studying at Adelphi University in New York, was killed last November when a driver hit her car and then allegedly ran over her as she got out to examine the damage. (Facebook remembrance page photo)Anika Kumar, an Indian American student who founded Forget Me Not, which aims to reduce feelings of loneliness among seniors by partnering them with teens in a companionship phone call program, was one of the youngest speakers at the 2018 SXSW Festival. (forgetmenotservices.org photo)Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users, including in India, had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)The East African region is emerging as one of the most prolific oil and gas exploration sites in the world.

Thousands of global and local buyers and sellers will gather in Kenya to meet leading experts in the Oil and Gas sector at the 7th Oil and Gas Kenya 2018, which opens at The Kenyatta International Convention Centre. Last year, more than 100 exhibitors presented their latest products and production capabilities to buyers from Europe, the United States, Asia, and the Middle East at Africas Prime Oil and Gas trade exhibition. The event, which runs from 29-31 May 2018, showcases Africa as a global sourcing destination.

The 5000 square-meter convention floor will welcome various decision makers and influencers as well as technical and professionals involved in the oil and gas Industry within Africa and around the globe.

This year's expo, which is organized by the Expogroup, Supported by East African Chamber of Commerce Industry and Republic of Kenya Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, is expected to exceed the feats of Oil and Gas 2017, which brought together 80 international companies, 70 of which subsequently pledged to source from Africa. As for the current exhibitionthese numbers are expected to increase after the success of the last exhibition on the local and international levels, last year consisted the biggest aftermarket brands on-board, spread over 15 product categories, Drilling, Cranes and Winches, Lifting &Well Completion Equipment, Floating and refining equipment and services to name a few.

Last year, with more than 100 exhibitors combined, Drilling, Lifting & Well Completion Equipment, Floating and refining equipment and services comprised the largest portion of Oil and Gas Kenya and = featured global stalwarts such as Delta Pipe And Tube Trading LLC, Aiv Europe Ltd, Cable Depot Fzco to name a few.

Some of the exhibitors shared their experience of last years Oil and Gas Expo...

Evelyne Vuyanzi Brand Manager, Toyota Kenya Ltd, Kenya said This year we chose to participate in this event, it is, in fact, the only prime exhibition for our company to showcase our products and the ideal platform for every Oil & Gas company to promote their products.

Amr Said General Manager, Corex Service Ltd., Egypt To participate this exhibition is a great opportunity to develop our business in AFRICA. We have been targeting the African market for a long time, through the show we got the chance to find highly motivated importers and distributors that can introduce our products in their respective markets.

Sandeep Kumar Marketing Manager, Western Corporation Limited, UAE said This OIL & GAS exhibition has been a success for WESTERN CORPORATION LIMITED in our first visit at this event. The customers also perceive this event as a 'MUST VISIT' destination for discussing their requirements.

Connect with the right people for your company; this is just a beginning of greater opportunities. There is no better place to be for getting market players, decision-makers and investors in one room, especially in this region that has huge potential.

Oil and Gas Kenya will continue to deliver growth to your business and to East Africa for years to come. It will be a combination of attendees, exhibitors and hours of networking. So you can mark your calendars, as the 7th Oil and Gas Kenya 2018 awaits.

Do not miss out on this unparalleled opportunity to network with industry peers and define the future of the East African Oil and Gas industry, be there to be part of the change.About this course...

This intensive 2.5 or 4-day course has been presented nearly 1,000 times to more than 23,000 people. Organized for managers, engineers, geologists, landmen, scientists, accountants, and others concerned with evaluating investments, this course relates to the economic analysis of income producing and service producing investments using discounted cash flow analysis criteria and procedures.

The course covers economic analysis techniques used to optimize the development and operation of mining, petroleum and non-natural resource production and processing operations.

The course textbook, Economic Evaluation and Investment Decision Methods, 15th Edition, 2017 by Franklin J. Stermole, John M. Stermole, and Andrew H. Pederson, demonstrates the evaluation techniques presented using a variety of applications for people with technical and non-technical backgrounds, with or without previous evaluation experience.

Classes for Economic Evaluation and Investment Decision Methods will be held on the campus of Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado USA. Specific locations on campus for each session will be identified in material sent to each registrant prior to the first day of class.

The campus is located near Denver, Colorado and is about a 45-minute drive west on I-70 from Denver International Airport. Directions to the campus, campus maps, and campus parking information are available.



We need hard evidence about what happened in Douma before threatening war.





By Scott Ritter

April 11, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - On Sunday, President Trump announced his intention to make those responsible for an alleged chemical weapons attack on Douma, including the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies, pay a big price for their continued disregard for international law. The next day U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley declared that The United States is determined to see the monster who dropped chemical weapons on the Syrian people held to account.

President Trump reinforced his call for action on Monday, noting that the United States would not sit back in the face of the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syria. It will be met, and it will be met forcefully, the president said, adding that those responsible for the attack will be held accountable, whether it was Syria, Russia, Iran or all of them together. Trump noted that a decision to use military force would be made over the next 24 to 48 hours.

The pronouncements of imminent military action by the United States are not made in a vacuum. Russia, which has considerable military forces deployed inside Syria, including advanced military aircraft and anti-aircraft missile batteries, has rejected the allegations of chemical weapons use by Syria as a fabrication, and promised that any attack on Syria would result in serious repercussions. Russian forces inside Syria have reportedly been placed on full alert as American naval vessels capable of launching cruise missiles have arrived off the Syrian coast.

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The United States and Russia appear to be heading toward a direct military confrontation that, depending on the level of force used and the number, if any, casualties incurred by either side, carries with it the risk of a broader conflict. While Russian (and Syrian) claims of innocence regarding the alleged chemical weapons attack cannot be accepted at face value, the fact that the United States has not backed up its own claims with anything other than a recitation of accusations made by rebel groups opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad is problematic insofar as it shows a rush to judgement on matters of war. Given the potentially devastating consequences of any U.S.-Russian military clash over Syria, it would be better for all parties involved to wait for a full and thorough investigation of the alleged attack before any final decision on the use of force in response is made.

There are two versions of what happened in Douma, a suburb of Damascus home to between 80,000 and 150,000 people. The one relied upon by the United States is provided by rebel forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. According to the Violations Documentation Center (VDC), a non-profit organization comprised of various Syrian opposition groups funded by the Asfari Foundation and George Soros Open Societies Foundation, at approximately 12 p.m. the Syrian Air Force attacked the vicinity of the Saada Bakery using munitions believed to contain poisonous gas. The VDC cited eyewitness accounts from members of the Syrian Civil Defense, or White Helmets, who described the smell of chlorine and the presence of numerous bodies assessed to have succumbed from gas sourced to a Syrian rocket. Later, at 7 p.m., a second air strike struck an area near Martyrs Square, again using munitions assessed by eyewitnesses to contain poisonous gas. Doctors from the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) described symptoms that indicated that a nerve agent had been used. Images of victims in the locations allegedly attacked were released by a rebel-affiliated social media entity known as the Douma Revolution and the White Helmets.

Douma is part of a larger district known as Eastern Ghouta which has, since 2012, been under the control of various militant organizations opposed to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In early February 2018, the Syrian Army, supported by the Russian Air Force, began operations to recapture the Eastern Ghouta district. The joint Syrian-Russian offensive was as brutal as it was effectiveby March, Eastern Ghouta had been split into three pockets of resistance at a cost of more than 1,600 civilian dead. Two of the pockets capitulated under terms which had the opposition fighters and their families evacuated to rebel-held territory in the northern Syrian province of Idlib. Only Douma held out, where Salafist fighters from the Army of Islam (Jaish al-Islam) refused to surrender. On April 5, the situation had deteriorated inside Douma to the point that the rebel defenders had agreed to negotiations that would lead to their evacuation of Douma; the very next day, however, these discussions had broken down, and the Syrian military resumed its offensive. The air attacks described by the VDC occurred on the second day of the resumption of hostilities.

There is a competing narrative, however, provided by the Russian government and those sympathetic to its position. After the breakdown of negotiations between the Douma rebels and the Russian government on April 6, the story goes, the Syrian government offensive to liberate Douma resumed. The Douma rebels, faced with imminent defeat, fabricated the allegations of a chemical attack. Russia had warned of such a provocation back in March 2018, claiming the rebels were working in coordination with the United States to create the conditions for a massive American air attack against Syrian government infrastructure.

Shortly after the Syrian government resumed its offensive against Douma (and after the opposition forces publicized their allegations of Syrian government chemical weapons attacks), the rebel resistance inside Douma collapsed, with the fighters agreeing to be evacuated to Idlib. The Russian military was able to dispatch units to the sites of the alleged chemical weapons attacks and conduct a survey. According to the state-run Russian news, no evidence of a chemical weapons attack was discovered. Representatives of the Syrian Red Crescent who claim to have worked in Douma stated that they have seen no evidence of any chemical weapons use there, either.

Beyond providing a competing narrative, however, Russia has offered to open up Douma to inspectors from the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, for a full investigation. This offer was echoed by the Syrian government, which extended an official invitation for the OPCW to come to Douma. On April 10, the OPCW announced that it would be dispatching an inspection team shortly to carry out this work. The forensic technical investigatory capabilities of an OPCW inspection team are such that it would be able to detect the presence of any chemical agent used in Douma. While the investigation itself would take days to conduct and weeks to process, its conclusions would, under these circumstances, be conclusive as to the presence of any prohibited substance.

One major drawback to any OPCW investigation is its inability to assess responsibility for the presence of any banned substances detected. In prior investigations inside Syria, the OPCW was able to operate as part of the United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), an entity specifically empowered by Security Council resolution to make such determinations. The mandate of the JIM was not extended, however, after Russia expressed its displeasure over what it deemed to be the inaccurate and politicized findings regarding previous allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government. The United States has submitted a resolution to the Security Council demanding that a new investigatory body be formed that would be able to provide attribution for any chemical weapons attack inside Syria; whether Russia would veto such a resolution or allow it to be passed has yet to be seen.

The bottom line, however, is that the United States is threatening to go to war in Syria over allegations of chemical weapons usage for which no factual evidence has been provided. This act is occurring even as the possibility remains that verifiable forensic investigations would, at a minimum, confirm the presence of chemical weapons (thereby contradicting the Russian claims that no such evidence was detected by its troops), and if the Security Council passes a resolution allowing for a properly mandated investigation team, actual attribution could be assigned.

Moreover, President Trumps rush to judgment on Syrian guilt is being done in a highly politicized environment, coming as it does on the heels of an FBI raid on the offices of the presidents personal attorney. In times such as this, a president is often attracted by the prospect of looking presidential in order to offset personal problems (one only need to look at President Clintons decision in August 1998, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, to launch cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan.)

If America is to place its military in harms way, it needs to be in support of a cause worthy of the sacrifice being asked of those who serve. Giving the OPCW time to carry out its investigation in Syria would allow a fact-based case to be made whether military force was justified or not, as well as support a determination of whether or not the risks associated with the use of force were warranted. Pulling the trigger void of such information, especially when Trump is distracted by personal political issues, is not something the American people, nor their representatives in Congress, should tolerate.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the Wests Road to War..

As Senator Tim Kaine has pointed out, President Trump should be required to have permission from Congress before taking military action. Hes a president, not a king, and Congress needs to quit giving him a blank check to wage war against anyone, anywhere, Kaine said. If he strikes Syria without our approval, what will stop him from bombing North Korea or Iran?

Democrat or Republican, your Rep. should help stop Trump from striking Syria.Macedonia Apologizes to Man Who Was Seized & Tortured in Secret CIA Prison By Democracy Now!



Macedonia has issued a formal apology to Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who was wrongly seized by Macedonian intelligence services while on vacation in 2003, then handed over to the CIA.



The CIA stripped him naked and drugged him, before flying him to a secret U.S. jail in Afghanistan where he was repeatedly tortured.



Five months laterlong after the CIA concluded el-Masri was innocenthe was flown to Albania and left by the side of a rural road in the middle of the night. The U.S. has never apologized or held anyone responsible for its role in his detention and torture. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter ===== 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.The Saudi-Israeli Liaison

By Lawrence Davidson

April 11, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - In a 2 April 2018 interview in the Atlantic, Saudi Arabias Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly declared that the Israelis have a right to live in their own land just like the Palestinians. It is a problematic assumption, given that the Israelis own land is the land they took away from the Palestinians. This, and much else, has been either forgotten or ignored by the Saudi crown prince.



Seventy-three years ago Saudi Arabias first king, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, expressed a very different position in a series of letters to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For instance in a letter of November 1938 Ibn Saud had wrote The [European] Jews have no right to Palestine and their claim is an act of injustice unprecedented in the history of the human race. Sadly, there was in fact plenty of precedent when it came to colonial injustice, but Ibn Sauds declaration certainly demonstrated the Kings depth of feeling. Other letters followed, predicting that Palestine was bound to become a hotbed of disturbances and troubles if the Zionists got their way.



The two leaders finally met face to face in 1945 on the U.S. Cruiser Quincy during FDRs return trip from Yalta. In that meeting Roosevelt tried to convince the Saudi ruler to allow European Jewish occupation of Palestine. Ibn Saud countered that Make the enemy and the oppressor pay; that is how we Arabs wage war. He continued, "Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander. What injury have Arabs done to the Jews of Europe? It is the 'Christian' Germans who stole their homes and lives. He finally added that The Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their land to the Jews."



Part II - What Has Changed?



Now Crown Prince bin Salman shows us that a lot has changed in the intervening years. Zionist Israel has become an established fact on the ground and thus settler colonialism is well rooted in Palestine. Saudi Arabia has, perhaps begrudgingly, accepted this change - and it is not hard to see why.

The Saudis have built their security around an alliance with Israels major backer, the United States. One price paid for that alliance has been a de facto acceptance of Israels existence. Thus, Saudi dislike of Israel has been largely rhetorical. However, it would seem that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has finally abandoned even that facade. That is why during the princes recent trip to the U. S., he was found publicly rubbing shoulders with AIPAC.

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In the face of their inability to do anything about the Zionist occupation of Palestine, the Saudis have moved on to focus on other enemies. This proved easy because there has always been another assumed foe out there. This enemy is the Shiite Muslims, whom the Sunnis have always seen as apostates. Specifically, the enemy is now Shiite Iran. The Saudi crown prince, once more resorting to hyperbole, claims that countrys supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, "makes Hitler look good. Then there are Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Zaydis Houthi of Yemen - all Shiite and all seen as enemies.



The interesting part of this shift in enemies is that by now focusing on the Shiites, and particularly Iran (which, since the 1979 revolution, has not accepted the permanence of Zionist Israel), the Saudi crown prince has discovered that there are a lot of interests we share with Israel.



Operating on the motto that the enemies of our enemies must be our friends, the Zionist Israelis have become good Jews in the eyes of the present aspiring Saudi leader. Also, the Saudis have become good Arabs in the eyes of the Zionists. Both now intrigue together against their common enemies.



Part III - The Odd Couple

The Saudis and the Israelis no doubt make an odd couple. However, there are, if you will, inborn similarities. For instance:



 Both Israel and Saudi Arabia assert that they are chosen people and therefore nations blessed by their one true God. In both cases this assertion has led to a claim that the territory they control is holy land - divinely granted to them.



 Also, in both cases, the religious leadership of society exercises guiding influence over many internal policies.



 As a consequence, both the Saudis and the Israelis run their respective countries like restricted clubs. One demands that you be Jewish to have membership rights, and the other wants you to be a Wahhabi Sunni Muslim. Outsiders claiming equal club rights (here read citizenship) are going to be restricted, persecuted or just expelled. And, of course, in both cases minority groups do claim such rights: in Israel it is the Palestinians and in Saudi Arabia it is the Shiite population of the eastern Arabian peninsula.



Part IV - Conclusion



Looked at objectively, both Saudi Arabia and Israel should be anachronisms. Two nations making outrageous, unprovable claims of divine right that in turn excuses undemocratic, racist-like behavior and policies. And the United States, which also sees itself as God-blessed, readily backs them both.



What this suggests is that, even amidst an increasingly high-tech culture, medieval thinking is still with us - deeply enough embedded to influence the thinking of millions, shape government policy and wage crusades. Glory be!

Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history from West Chester University in West Chester PA. His academic research focused on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East. He taught courses in Middle East history, the history of science and modern European intellectual history.

=====

Join the DiscussionApril 11, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce today, fresh off the heels of a grueling five-hour joint session before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees yesterday. In total, Zuckerberg will face questions from nearly 100 legislators, and many of those legislators have received thousands of dollars from the company Zuckerberg runs.

Over the last 12 years, Facebook has spent $7 million in campaign contributions. Historically, Facebook has donated slightly more to Democrats than Republicans, but overall, the platforms political footprint is small in Washington, DC relative to its market cap, which is currently calculated at about $400 billion. Thats not unusual for technology companies: Amazon spent $4 million in campaign contributions over 20 years, and it has a market cap of nearly $700 billion. (Note, however, that Alphabet, Inc., with a market cap just over Amazons, appears to be outspending Facebook in DC by an order of magnitude.)

According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, since 2014, Facebook has contributed a total of $641,685 to the members of Congress that Zuckerberg is facing this week. The top recipients of that money include Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA).

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The amount of money received didnt necessarily correlate to the hostility of questions asked by the legislators in Zuckerbergs first hearing. That said, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) did make a somewhat bizarre pro-Facebook comment, saying, Some have professed themselves shocked, shocked that companies like Google and Facebook share user data with advertisers. Did any of these individuals stop to ask themselves why Google and Facebook dont charge for access? Nothing in life is free. Hatch has taken $15,200 from Facebook since 2014  the sixth largest amount on the combined committees.

But other senators who have received even larger campaign contributions from Facebook didnt hold back. Cory Booker, who has received $44,025 from Facebook since 2014 (the largest amount), questioned Zuckerberg on the 2016 ProPublica investigation that showed Facebook allowed advertisers to target by race. Kamala Harris, who took the second largest amount ($30,990) grilled the CEO on why Facebook did not notify users in 2015 that Cambridge Analytica had misused their data, causing Zuckerberg to squirm uncomfortably.

If any senators pulled their punches, it was along party lines, when small-government Republicans like Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) or Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) questioned the necessity of additional regulation. At one point Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) held up a tablet and pointed at the Facebook privacy tab, blaming individuals for not properly reviewing their own settings. Wicker has received $10,000 from Facebook since 2014, Tillis has received $7,500, and Sullivan has received a whopping $2,500.

The campaign contributions from Facebook to all the legislators who posed Mark Zuckerberg questions this week are listed below. The list includes the members of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees and House Committee on Energy and Commerce are listed in full below, and dates back to 2014.

Committee Leaders Legislator Committee Role Party 2014 Cycle 2016 Cycle 2018 Cycle Total 2014-2018 Grassley, Chuck (R-IA) Senate Judiciary Chairman R $1,000 $4,000 $0 $5,000 Feinstein, Dianne (D-CA) Senate Judiciary Ranking Minority Member D $10,000 $1,000 $0 $11,000 Thune, John (R-SD) Senate Commerce Chairman R $3,500 $5,000 $2,000 $10,500 Nelson, Bill (D-FL) Senate Commerce Ranking Minority Member D $2,500 $5,000 $2,500 $10,000 Walden, Greg (R-OR) House Energy & Commerce Chairman R $7,500 $7,000 $5,500 $20,000 Pallone, Frank (D-NJ) House Energy & Commerce Ranking Minority Member D $3,500 $0 $2,500 $6,000

Senate Search: SENATOR PARTY COMMITTEE 2014 Cycle 2016 Cycle 2018 Cycle Total 2014-2018 Booker, Cory (D-NJ) D Judiciary $42,000 $0 $2,025 $44,025 Harris, Kamala (D-CA) D Judiciary N/A $28,275 $2,715 $30,990 Leahy, Patrick (D-VT) D Judiciary $2,500 $13,900 $0 $16,400 Klobuchar, Amy (D-MN) D Commerce, Judiciary $2,500 $8,200 $5,200 $15,900 Hatch, Orrin (R-UT) R Judiciary $9,200 $4,000 $2,000 $15,200 Heller, Dean (R-NV) R Commerce $3,000 $2,500 $8,900 $14,400 Blunt, Roy (R-MO) R Commerce $0 $14,100 $0 $14,100 Lee, Mike (R-UT) R Commerce, Judiciary $2,500 $11,000 $0 $13,500 Blumenthal, Richard (D-CT) D Commerce, Judiciary $6,000 $7,200 $0 $13,200 Schatz, Brian (D-HI) D Commerce $2,500 $10,000 $0 $12,500 Gardner, Cory (R-CO) R Commerce $0 $4,000 $7,900 $11,900 Feinstein, Dianne (D-CA) D Judiciary $2,500 $0 $8,935 $11,435 Udall, Tom (D-NM) D Commerce $10,000 $1,000 $0 $11,000 Thune, John (R-SD) R Commerce $3,500 $5,000 $2,000 $10,500 Nelson, Bill (D-FL) D Commerce $2,500 $5,000 $2,500 $10,000 Tester, Jon (D-MT) D Commerce $0 $5,000 $5,000 $10,000 Cornyn, John (R-TX) R Judiciary $5,000 $5,000 $0 $10,000 Fischer, Deb (R-NE) R Commerce $2,500 $5,000 $2,500 $10,000 Wicker, Roger (R-MS) R Commerce $0 $2,500 $7,500 $10,000 Cantwell, Maria (D-WA) D Commerce $0 $0 $9,100 $9,100 Coons, Christopher (D-DE) D Judiciary $5,000 $2,500 $0 $7,500 Flake, Jeff (R-AZ) R Judiciary $5,000 $2,500 $0 $7,500 Moran, Jerry (R-KS) R Commerce $2,500 $5,000 $0 $7,500 Tillis, Thom (R-NC) R Judiciary $0 $5,000 $2,500 $7,500 Johnson, Ron (R-WI) R Commerce $1,000 $5,000 $0 $6,000 Hirono, Mazie (D-HI) D Judiciary $0 $0 $5,200 $5,200 Peters, Gary (D-MI) D Commerce $0 $5,000 $0 $5,000 Grassley, Chuck (R-IA) R Judiciary $1,000 $4,000 $0 $5,000 Sasse, Ben (R-NE) R Judiciary $0 $2,500 $2,500 $5,000 Baldwin, Tammy (D-WI) D Commerce $0 $0 $3,535 $3,535 Graham, Lindsey (R-SC) R Judiciary $3,500 $0 $0 $3,500 Whitehouse, Sheldon (D-RI) D Judiciary $0 $2,000 $1,000 $3,000 Crapo, Mike (R-ID) R Judiciary $2,500 $0 $0 $2,500 Sullivan, Dan (R-AL) R Commerce $0 $0 $2,500 $2,500 Young, Todd (R-IN) R Commerce N/A $0 $2,500 $2,500 Capito, Shelley Moore (R-WV) R Commerce $0 $1,000 $1,000 $2,000 Duckworth, Tammy (D-IL) D Commerce N/A $0 $1,000 $1,000 Durbin, Dick (D-IL) D Judiciary $0 $0 $0 $0 Hassan, Maggie (D-NH) D Commerce $0 $0 $0 $0 Markey, Ed (D-MA) D Commerce $0 $0 $0 $0 Masto, Catherine Cortez (D-NV) D Commerce $0 $0 $0 $0 Cruz, Ted (R-TX) R Commerce, Judiciary $0 $0 $0 $0 Inhofe, Jim (R-OK) R Commerce $0 $0 $0 $0 Kennedy, John (R-LA) R Judiciary N/A $0 $0 $0

House of Representatives Search: REPRESENTATIVE PARTY 2014 Cycle 2016 Cycle 2018 Cycle Total 2014-2018 Eshoo, Anna (D-CA) D $17,800 $18,100 $3,900 $39,800 Walden, Greg (R-OR) R $7,500 $7,000 $5,500 $20,000 Scalise, Steve (R-LA) R $10,000 $7,000 $2,500 $19,500 Shimkus, John (R-IL) R $4,000 $8,000 $2,000 $14,000 Upton, Fred (R-MI) R $12,000 $0 $2,000 $14,000 Degette, Diana (D-CO) D $4,000 $4,000 $1,000 $9,000 Guthrie, Brett (R-KY) R $3,500 $3,000 $2,500 $9,000 Kinzinger, Adam (R-IL) R $3,000 $3,000 $2,500 $8,500 Welch, Peter (D-VT) D $2,500 $4,000 $2,000 $8,500 Matsui, Doris (D-CA) D $2,000 $4,000 $2,000 $8,000 Blackburn, Marsha (R-TN) R $4,500 $3,000 $0 $7,500 Walters, Mimi (R-CA) R $0 $4,500 $3,000 $7,500 Olson, Pete (R-TX) R $1,000 $4,000 $1,500 $6,500 Burgess, Michael (R-TX) R $0 $5,000 $1,000 $6,000 Long, Billy (R-MO) R $1,000 $2,000 $3,000 $6,000 Lujan, Ben (D-NM) D $2,000 $3,000 $1,000 $6,000 Pallone, Frank (D-NJ) D $3,500 $0 $2,500 $6,000 Butterfield, G.K. (D-NC) D $0 $4,500 $1,000 $5,500 Latta, Robert (R-OH) R $0 $0 $5,000 $5,000 Rodgers, Cathy McMorris (R-WA) R $1,000 $1,500 $2,000 $4,500 Cardenas, Tony (D-CA) D $1,000 $2,000 $1,000 $4,000 Clarke, Yvette (D-NY) D $0 $3,000 $1,000 $4,000 Hudson, Richard (R-NC) R $0 $2,500 $1,500 $4,000 Kennedy, Joseph (D-MA) D $0 $3,000 $1,000 $4,000 Ruiz, Raul (D-CA) D $2,000 $750 $1,000 $3,750 Cramer, Kevin (R-ND) R $0 $1,000 $2,000 $3,000 Johnson, Bill (R-OH) R $1,500 $1,500 $0 $3,000 Mcnerney, Jerry (D-CA) D $1,000 $1,000 $1,000 $3,000 Rush, Bobby (D-IL) D $1,000 $2,000 $0 $3,000 Schrader, Kurt (D-OR) D $0 $2,000 $1,000 $3,000 Costello, Ryan (R-PA) R $0 $0 $2,750 $2,750 Collins, Chris (R-NY) R $0 $1,500 $1,000 $2,500 Peters, Scott (D-CA) D $0 $1,500 $1,000 $2,500 Brooks, Susan (R-IN) R $0 $2,000 $0 $2,000 Bucshon, Larry (R-IN) R $0 $2,000 $0 $2,000 Doyle, Michael (D-PA) D $0 $0 $2,000 $2,000 Griffith, Morgan (R-VA) R $0 $2,000 $0 $2,000 Mullin, Markwayne (R-OK) R $0 $500 $1,000 $1,500 Bilirakis, Gus (R-FL) R $0 $1,000 $0 $1,000 Carter, Buddy (R-GA) R $0 $1,000 $0 $1,000 Dingell, Debbie (D-MI) D $0 $0 $1,000 $1,000 Duncan, Jeff (R-SC) R $0 $0 $1,000 $1,000 Flores, Bill (R-TX) R $0 $1,000 $0 $1,000 Green, Gene (D-TX) D $0 $1,000 $0 $1,000 Harper, Gregg (R-MS) R $0 $0 $1,000 $1,000 Sarbanes, John (D-MD) D $0 $1,000 $0 $1,000 Barton, Joe (R-TX) R $0 $0 $0 $0 Castor, Kathy (D-FL) D $0 $0 $0 $0 Engel, Eliot (D-NY) D $0 $0 $0 $0 Lance, Leonard (R-NJ) R $0 $0 $0 $0 Loebsack, David (D-IA) D $0 $0 $0 $0 McKinley, David (R-WV) R $0 $0 $0 $0 Schakowsky, Janice (D-IL) D $0 $0 $0 $0 Tonko, Paul (D-NY) D $0 $0 $0 $0 Walberg, Tim (R-MI) R $0 $0 $0 $0 This article was originally published by "The Verge " -

 2018 Vox Media, Inc. All RightsApril 11, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - The media onslaught has moved past the attack in Salisbury by a weapon of mass destruction (quoting Theresa May) which could only be Russian, except that was untrue, and was extremely deadly, except that was untrue too. It now focuses on an attack by chemical weapons in Douma which could only be by the Russian-backed Assad regime, except there is no evidence of that either, and indeed neutral verified evidence from Douma is non-existent. The combination of the two events is supposed to have the British population revved up by jingoism, and indeed does have Tony Blair and assorted Tories revved up, to attack Syria and potentially to enter conflict with Russia in Syria.

The Russian attack in Salisbury is supposed to negate the not our war argument, particularly as a British policeman was unwell for a while. Precisely what is meant to negate the why on earth are we entering armed confrontation with a nuclear power argument, I do not know.

Saudi Arabia has naturally offered facilities to support the UK, US and France in their attempt to turn the military tide in Syria in favour of the Saudi sponsored jihadists whom Assad had come close to defeating. That the Skripal and Douma incidents were preceded by extremely intense diplomatic activity between Saudi Arabia, Washington, Paris and London this year, with multiple top level visits between capitals, is presumably supposed to be coincidence.

I am not a fan of Assad any more than I was a fan of Saddam Hussein. But the public now understand that wars for regime change in Muslim lands have disastrous effects in dead and maimed adults and children and in destroyed infrastructure; our attacks unleash huge refugee waves and directly cause terrorist attacks here at home. There is no purpose in a military attack on Syria other than to attempt to help the jihadists overthrow Assad. There is a reckless disregard for evidence base on the pretexts for all this. Indeed, the more the evidence is scrutinised, the dodgier it seems. Finally there is a massive difference between mainstream media narrative around these events and a deeply sceptical public, as shown in social media and in comments sections of corporate media websites.

Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter

The notion that Britain will take part in military action against Syria with neither investigation of the evidence nor a parliamentary vote is worrying indeed. Without Security Council authorisation, any such action is illegal in any event. It is worth noting that the many commentators who attempt to portray Russias veto of a Syria resolution as invalid, fail to note that last week, in two separate 14 against 1 votes, the USA vetoed security council resolutions condemning Israeli killings of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza.

The lesson the neo-cons learnt from the Iraq war is not that it was disastrous. It was only disastrous for the dead and maimed Iraqis, our own dead and maimed servicemen, and those whose country was returned to medievalism. It was a great success for the neo-cons, they made loads of money on armaments and oil. The lesson the neo-cons learned was not to give the public in the West any time to mount and organise opposition. Hence the destruction of Libya was predicated on an entirely false we have 48 hours to prevent the massacre of the population of Benghazi narrative. Similarly this latest orchestrated crisis is being followed through into military action at a blistering pace, as the four horsemen sweep by, scything down reason and justice on the way.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.Sabcat said: Do we know the delivery system used? What information do we actually have?



isn't this almost a year to the day since the last one? Click to expand...

Saturday, April 7, 2018 at approximately 4pm: The Syrian air force targets Saada Bakery on Omar Ibn Al-Khattab street in with an airstrike suspected to have contained poisonous gas. Click to expand...

Yes it is almost to the year. Another reason it seems like grandiose posturing by Russia/Assad. Another thing is Russian and Assad are not denying they did it, they are denying it even happened. Sorry, we know it happened.I dont agree we should be playing policeman, but at the same time I feel if we are going to then do it right. Do not handcuff are forces with bullshit. At least Trump up to date has let Mattis run things and its worked.Home Search ICH By Finian Cunningham April 11, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - So, the world is counting the hours to see whether the US and its allies will launch a military strike on Syria. If this war plan goes ahead, the attack will be furious - and the repercussions grave, as Russia sternly warned this week. Indeed, we are talking about the very real danger that any US-led military action against Syria will rapidly escalate into a region-wide, or even world war. Russia has alerted that any missiles targeting its ally Syria will be shot down and their launchers destroyed. The latter inevitably means US warplanes and naval vessels. Already, Syria is set to explode into a wider war involving Russia and Iran on one side, and the US, Britain, France, Israel and Saudi Arabia on the other. Repeated lethal air strikes on Syria by Israel  again this week  are hardly met with condemnation, even when Iranian nationals were killed. US and Allies Hold World in Terror Siege With War Threat The stance of President Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, as well as Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May is abominable. These three leaders are threatening to take coordinated military action against Syria allegedly over a chemical-weapon incident last weekend. They have no evidence of the alleged incident, despite bombastic statements blaming Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies. At times, the Western leaders even admit they have no evidence, saying "if confirmed" to qualify their condemnations. Yet on the basis of no evidence, the US, Britain and France are declaring preparations to strike Syria. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter This is typical of the general degradation of international law by these three arrogant powers. The Skripal poison case in Britain is a particular illustration of how prejudice and contempt for due legal process have become par for their course. The war threats against Syria are made even before inspectors from the UN-affiliated Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have entered Syria  at the request of the Syrian government and Russia by the way  to carry out an investigation into the alleged chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta on April 7. Moreover, there is plausible reason and evidence to show that the purported incident was actually a false-flag provocation staged by the Western-backed militants precisely for the purpose of creating a pretext for external military intervention. Thus, President Trump and his NATO allies have absolutely no legal grounds for carrying out a military strike on Syria. It is entirely criminal what they are proposing to do. Nikki Haley, the insufferably ignorant American ambassador at the UN, declared this week that her country reserves the right to militarily hit Syria  with or without a mandate from the Security Council. This is tantamount to proclaiming a prerogative for lawlessness and unlimited aggression. The US and its allies are flouting international law to openly perpetrate the supreme war crime of aggression. Adding to the obscene spectacle is the flagrant expedience of the three Western leaders. Trump is being assailed with serious allegations of having affairs with a porn star and a Playboy model. The president is fighting for his political survival over alleged corruption and pay-offs to his accusers who claim to have had trysts with Trump. Britain's Theresa May is facing the collapse of her government over the Brexit debacle, which is tearing her country apart due to immense economic uncertainty for Britain after it quits the European Union next year. In addition, the Skripal poisoning affair has boomeranged to show that British Cabinet ministers have been caught out lying over allegations against Russian in a supposed assassination plot against a former Russian spy in England last month. British scientists lately admit they haven't confirmed the Russian origin of the alleged nerve poison, despite ministers earlier claiming they did confirm. Also, the Skripal affair is beginning to look like a farcical British propaganda stunt, which in truth resembles more a case of abduction by Britain's authorities. As for France's Macron, his presidency is reeling from nationwide industrial strikes against plans to ransack workers' employment rights. Macron is so desperate to salvage his political and economic woes that this week he shamelessly pandered to the visiting Saudi Crown Prince to seek more multi-billion-euro arms deals. Banging the drums of war over Syria is music to the ears of the Saudi rulers, and Macron is banging furiously to ingratiate himself. Trump, May and Macron  three politically damaged leaders  are pushing a war in Syria out of venal expedience. Regardless of any proof to justify their aggression, and regardless of the very grave repercussions involving a world war. The audacity is staggering. Only 15 years ago, the US and Britain launched a war on Iraq based on lies over non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. As many as one million lives were destroyed by this American and British aggression. Washington, London and Paris are currently supporting a genocidal war by Saudi Arabia against Yemen, where millions of children are starving to death due to a blockade of the country. Meanwhile, the US and its allies are silently complicit as Israeli military snipers shoot dead unarmed Palestinians protesting against illegal occupation. And the Israelis post videos celebrating their cold-blood murdering spree. Syria has been salvaged from a seven-year covert war for regime change orchestrated and sponsored by Washington, London and Paris, as well as Saudi Arabia and Israel, among others. It was Russia and Iran's military intervention that decisively defeated the terror proxies waging the war for Washington and its accomplices. And now we have the Western state terror-sponsors threatening to attack Syria. Of course, the conduct of Washington, London and Paris is criminal if they do go ahead with their military aggression on Syria in the coming days. But even if these Western warmongers do not deliver on their threats to strike Syria, it is still abominable that they even make such threats. The incitement of war and blackmail to use military force is in itself a war crime. Washington, London and Paris are holding the world to ransom with their wanton, self-entitled right to use violence  in complete contempt for international law. These three Western powers are engaging in state-sponsored terrorism against the entire world, by pushing the planet to the brink of all-out war. There would seem to be not many options to rectify the appalling situation. Perhaps a war does indeed erupt, and Russia and its allies inflict military defeat on the arrogant US-led forces. Or perhaps, the people in the US, Britain and France finally recognize the warmonger leaders they have in their midst, and rise up to overthrow them. 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 " - ===== 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. Search Information Clearing House === Click Here To Support Information Clearing House Your support has kept ICH free on the Web since 2002. Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.Today, i want to share with you, Four different Young teenagers have over stepped the boundaries and shared too intimate photos on Facebook.

The first photo is that of a Girl who is just Fourteen (14) years old, Her name is Gift Simeon and shes residing in Lagos State. According to the user who decided to give us more indepth information about Gift Simeon, she shared some emotional writeup about why this young girl, decided to go wayward.

She said 14 yrs old Gift and her elder sister always roam the street after their Mother travel and leave for work. Young Gift and her elder sister roams the street, and answers any guy who call them.

Here is the Picture that broke Nigeria internet

Who do you think should be blamed?

Is this 14 years old girl to be Blamed, Elder sister or her Mother, who leaves them and travel for work?

I certainly would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.

TEDDY SKITT

Taking 3rd Position for Nigeria teenagers who have disgraced themselves on Social media is Teddy Skitt.

Teddy Skitt is a young 14 Yrs Old Nigerian Girl, who decided to shares after S Vdeo of she and her Man on facebook, where she proudly disclosed that her man Made Her Night.

Now, looking at their picture clearly, you have to ask yourself who is fooling who here?

Going through Facebook, i came across a rather sad but viral post, where a facebook user who goes by the name Teddy Skitt shared this short video earlier today.

According to her bio, she lives in Port Harcourt but hails from Imo State. The young girl captioned the video: Good morning. Boo made my night. I love u baby

Like I asked before, whose child is this?Former president Goodluck Jonathans daughter, Faith Sakwe and her husband, Godswill Edward, are celebrating their 4th wedding anniversary today April 12th. The former president pulled all the stops to host a dream wedding for Faith and her husband in 2014.

Godswill took to his Facebook page this morning to celebrate his wife and mother of his two children

4 years today, its been an awesome journey and experience with you my love. Thanks for all we share, for constantly standing by my side, for being my no one fan always.#happy4yearsanniversarytous #p7dynast he wrote

Congrats to them!Real Madrid fans have officially dubbed Christaino Ronaldo a GOAT. Which means Greatest Of All Times, after he scored a penalty against Juventus last night to earn Madrid a place in the Champions League semi-finals. Real Madrid fans have taken to social media to sing C.Ronaldos praise as they bash Messi for ghosting when Barca encountered Roma. See funny reactions below;

Must be hard being a messi fan these days tho. Watching Ronaldo score in 10 consecutive champions league games while your goat is chopping yellow card against Roma   JAGS (@EtniesJags) April 11, 2018

Ronaldo is Real Madrid personified. The hunger, the drive, the mentality, the calmness, the quality, everything. Forever thankful for everything he has done. GOAT.  JP (@Emperor_RM) April 11, 2018

Your GOAT couldn't score a penalty in 2012 against Chelsea, your GOAT Was busy eating grass yesterday in Rome but you are shouting Penaldo Penaldo Keep up the Noise and Watch Us Lift The Champions League Again!!!!!!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/5UuDzEDBcE  Village Headmaster (@josh_cr7) April 11, 2018

Real Madrid knocked out Juventus that Barcelona couldn't even score a goal against last season. Real Madrid defeated Roma over two legs last season, that same Roma that knocked Barcelona out of the UCL Your MCM couldn't score a "tap in" again both teams yet he is the GOAT  Ayo (@Meedey03) April 11, 2018

After facing two Italian teams in the quarter finals.

_

GOAT Vs Ewure . pic.twitter.com/aEi7SfXWHe  Dayor  (@kvng_dayo) April 11, 2018

Your MCM ghosted home and away against ROMA

Mine scored home and away against Juventus

And you want to tell me that they're mates? There are levels to this GOAT thing  KhalKenshin (@la_OK3) April 11, 2018

Barca Fans Now Criticizing Ronaldo For Scoring A Penalty In A Very Important Game While Forgetting Their Goat Bottled A Penalty In A Final!!. Midget Bottling Company!!  Brighter Days (@OneXMind) April 11, 2018

Please y'all should co-ordinate Lionel Messi is the goat and we're not dragging with him again. CR7 is officially a COW!!  Baba Ibeji (@Marapolsa) April 11, 2018

Don't ever compare the little midget who goes missing against Roma against the goat ever again pic.twitter.com/dabmIWWjmG  C (@VivaMartiaI) April 11, 2018A 28-year old housewife, Mrs. Rita Esosa Ogbuenyi has landed in trouble for displaying her strength on her husband, Mr. Henshawell Ogbuenyi, 42, by intimidating and constantly beating him up in their matrimonial home.

The alleged assault took place at their matrimonial home located at House 18, Diamond Estate in Ikeja area of Lagos where they resided.

It was learnt that the husband married Rita some years back but did not know that she had enormous strength until she started beating him up constantly and eventually intimidated him.

It was gathered that whenever there was a little quarrel between Rita and her husband, Henshawell, she will grab him and beat him mercilessly until he becomes helpless and plead with her.

According their neighbours, the intimidation and beating continued but the husband was ashamed to reveal what he was passing through in his home.

However, the man became afraid that the constant beating by Rita might lead to his untimely death if she did not stop and he decided to open up.

Henshawell then went to the police and reported the intimidation and assault. Rita was arrested and charged to court for assault.

She was arraigned at Ogba Magistrates Court before the Presiding Magistrate, Mr. Peter Nwaka for the alleged offence.

The court granted Rita bail in the sum of N100,000 with one surety in like sum. The court ordered that the surety must show evidence of tax payment tax in Lagos State.

The prosecutor, Mr. Christopher John did not object to her bail condition because it was a bailable offence.

However, Rita was remanded in prison custody pending when she will perfect her bail condition.

The matter was adjourned till 22 May, 2018.A club known for its rich history and tradition. Manchester United are among the famous clubs in Europe. Its success over the years has attracted a pull of players from all around the globe.

The resurgent club though has had to spend a lot of quid for players during the post-Ferguson era. We take a look at the clubs most expensive signings. Jose Mourinho became the first manager to hit the 1 billion mark in transfer outlays, hence it is no news that he has made some of the clubs most expensive signings since he took over in 2016. After most expensive signing, bet lovers tend to regain their trust for the club and this can be noticed in the way they seek betting affiliate code to place bet on Manchester united.

1) Paul Pogba (89)

A product of the clubs youth system, Pogba returned to Manchester looking to exorcise the doubts nurtured prior to his move to Juventus in 2012.

The big money move though hasnt been a considerable success, largely down to overwhelming performances. Reports have surfaced the Frenchman could be set for an exit, amid reports of a fall out with Mourinho.

2) Romelu Lukaku (75m)

Signed from Everton from a huge fee of 75m in 2017. The Belgian international arrived Old Trafford looking to quash doubters who labelled him a flat-track bully.

11 goals in his first 11 games went a long in proving that .Although, the 25 year-old had a mild barren spell. An improvement is his all round play should been commended in his first season at the club.

3) Angel Di Maria (53.5M)

Coveted By a host of clubs after aiding Real Madrids triumph in the Champions league. The 29 year old was snapped by Manchester united and expected to become a star in the Premier league.

The Argentine though after a bright start struggled to feature consistently, but was eventually offloaded to PSG after a single season under Van Gaal.

4) Juan Mata (37.1M)

The playmaker had a brilliant spell at Chelsea, securing back to back player of the year awards. However, a lack of game time under new boss Jose Mourinho saw the diminutive midfielder make the short trip to Manchester for a fee of 37.1m.

The Spanish international has been a constant fixture, reaching double figures in his three seasons at Manchester United.

5) Anthony Martial (36m)

United paid a record fee for a Teenager when they acquired the services of Anthony Martial from Monaco in the summer of 2015.

The prospect had an impressive first season, netting a superb goal on his debut against Liverpool and scoring 17 goals in all competitions. His form though faded thereafter and has been in and out of the side since.

Leave a Comment

commentsAnticult Volunteer Corps (AVC), will NEVER be distracted nor condone any illicit act towards the general public as we must bring to justice (as our slogan portrays) everybody involved in the any act against the LAW

Umunede community might not understand the gravity of provocation which has been ignited by few insane being and whom must dance to the music they played.

These set of AYES is reported to be responsible for the killing of One of the personnel of the AVC Umunnede Unit.

Their days of evil are over as justice must prevail on this case and Umunede community must know that cultists have no place to hide within and around Umunede as we have set our ex-ray satellite deep on perpetrators of this evil murder act.

The gallantry usual services of Anticult Volunteer Corps (AVC) IKA UNIT ably led by our KINGSLEY OKONTA (AGBOR ZONAL COMMANDER) in a joint operation with EAGLE NET SQUAD of the DELTA STATE POLICE COMMAND did apprehended Nine members of the with weapons which can cause instant or slow-sure death.

AVC will resist any form of truncation to seeing these arrested suspects face the laws of the land.

We remain focused and more dedicated to ensuring above one hundred percent (100%) safety of lives and properties including zero tolerance to every formation of violent cult related activities within Delta State.

Eseka Nathaniel

Deputy Director

Department of Intelligence and Media

Anticult Volunteer Corps (AVC),

Delta State,

Federal Republic of NigeriaPunch

President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday said the killings in some parts of Nigeria would soon come to an end as his administration was finding solutions to them.

Vanguard

lagosBarely two days after President Muhammadu Buhari declared his intention to contest 2019 election, students of Lagos State in tertiary institutions, across the country yesterday demanded that Governor Akinwunmi Ambode to publicly declare his intention for a second term.

Thisday

In attempt to help reduce mouth-related diseases amongst the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), the State House Clinic, Abuja, has trained 200 IDPs children below the ages of 16 years on the need to brush their mouth and keep it clean regularly. The Sun Kaduna: El-Rufai engages 17,000 monarchs to tackle insecurity Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El Rufai, has engaged the services of 17,000 village heads, to assist the state government in tackling insecurity as well as mobilise to their subjects to immunise their children against child killer diseases. Tribune

The Director-General of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Engr Mustapha Maihaja on Wednesday said N1.5 billion suspicious contracts were awarded in the agency before his assumption of duty.

The Nation

Who are the killer-herdsmen? They are gunmen trained by the late Libyan President Muammar Gadaffi, President Muhammadu Buhari said yesterday. Leadership Ayade Weeps As He Signs Historic N1.3trn Budget Into Law Cross River State Governor, Prof Ben Ayade, Tuesday, wept profusely at the state executive council chambers whilst signing the historic 2018 budget of N1.3 trillion into law. Daily Trust We were paid N.5m each to impeach NaAbba, Jagaba tells courtThe Lagos State Police Command says it has uncovered an illegal brewery at Egbe-Afa in Igbogbo area of Ikorodu, Lagos State, while five suspects have been arrested.

Edgal Imohimi, Lagos State Commissioner of Police, made this known to journalists at the scene on Wednesday.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the illegal brewery was producing malt drinks, stout and ethanol which they pumped into trucks to bottle at another location.

Mr Imohimi said that the suspects would be subjected to further interrogation to know where the drinks were bottled and sold.

He said that the illegal brewery would be sealed and samples of the drinks would be sent to the laboratory for test.

The police chief attributed discovery of the illegal brewery to the efforts of community policing and partnership.

According to him, the people of Lagos are showing increasing confidence in the police.

Mr Imohimi urged residents to know their neighbours, saying that vigilance was the only way to have a crime-free society.

This success story of the police is an evidence that community policing and partnership is working in the state.

This is an illegal distillery where malt, stout and ethanol are being produced in an unhygienic environment thereby feeding poison to the people.

You will recall that a fake wine factory was also discovered at Mushin recently. This is as a result of vigilance. I encourage the people to do more.

This is an information which should have got to the police earlier, but I commend the people for sharing this information with the police.

People must be deeply involved in crime fighting and this can only be done if we are vigilant.

Lagosians can only give credible information to the people when they are healthy; so I will encourage you to say something when you see something, he said.

NAN reports that the illegal brewery has more than 1,000 drums of brewed malt and 100 tanks where the drinks are pumped before supplying tankers.

A building where operational items of the suspects were kept was also located close to the illegal brewery.

(NAN)General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, has advised pastors of the church in attendance to warn their parishioners about the danger of ignoring tithing. Adeboye said this as he spoke at the April edition of the monthly Holy Ghost Service at the Redemption Camp, along Lagos/Ibadan Expressway. In his words;

I want to give every one of you pastors an opportunity to repent tonight.

And then to go back, immediately after this convention, to restitute your ways with your congregation.

Make it clear to themAnyone who is not paying his tithe is not going to heaven, full stop.

Some Nigerians however took to Twitter to react. Read below;

Oga pastor Adeboye wen u and yur co pastors go stop to dey brainwash our people, people hve enuff problem to deal wit 4 life,why u & yur co pastors dey add more: FULL STOP! Without tithe you will not make heaven, says Pastor Adeboye [Video]  WuzupNigeria https://t.co/IWeGP9zBxu  Seun Anikulapo Kuti (@RealSeunKuti) April 12, 2018

Na Adeboye father get heaven and why be say Na all these Pentecostal dey always emphasis on tithe like say Na Dem born Jesus?  #BlackLiveMatter (@OlugbengaBlacks) April 12, 2018

Anyone who is not paying tithe is not going to heaven  Pastor Adeboye says

Me: THIEVES!!!  Daniel Elombah (@Elombah) April 12, 2018

Oga Pastor, please let me worry about hell fire as I am not ready to give a kobo out of my hard earned recession money to any man of God in the name of tithe, particularly people like you who fly in a private jet while i struggle with my small jalopy to work every day.  Valentine Onyeakazi (@VCoolH23) April 12, 2018

He is in heaven. Now he is the gateman in heaven.

Liars. I wonder how ppl revere liars in d name of pastors.

First it was cursed

Second no open heaven

Third no blessing

Forth you will be having misfortune

Fifth you wont go to heaven Stupid antics to swindle money from ppl  Evince Sammy (@EvinceSammy) April 12, 2018

Any pastor that doesnt pay their tax would aswel go 2hell Because it was stated in the Bible that we should give unto Caesar what belongs 2 Caesar. I hope u knw that sir  Vicky*Spiceman#ProRockstar (@Victor19249217) April 12, 2018

The bizness of whether I make heaven or not is my personal bizness. So whether I pay tax or not lemme be d one to worry about dat. Tnk u  Jlo (@joychibuogwu_7) April 12, 2018

God did not say you wont make heaven if you dont pay your tithe. He said he will open the floodgates of heaven to bless you if you do pay your tithe. People should not misquote Gods words. People should spend time in reading their bible. Not my pastor say. Thank you  calabar talkactive (@beckleyhans) April 12, 2018A Pastor identified as Joshua Ibeneme approached an Igando Customary Court in Lagos to end his 21-year old marriage to his wife for allegedly having sex with two of his Church members.

According to NAN, Ibeneme told the court that his wife was messing around with his male members.

My wife had sexual affair with two of my church members, a deacon and a bishop.

Both were boasting telling my other members that they slept with my wife because she enticed them.

Whenever I return from a trip, my last born always tells me that men came to pick and drop my wife. Even God told me to divorce her or else she will destroy my ministry, he claimed.

The petitioner said that his wife denied him sex for five years.

My wife starved me of sex for over five years. Whenever I want to sleep with her, she will be given one excuse or another, in fact, she had moved out of my room to a separate room.

But she gives it to my members freely, the pastor said.

The 53-year-old pastor said that his wife was always mocking and embarrassing him in public telling people about his sexual performance.

He said that his wife always accused him of having affairs with any female member who came to the house for counselling.

She accused them of dating me and also goes to their houses to fight them. Her behavior and attitude have chased members away from my church, he said.

According to him, his wife instigated their children against him, they do not respect him and they refused to run errands for him except when their mother permitted them to do so.

He begged the court to divorce the loveless union claiming he was no longer in love with his wife.

However, the respondent, Uzomaka, denied having sex with their church members but accused her husband of infidelity.

It is women that cause our frequent fighting, they are the problem in our home and my husbands lust for them is very high.

I never slept with the two men who claimed that they slept with me, they just wanted to tarnish my image, my husband is dating the wife of the deacon, she said.

The mother of three said that she starved her husband of sex because she hated sex adding that she married him because she wanted children.

The 45-year-old teacher said that her husband became sexually inactive five years ago.

He calls me derogatory names in public such as prostitute. I did not instigate the children against him, she explained.

She begged the court not to grant her husbands wish to dissolve the marriage claiming she was still in love with him.

The court president, Mr Akin Akinniyi, urged the couple to maintain peace and adjourned the case to May 10 for judgment.

NANPresident Muhammadu Buhari has blamed late Libyan President MuammarGaddafi for Killer-Herdsmen,saying they escaped into Nigeria from Libya.

Responding to Welbys comment on the herdsmen and farmers clashes in some parts of the country, Buhari said: The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region.

They were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram.

Do you agree???TULSA, OK (April 12, 2018)  The Frankenstein Engine Dynamics Mid-West Pro Mod Series (MWPMS) is proud to welcome Summit Racing Equipment as its official speed shop and parts supplier. Additionally, Summit Racing has been named the title sponsor for the MWPMS event Sept. 7-8, at Trumbull, TX.

Were very excited about Summit Racing Equipment joining us as both a full-season sponsor and the title rights holder for our race at the brand-new Xtreme Raceway Park, stated Keith Haney, owner and promoter of the Tulsa-based drag racing organization. Summit Racing is a huge company and very well-known in all forms of motorsports, so for them to come on board with the Mid-West Pro Mod Series is a great vote of confidence in the strength of our series. It shows they have faith in what were doing and what we say were going to do.

In addition to the flagship store and mail-order headquarters in Tallmadge, OH, Summit Racing operates retail outlets in Sparks, NV, McDonough, GA, and Arlington, TX. Summit Racing Motorsports and Events Manager Jim Greenleaf explained a visit to the Arlington store this spring led to him attending the MWPMS season opener at the Texas Motorplex.

We had some other events going on that were rained out that weekend so I got a chance to see the Mid-West Pro Mod Series for the first time and what was really impressive, especially since they made a venue change on short notice, is they really drew a nice crowd to the Motorplex. We had worked with the track there to promote the event through our retail store and to see the quality of cars, the level of performance, and the competition was really exciting, just a heck of a show, Greenleaf said.

(Motorplex general manager) Andy Carter introduced me to Keith there, too. We obviously had seen Keith out racing and knew a little of his history, but it was just cool to finally get to meet him. I really was excited about the program he had put together.

Negotiations between Greenleaf and Haney continued shortly after that meeting, leading to todays announcement.

With the opening of the new store in Arlington, Summit Racing is obviously expanding their brand in the Midwest area and for Jim and everyone at Summit to recognize the value of supporting the Mid-West Pro Mod Series, from the drag radial classes and all the way to Pro Mod, well, I couldnt be happier or more excited, Haney said.

Them coming on board is even strong for all the other sponsors that are currently with us because a lot of them offer their products and parts online through SummitRacing.com. To just think of Summits actual reach socially, their reach customer base, their reach racer base, theyre just everywhere in drag racing. And its also going to draw fans to the race tracks just as much because theyre going to be talking and encouraging people to come see the racers and cars of the Mid-West Pro Mod Series. This is a big deal for us.

Greenleaf agreed, saying the proximity of MWPMS events to the new Summit Racing store in Texas helped convince him the time was right to get involved.

Were happy about supporting events at the Motorplex and the new track, Xtreme Raceway Park, since theyre practically in the backyard of our newest store in Texas, he said. And really, as I spoke with Keith to get his philosophy of why he does what he does, I knew it was a great opportunity for us to give back and help him and his race teams be able to do what they need to in order to get those cars down the track at quality facilities.

The Frankenstein Engine Dynamics Mid-West Pro Mod Series returns to action next weekend (Apr. 20-22), as part of the Outlaw Street Car Reunion at Beech Bend Raceway Park in southern Kentucky.

ABOUT THE FRANKENSTEIN ENGINE DYNAMICS MID-WEST PRO MOD SERIES

The Frankenstein Engine Dynamics Mid-West Pro Mod Series is an all-eighth-mile, no-profit organization that typically competes during each host tracks biggest event of the year. Its appearance is entirely funded by sponsorships passed along to benefit the host tracks (typically about $10,000). The Mid-West Pro Mod Series also provides trackside sponsor banners to be displayed at each event, on-site PA sponsor announcements, and links to each company on the MWPMS website (www.MidWestProModSeries.com), plus an extensive social-media presence, texts and e-mail blasts, and commercials during all events.April 12, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Commentary for Enterprise Group, Inc. (TSX:E): One of the great things about being an investor is unearthing something that, while logical, is unexpected: But could be a nifty value add to shareholders. Such an example is Enterprise Group's (E: TSX) proprietary asset tracking software STAR'; critical to maximum use of equipment and most importantly, getting it back.

Experienced investors will note the potential of Industrial equipment rental leader Enterprise Group, not the least of which is that its book value has risen to $1.01 a share and is trading at 44 cents. This growth is just the latest in a successful strategy taken by Enterprise management after weathering the 2014-15 resource downturn. If anything, the company is leaner and stronger now; the result of the recent sale of subsidiary sale of CT Underground for $20.6 million.

The tale of Enterprise's proprietary 'STAR' tracking program is one such story. For those old enough, the software is like Six Sigma on steroids.

Likely the most significant headache/loss/revenue hit haunting all rental businesses (in this case resource and industrial rentals) is the risk of losing a piece of expensive equipment (or several parts that add up to a significant corporate loss.)

Or not realizing maximum usage through inefficient tracking. Given that the security of assets could well be at the whim of client honesty and the weather; pieces lost for a period of time or forever can obviously be costly.

When Enterprise Group (TSX: E) acquired Westar Oilfield Rentals in 2014, one of the assets the company was working on was a business management software, known today as 'STAR'. Enterprise continued to fund and upgrade the project and found itself with a proprietary asset that is critical to the profitability and cost mitigation of all of its subsidiaries.

Enterprise management currently owns almost 20 percent (just shy of 11 million) of its shares, so investors should not worry about motivation. It intends to be the leader and industrial and resource rental company of choice nationwide.

How E Got Here.

Through strategic plans including asset sales, ongoing cost-cutting and sound business decisions E is leaner, more pivotal and have added diversity to its client base. The fact that Enterprise also designs and builds specialty equipment for our clients-15 patents in place with more coming --means that it can be immediately responsive and relevant to address its private or Government customers' unique needs.

Since January 1, 2018: Key investment metrics evidencing ongoing growth:

Secured a $9 million Supply and Services agreement with a significant International resource company. Q4 2017 revenue $10.7m versus Q4 2016 at $8.3m EBITDA Q4 2017 $2.56m versus Q4 2016 $1.87m Net Income Q4 2017 $1.1m versus Q4 2016 loss ($9.9m) EPS Q4 2017 $0.02 versus Q4 2016 loss ($0.85)

In Q1 2018, Enterprise has secured a $9.1 million contract, sold its CT Underground subsidiary for $20.6 million resulting in virtually complete debt retirement. As well, the Company has an acquisition chest of $15 million loan availability for accretive and complementary companies or assets.

Next? STAR.

Financial results of the software use are measurable and impressive:

Proprietary platform for future development and refinement

Task and monitoring capabilities saves two significant salaries

Allows management to plan to deploy company-wide through 3 subs and future acquisitions

Generates a roughly 30 percent annual cost savings

Produced a five up to a possible 10 percent margin improvement

One of the Company's impressive value propositions over competitors

No plans to license; to remain a corporate asset.

Not aware of any competitive software

The software tracks assets, which in itself cuts costs, utilizing the location and site ID put directly on the invoice. The system always knows where the asset is, and fleet managers confirm that on delivery.

This approach keeps the customer up and running and ensures other expended revenue and protection of the asset. The key is the development of about 18 modules that work together and exchange information over a central database; all laid out in a very user-friendly navigational format.

"With the components developed, we began process mapping our existing business operations. As a result, we were able to considerably reduce our administrative costs by automating many of the human elements," stated Des O'Kell SVP of Enterprise Group. "Furthermore, with its implementation, the cost benefits that emerged from asset tracking are substantial."

Enterprise is not the same Company that went into the 2015 resource downturn.

All Cylinders Firing

Throughout 2017, Enterprise has experienced a meaningful increase in activity from its existing customers coupled with a substantial surge in new customers which has resulted in increased market share for its business units.

Management's efforts to streamline and maximize efficiencies have translated into improved margins, decisive cash-flow quarter after quarter and a return to profitability in Q3 2017.

Management feels that Enterprise is within a very select group of producers and service providers that have aggressively adapted their organizations to operate successfully in the current commodity price environment.

With 2018 starting out with impressive strength, the Company has many other initiatives and strategic business plans to execute, particularly in further debt reduction, potential acquisitions and expansion beyond Western Canada.

With the calculated diversification of its customer base over the last three years, the Company has further mitigated market risk and is exploring substantial development opportunities to grow and enhance shareholder value.

For questions or additional information, please contact:

Leonard Jaroszuk, President & CEO, or

Desmond O'Kell, Senior Vice-President

780-418-4400

contact@enterprisegrp.ca

Forward Looking Information

Certain statements contained in this news release constitute forward-looking information. These statements relate to future events or the Company's future performance. The use of any of the words "could", "expect", "believe", "will", "projected", "estimated" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Company's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. The Company's Annual Information Form and other documents filed with securities regulatory authorities (accessible through the SEDAR website www.sedar.com) describe the risks, material assumptions and other factors that could influence actual results and which are incorporated herein by reference. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be expressly required by applicable securities laws.

Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investment involves risk and possible loss of investment. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Contact each company directly regarding content and press release questions. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. More disclaimer info: http://www.investorideas.com/About/News/Clientspecifics.asp Disclosure: Enterprise is a paid PR news and social media client effective January 12018 for four months -five thousand per month

Additional info regarding BC Residents and global Investors: Effective September 15 2008 - all BC investors should review all OTC and Pink sheet listed companies for adherence in new disclosure filings and filing appropriate documents with Sedar. Read for more info: http://www.bcsc.bc.ca/release.aspx?id=6894. Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country

OilandGasStockNews.com- investing ideas in oil and gas stocks

Like Oil and Gas Stocks? View our Oil and Gas Stocks Directory Get News Alerts on Energy StocksOxford, UK - April 12, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) A new market report published by GWI has found that water tariffs will need to increase by 5.9% each year in order to generate the $449 billion of annual investment required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal on water and sanitation by 2030, and maintain existing infrastructure. The report comes at a time when the funding model for water infrastructure is evolving to incorporate more private and commercial finance sources, in the face of ageing infrastructure, population growth and climate change.

$449 billion of investment in water infrastructure will be needed each year between 2018 and 2030 to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6 on water and sanitation, and maintain existing infrastructure, a new report has found.

The report, entitled Financing Water to 2030 and published by Global Water Intelligence (GWI), argues that in order to achieve these targets whilst reducing utility dependence on grant finance, tariffs around the world will need to increase substantially, rising at a compound annual growth rate of 5.9% and taking the global average combined tariff from $2.08 /m3 to $4.38 /m3 in 2030.

In Southern Asia, where average combined water and wastewater tariffs are just $0.14/m3 compared to a global average of $2.08 /m3, this means that tariffs would need to rise by 15.2% annually in order to meet the investment required by 2030 for SDG6.

Christopher Gasson, publisher at GWI and co-author of the report commented, "we are at an inflection point in the way water is financed. For the past two decades there hasn't been much change in the way utility assets are paid for. Going forward, there will be. We will see the utility sector steadily building its financial independence and the corollary of all this is that tariffs will have to rise."

The report findings come at a time where private finance in water infrastructure has returned to the political agenda, as governments across the world look to move more responsibility to utilities themselves. As well as meeting SDG 6, utilities will need to mitigate the effects of ageing infrastructure, industrial pollution, growing urban populations, and the more extreme flooding and droughts brought by climate change, and will need to access more finance sources to meet these challenges.

GWI forecasts that the amount of global private finance used to fund water infrastructure will increase from $3 billion during 2013 / 2017 to $35 billion a year in the next 12 years, providing 7.7% of global infrastructure investment needs by 2030.

Within the same time frame, funding for water infrastructure by central government grants and international transfers is expected to fall from 31% to 18% of annual investment needs, according to the report. GWI notes that the key driver of this trend is governments moving away from financing water projects on their own balance sheets and through grants to utilities, and towards providing more loans and encouraging public-private partnerships.

In the USA for instance, the Trump administration's $1.5 trillion infrastructure investment plan brings with it only $200 million of federal finance. Financing Water to 2030 explains that the rest is expected to come from the private sector.

In Saudi Arabia meanwhile, the government is contemplating the largest water privatisation programme since the UK government sold off its water assets in 1989. The report also details how the governments of countries such as Japan, Brazil, Peru, Indonesia, and Vietnam have recently announced major plans and new legislation for bringing private finance into their water infrastructure.

The report also examines how the trend towards mobilising more private finance for water infrastructure is also being driven by development finance institutions (DFIs), pointing to the "blended finance" strategies at major DFIs like the World Bank.

This increasingly involves developing structured financial products designed to attract commercial finance for more credit-worthy clients, while directing more concessionary resources to places and projects for which they are critical. Though blended finance has been growing as a concept for several years, the US government's denial of a capital increase for the World Bank has given the strategy added impetus and visibility.

GWI also found that utility consolidation and government reforms aimed at improving the bankability of projects will be crucial in order to attract the infrastructure finance that utilities need to achieve the SDG on water and sanitation. The report examines several political developments as part of this trend.

In Japan, recent legal reforms to support and incentivise the consolidation of its 2,800 small-scale water and wastewater utilities have been introduced. The USA has also seen growing discussions on utility consolidation with many of the country's small utilities struggling to maintain their infrastructure. The report explains that the elimination of $509 million in grants for small rural utilities by the federal government will likely make the discussion even more relevant.

GWI will next host The Global Water Summit 2018 in Paris on 15-16th April 2018. The summit's 2018 agenda will feature a pre-conference workshop on the privatisation of Saudi Arabia's water sector, along with expert-led sessions and roundtables on PPP opportunities in emerging markets and utility bankability, and sessions on blended finance run in partnership with the World Bank.

Find out more about Financing Water to 2030 here: www.globalwaterintel.com/market-intelligence-reports/Financing-Water-to-2030

Find out more about The Global Water Summit 2018 here: www.watermeetsmoney.com

Financing Water to 2030 is GWI's new digital market report, providing you with a detailed understanding of how capital flows in the water sector will change in the next 10 years, and where the finance sources & private sector opportunities for water are now. The digital report examines how much investment is needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals for water and sanitation, and the potential sources of this investment. It analyses the financial models, organisations, and risks at play in infrastructure finance allowing you to find the most viable markets and investment strategies for your organisation, as the world acts to harness the potential of private finance in water.

Analyse:

Current water sector spending by different sources and forecasts of the changes to 2030.

5-year private capital expenditure & total capital expenditure forecasts by country.

Breakdowns of current water spending levels and forecasts of 2030 investment needs by country.

Digital (PDF) Report + 4 Accompanying Databases

(Databases featuring more than 500 M&A transactions, nearly 2900 historic private finance projects, 250 profiles of private utilities over 500 upcoming private finance project opportunities.)

About Global Water Intelligence:

Global Water Intelligence (GWI) researches and publishes business data and information about the water markets worldwide. Based in Oxford, UK it also has offices in Singapore and USA (Austin, Texas) and has researchers and office staff in many other countries. It publishes three subscription titles and a free weekly GWI Briefing email and around four individual reports per year on particular water sectors/geographic regions. It also organises two major financial conferences for the water industry each year: the American Water Summit in Autumn and the Global Water Summit in Spring. GWI was awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise in 2011.

Global Water Intelligence (GWI) researches and publishes business data and information about the water markets worldwide. Based in Oxford, UK it also has offices in Singapore and USA (Austin, Texas) and has researchers and office staff in many other countries. It publishes three subscription titles and a free weekly GWI Briefing email (http://www.globalwaterintel.com/accounts/mailinglist/) and around four individual reports per year on particular water sectors/geographic regions. It also organises two major financial conferences for the water industry each year: the American Water Summit in Autumn and the Global Water Summit in Spring. GWI was awarded the Queen's Award for Enterprise in 2011.

Press contact:

ashuttleworth@globalwaterintel.com, Media Analytics Ltd, Suite C, Kingsmead House, Oxpens Road, Oxford OX1 1XX, UK. Tel: +44 1865 204208 www.globalwaterintel.com

Water-Stocks.com: investing ideas in water stocks Like Water Stocks? View our Water Stocks Directory

More Info:

This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders

Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions.

More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com

Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.aspEmily Barske, editor-in-chief of the Iowa State Daily; Kathie Obradovich, political columnist at the Des Moines Register; and Scott Moss, senior in finance and organizer of Iowa State's Out of the Darkness walk, speak about mental health during a Depth and Dialogue session for First Amendment Day on April 11, 2018.Students gather on the steps of Curtiss Hall as part of the the Democalypse March on April 21. The march around campus gave college and high school students an experience of what life would be like without the first amendment.Almost five years after Apple first unveiled the iPhone 5s with Touch ID, the company is being sued by Korean company Firstface for infringing on one of its patents. The patent details how a smartphones screen would be unlocked once a users identity was verified by scanning their fingerprint.

Firstface had patented this technology back in 2011 in multiple nations including the United States, Japan, and Korea. Firstface co-CEO Shim Young-tack says that the company had approached Apple to find a middle ground and license its patent, but the Cupertino company rejected its offer.

The solution that activates the smartphone screen upon authenticating a users fingerprint was something unprecedented before Jungs invention, Shim Young-tack, another Firstface co-CEO who also serves as a professor at the Korean campus of New York State University, was quoted by local news outlet FN News as saying.

The first iPhone with Touch ID was released way back in 2013 so the Firstface co-CEOs have surely taken their time in filing a lawsuit against Apple for infringing on its patent. Like with hundreds of other companies that sue Apple for patent infringement, Firstface also seems to be a patent troll whose sole intention seems to be trying to extract money from Apple for bogus patent infringement.

Our Take

Ironically, the lawsuit comes at a time when Apple is seemingly preparing itself to ditch Touch ID from its iPhone lineup. After being a staple feature for its iPhone lineup for years, Apple is now moving towards facial recognition as seen with Face ID on the iPhone X. It is not only faster but also more accurate and convenient.

As for the patent in question, the way it has been described, it seems that Firstface could sue not just Apple but every other smartphone OEM out there because every other smartphone with a fingerprint scanner behaves in the same way.

[Via The InvestorThis Week in Review

A weekly review of the best and most popular stories published in the Imperial Valley Press. Also, featured upcoming events, new movies at local theaters, the week in photos and much more.FROM THEIR HOME TO YOURS Although one of the newest businesses in Jamestown will not open for a couple more weeks, the owners already are seeing curious passersby at their soon-to-be former location in North...

Rental rules still in limbo A subcommittee has been formed to incorporate suggestions from the town councilors into a proposed ordinance to govern short-term rentals. The council formed the panel at its Sept. 20 meeting....

Agreement pending for Simpatico There is an apparent deal in place for the sale of Simpatico Jamestown, but the principals are being tight-lipped until its finalized. If it does happen, it will reunite a...The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [official website] filed a lawsuit [text, PDF] in the US District Court for the Western District of Kentucky [official website] Tuesday challenging the Kentucky abortion measures that Governor Matt Bevin [official website] signed into law earlier that day.

ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of the EMW Womens Surgical Center, P.S.C., Kentuckys sole licensed abortion facility, and two physicians who also treat EMWs patients. The ACLU stated [press release] that this lawsuit is aimed at protecting womens rights to safe, affordable abortions and the ability to choose what happens to their bodies.

Under House Bill 454 [text, PDF], the abortion procedure [JURIST report] known as excavation and dilation is illegal after the eleventh week of pregnancy. A physician who knowingly performs an abortion in violation of the bill can be found guilty of a class D felony. The bill does include an exception for medical emergencies, but not for rape or incest.

The complaint alleges the law violates the Fourteenth Amendments right to privacy and right to bodily integrity, stating, [b]y banning the safest and most common method of abortion starting in the early second trimester, the Act violates Plaintiffs patients right to liberty and privacy. The plaintiffs are asking the court deem the law unconstitutional and unenforceable, and to immediately forbid enforcement.Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

UCOM offers affordable gadgets at bigger discount

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

Google Ad

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

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Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

Covid-19: 163 new cases in Armenia

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

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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Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

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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

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Karen Vardanyan has allocated 105 million AMD to rescue the Yerevan Botanical Garden.

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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

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Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

Covid-19: 163 new cases in Armenia

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Azerbaijan election lacked genuine competition in an environment of curtailed rights and freedoms, international observers say

BAKU, 12 April 2018  The early presidential election in Azerbaijan took place within a restrictive political environment and under laws that curtail fundamental rights and freedoms, which are prerequisites for genuine democratic elections.

Against this backdrop and in the absence of pluralism, including in the media, the election lacked genuine competition. Other candidates refrained from directly challenging or criticizing the incumbent, and distinction was not made between his campaign and his official activities, the international observers concluded in a preliminary statement today. At the same time, the authorities were co-operative and international observers were able to operate freely in the pre-election period, and the election administration was well resourced and prepared the election efficiently.

On election day the observers reported widespread disregard for mandatory procedures, a lack of transparency, and numerous serious irregularities, including ballot box stuffing. More than half of the vote counts were assessed negatively, largely due to deliberate falsifications and an obvious disregard for procedures. We have noted the positive attitude displayed by the national authorities of Azerbaijan towards international election observation, as well as the professional work of the Central Election Commission in the pre-election period. We stand ready to continue our co-operation and turn it into a joint effort to tackle the fundamental problems that a restrictive political and legal environment, which does not allow for genuine competition, poses for free elections, said Nilza de Sena, Special Co-ordinator and Leader of the short-term OSCE observation mission. I encourage the authorities to take good note of the recommendations ODIHR will make in their final report. We will be ready to assist in this process, if requested by Azerbaijan, and to continue our dialogue on the future development of the country`s democracy. The election took place in conditions dominated by the ruling New Azerbaijan Party (YAP), which nominated the incumbent president as one of the eight candidates who took part. Some opposition parties boycotted the election, citing a non-competitive environment, while others not participating said the early election date left them with insufficient time to do so meaningfully. Overall, the campaign generated limited public engagement. The ruling party campaign in favour of the incumbent was well-organized and well-resourced, while the candidate did not campaign himself but made visits across the country and received many high-profile foreign dignitaries in his official capacity. The campaigns of the other seven candidates were limited and appeared hampered by a lack of regional structures and resources. We have to consider that, in a political environment where democratic principles are compromised and the rule of law is not observed, fair and free elections are not possible, said Viorel Riceard Badea, Head of the delegation from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. On election day we observed several irregularities, but there is no way to know how this affected the outcome of the election. Highly restrictive laws related to the media challenge the freedoms of expression and the press, and extend also to website and social media content. Defamation is a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment and with additional penalties for defamation of the president, further limiting the freedom of expression key to political campaigning, the observers said. The largest part of the political coverage in media outlets monitored was of the incumbent in his official capacity, while all other candidates combined received only a fraction of the time. As required by law, the public broadcaster allocated free airtime to candidates, although only through roundtable discussions on television and radio. A few weeks of campaigning during which candidates could present their views on television cannot make up for years during which restrictions on freedom of expression have stifled political debate, said Margareta Kiener Nellen, Head of the delegation from the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly. The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly will certainly continue to support all steps by the authorities that will bring the country forward on a path towards creating the open political environment necessary for truly free and fair elections. Fundamental rights and freedoms, which are pre-requisites for genuine democratic elections, are severely restricted in practice, said Corien Jonker, Head of the Election Observation Mission from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. The authorities should deliver on Azerbaijans commitment as an OSCE participating State to respect, protect and support the democratic rights of its citizens. The election administration at all levels appeared highly organized and well-resourced but, due to the lack of political differentiation between the three groups in parliament that nominate commissioners, there is no guarantee the administration is impartial, the observers said. The Central Election Commission held regular public sessions at which no dissenting or argumentative opinions were stated, and the majority of members did not engage in any discussions. The CEC denied registration to two nominees after ruling a considerable number of the supporting signatures they submitted as duplicate or invalid, leaving them short of the total required. The CEC working group responsible for the verification of signatures was unable to clearly demonstrate the process was technically adequate and accountable. There is no legal provision for nominees to address errors or shortcomings identified by the CEC in relation to the signatures. The CEC reported registering a total of 58,175 domestic observers, including 4,041 accredited by NGOs, while a number of the international observers interlocutors maintained that obstacles introduced by the government and the election administration limit the ability of civil-society organizations to operate. One such organization remains unregistered since 2008, and its volunteers had to accredit themselves individually, some of them facing difficulties. This was the first presidential election since constitutional amendments in 2016 further increasing the powers of the president. A number of constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights and freedoms related to elections are subject in practice to legal and administrative restrictions. The Election Code is detailed and well-structured. Although a few previous ODIHR recommendations in this area have been taken into account, none of the priority recommendations by ODIHR and Venice Commission were addressed.MIAMI (AP) - The names of four deadly hurricanes that slammed parts of the United States, Central America and the Caribbean last year are being retired.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that hurricane names Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate will be replaced with Harold, Idalia, Margot and Nigel. The new names will make their debut during the 2023 hurricane season.

Eighty-six names have been retired from the Atlantic basin list since 1954. The names are retired if the storms were so severe that their future use would be insensitive.

Harvey hit Texas Aug. 25, killing at least 68 people. Irma caused 44 deaths and 85 indirect deaths in the Caribbean and Florida. Maria killed 31 in Dominica and 65 in Puerto Rico. Nate's rainfall inundated Central America and killed 45.KLAMATH FALLS, Ore.  A multi-agency investigation in Klamath Falls earlier this week led police to make two arrests and recover large quantities of methamphetamine, cash, firearms, and stolen goods, according to the Klamath Falls Police Department (KFPD).

The first bust occurred on Sunday, April 8, when KFPD assisted Oregon State Police (OSP) and detectives from the Basin Interagency Narcotics Enforcement Team (BINET) in arresting two people in Klamath Falls. Police seized 12.9 pounds of meth during the bust.

One of the suspects arrested during the bust was 32-year-old Carlos Pena Jr., who had just gotten out of prison on meth-related charges. Pena Jr. was arrested back in June of 2016 by BINET in Klamath Falls for possession of more than 7 pounds of meth. He was sentenced to 24 months in prison, according to KFPD.

A KFPD statement did not give any details on the second suspect in this bust.

On Tuesday, April 10, police raided a residence on Owens Street in Klamath Falls. They arrested 57-year-old Ruben Ramos Cano, and lodged him in the Klamath County Jail, according to KFPD.

This second bust yielded 3.9 pounds of meth, $8000 in cash, 2 handguns, and a large amount of laptop computers and jewelry that police suspect were stolen. KFPD had help from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the investigation and execution of the search warrant.

BINET is comprised of detectives from the KFPD, OSP, and Klamath County District Attorneys Office. BINET operates out of the Klamath Falls Police Department and works closely with the DEA, Homeland Security Investigations, Klamath County Sheriffs Office, Klamath County Parole and Probation, and DHS Child Welfare.

Anyone who was a recent victim of laptop, jewelry or coin collection theft or has information regarding the illegal distribution of drugs within Klamath County is encouraged to call the Klamath Falls Police Department Anonymous Tip Line at (541) 883-5334.A month after London hosted the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Paris is the next European capital to host the son of the Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz who also serves as the Arab monarchy's defense minister.

(AhlulBayt News Agency) - A month after London hosted the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Paris is the next European capital to host the son of the Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz who also serves as the Arab monarchy's defense minister.

Bin Salman arrived in Paris on Sunday and met the French President Immanuel Macron. The visit, as part of an international tour that took the young prince to Egypt, US, and Britain, is linked to the West Asia regions issues, including Yemen aggression, tensions with Iran, and even the home affairs of the kingdom.

Close your eyes to Yemen crisis, please!

Yemen these days looks like a deep swamp to the Saudis, who in 2015 waged a full-scale war against the neighboring nation. Riyadh has stepped into the Yemen quagmire with its own accord, but it cannot find a way out of it with its own free will. The Saudi-led Arab military coalition's war on Sana'a is in its fourth year. According to the latest figures released by the Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights, so far, 600,000 Yemeni people been killed and injured, and millions were displaced from their homes. The United Nations aid agencies assert that over 90 percent of the Yemeni civilians are in urgent need of humanitarian aids. Despite all of these costs, Riyadh still keeps pounding Yemen, without reaching any of its stated goals. The Saudi rulers have failed to re-impose on Yemen the fugitive President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi who fled the country to Saudi Arabia immediately after announcing his resignation. The northern parts of the country are still held by the Yemeni army and the popular committees, making the Saudi campaign look like launched in vain.

The deterioration of the humanitarian crisis and the condemnation of the military campaign in Yemen by the rights organizations, which warn the situation is setting the alarm bells to the world community, have drawn reactions from some European leaders who while formally offering their full backing to the Saudis, in more private spaces call on their Arab allies to end the aggression.

In Germany, for example, rights groups pressure made the newly formed coalition government in Berlin to announce putting curbs on the arms sales to Saudi Arabia. In France, too, the pressures urging Macron to stop weapons sales to Riyadh are building on the president. Some 12 NGOs have reportedly urged the French leader to suspend arms deal with the Saudis and put strains on the crown prince to lift the four-year-old air, sea, and land siege on Yemen that has deprived the Yemen civilians of international food and medicine aids.

Similar pressure was put on Washington and London leaders. Still, they proved unsuccessful in halting the two Western countries' arms deliveries to the oil-wealthy monarchy. The US during bin Salman visit to Washington unveiled sealing a deal of $12 billion various military facilities including missiles and ammunition to Riyadh. During the years of war, Saudi Arabia procured tanks, armored vehicles, ammunition, artillery, and warships from France. In 2016, for instance, Paris issued a license for the French companies to deliver 18 million ($22 million) worth of weapons to the Saudi military. On Friday, the French newspapers predicted that during the visit of bin Salman, Saudi Arabia will sign an agreement to purchase military patrolling boats from a French company. They also talked about possible agreement to buy artillery from Nexter Systems, a French government-owned weapons manufacturer. The next destination of the prince will be Spain, where he is expected to, according to the Spanish media, finalize a deal to get 5 battleships, with an estimated price of 2 billion ($2 billion), from Madrid.

Many experts believe that the Saudi prince has demanded the Western governments to turn a deaf ear to the human rights organizations' anti-Riyadh pressure calls and strongly continue their military and diplomatic support to the kingdom.

Garnering further anti-Iranian pressure

These days, some analysts have made a proverb: Where there is bin Salman, there is talk of anti-Iranian pressure. The political proverb is not an exaggeration, however, and there appears to be a consensus on it.

During his London trip, bin Salman appreciated a Britain-drafted anti-Iranian UN Security Council resolution, which failed by a Russian veto, calling it a sign of Riyadh-London consistency of views on pressing Iran. In late February, the British envoy to UN proposed a Yemen resolution, accusing Iran of supporting the Yemeni revolutionaries. With this in mind, naturally, bin Salman will use the potentials of his Paris visit to demand additional pressures against Tehran.

The European Union and the US are severely at odds over Iran nuclear deal, signed in 2015 between Tehran and the six world powers the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany. The analysts hold that part of the princes efforts will very likely focus on uniting the views of the EU and the US to facilitate the demanded anti-Iranian strains.

In February last year and while Macron was on Saudi Arabia visit, Reuters news agency said that bin Salman in a meeting with the French leader asked him to limit business ties with Iran. The same demand is expected during his visit to Paris.

Bragging about home reforms

In the past few months, bin Salman went to great lengths to paint himself to domestic public and to the world a reformer and modernist leader. He brought in spotlight some of his domestic reforms in the closed Saudi society to send the message to the world that the absolutely-governed kingdom is different now. The Vision 2030, and Women freedoms, such as driving right and social attendance rights, are seen as his efforts to burnish the highly traditional image of Saudi Arabia.

But there is a goal behind all of these tradition-breaking attempts: He struggles to get support to facilitate his ascension to the throne. In his eyes, posing as a reformist who wants to transform Saudi Arabia can soften the human rights activists' harsh tone against the war violations and help the Western leaders more comfortably have his back.

For the Western governments, especially the US administration, which have often been target of toughest rights groups' condemnation for their alliance with Saudi Arabia, alliance with the ostensible reformer can rid them of media and NGO pressures.

But the sham optimism of the Western governments about the reforms has proven false and ineffective, as the crown prince during his visits to Britain, the US, and France was received with angry pro-rights protests.









/129In this Nov. 4, 2015 file photo, Shigehisa Takada, president and CEO of Japanese parts supplier Takata Corp., attends a press conference in Tokyo. Takata Corp., the Japanese air bag maker embroiled in a massive recall, says the acquisition by U.S. mobility safety company Key Safety Systems has been completed, and the president resigned. Takata President Takada said Thursday, April 12, 2018, in a statement he has resigned as president and chairman, replaced by Yoichiro Nomura, chief financial officer, effective Wednesday. (Kyodo News via AP)FILE - In this Monday, Dec. 25, 2017 file photo, Britain's Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle leave the traditional Christmas Day church service, at St. Mary Magdalene Church in Sandringham, England. As Prince Harry's future bride left a church service on the grounds of Queen Elizabeth IIAos private country estate, designer Bojana Sentaler recognized her coat AuI was looking for the ribbed sleeves, hoping it was a Sentaler coat,AoAo said the designer, who met Markle when she was a mere TV star. The Meghan magic was almost instantaneous; Markle's coat sold out, as Sentaler expected, and the publicity fueled sales of other designs. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, file)Professor David Scheffel is seen in this undated handout photo. An anthropology professor from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., has been in jail in Slovakia since last November, accused of child pornography, sexual violence and arms trafficking. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO, Thompson Rivers University *MANDATORY CREDIT*A senior aide to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has visited Syrias Eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of the capital Damascus.



(AhlulBayt News Agency) - A senior aide to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has visited Syrias Eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of the capital Damascus.



Ali Akbar Velayati on Wednesday visited Eastern Ghouta and secret underground tunnels used by Takfiri terrorists in the almost fully liberated region near Damascus.



He also met with military commanders there.



Velayati reaffirmed Irans support for Syria and the nations resistance against terrorists and underlined the necessity of further expansion of bilateral ties to counter the threats of the US, Israel and their regional stooges.



He also congratulated the victories of the Syrian army in Eastern Ghouta, and described as pivotal the strategic ties between Tehran and Damascus.



Earlier in the day, the adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei also met with Syrias Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem, during which the two sides emphasized further coordination between the two brotherly countries in order to contribute to further victories of the Syrian army in combating terrorism and confronting its provocative acts and threats by the United States and its allies in the region against Syria.



Velayati, who is in Damascus to attend a conference on Palestine, also stressed that the Islamic Republic would stand by the Syrian government and people and reaffirmed Tehrans support for resistance against terrorism that has targeted the territorial integrity of Syria and the stability of the region. He also underlined the need for the strengthening of relations with Syria.



Muallem, for his part, briefed the Iranian official on the latest developments in Syria and praised Irans full support for his country.



Eastern Ghouta, which is home to nearly 400,000 people, fell to multiple militant groups in 2012, months after Syria plunged into crisis. Militants had been using the area to launch incessant rocket attacks on the capital.



Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The Syrian government says the Israeli regime and its Western and regional allies are aiding Takfiri terrorist groups that are wreaking havoc in the country.









/129ADDS NAME OF POLICE OFFICER Halifax Regional Police officer Det. Const. Randy Wood carries evidence at the Nicholas Butcher murder trial at Nova Scotia Supreme Court in Halifax on Thursday, April 12, 2018. Butcher is accused of murdering Kristin Johnston, a Montreal-born yoga instructor, who had ended her relationship with Butcher hours before he allegedly killed her. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew VaughanFord Edges sit on a production line at the Ford Assembly Plant in Oakville, Ont., on Thursday, February 26, 2015. The United States has softened another one of its key NAFTA demands, shaving 10 per cent off a request on automobiles amid a flurry of talks aimed at getting a preliminary agreement this spring. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris YoungLeader of the Government in the House of Commons and Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc stands during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa, Wednesday, December 6, 2017. Ottawa has awarded a $15-million contract to a company to remove bulk oil from the Manolis L shipwreck off Newfoundland and Labrador. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred ChartrandFILE - In a July 24, 2013 file photo, Heather Locklear arrives at the TNT 25th Anniversary Party at The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. Locklear has pleaded not guilty to attacking deputies who answered a domestic violence call at her Southern California home. LocklearAos attorney entered the plea on her behalf in Ventura County Superior Court on Thursday to four misdemeanor counts of battery on an officer. A pretrial hearing is scheduled June 7. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, joined by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, speaks at the Pentagon, Friday, April 13, 2018, on the U.S. military response, along with France and Britain, in response to Syria's chemical weapon attack on April 7.Aa (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens speaks at a news conference about allegations related to his extramarital affair with his hairdresser, in Jefferson City, Mo., Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Greitens initiated a physically aggressive unwanted sexual encounter with his hairdresser and threatened to distribute a partially nude photo of her if she spoke about it, according to testimony from the woman released Wednesday by a House investigatory committee. (J.B. Forbes/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)GARNER, Iowa  A Hancock County man is accused of stealing from his grandparents home.

Anthony James Fickel Schoneman, 22 of Garner, is charged with 2nd degree burglary, 1st degree theft, and two counts of possession of a controlled substance-1st offense.

The Hancock County Sheriffs Office says it was called to a home in the 3000 block of Oak Avenue on May 15, 2017, to investigate a burglary. A woman watching over the property called law enforcement when she noticed something wrong at the home.

Deputies say over $10,000 in cash, collector coins, a firearm, ammunition, and prescription pills were taken. Investigators say the burglar obviously knew where items were located inside the home, such as money that was hidden in a bag of clothes.

The Sheriffs Office says Anthony Fickel Schoneman learned his grandparents were going to be out of town to attend a graduation in Texas, then did not show up for dinner with his family on May 14, 2017. Authorities say Fickel Schoneman was found walking home by his father on the morning of May 15.

The criminal complaint also states that Fickel Schoneman was seen on May 16 or 17 cashing a large jug of coins that had been stolen from his grandparents home. Authorities say Fickel Schoneman said he and a friend had been collecting the coins, something the friend disputed.

The Sheriffs Office also says a search of Fickel Schonemans phone found he searched a pill identifier website on the night of the crime. Oxycontin and hydrocodone had been taken during the burglary and Fickel Schonemans father says he found a pill of Oxy on the couch.

A criminal complaint was filed against Anthony Fickel Schoneman on March 24 and he was arrested on March 27.Winter Storm Watch

Areas Affected: Allamakee; Chickasaw; Floyd; Howard; Mitchell; Winneshiek

NWS LaCrosse (Southwestern Wisconsin, Southeastern Minnesota, and Northeast Iowa)

...Wintry Mix, Snow Tonight Through The Weekend... .A complex spring storm system will impact the area tonight through the weekend. Rain will become a wintry mix of freezing rain and snow later tonight, persisting through Saturday, and then transitioning to mainly snow for most Sunday. The bulk of the icing threat is expected overnight tonight through Saturday morning, with the potential for 1/4 inch or more in the Interstate 90 corridor. The highest snow totals are currently expected in north-central Wisconsin, with 8 plus inches possible. Travel may become difficult later tonight through the weekend at times with snow-covered or icy roads. In addition, winds gusting up to 40 mph could cause isolated damage to power lines or trees that become ice-coated. ...WINTER STORM WATCH IN EFFECT FROM SATURDAY MORNING THROUGH SUNDAY EVENING...

* WHAT...Heavy mixed precipitation possible. Total snow accumulations of 3 to 5 inches and ice accumulations of up to 1/4 of an inch possible.

* WHERE...Portions of southwest Wisconsin and north central and northeast Iowa.

* WHEN...From Saturday morning through Sunday evening.

* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Power outages and tree damage are possible due to the ice. Travel could be dangerous and nearly impossible. Tree branches could fall. Significant reductions in visibility are possible.

A Winter Storm Watch means there is potential for significant snow, sleet or ice accumulations that may impact travel. Continue to monitor the latest forecasts.

Winter Storm Warning

Areas Affected: Blue Earth; Faribault; Freeborn; Goodhue; Le Sueur; Martin; Rice; Steele; Waseca

NWS Minneapolis (Southern Minnesota)

...BLIZZARD CONDITIONS EXPECTED ACROSS WEST CENTRAL MINNESOTA FRIDAY NIGHT THROUGH SATURDAY EVENING... ...SEVERE WINTER TRAVEL CONDITIONS ALSO LIKELY ACROSS THE REST OF THE SOUTHERN HALF OF MINNESOTA AND WEST CENTRAL WISCONSIN BEGINNING LATE FRIDAY... .A significant winter storm will develop Friday afternoon and continue into Saturday evening. All precipitation types, strong winds, and blizzard conditions will occur in this winter storm. A Blizzard Warning is in effect Friday night through Saturday evening for portions of west central Minnesota. A Winter Storm Warning is in effect south of a line from Litchfield to the Twin Cities metro and Bloomer Wisconsin. A Winter Storm Watch remains in effect for areas north of the warning areas. Showers and thunderstorms are expected to develop late tonight, and persist for much of the day Friday as temperatures remain in the mid 30s in central Minnesota to the lower 40s along the Minnesota/Iowa border. Colder air will begin to move into central Minnesota Friday afternoon and evening, changing the precipitation to snow. In addition to the heavy snow, strong gusty winds of 40 to 50 mph will bring blizzard conditions to west central Minnesota. The best chance for whiteouts will be late Friday night across west central Minnesota. The rain will turn to a wintry mix of freezing rain, sleet, and snow across south central and east central Minnesota, and west central Wisconsin Friday evening, before changing to all snow by Saturday morning. Total snow accumulations of 8 to 15 inches are expected from west central and southwest Minnesota to east central Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, with totals nearing 18 inches possible across southwest Minnesota. Totals will taper off to 4 to 8 inches across south central Minnesota. There may be a sharp gradient in the watch area north of Morris, Saint Cloud, and Rice Lake. In addition, total ice accumulations of one to two tenths of an inch are possible across the southern third of Minnesota into west central Wisconsin. ...WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 1 AM SATURDAY TO 1 AM CDT SUNDAY...

* WHAT...Heavy mixed precipitation expected. Total snow accumulations of 4 to 8 inches, with localized higher amounts, and ice accumulations of one tenth to two tenths of an inch are expected.

* WHERE...Portions of west central Wisconsin and south central and southeast Minnesota.

* WHEN...From 1 AM Saturday to 1 AM CDT Sunday.

* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Plan on difficult travel conditions. Tree branches could fall. Winds gusting as high as 45 mph will cause areas of blowing and drifting snow.

A Winter Storm Warning means significant amounts of snow, sleet and ice will make travel very hazardous or impossible. Strong winds are also expected. The latest road conditions for Minnesota can be found at 511mn.org and for Wisconsin at 511wi.gov, or by calling 5 1 1 in either state.

Winter Storm Watch

Areas Affected: Calhoun; Carroll; Cerro Gordo; Crawford; Emmet; Hancock; Humboldt; Kossuth; Palo Alto; Pocahontas; Sac; Webster; Winnebago; Worth; Wright

NWS DesMoines (Central Iowa)

...Blizzard Conditions Possible Saturday into Saturday Night... .Confidence remains high in strong northeasterly winds of 25 to 35 mph, gusting from 40 to 50 mph at times during periods of falling snow. The combination of potent winds and snow may lead to potential blizzard conditions from west central, northwest, to north central Iowa. ...WINTER STORM WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM SATURDAY MORNING THROUGH LATE SATURDAY NIGHT...

* WHAT...Blizzard conditions possible. Winds gusting as high as 45 mph could cause whiteout conditions in blowing snow. Significant drifting of the snow is also possible. Total wet snow accumulations of 1 to 3 inches, with localized amounts up to 6 inches further northwest. Some light ice accumulations are possible.

* WHERE...West central, northwest to north central Iowa

* WHEN...From Saturday morning through late Saturday night.

* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Travel could be very difficult to impossible. Tree branches could fall.

A Winter Storm Watch for blizzard conditions means there is a potential for falling and/or blowing snow with strong winds and extremely poor visibilities. This can lead to whiteout conditions and make travel very dangerous.

Winter Storm Watch

Areas Affected: Dodge; Fillmore; Houston; Mower; Olmsted; Wabasha; Winona

NWS LaCrosse (Southwestern Wisconsin, Southeastern Minnesota, and Northeast Iowa)

...Wintry Mix, Snow Tonight Through The Weekend... .A complex spring storm system will impact the area tonight through the weekend. Rain will become a wintry mix of freezing rain and snow later tonight, persisting through Saturday, and then transitioning to mainly snow for most Sunday. The bulk of the icing threat is expected overnight tonight through Saturday morning, with the potential for 1/4 inch or more in the Interstate 90 corridor. The highest snow totals are currently expected in north-central Wisconsin, with 8 plus inches possible. Travel may become difficult later tonight through the weekend at times with snow-covered or icy roads. In addition, winds gusting up to 40 mph could cause isolated damage to power lines or trees that become ice-coated. ...WINTER STORM WATCH IN EFFECT FROM LATE TONIGHT THROUGH SUNDAY EVENING...

* WHAT...Heavy mixed precipitation possible. Total snow accumulations of 4 to 7 inches, and ice accumulations of 1/4 to 1/2 of an inch possible.

* WHERE...Portions of central, southwest and west central Wisconsin and southeast Minnesota.

* WHEN...From late tonight through Sunday evening.

* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Power outages and tree damage are possible due to the ice. Travel could be dangerous and nearly impossible. Tree branches could fall. Significant reductions in visibility are possible.

A Winter Storm Watch means there is potential for significant snow, sleet or ice accumulations that may impact travel. Continue to monitor the latest forecasts.CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa  Its 15 years in federal prison for a Butler County man convicted for child pornography.

David Myers, 54 of Greene, was indicted in October 2017 on five federal child porn crimes. The U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Iowa says Myers received sexually explicit images of minors between March 2005 and August 2014. He pleaded guilty to one count of receipt of child pornography after being convicted of sexual abuse.

Myers was found guilty of 3rd degree sex abuse in Floyd and Butler counties in 1998. Authorities say the victim in both cases was under 14 years old.

15 years in federal prison is the minimum sentence Myers could have received. He will also be on supervised release for five years after leaving prison and must pay $3,000 in restitution.WASHINGTON (AP)  President Donald Trump has asked trade officials to explore the possibility of the United States rejoining negotiations on the Pacific Rim agreement after he pulled out last year as part of his "America first" agenda.

Farm-state lawmakers said Thursday after a White House meeting with Trump that he had given that assignment to his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, and his new chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow. The Trans-Pacific Partnership would open more overseas markets for American farmers.

"I'm sure there are lots of particulars that they'd want to negotiate, but the president multiple times reaffirmed in general to all of us and looked right at Larry Kudlow and said, 'Larry, go get it done,'" said Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb.

Eleven countries signed the agreement last month. Trump's rejection of the deal has rattled allies and raised questions at home about whether protectionism will impede U.S. economic growth.

Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, said he was "very impressed" that Trump had assigned Kudlow and Lighthizer "the task to see if we couldn't take another look at TPP. And that certainly would be good news all throughout farm country."

The discussions came during a meeting in which Trump told farm-state governors and lawmakers that he was pressing China to treat the American agriculture industry fairly. Midwest farmers fear becoming caught up in a trade war as Beijing threatens to impose tariffs on soybeans and other U.S. crops, a big blow to Midwestern farmers, many of whom are strong Trump supporters.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds participated in the meeting and issued the following statement: I want to thank the president for a productive meeting on agriculture and trade. He understands that for our farmers to be successful, we need to grow - not contract - our markets."

In addition to discussing trade with China, we emphasized the importance of finalizing NAFTA negotiations, expanding the use of E15 year-round and reconsidering the TPP."

The president listened to our concerns, said that he is determined to resolve the dispute with China, said that he intends to expand E15 and ordered his top advisors to study the possibility of reentering the TPP."

I appreciate the opportunity to meet with the president, as well as his administrations continued commitment to partner with states and listen to their concerns.

Trump has mused about re-joining TPP negotiations in the past but his request to his top aides show a greater level of interest in rejoining the pact he railed against during his 2016 campaign.

During a February news conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump raised the possibility of rejoining TPP if the negotiators offered more favorable terms. In a CNBC interview in January, Trump said, "I would do TPP if we were able to make a substantially better deal. The deal was terrible."

The White House meeting was aimed at appealing to the Midwest lawmakers at a time of high anxiety because of the China trade dispute.

During the exchange, Trump suggested the possibility of directing the Environmental Protection Agency to allow year-round sales of renewable fuel with blends of 15 percent ethanol.

The EPA currently bans the 15-percent blend, called E15, during the summer because of concerns that it contributes to smog on hot days. Gasoline typically contains 10 percent ethanol. Farm state lawmakers have pushed for greater sales of the higher ethanol blend to boost demand for the corn-based fuel.

The oil and natural gas industries have pressed Trump to waive some of the requirements in the federal Renewable Fuel Standard law that would ease gasoline and diesel refiners' volume mandates. Farm state lawmakers fear that would reduce demand for the biofuels and violate the RFS law.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said Trump made some "pretty positive statements" about allowing the year-round use of E-15 ethanol, which could help corn growers.

Iowa's junior U.S. Senator Joni Ernst issued the following statement on Thursday's meeting: We had a productive meeting today with President Trump and Secretary Perdue to discuss ways to support our agriculture industry and help secure greater certainty for our farmers."

In light of the growing concerns Ive heard from Iowans regarding tariffs, I immediately brought up the importance of renegotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Iowa farmers arent looking for another subsidy program, rather they want new and improved market access, which is critical to rural economies. Im so pleased that the President asked his administration to reengage in these discussions with other TPP countries, and is continuing his work to negotiate a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) deal. There is a growing demand for U.S. agricultural products around the world, and American farmers and manufacturers should be able to compete in these markets."

Additionally, I was glad to hear the President support the sale of E15 year round. My colleagues and I previously offered legislation to break down the barriers that have impeded retailers and consumers from accessing E15 during the summer months, ultimately lowering the cost at the pump for folks across the country."

Moreover, we must continue pursuing policies that enhance our competitiveness, rather than reducing our access to foreign markets. I remain committed to working with the Trump administration toward a stronger trade agenda on behalf of Iowans.

The administration is also considering the possibility of the federal government aiding farmers harmed by retaliatory tariffs from China, according to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and advocacy groups. But some key senators oppose the approach. "We don't need that. We do not want another subsidy program. What we want is a market," Roberts said during a congressional hearing this week.

The meetings came as an array of business executives and trade groups expressed alarm to federal lawmakers Thursday about the impact that tariffs will have on their business.

Kevin Kennedy, president of a steel fabrication business in Texas, said tariffs on steel and aluminum imports have led U.S. steel producers to raise their prices by 40 percent. He said that's shifting work to competitors outside the U.S. including in Canada and Mexico because they now enjoy a big edge on material costs.

Representatives for chemical manufacturers and soybean farmers also expressed their concerns to the House Ways and Means Committee, which is examining the impact of the tariffs.

The U.S. and China are in the early stages of what could be the biggest trade battle in more than a half century. 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 practices by U.S. trading partners.

Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, urged lawmakers and the administration to stay the course in getting tough on China. He said China's theft of intellectual property has inflicted serious damage to U.S. companies and threatens the country's future economic outlook.DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds is traveling to Washington to discuss trade with President Donald Trump amid escalating tensions with China over tariffs.

Reynolds' staff says in a press release Wednesday that the governor will be in Washington on Thursday to meet with Trump, governors and congressional leaders. The press release says Reynolds will discuss "issues impacting the agricultural community, including trade."

Reynolds has said she's closely monitoring communication between the countries over proposed tariffs on a range of products. China's tariffs on U.S. exports could have a huge economic toll on soybeans, ethanol and pork.

Reynolds' trip caused her to cancel an event in Muscatine. She plans to return to Iowa by Thursday afternoon and will attend an event in Bettendorf.LAKE MILLS, Iowa  A man stands accused of stealing from the city of Lake Mills.

Dylan James Mitchell, 26 of Lake Mills, is charged with 3rd degree burglary and 2nd degree theft. Authorities say he and another individual identified only as Justin stole tools out of the Lake Mills City Shed on March 20. Court documents state the total value of the tools taken is about $2,171.85.

Lake Mills police say Mitchell tried to sell the stolen tools via social media, with officers monitoring the activity and intercepting Mitchell during a sale. The investigation then led to a search at 507 West Main Street, where officers say more of the tools were recovered.DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  The Iowa Senate has declined to confirm a woman to the state Board of Medicine because of an online comment she made about the LGBTQ community.

Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds' appointment of Katherine Asjes failed Wednesday. All 18 votes against the appointment were cast by Democrats, the Des Moines Register reported .

Asjes' comment supporting a Catholic World Report article that criticized the LGBTQ community is concerning, said Democratic Sen. Tony Bisignano of Des Moines. Article author Jim Russell said the LGBTQ community is constantly changing the rights they're seeking and criticizing those who oppose them.

Asjes posted a comment where she said she agrees with Russell's statements, but wants more information about the "original definition of heterosexual."

"What I read was pretty off-the-wall," Bisignano said. "In reading this, she states that she completely agrees with all that this person has said and this guy goes back into the Dark Ages talking about sexuality and getting into homosexuality."

The comment raised concerns about whether Asjes would protect the health of all Iowa residents, said Senate Minority Leader Janet Petersen.

Asjes said that while she expressed agreement with the author, she made the comment to seek additional information. Asjes said she's a conservative Republican and believes her views on marriage are in line with the Republican party.

"I really think that this speaks to a lack of open-mindedness and the intolerance of Democrats," Asjes said.

Republican Sen. Brad Zaun of Urbandale said Asjes' experience in hospital public relations makes her "more than qualified" for the position.

The state Board of Medicine regulates physicians and surgeons, osteopathic physicians and licensed acupuncturists.

On Thursday, Senate Democrats also voted down reappointment of Mike Cormack as chairman of the Iowa Public Employment Relations Board. Democrats argued Cormack had done a poor job of overseeing union elections tied to a collective bargaining law passed last year. The board recently walked back immediate plans to add new registration requirements to vote, a proposal that was criticized by unions.MASON CITY, Iowa - Following the massive data leak involving Facebook and the testimony by the company's CEO over the past two days, millions of people using Facebook and other social media are feeling not in control of their online data.

NIACC student Conner Gauch will tell you she only uses Facebook to post pictures.

I don't really care who sees them, its not like any personal information about my life, its just my friends and somewhere to store something for a while, Gauch said.

Gauch says she expects a little privacy.

RELATED: More on Facebook's privacy.

My account is private so I would feel like it should be private but I don't really care, Gauch said.

The content that we put on social media is social media. Its meant to be social, share things. If you think about it what you're posting on social media anybody can grab it and share it, said Sara Broers said, a social media expert.

Broers is paying close attention to what's happening with Facebook. This week, Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook, testified about a recent data breach scandal in front of lawmakers.

A CBS news poll shows many social media users are asking for more government regulation of social media to keep data private, but they don't have much confidence in Facebook to keep that data to themselves.

I think theres a misconception that everything we put online is ours because we have clicked a box that says we are only sharing with our friends, but we have also clicked a box that says we are also posting to the World Wide Web, Broers said.

In the CBS poll, Americans say they're at least somewhat concerned that Facebook data was obtained by an outside company, but less than half say it's a big deal.BEIJING (Reuters) - China will remove import tariffs on cancer drugs from May 1, state media reported on Thursday, citing a meeting of the State Council, or cabinet, chaired by Premier Li Keqiang. China will also strengthen intellectual property right protections of drugs, the report said. Reporting by Beijing Monitoring Desk; Editing by Kim Coghill

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.SANTIAGO (Reuters) - South African miner Gold Fields Ltd will complete preparatory work in 2019 at its Salares Norte project in northern Chile and is eyeing potential output of around 345,000 ounces of gold a year at the site by the early 2020s, a company executive said.

Gold Fields will decide whether to give the go-ahead for construction of the mine high in the Andes mountains next year, Alberto Cardenas, vice president for operations in the Americas told Reuters.

Probably we are going to be in study mode until September next year, he said in an interview at the CRU/CESCO copper conference in Chile on Tuesday.

After that, if we continue with the project we start burning the $850 million construction budget ... It (the decision on investment) is going to be 2019.

Gold Fields produced 2.16 million ounces of gold last year but profit fell 4 percent as it struggled to resolve operational issues at its underground mine in South Africa, South Deep.

The company is also investing in a new mine in Australia and upgrades at mines in Ghana and Peru.

Assuming the Salares Norte project gets the go-ahead, Cardenas said he expected production to begin around 2021 and quickly achieve target output of 345,000 ounces of gold a year.

We expect to be at that level of production during the first year or entering the next year. It could be higher, he said.

The financing of the project had not been finalized, he added.

Its still open how to structure that. There is no clear resolution - it could be a JV (joint venture) or any alternative.CHICAGO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans on the U.S. House Agriculture Committee on Thursday called for changes to the governments food assistance program for the poor, in a package of long-awaited proposals for the next U.S. Farm Bill that could complicate its passage through Congress.

Among the proposed changes is a plan to raise the age to 59 from 49 for able-bodied individuals without dependents who receive food stamps if they meet certain work requirements. About 40 million individuals currently benefit from the program, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The changes are likely to complicate the legislations passage through the Senate. Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Republican, has warned that the changes to SNAP sought by conservative House Republicans and the administration of President Donald Trump will make it difficult to get the votes needed from Democrats to pass the bill.

Farm Bills are massive pieces of legislation providing funding for a broad swath of programs including food aid, crop subsidies, rural development, conservation and efforts to stem the opioid crisis in rural communities.

The last bill came into effect in 2014, two years behind schedule, after extensive congressional negotiations and partisan fights over food stamps.

Republicans have a slim 51-49 Senate majority and the bill will need 60 votes to pass.

Republican changes to the Nutrition Title, which provides food assistance to people with low income, derailed bipartisan committee negotiations earlier this year.

TRADE FLOW DISRUPTION

The Republican-controlled committee has also called for a $255 million-per-year budget to develop trade opportunities for U.S. agricultural exports.

The bill comes at a time when the farm sector, already reeling from years of declining incomes, is struggling to deal with disruption to trade flows, as Trump says he wants to renegotiate better terms for the United States with international partners.

The proposals do not contain fresh measures to protect U.S. farmers from the impact of the trade disputes on agricultural exports or imports. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is already equipped to deal with any fallout through the Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act, which allows the USDA to borrow up to $30 billion to protect farm income, according to briefing materials provided by Republican committee staff.

Proposals for the new bill also include provisions to renew insurance programs that have proven popular with farmers.

ARC VS PLC

One of the biggest changes in the previous bill was to shift away from direct cash payments provided to grain growers, to more market-based formulas based on actual crop prices.

Farmers had to choose between two options, the price-average formula of Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) or the more fixed-price formula of Price Loss Coverage (PLC), and stick with their choice for the five years of the farm bill.

The proposed House bill reauthorizes those programs and calls for farmers to make a fresh choice between the two. Analysts have said that many farmers might switch to PLC under the new bill due to the slump in futures markets as payouts under ARC are likely to be smaller.

Under the 2014 Farm Bill, the majority of farmers chose ARC, which used a price-average formula to determine payouts, as high grain prices from a drought in 2012 were included in the average used when determining ARC payouts.

The new proposal modifies PLC by allowing reference prices for coverage to change when commodity markets rise, which would give higher payments to growers if prices rally.

For ARC, the bill calls for payments to be calculated based on actual yield data, as well as the county where farms are located and if fields are irrigated.

The bill now enters the mark-up phase, where members of the House Agriculture Committee can propose changes. House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday he would like to see the House pass a bill this spring that includes changes to the SNAP program.

The Senate could consider a House-passed bill as is, with changes, or write its own.(Kitco News) - Soaring housing prices in all the major markets do not reflect a problem within the housing market but demonstrates a problem with global currencies, according to one gold bullion investment firm.

In 2017 Canada saw the fast rise in housing prices in the world. According to research from Goldmoney, Canadian homes, priced in Canadian dollars have risen 350% since 1990. However, home prices, measured in gold ounces has been relatively unchanged for the last few years.

While many economists have attributed higher Canadian home prices to growing demand, mainly from foreign investors, Wieler said that he sees the higher prices as a symptom of devalued fiat currencies.

In other words, the Canadian dollar lost its purchasing power dramatically, while gold prices fluctuate and remain in line with real assets, said Stefan Wieler, director and lead researcher at the investment firm in a recent email comment to Kitco News.

Buts its not just Canada, you can see the same trend in all the major housing markets in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Geneva, Shanghai, he said in a telephone interview. One thing all these places have in common is unhinged central bank monetary policy.

While gold can be volatile over the short-term, Wieler said that the research shows that the yellow metal does a better job of holding value over the long-term, compared to fiat currencies. He added that the housing data shows that gold remains the ultimate global currency.

In the global marketplace, gold has seen significant gains against the U.S. dollar. June Comex gold futures last traded at $1,340 an ounce, up 2.6% since the start of the year. Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar has dropped 2.5% against a basket of global currencies year-to-date.

While there continues to be underlying support to bring back a global gold standard to support devalued currencies, Wieler said that developing technology has made the issue a mute topic. With companies like Goldmoney, he explained that consumers can take direct control of their purchasing power.

Because of technology, you can do everything with gold that you can do with fiat currencies, he said. In particular, with our platform, if you are a merchant, you can receive gold as a form of payment and companies can even pay their employees in gold.

Looking ahead, Wieler added that he expects more consumers and business to turn to gold as a global currency as the world deals with the impact of global devalued currencies.

While housing prices have remained relatively stable in gold ounces, Wieler warned that like all markets, there is a risk that prices drop. He noted that the housing market faces strong headwinds as few consumers buy homes.

While home prices in gold have remained relatively unchanged, we have seen a decline in wages in gold and that will weigh on the housing market and the general economy.ROME (Reuters) - Italys three main rightist parties are determined to govern together, League leader Matteo Salvini said on Thursday, calling on its potential coalition partner, the 5-Star Movement, to stop playing political games.

National elections last month ended in a hung parliament with the conservative bloc, comprising the League, the Brothers of Italy and Forza Italia winning the most seats while 5-Star emerged as the largest single party.

The 5-Star has said it is willing to govern with the League, but has ruled out working either with Forza Italia or its leader, four times prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

President Sergio Mattarella launched a second round of consultations on Thursday after a first round last week failed to break the deadlock.

In last weeks talks the rightist parties met Mattarella separately, but this time they saw the head of state together in a show of unity.

At the end of the meeting, Salvini read a joint statement saying he and his allies were ready to build a government together as a united front, adding that his own party would indicate the name of the prime minister.

With Berlusconi nodding and gesticulating alongside him, Salvini called on 5-Star to show a sense of responsibility.

If we continue with a political game of tactics, of no and of vetoes while Italians suffer and wait for solutions, it would mean that the demand for change that emerged from the March 4 elections wont be met, Salvini said.(Kitco News) - New Energy Metals Corp. (TSXV: ENRG) has entered into options agreements to acquire a 100% interest in three additional cobalt exploration projects in Chiles past-producing cobalt district, the company announced Wednesday.

These projects add to the two cobalt acquisitions announce earlier, and provide the company with a strong land position in the prospective San Juan cobalt district in Chile, said Grand Ewing, president and chief executive officer of New Energy Metals. We view the potential for the discovery of primary cobalt deposits on the projects as very good, based on historical records and the fact that only limited exploration has been conducted in the region in more than 60 years.

The company said it chose the projects based on geological characteristics, historic workings, evidence of mineralization and proximity to past production. The company also said its initial exploration will center on historical data, regional mapping and prospecting, and sampling to identify priority areas for follow-up work. Officials said infrastructure is good and the district is 10 kilometers from tidewater.

The San Juan cobalt district includes several mines that produced cobalt and copper for several decades at the turn of the 20th century. The last closed in the mid 1940s. From 1903 to 1944, the district produced some 300,000 tonnes of cobalt ore grading 4% cobalt, plus some copper, New Energy Metals reported.

The options purchase sets out a schedule by which the company can earn a 100% interest in the projects, with cash and share payments. Over a period of up to two years, the cumulative payments for all of the projects would amount to $2.6 million and 2.4 million shares.

New Energy Metals completed an initial public offering in January and closed on $4.37 million financing in February. The principal project is the Cristal copper project in northern Chile, for which the company has an option to acquire a 100% interest.WASHINGTON/LONDON/MOSCOW (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said he was holding meetings on Thursday on Syria where he has threatened missile strikes in response to a suspected poison gas attack and he expected decisions to be taken fairly soon.

Fears of confrontation between Russia, Syrias big ally, and the West have been running high since Trump said on Wednesday that missiles will be coming after the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on April 7, and lambasted Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! Trump said in an early morning tweet on Thursday.

Later on Thursday, he said: Were having a number of meetings today, well see what happens. Now we have to make some ... decisions, so theyll be made fairly soon.

Earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron said France had proof the Syrian government carried out the attack, which aid groups have said killed dozens of people, and will decide whether to strike back when all the necessary information has been gathered.

We have proof that last week ... chemical weapons were used, at least with chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of (President) Bashar al-Assad, Macron said, without offering details of any evidence.

We will need to take decisions in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective, he told broadcaster TF1.

British Prime Minister Theresa May meanwhile held a special cabinet meeting to weigh whether Britain should join the United States and France in possible military action. She has cast the attack in Douma, then rebel-held, just east of the capital Damascus, as barbaric.

Syria and its backers, Russia and Iran, say reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers in Douma and have accused the United States of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the government.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, however, told Congress on Thursday that he believed there was a chemical attack in Syria, but added a short while later that the United States had not made any decision to launch military action in Syria.

He accused Russia of being complicit in Syrias retention of chemical weapons, despite a 2013 deal requiring Syria to abandon them that Moscow helped broker.

A team of experts from the global chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was travelling to Syria and will start their investigations on Saturday, the Netherlands-based agency said.

Despite the tension, there were signs of a global effort to head off a direct confrontation between Russia and the West. The Kremlin said a crisis communications link with the United States, created to avoid an accidental clash over Syria, was in use.

There was no direct word from Russian President Vladimir Putin on the crisis, though he discussed the situation with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan by phone on Thursday, Interfax news agency said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow sought no escalation of the situation, but that it could not support dishonest accusations and it had found no evidence of a chemical weapons attack in Douma.

Statements from Washington have been militaristic, ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, and threats by the United States and France were a violation of the U.N. charter.

NAVAL MANOEUVRES

Syrias military has repositioned some air assets to avoid missile strikes, U.S. officials told Reuters. Locating them alongside Russian military hardware might make Washington reluctant to hit them.

Russian ships had left the Tartus naval base in Syria, Interfax news agency quoted a Russian lawmaker as saying. Vladimir Shamanov, who chairs the defence committee of the lower house, said the vessels had departed the Mediterranean base for their own safety, which was normal practice when there were threats of attack.

For its part, the Russian military said it had observed movements of U.S. Navy forces in the Gulf. Any U.S. strike would probably involve the navy, given the risk to aircraft from Russian and Syrian air defences. A U.S. guided-missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, is in the Mediterranean.

Moscows ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, warned on Wednesday that any U.S. missiles unleashed at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted.

Russia, Assads most important ally in his seven-year-old war with rebels, said it had deployed military police in Douma on Thursday after the town was taken over by government forces.

They are the guarantors of law and order in the town, RIA news agency quoted Russias defence ministry as saying.

Assad said any Western action will contribute nothing but an increase in instability in the region, threatening international peace and security, Syrian state TV reported.

The Syrian conflict has increasingly widened the rifts between Moscow, Washington and European powers and inflamed the bitter rivalries that run across the Middle East.

Syria, Russia and Iran say reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers in Douma and have accused the United States of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the government.

Nervous world stock markets showed signs of recovery after Trump signalled military strikes might not be imminent.

ISRAELI AIR STRIKE

Syria and its allies Russia and Iran say Israel was behind an air strike on a Syrian air base on Monday that killed seven Iranian military personnel, something Israel has neither confirmed nor denied.

Putin spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone on Wednesday and urged him to do nothing to destabilise Syria. Netanyahus office said: The prime minister reiterated that Israel will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Irans Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said the Western threats were based on lies about the poison gas assault, after meeting Assad. He said later he hoped Syrias army and its allies would drive U.S. troops out of eastern Syria, and take Idlib in the northwest from rebels.

May has ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military that could begin as early as Thursday night, Londons Daily Telegraph newspaper said on Wednesday.

The BBC reported that May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in military action. She would not seek approval from parliament, the BBC said.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the trade negotiations between Washington and Beijing were going well, conflicting with Chinese official statements on the dispute.

Were doing really well with China. I think were having some great discussions, well see what happens, Trump said at a meeting with governors and lawmakers, attended by reporters.

We want more trade. We want no barriers, Trump said.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly condemned as a witch hunt a federal probe into possible collusion between Moscow and his presidential campaign, said on Thursday he backed a cooperative approach to the investigation.

I have agreed with the historically cooperative, disciplined approach that we have engaged in with Robert Mueller, Trump said in a Twitter message, referring to the special counsel leading the investigation.

Mueller, appointed by the Justice Department, is investigating alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow.

Russia denies U.S. intelligence agencies findings that it interfered in the campaign to try to tilt the vote in Trumps favor. Trump has denied any collusion and has repeatedly attacked Muellers investigation as politically motivated.

Trumps irritation erupted again this week after an FBI raid targeting his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, which followed a referral by Mueller. This raised concerns among critics and lawmakers, including some in Trumps own Republican Party, that he might try to have Mueller removed.

The president denied a New York Times report on Tuesday that he had sought to fire Mueller in December. If I wanted to fire Robert Mueller in December, as reported by the Failing New York Times, I would have fired him, he said on Twitter early Thursday.

White House lawyers Ty Cobb and Donald McGahn have told Trump that firing Mueller would leave him vulnerable to charges of obstruction of justice, two officials told Reuters on Tuesday. They said he must have good cause to order the Justice Department official overseeing the Russia probe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, to oust Mueller.

ADVICE FROM FORMER AIDE

Steve Bannon, a former senior adviser to Trump, has encouraged White House aides to advise Trump to fire Rosenstein, the Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing unidentified sources. It also said Bannon wanted the White House to stop cooperating with the Mueller investigation and fire Cobb.

Cobb, the lawyer in charge of the White House response to the Russia investigation, has stressed cooperation with Mueller. The White House has said it has turned over tens of thousands of pages of documents to the special counsels team.

Trump said in one of his Twitter messages on Thursday that he had full confidence in Cobb.

A bipartisan group of senators put forward legislation on Wednesday to protect Mueller and his investigation, which the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider next week.

Anyone advising the President - in public or over the airwaves - to fire Bob Mueller does not have the President or the nations best interest at heart. Full stop, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch wrote on Twitter on Thursday.WASHINGTON/LONDON/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Fears of a military confrontation between Russia and the West ran high on Thursday but U.S. President Donald Trump cast doubt over the timing of his threatened strike on Syria in response to a reported poison gas attack on a rebel enclave.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! said Trump in his latest early morning tweet.

That appeared a day after he tweeted that missiles will be coming after the April 7 chemical weapons attack alleged to have killed dozens of people, and lambasted Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Prime Minister Theresa May prepared to convene a special cabinet meeting at 1430 GMT to weigh whether Britain should join the United States and France in a possible military action.

May recalled ministers from their Easter holiday to debate action over what she has cast as a barbaric poison gas attack by Syrian government forces on civilians in the formerly rebel-controlled town of Douma, just east of the capital Damascus.

There were signs, though, of a global effort to head off a dangerous conflict pitting Russia against the West. The Kremlin said a crisis communications link with the United States, created to avoid an accidental clash over Syria, was in use.

The situation in Syria is horrific, the use of chemical weapons is something the world has to prevent, Britains Brexit minister David Davis said on Thursday morning.

But also its a very, very delicate circumstance and weve got to make this judgment on a very careful, very deliberate, very well thought-through basis.

French President Emmanuel Macron said he would decide whether to strike Syrian government targets after the reported attack by internationally banned chemical munitions in Douma once all the necessary information had been gathered.

We will need to take decisions in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective, Macron said, adding that all the necessary verifications had to be carried out first.

He said he would also strive to prevent an escalation of conflict across the Middle East.

SYRIA MOVES TARGETS

At the eye of the storm, Assad said any Western action will contribute nothing but an increase in instability in the region, threatening international peace and security, Syrian state television reported.

Russia, Assads most important ally in his seven-year-old war with rebels, said it had deployed military police in Douma on Thursday after the town was taken over by government forces.

They are the guarantors of law and order in the town, RIA news agency quoted Russias defence ministry as saying.

Syrias military has repositioned some air assets to avoid fallout from possible missile strikes, U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

Syrias attempt to shelter aircraft, perhaps by locating them alongside Russian military hardware that Washington might be reluctant to hit, could limit damage that the United States and its allies might be able to inflict on Assads military.

World stocks edged down as anxious investors stayed wary of risky assets.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, striking a cautious tone after Trumps threat of missile strikes, said on Wednesday the United States was still assessing intelligence about the suspected toxic gas attack.

Both Syria and Russia have said reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers in Douma and have accused the United States of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the government.

The Russian military said it had observed movements of U.S. Navy forces in the Gulf. Any U.S. strike would probably involve the navy, given the risk to aircraft from Russian and Syrian air defences. A U.S. guided-missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, is in the Mediterranean.

Moscows ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, warned on Wednesday that any U.S. missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted.

The Syrian conflict has increasingly widened the rifts between Moscow, Washington and European powers and inflamed the bitter rivalries that run across the Middle East.

ISRAELI AIR STRIKE

Syria, Iran and Russia say Israel was behind an air strike on a Syrian air base on Monday that killed seven Iranian military personnel, something Israel has neither confirmed nor denied.

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone on Wednesday and urged him to do nothing to destabilize Syria. Netanyahus office said: The prime minister reiterated that Israel will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Irans Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said the Western threats were based on lies about the poison gas assault, after meeting Assad.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he had spoken to Trump on Wednesday and would speak to Putin on Thursday night about the chemical attack.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Berlin wanted to be consulted before any Western military action. Its important at the same time to maintain pressure on Russia, he said. If we want to do that, we the Western partners cannot diverge in our approaches.

May has ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military that could begin as early as Thursday night, Londons Daily Telegraph newspaper said on Wednesday.

The BBC reported that May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in military action. She would not seek approval from parliament, the BBC said, despite calls from the opposition Labour Party for parliament to be given a say.

Parliament voted down British military action against Assads government in 2013 in an embarrassment for Mays predecessor, David Cameron. That then deterred the U.S. administration of Barack Obama from similar action.

British Minister Davis said his decision then to vote against action was based on a lack of clear evidence and a lack of a clear plan. Those two things, Im assured, we will get an answer to today, he said of Thursdays cabinet meeting.CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday said he thinks a conversation he had with Chinas President Xi Jinping has had an impact on U.S. beef exports to China, where American exporters are now selling a lot of beef.

The volume of U.S. beef exported to China is a small slice of the American beef export market, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

Beijing lifted a 14-year ban on U.S. beef imports about 10 months ago, but the countrys purchases are dwarfed by sales to Japan, Mexico and South Korea.

Sales of beef to China this year represent less than 1 percent of U.S. beef exports. About 1,100 tonnes of U.S. beef has been shipped to China this year through April 5 - while another 274 tonnes were sold but yet to ship, according to the latest USDA data. Overall, the U.S. has sold nearly 360,000 tonnes of beef for export this year, of which almost 211,000 tonnes have been shipped.

Trump, speaking at a White House meeting with legislators from top agriculture states, including Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, said his conversation with Xi made a big impact. Trump did not say when this conversation with Xi took place.

The lawmakers were advocating for the president to ease tariff-related strains on American farmers worried about rising tensions between the United States and China, a top agricultural export market.

I think, Governor, that made a big impact. And theyre selling a lot of beef in China. That hadnt been for 14, 15 years. They were not allowed to sell beef in China, Trump said.

China proposed tariffs last week on U.S. beef, soybeans and other agricultural goods in the deepening trade dispute.

Some U.S. beef shipped to Hong Kong is later brought into mainland China. If beef sales to Hong Kong of 43,055 tonnes year-to-date were included, the combined sales would account for about 12 percent of the U.S. beef export market.

Last year, about 3,000 tonnes of U.S. beef valued at $31 million was shipped to China, making it the No. 18 market.

When China lifted the ban, everyone got all whipped up, said CHS Hedging analyst Steve Wagner. But I dont think demand is going to increase substantially. It will be incremental.

Overall U.S. beef exports were up about 10 percent so far in 2018, USDA data showed.

Exports have been good but they have not been good because of China, Wagner said.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA Director Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trumps nominee to be secretary of state, said on Thursday he had been interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. During questioning at his Senate confirmation hearing, Pompeo declined to discuss details of private conversations with Trump when asked if Trump had talked to him about the Russia investigation, which includes probing possible collusion by Trumps campaign with Moscow. But he said the president had never asked him to do anything improper. Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Frances Kerry

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.Rescue helicopters hover above sunk Sewol ferry in waters off Jindo Island in South Jeolla Province, April 16, 2014. / Korea Times file







By Ko Dong-hwan





Jung Woo-sung promotes "Intention" on Instagram. / Capture from Instagram

Actor Jung Woo-sung worked on the documentary film about the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster without pay, sources said Wednesday.



The revelation came after the A-list star promoted the film on Instagram with a selfie video Tuesday.



"I joined the movie to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the tragedy on April 16 and encourage people to remember the day," said Jung, 45, who provides narration. "The movie traces back to the disaster's cause using scientific approaches."



In his short video  shared by almost 600,000 people on Wednesday  Jung asked fans to watch "Intention" that opens on Thursday in theaters nationwide.



Journalist and news critic Kim Eo-jun, who worked on the production and cast Jung over the phone, said on online portal Naver's smartphone real-time video platform V app Tuesday that it took the star only a second to accept the offer.



"He is a top actor and pretty expensive to hire as a narrator," Kim said. "But we had no money. I called him to ask him the favor. He thought for exactly one second and said 'I will do it.' I was impressed by the handsome man's big heart."



Director Kim Ji-young worked nearly four years on the film that traces the vessel's voyage from April 15, when it left Incheon harbor, to when it capsized the following day in waters off Jindo Island in South Jeolla Province as it headed to Jeju Island. The disaster killed nearly 300 people, mostly students from Danwon High School in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, who were on a field trip.





Above Sewol ferry in the "Intention" poster reads, "The ocean knows all about that unforgettable day."By Kim Jae-kyoung



Since taking office a year ago, President Moon Jae-in has made all-out efforts to create more jobs and rehabilitate the economy, but unfortunately to no avail.



The unemployment rate hit a 17-year high in March, as companies have been reluctant to hire new employees and make fresh investments.



Why are Moon's efforts not making their way through to the economy?



There could be many reasons but the root cause could be mistrust between the government and business, which has impaired a virtuous economic cycle.



Jeffrey Jones, chairman of the AMCHAM board of governors, said that restoring trust is the most urgent task to produce jobs and revitalize the economy.



"One of the fundamental problems in Korea's economy is the distrust between government and business," Jones said in a recent interview.



"Government has a very low trust of business and believes that greater regulations and controls are necessary," he added.



Jones believes that this trend will have a stifling effect on the economy.



From his perspective, the economy falls into a vicious cycle when greater regulations prevent businesses from investing and growing, which leads to a decrease in job creation and consumption.



He said that there are reasons for this mistrust, much of which stems from poor corporate governance and a lack of transparency.



"Korean companies need to make dramatic changes to regain this trust. This will then permit the government to deregulate the economy and let businesses grow," he said.



Jones, an international lawyer at Kim & Chang, stressed that in order to address issues associated with corporate governance, more efforts should be made to reform firms' outside director system.



"One of the most severe problems with corporate governance in Korea is the practice of managing the outside directors of companies," he said.



He explained that a practice has developed in which management seeks to fill its outside board with "friends" who will simply approve its requests.



"It is the function of a board of directors to oversee and regulate the management of a company. This function is not being implemented as it should," he said.



In his view, the failure of boards to properly oversee management of a company requires government to step in and increase regulatory oversight. "It is a vicious circle," he said.



The former AMCHAM chairman suggested that companies reduce the number of former government officials and professors as outside directors.



Instead, he advised firms to bring onto the board individuals who have real business experience and who can look at the issues raised by management from a perspective of what is in the best interests of the company and its many stakeholders.



"With a much more effective board of directors, trust can be reestablished and deregulation can occur," he said.



Regarding the ongoing turmoil at GM Korea, Jones said that the most viable solution would be the proposed debt-for-equity swap.



"It seems the best solution is for GM to convert its loans to capital," he said.



"The Korea Development Bank (KDB) invests cash to preserve its equity position and the company downsizes to preserve as many jobs as possible."



The Detroit-based automaker has proposed to invest $2.8 billion in the Korea unit but demanded the state-run KDB, which is the second-largest shareholder with a 17-percent stake, participate in its debt-to-equity swap plan.



As for U.S. President Donald Trump's protectionism, he said that Korea is not actually a target of Trump's trade measures.



"The bigger problem is China and Japan. Trump is concerned of course about Korea, but I do not believe he is specifically targeting Korea," he said.



By Park Si-soo



The United States and North Korea are in "last-minute" negotiations on the agenda for historic talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, the Chosun Ilbo daily reported on Thursday, citing sources in Washington.



The exact date and venue for the summit could be announced next week, the Seoul-based newspaper said.



Earlier, Trump said the summit would take place "in May or early June."



Chosun reported Trump would demand Kim denuclearize the North over six months or a year after their meeting, citing an unnamed source in Washington. The paper said Trump did not support the idea of a "phased and synchronized" implementation of a denuclearization deal, an option Pyongyang favors.





Meanwhile, the New York Times reported on Wednesday that the U.S. and the North have been negotiating with "will and sincerity" over the summit details.

By Park Si-soo



What would the United States give North Korea in return for denuclearization?



The Trump administration is now detailing a compensation package for the Kim Jong-un regime that would significantly boost economic and diplomatic sectors, the Dong-A Ilbo daily reported on Thursday, citing government sources.





By Kim Bo-eun



National Security Office chief Chung Eui-yong sat down with his new U.S. counterpart John Bolton in Washington D.C., Thursday (local time), to map out a picture of the denuclearization of North Korea ahead of scheduled summits that will address this issue.

In Chung's first meeting with Bolton, who was named national security adviser April 9, the two are expected to open a communication channel as their countries prepare for the summits with North Korea. An inter-Korean summit will be held April 27 and a Pyongyang-Washington summit in May or June.

Chung arrived Wednesday for the scheduled meeting with Bolton, but this was postponed until the following day, due to Washington dealing with the situation surrounding Syria.

His visit comes a month after he and other South Korean envoys visited President Donald Trump to deliver North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's invitation for a summit, after their meeting with Kim in Pyongyang.

Kim said in the meeting with the envoys that his regime was willing to give up its nuclear program if its security was guaranteed.

Chung and Bolton are likely to attempt to narrow their differences in the views they hold about how to achieve the denuclearization of the North.

Bolton, referred to as a super-hawk in foreign policy, is known for his hard-line stance against Pyongyang. He has advocated military options against the regime.

His views are in contrast with his predecessor Herbert McMaster, who supported dialogue.











Robert Gallucci, chairman of U.S.-Korea Institute. / Yonhap



By Choi Ha-young









The Korean government decided to cut funding for the U.S.-Korea Institute (USKI) because it neglected a bipartisan request from the National Assembly to provide proper records on how it has used funds from Korea, National Assembly sources said Thursday.

The USKI, affiliated with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), was not the only U.S. institute that received such a request from Korea. For example, the Korea Economic Institute (KEI), also based in Washington, D.C., was also a beneficiary of funds the Korean government has provided to U.S. think tanks through the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP).



The KEI, however, provided proper data on its use of funds, so it had no trouble with the National Assembly, unlike the USKI, the sources said. The sources doubted the USKI's claims that the Korean government pressured it to change its leadership.

"The root cause of the problems was the institute's lax accounting," a source said. "This is not related to dissonance between Washington and Seoul or meddling in academic freedom. The institute should have provided proper spending records, but it did not."

The source continued, "The USKI claims the fund was part of a donation, but it was Korean taxpayers' money. If the National Assembly refused to look into the USKI's account, it would be a dereliction of duty.

"These days, even donations in the form of official development assistance are obliged to prove documentary evidence. The government is not a charity."

A senior secretary in the Assembly's Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee claimed the government needs to tighten its grip on the fund by installing a liaison in Washington. The Japanese government is doing so, he said. Even if it could ensure better transparency, this may arouse further controversy about "intervention on academic freedom."



Since 2014, the Assembly has taken issue with the USKI's lack of transparency. After years of discussions in the Assembly's National Policy Committee, it adopted a comment in a budget report in, November 2017.

The comment reads, "To enhance the management of the USKI, the KIEP should draw up plans to carry out a reshuffle and strengthen its transparency by March 2018. After judging the achievement, the Assembly will decide whether it will keep funding the organization in September 2018."

Such comments couldn't be included without mutual bipartisan consent. During the meeting, no conservative lawmakers opposed the comment.

The committee is now chaired by conservative opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP) lawmaker Kim Yong-tae. Formerly, Rep. Lee Jin-bok of the LKP chaired the committee. During the 19th Assembly from 2012 to 2016, Reps. Chung Woo-taik and Kim Jung-hoon of the Saenuri Party  precursor to the LKP  chaired the committee.

There have been some doubts about why the KIEP cut off funding in April, rather than waiting until September. The secretary explained it shows the obstinate position of the KIEP.

"The KIEP has figured out it was impossible to improve the transparency of the USKI in the face of protests of the think tank's leadership. This means the KIEP will be grilled by lawmakers in September 2018, if it decides to keep funding the USKI," the secretary said.

Another senior secretary, who has long been involved in the Assembly's National Policy Committee, said aides even suspected USKI officials were doing some intelligence activities because of its poor accounting.

"Since the KIEP kept bringing up lax accounts of the USKI's 2 billion won ($1.87 million), I asked the KIEP vice chief whether the USKI is related to the National Intelligence Service. In an off-the-record meeting, I told him the Assembly could have a closed-door audit if that's true, but he kept mum," he said.

According to law, the spy agency's special activity funds are exempt from the Assembly's budget and accounting.

"If the USKI had difficulties in revealing its accounting, the think tank should have explained the reason before receiving the funds," he said.

He also refuted the rumor about a rift in the U.S.-ROK alliance due to the conflict. "If the government provided 2 billion won annually to a China-based think tank, conservatives would criticize the government for submitting to Beijing," he said. "If they politicize the issue, it will never get resolved."

Meanwhile, a ranking USKI official did not respond to The Korea Time's email for counter-arguments about the problems.



By Jung Min-ho







The Supreme Court upheld a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence Thursday for a man who blackmailed Samsung Electronics with sex videos of its chairman Lee Kun-hee.





The top court upheld the Seoul High Court's ruling that sentenced the former CJ CheilJedang official, surnamed Seon, 57, to four years and six months in prison for extorting 900 million won ($840,000) from Samsung in 2013 by threatening to release the videos.





In the videos, a man who appears to be the business tycoon offers money to women after receiving sexual services.





Seon and three other people recorded the videos between December 2011 and June 2013 at Lee's private residence in southern Seoul. The videos were disclosed to the public in 2016 with a report by online news outlet Newstapa.

By Ko Dong-hwan





A Russian man on a tourist visa will be deported after crashing his unregistered car several times and fleeing the scenes.







The man, 24, bought a 20-year-old Avante sedan for 600,000 won ($560) from an unidentified Russian woman he met via social networking after arriving in South Korea in October. The car was unregistered.







His trail of destruction began when he crashed into a parked car in an emergency lane in Songhyun-dong, Dalseo-gu, in Daegu on March 30. Immediately following the crash, he hit another vehicle coming from the opposite direction.







The Russian fled the scene and drove for about 200 meters before smashing into a motel sign. The motel owner confronted the man and was offered a fake $100 bill before the Russian again fled.







Dalseo police received reports of the incidents and used security camera video to identify the man.







Police raided the Russian's home on April 3 and arrested him over the incidents.







He was taken to the Daegu immigration office on Thursday for deportation.







Police are now looking for the woman who sold the car to the Russian.

A bird's-eye view of the envisioned new Gwanghwamun Square / Courtesy of Seoul City



By Kang Seung-woo



Seoul City's master plan to expand Gwanghwamun Square at the heart of the capital nearly fourfold is drawing mixed reactions from citizens.



Some say the redesign will help the square become another landmark of the metropolitan city, but others are concerned about possible fallout such as traffic jams and wasting of money.



The city government and the Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA) unveiled the 99.5 billion won ($94 million) project, Tuesday, that will nearly quadruple the current area from 18,840 square meters to 69,300 square meters and make it a more pedestrian-friendly public place.



Under the plan, the vehicle lanes running in front of the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts will be transformed into a pedestrian area, meaning the 10-lane streets on either side of the existing square will be redesigned to a two-way six-lane road in front of the U.S. Embassy and KT headquarters.



According to the city government, the construction is planned to begin in January 2020 for completion by May 2021.



Also, a new "history square" will be built in front of Gwanghwamun Gate.



The biggest stumbling block to the redesign plan is possible increased traffic.



Given that more than 5,000 vehicles per hour pass the area, the envisaged lane reduction is feared to trigger massive traffic jams.



"I welcome the pedestrian-friendly plan. However, this should be well-planned and should not cause further traffic jams," said Howard Kim, a 44-year-old public relations director.



Amid the growing concerns, the city plans to advise citizens to detour to an adjacent lane behind the Sejong Center that will be widened from two lanes to six. In addition, the city plans to ask the central government to include Gwanghwamun on the route of the planned Great Train Express (GTX) A-Line. The GTX lines currently being developed will link satellite cities and the capital.



Some are also criticizing the plan as the city already renovated the square in 2009, spending 72.2 billion won.



Compared with other districts of global metropolitan cities such as Ginza in Japan and Champs-Elysees in Paris, Seoul's reconstruction is frequent, according to critics.



The timing of the announcement is also casting suspicions.



Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon announced his bid for re-election as mayor, Thursday, although he denied any connection. The election is scheduled for June 13.



"This project has nothing to do with the local elections," Park said, Tuesday, adding the plan has been in discussions with the central government and experts for a long time.



Despite such criticism, those who work near the square welcomed the plan.



"Gwanghwamun Square has been at the center of Korean history -- from the 1392-1910 Joseon Kingdom to the modern day. Despite its significance, however, it has been regrettable that the square has been mainly used as vehicle road," said Jin Hyon-ho, 40.



"In that respect, I totally agree with the plan to set up a history plaza. In addition, I hope the renovation plan will lead to Gwanghwamun Square becoming an eco-friendly place for children."







By Lee Kyung-min



Residents in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, remain at odds over the city government's planned construction of a commemorative space for the victims of the ferry Sewol sinking, most of whom were students at Danwon High School in the city, Thursday.



Conflict over the politically and socially divisive issue is expected to escalate, with mayoral candidates in the region vying to make related campaign pledges ahead of the upcoming June 13 local elections. The fourth anniversary of the sinking is next Monday.



Supporters of the plan agree to build a space in Hwarang Park near the school, a move vehemently opposed by others claiming what they call a "charnel house" would only prolong the emotional distress that has haunted them over the past four years.



The conflict was triggered by Ansan Mayor Je Jong-geel who pledged to complete the construction of the commemorative space in the park housing an underground memorial site with victims' remains by 2020.



The pledge made during a Feb. 20 National Assembly session followed repeated requests by the bereaved families and civic groups who claimed a commemorative place should be set up where the children used to "go out and have fun."



According to Ansan City officials and the city website, the city plans to build the commemorative space which will account for 3.8 percent of the 620,000-square-meter Hwarang Park.



The underground memorial site, where victims' remains will be interred, will take only about 0.1 percent of the space.



The memorial site will be designed in a way that does not draw criticism for being "repulsive and abhorrent" from residents, according to a city official.



"This is why the city is planning to build the place underground to respect the opinions of both sides. We will continue the discussion about the construction after forming a 50-member deliberative body. We will submit the city's opinion with the Office for Government Policy Coordination," he said.



The move is supported by civic groups including the Coalition 4.16 on the Sewol Ferry Disaster, whose more than 30 members staged a rally in Hwarang Park Tuesday.



The group urged President Moon Jae-in to attend the fourth commemoration ceremony next week so he could promise to help the city's plan.



"President Moon Jae-in, who attended a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Jeju April 3 Massacre to apologize for the state-sanctioned violence, should do the same with us for the ferry Sewol victim families and Ansan residents," the group said.



However, opposition is just as fierce from other residents who claim they have suffered long enough and the construction is simply illegal.



"Under the law, no facility housing human remains is allowed for construction in the park," a group of 100 residents said in a press conference near Cheong Wa Dae Wednesday.



"The city is unilaterally pushing for a project that is apparently illegal, citing the wishes of the bereaved. The plan should be scrapped immediately."



The issue is expected to be further politicized as the non-ruling party of Ansan mayoral candidates declared they would make the city's plan "null and void."



Candidates from the main opposition Liberty Korea Party and the minor opposition Bareun Mirae Party are of the opinion the city's plan lacks due democratic procedure, lacking debate and discussion, and deepening the conflict among residents.



The Sewol sank off the coast of the South Jeolla Province island of Jindo, killing over 300 passengers en route to Jeju Island from Incheon on April 16, 2014.





By Lee Min-hyung







Ulaanbaatar is reportedly cited as one of the most probable venues for the upcoming summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-un.







According to multiple overseas reports, the Mongolian capital city is highly likely to become the historic venue for the first-ever summit between Washington and Pyongyang.







CNN reported, citing U.S. government sources, that the upcoming Trump-Kim summit will take place in Ulaanbaatar sometime between late May and early June, even if the two countries have not officially announced the summit venue and timing.







President Moon only noted on Wednesday that the U.S. and North Korea are in careful discussions to decide on details on the summit timeline, venue and agenda. The South Korean government has so far been of the position the venue should be decided by the two countries, and did not actively engage in the discussion.







Overseas media, however, reported North Korea is persuading the U.S. to accept Ulaanbaatar as the summit venue.







The Mongolian government has expressed its willingness to host the historic summit in the country's capital city.







The upcoming Washington-Pyongyang summit is expected to be the third in a series of Kim's meetings with state leaders this year. Last month, Kim met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and plans to visit the truce village of Panmunjom later this month for a summit with President Moon Jae-in.



Tug of war among candidate cities causes controversy



By Kim Jae-heun



An old plan to build a new airport in the southeastern region of the nation _ scrapped in 2016 _ is being revived by politicians ahead of the forthcoming local elections to carry favor with voters.



Oh Keo-don, a former maritime minister running for Busan mayor in the June 13 elections, has pledged to build an airport on Gadeok Island off the port city, if elected.



His promise has stirred civic groups in Daegu, the other city vying with Busan two year ago, to host the new airport at Miryang, North Gyeongsang Province, calling for the airport to be constructed there



In June 2016, the Park Geun-hye government decided to expand Gimhae International Airport in Busan instead of building a new airport. This was considered a "stopgap measure" to prevent a split in the traditional stronghold of Park and the ruling party.







By Lee Min-hyung





North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was absent from the Supreme People's Assembly meeting, Wednesday.



Analysts had been speculating on whether the young dictator would make an appearance during the regime's parliamentary meeting and send a public message on nuclear issues and the upcoming summits with South Korea and the United States.



Kim, who took office in 2011, has mostly presided over the event except in September 2014 and April 2015.



The Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on the gathering but gave no details on its sensitive agenda  such as plans for nuclear disarmament and the scheduled meetings with President Moon Jae-in and President Donald Trump.



The KCNA instead focused on discussions on the state budget and legislative plans.



"We looked closely at whether the regime would make any remarks particularly on nuclear weapons, as it did during last year's meeting," a unification ministry spokesman told reporters Thursday.



The move came as part of the regime's apparent efforts to evade making a fuss at a time when Kim has in recent months expressed his strong determination for denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.



High-ranking North Korean officials who participated in the meeting included Choe Ryong-hae, vice chairman of the North's ruling Workers' Party of Korea.



Choe said Kim stood at the center of making the regime one of the world's leading military powerhouses, according to the KCNA. He also called the regime a "strategic state" but did not elaborate on the meaning. The term is believed contain the symbolic connotation that the regime holds enough defense and military capability to pose a threat to any country.



Starting earlier this year, Kim has sent messages of peace and reconciliation to his South Korean counterpart by engaging in a series of inter-Korean reconciliatory activities during the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in February. The regime has since remarked little on its military prowess.



In a rare sign of warming inter-Korean relations, Kim sent an invitation for a summit to President Moon.



With both sides agreeing to hold meet April 27.



Last month, the North Korean leader also held a summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping under utmost secrecy.



















Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Holland and Pom Klementieff, stars of 'Avengers: Infinity War' hold a press conference Thursday.



The movie is set for release on April 25.













By Tom Plate





Simplistic judgment is a common malady from which academics and intellectuals, alas, seem no more immune than politicians.



In Texas, a "red scare" has whipped up like a prairie storm: a pair of congressmen, expressing unctuous concern, are pressuring local universities to cut formal educational links with China, in particular its Confucius Institutes. They have told state officials of worries about "communist government influence on your campus."



Confucius Institutes are funded by the Chinese government for the announced purpose of offering free instruction to foreign students in the Chinese language and Confucian philosophy in their country. On the whole, they amount to a helpful addition to foreign-language curricula and are no more subversive than branches of U.S. universities in China.



Even so, Texas A&M University wilted in the hot-air windstorm, and it was not the first. It followed opt-outs at the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University. Chancellor John Sharp explained why he followed the recommendation of Republican Congressmen Michael McCaul and Democrat Henry Cuellar this way: "They have access to classified information we do not have. We are terminating the contract [with China] as they suggested." Other universities, in and out of Texas, are reviewing their institutes.



Back in 2004, the University of Maryland took in the first Confucius Institute; their numbers have grown dramatically in the United States since then. They also train Chinese-language teachers and underwrite scholarly publications. As, ultimately, they are under China's Ministry of Education, they can be somewhat likened to libraries operated overseas by the U.S. Information Agency in their fealty to the home government. The paranoiac pair of Texas congressmen believes the effort is confusing students with pro-Chinese communist notions and other evil, subversive ideas.



Well, here is the scary story as some may imagine it, and it may stun many of you  though not Texans, of course: It is true that all Chinese citizens on the mainland are brainwashed to think exactly alike  born to be automatons. The way this is done is that many are hurriedly dunked, not minutes after birth, into a sort of MRI-like bath that somehow rewires normal DNA into a combative communist doublethink helix.



Sort of like lobsters in a pot gradually being brought to boil, before they know it their brain is cooked, and they become food for commie thought. These secretly sauteed citizens comprise a phalanx of Confucius cadres  a clear and present menace to a "free" society.



What infantilism! American universities need to rise above this nonsense. One major institution that, admirably, has kept its poise is the University of California at Los Angeles, which has dismissed the Confucius Institute controversy with the sort of clear-headed self-confidence one expects from a great research university. Its formal review, headed by UCLA political scientist Mark Peterson, assessed its campus chapter as a valuable instrument of cultural diversity, not some nasty ideological submarine. UCLA students pointed out the folly of broad-brushing Chinese instructors and students as propaganda robots.



There's another issue that needs to be addressed. It's that the much-advertised binary contrast between America's totally "open" society and totally "closed" China's is overdrawn. How much orthodoxy in political instruction the Xi Jinping government will be formally requiring of its universities is as yet unclear (for any professor, of course, an inherent worry). But China's intellectual validity is hardly confined to the campus.



China fields more think tanks than any other country aside from the US. Few wear ideological dunce caps and sit in a corner searching for hidden proletariat algorithms in the Little Red Book.



The Lauder Institute of University of Pennsylvania rates nine of China's think tanks as among the world's 175 best. That estimate may be on the conservative side. America, with a fourth of China's population, does have four times as many think tanks; and more great universities, though Tsinghua and Peking (and sometimes Fudan in Shanghai) make every credible global top 100 list.



For their part, U.S. universities have their own set of problems. One is political homogeneity. As provocatively framed in the lead essay by philosopher John Gray in the current Times Literary Supplement, a high-level London review, there has been a creeping sterilization of some Western universities "into institutions devoted to the eradication of thought crime"; where course reading materials are "routinely scrutinized" for material that "students might find discomforting"; where faculty members face "attempts to silence them or terminate their careers" when they challenge a prevailing campus consensus; and where invited guest lecturers wind up disinvited because "their views were deemed unspeakable."



Gray, until retirement a decade ago a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, adds: "When students from China study in Western countries, one of the lessons they learn is that the enforcement in intellectual orthodoxy does not require an authoritarian government."



What's more, American ideology sweetly imagines the universal applicability of its "democratic" system  as if one size fits all. Leaving aside that at the moment our Trumpian iteration would prove a hard sell almost anywhere, it is fatuous to ignore the gradual shrinking of the West's political mind  and not just in uptight Texas. "Liberticide" is the word John Stuart Mill used for the destruction of intellectual freedom that comes when everyone is required to hold the same view.



And so we must acknowledge that the political cultures of China and America are not as if Mars to Venus. Sensible citizens on both sides of the China-U.S. divide know that ideological thinking will only deepen divisions  and misunderstandings. A superiority complex, on either side, is a good way to achieve bad results. Intellectual and political humility is wisest. Confucius was often right, Marx was not always wrong, East and West need to learn from  and respect  one another.





Columnist Tom Plate taught at UCLA for 15 years before joining Loyola Marymount University as its distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific studies. The above article was distributed by the South China Morning Post.

By Thomas R. Pickering and Atman M. Trivedi



For months now, U.S. congressional leaders have been pressing President Donald Trump to impose biting sanctions on Russia for its meddling in Ukraine, Syria, the 2016 U.S. elections and, most recently, the U.K.



In frustration, legislators have sought to act unilaterally where they can. Their efforts now threaten critical U.S. allies and partners _ India chief among them. Like its predecessor, the Trump administration has wisely sought to make India a central pillar in its overall Asia strategy.



The rising power, in a rare feat, enjoys bipartisan support in Washington; an overwhelming majority of U.S. foreign policy players would like to see an acceleration of U.S.-India ties, given the two countries' convergence of interests and values. Neither country wants any one nation to dominate Asia's future and democratic India constitutes a bulwark against the region's rising tide of authoritarianism.



That comfortable consensus, however, could now run afoul of politicking in Washington. Visiting Moscow last week, India's defense minister agreed to expedite the purchase of the sophisticated, long-range S-400 air defense system from Russia. The deal had originally been signed in October 2016 but has been held up mainly by quibbles over price.



The Indian arms purchase could violate a law Trump reluctantly signed in August 2017 that targets Russia for its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and other destabilizing behavior. The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act requires punishing any country engaging in "significant transactions" with Russia's defense and intelligence sectors.



The India-Russia deal is a byproduct of a defense relationship that dates back to the beginning of the Cold War. Despite leading a movement of countries "non-aligned" with either Washington or Moscow, India tilted toward the Soviets, while its archrival Pakistan sought an alliance with the U.S. About 60 percent of India's defense equipment still comes from Russia.



As the estrangement of that era has steadily melted away and India's economy has surged, the U.S. has risen to become India's second-largest defense supplier. In fact, U.S.-India defense ties enjoy the strongest momentum in the overall relationship today. India is a critical partner in helping manage China's rise, fighting terrorism in South Asia and providing maritime security in the Indian Ocean.



Yet, there's some catching up to do. India lives in a dangerous neighborhood with nuclear-armed China and Pakistan, rivals with whom it has fought wars and has active border disputes. State-of-the-art military equipment is a must-have for the world's largest arms importer, especially when its most formidable strategic competitor, China, was Russia's first overseas customer for the S-400 system.



India wants to be the second, largely to strengthen its borders against attack. The essentially defensive S-400 is meant to provide India reassurance even as its armed forces face acute combat aircraft shortages and procurement delays.



Any public threat _ let alone imposition _ of sanctions will severely damage the growing U.S.-India strategic partnership. The merest suggestion of Western interference in sovereign decisions has long been considered an affront in India _ a neuralgia that can be traced not only to the country's searing colonial experience, but to past U.S. penalties imposed for nuclear tests conducted in 1974 and 1998.



Those restrictions, and extant export controls on defense equipment, raise questions in India about America's reliability as a security provider. The array of active threats India faces can make any withholding of aid and equipment seem like a life-and-death decision.



While understandably frustrated by Trump's lack of enthusiasm for implementing Russia sanctions, Congress was ill-advised to pass an extraterritorial measure putting countries such as India in the cross-hairs without explicitly providing for carve-outs. It would undermine significant American interests if secondary U.S. sanctions, of all things, pushed India deeper into Russia's arms.



Before it's too late, the U.S. and India should quietly work together to find other arrangements to address the latter's defense requirements. If that's not feasible _ India has reportedly turned down the older Patriot missile defense system, for example _ Congress should provide India a sanctions waiver. Allowing for exceptions based on an overall assessment of national security is hardly unusual under U.S. sanctions and trade law.



Better yet, U.S. legislators should consider offering a blanket waiver to all allies or partners that could foreseeably be caught up in the Russia sanctions _ from India to Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. Too much is at stake to allow one-off defense transactions and well-intended U.S. legislation to damage budding relationships with promising security partners.





Thomas R. Pickering and Atman M. Trivedi are columnists for Bloomberg News. The above article was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.



Relevant parties remain apart on denuclearization



The U.S. and North Korea are reportedly close to finalizing the details of their summit, including the date and venue.



Both sides confirmed this week the meeting will take place soon. "We'll be meeting with them sometime in May or early June and I think there will be great respect paid by both parties, and hopefully we'll be able to make a deal on the de-nuking of North Korea," U.S. President Donald Trump said during a Cabinet meeting Monday. "Hopefully, it will be a relationship that's much different than it's been for many, many years."



President Trump's comments came after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un mentioned for the first time the upcoming summits with South Korea and the U.S. North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that Kim assessed the development of inter-Korean relations as well as the prospect of dialogue with Washington during a meeting of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea. Kim reportedly mentioned the latest developments, including the planned summit with President Moon Jae-in on April 27.



It is a good sign that both the U.S. and North Korea are showing a willingness to start dialogue with what will be the first-ever U.S.-North Korea summit. But the two sides remain wide apart on the issue of denuclearization.



In previous diplomatic settings with South Korea and China, the North Korean leader said he is willing to discuss the issue, but there are differing positions on how to achieve denuclearization.



The North Korean leader wants a "phased and simultaneous" formula toward scrapping its nuclear program, seeking rewards for each step it takes. However, the U.S. is against such an approach, which has failed in the past, and has been firm about the principle of pursuing complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization. Trump may aim to denuclearize the North quickly. According to some local media reports, Trump may demand North Korea's denuclearization over six months or a year from the meeting.



The success of the U.S-North Korea summit depends on how much the two countries narrow their differences on denuclearization. Otherwise, the security situation on the Korean Peninsula could worsen, particularly with hawkish figures such as new National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo dominating the decision process.



The two sides should refrain from making unacceptable demands and be open to listening to each other and being flexible in their negotiations, with the common goal of achieving lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula.



By Donald Kirk





In our obsession over prospects for peace on the Korean Peninsula, it's easy to forget what may be a more immediate, more serious clash of regional and great powers 8,000 kilometers away.



That's the rising confrontation between the U.S., Russia and Iran over Syria. That oft-used phrase, "There are no good options," applies perfectly to all the ways suggested for resolving that terrible war, in which hundreds of thousands have lost their lives and millions more have fled their homes, forced to seek shelter elsewhere in Syria or across the Mediterranean on journeys in which thousands have perished.



Now the use of chemical weapons by the hideous Bashar Assad regime has again taken the war to horrifying levels. The sight of hundreds dying or maimed or writhing in pain and terror from this evil form of warfare is a reminder of what the North Koreans might consider in a no-holds-barred conflict for the Korean Peninsula.



We know North Korea has both chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction though they don't seem to have come up as an issue while the U.S and South Korea demand complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization (CVID) of the North's nuclear program. Nor has Kim Jong-un threatened to annihilate his foes with them, though his agents did use VX nerve agent to snuff out his half-brother Kim Jong-nam last year in Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur airport.



If the Korean confrontation is on hold in the run-up to the summit between Kim and President Moon Jae-in on April 27 and maybe, just maybe, between Kim and President Trump next month, the one in Syria is on the verge of exploding. The Russians are making dire threats while Iran, a nascent nuclear power, backs the Assad regime like a blood brother in a contest for control of the Middle East.



It's easy to say punitive strikes on Assad's forces would be what he deserves to avenge the horror of the latest chemical attack and dissuade him from trying again. The fact is, however, he's got the Russians and Iranians firmly on his side, and there's no telling what they might do after their bluster and bombast is said and done.



No two wars or crises are alike, but there's an easy comparison between the standoffs in the Middle East and on the Korean Peninsula. The North Koreans know they have China on their side. Yes, China's President Xi Jinping, unlike Russia's President Vladimir Putin, does not want conflict in Korea to escalate into another Korean War. The Chinese yearn for stability as Xi made clear to Kim during their great meeting in Beijing. It's reasonable to assume, in fact, that Kim expressed his "willingness" to talk over his nuclear program with Moon and then Trump on the strong advice if not pressure from China.



Against this background, Trump and John Bolton, having just assumed his formal title of Trump's national security adviser, have to forget a "military option" in the form of a quick strike against North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities. Trump may not be happy with whatever deal Moon strikes with Kim, and he may not get what he wants from Kim, but we may be pretty sure he will be in no position to order an attack on the North that U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis would oppose.



The Middle East is another matter. Trump has denounced the carefully negotiated multilateral deal under which Iran agreed to hold off on developing nuclear warheads, and he has Israel, a nuclear power in its own right, firmly on his side. He also has those heart-rending images of Syrians, young and old, writhing in unspeakable agony while attempting to wash off the terrible chemicals that Assad ordered used against them to wrest back territory he's lost in years of civil war against his cruel dictatorship.



The U.S., however, faces another fear in the Middle East, a renascent Russia, anxious under Putin to revive the strength of the old Soviet empire that crashed down nearly 30 years ago. Russia can make trouble for the U.S. and its NATO allies in Eastern Europe, notably Ukraine, and let us not forget Stalin's Soviet Union was a prime supplier of weapons for the North Koreans in the 1950-53 Korean War. Russia under Putin can just as easily sidle up to the North Korean regime with promises of stuff to replace its Soviet-era planes and tanks.



For the U.S., the worst nightmare would be a two-front war extending from the Middle East to Northeast Asia. That's a nightmare that Trump has to consider while embroiled in a trade war with China and one scandal after anther in his own backyard.





Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) has been covering war and peace from the Middle East to Northeast Asia for decades.

By Park Moo-jong





National Security Office chief Chung Eui-yong has been spotlighted for his brave, heartfelt but somewhat "dangerous" advice to the "adorable" supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, during their dinner on March 15 in Pyongyang.



"How about quitting smoking? It's bad for your health," the 71 year-old seasoned Seoul diplomat advised the 34-year-old dictator of the reclusive country on the northern part of the Korean Peninsula during the dinner for a South Korean delegation for a proposed summit between President Moon Jae-in and Kim.



The Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily, citing multiple government sources in both Koreas, said Chung's unexpected and abrupt advice to the top leader, known as a chain smoker, froze for a moment Kim's onetime spy chief Kim Yong-chol, who had led the North Korean delegation at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in February. (What were our media outlets doing to allow the Japanese newspaper to get such a scoop?)



It is common sense for many South Koreans to know that admonishing the dear leader, worshipped as a virtual deity, is a sort of blasphemy and Chung's sudden advice chilled the atmosphere for a second until Kim's wife, Ri Sol-ju, reacted immediately to say, clapping her hands, "I always ask (him) to quit smoking, but (he) won't listen to me." And Kim, called by Ri "my husband," laughed for a peaceful dinner.



It has not been known yet what motivated Chung to give such advice all of a sudden to the young heavy smoker during such an important meeting, the first of its kind Kim had with top South Korean officials in person since he took power after his father Kim Jong-il died in December 2011.



But it's like an "old" man advising his son out of concern for the young man's health ahead of the historic summit on April 27 because Kim reportedly started lighting up at the age of around 15 or younger. In fact, Kim is notorious for smoking whenever and wherever he wants. His father was also a heavy smoker.



It is a familiar sight of Kim holding a lit cigarette in his hand during his "guidance" visits at hospitals, schools and even kindergartens. To the surprise of the people outside his country, a photo showed him smoking just meters from the base of an untested, liquid-fueled rocket engine during a missile launch last July.



Ironically, however, the heavy smoking North Korean dictator has been ordering the people to kick the deadly habit, saying, "Just for one's health and for cultural, moral and sound living as well, and further for the civilized and wealthy future of our fatherland, it would be better for you to quit smoking boldly," according to Rodong Sinmun, the North's Communist Party mouthpiece.



Even he reportedly asked questions in detail during his visit to hospitals to see that they were sterilized and dust free, stressing that hospitals should be neat and splendid, and the dear leader is never setting an example. Who dare asks him to take the lead in the antismoking campaign?



Kim may like to take after other notoriously heavy-smoking dictators such as Fidel Castro of Cuba and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and his father, too.



How about the antismoking campaign in South Korea?



Recently, the government honored Dr. Park Jae-gap, 70, the inaugural president of the National Cancer Center, with a national medal for his lifelong contribution to helping people quit the deadly habit of puffing as a pioneer of the nation's antismoking movement.



One of the few good jobs of the government is discouraging people from smoking by expanding no-smoking zones and raising tobacco prices. Smoking was banned as early as three years ago within 10 meters of 1,662 subway entrances in Seoul and also on most main streets.



Indoor smoking is prohibited here, there and everywhere, ever making the world smaller for smokers, except mostly back alleys. Notably, smoking was banned from January in billiard rooms, virtually the last location where pool shooters were lighting up.



Still, South Korea is notorious for its high smoking rate and comparatively low cigarette prices, amid concerns that the smoking age is getting lower and the number of young women smoking is increasing.



Not only nonsmokers but smokers know the famous phrase: "Smoking causes 100 harmful effects and not a single good thing, doing more harm than good."



So many people complain that quitting smoking is really a difficult job as one of the top three signature New Year resolutions along with losing weight and stopping or reducing drinking.



Mark Twain (1835-1910), a U.S. writer, known as a "cloud-compeller," proved the difficulty of throwing away the deadly habit by saying: "If smoking is not allowed in heaven, I shall not go." And he joked, "Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times."



But personally I am proud that I quit smoking 29 years ago after smoking about one pack of 20 cigarettes a day for 23 years and have not touched a cigarette since then _ so far.



Now, here comes the basic question: "How to quit smoking?" The answer is, needless to say, the will of smokers. It depends on them. Smokers may get angry with me, if I call for designating tobacco as a kind of narcotic just as Dr. Park, the pioneer for the no-smoking campaign, did.



So why don't you declare to your family, friends, co-workers and others around you that "I gave up smoking"?



Smokers still have the right to light up. But they do not have the right to pollute the air nonsmokers breathe, not to speak of harming their own health.



I firmly believe that the people of the world will have the chance to see Kim Jong-un hold a lit cigarette during his meetings with the much older Moon and Donald Trump.





Park Moo-jong is a standing adviser of The Korea Times. He served as the president-publisher of the nation's first English daily newspaper founded in 1951 from 2004 to 2014 after working as a reporter since 1974. He can be reached at moojong@ktimes.com or emjei29@gmail.com.

By Kim Yoo-chul



The country's trade ministry has accepted requests by two Samsung affiliates asking the government agency for a thorough review of each of its workplace assessment reports they were ordered to release.



"The trade ministry will review the workplace assessment report of the Samsung Electronics semiconductor plant in the provincial city of Onyang on April 16. The ministry's panel review committee will judge whether the report includes trade and operational secrets that have to be protected from public scrutiny," Trade Minister Baek Woon-kyu told reporters late Thursday.



"The Ministry of Employment and Labor's criteria is that the report should be released to protect the right to know, while the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy is the government agency that should prevent technology leakage to defend the national interest."



The minister added the review committee will pay attention to check the amount of chemical substances being used in the target plant. "If necessary, we can hold the committee two times," Baek said. The committee has 14 experts including one from the government.



Samsung Electronics earlier filed its petition with the trade ministry asking the government agency to make a deep review on its workplace assessment report for the Onyang plant.



Samsung was ordered by the country's labor ministry to release the reports after the ministry set its principle to share them with civic groups and former workers who worked at those factories who were suffering from various "occupational diseases."



Samsung Electronics filed its administrative lawsuit against the labor ministry to stop the government agency from publicly releasing reports on the working environments at Samsung's key local semiconductor plants in Giheung, Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek, all located in the Gyeonggi Province.



Back in January this year, two French human rights groups filed a lawsuit against Samsung, accusing it of misleading advertising because of alleged labor abuses at factories in China and Korea.



Separately, Samsung's display unit, Samsung Display, has filed an administrative lawsuit with the Central Administrative Appeals Commission. It plans to file a separate lawsuit with a local court.



"Once the trade ministry decides the details of which were included in the report as a category of national technology, then Samsung Display will submit the latest to the court," Samsung Display spokesman Kim Ho-jeong said by telephone.



The report, which Samsung Display was ordered to release, is a sum of the details of its LCD facilities in the local provincial city of Tangjeong, where the company operates a massive display complex. The report is said to have included a tech roadmap and display manufacturing factsheets Samsung developed.



"As we believe the report includes many company secrets and such, related factors should be identified to prevent technology leakage to rival companies. This assertion should be reviewed in terms of national interest as Samsung Display is one of the global leaders in the display industry," the spokesman said.





Cho Hyun-min / Yonhap



By Jung Min-ho



A container carrier of Hyundai Merchant Marine is seen in this file photo. The country's struggling shipbuilders are expected to build new momentum following the shipping company's plan to order 20 container ships. / Korea Times file



By Yoon Ja-young



Hyundai Merchant Marine's (HMM) plan to order 20 container carriers is expected to breathe fresh air into the county's ailing shipbuilding industry.



According to sources in the shipbuilding industry, the country's top three shipbuilders _ Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering (DSME), Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) and Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) _ are preparing to win orders from Hyundai Merchant Marine.



The country's leading sea carrier said recently it sent local shipbuilders a request for proposal (RFP), to order 12 20,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) container vessels as well as eight 14,000 TEU carriers. If the shipbuilders participate in the bidding, suggesting a price and deadline, the shipper will select a shipbuilder and sign a letter of intent. As the deadline will be tight, it is expected the shipping company will distribute the orders for the 20 ships among the top shipbuilders.



Analysts say the massive HMM order, the first in seven years, will help local shipbuilders that have been going through restructuring. The shipping company needs new ships as it has to prepare for stricter environmental regulations of the International Maritime Organization that will take effect in 2020. As it is scheduled to lower down the maximum sulfur content of bunker fuel oil to 0.5 percent from the current 3.5 percent, shipping companies will have to either get new ships using liquefied natural gas (LNG) or install equipment called "scrubbers" that reduce sulfur. HMM plans to deploy the 12 20,000 TEU ships to its Asia-North Europe route, while the eight 14,000 TEU ships will be navigating the east coast of the United States.



HHI closed at 129,000 won in the stock market Thursday, up 2.38 percent from the previous day. DSME gained 3.75 percent, while SHI inched down 0.26 percent.



"It will definitely be good news for the shipbuilders," said Yoo Seung-woo, an analyst at SK Securities.



"Of course, it would have been better if domestic shipbuilders received orders from global shippers. Korean shipbuilders had their position in the global container market shaken as a Chinese shipbuilder won CMA CGM's order last August. However, they would be more than glad over HMM's order since they have been going through intensive restructuring due to slower-than-expected recovery in orders."



HHI, for instance, had announced it will implement a voluntary retirement program once again due to shortage of orders. Its employees have also been taking leaves of absence in turns. Its shipyard in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province, has stopped operation due to lack of orders.



SHI has also been implementing leave-of-absence programs among employees, as two of its eight docks in its Geoje shipyard are empty.

In this Nov. 9, 2017, photo, U.S. President Donald Trump, right, talks to Chinese President Xi Jinping during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. / AP-Yonhap



By Sarah Zheng





The latest promises made by President Xi Jinping to open up China's economy were billed by state media as part of a long-term strategic policy, but portrayed by a senior adviser in Washington as the political equivalent of Xi having blinked in response to the rising threat of a trade war between the two countries.

In his keynote speech at the Boao Forum for Asia on Tuesday  his first to a foreign audience since starting a second term as leader  Xi pledged to open China's doors "wider and wider" to the world.

The most notable pledges were the easing of foreign ownership limits in the financial and automotive industries, lower tariffs on imported cars, and improved protection for intellectual property rights.

The financial sector changes were later confirmed by Yi Gang, the newly appointed head of China's central bank, who said foreign investors would be allowed to hold up to a 51 per cent equity stake in brokerage firms, futures companies and fund management firms.

Just hours after Xi's speech, US President Donald Trump took to Twitter to say he was "very thankful" for the concessions made. On Monday, he had tweeted his frustration at the imbalance between US and Chinese tariffs on car imports.

Despite Trump's gratitude, in an interview on US radio his top economic adviser Larry Kudlow was less magnanimous in his summing up of Xi's speech, though he remained upbeat.

"I don't know what the code is in China, but [Xi] may have blinked three times," he said. "All of the things that we've been saying are wrong. He addressed in his speech in a positive way, that change is coming. And he said it'll come sooner rather than later."

In contrast, China's state media described Xi's promises as simply the next stage in the country's economic restructuring and reform, albeit with the caveat that countries that "frequently launch trade wars against other countries" would not benefit from it.

"China's reform and opening up is entirely autonomous, and it is gradually expanding and progressing according to its own timetable and road," People's Daily said in a commentary published on Tuesday.

"Some people believe that China's new measures for opening up are forced by the pressure of a trade war. This is clear that they do not understand a strategic choice and the internal logic of China's development."

Beijing has described the trade dispute with Washington as a battle between multilateralism and unilateralism. At the same time, Trump has been seen withdrawing America from its global leadership role, after exiting both the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

While more contained than his address at the Davos Economic Forum last year, in his speech on Tuesday Xi again sought to portray China as a champion for globalisation and the existing international order.

"Open or closed, forward or backward, humankind is facing new major choices," he said, in a veiled swipe at Trump's protectionist "America first" policy. "Economic globalisation is an irreversible trend of the times."





US National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow suggested Xi had "blinked" amid the pressure of a possible trade war with the United States. / Reuters-Yonhap



Xi reiterated the message when he met businessmen and forum organisers in Boao on Wednesday, saying China would continue to "take a more active part in global governance, and work with the rest of the world to deal with challenges more effectively."

Trump said in a tweet on Wednesday that his focus was on "fair trade with China" as well as his upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Stock markets in the US rallied overnight after Xi's speech on Tuesday, which some analysts said was intended to de-escalate the tit-for-tat trade conflict after the Trump administration had threatened to impose tariffs on US$150 billion worth of Chinese goods, many of them hi-tech products.

Zhang Baohui, a specialist in Chinese politics and international relations at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, said Xi's address was strategic in that it allowed China to save face at home, while paving the way for trade negotiations with the US to prevent any further escalation of the trade spat.

"This is their way to signal to the United States without losing face  since we are willing to do this, we were already planning to do this," he said.

"For domestic purposes, it's a very good tool that doesn't create an image that China is yielding because of American pressure."

However, Bates Gill, a professor of Asia-Pacific security studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, said that the stock market reaction might been overexuberant as Xi had not said anything "new or bold" in his speech.

"Xi Jinping's strategic intention here is to put things into a holding pattern, to buy time, and to potentially move down the pathway of negotiation and avoid a trade war," he said.

"The question is whether Washington will accept more delay and continue with the rhetoric rather than action."

China last week showed it was willing to hit back against the threat of punitive action by the US, by announcing proposals for retaliatory tariffs on a further US$50 billion worth of US goods.

According to Du Lan, an assistant research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing, while Xi's speech was generally well received in the US, until there was further evidence of China's opening up, the threat of an all-out trade war would not go away.

"The purpose of this round of pressure from the US was mainly to force China to make concrete commitments and measures," she said.

"But China has shown it is willing to meet hard with hard  While the possibility of a trade war is small, in the long-term, the US will continue to suppress the development of hi-tech in China, and competition between the two in these areas will only get increasingly fierce."

Zhang Zhexin, a research fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, was more upbeat, saying that now that Trump had got at least some of the answers he wanted from Xi, trade war tensions should ease.

"China's strategy has been to move step by step with its reform, while maintaining its bottom line and not yield to unreasonable pressure," he said.

"The next step is for both sides to negotiate on specific issues, including the scope of two-way investments, effective ways to improve the trade balance, and measures for ensuring intellectual property protection.

"It is not very likely that Trump will take on a stance or action that will escalate the trade dispute."

Following Trump's "thank you" tweet, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said that until Washington saw "concrete steps and concrete action" from China, the planned tariffs for Chinese goods would go into force.

In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said on Wednesday that the heads of state and other senior figures who attended the Boao Forum agreed that China's commitment to opening up was clear.

"[They said] it is time for the US to respond."National Security Advisor John Bolton listens to US President Donald J. Trump speak to the media before a meeting with his military leadership in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington DC, April 9. / EPA-Yonhap



By Zhenhua Lu, US correspondent





The new US national security adviser is willing to risk a military conflict with China to achieve President Donald Trump's goals for America, two former senior US officials have told the South China Morning Post.

John Bolton, who is fond of quoting the ancient Roman battle philosophy, "If you want peace, prepare for war", would use military force to coerce compliance from China  which an increasingly hawkish White House has painted as a competitor, if not an adversary, the former officials who worked with Bolton said in interviews.

Bolton, who began his new job on Monday, also seeks to challenge Beijing over its "one China" policy on Taiwan, a move that would certainly inflame tensions amid a looming US-China trade war.

Speculation grew over the weekend that Bolton could visit Taiwan in June when the new American Institute on the self-governed island is slated to open, The Economist reported. The institute represents US interests in the absence of formal ties.

But while Bolton is seen as a military hawk who shares the "Make America Great Again" world view that underpinned Trump's 2016 election campaign, the president is believed to oppose the idea of hostilities with another nation.

Those opposing views would tend to set the stage for a potentially contentious relationship between Bolton and Trump on certain US foreign policy and security matters.

Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, told the Post he doubted Trump would tolerate Bolton's disagreeing with him at any point, in light of the bad endings that have come to Trump's relationships with White House officials who have questioned the president's past actions on trade, foreign policy and other issues.

However, "if Trump surprises me and does warm to Bolton, we are all in trouble  from North Korea to China," Wilkerson said.

A major witness during Bolton's Senate UN ambassadorship hearing in 2005, Wilkerson has labelled Bolton "the most dangerous American" for US foreign security policy.

Bolton, 70, was named by Trump as H.R. McMaster's replacement in a Twitter posting on March 22. The post did not need to be confirmed by the US Senate.

Bolton's views on ending the North Korean nuclear crisis are already well-known. He has advocated launching a pre-emptive strike on North Korea over its threat to use nuclear weapons against the US.

It is unclear what Bolton's endgame for China would be.

Given Trump's liking for conflict as a negotiating tool  as shown in his verbal clashes with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his tit-for-tat trade row with Beijing  it is feasible that Bolton's liking may be to use military action as a means to an end.

If the ultimate goal would be merely to push back against China in a show of American might that would placate Trump's voter base, who have accepted the president's claim that China is taking advantage of the US at the US's expense, Bolton could play a significant role.

But Bolton's critics increasingly worry that any outbreak of hostilities now would be ill-timed coming ahead of the proposed historic meeting between Trump and North Korea's Kim and the reportedly unprecedented visit to Taiwan by a top US official, possibly Bolton himself, in June.

Bolton's extremely militaristic views, however, are subject to Trump's final say. If the president were to reject his security adviser's recommendations, then Bolton would be "utterly powerless", the former officials said.

Bolton has said the US should intensify its military forces on the US island territory of Guam, in Japan and in the Yellow and East China seas.

To convince China to "crack down" on North Korea's nuclear activities, he has argued that Washington make a case to "reunify the [Korean] peninsula" and make military threats toward Pyongyang "credible".

China opposes an outbreak of war between the two Koreas on its doorstep, for various reasons.

On Taiwan, Bolton is equally hard-nosed.

In an opinion essay he wrote for The Wall Street Journal in January, Bolton called on the US to "revisit the One China policy" and suggested the Shanghai Communique of 1972 be renegotiated 45 years after the US agreed to acknowledge that "there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China".

"Let us see how an increasingly belligerent China responds," Bolton wrote.

Beijing regards the self-ruled Taiwan as a wayward province, to be brought under Beijing's rule by force if necessary.

China has warned the US to back down from any official exchange with Taiwan.

"We urge the US to strictly abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques," Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters.

The US should "avoid having official contacts with Taiwan or trying to improve their relations in substantive ways, and stop military contacts and arms sales with Taiwan so that China-US relations and peace and stability across the Straits will not be severely damaged", Geng said. .





In this April 7, 2017, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he and Chinese President Xi Jinping walk after their meetings at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. / AP-Yonhap



Ruan Zongze, a former minister counsellor for political affairs at the Chinese embassy in Washington, said on Monday that China will do "whatever it can" to defend the one-China principle. "China has no interest in backing off," he said.

While some analysts have wondered whether Trump actually needs Bolton as his inner circle takes on an increasingly hard-line tone, the consensus is that Bolton's arrival gives the president an important official who is, in many ways, like himself.











Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Mainly sunny to start, then a few afternoon clouds. High 76F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies. Low near 50F. Winds light and variable.Rome, April 12 - President Sergio Mattarella starts a second round of formal government-formation consultations on Thursday after last month's inconclusive general election. The president will meet the political parties on Thursday and then have talks with institutional figures on Friday. The talks kick off with a meeting with parties representing autonomous regions (SVP-PATT, UV). Mattarella then meets representatives of the mixed group followed by the leftwing Free and Equal (LeU) group. Later on Thursday Mattarella meets members of the centre-left Democratic Party and then has a meeting with the three parties of the centre-right coalition, the League, Forza Italia (FI) and Brothers of Italy (FdI). The first day will finish with a meeting with representatives of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S). On Friday the president will meet his predecessor as head of State, Giorgio Napolitano, and then have talks with Lower House Speaker Roberto Fico before wrapping up the consultations with Senate Speaker Maria Elisabetta Alberti Casellati.Vatican City, April 12 - Pope Francis has admitted to making "serious mistakes" over child sex abuse by members of the clergy in Chile. The pontiff made the admission in a letter to the bishops of Chile after reading report by two special envoys sent for the express purpose of listening the stories of victims in the South American country. Francis caused an outcry during his visit to Chile in January when he defended Bishop Juan Barros, who is accused of protecting predator priest Fernando Karadima despite having witnessed the abuse, saying there was no proof. "The collected testimonies speak in a stark way, without additives or sweeteners, of many crucified lives, and I confess to you that that causes me sorrow and shame," the pope wrote in the letter, which the Vatican made public on Wednesday. "I have made serious mistakes in the assessment and perception of the situation, especially due to the lack of truthful and balanced information." The head of the Catholic Church asked for forgiveness "from all those I have offended," saying he hoped to do so personally in coming days, in a series of meetings in Rome with representatives of the people interviewed.Rome, April 12 - President Sergio Mattarella is concerned about the escalation in Syria after a suspected chemical attack by the Assad regime, Senate autonomies group chief Juliane Unterberger told reporters after government-formation consultations Thursday. "We cannot report the content of our talks with President Mattarella, but it doesn't take much imagination to understand how concerned he is for this escalation and how the political forces in Italy are reacting," she said. Matteo Salvini of the rightwing populist League on Wednesday called on Premier Paolo Gentiloni to take a "clear position for Italy against all further and disastrous military intervention in Syria. "I would not like that economic motives, power demands or the alleged use, never proven, of chemical weapons never found in the past should unleash a conflict that may become extremely dangerous". He said Italy must "oppose missile raids and bombing", which have been announced by US President Donald Trump. Gentiloni responded by saying that the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad "cannot be tolerated". However, "over and above the response to crimes we first of all need to work for peace," he added. Gentiloni was commenting on a suspected chemical attack on rebel-held Douma in the besieged Eastern Ghouta region.Rome, April 12 - Premier Paolo Gentiloni on Thursday phoned German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the Syrian question among several international contacts, sources at the premier's office said. In his conversations, the premier reiterated a firm condemnation of the violations of human rights and the unacceptable violence used towards civilian populations with the use of chemical weapons on the part of the Syrian regime, sources at his office said. The international community has widely condemned the suspected use of chemical weapons in the Syrian town of Douma.Milan, April 12 - A woman has died from complications after a liposuction operation in a Milan clinic, it emerged on Thursday. The woman, 36 and of Romanian origin, died at a hospice in Brescia Wednesday after months of agony, the sources said. The cosmetic surgery was performed by Mattia Colli, 32, in July 2017 to remove fatty tissue from the woman's legs, thighs and abdomen. The woman experienced a high temperature and convulsions shortly after, and underwent several operations in Romania before being transferred to Italy when her condition deteriorated further. Colli has been placed under investigation for manslaughter.Florence, April 12 - Police were on Thursday investigating a reported attempted rape on a 27-year-old American student in Florence. The incident reportedly occurred in the early hours of Thursday morning as the woman was returning home after a night out with friends. The victim told police she was approached by a man who she described as an "immigrant", who grabbed her arm and suggested they go for a drink. When she refused he attacked her and tried to rape her before four young Britons intervened, she said. The men then reportedly accompanied her home. They are now being sought by police as witnesses.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.Okay, so it is April now. You have heard from all of the schools to which you applied and hopefully have been accepted to a few. Congratulations! Now what do you do? Did you get a yes to your dream school? Were you waitlisted? Do you really want to be so far away from home? How do you evaluate financial aid packages? Should you stay local at a community college for two years before moving on?

So many questions for the senior who is about to make the most important decision of his or her life so far. So how do you sort it out?

If you got into your dream school and the finances are in order, you are set and very lucky! But it is not that simple for most people.

Lets say that you are accepted to a couple of schools that match your academic goals equally how do you decide? Well, first, were you accepted to the major to which you applied? If you applied to a school where your major is highly ranked, but you were accepted to the school and not your major, you need to ask some questions. Can you waitlist for the major? If you do, what are the chances of acceptance? If not, how hard is it to transfer into the major after entering as undeclared? If you cannot get assurances to these questions, then move to the next school on your list. The same questions apply to being waitlisted to a school. Since decisions need to be made by May 1, what are the chances that you will have an acceptance by then? It is okay to contact admissions counselors and ask these questions.

Is the school an acceptable distance from home? This is a difficult question for many students from Hawaii. Unless you are headed for UH, your closest option is almost 2,400 miles away. Maybe when it was time to apply, going to the East Coast seemed like a great idea, but now you are not sure. How does that feel for you and your family? Is traveling home for the holidays a priority? Can you afford that? Does the school have on campus housing if you are unable to fly home for the holidays? Is the program on the East Coast better than the one on the West Coast? If yes, HOW much better? These are the questions you need to answer before you make that final choice.

What about those financial aid packages? Scholarships are the best (free money!), either academic or talent (sports, music, art, etc.), but keep in mind that you will need to maintain certain GPAs or meet standards of some sort for talent awards to keep those scholarships.

If you were offered need-based aid, make sure you understand the impact other scholarships may have on the amount of aid offered. Students are required to tell their college about any outside scholarships they receive. In some cases, schools will reduce the financial aid packages offered to students because they won this additional money. When considering loans, of course you will want to borrow at the lowest rate of interest. Make sure your family has explored all loan options, especially with recent changes to the tax laws.

Sometimes, finances will make the decision for you. If you were not given the financial aid needed to attend school beyond home, thats okay. Go to community college and excel where you can. Take those general education classes where it does not cost so much. This can put you in a great position for transferring to an even better school than the ones where you were admitted straight out of high school and possibly open doors to scholarship opportunities. Transfer expectations are not as high as admissions direct from high school, so save your money, do your best work and apply to transfer the degree is the same in the end. (Seriously, Auntie knows this one firsthand!)

May 1 is the deadline for ALL admission decisions to be made. Dont be late! You should commit to and make a deposit to only one school. As a courtesy, you should also notify all schools that you are NOT attending to let them know, so they can offer your spot to a waitlisted student. Whatever you decide, congratulations and enjoy your last month of high school!

(Maryanne Hogan is an Independent College Admissions Consultant working with students on Maui. Visit her website, thecollegeauntie.com, for more information.)La Jollan Maureen Murphy didnt study history when she was younger; she was in it.

In her early 20s, Murphy was a civil-rights activist who campaigned aggressively to register African-American voters all over the still-segregated South. As her thanks, she got shot at by a racist in Louisiana and lost two good friends at one of modern historys most contemptible crime scenes.

It was outrage over the beating and shooting deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner by the Ku Klux Klan  Schwerner was Murphys roommate  that helped gain the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (You might remember a little movie, Mississippi Burning, released about it in 1988 starring Willem Dafoe.)

Murphy went from activist to La Jolla mom in 1971, when she moved here with her husband, Bill, after the birth of their daughter, Nicole. Murphy doesnt discuss her past casually, so some of her friends dont even know about it.

This part of you is a secret?

Maybe if Id gone back to the Bay Area, I would have been active again, but I came here and thats when I just left my past behind. I had been active my whole life and it was fine settling down with my daughter. Its just a different phase of your life. And my husband was born in San Diego. It was either San Francisco or here and he wanted to come back and go to architectural school here.

How did you get involved in civil rights?

I grew up in Marin County, where I dated a guy whose father was a famous criminal attorney who defended a lot of union workers. Everyone in that family was politically active, and I became very active through them. Later, I was in Hawaii with my friend who had a big fundraiser for civil rights at his home and Dick Gregory got up to speak. After the event was over, I told Dick that Id like to go south and work in one of the states. He said, OK, which organization you want to work for? And I was like What?! But he made a call to SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and I left for Atlanta, Georgia in 1963.

But SNCC didnt want to let Caucasian people into the field to do registration due to safety concerns for us. So I went to work for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and an amazing man called James Farmer, because they were more open to having us in mixed groups do voter registration work and be out in the field showing that many white people supported the movement across the nation. They sent me to work in a place call Plaquemine, Louisiana, and I lived with a black family there. Families put you up then.

What was a place called Plaquemine like back then?

I had a lot of bad experiences in Plaquemine. President Kennedy was shot while I was living there and there were signs in the windows that said: Due to the death of this n-word-loving president, we are closed for the day. It was very dangerous for people to try to register to vote then.

One day, I was with my friend  a tall, young black girl  doing voter registration ... and you have to visually think of being out in the middle of a dirt road until you come to these little shacks ... and a woman drove by with her daughter in a truck and went by us, then did a U-turn and came back and started yelling names at us. Then she drove away and came back with a shotgun. We jumped into an irrigation channel and she shot at us.. Then she drove away and came back with a shotgun. And we jumped into an irrigation channel and she shot at us.

What did you do?

Theres nothing you can do. You report it to your civil-rights people, but theres no point in reporting it to the police. They were all involved with the KKK.

How did you get to Meridian from there?

CORE wanted more whites working in Meridian. Our offices were on Lynch Street, by the way. I met Micky Schwerner, Rita Schwerner, Ben Chaney and Pat Walker. We lived in a two-bedroom house. We did a lot of field work, a lot of good things. We were always getting stopped, always getting arrested, because we were outside agitators. But we knew that would happen. It doesnt make it pleasant, but we were prepared.

So all civil rights organizations organized what we called a summer invasion to register voters in 1964. They took 2,000 college students and taught them how to behave, what would happen to them, the names theyd be called. I think they were doing the training in Ohio. But Pat and I, we didnt need any training. So we were sent to collect books at books at universities and ended up back in New York, living in James Baldwins house on West End Avenue with other civil-rights workers. And thats where we got the news that our friends went missing in Mississippi.

How did you react to the news?

It had a huge effect on us. We were really shaken. We both knew they were dead. Everybody in the civil rights movement knew they were dead. They were brutally killed. And after that, I just didnt think it was worth it. I switched to the fundraising side of civil rights.

How much did Mississippi Burning get wrong about the murders?

I saw the film only once and many of the situations were wrong, but it is a film so that is to be expected. One thing, though: The FBI did not find the clue to where they were buried.

Who did?

I did. Dick Gregory offered $25,000 as a reward. So I was in San Francisco and we had a pile of letters saying where the boys were buried. Gregory received a letter from a man in DC and I was the one who found the letter and turned it over to the FBI.

Who knows this?

Not a lot of people. Theres a professor in Chicago doing a book on Dick Gregory. He emailed me and said that Dick told him that I was the one who found the letter. And I was contacted when they were trying to do research and background for the film. But I was living in Spain and felt at the time that I did not want to relive that period of my life.

Do you think that lasting social change ever happens because minds are changed, or does it only happen because the people who adhere to the old ways die off and get replaced?

People dont change. You evolve from your 20s to your 50s. You have different outlooks because you have different responsibilities. But youre the same core person. And my family is an example of that. I come from such a bigoted family, you have no idea. My parents were very bigoted, and nothing could change them.

Does whats happening in the U.S. now make you feel like your parents world is returning  that all the work you did was for nothing?

Not that it was all for nothing. What we did in the 60s, I believe, had a huge impact on the country and changed many laws. If not for the movement, we might not have had the first black president. I think the movement in the 60s was a very worthwhile because it showed the importance of getting out the vote to all Americans.

But it feels like the work we did has come to the top again. And fortunately, a younger generation does seem to be rising again to meet it.At an Authors Guild gala honoring Toni Morrison last May in New York, two women started chatting  about their hair, about their dresses and, ultimately, about books. Glory Edim and novelist Tayari Jones shared a cab ride home to Brooklyn afterward, and on the way, Edim told Jones her idea for expanding her Well-Read Black Girl book club. I told her I was thinking of doing a literary festival, but I didnt know what it would look like, Edim says. She helped me figure it out.

Says Jones, The conference she was describing was a full-on extravaganza of writers, readers, artisans and other talented folks. She had her heart set on September. I told her I loved the idea, but there was no way she could pull it together in just a few months. She said, I think I can.

Soon after that, Edim launched a Kickstarter campaign. She hoped to raise $15,000, but far surpassed that, reaching close to $40,000. (It probably helped that her day job at the time was at Kickstarter, as a publishing outreach specialist; she has since quit.) The literary festival  with Naomi Jackson as a keynote speaker and Marita Golden leading a writing workshop  sold out, drawing 600 people. If you had to pinpoint a moment when Well-Read Black Girl transformed from a Brooklyn book club to a literary phenomenon, this would be it.

The good will and optimism in the air changed every person in that room, Jones says. We each left the conference knowing that we were part of a movement celebrating black women not just as readers and writers, but as members of a community.

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Edim didnt have this goal in mind when she launched the project. At first, she was just looking  like many of us  to bond with other women about the books they loved and to shine a spotlight on black female authors. There are other spaces where black womens voices are not given as much visibility, but the literary canon should be more expansive, she says. She points to data from a Pew Research Center report that showed the most likely person to read a book is a college-educated black woman. Why arent we giving that more attention?

Glory Edim in the audience at the 2017 inaugural Well-Read Black Girl Writers Conference and Festival. (Kolin N. Mendez )

Edims focus on black female authors began as a freshman at Howard University. Her mother had fallen into a severe depression that lasted for years; during that time, she lost her job, her home and ultimately, her voice. My mom was basically mute for five years, Edim explains. She wouldnt talk or communicate, until that moment when we would try to seek help or get her into a facility, and suddenly shed find her voice again, for that moment. Faced with a situation that forced her to take responsibility for her parent and two younger brothers, Edim looked for solace  and a substitute for her mothers voice.

I dont think I was looking for representation per se, she says. I was looking for advice or ground rules on how to become an adult, how to cope. But I didnt have the language for it. Audre Lorde has this whole passage about mothering herself, and I remember encountering that and going, This is what Im doing.  Edims eyes begin to glisten. When youre lacking the attention or validation or affirmation that you need, you have to find it other places, and for me, that was literature.

She didnt know she was starving until she started devouring [Toni] Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston.

Had her immigrant mother had been willing to speak, what could she have told her first-generation Nigerian American daughter about growing up as a self-empowered black woman in the United States? Edim created her own road map, reading works such Mari Evans I Am a Black Woman and Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye. The books I was reading, they told me, This is how you practice your feminism, how you navigate micro-aggressions, how you can compose yourself in places which project their own individual bias on you,  Edim says. She didnt know she was starving until she started devouring Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston.

This inspired her nickname: Well-Read Black Girl. Edims boyfriend, Opiyo Okeyo, had it printed on a T-shirt four years ago as a birthday gift, complete with a university-style seal listing her favorite authors. It was like my own house sigil from Game of Thrones, she says, laughing. The shirt became an instant conversation-starter, as women on the New York subway would ask her about it and then begin discussing the authors they were currently reading, from Octavia Butler to J. California Cooper. After that happened six or seven times, Edim says, I started thinking, There is something here. I want to keep having these conversations. Thus was a book club born, one that was designed to be aspirational and affirmative.

The clubs first meeting was a modest affair, a test group of eight people who gathered in August 2015 to discuss Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me. The next meeting, a month later, was more ambitious. Edim approached Naomi Jackson during a book signing and asked if she would come to a club meeting to discuss The Star Side of Bird Hill. Edim told Jackson how much the book had meant to her because of her mothers mental illness. She also mentioned the book clubs small but avid online community. We had about 100 followers on Instagram at that point, she says, so I pulled out my phone and showed her. She immediately said yes. The session was also made available on video.

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A few months later, Edim brought in another author, LaShonda Katrice Barnett, whose Jam on the Vine had been selected as a book-club read. Barnett invited the Well-Read Black Girl group, by then about 20 people, to meet in her home. At the time, I lived in a beautiful, sprawling Upper West Side apartment, Barnett says, and I wanted to put together a little spread for the ladies. Where I come from, feeding people signals your deep appreciation. I wanted the group to know that I dont take readership for granted.

Tayari Jones, left, Rebecca Carroll, Glory Edim, Marita Golden and Jacqueline Woodson at the 2017 inaugural Well-Read Black Girl Writers Conference and Festival. (Kolin N. Mendez )

That she opened her heart and home to us, we were at her feet, in awe of everything she had to offer, Edim says. When youre in close proximity with an author like that, you feel like you get some of her magic onto you!

Barnett says she quickly recognized that this was more than a book club: It is a literary movement, celebrating the rich legacy, current moment, and future of black womens writing.

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A year later, a young editor at Ballantine Bantam Dell approached Edim about publishing a book of her own. I was really surprised, she says, because I saw myself more as a reader. So my first thought was, What can I write about?

She settled on creating an anthology in which black women would discuss recognizing themselves in literature for the first time. Jesmyn Ward, Jacqueline Woodson and Gabourey Sidibe are contributing essays for the collection, coming this fall. Edims own contribution, the introduction, is behind schedule. I have a draft for two different versions, and my editor is going to murder me, she says, laughing.

Also coming up is a memoir, to be called Raised by Books. Says Edim: I was so used to being a caregiver and being a cheerleader, advocating for other people to tell their story, and now Im trying to figure how to give myself the space to do that, too.

All of these are stepping stones, Edim hopes, toward something bigger. The anthology could become a series, for example. And a second literary festival, planned for this fall, could become a two-day event, with 800 people attending. In addition, the brand could expand into the worlds of film and theater. I want this to be a continuous thing in the world, Edim says. With her Instagram count now up to 69,000, that seems entirely possible.

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Recently, the news about Well-Read Black Girl has spread to the pages of Vanity Fair, where for a cover story about Lena Waithe, the writer, producer and actress was pictured inside wearing the clubs T-shirt. A black woman handed me the shirt when I was in New York doing press, Waithe says. And when I got back to my hotel and saw what it said, I loved it. I loved what it stood for and that it perfectly described me, so I started to wear it around the house. Edim was getting off a plane in Memphis when the photos appeared, and suddenly understood all the notifications shed been getting on her phone. My friend Whitney said, Youre in Vanity Fair! Edim says, laughing. I was confused, but then I saw the shirt. It was such a surreal, full-circle moment, because it really is the T-shirt that started so much of this. It was a crazy trifecta of excellence  how is this even my world?

Since the Vanity Fair issue hit newsstands, demand for the T-shirt has taken off, spreading what Edim feels is an important message: You can decide what it means for you, but for me, it means Im unafraid of how the world might see me. Why wouldnt I be a well-read black girl?

Vineyard is a writer and editor in New York.

Glory Edim will be at the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes April 20 and at the book festival April 21, on the panel Publishing: Whats Working and Whats Next at 11 a.m. and on the panel Black Girl Magic at 3 p.m.Austin-based writer Lawrence Wright has never been easy to pigeonhole. Hes been a journalist for almost 50 years, but hes also a screenwriter, playwright and musician. His 11 books include the critically acclaimed Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief and the Pulitzer Prize winning The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, now a limited series on Hulu, starring Jeff Daniels and Tahar Rahim; Wright is a co-creator and an executive producer.

Out next week, his new book, God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, is a tribute to the state that in many ways exemplifies America. As a longtime Texan, Wright is perhaps uniquely qualified to write about the state  he knows just about every prominent politician and writer in Texas, and was even neighbors with Matthew McConaughey when the actor was famously arrested for what might be the most Austin crime possible (it involved nudity and bongos). Wright spoke to The Times from Houston, where his play Cleo, directed by Bob Balaban, was having its debut run. Our conversation has been edited.

What do you think is the main thing that people across the country who aren't from here get wrong about Texas?

People have monovision. It's like those contact lenses where one lens allows you to see in the distance and one allows you to see up close. People look at Texas through one lens or the other, and they either hate it or love it. It doesn't even matter if they've been to Texas; they have opinions about it. I think it breaks down along political lines. Liberals look at Texas with a kind of dread, because Texas embodies for them this heartless capitalism, these predatory attitudes toward human behavior, and this heartlessness that seems to be very much the dominant trend in our national politics. They see it as emanating from Texas. And conservatives look at Texas and think it's the heartland of entrepreneurism, and it embodies the small-government, low-regulation, low-tax, business-friendly environment that they espouse. Texas has come to represent these things politically, not just in the U.S. but all over the world.

And it's a little more complicated than that. The cities are, for the most part, blue and as progressive, almost, as any city in America. If you look at Austin, for instance, it's probably the most liberal city in the entire southern tier of the United States, from Washington to San Francisco. I was trying to back this claim up, looking at how cities are rated, and based on voting histories and so on, Austin was the most liberal city I could find in the entire southern tier, and Dallas and Houston aren't far behind, either. I looked at the map of Trump's victories, where the votes came from, and the entire country is red except for the coasts, and then there are these polka dots, which are the cities [Austin, Dallas, Houston], and you couldn't tell where Texas started and where the rest of the country began.

In the book you write about the stark political contrast between California and Texas. Is there anything you find that those two states have in common?

I wrote a book about twins once [Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are], and there's a kind of identical twin called a mirror image twin. The thing about mirror image twins is that if one is left-handed, the other will be right-handed. One will have a mole on the left cheek, and the other on the right cheek. In other words, they're genetically identical, but they're physically different. And I think there's something like that in the relationship [between] California and Texas. They are each majority-minority, which presages the future of America itself; they're unusual in that regard. They are the No. 1 and No. 2 states in terms of population, and they have almost perfectly opposing political trajectories. California has not a single statewide-elected Republican, and of course Texas hasn't elected a Democrat in more than 20 years. California is seen as a kind of high-tax, big-government model, and Texas is the opposite, and yet they have, in some respects, rather similar outcomes. We both struggle with education, for instance.

We have similar problems, but if you go back to my childhood, for instance, Texas is blue and California is red. Texas produced Lyndon Johnson, who was the father of the Great Society, and California produced Ronald Reagan, who gave birth to the modern conservative movement. California was as reliably red as Texas was blue back in those days. These two states, they intertwine like strands of DNA; they're opposing each other, but they're also related to each other, and they're the poles around which our national politics tend to revolve.

There's an interesting arc which starts with Hollywood glorifying the myth of Texas.... After the Kennedy assassination, that totally changed. Lawrence Wright

You point out in the book that Hollywood has had a huge influence on how Texas sees itself, and how the rest of the country and the world see Texas. Do you think that the portrayal of Texas in film and TV has changed in any noticeable way over the past years?

I think there's an interesting arc, which starts with Hollywood glorifying the myth of Texas. These were John Wayne movies shot in Arizona, which is supposed to stand in for Texas, and which celebrated the myth of the individualistic cowboy on this existential plane. After the Kennedy assassination, that totally changed, and everything Texas was evil. [You had] the mad bombers, the motorcycle gangs, the chainsaw massacres, all of those were Texas stereotypes manufactured in Hollywood. And it wasn't until the novels of Larry McMurtry began to be made into movies that I began to recognize the state that I lived in. "The Last Picture Show" was the first movie that looked like Texas, even though it was very dismal-looking, it was very familiar to me. Then for a while, Texas seized control of its story in the movie business. People like Bill Wittliff and Rick Linklater and Robert Rodriguez and other filmmakers began to make pictures that told stories about who we are. I'm concerned that we're going to lose some of that because the legislature has been so unreasonable on support for the [Texas] Film Commission. Once you start trying to make stories about Texas that are [filmed] in Canada, then you're going to lose the reality that we struggled so hard to obtain.

The final episodes of "The Looming Tower" are coming up. Have you seen all the episodes so far, and what's your reaction to the show?

I've seen all the episodes many times in different edits, and yet I haven't seen the last five episodes in their final form because I've been caught up in this theater world. But I'm very pleased with the way it turned out. We were well treated by Hulu. They spent a lot of money on the series. Dan Futterman, who is the showrunner, hired some terrific writers. We've got a cast that I'm thrilled by. They shot in eight countries. For me, all this is interesting, because when "The Looming Tower" first came out, I had mixed feelings about trying to make it as a movie or a television show, because I wasn't sure it would be able to honor the hallowed nature of 9/11.

But television's changed. When you have 10 episodes to tell a story, and you have the kind of talent that we've been able to attract in this series, it's a far more interesting medium for a storyteller. For young people, kids that are going into college [who] weren't even born on 9/11, that tragedy is not a part of their lived experience. They don't know why they're living in a world in which there's a war on terror, and endless wars in the Middle East, the security measures that we built up to protect ourselves. They don't understand why America is the country it is now, and they don't know the America that existed before 9/11, and I wanted to present this story to them in a new form that will help this new generation understand why America became the country it is.

There's another factor that has always been concerning me. Having researched 9/11 very carefully, I think the plot could have been stopped. If the intelligence agencies had worked together, especially if the CIA had given the FBI information that it knew that al-Qaeda was in America, then I think that it's very likely that 9/11 would not have happened. And just think if you could roll back the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the torture, the deaths of 3,000 Americans; if you could roll all that back, then imagine where we might be if 9/11 hadn't happened. The fact that nobody has been held to account for those failures seems so stark to me.

You've lived in Texas for a long time. Was there something in particular that made you decide to write this book now?

My editor, David Remnick at the New Yorker, asked me to explain Texas, because he can't understand why I live here. And I wondered that myself. Why do I stay in Texas when my life, my career is really outside of Texas and has been for decades? I work in New York and Washington and L.A. I hadn't written about Texas since I left Texas Monthly [magazine], and that was in 1980. I lasted only six months on the staff because I wasn't a very good employee, but I've continued to write for Texas Monthly for a long time. When I stopped writing for Texas Monthly, I pretty much vowed that I wasn't going to write about Texas anymore because I didn't want to be seen as a regional writer. And it turned out I am. [Laughs]

God Save Texas is very honest about the problems facing the state, especially the political ones. When people from outside criticize Texas, do you ever find yourself getting defensive about it?

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's always annoying when people criticize the place you live, even justly. [Laughs] There's a universal human tendency to want to blame everybody else for the problems that beset them, and Texas has gotten more than its share of blame, much of which is deserved, but not all of it. And so I find myself bridling at the smears that people cast in our direction. If you're going to accuse us, at least get your facts right, and try to understand the culture that we're a part of and also the good parts of it. That's the thing I find most meddlesome, is that there's a black-and-white view of Texas, and it doesn't entertain all the wonderful parts of the state.

Austin is known for live music, and youre a musician. Has the citys music scene changed, do you find, with the influx of people moving here from other parts of the country?

Austin is kind of a puzzling town. For years, it had this unbelievably great reputation, even among people who never visited the city, of being hip and cool and a great music town, a high-tech town, a university town. And it became a beacon for a certain kind of people who wanted to affiliate with that. So they moved to Austin, and made it more like its reputation. Austin had the reputation of being a kind of city that it really wasn't, but it's more like that reputation now because of the new people. They came expecting the music, and clubs and bands formed, and it became much more like they imagined Austin would be.

Schaub is a writer in Texas.

Lawrence Wright will appear at 12 p.m. April 21 at the Festival of Books in conversation with L.A. Times deputy managing editor Scott Kraft.The National Transportation Safety Board stripped Tesla Inc. of its role in an investigation of a fatal crash involving one of its vehicles, saying the electric carmaker failed to abide by an agreement not to disclose information while the probe was under way.

While we understand the demand for information that parties face during an NTSB investigation, uncoordinated releases of incomplete information do not further transportation safety or serve the public interest, NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said in a statement.

He relayed the decision Wednesday night in a call to Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, he said.

The unusual move followed public statements by the company blaming the driver of a Tesla Model X who died in a March crash  statements made in apparent violation of agency protocols. The NTSB guards the integrity of its investigations closely, demanding that participants adhere to rules about what information they can release and their expected cooperation. These participants, known as parties to investigations, must sign legal agreements laying out their responsibilities.

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It is unfortunate that Tesla, by its actions, did not abide by the party agreement, Sumwalt said.

Tesla shares were down 1% to $297.80 at 2:12 p.m. in New York after falling by as much as 2.4% following Bloombergs report of the NTSB action.

Tesla, in a statement issued late Wednesday, suggested it chose to leave the probe.

Tesla withdrew from the party agreement with the NTSB because it requires that we not release information about Autopilot to the public, a requirement which we believe fundamentally affects public safety negatively, the company said in an emailed statement. We believe in transparency, so an agreement that prevents public release of information for over a year is unacceptable.

Tesla said that although it wont be a formal party to the probe, it will continue to provide technical assistance to the NTSB.

Out of play

Companies that no longer have formal status as a party to an NTSB investigation can lose access to information uncovered in the investigation and the ability to shape the official record of the incident, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director at the NTSB who is now senior vice president at ONeill & Associates, a Washington lobbying and public relations firm.

By removing yourself from the process, youre really taking yourself out of play in a critical element of the investigation, he said. It will by no means stop the investigation, and it will by no means hinder the investigation.

The dispute between the safety agency and automaker stems from statements the company made regarding Walter Huang, a 38-year-old who died last month in his Model X while using the semiautonomous driver-assistance system known as Autopilot.

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In a March 30 blog post, Tesla said that Huangs hands werent on the Model Xs steering wheel for six seconds before the fatal crash. An NTSB spokesman said the agency was unhappy with Tesla for disclosing details during the investigation.

Musk and Sumwalt spoke by phone over the weekend and had what an agency spokesman said at the time was a constructive conversation. Musk promised to follow NTSB rules barring Tesla from commenting on the investigation.

But this week, Tesla responded to a local television appearance by Huangs family saying the only explanation for the crash was that he was not paying attention to the road, despite the car providing multiple warnings to do so.

The companys statements violated agency protocol for parties to an accident investigation by alleging the cause of the crash, Goelz said.

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The NTSB is a trusted investigatory agency. Their processes can be challenging and frustrating, but they are ultimately fair, Goelz said by phone. Mr. Musk and his company, and frankly the future of autonomous vehicles, would have been better served had they followed the rules and continued to participate fully in the investigation.

Prior ejections

The action to remove the company from the probe was limited to the most recent fatal accident. Tesla is still a formal participant in the NTSBs investigation of a January crash involving a Tesla Model S that was using Autopilot when it rear-ended a fire truck parked on a freeway near Los Angeles.

The stakes for Teslas bid to defend Autopilot are significant. The NTSBs investigation of the March 23 crash involving Huang contributed to a major sell-off in the companys shares. Musk claimed almost 18 months ago that the system will eventually render Tesla vehicles capable of full self-driving, and much of the value of the $50-billion company is linked to views that it could be an autonomous-car pioneer.

The safety board has thrown airlines, aircraft manufacturers and unions off of investigations in cases in which they were either making unauthorized statements or not producing information the NTSB expected of them.

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Small agency

Because its a relatively small agency, the NTSB relies heavily on these parties to assist its investigations. The safety board has subpoena power that it has used in rare instances to compel companies involved in investigations to provide information.

NTSB rules dont prohibit participants in investigations from releasing general information about their products. The agencys oft-repeated rule of thumb is that factual information that could have been released before an accident can be put out afterward as well.

What the NTSB prohibits is the release of information related to the accident itself.

In December 2010, the safety board removed American Airlines, now part of American Airlines Group Inc., from an investigation into a runway accident in Jackson Hole, Wyo. American had taken one of the planes two crash-proof recorders and downloaded its contents before turning the device over to the agency.

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In 2014, it kicked United Parcel Service Inc. and its pilots union off a probe into a cargo-jet crash that killed two people in Alabama. The safety board said then that UPS and the union took actions prejudicial to the investigation by issuing comments and analyzing findings before the NTSB had met to determine a cause.

If one party disseminates information about the accident, it may reflect that partys bias, Christopher Hart, who then was the NTSB acting chairman, said at the time. This puts the other parties at a disadvantage and makes them less willing to engage in the process, which can undercut the entire investigation.Judges on a federal appeals court panel Thursday appeared hesitant to overrule President Trump and install the deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as the agencys temporary leader.

But two of the three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit indicated they had a problem with the person Trump selected to take the position, Mick Mulvaney, because he also heads the White House Office of Management and Budget. The 2010 law that created the bureau as an independent federal agency specifically said OMB should not have oversight or jurisdiction over it.

That raised the possibility that the legal battle over the future of the watchdog agency could end with Mulvaneys removal as acting director  a move that would be cheered by Democrats and consumer advocates who have complained about his public opposition to the bureaus existence.

But Mulvaney would not be supplanted as they want by Deputy Director Leandra English, who brought the suit to remove him after his appointment by Trump last fall. Under such a ruling, English might be elevated to acting director for at best a day or so until Trump simply named another person to serve as acting director, pending appointment of a permanent director needing Senate confirmation. Or the administration might appeal such a ruling to the full appeals court.

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The judges on the panel  Thomas B. Griffith, Patricia A. Millett and Judith W. Rogers  all seemed as if they did not want to take the rare step of telling a president how to fulfill his constitutional duties to appoint executive branch officials.

Unless you can enjoin the president here, I dont see how she gets her relief, Griffith told Englishs attorney, Deepak Gupta, during the hourlong hearing in a Washington courtroom. The audio of the oral arguments was streamed live over the internet because there was so much interest in the case.

As the hearing wrapped up, a few blocks away at the U.S. Capitol, Mulvaney faced questions from members of the Senate Banking Committee.

It was his second day of hearings as the bureaus acting director. As at the House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Democrats said he was not the lawful acting director at another often-contentious hearing in which Mulvaney answered questions even though he asserted he wasnt required to under the law that created the bureau.

Mulvaney has moved quickly to make his mark on the bureau, stressing his approach would be very different than that of his predecessor, Democrat Richard Cordray.

Mulvaney has scaled back enforcement efforts, said he would no longer push the envelope to enforce consumer protection laws and changed the bureaus mission statement to make weeding out outdated, unnecessary or unduly burdensome regulations the top priority.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who conceived of the agency and then helped launch it as an Obama administration aide, reminded Mulvaney on Thursday that he often voted when he was a Republican congressman to kill the bureau. Then she listed several instances in which the bureau obtained millions of dollars in refunds for consumers, arguing those wouldnt have happened if he had gotten his way.

Youve taken obvious joy in talking about how the agency will help banks a lot more than it will help consumers and how upset this must make me. But heres what you dont get, Mr. Mulvaney: This isnt about me, Warren told him in a highly anticipated showdown after theyve exchanged sharply worded letters since he took over as acting director.

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This is about active-duty military. Its about first responders and students and seniors and families  and millions of other people who need someone on their side when consumers get cheated, she said. Youre hurting real people to score cheap political points.

Mulvaney offered no response. But the political dispute over the bureaus existence was clear when the next questioner, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Mulvaney, How does it feel to lead an unconstitutional agency?

The dispute over acting leadership of the agency began Nov. 24 when Cordray stepped down as bureau director. He promoted English, his chief of staff, to deputy director and said she would be the acting director under a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that created the bureau.

Within hours of Cordrays resignation announcement, Trump appointed Mulvaney to fill the post under the Federal Vacancies Act of 1998. The administration said that law allowed Trump to appoint an official who already had been confirmed by the Senate in another capacity to also serve as the bureaus acting director.

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English went to court but Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a Trump appointee, denied her request for a temporary restraining order to remove Mulvaney and install her as acting director.

The restraining order decision could not be appealed, so Englishs attorney, Gupta, filed for a preliminary injunction. After hearing nearly two hours of arguments on the injunction, Kelly also denied that request in January.

English appealed and the case was randomly assigned to a three-judge panel. Two of the judges, Millett and Rogers, were appointed by Democrats. Griffith was appointed by President George W. Bush.

Part of Englishs argument against Mulvaney is that he should not be the bureaus acting director because he serves at the pleasure of Trump as the OMB chief. Mulvaney is juggling both jobs right now.

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Gupta argued that made Mulvaney uniquely unlawful to be the bureaus director because Dodd-Frank specifically insulated the agency from OMB oversight.

I dont see how Mr. Mulvaney can be in the bureau and not be violating the provision every day he is there, Gupta told the judges.

Millett and Rogers appeared sympathetic to that argument.

The end result of appointing Mr. Mulvaney is everything the CFPB director is going to decide is going to be approved by the OMB director, Millett told Justice Department lawyer Hashim Mooppan, who was arguing in Mulvaneys favor. Hes wearing two hats at the same time.

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Mooppan said in response that Congress did not specifically prohibit the OMB director from serving as acting CFPB director in the law.

All three judges ruled in the consumer bureaus favor in January in another case. In a 7-3 ruling, the full court found the bureaus structure is constitutional.

The ruling said that Congress acted appropriately in mandating that the bureaus single director  who serves a five-year term after being nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate  can only be removed by the president for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.

Most presidential appointees can be removed at will and usually depart when a new president takes office.

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The decision reversed a 2-1 ruling in 2016 by a three-judge panel of the court that found that the bureaus structure violated the Constitutions separation of powers because it limited the presidents authority.

That earlier ruling said the solution was to strike down the laws for cause provision, meaning that the president could remove the bureaus director for any reason, as with other executive branch appointees.

The CFPB appealed the 2016 ruling, backed by the Obama administrations Justice Department.

After Trumps election, the Justice Department reversed its position and told the full court that the president should be able to fire the bureaus director at will.

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The law under which Trump appointed Mulvaney allows him to serve for as long as 210 days, assuming the court does not remove him. Mulvaney told lawmakers his clock would run out on June 22.

But if Trump nominates a permanent director, Mulvaney can stay in the acting position while the nomination is pending in the Senate. The 210-day clock starts again if the Senate rejects a nomination.

jim.puzzanghera@latimes.com

Twitter: @JimPuzzanghera

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UPDATES:

9:30 a.m.: This article was updated with remarks by lawmakers at the Senate Banking Committee hearing.

This article originally was published at 9 a.m.Former Los Angeles Times Editor in Chief Lewis DVorkin was fired by Tronc Inc. on Thursday and several dozen other employees of the company were laid off.

DVorkin was the chief content officer of Tribune Interactive, a newly formed digital business unit of The Times parent company. The reason for his removal was not clear.

DVorkin said the decision to part ways with the company was mutual. He noted that his heart just wasnt in the various initiatives that Tribune Interactive was planning.

In discussions with the company that were going on for a while, finally I said, You know, its time for me to move on and explore new ventures that take me back to my entrepreneurial roots, he said. Those are the things that are appealing to me.

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The layoffs, which included Tribune Interactives Los Angeles-based video and online content teams that operated separately from The Times, were due to a change in the companys business strategy, according to a source familiar with the cuts who was not authorized to speak publicly.

A spokeswoman for Chicago-based Tronc declined to provide details, citing personnel privacy.

Departing employees in Los Angeles said they were laid off en masse during a staff meeting early Thursday afternoon that was originally supposed to be led by DVorkin. But he did not appear for the meeting, and instead, employees were told by a human resources manager that they were being let go. The manager cited a reorganization, according to people who were there.

The news comes after a tumultuous few months for Tronc and The Times, starting in August when several top editors were ousted from the newspaper. Tronc named Ross Levinsohn, a former Yahoo and Fox executive, as Times publisher.

Levinsohn in October named DVorkin editor in chief of The Times. DVorkins tenure was brief  just three months  and marked by several hostile encounters with the newsroom.

In January, Levinsohn was placed on unpaid leave after NPR reported that he had been a defendant in two sexual harassment lawsuits earlier in his career and engaged in frat boy behavior in work settings before joining The Times. He was later cleared of wrongdoing after a company investigation into his conduct and was made chief executive of Tribune Interactive.

Levinsohn remains with the company.

Also in January, The Times newsroom voted overwhelmingly to join the NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America  in part out of frustration with corporate ownership and concerns about pay.

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A month later, Tronc announced that it had entered an agreement to sell The Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune to L.A. biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong. The deal is expected to close this month.

Tribune Interactive was formed after news of Soon-Shiongs agreement to purchase the papers; many of its employees previously produced digital content for The Times.

In announcing the formation of the business unit in February, Tronc Chief Executive Justin Dearborn said Tribune Interactive would deliver value for our shareholders through growing digital audiences for our award-winning journalism, new creative content and product initiatives, and growing digital and diversified revenue streams.

But how it would accomplish that was unclear. In recent weeks, Tribune Interactive employees in Los Angeles said they were not given tasks and felt abandoned by management. They were especially concerned when several Tribune Interactive executives, including DVorkin, moved out of their downtown L.A. offices to the Westside without alerting them.

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Thursdays layoffs came a few weeks after layoffs at the Chicago Tribune and other Tronc publications. On Wednesday, journalists at the Tribune announced that they had decided to form a newsroom union.

Times staff writer Lauren Raab contributed to this report.

andrea.chang@latimes.com

Follow Andrea Chang on Twitter @byandreachang

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UPDATES:

5:35 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Lewis DVorkin.

4:30 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details.

This article was originally published at 3:55 p.m.Donald McKayle, the pioneering dancer and choreographer whose seven decades in modern dance distinguished him as one of the art forms leading lights and socially conscious practitioners, has died. He was 87.

He had complications due to pneumonia, his family said.

McKayle created hundreds of pieces for companies around the world, in addition to performing works by giants of choreography such as Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. He was a five-time Tony Award nominee and one of the first African American men to both direct and choreograph major Broadway musicals, including Raisin (1973) and Sophisticated Ladies (1981).

In the 1950s and 60s, he ran Donald McKayle and Company, a troupe whose distinguished alumni included Alvin Ailey, Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch and Arthur Mitchell. McKayle also choreographed for film and television and taught and administered dance programs across the country, including at Juilliard and UC Irvine. In 2000, the Dance Heritage Coalition and the Library of Congress named him to the list of America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures: The First 100.

He was an incredibly warm and thoughtful person with a truly original creativity, said Stephen Barker, dean of UC Irvines Claire Trevor School of the Arts, where McKayle taught for nearly 30 years. He was one of those people who was both a deeply trained dancer, and also a social commentator and social critic.

Standing a graceful 6 feet, 2 inches, McKayle was described by dance legend Carmen De Lavallade in a 1998 interview with The Times as having the beauty of a big cat. McKayles dances were known for their humanism as well as their eclectic mix of influences including tap, flamenco, folk and ballet, with an eye toward exploring distinctly African American themes.

In his late teens, Donald McKayle entered the New York dance world as a dancer, costume designer and fledgling choreographer. In 1950 he appeared in "Creole Afternoon"; his costume was sewn by an aunt. Carmen Schiavone

He created very important social work in terms of the racial divide, his wife, Lea McKayle, said by phone from the couples home in Irvine. His work was cutting to the heart, but not full of rage and anger.

Rainbow Round My Shoulder (1959), which is among McKayles most celebrated pieces, is set to folk songs and chants from Southern chain gangs and plunges into the psyches of exhausted indentured laborers as they conjure a female muse who represents freedom and spiritual fulfillment. Another influential piece, Games (1951), uses childrens chanted songs and dialogue to present a tale of youthful street play interrupted by a police beating.

He told stories from the personal perspective rather than the political perspective, said his daughter Gabrielle McKayle, addressing her fathers reputation for leading with the heart and soul, and trusting that the mind will follow.

Donald McKayle was born in 1930 and grew up in Harlem. His father worked as a maintenance man at movie theaters and clubs, a job that afforded a young McKayle free access to the pop culture of the day. Those early influences stuck with him for life.

He became certain of dance as a career at age 15 after seeing the early modernist Pearl Primus perform. He got the opportunity to study with Primus two years later when he earned a scholarship to the New Dance Group, where his instructors included Graham, Cunningham and Anna Sokolow.

He premiered his first solo piece, Saturdays Child, in 1948 at the age of 18, after which, by McKayles account, he was never out of work  a rarity in the fickle dance world.

His work was cutting to the heart, but not full of rage and anger. Lea McKayle, speaking of her late husband, Donald

His most notable movies are Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and The Great White Hope, (1970) but the bulk of his screen work was done for TV. He created the choreography for the Oscars and the Grammys, as well as for network variety shows.

His first marriage to Esta Beck McKayle, one of the dancers in his company, ended in divorce after the couple had two children. In 1965 he married Lea Vivante, an Israeli flamenco dancer he met while working on a commission for Tel Aviv-based Batsheva Dance Company.

Daughter Gabrielle McKayle remembered her father as a busy man with a bottomless creativity. He had a beautiful voice and sang to the children constantly, she said. He loved to cook and made costumes for Leas dance performances. He once measured her in her sleep in order to finish a costume on time. Gabrielle remembered his keen eye for detail, applied to the miniature dolls he made for the Christmas tree every year out of pipe cleaners, cotton, crepe paper and paint.

A flamenco dancer with crepe paper ruffles sewn onto each petticoat, and an Eskimo with fringed boots, she said, describing the dolls. A couple of times when he was out of town, he sent my sister and I books that he wrote  with stories about us, about what he imagined we were doing over the summer, and he painted them with watercolors.

Donald McKayles career in academia included an appointment as dean of the CalArts dance department as well as artistic administrator of the Inner City Repertory Dance Company in Los Angeles. He served on the faculty at the Juilliard School, where he held an honorary doctor of fine arts degree, as well as at Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence and Bard College. He joined the faculty at UC Irvine in 1989, where he was a professor emeritus of dance and where he continued teaching until shortly before his death.

In 2001 McKayle published an autobiography, Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life, which was honored with the Society of Dance History Scholars de la Torre Bueno Prize. He was also the subject of a 2003 PBS documentary, Heartbeats of a DanceMaker. In 2005 he was honored by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and presented with a medal as a master of African American choreography.

Im not a disciple who worships at one altar, McKayle told The Times in 1998. I have an ecumenical love for the field. I love differences and change.

McKayle is survived by wife Lea, daughters Gabrielle and Liane McKayle, son Guy McKayle and two grandchildren.

jessica.gelt@latimes.com

@jessicagelt

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What does it mean to be of mixed race in America? A photographer shoots for an answerSlightly faded and scratched, the image of a sailboat in Monterey Bay looks like countless vacation photos that might be boxed in the attic or sandwiched between pages of a scrapbook. The boat sits slightly off-center in the frame, its significance a mystery.

The photographer might have explained it  but the film was misplaced at some point and Gabriel Berent had to wait almost 20 years to see that image and feel the flood of memories it evoked: I think of being a long-lost adventurer about to set sail into the great beyond, he wrote when he was finally able to inspect his work. The photograph of that boat, sailing away to destinations unknown, made him feel free without a care in the world.



For the record: In an earlier version of this article, the photo caption and photo credit misspelled Valentina Zavarins last name as Bavarian.

Berent had heard about a project whose organizers were asking Americans to dig through their drawers and closets to find undeveloped rolls of film and send them in to be processed. Now his image is part of a national archive  christened Lost Rolls America  that includes hundreds rescued from obscurity. Some of them will be on view in a free exhibit at the Line Hotel in Koreatown through Sunday displayed inside and outside a vintage-style Airstream  in picture frames, journals and photo albums that, the organizers hope, will evoke a feeling of Americana.

One of the things that I find quite remarkable is the fact that you [didnt] see the image immediately, says Lauren Walsh, the project director who is also the director of the photojournalism lab at NYUs Gallatin School. In some cases, the time gap is 30 or 40 years ago. Theres something magical about having a glimpse of your past brought back to you.

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The archive is an outgrowth of a 2015 book, The Lost Rolls, by photojournalist Ron Haviv, who filled its pages with images processed from more than 200 of his own rediscovered rolls of analog film.

What began as a fun book project turned out to be something more, says Haviv, whose work  he has covered more than 25 conflicts worldwide in the last three decades  has been featured in critically acclaimed collections of photography and in numerous museums and galleries.

When I did the book tour, I would talk about those experiences and I would ask the audience, How many of you have a canister of film that was never developed? At least 50% of the people, if not more, said they had [undeveloped] film ... but theyd moved on to digital cameras.

Friends and acquaintances, especially those whose parents had passed away, had similar stories: No one knew what to do with newly discovered rolls of film that had been shot and squirreled away, their purpose long forgotten.

I realized there were these memories locked away in these canisters that were going to disappear, Haviv says. A national archive could, at the very least, save a small percentage of them.

The experience of encountering an image  never seen before  allows participants to fill in the details of a barely remembered event or provide a new prism through which to view the past or create an entirely new memory.

But Haviv and Walsh hope the archive  and the exhibit at the Line  will be more than a collection of individual stories.

The project is speaking about the American experience and showing, today, when we feel we are so divided politically, that we are more alike than different. It crosses race. It crosses class, Haviv says. Because the project revisits the past, the Lost Rolls America website says, it also encourages contemplation of how the present and future will be remembered.

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Share the memories

To participate in the project, participants sent in a lost roll, and it was developed and scanned (by Fujifilm, a project sponsor) for free. Images were uploaded to a secure website where entrants, most of whom were not professional photographers, could view them, then select a favorite to include in the archive.

Family time in the mid-1980s. A Thanksgiving weekend scene in Cleveland among aunt, nephew and a very early electronic toy. (Jeffrey Levin / Lost Rolls America )

In addition, they were asked to fill out a form that asked some of the basics  where and when the photo was taken  as well as questions such as How does this old photo make you feel? and What kind of memories does this photo bring back and How do you think others will respond to this photo?

The website currently features more than 350 images of vacations, landscapes, celebrations and a range of random, intimate moments. Some of the photographs look as though they were framed by artists. Others look as if they are the work of people with more enthusiasm than skill  but memory, rather than workmanship, is the star of the show.

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The exhibit is one of many included in the ambitious schedule of Month of Photography Los Angeles, which is sponsored by the Lucie Foundation, a nonprofit that works to promote photography, honor master photographers and cultivate new talent.

What Ron [Haviv] has done is really significant, says Cat Jimenez, a photographer, co-founder of Month of Photography Los Angeles and executive director of the Lucie Foundation.

With digital tech taking over the world, film is, essentially, going out of business. Lost Rolls America, Jimenez adds, is mixing the beauty of analog film with the benefits of digital technology. [Haviv] is capturing a lot of memories across the Unites States. Its a collective, conscious archive.

News accounts of the rapid decline of film photography are plentiful, but despite the ascendancy of all things digital, film photography  like vinyl records  continues to attract a small but enthusiastic fan base. A report in Time magazine last year stated that companies such as Kodak and Fujifilm have been experiencing a comeback, fueled by a new generation of practitioners who grew up with digital but have begun dabbling in film.

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High schools and colleges are experiencing a small but growing interest in film photography, scheduling classes for students interested in a vintage art. Walsh, whose NYU classes focus on the history of photography, contemporary visual culture, war reportage and journalistic ethics, is working to develop a Lost Rolls curriculum for high school students.

In the meantime, fans of film photography continue to champion the craft  and the power of newly discovered undeveloped film.

Last year, Lizzy Acker of the Portland Oregonian wrote about a photographer named Kati Dimoff who checks old cameras at Goodwill shops for undeveloped rolls of film. One of them yielded images of plumes of smoke and detritus following the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980  and a photo of a young couple flanking an older woman holding a baby. Thirty-seven years after the image was taken, Mel Purvis of Bend, Ore., recognized himself in the photograph and contacted the reporter to let her know the film probably came from his grandmothers camera.

Boise-based photographer Levi Bettwieser created the Rescued Film Project in 2013, and it made headlines a couple of years later after he acquired and developed several rolls of film that had been shot during World War II. Many of images show large groups of soldiers on ships or waiting for train transport or walking out of a church. The age and anonymity of many of the images contributes to a feeling of lost moments in time. We really look at every roll of film as if its the photographers mark in history, he says in a video that details his project.

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In Germany after World War II, Valentina Zavarin, far left, packs to leave for America  such excitement and playful joy after such a tumultuous time. (Valentina Zavarin / Lost Rolls America )

History  and the way we sometimes rewrite it  is also of interest to the Lost Rolls America organizers. Haviv says one image in the Lost Rolls archive was taken by a refugee in Germany a few years after WWII. There are four people in the frame, smiling and standing amid a series of packing crates behind a truck; their joy feels infectious.

The woman who submitted the film and filled out the questionnaire explains that she was leaving for America and added, I almost fell out of my chair when I saw these images. Really a small miracle. In response to the final question  How do you think others will respond to this photo?  she wrote, Surprised that there was such excitement and playful joy after such a tumultuous time, to start a new life.

The Lost Rolls America exhibit will be open at the Line Hotel, 3515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., 6-10 p.m. April 12, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. April 13, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. April 14 and 15. Free. Haviv and Walsh are scheduled to talk about the project at the hotel 4-5 p.m. April 15. Tickets for the talk are $15 at lostrollsamerica.eventbrite.com. For a full schedule of Month of Photography Los Angeles events  including more talks and exhibits at the Line Hotel  go to www.monthofphotography.com/calendar.

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calendar@latimes.comWith the banning of red-carpet selfies, a bitter renewal of last years heated Netflix debate and more intense discussion than usual over how many female directors would be selected for competition, it was shaping up to be a dramatic year for the Festival de Cannes even before its official selection lineup was announced.

For those who hoped Cannes would shake things up further still with its freshest, nerviest, most unpredictable slate in years, the festival did not disappoint.

Spike Lees BlacKkKlansman and David Robert Mitchells Under the Silver Lake will lead a relatively slim American presence in the main competition, for which selections were unveiled Thursday morning in Paris by festival general delegate Thierry Fremaux and President Pierre Lescure.

The festivals lone major studio title was already announced last week: Solo: A Star Wars Story, directed by Ron Howard (who took over the troubled production from Phil Lord and Chris Miller) and starring Alden Ehrenreich as the young Han Solo, will receive its out-of-competition world premiere at Cannes the weekend before its May 25 release. (The festival runs May 8-19.)

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Lees BlacKkKlansman, which Focus Features will release in the United States in August, stars John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer in Colorado Springs, Colo., who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1979. It will be Lees first film to compete for the Palme dOr since Jungle Fever 27 years ago.

Riley Keough in the movie Under the Silver Lake. (A24 )

Under the Silver Lake, an A24 release set to open in June, is a Los Angeles neo-noir starring Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough and Topher Grace. (Grace, as it happens, also has a role in BlacKkKlansman.) It will mark Mitchells first appearance in competition, though he was previously at Cannes with two well-received indies, It Follows and The Myth of the American Sleepover, both of which played in Critics Week, a program that runs parallel to the official selection.

The number of American directors and Hollywood stars tends to fluctuate at Cannes from year to year. The 2017 edition, for example, featured a more robust U.S. showing, with new films from Sofia Coppola, Josh and Benny Safdie, Noah Baumbach, Todd Haynes, John Cameron Mitchell and Taylor Sheridan in the official selection. A smaller American contingent is nothing new at Cannes, which remains world cinemas most prestigious annual showcase.

The more startling development at this years 71st annual edition is the absence of new films from heavyweight European auteurs  among this years possibilities were Frances Olivier Assayas, Italys Paolo Sorrentino and Britains Mike Leigh  who are often seen as competition mainstays. The annual inclusion of usual suspects has led many to dismiss Cannes as a perpetual old boys club, resistant to change.

Not this year. In what Fremaux hailed as a great renewal for the festival, the competition is teeming with new names and unknown quantities. Eight directors, including Mitchell, will compete for the Palme dOr for the first time, a bumper crop without recent precedent.

Two of those newcomers are women: Frances Eva Husson with Girls of the Sun, starring Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani as a Kurdish fighter trying to take back her hometown from extremists, and Lebanons Nadine Labaki with Capernaum, a political fable set somewhere in the Middle East, about a rebellious child who pursues a lawsuit. Labaki was previously at Cannes with Where Do We Go Now?, which screened in the festivals Un Certain Regard program in 2011.

Golshifteh Farahani, front, appears in a scene from the movie Girls of the Sun. (Elle Driver )

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Three of the 18 films in competition are directed by women: Husson, Labaki and the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who will follow The Wonders, which won the Grand Prix (second prize) at Cannes in 2014, with a rural time-travel tale, Lazzaro Felice. Cannes draws criticism annually for not featuring more female directors in competition, and it is likely to face continued scrutiny on the issue as the film industry confronts issues of representation and gender parity worldwide.

This years number is neither the best nor the worst the competition has managed in recent years. Fremaux, who has often rebutted these criticisms by noting that he would never program a female-directed film simply for inclusiveness sake, nonetheless said he deplores the fact that only one female director, Jane Campion, has won the Palme dOr in the festivals seven-decade history. Jane Campion would love to have another woman receive the Palme dOr, he added.

One of the higher-profile competition newcomers is Polands Pawel Pawlikowski, who won the foreign-language film Oscar for Ida (2014). His Cannes entry, Cold War, a romance set across Europe in the 1950s, will be distributed by Amazon Studios  a fact that Fremaux couldnt resist drawing attention to at the news conference, in a possible dig at Amazons high-profile rival Netflix.

Joanna Kulig in the movie Cold War. (Lukasz Bak )

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Notably, two first-time competition entrants, Irans Jafar Panahi and Russias Kirill Serebrennikov, are under house arrest in their home countries, and Fremaux noted that special invitations will be sent to the relevant authorities requesting that the directors be allowed to attend the festival.

In 2010, Panahi was officially sentenced to a 20-year filmmaking ban for running afoul of the Iranian government, which hasnt stopped him from making movies, including Taxi, which won the top prize at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival, and This Is Not a Film (2011), which was famously smuggled into Cannes on a flash drive hidden inside a cake. His new picture, Three Faces, tells the stories of three Iranian actresses.

Serebrennikov, a stage and screen director who was previously at Cannes with The Student (2016), stands accused of embezzling funds from the Russian government, though his allies have alleged that the charges are politically motivated. It remains to be seen if Serebrennikov will be allowed to leave Moscow and attend Cannes with Leto, a music-heavy portrait of Leningrads underground rock scene during the summer of 1981.

Rounding out the competition newbies are Japans Ryusuke Hamaguchi with Netemo Sametemo (Asako I & II), a love story adapted from a novel by Tomoka Shibasaki, and Egypts A.B. Shawky with Yomeddine, a road-trip comedy about two outcasts who leave behind the leper colony where theyve spent their entire lives. Yomeddine is a debut feature  another competition rarity  and will thus be eligible for the Camera dOr, awarded annually to the best first feature in the entire festival.

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Zhao Tao in the movie Ash Is Purest White. (mk2 Films )

The Palme dOr competition isnt entirely devoid of familiar faces. The French master Jean-Luc Godard hasnt attended the festival in years, but has been consistently represented in the lineup, most recently winning a prize for 2014s Goodbye to Language. His new competition entry, The Image Book, is a five-part essay film exploring the modern Arab world. Its presentation coincides with the 50th anniversary of the tumultuous events in France of May 1968, when Godard and his fellow revolutionaries brought that years Cannes festival to a screeching halt.

Other significant auteurs returning to competition this year are South Koreas Lee Chang-dong (Poetry) with his Haruki Murakami adaptation, Burning; Chinas Jia Zhangke (A Touch of Sin) with the gangland love story Ash Is Purest White; and Japans ever-prolific Hirokazu Kore-eda with Shoplifters, about a family of small-time crooks who take in an orphan child. Along with the Panahi and Hamaguchi selections, its an especially strong year for Asian directors in competition.

Other returning Cannes competition alumni include Italys Mateo Garrone (Reality), back with the revenge western-thriller Dogman, and two French filmmakers: Stephane Brize (The Measure of a Man) with At War, a drama about a revolt by factory workers, and Christophe Honore (Love Songs) with Sorry Angel, about the relationship between a cynical writer and an optimistic student.

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Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem in the movie Everybody Knows, which is set to open the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. (Memento Films International )

And as previously announced, Irans Asghar Farhadi, a double Oscar winner for A Separation and The Salesman, will open the festival in competition with the Spanish-language psychological drama Everybody Knows, starring Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Ricardo Darin.

Announced alongside the competition lineup were the titles selected for Un Certain Regard, a sidebar for new and established voices, and several films that would be holding special screenings, including Wim Wenders documentary Pope Francis: A Man of His Word. (The pope, Fremaux noted, would not be attending.)

Asian filmmakers are well represented across the board: South Koreas Yoon Jong-bing will receive a midnight screening of his thriller The Spy Gone North; Thai directors Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Aditya Assarat, Wisit Sasanatieng and Chulayarnon Sriphol will get a special screening of their compilation film 10 Years in Thailand; Chinas Bi Gan will bring his noirish thriller Long Days Journey Into Night to Un Certain Regard; and his countryman Wang Bing will get a special screening for the eight-hour-plus documentary Dead Souls.

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Among other notable trends and precedents, Wanuri Kahius Certain Regard entry, Rafiki, is billed as the first Kenyan feature to play Cannes. Also premiering in that program is the South-Africa-set The Harvesters, Etienne Kallos drama about a sheltered Afrikaans teenager whose parents bring home an orphan.

Although Fremaux noted that more films would be added to the lineup in the coming days, Thursdays announcement was as interesting for what didnt make it in as for what did. Several new works by past Palme winners didnt make the cut, including The Sisters Brothers, a western starring John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix, from Frances Jacques Audiard; Leighs Peterloo, an epic reconstruction of a 19th century massacre in Manchester, England; The Wild Pear Tree, a drama about an aspiring writer, from Turkeys Nuri Bilge Ceylan; and The House That Jack Built, the latest from Denmarks Lars von Trier, starring Matt Dillon as a serial killer.

Fremaux hinted that he would hopefully have an answer on The House That Jack Built in a few days, suggesting it might still make the cut. If so, it would mark Von Triers long-awaited return to Cannes since 2011, when his especially ill-considered remarks at a press conference for Melancholia spurred the festival to declare him persona non grata.

Other films that had been hotly tipped for Cannes, but were not announced Thursday, include High Life, a science-fiction drama starring Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche, from Frances Claire Denis; Domino, a thriller starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Christina Hendricks, from the United States Brian De Palma; Sunset, a pre-World War I drama from Hungarys Laszlo Nemes, who won the festivals Grand Prix and a foreign-language film Oscar for Son of Saul (2015); Suspiria, a remake of the Dario Argento horror classic from Italys Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name); and Loro, a two-part portrait of Silvio Berlusconi from Italys Paolo Sorrentino.

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Some of these films could still be added to the official selection; others might pop up in Directors Fortnight, a parallel program that often competes with the official selection for titles. Still others might hold out for a slot at one of the major fall festivals, such as Venice, Telluride and/or Toronto.

No discussion of no-shows would be complete without a mention of Netflix, which on Wednesday announced that it would be withdrawing from the festival altogether, rather than face the perceived indignity of screening out of competition. Although Netflix had two competing movies last year, Bong Joon-hos Okja and Noah Baumbachs The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), the ensuing controversy led Cannes to reassert an old rule that requires all competition titles to have French theatrical distribution  a rule that disqualified Netflix, owing to Frances strict three-year window separating theatrical and streaming releases.

At Thursdays press conference, Fremaux opened up about two Netflix titles he wanted in the festival: a completed version of Orson Welles never-finished 1970s project, The Other Side of the Wind, which would have played out of competition; and one unnamed film that would have been in competition, had Netflix abided by the rules.

We have a fruitful dialogue with Netflix, Fremaux said, noting that the festivals conversations with the company were still ongoing. His closing words on the matter  Netflix is welcome to Cannes  were inviting and diplomatic, but also made clear his feeling that the ball was very much in Netflixs court.

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Here are the films chosen for the Cannes Film Festivals 2018 official selection:

COMPETITIONAsh Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke)At War (Stephane Brize)BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)Burning (Lee Chang-dong)Capernaum (Nadine Labaki)Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski)Dogman (Matteo Garrone)Everybody Knows (Asghar Farhadi, opening night)Girls of the Sun (Eva Husson)The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard)Lazzaro Felice (Alice Rohrwacher)Leto (Kirill Serebrennikov)Netemo Sametemo (Asako I & II) (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda)Sorry Angel (Christophe Honore)Three Faces (Jafar Panahi)Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell)Yomeddine (A.B. Shawky)

OUT OF COMPETITIONLe Grand Bain (Gilles Lellouche)Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard)

UN CERTAIN REGARDAngel Face (Vanessa Filho)Border (Ali Abbasi)El Angel (Luis Ortega)Euphoria (Valeria Golino)The Gentle Indifference of the World (Adilkhan Yerzhanov)Girl (Lukas Dhont)The Harvesters (Etienne Kallos)In My Room (Ulrich Kohler)Little Tickles (Andrea Bescond, Eric Metayer)Long Days Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)Manto (Nandita Das)My Favorite Fabric (Gaya Jiji)Rafiki (Wanuri Kahiu)Sextape (Antoine Desrosieres)Sofia (Meyem BenmBarek)

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MIDNIGHT SCREENINGSArctic (Joe Penna)The Spy Gone North (Yoon Jong-bing)

SPECIAL SCREENINGS10 Years in Thailand (Aditya Assarat, Wisit Sasanatieng, Chulayarnon Sriphol, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)The Circus Mystique (Carlo Diegues)Crossing (Romain Goupil)Dead Souls (Michel Toesca)Pope Francis: A Man of His Word (Wim Wenders)The State Against Mandela and the Others (Nicolas Champeaux, Gilles Porte)

justin.chang@latimes.com

Twitter: @justincchangOne wouldnt normally expect to find such dazzling sound design in a production conceived and directed by a deaf filmmaker, but thats just one of the unexpected surprises surrounding Emilio Insoleras Sign Gene.

Energetically blending elements of X-Men, The Da Vinci Code, 007 and martial arts wuxia while giving shout-outs to such historical deaf community figures as Laurent Clerc, Alexander Graham Bell and Jean Massieu, the lively experimental sci-fi film, shot in the U.S., Japan and Italy, is an origins story about the first generation of deaf superheroes.

As Japanese police investigate a series of murders in which the victims have apparently been shot with invisible bullets, the perpetrator is ultimately discovered to possess a genetic mutation triggered by an evolutionary response to centuries of social and linguistic oppression.

What follows is a fast-paced potpourri of stock footage combined with sign-language and stroboscopic action sequences performed by a deaf cast, video effects simulating grainy, scratchy film stock and that aforementioned all-enveloping sound mix, with an end result that proves as wildly inventive as it is empowering.

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Given how much stuff Insolera, who also stars as an intelligence agency operative, manages to cram into the 68-minute running time, it would be intriguing to see what this fresh, unique filmmaking voice could do armed with a more extensive canvas and matching budget.

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Sign Gene

In English, Japanese, Italian, American Sign Language, Japanese Sign Language and Italian Sign Language with English subtitles

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 8 minutes

Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills

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calendar@latimes.comA moving and intelligent drama about a schism that tore an American church apart, Come Sunday spends 105 minutes contemplating the nature of eternity. That is its accomplishment and, inevitably, something of a limitation. But for its engrossing duration, and perhaps for some time afterward, it compels the viewer to ponder the kinds of questions more often heard from a pulpit than from a movie or TV screen.

If Jesus Christ was an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world, what level of human acceptance is required to ensure ones salvation? Would a truly loving God send nonbelievers to hell, even those who have never heard the gospel? These questions are invariably destined to inspire indifference from some and impassioned arguments from others.

As for myself, I couldnt help but flash back on my own heated high-school arguments with atheists and fellow believers alike, as we played out our own earnest, circular variation on the Is Gandhi in hell? debate.

The Pentecostal bishop Carlton Pearson was one of those high-profile Christian leaders who, in the eyes of his sharpest critics, ultimately arrived at the wrong answers. Come Sunday, which revisits the story of Pearsons very public rise and fall, isnt so certain.

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Adapted by Marcus Hinchey from Heretics, a three-part story that aired on the public radio show This American Life in 2005, the movie places its sympathies with Carlton not because his beliefs are unassailable, but because they stem from a willingness to ask uncomfortable questions.

With appreciable sensitivity and intellectual curiosity, the director Joshua Marston turns public and private spaces  a sanctuary where a congregation sits angrily divided, an office where a pastor collapses in anguished prayer  into zones of spiritual and emotional confusion.

In 1998, Carlton (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is at the height of his ministry at Higher Dimensions Evangelistic Center, one of the largest churches in Tulsa, Okla. Thousands gather each week to hear his sermons, which prove enthralling in their scholarly erudition and lively humor, and which invariably lead to ecstatic outbursts of prayer, worship, healing and deliverance. Marston shoots these services with a calm, steady camera that captures, but never surrenders to, an atmosphere charged with intense religious feeling.

Carltons theology is a stirring, straightforward blend of easy grace and hard truth, fueled by a genuine fear for the souls of humanity: His belief in a righteous God also accounts for his belief in a fiery hell, where those who do not accept Christ in the here and now will be doomed to spend eternity. But while Ejiofors superb performance emphasizes the preachers larger-than-life stature and charismatic (in every sense) nature, the actor also makes Carlton a recognizably flawed, human-scaled figure.

Some of the best scenes in Come Sunday show us the banal, behind-the-scenes operations at Higher Dimensions, where everyday stresses and disagreements intrude as they would in any workplace. Some of the recurring issues involve Carltons nervous, conscientious business partner, Henry (Jason Segel, playing very well against type), whom the preacher loves like a brother, and a harried but hard-working assistant, Nicky (Stacey Sergeant).

Nearly all those tensions are exacerbated to some degree by Carltons marriage to Gina (a sharp Condola Rashad), who outwardly supports her husband but bitterly resents her prescribed role in a marriage as carefully orchestrated as an Easter Sunday service. But Ginas relative outsider status makes it easier for her to support Carlton when he experiences a dramatic theological reversal. Believing that God has spoken to him, he begins preaching what will become known as the gospel of inclusion, claiming that salvation is extended to all, whether one believes in Christ or not.

This proves impossible for much of Carltons congregation to swallow, and before long many of them are leaving the church and/or decrying him as a heretic. Particularly displeased is his longtime mentor, the legendary Pentecostal preacher Oral Roberts (Martin Sheen, both affectionate and steely), who openly refers to Carlton as my black son before things start to go awry.

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Come Sunday doesnt delve too deeply into the racial dynamics at play at Higher Dimensions, where one of the most prominent African American preachers of his generation oversees a large, diverse congregation. But the movie is careful to suggest that public opinion of Carlton, although heavily polarized, doesnt divide cleanly along ethnic lines. Certainly thats true with regard to the Joint College of African American Pentecostal Bishops, who ultimately place one of their own on trial.

Marston has made worthy, far-flung dramas about Colombian drug mules (Maria Full of Grace) and Albanian honor feuds (The Forgiveness of Blood), and he approaches the salvation debate from his usual position of respectful, somewhat dispassionate empathy. The filmmaking is seamless, sometimes to the point of blandness; the respectfully muted approach is underscored by a visual palette consisting of many literal shades of gray (the cinematography is by Peter Flinckenberg).

At times Marstons reticence can feel like an implicit acknowledgment of his position as a cultural outsider. (He acknowledged this more directly onstage after the films recent Sundance premiere, noting, I was raised Jewish. Im not Pentecostal  yet.) Still, he might have done well to push both the filmmaking and the discourse a bit further, to rise to the challenge of his characters soul-baring honesty.

One of the pictures most affecting performances comes from Lakeith Stanfield as Reggie, the churchs organist and worship leader, whose attempts to reconcile his faith and his homosexuality bring out a compassionate but conflicted response from Carlton. Theres so much beautifully understated feeling in this subplot that you wish it stood more completely on its own, rather than merely facilitating Carltons shift in perspective.

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The value of that shift, whether or not one agrees with Pearsons universalist conclusions, is that it forced a widespread reconsideration of beliefs and assumptions that have a way of hardening into complacency. Do churches exploit the natural human fear of damnation when spreading a message generally thought of as Good News? Does a strict, exclusive view of salvation wind up turning faith into something overly transactional? In Carltons own words: What is it about loving each other unconditionally that scares us so much?

In its pursuit of ideological even-handedness and narrative expedience, Come Sunday doesnt always propound or dramatize these questions perfectly. Nor, to its credit, does it pretend to have any of the answers. But its willingness to dwell in its own uncertainty makes it awfully hard to cast aside. Its odd how effectively the movie winds up accomplishing what some of the best sermons do  heightening our compassion, stirring our emotions and intermittently earning our awe.

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Come Sunday

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(Not rated)

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Playing: iPic, Westwood; streaming on Netflix

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justin.chang@latimes.com

@JustinCChangConsidering the subject matter  an intense relationship between a bio-mathematician on a groundbreaking deep-sea diving expedition and an enigmatic water system engineer  Wim Wenders Submergence should have been more immersive.

Instead, the French-German-Spanish co-production resembles the filmmakers more recent impeccably crafted but ponderously meandering output.

Unfolding in non-chronological order, Erin Dignams script (adapted from J.M. Ledgards novel) centers around Alicia Vikanders Danielle Danny Flinders and James McAvoys James More, who meet and engage in a brief but urgent affair while vacationing in Normandy.

Their work leads each to different ends of the world, with Danny preparing to board a submersible that will take her depths of the Greenland Seas abyss where she hopes to prove her theories on the origin of life.

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Unbeknownst to Danny, James is actually in the employment of the British Secret Service, and the reason for his lack of communication pertains to his capture and torture by Somalian jihadists.

Despite the potent raw material at his disposal, Wenders listlessly flips back and forth between the two backdrops, allowing any remaining element of dramatic tension to slowly seep out along the way.

While Vikander and McAvoy are two undeniably photogenic actors who also radiate considerable intelligence, their best efforts are lost in the claustrophobic environment. Also lost in the telling is an affecting portrait of two fiercely independent individuals who discover that delicate boundary between solitude and loneliness.

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Submergence

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes

Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills

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calendar@latimes.comKyra Johnson, middle-aged, divorced and unemployed, looks after her elderly mother in their small New York apartment. Mom isnt long for this world, and in time you might start to suspect something similar about Kyra. She hasnt had a job since she was laid off two years ago, though not for lack of trying. Shes beautiful  to put it another way, shes played by Michelle Pfeiffer  but her beauty, much like her pain, is something the world has long ceased to notice, much less concern itself with.

That more or less explains who Kyra is. As for Where is Kyra?, the title of Andrew Dosunmus grave, searing and determinedly low-wattage new drama, the question is apparently meant to be taken quite literally. Much of the movie, shot by the brilliant cinematographer Bradford Young, unfolds in rooms and offices cloaked in thick, impenetrable shadows, with Kyras forlorn silhouette often lurking at the margins of the frame. You might have to go back to the cinematographer Gordon Willis work on The Godfather: Part II to see darkness employed to such powerfully cavernous effect.

Its visual extremity aside, Where Is Kyra?, written by Darci Picoult, might at first seem to be a straightforward if unremittingly bleak drama of economic anxiety. Once her mother (Suzanne Shepherd) is gone, relieving her of one burden but immediately imposing another, Kyra begins her sad, steady descent into desperation and petty criminality, a journey set to the pulse of a psychological thriller and punctuated by the nerve-shredding eruptions of Philip Millers score.

Offering Kyra some respite from her woes is a lover, Doug (an excellent Kiefer Sutherland), who picks her up at a bar, not long after she learns her credit card has been rejected. Doug turns out to be only slightly better off, with his own hard-knock history to boot. He tries to help and keep her out of trouble, not realizing until too late that hes playing the chump in a modern-day noir, which makes Kyra the most dangerous kind of femme fatale  the unwitting kind.

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Dosunmu, a Nigerian-born director with a background in photography, isnt a fatalist at heart, though like many other filmmakers he seems enthralled by the spectacle of a woman on the verge. His previous picture, Mother of George (2013), was a vibrant Brooklyn-set melodrama about a Nigerian immigrant striving to uphold her cultural traditions and adapt to the pressures of a new marriage. In Youngs hands (which have since gone on to do similarly stunning work in Arrival and Selma), the movie became a ravishing interplay of hues and textures, an exquisitely bejeweled shadow play.

In Where Is Kyra? those shadows have deepened and lengthened. With the occasional exception of flashing red lights or the striking yellow coat Kyra likes to wear, nearly all bright colors have been carefully drained from the frame. But if Youngs work here is another master class in painterly under-lighting, then Pfeiffers brilliantly self-effacing performance feels like something sculptural by comparison. Remarkably, she doesnt compete with the movies rigorous visual scheme; she completes it. Her powers of expression, far from being obscured by all this darkness, are instead enriched and heightened by it.

I am surely not the only moviegoer who, over the years, has been moved to ask, Where is Michelle Pfeiffer?  a question that was recently and gratifyingly answered by her expert supporting performances in mother! and Murder on the Orient Express. Those willing to seek out Dosunmus movie will find an even more satisfying if undeniably challenging answer.

There are some who might quibble with the decision to cast a movie star as a woman of extremely limited means  a judgment that effectively reduces good acting to a purity test, rather than a feat of imaginative empathy. Which is not to say that Pfeiffers performance is entirely devoid of subtext. In the context of an industry not known for its kindness to women over 35, there is something strangely right about one of our most criminally underemployed actors taking on the role of a woman who time forgot.

Pfeiffer disappears into Kyra, and Kyra disappears into the movie. Dosunmu delights in playing hide-and-seek with his protagonist, disguising her in more ways than one; he reminds us that crushing poverty has a way of obliterating ones entire identity.

But then, just when we think Kyra might slip away for good, the camera suddenly moves in for a tightly framed, perfectly chiseled close-up, revealing her in all her unadorned anguish. This woman may be lost to the world, but in Dosunmus quietly shattering vision, she is also unexpectedly, triumphantly found.

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Where Is Kyra?

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(Not rated)

Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

Playing: Laemmles Monica Film Center, Santa Monica; Laemmles Pasadena Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Laemmles Town Center 5, Encino

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justin.chang@latimes.com

@JustinCChangOn a balmy morning in late March, the dining room at Guelaguetza, the Lopez familys Oaxacan restaurant in Koreatown, was humming to life as regulars nursed half-finished cups of cafecito and plates of chilaquiles de mole. At 11 a.m., the bar was mostly empty save for Ulises Torrentera, who raised a glass of mezcal and proposed a toast. "After the first shot of mezcal," he said in Spanish, "life starts."

In the world of agave aficionados, Torrentera looms larger than life, but leaning against the bar at Guelaguetza with his mop of salt and pepper curls and thick-rimmed glasses, he barely crests five and a half feet. When Bricia Lopez, the daughter-turned-doyenne of Guelaguetza, spots him across the room she squeals, unleashing hugs, kisses and a prolonged, "Como estaaaaaaa?"

Lopez first met Torrentera in Oaxaca City, where he is known as the author of two influential texts on mezcal and the co-owner of the mezcaleria In Situ with his partner Sandra Ortiz Brenna.

"You can't really speak of mezcal in Oaxaca without knowing Ulises," Lopez says, and you cant speak of mezcal without speaking of the state of Oaxaca, where mezcal is as essential to life as mole. "My family has been making mezcal forever, Lopez adds, but it wasn't until I met Ulises that I started seeing it like wine, with different agaves and flavor profiles. I think everybody knows there are Cabs and Merlots, but most people don't know there are mexicanas and tobaziches, and he was the person who opened my eyes to that."

Once demonized as the drink of Mexico's rural poor, mezcal  which in simplest terms can be described as a distillate of agave that has been produced in Mexico for centuries  has become what one L.A. bartender dubbed "the hipster's Cognac." Unlike tequila, which can only be made with blue agave, mezcal can be made with more than 40 varietals, lending the category a vast spectrum of flavors. The mezcal boom north of the border parallels the popularity of modern Mexican restaurants and a surge of interest in regional Mexican cuisine; in the last decade, dedicated mezcalerias have popped up in every major city in America, from Baltimore to Seattle.

"You can't really speak of mezcal in Oaxaca without knowing Ulises" Bricia Lopez

Los Angeles has seen its own mezcal renaissance, and today Torrentera and Ortiz Brenna, along with Oaxaca-born L.A. restaurateur Ivan Vasquez, are embarking on a five-stop mezcal crawl across the city to survey the popularity and growth of Mexico's national spirit in the most Mexican city in America. So Guelaguetza, which stocks more than 50 expressions of mezcal and might as well serve as the Oaxacan consulate in Southern California, is the obvious place to start.

The first pour of the day is distilled from tepeztate, a type of agave that can take 20 to 30 years to reach maturity before harvest. Torrentera takes a sip and immediately identifies it as from Santiago Matatlan, a town outside of Oaxaca City where dozens of brands have clustered their palenques, or distilleries. "Each village has the print of the terroir, and Matatlan is less complex than other regions," says Torrentera. "That doesn't mean it's bad, but other regions are more herbal and taste of the endemic fruits and vegetables."

With four more stops to go, time is short, and after another round of hugs everyone is in an Uber, en route to Petty Cash, chef Walter Manzkes 5-year-old homage to Tijuana street tacos in West Hollywood. At a red light on Highland Avenue near Wilshire Boulevard, Torrentera points at an agave growing on a parkway. "That looks like a cupreata," he says, a varietal commonly used to make mezcal in Guerrero and Michoacan. As the car glides north toward Beverly Boulevard, blue and green spikes appear and disappear out the window, a reminder that Mexico, the epicenter of biodiversity in agave, is not so far away.

Some brands will break down the percentage of each agave used on the bottle, and include the name of the master distiller, in this bottle it is Javier Mateo. Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times

At Petty Cash, the bar is stacked five shelves high with mezcal. To the uninitiated, the variety is overwhelming, but for Torrentera and Vasquez, a vast selection of brands, representing multiple agaves, regions and styles is the first sign of a good mezcaleria. They settle on an ensemble, or blend, of tepeztate and espadin, but like a needle scratching vinyl, the mood shifts abruptly when they both take a taste. "We don't taste the tepeztate," Vasquez says  illuminating one of the biggest challenges American consumers face when drinking mezcal.

As consumers educate their palates, they are taught to value the complex flavors of rare agaves like the wild tobala, or tepeztate, which take longer to grow and fetch higher prices than the more common espadin. One of the concerns among traditionalists is that brands are incorporating trace amounts of these varietals, not for flavor, but to add trendy buzzwords to their bottles and sell their products at a higher price point. At $40 a shot, consumers assume that theyre paying for the complexity that comes from the 20 to 30 years a tepeztate spent in the soil, but the reality is that unless you trust the producer, it's difficult to know what you are getting until it's in your mouth.

Some brands, like Vago and Mezcalosfera, will break down the percentage of each agave used on the bottle, and include the name of the maestro mezcalero, or master distiller, the method of distillation, the village where it was distilled and even the type of water used. For Vasquez, this level of transparency is essential, and when the brands don't provide the information, he tracks it down himself.

A bottle of "Iba 55" mezcal from the restaurant Madre. Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times

At the third stop, Madre, Vasquez's 7,000-square foot love letter to Oaxacan food and drink in Torrance that opened in August, the 265-bottle mezcal menu is organized by type of agave. Beneath each bottle Vasquez lists the who, where and how of its production. His ambition for 2018 is to meet every single maestro mezcalero represented on the menu, and at his restaurant El Nopal in Palms  the fourth stop on the crawl  his mission is much the same.

"My chef tells me I'm going crazy on the mezcal," Vasquez says, "but this is the history of Mexico. It's me. I want to educate people to understand what theyre drinking."

The very fact that one can spend an entire day zigzagging across the city tasting different expressions of mezcal demonstrates the extraordinary growth of the industry in Los Angeles. (Had the days crawl veered downtown, they might have stopped for a flight at the agave emporium Las Perlas, or for a tamale and a mezcal at chef Ray Garcia's Broken Spanish, which pours at least 100 bottles by the glass.)

On the way to Scopa in Venice, the fifth and last stop on this tour, where Pablo Moix and Steve Livigni have amassed an extensive selection of mezcals, Torrentera questions whether the exposure and popularity north of the border is a good thing.

Restauranteur Ivan Vasquez and Ulises Torrentera at Vasquez's restaurant, Madre. Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times

"Mezcal esta de moda," says Torrentera. "And there are people who drink it because it's in style, and people who drink it to get to know the drink, and that should be the reason why it's popular, not because it's cool."

Spreading the word of traditional mezcal helps Oaxaca, Torrentera adds, which is why hes now bottling his own mezcal under the brand name Farolito. Exporting to the U.S. was never a goal for Torrentera, but as major brands like Casamigos enter the marketplace with mass-market bottlings, he wants to give consumers another choice. So that evening hell board the Amtrak Surfliner with six bottles of Farolito tepextate in his suitcase, and tomorrow hell pour his mezcal at Mexico in a Bottle, a tasting event in San Diego, where hell continue to spread the gospel of traditional mezcal.

Stops on the mezcal crawl, each restaurant featuring at least a dozen producers and a wide variety of agaves and regions.

Tee Mezcal selection at Guelaguetza. Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times

Guelaguetza  One of the first L.A. institutions to expand its mezcal bar, eight years ago, it now stocks 60 bottles at any given time, including multiple expressions from Los Javis, which has roots in L.A. and Oaxaca. 3014 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 427-0608.

Petty Cash Taqueria  The restaurants mezcal bar is fast approaching 100 bottles, with 17 brands and dozens of ensembles and single-agave expressions to choose from, including extensive offerings from well-respected producers Real Minero and Rey Campero. 7360 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 933-5300.

Madre  With 265 bottles and counting, Madre rivals Las Perlas for the most extensive mezcal selection in the L.A. area. The menu is as long as it is educational, with drawings of each agave and detailed explanations on their origin and flavor. 1261 Cabrillo Ave., Suite 100, Torrance, (310) 974-8005.

El Nopal  A destination for mezcal and Oaxacan classics, such as tlayudas and molotes, that offers 201 bottles as well as curated flights. 10426 National Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 559-4732.

Scopa Italian Roots  Co-owner Pablo Moix says mezcal outsells tequila at his bar, which stocks at least 60 bottles at any given time, including a one-off collaboration Moix produced with Vago Mezcal. 2905 Washington Blvd., Venice, (310) 821-1100.

food@latimes.comUSC names retired aerospace executive Wanda Austin as acting president, announces Nikias departure By Harriet Ryan USC appointed a retired aerospace executive as interim president and laid out a detailed plan for selecting a permanent leader Tuesday, ending speculation about whether outgoing President C.L. Max Nikias might remain in the post. Nikias, embattled over his administrations handling of a campus gynecologist accused of sexually abusing patients, relinquished his duties after a meeting of USCs board. The trustees tapped one of their own, Wanda Austin, an alumna and former president of the Aerospace Corp., to temporarily run the university. The trustees also approved the formation of a search committee and the hiring of firm Isaacson, Miller to coordinate the selection of a successor. A second search company, Heidrick & Struggles, will also advise trustees. Read More Facebook

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Ex-student sues elite Brentwood School after teacher is charged with sexually abusing him By Richard Winton A former student sued the elite Brentwood School on Monday in the wake of a female teacher being charged with repeatedly having sex with the minor, alleging that other faculty members encouraged the unlawful behavior and failed to report it to authorities. The lawsuit accuses the private school, whose students include the children of many of Hollywoods elite and L.A.s powerful, of acting negligently and allowing Aimee Palmitessa to abuse and batter the teenager sexually. The suit alleges that the student was abused in summer 2017 after one of the schools counselors offered words of encouragement to the then-17-year-old, identified in the suit as only John Doe, to engage in an illegal relationship with the teacher. Read More Facebook

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Civil jury vindicates fired Montebello school executives in whistleblower case By Howard Blume The Montebello school district is in dire straits  at risk of insolvency and under apparent criminal investigation. An outside audit in July found some teachers earning more than $200,000 a year, as well as improper raises, excess paid vacation time and inappropriate overtime, sick leave and car allowances. Fixing the district and pinpointing blame could take time. Read More Facebook

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L.A. schools fall short on safety measures, new report warns By Howard Blume After the mass shooting at Floridas Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, Los Angeles school officials reassured parents that much had been done to keep local schools safe. California had tougher gun laws, after all, and the school district paid close attention to students mental health. But a new report issued Monday by a panel convened to take a close look offers some cause for concern, flagging inconsistent campus safety measures, thinly spread mental health staff and inadequate coordination between the school district and other public agencies. With the stakes this high, we must strive to do better, said L.A. City Atty. Mike Feuer, who assembled the panel. Read More Facebook

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L.A. school district says more are graduating, but rate may not show it By Howard Blume The L.A. Unified School District has hopes of continuing its winning streak this year with another record graduation rate, but the official numbers may not show it. A senior district administrator warned the board Tuesday that graduation rates were likely to decline 2% to 3% across the state, even though L.A. Unified is likely doing better than ever in producing graduates, he said. The issue is that the state will now count high school students who transfer to adult school as dropouts, said Oscar Lafarga, who heads the districts office of data and accountability. Previously, schools treated these students as though they had simply enrolled in another high school, he said. Read More Facebook

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Betsy DeVos to California: Not so fast on that federal education plan By Joy Resmovits Education Secretary Betsy DeVos (Erik Lesser / European Pressphoto Agency) In April, Californias top education officials breathed a sigh of relief. After months of debate and back-and-forth with Betsy DeVos staff, they had finalized a plan to satisfy a major education law that aims to make sure all students get a decent education. The state focused on aligning its plan to fulfill the requirements of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act with Californias Local Control Funding Formula, which gives extra money to districts to help students who come from low-income families, are in the foster system or are English learners. But this week, DeVos team said not so fast. Jason Botel, the U.S. Department of Educations principal deputy assistant secretary, sent California education officials a letter asking for more information in such areas as measuring student progress, graduation rates and English learners. In an unsigned statement, the California Department of Education declared itself surprised and disappointed because officials thought  after a meeting with federal officials in Washington  that they were on the right track to get approval. Now the Every Student Succeeds Act plan will be up for discussion once again at the July meeting of the State Board of Education. The U.S. Department of Education has already approved most state plans. Every Student Succeeds is the Obama administrations 2015 replacement for the No Child Left Behind Act. Facebook

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L.A. school board sets a new goal: prepare every grad to be eligible to apply for Cal State or UC By Sonali Kohli Last month, Los Angeles school board president proposed a spate of highly ambitious mandates aimed at ensuring that every district graduate be eligible to apply to one of the states public four-year universities by 2023. By the time the L.A. Unified school board unanimously approved the resolution Tuesday, the original language had been watered down. The goal is no longer that in five years 100% of students meet the long list of benchmarks, which include not just college eligibility for graduates but first-grade reading proficiency and English fluency by sixth grade for all students who enter the district in kindergarten or first grade speaking another language. The original college-readiness goal, for example, called for 100% of all high school students to be eligible to apply to one of the states four-year universities. Now the goal seems to offer more wiggle room: Prepare all high school graduates to be eligible to apply to a California four-year university. Read More Facebook

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We have been hurt. More women say they were mistreated by USC gynecologist By Richard Winton USC student Anika Narayanan says she vividly recalls her first appointment with Dr. George Tyndall at the campus health center, alleging that he made several explicit comments during an examination she felt was inappropriate and invasive. When she came back for a second visit in 2016 after a nonconsensual sexual encounter, he allegedly chastised her, she said in a civil lawsuit and at a press conference Tuesday. He asked me if I had forgotten to use a condom again,  said Narayanan, 21. At one point, she said, Tyndall asked if I did a lot of doggy style,  she said. Read More Facebook

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L.A. Unified gives inspector general brief contract extension By Howard Blume The Los Angeles school board on Tuesday extended the contract of Ken Bramlett, its inspector general, by three months, though his job is far from secure and questions remain about the future direction of his watchdog office. Board members also unanimously promoted Vivian Ekchian, who had been the runner-up for the superintendents job, to deputy superintendent  the districts No. 2 position. Both moves had elements of peacemaking between different factions on the board. Read More Facebook

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USCs handling of complaints about campus gynecologist is being investigated by federal government By Harriet Ryan The U.S. Department of Education announced Monday that it has launched an investigation into how the University of Southern California handled misconduct complaints against a campus gynecologist, the latest fallout in a scandal that has prompted the resignation of USCs president, two law enforcement investigations and dozens of lawsuits. In revealing the inquiry by the departments Office of Civil Rights, officials rebuked USC for what they alleged was improper withholding of information about Dr. George Tyndall during a previous federal investigation. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who has been criticized for taking a less vigorous approach to examining sexual misconduct than predecessors, called for a systemic examination of USC and urged administrators to fully cooperate. Read More Facebook

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Judge to sentence woman and her boyfriend for the murder of an 8-year-old that led to L.A. child welfare reforms By Marisa Gerber A woman and her boyfriend are expected to be sentenced Thursday for the torture and murder of an 8-year-old boy whose killing in 2013 provoked public outrage, prompted sweeping reform of Los Angeles Countys child welfare system, and led to unprecedented criminal charges against social workers who handled the childs case. Pearl Sinthia Fernandez, 34, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole for her role in the death of her son, Gabriel. A jury decided last year that her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, 37, should be executed. When paramedics arrived at the boys Palmdale home in May 2013, Gabriel had slipped out of consciousness. He had a fractured skull, broken ribs, burned skin, missing teeth and BB pellets embedded in his groin. A paramedic would later testify that every inch of the boys small body had been abused. Read More Facebook

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L.A. Unifieds spending out of step with similar school systems, task force says By Howard Blume The Los Angeles school district is out of step with similar school systems, spending more on teachers pay and health benefits and less on activities that could enhance student learning, according to a new report by an outside task force. The L.A. Unified School District Advisory Task Force did not make specific recommendations, but instead posed a series of questions it said the district needs to answer to make sure its funding is aimed at providing a full opportunity for all students to succeed. What were trying to say is: Lets put the data on the table. Lets look at the truth. Lets be transparent and here are the numbers, said task force member Renata Simril. This is not to say that  we should cut teachers salaries. Read More Facebook

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Top USC medical school official feared dean was doing drugs and alerted administration, he testifies By Paul Pringle A former vice dean of USCs Keck School of Medicine testified Tuesday that he feared the schools then-dean, Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito, could be doing drugs and expressed concerns about his general well-being to the universitys No. 2 administrator before Puliafito abruptly left his job in 2016. Dr. Henri Fords testimony at a hearing of the state Medical Board marks the first suggestion that any USC administrator had suspicions about Puliafitos possible drug use before he stepped down. A Times investigation in 2017 found Puliafito led a secret second life of using illegal drugs with a circle of young criminals and addicts. Puliafito testified about his behavior at the hearing Tuesday, saying he took drugs with one young woman on a weekly basis. Ford said that he decided to alert USC Provost Michael Quick after receiving reports in early 2016 that Puliafito was partying in hotels with people of questionable reputation, and that he came to worry about his mental stability. Read More Facebook

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Why L.A. Unified may face financial crisis even with a giant surplus this year By Jessica Calefati With more than half a billion dollars socked away for next school year, the Los Angeles Unified School District hardly seems just two years from financial ruin. Its a scenario that is especially tough to swallow if youre a low-wage worker seeking a raise or a teacher who wants smaller classes. But budget documents show that todays $548-million surplus cannot be sustained  and that even basic services face steep, seemingly unavoidable cuts because of massive problems barreling the districts way. Theres a disconnect between the rosy short-term picture and what we know is coming, said board member Kelly Gonez. Read More Facebook

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We have failed: Top USC officials try to reassure students amid gynecologist scandal By Joy Resmovits Top administrators at USC are reaching out to students in the wake of misconduct allegations against the universitys longtime gynecologist, acknowledging failings and vowing reforms as they try to address growing outrage over the revelations. Several USC deans have sent out messages trying to reassure students and faculty that the university is committed to changing. We have failed, wrote Jack H. Knott, dean of USCs Sol Price School of Public Policy, in a May 24 letter. What happened is antithetical to everything we know is right. Read More Facebook

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Rick Caruso is named chair of USCs trustees, vows swift investigation of gynecologist scandal By Thomas Curwen The University of Southern Californias board of trustees has elected mall magnate Rick Caruso to be the new chair of the board, giving fresh leadership as the university navigates a widening scandal involving a longtime campus gynecologist. The move marks the latest effort by USC to address the case, which has sparked a criminal investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department and dozens of civil lawsuits. More than 400 people have contacted a hotline that the university established for patients to make reports about their experience with Dr. George Tyndall. In his first act as chairman, Caruso announced that the white-shoe L.A. law firm OMelveny & Myers would conduct a thorough and independent investigation into the gynecologists conduct and reporting failures at the clinic. He set an ambitious timeline for the review, pledging it would conclude before students return for the fall semester. Read More Facebook

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UC Berkeley students persistence helps win more liberal rules for in-state tuition By Teresa Watanabe Ifechukwu Okeke thought shed be a shoo-in for in-state tuition when she was admitted to UC Berkeley for fall 2016. She had moved to the United States from Nigeria in 2012 to go to Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga. By the time she got her acceptance to transfer to UC to study molecular and cell biology, she had lived in California four years. She had a California drivers license, bank account and rental records as proof. UC Berkeley, however, ruled she was a nonresident  which meant she would have to pay nearly $27,000 more. Read More Facebook

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State medical board calls former County-USC doctor a sexual predator, suspends his license By Matt Hamilton A UCLA cardiologist has been temporarily stripped of his medical license after state regulators described him as a sexual predator who assaulted three female colleagues when he was working and training at L.A. County-USC Medical Center. Read More Facebook

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Global California 2030' aims to get more students learning more languages By Joy Resmovits Tom Torlakson (Andrew Seng / Associated Press) Outgoing state Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson on Wednesday announced a new statewide effort to encourage students to learn more languages. Called Global California 2030, its goal is to help more students become fluent in multiple tongues. Torlakson said that by 2030, he wants half of the states 6.2 million K-12 students to participate in classes or programs that lead to proficiency in two or more languages. By 2040, he wants three out of four students to be proficient enough to earn the State Seal of Biliteracy. Torlakson announced the initiative at Cahuenga Elementary School, which offers a dual-language immersion program in English and Korean. Californias public school students speak more than 60 languages at home, and 40% come to school with knowledge of a language other than English. Torlakson called his plan a call to action that invites parents, legislators, educators and community members to pool resources to expand language offerings in schools and get more bilingual teachers trained. He said the state already is working with Mexico and Spain to expand a teacher-exchange program. Fluency, the plan argues, can help students succeed economically  and language acquisition can help their overall critical thinking. The initiative builds on Proposition 58, a ballot initiative passed in 2016 that undid an earlier requirement that English learners be taught in English-immersion classes unless their parents signed waivers. Torlakson recently visited Mexico and met with that countrys education secretary. They later signed a pact to increase collaboration, particularly in language education. This [Global California 2030] is great follow-through on Toms part and very important, Patricia Gandara, a UCLA education professor who hosted the Mexico meeting, said in an email. It hands over a plan to move forward in an area in which California has a unique advantage, but must seize the opportunity. Facebook

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Jury convicts man of murder in 2015 slaying of UCLA student found inside her burning apartment By Marisa Gerber A jury on Tuesday convicted a man in the 2015 slaying of a UCLA student found dead inside her burning apartment  a gruesome stabbing case that led to a fierce rebuke of the police response amid concerns that the killing could have been prevented. The panel deliberated for about six hours before finding Alberto Medina, 24, guilty of murder, arson, burglary and animal cruelty. On Sept. 21, 2015, firefighters found the charred body of Andrea DelVesco inside her apartment after responding to the complex a block from campus. The 21-year-old student  an Austin, Texas, native known to her sorority sisters as a fearless giver who befriended others with ease  was stabbed at least 19 times, authorities said. Read More Facebook

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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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2 hurt in Indiana middle school shooting; suspect in custody, authorities say By Associated Press Authorities say two victims in a shooting at a suburban Indianapolis school are being taken to a hospital and the lone suspect is in custody. Bryant Orem, a spokesman for the Hamilton County Sheriffs Office, said in a news release that the victims in Friday mornings attack at Noblesville West Middle School are being taken to Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis and their families have been notified. He says no other information is available about the victims. Orem said the suspect is believed to have acted alone and was taken into custody. No additional information about the suspect was made public. Read More Facebook

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For new L.A. schools chief Austin Beutner, some key unions are giving no honeymoon period By Howard Blume In the less than two weeks since Austin Beutner took charge of Los Angeles schools, unions representing teachers and administrators have staged a job action and a protest. Theyve made it clear that they will not give the new superintendent the traditional honeymoon period, and they are bashing him for his wealth and lack of experience running either a school or a school district. Beutner is a billionaire investment banker with zero qualifications, local teachers union President Alex Caputo-Pearl told members in a phone alert urging them to participate in a Thursday afternoon rally in Grand Park. The board is saying that billionaires who made their money blowing institutions up and making money off it know best  not the education professionals who have dedicated our careers to working with students. 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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UC regents approve leaner budget for Janet Napolitano By Teresa Watanabe University of California regents on Thursday unanimously approved a leaner, more transparent budget for President Janet Napolitano, moving to address political criticism over the systems central office operations. The $876.4-million budget for 2018-19 reflects spending cuts of 2%, including reductions in staffing, travel and such systemwide programs as public service law fellowships, carbon neutrality and food security. Napolitano shifted $30 million to campuses for housing needs and $10 million to UC Riverside to support its five-year-old medical school. She also permanently redirected $8.5 million annually to help enroll more California students, as required by the state. 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 The deaths of two Central Valley farmworkers in a car accident near Delano has become a flash point in the immigration battle between California and federal officials cracking down on people in the country illegally.

The parents of six were killed in a car crash while they were fleeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. ICE says the two were not the targets ICE was looking to arrest, but there are discrepancies about whether agents chased them.

Delano police have submitted a case to the Kern County district attorneys office, which will decide whether to file criminal charges against ICE officers for what police say were discrepancies in the officers accounts of the incident.

After a series of ICE enforcement actions in the Central Valley, this case has immigrants in the region even more on edge.

Here is what we know:

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Q: How did the crash happen?

Santos Hilario Garcia and Marcelina Garcia Profecto were killed while fleeing from ICE agents on March 13. The couple had initially stopped, but then fled before crashing into a utility pole at high speed.

ICE deportation officer Ramiro Sanchez told police that on the morning of the crash, he and colleagues were conducting surveillance on an apartment in order to detain Celestino Hilario-Garcia, who was targeted for removal from the country, according to a report by the Delano Police Department.

Sanchez stated that a colleague witnessed Santos Hilario Garcia, whom they mistook for Celestino Hilario-Garcia, enter a vehicle in front of the apartment, along with a woman and a girl, the report said.

Sanchez and another deportation officer, Dimas Benitez, followed the car in black, unmarked Jeeps as the couple dropped their daughter off at school. Shortly afterward, Sanchez activated his emergency lights to signal the car to pull over.

Santos Hilario Garcia complied, but as Sanchez got out of his car, the couples vehicle sped away, the report said.

Agents later came across the vehicle, which had struck a utility pole and overturned, and called local authorities. Garcia, 35, and, Profecto, 33, who were in the country illegally, both died at the scene.

Garcia, who was convicted in 2014 of driving under the influence, was voluntarily returned to Mexico three times between 2008 and 2017, said ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley. Profecto had no prior encounters with ICE.

Q: What are the discrepancies in the narrative?

Shortly after the March 13 crash, a deportation officer told police officers that his car followed in the same direction of a vehicle he was attempting to stop, but that he was not in pursuit with emergency lights/sirens, according to a statement provided in the Delano Police Department traffic collision report.

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But surveillance video obtained by the Police Department showed the immigration agents vehicles traveling in the same direction as the couples vehicle with their emergency lights activated. A time stamp showed the couples car at 06:48:42 traveling at a faster rate of speed than other traffic. At 06:48:52, two cars that matched the deportation officers vehicles followed with the lights activated, according to the report.

Based on the discrepancy the report was forwarded to the Kern County District Attorneys Office for review since they have jurisdiction, Delanos interim police chief, Raul Alvizo, said in a statement. The charges requested are according to California Vehicle Code Section 31, No person shall give, either orally or in writing, information to a peace officer while in the performance of his duties under the provision of this code when such person knows that the information is false. 

The complaint, received Wednesday morning, is pending review, according to the district attorneys office.

What is ICE saying?

Per routine protocol, at the time of the incident, the facts surrounding the encounter were referred for review and that review is ongoing, ICE spokesman Richard Rocha said in a statement Monday. While this was an isolated and extremely unfortunate incident, ICE wants to encourage all individuals we encounter to fully cooperate with our law enforcement officers.

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The statement cited sanctuary policies that have pushed ICE out of jails and force our officers to conduct more enforcement in the community  which poses increased risks for law enforcement and the public.

It also increases the likelihood that ICE will encounter other illegal aliens who previously werent on our radar, Rocha said.

Citing the ongoing review, ICE did not provide further details.

Q: What has been the reaction in Delano?

The case has sparked fear and anger in the farmworker community, which was on display last week at a memorial service for the couple.

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Marcelina and Santos were hard workers who only wanted to provide for their family. Like many other immigrants, they were farmworkers  people who lifted up this country, said Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers of America. We want to ensure that the deaths of Marcelina and Santos are not in vain. This tragedy has shown this country that the inhumane politics of this administration destroy families.

Although some of the hundreds who attended did not know the couple, many said they could relate to their story.

It could happen to anyone of us, said Delano resident Susana Ortiz. People are scared, because theyre leaving their kids and they dont know if theyre going to come back.

Former and current farmworkers, as well as classmates, turned out to show their support for the couples children.

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Victoria Lennon, 17, attends school with one of the couples daughters and is on the track team with her.

This was definitely a situation in which I wanted to make sure that I was there for her and that she knew there were people who cared and she wouldnt be alone, Victoria said. The people here are very caring, very giving, very family oriented. People stick together when things go down.After decades of debate and failed plans, it appears L.A. will soon finally have a rail link to Los Angeles International Airport.

The new people mover system comes after numerous aborted rail plans, including a bullet train from LAX to Las Vegas, another high-speed rail line from LAX to San Diego and the Green Line, which was supposed to go to LAX but never did. L.A. has fallen behind many other American cities when it comes to mass transit options at its main airports.

Here is what we know from the pages of The Times:

What exactly is the people mover?

The train is expected to begin service in March 2023.

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It will stop three times in the center of LAXs arrivals and departures area, with moving walkways to connect travelers and employees to each terminal.

East of the airport, the trains will connect to a ground transportation hub for shuttles and taxis and a Metro rail station at 96th Street and Aviation Boulevard. Reaching a terminal from the Metro station should take less than 10 minutes on the train, airport officials said.

At the end of the line, near the 405 Freeway, the people mover will stop at a consolidated car rental facility, eliminating the need for the lumbering rental car shuttles that account for 1 in 5 curbside boardings at the airport.

The people mover will connect to the rest of the Metro rail network via the Crenshaw Line, now under construction. From there, riders can access downtown L.A., Santa Monica, Pasadena and other communities covered by Metros rail lines.

Why has this taken so long?

The idea of connecting LAX to some type of rail line has been around for decades. But these plans faltered due to funding issues and political opposition.

In the early 1970s, there was a plan for a train that would have linked LAX to the San Fernando Valley. That plan would have had a train depot at the Sepulveda Dam area with possible future links to Palmdale, Pasadena and beyond.

At one point, the idea was for the high-speed Air-Cushion train to go all the way to Las Vegas, traveling at 300 mph.

But the plan died.

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In the 1980s, there was talk of a privately financed bullet train through LAX and on to San Diego. That didnt go very far either.

Why doesnt the Green Line go to LAX?

The original Green Line design drafted in the 1980s included an LAX extension.

But Metro officials couldnt decide where the station should go inside the terminal complex and cut the project from their 20-year plan.

Ultimately, the project ran out of money when the price tag on the 20-mile Norwalk-to-Redondo Beach line tripled. Further complicating plans, the Federal Aviation Administration worried that an extension of the Green Line, which is elevated south of the airport, might interfere with airport navigation and runway sightlines.

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For years, the Green Line became known as the train to nowhere.

How hard is it to get to LAX?

A study published this year by the travel app Travelbank ranked all major airports in the U.S. It used an index that includes the time it takes during morning rush hour to get to the terminals from a nearby metropolitan center on public transit and in a private car, as well as the cost of taking Uber and public transit for the trip.

LAX ranked 21st out of 23 airports in the study, which found that it takes 33 minutes to get to the airport from downtown L.A. via transit and 50 minutes by private car.

An Uber ride costs $40 from downtown Los Angeles, the study said.Powerful wind, rain and even a little bit of snow could make traveling along the 5 Freeway through the Grapevine hazardous Thursday and Friday, forecasters said.

Northerly winds with gusts up to 50 to 65 miles per hour are possible in the area through early Friday morning, said Robbie Munroe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. A high winds warning is in effect for the area through 1 a.m. Friday, he said.

Forecasters had received reports of snow near Sandberg on Thursday morning, he said.

Rain and snow showers will likely bring wet conditions to the I-5 through the Grapevine this morning. This combined with gusty northerly winds will make for hazardous driving conditions. Drive safely out there. #CAwx #LAweather #Socal @NWSHanford pic.twitter.com/MNVThyh0pL  NWS Los Angeles (@NWSLosAngeles) April 12, 2018

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Gusty wind is expected Thursday for much of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties, with gusts around 35 to 45 miles per hour and possibly stronger in the mountain areas, Munroe said. The wind could be strong enough for reduced visibility due to blowing dust and sand across the Antelope Valley, and forecasters have warned of potential downed tree limbs and trees, as well as possible power outages.

The winds are courtesy of a storm system in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest with a cold front trailing behind it that reaches all the way to Southern California, Munroe said.

Winds are expected to increase across coastal waters late Thursday, prompting a gale warning. Seas are expected to become choppy, with potentially dangerous harbor entrances through the end of the week, according to the National Weather Service.

hailey.branson@latimes.com

Twitter: @haileybransonLos Angeles police have arrested a Long Beach physician who allegedly sent a lewd photograph to an undercover officer posing as a 16-year-old girl on the internet.

Officers with the Los Angeles Police Departments Human Trafficking Unit arrested Jonathon Ellis, 35, after he contacted the undercover officer and sent her a sexually explicit image, the department said in a statement.

Ellis was arrested just after 9 a.m. Wednesday and booked into the LAPDs 77th Street Community Police Station, according to inmate records from the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department.

Ellis studied medicine in Henderson, Nev., and currently is a resident physician in Long Beach, according to the LAPD.

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Ellis has been charged with four felony counts of distributing or showing pornography to a minor and one misdemeanor count of arranging a meeting with a minor for lewd purpose, said Paul Eakins, a spokesman for the L.A. County district attorneys office. Ellis, he said, is due in court in downtown Los Angeles for arraignment on May 2.

The LAPD is asking any potential victims to come forward and to contact Officer Aaron Korth or Det. Sammy Cruz at (213) 486-0910. Persons wishing to remain anonymous can call (800) 222-8477 or submit a tip to www.lacrimestoppers.org.

Ellis is being held in lieu of $85,000 bail, according to inmate records.

hailey.branson@latimes.com

Twitter: @haileybranson

UPDATES:

2 p.m. This article was updated with the specific charges against Jonathon Ellis from the Los Angeles County district attorneys office.

This article was originally published at 11:40 a.m.Los Angeles County sheriffs homicide detectives have arrested a man suspected of stabbing another man aboard a Montebello bus on Monday.

Detectives arrested Manuel Ortiz, a 27-year-old transient, at about 1 a.m. Monday while Ortiz was being treated at a medical facility for unspecified reasons, the Sheriffs Department said in a statement.

On Monday morning, Ortiz and the victim were riding a municipal bus on Route 10 that was westbound on Whittier Boulevard. When the bus arrived in the 5700 block of Whittier Boulevard at 10:13 a.m., Ortiz stabbed the other man multiple times in the torso with a knife, got off the bus then ran away, authorities said.

The victim was taken to a hospital, where he was in critical condition on Thursday, according to the Sheriffs Department.

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Video released by the Sheriffs Department shows a man in a hat and sunglasses standing in the aisle of the bus as it travels. His right hand appears to be in his pants pocket. When the bus appears to stop, with its door opening, the man walks toward the front of the vehicle and pulls a knife on someone sitting near the door.

It was a savage attack and one that caused us great concern, Sheriff Jim McDonnell said in a statement. It was seemingly unprovoked, as the suspect walked towards the front of the bus, pulled a knife and stabbed the victim multiple times.

Investigators are continuing to search for any additional witnesses or evidence related to the attack. The motive remains unknown, and the stabbing does not appear to be gang-related, authorities said.

Ortiz has been booked in the East Los Angeles Sheriffs Station on suspicion of attempted murder and is being held without bail, according to the Sheriffs Department.

hailey.branson@latimes.com

Twitter: @haileybransonA 12-year-old girl who went missing from her Panorama City home was found in good health Wednesday evening, authorities said.

Stacey Laura Solano disappeared Tuesday night from a courtyard of her residence in the 9400 block of Van Nuys Boulevard with two unidentified people, an 18- or 19-year-old man and a woman, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. She was last seen about 8:30 p.m.

Her family was extremely concerned for her safety, noting that she takes medication for anxiety and depression but did not have the medication with her, authorities said.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

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Twitter: @AleneTchek

UPDATES:

6:10 p.m.: This article was updated to reflect that the girl was found.

This article was originally published at 5:40 p.m.The U.S. Department of Justice cannot favor police departments that are willing to cooperate with immigration agents when it doles out tens of millions of dollars in funding each year, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled this week.

U.S. District Judge Manuel Real issued a permanent, nationwide ban against a Justice Department policy that gave an edge to obliging police departments applying for a community policing grant program. In doing so, Real dealt a legal setback to the Trump administration in its aggressive campaign to crack down on illegal immigration and to force compliance from law enforcement officials.

This is a complete victory, said Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer, who challenged the new rules in federal court last year. This is yet another dagger in the heart of the administrations efforts to use federal funds as a weapon to make local jurisdictions complicit in its civil immigration enforcement policies.

Calling the ruling overbroad and inconsistent with the rule of law, a Justice Department spokesman said the government was within its rights to give preference to departments that assisted in immigration enforcement.

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The Department has the lawful discretion to give additional consideration for jurisdictions that prioritize the safety of their communities and their law enforcement officers when they promise to cooperate with federal immigration authorities seeking information about illegal aliens who have committed crimes, Devin M. OMalley said in a statement.

Feuer, who was flanked Thursday by Mayor Eric Garcetti and Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck, filed a lawsuit in September, claiming that U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions had overreached his authority and crossed constitutional lines when the Justice Department changed how it judged applications from local police agencies for the Community Oriented Policing Services program. The LAPD applied for funding and was rejected.

For years, police departments around the country have sought a share of the programs funds to bolster their community policing programs, which are focused on building stronger ties and trust with neighborhoods instead of traditional law-and-order enforcement.

Los Angeles applied regularly to the program and often received funds. In 2016, the LAPD was awarded $3.125 million and has received as much as $16.8 million in previous years. The department typically uses the money to add officers to its Community Safety Partnership program. Instead of focusing on arrests, officers in the program take on assignments coaching sports teams and leading mentoring programs.

The strategy, police say, has paid off. Violent crime dropped by more than 50% and arrests were cut in half during the programs first three years in three Watts housing developments, officials have said. Police also credit the program for a three-year stretch without a homicide in Jordan Downs, one of the developments.

Last year, however, Sessions implemented a change in how applications for the grant would be scored: Additional points would be awarded to police departments that helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents identify and apprehend jail inmates believed to be in the country illegally.

To get the point boost, police departments had to be willing to alert ICE 48 hours before releasing inmates who agents had targeted for deportation and were required to give ICE agents access to jail facilities so they could interview inmates and review records. Los Angeles, which refused to abide by the new rules, was not awarded any funds, while 80% of the departments that did receive money cooperated with ICE, court records show.

The move by Sessions fit into a larger campaign to clear the way for immigration agents to dramatically ramp up the number of people they arrest and deport. President Trump and Sessions have been infuriated by so-called sanctuary municipalities such as Los Angeles that, to varying degrees, refuse to help federal authorities enforce immigration laws because of legal and moral concerns over cooperating.

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Sessions has tried to punish objectors through public shaming and threats of withholding funds.

An executive order by Trump that sought to deny a broad array of federal funding to sanctuary cities was knocked down in federal court last year. Since then, Sessions has made more targeted threats to withhold just law enforcement related-funds. Those threats too have been met with legal challenges by Feuer and others.

Jean Reisz, a professor at the USC Gould School of Law who specializes in immigration issues, said that shes not surprised by Thursdays announcement or the other, similar ones.

The courts have held that the government cant coerce a local jurisdiction to enact a federal law, she said. The federal government cant force local jurisdictions to enforce immigration laws. Thats something the federal government has to do.

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The legal sparring ratcheted up last month, when the Justice Department sued California over laws that, among other things, make it a crime for business owners to voluntarily help federal agents find and detain workers in the country illegally and prohibit local law enforcement from alerting immigration agents when detainees are released from custody.

For decades, the LAPD has abided by rules that sharply restrict an officers ability to inquire about a persons immigration status. In a city with a large population of immigrants living in the country illegally, the rules are meant to assure immigrants that they can report crimes without fear of being questioned about their status in the country.

During his tenure, Beck has been particularly assertive on the need for the department to build trust with the citys immigrant communities.

The court ruling, Beck said, showed that we wont be bullied and we cant be bought. You cannot force us to go against our philosophies, to go against our principles by withholding money.

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Losing out on funding last year upended the LAPDs plans to hire 25 officers for the community policing program in Harvard Park, one of the citys deadliest neighborhoods. Instead, Beck said, the city cobbled together money from private donors and local public funds to carry out the Harvard Park plans. The ruling this week does not allow city to retroactively seek money.

In issuing his ruling, Judge Real sided with Feuer, saying the new funding rules violated the separation of powers laid out in the nations Constitution.

Real found that tying funds to cooperation with ICE was an improper attempt to force local police to participate in immigration enforcement, which is the job of the federal government. The move, he wrote, upset the constitutional balance between state and federal power by requiring state and local law enforcement to partner with federal authorities.

The judge said the rules also violated the authority given to Congress to control government spending.

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As a result, Los Angeles and other cities that refused to adhere to the funding requirements were put at a disadvantage and would be handicapped again in future years, Real concluded. The remedy, he said, was to issue a permanent injunction against the Justice Department that prohibits it from giving an advantage to departments that play along with ICE.

Saying the Trump administration has been hostile to the law, to our constitution, to immigrants and most importantly, to public safety, Garcetti praised the ruling.

Today, the court said loud and clear what we have said loud and clear: Quit politicizing public safety, he said.

Times staff writer Kate Mather contributed to this report.

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joel.rubin@latimes.com

Twitter: @joelrubin

dakota.smith@latimes.com

Twitter: @dakotacdsmith

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UPDATES:

4:10 p.m.: This article had been edited for clarity and updated with additional details about the ruling and comments from Chief Beck and Mayor Garcetti.

This article was originally published at 12:15 p.m.Television producer Jill Blackstone is facing extradition from Maryland after being charged in the 2015 slaying of her deaf and partially blind sister in Studio City, Los Angeles police said Thursday.

Los Angeles County prosecutors filed a murder charge against the producer last month, following a two-year investigation by LAPD Valley homicide detectives into the death of 49-year-old Wendy Blackstone. Jill Blackstone was also charged with three counts of animal cruelty.

In March 2015, Wendy Blackstone was found unconscious next to a dead dog in an enclosed garage that had filled with carbon monoxide. Paramedics tried to resuscitate her, but she was pronounced dead at the scene.

The Los Angeles County coroners office determined that the victim died of inhalation of combustion and the sedative alprazolam. Her death is listed as undetermined on the coroners website.

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On Tuesday, after Valley homicide detectives tracked Jill Blackstone to a relatives home in Hoboken, N.J., they learned that she had gone to Johns Hopkins Universitys medical center. Officer Mike Lopez of the Los Angeles Police Department said detectives arranged for Baltimore police to arrest her on the outstanding charges. Lopez said she is now in Baltimore police custody awaiting extradition to Los Angeles.

From the outset, investigators considered Wendy Blackstones death to be very suspicious and possibly staged, according to the autopsy report by the Los Angeles County coroners office.

She was found in the garage of a Studio City home in the 12000 block of Landale Street atop blankets with a suicide note in her hand. Investigators said the note was written by Jill Blackstone, according to the coroners report. Wendy Blackstone was legally blind and required hearing aids, the report said.

Near her feet were a Weber charcoal grill and a trash can with ash in it  both believed to be the source of the carbon monoxide, the report said. Nearby was a mostly empty bottle of vodka, although no alcohol was detected in the dead womans body.

Investigators saw several notes near the body of Wendy Blackstone with end-of-life instructions, including orders not to resuscitate, but none were signed by the dead woman.

When paramedics arrived and opened the doors to the garage, they found one dead dog and two others walked lethargically out, the report said. One of the two, a Doberman, later died.

Jill Blackstone later told investigators that a friend called her home and she just came to and did not remember what happened, according to the coroners report. She later told police that the grill was used in the garage to keep warm, and that the charcoal was used to roast marshmallows, the report said.

Jill Blackstone, who once was a producer for Rosie ODonnell, was initially arrested after her sister died. She was released without any charges being filed against her, but only days later, the district attorneys office ordered further investigation.

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Homicide detectives and arson investigators then began an extensive series of interviews related to the death, Lopez said.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Jill Blackstone rose to fame producing numerous television shows, including The Rosie ODonnell Show and Sally Jessy Raphaels Sally, according to her personal website. She also produced a 1993 episode of The Jerry Springer Show, according to the Internet Movie Database.

richard.winton@latimes.com

Twitter: @lacrimes

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matt.hamilton@latimes.com

Twitter: @MattHjourno

UPDATES:

3 p.m.: This article was updated with details from the autopsy report on Wendy Blackstone.

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This article was originally published at 2:25 p.m.This week, lawmakers from the Northeast to the Deep South have been debating and voting on gun control legislation, with mixed results. Heres a snapshot of what has been happening with these measures in recent days.

Vermont

Over the objection of gun rights advocates, Republican Gov. Phil Scott signed three bills Wednesday that will ban high-capacity magazines and the rapid-fire devices known as bump stocks, expand background checks for gun purchases, and increase the legal age for purchasing assault weapons from 18 to 21.

Scott also signed into law a red flag policy to make it easier for police to take guns from potentially dangerous people. Under such a law, police report to a court anyone who may pose a significant or imminent danger to themselves or others. Threats of violence made on social media can constitute a red flag.

If a court finds the person to be a threat, a person can have their guns confiscated.

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If we are at a point when our kids are afraid to go to school and parents are afraid to put their kids on a bus, who are we? Scott said in a statement.

These legislative changes come after police arrested Jack Swayer, 18, in February on suspicion of plotting a mass shooting at a Vermont high school. Sawyer pleaded not guilty to first-degree attempted murder, aggravated assault with a weapon and two counts of aggravated attempted murder after being accused of bringing a gun onto the campus of Fair Haven Union High School.

A number of states, including Massachusetts and New Jersey, have passed laws to ban bump stocks. Last month the Trump administration said the Justice Department would move to ban the devices, which essentially turn semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons.

Gun rights enthusiasts protested Vermonts legislation last month, gathering outside the Statehouse and passing out 30-round magazines of ammunition. On Wednesday, demonstrators for and against the measures gathered for the bill-signing ceremony on the steps of the Statehouse in Montepelier.

Protesters wearing orange hunting vests and caps carried signs saying #NotMyGovernor. One supporter of the bills carried a sign reading, Thank you Gov. Scott!

Louisiana

A bill prohibiting the sale of assault weapons to people under 21 was defeated in the state Legislature on Tuesday.

Current state law allows people 18 or older to purchase assault weapons. Democratic state Sen. Troy Carter proposed Senate Bill 274 to raise the age from 18 to 21 after the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Majory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

Everyone would acknowledge that the shootings in Florida were a tipping point. Weve had numbers of shootings in theaters and churches  at some point we have to start doing something about these things, Carter said in a phone interview Wednesday.

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Senators voted 26 to 9 against the bill. Carter also sponsored Senate Bill 491, which would prohibit the sale of bump stocks. It is scheduled for a vote next week.

Carter said that the defeated bill may be brought back for reconsideration at a later date and that he hopes other lawmakers change their stance.

Im a gun enthusiast. I would never try to deny anyone the right to bear arms, he said. Do you need an AK-47 to hunt or protect your home? The answer for those who want to be realistic about it is no.

Rhode Island

A pair of gun control bills are swiftly moving through the General Assembly in the New England state.

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The Rhode Island House Judiciary Committee passed two bills Tuesday that would ban the purchase of bump stocks and implement a red flag policy.

Tuesdays vote was a unanimous 12 to 0, said House spokesman Larry Berman. The bills will go before the full House for a vote Thursday afternoon.

The measures are expected to pass, Berman said, with House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, a Democrat, strongly supporting them. They will next head to the state Senate. The red flag measure has enjoyed support from various senators for months. Too often, after a mass shooting we learn about all the warning signs people saw from the shooter and wonder why they still had guns, Senate Majority Whip Maryellen Goodwin, also a Democrat, said in a statement.

Ohio

Republican Gov. John Kasich was joined this week by the father of a victim from the Florida mass school shooting to voice support for gun control legislation pending in the Legislature.

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Fred Guttenberg testified Tuesday at a meeting with Kasich and sponsors of House Bill 585, urging them to implement the six proposed policy changes.

Guttenbergs daughter, Jaime, was one of the 17 people killed in the Parkland shooting.

The bill seeks to implement a red flag policy as well as ban bump stocks, armor-piercing ammunition and the purchase of guns by people convicted of domestic violence.

Guttenberg, whose family is from Ohio, has been campaigning across the state for gun control legislation.

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The gun policy recommendations were made by a bipartisan panel created by Kasich. A date for lawmakers to vote on the bill has not been determined.

michael.livingston@latimes.com

@Livingston_LATMissouris governor faced calls to resign and a threat of impeachment Wednesday after state legislators released a bombshell report in which a woman testified he slapped her, ripped open her shirt and coerced her into giving oral sex against her will.

Republican Gov. Eric Greitens  a former Navy SEAL whose outsider 2016 campaign for governor made him a rising star in the GOP  already faces an upcoming felony trial in St. Louis over allegations he photographed the woman naked against her will during an affair in 2015.

But after a special House of Representatives investigative committee  commissioned to examine the pairs extramarital affair  released a much-awaited 24-page report, legislators expanded the committees mission to include discussing whether Greitens should be impeached.

The testimony outlined in the report is beyond disturbing, Republican House Speaker Todd Richardson said in televised remarks.

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Republican state Atty. Gen. Josh Hawley, a candidate for U.S. Senate, called on Greitens to resign, saying the report contains shocking, substantial and corroborated evidence of wrongdoing by Gov. Greitens. Hawley said the behavior was impeachable.

In a defiant statement given to reporters before the reports release, Greitens called the inquiry a political witch hunt and said the report included lies and falsehoods.

Greitens has acknowledged having an affair with the woman, a St. Louis-area hairdresser, but has denied that he threatened, photographed or struck her.

This was a private mistake that had nothing to do with governing, Greitens said of the affair.

The affair, which occurred during the gubernatorial campaign, exploded into public view in January after the womans ex-husband leaked audio of a private conversation in which she told him how Greitens had treated her.

The Times is withholding the womans identity because the recording was made and released against her will, and she has declined to speak publicly about her allegations of sexual misconduct.

As controversy grew, legislators in the Republican-dominated Missouri statehouse impaneled a committee to examine the womans claims.

Their report, which was based on testimony from the woman, her ex-husband and two of her friends, recounted the allegations against the governor in such detail that lawmakers branded the front page of the document with a sensitive content warning.

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The legislative committee said it found the woman to be an overall credible witness. Greitens declined to give testimony or evidence.

The woman said she first met Greitens in 2013, when he became a client at her hair salon.

During an appointment on March 7, 2015, Greitens moved his hand up her leg and groped her crotch without her consent, the woman told lawmakers.

The pair later made plans to meet outside the salon, though the woman said she was hesitant about an invitation from Greitens to come to his house while Greitens wife was out of town. She said Greitens told her he could not be seen in public with her because he was running for office.

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The woman said that when she came over to Greitens house, he shushed her at first, and then patted her down head to toe to look for recording devices, and then peeked outside to see whether anyone had seen her come in.

The woman said she felt nervous, and that Greitens said exercising might help her calm down, offering to teach her how to do a proper pull-up, which the woman interpreted as being some sort of, like, sexy workout, the report said.

The woman then told legislators that, after the pair went into the basement, Greitens taped her hands to a set of pull-up rings with this gauzed tape stuff and put a blindfold on her.

Then Greitens tried to spit water in the womans mouth, then began kissing her and ripped her shirt open and pulled down her pants to her ankles without her consent, she testified.

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Then I hear him kind of, like, step back  take a step back and I hear  I can hear like a, like a cellphone  like a picture, and I can see a flash through the blindfold, the woman testified.

Then, according to the woman, Greitens told her: Youre not going to mention my name. Dont even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, Im going to take these pictures, and Im going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are.

The woman said, I just didnt answer at all, and then he spanked me and said, Are you going to mention my name? And I said  I just gritted through my teeth and I said, No. And hes like, Good  now thats a good girl. 

When the woman tried to leave, she said Greitens grabbed her in a bear hug as she was uncontrollably crying, and he was trying to, like, fondle my body, the woman told legislators.

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She said Greitens then pulled out his penis and put it near her face. Im like  so this guy literally just wants me for this, and this is all he wants, and then hell let me  because at this point too, I also know I have to be at work, and hes not going to let me leave, because hes obviously still horny, she testified. So I gave him oral sex at this point.

The committee asked the woman if she consented. Its a hard question, because I did it  it felt like consent but, no, I didnt want to do it, she testified. Coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave. She added that she was definitely in fear for her physical self.

The report says the woman talked to two friends about the encounter afterward, and they recounted their stories to legislators.

About three weeks after the encounter at the house, the woman decided to tell her then-husband about the incident. He recorded the conversation without her knowledge. The pair later divorced.

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Youve been half-raped and blackmailed, her then-husband told her, and she responded, Yes, according to the committees transcript of the recording.

The conversation with her husband, who later leaked the recording to the media, was consistent with her testimony, the committee said.

The woman saw Greitens again, and the pair kissed and had sex consensually, she said. But on another evening when the pair were about to have sex, she said Greitens asked her if shed had sex with anyone else since seeing him.

When she responded that shed slept with her husband, he slapped me across my face, she testified. It wasnt sweet and gentle; it was forceful.

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During another sexual encounter, she said Greitens kind of smacked me and grabbed me and shoved me down on the ground. It actually hurt, and I know that I actually was really scared and sad when that happened.

As fears grew that Greitens wife might find out about the affair, the pair broke it off, the report said. The woman wrote Greitens an email: Please think of everyone involved and just leave me alone. Dont come in at all.

Greitens was indicted by a St. Louis grand jury on suspicion of taking a picture of the woman against her will. His trial is set for May 24.

matt.pearce@latimes.com

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Matt Pearce is a national reporter for The Times. Follow him on Twitter at @mattdpearce.

More national headlinesMike Pompeo, facing tough questions Thursday in a Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of State, called for using relentless diplomacy to avoid war but came under fire from Democrats who questioned whether he would stand up to President Trump when necessary to restore American influence around the world.

Pompeo, 54, served six years as a tea party Republican member of Congress from Kansas before Trump picked him early last year to lead the CIA. Given the turmoil in the presidents Cabinet, he kept a low public profile but was known as a fierce Trump loyalist in a spy service that prides itself on being apolitical.

Pompeo sought to mollify his Democratic critics in an often contentious five-hour hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that did little to undermine his chances for confirmation by the full Senate, where he has numerous allies.

If he is confirmed as the nations top diplomat, Pompeo said, his first priority would be to revitalize the demoralized State Department after a year of painful staff cuts and high-level departures under Rex Tillerson, whom Trump fired last month.

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Ill do my part to end the vacancies, Pompeo said. He vowed to foster a State Department culture that finds its swagger once again. We will be effective, expeditionary, diverse and successful in fulfilling our mission.

The barrel-chested West Point graduate and veteran of the Gulf War pushed back on criticism that he is a war hawk and hard-liner. No one understands the value of diplomacy and the terror and tragedy that is war like someone who has served in uniform, he said. Its the last resort. It must always be so.

Pompeo, a sharp critic of the 2015 nuclear disarmament accord with Iran, acknowledged that Iran is complying with terms of the deal. But he went back and forth as to whether he would seek to fix what he called its egregious flaws, or withdraw and then try to renegotiate it  even though European allies and Iran have rejected that possibility.

If confirmed it will be an immediate personal priority to work with [U.S.] partners to see if such a fix is achievable, he said. Trump has vowed to withdraw from the deal next month unless it is revised.

Pompeo vowed to toughen U.S. sanctions that have targeted Russian President Vladimir Putins inner circle and other senior government officials. Moscow continues to act aggressively, enabled by years of soft policy toward that aggression. Thats now over, Pompeo said. Russia, he added, has not gotten the message.

If confirmed, Pompeo also will help plan a proposed high-stakes nuclear summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a task he was already immersed in as CIA director. Trump said last week that the meeting would occur in late May or early June.

No one is under any illusions that a summit would produce a comprehensive agreement to strip North Korea of its nuclear weapons, Pompeo said. But it could set us down the course to achieve a diplomatic outcome that America and the world so desperately need.

Pompeo said he read CIA histories of previous failed U.S. negotiations with North Korea and is confident that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past. President Trump isnt one to play games at the negotiating table  and I wont be either, he added.

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Pressed by Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.), Pompeo also denied that he had ever called for overthrowing the North Korean government. I have never advocated for regime change, he said. I am not advocating for regime change.

He also pledged to rebuild the U.S. diplomatic presence in Cuba, which has dropped to a skeleton staff. President Obama sought to end half a century of hostilities with Havana by reestablishing diplomatic ties in 2015, but Trump has reversed course and made it more difficult for travel and business.

Democrats used the hearing to criticize Trumps foreign policy as erratic, and urged Pompeo to push back when necessary.

Will you enable President Trumps worst instincts? asked Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the committee. Will you stand up to [Trump] and say, No, you are wrong, or will you be a yes man?

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Pompeo said he would express his views forcefully but carry out the presidents policies once decisions were made.

He said that he shared Trumps view that the 2015 Paris climate accord placed an undue burden on the United States, and that he supported Trumps decision to withdraw from it.

He said he has been interviewed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. He said he believed the Russians meddled in the campaign, something Trump has been reluctant to do.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) pressed Pompeo on past statements that critics called anti-Muslim, as well as his views on gay rights. Pompeo responded that he personally opposes same-sex marriage but that he respected equality in the workplace and would not tolerate discrimination against Muslims or gay people.

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Pompeo sidestepped a question about Trumps harsh rhetoric toward Mexico, saying only that he hoped to develop a relationship that benefits both countries, especially ours.

One Republican on the Senate committee, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, has said he will oppose Pompeos nomination because of his past defense of harsh CIA interrogation tactics that critics called torture.

Unless Pompeo gains the vote of at least one Democrat on the panel, his nomination probably would move to the full Senate without recommendation. He is likely to win confirmation there, but not without more debate.

Several protesters attended the hearing and occasionally interrupted. But Pompeos Republican support runs deep.

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Mike Pompeo is a proven defender of U.S. national security interests, and I have full confidence in his ability to lead the State Department as well as he has led the CIA, said Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), a committee member.

Trump fired Tillerson via Twitter on March 13 after the two repeatedly clashed over policy and style. By contrast, Trump has said he and Pompeo are always on the same wavelength.

tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com

For more on international affairs, follow @TracyKWilkinson on Twitter

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UPDATES:

2:45 p.m.: This article was updated after the hearing ended.

11:05 a.m.: This article was updated to add additional details from the confirmation hearing.

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8:40 a.m.: This article was updated to include quotes from the confirmation hearing.

This article was originally published at 3 a.m.Voters in Alaskas largest city are on track to becoming the first in the U.S. to defeat a so-called bathroom bill in a referendum that asked them to require people using public bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender at birth.

The initiative asked Anchorages voters to repeal an ordinance passed in 2015 that prevented discrimination based on sexual orientation and added a clause that would have prevented transgender people from using bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to their gender identities.

Voting by mail and in person ended on April 3 and the repeal effort was losing 53%-47% as of Monday, with nearly 78,000 votes counted and only several hundred to be counted when tallying ends on Friday. Supporters of the referendum have conceded defeat and opponents are claiming victory.

Among those celebrating was Lillian Lennon, who was 14 when her parents sent her from Alaska to Utah for residential therapy, where conversion therapy was practiced and the transgender teen was placed in a boys dorm.

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I was forced to go by pronouns and a name I didnt identify with, and was regularly harassed and bullied for who I was and simply not being able to be known as myself, she said.

Lennon took the semester off from the University of Alaska Anchorage to campaign against the initiative, and said her parents spoke out against it.

I wasnt able to live my life fully, and I absolutely would not want anyone under any circumstances to have to go through what I had to go through, Lennon said.

After the results final tally emerges and it is certified next week, Anchorage will hold the distinction of being the first U.S. voting jurisdiction to defeat such an effort in a stand-alone ballot measure, said Alex Morash, spokesman for the National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund.

The issue of transgender bathroom access moved into the national spotlight in 2015, after the Houston City Council adopted a nondiscrimination ordinance that included protections for transgender people using restrooms based on gender identity.

Opponents of the ordinance gathered enough signatures for a repeal referendum, then mounted a campaign using the slogan No Men in Womens Bathrooms. By a margin of 61% to 39%, the anti-bias ordinance was repealed.

The Anchorage proposition was filed by Jim and Kim Minnery and their group, Alaska Family Action.

While conceding defeat, Jim Minnery said were encouraged that 47% of the people in Anchorage didnt buy into the $1-million infusion that the outside LGBT activist groups poured into the city.

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Groups opposed to his effort reported receiving about $826,000 in donations while Minnerys campaign effort, Yes on 1 Protect Our Privacy, raised nearly $140,000.The not entirely unexpected announcement that Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan would not seek reelection in November reveals major weaknesses in the Republican Party. In the short term, its the latest indication that the Republicans may be swept out of the House by a Democratic wave this fall. And in the longer term, it reflects a Republican Party that maintains enough institutional advantages to win some elections, but will have an increasingly difficult time passing a legislative agenda when it controls Congress.

Ryans more time with my family motive for quitting isnt even half the story. It seems highly likely that he sees the writing on the wall for November. His speakership, had he decided to try to retain it, would have been in serious peril. Since President Trumps triple-bank-shot win of the electoral college, Democrats have been consistently over-performing in special elections by huge margins. Traditionally, Republicans can count on out-mobilizing Democrats in off-year elections, but for the last 15 months its been the opposite.

Ryan aggressively covered up Trumps unprecedented corruption and unfitness for office just to further his agenda.

Admittedly, the GOP has structural advantages in the form of gerrymandered districts, which means its not certain the party would lose the House even if it badly loses the national popular vote (as is probable). At least some of these structural advantages are being attenuated: the Pennsylvania courts struck down that states very pro-Republican congressional map and replaced it with a fair one, and the Supreme Court may well do the same in Ryans home state of Wisconsin. And Ryan joins an already long list of incumbents who arent running again. If his retirement sends a signal to other wavering House members that this may not be their year, it will further erode another GOP advantage.

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Whatever the pressures on congressional maps and GOP turnout, Ryan himself bears plenty of responsibility for his speakerships peril and his partys precarious position.

In one of the more impressive cons in recent American political history, Ryan managed to generate a lot of fawning profiles portraying him as a humble wonk committed to bipartisan solutions on deficit spending. It was pure fiction. It is all too appropriate that Ryan announced his retirement the same week the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the federal deficit in 2020 would exceed almost a trillion dollars. It would be one thing if these deficits were being used for much-needed public investments, but instead the exploding deficits will largely be the product of the massive upper-class tax cut Ryan shepherded through Congress this year.

One could object that its unfair to blame Ryan for the compromises necessary to keep a relatively narrow majority together. But Ryan had the same priorities as an obscure House backbencher. He argued during this period that President George W. Bushs debt-funded tax cuts should have cut deeper and his debt-funded defense spending increases should have been larger. Ryan has never cared about the deficit. His priorities have always matched the contemporary Republican priorities: relieving the financial burden on the rich and inflicting as much suffering on the poor as is politically possible.

Even more than the tax reform that Congress passed this year, the definitive Paul Ryan achievement was the American Health Care Act, the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act that the House voted for and the Senate nixed. The AHCA was a reflection of Ryans worldview so pure it almost reached the level of self-parody. It cut healthcare savagely; the CBO estimated 23 million people would lose their health insurance. The money saved was transferred to, you guessed it, the well-to-do.

The AHCA bill reflected Ryans leadership in other ways too. It was rushed through an undemocratic process, with only three hours of debate and voted on before a public version of the bill was even made available.

This is Ryans legacy: a single-minded campaign of rich-on-poor class warfare. Worse, he aggressively covered up Trumps unprecedented corruption and unfitness for office just to further that agenda.

Ryans colleagues have been quick to praise him since his retirement announcement, but he will be leaving a problem in the lap of his successor  whether its House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) , or a dark horse candidate: The agenda he presided over is popular with donors, but it has very little support among voters (including Republican ones). Ryan is getting out just before the bill comes due for the Republican Party in November.

Scott Lemieux is a lecturer in political science at the University of Washington.

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Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand FacebookSoon, perhaps by the time you read these words, President Trump will launch a missile strike against Syria.

It may be small; it may be large. It may include French and British aircraft as well as U.S. missiles. Either way, it will enable Trump to declare victory and applaud his own resolve, probably on Twitter. (Thats where he issued his missile warning on Wednesday: Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!)

But the attack wont have much effect, because it isnt connected to a clear, coherent strategy.

The missile strike will accomplish one narrow goal: It will reaffirm the international norm against using chemical weapons. Thats a good thing.

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But it wont change much on the ground. It wont alter the course of Syrias seven-year war, which Bashar Assad is winning with help from Russia and Iran. It wont even protect Syrian civilians from future chemical attacks. Its mostly about us  and mainly about the presidents irritation that his red line has been ignored  not about them.

At the most basic level, Trumps missile strike will be aimed at punishing Assad for dropping chemical weapons on a neighborhood full of children, and deterring him from doing it again.

Just as Obama found, there are no easy choices in Syria, let alone easy victories.

But the Syrian president, Animal Assad in Trumps tweets, is willing to absorb the punishment. He proved that after the U.S. missile strike against a Syrian airbase last year.

That attack was intended to deter, too, but Assad resumed using chlorine gas after a few months. For the Syrian leader, the chance to eliminate pockets of opposition and demoralize his enemies by suffocating their children is worth the risk.

An effective deterrent would require a much larger action than last years pinprick strike. Trump would need to promise that future attacks will be met with a continuing, escalating campaign against Syrian military assets.

But that would draw the United States more deeply into the Syrian war, a step Trump has resisted, just as Barack Obama did. In 2011, Obama declared that Assad must go, but he never found a way to enforce that wish at an acceptable cost. It was his greatest foreign policy failure.

Then, as now, the U.S. had clear interests in Syrias fate, well beyond the wars terrible cost in human lives. Assads brutal rule has helped spawn terrorist opposition groups, including Islamic State, which briefly ruled much of Syria and Iraq. An Assad victory could turn Syria into a permanent base for Iranian military units on Israels northern border. (The country is already a base for Russias navy on the Mediterranean.)

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Now its Trumps turn to grapple with a no-win situation. American interests havent changed, but there is one new factor: About 2,000 U.S. troops are in eastern Syria, finishing up the war against Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

The U.S. military is wrestling with a practical problem: Once Islamic State is defeated, what happens to the desert territory that pro-American forces have gained?

Last year, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced a strategy of sorts. U.S. forces will remain in eastern Syria to help those local forces establish a provisional government, in a de facto American protectorate.

What we are going to do is hold that territory and get it back in local leaders hands, Mattis said a few weeks ago, and assure that ISIS 2.0 doesnt rise in the middle of all of that and derail everything were fought for. At that point, he said, it will be up to the United Nations to restart its sputtering Geneva peace negotiations and produce a post-conflict plan for the way ahead.

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But theres a flaw in that strategy: President Trump doesnt like it, especially if it means a long-term commitment. I want to get out  I want to bring our troops back home, Trump said last week. Its time. We were very successful against ISIS.

Trump reportedly told Mattis that U.S. troops could stay in Syria for now  but only for months, not years. Meanwhile, he ordered the State Department to halt reconstruction aid to the area.

Thats not going to work. Trump has suggested that Saudi Arabia or other Arab governments could take the mission over, but the Saudis are inexperienced and unready. The Assad regime will do its best to undermine any effort to establish a competing government in its eastern provinces. It is experienced and ready. And the Geneva process will take a very long time. The United Nations has been trying to negotiate a peace agreement without success since 2012. A declaration that the U.S. is there for weeks, not months is a virtual invitation for Assad to wait us out.

Just as Obama found, there are no easy choices in Syria, let alone easy victories. Trump will declare his missile strike a resounding win, but dont believe it. No strategy, no success.

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Doyle McManus is a contributing writer to Opinion.

mcmanus.columns@gmail.com

Twitter: @DoyleMcManus

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Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or FacebookCIA Director Mike Pompeo made all the right noises  well, most of the right noises  during his confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The former representative from Kansas and favorite of President Trump promised to exhaust diplomacy before turning to a military solution to North Koreas nuclear threat. He held out some hope that Trump might not walk away from the Iran nuclear agreement next month if the U.S. and its European allies were close to terms on a deal to improve the accord. He acknowledged that the Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election and said the U.S. needed to push back in each place we confront them.

There was even an olive branch to his former colleagues in Congress in the form of an endorsement of the idea that it would be good for Congress to endorse U.S. military action in Syria. (That doesnt mean Pompeo thinks a new Authorization for Use of Military Force is needed to justify the current deployment of U.S. forces in Syria or the strike Trump is contemplating to punish the Syrian government for using chemical weapons.)

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All in all, Pompeos hearing was relatively smooth sailing, a consequence perhaps of what the New York Times referred to as a charm offensive. Its also true that Pompeo, considered a firebrand in his days in Congress, seemed the model of sober reflection compared with the president who appointed him. In alluding to the possibility of a U.S. strike against Syria, Pompeo was guarded in his language. Trump tweeted Wednesday: Russia vows to shoot down all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! 

Trump has said that he and Pompeo are on the same wavelength. Senators seem to hope that Pompeo will take advantage of that fact to dial Trump down.

Pompeo did run into some aggressive questioning at the hearing on three subjects. One had nothing to do with foreign policy: his statement that he likely wouldnt resign if Trump fired special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The other two  on troubling past comments about Muslims and same-sex marriage  mixed domestic culture-war politics and diplomacy.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) pressed Pompeo about his comment that Muslims have a special obligation to speak up about terrorism and about his opposition to same-sex marriage. Pompeo replied that he meant that Muslims had an opportunity to combat terrorism and that his record of treating people of all faiths with dignity had been exquisite. He said he treated all couples within the CIA, gay and straight, with the exact same set of rights.

Pompeos confirmation isnt a sure thing, but Democrats who under other circumstances might have opposed him may reluctantly support this nominee because of the possibility that he might be able to retrain his volatile boss. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the committee, said that sometimes good counsel has led the president to evolve. Thats a polite way of saying that, as secretary of State, Pompeo might be able to keep Trump, and the country, out of trouble and maybe out of war.

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Allies balk at Trump administration bid to block Chinese firm from cutting-edge telecom markets By David S. Cloud Britain and Germany are balking at the Trump administrations call for a ban on equipment from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, threatening a global U.S. campaign to thwart Chinas involvement in future mobile networks. Both countries are expected to limit Huawei and other Chinese companies from providing core components including routers. But other types of Chinese equipment for next-generation, high-speed communications could still be installed on British and German networks, officials and analysts say. The U.S. push to ban Huawei has provoked a global dispute in recent weeks, with senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, publicly urging NATO allies in Europe to exclude the company and warning that the United States might limit its military presence in countries that did not do so. Read More Facebook

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Confucius Institutes: Do they improve U.S.-China ties or harbor spies? By Don Lee Hanging red lanterns welcome visitors to the University of Marylands Confucius Institute, the oldest of about 100 Chinese language and cultural centers that have popped up over the last 15 years on American campuses, subsidized by millions of dollars from Chinas central government. But last fall, when four U.S. Senate investigators walked into the Confucius offices in Maryland and spent hours questioning staff, they werent looking for an educational exchange. The committee has been seeking detailed information from the university about the program, including contracts, email exchanges and financial arrangements that school administrators have kept under wraps since it started in 2004. American colleges once viewed these jointly funded institutes as an economical way to expand their language offerings  one that could also bring warmer ties with China and, importantly, an influx of Chinese international students paying full tuition. Read More Facebook

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U.S. policy toward China shifts from engagement to confrontation By David S. Cloud For decades, China had no closer American friend than Dianne Feinstein. As San Francisco mayor in the 1970s, she forged a sister-city relationship with Shanghai, the first between American and Chinese communities. As U.S. senator, she dined with Chinese leaders at Mao Tse-tungs old Beijing residence. And in the 1990s, she championed a trade policy change that opened a floodgate of Western investment into China. Today the Democratic senator sees China as a growing threat, joining a broad array of Trump administration officials, national security strategists and business executives who once favored engagement with Beijing and now advocate a confrontational approach instead. Read More Facebook

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Mnuchins attempt to calm markets backfires as Trump takes another shot at the Federal Reserve By Jim Puzzanghera An attempt by Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin to calm plunging financial markets backfired Monday, further rattling investors with new fears about whether major U.S. banks have enough cash on top of worries about interest rates, political instability in Washington and a slowing global economy. Adding to the volatile mix was a fresh attack on the Federal Reserve by President Trump, who declared that the central bank was the U.S. economys only problem and that it didnt have a feel for the market. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who cant score because he has no touch -- he cant putt! Trump said on Twitter. Read More Facebook

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He speaks to Democratic hearts. But is Beto ORourke a serious White House contender? By Mark Z. Barabak Hes a failed U.S. Senate candidate with an undistinguished congressional record who, for the moment, is a blazing-hot 2020 presidential prospect  despite the fact that he may not run and faces long odds if he does. Beto ORourke suggests the will-he-or-wont-he speculation is something he himself cant quite fathom. I think thats a great question, he responded in a Dallas Morning News interview when asked whether his unsuccessful November Senate bid merited a promotion to the White House. I ask that question myself. Read More Facebook

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Russian disinformation teams targeted Robert S. Mueller III, says report prepared for Senate By Craig Timberg, Tony Romm, Elizabeth Dwoskin Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. (Associated Press) Months after President Trump took office, Russias disinformation teams trained their sites on a new target: special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Having worked to help get Trump into the White House, they now worked to neutralize the biggest threat to his staying there. The Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies. One post on Instagram  which emerged as an especially potent weapon in the Russian social media arsenal  claimed that Mueller had worked in the past with radical Islamic groups. Such tactics exemplified how Russian teams ranged nimbly across social media platforms in a shrewd online influence operation aimed squarely at American voters. The effort started earlier than commonly understood and lasted longer while relying on the strengths of different sites to manipulate distinct slices of the electorate, according to a pair of comprehensive new reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee and released Monday. Read more Timberg, Romm and Dwoskin report for the Washington Post. Facebook

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President Trump announces Mick Mulvaney as acting White House chief of staff By Associated Press President Trump says budget director Mick Mulvaney will serve as acting chief of staff, replacing John F. Kelly in the new year. I am pleased to announce that Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management & Budget, will be named Acting White House Chief of Staff, replacing General John Kelly, who has served our Country with distinction. Mick has done an outstanding job while in the Administration....  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 14, 2018 Facebook

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It aint over when its over: In Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere, losers seek to undermine election results By Mark Z. Barabak Democrat Gavin Newsom has yet to become California governor, but already a candidate for state Republican Party chairman is promoting a recall effort. In Michigan and Wisconsin, GOP lawmakers have rushed through legislation to thwart their incoming Democratic governors and hamper others in the opposing party from doing the jobs voters chose them to do. In Congress, GOP leaders have echoed President Trump and sought to undermine the legitimacy of Democrats strong midterm performance, raising unsubstantiated allegations of fraud and political malfeasance. Read More Facebook

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New CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger says she wont be a puppet of Mick Mulvaney By Jim Puzzanghera On her first full day leading the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kathy Kraninger said she wont be a puppet of Mick Mulvaney, the controversial acting director whom she replaced in the powerful regulatory position. To underscore that point, the former White House aide said she would even reconsider a Mulvaney action that critics saw as a gratuitous jab at Democrats who championed the agencys creation: changing its name to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Kraningers declaration during a meeting with reporters Tuesday addressed one of the main criticisms of her selection. She is considered a protege of Mulvaney, her boss at the White House Office of Management and Budget who has executed a dramatic, industry-friendly shift at the watchdog agency. Read More Facebook

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Trumps pick for chief of staff, Nick Ayers, out of running By Associated Press Nick Ayers, right, with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, at the funeral service for George H.W. Bush on Dec. 3. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Associated Press) President Trumps top pick to replace John F. Kelly as chief of staff, Nick Ayers, is no longer expected to fill that role. Thats according to a White House official who is not authorized to discuss the personnel issue by name and spoke on condition of anonymity. Ayers is Vice President Mike Pences chief of staff. The official says that Trump and Ayers could not agree on Ayers length of service. The father of young children, Ayers had agreed to serve in an interim capacity though the spring, but Trump wanted a two-year commitment. The official says that Ayers will instead assist the president from outside the administration. Trump announced Saturday that Kelly would be departing the White House around the end of the year. Thank you @realDonaldTrump, @VP, and my great colleagues for the honor to serve our Nation at The White House. I will be departing at the end of the year but will work with the #MAGA team to advance the cause.  #Georgia  Nick Ayers (@nick_ayers) December 9, 2018 Facebook

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U.S. hiring slows to 155,000 jobs, unemployment rate holds at 3.7% By Jim Puzzanghera Job growth slowed significantly in November but still was solid, indicating the economy remains in good shape but not expanding so quickly that it will lead to sharply higher interest rates. U.S. employers added 155,000 jobs last month, well below analyst expectations and a steep decline from Octobers strong 237,000 figure, the Labor Department reported Friday. Still, monthly job gains are averaging 206,000 this year, the best since 2015. Even the slower pace of 170,000 over the last three months is close to last years average of 182,000 and well above the amount needed to keep up with population growth. Read More Facebook

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Trump is expected to pick State Department spokeswoman for U.N. ambassador By Associated Press Heather Nauert at a briefing at the State Department on Aug. 9, 2017. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) President Trump is expected to nominate State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Two administration officials confirmed Trumps plans. A Republican congressional aide said the president was expected to announce his decision by tweet on Friday morning. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly before Trumps announcement. Trump has previously said Nauert was under serious consideration to replace Nikki Haley, who announced in October that she would step down at the end of this year. Trump has been known to change course on staffing decisions in the past. Nauert was a reporter for Fox News Channel before she became State Department spokeswoman under former Secretary Rex Tillerson. Facebook

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Senate confirms new consumer financial protection chief: Kathy Kraninger, protege of industry-friendly Mick Mulvaney By Jim Puzzanghera The Senate, in a party-line vote Thursday, confirmed White House aide Kathy Kraninger to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and experts predicted a continuation of the industry-friendly shift it has taken since President Trump installed an acting director last year. Kraninger is a protege of acting director and White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney, an outspoken critic of the agency that was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to prevent predatory lending and other abuses that led to it. Democrats and consumer advocates have denounced him for sharply departing from the aggressive watchdog role the bureau had pursued under its first director, Obama-appointee Richard Cordray, including scaling back enforcement and moving to reassess tough new rules on payday loans and narrow the definition of abusive practices by banks and other firms. Read More Facebook

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Shutdown postponed by two weeks under plan approved by Congress By Erik Wasson Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), shown at the Capitol on Tuesday, says President Trumps border wall is a waste of money. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) Congress passed a two-week stopgap spending bill that will delay the chance of a partial government shutdown until Dec. 22 as lawmakers and President Donald Trump negotiate over his demands to pay for a wall on the southern border. The House and Senate passed the measure Thursday without dissent, and Trump has indicated hell sign the bill before the current shutdown deadline of midnight Friday. Negotiations were delayed by memorial services this week for former President George H.W. Bush. The temporary measure gives Democrats and Republicans more time to find a resolution to their biggest hurdle: funding a wall on the U.S. Mexico border wall. Trump says he wants $5 billion for parts of a concrete wall on the southern border and is willing to shut down the government if he doesnt get it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has said Democrats will provide no more than $1.6 billion for border security, because the wall is a waste of money. The presidents demands for wall funding from Congress come after he said during the campaign that Mexico would pay for it. This week he said on Twitter that a $25 billion border wall would pay for itself in two months, without providing evidence. Most of the U.S. governments $1.2 trillion discretionary budget has been appropriated already by Congress for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1. Departments at a risk of a partial shutdown late this month include the departments of State, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Treasury and Homeland Security. Talks to resolve the differences have been on hold since a meeting among Trump, Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California originally slated for Dec. 4 was postponed due to Bush memorial events. The three are scheduled to meet on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the matter. Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby of Alabama told reporters the rest of the seven-bill spending package being negotiated is basically done. Shelby in recent weeks had tried to broker a compromise in which Trumps $5 billion request would be split over two years, but Schumer has rejected that. Some Democrats have been willing to trade border wall funding for deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants. Pelosi ruled out such a deal in remarks to reporters Thursday. The stopgap government funding measure also would extend the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides subsidized coverage for homes in flood-prone areas, to Dec. 21. Facebook

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Bipartisan Senate group wants to formally blame Saudi crown prince for journalists killing By Karoun Demirjian Saudi Arabias Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires. (Associated Press) A bipartisan group of senators filed a resolution Wednesday condemning Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as responsible for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, directly challenging President Trump to do the same. This resolution -- without equivocation -- definitively states that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was complicit in the murder of Mr. [Jamal] Khashoggi and has been a wrecking ball to the region jeopardizing our national security interests on multiple fronts, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement accompanying the release of the resolution. It will be up to Saudi Arabia as to how to deal with this matter. But it is up to the United States to firmly stand for who we are and what we believe. The resolution put forward by Graham and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who are expected to lead the Judiciary Committee together next year, comes just one day after CIA Director Gina Haspel briefed leading senators about the details of the agencys assessment that Mohammed ordered and monitored the killing and dismemberment of Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Senators emerged from that closed-door briefing furious not only with Saudi Arabia, but Trump as well for dismissing the heft of the CIAs findings. You have to be willfully blind not to come to the conclusion that this was orchestrated and organized by people under the command of MBS and that he was intricately involved in the demise of Mr. Khashoggi, Graham said following the briefing, referring to Mohammed by his initials. He added that Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, who briefed senators last week, were at best being good soldiers and at worst were in the pocket of Saudi Arabia for presenting the evidence of Mohammeds involvement as inconclusive. The release of the resolution condemning Mohammed also comes as the Senate is preparing to move ahead with debate on a resolution to curtail U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen. Though the Yemen resolution does not directly address Khashoggis murder, its popularity is a sign of how strained the United States patience with Saudi Arabia is on multiple fronts, including its role in worsening the civilian cost of the war in Yemen, cited by the United Nations as the worlds worst humanitarian crisis. Last week, the Senate voted 63 to 37 to advance the Yemen resolution past an opening procedural hurdle. But Graham and Feinsteins resolution on the crown prince has the potential of drawing broader support, especially from Republicans, who are deeply divided about how fiercely to punish Saudi Arabia over Khashoggis killing. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has been an outspoken advocate for human rights and is seen as one of the more influential foreign policy voices in the GOP, did not vote for the Yemen resolution last week or sign on to a bipartisan measure last month to sanction Saudi officials and cease weapons transfers to the kingdom. But he is an original co-sponsor of the resolution condemning Mohammed over Khashoggis death. So is Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who represents the other end of the GOP spectrum in terms of recent Saudi-related votes and endorsements. Young was an initial co-sponsor of the bill Graham wrote with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to sanction Saudi officials deemed responsible for Khashoggis killing and stop the sale of anything but exclusively defensive weapons to the kingdom until it ceased hostilities in Yemen. Young also voted to advance the Yemen resolution  something Graham did as well, though Graham has signaled he will not be lending any similar support to the measure, fearing it may establish a precedent of invoking the War Powers Act too broadly. Sens. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) are listed as original co-sponsors of the resolution condemning Mohammed, which also urges Saudi Arabia to negotiate with Houthi rebels to end the Yemen war, work out a political solution to its standoff with Qatar and release political prisoners. But how much sway the resolution has probably comes down to how forcefully the administration decides to heed it -- and thus far, Trump has not shown any interest in condemning the crown prince the way the senators hope he will. Demirjian reports for the Washington Post. Facebook

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Los Angeles County offices and U.S. Postal Service closed Wednesday in honor of George H.W. Bush By Brian Park The Honor Guard carries the casket of former U.S. President George H. W. Bush following his funeral on Dec. 5 in Washington, DC. (Doug Mills - Pool/Getty Images) The U.S. Postal Service will suspend regular mail delivery Wednesday, which President Trump has declared a national day of mourning in honor of former President George H.W. Bush. All retail postal outlets will be closed, and package delivery will be limited. In Los Angeles, all nonessential county departments, offices and libraries will be closed for the day, L.A. County officials said. The Los Angeles County Library said no overdue fines will be assessed for books, and due dates will be moved forward one week. Los Angeles County Department of Public Health offices also are closed Wednesday. The Sheriffs Department, Fire Department, clinics and hospitals will continue to operate, the county said. The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health clinics are being operated with reduced staffing, and the department asked patients to confirm or reschedule any appointments. All county courts and the disaster recovery centers for the Woolsey fire in Malibu and Agoura Hills will remain open. Larger federal government operations will be closed Wednesday. To honor the life and legacy of President Bush, the Postal Service will observe the National Day of Mourning. Learn how Postal operations will be affected. https://t.co/Mffch7bPCh pic.twitter.com/vG46BsIOpm  U.S. Postal Service (@USPS) December 4, 2018 L.A. County offices and libraries will be closed tomorrow (Dec 5) in observance of the #NationalDayOfMourning for President George H. W. Bush.



The Countys Disaster Recovery Centers in Malibu & Agoura Hills will remain open from 10 a.m. - 8 p.m. pic.twitter.com/Sv1J7GoJ7T  Los Angeles County (@CountyofLA) December 4, 2018 @LAPublicHealth offices will be closed tomorrow December 5 in observance of the national Day of Mourning for President George H. W. Bush. Essential Services including clinics and other services will remain open: https://t.co/tZGoGGHRlg pic.twitter.com/ypXsV6vlYY  LA Public Health (@lapublichealth) December 4, 2018 Facebook

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Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to skip 2020 White House race, sources say By Associated Press Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick speaks during an interview in Boston on Dec. 15, 2014. (Elise Amendola / Associated Press) Former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts will soon announce he wont launch a 2020 presidential campaign, according to three sources familiar with his plans. They did not say why the Democrat decided against a run. A formal announcement was delayed as the country observed a day of mourning for President George H.W. Bush, one source said. News of Patricks plans was first reported by Politico. Patrick, 62, served two terms as governor, from 2007 to 2015, was assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration and since leaving the governors office has been a managing director for Bain Capital. Patrick traveled the country in support of Democratic candidates in the recent midterm election. Earlier this year, some of Patricks supporters and close advisors started the Reason to Believe political action committee, a grassroots organization dedicated to advancing a positive, progressive vision for our nation in 2018 and 2020. Reason to Believe PAC had been holding meetups across the country, including in early presidential primary states. While Patrick is opting against a 2020 run, dozens of Democrats are considering jumping in, including nearly a half-dozen members of the Senate, several House members, and other Massachusetts politicians. On Tuesday, Michael Avenatti, the attorney for adult film star Stormy Daniels and a vocal critic of President Trump, said in a statement that he would run. Patrick had previously expressed some concerns about breaking through if he sought the nomination, telling David Axelrod, a former advisor to President Obama, that he wasnt sure he could stand out in such a large field. Its hard to see how you even get noticed in such a big, broad field without being shrill, sensational or a celebrity, and Im none of those things and Im never going to be any of those things, Patrick said in a September interview with Axelrod. Facebook

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Former Trump adviser Roger Stone invokes 5th Amendment right and wont testify before Senate Judiciary Committee By Associated Press Roger Stone in 2017. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images) Roger Stone, an associate of President Trump, says he wont provide testimony or documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee. An attorney for Stone said in a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committees top Democrat, that Stone was invoking his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to produce documents or appear for an interview. Stone has been entangled in investigations by Congress and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about whether Trump aides had advance knowledge of Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 election. Stone has not been charged and has said he had no knowledge of the timing or specifics of WikiLeaks plans. In the letter to Feinstein, Stone said the committees requests were far too overbroad, far too overreaching and far too wide-ranging. Facebook

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Watch live: Vice President Pence and lawmakers honor George H.W. Bush at the U.S. Capitol before he lies in state Facebook

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Rebuilding crumbling infrastructure has bipartisan support. But who gets to pay for it? By Jim Puzzanghera The grades for major U.S. infrastructure would give any parent indigestion if they were on a childs report card. Roads: D; bridges: C+; dams: D; ports: C+: railways: B; airports: D; schools: D+; public transit: D-. The nations overall grade: D+, which translates to being in fair to poor condition and mostly below standards with significant deterioration and a strong risk of failure, according to an evaluation last year by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Read More Facebook

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Trump calls former lawyer Michael Cohen a weak person who is lying By Associated Press President Trump says his former lawyer Michael Cohen is lying to get a reduced sentence. The president is reacting to Cohens guilty plea Thursday to lying to Congress about work he did on a Trump real estate project in Russia. During a surprise court hearing, Cohen admitted to lying in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee about a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen in his guilty plea said he made the false statements to be consistent with Trumps political message. Cohens lawyer says he continues to cooperate with special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with Trump associates. Facebook

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As California Republicans confront a congressional wipeout, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy faces a reckoning By Mark Z. Barabak When the House voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Kevin McCarthy trooped with other Republican lawmakers to a splashy Rose Garden celebration, smiling alongside President Trump as they celebrated the moment. As majority leader, McCarthy had helped round up the votes to narrowly pass the hard-fought legislation, convincing 13 other California Republicans to go along, even though several faced tough reelection fights. Fewer than half will be returning in January. Read More Facebook

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As California Republicans confront a congressional wipeout, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy faces a reckoning By Sarah D. Wire When the House voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Kevin McCarthy trooped with other Republican lawmakers to a splashy Rose Garden celebration, smiling alongside President Trump as they celebrated the moment. As majority leader, McCarthy had helped round up the votes to narrowly pass the hard-fought legislation, convincing 13 other California Republicans to go along, even though several faced tough reelection fights. Fewer than half will be returning in January. Read More Facebook

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Michael Cohen, President Trumps ex-lawyer, pleads guilty to lying to Congress about Trump real estate project in Russia By Associated Press Michael Cohen, President Trumps former personal lawyer, pursued a Russian real estate project on candidate Trumps behalf well into the 2016 campaign, he said Thursday while pleading guilty to lying to Congress. Cohen had previously said that the project was abandoned in January 2016, but he now admits he continued to pursue a deal and says he updated Trump and members of his family about the negotiations, according to a new court document. Read More Facebook

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James Comey says acting Atty. Gen. Whitaker may not be the sharpest knife in our drawer By John Wagner Acting Atty. Gen. Matthew Whitaker speaks at the Justice Department in Washington on Nov. 14. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press) Former FBI Director James B. Comey apparently isnt too impressed with the mental prowess of President Trumps acting attorney general. Matthew Whitaker may not be the sharpest knife in our drawer, Comey said during a radio interview on Monday night in which he sized up the man Trump installed this month to replace ousted Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. Comey was asked by WGBH News in Boston if he thinks Whitaker could derail the investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Whitaker has spoken critically of the probe, and Trump  as recently as Tuesday  continues to call it a witch hunt. I think its a worry, but to my mind not a serious worry, Comey said. The institution is too strong, and [Whitaker], frankly, is not strong enough to have that kind of impact. He may not be the sharpest knife in our drawer, but he can see his future and knows that if he acted in an extralegal way, he would go down in history for the wrong reasons, and Im sure he doesnt want that, added Comey, who was fired by Trump last year and later wrote a book that portrays the president as an ego-driven congenital liar. Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney in Iowa, was Sessions chief of staff before being picked by Trump to lead the Justice Department. Trump has called Whitaker a very smart man. Earlier this year, Trump called Comey an untruthful slime ball. Wagner writes for the Washington Post. Facebook

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Interior Department watchdog clears Zinke in investigation of Utah national monument By Juliet Eilperin Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, third from the left, and Gov. Jerry Brown tour fire damage in Paradise, Calif., on Nov. 14. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) The Interior Departments Office of Inspector General has cleared Secretary Ryan Zinke in a probe of whether he redrew boundaries of a national monument in Utah to aid the financial interests of a Republican state lawmaker and stalwart supporter of President Trump. In a Nov. 21 letter to Zinkes deputy, David Bernhardt, Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall wrote that her office found no evidence that the secretary or his aides changed the boundaries of Utahs Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in an effort to help former Utah state representative Mike Noel, who serves as executive director of the Kane County Water Conservancy District. Last December, Trump shrank the monument, first established by President Clinton in 1996, by 46% based on Zinkes recommendation. Noel owns 40 acres that had been surrounded by the monument, but now lies outside its boundaries. The new boundaries also would make it easier to construct the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline, which would deliver water to sites in Kane County that include Noels property. Earlier this year, the Interior Department had proposed selling off 120 acres of federal land from the former monument that lay adjacent to some of Noels land holdings, but later reversed the plan. We found no evidence that Noel influenced the DOIs proposed revisions to the [monuments] boundaries, that Zinke or other DOI staff involved in the project were aware of Noels financial interest in the revised boundaries, or that they gave Noel any preferential treatment in the resulting proposed boundaries, Kendall wrote. Neither the Interior Department nor the inspector generals office would release the actual investigative report. In the letter, Kendall writes that her office will provide the report to Congress no sooner than 31 days from Nov. 21, when it is provided it to Zinkes office. The Associated Press first reported the inspector generals conclusions Monday night, but did not provide details from the report itself. Noel emailed Zinke about the effort to alter Grand Staircase-Escalante, according to emails released by Interior under the Freedom of Informational Act. But those emails do not make references to Noels land holdings. Noel also pushed to rename a Utah highway in honor of Trump, but abandoned that effort in March after some of his fellow Republicans objected to the idea. Noel did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday. The inspector generals office still has at least two ongoing probes of the secretary, including one focused on his real estate dealings in Whitefish, Mont., and another regarding his decision to deny a permit to two Connecticut tribes who were hoping to jointly run a casino after MGM Resorts International lobbied against it. Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift welcomed the watchdogs conclusions. The report shows exactly what the secretarys office has known all along  that the monument boundaries were adjusted in accordance with all rules, regulations and laws, she said in an email. This report is also the latest example of opponents and special interest groups ginning up fake and misleading stories, only to be proven false after expensive and time consuming inquiries by the IGs office. But Kendalls spokeswoman, Nancy DiPaolo, defended the inquiry, even though she said the report has not been publicly released and we will not be speaking specifically about the matter at this time. The OIG opens investigations based on credible allegations and reports our findings objectively and independently, DiPaolo added. Any time or resources spent investigating conduct or activity that may be a violation of law, regulation or policy is a service to the public, Congress and the Department. Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement that he still intended to investigate the way Zinke and his colleague redrew the boundaries for Grand Staircase-Escalante and another Utah national monument, Bears Ears, next year. I have great respect for the inspector general, and I accept these findings, but Secretary Zinke should have known the people he listened to while destroying our national monuments had disqualifying conflicts of interest, he said. Should I chair the Natural Resources Committee in the next Congress, the process he and President Trump used to destroy Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante will be front and center in our oversight and investigations efforts. We need to know why they ignored overwhelming public expressions of support for both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, why they ignored Native American tribes throughout their decision-making, and why they removed protections on parcels of land with known mineral deposits. Eilperin and Rein report for the Washington Post. Facebook

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Trump advisor Larry Kudlow says China must do more to end trade war By Jim Puzzanghera Larry Kudlow, President Trumps top economic advisor, said Tuesday that Chinas response to U.S. efforts to rework the two economic superpowers trade relationship has been extremely disappointing but the planned meeting this weekend between the nations leaders is an opportunity for a breakthrough. They have to do more. They must do more, Larry Kudlow, director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters ahead of a Saturday dinner between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Group of 20 Summit in Argentina. I think the president is exactly right  to show strong backbone when prior administrations did not, to break through these Chinese walls, Kudlow said. Theyre so resistant to change. We have to protect the country. We have to protect our technology, our inventiveness, our innovation. Read More Facebook

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Watch live: White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders holds a media briefing amid tensions at the border By Los Angeles Times Staff Facebook

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Democrat TJ Cox grabs lead over Republican David Valadao in nations last remaining undecided House race By Maya Sweedler Democrat TJ Cox slipped past Republican incumbent David Valadao on Monday to take the lead in the countrys sole remaining undecided congressional race, positioning Democrats to pick up their seventh House seat in California and 40th nationwide. Cox, who trailed by nearly 4,400 votes on election night, has steadily gained as ballot counting continues nearly three weeks after the Nov. 6 election, a pattern consistent with the states recent voting history. On Monday, he pulled ahead by 438 votes after Kern County updated its results. Read More Facebook

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Former CIA director Michael Hayden hospitalized after suffering a stroke By Deanna Paul Then-CIA Director Michael Hayden testifies before a Senate committee in 2008. (Saul Loeb / Getty Images) Former CIA Director and retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke, his family said Friday. He is receiving expert medical care for which the family is grateful, according to a statement issued by his namesake organization. The General and his family greatly appreciate the warm wishes and prayers of his friends, colleagues, and supporters. Hayden, 73, served as director of the CIA and National Security Agency during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. He retired from the CIA in 2009. Hayden has been a vocal critic of Donald Trumps campaign and presidency. Earlier this year, after Trump decided to revoke the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan, Hayden was one of several former intelligence leaders who signed a statement in opposition. Criticizing the president for crossing a line, he quickly became one of the individuals whose security clearance Trump threatened to review. Deanna Paul writes for the Washington Post. Facebook

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Trump tells troops hes thankful for what hes done for the U.S. and rails against courts and migrants By Associated Press President Trump talks with troops via teleconference from his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Thanksgiving. (Susan Walsh / Associated Press) President Trump used his Thanksgiving Day call to troops deployed overseas to pat himself on the back and air grievances about the courts, trade and migrants heading to the U.S.-Mexico border. Trumps call, made from his opulent private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., struck an unusually political tone as he spoke with members of all five branches of the military to wish them happy holidays. Its a disgrace, Trump said of judges who have blocked his attempts to overhaul U.S. immigration law, as he linked his efforts to secure the border with military missions overseas. Trump later threatened to close the U.S. border with Mexico for an undisclosed period of time if his administration determines Mexico has lost control on its side. The call was a uniquely Trump blend of boasting, peppered questions and off-the-cuff observations as his comments veered from venting about slights to praising troops  You really are our heroes, he said  as club waiters worked to set Thanksgiving dinner tables on the outdoor terrace behind him. It was yet another show of how Trump has dramatically transformed the presidency, erasing the traditional divisions between domestic policy and military matters and efforts to keep the troops clear of politics. You probably see over the news whats happening on our southern border, Trump told one Air Force brigadier general stationed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, adding: I dont have to even ask you. I know what you want to do, you want to make sure that you know who were letting in. Later, Trump asked a U.S. Coast Guard commander about trade, which he noted was a very big subject for him personally. Weve been taken advantage of for many, many years by bad trade deals, Trump told the commander, who sheepishly replied, Mr. President, from our perspective on the water  we dont see any issues in terms of trade right now. And throughout, Trump congratulated himself, telling the officers that the country is doing exceptionally well on his watch. I hope that youll take solace in knowing that all of the American families you hold so close to your heart are all doing well, he said. The nations doing well economically, better than anybody in the world. He later told reporters, Nobodys done more for the military than me. Indeed, asked what he was thankful for this Thanksgiving, Trump cited his great family as well as himself. I made a tremendous difference in this country, he said. Facebook

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Trump contradicts CIA assessment that Saudi crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi killing By Josh Dawsey | Washington Post (Susan Walsh / Associated Press) President Trump on Thursday contradicted the CIAs assessment that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, insisting that the agency had feelings but did not firmly place blame for the death. Trump, in defiant remarks to reporters from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, defended his continued support for Mohammed in the face of a CIA assessment that the crown prince had ordered the killing. He denies it vehemently, Trump said. He said his own conclusion was that maybe he did, maybe he didnt. I hate the crime .... I hate the cover-up. I will tell you this: The crown prince hates it more than I do, Trump said. Asked who should be held accountable for the death of Khashoggi, who was killed at the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, Trump refused to place blame. Maybe the world should be held accountable because the world is a very, very vicious place, the president said. He also seemed to suggest that all U.S. allies were guilty of the same behavior, declaring that if the others were held to the standard that critics have held Saudi Arabia to in recent days, we wouldnt be able to have anyone for an ally. Trumps remarks came after he held a conference call with U.S. military officers overseas, during which he repeatedly praised his administration and sought to draw the officers into discussions of domestic policy. Facebook

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Former FBI Director James Comey gets subpoena from House Republicans By Bloomberg Former FBI Director James B. Comey said he has received a subpoena from House Republicans, according to a Twitter post on Thursday. Bloomberg News reported last week that Comey would be receiving a subpoena alongside former Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch as part of continuing probes into their handling of investigations into Hillary Clinton and Russian election meddling, according to a top House Democrat. Happy Thanksgiving. Got a subpoena from House Republicans. Im still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a closed door thing because Ive seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion. Lets have a hearing and invite everyone to see.  James Comey (@Comey) November 22, 2018 Read More Facebook

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Republican David Valadaos lead slips to 447 votes over Democrat TJ Cox in still-undecided Central Valley House race By Mark Z. Barabak Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford), right, finds himself in an increasingly harrowing cliffhanger against Democrat TJ Cox. (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call) On election night, it looked like Rep. David Valadao had survived a close shave and was destined to return to Washington for his fourth term. But on Wednesday, when Fresno County announced its latest vote totals, the Hanford Republican found himself in an increasingly harrowing cliffhanger against Democrat TJ Cox, with his lead in the Central Valley district shrunken to 447 votes. Thousands remain to be counted. Valadao, a repeated Democratic target, finished election night with a lead of nearly 4,440 votes. Cox, an engineer and a business owner who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2006, has steadily gained ground in the 21st Congressional District ever since. The trend is consistent with historic patterns showing Republicans in California tend to vote early and Democrats later, meaning their mail ballots continue to stream in past election day. Under California law, ballots postmarked up to midnight on Nov. 6 will be counted. Democrats have already picked up six House seats in California. They ousted Reps. Dana Rohrabacher, Mimi Walters, Steve Knight and Jeff Denham and won the seats of retiring Reps. Ed Royce and Darrell Issa. All six represented districts that backed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. Valadao was the seventh California Republican in a district Clinton won, though his previous successes  he last won reelection by a 14-point margin  suggested his ouster was a longer shot for Democrats. If Cox prevails, it would give Democrats a 40-seat gain nationwide, far more than the 23 seats needed to take control when Congress reconvenes in January. Facebook

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Trump says no new punishments against Saudi Arabia in Jamal Khashoggi murder By Eli Stokols In this Oct. 25 photo, candles are lit in front of a photo of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (Lefteris Pitarakis) President Trump made it clear on Tuesday that he does not intend to punish Saudi Arabia or Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, an American resident killed by Saudi officials in Turkey in October. In a remarkable statement replete with exclamation points, Trump cast doubt on the CIAs reported conclusions that it has a high degree of confidence that the crown prince ordered Khashoggis murder and sent his closest allies to Saudi Arabias consulate in Istanbul to carry it out. Read MoreThis article has been updated with staff. Facebook

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Sixteen House Democrats vow to oppose Nancy Pelosi as next speaker By Mike DeBonis | Washington Post House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) Sixteen House Democrats said Monday that they will vote to deny Rep. Nancy Pelosi another stint as House speaker, a show of defiance that puts her opponents on the cusp of forcing a seismic leadership shake-up as their party prepares to take the majority. Their pledge to oppose Pelosi (D-San Francisco), both in an internal caucus election and a Jan. 3 floor vote, delivered in a letter sent to Democratic colleagues, comes as Pelosi has marshaled a legion of supporters on and off Capitol Hill to make her case. But her opponents said Monday they are convinced it is time to select a new leader. We are thankful to Leader Pelosi for her years of service to our Country and to our Caucus, they wrote. However, we also recognize that in this recent election, Democrats ran on and won on a message of change. Pelosi has expressed complete confidence that she will retake the speakers gavel in January  eight years after she lost it following massive Republican gains in the 2010 midterms and 16 years after she was first elevated to the top Democratic leadership post in the House. Come on in, the waters fine, she said Friday about a potential leadership challenge. The signers might not be able to force Pelosi out themselves. The size of the Democratic majority remains in flux, but Democrats have already won 232 seats, according to the Associated Press, with five races still undecided. All those races have Republican incumbents, but the Democratic challenger is ahead in only one of them. If the leads hold in the uncalled races, Democrats would have won 233 seats, a 16-seat majority. That means Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. Read More Facebook

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Democratic senators sue over Whitakers appointment as acting attorney general By Associated Press Acting U.S. Atty. Gen. Matthew Whitaker (Nicholas Kamm / AFP/Getty Images) Three Senate Democrats filed a lawsuit Monday arguing that Acting Atty. Gen. Matthew Whitakers appointment is unconstitutional and asking a federal judge to remove him. The suit, filed by Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, argues that Whitakers appointment violates the Constitution because he has not been confirmed by the Senate. Whitaker was chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions and was elevated to the top job after Sessions was ousted by President Trump on Nov. 7. The Constitutions Appointments Clause requires that the Senate confirm all principal officials before they can serve in their office. The Justice Department released a legal opinion last week that said Whitakers appointment would not violate the clause because he is serving in an acting capacity. The opinion concluded that Whitaker, even without Senate confirmation, may serve in an acting capacity because he has been at the department for more than a year at a sufficiently senior pay level. President Trump is denying senators our constitutional obligation and opportunity to do our job: scrutinizing the nomination of our nations top law enforcement official, Blumenthal said in a statement. The reason is simple: Whitaker would never pass the advice and consent test. In selecting a so-called constitutional nobody and thwarting every senators constitutional duty, Trump leaves us no choice but to seek recourse through the courts. The lawsuit comes days after a Washington lawyer challenged Whitakers appointment in a pending Supreme Court case dealing with gun rights. The attorney, Thomas Goldstein, asked the high court to find that Whitakers appointment is unconstitutional and replace him with Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein, the second-ranking Justice Department official, has been confirmed by the Senate and had been overseeing special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation. Whitaker is now overseeing the investigation. The Justice Department issued a statement Monday defending Whitakers appointment as lawful and said it comports with the Appointments Clause, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and legal precedent. There are over 160 instances in American history in which non-Senate confirmed persons performed, on a temporary basis, the duties of a Senate-confirmed position, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said. To suggest otherwise is to ignore centuries of practice and precedent. Facebook

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Gov. Rick Scott says Sen. Bill Nelson concedes Florida Senate race By Associated Press Republican Senate candidate Rick Scott speaks with his wife, Ann, by his side at an election watch party in Naples, Fla., on Nov. 7. (Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press) Floridas Republican Gov. Rick Scott says incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson called him to concede defeat in their extremely tight race. Scott issued a statement Sunday saying Nelson graciously conceded their Senate race shortly after the states recount ended. The final results show Scott defeated Nelson by just over 10,000 votes out of 8 million cast. Nelson is scheduled to release a videotaped statement later Sunday. The defeat ends Nelsons lengthy political career. The three-term incumbent was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000. Before that he served six terms in the U.S. House and as state treasurer and insurance commissioner for six years. Scott spent more than $60 million of his own money on ads that portrayed Nelson as out-of-touch and ineffective. Nelson responded by questioning Scotts ethics and saying he would be under the sway of President Trump. Facebook

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Orange County goes blue, as Democrats complete historic sweep of its seven congressional seats By Michael Finnegan Gil Cisneros defeated Republican Young Kim on Saturday in the last of Orange Countys undecided House races, giving Democrats a clean sweep of the states six most fiercely fought congressional contests and marking an epochal shift in a region long synonymous with political conservatism. With Cisneros victory, Democrats will constitute the entirety of Orange Countys seven-member congressional delegation, the first time since the 1930s that the birthplace of Richard Nixon, home of John Wayne and spiritual center of the Republican Party will have no GOP representative in the House. Sitting back in the 1960s, I would never have believed this would happen, said Stuart K. Spencer, a party strategist who spent more than half a century ushering Republicans, including President Reagan, into office. Read More Facebook

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Going, going ... with midterm wipeout, California Republican Party drifts closer to irrelevance By Michael Finnegan For a party in freefall the last two decades, California Republicans learned that its possible to plunge even further. The GOP not only lost every statewide office in the midterm election  again, in blowout fashion  but Democrats reestablished their supermajority in Sacramento, allowing them to legislate however they see fit After major defeats in Orange County and the Central Valley, two longtime strongholds, Republicans will have a significantly smaller footprint on Capitol Hill. (Democrats hold both Senate seats.) When the vote-counting is finished, the GOP may not even have enough lawmakers in Californias 53-member House delegation to field a nine-person softball team. Read More Facebook

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Congresswoman-elect Katie Porter says she will support Rep. Nancy Pelosi for speaker By Maya Sweedler Democratic Rep.-elect Katie Porter is congratulated by volunteers at her campaign headquarters in Irvine. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Congresswoman-elect Katie Porter said she plans to support Rep. Nancy Pelosis bid for speaker of the House and will make campaign finance reform her top priority when she enters the chamber in January. Im going to continue to have conversations, but so far I feel like Leader Pelosi is definitely making the things that were a priority to the families that elected me her priorities, including announcing her support for campaign finance reform and anti-corruption as HR1, Porter said in her first public appearance since being declared the winner in Californias 45th Congressional District on Thursday evening. It means a lot to me that she is a Californian. She understands our state, Porter added. When we talk about environmental protections, this is a person who understands as a Californian how fragile our environment is and whats at risk in things like drilling off our coasts. Porter, a law professor at UC Irvine, defeated two-term Republican Rep. Mimi Walters. The 45th District, covering inland Orange County, has never been represented by a Democrat. Porter became the third Democrat to claim a Republican-held seat in Orange County, following the victories of Harley Rouda in the 48th District and Mike Levin in the 49th. A fourth, Gil Cisneros, is running slightly ahead of his Republican opponent in the race for the open seat in the 39th District, which extends into Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. Porter attributed the massive political shift in the county, for decades a conservative stronghold, to increased levels of political engagement. Folks here care about education, they care about the environment, they believe climate change is real, they want healthcare that protects preexisting conditions, they want a tax system that doesnt punish California, they want our schools and places of worship to be safe from gun violence, she said. Those are the issues we campaigned on, and to the extent that Donald Trump and Mimi Walters were on the wrong side of those issues, the voters have made clear what direction they want us to go. Porter was flying back from the East Coast when her race was called, she said. She turned on her phone to find 167 text messages from friends and supporters. Among them was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was one of Porters teachers in law school and with whom she has remained close. The pair spoke via FaceTime this morning, she said. Facebook

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Bitter battle for Senate seat in Florida goes to hand recount By Associated Press Employees look through damaged ballots during a recount Thursday in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press) Floridas acrimonious battle for the U.S. Senate headed Thursday to a legally required hand recount after an initial review by ballot-counting machines showed Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson separated by less than 13,000 votes. But the highly watched contest for governor between Republican Ron DeSantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum appeared to be over, with a machine recount showing DeSantis with a large enough advantage over Gillum to avoid a hand recount in that race. Gillum, who conceded the contest on election night only to retract his concession later, said in a statement that it is not over until every legally casted vote is counted. The recount so far has been fraught with problems. One large Democratic stronghold in South Florida was unable to finish its machine recount by the Thursday deadline due to machines breaking down. A federal judge rejected a request to extend the recount deadline. We gave a heroic effort, said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher. If the county had three or four more hours, it would have made the deadline to recount ballots in the Senate race, she said. Meanwhile, election officials in another urban county in the Tampa Bay area decided against turning in the results of their machine recount, which came up with 846 fewer votes than originally counted. Media in South Florida reported that Broward County finished its machine recount but missed the deadline by a few minutes. Counties were ordered last weekend to do a machine recount of three statewide races because the margins were so tight. The next stage is a manual review of ballots that were not counted by machines to see whether there is a way to figure out voter intent. Scott called on Nelson to end the recount battle. Its time for Nelson to respect the will of the voters and graciously bring this process to an end rather than proceed with yet another count of the votes  which will yield the same result and bring more embarrassment to the state that we both love and have served, the governor said in a statement. The recount has triggered multiple lawsuits, many of them filed by Nelson and Democrats. The legal battles drew the ire of U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker, who slammed the state for repeatedly failing to anticipate election problems. He also said the state law on recounts appears to violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that decided the presidency in 2000. We have been the laughingstock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this, Walker said during a morning hearing. Walker vented his anger at state lawmakers and Palm Beach County officials, saying they should have made sure they had enough equipment in place to handle this kind of a recount. But he said he could not extend the recount deadline because he did not know when Palm Beach County would finish its work. This court must be able to craft a remedy with knowledge that it will not prove futile, Walker wrote in his ruling turning down the request from Democrats. It cannot do so on this record. This court does not and will not fashion a remedy in the dark. The overarching problem was created by the Florida Legislature, which Walker said passed a recount law that appears to run afoul of the 2000 Bush vs. Gore decision by locking in procedures that do not allow for potential problems. A total of six election-related lawsuits are pending in federal court in Tallahassee as well at least one lawsuit filed in state court. Walker also ordered that voters be given until 5 p.m. Saturday to show a valid identification and fix their ballots if they have not been counted due to mismatched signatures. Republicans appealed the ruling, but an appeals court turned down the request. State officials testified that nearly 4,000 mailed-in ballots were set aside because local officials decided the signatures on the envelopes did not match the signatures on file. If those voters can prove their identity, their votes will be counted and included in final official returns due from each county by noon Sunday. Walker was asked by Democrats to require local officials to provide a list of people whose ballots were rejected. But the judge appointed by President Obama refused the request, calling it inappropriate. Under state law, a hand review is required with races that have a margin of 0.25 percentage points or less. A state website put the unofficial results showing Scott ahead of Nelson by 0.15 percentage points. The margin between DeSantis and Gillum was at 0.41 points. The margin between Scott and Nelson had not changed much in the last few days, conceded Marc Elias, an attorney working for Nelsons campaign. But he said that he expected the vote tally to shrink due to the hand recount and the ruling on signatures. The developments fueled frustrations among Democrats and Republicans alike. Democrats want state officials to do whatever it takes to make sure every eligible vote is counted. Republicans, including President Trump, have argued without evidence that voter fraud threatens to steal races from the GOP. Facebook

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Democrat Gil Cisneros pulls ahead of Republican Young Kim as more votes are tallied in Orange and San Bernardino counties By Michael Finnegan Congressional candidate Gil Cisneros (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) Democrat Gil Cisneros pulled ahead of Republican Young Kim in one of Californias undecided congressional races Thursday, an ominous sign for a GOP already reeling from its loss of four House seats in the state. In updated vote counts released by the registrars for Orange and San Bernardino counties, Kim fell 941 votes behind Cisneros in the contest to succeed Republican Rep. Ed Royce in Californias 39th Congressional District. The 39th straddles Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties. In another unresolved House race, Democrat Katie Porter pulled further ahead of Republican incumbent Mimi Walters in the 45th District, which includes Mission Viejo, Tustin, Irvine, Rancho Santa Margarita and Laguna Hills. Porter, a consumer attorney and UC Irvine law professor, is now 6,203 votes ahead. The Nov. 6 midterm election has been devastating to Republicans in California. If Cisneros and Porter win, the party will have lost six of its 14 House seats in the state, essentially a wipeout in every contest that both parties spent heavily to win. The three Republicans already bounced from Congress are Reps. Dana Rohrabacher of Costa Mesa, Steve Knight of Palmdale and Jeff Denham of Turlock in the San Joaquin Valley. Democrat Mike Levin won the seat of retiring GOP Rep. Darrell Issa of Vista in the fourth district flipped so far. Facebook

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Florida Senate race likely headed to second recount By Associated Press A Palm Beach County Sheriffs deputy walks past boxes of ballots before a recount on Nov. 15 in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Wilfredo Lee) Unofficial Florida election results show that the governors race seems to be settled after a machine recount but the U.S. Senate race is likely headed to a hand recount. Republican Ron DeSantis is virtually assured of winning the nationally watched governors race over Democrat Andrew Gillum. Florida finished a machine recount Thursday that showed Gillum without enough votes to force a manual recount. Unofficial results posted on a state website show the margin between U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and Gov. Rick Scott is still thin enough to trigger a second review. State law requires a hand recount of races with a margin of 0.25 percentage point or less. Counties have until Sunday to inspect the ballots that did not record a vote when put through the machines. Those ballots are re-examined to see whether the voter skipped the race or marked the ballot in a way that the machines cannot read but can be deciphered. The election will be certified Tuesday. Read More Facebook

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Pelosi says she has the votes to become the next House speaker By John Wagner Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi speaks during a news conference in Washington on Nov. 14. (Susan Walsh) House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi insisted Thursday that she has the votes to become the chambers speaker despite solid opposition from more than a dozen Democrats who want fresh leadership when the party takes control next year. I have overwhelming support in my caucus to be speaker of the House, the San Francisco lawmaker told reporters. I happen to think at this point, Im the best person for that. A vote within the Democratic caucus is scheduled for Nov. 28. The full House votes on Jan. 3 to elect a new speaker. During her remarks, Pelosi touted the size of the Democratic victory in the midterms, which she called almost a tsunami. With a few races still to be decided, Democrats are poised to pick up close to 40 seats in the chamber. Pelosi called that the biggest victory for the Democrats since 1974, when the Watergate babies came in. Pelosis comments come as she faces solid opposition from at least 17 Democrats, setting the stage for a battle over who will ascend to one of the most powerful positions in Washington. After a campaign in which some Democrats prevailed in competitive districts by promising to oppose her, a coalition of incumbents and newly elected members has denied her a smooth path to the speakership. The defections, if they stand, would leave Pelosi, who has led the Democrats for more than 15 years, several votes short of the 218 she would need when the full House votes for speaker Jan. 3. However, no Democrat has stepped forward to run against her for a job she held from 2007 through 2010. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) told reporters Wednesday that shes being encouraged to stand for speaker if Pelosi doesnt have the votes. In an interview with the Washington Post on Thursday, she said she has been overwhelmed by the support from many of her colleagues for her possible entry into the race for House speaker. Over the last 12 hours, Ive been overwhelmed by the amount of support Ive received, Fudge said, adding that there are probably closer to 30" Democrats who have privately signaled that they are willing to oppose Pelosi. Things could change rapidly, Fudge said. Fudge, 66, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said she is building a diverse coalition as she mulls a speaker run, talking with allies in the caucus, moderate Democrats and newly elected members. To this point, Pelosi has enjoyed the strong backing of the Congressional Black Caucus. On Thursday, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), one of its members, wrote a letter to colleagues praising her insight, fortitude and strategic thinking and urging support for her speakership bid. Former Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., an African American who is contemplating a 2020 presidential bid, also voiced support for Pelosi, praising her in a tweet as an architect of the recent midterm success. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a leader of the resistance to Pelosi, said during an interview on CNN on Thursday that Fudge is the kind of new leader that we need in this party. Shes in touch with middle America. She understands what the American people want. Shes a next-generation leader that people will look to and say, Thats the future of our party, thats the future of our country, and thats exactly the kind of leader that I want to see as our next speaker. Wagner reports for the Washington Post. The Posts Robert Costa, Erica Werner, Mike DeBonis, Paul Kane and Elise Viebeck contributed to this report. Facebook

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GOP Rep. Jeff Denham concedes to Democrat Josh Harder in Central Valley race By Maya Sweedler Rep. Jeff Denham (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call) Republican Rep. Jeff Denham has conceded to Democrat Josh Harder in the race to represent Californias 10th Congressional District in the San Joaquin Valley. It has been an absolute honor to serve our community and represent the Central Valley in Congress over the past eight years, the 51-year-old congressman said. The enormity of the responsibility was never lost on me. My wife Sonia and I look forward to starting the next chapter of our lives. Harder said he had spoken with Denham and the two were committed to a productive transition. Denham, an Air Force veteran, previously represented the region in the state Senate for eight years and founded a company specializing in plastic packaging used in agriculture. While a member of Congress, he sat on the Transportation and Infrastructure, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture committees. First-time candidate Harder was born and raised in the district. After graduating from Stanford University, he served as vice president of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Since moving back, he has been teaching at Modesto Junior College. Denhams House seat is one of four in California that Republicans lost in the Nov. 6 election, with two contests in Orange County still undecided as of Thursday morning. Jeff Denham called me this morning and we had a very productive conversation. I'm honored that I've been chosen to serve our community in Congress, and we're both looking forward to a productive transition that best serves the people of District 10.  Josh Harder (@JoshHarder) November 14, 2018 Facebook

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Democrat Katie Porter now nearly 3,800 votes ahead of GOP Rep. Mimi Walters By Maya Sweedler Rep. Mimi Walters thanks all of her supporters as she watches election results in Irvine on Nov. 7, 2018. (Alex Gallardo / Associated Press) Democrat Katie Porter opened a 3,797-vote lead Wednesday over Republican Rep. Mimi Walters in Orange Countys 45th Congressional District. In the neighboring 39th, Democrat Gil Cisneros has nearly tied the race against Republican Young Kim. Cisneros now trails Kim by a razor-thin margin of 122 votes. The 39th District straddles Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties; Wednesdays updated ballot counts came from the latter two. There are more than 202,000 ballots left to count in Orange County, which includes parts of seven congressional districts. The 45th is entirely in inland Orange County. In California, the ballots counted first tend to lean Republican and those tallied later skew Democratic. In the Central Valleys 21st Congressional District, Democratic challenger TJ Cox has pulled within 2 percentage points of Rep. David Valadao, who is serving his third term. The Associated Press had projected a win for Valadao on election night, but his 4,839-vote advantage has shrunk to 2,090. Back in CA-21, Valadao (R) wins a batch of ballots from his stronghold in Kings Co., but by a considerably smaller margin (14 points) than his previous ~30-point margin in the county. We're moving to Lean R from Likely R; today a bit scary for Valadao.https://t.co/WqJVUVkqGW  Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 15, 2018 A spokesman for Valadao told the Fresno Bee that the changes were expected and that [s]tatistically, David Valadao has won this race. Democrats in California have already flipped four House seats, defeating three Republican incumbents and claiming an open seat previously held by the GOP. Reps. Steve Knight of Palmdale, Dana Rohrabacher of Costa Mesa and Jeff Denham of Turlock have already lost their races, and retiring Rep. Darrell Issas San Diego County seat was claimed by Democrat Mike Levin. Facebook

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Trump aide departs West Wing after rebuke from Melania Trump By Associated Press First Lady Melania Trump. (Alain Jocard / AFP-Getty Images) Deputy national security advisor Mira Ricardel is leaving the White House, one day after First Lady Melania Trumps office issued an extraordinary statement calling for her dismissal. No replacement was named. Aides said Ricardel clashed with the first ladys staff over her visit to Africa last month. Yet it is highly unusual for a first lady or her office to weigh in on personnel matters, especially the presidents national security staff. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Ricardel would have a new role in the administration. On Tuesday, Stephanie Grisham, the first ladys spokeswoman, released a statement saying, It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House. President Trumps White House has set records for administration turnover. Ricardel was the third person to hold the post under Trump. An ally of national security advisor John Bolton, Ricardel began her service in the Trump administration as associate director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, then moved to the Commerce Department last year. Bolton brought her into the West Wing shortly after taking the job in April. He is traveling in Asia this week alongside Vice President Mike Pence. Facebook

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Race for House Minority Leader is Kevin McCarthys to lose By Associated Press (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call) House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is running to take over next years shrunken caucus in closed-door elections that will set the tone for the new Congress. The race for minority leader is McCarthys to lose Wednesday. But the California Republican, who is an ally of President Trump, must fend off a challenge from conservative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan is a leader of the House Freedom Caucus. The two encountered questions and finger-pointing during a private meeting with lawmakers Tuesday night as the GOP sorted through the midterm defeat that put Democrats in the majority next year. Elections Wednesday will also determine party leadership in the Senate. Voting for the biggest race, Nancy Pelosis bid to return as the Democrats nominee for speaker, is later this month. Read More Facebook

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Melania Trump calls for the firing of deputy national security advisor By Justin Sink First Lady Melania Trump arrives at the Chateau de Versailles outside Paris on Nov. 11. (Alain Jocard / AFP/Getty Images ) First Lady Melania Trumps office said she wants Mira Ricardel, the deputy national security advisor, ousted from the White House. It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House, Trumps spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement in response to a question about reports the first lady had sought Ricardels removal. Ricardel is the top deputy to national security advisor John Bolton. She drew the first ladys wrath after threatening to withhold National Security Council resources during Melania Trumps trip to Africa last month unless Ricardel was included in her entourage, one person familiar with the matter said. Grishams statement comes as several media outlets have reported that President Trump is considering a broader shakeup of his administration, including ousting Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Sink and Jacobs report for Bloomberg. Read More Facebook

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CNN sues Trump over the suspension of Jim Acostas White House press credentials By Jim Puzzanghera CNN said Tuesday that it is suing President Trump and other administration officials over the decision to suspend the White House press credentials of correspondent Jim Acosta after a conflict at a news conference last week. The suit, to be filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, escalates an ongoing battle between Trump and the cable news outlet that he frequently accuses of disseminating fake news for its aggressive coverage of him and his administration. The wrongful revocation of these credentials violates CNN and Acostas 1st Amendment rights of freedom of the press, and their 5th Amendment rights to due process, CNN said in a written statement. If left unchallenged, the actions of the White House would create a dangerous chilling effect for any journalist who covers our elected officials. Read More Facebook

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Maxine Waters to take aim at Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank as new head of House Financial Services Committee By Jim Puzzanghera Rep. Maxine Waters plans to zero in on two big banks  Wells Fargo & Co. and Deutsche Bank  when she becomes head of the powerful House Financial Services Committee. The Los Angeles congresswoman, now the committees top Democrat, is widely expected to gain the gavel after her party won control of the House in last weeks elections. While Waters has outlined a wide-ranging agenda, she said her focus on bank oversight will target two large institutions she has been tangling with for a while  including one, Deutsche Bank, that spills into her bitter feud with President Trump. With Trump in the White House, I know that our fight for Americas consumers and investors will continue to be challenging. But I am more than up to that fight, Waters wrote in a letter last week to her Democratic colleagues on the committee that was obtained by The Times. Read More Facebook

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Heres how a controversial voting system will decide a congressional race in Maine By Kurtis Lee For the first time in U.S. history, a controversial voting system known as ranked choice is being used to decide a federal election. Its happening in Maine, which adopted the system in 2016. Rather than marking a single candidate, each voter ranks them all, assigning a first-place vote, a second-place vote and so on down the ballot. Read More Facebook

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ACLU files suit to stop Trumps new asylum limits By Associated Press A group of Central American migrants march to the office of the U.N.'s humans rights body in Mexico City on Nov. 8. (Rebecca Blackwell / Associated Press) The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a legal challenge to President Trumps order denying asylum to migrants if they cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. The lawsuit was filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco and argues the new rules are against the law. Attorney Lee Gelernt said the regulations will put families in danger. The suit seeks to declare the regulations invalid and wants a judge to stop the rules from going into effect while the litigation is pending. The new rules were spurred in part by caravans of Central American migrants slowly moving north on foot, but officials say they will apply to anyone caught crossing illegally. Officials say about 70,000 people who enter the country illegally claim asylum. The order invoked the same national security powers Trump used to push through his travel ban. Read More Facebook

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Trump on new acting AG: I dont know Matt Whitaker By Associated Press President Trump talks with reporters before departing for France on the South Lawn of the White House on Nov. 9. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press) President Trump is moving to distance himself from Matthew Whitaker as he faces criticism over his choice for acting attorney general. Trump told reporters Friday that I dont know Matt Whitaker and said he didnt speak with Whitaker about special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation. Whitaker has made public comments critical of Muellers investigation, and critics have called on Whitaker to recuse himself from oversight of the inquiry. Under former Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, the investigation was overseen by Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein. Of the scrutiny Whitaker is facing, Trump said: Its a shame that no matter who I put in they go after. He also called Whitaker a very highly respected man. Whitaker was Sessions chief of staff before Trump made him Sessions interim replacement. Facebook

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg out of hospital after fall By Associated Press The Supreme Court says 85-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is home after being released from the hospital. She had been admitted for treatment and observation after fracturing three ribs in a fall. The court said Ginsburg was released Friday. Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg says she is doing well and working from home. The court had previously said the justice fell in her office at the court on Wednesday evening and went to George Washington University Hospital in Washington early Thursday after experiencing discomfort overnight. Ginsburg broke two ribs in a fall in 2012. She had two prior bouts with cancer and had a stent implanted to open a blocked artery in 2014. Facebook

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Gun-control activist Lucy McBath defeats GOP Rep. Karen Handel in Georgia By Associated Press Lucy McBath speaks during a rally for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on Nov. 2 at Morehouse College in Atlanta. (Alyssa Pointer / Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP) Democratic gun-control activist Lucy McBath has defeated Republican Rep. Karen Handel of Georgia in a suburban congressional district long considered safe for the GOP. Handel had to seek reelection after winning her seat last year in a close special election race against Democrat Jon Ossoff. McBath became an advocate for stricter gun laws after her son, Jordan Davis, was fatally shot at a Florida gas station in 2012 by a man angry over loud music the teenager and his friends were playing in a car. McBaths margin of victory was narrow enough for Handel to have requested a recount. The Associated Press declared McBath the winner Thursday after Handel conceded. Handel conceded in a statement Thursday morning, stating that after reviewing all of the election data, its clear she came up a bit short in Tuesdays vote. Handel congratulated McBath, offering good thoughts and much prayer for the journey that lies ahead for her. McBath, who is African American, declared victory Wednesday. Facebook

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hospitalized after fracturing 3 ribs in fall By Associated Press Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press) The Supreme Court says 85-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg fractured three ribs in a fall in her office at the court and is in the hospital. The court says the justice went to George Washington University Hospital in Washington early Thursday after experiencing discomfort overnight. The court says the fall occurred Wednesday evening. Ginsburg was admitted to the hospital for treatment and observation after tests showed she fractured three ribs. Ginsburg broke two ribs in a fall in 2012. She has had two prior bouts with cancer and had a stent implanted to open a blocked artery in 2014. Facebook

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White House suspends press pass of CNNs Jim Acosta after heated exchange with Trump By Associated Press The White House on Wednesday suspended the press pass of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta after he and President Trump had a heated confrontation during a news conference. They began sparring after Acosta asked Trump about the caravan of migrants heading from Latin America to the southern U.S. border. When Acosta tried to follow up with another question, Trump said, Thats enough! and a female White House aide unsuccessfully tried to grab the microphone from Acosta. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders released a statement accusing Acosta of placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern, calling it absolutely unacceptable. The interaction between Acosta and the intern was brief, and Acosta appeared to brush her arm as she reached for the microphone and he tried to hold onto it. Pardon me, maam, he told her. Acosta tweeted that Sanders statement that he put his hands on the aide was a lie. CNN said in a statement that the White House revoked Acostas press pass in retaliation for his challenging questions Wednesday, and the network accused Sanders of lying about Acostas actions. This conduct is absolutely unacceptable. It is also completely disrespectful to the reporters colleagues not to allow them an opportunity to ask a question. President Trump has given the press more access than any President in history.  Stephanie Grisham (@PressSec) November 8, 2018 Contrary to CNNs assertions there is no greater demonstration of the Presidents support for a free press than the event he held today. Only they would attack the President for not supporting a free press in the midst of him taking 68 questions from 35 different reporters...  Stephanie Grisham (@PressSec) November 8, 2018 As a result of todays incident, the White House is suspending the hard pass of the reporter involved until further notice.  Stephanie Grisham (@PressSec) November 8, 2018 Sanders provided fraudulent accusations and cited an incident that never happened. This unprecedented decision is a threat to our democracy and the country deserves better, CNN said. Jim Acosta has our full support. Journalists assigned to cover the White House apply for passes that allow them daily access to press areas in the West Wing. White House staffers decide whether journalists are eligible, though the Secret Service determines whether their applications are approved. Facebook

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Trump spars with reporters at post-election news briefing, ordering several to sit down By Associated Press  President Trump assails CNNs Jim Acosta at a White House news conference. President Trump sparred with reporters at his post-election news conference, ordering several to sit down and telling another hes a rude, terrible person. He told another reporter hes not a fan of yours, either. The presidents mood turned sour Wednesday after reporters pressed him on why he referred to a migrant caravan making its way to the U.S. on foot through Mexico as an invasion. Trump ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric against the caravan in the final days of the midterm elections. Trump was also pressed on why his campaign aired an ad featuring a Mexican immigrant convicted of killing American police officers and linking the mans actions to the caravan. Several television networks pulled the ad after airing it or declined to air it at all. Facebook

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Im living one hour at a time at this point By Christine Mai-Duc Republican congressional candidate Young Kim and gubernatorial candidate John Cox campaign in Rowland Heights. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) Republican congressional candidate Young Kim greeted gubernatorial candidate John Coxs giant campaign bus, the words HELP IS ON THE WAY emblazoned across it, as it rolled into the parking lot outside her Rowland Heights field office. Standing beside Cox on Saturday, Kim predicted that a string of GOP victories Tuesday would start with voters repealing the gas tax hike. Can you imagine Gavin Newsom being our governor? Can you imagine Gil Cisneros being your representative? Kim asked the crowd, to loud boos and cries of Nooo! The former state assemblywoman who worked for retiring Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) is vying for his seat with Democrat Gil Cisneros. She led the crowd in chants of Enough is enough! and, though short-lived, Drain the swamp! Ive served you in Sacramento and Ive seen dysfunction personally, Kim continued. We cannot continue that route. She urged her supporters to stay and help make phone calls or walk neighborhoods. Lets get out there  the 72 hours is really critical. Its all going to come down to a few votes, it could be your vote, she said pointing to her left, then pivoting right, it could be your vote. So dont sit back and do nothing. Every night I go to sleep thinking, OK, how many more votes can I get or how many more people can I call tomorrow? Kim said. It can be physically exhausting but Im mentally, emotionally very energized. She listed off her events so far that day  and the next one she was heading to. Thats just what I can remember, she said. Im living one hour at a time at this point. Kims campaign invited press to two of her events on Saturday. After she was whisked away to her next event  a high tea fundraiser in Walnut, a couple dozen volunteers remained. John Freeman, a statewide field manager for the state Republican Party, tried to pump them up. This is the Super Bowl. Were not in an NFL stadium, were not getting paid millions of dollars, but you know what? Freeman said. Were walking on the field right now. This is that high-stakes-level game. Facebook

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Its going to be tough out there Democratic candidate Katie Porter speaks to volunteers in Mission Viejo. Jon Bauman, Bowzer from the band Sha Na Na, is in the background. (Victoria Kim / Los Angeles Times ) Judging from the cheers in the crowd, about half those assembled at Katie Porters campaign headquarters in Mission Viejo Sunday morning were old enough to remember 70s rock n roll star Bowzer from the band Sha Na Na. Jon Bauman, as Bowzer is known off stage, said it was her position on senior issues including retirement and social security that has him out supporting Porter over her opponent, incumbent Rep. Mimi Walters. I want you to make sure every phone is called and every door is knocked, he told the crowd of about 80 volunteers. There has never been a more important election. Both Bauman and his nephew, California Democratic Party Chairman Eric Bauman, were interrupted by yells from Trump supporters coming from an adjoining hillside. We love Trump, the voice cried out. We love him too, he makes great fodder, the younger Bauman retorted, before introducing Porter. Porter, a UC Irvine law professor and first-time candidate, acknowledged the uphill battle some of her canvassers might face in this more conservative end of the long-red Orange County district. I know its going to be tough out there, she said, motioning to the hillside. But she said the attacks meant the other side viewed her campaign as a significant threat. This election is going to be close, she said. If we dont fight all the way to the finish line, until 8 oclock on Tuesday, this could slip away. Bowzer then took to a keyboard piano to lead the crowd in a reworded rendition of the song Good Night Sweetheart: Good night, Mimi Walters, he crooned. A woman in a black tank top, jeans and flip flops holding a cup of coffee later joined the crowd with her two sons, 17 and 14, the younger one wearing a Trump 2016 T-shirt. She declined to give her name, saying she was concerned about being attacked, but said she lived up the hill and said she had been the one yelling. She said she was encouraging her sons to talk to people on both sides and make up their own minds. We need to have a government that runs the way government teachers are telling kids its supposed to be run, said the woman, a retired registered dental assistant who voted early for Mimi Walters. Referring to Democrats, she said: Theyve had control over all these years and Californias gone to crap. Among those canvassing was Stacie Campbell, 37, who was at the launch with her husband Jerome and three children, the youngest of whom was 2 months old. Campbell, a Mission Viejo resident who runs a business, had never canvassed or volunteered for campaigns before, and her husband is a French citizen and unable to vote. She said they had been talking to their children  the older ones are 5 and 2  about the presidency and the government since Trumps election. Together, they worked on homemade Katie Porter lawn signs and put them up around town. This is the first time its felt like a big deal and there isnt a president up for election, she said. Because her city is a mix of conservatives and liberals  her next-door neighbor is an NRA-supporting Republican  she the race felt mThe National Enquirers parent company paid a Manhattan doorman $30,000 for a story it never published alleging that Donald Trump secretly fathered a child, according to news reports.

Former doorman Dino Sajudin told the story to the National Enquirer in late 2015, when Trump was the top contender for the Republican presidential nomination, the Associated Press and the New Yorker reported early Thursday.

Sajudin, who worked at Trump World Tower near the United Nations headquarters, told the National Enquirer that hed heard from co-workers that Trump had knocked up one of his employees, who gave birth to a girl, according to documents posted on the website of Radar Online, a sister publication of the National Enquirer.

The supermarket tabloid requested a polygraph exam, and the examiner concluded that Sajudin was telling the truth about hearing the story, the documents say.

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Four unnamed National Enquirer employees told AP that top editors, despite the polygraph results, ordered them to stop reporting the story.

Sajudin signed a contract with the tabloids parent company, American Media Inc., led by President Trumps close friend David Pecker. Sajudin, who received the $30,000 in return for giving American Media exclusive rights to the story, agreed to pay a $1-million penalty if he failed to keep quiet, according to the AP and the New Yorker.

I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower, I was instructed not to criticize President Trumps former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump which produced a child, Sajudin told CNN on Thursday.

It is the second known case of American Media spending money in a way that protected Trump from a potentially harmful story during the 2016 presidential race  a practice known in the tabloid gossip world as catch and kill.

Days after Trump won his partys presidential nomination, American Media paid former Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for exclusive rights to her story of a nine-month affair with Trump, but never published it.

McDougal is suing to void the deal, alleging that her attorney was secretly colluding with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is prized for his loyalty  and willingness to attack the presidents rivals 

The FBI raided Cohens office, home and hotel room this week under search warrants reportedly seeking records on McDougals nondisclosure deal with American Media.

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The search warrant also reportedly sought records on a separate confidentiality agreement that Cohen reached in October 2016 with porn star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. He set up a shell company that paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about Trumps alleged 2006 sexual encounter with her.

Its unclear what crimes federal authorities suspect were committed. But McDougals lawsuit charges that American Medias $150,000 payment to her was an illegal secret donation that federal election law required the Trump campaign to publicly disclose.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan ethics group, has filed complaints with the Justice Department and Federal Election Commission alleging that the payments to McDougal and Daniels were illegal campaign contributions.

On Thursday, Common Cause submitted new complaints alleging the payment to Sajudin, too, was an unlawful attempt to influence the 2016 election by protecting Trumps candidacy from bad publicity.

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Secret payments to hide affairs may have been commonplace in the presidents previous life as a tabloid figure, but when he became a candidate for the presidency, any new payments to safeguard his candidacy became violations of federal law, said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause.

Cohen acknowledged that he discussed Sajudins story with the National Enquirer when it was reporting on the allegations, but denied knowing in advance that the tabloid paid the former doorman $30,000, the AP reported.

Neither the AP nor the New Yorker named the woman who was alleged to have had Trumps child about 30 years ago.

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The documents posted by Radar Online indicate that the National Enquirer found in late 2015 that the woman was then living in Queens, and her daughter in Northern California.

Radar Online reported that despite the polygraph results, National Enquirer editors concluded after four weeks of investigating, that Sajudins story was false.

When we realized we would be unable to publish, and other media outlets approached the source about his tale, we released Sajudin from the exclusivity clause that had accompanied his $30,000 payment, freeing him to tell his story to whomever he wanted, Dylan Howard, the chief content officer at American Media, told Radar Online.

American Media, or AMI, led by longtime Trump friend Pecker, released a statement denying that Cohen or Trump had anything to do with its decision not to pursue a story about a love child that it determined was not credible.

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The suggestion that David Pecker has ever used company funds to shut down this or any investigation is not true, the statement said. In addition, AMI and Mr. Pecker emphatically deny any suggestion that there might have been be any partnership created which might influence any business ties in regard to AMI. These claims are reckless, unsubstantiated, and false.

The statement also quoted Howard defending the decision to not publish a story.

Paying for information has long been a practice of The National Enquirer and to suggest that it has only paid for, and not run, stories about any particular person is absurd, he said.

The former National Enquirer employees told the AP that the tabloid failed to pursue its standard reporting practices for proving paternity, such as exhaustive stakeouts.

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In 2007, when the National Enquirer disclosed that Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards had fathered a child with a mistress, it did so in part by rummaging through a dumpster for material to use in a DNA test. Months later, Edwards admitted the story was true.

Edwards, a former U.S. senator from North Carolina, was tried on federal charges of using campaign money to hide the pregnant mistress from voters during the campaign. The case ended in an acquittal on one charge and a mistrial on five others.

michael.finnegan@latimes.com

Twitter: @finneganLAT

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UPDATES:

6 p.m.: This article was updated with a statement from American Media Inc.

1:30 p.m.: This article was updated with Sajudins statement to CNN and background on John Edwards.

12:20 p.m.: This article was updated with new Common Cause complaint.

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This article was originally published at 10:55 a.m.Gov. Jerry Brown agreed Wednesday to take money but not marching orders from President Trump in deploying 400 National Guard troops to various locations around the state, insisting any service members near the border would not enforce federal immigration law.

Your funding for new staffing will allow the Guard to do what it does best: support operations targeting transnational criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers along the border, the coast and throughout the state, Brown wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Defense Secretary James N. Mattis.

Brown was the last of the nations border governors to respond to Trumps request for a beefed-up presence. In his letter, he said that he wanted to be crystal clear in what he was agreeing to provide.

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This will not be a mission to build a new wall, Brown wrote. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life. And the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws.

Although Brown may have taken longer to act than governors in the other border states  Texas, New Mexico and Arizona all pledged assistance earlier in the week  only eight days passed between the California Democratic governors decision and the presidents off-the-cuff remark about assisting with border duties. Last week, Trump told reporters that his administration would be guarding our border with the military, a statement his staff later amended to focus instead on help from the National Guard.

By the weekend, Mattis had signed an order to send up to 4,000 National Guard troops from various states to the border, but barred them from interacting with migrants detained by the U.S. Border Patrol in most cases. At the time, a spokesman for Brown said the request was still under consideration.

Less than one-tenth of the United States 1,933-mile border with Mexico is in California. And the decision Wednesday does not guarantee that Californias 400 additional Guard personnel will be in any specific location. The states current efforts on transnational crimes include 250 troops, with 55 of them stationed at the border. A spokesman for Brown said Wednesday that decisions on staffing will be made based on needs as they are identified.

There was no immediate estimate of the amount in federal funds California would receive to cover the costs of the California deployment. A copy of the agreement signed by Brown says the operation will end Sept. 30 unless federal and state officials agree to extend it. The agreement also says that Brown or the Trump administration can cancel the effort at any time.

Trump is the third consecutive president to ask for National Guard assistance along the U.S.-Mexico border. Former President George W. Bush used assistance from the states to deploy 6,400 troops for a two-year period beginning in 2006, while former President Obama authorized 1,200 troops in 2010. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger approved the use of Guard troops in both instances, though he rejected one request from Bush, citing the need to keep the service members available for potential wildfires or earthquakes.

But in the Bush and Obama requests, the circumstances along the southern boundary with Mexico were different  they were in conjunction with efforts to get sweeping immigration reform through Congress. Trump administration officials have pointed to a surge last month in the number of unlawful border crossings, but immigrant rights groups have suggested the action is based more on political fear-mongering than a provable crisis.

Brown, who only occasionally pushes back on the presidents rhetoric, made it clear in his letter Wednesday where he stands on the current situation.

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Here are the facts: there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California, the governor wrote to Nielsen and Mattis. Overall immigrant apprehensions on the border last year were as low as theyve been in nearly 50 years (and 85 percent of the apprehensions occurred outside of California).

Mattis authorizes up to 4,000 National Guard troops for U.S. border with Mexico 

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that the administration is glad to see cooperation from Brown, but did not address the specifics of the governors letter.

Seen in the context of Trumps insistence on sealing up our Southern Border, as he wrote on Twitter, Browns announcement was hardly a vote of confidence. In comparison, the governors of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona were more enthusiastic in their offers of help. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pledged to ultimately send as many as 1,000 troops to aid in the effort.

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California officials, in contrast, have found little to applaud in Trumps approach to illegal immigration. The state has gone to federal court to block construction of a new border wall, and no state officials welcomed the president to Southern California last month as he toured prototypes of the barrier. Last year, Brown signed a state law to limit local law enforcement cooperation with immigration agents  a law the Trump administration is now challenging in court.

Times staff writer Noah Bierman in Washington contributed to this report.

john.myers@latimes.com

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Updates on California politicsA Bay Area lawmakers housing proposal could expand the size and scope of home building efforts in California at an unprecedented scale.

The legislation, Senate Bill 828, from state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), would require cities and counties to rezone land in their communities to permit many more homes than are currently in their plans.

Under the bill, local governments could have to double the amount of land made available for condominium and apartment complexes, and zone even more parcels for residential development in an effort to address a shortage of homes in the state that Wiener has estimated stands at 4 million.

The goal of all of my housing work is to lead to a lot more housing, Wiener said.

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Coverage of California politics 

Wiener wants to implement the new zoning through changes to the states housing supply law, which for the last 50 years has aimed to spur the construction of enough housing at all income levels to keep pace with Californias growth.

The law compels cities and counties to zone enough land in their communities to accommodate projected population increases, so theoretically developers have enough places to build. But numerous factors, including developers construction and financing costs, competing state environmental regulations and often lengthy approval processes for projects, have stalled actual production.

The state Department of Housing and Community Development has estimated that developers need to build 180,000 new homes a year simply to keep pace with Californias population growth. Yet that number has been reached only three times in the last 27 years, according to statistics from the state construction industry, leading to a shortage particularly in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where recent strong job growth has led to booming demand.

The existing housing supply law says local governments must plan to have enough land zoned for residential construction to meet housing production goals across a range of income levels. The state resets the numbers and reallocates the targets to local governments every eight years.

Wieners bill would increase the number of homes that cities and counties have to plan for in several ways:

Doubling the amount of land intended to house very low- and low-income residents by setting aside more properties for apartments and condominiums.

Zoning land to account for homes not built under production goals from the prior eight years.

Zoning even more land for residential properties if a state audit shows theres a shortage in that community.

Boosting targets higher where home prices are far outpacing wage increases.

Wiener declined to estimate how many more homes he expects SB 828 to produce, but the effects could be substantial.

California lawmakers have tried for 50 years to fix the states housing crisis. Heres why theyve failed 

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Another bill from Wiener, SB 827, would raise height limits near transit stops and has attracted national attention for the large increases in housing densities it would allow in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other areas of the state ringed with mass transit.

By contrast, SB 828 has garnered less interest because its changes are harder to understand and predict, said Greg Morrow, director of the Fred Sands Institute of Real Estate at Pepperdine University. But Morrow said SB 828s increases to allowable zoning for housing across the state could be as dramatic as those anticipated by Wieners other bill.

Could it be just as impactful? Morrow said. I think so.

Homes in Los Angeles South Carthay neighborhood. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times )

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The housing supply law has had a troubled history, with local governments resenting, sidestepping and, at times, ignoring it. In turn, the state has layered planning requirement after planning requirement into the law. The entire process, former state housing director Timothy Coyle said, has turned into an energy- and money-guzzling bureaucratic maze that hasnt resulted in the building needed to keep pace with Californias growth.

Just two of 539 cities and counties met housing production goals at all four income levels during the eight-year period that ended in 2014, according to a Times review of housing department data.

The figures arent much better now, even though the housing market is much stronger than it was during the recession. More than 98% of local governments are off track in meeting their current goals, according to a recent housing department report. Some of the 11 cities and counties that are on pace are doing so for reasons other than welcoming growth.

Beverly Hills is meeting its target because the city was allocated just three new homes. The more than 500 new homes built in Foster City, a Bay Area bedroom community, were approved at least six years ago and are just coming on the market now. A city councilman there has called the entire housing supply law process an elaborate shell game.

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Villaraigosa and Newsom want to build more houses in California than ever before. Experts see the candidates goal as an empty promise 

Regional agencies, including the Southern California Assn. of Governments in the Los Angeles area, serve as the clearinghouse for housing goals outlined by the state. Wieners bill would give the state more of a say in the numbers each city receives. So would Assembly Bill 1771 from Assemblyman Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica), which also would allow outside groups to weigh in on the number of homes that should be built in each community.

Its an open secret that theres a lot of political horse-trading that seems to override the actual objectives of the housing supply law, said Anya Lawler, a policy advocate at the Western Center on Law & Poverty, a principal supporter of AB 1771.

Wieners and Blooms bills continue the Legislatures recent push to use the housing supply law to make it harder for cities to say no to projects. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law aiming to ensure cities zoned parcels of land that could best accommodate home building. Another new law, Senate Bill 35, forces cities that are behind on their housing goals to approve projects without delaying or requiring additional environmental review if developers set aside some units for low-income residents and abide by union wage standards.

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Developers are already taking advantage of SB 35, also written by Wiener. In Cupertino, home to Apple, a developer has announced plans to use the law to gain approval of about 2,400 new homes, with half reserved for low-income residents, to help redevelop a mall into offices and homes.

But there are concerns that forcing cities and counties to set aside additional land for housing wont necessarily result in more construction and could be counterproductive.

Cities dont build houses, and without a substantial increase in state dollars to help finance low-income housing projects, local governments cant meet production goals in place now, let alone higher ones, said Jason Rhine, who works on housing legislation at the League of California Cities.

Its moving the goalposts even further away from us, Rhine said.

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Homes in Los Angeles South Carthay neighborhood. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times )

Cities also receive less tax revenue from residential developments than commercial and hotel projects, and reserving a larger percentage of land for housing would squeeze local budgets, he said.

Worries about overly ambitious housing goals arent just coming from local governments. Ben Metcalf, director of the state Department of Housing and Community Development, said setting production targets that would account for the entire backlog of needed homes runs the risk of being so unattainable as to induce us all to a state of helplessness.

We need to push and we need to make sure were bringing cities along on the journey to the greatest extent possible at the state level, said Metcalf, who has not taken a position on the bill. But there is also a risk of overreach.

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Wiener said that he understands the risks of making the housing goals too aggressive but that the state has to do more than it is now.

We are working to create a shift to show how much of hole were in with respect to the production of housing, he said.

SB 828 is scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Transportation and Housing Committee on April 24.

liam.dillon@latimes.com

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@dillonliamReal estate developer Alastair Mactaggart became alarmed about the internets threat to personal privacy while chatting with a Google engineer at a cocktail party.

I asked, Whats this deal with all the privacy stuff? Is it anything to be worried about? Mactaggart recalls. I expected him to say, No, its not a big deal.

Instead he said, If people only knew how much we know about them, theyd really freak out.

I was taken aback, the developer says. That got me interested.

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Now the big internet companies are freaking out over what Mactaggart is doing. Hes threatening to jeopardize the operations of Google, Facebook and the like with a ballot initiative that regulates profiteering off their users private data.

Most people dont understand how pervasive this [data leaking] is and that these big companies know so much about you, he says. Its like a frog boiling in a pot.

People have become a lot more aware of it this week, however, as two congressional committees grilled Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. The lawmakers particularly wanted to know why Facebook failed to protect the data of 87 million users that fell into the hands of Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm working for President Trumps election campaign.

Its not just the marketing of political candidates that personal data is used for, of course. Its also employed to market shoes, TV sets, cars, you name it. Companies glean information about your hobbies, age, children, residence, religion, gender and sexual orientation. And they use it to target ads at specific groups.

Theres nothing new in this. But with technology, the data is a lot easier to collect. It also can be used for anything, including scary stuff.

Its all very complex. But the basics are simple: The internet is collecting personal data on people, unbeknownst to them, and spreading it around for big profit. People are becoming more aware of that and starting to demand protection. It seems a timely intersection of one persons crusade and the publics desire.

More from George Skelton 

The internet is no longer the infant that needed freedom to innovate and grow unregulated, if it ever was. It has grown into a monster and now needs to be restricted  like the railroads at the turn of the last century and financial institutions during the Great Depression.

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Were taking on the richest, most powerful industry that the world has ever seen, says Mactaggart, 51, of Piedmont in Alameda County. Standard Oil was powerful, but they didnt know everything about you.

Mactaggarts initiative would affect companies that earn at least $50 million a year and derive half their annual revenue by peddling personal information.

Consumers would have the right to learn what info is collected. Theyd need to be told whether it was disseminated and to whom. They could tell the companies to stop selling or sharing it. They couldnt be charged more for internet service if they opted out. And they could sue if they were ignored.

Mactaggart must collect 365,880 voter signatures by June 18 to qualify the initiative for the November ballot. Hes the sole financer so far, putting up $2 million-plus.

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The timing couldnt be better with the Facebook controversy.

This is not a tough sale, campaign manager Robin Swanson says. Right now were riding a tidal wave.

Coverage of California politics 

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Tech companies are expected to spend tens of millions fighting the measure if it qualifies. So far theyve put up $1 million  $200,000 each from Facebook, Google, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

After its hammering by the congressional committees, however, Facebook announced Wednesday that it wouldnt contribute more money to the opposition campaign. The company said it wants to focus on supporting reasonable privacy measures in California.

That sounds like it might be looking for a legislative compromise  something the rest of the tech industry has shown no interest in.

Weve got all our resources focused on the ballot measure, says Robert Callahan, vice president of government affairs for the Internet Assn. This is very much a gotcha initiative. Its unworkable. It would strangle the ability of companies to innovate.

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Tech firms especially fear giving opportunistic internet users the ability to sue, he says.

Callahan also contends its dishonest to link the initiative with the Facebook turmoil. But good luck convincing voters of that.

Opposition campaign spokesman Steve Maviglio says, This is a national issue. Its more appropriately settled in Washington. Clearly thats the way to do it, not state by state.

But if California had waited for Washington to act, Southern Californians would be choking on smog. And who knows how many beaches would have been fouled by oil spills.

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Under a relatively new reform, an initiative proponent can negotiate a legislative compromise and drop the ballot measure. A potential compromise vehicle is a bill by Assemblyman Ed Chau (D-Arcadia).

Chaus measure would restore federal regulations rolled back by President Trump that required internet providers to obtain users permission before sharing data.

Its our own data, Chau says, so we should be the ones able to say whats collected and how its used.

He dropped the bill last year under stiff opposition from the tech lobby. But its still there waiting for a compromise.

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Some regulation is needed. The Wild West days of an uncontrolled internet should be history.

george.skelton@latimes.com

Follow @LATimesSkelton on TwitterA homeless man accused of killing a homeless woman with a tree branch in February in Costa Mesa pleaded not guilty to a murder charge Thursday, according to Orange County Superior Court records.

Daniel Correa, 24, who previously lived in Santa Ana, also denied a sentencing enhancement allegation that he personally used a deadly weapon.

Authorities allege Correa killed Ashley Boulay, 29, at a nature preserve at 1299 Victoria St.

Authorities described Boulay as a transient who previously lived in Massachusetts. Police said her body showed signs of blunt force trauma, but they did not detail her injuries.

Costa Mesa detectives began investigating Boulays death as a homicide after receiving a call at 7:10 a.m. Feb. 28 from a man, later identified as Correa, who said he had found a womans body in the park, police said. It isnt clear how authorities came to suspect Correa in the crime.

Correa, who is listed in jail records as a warehouse worker, is being held in Orange County Jail in Santa Ana with bail set at $1 million.

If convicted, he could face a maximum sentence of 26 years to life in prison.

hannah.fry@latimes.com

Twitter: @HannahFryTCNThe Newport Beach City Council accepted an amended contract Tuesday night allowing for City Manager Dave Kiffs early departure as Councilwoman Diane Dixon ripped two colleagues who she said worked behind the scenes to force Kiff out.

Dixon, who along with council members Jeff Herdman and Brad Avery said they were in the dark about Kiffs accelerated exit, claimed an ambush against Kiff by Mayor Marshall Duffy Duffield and Mayor Pro Tem Will ONeill.

They wanted to fire him. They decided to fire him. They fired him. But they didnt tell anyone, Dixon said. On what basis did a minority cabal of two council members decide they had the authority to force out Dave Kiff?

Dixon said Duffield and ONeill dictated and negotiated the terms of Kiffs exit contract starting in February and that the full council never saw a draft, although there would have been ample time to discuss it in closed session.

They are not chief executives, the king or dictators, she said.

Kiff recused himself from the discussion Tuesday. He has said he wants a smooth transition and will work with city leaders on key issues before he departs Aug. 31. The previous version of his contract expired in April 2019.

Dixon listed several statements attributed to Duffield in 2015 and 16 about wanting Kiff fired. Then in February, after a regular conference among the mayor, mayor pro tem, city manager and city attorney, Duffield and ONeill wanted to talk about speeding up Kiffs departure, Dixon said. She said ONeill pressed for the change to happen over the summer.

Under the contract amendment approved Tuesday, the city will pay more than $100,000 upon Kiffs resignation. That includes $84,000, which is what Kiff would have earned in salary in September through December, a one-time deferred compensation contribution of $20,000, and up to $5,000 toward attorney fees Kiff incurred while having a lawyer help prepare the agreement. The amendment also says Kiff would be entitled to any unused administrative leave pay for the year, which tops out at 80 hours.

The council will use an executive search firm to look for Kiffs replacement.

Mayor Pro Tem Will ONeill, Mayor Marshall Duffy Duffield and Councilwoman Diane Dixon, from left, were at odds during Tuesdays Newport Beach City Council meeting over City Manager Dave Kiffs pending departure. (Kevin Chang / Staff Photographer )

Duffield said Kiff  who has been city manager since 2009 and a city employee since 1998  told the council more than a year ago about his plans to eventually leave Newport Beach and move to Northern California to be closer to family.

Duffield characterized the February discussion as a chat about the transition. He said he expected it would land on a council meeting agenda. But in March, Kiff announced his plan to leave early after unfounded rumors circulated about four council members demanding Daves resignation or be fired, Duffield said.

At the April 10 council meeting, several community members accused Duffield, ONeill and Councilmen Scott Peotter and Kevin Muldoon of conspiring to oust Kiff. The four have denied it and did so again Tuesday.

But former mayor Nancy Gardner, a Kiff supporter, said denials are cheap.

She suggested a subpoena-driven investigation of the matter similar to one the council authorized this year to look into possible irregularities on petitions aiming to recall Peotter.

Ask all the questions there could possibly be and have it under oath so its not just a simple lie, its perjury if people are untruthful, Gardner said.

Seymour Beek, a lifelong Newport Beach resident, said the council is being level-headed as it looks for its next city manager.

Beek said he has seen many popular and capable city managers leave.

However, I have never quite witnessed a firestorm of irrationality and anger resulting from a retirement of a city manager as Ive witnessed this time, he said.

Resident Peter Van Voorhis said replacing an employee, even an important one like the city manager  the citys top administrative official  is basic government work, not politicized work.

I hope you remember that the loudest groups are rarely the ones that are right. Because if youre right, you dont need to scream about it, Van Voorhis said.

But Herdman, like Dixon, was firm in saying the citys charter and policies were violated by not having the entire council involved in discussions about Kiffs earlier exit.

Herdman said he doesnt know why Kiff is leaving but insisted he was pressured.

He should be allowed to work out his present contract with dignity and the respect he deserves and exercise his right and privilege to retire at his own choosing, Herdman said. A city manager of Mr. Kiffs caliber should not be forced to speed up his retirement.

Kiff said in an email Wednesday that he has used the term transition to describe his departure because I dont think Ill ever retire from doing things. Maybe Ill do something totally different, maybe something part time. Im not sure.

ONeill disputed Dixons remarks, though he said he erred in not bringing the matter to the council immediately. He said he was concerned that if it appeared on a closed-session agenda, it would look like the council was firing Kiff.

I wish I had rethought that. I look back on that and wish I had, ONeill said.

Duffield acknowledged that before he was elected to the council in 2014, it was widely known that he and Kiff didnt see eye to eye on harbor issues. But his feelings evolved, Duffield said, and years-old comments no longer apply.

Muldoon said he and Kiff also used to butt heads but have built up respect.

I think this whole process has been very unfortunate and a little bit heartbreaking, Muldoon said.

hillary.davis@latimes.com

Twitter: @Daily_PilotHDNewport Beach City Manager Dave Kiff will be retiring soon. Normally, his myriad fans would simply wish him well, but this is not a normal situation. Team Newport (Councilmen Will ONeill, Kevin Muldoon and Scott Peotter and Mayor Marshall Duffield) are running him out of town, despite wide acknowledgment among his peers and the residents that he is one of the best city managers in California.

Our bay is no longer covered with green mats of algae because of his advocacy for clean water. We are proactively addressing our pension liability under his direction. His enormous depth of knowledge about the airport benefits everyone under the John Wayne flight plan, making his departure especially mourned by those concerned about flight noise.

Team Newport claims that Kiff is retiring of his own accord and vigorously denies that it has pushed him out, but his newly amended contract calls for severance pay.

Have you ever heard of a retiree getting severance pay? Of course not.

Council members Jeff Herdman, Brad Avery and Diane Dixon were left completely out of this power play and were apparently not even aware that Mr. Kiffs contract was being discussed until it was a done deal.

At Tuesdays meeting, Dixon presented Kiffs description of events, confirming to me that he had been forced out.

This is a situation that can only lead to chaos. Newport Beach deserves better than this, but we may not get it.

It is time to clean house in Newport Beach, but not by removing Kiff. It is time for Team Newport to be swept from office and elect representatives who put city before self on the City Council. Character matters.

Susan Skinner

Newport Beach

Helicopter noise is unbearable

I am writing you this letter because I was awoken at 2:40 on a recent morning by a Huntington Beach police helicopter flying over my neighborhood. This was especially irritating because I was awoken the previous day at 2:35 a.m. and then again at 6 a.m. After the 6 a.m. flyover, the helicopter flew over my house one, two, three, four times. Then at 1:15 p.m. it flew over for the sixth time that day.

Then the helicopter flew over my house at 1:15 p.m., 1:22 p.m., 1:25 p.m.and again at 1:45 p.m. I left for a couple hours, then it flew over my house at 7:30 p.m. while my neighbors were trying to enjoy dinner on their porch. So in a 24-hour period the helicopter flew over my neighborhood at least 11 times.

The noise, congestion and oppression of police helicopters has degraded Newport Beach like nothing Ive experienced since 1985. Beach ambience is being ruined.

This was a huge mistake: if there is just one thing the city should do it is to cancel the contract with the H.B. police department.

Donald Graham

Newport Beach

Condo proposal is too large for Newport

I try to stay current with developments proposed to my city, especially a major project like the Koll Center Residences. I oppose it in its current size. Its three huge 13-story buildings. So dense, so massive, so imposing on other buildings. It also will add a large amount of traffic.

There is no way this project fits into the area for which its proposed. I would turn it down.

Jo Carol Hunter

Newport Beach

Save us from Allman, Nugent

Im not a particularly religious person, but I do believe in living by the Golden Rule. With this thought in mind, I am begging religious leaders like Franklin Graham and Joel Osteen to help save our country from the likes of entertainer Ted Nugent and conservative commentator Jamie Allman.

If you have forgotten or didnt know, Nugent recently called for Democrats, the media and academics to be shot like rabid coyotes, while Allman tweeted he wanted to assault Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg with a hot poker.

I believe its time the likes of Graham and Osteen clearly and emphatically speak out and say, Enough is enough. Your comments are blasphemous, not to mention un-American.

Its time religious leaders put aside their personal political beliefs and help save this country. If they dont, then I am afraid their Golden Rule will mean very little.

Denny Freidenrich

Laguna Beach

How to get published: Email us at dailypilot@latimes.com. All correspondence must include full name, hometown and phone number (for verification purposes). The Pilot reserves the right to edit all submissions for clarity and length.An investigation into a controversial award application from Mariners Elementary School in Newport Beach concluded that while the principal at the time included inaccuracies about some school programs in the application to the California Department of Education, some concerns from teachers were unsubstantiated or even embellished, according to a letter released Wednesday.

The letter from Newport-Mesa Unified School District Deputy Supt. Russell Lee-Sung details the investigation conducted by Dana Point-based Nicole Miller and Associates. The letter is dated Feb. 7, 2017, and is addressed to former Mariners principal Laura Canzone, who previously was known as Laura Sacks.

Lee-Sung wrote that investigators found no evidence that Canzone made malicious or blatantly fabricated statements in the application submitted in fall 2015 for a California Gold Ribbon School Award, which the school received. However, they did determine that she included some inaccurate information, Lee-Sung wrote.

Lee-Sung, the districts chief academic officer, directed Canzone to refrain from providing any inaccurate or misleading information in documentation submitted on behalf of the district and said the letter was being added to her personnel file.

Canzone could not be reached for comment Thursday.

In 2016, after one school year at Mariners, Canzone was transferred to Costa Mesa Middle School as a principal on special assignment after she requested new duties. On March 7, 2017  a month after Lee-Sungs letter  she submitted a letter resigning from the district and was on paid administrative leave through June 30, according to documents.

District administrators released the 12-page letter summarizing the investigation after an appellate judge declined their request to block an Orange County Superior Court ruling that the public has the right to know the findings.

Among the reports conclusions was that a lack of communication and staff participation before Canzone submitted the application was a key contributor to the inaccurate statements about certain activities and programs at Mariners.

Investigators determined that Canzone did not keep her staff informed about the application process, did not share any portion of it with staff before submittal and did not notify staff when she filed the application.

[T]here was no evidence you refrained from sharing the application with the staff as a means to be secretive or to intentionally conceal things from the staff, Lee-Sung wrote. However, he added, if a better process and culture of collaboration existed among you and the staff members, there would likely have been improved clarity and accuracy of the application.

Lee-Sung also wrote that investigators noted that veteran teachers had difficulty adjusting to a new principal because they were accustomed to the prior principal who had been there approximately 15 years. The investigation also determined that those veteran teachers embellished their concerns surrounding the application.

John Caldecott, a former human-resources director for Newport-Mesa, fought a year-long legal battle with the district over his public records request to obtain documents about the investigation.

After reading the investigation summary, Caldecott said in a statement Thursday that he still questions why the human resources department rejected an initial complaint filed by Mariners Elementary teachers.

The responsibility for this out-of-control crisis lies at the doorstep of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District superintendent and board of education, he said.

District spokeswoman Annette Franco said: While we do not discuss personnel matters, what we can tell you is that Newport-Mesa Unified School District holds itself to high standards, thoroughly investigating all matters of concern. Our district employs objective and unbiased efforts to accurately determine the facts when addressing and investigating a concern.

Britt Dowdy, president of the Newport-Mesa Federation of Teachers, said the letter released Wednesday was very similar to a report provided to the teachers union.

Had the district dealt with the internal complaints differently, they would not have needed to hire Nicole Miller and Associates, Dowdy said.

Daniel Langhorne is a contributor to Times Community News.

Twitter: @DanielLanghornePhotographer Clifford Lester has devoted more than a decade to telling the stories of Holocaust survivors through his craft.

Lester, 62, has photographed close to 100 survivors, with 32 of the portraits lining walls along a long hallway in the student center at Cypress College, where he has been a photography instructor for 16 years.

Lesters portraits, lit only by windows, capture the emotions of his subjects during their most intimate, introspective moments.

The expressions are profound.

Every wrinkle, blemish and age spot are seen.

The subjects often-horrific testimonies are etched in text boxes alongside each portrait.

Every one of their stories are so unique, even though you can (say) they sort of went through similar things, Lester said. I go there with a sincere interest with what they have to say  and were just talking as Im photographing them.

His portraits will appear in a slideshow at Cypress College theater for the third annual Yom HaShoah event on April 17, where Holocaust survivors will share testimonies and World War II veterans involved in liberating the concentration and death camps in Germany will be recognized.

Clifford Lester describes one of his portraits of a Holocaust survivor on display in the gallery at Cypress Community Colleges student center. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley )

Both of Lesters parents are Holocaust survivors.

In November 1938, Lesters father, Harry, witnessed the violent pillaging of Jewish neighborhoods in Germany.

The event became known as Kristallnacht, or night of the broken glass, referring to the glass that blanketed the streets.

Lesters father fled to the U.S. in 1939.

Lesters mother, Ursula Lowenbach Foster, spent much of the war with her parents in Amsterdam and eventually went into hiding for 18 months with a non-Jewish family.

She later spent years speaking to thousands of American schoolchildren about her experiences during the Holocaust.

After his mothers death in 2004, Lester read letters his mother received from students who expressed gratitude for hearing her story.

The letters were so powerful, Lester said. They would talk about her courage and her bravery and how she impacted their lives and all these different things behind her message. I thought, Well she is gone. Im here. Ive got to continue her work.

For Lester, the logical way to do that would be through photographs.

Survivors have been photographed so many different ways, he said. I said, How can I do something different?

Lesters first portrait in the series was of Nathan Langer, a family friend and founder of Langer Juice Company.

Langer was taken to concentration camps with his family in 1939 and eventually escaped. He was the only member of his immediate family who survived.

Lester photographed Langer outside his factory in Commerce.

Speaking about the horrors he endured during the Holocaust, Langer became too distraught to continue and the photo session abruptly ended, Lester said.

If there is one survivor whose anguish still shows in his eyes and clearly the depths of his soul, it would be Nathan, Lester said.

Clifford Lester inspects prints he has created of Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans at Cypress Community College. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley )

Lester showed Langers portrait to Dr. Marilyn Harran, director of the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education at Chapman University.

Harran appreciated the image and sent Lester on assignments to photograph more Holocaust survivors.

He has since connected with survivor support groups and located survivors through a variety of other sources.

Lester researches his subject before each shoot and spends hours talking with him or her during the shoot.

I dont pose them at all, he said. All these portraits are done by conversation.

Another portrait is of Tova Cohen, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz at age 12 and credits her survival to being on Schindlers list.

During the shoot, Cohen spoke about her rebellious personality and once receiving 25 lashes by a Nazi guard without making a sound by chewing on her hands to keep from screaming.

While in Poland, Lester photographed survivor Philip Bialowitz, a U.S. resident who traveled the world to share his story.

Bialowitz was transported to the Sobibor death camp in Poland, where 250,000 Jews were sent.

Only about 50 survived.

The collection of survivors portraits at Cypress College is believed to be the only exhibit of its kind in any community college in the state, said Paul de Dios, dean of counseling, student development and admissions and records at Cypress College.

Its an opportunity to bring the community to our campus, from K-12 kids who are probably studying history to our own students on this campus and our own community, said de Dios, who helped spearhead the exhibit along with Lester. We like to promote diversity on this campus and we want our students to learn that diversity and to be inclusive along with the other core values that we have.

Clifford Lester stands in the gallery displaying his photos of Holocaust survivors at Cypress Community Colleges student center. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley )

In 2016, Lester organized the first Yom HaShoah Holocaust Day of Remembrance at Cypress College and invited several survivors to share their testimonies.

Yom HaShoah has been observed annually around the world since 1951 and Cypress third annual Yom HaShoah event will take place at 7 p.m. April 17.

Survivor Jacob Eisenbach will share his memories at the event for the third time.

I want people to know what the consequences can be to accepting ideas of hatred, discrimination and intolerance, Eisenbach said. Because this is what led to the Holocaust.

For the first time in the events history, U.S. World War II veterans involved in liberating the concentration and death camps in Germany will be recognized along with survivors.

World War II veteran Henry Nahoum, 98, of Laguna Woods is one of the veterans who will be honored.

In 1945, Nahoum was a member of the 109th Regiment of the 28th Infantry division. He approached a Nazi prison camp, prompting guards to run away.

Lester recently photographed Nahoum and is adding a section to the Cypress exhibit to include portraits of military veterans.

Adding veterans is a natural next step, said Lester, in part, because of the large number of veterans who take classes at Cypress along with the presence of a new veterans center on campus.

Lester is retiring from Cypress after the semester ends in May but said he will continue shooting portraits of Holocaust survivors and adding them to the exhibit.

Its rewarding, Lester said. Its an honor to me, beyond belief, that they want to share their stories with me.

The third annual Yom HaShoah event at Cypress College is at 7 p.m. April 17 at Cypress College, 9200 Valley View St., with the free event being staged inside the campus theater for the first time. Attendees are required to pre-register at https://bit.ly/2JzQekd. The ceremony also will be streamed live on the Cypress College Facebook page.

Lou Ponsi is a contributor to Times Community News.Barely back from spring break, a group of La Canada High School students is working overtime rehearsing for a spring musical that combines the talents of the choir, instrumental and theater departments in the dramatic tour de force Les Miserables.

Running April 19 through 22, the colossal production features an ensemble cast, choreography and live music that will be synchronized with choral performances. Though guided by director and choreographer Orlando Alexander and assistant director Zoe Bright, the show is entirely run by students.

With close to 80 students participating, the musical is one of the largest student-produced events at La Canada High, according to theater director Justin Eick.

Its a big show, he said. The last time I did this show (in 2010) I threw my back out.

The epic production is a fitting send-off to two LCHS seniors whove risen to the top of their respective fields and who happen to be playing the two male leads Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert  Anthony Crehan and Finn Sagal.

Crehan joined the theater class as a freshman and has appeared in more than a dozen Playhouse productions. He said he and Sagal had hoped this years musical might be Les Miserables. They were thrilled to discover earlier this year their hunches were right.

Last year in math class we were like, What if we did Les Mis? Crehan said of the selection made by Eick, choral director Dr. Jeff Brookey and music director Jason Stone. Its really cool that it happened that way.

Knowing Sagal was leaning toward the role of Javert, Crehan tried out for Valjean and snagged the part. It will be Crehans last high school production before he heads off to UCLAs Theater Department, a competitive program that accepts just 20 students each year. Hes excited to continue his craft.

The medium doesnt matter as much to me, Crehan said. What I love is being someone else for a little while and portraying someone else through my body and my actions.

Eick shared his thoughts on Crehans exceptional talents.

He has a work ethic that is indefatigable, and he truly cares about how other people are doing, Eick said. Hes one of the most humble and generous people youll ever see.

Sagal joined the choir freshman year, but only recently discovered his passion for vocal performance might guide his future career. Last August, he won 2017 Great American Songbook Youth Ambassador offered by Emmy and Grammy Award winning-artist Michael Feinstein and has since appeared in several high-profile performances.

He auditioned for Eicks advanced theater program last year and was accepted.

He has a natural charisma and an honesty that makes him unbelievably watchable, Eick said. You forget hes acting and get sucked into the story, which is rare to find in someone so young.

Sagal was eager to land the villainous role of Javert, known for its challenging vocals. But hes also looking forward to all students getting their moments in the spotlight, including female leads Nicole Reynolds (Fantine), Sarah Lee (Cosette) and Lisa Son (Eponine).

One of the great things about this show is everyone gets to shine, he said.

Accepted to UCLA and Northwestern University, Sagal has yet to make a final decision but knows he wants to study voice. Still, the thought of a last performance at LCHS is tinged with sadness.

Its very emotional, especially with a show like this thats so moving and so powerful, Sagal said. Its going to be very difficult from this point on, where everyone Im working with isnt my best friend.

For times and ticket prices, visit the La Canada Playhouse online.

sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardineId heard that Tinder was just for hookups (no thanks), but after giving every other dating app a try with no luck, I gave in. Within an hour, I matched with 33 men, but one in particular stood out. We talked on the phone and met for lunch. We clicked immediately as he made me laugh, my favorite thing to do.

He was so much fun to be around that I didnt want it to end. He drove us back to his place and we kissed on his couch  and only kissed  for hours. I fell asleep on his chest, and the next morning, he told me that he wouldve kissed me all night if Id stayed awake.

The more time I spent with him  at the beach in Santa Monica, at a Q&A at the Directors Guild  the more I fell for him. I was thinking that he could be the one. He seemed perfect and instead of looking for red flags, I remained optimistic.

Are you a veteran of L.A.'s current dating scene? We want to publish your story

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Then one day when I arrived to his house, he announced, Look, Im fostering a cat! (Red flag?) He introduced me to his new four-legged housemate and it seemed weird that he, a single guy in his forties with no marriages or kids, all of a sudden had a foster cat. A few days later, he also announced, Im sad to let you go, but I need to explore dating my ex-girlfriend, and Im ending it now so I dont hurt you. It wasnt me, he insisted. He needed to see where this other relationship could go.

Just as I thought of a future with him, it was over. (That cat? He was taking care of it for his ex.)

I was in shock and my head couldnt wrap around the fact that I didnt do anything wrong. Maybe I didnt do anything right? We stayed friends and within two months, he realized he had made a mistake. He broke up with his girlfriend and said, Shes not a good person. I want a relationship with someone whos available.

I really felt like the backup plan, but I had started to fall in love with him (I think) and we were a good match. I decided to give us another chance. We made each other laugh and once again, I started dreaming of a future with him.

More L.A. Affairs columns

We dated for another month before going on a trip together to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The vacation was amazing but when we got on the plane to come home, he began acting bizarrely. To start with, he picked a fight with the flight attendants. The WiFi wasnt working, and he insisted that one reset it. It escalated. At one point, he said she was being rude and he demanded to be treated with respect.

I begged him to stop, but he just kept hitting his call button. He even yelled, WiFi, at one point. When the poor flight attendants were at our seats, I mouthed the words, Im so sorry, as he scolded them. During the flight, he went up to the front of the plane. I have no idea what went down up there as I was hiding in my seat.

When we landed at LAX, he took off his hat and tried to distance himself from me, like he was trying to throw off the authorities. Once off the plane, uniformed officers approached. He told me to keep walking, even as they yelled at him to stop. He ignored them and I could hear him being tackled  but I was already halfway down the escalator. I didnt turn back.

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Thats a scary moment when you know your boyfriend is being added to the No Fly List.

He was arrested but later would end up blaming me for the entire ordeal, saying he was stressed from our trip. He claimed he didnt know who the cops were ordering to halt and that there was no reason why he should have stopped for them. (It was obvious to me.) He felt he did nothing wrong and was only demanding the respect he deserves. (Ironically, he didnt seem to respect the flight attendants, the cops or me.)

I thought back over the trip and realized there were a few things that I had overlooked. He argued with the car rental agent because they ran out of cars, and the agent threatened to call the police. He was rude to the Airbnb host and looked for all the problems with the rental instead of all the amazing features  just so he could dispute the charges.

He later wrote me an email telling me that I had abandoned him three times: at the airport, when I kept walking like he told me to; a few days later when I refused to take him to the ER (he claimed he had been injured during his scuffle with the cops); and when I walked to the nearest emergency exit and evacuated the relationship permanently.

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I kept wondering about what happened. What went wrong? Why had he acted like that?

Did he purposely sabotage a future with me because he was so afraid of commitment?

I dont know. But I knew I had to distance myself from him. I couldnt trust him. I mean, who lies about a cat?

Its hard breaking up with someone you love, but no matter how much you love them, sometimes you just have to love yourself more.

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The author lives in Valley Village and wrote the book Traveling Daisy, about her journey with cancer. Her website is LisaMarieWilson.com.

L.A. Affairs chronicles love and the dating scene in and around Los Angeles. If you have comments or a true story to tell, email us at LAAffairs@latimes.com.

To read this article in Spanish, click here

MORE L.A. LOVE STORIES 

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Im black. Hes white. Heres what happened

I went on a bunch of blind dates with total losers

I was sleeping alone in a strangers bed  and falling for him

home@latimes.comMontage Hotels & Resorts opened its first luxury resort in Laguna Beach in 2003. In honor of its 15th year, the resort brand with California locations in Laguna Beach and Beverly Hills will take 15% off the best available room prices.

The deal: The Sweet 15 offer is good at Montages in California as well as Deer Valley, Utah; Kapalua Bay, Hawaii; and Bluffton, S.C. Guests receive a hotel gift of two branded caps.

Payment is required in full when you reserve; no refunds or cancellations allowed with this rate.

The renovated lobby/lounge at Montage Laguna Beach, the brands first location. (Montage Hotels & Resorts )

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When: Book by Nov. 15 for stays through Dec. 31.

Tested: I checked availability for several hotels and found wide availability. (Montage Beverly Hills rooms from May 11-13 start at $774 a night, instead of $910, excluding taxes and resort fees.)

If you feel like a big splurge, 15th anniversary packages include a wardrobe redo and three nights in a suite at Montage Laguna Beach ($175,000) and a hair and makeup session and photo shoot by photographer John Russo, plus three nights in a suite at Montage Beverly Hills ($50,000).

Info: Montage Hotels, www.montagehotels.com/

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravelIf youre looking for a spring trip and love baby animals, you may want to head to Custer State Park in South Dakotas Black Hills. The park welcomed its first baby bison in late March  and about 450 more are expected to be born this spring.

The video above shows the cinnamon-colored calf take its first clumsy steps as it bonds with mom and other members of one of Americas largest publicly owned herds.

Millions of bison, sometimes referred to as buffalo, once roamed North America. By the late 1800s, only a few hundred were left. Europeans settling in the West had hunted the creatures and destroyed their habitat.

Custer State Park maintains its herd of 1,300 by having a roundup each fall (Sept. 28 this year). Its a chance to watch cowboys, cowgirls and park staff saddle up to rally the herd. Most return to the park; some are auctioned off.

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Spring also brings baby elk, deer and bighorn sheep that you can view in a drive along the parks 18-mile Wildlife Loop Road.

Info: Custer State Park

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That sunscreen that protects you? It harms Hawaiis corals. Now one airline is doing something about that

Cruise lines increase automatic gratuities and call them something else now

Swimming with giant sharks is not as scary as it sounds

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravelIn a fog of tear gas, a priest in the Congolese capital drags a woman to safety after she was shot. In the churchyard. By the police.

About a thousand miles away in the Ituri region, on the other side of the Democratic Republic of Congo, people fleeing a massacre climb out of boats and wade ashore, their homes burned to the ground, their dead unburied.

And 700 miles from there, in the Kasai region, the United Nations discovers 80 mass graves, then blames government soldiers for most of the deaths.

It is easy to see these recent scenes as unrelated incidents in the panoramic chaos of a vast and troubled nation spinning out of control.

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But there is another theory: The events are part of a plan.

Ida Sawyer, Human Rights Watch director for Central Africa, said senior security and intelligence officials in Congo told the organization about a scheme being carried out by President Joseph Kabilas powerful supporters in the government and security sector to derail elections scheduled for December and keep him in power: Sow violence across the country in a strategy of chaos.

Kabila, who inherited the presidency from his father in 2001 and won an election in 2006, was supposed to leave office in 2016 when his second and final term expired. He refused. Then he was supposed to step down in 2017 under a deal negotiated by mediators from the Catholic Church. Now 46, he and his government have used every ploy to keep him in power.

Meanwhile, his family has amassed a fortune with interests in at least 80 companies in a range of industries, including diamonds, copper and cobalt mining, and telecommunications.

This Congolese woman and her child fled violence in northeastern Congos Ituri region in December. They took shelter in this church with other families. (John Wessels / AFP/Getty Images )

Despite the countrys vast natural resources, 2 million children are at risk of starvation and 4.5 million people have fled their homes because of recent fighting. The U.N. is scheduled to host a global donor conference Friday seeking to raise $1.7 billion for Congos humanitarian crisis.

But Kabilas government will boycott the conference. It says there is no crisis.

That response left observers gasping. But it is consistent with a government that analysts describe as isolated, bellicose and running out of options. Senior officials have been sanctioned by the U.N. and major Western powers. Belgium, the former colonial power, has suspended aid.

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Kabila has long been hostile to international meddling in the country, said Stephanie Wolters, an analyst with the Pretoria, South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies. The president wants the worlds largest and most expensive U.N. peacekeeping mission  costing the international community $1.14 billion a year  out of Congo by 2020.

Kabila and his government are also extremely unpopular at home. One recent poll found that 80% of Congolese had a negative view of the president, 74% want him to leave office and 69% do not trust the Independent National Electoral Commission to organize free and fair elections.

Snapshots of recent violence offer a window into the human misery that the U.N. donor conference hopes to address.

At least 18 people have been killed in recent demonstrations at churches around the country, including eight in December at the St. Dominic Church in the capital, Kinshasa, where people were protesting Kabilas refusal to leave power. When police fired into the churchyard, the crowds ran screaming, video from local media showed. Police beat protesters with batons and arrested white-clad priests.

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Nationwide, about 300 protesters have been killed by security forces since 2015, according to Human Rights Watch.

In the case of the mass graves in the Kasai region uncovered in 2016 and 2017, a U.N. report blamed army soldiers who were cracking down on a local rebel group known as Kamwina Nsapu.

They sent in the army and in a dramatically disproportionate fashion set about killing many of these militiamen who were armed with nothing except brooms and sticks, said Jason Stearns, director of the Congo Research Group at New York University. So thousands of people, either civilians or insurgents, were killed by the government.

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At least 5,000 people, including many civilians, have died in fighting in Kasai since 2016, according to Human Rights Watch. The U.N. also implicated armed ethnic groups that the government had backed to help suppress the rebels.

Congolese protesters outside St. Francis de Sales Church in Kinshasa, the capital, on Feb. 25 call for President Joseph Kabila to resign. (John Wessels / AFP/Getty Images )

It is unclear who was behind the massacres that started in December in Ituri, in the northeast.

The military says youths from the Lendu ethnic group attacked villages of Hema people and burned dozens of settlements, raped women and killed at least 200 people.

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They cut off the heads and arms of some and even slit open their bellies, a survivor from the village of Seseti told Human Rights Watch. We were afraid to stay and bury them properly, so we just dug a small hole and quickly left.

But the attacks puzzled analysts and community leaders, because many of the attackers did not speak the local language. Survivors said outsiders were involved.

Many survivors referred to a hidden hand when describing those who might be behind the attacks, Sawyer said at a conference on the Congo crisis in Johannesburg this week. Seemingly professional killers came into their villages and hacked people to death with notable efficiency and brutality, in what appeared to be premeditated attacks. Some alleged that government officials may be involved.

Although there has been long-standing tension between the Lendu and the Hema, Stearns said that community leaders were adamant there were no local issues that fed the violence, and that many of them suspected external forces.

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The question is why now, he said. It does certainly appear that somethings going on that cant just be attributed to local communal conflict.

But would figures close to Kabila be willing to orchestrate violence to avoid elections?

I think its extremely plausible. We have already seen it, said Wolters, referring to months of delays in voter registration due to the violence in Kasai. Theres nothing it seems to me at this point that they would not be willing to do to serve their purposes and delay elections to keep Kabila in power.

Wolters said government ministers, military and security figures, senior parliamentary officials and Kabilas family were working to keep the president in office. Theres a long list of people whose political futures are linked to Kabila, and of course the longer they linger, the more the crackdowns go on, the more closely their futures are linked to him.

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Sawyer said some figures close to Kabila were speaking of changing the law or constitution to enable him to stay.

A Congolese woman mourns the death of a man who was killed when police opened fire on protesters at a Catholic church in Kinshasa on Feb. 25. (John Wessels / AFP/Getty Images )

Last year Human Rights Watch interviewed fighters from M23  a notorious rebel group that wreaked havoc for years in the eastern part of the country  who said they had been paid by members of the government to beat, arrest and kill people who took part in protests against Kabila in 2016. One recounted how he and others took care to hide the bodies of the dead in places where they would not be found.

The head of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Corneille Nangaa, said the main reason for the failure to hold elections in 2017 was the Kasai violence. In February, he said the new violence in Ituri could lead to more delays.

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Other experts doubted that violence was a government strategy. Stearns said the government was more focused on using political and administrative tactics to delay elections, such as tying up the opposition in protracted negotiations or insisting the entire population re-register to vote.

I think the government realizes that its in its own interests to try to hold elections and to use all means  legal and extralegal  to make sure these elections go in its favor, he said. Its banned opposition protests. Its banned the movement of opposition candidates across the country, so really they have a huge advantage compared with the opposition because of that.

If Kabila stepped down and chose a successor who went on to win in flawed elections, many Congolese would reject the legitimacy of the result, Stearns said.

I think that would undermine the confidence in democracy and electoral institutions and would set the country up for further instability and further violence in the future, he said.

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A protest organized by Catholic intellectuals against Congolese President Joseph Kabila on Feb. 25. (John Wessels / AFP/Getty Images )

Other experts echoed that concern.

Its pretty clear even to the hard-liners at this point that sooner or later this is going to end and its not going to end well, Wolters said. If the election doesnt take place and Kabila clings to power and comes up with flimsy excuses, or if the election goes ahead but its not credible, I think that could very much lead to an all-out conflict.

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

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Twitter: @RobynDixon_LATA saga thats already been widely likened to a spy thriller took on a series of new plot twists Thursday: a war of words over a watchdog groups scientific report, a growing diplomatic tug-of-war over a stricken Russian ex-intelligence agent and his daughter, and even a seeming family feud.

Britain said Thursday that an international chemical-weapons monitoring organizations report strongly bolsters the case for Kremlin guilt in last months poisoning of onetime spy Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed that the Skripals were exposed to a sophisticated nerve agent that it did not name in a summary of the report that was made public Thursday. Britain has earlier identified the nerve agent as Novichok, developed by Russia during the Cold War.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said there was no alternative explanation when it came to culpability for the apparent attack on the father and daughter on March 4 in the British cathedral city of Salisbury, where they were found slumped comatose on a public bench.

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Yulia Skripal, the daughter of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal (AP )

Only Russia has the means, motive and record, Johnson said. The Kremlin must give answers.

The Netherlands-based watchdog group, whose full report remained classified, did not identify the source of the toxin  an omission that was swiftly seized upon by Moscow to cast doubt on the findings. Russian officials have consistently described the entire episode as a Western-concocted provocation meant to discredit the Kremlin.

Britain said the reports characterization of the substance as highly purified supported its stance that the toxin could only have been produced by a state laboratory, although Moscow refuses to provide samples against which it could be matched.

At the same time, Russia stepped up demands for diplomatic access to Skripal, who remains hospitalized, and his daughter, who is is continuing her recovery in an undisclosed location after having been released earlier from the hospital.

A month has passed, yet nobody has seen them yet, Maria Zakharova, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, told reporters in Moscow. She insisted it was up to Britain to prove that these people arent being held hostage, and are not taking part in some horrible game.

A day earlier, Yulia Skripal, in a statement released on her behalf by Scotland Yard, declined what she called a kindly offer of assistance from the Russian Embassy in London. The embassy, which for weeks has offered a stream of caustic commentary about the incident, quickly suggested that the young womans statement had been fabricated or coerced.

With no possibility to verify it, the publication by the Metropolitan Police raises new questions rather than gives answers, the embassy said. We would like to make sure that the statement really belongs to Yulia. So far, we doubt it much.

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In the statement, Yulia Skripal said no one could speak for her and her father but they themselves. That was an apparent reference to a cousin in Russia, Viktoria Skripal, who has repeatedly popped up in interviews with official Russian media, and has offered to travel to Britain to bring her cousin home.

Members of the emergency services and police help colleague remove protective suit (DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS / AFP/Getty Images )

I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can, the ex-spys daughter said in her statement. At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.

She also thanked Viktoria Skripal for her concern, but asked her cousin not to visit me or try to contact me for the time being.

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The poisoning of father and daughter comes against the backdrop of an escalating confrontation between Russia and the West over Syria. More than two dozen countries, including the United States, announced the expulsion of Russian diplomats in solidarity with Britain over the poisoning of the Skripals, plunging relations to a post-Cold War low.

President Trump warned Russia this week of an impending missile strike against its ally, Syrian President Bashar Assad over the alleged use of chemical weapons against his own people, although the president subsequently walked back denunciations of Russian President Vladimir Putin for backing Assad.

Special correspondent Ayres reported from Moscow and staff writer King from Washington.

UPDATES:

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12:42 p.m.: This story was updated throughout with staff reporting and additional details.

This article was originally published at 8:25 a.m.President Trump on Thursday appeared to step back from an earlier aggressive stance on firing missiles at Syria, while some European nations debated their participation in any such military strike.

Trump, a day after taunting Russia, a key ally to Syrian President Bashar Assad, about its need to get ready for missile strikes in Syria, seemed to present a lesser sense of urgency about attacks in a new Twitter message.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! Trump tweeted Thursday.

Russia has said it would shoot down any cruise missiles targeting Syrian government and military installations.

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Russias military Thursday declared that Syrian government troops had taken control of the city of Duma, signaling the end of a wide-scale offensive to take back the rebel enclave in eastern Ghouta.

The announcement by Russia indicated that military police would be deployed Thursday to maintain order in the city, a Damascus suburb where a suspected chemical attack by the Assad government killed dozens of people during the weekend.

The city was in a transitional period toward coming under the control of Syrias legitimate government, said Maj. Gen. Yuri Yevtushenko, head of Russias reconciliation center in the country, according to Russian state news agency Tass.

Today marked a landmark event in Syrias history, Yevtushenko said. The state flag was hoisted on the Duma building which signaled [Damascus] control over this settlement and, hence, over all of eastern Ghouta.

Activists, rescue workers and medical groups have accused Damascus of deploying chemical weapons during a ferocious offensive to subdue opposition fighters in Duma.

Damascus and Moscow vehemently denied responsibility for any gas attack and asked the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to inspect the site of the purported chemical strike, an invitation the group accepted Tuesday.

Many observers had expected an imminent missile strike after Trump tweeted Wednesday Get ready. . . because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!

The pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor which tracks the violence in Syria via local activists, said concerns about a missile attack led to an alert for loyalist forces to abandon their bases.

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Danny Makki, a Damascus-based journalist, said military airports, including Dumair, Shayrat and T4 had been emptied, with the bulk of the governments air power moved to Russian bases or other secure locations.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has repeatedly marked chemical weapons use as a red line, insisted in a television interview with TF1 channel that Paris had proof that chemical weapons were used by the Assad government. He did not elaborate.

Macron said a decision to strike would need to be taken in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said during a news conference she would support a signal that this use of chemical weapons is not acceptable, according to a report in Die Welt. She maintained her country would not take part in military action.

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The BBC reported British Prime Minister Theresa May had summoned her Cabinet to discuss a possible strike.

Meanwhile, a defiant Assad, in a meeting with a delegation from ally Iran led by Ali Akbar Velayati, top advisor to Irans supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the threats of an attack by the West were based on the lies fabricated by these countries and their proxies in Syria, according to a report by the states Syrian Arab News Agency, or SANA.

Whenever the Syrian army achieves victory in the field, some Western countries rise [sic] their voices and intensify their movements in an attempt to change the track of events, Assad said, adding that these maneuvers would further destabilize the region.

Syrian state and pro-government media did not announce Dumas capture from rebels, but SANA displayed pictures of medium-grade arms said to be surrendered by the Army of Islam, the dominant faction in the city.

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A SANA report on Wednesday said some 12,000 militants and their families had already left Duma for rebel-held areas in the countrys north, and that evacuation was ongoing.

Nizar Abu Anas, a pro-opposition activist in Duma, said by phone Thursday that buses had entered Duma and were poised to leave once sufficient numbers gathered for evacuation.

The observatory said the Army of Islam had already relinquished its heavy weaponry and had provided maps of minefields as well as the network of tunnels the group had once used to smuggle materiel and supplies into Ghouta.

Observatory head Rami Abdul Rahman and Suad Khabiyah, an opposition journalist in touch with residents in Duma, said some 40 carloads of the Army of Islams top commanders had left the enclave Wednesday.

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The Russian police have started to enter, Abdul Rahman said in a phone interview Thursday.

He said the Army of Islams remaining leadership was hastening its departure from the city after residents had broken into the groups warehouses this week and found tons of food and fuel.

The discovery spurred a wave of anger; Ghouta had suffered under a years-long siege by loyalist forces. Residents had often complained of being deprived of staples like rice and bread, even as they struggled with skyrocketing prices.

Al Mayadeen, a Lebanese broadcaster aligned with Damascus, reported that a top Army of Islam cleric, Abu Abdul Rahman Kaakeh, had left eastern Ghouta on a bus Wednesday night.

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A spokesman for Dumas local council who calls himself Bilal Doumi to guard his safety said in a WhatsApp conversation Thursday there had been no official handover and that there were still fighters as well as a number of commanders who had not left the city.

Doumi also insisted that the Syrian government flag, reviled by the opposition and replaced with an alternative version, had only been briefly hoisted on a building in Duma, when a Syrian government civilian delegation, escorted by Russian military police and media, entered the city Wednesday.

When the civilian committee came, people gathered before the local council building to see what was going on, Doumi said. Some of them shouted pro-government slogans and I didnt see who raised the flag  after that some of the [Army of Islam] fighters were angry and broke up the gathering.

The enclave itself, which had been under the sway of a group of Islamist rebel factions since early 2013, stretched into a major square on the outskirts of the capital; the rebels would often conduct surprise attacks and kidnappings in the area.

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While their fellow fighters peppered the capitals eastern neighborhoods with mortar shells and rockets, the government pounded Ghouta with airstrikes.

Bulos is a special correspondent.

Twitter: @nabihbulos

UPDATES:

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2:35 p.m.: This article was updated throughout with President Trumps tweets and other developments.

This article was originally published at 9:10 a.m.A two-vehicle crash resulting in a vehicle fire Thursday afternoon closed Route 22 West in Northampton County and was causing significant backups eastbound, authorities said.

One person was taken by ambulance for treatment, a county 911 dispatch supervisor said.

It was reported about 3:20 p.m. on Route 22 West just east of Route 512. The dispatcher said the incident was in Hanover Township.

A Pennsylvania Department of Transportation traffic camera showed Pennsylvania State Police shortly before 4 p.m. forcing westbound traffic to exit at Route 191 in Bethlehem Township.

Fan photos from the Route 22 crash with Vehicle Fire in Hanover Twp, Northampton County..... Posted by Nester Video Production on Thursday, April 12, 2018

The eastbound backup extended to around Schoenersville Road, according to PennDOT.

UPDATE: Vehicle fire on US 22 westbound between PA 191/Nazareth Pk and PA 512/Center St. All lanes closed.  511PA Allentown (@511PAAllentown) April 12, 2018

Vehicle fire on US 22 eastbound between PA 512/Center St and PA 191/Nazareth Pk. There is a traffic disruption.  511PA Allentown (@511PAAllentown) April 12, 2018

State police were not immediately providing information on the incident.

Fire crews had cleared by a little after 4 p.m., and the road was expected to reopen once the vehicles were towed away, according to the 911 center.

PennDOT was reporting the incident cleared by about 4:30 p.m.

CLEARED: Vehicle fire on US 22 westbound between PA 191/Nazareth Pk and PA 512/Center St.  511PA Allentown (@511PAAllentown) April 12, 2018

CLEARED: Vehicle fire on US 22 eastbound between PA 512/Center St and PA 191/Nazareth Pk.  511PA Allentown (@511PAAllentown) April 12, 2018

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.The Lehigh Valley is about to get its first liquefied natural gas tank.

Thursday afternoon the Bethlehem Planning Commission approved UGI Energy's plans for an 80-foot-tall liquefied natural gas storage tank on an almost 100 acres of land along Easton Road on Lehigh Valley Industrial Park VII property.

The commission voted 3-0 to grant final land development approval for the project, conditioned on meeting several city requests.

Last year, the city zoning hearing board granted UGI special exception as well as two variances, said Marco Calderon, director of business development for UGI Energy Services.

But UGI modified its plans in January and eliminated the need for the variances. The project approved Thursday reduces the storage tank's height from 98 to 80 feet and changes the main access road from Ringhoffer Road to Easton Road. An emergency access road will remain on Ringhoffer at the request of the fire department, Calderon said.

The project had been met with resistance from neighboring Lower Saucon Township, which was concerned that the proposed entrance Ringhoffer Road would stress township roads and put neighbors in harm's way if there was an environmental disaster on the site.

Lower Saucon appealed the zoning board's decision in Northampton County Court. Calderon said Thursday that an agreement had just been filed with the court over the appeal, but did not provide further details.

By modifying its plans, UGI negated the primary items that the township was appealing.

UGI plans to build the concrete storage tank, which will store liquefied natural gas, and a handful of outbuildings on the site. On very cold days, the gas will be pumped into the local natural gas pipeline to supplement supply, Calderon explained.

There could be some winters that it never operates, while others it might be used five to 10 times, Calderon said. When it is in operation, two or three employees would be on site.

The property is zoned for industrial use and sits on the far reaches of Bethlehem Steel's former 1,800-acre plant, around an area being redeveloped into industrial and business parks.

UGI had been granted variances for the height of the tank and exceeding the impervious coverage requirements on the site. With the project revisions, it avoided the need for the variances.

Planning commission member Lou Stellato expressed concerns that hunters could stumble upon the property unintentionally.

Calderon assured him it would be well posted and the facility would be surrounded by an 8-foot-tall security fence topped with barbed wire.

The commission also granted UGI a sidewalk and curbing deferral.

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.A community dialogue has resulted in a scaled-back proposal for new residence hall regulations adjacent to Lafayette College, Easton officials said Wednesday night.

The city in March unveiled a proposed new College Hill/Institutional 1 Transition Zone that would permit, without a special exception from the zoning hearing board, "a mix of residential and non-residential uses that will accommodate current and future College Hill and Lafayette College needs and amenities."

College Hill residents came out strongly against the proposal, calling it tailor-made to permit the mixed-use dorm rejected last September by the city planning commission in the area of McCartney, Cattell and High streets.

The planning commission last month voted against backing the new transition zone.

Mayor Sal Panto Jr. convened an ad hoc committee of city officials, Lafayette representatives and residents, resulting in a new proposal scheduled to be introduced by city council April 25. A vote would follow May 9.

"It's definitely changed, I think for the better," Panto said following council's meeting Wednesday night.

The new transition zone proposal narrows the scope of permitted uses, in response to residents' concerns, said Stephen Nowroski, city zoning director.

It would still permit education uses and amenities open to students, staff, residents and visitors alike, Nowroski said.

As originally proposed, the zone would permit, without a special zoning exception, uses including multifamily housing; residential low-rise and mid-rise developments; mixed-used residential and business buildings; a mixed-use dormitory; eating and drinking places; retail specialty establishments; professional services; administrative offices and educational services.

The new proposal is still being drafted ahead of its introduction in two weeks, he said Wednesday.

Part of the goal in tweaking the scope of permitted uses is to quell neighbors' concerns about classrooms encroaching off campus into College Hill, Nowroski said.

Once the transition zone is finalized, the city plans to address residents' call to establish a boundary between Lafayette College and the neighborhood, Nowroski said.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.A 41-year-old Phillipsburg area man was charged Thursday with attempted homicide in a Dec. 19 shooting in Easton, city police say.

Shareef Boston. (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Shareef N. Boston was named a person of interest soon after the Dec. 19 gunfire in the 1000 block of Washington Street that wounded a 53-year-old man in the leg, police said.

The injury was not life-threatening, police said. The victim was walking toward a home when he was hit, police said. The home was struck by gunfire, police said.

Boston was not in custody as of Thursday afternoon.

He was also charged with aggravated assault, propelling a missile into an occupied structure, person not to possess a firearm and firearms not to be carried without a license, records in District Judge Richard Yetter III's court in Wilson Borough show. He has a previous felony conviction, police said.

He is believed to be in the Easton or Phillipsburg area and should be considered armed and dangerous, police said.

The incident was reported at 8:16 p.m. and occurred on the sidewalk near South Warren Street, police said.

On March 27, 2017, Boston used a baton to smash the windows of his former girlfriend's car on the 1000 block of Washington, police said in court papers. That led to a criminal mischief warrant and a protection-from-abuse order against Boston, police said.

The gunshot victim was heading to see the same woman on Dec. 19 when a Jeep SUV slowed down on Washington Street and a man opened the passenger-side window and began to fire at the victim, police said. Only one of several shots fired hit the victim, police said.

Witnesses said they heard between four and eight gunshots.

Later that night, the ex-girlfriend said the SUV she saw matched one driven by Boston, police said.

A woman who owns a tan 2004 Jeep Liberty registered in New Jersey -- and was said to be Boston's girlfriend -- was contacted and told investigators that Boston was the only other person who drove the vehicle, police said. Boston was behind the wheel at the time of the shooting on Dec. 19, she told police, court records say.

She allowed a search of the Jeep and two spent 9mm sheep casings were found, the same caliber of round located at the house on Washington Street, Pennsylvania State Police would later determine, court papers say.

The woman said she owns no firearms and didn't know why the shell casings were in her vehicle, police said.

The vehicle matches an image of an SUV captured by a surveillance camera about the time of the shooting on Washington Street, police said.

A search warrant was obtained for Boston's cellphone number and officers learned Boston called his ex-girlfriend 27 times between 3:45 p.m. and 8:06 p.m. Dec. 19, police said. He also called the owner of the Jeep at 8:30 p.m., police said.

Analysis of Boston's cellphone number indicated he was in Phillipsburg earlier in the evening but was later in the sector that includes the 1000 block of Washington, police said.

The night of Dec. 31, Boston used the phone to call his ex-girlfriend and issued a "veiled threat" telling her to have a good night and he'd see her soon, police said. A few days later he called her again, telling her "you or one of your kids gonna be out next time," police said.

In both cases she said she recognized Boston's voice, police said.

On April 9, Boston's mother told police that Boston admitted to her that he shot a man in the leg and "was waiting to be picked up by police."

If you know where he is, call Northampton County emergency dispatch at 610-759-2200 or the city police tip line at 610-250-6635. Callers can remain anonymous.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.A dump truck driver was injured in a collision with a Norfolk Southern Corp. train Wednesday on the grounds of a Nazareth area cement plant.

It occurred at 3:47 p.m. at Lehigh Cement's Nazareth Plant, 3938 Easton Nazareth Highway (Route 248) in Lower Nazareth Township, said Krzysztof Burek, plant manager.

The driver was taken by Bethlehem Township EMS to St. Luke's University Hospital, Fountain Hill, according to Colonial Regional police. He was seriously injured, suffering a gash to the head, Patrolman Andrew Laudenslager confirmed.

The driver's identity was not immediately released.

He is the owner-operator of the truck, working as a contractor for Lehigh Cement, police said.

The driver crossed into the path of the train, and the train hit the truck, according to police. The truck was empty at the time, and the driver was heading out of the plant, said.

The crash remained under investigation, according to police.

The internal plant railroad crossing is marked, and investigators were trying to determine whether the driver stopped as required, Burek said.

A tri-axle dump truck is damaged after being struck by a Norfolk Southern train April 11, 2018, at Lehigh Cement's Nazareth Plant, 3938 Easton Nazareth Highway (Route 248) in Lower Nazareth Township. The driver of the truck was seriously injured and taken to an area hospital. (Kurt Bresswein | For lehighvalleylive.com)

"The train crew applied the train's emergency braking, but was unable to avoid striking the truck," Norfolk Southern spokesman Jonathan Glass said. "The train was traveling under 20 mph. The train crew was not injured."

The southbound general merchandise train operates in local service and was en route to Allentown, Glass said. Norfolk Southern assisted local authorities in investigating the incident, he said.

In addition to Colonial Regional police, Lower Nazareth's Hecktown Volunteer Fire Co. and Nazareth's Vigilance Hose Co. 1 were among those responding.

The train remained stopped until about 5:25 p.m., when it moved about 100 yards forward. At that point, it comprised two locomotives and five empty rail cars. It continued off site, headed into Nazareth, a few minutes later.

Fast Lane Towing responded to remove the tri-axle truck.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.A group of Nazareth Area parents were outraged when the county election board failed to move polls out of their local elementary school.

So they're taking their fight to Harrisburg.

The group PA Parents for Safe Voting formed Wednesday to lobby Pennsylvania legislators to make it illegal to put polls in schools on Election Day unless there's no alternative.

The group formed after Butz Elementary School was left open as a polling place on Nov. 7 even though most of the Bushkill Township school was locked down due to a state police manhunt for an active shooter.

"When parents of Butz Elementary learned that their school could not honor or enforce the lockdown due to the building serving as a polling location, those parents quickly mobilized to demand voting get moved away from Butz," said the group in a prepared statement.

The group formed a Facebook page, a Twitter account and hashtag -- #paparents4safevoting.

The parents unsuccessfully took their cause to the Northampton County election commission meeting March 22. One election commission member said she needed more time before approving a polling place change. Another said polling places belong in schools and a third recommended the school district take a teacher in-service day on Election Day.

Superintendent Dennis Riker surveyed parents to see whether they're in favor of closing Butz Elementary for the May 15 election. The period to participate in the survey expired April 7. Riker said the school board will probably vote on a plan for Butz at the April 24 meeting.

Northampton County County took at 5-4 vote in line with the parents' request. They voted April 6 to support a state law that would encourage local authorities to keep polls out of schools whenever possible.

Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.Industries SCHWING Technologies showing thermal cleaning solutions at the NPE 2018 in Orlando

SCHWING general manager Thomas Schwing. Photo: SCHWING Technologies

12.04.2018 15:37:38 - Orlando is once again the meeting point for the international plastics sector this year as it was in 2015. In line with the leading American plastics trade fair, NPE, SCHWING Technologies will inform visitors on systems to thermally clean plastic contamination from machine parts at booth S26199 from May 7-11, 2018.



(live-PR.com) - Neukirchen-Vluyn (Germany), April 12, 2018. Orlando is once again the meeting point for the international plastics sector this year as it was in 2015. In line with the leading American plastics trade fair, NPE, SCHWING Technologies will inform visitors on systems to thermally clean plastic contamination from machine parts at booth S26199 from May 7-11, 2018. "Our systems work extremely - Neukirchen-Vluyn (Germany), April 12, 2018. Orlando is once again the meeting point for the international plastics sector this year as it was in 2015. In line with the leading American plastics trade fair, NPE, SCHWING Technologies will inform visitors on systems to thermally clean plastic contamination from machine parts at booth S26199 from May 7-11, 2018. "Our systems work extremely fast, are safe, energy-efficient, eco-friendly and clean reliably and gently," emphasized Thomas Schwing, general manager at the company and their expert at the NPE.



With its VACUCLEAN, INNOVACLEAN and MAXICLEAN systems, the German plant manufacturer is an internationally successful specialist in removing polymers. Since 1969 SCHWING offers intelligent and reliable systems for any metal parts and tools in the plastics industry. The benefits for the plastics industry include shorter machine downtimes and higher service lives of cleaned tools and machine parts.



Schwing will be exhibiting three green cleaning systems at the NPE 2018:



- The gentle VACUCLEAN vacuum pyrolysis system requires just electricity and water. This system is ideal for cleaning granulating spinnerets and packs, filter bundles, filter discs, film extrusion dies, extrusion screws, spin nozzles, melt-blown dies and spunbond dies.



- The INNOVACLEAN fluidized bed pyrolysis system functions at high speed with no excess water or other waste products. It is suitable for almost all polymers including high-temperature polymers such as LCP, PEI, PPS, PI, as well as PVC and halogenated polymers such as PTFE. The system is ideal for cleaning die plates, screw elements, special profile dies, hot runner distributors, spin nozzles and assembled spin packs.



- MAXICLEAN, a gas-fired pyrolysis oven cleans by thermal oxidation. The system is ideal for tools and parts such as heat exchangers, extrusion screws, large extrusion tools, granulating discs and hot runner tools.



Schwing also provides "Cleaning Shops", full turnkey cleaning centers ranging from dismantling through to thermal cleaning, afterburning and inspection. The company also offers cleaning services within Germany and enables customers to perform specific tests at Schwing's corporate headquarters in Neukirchen-Vluyn.



For more information, please visit Schwings website at:



SCHWING Technologies

SCHWING Technologies has been operating since 1969 and is the worldwide technological leader for high-temperature systems for thermal cleaning, thermo-chemical finishing and heat treatment of metal parts and tools. The owner-managed company constructs, manufactures and operates its systems at its headquarters in Neukirchen-Vluyn in Germany's Lower Rhine region. Built upon the achievements of German engineering, the medium-sized business is globally the best-known specialist in the removal of plastics. Among its around 2,500 international clients are companies from the plastics and fiber industries, as well as from the chemicals and automobile sectors. With its 80-strong personnel, the company is equipped with the tools and systems for any cleaning need and delivers the best economy, ecology and quality. SCHWING is also a reliable service partner for contract cleaning by cleaning more than 250,000 tools and parts each year to the highest environmental and qualitative standards. In the words of Ewald and Thomas Schwing, the two managing directors at SCHWING Technologies GmbH, So far, there has not been a single component that we have not been able to free from polymers and inorganic contaminants.

fast, are safe, energy-efficient, eco-friendly and clean reliably and gently," emphasized Thomas Schwing, general manager at the company and their expert at the NPE.With its VACUCLEAN, INNOVACLEAN and MAXICLEAN systems, the German plant manufacturer is an internationally successful specialist in removing polymers. Since 1969 SCHWING offers intelligent and reliable systems for any metal parts and tools in the plastics industry. The benefits for the plastics industry include shorter machine downtimes and higher service lives of cleaned tools and machine parts.Schwing will be exhibiting three green cleaning systems at the NPE 2018:- The gentle VACUCLEAN vacuum pyrolysis system requires just electricity and water. This system is ideal for cleaning granulating spinnerets and packs, filter bundles, filter discs, film extrusion dies, extrusion screws, spin nozzles, melt-blown dies and spunbond dies.- The INNOVACLEAN fluidized bed pyrolysis system functions at high speed with no excess water or other waste products. It is suitable for almost all polymers including high-temperature polymers such as LCP, PEI, PPS, PI, as well as PVC and halogenated polymers such as PTFE. The system is ideal for cleaning die plates, screw elements, special profile dies, hot runner distributors, spin nozzles and assembled spin packs.- MAXICLEAN, a gas-fired pyrolysis oven cleans by thermal oxidation. The system is ideal for tools and parts such as heat exchangers, extrusion screws, large extrusion tools, granulating discs and hot runner tools.Schwing also provides "Cleaning Shops", full turnkey cleaning centers ranging from dismantling through to thermal cleaning, afterburning and inspection. The company also offers cleaning services within Germany and enables customers to perform specific tests at Schwing's corporate headquarters in Neukirchen-Vluyn.For more information, please visit Schwings website at: www.thermische-reinigung.de/en/schwing-thermal-cleaning.html SCHWING TechnologiesSCHWING Technologies has been operating since 1969 and is the worldwide technological leader for high-temperature systems for thermal cleaning, thermo-chemical finishing and heat treatment of metal parts and tools. The owner-managed company constructs, manufactures and operates its systems at its headquarters in Neukirchen-Vluyn in Germany's Lower Rhine region. Built upon the achievements of German engineering, the medium-sized business is globally the best-known specialist in the removal of plastics. Among its around 2,500 international clients are companies from the plastics and fiber industries, as well as from the chemicals and automobile sectors. With its 80-strong personnel, the company is equipped with the tools and systems for any cleaning need and delivers the best economy, ecology and quality. SCHWING is also a reliable service partner for contract cleaning by cleaning more than 250,000 tools and parts each year to the highest environmental and qualitative standards. In the words of Ewald and Thomas Schwing, the two managing directors at SCHWING Technologies GmbH, So far, there has not been a single component that we have not been able to free from polymers and inorganic contaminants. Contact information:

SCHWING Technologies GmbH



Oderstrae 7

47506 Neukirchen-Vluyn



Contact Person:

Nicola Leffelsend

PR Department

Phone: +49 2845 930 146

eMail: eMail



Web: http://www.schwing-technologies.com

Author:

Nicola Leffelsend

e-mail

Web: http://www.schwing-technologies.com

Phone: +49 2845 930 146 12.04.2018 15:37:38 -

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African Battery extends auger programme at Kisinka 12-04-2018 10:36



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Beowulf Mining begs patience of shareholders over Kallak approval 12-04-2018 15:13



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Bitcoin unexpectedly climbs over $8,000 on Thursday 12-04-2018 15:00



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Europe midday: Stocks gain as Syria tensions ebb, euro slips 12-04-2018 15:16



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Stock Market News

Friday preview: Chinese trade data, US consumer confidence in focus 12-04-2018 16:59



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Results round-up 12-04-2018 18:40



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SDX Energy makes sizeable gas discovery at Egyptian asset 12-04-2018 08:09



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

Syrian govt forces take control of Douma; US ponders airstrike 12-04-2018 09:27



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The beginning of the school year when you got to show off your new duds, new cars, new looks!

Sports! Playing, cheering, watching high school athletics.

The arts: Dramatic arts, musical groups and shows, graphic arts groups, debate, etc.

The prom! No dancing the night away or punch bowl antics.

The daily interactions. Just being with the group, hanging with friends and classmates.

Access to college recruiters and advisors  its harder to line up higher education.

Walking onstage to get a diploma while all the family is watching with everyone elses family.

Vote

View ResultsCulture / Art Republik

Apr 12, 2018 | By Art Republik

More often than not, intriguing and sometimes complicated cross-disciplinary practices are driven by art collectives made up of individuals with varied skills. The art world seems to continually question and redefine itself through cross-disciplinary practices, and art is increasingly used to illustrate and express the content of other disciplines. It is common to see art used to give visual form to an electronic music composition or illustrate a science project. However, it takes great art producers, in the form of collectives, to demonstrate the value of art in the active development of other disciplines and produce works that question the conventional in concept, creation and practice.

Vertical Submarine, an independent art collective from Singapore, is known for their playful installations and works. Their recent project took the form of a maze that dogs could explore by following their owners voices through speakers, and a smaller one for cats that chased remote-controlled mechanical mice. In addition to eight other pet-friendly installations, the works were part of the exhibition, PAW-sitive: Interactive Art for Pets held at the School of the Arts Gallery in October 2017. This innovative project led by Silversky Ltd involved collaborations involving artmakers, animal behaviourists and veterinarians. Art is not used to merely make the maze look fanciful, but rather, design an interactive space for pets and their owners to experience.

Malaysia-based group Toccata Studio has worked across theatre, dance, art, light and music. One project is 2020: Futurists Diaries, an experimental performance where scientists, artists and clones explored the concepts of time and space. Dancers interacted with light installations, and a live painting took centrestage. Another is Space Age: The Phantom Power, a contemporary classical performance featuring five musical instruments. In the words of founder Tan E-Jan, their practice is cross-disciplinary not only within all art forms but outside of them as well.

Singapore-based art collective INTER-MISSION reflects a growing number of artists collaborating across different disciplines. Their collaborative works span across video art, audiovisual, performance, installation and interactive art. With a focus on research, INTER-MISSION believes cross-disciplinary art practices provide a platform to uncover new or unknown methods of working, and to tap into a collective pool of knowledge and skills. Urich Lau, a member of the collective notes that artmaking is never a lone effort and that its definitely a form of co-existence. Their involvement in the Interdisciplinary Art Festival Tokyo and the OSMOSIS  Audiovisual Media Festival (Taiwan) has contributed to awareness and dialogue about cross-disciplinary art practices and approaches in Singapore, Japan and Taiwan.

Ace Mart, a 24-hour minimart that sold artworks alongside items regularly found in convenience stores was a conceptual work conceived by Ace House Collective. The Yogyakarta-based art collective has collaborated with institutions, restaurants and independent practitioners to produce conceptual projects inspired by youth-pop culture. The collective aims to interact with the community where its gallery is located, including taxi drivers and construction workers, through blurring the space between the gallery and its surrounding environment. The transformed gallery space resembling a provisional shop represents conceptual layers of artmaking while bringing new meanings to objects and spaces that were previously not associated with art.

This article was written by Daryl Goh for Art Republik 18.Properties / Hotels

Made from 180-degree transparent walls, the Finn Lough Bubble Domes located in a 50-acre forest on the remote peninsula of Aghnablaney, reminding one of Queen Boudica, leader of the British Celtic Iceni tribe

Apr 12, 2018 | By Jonathan Ho

There are many interesting sights and points of interest in Northern Ireland including the Titanic Belfast, a visitor attraction in Belfast, opened in 2012 as a monument to Northern Irelands maritime heritage on the site of the former Harland & Wolff shipyard where the RMS Titanic was built; but I dare say that the novelty factor (and wow factor) of the Finn Lough Bubble Domes beat even Ulster Museum and Belfast Castle.

Experience Northern Ireland: Finn Lough Bubble Domes

Irelands geography comprises low-lying mountains, lush vegetation and inland river, supported by bio-diverse lush vegetation. Not many know this but the land of was covered by thick woodlands until the Middle Ages and that the true heritage of Ireland lies in her rich forests.

Made from 180-degree transparent walls, the Finn Lough Bubble Domes located in a 50-acre forest on the remote peninsula of Aghnablaney remind one of Queen Boudica, leader of the British Celtic Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire in AD 60 using nothing but small-scale guerilla warfare which kept the overwhelming might of Roman army at bay using Irelands greatest military asset, the forest landscapes.

Technically balloon transparent rooms, Finn Lough Bubble Domes keep the Northern Ireland landscape allowing you to fall asleep in the twilight, wooded surrounds of Northern Ireland without any of the pesky bugs to ruin your stay. Its the best way to experience true Ireland, totally immersed in the surrounding nature.

Each Bubble Dome features cozy cabin amenities and all the comforts of luxury glamping like custom four-poster beds, ensuite bathrooms, private sitting area, and soft robes. Meanwhile, the crystal clear shell of Finn Lough Bubble Domes allows you to enjoy your repast or books with the sunrise or gaze at the stars as the sunsets. Its best to come try out the Finn Lough Bubble Domes because next time someone accuses you of living in the bubble, you can say that you literally have.

Escape the world and enjoy the beauty, tranquility and romance of Northern Ireland. Rooms start from $320. Visit Finlough.comIn lieu of Virgil Ablohs recent appointment as Louis Vuittons menswear designer, New York-based artist Ceeze, RelevantCustoms and richierange collaboration to create a special-edition Air Jordan 1 sneaker. The Off-Louis custom features Louis Vuittons signature monogram across its upper, with a complementary tonal brown colorway.

Some details are reminiscent of Ablohs previous Air Jordan 1 collaboration with Nike, such as the medial side inspired by the signature Off-White branding and exposed stitching on the Swoosh. LOUIS and VUITTON adorn the left and right midsole, features the designers hallmark quotation marks.

Only 10 pairs of this Ceeze Creative Studios x Relevant Customs Off-Louis Air Jordan 1s are up for sale. They will be available from Ceezes website for $4,000 USD on April 14.This content is from: Patents

President Trump has already made his mark by appointing a USPTO director and taking a stand against China. Panellists at the Fordham IP Conference, including David Kappos and James Pooley, assessed the impact Trump could have on IPPTAB Forum 168

Managing IP is holding two PTAB Forums in May, in New York and Palo Alto. The events are free to in-house counsel to attend.

The introduction of the America Invents Act has revolutionised the patent litigation system and, with over five years in practice, there is no doubt that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has had a profound impact on the global patent landscape.

The forums will contemplate the biggest PTAB issues and provide strategic, innovative recommendations for future proceedings. Topics to be discussed include: lessons learned and tips for future success; evolving procedural challenges associated with AIA; influences on filings, success rates and identifying what is working well; decoding recent decisions; and examination of the future of the PTAB.

You can find out more information about the Managing IP PTAB Forum here, and download the brochures for each event below.

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The forum is an opportunity to debate the biggest issues that are influencing PTAB proceedings, and to hear from world leaders in corporations, government officials and legal experts on implementing winning strategies to overcome complex issues and the changing AIA landscape.Chennai: As Prime Minister Narendra Modi is all set for his Tamil Nadu visit, #GoBackModi emerged as the top trend on Twitter on Thursday morning. Twitter is also venting the anger at Central government's delay in setting up Cauvery Water Management Board, despite a Supreme Court order,

PM Modi will arrive in Tamil Nadu to inaugurate a major defense exhibition near Chennai. People are venting their anger on Twitter through the hash tag #GoBackModi.

For the past few days, Tamil Nadu had been in an eye of storm of bandhs, protests with actors and politicians, farmers joining hands against the center's delay.

We oppose Modi not personal but political. We are against his divisive politics. #GoBackModi Ra Sindhan () (@sindhan) April 12, 2018

#GoBackModi its just shows people anger. Its just sample. It surely reflect in 2019 parliament election and as well as in Karnataka also. Hereafter Please do anything useful for the people who voted for u #Modi ji. R.Naveen Kumar (@NaveenBE29) April 12, 2018The railway workers' strike has encouraged other sections of the working class (and also the students) to mobilise. Refuse collectors, Air France workers, civil servants, lawyers, postal workers, hospital workers and care workers assisting the elderly (among others) are gearing up for action, and every day new layers are joining the fight. The convergence of struggles is no longer just a slogan; it has become a fact.

However, in order to force the government to retreat, this will have to be stepped up, because Macron and his ministers are determined not to make any concessions. They want to inflict a heavy defeat on the railway workers, this vanguard of our class, which will make it easier to attack all the other workers, in addition to also the unemployed, pensioners, high school students and university students.

The railway workers are carrying out a militant strike under a barrage of media slander. All day long, journalists and politicians pouring out their sympathy on television for the passengers united in their hatred of the strikers. With every movement of the railway workers, we see the same hypocritical fanfare in the big media. Despite this, many passengers support the struggling railway workers, as most of them are also victims of the reactionary policies of recent governments, including that of Macron.

Rank-and-file must overcome the passivity of TU leaders

Support for the railway workers' strike is expressed in various ways, including the success in raising strike funds. This is very important and also significant. But the best way to support this struggle  and in fact, the only one that can guarantee its victory  is with the mobilisation of a growing number of workers in an all-out strike. The union leadership should throw all their forces in this direction. Instead, they are involved in so-called consultations with the government. From the point of view of the government, the main role of such consultations is to weaken the struggle on the ground by claiming that dialogue is continuing and that therefore there is no reason to stay out on strike.

A strong strike by one or two sectors of the working class could trigger a rapid expansion of the strike movement / Image: Flickr, Rafael Lopez

That said, the passivity of the trade union leadership is not an absolute obstacle to the extension of the movement. France is the country of June 1936 and May 1968, two powerful, general all-out strikes that did not come from the union leaders, but the rank-and-file. There is no shortage of militant workers and trade unionists in the public and private sectors, who see what is going on every day and are ask themselves if it is not time for them to join in as well. Different workers are asking themselves what to do, and are sending each other signals of encouragement. In this explosive context, a strong strike in one or two sectors could be enough to trigger a rapid expansion of the strike movement.

The rise of student mobilisations is another important element in the situation. In the space of a few days, a large number of universities have mobilised. Massive General Assemblies are being held, pickets and occupations are being organised, links are being forged between students and the labour movement. The government is reacting with police violence  in addition to attacks by far-right groups. But this violence only has the effect of strengthening the mass movement of students. They also have the effect of increasing the workers' anger. If the government wants to have a replay of May 68 to celebrate its 50th anniversary, they are going about it right!

Massive General Assemblies are being held at universities all over France / Image: Revolution

Resist austerity and attacks on working conditions

Different sections of mobilised workers have their own particular demands, of course, but taken as a whole, they converge into one. Hiring and firing, wage levels, working conditions, casualisation are they key questions. At every turn the workers are mobilising against wage austerity and the deterioration of their working conditions, which have been worsening for many years. The Macron government wants to go even further in the casualisation of the workers, cutting their real purchasing power and, in general, destroying of the social gains of the labour movement. Even assuming that Macron were to back down this time, it would only be a delaying tactic and he would return to the offensive at a later stage.

Therefore what is needed is for various sectoral struggles to converge into one united political struggle: a general struggle against the Macron government and its entire programme. Political demonstrations can be a powerful lever of the strike, opening up the perspective not only repelling this or that counter-reform, but bringing the government down by dissolving the National Assembly and calling early parliamentary elections.

The workers must converge into a general struggle: bring down the government! / Image: Flickr, Gwenael Piaser

Of course, this would require a powerful movement of strikes in the factories. The mobilisation of 14 April in Marseille shows the way. At the national level, the date of 5 May has been set by Melenchon for a political rally. The principle of calling such a political demonstration is absolutely correct. But can the railway workers, for example, hold on until 5 May? An earlier date would have made it possible to connect the national political demonstration to the strike movement, which alone can push back  or even bring down  the government. On its own, a political demonstration will not be enough, even if it is massive.

Considering all the above, it is impossible to predict the dynamics of the struggle in the days and weeks ahead. The 5 May demonstration could be huge and could be taking place in the context of a rising strike movement, or could even give renewed energy to this movement. But in the coming days, the initiative of 14 April, in Marseille, is an example that should be taken up at the national level  and the sooner the better.While the attention of the international media is drawn to the threatened US airstrike on Syria, the Palestinian mobilisations for the right of return of refugees and the ruthless killing of demonstrators by the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) in the Gaza Strip continues.

The massacre carried out at the Gaza border by IDF snipers on 30th March  who killed 18 Palestinian demonstrators and injured several hundreds  and repeated on 6th April, is not an accident. It is the consequence of a conscious long-term strategy by the Israeli state aimed at strangling the livelihood of the more than 1.8 million Palestinians living in what can be effectively described as an open-air prison. This should not be taken as a polemical exaggeration: even UN Human Rights rapporteur John Dugard described Gaza as a sealed-off, imprisoned and occupied territory, of which Israel appears to have thrown away the key.

The recent scandal around the publication on social media of a video taken by an IDF soldier of a fellow sniper gunning down in December a Palestinian getting too close to the border fence is revealing  both of the IDF soldiers attitude and that of the Israeli government. The cheering at the sniper and the insults thrown at the wounded man  who may have succeeded in damaging the hated border fence before being killed  reveal inhuman and demented hatred at the enemy by the soldiers. But what is the background to all this? The ruthless attitude of the Israeli ruling class is represented by Defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, who said there were "no innocent" people in Gaza. He also commented: The Gaza sniper deserves a decoration, and the photographer a demerit, thus showing his utter contempt for Palestinian lives and at the same time his pique at being exposed by the insanity of his own soldiers, who fail to realise how their behaviour would not be regarded as monstrous.

The killing of 18 Palestinian demonstrators on 30 March was no accident, but part of a conscious strategy / Image: fair use

It is not by chance that this episode resonates with the witnesses reports and the pictures taken by the US Army and CIA torturers of fellow-torturers smiling for the camera while performing the worst type of abuses on unarmed prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. What these episodes have in common is not just the inhumane attitude of the material butchers, but the fact that the real responsibility for creating such monsters lies all the way up the chain of command, up to the highest levels of the army and the government in both cases. Occasionally, in order for the system to keep a resemblance of credibility, a few of these butchers are apprehended, tried and convicted, often labelled as criminal psychopaths and tossed away from public scrutiny, while the real instigators are left untouched.

The decision to deploy sharpshooters to enforce a no-go zone on the Gaza side of the border and to stop Palestinian attempts to breach into this zone during protests led inevitably to the massacres of Palestinian protesters on 30th March and 6th April, and to more massacres in the foreseeable future. The growing anger and determination of the Palestinian youth is finding a focal point in the movement around the Great March of Return, which will escalate towards the 70th Anniversary of the proclamation of the State of Israel (and the forced eviction of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes) on 15th May.

Israel and Gaza

But what is the logic behind such a conduct on the part of the Israeli government? Who gains from all this?

Gaza has been for decades  from the point of view of the Israeli state  an open wound festering at its border. On paper, it would be a wiser policy to allow the Palestinian population some breathing space. After all, even minor but sustained concessions and the easing of the economic stranglehold over the Territories would produce under the present situation an immediate improvement in the conditions of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. But the whole foundation of Israeli capitalism would be threatened by a different course of action.

The Israeli capitalists base their survival strategy on dividing the Palestinian population in different camps and would be threatened by the formation of a unified struggle of the Palestinian population in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza with the 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel. Even the slightest possibility that a connection could be established between the struggle of the Arab and Jewish working class within Israel against their capitalist government with the struggle of the Palestinians in the Territories would represent an existential threat to capitalism in Israel.

More than once and even now, the Palestinian population of the Territories has been used as a scapegoat to overcome internal divisions developing in Israeli society, with the ruling elite riddled by all sorts of corruption scandals and society polarised by rising inequality. Netanyahus aggressive anti-Palestinian policy is designed also to prevent his own demise, as he is trying to divert attention from the corruption scandals that have been plaguing his authority over the past years.

The Palestinian population of the Territories has been used as a scapegoat to overcome internal divisions developing in Israeli society / Image: fair use

The result is clear. More than three years after the Gaza shelling of 2014, living conditions in the Strip have seen no improvement, with unemployment at 29% in the Palestinian Authority, but above 44% in Gaza and well above 60% among the youth, according to the World Bank. 80% of the population rely on humanitarian aid to survive. Over 70% of Gazas population are refugees (according to the UN Relief and Works Agency) from land now within the borders of Israel, which explains how heartfelt is the demand to return posed by the present movement. But the sense of hopelessness among the Gaza population, especially the youth, cannot be conveyed by mere figures, when hopes are shattered by a daily routine of oppression, abuse and injustice to which there seems to be no end in sight.

On the other hand, why is not Israel just going for an all-out war against the Palestinians? The disproportion of military power between the two sides is staggering. The IDF could easily crush any resistance in a matter of days, if not hours. The option of just occupying militarily the Strip, however, was ruled out as not feasible by the late Ariel Sharon, surely not a friend of the Palestinians, who in 2005 implemented the decision of forcefully withdrawing the Israeli settlers, disengaging from Gaza and sealing off the borders. In fact, Sharon realised that while the IDF could easily crush the Palestinian militarily, it would be a completely different question to rule over an occupied Gaza, and it would be impossible to push out a significant part of the Arab population without openly committing genocide in front of the world.

Gaza is a strip of land about 40 km long and 6 to 12 km wide, squeezed between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea. It is the third most densely populated area enclosed in boundaries in the world (after Singapore and Hong Kong) with over 5,000 people per square km. An extensive Israeli buffer zone within the Strip renders much land off-limits to Gaza's Palestinians. The population is expected to increase to 2.1 million in 2020. By that time, Gaza may be rendered unliveable, if present trends continue.

Embed from Getty Images

Due to the Israeli and Egyptian border closures and the Israeli sea and land blockade, the population is not free to leave or enter the Gaza Strip, nor is it allowed to freely import or export goods. Fishing has been restricted to up to 6 nautical miles. The Oslo Accords of 1993, which gave birth to the Palestinian Authority allowed fishing to take place within up to 20 nm.

Gaza depends on Israel for almost everything from food to medicines and hospital supplies, machinery and spare parts and fuel, energy and drinkable water. Israel controls Gazas telecommunication system, which could be shut down at any time. Deliberate cuts to electricity or water supply are a daily occurrence for which the people in Gaza pay a heavy price. Sudden closures of the border have an immediate impact and are often used by Israel as a blackmail weapon.

But there is another side to scarcity and misery. It strengthens the position of the Hamas leaders, whose patronage and charity structures are sometimes the only source of relief for the population.

The policies of the Israeli state are designed to feed a sense of desperation and helplessness in the population  especially the youth. This is the reason for the recurrent escalation in the level of mobilisation or military tension at the borders. The Hamas leaders can obviously count on a disproportionate reaction by the Israeli state to any friction or conflict arising, which helps them preserve their authority as the only force able to challenge Israel in the eyes of an important section of the people in Gaza. The very fact that the concrete possibility of being shot at and killed has not deterred the participation of tens of thousands of people in the demonstrations at the borders reveals the unbreakable determination of the Palestinian youth, which is also reflected in a rising pressure on the Hamas leadership to challenge the blockade.

The role of Hamas

The poisonous fruits of the Oslo Accords of 1993 are displayed before our eyes. The setting up of the Palestinian Authority (PA) was designed to be a trap for the Palestinians, to which the PLO and Fatah leadership, headed by Yasser Arafat obliged wilfully in exchange for a parody of semi-independent Palestinian state.

In reality, with the collaboration of the Palestinian leadership, the PA was turned more and more into a repressive proxy by Israel to keep the different Palestinian factions under check. Many Palestinians who were pushed into rebelling against a new form of oppression experienced Palestinian jails. The corruption of the leadership, constant Israeli intervention and the persisting misery for the majority of the Palestinian workers and youth exposed soon a different reality from the propaganda dreams of a bright future after the establishment of the PA.

The constant threats of Israeli intervention helped Hamas in consolidating its grip over Gaza / Image: public domain

On a capitalist basis, the West Bank and above all Gaza could never experience an economic development on their own, also because Israel would simply not allow it. Only a small layer of the Palestinian elite enjoyed the meagre benefits of the new situation. Arafats promise to turn Gaza into a Singapore of the Middle East sounds now to many Palestinians as a cruel joke. Interestingly the Hamas leaders  who dont have any real alternative to offer  are now echoing the same promise.

In 2005 Sharon decided Israels unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, but that did not mean for a moment that Israel decreased its pressure against the Palestinian population. The growing discontent against the PA and the Fatah leadership eventually brought about the 2006 election victory by the Islamic fundamentalist movement of Hamas, triggering the political division of the PA and the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is still continuing. The horrendous crimes of the two Gaza Wars of 2008-09 and 2014 showed what the so-called peace process under the wings of US and European imperialism meant in practice. The first, denominated by the Israeli army Operation Cast Lead saw 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed, not to speak of the thousands of injured and the destruction of large parts of the shaky Gaza infrastructure. The same scenario was repeated on even a bigger scale in 2014 (2,300 Palestinians and 73 Israelis killed). The very figures of the casualties are telling of the asymmetry of the firepower in these so-called wars.

The constant threats of Israeli intervention paradoxically helped Hamas in consolidating its grip over Gaza and achieve the internal suppression of most secular and socialist opposition. Now, 12 years later we are witnessing again the same mechanism at work.

The threat of Hamas has been skilfully used by the Israeli ruling class and by Netanyahu in particular as a means of consolidating their grip over society, after facing rising criticism and opposition to the austerity policies imposed by the government on the Israeli working class. Corruption scandals have undermined Netanyahus authority to a great extent and the still relatively small but significant demonstrations of tens of thousands of people over the past few months against the government policy on immigration and against corruption show that the potential for a stronger movement against the government exists.

The shooting of unarmed protesters in Gaza and the defiant attitude of the Palestinian youth has also undermined the credibility of the government.

The crisis of capitalism in Israel is creating the basis for further convulsions in the area, which will put on the agenda once again the need to unify the struggle of the Palestinians in Gaza and the Territories with the struggle of the working class and youth within Israel against the policy of austerity, war and class inequality ruthlessly imposed by the Israeli ruling elite.Cooperation in the agriculture and forestry industries has been a very important part of Australias relationship with Vietnam throughout the 45 years of diplomatic links between the two countries.

This year marks our 25th anniversary of agricultural research partnership with Vietnam. Australias support through agricultural research collaboration has been consistent and efficient, as part of our larger aid program in Vietnam, said Australian Ambassador to Vietnam, Mr Craig Chittick.





The research collaboration with Vietnam has been led by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) since 1993.

According to Dr Le Quoc Doanh, Vietnams Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, ACIAR is a special partner for Vietnam in agricultural research and development. The collaboration and knowledge-sharing from Australia and the world through ACIAR have promoted research capacity in Vietnam, brought advances in science and technology, and contributed to poverty reduction.

The positive impact of these partnerships are reflected in research and development of acacia and eucalypt plantations; rapid expansion of the oyster industry; and the successful market engagement for vegetables and fruits from the northwest region, to give just three examples.

Australia has extensive research and development experience, which it has been able to share with Vietnamese counterparts to build on their capability to tackle their problems more effectively. This includes expertise in horticulture and livestock production and marketing, food quality and safety assurance, water saving practices, plantation forest management, and aquaculture.

Over the past 25 years, the Australian Government has invested AUD100 million in 170 research projects in Vietnam, and at the same time provided hundreds of postgraduate scholarships for Vietnamese researchers to study in Australia. Many of these scientists are now research leaders.

ACIAR has recently announced its research collaboration strategy with Vietnam for 2017-2027 to continue supporting the nation in agricultural research for development, focusing on the North West Highlands, the Central Highlands and the Mekong Delta./.SPRINGFIELD -- Railroad equipment is included on the list of Chinese products the Trump administration is threatening to hit with tariffs in retaliation for what the U.S. says is Chinese theft of American technology.

And the prospect has CRRC MA -- Chinese-owned and the largest maker of rail cars in the world -- lobbying on behalf of its business and the new $95 million factory it's now opening in the East Springfield neighborhood to make cars for the MBTA.

CRRC MA Vice President Jia Bo, according to China Daily, said he and his fellow CRRC executives worry that the threatened tariffs -- called a "Section 301" investigation after the applicable part of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974 -- might change the world marketplace for rail equipment.

CRRC MA spokeswoman Lydia Rivera said the company would have no comment on U.S. trade policy.

But Jai told China Daily that CRRC has made its concerns known to the appropriate parts of the federal government.

In March, the Trump administration said it would press its Section 301 case against China with the World Trade Organization.

"China appears to be breaking WTO rules by denying foreign patent holders, including U.S. companies, basic patent rights to stop a Chinese entity from using the technology after a licensing contract ends," the office of the United States Trade Representative said in a news release.

U.S. officials allege that China forces U.S. companies to transfer technology in order to have access to the Chinese marketplace.

Jai told China Daily that the U.S. government's decision to put a 25 percent tariff on imported steel will not hurt CRRC in Springfield as badly because some of the steel used in CRRC MA's production comes from the U.S. and some from China.

"The steel tariff has less of an impact on us," he said.

The first four MBTA Orange Line subway cars arrived at CRRC MA's East Springfield factory this week. Work on Red Line cars begins later this year.

In 2014, CRRC received a $566 million contract from the MBTA to build 152 Orange Line and 252 Red Line cars at the Page Boulevard site in Springfield. In December 2016, the state upped the order with another 120 new Red Line cars, with production set to begin in June 2022 at a cost of $277 million.

The state went without federal money for the cars so that it could mandate that they be assembled in Massachusetts. The idea was to start a transit car industry here.

It's working, with CRRC already having agreements to make cars in Springfield for transit systems in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. CRRC is pursuing work with Atlanta's transit system and others as well.

CRRC MA has 124 employees now and plans to staff up to 200 by the fall, Rivera said.SPRINGFIELD - The Massachusetts Gaming Commission on Thursday approved mitigation funds for the Hampden County Sheriff's Department, the Springfield Police Department and state police to offset costs and hardships related to the MGM Springfield casino.

In a unanimous vote, the commission granted $772,000 to the sheriff's department over a two-year period to continue easing the higher rent being paid by the department for the Western Massachusetts Correctional Addiction Center. The center moved from what are now the casino grounds to a more expensive location on Mill Street.

The commission annually considers requests for mitigation funds, which are funded by gambling revenues. The commission has previously provided mitigation funds to the sheriff's department and also for costs such as free valet parking service in the South End to address parking hardships.

The commission also approved $160,498 for the Springfield Police Department, far less than the request for $744,160.

The funds approved were for the training of six new recruits attending a police academy, that will "back fill" officers being transferred to the Gaming Enforcement Unit at the MGM Springfield casino, said John Ziemba, commission ombudsman.

The city also receives funds directly from MGM for its expanded police force in the downtown area under a host community agreement with MGM. The city receives $2.5 million annually from MGM for public safety and public health costs, Ziemba said.

The $160,498 is a "reasonable" amount for the replacement training primarily involving the recruits' salaries during the 24-week academy and equipment costs, Ziemba said. Although the new recruits will not be assigned to the casino, they will allow the city to fill those needed positions, he said.

The city, in arguing for the higher amount with the Gaming Commission, sought to be compensated for Quinn Bill education incentive payments, for one additional officer and for projected overtime pay needs, Ziemba said. The commission backed its staff recommendation.

The commission also voted to approve $1.8 million for the state police for the cost of hiring and training troopers assigned to the Wynn Boston Harbor casino and MGM Springfield.

The mitigation funds will pay for 31 additional troopers, the commission said. That will consist of 13 troopers at MGM Springfield, 13 at Wynn, four troopers with the state attorney general's office and one trooper with the state Investigations and Enforcement Bureau.

MGM, in a statement provided to the commission, supported the mitigation requests from all three law enforcement groups.

Regarding the Springfield police request, MGM said: "We fully support any efforts that enhance the SPD's effort to continue to make the City of Springfield a safe place for residents, businesses and visitors."The Massachusetts Gaming Commission, which has exempted more than 800 MGM Springfield casino service jobs from a stricter licensing process, voted 3-2 Thursday not to extend that exemption to approximately 150 future porter jobs.

At its meeting in Boston, the commission voted to keep a policy that requires porters, who will be responsible for cleaning duties throughout the $960 million casino complex, to register with the commission, as is required of most MGM Springfield employees.

MGM Springfield and some local organizations had urged the commission to remove the registration burden, in part to expand the applicant pool and offer opportunities to more people. The licensing requirement is likely to cause many potential applicants to "self-exclude" themselves from jobs because of past troubles with the law, even youthful offenses.

The commission voted 3-2 to keep the existing policy, as recommended by commission staff led by Director of Licensing Paul Connelly.

A key concern about the porters being exempted is that they will sometimes be in sensitive areas, such as the gaming floor, said commissioners and commission staff.

"That's a big red flag for us," Connelly said, citing the commission's regulatory role and the need to protect the integrity of gaming operations. "We understand the burden it places on those seeking jobs."

More than 800 jobs, such as kitchen workers, hotel room attendants, retail and marketing, have already been exempted from the registration process by the Gaming Commission because they are not a concern for being on the gaming floor or other sensitive areas, officials said.

Commissioners said the exemption for porters could be brought back for consideration at a future time, after the casino opens.

The registration and licensing process with the commission is required for casino jobs in Massachusetts "to meet the statutory requirements of good character, honesty and integrity," a Gaming Commission summary states.

Representatives of the New England Farm Workers Council and ROCA were among those urging the Gaming Commission to exempt the porters from the registration requirement.

They said registration will be a barrier to some potential applicants fearful they will not qualify.

Commissioners Gayle Cameron, Bruce Stebbins and new member Eileen O'Brien voted to keep the registration requirement.

Commission Chairman Stephen Crosby and Enrique Zuniga supported the change.Fire officials said a New Bedford man was killed in a two-alarm house fire Wednesday morning when the Potter Street home he lived in with his family caught fire and burned, the New Bedford Standard-Times reported.

Jackson Leahy, 21, was found dead on the second floor of 176 Potter St. after the fire was extinguished, the Bristol District Attorney's Office said in a statement.

Fire officials said six people lived in the house. Officials do not know how many were home at the time of the fire, but everyone present, except the victim, were able to flee the 7:20 a.m. fire.

Firefighters who went into the building were forced back several times by high temperatures, heavy smoke and low visibility. After ventilating the house, firefighters were able to make their way to the second floor and found Leahy's body in a second-floor bedroom.

Fire officials said they believe the fire started in a first-floor living room. They attribute the cause to careless disposal of smoking material, the DA said.

New Bedford fire investigators along with the state Department of Fire Services and Massachusetts State Police detectives attached to the district attorney's office are continuing to investigate.A 24-year-old Honduran national and a member of the Enfermos Criminales Salvatrucha MS-13 gang in Chelsea was sentenced Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boston to 27 years in federal prison for his part in the shooting death of a Chelsea woman in 2014.

Hector Ramires admitted he and an accomplice were shooting at a group of rival gang members in Chelsea the evening of Oct. 18, 2014, when one of his shots missed the rivals and struck an innocent bystander, the mother of three small children who was looking out the window of her home during the gunfire. She died from her wounds.

Ramires also admitted trying to kill a rival gang member in Chelsea and an armed robbery.

Prosecutors pursued Ramires under racketeering laws, commonly called RICO.

His accomplice, Galicia Barillas, was sentenced to 22 years in prison during a hearing in March.HADLEY -- As expected, American Legion Post 271 is suing the town over a parking lot that falls within the footprint of the new senior center project.

At issue is a town-owned "upper" lot the Legion uses for overflow parking when the "lower" lot -- which Hadley deeded to the legion -- is full.

Northampton attorney Michael Pill, who is representing the Legion, contends that while the town owns the upper lot, the Legion has been using it for decades. "The Legion has used that land for a parking lot for far more than the 20 years required to establish a presumption of adverse use and occupation," he said.

According to the suit, filed suit in Land Court in Boston, "the burden is on defendant Hadley to prove that such use was permissive."

The suit asks that "defendant Hadley not to trespass upon or interfere in any way with plaintiffs use of that parking lot."

Senior center committee members have said the Legion can use the center's new lot when the Legion knows it will need the additional parking. Plans call for the existing senior center at 46 Middle St. to be torn down and a new one built at the site. The new building's footprint would extend into the upper parking lot. Two new parking lots would be created for the senior center.

Town Meeting twice voted on funding components for the senior center project, followed by town-wide votes needed to support the debt exclusion overrides. But in February, the Legion filed two petition articles seeking to either relocate or stop the $7.1 million project.

"The Legion has been begging for months to be not just heard but listened to, without success," Pill wrote in an email, adding that the Legion started protesting as soon as they learned about the problem. The Senior Center Building Committee, he said, "should have both disclosed much sooner and publicized more widely the exact location for the proposed Senior Center."

Pill also wrote: "Things came to a head at the recent Hadley Select Board meeting where it became clear that the Senior Center Building Committee had no intention of doing anything other than throwing a few crumbs at the Legion, in the form of a proposed walkway to a distance new parking lot."





The Legion is not opposed to the new senior center or library, Pill wrote: "Their primary opposition is to the proposed location of the Senior Center on their Parking Lot."

"In a nutshell, the proposed new senior center needs to be constructed on a different location, not on the American Legion parking lot and the Legion's right to continue to use that parking lot permanently needs to be documented in a form that can be recorded in the Hampshire County Registry of Deeds," Pill wrote.

But Jane Nevinsmith, chairwoman of the building committee, said the committee already looked into the possibility of altering the new building's location. "It is not feasible," she wrote in an email.

The Select Board, she said, has encouraged the committee to "keep going forward" while attorneys for the town work on the situation.

The Select Board met with Legion members in March to address their concerns. The board met in executive session Wednesday night to continue discussing a memorandum of understanding with the Legion, and will do so again next week, Town Administrator David Nixon said.

Nixon declined to comment on the suit. He said he has not instructed the committees involved in the senior center project to change course.

Pill, meanwhile, said the Legion is "ready and willing" to discuss settlement options with the town.A Cape Cod police officer was shot while serving a warrant at a home on Blueberry Lane in Barnstable Thursday afternoon, a State Police spokesman has confirmed.

The suspect may still be in the home and authorities have set up a perimeter around the residence, which is located in the Marstons Mills neighborhood.

The officer was rushed to a Cape Cod hospital and their condition is unknown at this time.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated as more information becomes available.HOLYOKE -- Robot coding, an address from the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico and a look at the new culinary arts center are among events set for Holyoke Innovation Week April 22 to 29.

"Our goal is to provide opportunities for you to see, experience and connect with the people and places that are critical to innovation in Holyoke, and be inspired to join the movement," a press release said.

The $165 million Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center is the the anchor for the Holyoke Innovation District, which, officials have said, is both a geographic zone and a plan. The district consists of the downtown blocks around the computing center, which is between Cabot and Appleton streets overlooking the first-level canal.

The idea is to maximize city benefits from the computing center such as by attracting and helping business owners, and workshops and other events like those scheduled this month, officials said.

A workshop April 25 from 4 to 6 p.m. at the computing center at 100 Bigelow St. will show how to build a robot out of a kit and how to use computer code from a phone app to control the robot's rovings, the press release said.

"People ages 9 to 109 are invited to join us to learn about coding and robotics. If you're younger than 11, please bring someone along to help," the press release said.

To register for the Mars Robotic Rover Mission, visit holyokecodes.org

Also on April 25, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz will speak about the transformation of Puerto Rico after hurricanes Irma and Maria, which devastated the island in September. Doors open for the event at 6 p.m. at Gateway City Arts, 92-114 Race St.

"Please note that in order to allow the highest number of attendees, this will be a standing room event. There will be no tickets in advance: first come, first serve. Maximum capacity is 500 attendees," the press release said.

On April 26, a tasting tour and detailed look at the Holyoke Community College MGM Culinary Arts Institute at 164 Race St. will be offered 3:30 to 7 p.m. Two options are available:

1. An open class where a limited number of participants can "experience what it's like to work in a commercial kitchen, experiment with cutting edge culinary equipment and make some tasty treats that you then get to enjoy." This option begins at "3:30 p.m. sharp" and participants must wear long pants, sleeved shirt and close-toed footwear, the press release said.

2. A self-guided tour of facility to sample a variety of finger foods begins at 4 p.m., the press release said.

The complete schedule of events is available at holyokeinnovates.com

The computing center opened Nov. 16, 2012. It is an academic research hub of tens of thousands of computers that university researchers use to explore exploring projects such as diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Sickle Cell Anemia, how to control blight in wheat production and the physical principles that govern the dynamics of cells.NORTHAMPTON -- A Granby man was sentenced to 7-10 years in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty in Hampshire Superior Court to a long list of sex crimes.

Eric LaCoste, 35, pleaded guilty to a count of child pornography possession, four counts of enticement of a child younger than 16, and four counts of posing or exhibiting a child in a state of nudity or sexual conduct.

LaCoste, who was previously convicted of child porn charges in the same courtroom several years ago, also admitted to violating his probation.

Judge Mary-Lou Rup gave LaCoste a combined sentence of 7-10 years for three of the charges. He was also given concurrent sentences of 10 years of probation for each additional charge. He will serve his term at MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole.

LaCoste was arrested in September of 2016 after state police officers traced his computer to one allegedly used to transmit naked images of children.

LaCoste used social media apps like Instagram and Kik messenger to connect and communicate with underage girls, asking them to send him nude pictures in exchange for concert tickets. All four girls that LaCoste did this to were from out of state and were 13 or younger.

In 2014, LaCoste pleaded guilty to dissemination of obscene material to a minor and soliciting a child to pose in a state of nudity in a case involving at least two girls.

He was sentenced to 2.5 years in jail, but was only ordered to serve six months -- with the remainder of the term suspended in favor of five years probation.Photo for illustration

The move is part of national tourism promotion program for 2018.

In each locality, the VNATs working group will introduce the potential, tourism products and tourism development policy, with the focus on promoting Vietnams sea tourism.

At the same time, meetings and exchanges between travel agencies and hotels of Vietnam and China will be organized to enhance business cooperation opportunities and promote exchanges of tourists between the two sides.

In addition, the organ will coordinate with airlines to promote direct air routes and intensify the launch of direct air routes from Chinas localities to Vietnam, in order to increase the ability of attracting more Chinese tourists in 2018 and the following years.

The program is expected to attract the participation of about 300 delegates being representatives of the Embassy of Vietnam in China, travel management agencies, travel businesses and hotels.

According to UNWTOs forecast, with a population of more than 1.3 billion people, about 220 million Chinese will travel abroad in 2025./.UPDATE, Thursday, April 12, 2018, 4:10 p.m.: Jury deliberations have concluded for the day and will resume Friday morning.

GREENFIELD -- Joshua Hart may be guilty of stealing an elderly couple's car and using their credit cards, but his co-defendant Brittany Smith -- "crazed for drugs and desperate for her next fix" -- was responsible for their grisly slayings, Hart's attorney told a Franklin Superior Court jury Thursday.

Hart, 25, and Smith, 29, both of Athol, are accused of killing Thomas Harty, 95, and fatally wounding his wife, 77-year-old Joanna Fisher at the couple's Orange home on Oct. 5, 2016. Hart and Smith were arrested days later in the parking lot of a Virginia Walmart.

Smith is due to be tried separately following the conclusion of Hart's trial.

Addressing the jury during closing arguments, defense attorney Brian E. Murphy did not deny that the "brutal and horrendous" murder or murders took place -- but claimed Smith was the killer.



During taped confessions, Murphy said, Hart lied to police investigators to protect Smith, who he was "madly in love with." Hart had "signed up to break into an empty house" and "had no idea (Smith) was going to go crazy" and start stabbing the occupants, Murphy said.

Hart told police he was wanted to protect Smith, Murphy said, telling jurors they should convict Hart of stealing a motor vehicle and fraudulent use of a credit card -- but not of murder.

Jeremy Bucci of the Northwestern District Attorney's Office said Hart indeed stabbed and killed the elderly man, and also grievously injured Fisher, who died weeks later.

"This was at its core a joint venture," he said. "At all times they acted in concert."

Bucci said Hart acted with premeditation and exhibited extreme cruelty, and that his actions meet the bar for a first-degree murder conviction.

He said confessions Hart gave to law enforcement officers in Virginia and to Massachusetts State Police were "rich in detail" and consistent across several hours of questioning.

Bucci revisited evidence presented over the week-long trial, including the placement of a set of rosary beads Harty reportedly ripped from Hart's neck during the home invasion, DNA testing of a sweatshirt that Hart reportedly disposed of, and video surveillance of the pair at various locations.

Bucci replayed portions of interviews conducted by the Rockridge County Sheriff's Office and Massachusetts State Police, where Hart can be heard admitting to stabbing both Fisher and Harty.

"Veritas Dictum," Bucci told the jury. "When you return here, speak the truth."

Judge John Agostini gave extensive instructions to the jury, including standards for conviction for first and second-degree murder.

"Your emotions or sympathy for one side or the other play no role in this proceeding." Agostini said.

The jury retired to begin its deliberations at around 1 p.m., and Agostini advised them to "take whatever time they need."SPRINGFIELD - A judge has given the lawyer representing Springfield Police Officer Jonathan Hernandez more time to prepare his defense on assault, witness intimidation and firearm charges.

Hernandez, 35, pleaded not guilty in January to assault with a dangerous weapon (ashtray), witness intimidation and possession of a firearm without an FID card or license to carry.

The five-year police veteran was released on personal recognizance and ordered to have no contact with a former girlfriend identified as the victim in the case.

The victim told police Hernandez damaged her car, hurled an ashtray at her and threatened her, saying he would "have nothing to lose" if she reported the incidents and he lost his job, according to court documents.

Police discovered a loaded personal handgun when they came to collect his police-issued gun and serve him with a restraining order, according to court documents. That handgun, with a 10-round magazine, was in a safe, but Hernandez had not renewed his license to carry it, police said.

During a pretrial hearing on March 9, Hernandez was granted a two-month continuance to allow defense lawyer Jared Olanoff to review evidence, interview witnesses and take other steps to prepare for trial.

Defense lawyer Jon Helpa represented Hernandez for his arraignment on Jan. 19 in Springfield District Court.

Six weeks later, Olanoff notified the court he was hired to represent Hernandez. At the March 9 pretrial hearing, a judge granted Olanoff's request for additional time, and continued the case for a pretrial hearing on May 17.

Hernandez was the second Springfield officer arrested in four weeks on domestic violence charges.

Officer Dushaine K. Goffe, of Hatfield, was arrested Dec. 26 in Northampton and charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, strangulation and maliciously damaging a motor vehicle.

Following their arrests, both Hernandez and Goffe were suspended indefinitely with pay, per civil service requirements, Springfield police spokesman Ryan Walsh said.

Goffe's case is pending in Northampton District Court.NORTHAMPTON -- A state agency that supports crime victims and witnesses officially opened its first office outside of Boston Thursday, bringing $9 million in funding for Western Massachusetts programs with it.

"Nothing is more important than making sure victims, survivors, and their families have the support and resources they need," Attorney General Maura Healey said at the opening of the 403 Pleasant St. satellite office for the Massachusetts Office for Victim Assistance.

The 34-year-old agency helps crime victims through advocacy, education and various other forms of assistance. The new office represents the first time it has expanded beyond Boston, and will be the organization's headquarters in Western Massachusetts.

Healey, who is the chairwoman of the Victim Witness Assistance Board that governs the agency, said the agency will provide $9 million to 25 different programs throughout Western Massachusetts to support free services for victims.

"It's a great day here in Northampton, a great in Western Massachusetts, and a great day for victims and survivors in this region, who for far too long have gone without access to the kinds of resources and direct services that they deserve," Healey said.

The funding, through the U.S. Department of Justice's Office for Victims of Crime, comes from fines against criminal offenders in federal courts.

Liam Lowney, the agency's executive director, said he was grateful for the opportunity the new office represents in terms of bringing services to victims.

"Victims and survivors and unique and we always strive to develop a response that meets their unique needs," Lowney said. "Working in Western Mass, alongside the creative programs that serve victims here, ensures we can support a local victim service response that is modeled on their unique needs."

Diane Coffey, the agency's director of victim services, will also serve as the director of the new Northampton office. She said the event showed the passion local service providers have for the work they do. "You could feel it, there was an energy and an enthusiasm today, that really is reflective of the way all of these providers serve crime victims," Coffey said.

Also in attendance were a number of local and area officials, including Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan, Hampden County District Attorney Anthony Gulluni, Berkshire County District Attorney Paul Caccaviello, Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz, and Josh Moulton, a member of the Victim Witness Assistance Board's Survivor Board.

Sullivan said the new office could be a "catalyst" for change. "As we all know, to fight for an agency to come west is a big fight and I'm really grateful that they put all that effort into it and it's really going to make a difference for the victims of crime," he said.

"There's so much work that needs to be done, and another strong voice for victims is eternally welcome," Sullivan said, explaining that he thought the new office would allow local authorities to "focus on the needs of victims."

Mayor David Narkewicz thanked Healey as well as the many individuals in the local health community who lobbied for the local office.

"Obviously this is really important," Narkewicz said. "I'm really grateful to the Attorney General for her leadership on this issue and for putting resources behind the words of wanting to support western Massachusetts -- opening this office that is going to support victims and survivors."

Below is a complete list of the funding allocations:

Berkshire County

Berkshire County Kids' Place

Elizabeth Freeman Center

The Brien Center

Franklin County

Franklin North Quabbin CAC

NELCQIT

Hampden County

Baystate Medical Center

Hampden County District Attorney's Office

Womanshelter/Companeras

YWCA of Western Massachusetts

Hampshire CountyPITTSFIELD - A 45-year-old city man, wanted by Vermont State Police for burglary and aggravated assault, was arrested here last week.

Robert Dondi is a suspect in a burglary that occurred in Pownal, Vermont on March 13, Vermont State Police said.

The burglary was interrupted by the resident's son, who saw a suspicious vehicle in the driveway and called 911. While on the phone, the son saw Dondi emerge from the home and a struggle ensued.

Dondi then got into the son's vehicle to move it, since it was blocking his own vehicle, and narrowly missed hitting him in an attempt to escape, state police said.

Dondi fled. Pittsfield police arrested him on April 3.SPRINGFIELD - The Springfield Fire Department's Rescue Squad rescued a young female dog that was found on a concrete ledge above the Connecticut River Thursday afternoon.

Firefighters, assisting animal control officers, lowered a basket approximately 20 feet down a steep embankment to rescue the pit bull, Dennis Leger, aide to Commissione Bernard J. Calvi, said.

The ledge is part of a structure that brings the Mill River into the Connecticut River, Leger said.

The dog's owner should contact the T.J. O'Connor Animal Control and Adoption Center at 413-781-1484.AMHERST -- University of Massachusetts Amherst officials say the acquisition of Mount Ida College is a great opportunity for the flagship's students and part of Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy's strategy to expand the Amherst campus' footprint statewide.

The board of trustees from both campuses last week agreed to UMass Amherst's acquisition of the Newton college's 74 acres, assorted buildings and debt, but the state Board of Higher Education still has to approve it. The satellite will be called Mount Ida Campus of UMass Amherst.

"We think it is a very good investment for the campus. It's going to benefit our students greatly," UMass spokesman Edward Blaguszewski said Thursday. "In the long run, it's going to benefit the commonwealth (by) connecting students to jobs in the Boston area."

"This is a strategic move that will expand career opportunities for our students and help drive the Massachusetts economy while strengthening the flagship campus' position in the competitive national higher education marketplace," Subbaswamy said in a statement. "The Mount Ida campus' ideal location will help us grow a much-needed talent pipeline for Massachusetts businesses, especially in high-demand STEM fields.

"And since the flagship campus educated more Massachusetts residents last year than the top eight private universities in Massachusetts combined, we are keenly aware of our responsibility to keep Massachusetts at the forefront of innovation and discovery." Subbaswamy said.

Blaguszewski said the chancellor had been looking for opportunities for a statewide presence since soon after he arrived in 2012.

"The chancellor's been looking for an opportunity that would be the right fit," Blaguszewski said. "You can't control the timing of the circumstances.

"This is a very good acquisition," Blaguszewski said. "We're talking about property in the heart of metropolitan Boston."

Blaguszewski said 70 percent of the students who attend UMass Amherst are from the eastern part of the state, and that's a larger number than any other university or college in Massachusetts. "We are a Boston school in that sense," he said.

"(Subbaswamy) clearly understood the importance of our relationships in eastern Massachusetts," Blaguszewski said.

UMass Amherst will acquire $58 to $70 million of Mount Ida's debt, as well as the Newton campus, and no state money is involved in the deal, University of Massachusetts President Marty Meehan has said.

Blaguszewski said that represents less than half a percent of the UMass Amherst budget, and he believes that the campus will be able to generate more than enough to cover the borrowing costs with additional revenue.

The Mount Ida campus has about 820 dormitory beds, and that means UMass Amherst will be able to accept about 1,000 more students, he said. With admission to UMass Amherst increasingly more competitive, it will allow the campus to accept more students.

"We can grow the campus. We can generate additional revenue," Blaguszewski said.

He did not foresee student costs increasing as a result of the deal.

"We don't expect (the Mount Ida acquisition) to have any impact on UMass Amherst tuition or fees," he said.

The plan is for UMass Amherst graduate students to begin taking classes at the Mount Ida campus in the fall. Over the next year or two, officials expect to ramp up the offerings for undergraduate students, Blaguszewski said.NORTHAMPTON -- A former student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst accused of raping a woman in his dorm room was arraigned Tuesday in Hampshire Superior Court.

Ryder Chilcoff, 21, of Villa Park, California, pleaded not guilty to a charge of rape.

He was previously released on $7,500 cash bail. As conditions of his release, he has been ordered to stay away from the alleged victim, as well as from UMass, court documents show.

Chilcoff was indicted by a Hampshire County grand jury on March 7, transferring the case from Eastern Hampshire District Court to Hampshire Superior Court.

The victim in the case told police that on Dec. 9 she woke up in Chilcoff's dorm room, "specifically in his bed," without pants or underwear on, and that "she had been taken advantage of." She claimed she didn't know how she got into the room or what happened there.

Chilcoff told police he was watching a movie with two friends when "an unknown female walked into his room." She left and came back and went to Chilcoff's bed where she fell asleep, he said. Chilcoff said that later that night the woman made sexual advances and he eventually "gave in," having intercourse with her and describing the woman "as an active participant."

He is due back in court for a pretrial hearing on Sept. 18.Paul Ryan announced he won't be running for reelection in 2018, making him the 25th House Republican to call it quits. Trump promised to "drain the swamp" on the campaign trail, but critics say his cabinet picks have been swamp rats to the fullest. Others argue Trump is keeping his promise, pushing out many establishment Republicans such as Bob Corker, Jeff Flake and now Ryan. Is Trump draining the swamp?

PERSPECTIVES

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan announced he will not seek reelection in 2018, making him the 25th House Republican to call it quits. Trump supporters argue this is proof that Trump is sticking to his promise to "drain the swamp" by pushing out "establishment" Republicans.

But many have criticized Trump for appointing nominees to regulate the very industries they have ties to. According to Lachlan Markay and Sam Stein at The Daily Beast, more than 50 percent of Trump's nominees fit this criteria. Not exactly draining the swamp.

Seth Meyers called out Trump's "drain the swamp" pledge as nothing more than an empty promise.

But others have applauded Trump for draining the swamp. Newt Gingrich praised Trump for sticking to his promises and pushing out establishment Republicans.

After Jeff Flake and Bob Corker announced their retirement from the Senate and lambasted the president, many called this a victory for Trump, by pushing out Republicans who failed to support him.

And some blame establishment Republicans for holding back Trump, threatening to drain them out of a job if they don't work with the president.

Dear Mitch, Paul & GOPe in Congress,



We know youre playing games to obstruct Trump & really do not want to pass Tax Reform. You would rather tank the economy than let POTUS have a victory.



In 2018 we will drain the swamp.



Sincerely,



The People  C3 (@C_3C_3) November 8, 2017

Breaking: Reports- House Speaker Paul Ryan will NOT run for re-election.



Trump 1

Swamp 0@realDonaldTrump  Eric Bolling (@ericbolling) April 11, 2018

Donald Trump finally kept a promise - with Paul Ryan quitting the swamp is starting to drain. #IA03  Pete D'Alessandro (@peteforiowa) April 11, 2018

But others find Trump's actions speak volumes about his true intentions.

The Trump team built their campaign with rallying cries to drain the swamp, lock up crooked Hillary, and MAGA. The level of hypocrisy is mind numbing in light of the depth of corruption going on. Trump supporters should get a gold medal in mental gymnastics.  Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) November 12, 2017

.@realDonaldTrump: the corruption and incompetence of this Administration has reached a fever pitch. If you truly mean to drain the swamp you ought to fire Administrator Pruitt or accept his resignation.  Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 9, 2018

The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Digital, Inc. property. Join us on Twitter @TheTylt or on Facebook, we'd love to hear what you have to say.Massachusetts gambling regulators plan to hold a hearing on the requests from Steve Wynn and his former companies to formally remove the casino mogul from holding the eastern Massachusetts casino license.

Whether or not Wynn is removed as a "qualifier," the Massachusetts Gaming Commission's term for a key person involved in a licensed casino project, the commission's investigation into the "suitability" of the Wynn company to hold the license will continue.

Lawyers for Steve Wynn and Wynn Resorts say since he resigned from the company and sold his shares, that means he should no longer be part of the Wynn Boston Harbor casino license.

The company, Wynn Resorts, is moving ahead with building the $2.4 billion gambling facility in Everett, just outside Boston, but on an "at-risk" basis. A related company, Wynn MA LLC, formally holds the casino license.

But the Gaming Commission is looking to see if Steve Wynn maintains influence within his former companies.

"This is not just a routine change of a significant player, this is the change of a very significant player and therefore we ought to have a public hearing," Steve Crosby, chairman of the commission, told reporters.

"It's not just checking boxes, did he sell his stock, does he have a position. It also goes to does he has any residual influence, for example," Crosby said. "So yes, we will be asking some questions and making sure that we understand for sure and in detail exactly what the relationship is."

The sexual misconduct allegations, reported by the Wall Street Journal and denied by Steve Wynn, won't be covered at the hearing, according to Crosby.

The investigation into "suitability" remains ongoing into who at the company knew about the allegations and a settlement. "We've always been clear that there are the Steve Wynn personal issues, and then there are the other issues of the organization, the board of directors and other senior management," Crosby said.

Steve Wynn's attorney, Brian Kelly, sat in the audience of the Gaming Commission's Thursday meeting as the gambling agency laid out the removal process. Kelly, who works at the Nixon Peabody law firm, was the federal prosecutor behind the case against Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger.

"He stepped down from the company, he sold all his shares, and at this point we don't view him as a qualifier," Kelly said. "So we're glad the commission's scheduled a hearing and we'll be happy to attend."

The commission hopes to hold the hearing the first week of May.

Asked about the company considering the removal of Wynn's name from the facade of the casino, Kelly said, "That's entirely up to the company, not him. He's out."WEST SPRINGFIELD -- Three Hampden County cities are expected to receive over $5.8 million in Chapter 90 highway money as a result of Senate legislation authorizing $600 million for road and bridge repairs.

Legislation passed by the Senate on Wednesday calls for spending $200 million annually for the next three years on infrastructure improvements in cities and towns across the commonwealth.

Giving communities access to consistent, predictable funding allows them to plan their construction needs in advance, said state Sen. James T. Welch, D-West Springfield, a supporter of the bill. The legislation must now be reconciled with a version passed by the House of Representatives before it's sent to Gov. Charlie Baker for final approval.

"Springfield, Chicopee and West Springfield will each be receiving money to fund local road projects, giving them the autonomy and financial ability to maintain their infrastructure," Welch said.

MassDOT's Chapter 90 program uses a longstanding formula to calculate funding levels based on a community's total road mileage, population and employment. The expected fiscal year 2019 apportionments for three of Hampden County's larger population centers are as follows:

$1,334,849 for Chicopee.

$3,682,135 for Springfield.

$849,092 for West Springfield.

"The Chapter 90 funding is critical for towns and cities to maintain their local roads," Welch said.

The Massachusetts Municipal Association had advocated for a higher annual rate for the multiyear funding package.

"The bottom line is that our dependency on Chapter 90 will continue well into the future," Geoff Beckwith, director of the MMA, said on the organization's website. "We're not getting additional federal help, so passing an adequate, multiyear program will continue to be a top priority for local leaders."

Maintaining Chapter 90 funding at current levels guarantees the "cycle of pavement erosion will accelerate," he said. "This is why a long-term, state-local transportation funding partnership is more important than ever."Chairwoman of the Vietnamese National Assembly Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan and President of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples Fernando Gonzalez Llort. (Source: VNA)



The honour was presented to the Vietnamese top legislator by Fernando Gonzalez Llort, President of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples (ICAP), in Hanoi on April 11th.

Expressing her pride and honour to receive the award, NA Chairwoman Ngan pledged to do her utmost to consolidate and further develop the bilateral relationship.

Fernando Gonzalez Llort said the award recognises Ngans contributions to the bilateral ties in her capacity as President of the Vietnam-Cuba Friendship Association (VCFA), and in different positions.

As President of the VCFA, Ngan had, together with the Cuba - Vietnam Friendship Association, carried out a range of exchange activities, he said.

He recalled the time when NA Chairwoman Ngan led a Vietnamese delegation to pay tribute to Cuban Leader Fidel Castro in 2016.

Highlighting the tightened friendship between Vietnam and Cuba in the combat against poverty and under-development, Fernando Gonzalez Llort promised that he, in his capacity of the ICAP President, will make more efforts to foster solidarity between the Parties, Governments and people of the two countries.

The same day, the Vietnamese top legislator hosted reception for Fernando Gonzalez Llort and members of the delegation, during which they expressed their delights over the successful trip of Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong to Cuba in March.

They said that the visit served as an impetus for the traditional friendship between the two countries and stressed that Vietnam-Cuba solidarity and comprehensive cooperation has been strengthened over the past six decades. This is a valuable asset that both Parties, States and peoples need to treasure and educate younger generations.

Lauding Cuba on its socio-economic achievements, NA Chairwoman Ngan hoped that the country will successfully carry out the Update of Economic Model.

She stressed that the bilateral relations have been developed in various channels, including Party, State and people - to - people diplomacy, adding that the Vietnam - Cuba Friendship Association is one of the organisations that have numerous practical activities to promote friendship between the two countries.

Ngan said she believed that Fernando Gonzalez Llort will do his utmost to develop the relations between Cuba and other foreign countries, including Vietnam./.Consumers just gained more power over the products they buy.

On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) informed consumer technology companies that those "warranty void if removed" labels on gadgets arent OK. Its a win for the "Right to Repair" movement, which advocates for individuals to be able to fix their products wherever they wish to  not just with a products original manufacturers.

"Provisions that tie warranty coverage to the use of particular products or services harm both consumers who pay more for them as well as the small businesses who offer competing products and services," Thomas B. Pahl, acting director of the FTCs bureau of consumer protection, said in a statement.

BY RACHEL KRAUS

https://mashable.com/2018/04/11/warrant-void-labels-ftc/?utm_cid=hp-h-2#niENDFI6SOqyHer Excellency Mrs. K. Nandini Singla, High Commissioner of India paid a courtesy call to the Minister of Youth Empowerment, Sports and Recreation, The honorable Stephan Toussaint on the 08th March 2021.

During the consultation, the High Commissioner uttered her appreciation for the cordial and mutual relations between Mauritius and India. She also expressed great interest in increased collaboration between the high commission of India in Mauritius and the Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Sports, and Recreation.

The discussions focused on the avenues of cooperation that can be further developed in the sports sector, youth development, and recreational activities.

In this context, 10 Mauritian youngsters will be invited to participate in next years national day celebration of India.

The cost and accommodation will be borne by the government of India.

Finally, both sides have also expressed the willingness to review the existing MoU between the Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Sports and Recreation and the High Commission of India signed in 2012.

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At the reception for outgoing RoK Ambassador Lee Hyuk in Hanoi on April 11th, the PM said the RoK has become one of Vietnams leading partners, ranking first in terms of direct investment.

Vietnam wishes that the RoK will expand the import of Vietnamese agro-forestry-fishery products, receive more Vietnamese workers, help Vietnam in high-quality human resources development, speed up the transfer of technologies in support, automobile, mechanic, garment-textile and electronic sectors, he said, explaining that Vietnam is running a big trade deficit with the country.

The leader also urged the RoK side to assist the Vietnamese Governments Office in building the E-Government.

Vietnam is willing to create conditions for RoK businesses to increase their investment in the country, thus, expanding their operation in Southeast Asia, he said.

He also suggested increasing cultural exchange and the teaching of Vietnamese and Korean languages in the respective countries, simplifying visa procedures and protecting legitimate rights of the two countries citizens.

The PM stressed that Vietnam welcomes and backs measures to the Korean Peninsula situation, aiming to promote dialogues and maintain peace and stability in the region and the world.

Noting Lee Hyuks contributions to cooperation achievements between Vietnam and the RoK during his tenure in Vietnam, the leader said he hopes that the diplomat will make more contributions to the relations between the RoK and Vietnam as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

For his part, Lee Hyuk said more and more RoK businesses want to invest and expand operation in Vietnam, voicing his belief that the bilateral relationship will yield more fruits in the coming time.

He called on the PM to prioritise Vietnam - RoK cooperation, while supporting the enhancement of relations between the RoK and other ASEAN nations.

The diplomat pledged that he, in any position, will continue to support and foster relations between the Governments and people of the two countries./.Delegates at the conference (Photo: vov.vn)

The conference attracted the interest and participation of a large number of diplomats, politicians, researchers, scholars and experts.

Speaking at the event, Vietnamese Ambassador to France Nguyen Thiep stressed that the conference marked the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations, 5th anniversary of the strategic partnership between the two countries and two weeks after the successful visit of General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong to France.

He reiterated the words of Party leader at the ceremony to mark the 45th anniversary of diplomatic relations of the two countries at the headquarters of the French National Assembly on March 26th.

The ambassador also reiterated the words of French President Emmanuel Macron about the relations between the two countries, stressing the history between Vietnam and France is the history of war and peace, of distance and union. The history between the two countries has made legendary stories and we have never turned back.

Mr. Duong Van Quang, former ambassador and Head of the Vietnamese delegation at UNESCO and the Francophonie Organization, said that "The Vietnam - France relationship is a special relationship in the future, in history, in culture, exchanges between the two peoples. Therefore, the General Secretary chose France as the country to visit."

French researchers and politicians highly appreciated Vietnam's efforts in the past, especially the reform and renovation processes to achieve the current encouraging achievements. Ms. Helene Luc, a honorary senator, honorary chairwoman of the France-Vietnam Friendship Association, emphasized that with the innovation policy, Vietnam has opened up to integrate into the region and the world, first joining ASEAN and then signing agreements with the European Union, becoming members of the Francophone Organization. Vietnam wants to play an increasingly important role in the relationship between Europe and Asia.

On the bilateral relations between Vietnam and France, the delegates said that the relationship between the two countries has a long history, the cooperation fields have achieved many successes such as politics, diplomacy, economy, trade, culture and cooperation in the framework of Francophone organization. The delegates appreciated the good results in cooperation between the two countries during the past time, and pointed out the advantages and difficulties to continue to preserve and further develop this good relationship.

In this context, the role of researchers, scholars and the overseas Vietnamese community in France is very important. The overseas Vietnamese community in France is willing to contribute to the further strengthen the relationship.

The successful organization of the conference showed the interest of the public in the good relationship between France and Vietnam, while continuing to assert the willingness of the diplomats and politicians, scholars and the Vietnamese community in France to join hands to bring the bilateral relationship to further develop in the future./.Fernando Alonso says consistency will be the key for McLaren next weekend in China, with the Spaniard aiming to improve his team's overall performance, especially in qualifying.

Despite a collection of points for both its drivers in Australia and in Bahrain, it hasn't exactly been the start of 2018 that McLaren was hoping for.

The Woking-based outfit has been a mid-field contender on Sundays but the team's depressed performance in qualifying in Bahrain didn't make Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne's task easier on race day.

"For us, consistency has to be the key," says Alonso before China.

"Weve been able to pull everything together on a Sunday so far  a combination of both hard work and good fortune  but we havent given ourselves the best chances on Saturday, so its important we pull the whole package together.

"It wont happen overnight, but we know where our issues lie and we know that we need to work hard to overcome them as soon as possible.

"In the meantime, well be pushing hard in China, as always, and continue our fight to the front of the midfield pack."

Boullier echoed his driver's view on the need for better consistency overall.

"Our results are solid but havent come easily, and we are by no means satisfied with our progress so far," says the Frenchman.

"We know theres a lot of work to do and were working hard, day and night, to bring more performance to the car each time we hit the track.

"Our biggest deficit is our qualifying performance and addressing this is our priority.

"The Shanghai International Circuit is a very different challenge again to Melbourne and Bahrain.

"The long straight, high top speeds and the low and medium-speed corners mean it has a bit of

everything, so our objective is to get on top of the circuits characteristics from Friday onwards."

Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and TwitterFIA race director Charlie Whiting is casting a suspicious eye on the two high profile 'unsafe releases' which have occurred this season, in Melbourne and in Bahrain.

After a double pitstop blunder in Australia saw both Haas drivers rejoin the race with a loose rear wheel only to retire a few hundred yards up the road, Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen was the subject of an unsafe release at Sakhir last Sunday.

The mishap not only led to his demise, but also inflicted injury on a Scuderia who was sent tumbling with a broken leg as the Finn accelerated away prematurely.

It hasn't been lost on Whiting that both incidents involved teams - Haas and Ferrari - using the same rear wheel components.

"Its looking like less and less like a coincidence but the two incidences in Melbourne were quite clearly wheelgun operator error," said Whiting.

"They cross threaded the nuts and thought it was tight, came off and then realised a little too late it wasnt.

"[With the incident in Bahrain], the guy hadnt even taken the wheel off, which is slightly perplexing."

Whiting says that wheelguns are at the center of the FIA's investigation to determine what went wrong and how to prevent any repeat of the problem.

"Alonso lost a wheel in testing if you remember, we went through it all with McLaren, they gave us a report in the week," said Whiting.

"We discussed it with the Technical Working Group to understand it all, to make sure everybody else realises these things can happen, everyone tries to learn from them.

"What happened was that the design of the nose piece that goes into the axel, that is the thing that holds the two-stage retention mechanism. But the way that is fixed into the axel was not quite strong enough so the wheel was a little bit loose, it worked itself loose because it had done four laps prior to that.

"So when the wheel started to tip a little bit, it put abnormal loads into the things that were holding the nose in and once the nose came out, there was no retention.

"So a lesson to be learnt there - that was shared with everyone in the Technical Working Group so that they can all look at that and make sure their designs arent similar.

"Of course they said ours wont do that..."

Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and TwitterChinese President Xi Jinping meets with incumbent and incoming members of the Board of Directors of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) in Boao, south China's Hainan Province, April 11, 2018. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei)

BOAO, Hainan, April 11 (Xinhua) -- China's development cannot be achieved without the world, and the world also needs China for its development, Chinese President Xi Jinping said Wednesday.

That is one of the important conclusions drawn from the past four decades of reform and opening-up in China, said Xi while meeting with incumbent and incoming members of the Board of Directors of the Boao Forum for Asia in the southern Chinese island province of Hainan.

China will continue to staunchly stay on the path of peaceful development, pursue a mutually beneficial strategy of opening-up, and forge a new type of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation, Xi said.

The country will promote coordination and cooperation with other major countries, develop good-neighborly relationship with its neighbors, take a more active part in global governance, and work with the rest of the world to deal with challenges more effectively, the president noted.

Xi pledged that China will closely connect its own future with that of the world people and strive for both the wellbeing of the Chinese people and human progress.

Efforts will be made to further expand cooperation with others and promote the building of a community with a shared future for humanity to build an open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity, Xi said.

China will also promote the Belt and Road Initiative, follow the principle of achieving shared growth through discussion and collaboration, build a new platform for international cooperation to create new drivers of shared development, and deliver the benefits of the initiative to more countries and their people, he noted.

[ Editor: Zhang Zhou ]These days, LG Display Vietnam is boosting recruitment for its US$1.5 billion plant in the northern city of Haiphong, producing OLED products for mobile phones, smart watches, TVs, and tablets. The firm is in need of thousands more employees, such as engineers, security men, mechanics, accountants, interpreters, and technicians.



LG Display is one of the few enterprises to have contributed the most to the economy in this years first three months and beyond. Specifically, in just the first two months of 2018, LG Displays increased production and exports generated revenues of VND49.3 trillion (US$2.24 billion), which is 2.2 times higher than that of the same period last year. The firm earned an average of US$1.12 billion each month, according to the General Statistics Office (GSO).



Though the official March figures remain undisclosed, if LG Displays performance continues as it did in January and February, the figure may rise to US$3.36 billion for the whole quarter.



In another case, Samsung Display Vietnam has been boosting production, with a two-month revenue of VND49.3 trillion (US$2.24 billion) which is 2.2 times higher than that of 2017s first two months.



According to the General Statistics Office (GSO), LG and Samsung have made remarkable contributions to Vietnams trade deficit over the first three months of the year and this situation is expected to continue in the coming months.



GSO reported that in this years first quarter, Vietnam suffered from a US$7.6 billion trade deficit from RoK, up from the US$6.3 billion deficit recorded over the same period last year.



Of this figure, Vietnams imports of electronics products from RoK witnessed the strongest rise. Notably, over the first quarter of 2018, Vietnams import turnover of electronics, laptops, and related spare parts skyrocketed 52.8% year-on-year  far higher than the 16.1% increase in last years corresponding period, and the import turnover of mobile phones and their spare parts climbed 13.6% year-on-year, lower than the 20.9% expansion in last years first quarter.



Last year, Vietnam saw a trade deficit of about US$31.8 billion with RoK, up 53.4% from the US$20.8 billion deficit of 2016. In 2015, the figure stood at US$18.7 billion.



However, according to the Korea Chamber of Business in Vietnams (KorCham), the trade deficit presents a grey area for Vietnam, as many RoK firms have been boosting their investment and exports to Vietnam, while increasing imports of machinery, equipment, and materials to serve their production in the country.



Many are worried about the strong rise in Vietnams trade deficit with RoK. However, they shouldnt be, and should understand that Vietnams imports from RoK are largely conducted by RoK firms in Vietnam  mostly Samsung and LG. They largely import machinery, equipment, and materials for production, and then export products from Vietnam to foreign markets, KorChams vice chairman Hong Sun explained.



Samsungs export turnover sat at about US$51 billion last year, accounting for more than 25% of Vietnams total export turnover of US$214 billion. Samsung also holds 95% of the total export turnover of RoK firms in Vietnam.



Meanwhile, Vietnams exports to RoK, mostly end-products and consumer goods, have increased rapidly by more than 31% in 2017, against last years 28% rise, Sun said. Thus I would affirm that firms from both countries are doing well to take advantage of the Korea-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (KVFTA) and other trade pacts between RoK and ASEAN.



These pacts include a goods trade agreement which took effect in 2007, a service and commercial deal which came into force in 2009, and an investment co-operation agreement made valid in 2009. These pacts have created the ASEAN-Korea Free Trade Area (AKFTA).



According to KorCham, the most important thing now is for the two countries to boost their exports to each others markets. Thus during the Korea-Vietnam Summit on November 11, 2017 in the central city of Da Nang on the sidelines of the 2017 APEC Economic Leaders Week, RoK President Moon Jae-in and Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang vowed to boost the countries bilateral trade to more than US$100 billion in 2020, from the former target of US$70 billion as set by the two countries in 2013.



According to Vietnams Ministry of Finance, by 2018, 86% of the import tariff lines under AKFTA will be reduced to 0%, from their current average of 50%.



Under KVFTAs commitments, Vietnam will completely remove its import duties on 89.9% of all products from RoK over a 15-year period.



For example, Vietnam will remove its 30 and 20 per cent tariffs imposed on RoK air conditioners and rice cookers, respectively, over the next 10 years. The average tariffs for foodstuffs and consumer goods will be gradually reduced from the existing 16-17% to 0% over the next five years.



The Korea International Trade Association recently issued a survey on 1,015 RoK small and mid-size export firms. The results showed that more than 33% of respondents said they plan to expand their facilities in Vietnam, followed by China (19%), ASEAN member nations (10.7%), and India (8.3%).The nations largest annual international trade fair is a joint event co-organised by the Vietnam Trade Promotion Agency (VIETRADE) under the Ministry of Industry and Trade and the Vietnam National Trade Fair & Advertising Company, in cooperation with relevant ministries, sectors, and localities across the country.

In his opening speech, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Quoc Khanh said that since its first launch in 1991, the Vietnam Expo has become one of the largest trade promotion events in Vietnam, bringing about valuable economic opportunities for Vietnamese enterprises and contributing to the Government's commitment to international economic integration.

Following a theme of strengthening regional and international economic connectivity, this years event attracts the participation of more than 500 businesses from 21 localities across Vietnam, as well as from 23 foreign nations and territories, including Russia, the Republic of Korea (ROK), China, Nepal, Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, Mongolia, Chinese Taipei, and Hong Kong (China).

According to Deputy Minister Khanh, a highlight of this years fair is the presence of Russian enterprises for the first time. The participation of Russia in the role of the guest of honour is a meaningful activity that will bring about opportunities for effective trade promotion between the two sides, he affirmed.

On an area covering more than 520m2, Russian enterprises showcase their key products in prominent industries, such as mechanical processing, precision mechanics, automation equipment, industrial biotechnology, and hi-tech electronics.

Russian enterprises make their debut at the event, bringing their key products in prominent industries, such as mechanical processing, precision mechanics, automation equipment, industrial biotechnology, and hi-tech electronics.



Tatiana Khamanova, Marketing Director of Russian VIST Group, which offers IT solutions for mine fleet and railroad management systems, said that her company can offer Vietnam software solutions to support mining operations, metallurgy, electrical science, and telecommunications, which have been applied in Russia, Africa, and South America. She expressed her wish to find a suitable Vietnamese partner in these fields.

The 28th edition of Vietnam Expo also marks the two decades that the ROK has run a national pavilion at the event. This years Vietnam Expo features 150 booths from 132 Korean businesses in cosmetics, IT software, electronics, home appliances, and processed foods. A special pavilion named Vietnam - Korea Design Sharing is also a highlight. It is a joint effort of VIETRADE and the Korea Institute of Design Promotion who have provided active support in enhancing design capacity and market research for Vietnamese enterprises.

Korean businesses bring cosmetics, IT software, electronics, home appliances, and processed foods to the fair.



The reduced tariffs for exports of Vietnamese agricultural products to the ROK under the Vietnam-Korea Free Trade Agreement (VKFTA) has encouraged domestic enterprises to export rice, tea, cashew nuts, macadamia, cat fish, shrimp, and octopus to the East Asian market. At the fair, typical products from localities across Vietnam will have greater chances to reach Korean importers and foreign partners in general. The VKFTA is expected to rouse Korean enterprises to select Vietnamese agricultural products due to the reduced tariff.

The national pavilion run by Cuba at this years event is also the largest of its kind during the past ten years of attending the Vietnam Expo. The Caribbean nation sent its largest delegation ever of 30 enterprises to the fair, focusing on mechanics, renewable energy, bio-products, irrigation, and medicine.

Cuba sends the largest delegation ever of 30 enterprises to the fair to mark a decade of attending the event.



The host will have some of its strongest brands featured at Vietnam Expo, with the participation of enterprises under the Vietnam Value, such as the Hanoi Trade Corporation (Hapro), Hanoi Beer Alcohol and Beverage JSC (Habeco), Binh Minh Plastics JSC, Duy Tan Plastic JSC, and Dien Quang Lamp JSC.

Nguyen Duy Chinh, General Director of Tan A Dai Thanh Group, said that participating in the trade fair is an important element in the marketing efforts of most enterprises, where they can introduce products and receive feedback from their customers. In addition, the fair also brings opportunities for businesses to seek partners through the signing of trade contracts, which not only present immediate benefits but also hold long-term significance for each enterprise in its development strategy.

Characteristic products from 21 localities across Vietnam are showcased at the event.



On the sidelines of the fair, there are a series of Vietnams investment promotion and industrial development pavilions organised by the VIETRADE to provide updated information on the investment environment in Vietnam to foreign investors. At the same time, it also introduces the strengths and policies to attract investment and commitments of local authorities as well as the investment opportunities of six provinces and cities of Hanoi, Hai Phong, Yen Bai, Ninh Binh, Thanh Hoa, and Dong Thap. In addition, there are promotion activities, including export promotion forums, specialised seminars, contract signings, and field trips to industrial parks.

Vietnam Expo 2018 will run until April 14 at the Hanoi Cultural Friendship Palace, No. 91 Tran Hung Dao Street from 9am to 6pm every day. The four-day event is expected to welcome 20,000 visitors.

Visitors taste Vietnamese tea at the fair.

The event features booths from other nations, such as China, Nepal, Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, and Mongolia.

A joint pavilion run by Vietnam and the Republic of Korea.

Visitors interact with the Russian made KiKi robot at the fair.

Vietnamese and foreign enterprises make direct contact at the event.

Strong Vietnamese brands, such as the Hanoi Trade Corporation, Hanoi Beer Alcohol and Beverage JSC, Binh Minh Plastics JSC, Duy Tan Plastic JSC, and Dien Quang Lamp JSC are present at the event.

Vietnam Expo 2018 is expected to welcome 20,000 visitors over its four days.The Russian President made the remark at a reception in Moscow on April 11 for Vietnamese Ambassador Ngo Duc Manh and 16 other ambassadors who came to present their credentials.

President Putin said Vietnam and Russia have closely coordinated with each other, firstly within the framework of multilateral organisations in Asia-Pacific.

Vietnam is one of Russias leading trade partners, he said, noting that the two countries have also joined hands in military and military technology.

The leader also commended the effective operation of the Vietnam-Russia inter-governmental committee on economic, commercial, scientific and technological cooperation.

At the reception, President Putin stressed that Russia stands ready to support constructive initiatives raised by the ambassadors.

Vietnam and Russia established diplomatic ties on January 30, 1950. Two-way trade topped US$5.3 billion in 2017, representing a year-on-year rise of 35%.

The two countries are working together to raise the figure to US$10 billion by 2020.The honour was presented to the senior Vietnamese legislator by Fernando Gonzalez Llort, President of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with Peoples (ICAP), in Hanoi, on April 11.

Expressing her pride and honour to receive the award, NA Chairwoman Ngan pledged to do her utmost to consolidate and further develop the bilateral relationship.

Fernando Gonzalez Llort said that the award recognises NA Chair Ngans contributions to the bilateral ties in her capacity as President of the Vietnam-Cuba Friendship Association (VCFA), and in various other positions.

As President of the VCFA, she had joined together with the Cuba-Vietnam Friendship Association to carry out a range of exchange activities, he added.

He recalled the time when NA Chairwoman Ngan led a Vietnamese delegation to pay tribute to Cuban Leader Fidel Castro in 2016.

Highlighting the tightened friendship between Vietnam and Cuba in the combat against poverty and under-development, Fernando Gonzalez Llort promised that he, in his capacity of the ICAP President, will make further efforts to foster the solidarity between the Parties, Governments and people of the two countries.

The same day, the senior Vietnamese legislator hosted a reception for Fernando Gonzalez Llort and members of the delegation, during which they expressed their delight over the successful trip made by Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong to Cuba in March.

They said that the visit served as an impetus to enhance the traditional friendship between the two countries and stressed that the Vietnam-Cuba solidarity and comprehensive cooperation has been strengthened over the past six decades. This is a valuable asset that the Parties, States and peoples need to treasure and educate the younger generations on.

Lauding Cuba for its socio-economic achievements, NA Chairwoman Ngan hoped that the country would successfully carry out the Update of Economic Model.

She stressed that the bilateral relations have been developed in various channels, including Party, State and people-to-people diplomacy, adding that the Vietnam-Cuba Friendship Association is one of the organisations that is deploying numerous practical activities to promote the friendship between the two countries.

She said she believed that Fernando Gonzalez Llort would do his utmost to develop the relations between Cuba and other foreign countries, including Vietnam.Deputy Foreign Minister Dang Dinh Quy and his Sri Lankan counterpart Sumith Nakandala co-chaired the event.

Speaking highly of the sound traditional friendship and all-round partnership between the two countries, Deputy Minister Quy agreed to propose an early visit by Vietnamese leaders to Sri Lanka.

Sumith Nakandala stated that the consultation is one of the important mechanisms to boost the growth of bilateral ties, and agreed to hold the fourth meeting of the bilateral Joint Committee soon in 2018.

Concurring that trade and investment are a key pillar in their bilateral cooperation, the two sides agreed to organise the second meeting of the Sub-Committee on Trade Cooperation in Vietnam to accelerate the initiatives and measures needed to reach the set target of US$1 billion in two-way trade in 2020.

Meanwhile, the two sides will create favourable conditions for their businesses to seek partnerships, especially in tea, pharmaceuticals, garments, telecommunications, aquatic farming and processing, logistics, education, oil and gas, and construction material production.

The Sri Lankan side took note of Vietnams suggestion on enhancing their cooperation in exporting rice and milk.

The two sides also vowed to boost their ties in culture and tourism.

Vietnam and Sri Lanka agreed to continue working closely together and supporting each other at regional and international forums. Sri Lanka recognised Vietnams proposal to support Vietnams bid to become a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council in the 2020-2021 tenure.

Sri Lanka also affirmed the significance of maintaining peace and stability in the East Sea, maritime and aviation freedom and unhindered trade activities, as well as the settlement of disputes through peaceful measures in line with international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982.

The country proposed enhancing their cooperation in maritime security, especially the exchange of information and experience on law enforcement at sea.

On the occasion, Deputy Foreign Minister Quy paid a courtesy call to Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Tilak Marapana who suggested that the two ministries should work with other ministries and agencies to effectively implement the outcomes of the visits of the senior leaders of both countries, as well as the signed agreements.

The two sides will coordinate to organise a visit of the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister to Vietnam in the near future.The finding helps to raise the number of these turtles living around the world to four and opens up the opportunity for breeding one of the worlds rarest animals.

In January 2016 a large male Swinhoes Softshell Turtle that had lived in Hanoi's Hoan Kiem Lake passed away. This ancient animal was the last surviving individual of the species in the lake and was possibly over 100 years old.

Now believed to be almost extinct in the wild, as of 2016 only three animals were known globally, two are being kept in Suzhou Zoo in China, a female and ancient male who have been together since 2008, but despite successful nesting all of their eggs have been infertile. Meanwhile a single wild animal was found in 2007 by the ATP that resides in Dong Mo Lake west of Hanoi.

Since 2003, the ATP has conducted surveys throughout a lot of northern Vietnam covering 18 provinces looking at the lakes, wetlands, and rivers that were once home to the species. These impressive animals were once found throughout much of the Red River Delta but the large softshell turtles, which can grow to over 150kg in size, were heavily hunted in the 1970's and 1980's, and in its last strongholds until the 1990s.

Though the surveys have identified numerous sites where the species historically used to survive, in most of the sites, accounts of hunting are old and its likely that the species is now locally extinct in many areas. Historical wetlands have been dammed to form isolated artificial lakes, and its from these areas that most of the last giant turtles were caught. But some of these lakes are large and complex, well over 1,000 ha in size. The animals are secretive, surfacing and basking rarely, preferring to spend time in the depths of the lakes. This makes positive identification of the animals that are reported extremely difficult and time consuming.

A photograph of the Swinhoe's Softshell Turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) that was rescued following a dam break in Dong Mo Lake, Hanoi in 2008. (Photo: ATP)



To help with this the ATP/IMC has teamed up with the US Turtle Survival Alliance and Dr. Caren Goldberg from Washington State University to explore the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to find the species. eDNA is a relatively new technique for which Dr. Goldberg was an early pioneer, the technique relies on detecting the tiniest amounts of DNA in samples of water collected in the area of interest to confirm that the species is present. The technique has often been used for fish and amphibians but the methods have only recently been applied to endangered turtles.

The ATP/IMC has been collecting samples from a number of lakes, including Dong Mo Lake where the only known wild Swinhoe's Softshell Turtle lives, but eDNA samples have been inconclusive. It seems that the dilution factors in large water bodies, coupled with there possibly being only one animal, has made the process challenging. However, at the end of 2016 the ATP/IMC had news of a large softshell turtle being seen in Xuan Khanh Lake, Son Tay district, not far from Dong Mo Lake.

Xuan Khanh Lake came to our attention in 2012 when a photograph emerged of what was reported to be a large turtle but which was not clear enough to confirm as an animal. Intensive observation at this time did not find anything at the lake. With the new information in 2016 the ATP/IMC decided to make intensive observations through 2017, with thousands of hours spent by the team watching the lake which resulted in a number of sightings, and in May 2017 a photograph was eventually taken by Nguyen Van Trong, a former fisherman who has worked for conservation since 2007 for the ATP/IMC. The photo is clearly a large softshell turtle, similar in general appearance to a Swinhoes Softshell Turtle, but again was not enough to confirm the species.

Nguyen Van Trong of the ATP/IMC processes water samples by the lake ready for the eDNA testing. (Photo: ATP/IMC)



The ATP/IMC decided to intensify the collection of eDNA samples for processing at the Washington State University laboratory. A clear positive result was given, with a trace of DNA from the water samples matching the current samples for the species, indicating that the animal in the new lake is also a Swinhoe's Softshell Turtle. Through the eDNA method, additional evidence has been produced, indicating that the unclear photo of the turtle in the lake is in fact another Rafetus swinhoei, bringing the globally known population for this species to four individuals.

This finding brings new hope, with the possibility of bringing wild animals together in a controlled environment for captive breeding. However, the conservation and future of this, the worlds rarest turtle species, is far from guaranteed, a great deal of effort is now needed to protect these known animals and ensure they are able to breed, this will mean bringing them together in a single location. The ATP/IMC still has almost a dozen historical sites for which we want to invest more time in monitoring and will hopefully use eDNA to help to confirm more animals.

Nguyen Tai Thang of the ATP/IMC makes observations around Xuan Khanh Lake, Hanoi. (Photo: ATP)BEIJING, April 11 (Xinhua) -- China's state economic planner released a document Wednesday to guide the development of outbound investment and financing funds, eyeing more capital for the Belt and Road Initiative and better cooperation with global lenders.

The funds will be encouraged to direct investment into industrial cooperation, according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

The document said the funds should help ensure "stable, sustainable and safe capital sources" for the Belt and Road.

Chinese outbound investment funds will be supported to expand collaboration with global financial institutions, including the World Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the New Development Bank.

China will support those funds to expand business, such as overseas equity investment, debt financing, and cross-border guarantee.

Financing channels of those funds will be broadened, the document said, allowing fund-raising from all types of private capital, including sovereign wealth funds.

Regulators including the NDRC and the central bank will step up supervision and channel more energy into risk control to ensure healthy development of the funds.BEIJING, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Key documents of the third plenary session of the 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee were published on Wednesday.

Also published was a book written to help the public understand the documents. It includes a piece by General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee Xi Jinping, explaining the decision on deepening reform of Party and state institutions at the plenary session, said Xin Guangwei, editor-in-chief of the People's Publishing House.

Xin said Xi's piece had never been made public before. Seven articles written by other Party and state leaders on the matter were also included.

Zhang Yongjun, an official at the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, said these publications are the most fundamental and authoritative materials for all Party members to study and implement the spirit of the plenary session.Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visits the Shanghai pilot free trade zone in Shanghai, east China, April 10, 2018. Li made a two-day inspection that ended Wednesday to the municipality. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)

BEIJING, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has called on Shanghai to further improve the business environment and reduce institutional transaction costs in its efforts to expand reform and opening up.

Li made the remarks during a two-day inspection to the municipality that ended Wednesday.

Li made his first stop at Shanghai pilot free trade zone, where he called on the local government to firmly promote reforms and opening up to accumulate more fresh experiences.

Promotion of high-quality growth entails a good business environment, Li said, urging Shanghai to increase efforts in this regard and reduce institutional costs to invigorate the market and make local people's life easier.

At foreign medicine firm Roche, Li pointed out that expanding opening up can both benefit economic growth and people's livelihood, citing that China has huge market demand for cancer drugs.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visits a foreign medicine firm in Shanghai, east China, April 10, 2018. Li made a two-day inspection that ended Wednesday to the municipality. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)

Li said China will introduce multiple steps to increase supply of cancer drugs and reduce the cost for patients, and hoped that medicine producers can lower their prices to boost sales and benefit patients.

Visiting Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery Company Limited, Li encouraged the global leading port equipment maker to combine high-quality manufacturing and service to gain stronger global competitiveness.

Li also visited a local hospital and an innovation incubator, where he called on them to further leverage the power of the internet to expand medical services to remote areas and facilitate economic transition.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visits a hospital in Shanghai, east China, April 11, 2018. Li made a two-day inspection that ended Wednesday to the municipality. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)Photo by Ed Pevos | MLive

Her Favorite Things

Travel writer Kim Schneider has served up dozens of great adventure ideas in her new book, "100 Things To Do in Traverse City Before You Die."

And while it's hard to pick favorites in a place like Northern Michigan, that's exactly what we asked Schneider to do.

If she could winnow her list to her 10 most-loved trips and places, what would those be?

And then we threw in an extra one, because life is short and you've got to pack in all the fun you can.

Here are Schneider's picks:

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By Mark Bugnaski | MLive

Pick up dinner in the woods by hunting for morels

If you don't already have a secret spot for hunting morels each spring, know it's legal to pick in state and national parks, and many have great luck in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

But cheating is also encouraged at the Taste of Morels at Boyne City's Morel Fest, a sample of best area chef creations using morels.

Another tip: Black Star Farms has a morel dinner (worth saving up for) that follows a hunt on their pretty property that you are encouraged to hike/snowshoe on year-round.

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Mark Bugnaski | MLive

Pro tip if you're picking your own: Let the mushrooms sit on a paper towel to dry after soaking them in salt water for up to an hour to remove unwanted dirt, bugs and slugs.

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Brian Davies/The Register-Guard via AP

Time a trip around the blossoms in bloom (mid-May)

Savoring blossom time means leaving a lot of time to drive and stroll.

Schneider joined the Brengman Brothers Winery just so she could enjoy its Feast of St. Vincent festival in late April, which now is open to anybody. "What I love is the whole philosophy of the owners in trying to bring old-world festivals to the new-world wine region, but the best part was just an excuse to walk in the vineyard just starting to bloom and the pours of wine made from a certain row of wine grape as that grape was being blessed. There's great food after, too."

Also check out guided bike tours in vineyards (around orchards) led by Suttons Bay Bikes.

And don't forget downtown Traverse City, she says. It's gorgeous when all the trees lining Front Street and Union are in bloom and big puffs of pink blossoms rain down on the sidewalks.

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Photo by Ed Pevos | MLive

Take America's prettiest 7-mile road trip: Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive

This is a big, obvious idea and maybe something almost everyone in Michigan has already done. But the view from the Pierce Stocking Drive in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore never gets old, and it also seems to be a different experience every time I go.

Last time, I ended up at the Lake Michigan overlook at sunset. I sat on the ridge of sand and was surprised when the whole "sunset audience" broke into applause as the sun sank over the horizon.

There's also something really cool that's new this year: The park hired the former graphics editor of National Geographic to create a series of authentic mural signposts along the trail. One has the sad story of "Sleeping Bear" written out in the native Anishnabec language, and also translated.

There also are star maps and constellation stories as told by the region's original people. And there's a lot more. Ask for a map at the visitor booth as you enter.

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Joel Bissell | MLive

Sunset, bonfire and star gazing

To keep it easy, most times I just try to catch sunset. And on as many summer nights as I possibly can, after a beach hike.

Stay for at least 20 minutes after, when the sky gets really brilliant. I mention Empire Beach in the book, but any beach from Leland to south of Empire gives you a similar view of the sun sinking over the Manitou Islands and with dunes along the shoreline.

I like Leland's North Beach for the way it's lined by a tall bluff and feels really private. Also, the National Lakeshore did a night sky inventory. Those bluff-lined beaches block the most city lights and are best for star gazing.

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Empire Beach is a great spot to catch a sunset.

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Photo courtesy of Kim Schneider

The Cherry Bowl Drive-in

This just feels like a classic summer thing.

They have vintage cartoons and double features. All films are PG or G. Snacks are great. And you get families and couples and friends who open the backs of their vans, sometimes come in pj's, and snuggle up to watch the double feature.

The trick is getting in a nap since the sun doesn't set until 10 p.m. on the long summer nights in Michigan's north.

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Winery inn stays

This is a favorite splurge, and something I actually do, sometimes with my husband, sometimes with a visiting couple.

My all-time favorite thing, I think, is the way Chateau Chantal lets guests serve themselves at the tasting room bar after the daytime tasters have gone home.

The few guests staying the night gather around and have a private party in this fully-stocked tasting bar. The owners also leave a bundle of wood by the fire for guests to start when they're ready, and we always get out some board games or wine trivia to play with friends, or strangers who become fast friends.

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Photo courtesy of Northwestern Michigan College

Lobdell's (Let a future top chef pamper you)

I try to get to at least one lunch each year at Lobdell's restaurant staffed by culinary students at Northwestern Michigan College. They also throw international dinners. It's got the best water view in town, and it's also fun to see enthusiasm and hear stories of why the students headed back for a culinary degree.

There's gorgeous plating too, and it's a great deal!

I also have to mention that my favorite restaurant in town, Alliance, is led by a really creative chef team. Tip: Take the recommendations of your wait staff, many of whom (like the chefs) travel to spots like Thailand to study the food scene to bring the flavors back). Tip 2: It's often hard to get a reservation, but you can almost always get in for a seat at the bar, where you should order The Constant Gardener cocktail, notable for the cucumber and mint.

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Photo courtesy of Interlochen Center for the Arts

Interlochen College of Creative Arts

This isn't one you'd do all the time, but if you haven't done it, it's really an experience to take one of the growing number of classes at Interlochen College of Creative Arts targeted to adults and amateurs.

I took a class in watercolor journaling and loved it. You sit amid the campers in uniforms. Hear them practicing. Eat in the cafeteria. Work along the lake. You can even book lakefront lodging on campus.

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Photo courtesy of Kim Schneider

Traverse City Film Festival

I take my vacation time around the Traverse City Film Festival. I've loved nearly every film I've seen, but even more so, the energy in town.

People yell across parking lots to strangers, asking what movies they've seen, and wanting to know their picks for the don't-miss films. The filmmaker panels are free and fascinating.

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MLive file art

Paddling local rivers

Kayaking is especially exciting during the fall salmon run. On the Boardman, Platte and Crystal rivers, giant salmon rush past you. We don't get get the dolphin sightings here, but the salmon add the wildlife thrill to an already pretty and fun experience.

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MLive file art

Savory Snacks

It's a toss-up between the samosas at NJ's Grocery in Lake Leelanau and the Village Cheese Shanty's sandwiches on pretzel bread in Leland's historic Fishtown.

Tip for both: Call ahead. At NJ's, that means there will be some when you get there, and they'll be hot and yummy.

A call to the Cheese Shop, as locals call it, will ensure it hasn't run out of pretzel bread, which usually happens well before noon.

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Photo by Ed Pevos | MLive

Pencil yourself in, get outside and have fun

If you've been traveling Up North, chances are you have your own favorite spots.

Share them in the comments so we can all find some new exciting places to visit this year.

Here are a few more ideas for your Northern Michigan adventures:

Cottage for rent has Dark Sky Park next door

Mackinac Island debuts Fort2Fort Five-Mile Challenge

Sleeping Bear Dunes unveils 2018 stargazing parties

Don't EditBLUEBERRY AMBASSADOR MOMENTS

Kearsley Fiedler Elementary, coordinator Kelli Verran



Steven Taft

Blueberry Moment 15996

This weekend we celebrated Easter with my mom and step-dad, my grandma, grandpa, cousins, aunt, and my great grandma. My great grandma has been very sad since my great grandpa died a couple of months ago and I wanted to do something to cheer her up a little bit. My mom said we should make her a craft and get her some of her favorite flowers. I let my mom trace my hand to make the Easter craft for my great grandma. When we got to my grandma's, I surprised my great grandma by giving her some yellow roses and the craft we made. She was surprised and happy! She gave me a hug and said thank you. She smiled a little. This made me feel good!

Blueberry Moment 15995

During one weekend at my dad's in Illinois, I was able to help greet people at church. To greet people, I shook their hand and said hello. I decided to do this because it makes me feel happy and I wanted to make others feel happy too. The lady smiled when I shook her hand and said hello back and seemed happy. Greeting others at church made me giddy and feel like I wanted to dance! I want to do it more often!

My mom is often sad and misses my great grandpa who died a few months ago. One night when we were at our house before going to bed, when she was sad, I decided to do a happy dance to cheer her up and boy did she laugh! I was feeling so silly and excited and just wanted to make mom smile! I'm trying to do more silly things when mom is sad to make her feel better because it also makes me feel happy and good inside.

One weekend while I was at my dad's house in Illinois, I decided to go with my dad to Dunkin Doughnuts and buy my grandma one of her favorite cups of coffee. After we bought the coffee, we went to my grandma's house so I could give her the coffee and the card I made. I made her a card for her birthday so I could wish her a Happy Birthday and make her feel happy! I decided to do this so she could have a good birthday and be happy!

After I gave my grandma her coffee and card, she hugged me, kissed me, and said thank you and I love you! She smiled and was very happy! Doing this stuff for my grandma and making her birthday special made me feel great inside. I smiled!



Layne Shimmons

Blueberry Moment 13723

I shoveled my neighbor's driveway. I decided to do it because they are older and need help with some things. She was very thankful. Mrs. Kathy fell and hurt her arm and could not do it and Mr. Charlie is in a wheelchair. I thought it was no problem and I was happy to help.

Blueberry Moment 15013

When my Papa found out that I shoveled the neighbor's driveway for my first Blueberry Moment, he said he was proud of me and gave me four dollars to use to

play games at the Bowling Alley. My brother had spent all his game money that day trying to win a sleepy dinosaur stuffed animal out of the claw machine. He was sad because he didn't win. I decided to use the money that my papa gave me to try to win it for him. I won the dinosaur that my brother was trying to get and gave it to him. I had some money left so I kept trying and I won a teddy bear and gave it to my little sister. My brother and sister were so happy! It made me feel good that I could give my brother something that he wanted and had enough left to get something for my sister too.

Blueberry Moment 13722

When my mom told me that one of her friend's best friend passed away, I felt sad for her and wanted to get her a present to help make her feel better. For my third Blueberry Moment, I decided to give her a painting and a card. She felt very happy and really liked the painting that I gave her. She read the Blueberry Card that I gave her and said that she would definitely continue the chain and pay it forward. I was thankful that I could do something to make her happy.



Abbey Hogan

Every year at Christmas time, our family adopts a family from the Shelter of Flint. I help my mom shop for, wrap and deliver clothes and toys for a family in need. It made me very sad to hear that there were families who did not have a place to live, clothes that fit them, or money to buy presents. It makes me feel happy that our family can give a Christmas to another family. I really appreciate all the things that I have and my family and I talk about how not to take that for granted.

Every year in February, my sister and I make homemade Valentines for the residents at Swank Nursing Home. I try to make each card different and funny, because a lot of the people in the nursing home are sick or lonely. We also give them a little bag of candy, because they like sweets too! It makes me feel good to see the people smile when we deliver their cards.

My mom gets a coffee from Starbucks every morning on our way to school. Sometimes we pay for the person's order behind us. We asked the lady at the window to give them the Blueberry Card and she said, "That is so cool!" I asked my mom to drive away slowly and the person honked and waved when they found out their order was free. I remember how surprised my mom was when someone did that for her. It felt good to brighten someone's day.



Brooklyn Hoskey

My first Blueberry Moment was when I shoveled most of my neighbors' driveways. Why I did it because all my neighbors are busy and not shoveling their driveway. I did not want them to get hurt so I went around and shoveled their driveways.

My second Blueberry Moment was when I helped my mom bake cookies. When I saw my neighbor John's car in the driveway, I knew he was home from work and I decided to deliver the cookies to him. I went out in the cold and delivered the cookies and snuck in a Blueberry Card.

My last Blueberry Moment was with my sister who is in the eighth grade. She was studying for a big test and I saw she was struggling. I asked if she wanted help. She told me what she needed me to do and we studied for her test together.

Maxwell Thiede



Blueberry Moment 15004

I was with my mom waiting for my brother Samuel to get off the school bus. It was snowing really hard and I decided to wipe the snow off the car so my mom could see. Helping my mom clean the car off made me very happy.

Blueberry Moment 15028

On Sundays, my family goes over to my grandma and grandpa's house for lunch. I helped my grandma in the kitchen making macaroni and cheese. By helping my grandma cooking in the kitchen, it made me feel great.

Blueberry Moment 13729

On Sunday, I was at my grandparent's house for lunch. After lunch, my great uncle

Craig, needed help with his laundry so I took a basket out to his car for him. Helping him with his laundry basket made me feel excited.



Anthony Frost

My first random act of kindness, I helped an elderly lady load her groceries in her vehicle. I was with my mom and we were at Kroger. It made me feel happy because I helped someone.

For my second random act of kindness, I was with my mom and brother at the doctor. There was a boy who was acting out. I helped calm him down by talking and playing with him. It made me feel good to know that I was the one who helped calm him down.

For my final random act of kindness, I was at Kroger with my mom. I picked up trash along side the parking lot. It made me feel good to know that I was helping the environment along with helping clean up our community.



Preston Boggs

I did this to someone I didn't know at the store. What I did was a big help. I noticed their hands were full with bags, so I simply opened the door for them. This I know is random but that is still something special and I'm glad I did it. It made me feel great, so yes even though it was just something simple it made me feel good on the inside, a warm feeling.

My second Blueberry Card was also in a store. I helped an adult carry their groceries. The adult of course was not dangerous and my mom was around to make sure I was ok and safe. When I helped the adult, my head was racing thoughts that he might say, "I don't need help, or Thank You," in a bad way. But I did it anyway, and it turns out the adult was very kind and thankful that I helped them and that was good enough for me myself and I.

My final Blueberry Card was simple but still a random act of kindness. I was in my house, waiting to call mom when I saw my grandma struggling to finish folding the clothes in the basket. My grandma told me I didn't have to help if I didn't want to, but I decided to do what is the best for her not my time. I walked up to her and I started folding clothes. We ended up finishing the basket, after I did so my heart felt warm and I was in the happiest mood ever. Still, the fact I helped my family member doesn't mean it's not random.



Lily Weidman

My first Blueberry Moment was when I helped a boy pick up his stuff because he dropped it all over the floor. It was a mess.

Another Blueberry Moment was when I helped base for another cheer team. It wasn't my team, but I wanted to help because they had a girl that was absent.

My third Blueberry Moment was when I help my brother Jackson with his homework.

My last Blueberry Moment was when I helped Delaney up. She slid on the ice and got snow all over her.



Nathan Richardson

Blueberry Moment 15080

When I was at school, a classmate did not have money for popcorn day. I shared and gave him a bag of my popcorn. It felt good to give to someone that would have been left out.

Blueberry Moment 15081

When I was at school, getting my hearing tested, the other half of my class walked in when I finished. I held the door open for them and that made me feel helpful.

Blueberry Moment 15082

A classmate didn't have a snack and needed one. My mom always sends extra food with me so I asked him if he would like any of my snack to share and that made me

feel good that I could help someone out.



Mary Jane Desgrange

One of my first Blueberry Moments I did was give a couple of different books to Mr. Billing for his classroom. I felt like it was a way I could thank him for letting me borrow his books and letting me take them home.

My second Blueberry Moment was when we got rid of my dog Bowser. We had a bunch of dog toys that were almost new. Coincidently my neighbor got a new dog and we gave him the toys so he wouldn't have to spend a lot of money on a baby dog. I feel like we did something very nice.

My last Blueberry Moment was that my family couldn't afford a big party for my little sister like she wanted. I helped plan a party (not as big) for her so she wouldn't be disappointed or fell like we forgot about her.



Kaydence Sontag

I was out for desert with my mom at Big Boy restaurant. Across from us there was a police officer in uniform eating dinner. I walked up to him and said ''Thank you for your service" and I shook his hand. My mom even took a picture of us giving the camera a thumbs up. This act of kindness made me feel very happy and appreciative for our police officers.

One night, I was out to eat at McDonalds, and one of the workers dropped off a milkshake to me that someone had bought me without me knowing. Then I noticed a little boy about my age out to eat with his dad. The thought came to me of paying the favor forward to someone else. So, my mom and I went to the counter and ordered the little boy a milkshake. I remembered the happy feeling I felt when I received my surprise, and I hoped the little boy would get the same feeling. This random act of kindness made me feel like the world is getting better one act of kindness at a time.

My third act of kindness took place at school. It all started one day at lunch when I noticed one of my classmates and what she was packed for her cold lunch. I know how much I love a nutritious lunch, and it made me feel sad when I saw she only had cookies and carrots. That night I decided to bring an extra lunch for the following day. The next day at school I brought her a lunch. Just doing that small act of kindness made me feel like a compassionate person.



Vanessa Hood

I was at my grandma's one weekend with my grandpa, sister and cousin. She was sick! We decided we would stay there and help her out. We helped her get out of bed, eat her food, and we were always by her side. I did not really want to stay, but on the inside, I decided it was the best thing to do.

I was watching television, and my mom was doing the dishes. I decided that she does the dishes all the time and I was going to do them today. Parents do a lot for us, so I let my mom rest. While I was doing the dishes, I got all wet, but it was worth it. It made me feel proud inside for what I did. I did it because it was the right thing to do.

Summer was ending and it was starting to get cold outside. My dad had to put all the stuff in the shed. I was going outside to play with my friends. We all saw my dad carrying a bike to the shed. I asked my two friends if they would go over there with me and help my dad. They said yes. We head over there. We carried all the things to the shed. After the shed was full and yard picked up, we went to play. That made me feel like I had some very good friends who were willing to help me. I made that decision because it was the right thing to do.



Kadence Streeter

My first Blueberry Moment I gave my snack away to a friend because they did not have a snack. I had extra and thought since I have an extra, why don't I give one of my snacks away to be nice. That is what I did.

My second Blueberry Moment is when I went caroling with my mom, sister and friends. We rang the doorbell and began singing. When the family came to the door, not only were we singing, we gave them a give them a gift bag.

My last Blueberry Moment was when a couple of friends helped me. We went another friend's house and gave her a present for Christmas to be nice.I felt good when I did this stuff because it made me feel happy what I did for others and it made me happy that they were happy.



Sarah Chambers

My first Blueberry Moment is when my dad left all his papers on the table while he was pulling out of the driveway going to work. I ran out of the house and made him stop so I could give them to him.

My second Blueberry Moment was when my friend Abby fell outside and she got all muddy. I helped her clean up in the bathroom while she went back to class. I also did a favor for her by putting her coat in her locker and helping her up outside.

My last Blueberry Moment is that my neighbor dropped his papers on the ground outside. When I was riding my bike, I went to go help him and he had a big smile after I gave a random act of kindness card to him.



Christopher Owens

My first moment was when I shoveled my neighbor's driveway, porch, and sidewalk. I walked to her house and asked if she needed help. She said, "Can you shovel my porch?" I ended up shoveling the driveway, sidewalk, and porch.

My second moment is when I helped my neighbor bring in groceries. I brought them up the stairs into the house. When I was done, I felt really good

My final Blueberry Moment was when I donated two stuffed animals to the kindergarteners and I feel really good about it.SHELBY TOWNSHIP, MI - A Michigan woman bought a round for everyone in a Michigan bar after realizing she won a $189,912 prize from the Michigan Lottery.

Mardi Swiss, of Utica, won playing Club Keno The Jack when she matched eight of the 20 Club Keno numbers drawn on Tuesday, April 10.

She bought her winning ticket at Steiny's Tavern, 55161 Shelby Road in Shelby Township, and promptly bought a round for everyone in the bar and picked up the tab for her friend's dinners.

"I was eating dinner with some friends, and we were kind of half-watching the Club Keno drawings," Swiss said.

"We saw The Jack had reset and we were looking at the numbers, but the next drawing started before we could see what all of the numbers were. I took my ticket up to the bartender to be scanned and she told me I had a big winner. I felt like jelly, I was shaking so much."

Swiss' tab ended up being about $100. The 55-year-old visited Lottery headquarters Thursday to claim the big prize. She plans to pay some bills, share with family and friends, and then save the remainder.

"It's so unbelievable to win, it still hasn't sunk in yet," Swiss said.

In 2017, Lottery players won about $423 million playing Club Keno, The KICKER, and The Jack.The following is a guest editorial written by Mike Borders, president of Michigan Gun Owners Inc., which is suing Ann Arbor Public Schools over its policy that bans weapons on school grounds. On Wednesday, April 11, the Michigan Supreme Court held a hearing on lawsuits related to AAPS and Clio Area School District's policies on guns in schools.

One of the founding principles of our nation is the rule of law. Our elected legislature has been tasked with creating the laws that we must all follow. In the case of Ann Arbor Public Schools v. MGO, AAPS would have you believe that they have the ability to prohibit a person who otherwise has a lawful purpose on their premises simply because the person is carrying a firearm. Unfortunately for AAPS, the law says otherwise.



At (Wednesday's) Supreme Court hearing, Chief Justice Markman correctly described the exemption that would allow a person with a Concealed Pistol License to openly carry a firearm on school property. The law often cited by AAPS' superintendent, Dr. Jeanice Swift, allows for schools to provide for safety and security measures for students. What Dr. Swift has failed to mention in all of her public comments is a very important line in the Michigan School Code. "Except as otherwise provided by law" means that public schools must adhere to all state laws. In this case, current Michigan laws make it perfectly legal to openly carry a firearm if in possession of a CPL.

Supreme Court in 'difficult position' on school gun policy, justice says



AAPS has attempted to argue that schools are protected by the "Gun Free School Zone Act," while ignoring language that provides for exemptions from the law by those who are lawfully licensed to carry a concealed firearm. This language is codified in both federal and state laws, and the exemption plays a pivotal role in determining legislative intent. The language shows that our legislators have always intended for CPL holders to be allowed to carry on school grounds.



Dr. Swift also says the "Michigan Supreme Court has an opportunity to move forward in drawing a definitive line on the side of keeping our children safe at school." The Michigan Supreme Court is solely in the business of interpreting the plain language of the law as written and passed by our legislature. The Michigan Supreme Court has no business legislating from the bench, as Dr. Swift would like to see.



For the past three years, AAPS and Clio have trampled on the rule of law and trespassed lawful gun owners. Gun owners throughout this state want nothing more than to be treated as equal citizens, rather than fear prosecution for trespassing while doing something otherwise permissible by law. The court system is not the appropriate venue to argue a matter already deliberated by our legislators.



Should AAPS or Clio wish to see a law that would prevent individuals with a CPL from openly carrying in a school, Michigan Gun Owners would argue the most appropriate venue for change would be within the halls of our state House and Senate. It is quite obvious that the legislature intended to allow a CPL holder the ability to openly carry a firearm while on school property. This is apparent because there is no law that makes such an act illegal. If we are to consider changing the law to prohibit firearms in schools, we should allow an open and

transparent debate to occur. With that being said, the legislature has had numerous opportunities to ban firearms from schools and have not taken action. The only logical answer for the legislature's inaction on the topic is that it is not necessary.



While Dr. Swift chastises the position that lawfully carried firearms are a deterrent, AAPS has yet to address the fact that their policies will not stop someone who has ill intent from harming schools. Instead, Dr. Swift wishes to deny citizens the ability to protect themselves in the event of a tragic situation. We will likely never know how many mass shootings are stopped by a lawfully carrying gun owner. It is impossible to provide a quantitative and definitive answer to something that cannot be statistically studied, and for AAPS to argue to the contrary is misinformed. Furthermore, Dr. Swift has neglected to mention the simple fact that numerous firearms training centers throughout the state have been filled to capacity when offering free firearms training to school employees.



Dr. Swift also wrote about two cases in which a firearm was negligently handled by a gun owner. Michigan Gun Owners and other firearms rights organizations around the state advocate for firearms safety programs and offers those programs to children and adults around the state. Gun owners would be remised if we did not counter Dr. Swift's stories with the account of an assistant principal of a school in Mississippi who stopped a school shooting after retrieving a pistol from his vehicle.



Nobody is arguing that there is an imminent or immediate danger at all times. No gun owner wakes up in the morning hoping they will have an opportunity to stop a violent crime from happening. To the contrary, gun owners are doctors, lawyers, teachers, truck drivers, secretaries, and even legislators. Gun owners go about their day by going to work, running their errands, and picking their children up from school. We carry firearms for the same reason most have a fire extinguisher in our homes; we would rather be prepared for any situation rather than be left unprepared.



Michigan Gun Owners and lawful owners of firearms around the state are certain that the Appeals Court erred in their ruling and engaged in judicial activism. While we all agree that safety of school students is paramount, we disagree with AAPS and Clio schools in regards to the best means to do so. Michigan Gun Owners stands ready to work with school districts to provide a comprehensive school safety plan that would allow gun owners to comply with the law while ensuring the safety of school staff and students. We implore the state Supreme Court to look at the plain language of the law, and to interpret the law as it was written. If they do just that, we are absolutely confident that gun owners will prevail.ANN ARBOR, MI - The Ann Arbor YMCA is holding a free community event next month to inspire kids to keep their minds and bodies active.

From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, May 19, the YMCA will celebrate "Healthy Kids Day" at YMCA Camp Birkett, 9141 Dexter Townhall Road in Pinckney, according to a press release.

"Healthy Kids Day" is the organization's national initiative to improve health and well-being for kids and families. The event is used as an opportunity to ignite children's imaginations so that they can imagine what they'll accomplish this summer, according to the release.

Activities include canoeing, games, healthy cooking demonstrations, and arts and crafts.

The event is celebrated at over 1,500 Ys across the country by over 1.2 million participants, according to the release.

The YMCA reports that research shows without access to out-of-school learning activities, kids fall behind academically. Kids also gain weight twice as fast during summer than the school year, according to the release.

"When a child is healthy, happy, and supported they can make great things happen," Colette Hemker, youth community program director, said in the release. "We believe in the potential of all children, and we strive to help kids find that potential within themselves.

"A child's development is never on vacation and 'Healthy Kids Day' is a great opportunity to educate families and motivate kids to stay active in spirit, mind and body throughout the summer."

For more information, visit www.annarborymca.org.SOUTH LYON, MI - Residents are being encouraged to get their hands dirty this weekend at the 14th annual Creek Clean Up in South Lyon.

From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, April 14, volunteers will remove trash and debris from local creeks and streams in an effort to clean up the environment, according to the South Lyon Storm Water Management Planning Program.

Volunteers are asked to meet at the Michigan Seamless Tube and Pipe parking lot, 400 McMunn Street.

Attendees should plan on mud and water conditions and bring rubber boots, gloves, sunscreen, hats and warm clothes, officials said.

The event is sponsored by Michigan Seamless Tube and Pipe, South Lyon Area Boy Scouts and the City of South Lyon Storm Water Management Planning Program.ANN ARBOR, MI - Between evacuations for bomb threats, snow days, the National School Walkout on March 14 and regularly scheduled days off, it's been difficult for students and teachers at schools like Lincoln High to fall into a regular routine this spring.

"Time is absolutely the most valuable commodity we have," said Lincoln Superintendent Sean McNatt. "Teachers do try to pick up the pace a little with days missed."

Lincoln High School students are going into their SAT testing with just five uninterrupted weeks of school in the 12 weeks of classes since winter break.

As older students across the state began taking the SAT and M-STEP as part of the Michigan Merit Exam this week, it's hard to say whether their scores will be affected by the recent disruptions, McNatt said.

Washtenaw County schools have missed between three and seven days of school so far in the 2017-18 school year, mostly due to inclement weather.

Five Ann Arbor schools canceled one day this school year due to power outages, in addition to the district's four snow days. Lincoln Schools called off classes on Feb. 26 because the district did not have enough bus drivers to run the bus routes.

Local students who participated in the National School Walkout to protest gun violence in schools on March 14 may have missed about 30 minutes of class, or they may have missed most of the school day if they attended a rally in Ypsilanti following the walkout.

The wave of threats against schools following the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, also has disrupted the learning environment for students. While not every threat prompted a cancellation, evacuations and lockdowns added a level of anxiety for staff, students and their parents.

Whitmore Lake Public Schools canceled on March 14 due to a threat to "shoot up" a Whitmore Lake school. Milan Area Schools sent students home on Feb. 26 due to a bomb threat.

Washtenaw International Middle Academy and Washtenaw International High School, which share a building in Ypsilanti, went into a lockdown and then evacuated the school for about an hour due to a bomb threat on Feb. 2. Students returned to class after law enforcement cleared the building.

Ypsilanti Community Middle School evacuated due to a bomb threat on March 5 and parents were able to pick up their children. That day counted as instructional time because students had the option to spend the day at Ypsilanti Community High School with teachers, said Taryn Reid, spokesperson for Ypsilanti Community Schools.

Lincoln High School evacuated on Feb. 23 and March 5 due to bomb threats, and the school went into a lockdown due to another threat on March 6.

The school threats have slowed since students returned from spring break, and in many cases, the people responsible are now facing criminal charges. Knowing the people who allegedly made two of the threats against Lincoln Schools have been arrested has brought a sense of closure for the school community, McNatt said.

"I think things are starting to get back to normal," he said. "For a period of time, we heard from kids that any time they heard an announcement, they were thinking where are we going (to evacuate) and what's going on."

The Lincoln board of education is considering applying for a waiver from the Michigan Department of Education to avoid making up one of its seven missed days of school in the 2017-18 school year.

Michigan public schools are required to provide 1,098 hours of instruction over 180 days in an academic year. Schools do not have to make up the first six days of school that are canceled due to conditions outside of the school's control, like weather.

Schools can apply for a waiver to have up to three more missed days forgiven.

Here's a look at when Washtenaw County traditional public schools have closed this school year:LANSING, MI -- The state's highest court has ruled a lower court must reconsider a lawsuit that was originally dismissed of a Midland woman who was offended by a transgender person's presence in a locker room.

In an April 6 order, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled a Michigan Court of Appeals erred in declining to consider plaintiff Yvette M. Cormier's claims under the Michigan Consumer Protection Act. Thus, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the Court of Appeals "for consideration of the trial court's grant of summary disposition on those claims."

Cormier in March 2015 filed her lawsuit in Midland County Circuit Court against Planet Fitness, seeking damages of more than $25,000. The suit is based on Cormier seeing a transgender person in the women's locker room at the Planet Fitness, 701 Joe Mann Blvd. in Midland, on Feb. 28, 2015.

Carlotta Sklodowska later came forward, saying she was the transgender woman in question.

Planet Fitness canceled Cormier's membership after she complained to fellow gym members over several days.

Cormier then filed a lawsuit, alleging violations of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, breach of contract and other claims.

The Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in Michigan on the basis of "religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, familial status, or marital status" in employment, housing, education and access to public accommodations.

Midland County Circuit Court Judge Michael J. Beale dismissed the lawsuit on Jan 4, 2016. Cormier's attorney, David A. Kallman, appealed the judge's decision to the Michigan Court of Appeals 24 days later.

In June, the Court of Appeals affirmed Beale's dismissal, prompting Kallman to file for leave to appeal to the state Supreme Court.Volume II of 'Xi Jinping: The Governance of China' unveiled in 9 languages

London (People's Daily) - The second volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China was unveiled in 9 languages in London on Wednesday, during the 2018 London Book Fair.

Jiang Jianguo (third from right) and Prince Andrew (center) unveil the book together in London on Wednesday. (Photos: Qiang Wei/People's Daily)

Ninety-nine of Xi's speeches, conversations, instructions and letters from 2014 to 2017 are included in the second volume. The book highlights the Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, and Xis perspective on building a community of shared future for mankind.

Jiang Jianguo, minister of the State Council Information Office, said the Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is a philosophy rooted in fertile humanistic soil. It is a philosophy built on a people-centric stance and takes aim at the future of mankind.

Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, said the international publication of the book is a milestone. He remembers clearly when he met President Xi during the president's formal visit to the UK in 2015. I hope the book will enlighten readers about where Chinas going, thinking and being, he said.

The book follows the successful publication of the first volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, which was published in 2014.

British sociologist and globalization theorist Martin Albrow poses a photo with the book.

A visitor is browsing Xi Jinping: The Governance of China at the 2018 London Book Fair.On the desk of Detroit homicide detective Sgt. Todd Edy sits a manila folder labeled "teletypes."

Inside are yellowed, typewritten pages, the first wire communications issued by Detroit police after an officer was shot in the chest outside a methadone clinic in August 1972.

That officer, Donald O. Kimbrough, lived the remainder of his life paralyzed with a bullet lodged in his back.

He survived another 45 years before dying in December 2017 at 71, leaving behind a most unusual homicide investigation.

While ulcers, infection, severe malnutrition and septic shock all contributed to Kimbrough's death, according to Oakland County Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. Bernardino B. Pacris, there was but one underlying cause -- that 1972 gunshot wound.

Pacris ruled Kimbrough's manner of death a homicide. That finding set into motion a series of events.

The seemingly ancient investigative files landed on the desk of Detroit Police Sgt. Todd Edy, a member of a specialized homicide task force that includes state police and federal agents, shortly after Kimbrough's death.

"We were a little confused; this isn't something we see routinely," said Edy, whose unit investigates some of the city's most high-profile crimes. "Normally, when a person lives 40 years after suffering an injury in the line of duty, his death rarely has anything to do with that injury ... So obviously, we had a lot of questions."

Edy believes the city's bankruptcy was partially to blame for Kimbrough's death.

"He had lost a good portion of his retiree benefits and he fell under the Medicare-Medicaid system, due to his age." the detective said. "... One of the things that he lost was his in-home health care.

" ... He developed the bed sores and the blood clots and the bed sores led to infections that ultimately led to his death."

The medical examiner told Edy that had Kimbrough not been shot 45 years ago, "he would not have died of what he died of."

Benefits

It doesn't appear that Kimbrough's family will benefit from the unusual homicide ruling.

Under Michigan law, a child of a slain officer could be eligible to receive $25,000 from the state.

There is also a much larger federal payout, currently about $350,000, potentially available to spouses and children of police who die as a result of an in-the-line-of-duty injury.

But not in this case.

U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman Joan LaRocca tells MLive, based on information provided her by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, that the federal benefit only applies to deaths resulting from in-the-line-of-duty injuries that occurred after 1976.

The shooting

Edy splits the case into two stacks of files that sit on an interrogation room desk on the fifth floor of the Detroit Police Department headquarters.

One pile, he says, is from the original investigation conducted nearly a half century ago; the other contains interviews and evidence he's collected since revisiting the case in December.

Edy said Kimbrough, along with two partners, James Younger and Donald Hughes, were investigating loitering outside a defunct methadone clinc near Detroit's Arden Park on Belmont between Woodward and John R on the day he was shot.

"We were outside because they used to sell methadone out on the street there," Younger, who retired from the Detroit Police Department in 1995 and now lives in Harper Woods, told MLive. "Back then, those who were addicted could be treatment programs.

"They'd give them methadone in a wafer shape to take home over the weekends, (they looked) similar to Dial soap; it was a pinkish color."

Methadone is given to heroin addicts to help them stave off opiate withdrawls.

Younger said the three officers heard gunfire. Kimbrough and Hughes ran toward an alley to apprehend any suspects; Younger said he tried to drive the patrol vehicle toward the shooting, but was blocked by traffic.

Edy said Detroit police at the time had become one of the first departments in the nation to install two-way radios, so Younger stayed behind with the vehicle to relay information to dispatch.

When Kimbrough and Hughes rounded the corner to the alley, there were two white men, one sitting in a green 1968 Lincoln Continental with a black vinyl roof; the other standing in the alley with a long gun.

Police ordered the man to drop his gun, and their attention was drawn to the Lincoln, as the driver was rolling down the window, Edy said.

"When they looked over, the white male that was in the driver's seat looked over and began firing at the two officers," Edy said.

Hughes and Kimbrough returned fire as the second man picked up his long gun and ran to the passenger side of the Lincoln and got inside before the car sped off.

It's possibe the second suspect was shot in the leg during the gunfight. It's believed the men were targeting a dealer who previously sold the men fake methadone.

Another witness, who was on his porch when the shooter fled, told police he saw the driver throw a handgun from the vehicle.

The recovered gun, a 1903 "pocket-model" Colt handgun, matched .32-caliber casings recovered at the scene, said Edy, but there were no fingerprints, and Detroit police evidence handlers melted the gun down in a blast furnace in March of 1994 for unknown reasons.

The driver was described as having "dark, thick, shoulder-length hair with "long, bushy sideburns and a thick, dark moustache."

The passenger had long, shoulder-length, light-orange or blonde hair and was clean-shaven. Both men were in their mid-20s.

An unchecked lead

The veteran detective's first step upon taking on the 45-year-old case was to reevaluate the original prime suspect, a man who claimed to his cellmate that he was the shooter.

The susepct was also identifed by Kimbrough in what Edy called an improper and "suggestive" lineup. Kimbrough's partner, Hughes, however, said the man in the lineup wasn't the shooter.

The problem is, says Edy, none of the details the now-dead suspect provided during interviews matched up with the actual shooting. The suspect told police at the time that he lied to other prisoners and claimed the shooting in order to bolster respect.

Police at the time submitted a warrant request to charge the man. It was rejected.

Digging deeper into the file, Edy found a hand-written tip from 1975 in which a caller claimed to have overheard two brothers talking at a party near Urbandale, Illinois.

One brother told the other that he'd shot a Detroit police officer. The only Detroit police shooting that remained unsolved and matched the description was Kimbrough's

"As hard as I looked, I could not find any follow-up on this tip," Edy said.

Edy tracked the tipster to Florida, flew down, interviewed him and determined the tip was viable. The detective then used the information provided by the tipster to find the two brothers referenced in the 1975 tip.

One brother had an extensive criminal history, including convictions for fraud and drug possession, and was arrested for writing a bad check in St. Clair Shores two days before Kimbrough was shot, Edy said. And his mugshot fit the description of the passenger in the green Lincoln.

"I thought it was going to be the driver, so when I saw the picture, I was like 'Damn," Edy said. "But then I'm thinking further: That's the guy with the shotgun."

An extremely optimistic Edy flew to a city near Des Moines, Iowa where the suspect now lives in a retirement home.

A search warrant was executed at the man's home and he was detained for questioning.

"Obviously, he was really confused and curious why we were there," Edy said. "Once he learns why we're interviewing him, he's very comfortable with the interview."

Edy said the man insisted he never claimed to have shot a Detroit police officer, seemed believable and "passed the lie detector test with flying colors."

"I fly back to Detroit, and now we sit here ... hoping that someone can give us something that can help out here," Edy said.

"In the history of the Detroit Police, there's only been two officers that have been shot and killed that are considered open cases. Prior to this, there was one.

" ... You don't want your name attached to something that's unsolved, especially when there's only been two in the entire history of the Detroit Police Department."

The only other unsolved Detroit police officer killing is the fatal shooting of Officer Ulysses Brown during a prostitution sting on Aug. 20, 1971. Brown is the father of former Deputy Chief Ulysha Renee Hall, who is now chief of the Dallas Police Department.

"If this case happened today, it would be solved in 48 hours," the detective said. "If they couldn't solve this thing 45 years ago, trying to grab ahold of this thing 45 years later is quite challenging."

Anyone with information about the cold case is asked to call Detroit police, 313-596-2200.GENESEE COUNTY, MI -- A 19-year-old Genesee Township man is accused of sharing child porn over the Internet.

Dante Alan Hacker was arraigned on April 7 in Genesee District Court on five counts each of child sexually abusive material and using a computer to a commit a crime.

The Michigan State Police Computer Crimes Unit launched an investigation after it was allegedly learned that Hacker was sharing child sexually abusive materials online.

Hacker was arrested following completion of a forensic examination of digital evidence collected by law enforcement officials.

Additional agencies involved in the investigation include the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Northeast Michigan Trafficking and Exploitation Crimes Task Force

He faces up to four years in prison and a $10,000 fine on each child sexually abusive material charge and up to seven years behind bars, a fine of $5,000, or both, in connection with the computer crime charges.ST. IGNACE, MI -- As the U.S. Coast Guard continues its response to a spill of an estimated 600 gallons of mineral oil containing toxic chemicals in the Straits of Mackinac, one of Michigan's senators expressed his dissatisfaction with the speed of that response.

U.S. Sen Gary Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, voiced his concerns during a committee hearing held Thursday, April 12, on preparations for the upcoming hurricane season. Peters explained that his constituents are demanding answers.

"We need to know," he said. "A lot of people in Michigan are asking questions. Folks are very concerned."

At the center of those concerns is a leak of dielectric fluid from underwater power cables operated by American Transmission Company, first reported on April 3.

The incident was initially presented as having no impact on the Enbridge Energy Line 5 oil and gas pipelines crossing the Straits of Mackinac. But new information released by the governor's office Wednesday, April 11, suggests an anchor strike damaged the controversial pipeline as well as the electric cables that leaked. Enbridge has confirmed there are three "dents" to the pipelines.

Though still evaluating the scope of the damage, Enbridge officials claim the pipeline integrity remains and, after a brief shutdown, have continued pumping oil through.

In response to a series of questions from Peters on Thursday, U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Linda Fagan admitted she did not have many details about the ongoing investigation into the cause of the spill.

Fagan did confirm Enbridge Energy's Line 5 oil and gas pipelines are still in operation, despite the damage.

Calling a potential rupture of Line 5 "absolutely catastrophic," Peters asked Fagan whether the Coast Guard is "fully confident" in the decision by the state and the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to allow Line 5 to continue operating in the wake of that new damage.

Fagan, deputy commandant for operations, policy, and capabilities, explained the Coast Guard's role in coordinating spill response efforts does not include determining whether Enbridge's pipelines should continue operation.

"The pipeline oversight is in the state's and PHMSA's purview," Fagan said. "Our role in the unified command focuses on the response and the oil spill, spill mitigation -- to ensure that we have appropriate entities and resources brought to bear in this spill and should other spills occur."

When pressed by Peters for more details on the reasoning behind the decision, Fagan said she would need to get back to the senator.

Flow through the Line 5 crossing was stopped on April 3 to accommodate inspections of the pipeline, according to an Enbridge spokesperson. The pipeline was put back in service the following day, after Enbridge determined the "pipelines had not been compromised," according to a company statement released at that time.

A higher-resolution inspection of the pipes was conducted Saturday, April 7, according to Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy. Analysis of that inspection data confirmed on Tuesday, April 10, there were three dents in the twin pipelines, Duffy said.

At that time, he said, the company reported the damage to state and federal authorities. But those dents pose no threat to pipeline integrity, according to Enbridge.

"A review of all leak detection systems and available data indicates the structural integrity of the pipelines has not been compromised," the company said in a statement.

A spokesperson for the governor's office, which called on Enbridge to accelerate its examination of pipeline alternatives after learning of the new damage, explained why the state allowed Line 5 to continue operating.

"We have information from Enbridge that the pipes are slightly dented but there is no indication of any damage that would result in a problem, such as a leak," spokesperson Ari Adler wrote in an email. "The state is working to confirm everything as Enbridge provides it. We have no reason at this time to believe they have not been forthcoming with all the information they have."

During the U.S. Senate committee hearing, Peters also pointed out that no information has yet been provided about the cause of the damage, other than a Coast Guard statement saying "vessel activity" is being investigated as a potential cause.

The Coast Guard has declined to release any information about the ongoing marine casualty investigation, citing policy, including what vessels were known to be operating in the area on April 1.

Though Enbridge was planning to begin work installing new anchor supports along Line 5 in May, Duffy said the company had not yet been out on the water when the incident occurred.

"Enbridge did not have any vessels or resources on the water at the Straits in 2018, including prior to or at the time of incident," he said in a statement. "Our installation of new anchor supports is scheduled to begin in May."

Peters, who also asked for specifics on the status of visual inspections of the Straits of Mackinac crossings, told Fagan he would like all the requested information before the end of the day Thursday.

Peters questioned why he has seen no reports of visual inspections of damage to the underwater pipelines and cables, despite the fact it occurred 11 days ago.

"This has gone on for a number of days," he said. "Not to have visual inspections, to have any kind of understanding of what happened and to be relying on the state and PHMSA without knowing exactly what they have looked at, I think, is irresponsible."

Duffy said Enbridge expects to send down a remote-operated underwater vehicle sometime next week to further inspect the pipelines for damage.

Citing a statistic that the volumes of water moving through the straits are more than 10 times that of Niagara Falls, Peters called the Straits of Mackinac "vitally important."

"It's right next to our No. 1 tourist attraction: Mackinac Island," he said.

In addition, the risk of oil or other toxic substances being released on a large scale is unacceptable, Peters said.

"The economic and environmental impact would be devastating," he said.

U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, also brought up the issue of Line 5 during a Subcommittee on Energy hearing with U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.

"There is no excuse for this ship's action and no excuse for not protecting the straits and our Great Lakes," Upton said in a statement. "In the coming days and weeks we'll continue working hand-in-glove with all involved to ensure everything is safe. We are all watching."

Upton said he will push for "long-term solutions," including a potential for a tunnel beneath the Straits of Mackinac -- one of the alternatives the governor's office is pushing Enbridge to evaluate.

The Great Lakes contain one-fifth of the world's fresh surface water and provide drinking water supplies for over 40 million people.

In addition to his questioning of Fagan, Peters also called for an oversight hearing on the issue and said he would set a meeting with Vice Admiral Karl L. Schultz, nominated to take over as Coast Guard commandant on June 1.GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Two weeks after residents voiced their concerns over proposed zoning amendments related to an affordable housing initiative, the Grand Rapids city commission is seeking further discussion.

At the same time, city officials are looking to expedite their timeline for producing a new master plan in recognizing the need to better address the affordable housing issue.

The current master plan, which acts as a guide for the planning commission in regards to land use and development, was adopted in 2002.

"We cannot afford to wait any longer with the issues that we're dealing with in this city and it will take some changes to the master plan," said Third Ward Commissioner David Allen.

"The issues we're dealing with right now aren't going away any time soon so I think moving the plan up is a good decision."

Second Ward Commissioner Joe Jones was the first to recommend beginning the master planning process "as soon as possible," rather than late in 2019, as is the current timeline.

Multiple commissioners support another 90-day period to engage community members in search of common ground, and to better understand the biggest concerns related to zoning amendments recommended as part of the "Housing NOW!" initiative.

Community members filled the city commission chambers during a March 27 meeting, many of which were there to protest four zoning changes being recommended by the housing advisory committee.

Those amendments are meant to make it attractive for developers to bring more affordable housing options to Grand Rapids. While residents acknowledged the city's housing problems, they argued the recommendations took power away from neighbors in deciding what their neighborhoods would look like.

Commissioners said Tuesday that there were likely aspects of each recommendation that they could adopt relatively soon with approval of the community.

The first community forum within the 90-day window was suggested to focus on the "low hanging fruit" of the recommendations that could be quickly put into effect.

Additional meetings would focus on the issues that have received more push-back, like allowing developers "by-right" opportunities to construct accessory dwelling units like apartments over garages, or in basements or backyards in residential districts.

No meeting dates were set Tuesday. Rather, the commission agreed to inquire with members of Public Agency at the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology about organizing opportunities to engage the public.

Public Agency at WMCAT offers "open courses, tailored training, project facilitation, and a network of community catalysts" to help schools, businesses and non-profit organizations foster "a culture of collaboration, innovation and action," according to its website.HOLLAND, MI - A Title IX lawsuit was filed against Holland Christian Schools, alleging the institution created and subjected a female student, raped by a classmate, to a hostile educational environment in violation of federal law.

"We are reviewing the suit with our attorneys and are taking steps to actively defend the school,'' according to a statement provided by Holland Christian Superintendent Dan Meester.

According to the lawsuit filed Tuesday, April 10, the student referred to as Jane Doe, was age 15 when assaulted by a 17-year-old male student.

The attack was reported to Zeeland police and Bryce J. DeRoo, referred to in the lawsuit as BJD, was investigated. He plead guilty to third-degree criminal sexual conduct in December 2016 and was sentenced Feb. 20, 2017, according to the lawsuit.

No public records are available on DeRoo's case, according to the Ottawa County Circuit Court.

However, media outlets present at the 2017 sentencing, including the Grand Haven Tribune reported he received three years probation and permitted to graduate. He was also approved for the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act, allowing the removal of the felony from his record after probation.

The victim's mother filed the lawsuit on her daughter's behalf. There are 207 allegations and five counts cited against Holland Christian, which serves roughly 1,700 K-12 students.

The student "was subjected to a hostile educational environment created by Holland Christian's lack of effective and appropriate policies and procedures to properly prevent, investigate, and address sexual assault and harassment, and failure to protect Plaintiff from her attacker's subjugation and presence,'' according to the lawsuit.

In November 2015, the lawsuit says the female student began a secret, romantic relationship with the male student because she was not allowed to date until age 16. The relationship was soon discovered by her parents.

When her mother began monitoring her phone in 2016, she reportedly discovered an abusive message from the teen, according to the lawsuit.

After Memorial Day, the mother allegedly saw a message in which he apologized for forcing her daughter to have sex. "He referred to the incident as rape," according to the lawsuit.

The student later told a teacher and her parents.

Despite requests by her parents and knowing of the allegations, the lawsuit says the school did nothing to separate the alleged attacker from his victim.

For example, allowing DeRoo to attend classes in close or adjacent proximity to the plaintiff's classes and participate in extracurricual actitivies such as choir, forcing her to drop out, according to the lawsuit.

"Holland Christian persisted in its actions and inaction even after it had actual knowledge of the harm suffered by the Plaintiff,'' according to the lawsuit.

"Holland Christian failed to commence an internal investigation, failed to implement protections, failed to provide accommodations for Plaintiff, and failed to have any Title IX policy whatsoever.''

The lawsuit cites the Dear Colleague letter issued by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in April 2011, saying it specifically concerns peer-on-peer sexual harassment and sexual assault.

The letter told educational institutions receiving federal funds to use the lowest possible standard of proof, a preponderance of evidence, in sexual assault cases.

The family is seeking compensatory damages for the teen's psychological and emotional stress, punitive damages, damages for tuition paid, and injunctive relief requiring the school to take effective steps to prevent sex-based discrimination and harassment.

Attorneys for the family could not be reached for comment.GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Three former waitresses have filed a federal lawsuit against Grand Coney Diner and its parent company, claiming the restaurant's management ignored their sexual harassment complaints involving a male co-worker.

In the lawsuit, filed Tuesday, April 10 in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, the women alleged that a shift manager at the Grand Coney restaurant at 401 28th St. SE touched them inappropriately and made sexually harassing comments.

The alleged harassment generally occurred in 2016 and early 2017.

According to the lawsuit, one of the waitresses alleged that the shift manager gave her unwanted back rubs, shoved his hands in her apron, shoved his hands between her legs, tucked the back of her shirt into her pants, rubbed the collar to her shirt near her neck, and "rather than hand her his keys or key card that was clipped to his waist he would force her to retrieve the keys near his crotch."

The waitress claimed that several managers witnessed the behavior and did nothing to stop it.

Two of the waitresses also said they complained to the company's district manager but no disciplinary action was taken and the shift manager did not stop the behavior.

A waitress who started work at Grand Coney in March 2016 alleged the staff manager began texting her outside of work and sent photos of himself only in boxer shorts.

"Every time she came in for my work shift, Gonzalez would call her over, take her cell phone and make sure she deleted all of the texts he had sent to her," the lawyer for the waitresses wrote in the lawsuit.

All of the waitresses ended up leaving the job at Grand Coney.

The lawsuit names Grand Coney's parent company, Restaurant Partners Inc.,. as a defendant and claims the company violated federal laws by allowing "a sexually harassing hostile work environment."

A spokesperson for the company on Wednesday released the following statement:

"Coney Partners LLC was made aware today of a lawsuit filed by three former employees alleging harassment by a former shift manager. The company prides itself on its positive relationships with its employees and the community. Coney Partners LLC denies the allegations against the company and plans to defend itself vigorously."

The lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages.If you were born in Michigan in July 1984 or later, you may be among more than five million people whose blood is being held by the state of Michigan, some of which may be used in medical research.

If you didn't know, blame your parents for not asking more questions.

If you want your blood to be excluded from research or destroyed, ask the state.

Or, like a group of parents who say the state did not obtain proper consent for their newborns' blood to be drawn or stored, you could sue the state of Michigan.

A federal lawsuit, filed by Saginaw County Attorney Philip Ellison on behalf of a group of Michigan parents, argues that the practice is unconstitutional and there are no protections in place to stop police or others from accessing the information that can be derived from stored blood samples.

The lawsuit does not aim to stop newborn testing, Ellison said, but to give control back to parents and guardians.

"Essentially, the state has stolen consent from parents," Ellison said.

He learned about Michigan's process of drawing infant blood works when he became a father in September, and said he's fighting for the rights of his newborn son and others to make their own choice about their blood.

The lawsuit asks for a jury to hear the case, to award damages, and for the court to find the practice unconstitutional.

Blood of 5 million

The blood of more than five million people is being stored, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) told MLive in March. That's half of Michigan's total population of just under 10 million.

MDHHS declined to provide more specific numbers or answer other questions because of the ongoing litigation, spokeswoman Lynn Suftin said. The department provided publicly available information to MLive about the program.

Michigan has drawn newborn blood for decades, beginning in the 1960s, to test babies for ailments on a list that began with six maladies and has grown to more than 50 conditions today, MDHHS said.

"I think it's a laudable goal," Ellison said.

But the program has evolved to become what it is today and with changes in technology, and blood can tell a lot about a person now compared to when the program began, he said.

In the mid 1980s, the state began storing blood samples for up to 100 years, MDHHS said, and in 2000, the Michigan Legislature amended the Public Health Code to allow use of newborn screening blood spots in health research, later developing the BioTrust, a program with an advisory board to oversee the stored blood spots and their use in health research.

The stored blood samples or spots are "de-identified," MDHHS said. They may be used by health researchers under a waiver of informed consent that can be granted by the MDHHS Institutional Review Board, made up of mostly MDHHS employees, which exists to make decisions about human subject research.

People born between 1987 and 2010 can opt out of blood research and storage by contacting the state to ask that samples not be used for research or be destroyed, or otherwise their blood will remain in private storage indefinitely. Parents may also contact the state to make the request, MDHHS said.

Parents of children born after May 2010 can opt out of the research portion by declining to sign over their consent, according to the state. Blood spots will continue to be stored unless a parent asks the state to destroy them.

Ellison argues in the suit, based on information from the state, that Michigan has processed 22 requests from law enforcement agencies asking for blood samples/spots or information derived from them.

The state emphasizes that privacy is being protected during the blood draw and storage process.

Fighting for Patton

Ellison said he first learned of the state's practice when he became a father and he and his wife, Katherine Ellison, welcomed Patton Justus Ellison into the world last September.

Patton was born early, Ellison said, among a whirlwind of excitement, uncertainty and anxiety.

The Hemlock attorney said he was surprised the next day when a healthcare professional at Saginaw's Covenant HealthCare hospital told him the newborn's blood sample was sent to the state of Michigan, and more surprised when he found out it would be kept in storage.

No one, not Ellison or his wife, a professor and director at Saginaw Valley State University, signed over consent before the blood was drawn, Ellison said.

The nurse handed Ellison a form that asked if the state could keep the extra blood. He signed and checked an option saying he did not wish to donate, Ellison said, though he believes the form indicates the state would keep the blood regardless.

"They didn't ask you if they could take the blood or test the blood. They only ask, after the fact, can we keep for research purposes? And if you say no, we're going to keep it anyway," Ellison said.

"My fears were realized, which is that the state of Michigan is keeping everyone's blood," he said.

He calls it "false consent."

Lynnette Wiegand, 30, of Saginaw Township, has four children ages 1 to 6. She is a plaintiff in the case after she learned about the state's practice to store infant blood from Ellison.

"I thought, once they did testing, the blood was discarded," she said.

She said she believes the state should be more transparent and hospital staff should be required to tell parents what they are signing, with clear and separate questions on a form asking parents to sign consent for the blood to be drawn, for it to be used in medical research, and for it to be stored.

"What else do they use the blood for?" she said. "Why do they have permission to donate or sell it to another third party?"

She wouldn't have signed the form at the hospital if she knew the blood was going to be stored, she said, and believes a person should be notified when they turn 18 if their blood is being stored.

"It's kind of like the typical government in my opinion, they always hide everything, they don't want anybody knowing what's going on," she said.

Natasha Bonhomme, chief strategy officer at the Washington D.C. based nonprofit Genetic Alliance, which promotes the idea that access to quality genetic services is critical to comprehensive healthcare, said she believes citizen input is important on issues like Michigan's blood bank, but there are different ways to go about it rather than filing a lawsuit.

Lawsuits challenging the storage of blood in other states have led to the destruction of millions of blood samples. "It really goes counter to what other parents might want and the importance of them having a say in the process to eliminate samples from the bio bank," she said.

The newborn screening takes place without consent, she said, as part of public health, in every state.

"Typically, it's put under the umbrella of you do whatever it takes to keep newborns safe," she said.

She believes it's important to separate the issue of consent for blood draw and the issue of consent for storage and/or testing.

It falls to MDHHS to provide information on their processes to help citizens be informed, she said, and criticism of the practice, like the lawsuit, could mean the state has to make a change or do a better job of informing people.

Destroying baby's blood

After returning home from the hospital, Philip Ellison wrote a letter to ask the state to destroy Patton's blood. The state argues in the lawsuit that it destroyed the blood after Ellison requested them to.

A separate lawsuit, filed by Ellison's wife in the Michigan Court of Claims, argues that the state should be required to release more details about the program, after MDHHS responded to her FOIA requests.

According to the lawsuit, the state responded to FOIA request for records of all requests from law enforcement seeking blood samples or spots or information derived from them by sending a document that states, "Twenty-two forensics requests processed."

MDHHS's response in the Court of Claims states that some of the information Ellison requested about forensic requests of the blood spots "is confidential; thus, not subject to public disclosure."

MDHHS responded to a FOIA request from MLive seeking the same information about requests from law enforcement agencies, denying the request, saying the records are exempt under the public health code and medical research act, and also because they would contain information of a personal nature that public disclosure would constitute "a clearly unwarranted invasion of an individual's privacy," citing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

MDHHS admits it initially retained the newborn Ellison's blood spots, according to an MDHHS court filing, but denies it was done without the knowledge of his parents.

The state has not yet filed a response to the federal complaint.

If the information found within blood spots is not being misused now, concern remains about what the government could do in the future because of the system that's in place, Ellison said.

He disagrees with the state's assertion that privacy is being protected, he said, but if that is the case, it may not be in the future because laws can change.

Ellison and his clients are not against the notion of testing newborn blood for health reasons, he said, but believe citizens should be informed and make the decision themselves. Giving consent is about having control, he said, and the state has removed the person's right to decide.

He created stolenblood.com to spread the word about the lawsuit.

"If you're willing to let the state have your blood and take the risk of what the future might bring, that's your choice," he said. "But it's also your choice to say I don't want to participate in that."Lawmakers in the state House have rolled out a wide-ranging package of bills meant to respond to the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal, proposing new penalties for misconduct and stiffer punishments for existing crimes.

Overall, the bill package focuses on holding authority figures accountable for engaging in sexual misconduct, or for prohibiting someone from reporting misconduct.

Several bills specifically deal with regulating health care professionals, including creating a new crime for those who engage in sexual misconduct with a patient under the pretext of medical treatment. The penalty would be up to 25 years in prison and an automatic revocation of the person's medical license. Other policies included would enact stricter standards for conducting and reporting invasive procedures.

The legislation comes about a week after a state House inquiry found Michigan State University failed to protect students and patients from Nassar as he systemically abused patients at the university and elsewhere over decades in practice.

Lawmakers pointed out issues with MSU policies, such as no recordkeeping of Nassar's "treatments" and records that lacked references to the sensitive nature of the treatments, no adequate informed consent policy for much of the time Nassar was seeing patients and no requirement of a chaperone or other person to be present in the exam room during sensitive examinations, "which Nassar took full advantage of on multiple occasions."

The letter also found "MSU erroneously concluded Nassar did not engage in misconduct and almost entirely based this conclusion on the flawed testimony of biased medical experts" when conducting a Title IX investigation into Nassar in 2014.

The Title IX report was filed by Amanda Thomashow, and lawmakers investigating the issue found "MSU failed to utilize truly independent medical experts to determine whether Nassar's conduct was medically appropriate," considering one witness was chosen by Nassar, and two others were picked by then-Dean William Strampel, who is now facing criminal sexual conduct charges as well.

"This legislation is the next step we're taking to prevent another individual from preying on children," state Rep. Kim LaSata, chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Higher Education, said in a statement. "These bills will prevent another failure like this from occurring again."

Other bills in the package would place stricter penalties on child pornography-related charges, establishing a Title IX ombudsman to work with college students and enhance training for mandatory reporters of sexual assault.

In a statement, House Law and Justice Committee Chair Klint Kesto, said the legislation is the "most complete and overpowering response possible" to the Nassar scandal.

"We've heard loud and clear from Nassar's victims. This plan will make it virtually impossible for this kind of predator to exist in Michigan," Kesto said.

Daniel Hurley, CEO of the Michigan Association of State Universities, said in a statement that public universities "applaud the direction" of the legislation in that it aims to prevent sexual assault and encourages improvement of campus sexual assault policies and programs.

"Michigan's 15 public universities remain committed to ensuring that their campuses are safe places to learn, live and work," Hurley said. "We look forward to discussing with lawmakers the specifics of the bills, to ensure that the package achieves its goals without creating undue unintended consequences."Saying it had "lost confidence" in Michigan State University, the Mastercard Foundation is ending a $45 million commitment to fund the education of African students at MSU, as well as a second $13 million program.

"The Mastercard Foundation is dedicated to providing a safe environment for young people who participate in our programs," said a press release from the foundation.

"Due to extensive media reporting about issues involving Michigan State University (MSU), the Foundation has lost confidence in our partnership with the university," the release said.

The Master

card

Foundation Scholars program began in 2012 and was scheduled to run for nine years, funding the education of 100 undergraduates and 85 graduate students from sub-Sahara Africa.

Mastercard also is ending its funding for the Agriculture Youth Opportunity Lab, a five-year, $13 million collaboration with MSU to help 15,000 young people access agricultural employment opportunities in Tanzania and Nigeria. That program started in 2017.

Michigan State University has been under fire for its handling of sexual assault cases involving athletes as well as molestation of patients by Larry Nassar, a former MSU sport-medicine doctor.

The foundation's press release said they will continue funding for MSU students already in the Mastercard Foundation Scholars program through their graduation, and will "honor any expenses occurred to date" in the MSU Agriculture Youth Opportunity Lab project.

Fifty students have graduated from the scholarship program so far, and 109 are on campus now, MSU officials said.

"MSU did receive notification from the Mastercard Foundation and notified all impacted students and partners," MSU spokesperson Emily Guerrant said in a written statement. "We appreciate that the Foundation acknowledged this decision was difficult and that they expressed their ongoing respect for all people engaged in the programs. Our focus now is the continued support of the current students through their graduation."

The foundation is directing students interested in the Mastercard Foundation Scholars program for 2018-19 to apply at other participating universities.

When the scholars program was first unveiled, Michigan State received the biggest share of dollars committed.Republican U.S. Senate candidate John James filed petition signatures to qualify for the 2018 ballot Thursday.

During a brief press conference outside the Secretary of State's Bureau of Elections in Lansing Thursday morning, James said his campaign was submitting about 23,000 signatures collected through a mix of paid and volunteer petitioning.

He said he plans to continue outreach to Michigan voters and add a personal touch to his campaign for Senate. His next planned event is a speech and tour Thursday evening at General Machine Service, a blueprint tooling manufacturing business, in Saginaw.

"This seat will not be bought - it must be earned," he said. "I'm willing to put the work in to go out and fight hard."

James is a 2004 graduate of West Point and served as a U.S. Army captain who served during the Iraq War, leading two platoons of Apache helicopters.

After eight years in the Army, James returned to Michigan to work in the family business, James Group International, which works in supply-chain management. James is president of the company, which was founded by his father.

He initially announced his candidacy for Senate in September of last year.

Also running in the U.S. Senate Republican primary are Grosse Pointe businessman and economist Sandy Pensler and historic preservationist Bob Carr.

Whoever wins the Republican primary will face off against Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow, who has represented Michigan in the U.S. Senate since 2001.Philippines-China relations are flourishing in the world of openness and innovation, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said at a Monday press conference held in southern Philippine city of Davao, before heading to China for the 2018 annual conference of Boao Forum for Asia (BFA).

The Philippine President noted that the forum will help his country expand trade and increase investment, which is in line with the national interests of the Philippines.

At the press conference, Duterte expressed his expectation for talks with Chinese leaders. We will conduct in-depth discussion on the development of bilateral relations, review the progress made through ceaseless efforts, and seek for paths leading to national and regional prosperity, he said.

He also extended his gratitude to China for the latters helpful hand in rebuilding the war-torn Philippine city of Marawi.

China plays a significant role in international and regional affairs, Duterte said.

Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the Belt and Road Initiative, while the Philippines is implementing the "Build, Build, Build" plan, the president said, noting that China plays a very important role in this project, and is also an inseparable part to his countrys development.

Duterte told Peoples Daily that he hopes the two countries could keep enhancing trade cooperation and expects to collaborate with China in human resources.

China and the Philippines are moving forward on all-round exchanges of national governance, and we are ready to keep enhancing cooperation and mutual assistance, he said.

Duterte disclosed that the Philippines will strengthen economic exchanges with its neighboring countries including China.

The fate of the Philippines is closely related with that of Asia, he said, adding that Asian economy is expected to grow to over half of the worlds total by 2050.

Devoting ourselves to improving peoples livelihood by development, we must make good use of the potential of regional development, Duterte noted.

I will stress on the BFA annual conference 2018 that the Philippine government will keep optimizing social orders and environment and fighting against corruption, and establish a policy framework that helps the growth of enterprises, he claimed.

He will also reiterate that his government will increase investment in national construction, especially in infrastructure, innovation and connectivity. Besides, the president will persuade business leaders to implement their investment plans at the event.

He noted that Asias development will be made upon peace and stability, and no mistake is tolerable in this regard.

At present, transnational crimes, terrorism, extremism and other unresolved conflicts still exist. As responsible countries, we will play our due roles to tackle such challenges that threaten regional peace, he said.JACKSON, MI - Joining roughly 50 other Michigan cities and counties, the Jackson City Council is pursuing a national lawsuit against pharmaceutical manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors.

With a 5-2 vote at the Tuesday, April 10 City Council meeting, the city retained law firms Weitz and Luxenberg and the Sam Bernstein Law Firm - who are representing numerous other communities in this litigation.

Councilmen Craig Pappin and Jeromy Alexander voted no.

The topic first surfaced at the March 27 council meeting, but was postponed to Tuesday to give members more time to consider the issue.

About the lawsuit

While communities across the country are entering into this lawsuit, it is not a class-action lawsuit, Mark Bernstein, president and managing partner at the Sam Bernstein Law Firm, said.

It is multi-district litigation - meaning each community files on its own and can choose to settle on its own, but evidence is heard once collectively. A northern Ohio federal court is consolidating the litigation, Bernstein said.

The lawsuit's goals are to make pharmaceutical groups change the way they do business and pay communities for the damages opioids have caused to them in recent years.

"These opioid manufacturers misrepresented the addictive quality of these drugs - in some instances went so far as saying they are not addictive or minimally addictive," Bernstein said. "And then pushed them aggressively for uses that they should never have been used for, and then stood back when they were being diverted in astonishing ways."

Other communities taking part in the lawsuit include Detroit, Lansing, Grand Rapids, Kent County, Oakland County and Wayne County.

While Bernstein argues the blame should start with pharmaceutical manufacturers, wholesalers and distributers, groups representing distributors like the Healthcare Distribution Alliance claim they aren't the root of the problem.

"The idea that distributors are responsible for the number of opioid prescriptions written defies common sense and lacks understanding of how the pharmaceutical supply chain actually works and is regulated," John Parker, Healthcare Distribution Alliance vice president, said. "Those bringing lawsuits would be better served addressing the root causes, rather than trying to redirect blame through litigation."

Costs to the city

If the city of Jackson is awarded or settles for money through the lawsuit, 30 percent of the net sum recovered is split between the two law firms. Other litigation expenses and costs will also be owed.

If the city is unsuccessful in the lawsuit, Bernstein said the city won't be financially burdened.

"In 50 years, I've never collected costs from a client when we have been unsuccessful. Ever," Bernstein said. "And that applies to Weitz and Luxenberg as well."

Bernstein can't legally say he'll cover the costs of the lawsuit, he said. The city's retainer agreement, on page 66 of the council agenda packet, doesn't specify any dollar amount.

"If you collect zero, then I get zero," Bernstein said.

Bernstein and Paul Novak, managing attorney at Weitz and Luxenberg, didn't specify to the city how much it could receive. A damage team will meet with the city to tally up how much it could ask for in its claim, Bernstein said. This would take 25 to 40 hours of work from the city, he said.

Communities are asking to be reimbursed for costs like Narcan usage, emergency room visits, increased enforcement costs, opioid-related autopsies, substance abuse treatment and more. The money would go into the city's general fund.

Of the two components of the case, Bernstein said the judge seems most interested in the ruling in the case, not the monetary damages portion.

Council thoughts

If the litigation is successful and the opioid industry is forced to change its methods, the whole country would benefit, Bernstein said. Because of this, Alexander and Pappin argued the city might be best to not engage in litigation immediately.

"We can actually have that largest gain from this with having zero risk, by not participating in it," Alexander said.

Bernstein argued the solutions wouldn't be tailored to specific issues in Jackson, but couldn't answer what makes Jackson's issue unique from others in the lawsuit.

"It is true that you can do nothing and sit on your hands and be a tool of the pharmaceutical industry," Bernstein said. "It is true that you can let other municipalities lead on this. But I don't think you're doing your job as a city council if you do that, I'll just be blunt."

Other council members talked about wanting to be part of the solution.

"I just think to do nothing is a huge mistake. I want to be part of the solution," Councilwoman Colleen Sullivan said. "I want to let our citizens know that we care. It's not acceptable to see what's going on and just sit here and say we'll let someone else carry the water."

Mayor Derek Dobies was questioned for his connection to Bernstein - as Dobies received $250 last fall toward his campaign from the Bernstein Family PAC. Dobies had no part in selecting the law firm, city officials and Bernstein confirmed.

Jackson County likely won't participate

Bernstein and Novak gave a similar presentation to the Jackson County Board of Commissioners on April 3, but no action was taken.

Board Chairman James "Steve" Shotwell Jr. said there's not even a minority interest in the litigation.

"It's not the Republican way to blame big business for peoples' mistakes," Shotwell said. "I believe all the lawsuit's going to do is pay a bunch of attorneys."

Shotwell's comments echoed those from groups representing the distributors, saying this lawsuit won't fix the problem.

"The opioid problem is very diverse and complex. It's something that is going to involve treatment as well as law enforcement as well as mental treatment," Shotwell said. "It's not an easy fix. It's not a turn off the switch or collect a bunch of money from a drug company and fix the problem."

The Michigan Association of Counties has supported the litigation. The issue won't resurface with Jackson County, though, unless a commissioner asks for it to be added to an agenda.

The opioid issue in Jackson

Both the city and county of Jackson haven't been exempt from the destruction opioids are causing across the nation, Bernstein said.

In 2014 alone, Medicare Part D paid for 566,000 days worth of opioid prescriptions in the city, Bernstein said. That's enough for 17 days of opioids for every resident.

The U.S. - which makes up about 4 percent of the world's population - consumes 80 percent of its opioids, Bernstein said. It cost the nation $504 billion in 2015, according to the White House.

Jackson County has seen a 32 percent increase in opioid prescriptions since 2009.

While not all opioids consumers are prescribed, Bernstein argues legal remedies get people hooked in the first place. They're only supposed to be used in end-of-life situations, cancer and short-term, high-pain situations, Novak said.

Instead, they're handed out in large doses in a swath of medical situations, Novak said.

"The conduct by these defendants is the most egregious corporate conduct I have ever observed in many, many years doing pharmaceutical litigation," Bernstein said. "And it is time for municipalities to do everything they can to hold these defendants accountable."BERRIEN TOWNSHIP, MI -- A 15-year-old Berrien Township resident accused of making a threat against a Berrien County high school was arrested Wednesday.

The teen, who had been a student at Berrien Springs High School, allegedly made a threat of violence, Berrien County Prosecuting Attorney Michael Sepic said in a statement.

No information was uncovered that suggested violence towards another person or a school was going to happen.

The teen was taken into custody by Michigan State Police troopers and lodged at the Berrien County Juvenile Center on a threat of terrorism charge.

Sepic said the Juvenile Division of the Berrien County Family Court accepted the Berrien County Prosecutor's Office petition.

The teen's arraignment date has yet to be determined.

In addition to MSP, agencies involved in the investigation were the Berrien Springs/Oronoko Township Police Department, the FBI and the Berrien County Violent Crimes Task Force.MUSKEGON, MI - The finance director for Muskegon Public Schools was given a $12,000 raise to do the same work at the district that she had previously done under a contract with the intermediate school district.

Chief Financial Officer Catherine Kloska is the second-highest paid employee of Muskegon schools, behind Superintendent Justin Jennings. Kloska's annual salary is $132,000; Jennings' is $182,580.

Muskegon schools last June hired Kloska, who previously provided financial oversight to the district through a contract with the Muskegon Area Intermediate School District.

Cindy Larson

Kloska's contract includes several benefits that are not in the superintendent's agreement. For example, Kloska and her spouse will have fully paid health insurance until they qualify for Medicare.

Kloska oversees the district's budget, which is $1.3 million in deficit for this school year. Her raise was among $500,000 in additional spending on administrative salaries for this year.

Her contract is with the board of education, but the board did not look at Kloska's contract before approving it, said board President Cindy Larson.

Kloska's contract was signed by her and Jennings on July 10, after her hiring was approved by the board in June. Its duration is July 1, 2017-Dec. 31, 2019, although it also says the contract term is one year.

Not reviewing contracts was standard procedure for the school board at the time, Larson said.

"We've learned to ask more questions, she said. "It's been a learning process for all of us."

The contract includes:

Health insurance: The district will "fully cover" the cost of health insurance for Kloska and her spouse until they are eligible for Medicare.

Life insurance: Kloska will receive life insurance for the amount equal to her salary at the time of retirement through age 69.

Severance pay: The wording of the contract is somewhat confusing. It reads that when she retires, Kloska will receive "an amount equal to his/her daily rate of pay, not to exceed $150 per day, for up to 65 days, plus one-fifth of his/her earned but unused sick leave over 65 days, up to a total of 100 days."

12 holidays, 12 sick days, three personal days, five days of bereavement.

On Oct. 24, 2017, a quorum of the board and Jennings discussed Kloska's salary in a text message conversation that likely violated the Michigan Open Meetings Act. The thread referencing an MLive article about administrative raises was started by Trustee Zachary Anderson, who provided screenshots to MLive/Muskegon Chronicle.

In the texts, Anderson - who was the only board member to vote against hiring Kloska - questions why Kloska would have a higher salary than most Muskegon-area superintendents did in 2013.

"I like Catherine I think she is great at her job but she shouldn't be paid more than most superintendents," Anderson said to the group.

"Why would you decide what Catherine makes?" Trustee Bill O'Brien Sr. said in response. "That is why our only real job is to hire a good superintendent (we did that) and stay out of the way. This is for the long haul not a quick snapshot."

In the thread, Jennings defends Kloska's pay by saying it's similar to finance directors at schools with "the same population and at risk funds."

The board's approval of the June personnel report, which included hiring Kloska, brought the district's finance department back inhouse, after the district contracted with MAISD for financial services for several years.

Jennings sold the move as a cost-saving measure, Anderson told MLive/Muskegon Chronicle in March.

Former Superintendent Jon Felske contracted the MAISD to provide financial services to MPS in 2013 to save $100,000 to $200,000 a year. The cost-saving measure came at a time when the district had a $2.5 million deficit.

Kloska was hired by MAISD in May 2013 to provide those services to MPS, said MAISD Superintendent Jon Severson.

When the decision was made to hire Kloska at Muskegon rather than pay the MAISD, Muskegon schools simply adopted the same contract she had had at MAISD, Jennings and Kloska told MLive/Muskegon Chronicle.

However, MAISD officials said her salary in 2016-17 was $119,946, while this year she is making $132,000. Kloska explained that MPS had paid a fee of $11,729 to MAISD for her work.

"Instead of paying the ISD the fees, they're giving that to me," she said.

At the time Kloska was hired by the MAISD, the post-retirement benefits in her contract were standard, but they have since been capped and "sunset language" has been added, Severson said.

Kloska's contract with MPS was carried over without caps or "sunset language."

MAISD sets money aside for those post-retirement benefits each year, but MPS does not, Kloska said. The cost is not included in the current annual budget; the district will pay for them when she retires.

Post-retirement benefits are what originally attracted Kloska to the job at MAISD, she said.

"Why would I come over to MPS if I couldn't have the same benefits?" Kloska said. "It wouldn't make sense. ... it would be a humongous pay cut in the future."

In the Oct. 24 text thread, Anderson accused Jennings of lying about the savings related to the finance department.

O'Brien responded, saying "He doesn't lie."

Documents indicate that Muskegon saved about $3,000 by moving the finance department back inhouse.

The finance department has a budget of about $705,583, as of the original 2017-18 district budget, according to documents the district required MLive/Muskegon Chronicle to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to receive. The department budget includes salaries and benefits for seven employees.

For the 2016-17 school year, Muskegon schools paid MAISD $708,521 for financial services, according to documents provided to MLive/Muskegon Chronicle by the MAISD.

Muskegon schools started 2017-18 with a $105,500 deficit. An amendment approved on Feb. 20 put the deficit at $1,301,350. If it stands, that would leave the district with a $1,858,367 fund balance - the fund balance is like a savings account or rainy-day fund - on June 30, which would be below the state mandated 5 percent of annual expenditures.SAGINAW, MI -- A 71-year-old woman who embezzled a six-figure sum from a Saginaw medical institute has received probation, but must also pay back all that she stole.

Saginaw County Circuit Judge Janet M. Boes on Tuesday, April 10, sentenced Marcia J. Conaway to five years of probation. Boes also ordered Conway spend a year in jail -- with credit for one day already served -- but allowed her to serve that time on the Plus Program, so she'll actually be out of the jail on an electronic tether.

The program "accepts male and female offenders and was designed to provide a residential setting for probation/parole violators who require intensive outpatient substance abuse services."

The judge also ordered Conaway to pay $466,078.87 in restitution to Michigan CardioVascular Institute.

Conaway in February pleaded guilty to one count of embezzlement of more than $100,000, a 20-year felony and the only charged she faced.

While an employee of Michigan CardioVascular Institute, Conaway used institute funds to pay for purchases she made on personal credit cards from June 2010 until her retirement in February 2017, according to the Saginaw County Prosecutor's Office.

Prosecutors alleged Conaway falsified the company's accounting record by withholding revenue to cover up the missing funds.NASA offered an insanely detailed and up-close view of Earth's moon when its Goddard Space Flight Center released a 4K virtual tour on Monday, April 9.

The U.S. space agency reports the data for the video was retrieved by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. It says in a post with the video that as it moves along it highlights features, important sites and information the space agency has gathered on the moon.

One of the areas highlighted was the moon's south pole, which is described by NASA as being one of the coldest places in our solar system as it hits 410 degrees below zero at times.

Back in late 2017, President Donald Trump signed the White House Space Policy Directive 1 that aims to send the United States back to the moon for the first time since 1972. The directive has the goal of sending NASA astronauts back to the Moon, and then eventually onto Mars "and the broader solar system."

The U.S. space agency has said it hopes to conduct an unmanned Space Launch System/Orion flight in 2020, with the goal to launch humans to the moon in 2023. In its 2018 to-do list, NASA said it would continue to ready the Space Launch System and Orion Spacecraft ahead of the hopeful unmanned launch.

Exploration Mission-1, is the first in a "broad series" of exploration missions aimed at taking humans deeper into space, and "eventually to Mars."

For those that need the near 5-minute 4K virtual tour broken down into blurbs, NASA's Twitter account for the moon has shared several highlights in shorter clips on its page.

This week we'll go through each site featured in our brand new Tour of the Moon video. First up, Orientale Basin. Its about the size of Texas and is the best-preserved impact structure on the Moon. Learn more about the gravity map of Orientale: https://t.co/lTuOpKC23T pic.twitter.com/ZFWzmOSM4c  NASA Moon (@NASAMoon) April 10, 2018

Next stop on the Moon tour: the South Pole. Unlike Earth, the Moon is barely tilted relative to the Sun. As a result, craters at the poles never see sunlight and are extremely cold. @LRO_NASA has found that these cold traps contain water ice! https://t.co/7kws2d43sR pic.twitter.com/skYJLfZ4eg  NASA Moon (@NASAMoon) April 11, 2018After the makers of the chalky, colorful Necco Wafers announced it might close up shop if it couldn't find a buyer, fans are pulling out all the stops in an attempt to hoard up on the candy.

Necco stands for New England Confectionery Company, and country's oldest operating candy company has made the chalky wafers since 1847. The nostalgia factor seems to be kicking in strong as the Boston Globe reports a 23-year-old woman offered up her 2003 Honda Accord for a company's inventory of wafers.

The newspaper reports Florida native Katie Samuels came to candy wholesaler CandyStore.com and offered up her Accord for its Necco stock. Samuels said her memories from childhood are filled with playing church and pretending the wafers were communion.

2003 Honda Accord

The Associated Press reports Candystore.com turned down the offer for the 2003 Honda Accord -- that comes with a Kelley Blue Book price in the $4,000s -- and is referring to this ordeal as "The Great Necco Wafer Panic." While the 23-year-old Florida woman was unable to score the inventory takeover, the candy wholesaler told A.P. that she bought four dozen rolls of Necco.

"I offered to trade my 2003 Honda Accord for all of their stock," Samuels told the Boston Globe. "I knew it was kind of a silly thing to say, but I'm serious.

"I don't have much right now, so I was like, 'I've got this car, and I want all that candy, so maybe they would consider it.'"

Back in March of this year, Necco CEO Michael McGree said the company would close by May 6 unless it could find a buyer. The Massachusetts-based company also is known for making Clark bars and heart-shaped, Valentine's Day favorites in the also chalky Sweethearts.

A.P. reports that if the company shuts down, nearly 400 workers could be laid off in the process. Last year, Necco's headquarters sold for $54.5 million to developers who left enough room to continue making chalky candy.

Candy wholesaler CandyStore.com reports that in the "The Great Necco Wafer Panic," the company's sales have shot up 82 percent and the sale of Necco wafers were up 150 percent.

The store said it has received 253 emails about Necco candy, 167 phone calls, 77 messages over social media, 29 customers offering up to double for bulk quantities, three people offered to work for candy and, of course, there was one used car trade-in offer.

"Online bulk candy stores like CandyStore.com are stockpiling Necco candies, but orders are coming in fast," the wholesaler writes in a blog post on its website.

"We contacted industry partners and distributors and they are reporting the same phenomenon. The big question is, when will the shipments stop coming?

"No one can say, which only contributes to the panic."People who stay up late at night and struggle to get going in the morning have a 10 percent higher risk of dying early than to those who go to bed earlier and wake up with the son, according to a new study.

The study was published Thursday, April 12 in the Chronobiology International journal. The lead author of the study, Kristen Knutson, is an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

The Northwestern study examined around 433,268 people in the United Kingdom between the ages of 38 and 73 over a course of 6 1/2 years.

Results showed that night owls have a 10 percent greater risk of dying than their "counterparts" who are early risers. These night owls also were found to have a higher risk of developing diabetes, and psychological and neurological disorders.

While pointing to an increased mortality rate for those who stay up late and struggle in the morning, researchers did not dive deep into the reasons for increased early death risks.

"It could be that people who are up late have an internal biological clock that doesn't match their external environment," Knutson told the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "It could be psychological stress, eating at the wrong time for their body, not exercising enough, not sleeping enough, being awake at night by yourself, maybe drug or alcohol use.

"There are a whole variety of unhealthy behaviors related to being up late in the dark by yourself."

The study says that night owls are about twice as likely to develop a psych disorder, 30 percent more likely to have diabetes, 23 percent higher risk of respiratory diseases and 22 percent higher for gastrointestinal diseases.

Researchers pulled data from the massive U.K. Biobank study, that between 2006 and 2010 looked at risk factors of major diseases for adults between the ages of 37 and 73. As part of the Biobank research, people were asked to either identify as a morning or evening person from four options.

Over the course of the study, 10,534 of the 433,000-plus participants died and researchers noted that those who identified as "evening people" in the study had a 10 percent higher mortality rate.

"This first report of increased mortality in evening types is consistent with previous reports of increased levels of cardiometabolic risk factors in this group," the study reads. "Mortality risk in evening types may be due to behavioural, psychological and physiological risk factors, many of which may be attributable to chronic misalignment between internal physiological timing and externally imposed timing of work and social activities.

"These findings suggest the need for researching possible interventions aimed at either modifying circadian rhythms in individuals or at allowing evening types greater working hour flexibility."

Jamie Zeitzer, an associate psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford who was not involved with the study, told CNN that these results are "just one piece of the puzzle," Zeitzer told the outlet that she hoped the findings would have been more robust, and asked the question "So, are people going to be at their correct time?"Only Maine and Vermont currently allow incarcerated individuals to vote. Florida permanently disenfranchises felons, but a judge just ordered Gov. Rick Scott to restore felons' voting rights and Scott has appealed the ruling. Critics say if you break the law, you lose the right to participate in our political process. But others argue mass incarceration and sentencing disparities disenfranchise millions of Americans and disproportionately impact people of color. Should we let felons vote?

PERSPECTIVES

Some think once criminal offenders have served their time, they should have their rights restored. But in an impassioned editorial for The Washington Post, a Yale law professor argues it's wrong for us to take away the voting rights of people in prison.

But for many people, disenfranchisement is a just part of the punishment for committing crimes. If voting was important to you, you shouldn't have broken the law.

While public opinion on whether incarcerated people should be allowed to vote differs, there is widespread support to restore prisoners' voting rights once they have served their time.

Being a felon should not prohibit you from voting. The whole point of prison time is to rehabilitate, so after you serve your time your rights ought to be fully restored.  Marc  (@MGonGivItToYa) April 3, 2018

They are still citizens. They still pay taxes.

But others say losing your right to vote is the price you pay for breaking the law.

Um.......Oh Hell NO! They made the mistake of being a convicted felon, so they can give up their voting rights as well.  IRONCAVEDIVER (@Ironcavediver) March 12, 2018

The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Digital, Inc. property. Join us on Twitter @TheTylt or on Facebook, we'd love to hear what you have to say.Chinese President Xi Jinping and visiting Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen agreed to establish a Sino-Austrian friendly strategic partnership and advance bilateral pragmatic cooperation on Apr. 8.

Invited by Xi, Van der Bellen headed a large delegation on his state visit to China, including Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, four cabinet ministers, and president of the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber.

The Chinese trip of Austrias largest-ever delegation in history is described as a rare and unusual super visit by local media.

The super visit indicates Austrias great enthusiasm to conduct cooperation with China and signals a new historic starting point for China-Austria relations.

In recent years, the two countries have enjoyed solid bilateral ties, which can be evidenced by increasing new drivers and fruitful cooperation results in all areas.

China is the fifth largest trading partner of Austria, and the biggest in Asia. In 2017, bilateral trade totaled $8.39 billion, and China invested $320 million in Austria and received $94.88 million from it. In addition, over 900,000 Chinese tourists visited Austria last year.

The worlds first intercontinental quantum-encrypted video conference, jointly made by scientists from the two countries, has also been a highlight of bilateral cooperation in science and technology.

Besides, Chinas five development concepts featuring innovation, coordination, green development, opening up and sharing have a lot in common with the Austrian strategy that prioritizes reform, innovation and economic growth.

Both countries should take the chance to usher in a new chapter for the development of bilateral relations.

With developed economy, advanced technologies, beautiful environment and innovative enterprises, Austria is indeed a low-profile leader in multiple fields. Both the government and enterprises of Austria welcome, support and expect an active participation in the international cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Chinas economy is making a shift from high-speed growth to high-quality development, with great efforts in promoting supply-side structural reform, pollution control, and the Belt and Road construction.

The two countries have huge potential for cooperation in high-end manufacturing, innovative research and development, infrastructure construction, ecological protection, green development, health care and winter sports. Such cooperation is believed to create a better life for the two countries.

In addition, both as supporters of multilateralism, trade liberalization and investment facilitation, China and Austria share broad interests in addressing global challenges, including peaceful settlement of regional conflicts, counter-terrorism and tackling climate change.

As Austria is to take the rotating EU presidency in the second half of this year, the strengthened China-Austria communication and coordination will boost mutual trust between China and the EU, and deepen their partnerships for peace, growth, reform and civilization.

It is also conducive to improving global governance, maintaining international peace and security, and promoting common development of all countries.

I, therefore, firmly believe the China-Austria relations will constantly advance to new levels under the guidance of leaders of both sides and with support of people from all walks of life in the two countries.

The author is the Chinese Ambassador to Austria[April 11, 2018] Uruguay Telecoms Market Report 2018: Analysis and Outlook (2005-2025) - Leading Companies Along with Their Market Shares are Identified DUBLIN, April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The "2018 Uruguay Telecom Market Analysis and Outlook Report" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The research work strategically analyzes Uruguay telecommunications market, examining the recent trends, drivers and challenges across diverse dimensions such as growth, demand, pricing, competition, consumer behaviour, infrastructure, policies and others. The study also provides in-depth analysis of segment wise telecommunications including mobile, fixed line and fixed broadband services. The number of subscribers and penetration rates are forecast for each of the sub-segment including mobile, fixed landline and broadband segments from 2005 to 2025. Uruguay telecommunication revenues, investment and infrastructure details are also covered in the report. Further, emerging business environment in Uruguay together with comparison to five competitive benchmark countries are included, to assess the country's prominence on regional front. On the competitive analysis front, leading companies along with their market shares are identified. Further, key business strategies of market leaders, their tariffs and SWOT profiles are included. In addition, the research work forecasts the demographic and economic drivers of Uruguay that enable strategy planners to formulate their pricing an branding strategies. The report also includes latest telecommunication market developments, mergers, acquisitions and launches, spectrum availability, tenders and other aspects are analyzed. Key Topics Covered:







Executive Summary Key Findings

Uruguay Telecom Market Overview Uruguay Telecom Market - Strategic Analysis Trends Shaping the Future of Uruguay Telecom Industry

Key strategies being Implemented by Market Leaders

Telecom Revenues in Uruguay

Telecom Investments in Uruguay

Market Drivers

Market Restraints Uruguay Telecom Market Outlook Fixed Line Subscriber and Penetration Outlook

Mobile Subscriber and Penetration Outlook

Fixed Broadband Subscriber and Penetration Outlook Uruguay Telecom Competitive Environment Market Shares by Company

Major Operators-Domestic vs International

Regulatory Body and Its Role in Industry Uruguay Telecom Industry Benchmarking Overall Ranking as Compared to Peer Markets

Demand Index

Infrastructure Index

Growth Index Uruguay Economic Outlook to 2025 GDP Forecast, 2005-2025

GDP per Capita Forecast, 2005-2025

Inflation Trends Uruguay Demographic Outlook to 2025 Population Forecast, 2005-2025

Population Forecast by Gender, 2005-2025

Population Forecast by Age Group, 2005-2025

Population Forecast by Location-Rural Population: Urban Population, 2005-2025

Unemployment Trends in Uruguay Competitor Analysis Company A: Profile and operations in Uruguay

Company B: Profile and operations in Uruguay

Company C: Profile and operations in Uruguay Recent Industry Developments



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/4vhtw5/uruguay_telecoms?w=5 Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com



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View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/uruguay-telecoms-market-report-2018-analysis-and-outlook-2005-2025---leading-companies-along-with-their-market-shares-are-identified-300628032.html SOURCE Research and Markets

[ Back To www.mobilitytechzone.com\LTE's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] Tallahassee: 50 HIV Advocates to Picket Florida Medicaid Program HQ Thursday Over Denial of HIV Care Contract AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the nation's largest non-profit HIV/AIDS healthcare provider and largest global AIDS organization, today blasted Florida Medicaid officials for their failure to renew an HIV care contract with AHF's Positive Healthcare-a respected non-profit which has been providing critical health insurance coverage for people living with HIV in Florida since 1999. AHF says the state's move will recklessly disrupt care for a vulnerable population of nearly 2,000 Florida HIV patients. In response to the decision, AHF and Positive Healthcare are spearheading a PROTEST in TALLAHASSEE on Thursday, April 12th starting at 10:30am in front of the headquarters of the state's Medicaid agency (AHCA--the Agency for Health Care Administration, 2727 Mahan Dr., Tallahassee, FL 32308). The protesters-expected to be about 50 HIV/AIDS advocates, patients, community partners & others-will seek to persuade state officials to renew its Medicaid contract with Positive Healthcare.



WHAT: PROTEST on Denial of Florida Medicaid HIV Care Contract HIV/AIDS advocates, community partners & others to protest Florida Medicaid's move to deny renewal of an HIV care contract with AHF's Positive Healthcare. WHEN: Thursday, April 12, 2018, 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM WHERE: In front of: Florida Medicaid Program's State Headquarters (Agency for Health Care Administration) 2727 Mahan Dr., Tallahassee, FL 32308 WHO: PROTESTERS: 50+ HIV/AIDS advocates, community partners and others AHF MEDIA CONTACT: Imara Canady, Imara.Canady@aidshealth.org - 954.952.0258 mobile "The decision by Florida Medicaid officials not to renew the contract for HIV care for the state's Medicaid population with Positive Healthcare will undoubtedly disrupt patient care for a vulnerable population of as many as 2,000 Florida HIV patients," said Donna Stidham, Chief of Managed Care for AHF. "Many of these patients have been seeing their doctor for years, even decades, and are thriving in care. These same patients will suffer disruption of treatment and can suffer substandard care if they are simply dumped into the general patient population, or if their care is jobbed out by huge, for-profit insurance companies for treatment by a family medicine doctor or general practitioner without HIV expertise. We respectfully urge Florida officials to restore its Medicaid contract with Positive Healthcare." AHF Launches Statewide Ad Campaign Challenging Florida Medicaid Officials on HIV Care Contract In addition to the Florida Medicaid/HIV care contract protest set for Thursday in Tallahassee, AHF advocates also kicked off a statewide newspaper advocacy ad campaign with a full-page, full color ad which ran in five major daily newspapers in Florida on Sunday, April 8th. The ad, with the headline, "Why Are Florida Medicaid Officials Disrupting Healthcare Coverage for People Living with HIV?" ran in the 'Miami Herald,' the 'Sun-Sentinel' in Ft. Lauderdale, the 'Tallahassee Democrat,' the 'Tampa Bay Times' and the 'Florida Times-Union,' in Jacksonville. The advocacy ads included several alarming statistics about HIV in Florida including the following facts: Nearly 5,000 people in Florida were infected with HIV in 2016 alone, which means one out of every eight new HIV infections in the United States occurred in Florida.

South Florida leads the nation in new HIV diagnoses at 38.7 new infections per every 100,000 people. In contrast, the overall rate in the United States is 12.3 new infections per every 100,000 people.

Nearly 136,000 Floridians are estimated to be living with HIV, but one in six is still not aware of his or her HIV-positive status.

More than 30,000 Floridians currently living with HIV are not receiving care for their infection. The ad urged readers to go to the website: HIVcare.org/Florida to learn more and how you can support those living with HIV. AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to over 889,000 individuals in 39 countries worldwide in the US, Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and Eastern Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website: www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook (News - Alert) : www.facebook.com/aidshealth and follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) : @aidshealthcare and Instagram: @aidshealthcare View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180411006400/en/

[ Back To www.mobilitytechzone.com\LTE's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. Senior Advisor Bruce Barren Returns to the Nationally Syndicated "The Mick Bazsuly Show" FT LAUDERDALE, Fla., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE --PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. (OTC Pink:POTN) On Thursday, March 12, 2018, PotNetwork Holdings Inc. CEO Dr. Richard Goulding and Senior Advisor Bruce Barren will return to the Beasley Broadcasting Production, The Mick Bazsuly Show.

The PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. leaders are expected to discuss a future uplisting to OTCQB, the growth of company brands over Q1 2018 and results of recently audited financial reports for 2017.



The Mick Bazsuly Show airs at 10:30 AM EST on 95.3 FM and `1470 AM in South Florida and is available live worldwide on AMP2.TV and WWNNRadio.com.



Watch a streaming video recording of CEO Goulding and Senior Advisor Barren of PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. appearing on The Mick Bazsuly Show.



PotNework Holdings, Inc. recently announced record breaking sales performance for March 2018. With over $2.2 million in sales revenue recorded across the month, the Company has posted a 152% year over year increase when compared with March 2017.



With over $6.3 million in revenues recorded for Q1 of 2018, PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. is well on track to exceed its performance from 2017. The company recently announced the release of audited consolidated financial statements reporting 2017 sales of $14.5 million, with gross profits of $5,180,865, and, despite making large reinvestments in its future growth, positive net income of $178,918.



The companys wholly owned subsidiary, Diamond CBD Inc., has been aggressively exploring new business development opportunities. In March, the company presented its products at the high profile industry leading trade shows ASD Market Week and Global Pet Expo.



Diamond CBD, Inc. announced the brands participation at the 2018 Telecom Review Summit held in Beirut, Lebanon. Taking place on April 13th of 2018, this years Telecom Review Summit will feature a keynote panel hosted by Exponential, Inc. (XPO2) founder and CEO, Dom Einhorn.



During his keynote address at the Telecom Review Summit, the XPO2 Founder and CEO will be discussing the importance of corporate social responsibility and impact investing and how these corporate values can strengthen brand recognition and develop new sales channels.



Between April 17th and 27th, 2018, Diamond CBD Inc. is contributing material support and resources towards community action projects across Kenya. Among the activities planned is a reforestation project in the Ngongs Hills, direct service projects at nonprofit organizations around Nairobi, and a range of other charitable endeavors near Mt. Kenya and other locations.



Diamond CBD, Inc.s efforts in Kenya support the companys business development strategy and organizational culture. By providing corporate partners with access to corporate social responsibility activities that lead to real world results, XPO2 is on a mission to give voice to the voiceless, disrupt fundraising, transform ecommerce and make the world a better place.



About Diamond CBD, Inc.: Diamond CBD focuses on the research, development, and multinational marketing of premium hemp extracts that contain a broad range of cannabinoids and natural hemp derivatives. Diamond CBDs team consists of hemp industry pioneers and natural product experts, chemists, doctors and scientists, dedicated to producing the finest and purest cannabidiol (CBD) oils. The result is a robust selection considered among the most powerful natural CBD oils, tinctures, edibles, and vape liquids found anywhere. For more information, please visit its website at www.DiamondCBD.com.



About PotNetwork Holdings, Inc: PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. (OTC Pink:POTN) is a publicly traded company that acts as a holding company for its subsidiaries, First Capital Venture Co., the owner of Diamond CBD, Inc., the maker of Diamond CBD oils.



About XPO: Exponential, Inc. (XPO) is a cause related technology marketing company that develops and promotes a white label e-commerce platform to drive fundraising revenue on behalf of charities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide. Via the platform, donors and supporters gain access to exclusive discounts and savings typically not available on the merchant site while helping raise incremental funds for their favorite cause with every purchase, at no extra cost to them.



Safe Harbor Act: Forward-Looking Statements are included within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements regarding our expected future financial position, results of operations, cash flows, financing plans, business strategy, products and services, competitive positions, growth opportunities, plans and objectives of management for future operations, including words such as "anticipate," "if," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "could," "should," "will," and similar expressions are forward-looking statements and involve risks, uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from anticipated results, performance, or achievements. We are under no obligation to (and expressly disclaim any such obligation to) update or alter forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Contacts PotNetwork Holdings Inc.

Investor Relations:

Marisol Elwell, 1-800-915-3060

investor@PotNetworkHolding.com

[ Back To www.mobilitytechzone.com/wimax's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Florida: Walmart Plans Estimated $200 Million in New Store Construction, Improvements and Innovations in 2018 Walmart today announced it expects to spend an estimated $200 million over the next year in Florida through the opening and remodeling of 43 stores as well as the rollout of several in-store and online innovations designed to help busy customers save time and money. The spend is part of Walmart's total capital expenditures guidance of approximately $11.0 billion for Fiscal Year 2019, which was outlined last October at the company's annual meeting for the investment community and reiterated in February 2018. Walmart recently reported strong comp sales growth of 2.1% for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2018, indicating customers are responding well to the company's business strategy. The plan is to continue improving stores and accelerating innovation during the coming year to make shopping faster and easier for customers in Florida. "Making every day easier for busy families is at the forefront of everything we're doing as a company," said Elise Vasquez-Warner, a vice president and regional general manager for Walmart in Florida. "Customers have told us they want the convenience of shopping how, when and where they want. And, here in Florida, we'll achieve that by building off the momentum we had last year, accelerating the rollout of customer-centered innovations, creating more than 1,000 jobs this year alone, and maintaining a sharp focus on improving our store experience." 2018 Walmart New Store Construction and Remodels in Florida Walmart plans to build and remodel stores in the following locations: Grand Openings (see addendum below for complete list of stores)* Central Florida (1)

Jacksonville (2)

Miami-Fort Lauderdale (3) *Walmart will also open a new Distribution Center in the City of Cocoa later this year. Remodels (see addendum below for complete list of stores) Central Florida (12)

Jacksonville (3)

Panhandle (1)

Southwest Florida (1)

Tampa Bay (12)

Miami-Fort Lauderdale (4)

West Palm Beach (4) "Walmart's continued investment in communities across Florida plays a key role in job creation and economic development. By building on their innovation plans, Walmart's commitment to strengthening their footprint in Florida is to be commended," said Mark Wilson, President and CEO of the Florida Chamber of Commerce. 2018 Walmart In-store and Online Innovations in Florida Walmart continues to innovate how it serves customers, helping them save time and money by creating a seamless shopping experience that empowers customers to shop when, where and how they want. In addition to continuing to test new technologies that transform how customers shop, Walmart plans to expand several innovative services that deliver greater convenience and faster services, including: (1) Online Grocery Pickup Florida customers can order Walmart groceries online and pick them up without ever having to unbuckle their seatbelts. The service is free and prices through Walmart Online Grocery are the same as in-store.

Walmart currently offers Grocery Pickup at more than 100 Florida locatins and plans to roll-out approximately 80 new Grocery Pickup locations at area stores in the coming year.

Walmart Online Grocery Pickup-How it works. (2) Mobile Express Scan & Go Walmart offers Mobile Express Scan & Go in select markets which allows customers to scan items with their mobile devices while shopping in store, pay instantly and skip the checkout line. Customers can download the Walmart Scan & Go app from iTunes or the Google (News - Alert) Play store.

Mobile Express Scan & Go is currently offered at all 49 Florida Sam's Clubs and was recently launched at more than 10 Florida Walmart stores. Walmart will continue evaluating opportunities to expand the service to more local customers in the coming year.

Walmart Mobile Express Scan & Go video here: https://youtu.be/NHzfhDDRgME (3) Walmart Pickup Towers Much like a high-tech vending machine, the Walmart Pickup Tower allows customers to pick up their online orders in less than a minute by scanning a bar code sent to their smartphone. To use the tower, customers simply choose from millions of items available on Walmart.com and select the Pickup option at checkout.

Pickup Tower service is currently available at more than 15 Florida Walmart stores. Walmart will continue evaluating opportunities to expand the Pickup Tower service to Florida customers in the coming year.

Walmart Pickup Tower video here: https://youtu.be/X4c951tg9TM About Walmart Walmart Inc. (NYSE: WMT) helps people around the world save money and live better - anytime and anywhere - in retail stores, online, and through their mobile devices. Each week, over 270 million customers and members visit our more than 11,700 stores under 65 banners in 28 countries and eCommerce websites. With fiscal year 2018 revenue of $500.3 billion, Walmart employs approximately 2.3 million associates worldwide. Walmart continues to be a leader in sustainability, corporate philanthropy and employment opportunity. Additional information about Walmart can be found by visiting http://corporate.walmart.com, on Facebook (News - Alert) at http://facebook.com/walmart and on Twitter (News - Alert) at http://twitter.com/walmart. Florida 2018 Grand Openings Apopka Walmart Neighborhood Market

Jacksonville Walmart Neighborhood Market

Jacksonville Walmart Supercenter

Miami (Coral Way West) Walmart Neighborhood Market

Naranja Walmart Neighborhood Market

Pompano Walmart Neighborhood Market Florida 2018 Remodels Central Florida Altamonte Springs Discount Store, 200 S. State Road 434 Apopka Walmart Supercenter, 1700 S. Orange (News - Alert) Blossom Trail Clermont Walmart Supercenter, 1450 Johns Lake Road Kissimmee Walmart Neighborhood Market, 3183 W. Vine St. Ocala Walmart Supercenter, 9570 S.W. Highway 200 Ocala Walmart Supercenter, 2600 S.W. 19th Avenue Road Ocala Walmart Supercenter, 4980 E. Silver Springs Blvd. Orlando Walmart Neighborhood Market, 12550 S. Orange Blossom Trail Orlando Walmart Neighborhood Market, 201 S. Chickasaw Trail Orlando Walmart Neighborhood Market, 2271 N. Semoran Blvd. Oviedo Walmart Supercenter, 5511 Deep Lake Road Summerfield Walmart Supercenter, 17961 S. U.S. Highway 441

Jacksonville Jacksonville Walmart Supercenter, 8808 Beach Blvd. Jacksonville Walmart Supercenter, 10991 San Jose Blvd., Suite 1 Jacksonville Walmart Supercenter, 9890 Hutchinson Park Drive

Miami-Fort Lauderdale Coconut Creek Walmart Supercenter, 5571 W. Hillsboro Blvd. Doral Walmart Supercenter, 8651 N.W. 13th Terrace Hialeah Gardens Walmart Neighborhood Market, 11800 Hialeah Gardens Blvd. Miami Walmart Supercenter, 8400 Coral Way

Panhandle Lynn Haven Walmart Supercenter, 2101 S. Highway 77

Southwest Florida Naples Walmart Supercenter, 5420 Juliet Blvd.

Tampa Bay Clearwater Walmart Neighborhood Market, 2171 Gulf to Bay Blvd., Building 10 Gibsonton Walmart Supercenter, 9205 Gibsonton Drive Haines City Walmart Supercenter, 36205 U.S. Highway 27 Pinellas Park Walmart Supercenter, 8001 U.S. Highway 19 N. Port Richey Walmart Supercenter, 8701 U.S. Highway 19 Sarasota Walmart Supercenter, 4381 Cattlemen Road Sebring Walmart Supercenter, 3525 U.S. Highway 27 N. Spring Hill Walmart Supercenter, 1485 Commercial Way Tampa Walmart Discount Store, 7011 W. Waters Ave. Tampa Walmart Neighborhood Market, 6216 Elliot Drive Tampa Walmart Supercenter, 4302 W. Gandy Blvd. Tampa Walmart Supercenter, 19910 Bruce B. Downs Blvd.

West Palm Beach Boynton Beach Walmart Supercenter, 3200 Old Boynton Road Lake Park Walmart Supercenter, 101 N. Congress Ave. Port St. Lucie Walmart Supercenter, 10855 S. U.S. Highway 1 Stuart Walmart Supercenter, 4001 S.E. Federal Highway

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005643/en/

[ Back To www.mobilitytechzone.com/wimax's Homepage ]The US accusation that China has put restrictions on US investment in China is false claim, according to experts from home and abroad.

They explained that in recent years, China has expanded openness, and created a business environment of more stability, transparency and predictability for foreign enterprises.

China treats domestic and foreign enterprises equally, said Gao Fengspokesperson of the Ministry of Commerce.

Be it Foreign Investment Law which is still in the drawing or other regulatory documents on foreign investment, the ultimate goal is to defend the legitimate rights and interests of foreign investors, push opening up through legislation, and create a stable, transparent, and predictable legal environment for foreign businesses in China, Gao elaborated.

The organizational structure and operational activities of domestic and foreign companies are equally subject to relevant laws and regulations, such as Company Law and Partnership Enterprise Law, the spokesperson explained, adding that foreign and domestic businesses are treated alike in China.

Zhang Monan, a researcher with the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, said the Chinese government has taken the number of free trade zones (FTZs) up to 11.

The country has opened the market to a broader scope through institutional innovation, said Zhang, adding that in the future, it will vigorously promote opening-up of the financial, education and medical service sectors in an orderly manner based on its preset plan.

Meanwhile, China has been acting more in pushing forward the construction of an open economy by improving its fiscal taxation and financial policies to expand imports, creating better conditions for trade facilitation, comprehensively granting pre-establishment national treatment to foreign companies and implementing the negative list management system, Zhang said.

A guidance catalogue for foreign investment in China jointly revised by the Ministry of Commerce and other departments in 2017 launched a negative list across the country, and called for wider openness in service, manufacturing and mining industries.

Last year, the country released a new foreign investment negative list for free trade zones, cutting ten categories and 27 special administrative measures from the 2015 version, in an effort to further optimize investment access.

According to the 2018 Business Climate Survey Report released by the American Chamber of Commerce in China, more than half of the surveyed US enterprises are optimistic about the investment prospect in China, and 75 percent reported a profitable year in 2017, the highest proportion over the last three years.

One third of the US companies surveyed recognized Chinas improving environment for investment and about 60 percent considered China as one of the top three investment destinations.

China is also elevating the level of opening-up of the financial sector. In December 2017, the China Banking Regulatory Commission decided to revise rules on administrative licensing for foreign banks, to push forward reform of the administrative approval system and further open up the financial sector.

All the measures included in the national strategy of Made in China 2025 apply to both domestic and foreign enterprises, and all companies will be given equal treatment.

It is untrue that foreign investment is restricted in China, since as a matter of fact, a lot of foreign enterprises have found new development opportunities in China by participating in the countrys high-end, green and intelligent manufacturing projects, experts pointed out.New York (People's Daily)  Despite an ever-precarious security situation that has claimed lives of civilians and United Nations peacekeepers alike, the peace process in Mali is making headway following a timetable leading to elections later in 2018. While Malians must ensure the successful holding of elections this year, their priority should be the implementation of the 2015 peace agreement, a senior United Nations official said Wednesday at the meeting of the UN Security Council on the latest situation in Mali.

In March 2012, a military coup took place in Mali, and a number of rebel forces appeared in the north of the country. In April 2013, the Security Council adopted a resolution to establish a UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali MINUSMAto support the political process in the country and carry out other security-related tasks. On May 15, 2015, the Malian government signed a "peace and reconciliation agreement" with armed groups in the northern region, and finally completed signing the agreement on June 20.

Mahamat Saleh Annadif, who is also head of the MINUSMA, said significant developments were seen in the past three months, including the appointment of a new prime minister, Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga, who, in March, toured the restive north and central regions, as well as a growing level of trust between the signatories of the 2015 Agreement.

While progress towards peace was being made, the fact that 2018 was an election year could not be overlooked, Annadif said, with presidential elections scheduled for July 29 and August 12, followed by legislative elections in November and December, he emphasized the urgency of sticking to the electoral timetable.

"The peace process is complex, but it is time to move from promises to actions to meet agreed deadlines," he said, adding that advancing the peace process and holding the elections must go hand in hand.

In terms of preparations, he said, an agreement is in place to revise the electoral law and an order has been placed for 8 million voter's cards.

In line with its mandate, MINUSMA has started to lend technical and logistical support, including the distribution of election materials and deployment of electoral personnel, while also preparing for any potential violence.

With the UN Country Team, MINUSMA has launched an initiative to promote the restoration of a state authority in central Mali, as well as economic growth and the provision of social services.

Annadif also emphasized the need for the training of peacekeeping troops, adding that the mission remained about 100 armored vehicles short. Countries contributing troops and police have been asked to do what they can to fill the equipment gap.By By:

Dr. Francis R. Souder, 85, formerly of Telford, died Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007 in the skilled nursing unit of Peter Becker Community, Franconia Township. He and his wife Marion R. (Parker) Souder celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary in July.

Born in Souderton, he was a son of the late Elvin B. and Mary (Rittenhouse) Souder.

A 1938 graduate of Souderton High School, he received his undergraduate degree in 1941 from the University of Pennsylvania where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. Souder went on to receive his medical degree from Hahnemann Medical College in 1944 and completed his internship at Hahnemann Hospital from Oct. 1944  July, 1945.

He served with the U.S. Navy Medical Corps for 30 months in San Diego and Long Beach, Calif. during WW II and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant prior to his discharge. He entered his second tour of duty during the Korean War where he served in Panama City, Fla. as the medical officer for the Panama City Naval Air Station and the Tyndal Air Force Base.

Dr. Souder owned and operated his family practice on Main Street in Telford from 1947-1989. He served on the staff of Grand View Hospital, and as its president, and taught at the Grand View Hospital Nursing School. He was a member of the Pa. Medical Society, the Bucks County Medical Society, Diplomat American Academy of Family Practices, and served on the board of trustees at Grand View Hospital, Sellersville.

He was a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Telford, where he sang in the church choir. He was also a member of the MacCalla Lodge #596 in Souderton, the Raja Shrine, and Lehigh Consistory.

In addition to his widow, he is survived by a son, Dr. Ronald L. Souder, and his wife Susan L. of Green Lane; a daughter, Susan J. Souder, and her husband Stephan Russo of New York, N.Y.; five grandchildren: Jennifer A. Souder of Philadelphia; Emily E. Souder of Philadelphia; Kathryn A. Souder of Washington, D.C.; Noah Russo of New York, N.Y., and Rebekah Russo of New York, N.Y., and two brothers: Attorney Elvin B. Souder of Souderton and Dr. Lawrence Souder of Souderton.

Memorial services will be held on Saturday, Nov. 10 at 12 p.m. in Trinity United Church of Christ, 101 S. Main St., Telford, with calling hours following the service.

Interment will be private in Trinity UCC Cemetery Telford.

Memorial contributions may be made to Grand View Hospital, 700 Lawn Ave., Sellersville, Pa. 18960.

Arrangements are by Sadler-Suess Funeral Home, Telford.April 12, 2018

New Developments In The Skripal Drama - Police Statement, OPCW Report Release

There are a few notable developments in the Skripal case about the poisoning of a former British secret agent from Russia and his daughter in Salisbury.

(If you are new to the issue please refer to our older pieces listed below. You may want to start with The Best Explanation For The Skripal Drama Is Still ... Food Poisoning.)

On Sunday Yulia Skripal was secretly released from the Salisbury District Hospital but immediately taken into British government custody. She is under guard at an unknown location. Yesterday the Metropolitan Police released a Statement issued on behalf of Yulia Skripal:

"I have specially trained officers available to me, who are helping to take care of me and to explain the investigative processes that are being undertaken. I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian Embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can. At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.

"Most importantly, I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do. Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves. I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being. Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's. "For the moment I do not wish to speak to the press or the media, and ask for their understanding and patience whilst I try to come to terms with my current situation."

While written in quotes it is doubtful that Yulia Skripal expressed any of these words. "At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services" is British bureaucratese, not the wording any Russian (or anyone else) with English as a second language would ever use.

The Russian embassy in Britain seriously doubts that the letter is from Yulia Skripal. It notes that despite the claim that Yulia has "access to friends and family" none of her nearest family members, who are in Russia, was recently contacted by her. It also notes a contradiction:

Particularly amazing is the phrase no one speaks for me appearing in a statement which, instead of being read on camera by Yulia herself, is published at Scotland Yard website.

(The embassy also published a refutation of earlier British government accusations.)

In discussing the police statement the former British ambassador Craig Murray suggests that Yulia Skripal Is Plainly Under Duress:

It strikes me as inherently improbable that, when Yulia called her cousin as her first act the very moment she was able, she would now issue a formal statement through Scotland Yard forbidding her cousin to be in touch or visit. I simply do not believe this British Police statement.

---

Today the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) released the summary of a technical finding of the substance that allegedly injured Sergej and Yulia Skripal.

The British state media BBC headlines: Russian spy poisoning: Nerve agent inspectors back UK

The report itself does not holdup to the headline claim:

The international chemical weapons watchdog has confirmed the UK's analysis of the type of nerve agent used in the Russian ex-spy poisoning. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons did not name the nerve agent as Novichok, but said it agreed with the UK's findings on its identity.

The British government accused Russia as having caused the incident with a 'nerve agent'. In no way does the OPCW confirm any of those claims. Its press release only states:

The results of the analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people.

Some unnamed 'toxic chemical' was found by Porton Down and the OPCW confirmed that Porton Down was correct in its chemical analysis.

Neither in its press statement nor in its public Summary Report (pdf) does the OPCW speak of finding a 'nerve agent'. But what is this 'toxic chemical'? Saxitoxin, a natural poison that causes Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP) which would be consistent with the symptoms the Skripals showed shortly after eating a Risotto Pesce with mussels? Or some artificial agent designed as chemical weapon? Neither the OPCW nor Porton Down will say.

The BBC continues:

The OPCW does identify the toxic chemical by its complex formula but only in the classified report that has not been made public.

Early involvement of the OPCW, as demanded by Russia, was resisted by the British government. Only on March 14, ten days after the incident happened and two days after Prime Minister Theresa may had made accusations against Russia, did the British government invite the OPCW. Only on March 19, 15 days after the incident happen did the OPCW technical team arrive and took blood samples.

Nowhere does the OPCW support the British claims of a 'Novichok' nerve agent nor does it support the British accusations made against Russia.

---

Previous Moon of Alabama posts on the Skripal case:

Posted by b on April 12, 2018 at 12:46 UTC | Permalink

CommentsIt was quite the surprise when a 29-year-old woman recently found out the stomach pains she suffered from were not from food poisioning, but from a baby that was basically at its full trimester.

American woman, Crystal Gail Amerson, told local papers that she woke up around 4am on a Sunday with stomach pains that had frequently visiting the bathroom.

"I had Chinese food the night before and I kind of figured maybe I had food poisoning or something like that," she told wwltv.com.

But it turned out she was 37 weeks pregnant and was soon to be giving birth to her second son. The mum had been completely clueless until the contractions started, as she hadn't experienced any typical pregnancy symptoms.

"I gained a little bit of weight, but I think with my first baby I didn't notice either," she said.

"I never gained that pregnancy shape, really. And then I wear scrubs to work because I work at a retirement home for Alzheimer's and dementia patients. So I guess the way they fit me as well, it was hard to notice anything or tell anything."

Only a couple of hours later since that 4am wakeup did she give birth to Oliver James, who was born in the back of the ambulance as they travelled to the hospital. He weighed in at 18.9 inches and 5.27 pounds.

And while the baby was happy and healthy, Crystal says she has yet to return to eating Chinese food any time soon, saying the experience has "traumatised" her from looking at Chinese food the same way.

China's central bank governor on Wednesday announced six measures and disclosed a timetable to further open up the countrys financial sector, following Chinese President Xi Jinpings declaration at the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) annual conference to further widen market access to foreign investors.

The opening-up policies will be implemented in the coming months, according to Yi Gang, governor of the People's Bank of China (PBOC) .

The PBOC and finance regulation departments are working on these policies and making the sector more globally competitive under the deployment of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and State Council, said Yi at the BFA annual conference in southern Hainan Province.

According to the policies, foreign equity restrictions on banks and financial asset management firms will be canceled, with equal treatment for domestic and foreign-funded institutions. Foreign banks will be allowed to set up branches and subsidiaries in the country, Yi said.

In addition, foreign businesses will be allowed to own up to 51 percent of shares in securities, funds, futures and life insurance joint ventures, and the cap will be phased out over three years, he added.

Securities joint ventures will not be required to have at least one securities firm among its domestic shareholders.

To further improve the Hong Kong-Shanghai and the Hong Kong-Shenzhen stock links, Yi announced that the daily northbound quota will be increased to 52 billion yuan ($8.3 billion) from the current 13 billion yuan, and the daily southbound quota would be increased to 42 billion yuan from the current 10.5 billion yuan. .

He also said that qualified foreign investors will be allowed to conduct insurance brokerage and assessment business in the country. Foreign-funded insurance brokers will have the same business scope as their Chinese counterparts.

Other measures will also be taken to open up the financial sector before the end of the year, Yi added.

For instance, foreign investors will be encouraged to enter trust, financial leasing, auto financing, money brokerage, consumer finance sectors and other financial sectors.

No foreign ownership limits will be set for new financial asset investment and wealth management companies initiated by commercial banks, he said.

The country will also substantially expand the business scope of foreign banks, and impose no restrictions on the business scope of joint-venture securities companies, Yi disclosed.

In addition, the country will remove the requirement that foreign insurance companies must have had representative offices for two years before they set up businesses in China.

Yi added that finance regulation departments are in the midst of procedures to modify laws and regulations and trying to implement them.

To accelerate the opening up of the financial sector, the central bank will also take supporting measures to strengthen supervision over it, Yi said.

While broadening market access to foreign investors and widening their business scope, the central bank will enact equal and prudent supervision for all enterprises under various ownerships based on laws and regulations, he added.

Through strengthened financial supervision, the central bank hopes to effectively prevent and defuse financial risks and keep the financial sector stable, the governor said.Foreigners visiting China often get stunned at the vast supply of cheap-but-quality goods, which largely come from hundreds of characteristic townships, dotting around the country especially near industrial hubs, such as leather villages in the Pearl River Delta.

China's costal Zhejiang Province, which plays a leading role in pushing forward the township economy, became the first to issue a guidance on characteristic townships' development, prodding it into a healthy and competent shape, according to local authorities.

"Zhejiang's version of characteristic townships draws its inspiration from abroad such as Davos of Swiss, Greenwich Hedge Fund Town in the US, and Provence of France," said Weng Jianrong, a vice director of Zhejiang Provincial Development and Reform Commission.

The new economic pattern is an exploration of the supply-side reform and has attracted wide attention as a new mode of relationship between the government and market, experts said.

Yet the exuberance factors that stoke economic booms in the specialized towns also lead to risk, as large-scale copycatting discourages innovation.

The new policy aims to tighten the scrutiny of applications for townships and to cultivate the mechanism by which pioneers' models get patent protection and followers are active to experiment, said the Zhejiang provincial planning office in charge of the characteristic townships' development.

Under the plan, specialized townships will be divided into three categories: knowledge-service-oriented towns, primarily focused on finance and information technology, providing consultancy and technical support; manufacturing and bricks-and-mortar services towns focusing on products like auto parts and medical treatment; and towns focusing on customer experiences, including spa villages and themed sightseeing spots.

In a bid to support industries and curb real-estate speculation, Zhejiang government also requires each town to have a physical industrial presence. The way local officials use townships to reach GDP target in regardless of market rules will be restricted.

Local authorities also stress "unique features" as the key job of townships' development, which means that even if two townships feature the same industries, they must have different positions and focuses.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.MBS RECAP: This Week is Getting Crazy Flat

Bonds were set to begin the day in fairly unchanged territory when Trump tweeted about launching missiles at Syria and forcing Russia to try to shoot them down (here). That was initially of some benefit to bonds just before the start of the domestic session, but it didn't create any lasting momentum. After all, bonds still had to get through all of the events that would surely cause bigger movement: CPI data, 10yr Treasury Auction, and the Fed Minutes. But none of the remaining events really moved the needle. CPI came in just a hair weaker, but was only weak enough to be traded as such by the time investors scoured the internals (thereby seeing medical supplies and "shelter" costs buoying the otherwise weaker price movement). The 10yr auction was inoffensive, and the FOMC Minutes contained no new news. With bonds in stronger shape than traders thought necessary in the morning, the day was spent gradually drifting higher in yield until the 10yr auction. After the auction confirmed yields didn't need to go any higher, the rest of the day was spent drifting sideways to slightly stronger.

MBS Pricing Snapshot Pricing shown below is delayed, please note the timestamp at the bottom. Pricing shown below is delayed, please note the timestamp at the bottom. Real time pricing is available via MBS Live.

MBS FNMA 3.5 100-02 : +0-04 Treasuries 10 YR 2.7790 : -0.0180 Pricing as of 4/11/18 6:36PMEST

Today's Reprice Alerts and Updates

A recap of Alerts and Updates provided to MBS Live subscribers

1:23PM : Detailed 10yr Auction Results, Two Ways 1:06PM : ALERT ISSUED: 10yr Auction Decent, But Bonds Lose Ground; Some Reprice Risk 8:39AM : Core CPI Right on The Screws; Bonds Not Sure How to Act

MBS Live Chat Highlights

Live Discussion on the A recap of featured comments from theon the MBS Live Dashboard

Jeff Anderson : "10 years of transitory"

Matthew Graham : "looks like no new news so far"

Matthew Graham : "ALMOST ALL POLICYMAKERS SUPPORTED HIKE AT MARCH MEETING; A COUPLE POINTED TO POSSIBLE BENEFITS OF POSTPONING HIKE"

Matthew Graham : "ALL POLICYMAKERS SAID FURTHER TIGHTENING POLICY LIKELY WARRANTED, ALMOST ALL AGREED GRADUAL APPROACH APPROPRIATE"

Victor Burek : "for real this time?"

Matthew Graham : "MANY POLICYMAKERS SAID THEY WERE MORE CONFIDENT INFLATION WOULD RISE TO TARGET IN COMING MONTHS AND STABILIZE AROUND THAT LEVEL"

Matthew Graham : "ALL FED POLICYMAKERS EXPECTED 12-MONTH INFLATION TO RISE IN COMING MONTHS; POLICYMAKERS NOTED THE WIDELY EXPECTED INCREASE WOULD NOT BY ITSELF JUSTIFY CHANGE IN PROJECTED RATE PATH -MINUTES OF MARCH 20-21 MEETING"

Matthew Graham : "STRONG MAJORITY OF POLICYMAKERS VIEWED PROSPECT OF RETALIATORY TRADE ACTIONS BY OTHER COUNTRIES AS DOWNSIDE RISK FOR U.S. ECONOMY"

Matthew Graham : "tough to grade. for those that dissect the past data, it's a solid B/B+. For the casual observer, perhaps a C-"

Matthew Graham : "RTRS - U.S. 9-YR 10-MO NOTES BID-TO-COVER RATIO 2.46, NON-COMP BIDS $8.26 MLN"

Matthew Graham : "RTRS - U.S. SELLS $21 BLN 9-YR 10-MO NOTES AT HIGH YIELD 2.795 PCT, AWARDS 70.96 PCT OF BIDS AT HIGH"

Matthew Graham : "This is a "refunding" auction, which tends to have slightly weaker stats vs reopening auctions, Average bit-do-cover is 2.32x. The when-issued yield is 2.793 and the average result is 1.2bps higher (so 2.805%). Indirects take an average of 62%"February 25, 2018

Uyuni salt flats, Bolivia

You see his smiling face on about every third billboard, a giant Big Brother image redolent of Orwells 1984. No brick wall is complete without Evo, Si spray painted in size triplegiga font. Hes Evo Morales, Bolivias president-for-life (if he gets his way), an unreconstructed Socialist straight out of central casting. Sailing into the presidency of one of South Americas poorest countries in 2005, he immediately jumped into bed with his two heroes, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. Heard this one before, you say? Thats what I thought too.

The basic script for the caterwauling reformer was written by Gaius Gracchus 2,300 years ago and without changing a single note it was working still for Bernie Sanders in 2016: Those rich bastards stole your money and your land. Vote for me and Ill steal it back. Evos twist was to add that he was born into the Aymara indigenous nation, one of 36 such groups recognized in Bolivia, some of which have as many as 40 members. And you thought identity politics in the U.S. was out of control.

In the campaign Evo rode his native heritage like a horse, despite the fact that he couldnt actually speak the Aymara language. But pointing out such trivial inconsistencies is considered poor form, much like noting that Elizabeth Warren, the Senates only Cherokee, rarely sleeps in a teepee. Other warts Evo didnt even bother to hide. The only things he believed in, he said, were the land, his parents, and Cuchi-Cuchi. Yes, that means exactly what you think it means, as his three children, all out of wedlock by three different women, mutely attest.

Upon his inauguration in 2006 diplomatic relations with the U.S. crumbled. Evo had come up through the trade union ranks as a coca grower. He refused to cooperate with DEA efforts in Bolivia. His stance was Coca yes, cocaine no. That wasnt good enough for the U.S, State Department. If youre not all in with Just say no, then you might as well be a narco-trafficker. Even Obama, whom youd have thought could have been Evos brother by another mother, condemned him. Evo seemed genuinely hurt by the repulse, and I cant say that I blame him. The man wanted to protect one of his countrys industries, and besides, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of truthful words the U.S. government has spoken about drugs since 1938. I give this round to Evo.

Im tempted to say that no one knows where all this will end, but if the past is prologue, then we have some clues. Nationalize gas and oil (check), see if Iran is interested in your uranium (check), and bypass or ignore the Constitution when it gets in your way (check). Despite some positive economic gains during Evos presidency, Bolivia is still dirt poor, but that word means something else when you look at Venezuela and Cuba. Unlike kleptomaniacal thugs like Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe, Evo cares nothing for material things. One thing is sure: He wont be going quietly into the night. The man is on a mission.

Our mission today was to visit the salt flats 300+ miles south of La Paz. Until recently the farther south you crept, the worse the road got, including some infamous river crossings. Friends of mine a few years ago came down the highway only to return northbound with their bikes on the back of a truck. Now the road is sealed the entire distance. The river crossings are made on bridges. The world changes apace, even in Bolivia.

As Mike Paull mentioned this morning before we set out in three 44 land cruisers, unlike Chinas Great Wall, El Salar de Uyuni really can be seen from space. It is the greatest concentration of flat land on the face of the Earth, so unvarying that it is used to calibrate the altimeters of orbiting satellites. Now, during the wettest rainy season in years, more than 10% of the 4,200 square miles of the salt flats is under water.

As Machu Picchu is to the tourist industry in Peru, so is El Salar to Bolivia. Last night every hotel in the Uyuni-Colchani area was booked with Asian tourists. Even so they are not the principal benefit to Bolivias economy in this forlorn place. Lurking a few inches to a few yards below the surface are the chlorides of salt, magnesium, potassium, and particularly lithium, the latter making up nearly half of the worlds supply of the precious metal. Without that element, you dont have modern batteries, a fact that surely has not escaped Evos attention.

In our vehicle as we splashed toward a rendezvous point miles away, Ron and Paul suddenly burst into their rendition of Gordon Lightfoots Carefree Highway. Nick, Lightfoots countryman, could not help but join in. As Lightfoot was in large measure responsible for my getting through law school  another story for another day  I quickly cranked up the tune on my phone. That led the driver to pass me a connection cable and soon wed turned the cruiser into an 80 dB boom box. I turned to Franco and said, I guess youre outvoted here. He smiled and replied that he too was a big fan. We reverberated through the brine at 10 mph. If it were the only memory I ever carry away from the magical place, it will be enough.

https://spotwalla.com/tripViewer.php?id=177dc5a62c0d1d6a1c&hoursPast=0&showAll=yesLong time no see! Although we are with each other right now, I know I cannot wait to see you again, Chinese President Xi Jinping borrowed words from a local folk song to extend his greetings to global guests at the opening ceremony of the 2018 Boao Forum for Asia held on April 10 in Boao, South Chinas Hainan Province.

Long Time No See, a love song of the Li ethnic group in Hainan, is regarded as a window to Hainan music. The Li people are adept at singing and dancing. As one of the original residents on the Hainan Island, they have their own culture, in which music is the most splendid part.

Folk songs are an important tool to pass on the ethnic culture and customs as the Li ethnic group doesnt have its own written characters. In 2008, the Li folk songs were put onto the national intangible cultural heritage list.

The Li folk songs are very distinctive even regionally. They cover a wide range of themes, including story-telling and feeling expression and they are sung at various occasions, such as at workplaces and at happy ceremonies.

The tunes of the Li songs are also rich. They are graceful and lyrical, resounding and bold, soft and touching, signifying the positive, unsophisticated, straightforward and firm character of the Li people.

One sentence of a song in the Li language normally consists of five words, while those found in the Hainan dialect generally consists of seven words. Furthermore, locally four sentences are referred to as chapters.Nielsen Rolls Out Bookscan in Poland

Nielsen's Book division has rolled out its online Bookscan point-of-sale (POS) tracking service in Poland.



Bookscan collects retail sales information from POS systems in tens of thousands of bookshops around the world. Sales information is presented by market size and share of different book categories, as well as by individual publishers specific imprints, authors and price points. In most countries which use Bookscan, statistics are also available by actual sales price.



Through the launch in Poland, Nielsen will provide the market with access to information on consumer behaviour, sales by genre, ISBN numbers, authors and imprints. In addition, the service will provide weekly audits of the country's book sales, both physical and online.



Andre Breedt (pictured), co-Managing Director, Nielsen Book, comments: 'We're delighted to announce the launch of the first BookScan charts in Poland, a market which has over 1,800 bookshops nationwide. Poland is a country of book lovers and by bringing our BookScan services to this market, booksellers, publishers, libraries and the media will be able to track with confidence which books are being sold, defined by numerous categories and authors'.



Web site: www.nielsen.com .



Euromonitor Expands to Hong Kong

Global business intelligence and market analysis specialist Euromonitor International has opened an office in Hong Kong, its fourteenth location worldwide.



Headquartered in London, Euromonitor publishes international market reports, business reference books and online databases on consumer markets. Agilson Valle (pictured) has been named General Manager in Hong Kong, having previously been the firm's Key Client Consultant - Global Accounts in London. He joined Euromonitor two years ago, having previously served as Business Development Director at the Global Career Company, working with clients in the African and Middle Eastern Markets; and for Mintel, as an Account Director for the Iberian market and later Sales Director for the European team.



CEO Tim Kitchin says the expansion not only addresses the growing demand in serving long-term customers, but also strengthens the company's research in Hong Kong with analysts on the ground. He comments: 'We're excited to be establishing a presence in Hong Kong, just a few months after opening a new office in South Korea. Both new offices demonstrate our commitment to growing in Asia as well as our desire to support customers locally'.



Web site: www.euromonitor.com .



Cairo International Airport received late Wednesday night its first Russian flight in more than two and a half years, ending a ban by Moscow on direct flights to Egypt following the October 2015 deadly crash of a Russian Airbus A321 shortly after taking off from Sharm El-Sheikh airport.

The Aeroflot flight arrived with 120 passengers on board and was scheduled to depart for Moscow at 1:30am CLT.

Travellers from Russia are set to fly to Cairo on Aeroflot Airbus flights 320 and 321 on Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays of every week.

Egypt's flagship airline EgyptAir is also set to resume its Cairo-Moscow flights on Thursday morning, the first since Moscow suspended commercial flights between the two countries.

EgyptAir will be flying three weekly flights to the Russian capital.

Russians have traditionally comprised the largest group of foreign tourists to Egypt, contributing about a fifth of foreign vacationers to the country as of 2015, according to official data.

Moscow's flight suspension has taken a toll on Egypts tourism industry, a major source of the country's foriegn currency.

Russian flight resumption is expected to boost Egypt's recovering tourism sector,

In December 2017, following many rounds of negotiations and security inspections to Egyptian airports by the Russian side, President Vladimir Putin issued a decree to resume commercial air traffic between the two countries' capitals.

A new round of talks between the two countries is set for later this month to discuss resuming charter flights from Russia to the Red Sea resort cities of Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh.

Search Keywords:

Short link:

POINT PLEASANT BEACH, N.J. (AP)  The bizarre trash items plucked from New Jersey's beaches last year might be enough to cause nausea or heartburn. But don't worry, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol was among the items collected.

Also plucked from the sands of the state's beaches were a lawn mower, a saw blade, an empty medical marijuana container, a strobe light, a bird cage and two fire extinguishers.

Other items included a plastic statue of the Hindu god Vishnu, a cheese grater, and a human tooth in a box.

Aside from the bizarre items, Cindy Zipf of Clean Ocean Action said Thursday most of the trash consisted of plastics, which can kill fish and animals that swallow it.

"An emaciated sperm whale washed up dead on a beach in Spain recently," she said. "The once majestic ocean-cruising youngster looked like a burnt pancake. He died a tragic and painful death feeding on 64 pounds of plastic he thought was food. Countless others have died the same way, or by entanglement of plastics or other man-made products. We humans are wholly responsible for their deaths, and it is on us to do something about it."

The groups sponsors beach sweeps along New Jersey's entire ocean and bay coastline in spring and fall each year, and painstakingly catalogs everything collected. In 2017, they picked up nearly 374,000 pieces of trash, 84 percent of which was plastic or plastic foam; 66 percent of the trash collected was discarded single-use items.

The trash is either left behind by beachgoers or washed ashore from sewage systems that overflow during heavy rainstorms.

Some of the more unusual items included enough to stock a small medical clinic: blood vials, dentures, a knee brace, pill bottles, a surgical mask, and a bottle of eye drops.

Good grooming may have been on the minds of Jersey beachgoers last summer. Items found on the sand included acrylic nails, a bag of costume jewelry, a belly ring, a fake mustache, a mascara brush, a mermaid purse, nail clippers, perfume samples and shampoo pump.

There also was enough to stock a nightmare kitchen: a full jug of milk, presumably WAY past its expiration date, a jar of honey, a coffee maker, an oregano jar, zucchini and raw chicken pieces.

There were 19 car batteries found on the sand; 204 tires, and 43 large 55-gallon drums.

The sweeps also continued to show disturbing evidence of sewage making its way into waterways  and later onto beaches  by the presence of items presumably flushed down the toilet, including condoms (361, up 13 percent from two years ago), and tampon applicators (4,080, up 16 percent in two years.)

___

Follow Wayne Parry at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.BEIRUT (AP)  The Latest on the Syrian conflict (all times local):

5 p.m.

NATO is calling on Russia and Iran to make sure that international observers and medical staff are being allowed in and around the area of the suspected chemical attack in Syria.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters that beyond Syrian President Bashar Assad, the alliance also wants Syria's "supporters Iran and Russia to make that possible  both to allow international observers but also to allow medical assistance access to the area."

Stoltenberg said that consultation were ongoing among the NATO allies on how to respond to the suspected chemical attack, and said "it is important that those responsible are held accountable."

Syrian opposition activists and medics say a suspected gas attack last week killed more than 40 people in Douma, a town outside the capital that was then controlled by Syrian rebels. The Syrian government has denied the allegations.

The Russian military says government forces are now in full control of Douma.

___

4:50 p.m.

Russia has warned the U.S. and its allies against assuming the role of a "global policeman" in response to what it describes as fake claims of chemical weapons use in Syria.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday that Western leaders have no authority to be "investigators, prosecutors and executioners."

Syrian opposition activists and medics say a suspected gas attack last week killed more than 40 people in Douma, a town outside the capital that was then controlled by Syrian rebels. The Syrian government has denied the allegations.

Zakharova described the allegations as fake, but said the international chemical weapons watchdog should investigate them. She said Russia would ensure the monitors' security.

Zakharova called for de-escalating the situation, urging the West to carefully weigh the consequences before taking any action.

___

3:40 p.m.

An aide to Iran's supreme leader says he hopes Syrian forces will "expel the American occupiers" in the country's northeast after they retake other areas of the country from insurgents.

Ali Akbar Velayati, speaking in the Syrian capital on Thursday, said he visited eastern Ghouta a day earlier, calling the capture of the Damascus suburbs one of the most important victories of the seven-year civil war.

Iran is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad and has sent thousands of troops and allied militiamen to support his forces.

Velayati said he hoped the northern Idlib province, which is dominated by al-Qaida militants would be the next to fall to government forces. He said Assad's forcers should then push east of the Euphrates River, where U.S. troops are embedded with Kurdish forces.

He said: "We are hopeful that major and extensive steps are taken later to liberate this area and expel the American occupiers."

___

3:05 p.m.

President Emmanuel Macron says France has proof that the Syrian government launched chlorine gas attacks.

Macron said Thursday that France would not tolerate "regimes that think everything is permitted." Speaking on TF1 television, Macron said "we have proof that chemical weapons were used, at least chlorine" in recent days by Syrian President Bashar Assad's government.

He did not say whether France is planning military action against Assad's government. Macron said he has been talking regularly this week with U.S. President Donald Trump about the most effective response.

With increasing concerns about a U.S.-Russia proxy war in Syria, Macron insisted that "France will not allow an escalation or something that could damage the stability" of the region. On Tuesday, Macron said any French action would target Syria's chemical weapons abilities.

Syrian opposition activists and medics say a suspected gas attack last week in Douma killed more than 40 people. The Syrian government has denied the allegations.

___

3 p.m.

Chancellor Angela Merkel says Germany won't participate in possible military action in Syria, but supports sending a message that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable.

Merkel stressed the importance of a united position in the face of a suspected chemical weapons attack that the West is blaming on President Bashar Assad's forces. She said she spoke Thursday with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Merkel said in Berlin: "Germany will not take part in possible military action  I want to make clear again that there are no decisions  but we see, and support this, that everything is being done to send a signal that this use of chemical weapons is not acceptable."

___

2:45 p.m.

Russia has warned the U.S. and its allies against any steps that could destabilize the situation in Syria.

Asked to comment on possible U.S. strikes, President Vladimir Putin's spokesman said Thursday that "it's necessary to avoid any steps that may fuel tensions in Syria." Dmitry Peskov added that it would have an "utterly destructive impact on the Syrian settlement."

Peskov wouldn't say if Moscow could use a Russian-U.S. military hotline to avoid escalation in the event of a U.S. strike, saying only that "the hotline exists and has remained active."

President Donald Trump warned Russia on Wednesday to "get ready" for a missile attack on its ally Syria, but tweeted Thursday that it may come "very soon or not so soon at all!"

The U.S. and its allies have threatened to respond militarily to an alleged chemical attack near Damascus last weekend.

___

2:30 p.m.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says he will discuss ways of ending "the chemical massacre" in Syria during a telephone call with Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

Erdogan said he'll talk to Putin later on Thursday, a day after he talked to President Donald Trump about Syria.

Erdogan's remarks appear to criticize an exchange of threats by the United States and Russia, saying Turkey was "deeply disturbed by some countries that rely on their military might, turning Syria into a virtual wrestling ground."

Erdogan says Turkey's warming ties with Russia and Iran are "not an alternative" to its traditional ties to the West, adding that Ankara would "fight until the end" against Russia's support for Syrian President Bashar Assad and against U.S. support to a Syrian Kurdish militia that Ankara has labelled a terrorist group.

___

1:45 p.m.

Syrian President Bashar Assad says Western threats to strike his country after a suspected chemical attack are based on "lies" and seek to undermine his forces' recent advances near Damascus.

The U.S. and its allies threatened military action after an alleged gas attack by government forces over the weekend that Syrian opposition activists and medics say killed more than 40 people. The Syrian government has denied the allegations.

Assad said Thursday that Western countries were lashing out after they lost their "bet" on opposition forces in the eastern Ghouta suburbs of the capital. Russia, a key ally of Assad, says government forces have taken full control of the town of Douma, the last rebel holdout in the region and the scene of Saturday's alleged attack.

Assad says the Western threats endanger international peace and security, and that military action would only contribute to the "further destabilization" of the region.

Assad spoke during a meeting with Ali Akbar Velayati, an aide to Iran's supreme leader.

___

12:20 p.m.

Kuwait's national carrier says it is suspending flights to Lebanon in line with security warnings from airline authorities concerning a possible strike on neighboring Syria.

Kuwait Airways released the statement overnight, saying flights to Beirut would be suspended from Thursday until further notice.

A day earlier, European airspace authorities warned aircraft to be careful over the next few days when flying close to Syria because of the possibility of air or missile strikes into the country.

The U.S. and its allies have threatened to take military action in response to an alleged chemical attack last weekend. Syrian activists and rescuers say the attack on Douma killed more than 40 people, allegations denied by the government.

___

12:15 p.m.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has summoned her Cabinet back from vacation to discuss military action against Syria over an alleged chemical weapons attack.

May has indicated she wants Britain to join in any U.S.-led strikes in response to the suspected attack near Damascus. She has said the use of chemical weapons "cannot go unchallenged."

The U.S., France and Britain have been consulting about launching a military strike, and President Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday that missiles "will be coming."

Britain's Ministry of Defense refused to comment on reports that Royal Navy submarines armed with cruise missiles have been dispatched to within range of Syria.

British opposition lawmakers are calling for Parliament to be given a vote on military action. That is not a legal requirement, though it is a convention.

Syrian opposition activists and rescuers say a chemical attack launched by government forces in a rebel-held area near Damascus late Saturday killed more than 40 people, allegations denied by the Syrian government.

___

11:50 a.m.

France says it will decide in the coming days whether to launch a military strike over a suspected chemical attack in Syria.

Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Thursday that President Emmanuel Macron would decide whether to launch an attack over the "non-respect of the international convention against chemical weapons," which is a "red line" for France.

Speaking to reporters in Romania, Le Drian says: "We are very firm...as the president of the Republic said.... this situation can't be tolerated."

Asked about consulting the U.S, which has also threatened military action, Le Drian said "France is autonomous in taking its decisions."

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday warned of imminent military action in Syria over a suspected poison gas attack near Damascus that Syrian opposition activists and first responders say killed more than 40 people. Syria has denied carrying out such an attack.

___

10 a.m.

The Russian military says the Syrian government is now in full control of town on the outskirts of Damascus that was held by the rebels and that was the site of suspected chemical attack over the weekend.

The Defense Ministry said in a statement on Thursday that the situation in the town of Douma, just east of the Syrian capital, is "normalizing."

More than 13,500 Syrian rebel fighters and their families have left Douma this month under a so-called evacuation deal between the rebels and the Russian military, a top ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad's government.

The Russian ministry says 1,500 left the town in the past 24 hours.

There was no immediate confirmation or indication from Assad's government that Syrian troops entered Douma on Thursday.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.ORLANDO, Fla.  A group of students at University of Central Florida are working to develop a special sponge aimed at cleaning oil spills.

UCF students developing sponge to clean oil spills

Students showed off sponge to EPA in D.C.

The group eventually want to see it used commercially

The students just returned from Washington, D.C. where they had the chance to show it off to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Spectrum News 13 met with the students Wednesday as they demonstrated how it works.

Its a sponge that rejects water and loves oil, said UCF Civil Engineer Hernan Sabau.

The sponges are attached to tubing on a vessel, and the special sponges will go into the water where the oil is. They showed a simulation of how it works Wednesday.

With the help of the pump it sucks in and basically the sponges are selectively permeable so they only let threw the oil, said UCF student Dwight Davis.

Sabau is from Mexico, and when the BP Horizon oil spill hit the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, it was a motivation for him to find a solution to clean oil.

See if a better way to combat oils that reside within the oceanic conditions, Sabau said.

Davis said it was a lot of hard work to create the right sponge.

What ratios to use to get the correct sponges, there were a lot of failed sponges, Davis said.

The group presented to the project to the EPA and others at the National Substainable Design Expo in Washington, D.C. over the weekend.

They were very eager to get it out there, because they knew it had some potential, Sabau said.

They tell Spectrum News 13 they are stopping there. They are looking at ways to improve the process and want to try it on a larger scale. Some want to see if it can be used commercially.Staff writer Mary Ellen Godin joins the Morning Record to talk about the decision by Meriden Assistant fire Chief Louis DiGennaro's decision to retire in March while facing yet another complaint of misconduct.

Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or on Stitcher

msavino@record-journal.com

203-317-2266

Twitter: @reporter_savinoStaff writer Jesse Buchanan joins the Morning Record to talk about the Aqua Turf's decision Wednesday to no longer host an annual NRA fundraiser. Buchanan and editor Mike Savino also talk about the possible fallout.

Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or on Stitcher

msavino@record-journal.com

203-317-2266

Twitter: @reporter_savinoHARTFORD (AP)  Despite a lack of sexual harassment complaints filed against Connecticut lawmakers, the states Democratic and Republican legislative leaders want to determine if any policy changes are needed and give any possible victims an opportunity to come forward.

The lawmakers will hold a public hearing next Monday at the Legislative Office Building, where invited guests and members of the public are expected to testify.

We need to take a real hard look at what we do currently, the structure we have currently and is it enough, said House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz, a Berlin Democrat.

Over the past 15 months, dozens of state lawmakers across the U.S. have been forced out of office, removed from leadership roles, reprimanded or publicly accused of sexual misconduct during a mounting backlash to such behavior by those in power.

The Associated Press recently requested records under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act from all four legislative caucuses and the Office of Legislative Management, which oversees the state Capitol complex, regarding any sexual misconduct or harassment complaints against lawmakers over the past decade. All reported having no records of formal complaints. They also said they had no records of financial settlements paid because of misconduct or harassment.

Caucus staff did confirm that several former lawmakers in the past were verbally reprimanded for inappropriate behavior.

Last month, Hartford Rep. Angel Arce resigned effective April 9 after the Hartford Courant published affectionate texts the 57-year-old grandfather had sent to a 16-year-girl in 2015. The messages included, you are so beautiful and gorgeous and I think we going to keep a lot of secrets between us.

Two of his fellow Democrats, Aresimowicz and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy had called on him to step down. Aresimowicz also stripped Arce of his leadership and committee responsibilities. Arce has denied any wrongdoing and said he resigned because he didnt want his presence to be distraction to the very important work that occurs at the Capitol.

Speaking for House Republicans, Minority Leader Themis Klarides said they have always kept a close eye on allegations.

If we hear even a whiff of anybody, whether its a staffer or a legislator, complaining about even the slightest thing, we go in, we have a conversation, we see whats going on and we try to nip it in the bud, if it hasnt become something yet, she said.

Klarides said that legislative leaders from both parties agreed they should see if the current harassment reporting process can be improved. The General Assembly last updated its policies in 2014.

Im sure there are things that were not doing that we dont know about, she said. Thats why I want people with experience to tell us.

Aresimowicz noted how the employee handbook requires people to report harassment to the chief of staff of the pertinent legislative caucus, such as his House Democrats. He said that process is problematic.

What if youre a lobbyist? he said. Youre going to go to the chief of staff of a caucus that your livelihood is dependent upon?

State Sen. Cathy Osten, a Sprague Democrat, is a former lieutenant at the Department of Correction who joined other female correctional officers in 2003 to protest harassment within the state agency. She welcomes the upcoming hearing.

A lot of times people dont come forward, she said. We found there were many more people that just felt that they couldnt come forward because it would impact their trajectory within that job ... and they were afraid if they made a complaint, it would be seen that they were not strong.NORTH HAVEN  Quinnipiac University administrators, local high school and college students, and members of the community gathered Tuesday night at Quinnipiacs campus to discuss school gun violence.

It's not just Parkland, it's not just Sandy Hook, it is a culture of violence and whether it's schools, or churches, or boarding houses, or nightclubs, we are here tonight to really just move you to say 'No more. Enough,  said Dr. Anne Dichele, the Dean of the School of Education at Quinnipiac University.

The event included a panel of speakers and a memorial gallery of some of the many people killed by gun violence.

Sheehan High School student Sydney Carim, who joined the panel, was involved in organizing a student walkout and other activities at her school after the Parkland, Florida shooting in February. She said students have become desensitized to school shootings because of their frequency.

That is not normal. That is unacceptable. And that is why we must act, Carim said.

Carim described the 17 minutes students spent with arms linked as they listened to the name, age, and description of each person killed in the Parkland shooting.

Hearing the names of these students, hearing about them, and seeing their faces while surrounded by complete and utter silence moved me to tears, Carim said. Those 17 minutes were ones of power and solace and the energy in the room was palpable.

"There is still so much to be done to ensure that our community is one in which school is not a place of death and tragedy, but growth and discovery, Carim said.

For fellow speaker Dr. Khalilah L. Brown-Dean, the loss of a loved one to gun violence is personal. The associate professor of political science at Quinnipiac University lost a cousin to gun violence in 2011.

For families like my own... every loss is heinous. No less so because of the conditions of our loved ones' death. And so the time has come for us to say collectively 'enough, Brown-Dean said.

Since the Parkland shooting, many possible solutions have been discussed in an effort to make American schools safer. One suggestion was to arm teachers. North Haven principal Russ Dallai expressed his distaste with the idea.

It's sickening to me to think that we even have to consider it, Dallai said, who added that he had explored the idea thoroughly by speaking to local police and school administrators.

Police in (active shooter situations) get such an adrenaline rush that it impacts their judgment and they have to learn how to overcome it... even trained officers in these situations have an accuracy rate, in their marksmanship, of 18 percent, Dallai said.

Gerald Conlogue, co-executive director of The Bioanthropology Research Institute, said he was working in the chief medical examiners office when the Sandy Hook shooting happened in 2012.

Conlogue explained that hes been able to handle 50 years of autopsy work by compartmentalizing. He would note case numbers, but never names, ages, or anything about the people he worked on.

The Sandy Hook cases didnt feel much different the day of, but as time passed, he realized how much the experience stuck with him.

Their lives matter as much as any other victim's life, but for me it was just the horrendous destruction that was done was beyond belief. I could not prepare myself for that, Conlogue said. I'm not saying we have to take everyone's guns away, but I'm saying that we have to be responsible and stop people from killing other people as much as possible.

bwright@record-journal.com

203-317-2316

Twitter: @baileyfaywrightWALLINGFORD  The mayor and school superintendent disagreed over adding school resource officers to middle and high schools during a public hearing on the mayors budget proposal this week.

Mayor William W. Dickinson Jr. voiced opposition to adding school resource officers during the forum, citing logistical concerns about assigning police officers to schools.

I think the SROs are a very difficult concept, Dickinson said during the forum Monday. To expect that a police officer is assigned to a school, even though other events in town may be occurring that they must respond to, is a very difficult thing.

School Superintendent Salvatore Menzo and the Board of Education sent a budget addendum to Dickinson last month, before Dickinson released his budget proposal on April 2, seeking $480,000 to hire four school resource officers  one for each middle and high school.

In response to Dickinsons concerns, Menzo said at the forum that surrounding communities have had resource officers in schools for nearly 20 years.

They are in other districts and they do work in collaboration with the police department, Menzo said. Meriden, for example, first introduced police officers into schools in 1998, according to the citys website.

The school resource officers would be armed, sworn police officers. Unlike armed guards that provide security on school grounds, the school resource officers would also be responsible for developing programming for students, cultivating relationships with students, and collaborating with school counselors to assist students, according to a draft job description created by the school district.

Menzo said at the meeting that the school board has requested funding for SROs for the last three years. The positions would need to be funded through the police departments budget, Menzo said.

Dickinson continued at the meeting, saying the police department is a highly mobile, emergency response, investigative, criminal enforcement agency ... They are the only people in our society that can take away your civil rights. They do that because they have training and a license to do that  that is their principal job. When we talk about someone being in the schools and able to teach a course or do other things, that person could be called out at any time because something is occurring elsewhere in the community.

Menzo said Wednesday he believes the mayor misunderstood the responsibilities of the proposed resource officer. Menzo said the officer would stay in the school unless there is an extraordinary event in the community that required all hands on deck.

Its just a matter of a misunderstanding, Menzo said Wednesday.

Menzo said he will meet with the mayor and police chief on Friday to discuss and clarify the role of SROs and other school security items for which the Board of Education requested funding.

Im certainly not mad at the mayor, and I dont think hes mad at me, Menzo said Wednesday. We just want to make sure we all understand the requests.

Police Chief William Wright and Dickinson couldnt be reached for comment Wednesday.

The addendum that school officials sent to Dickinson included six items, totaling $1.1 million, aimed at improving school security. The board requested the items based on feedback it received during a community forum last month to discuss school security and mental health resources.

During the forum, Dickinson said that police do have a presence in the schools. Menzo responded by saying officers are not able to develop relationships with students by going in and out.

In his proposed budget, Dickinson gave the school board about $1.9 million less than its request. Despite the funding gap, Menzo said he doesnt want to rule out the possibility of funding SROs in the next year.

mzabierek@record-journal.com

203-317-2279

Twitter: @MatthewZabierekEgyptian national carrier EgyptAir sent its first flight from Cairo to Moscow Thursday morning after a more than two-year Russian suspension following the October 2015 deadly crash of a Russian tourist jet over the Sinai Peninsula.

The MS729 Moscow-bound flight departed at 9:35 CLT, the flagship airline said in a statement sent to Ahram Online.

A spokesman for the company said EgyptAir will be operating Airbus A320 flights to the Russian capital three times a week: on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.

Late on Wednesday, an Aeroflot plane arrived in Cairo from Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, in the first step towards resuming direct flights between the two countries.

Moscow grounded all commercial passenger flights to Egypt in late 2015 over security concerns after a Russian A321 airbus crashed in Sinai shortly after taking off from Sharm El-Sheikh, killing all 224 people on board.

Russian travellers had comprised the largest single tourist group in Egypt, contributing to about a fifth of foreign vacationers in the country as of 2015, according to official data.

The two countries have yet to resume charter flights from Russia to the Red Sea resort cities of Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh, popular destinations for Russian tourists.

This means Russian tourists aiming to visit the Red Sea will still have to transfer in Cairo to reach the resort cities.

The crash of the Russian flight dealt a blow to Egypt's tourism industry, a major source of hard currency for the country, with the number of foreign tourists visiting Egypt dropping from 9.3 million in 2015 to 5.4 million in 2016.

However, the figure has jumped by more than 50 percent to 8.3 million visitors, a government official told Reuters in January.

That number is still well below the 14.7 million who visited Egypt in 2010, ahead of the 2011 uprising that toppled long-time autocrat Hosni Mubarak and ushered in years of political turmoil.

The country's official statistics agency has yet to announce final numbers for 2017.

Russian flight resumption is expected to boost Egypt's recovering tourism sector,

In December 2017, following many rounds of negotiations and security inspections to Egyptian airports by the Russian side, President Vladimir Putin issued a decree to resume commercial air traffic between the two countries' capitals.

A new round of talks between the two countries is set for later this month to discuss resuming charter flights from Russia to the Red Sea resort cities of Hurghada and Sharm El-Sheikh.

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First Reading is your guide to the world of Canadian politics.

Sign up now>President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa of Portugal will hold a meeting with parliament speaker Ali Abdel-Aal as part of his three-day visit to Egypt, Gamal Essam El-Din reports

Portuguese President Rebelo de Sousa will begin a state visit to Cairo on Thursday, during which he will meet with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and with speaker of Egypt's parliament, Ali Abdel-Aal.

Parliamentary sources told Ahram Online that de Sousa and Abdel-Aal will focus on discussing political and parliamentary relations between Egypt and Portugal during their meeting on Thursday afternoon.

One source said they will also discuss the possibility of forming an Egyptian-Portuguese parliamentary friendship association.

"Speaker Abdel-Aal is expected to give President de Sousa a review of pieces of legislation passed by parliament on matters related to fighting terrorism and human trafficking, boosting economic reform, and reinforcing religious tolerance," said a parliamentary source, adding that "Portugal took a positive position towards Egypt after the country's uprising against Muslim Brotherhood in June 2013."

The Portuguese president will meet with Egypt's president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi at the beginning of his visit on Thursday.

"When President El-Sisi was in Portugal in 2016, he visited the Portuguese parliament, meeting with senior members there," said the source.

De Sousa will also visit Islamic learning institute of Al-Azhar on Thursday to meet with Grand Imam sheikh Ahmed El-Tayyeb.

The Portuguese president is expected to address Al-Azhar's religious clerics and students on the importance of coexistence and religious tolerance in a lecture entitled Vision of a Teacher and President.

He will also meet with Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria in the Coptic cathedral in Abbasiya in Cairo.

The visit will also include a meeting with the Egyptian-Portuguese Businessmen Association.

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Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images

He said I could have it. I have a lot of respect for his game, Matthews told reporters Thursday at Gillette Stadium, where hes working out in advance of the start of the offseason program on Monday.



I know what he did here. I dont think you have to get a number retired and all that stuff to understand you need to have respect for what guys do in a place like this. They call him Danny Playoff, and I think he earned that nickname. I just wanted to make sure, Hey, is this cool? He said it was.

Even though Danny Amendola is now a member of the Miami Dolphins (still not used to writing that), the respect he has earned throughout the Patriots organization runs pretty deep.So much so that newly signed wide receiver Jordan Matthews called Amendola and asked him if it was okay for him to take No. 80, Amendola's number with the Patriots.Matthews signed a one-year deal with the Pats last week and looks to add to an already deep group of receivers.Follow me on Twitter - @JesseGaunce For more of my articles, click hereEgyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi praised on Thursday growing cooperation between Cairo and Lisbon as he received his Portuguese counterpart in the Egyptian capital, in the first such visit by a Portuguese president in more than two decades.

President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and El-Sisi held "constructive talks" in which they discussed cooperation between the two countries over the past two years, El-Sisi told a press conference broadcast live on state television.

They also addressed the outcome of meetings of a bilateral commission of foreign ministers of the two countries held in Cairo in October last year, El-Sisi said.

The two leaders on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding between the Camoes Institute of Cooperation and Language at the University of Porto and Cairo's Ain Shams University.

The deal is "a sign of how deep we want our cultural relationship to be," the Portuguese president told the conference.

Another memorandum of understanding was signed between the economic zone of Egypt's Suez Canal and Portugal's industrial plant management company AICEP Global Parks, Rebelo de Sousa said.

"We have agreed today to continue working closely to advance our bilateral relations to greater horizons, maximise the use from available potential and opportunism and speed up the implementation of signed agreements and memorandums of understanding," El-Sisi told the press conference.

The last visit by a Portuguese head of state to Cairo took place in 1995.

Rebelo de Sousa said his visit is starting "a new cycle" of "not only very good political relationship but also economic, cultural and social relationships between the two peoples and the two countries."

"We can work together concerning the region, concerning Africa and concerning the world. You can count on us, we shall count on you," he said.

During Tuesday's talks, the two leaders discussed the fight against terrorism and eliminating its source of funding, Egyptian-European partnerships, and boosting European Union (EU) cooperation in Africa.

El-Sisi urged greater cooperation between the two countries to fight terrorism and extremism, organised crime, illegal migration and regional agendas to sow instability in the region.

His Portuguese counterpart called for cooperation in social development and health care. "We could and shall cooperate in that field."

He said the two countries "have many common fields of action bilaterally and multilaterally."

He referred to economy, trade and investment ties as well as cooperation opportunities in infrastructure, tourism, environment energy, water supply and good governance. At an international level, he said the two countries have been working together at the UN.

Bilateral trade between the two countries amounted to 218 million euros in 2017, while Portugal has an estimated $404.7 million-worth of investment in Egypt, Egypt's trade minister said last month.

El-Sisi visited Portugal in November 2016, the first such visit by an Egyptian leader in over a decade since former President Hosni Mubarak visited the country in December 2007 for an African-European summit.

The landmark trip was described by Egypt at the time as "a turning point" in economic and political ties between the two countries as well as a fundamental boost to Egypt-EU ties.

Rebelo de Sousa arrived in Cairo on Wednesday for a three-day visit. Following the talks with El-Sisi, the Portuguese president met with Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayyeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, and visited Al-Azhar University, where he delivered a speech to Muslim clerics and students.

He is due to meet Egyptian parliament speaker Ali Abdel-Aal and Prime Minister Sherif Ismail and attend the closing session of an Portugal-Egypt economic forum on Thursday afternoon.

On Friday, he is scheduled to meet Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II and visit the Pyramids of Giza, the website of the Portuguese presidency said.

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By IANS

CHENNAI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday rejected the allegations of southern states, including Tamil Nadu, that the Terms of Reference (ToR) of the 15th Finance Commission were biased against them and said it would benefit states that took population control measures.

"An issue that has been raised by certain vested interests over the last few days... Baseless allegations are being made about the ToR of the 15th Finance Commission being biased to the states of a particular region," he said after inaugurating a building of the Cancer Institute (WIA) here.

READ HERE | 15th Finance Commission's Terms of Reference are against progressive states, say three southern state Finance ministers

"Let me tell you our critics seem to have missed something. The Union government has suggested to the Finance Commission to consider incentivising states who have worked on population control. By this yardstick, states like Tamil Nadu, which has devoted a lot of efforts, energy and resources towards population control, would certainly benefit."

He said it was not the case earlier. Southern states have been complaining about the ToR of the Finance Commission saying their interests would be harmed in the matters of resource allocation because of their better performance on population control and economic growth.

His statement was seen a response to the accusations that Union Government planning to reduce the revenue share of the southern States made at southern Finance Ministers conclave held at

Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday. The conclave was participated by finance ministers from Karnataka, Puducherry, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.

ALSO READ: Tamil Nadu government to take up Terms of Reference with 15th Finance Commission

The issues were first raised by Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, which was followed by BJP's ally-turned-foe Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu.

On Tuesday, Kerala Finance Minister Thomas Issaac convened a meeting of southern Finance Ministers which was attended by representatives from Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry, in which they called the ToR a "threat to federalism".

Modi said the Union government was committed to cooperative federalism.

"Our Mantra is 'Sabka Sath Sabka Vikas'. Let us all work together to build new India, which would make our freedom fighters proud," he said.

However, even as the protests over the Centre's failure in forming the Cauvery Management Board is raging in Tamil Nadu for last one week, Modi skipped the topic.

Earlier in his speech, he said the Union government had planned setting up 20 state cancer institutes and 50 tertiary care cancer centres in different parts of the country.

"Proposal can be approved for eligible institutional up to Rs 45 crore for tertiary care cancer centres and up to Rs120 crore for setting up of state cancer institutes. I am happy to note that the proposal of 15 states cancer institutes and 50 tertiary care centres have been approved so far," he said.

Modi also said 40 new All India Institute of Medical Sciences were being set up with focus on oncology and its various aspects.

Also, eight existing institutions were being upgraded with provision of oncology services under Pradhan Mantri Swasthya Suraksha Yojana (PMSSY), Modi added.

Earlier, about 20 students of IIT Madras waved black flags inside the campus through which Modi travelled in a car to the Cancer Institute. The students were showing their opposition to the Central government in the Cauvery issue.

(with inputs from ENS)By Express News Service

CHENNAI: As sporadic protests by political parties and various groups over the Cauvery issue in the city continue, police personnel have cordoned off Thiruvidanthai in Kancheepuram district where Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will inaugurate the Defence Expo - 2018 on Thursday.As police suspect fringe outfits and political parties to protest against Modi by waving black flags, around 5,000 police personnel have been deployed in the city and at the expo venue.

READ HERE | Black flags, 'Go back Modi' chants welcome PM as he arrives for Defence Expo launch in Chennai

Also, Special Action Force and Special Task Force have been roped in and a three-tier security has been arranged at the airport, IIT-M and Cancer Institute, Adyar. Sources said Modi will reach Chennai airport around 9.25 am and will fly to Mamallapuram by helicopter by 9.50 am and by road to the venue. Again, he will reach IIT-M by helicopter and visit Adyar Cancer Institute. Also, Indian Coast Guard and Coastal Security Group CID officials have also been roped in to monitor the States coast.

Meanwhile, political parties have issued statements that they would protest near the airport with black flags. Also, East Coast Road has been cordoned off and vehicles are diverted via Old Mahabalipuram Road.

Opposition ready with black flags

Opposition parties and several organisations are gearing up to wave black flags to Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visits the city on Thursday to protest the Centres delay in constituting Cauvery Management Board (CMB), despite a six-week deadline set by Supreme Court by its February 16 order.

DMK sources said partymen would line up from Saidapet to Airport waving black flags though the Prime Minister would take the aerial route to reach the venues of both functions, one at Cancer Institute in Guindy and the other at the ongoing Defence Expo at Tiruvidanthai near here. Other parties in the Opposition combine would also join the stir to show black flags to Modi.

MDMK general secretary Vaiko announced that he would lead a black flag demonstration at Chinnamalai in Saidapet. He said the black flag demonstration would be held to protest against the Prime Ministers visit as he had been acting against the interests of Tamil Nadu on a host of issues, including Cauvery, NEET, neutrino project, hydrocarbon project and methane extraction project, and attempt of Hindutva forces to shake the countrys secular fabric.

The decision to show black flags to the Prime Minister was taken at an emergency meeting of the DMK executive committee on March 30. Later, an all-party meeting convened by the DMK on April 1 decided to stage the protest on behalf of the Opposition.

They also appealed to the public to hoist black flags in their houses and wear black shirts or black badges to register their protest.Tamilar Kalai Ilakkiya Panbattu Peravai, an umbrella body of filmmakers, actors and political outfits, have also announced a black flag stir. Top figures of Kollywood are expected to join the protest.

Traffic diversion for Modi visit

The following traffic arrangements will be made in the city between 11 am and 2.30 pm on Thursday in view of the Prime Ministers visit to the city.

A police press release said vehicles coming to Adyar from Chennai Airport via Kathipara flyover, Guindy Bridge, Halda Junction, Little Mount and Sardar Patel Road wont be allowed to turn towards Raj Bhavan.

Instead, all vehicles should continue towards Saidapet and turn right at Nandanam junction to take Chamiers road and Thiru Vi Ka Bridge.

Vehicles from Adyar to airport, will not be allowed to go straight on Sardar Patel Road beyond Madhya Kailash junction.

They will have to turn left towards Tidel Park and take right at SRP tools junction and reach airport via Velachery.

Vehicles will not be allowed also via Gandhi Mandapam Road, the release said.

Saidapet to Airport

DMK sources said partymen would line up from Saidapet to Airport waving black flags though the PM would take the aerial route to reach the venuesAn Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman has rejected comments by Ethiopian and Sudanese officials that he said blamed Egypt for the failure of a recent round of tripartite talks on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).

Egypt participated in the Khartoum talks with positive intentions and a firm desire to reach an agreement that implements the directives of the leaders of the three countries, aiming to reach solutions to break the current stalemate in the technical negotiations of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said on Thursday.

Abu Zeid added that all Egyptian stances during the technical and political meetings on the GERD cannot be doubted, affirming that Egypt had showed flexibility in the talks, with the aim of reaching a consensus that serves the interests of all three countries.

The spokesman pointed to Egypt's proposal to involve the World Bank in the stalled technical negotiations over the dam as proof of its goodwill in negations.

Abu Zeid said that Shoukry delivered a message on Wednesday to his Sudanese and Ethiopian counterparts, calling for a second meeting in Cairo to resume discussions.

"This move affirms Egypt's keenness to reach an agreement to resume the technical track, and that Egypt cannot be a hindrance to reach this consensus as was circulated in the media, he said.

The talks, which took place last week in Khartoum, were the latest in a series of negotiations aimed at resolving an impasse in negotiations over studies conducted to determine the impact of the dam on the downstream countries of Egypt and Sudan.

The talks involved the foreign and irrigation ministers and the intelligence chiefs of each country.

Speaking last Friday, Egypts Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry announced that the talks had not yielded significant results.

On Thursday, Ethiopian Foreign Ministry spokesman Meles Alem told reporters that Egypt requested Ethiopia recognise a 1959 treaty between Sudan and Egypt on sharing the waters of the Nile, a request he described as a red line for Ethiopia, as the agreement was signed without Ethiopias presence.

There was a lack of goodwill on Egypts part to move the consultations forward, Alem said, adding that the three water ministers nevertheless plan to meet again soon.

According to the 1959 agreement, Egypt is entitled to 55.5 billion cubic metres of Nile water per year, while Sudan is entitled to 18 billion cubic metres. Ethiopia and other Nile Basin countries were not parties to the agreement.

Sudanese Foreign Minister Ibrahim Ghandour has earlier said that the talks had failed to achieve any significant results, adding that the ministries of irrigation in the three countries will hold further meetings to look into the technical disagreements.

The Ethiopian government began construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile near the border with Sudan in 2011, as part of a development plan aimed at eradicating poverty and generating electricity.

Over the past seven years, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan have held several rounds of talks on the dams anticipated impact on Nile water resources.

Egypt has expressed concern the dam could adversely affect its share of Nile water.

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By ANI

LUCKNOW: The Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday had handed over the Unnao rape case, in which BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger is the prime accused, to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

On the basis of the SIT report submitted to the state government, instruction has been given to lodge an FIR against the MLA from Unnao.

Two doctors, namely Dr. D.K. Dwivedi and Dr. Prashant Upadhyay, have been suspended and disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against three other doctors for laxity in giving proper medical care to the victim's father, both prior to judicial custody and on referral from jail to the district hospital while in judicial custody, according to an official statement.

Apart from this, Safipur Circle Officer Kunwar Bahadur Singh has also been suspended for negligence in handling the repeated complaints given by the victim.

Meanwhile, in a late night development, BJP MLA Sengar appeared outside Lucknow SSP's residence.

I came here to show to the media that I am not on the run, and I am very much in Lucknow. I am here, tell me what to do, Senger said.

Singh is accused of rape by a 16-year-old girl from Unnao, which took place last year in June.

WATCH: Scuffle between media persons and supporters of Unnao BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger outside SSP office in Lucknow. pic.twitter.com/jxJevmRmj4  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 11, 2018

Since then, the family attempted to file an FIR against the accused numerous times but were thwarted by the police.

Earlier on Sunday, a woman, along with her family members, tried to commit suicide in front of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath 's residence in Lucknow, alleging that she was raped by Sengar and his fellow accomplices.

Later, the rape victim's father was arrested, and on Monday, he died in hospital. However, the family alleged that he was murdered by Sengar.By AFP

PARIS: In laying his integrity on the line over Syria's suspected use of chemical weapons, French President Emmanuel Macron might be playing for even higher stakes -- maintaining the landmark Iran nuclear accord, analysts say.

The 40-year-old leader, weighing the first foreign military operation on his own initiative, has made clear he considers Damascus behind a suspected chemical attack in the rebel-held Syrian town of Douma last weekend that killed at least 40 people.

Macron's response is expected to be high on the agenda during a TV interview Thursday afternoon, only his third since the centrist swept to power last year.

For many experts, he has no choice but to enforce his "red line" on the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime, which would prompt French military strikes.

"Unlike previous incidents, alleged or real, in recent months, what happened Saturday in Douma is a huge and evident violation of Western red lines," said Bruno Tertrais, a political scientist at the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS).

"If France doesn't react now that the conditions are met, we would lose all credibility," he said.

The country, victim of the first extensive use of chemical weapons in military history during World War I, has long made combatting chemical weapons a priority.

A child receiving oxygen through respirators following an alleged poison gas attack in Douma, Syria. | AP

It worries that allowing such attacks by Syria's President Bashar al-Assad could set a dangerous precedent for other repressive regimes.

Many French officials still bristle over former US president Barack Obama's last-minute pullback on Syria strikes after a chemical attack in 2013.

The decision shocked the French, whose planes were poised for launch to participate in the operation.

"Emmanuel Macron has tied his hands," said Francois Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"He's in the same position as Obama in 2013, and if he decides not to follow through, there will be a political price to pay."

- Uphill battle -



Macron has spoken at length with US President Donald Trump about how to react to the Douma attack.

Both men have played up their sound relations since Macron invited the American leader to attend France's Bastille Day festivities last July.

Macron has also taken advantage of weakened leadership in Britain and Germany to carve out a role as Trump's privileged partner in Europe.

But he has been unable to sway the US leader on two crucial issues -- the US decision to exit the 2015 Paris agreement on curbing global warming, and Trump's threat to scupper the deal with Iran to curb its nuclear weapons programme.

Several analysts say ending the deal with Tehran and re-imposing American sanctions could inflame tensions across the Middle East, after years of tensions amid the fight against the Islamic State group.

As Macron prepares for a state visit to Washington later this month, "French military action could earn him some much-needed favour," Benjamin Haddad, a researcher at the Hudson Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine this week.

Decisive joint action could give him leverage in arguing to uphold the deal, which comes up next for Trump's review on May 12.

"At the betting table of international relations, the chances are still 20 to one" against saving the deal, Heisbourg said.

Against such odds, "a show of France-US unity on Syria surely can't do any harm" during Macron's Washington visit, he said.By AFP

ISTANBUL: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US counterpart Donald Trump discussed the crisis in Syria during a telephone conversation late on Wednesday, a Turkish presidential source said.

Erdogan and Trump "exchanged views on the latest developments in Syria," the source added, without providing further details.

ALSO READ: Must prevent Syria spiraling out of control, says UN chief

The talks come after Trump warned Russia over its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying US missiles "will be coming" in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack.

ALSO READ: Trump holds Syria, Russia 'responsible' for chemical attack

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (AP)

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim earlier in the day told Russia and the United States to end their "street fighting" over Syria, saying it was time to put aside a rivalry that risked harming civilians.

Turkey and the United States are key NATO allies, but their relations have been strained over a number of issues including Washington's support for Syrian Kurdish militia deemed as a terrorist outfit by Ankara.

And in recent months, Turkey has worked closely with Russia despite their differences.

Ankara backs rebel forces seeking Assad's ouster while Moscow remains major ally of the regime in Damascus.Egypt has strongly condemned the firing of a number of ballistic missiles by Houthi fighters in Yemen at several Saudi cities, including Riyadh, on Wednesday, an Egyptian foreign ministry statement said.

The missiles were intercepted and destroyed by the Saudi military.

The Egyptian foreign ministry said that the Egypt was standing in solidarity next to Saudi Arabia, against all those attempting to destabilise it or threaten its peace and stability.

The statement added that that attack made the countries of the Arab coalition more determined to restore legitimacy in Yemen and to boost efforts in the war on terrorism.

Egypt has been a member of the Saudi-led military coalition to restore legitimacy in Yemen since March 2015.

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When you own a property, it is up to you to maintain it. I should not have to come here and maintain the grounds."First Beach: What Goes or Stays?

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Newport, RI: The Eastons Beach rotunda should be saved, but the carousel and snack bar buildings should be demolished. Those were the conclusions in a structural report presentation by Martha...Foreign ministers from the Arab quartet have reiterated that Qatar should abide by the group's list of 13 demands and six principles as a condition to resume normal ties with the Gulf emirate.

The foreign ministers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain held a preparatory meeting on Thursday on the sidelines of the 29th Arab summit in Saudi Arabia's Dammam, which is scheduled to start on Sunday.

The preparatory meeting discussed the latest regional developments concerning Iran and its intervention in Arab countries' affairs, as well as latest escalations in Syria and the situation in Yemen.

The four countries severed diplomatic and transport links with Qatar in June last year, accusing Doha of supporting terrorism and meddling in their internal affairs, and sparking the region's worst diplomatic dispute in years. Doha has denied the accusations.

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.

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Copy Editor/Entertainment Editor

Frank Pieper is a copy editor and entertainment editor at The News-Gazette, and the author of Frank's Faves and Frank's Weekend Faves. His email is fpieper@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@frp308).More than 250 people including members of Western Saharas Polisario independence movement were killed when a military plane crashed in a field outside Algerias capital on Wednesday, officials said.

Television footage showed crowds gathering around the smoking and flaming wreckage near Boufarik airport southwest of Algiers. A line of white body bags could be seen on the ground next to what media said was a Russian Ilyushin transport plane.

A total of 257 people died in the crash, state TV reported.

A member of Algerias ruling FLN party told the private Ennahar TV station the dead included 26 members of Polisario, an Algerian-backed group fighting for the independence of neighbouring Western Sahara  a territory also claimed by Morocco in a long-running dispute.

The plane was heading to Tindouf, an area on Algerias border with Western Sahara, but crashed on the airports perimeter, Algerias defence ministry said.

Tindouf is home to thousands of refugees from the Western Sahara standoff, many of them Polisario supporters.

UN attempts to broker a settlement have failed for years in the vast desert area, which has contested since 1975 when Spanish colonial powers left. Morocco claimed the territory while Polisario established its self-declared Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic there.

Algerias defence ministry issued a statement expressing condolences to families of the victims.

In February 2014, an Algerian Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules crashed in a mountainous area in eastern Algeria killing 77 passengers and leaving one survivor.

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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).Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Sunshine and a few afternoon clouds. High 88F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 59F. Winds light and variable.The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government and the Monetary Authority today welcomed the announcement to increase daily quotas for stock connects between Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Financial Secretary Paul Chan said: "This will facilitate the healthy development of Stock Connect, and facilitate international investors' access to the Mainland's stock markets and Mainland investors' access to Hong Kong's stock market, thereby reinforcing Hong Kong's status as an international financial centre.

"Hong Kong's capital markets will play a more significant role and make greater contributions in the two-way opening-up of the Mainland's capital markets to the rest of the world."

The authority's Chief Executive Norman Chan said: "Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect are important mutual access arrangements between the Hong Kong and Mainland capital markets.

"They have been operating smoothly since launch. The expansion of daily quota will further enhance the smoothness and certainty of trading."

The authority added it will continue to monitor market developments and maintain close contact with Mainland authorities.Chief Executive Carrie Lam

This is already the third edition of the Internet Economy Summit. The first summit was held in 2016, just a few months after an Innovation & Technology Bureau was created within the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government to provide dedicated leadership and co-ordinated effort in this area. Since then, the Government has made significant investments to boost innovation and technology. These included a total of $28 billion allocated under the last term of the HKSAR Government. It was a good start but given the speed of technological evolution, that is clearly not enough. And investment is only one, though an important one, measure to achieve our ultimate goal of fostering economic development and improving peoples daily lives through wider application of I&T. We must keep reinforcing and upgrading our capability as well as providing a conducive ecosystem for I&T development in Hong Kong.

This is the reason why this term of the Government, which started on July 1 last year, has come up with a more holistic approach to drive I&T in Hong Kong. In my maiden Policy Address last October, I outlined an eight-pronged strategy for Hong Kong to strengthen our competitiveness in the global I&T race, ranging from more resources for research and development and nurturing a talent pool to venture capital and popular science education. We have also highlighted four key technology areas namely healthcare technologies, artificial intelligence and robotics, smart city and fintech. I believe these can become new economic drivers for Hong Kongs future development.

Our I&T efforts will be given a major boost in the context of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Bay Area on which a State Council-approved development plan will be promulgated soon. This economic blueprint for the nine cities in Guangdong and the two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, with a population of 68 million and a combined GDP of US$1.5 trillion, will provide enormous opportunities. One of our targets is to develop an international I&T hub in the bay area and Hong Kong will play a key role in it. Together with the planned Hong Kong-Shenzhen Innovation & Technology Park at the Lok Ma Chau Loop, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and cities in the bay area can complement one another and create our version of Silicon Valley.

To realise our vision, we have put together a comprehensive package of long and medium-term initiatives as well as immediate support measures for relevant industries. I have set a goal to double Hong Kongs R&D expenditure as a ratio to the Gross Domestic Product to 1.5% by 2022, or about $45 billion a year. To help achieve this, we will for the first time in Hong Kong provide super tax deduction of up to 300% for R&D expenditure incurred by enterprises.

On talent development, we are launching a $500 million Technology Talent Scheme, which includes the establishment of a Post-doctoral Hub and a dedicated Re-industrialisation & Technology Training Programme to subsidise local companies to train their staff in advanced technologies, especially in Industry 4.0. These will be rolled out by the third quarter of this year. Our goal is to encourage more young people to engage in R&D and technology entrepreneurship as a long-term, life-long career. We will have a separate programme for young people tomorrow. In addition, we will provide studentships for local students to pursue research postgraduate programmes in our publicly funded universities.

At the same time, we aim to attract the best talents from the Mainland and overseas to enrich Hong Kongs ecosystem. In order to attract the worlds top scientific research institutions and technology enterprises to Hong Kong, we have earmarked $10 billion to support the establishment of two research clusters in Hong Kong: one on healthcare technologies and the other on artificial intelligence and robotics technologies. We aim to achieve a win-win result by attracting the best scientific and innovation brains from around the world to join forces with our local research talents.

I should point out that the above-mentioned $10 billion is just part of the $50 billion funding committed by the Financial Secretary in his Budget Speech delivered in February this year to support I&T development in Hong Kong. Other initiatives include allocating $7 billion to the Science Park to boost support for its tenants and set up a Smart Campus. Cyberport will also receive $200 million to enhance support for its startups.

In adopting new technology, the Smart City Blueprint for Hong Kong published last December provides a clear roadmap for making use of technologies to drive economic growth and enhance the quality of living in our city. Pivotal to this no doubt is the application of information and communications technology, in particular big data analytics, cloud computing and Internet of Things to take advantage of the ever-increasingly connected Internet-driven economy. We will invest more than $900 million in the next few years to implement several smart city infrastructure projects, including the provision of e-ID to all residents, and launching a multifunction smart lamppost pilot scheme.

The success of all these programmes and initiatives requires strong leadership and sustained investment well into the future. Within the Government, the high-level Steering Committee on Innovation & Technology, which I personally chair, will provide the steer and co-ordination needed at the highest level to implement our I&T agenda. With the support of industries and the community at large as well as our partners in the Mainland and around the world, I look forward to sharing with you the results and achievements on different fronts at next year's Internet Economy Summit.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam gave these remarks at the Internet Economy Summit 2018 on April 12.On Sunday Arab leaders are scheduled to meet in the Saudi city of Dammam for a summit that is likely to focus intensively on Iran.

Not that Iran was ever going to be low on the agenda.

Arab diplomats say Saudi Arabia had insisted Irans regional machinations be addressed but now, as the situation in Syria escalates and the confrontation between Iran and Israel is increasingly unmasked there, Iran will consume more of the attention of Arab leaders than was originally planned.

On Tuesday the Israeli press was loaded with suggestions the countrys military is adopting a more aggressive approach towards Iran in Syria. The Jerusalem Post went so far as to announce in a headline that there was no more a shadow war between Israel and Iran.

On Sunday Israel attacked an airbase in Syria that was hosting foreign troops fighting for the Al-Assad regime.

According to the official Iranian news agency, four Iranian advisors were killed.

The attack came less than 24 hours after chemical weapons were allegedly used against civilians in Douma, one of the last strongholds of anti-regime militants, with most fingers pointing to the Al-Assad government as being responsible for the assault.

US President Donald Trump promised prompt and major retaliation for the Douma attack by animal Assad.

Russia, whose major military presence in Syria supporting the regime further complicates the equation, claimed the Israeli attack heralded very serious developments and said that it was addressing the issue with Israel.

It is a very serious situation. Things could easily escalate. It is not like previous occasions when there have been limited Israeli attacks against Iranian facilities usually related to Hizbullah in Syria. This time it looks like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has decided to forcibly move the parameters of any future Iranian presence in Syria and it is very disturbing, said an Egyptian official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to the official, regardless of who wins or loses the Israeli-Iranian confrontation in Syria, it will serve only to destabilise the country.

Nobody, not even the Americans who are threatening military action against Syria or the French who are encouraging it, has a clear scenario about removing Al-Assad or replacing the regime with something more stable. So what we are talking about is more confusion  an open proxy war between Iran and Israel and a less explicit proxy war between Russia and the West.

This is the nightmare scenario that we must avert, warns the official.

Foreign diplomats in Cairo say there is a flurry of diplomatic contacts across the region, and in the UNs New York headquarters, to try to reach a consensus among the leading players in the Syria.

One well-informed source said that these consultations include direct appeals from some Arab leaders to Tel Aviv to exercise caution.

According to one regional diplomat, the message being sent to Netanyahu from Arab capitals is that the situation could spin out not just in favour of Iran and Hizbullah but also of Islamist and anti-Israeli camps in the Arab world that are already protesting what they see as the lax Arab response to Palestinian protests in Gaza.

They say any escalation in Syria could eliminate the chances of talks that could end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict being launched, talks which the Arab Summit was supposed to support, says the diplomat, though Im not really sure they understand Netanyahus priorities.

Abbas Kamel, senior political and security aide to President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, visited both Ramallah, home of the Palestinian Authority, and Tel Aviv last week in a bid to lay the ground for the Arab summit to adopt a resolution expressing willingness to engage with the planned US peace scheme. Saudi and Emirati officials have also been consulting with Palestinian and Israeli officials on the same issue.

The aim of the talks, both announced and un-announced, is now not only to persuade Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to approve of the launch of settlement negotiations but to convince Netanyahu to exercise restraint before what he sees as the perfect opportunity to deal a blow to Hizbullah and limit Irans presence in Syria.

On Monday the UN Security Council met to discuss Syria. On Tuesday, as Al-Ahram Weekly went to print, diplomats in New York were holding another round of consultations with a scheduled Security Council session expected.

Arab and foreign diplomats who spoke to the Weekly agreed the situation would be managed one way or the other before Arab leaders arrive in Saudi Arabia for their summit. Already there are intense Arab talks on the matter, and discussions were scheduled for Tuesday evening (Middle East Time) between Trump and the Emir of Qatar Tamim bin Hamad, French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman who is currently in Paris. Consultations are also already underway between on-the-ground Syrian players Russia, Iran and Turkey.

Whatever understandings are reached as a result of these talks will be reflected in the Arab Summit.

The Arab Summit, says an Arab League official, was expected to be tense given that it would be the venue for the first encounter between Qatar  Doha has yet to announce the level of Qatari participation  and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain since June last year when the four allies instigated their diplomatic embargo of Qatar.

The summit is being held in the absence of any breakthrough in the stand-off between Qatar and its Gulf neighbours and Egypt and after Washington called off, at least for now, a summit Trump had planned to host for the leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

The biggest concern now, say Arab diplomats, is whether the delegations of the conflicting countries will attempt to pin their positions on developments in Syria and exchange accusations over siding with non-Arab regional players, be they Iran, Turkey or Israel. Any tit-for-tat accusations could also spill over to include support of militants in Syria, and in Libya.

Kuwait, the current Arab member of the UN Security Council which has been attempting to mediate and contain the fall-out of the dispute between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates on the one hand and Qatar on the other, has been stepping up consultations in an attempt to ensure the Arab Summit ends without further escalation on either the Arab Gulf or Syrian fronts.

*This story was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly

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iStock/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- For Jessika, standing in the Oval Office today was an emotional moment, as the president signed new legislation that would help prevent what happened to her from happening to other young girls.



Jessika is one of hundreds of young women who say they were sold for sex allegedly through Backpage.com, the highly controversial classifieds site that federal authorities shut down last week, indicting seven of its top officials with facilitating prostitution and money laundering.



President Donald Trump signed a new law today that will hold online services responsible for abusive content knowingly facilitating sex trafficking. The Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or the "FOSTA" bill, goes into effect immediately.



Survivors of sex trafficking "are very brave," Trump said at the White House today.



As part of the signing ceremony, Jessika got a chance to speak with Trump, as well as attend a private meeting with the president's daughter Ivanka Trump.



"I was a little nervous," Jessika said. "For him to shake my hand and tell me thank you was really kind of the cherry on top of this whole experience, and it was worth it. Its been a long fight, but ... its closure."



And today, she said she realized she has an "army of mothers and sisters" standing with her.



"It is really, truly a day for real healing to really truly begin," Jessika's mother, Nacole, added. "[Jessika] has been so brave, and so courageous over the years to come out and use her voice to champion good, and to not let this experience silence her."



Jessika is not alone. ABC News' Nightline has been conducting an investigation for the past two years on underage sex trafficking through ads on Backpage.com and the efforts to stop it. Nightline first met Tom, Nacole and their daughter Jessika in 2016.



Jessika estimates she was paid for sex over 150 times when she was 15 years old, and she firmly believes Backpage.com made it possible for her pimp to post ads offering her for sex over and over again.



Jessika is now a 23-year-old mother to two young children who is part of a major civil lawsuit against Backpage.com. In October, she won her own personal civil suits against Backpage, the first to focus on the claim Backpage knowingly facilitated prostitution of underage girls.



"I have done a lot of self-healing," Jessika said. "Im very confident with what I know about myself and what Ive learned about myself, and it is something that you have to accept, you cant ever change it. I cant ever change it, but I can become better from it, and ... Im OK with that."



Backpage.com operated as a website where people can sell cars, furniture and other items, but critics have said  and a Senate investigation concluded - the vast majority of the site's revenue came from its racy adult section, with categories like escorts and body rubs -- technically legal services that law enforcement described as thinly veiled codes for prostitution.



Federal authorities have seized Backpage.com and its affiliated websites, according to a notice posted by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies on the site last week. The notice did not detail the reason for the seizure but noted that Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, as well as the offices of the Texas attorney general and California attorney general, were involved.



The U.S. Senate has been investigating underage trafficking on Backpage.com for years. In January 2017, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a new report saying Backpage.com had knowingly facilitated underage trafficking on its site by actively editing ads posted in the adult services section.



The subcommittee found that Backpage.com was erasing words that would indicate underage trafficking. Through its automatic word filtering system, the site would erase terms like Lolita," Little Girl and even Amber Alert from ads posted in the "adult" section, then post the "cleaned up" ads to the site.



Jessika's parents testified at the January 2017 Senate hearing and have been by her side through every step of the way, fighting for the past seven years to get legislation passed to protect sex trafficking victims.



"I just couldnt hear the word 'no,' that this was not going to happen," Nacole said today. "For me, no wasnt the right answer and just working that phone every day and calling our legislators ... we really we built an army, and it took everybody's voice to get this done."



Backpage.com has said its ads are constitutionally protected free speech. Its argument is based on the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which is a law that protects all internet hosting companies from being held legally responsible for what users post on their websites, including anything related to sex trafficking.



In the past, many women and girls who say they were trafficked on Backpage.com have tried suing the site, but nearly every lawsuit was dismissed under the CDA.



But the new law Trump signed today seeks to weaken this legal shield.



"Thats what this legislation says, is that in the U.S. we do not sell our kids," Nacole said.



Backpage.com has repeatedly claimed that it was part of the solution, not the problem. The company told ABC News in a previous statement that it employs moderators who diligently screen ads to stop underage trafficking on its site. It added that it has voluntarily undertaken a multitiered "policing system to prohibit and report attempts at human exploitation and the advertisement of prostitution" that screens for words and phrases that might "suggest illegal activity."



The company also has said it actively cooperates with law enforcement and reports suspicious ads to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).



In 2012, Backpage's attorney told Nightline that online human trafficking exists  and the best tools to fight it are online, and Backpage.com is currently one of the very best tools to fight it.



One former Backpage employee, who agreed to speak with Nightline" last year under the condition of anonymity, said her job was to moderate ads to make sure they didnt contain pictures or certain terms indicating prostitution or underage trafficking.



The way they described the job ... is that we would be monitoring ads that came through the site for our adult content section, she said. The ads were basically, Hey come have a good time with honey'  no raincoats would be code word for no condoms.'



... These ads would be so cheap that they would post them constantly, she continued. So if the ad did get deleted, they would take $5 and post five more ads of the same one. So it becomes really frustrating because you know you just deleted this ad and 10 minutes later, youre seeing it again.



CEO Carl Ferrer has declined "Nightline's" repeated requests for an interview, and when we tracked Ferrer to a classified ad industry conference in Amsterdam in 2016, he again refused to speak with us. Ferrer was not among the seven indicted last week but the initials C.F. are referred to throughout the indictment.



ABC News legal analyst Sunny Hostin says, It is noticeable that Carl Ferrer is not a named defendant in this indictment. But when the initials C.F. appear throughout the indictment and a lot of the information for this case seems to come from a C.F. that tells me that perhaps C.F. is a cooperator. Perhaps C.F. is an informant.



Today, after meeting with the president, Jessika said she finally felt her voice was heard, and she encouraged others not to give up in their fight to share their stories.



"Everybodys journey and recovery is so different," she said. "But ... dont give up on yourself, even you feel like everything is just caving in and falling down. Just, keep, keep pushing because youve already, you made it through probably one of the worst, traumatic experiences of your life.



"Its going to seem difficult and there is mountains to climb in your life, but just dont give up on yourself because you're totally worth it," she added.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.After this weeks reported chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian regime on Douma in Eastern Ghouta, there are fears the struggle will now spread to the strategic area of southern Syria, writes Bassel Oudat in Damascus

International sources have confirmed that on 8 April the regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad bombed the suburb of Douma outside Damascus using chemical weapons, killing at least 60 people and leaving more than 1,000 injured.

The surprise escalation forced armed opposition factions controlling part of the surrounding area of Eastern Ghouta to surrender to regime and Russian forces.

The escalation was preceded by air and land attacks on the area that has a population of 400,000, also killing more than 1,000 civilians in one month.

The aim is to take back control of the area by the regime and Iranian-backed militias with the blessing of Russia.

The Syrian government and its ally Russia have denied involvement in the Saturday attack. International bodies led by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are trying to establish what happened in Douma.

The conflict was further complicated on Monday when unidentified planes struck a Syrian air base near Homs, killing at least 14 people, including Iranian personnel.

Syria and Russia accused Israel of carrying out the attack.

Israel, which has struck Syrian army locations many times in the course of the countrys seven-year civil war, has neither confirmed nor denied mounting the raid.

On Monday, US President Donald Trump promised what he called quick and forceful action in response to the suspected chemical weapons attack on Douma, appearing to suggest a potential US military response. He said, however, that Washington was getting more clarity on who was responsible for the attack.

After a fierce and destructive military campaign, the battle for Eastern Ghouta thus seems to be nearing its end, and the last bastion under opposition control near the capital Damascus has almost fallen.

The armed opposition will lose one of three areas under its control if this happens, the others being Idlib in the north of the country and Deraa in the south.

The fall of Eastern Ghouta has coincided with escalation in the south.

On 12 March, regime air raids bombed southern towns under opposition control in the first such campaign in this area since the US and Russia, with Jordanian participation, reached an agreement on 7 July 2017 to maintain a de-escalation zone.

The attacks raised questions about plans for this triangle in the southwest of the country on the border with Occupied Palestine and Jordan, especially since the US has not responded to the breach of the truce agreement it sponsored.

The air raids coincided with the mobilisation of regime troops to frontlines with the opposition and near strategic towns close to the Jordanian border. There were some military skirmishes between the two sides for the first time in a year, but these did not evolve into all-out battles.

Since southern Syria is a strategic region not only for the US, but also for Israel and Jordan, it was unlikely that the opposition would risk breaching a truce sponsored by the US since this would be a direct challenge to Washington, Tel Aviv and Amman.

It is more likely that the US made a deal with Russia giving the latter free pass in the south.

On 18 February, the regime escalated air and land attacks in Eastern Ghouta, and residents began to flee for their lives, calling opposition forces in the south to their aid since these are geographically closer and more disciplined.

In response, the armed opposition in the south decided to suspend the truce in solidarity with the people of Eastern Ghouta, saying it would launch attacks against regime positions in the south because the people of Syria are united and their cause is one.

Air raids by the regime appeared to be pre-emptive strikes and a warning to opposition combatants in the Free Syrian Army (FSA) planning attacks to end the siege of the area and ease the pressure on their comrades in Eastern Ghouta.

Responding to threats by the opposition to act in solidarity with the people of Eastern Ghouta, a spokesman for the regimes Hemeim Military Base said we do not believe the rebel groups in southern Syria have the courage to attack government positions. This area is subject to the de-escalation agreement and any violation is unacceptable.

Opposition factions in the south have been criticised for procrastinating in supporting Eastern Ghouta against attacks by the regime, with statements by regime officials and Russian military personnel suggesting that southern Syria will be the next battleground for regime forces after Eastern Ghouta.

However, after the opposition threatened to breach the truce and attack regime positions, it received warnings from the US to the effect that the de-escalation agreement in the south was the subject of a US commitment.

Igniting a war against the regime in the south will give the regime and Russia the pretext to kill more civilians and occupy more land. This would end the truce through which we can negotiate with the Russians to reach a solution We urge you not to give the regime an excuse to bomb the area and eliminate the last stronghold of the moderate opposition in Syria, such warnings said.

The US also held an emergency meeting in Jordan regarding mock operations in Syria, but it did not divulge the result of this meeting.

Opposition figure Iyad Barakat said the reason why the opposition forces in the south did not take action is because of pressure from the US and the International Coalition that want to maintain the truce.

There is also no popular support in the area for carrying out attacks against regime forces because that would lead to random strikes against local residents. This would result in more refugees and displaced residents who are already exhausted and displaced, Barakat said.

US ally Jordan is concerned that any breach of the ceasefire in the south will lead to an explosion of violence and tens of thousands more refugees fleeing to Jordan, which already hosts more than 600,000 Syrian refugees accounting for half of the Syrians living in Jordan.

Amman is also worried the violence could reach its territory if fighting begins along the border.

Israel has the same concerns as Jordan, namely that militias loyal to Iran, most notably from the Lebanese Shia group Hizbullah, could take control of positions close to the Golan Heights and Jordans northern border and constitute a threat to its security.

However, this is undermined by reports that there is in fact a backdoor relationship and indirect coordination between Israel and Iran.

The de-escalation agreement in the south has reduced the violence and destruction.

The opposition factions have mostly adhered to it, as has the regime, unlike in other ceasefire areas such as Idlib and Eastern Ghouta, because it was sponsored by the US, while in other areas the sponsors were Russia, Iran and Turkey.

The possible collapse of the ceasefire in the south could change the course of events for Jordan and Israel. They could try to convince the US to continue to guarantee the truce in southern Syria, where the US, Israel, Jordan, Russia, Iran, the Syrian regime, Iran-backed militias and the FSA are all involved.

The US and Russia see Israels interests as their top priority, and to a lesser degree those of Jordan. It is in their interest that there are no confrontations between Israel and Iran in the south of Syria, or military confrontations between the opposition, the regime and Russia a few kilometres away from Jordans borders.

It is most likely that the tensions will be contained before they get out of control. In the short run, Washington, Moscow, Amman and Tel Aviv will likely coordinate together to prevent the collapse of the safe zone in southern Syria.

However, Russian and regime operations may also expand to the south after the retaking of control of Eastern Ghouta. It is also in Jordans interest that the Syrian regime re-opens the border crossing between Amman and Damascus.

US policy in Syria remains ambiguous, and it could withdraw from any area at any time.

US President Donald Trump said in early April that US troops would withdraw from Syria, but then retracted and asked Saudi Arabia to foot the bill for the US operations and froze $200 million in funds earmarked for Syria.

Russia will need to decide whether to agree with Washington or risk marginalisation. It may need to accept the US managing the war in the south of Syria, while throwing it the crumbs.

*This story was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly

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"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" said Trump in his latest early morning tweet.

That appeared a day after he tweeted that missiles "will be coming" after the April 7 chemical weapons attack alleged to have killed dozens of people, and lambasted Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Prime Minister Theresa May prepared to convene a special cabinet meeting at 1430 GMT to weigh whether Britain should join the United States and France in a possible military action.

May recalled ministers from their Easter holiday to debate action over what she has cast as a barbaric poison gas attack by Syrian government forces on civilians in the formerly rebel-controlled town of Douma, just east of the capital Damascus.

There were signs, though, of a global effort to head off a dangerous conflict pitting Russia against the West. The Kremlin said a crisis communications link with the United States, created to avoid an accidental clash over Syria, was in use.

"The situation in Syria is horrific, the use of chemical weapons is something the world has to prevent," Britain's Brexit minister David Davis said on Thursday morning.

"But also it's a very, very delicate circumstance and we've got to make this judgment on a very careful, very deliberate, very well thought-through basis."

French President Emmanuel Macron said he would decide whether to strike Syrian government targets after the reported attack by internationally banned chemical munitions in Douma once all the necessary information had been gathered.

"We will need to take decisions in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective," Macron said, adding that all the necessary verifications had to be carried out first.

He said he would also strive to prevent an escalation of conflict across the Middle East.

SYRIA "MOVES TARGETS"

At the eye of the storm, Assad said any Western action "will contribute nothing but an increase in instability in the region, threatening international peace and security", Syrian state television reported.

Russia, Assad's most important ally in his seven-year-old war with rebels, said it had deployed military police in Douma on Thursday after the town was taken over by government forces.

"They are the guarantors of law and order in the town," RIA news agency quoted Russia's defence ministry as saying.

Syria's military has repositioned some air assets to avoid fallout from possible missile strikes, U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

Syria's attempt to shelter aircraft, perhaps by locating them alongside Russian military hardware that Washington might be reluctant to hit, could limit damage that the United States and its allies might be able to inflict on Assad's military.

World stocks edged down as anxious investors stayed wary of risky assets.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, striking a cautious tone after Trump's threat of missile strikes, said on Wednesday the United States was still assessing intelligence about the suspected toxic gas attack.

Both Syria and Russia have said reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers in Douma and have accused the United States of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the government.

The Russian military said it had observed movements of U.S. Navy forces in the Gulf. Any U.S. strike would probably involve the navy, given the risk to aircraft from Russian and Syrian air defences. A U.S. guided-missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, is in the Mediterranean.

Moscow's ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, warned on Wednesday that any U.S. missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted.

The Syrian conflict has increasingly widened the rifts between Moscow, Washington and European powers and inflamed the bitter rivalries that run across the Middle East.

ISRAELI AIR STRIKE

Syria, Iran and Russia say Israel was behind an air strike on a Syrian air base on Monday that killed seven Iranian military personnel, something Israel has neither confirmed nor denied.

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone on Wednesday and urged him to do nothing to destabilise Syria. Netanyahu's office said: "The prime minister reiterated that Israel will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria."

Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, said the Western threats were "based on lies" about the poison gas assault, after meeting Assad.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said he had spoken to Trump on Wednesday and would speak to Putin on Thursday night about the chemical attack.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Berlin wanted to be consulted before any Western military action. "It's important at the same time to maintain pressure on Russia," he said. "If we want to do that, we the Western partners cannot diverge in our approaches."

May has ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military that could begin as early as Thursday night, London's Daily Telegraph newspaper said on Wednesday.

The BBC reported that May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in military action. She would not seek approval from parliament, the BBC said, despite calls from the opposition Labour Party for parliament to be given a say.

Parliament voted down British military action against Assad's government in 2013 in an embarrassment for May's predecessor, David Cameron. That then deterred the U.S. administration of Barack Obama from similar action.

British Minister Davis said his decision then to vote against action was based on a lack of clear evidence and a lack of a clear plan. "Those two things, I'm assured, we will get an answer to today," he said of Thursday's cabinet meeting.

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1610: VP Dr Chiwenga has finished his address.





1609: We want to thank him for that. The President should stay focused and ignore efforts by detractors who use social media to spread falsehoods. We are heading for elections lets be peaceful and shun violence. Lets be peaceful just like what happened during Operation Restore Legacy.





1606: VP Dr Chiwenga says the country must move forward with the mantra Zimbabwe is open for business and support the Presidents re-engagement efforts.





But in doing all this we should have enough food because food security is important. The President has been on a diplomatic offensive centred on reengagement and we are now seeing positive results. He has been in China and the trip was very successful,





1559: The President has called for peace and has reiterated the call to let be bygones be bygones. As a nation, we must show the unity we exhibited in November last year under Operation Restore Legacy.





He condemns corruption and says all the corrupt people should be incarcerated.





1554: We now have our country after we waged the war and we have the soil so lets utilise it. The purpose of the war was to reclaim our land. We now have it, the war is now on utilising the land. Lets all go back and practice what we have learnt at the Presidents farm,





He thanks President for the successes he has made in the shortest time he has been in power.





1547: We want to embark on a massive Command Livestock programme as a nation. Farmers should take notes from President Mnangagwa. Agriculture contributes 15 to 18 percent of the nations GDP. We want it to reach 30 percent so we must all take farming seriously,





1541: VP Dr Chiwenga applauds seed makers SeedCo and Sakunda Holdings for supporting Command Agriculture.





We did not receive enough rains but the President managed to do wonders. We should now focus on irrigation as we have more than 10 000 dams with some being idle,





1538: He says the fact that President Mnangagwa is a leader in everything including leading the people and country to recover economically. Farmers should emulate the President as we strive to have enough grain to feed the nation. Zimbabwe has enough resources and expertise as evidenced by the success of Command Agriculture.





1532: VP Dr Chiwenga says today is an important day as everyone has come to see how important farming is for the nation. He thanks President Munangagwa for a job well done adding that it means he (President Mnangagwa) is a God-ordained leader who can lead in everything.





1528: Guest of honour VP Dr Chiwenga is now addressing the gathering.





1522: Agriculture Minister describes VP Dr Chiwenga as a brave leader who led Operation Restore Legacy and the only army chief in the world to manage such an operation peacefully.





1516: Minister Shiri has now introduced the guest of honour, Vice President Dr Constantino Chiwenga.





1514: Minister of Agriculture Perrance Shiri now on the podium.





We fought for the land reform programme and now we should fight to produce enough for the nation. Minerals will diminish but agriculture will remain relevant forever, he says





1453: Denias Zaranyika, Managing Director for Seed Co Zimbabwe, is now addressing the people. He congratulates the First Family for leading by example in farming.





1439: First Lady Amai Auxilia Mnangagwa thanks farmers for coming to the field day. She says she was a First Lady of the nation and everyone who wishes to share his or her problem with her should call her. She says she has an open door policy to every Zimbabwean and has made her contacts public.





1437: President Munangagwa took to the dance floor as Jah Prayzahs Kutonga Kwaro song is played before the First lady speaks.





1431: Midlands Provincial Affairs Minister Owen Ncube is now giving a speech, he thanks the President for being a leading farmer to the agrarian economy.He thanks the First Lady for relinquishing her political post to focus on helping the nation. He particularly mentions the First Lady cancer screening programme which he says has helped many women across the country.





1420: President Mnangagwa and First Lady Amai Mnangagwa have just arrived at the venue in the company of VP Chiwenga several Cabinet ministers and senior Government officials.



Government yesterday took delivery of a Boeing 777-200ER aircraft from Malaysia, which is part of an envisaged fleet of 10 aeroplanes to be managed under a new company tasked to boost the local aviation sector.



The 300-seater plane, which touched down at Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport yesterday, is wholly-owned by the Governments special purpose vehicle, Zimbabwe Aviation Leasing Company, which, in turn, is leasing the aircraft to Zimbabwe Airways.



Zimbabwe Airways is also owned by the Government and was formed to give Air Zimbabwe

(Airzim) time to come back to its feet and recover from its debts.



The second Boeing has already been paid for in Malaysia and is expected in the country soon.



It is believed that the newly-acquired planes will add impetus to efforts to open Zimbabwe to investment and boost local tourism and trade.





In essence, Government, through Zimbabwe Airways, plans to acquire three additional Boeing 777 aeroplanes to service regional and international routes, including six small planes that will be used as feeder aircraft for long-haul flights.





Government has already paid $41 million out of the $70 million that is needed for the four Boeing 777 planes. It is believed that to date, local authorities have managed to arrange funding for two Boeing 777 planes and one Embraer.





Speaking after the delivery of the plane, Finance and Economic Development Minister Patrick Chinamasa said the new aeroplanes, contrary to speculation, belonged to Government.

I wish to categorically state the aeroplane that is outside there is the property and asset of the Government of Zimbabwe, he said.





I know speculation has been rife that the aircraft belonged to the former First Family.

That is wrong and I am here to set the record straight. (Mr) Simba Chikore (President Mugabes son-in-law) has no interests in the business, directly or indirectly.





Mr Chinamasa said Mr Chikore, who was one of the pilots who flew the plane from Malaysia, was initially roped in to offer technical support and assist in negotiating the deal.





(Mr) Simba Chikore has no shareholding in this plane, he said.

We only recruited him to assist us with technical support during the negotiations since he has vast experience in the aircraft industry.





Government has decided to lease out the planes to its newly-created firm, Zimbabwe Airways, in order to allow Airzim  currently saddled with a $300 million debt  time to recover.

Zimbabwe Aviation Leasing Company, which is 100 percent owned by the Government, is leasing the new Boeing 777 to Zimbabwe Airways, which is also wholly owned by the Government, said Minister Chinamasa.





We will lease the aircrafts to third parties until Air Zimbabwe, which is now a bottomless pit, puts its house in order.





Minister Chinamasa said the deal had been kept under wraps since 2016 to avoid jeopardising negotiations.





Zimbabwe Tourism Authority chief executive officer Mr Karikoga Kaseke urged Government to appoint a vibrant leadership to the new airline.





I urge you to put a very serious board in the airline and a serious management and everything will follow, he said.





Mr Kaseke said in future, Government should inform the nation of such crucial deals to avoid speculation.





I am one of the people who believed in the media reports, he said. We are concerned because when you do not give us information we will have to believe the newspaper stories.





Mr Kaseke urged Government to reopen the traditional international routes for business.





These Boeing 777 planes should go to their traditional routes like the Harare-London route, he said. Before Air Zimbabwe became a bottomless pit, we used to win awards every year as the best airline in Africa.





I hope we will be flying to London, China and other countries as soon as possible.

Government says aviation experts that have examined the Boeing 777 planes from Malaysia say they can operate efficiently for between 15 to 20 years. HeraldOPERATION Restore legacy which saw the resignation of former President Mugabe is an unprecedented miracle which cannot be repeated anywhere else in the world, Presidential spokesperson Mr George Charamba has said.



Mr Charamba lauded the intelligence of the security forces for the smooth transition which ended with no bloodshed despite millions of people spontaneously taking to the streets.



In an interview on ZiFM Stereo, a local radio station this week, Mr Charamba  who is also the Permanent Secretary for Media, Information and Broadcasting Services  said it was indeed an unparalled miracle that cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world.





I was part of the negotiating team that provided some link between the military and the former President alongside Father (Fidelis) Mukonori and a colleague called Aaron Nhepera. So really, I had this rather unenvious role of plying between the military and of course the outgoing President to just make sure that there was some understanding and to just make sure that the transition itself was peaceful.





Im so happy that we were able to discharge that function without a loss of life. In a way that really made for a very smooth transition which has been a miracle in the world, said Mr Charamba.





He said considering that guns were moving, tanks were moving and the country was going through that delicate phase, elsewhere there would have had bodies and bodies on the streets which did not happen in Zimbabwe.





The Zimbabwean transition is non-repeatable, thats why it passes for a miracle. What makes it non-repeatable is the fact that the command of our defence or security forces establishment is amazingly literate. You could sit down with the commanders and reason out with them in spite of operations and tension that come with that operation to say ah General Chiwenga this one is not . . . why dont we look at it this way, and they could see your point because quite a good number of them have PhDs. Just to have that intellectual faculty does make a difference between creatures of the brawn and creatures of the brain, said Mr Charamba.





So you dont find that level of literacy in any other command on the continent which is why I dare say what happened in the month of November which has passed for a miracle cannot be tried elsewhere.

In November 2017, the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) carried out Operation Restore Legacy (ORL) to remove criminals around the former and first Executive President of Zimbabwe, Mr Mugabe.





It was an intervention meant to arrest a potentially volatile, social, economic and political situation in the country.





The ZDF assured the nation that the uniformed forces had not staged a coup to unseat Mr Mugabe but were targeting some criminal elements around him that were causing instability in Government and the ruling Zanu-PF.





President Emmerson Mnangagwa is on record as saying Operation Restore Legacy was launched to rescue the values and ethos of the liberation struggle threatened by political upstarts and counter-revolutionaries.





He said the G40 cabal and their destructive politics not only destabilised Zanu-PF but also brought confusion in the country. It had destabilised the party, causing absolute divisions and disquiet in the nation which sat on edge. The party ideology, rules and protocols were being desecrated daily; or simply being brushed aside at will, said President Mnangagwa.





Party structures were overrun, while elected office-bearers were summarily suspended and dismissed at speeds of caprice and vaulting ambition. Corrupt activities and corrupt individuals were daily sanitised while millions of dollars were being stolen and stashed outside the country. ChronicleHis Trek Up Mount Whitney

Was 'a Hell of His Own Making'Germany will not join any military strikes against Syria in response to a suspected poison gas attack on an opposition enclave, but supports Western efforts to show the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable, Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

"Germany will not take part in possible - there have not been any decisions yet, I want to stress that - military action," Merkel said after meeting Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen in Berlin.

"But we support everything that is being done to show that the use of chemical weapons is not acceptable," she added.

In Dublin, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Germany expects to be consulted before any Western allies conduct an attack on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces as the allies must be united on the matter.

Earlier, Merkel spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron about the suspected gas attack and expressed her concern that the international community's ability to ban chemical weapons was eroding, her spokesman said.

U.S. President Donald Trump warned Russia on Wednesday that missiles "will be coming" in response to the April 7 gas attack, which aid groups said killed dozens of people, and lambasted Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Norbert Roettgen, chairman of the German parliamentary foreign affairs committee and an ally of Merkel's, said: "Shamefully, there is still no policy from the EU - or even individual EU states - for the Middle (East) countries.

"If it came to military strikes with the participation of France and Britain, that is still not a policy."

Roettgen urged the European Union to develop a policy for the Middle East as a whole, adding: "Germany should work together with others for a Middle East peace conference. We have various diplomatic options to not let the topic rest."

He called for a "step-by-step approach", which could start with humanitarian access in Syria. "The situation is so burdened with multiple conflicts that one can only proceed gradually."

Asked about such a conference, Merkel told reporters: "We know a lot of things are linked in the Middle East, no question, but now we must urgently deal with a situation where there is a lot of evidence that the Syrian regime again used chemical weapons."

Roettgen said another option would be to talk to Iran in connection with its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which Trump has criticised as "the worst deal ever negotiated".

Iran needed to understand that its economic prospects would be constrained if it "pursues a permanent bellicose expansion of power," he said, adding Turkey should be told "there cannot be a warrant for warfare in Syria."

"But there is no country - neither the U.S. nor a European country - that is taking the initiative. That's the shameful thing about Western politics," Roettgen said.



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(Newser)  Amal Clooney opens up about the early days of her relationship with her husband, George, in a new Vogue cover story. She met the actor when she accompanied a friend to Clooney's house on Lake Como, Italy; he recalls that he not only found the acclaimed human rights attorney beautiful but also "fascinating" and "brilliant": "I was taken with her from the moment I saw her." They struck up a friendship, emailing back and forth, with George often writing to her as his dog, Einstein, pretending to be in need of legal assistance from her. Eventually, she realized their friendship was evolving, telling a cousin, "There's a bit of a romance brewing." George came to visit her in London, and they saw each other every day. "It felt like the most natural thing in the world," she says.

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George acknowledges that before meeting Amal, "Id pretty much committed to the idea of never marrying again." But it was "immediately" clear to him that "something was very different" with her, he says. During a safari trip together to Africa, "Some giraffes walked up to her," he recalls. "They just came out of the blue. I took a picture of her, and she was smiling. I said to my buddy Ben, 'You know, I think I should ask her to marry me.' And Ben said, 'I think thats a good idea.'" Amal also talks about the couple's twins, Ella and Alexandershe never schedules calls before 8am so that she, George, and the babies can spend mornings together in bed, she says; George sometimes refers to the twins as "the knuckleheads." Click for the full interview, in which the Clooneys also discuss their life together and Amal talks a lot about her work, her activism, and her, indeed, fascinating life. (Read more Amal Clooney stories.)(Newser)  A man charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old Michigan girl is now accused of killing her while free on bond, preventing her from testifying in the rape case. Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker says two men are facing charges connected to the death of Mujey Dumbuya. Her partially clothed body was found in January in woods about 50 miles from her Grand Rapids home. Her cause of death was listed as "asphyxia, including strangulation" on the death certificate. The man accused of rape, Quinn James, is charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping, and other crimes, the AP reports. The 42-year-old is accused of sexually assaulting Mujey last summer and then killing her while he was free on a $100,000 cash bond.

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Dumbuya went to police in November saying she had been repeatedly raped by James, her boyfriend's uncle. She was due to testify against him this month. James' co-defendant, Gerald Bennett, is charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Police believe James gave him a vehicle in return for help with the murder and disposal of the body. Kentwood District Judge William Kelly had wide discretion to set the amount of James' bond with the third-degree criminal sexual conduct charge, which pertains to the sexual assault of a minor. Authorities picked him up on Feb. 1 on an unrelated 2014 sexual assault charge and the bond in the case involving Mujey was increased to $250,000 after she died. "When I set the $100,000 bond, Mujey was alive," Kelly said last month.

(Read more Michigan stories.)(Newser)  President Donald Trump insisted that all was "very calm and calculated" at the White House, even as he vented Wednesday about the Russia probe and complained about Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the AP reports. Trump, who was so incensed by the FBI's raid of his personal attorney's office and hotel room that he's privately pondered firing Rosenstein, let loose on Twitter Wednesday against the deputy attorney general and special counsel Robert Mueller. He said the Russia probe was "headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama. Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!" Trump also tweeted: "No Collusion or Obstruction (other than I fight back), so now they do the Unthinkable, and RAID a lawyers office for information! BAD!" And he insisted the White House was "Very calm and calculated."

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The raid, in which agents seized attorney Michael Cohen's records on topics including a $130,000 payment to a porn actress who alleges she had sex with Trump, left the president more angry than advisers had seen him in weeks, according to five people familiar with the president's views but not authorized to discuss them publicly. Nervous White House aides expressed new fears about the president's unpredictability in the face of the Cohen raid, which he viewed as an assault on a longtime defender and a sign that Mueller's probe into potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign was "going too far." Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made clear that White House officials have explored Trump's authority to fire Mueller. "He certainly believes that he has the power to do so," she said at Tuesday's press briefing. Under Justice Department regulations, only Rosenstein, who oversees the Russia investigation, can fire Mueller. Multiple sources have also told CNN Trump is considering firing Rosenstein.

(Read more Rod Rosenstein stories.)(Newser)  Mark Zuckerberg appeared to endure a tougher round of questioning in the House of Representatives on Wednesday than he did Tuesday in the Senate. While CNN called Tuesday's Senate hearing on the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal "softball," the Facebook CEO received a more intense grilling in the House about the specifics of how personal data is used by the social media giant. Per the New York Times, members of Congress also demanded from Zuckerberg his beliefs about the potential regulation of Facebook, about whether Russians used the platform to affect the 2016 election, and if Facebook has a liberal bias, among other pointed questions. One such question came from Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, who wanted a yes or no from Zuckerberg about whether he'd agree to pare down data collection to a bare minimum.

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Zuckerberg declined to answer definitively and managed, mostly, to stick to the same script he used in the Senate on Tuesday. He did, however, reveal at least one new bit of information: he claims to be among the 87 million users whose data was compromised. Throughout the testimony, Zuckerberg stood firm on the Facebook stance that users control their own data. "Every time that someone chooses to share something on Facebook  there is a control," he said. Also, in what could be a revelation to some, Zuckerberg said Facebook collects data from some people who do not have accounts, as well as some who've deleted theirs, "for security purposes." (Read more Facebook stories.)(Newser)  CandyStore.com is calling it "the Great NECCO Wafer Panic," and that's no exaggeration. Terrified by reports that the New England Confectionery Co. may soon be out of business, fans of the candy company's sugar wafers are stocking up, with one woman offering to exchange her 2003 Honda Accord for CandyStore.com's hefty stash. The offer was refused, so she bought 48 rolls instead, reports the Boston Globe. Jon Prince of CandyFavorites.com tells NPR that another fan tried to buy his entire stock of NECCO Wafers and cried after learning sales were being limited. "They said they couldn't imagine a world without their NECCO wafers," says Prince.

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Of course, not everyone loves the wafers, which come in flavors like chocolate, clove, and licorice. "I mean, it is really like chewing on chalk," one man tells NPR. More likely to be missed are NECCO's conversation hearts, always a hit around Valentine's Day. A few weeks after this year's holiday, NECCO said it would be forced to closemeaning 395 lost jobs at its factory in Revere, Mass.unless it found a buyer by May. NECCO sales on CandyStore.com have jumped 82% in the aftermath, while wafer sales have spiked 150%. The turnaround might not be enough to save NECCO, but "who knows, NECCO wafers might make a comeback the way Twinkies did," Revere's mayor tells the Wall Street Journal. (Read more candy stories.)(Newser)  It's certainly not the prettiest house on the block. But a burned-out home on a 5,800-square-foot lot in Silicon Valley could be yours if you have $800,000 to spare and act fast. "This is what it's worth," realtor Holly Barr tells KTVU of the San Jose home, which Fortune reports was destroyed by fire more than two years ago. She expects it to sell in a few days, noting 10 potential buyers reached out in the hours after photos of the home were posted to Facebook Tuesday. Despite its appearancewith a gaping hole in the roof, no siding, and a leaning fencethe abandoned house in the Willow Glen neighborhood has a few things going for it: It's close to the proposed Google Village, where new offices are likely to be built. And "you save a lot of money when you  do a remodel versus a complete teardown," says Barr, noting another house nearby sold for $1.6 million.

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"This sells for over $1mil, Im calling it now," reads one comment on Facebook. "Why people are leaving California," reads another. Plenty of others are experiencing sticker shock, but a rep for the Santa Clara County Realtors Association says he's "not surprised at all by the $800,000 asking price. "Buyers are trading money for time all the time now so they can be closer to their employment," he says. Noting a similar burned-out home in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood sold last year for $700,000, Fortune reports the average price of a single family home in Santa Clara County is $1.4 million. Interested in what some might call a bargain? You should probably move now. Houses in San Jose are increasing in value by about $200,000 per year, reports Bloomberg. (There's a sad real estate game involving abandoned properties.)The UN Security Council will meet behind closed doors Thursday to discuss the threat of military action against Syria after President Donald Trump warned that "missiles will be coming."

Bolivia, one of 10 non-permanent council members and a strong supporter of Russia, requested the meeting to address "the recent escalation of rhetoric regarding Syria and the threat of the use of unilateral actions," according to the request sent Wednesday and seen by AFP.

Trump earlier warned on Twitter that "missiles will be coming" to Syria in response to an alleged chemical attack and that Russia should "get ready."

The meeting will be held immediately after a briefing on non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which is scheduled for 10:00 am (1400 GMT), diplomats said.

The Security Council failed on Tuesday to agree on setting up an investigation of chemical weapons use in Syria, with draft resolutions from Russia and the United States defeated in three votes.

Russia used its veto to block a US-drafted measure, while two other proposals from Russia failed to garner enough votes for adoption.

The United Nations is facing calls for a response following an alleged chemical attack in the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday that killed at least 40 people, according to medics and rescuers.

The United States is consulting Britain and France about a possible military response.

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that the Pentagon was ready to provide military options.

After the three failed votes at the council on Tuesday, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia implored the United States to change course.

"I would once again ask you, once again beseech you to refrain from the plans that you are currently developing for Syria," he said.

Russia has warned at the council that Western military action in Syria would be illegal and could lead to a wider conflict.

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(Newser)  The Chicago aviation security officer who dragged a physician off a United Airlines flight last year is suing the airline and the city, claiming that their negligence led to his firing. In the lawsuit, James Long argues that United should have known that calling security to remove David Dao, 69, from the overbooked flight would "require the use of physical force," the BBC reports. The complaint also states that although Long completed five months of training as a police recruit, the Chicago Department of Aviation failed to provide training on the "level of force continuum." With that training, Long "would not have acted in the manner he did, which resulted in his termination," states the lawsuit, which seeks damages and back pay.

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Dao, who was removed to make space for a United employee on the flight to Louisville, Ky., suffered a concussion and a broken nose. The doctor, who also lost two front teeth, settled with the airline for an undisclosed sum. Long and three other aviation security officers were fired after the incident. In a separate lawsuit, some 300 aviation security officers are suing Chicago and the state of Illinois, complaining that they were stripped of their law enforcement officer status after the Dao incident, the Chicago Tribune reports. The officerswho completed police or sheriff's department training and were sworn in as law enforcement officersargue that while the state has the right to strip the agency of its policing powers, their work history as law enforcement officers shouldn't be expunged. (Read more United Airlines stories.)(Newser)  Kevin Spacey is now the subject of criminal investigations in two countries. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office has confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter that it is reviewing a sexual assault case against the actor passed to it by the sheriff's office earlier this month. Police say the alleged events occurred in West Hollywood in Oct. 1992 and involved a male adult, reports the Guardian, which notes that British police are investigating allegations Spacey sexually assaulted three men in London between 2005 and 2008. The BBC reports more than 30 men have come forward with allegations against Spacey, who has been removed from Netflix hit House of Cards and other projects. (London's Old Vic theater says it received more than 20 "personal testimonies" against Spacey.)(Newser)  British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her Cabinet back from vacation Thursday to discuss military action against Syria over an alleged chemical weapons attack. May has indicated she wants Britain to join in any US-led strikes in response to the attack in Douma. She has said "all the indications" are that President Bashar Assad's forces were responsible, and the use of chemical weapons "cannot go unchallenged," the AP reports. The US, France, and Britain have been consulting about launching a military strike, and President Trump tweeted Wednesday that missiles "will be coming."

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Britain's Ministry of Defense refused to comment on reports that Royal Navy submarines armed with cruise missiles have been dispatched into range of Syria. British opposition lawmakers are calling for Parliament to be given a vote before any military action. May isn't legally required to do that, though it's conventional for lawmakers to be given the chance to vote. Kuwait's national carrier, meanwhile, says it's suspending flights to Lebanon in line with security warnings from airline authorities concerning a possible strike on neighboring Syria. On Wednesday, European airspace authorities warned aircraft to be careful over the next few days when flying close to Syria because of the possibility of air strikes.

(Read more Syria stories.)(Newser)  With a fireplace and a deck overlooking the bay, the home on Hermosa Beach Road was a desirable rentalso much so that a man who didn't even own the Marysville, Wash., home rented it out. KIRO 7 reports 35-year-old Matthew Robert Paul (or "Ryan," as the Daily Herald says he was known to the renters he allegedly swindled) is facing charges of theft and obtaining a signature by deception. Police allege Paul broke into the home in April 2017 after finding out the owners were away for a lengthy vacation. After telling neighbors he was a family friend who was housesitting, Paul fired up the fireplace and put up pictures of himself around the home, and when interested parties responded to his rental ad, he tried to make it look more legit by checking references, per charging papers.

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Police say he told two men their applications had been accepted; they in turn paid him more than $5,000 for upfront rent, security deposits, and remodeling costs. Paul allegedly told potential renters to make out all checks to his "uncle," a man police say cashed the checks in exchange for $20 worth of heroin from Paul. When the owners finally arrived home, nearly $2,000 worth of their stuff was gone, including their laptops, TV, and various tools; there was also damage to the property. "Using somebody's house is dirt-baggish to begin with," the son of the owners tells KIRO 7, noting he thinks Paul gained access to the house by finding a spare key. "Going the extra mile and trying to gain from it? It's really crazy." Paul, who has pleaded not guilty, is set to appear in court April 19. (A Bay Area man was accused of breaking into homes during his shift as a FedEx worker.)(Newser)  President Trump on Thursday appeared to temper his threat of an imminent missile strike on Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical attack. "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place," the president tweeted. "Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" The tweet comes after his warning on Wednesday that US "missiles will be coming," itself a response to Russia's threat that it would shoot down any American weaponry. The second half of Trump's Thursday tweet branched into a different but related subject: "In any event," he wrote, "the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'" Amid the tension, Reuters reports that a "global effort" is underway to simmer things down, with a US-Russia hotline in use to prevent an accidental conflict over Syria.

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Still, in another development Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron told French TV that "we have the proof that chemical weaponsat least chlorine gaswere used," per the Guardian. He said a decision on how to respond would be made when "most effective." And British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her Cabinet from vacation to discuss joining any US-led military action. Another potential reason behind Trump's Thursday tweet: He was taking criticism for doing what he once criticized President Obama of doingtalking about a military attack in advance on Syria. "Why can't we just be quiet and, if we attack at all, catch them by surprise?" he wondered in 2013, one of multiple critical tweets on the subject, notes CNN. The network also ran a mashup of several times Trump declared the US will stop telling its enemies about military plans. (Read more President Trump stories.)(Newser)  Thursday is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and a new survey suggests the day is sorely needed. The results show that many Americans, particularly young adults, lack a basic understanding of the Nazi genocide during World War II. Though 96% of respondents said the Holocaust took place, 31% believe a maximum of 2 million Jews were killed, well under the actual figure of about 6 million, reports the New York Times. The percentage increased to 41% among millennials, defined as those aged 18 to 34. Some 41% of Americans and 66% of millennials had no idea about Auschwitz, the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where an estimated 1.1 million were killed, per WFTS.

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The executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which seeks restitution for Holocaust victims and their heirs and commissioned the February survey of 1,350 respondents, says the gaps in understanding are "troubling" given that some 400,000 Holocaust survivors are still living. "Imagine when there are no longer survivors here to tell their stories," he says, stressing the importance of Holocaust education. He's backed by survey respondents, 93% of whom said it was important to teach about the Holocaust in schools. While experts say there's nothing quite like hearing about the genocide directly from a survivor, museums are preparing for a time when no survivors remain, using holograms and recorded testimony to keep their stories alive, notes the Times. (Read more Holocaust stories.)(Newser)  Some bad news for those who like to stay up late. A six-and-a-half-year study on the sleep habits of almost half a million people in the UK suggests that night owls are at a higher risk of early death than morning people. Though the study didn't examine the cause of this correlation, researchers suspect the problem doesn't actually have to do with sleeping in, specifically. The study published Thursday in the journal Chronobiology instead cites "circadian misalignment," per Live Science. "We think the problem is really when the night owl tries to live in a morning-lark world," study author Kristen Knutson of Northwestern University tells the Los Angeles Times. "They want to be up late but they have to be up early for work and so the time that they're doing things, like waking up or eating, is not at the correct time for them."

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After compiling data on 433,268 people aged 38 to 73, researchers divided them into four groups: definite morning types (early risers), moderate morning types, moderate evening types, and definite evening types (night owls). They found night owls were 10% more likely to have died during the study period than early risers, even though participants in the two groups reported getting roughly the same amount of sleep. Night owls were also more prone to diabetes, psychological disorders, and neurological disorders, per a release. "This is a public health issue that can no longer be ignored," says study co-author Malcolm von Schantz of the University of Surrey. He suggests employers be encouraged to allow night owls to start later, when possible. (More sleep could mean more nightmares.)(Newser)  The international chemical weapons watchdog on Thursday confirmed Britain's finding that a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent, as Russia continued to deny suggestions that it was behind the attack. Investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, said the nerve agent was "of high purity." Britain says that means only a state with a sophisticated laboratory could have manufactured it. The watchdog's report does not say who was responsible for the attack, since that was outside the scope of its mission. The OPCW's job was to identify the poison, not to trace its origins or assign blame. Britain blames Russia for the March 4 poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury, per the AP. (Yulia is out of the hospital.)

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"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible only Russia has the means, motive and record," said UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson Thursday, per RT. Russia denies involvement, calling the new report "propaganda." Britain has called for an OPCW meeting next week to discuss the results of the organization's report. In a published summary of its findings, the OPCW did not name Novichok, the type of nerve agent previously cited by British Prime Minister Theresa May. But it confirmed "the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury." It said the name and structure of the toxin were included in the full classified report, distributed to 192 member states of the organization. The Novichok class of nerve agents was developed in the Soviet Union. (Read more Sergei Skripal stories.)(Newser)  A Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School teacher who was at the Parkland, Fla., school when 17 people were killed in a mass shooting has been arrested after allegedly leaving his gun in a public restroom, the Miami Herald reports. Science teacher Sean Simpson told deputies he accidentally left the Glock 9mm in the bathroom at Florida's Deerfield Beach Pier Sunday; when he realized what he'd done and went back to get it, he heard a gunshot. Joseph Spataro, a 69-year-old homeless man who was allegedly drunk at the time, had found the gun and fired it, authorities say; Simpson was able to take the gun from him. Spataro told deputies he fired it to see whether it was loaded. No one was injured in the incident, Local 10 reports.

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Spataro was charged with trespassing and firing a weapon while intoxicated; Simpson, 43, was charged with failing to safely store a firearm. Local 10 notes that after the Parkland school shooting, Simpson told MSNBC he was open to President Trump's idea of arming teachers. He has also supported the student activists from the school protesting for gun control, saying, "These kids are demanding action, they're going to cause change." A Broward County School Board spokesperson says Simpson remains a teacher at Stoneman Douglas and that the district is not expected to take any professional action against him. The second-degree misdemeanor he's been charged with carries a maximum sentence of 60 days in jail. (Read more Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School stories.)(Newser)  The fatal gang rape of a female medical student in India in 2012 galvanized hundreds of thousands of Indians to take to the streets to demand tougher rape laws. A horrific new case has the potential to unleash similar unrest. The victim was an 8-year-old girl in Kashmir who belonged to a nomadic Muslim tribe, and the details are rough. Police say she was lured away from the horses she was grazing, sedated, and raped multiple times by men in a Hindu temple over the course of at least three days, reports the New York Times. At that point, police say the men killed the girl by hitting her head with a stone, and her body was found in a nearby forest a week after she disappeared, reports the Indian Express. Authorities say Muslim-Hindu tensions are behind the murder of the girl, known as Asifa.

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The custodian of the local Hindu temple wanted to frighten away her Bakarwals tribe from the area and saw the girl as a "soft target," say police, per the Guardian. The custodian, Sanji Ram, is among eight Hindu men charged in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Two of the eight are police officers accused of taking bribes in their investigation. The murder happened in January, but new court proceedings have inflamed tensions. Thousands of members of a Hindu group linked to the ruling BJP party have marched to demand the release of the suspects, and a large group of Hindu lawyers tried to block the filing of charges Monday at the local court, per the AP. They claim the men are innocent but will not get a fair trial because the investigating officers are Muslim. Protests and counter-protests are now spreading. (Read more India stories.)US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told lawmakers in Congress that the US military does not have evidence that either chlorine or sarin were used in an alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma, adding that the Pentagon's only proof that such an incident occurred has come from social media and media reports.

"There have been a number of these attacks. In many cases, you know we don't have troops, we're not engaged on the ground there, so I cannot tell you that we had evidence, even though we had a lot of media and social media indicators that either chlorine or sarin were used," Mattis said, speaking to members of the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

The defense secretary said that he did believe that a chemical attack did take place, but that the US was still "looking for the actual evidence."

"We're still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies. We're still working on this," he reiterated.

Warning that he was concerned that a US strike might lead to an "out of control" escalation in the Syrian war, Mattis said that Washington was "committed to ending that war through the Geneva process through the UN orchestrated effort."

"On a strategic level, [the issue is] how do we keep this from escalating out of control, if you get my drift on that," he said, likely alluding to the prospects of a confrontation between Russian and US forces deployed in the Middle Eastern country.

Mattis said he would discuss Syria options at a National Security Council meeting later Thursday, and promised to keep Congressional leaders informed if the Pentagon did decide to strike.

Asked if the US was ready for an attack, Mattis replied that "We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the president determined."

Emphasizing that the use of chemical weapons was "simply inexcusable," the defense secretary also accused Moscow of complicity in Syria's alleged retention of a chemical weapons stockpile.

Syrian opposition media reports last week of an attack by government forces involving chemical weapons prompted the US and its allies to blame Damascus and begin preparations for a possible military response.

The Syrian government denied responsibility.

The Russian Center for Reconciliation sent inspectors to Douma, finding no trace of chemical weapons use.

Moscow has called for an independent investigation into the matter.

Syria destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile in 2013 in a deal brokered by Russia and the United States in exchange for the latter's agreement not to attack the Middle Eastern country.

In 2014, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed that Syria's chemical weaposn arsenal had been eliminated.

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Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low 23F. Winds light and variable.US CIA Director Mike Pompeo has called for strict measures against what he called a "failed state" of Syria amid claims of a chemical attack in Douma, blamed on Damascus by Washington and its allies.

Pompeo appeared before a Senate Committee on Thursday as part of the confirmation process for his nomination as secretary of state.

He is currently the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

"The failed state of Syria poses a mounting threat to human rights, national security, and regional stability - and it deserves an increasingly severe response," Pompeo stated in front of the Senate committee.

Mike Pompeo further spoke about the possible firing of Special Counsel Robert Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein by President Donald Trump.

"I have not given that question any thought. My instincts tell me 'no,'" Pompeo told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee when asked whether he would resign if Trump fired the special counsel or interfered with the investigation into allegations of Trump-Russia collusion by firing Rosenstein.

Pompeo noted: "My instincts tell me that my obligation to continue to serve as Americas senior diplomat will be more important at increased times of political domestic turmoil."

Syrian Issue

The tough rhetoric on Syria from the state secretary nominee follows US President Donald Trump's April 11 "Twitter diplomacy": on his social media page he urged Russia to "get ready" for "nice and new and smart" missiles in Syria. After almost 24 hours, he backed out, saying that he "never said when an attack on Syria would take place."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Pesov promptly responded to this discourse, saying that Moscow doesn't support "Twitter diplomacy" and called for a more serious approach to the issue to avoid escalating an "already fragile situation."

Alleged Chemical Attack

The situation around Syria has further escalated over reports that emerged in Syrian opposition media outlets on April 7, which claimed that the country's government had used chemical weapons in the city of Douma.

The publications soon were picked up by the White Helmets, who began posting unverified footage of the aftermath of the alleged attack, claiming that up to 70 people had died of "widespread suffocation."

Reacting to these reports, the United States and its allies accused Syrian government forces of using chemical weapons, explaining that Damascus allegedly had a history of using such weapons.

Donald Trump has also blamed Russia and Iran for supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Both Damascus and Moscow have refuted all the allegations, calling for a thorough probe into the incident.

The Syrian side cited Red Crescent reports, which confirmed that no chemical attacks had taken place in the area.

Moscow, in its turn, sent specialists from the Russian Reconciliation Center to the site immediately after the alleged chemical attack.

The experts didn't find signs of nerve agents and chlorine-containing poisonous substances.

Pompeo on Relations With Russia

The US secretary of state nominee touched upon the issue of relations with Russia speaking in front of the Senate committee.

"If I am confirmed as the Secretary of State, I can assure you this administration will continue, as it has for the past 15 months, to take real actions to push back, to reset the deterrence relationship with respect to Russia," Pompeo stated.

The relations between Washington and Moscow have been tense within the last several years: at first, the escalation was reasoned by Crimea's reunification with Russia, condemned by the US and then after Washington accused Moscow of meddling in its 2016 presidential election.

The latter became one of the most high-profile cases, with US authorities investigating alleged Russian meddling at various levels.

Moscow has repeatedly refuted allegations of interference in elections, noting that no proof of its involvement in such activities had ever been provided.

'fix' Iran nuclear deal

Mike Pompeo, also said on Thursday he "wants to fix" the international Iran nuclear deal, with just weeks to go before a crucial deadline affecting the pact.

US sanctions that were lifted under the 2015 agreement will resume unless Trump waives them again on May 12. Trump has effectively set that as a deadline for European powers to fix the terrible flaws of the deal.

If Trump does end the waiver it would essentially pull the United States out of the nuclear pact. Pompeo told his Senate confirmation hearing that he would still push for a tougher deal even if Trump decides not to waive the sanctions.

"There is continued interest on the part of Iran to stay in this deal. It's in their own economic self-interest to do so," he said.

Pompeo was a strong opponent of the nuclear pact, which was reached under Democratic President Barack Obama, when he was a Republican member of the House of Representatives.

The agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was between Iran, the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China and Germany. Under the deal, many sanctions on Iran were lifted in exchange for curbs to Iran's nuclear program.

Pompeo said Iran was not "racing" to develop a nuclear weapon before the deal was finalized, and that he did not expect it would do so if the deal were to fall apart.

"There is no indication that I'm aware of that if the deal were no longer to exist that they would immediately race to a nuclear weapon today," he said.

Pompeo, who disputed during his hearing the notion that he is a foreign policy hawk, said he believes diplomacy is the best way to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron are both due to visit Washington before May 12 and Pompeo said he was "confident" they would discuss the Iran issue at length with Trump.

Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said it was still possible that Germany, France and the United States could come up with an agreement that would keep Trump from ending the waiver.

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New Delhi:

India, China, Japan and Korea have agreed to expand cooperation in the energy sector in view of their increased consumption of hydrocarbons, primarily in business to business segment, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Thursday.

Cooperation among oil-consuming nations is warranted in view of oil-producing countries charging Asian premium from India, China and others for supplying petroleum, Pradhan said while addressing the concluding conference of the International Energy Forum (IEF).

More cooperation is expected to deal with the Asian premium issue, he said, adding that the responsibility had been assigned to IOC Chairman Sanjiv Singh and from China side, Chairman of China National Petroleum Corporation will work on the issue.

"In some areas both of us (India and China) are working together. In some parts of Africa, CNPC and OVL (ONGC Videsh Ltd) are natural partners," he said.

The two nations can work together in the energy sector as consumer as well as energy producer, said Li Fanrong, Deputy Administrator, National Energy Administration, China said.

Asked about reported government direction to oil marketing companies for not hiking fuel prices, Pradhan said, there is no such direction.

On Wednesday, Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil producer, entered into an agreement to pick up 50 per cent stake in a planned $44-billion refinery-cum-petrochemical project in Maharashtra. On Shiv Sena's opposition to the deal, the minister said the deal was in favour of the people of Maharashtra as the investment would boost the state's economy, job creation and industrialisation.

Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, speaking at the event, said India had deployed $8 billion on gas infrastructure across the country and share of natural gas in the energy mix will increase from 6.5 per cent now to 15 per cent by 2020. She then said LPG penetration in the country had increased from 66 per cent in 2014 to 80 per cent in 2018.

This time, over 1,300 representatives took part in the IEF and 53 representatives from different countries attended the forum. At least 38 ministers marked their presence. The next IEF will be held in China.

Currently, Indias per capita consumption is about one tenth of the developing nations.

For all the Latest Business News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the national capital on Wednesday and had an insightful conversation on providing quality healthcare to women, children and adolescents.

The actress, who is Unicef goodwill ambassador, shared a picture of herself with PM Modi, Health Minister J.P. Nadda and former President of Chile Michelle Bachelet on Instagram account.

While Priyanka was grateful to meet the PM, she invited him to be a patron for the Partners' Forum. The event will be held in Delhi in December this year.

Priyanka wrote, "Very grateful to the honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi to meet me, Shri J.P. Nadda (Indian Health Minister) and Mrs. Michelle Bachelet, (former President of Chile, incoming #PMNCH Chair) in regards to being a patron for the Partners' Forum which is being held in New Delhi in December this year. The aim is very important - the improvement and transformation of access to quality healthcare atA every life stage for women, children and adolescents, in an effort to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030. This year, India will play host to the largest ever Partners' Forum, with more than 1,200 delegates from more than 92 countries. It was an insightful, positive conversation which was very heartening and inspiring because of the personal commitment of everyone at the meeting. We covered a lot of ground from the various efforts being taken by individual countries & partners to building a collective environment that could help propel the change we seek for a better world. We started something important today and I am looking forward to what is being set in motion."

Priyanka has been attached with the organisation for over a decade, was on a 16-hour-long trip to India to formally introduce the 2018 Partnersa Forum, a platform which works towards improving the health and well-being of women, children and adolescents.

The Forum will be hosted by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of India in collaboration with the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) this December.

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.Bhopal:

The nation is boiling over horrendous gang-rape and brutal murder of an 8-year-old girl Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua area, however, a BJP senior leader has come up with an conspiracy theory, where he terms the savage criminal incident as Pakistan engineered propaganda to divide the country.

According to BJP Madhya Pradesh chiefs and Khandwa lawmaker Nandkumar Singh Chauhan, the brutal rape and murder had been scripted by Pakistan.

Men from Pakistan chanted Jain Shri Ram in support of rape accused just to divide India, said the Khandwa lawmaker.

The 65-year-old BJP leaders statement comes hours after Union Minister VK Singh came in support of the minor victim and had said,  We have failed Asifa as humans. But she will not be denied justice.

The minor from Bakherwal nomads community was abducted from near her house on January 10. Her body was recovered on January 17.

During the course of investigation, police learnt that she was kept sedated, hungry and gang-raped multiple times for several days before being strangulated to death. Her perpetrators, to ensure she was dead, crushed her head with a boulder.

According to police records, the minor was raped by at least eight people before being killed. One of the perpetrators, a police officer, asked her killers to wait for while so that he could satisfy his lust. The victims perpetrators had also invited a minor to satisfy his lust from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh.

Two BJP ministers of Jammu and Kashmir had participated in a rally called by a fringe group, Hindu Ekta Manch, in support of the girls alleged perpetrators.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Amid the opposition's accusation at the Union government of being silent on the Kathua rape case, Union Minister VK Singh has called for justice to the eight-year-old gang-rape victim, who was tortured and murdered by her rapers.

Singh took to Twitter on Thursday to express anguish over the incident that took place in J&K's Kathua and wrote that Asifa, the rape victim, will not be denied justice.

We have failed Asifa as humans. But she will not be denied justice, Singh tweeted.

Singh rose in support of Asifa soon after Congress president Rahul Gandhi termed the incident "crime against humanity" and tweeted, How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil?

Further targeting the BJP, Gandhi wrote, What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?

The minor from Bakherwal nomads community was abducted from near her house on January 10. Her body was recovered on January 17.

During the course of investigation, police learnt that she was kept sedated, hungry and gang-raped multiple times for several days before being strangulated to death. Her perpetrators, to ensure she was dead, crushed her head with a boulder.

According to police records, the minor was raped by at least eight people before being killed. One of the perpetrators, a police officer, asked her killers to wait for while so that he could satisfy his lust. The victims perpetrators had also invited a minor to satisfy his lust from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh.

Two BJP ministers of Jammu and Kashmir had participated in a rally called by a fringe group, Hindu Ekta Manch, in support of the girls alleged perpetrators.

Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, targeting the Mehbooba Mufti-led state government, tweeted, What rubbish! They are HER ministers, not the Hon PMs. The way for her to express her displeasure is to sack them in Jammu not come & leak her alleged displeasure in Delhi. 

Replying to Abdullah, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister tweeted, The Law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions & statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track & justice will be delivered. #JusticeForAsifa.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

In a heart wrenching, an eight-year-old girl was gang-raped by six men, including one who had been "invited" to come all the way from Meerut inside a village temple in Kathua.

She was held in captivity in a small village temple in Kathua district for a week in January, was kept sedated and sexually assaulted once again before she was bludgeoned to death, reveals the chargesheet in the case.

The abduction, rape and killing of the Bakherwal girl was part of a carefully planned strategy to remove the minority nomadic community from the area, reveals the 15-page chargesheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir Police's Crime Branch in the chief judicial magistrate's court here Monday.

It lists the caretaker of the Devisthan, a small temple, in Rassana village in Kathua, about 90 km from here, as the main conspirator behind the abduction, rape and killing.

Sanji Ram was allegedly joined by special police officers Deepak Khajuria and Surender Verma, friend Parvesh Kumar alias Mannu, Ram's nephew, a juvenile, and his son Vishal Jangotra alias "Shamma".

The chargesheet also names investigating officers head constable Tilak Raj and sub-inspector Anand Dutta, who allegedly took Rs 4 lakh from Ram and destroyed crucial evidence.

A separate chargesheet was filed on Tuesday on the role of the juvenile, who cannot be publicly named according to the law.

All eight are under arrest. Lawyers in Jammu today struck work in support of the accused.

On January 11, six days before the child's body was recovered from the Rassana forest on January 17, the juvenile phoned his cousin Jangotra and asked him to return from Meerut where he was studying if he wanted to "satisfy his lust", the chargesheet stated.

The document lays bare the larger conspiracy to instil fear in the Bakerwal community and explains in chilling detail how it was carried out.

The eight-year-old had gone missing on January 10 while grazing horses in the forest. Investigators said the accused abducted the girl on the pretext of helping her find her horses.

The day after their daughter went missing, the parents went to the Devisthan and asked Ram about her whereabouts. He said she may have gone to a relative's house.

According to the chargesheet, the accused gave the girl sedatives to make her unconscious while holding her in captivity at the Devisthan'.

The juvenile, a school dropout, turned out to be the main player in the abduction and murder, raping the child repeatedly along with Jangotra and Khajuria.

The medical examination of the juvenile show he is an adult but the court is yet to take cognizance of the report, said an official.

"Khajuria lured the juvenile to kidnap the girl on the assurance that he will help him in passing the board examination (through cheating). Subsequently, he shared the plan, worked out by Ram and Khajuria, with Parvesh Kumar alias 'Mannu', his close friend and asked for his help in executing the plan," the chargesheet stated.

Jangotra reached Rassana from Meerut after his cousin's call and raped the sedated girl along with the juvenile and Mannu. Ram and his nephew performed the usual rituals to avoid suspicion.

It was on Ram's direction that the child was removed from the temple and taken to a culvert in the nearby forest by Mannu, Jangotra and the juvenile with the intention of eliminating her.

According to the investigation, Khajuria also reached the spot and told them to wait as "he wanted to rape her before she is killed". The chargesheet said the girl was once again gangraped and later killed by the juvenile.

"The juvenile hit the girl twice with a stone on her head and later dumped her body in the forest after their plan to throw the body in a canal could not materialize due to failure to arrange a vehicle," it said.

On January 23, about a week after the body was discovered, the government handed over the case to the Crime Branch, which formed a Special Investigation Team.

In the course of investigation, it transpired that somewhere in the first week of January, accused Sanji Ram decided to put a plan to dislodge the Bakherwal community from Rassana area which had been brewing in his mind for quite sometime, into operation and in pursuance to that he made accused Deepak Khajuria, a special police officer, and his nephew (juvenile) as part of the conspiracy and assigned them tasks separately and individually, the chargesheet said.

He surrendered on March 20 after his son was arrested from Uttar Pradesh a day earlier investigations revealed that Ram gave Rs 4 lakh to the police officers investigating the case in three installments.

After the body was recovered, head constable Raj, who knew about the conspiracy, met Ram at his home and requested him to hand over one of the accused as things had gone out of control due to the agitation by the Bakerwals.

However, Ram paid Raj Rs 1 lakh to be passed on to sub-inspector Dutta.

The investigation explained in detail how the accused police officials destroyed crucial evidence by washing the clothes of the victim before sending them to the forensic laboratory and created false evidence at the scene.

"In the course of the investigation, it transpired that Ram was against the settlement of Bakherwals in Rassana, Kootah and Dhamyal area and always kept on motivating members of his community not to provide land for grazing or any other kind of assistance to them," the investigation said.

(with inputs from agencies)

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Tamil Nadu visit on Thursday would be without any public road show as some opposition parties and pro-Tamil outfits in Tamil Nadu will hold a black flag protest against PM's visit to the state.

This comes a day after the main opposition party, DMK, asked people to hoist black flags atop their houses to oppose his visit.

PM Modi has inaugurate India's mega defence exhibition - the Defexpo- at Thiruvidanthai, about 40 km from Chennai.

Meanwhile, T Velmurugan, coordinator of Tamizhar Vazhvurimai Koottamaippu, an umbrella body of pro-Tamil outfits including 'May 17', announced a 'black balloon-cum-black flag' protest against Modi's visit.

The balloons have been released at Meenambakkam in the airport's vicinity and "several other locations."

The black flag protest took place at the Alandur Metro Rail Station, Velmurugan told reporters.

DMK's working president M K Stalin urged Tamil people to hoist black flags and wear black badges as a mark of protest.

Here are the Live Updates on PM Modi's Chennai visit:

#02:06 PM:A The Union Government has suggested to the Finance Commission to consider to incentivise States who have worked on population control. Thus, a state like Tamil Nadu, which has devoted a lot of effort, energy and resources towards population control would certainly benefit: PM Modi.

The Union Government has suggested to the Finance Commission to consider to incentivise States who have worked on population control. Thus, a state like Tamil Nadu, which has devoted a lot of effort, energy and resources towards population control would certainly benefit: PM Modi pic.twitter.com/4UDoFPrx57 a ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2018

#01:58 PM:A Chennai: DMK members protests in Chennai against PM Modi's visit to TamilNadu.

#01:47 PM:A Union govt is committed to cooperative federalism, our mantra is 'sabka-sath, sabka-vikas,' let us work together to build a new India that would make our freedom fighters proud: PM Modi in Chennai, TamilNadu.

#01:00 PM:A Tamil Nadu: DMK floats a black balloon in Chennai with the slogan 'Modi Go Back', in protest against PM Modi's visit.

Tamil Nadu: DMK floats a black balloon in Chennai with the slogan 'Modi Go Back', in protest against PM Modi's visit #CauveryProtest pic.twitter.com/mSLoJ922aN a ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2018

#12:14 PM:A Chennai: DMK's Kanimozhi joins the party's protest against PM Modi's visit.

#11:57 AM:A PM Modi, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and CM EK Palaniswami witness combat free fall demonstration by MARCOs (Marine Commando Force) at Defence Expo 2018 in Tamil Nadu.

#TamilNadu: PM Modi, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and CM EK Palaniswami witness combat free fall demonstration by MARCOs (Marine Commando Force) at #DefenceExpo2018 pic.twitter.com/Sh4mX3oPl0 a ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2018

#11:21 AM:A You would recall the long-drawn process of procurement of fighter aircraft that never reached any conclusion. We've not only taken bold action to meet our immediate critical requirements, but have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircrafts: PM Modi at Defence Expo 2018.



You would recall the long-drawn process of procurement of fighter aircraft that never reached any conclusion. We've not only taken bold action to meet our immediate critical requirements, but have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircrafts: PM #DefenceExpo2018 pic.twitter.com/7APMey7OxA a ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2018

#11:03 AM:A Our commitment to peace is as strong as our commitment to protecting our people & our territory. For this we are ready to take all necessary measures to equip our Armed Forces, including through the establishment of a strategically independent defence industrial complex, says PM Modi.

#11:00 AM:A Wonderful to see that more than 500 Indian companies & over 150 foreign companies are here. More than 40 countries have sent their official delegations as well: PM Modi at Defence Expo 2018 in Mahabalipuram, TamilNadu.

#10:58 AM: I am very happy to be here in the land of the great Cholas who established India's historical civilization links through trade & education: PM Modi at Defence Expo 2018 in Mahabalipuram, TamilNadu.



#10:54 AM:A PM Modi addresses #DefenceExpo2018 in Mahabalipuram. #TamilNadu.

#10:37 AM:A 50 percent of this Expo has Indian manufacturers, most of them small and medium industries, says Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman at the venue of Defence Expo 2018.A

# 10:16 AM:A PM Modi at the venue of #DefenceExpo2018 in Mahabalipuram.A

# 09:37 AM:A PM Narendra Modi arrives in Chennai he will be addressing #DefenceExpo2018, later today.A

# 09:34 AM:A PM Narendra Modi to arrive in Chennai shortly, protests near the airport in Alandur area.Thamizhaga Vazhvurimai Katchi leader Velmurugan and other protesters detained

# 09:23 AM:A PM Narendra Modi to arrive in Chennai shortly, protests near the airport in Alandur area.A

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Congress president Rahul Gandhi, his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra along with other party leaders, took out a candle march at India Gate to demand justice for Unnao and Kathua rape victims on Thursday night.

Earlier in the day, the Uttar Pradesh Police has handed over the Unnao rape case, in which Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar is the prime accused, to the CBI.

The state police, earlier in the day, had registered a case against the BJP lawmaker from Unnao after a report was submitted by the Special Investigation Team (SIT).

After the report was published and shown in media, departmental proceeding were initiated against three doctors, including Dr DK Dwivedi and Dr Prashant Upadhyay for the negligence of duty.

The doctors showed laxity in giving proper medical care to the victim's father, both prior to judicial custody and on referral from jail to the district hospital while in judicial custody, an official report read.

The district police chief has also suspended Safipur Circle Officer Kunwar Bahadur Singh for not properly handling the case in spite of repeated complaints by the victim and her family members.

Late Wednesday, the BJP lawmaker was seen outside Lucknow senior superintendent of police (SSP)s residence. He then told the media said that he was not on the run.

Unnao legislator Sengar is accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in June 2017. The family since then had been making attempts to lodge a complaint against him.

In the Kathua incident, earlier in the day, Union Minister VK Singh has called for justice to the eight-year-old gang-rape victim. Singh took to Twitter on Thursday to express anguish over the incident that took place in J&K's Kathua and wrote that Asifa, the rape victim, will not be denied justice.

We have failed Asifa as humans. But she will not be denied justice, Singh tweeted. Singh rose in support of Asifa soon after Congress president Rahul Gandhi termed the incident "crime against humanity" and tweeted, How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil?

Further targeting the BJP, Gandhi wrote, What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?

The minor from Bakherwal nomads community was abducted from near her house on January 10. Her body was recovered on January 17.

During the course of the investigation, police learnt that she was kept sedated, hungry and gang-raped multiple times for several days before being strangulated to death. Her perpetrators, to ensure she was dead, crushed her head with a boulder.

According to police records, the minor was raped by at least eight people before being killed. One of the perpetrators, a police officer, asked her killers to wait for while so that he could satisfy his lust. The victims perpetrators had also invited a minor to satisfy his lust from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh.

Two BJP ministers of Jammu and Kashmir had participated in a rally called by a fringe group, Hindu Ekta Manch, in support of the girls alleged perpetrators.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

The Allahabad High Court on Thursday slammed the Yogi Adityanath government over failure to arrest the accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar.

The court also added that it will pronounce its order on the case at 2 pm on Friday.

While at the hearing on Thursday, it asked the counsel representing the Uttar Pradesh government why the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA, who was accused of raping the minor girl, had not yet been arrested.

Advocate General Raghvendra Singh, who was representing the state government, told the court that there was no enough evidence against Kuldeep Senger as per the investigation team.

The UP Police on Thursday had filed an FIR against Sengar, charging him under the POSCO Act and Indian Penal Code (IPC) (including Section 376 for rape), confirmed a senior police officer.

Sengar, on Wednesday night, asked the Lucknow police to call him if there was an arrest warrant against him. Sengar said, When there is an arrest warrant, call me.

Sengar reached the Lucknow SSPs office at around 11:40 pm at night and told reporters that he was being framed. He said, I just came here to prove that I have done no wrong and would be here anytime the police wants me.

Sengar reached the SSP with office with nearly two dozen supporters in tow. When confronted by the media, the MLA said that he had come to enquire whether his name had appeared in any of the First Information Reports (FIRs).

On the way back, Sengar and his henchmen got into a scuffle with the media reporters.

Also Read| Unnao rape case LIVE updates: CBI takes case after PM Modi's intervention

However, OP Singh, DGP of UP, cleared that no one was backing up the BJP MLA. He said, Nobody is defending him(#KuldeepSinghSengar), all we are saying is that we have to hear both sides. Now case has been given to CBI, they will decide on arrest.

While on the other hand, BJP MLA from Bairia, Surender Singh, said that the minor had filed a false case against Sengar. Singh said, Narco test should be done of Kuldeep Singh Sengar &complainant, truth will be out then. If MLA found guilty punish him, but I have heard this same girl had filed a false rape case against a man some years back,man had to spend 6 months in jail.

The Unnao rape case came into light when the survivor attempted suicide outside UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanaths Lucknow residence on Sunday demanding justice.

The victim alleged that Sengar and his accomplices had gang-raped her.

Sengar and his henchmen are also custodial in the death of the victims father. A Special investigation Team (SIT) formed by the UP Police to probe the alleged rape and the death of the victims father reportedly found serious lapses by police and doctors in Unnao.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

An FIR has been registered against the rape accused Kuldeep Sengar on Thursday, confirmed SO Rajesh Singh to ANI. The case has been filed at the Makhi police station in Unnao.

The case has been registered under several sections of the Indian Penal Code (including Section 376 for rape) and POCSO Act.

Unnao rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar asked the police on Wednesday night in Lucknow to call him if there was an arrest warrant. "When there is an arrest warrant, call me,.

Sengar reached the Lucknow SSP's office at midnight and told reporters he was being framed. I just came here to prove that I have done no wrong and would be here anytime the police wants me, he told reporters as he was leaving.

WATCH: Scuffle between media persons and supporters of Unnao BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger outside SSP office in Lucknow. pic.twitter.com/jxJevmRmj4  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 11, 2018

In a midnight drama that unfolded after Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah returned to the national capital from Lucknow, the rape-accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar reached the Senior Superintendent of Police's (SSP) office with two dozens supporters in tow.

When confronted by the media, the MLA said that he had come to enquire whether his name had appeared in any of the First Information Reports (FIRs).

 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 11, 2018

"Hum to ye pata lagaane aaye the ki kahin hamara naam kisi FIR me hai ya nahi (I just came to find out whether I was named in any FIR)," he said. Sengar showed up at the SSP's office at around 11.40 pm.

The case has been transferred to CBI: Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar #UnnaoCase pic.twitter.com/6pWfRmmmVW  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 12, 2018

He told media persons that naming him an "absconder" was not fair. On their way back, Sengar and his aides got into a scuffle with reporters.

In Unnao, about 50 kilometres from Lucknow, four-time BJP MLA Sengar and his brothers allegedly gang-raped an 18-year-old girl.

 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 11, 2018

Also Read: Unnao Rape Case: CBI to take over probe against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar

Live Updates:

# 01:39 PM:Allahabad High Court asks state govt counsel, "Why has the MLA not been arrested yet?' Seeks reply post lunch.

# 11:38 AM: Still so many questions are being raised on me, even after my father's murder. How will I get justice? CBI probe is fine but first MLA(#KuldeepSinghSengar) should be arrested as he will influence probe, I now fear for my uncle's(father's brother) life.

 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 12, 2018

# 10:22 AM: Nobody is defending him(#KuldeepSinghSengar), all we are saying is that we have to hear both sides. Now case has been given to CBI, they will decide on arrest: OP Singh,UP DGP.

 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 12, 2018

# 10:14 AM:The case has been transferred to CBI: Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar

 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 12, 2018

# 10:05 AM: Narco test should be done of Kuldeep Singh Sengar &complainant, truth will be out then. If MLA found guilty punish him, but I have heard this same girl had filed a false rape case against a man some years back,man had to spend 6 months in jail: BJP Bairia MLA Surendra Singh

 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 12, 2018

# 09:31 AM: FIR copy

# 09:15 AM: Yes we are happy that finally an FIR has been registered against #KuldeepSinghSengar , had this been done much earlier, my brother(victim's father) would be alive today. Still, lets see if he will be arrested or not: Uncle of victim

 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 12, 2018

# 09:09 AM: FIR was registered against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger under sections 363, 366, 376 ,506 and POCSO act.

# 08:37 AM: An FIR has been registered against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger,confirms Police SO Rajesh Singh

The victim later attempted suicide outside Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath's residence in Lucknow on Sunday, demanding justice. Sengar and accomplices are also accused in the custodial death of the victim's father. A special investigation team (SIT) formed to probe the alleged rape and the victim's father's death reportedly found serious lapses by police and doctors in Unnao.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Reliance Jio is now targeting the laptop market in India, after completing talks with American chipmaker Qualcomm. Jio is looking to bring laptops with built-in cellular connection.

The laptop is Jios next big move to capture the Indian market and increase its average revenue per user (ARPU).

Jio is looking to take the device and power it with data and content said Miguel Nunes, Senior Director of Qualcomm Technologies.

ALSO READ: IPL 2018 Live Score | Sunrisers Hyderabad vs Mumbai Indians

Qualcomm has already started working on Always Connected PC with big shots like Asus, Lenovo and HP on global basis. A global research firm named Counterpoint Research specialists in technology and mobile products, said that almost 5 million laptops are sold in India every year and laptops with cellular connectivity could be the next big hit in India and for ARPU.

The firm further mentioned that even with a million laptops, the 4G networks could charge Rs 300-Rs 1,000 a month, which means operators could generate a whooping Rs 30 crore to Rs 360 crore a month.

Reliance Jio and Qualcomm are already on a tie up for a 4G feature phone.Washington:

US President Donald Trump is weighing all options on the table with regard to Syria as he holds the Syrian regime and Russia responsible for the latest chemical weapons attack, the White House said on Thursday, adding that no final decision has been taken yet on the military response.

"It sounds like all options are on the table, and a final decision hasn't been made, but we'll keep you posted once it is," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters at her daily news conference.

Referring to the allegation of a Russian military official that there was an attack but it was staged by the White Helmets brigade component of the rebels in Syria, she said the intelligence provided "certainly paints" a different picture, and the President holds Syria and Russia responsible for the chemical weapons attack.

In the last few days, Trump has blamed the authoritarian Assad regime for the chemical attack that killed dozens of Syrian civilians, including children and women, in the Damascus suburb of Douma.

"We're maintaining that we have a number of options, and all of those options are still on the table. Final decisions haven't been made yet on that front," Sarah Sanders said, adding that the President has not laid out a timetable.

"In a public sense, certainly the President has made some decisions.? He made a decision not to travel to Latin America so that we could focus on this. That was the first step in this process, but we're continuing to look at a number of options," she said.

Russia, she alleged, holds some responsibility in the fact that they had guaranteed that Syria wouldn't use chemical weapons again, which they did. They also hold some responsibility in the fact that they have the six UN resolutions that they vetoed to help protect Assad. Both of those things lie at Russia's feet in terms of responsibility in this process, Sarah Sanders said.

In a statement, Senator Bernie Sanders said Trump has no legal authority for broadening the war in Syria.

"It is Congress, not the President, who determines whether our country goes to war and Congress must not abdicate that responsibility. We have been in Afghanistan for 17 years and Iraq for 15 years. The result has been massive regional instability, terrible loss of life and a cost of trillions of dollars," he said.

"If President Trump believes that expanding the war in Syria will bring stability to the region and protect American interests, he should come to Congress with his ideas," Bernie Sanders.

Senator Edward Markey, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, criticised Trump's warnings that he intends to conduct military strikes in retaliation against Assad's use of chemical weapons.

"Before President Trump conducts military operations, he must come to Congress for authorisation," he demanded.

"Numerous, large-scale attacks on another country without Congressional authorisation are unconstitutional, and they push the US closer to what could be an interminable, all-out conflict in Syria. And announcing military actions over Twitter is the height of irresponsibility and contradicts the President's own previous commitment never to disclose America's plans publicly," Markey said.

Sarah Sanders said the Trump administration will follow whatever laws and regulations were necessary for any actions that it takes.

"Because we haven't laid out any specific actions that we plan to take, I can't tell you exactly what needs we would have to go to Congress with," she said.

Meanwhile, Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana requested a classified hearing for members of Congress on the chemical weapons attack in Syria.

"The images of children struggling to breathe after the chemical attack are unconscionable. Whoever did this is a human butcher," he said.

"We need answers to fully understand who is responsible for the attack. We can't let this go unanswered. If we do, our friends won't trust us and our enemies won't respect us," Kennedy added.

Congressman Brad Schneider said the reports from Syria of another major chemical weapons attack against civilians, represent yet one more war crime committed by Bashar al-Assad and his regime.

"Assad must be held to account and the world must clearly demonstrate that chemical weapons are unacceptable anytime, anywhere, and in any context," he said.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.The Greek campus at the American university in Cairo hosted the launch of a joint social media campaign by the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM), under the hashtag #ImAgainstBullying, on Tuesday.

The campaign comes under the umbrella of a joint program implemented by UNICEF and funded by the European Union, titled Expanding Access to Education and Protection of at Risk Children.

Cyberbullying made headlines in Egypt on a large scale recently after the infamous Blue Whale game was allegedly linked to the suicide of the son of Egyptian former MP, Hamdy El-Fakharany in the Gharbiya governorate.

Cyberbullying can take many forms, and includes posting or sending messages, pictures or videos that harass, threaten or spread rumors on another person through any digital platform.

At the beginning of the event, secretary general of NCCM Dr. Azza El-Ashmawy took to the podium addressing the main goal of the campaign, which is to use engaging content to inspire and empower children and adolescents with online safety tips.

In his speech, Bruno Maes, the UNICEF representative in Cairo, pointed out the fact that one in three internet users globally is a child, and that with lack of proper adult supervision, more and more children may be exposed to cyberbullying at any given time and place.

Accordingly, they may suffer dire psychological and physical consequences.

"It is our collective responsibility as governments, international and national organizations, private sector, families and caregivers to eliminate these risks and to increase childrens access to safe and quality online content," he said.

Among the highlights of the event was the contribution of the famous Egyptian movie star Mona Zaki, a UNICEF ambassador.

Zaki introduced an engaging video about cyberbullying that discussed the extreme harm it can cause, and called for the right of each child to experience safe internet surfing and online learning.

Finally, Jerome Boniface, programme manager within the governance section of the EU Delegation to Egypt, highlighted that the EU highly endorses the child's right to an enriching and positive digital experience.

"Efforts to protect children from cyberbullying need to focus particularly on vulnerable and disadvantaged children, who may be less likely to understand online risks and more likely to suffer harm, he concluded.

The hashtags launched by the campaign are #ImAgainstBullying #AnaDedElTanamour.

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Washington:

The top Republican in the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, has decided to retire when his term ends, paving the way for a new Republican leadership in the Congress next year.

Citing family reasons for his decision, 48-year-old Ryan clarified that he is not resigning and that he would serve the rest of the term till early January next year.

"I am announcing that this year will be my last one as a member of the House," Ryan told reporters at a news conference.

"I will be retiring in January, leaving this majority in good hands with what I believe is a very bright future," said the Speaker who in 2015 had invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his highly successful joint address to the US Congress.

President Donald Trump paid tribute to Ryan as "a truly good man."

"Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man, and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question. We are with you Paul!"A Trump said in a tweet.

Vice President Mike Pence said Ryan will continue to be a great representative for the people of Wisconsin through the rest of his term and will continue to work every day with him to keep our promises to the American people.A Ryan cited family reasons for his decision.

"It's almost hard to believe, but I have been a member of Congress for almost two decades. This is my 20th year in Congress. My kids weren't even born when I was first elected. Our oldest was 13 years old when I became speaker," Ryan said.

"Now all three of our kids are teenagers. And one thing I've learned about teenagers is their idea of an ideal weekend is not necessarily to spend all of the time with their parents," he said.

"What I realize is, if I'm here for one more term, my kids will only have ever known me as a weekend dad. I just can't let that happen. So I will be setting new priorities in my life, but I'll also be leaving incredibly proud of what we have accomplished," Ryan said.

The opposition Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez said Ryan's retirement is an indictment of Republican leadership that has failed to provide meaningful results for the American people.

"Since Donald Trump took office, 46 Republicans have resigned or made retirement plans, and Democrats have flipped another 39 state legislative seats from red to blue across the country," Perez said.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.A group of 49 Miss World contestants visited the Giza Pyramids on Thursday, as part of their tour of Egypt.

They were escorted by archaeologist Mohamed Saleh, who said that they entered the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the Sphinx and the panorama area, where they documented their trip with photos.

The Miss Worlds are also visiting the cities of Luxor, Ain Sokhna and Marsa Alam.

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Once again the Palestinian people, especially their valiant sons and daughters, have accomplished astonishing deeds in the Gaza Strip

Tens of thousands of men, women, elderly people and children have taken part in popular protests to affirm the Palestinian people's hold on their homeland and the right of refugees to return to the homes from which they were driven.

Once again, the unity of the Palestinian people has been reaffirmed through parallel protests in the 1948 Land and in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and wherever the Palestinians are located abroad.

Land Day is an established symbol of Palestinian unity, but this time the unity was embodied by the participants on the field of struggle, completely ignoring political divisions and the fight over authority, which is totally under the control of the occupation.

Land Day this year was a day of glory for the popular resistance as an idea, an approach and the practice of struggle, having been embraced by all the national and Islamist forces who have seen its effectiveness and impact.

Sixteen years after it was launched in opposition to the recist apartheid wall, its content has deepened through various actions: demonstrations against settlements; ships breaking the Gaza blockade; the resisting villages, such as Bab Al-Shams, Ahfad Yunus and Al-Manatir; through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; and the popular uprising that forced Netanyahu to back off from his measures against the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

From the early beginnings of the first demonstrations against Gaza's borders, the popular resistance has reached a new peak, due to the comprehensive popular participation in the March for Return in Gaza on Land Day.

Undoubtedly, the conscious and organised adoption of popular resistance represents a sign of maturity in the struggle among the entire Palestinian national movement. At the same time, it is a challenge to all the Palestinian forces to participate with full force, bearing in mind that it is one of the key foundations of the Palestinian national strategy for changing the balance of power in favour of the BDS movement.

In spite of the martyrdom of sixteen Palestinians and the injury of 1,800 others in just one day, the bravery and heroism of huge numbers of Palestinian people have reaffirmed a total popular rejection of the Trump administration's decisions.

These decisions were related to Jerusalem and the "Deal of the Century" and aimed at liquidating the Palestinian cause and establishing malicious normalisation projects at the expense of the Palestinian people and their national cause.

Holding on to the right of return in practice was a suitable response to the Trump administrations aim of strangling UNRWA as a means of liquidating the rights of Palestinian refugees. Given the failure of the Oslo accords to provide a viable solution, the masses have asserted the existence of an actual alternative path to resistence.

Israel was terrified by the prospect of a victorious return of the events of the first popular Intifada, and its foundations were shaken because the number of Palestinians on the historical land of Palestine has exceeded that of Israeli Jews.

However, what Israel's forces have done under the leadership of its Chief of General Staff Eizenkot, by firing live bullets at peaceful, unarmed Palestinians demonstrators, is a great scandal and an unforgivable war crime.

The use of live bullets isn't proof of strength but rather a manifestation of the Israeli sides weakness and the futility of its attempts to prevent the popular protests

Here, we must clarify the false Israeli narrative that claimed that the martyrs and the injured were hit while they were trying to cross the fence from the Gaza Strip.

Everybody has seen that they were injured while they were inside the so-called buffer zone within the Gaza Strip, which was imposed by the occupation army, an area that amounts to no less than 24 percent of Gaza.

We must keep in mind the Gazans' right to access those villages and towns from which they were driven out, such as Al-Majdal, Hamama and Al-Masamiya and others.

Israeli snipers didn't restrict their crimes to the Gaza Strip, for they also confronted our demonstrations in Ramallah in front of the Beit El settlement and other demonstrations in the West Bank in the same way.

Despite the great loss of life and those injured, mostly in the Gaza Strip, the amazing success of Land Day and the March for Return, represents a starting point for a movement that will continue and a popular resistance that will escalate.

This should be an incentive to political leaders to transform the unity of the struggle on the ground into a comprehensive and complete ending of divisions and the achievement of national unity based on real partnership and joint struggle.

The bravery of the Gazans confirms the necessity that everybody should help them and criminalise any form of harm done to them.

These events should lead to the immediate transfer to the International Criminal Court of the criminal Israeli soldiers and officers, headed by Eizenkot.

As for the foreign parties and governments equating the victim with the executioner and not commenting on what has taken place except for asking both sides to adopt self-restraint, we must remind them of lectures and advice in which their representatives spoke at length about the necessity of the Palestinians organising peaceful rallies in their thousands.

Well, the Palestinian people have done it in their tens of thousands. Shall we see these governments impose any form of sanctions on Israel due to the brutal force it has used against unarmed demonstrators?

Regardless of what they do, the Palestinian people have regained the awareness of the first popular Intifada and the perception that they should apply self-reliance first and that the way to success is through self-organisation and challenging and resisting the decisions of the occupation and the apartheid system.

May our valiant martyrs achieve immortality and the injured have a speedy recovery, and all respect goes to our people, especially the Gazans, who have once more proved their greatness.

*The writer is Secretary-General of the Palestinian National Initiative.



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A policeman was found shot in the head and back in a police box in Hikone, Shiga Prefecture, western Japan, Wednesday evening.

Sergeant Akira Imoto, 41, was sent to a hospital and confirmed dead. The Shiga prefectural police suspect his colleague, Tomohiro Onishi, 19, shot the victim and ran away.

Onishi was held in the small hours of Thursday.

Police received an emergency call around 8:15 p.m. (11:15 a.m. GMT) saying that a police car was found shoved into a rice paddy in Aisho near Hikone.

As nobody was found in the car, Hikone police station staff visited the police box, to which the car belongs. The staff found bleeding Imoto slumping over a desk around 8:45 p.m.

1119In a bid to increase the number of foreign workers to alleviate the country's labor shortage, Japan will introduce a new residency status for foreign technical intern trainees as early as April 2019.

Foreign nationals who have finished a five-year technical intern program will be allowed to stay and work for an additional five years. They may also be able to change their visa status to work longer in the country and invite family members from their home countries.

Currently, foreign technical interns must leave Japan after finishing the five-year program. The new visa is aimed at extending their stay to help alleviate the nation's labor shortage.

Japan's policy, in principle, is to not grant unskilled workers permanent residency. Instead, the government hopes to expand the scope and length of the technical intern program, which allows foreign nationals to work in the country to acquire on-the-job skills.

The move, which broadens the scope of the program, signals a significant policy change by allowing interns to remain in the workforce for an additional five years.

A bill introducing the measure through an amendment to the Immigration Control Law will be submitted as early as April 2019.

The new residency status will help ease labor shortages in such areas as farming and nursing.

As of the end of October 2017, the number of interns in Japan totaled about 250,000. The government believes the new status will attract many interns and boost the number of foreign workers by at least several tens of thousands.

Industries suffering from a lack of labor, such as farming, nursing and construction, will be the main beneficiaries of the new measure.

The main purpose of the technical trainee program is for trainees to transfer skills acquired in Japan to their home country, meaning that participants must leave Japan after finishing the program.

But both trainees wanting to continue working in Japan and their employers have been calling for a change in the policy.

To keep the program running as intended, the new visa will only be granted to trainees who revisit Japan after having returned to their home countries for a specified period.

One requirement for foreigners who want to obtain permanent residency in Japan is to have lived continuously in the country for 10 years or more.HUNTER MOUNTAIN, NY -- TAP New York, the biggest annual beer event in the state, has been named the No. 5 best beer fest in the country by 10best.com, an affiliate of USA Today.

The news comes just in time for the 2018 edition of TAP New York, to be held April 28 and 29 at the Hunter Mountain ski center in the northern Catskills. Patrons can buy one or two-day tickets. Buy tickets.

A panel of beer experts initially picked the 20 finalists in the 10best.com survey. Then readers picked and ranked the Top 10. The final list of best U.S. beer fests:

Great American Beer Festival - Denver

Great Taste of the Midwest - Madison, Wis.

Atlantic City Beer & Music Festival - Atlantic City

The Festival - Location Varies

TAP New York Craft Beer and Food Festival - Hunter Mountain, N.Y.

Michigan Summer Beer Festival - Ypsilanti, Mich.

Tailspin Ale Fest - Louisville

Firestone Walker Invitational Beer Fest - Paso Robles, Calif.

Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines Festival - Breckenridge, Colo.

Dark Lord Day - Munster, Ind.

Here's what the 10best.com write-up on TAP New York had to say:

"One of New York State's largest craft beer and food events, TAP New York Craft Beer and Food Festival brings more than 120 breweries pouring over 400 beers to Hunter Mountain each April for two days of tastings, food pairings and beer competitions."

This year 127 breweries are registered to attend, pouring about 400 different beers. The event also features dozens of food vendors (food is included in the price of a ticket). This year's food theme is "Sandwiches From Around the World.

This is TAP's 21st year. It started in 1998 as the Hudson Valley Beer and Food Festival, and was held at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park with just nine brewers.

It moved to Hunter Mountain in 2000 (with about 25 breweries) and in 2001 changed its name to TAP New York. That's when it became a true statewide event, with brewers from Long Island to Buffalo. It hosted 117 brewers in 2016.

Along the way, TAP New York has grown from using one or two rooms at the resort to taking up just about all its indoor space and a bunch of outdoor tents, too.

Each year, TAP New York also awards prizes to the top breweries and beers in both the Hudson Valley and the state as a whole. The 2017 brewery winners were Spider Bite Brewing of Long Island as best in the state and Chatham Brewing as best in the Hudson Valley.

Don Cazentre writes about craft beer, wine, spirits and beverages for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.Honda says it has started a "different story" in formula one.

After three woeful seasons together, McLaren dumped Honda at the end of 2017.

The Japanese manufacturer went off to Toro Rosso, which could have been the start of a deeper collaboration with Red Bull Racing for 2019 and beyond.

And in Bahrain last weekend, the chances of that happening increased, as Pierre Gasly qualified sixth and finished fourth  Hondas best result since returning to F1 in 2015.

Spains El Confidencial quotes a reporter as asking new Honda technical director Toyoharu Tanabe if it is a relief to no longer be subject to Fernando Alonso and McLarens complaints.

"This year the story is different," the Japanese smiled as he answered.

So while McLarens fans wonder if the timing of the Honda split was right, Toro Rosso boss Franz Tost is in no doubt about his teams move.

"This result shows that being with Honda was the right decision," said Tost.

However, Hondas Tanabe said he wants more.

"I cannot afford to be satisfied with this result, because there were three retirements and a minute of difference to the first three," he said.

"We do not want to say great things now, as there is no choice but to keep climbing steps. Because we aspire to win and be number 1."Justin Welby and Muhammadu Buhari

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has revealed that the complex security situation in Nigeria was on the agenda, when he was hosted by President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday in London, UK .

Welby took to his Facebook page to provide highlights of their discussion.

The Nigerian Presidency had earlier circulated a statement detailing what it said both men discussed.

The update by Welby was accompanied by a photograph showing him presenting a copy of his book, Reimagining Britain: Foundations For Hope, to Buhari

Check Out The Full Statement By The Archbishop below:

"It was an honour to meet President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria in London today. We discussed the complex security situation in Nigeria and their governments efforts to address it, and I offered support in seeking a sustainable solution to the herder-farmer conflict.





"I expressed deep concern about the suffering resulting from raids on Christian communities and villages as far south as Delta State. We discussed the causes of such depredations, which have led to very many deaths and threaten an escalation of violence. I urged measures to restore confidence in the neutrality of the state, and spoke of the suffering of the poor in such tragedies.





"I also raised the urgent situation of Leah Sharibu  the 14-year old Dapchi Christian school girl still held captive by Boko Haram for refusing to convert to Islam  and urged the President to do everything possible to secure her release.





"I briefed President Buhari about my pastoral visit to Nigeria in 2014 following the abduction of the Chibok girls, and assured him of my continued prayers for the release of all those still in captivity. The President promised that the Government would do all in its power to secure their release.





"No country or society can flourish without excellent education  so it was good to speak with the President about how education helps tackle poverty. I highlighted the vital role that churches in England play not just in educating a million children, but in providing them with values, identity and purpose.





"Please join me in standing prayerfully with those suffering from the herder-farmer conflict, the Boko Haram insurgency, and all those mourning the loss of loved ones. Its so important that we pray for the peace and progress of Nigeria  and particularly for the liberating peace of Jesus to be with all those held in captivity."The Archbishop, Enugu Ecclesiastical Province (Anglican Communion), Most Rev. Emmanuel Chukwuma, has said that re-electing President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019 would perpetuate suffering and evil in the country.He, therefore, called on those fanning the embers of continuity to rethink their decision in the interest of the country and Buhari.Chukwuma, who reiterated his earlier call on Buhari to quit at the expiration of his tenure in 2019, stated that accepting to re-contest the position might lead to his disastrous end, as according to him, he has brought more tears and weeping on the people.Speaking with reporters yesterday in Enugu shortly after a service of songs in honour of the late Rev. Canon Chris Nwezi, held at St. Johns Anglican Church, Idaw River, Chukwuma expressed shock that President Buhari could contemplate to re-contest, saying such decision was a mockery on Nigeria.He said: I want to let you know that President Buhari declaring or not declaring is not anything to be feared. It is not anything that is new. Rather, he should know that it will lead to his disastrous end should he dare to re-contest. I have told him, he should go and rest.He has expired. All those yearning for him to continue are the people benefiting from him. He has not done anything to warrant his coming back to office. The way things are, we need a new wine in a new wine skin. I am against people who are coming out to perpetuate sufferings of the people and Buhari has shown that he cannot solve our problems. We need good governance. It does not matter the party you belong. All the people yearning to become president have all expired. They have no new thing to offer and we cannot continue to perpetuate failure and evil.Chukwuma urged Nigerians to intensify in prayers for God to intervene in the leadership of the country by removing all those who have continued to cause hardship and crisis, adding that it was not enough to release looters list but to prosecute those involved if the government was sure they were corrupt.In a related vein, Senior Advocate of Nigeria and constitutional lawyer, Chief Mike Ozekhome, has called on Nigerians to reject Buhari at the polls.The lawyer, who stated although Buhari has the constitutional right to contest for a second term, said he had performed abysmally and disastrously below average.The SAN, in a statement yesterday, also stressed that the second leg of Buharis campaign to stamp out insecurity did not happen.His words: At campaign rallies across Nigeria, he convinced gullible Nigerians that as a retired military General, he would lead from the front to crush Boko Haram. Indeed, he gleefully told a bemused country in December 2015 that Boko Haram had been technically defeated, and repeated it in 2016 that it had been beaten. But, Nigerians know that Boko Haram is stronger today, more potent and more deadly than it ever was.He had promised to fight corruption. Three years down the line, he has not secured a single conviction of any high-profile politically-exposed person.Victor Kolade, an All Progressives Congress, APC, governorship aspirant in Ekiti State has described the state Governor, Ayodele Fayose as...

Victor Kolade, an All Progressives Congress, APC, governorship aspirant in Ekiti State has described the state Governor, Ayodele Fayose as the most wasteful governor in the history of the state.





Kolade said Fayoses stomach infrastructure was nothing but a fraud, adding that people are still hungry in the state.





Addressing journalists in Abuja, on Wednesday, Kolade stated that Fayose was attempting to build a bridge that leads to nowhere.





Kolade said, Ekiti state was created in October 1996, but one thing that is certain is that there is no tangible development. You cannot see an improvement.





Anybody who visited the state when it was created and now, would agree with me that there is no substantial development.





The infrastructure that the governor is talking about is a farce. What he is talking about stomach infrastructure is nothing but a fraud. One thing I have always told my audience is that the human capital in Ekiti is not developed.





The sitting governor has done a bridge and has not completed it. As of today, he has spent N20 billion and has not completed it. He keeps on reviewing the cost.





If you want to go the Ghadaffi way and you divide this money by the 2.5 million people in Ekiti, each of us would be entitled to about N4 million.





Now, if you take N1.6 billion for instance and give N100 million to each of the 16 local governments and then form co-operatives, you then ask people to access the loans, you would have created more millionaires in the state.





The bridge is so long that no one will even use it except few people travelling very far because underneath it, there are so many easy outlets that motorists can use.





The three problems we have are; government is the only employer of labour. There are no factories. If you do not work with the government, you work in the hotel, filling station, the saw mill or you are an Okada rider. It is mostly a civil service state.





If we had successive governments and they were not able to discern that this burden should be taken off the shoulders of government, then what are we talking about? Successive governments in Ekiti state have failed.





The second problem we have is hunger. We farm so much but so well we are hungry. It is like 90 percent of everybody in the state is a farmer even while doing government work, but hunger is still prevalent in the land.





You remember how someone was cooking, went inside in the house and by the time she came out, the food had been stolen from the fire. It happened in Ekiti state.





It is like this because there is no government interference in farming. Farmers till the ground hopelessly. They farm on lands that have been farmed consistently by several generations earlier on.



The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has revealed its major challenge in the course of organizing the annual University Ter...

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has revealed its major challenge in the course of organizing the annual University Tertiary Matriculation Examination, UTME.





The exam body said one of the greatest challenges it had was the involvement of candidates in exam malpractices and fraud.





The registrar of the board, Ishaq Oloyede, said this during a meeting with the Itse Sagay led Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption in Abuja on Wednesday





He said most parents have gone haywire in their various activities of making sure their wards passed the examination at all cost.





A candidate was caught here for impersonation. He agreed he did it that he was writing for his brother and their mother was aware. And when a call was put through to the mother, she said she is a prophetess. This is an example among others, he said.





Mr Oloyede decried the use of religion to achieve non-religious issues.





My two years here have been more stressful than my cumulative years in the university system. None of my superiors ever asked me to do what is wrong since I became a registrar, Mr Oloyede said.





The board will open an account too and any candidate who pays into the account for fraudulent activities will be disqualified from writing the examination, he hinted.





According to him, out of 1,840,225 candidates who wrote the examination, only 800,000 have the 5 credits minimum requirements for Olevel.



Shehu Sani, the senator representing Kaduna Central Senatorial district in the National Assembly has raised the alarm over killings and kidnappings in the state.Sani accused the Kaduna state government of concealing massive killing of citizens in the state, adding that the state is unsafe as Benue and Taraba which are currently being controlled by herdsmen.According to him, poor residents of the state bury their loved ones daily and pay heavy ransom to herdsmen.The lawmaker disclosed this in a series of tweets on his Twitter page.He wrote, Kaduna state is as unsafe as Benue, Zamfara and Taraba states. Birnin Gwari bothering Zamfara and Niger state is controlled by heavily armed bandits or herdsmen who are killing both soldiers and civilians.Kidnaping & killing are a daily occurrence. Anything short of this is a lie.The mass killings & kidnappings going on in parts of Kaduna state are systematically suppressed in order not to embarrass the state and the federal government.Poor people keep burying their dead with tears & others paying heavy ransom to herdsmen. The victims are expected to praise government for trying.Who are the killer-herdsmen? They are gunmen trained by the late Libyan President Muammar Gadaffi, President Muhammadu Buhari said yeste...

Who are the killer-herdsmen? They are gunmen trained by the late Libyan President Muammar Gadaffi, President Muhammadu Buhari said yesterday.The President spoke at the Abuja House in London when Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby visited him.The gunmen, he said, escaped into Nigeria and other West African countries after Gadaffis death.He spoke, even as suspected herdsmen killed 13 people in Benue and Nasarawa states on Tuesday.Responding to Welbys comment on the herdsmen and farmers clashes in some parts of the country, Buhari said: The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region.They were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram.Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons. The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions.The President said irresponsible politics had been brought into the farmers/herders crisis, promising that enduring solutions would be found, and justice done to all concerned.He said he declared his second-term bid on Monday before his London trip because many Nigerians were talking too much about whether he was going to run or not.A statement by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, quoted him as saying: I declared before leaving home because Nigerians were talking too much about whether I would run or not.So, I felt I should break the ice. We have many things to focus on, like security, agriculture, economy, anti-corruption, and many others. We needed to concentrate on them, and politics should not be a distraction.The majority of Nigerians appreciate what we are doing, and that is why I am re-contesting.On Leah Sharibu, the Dapchi schoolgirl still being held by insurgents, reportedly because she refused to renounce her faith, the President said: We are managing the matter quietly. Making noise would not help. We are collecting as much intelligence as possible, working with the Red Cross and other international organisations.There are too many fraudulent people around, who claim they can do this and that. We wont deal with them. That was how we got the Dapchi girls back, and the Chibok girls.The President also recounted some successes of his administration, especially in agriculture.We have cut the importation of rice by about 90%, saving billions of dollars in the process. People who rushed into petrol money have now gone back to agriculture. Even professionals have gone back to the land. Nigeria should be able to feed itself comfortably soon. I am so pleased, he said.On the war against insurgency, he stressed the need for continuous education of the people, so that they can be free from religious manipulation, adding that no true religion advocates the hurting or killing of the innocent.Archbishop Welby said it was always a delight to see President Buhari, whom I have tremendous respect for, adding: You have my best wishes on your recent decision. I read your declaration speech. We are neutral as a church, but we will pray for you. Great statesmen are those who run for the good of their country. We will be praying for you.The Archbishop presented President Buhari with a copy of his recent book: Reimagining Britain. Foundations for Hope.House of Representatives on Thursday mandated the Nigerian Police to investigate the Offa, Kwara State robbery attacks on banks and bring the perpetrators to justice.It also mandated its Committee on Police to unravel the circumstances of the robbery.The resolution came on the heels of a motion titled Motion on the lost of about 30 lives and 50 persons injured in Bank Robbery in Offa, Kwara State on Thursday 5th April, 2015. Need for Urgent Intervention , sponsored by Hon. Olayonu Tope from Kwara State.Moving the motion, Tope recalled the gruesome murder of several police personnel, bankers and many other Nigerians in the attacks, saying it was against their constitutional rights to life.He said: The House notes there was a deadly armed robbery attack in Offa, Kwara State on Thursday, 5th April, 2018 where a gang of heavily armed robbers numbering about 30 in a convoy of about 10 vehicles invaded the town.Aware that the robbers commenced their dastardly action with the invasion of the Police Station in the town where about 16 policemen were killed before descending on the citizens and banks, where innocent citizens including bankers were also killed with no visible restriction.Concerned that the security system could be easily overwhelmed and personnel gruesomely killed in security facility is an issue that calls for serious concernAlso aware that the citizens have right to security and right to life as guaranteed in the Nigeria Constitution Section 33(1) and this cannot be undermined.Contributing to the motion, the deputy speaker of the House, Hon. Yusuf Lasun said the attacks had semblance of the early days of boko haram, warning that the situation may degenerate if left unchecked.He feared that the situation may affect the peace of Osun State especially with the gubernatorial elections barely 3 months away.My mind went straight to the stages boko haram took before going to insurgency. You have an institution right in the heart of offa where there are cult activities. You can separate what what in Offa from the fact that there is an institution there and how boko haram started.Let me remind us that Offa is the second largest city in kwara state which goes to show that if the economy of Offa is down, it means that the economy is Kwara State is down too. By September this year, in Osun we shall be going into governorship election and we are nearer to Offa, he said.Also speaking, Hon. Beni Lar (Plateau) asked that If the banks in this country are not save where in Nigeria today is safe.Also Hon. Nkiru Onyejiocha (Abia) said that the attacks on the station was a sad commentary on the security architecture of the country.Of all places, if armed can go to police station, this is part of why we voted this government, insecurity. It is a sad commentary. I urge that Police Committee should go on and investigate this matter, she said.On his part, Hon. Toby Okechukwu (Enugu) said that the responsibility of the government to discharge this security functions has been abdicated.Adopting the motion, the House also urged the Police to ensure adequate security to other sites and locations of Nigeria.Shehu Sani, the Senator representing Kaduna Central has alleged that some governors were responsible for the mass murder executed by Fulani herdsmen in some parts of Nigeria.The lawmaker in a series of tweets on his Twitter page, said Governors operating the policy of conditional cash transfer were the cause of herdsmen killings in the country.Sani urged the federal government to treat such governors as a national security risk.His tweets read, The roots of Herdsmen mass murder and kidnappings in other parts of Nigeria is in the policy of Paying Fulani Herdsmen by some Governors.They appeased a monster with public funds and now the monster is going door to door;Sahel,Savanna and mangrove forests.Any Governor of a state operating the policy of Conditional Cash transfer to Killer Herdsmen is their patron. And he must be seen and treated as a national security risk.Kathryn Blackshear said she didn't know what to pray for before Paymon Rouhanifard arrived in Camden.

But she freely admitted Wednesday evening her "prayers had been answered."

"He's the most outgoing superintendent we've had here in the time I've been on the school board," Blackshear said. "He's just what Camden needed."

Blackshear said she was surprised and saddened earlier in the day when she learned Rouhanifard was stepping down as the district superintendent at the end of the school year with two years remaining on his contract. In five years, Rouhanifard was greatly credited with leading a turnaround of a district that was failing by just about every objective measure and had been taken over by the state.

"I realized I was seen as the face of the takeover," Rouhanifard said Wednesday during a phone conversation as he drove back to Camden after handing his resignation to the state secretary of education. "But this is the best job I've ever had. It has been unbelievably fulfilling. But I'm also tired. It has been grueling."

Rouhanifard said he's proud the district has cut its dropout rate from 21 percent to 11, and that only eight of 18 public schools are performing in the bottom 5 percent of achievement in the state now. That compares to 23 of 26 schools that were bottom performers when he arrived. The district also boast of nearly tripling K-8 math proficiency in three years; and more than doubling proficiency in reading in the same time. It also cites a 17-point rise in the district's graduation rate - up from 49 percent in 2012 to 66 in 2017.

Yet critics, including some public teachers' union leaders, accuse Rouhanifard of presiding over the dismantling of the public school system. Public schools were reduced by almost a third, from 26 to 18, while more than half of the city's 15,000 students receiving a public education go to the 11 renaissance and 11 charter schools operating in the city. Renaissance schools are a publicly funded, privately operated community schools.

Rouhanifard was also in the middle of a battle over demolishing the century-old Camden High School over the objections of community and alumni who hailed the architectural and historic significance of the building. But he said the district has fought to incorporate elements of the old structure in the new $136 million construction of a state of he art Camden High School scheduled to open in 2021.

Rouhanifard, 36, said he doesn't want to just walk away now.

"I want to do a slow fade," he said.

He and his wife welcomed the birth of a baby girl, Ava, six weeks ago and he said spending more time with her, his wife and 4-year-old son, Jonah, are the prime concerns he has going forward.

But he also said the kids of Camden also remain on his mind.

"Our kids are tired of being pathologized and capturing negative headlines in the paper," he said. "There's greatness in the city. I'm proud that we could play a small role in steadily changing the perception of the city."

Bill Duhart may be reached at bduhart@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @bduhart. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tipsBy Erin Petenko | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

You're stuck in the 7 a.m. Jersey jam, head on the wheel, wondering why you live so far from your job.

You want to lay on the horn, but let's be honest, it won't get you there -- or to the weekend -- any sooner.

Then you begin to wonder: Where the heck are all these other people going, anyway?

Now, we've got a map for that.

Nearly half of the state's workers leave their home county to go to work each day, making it the third-highest traveled state in the nation, according to the most recent Census data. Those 1.9 million commuters keep the economy humming, while putting enormous pressure on the state's road and mass transit systems.

We've told you the towns in the longest commute times.

We've told you the towns with the shortest.

But now, for the first time, we can see where everyone is actually going.

Using the map below, click or hover over each county to see where commuters end up each day. Notice how far people are willing to drive for New York versus Philadelphia.

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More than 500,000 people travel to another state every day. As expected, New York City is the top destination, far ahead of Philadelphia and other portions of Pennsylvania, as well as Delaware and Connecticut. Significant flows of people head to New York from as far as Camden County.

The reach of Philadelphia, however, does not extend nearly as far to the north.

"We're right next to one of the planet's largest employment centers," said David Behrend, a spokesperson for the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority. "And with the high housing costs and cost of living in New York, it's not surprising that a large number of people are going to live outside of the city."

Within New Jersey, Middlesex and Essex counties each receive more than 100,000 people each day. In terms of the biggest flows, check out the lines running from Hudson and Bergen counties to New York City.

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A note about the data: From the 2009-2013 Census snapshot for commuting flow, which is the most recent available data. Travel routes with a large margin of error were excluded.

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Read more NJ.com data reportingProsecutors in Los Angeles are reviewing sexual assault allegations against actor Kevin Spacey, NBC reports.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department presented the case, which is being reviewed by the Los Angeles County District Attorney Office's Sex Crimes Task Force, to prosecutors on April 5, according to the report.

The incident described in the case concerns an adult male and allegedly took place in 1992 in West Hollywood, according to a BuzzFeed report. Police started investigating the case in December.

In the wake of stories about sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein last year, a number of men claimed that Spacey had assaulted or sexually harassed them. As a result, Spacey, 58, was dropped from his starring role on the Netflix series "House of Cards" and all of his scenes in the movie "All the Money in the World" were reshot with Christopher Plummer.

Spacey, born in South Orange, was an Oscar winner and enjoyed a long, successful career before actor Anthony Rapp came forward with allegations against the actor. In October, Rapp claimed that Spacey had made sexual advances toward him in 1986, when he was 14 and the actor was 26, climbing on top of him.

"If I did behave as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior," Spacey tweeted at the time, going on to come out as gay in the same statement. Many criticized Spacey for trying to deflect from Rapp's allegations.

More allegations followed, stretching as far back as the 1970s, with men claiming Spacey has groped them or made unwanted advances, including Harry Dreyfuss, son of actor Richard Dreyfuss (he said Spacey groped him when he was 18 while his father was in the same room reading lines in a script). Multiple performers who worked at the Old Vic theater in London, where Spacey had served as a artistic director for a decade, also came forward with allegations -- eventually, 20 people there made claims against Spacey.

In November, London police launched an investigation of Spacey for an alleged sexual assault in 2008.

One man also alleged that when he was 14, he had a sexual relationship with Spacey that ended in an attempted rape.

In November, Heather Unruh, a former news anchor in Boston, alleged that Spacey groped her 18-year-old son's crotch in 2016 after offering him alcohol. She said her son filed a complaint with Nantucket police.

Shortly after Netflix shut down production in the wake of the Spacey allegations, multiple "House of Cards" employees also made allegations against Spacey, with a production assistant claiming that the actor had stuck his hand down his pants as he drove to the set.

"I was in a state of shock," the man told CNN. "He was a man in a very powerful position on the show and I was someone very low on the totem pole and on the food chain there."

Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.JERSEY CITY -- A 26-year-old has been arrested for his connection with a drug den that was raided across the street from St. Peter's University last month.

Luis Garcia, whose 100 Glenwood Ave. is where police recovered more than $30,000 worth of drugs and six guns, turned himself into police this week.

He is the eighth person to be charged in connection with the raid by the Jersey City Police Department on March 27.

Authorities alleged Luis Garcia, 24, Kelvin Lopez, 24, Siul Garcia, 28, Carlos Cepeda, 37, Henry Abad-Batista, 34, Jesus Garcia, 22, Jason Robles, 28, and Trevor Gonzalez, 25, secured the apartment with a metal steel frame door and latch. Three dogs were also tasked with protecting the drugs, court records indicate.

The state had filed for pretrial detention against the men, but a superior court judge denied that request for all of the men charged with the exception of Carlos Cepeda.

Cepeda is alleged to be the person who was in charge of the drug operation, according to the charges lodged against him.

Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.-JERSEY CITY  Mayor Steve Fulop's plan to bar recreational marijuana sales citywide before coming up with pot-friendly zones lives for another day, with the City Council last night moving to postpone a vote on the controversial proposal.

The council voted 8-1 to set aside the measure, which was scheduled for a final vote last night. Councilman-at-large Daniel Rivera, who supports Fulop's plan, was the only no vote.

The action came after the council heard impassioned pleas from residents who questioned the mayor's proposed ban, which would also apply to growing and distributing recreational marijuana. Fulop has said if state lawmakers legalize weed, the city should have a say in where the industry can be located.

Venus Smith, 39, of Jersey City, said the ban would scare off cannabis investors.

"We don't want to push them all to Newark," Smith said.

Fulop's plan has attracted the interest of the ACLU of New Jersey. Its director, Amol Sinha, said in a statement that the proposal "defies logic."

"The current illegality of marijuana makes the ban unnecessary," Sinha said. "If the city wants to take advantage of economic opportunity for its residents when marijuana is legalized, taxed and regulated in our state, the ban would need to be reversed."

As Gov. Phil Murphy tries to convince lawmakers to approve his plans to legalize recreational weed, Jersey City appears to be the only city that claims to be in favor but is making moves to ban it first. Jersey Shore locations like Point Pleasant Beach and Shrewsbury are anti-legalization and have banned recreational pot sales, while Asbury Park officials have expressed support of marijuana dispensaries in their city.

Brian Platt, who was appointed last night to replace Bob Kakoleski as the city's business administrator, reiterated the administration's position on recreational marijuana. The city does not intend for there to be a blanket prohibition, but wants an initial ban to "make sure that we're protecting ourselves and not letting this move forward without doing our homework."

It's not clear when the proposal will come back before the council for a final vote.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.Robert Max, the last living American to have escaped and survived Nazi forced labor, will be the featured speaker when Bayonne pays tribute to those killed and the survivors of the Holocaust tonight.

The annual Holocaust Remembrance Service, sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) Federation of Bayonne and the Bayonne Interfaith Clergy, is scheduled for 6 p.m. in the Dorothy Harrington City Council Chambers at 630 Ave. C. Mayor Jimmy Davis is the honorary chairman of the program.

Max, 94, author of the book "The Long March Home: An American Soldier's Life as a Nazi Slave Laborer," will speak about his wartime experiences.

Captured behind enemy lines by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, Max was not registered as a prisoner of war (POW) and much of the treatment he received violated the international laws of the Geneva Convention.

He was imprisoned for 68 days -- and lost 66 pounds -- before he made a daring escape along with two other American prisoners while on a forced march. The soldiers were fortunate to find a German family who helped them. After the escape, an emaciated Max weighed just 89 pounds and spent nearly a year recovering in hospitals.

Max said he kept a Star of David on the chain that held his dog tags, but he was able to avoid showing them to the Nazis, and they never found out he was Jewish.

Max has been awarded the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster, three Bronze Campaign Battle Stars, and the New Jersey Distinguished Service Medal.

For more than three decades, this memorial program has taken place in the City Council Chambers at 630 Ave. C, Bayonne. The program is free and open to the public.A former Wall Township schools superintendent will continue to spend his golden years behind bars, after an appellate panel upheld his conviction and 5-year prison sentence on charges he claimed to be working while actually spending time at his Florida vacation home, the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office announced Wednesday.

James Habel, now 61, was indicted in 2013 and two years later was convicted of official misconduct and falsifying public records following a trial in State Superior Court.

Prosecutor Christopher Gramiccioni's office had charged Habel with bilking the Wall school district out of about $240,000 by fraudulently cashing in more than 100 vacation and sick days, fudging vehicle mileage, and failing to return an iPad and other electronics owned by the district following his retirement.

Prosecutors said Habel falsely claimed to have accrued nearly 550 unused days off and to have taken only four vacation days out of about 2,000 days on the job, even though he spent many of those "unused" days relaxing at a home he owned in Dunedin, Florida.

Habel and a new lawyer appealed his conviction and sentence on several grounds: that his trial lawyer, Robert Honecker, a former assistant county prosecutor, had a conflict of interest; that the trial judge, Francis J. Vernoia, gave improper instructions to the jury; that the misconduct conviction lacked sufficient evidence; that the prosecutor committed misconduct; and that the prison term imposed by the sentencing judge, Judge Ronald L. Reisner, was excessive.

Reisner, who is now retired himself, sentenced Habel in December 2015 to five years behind bars with no possibility of parole, barred him from ever again holding office in New Jersey, and revoked his state pension and retirement benefits. Habel entered the Southern State Correctional Facility on Dec. 4, 2015, and has been held there ever since.

In the panel's decision on Wednesday, Gramiccioni's office said, Appellate Division Judges Douglas Fasciale, Thomas W. Sumners, Jr., and Scott J. Moynihan rejected each of the assertions by Habel's appeals lawyer, Edward Bertucio.

Bertucio said in an interview Wednesday that his client had not exhausted the appeals process, and would take his case to the state Supreme Court or seek post-conviction relief.

"It is the intention of Dr. Habel to continue to fight," Bertucio said.

Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.One afternoon in late 2017, a Newark couple arrived home from a short visit with a cousin in Virginia. They texted to let her know they were back safe - along with the five new semi-automatic handguns they'd just bought with her there.

"Omg please don't be carving bodies," the cousin, an active-duty U.S. Navy member wrote. "My name on them thangssssss lol."

"Lol nah we not crazy ass," Azia Sinclair, 28, of Newark texted back.

Five hours later, police in Orange responded to call for gunfire and made an arrest. At the scene, they recovered one of the handguns the couple purchased the morning before, nearly 400 miles away.

Months later, the trio - Sinclair, her cousin Tesora Trejorojas, 23, of Norfolk and her boyfriend Shyheim Tyson, 22 - have been charged federally with illegally transporting the guns from Norfolk, Virginia to Newark.

The deal started in a text conversation, a criminal complaint in the case shows.

On November 1, 2017, Sinclair asked her cousin Trejorojas, who's in the Navy, about buying a gun. It was taking her too long to get a license in New Jersey, she said.

It wouldn't be a problem for Trejorojas, who's full name is Tesora Amanda Cortes Trejorojas, because active military members didn't need a gun license to purchase a firearm in the state, she told Sinclair.

The cousins texted for a while, and soon Sinclair said her sister wanted in on it too.

"Lol a gun?" Trejorojas shot back.

"I told her how ima get one and her crazy ass got excited like tell cousin I want some too," Sinclair sent. The sister was not identified.

Late on November 10, 2017, Sinclair and her boyfriend, Tyson, who is known as "Shy" drove down to Norfolk with enough cash for multiple weapons.

On November 11, Sinclair, Tyson and Trejorojas visited a gun store where they picked out six semiautomatic handguns.

They only had enough cash for five, and they bought three Smith & Wesson M&P 40 Shield.40 caliber models, and two Smith & Wesson M&P 9 Shield 9-millimeter models.

They also left with 100 rounds of .40 caliber ammunition, and 100 rounds of 9-millimeter ammunition, court documents say.

Trejorojas signed the required federal forms indicating she was the actual owner, even though she was not, authorities allege.

Sinclair and Tyson drove home to New Jersey on November 12 and 35 minutes after their arrival in the state, the complaint says, Sinclair's cell phone made a video of Tyson defacing the serial number of one of the handguns. (Authorities found the video during a later search)

And less than five hours later than that, one of the guns was in police custody, seized at the Orange crime scene.

Last month, law enforcement searched Sinclair's residence in Newark and found one of the other guns purchased in Norfolk. And on Thursday, Trejorojas was charged and appeared in federal court in Virginia.

On March 8, Trejorojas admitted to federal investigators she bought the guns for Sinclair and Tyson, and they took them back to New Jersey. And Sinclair admitted the same during the search of her home, the complaint says.

Paige Gross may be reached at pgross@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @By_paigegross. Find NJ.com on Facebook.WASHINGTON -- The U.S. House on Tuesday approved legislation to improve the collection of railroad safety data.

The bill was introduced in response to the the September 2016 fatal train crash at Hoboken Terminal.

And it's the first piece of legislation by freshman Rep. Josh Gottheimer to pass the chamber. The Democrat took office in January 2017.

Under the measure, the Federal Railroad Administration would be required to follow the recommendations of the U.S. Department of Transportation's inspector general designed to make it easier to uncover safety problems.

Gottheimer introduced the FRA Safety Data Improvement Act in February shortly after the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the Hoboken crash on the engineer's fatigue due to undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea.

Better reporting of data will make it easier to track safety problems, Gottheimer said.

"Our roads and rails in New Jersey and across our country are literally crumbling -- and our rail safety is way behind where it should be," Gottheimer said. "We can't play partisan games with the safety of our children and family."

Gottheimer's bill was the second one addressing railroad safety and security that has passed the House in recent weeks.

Last month, the House approved a bill by Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman to require the Transportation Security Administration to establish priorities in protecting railroad and transit systems.

"Surface transportation systems are absolutely vital to the daily lives of millions of Americans," said Watson Coleman, D-12th Dist. "Given their critical importance, it is no surprise that terrorists have targeted these systems for attack."

An attempted terrorist bombing occurred in December in a passenger tunnel connecting the New York City subways to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Four people, including the suspected bomber, were injured.

Just days later, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress said the TSA did not know where the highest security risks to the nation's rail systems were.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.Tim Eustace, the second openly gay person ever elected to the New Jersey Legislature, will resign from the state Assembly on Friday, he confirmed to NJ Advance Media.

Eustace, a Bergen County Democrat who has served in the Legislature's lower house since 2012, said Wednesday he's "moving on to a different position" -- though he declined to say what the job is.

"I've been honored and privileged to serve the people of New Jersey," the 61-year-old Maywood resident said. "We've gotten some great stuff done."

Politico New Jersey was the first to report the news.

Eustace was Maywood's mayor from 2008 to 2011, when he was elected to represent north Jersey's 38th legislative district -- which includes parts of Bergen and Passaic counties -- in the Assembly.

He is one of only two openly gay members of the Legislature. Assemblyman Reed Gusciora, D-Mercer, was the first. Gusciora came out in 2006, 10 years after his election.

Eustace and his late partner, Kevin Williams, gained national attention in the late 1980s when they became New Jersey's first openly gay couple to apply to the state for joint adoption.

They adopted three children, all of whom had contracted HIV.

Eustace was elected to his fourth term in the Assembly in November.

But though he's a major supporter of the environment, he was replaced as chairman of the Assembly's environment committee in January.

That came after he backed former Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto, D-Hudson, in the battle for who would be speaker as a new term rolled around in January. New Speaker Craig Coughlin, D-Middlesex, won out.

Eustace was also recently passed over for a state Senate seat when veteran Sen. Robert Gordon resigned to become a member of the state Board of Public Utilities.

Democratic committee members in the district are expected to vote Wednesday night for Eustace's district mate, Assemblyman Joseph Lagana, D-Bergen, to fill Gordon's seat instead.

Eustace denied that either of those developments played a role in his decision to step down from the Assembly.

"Hopefully, I'm a bigger man than that," he said.

Eustace's resignation means Democratic committee members in the district will also vote on someone to fill Eustace's Assembly seat until a special election in November for the remaining year of his term.

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey must turn over a consultant's report that guided the company in creating OMNIA, the influential insurance plans that excluded half of the hospitals in the state from sharing in the most lucrative benefits, a state judge ruled this week.

State Superior Court Judge Robert P. Contillo, sitting in Bergen County, rejected Horizon's request to keep the consultant report by McKinsey & Company and other related documents under seal. The report is key evidence in a lawsuit filed by three hospitals. A trial is set to begin soon.

NJ Advance Media, which provides content to NJ.com, The Star-Ledger and other affiliated newspapers, sued to obtain a copy of the McKinsey report, arguing OMNIA was created to shake-up New Jersey's health care marketplace and the public had a right to know how the plans were created.

Contillo agreed. Horizon must turn the records over next week, according to his Tuesday opinion.

"Nothing I deal with...has a more immediate, acute public impact than these matters. This is no mere private dispute -- it is infused with broad public impact and it is of legitimate public interest," Contillo wrote.

"Horizon hopes to transform the way health care is delivered and paid for here in New Jersey, with a focus on quality and cost containment," Contillo's decision said. "The public interest is not confined to what Horizon says about how it structured OMNIA and created Tier 1 and 2, or awarded participation, but also how it hopes to achieve these goals, by incentivizing value-based, result-based health care at the alleged expense of those network partners designated as Tier 2."

Horizon insures 3.8 million of New Jersey's 9 million residents, and Horizon intended to change the insurance landscape by offering a new line of plans that promised discounts to people willing to use a set of hospitals and physicians.

There are 238,000 OMNIA policy holders, according to information Horizon released last year. When the plans were unveiled in 2015, consumers paid about 15 percent less in premium costs than for Horizon's other product lines. Premiums rose significantly this year, which Horizon attributed to the uncertain future of the Affordable Care Act under the Trump administration.

OMNIA policy holders also potentially save thousands of dollars more in copays and deductibles by using 39 "tier 1" hospitals and medical professionals, which have agreed to accept lower reimbursements in exchange for higher patient volume. Consumers can use "tier 2" hospitals and doctors but they will pay more to do so.

Horizon spokesman Kevin McArdle expressed disappointment in the decision.

"Horizon is disappointed with the Court's ruling as it permits public dissemination of information that the New Jersey Supreme Court has previously recognized as protected and that is critical to defending the interests of the policyholders we exist to serve," McArdle said.

"The company has always been clear and transparent about why it created OMNIA - to make high quality medical insurance more affordable to New Jersey families. Horizon respectfully disagrees with the Court's ruling and plans to appeal this decision."

Kevin Whitmer, vice president of Content at NJ Advance Media, hailed Judge Contillo's opinion.

"Horizon went to the wall to keep the public in the dark and also launched an ugly and mean-spirited attack on the principles of a free press," Whitmer said. "Judge Contillo saw Horizon's actions for what they were, and we now look forward to sharing with the public how and why these decisions were made."

NJ Advance Media is represented by the law firm of Robinson Miller LLC of Newark.

The case stems from a lawsuit brought by a handful of hospitals angry they had been relegated to tier 2 status, arguing they are losing money and ultimately may have to downsize, merge or close. The hospitals are suing for the right to be included among the tier 1 hospitals.

Michael Furey, the attorney for Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, Valley Hospital in Ridgewood and CentraState Medical Center in Freehold, hailed the judge's decision.

"With Judge Contillo's decision, the public should finally have an opportunity to learn the truth behind OMNIA," Furey said. "He saw through Horizon's baseless claims of confidentiality and recognized the public's interest in acquiring an understanding of how OMNIA was formed, the selection of the Tier 1 hospitals, and the efforts of Horizon to direct its insureds to the Tier 1 hospitals and away from the Tier 2 hospitals.

"If Horizon truly believes that healthcare is an important issue to the public, then it should stop its efforts to hide the documents that explain what happened and comply with the Court's order directing their release," Furey said.

Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.Gov. Phil Murphy didn't do what his predecessor, Chris Christie, might have done.

A day after state Senate President Stephen Sweeney said he's holding up the confirmation of the governor's two nominees to oversee education in New Jersey, Murphy responded not by hammering Sweeney or denouncing him by name.

Instead, Murphy said Thursday that the nominees -- Lamont Repollet for education commissioner and Zakiya Smith Ellis for higher education secretary -- are "extraordinary individuals" and that "there's no reason not to confirm" them.

And he noted that both of those picks are African-Americans with doctoral degrees.

"Folks need to look up Lamont Repollet and Zakiya Smith Ellis because we have two African-American Ph.Ds on our nominated cabinet," Murphy said during an unrelated event in Montclair.

The remarks drew cheers from a crowd that included many African-American officials.

"It's the most diverse cabinet ever nominated in our state, and it's the most diverse cabinet in the country," added the governor, who then pointed to Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver -- the first African-American woman to hold statewide office -- who was seated to his left.

"I'm incredibly proud of everybody, beginning with my partner to the left, and I'm certainly proud of the two of them," Murphy said of Oliver and the two nominees. "I just hope that they get confirmed as soon as possible."

Murphy also noted that the country recently celebrated Black History Month and that he was once a member of the national board of the NAACP.

Sweeney, a fellow Democrat, was surprised by the governor's remarks.

"I can't believe he said that," Sweeney, D-Gloucester, said after a Senate voting session at the Statehouse in Trenton on Thursday. "It has nothing to do with race. It has to do with school funding."

Sweeney told NJ Advance Media on Wednesday that he is holding off on having the state Senate vote to confirm Repollet and Smith Ellis because he wasn't satisfied with answers they've given about how to fix the state's controversial school funding formula and how to make college more affordable here.

Sweeney said he expects both nominees to eventually get confirmed but added that he's "entitled to get my questions answered."

Repollet is the former superintendent of Asbury Park schools. He has a doctorate in educational leadership from Nova Southeastern University.

Smith Ellis was an education policy advisor for then-President Barack Obama. She has a doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania.

Both have been serving in an acting capacity and can continue to do so even if the Senate doesn't vote on their confirmation.

This is the latest disagreement -- and maybe the most unusual -- between Murphy and Sweeney, the state's top two elected officials.

The men have had a shaky relationship since Murphy took office in January, even though they're both Democrats. But they need to be on the same page to institute initiatives in New Jersey like a higher minimum wage, a new tax on millionaires, and legal marijuana.

Asked Thursday what this new episode says about their relationship, Murphy was curt.

"I think it says nothing about the relationship," the governor said."But these two folks need to be confirmed, and I'm confident they will be. Because they deserve it."

Sweeney said he's bothered by how Repollet said during a recent hearing that may take six to eight months to implement changes to school funding in New Jersey.

The Senate president said Thursday that's "unacceptable."

"We want to fix school funding, and we want to fix it now," Sweeney said. "I'm bringing the issue to a head."

Sweeney wants to fully fund New Jersey's school funding formula and remove all caps and limits on how much new aid a district can receive from one year to the next. He's willing to reallocate state aid from districts considered overfunded to districts considered underfunded.

Murphy vowed during last year's campaign to fully fund the formula. But he recently talked of of working with lawmakers to rework it -- though he hasn't detailed how.

Sweeney said he's encouraged that Murphy has scheduled a meeting on school funding with legislative leaders Friday.

But Sweeney added that he wants to remedy the situation before the new state budget takes effect July 1.

"There's a lot of things we agree on -- and we're going to agree on," Sweeney said of Murphy. "But I am not going to compromise and fold and run away when it comes to school funding. It's out of whack, it's been out of whack for too long, and it's been unfair to too many people."

Gov. Phil Murphy (left) and state Senate President Stephen Sweeney (right) shake hands in Trenton earlier this year.

NJ Advance Media staff writer Adam Clark contributed to this report.

Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewArco or Facebook.

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01.Just how damaged is New Jersey's Sen. Robert Menendez?

Well, a week ago, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez's re-election campaign sent out this challenge on Twitter.

-- Menendez for NJ (@Menendez4NJ)

Retweet if you agree with @CoryBooker and @PhilMurphyNJ - Bob Menendez is NJ's champion and should be reelected this November! pic.twitter.com/tc55DKvgAc  Menendez for NJ (@BobMenendezNJ) April 3, 2018

Just 40 of the Menendez campaign's 13,200 Twitter followers retweeted the message.

Menendez, whose federal bribery indictment ended in a mistrial last November, saw many of replies to the campaign's Twitter challenge do exactly opposite of what was hoped for: Dredging up fresh doubts from Democratic-leaning voters about whether the senator used his office to benefit a Florida eye doctor in exchange for lavish gifts.

Love Murphy love booker Menendez only cares about south Florida his rich donors and Puerto Rico time for a change!  Bradley G (@dmbfan52) April 4, 2018

Im concerned, he is solid on many things. Im unsure   Denise Mizrachi (@denise_mizrachi) April 4, 2018

The fact that you weren't convicted does not equal you are still qualified to hold such a prestigious office. Sorry, the other two are great. You spoiled it. Step aside.  Greg Heizler (@Gscotth54) April 4, 2018

Then, on Wednesday evening, Menendez's GOP rival, former Celgene executive Bob Hugin, made an unusual offer to Menendez' fellow Democrat, Rep. Frank Pallone, who's been blasting EPA chief Scott Pruitt as "the poster child for the Trump administration's shameful culture of corruption."

I call on Scott Pruitt to resign. @FrankPallone your turn on @SenatorMenendez #NJSen https://t.co/fslWHeSY0T

As of late Wednesday, there was no response from Pallone, Menendez, Booker or Murphy on Twitter.

A Quinnipiac University poll released last month had Menendez with a 17-point lead over Hugin, who's vowed to spend $20 million of his own money in the hopes of becoming the first Republican elected to the Senate from New Jersey in 45 years.

Menendez raised $5.9 million for his re-election and started the year with $4.1 million in the bank according to the most recent Federal Election Commission filings. He had twice that amount, $8.2 million, going into 2012, his last re-election campaign.

Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.WASHINGTON -- Here's why experts say President Donald Trump was dead wrong when he opposed funding for the Gateway tunnel project under the Hudson River.

The Northeast Corridor is "an economic crisis waiting to happen" unless the federal government helps pay to replace aging bridges, tunnels and railroad stations, an advocacy group warned federal lawmakers on Thursday.

At risk is a $3 trillion economy that depends on reliable rail service from Washington to Boston, said Drexel University President John Fry, representing the Washington-based Coalition for the Northeast Corridor, whose group includes business organizations and transportation companies.

The loss of the transportation network could cost the U.S. economy $100 million a day, said Fry, refuting Trump's contention that rebuilding a key part of the Northeast Corridor, the Gateway Tunnel project the Hudson River, was a local rather than national concern.

"The Northeast Corridor is simply crumbling," Fry told the House Appropriations transportation subcommittee. "In its current state, it is an economic crisis waiting to happen.

"This work must be done or our nation will be irreparably damaged."

Amtrak Executive Vice President Stephen Gardner said Gateway awaits a final environmental impact statement and is still on track to begin in 2019. Any further delay could add $1 million a day to its cost. The new tunnel is needed so the existing tubes can be closed to repair damage caused by Hurricane Sandy.

"There is no time to waste to do what needs to be done to move this project forward at full speed," Gardner said.

Construction of a new Portal Bridge over the Hackensack River could begin this year, now that full funding is available under the just-passed federal spending bill that boosted support for Amtrak and federal rail agencies, he said.

Trump at one point threatened to shut down the federal government rather than support federal funding for Gateway, even though he seemed inclined to back the project following a White House meeting with New Jersey and New York officials in September.

The final spending bill did not specifically allocate any money for Gateway but rather provided funds to other accounts that will be tapped to pay for construction.

While not mentioning Trump by name, Fry refuted his contention that Gateway was a local project that should be funded largely by New Jersey and New York.

"It would be a grave mistake to think of the dire problems facing the Northeast Corridor as just a regional challenger," Fry said. "The economic consequences of continued inaction are a problem for our entire nation."

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.A New York woman who suffered severe facial injuries after a NJ Transit train crashed into Hoboken Terminal in 2016 is the first passenger to settle a lawsuit against that railroad and Metro North, according to her attorney.

Megan D. McGuinness, was commuting to her job at Pace University in New York from Pearl River N.Y., on Sept. 29, 2016, when her train crashed in Hoboken Terminal. The crash killed a woman who was walking through the station and injured 110 people. The train sped up to 21 mph, twice the posted 10 mph speed limit as it entered the station.

The case was settled on April 10, for $475,000, before a trial was scheduled, said her attorney, Christopher L. Musmanno of Einhorn Harris in Denville. She sued NJ Transit and Metro North commuter railroad. Metro North contacts with NJ Transit to run its west of the Hudson River rail service, however Metro North made the settlement with McGuinness because she got on the train in New York State, officials said.



The laceration to McGuinness' face required 100 stitches and two surgeries, however, she still has no muscle control on the right side of her face.

McGuinness, who was 24 at the time, was sitting near the back of the second car when the train failed to stop and crashed through a concrete and steel barrier into the station. McGuinness was violently thrown around and a piece of flying metal cut through her face, Musmanno said.

"It was like slicing a steak completely through, it was horrific," he said. "Inside, it was like exploding a bomb inside the train."

She suffered an eight-centimeter laceration through her skin and muscle that left her lip hanging from her face after the crash, Musmanno said. She climbed out of an emergency window, dropped about 15 feet to the ground and walked bleeding to the station, where she was taken to Hoboken University Medical Center for immediate surgery, he said.

The first surgery left her with 100 stitches, however her facial nerves were severed. She had a second surgery last October, but she still has no muscle control on the right side of her face.

"From her lip to her chin, she has no feeling on one side of her face," Musmanno said. "She still has a problem drooling due to the damaged muscle and nerves. What she has now is permanent."

McGuinness was also studying at Pace for her graduate degree in early childhood education. While she is now teaching, her students ask about her scars and drooling problem, Musmanno said.

"She has to stand in front of first and second graders...who ask what's the matter with your face," he said. "It hasn't affected her ability to work because she's such a tough kid. She says she was involved in a bad accident."



McGuinness also has been treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder because of the crash.

"She can't ride a train anymore," he said.

The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the crash on engineer Thomas Gallagher's undiagnosed sleep apnea and the lack of a safety system called Positive Train Control which might has stopped the train.

The release of 79 documents on Sept. 21 by the NTSB said Gallagher was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea in a sleep study he underwent after the crash. He told investigators he had no recollection of the crash.

As of September 2017, NJ Transit had spent $91,000 to settle personal injury claims, a spokeswoman said. Both NJ Transit and Metro North officials declined to comment about the settlement.

NJ Transit faces at least five other law suits filed by passengers. They include a wrongful death suit brought by the family of Fabiola Bittar de Kroon, 34, of Hoboken, who was killed by falling debris while she walked through the terminal.

Another suit was filed by Sheldon Kest of Tenafly, who lost part of his middle finger and had cuts to his face and head. Musmanno said Kest may have been the passenger sitting next to McGuinness. Kest testified about his experience during a legislative hearing on NJ Transit safety.

Four other passengers, two from New Jersey and two from out-of-state also announced their intent to sue in October 2016.

Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @commutinglarry. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

A man who admitted robbing four TD Bank branches along the East Coast over two weeks last year was sentenced to almost 10 years in prison on Thursday.

In January 2017, Israel Cosme, 36, of Elizabeth robbed branches in:

Little Ferry, Bergen County

New York

Essex, Maryland

Baltimore, Maryland

Judge Esther Salas sentenced Cosme to 115 months, or nine years and seven months in prison at the sentencing in Newark federal court.

In the Bergen County robbery, Cosme demanded money from a teller and threatened to shoot her if she did not comply, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Newark said in a news release.

In the three robberies outside New Jersey, Cosme handed the tellers a note demanding money and stating that he had a gun.

Joe Brandt can be reached at jbrandt@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JBrandt_NJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tipsThe Times-Picayune is marking the tricentennial of New Orleans with its ongoing 300 for 300 project, running through 2018 and highlighting 300 people who have made New Orleans New Orleans, featuring original artwork commissioned by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune with Where Y'Art gallery. Today: Civil War hero Andre Cailloux.

The icon: Capt. Andre Cailloux.

The legacy: Port Hudson had to fall. That was the thinking. With Gen. Grant besieging Vicksburg upstream, if the Union Army was to secure unfettered access to the Mississippi River, it had to take Port Hudson, just above Baton Rouge. And so, on May 17, 1863, Capt. Andre Cailloux, a free man of color from New Orleans, led a regiment of fellow black soldiers in a charge against an entrenched Confederate position there as part of a larger Union siege. He wouldn't survive the day, becoming one of the first black battlefield casualties of the Civil War. His name would live on, though. Thousands turned out for his funeral in New Orleans, and his name would become a national rallying cry, used to recruit other black warriors to the cause -- and blowing holes in the myth that black soldiers weren't suited for battle.

The artist: D. Lammie Hanson.

The quote: "Both in life and in death, the strength and courage of Capt. Andre Cailloux, whose last name could be loosely translated as 'the Rock,' inspired and united people of African descent in their struggle for that new birth of freedom that Lincoln had so eloquently proclaimed." -- historian Stephen J. Ochs, in a 2013 article for The New York Times

Explore more of D. Lammie Hanson's work online at WhereYart.net and in person at the Where Y'Art gallery, 1901 Royal St.

Cailloux was born a slave on Aug. 25, 1825, on the Duvernay plantation in Plaquemines Parish.

Source: The Times-Picayune archive; The New York Times

More on 300 for 300:Toys 'R' Us stores in Metairie will officially close for business on Saturday (April 14). Two remaining Babies 'R' Us locations in the area remain open, though are expected to close in coming weeks.

Signs posted Wednesday at the Metairie store notified customers April 14 would be the store's last day. Shelves were mostly cleared and most of the aisles were cordoned off. A few remaining discounted items had been moved to the front of the store.

"Thank you and goodbye!" read a message on an empty store display, apparently written by an employee. It was signed with a heart and "TRU Metairie."

In March, Toys 'R' Us Inc. said it would close or liquidate all of its U.S. stores, including Babies 'R' Us locations. The company, struggling under heavy debt and flagging sales, filed for bankruptcy last fall. It had been gradually announcing store closures across the country before sharing with employees March 14 that it would close all its stores in a full liquidation.

The Toys 'R' Us location in Slidell has already closed. There are two remaining Babies 'R' Us stores in the New Orleans area, both in Metairie. It is not clear when the last day is for those stores, though it's likely to be before the end of May. An employee at one of the local Babies 'R' Us stores said the company has not yet shared an official closure date with local employees.

A Toys 'R' Us spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for additional information.

The photos below, shared by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune reporter Carlie Kollath Wells, were taken Wednesday at the Metairie store.NOPD is searching for a man who broke into the Saint Andrew the Apostle School in Algiers early Wednesday morning (April 11).

Security footage captured a man smashing windows out and breaking into the school around 4:53 a.m. The man caused significant damage to the school and stole numerous items from inside, police said.

In the wake of the burglary, the Catholic school canceled class Wednesday, calling the campus an "active crime scene." The school had reopened in time for Thursday class.

No injuries were reported in the break in.Rainy skies won't be the only concern for French Quarter Fest attendees. Mississippi River boaters at the fest should also prepare for hazardous conditions, the Coast Guard cautioned.

The spring snow melt has caused cresting waters that bring strong river currents and floating debris, the Coast Guard cautioned in a Wednesday (April 11) release.

"The river is a challenging place even for the experienced licensed mariner," warned Commander Zac Ford, head of the Sector New Orleans Response Department.

French Quarter Fest kicks off Thursday and runs through the weekend.Health officials are reaching out to certain WWE fans who may have come in contact with a British tourist who was hospitalized with measles last weekend, FOX 8 reports.

A source told FOX 8 that the tourist with measles attended the WWE Hall of Fame Event at the Smoothie King Center last Friday. State health officials are asking wrestling fans who attended the event to monitor their symptoms.

Kelly Zimmerman, a spokesperson for the Department of Health said that in the course of a public health investigation, the department notifies those who can help in the investigation.

"We notify the general public only when it is clinically appropriate. Our agency has been working to investigate where the patient visited. We are working to identify and notify those who may have come in contact with the patient and we are helping those individuals follow proper precautions to ensure their health and safety," she said in an emailed statement.

Measles is a highly contagious viral illness that can spread quickly among people who have not been vaccinated. In extreme cases, it can lead to hospitalization and even death.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, measles symptoms appear about seven to 14 days after a person is infected. It typically begins with high fever, cough, runny nose, and red, watery eyes. After three to five days a rash breaks out and usually begins as flat red spots.

FOX 8 reported that health authorities in England are also contacting passengers who traveled on the same flights as the tourist with measles. He was hospitalized on Saturday and tested positive for measles on Sunday in New Orleans.

Click here to read the full report on FOX 8.

Maria Clark writes about health, doctors, patients and healthcare in Louisiana for NOLA.com | The Times Picayune and NOLA Mundo. Reach her at mclark@nola.com or 504.258.5306. Or follow her on Twitter at @MariaPClark1 .From the get-go, Wendy Vitter's nomination to be a federal judge in New Orleans has been a lightning rod. Political conservatives and lawyers who worked with her praise her abilities, while left-wing interests decry her opposition to abortion and her failure on her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire to disclose some of her public statements on the issue. Cynics said the nomination was a favor to her husband, former Sen. David Vitter, R-La.

Now critics have seized new ammunition: She won't say whether the Supreme Court was right in 1954 to outlaw racially segregated public schools. She dodged the question when Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., asked during her Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday (April 11) whether she thinks Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., was correctly decided.

"Senator, I don't mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions, which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with," said Vitter, general counsel to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans. "That is Supreme Court precedent. It is binding. If I were honored to be confirmed, I would be bound by it and, of course I would uphold it."

Blumenthal asked again: "Do you believe it was correctly decided?"

"And again, I will respectfully not comment on what could be my bosses' ruling, the Supreme Court. I would be bound by it, and if I start commenting on I agree with this case or don't agree with this case, I think we get into a slippery slope. ... If I'm honored to be confirmed, I would be bound by Supreme Court precedent and would follow it, and 5th Circuit [Court of Appeals] precedent."

Vitter similarly sidestepped questions about Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973 decision legalizing abortion. While saying she is pro-life, she repeatedly answered that she would set aside her personal, political and religious views when deciding cases and would follow Supreme Court precedent.

Later in the hearing, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., gave Vitter a chance to recover. "I'm not asking about precedent," he said. "I just want to know about what you think about the social policy, Mrs. Vitter, of having schools segregated by race even if they are equal. Can we agree that's immoral?"

"Yes," Vitter said.

Even to Blumenthal, Vitter indirectly endorsed the school desegregation decision while recalling the court's 1896 separate-but-equal public accommodations ruling -- in a New Orleans case -- that Brown overturned. "It's very easy when we have hindsight, looking back through history, to see [cases] that were not correctly decided. So it's very easy to see in Plessy v. Ferguson, and to read Justice Harlan's dissent -- which, of course, became the basis for Brown v. Board of Education -- and to look at that and say, 'Well, that sounds very obvious to us now, in 2018, that that was the right decision.'"

But her critics, including some of the same ones who slammed her on abortion, pounced on her earlier answers.

Blumenthal called Vitter's response "disqualifying," and the NAACP branded her unfit for the bench: "Her refusal to show support for Brown v. Board of Education ... speaks volumes about where her priorities lie," said Derrick Johnson, NAACP president and chief executive officer. "It is unacceptable and should be disqualifying. Simply put, Wendy Vitter is not fit to judge." A stinging Above the Law post by Elie Mystal put Vitter in a long string of constitutional originalists who have "got a whole line of tricks and obfuscations that they deploy to throw people off the scent that their guiding principle is morally bankrupt."

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., however, who introduced Vitter to the Judiciary Committee, stood by her: "Republicans and Democrats in Louisiana support Wendy Vitter's nomination, notwithstanding whatever spin Washington Democrats try to manufacture."

To be sure, there is a history of judicial nominees hedging on controversial court cases, especially contemporary ones and most especially when Blumenthal is asking the questions. "As Blumenthal has made clear, the question about the 64-year-old desegregation decision is designed to get nominees to indicate there is something they can agree the Supreme Court got right when those nominees are so reticent to answer similar questions about more recent landmark rulings, such as the one upholding the right to get an abortion in the court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade," Mark Walsh wrote in Education Week.

"Some nominees are very reluctant to say anything about a case, lest they have to recuse later," said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor and student of judicial confirmations. "Others will testify more generally or even speak about specific cases if they are older, the precedent is clear or there is little chance of the issue arising again."

The American Bar Association's Model Code of Judicial Conduct advises that a candidate for judge "shall not, with respect to cases, controversies or issues that are likely to come before the court, make pledges, promises or commitments that are inconsistent with the impartial performance of the adjudicative duties of the office" and "should emphasize in any public statement the candidate's duty to uphold the law regardless of his or her personal views."

At his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1986, Antonin Scalia avoided disclosing his views on the correctness of even the Supreme Court's authoritative 1803 decision establishing judicial review of executive branch decisions. "To the extent that you think a nominee would be so foolish or so extreme as to kick over one of the pillars of the Constitution, I suppose you shouldn't confirm him. But I don't think I should answer questions regarding any specific Supreme Court opinion, even one as fundamental as Marbury v. Madison."

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his confirmation hearing in 2005, brought up Brown v. Board of Education as a "good example" of the Supreme Court taking action when the executive and legislative branches of government "had been slow to act." Other would-be judges who have endorsed the Brown ruling during confirmation hearings include Sixth Circuit nominee John Nalbandian in March and Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987, according to the National Law Journal, which said Vitter fell into a "well-trodden trap."

On Roe v. Wade, however, Nalbandian kept his counsel, saying "I think it would be inappropriate for me to go down a list of Supreme Court cases and say I think this case was rightly decided and that case was not, because I think it would call into question my partiality going forward," wrote Harsh Voruganti, founder and editor of The Vetting Room.

"The only 'principled' answer is to decline to state the 'correctness' of any Supreme Court decision," Voruganti wrote. "Unfortunately, this answer looks awful from a political sense. It leads to a nominee being battered for not 'supporting' popular precedents such as Brown, or worse, having their partiality questioned through their refusal to answer."

. . . . . . .

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said The Vetting Room's post on Vitter was unsigned.

Drew Broach covers Jefferson Parish politics and Louisiana interests in Congress, plus other odds and ends, for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Email: dbroach@nola.com. Facebook: Drew Broach TP. Twitter: drewbroach1. Google+: Drew Broach.Authorities found 50 dead horses on property in East Texas on Tuesday (April 10) and took custody of nearly 90 animals they said were being cruelly treated, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.

"It was just a sea of dead horses," SPCA of Texas spokeswoman Victoria Albrecht told the Star-Telegram. "It was just heartbreaking."

Investigators found and relocated 70 live horses, nine donkeys, six pigs and one longhorn on the property in Van Zandt County, about 30 miles east of Dallas, the newspaper reported. Some horses were so desperate for food that they were eating the bark of the trees on the property, the story said.Following two weeks of record-shattering COVID hospitalizations, Louisiana saw a glimmer of hope in its battle against its fourth and worst surge of the deadly virus on Friday when the number of patients hospitalized dropped for the second day in a row.The Hurricane Heist chronicles an elaborate plot by a group of robbers to loot a bank using the cover of an approaching hurricane.

The plan to raid the Federal Reserve Bank storing over 600 million dollars in currency is developed by a treasury staff member.

As the hi-tech thieves prepare to pull off the ultimate heist, they have to deal with a small team of security agents intent on frustrating their well-orchestrated robbery in the midst of raging winds.

Director Rob Cohen gets the cast to pull off mind-blowing stunts as they toil against an oncoming hurricane wreaking large-scale destruction on the town.

Cohen, the creator of the Fast and the Furious film franchise, brings his top form to The Hurricane Heist, casting Toby Kebbell (Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Wrath of the Titans), Maggie Grace (Taken film trilogy, Knight and Day, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 1 & 2), Ryan Kwanten (Northmen: A Viking Saga), Melissa Bolona (I Am Wrath) and Ralph Ineson (Star Wars: The Last Jedi).

The film premiers this Thursday at Century Cinemax.

ayebeanthony@gmail.comUganda Revenue Authoritys (URA) attempt to force commercial banks to reveal all clients private accounts information was part of an effort to drag politicians, businessmen and the very rich into the income tax net, sources have revealed.

Over time, the authority had observed that there are many high-net individuals flaunting their wealth, and yet they seem not to be paying their fair share of taxes. This created suspicion that these individuals might not be paying the taxes they are supposed to.

URA commissioner general Doris Akol

A well-placed insider at the tax body has told The Observer that URA formed its decision upon noticing this contradiction.

The CG [commissioner general] and the commissioners believe that there is a lot of wealth out there which is untaxed. So, by looking at the account details, they would know who paid their fair share of tax and who did not, the source said.

The information revealed by this insider dovetails with findings from URAs own study that was released last week.

Wealthy individuals in Uganda contribute very little to personal income taxes (PIT), the report concluded. In 2013/14, for example, only 5 per cent of the directors of the top tax-paying companies were paying PIT.

In general terms, therefore, URAs intentions were noble, which probably explains why even the governments official version, denying a wish to expose all personal bank account information to the taxman, essentially confirmed what our sources said.

Speaking at the Uganda Media Centre, Frank Tumwebaze, minister for ICT and national guidance, moved to calm public anxiety, saying it is only interested in tax evaders.

Pointing out that mass access could unsettle the banking industry, Tumwebaze, however, did not deny that the law allows URA power to check bank account details.

Cabinet agreed that URA is given mandate to get information on accounts of suspected people but those who pay their taxes and have had no bad records shouldnt be disturbed, he said.

Cabinet agreed that URA should use existing mandate given by the Constitution of Uganda, but not ask for access to all citizens information from banks.

It is possible that URA may have been further fortified in its belief following the recent scandal in which bank account details of Justine Bagyenda, the executive director for bank supervision at Bank of Uganda, were leaked. The accounts in Diamond Trust and Barclays banks were stuffed with almost Shs 20 billion.

Vincent Seruma, URA assistant commissioner of corporate affairs, On Tuesday said since cabinet has okayed access to details of suspected tax evaders, URA will do exactly that.

It is clear, we have to go with that, Seruma said.

Also late Tuesday afternoon, Tumwebaze further told The Observer that cabinet listened to Attorney General William Byaruhangas counsel about the legal challenge facing the URA initiative to increase revenue collections -- in light of privacy provisions of laws governing such client relationships.

The law allows URA to access accounts of people which are suspicious so they can work with the Financial Intelligence Authority to monitor suspicious inflows and outflows of money. It is not necessary to demand an omnibus declaration of bank details of all Ugandans. This can create uncertainty in the economy and scare away investors, he said.

Officially, central bank governor, Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile, declined to address the issue during Mondays press briefing at Bank of Uganda, but other staff members had warned that URA was toying with a regressive idea.

We think it will affect the integrity of banks, one staff member told The Observer. And URA is using a wrong channel. Why did they skip the regulator and go straight to the banks?

Speaking on the sidelines of Monday conference, BoUs executive director for research, Dr Adam Mugume, told reporters that the plan to plug this loophole is problematic.

You signed a contract with the bank that my information is going to be confidential and you are giving it away. You lose trust and the banks dont want to lose trust, said Mugume.

Since it became public knowledge last week that the tax body had directed commercial banks to release all customer details, Ugandans have denounced the order as intrusive. The URA quoted Section 42 of the Tax Procedures Code Act, 2014, which gives the commissioner powers to ask for details of any person for tax investigations purposes.

However, Kampala city traders spokesman, Issa Ssekito, told The Observer on Monday that URA should instead look at peoples businesses, facilitate their growth and only then tax them accordingly.

A bank account should be private, Ssekito said. They should explain to us why they are running to banks to get our details. If you seek to tax an account and not an economic activity, it shows you there is something wrong with the economy.

People are going to run away from banks and it is going to create a problem of thieves attacking peoples homes looking for money. I am already planning on what to do yet I am a poor man; how about the rich ones?

URA officials pitched camp at parliament on Tuesday, hoping to lobby MPs for support. Paul Lakuma, a senior research fellow at Economic Policy Research Centre in Makerere University, said while developed countries were doing it, it can provoke people into draining their accounts.

It may lead to bank runs or large withdrawals by depositors. This would reverse government attempts to deepen the financial system. It should have been done in a humane and phased manner, Lakuma said.

Many developed systems do it. I thought they were already doing it. You cant receive unexplained large sums of money without an explanation of the source and other supportive documents such as withholding tax certificate.

Through Uganda Bankers Association, commercial banks have petitioned the Constitutional court to declare the provision giving URA powers to seek peoples account details illegal.

MORE TAXES

It also emerged this week that more tax measures taking effect on July 1 have been proposed. These include; a proposal to repeal the progressive section 21[1] (ad) of the Income Tax [amendment] law which, in an attempt to encourage savings, exempted Saccos from income tax till June 30, 2027.

Saccos will have to pay taxes on their income starting this July. Also proposed, is that companies which register losses for seven straight years pay 0.5% tax on gross turnover for every year after the seventh year.

Government will also seek to impose a 10% withholding tax on the commission telecom companies pay for airtime distribution or provision of mobile money services.

Other tax proposed are:

Shs 230 on each litre of opaque beer (beer brewed from millet and sorghum).

Shs 2,000 will be charged on a litre of undenatured spirits made from locally produced materials.

The spirits made from imported raw materials will be charged 100 per cent or Shs 2,500 per litre.

A similar levy will be placed on each litre of wine made from locally produced materials.

Imported wine will be charged 80 per cent or Shs 8,000 per litre.

Airtime on mobile phones, landlines and public pay phones will be taxed 12 per cent of the fee charges.

Mobile money transactions on receiving, payments and withdrawals will attract one per cent of the value of the transaction. Already mobile money withdrawals and sending are charged 10%.

Incoming international calls, except for Kenya, Rwanda and South Sudan, will attract $0.09 per minute.

Cooking oil Shs 200 per litre, while motorcycles at first registration, one will have to pay Shs 200,000.

This financial year, URA is expected to register a shortfall of at least Shs 600bn, according to the central bank.

amwesigwa@observer.ug

Additional reporting by Sadab Kitatta Kaaya.20-year-old Kasandra Smith, from Macon, Georgia, has shun all kinds of footwear for the last three years, and claims that despite occasionally stepping on glass shards or metal pins, going barefoot full-time has done wonders for her confidence and overall well-being.

Kassandra Smith was never really big on shoes. In school, she would often wear flips-flops just to have an excuse to get out of participating in gym class, but the more she wore them, the freer she felt, and the more she loathed the thought of putting on shoes. She started wearing flip flops when shopping or going to the restaurant, and after leaving school in 2015, she started walking completely barefoot as well. Just two months later, she decided to give-up footwear all-together, and shes been walking barefoot ever since.

Photo: Kassandra Smith/Facebook

Not only do I feel lighter and more spiritually grounded when I dont wear shoes, but it makes my skin healthier and gets rid of the chance of athletes foot or something similar, Smith told Xpose.ie. The only reason I can see myself wearing shoes again is if I found a job that required me to. But it would need to be a job I really loved to be worth it, and Id speak to them first to see if there was a way around it.

Kassandra says her feet have toughened up in the three years that shes been walking barefoot, but she admits that she has suffered a few accidents. She once stepped on a pin that went right through her flesh, and on another occasion, she stepped on a glass shard. But that was in her early barefoot-walking days, and the 20-year-claims her feet are much tougher now.

As for peoples reactions, Kassandra says they have been mixed. On one occasion, she was asked to leave a home and hardware store for her own safety, as staff were worried about something falling on her feet. Another time, she got a disgusted look from a mother, who even pulled her child back after seeing her barefoot, but for the most part, people are just curious to know why she doesnt wear any footwear.

A post shared by Kasandra Smith (@crystal.earth.witch) on Jan 18, 2017 at 6:16pm PST

The most asked question is, Where are your shoes? People arent that negative, theyre more just interested, Kassandra said. I get asked a lot if Ill get sick. I did in the beginning, but not anymore as my body has now got used to the different temperatures. I think its actually improved my immune system.

People dont always understand it, so I had little cards printed that explain why I do it, and that its perfectly legal, the Macon woman added. I hand them out to anyone who stops me to ask questions. Ive even convinced a couple of people to ditch their shoes then and there.

Kassandra describes herself as a socially anxious person, but claims that shes been feeling a lot calmer and more confident since she started walking barefoot.

A post shared by Kasandra Smith (@crystal.earth.witch) on Jul 31, 2017 at 12:12am PDT

I cant quite explain it but I feel so much more calm and confident without shoes. she said. Im a socially anxious person but, when Im barefoot, I feel much more relaxed.

Smith, who didnt even wear shoes for her wedding, now plans to go on a barefoot 540-mile hike to New York, with her husband Don, later this month. Even though he convinced her to pack some flip-flops just in case, she hopes she wont need to wear them at all.

Going barefoot full-time in an urban setting sounds pretty crazy to most people, but Kassandra Smith is just one of many barefoot-living people. Two years ago, we wrote about Andrzej Novosiolov, a Ukrainian man for Kiev, who had been walking barefoot since February 2006. But even he didnt even come close to the feat of Pete the Feet, an Englishman who hasnt worn footwear in over 50 years.

Ron Fournier

Ron Fournier, Crains Detroit Business editor/publisher and veteran DC political journalist, has joined Truscott Rossman in Lansing.

He will succeed president Kelly Rossman-McKinney, who is retiring June 1 to run for a state Senate seat.

Fournier moved to Crains in 2006 after serving as Associated Press national political writer/DC bureau chief, National Journal editor-in-chief and Atlantic columnist. He began his journalism career at the AP in Little Rock, where he covered Gov. Bill Clinton.

Fournier is leaving journalism because he wants to get off the sidelines and into the arena, according to the CDB.

At TR, Fournier will help shape the direction of the firm and seek new business opportunities in the Detroit area and Washington.

John Truscott is buying out Rossman-McKinneys stake in the firm. He plans to retain the firm's name.

TR moved into the national spotlight in February with news that it was working with Michigan State to manage fallout connected with the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal.Edelman topped 16 bidders for the $250K Wyoming Office of Tourism account because it proved its ability to be strategic thinkers and creators with a core focus on media relations, WOT announced today.

The No. 1 independent firm also has the insights and skills that will help WOTs publicity program amplify other marketing programs, including paid advertising and travel trade efforts.

Diane Shober, executive director of WOT, expressed confidence that Edelman will help The Cowboy State stand out from other destinations in the world.

More than 8.5M people visited Wyoming in 2016.

WOT issued its PR RFP in October for a year-long program with media outreach targeted at travel writers, journalists and influencers, plus PR events (receptions, deskside appointments).

The state is launching the third year of its Thats WY campaign, which attempts to bring stories of Wyoming (outdoor adventures, Yellowstone National Park, culinary scene) to life.

Edelman Seattle will handle the business.12/04/2018 - The taxation of personal savings and wealth varies widely, offering governments significant scope for tax reforms that simultaneously improve both the efficiency and fairness of their tax systems, according to two new OECD reports.

The reports  Taxation of Household Savings and The Role and Design of Net Wealth Taxes - recognise that taxes are among the most effective tools governments have for reducing inequalities and bringing about more inclusive growth.

While countries do not necessarily need to tax savings more, there is a lot of room to improve the way countries tax savings, said Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration. There is also a very strong case to be made for addressing income and wealth inequality through the tax system, notably by ensuring effective taxation of capital. Governments have an opportunity to increase both the efficiency and fairness of their tax systems, and these reports outline concrete measures to help achieve this Mr Saint-Amans said.



Taxation of Household Savings provides a detailed review of the way savings are taxed in the 35 OECD countries and five key partner countries (Argentina, Bulgaria, Colombia, Lithuania and South Africa). It finds large differences within countries in the tax treatment of a range of assets, such as bank accounts, bonds, shares, private pensions and housing, and points out that tax rules  rather than pre-tax rates of return  are likely driving some savings decisions.

Analysis of asset-holding patterns across income and wealth levels shows that differences in tax treatment of certain types of savings often favour wealthier taxpayers over poorer taxpayers. For example, poorer taxpayers tend to hold a larger share of their wealth in relatively high-taxed bank accounts than wealthier taxpayers, who tend to hold a greater share of their wealth in investment funds, pension funds and shares, which are often taxed at lower rates.

Faced with these outcomes, the report outlines a range of opportunities for greater tax neutrality across different types of savings to foster more inclusive growth. At the same time, it recognises the case for preferential tax treatment to encourage retirement savings, in light of population ageing and increasing pressure on social security systems.

The report also finds that opportunities may exist for some countries to increase progressivity in their taxation of savings as a result of the recent move towards the automatic exchange of financial account information between tax administrations. This ground-breaking change in the international tax environment is likely to make it harder in years to come for taxpayers to evade tax by hiding income and wealth offshore  presenting a particular opportunity for countries that previously moved away from progressive taxation of capital income to reintroduce a degree of tax progressivity.

The Role and Design of Net Wealth Taxes examines the use of net wealth taxes  both currently and historically  across the OECD. It assesses the case for and against the use of net wealth taxes to raise revenue and reduce inequality, but does not call for their introduction. The report suggests that there is little need for net wealth taxes in countries with broad-based personal capital income taxes, including capital gains taxes, and well-designed inheritance and gift taxes. It finds there may be scope for such taxes in countries where the taxation of capital income is low or where inheritance taxes are not levied.

Journalists are invited to join a one-hour webinar at 14:00 GMT/15:00 London/16:00 CEST on Thursday 12 April, during which the OECDs Head of Tax Policy and Statistics David Bradbury, senior tax economist Alastair Thomas and tax economist Sarah Perret will present the findings and answer questions.

To register for the webinar, go to this Registration link click on "Register," enter the requested information and click Submit. No password is required.

For copies of the reports, or for further information, journalists should contact Lawrence Speer in 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.Opalesque Industry Update - Mariner Investment Group, the global alternative investment manager, announced that it has appointed Mark Curtis to the role of Global Head of Sales & Marketing. Mr. Curtis is responsible for overseeing the firm's marketing and sales activities across its broad suite of liquid fixed income and private debt strategies. Mr. Curtis joins Mariner from Winton Capital, one of the world's largest and most successful systematic macro managers, where he was co-Head Americas Investment Solutions, and has previously held senior positions at Merrill Lynch in Global Banking & Markets and Global Wealth Management. "Mark Curtis has considerable market knowledge and industry experience delivering marketing solutions across a complex set of asset classes and products, and will be a valuable addition to our team as we seek to build out more comprehensive investment offerings across the firm," said Bill Michaelcheck, founder and Chief Investment Officer of Mariner. "We believe that the changing market dynamics, particularly the rising rate volatility, call for more active management and are favorable to many of Mariner's investment strategies. Mark will spearhead efforts to ramp up our engagement with existing as well as new clients, and we are delighted to welcome him to the firm." Prior to joining Winton Capital in 2015, Mr. Curtis held a variety of positions at Merrill Lynch from 2004-2015 in Global Banking and Global Wealth Management, including as Managing Director, Head Investment Solutions Team at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Global Banking & Markets, and Managing Director, Head International Investment Solutions at Merrill Lynch & Co. Mr. Curtis previously held positions at CIBC World Markets and ABN AMRO, where he began his career. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Exeter in England. Mariner Investment Group, LLC Mariner Investment Group is an SEC-registered investment adviser that manages several direct and affiliated single and multi-strategy hedge funds, funds of funds and other alternative investments services. Founded in 1992, Mariner and its associated advisers employ approximately 140 people in New York, London, Tokyo, Philadelphia, Dallas, Harrison (NY), Rowayton (CT), and Summit (NJ).Legacy Health has hired Kathryn Correia, a veteran executive of the Minnesota health care industry, as its new president and chief executive officer.

Correia is the former CEO of Health East, a health care system in Minneapolis. She replaces George Brown, who had led Legacy Health since 2008.

There is no shortage of change at the top of Portland's largest health care operations. Oregon Health & Science University has yet to name a successor for Joe Robertson, who announced his retirement last October. David Underriner announced April 2 his intention to leave the helm of Providence Oregon to join Kaiser Permanente in Hawaii. And Legacy has been looking to a successor to Brown since last summer.

Legacy found Correia after a nationwide search. She will join Legacy in June.

Correia's job at Health East came to an end in 2017, when she led its merger with Fairview Health Services, creating the largest health system in Minnesota. Correia then became Fairview Health Services' chief administrative officer, where she has played a key role in Fairview's overall integration, planning, advocacy and philanthropic efforts.

"I'm honored and I'm grateful to the board for the opportunity to lead this renowned regional health care institution," Correia said. "I have spent my career building health systems that are not only dedicated to providing quality, safe and reliable care but also addressing social determinants of health through deep community engagement. I look forward to working with employees across the system to continue building on the critical mission of good health for our people, patients, communities and world."

Legacy, a locally owned nonprofit, operates six hospitals in Portland, Vancouver and the Willamette Valley. It employs 13,000 people.

"Kathryn is a mission-driven leader who aligns with Legacy's culture of respect, service and excellence," said Dr. Jeff Fullman, chairman of Legacy Health's board of directors. "This combined with her deep experience in hospital operations, the physician community and health plan administration make her uniquely qualified to lead Legacy Health into its new chapter."

-- Jeff ManningTerry Richard/The Oregonian

Last month, in the second week of spring, I set off for what promised to be a challenging hike. My plan was to head up to the top of Table Mountain, a 3,400-foot peak on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge. From the trailhead, it's about 16 miles round trip, including a grueling climb up a steep and rocky slope.



As I went, I passed a few fellow hikers who offered ominous warnings about the conditions ahead: "We sank up to our hips in snow," "Take your time at the top," "It's scary up there." Cautious, but undeterred, I trekked on, along the winding forested trails, up the leg-burning mountain slopes and, finally, into deep patches of lingering spring snow, a condition I hadn't entirely anticipated.



I threw on another layer and broke out a trekking pole, the trail soon lost but for the boot prints of those who hiked before me. As I carefully picked my way up the mountain, dangers lurked in all directions: sharp drop-offs beside icy embankments, deep holes in the thawing snow, loose rock that tumbled under foot, and a lingering storm that seemed to swirl around the edges of the gorge.



Having learned from some rough experiences, I was well enough prepared for the worst. In my backpack was a first aid kit, an emergency blanket, food, water purification and several extra layers. I could stay on the mountain if I really needed to, though I'm grateful it didn't come to that. I made it up and down Table Mountain fine (my knees protesting the whole way back), but came away with what has become a regular reality check on the dangers of hiking.



Some amount of danger is inherent in exploring the outdoors, of course, but when hiking through the rugged wilderness of Oregon, it's important to keep those elements of danger in mind. There's no such thing as perfect preparation, but a healthy dose of precaution is necessary for any serious hiking. Because while it's easy to romanticize our beautiful trails, it's important to remember that serious injury or death is a simple reality out in nature.



Before we get to the dangers, a basic precaution to keep in mind: If you're hiking alone, always, always, let somebody know where you're going, and plan to be in touch when you get off the trail. Also, it's wise to carry most, if not all of the 10 essentials with you when you hike.

Don't Edit

Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

1. Cliffs

One of the most common ways people die on the trail is a simple stumble off a sharp cliff. Whether you're taking a picture at a viewpoint or creeping out to get a better look, always be wary around the edges of cliffs, and try to leave some space between your feet and a sudden drop.

Don't Edit

Jamie Francis/The Oregonian

2. Weather

When it comes to weather on the day of a hike, trust neither the forecast nor the conditions at the trailhead. Pack extra layers and prepare for rain or snow, especially when hiking at higher elevations, and during the rainy season in Oregon. Storms can show up unannounced and stop you dead in your tracks, so be prepared to hunker down or find shelter if a storm comes.

Don't Edit

Jamie Francis/The Oregonian

3. Hydration

It's easy for dehydration to sneak up on you. When deciding how much water to bring on the hike, ask yourself a few questions: How much do I normally need to stay hydrated? How much extra exertion will be involved? Are there sources of clean drinking water along the trail? Water purification (like a LifeStraw filter) is easy enough to throw in your pack, but also try to hydrate the day before and morning of your hike.

Don't Edit

Dillon Pilorget/The Oregonian

4. Navigation

Trails are typically designed to be easy to follow, but it's almost just as easy to lose them. A wrong turn can lead you miles astray. Snow can cover the path. And in the off-trail wilderness, it's amazingly easy to get turned around. I try to carry a print-out of directions as well as a compass and topographical map of the area when going off-trail (federal agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service, usually provide them online for free). While smartphones are increasingly reliable, it's unwise to rely solely on technology. But most important, stay aware of your surroundings, and stop immediately if you feel like you're losing your way.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

5. Snow

Living in a land of mountains means a near-constant risk of running into snow. Mountain trails are only reliably clear between mid-summer and early fall, while the highest reaches of the Cascades can be covered in glaciers year-round. If you're going to do any substantial hiking through ice and snow, bring the right equipment (like crampons and an ice axe), and if you don't have the proper gear, turn around and don't chance it.

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Terry Richard/The Oregonian

6. Loose Rocks

A subtle danger, loose rocks often pose the biggest danger on trails by simply taking away your balance and sense of control. One slip on scree can leave you with a badly injured ankle, or send you tumbling headlong down the side of a mountain. The best way to avoid falling is to walk slowly and carefully, using a trekking pole or walking stick, and looking for solid footing wherever you can. If things get really dicey, lower your center of gravity and keep your hands free to catch yourself in case you fall.

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Terry Richard/The Oregonian

7. Poisonous Plants

The Pacific Northwest is no Amazon jungle, but there are several poisonous plants to watch out for on the side of the trail. Poison oak is the most common, but you'll also see stinging nettle and poison hemlock. Familiarize yourself with characteristics of poisonous plants, check trail reports before you go, and keep your eyes peeled as you walk.

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Terry Richard/The Oregonian

8. Animals

Odds are good that you'll encounter at least one dangerous animal if you hike enough trails around Oregon. Black bears, mountain lions and rattlesnakes are rightly feared, but most animals will actively avoid confrontation most of the time. Still, it's important to know what to do if you're attacked: With black bears, try to escape or else fight back; for mountain lions, make yourself big, make noise and fight back if necessary; if a rattlesnake bites you, try to stay calm and get medical attention as soon as possible.

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Bill Monroe/The Oregonian

9. Insects

Bugs are annoying, but they can also be a real danger. Mosquitos are the most prevalent, swarming around standing water, and occasionally hatching out of fresh snowmelt. Bees and wasps pose a big problem for those with an allergy (or those who don't know they have an allergy). And while most ticks in the Pacific Northwest are not Lyme disease carriers, they can cause swelling and itching if they latch on.

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Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian

10. Water

Whether it's a stream crossing in the mountains, big waves at the coast or a simple tranquil lake, water continues to be one of the biggest killers in nature. It can be hard to prepare for sudden events like a sneaker wave or flash flood, but the best thing you can do is to stay aware and move quickly if a wall of water arrives. When it comes to boating and swimming, know your skill level, wear or carry floatation devices, and go with other people when you can.

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Ian Malkasian/The Oregonian

NORTHWEST TRAVEL GUIDES

Backpacking trips in Oregon: Backpacking is a time-honored tradition in Oregon. Try one of these dozen incredible adventures.

Summer rentals: From lakeside cabins to fire lookout towers, here's your comprehensive guide to summer rentals on public land.

Gorge hikes that are open: A lot of trails are still closed by the Eagle Creek Fire, but these 15 are still open to hikers.Oregon voters should pay close attention to the May 15 primary election for Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor and Industries. A very important choice will be made in this nonpartisan race. I hope voters will support Lou Ogden. Ogden has been mayor of Tualatin for the last 24 years. His balanced and fair leadership has brought business and industrial development providing thousands of jobs and over a billion dollars of investment by the private sector. He wants to lead the bureau as the driver for skills training and apprenticeship programs that will put employees into living-wage jobs and provide high school graduates an alternative to college. Ogden is an insurance broker, farmer, husband and father. He has the vision, experience and proven record of leadership necessary for the job.

Gary Wilhelms, Northwest PortlandBy Cal Thomas

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." - Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

No one ever accused Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz of being a conservative, but Dershowitz is a rare breed these days; someone who applies the Constitution and the law to everyone, regardless of their political leanings.

In the matter of the FBI raid on the law office of President Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, Dershowitz has said: "(It is) a dangerous day for lawyer-client relations."

Dershowitz noted that federal agents confiscated an unknown number of documents and items from Cohen's office, home and hotel room and speculated they might include confidential papers pertaining to attorney-client discussions with the president about the $130,000 payout to porn star Stormy Daniels and the $150,000 payout to Karen McDougal, who claimed to have had yearlong affair with Trump.

Raising the issue of double standards when it comes to investigations into the behavior of Republicans vs. Democrats, Dershowitz said on Fox News and other media outlets: "If this were Hillary Clinton (having her lawyer's office raided), the ACLU would be on every TV station in America jumping up and down. The deafening silence of the ACLU and civil libertarians about the intrusion into the lawyer-client confidentiality is really appalling."

Being appalled isn't what it used to be in the face of government intrusions through wiretaps and the exposure of personal data in many social media accounts, most notably Facebook.

What President Trump's lawyers should do is demand that a judge require all of the documents and items seized in the raid be turned over to a court for examination as to which are relevant to an investigation and which violate attorney-client privilege.

On Monday, when asked by a reporter if he intends to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who's currently spearheading the FBI's investigation into possible Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election, Trump responded, "We'll see what happens." He again criticized Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the investigation. Sessions' recusal led us to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who personally approved the FBI's raid. Rosenstein then named former FBI director Robert Mueller to the investigatory team, a team that reportedly includes three members who have donated to Democratic presidential campaigns. Does this smack of partisan politics? It certainly smacks of partisan overreach.

The point about individual rights, including the right to privacy, is that they must be equally applied. You can't deny those rights when it suits your political goals and apply those same rights when they don't. If the government can sweep up every document in Michael Cohen's possession, whether they are relevant to an investigation or not, simply because they have it in for those on the right, we are all potentially in jeopardy.

The president has the right to dismiss Mueller for exceeding his original mandate. The question, however, is not whether he has the right, but what the political cost would be. Just as Dershowitz noted the silence from the left and the ACLU, to which I will add major newspaper editorials and Democratic politicians, is deafening. You don't have to be a psychic to know they would all express outrage if Mueller was fired.

With so much riding on the mid-term elections, including possible articles of impeachment against the president should Democrats win a House majority, whether to fire Mueller is a huge decision for the president and his lawyers to make, a decision with serious political consequences.

Of even greater importance than the fate of one president is the future of individual citizens and their right to be protected from an increasingly intrusive federal government.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditorstribpub.com.

(c)2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLCA Texas appeals court in 2010 turned down an aunt's attempt to adopt Devonte Hart and three of his siblings because she previously violated an order barring their biological mother from seeing the children, court records show.

The biological mother had already been deemed by the state's Department of Family and Protective Services as unfit to care for them in 2006, and they lived with their paternal aunt for about five months before being placed in foster care later that year, the appeals court opinion said. Sierra, Devonte and Jeremiah were adopted by Sarah and Jennifer Hart in 2009.

The appeals court opinion provides the most detailed picture yet of the Hart children's lives before they were adopted.

The two women on March 26 were found dead in their SUV at the bottom of California cliff with three of their adopted children, Markis, 19, Abigail, 14, and Jeremiah, 14. Three others remain missing: Devonte, 15, Hannah 16, and Sierra, 12. Devonte in 2014 was at the center of a viral photo showing his tender embrace with a Portland policeman during a "Black Lives Matter" demonstration.

Authorities say Jennifer Hart intentionally drove off the cliff. The deaths came days after a visit to the family's home by child protective services authorities. The couple have been accused of abusing their adopted children in all three states where they lived after the adoptions, records show.

One abuse investigation came in November 2010, four months after the July 2010 appeals court opinion in Texas. In that case, the court upheld a decision by a Harris County District Court judge to deny the aunt's petition to adopt four children -- then known as Devonte, Jeremiah and Ciera Davis -- and her motion for a new trial in the case.

The mother was addicted to crack cocaine, had interactions with the state's Department of Family and Protective Services since 1985 and had other children removed from her care before the latest case, the opinion said.

The appeals court opinion mentions that the aunt, Priscilla Celestine, had "ample opportunities" to argue why the children should be returned to her care in prior hearings and that her fitness to care for the kids had been called into question before the caseworker visit. The opinion doesn't elaborate on what those allegations were.

"We see no reason why Celestine should be allowed to have yet another bite at the proverbial apple," the opinion said.

The aunt and children lived in Houston at the time. The opinion said her brother, Clarence, is listed in court documents as the biological father of Jeremiah and Sierra. The fourth child, Dontay Davis, was not adopted by the Harts. The biological mother is not identified by name in the opinion.

According to the court of appeals opinion, a Harris County District Court judge ordered the parental rights of the biological parents of Devonte, Jeremiah, Sierra and a fourth child terminated in August 2006. The children lived with Celestine while the order was pending.

The state Department of Family and Protective Services removed the four kids from Celestine's care in December 2006 after the caseworker visit.

The caseworker testified during a district court hearing that she had previously told Celestine that the mother couldn't have contact with the kids, the opinion said. Celestine testified that she wasn't home when the caseworker visited and it was her daughter who let the mother in to see the kids.

The children were then placed in foster care. Celestine filed a petition in May 2007 to adopt all four children while they were being cared for by the state. The petition was denied in Harris County District Court the next year. Celestine filed a motion for a new trial, and that was denied as well. She appealed to the high court in October 2008 to overturn the adoption petition and new trial dismissals, the appeals court opinion said.

Shonda Jones, a Houston family law attorney who represented Celestine at the time, told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Thursday that she agreed the children shouldn't have stayed with their parents, but she thought the courts acted too rashly in removing them from their aunt.

Jones said the mother's visit was the only infraction Celestine committed, and it occurred over a 45-minute window when the caseworker arrived at her home unannounced while the aunt made a trip to her workplace. The kids were immediately removed from the home, she said.

Celestine had stable employment in Houston, no previous criminal history, raised an older daughter and had taken steps to accommodate the kids, such as moving to a larger home to care for the children, Jones said.

"They have an aunt who I truly believe in my soul and in my heart would have made a difference in those children's lives," said Jones, who has been an attorney for 21 years.

Nathaniel Davis, longtime partner of the four children's biological mother, also questioned why an out-of-state couple was able to adopt the children.

"They were born in the state of Texas," he said Thursday from his Houston home. "Why did the state of Texas let them take them away from here?"

Houston adoption attorney Ellen Yarrell said the aunt likely would have signed a form agreeing to follow certain rules when she was caring for the children."One major rule is to prevent the terminated parent from re-entering the children's lives," Yarrell said.

Yarrell noted the aunt had other avenues of redress with the state, but waited several months to file her adoption suit.

Yarrell, who read the decision, described it as a challenging case centered on questions of jurisdiction and standing.

Ultimately, the Harts' adoption of the children was finalized in Feburary 2009, before the appellate court decision was issued. Yarrell questioned if the court that granted the adoption was aware of the pending case. Had the court sided with the aunt, she could have challenged their adoption.

According to the appeals court opinion, the children's biological mother had three older children, one of whom had several bone fractures before being removed from his mother's care, who were born before the four trying to be adopted by the aunt. Of the second group, one sibling, Jeremiah, tested positive for cocaine when he was born in 2004, leading to family and protective services becoming involved with the family again, the appeals opinion said.

After the mother tested positive for cocaine when her seventh child was born in 2006, the state agency took custody of her four remaining children, and her parental rights were terminated.

The children are identified in the opinion by their initials, with the last name beginning with D. Sierra appears to have the first initial of C. The opinion identifies Davis as the biological mother's long-time boyfriend and who was making child support payments for the children at one point.

The opinion says another court document lists Clarence Celestine as the biological father for two of the four children, Jeremiah and Sierra.

Sierra, Devonte and Jeremiah were adopted by Sarah and Jennifer Hart in February 2009, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. At the time, they lived in Alexandria, Minnesota, about 130 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

The couple's other three children -- Markis, Abigail and Hannah -- were adopted in September 2006 from Colorado County, Texas, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services said.

The family later moved from Alexandria to West Linn, then most recently lived in Woodland, Washington.

Freelance reporter Roxanna Asgarian and Molly Young of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed to this report.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBaileyA Texas attorney who represented the biological aunt of Devonte Hart and two of his siblings in a custody case more than a decade ago said she believes the children never should have been placed with an adoptive family.

Houston family law attorney Shonda Jones told ABC 13 in Houston that she realized this week after reading news reports that she once fought to keep Devonte, 15; Sierra, 12; and Jeremiah, 14, with their aunt in Texas. Jones said drug use led to the children being removed from their parents and placed with their aunt.

The aunt lost custody of the children because she allowed their mother to watch them while the aunt was at work, which violated a court stipulation, according to Jones.

"She's having a very hard time, in my opinion, accepting what has happened," Jones said of the aunt, who wasn't identified by the TV station. "I think she hears it, but doesn't want to believe it."

Jeremiah, along with adopted siblings Markis, 19; and Abigail, 14; and adopted parents Sarah and Jennifer Hart, both 38, were found dead on the northern California coast March 26 after the SUV they were in apparently went off a cliff. Three other children, including Sierra and Devonte, still haven't been found.

A person found dead in the Pacific Ocean near the crash site hasn't yet been identified. Authorities in California have said they believe all six of the children were in the SUV when it crashed and suspect the crash may have been intentional.

Jones said she never met the children and after the custody case only knew the three siblings were sent to live with a couple in Minnesota. She described what she's read about the latest case as "very disturbing."

She said the aunt still lives in Houston.

Sierra, Devonte and Jeremiah were adopted by Sarah and Jennifer Hart in February 2009, according to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. At the time, they lived in Alexandria, Minnesota, about 130 miles northwest of Minneapolis.

They later moved to West Linn and most recently lived in Woodland, Washington. The couple of been accused of abusing the children in all three states, records show.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBaileyA photo of an Oregon sheriff without pants on, thrusting his pelvis toward the camera, with his genitals covered in a sticker that reads "Lit Saturday," was shared to a page that mimicked the sheriff's Facebook page, according to The News-Review.

Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin told the paper the pants-less photo of him that appeared online was likely posted by an ex-girlfriend and that he did not "authorize the photo that was posted."

In a statement to The News-Review, Hanlin said, "I am facing an unusual personal circumstance."

"Recently, my girlfriend and I ended our relationship," he continued. "After the fact, it was brought to my attention that a private photo of me was posted on a Facebook site intended to appear as if the Facebook site was mine."

Hanlin said that he contacted Facebook and had the photo removed.

"I am working to understand how and why this happened and to resolve the issue," he said, "but in the meantime, this is a very private, personal matter and I intend to deal with it in a private manner."

"I apologize for this distraction," he added.

Hanlin gained national attention in the wake of the October 2015 shooting at Umpqua Community College that left 10 people dead, when it was reported that he had once posted about a Sandy Hook conspiracy theory on his Facebook page.

The post, a video, suggested that the tragedy that killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut may have been staged by the government to justify "disarming the public." It also said the parents of the dead children were "crisis actors."

"This makes me wonder who we can trust anymore," Hanlin wrote in the post. "Watch, listen, and keep an open mind.

Hanlin later said he did not believe that conspiracy theory.

Hanlin has also been very outspoken about gun rights. Also in 2013, he posted a letter he said he sent to then-Vice President Joe Biden, which read, "Gun control is NOT the answer to preventing heinous crimes like school shooting."

In 2017, Hanlin supported Senate Bill 508, which "Provides that images of dead bodies that are part of law enforcement agency investigation are exempt from disclosure as public record if disclosure would create unreasonable invasion of privacy of family of deceased person."

The law created by that bill went into effect on Jan. 1, 2018.

-- Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052

lacker@oregonian.com, @lizzzyackerBY JIM RYAN and SHANE DIXON KAVANAUGH

Washington State Department of Social and Health Services documents obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive this week provide more details about Devonte Hart's actions in the days leading up to his disappearance.

Over a string of conversations, Devonte told someone who later contacted authorities  believed to be neighbor Dana DeKalb  that his parents were mean and not feeding him meals for days at a time. DeKalb asked if Devonte's parents were abusing him, and he replied they did "sometimes."

He was apparently concerned about law enforcement getting involved and didn't want he and his siblings to be split up. DeKalb asked why the children weren't ever outside, and Devonte said his parents wanted to keep their children hidden. The documents also provide more details about Hannah Hart's runaway attempt.

DeKalb said Hannah jumped from her second-story window at 1:30 a.m. last year, rang her doorbell and ran into her house. Hannah was covered in weeds and blackberries and asked DeKalb to hide her. The girl said her parents were racist and had been abusing her.

All eight of the Harts came over the next morning. Jennifer Hart said Hannah had two missing teeth after falling and knocking them out and that Hannah didn't want new ones.

DeKalb said Hannah looked like she was 7 years old. Authorities say Hannah is 16.

Sarah and Jennifer Hart also fostered a teen in the mid-2000s, according to the Seattle Times.

The Minnesota Department of Human Services confirmed to The Oregonian/OregonLive that the couple was licensed to provide child foster care in Douglas County, Minnesota, for almost two years beginning April 1, 2005.

The Harts weren't hit with any licensing sanctions, the agency said. They adopted siblings Markis, Abigail and Hannah in September 2006.

Long before authorities showed up at the Hart's home last month, a relative of the family's neighbors reported his fear the children were in danger, according to 911 and dispatch records.

Steve Frkovich, Dana DeKalb's father, told a dispatcher in November 2017 that he was concerned about the children, according to the records, obtained this week by The Oregonian/OregonLive. He said he felt the kids were "being highly abused" and recounted Hannah jumping out a window and seeking help.

The incident happened a few months prior to his call to authorities, and Dana DeKalb said there had been no other issues since that one, according to records. It was determined that a welfare check wasn't necessary because of the "isolated incident," according to the records.

The Seattle Times

-- Jim Ryan and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

jryan@oregonian.com; skavanaugh@oregonian.comJamie Francis/The Oregonian

Link and Jennifer Phillippi, co-owners of the Rough & Ready sawmill, say they did their all to keep the mill open and workers employed.

By Hillary Borrud

The Oregonian/OregonLive

The advocacy group Tax Fairness Oregon is calling for Gov. Kate Brown to claw back the millions of dollars in remaining taxpayer support issued to a failed sawmill project in Southern Oregon.

It's the second such request the governor has received since The Oregonian/OregonLive outlined problems with the taxpayer-supported project to reopen Rough & Ready mill. The story "Destined to fail: Oregon officials missed taxpayer-backed mill project's red flags ran in March.

The story revealed that the deal was structured in a way that broke state rules, in the judgment of Oregons Department of Revenue. Project broker and environmental nonprofit Ecotrust did not share those details with state regulators before they gave Ecotrust $3 million in state tax credits.

"This was clearly an effort to scam the system," Tax Fairness Oregon's founder Jody Wiser wrote in a letter to Brown on Wednesday. The group, which advocates progressive tax policies, has long criticized the so-called "new market" tax credits that provided most of the support for the project. Conservation group Oregon Wild sent a similar request to the governor last month.

Jennifer Phillippi, one of the Rough & Ready mill owners, rejected the advocacy groups criticism. Im confident that our new market tax credit structure was appropriate and even typical, Phillippi said.

Carolyn Holland, Ecotrusts vice president for communications, wrote in a statement that it is deeply frustrating to all parties when a business activity fails, especially to the affected community. However, Holland said the vast majority of projects that receive new market tax credits are successful and create jobs.

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Jessica Floum | The Oregonian/OregonLive

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown.

Browns position on clawing back the tax credit is unclear. The governors communications director Chris Pair did not respond to a phone call and email seeking her response. John Kitzhaber was governor when the incentives were approved.

The small family-owned mill reopened in 2014 thanks to more than $12 million in state and federal taxpayer incentives. Despite expensive upgrades, the mill shut down less than 20 months later. After the equipment was auctioned off and the land sold, only $5 million remained.

Wiser also asked the governor to request a state audit of any other Ecotrust projects that received state new market tax credits. It appears the group only received that incentive for one other project, although theyve overseen more projects with federal new market tax credits.

Jennifer Phillippi said Tax Fairness Oregons objections were not legitimate because they were based on an Oregonian article that is inaccurate  The story insinuates that the new market tax credit structure was inappropriate, and it was not.

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Kevin Launius | Grants Pass Daily Courier

Oregon officials hoped taxpayer subsidies could keep alive the last working sawmill in rural Josephine County to provide jobs for unemployment-racked Cave Junction. Regulators missed warning signs that Ecotrust's tax-credit-backed plan to retool the mill was flawed.

But Oregon Department of Revenue Director Nia Ray concluded elsewise, writing that the purchase of the lumber company improperly inflated the state tax credit.

After The Oregonian/OregonLive began inquiring about the deal last fall, Business Oregon told Ecotrust and sawmill owners Jennifer and Link Phillippi it would seek repayment of $1 million because of improper spending. Ecotrust had included in its tax credit application a $4 million expense to buy Rough & Ready mill and the land on which it sits. But buying the mill property shouldnt have counted as a project expense because the company in charge of the sawmill already owned the mill and the land, according to Ray.

Ecotrust has the option to avoid repayment, however, if by May 3 it spends $2.9 million on other allowable projects in rural Oregon. Ecotrust officials and Jennifer Phillippi have said they plan to do this by purchasing timberland which the Phillippis will manage. This will create new jobs, because the Phillippis plan to purchase land that hasnt been managed for industrial forest production, Jennifer Phillippi said. Our forest management will generate important living wage jobs for our struggling community, and will support jobs and provide logs to neighboring manufacturers desperate for wood.

Tax Fairness Oregon objects to this.

Both the Phillippis and Ecotrust should be censured, not rewarded with another try at the same money, Wiser of Tax Fairness Oregon wrote.

-- Hillary Borrud

hborrud@oregonian.com

503-294-4034; @hborrudMore than 50 people gathered at Portland City Hall Wednesday afternoon in response to the death of John Elifritz, 48, who was shot and killed by police at a Southeast Portland homeless shelter over the weekend.

The rally, "Beds Not Bullets," was organized by Portland's Resistance and featured several speakers, including Portland City Council candidate Jo Ann Hardesty. Demonstrators called attention to the link between police violence and the homeless community.

Those who attended were encouraged to donate supplies to the homeless community, including coats and tents.A federal judge has dismissed a felony tax evasion charge against a man who describes himself as a Christian who refuses to give money to the government to support abortion.

U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman ruled that the government's indictment failed to provide any evidence that Michael Bowman tried to conceal or mislead government officials by simply cashing his checks and keeping a low bank balance so tax collectors couldn't garnish his account to pay taxes.

"Not everything that makes collection efforts more difficult qualifies as evasion,'' Mosman said Wednesday.

Bowman, a contract engineer who lives in Columbia City, said he's been up front with the Internal Revenue Service, refusing to file a tax return or pay taxes since 1999 without some accommodation afforded to him for his religious beliefs.

"I'm not a tax protester. I love my country. I have a duty to my country. I have a duty to my conscience,'' the 53-year-old said, raising his hand and striking his chest, where the front of his shirt spelled out a definition of "conscience."

Prosecutors alleged that Bowman hasn't filed an accurate or timely income tax return since at least 1997.

When the Oregon Department of Revenue stepped up its enforcement and began garnishing money from Bowman's bank account in January 2012, Bowman changed his method of financial transactions. He began cashing out his work checks, leaving a minimum balance in his bank account, between January 2012 through September 2014, according to the government.

"Defendant's altered bank behavior removed his income from the reach of taxing authorities and allowed him to avoid payment of assessed taxes,'' Assistant U.S Attorneys Donna Brecker Maddux and Rachel K. Sowray wrote in their defense of the felony tax evasion charge against Bowman.

Between 2002 and 2014, prosecutors said the IRS sent many notices to Bowman that his federal taxes were due, of penalties, of intended collection actions and lien filings.

The indictment alleged Bowman evaded paying his taxes, starting in about January 2012, for income taxes and penalties due in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2008 and 2009, totaling $356,857.

But defense lawyer Matthew Schindler argued that the simple act of depositing a check and then withdrawing cash from an account isn't a crime, particularly when the checks Bowman received for work were all disclosed to the Internal Revenue Service.

Schindler questioned how Bowman could engage in tax evasion for his 1999 taxes through the cashing of checks in 2012 in his own name, at his own bank.

"Like a player collapsing as they lose Twister, the government has reached too far forward and stretched way too far back,'' Schindler wrote in a motion to dismiss the charge. "Cashing a check at your own bank, made out to you, representing income contemporaneously disclosed by employers through 1099 and W-2 forms to the IRS is not 'handling one's affairs to avoid making records.'"

Mosman agreed with Schindler's argument. "Just cashing checks is not evasion,'' the judge said.

The judge dismissed the charge without prejudice, meaning prosecutors could seek a new indictment to replace it. Maddux said the government was considering its options.

Bowman still faces four counts of willful failure to file tax returns, a misdemeanor.

Lending support to Bowman at the hearing was another client of Schindler's, Oregon refuge occupier Kenneth Medenbach, who was acquitted of all federal charges in the refuge takeover during a trial in 2016.

Medenbach, a longtime protester of federal ownership of public land, said he's following Bowman's lead, refusing to pay taxes, citing his own religious beliefs against abortion.

-- Maxine Bernstein

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212

@maxoregonianA 50-year-old Portland man accused of yelling at a Muslim couple and pretending to shoot them by mimicking a gun with his fingers pleaded no contest Wednesday to bias crimes.

Frederick Nolan Sorrell agreed during a Multnomah County Circuit Court hearing that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him of two counts of second-degree intimidation.

He had tormented the couple as the two were on the way to the hospital last May 29 because the wife was experiencing complications with her pregnancy, investigators said.

Sorrell will be sentenced in May. Its unclear what his sentence will be, but prosecutors plan to ask for some jail time. Sorrell is also known as Frederick "Rick" Harmes.

According to court papers, the wife was wearing a hijab when Sorrell pulled his van alongside the couples car and yelled Take the (expletive) burka off! and Go back to your own (expletive) country! The husband and wife also told investigators that Sorrell yelled Terrorists! at them.

They said Sorrell swerved his van toward the couple's car and then used his hand to mimic pulling the trigger of an imaginary gun while stopped at a traffic light at Northeast 102nd and Glisan Avenue. He drove alongside the couple for an estimated 20 blocks.

The couple dialed 911, but Sorrell drove off before police could find him. Sorrell was indicted a month later.

His trial was expected to begin Wednesday. But instead, Sorrell entered his pleas.

Sorrell told KGW that he didnt swerve at the man and the woman, but he did yell at them.

I ended up yelling out my car window at folks who didnt deserve it, Sorrell said, in a video interview outside the courthouse.

He also said hes received anger management counseling that he sought on his own.

I needed to fix myself now, he said.

A mental health professional will do a psychological evaluation of Sorrell before his sentencing hearing.

-- Aimee Green

o_aimeeA 25-person committee tasked with offering recommendations to the state's transportation commission on how, whether, and where to toll Interstate 5 and 205 in the metro area passed the halfway mark Wednesday.

The Value Pricing Policy Advisory Committee held its fourth of six scheduled meetings in Northwest Portland.

Despite being more than halfway to its designated finish line, the group created after the Legislature approved a $5.3 billion transportation package last year, doesn't appear close to any sort of consensus. Lawmakers asked the commission to investigate tolling Portland area highways with the goal of reducing congestion.

The committee is looking at five concepts:

Toll all I-5 and I-205 lanes in all directions, a total of 47 miles of freeway.

Toll lanes in both directions between North Going Street and Southwest Multnomah Boulevard on I-5.

Convert the existing carpool lane on I-5 northbound in North Portland to a toll lane while converting a southbound left lane to tolls in the same region.

Add a toll on the Abernethy Bridge on I-205 in West Linn.

Add a priced lane on I-205 under a plan to add a new travel lane in both directions between the Abernethy Bridge and Stafford Road.

The group discussed how to alleviate proposed tolls, which are years away from becoming a reality, for low-income residents. They separated into small groups and workshopped ideas such as giving people toll "credits" if they ride transit, offering variable pricing during peak transit hours, and even lowering income taxes for Washington residents who work in Oregon.

But when they reconvened, elected officials from both Multnomah and Clackamas county's commissions expressed concern about the process overall.

Jessica Vega Pederson, a Multnomah County Commissioner, said the committee is forced to make a lot of assumptions about what the region's transportation network will look like in a decade, when tolls would be effective. She said there are two separate conversations happening about the region's transportation future, with no cohesion between plans for expanding public transit throughout the region and the toll debate.

"You can't just be talking about one," she said, "or the other."

The committee is expected to send a list of recommendations to the Oregon Transportation Commission this summer. That body, which is appointed by the governor, is then expected to discuss and debate a tolling plan. A formal submission to the Federal Highway Administration is expected to occur by the end of 2018.

Sean O'Hollaren, a state transportation commissioner and a member of the tolling committee, said the committee needed to look at the issue "holistically," and "not just those two corridors," he said, citing I-5 and I-205, "but a much broader loop around Portland that addresses a much bigger area."

He also added the transportation commission, in his view, isn't constrained to looking at tolls strictly on I-5 and I-205. He said the statute gives the commission leeway to consider other highways. "It's something that we may need to do," he said.

The tolling committee next meets May 14.

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheenFormer FBI Director James Comey apparently equates President Donald Trump's actions to those of a "mob boss" in a soon-to-be aired television interview, Axios reports.

"How strange is it for you to sit here and compare the president to a mob boss?" ABC News correspondent George Stephanopoulos asks Comey in a program teaser.

The interview airs on the news magazine "20/20" on Sunday. A source told Axios that the ABC News special "is going to shock the president and his team" and will "certainly add more meat to the charges swirling around Trump."

Comey is promoting his new book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership," which hits bookstores next week. Comey will be appearing at Revolution Hall in Portland on April 21. The event is sold out.

"Was President Trump obstructing justice? Former FBI Director James @Comey sits down with @ABC's @GStephanopoulos for an exclusive interview airing Sunday night at 10/9c on ABC. https://t.co/IE4XwxvIih #Comey pic.twitter.com/jNW3RUSVTi  ABC News (@ABC) April 12, 2018

Trump fired Comey last spring. Comey later said the president, referring to the bureau's investigation of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, encouraged the then-FBI director to "see your way clear to letting this thing go."

Comey's shock termination led to the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to investigate possible Russian government collusion with the 2016 Trump campaign and related matters. This week, the FBI raided the offices and home of Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, based on a referral from Mueller to the U.S. attorney of the Southern District of New York.

"We are in pretty treacherous territory here," CNN political analyst and former presidential adviser David Gergen said. "It's unprecedented to my knowledge to have the president's personal attorney raided like this. They must have been able to present evidence that was hugely compelling to take a step like this."

The special counsel's office has already indicted former Trump campaign executive Paul Manafort on a variety of charges and scored guilty pleas from Flynn and others for lying to federal agents.

Trump has repeatedly called Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt."

-- Douglas PerryNijel Amos will head the field for the men's 800 meters at this year's Prefontaine Classic.

Amos, a native of Botswana and 2012 Olympic silver medalist, trains with Eugene-based Oregon Track Club Elite.

Other runners expected to battle Amos in the Pre Classic 800 are 2017 USA Track & Field champion Donavan Brazier and reigning world indoor champ Adam Kszczot.

This year's Pre Classic will take place May 25-26 at Hayward Field in Eugene

Here is the complete release on the field for the Pre Classic men's 800.

-- Ken GoeThe votes are in! Get a recap of the 2021 Election.

The votes are in! Get a recap of the 2021 Election.

Subscribe now>We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription.One night when I was up late, I found something I intuitively felt could ease my growing sense of dis-ease: the gift of silence.

It's no secret that many Millennials suffer from a particular strain of anxiety that translates to less time away from real-time interactions and more time spent alone consuming all manner of media. It's all noise and more noise. For me, this looks like hours past my bedtime scrolling through Instagram and scouring the web for docudramas about female murderers, random YouTube rabbit holes featuring pimple-popping, Google image search results of "Drew Barrymore in the '90s" and "Illuminati rituals," and regular search results including "Does rice make you skinny?"

There are benefits to this kind of activity: being "plugged in," as it were, means wider social networks that I could reach out to if I wanted. And, of course, there are numerous drawbacks, including but not limited to: increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, isolation, sleep deprivation, and a restless, irritable, and discontent monkey mind racing at 1,000 paces per millisecond.

I work in media. Sometimes it feels impossible, because of my job's requirements alone, to truly unplug. This is certainly a product of being raised in the Internet age. This is also a product of my own lack of self-discipline, and also likely, some MK Ultra programming from watching too many Lady Gaga videos because Satan.

People (or is it Oprah?) always say the only way out is through, but for me, it all reached a fever pitch recently: stressful news surrounding a dying family member and a move to a new borough within New York City, which is known for its premium on all-that-overwhelms, combined with de rigueur work-life demands, all piled up and I need to not just get through, but out.

I've been a fan of meditation for about five years. The ability to carve out definite space for my own sanity is not only a blessing, but now more than ever, it is absolutely essential for me as a black, gender nonconforming queer person in 45's America. I often talk with my friends and support network about the importance of finding, curating, and protecting safe spaces for people like me. While the world is changing despite resistance from patriarchal powers that be, the fact is, there is still a system at large that would rather see me and my kind extinct than reaping the benefits of living my best life. So to sit still and remember that inside is the safest space of all for me; to remind myself that actually, no one can hurt me  when I remember to do that regularly, daily, even  it's literally a breath of fresh air.

Anyway, during my last binge of late-night dark night of the soul existential din, I stumbled across a Facebook event invite (which, remarkably, I rarely check), to a silent retreat in a remote town in Rhode Island. The invite was from a friend of mine, a meditation teacher who happened to be co-facilitating the event. In the moment, my reaction was resistance, which is customary for anything I feel could pull me out of my self-prescribed rabbit holes. I told myself, I know little about this except for its housing of ritzy private schools like Brown and Rhode Island School of Design. There will only be white people there and they will all hate me. I can't get there by taking one train on a nonstop trip, so why bother? As that last thought barged in, another one, quietly but loud enough for me to hear it, cropped up in its place: Why not bother? Don't you think you're worth it?



Despite my resistance, there was an opening. I've learned through my experiences that opening up even the tiniest mustard seed of willingness becomes a gateway to change. And that moment of silence opened me up for almost a week of it, where still yet more resistance came up.

When I arrived in Rhode Island, after taking two trains, including a transfer, and being driven by car to the house I'd be staying in with five other strangers and the three facilitators, I thought, This house is too big. I'll get murdered in it and no one will find me.

After a welcoming dinner of the most delicious vegan soup I've ever consumed, the facilitators introduced to our new home, where I immediately felt drafts of cold air. This won't work, the diva in me boomed to myself. In entering silence in t-minus a couple hours, who would I complain to? There was no manager present, really, since we, as spiritualists from different walks of life were all on the same playing field as silent, sentient beings, so I would have to manage myself (and my reservations). Yes, in silence. It had begun.



I know my body and know I can't sit on the floor to meditate or do much else in any position for longer than five minutes without feeling like my bones are breaking, and that's totally my bad. But you know what? There were chairs available.

I don't tend to eat vegan food options much, so I had this horribly embarrassing image of myself running to the bathroom fifty times a day to relieve myself, and maybe that's my bad, too? But you know what? Everyone had to use the bathroom, because that's what the body does.

I really hate being cold outside, inside, any side, anytime, and swore I was gonna lose it because gah, why isn't it SUMMER YET? But you know what? I am fortunate enough to have layers of clothing to choose from when I'm cold, so I simply added them as needed.

Over the next several days, my spirit really wanted to resist the 6 AM rising time, the fact that I couldn't snap a stage selfie next to flowers backlit by a gorgeous sunset, the sits which only felt too long when I had thoughts other than perfect peace, and anything the meditation instructors said during dharma talks that gave rise to the cynic in me. I wanted to make sounds and grunt when I needed someone to pass me the salt at dinner. I wanted someone to see in my eyes exactly what I meant and respond accordingly, but people aren't mind readers. For every situation where I wanted to resist and break into full sentences, I remembered that I couldn't really. What could I say that would let people know more about me? Eventually I (or my ego) grew tired of fighting, and so, I let go. The thought popped up again that led me to signing up for silence in the first place: Why not bother? Don't you think you're worth it?

The answer was no. The environment was this type of container that seemed to constantly imply that silence affords us the gift of knowing who we really are. I didn't think I was worth "all this effort" because I didn't, in those moments, want to know who I really was and am. And yet, there I was.



What broke open for me during the heart practices focused on teachings like "See Hear Feel" from the teachings of mediation teacher Shinzen Young, or "Open Awareness," from Adyashanti, or the ages-old Loving Kindness metta Buddhist meditation practice was my heart.

When you think of yourself, someone you love, and eventually, the whole world, full of suffering and joy, and say to all of those entities, "May I be safe, may I be well, may I be happy, and may I be at peace," how can you not open up, and dare I say, cry a little? Who am I kidding: the waterworks started and were not stopping easily.



Also present in the teachings was the work of spiritual author and educator Byron Katie, who is perhaps most famous for inventing the concepts known collectively as "The Work," and the four questions that the work is based on. My silent, patient contemplation of the answers was the most notable game-changer for me. Proof:



Original statement: "I don't think I'm worth it."

Is it true? (Yes or no. If no, move to 3.) My answer: yes. Can you absolutely know that it's true? (Yes or no.) My answer: no. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought? My answer: I feel small, selfish and insignificant. I feel like the world is all going to shit, and like nothing matters. Who would you be without the thought? My answer: I would be selfless, present, and kind. I would come to know a deep internal peace. I would see the beauty in my life and that of the world around me. I would have an honest desire to be a better person, happy only as I define happiness.

When I finally spoke fully again, almost five days later, I had this sense I knew what I needed to do going forward, and I was reminded of who it is I want to be. Going inside reminded me that I can go anywhere  back to NYC, back to my job, back to my life  but there's so much to do right here.

Photo via GettyWhereas talk of doomsday scenarios about killer robots destroying mankind were once the stuff of science fiction nightmares, increasingly more and more people  including some of the world's leading technologists  are sounding the alarm about the perils of AI. But are our fears misplaced? Should we be more afraid of robots or the humans who make and use them?

Somewhere between the '90s and now, a suspicion began to take root among even the most tech-illiterate that we are living in The Future. Not the nebulous experience of the future as a block of time relative to our past and present selves and sandwiched somewhere murky between birth and death, but The Future, as in, that imagined faraway destiny where fashion designers inexplicably (and exclusively) work in silver palettes, cars drive themselves and fly overhead, the service industry is populated by accommodating robots, distance means nothing and interpersonal communication is interceded by technological connections. The subject of many special episodes of sitcoms and cartoons, the post-Y2K world has been spinning faster than we've noticed, landing us squarely in a post-human present hurtling toward a future that many predict will be just what we imagined  or much, much worse.

The term artificial intelligence is loaded with baggage, mostly in the form of robots with human characteristics that are either kindly and benevolent to humans (think C-3P0) or evil with a kill switch that can't be turned off (see the plot of most mainstream sci-fi films). Really, though, AI refers to the development of computer systems and machines that have the ability to perform tasks that normally require the intelligence of a human. While we currently only have narrow (weak) AI that is designed to perform a specific task, like facial recognition, voice recognition (i.e. Siri) or even driving a car, many researchers have their eyes on the long-term prize of general (AGI) or strong AI, when a machine could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. According to the Future of Life Institute, whose scientific advisory board includes Elon Musk, Morgan Freeman, Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, Italian computer scientist Francesa Rossi and several other leading minds, "While narrow AI may outperform humans at whatever its specific task is, like playing chess or solving equations, AGI would outperform humans at nearly every cognitive task."

"In a United States context, I think one of the most difficult concepts to grasp is that we as a people are no longer in control of the directions in which our society is moving," says N. Katherine Hayles, professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University and the author of How We Became Posthuman, a work considered to be "the key text which brought posthumanism to broad international attention," according to the Kilden Journal of Gender Research.

A feeling of despair founded on the disorienting sensation of losing control over one's environment is a hallmark of certain types of depression, and certainly the proliferation of AI has been met with skepticism and criticism that humans will lose their connection to each other and  perhaps even more urgently, in a capitalist society  their spot in the workforce.





"We humans should not ask what will happen in the future as if we were passive bystanders, when we in fact have the power to shape our own destiny."





While new realities like self-checkout at the grocery store, the table side replacement of waiters with iPads, Google Maps' traffic predictions and the ability of smart assistants like Alexa to make your appointments and the like are so commonplace as to be banal, flashier moments that hint at the future of AI's capabilities and potential roles in our lives like drones hovering down the runway at Fashion Week carrying handbags, sex dolls you can make orgasm with the right algorithmic touch, Facebook chatbots that create their own languages, self-driving trucks to deliver our goods and eerily lifelike robots like Hanson Robotics' crown jewel Sophia induce the sort of existential anxiety that is felt at a primal, cellular level.

From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner, it's somehow easy for us to imagine worlds in which another form of intelligence threatens to supersede ours. At a more practical level, the human labor that AI renders unnecessary represents the loss of jobs at a grand scale. People who lose their jobs to technology may not have the skill sets required to take on a new job in the ever-growing technology sector. In a capitalist society, where does that leave us?

It's a worry pressing enough that the Future of Life created a section on its site dedicated solely to "Existential Risk" that includes charts, graphics and statistics on just how founded our fear of AI is. Weighing myths versus facts, as scientists are wont to do, the institute's tone is that of a kindly, rational yet empathetic older professor who knows that the aliens are real but is choosing not to reveal everything to you yet lest you totally freak out because you don't know how to work with them.

"During the early years of trains," the Institute gently reminds us, "many worried that the human body couldn't handle speeds greater than 30 miles per hour; people were hesitant to use the first phones for fear of electric shocks or that the devices were instruments of the devil himself; and there were equally dire predictions about planes, heart transplants and Y2K, just to name a few red herrings. While we hope that concerns about [some technologies] prove equally unwarranted, we can only ensure that to be the case with sufficient education, research and intervention. We humans should not ask what will happen in the future as if we were passive bystanders, when we in fact have the power to shape our own destiny."





"There is great opportunity to improve lives with AI, but if the technology is not developed safely, there is also the chance that someone could accidentally or intentionally unleash an AI system that ultimately causes the elimination of humanity."





That being said, while researchers may stress that we needn't fear that robots (like the roaming Knightscope security robot that mowed down a toddler at a California shopping mall in 2016) will suddenly "turn evil" and start attacking us, there is concern, even among some of the top AI researchers and tech innovators in the world (Bill Gates, Elon Musk and formerly the late Stephen Hawking), about the dangerous misapplications of AI. At the largest technology conference in the world, Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, last November, Hawking said, "AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. It brings dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It could bring great disruption to our economy."

One thing most top researchers seem to agree on is that the main concern regarding AI is not with malevolent robots, but, as the Future of Life Institute explains, "with intelligence itself: specifically, intelligence whose goals are misaligned with ours." The institute gives several examples of ways AI with goals "misaligned with ours" could operate to hurt society: "outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand." The warn of a "a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI" that "could easily pay or manipulate many humans to unwittingly do its bidding."

Related | Woman Killed by Self-Driving Uber in Arizona



These researchers know better than anyone the power technology holds, and while the machines themselves may currently exist in a plane of moral neutrality, centuries of human history have taught us that people are capable of grand-scale evil. Bluntly, the Future of Life Institute states, "There is great opportunity to improve lives with AI, but if the technology is not developed safely, there is also the chance that someone could accidentally or intentionally unleash an AI system that ultimately causes the elimination of humanity." In short, worry less about the machines themselves and more about the goals of the people making them.

A report titled "The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention and Mitigation" published in February details exactly how AI could become both a conduit and a creator of disaster. The report, which draws on the expertise of 26 AI experts, including top minds from Elon Musk's non-profit research firm OpenAI, Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute (not to be confused with the Future of Life Institute) and others, details in 100 pages how AI could be manipulated (and in some cases, already is) to cause mass mayhem, destruction and confusion.

The report mentions threats to digital security (e.g. cyberattacks, automated hacking and the use of speech synthesis for impersonation, the last of which has already been done semi-successfully to make convincing but fake videos of Barack Obama); physical security (e.g. malicious swarms of thousands of micro-drones a la the creepy bee episode of Black Mirror, the deployment of autonomous weapons systems  think missiles that could make decisions about where and when to strike on their own  or self-driving vehicles that are hacked to crash into crowds); and political security (e.g. the creation of targeted propaganda through the utilization of mass-collected data along the lines of what Russian hackers did to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the manipulation of videos, known as Deepfakes, which have already taken off in the making of hyper-realistic, fake celebrity porn).



Related | Deepfake Porn Is Technically Legal (and Abusive)



One factor amplifying AI anxiety, beyond even the general insecurity, fear and malaise rampant throughout the Western world and beyond, is the impending crisis of climate change. Israeli historian, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of two international bestsellers on, roughly, the history and fate of mankind, Yuval Noah Harari has said that climate change will be the catalyst that rushes in world-changing technological development. When asked in a recent interview with The Guardian if environmental degradation would halt technological progress, Harari replied, "I think it will be just the opposite  that, as the ecological crisis intensifies, the pressure for technological development will increase, not decrease. I think that the ecological crisis in the 21st century will be analogous to the two world wars in the 20th century in serving to accelerate technological progress."

Indeed, while the quest for human-level, strong AI was long considered the stuff of science-fiction dreams, the recent breakthroughs in AI that we've seen have caused leading experts to rethink their predicted timelines of technological advancement. But these surveys still show disagreement across the board. For instance, while some experts still believe that we are centuries away from human-level AI, many AI researchers at the 2015 AI Safety Conference in Puerto Rico guessed that this holiest of technological grails would happen before the year 2060.





"Homo sapiens as we know them will probably disappear within a century or so, not destroyed by killer robots or things like that, but changed and upgraded with biotechnology and artificial intelligence into something else, into something different."





Making scientific and technological predictions for the future is notoriously difficult. For instance, in 1933, less than 24 hours before Leo Szilard's discovery of the nuclear chain reaction, respected nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford ended a lecture to the British Association for the Advancement of Science by essentially saying the search was atomic energy would inevitably be fruitless, calling it "moonshine." In 1956, Astronomer Royal Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley is said to have called interplanetary space travel "utter bilge." On the flipside, William Gibson famously "predicted the internet" with his 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer.

When it comes to the future of AI, many of the wildest predictions are related to the functioning of the brain itself, and how it might merge with technology. A start up called Kernel, for example, is working to create a neural prosthetic that can be used to enhance brain capacity even more than the "smart drugs" that have become so popular in tech circles. Elon Musk's brain-computer interface venture Neuralink is focused on creating devices meant to be implanted in the human brain for similar purposes. Engineers at Samsung are already hard at work trying to one-up Google Glass by putting the Internet onto contact lenses. "Smart dust," or tiny AI cameras no bigger than a grain of salt, threatens to follow you around in decades to come, recording your every move (makes you a bit nostalgic for the FBI agent watching you through your laptop). And Ray Kurzweil, a prolific inventor and Google's chief futurist, believes we are approaching the possibility of technology-assisted immortality.

"Most people on record worrying about superhuman AI guess it's still at least decades away," the Future of Life Institute says. "But they argue that as long as we're not 100% sure that it won't happen this century, it's smart to start safety research now to prepare for the eventuality. Many of the safety problems associated with human-level AI are so hard that they may take decades to solve. So it's prudent to start researching them now."





Beyond malicious actors actively seeking to manipulate technology to destructive ends, there's also a certain kind of passive and unexamined bias that's both uniquely and pervasively human influencing everything it touches, including the programming underlying AI.





"Whenever a species enters into a symbiotic relationship with another species, there are benefits as well as risks," Hayles says. "With humans and networks and programmable machines, the benefits are clear: more information flowing through networks, more control mechanisms developed that can handle these exponentially increasing flows, more delegation of mundane tasks to intelligent machines and devices, more complex and faster infrastructural networks. The risks are the new vulnerabilities that arise as one species becomes increasingly dependent on another for its livelihood and indeed, life itself. If the electronic networks crash, either inadvertently or through cyber warfare, millions of humans will die because they will lack water, food distribution, shelter, heat, etc. I consider much more far-fetched the 'Terminator'-type fictions that imagine the machines will take over. Humans invent these machines, control their energy requirements, implement and maintain them, and junk them when they become obsolete. Rather, the changes will be more indirect, more distributed and slower."

To this end, the researchers behind the 100-page doomsday report recommend a four-point action plan to start putting safety guards in place. They suggest that policymakers collaborate closely with technical researchers; that AI engineers "take the dual-use nature of their work seriously, allowing misuse-related considerations to influence research priorities;" researchers and policymakers should develop best practices for addressing dual-use concerns like computer security; and those same parties should get even more people involved, actively seeking "to expand the range of stakeholders and domain experts involved in discussions of these challenges."

And the top companies in the AI field are working toward these solutions. Though they are competitors, Amazon, Apple, Google/DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have partnered to create The Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society, a non-profit organization whose goal is "to ensure that applications of AI are beneficial to people and society." Amazon's vice president for global innovation policy Paul Misener says, "We believe that artificial intelligence technologies hold great promise for improving the quality of people's lives and can be used to help humanity address important global challenges."

Beyond malicious actors actively seeking to manipulate technology to destructive ends, there's also a certain kind of passive and unexamined bias that's both uniquely and pervasively human influencing everything it touches, including the programming underlying AI. Researcher Joy Buolamwini found that the AI-powered facial recognition systems of Microsoft, IBM and Chinese company Face++ had 34% more errors identifying dark-skinned women than light-skinned men. It turns out that when software engineers, already predominantly white males due to a historical lack of diversity in STEM fields, train their facial-recognition algorithms with mostly images of other white males, the algorithm itself takes on the bias of the human programming it. Bias and outright hate can also be learned by a machine when exposed to the influences of the outside world; in 2016 Microsoft had to shut down Tay, an AI Twitter bot programmed to have "conversational understanding," just 16 hours after it was launched when it began spewing anti-Semitic and sexist rhetoric it learned from other users online.

And while the implications of racist and sexist intelligent machinery for our everyday lives are as varied as the current problems we face, Hayles argues that the inequality present in society will become exacerbated to an even greater degree by AI, and far beyond the inconveniences people of color and white women already deal with due to bias every day.



"The issues are, who will have access to the intelligent technologies? Who will decide the purposes for which they are used, who will be in control of their development and implementation, and who will be responsible for constraints on their use?" Hayles says. "My prediction is that the results will be complex and not all in one direction. In some respects, human lives will improve in some areas and for some people, and in other respects, human lives will be put at risk and will devolve relative to the prospects available to others."

In his Guardian interview, Harari asserts that "Homo sapiens as we know them will probably disappear within a century or so, not destroyed by killer robots or things like that, but changed and upgraded with biotechnology and artificial intelligence into something else, into something different." Surely access to such biotechnology will be anything but even across class, race and gender, if history teaches us anything. When an entire gender is denied full rights to bodily autonomy, or when populations are discriminated against to the point of disenfranchisement, limited access to health care, education and other resources, as is the case in too many places now, why should we assume that things will be any different when superhuman AI finally arrives?

Acknowledging both this reality and also the looming negative effects of an environment out of whack, Hayles argues, "We desperately need new ideas and discussions that begin from the reality of interdependence, limited resources, sustainability and collective responsibility for the world in which we live and the planet we inhabit." She adds, "If the environment ceases to be habitable by humans or social mechanisms cease to function properly, no one, no matter how rich, privileged or powerful, will be able to insulate himself or herself from the ensuing disasters. It's high time we realize that for better or worse we are all in this together, and plan accordingly."

Photos via GettyThis service applies to you if your subscription has not yet expired on our old site. You will have continued access until your subscription expires; then you will need to purchase an ongoing subscription through our new system. Please contact the Parsons Sun office at (620) 421-2000 if you have any questionsIt's being reported today that Korean mobile technology solutions firm Firstface will be filing a patent infringement suit against Apple for allegedly copying their feature to unlock smartphone screen through biometric sensor-based user authentication.

Firstface co-CEO Jung Jae-lark has registered its own patents in multiple nations including Korea, Japan, and the US since 2011 on a solution that enables users to unlock the smartphone home screen immediately after they authenticate themselves by pressing their fingers on the fingerprint sensor-installed home button.





Apple introduced Touch ID in the iPhone 5 which debuted on September 21, 2012. The Korean company Firstface contends their US patent application US2015077859 A1 predates the iPhone 5 .However, patent applications don't count in court. On record is a granted patent for their invention in the U.S. dated 2017 which was filed back in 2015. The application number that is listed associated with the granted patent is US 20150378595 A1. We we unable to find their US2015077859 A1 nor a granted patent related to it.



The patent figures of the 2017 granted patent 9,779,419 show a home button identical to Apple's, how convenient.

Shim Young-tack, another Firstface co-CEO who also serves as a professor at the Korean campus of New York State University, was quoted by local news outlet FN News as saying "The solution that activates the smartphone screen upon authenticating a user's fingerprint was something unprecedented before Jung's invention."

Shim said he and Jung are working together with US attorney and patent lawyer Lee Jae-gyu. He also said the CEOs approached Apple to find a middle ground for the case by inking a licensing deal, but the US firm has rejected the offer.

The company appears to only have a single granted patent dated 2017. It's the Korean company who told the Korean publication that they were considering the lawsuit based on a patent application and not a granted patent. It's difficult to see how they'll be able to sue based on a patent application. For the record we couldn't find a 'Firstface' website, only a useless Facebook page



Update 4:15 am PST: A second Korean report definitively claims that the company did file a lawsuit yesterday against Apple and Samsung sometime yesterday. The second report claims the company has three patents. The patents may be foreign patents. When the lawsuit comes to light we'll follow up accordingly.







About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Those using abusive language or negative behavior will result in being blacklisted on Disqus.Last month we reported that after months of rumors, Jimmy Iovine was going to fade into the background of Apple Music and stay on as a consultant, opening the door for new blood to come in to run Apple Music. Late yesterday that's exactly what happened. Apple appointed a new executive to oversee its Apple Music streaming business and hit 48 million subscribers.

The Reuters report further noted that "Apple said it had appointed Oliver Schusser as vice president of Apple Music and international content. Schusser, who joined Apple 14 years ago, will report directly to Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue and will also oversee Apple's services outside the United States, including the App Store and iTunes."

Variety added that "Schusser has led efforts outside the U.S. related to the App Store, iTunes' movies and TV portals, iBooks, Apple Podcasts, and more.

Schusser will relocate from London to California, splitting his time between Apple Park in Cupertino and Apple's offices in Culver City. While in the U.K., he played a key role in the acquisition of Shazam, which has yet to receive European regulatory approval. He will continue to lead international teams in 38 different offices."

Apple Music service has 48 million subscribers, 40 million of whom are paying subscribers and 8 million of whom are on a short free trial, Apple said. Spotify has a larger number on the books but many are a free tier.

Schusser may provide the missing link between Apple's ambitions in television, music and artificial intelligence, by bringing all of these elements under one leader. Below is a picture of Schusser with Eddy Cue in an off-beat (costume) outfit.





About Making Comments on our Site: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit any comments. Those using abusive language or negative behavior will result in being blacklisted on Disqus.News and commentary on organized crime, street crime, white collar crime, cyber crime, sex crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism.IRAN: Supreme Leader Rejects 'Western Influence' Of UNESCO Education Goals

04/12/18

Source: Radio Farda

Speaking to a group of teachers and education specialists April 7, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vehemently denounced UNESCO's Education 2030 goals, which include gender equality in education.



Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Speaking against UNESCO's Education 2030 in July 2017



"The Islamic Republic will not surrender to documents like UNESCO's Education 2030, and its implementation is forbidden," Khamenei told the group of educators. "The basis, in this country, is Islam and the Quran. This is not a land where the defective, corrupt, and destructive Western lifestyle will be permitted to expand its influence."

Adopted in May 2015 at the World Education Forum, UNESCO's Education 2030 document lays out goals for the global education community, including an expansion of early childhood and adult education opportunities, an emphasis on civics and citizenship education, and access to education for girls and women.

The Supreme Leader rebuked the government of president Hassan Rouhani for signing, implementing, and promoting UNESCO's "Western influenced" educational agenda.

Conservative allies of the Supreme Leader also warn that implementing the UNESCO plan paves the way for foreigners to infiltrate the Iranian educational system, promoting and spreading a decadent Western lifestyle and liberal values.



Protests in Qom, Iran against UNESCO's Education 2030

(July 2017 file photo by Tasnim News Agency)

In an open letter published last year, Sohrab Salahi the head of the Basiji Professors Organization, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), went even further, saying, "U.S. spies have deceived simpleton Iranian government officials through UNESCO's educational project into surrendering Iran's 'great cultural capacity to the Americans."

Calling the project "a joke," Salahi did not present any evidence indicating American spies are behind the UNESCO plan.

Immediately following a reprimand from Khamenei last year, President Hassan Rouhani's administration announced that UNESCO 2030 had been shelved indefinitely, and it is unclear why the document is again raisinghackles among conservatives now.

"We will confront whoever implements UNESCO's Education 2030 or educates students on any basis related to it," Education Minister Mohammad Bat'haei told the Islamic Republic's official news agency (IRNA) April 11.

Education in Iran is tightly controlled by the government at all levels, so it is highly unlikely the UNESCO program will make it into schools if it is condemned by the Supreme Leader. Bat'haei also warned independent NGOs focused on education to shun the UNESCO document or expect "unknown consequences."Iranian messaging apps reportedly removed from Apple's App Store

04/12/18

Source: Tehran Times

TEHRAN - Two Iranian messaging applications have been reportedly removed from the Apple's iOS App Store from Monday, according to local media. However, Apple Inc. has not yet issued any statement about removing the messaging apps Soroush and Baleh.



Read related report (in Persian) by Iranian daily Ghanoon



In recent weeks, Iranian officials are mulling over the replacement of domestic messaging apps instead of Telegram, which is popular in Iran.



Last week, President Hassan Rouhani announced the development of domestic messaging applications, saying it is intended to end monopoly in social media.



"Domestic messaging applications and software should not be developed to restrict access (to cyberspace), but should be developed to end monopoly in messaging apps," Rouhani said during a meeting with his ministers, provincial governors and heads of executive bodies.



It is a source of honor to develop "Iranian messaging apps" which are "safe and cheap" and meet the people's needs.



Up to now, five messaging applications have been approved by the National Center for Cyberspace, an organization established by the Supreme Cyberspace Council.



Soroush, Gap, iGap, BisPhone Plus and Wispi are the applications developed by Iranian experts and are supported by the center.



Domestic messaging applications eye officials for further support and to help them to convince subscribers to move to another application yet.

Iranian apps, not welcomed on App Store

Apple does not have an App Store in Iran, but Iranian developers have created several apps for sale in other domestically developed App Stores, and iPhones are routinely smuggled in to the country, despite an official ban on their sale.



According to statistics published by The Verge in August 2017, an estimated 48 million smartphones have been sold in Iran, a country of 80 million people, and there are an estimated 47 million social media users.



According to the AppleInsider, the company has in the past banned certain apps created by Iranian developers in reaction to U.S. sanctions against that country; this most recently happened last August. Those sanctions forbid Apple from selling hardware or distributing software in Iran.Former Ghana President Jerry John Rawlings has described the late Winnie Mandela of South Africa as a very brave apartheid fighter who carried her defiance for the system with quiet dignity.

In a tribute to the late Winnie Mandela who is due for a state burial at the weekend, Rawlings said the fight against the devious, wicked and callous apartheid regime was not for the faint-hearted and that Winnie was truly prepared to fearlessly live and die for the cause.



Let us make the effort to understand and acknowledge her superiority. Nothing pleases us more than to know that she and Mandela restored their spiritual bond, respect and admiration known to only those who dared to walk the plank, said Rawlings in the tribute he wrote on behalf of his family - Nana, Zanetor, Asantewaa, Amina and Kimathi.



Winnie Mandela, popularly called Mother of the Nation and champion of justice and equality died on April 2, 2018 aged 81, following a protracted ill health.



Below is Rawlings' tribute:



WINNIE MANDELA WAS THE BRAVEST OF THE BRAVE - A Tribute By H. E. Jerry John Rawlings, former President of Ghana



Winnie was the bravest of the brave. She carried her defiance with quiet dignity. She did not wait for others, nor did she need the courage of numbers. The fight against the apartheid regime was not for the faint-hearted. They were devious, wicked and callous.



Winnie was one of the few who no doubt knew the liberating effect of being reborn out of the fear of death, and being truly prepared to fearlessly live and die for a cause.



Her lonely strength finally won the admiration of those who had been cowed, to wake up to their roles in those dangerous days. The infectious courage of her conviction led to her being effectively isolated for years. And even as the spirit of liberation was becoming more and more evident, the intensity of her courage, defiance and outspokenness still kept her a lonely figure. Understandably, she had little tolerance for weak opportunists.



Winnies fearlessness and absolute candour elevated her well above most of us. You cannot possibly go through what Winnie went through alone and still continue to trust and respect others as you do your very own self. Finding people of a similar nature is rare and can only come from those who would have suffered the same fate.



So much is owed to Winnie. Sadly a good number of those who benefitted the most from her pain and struggle did not see their way clear and early enough to give her what was her due.



Let us make the effort to understand and acknowledge her superiority. Nothing pleases us more than to know that she and Mandela restored their spiritual bond, respect and admiration known to only those who dared to walk the plank.



Winnie and Mandela gave each other what we couldnt give them - the richness and tranquility of their love; the spiritual peace and sanctity of their reunion in those final months and moments.



On behalf of Nana, Zanetor, Asantewaa, Amina and Kimathi, I express our sincere condolences to the family, friends and all who in diverse ways were partners in the painful struggle for freedom.



Fare thee well Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. God be with you.













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Featured VideoPresident Akufo-Addo has decorated the outgoing Chinese Ambassador to Ghana Sun Boahong with the Member of order of the star of Ghana honorary division.



This is in recognition for her outstanding contribution to the socio-economic development of Ghana.



A citation read by the Foreign Affairs Minister, Shirley Ayokor Botchway said under her tenure, trade relations between Ghana and China increased from from 5.6 billion dollars to 6.6 billion.



At a farewell lunch at the Jubilee House, President Akufo-Addo asked her to continue to be an advocate for Ghana as she ends her duty tour in Ghana.



Madam Sun Baohong begun her duty in Ghana in 2014 after similar stint in South Africa.



During her four year stay in Ghana, there had been tremendous achievement in bilateral relations between the two countries and high level exchanges.



China remains Ghanas largest trading partner and main source of foreign investment. China's registered investment projects in Ghana has risen from 691 to 790 during her tenure.



Madam Sun Baohong said China will support government in the implementation of its flagship programmes such as one district one factory policy.



President Akufo-Addo was grateful to China for the continuous support to the economy.



Madam Baohong officially invited the President to the China Africa Cooperation Forum this September.

Source: GBC









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Featured VideoNewmont Ghana has resumed operations after a temporary suspension during the tragic loss of six contractors in a construction accident at the Ahafo Mill Expansion project site.



Following the tragic incident, the company suspended production at both Ahafo and Akyem mines.



Though the Ahafo Mill Expansion project and all surface civil construction work still remains suspended, operations at both mines have commenced following extensive safety discussions and risk assessments



According to a statement issued by Agbeko Azumah, Communications and External Relations Manager of the Ahafo Mine, work at the Ahafo Mill Expansion project site will resume when Newmont and the authorities are satisfied that work can resume safely.



The company has also expressed its condolences to the bereaved families of the six contractors and promised to support the families and its employees as well as employees of Consar Company Ltd.



The company also continues to cooperate with the Inspectorate Division of the Minerals Commission to support their investigation of the accident.







Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Featured VideoUganda plans to impose a daily tax on social media users from July in a bid to raise revenue, government ministers have confirmed.



The move has been criticised by rights activist Rosebell Kagumire who told Reuters news agency: Its part of a wider attempt to curtail freedoms of expression.



Earlier this month, President Yoweri Museveni - who has been in power for more than 30 years - was quoted by Uganda's privately owned Daily Monitor newspaper as saying that a tax should be introduced on people who use social media for "gossip".



"I am not going to propose a tax on internet use for educational, research or reference purposes these must remain free," he was quoted as saying.



The proposed tax will see each mobile phone subscriber who uses platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter being charged.



The amount is unclear - Reuters reports that Finance Minister Matia Kasaija said it will be 200 Ugandan shillings ($0.027) a day, while State Minister for Planning David Bahati is quoted by the Daily Monitor as saying it will be 100 shillings.



Were looking for money to maintain the security of the country and extend electricity so that you people can enjoy more of social media, more often, more frequently, Mr Kasaija told Reuters.

Source: BBC









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Featured VideoOutspoken New Patriotic Party Member of Parliament for Assin Central, Kennedy Ohene Agyapong has denied media reports that his wife has been awarded a juicy contract at the Energy Ministry through sole sourcing.



The Daily Post Newspaper, last week, reported that the Akufo-Addo government has awarded contracts to Mrs. Agyapongs company to the tune of one million Ghana cedis through sole sourcing.



The Newspaper claimed documents in its possession revealed, Stella Wilsons Imperial World Ventures, landed the GH100,260,000.00 contract through sole sourcing at the Ministry of Energy to supply 150W LED streetlights.



But Kennedy Agyapong told Adom TV Tuesday that the street light contract was not sole-sourced, adding that the contract went through limited tendering.



My wifes contract was not sole-sourced. It was a restricted [limited] tender. She qualified for it, the reason she was awarded. Those accusing her should desist from that because that wont stop her from doing the right thing.



That publication from that newspaper is a diabolical plan by the NDC to tarnish my image and that of my wife, he said.



According to him, his wife [Stella Wilson] has already delivered 50 percent of the contract work even before the mobilization period, something he says calls for commendation rather than condemnation.



But a former Deputy Communications Minister, Felix Kwakye Ofosu commenting on the issue said the contract awarded Mr. Agyapongs wife did not meet the criterion for which sole-sourcing is awarded.



According to him, sole- sourcing may be allowed when national security [non-economical] considerations are paramount.

Source: adomonline.com









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Featured VideoRas Mubarak has been denied entry into the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) by Israel.



The National Democratic Congress MP for Kumbungu was traveling under the aegis of the Palestinian Authority to present a paper in Ramallah.



It is true and very unfortunate, Mr. Mubarak told Starr News from Jordan.



The Ghanaian MP who had permit from Israel to carry out his assignment in Palestine through the Allenby Border Crossing was stopped at Jordan.



When we got to the Jordanian border the Israelis said they wont allow us to go to Palestine for this particular conference. I find it unfortunate, but Im not surprised because it is part of a strategy to persecute Palestine and to harass friends of Palestine, Mubarak stressed.



Israel as the occupying power, controls almost all access to the Occupied Palestinian Territories which comprises the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.



Mr. Mubarak, who has been outspoken against Israels occupation in Palestine, said he will not be deterred.



However long it takes the oppressed Palestinian people [to] get justiceIf they change their minds and allow me entry, I would say what I plan to say. If they dont, I would say it anyway, Mubarak later said in a Facebook post.



Ghanaians will continue to support the cause of the Palestinian people, Mubarak added.



What is this rogue state [Israel] afraid of? The truth? That I would witness the occupation first hand and call them out for the terrorists they are?



Mubarak is an active member of the Palestine solidarity movement in Ghana who recently led a pro-Palestine march in Accra. He joins a growing list of African parliamentarians and dignitaries who have been critical of Israel and then denied entry into the OPT by Israel.



In April 2015, South Africas Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, was denied entry into the OPT, while en-route to Ramallah to promote research collaboration between the University of Johannesburg and institutions in the OPT.



In December 2016, Associate General Secretary for the World Council of Churches (WCC), Dr. Isabel Apawo Phiri from Malawi, was banned from entering Israel after landing at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. The Christian theologian was attending a WCC meeting in the holy city of Jerusalem. Phiri was the only African member in the WCC staff delegation and the only one who was denied entry to Israel.

Israels anti-African discrimination and racism also extends to asylum-seekers, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, who the Israeli state is seeking to illegally deport.



The politics of discrimination and apartheid should have no place to thrive in the 21st century. Alas, it is happening. A state thats erroneously described as the only democracy in the Middle East treats international law and conventions with contempt, flouts them with increasing regularity and maintains a brutal military occupation [of Palestine] while the whole world looks on, Mubarak wrote.







Source: classfmonline.com









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Featured VideoOpposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament (MP) for Bawku Central in the Upper East Region, Mahama Ayariga, has thrown a challenge to the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) over the double salary scandal that has rocked some NDC officials, who served under President John Mahama.



Mr Ayariga confirmed a police invitation asking him to come to the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service to assist in an ongoing investigation into the allegation that between January 2013 and December 2016 when he was a minister of state, he received salaries as an MP and also as minister of state.



The act, according to the police, is contrary to Section 124(1) of the Criminal and other Offence Act 1960 (Act 29) as amended in 2012 (Act 849). Section 124 relates to the offence of stealing.



Political Witch Hunting



Instead of honouring the invitation, he has rather written to the IGP, asking the police to furnish him with the details of the person (s) making the allegation, and failing that he is asking his lawyers to sue those who made the claims, adding that the police are embarking on what he called political witch hunting.



Mr Mahama Ayariga, in his letter, which was copied to the speaker, the leadership of parliament, the Attorney Generals Department, among others, denied the allegation of stealing before threatening legal action.



Public Record



He said the charge the police are trying to bring against him are basic matters of public record you can easily find out from the Hansard of Parliament and the Office of the President.



Mr Mahama Ayariga insisted, To assist you with the investigation, let it be known that no single Member of the Parliament of Ghana from 1993 to date, including New Patriotic Party (NPP) Members of Parliament and NDC Members of Parliament, ever knew their salaries, allowances, facilities and privileges until the last months of their 4 years stay in Parliament when the various Presidents and Parliaments have acted under Article 71 to determine those salaries, allowances, facilities and privileges; and they are communicated to the appointees, he fired.



Advance Payment



He said that every salary or allowance that has been advanced to all MPs since 1993 has been advance payment done pending the determination, pursuant to Article 71, of the actual salary, allowance, facilities and privileges that that person is entitled to, and said the same had been for all ministers of state, who served under NDC administrations and the NPP administration.



They have all not known their actual salaries, allowances, facilities and privileges until the Presidents and Parliaments have acted pursuant to article 71 in the last months of their administrations in 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016, he averred.



Mahama Ayariga said to the best of his knowledge, the Controller and Accountant Generals Department (CAGD) computes the total entitlement of each MP for the entire four years and also deducts and validates every single payment advanced to the MPs within the period, saying, A determination of the ex-gratia is made based on the emoluments determined under Article 71.



Should the total payments made by both Parliament and the Office of the President to a Minister/MP or Deputy Minister/MP exceed the moneys entitled by that person as emoluments as determined under Article 71, a reconciliation is done, and the CAGD would withhold an amount of that persons ex-gratia equal to the excess advance payment and the remaining amount of the ex-gratia, if any, then paid to the Minister/MP or Deputy Minister/MP, Mr Ayariga explained.



He stated, It is obvious that at the time when a Member of Parliament who is serving also as a Minister or Deputy Minister is being advanced any payment by Parliament or the CAGD, before Article 71 determination is made, he or she cannot be legally said to have stolen any public money because all payments are advances pending actual determination of their entitlements.



Request



The opposition MP said cheekily, To further assist you with your investigation (or political witch hunting), if there is any such need, I request you to furnish me with evidence that after Article 71 determination of my emoluments, all total advances paid to me exceeded my total entitlements as determined subsequent to the President and Parliament acting in compliance with Article 71.



He said that for the police to prove to him that they were not embarking on political witch hunting because he belongs to the NDC, kindly also invite all previous Ministers/MPs under both NDC and NPP administrations and crosscheck same.



To prevent future political witch hunting of the type you are engaged in now, kindly advise Parliament and the President to cease all on-going payment of salaries of parliamentarians and ministers until Parliament and the Presidency comply with Article 71. Perhaps, receipt of such on-going payments amounts to stealing since they have not been lawfully determined.



Political Harassment



Mr Ayariga averred, If I am unable to confer with (Addo-Danquah (Mrs.) the Director-General/CID on Thursday, 19th April, 2018 at 11:00 am as requested in your letter, it might be because I dont understand what, in law, confer with means in the context of criminal investigations.



The conduct of the police constitutes political harassment simply because I am a Member of Parliament (MP) elected on the ticket of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and a former appointee of the NDC administration led by President John Dramani Mahama.



However, he said he would honour the invitation with his lawyers.

Source: Daily Guide









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Featured VideoManaging Editor of the Daily Dispatch Newspaper and Pollster, Ben Ephson has said whoever will contest Acting General Secretary of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) John Boadu for the General Secretary position of the party in the upcoming elections will be engaging in an exercise in futility and will be wasting his or her money.



John Boadu whos the National Organizer of the NPP was given additional responsibility as the Acting General Secretary after the National Executive Committee (NEC) of NPP in September 2015 upheld the decision of the Disciplinary Committee to suspend indefinitely Kwabena Agyapong, who was the substantive General Secretary, along with the National Chairman, Paul Afoko; 2nd Vice Chairman, Sammy Crabbe, for working against the partys chances of winning the 2016 elections.



John Boadu in that acting capacity worked very hard and steered the affairs of the party and contributed hugely to then opposition NPP wrestling power from the National Democratic Congress(NDC) in the 2016 elections.



Though hes widely tipped to win the election which is scheduled to take place in June 2018, John Boadu is said to have competition in former Hon. Joe Baidoo Ansah, former Minister of Trade, Industry, Private Sector Development and Presidents Special Initiative in President John Agyekum Kufuors administration, who has indicated his interest to contest to be the NPPs chief scribe.



Another hopeful, Richard Ahiagbah whos the communication Director of the Chicago Chapter of the NPP and a member of the NPP-USA has been in Ghana since last year working very hard and engaging delegates to convince them to elect him as the General Secretary.



But speaking on Kasapa FM, Ben Ephson stated that the hopeful should put their energies and resources to good use as it will be practically impossible to beat John Boadu.



John Boadu as Acting General Secretary worked very hard to bring the party from opposition to power, so what will be the message of whoever is going to contest him? Is the person going to tell the delegates not to vote for John Boadu because he brought the party to power. Anyone who contests John Boadu with the view to beat him will be deceiving himself. One can only contest John Boadu this year to make a showing with the candidate having his name registered in the minds of electorates to better his chances in future elections.

Source: kasapafmonline.com









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Featured VideoDeadly teen-on-teen violence in the City of Brotherly love have Philadelphia police seeking the public's help in finding a suspect in the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old boy on Easter Sunday.

As CBSPhilly.com reports, police yesterday identified the suspect as 18-year-old Zahmir White.

He is being sought in the April 1 fatal shooting of 16-year-old William Bethel.

The shooting occurred on Philly's South Street around 6 p.m. Easter as two groups of teens got into an argument, then fought.

"One of the kids from the opposing group had a firearm and shot 16-year-old William Bethel in the pelvis," Philadelphia Police Capt. Jack Ryan told CBSPhilly.com.

Bethel died two days later from his wounds at a Philadelphia hospital.

Police now say the trigger man behind the fatal shooting was White.

Anyone with any information on White is asked to call police at 215-686-TIPS.Several fire companies battled a house fire in the 100 block of Schoolhouse Road in Penn Township, Perry County, near Duncannon.

The house appears to be a total loss.

Three people were home when the fire started, according to Duncannon's fire chief, and all escaped uninjured. They're being helped by the Red Cross.

The family had 10 cats, however, that might've died. The fire might have started in a wood stove, the chief said.

Photos from live video:

A house fire in the 100 block of Schoolhouse Road in Penn Township, Perry County, near Duncannon. April 12, 2018.

A house fire in the 100 block of Schoolhouse Road in Penn Township, Perry County, near Duncannon. April 12, 2018.

A house fire in the 100 block of Schoolhouse Road in Penn Township, Perry County, near Duncannon. April 12, 2018.

Tanker trucks were called in because of a lack of hydrants in the immediate area. Firefighters are on the scene from Perry and neighboring counties.

LIVE: Crews battle structure fire in Penn Township, Perry County. Posted by PennLive.com on Thursday, April 12, 2018

This story is being updated as more information becomes available.Franklin & Marshall College is no longer using a security company accused of making inappropriate Facebook posts of campus events, according to reports.

The college severed ties with MProtective of York County, which helped monitor fraternity parties, LNP reports.

The student newspaper criticized the company for what were described as "racist, homophobic and xenophobic" posts on Facebook.

F&M let the company go last month in response to "inflammatory and disrespectful" social media posts, college dean Margaret Hazlett told LNP.

MProtective responded that the posts were taken out of context, and showed staff were doing their job, said the report.Undocumented immigrants without a criminal background are being deported in the Philadelphia region at greater rates than in other states, a report by Philly.com and ProPublica shows.

The Philadelphia Immigration and Customs Enforcement office arrested more immigrants without criminal convictions than any of the other 23 regions in the U.S. last year, says the report.

Immigrants without criminal records made up 64 percent of "at large" arrests last year in the Philadelphia ICE field office, compared with 38 percent in the rest of the U.S., said the report.

The Philadelphia ICE region includes parts of Pennsylvania, along with Delaware and West Virginia.

Under the Obama administration, ICE focused on deporting immigrants with criminal histories. That changed when Donald Trump took office.

Soon after he took office, President Trump issued an executive order expanding the population of undocumented immigrants that could be deported.

By the year's end, Philadelphia ICE arrested three times as many undocumented immigrants without criminal convictions as New York or Los Angeles.

The report describes the disruption of a wedding in Camp Hill when the groom and his best man were led away in handcuffs.

The report says District Judge Elizabeth Beckley called ICE after the couple came to her office to get married last year. The groom had been born in Guatemala and was adopted by parents in the U.S. when he was a baby. His green-card status renewal was being processed.

ICE ended up backing off, and the judge married the couple, who have since moved to another state.

Pennsylvania's undocumented population is 16th in the nation, and that of West Virginia and Delaware is far behind. Next highest, at 50-60 percent, were the New Orleans, Buffalo and Boston regions.

In the Philadelphia region last year there were 1,742 arrests of undocumented people without criminal convictions, compared with 999 with criminal convictions.

Many of the undocumented people arrested in this region were living or working in areas that ICE was staking out.

The report analyzed data on monthly at-large arrests in each of ICE's 24 regional offices last year.

Reporters said the Philadelphia region ICE officers routinely arrested undocumented immigrants in the course of trying to arrest someone else.

They also included minor infractions like traffic tickets and loitering in their definition of "criminal alien."

They are also accused of sometimes conducting warrantless searches, fabricating evidence, racial profiling and soliciting a bribe, said the report.

ICE responded to the report:

"ICE and its employees have been given the honor of a special public trust. In keeping with this trust, ICE's enforcement activities are conducted with integrity and professionalism."

"ICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy."

There were 11,643 cases pending in Pa. immigration courts March 1, which is a 62 percent increase over the end of fiscal 2016.A Florida man is charged with sex trafficking two women in his state and Monroe County, Pennsylvania.

John Golom, 52, was indicted in federal court Tuesday on charges he coerced the women into prostitution between 2014 and Feb. 1, 2018, said U.S. Attorney David Freed.

Golom is accused of using force, threat and coercion against the women, authorities say.

If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of life in prison. The investigation was through Project Safe Neighborhoods, which targets violent crime in neighborhoods.Steel beams with reflective red and white stripes are now the gateway to an historic covered bridge in Lancaster County.

While it might not be the most aesthetically pleasing addition, authorities are hoping the change will keep trucks from running into Schenck's Mill Bridge that spans Big Chiques Creek between East Hempfield and Rapho townships.

"Our preference is it would not be there," said Charles Douts Jr., Lancaster County facilities manager, regarding the new warning beam that some nickname a "headache bar" that was installed on either side of the bridge about a month ago.

"But it's a historic treasure. It needs to be protected," Douts said.

New look for Shenck's Mill Bridge, which has been damaged by large trucks last year.. Necessary eyesore?? (Photo submitted by Bill Zell) Posted by Only in Lancaster - PA on Tuesday, April 10, 2018

The bridge was last hit by trucks on New Year's Eve and last October.

"It's been hit several times - the last was the worst," Douts said.

Despite warning signs about the 10-foot 6-inch height limit for the bridge, and a three-ton weight limit, trucks have continued to try to get through, damaging the bridge.

Most tractor trailers require a 12-foot 6-inch clearance.

This is the first time Lancaster County has tried this "fix" on one of its 20 covered bridges open to traffic, Douts said.

Lancaster County saw similar warning structures on bridges elsewhere in the state. The steel beam is erected about 15-20 feet ahead of the bridge, on either side. It has reflective tape and flashing lights, and cost $19,000.

New Year's Eve, a tractor-trailer driver thought he could get through, and caused significant damage to large support beams on the bridge. Repairs cost $45,000, and the county is trying to recoup it from the driver's insurance company.

"It happens quite often, actually - a couple times a year," said Robert Krimmel, East Hempfield Township manager. "Signs have been up for many years, and it doesn't make much difference," he said.

Will this fix work?

"I want to say yes, but most likely there will be someone who will strike it," Douts said. "Our fingers are crossed that this is successful in keeping large vehicles out of the bridge." So far, he said he hasn't heard any complaints about the looks of the large beam.

According to Kenneth Collins, author of "Covered Bridges of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania," the bridge was built in 1847 for $650. After a flood damaged it, it was rebuilt in 1955 for $837. Collins says it is the third oldest bridge in Lancaster County still open to traffic.

Schenck's Mill Bridge is a quarter mile north of Route 283 and Spook Road and a half-mile west on Shenck Road in East Hempfield Township.Students at Capital Area School for the Arts Charter School and Harrisburg SciTech High School are planning a walkout to the state Capitol April 20 to lobby for stricter gun control laws and safer schools.

Students will leave their schools at 10 a.m. April 20, and will hold a program on the Capitol steps at 10:30 a.m. with speakers and on-site voter registration. The public is invited to attend.

The rally on is on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado. National School Walkout web site lists other districts staging protests.

They include Cumberland Valley, Manheim Central, Central York, York Suburban, Eastern York, Dallastown and Spring Grove high schools.HENRICO, Va. -- A music teacher in Virginia has been placed on leave after a Roman Catholic diocese said she had been fired from a Pennsylvania school 15 years ago for kissing a student.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports the Diocese of Erie named Henrico County Public Schools teacher Eve Minter in a list of more than 50 lay employees and priests who church leaders say shouldn't be allowed to work with children, a disclosure some dioceses are issuing to address a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse.

Minter says the diocese misclassified the incident and that she's working to have her name removed from the list. She's been placed on administrative leave from the two middle schools where she teaches, pending investigation.

District spokesman Andy Jenks says Minter passed a background check.

___

Information from: Richmond Times-Dispatch, http://www.richmond.comJohn Arway, the embattled executive director of the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission, is the sort of person that Pennsylvanians should hope enters into public service.

A four-decade veteran of state government, Arway recently found his job in jeopardy after playing a bit of hardball with the General Assembly in his quest to make sure that his agency is adequately funded in the years to come. That agency relies largely on license fees and not tax dollars to pay for its $52 million balanced budget.

To do that, Arway has suggested a $6 price hike for an annual fishing license, from the $21 where it has stood since 2005, to $27. He's proposing to then increase it by 3 percent a year over the next four years.

Despite the hard reality that no private enterprise could long survive without raising prices for 12 years, lawmakers who often boast they want to run government like a business, balked.

Arway has acted as both an unstinting promoter of the outdoors and a responsible steward of his resources. He has built the kind of reserves that the perennially cash-strapped General Assembly can only dream of.

But in the face of flat-lining revenues, the agency has nonetheless had to trim staff and put off needed repairs to critical infrastructure. Lawmakers, meanwhile, pressed Arway to spend down his reserves.

To avoid such future challenges, Arway has sought legislative authorization of a bill that would allow the commission to set its own rates for three years, subject to public comment, and with oversight by the Legislature and the governor.

The bill cleared the Senate last March. But it has been marooned in a state House committee ever since.

Without a hike, the agency would have to further curtail services and shut down trout hatcheries, Arway recently told the PennLive Editorial Board.

Such a move would reduce, by the hundreds of thousands, the number of fish stocked by the commission into Pennsylvania's rivers and streams, dealing a sharp blow to an industry that pumps about $1.2 billion a year into the state's economy.

To further press his case, Arway briefly floated the idea of shutting down hatcheries in the home districts of lawmakers who opposed the three-year funding scheme. That brazen but bold action led to legislation that would slap an eight-year term limit on Arway and his eventual successors.

The Senate has already approved the term-limit bill. And, Arway, it should be noted, hit his eight-year anniversary on March 2. He's effectively living on borrowed time for the sin of speaking truth to power.

The House Game & Fisheries Committee, meanwhile, is also sitting on a fee bill for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Its chairman, Rep. Keith Gillespie, R-York, has linked the bills' fates, and will not move one without the other, according to published reports.

So the two sides are engaged in a legislative stand-off, with little movement in sight and rampaging egos teetering on the brink. Anglers and citizens, as ever, are collateral damage.

The solution here is simple: The House should stop dallying, pass the commission funding bills and then begin working on long-term solutions to shore up the finances of both outdoor agencies. The vengeful term-limits bill should wither on the vine where it belongs.

We end where we began: Pennsylvanians should be glad that there are such responsible public servants as John Arway. He deserves commendation for his efforts, not a spot on the unemployment line.Rod Serling warned us about Vladimir Putin years ago.

Mike McCarthy (submitted photo)

Many of you are younger than me, and I know there are a lot of you out there, and that means you probably never saw or perhaps heard of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street." It usually shows up once a year in an anthology of Serling's creation during the holiday season.

Baby Boomers will remember staying up Friday nights to watch episodes of Twilight Zone, many of which were entertaining allegories focusing on issues of the day.

This was a time of the Red Scare, bomb shelters and blacklisting.

"Monsters" was a story of the havoc brought on the inhabitants of Maple Street. It begins with a flash of light and the neighborhood's power going off. The neighbors come outside to find out what is going on. Someone suggests that space aliens might be the cause.

Then houselights go on and off and cars cannot start and then start on their own. All of these happenings raise the suspicions of neighbors toward each other.

One adventurous soul volunteers to find out what is going on in an adjacent neighborhood. Suspicions continue to increase about that is responsible for the strange goings on.

Eventually someone walks into the neighborhood and is shot and killed. The neighbors soon discover that it was the volunteer coming back from his foray into the other neighborhood. The final scene on Maple Street shows the neighbors chaotically turning on one another.

The next scene is the inside of a spaceship with "real aliens" congratulating themselves on sewing the discord, creating the paranoia and the panic that ensued through minimal interventions in the power system and promising to use the same methodology to conquer the earth one neighborhood at a time.

The Russians who were indicted recently in the Mueller probe and their leader, Putin must likewise be congratulating themselves. For like the aliens in the spaceship, they have caused an extreme amount of discord with a minimal investment.

But these Russians wee much more efficient than Serling's aliens for they have spread their disruption and discord throughout the entire country with that minimal investment.

Beginning in 2014, they launched a disinformation campaign that disrupted our elections and in the process fanned the flames of paranoia and discord that lingers and is perhaps even more pronounced than it was on Election Day in 2016.

Putin, like the aliens, found willing accomplices in our leadership and media both on the left and the right.

And like the neighbors stoked by the aliens, our leaders and the media cannot resist casting blame and fanning the flames that Mr. Putin's operatives kindled.

Serling closed the episode that Friday night in 1960 with the following:

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices - to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill - and suspicion can destroy - and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own - for the children - and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is - that these things cannot be confined - to the Twilight Zone."

Serling's admonition was true then and is true now and we, our leaders and the media would do well to be mindful of it as we deal with Mr. Putin's invasion of our country.

Currently retired, Mike McCarthy spent four decades in and around state government, including stints as president of the Pennsylvania Business Roundtable and as counsel to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. He writes from Hampden Township.A loud and raucous crowd demanding gun law reforms gathered in the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday just outside a nearby meeting room where that very topic was being discussed at a House Judiciary Committee hearing.

A chant of "vote, vote, vote" arose frequently from the sea of people filling the marble staircase and holding colorful handmade signs with messages such as, "One child's life is worth more than all of the guns in the world" and "Killing innocent people, acts of pure evil. Not passing gun laws, acts of pure cowardice."

Fritz Walker, a representative of CeaseFirePA, said he was grateful judiciary committee Chairman Ron Marsico, R-Dauphin County, was showing leadership and courage by having his committee take on the controversial issue of gun law reforms and gun violence.

"We stand here to support those hearings. But we also have a clear message for the Pennsylvania Legislature. We're losing 1,500 Pennsylvanians, and 36,000 Americans a year to gun violence," Walker said. "So let us be crystal clear: just like thoughts and prayers are not enough, hearings are not enough. We demand a vote."

Representatives from nearly a dozen groups in attendance were rallying for passage of legislation to require background checks on private long gun sales, a ban on bump stocks, a ban on the sale and manufacture of semi-assault rifle sales, limits on magazine capacity, and emergency risk protection orders that temporarily allow a firearm to be seized if an individual poses a threat to themselves or others.

Victims of gun violence shared their stories that led them to advocate for laws to help reduce gun violence.

Among those who spoke was Movita Johnson, who said her two teen-age sons told her that they knew nine boys in their Philadelphia neighborhood who had been shot. So she moved her family to Delaware County where in 2008 her 18-year-old son was shot in a case of mistaken identity by two men with a semi-automatic assault rifle.

"You cannot move away from this problem," she said. "So what do we want? We want a vote."

Woodland Hills High School student Ciara Turner read off the names of 56 people from her community who died from gun violence, each name was marked by a single group clap. Turner said these were "our friends, our family, our own community. We're killing each other."

Turner's 16-year-old twin brother Jerame was killed and a 13-year-old boy wounded in a November shooting. In a tearful voice, Turner said,"He was my brother, my protector. He meant the world to me. He gave me a reason to smile and laugh. We shared the absolute best memories. So when they shot him, they shot me. We demand a vote."

Marsico, whose committee has held three days of hearings this week and plan more for next week, said he anticipates his committee will consider some gun reform bills later this month or early next.

The top contenders, he said, are a bill that would seize the firearms of anyone with a permanent protection from abuse order within 48 hours and require the firearms be turned over to an attorney, law enforcement or licensed gun dealer and another bill that would create the emergency risk protection order that was on the list of reforms that rally attendees sought.

Marsico also indicated he was open to further discussion of two other bills on their list - barring bump stocks and other equipment designed to accelerate the firing rate of semi-automatic rifles into something like that of a machine gun; and the extension of background checks on gun buyers to private sales of rifles and other so-called "long guns."

Walker of CeaseFirePA ended his remarks imploring the House to act on the package of five bills they support. He said, "Protect our children. Protect our families. And protect our communities."Four months after the #MeToo movement first hit the Pennsylvania Capitol, House Republican lawmakers have come up with a response to dealing with the issue of workplace harassment and sexual misconduct: They are going to study it.

Some 50 or so GOP House members crowded on to the Capitol Rotunda staircase on Wednesday afternoon to announce the introduction of resolutions to do just that.

House Resolution 828 would form an 11-member task force to investigate the laws, practices and procedures in dealing with the issue broadly both inside and outside the Capitol.

House Resolution 829 would direct the Joint State Government Commission over the course of 12 months to review the workplace harassment and sexual misconduct complaints in state government agencies and compare their policies related to this behavior.

House Labor & Industry Committee Chairman Rob Kauffman, R-Franklin County, also announced that his committee will be holding a hearing on April 24 to discuss the issue.

"We don't want to enact any sweeping reforms that put at risk the confidentiality of any victim or jeopardizes the safety of any employee. This is a complicated issue that can't be solved by one piece of legislation and we do not want to put a Band-Aid that may only work for a handful of cases," said Rep. Donna Oberlander, R-Clarion County.

The call for the study of these issues arises out of several lawmaker sexual misconduct-related scandals, with the latest one involving two sitting House Republican members - Reps. Tarah Toohil of Luzerne County and Nick Miccarelli of Delaware County.

Toohil, along with a Harrisburg political consultant filed a joint domestic violence and sexual assault complaint with the House against Miccarelli, which the House subsequently found the women to be credible. Toohil separately obtained a three-year protection-from-abuse-order against Miccarelli, which among other restrictions, limits his interaction with her to only what is necessary in an official capacity.

READ MORE: It's anything but a normal day at the office as Toohil, Miccarelli return to House

Toohil, who stood at the rear of the Rotunda during the news conference, said she was pleased her GOP colleagues are looking at these issues but chose not to join them to avoid becoming a distraction.

"The press conference was about changing the current harassment policy," she said. "I did not want to have the press conference be about my situation because this event was for the protection of all employees in the Capitol."

Miccarelli avoided the gathering altogether. His spokesman Frank Keel said, "Nick was not going to subject himself to being the featured performer of someone's well-orchestrated three-ring circus. Countless other state representatives skipped the event, but no one's asking them why they didn't attend. The mere fact that Nick's non-attendance is deemed worthy of a news story illustrates the ridiculousness of this situation."

The proposed task force is being modeled after the child protection task force formed in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky child sex scandal, which resulted in more than two dozen changes in child welfare laws.

It would include appointees of the House, Senate and governor along with the Secretary of Labor & Industry. Its work is to be completed by Feb. 28, 2019.

Despite not being invited to participate in Wednesday's news conference, House Democrats "are partners in the bipartisan effort to change things for the better," said their spokesman Bill Patton.

A spokeswoman for the Senate Republicans, meanwhile, said that chamber began its conversation about addressing the issue of workplace harassment and sexual misconduct months ago and has been working toward addressing the myriad of concerns surrounding it.

Rep. Sheryl Delozier, R-Cumberland County, the sponsor of the resolution to create the task force, said she is confident the task force would be able to see where the gaps are in federal, state and local laws and recommend ways to plug those holes.

"Before we go out and pass legislation, we need to understand what we have in place, what we have that's working and what we have that's not working and we need to make sure we question what it is that we need to do," she said.

But one Democratic lawmaker, who introduced legislation that she believes would address this issue inside the Capitol in January, doesn't think this broader look at workplace harassment and sexual misconduct policies and practices should hold up action on her bill that has 66 co-sponsors, including 12 Republicans.

READ MORE: What did report on accusations against Rep. Miccarelli conclude? Attorneys offer competing views

"I think victims and survivors in this building have waited too long for action and we have legislation ready to go with bipartisan support that deserves a vote," said Rep. Leanne Krueger-Braneky of Delaware County.

Her bill would ban non-disclosure agreements that hide the names of state lawmakers who are accused of harassment; bars taxpayer-funded settlement in harassment cases involving lawmakers; and establishes an independent body to receive, investigate and resolve complaints instead of leaving that in caucus leadership hands.

House Majority Leader Dave Reed, R-Indiana County, admitted that was a weakness in his caucus' recent investigation of the complaint against Miccarelli.

Responding to a question after taking notice that House Speaker Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny County, had slipped out early from the news conference, Reed said he believed the process his caucus used to investigate that complaint worked effectively from the beginning to the end when it was turned over to the Dauphin County District Attorney's office and led to the House GOP leaders' calling for Miccarelli to resign.

However, in hindsight, he said too much was left up to the leaders' discretion.

"I think [having] safeguards in place to ensure that there's a check and balance on those individuals, to make sure that the people in those offices are just as committed as we were to ensure the proper investigation took place and the proper authorities were notified is essential to ensure that such a scenario is handled properly in the future," Reed said.

Not only were Toohil and Miccarelli absent from the afternoon news conference, they also weren't present earlier in the day at a hearing on the need for more funding for services for hearing and visually impaired Pennsylvanians held by the House Human Services Committee, on which both lawmakers serve.

Miccarelli didn't attend due to a scheduling conflict with a previously scheduled meeting to discuss Penn State funding, Keel said. Toohil didn't show because she didn't want to encounter Miccarelli, who she has said in the complaint flled with the House and in her request for a protection order that he threatened to kill her six years ago.

"Most victims would say being required to be in the same work space as the person who harmed them shouldn't happen," said Terry Mutchler, one of Toohil's attorneys. "Rep. Toohil has said directly that he should be removed from committees immediately so she, Rep. Toohil, didn't have to worry about navigating around him in the building let alone in a committee room."In this Jan. 18, 2018 photo, Darryl Mack, a health educator with the Baltimore City Health Department, places tourniquets into a bag containing clean needles for a client inside the health department's Needle Exchange Team van in Baltimore. An overdose-reversal drug is a critical tool to easing AmericaAos coast-to-coast opioid epidemic. But not everyone on the front lines has all they need. BaltimoreAos health department is rationing its supplies of naloxone because it says it canAot afford an adequate stockpile. C (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)Medical marijuana is shown with its packaging label in Toronto, Nov. 5, 2017. The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal has struck down a provincial human rights board decision that said an injured man's prescribed medical marijuana must be covered by his employee insurance plan. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graeme RoyFlowers are placed on a fence near the start area for the bobsled track after an incident on the track that left two teenagers dead and six injured at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary on February 7, 2016. One of the survivors of a deadly slide down the bobsled run at Canadian Olympic Park in Calgary says fences or signs probably wouldn't have stopped him that night.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Larry MacDougalA sign warning of an underground petroleum pipeline is seen on a fence at Kinder Morgan's facility where work is being conducted in preparation for the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, in Burnaby, B.C., on Monday April 9, 2018. The Prime Minister's Office says Justin Trudeau will sit down Sunday with B.C. Premier John Horgan and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley in an effort to hash out a solution to the ongoing dispute over the Trans Mountain pipeline project. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl DyckQuebec Islamic Cultural Centre president Boufeldja Benabdallah, left, and mosque shooting victim Ahmed Cheddadi leave a news conference after they reacted to the judge's decision to forbid the publication of a surveillance video of the mosque shooting, Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at the courthouse in Quebec City. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jacques BoissinotFILE - In this Jan. 3, 2013, file photo, Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Texas, right, participates in a mock swearing-in ceremony in Washington. A federal jury has convicted the former Texas congressman of fraud and conspiracy for misusing charitable donations to pay for personal and political expenses. Stockman was found guilty Thursday, April 12, 2018, following a three-week trial in Houston. Prosecutors say Stockman conspired with two staffers to bilk conservative foundations out of at least $775,000 that was meant for charitable purposes and voter education. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)FILE - In this June 8, 2017 file photo, former FBI director James Comey speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, in Washington. Comey is blasting President Donald Trump as Auunethical and untethered to truth,Au and says TrumpAos leadership of the country is Auego driven and about personal loyalty.Au ComeyAos comments come in a new book in which he casts Trump as a mafia boss-like figure who sought to blur the line between law enforcement and politics. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)In this April 10, 2018 frame from video, a National Guard troop watches over Rio Grande River on the border in Roma, Texas. The deployment of National Guard members to the U.S.-Mexico border at President Donald Trump's request was underway Tuesday with a gradual ramp-up of troops under orders to help curb illegal immigration. (AP Photo/John Mone)This undated photo made available by NASA shows technicians with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Scheduled for an April 2018 launch, the spacecraft will prowl for planets around the closest, brightest stars. These newfound worlds eventually will become prime targets for future telescopes looking to tease out any signs of life. (NASA via AP)Perryville soccer coach Jerry Fulton has been approached about how good his team is, because according to the results, they have to be pretty good.Perryville claimed first place in the Hillsboro 

The St. Vincent cross country teams made a statement. The boys finished first, while the girls took second place at the Perryville High School Invitational on Tuesday in the Perryville City Park.It 

St. Vincent football has asserted itself the past few years when it comes to matchups with their crosstown rival Perryville. The Indians had won three straight contests against the Pirates. St. 

Roth to help raise money for cancer society During last years Perryville homecoming game, the football coaches donned pink hats and pink pants in honor of a noble cause. They hope to do so again this year.Perryville football head coach 

Pirates play to win against Blackcats Perryville football has had a flair for the dramatic this season. This past week was no different as they held on late for a 21-14 victory over Fredericktown on Friday at Pirate Stadium. Perryville 

St. Vincent keeps foot on the gas in victory St. Vincent made quick work of Herculaneum in week four. The Indians got off to a quick start and kept it rolling as they dispatched of the Blackcats 49-0 on Friday at Herculaneum High School. That 

Click Here For Our Local Sports PageJUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  The Alaska Legislature on Tuesday rejected Gov. Bill Walkers nomination of a former

Planned Parenthood field

organizer to serve on a board that regulates midwifery in Alaska.

Kenni Linden was the only one of Walkers nominees to boards and commissions that failed to win confirmation during the joint session.

Lawmakers also confirmed Walkers Cabinet nominees.

Linden, whos from Palmer, has said that her own midwife encouraged her to apply for the public seat on the Board of Certified Direct-Entry Midwives. She has said shes passionate about access to mi...A police sergeant in Petersburg was notified on Wednesday that he has been accepted into the FBI National Academy, a program that roughly one percent of officers in the United States are selected for.

Sgt. Randy Holmgrain is looking forward to being one of two Alaskan law enforcement officers at the 2019 FBI National Academy. He's going to be networking and learning from about 240 officers from around the globe.

"I was going to apply because I wanted the experience for the application with the hope that I might get selected," Holmgrain said on Wednesday. "So, I was pleasantly surprised tha...President Granger continues to act unilaterally, real democracy continues to elude Guyana ...

By Kaieter News



GEORGETOWN

Petroleumworld 04 12 2018 The first quarter of the year has been completed and the National Assembly was convened only four times. Social Commentator and Attorney-at-law, Christopher Ram, said that such a state of affairs is not reflective of a country faring well with democracy.



Ram said this as he recently delivered the featured address to the triennial Conference of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Guyana (FITUG)



He said that while the Coalition Government has proven to be friendlier with democracy in certain areas, the governments performance in other areas is disappointing.



Ram said, This Government has a much better record than its predecessor in terms of constitutional bodies and local government elections. But there are other developments that are cause for concern.



President (David) Granger has appointed himself as the counterpoint to pronouncements by the judiciary. He has unilaterally handpicked a Chairman of the Elections Commission whose principal function is the declaration of who is to be President.



Ram said that the Granger Government decides if and when the peoples representativesthe National Assemblywill meet and what business they can transact.



The National Assembly has had four sittings for the year even though 100 days have already passed.



The House met three times in January and once in March.



Ram said that this is unacceptable and it is not the democracy that we have been promised.

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'98,ME,XP, Vista, Windows 7,8,10 +/ 800x600 pixelsNatural gas found in Guyana's Pomeroon Region, locals make use for domestic purposes

By Rehanna Ramsay



GEORGETOWN

Petroleumworld 04 12 2018 Residents of the lower Pomeroon River, (Region Two) are making use of the flow of natural gas discovered in parts of their community. At least eight households from Friendship Village have been able benefit from the pockets of the natural gas emissions found right in their own backyards.



The development came to light during a recent visit by Junior Minister of Public Infrastructure, (MPI) Annette Ferguson and her team to the Region.



Communications Officer of the MPI, Andrew Weekes, revealed that the residents of Friendship have been benefitting from the use of the natural gas for almost two decades.



Kaieteur News understands that the commodity is harnessed by residents mainly for domestic purposes.



Weekes noted that the residents can cook in comfort, without the hassle of having to worry about purchasing the commodity (cooking gas).



The Communications Officer said that the Pomeroon natural gas plants have been under the supervision of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, (GGMC). He explained that GGMC has been responsible for spearheading the project since 2002.



We were informed that the GGMC has been responsible for constructing the two natural gas plants in the Pomeroon; for testing and ensuring its safety and use to the residents.



GGMC's Head, Newell Dennison disclosed that the discovery was made during investigations of such occurrences on the coastland fringe.



Dennison said that during the exploration, the staff of the GGMC's Petroleum Unit found that there was a considerable quantity of natural gas available in areas of the Lower Pomeroon. He noted however, that the natural gas occurrence should not be viewed in isolation, since there are occurrences at a number of locations along the coastland. Dennison explained that the pockets of natural gas emissions stem from biogenic occurrences (biodegradable composts) as well as thermogenic phenomenon such as petroleum activities.



Within the environment of the coastland there are lots of biogenic occurrences It is (therefore) ubiquitous; it can happen in almost any environment, especially in conditions that are marshy, swampy. The environment along the coastland of Guyana presents such conditions What intrigued the exploration team here at GGMC, however is the gas occurrence was very high in the Pomeroon. The team therefore found a way to use simple technology to trap the gas and make it useful to the people of the Pomeroon.



It is clean and cheap source of energy that can be used to sustain the cottage industries.



Dennison said however that based on the examinations; the Commission has not been able to determine the source of the natural gas emissions.



He explained that while it is possible that the occurrences can be as a result of oil/petroleum activities offshore, the Commission has not been able to definitively say that gaseous hydrocarbons found in the Pomeroon are linked to the offshore occurrences.



If we could confirm (corroborate), then it lends to the geoscientifc evidence that there has been a migration from the petroleum kitchen offshore to the shelf (on shore) and that raises the prospects of the areas onshore for petroleum occurrences .



But we have not been able to account definitively for long migration from the kitchen which is way outside of the shelf which is the Coast.



Manager of GGMC's Petroleum Unit, Christopher Lynch, explained that the technical team would have conducted tests to ensure the safety and usefulness of the natural gas found in the Pomeroon.



He explained that the team has been responsible for helping the residents harness the gaseous extracts through the use of trapping devices (cylinders). These cylinders are then fitted with several PVC pipelines, creating an apparatus which transmits the gas to the homes of the residents.



In addition to the activities in the Pomeroon, the Commission has been able to assist residents in Wakenaam with a similar project.



Meanwhile, Petroleum Technologist, Mitchell Prince, revealed that the unit has discovered quantities of natural gas in various parts of the coastland.



Kaieteur News understands that in addition to the two plants at Friendship, Pomeroon, GGMC Petroleum Division has been managing similar projects in Wakenaam and Grove, East Bank Demerara.

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Kaieteurnewsonline.com 04 11 2018

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'98,ME,XP, Vista, Windows 7,8,10 +/ 800x600 pixelsFailure of Guyana's governmen to secure fair deal with Exxon for nation should spark unrelenting concern

By Kaieter News



GEORGETOWN

Petroleumworld 04 12 2018 When a government fails to secure a fair deal for its nation, it should spark unrelenting concern among its citizens. This point was made in a detailed report by the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI).



The NRGI is an international body which provides expert advice to administrations around the world as it relates to getting the best deals and arrangements out of extractive sectors. It has on several occasions, provided advice to Guyana on similar matters.



In one of its documents which look at the red flags of corrupt contracts, the Institute said that agreed terms which are more favourable to the contractor, often deviate significantly from industry or market norms. It further noted that if the terms of licenses or contracts depart significantly from expectations, past examples or industry norms, extra scrutiny from oversight actors would be warranted.



The Institute also stated that there is no global rule for how much deviation is too much  only close scrutiny of the underlying industry and country context can support informed judgment calls in that regard.



The Institute also cautioned that corruption is by no means the only possible reason why final terms may favour the company more than the country. It noted that other contributing factors could include the fact that the government negotiated poorly, based on limited experience, information or negotiating power.



Be that as it may, it said that there are specific warning signs which concerned citizens can look for.



In this regard, the report noted that citizens must be mindful of one or more terms of the license or contract which have been changed only shortly

before signing, in a manner that favours the company.



The Institute warned of non-standard provisions which include excessive tax holidays, unclear or skewed currency conversion formulas or rates; unusually long payment windows; or concessionary credit lines, debt guarantees, or other non-standard financial support from the government to the winner, either as terms of the sale or in side deals with the winner.



GUYANA'S LOPSIDED DEAL



The Guyana-ExxonMobil deal has been criticized continually for being highly favourable to the contractor.



In fact, local critics have noted that there were several last-minute changes to the contract during the review in 2016. Chartered Accountant, Chris Ram had noted that one of the most significant additions was in relation to the stability clause.



The lawyer said that Article 32 of the Guyana-ExxonMobil oil deal speaks to the stability clause. Ram said that when one compares the 1999 Agreement to the 2016 Agreement, one notices several worrying additions in the latter.



The anticorruption advocate said that additions to the 2016 Agreement only serve the interest of Exxon Mobil, as it limits the role of the government in applying new laws made in the petroleum sector. Ram revealed that if Guyana were to amend any of its laws which would affect the entity's operations, then the Government would have to restore the benefits lost.



Ram noted that the Stability Clause provides, inter alia, that any delay by the government to respond to any notification from the contractor that they may have suffered any adverse effects, can result in the contractor taking the matter to arbitration.



The Chartered Accountant added, In such a case, the arbitral tribunal is authorized to modify the agreement to reestablish the economic benefits under the Agreement to the Contractor. Where such restoration is not possible, the tribunal has the power to award damages to the Contractor that fully compensates for the loss of economic benefits under the Agreement, both for past as well as future losses.



Additionally, ExxonMobil is able to benefit from uncapped imports based on the Production Sharing Agreement it has with Guyana.



The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has also commented on Guyana's lopsided deal with the American oil giant.



In its latest report which was prepared for the coalition administration, the IMF said that the ExxonMobil deal gave Guyana the lowest average effective tax rate among nine projects in countries that include; Norway, Brazil, Peru and Trinidad and Tobago. It stressed, too, that the terms are relatively favourable to the investor not the host country.

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'98,ME,XP, Vista, Windows 7,8,10 +/ 800x600 pixelsPeru's Tullow offshore oil contracts on hold amid probe: minister

By Reuters



LIMA

Petroleumworld 04 12 2018

Peru will put five offshore oil contracts on hold until it can clear up questions over why the country's disgraced former president awarded them to Tullow Oil before resigning, the new energy and mines minister said on Wednesday.

The comptroller's office and lawmakers opened probes into the contracts after learning former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski had signed a decree approving them while his government imploded in a graft scandal last month.

The new government of President Martin Vizcarra said the contracts must be shelved in the meantime.

The contracts cannot be signed until it's clear they fulfilled all legal requirements and that is in the hands of the comptroller's office, Energy and Mines Minister Francisco Ismodes told a press conference.

They also cannot be signed without having first developed a process to clear up doubts from residents, fishermen and authorities, he added.

Tullow could not immediately be reached outside of regular working hours. It said last week that the terms and conditions of its contracts and the process for approving them were similar to those Peru signed with other oil companies last year.

It was unclear if Peru could block the concessions without running the risk of a lawsuit.

Critics say the contracts should have been awarded in a public auction following consultations with environmental authorities, fishermen and coastal residents. They also say the government should have set a higher royalty rate.

Perupetro, Peru's state oil investment agency, has said the contracts were the fruit of months of negotiations and well within the laws of a country where open bidding rounds have been repeatedly canceled due to lack of interest.

The contracts grant Tullow the right to explore and drill for oil off Peru's northern coast, including biodiverse swathes of the Pacific where whales and dolphins breed, according to environmentalists.

The company, which has been reviving its search for new resources, planned an initial investment of more than $200 million, according to Perupetro.

Peru is a relatively small oil producer in a region where major players like Mexico, Brazil have cut regulations to promote investments in the sector.



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ONGC Videsh, CNPC look to invest in Ecuador, minister says

By Reuters



NEW DELHI

Petroleumworld 04 12 2018

Indian oil company ONGC Videsh is looking at buying a stake in oil fields in Ecuador and may also participate in an upcoming tender for the Intercampos blocks, Ecuador's oil minister Carlos Perez said on Wednesday.

We will be signing a confidentiality agreement with them (ONGC Videsh) in the following weeks and we will provide them with information in new blocks, he said on the sidelines of the International Energy Forum.

They are (also) interested in partnerships with companies to take a share in the current production in certain fields over there, Perez said.

ONGC is looking for fields with a minimum 25,000 barrels per day of oil production, he said.

ONGC Videsh managing director N K Verma said: We had a good meeting with Ecuador and we will explore possibility of expanding our footprints in Ecuador. We are already present in Colombia.

Ecuadorean crude is heavy in quality, suitable for processing at complex refineries in Asia and the United States.

The OPEC producer needs capital to replace oil reserves, revitalize production and overhaul refineries and terminals. But frequent contract changes have spooked big oil firms in recent years, contributing to an output decline.

Separately, Perez said China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) which already has investments in Ecuador's upstream sector is also interested in downstream projects such as a 300,000 barrels per day oil refinery.

The proposed plant will be a complex refinery capable of processing crude of API 14 degrees produced at the Ishpingo, Tambococha and Tiputini (ITT) field located in a national park in the Amazon, he said.

CNPC could not be immediately reached for comment.

Reporting by Florence Tan and Promit Mukherjee. Editing by Jane Merriman



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The Chinese Foreign Ministry has denied a report that the country is planning to set up a military base in Vanuatu.

"Fake news!" Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said in English at a regular press briefing on Tuesday.

Australia's Fairfax Media reported earlier on Tuesday that China is in talks with Vanuatu to build a permanent military presence in the South Pacific.

Vanuatu has also denied the report.

"No-one in the Vanuatu government has ever talked about a Chinese military base in Vanuatu of any sort," Ralph Regenvanu, the island nation's foreign minister, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Tuesday.

"We are a non-aligned country. We are not interested in militarization," he added.

The Chinese Navy established its first overseas support base in the African country of Djibouti last year. The base enables China to better fulfill its international obligations in conducting escort missions, peacekeeping and humanitarian aid in the Gulf of Aden and the waters off Somalia, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf. His Administration is working with Republicans to transfer Civil Service Commission hiring powers to direct political appointees. Veterans groups and Civil Service commissioners warn that opens the door for a return of old-fashioned partisan corruption. Read more

Gov. Wolf and senators from both parties seem to have tired of Pennsylvania's Civil Service Commission, the independent, three-member body that oversees hiring for public jobs.

The bipartisan critics say it's taken too long for the commission to put job applications on smartphones and otherwise update hiring. Sen. Mike Folmer (R., Lebanon) has sponsored bill 1037, with bipartisan backing, which would take merit-based state job applications, hiring, exams, and promotions away from the independent commission and put it all under the control of Wolf's secretary of administration, Sharon Minnich, leaving the commission as just an appeals board.

Minnich and Folmer told me this will move Pennsylvania hiring into the 21st century. Minnich, an ex-Deloitte executive, will testify for the change in a Monday hearing on Folmer's bill in the Senate State Government Committee.

The bill is stoutly opposed as a political power grab by the Civil Service Commission, which is made up of Chairman Bryan Lentz, a Philadelphia lawyer appointed by Wolf; Gregory M. Lane, a Harrisburg accountant appointed by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett; and Odelfa Smith Preston, a Pittsburgh banker first appointed by Gov. Ed Rendell and reappointed by Corbett and Wolf; and by past-Chair Marwan Kreidie.

These critics say the change would politicize hiring and allow future governors to favor, for example, pro-choice (or pro-life) social workers, upstate (or urban) prison guards, and conservative (or liberal) regulators as job candidates. And that passing this bill will open the door to the bad, old days of super-partisan governments that corrupted and degraded public services, they say.

Kreidie, who served on Wolf's transition team, tells me he doesn't believe Wolf would personally taint hiring. But dark forces, he adds, are always a threat in politics. He doesn't like how Minnich, Folmer, and their allies have conjured data-challenged efficiency claims to justify big change. Kreidie says state data show that the Civil Service Commission has been far more likely than the agency Minnich now heads to hire veterans, as required by state law. And he showed me the state's last attempt to measure  back in 2008  showed civil service hiring was faster than for other jobs.

New Jersey stripped its old Civil Service Commission of hiring powers in 1986  but resurrected the commission and put it back in charge of hiring in 2008, arguing, among other things, that it is cheaper than using a regular state agency. New Jersey public worker unions are top defenders of an independent civil service agency.

By contrast, in Pennsylvania, where nearly a third of public-sector jobs are already under the governor's control and exempt from civil service hiring even without the proposed new law, no state union reps are scheduled to testify Monday. AFSCME officials I called had nothing to say, pro or con.

Labor sources tell me that's because state union leaders are reluctant to oppose Wolf in an election year. They're afraid to lose a Democrat who resists Republican budget cuts and protects automatic union dues checkoff.

So, Pennsylvania's veterans are leading the fight for civil service. "We're concerned about all of it," Keith Beebe, chairman of the legislative committee of the Pennsylvania War Veterans Council, told me, after American Legion and Veterans of Foreign War state leaders sent me to him as the voice on hiring issues for their coalition of veterans groups.

Beebe on Wednesday sent senators the veterans' carefully sourced 24-page review of the proposal. It urges the state to improve, not scrap, civil service hiring. The report notes there's an "idealistic" view  which I heard from Minnich and Folmer  "that the private sector has a much more efficient hiring process," and that some in government cite that notion for "a concerted effort to diminish" civil service.

But hiring for the people and with the people's money needs extra care, the veterans argue. They cite a recent report by the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity that found repeated attempts by Pennsylvania politicians to influence hiring, which the commission has resisted. The commission, they concluded, has in the past "accepted criticism and adapted." Let's do that again, veterans say.

To be sure, "Pennsylvania's workforce planning, hiring, and retention system undoubtedly does need updating." Software automation is part of the solution, yet it also creates new problems, that taking power from civil service won't solve. Hiring "can be improved without major structural realignments." But the Senate bill contains no "evolved human resources plan" for making that happen.

The Civil Service Commission members and staff "are doing a good job," Beebe told me. He said the commission has worked to push for enforcement of merit hiring and to enforce the state's veterans preference rules. He says veterans trust the commission and don't see why it should be stripped of power.

"The legislation tries to essentially change the whole process of hiring," Beebe added. "But 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.' Instead, you make the process better."

If the politicians are intent on a reorganization, instead of gutting the commission they should "broaden their thinking"  to expand the commission's hiring authority so it includes thousands of jobs that in Pennsylvania have been under the governor's control. "Let's create one merit system that allows streamlining, to roll all of these employees together," he concluded.

Senior state officials, as well as commission members, have approached the veterans' groups seeking support in the fight; they see it will be harder to pass the law over veterans' objections.

Beebe expects that Wolf's appointees and dependents will testify for the law Wolf backs. But as independent organizations that advocate for their members and for the public, "we have done a very comprehensive review of this thing, and that is where we stand": with an independent Civil Service, not a state hiring system run by political employees under the boss's thumb.

(The spelling of Sharon Minnich's name has been corrected)When a parolee tests positive for marijuana, a judge can send the offender back to jail or order the person into drug treatment.

A Philadelphia lawmaker wants to eliminate those penalties and the urine test for THC, the psychoactive ingredient in the drug. Councilman Derek S. Green (D., at large) said he will ask Thursday for hearings on the matter.

A violation often results in a great expense. Parolees lose whatever momentum they had in returning to a life and a job in mainstream society, he said. Taxpayers are burdened with the cost of holding the person behind bars  at $42,000 a year  or sending the offender into an expensive drug treatment programs.

The city decriminalized the possession and use of small amounts of marijuana in 2014.

It's not just about cash expense, Green said. "Sending people to jail runs counter to the city's stated goal of reducing the prison population." Green also wants to see THC testing eliminated for people on probation.

Philadelphia would not be the first to stop testing for THC, said Kier Bradford-Grey, chief of the Defender Association of Philadelphia. "New York City stopped drug testing for THC a while ago," Bradford-Grey said. "I'm hoping we catch on to the New York way."

Both Green and Bradford-Grey said beds in drug-treatment centers are filled by people who tested positive for cannabis. They could be better used to treat people struggling with heroin addiction. Over 1,000 people on probation or parole are penalized for testing positive for marijuana every year in Philadelphia, according to Bradford-Grey.

Said Green: "That takes away resources we could be using to treat opioid addiction."Stephanie Henderson at the Second Chances thrift store in downtown Forest City, N.C., a small town that's home to one of just four Facebook data centers in the U.S. Read more

FOREST CITY, N.C.  It was slow at the thrift shop, and manager Stephanie Henderson, 38, was looking at her laptop, trying to discover all that Facebook had collected on her: the posts, the memes, the photos, the messages to her family.

She had been meaning to do this for weeks, ever since outrage over Facebook's handling of user privacy first burst into her timeline. Now, she clicked a button. Her request for her Facebook data was sent. As she waited, Henderson tried to imagine what a decade's worth of personal details might look like.

"I'm afraid to see what Facebook has on me," she said. "This is just so embarrassing."

Facebook has been on the defensive about user privacy since last month's revelation that political-data firm Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested the profiles of 87 million Facebook users. The social media giant pledged reforms while also divulging that "malicious actors" could have collected the personal data of most of its two billion users worldwide. Facing intense criticism, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday, repeatedly offering apologies and attempting to explain the social network's business model.

The privacy debate raging in policy and corporate circles can feel distant in rural western North Carolina, but Forest City plays an unusual role: It is home to a massive Facebook data center, one of just four such digital attics in the United States. The Facebook user data obtained by Cambridge Analytica and others has probably spread far out of reach, experts say, to other databases and the dark Web. But it is also here  in bytes stored on tens of thousands of computer servers tucked inside three well-guarded and ever-expanding buildings  that the amorphous discussion about privacy is made concrete.

And residents such as Henderson are just starting to dig in  both creeped out by what they find and resigned to an online world where the loss of privacy is taken for granted.

"It surprises me that they have all this stuff," Henderson said, scrolling through her personal Facebook archive.

Henderson's data is probably stored just on the other side of town, at the Facebook complex next to U.S. Route 74. It's in the middle of a construction boom, part of a rapid expansion that includes plans to beef up existing Facebook data centers and build five new ones across the country. The gray warehouses are ringed by security cameras and thick steel fences. The data center has its own electrical substation next door. Beyond that are a few houses and rolling pastures for cows and horses.

Facebook choose Forest City in 2010 because the town sits near the slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains in an isothermal belt that provides unusually consistent weather. The Facebook property is worth about $650 million, according to municipal records, accounting for nearly half of the entire town's value. But only about 250 people work there, in a town with a population of 7,400. Forest City has more computer servers than people.

Kenneth Odom often finds himself curious about the data center, which he passes on his way to work each day.

"A lot of my stuff is probably sitting in that building," said Odom, an information technology specialist with the county library.

He's cautious online  more of a Facebook "lurker" than active "poster." But he and the rest of the library staff have long wanted to teach the public how to protect themselves online. So, a couple months ago they hosted a Facebook privacy class. They hoped for a big draw.

"Maybe one person showed up," Odom said.

But the topic, especially in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, has sparked debate  at least among library staff.

"I don't feel like a trust has been broken," said Tamara Edwards, youth services librarian.

April Young, director of county libraries, asked: "But don't you think that's because you know how all this works?"

"It seems no different than the information they collect when you swipe your loyalty card at the grocery store," Edwards said.

Still, Edwards admitted to being "creeped out" by the feeling of being watched online. After she researches teen fiction on her work computer, her Kindle at home sometimes recommends that she reads vampire romance novels. Once, library staff were talking about something in the office, and Edwards later saw ads for it on Facebook, as though the computer were eavesdropping.

"That was really creepy," said library assistant Amanda McClay.

"That's because it's tracking you," Young said.

"Well," Edwards said, "I don't think you can put that ketchup back in the bottle."

Jerred Roberts, who owns Puzzle Creek Outdoor, finds what Facebook is doing with data both "scary" and "interesting." He uses Facebook as a small-business owner to place ads, and he marvels at its ability to target people who, for example, ride bicycles and live in the county. Otherwise, he uses it to keep up with far-flung friends and family.

"It does get a little weird, though, when my data is being shared with various groups in any way they want to use it," Roberts said, "and that can be in ways that doesn't line up with my political and religious beliefs."

A customer overheard Roberts and, after inquiring about a product to clean his bicycle drivetrain, said Facebook's recent privacy problems led him to finally delete his account.

"That's what pushed me over the edge," Scott Griffith said.

It wasn't easy. He had to research the process, and it took two weeks to complete. He wasn't even sure it was finalized. He asked Roberts to check. Roberts tried searching for him on Facebook on the store's computer.

"Nope, I don't see you," Roberts said.

"Good," Griffiths said.

While deleting Facebook is rare, several residents spoke of pulling back from sharing intimate details on their social media pages because of the recent privacy trouble. This is a part of a larger worry for Facebook, which recently noted that at the end of 2017 it suffered "a slight decline" in the number of daily active users in the United States and Canada after years of growth.

At the Second Chances thrift shop, which benefits Brother Wolf Animal Rescue, Henderson was clicking through file after file in her Facebook data archive, teasing out bits of what she had assumed was information lost to history. There was an old selfie shot  "Oh, I look so much younger," she said  and a local news piece on ATM skimmers that she didn't remember sharing. GIFs she'd sent to friends. Apps she'd downloaded onto her phone. A list of everyone who had "poked" her on Facebook and how many times.

"It doesn't really bother me if this stays on Facebook," she said, "but if they share this with other people, that's scary."

Then she found lists of books she'd read. It looked as though it came from her Goodreads app. But she didn't know for sure. It was an unsettling jumble of information, shards that perhaps could be assembled into some kind of useful profile for someone, but not her. This didn't feel as though it was about her.

It started to feel overwhelming. File after file after file.

There was just one thing left to do. It was a temporary fix, only for the night.

She logged out of Facebook.Renee Patrone, founder of Party Host Helpers, at a friends home in Bryn Mawr, having set the table as if for a formal dinner party. Read more

There's boldness in business. Even brashness. Then there's Renee Patrone's style  not cocky, more like an aversion to saying no.

That seems the most logical explanation for why the Wayne resident did what she did that day in February 2015 when she answered the phone, listened, and then told the caller, as Patrone recalled recently: "OK. All right. I can do this. No problem."

Then she hung up and wondered just how the heck she was going to pull off what she had just agreed to: Provide a bartender proficient in the art of making mojitos  for a party clear across the country in Malibu, Calif.

Patrone would turn to her vast network of Facebook friends  currently more than 3,300. Tom Petrucci, whom Patrone had met through a public relations job she once held, had recently moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. When he saw Patrone's Facebook message, he volunteered to be that bartender.

"He did a great job," Patrone said. "From that, it sort of like launched my brain into dreaming even bigger than I already was."

What she was at the time was head of Events by Renee, which the South Jersey native formed in 2009 to indulge that passion for theater she developed as a student at Highland Regional High School in Blackwood: "Putting on a production." Patrone had been in Dallas with Events by Renee, overseeing a recruitment affair for a pharmaceutical company, when she got the call requesting the bartender. It was made to a 1-800 number Patrone had established for what was then a fledgling Philadelphia-focused side business to her events-planning company. She had just launched Party Host Helpers in 2014, expecting it would be a "great supplemental income" to Events by Renee.

"I always thought, 'Oh, Party Host Helpers is Events by Renee's little sister,' " Patrone said. "Well, it flip-flopped."

Party Host Helpers is now a company with 15 regional directors and a network of 1,500 (and growing) people with hospitality experience to answer calls for bartenders, servers, and coat checkers in 26 cities. Patrone would not disclose revenues, saying only they are "a little more than 10 times" Events by Renee's, with more expansion planned.

"I'd love to go international," she said. "I've gotten inquiries from England and Canada, so far.  I want to be a household name."

The idea for Party Host Helpers was to do precisely what the name suggested: help hosts put on parties so they could actually spend time enjoying them rather than working them.

"It came from me personally hosting a ton of events, and seeing friends and clients spend all this money on flowers and glassware and food and then waking up the next morning and being like, 'That was cool. I did dishes the whole night. I didn't get a chance to connect.' "

There was another motivating factor: knowing there were other Renee Patrones, a self-described "hustler," out there.

"There's people like me that like to work on the weekends, and starting Party Host Helpers helped me create opportunities for those hustlers," she said.

What gave her the confidence to say yes to that caller who needed help for a party in California when Patrone at the time had a new company with "a few" Thanksgiving jobs under its belt trying to build momentum in her own backyard of Philly?

"For me, it represented the future and the possibility of what was to come," she said. "So obviously, if I mess it up, that was kind of like a sign saying, 'Maybe you should stick to just Philly.' "

Her story was one Ellen Fisher wanted this year's Young Entrepreneurs Academy (YEA! Philadelphia) class to hear as an illustration of the importance of listening in business. Fisher, executive director of the program to help students start their own businesses, included Patrone in a CEO roundtable event at Cabrini University in February, at which budding entrepreneurs  ages 11 to 17  got to question a range of businesspeople.

"She went out and worked her networks and filled that need," Fisher, herself an entrepreneur, said of Patrone's reaction to the request for the Malibu bartender. "And that, in turn, started the wheels turning at how she could grow that one event into a national business. Listening to others and turning them into opportunities  great lesson for everyone."

From that Los Angeles job, Patrone created a business model and ran it by a few business-savvy friends. It called for hiring "ambassadors," now regional directors, in charge of developing a bench of help to work parties in their service area. Hiring help is based on a process prescribed by Patrone to ensure consistency from city to city. Regional directors get a percentage of the profit from each event they staff.

Party Host Helpers, believed to be the only such company nationally in scope, typically charges $45 to $60 an hour per helper. It recommends one helper per 25 guests. Its top five markets are Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New Jersey, Washington, and Chicago.

Patrone wants people with hospitality experience, such as waitresses, hostesses, caterers, and event planners.

"We have people who are retired  stay-at-home moms who like to get out of the house once in a while  college kids who are in hospitality programs  women and men in their 20s who are like me, trying to start a business, or just trying to make ends meet. It's hard to live on one salary nowadays," she said.

Party Host Helpers staff  all of whom are paid $15 an hour plus tips  can typically make $250 to $500 a week, depending on availability and the size of a job, Patrone said.

"The biggest thing I enjoy is empowering individuals to make side money," said Lauren Del Collo, a Party Host Helpers regional director for central and South Jersey who has a full-time job in procurement for a pharmaceutical company. She described Patrone as "fearless, but not reckless. She empowers you to never say no to a job."

Among those whose jobs  about six to eight  Party Host Helpers has said yes to is Megan McHugh, a 47-year-old mother of three from Bryn Mawr and a director of admissions at a private school. One of the events was a party for her parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

"I'm not afraid to lift a plate, I'll do my share," McHugh wanted to make clear. But, "when you have the Party Host Helpers there, you're not doing anything other than enjoying the party."

Party Tips from Party Host HelpersSyngenta on Thursday announced the acquisition of Abbott & Cobb, a Trevose, Pa. independent breeder, producer, and marketer of vegetable seeds.

Price wasn't disclosed. Founded in 1917, Abbott & Cobb has supplied commercial growers, distributor, retailer, fresh market, fresh-cut, and food services industries in the U.S. and worldwide.

Javier Martinez-Cabrera, Syngenta head of Vegetables Seeds North America, said in a statement: "Abbott & Cobb is a strategic acquisition for Syngenta Vegetable Seeds and it will give us access to high eating quality germplasm, and early maturity varieties to complement the Syngenta portfolio."

In 2016, Greensboro, N.C.-based Syngenta signed a long-term agreement to license Abbott & Cobb's patented technology, SuperSeedWare, to Syngenta Seeds LLC for worldwide use in sweet corn varieties. SuperSeedWare represented the first privately owned, 100 percent natural, gene-type in sweet corn breeding.The 18 rowhouses that line a narrow lane off Lena Street in East Germantown must have been a charming place at one time. Built as affordable housing in the early 1990s, the simple brick homes were designed with pointed gables and wooden porch railings that mimicked the look of Germantown's early-19th-century housing stock.

But these days, neighborhood residents take pains to avoid walking down the little street. It's not just the weathered plywood that covers the windows, the broken doors that hang slack on their hinges, or the drug users who gather in the porch shadows to smoke K2, a synthetic marijuana. The street, just a few blocks from Germantown Friends School, has been made nearly impassable by a mountain range of construction debris deposited by midnight dumpers. The last residents moved out several months ago. It's hard to believe a development this new could look this old.

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Germantown's recent history that these gabled houses were built by Emanuel Freeman's Germantown Settlement, a nonprofit social service agency that morphed into a real estate juggernaut during the three decades he was at the helm. Using charm and political connections, Freeman was able to secure an estimated $100 million in public money to help support his pet projects, including a charter school, health clinics, and affordable housing. But the operation became overextended, and Settlement was forced to file for bankruptcy in 2010.

Freeman, now 68, went underground after things fell apart, but it appears he never quite left Germantown. Although most of Settlement's real estate ended up in the hands of a bankruptcy administrator, Freeman and his wife, Emma Cummings-Freeman, somehow managed to remain involved in four of Settlement's spin-off companies, with a combined portfolio of 45 properties. The Freemans' management  or, rather, mismanagement  of these homes has left a trail of blight across Germantown, making it harder for the historic neighborhood to pull itself out of a spiral of decline and disinvestment.

But now, thanks to an organized effort by a group of residents, the city may finally be forced to act.

Pressured by the group's leaders  Yvonne Haskins, Connie Winters, Allison Weiss, and Irv Ackelsberg  the Redevelopment Authority was shamed last month into initiating foreclosure proceedings against the four holding companies. Altogether, those companies owe the authority $3.5 million.

You might ask, what took the authority so long?

For years, city officials at various agencies have looked the other way as the holding companies racked up code violations, unpaid property taxes, and utility liens. The tax bill for the 18 gabled rowhouses alone now stands at $22,000. Worst of all, the city never undertook an investigation of Freeman's management of Germantown Settlement.

"We don't understand why the city hasn't been more responsible," neighborhood activist Ted Stones told me as we picked our way through the trash. He and Keith Q. Schenck, founder of Friends of Germantown, have organized repeated cleanups. "It was getting to the point where people didn't want to come to meetings because they despaired about getting anything done," Stones said.

What reenergized them was Freeman's chutzpah.

This year, he approached the Redevelopment Authority to negotiate a deal. He would pay back the original $3.5 million loan from the authority, he said, if its board would forgive the interest and penalties  which would have brought the total debt to $9 million. Astonishingly, the board agreed to take him up on the offer.

How could the authority have entertained such an arrangement given Freeman's notorious record and the properties' deplorable conditions? It's not as though the board didn't know the backstory. Three of its five members  Rob Dubow, Duane Bumb, and James Cuorato  worked for the city agencies that channeled money to the nonprofit in the late '90s. A fourth, Anne Fadullon, who now runs the Department of Planning and Development, did a stint at the authority and is a longtime Germantown resident.

The possibility that Freeman might get off easy once again, just as he did after the original Settlement bankruptcy, so incensed Germantown activists that they mounted a campaign to stop the deal. Red-faced, the authority agreed to start foreclosure.

Still, it's a small victory. The process could take years. In the interim, the Redevelopment Authority wants the Philadelphia Housing Authority to manage the 45 properties, which include 140 housing units. But the Germantown activists argue that the housing agency has done a poor job of managing its existing holdings in the neighborhood. "There has to be a better solution for a community that has suffered under the hands of Emanuel Freeman for all these years," argued Haskins, who also worries that the City Council members will use their prerogative to distribute the properties to their pals.

The foreclosure will also cost the Redevelopment Authority dearly. The agency uses loan repayments to fund the construction of new affordable housing projects. If the agency is forced to write off the loans, that means it will have $3.5 million less to reinvest. Meanwhile, the taxpayer-funded subsidized housing that Settlement built in the '90s may not be salvageable after the years of neglect under Freeman's management. At a time when the city's low-income residents are desperate for decent housing, and the federal government is cutting back dramatically on grants, Philadelphia can ill afford the loss of inventory.

I couldn't reach Freeman for comment. His lawyer, Gary M. Perkiss, never returned my phone calls. As far I can tell, Freeman hasn't responded to a reporter's request for comment since the 2010 bankruptcy.

If he had responded, I would have asked him how a salaried employee of a failed nonprofit  albeit a well-paid CEO  came to manage the large real estate portfolio. The Redevelopment Authority confirmed that his name does not appear on any of the deeds, although his wife is listed as the president of one of the holding companies. Because the properties are deeded to a limited partnership and not to individuals, "it is difficult for us to understand who the exact owners are," said Ryan Harmon, the authority's in-house lawyer.

But according to Cuorato, Freeman "certainly acted like the owner" when he appeared at the authority's board meeting to plead for loan forgiveness.

That was what Margaret Scott assumed when Freeman showed up recently at her front door on East Church Lane to collect her $875 monthly rent. For 26 years, the 73-year-old grandmother and foster mother has lived in an 1825 house renovated by Germantown Settlement. She used to drop off her rent at a nearby senior housing project, but that stopped after the building was shuttered this year by the holding company.

When she informed Freeman that her roof needed repairs, he said it was her responsibility. When he offered to handle the contractor, she handed him $1,300 in cash to pay for the work, she told me. "He saw the hole in the roof. He saw the rain coming in," Scott said.

She hasn't seen Freeman since.

That's another reason that foreclosing on the four holding companies isn't enough to close this sad chapter. Before another penny goes to undo Freeman's mess in Germantown, all of Philadelphia deserves full accounting of how this taxpayer-funded slumlord blighted Germantown.

This article has been updated to correct the number of vacant houses owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority on Collom Street.When former WCAU-TV co-anchor Renee Chenault wedded former Congressman Chaka Fattah in 2001, the Daily News proclaimed theirs the marriage of a century.

And for a while, it looked as if it was just that.

But their real-life fairy tale turned into a nightmare in 2015 after the feds indicted and later convicted Chaka Fattah of racketeering, bribery, money laundering, and fraud. He's currently serving a 10-year prison sentence.

Chenault-Fattah, who used to anchor her station's 4 and 6 p.m. newscasts, went on a six-month leave that eventually became permanent. Suddenly, the popular broadcaster was a stay-at-home mom with a whole lot of time on her hands and a non-compete clause that sidelined her for a least a year.

After 30 years of working first as a Wall Street lawyer and later a TV broadcaster, she had to figure out what her third act would be. Wisely, Chenault-Fattah, now 60, decided to stick to what she's known for, which is telling stories.

But this time around, she intends to be an advocate for causes about which she's passionate. Chenault-Fattah is focusing her attention on Alzheimer's disease and the disproportionate way it affects people of color. When I reached out to her on Tuesday, she was about to take part in a round-table discussion organized by Us Against Alzheimer's.

"If you're black or Hispanic, you're twice as likely to be impacted by this disease," Chenault-Fattah told me. "And that's something that a large segment of the population is not aware of."

She added, "This is a disease that has no effective treatment and no cure."

We, journalists, typically know a little bit about a lot of subjects. So it was interesting to hear Chenault-Fattah spout facts and figures about Alzheimer's, which impacts about 5.7 million Americans.

"Almost every chronic illness hits us harder," she said, referring to African Americans. "Whether it's diabetes, whether it's heart disease, strokes  across the board."

Chenault-Fattah is raising money on the Indiegogo crowd-funding website for a new documentary called In Search of Lost Time: Alzheimer's and Dementia's Impact on People of Color, that she's producing along with veteran filmmaker Bob Lott of Teamwork Productions. At press time, she'd raised about $10,000 of the $40,000 she needs.

"After this, I would like to do something around cancer in our community," she said. "My dad died from pancreatic cancer. He had eight siblings and seven of them died from different forms of cancer"

This was her first interview since her husband's conviction, so I asked her about that  not that I could get her to say much about Chaka, his legal case or the infamous 1989 Porsche that prosecutors alleged was a cover for a bribe from a lobbyist.

Chenault-Fattah did let me know, though, that her marriage remains intact.

"I love my husband. I don't want to say anything about the case because it's being appealed. And I don't want to do anything to jeopardize that," she told me. "Our family misses and loves him."

When I asked how he's faring in federal prison, she said, "Chaka's doing great. If you know Chaka, he is the eternal optimist. He's doing well. I kind of want to leave it there."

Chenault-Fattah has sold the 2.6-acre estate in East Falls that had been their marital home and downsized into something smaller near Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, where their daughter, Chandler, is an eighth grader. Their older daughter, Cameron, is a freshman at Johns Hopkins University.

Even though she's been off the air for almost three years, people still recognize Chenault-Fattah when she's out and about and question her about when she'll be back on air. She's done with that.

"People will say, 'We miss seeing you on TV and it's such a shame what happened to your husband and your family," Chenault-Fattah said. "And when it's all said and done, I would like for the story to be, 'We miss you on TV. We're sorry what happened to your family, but isn't it great that you went on to use your voice to do something which makes an impact around this issue of Alzheimer's.' "Larry Krasner is making big changes to the District Attorneys office Read more

If Mayor Kenney were a media hog, he'd be green with envy because Larry Krasner is getting all the ink.

I can't think of a newly elected Philadelphia official who's gotten more coverage than the new DA. I also can't think of a politician who ran for office on a stronger promise to turn that office upside down.

In his first 100 days, controversies have been breaking like waves on a beach.

The first crested mere days after he took office when he wheeled in a guillotine and lopped the heads off 31 staffers.

The latest was last week when victims' families and judges were pushing back against shorter sentences and generous plea bargains from his office.

Controversy was predictable. As a defense attorney, Krasner spent a lifetime fighting prosecutors and suing police. He promised to revolutionize the DA's Office. His vision was more about dispensing social justice than racking up a high conviction rate.

He presented a sort of Declaration of Independence in a five-page memo to his staff dated Feb. 15.

Top objectives I like: Reducing the number of people incarcerated, ending cash bail for nonviolent crimes, ceasing illegal use of stop and frisk, ending civil-asset forfeiture, rebuilding the conviction review unit, and charging some cops who shoot suspects.

That's a progressives' wish list.

What I don't like: Prohibiting the death penalty, ceasing prosecution of some lesser offenses, and requiring prosecutors to specify how much it costs to incarcerate someone.

The death penalty should be kept as a bargaining tool in some capital cases. The attorney for the accused Parkland, Fla., mass shooter, for instance, said his client will plead guilty if capital punishment is off the table. I believe some murderers  such as cop- or child-killers  deserve death.

Lesser crimes were not enumerated by the DA but can be determined by reviewing the Feb. 15 directive.

Possession of any amount of marijuana, or buying pot, will not be prosecuted. Ditto for prostitution. Krasner, in effect, has legalized pot and prostitution.

Also shoplifting, almost.

He wants retail theft of less than $500 to be handled as a summary offense, the most minor offense. Restitution will be sought but is not mandatory. The offense can result in jail time, but Krasner's very fabric opposes incarceration.

I find it alarming that someone caught drunk driving  without a driver's license  will be steered to a diversionary program rather than jail.

The most bedazzling new rule requires prosecutors to state at sentencing the cost of imprisonment, among other factors. Krasner estimates it costs $360 million a year to house inmates in Philadelphia, or $42,000 for each.

That's a lot of money, but this smacks of putting a price on justice. DA spokesman Ben Waxman says, no, it's just accountability with public funds. "We are acknowledging there are costs in the criminal justice system. It doesn't mean the costs aren't worth it."

Maybe we should have a price list posted in the courtroom, showing the "cost" for grand larceny, burglary, attempted murder, sexual assault. Is the DA trying to shame judges into lighter sentences?

This is where Krasner's channeling his inner social worker collides with his role as a prosecutor.

The revolution has arrived. We are in a Krasnerian experiment of justifying, minimizing, and forgiving bad behavior. If the crime rate goes down, Philadelphia will become a national model.

If it goes up, the revolution will end with Krasner's head on the chopping block.An image released by the Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets shows victims of an alleged chemical weapons attack collapsed on the floor of a building in the rebel-held town of Douma, near Damascus, Syria. Read more

It's hard to know where to begin when describing the incoherence of President Trump's Syria policy as he threatens missile strikes on the Assad regime.

The presidential tweet vowing an upcoming strike  which also taunted Russia's pledge to stop any missiles  was bizarre and counterproductive. "Get ready Russia, because [the missiles] they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!" Trump couldn't resist typing.

Never mind that candidate Trump chastised Barack Obama for telegraphing U.S. military moves to the enemy by announcing plans in advance. After Trump's twitter announcement, Syria is moving key assets to safety; Russia is no doubt readying the air defenses it has installed in Syria. (And if Trump fails to strike, he will now look weak and foolish.)

Yet even more disturbing was Trump's signal last week to Russia and Iran  and Bashar al-Assad  that he wants to pull 2,000 U.S. forces out of northeast Syria in four to six months. Trump's timetable appears dictated not by U.S. security needs but by the need to satisfy a campaign promise before 2018 elections. Aware of Trump's eagerness to exit, Assad felt free to use toxic weapons.

Unless someone can inject some coherence into Trump's scattershot approach to Syria, a missile attack could do more harm than good.

Yes, there should be a response to the Syrian regime's latest hideous chemical attack on civilians in Douma. Such weapons are prohibited by international law and Russia had guaranteed that its Syrian ally had destroyed its chemical stocks.

But it's necessary to recall that the U.S. launch of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles on Syria's Shayrat airbase a year ago, much touted as a sign of Trump's toughness, had little long-term impact on Assad's behavior. Several chlorine attacks have occurred since then.

Moreover, Assad has directly targeted hospitals and civilian neighborhoods with barrel bombs, killing hundreds of times the number who have died from chemical weapons. Yet Trump, like Obama before him, has rejected any deeper involvement in Syria, and left the field to Russia and Iran.

It is too late to revisit that policy. Supported by Moscow and Tehran, Assad is assured of power for the foreseeable future. Another one-off missile strike may persuade him to lay off the chemicals, but it won't stop the barrel bombs or the continuing slaughter of Syrian civilians.

The only hope of ending the bloodshed is at the negotiating table, where Russia has taken charge, along with Iran and Turkey  but where the United States is strikingly absent.

And the only way for the U.S. to have any leverage at the table and return the process to the original aegis of the United Nations, rather than leave it to Moscow and Tehran, is for the president to reverse his pledge on withdrawing troops.

Indeed, those troops  based mainly in the northeastern Kurdish region of Syria, known as Rojava  do more than give America some heft at negotiations. They are also helping Syrian Kurds, and some Sunni Arab tribesmen, who bore the brunt of liberating Raqqa, the capital of the ISIS caliphate. With U.S. help, they are helping clean up the last pockets of ISIS.

Even more important, continuing U.S. support in stabilizing northeast Syria is vital to prevent a resurgence of ISIS. It is also important to demonstrate that America does not callously abandon allies, like the Kurds, before there is a negotiated settlement of the Syrian civil war.

I reached the former co-president of the main Syrian Kurdish PYD political party, Salih Muslim, by phone and asked him what would be the consequence of a U.S. withdrawal within the next four to six months. He answered swiftly: "If you leave, Da'esh [the Arab acronym for ISIS] will start to appear again where the Americans are not.

"If you don't want extremists, or ISIS to return, you should keep some kind of presence [in Rojava]. We Kurds are different. Our areas are safe."

Muslim added, "If President Trump withdraws, it would be a failure for the West. It means that the Russians and Iranians would be shown to be far more effective. Also, the withdrawal of the U.S. from Rojava means that they will lose a very sincere friend." He meant the Kurds.

Unfortunately, Trump seems not to have grasped the connection between a troop withdrawal and Assad's use of chemical weapons. In a rare critique of Vladimir Putin, Trump blustered: "President Putin, Russia, and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay."

But a one-off missile strike, or even two strikes, won't persuade Putin to stop backing Assad. Nor will such strikes prevent Tehran from trying to expand its hold on Syria, which could provoke a war between Iran and Israel. Nor will they stop Turkey from attacking America's Syrian Kurdish allies  and possibly U.S. troops. Nor will the ad hominem name-calling that Trump delights in on Twitter impress Putin or Assad.

As one-off events, missile strikes could make the Syria situation worse. They won't make it better. That would take a broad Syria policy that shows the U.S. president is serious, a policy (and a president) that we have yet to see.

trubin@phillynews.com; @trudyrubinThe Chinese Navy began a three-day series of exercises in the South China Sea on Wednesday, the Maritime Safety Administration said.

It released the coordinates of the drill zone - a rectangular area off Hainan province's southern coast - on its website on Tuesday, asking ships to stay out of the area.

The information sparked a wave of speculation among Chinese military enthusiasts who, since last month, have been talking on internet forums about the possibility of a large display of the Navy's best ships and submarines in the South China Sea. Some fans also posted what they claimed were satellite images of a vast armada of Chinese ships, including the CNS Liaoning aircraft carrier, gathering recently in the South China Sea area.

The Navy said last month that it would conduct combat exercises there "in coming days", noting that the drills are part of its annual training regimen.

Whether that was a reference to the exercises that began on Wednesday wasn't known. There have been no reports of other naval operations in the South China Sea. Navy publicity officials reached by China Daily declined to elaborate.

The Chinese military has emphasized combat drills and joint operations since President Xi Jinping, who is also chairman of the Central Military Commission, took office in late 2012.

All the Navy's combat ships and submarines now spend around eight months each year at sea, carrying out patrols, drills and other training operations - much longer than before. As a result, their operational capabilities have improved substantially, the Navy said.

In 2017, the Navy commissioned at least 16 ships, mostly large combat vessels. China is now building its second aircraft carrier and a new-generation guided-missile destroyer believed to be the most powerful of its kind in the world.No matter how bad things get in his recent apocalyptic action movies, action star Dwayne Johnson frequently seems in a weirdly good mood.

In San Andreas and Rampage, the Golden Gate Bridge may be falling on his head (the former), a giant alligator may be trying to eat him (the latter), but Johnson is often engagingly cheerful.

Of course now we know why: In these movies, he's not working with Vin Diesel.

Sweet relief!

Maybe more for Johnson, though, than for us. Both San Andreas and Rampage are directed by Brad Peyton, and they share a bland disaster-movie sameness  you get a lot of Johnson flying around in a helicopter, surveying damage, trying to warn people of impending natural disaster.

The disaster in Rampage, though, is not strictly natural. An evil corporate executive (Malin Akerman) has been experimenting with for-profit pathogens that alter DNA and cause runaway growth and aggression. The pathogens get loose in the world, infecting a gator in Florida, a wolf in the Rockies, and a gorilla at the San Diego zoo where Davis Okoye (Johnson) supervises the animals. He can only watch as his prized silverback starts to get gigantic and aggressive, then is hauled off to a military base for research. Okoye tags along, as does a scientist (Naomie Harris) who thinks she can help.

Meanwhile, the wolf turns into a 10-story snarling maniac, and makes a beeline for Chicago, where Akerman's character is luring the beasts with a special radio signal (atop the former Sears Tower) with hopes of harvesting valuable mutated DNA when the military eventually kills them.

The plot, obviously, is insane. It's credited to four writers, and yet, working together, none managed to come up with an explanation for how the million-pound alligator swims from Florida to Chicago.

St. Lawrence Seaway, via Eastern seaboard?

Up the Mississippi River watershed, then into Lake Michigan, like the Asian carp?

It seems likely an early version of the script supplanted Chicago with an East Coast port like New York, but since the climax involves the destruction of a tall tower, that might have seemed in poor taste.

I doubt folks would take offense, though, to anything that happens in Rampage, based on a vintage video game, and with vintage special effects that recall (perhaps intentionally) the old Toho studios matinee monster movies.

The look and movement of the monsters is pretty basic, with one new wrinkle  effects artists conspire to give the gorilla an unprecedented CGI movie skill: When someone gets on his nerves, he flips them the bird. Coming soon to Instagram."Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950," the Philadelphia Museum of Art's new show, throws the viewer right into the 20th-century urban hurly-burly.

The first gallery of the exhibition, which opens Wednesday after several days of members' previews, contains a beach scene by George Bellows in which the bathers appear to sprawl unconscious amid the Newport dunes, and another by Reginald Marsh, whose Coney Islanders seem to be engaged in either a brawl or an orgy, or perhaps a little bit of both.

Marsh and Thomas Hart Benton show us burlesque shows, and Philadelphia artist George Biddle depicts a scene in a speakeasy in which some prosperous but dodgy types are chatting up an androgynous figure who looks a little bit like Harpo Marx.

So far, it's all fun, if a little bit predictable. Men in low places ogling female flesh or beating each other up provided a popular subject, one that seemed to sum up the violence of life and the apparent absence of rules in the modern metropolis.

Shopping as blood sport

Amid these paintings, Spring Sale at Bendel's (1921) by Florine Stettheimer comes as a surprise. It eschews the murky colors of the masculine scenes for a palette of pinks and reds and other vibrant accents, suggested by its locale at what has long been one of Manhattan's swankiest stores.

But if you look at it carefully, you notice that the carriage-trade lady shoppers are almost as desperate and aggressive as the men in the other pictures. One woman appears to have flung herself across a table full of merchandise.

It is hardly a realistic scene. Indeed, it seems to owe something to the scenes of demons and supernatural anguish that Hieronymus Bosch painted around the turn of the 16th century. It's difficult to tell what is going on in this painting, but it's lively and a little scary. And it adds a new, unexpected twist to a familiar story.

"Modern Times," is a fairly deep dive into the Art Museum's holdings from the period it covers. It includes 166 paintings, photographs, sculptures, design objects, and items of clothing.

Jessica Todd Smith, the curator who organized the exhibition, said none of the works were simply moved from permanent display in the American galleries into this show. If you are a regular museumgoer, you have seen some of these works before. Still, there will be many you have not seen.

It is part of a series of shows spotlighting aspects of the permanent collection that are a consequence of the museum's building program. The active construction makes it difficult to borrow works for special exhibitions. And shows like this, which reveal how many wonderful things are not on display, help make the case for expanding.

Smith says the Art Museum has not done a show examining this period since 1946. That show, which featured the collection of the influential gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, included works by artists including Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and others who still form the core of the museum's collection in this period.

In O'Keeffe's wonderful Red and Orange Streak (1919), an abstract outburst of energy and transcendence slashes across a landscape like a hot flame.

Even though this is not a period on which the Art Museum has focused, there have been many exhibitions on artists and movements of the period  at least 15 by my count in greater Philadelphia alone during the last four years. That's because there has been a lot of new thinking about this period.

We have long thought of modernism as a European phenomenon, even though Europeans acknowledged that modernity was happening more forcefully here. We have stopped being embarrassed about the way artists tried to mix documentation and abstraction, about the naked emotionalism of some works, and the acceptance and celebration of a commercial culture.

This reevaluation has made us look more respectfully at key artists of the period. Stuart Davis, for example, has long been seen as a bridge between French geometric abstraction and American pop. But now we are more likely to look at his large canvas Something on the Eight Ball (1954), one of the centerpieces of the show, and see the work of a great artist.

Berenice Abbott's photograph New York at Night (1932), a long-exposure twilight view taken from the newly completed Empire State Building, shimmers with life and excitement.

Moreover, other artists who were earlier considered marginal are now part of the picture. Stettheimer was once considered eccentric, but now her view feels essential. Dorothea Tanning's self-portrait Birthday (1942) shows her bare-breasted, standing with a small winged monster with her back to a house full of open doors. It is psychoanalytical, surrealist, and assertively female.

Self-trained Horace Pippin was considered somehow primitive at one time, but his works fit very well into "Modern Times." The same goes for the outsider-sculptor William Edmondson, whose three heavy little limestone birds have a touch of modern menace.

Dox Thrash, a Philadelphia artist best known for his printmaking and depiction of African American life, is represented here by Demolition (1944), which shows workers tearing apart rowhouses from the back and which contrasts nicely with the slickness and abstraction of some of the other urban views in the show.

Philadelphia artists as a group often feel a bit marginalized by the Art Museum, but this show makes an impressive case for Philadelphia modernism, including such artists as Arthur B. Carles, Benton Spruance, and the brilliant Morton Schamberg. The show celebrates the groundbreaking PSFS Building with a vintage photograph and a monumental lounge chair designed by the building's architects, George Howe and William Lescaze.

The most covetable piece of furniture in the show, however, is the monumental cherrywood, cubist-inspired record and phonograph cabinet, designed and made in the mid-1930s by Wharton Esherick.

"Modern Times" isn't definitive, of course. It is one institution's collection, and a very distinguished one at that.

It is fitting that one of the most charming items in it is a pair of wire sculptures by Alexander Calder of Carl Zigrosser and his wife, Laura.

Zigrosser was a New York art dealer turned Philadelphia curator who was responsible for the museum's acquisition of many of the key items here. With his roll of wire, Calder improvised what were, in effect, three-dimensional drawings. They take off into the air and go where they will  free, light, modern, and full of character.At the Franklin Institute, DuPont scientist Philippe Horvath, left, used the ZOOB construction toy to illustrate a bacterial defense mechanism called CRISPR, which has led to the development of a powerful gene-editing tool. He and eight others are getting awards at the museum Thursday. Read more

It began with the quest to keep yogurt from going bad.

Philippe Horvath, a soft-spoken food scientist who went to work for a French chemical company in 2000, was charged with identifying the best strains of bacteria for making the popular dairy product. Bacteria can be infected by viruses, just like humans and other living things, and Horvath was engaged in a constant effort to weed out the infection-prone strains that would no longer work.

But a few years into the job, he noticed an odd thing: Certain bacteria seemed to have incorporated snippets of DNA from the viruses that attacked them. He began to study this phenomenon, and in 2007, he and colleagues announced a finding that has electrified the fields of biology and medicine. These snippets were microbial "mug shots"  a record of past attackers that bacteria could use to recognize and fight off viruses the next time they showed up.

Horvath, now a senior scientist at DuPont, is in Philadelphia this week to receive a $250,000 prize from the Franklin Institute. That's because others have built on his bacterial discovery to develop a fast, inexpensive tool for editing genes.

In just a few short years, this CRISPR technique  pronounced "crisper"  has upended almost too many fields of science to name. It is being used to design greener plastics, disease-resistant crops, and new weapons against cancer, malaria, and sickle-cell anemia. And it is so straightforward that even high schoolers  with careful supervision  have used it.

Horvath is joined this week by eight other honorees at the Franklin Institute, including pioneers in such fields as climate change, computer science, and rechargeable batteries. CRISPR is a relative newcomer among these disciplines, and likewise Horvath, who turned 48 this week, is the youngest of the award-winners by at least a decade.

The gene-editing tool that emerged from his discovery is not without flaws, as well as legal battles, and even some of its proponents worry there is too much hype when careful science is essential. But these days, no one would deny that CRISPR is powerful.

Like Lego pieces

Horvath grew up in Colmar, in eastern France, inheriting a fondness for tinkering from his father, a toolmaker. He enjoyed Legos and puzzles such as Rubik's cube, and he went on to study molecular biology  working with DNA, the building blocks of life.

(In the same vein, the Franklin Institute illustrated his research Tuesday afternoon with a construction toy called ZOOB, while Horvath and other award-winners fielded questions from museum visitors.)

Horvath earned his Ph.D. from Louis Pasteur University  named for another French scientist acclaimed for his work with bacteria  and started work in 2000 at the food division of a company called Rhodia, which made cultures used in the production of cheese and yogurt.

He began to study the mysterious stretches of DNA in bacteria after learning of them at a conference in 2002, and was joined by colleague Rodolphe Barrangou in 2005, soon after Rhodia's food division was acquired by the Danish company Danisco.

The name CRISPR, coined by other scientists who were studying it, stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats  short, repeating stretches of bacterial DNA that were interspersed with the odd snippets that seemed to come from viruses.

Horvath's team found that bacteria exposed to viruses could indeed acquire these viral snippets, called spacers. And by artificially adding or deleting spacers, the researchers found they could increase or decrease the ability of bacteria to fight off infection.

They applied for patents on their discovery, then submitted the findings for publication in the leading scientific journal in the United States. No luck.

Horvath is not sure why, but his impression is that at least one reviewer simply did not believe the findings. Scientists had been studying the genetic codes of bacteria for years. And now he and his colleagues claimed to have discovered a kind of bacterial immune system no one had seen before?

After some tweaks, the authors resubmitted the study, and it was published in Science. But even Horvath failed to realize its full impact, at first.

"We understood that it was an important discovery," he said. "At the time, we did not anticipate it would become a revolution in biology."

Labs around the world started to explore the phenomenon further. Horvath and others went on to identify important roles for still other stretches of DNA next to CRISPR and the viral spacers  sequences they called "cas," for CRISPR-associated. One type of "cas" protein appeared to act as a knife, cutting genes in invading viruses as directed by the spacers.

Then by 2012, multiple teams of researchers demonstrated that a synthetic tool based on Horvath's research could be used to edit DNA in any organism. Bitter patent battles ensued.

Horvath  whose employer was acquired in 2011 by DuPont, which in turn merged with Dow last year  has steered clear of the acrimony. At his lab in the small town of Dange-Saint-Romain, a three-hour drive southwest of Paris, he does not even use the synthetic gene-editing tool that emerged from his research. Instead, he makes use of the CRISPR process in its natural form  dubbed "scissors in yogurt" by one media outlet in France. He exposes bacteria to selected viruses in order to determine which ones can resist infection.

"It's like a vaccination," Horvath said. "It's a natural process."

Crops and cancer

Others under the DowDuPont umbrella, however, are plowing ahead. The company's agricultural products division, Corteva Agriscience, is using a CRISPR-based tool to improve yields in a crop called waxy corn  a grain whose starchy properties are useful in industrial applications such as paper manufacture. The technique is not used to add "foreign" genes to the corn, but to disable one of the plant's naturally occurring genes  in effect, using gene editing as an efficient way to accomplish what is now done by breeding.

The field of medicine has embraced the tool as well. University of Pennsylvania researchers plan to use a CRISPR-based tool to treat melanoma, sarcoma, and multiple myeloma  removing immune-system soldiers called T-cells from patients, "editing" the cells so they will target the cancers, then re-implanting them in the body. At Christiana Care Health System in Delaware, researchers have used a CRISPR-based tool to fight lung cancer in mice, "knocking out" genes that cause tumor cells to resist chemotherapy and immunotherapy. And countless biology labs around the world use the technique for basic research, tweaking the genetic recipes of life to determine how they work.

Eric Kmiec, director of the Gene Editing Institute at Christiana's Helen F. Graham Cancer & Research Institute, also sees potential for CRISPR in education. He conducts workshops for teachers and students at the community college and high school levels, viewing it as a way to prepare students for the high-tech workplace.

One such student, senior Ally Kong at the Tatnall School in Wilmington, followed Kmiec's CRISPR "protocol" recently to disrupt a gene in yeast  causing the normally white organism to turn red when placed in a growth medium.

"It was so incredible," said Sharon Kreamer, a Tatnall biology teacher. Kong now plans to teach the technique to fellow students at the school in May.

As with previous gene-editing techniques, scientists are alert to the possibility that CRISPR could "edit" genes other than the one being targeted. What's more, the edits can leave behind a type of genetic scar tissue  an issue Kmiec's lab has addressed by devising what he calls a molecular "bandage."

He is a big proponent of CRISPR, but also is among those urging caution.

"CRISPR is good enough not to have any hype," Kmiec said. "It really is a remarkable tool, if we just move forward methodically and carefully."

Yet the initial advances were made at a startling pace once Horvath discovered the defense mechanism that bacteria have had for millions of years, said Jayatri Das, chief bioscientist at the Franklin Institute.

"It's really remarkable how this technology has gone from an observation in nature to a potential life-changing tool in medicine so quickly," she said.

The attention has led some to raise the prospect of an even bigger honor for CRISPR's early leaders: the Nobel Prize. That kind of talk makes Horvath uncomfortable, as he told the French publication La Nouvelle Republique in 2016.

"That seems to me like something on another planet," he said. "Very far from the little world where I work."

Here are the other winners of the 2018 Franklin Institute awards, to be given at a ceremony Thursday:From the beginning, April Hutcheson's monthly periods were heavy and excruciating. Family doctors and school nurses told her it was normal.

"Sophomore year in high school, I would pass out," recalled the 44-year-old Mechanicsburg resident. "They're like, 'Oh, you just want to get out of school. Take some ibuprofen and you'll be fine.' "

She was 24 when she was finally diagnosed with endometriosis, a disorder in which the endometrium  tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus  grows outside that organ. The displaced tissue commonly implants on the ovaries and fallopian tubes, but sometimes on the bowel, bladder, rectum, or even beyond. This can cause disabling pain, organ dysfunction, and infertility.

An estimated 1 in 10 women, 176 million worldwide, suffers from endometriosis. Yet the disease remains an enigma, and surveys show diagnosis is typically delayed by an average of seven years, largely because awareness is lacking.

That may finally be changing. Recently, "endo" has been the subject of a surge in activism, fueled in no small part by the frustration and candor of women such as Hutcheson.

"We need to be open and not embarrassed," said Hutcheson, director of communications for the Pennsylvania Department of Health. "We need to talk about the pain, without stigmatizing or minimizing it, like, 'It's your time of the month.' "

There have been many high-profile, outspoken endo sufferers, including Susan Sarandon, Hillary Clinton, even Marilyn Monroe. But the new generation of activists wants change, not just support. Padma Lakshmi, cookbook author and host of TV's Top Chef, cofounded the Endometriosis Foundation of America seven years ago to push surgical training and research as well as advocacy. Last month, the documentary Endo What?  billed as "More than a film. A movement"  premiered in New York City, a triumph for lawyer-turned-filmmaker Shannon Cohn, whose own diagnosis took more than a decade. This month, endo patients held a protest outside the Washington headquarters of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to "address the endometriosis care crisis."

The movement has some surprising allies. Republican U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah lamented his granddaughter Emily's "heartrending" struggle with chronic pain in an essay published last month by CNN.com.

"Let's work together so we can drive the conversations, medical practices, and research priorities that will help deliver a better future for our loved ones, free from the pain and suffering of endometriosis," Hatch urged.

The leading theory

During a woman's monthly menstrual cycle, hormones signal the endometrium to thicken. If there is no fertilized egg to launch a pregnancy, the blood-rich lining is shed.

The leading theory about how this goes awry in endometriosis is called retrograde menstruation: The endometrial tissue flows back through the fallopian tubes into the pelvic cavity. But there is also evidence that bone marrow stem cells or abdominal cells can transform into endometrial tissue. And studies have found endometrial lesions in such distant sites as the lung and the brain, suggesting the blood or lymph system may serve as a transporter.

In any case, displaced endometrial tissue still responds to normal hormone cues, building up and breaking down each month. But because the trapped tissue can't drain from the body, it triggers inflammation, forming cysts, blockages, and fibrous scars that can make pelvic organs stick together.

Even with ultrasounds and other imaging, endometriosis may be mistaken for  or occur along with  other conditions that cause pelvic pain such as irritable bowel syndrome. That's why the definitive diagnosis requires minimally invasive surgery, called laparoscopy, to get a tissue sample that can be analyzed under a microscope.

"That's the only way to know for sure," said Karen Tang, a Philadelphia obstetrician-gynecologist who specializes in laparoscopic surgery and pain management of endometriosis.

When menstruation stops, either temporarily because of pregnancy or permanently because of menopause, symptoms of endometriosis subside. But this is a generalization. Tang said a colleague in Indiana recently posted that he was finding endometriosis in postmenopausal Amish/Mennonite women, suggesting that rare, unidentified genetic mutations may play a role.

The quest for pain relief

In most cases, endometriosis can be managed with pain medication, hormonal drugs to control or suppress menstruation, and periodic laparoscopic surgery to remove as much of the abnormal tissue as possible. But each treatment comes with limitations and downsides.

Hutcheson, for example, relied for years on such massive doses of ibuprofen, the over-the-counter anti-inflammation painkiller, that she damaged her kidneys. She had a "stockpile" of prescriptions for tramadol  an opioid that was once incorrectly believed to be less addictive than other versions  but fear of getting hooked kept her from filling them.

"I have zero patients on opioids," Tang said. "But a lot of patients [in other practices] end up taking it because they're desperate."

Mindy Kline, 39, of Yardley, rejected opioids for another reason. The painkillers cause constipation, which intensified the bowel problems caused by her endo.

"I would take sleeping pills or Benadryl," she said. "It would daze me enough to get through the day."

Birth control regimens are a first-line treatment. By switching from one formulation to another, some women keep the pain in check.

"For six years, birth control made a huge difference. I felt like a normal person," said Kline, a part-time ESL teacher. "Then the pain slowly creeps up and comes back."

Both Kline and Hutcheson tried leuprolide injections, which block production of ovary-stimulating hormones. That shrinks endometrial tissue  but plunges the patient into what feels like menopause.

"I couldn't function," Kline said. "I had massive night sweats all night long."

And both women have had multiple laparoscopic surgeries. These operations, which are performed with scopes and instruments inserted through small incisions, can be very challenging for the surgeon, who may have to remove part of the colon, Tang said.

"I have a lot of scar tissue from the laparoscopic surgeries," Hutcheson said of her five operations.

Tang, who treated Kline, almost always prescribes an alternative therapy that many physicians are unaware of: pelvic floor therapy. A specially trained physical therapist uses massage, dilators, and other techniques to gently stretch muscles tightened by chronic pain.

"I use a multidisciplinary approach, because there isn't one treatment that will fix everything," Tang said.

That fact may ultimately lead women to consider the most radical, controversial treatment option: hysterectomy.

Lena Dunhams choice

Even for a celebrity who has raised awareness of endometriosis, Lena Dunham's move was brave. In an essay in the March issue of Vogue, the creator and star of the HBO series Girls revealed that intolerable pain had driven her to have a hysterectomy at age 31.

"I made a choice that was never a choice for me, yet mourning feels like a luxury I don't have," she wrote. "I weep, big stupid sobs."

Because she had always dreamed of having children, she preserved her ovaries in hope of harvesting eggs. That implied she might try in vitro fertilization and a gestational surrogate. She also called adoption a "thrilling" possibility.

"I know a hysterectomy isn't the right choice for everyone," she wrote. "That it's not a guarantee that this pain will disappear."

Her soul-baring confessional drew a mix of condolences  and criticism. Even though she didn't portray hysterectomy as a cure, some experts and activists faulted her for feeding misconceptions.

Removing the uterus alone will not eliminate painful endometrial lesions outside the uterus, or the hormones that signal the abnormal tissue. But as with everything about endo, it's complicated. Eliminating menstruation often brings pain relief. And removing the uterus is the only way to fix a related condition called adenomyosis, in which endometrial tissue grows into the muscular wall of the organ.

Kline, who has two children, recently opted for another laparoscopic surgery rather than a hysterectomy, only to have Tang find hardly any endometriosis  and evidence of adenomyosis.

Hutcheson, who also has two children, had her uterus out two years ago, and has no regrets.

"It took me six months to recover," she said. "But I'm virtually pain-free and that's remarkable, because I never knew an adult life without it."George Hopkins resigned as director of the Cadets, an elite drum corps based in Allentown, Pa., after nine women accused him of sexual misconduct. Read more

Two more women say they were raped by George Hopkins, bringing to 11 the number who have accused the former Allentown drum and bugle corps director of sexual misconduct.

>>UPDATE: Interim CEO of drum corps organization suspended amid sexual misconduct scandal

Jessica Beyer, one of the new accusers, said Hopkins regularly made inappropriate comments at work, texted her seeking sex, and once raped her in his apartment.

Overwhelmed by the unwanted attention, Beyer said she more than once told a superior that Hopkins was making her uncomfortable, stopping short of telling him about the alleged rape but sharing some details about Hopkin's texting and office behavior.

"I was told that's just how he was," Beyer, 33, said. "'You know how George is.'"

The man Beyer said she confided in, Sean King, last week was named as Hopkins' interim replacement.

King took the helm of Youth Education in the Arts, the Allentown nonprofit that runs the famed Cadets drum and bugle corps, after Hopkins resigned last week. King declined to speak with a reporter. Through a spokesman, he denied that Beyer or any woman told him of being sexually harassed by Hopkins.

>> Sexual abuse in drum and bugle corps: Do you have a story?

"I have never heard of him [George] sexually abusing anyone," King said. "I never received an allegation. Ever. Had someone brought that to me, I would have reported it."

Hopkins, 61, did not respond to calls and text messages seeking a response to the new accusations, which fall within the 12-year criminal statute of limitations for rape.

His downfall has rocked the drum and bugle corps world, where he was a fixture for four decades, and led to calls for widespread change to better protect participants and employees from sexual harassment and assault. The activity is like marching band but with more theatrics. Members ranging in age from 16 to 22 spend the summer traveling the country performing and competing against other corps.

On Wednesday, the board of Youth Education in the Arts resigned en masse amid concerns that it did not do enough to investigate the claims against Hopkins. A new board was named in its place. On the same day, Drum Corps International, the activity's sanctioning organization, placed the Cadets on probation and outlined a series of steps, including submitting a plan of action to prevent and report misconduct, that the new board must take in order to participate in this summer's season.

The women who have now publicly accused Hopkins of sexual misconduct all either marched with the Cadets or were employees of the organization. Their stories span four decades.

Beyer, of Drexel Hill, marched with the Cadets in 2006 and was hired by Hopkins the following year. Then 22, she had majored in music education and saw the position, which required she relocate from South Carolina, as a path to a career in the arts.

Within two months, she said, Hopkins set his sights on her. She recalls a night when, she, Hopkins, and two others went to dinner after work. Beyer said that when Hopkins got up to leave, he texted her to meet him in the parking lot.

Outside, Hopkins was standing at her car. She said he grabbed her and kissed her, then, just as abruptly, got in his car and left. She stood there, stunned.

"Looking back, I go 'Well, maybe I shouldn't have done what he said,'" said Beyer, then known by her maiden name, Jessica Wilson. "But you're like, 'This is the CEO. I don't want to lose my job.' "

Beyer wrote about the incident at the time in a journal, which she shared with a reporter.

After that night, she said, Hopkins started making comments at the office about her looks, brushing against her when he walked past and texting her late at night.

One day in spring 2008, Hopkins asked her to come to his apartment, saying he needed her help with some work and was too busy to go to the office, she said.

Hopkins was drinking red wine when she arrived, Beyer said. He told her to put down her work things, then began kissing and undressing her.

Beyer told Hopkins she didn't want to have sex, but he persisted and led her to his bedroom where he forced her to perform oral sex on him and then performed oral sex on her. He said little to Beyer when he finished.

"I just got my clothes and got dressed and went home," Beyer said. "And I got in the shower until I ran out of hot water. I brushed and flossed my teeth about 20 times. And then I just got in bed and cried."

In the months that followed, she said, she was a shell of herself She wore sweatpants to work most days, self conscious of her body. She turned down social engagements. She snapped at colleagues, succumbing to what she said had become a toxic work environment.

Beyer said she was fired in 2009.

Then and for years following, she said, she buried the trauma. She said she spoke to a therapist in 2012 about what had happened. The therapist confirmed that Beyer in 2012 confided in her about being raped by a boss years before. Beyer's mother also confirmed her daughter told her several years ago that she was raped by Hopkins.

Beyer said she never considered telling King or anyone else at work about the assault because she didn't think she would be believed but also because she didn't want to hurt the organization. Reporting the incident to the police, Beyer said, didn't cross her mind.

"It took me a long time to say it wasn't my fault. Because I really felt like it was my fault," she said. "Maybe I wore the wrong thing. I shouldn't have gone over there. I should have seen he was drinking and left. I shouldn't have ever let him kiss me. I should have pitched a bigger fit."

I just stared at the ceiling

The second woman, who briefly worked for Youth Education in the Arts in 2006, agreed to share her story only if not named, out of a concern for her privacy.

Like Beyer, she said Hopkins first made a sexual advance on her by kissing her in a parking lot after the two had drinks with coworkers. The woman was 22 at the time and married. She said she covered her face with her hands, told Hopkins to stop, then got in her car and left.

(A man who worked at the office at the time confirmed that the woman told him Hopkins once kissed her without her consent.)

As she drove home that night, she contemplated quitting, thinking it would be uncomfortable to work with Hopkins.

She didn't have to. She was let go within days. Though her position was a seasonal one, she said she saw the action as retaliation.

She found work with another drum corps. In 2010, then 26, she asked Hopkins to meet for dinner to discuss a change in drum corps rules he had proposed that she feared would negatively impact her team.

Given her previous experience with Hopkins, the woman went to the bar that night with her guard up. Below is how she described the evening:

She ordered a light beer though she loves craft brews, knowing she would sip it slowly and be fine to make the hour-long drive home. Hopkins wanted her drink a shot, goading others at the bar to join in pressuring her.

She agreed and downed a single birthday-cake-flavored shot.

When she went to stand, the room spun around her. She said Hopkins told her she couldn't drive, took her keys and offered to take her to his home. There, she asked for a glass of water. He brought her wine.

She got up to go to the kitchen but Hopkins grabbed the collar of her shirt, ripping it as he pulled her onto the couch. He kissed her, then hoisted her over his shoulder and carried her to his bedroom and raped her, she said.

"I remember he pinned my arms over my head with one hand and was touching me," she said. "I know at one point he got undressed because he let me go and I went to curl up. And I know that he was on top of me, and I just stared at the ceiling."

When she awoke the next morning, Hopkins was gone. He had left a Cadets T-shirt on the nightstand. She tied her own tattered shirt together and put it on instead. On the drive home she stopped and bought a morning-after contraception pill.

Years later, the woman said she has no doubt Hopkins drugged her. She had two drinks and two glasses of water at the bar, yet she had never felt so incapacitated.

She said she first told someone, a boyfriend, about the incident in 2012. That man, now her husband, confirmed that the woman, after they began dating, told her Hopkins had driven her home from a bar and had nonconsensual sexual contact with her.

The woman said she considered reporting the assault to police but didn't, in part because she worried about hurting the Cadets.

"I felt like I would be taking down an organization that did so many wonderful things," she said, "that the good things that George was responsible for outweighed my experience."Greensgrow Farms beloved pig Milkshake was rushed to the hospital on Tuesday. While now recovering back in his pen, the farm is asking for community support in a GoFundMe campaign to help cover the stack of veterinary bills. Read more

When Deirdre Sheehy pulled into Greensgrow, the urban farm in Kensington, on Tuesday, she knew something was immediately wrong when her companion, Milkshake, didn't come to greet her.

"He's one of the first people I talk to every morning," says Sheehy, head farmer at the spot at Cumberland and Gaul Streets. "He usually grunts and howls and is out there before all the rest, waiting to be fed, but on Tuesday, he was nowhere to be found."

Sheehy went straight to Milkshake's pen and found him lying in his little hut, vomit by his head, and showing signs that he was having trouble getting up. It was clear that the farm's pet pig  loved and known by many in the surrounding community  needed to be taken to the hospital.

"At first, it was like, 'How do we transfer a 250-pound pig that doesn't want to move and get him to where he needs to be?'" says Sheehy. "All of our mother instincts quickly kicked in, and we got to work pushing him up onto his feet."

After being nudged into a dog crate, Milkshake was transferred by way of a forklift into Sheehy's pickup truck and driven to Mount Laurel Animal Hospital. The vets ran a bunch of blood tests, all of which came back normal. Yet, head held low, Milkshake was clearly not doing so well.

"What I learned from the vets is that pigs have very sensitive gastrointestinal systems," recalls Sheehy, who notes that Milkshake's tummy troubles are suspected to be a result of something he ingested. "They eat a lot of different things, but if they come into contact with something they're not supposed to have, it can do a lot of damage."

The vets flushed his system, and advised that they'd need to keep him overnight. Sheehy went home, but then things took a turn for the worse.

"I ended up getting a phone call around 10 o'clock at night. They said he was still vomiting and would need to be transferred somewhere else," says Sheehy. "Mount Laurel Animal Hospital is a small animal hospital and Milkshake is obviously not a small animal. We knew we had to pull the funds together and make this happen, because he's a part of the family."

Sheehy hopped back in her pickup truck with Milkshake in tow, and set out on an hour-long track to PennVet's New Bolton Center in Kennett Square, refraining from pressing pedal to the medal in fear that Milkshake might get cold.

Milkshake finally stabilized at the New Bolton Center of the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, where he was released on Wednesday afternoon. Now back at home, he's slowly regaining his appetite, munching on Swiss chard, lettuce, beets, and other harvests from the farm. As he sleeps off the remainder of his illness, Greensgrow is asking for the community's help.

The final receipts for Milkshake's hospital care are not yet in, but the bill for the overnight stay alone was quoted at $2,000. Sheehy created a GoFundMe account asking for help in paying for the veterinary care of the beloved neighborhood pig. It didn't take long for Milkshake's loyal following to show their support.

"Milkshake's become a symbol of the farm in ways I don't think we could've ever predicted," says Greensgrow Farms' executive director Ryan Kuck. "We see kids that have changed the way they walk to school in the morning to come say hi to Milkshake, or adults who stop by every day on their way home from work to give him a visit. Milkshake just brings joy to people's lives."

Within just one day, the GoFundMe page has raised more than $3,700 toward a goal of $5,000. Nearly 130 people have contributed.

"I think Greensgrow is incredibly important to the neighborhood, and Milkshake acts as a sort of mascot for what they represent," says Kate McCann, who donated to the fundraiser on Thursday and who frequently takes family and friends to introduce them to the pig. "When I saw the post about Milkshake, it was a no-brainer to contribute towards his medical bills. He contributes largely to the morale of the farm and is a huge part of their community."A group representing 87 charter schools has sued the Philadelphia School District over a policy it says will hamper charter operations. In this file photo, protesters railed against the policy. Read more

A nonprofit that supports charter schools filed suit Thursday against the Philadelphia School District, saying the school system's new policy unfairly and illegally restricts charter-school operations.

Excellent Schools PA says the policy, passed by the School Reform Commission on March 22, will require charters to seek approval from the district for virtually all changes to their curriculum and imposes illegal enrollment caps. In Pennsylvania, charters are privately managed but authorized and funded by local school boards with public money.

A coalition of 60 charter schools had opposed the policy. The group says its suit is on behalf of all 87 of the city's charters, which educate 70,000 students  a third of all those in public schools in Philadelphia.

The charter policy has been a sore subject in recent months, drawing protesters who say it represented an overreach on the district's part.

The district is supposed to be a "neutral arbiter" toward charter schools, "not to micromanage their operations," said Stephen DeMaura, executive director of Excellent Schools PA.

Of the new policy, "we believe the main purpose is to restrict the operations and growth of charter schools, not improve the outcomes of children," DeMaura said.

Estelle Richman, chair of the School Reform Commission, said in a statement that the revised policy "provides a new and clear avenue for charter schools seeking midterm amendments," through "a transparent and predictable process that will benefit students, families, and charter schools.

"This lawsuit is a distraction and would stop those charter schools who have already begun to submit amendments dead in their tracks," Richman said.

The suit says that four provisions of the policy violate state law: one that applies to changes in charter facilities and others that spell out district oversight of charter curriculum; enrollment caps; and allow the district to consider the financial impact of charter amendments.

It is "well settled" in Pennsylvania that a school district's financial considerations can't be the basis for deciding whether to allow charter schools, the suit says.

In allowing the Philadelphia School District to consider the financial impact in granting charter amendments, the policy "could provide a blanket reason for the district to routinely deny any requests," especially those seeking to add grade levels or expand enrollment, the suit argues.

District officials have defended the policy, saying that they do not intend to oversee day-to-day operations of charters, but that they are required to sign off on major changes in location, mission, or operation in charters, and that the policy targets only those significant changes.

The district's previous policy for charter amendments was "fairly evenhanded," DeMaura said. The district moved to change that policy after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in August that the 1997 charter-school law did not include a process for charter schools to amend their operating agreements. The court said the state Charter Appeals Board did not have authority to settle disputes over amendment requests.

The decision overturned a lower-court ruling that Discovery Charter School in Philadelphia's Parkside neighborhood could take its case for increasing its enrollment by 70 percent to the state board because the School Reform Commission had not acted on the request.

Charter schools "had no clear and predictable way" to amend their charters until the district revised its policy, Richman said. "This limited charters in their ability to improve educational opportunities for Philadelphia's public school students."

While the suit asks the court to block the policy from taking effect, the new school board, which takes over July 1, could also address the issue, DeMaura said.

"Our hope is that the new school board takes a look at this policy, and maybe makes changes to reflect our concerns," he said.The photo taken on April 10 shows the new type watchtower build by the 8th Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment at the camp zone of the peacekeeping forces of the Sector West of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) in Wau. (mod.gov.cn)

WAU, South Sudan, April 12 (Chinamil) -- Ten new type watchtowers built by the 8th Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment to South Sudan (Wau) for were put into use at the camp zone of the peacekeeping forces of the Sector West of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) in Wau on Tuesday.

The old watchtowers with a small space, low eaves and poor defense had been used for more than ten years. In order to improve the security and defense capability of the peacekeeping forces' camp as soon as possible, the Chinese peacekeeping engineers completed the construction of all the 10 new watchtowers in less than one month.

The new type watchtower built by stacking two layers of containers is 8 meters high, 4 meters long and 4 meters wide with welded stairs and handrails and a metal sheet roof on the top. The protective cover in the watchtower consists of net cages filled with red clay.

The "Chinese Quality" and "Chinese Standard" demonstrated by the Chinese engineers in the construction of the new watchtower once again won praises of the UNMISS.

Since the deployment to the mission area at the end of September last year, the 8th Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment has completed multiple tasks including the 218 km Kuacjok-Wau-Tonj main-supply route (MSR) maintenance project.

The undated photo shows an old shabby watchtower ever used at the camp zone of the peacekeeping forces of the Sector West of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) in Wau. (mod.gov.cn)Janice Dickinson walks through the Montgomery County Courthouse Thursday. Dickinson, Cosby's most famous accuser, was the fourth woman to testify against Bill Cosb in Cosby's sexual assault retrial. Read more

She sat on the witness stand Thursday and answered prosecutors' questions about her alleged assault by Bill Cosby with an uncharacteristic reserve.

But seconds into Janice Dickinson's face-off with defense lawyer Tom Mesereau on the fourth day of testimony at Cosby's retrial in Norristown, the 63-year-old supermodel's trademark, reality TV-honed pugnacity had returned.

Dickinson  one of Cosby's most vocal critics and a former fashion plate better known these days for her late-career turn on shows like America's Next Top Model and Celebrity Rehab  snarled and sneered her way through an electric, hour-long cross-examination Thursday as Mesereau dug deep into her colorful past.

But, facing repeated attempts to discredit her, Dickinson refused to give an inch.

"So what?" she snapped at him at one point. Cosby "raped me in Tahoe."

There may be no better-known name than hers in the pantheon of the more than 60 women who have come forward since 2014 to accuse Cosby of sexual improprieties. The self-styled "world's first supermodel" helped kick off that wave when she first aired her allegations publicly that year in an interview with Entertainment Tonight.

But with her Hollywood allure and tales of modeling trips to exotic locales, Dickinson cut a far different figure than the other Cosby accusers jurors heard this week, all of whom had long left their acting, modeling or partying days behind. That list included Lise-Lotte Lublin, a sixth-grade teacher from Las Vegas, who said Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her in 1989. She also testified Thursday.

Mesereau, in questioning Dickinson, sought to take advantage of her outsize  and at times messy  public persona.

He balked at her account of a 1982 trip to Nevada, where she said Cosby offered her a pill for menstrual cramps that knocked her out and then assaulted her in a hotel room.

She stood firm in her story, calling Cosby a "monster" and punctuating her answers with a series of icy glares at the 80-year-old defendant.

The lawyer accused her of wanting to see Cosby convicted to bolster a defamation lawsuit she has filed against his client. The supermodel pushed back, saying all she wants is an apology from Cosby to all his victims.

And when Mesereau, seemingly out of nowhere, interrupted to ask Dickinson whether she ever spread false rumors that she was pregnant in the early '90s with Sylvester Stallone's child, the supermodel responded with a coarse frankness laid down like a challenge.

"I was pregnant. I had sex with two men that month. [Stallone] wasn't the only contender," she said. "After the DNA test, he was not the father of my child. Thank God."

As usual, Cosby sat silently. But the antagonism between his lawyer and his accuser was so charged, it seemed to inspire open antipathy in others. As the court broke for lunch halfway through Dickinson's testimony, Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt lashed out at lawyer Gloria Allred as she answered reporters' questions on the courthouse steps.

"You're a highly paid, so-called civil rights lawyer," Wyatt heckled, shouting over her answers. He later referred to Allred, who represents three of the accusers to testify so far at the trial, as "Gloria Awful-red" and her daughter, Lisa Bloom, who is Dickinson's attorney, as "Lisa Blasphemous Bloom."

Amid those bouts of rancor, Dickinson told a sobering tale on the stand.

Under questioning from Assistant District Attorney M. Stuart Ryan, she explained she had just begun to find success as a working model in 1982 and was at a photo shoot on Bali, in Indonesia, when she received a phone call from Cosby inviting her to meet him in Reno.

"He offered me transportation. He said, 'Will you fly economy?'" Dickinson recalled. "I said, 'No, I will not. I fly first class.'"

Ostensibly, the purpose of her trip was to discuss a possible future career as a singer  one that Dickinson explained "never got off the ground because I can't sing."

When she complained of cramps that night over dinner, she said, Cosby offered her a blue pill. She said she began to feel woozy and lightheaded as he later led her to a hotel room.

"He got on top of me. His robe opened," Dickinson said. "He smelled like cigars, and espresso and body odor."

She told jurors she was powerless to resist and felt immobile.

"I remember thinking, 'What the heck is he doing?' I was just in shock," she said. "Here was 'America's Dad' on top of me  a happily married man with five children. I remember thinking how wrong it was  how very, very wrong it was."

But, Mesereau noted, Dickinson made no mention of sex with Cosby that night in her 2002 memoir, No Lifeguard on Duty  a book that the lawyer pointed out, in an aside, was ghostwritten by Pablo Fenives, who also wrote O.J. Simpson's 2007 tell-all, If I Did It.

Instead, the book says Dickinson drank herself to sleep that night in Tahoe with cognac and Quaaludes after Cosby left her at the hotel room door.

"It's all fabrication," Dickinson spat back. "It was written by ghostwriters. I wanted a paycheck."

Mesereau pounced: "So you made up a story about Bill Cosby because you wanted a paycheck?"

Lublin, who followed Dickinson on the stand, said it was the supermodel's own Cosby story that helped her come to terms with the experience she had with the comedian in 1989. Prosecutors hoped her testimony, like that of the four other women who said Cosby attacked them, would bolster the account of their central accuser, Andrea Constand, when she is expected to testify Friday.

Lublin recounted meeting Cosby for an acting lesson at the Elvis Presley suite at the Las Vegas Hilton, where he offered her two drinks that made her feel woozy.

It wasn't until Dickinson and other women came forward, she testified, that she was sure something more had happened to her that night  a point Cosby lawyer Kathleen Bliss stressed in cross-examination.

Still, Lublin left the Norristown courtroom standing firm  though perhaps not as memorably as Dickinson had done before her.

As the supermodel was dismissed by Judge Steven T. O'Neill, she stopped to address him.

"I think you've been great," Dickinson told the judge, quipping: "And I swear, Law and Order is my favorite program."

Keep up with every development in Bill Cosby's case with our day-by-day recaps, timeline, and explainer on everything you need to know about the case and its major players.Mark Bookman designed a project to map wheelchair accessibility at Penn, where, he was photographed April 11, 2018. Read more

As the March 2 nor'easter arrived, packing snow, rain, and 70-mph winds, 25 University of Pennsylvania students scattered across campus. Despite the storm, their mission  investigating the university's accessibility in exacting detail  hadn't changed.

Just past 3 p.m., their data started popping up on a new, online map created by Mark Bookman, a doctoral student in East Asian languages and civilizations, who uses an electric wheelchair due to a rare, glycogen-storage disease.

A trash can blocked a doorway in a student residence.

The performing arts center's braille signs had been installed out of arm's reach.

The hallways separating the stacks of the fine arts library were too narrow.

Bookman's project is just one of the latest efforts to crowdsource accessibility, particularly wheelchair accessibility, that are popping up across the country.

WheelchairTravel.org gave Philadelphia an "excellent" for wheelchair-accessible tourism. Mapping projects such as AccessNow, which boasts more than 500 ratings for Philadelphia businesses, and Unlock Philly, which uses real-time SEPTA reports and Yelp data to document broken-down elevators and inaccessible restaurants, have shown more mixed results.

And later this month, the nonprofit Jewish Learning Venture will start rating Lower Merion businesses on the Access Earth mapping tool.

But so far these services have yet to join forces. As a result, some sites are barely mapped here.

AXS Map, a service founded in New York in 2012, has just a few businesses reviewed in Philadelphia. AbleRoad, another accessibility map application, is shutting down at the end of the month.

In March, Google Maps announced it would offer wheelchair-accessible transit routes for some cities, but not Philadelphia, whose narrow passages were in place centuries before the Americans With Disabilities Act was signed in 1990.

To Bookman, crowdsourcing is attractive because users can measure accessibility on their own terms, as well as report obstructing barriers like construction in real time. His "intersectional" map also notes nearby accessible gender-neutral bathrooms, prayer spaces, and lactation rooms.

Later in March, at Bookman's second "map-a-thon," 40 students and staff members traversed campus again, this time through a rainstorm.

He was surprised that nine out of 10 volunteers "are people you would traditionally not think of needing access." The process of mapping, he believes, can actually change people's consciousness of the spaces they inhabit.

Back in the spring of 2016, when Wharton student Leah Davidson studied more than 500 Philadelphia storefronts, she noted where elevated doorways, bulky steps, and narrow entrances  architectural hindrances built into much of Philadelphia's landscape  make merchants inaccessible to city residents who use wheelchairs.

While working for the Toronto-based accessibility map service AccessNow, Davidson rated small shops like Chestnut Jewelry and Image Hair Salon as "not accessible," since patrons must climb at least one step to enter. Meanwhile, businesses like Almaz Cafe on 20th Street received a "partially accessible," for having patio access but a "very narrow door."

But few ratings have been added for Philadelphia since Davidson's survey.

Businesses in buildings constructed before the ADA became law must remove architectural barriers if "readily achievable," a mandate that can include installing an entrance ramp or widening a doorway.

"There are many businesses with one or just a few steps where a ramp could be built to provide access," said Dynah Haubert, a staff attorney at Disability Rights Pennsylvania. "Public accommodations are often not aware of their obligations to do that."

While Haubert sees promise in projects mapping wheelchair accessibility, she said they need a "critical mass on one of these things to make it really usable."

Meanwhile, there are tourism blogs like WheelchairJimmy.com, which rated 88 Philadelphia hotels and restaurants for accessibility last year. John Morris, of Orlando, Fla., who runs WheelchairTravel.org, is returning to Philadelphia tourist spots in just a few weeks on behalf of Visit Philadelphia. In 2015, Morris gave the city a 20 based on a 25-point scale.

"These guides are designed to report on access for tourists," he cautioned. "I am completely cognizant that sidewalks may be nonexistent, or horrible, in some of the residential neighborhoods. The bus stops may not be accessible."

The creators of Unlock Philly are headed back to the drawing board. Today, their map, created in 2013, sees fewer than 10 users a day. The aging program that allowed the map to import accessibility data from Yelp reviews is also shutting down.

Ather Sharif, an engineer who advised the original Unlock Philly, is now working on improving the map to update its method of importing Yelp data and hopes to make the project more easily expandable to other cities.

He emphasized that with these kind of projects, it's vital that data and code be shared whenever possible. Right now, coordination among those involved in accessibility applications "is terrible."Camden Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard observing a group of 7th-grade students as they work together to build a card tower. Read more

Camden School Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard, an outsider brought in to transform the failing South Jersey school district, announced plans Wednesday to step down from the state-run school system he has led since 2013.

Rouhanifard, 36, said he would leave his post at the end of the school year. He cited a litany of accomplishments that he said changed public education in the district he inherited after the state took control a few months before he arrived.

"I just think now is the right time," Rouhanifard said. "By any measure, Camden's schools are better than they were five years ago."

The announcement ends months of speculation about the superintendent's future in Camden under Gov. Murphy, a Democrat who took office in January. Rouhanifard was appointed by former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, who credited him with changing public education in the city.

"It's the best job I've ever had," Rouhanifard said. "I just can't imagine another job giving me the same sense of fulfillment."

Rouhanifard said he met in Trenton on Wednesday with Murphy's chief of staff and believes he had the Democratic governor's support. He said he also met Wednesday with acting state Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet and submitted his resignation. He later notified the district staff in a message saying in part, "This will be my last school year as your superintendent."

In a statement, Murphy spokesman Dan Bryan said: "The governor thanks Paymon Rouhanifard for his service to the Camden School District. We thank him for his leadership, effort and dedication over the past five years, and we wish him the best in his future endeavors."

Camden Mayor Frank Moran said he was saddened to see Rouhanifard step down. The mayor said he plans to ensure that the next school chief has Camden's "children at heart."

"Since Day 1, he's been a strong advocate for real change in our district," Moran said. " "He did leave his print on this education system and it has proven positive."

Critics, including civil rights leaders, however, believe Rouhanifard focused too much on creating new schools and not enough on making improvements to traditional public schools.

In 2014, the schools chief elected to turn five of the city's most struggling schools into Renaissance schools. The district's iconic Camden High is being demolished and its headquarters recently moved from a former RCA building on the waterfront to a vacant neighborhood school.

"So many tears have been shed and so many lives upended," said Camden Education Association president Keith Benson. "He's leaving and now we can move on and try to rebuild what he has torn down."

Months after the state took over Camden's troubled schools in 2013, Christie named Rouhanifard, only the fourth outsider to serve as schools chief, to run the district, which has long been plagued by poor test scores, a low graduation rate, and a high dropout rate.

Several years ago, all but three of the city's schools were rated among the worst public schools in the state. Today, eight schools remain on the list. Rouhanifard is also credited with improving the district's graduation rate from 49 percent to 70 percent and cutting the dropout rate from 21 percent to 12 percent in five years.

During his tenure, more Camden public school students enrolled in charter schools and Renaissance schools than traditional public schools. In 2000 those traditional schools educated nearly 19,000 students in more than two dozen schools. For the 2017-18 school year, there are 6,800 students who attend the city's 18 traditional public schools; 4,350 enrolled in 11 schools operated by charters; and 3,850 students in 11 Renaissance schools, which are publicly funded and privately operated by KIPP, Mastery, and Uncommon Schools.

"It's been five long years of a lot of work," said Felisha Reyes-Morton, Camden school board vice president. "He's done some remarkable work."

Unlike his three immediate predecessors, Rouhanifard did not rise through the ranks of traditional public schools or serve as a principal or assistant superintendent, and that rankled some educators. A Teach for America alum, he worked on Wall Street for a few years and later worked in the New York City and Newark public schools.

Rouhanifard, who was 5 when he arrived in the United States with his family from Iran in 1986, fleeing religious persecution, has often used his story as an example of the power of education to transform a child's life. He became an American citizen while in grade school.

In Camden, Rouhanifard, who lives in the city in a waterfront apartment, amassed a loyal following, especially among parents who wanted an alternative to the traditional public schools. He plans to remain in Camden with his wife, son and infant daughter, born three weeks ago.

"I'm just ready to reacquaint myself with my family and spend a lot of time with them," he said. "I just need a little bit of a break."

Rouhanifard said his contract, which runs through June 30, 2019, required him to give 90 days' notice. His base salary is $213,360 a year. Although his name surfaced last year as a possible candidate for the New York City school chancellor's job, Rouhanifard said he has no immediate job plans.

"No matter where I am next, Camden will always be home to me," he said.

Some Camden residents hope the state will soon relinquish its control over the school system. Murphy and state education officials have not indicated how much longer Camden would remain under state supervision.

Rouhanifard said he would like to see Katrina McCombs, a deputy school superintendent and Camden native who worked in the district as a teacher and an administrator, named as his successor. The appointment will be made by the governor.

"I hope that someone from Camden steps up to move our district forward," he said. "From here on out, it's in someone else's hands."Thirty years in prison can teach you patience. That's a good thing for Ronald Pierce, who was paroled last year, as he's likely in for a long fight.

Pierce, a 59-year-old North Jersey man, accepts that he's on parole and will be for the rest of his life. But one thing he can't accept: He's also being denied the right to vote.

That's because while the right is guaranteed to people on probation or parole in Pennsylvania and 15 other states, anyone under supervision for a felony conviction is barred from the ballot box in New Jersey.

He's part of a coalition of activists, legislators, faith leaders, judges, and even former prison officials advocating for New Jersey lawmakers to pass bills introduced last month to restore voting rights to all citizens.

They say it's a constitutional imperative, made even more urgent by the fact that New Jersey has the nation's largest racial disparity in incarceration rates. African Americans make up 15 percent of New Jersey residents, but represent about 50 percent of the nearly 100,000 people statewide stripped of voting rights due to criminal convictions.

Pierce, who spoke at a forum in Cherry Hill to rally support for the legislation, said it's not only unfair, it's also bad public-safety policy.

"For people who are incarcerated, voting has a potential to be an effective means of rehabilitation," he said. "I've seen this. When a person engages in civic dialogue, it opens them up to seeing beyond their personal needs to the issues that affect the community."

Pierce was convicted of the 1986 robbery and murder of Wayne Ferragine, 27, of Bayonne. He is now a student at Rutgers University and an intern at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, which has been organizing for this legislation.

Camden County has one of the highest rates of disenfranchisement under the current law, according to a report the institute released in December. According to the analysis, New Jersey incarcerates 12 black adults for every white one, and 30 black youths to one white. The average disparity nationwide is 5-1.

The restriction on voting dates back to 1844; lawmakers in the New Jersey Legislative Black Caucus said the reason for proposing a change now was the disproportionate impact on black residents.

"If you attach a voting system to a criminal justice process, you will see those racial disparities in the political process as well," said Ryan Haygood, president of the institute. "So part of our goal is to disentangle this relationship."

Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow people to vote while incarcerated. The draft legislation would put New Jersey in that group.

A group of three New Jersey Republican lawmakers issued a joint statement saying that would be a mistake.

"Do we really want convicts who knowingly broke the law and victimized others in the process to determine public policy, including gun laws, resources for law enforcement, and school security?" Sen. Chris Connors, Assemblyman Brian Rumpf, and Assemblywoman DiAnn Gove wrote in a statement. "Felons forfeited these rights reserved for law-abiding citizens by virtue of the crimes they've committed."

A spokesman for Gov. Phil Murphy said the governor does not comment on pending legislation, but "looks forward to working with the Legislature to pass legislation that expands access to the ballot." He declined to respond to an inquiry as to whether Murphy supports expanding that access to people in prison or under supervision. State Sen. President Stephen Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, whose support would be critical to bringing the measure to a vote, also did not respond to requests for comment.

Still, back at the panel, U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Williams, one of the judges who presides over Camden Reentry Court, simply unfolded her pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution  the part that says the right to vote shall not be denied "on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude."

"The 15th Amendment addresses this issue," she concluded. "At some point, the Legislature will address it or not  but I can assure you at some point it comes through the court system."Rowan College at Burlington County has reached a $238,500 settlement in a discrimination case by an employee against its outgoing president, Paul Drayton Jr., who resigned last week for health reasons.

At a special meeting Wednesday, the Board of Trustees approved an agreement to settle a complaint filed last summer by the employee against Drayton and the college, said college spokesman Gregory Volpe. The college, in the agreement, denied "any wrongdoing or liability of any kind."

With the agreement, the college said a complaint filed by an employee in August with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was closed. The college has not released the findings of an internal investigation into the matter. The employee has not been identified or the nature of the allegations.

"To the best of my knowledge, all matters related to this have been resolved," George Nyikita, trustee board chairman, said Thursday. "It's certainly been a challenging period, but the employees and the staff and the faculty of the college have responded remarkably well and performed at a high level."

According to the six-page agreement reached through mediation, the employee, whose name was redacted from the document, was placed on paid administrative leave on March 13. The employee's position at the college will end Friday, the agreement says. The settlement includes attorney's fees and bars the employee from further legal action against the college.

Drayton, 58, of Mount Laurel, did not respond to a telephone message seeking comment. In an interview on Saturday, Drayton, the college's first African American president, said he was proud of his record promoting women and minorities.

"I've lived my life on opening doors," he said. "The last thing I would do is discriminate against anyone."

Last week, the trustees voted unanimously to allow Drayton to step down from his post and placed him on medical leave. Drayton declined to disclose his medical condition. The college will continue to pay his $203,206 annual salary and benefits until Sept. 1.

Drayton was placed on paid administrative leave after the discrimination complaint was lodged. Details about the nature of the complaint or specific allegations have not been disclosed. The federal agency enforces civil rights laws against discrimination in the workplace, including for age, disability, race, religion, sex, and sexual harassment.

Nyikita said no decision has been made on when Drayton's successor will be named. Michael Cioce, vice president of enrollment management and student success, has been serving as acting president.

Drayton, a longtime South Jersey political figure, became president in March 2015, the fifth in the history of what once was Burlington County College.

Previously, Drayton was the Burlington County administrator for five years. Prior to that, he headed the Delaware River Port Authority. He resigned from the bistate agency in 2003 after resisting commissioners' attempts to oust him.

Before working in county government, Drayton was an administrator at Temple University. He also worked as a lawyer in the office of former New Jersey Gov. James J. Florio and, before that, for a U.S. Senate committee.

Under a separation agreement with Drayton, Rowan agreed to pay his life insurance and COBRA health benefits from Sept. 1 through Aug. 31, 2019, college officials said. It also includes a mutual non-disparagement clause that bars Drayton from taking any legal action against the college.Sen. Scott Wagner meets and greets voters during a campaign swing through the Pennsylvania Farm show in January. Read more

Facing an attack ad that depicts him as a "deadbeat dad," Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner responded Thursday with a new television spot featuring a character witness who was well-positioned to rebut the claim: his daughter.

Staring directly into the camera, Katharine Wagner calls her father's rival Paul Mango a "disgrace" and accuses him of peddling "flat-out lies."

"Dragging me into his dirty campaign is beyond the bounds of decency," Katharine Wagner says in the 30-second ad, which the Wagner campaign said was airing in all six markets in Pennsylvania. "My dad is a wonderful father who has always supported me."

"Mango is taking a decade-old dispute and twisting the truth," she says. "Mr. Mango, you're not half the man my father is. Take down your disgusting ads and apologize."

The Wagner campaign said the ad was a direct response to Mango's latest ad, launched last week, that said Wagner had been "hauled into court" and ordered to pay $800,000 in back alimony and child support. (The case involved Wagner's daughter from a different marriage  not Katharine.)

The Mango campaign cited court records stemming from Wagner's 2008 divorce. The records involve a dispute in 2012 over Wagner's income and how much he could feasibly pay each month in child support and alimony. A judge wrote that Wagner's "total arrearage" under a recalculated obligation was "approximately $800,000." But there was no indication that Wagner had missed any payments. His campaign has said Wagner made all payments on time.

Typically, family members show up in political ads seeking to introduce a candidate as a likable person. In this case, the ad actually shows how ugly the race has become with a month to go in the primary election.

The testimonial from Katharine Wagner may serve another purpose. The Mango campaign has intimated that it will go on the air with a new ad about "violent Wagner."

That raised the prospect that Mango would resurface a 2006 temporary protection-from-abuse order that Katharine Wagner obtained against her father. In her petition for the order, Katharine Wagner, who was 19 and living with her grandparents, wrote that her father had visited to talk about her drinking.

At one point, her father "came after" her, squeezed her neck, and pushed her up against the kitchen counter, the petition says. Katharine Wagner said that her father had been "verbally and emotionally abusive to her and her family, at least for the past 10 years."

A judge granted the order but later dismissed it after Katharine Wagner failed to show up for a court hearing. Charges were never filed against Scott Wagner.

He has said that his daughter had been in a drunk-driving accident. In a letter to the State GOP Committee this year, Katharine Wagner reflected on the incident, saying she had gotten "into trouble with alcohol" at the time. "My father stepped in and did everything possible to save my life," she wrote, adding that her father "even grabbed a hold of" her once but didn't choke her, as she said Mango's camp had claimed.

Katharine Wagner wrote that she "reacted like an angry teenager by filing a PFA against my father  an act that I deeply regret to this day."

"I have worked at my dad's company for over 10 years and enjoy a wonderful, healthy relationship with him," she wrote.

Scott Wagner, addressing reporters in Harrisburg on Tuesday, said: "There's big talk out there about an issue with my oldest daughter. Almost 12 years ago, I tried to save my daughter's life. That's what this is all about."

"Mr. Mango wants to go after my daughter, he's going after the wrong person's daughter," he said. "I was being a parent."

The Mango campaign said it had not, and would not, bring up Wagner's daughter in the campaign. "We believe the history of their personal problems is between Wagner, his daughter and the law," campaign spokeswoman Laura Lebaudy said.

"It is disappointing to see that Wagner is the one who chose to bring his daughter into this campaign to defend his actions when no one else has," she said in an email.

The primary election is set for May 15. Pittsburgh-area lawyer Laura Ellsworth is also running in the primary against Wagner, a York County state senator, and Mango, a Pittsburgh-area retired health-care consultant.

The winner will face Gov. Wolf, a Democrat, in November.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election. Read more

The 2008 financial crisis made the phrase "too big to fail" a part of common parlance. Until now, it's been used mainly to describe financial institutions that have become so vital to our system that their collapse could take down the larger economy. When these institutions run into trouble, the government feels obliged to step in  and it has.

Following Mark Zuckerberg's testimony on Capitol Hill, one wonders: Is Facebook trying to take the "too big to fail" designation for itself? One of Zuckerberg's messages seemed to be that his social network is so systemically important, the government should leave it alone.

The Facebook chief executive continued to make a glowing case for the importance of his platform. In earlier interviews, he mused on the "philosophical question" of helming a community of more than 2 billion active users, and about his "social mission" of connecting the world in new ways.

Before Congress, he went further, painting a picture of the platform as all but essential to the functioning of the United States. "After Hurricane Harvey, people raised more than $20 million for relief," he said. "And more than 70 million small businesses now use Facebook to grow and create jobs." While Zuckerberg apologized for the mistakes the company has made, he made clear that he views it as his responsibility  and no one else's  to fix them.

Many members of Congress appeared willing to accept Zuckerberg's reasoning. It's easy to see why they might. The majority of those asking questions weren't necessarily familiar enough with Facebook's technology to suggest any specific regulation to secure user data in advance of the next Cambridge Analytica-style scandal, or to prevent a new infestation of Russian bots.

Perhaps more important, they seemed to buy into the myth of Facebook's importance and the inevitability of its growing influence. In his opening statement, Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R., S.D.) said, "Today's hearings are extraordinary.  But then, Facebook is pretty extraordinary." Later, Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.) waxed nostalgic about how his were the first Senate business cards printed with a Facebook address, and how today his young son was already a dedicated user of Instagram, another Facebook-owned platform.

Yes, there were questions about what the company should change or what it should have reported earlier. But few bothered to wonder whether the platform was worth all the trouble it had caused, or whether it was time for a major shift in how it operates  its revenue model, its data collection methods, its end goal of world connection.

That's a mistake. Facebook may tout itself as an idealistic operation, connecting humans across the globe for the greater good, but its business model is based on monetizing as much personal data as possible. In essence, the company has ushered in a new era of what is essentially personal surveillance for profit.

Facebook may be making itself safer or more secure, but it hasn't answered the question of whether we should continue to interact with it at all. Congress should remember that the social network is not too big to be punished for prior bad actions. It's not too big to be tightly regulated by experts. And it's not too big to be reformed in ways that could help us all.

In Europe, plans for a consumer-oriented regulatory scheme are underway, to be implemented next month. And as my Washington Post colleague Anne Applebaum has noted, Zuckerberg seems agreeable to having the European Union General Data Protection Regulation suggest changes to his site.

Clearly, Facebook's not too big to accept orders, and it's not too big to pivot when needed. After this week's hearings, Congress should begin to look past Facebook's bluster about its size and importance and begin to push for real legislative remedies to the social network's problems, rather than leaving them to the site's users to deal with after the fact.

Facebook may be big, but it's not too big to fail.

Christine Emba writes for the Washington Post. Twitter: @ChristineEmbaNew Jersey State Trooper Joseph Drew reached inside a young mans underwear to conduct a body search after he said he smelled marijuana during a motor vehicle stop on March 8, 2017 in Southampton. The search, captured by dashcam and body cameras of the trooper and his back-up officer, was obtained by the New Jersey Libertarian Party through an open public records request. Read more

A number of troubling recent incidents involving New Jersey police suggest that conflicts between law enforcement and the public are not limited to big cities  nor is the damage to the public trust.

A state trooper cavity-searched a man on the side of the road as cars whizzed by on busy Route 206 in Southampton, Burlington County. The act is in conflict with state policy  and basic decency  requiring cavity searches to be conducted in private and with dignity. The trooper said he was looking for marijuana, but he didn't find any when he poked his hand in the man's underwear. The incident last year is now the subject of a civil lawsuit.

An Atlantic City cop, repeatedly in hot water for alleged brutality, faces a federal civil suit, scheduled to be heard May 14, for beating a man with his baton and kneeing him in the ribs in 2012. Instead of condemning brutal behavior, the city is trying to cover up previous allegations of violence by the officer by keeping Internal Affairs files sealed. Just a month ago, a federal jury awarded $300,000 to a man who said three Atlantic City police punched and kicked him while a police dog bit him. The jury found that Atlantic City failed to train and monitor its police.

A Gloucester Township cop smacked a 13-year-old girl twice in the face after he handcuffed her March 8. Last week, the Camden County prosecutor charged him with simple assault.

Clearly, discipline seems to have fallen apart in these departments. That's dangerous not only for the cops' victims, but anyone else living in or traveling through the state.

It is part of a larger national conflict between police and communities that has exploded in violence in recent years. In many cases, race was at the center of a sickening number of incidents involving police violence and brutality. Just because that's not necessarily the case in the New Jersey incidents doesn't mean these don't cause grave damage to the community  and to trust between civilians and law enforcement.

There are many ways to improve community-police relations, including community policing, where police cultivate good relationships with residents. The practice has reduced hostilities between cops and the community in Philadelphia and elsewhere. But Congress wants to cut funding to a program that pays community police officers' salaries. Sen. Bob Menendez (D., N.J.) is fighting that and every delegate from New Jersey and Pennsylvania should join him.

But even more should be done to address these problems with New Jersey police. The state's leaders and its residents have an obligation to hold police departments accountable.

Gov. Murphy needs to investigate state police behavior as well as how the command structure broke down. Based on the results, he can't hesitate to recommend discipline or retraining for those responsible. Otherwise, it looks like he's tolerating the abuse, and allowing bad behavior to get worse.

The same goes for mayors in Atlantic City and Gloucester. They are the executives and they are responsible for setting the standards for police conduct. Public confidence in law enforcement as well as public safety are on the line.Late on Easter Sunday afternoon, we heard four quick pops. One neighbor said it was fireworks, but a minute later people gathered around a boy lying on the sidewalk. He was unresponsive, the wire of his retainer visible behind his motionless lips. I tried to find a pulse, but there was none. Two minutes later, this beautiful 16-year-old boy was in the back of a patrol car rushing to the ER.

Two days later, we learned that William Bethel had died.

Our hearts go out to his family, friends, teachers, and everyone who knew this highly regarded young man. I can barely imagine their pain.

The questions that haunt me  and should haunt all of us  are: Why did this happen, and what can we do to prevent the loss of another promising child of Philadelphia? As a health expert, my job is to study these issues from a safe distance. On that Sunday, the impact of my work got very real. Because violence is a significant health issue, maybe my role here is to try to explain the unexplainable and understand why tragedies like these keep happening.

I can't presume to know what happened on that Easter day on South Street, just hours after families (and the mayor) paraded down that very same street. All we know is what's been reported; that two groups of kids argued and one fired a gun, killing William.

We can't know what insult made the shooter so angry (I assume) that he had to pull out his gun, or why he felt it necessary to bring it with him in the first place, or why he lacked the self-control not to fire, or what had happened in his life to put all that explosive rage so close to the surface.

We do know that violence does not happen in isolation; it's the result of circumstances and choices made at the individual, community, and government levels.

Research tells us that the events of our earliest years live with us until the day we die. Serious early childhood experiences like abuse, a parent's death, or divorce can cause illness and early death. They can also prime us for risk-taking and impulsive behavior.

Health-care providers have started to ask "What happened to you?" before "Why do you do this?" to assess and prevent the impact of these adverse experiences.

Where we live can impact our health more than the traits we inherit from our parents. Essentially, zip codes matter more than genetic codes. Like individuals, whole communities can be traumatized. Harmful experiences now and from generations past can weigh on the collective psyche, holding back people's progress and priming them for stress-related illness.

Institutional racism, chronic unemployment, poverty, limited opportunity, disinvestment, and loss of economic resources destroy the infrastructure and sap a community's strength, denying its children the opportunities other neighborhoods provide.

Again, I don't know why the shooter did what he did, but I do know that no child should carry a loaded weapon. I know that lax gun laws allow these guns to circulate. I know that our culture glorifies gun violence and that in the face of the NRA-led gun lobby, our political leaders are impotent to act. And I know that the mythical "good guy with a gun" would never have stopped this.

Philadelphia is the poorest of the nation's biggest cities. While some of our neighborhoods are growing and young people are moving in, others are still struggling from decades of stagnation and chronic social issues.

Unfortunately, violence is also contagious, infecting younger men in greater numbers. Boys need to find their place in the world, a meaningful place where adults take an interest in them and they feel valued. They need to learn how to be real men, strong in values and passionate in their conviction to do right, not some form of soulless, toxic masculinity. They need constructive challenges to surmount to prove their worth and develop resilience.

Our job as adults  especially adult men  is to be engaged mentors and help them grow with love and hope. Boys' Latin, the school William Bethel attended, seems like just such a place. If only every child had the same opportunity.

The children of Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., turned their anger and rage about a senseless school shooting into social action and a nationwide antiviolence movement. Instead of fighting boredom, frustration, or each other, they are fighting for change. If only those boys on South Street that Sunday had something better to fight for.

Drew Harris is a professor of population health and health policy at Thomas Jefferson University.CHEYENNE: A close call in a bridge construction zone on Interstate 80 near Cheyenne last year could have been much worse.

When a tractor trailer driver didn't slow down his vehicle from 75 mph to the reduced construction zone speed, he temporarily lost control of his vehicle, which partially drove up on a concrete barrier.

Luckily, no workers were working close to the incident when it happened.

"There was cement dust flying everywhere," said Ethan Crockett, WYDOT engineer in Cheyenne. "The contractors were running to get away. The driver apparently didn't slow down. There were tire marks on the concrete barrier 18 inches to 2-feet high."

With April 9-13 National Work Zone Awareness Week, the Wyoming Department of Transportation wants to remind motorists to follow posted speed limits, pay attention and not drive distracted when entering construction zones.

While the number of crashes in work zones are down over the past five years in Wyoming, these events still make up more than 200 crashes per year, for a total of 1,271. More than 30 percent of those crashes led to injuries or fatalities.

Construction season in Wyoming can start as early as April but typically gets under way in May. WYDOT will have construction along interstates 80, 25 and 90, and secondary highways.

"Our main goal out there is to keep the traveling public and everyone safe," said Kevin Erickson, resident engineer in Cheyenne. "We're out there working alongside of the traveling public. We want to establish traffic control, so they can maneuver through the site safely."

Work zones are designed to separate traffic from construction activities so workers and drivers are safe. Although the lanes are narrower, they are wide enough to safely accommodate traffic.

WYDOT also posts safety signs before construction sites to alert motorists of upcoming work. In work zones, motorists may see traffic cones, concrete barriers, flaggers, reduced speed signs and other safety-related measures.

Photo courtesy of WYDOT WYDOT workers install a new Welcome to Wyoming sign at the Wyoming-Nebraska border on I-80 at Pine Bluffs.

"Every work zone is different so you really need to pay attention to what's on the signs," Erickson said. "The configurations vary from site to site. The important thing is to just slow down when you're in construction zones. There are a lot of people out there working. We want everyone to go home safe."

When traveling in or near work zones, motorists should:

Plan ahead and give themselves extra time to reach their destinations.

Slow down and follow speed limit signs.

Pay attention to other drivers.

Don't drive distracted.

Wear their seat belts.

Visit WYDOT's 511 website at wyoroad.info for the latest road and travel information.

For additional information about this news release, contact Aimee Inama, senior Public Affairs specialist, at [email protected] or (307) 777-4013.Are you an older (55+) relative caring for a minor child? The National Family Caregivers Support  Older Relative Caregivers (Grandparents Raising Grandchildren) program may be able to help you with supports and services. Please join us for our monthly group support meeting on Thursday, April 19, 2018 at the North Christian Church at 2015 Tranquility Rd. Homemade Lasagna dinner for the adults and Sonic is donating kids' meals for the children at 6 p.m. At 7 p.m, our guest speaker, Jeff Grant, from Parks and Recreation will fill us in on activities available for our children. For more information, please call Debbie Walter at 307-635-9291 ext. 12. We hope to see you there!Traveling was not a new concept to Jeffrey Clay Stottlemyer. Born in Hampton, Iowa in November of 1965. He is the son of a minister, and his father's work took him many places in his young life.

The family settled in Winslow, Arizona, where he would graduate from Winslow Senior High School in 1984.

After graduation, Stottlemyer worked a variety of jobs, and even started his own landscaping business. "I gave my best effort and it was doing great, just couldn't find my place...not what I wanted to be doing for a career." he stated .

At the age of 23, after trying different things, he thought about the military. "My brother served in the United States Air Force, and my grandfather was in the United States Army, and after listening to both, I chose to follow in my granddad's footsteps...I went Army!" Stottlemyer said with strong conviction.

From desert region of Arizona, Stottlemyer headed to basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. "This was a cultural shock, as well as climate change for me." he said. "We were worlds apart from home." he added.

His time at Fort Jackson, would prepare him for tech school at Fort Gordon, near Augusta, Georgia. He would spend 16 weeks at tech school and he was glad to be leaving the climate as he headed out to a climate a little bit closer to home...Fort Bliss, at El Paso, Texas. However, fate would play a part in taking him back to Fort Gordon years later.

After a tour in Texas, as a communication signalman, Stottlemyer headed overseas. His duty station would be more than a tour of duty, but a family reunion of sorts. "I have relatives I had not met yet, and while in Germany, I met many, visited many places, and toured much of Europe as I could!" he declared. While stationed at Darmstadt, Germany, with the 440 Signal Battalion, he was one of the ones to test the newest signal equipment. "This was a wonderful unique experience, and testing new equipment that was on the cutting edge I was excited. I would never forget this tour!" he stated. This turned out to be a dream tour of duty, and with his love of travel, seeing sights he only imagined, and meeting family he thought he never would, he reluctantly took his next tour of duty taking him back to Texas. This time he would land at Fort Hood.

Fort Hood was a shocker for this soldier. This is a massive base. "It is like a huge city, and it even has 6 zip codes just for the base!!" he exclaimed. "You could actually get lost on Fort Hood!" he said with a laugh.

A transfer would soon come his way, and Stottlemyer found himself on the west coast, stationed at Fort Lewis, in Washington. He would do his tour and enjoy what he referred to as a hidden secret paradise on the west coast. Then it would be off to Korea.

Stottlemyer would serve a year in South Korea at Kunsan Air Force Base located at Gunsan Airport, on the west coast of the South Korean peninsula by the Yellow Sea. As his time was nearing end, he was given a choice of duty stations and headed back to Fort Hood. He would be with the 1st Calvary Signal group.

Courtesy Jeff Stottlemyer Stottlemyer, left with his wife Alana at the Trevi fountain, in Rome, Italy.

He then applied for a special duty assignment, and found himself back at Fort Jackson, South Carolina in school. He would become a recruiter for the Denver Recruiting out of Colorado Springs,Colorado.

Stottlemyer would spend three years there, and then find himself back in Korea at Camp Stanley, in his regular career field but as a Section Sergeant in the Signal Platoon.

During this tour of duty, he would develop a condition with his eye, and would be medivaced back to the states. He would spend 22 months at Fort Lewis, Washington, Wounded Warrior Battalion. Upon his discharge from the Wounded Warrior Battalion, fate would send him back to Fort Gordon, Georgia. His new assignment was supply sergeant, until he received his certification and license as a master amour. He would head back to Colorado Springs, where he would retire from the United States Army, after 22 years.

Thank you for your service Sgt. Stottlemyer.CHEYENNE - Overall, Wyomings fourth and eighth grade students in 2017 continue to outperform national average test scores in reading and mathematics on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nations Report Card or NAEP.

The Wyoming Department of Education (WDE) today released the states reading and mathematics results.

NAEP provides an important independent look at how our schools are doing, and these results show that Wyoming schools and students have a lot to be proud of, particularly with fourth grade math, said State Superintendent Jillian Balow. "Wyoming spends more per student than many states, and by equitably distributing those funds, we create opportunities for every student to be successful. Teachers have the funds and the support they need to make sure curriculum is aligned to assessments and the standards. As we move to a new statewide assessment that provides more data to teachers and takes up less time in the classroom, I am confident Wyoming will continue to be a national leader in education.

No state performed above Wyomings average NAEP score in grade four mathematics in 2017 (in 2015, two states had higher grade four math scores). Additionally, Wyoming was one of only six states with over 50 percent of students in the sample scoring proficient or advanced in grade four mathematics.

Another bright spot in the new results was an increase in grade eight mathematics scores for the states Native American students; their increased performance in mathematics during 2017 significantly reduced the achievement gap between Native American and White students in Wyoming as previously reported in 2015.

Overall, average reading and mathematics scores in Wyoming for both grades four and eight were statistically unchanged from NAEP results reported in 2015. Similarly over the four-year reporting period from 2013 to 2017, Wyoming results in reading and mathematics at both grades were statistically flat or unchanged.

Unlike the states WY-TOPP census, which tests all students, NAEP is administered to a statistical sample of students and does not render individual test results for students or their schools. As such, NAEP data represent a sampling of Wyoming students and their responses.

NAEP testing is administered every two years in reading and mathematics to Wyomings fourth and eighth grade students. The 2017 results mark a shift in NAEP procedures from a paper-and-pencil testing format to digitally-based assessments. All fifty states participate in the assessment, as well as the District of Columbia and Department of Defense (DoD) schools. NAEP provides an external reference or point-of-comparison to audit, review, and compare each states educational program. Additionally, NAEP provides a stable trend line for tracking achievement during the current flux nationally in state testing programs.Gov. Jerry Brown agreed on Wednesday to expand the California National Guards efforts on crime and drug issues that cross the states border with Mexico, but insisted troops would not be used to enforce immigration directives from President Trump.

This will not be a mission to build a new wall. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life, Brown wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Defense Secretary James N. Mattis. And the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws.

The decision comes one week after the Trump administration asked governors in border states to provide Guard troops for assistance with the duties of Border Patrol agents.

But Brown suggested a very limited role for the 400 additional California troops, writing to Nielsen and Mattis that support operations would be focused on targeting transnational criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers along the border, the coast and throughout the state, the Los Angeles Times reports.Officer Kevin Crossley was killed in a two-vehicle crash. Photo: Oneida County Sheriff's Office/Facebook

A New York police officer was killed Wednesday night in a two-vehicle crash, state police said.

Officer Kevin Crossley was in his Whitesboro, NY, Police patrol car when his vehicle was struck by a Chevrolet Avalanche at the intersection of Oriskany Boulevard and Westmoreland Street in Whitesboro just before 8 p.m., reports WKTV. He succumbed to his injuries at the hospital.

Last night we lost one of our fellow part time Police Officers. Officer Kevin Crossley who was working in the Village of Whitesboro was killed in a 2 car motor vehicle accident on Oriskany Blvd, Whitestown police posted on their Facebook page Thursday morning.SANYA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping reviewed the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in the South China Sea Thursday morning, saying that the need to build a strong navy "has never been more urgent than today."

The navy review is the largest of its kind in the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, called for efforts to build a first-class navy.

Taking part in the review were more than 10,000 service personnel, 48 vessels and 76 aircraft. They included the aircraft carrier Liaoning and latest submarines, vessels and fighter jets. More than half of the vessels were commissioned after the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012.

At around 9 a.m., Xi boarded the missile destroyer Changsha and sailed to where the review was to be conducted.

It started at about 10 a.m. after Xi gave the order.

Xi made a speech after the review, saying that it has always been China's aspiration to have a strong navy, which serves as a key guarantee to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

He pledged to speed up the modernization of the navy.

Xi said notable progress has been made and today's Chinese navy has "stood up in the East" with a brand new image.

"The Party and the people are proud of the PLA Navy," Xi said.

He asked naval officers and soldiers to fully implement the Party's absolute leadership over the military, be firm in ideals and convictions, and uphold the glorious traditions, while pushing for technological innovation, developing new types of battle forces, and building a modern maritime combat system.

Xi asked naval officers and soldiers to remain on high alert, answer the calls of the Party and the people at all times, resolutely defend the national interests, and strive to contribute more to upholding the peace and stability of the region and the world.Maggie Habermaan, Matt Apuzzo, and Michael Schmidt are three of the best reporters at the New York Times. This afternoon they report a story peddled by three people who have been briefed on the contents of a federal search warrant. I therefore take it that the story is derived from no one with first-hand knowledge. Indeed, it sounds like it comes from three people trying to discredit the Mueller project in stereo:

The F.B.I. agents who raided the office and hotel of President Trumps lawyer on Monday were seeking all records related to the Access Hollywood tape in which Mr. Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women, according to three people who have been briefed on the contents of a federal search warrant.

The search warrant also sought evidence of whether the lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, tried to suppress damaging information about Mr. Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

It is not clear what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played regarding the tape, which was made public a month before the election. But the fact that the agents were seeking documents related to the tape reveals a new front in the investigation into Mr. Cohen that is being led by the United States attorneys office in Manhattan.The Iran deal comes up for recertification by President Trump on May 12. Last time around, this past January, Trump vowed to terminate the agreement unless the participating European allies agreed to strengthen it. This is a last chance, Trump said. [E]ither fix the deals disastrous flaws, or the United States will withdraw. Its a hot subject in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the confirmation of Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State this morning.

Those fixes  theyre basic, if inadequate, but theyre not going to happen. The disastrous flaws for which Trump demands a remedy are suggestive of the absurdity of the deal. Trump seeks a follow-on agreement that addresses Irans development or testing long-range missiles, ensures strong IAEA inspections, and fixes the flaws of the sunset clause.' At National Review, Fred Fleitz recently identified several more of the deals basic flaws in this column (highly recommended).

Even if Trumps proposed fixes fall short of what would be necessary to make the deal meaningful, Trump has the big picture right. If its not the worst deal ever, as he says, its up there.

On the merits, Victor Davis Hanson recently included it among Five catastrophic decisions. His assessment: It was a disaster precisely because a) it was unneeded, given the ongoing strangulation of the Iranian economy due to tardy but finally tough sanctions, and b) it was embedded within so many side deals and payoffs, mostly stealthy, that it became a caricature, from nocturnal hostage ransom payments that helped fuel terrorists to whole areas of the Iran nuclear project exempt from spot inspections.

The Obama administration prevented Israel from undertaking a military strike to destroy the infrastructure for Irans development of nuclear weapons. Michael Orens memoir Ally reveals Obamas duplicity to Israel on this score. Given the nature of the threat Iran poses to Israel, Israeli intelligence has continued to monitor Irans efforts. The Times of Israel provides Yossi Cohens assessment in Mossad chief 100 percent certain Iran still seeks nuclear bomb.

Cohen is on the same wavelength as Hanson. He called the nuclear deal a terrible mistake, saying it allows Iran to keep key elements of its nuclear program intact and will remove other restraints in a few years. Then Iran will be able to enrich enough uranium for an arsenal of nuclear bombs, Cohen reportedly said.

He added: As head of the Mossad, I am 100 percent certain that Iran has never abandoned its military nuclear vision for a single instant. This deal enables Iran to achieve that vision.

Consistent with Cohens assessment, A. Savyon and U. Kafash draw on public Iranian sources to analyze the state of the deal in the MEMRI update In Advance Of Irans April 9 Nuclear Technology Day: Developments in Irans nuclear program deviate from deal. They focus on steps taken by the Iranian regime to maintain and further develop its nuclear capabilitiessteps that deviate from the framework of the deal and that in some cases even blatantly violate it.

Do these observers have it wrong? Jeremy Bernstein is a theoretical physicist and the author, most recently, of A Bouquet of Numbers and Other Scientific Offerings, a collection of essays. Over at the New York Review of Books he warns If Trump blows up the deal, Iran gets the bomb.

Its an interesting column. Before giving a brief lesson in nuclear weapons physics, Bernstein notes in his first sentence that the Iran deal was signed in Vienna on July 14, 2015[.] Im not impressed by an expert who gets a basic fact wrong in the first sentence of his analysis. The Iran deal was never signed. Permit me a digression on this point.

In a letter dated November 19, 2015, to then Rep. Mike Pompeo, Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Julia Frifield wrote that President Obama didnt require Iranian leaders to sign the deal and further stated the deal is not legally binding[.] Whether or not the deal is legally binding, it was never signed.

Joel Gehrke broke the story on Frifields letter in this column for National Review. Gehrke quoted Frifields letter: The [Iran deal] is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document. Although the letter is no longer accessible online, it was widely reported at the time.

Back to Bernstein. His object, he says, is to try to review what will be lost if the [Iran deal] is not renewed Bernstein leads off with this critical point. The first thing I would like to point out does not involve any physics, he writes. The first paragraph of the agreement says that Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire nuclear weapons. Note the ever. There is no sunset clause here. Toward the end of his piece, Bernstein argues that Iran is capable of developing a nuclear bomb in a matter of months[.] Yet Bernsteins critical point suggests that we can skip the physics in between and write him off as a fool.

Like Neville Chamberlain, Bernstein holds faith in the supernatural power of words written on a piece of paper. The remainder of his column reveals no ground for his faith. In the tweet below, Michael Oren draws on current events to blast the faith of Bernstein (and Obama and Kerry and all the rest). In this case brevity is indeed the soul of wit.During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump often refused to say what action he would take in response to various world hot spots because, he argued, it is foolish to tell our adversaries what well do before we do it. I viewed this response at least in part as an evasion  an excuse for not discussing policy. But the response made some sense and Trump may not have been entirely insincere in giving it.

In response to Syrias latest chemical attack, however, President Trump is doing just what he used to say a president shouldnt do. Several times a day, Trump is telling the world, including Russia and Syria, that hes going to attack Syria.

Trumps critics are seizing on this inconsistency, as well they might. However, I think theres less to it than meets the eye.

Why? Because it probably goes without saying that Trump will retaliate against Syria militarily. He committed the U.S. to this approach last April when he struck Syrian air bases following a chemical attack on civilians by the Assad regime. He was clear that future use of chemical weapons by the regime would trigger another U.S. military response.

Thus, Syria and Russia have every reason to expect a retaliatory attack, and no doubt began preparing their defense straight away. Trump, then, isnt really tipping his hand on Syria. He tipped it last year, and had to in order to maximize the chance of deterring future chemical attacks.

Still, its fair to ask what the point is of repeatedly threatening to attack Syria. By doing so, the president puts himself in a position where, if our forces encounter fierce resistance, his critics can claim (however speciously) that its Trumps fault for tipping his hand, in violation of his own rule against doing so.

Maybe Trump hopes not to attack. Maybe he hopes to scare Russia and Syria into some sort of negotiation.

This, I think, would be a major mistake  essentially the same one then-President Obama made when Syria crossed his red line. After planning an attack and seeking congressional approval, Obama backed down and agreed to a scheme whereby Russia supposedly would ensure the elimination of Assads chemical weapons stockpile. We know how that turned out.

Trump justly portrays Obamas failure to uphold his red line as the root of much of the evil in Syria today (although at the time, Trump said we shouldnt retaliate against Syria  we should stay the hell out, he opined). It would be ironic, and probably tragic, if Trump repeated Obamas mistake.

He might do, though. Im sure Trump considers himself a better negotiator than Obama, and Im confident he is. But weve been such a peripheral player in Syria that we need to demonstrate our ability to inflict real pain on the regime before well obtain anything approaching the amount of leverage necessary for a successful negotiation, even assuming one is possible.

I think Trump understands this and will act on his threat.Following up on Tuesdays dispatch about the recent disgrace at Beloit College, today comes news of an even more disgraceful outrage at CUNY Law School. Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law, a fine legal mind and author of many excellent legal articles as well as cogent popular articles for National Review Online and elsewhere, was invited by the CUNY Federalist Society chapter to speak on free speech. The Federalist Society was unable to find anyone from the faculty to comment or offer a rebuttal to Prof. Blackman (the Federalist Societys usual practice is to invite someone from the faculty of the host school to offer a different opinion). This is not unusual in my experience. Leftist faculty are increasingly unwilling to have their views contested in public. (Some day Ill have some of my own stories about this to share.)

Instead, Prof. Blackman was greeted with a protest that was off the chart even on the usual scale of infantile campus protests. Go see his own full account and pictures of the event at his website. Among other offenses, Blackman had written that the Trump Administration was legally correct to rescind DACA because it exceeded the Presidents authority. But Blackman supports enacting DACA through proper congressional legislation. This was apparently not sufficient for law students at CUNY Law. Such a viewonce held by none other than Barack Obama before he decided he could get away with itmakes Blackman a white supremacist. Heres some of his description:

The protestors called out: Shame on You. I dont understand how CUNY allows this. There are students that are directly affected by this hate speech. Legal objectivity is a myth. You still have an opportunity to leave. As the President began my introduction, the protestors heckled him. This is not okay. As he said my name, someone called out Hes a white supremacist. Others booed. I dont understand how CUNY law allows this. One of the protestors observed, Hes filming us. Just so everyone is aware, he is filming us. I told her, I am. (New York is a one-party consent recording jurisdiction.) A few students in attendance clapped as I began to speak. Well thank you very much to CUNY for having me, I said. In unison, they yelled out, CUNY is not having you. You are not welcome. Another shouted out something about white men and those who support white supremacy. An African-American student who was attending the event replied, I am not white. A protestor, holding a sign that said Josh Blackman is not welcome here and neither is the Fed Society asked, then why are you here? Why arent you with us? . . A student shouted out Fuck the law. This comment stunned me. I replied, Fuck the law? Thats a very odd thing. You are all in law school. And it is a bizarre thing to say fuck the law when you are in law school. They all started to yell and shout over me.

Read the whole thing if you have time. Heres just one pic of the calibre of future lawyers at CUNY:

And heres a complete video of Joshs talkover an hour long, but you may wish to sample it.

P.S. For what its worth, I have at last been implicated as a white supremacist at Berkeley as of yesterday, so Im finally making progress!

And note to self: Ill try to get Josh on the Power Line podcast some time soon.Seoul residents are apparently starved for forests, trees and parks compared to residents of other major capitals.

Green space in Seoul stands at just one-ninth the level of London on a per-capita basis, main opposition Democratic United Party lawmaker Park Min-soo said on Monday, drawing on data from the Korea Forest Service. As of 2009, Seoul had 3.1 sq.m of green space per capita, compared to London's 27 sq.m.

Seoul also fares poorly compared to other parts of the country, with North Jeolla Province boasting 16.4 sq.m per capita, Busan 12.4 sq.m. and Daegu 5.3 sq.m.

Green areas in urban centers play a huge role in improving the quality of air for residents. The World Health Organization recommends that cities try to keep per-capita green space to at least 9 sq.m., which is three times more than in Seoul.

While the Seoul Metropolitan Government has focused on building artificial recreational areas and facilities such as Gwanghwamun Plaza, Seoul Plaza in front of City Hall and the restored Cheonggyecheon Stream, it neglected to protect the city's natural green resources.President Andrzej Duda addressed a message of condolences to the President of the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria Abd al-Aziza Buteflika in connection with the April 11 plane crash.

"I received with the deepest sadness news of the crash of an Algerian military aircraft in which so many people were killed, including soldiers and officers. Poland unites with all of Algeria in mourning and sends most sincere condolences and words of compassion to the families of the victims", President Andrzej Duda wrote in the message.

President Duda assured President Abd al-Aziza Buteflika of Poland's solidarity in this difficult moment for the authorities and all citizens of Algeria.

As many as 257 people were killed when a military plane crashed near Algeria's capital on Wednesday. (PAP)Distinguished President Rivlin,

Honourable Survivors,

All Esteemed Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today we meet at a place which is a symbol for the whole world, for the entire humanity, the synonym of the Holocaust. We meet in Auschwitz-Birkenau  German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp.

In the years 1941-1945 more than one million Jewish people were deported here from almost all over Europe. After arrival, the path of most of them was short, tragically, horribly short. When the train cars were opened, they got off on a loading ramp after which a selection process took place. Terrorized, separated from their loved ones, they were deprived of their belongings and driven to gas chambers. Oftentimes less than one hour would lapse from arrival till death.

Hence, we meet at the place where Nazi Germans perpetrated the most horrendous genocide in history. It is beyond comprehension how such cruel crimes could have been committed.

We come here together  Jews, the nation of Survivors, and Poles, the nation who was also brutally persecuted by Hitler`s Third Reich  in order to jointly pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. We come together because we do remember and want to pass on the truth about what happened here to future generations. We come together to demonstrate that the demonic plan of Germans, who wanted to wipe out the entire Jewish nation, failed.

Extermination claimed 6 million lives, including 3 million Polish citizens of Jewish descent. But the Jewish nation has survived. Therefore, we meet here today: the Survivors and their descendants, the heirs of those dramatic experiences, the depositaries of the memory and truth about the Shoah.

Our joint presence in this place is a sign and a proof of the victory of life over death, the victory of memory over oblivion.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

As we stand here today it is hard to imagine that for many centuries the old, historical Polish town of Oswiecim had not been associated with antisemitism, racism, extermination. Such associations were evoked only after the invasion by Nazi Germany, who in 1939 destroyed the independent Polish state and brought its death factories, gas chambers and crematoria to our lands.

Before that however, from the 16th century onwards, Oswiecim was the place of coexistence of Poles and Jews. For 1000 years, the Jewish nation regarded my country as the land of Polin  a hospitable, safe home. Also here, in Oswiecim, there were houses of worship and schools. Jewish religious, cultural and economic life flourished. Just 80 years ago  during the Second Republic of Poland  Jews accounted for almost 50% of the city`s population. Together we lived as fellow citizens in one sovereign state. Together we were fighting for Poland`s independence from 1918 until 1920. Together we were building the country throughout 20 years of the interwar period.

That very coexistence of our nations was brutally interrupted by Germans, who imposed their own, inhumane laws upon the occupied Polish lands. They confined Jews to ghettos and punished with death any assistance to them. They wanted to break solidarity among the citizens of the Republic of Poland, they separated our nations with walls and barbed wire fences.

Despite that, Poles helped Jewish people in many different ways. On the institutional level, the Polish resistance movement organized the Council to Aid Jews Zegota. A big number of my compatriots also tried, individually and spontaneously, to rescue our Jewish neighbours. Today all those Righteous are the heroes of both our nations.

Auschwitz concentration camp was established in the spring of 1940, with its first inmates being representatives of the Polish elites active in the anti-German resistance movement. Soon more camps followed, including the largest one in Birkenau on the premises of which we are standing right now.

In that way, the former Polish-Jewish town of Oswiecim vanished in the shadows of Auschwitz-Birkenau. And the land of Polin  a blessed place which for centuries welcomed Jews from abroad fleeing persecution  turned into the place of the Shoah, ominously prepared by Germans.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We, Poles, consider it our duty to spread the testimony about the Holocaust across the globe. We were doing it already at the time when Germans were executing it. Crimes perpetrated by them here, in Auschwitz, were documented by Cavalry Captain Witold Pilecki in his reports. Jan Karski, the emissary of the Polish government-in-exile gave account of the extermination of Jews carried out by the German occupiers directly to the highest authorities of the Allied Powers: the United Kingdom and the United States.

But our alarming calls fell on deaf ears. The scale of indifference is exemplified by the fact that the call of the Polish Government to help rescue Jews was published in a brief note by The New York Times on 11 December 1942, as far as page 8. One would not believe that such horrendous developments were unfolding in the very heart of Europe.

Today it is us, the contemporary Poles, who are fulfilling the duty and preserving the memory and truth about the time of the Holocaust. It is reflected through Polish authorities taking care of the places of remembrance, predominantly of this one here, which is guarded by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Also my presence here today, at the March of the Living, together with President Reuven Rivlin, for whose participation I am deeply grateful, is a sign of tribute paid by the Republic of Poland to the victims of the German genocide and a testimony to their memory.

Polish institutions and social organizations do their utmost to disseminate knowledge about the Holocaust. Since 1988, they have also supported the March of the Living, attended by tens of thousands of people from all over the world for the past 30 years. Let me use this opportunity and extend my gratitude to the organizers of the March and to the management of the local Museum, who have jointly decided to dedicate part of the exhibition hosted in the new building to the March.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Memory and truth about the Holocaust have made both our nations realize, perhaps more profoundly than in case of anyone else, that it is necessary to have a strong state, which is the only entity capable of ensuring our security, prosperity and unrestrained development.

We, Poles, repeatedly fought for Poland`s freedom, arm in arm with our Jewish fellow citizens. That was also the case 100 years ago, when Poland was reborn as a free state.

Today we look with respect, admiration and affinity at the State of Israel which will celebrate the 70th anniversary of the proclamation of independence in one month`s time. Its existence, strength and sovereignty constitute the ultimate proof of the defeat of German criminals. The Nazi annihilation plan failed. The Jewish nation has survived. And may nobody ever again dare raise their hand to harm it.Dearborn Public Schools students participating in five-year combined high school and college programs pass more than 90 percent of their college classes and on average get better grades than their peers, according to a report heard Tuesday night by the Board of Education.

But the report on Dearborn students at Henry Ford College was not all good. It showed that only a third of the students who graduate from the district and then attend HFC are ready for college math. That is, however, above the national and HFC average.

The report covered different groups of students, said Shannon Peterson, executive director of student achievement.

Dearborn Schools in conjunction with HFC has two programs that allow students to get both a high school diploma and associates degree in five years at no cost to the student.

Henry Ford Early College is a separate high school on the college campus. It initially focused on medical careers, but has added a program for manufacturing and skilled trades, Principal Majed Fadlallah said. Those students apply in eighth grade, and the only academic requirement is that they are graduating middle school and can read at the sixth grade level, Peterson said.

The second program, called the Henry Ford Collegiate Academy, requires 10th grade students to test as college ready on the PSAT, she said. Those students continue a mix of their home high school and college in 11th and 12th grades. Their 13th year is spent entirely on the HFC campus.

Its two really different groups, Peterson said of the two combined high school and college programs.

Despite the different beginnings, both groups of five-year students do well in their college classes. All Collegiate Academy students passed their college classes in 2016-17 and more than 90 percent of Early College students passed. The average for Michigan students involved in similar programs is about 90 percent as reported by the Michigan Early/Middle College Association.

The cumulative grade point average for Collegiate Academy was 3.15, Early College was 3.05 and MEMCA about 2.94, the report said.

The report also showed that Dearborn students not in the college programs took 1,122 college classes through dual enrollment at HFC the first semester of this school year. About 83 percent scored an A or B in their college course.

While students who take classes early do well, those who go on to attend HFC after graduation sometimes struggle to get on par.

About 36 percent of DPS graduates entering HFC are ready for college math. That is far better than the 19 percent score from all other students at HFC, said Michael Nealon, HFC vice president of academic affairs.

Reading and writing placement were higher, each at 63 percent college ready, he said. Those scores were more than 10 percentage points higher than rates for non-Dearborn students.

Students coming out of the Dearborn school system really outperform students from other districts, Nealon said.

Still, the college and district are working together to close the gap from where students graduate academically to where colleges need them to be.

For example, Fordson, Edsel Ford and Dearborn high schools now offer a math class for seniors who plan to attend HFC and need help to avoid remedial math, Peterson said. The class has been aligned to meet college requirements.

Board President Michael Meade applauded the college and district for working together to help students. The need for remedial college classes often means forcing students to pay for and take courses in subjects they dislike and may not get credit for, he said.

This is really critical to the success of all our Dearborn students in particular, Meade said.

Trustee Mary Lane had other concerns.

Why are they taking math in college? she asked.

Except for pre-engineering students, she wondered why students need math and if the math goals were unrealistic.

We have a high number of English language learners, and yet our scores are better for reading and writing than for math, Lane observed.

Nealon said the better question is what type of math students really need. HFC is trying to skip the forced march to calculus that many adults remember from school, he said. Instead, students may just take a statistics course or quantitative reasoning, depending on their major. Nurses, for example, have classes that focus on dosing.

We do try to make sure the math is relevant to the work they will be doing, Nealon said.

However, students who plan to transfer to four-year colleges still need to meet state math requirements, he said.

The Early College is currently working on admissions for next year, Fadlallah said. About 540 students applied and roughly 330 qualified based on grades and recommendations, he said. The entire school has fewer than 400 students. Students will be selected by lottery.

Trustee Fadwa Hammoud said she would still like to see how Dearborn students do at other colleges, but realizes those universities are not always willing to share that information.European airspace authorities are warning aircraft to be careful over the next days when flying close to Syria because of possible military action against President Bashar Assad's forces.

The Eurocontrol airspace organization said that the European Aviation Safety Agency had sent a "Rapid Alert Notification'' that flight operations needed to consider the possibility of air or missile strikes into Syria.

U.S. officials have consulted with global allies on a possible joint military response to Syria's alleged poison gas attack on a rebel-held town.

House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan will not run for re-election this November, raising questions about the Republicans' ability to maintain control of the House during midterm elections.

During a press conference on Wednesday, Ryan announced he will retire after this Congress ends in January because he wants to spend more time with his family.

"I have given this job everything I have, and I have no regrets whatsoever for having accepted this responsibility," Ryan told reporters. "But the truth is, it's easy for it to take over everything in your life."

After 20 years in Congress, Ryan noted, he wants to spend more time with his wife and three teenage children.

"If I'm here one more term, my kids will only have ever known me as a weekend dad. I just can't let that happen," he explained.

His departure likely will lead to a battle to replace him as House Speaker. Some key players reportedly are House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, and the House majority whip, Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

Ryan dismissed concerns that his retirement may affect Republican efforts to keep its majority in the House.

"I really do not believe whether I stay or go in 2019 is going to affect a person's individual race for Congress," he said.

President Donald Trump, with whom Ryan has had a tense relationship at times, praised the Ryan on Twitter.

"Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question. We are with you Paul!" tweeted the president on Wednesday.

Ryan touted accomplishments under his leadership, including passage of sweeping tax reform legislation in December, legislation he said will help rebuild the nations military.

The speaker vowed to continue to work on entitlement reform during the remainder of his time in office.

Ryan expressed gratitude for having served as leader of the House Republican Conference since 2015, a post he reluctantly took after his predecessor, John Boehner, departed under pressure from a conservatives.

Tensions within his own party continued under Ryan's tenure, with Republicans unable to repeal and replace the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, a key promise by President Trump during his presidential campaign.

Despite Ryan's sometimes uneasy relationship with Trump, the speaker and White House worked together to push the conservative agenda.

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a statement commending Ryan for "his steadfast commitment to our country" and expressed hope both parties will "work constructively" during his remaining time in Congress.MUMBAI, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Region secures more than 40 new brands

Aspect Software , a leading provider of native consumer engagement, workforce optimization, and self-service solutions, today, shared details of their unprecedented growth in APAC, as they added more than 40 new logos to their portfolio in the region. Aspect's Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) centric solutions along with notable growth in the e-commerce, utility, hospitality industries as well as in the BPO, BFSI and telco markets, significantly contributed to the company's momentum.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/675536/Aspect_Software.jpg )



In the last year, Aspect engaged with esteemed brands such as Bajaj Allianz, IIFL Group, Malindo Airways, and many more in the region.

Speaking on Aspect's performance, Krish Arani, Senior Vice President APAC & Middle East, said, "At Aspect, we are constantly innovating, researching and building newer ways to enable enterprises to more productively and effectively engage with their customers. Our role is not just to build these solutions, but also to ensure our clients are prepared with right tools to engage with the changing customer preferences in this dynamic, digital, customer-centric world."

Aspect's award-winning customer service solutions have given the contact center industry a new dimension. Aspect shares its remarkable growth and expansion to its extended partner ecosystem, which includes Value Added Resellers (VARS), System Integrators (SI), Consultants, Business Process Outsourcing (BPOS), e-Sellers and telecommunication companies.

Commenting on Aspect's growth, Shilpi Puri, Senior Director, Strategic Alliances and Partner, "It is extremely exciting for Aspect to experience such high growth in the APAC market in the past year, exceeding industry growth rates by a large margin. Our APAC success is a testimony of not just our solution offerings, but also of our partner community. This is when we stop and say thanks to our customers, colleagues and all our partners for their incredible commitment and continued trust throughout our journey."

Aspect's channel and partner program is designed to provide greater opportunities for existing and new Aspect partners to enable enhanced customer engagement capabilities through the deployment of Aspect's deep and wide solutions portfolio. Aspect's global partners are excelling at delivering exceptional customer experiences thereby bolstering Aspect's success not only in APAC but globally as well.

To further fortify its position in 2018, Aspect plans to widen their partner reach by adding industry savvy, experienced firms from the contact center industry, who have the ability to showcase Aspect's solutions for interaction management, workforce optimization and self-service over on-premise and cloud.

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 helping enterprises keep service levels high and operational costs contained. For more information, visit http://www.aspect.com/in.

Media Contact:

Shailendra Tanwar,

[email protected]

+91-9930134118

Head Marketing - India & Middle East

Aspect



SOURCE Aspect SoftwarePUNE, India, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new market research report "Busbar Protection Market by Voltage (Medium Voltage, High Voltage, and Extra High Voltage), Impedance (Low Impedance and High Impedance), End-User (Utilities, Industries, and Transportation), and Region - Global Forecast to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global market is expected to grow from an estimated USD 3.20 Billion in 2018 to USD 4.31 Billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 6.10%, during the forecast period. The market is set to witness growth due to the adoption of smart grids and HVDC technology in the utilities sector and create new revenue pockets for the market during the forecast period. Furthermore, favorable government policies coupled with increasing emphasis on renewable energy sources globally would boost the growth of the Busbar Protection Market during the forecast period. Delays in grid expansion projects act as a restraint for the Busbar Protection Market.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660509/MarketsandMarkets_Logo.jpg )

Browse 68 Tables and 32 Figures spread through 137 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Busbar Protection Market"

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/busbar-protection-market-264637340.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report

The utilities market is expected to be the largest Busbar Protection Market, by end-user, in 2018.

The utilities segment accounted for the largest share of the market in 2017, while the transportation segment is projected to grow at the fastest pace among all the end-user segments. Growth in demand for the reliable delivery of electric power led to increased investments in the transmission & distribution infrastructure, which is likely to create the demand for busbar protection systems in the utilities segment.

Ask for PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=264637340

The low-impedance segment is expected to hold the largest share of the Busbar Protection Market, by impedance, during the forecast period.

The low-impedance segment is the fastest growing market during the forecast period and is projected to dominate the market during the forecast period. Development of microprocessor-based low-impedance relay is the main driver for the growth of the low impedance Busbar Protection Market. Countries such as the US, India, China, the UK, and Norway are investing in developing HVDC, UHVDC, and UHV network for transmitting power from remote locations to conventional power plants as well as renewable power plants, which is expected to create the demand for low-impedance busbar protection systems during the forecast period. Furthermore, increasing investment in the smart grid and smart substation is expected to create the demand for microprocessor-based low-impedance busbar protection systems.

Asia Pacific: Key market for busbar protections market during the forecast period.

The Asia Pacific market was the largest market, by value, for busbar protections in 2017, driven largely by China. Asia Pacific is the most populated region in the world and consequently witnesses high demand for electricity. A rise in investments in smart grid technologies and smart cities is creating demand for necessary transmission & distribution infrastructure, which in turn, is likely to create demand for the Busbar Protection Market in the region. China accounted for the highest installed generation & distribution capacity in the Asia Pacific region, resulting in an increased demand for transmission & distribution infrastructure. Despite the fall in feed-in tariffs for solar energy, Japan is becoming a hub for renewable power and is attracting foreign investors in the power sector. For instance, Goldman Sachs is expected to invest approximately USD 487 million in Japanese renewable projects. These developments in the Japanese power sector are likely to enhance its power generation capacity. These investments in Japan are expected to improve the operation of utility firms and help secure the reliability of grid networks from power outages.

To enable an in-depth understanding of the competitive landscape, the report includes the profiles of some of the top players in the Busbar Protection Market. These players include ABB (Switzerland), Schneider Electric (France), GE (US), Siemens (Germany), Mitsubishi Electric (Japan), NR Electric (China), Toshiba (Japan), Eaton (Ireland), and ZIV (Spain).

Know more about the Busbar Protection Market:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/busbar-protection-market-264637340.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.

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MarketsandMarkets INC.

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Connect with us on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets

SOURCE MarketsandMarketsThe City of Lincoln Council upgraded 300 CCTV cameras to a new wireless high definition 4K HD system after a 400,000 investment.

FORT LEE, New Jersey, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Siklu Inc., the global market leader in mmWave solutions, announced today that its wireless radios have been deployed in the City of Lincoln, United Kingdom. These systems provide 14 high capacity wireless data links in support of a modern IP networked CCTV system, primarily to provide surveillance for the city and public spaces.

The new wireless network is part of the Vision 2020 project announced last year. Vision 2020 is a three-year plan to build a Smart City improving the city's infrastructure, roadways and parks and includes investing in a new transportation hub. Previously the cities CCTV system was transmitted back on traditional analogue fiber circuits, these were both costly and bandwidth limiting.

To install the wireless network, the City of Lincoln Council worked closely with security systems integrator Videcom Security Ltd, a company specializing in large multisite Town and City Centre public safety CCTV systems. Videcom chose Siklu as their wireless partner following previous successes in Watford, London Borough Richmond, Ipswich and Cambridge City where Siklu hardware had already been successfully deployed, demonstrating the best cost and performance solution.

The project involved installing Siklu's mmWave EtherHaul E-band radios to deliver 1 Gbps full duplex capacity for the main backhaul resilient ring over the 80 GHz frequency. Utilizing Siklu's Layer 2 switch functionality to deliver resiliency and diversity routing, the network provides 'mission critical' up-time with automatic fail-over. In addition, Videcom installed Siklu's 60 GHz V-band frequency radios to connect 300 cameras at the street level including city wide Urban Traffic Cameras.

Ultralow latency combined with high reliability and accurate forecasted uptime and resilience, added weight to the tendered design and installation. Significant cost savings on transmission and reduction in maintenance have also helped to reduce the total lifetime cost of the CCTV system.

"At Videcom we have always been impressed with the level of support and in particular Siklu's commitment to training of our engineers and the ongoing direct support offered," said Bill Mead Managing Director of Videcom Security. "We are pleased to work closely with Siklu and are looking forward to the next project."

The extended CCTV camera coverage, including the creation of a Safe Zone, utilizing Siklu radios connecting high specification Dahua cameras is already providing significant results, both proactively and reactively. Spare transmission bandwidth is allowing the planning of smart services to the City as well as Wi-Fi connectivity and car park data sharing.

"We're pleased to have had such a successful working relationship with Videcom Security on numerous projects throughout the United Kingdom," said Eyal Assa, Siklu's CEO. "The recent project with the City of Lincoln Council is part of our commitment to providing the most reliable, interference free mmWave technology available to the market for Smart City and surveillance system networks."

About Siklu

Siklu delivers multi-gigabit fiber-like wireless connectivity in urban, suburban and rural areas. Operating in the millimeter wave bands, its wireless solutions are used by leading service providers and system integrators to provide gigabit services, 5G fixed wireless and in safe city and smart city projects. Thousands of carrier-grade systems are delivering interference-free performance worldwide. Easily installed on street-fixtures or rooftops, the price-competitive radios have proved to be ideal for networks requiring fast and simple deployment of secure, fiber-like and future-proof connectivity. www.siklu.com.

About Videcom Security

Videcom are a national IP CCTV systems integration and wireless network installer, working primarily in London, the Home Counties, Eastern England, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire. https://videcomsecurity.co.uk.

Press Contacts





Shiri Butnaru Dave Sumi Marketing Manager, Siklu VP Marketing, Siklu [email protected] [email protected]

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/676263/Leading_image_logo.jpg

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFTsgTQ75PU

Related Links

https://www.siklu.com



SOURCE SikluThis expansion of global connectivity and mobile internet adoption, otherwise known as Digital Inclusion, extends both economic and social benefits to unconnected populations, fueling a cycle that reduces poverty, improves infrastructure and services, and further increases internet access and usage.

"Today's announcement with ITOCHU and Erajaya is another step towards fulfilling our mission to make smartphones accessible to more people," said PayJoy's CEO and co-founder, Doug Ricket. "Our technology enables distributors to offer installment financing options to customers who have no access to credit and may not be able to afford a smartphone. This deal will put the internet and all the tools smartphones offer in the hands of more people in Indonesia, enabling growth that comes with having a more connected population."

Atsushi Hashimoto, General Manager of Communication & Mobile Business Dept. at ITOCHU, said, "We are pleased to be a part of this deal that will put more smartphones into more people's hands in Indonesia. ITOCHU is proud of the work we have done to create a more connected world and this is one more example of bringing together technology, distribution and capital to create a winning solution."

The smartphone, with its improved availability and affordability, is quickly becoming a fundamental tool for accessing mobile internet, in developed and developing countries alike. The opportunity for companies in the mobile space to shape the future of this rapidly growing market  and the lives of consumers in Indonesia  is enormous.

About PayJoy

PayJoy was founded in 2015 in San Francisco with the mission of making smartphone technology and financial services affordable to everyone worldwide. PayJoy's patented technology for locking smartphones and proprietary data science for underwriting customers enables people who lack credit to qualify for an installment plan to purchase their first smartphone. Today, PayJoy offers finance to millions of customers in the US and Mexico, and is expanding throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa in 2018. PayJoy's team of 60 professionals bring premier fintech experience from Google, Facebook, Amazon, PIMCO, McKinsey, Oportun, and Merrill Lynch. PayJoy is funded with over $30M of equity and debt from top fintech investors including Union Square Ventures.

About ITOCHU

ITOCHU, based in Japan, is one of the leading general trading companies. ITOCHU engages in domestic trading, import/export, and overseas trading of various products such as textile, machinery, metals, minerals, energy, chemicals, food, general products, realty, information and communications technology, and finance, as well as business investment in Japan and overseas. ITOCHU was originally founded in 1858, and has approximately 120 bases in 63 countries.

About Erajaya

Established in 1996, Erajaya conduct of business activities importer, distribution and retail trade of telecommunications equipment such as mobile cellular phones and tablets, subscriber identity module card (SIM card), vouchers mobile network operator, accessories, and gadgets such as computers and other electronic devices . In 2011, Erajaya officially became an open company and sold its shares on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, making Erajaya the largest and most trusted company in its business in Indonesia.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/665447/PayJoy_Logo.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/665446/erafone_Logo.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/676036/itochu_20logo_ID_d5894bbc7320_Logo.jpg

Related Links

www.payjoy.com



SOURCE PayJoySergey Kasich is the first recipient of the joint "Garage/BMW : Art/Tech Grant" program by BMW Group Russia and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art which was announced this Tuesday. The grant program is aimed at supporting individual and collective art projects in the field of IT, engineering and science art. Over the period of one year, Kasich will receive a monthly scholarship and will be able to implement his art project "Spaces of Silence". The artist will also be able to consult with BMW designers and engineers and visit BMW Museum and other relevant locations.

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/675828/BMW_Group_Art_Grant.jpg )



(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/676279/BMW_Garage_Grant.jpg )



Sergey Kasich's project "Spaces of Silence"

Every year, the acoustic environment of modern cities is becoming noisier. It is proven that overabundance of auditory stimuli can adversely affect the wellbeing of living beings. Kasich proposes to preserve silence with the help of a hybrid public art project.

The project involves measuring the noise level in a city, the detection of noisy and quiet areas and the creation of special structures in selected locations made of noise-absorbing screens with echo surfaces on the inside. Spaces are protected from noise while leaving them as open as possible creating unique environments to experience sound in unexpected ways.

Partnership with Garage Museum

With this partnership, the BMW Group aims at making art and culture more accessible and supporting contemporary art in Russia.

BMW Group Russia concentrates its efforts mainly on the recently included Art and Technology section - the Art/Tech Grant offers emerging artists financial independence and allows them to engage in creative activities, to grow professionally and to conduct research.

For further questions please contact:

Dr Thomas Girst

BMW Group Corporate and Intergovernmental Affairs

Head of Cultural Engagement

Telephone: +49-89-382-24753

BMW AG

80788 Munchen

Telephone: +49-89-382-20067

Internet: http://www.bmwgroup.com

SOURCE BMW GroupBitholic can trade six coins at moment: including Bitcoin, Quantum, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Lightcoin and Bitcoin Cash, which are the most competitive and stable in the global crypto market.

Bitholic is also planning on listing new coins and OTC (over-the-counter) services.

RDMCHAIN as joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) as an enterprise member to develop and deploy blockchain technology.

Bitholic will hold a pre-registration event where 1 lucky participant will be rewarded 1 BTC. After the pre-registration event closes, Bitholic will reward coins to 500 participants through a lottery, which can be used for trading on Bitholic. Anyone can participate in the pre-registration event by visiting Bitholic's homepage - www.bitholic.com.

Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180410/2101062-1

SOURCE RDMCHAINPORTLAND, Oregon and PUNE, India, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new report published by Allied Market Research, titled, "Culture Media Market by Type, Application, and End User: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2017-2023,"the global culture media market was valued at $3,775 million in 2016, and is projected to reach $6,532 million by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 8.1% from 2017 to 2023. North America is anticipated to be the highest revenue contributor throughout the forecast period.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/636519/Allied_Market_Research_Logo.jpg )



Culture media are nutrient growth substances provided in laboratory and research settings for growth, proliferation, maintenance, and storage of microorganisms and other cell types such as stem cells, mammalian, and other cell lines. Different culture media are available in the market for various cell cultures to survive and grow in their incubation environment.

Request Sample Report at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/3979

The culture media market is anticipated to grow considerably in the near future, owing to different factors such as increase in investments and funding for R&D and innovation in life sciences, especially biopharmaceutical products. In addition, the development of the biosimilar industry is instrumental in growth of the culture media market.

However, scientific and ethical constrains with respect to use of animal-derived products in culture media and dearth of skilled professionals restrict the market growth. On the contrary, the emerging markets such as India and China are anticipated to provide lucrative growth opportunities to the market players.

By type, lysogeny broth accounted for nearly one-fourth share of the global culture media market in 2016. In terms of application, cancer research accounted for a global revenue of nearly one-third share in 2016, and is projected to exhibit prominent growth rate, owing to its crucial role in drug development and surge in prevalence of cancer globally.

For Purchase Enquiry: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/3979

In the culture media market, biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry generated revenue of $1,511 million in 2016, highest amongst all end users. This segment is anticipated to exhibit prominent growth rate, due to rise in demand for culture media and reagents required in this industry. By region, North America generated the highest revenue in the global culture media market in 2016.

Key Findings of the Culture Media Market:

Research laboratories accounted for nearly one-third of the share of the culture media market in 2016.

Biopharmaceuticals application is anticipated to grow with the highest CAGR throughout the forecast period.

North America accounted for more than 40% of the global culture media market in 2016.

accounted for more than 40% of the global culture media market in 2016. The Asia-Pacific region is anticipated to grow at the highest rate in the culture media market during the analysis period, followed by LAMEA.

The report provides extensive competitive analysis and profiles of key market players such as Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Merck & Co., Inc., GE Healthcare, The Sartorius Group, Corning Inc., Lonza Group, Becton, Dickinson and Company, HiMedia Laboratories, Vitro Biopharma, and Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. The other players in the value chain (not included in the report) include Irvine Scientific, Takara Bio, Inc., Caisson Laboratories, Inc., and Cyagen Biosciences, Inc.

Access KNOWLEDGE TREE (Premium on-demand, subscription-based pricing model) at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/knowledgetree

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.

About Us

Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain.

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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Web: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com

SOURCE Allied Market ResearchThe head of the International Monetary Fund is warning that the global trading system is in danger of being "torn apart."

In a speech prepared for delivery in Hong Kong Wednesday, Christine Lagarde urged nations to "steer clear of protectionism." That may be a reference to Washington's recent moves to slap large tariffs on imported steel and other products. China responded by raising tariffs on U.S.-made products, beginning a cycle that some experts warn could escalate further into a trade war.

Lagarde says the benefits of trade far outweigh the costs and has credited unfettered global trade for drastically reducing the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty. Lagarde and other experts say everyone loses in trade wars, particularly the 800 million people around the world who, the World Bank says, remain mired in poverty.

PORTLAND, Oregon and PUNE, India, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new report by Allied Market Research, titled, "Planar lightwave circuit splitter Market by Type and Application: Global Opportunities Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2017-2023," the global planar lightwave circuit splitter market was valued at $778.80 million in 2016, and is projected to reach at $ 1,352.70 million by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 7.80% from 2017 to 2023.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/636519/Allied_Market_Research_Logo.jpg )



Planar lightwave circuit splitter is a type of optical power management device fabricated using silica optical wave-guide technology to distribute optical signals.

In 2016, 1N segment dominated the market, in terms of revenue, due to increase in investment in IT and telecommunication sector.

Request Sample Report at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/3086

North America was the highest revenue contributor to the planar lightwave circuit splitter market in 2016, accounting for around 37.41% share, owing to surge in demand for wide operating wavelength across the network fabrication and installation.

The report features a competitive scenario of the planar lightwave circuit splitter market and provides a comprehensive analysis of the key growth strategies adopted by major players. The key players in the global market are Corning Inc., Exfiber Optical Technologies, Fiberon Technologies, Go Foton, Huihong Technologies, Ntt Electronics, Oemarket, Opto-Link Corporation, Prysmian and other companies include Reliable Photonics, Shenzhen Technologies, and Sun Telecom.

For Purchase Enquiry: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/3086

These players have adopted various competitive strategies such as innovation, new product development, and market expansion to boost the growth of the market.

Key Findings of the Planar Lightwave Circuit Splitter Market:

The 1N segment accounted for the highest share in 2016, growing at a CAGR of 7.70% from 2017 to 2023.

FTTX application generated the highest revenue, accounting for $206.5 million in 2016.

in 2016. North America is expected to dominate the market, in terms of market share, during the forecast period.

Access KNOWLEDGE TREE (Premium on-demand, subscription-based pricing model) at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/knowledgetree

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.

About Us

Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain.

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.

Contact:

Shriram Dighe

5933 NE Win Sivers Drive

#205, Portland, OR 97220

United States

Toll Free: +1-800-792-5285

UK: +44-845-528-1300

Hong Kong: +852-301-84916

India (Pune): +91-20-66346060

Fax: +1855550-5975

[email protected]



Web: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com

SOURCE Allied Market Research(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/663542/Holiday_Swap_beach_villa.jpg )

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/663541/Holiday_Swap_Swipe_and_match.jpg )

By matching up with like-minded travelers, anyone can make connections to travel now or have a place to stay in the future, using the asset you have, your house or even your room, and you don't even have to own the space you're swapping. Asquith said, "The question I am regularly asked is from people wanting to travel more but many don't have the budget to do so, and certainly not on a regular basis."

This is where the idea of Holiday Swap was born. An app that allows us to swap anything from a beach villa or penthouse to a room with other travelers anywhere in the world for just $1 a night. Already on the radar of some of the largest tech companies in the world, Asquith wants to combine Tech and Travel to allow everyone to experience more of the world while reducing the cost. This allows travelers to spend more of their budget on flights to far-flung destinations and on experiences, rather than a place to sleep.

"The millennial generation is the future and this generation wants more with less. With the growth of technology we are building a true global sharing community, where we can actually use the assets we have to explore more of the world," Asquith says.

Already known as 'the tinder of travel' and being touted as a major rival to Air BnB, Holiday Swap has grown to 50 countries, and Asquith believes it's because the app puts the power back in the user's hands. "Instead of having travel envy and ever increasing bucket lists from traditional social media, we want people to be able to take action on seeing these places, so you can also use your connections as virtual tour guides." From Los Angeles to Sydney and Brazil to Japan, Holiday Swap is changing the way we travel and with the promise of upcoming rewards for members (from free flights to Ugandan Gorilla safaris), there may be such a thing as a free holiday after all. Use the code 'FreeSwap' on the free to use app today to get started.

http://www.holidayswap.com/

SOURCE Holiday SwapMUMBAI, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Infrastructure Innovation Summit 2018 is all set to lay the platform for the biggest Infrastructure Innovation forum on 23rd and 24th May 2018 in Mumbai. Jointly supported by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (Govt. of India) and the Ministry of New and Renewable energy (Govt. of India), the forum is ready to witness some of the biggest names in the industry.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/676336/Infrastructure_Innovation_Summit_Logo.jpg )



IIS 2018 brings about immense opportunities for networking. With an equal opportunity for all participants to be part of discussions; participation of Architects, international and domestic Consultants, Urban planners, Developers, Ministry delegates, Tech CXO's, regulatory authorities to name a few, the forum will enable a huge networking opportunity, with the topics discussed being closely related to the future of infra metamorphosis.

The infrastructure sector is one of the key drivers of the Indian economy, which may also be the reason for the vested interest of the Govt., as well as a keen eye of foreign and domestic investment. However, there is a huge gap between the expectation and reality. A recent study shows that the required capital funding for meeting the urban population demands over the next two decades will be approximately US$1.2 Trillion. About 200 million people will move from rural to urban areas in India in the next 15 years. To have a sustainable development, the tentative investment required in infra is estimated at US$ 778 Billion, by 2022. Apart from sustenance, being at the forefront of innovation and designs, India has also seen a rise in path-breaking projects. This spirit can be seen in projects like World One and Yamuna Expressway. Understanding the future scope and decoding the current scene of Indian Infra has become the major challenge.

The IIS 2018 forum will give 300+ professionals from various domains, a chance to network and understand current trends and innovations from industry stalwarts who have opulent experience in the infrastructure domain.

According to the latest statistics, the Govt. of India has taken up many promising projects, like the Rs. 191,155 crore (US$ 30.02 billion) investment in Smart City planning, or the investment of Rs. 4,200 crore (US$ 648.75 billion) in Green Energy Corridor Project. The active participation of the Govt. and their infra-centric policies are a great news for the industry. The Budget of 2018-19 saw the allocation of Rs. 5.97 lakh crore (US$ 92.22 billion) for infra sector, with a separate allocation of Rs. 1.48 trillion (US$ 22.86 billion) for the Railways. These decisions of the Govt. shed light on the importance, as well as the magnitude of the infra scene in India.

"We are really glad to be at the forefront of this infra revolution." quoted Mr. Raj Hesi (IIS 2018 Management), "The motive behind the forum is to create a positive impact in the fraternity and be a catalyst for sharing of ideas. With the merging of thoughts from the top brass to the executive, tomorrow's leaders will have guidance through these interactions" Mr. Hesi added.

The summit is also open for enterprises to showcase their prowess. With a grand stage set for targeting the right audience, companies have an immense scope of getting their message across. Sponsorship opportunities for the event are aplenty and companies can immensely profit by getting noticed by the right clientele. IIS2018 organizers have informed that both, individual registrations as well as delegate registrations are now open for the audience.

To stay updated regarding the infrastructure innovations happening around the world and the Infrastructure Innovation Summit 2018, one can follow #IIS2018 on social media. The forum remains to be seen as one of the most interactive and grand forums, for the infrastructure fraternity. With the arrival of infra evolution and its dynamic acceptance, the future of Infra innovation seems exciting. And IIS 2018 promisingly seems the window to this world.

About IIS Forum

IIS Forum is a distinct platform for leaders and innovators to share, network and learn the status quo and future prospects of the infra-revolution. IIS Forum is owned and organized by HDA Insights which is a research wing of a registered entity Visual Motion and Interactive Technologies Pvt. Ltd. which also owns other business units namely Vimito and BFC works.



Media Contact:

Mandar Kulkarni

[email protected]

+91-7798950305

Media Relations

IIS Forum



SOURCE IIS ForumKochava customers can more effectively target and measure their LINE Ads campaigns in the Japanese market

SANDPOINT, Idaho, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Kochava Inc., the industry leader providing holistic measurement solutions for mobile and connected devices, announces the ability to measure ads displayed with the LINE Corporation, a smart portal provider based in Japan.

LINE joins the industry's largest network and publisher integrations with Kochava. Marketers can now apply the same granular tracking on the expansive inventory that LINE provides. LINE boasts more than 200 million global monthly active users on their messaging platform. Kochava customers can broaden their audience reach and measure on the popular platform.

"This partnership marks another step in giving global marketers using Kochava access to the largest regional audiences," said James Benoit, senior manager of product operations at Kochava. "Anyone running ads with LINE will see an immediate benefit in their marketing analyses by having the ability to measure data from such a significant platform."

The Japanese market has one of the fastest growing gaming markets, bypassing the U.S. in recent years, according to Games Industry Biz. Marketers can now better measure their marketing efforts on Japanese audiences with real-time analytics and attribution, audience targeting capabilities, push notification tools, and searchable directory of media partners with Kochava.

About Kochava

Kochava Inc. (www.kochava.com) offers a unique, holistic and unbiased analytics platform to plan, target, engage, measure and optimize media spend. The Kochava platform for mobile and connected devices combines potent features and global coverage with thousands of network and publisher integrations, allowing advertisers to target audiences and measure campaign performance with precision. Real-time customizable visualizations give users fluid access to a full spectrum of data points, providing robust segmentation capabilities and real-time actionability. Yielding the most powerful tools in the ecosystem, Kochava is chosen by brands across industry verticals to measure the largest and most sophisticated ad campaigns.

About the LINE Ads Platform

The LINE Ads Platform is a performance-based ad platform for services related to the LINE messaging app operated by LINE Corporation. The service went into full-scale operation in June 2016 when it started distributing ads to LINE Timeline and LINE NEWS. Since its launch, the platform has been used by approximately 4,000 businesses and brands (as of the end of January 2018) and, in October 2017, LINE MANGA was added as an ad space.

Advertisers use a special admin panel to set the details (including budget, time period, user attributes, and creatives) and make bids, and the LINE Ads Platform system chooses an ad and shows it to users. By switching to a performance-based ad system, many more businesses are now able to post ads, which they were previously unable to do due to limitations on the numbers of slots, or for budgetary reasons. Further, since advertisers can monitor their ad displays, their effects, and other details as they operate their ads, they can conduct promotions with limited budgets and distribute ads to fit sales prospects, goal achievement rates, and more.

Contact:

Ben Stein

VP of Marketing

[email protected]

1-855-562-4282

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/458978/Kochava_Logo.jpg

Related Links

http://www.kochava.com



SOURCE Kochava Inc."The collaboration with the Jenner Institute will facilitate access to affordable vaccines while improving the global response to disease outbreaks," said Udit Batra, Member of the Merck Executive Board and CEO, Life Science. "Merck is committed to expanding access to advanced drug therapies, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Together with our partners we have shaped how vaccine production is done today and are helping to solve the toughest problems of tomorrow."

Through the collaboration with the Jenner Institute, the partners will improve the manufacturing process for adenovirus vaccines  vaccines based on adenovirus, a type of DNA virus, as a carrier  using Merck products, systems and technologies on a real-world feed stream. By applying Merck technology, the collaborators aim to develop a cost-effective and transferable manufacturing process that can be used to accelerate vaccine development and manufacturing worldwide.

"Merck is an excellent partner for enhancing our capabilities in adenovirus vaccine development, as the newly developed process should match or exceed our existing process in terms of productivity and purity," said Adrian Hill, Director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University.

The collaboration should result in a closed process that can be practiced in a cleanroom to minimize contamination, in line with the high biological safety requirements for viral vectors.

"Such improvements should help advance the development of clinical-grade, injectable drug product for use in clinical trials and other research applications," Hill added.

Merck building vaccine facility in Ghana

Separately, Merck is developing plans for a vaccine manufacturing facility in Ghana, helping to address significant health challenges in a continent that imports 99 percent of its vaccines. Working with Ridge Management Solutions, a recently signed memorandum of understanding between Merck and Ridge provides the opportunity for Ghana to become the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to have a dedicated human vaccine manufacturing factory.

"We want to support emerging economies by sharing our expertise, helping them streamline their manufacturing processes while supporting technology transfer and local facility startup," Batra added.

For more information on how Merck collaborates with the vaccine community to solve the toughest challenges in vaccine production, visit www.merckmillipore.com/vaccines.

About the Jenner Institute

The Jenner Institute was founded in November 2005 to develop innovative vaccines against major global diseases. Uniquely it focuses both on diseases of humans and livestock and tests new vaccine approaches in parallel in different species. A major theme is translational research involving the rapid early-stage development and assessment of new vaccines in clinical trials.

The Institute comprises the research activities of over 30 Jenner Investigators who head leading research groups spanning human and veterinary vaccine research and development. Together the Institute Investigators comprise one of the largest non-profit sector research and development activities in vaccinology.

Jenner Institute Investigators, through the support of many funders, are developing new vaccine candidates against major global infectious diseases. New vaccines against malaria, tuberculosis and HIV are currently in field trials in the developing world. Research is also underway on livestock vaccines against foot and mouth disease, avian influenza, bovine tuberculosis and other major causes of economic loss.

The Institute is a partnership between the University of Oxford and the The Pirbright Institute and is the successor to the former Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research. The Institute is supported by the Jenner Vaccine Foundation, a UK registered charity and advised by the Jenner Institute Scientific Advisory Board.

About Ridge Management Solutions

There's a 5 percent chance that a hurricane will cause $60 billion of insured losses next year and a 1% chance an earthquake will cause $50 billion of insured loss in the next 12 months. At RMS, we build the simulation models that allow insurers and investors to understand portfolio risks due to catastrophes: natural catastrophes (hurricane, earthquake, flood), terrorism, pandemic, and changes in life expectancy.

We are one of the most exciting companies you've probably "never" heard of, unless you're one of our hundreds of clients in the (re)insurance, banking or hedge fund sector. We lead an industry we helped pioneer and ultimately our work makes a true impact on the world at large. How we understand and manage risk affects everybody and our passion is nothing less than creating a more resilient world through a better understanding of catastrophic events.

We are evolving our vision by delivering future solutions in the cloud, our cutting-edge risk management platform "RMS(one)" for the global risk market. RMS(one) will create a holistic and integrated view across the enterprise with one platform for all models, all points of view, and all data. All will be run as equal partners on RMS(one).

RMS has 1,200 employees in 11 countries, including offices in Newark (CA-USA), Noida (India), London (UK), Hoboken (NJ-USA), and Zurich (Switzerland).

All Merck news releases are distributed by email at the same time they become available on the Merck website. Please go to www.merckgroup.com/subscribe to register online, change your selection or discontinue this service.

About Merck

Merck is a leading science and technology company in healthcare, life science and performance materials. More than 52,000 employees work to further develop technologies that improve and enhance life  from biopharmaceutical therapies to treat cancer or multiple sclerosis, cutting-edge systems for scientific research and production, to liquid crystals for smartphones and LCD televisions. In 2017, Merck generated sales of 15.3 billion in 66 countries.

Founded in 1668, Merck is the world's oldest pharmaceutical and chemical company. The founding family remains the majority owner of the publicly listed corporate group. Merck holds the global rights to the "Merck" name and brand. The only exceptions are the United States and Canada, where the company operates as EMD Serono, MilliporeSigma and EMD Performance Materials.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/664984/Vaccines.jpg

Related Links

http://merckgroup.com



SOURCE MerckPUNE, India, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new market research report "Orthodontic Supplies Market by Product (Removable, Fixed Braces (Brackets (Self Ligating, Lingual), Archwire (Ni-Ti, Stainless Steel), Anchorage (Buccal Tube, Band), Ligature (Elastomeric, Wire)), Retainers), Patient, and Region - Global Forecast to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global market is expected to reach USD 6.63 Billion by 2023 from USD 4.32 Billion in 2018, at a CAGR of 8.9%.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660509/MarketsandMarkets_Logo.jpg )

Browse 120 market data Tables and 28 Figures spread through 170 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Orthodontic Supplies Market"

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/orthodontic-supplies-market-236529189.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report

The major factors driving the growth of the Orthodontic Supplies Market include the growing number of patients with malocclusions, and jaw disorders; increasing disposable incomes and the expanding middle-class population in developing countries; increasing awareness about the availability of advanced orthodontic treatments; and ongoing research and technological advancements related to orthodontic products.

Fixed braces are expected to hold the largest share of the Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018

The Orthodontic Supplies Market is segmented on the basis of products into fixed braces, removable braces, adhesives, and accessories. The fixed braces products segment is expected to command the largest share of the global Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018. Factors such as affordability (compared to removable braces), increasing adoption of fixed braces among adolescents as well as adults, effective outcomes, and the huge demand for these braces in emerging countries such as India, China, and Brazil are propelling growth in this segment.

Children and teenagers are expected to be the largest patient group in Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018

By patient, the market is segmented into children and teenagers and adults. The children and teenager's patient segment is expected to account for the largest share of the Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018. The large market share of this segment can be attributed to the high prevalence of malocclusions and jaw disorders coupled with the increased adoption of fixed braces among adolescent children and teenagers.

Ask for PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=236529189

North America is expected to dominate the Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018

Geographically, the market is segmented into North America (the US and Canada), Europe (Germany, the UK, France, and the Rest of Europe), Asia Pacific (Japan, China, India, and the Rest of APAC), Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, and Rest of Latin America), and the Middle East and Africa. North America is expected to account for the largest share of the global Orthodontic Supplies Market in 2018. The dominant share of North America can be accounted to the growing acceptance of orthodontic treatment among children as well as adults, rising per capita disposable income, growing focus on appearance enhancement and aesthetics, and the presence of major orthodontic product manufacturers in North America.

The major players operating in the Orthodontic Supplies Market include Align Technology, Inc. (US), 3M Company (US), Danaher Corporation (US), Henry Schien, Inc. (US), DENTSPLY SIRONA, Inc. (US), American Orthodontics (US), Rocky Mountain Orthodontics (US), G&H Orthodontics (US), DENTAURUM GmbH & Co. (Germany), TP Orthodontics, Inc. (US), ClearCorrect (a subsidiary of Straumann Holding AG, Switzerland), Ultradent Products, Inc. (US), Great Lakes Orthodontics, Ltd. (US), DB Orthodontics (UK), and Dental Morelli Ltda. (Brazil), among others.

Know more about the Orthodontic Supplies Market:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/orthodontic-supplies-market-236529189.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]



Connect with us on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets

SOURCE MarketsandMarketsThe variety of new PHNIX hot water heat pumps launched in Southeast Asia this year are the results of PHNIX's mature product application integrating its experiences in both the Chinese market and the European market, specifically based on the climate characteristics and user habits of Southeast Asia.

PHNIX heat pump hot water solutions have found considerable success in countries throughout Southeast Asia in the last few years. Demand from Indonesia, India and Vietnam has recently increased significantly, with both the PHNIX HeatPlus Series with a 4.68 high COP and the HeatSpring Series with a high outlet temperature of 65C in especially high demand, according to Mr. Troy Wang, PHNIX product manager.

About PHNIX HeatSpring Heat Pump

65C high outlet temperature PHNIX HeatSpring Heat Pump Series can produce outlet water constantly at a temperature as high as 65C by circulating heating, while most domestic water heaters in the local market can achieve only 55C. The 65C high outlet temperature increases hot water volume supply by 30%.

Solar Collector + PHNIX Heat Pump For users that are currently annoyed by the unstable hot water supply of their solar heater system, this easily installed revolutionary system can be an ideal solution. It efficiently and consistently guarantees a plentiful supply of low-cost hot water. Utilizing the heat energy from both the sun and the air, this innovative system helps to increase the performance greatly.

About PHNIX

PHNIX, a leading manufacturer of heat pumps in China, is an international enterprise specializing in the R&D and production of heat pump products and energy-saving solutions. Nearly 50% of PHNIX products are exported to Europe, North America and other overseas markets. For more information about PHNIX and its products, please visit www.phnix-e.com.

Contact Information

John Zhu

+86-20-39067742

[email protected]

Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180411/2102118-1

SOURCE Guangdong PHNIX Eco-Energy Solution Ltd.Consumer-centric products and shared mobility solutions drive new growth opportunities, finds Frost & Sullivan

LONDON, April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In 2018, Frost & Sullivan expects the autonomous vehicle sector to witness the rise of virtual voice assistance; centralised domain architectures; improved vision and depth-sensing solutions; artificial intelligence powering development, testing and validation; and the rise of shared mobility platforms. The global autonomous driving market is expected to grow to $173.15 billion by 2023, with shared mobility services contributing 65.3%. In the near future, the combination of autonomous driving and shared mobility solutions will result in the convergence of e-hailing and car-sharing business models that will drive new growth opportunities and transform the mobility experience.

"2018 is expected to be the year of L3 automated vehicles for highway use and L4 testing and implementation of autonomous vehicles for limited, controlled and well-defined scenarios," said Anirudh Venkitaraman, Mobility Senior Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "In the future, customer-centric products will be at the core of innovation with artificial intelligence playing a key role, especially with customer-intuitive applications and real-time, path-planning algorithms driving new growth opportunities."

Frost & Sullivan's recent analysis, Global Autonomous Driving Market Outlook, 2018, identifies the prevalent factors contributing to market growth, challenges serving as barriers to success, technology and market trends, leading players, and technology progression of sensor suites for fully autonomous driving.

For further information on this analysis, please click here.

For non-automotive technology companies to enter the autonomous driving value chain, Venkitaraman recommends they focus on untapped entry opportunities in the areas of in-vehicle infotainment systems, cloud services, and open operating systems development.

Six trends driving transformational change in the autonomous vehicles sector include:

Autonomous shared mobility solutions; Collective intelligence for fleet management; Cybersecurity of autonomous cars; Convergence of artificial intelligence with autonomous cars; Domain controllers; and Driver monitoring systems.

"There are numerous hurdles, both quantitative and qualitative, that the industry will need to tackle if autonomous driving is to have a lasting impact on making safe, clean and lean transportation a reality," noted Venkitaraman. "Currently, the biggest hurdle is the lack of clear regulatory frameworks that define how these products can be made available to consumers."

Global Autonomous Driving Market Outlook, 2018 is part of Frost & Sullivan's Automotive & Transportation Growth Partnership Service programme.

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

Global Autonomous Driving Market Outlook, 2018

K24A_18

Contact

Kristina Menzefricke

Corporate Communications  Frost & Sullivan, Europe

P: +44 (0)208 996 8589

E: [email protected]

http://www.frost.com

Related Links

http://www.frost.com



SOURCE Frost & SullivanDeveloped for iOS and Android, the new ClinicAll app lets previously unfulfilled wishes come true, giving users full access to a wide range of services.

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/676359/ClinicAll_app.jpg )



ClinicAll has already been successful in providing digitalized solutions for clinics. This expertise has led to the idea of making all the possibilities of this new technology available to all users - conveniently on any smartphone or tablet.

The ClinicAll app makes sure users are the center of attention

During a hospital stay, the ClinicAll app enables the use of TV, Internet, and to call up all hospital information such as treatment appointments, meals, room lighting or bed control. Doctors and staff can inform the patient about upcoming visits via push messages. The app can also be used to call a nurse at any time - making it easy and uncomplicated to communicate with hospital staff.

After the stay, the ClinicAll app provides interesting news and information on the topics of health technology, ClinicAll, affiliated clinics and partners.

Available now in the App store - discover all the benefits live at conhIT 2018:

The ClinicAll app has now been released in the Android and iOS App stores. To date, no other supplier on the market has been able to realize an app for patients and clinics with a comparable range of features.

In order to install, search through the App store for "ClinicAll App".

The new ClinicAll app will be shown to industry representatives for the first time in our own virtual hospital set-up at conhIT 2018 - with some first applications.

Contact:

ClinicAll Germany GmbH,

Lea Kelic,

+49-2131 52813-30

[email protected]

SOURCE ClinicAllTRIVANDRUM, India, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

For the company's excellence in Learning and Development

UST Global, a leading digital technology services company, today announced that it has won Gold in the prestigious 2018 LearningElite awards for the company's excellence in Learning and Development.

(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/540539/UST_Global_Logo.jpg )



UST Global's learning & development initiatives and its practices are aimed at building a 'Born to Learn' culture within the organization. The company supports its talent transformation needs for its current IT and digital services as well as to build the workforce of the future.

The top priorities for the learning and development team at UST Global include, enhancing employee experience, being the 'one-stop-shop' for all learning needs; leading the talent transformation journey for its current and future associates, and bringing in a diverse workforce with initiatives like Impact India, Step IT Up and Network of Women Ussociates (NowU).

UST Global won a listing in the Gold Category based on the company's superior performance in learning strategy, leadership commitment, learning execution, learning impact and business performance results. While the company scored way above the benchmark figures in all categories, its business performance results scored very close to the industry best.

Chief Learning Officer magazine's LearningElite program honors the best organizations for learning and development. This robust, peer-reviewed ranking and benchmarking program recognizes those organizations that employ exemplary workforce development strategies that deliver significant business results. Developed under the guidance of a group of Chief Learning Officers and senior learning and development practitioners, the LearningElite program utilizes best practices in evaluation to rank the best organizations based upon their impact, size and industries served.

Some comments from the jury who evaluated UST Global's L&D practice:

Their four-pronged strategy for implementation - focusing on Expected Outcomes, Experience, Enablement and Engagement stands out as a most elite practice. This strategy focuses on ensuring outcomes are focused on business growth and client success while ensuring that a self-driven learning culture is provided to all employees.

Utilizing newer technologies, assessing directly to ROI, and having solid support of senior company leaders did not go unnoticed. However, UST is most commended for overcoming the obstacles and challenges related to changing internal cultural sentiment regarding successful implementation of self-driven learning. Very impressive accomplishment.

Commenting on the prestigious win, Dr. Madana Kumar, Global Head of Learning and Development, UST Global, said, "Talent development has a strategic role within the organization, and we believe that it is critical to organizational success. Our leadership team is the catalyst in building an active learning culture in the organization. We are thrilled to be recognized by the LearningElite program and awarded Gold for our Learning and Development practice."

About UST Global

UST Global is a leading digital technology company that provides advanced computing and digital services to large private and public enterprises around the world. Driven by a larger purpose of Transforming Lives and the philosophy of 'fewer clients, more attention', we bring in the entrepreneurial spirit that seeks the fastest path to value in today's digital economy. Our innovative technology services and pioneering social programs make us unique. UST Global is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California and operates in 25 countries. Our clients include Fortune 500 companies in Banking and Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Retail, High Technology, Manufacturing, Shipping, and Telecom. UST Global believes in building long-lasting, strategic business relationships through agile and client-centric global engagement models that combines local experts & resources with cost, scale, and quality advantages of global operations.

For more information, please visit: http://www.ust-global.com

Media Contact:

Divya Singh

[email protected]

+91-8552944004

UST Global



SOURCE UST GlobalU.S. and North Korean officials are fine-tuning the agenda for a bilateral summit and are likely to agree on venue and dates as early as next week.

A source in Washington said Tuesday that U.S. President Donald Trump will ask North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to dismantle his nuclear program in six months to a year.

Trump opposes the "phased and simultaneous denuclearization" proposed by Pyongyang, the source added. The phased approach preferred by previous U.S. administrations from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama failed to achieve any progress as North Korea habitually reneged on promises.

Trump's national security team believes that this made it more difficult to find a solution, and Trump is determined to achieve denuclearization in the shortest time possible. He may even demand that North Korea dismantle its nuclear weapons before this year ends, a diplomatic source in Washington said.

Katina Adams, the spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, told Voice of America that the Trump administration is not interested in any negotiations that would allow the North to earn time.

She added Washington will continue to exert maximum pressure on Pyongyang until it denuclearizes, but a brighter road will lie ahead if it does.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

NetCents Technology Inc. ("NetCents" or the "Company") (CSE: NC) (Frankfurt: 26N), announces a true game changer for the cryptocurrency market. NetCents announces the launch of Instant Settlements, providing merchants guaranteed protection against market-volatility and liquidity issues associated with processing cryptocurrency transactions.

Volatility and merchant risk have been the real gating item preventing cryptocurrencies to truly become mainstream and be used for everyday payment. NetCents will initially offer instant settlement for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin [and the NetCents Coin]. Additional cryptocurrencies will be added over time.

Despite the technological advances cryptocurrencies provides for payment processing, exposure to crypto-market volatility has deterred merchants from accepting cryptocurrencies from a growing segment, the holders of these cryptocurrencies. Through Instant Settlements, merchants will now be able to take advantage of all the benefits of lower fees, faster processing, and leverage the liquidity of 'crypto-to-fiat or crypto-to-crypto' settlement without being exposed to the risks or the price fluctuations inherent with cryptocurrencies.

With the NetCents Merchant Gateway, volatility within the price of digital currencies such as Bitcoin, Ether, or Litecoin will have no impact on the merchants. It will enable cryptocurrencies to, in essence, mirror traditional payment methods in convenience and usability. Merchants will be in a secure position to ultimately be indifferent to the form payment used by their customers, be it traditional or crypto currency. A first in the industry.

"I am proud to say that we have broken the largest objection to cryptocurrency processing with absolutely zero currency risk to the merchant. This is a game-changer for the cryptocurrency payments industry," said Clayton Moore, CEO of NetCents Technology. "Through this development, merchants can now expand their products and services to an untapped $270+ billion dollar cryptocurrency market, increase sales with ease, convenience and security. Cryptocurrency's promise was always one day. NetCents has made it today."1

In addition to the economic benefits of integrating digital payments with NetCents Technology as a partner, merchants and payment processors will also benefit from being an industry leader in blockchain technology adoption. This development further streamlines merchant processing and consumer payments into one secure frictionless process. Consumers benefit from lower transaction fees, a variety of digital payment options, fraud protection, and freedom to spend their cryptocurrency on everyday transactions at their favourite retailers.

Over the last year, NetCents has introduced the various pieces to its product offering to become the backbone of crypto processing worldwide. Unlike other companies in the space, NetCents has adopted a strategy to partner with leading merchant acquirers and payment processors to rapidly grow its user base. With the most advanced and complete product offering, NetCents is rapidly becoming the go-to solution provider for crypto processing. Today's announcement of Instant Settlements was the last missing piece to allowing mass adoption and use of cryptocurrencies. NetCents has positioned itself to be at the epicenter of this crypto revolution.

"Our technology is the missing puzzle piece that provides a stepping stone for emerging and existing companies to evolve with little to no risk to their current business and payment model," added Clayton Moore. "With our risk-free platform, merchants and payment processors will be able to accept these next-generation cryptocurrencies while behind-the-scenes, seamlessly and instantly settle of the purchase amount in the local fiat or digital currency of their choice. NetCents Technology removes all liability and merchant risk of cryptocurrency transactions."

If your company or organization wishes to integrate the NetCents platform into your website, visit https://net-cents.com/business/register and sign up for a business account to complete the online form to get the digital integration and application processes started.

If you are a merchant acquirer or payment processor looking to offer seamless and risk-free payment processors to your merchants, please contact claytonmoore@net-cents.com.

About NetCents

NetCents is a next-generation online payment processing platform, offering consumers and merchants online services for managing electronic payments. The Company is focused on capturing the migration from cash to digital currency by utilizing innovative blockchain technology to provide payment solutions that are simple to use, secure and worry-free. NetCents works with its financial partners, mobile operators, exchanges, etc., to streamline the user experience of transacting online.

NetCents Technology is integrated into the Automated Clearing House ("ACH") and is registered as a Money Services Business (MSB) with FINTRAC, which ensures our consumer's security and privacy. NetCents is available for deposits from 194 Countries around the World, providing you with the freedom to choose to Pay. Your Way. 

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

NetCents Technology Inc.

"Clayton Moore"

Clayton Moore, CEO, Founder and Director

NetCents Technology Inc.

Suite 880, 505 Burrard St (Bentall 1),

Vancouver, BC, V7X 1M4

_________________________________________

1 Cryptocurrency market cap as of April 11, 2018 https://coinmarketcap.com/

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that the Company expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include regulatory actions, market prices, and continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates, and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by applicable securities laws, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change.

Please visit the corporate website at www.net-cents.com , +1(604)895-7423; or

Contact

Gord Jessop

President

gord.jessop@net-cents.com



SOURCE NetCents Technology Inc.Hyundai unveiled the Chinese version of its Kona compact SUV at a launch event in Shanghai on Tuesday.

The new SUV named Encino is slightly bigger than the Kona in its chassis and comes with a red roof to meet the tastes of Chinese customers.

It is also equipped with a slew of safety features in addition to a voice-assisted navigation support, which was developed in collaboration with Chinese Internet portal Baidu.But even that plane, which the daily dubbed "Air Force Un," is superannuated, and all three often break down.

Kim has three jets, the most powerful being a Cold War-era Ilyushin IL-62 manufactured in the Soviet Union.

No North Korean aircraft could reliably fly North Korean leader Kim Jong-un across the Pacific Ocean or to Europe without stopping, the Washington Post said Tuesday.

In 2014, an Ilyushin IL-62 of the North's flag carrier Air Koryo carrying Kim's right-hand man Choe Ryong-hae was on its way from Moscow to Pyongyang but had to turn back due to a mechanical failure.

Most experts believe that the plane is not capable of flying over 9,000 km across the Pacific due to its age and lack of maintenance.

It would be difficult for it to stop en route for refueling and maintenance given international sanctions against the North.

"If Kim took his own plane, stopping to refuel on the way to any summit could also prove embarrassing by highlighting the limits of the aircraft -- and where to stop would be complicated, as well, given the number of countries that have put sanctions on North Korea," the daily said.

Instead, the North could borrow a plane from Russia or China, but this may not be a good idea because it could be wiretapped and damage the image of the "leader who stands up to the world's most powerful nation," which Kim wants to project.

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Energy Monitoring Contract Awarded for Continental Plaza utiliVisor was a natural choice for us. Their knowledge of building systems and efficient operations is unparalleled.

Continental Plaza is a 650,000 square office complex located along Route 4, with access to all major highways, midtown Manhattan, airports and shopping centers. The complex is comprised of three, 10- to 12-story office towers, a single-story TGI Fridays restaurant, and a multi-level interconnected parking deck. JD Companies and Capstone are making $10 Million in improvements that include new heating and cooling systems, efficient lighting and a fitness center overhaul. According to Jimmy DAgostino, CFOO of JD Companies, utiliVisor was a natural choice for us. Their knowledge of building systems and efficient operations is unparalleled.

The utiliVisor solution for Continental Plaza involves third party independent measurement and verification services for the central chilled water plant and the Building Management System upgrade in all three towers. The goal is to determine the most efficient operating sequence and provide ongoing performance recommendations and technical support to building operations staff. utiliVisors monitoring and reporting is exceptionally precise, added Shaun Townsend, Building Systems Engineer at JD Companies. They often catch deviations in operating data that the building may never feel, thereby maintaining efficiency and preventing potential equipment damage.

Our monitoring program will provide an understanding of the holistic energy efficiency of the existing system and its individual components, stated Peter Angerame, Vice President at utiliVisor. This will enable us to optimize production of chilled water in conjunction with the facilitys cost structure on a real time basis, resulting in significant cost savings.

To achieve this, utiliVisor will connect its monitoring and verification system to the building management system (BMS), Data will be collected from the BMS and transmitted every five minutes via the web to the utiliVisor Operations Center where the companys energy engineers will analyze the data and provide recommendations for facility optimization.

In addition to the chiller plant monitoring, JD Companies is implementing a variety of energy conservation measures at Continental Plaza. These include:



Complete DDC upgrade to all three buildings and equipment which will allow for advanced control strategies.

Installation of VFDs on large AHU and chilled water pump motors to generate energy savings and improve performance of system

Continental Plaza energy efficiency measures will benefit from a recently implemented statewide energy conservation program, Mr. Angerame noted. It is anticipated that the complex will receive $1.1M+ in energy incentives through the New Jersey Clean Energy Program Pay for Performance  Existing Buildings incentive program over the next year.

About utiliVisor

Founded in 1978, utiliVisor offers comprehensive energy monitoring and submetering services, providing accurate, reliable solutions to boost efficiency and lower energy consumption. The utiliVisor system is a web-based, networked solution, built on open standards, that works in real time to collect and format data, monitor operations and equipment errors, and deliver oversight via web-based alerts and alarms. UtiliVisor services more than 250 million square feet of commercial and institutional space nationwide and oversees more than 400,000 service data points, more than any other service provider in the United States. It is also the largest submetering company in the tri-state New York metropolitan area and an approved Meter Data Service Provider (MDSP) for the State of New York. (http://www.utilivisor.com).

About JD Companies

The JD organization is a consortium of real estate companies with extensive experience in all arenas of commercial and residential real estate: construction, development, management, sales, and leasing. Over three generations, JD has developed more than 4 million SF of commercial space and 5,000 residential units throughout New Jersey and New York. JD currently has holdings in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, and North Carolina. (http://www.jd-companies.com)

About Capstone Realty Group

Capstone is an Institutional Private Equity Investor that acquires Grocery-anchored Retail Shopping Centers, Office Buildings, Hotels and Non-performing Loans. Since 1998, Capstone has acquired over 25 real estate deals; comprising over 5.0 million SF and $685 million of total capitalization. Capstone primarily invests in the New York Metropolitan area and Upstate New York and has investments in Ohio and Pennsylvania. (http://www.crgre.com)The East Side podcast This world is one we haven't yet seen. It's ready to be explored by a larger audience.

Veteran TV producers and directors Louis Milito and Phil Conserva found out that their friend of a decade had a story to tell. The former CSI producers and directors, now working on projects as diverse as Gotham and Training Day, discovered that their long-time friend Dale Wiley, a Missouri author and lawyer, had penned a multi-media concept based on the no-holds-barred world of the small boroughs just east of St. Louis, from Sauget to Washington Park, known as The East Side.

"We were really gripped by the drama in Dale's idea, and decided it was worth spending some time with," said Conserva, who first worked with Wiley on various environmental projects more than ten years ago. "Dale has clued me in that he saw this area as a drama that hadn't previously been told. I told him to work on the idea, and when he got back with me, he had created a whole world that actually needed more than just TV to tell the story."

To that end, Wiley started working on parts of the idea. "The story told in the podcast is an example of finding ways to tell the stories in different ways," Wiley said. "The first TV story is very visual and fits more with Phil's and my idea of playing with the idea of Dante's Inferno, set in a fictional high-end gentlemen's club, just into Illinois. But it wouldn't make a good podcast. It's too image-heavy." Instead, the podcast, which is available to subscribe to for free on Apple, Stitcher, Google Play and TuneIn, among others, looks at what seems to be a crime, told from the multiple perspectives of the participants and unraveling the nature of truth. "It seems funny to say, but these stories have elements of many influences and allusions sprinkled throughout," Wiley said. "Everything from, of course, Dante, to Gatsby, with some Kurosawa and Billy Wilder as well," This may be set in the popular clubs of The East Side, but this is a far cry from other, less meaty material."

In addition to the podcast, there is a continuing short story, the first segment available for free by going to TheEastSide.tv and following the instructions for download. It is also available at iBooks, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords for free.EMS Consulting (EMS), a Salesforce Silver Consulting Firm headquartered in Tampa, Florida, announced today that it has joined the Ellie Mae Pro consulting partner program. By participating in the program, EMS will play as a strategic partner with Ellie Mae in providing integrated and optimized solutions to and from Salesforce, while leveraging the latest tools and technologies for customers.

EMS will help lenders and Ellie Mae accelerate the delivery, deployment and adoption of Ellie Maes Encompass all-in-one mortgage management solution.

As a Pro Select Partner in the Ellie Mae Pro consulting partner program, EMS demonstrates leadership in the Financial Services Industry with a dedicated focus and strong commitment to the Banking, Credit Unions and Mortgage markets. EMS is also recognized as one of Salesforces leading implementation partners, providing PAAS integration services to maximize opportunities for Ellie Maes customers.

Ellie Mae is a leading provider of innovative, on-demand software solutions and services for the residential mortgage industry. Ellie Maes Encompass digital mortgage solution provides one system of record that enables banks, credit unions, and mortgage lenders to originate and fund mortgages, while improving compliance, loan quality and efficiency.

EMS Consulting is very excited to partner with Ellie Mae to provide a fully integrated connector to the Encompass Lending Platform, said Elaine Myrback, President/CEO at EMS. Our participation in the Ellie Mae Pro program gives us access to Ellie Mae Executives and internal support required to be a leading partner on the latest Ellie Mae product and solutions. EMS Consultings goals are to develop the most innovative solution roadmap with integration services for Encompass. We look forward to a long, successful relationship with Ellie Mae.

About Ellie Mae

Ellie Mae (NYSE:ELLI) is the leading cloud-based platform provider for the mortgage finance industry. Ellie Maes technology solutions enable lenders to originate more loans, reduce origination costs, and shorten the time to close, all while ensuring the highest levels of compliance, quality and efficiency. Visit EllieMae.com or call 877.355.4362 to learn more.

About EMS Consulting

EMS is a Salesforce Silver Partner headquartered in Tampa, Florida with experienced, innovative consultants and architects around the country. They have a large dedicated practice in the Financial Services Industry providing expertise in banks, credit unions, mortgage, wealth management, investment banking and insurance. Visit http://www.consultems.com or call 813-287-2486 to learn more.Adults should be aware that law enforcement officials are no longer turning a blind eye on social hosts. They are coming down on them hard.

With Chicago teens gearing up for prom season, police are on heightened alert for underage drinking. The Chicago law firm of Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard P.C. has some important reminders and tips for parents and guardians to help keep their teens safe and themselves out of legal trouble this prom season.

According to a recent survey by AAA, 41 percent of teens between the ages of 16 and 19 admitted it was highly likely that they or a friend would use drugs or alcohol on prom night. Approximately 53% of teens who admitted to drinking during or after the prom said they consumed four or more alcoholic beverages.

Many parents believe that hosting a party at their home may provide a safe alternative to having their children sneak around. They believe that by hosting a party at their home, they may be able to ensure that no one drinks too much or gets behind the wheel. However, with the passage of the Social Host Law, parents could find themselves in serious legal trouble if they allow any underage drinking to occur on their watch. These legal troubles could range from jail time, to being sued in civil court for financial damages.

Adults should be aware that law enforcement officials are no longer turning a blind eye on social hosts. They are coming down on them hard, said Jeffrey J. Kroll, partner at Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard P.C.

The passage of the Drug or Alcohol Impaired Minor Responsibility Act in January of 2004 opened the door for social host liability for the first time in Illinois. And in 2013, Illinois passed a Social Host Law that states any adult who knowingly allows underage drinking or provides alcohol to minors can be found guilty of a Class A misdemeanor. If the illegal, underage drinking results in injury or death, the adult could be charged with a Class 4 felony.

Mr. Kroll says there are still a wide range of circumstances that could impact whether or not parents are held responsible under the law. For example, a person may not be liable if they have taken all reasonable steps to prevent underage drinking from occurring in their home.

In addition, renting a limo is especially popular for prom-goers. Teens like the glamour and parents like that their kids won't be behind the wheel on a night that involves a lot of distractions and potentially alcohol. But parents should know that not every limo company and driver can be trusted. Guardians should know who is behind the wheel before sending their teen off to prom.

When hiring a nanny or babysitter, parents typically do extensive interviews and background checks. Parents should approach hiring a limo driver for their teen with the same discretion, Kroll said. Surprisingly, it is not hard for someone to purchase a limo and tout themselves as a reputable limo company.

Mr. Kroll explains parents should take the following steps to ensure their teens are safe:

1. Ask about the companys liability insurance

2. Make sure the driver has a valid commercial drivers license

3. Read online reviews

4. You can even do a criminal background check on your driver to see if they have a record

When in doubt, it is important to remember that if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

To schedule an interview with Mr. Kroll about these prom safety warnings, please contact Marcie Mangan at 312-372-1227 or mmangan(at)salvilaw(dot)com.Gohlke Pools - The Best in Back Yard Living We were overwhelmed by the judges' recognition of the quality of the work that we do at Gohlke Pools. - Matt Gohlke

Gohlke Pools in Denton, TX was honored recently at the United Aqua Groups annual awards ceremony in San Diego, California. Gohlke Pools is celebrating its 60th of business in Denton in 2018 and received twenty-two different awards during the ceremony. Gohlke Pools received 18 Awards of Distinction for design and 4 Best of the Best Awards.

We were overwhelmed by the judges recognition of the quality of the work that we do at Gohlke Pools, said Matt Gohlke, president of Gohlke Pools, We have a great team here at Gohlke Pools and they are the folks that earned these awards.

Gohlke Pools designs received awards in the following categories:

Residential Concrete Freeform Pools  5 Awards



Lakeview Project

Merrill Project

Winthrop Project

Buffalo Project

Harvest Project

Chisum Project

Residential Concrete Geometric Pools  4 Awards



Falcon Project

Valera Project

Chapel Project

Wildgrove Project

Flower Mound Project

Residential Concrete Spa  1 Award



Lakeview Project Spa

Residential Concrete Water Features  6 Awards



Argyle Project Waterfall

Lantana Project Water Feature

Chisum Project Water Feature

Gainesville Project Waterfall

Falcon Project Water Feature

Valera Project Water Feature

In the Best of the Best Categories, Gohlke Pools was named the Retailer of the Year for the Gohlke Pools Retail Store at 909 Dallas Drive in Denton. Other Best of the Best Awards included:



Retail & Service Best Ad Campaign

Retail & Service Best Promotion for participation in the Yankee Doodle July 4th Parade\

Best of Customer Satisfaction

To see photos of the award winning pools, go to https://gohlkepools.com/gohlke-pools-captures-22-national-awards-in-pool-design-competition-2/

For 60 years, Gohlke Pools has been building and servicing pools in Denton County. The Awards of Distinction is a time-honored competition that recognizes the hard work, dedication and many achievements of members of the United Aqua Group.PLDT partners with Zenlayer to deliver SD-WAN technology to the Philippines and beyond This collaboration with Zenlayer is a monumental step forward in providing our customers with a dynamic bandwidth solution that allows them to connect and sync applications and workloads with other global offices and data centers.

PLDT Enterprise, Philippines leading ICT and digital services provider, has partnered with Zenlayer, a global software defined network and services provider, to offer software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology to global enterprises by Q2 of 2018. SD-WAN interconnects enterprise networks, data centers, and clouds with each other, enabling customers to be agile despite geographical distances via a powerful and secure cloud platform.

This collaboration with Zenlayer is a monumental step forward in providing our customers with a dynamic bandwidth solution that allows them to connect and sync applications and workloads with other global offices and data centers. There has been a huge demand for international inter-office and inter-cloud connectivity, and this partnership has allowed us to further broaden our capacity to fill that need, says VP & Head of PLDT Enterprise Core Business Solutions Jojo Gendrano. Enterprises need to be strategic, agile, and adaptive to achieve business resiliency, and we can provide the necessary tools to get them there.

We are excited to expand our SD-WAN capability to the Philippines by partnering with PLDT, the countrys market leader in fixed, wireless, and information communication technology. This is a great opportunity for us to serve more customers in Southeast Asia, one of the fastest growing Internet regions in the world, says CEO and Founder of Zenlayer Joe Zhu.

About PLDT (http://www.pldtenterprise.com)

PLDT is the leading telecommunications and digital services provider in the Philippines. Through its principal business groups  fixed line, wireless and others  PLDT offers a wide range of telecommunications and digital services across the Philippines most extensive fiber optic backbone, and fixed line and cellular networks. PLDT is listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE:TEL) and its American Depositary Shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE:PHI).

About Zenlayer (https://www.zenlayer.com)

Zenlayer, a software defined network and services provider, is headquartered in Los Angeles and Shanghai with offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing and Shenzhen. Enterprises utilize Zenlayers SDx platforms to instantly enable worldwide connectivity and deliver superior user experience. Zenlayer offers on-demand bare metal cloud, SD-WAN cloud connect, edge computing and colocation in more than 80 data centers on six continents.China and Russia are both warming up to North Korea ahead of imminent meetings between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the presidents of South Korea and the U.S.

China will send an art troupe to North Korea to celebrate the 106th birthday of regime founder Kim Il-sung in a decision symbolic of a thaw between the two uneasy allies.

And North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho, who is on a visit to Russia, extracted a promise from his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to give humanitarian aid to the North and visit Pyongyang. The North is fast escaping its diplomatic isolation by restoring traditional ties with both countries.

The Chinese art troupe will be accompanied by Song Tao, the head of the Chinese Communist Party's International Liaison Department to take part in the biennial April Spring Friendship Art Festival, the North's official Korean Central News Agency reported Wednesday.

The festival is held every two years during the week of Kim Il-sung's birthday (April 15), and artists from around the world give song and dance performances.

China did not participate in 2016, when relations were at their chilliest after Pyongyang conducted a nuclear test and test-launched a long-range missile in defiance of Beijing.

Last November, Kim refused to meet Song who went to Pyongyang as Chinese President Xi Jinping's special envoy. But Song escorted Kim during his surprise visit to China last month.

Ri, who has been on an overseas trip since April 3, met delegations from Cuba, Indonesia, Iran, Togo and Venezuela on the sidelines of the Non-Aligned Movement's ministerial conference in Azerbaijan on April 5-6. He visited Turkmenistan last Saturday and Sunday, and has been in Russia since Monday.

According to TASS on Tuesday, Lavrov accepted an invitation from Ri to visit the North.

Joseph Colwell, who has lived in the West all his adult life, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the US Forest Service, and fire information officer who lives with his wife, Katherine, on their forty-acre nature reserve overlooking the North Fork Gunnison River Valley of western Colorado, has completed his book Sands of Time: A Flight of Discovery and Search for Meanings of Time: a gripping story of geologic adventure, time-travel, and the essence of life itself.

Joseph shares, What would you think if you found evidence of an advanced life-form encased in a two-hundred-million-year-old sandstone canyon wall? This was the problem that Ev Collins had when he found something on a hike in the canyon country of southern Utah. Ev, a geology professor, was pondering whom he could tell and what he could share, when the day after his discovery he chanced upon Mida Peterson, a doctoral anthropology student from the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico.

Ev decided to share his find with Mida, who agreed with the life-changing implications of this stunning discovery. They teamed up for their scientific investigation of their find. Ev quit his job, they moved to nearby Torrey, Utah, and with the aid of Evs wealthy stepfather, set up a cultural center as a cover. In secrecy, they bring in a retired NASA physicist in excavating the find.

When they finally enter the buried object, they discover a timeless new Earth. As you join Ev and Mida in their discoveries of time, time travel, geology, supernatural powers, and new life-forms, you will think of the Colorado Plateau canyon country as more than rocks and beautiful views.

Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, Joseph Colwells book is an enthralling fantasy of discovery giving new meaning to time and space.

Readers who wish to experience this engrossing work can purchase Sands of Time: A Flight of Discovery and Search for Meanings of Time at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, 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 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 logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and the like. Its roster of accomplished authors and publishing professionals allows writers to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues to focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.LawPay and the American Bar Association (ABA) are excited to announce a five year extension of LawPays inclusion in the ABA Advantage program. This extension is based on the past success of the program, feedback from bar members, and proven value added to members of the ABA.

For more than a decade, LawPay has been helping firms get paid faster by offering attorneys a simple, secure way to accept online credit card payments. By working closely with the ABA to ensure trust accounting compliance, LawPay developed their payment solution to correctly separate earned and unearned fees and protect IOLTA accounts against any third-party debiting.

LawPay is extremely honored to be included in the ABA Advantage program. As the industrys leading payment processor, its our mission to develop and deliver the best online payment technology for law firms. Working closely with the ABA ensures we are up to date with IOLTA regulations and compliance guidelines that impact our clients. The knowledge and experience gained from this program allow attorneys to accept payments with confidence, building a more successful law practice, said Amy Porter, CEO and founder of LawPay.

ABA members who take advantage of this program benefit from reduced processing costs, advanced technology, and ease of payment. Members who open a new account by April 30, 2018 will also have their LawPay monthly program fee waived for three months.

About the American Bar Association

Founded in 1878, the American Bar Association is one of the worlds largest voluntary professional organizations, with nearly 400,000 members and more than 3,500 entities. The ABA is committed to improving and supporting the legal profession with practical resources for legal professionals while improving the administration of justice, accrediting law schools, eliminating bias and enhancing diversity, establishing model ethical codes, and advancing the rule of law throughout the United States and around the world. To learn more about the American Bar Association, please visit http://www.americanbar.org.

About LawPay

LawPay was developed specifically to provide a sophisticated payment solution for legal professionals. The LawPay platform contractually protects client funds by restricting the ability of any third party from debiting monies from an IOLTA account. LawPay is an approved member benefit of 47 state bars, trusted by more than 50,000 lawyers, and is the only payment solution offered through the ABA Advantage program. To learn more, visit http://www.lawpay.com.We are committed to helping Kiwanis clubs build community gathering spaces where children and entire families can come together to play, have fun and relax.

Landscape Structures Inc., a Delano, Minn.-based commercial playground equipment manufacturer, together with Kiwanis International, a global organization of members of every age who are dedicated to serving the children of the world, has launched the fifth annual Legacy of Play Contest. The contest, hosted on Facebook, will help a deserving Kiwanis club bring a playground to its community.

The winning Kiwanis club will receive $25,000 in playground equipment to be used toward a playground project. The contest is open to all Kiwanis clubs that are currently working on a playground project, and that can complete the project by Kiwanis One Day 2019, Kiwanis Internationals signature day of service during which clubs around the world participate in service projects benefiting their local communities.

Qualified contestants may enter the contest at facebook.com/Kiwanis by completing the entry form. Entries will be accepted April 12- May 12, 2018. Following the submission period, Facebook users will have the opportunity to vote for their favorite project. The winner of the contest will be announced on or around June 14, 2018. Find complete contest rules at facebook.com/Kiwanis.

We are excited that our partnership with Landscape Structures has enabled us to help Kiwanis clubs enhance their communities with playgrounds, said Pam Norman, senior director of corporate partnerships at Kiwanis International. Playgrounds help build community, and we are proud to be able to assist our clubs in bringing to their communities play opportunities that welcome children of all abilities.

The Legacy of Play Contest has allowed us to assist four different Kiwanis clubs in bringing play and playgrounds to their communities, and are excited to extend that honor to another Kiwanis club for the contests fifth anniversary year, said Pat Faust, president of Landscape Structures. We are committed to helping Kiwanis clubs build community gathering spaces where children and entire families can come together to play, have fun and relax.

The Kiwanis Club of Mankato won the contest in 2017 and plans to cut the ribbon on its all inclusive playground this summer. In collaboration with the City of North Mankato and many local organizations, community members and business owners, the Kiwanis Club of Mankato will create an all-inclusive playground where children and families of all abilities can develop, discover, laugh and experience the joy of play.

Landscape Structures became a vision partner of Kiwanis International in January 2013. Kiwanis and its family of clubs, including Circle K International for college students, Key Club for teens, Builders Club for adolescents, K-Kids for elementary students and Aktion Club for adults with disabilities, partner with Landscape Structures to bring play and playgrounds to communities across the globe. Learn more about the partnership at playlsi.com.

About Kiwanis International

Founded in 1915, Kiwanis International is a global organization of members dedicated to serving the children of the world. Kiwanis and its family of clubs, including Circle K International for university students, Key Club for students age 14 to 18, Builders Club for students age 11 to 14, Kiwanis Kids for students age 6 to 12 and Aktion Club for adults living with disabilities, dedicate annually more than 18 million service hours to strengthen communities and serve children. The Kiwanis International family comprises nearly 560,000 adult and youth members in 82 nations and geographic areas. For more information about Kiwanis International, please visit http://www.kiwanis.org.

About Landscape Structures

Since 1971, Landscape Structures Inc. has been the leading manufacturer of commercial playground equipment in the world. Our employee-owned company designs community and school playgrounds that encourage kids of all ages and abilities to learn persistence, leadership, competition, bravery, support and empathy through play. We push the limitsof design, inclusion, playto help kids realize there is no limit to what they can do today and in the future. For a better tomorrow, we play today.Baxter Planning Systems, a global leader in SaaS and PaaS planning solutions for the service supply chain, today announced that its board has appointed Chuck Moeling as the companys new chief executive officer. Chuck succeeds Greg Baxter, who has led Baxter Planning Systems since founding the business in 1993. Greg will continue to play a strategic role in the management and leadership of the company as Baxters chief product officer.

"After 25 years building Baxter into one of the worlds largest providers of service parts planning technology, I felt it was time to pass on the CEO-baton and allow new leadership to help write the next chapter in the Baxter growth story," said Greg Baxter. "Chuck brings a dynamic combination of strategy, sales, marketing, and technology skills that dovetail extremely well with the companys growth strategy, customer markets and culture. This will afford me the opportunity to focus on my long-term passion for developing innovative, powerful solutions for the service parts planning community. Beyond his product leadership role, Mr. Baxter will continue to serve on the companys board of directors and remains a significant investor in the company.

A proven leader, Mr. Moeling joins Baxter from Interface Security Systems where he served as CMO & EVP of Sales. He also held previous executive roles with SaaS companies including RedPrairie, now JDA, and Radiant Systems, now a part of NCR. Moeling spent the first decade of his career honing his skills in strategy and technology consulting with both Bain & Company and Accenture.

Greg and his tenured leaders have built an impressive roster of satisfied customers employing high ROI service parts technologies built by Baxter. As I got to know the team during the recruiting process, it became very clear to me that Baxters professionals are deeply passionate about delivering world-class solutions to service parts and supply chain leaders seeking to optimize the performance of their networks, Chuck Moeling commented. As CEO, my primary strategic objective is to continue creating powerful customer success stories driven by a continuous improvement mindset. At the same time, I plan to accelerate growth by leveraging Baxters deep expertise, uniquely collaborative culture and robust, process-driven technologies.

The hiring of Mr. Moeling was directly coordinated with Mr. Baxters strategy to recruit the companys first institutional investor, Polaris Partners, last fall.

"Investing in the Baxter platform and recruiting a talented, proven growth leader like Chuck gives us a powerful one-two punch to accelerate the companys trajectory", said Dan Lombard, Partner at Polaris Partners. Chuck brings a disciplined process and data-driven approach, coupled with decades of experience building strategic partnerships with customers like the ones we see in Baxters portfolio. We are very excited about this combination and the benefits we believe it will drive for the company and its customers.

Bryce Youngren, Managing Partner at Polaris Partners, added "In addition to his 15+ years of experience growing recurring revenue businesses, we felt Chucks leadership style would mesh exceptionally well with the collaborative and innovative culture at Baxter. We typically see great results when these stars align.

Bianca Moreno with Bespoke Partners led the recruiting process.

About Chuck Moeling

Chuck Moeling, 50, has more than 25 years of experience in strategy, sales, operations and SaaS, including 12 years consulting with Bain & Company and Accenture plc (formerly known as Andersen Consulting). Mr. Moeling most recently served as CMO & EVP of Sales for Interface Security Systems, one of the largest managed service providers in the IoT security space, and was CMO & EVP of Sales for Westec Intelligent Surveillance when it was acquired by Interface in 2012. Prior to that, Mr. Moeling held leadership roles with SaaS companies including RedPrairie, now JDA, and Radiant Systems, now a part of NCR. Mr. Moeling holds an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a BE in Electrical Engineering from Vanderbilt University and a Certification in Production and Inventory Management (CPIM) from the American Production and Control Society (APICS).

About Baxter Planning Systems

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with employees around the globe, Baxter Planning Systems was founded in 1993 by Greg Baxter, who saw the need for a proprietary solution to address the lack of planning technologies in the market. Now a worldwide leader in aftermarket supply chain software, Baxter helps customers plan billions in service parts inventory every day. The list of Fortune 500 enterprises and growing startups deploying solutions from Baxter include Verizon, RICOH, Stanley Black and Decker, NetApp, SONY, Johnson & Johnson, and many others. Baxter's differentiated combination of a SaaS platform featuring planning as a service (PaaS) enables sophisticated supply chain organizations to deliver dramatic improvements in post-sales service levels while increasing profitability and cash flow. Baxter has also been on SupplyChainBrain's "List of 100 Great Supply Chain Partners" for 14 consecutive years and was recently awarded their 3rd consecutive "Best Places to Work in Austin" recognition. For more information, visit http://www.bybaxter.com or email us at info(at)bybaxter.com.

About Polaris Partners

Polaris Partners invests in exceptional technology and healthcare companies across all stages of their life cycles. With offices in Boston, San Francisco and Dublin, Polaris partners globally with an unparalleled network of entrepreneurs, top scientists and emerging innovators who are making significant contributions in their fields and improving the way in which we live and work. For more information, visit http://www.polarispartners.com.

About Bespoke Partners

Bespoke Partners is the first holistic human capital firm (Executive Search and Growth Advisory) solely dedicated to helping PE-owned companies scale. We are a team of highly-driven experts who work passionately to achieve our clients' objectives. Bespoke Partners works side-by-side with Private Equity firms and their portfolio company leaders throughout the investment lifecycle  from Diligence through Value Creation to Exit. Bespoke Partners offices are based in San Diego, California and Austin, Texas.A Chance for Land and Fresh Air, Russian Jewish Immigrants in Sharon and Amenia 1907-1940 While telling a specifically Jewish story, Ascher's book honors the challenges of all immigrants who struggle to assimilate into a new land, learn a new language and take up a dramatically new way of life.

The Sharon Historical Society & Museum, located in Sharon, CT, announces the release of "A Chance for Land and Fresh Air, Russian Jewish Immigrants in Sharon and Amenia, 1907-1940" by distinguished historian and award-winning author Carol Ascher, Ph.D. This compelling narrative is about the courage, determination and imaginative spirit of thirty Russian Jewish families who, arriving in America at the turn of the 20th century, purchased small farms in western Connecticut.

Similar stories took place in thousands of rural communities throughout America, thanks to Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Belgian Jewish philanthropist who believed that anti-Semitism would end if only Jews could own land and become productive farmers. For decades, a generous fund that he established offered mortgages and other support to Jews willing to try their hand at farming. Many of the original thirty families supplemented their farm income by offering kosher vacations to New York Jews. Around 1920 they began to move to neighboring Amenia, NY, on the train line, transforming the town into a lively Jewish resort.The book, which grew out of a 2017 exhibit at the Sharon Historical Society & Museum, resonates with audiences today whose immigrant families likewise struggled to assimilate, learn English and take up new professions. Carol was drawn to this story, as she is the daughter of refugees from Nazism. Growing up in Topeka, KS, she began writing at a young age to make sense of her two very different worlds: the community of Jewish refugees in Topeka and the Midwestern Christian world of her public school and neighborhood.

The author of seven books and numerous short stories, essays and scholarly articles, Carol has won several awards for her writing, including four PEN/National Endowment for the Arts Syndicated Short Fiction Awards, two awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Thomas Carter award for literary nonfiction, and a fellowship from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. She frequently lectures about researching local histories, recording oral histories and conducting archival research.

Hear Carol Ascher speak with WSHU Morning Edition Host Tom Kuser about the history of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Sharon and Amenia.

For more information about the author, please visit: http://www.carolascher.net. To read an excerpt, find more information about the book or purchase it please visit: https://www.achanceforlandandfreshair.com. Follow Carol Ascher on Facebook and Twitter.

The book is also available for purchase via the Sharon Historical Society & Museum website, at select fine bookstores, or via Amazon.com.

# # #

The Sharon Historical Society and Museum collects, preserves and shares Sharons stories, building bridges between the past, present and future through its collections, exhibitions, and programs. Visit us on Facebook or on our website http://sharonhist.org/The most dangerous thing about perfectionism is [this level of perfection] doesnt exist. Yet so many people, especially women, are driven to seek it in every area of their lives. At a minimum, it pushes their goals further out of reach. At worst, it actually ruins their health and relationships.

Nearly every Monday, Joanna is brought to tears at a job that she feels is crushing her soul. Her position offers minimal pay, no opportunity for promotions and does nothing to boost her resume. Yet she cant seem to quit.

Stacey impulse buys clothes and shoes for fancy dinners and parties which she never seems to attend. At the same time, her dreams of home ownership slip farther and farther away.

Sam spends three hours every day at the gym and hasnt had a carb in months. Yet she just cant get where she feels she needs to be to be more attractive.

These stories may seem unrelated. But at the core of each is something more menacing than any of these women can imagine. Each of their struggles stem from an irrational desire to achieve some state of perfection.

The most dangerous thing about perfectionism is that the level of perfection theyre expecting of themselves just doesnt exist. Yet so many people, especially women, are driven to seek it in every area of their lives. At a minimum, it pushes their goals further out of reach. At worst, it actually ruins their health and relationships.

Thats according to writer and speaker Megan Reilly as described in her new book Escaping Perfectionism: Rewrite Your Story and Reclaim Your Life. (Now available through her website http://www.TheStoryisYours.com, and on Amazon in both kindle and print).

The book is partly a story about Reillys own journey from self-inflicted perfectionism to healing and recovery. Equally important, the book serves as a guide for those who continue to suffer from perfectionism and all its many faces and manifestations.

This is the book I wish had been on the shelf at the height of my own suffering, says Reilly. I wrote the book that would have helped me. My hope is that my experiences and journey can help others as they begin their own healing.

Perfectionism sabotages many areas of our lives, according to Reilly. She identifies seven: careers, money, personal relationships, health, spirituality, and our home/office environments. Reilly says that many unnecessarily suffer because of a limiting Perfectionism Story (PS) thats been learned at some point along the way to adulthood. Her book helps women identify the specific areas of her life being hampered or harmed by a Perfectionism Story. This, in turn, allows the healing to begin.

To aid in that healing, the book facilitates a process that has readers actually rewrite their own Perfection Stories in a way that avoids the people and situations that have derailed past endeavors. This, says Reilly, helps women (and men!) who read it make more lasting, authentic connections with everyone in their life  especially themselves. The book also includes optional meditations that allow readers to reflect back on the experiences and better understand how they learned a flawed Perfectionism Story.

Reilly provides a strong voice and writes from a unique perspective as she relates parts of her own story. A young woman from a rural farming town in Central California, she seemed to have everything going for her when in 2009, as a recent college graduate, she packed up her car and headed to LA. She quickly created a picturesque life living near the beach  a lifelong dream of hers  and established herself as a professional freelance writer, which included a column in the Santa Monica Daily Press.

It all seemed perfect. It almost was  until the day that Reilly found herself in a doctors office suffering the serious health consequences of an eating disorder that had escalated after many years of avoiding addressing it.

I was in denial for a long time because since I was able to keep appearances, I justified that what I was doing to myself wasnt really detrimental to my health or to those around me, says Reilly. That mindset was informed by what I now see and call Perfectionism Stories. I want other women who feel the way I did to know that its not as hopeless as it feels, that there is help available, and that they can rewrite their story no matter how lost they may feel right now.

Reilly has enjoyed several years of active recovery thanks to discovering that her professional writing was (and is) also a powerful tool for personal healing. By identifying her old Perfectionism Stories through a healthier lens  and rewriting them from a place of being good enough  she has transformed her life into something so much bigger than she ever thought possible.

While the book is geared toward women, it can help anyone interested in escaping the bonds of perfectionism. It can also help parents, partners, friends, and even distant family members find a renewed understanding and richer relationship with a person facing a perfectionism-based issue. Perfectionism comes in many different forms, not just eating disorders, says Reilly.

Manifestations of perfectionism include insomnia, over-worrying, excessive shopping, over drinking, over eating, and procrastination, among many other things.

In addition to the publishing of her book, Reilly offers public speaking and a free workshop series on YouTube, the Escaping Perfectionism Workshop Series. Named after her book, the videos provide a mini-writing workshop intended to help healing begin within minutes.

To join the community, hire Megan as a speaker, request an interview, or simply to find out more about her book, visit http://www.TheStoryisYours.com. Reilly can also be followed on Instagram at http://www.instagram.com/_thestoryisyours_.Azores Airlines has announced that it will offer 9 flights from Boston Logan Airport each week starting in May to Portugal. Plus, Providence will have a weekly flight as well. Right now the Portuguese carrier has daily service from Boston, and round-trip flights start at $609 to the Azores, and $728 to Lisbon.

Better yet, the service will be on Azores new the new Airbus A321neo fleet  with new amenities, comfort and reliability. With capacity for 186 passengers, 2 classes, this is the biggest single-aisle aircraft designed by Airbus.

All flights are non-stop the Azores, with easy connections to Funchal (Madeira), Lisbon, Porto, Frankfurt, Gran Canaria and Cape Verde. Plus from the Azores Airlines hubs of Terceira and Ponta Delgada there is connecting service to the nine islands of the Azores.

And this spring, a new website will offer passengers opting for an Azores stopover discounts on hotels, attractions and activities making the stopover even more affordable. Local partners, including the hotel sector, will have all kinds of special offers.

The Azores are the closest point to Europe from the US, and just four hours from Logan Airport. The Azores are also considered to be some of the most beautiful islands in the world. Not surprisingly, they have earned accolades for their exceptional travel and tourism experiences.

The National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations named the Azores the worlds second most appealing island destination in its fourth annual Destination Scorecard survey. The Azores received the title of authentic, unspoiled, and likely to remain so.

Azores Airlines Stopover is available for passengers traveling from North America with up to seven nights for a stopover on the Azores islands of Sao Miguel or Terceira. The airline has direct service from Oakland, Boston and Providence to Lisbon, Porto, Funchal (Madeira), London, Frankfurt, Gran Canaria and Cape Verde.

Azores Airlines, part of the SATA Group, has connected New England with the Azores and mainland Portugal for more than 40 years. For more information about booking flights visit http://www.azoresairlines.pt/usa or call 800-762-9995.MDSL Technology within the enterprise continues to be one of the top operating costs and it must be managed proactively.

MDSL, global leader in Technology Expense Management ("TEM") and Market Data Management (MDM) solutions, is set to attend the 2018 AOTMP Summit and is featured as a Platinum Sponsor. Held at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando, FL from April 15-19, the event provides educational sessions, workshops, and peer-to-peer discussions that speak to all levels of enterprise telecom vendor and enterprise professionals.

Were excited to support the upcoming AOTMP Summit and share best practices we employ at MDSL with the event attendees, said Charles Layne, Chief Executive Officer of MDSL. Weve supported this industry event for more than 10 years and feel its one of the premier places to exchange information on TEM, enterprise mobility, cloud, and IoT management.

MDSL will have a booth at the event in slot #1 of the Exhibit Hall and will showcase their innovative TEM solutions to attendees, including the newly launched Vendor Quote Management solution. Vendor Quote Management centralizes the process of obtaining quotes from vendors for new and existing services, centralizing quote communications, streamlining the ordering process, and ensuring their clients receive the best rates. Vendor Quote Management has also been announced as a finalist in Hot New Solution category of the events 2018 Summit Vendor Awards.

In addition to sponsoring and exhibiting, MDSLs Chairman, Ben Mendoza, will host a session titled TEM Evolution, Are You Ready for Whats Next? on Tuesday, April 17 at 3:00PM EDT. The session will cover the evolution of TEM and a forecast for whats to come as enterprise needs of tracking technology outside of traditional telecom continue to grow. Ben will be joined by an MDSL client from a global manufacturing enterprise to present a case study and illustrate the next phase in their TEM journey as part of the session.

Technology within the enterprise continues to be one of the top operating costs and it must be managed proactively, said Mendoza. AOTMP provides a great venue for telecom, mobility and IT professionals from around the globe to network and discuss the future of our industry and how best to manage the technology landscape both domestic and abroad.

###

About MDSL

MDSL is a world leader in Technology Expense Management and related services. MDSL partners with enterprises to provide clarity, control, compliance, and cost savings across their global technology estates. MDSL provides a unified expense management platform encompassing categories such as telecoms, cloud services, the Internet of Things, and Financial Market Data. By providing best practice procedures, unparalleled visibility of spend and automating time-consuming processes, MDSL helps ensure global digital transformations are smooth, secure, and cost-effective. For more information, visit http://www.mdsl.com.Paolo Costagli New York will be debuting never-before-seen bespoke jewels, as well as a collection of their most iconic designs

For the second consecutive year, fine jewelry brand Paolo Costagli New York is the corporate sponsor of LOOT: MAD About Jewelry, the Museum of Arts and Designs annual five-day exhibition and sale of contemporary art jewelry. Now in its 18th edition, LOOT remains the only event in North America to provide the public with the opportunity to meet and directly acquire contemporary pieces from the most skilled, innovative, and creative jewelry artists working globally today. Open to the public from April 17 through April 21, LOOT features a curated selection of jewelry by thirty-five international emerging and established artists, in addition to a showcase of Paolo Costagli New Yorks collection. At LOOT this year, Paolo Costagli New York will be debuting never-before-seen bespoke jewels, as well as a collection of their most iconic designs, including designs from the award-winning Brillante collection and the renowned Florentine collection.

LOOT remains the ultimate contemporary art jewelry shopping experience in New York, said MAD Museum LOOT 2018 Chair Marsy Mittlemann. No other event offers such a variety of expressive and original jewelry from around the world. We are proud to showcase the work of contemporary jewelry artists to the public, providing a platform for their creative practice, while supporting the Museums education and exhibition programs.

Paolo Costaglis involvement with the Museum of Arts and Design dates back to 2008 when the Museum acquired a bracelet from his iconic and award-winning Brillante collection currently on display in the MAD jewelry gallery.

Established in 1993, Paolo Costagli New York creates bold and modern, yet always timeless designs. Paolo Costagli New Yorks collection is recognized for blurring the line between fine art and jewelry. A testament to this is a bracelet from the Brillante collection, part of the Museum of Arts and Designs permanent collection.

For additional information on Paolo Costagli New Yorks collection, please visit http://www.paolocostagli.com, follow us on Instagram at @paolocostagliofficial, or visit our private Atelier located at 555 Madison Avenue, Suite 1300 in New York City.

Highlights from the Paolo Costagli New York collection are also available at Bergdorf Goodman, Mitchells Family of Stores, Betteridge Jewelers, Shreve & Co., and selected Neiman Marcus Fine Jewelry Salons."We are passionate experts that combine agility and tailored approaches to define the new ways of the industry" says Jeff Hart, President of Mike Albert Fleet Solutions.

WEX Inc., a leading global supplier of corporate payment and fuel card solutions, and Mike Albert Fleet Solutions, a premier provider of fleet solutions and fleet services, today announces that it has extended its longtime partnership. Both companies recently celebrated milestone anniversaries, Mike Albert celebrating its 60th anniversary and WEX its 35th. Their stability in an industry that is rapidly changing is a testament to their leadership and willingness to partner when together they create better solutions for their clients.

Mike Albert Fleet Solutions has been a strategic partner with WEX for many years. This mutually fruitful partnership has helped clients gain control of their fleet and fuel expenses thanks to the core capabilities of both companies.

Were thrilled to extend our ongoing relationship with Mike Albert Fleet Solutions, said Bernie Kavanagh, senior vice president and general manager of large fleet for WEX. Its an honor to continue to partner with a company that has such a unique approach in the industry and shares our vision of client satisfaction.

Our ability to develop and execute our growth plans is supported by our commitment to having strong data and analytics tools, nimble processes and strategic partnerships with key suppliers, said Jeff Hart, president at Mike Albert Fleet Solutions. We are passionate experts that combine agility and tailored approaches to define the new ways of the industry. WEXs ability to support and add to our industry leading approach gives us the confidence to offer the best outsourced fuel program available.President Moon Jae-in met Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono at Cheong Wa Dae on Wednesday during the first visit of a Japanese chief diplomat in years.

Moon said, "I hope that bilateral relations will improve to a higher level."

"Close cooperation between the two countries is more important than any other time because of the upcoming inter-Korean, Pyongyang-Washington, and trilateral Seoul-Beijing-Tokyo summits," he added.

Toxins, pharmaceuticals and many endogenous compounds are metabolized by several classes of enzymes. Oxford has already developed an extensive line of key detoxifying enzymes, including cytochromes P450 and Glutathione-S-Transferases. Uridine diphosphate glucuronosyltransferase (UGT) enzymes also play key roles in the metabolism of drugs and toxins, but few UGTs are commercially available.

Oxford has developed a proprietary method for producing recombinant enzymes in a novel format  a thermostable dry powder that readily hydrates to give a semipermeable catalytic system that is well-tailored to pharmaceutical research. This system exhibits remarkable organic solvent and thermal tolerance along with extended catalysis when compared to traditional recombinant enzymes. This grant will allow Oxford scientists to advance its technology to provide multi-catalytic platform, capable of simultaneous P450 oxidation followed by synergistic glucuronidation. The platform will also include accessory enzymes required to provide the cofactors required for P450 and UGT enzymes  thereby significantly reducing the cost and complexity of glucuronide production.

This research, led by Dr. Enrique Martinez, will give pharmaceutical scientists a robust, easy-to-use system for performing two metabolically-important reactions in one system; P450 oxidation followed by UGT glucuronidation.

Oxford Biomedical Research, Inc. develops, manufactures, and markets products for biomedical research, companion animal veterinary diagnosis and food quality testing.Retired U.S. Army Gen. Frank J. Grass (center) accepts the Missouri Military Academy's "I Will Hold" Award for Leadership from former U.S. Sen."Kit" Bond (left) and MMA President Tony McGeorge. Through his service, Gen. Grass elevated the National Guard in its mission to serve both community and country, said MMA President Tony McGeorge. Through his example, we hope to inspire our cadets to raise their own aspirations of leadership.

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Frank J. Grass received the 2018 Gen. Clifton B. Cates I Will Hold Award for Leadership at the Missouri Military Academy (MMA) Maroon and Gold Gala April 7, 2018, at the Chase Park Plaza in St. Louis.

Grass served as the 27th National Guard Bureau chief and as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from September 2012 to August 2016. In this capacity, he acted as a military advisor to the president, secretary of defense and National Security Council and was the Department of Defenses official channel of communications to governors and state adjutants general on all matters pertaining to the National Guard.

Gen. Grasss leadership helped to elevate the National Guard in its mission to serve both community and country, and for our MMA cadets, he is an outstanding role model, said MMA President Charles Tony McGeorge. By honoring him through this award, we hope to recognize the key service the men and women of the National Guard provide our nation and inspire our cadets to elevate their own aspirations of leadership.

During his career, Grass was responsible for ensuring that the more than 450,000 Army and Air National Guard personnel were accessible, capable and ready to protect the United States and to provide combat forces to the Army and Air Force. He retired September 1, 2016, after nearly 47 years as a soldier.

The 2015 recipient of MMAs I Will Hold Award, former U.S. Sen. Christopher Kit Bond introduced Grass at this years event.

Other special guests included Maj. Gen. Stephen L. and Katie Danner, U.S. Army, Missouri National Guard; Brig. Gen. David L. and Sandy Boyle, U.S. Army, Missouri National Guard Support; Lt. Col. T. Scott and Lisa Zimmerman, U.S. Army, current president of Missouri National Guard Association; and Dr. Joel D. Denney, executive director, Missouri National Guard Association. In addition, the following Missouri state leaders attended the event: Lt. Gov. Michael and Teresa Parson, Rep. Steve and Carolyn Hobbs, Sen. Jeannie Riddle and Sen. Wayne and Suzy Wallingford.

Established in 2014 in commemoration of MMAs 125th anniversary, the I Will Hold Award is named for Gen. Clifton B. Cates, a 1910 graduate of MMA. Cates led a distinguished military career and served through several major conflicts, including World War I, World War II and the Korean War. He eventually became the 19th commandant of the Marine Corps and is well known as the man who fought Congress to save the U.S. Marine Corps from possible extinction in 1951, which paved the way for the USMCs growth and prosperity.

The 129th Corps of Cadets is the student body of the Missouri Military Academy, a college preparatory boarding school with a military tradition located in Mexico, Missouri. MMAs 360 Education fosters academic excellence, character development and leadership training in a safe, structured environment for boys from around the world in grades 7 through postgraduate. For more information, visit MissouriMilitaryAcademy.org.Business Intelligence software allows companies to address both the speed and accuracy of decision making, and this guide provides an excellent introduction to these solutions.

MIBAR.net, a leading provider of enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and business intelligence software for companies in New York and throughout the Northeast, has announced the release of its newest guide for companies considering a business intelligence solution.

Out of the Spreadsheet and into the Cloud5 Key Considerations when Implementing a Modern BI Solution is a free whitepaper written by MIBAR designed to help companies get the advice they need when evaluating, selecting, and implementing business intelligence (BI) software.

As the speed of business increases, the only thing more dangerous to modern organizations than indecision is uninformed decision-making, said Derek Nachimow, Practice Manager at MIBAR. Business Intelligence software allows companies to address both the speed and accuracy of decision making, and this guide provides an excellent introduction to these solutions.

This new whitepaper discusses the following five considerations in business intelligence, and what they mean as you select and implement such a solution:

1. Computing environment: Adopt a cloud-based BI solution

2. User tools: Empower users with self-service and visualizations

3. Change management: Commit to a BI cultural change

4. Time to value: Realize some quick wins

5. The right choice: Find a solution that fits your needs

Those interested in receiving this 5 Key Considerations when Implementing a Modern BI Solution can download it here.

About MIBAR.net

MIBAR.net is an award winning provider of Software Consulting, IT Services and Business Solutions based out of New York City. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with a Gold ERP Competency and Silver CRM Competency, we deliver industry specific, Acumatica, NetSuite Microsoft Dynamics GP Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) based solutions to small and midsized businesses.

With a diverse and dedicated team of IT service providers and software consultants, we can provide our customers with a one stop shop for all of their business technology needs. Our services expand beyond ERP software implementation and CRM software implementation  they also include, project management, technical support, training, custom software development and computer networking services. To learn more about MIBAR.net, please visit MIBAR.net.The new trim system, which replaces the previous bungee system, features an elevator trim tab that reduces trim workload and system pressures. The Husky has a proud heritage; its reliable, safe and built with quality craftsmanship. It has a long-standing tradition for being the best-in-class and now its even better.

The Aviat Husky has learned some impressive new tricks. The rugged and reliable Husky is flying off of the 2018 production line with more than a dozen upgrade options. Aviat Aircraft unveils these enhancements including an entirely new trim system, factory extended landing gear, a removable rear seat, an enhanced VFR and IFR panel featuring the latest from Garmin plus creature comforts such as heated seat options at the Aviat display at Sun n Fun in Lakeland, Fla., April 10-15.

The Husky has a proud heritage; its reliable, safe and built with quality craftsmanship. It has a long-standing tradition for being the best-in-class and now its even better, said Stuart Horn, president, Aviat Aircraft, Inc. If youve been considering an upgrade or getting into a Husky for the first time, now is the time to buy. We listened to our customers and have been working hard to make enhancements that we know pilots and passengers will enjoy.

Improved Takeoff And Flight Performance

The new trim system, which replaces the previous bungee system, features an elevator trim tab that reduces trim workload and system pressures. This system increases control stick feedback and provides a more pleasing flight experience.

Get ready for even smoother landings and incredible takeoff performance with the factory extended landing gear option. It makes the aircraft more stable for landing on terrain or slopes and adds propeller clearance by extending the gear four inches, moving the tires forward two inches and making the gear 12 inches wider.

Best Seats In The House

Just pull a few quick-release pins and the rear seat and rear stick of the Husky can be removed. Add the stick cover and the aft cabin is transformed into more than 35 cubic feet of cargo space. Another great new feature is the adjustable front seat which now slides forward and aft, locking in greater comfort for pilots of any height, plus making easier ingress and egress for pilots, passengers and cargo.

For those cold days and chilly altitudes, new heated seat options for pilot and passenger make flying a joy even on those long trips. A new tufted diamond-stitch pattern and tufted chevron pattern upholstery in multiple colors adds style to the interior while new ANR headset control box holsters make for a cleaner and clutter-free environment.

Check Out The View  Of The Cockpit: VFR And IFR Avionics

While flying a Husky is a thing of beauty promising many scenic adventures, the new cockpit further enhances the view. In addition to the Standard VFR panel, the Husky now offers an Enhanced VFR and IFR panel featuring the 10.6 Garmin G500 TXi touchscreen display. With a crisp display, integrated engine analytics and a GTN 750 Nav/Comm/GPS, this is the most capable, attractive and intuitive flight deck ever found in a Husky. Theres even a new glove box and device storage cubby.

The Enhanced IFR panel also offers the SAM digital standby altimeter and attitude, making the Husky the most mission capable recreational machine in the world. It is also autopilot ready, with the Genesys Aerosystems S-TEC 3100 Digital Flight Control System. The S-TEC 3100 is a fully featured, attitude-based autopilot with workload-reducing and safety-enhancing capabilities that were previously unavailable on aftermarket autopilots.

A Sparkling Personality

Aviat Aircraft encourages and appreciates personal style. Each Husky can be customized with sound systems, floats, skis and now metallic paint. For the first time, Husky owners can enjoy this special paint treatment that adds stunning depth and esthetic appeal to set the airplane apart.

About Aviat Aircraft, Inc.

Crafted with pride in Afton, Wy., since 1941, Aviat Aircraft is the oldest continuously operating aircraft manufacturer in the United States. Whether working on a Husky, Pitts or Eagle kit airplane, each person at Aviat Aircraft possess a passion for perfection and pride of craftsmanship that results in the worlds finest aircraft, making Aviat aircraft the choice of pilots for decades. To learn more about Aviat Aircraft, Inc., visit http://www.AviatAircraft.com or call (307) 429-3195.The efficient implementation of Infor CloudSuite by The Copley Consulting Group will allow us to scale operations rapidly, said Don Spence, president and CEO, Ebb Therapeutics.

The Copley Consulting Group, an Infor Gold Level Channel Partner, announced a significant increase in FDA regulated customers and prospects in the 2017 fiscal year. Copley Consulting specializes in the implementation and validation process of Infor CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software for FDA regulated companies in North America. Copley Consulting is the sole channel partner for Infor specialized in FDA regulated industry and will be demonstrating the solution as part of its participation in the upcoming BIOMEDevice Boston Conference on April 18-19 at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center.

Key Facts



FDA regulated business for Copley saw a 65% growth in 2017.

FDA regulated/medical device represented 38% of overall business.

69% of current opportunities represented by FDA regulated.

Significant medical device wins over the past year include Femasys, as well as Ebb Therapeutics, which was implemented at an accelerated rate and at 35% under budget.

Having a specialization in ERP for medical device manufacturers has given us the opportunity to rapidly grow our business, said William Cary, vice president of sales at The Copley Consulting Group. Our proven implementation and FDA validation methodology, which we developed in-house, allows us to implement the solution faster while making sure our clients remain in full compliance with all FDA regulations.

Ebb Therapeutics, the medical device innovator of Ebb Insomnia Therapy, selected The Copley Consulting Group to facilitate and deploy Infors CloudSuite Industrial (SyteLine) solution in September of 2017. Ebb Therapeutics went live in February 2018, concluding a 5-month implementation and FDA validation process, which was months faster than the average ERP deployment for medical device companies.

The efficient implementation of Infor CloudSuite by The Copley Consulting Group will allow us to scale operations rapidly, said Don Spence, president and CEO, Ebb Therapeutics. With this FDA-validated enterprise system in place, we will be able to more effectively meet the clinical needs of patients and their treating physicians with our novel, drug-free treatment option for insomnia.

About The Copley Consulting Group

For nearly 30 years The Copley Consulting Group has delivered Infor SyteLine implementation success to more than 400 enterprises. From Fortune 1000 companies to start-up operations, Copley has provided education, training and technical services melded with a focus on Best Practices. As one of Infors premier Gold Level Channel Partners, Copleys team of dedicated professionals is committed to increasing the productivity and profitability of our customers.

http://www.copleycg.com

The Copley Consulting Group Media Inquiries:

Jason King

855-884-5305 ext. 297

jking(at)copleycg(dot)comReach Cyber and Harrisburg University students participate in sample partnership activities Providing our student body with direct access to state-of-the-art university resources as early as kindergarten is just another advantage of the Reach Cyber approach to education

Today, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology and Reach Cyber Charter School, a statewide STEM focused online public school, announced a partnership to provide STEM related university activities, programs and course offerings to Reach Cyber students in grades K-12. It is through this partnership that students from both institutions will have the opportunity to interact with fellow peers, expand their STEM knowledge, and explore additional course offerings. The partnership is the first of its kind for both institutions.

Reach Cyber is at the forefront of providing innovative learning opportunities to our students. Establishing this partnership with Harrisburg University means additional resources and even greater access to unique STEM education tools for our students who are hungry to learn, said Jane Swan, Principal of Reach Cyber Charter School. Providing our student body with direct access to state-of-the-art university resources as early as kindergarten is just another advantage of the Reach Cyber approach to education.

We are thrilled to partner with Reach Cyber Charter School in this exciting chapter for our university, said Eric D. Darr, Ph.D., President of Harrisburg University. With so much growth in recent years, Harrisburg University is certainly a hub of science and technology innovation, and we are excited to open our doors and invite the next generation of talent to join us.

Reach Cyber students in grades K-12 will have the option to participate in joint academic offerings with Harrisburg University students, including STEM curricula, activities, camps and more.

Eligible Reach Cyber high school students will have the opportunity to participate in advanced studies and earn college credits by enrolling in courses offered by Harrisburg University. The school partnership will also include an Early College Program, offered to Reach Cyber students who wish to attend college on a full-time basis prior to receiving a high school diploma.

With the assistance of Harrisburg University students, younger students at Reach Cyber can spend their summer months participating in Exploration Camps. The STEM-themed camps, including esports and GIS mapping using drones, will be held on the Harrisburg University campus and at other locations throughout the state. The Harrisburg and Philadelphia campuses will also host Science Nights to engage Reach Cyber students, parents and staff in the vast world of STEM.

The partnership also includes the installation of an Integrated Agriculture (Intag) Aquaponics System, which will be housed on the universitys Harrisburg campus. Students and staff at both institutions will have access to the aquaponics lab for academic lessons, projects, and field trips, and will also have access to college courses while in high school, trainings, and curriculum related to the system.

The Intag Aquaponics System will be connected to a WeatherSTEM system, which will track and aggregate data within the lab ecosystem via greenhouse, agriculture and other sensors. With access to this data, students and staff at both schools will be able to use real-time information to inform their research, class curriculum, and beyond.

The aquaponics labs use of WeatherSTEM builds upon an existing tie with Reach Cyber, as the virtual schools headquarters on East Park Drive in Harrisburg is already home to a WeatherSTEM weather station. Installed last year, the schools station measures and records weather conditions, including wind speed, rain fall, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, and the data is routinely used within science courses and clubs.

Benefits of this partnership will also extend to Reach Cyber staff, who will receive access to higher education and professional development opportunities through Harrisburg University, to include undergraduate and graduate degree programs.

Reach Cyber Charter School is now enrolling students in grades K-12 statewide for the upcoming 2018-19 school year. For more information about Reach Cyber or to begin the enrollment process, visit http://www.ReachCyberCharter.com.

About Reach Cyber Charter School

Reach Cyber Charter School is Pennsylvanias newest statewide, tuition-free, online public charter school for students in grades K-11. Reach Cyber, a Pennsylvania Connections Academy, provides students with the flexibility to learn from anywhere there is an Internet connection and with an innovative online school curriculum that meets rigorous state education standards. The combination of certified Pennsylvania-based teachers, an award-winning curriculum, engaging electives, technology tools, and social experiences provides a supportive online learning opportunity for students who want an individualized approach to education. Reach Cyber incorporates 21st century learning and STEM-enrichment opportunities, as well as offers flexible pacing options that allow all students to choose attendance based on a traditional calendar option, year-round option, or for high school students, an accelerated schedule. For more information, call 800-382-6010 or visit http://www.ReachCyberCharter.com.

About Harrisburg University of Science and Technology

Accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, Harrisburg University is a private non-profit university offering bachelor and graduate degree programs in science, technology, and math fields. For more information on the Universitys affordable demand-driven undergraduate and graduate programs, call 717-901-5146 or email, Connect@HarrisburgU.edu.The DER update of our test tools supports all of the requirements and specific DER tests in the SunSpec program." said Steve Kang, VP of Engineering at QualityLogic. These tools will significantly help the industry in testing their systems to ensure compliance to the certification requirements.

QualityLogic, a leading developer of interoperability test tools for the smart grid industry, today announced the release of a new DER Version of its IEEE 2030.5 certification and interoperability test tools. Version 3.1 shipped on March 30 and includes:

1. Certification tests for Distributed Energy Resources  e.g., Solar, Storage and EVs  and EV charge scheduling based on the most recent IEEE 2030.5 standard

2. Support for testing the Common Smart Inverter Profile IEEE 2030.5. The tools are designed to support the CA Rule 21 certification program developed by SunSpec.

IEEE 2030.5 is the internationally adopted standard for providing secure encrypted smart grid communications from energy management systems to end users and devices. It has been adopted as the default mandatory interface standard in California Interconnection Rule 21 which defines communications between utilities and "smart" inverters.

QualityLogic test tools are the industry standard for automating certification and interoperability of IEEE 2030.5 products. They are the first test tools to implement the CA Rule 21 CSIP Test Specification developed by the SunSpec Alliance. The SunSpec tests cover Communications basics (7 tests); Core Functions such as group management and metering (22 tests); Basic Function Tests such as inverter control tests (24 tests); Utility Aggregator tests such aggregator commissioning and event tests (16 tests); and Error Handling and Maintenance tests (8 tests).

The new QualityLogic IEEE 2030.5 Functional Test Suite V3 includes both Client and Server testers to validate conformance to CA Rule 21 CSIP. The user interface allows testers to select one or more of the test to be run, see the results in real-time, understand any conformance issues, and drill down into the detailed IEEE 2030.5 message exchanges.

"QualityLogic has been a key contributor to the SunSpec CA Rule 21 CSIP Test Specification, Common Smart Inverter Profile Implementation Guide for IEEE 2030.5, and the Interoperability Test Plan for IEEE 1547.1. The DER update of our test tools supports all of the requirements and specific DER tests in the SunSpec program." said Steve Kang, VP of Engineering at QualityLogic. These tools will significantly help the industry in testing their systems to ensure compliance to the certification requirements.

About QualityLogic

QualityLogic designs, develops, and sells smart grid test tools, training and support services, as well as advanced testing and consulting services. The Company has been delivering IEEE 2030.5 (SEP 2) conformance and interoperability test tools worldwide since 2012. QualityLogic also develops, supports, and maintains the official conformance and interoperability test tool for OpenADR compliant products, and offers test and certification program consulting and services for Smart Energy technologies and web and mobile applications. QualityLogic is an active participant in Smart Grid standards activities and conferences.Building Hope Today Team In my experience, very few offenders will admit to the crime, but I have yet to actually see an offender deny the grooming, said Danny Clark, Bonneville County Prosecutor. They will always tell you how much they took care of this child, how much they loved him/her.

Almost 700 people filled the Boise Centre on Monday night. According to national statistics, a crowd of that size would have nearly 150 adults that have been sexually abused at some point in their childhood.

Building Hope Today hosted its second annual Community Outreach Conference on Monday, April 9, 2018 in Boise. The conference brought awareness to the alarming prevalence of childhood sexual abuse  1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men  the need for better education of grooming tactics used by abusers and the signs that grooming is happening to a child. After a successful first conference in Idaho Falls, the Building Hope Today team was asked to bring the event to the Treasure Valley.

In my experience, very few offenders will admit to the crime, but I have yet to actually see an offender deny the grooming, said Danny Clark, Bonneville County Prosecutor. They will always tell you how much they took care of this child, how much they loved him/her.

One of Building Hope Todays main goals is to better educate legal experts and first responders on grooming tactics and to encourage using grooming as evidence to prosecute abusers. When the victim of sexual abuse is a child, that victim is manipulated, scared and confused, making it difficult to come forward and disclose that abuse is happening. This is why child sexual abuse often goes undetected until the child is an adult, if at all.

We are successfully prosecuting 6 percent of child sex abuse cases across this country. Why? Because the average time in which someone discloses this is over 20 years, explained Clark. These cases are not done with an audience, they are done in secret.

We dont want to consider that it might be in our families. It might be a trusted friend. It might be a trusted neighbor that is hurting our children, said Matt Morgan, co-founder of Building Hope Today. It is terrifying to consider that it just might be possible that we know someone close to us that is capable of doing this to an innocent child. Reality is, they are amongst us.

Another key topic addressed at the conference was focused on the ways we can help adults harmed by childhood abuse find a path of hope and healing for a better tomorrow.

Imagine with me for a moment what things could look like one generation from now. If we could achieve raising a generation without sexual abuse, the results will be profound, Morgan continued. There will be less addiction issues. There will be less homeless without hope. Mental health issues will lessen. We will not need to bury so many young kids to suicide. I can guarantee that with these young kids committing suicide, childhood sexual abuse is a large part of the problem.

Building Hope Today has a mission to create awareness of childhood sexual abuse, reveal its lasting effects and build a hope-filled tomorrow for survivors. The nonprofit has three charters within its education program to safeguard children today: a family track, a legal track and a victim track. To download resources and learn more about Building Hope Todays charters, visit http://www.buildinghopetoday.org/about-us.

If you or someone you know has experienced abuse and needs help, contact Building Hope Today for support and resources at http://www.buildinghopetoday.org.We continue to see record crowds at each Truck & Jeep Fest stop this year and with our thirteenth annual visit to Puyallup, were looking forward to an amazing show.

4 Wheel Parts, the global leader in off-road performance product sales and installation, is coming to Puyallup, Washington for Truck & Jeep Fest this weekend. The April 14-15 event features custom vehicles, factory direct pricing, product demonstrations and giveaways from the industrys leading experts to the Puyallup Fair and Events Center for two full days with the third stop on North Americas largest traveling off-road exhibition.

Admission to the Pacific Northwests preeminent off-road aftermarket show is free and with up to $500,000 of on-site inventory on hand, enthusiasts have the opportunity to purchase some of the industrys leading parts and accessories at some of the years lowest prices. With the Puyallup Fair & Events Centers convenient location, just forty minutes south of Seattle and twenty minutes southeast of Tacoma, enthusiasts from across the region are expected to attend the event.

Doors open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 14, and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday.

We continue to see record crowds at each Truck & Jeep Fest stop this year and with our thirteenth annual visit to Puyallup, were looking forward to an amazing show there, said 4 Wheel Parts Events and Advertising Director Brent Goegebuer. Truck & Jeep Fest is the one time a year where show attendees have the opportunity to interact with manufacturers representatives from many of the industrys top brands who are on hand to provide expertise regarding their products. Were excited for enthusiasts to be a part of this unique environment that combines wall-to-wall product and vehicle displays with great show-only deals on the latest parts and accessories for their own 4x4s and Jeeps.

Representatives from many leading manufacturers will be on hand to provide attendees their insight on the latest performance accessories including tires, wheels and suspension for trucks, Jeeps and SUVs. The weekend also features access to a host of promotional giveaways and factory-direct pricing along with the chance to win a $500 4 Wheel Parts shopping spree each day.

Puyallup is the third stop of the ten city 2018 Truck & Jeep Fest tour that also includes future events to be held in Dallas, Texas; Ontario, California; Houston, Texas; Denver, Colorado; Long Beach, California; Atlanta, Georgia and Orlando, Florida.

What: Puyallup Truck & Jeep Fest  Free Admission

Where: Puyallup Fair and Events Center

110 9th Ave SW Puyallup, WA 98371

When: Saturday, April 14, 2018 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. Sunday, April 15, 2018 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.

About 4 Wheel Parts

4 Wheel Parts is the global leader in truck, Jeep, SUV and off-road performance products. With 90 locations across the U.S. and Canada and growing, 4 Wheel Parts Service Centers install all the products they sell. Maintaining the nations largest inventory of off-road tires, wheels, suspension products and accessories, 4 Wheel Parts serves customers across the country and around the globe. Life is Better Off-Road. Visit them at 4wheelparts.com or call toll-free 877-474-4821Todd Schaefer, SVP of Sales and Marketing "I am thrilled to have Todd join the Novasyte team. I look forward to Todds leadership, sales rigor, and industry expertise as we navigate new markets." - Tim Gleeson

Novasyte LLC, the expert outsourcing solutions provider in the medical device, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical industries, announced the appointment of Todd Schaefer to Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Todd officially joined Novasyte on Monday, April 9, 2018 and is the first to hold this position.

Todd brings more than 20 years of experience in the medical device industry, holding numerous leadership roles. He held the title of National Vice President of Sales at Medtronic before leaving to spend 12 years at Philips Healthcare, most recently, as the Vice President of Specialty Markets in North America.

I am thrilled to have Todd join the Novasyte team, said Tim Gleeson, CEO and Chairman. I have known Todd for a long time and am thoroughly impressed with the successes he has brought to his previous roles. I look forward to Todds leadership, sales rigor, and industry expertise as we navigate new markets.

For many years, I have admired the innovative solutions Novasyte brings to the med-tech and pharma industries, Todd shared. I am excited to now be a part of Novasyte and work with such a talented team.

Todd will manage the sales, marketing, pharma, and recall departments within Novasyte. Additionally, he will be a part of the Senior Leadership Team where he will contribute to the development and execution of Novasytes strategic goals.

About Novasyte

Novasyte partners with medical device, diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies, offering innovative outsourced support teams and technologies. Our flexible model enables us to build, deploy and manage teams that expand and contract to meet our clients' customer-facing needs. Program success is tracked and measured with our real-time business intelligence analytics that provide our clients with critical insights into their most important resources  their people and their customers.Hollywood actors starring in Marvel Studios' superhero film series arrived in Korea on Wednesday to promote the latest film.

Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Tom Holland and Pom Klementieff attended a press event on Thursday and they are going to walk the red carpet for their latest film "Avengers: Infinity War," which is set for release here on April 25.

1st Lady of SBC & Event Hostess  Mrs. Tanishe Pitts  providing a free annual community health fair is a privilege for us. We look forward to having our local community participate. We make every effort to do God's work outside the church walls, this year's focus is on the body as a temple.

On Sunday, April 22, 2018 beginning at 9 am until 2:30 pm, the Second Baptist Church of Santa Ana, CA (SBC) will host the 4th Annual Orange County First Ladies Health Day.

As a faith-based initiative, the event will bring together the communities of greater Southern California and will be led by the First Ladies of several local churches.

The First Ladies Health Day will be held at SBCs  Santa Ana campus located at 4300 Westminster Ave. in Santa Ana, CA. 92703. Phone 714.741.0590 or visit http://sbc.family for additional information.

The event is nationally recognized, sponsored by Walgreens and produced by Danielle Ashley Group of Chicago. It was created to empower the First Ladies of the prospective churches to take a leadership role in promoting good health for the citizens of their communities.

The First Lady of SBC and Event Hostess  Mrs. Tanishe Pitts, says, Providing a free annual community health fair is a privilege for us at Second Baptist Church. We always look forward to having our local community participate in, and benefit from, the activities and information. We make every effort to do God's work outside the church walls, and this year our focus is on the body as a temple.

Open to the public and free of charge - the day will include screenings & testings for:



HIV

blood pressure

diabetes

weight related measuring  like BMI (body mass index)

vision test

mental health

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)

prostate awareness

All testing and screenings are made available confidentially, at no charge.

Over 400 participants are expected to visit the more than 25 vendors who have committed to attend.

There will be fun activities for kids and adults  including youth dancers, a self-defense demonstration and an Omega Psi Phi fraternity step show. Representation by Orange County Fire Authority and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is expected.

For More Information: Contact - SBC Church Office at 714.741.0590 or visit http://sbc.family

SBC is led by Senior Pastor Rev. Dr. Ivan S. Pitts. At 95 years, SBC is the oldest historically African-American church in Orange County, CA. Today, a fully multi-cultural, Christian church - it shares its two campus with a diverse group of Vietnamese, Hispanic and White congregations.

Sunday Service times are 8 am and 11:15 am in Santa Ana and 9:30 am at the Lake Forest Campus, 22600 Lambert St. Bldg. D., Ste.1006 in Lake Forest, CA 92630.

SBC is Sharing CHRIST | Building Believers | Caring for AllNeal Simon for U.S. Senate

Neal Simon, an unaffiliated candidate for Marylands U.S. Senate seat, today announced his campaign has received more than $625,000 in total receipts and has $465,000 cash on hand. Simon, who has never run for political office, announced his candidacy just eight weeks ago.

Im overwhelmed by the tremendous response from the people of Maryland who are sick and tired of the bickering and partisanship of career politicians that has stopped progress, said Simon. While they do nothing, sitting with their feet up and seemingly unaware or conveniently forgetful of their obligations and duty to our people and our great state, our country sits stagnant and Marylanders suffer. Marylanders want new, fresh leadership that is focused on bringing people together and helping them get ahead, not on manufacturing crises that divide our country.

Simons campaign has already raised more in its first quarter than any other U.S. Senate challenger campaign to lifelong politician Ben Cardin. Further, Simons fundraising is on par with Cardins first quarter fundraising during his previous election year. Cardin has not yet released his 2018 first quarter fundraising.

Simon, 49, is a husband and father to three children. He is well-known in the community as an entrepreneur, volunteer and donor to many great community causes. He currently serves as chairman of the Greater Washington Community Foundation. In 2016, Neal and his family were honored as Interfaith Works Humanitarians of the Year.

Since the fall of 2017, Simon has traveled across Maryland, meeting with Marylanders from all walks of life to hear their concerns and discuss key issues impacting the state and the nation.

Simon will face the Democratic and Republican candidates for Marylands U.S. Senate seat in November. If successful, he will replace Cardin, 74, who is currently running for his third Senate term after serving 20 years in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Simon is endorsed by Unite America, a national movement focused on recruiting, supporting and electing non-affiliated, moderate candidates to national and state-wide positions. In February of this year, Unite America unveiled the first national candidate slate of independents that includes Simon as well as U.S. Senate candidate of Missouri, Craig ODear, and gubernatorial candidates Terry Hayes of Maine, Greg Orman of Kansas, and Governor Bill Walker of Alaska.

For more information, visit http://www.nealsimon.com, and follow on Twitter: @nealjsimon.

Paid for by Neal Simon for U.S. Senate.Wes Sprinkle Through this partnership with xagent, we are offering tools and services that support agents ease of doing business with us, further demonstrating our ongoing commitment.

xagent, the single-entry market access solution for property and casualty (P&C) agents, announced today that CNA will be the first carrier to offer small business insurance policies through the xagent exchange. This new channel enables fast, automated access to rate, quote, and bind functionality for CNA Small Business policies.

CNA is solidly committed to the independent agency distribution channel, said Wes Sprinkle, Senior Vice President, Small Business, CNA. Through this partnership with xagent, we are offering tools and services that support agents ease of doing business with us, further demonstrating our ongoing commitment.

Small business agents will now be able to obtain a quick premium indication, quote, and bind a CNA Connect Business Owners policy (BOP) and Workers Compensation policy through xagent. The xagent portal connects directly to CNAs automated systems to eliminate manual processes, duplicate entry, and wasted time.

Were excited to work with an industry leader like CNA to bring new levels of access, choice, and compensation to the market, said Bryan Baird, xagents CEO, who has built successful wholesale, MGU, and MGA businesses for over 20 years.

About xagent:

xagent (http://www.xagent.com) was built by agents for agents, and delivers on the promise of a truly independent single-entry multi-quote exchange for standard and surplus lines business insurance in all 50 states.

About CNA:

CNA is the eighth largest commercial insurer in the United States. CNA provides a broad range of standard and specialized property and casualty insurance products and services for businesses and professionals in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia, backed by 120 years of experience and more than $45 billion of assets. For more information about CNA, visit our website at http://www.cna.comMay 22, 2018 (Gluckstadt, MS)  Taylor Auction & Realty, Inc. will be offering 25.88+- Acres in 4 Tracts at a live auction event taking place on Tuesday, May 22, 2018 @ 12 Noon. The sale will be conducted at the Embassy Suites Jackson North, Ridgeland, MS to facilitate the liquidation of properties of U.S. Bankruptcy VCR I, LLC Case No: 12-02009-EE.

The properties, located on Calhoun Parkway, Exit 112 off I-55 in Gluckstadt, Mississippi, will be sold in 4 tracts. Zoned C-2 according to the "Madison County Zoning Map, the parcels offer many potential uses for commercial operations. This bankruptcy auction provides a great opportunity for real estate developers and investors.

The tracts break down as follows:



Tract 1 - 5.8794 Acres (256,109.44 Sq. Ft.)

Tract 2 - 4.0503 Acres (176,430.05 Sq. Ft.)

Tract 3 - 7.8948 Acres (343.898.26 Sq. Ft.)

Tract 4 - 8.0604 Acres (351,112.25 Sq. Ft.)

For more information regarding the property, photos, and the complete terms of the sale, visit the Taylor Auction & Realty, Inc. website at: https://www.taylorauction.com/project/details/24401/

About Taylor Auction & Realty, Inc.

Taylor Auction & Realty, Inc. is a bonded and insured, full service auction, real estate and appraisal corporation. Our officers are in tune with the environment of the real estate and personal property market. As Certified Auctioneers, Benny and Ruthie are educated in forward thinking solutions and objectives to support their clients goals. #NAApro #tauctionrealty #taylorauction #auctionswork

For more information on this property, or to schedule an inspection appointment, please contact Benny Taylor at 662-226-2080 or 662-417-0397, or benny@taylorauction.com.Virginia Beach skies will once again be alive with the sight of flying vintage aircraft for the Military Aviation Museums Annual Warbirds Over the Beach Air Show, held Friday, May 18 through Sunday, May 20 at the Military Aviation Museum in Virginia Beach. The weekend boasts a real 1940s atmosphere with entertainers, re-enactor encampments, a military flea market, hangar dance and more!

The museums large collection of World War II aircraft fly all three days (weather permitting), featuring iconic American classics such as the P-51 Mustang and the Corsair, the British Spitfire and Hurricane, along with one of the newest additions to the museums collection, a German Messerschmidtt Bf-109. Airshow festivities take-off on Friday, with practice flights throughout the day from many of the aircraft participating in the show, along with re-enactor camp set up. Saturday and Sunday will feature a variety of entertainers to include Theresa Eaman, a nationally known jazz artist, and the New York based Americas Sweethearts. A military flea market will offer aviation-themed treasures and local vendors will be ready to serve up some tasty cuisine. A hangar dance headlines Saturday afternoon, complete with live big band music compliments of the Mark Michielsen Big Band.

For the full experience, guests can ride in an authentic World War II aircraft. The museums 1941 Boeing Stearman and 1989 Waco YMF-5 will be available for 15-minute rides. Rounding out the options for plane rides will be Bay Aviation, offering flights in their Fairchild PT-19. All rides are subject to weather conditions and prior reservations are strongly recommended. Rides may be booked by visiting http://www.VBAirshow.com.

Admission to the show also offers access to the rest of the Military Aviation Museum historical exhibits, such as their WWI and German Cottbus hangars, as well as a control tower from the first American fighter base in England in 1942, reconstructed using actual bricks from the original tower that was in operation at RAF Goxhill, during WWII.

Tickets are available online for a discounted rate of $27 per adult single-day admission and $14 youth single-day admission, now through April 30. Beginning May 1, tickets will be sold at the full price of $30 per adult single-day admission and $15 per youth single-day admission. For more information and to purchase tickets, call 757-721-7767 or visit http://www.VBairshow.com.

About the Military Aviation Museum:

A 501 (3) not-for-profit organization, the Military Aviation Museum is home to one of the worlds largest collections of First and Second World War, and Korean War era fighters, bombers and trainers. Each airframe has undergone painstaking restoration, using original components, whenever possible. Truly a living museum, aircraft are in restoration at facilities around the world. Besides the main Museum, the Virginia Beach complex features additional structures, including the 1934 Luftwaffe Hangar, originally from Cottbus, Germany, which now serves to house the Museums collection of WWII-vintage German aircraft. Additional hangar spaces include the WWI Hangar, in which resides the Museums genuine 1918 Curtiss JN-4D Jenny, besides other aircraft of the period. Visit http://www.MilitaryAviationMuseum.org for more information or call 757-721-7767.Rigaku NEX DE EDXRF Elemental Analyzer

Applied Rigaku Technologies, Inc. (ART) is pleased to announce its attendance at the 26th international Trade Fair for Laboratory Technology, Analysis and Biotechnology (Analytica 2018) taking place April 10-13 in Munich. The ART division is presenting its line of energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) analytical instrumentation at the Rigaku exhibit in Hall A1 Booth 330.

On display at the event is the Rigaku NEX DE analyzer, developed for heavy industrial applications and engineered to maximize flexibility and ease of use. It is equipped with a 60 kV, 12 W X-ray tube to deliver significant gains in elemental peak resolution and counting statistics, resulting in superior calibrations and precision for the most challenging measurements.

The system operates on the latest Rigaku QuantEZ analytical software, specifically designed for the Rigaku family of benchtop EDXRF analyzers. Running under the Microsoft Windows operating system, on a laptop or benchtop personal computer (PC), the software offers all the functions required for calibration and routine operation.

The ART division is also presenting the new Rigaku NEX LS Scanning Multi-element Process Coatings Analyzer. Featuring advanced third generation energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) technology, the NEX LS analyzer represents the next evolution of scanning multi-element process coatings analyzers for web or coil applications. The measuring head, mounted on a rigid beam is equipped with a linear traversing mechanism ensuring constant head-to-surface distance.

For on-line elemental analysis, the ART division offers the Rigaku NEX OL process elemental analyzer. The NEX OL enables real-time process elemental analysis for liquid stream applications. It is also designed to service web and coil applications, with the ability to analyze multi-element composition and/or coating thickness.

Rigaku's ART division specializes in X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometers employing energy dispersive detectors (EDXRF). More information about XRF as an X-ray spectrometric technique for elemental analysis of a wide variety of materials is available at http://www.rigakuedxrf.com.

About Rigaku

Since its inception in Japan in 1951, Rigaku has been at the forefront of analytical and industrial instrumentation technology. Rigaku and its subsidiaries form a global group focused on general-purpose analytical instrumentation and the life sciences. With hundreds of major innovations to their credit, Rigaku companies are world leaders in X-ray spectrometry, diffraction, and optics, as well as small molecule and protein crystallography and semiconductor metrology. Today, Rigaku employs over 1,400 people in the manufacturing and support of its analytical equipment, which is used in more than 90 countries around the world supporting research, development, and quality assurance activities. Throughout the world, Rigaku continuously promotes partnerships, dialog, and innovation within the global scientific and industrial communities.

For further information, contact:

Robert Bartek, President

Applied Rigaku Technologies, Inc.

tel: +1. 512-225-1796

info(at)RigakuEDXRF(dot)comVibe HCM, a leading provider of human capital management and employee engagement solutions, today announced that Susanne Bowen, a 15-year industry veteran, has joined the company as CEO.

"Susanne's deep experience leading customer focused, Software as a Service (SaaS) companies in our industry will be invaluable as we continue to build on Vibe HCM's success," said Vibe HCM's Executive Chair, Roberto Munoz. "Ms. Bowen's track record of innovation in the human capital industry will bring valuable perspective and strategic guidance as Vibe HCM extends our position and redefines both employer and employee expectations for their HR software."

"Vibe HCM is expanding beyond today's important core HR services to those that will enhance the connection between employers and their talented people. We have an incredible opportunity to build on a powerful foundation of client success with unique employee engagement technology," said Bowen. "I am honored and excited to join the Vibe HCM team as we continue to demonstrate market vision and leadership regarding the strategic role HCM platforms can fulfill connecting and engaging today's workforce."

Richard Maclean, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Frontier Capital, the growth equity firm that made an investment in Vibe HCM, said that adding a seasoned veteran like Ms. Bowen to the team is an important step in capitalizing on the opportunity ahead. "We founded our firm on the principles of "performance with humility" and believe in the importance of building a healthy culture where people genuinely love coming to work in an atmosphere of mutual respect and teamwork. We are pleased to support Susanne and the Vibe HCM team as they deliver valuable solutions for their customers who are seeking to build healthy cultures and differentiate through talent," he stated.

Susanne Bowen is a proven CEO, industry leader and board director in the software industry with over 30 years of sales and general management experience in technology companies. She has led four SaaS companies as CEO and has served on public, private and professional association boards, contributing expertise in market strategy and leading growth. Susanne has established herself as an accomplished leader in the enterprise SaaS industry and as an expert in the Human Capital Management (HCM) field. Prior to its successful sale to Vista Equity Partners, Susanne Bowen held the role of CEO leading PeopleAdmin's operations and guiding overall business strategy as this market leading provider of Talent Management Solutions to higher education drove market and product expansion. She served as the CEO of Webhire, Inc., a leading Talent Management provider assisting mid-size companies and healthcare organizations attract, hire and retain top talent. Prior to Webhire, Susanne held the position of Executive Vice President of Sales and Services for Workscape, Inc., where she was instrumental in driving customer results through innovative employee communication, performance management and benefits outsourcing solutions. Susanne Bowen earned her B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California, and attended the Wharton School, Aresty Institute of Executive Education, Directors' Consortium. She resides in Austin, Texas.

Ms. Bowen plans to continue the company's successful growth strategies: "I intend to build on Vibe HCM's demonstrated track record of creating exceptional products, excellent customer service, and unwavering focus on the customer," she added.

About Vibe HCM

Vibe HCM is redefining human capital management software expectations. We make it easy for companies to not only automate HR transactions but also connect, communicate and engage with all their employees. We partner with talent-driven businesses to elevate how they Work. Share. Applaud. Inspire. This relentless pursuit has led us to collaborate with some of the most innovative, recognized brands on the planet as we work together to set a new standard in the marketplace for HCM systems.

Relied on by over 1 million employees worldwide, the Vibe HCM platform delivers HR, Talent, Recruiting, Onboarding, Engagement, Analytics and Payroll. We have been doing this for over 20 years.

Vibe HCM - The HCM Engagement Platform, visit us on Twitter, Our Blog or Our Website.Drs. Steven White and Brad Haines Welcome Huntersville, N.C. for Cosmetic Dentistry With 40 years of collective experience, Drs. White and Haines proudly provide comprehensive general and cosmetic dentistry to their patients in a comfortable, modern practice.

Highly experienced general and cosmetic dentists, Drs. Steven White and Brad Haines of White and Haines Advanced Dentistry in Cornelius, North Carolina, expand their full-service cosmetic dentistry services to patients in Huntersville, with or without a referral. The team of dentists believes in the ability of cosmetic dentistry treatments to transform a patients smile, restoring esthetics, confidence and function in a wide range of oral conditions. Drs. White and Haines offer private cosmetic consultations to those seeking procedures like tooth-colored fillings, same-day dental crowns, Lumineers and teeth whitening in Huntersville, N.C., and surrounding areas.

Drs. White and Haines report that cosmetic dentistry offers a number of benefits to patients, including enhanced smile esthetics, improved oral function and increased self-confidence, factors important to many Americans today. A recent study conducted by the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry found that 99.7 percent of Americans feel an attractive smile is an important social asset to have, while 74 percent believe an unattractive smile impairs the opportunity for a successful career. To help patients achieve their desired smiles, the dentists offer a full complement of customized cosmetic services that include same-day dental crowns, dental implants, bridges, composite fillings, Lumineers, Invisalign and teeth whitening. Huntersville, N.C., patients can learn more about their candidacy for cosmetic procedures through a personalized consultation with one of the doctors.

With 40 years of collective experience, Drs. White and Haines proudly provide comprehensive general and cosmetic dentistry to their patients in a comfortable, modern practice. They strive to make receiving dental care easy, affordable and convenient by offering a wide range of cutting-edge dental treatments to serve the varying needs of their community. Incorporating the benefits of advanced technology into treatment, the dentists and their team are known for providing minimally invasive care and 5-star customer service in a patient-centered environment.

Residents interested in receiving cosmetic dentistry treatments like Lumineers, same-day dental crowns or teeth whitening in Huntersville, are invited to call Drs. White and Haines at 704-896-9535 to reserve a consultation, or visit their website at http://www.drswhiteandhaines.com for more on their services.

About the Practice

White and Haines Advanced Dentistry is a general dental practice offering personalized dental care to patients in Cornelius, NC. Dr. Steven White offers more than 20 years of experience in general and cosmetic dentistry. He has served as a mentor at the Nash Institute for Dental Learning as well as an instructor with the Advanced Aesthetics Program. Dr. Brad Haines was named a Top 40 Dentist Under 40 in Incisal Edge Magazine and brings more than a decade of experience in general and cosmetic dentistry. Drs. White and Haines strive to understand each patients unique set of goals to help them reach a healthy smile and they are members of the American Dental Association, Dental Organization for Conscious Sedation and Charlotte Dental Society, among many others. To learn more about Drs. White or Haines or the services they offer at their practice, please visit their website at http://www.drswhiteandhaines.com or call 704-896-9535 to schedule an appointment.Holocaust survivors find unparalleled care at Sheba It is both an honor and a duty to remember those who perished in the Holocaust: men, women and children of all ages, amongst them renowned doctors and nurses who tended to the ill throughout Europe.

To commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Thursday, April 12, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer is inviting all survivors involved in its program to a ceremony to honor survivors and victims of the Holocaust.

Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, offers a special program that caters specifically to the emotional and physical needs of Israels aging Holocaust survivors. The initiative is the only one of its kind in the country.

In addition to the ceremony, the executive staff of Sheba Medical Center, led by Director General Prof. Yitshak Kreiss, distributed 5,000 memorial candles to visitors entering the facility to mark the beginning of the solemn day, in memory of the 6 million Jews who perished during the Holocaust.

Prof. Dina Porat, head historian at Yad Vashem, will speak at the event, as will Mrs. Zahava Galal, a Holocaust survivor and longtime nurse in Shebas hypertension division. The ceremony will include an emotional musical interlude, and Shebas rabbi will say the Mourners Kaddish in commemoration of the six million Jewish lives that were stolen.

Sheba Medical Center provides a continuum of care, from prevention to rehabilitation, and its Holocaust survivor program is tailor-made to fit each patients individual needs. To date, more than 900 survivors have benefited from this unique offering.

Aging always takes a toll on the body, Holocaust survivors have needs that go beyond the natural issues that arise with the accumulation of years, including emotional, physical and psychological concerns that must be addressed.

To meet this rising need, retired occupational healthcare professional Hilda Rejwan and Sheba Medical Center formed a partnership to create the program. The caregivers employed by the program are dedicated only to working with Holocaust survivors and are carefully trained in the specific problems that many Holocaust survivors face. The caregivers role encompasses everything from bathing to general companionship.

When Sheba Medical Center was founded in 1948, it relied heavily upon donations from Israels early pioneers, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. The hospital views this program as a way to give back to the people who helped create it.

Since the program began, it has expanded and is now offered in the orthopedic ward, the internal medicine ward and the general surgery ward. Together, Rejwan and Sheba hope to expand it to many other departments.

Sheba Medical Center, Israels national hospital, carries both a public and moral commitment to the Holocaust survivors who live in our midst, said Director General of Sheba Medical Center Prof. Yitshak Kreiss. It is both an honor and a duty to remember those who perished in the Holocaust: men, women and children of all ages, amongst them renowned doctors and nurses who tended to the ill throughout Europe.

For aging Holocaust survivors who are suffering from long-held emotional and psychological issues, as well as physical issues, Shebas Holocaust survivor program has paved the way to a healthier and happier life.

This project is part of a larger Holocaust remembrance effort by Sheba Medical Center. For the first time in its 70-year history, 200 members of Sheba's diverse staff will embark on a life-changing trek in late May to various Nazi concentration camps in Poland, where the participants will light 900 candles in memory of the doctors and nurses who were murdered during the Holocaust.

About Sheba Medical Center

Born together with Israel in 1948, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer is the largest and most comprehensive medical center in the Middle East. Sheba is the only medical center in Israel that combines an acute care hospital and a rehabilitation hospital on one campus, and it is at the forefront of medical treatments, patient care, research and education. As a university teaching hospital affiliated with the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel-Aviv University, it welcomes people from all over the world indiscriminately.Tracy Armato, Chief Surrogate Liaison at Omega Family Global Each of my surrogacy experiences were different from one another, yet each brought me the fulfillment of enriching lives. My commitment to surrogacy is unsurpassed since it is my passion.

Tracy Armato, Chief Surrogate Liaison at Omega Family Global, which provides surrogacy solutions, is celebrating her fifteenth anniversary in the third-party fertility reproductive industry, having helped to create 3,200 new families to date. Since starting at Omega Family Global, Tracy, aka the Surrogate Whisperer, has become the go-to person for all its surrogates, and is available to them around the clock.

My passion for surrogacy started as a teenager. We had a family friend who was a surrogate for another family friend. It was then that the concept of carrying a child for another couple was introduced to me, and I just knew when the time was right for me, this was something I wanted to be part of, said Tracy, who has been a surrogate for international couples, domestic couples and same sex couples.

Prior to joining the team at Omega Family Global, Tracy built her experience and knowledge working with other third-party agencies. She was a former CEO of a surrogacy agency, and her professional background in surrogacy and egg donation has allowed Tracy to develop working relationships with IVF centers throughout California, other parts of the U.S., and worldwide. At Omega Family Global, she continues to manage thousands of successful surrogacy and egg donation cases from match to birth.

Each of my surrogacy experiences were different from one another, yet each brought me the fulfilment of enriching lives, concluded Tracy, who also has three children of her own. My commitment to surrogacy is unsurpassed, since it is my passion.

About Omega Family Global

Omega Family Global is a comprehensive Southern California agency that provides guidance, services, experience, and knowledge to intended parents, originating from any state or country. Omega Family Global exists to make new family creation as simple as it can be, while being legally protected. For more information, please call (619) 800-6505, or visit http://www.omegafamilyglobal.com.

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.North Korea's rubber-stamp parliament convened on Wednesday, weeks ahead of summits with South Korea and the U.S.

Leader Kim Jong-un has attended six out of the eight Supreme People's Assembly sessions that were held since he came to power but was absent this time. They are usually brief and wave through the current national agenda.

On Monday, Kim attended a Politburo meeting that mentioned the upcoming summits, so they were probably also on the agenda in the parliamentary meeting.

Drs. R. Douglas Campbell, Lawrence Addleson and David Landau, Cosmetic Dentists near El Cajon, Calif. Drs. Addleson, Campbell and Landau take a unique approach to cosmetic dentistry, one that creates natural-looking smiles through a combination of biology, esthetics and modern technology.

Drs. Lawrence Addleson, R. Douglas Campbell and David Landau, of The Art of Dentistry in San Diego, are pleased to help patients from El Cajon, California, determine if they are a good candidate for smile makeover treatments. Experts in improving both esthetics and function through comprehensive smile makeovers, the team of experienced dentists takes a unique approach to cosmetic dentistry and offers private consultations to discuss cosmetic treatment options. Smile makeover treatment plans may include one or more types of dental procedures, some of which include dental implants, orthodontics and dental crowns. El Cajon, California, patients seeking expert treatment from an experienced cosmetic dentist are encouraged to consult with The Art of Dentistry to determine if smile makeover treatments are ideal for their oral health needs and goals.

Smile makeovers are typically a collection of procedures designed to transform esthetics and function of the smile. Drs. Addleson, Campbell and Landau believe the creation of an exceptional smile requires the work of a master clinician and have spent a combined 86 years refining their craft of restoring health and confidence to the smiles of their patients. A study conducted by the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry found that 99.7 percent of Americans consider a smile an important social asset, and 74 percent of adults feel an unattractive smile can hinder a person's chances for career success. The dentists also understand the power a healthy, confident smile has over a patients quality of life.

Drs. Addleson, Campbell and Landau take a unique approach to cosmetic dentistry, one that creates natural-looking smiles through a combination of biology, esthetics and modern technology. The team offers several procedures that make up the smile makeover process, including porcelain veneers, orthodontics, dental implants and dental crowns. El Cajon, Calif., patients are invited to schedule a private cosmetic consultation with the team. If a smile makeover is deemed to be the best option for a patients situation, the dentists can craft a comprehensive treatment plan to achieve the desired results.

Those interested in consulting with a leading cosmetic dentist for smile makeover treatments like porcelain veneers or dental crowns in El Cajon, Calif., are encouraged to call The Art of Dentistry at 619-291-4325 to schedule an appointment. Additional information on the smile makeover process can be received at http://www.sandiegoartofdentistry.com.

About the Practice

The Art of Dentistry is a cosmetic dental practice offering patients customized dental care in San Diego, California. Applying a philosophy that considers the art, science and biology of a smile, Drs. Lawrence Addleson, R. Douglas Campbell and David Landau provide personalized care in a comfortable, family atmosphere. With combined experience of over 85 years, the Art of Dentistry team uses state-of-the-art technology and leading techniques to craft each healthy smile. To learn more about Drs. Addleson, Campbell and Landau or the services they offer, visit their website, http://www.sandiegoartofdentistry.com. To experience the Art of Dentistry difference, call 619-291-4325.Sir Fazle Hasan Abed accepts the LEGO Prize Niels Aage Skovbo At BRAC, we pride ourselves on taking an innovative approach to early childhood development and education, and we share the LEGO Foundations passion for learning through play.

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder and chairperson of BRAC, on Tuesday was awarded the prestigious 2018 LEGO Prize in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to improving the lives of children and their opportunities to play, learn and develop.

First awarded in 1985, the LEGO Foundation, a Danish corporate foundation, bestows the prize on individuals and organizations committed to the lives of children that champion learning through play. A cash award of $100,000, which will be used to advance BRACs support of children living with neuro-development disabilities (NDD) and their families, accompanies the prize.

It is an honor to receive the esteemed LEGO Prize. Every child deserves the opportunity to grow and develop. This generous financial contribution will support the holistic development of an underserved group of children in Bangladesh with special needs, said Sir Fazle Hasan Abed.

From the beginning of his career and the establishment of BRAC, Sir Fazle has viewed education as a crucial catalyst for change. His belief that education is about more than just schools and books is reflected in the constant innovation that is a cornerstone of BRACs approach. Since launching its education program in Bangladesh in 1985, more than 11 million children have graduated from BRACs primary and pre-primary schools.

In partnership with the LEGO Foundation, BRAC has set up more than 1,400 play-based early childhood development centers, known as Play Labs, across Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Uganda, where close to 40,000 children aged 1 to 5 years are enrolled. In the Play Labs, pre-school children have access to age-appropriate play materials, a play-based curriculum, and play spaces that ensure their holistic development. Play Labs also connect parents and caregivers with their children through regular play sessions while creating livelihood opportunities for young women from the community by training them as Play Leaders.

At BRAC, we pride ourselves on taking an innovative approach to early childhood development and education, and we share the LEGO Foundations passion for learning through play. Through our Play Lab program, we have seen first-hand the power it can have in a childs development, added Sir Fazle Hasan Abed.

Finnish educator and scholar Pasi Sahlberg, education expert and president of Reggio Children Carla Rinaldi, and the founder of Right To Play International, Johann Koss, are among the earlier winners of the LEGO Prize.

In addition to its early childhood development centers, BRAC operates some 10,000 pre-primary schools, 3,200 non-formal primary schools, 8,700 primary schools, and a university.

NOTES TO THE EDITOR:

For interview requests and additional information, please contact a member of our communications team below:

US

Emily Coppel, Communications Manager

Office: +1 (212) 808-5615

Email: emily(at)bracusa(dot)org

UK

Chris Lyne, Communications Manager

Office: +44 (0)203 434 3072

Email: chris(at)bracuk(dot)net

Bangladesh

Moutushi Kabir, Director of Communications and Outreach

Office: +8801708812616

Email: moutushi(dot)kabir(at)brac(dot)net

About BRAC

BRAC was ranked the #1 NGO in the world in 2016, 2017, and 2018, by NGO Advisor. The New York Times Nicholas Kristof calls BRAC the best aid group youve never heard of. Founded in Bangladesh in 1972, today BRAC is a global leader in developing cost-effective, evidence-based poverty innovations in extremely poor, conflict-prone and post-disaster settings. These include programs in education, healthcare, microfinance, girls empowerment, agriculture, human and legal rights, socially responsible businesses, a bank, a university, and the worlds largest mobile money platform. In 2016, BRAC employed more than 110,000 people in 11 countries, with a total global expenditure of more than $1 billion.

About BRAC USA

Based in New York, BRAC USA is the U.S. affiliate of BRAC, formed in 2006 to advance and support BRACs global mission to create opportunities for people to realize their potential. BRAC USA provides comprehensive support to BRAC around the world by raising awareness about its work and mobilizing resources to support programs.

About LEGO Foundation

The LEGO Foundation aims to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow; a mission that it shares with the LEGO Group. The LEGO Foundation is dedicated to building a future where learning through play empowers children to become creative, engaged, lifelong learners. Its work is about re-defining play and re-imagining learning. In collaboration with thought leaders, influencers, educators and parents the LEGO Foundation aims to equip, inspire and activate champions for play.We created this App to battle the degenerative effects of Alzheimers disease, helping patients remember past experiences and connect with their loved ones.

GreyMatters, an iPad app designed to catalyze positive interactions with people affected by Alzheimers disease or dementia, is the app category winner of Fast Companys 2018 World Changing Ideas Challenge.

Alzheimers disease and dementia affect more than 5 million people in the United States alone, according to the Alzheimer's Association. The illness is anticipated to reach epidemic proportions; by 2050, this number will grow to 14 million people.

Jennifer Rozbruch, the Founder and CEO of GreyMatters, thought of the idea while she was attending New York City's School of Visual Arts for her masters in design. At the time, her mother was acting as primary caretaker for her grandmother who had dementia.

"My mom was able to connect with her in ways that other people couldnt through music from her youth, telling stories from her early life, and looking through photos with her, Rozbruch says. I saw how much her mood and her manner changed when she was engaged in this way. She went from barely communicating and having no short-term memory to being able to sing the rest of a songs lyrics on her own."

Rozbruch decided to translate this experience into an app for her thesis project. After launching a minimum viable product, she enlisted the help of Dogtown Media, a prominent mobile healthcare app developer to scale the innovative technology for widespread usage. The end result was GreyMatters. In order to promote positive interactions, GreyMatters presents memories in a storybook format. The memories can range from music, pictures, video clips, and pop culture content from the past, but the goal remains the same: to establish a familiar context.

Familiarity can be difficult to establish with people afflicted with Alzheimers disease or dementia. But doing so can alleviate a monumental amount of stress. GreyMatters allows caregivers to arrange memories in a way that brings structure to interactions. "People have been using photo albums and scrapbooks for a long time," Rozbruch says. "This streamlines everything, and makes it easier for people to tap into memories with their loved ones."

Since debuting, GreyMatters has been downloaded more than 8,000 times. Rozbruch plans to introduce a sharing feature for family members to collaborate in the app regardless of where they are located. Winning Fast Companys 2018 World Changing Ideas Award will not only bring more exposure to GreyMatters, but also more awareness to the problems that Alzheimers disease and dementia pose.

Based in Venice Beach, California, Dogtown Media is a mobile app development firm that leverages disruptive design strategies and dynamic development to deliver unparalleled apps. Recently, the company was included on Inc. Magazines exclusive 500 List of Americas Fastest Growing Private Companies. The app technology studio has launched over 200 mobile apps and specializes in cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, mHealth, and the Internet of Things."By focusing on people with disabilities, we're really opening up the perspectives of our students, showcasing the capabilities of our network of nonprofit employers and what their employees can do via the appropriate technology." Charissa Garcia, program manager

SourceAmerica awarded Poolesville High School from Poolesville, Maryland, and the Cube XL Assembly team from Lawrence Technological University from Southfield, Michigan, as winners of the 2018 SourceAmerica Design Challenge competition April 11 for the outstanding workplace solutions they engineered to improve the jobs and lives of people with disabilities.

More than 120 teams of high school and college students in STEM programs across the country competed in the challenge. The three college and five high school finalists came together in Washington, D.C., this week to demonstrate how the devices they engineered benefited both employees with disabilities and their employers' bottom line.

Poolesville High created the Folder Filler, which enabled an employee with limited hand mobility to better manage paper work. Prior to the device, it took the employee 18 minutes to fill a folder with sheets of paper as part of his job as an account manager at NIH Project Search in Bethesda, Maryland. With the Folder Filler, he could complete the task in under one minute.

Lawrence Technological University had two teams in the finals. The first-place winners crafted the Cube XL Assembly, which nearly doubled the strut assembly output of employees in addition to improving user focus and fun. Employees with the use of only one hand can now assemble struts on the job at Services to Enhance Potential in Dearborn, Michigan.

Throughout the competition, students worked closely with employees with disabilities at nonprofit agencies in their communities. Their goal was to understand the challenges employees face and to design innovative assistive technology to make jobs more accessible, more efficient and more fun.

SourceAmerica, a national nonprofit agency with a mission to create employment opportunities for people with disabilities, hosts the Design Challenge annually. The contest is designed to bring greater awareness of the need and the impact of assistive technology in the workplace and encourage upcoming generations to develop an inclusive mindset.

SourceAmerica Design Challenge Program Manager Charissa Garcia said the competition is unique because it pairs STEM education with service learning.

"This really ties in with our engineering focus and creates empathy throughout the design process," Garcia said. "By focusing on people with disabilities, we're really opening up the perspectives of our students, showcasing the capabilities of our network of nonprofit employers and what their employees can do via the appropriate technology."

This year's winners also included:

High School Division:

SECOND PLACE: Triad High School from Troy, Illinois

Partner Organization: Challenge Unlimited http://www.cuinc.org

Project: Preparing Patches https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SZAvXIxsVA

Preparing Patches makes it easier to tear Tear-Aid Patches into groups of three. The patches then go into a repair kit for a wheelchair. The product reduces the time and increases efficiency for employees.

THIRD PLACE: The Catlin Gabel School from Portland, Oregon

Partner Organization: On The Move

Project: JonApp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7BFv5qU5dA

The JonApp supports people with cognitive and developmental disabilities by providing a structure to organize and complete tasks in the workplace. The app includes images, dictation and a very user-friendly interface.

FOURTH PLACE: STEM4Girls from Portland, Oregon

Partner Organization: Edwards Enterprises: http://edwardscenter.org

Project: Packy -- The Affordable Stretch Wrapping Machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qlRrgFNglc&feature=youtu.be

The Packy is a cost-effective and easily adjustable stretch wrapping device that enables employees to bundle a variety of boxes without the assistance of another staff member.

FIFTH PLACE: Copley High School from Copley, Ohio

Partner Organization: Weaver Industries http://www.weaverindustries.org

Project: Paper Stack Cutter (PSC) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkWUMoz9QqU&feature=youtu.be

The Paper Stack Cutter (PSC) opens packages of pamphlets for shredding to ensure all employees at Weaver Industries SecurShred can prepare the materials for shredding.

College Division:

SECOND PLACE: California State University, Los Angeles

Partner Organization: FVO Solutions, Inc. https://www.fvosolutions.com

Project: Interactive Virtual Assembly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6FE1BV2v-8&feature=youtu.be

The California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) team created an interactive, virtual reality job training program for employees with disabilities to support assembly processes.

Lawrence Technological University from Southfield, Michigan

Partner Organization: Services to Enhance Potential (STEP) http://stepcentral.org

Project: Clip Assembly Device https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9U4wbxxH9o

The Clip Assembly Device is a handheld device to help assemble a small metal pin into a plastic clip. It looks like a retractable ball point pen with a platform that contours the shape of the clip. A magnetic groove for the metal pin can be easily grasped to release the parts with the click of pen.

More information about the Design Challenge can be found here:

Competition: http://www.sourceamerica.org/design-challenge

Finalist stories: http://www.sourceamerica.org/news

SourceAmerica on Facebook and Twitter

About SourceAmerica

Established in 1974, SourceAmerica creates job opportunities for a skilled and dedicated workforce of people with significant disabilities. SourceAmerica is the vital link between the federal government and private sector organizations that procure the products and services provided by this exceptional workforce via a network of more than 800 community-based nonprofits. Headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, SourceAmerica provides its nonprofit agency network with business development, contract management, legislative and regulatory assistance, communications and public relations materials, information technology support, engineering and technical assistance, and extensive professional training needed for successful nonprofit management.Embassy Suites by Hilton Lompoc Central Coast Welcomes Christy Deeds The timing is critical to grow our leadership team to further support dedicated associates who for years have delivered outstanding service to our guests.

Embassy Suites by Hilton Lompoc Central Coast, owned and managed by Windsor Capital Group, Inc (also known as WCG Hotels), and General Manager Golda Mae Escalante, is proud to announce the hiring of Christy Deeds. She will serve dual roles as the new Human Resource Manager and Controller for the hotel. As the hotel completes its total makeover following over a year of renovations, the timing is critical to grow our leadership team to further support dedicated associates who for years have delivered outstanding service to our guests. said Escalante.

Ms. Deeds has worked for a number of years in the hospitality field and we are delighted to welcome her to our Lompoc team, Escalante continued. Most recently working in the insurance field, Deeds has numerous experiences within the Central Coast, including 12 years as General Manager with IHG Hotels, with Marriott International, and independent hotels as well. She also brings experience in both accounting and human resources with a proven record of accomplishment, which will be invaluable in helping meet the hotels goals and objectives. Escalante also said I am confident that Christy will be an excellent match for this position and a strong asset to provide our associates the motivation and appreciation they need to continue delivering the high-level of service and focus our guests expect.

In her role as Human Resource Manager, her focus on associate retention, hiring, and Embassy Suites-branded training will be paramount. Her years of experience in hotel accounting responsibilities will also prove invaluable.

The newly renovated all-suite hotel features a relaxing interior courtyard waterfall and two-room suites that include upgraded wired and wireless internet, digital check-in with room selection, and Digital Key that are exclusively available through the industry-leading Hilton Honors application. All two-room suites feature a separate living area, private bedroom, two 43 inch HD LCD TVs, in-room safes, a wet bar fitted with a microwave, mini-fridge, sink, and a selection of gourmet coffee and teas from The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Only 8 miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base and less than an hour from Santa Barbara, the hotel is the only full-service, all-suite hotel in Lompoc and is close to Santa Maria, Solvang, Buellton, and many other popular Central Coast cities and sites. For reservations or more information, visit http://www.embassysuiteslompoc.com or call 805-735-8311.

About Embassy Suites by Hilton

Embassy Suites by Hilton, one of Hiltons 14 market-leading brands, is dedicated to delivering what matters most to travelers. The full service, upscale brand offers two-room suites, complimentary made-to-order breakfast and a nightly two-hour reception with complimentary drinks and snacks. Both leisure and business travelers looking for a relaxed, yet sophisticated experience will feel right at home with brand-standard amenities like inviting atriums, complimentary 24-hour business centers, and fitness centers. Embassy Suites by Hilton has 238 hotels with 48 in the pipeline. Hilton Honors members who book directly through preferred Hilton channels have access to instant benefits, including a flexible payment slider that allows members to choose nearly any combination of Points and money to book a stay, an exclusive member discount that cant be booked anywhere except the brands website.

About Windsor Capital Group

Windsor Capital Group is a hotel management and development company that owns and operates full-service, focused, upscale branded hotels throughout the United States, with the Embassy Suites and Marriott flags. It also runs Windsor Management Services, a top-performing hotel management company that customizes hotel management services to meet the needs of the properties. With more than 30 years of experience to call on, Windsor Management Services is known for unmatched results for its owners and unparalleled service for its guests delivered with a personal connection.

For more information, please visit http://www.windsormanagementservices.com or http://www.wcghotels.com. Connect with us via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. For more information, contact Paul Francisco, Chief Operating Officer, at 310-566-1100.Profits Run, Inc. This government investigation into Facebook will have a minimal impact on the company. Facebook will do just fine. There will be other investigations regarding Facebook down the road, but Facebook will continue to expand and will continue to grow.

Bill Poulos, CEO of Profits Run, Inc., today announced his prediction on what will happen with Facebook in light of the current government investigation and media hype, This government investigation into Facebook will have a minimal impact on the company. Facebook will do just fine. There will be other investigations regarding Facebook down the road, but Facebook will continue to expand and will continue to grow. The Facebook stock, in the long run, could be a good long-term hold. Bill Poulos made his forecast as he watched Mark Zuckerberg testify before U.S Congress for the second day in a row. Zuckerbergs congressional testimony was requested as a result of the Cambridge Analytica data breach. Poulos went on to reveal, If anything, when these types of things occur, the market may sell off stock for the company thats involved in the investigation. When people sell off their stock in a company that is getting bad press, it usually provides a great buying opportunity.

Wednesday April 11, 2018, Bloomberg live streamed day two of Mark Zuckerbergs congressional hearing on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal. As the four-hour video streamed, Bloomberg had a live feed of Facebooks stock movement. Bloomberg showed that Facebook opened at $165.36 and during the hearing fell to $163.33 before a recovering to $167.63 as the 4-hour testimony ended.

Poulos continued, The latest investigation by the government into Facebooks activities is going to be something that well see more and more of as the government struggles to keep up with rapidly evolving technology.

Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. The companys mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Facebook is a social media platform that allows users to connect with other users and advertisers to market to users.

Cambridge Analytica, a British company, was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in London. The company is a political consulting firm. They combine data mining, brokerage, analysis, and marketing in regard to helping politicians during elections.

The Cambridge Analytica data breach was the collection of Facebook users personal information. Cambridge Analytica started collecting said data in 2014. Politicians then hired Cambridge Analytica to utilize the Facebook user personal data to sway voter opinion. Up to 87 million Facebook users had their data shared (according to Facebook).

Poulos added, The security of data is important. Of course, the government should do whatever they can to ensure the security of this data.

Bill Poulos is president and co-founder of Profits Run Inc. He is a published author, humanitarian, and retired automotive executive. Bill holds an MBA with a major in finance, as well as a bachelors degree in engineering. Bill currently resides in Michigan with his wife of over 48 years. He and his wife have three, now grow, children.

About Profits Run, Inc.

In 2001, Profits Run, Inc. was founded by father and son pair, Bill and Greg Poulos. The company received its namesake from an admired saying amid traders, Cut your losses and let your profits run. Profits Runs mission is to educate individuals on a simpler and safer way to invest.Walker Sands, an integrated PR and digital marketing agency for B2B tech and professional services companies, has made the top 15 in Crains 2018 Best Places to Work in Chicago list. This survey and awards program is designed to identify, recognize and honor the 100 best companies to work for in Chicago. Walker Sands was selected for this list because of its strong company culture and employees overwhelming support for the organization.

As we continue to grow and expand, our culture is something that we always want to be able to keep at our core, says Ellen Hanson, COO at Walker Sands. Were constantly looking for ways to make sure that our employees voices are heard, are engaged in their work and community, and that everyone, from the top down, is embracing our core values of learn, support, do. Im very proud of the culture that weve created and the people who have worked to embody these values.

Determining the Best Places to Work in Chicago involved a two-step process. The first step consisted of evaluating each participating companys workplace policies, practices, and demographics (worth approximately 25 percent of the total evaluation). The second part consisted of employee surveys aimed at assessing the experiences and attitudes of individual employees with respect to their workplace (worth approximately 75 percent of the total evaluation). The combined scores determined the best companies and the final ranking.

In addition to this recognition from Crains, Walker Sands has built a reputation as a top workplace. The company was named to Inc. Magazines Best Workplaces 2017, and honored as B2B Marketing Awards Agency of the Year finalist in 2017, as well as shortlisted as a finalist for the Holmes Reports 2018 North America Tech PR Agency of the Year award. Walker Sands also frequently contributes to the Chicago community through events like sponsoring Techweek Gives and partnering with After School Matters. Employees have become mentors with After School Matters and in summer 2017 Walker Sands had two After School Matters participants as interns. Walker Sands also offers pro-bono services to local organizations like ChiTech Academy and Edovo.

Were very excited to be named to the Best Places to Work in Chicago list, says Mike Santoro, president of Walker Sands. Its such an honor to know that our employees believe in our company just as much we believe in them. Over the past year, weve gone through a significant growth period which has been a rollercoaster, and to be able to say that our people wholeheartedly support what were doing and how were doing it, is incredible validation to the organization we have built and the unique, hard-working people we have to fill it.

For more information on Walker Sands and the Best Places to Work in Chicago program, visit http://www.walkersands.com and http://www.bestplacestoworkCHI.com.

About Walker Sands

Walker Sands is a public relations and digital marketing agency for business-to-business technology companies. With an integrated approach to creative services, Walker Sands helps clients build brand awareness, enhance credibility and drive new business. Walker Sands is a five-time Inc. 5000 honoree and regular recipient of some of the industrys most prestigious awards from organizations including Entrepreneur, Holmes Report and Hermes Creative. Walker Sands was founded in 2001 and has offices in Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle. To learn more, visit walkersands.com or walkersandsdigital.com.James Beaver, Branch Manager, Houston, Texas We are pleased to welcome James and his team back to the Envoy family. He is a 17-year veteran in the industry and brings a strong leadership style and excellent customer centric attitude, said Jim Hopkins, Senior Vice President.

Headquartered in Houston, TX, Envoy Mortgage, committed to providing the best mortgage experience to all its borrowers nationwide, announced today the addition of James Beaver as the new branch manager for its Houston, Texas branch. The branch is located at 5100 Westheimer, Suite 500, Houston, Texas 77056

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Starting his career as a loan originator in 2001, shortly after graduating with a BBA from the University of Texas, James quickly rose to the responsibilities of a branch manager. James worked with Envoy Mortgage previously from 2009 through 2016 as a branch manager. His return to Envoy is a strong testament to the tools, support and most importantly the culture that the company provides. James return to Envoy brings his entire team to the company.

Earlier in his career, James quickly realized that working in the mortgage industry provided him with an opportunity to do something he loves. Help others. Whether assisting a family buying their first home, forever home, second home, or a home that will do for now, James and his team aim to provide a world class experience and sound advice. He is a talented sales leader who has continually reached top producer stature for he and his team, year over year.

We are pleased to welcome James and his team back to the Envoy family. He is a 17-year veteran in the industry and brings a strong leadership style and excellent customer centric attitude, said Jim Hopkins, Senior Vice President. I am looking forward to working side by side with James as we continue to grow the Envoy brand in Houston. 

For Envoy career opportunities in Texas visit our website or call Jim Hopkins, Senior Vice President, 713.993.2212.

About Envoy Mortgage:

Founded in 1997, Envoy Mortgage is an independently owned, full-service mortgage lender headquartered in Houston, TX. As a Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie approved seller/servicer, Envoy branches offer a full menu of loan products with locations across the U.S. Licensed in 49 states, Envoy branches provide outstanding customer service by offering a full menu of loan products with the tools, expertise and technology needed to support all functions of the mortgage process. For more information, visit http://www.EnvoyMortgage.com. Envoy Mortgage, Ltd. NMLS #6666.the breadth of talent we see within our community is infinite and this year we are excited to induct a brand new cohort full of talent, amazing tech, and hard working entrepreneurs into our program

AngelHack, leaders in innovation and the hackathon space, announce Global Hackathon Series: Seamless Technology; a 50-city competition that challenges developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to code for impact through their nonprofit arm, Code For A Cause, and innovate with emerging and trending technology. The annual series will tap into AngelHacks community of 150,000+ and act as a funnel into their accelerator program that has seen three exits and a rising valuation over the past four years. Tech giants AWS, Nairobi Tech Week, HubSpot, Agora, Microsoft, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative have already joined the series to get their technology into the hands of the top one percent of tech talent from around the world.

The Global Series will start in flagship city, Silicon Valley on April 28th, 2018, before expanding out to Latin America, Asia Pacific, The Middle East, Africa, South Asia, North America, Europe, and Mainland China: https://angelhack.com/global-hackathon-series/#events.

We are expecting to bring out more developers than ever before and have projected a five percent bump in the female attendance. Over the past six years by introducing hackathons, virtual competitions, accelerator programs, and various developer initiatives to over 100 cities Ive seen some of the best rapidly-prototyped ideas the developer ecosystem has to offer. Through the HACKcelerator and other accelerator programs, Ive had the pleasure of working closely with these entrepreneurs and watched as their startups turned into reality; proving that the projects dont stop when the hackathon does, said AngelHack Founder & CEO, Sabeen Ali. Their Managing Director of Accelerators, Adi Abili added, the breadth of talent we see within our community is infinite and this year we are excited to induct a brand new cohort full of talent, amazing tech, and hard working entrepreneurs into our program.

The grand prize winning project from each hackathon will receive an exclusive invite into AngelHacks 12-week virtual program, the HACKcelerator, where they will receive mentorship, online and in-person resources, and the chance to pitch to a sea of investors in Silicon Valley at the end of the program. To encourage social impact projects, The HACKcelerator will also be accepting up to five Code For A Cause Impact Award projects to support social good technology in local communities, globally.

For more information on AngelHack and their Global Hackathon Series, contact Kelsey at (415) 754-0261 or email her at kelsey(at)angelhack(dot)com.

About AngelHack:

For over six years, AngelHack has been the leaders in innovation; introducing hackathons, virtual competitions, accelerator programs, Meetups, and various developer initiatives to over 100 cities around the globe. AngelHack, a female-owned, female-majority company, encourages their diverse community of 150,000+ developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to become holistic and well-rounded hackers. AngelHack believes in providing entrepreneurs with emerging technologies and the best mentors, resulting in the creation of seamless technology both inside and out of the Silicon Valley bubble. Through their nonprofit arm, Code For A Cause, AngelHack challenges their community to build code that positively impacts the world and promotes an inclusive environment. Find out more at http://www.angelhack.com.Smiles for Everyone! Many patients had not seen a dentist in over a decade.

Monarch Dental has set a new record for the Smiles for Everyone Foundations Days of Giving. With providers and support staff from multiple Monarch Dental offices in the Dallas-Fort Worth area volunteering their time this past Saturday, the team was able to provide free dental care for 108 low-income individuals in the community. The cleanings, fillings, extractions and various other services received that day amounted to over $120,000 in donated dentistry.

Smiles for Everyone Foundation and Monarch Dental partnered with local non-profit organizations to refer individuals to the free dental day. Many patients came from SafeHaven, a support organization for victims of domestic violence; Harvesting International, a local ministry and food pantry; and Alliance for Children, a non-profit with the mission to protect children from abuse.

One patient was so grateful for the services they received that they wanted to thank the providers in any way they could. With only $30 in their pocket, they told the doctor that it was all they could give, but insisted that the provider take it. The money was then donated to the Smiles for Everyone Foundation to help provide further dental care for additional people in need.

Patients checking out expressed their overwhelming gratitude for the services provided. Many had not seen a dentist in over a decade and were so thankful to hear about the event in their community.

Smiles for Everyone Foundation has three more Days of Giving planned for Texas in 2018. They will be in San Antonio, Houston, and Austin in the months of June, July, and September, respectively. Please check back on http://www.smilesforeveryone.org for more information. The next Day of Giving will be in honor of our veterans. On April 21, the Foundation will welcome veterans and their dependents in the Olympia, WA, community to receive dental care free of charge at the Bright Now! Dental office on Martin Way. Please visit the Smiles for Everyone Foundations website for more information.

About Monarch Dental

Monarch Dental provides general dentistry, childrens dentistry and specialty care services such as orthodontics, oral surgery, periodontics and endodontics at 89 locations throughout Texas, Arkansas and Utah. Monarch Dental affiliated practices make it easy and affordable for individuals and families to get the dental care they need with convenient locations, extended hours and same-day appointments. The Monarch Dental mission is to create healthier smiles by making dental visits easy and enjoyable. Learn more at http://www.monarchdental.com.

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About the Smiles For Everyone Foundation

The Smiles for Everyone Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the mission of delivering smiles for everyone by providing free dental care for those in need, both at home in the U.S. and around the world. Since 2011, the Smiles for Everyone Foundation has delivered over 14,000 smiles and $12 million in donated dentistry. The foundation currently supports programs which provide free dental care to those in need in Cambodia, Ghana, Laos, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Thailand and the United States. For more information or to make a donation, visit http://www.smilesforeveryone.org .

Contacts:

Monarch Dental

Jody Martin

PR(at)smilebrands(dot)com

714.427.1299

Smiles for Everyone Foundation

Crystal Strait

crystal.strait(at)smilesforeveryone(dot)org

714.824.5037The 28-year-old killer, surnamed Cho, initially told police that Go, who was mired in a financial dispute with relatives, promised to pay him W1 billion if he handed over information about the lawsuit, but only gave him W10 million, and he killed Go in a fit of rage (US$1=W1,068).

The man, surnamed Kwak, was found guilty of hiring a man to kill Go Woo-Seok in the office of Go's lawyer in southern Seoul in August last year.

The Seoul Central District Court on Wednesday sentenced a man to life in prison for hiring a hit man to kill the husband of actress Song Sun-mi last year.

But prosecutors discovered that Cho had been paid by Kwak, Go's cousin, who had used a bogus contract in November 2016 to make it look as if he had inherited a W68 billion piece of real estate from his rich grandfather who lived in Japan. The grandfather found out and asked Go to call the police.

Kwak then turned to Cho, whom he had met at a Japanese language school, and promised him W2 billion to kill Go and offered to send him to the Philippines to lie low. Kwak also promised to take care of Cho's mother and sister and pay his legal fees.

Cho accepted and approached Go pretending to have information about the lawsuit but killed him during their appointment at the law firm.

The court said Kwak was motivated by the desire to "gain exclusive possession of his grandfather's wealth and remains unrepentant." It added the surviving family "are suffering indelible mental anguish."

Song, who watched the trial, wept when the sentence was pronounced. She left without making any comments to the press.

Kwak set expressionless when his sentence was read. Cho, the hit man, was sentenced to 22 years in prison last month.

SkySwitch, provider of the ultimate white label platform for hosted telecom resellers, today announced a partnership with Telo for enhanced Caller Name lookup capabilities that yield an industry-leading accuracy rate of over 93%.

The ability to see a callers name as part of the Caller ID when you receive a phone call is a service provided by your phone company that is often taken for granted and, just as often, misunderstood. This service (sometimes referred to as CNAM) requires that your phone company query a caller name database to associate a name with the callers phone number every time that you receive a call. Errors in caller name are a frequent cause of customer complaints for providers of hosted PBX and UCaaS service.

According to SkySwitch CTO, Blake McKeeby, the problem stems from the fact that there is no single database that contains the caller name information for all U.S. callers. Because phone companies publish and query caller name information from disparate aggregators, inconsistencies often arise. This means that the caller name you see when you answer a call can be different from the caller name that is seen by someone else. The confusion is compounded by the fact that some cell phone carriers do not publish caller name information at all, resulting in generic names such as wireless caller being shown as part of the Caller ID.

The inconsistency of caller name results has been a pain point for SkySwitch resellers, who must field calls from end users that often dont understand the inner workings of the telephone network. So we decided to try to make things better. And, after extensive research we found a shared desire with Telo, creator of the well-known OpenCNAM data service continued McKeeby.

Brent James, COO for Telo, states that the collaboration emerged through discussions centered around customer feedback and a shared vision for quality of service. SkySwitch was among a small group of specifically selected carriers to work with Telo to implement improvements to OpenCNAM. By virtue of this product development relationship, OpenCNAM Plus has been able to achieve an increase of its already industry-leading caller name match-rate from 87% to over 93% domestically.

The improvements in CNAM results have translated to a demonstrable decrease in customer service calls for SkySwitch resellers. According to Guy Fawkes, CEO of Telepath Communications in Tampa, Florida, SkySwitch listened to my feedback when I informed them about the caller name complaints I was receiving. Ever since they put changes into effect, the complaints have stopped. This is just another example of how SkySwitch helps me to run my business more efficiently.

About Telo

Telo pioneered the first developer friendly telephony data API in 2011 with the launch of OpenCNAM. Since then, Telo has expanded its developer-focused product line to include EveryoneAPI, a highly advanced reverse phone append API, and released subsequent versions of OpenCNAM including the current third-generation version, which extends Caller ID coverage to over 200 countries globally. Telo is committed to leading data services innovation for telephone carriers and enterprise businesses worldwide. For more information on OpenCNAM please visit: https://www.opencnam.com

About TELEPATH Communications

TELEPATH Communications is a Florida based Voice Over IP and Managed Service Provider that has been in operation since 2004. With expertise in all aspects of networking and technology management, TELEPATH Communications serves as a trusted technology advisor to small and medium sized businesses in the Tampa metro area. For more information, visit: http://www.calltelepath.com

About SkySwitch

SkySwitch (http://www.skyswitch.com) is a US-based, next-generation communications platform provider. SkySwitch delivers a comprehensive white label communication service and back office support to our resellers. This enables our resellers - communication, telecom, IT service providers - to offer a branded, cloud-based, Hosted PBX Service and unified communications and collaboration services (UCCaaS) to their subscribers without the requirement to invest in or manage the platform from which the service is offered. The SkySwitch platform includes not only the infrastructure to deliver feature rich voice, video, text and fax communications, but also all operational and business support systems necessary for a reseller to experience rapid growth and profitability. This includes billing, carrier services, DID porting services, and regulatory compliance.Martello, a provider of network performance management solutions for real-time communications, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV) listed shell company Newcastle Energy Corporation to complete a reverse takeover transaction that would see Martello become a Technology Issuer on the exchange, subject to regulatory approval. The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and TSXV are Canadas leading public equity markets. The largest source of liquidity and pricing for Canadian securities, the exchanges are also home to more than 3,154 listed issuers. Technology companies on the TSX and TSXV raised $1.6 billion in equity capital in 2017(1).

Martello intends to go public in 2018, accessing public venture capital to fuel an aggressive growth strategy, says John Proctor, Martellos President and CEO. Todays announcement creates a path to the public market, via a TSXV listed shell company. Its a key step in Martellos drive to deliver value to shareholders as a global-leading player in IT performance management.

Founded in 2009, Martello merged with SD-WAN player Elfiq Networks in January 2018, to create a market leader in the performance management of real-time services such as unified communications (UC) on cloud and enterprise networks. In 2017, Martello led 18 Ottawa companies with the No. 48 spot on Canadas PROFIT 500. OBJ recently named the company one of four Ottawa tech companies to watch in 2018, suggesting that Martello may be Ottawas biggest tech story of 2018.

Access to public capital is an excellent growth vehicle for companies such as Martello, said Martello Co-Chair Terry Matthews, Chairman of current investor Wesley Clover International. This step towards a public listing exposes Martello to global investors who are attracted to the thriving Canadian technology sector. Co-Chair Bruce Linton, former CEO of Martello agrees noting that Martello is poised for significant growth and ready for public capital. We look forward to offering the public equity markets the opportunity to invest in another Canadian technology leader.

Having invested in Martello in its last two rounds of funding, we have confidence in their ability to execute, said Scott Gardner, Chief Investment Officer of Torrent Capital. Martello has a strong leadership team with a proven track record and a solid growth strategy. We look forward to a continued relationship with Martello.

About Martello

Martellos solutions manage and optimize the performance of real-time services on cloud and enterprise networks. Our solutions, which include network performance management software and SD-WAN technology, allow over the top (OTT) service providers and enterprises around the world to deliver better service quality and a reliable user experience. Designed for real-time communications such as voice and video, Martellos solutions detect, identify and address network performance problems BEFORE service quality is impacted. For information, visit: http://www.martellotech.com

1. Source: tsx.com ([https://www.tsx.com/ebooks/en/2018-guide-to-listing/)Edison Partners, the growth equity investment firm, has been named LendIt Fintechs Top Fintech Equity Investor. The award is given to the venture capital or private equity firm that has invested in a range of successful fintech companies and contributed to the industry's vision. Edison was selected among five notable peers by more than 30 industry experts who judged based on innovation, emerging talent and performance.

We are honored to receive this award. It reflects our differentiated approach to investing in and creating value for exceptional fintech businesses, said Chris Sugden, Managing Partner of Edison Partners. With roughly $300 million invested in fintech since 2002, and just under $50 million over the last 12 months, we are proud of the reputation our team has developed with entrepreneurs as domain experts and operators that can help them accelerate and scale growth. Recent Edison Fintech investments include Clearpool, MoneyLion, Solovis and GAN Integrity.

Edison led two rounds of financing in MoneyLion totaling $27 million since December 2016. MoneyLion the digital personal finance platform has grown more than 100 percent since Edisons initial investment. MoneyLion was also recognized at LendIts awards celebration on Tuesday evening as Top Emerging Technology Company.

Edison Partners has financed and guided more than 200 private companies, including 40 fintech companies. Noteworthy fintech exits include EdgeTrade, FolioDynamix, GAIN Capital, Liberty Tax, OptionsCity and Princeton Financial. Edisons active growth equity investments include: Axial, BFS Capital, Billtrust, Clearpool Group, ComplySci, GAN Integrity, Predata, Scivantage, Solovis and TraderTools.

About LendIt Fintech

LendIt Fintech is a recognized global internet finance industry leader, founded in New York in 2013. Its aim is to gather industry elites to discuss and explore latest trends in the development of international financial technology. LendIt Fintech has become the largest event in financial services innovation as it hosts three annual conferences, LendIt Fintech USA, LendIt Fintech Europe, and Lang Di Fintech, and dozens of complementary online and in-person industry events. LendIt also owns and operates one of the worlds leading industry educational channels, Lend Academy.

About Edison Partners

For more than 30 years, Edison Partners has been helping CEOs and their executive teams navigate the entrepreneurial journey and build successful companies. Through the unique combination of growth capital and the Edison Edge platform, consisting of operating leverage, the Edison Director Network, and executive education, Edison employs a holistic approach to accelerating growth and creating value for businesses ($5 to $20 million in revenue) in fintech, healthcare IT and enterprise solution sectors. Edison investment objectives also include: buyouts, recapitalizations, spinouts and secondary stock purchases. Edisons active portfolio has created aggregate market value exceeding $10 billion. Its long-tenured team based in Princeton, NJ manages more than $1 billion in assets throughout the eastern United States.

Media Inquiries:

Archie Group

Jeanne Yurman

Media Relations

jeanne(at)archiegroup(dot)com

917-656-3333VIA Ambassador and Expert world map You come here thinking you know a lot about Italian wine and Italian grapes and then you realise you know actually nothing! I would recommend it to anybody who would like to know more about Italian wine but you really need to study for it! (Sue Tolson, newly-certified VIA Italian Wine Expert)

After touring also two American cities (New York City, San Francisco) and 3 Chinese cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu), the Vinitaly International Academy Certification Course came back to where it all started in 2015: Verona. This time from April 6th to 10th, VIA welcomed 58 wine professionals at wine2digital, Vinitaly Internationals headquarters located in Veronafieres PalaExpo. Coming from more than 20 different countries, from the Czech Republic to Mexico, students were all brought together by the same passion for Italian wine.

The 2018 Verona edition saw 23 new Italian Wine Ambassadors and 2 new Italian Wine Experts entering the Vinitaly International Academy family. Based on the average score of the class, with 2 students scoring 91 and 92 (out of 100) for the first time, the outcomes of this last VIA Certification Course were the best so far. This Verona edition represented the perfect opportunity to gain extensive knowledge on the Italian wine world, directly from Italy; scheduled in the lead-up to Vinitaly, the Verona edition gives candidates the chance to fully immerse themselves in Italian wine and the business around it. With the level of the candidates getting higher and higher edition after edition, VIA can now count on the support of 11 Italian Wine Experts and 151 Italian Wine Ambassadors. Sue Tolson, Managing Editor at WineSofa and one of the two newly-proclaimed IWEs commented, Really great experience! You come here thinking you know quite a lot about Italian wine and Italian grapes and then you realize you know actually nothing. Ian really opens your eyes on all the fascinating varieties of the country and gives you really interesting anecdotes to help you remember, so its really good fun. I would really recommend it to anybody who would like to know more about Italian wine, but I also have to say is that you really need to study for it!

With 590 wine grape varieties officially recognised (one quarter of the worlds total) and over 500 wine regions, the Italian wine world is, without any doubt, difficult to explore. Even for the Masters of Wine or the Masters Sommelier, the Italian wine scenario can remain some kind of a riddle. Created to fulfil the ever-growing demand for specific knowledge and training on Italian wines, VIA Certification Courses function as the perfect answer for wine professionals interested in learning how to speak of Italian wine in a unified, organised, and thorough manner. Jenna Briscoe, general manager at Cafe Medina, Vancouver, and one of the 23 new IWAs certified on April 10th, stated that the course just proves how the journey into learning about Italian wine is unending: You have to be systematic if you intend to just deal with the pure volume of information, with respect to studying, one should start breaking down grape by grape and then drawing the parallels between DOC and regions in Italy.

Under the leadership of its Managing Director Stevie Kim, VIA is an educational initiative aimed at simplifying the vast diversity of Italian grape varietals by explaining, divulging and broadcasting the characteristics of Italian wine around the world. Conducted by Dr. Ian DAgata (Scientific Director), the VIA Certification Course is a five-day journey through the vast subject of Italian grape varieties and wines. In the first four days, students focus on theory and tastings. On the fifth and last day, they take a challenging written exam to become Italian Wine Ambassadors. In order to become Italian Wine Experts (the higher certification) participants who score at least 90/100 in the written test also have to take an oral exam consisting of a blind tasting. Held in English, what VIA offers is a touring course with editions in the US, China, Italy and Hong Kong.

The next edition of the Certification Course will be held in Hong Kong, in November 2018. Registrations are open and additional information can be requested at via@vinitalytour.com.

Full list of the 23 newly-certified IWAs and 2 IWEs from the 2018 Verona Edition

Italian Wine Expert:

Marcia J. Hamm, DipWSET, Store Manager at Hicks Fine Wines

Sue Tolson, Wine writer, translator and educator. Managing Editor at WineSofa

Italian Wine Ambassadors:



Stephanie Gut, Sommelier at The French Cafe

Srdan Lisac, Wine Educator at Biotechnicon

Andrea Eby, Educator/Buyer/Assistant Manager at Banville & Jones Wine Co.

Xiaolei Duan, General Manager at The Wine Story Co Dalian

Julie Garton, Wine Writer

Tommasella Perniciaro, DipWSET, Wine Educator and Director at The Good Wine Habit

Matthew Landry, General Manager/Sommelier at Stable House Bistro

Jenna Briscoe, General Manager at Cafe Medina

Christopher Poon, Senior Consultant, Information Risk Management at Manulife

Erik Klein, Export Manager at Freelancer

Yanhua Yang (Jack), Wine Educator at COFCO W&W International LTD CO

Faye MacLachlan, Regional Sales MGR Grape Brands/Sommelier at Langdon Hall

Fangqian Tang, Export Manager at S.A.R.L Pont Vin

Guido Walter, Owner/CEO at Walter & Soon - Weinhandlungen, Fritz Muller

Pedro Balesteros Torres MW, Master of Wine

Niklas Bergqvist, Wine Educator, Sommelier and Wine Writer at Restaurangakademien, Vinkallaren Grappe

David Furka, Wine Journalist at Vinoport Online Wine Magazine

Samuel Melanson, Wine Educator at The Sommelier Factory

George Caflish, Wine Educator and Attorney at Texas Wine School

Blagoy Kuzmanski, Sommelier at 67 Pall Mall

Bruno Vianna, President at Brazilian Association of Sommeliers - Campinas

Jay Hutchinson, Wine Advisor at Soutirage

Bin Zhang, Commercial Manager at Accenture

About

The grand Vinitaly 2018 will be held from April 15th to the 18th. Every year, Vinitaly counts more than 4,000 exhibitors on a 100,000+ square meter area and 130,000 visitors from over 140 different countries with more than 30,000 top international buyers. The premier event to Vinitaly, OperaWine (https://www.vinitalyinternational.com/?page_id=646) Finest Italian Wines: 100 Great Producers, which will be held on the 14th of April, one day prior to Vinitaly will unite international wine professionals in the heart of Verona, offering them the unique opportunity to discover and taste the wines of the 100 Best Italian Producers, as selected by Wine Spectator. Since 1998 Vinitaly International travels to several countries such as Russia, China, USA and Hong Kong thanks to its strategic arm abroad, Vinitaly International. In February 2014 Vinitaly International launched an educational project, the Vinitaly International Academy (VIA) with the aim of divulging and broadcasting the excellence and diversity of Italian wine around the globe. VIA this year launched the third edition of its Certification Course and today counts 151 Italian Wine Ambassadors and 11 Italian Wine Experts.Talish Aghababayan This year, volunteer Talish Aghababayan will receive the Jane Falk Award for distinguished volunteer service.

The Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (MABVI) will honor its many volunteers at its annual Champions of Volunteer Service brunch on April 15th, 2018 at The Westin Copley Place. In addition to honoring its volunteer force of 400, MABVI will present several special awards to recognize exceptional volunteers in two categories.

Jane Falk Award

Each year, MABVI presents the Jane Falk Award for Distinguished Volunteer Service to one volunteer who has creatively and generously participated in fostering the ideals, services, and mission of the organization. Jane Falk was a volunteer and former President of the Board of Directors for MAB Community Services (MABVIs parent organization). She believed strongly that individuals should seek the opportunity to give back to their communities, and that those volunteers should be recognized for their efforts. The award was established in 1983 in Janes memory. This year, volunteer Talish Aghababayan will receive the Jane Falk Award for distinguished volunteer service.

About Talish Aghababayan

Aghababayan has been an active volunteer with MABVI for the last two-and-a-half years, helping a local family. She is a recent graduate of the New England College of Optometry (NECO), and is currently an optometrist practicing at Dr. Magalhaes & Associates in their Attleboro & Dartmouth locations. She is passionate about low vision, and her clinical experiences include working with Dr. Richard Jamara at the New England Eye Center, and at the Carroll Center for the Blind. Currently, she is advocating for more optometrists to incorporate primary low vision care into their practices, and to educate patients about local resources and groups, including MABVI.

Talish has been an unwavering supporter and participant in the MABVI Volunteer Program, said Kyle Robidoux, MABVI Director of Volunteer & Support Group Services. What makes her unique is that she is volunteering with an entire family who is blindboth parents and two children. Her compassion is off the charts. She is also a NECO graduate, and just began work as a full-time optometrist.

Volunteer Community Partner Award

The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS) will receive the Volunteer Community Partner Award. This award is given to an organization or business which has shown a dedicated commitment to growing and strengthening MABVIs One-to-One Volunteer Program. Over the past four years, MCPHS has been an active partner in recruiting students to become volunteers. Additionally, MCPHS regularly invites MABVI to participate in their Student Volunteer Fairs, and earlier this year a team of optometrists attended MABVI volunteer training to learn more about blindness-related issues.

MCPHS University is honored to receive the Volunteer Community Partner Award from MABVI, said Michael Ratty, Director of Communications at MCPHS. Recruiting volunteers for the associations internship fair in September, the university had an important opportunity to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to student engagement and volunteerism in the community. The association has played an important role in the field for more than a century, and we look forward to partnering on more outreach initiatives.

About MCPHS

Founded in 1823 as the second-oldest pharmacy college in the U.S. and now a state-of-the-art university for health sciences, MCPHS University (formerly known as Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences) is focused on shaping healthcare and bettering the field one generation at a time. The universitys flagship campus is located in the heart of Bostons Longwood Medical and Academic Area, a world-class center for healthcare innovation. With additional campuses in Worcester and Manchester, NH, MCPHS enrolls more than 7,000 students in more than 100 graduate, professional, and undergraduate health sciences programs. In addition to physical campuses, MCPHS offers online degree programs designed to empower healthcare professionals.

The Gibney Family Foundation

MABVI will also recognize The Gibney Family Foundation, a long-time supporter of the organization. The Gibney Family Foundation (TGFF) puts the grantee at the center of its philanthropy partnerships. TGFF has an individualized approach, working one-on-one with grantees to build sustainable solutions through non-profit programs and the people they serve. They tap the knowledge and perspective of grantees and community members to build trust, and help shape more effective solutions.

These special people and organizations, along with all of our dedicated volunteers, provide people who are visually impaired a way to help themselves and become more independent, said Barbara Salisbury, CEO of Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. We can all take an example from their selfless work to improve the lives of so many.

About MABVI

Massachusetts Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (MABVI) is the oldest social service organization in the country that serves adults and elders who are blind or visually impaired. They provide vision rehabilitation services and partner with community and medical groups to create high-impact, cost-effective services.Cybereason CEO Lior Div (L) and CyberArk CEO Udi Mokady received the prestigious Asper Award from Brandeis President Ron Liebowitz Receiving the Asper Award from Brandeis is humbling because hundreds of talented executives in Massachusetts bring a profound entrepreneurial focus and spirit to their companies and our economy. Our mission at Cybereason is to make cyber crime unprofitable for hackers," said Lior Div.

Cybereason, creators of the leading cybersecurity data analytics platform including endpoint detection and response, next-generation antivirus, and active monitoring services, announced that Lior Div, the companys co-founder and CEO, received Brandeis Universitys 2018 Asper Award for Global Entrepreneurship at an event on Tuesday, April 10 celebrating the Israel-Massachusetts economic relationship. Udi Mokady, Chairman and CEO of CyberArk, also received an Asper Award.

Being named the recipient of the Asper Award from Brandeis University is very humbling because of the hundreds of talented executives in Massachusetts and the broader New England region that bring a profound entrepreneurial focus and spirit to their companies and our economy. At Cybereason, we are experiencing record growth, but I am not satisfied because of the advantage adversaries still have over the vast majority of companies. Our singular mission at Cybereason is to make cyber crime unprofitable by placing the bullseye squarely on the backs of hackers," said Div.

Cybereason is one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world having recently announced a record 2017 with an increase in revenues of more than 140 percent and an increase in new customers of more than 200 percent.

The Asper Center for Global Entrepreneurship at Brandeis International Business School is pleased to award Lior Div and Udi Mokady with this year's Asper Award for Global Entrepreneurship. The center's mission is to promote and accelerate entrepreneurship across cultures and borders. Liors and Udis leadership as pioneers on cybersecurity issues, and their companies' tremendous growth, exemplifies the spirit of our center and the strength of the Israel-Massachusetts economic relationship, said Ben Gomes-Casseres, Director of Brandeis International Business Schools Asper Center for Global Entrepreneurship.

About Brandeis International Business School

Brandeis IBS, located in the Boston suburb of Waltham, Massachusetts ,welcomes students from throughout the United States and around the world into its innovative and diverse community. The current student body includes representatives from over 40 countries.

About Cybereason

Cybereason, creators of the leading cybersecurity data analytics platform, gives the advantage back to the defender through a completely new approach to cybersecurity. Cybereason offers endpoint detection and response (EDR), next-generation antivirus (NGAV), and active monitoring services, all powered by its proprietary data analytics platform. The Cybereason suite of products provides unmatched visibility, increases analyst efficiency and effectiveness, and reduces security risk. Cybereason is privately held, having raised $189 million from top-tier VCs, and is headquartered in Boston, with offices in London, Tel Aviv and Tokyo.

Learn more: https://www.cybereason.com/

Follow us: Blog | Twitter | Facebook

Media Contact

Bill Keeler

Director, Public Relations

Cybereason

bill.keeler@cybereason.com

(929) 259-3261Its estimated that 50 million people worldwide are living with dementia, the disease represents a progressive decline in mental ability severe enough to interfere with daily life. In the United States, someone is diagnosed with dementia every three seconds. While theres no cure or preventive treatment to help people avoid dementia, education is key for loved ones, caregivers and others who may interact with someone who is diagnosed with dementia. Because of the need for more understanding of this condition, Senior Helpers of Franklin will offer the Virtual Dementia Tour at 42 locations throughout Middle Tennessee to further demonstrate its commitment to those they serve. TwelveStone Health Partners is sponsoring the tour through a partnership with Senior Helpers.

Senior Helpers of Franklin is part of a national organization created to provide the highest level of professional care and service to seniors. Services range from basic monitoring to around the clock home care assistance, both in the family's home as well as in facilities when more care is needed.

The Virtual Dementia Tour, created by a nonprofit called Second Wind Dreams, is an innovative and scientifically proven training used to build a personal understanding of dementia. Qualified instructors guide participants as they try to perform common daily tasks while equipped with patented devices that alter their senses to mimic the way a person living with dementia sees the world. This allows caregivers to experience firsthand the physical and cognitive challenges facing those with dementia by walking in their shoes. This experience results in greater empathy and better person-centered care. Through Second Wind Dreams, the Virtual Dementia Tour has been made available in more than 20 countries to more than two million people. In fact, several medical schools use the Virtual Dementia Tour to show students what living with dementia can do to the senses.

Senior Helpers of Franklin licenses the Virtual Dementia Tour from Second Wind Dreams and is the first mobile tour sharing this experience across middle Tennessee.

We are excited that TwelveStone sees the value in the Virtual Dementia Tour and wants to be a part of it, said Debbie Miller, Founder of Senior Helpers of Franklin. The tour itself is an eye-opener to those who participate and it creates compassion and empathy for those who live with dementia. Its a pleasure to partner with another post-acute healthcare leader in the community to impact so many people in our area.

The Virtual Dementia Tour is such an innovative concept, TwelveStone chief executive officer Shane Reeves says. We are glad to join forces with Senior Helpers of Franklin to help caregivers understand dementia better. We increase the quality of care for dementia patients through a concierge medication management program through our MEDIpack service. With a chronic disease, its very common for a person to misuse their prescription medication accidentally. Perhaps they forget a dose or take too many doses. With MEDIpack, we can alleviate that concern because our medications are presorted and labeled clearly to ensure the patients have what they need, when they need it.

The Virtual Dementia Tour begins on Tuesday, April 17, at NHC Place at the Trace in Bellevue. The tour is available from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and is open to the public. Other dates and schedules can be found at http://www.12stonehealth.com.

ABOUT TWELVESTONE HEALTH PARTNERS

TwelveStone Health Partners incorporates the objective of glorifying God into its mission by delivering a higher level of service to partners and patients. As an organization, TwelveStone supports the transition from acute to post-acute care environments and the transition from sickness to health. This is the third evolution in the companys history, beginning in 1980 when Richard Reeves and Ronald Powell created a single retail pharmacy location then called Reeves Powell Saveway Drug Store. In 1994 Shane Reeves and Rick Sain launched Reeves-Sain and over 20 years grew the organization to include seven companies. In 2015 Reeves Sain Drug Store, Inc., a retail pharmacy, and its specialty pharmacy, EntrustRx were sold to Freds, Inc. In 2016 Shane Reeves launched TwelveStone Health Partners with the objective of continuing to pursue the highest professional, business and community goals set forth by its founders.KWizCom, a leading developer of SharePoint Forms & Workflows, as well as multiple other top-notch SharePoint web parts, add-ons and apps for Office 365 (SharePoint Online) designed to expand Microsoft SharePoint, is pleased to announce that Systems 21 LLC is the newest member of KWizComs Global Partner Network.

Systems 21 LLC is the reseller of major software brands. The company was established in 1995 in Russia and since then they have been working in the software distribution, support and development area. Systems 21 LLC has extensive knowledge in the software market and their business focuses on technology professionals.

Weve partnered with KWizCom because Russian market has a great demand in data visualization tools, SharePoint applications and different types of components, most of them are on the list of programs created by KWizCom, advises Mikhail Kapyrin, the CEO of the Systems 21 LLC.

Systems 21 LLC and KWizCom will work closely to deliver Microsoft SharePoint based turn-key add-ons and apps for SharePoint Online for joint customers. It is with great pleasure that we announce the partnership with our new Russian partner Systems 21. We look forward to a mutually beneficial business relationship, adds Nimrod Geva, the Product Group Manager of KWizCom Corporation.

Partnership with KWizCom facilitates reaching new customers with innovative powerful products achieving increased sales and profits for both companies. KWizCom Partners benefit from joint activities, a special discount program arrangement with sales incentives, training, licenses to KWizCom add-ons for internal use, technical support, sales and marketing support, and much more. KWizCom has a standing partnership invitation and any interested parties are encouraged to inquire further by visiting the KWizCom website.

About Systems 21 LLC

Prodmag.ru is created on the basis of Systems 21 LLC. Since 1995 Systems 21 LLC has been working in software distribution, support and development area. The company is reselling major software brands and has extensive knowledge in this market, and their business focuses on technology professionals. Systems 21 has served the IT community for over two decades and has supplied thousands of products to software developers, designers, IT managers, network administrators, DBAs and corporate buyers.

About KWizCom Corporation

Since 2005, KWizCom has provided innovative solutions and services to make SharePoint even better for over 7,000 companies worldwide. KWizCom is a leading provider of SharePoint Forms, Mobile, Wiki solutions, and over 60 other add-ons for SharePoint on-premises and apps for Office 365.

KWizCom is a Gold Certified Microsoft Partner is headquartered in Toronto, Canada to find out more about the company visit http://www.kwizcom.com.

Follow KWizCom on Twitter @KWizCom

Join KWizCom on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/company/kwizcom

Become a fan of KWizCom on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/KWizCom

Contact a KWizCom Account Specialist at +1-905-370-0333/+1-855-KWIZCOM or info(at)kwizcom(dot)comSolo 401k Book - Adam Bergman I wanted to make sure that the people who purchased my Solo 401(k) plan book would have updated information, especially in light of the revised 2018 contribution limits and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

The Solo 401(k) Plan in a Nutshell, written by Adam Bergman, has now been updated and is available on Amazon & Kindle. The Solo 401(k) Plan book has been updated to include updated solo 401(k) plan contribution figures, changes in the law due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, as well as including a section on using a Solo 401(k) plan to purchase cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. I wanted to make sure that the people who purchased my Solo 401(k) plan book would have updated information, especially in light of the revised 2018 contribution limits and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, stated Adam Bergman.

According to Mr. Bergman, who is self-employed or has a small business with no employees should learn more about the enormous tax and retirement benefits of establishing a Solo 401(k) Plan.

Adam Bergman, IRA Financial Group partner, has written seven books the topic of self-directed retirement plans, including, How to use Retirement Funds to Purchase Cryptocurrencies, The Checkbook IRA, Going Solo, Turning Retirement Funds into Start-Up Dreams, Solo 401(k) Plan in a Nutshell, Self-Directed IRA in a Nutshell, and in God We Trust in Roth We Prosper.

Mr. Bergman is a member of the Forbes Finance Council and is a frequent contributor to Forbes.com on various topics involving retirement accounts, including the taxation of cryptocurrencies. Mr. Bergman has been quoted in over one hundred major news publications on the area of self-directed retirement plans. Mr. Bergman has been interviewed on CBS News and has been quoted in Businessweek, CNN Money, Forbes, Dallas Morning News, Daily Business Review, Law.com, San Francisco Chronicle, U.S. Tax News, the Miami Herald, Bloomberg, Arizona Republic, San Antonio Express, Findlaw, Smart Money, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, Morningstar, and American Lawyer on the area of retirement tax planning.

Prior to joining the IRA Financial Group, LLC, Mr. Bergman worked as a tax and ERISA attorney at White & Case LLP, one of the largest and most prestigious law firms in the world. IRA Financial Group is the market's leading provider of self-directed retirement plans. IRA Financial Group has helped thousands of clients take back control over their retirement funds while gaining the ability to invest in almost any type of investment, including real estate without custodian consent.

The IRA Financial Trust Company, a self-directed IRA custodian, was founded by Adam Bergman, a partner with the IRA Financial Group. Mr. Bergman is a leading expert on the taxation of retirement funds and has authored multiples articles on how to use a self-directed IRA to buy cryptocurrencies.

To learn more about the IRA Financial Group please visit our website at http://www.irafinancialgroup.com or call 800-472-0646.With the opportunity for seniors to live with dignity in their own apartments and receive the assistance they need, we are proud to say we continue to set the standard for assisted living in the Moline area. Past News Releases RSS Groundbreaking Ceremony Held for...

Construction to Begin for New...

Heritage Woods of McHenry...

Heritage Woods of Moline is celebrating 10 years of service to area seniors and their families with an anniversary party from 4:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 12.

The celebration will take place at the community, which is located at 5500 46th Ave. Dr. in Moline.

Guest speakers will include Moline Mayor Stephanie Acri and Quad City Chamber of Commerce Interim CEO Kristin Glass.

Since the beginning, Heritage Woods of Moline has established itself as the premier affordable assisted lifestyle community, said Rod Burkett, CEO of Gardant Management Solutions, the company that manages the community. With the opportunity for seniors to live with dignity in their own apartments and receive the assistance they need, we are proud to say we continue to set the standard for assisted living in the Moline area.

Over the past decade, Heritage Woods has spent more than 5 million minutes touching lives and providing love, compassion and care for residents. The community has served more than 500 families since it opened its doors.

Heritage Woods also has a significant impact on the local economy and employs nearly 50 people.

Much of the success can be attributed to the people who work at Heritage Woods of Moline.

During the celebration, the community will honor employees who have been with the community for the past decade, including Resident Services Coordinator Amy Fisher, Receptionist Donna Howell and Cook Linda Maher.

Two residents  Betty Burns and Kay Wolber  who have lived at Heritage Woods since the building opened will be honored as well.

Heritage Woods of Moline combines residential apartment home living with the availability of personal assistance, help with medications and a variety of convenience and support services.

We provide a wonderful alternative to a nursing home or to struggling alone at home, explained Ashley Steward, Director of Marketing at Heritage Woods of Moline.

Residents live in private apartments that they furnish and decorate to their tastes. Each of the studio and one-bedroom floor plans includes a kitchenette, spacious bathroom with shower and grab bars, individually controlled heating and air conditioning, and emergency alert system.

Certified nursing assistants, working under the direction of a licensed nurse, are on-duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Meals, housekeeping and laundry are among the included services.

Residents also benefit from all of the opportunities that are available to socialize with friends and neighbors and participate in activities and special programs, said Steward.

Heritage Woods of Moline is fully certified to operate through the Illinois Supportive Living Program.

Gardant Management Solutions is the largest provider of assisted living in Illinois and the 12th largest provider in the nation.

For more information about Heritage Woods of Moline, visit the communitys website (http://www.hw-moline-slf.com) or Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/heritagewoodsmoline).Walking was all the rage in Korea until a few years ago as a light, healthy form of exercise and a pleasant way to pass the time, but now fears of toxic haze are keeping more and more people indoors. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the proportion of regular adult walkers who head outside for at least half an hour a day more than five times a week stood at 41.3 percent in 2014, but fell to 39.1 percent in 2016. Deadly fine dust particles in the increasingly frequent haze played a role. The government first introduced a fine dust alert system in 2013 and began warning people about ultra-fine dust levels in 2014.

The cherry blossom festival in Yeouido, Seoul on April 16, 2013

Now spring is here, many people are still staying indoors. On Wednesday afternoon, only around 60 people were waiting in line to board a cable car to Mt. Nam in Seoul, and most of them were tourists. The owner of a nearby restaurant said, "Half of the people coming here used to be locals and half were tourists. But now, only tourists come here who have little knowledge about fine dust pollution." Suh Hyun-bok (69), a local who frequently climbs Mt. Nam, said, "I used to see a lot of people walking here even on weekdays, but the number has dropped sharply these days." Seoullo, the elevated park on an old overpass in downtown Seoul that opened last May, gets fewer visitors too. Owners of stores nearby said business is even slower than when the park was an overpass. Another trader said, "The city built lots of hiking courses and plazas, but nobody's walking these days."

The cherry blossom festival in Yeouido, Seoul last Friday

Annual outdoor festivals are also witnessing sharp declines in visitors. A cherry blossom festival in Hadong, South Gyeongsang Province drew 1.17 million visitors two years ago, but the number fell to 295,000 last year and even further to 203,000 this year. Shifting temperatures caused flowers to bloom later than usual this spring, while fine dust kept many visitors away. The cherry blossom festival in Yeouido in Seoul drew 5.6 million visitors last year, but as of Wednesday, just a day before the festival ends, only 4.27 million had come. "The biggest obstacles to the cherry blossom festival were news reports of fine dust warnings," a Yeouido festival staffer said.Meet John Parent, Adhere's Newest Marketing Coordinator "I am ecstatic about joining Adhere Creative, said John. This is a great opportunity for me to exercise my creative energy and work alongside an extremely talented team.

Adhere Creative just added another ace to their stack of marketing mavericks. Meet John Parent, their new Marketing Coordinator and content writer. With a background in digital strategy, analytics, social advertising, and graphic design, John brings a full plate to the digital marketing table.

John really impressed us, said Matt Lee, Agency Principal at Adhere Creative. Were excited to have him on board and confident that our clients will feel the same.

As marketing coordinator, John will work closely with account managers and strategists to develop, execute, and analyze powerful digital marketing campaigns for Adhere Creative and their client base. More specifically, John specializes in brainstorming unique topics that strike a balance between industry relevance and audience interest. This, paired with his exceptional creative writing abilities, will help businesses differentiate themselves from the masses, engage audiences, and connect with prospects on a deeper level. In addition to strategy and content creation, John will also support SEO initiatives, video projects, social media marketing and advertising, and more.

"I am ecstatic about joining Adhere Creative, said John. This is a great opportunity for me to exercise my creative energy and work alongside an extremely talented team.

John plans to keep his ear to the ground for Adheres clients, especially as social media channels face scrutiny over privacy and security measures. He is particularly interested in how these trends will impact traffic patterns and the future of social marketing.

About Adhere Creative

Adhere Creative is an award-winning Houston-based web design and inbound marketing agency. They specialize in B2B digital marketing with an emphasis on full-funnel inbound strategy, content marketing campaigns, and sales enablement.

For more information on Adhere Creative, please visit http://www.adherecreative.com.With a mission to balance the needs of the community with stringent environmental protection, the Port invests in things that make Kalama a better place to live.

The Port of Kalama board of commissioners last night voted to award the Amphitheater and Park Improvements Construction Project contact to Keystone Contracting, Inc., an excavation contractor based in Ridgefield, Washington. The $854,392.08 contractnot including Washington sales tax includes construction of a small outdoor amphitheater and maintenance at Marine Park. The project is expected to run between May and July 2018.

Th contract includes excavation, grading, and concrete to create seating, and construction of a covered stage as well as:



Replacement of the asphalt walkway in Marine and Rasmussen Parks,

Installation of lighted bollards along the asphalt walkway, and

Replacement of the irrigation system in Marine Park

Part of the Ports mission is to create recreational opportunities for the communitythese improvements and the addition of a small outdoor venue for public events fulfill that goal, says Randy Sweet, president, Port of Kalama board of commissioners. With increased use of Port parks, the intent is to create more diverse and enjoyable guest experiences at events like the ones the region has been enjoying for decades such as the Blues and Hawaiian Festivals among others.

The Port of Kalama has long considered the community benefits of creating a small public amphitheater on the Kalama waterfront to accommodate a growing number of events, concerts and public activities.

We envision a grassy open space with tiered seating for concerts and special events that already attract us to the Kalama waterfrontthe area will be open to the public except during special events, says Sweet. A significant benefit is that the stage and seating will be in a natural setting; the stage will be covered and power will be permanently installed for ease of planning community events.

About Port of Kalama  Where rail and water meet:

The Port of Kalama is located in Southwest Washington on the Columbia River and immediately off of Interstate Highway 5. The port exists to induce capital investment in an environmentally responsible manner to create jobs and to enhance public recreational opportunities. Port of Kalama's industrial area includes five miles of riverfront property adjacent to the 43' federally-maintained deep draft navigation channel of the Columbia River. The Port is served by the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads. There are over 30 businesses located at the Port of Kalama, employing over 1,000 people. Port of Kalama offers all the superior facilities businesses need to thrive, and an unsurpassed quality of life. The port offers shovel ready sites, a new Industrial Park, state of the art Marine Terminals and transportation accessibility to rail and highway all just a 30-minute drive to the Portland International Airport. Port of Kalama also offers high-bandwidth communications, with dual access fiber-optic service to Seattle and Portland. Properties currently available at the port for businesses wishing to expand and thrive: Visit http://portofkalama.com/available-properties/.

Contact: Liz Newman, marketing manager, Port of Kalama, 360-673-2379 or Claudia Johnson, PR, 503-799-2220.China moves to guide development of outbound investment funds

From:ChinaDaily | 2018-04-11 22:40

BEIJING - China's state economic planner released a document Wednesday to guide the development of outbound investment and financing funds, eyeing more capital for the Belt and Road Initiative and better cooperation with global lenders.

The funds will be encouraged to direct investment into industrial cooperation, according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC).

The document said the funds should help ensure "stable, sustainable and safe capital sources" for the Belt and Road.

Chinese outbound investment funds will be supported to expand collaboration with global financial institutions, including the World Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the New Development Bank.

China will support those funds to expand business, such as overseas equity investment, debt financing, and cross-border guarantee.

Financing channels of those funds will be broadened, the document said, allowing fund-raising from all types of private capital, including sovereign wealth funds.

Regulators including the NDRC and the central bank will step up supervision and channel more energy into risk control to ensure healthy development of the funds.Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2018 8:00 pm

The Port Ludlow Artists League presents artists of the month Leilani Child Wilds, a multimedia artist, and Maggie Smith, a jeweler. Port Ludlow also hosts artist Heidi Lee at its Bay Club. The community is invited to meet the artists at a reception set for 4-6 p.m. April 11 at Sound Community Bank and adjacent gallery at the corner of Oak Bay Road and Osprey Ridge Drive.

WILDS

Wilds work spans multiple creative forms, from printmaking, photography and painting to ceramics and sea glass jewelry.

While living in Southern California, Wilds earned a liberal arts degree at California State University and then attended Claremont Graduate University, where she received a Master of Fine Arts degree.

Wilds stated in a press release she is always on the hunt for new techniques and enjoys the process of making a technique her own through lots of trial and error. She often incorporates flora and fauna into her art, especially in printmaking.

Peace, complexities, color and the beauty of nature inspire most of my art, she stated in a press release.

Wilds also has hosted fundraisers for charitable organizations and colleges at her art studio. Her artwork is to be on display at the Port Ludlow Sound Community Bank in April.

SMITH

Smith has been making beads and designing jewelry for more than 25 years. She got her inspiration for creating lampwork beads after visiting glass bead-maker Andrea Guarino-Slemmons at her Port Townsend art studio. After taking one of Guarino-Slemmons classes, Smith said, she was hooked. She then went on to hone her talent by attending art classes at the Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle. Smith is currently a member of the International Society of Glass Beadmakers.

Many of her art pieces are a collaborative effort with her daughter, Shelby.

When I work with glass, unexpected things just happen, she stated in a press release.

When traveling, Smith said she often leaves some of her glass beads in rivers and lakes or tucked into unobtrusive places for others to find.

Her latest jewelry collection is to be on display at the Port Ludlow Art Gallery in April.

LEE

Lee is a Pacific Northwest artist who holds bachelor degrees in fine arts, psychology and religion. Over the past 35 years, she has worked and exhibited out of Directors Gallery on Bainbridge Island and multiple community venues. She also participates in artists cooperatives, juried shows and philanthropic endeavors.

Lee said her work reflects her passion for diversity and portraying the human condition. Through her art, Lee hopes to start a conversation about some of the current issues that are facing our society, she said.

Lee has held multiple solo exhibits, including her graphite life studies of children, the Colors of a Woman show, her Madonna series and her Touching the Troubled Mind exhibit. Her graphite work was on display at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art as part of its grand opening and remains a part of its permanent collection.

Lees pastel portraits are to be on display at the Bay Club, located at 120 Spinnaker Place in Port Ludlow.Posted Wednesday, April 11, 2018 1:19 pm

The community is invited to participate in Citizen Science Day on April 14 at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center.

This is a brand new event for us, said Betsy Carlson, PTMSC citizen science coordinator.

As part of the event, visitors are invited to take part in a BioBlitz, in which participants will look for every single species that can be found on that day, to be documented in a list for Washington State Parks. We'll look for birds, mammals, fish, invertebrates, trees, flowers, grasses and more, Carlson said. We'll get a snapshot of what's there on Citizen Science Day.

All ages and skill levels are welcome.

Citizen science is basically, people doing science mostly on a volunteer basis, Carlson said. The projects are designed so that the average person can be trained.

The BioBlitz will take place from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Natural History Exhibit, located at 532 Battery Way East.

The great thing about citizen science, Carlson said, is it gets more people involved and on the ground than any one particular entity could facilitate.

Another reason is it really helps to engage citizens, she said.

It encourages people to look more deeply at science  and to also pay more attention to what is going on in their backyard, she added.

It creates a population of informed citizens, Carlson said.

BioBlitz participants will be using the free iNaturalist app and should create an account before arriving. Observations can be made during the event with a smartphone or with a camera that can upload photos afterward, said Carlson.

For more information, visit

inaturalist.org/projects/port-townsend-marine-science-center-bioblitz.

Carlson said the app is brilliant and encourages everyone to download it to learn more about their surroundings. Entries made will be vetted by scientists. It is also a great way to learn more about the species in a new area, she said.

Due to limited space for the BioBlitz, RSVP to AmeriCorps Citizen science educator Lily Evanston at levanston@ptmsc.org. Anyone who has the app is invited to participate on their own without attending the actual event.

The event also includes a tour of the redesigned marine exhibit, which features a new conservation lab. Admission is fee-based: $5 for adults and $3 for youths ages 6-17. Children under 6 are free.

We are especially proud of our new conservation lab, which functions as a citizen science demonstration area and exhibit, said PTMSC Executive Director Boire.

Visitors to the Marine Exhibit will learn about four nearshore habitats  eelgrass, kelp forest, oyster bed and rocky subtidal  when interacting with the marine science center's popular tidepool touch tanks and aquarium exhibits, Boire said.

Because April 14 is a Washington State Parks Free Day, there is no charge to enter Fort Worden State Park and vehicle parking is free at both marine exhibits.Posted Tuesday, April 10, 2018 8:00 pm

I agree with the Collateral Damage author (Perspective, Leader, March 14). The Navy has been a great neighbor for more than 75 years. It continues to be so.

However:

There are not 160 Growlers jets at Whidbey. Not even close. More to the point, the proposed [environmental impact statement] increases the Growler inventory to only 60 percent of historic Whidbey combat-jet numbers.

Concerning jets and health, recent courts could not discern the difference between Whidbey, anti-Navy declarations of poor health and their dislike for the Navy. Its really more about personal disposition than disease.

That ruling listed those activists, by name, as conspicuous PNW newcomers. Did this author also retire here?

The Coupeville touch-and-go field is not in a residential neighborhood. The Navy has never relinquished its green zoning area, as the USAF did at McChord. A simple view from Google Earth can easily verify this.

The author uses a common stratagem of contrived childrens trauma, disparaging Special Forces by extension. I have witnessed many children distressed by Santa, Easter bunnies, Mariner Moose and even a Coke polar bear, but never SOF.

Children know genuine good guys.

Remarkably, on the authors eponymous Collateral Damage radio show, activists asserted people are dying [due to jet noise] and, Oak Harbor is filled with crime because of the Navy.

Like other anti-Navy claims, linking the Navy with diminished prosperity, poor health and unneighborly conduct, these were easily debunked.

Speaking of neighborly, the Olympic Peninsula benefits extensively from Whidbeys incomparable sea-to-mountain search and rescue capabilities. Navy SAR, quite possibly, impacts more people each year than the entire, committed Washington anti-military demographic combined.

Since 1902, the Navy League of the United States is a nonpartisan, worldwide organization, dedicated to informing the American people and their government, advocating for strong sea services.

STEVE BRISTOW

president, Oak Harbor CouncilNigerian born Pamela Anomneze has been invited to attend the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari will be missing out.

Kensington Palace named Pamela amongst the favoured 1200 guests expected to share the best moments with Harry and Meghan on the grounds of Windsor Castle where they will be joined together in holy matrimony on May 19, 2018, at St Georges Chapel.

Other members of the public who have been specifically selected by regional lord lieutenant offices include a primary school teacher, David Gregory, from Blyth, Northumberland and 12-year-old Amelia Thompson, who was caught up in the Manchester Arena bombing last year.

How Pamela Anomneze got on the list

Pamel Anomneze didn't just get on the list of the 1200 invited guests for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal wedding on a platter of gold, she was nominated.

According to Kensington Palace, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had asked for 600 of their guests to come from a range of backgrounds and ages, including young people who have shown strong leadership, and those who have served their communities.

The other 600 guests are are expected to be people with whom Meghan and Prince Harry have a direct relationship and considered appropriate for their wedding.

For Pamela, her activities at the Studio 306 Collective, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people recover from mental health problems, might have been spotted by the regional lord lieutenant office.

Studio 306 Collective consists of a group of skilled arts and craft practitioners, who have come together to empower disadvantaged local individuals by offering a creative space for those who are recovering from mental illness.

Why President Buhari was not invited

President Muhammadu Buhari who is already in London to rest and attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting has not been invited for the wedding of Prince harry and Meghan Merkle.

Though Buhari isn't the only politician and world leader exempted from the wedding ceremony, the royal family has decided against inviting political and world leaders including President Donald Trump and ex-President Barrack Obama.

A Kensington Palace spokesman said: It has been decided that an official list of political leaders  both UK and international  is not required for Prince Harry and Ms Markles wedding. Her Majestys government was consulted on this decision, which was taken by the royal household.

Pamela's reaction after getting invited to a royal wedding

Obviously, it will be Pamela's first time of attending a British royal wedding having seen the wedding of Prince Williams to Kate Middleton on TV.

Hence, her excitement knew no boundary as she thought the invitation to be a prank or some form of joke associated with April fool.

I got an email informing me, and I thought it was an April Fools Day prank.

A resident of Haringey, Pamela explained that she will be attending the wedding with her 15-year-old son, Jude, who went on his knee to plead make a case for himself.Joseph diGenova, a controversial former federal prosecutor who was recently under consideration to join President Donald Trump's legal team, said Wednesday night that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "tomorrow morning."

DiGenova made the comments to the Fox News opinion-show host, Sean Hannity, who is an ardent Trump supporter. Shortly before Hannity's show aired featuring comments from diGenova and other Trump supporters, the president plugged it on Twitter.

"Big show tonight on @seanhannity! 9:00 P.M. on @FoxNews," he tweeted.

On Hannity's show, diGenova called the special counsel Robert Mueller's team "legal terrorists" and said James Comey, the former FBI director, was a "dirty cop."

DiGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, both used to work within the US Justice Department, but later made their reputations peddling conspiracy theories on TV about the DOJ and FBI. They are staunch critics of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and both frequently appeared on conservative news networks during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Sessions "has a duty to fire Rod Rosenstein," diGenova said Wednesday, adding that it was not Trump's job to carry out the action.

The knives have come out for Rosenstein since it emerged on Monday that the FBI obtained a search warrant to raid the office and home of Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime personal lawyer.

Agents working for the US attorney's office for the Southern District of New York reportedly seized Cohen's electronic devices; financial records; documents related to payments made to two women who claim they had affairs with Trump; records related to a 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape featuring Trump; and attorney-client communications between Trump and Cohen.

News of the raid enraged Trump, who reportedly fumed in private about firing Rosenstein and said the event represented a breach of the "red line" he said investigators would cross if they looked into his or his family members' personal dealings.

The FBI agents who carried out the raid were not working for Mueller's office. Instead, they were acting on a referral from Mueller that was likely made after Mueller uncovered evidence of wrongdoing connected to Cohen that fell outside his purview. The Washington Post reported that the Manhattan US attorney's office is now investigating Cohen for possible bank fraud, wire fraud, and election law violations.

The president's fury toward the deputy attorney general ratcheted up a notch when The New York Times reported that Rosenstein had personally greenlit the FBI's decision to carry out the raid on Cohen, who is known as Trump's longtime fixer and close confidant.

According to The Times, Trump's anger is directed primarily toward three top Justice Department officials: Sessions, Rosenstein, and the FBI director Christopher Wray.

His volatile mood was likely bolstered by a steady stream of loyalists who appeared on Fox News throughout the week to slam Mueller, Rosenstein, and the Russia investigation.

In one instance, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich compared the FBI, in light of the Cohen raid, to the secret police in Nazi Germany and the fascist regime of Joseph Stalin.

Meanwhile, ousted White House chief strategist and Republican firebrand Steve Bannon has pitched a plan to several West Wing aides aimed at crippling Mueller's investigation, The Washington Post reported.

The first step, sources said, was for Rosenstein to be fired. The second and third steps, respectively, are for Trump to cease cooperating with Mueller and to retroactively assert executive privilege over Mueller's interviews with White House officials over the last year.

DiGenova said Wednesday night that Mueller and his team of "legal terrorists" were working to "trap" Trump so that they could convey information to Rosenstein, which diGenova said Rosenstein would then pass on to the House of Representatives to trigger impeachment proceedings against Trump.Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina offered advice for President Donald Trump in light of renewed worries he may try to dismiss special counsel Robert Mueller.

"Mr. President, if you're watching, I think you're gonna be fine unless you screw this up," Graham said to Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum on Wednesday. "Let the process play out."

"I don't believe you colluded with the Russians, but Mueller will soon tell us," he continued. "The Cohen situation I am convinced has got nothing to do with Russia."

Graham's comments come amid the White House's veiled suggestion that Trump may have the authority and the inclination to fire Mueller.

Trump's latest statements follow the FBI's raid on the offices of Michael Cohen, his longtime personal attorney. He appeared to blast the investigation's course on Tuesday by calling it "A TOTAL WITCH HUNT."

The FBI raid on Monday, which was reportedly spurred by a tip from the special counsel and approved by the Southern District of New York, produced records related to the $130,000 nondisclosure payment Cohen made to the adult-film actress, and records on the infamous 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape featuring Trump.

Cohen has since signaled that he intends not to incriminate his client: "I'd rather jump out of a building than turn on Donald Trump," Cohen said to a radio show host.Nepali and English broadsheet dailies published from Kathmandu on Thursday have prioritised a host of issues from political, sociocultural and economic spheres. As always, political stories are on the top; however, owing to lack to significant political events throughout the day, newspapers have also used stories from other beats and sectors for their front page.

Kantipur and The Kathmandu Post have published reports about the latest annual report of Office of the Auditor General whereas Nagarik and Republica concentrate on the delayed unification negotiations between the CPN-UML and the CPN-Maoist Centre.

Important

Auditor Generals report shows huge irregularities

Kantipur lead story for the day informs that the total amount of arrears accumulated over past few years has reached Rs 505 billion. In this amount, the arrears from last fiscal year (2016/170 is Rs 396 billion, the newspaper informs quoting the reports of Office of Auditor General.

The Kathmandu Post, likewise, reports that expenditure irregularities in government offices stood at Rs 100 billion followed by over Rs 11 billion in various committees and District Development Committees, and over Rs 14 billion in the local governments.

The total amount of improper spending surged in the last fiscal due to the addition of such amounts from local unitsrural municipalities and municipalities. The OAG audited accounts of local units for the first time as per the constitutional mandate. The cumulative expenditure done without following due procedure will cross Rs500 billion, a senior official at the OAG office told the Post.

Naya Patrika had covered the report yesterday as well whereas it also published a follow-up story today, informing that the government agencies spent Rs 7 billion for tea and snacks in one year.

Meanwhile, the report is being submitted to President Bidya Devi Bhandari today, according to Abhiyan.

PM blamed for delay in UML-Maoist merger

Republica in its lead story claims that busy schedule of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, who is also the CPN-UML Chairman, is seriously affecting negotiations between his party and the CPN-Maoist Centre, which have been planning for a historic merger for last six months. Though the two parties have decided to announce the merger formally on April 22, they still hold differences on some key issues and the top leaders have failed to sit together to sort them out. Likewise, the two parties have not managed to do homework for the unification seriously, according to the report.

The newspaper made the conclusion after the meeting of Party Unification Coordination Committee scheduled for Wednesday evening got postponed.

Meanwhile, Nagarik lead story says the Maoist Centre has adopted the policy for wait and watch about the merger as the UML did not show flexibility in settling contentious issues. On the other hand, the Maoist leaders are not satisfied with the Prime Ministers unilateral working style, according to the report.

Ignored

Transitional justice law being amended

The government is planning to amend the act related to transitional justice in line with the Supreme Courts verdicts provisioning sentencing in at least four types of crimes  extra judicial killing, enforced disappearance, torture and rape and other cases of sexual violence, reports The Himalayan Times in its lead story.

Quoting Attorney General Agni Kharel, the report says that the government would focus on conducting investigation and prosecution of most serious human rights violations in emblematic cases and taking the suspects to the special court.

All govt bodies involved in reconstruction are now under NRA

Various bodies which were involved in post-earthquake reconstruction works in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake now work under the National Reconstruction Authority, according to Gorkhapatra. Earlier, various agencies under various ministries were working on their own and lack of coordination was blamed for relayed reconstruction.

A meeting of the Authoritys Steering Committee headed by the Prime Minister recently made the decision to let the Authority coordinate among various thematic agencies, the report informs.

Interesting

Nepal will be developing country in three years

Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has said Nepal will get promoted as a developing country within next three years, reports Abhiyan in its three-column boxed story. The Prime Minister made the statement speaking at a function organised on the occasion of 52nd annual general meeting of the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister also informed that the government was working seriously to achieve Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Traders from eight countries in Ilam to buy Nepali tea

Traders from eight countries have gathered in hills of Ilam of eastern Nepal in search of quality tea, according to the anchor story in Karobar daily. Recently, a tea festival was also organised in Suryodaya Municipality of the district in order to attract foreign traders towards quality organic tea produced here, the report says, adding the festival featured tea produced by 21 small farmers and entrepreneurs.The chairman of the Polytechnic Teachers Association of Ghana (POTAG) Mubashiru Bamie confirmed to Accra-based Starr FM.

The Registrar of Wa Polytechnic called me and told me that they have had a letter from the police CID inviting myself and some three others to come to the police [and] help them with investigations in a case of assault.

The invitation comes after the suspended rector of the school Professor Marfo-Owusu complained of an assault against him by the lecturers to the Police.

The staff of the polytechnic prevented the Rector from entering his office by blocking all roads that lead to the schools administration.

Mr Bamie said workers will repeat a similar action if the Rector returns, saying if he comes we will block the roads again.

The Rector was suspended for investigations to be carried out into corruption allegations levelled against him by the Polytechnic Governing Council. He has however filed a suit seeking to quash his suspension.

But Mr Bamie explained that even though they had been served with an injunction Prof Owusus suspension still holds since the injunction had not been granted yet.

The lecturers earlier called on the Governing Council of the institution to cancel the induction ceremony for the Rector, who had been in office for nearly a year, but the induction went ahead.This initiative is part of VVIPs landmark in the Ghana music industry, as they celebrate their 20 anniversary in show business.

In a sighted statement, the group said they have always held a dream to give back to society by building health facilities in the Zongos.

This project, in particular, seeks to build a Mother and Child Care facility for the Zongo communities.

VIP/VVIP@20 EXPERIENCE which marks the 20 Anniversary Celebration of the group is set to outdoor the long held dream of the group to establish a MOTHER & CHILD HOSPITAL for Zongo Communities across Accra and beyond, they stated.

VVIP have been one of the most consistent performers in the Ghana music industry, having had their breakthrough in the early 1990s.

The musical trio used to be VIP before a series of split ups led to them rebranding to become VVIP.

The group used to be made up of Zeal, Prodigal and Promzy, however, the later went solo in 2013, leaving the door open for Reggie Rockstone to join the new VVIP.

The VIP/VVIP@20 Experience forms part of a series of programmes line up as they celebrate their anniversary.

According to management, the full programme for the celebration will be made public on 27 April, 2018 at the official launch of the anniversary celebration.The challenge, organized by Zylofon FM and proudly sponsored by MenzGold, was to commemorate Ghana's Independence Day celebrations and also, unearth talents hidden in the prospective stars who participated in the challenge.

The competition, which took off on the 1st of March 2018, had over 150 entries after which 60 were picked. The selected 60, went through daily and weekly challenges with their own songs and works, to determine who qualified for the grand finale.

After four weeks of pitting their strength against each other, Kojo Kente (Highlife), DDT (Highlife), Emefa (Spoken Word/Poetry) and Munumkum MBee (Rapper) were selected for the finals.

Among the four, the winner was determined by 15 votes from the general public - who were given the opportunity to call in and vote for their favourite contestant, while 10 selected studio judges, also had same opportunity to select their favourite contestant.

After collating the total votes from both the general public and the studio judges, Sammy Flex, host of Showbiz Agenda on Zylofon FM, announced Mununkum Mbee as the winner with 16 votes, while Kojo Kente, Emefa and DDT all had 3 votes respectively.

Communications director at Zylofon media, Samuel Atuobi Baah presented the winner of the challenge, Mununkum Mbee, with the ultimate prize of gold from MenzGold, sponsor of the challenge.According to Delay, she has always been under constant criticisms when she uploads videos of her exclusive interviews with celebrities on YouTube. She is always bashed for asking 'unnecessary questions and accused of defaming them.

READ ALSO: 6 times Moesha Boduong showed off her travels to the world

Two years ago, Delay interviewed Ghanaian model and actress, Moesha Boduong where the 'Cocoa Brown' star revealed she left her boyfriend to date married men to cater to her needs. Social media users came after Delay for her unprofessionalism.

CNNs Christiane Amanpour also had an exclusive interview with Moesha Boduong in a Ghana last year on the topic, sex and love and some Ghanaian are hailing Amanpour.

It appeared Amanpour with years of experience in journalism also asked her questions in the same line as Ghanas Delay and the latter is asking why her fellow Ghanaians are praising the former when they always criticise her for doing the same thing.His comment comes after Minister for Environment, Science, Technology and Innovations, Prof. Frimpong Boateng, called for the use of WhatsApp and text messages in calling for prayers.

In his view, such a move will help limit the noise produced when microphones are used for the call to prayer during worship.

In the house of worship, why is it that the noise will (not) be limited to the house of worshipand again maybe from the mosque, why is it that time for prayer would not be transmitted with a text message or WhatsApp so the Imam will send WhatsApp message to everybody that the time for prayer is up so appear, Prof. Boateng suggested in an interaction with the media.

However, in a sharp riposte, the National Chief Imams spokesperson has shot down the Ministers calls.

According to him, such a suggestion is unreasonable and will only qualify as a violation of our religious rights.

Speaking in an interview with Accra-based Starr FM, Sheikh Shaibu said: If you listen to the soundbite youd notice that he [Minister] himself has indicated that the suggestion can start controversies. In other words, he knows the consequences of such a thing.

For us the impracticability is clear. The unreasonability is so clear. It is not practical.The 60-year-old journalist has toured Berlin, Beirut, New Delhi, and Accra in Ghana to gather amazing stories about love and sex.

Speaking to the Cut.com Amanpour revealed that "the six-part series about love and sex around the world. Its mostly done through womens and young girls perspectives, but its really a very unusual and somewhat unprecedented look at the complexity of sex, intimacy, partnership, and motherhood.

READ ALSO: Delay bashes Ghanaians for being hypocrites

In Ghana, she interviewed a local who revealed that he is married to one wife and he doesnt cheat because he was poor when they got married. We understand each other. So when I have money, I let them know today I have money. Sandra, lets share this money. Rich men cheat because when you are rich you can decide to choose any woman you want. But I am a poor person. I have to stay with one lady.Hamid says being an Information Minister is a lot of work than just gathering documents and going to sit on Newsfile on Joy FM.

Mustapha Hamid has come under some intense criticism from a section of Ghanaians fOR how he is handling his job. Some people feel he is not defending and espousing the works of government very well, therefore he should be replaced by Kweku Baako.

READ ALSO: Here are 5 Ministers that need an Obinim sticker to perform

In a response to this criticism on "Hard Truth", Hamid said: "He [Baako] has not been where I am now. Because when you are Minister for Information, you dont just sit at home the whole day pulling papers here, doing research, going around offices and nosing for information. That is not what you do as Minister of Information.

[The Information Minister] is running GBC, Information Services Departmentyou have 10 regional offices; you have 180 district offices that you are running; you have a government communication machinery that you are superintending and you have also to manage hundreds of party communicators. Sometimes you have to filter your information", he added.

He responded, "It is not as easy as going to sit on Newsfile on Saturday and then speak and then you go, and then you have the whole week to yourself and then you come back another Saturday. You dont have that luxury if you are Minister for Information".

He said President Nana Akufo-Addo has confidence in him and so far he has done his job delingently.According to him, his latest appointment is not a political post but rather a platform to serve Ghanaians.

Earlier this week, the outspoken man of God was appointed as a member of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Board.

His appointment raised a few eyebrows, with some questioning the rationale behind it, especially as Owusu Bempah has no experience in such a field.

Others also accused the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) government of handing him the post as a thank you for his public show of support towards the party before, during and after the 2016 elections.

However, Owusu Bempah has strongly rejected such claims, insisting his appointment is not political.

He said the Gender Ministry approached him with an offer to serve on the Board  a role he sees nothing wrong with.

According to him, it is more of a service to the nation than of personal or political motivation.

My appointment is not a political position or a thank-you appointment but rather an offer of assistance by the ministry to serve Ghanaians, the preacher told Accra-based Adom FM.

I have received a letter from the Gender Ministry requesting my assistance to support the ministry in my capacity as a man of God, he added.

The 16-member Board which was inaugurated by Gender Minister, Otiko Afisah Djaba consists of advocates from the academia and health professionals in the country.It is not all the things I can say here so kindly understand me. I should not do something that will affect the fortunes of the party that is why in most cases we always say the party is supreme. I have thought through and decided that I should allow the interest of the party to reign, he said.

READ THE FULL STATEMENT BELOW

The panin pa wo fie campaign has the New Patriotic Party (NPP) at heart. But, upon sober reflection and introspection, and circumstances beyond my control, I, Robert Asare Bediako, gracefully suspend my campaign.

I extend my gratitude to the great men and women of the NPP, including members of my campaign team and sympathizers, whose sacrifices served as the anchor for my campaign, and to those who believed in my vision.

It is important to state that the race for the position of Ashanti Regional NPP Chairman is not and has never been about our parochial interests, but my desire for a strong regional coalition. My hope and faith in the grassroots of the party remain unshakeable. We need to enforce the unity, solidarity and peace front of the Region.

Whilst I suspend my campaign and candidacy today, Wednesday, 11th April, 2018, I, nonetheless, will continue to tour the Ashanti Region, and fight for the betterment of our party.

Long live NPP

Long Live Asanteman

Long Live Ghana

SignedThe king met with Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who serves as defence minister and also controls economic policy for the world's top oil exporter, at the Zarzuela Palace on the outskirts of Madrid, before hosting a lunch there in his honour.

Prince Mohammed arrived in Spain late on Wednesday hot on the heels of a three-day official visit to France and after a tour lasting several weeks of Egypt, the United States and Britain that saw the self-styled moderniser sign multimillion-dollar deals.

Madrid is the last stop of his global diplomatic charm offensive in a bid to project a new liberal image of his conservative kingdom.

Top-selling daily newspaper El Pais reported earlier this week that Spain would likely make progress during his visit on a deal to sell five corvettes warships to Saudi Arabia for around two billion euros ($2.5 billion).

"The signing of this memorandum of understanding (on defence) can be a step in that direction," a Spanish government source told AFP.

A coalition of NGOs including Amnesty International and Greenpeace urged Madrid not to go ahead with the deal because the corvettes could be used in Saudi Arabia's military campaign against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, where thousands of civilians have been killed.

But Spain's loss-making shipbuilder Navantia is placing a lot of hope on the deal, which has reportedly been under negotiation for two years.

Spanish firms have already won two major infrastructure contracts in Saudi Arabia in recent years.

A Spanish consortium, Al-Shoula, is building a high-speed railway across the desert to link the holy cities of Mecca and Medina while Spanish construction group FCC leads one of three consortia building a rapid transit system in the Saudi capital.

Spain's public works ministry has identified Saudi Arabia as one a "nation of interest".

Under Prince Mohammed's "Vision 2030", a package of economic and social policies designed to free the kingdom from dependence on oil exports, Riyadh plans to spend 32 billion euros in transportation infrastructure in the next decade.Home  Just In  German trekker dies in Rasuwa; body taken to Kathmandu

Kathmandu, April 12

A German national reportedly died in Gosainkunda Rural Municipality-4 of Rasuwa district on Wednesday.

The District Police Office informs that 49-year-old Nils Jakel (Passport number: C3T8RNL97) from Rostock of Germany died while returning from a mountainous region at around 6:30 pm yesterday.

He was accompanied by three Germans and three Britishers. They have suspected that Jakel had a heart attack, according to Prakash Simkhada, Managing Director of Kathmandu-based Google Trek.

Simkhadas company had taken the team to Langtang for the trekking.

Meanwhile, the body has been taken to Kathmandu, but the postmortem is yet to conducted, according to Simkhada.US President Donald Trump was mulling his options and British Prime Minister Theresa May called an emergency cabinet meeting Thursday, as the Syrian army braced for Western strikes, hiding assets and clearing key buildings.

Jaish al-Islam, which has controlled Eastern Ghouta's main town for years, had balked at a Russian-brokered deal like those that saw other factions bussed to northern Syria.

The group's political chief told AFP it was a chemical attack by the regime that forced them to accept Russia's terms and evacuate their former bastion.

"Of course, the chemical attack is what pushed us to agree" to a withdrawal from Douma, said Yasser Dalwan.

Western powers such as France and the United Nations have alleged the regime used chemical weapons on Douma last Saturday.

Damascus has said the case was entirely fabricated to justify military action against the regime and that international chemical experts would arrive in the country Thursday.

The OPCW global watchdog said the team was "on its way to Syria and will start its work as of Saturday" on a fact-finding mission into the alleged attack.

Regime forces had yet to take over Douma Thursday but, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the rebels gave up their heavy weapons.

"Jaish al-Islam fighters handed over their heavy weapons to Russian military police in the town of Douma on Wednesday," the Britain-based monitoring group said.

Their top leader Issam Buwaydani boarded a convoy out of Ghouta with thousands of other fighters and their relatives, it said.

Flag raised

Douma residents told AFP that Syria's national red, white and black flag with two green stars was raised on Wednesday above the main mosque, which was also used as the office of the town's opposition-run council.

But a dispute subsequently erupted, shots were fired and the flag was taken down, the residents said.

Russian military police, who had started deploying in the town as part of a deal that would allow some rebels to disarm and stay in Douma, also left after the incident, the residents said.

Simultaneously carrying out air strikes, brokering talks and supervising humanitarian operations, Russia was the key player in an assault that left at least 1,700 civilians dead.

"Today a significant event in the history of Syria took place," Major General Yury Yevtushenko, head of the Russian military's centre for reconciliation in Syria, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

"The raising of a regime flag over a building in the town of Douma signified control over this town and consequently over Eastern Ghouta as a whole," he said.

It was not clear whether he was referring to the flag that was taken down or to another.

Assad recovery

Moscow also said Russian military police had returned to the town on Thursday and were in full control.

"From today, units of the Russian armed forces' military police are working in the town of Douma," the defence ministry said.

Yet chaos and confusion prevailed in the streets of Douma, where civilians appeared to have very little information on the latest political developments.

Many residents were preparing to take what should be some of the last buses leaving the region to head to parts of northern Syria still under rebel control.

A military official said around 30 of 80 buses brought to Douma for the evacuations had already left.

According to the Russian military, more than 160,000 people have been evacuated from Eastern Ghouta, which only two months ago was a sprawling rebel enclave within mortar range of central Damascus.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad, which since Russia's military intervention in 2015 has gradually reasserted what was once a very tenuous grip on the country, was keen to secure an area that directly threatened the capital.

"Victory in Ghouta is a critical point," Bouthaina Shaaban, a top Assad adviser, said on the Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen.

"It has sent a message to the whole world that Syria's army and its allies can liberate every inch of Syrian territory," she said.

The Syrian pound has risen significantly as the operation to flush rebels out of Ghouta wrapped up.

Regime and allied forces are next expected to train their sights on areas in southern Damascus that are almost empty of civilians but still controlled by the Islamic State jihadist group (IS).

According to the Observatory, more than 350,000 people have been killed in seven years of conflict, including a proportion of children that has risen sharply over the past year.

While the scramble for Syria that followed the collapse of IS's self-styled "caliphate" last year is winding down in some parts of Syria, the humanitarian emergency is still acute.Francis has endured intense criticism over accusations that he had a blind spot on the issue of sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.

A spokesman for the Chilean bishops conference said that some of the victims would go in the coming weeks, and that the pope would individually ask for their forgiveness. Francis in the letter also summoned the countrys 32 bishops to meet at the Vatican in May  an exceptionally large gathering of bishops  to discuss clerical sex abuse.

In the popes letter, which he signed Sunday, he said that a delegation led by Maltese Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna, who has been called the Vaticans Eliot Ness in fighting clerical sex abuse, had taken the testimony of 64 people in Santiago, Chile, and New York and produced more than 2,300 pages. The result, Francis wrote, was his being moved to write this letter.

As far as my role, I acknowledge, and ask you to convey faithfully, that I have made grave errors in assessment and perception of the situation, especially as a result of lack of information that was truthful and balanced, wrote Francis, 81. From this time I ask forgiveness to all those that I offended and I hope to do so personally, in the following weeks, in meetings that I will hold with representatives of the people who were interviewed.

In a visit to Chile and Peru in January, the pope made a spirited defense of Bishop Juan Barros Madrid that seemed to disregard the testimony of abuse survivors, who had long claimed the prelate had witnessed and covered up abuse by his mentor, the charismatic priest the Rev. Fernando Karadima. The pope said he had seen no proof of a cover-up.

Then, in an attempted apology on the flight back to Rome, Francis made a strange distinction between proof and evidence, and reiterated accusations of calumny against the bishops accusers. He revealed that he had twice rejected the resignation in recent years of Barros, whom he appointed to the small diocese of Osorno in 2015.

I am also convinced he is innocent, Francis added on the flight.

But one of the popes top advisers, the leader of his commission investigating abuse, Cardinal Sean OMalley of Boston, distanced himself from the pontiff. And it then emerged that OMalley had hand-delivered a victims letter to Francis with a graphic account of how Barros had observed abuse by a priest. The letter seemed to contradict the popes claim that he had received no evidence.

The popes belief in the bishops innocence over the victims accusations outraged advocates for abuse survivors, and gave ammunition to those who said the usually politically deft pope had a tin ear when it came to sex abuse. All that pressure prompted Francis to send Scicluna to Chile in January as a result of some information received regarding the case, the Vatican said at the time.

The popes letter released Wednesday had an entirely different tone. He wrote that the investigators sometimes felt overwhelmed by so many victims of grave abuses of conscience and of power and in particular of the sexual abuses committed by various clergymen of your country against minors, who were robbed of their innocence.

In Chile, the church hierarchy followed his lead. Monsignor Santiago Silva said church leaders share the pain of Pope Francis, and added, we havent done enough. Our commitment is that this will never happen again.

One of the victims, Juan Carlos Cruz, said of the popes letter, It seems like he is ready to make some much-needed changes that will not only affect the church in Chile, which is in dire need of new bishops, and stop the cover-up of sexual abuse, but it would also send a sign to all the world that zero tolerance is zero tolerance.

The Vatican has repeatedly argued that it is serious about cleaning up what Pope Benedict XVI once called filth in the church. On Saturday, the Vatican police arrested Monsignor Carlo Alberto Capella, a former diplomat at its embassy in Washington, where he was suspected of possessing child pornography. The Vatican had recalled him in September amid an investigation by U.S. law enforcement officials, who had sought to strip him of his immunity.

On Wednesday, the pope seemed to seek a silver lining in what has become a black cloud over his pontificate and the Chilean church. I assure you of my prayers and I want to share with you the conviction that the present difficulties are also an occasion to re-establish the trust in the church, broken by our mistakes and sins, and to heal wounds that havent stopped bleeding in Chilean society, he wrote.

Austen Ivereigh, the author of a papal biography, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, also seemed intent on finding some good in the painful chapter.

Hes shown hes determined to defend the innocence of a bishop if there isnt convincing evidence, he said of Francis. But when there is, hes willing to say sorry and act.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.Google said the new product is available on the Play Store in 26 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Juliet Ehimuan, Google Country Director, stated during the launch on Thursday, April 12, 2018, in Lagos, that new app - Google Go - encompasses search, video, images, links and other sophisticated algorithms that help first-time users to get quick results even with an unstable network connection.

As more and more Africans come online every year, using mobile phones as their primary and sometimes only internet device, online isnt somewhere they go anymore, its where they live - connecting with the people, places and things that matter to them. Weak data connectivity, high data costs and low RAM or storage space often make it hard for people to get the most out of the internet - Google Go is built to handle these challenges.

With Google Go, everything you need is just a tap away. Easily search for information or see whats trending in your country. Find an inspirational quote for a loved one with an image or GIF search, discover places nearby, and browse videos. Access all your favourite apps and websites and discover the top destinations in your country, Google said in a statement.

Mzamo Masito, Google Africa Chief Marketing Officer, said: Users come to us to experience the web and access accurate information quickly. Unfortunately, users cant always decide on the type of device they have or the kind of connection they are on.

Google Go is designed from the ground up to address these issues and provide a seamless experience irrespective of what device or network the user is on.

Features of Google Go

Saves Data - Google Go is small in size - less than 5 MB  which makes it quick to download without using much data and saves you space on your phone. It uses the latest version of Googles advanced compression algorithm, using up to ~ 40% fewer data for displaying search results.

When theres no internet access, Google Go retries failed search requests in the background and lets you know as soon as the results are ready. Web pages load quickly, even in data saving mode or on 2G connections.

Fast - Google Go provides a lighter, faster way to search. It loads results instantly as users type and smart word suggestions help you search faster with minimal typing. The home page icons make it faster and easier for you to discover new content and find what youre looking for with a single tap. Voice search has been improved to work better on slow connections. Add the search bar widget to your home screen for fast and easy access to whats trending.

In March 2018, Google launched its search engine New job search experience to help millions of job seekers in Nigeria find employment opportunities.These are five controversial moments when the leader of the 1 billion-member Roman Catholic Church grabbed headlines with his statements.

1. Who Am I to Judge?

During an interview after the 2013 World Youth Day event, the Holy Father said, If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?

Afterward, LGBT publication, The Advocate, awarded the pontiff their person of the year award.

Despite this controversial statement, Pope Francis was later quoted in 2014 saying, the complementarity of man and woman  is at the root of marriage and family.

2. Stop being obsessed with abortion and gay marriage

That same year, The New York Times reported that the Pontiff urged the Catholic Church to stop being obsessed abortion, gay marriage and other social issues.

The article read: Six months into his papacy, Pope Francis sent shock waves through the Roman Catholic Church with the publication of his remarks that the Church had grown obsessed with abortion, gay marriage, and contraception, and that he had chosen not to talk about those issues despite recriminations from critics.

The article was titled: Pope Says Church Is Obsessed With Gays, Abortion and Birth Control.

His statements were later put in context by a Catholic writer named professor Paul Kengor who wrote, I see the word obsessed in there, but not quite the same way The New York Times and other liberal/progressive enthusiasts see it and have run with it full speed, full throttle.

Liberals and liberal Catholics and secular progressives will run hog-wild with Francis remarks, exaggerating and exploiting them for their completely contrary ideological, political, and cultural purposes.

3. Everyone can go to heaven including atheists

In September 2014, Pope Francis caused a stir when he allegedly claimed that atheists can go to heaven.

According to atheist Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari of news publication, La Repubblica, the pontiff said, I start by saying  and this is the fundamental thing  that Gods mercy has no limits if you go to Him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.

The pontiff's comments to Scalfari were later retracted by the Vatican.

The Vatican spokesman said, The information in the interview is reliable on a general level but not on the level of each individual point analyzed: this is why it was decided the text should not be available for consultation on the Holy See website. Its removal is a final update on the nature of this text. Some mistakes were made regarding its value, which was questioned.

4. Pope Francis shows support for same-sex unions?

In November 2014, the National Catholic Reporter published an article titled: Francis tells religious to wake the world, outlines modern struggles for church.

The article read: Reflecting on educational challenges hed faced as the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the pope mentioned a situation involving the child of a lesbian couple as an example of new challenges which sometimes are difficult for us to understand.

This story about the pontiff's seeming openness to same-sex unions was carried by many other publications causing a major confusion over the churchs stance on same-sex marriages.

Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi reacted by releasing a statement on Vatican Radio. He wrote, This point about the educational responsibilities of the Church, which in a sense is fairly obvious, was made on Nov. 29 in entirely general terms, [but] has been placed by various Italian media outlets in the context of the question raised in recent days of recognition of civil unions of homosexual couples.

To speak of an opening to gay couples is paradoxical, because the popes comment is completely general and because even the small concrete example made by the pope in this regard (a young girl who was sad because the female fiance of her mother doesnt love her) alludes to the suffering of the child 

5. Hell does not exist

This year, Pope Francis caused a major stir when it was reported that he said that hell does not exist.

Journalist Eugenio Scalfari wrote that the Catholic leader had told him in a conversation that Hell does not exist and that those who do not repent and cannot, therefore, be forgiven disappear.

The next day, the Vatican immediately released a statement denying that the pontiff ever made those comments.

What is reported by the author in todays article is the result of his reconstruction, in which the literal words pronounced by the pope are not quoted.On Tuesday, January 23, 2018, Pulse reported the violent protest the students of the Polytechnic staged to reject the management's policy. The protest led to the invasion of the institution's ICT centre, destruction of properties worth millions of Naira and the closure of the polytechnic.

Two months after, the committee set up to look into the protest has recommended that the polytechnic students should pay N168 million damages as a condition for the school to be re-opened.

Prior to the committee's recommendations, the students have been clamouring for the school to be reopened.

On Tuesday, April 10, 2018, the Polytechnic's Students Union Government (SUG) issued a seven-day ultimatum to Ondo State Government to re-open the school, saying students were tired of staying at home.

ALSO READ: 20 expensive institutions in Nigeria and their fees

The SUG release reads in part:

We are tired of sitting at home without doing nothing. We have no information on when our school would be re-opened. We agree strongly that we must pay for the damages, but we want to return to our studies.

The union calls for the resumption and immediate announcement of reparation fee for each student within the next seven days starting from April 10''.

Meanwhile, following the submission of its report, the Chairman of the Committee, Pastor Oyekan Arije said the destruction and vandalism of the school properties by the students is unacceptable.

Arije also said that members of the committee were startled by the level of destruction carried out by the students during the protest.

Tertiary education in crisis in Ondo state

However, academic activities in state-owned tertiary institutions in Ondo state is in crisis as the students of Adcekunle Ajasin University students threaten to make the state ungovernable for Governor Rotimi Akeredolu for increasing their tuition fees from N30,000 to N180,000.

On Monday, April 9, 2018, the student leaders of AAUA, with solidarity from the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) and National Association of Ondo State Students (NAOSS) mobilised thousands of students to protest against the hike.The accused  Awotayo Afusat, 23, and Remi Adeyefa, 32  who are residents of Ladega area of Ikorodu were docked on a two-count charge of unlawful possession and assault.

The Police Prosecutor, Insp. Aminu Isaac told the court that the accused committed the offences at Palace Way, Ikorodu, on April 9.

Aminu said the two accused, who are women, occupied the two shops belonging to Mrs Mojisola Etti since 2014 and have refused to pay rents for four years.

The shops were transferred to the accused by the original occupant, but the landlady was not informed.

In the process of requesting her shops rent, the duo abused her and threatened her life  they also warned her not to visit the place again.

She reported them to the police and they were arrested.

The offences contravened Sections 53 and 166 (d) of the Lagos State Criminal Law 2015.

The accused, however, denied the charges.

In her ruling, Magistrate Makanjuola Oshodi granted the two traders bail of N50,000 each with one surety each in like sum.

She said the surety should produce an evidence of three years tax payment to the Lagos State Government as part of the bail condition.The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the incident occurred early Thursday morning at number 53 Obakhavbaye Street, Benin City.

It was gathered that mother of the baby had gone to urinate outside at about 6a.m, but did not find the baby where she kept him.

After three hours of searching around the house, the baby was eventually found inside the drum of water dead.

Landlord of the house, Mr Ali Abubakar, said he was observing his prayers when he heard shouting and wailing.

Ali said he went downstairs and was told that Abdulaziz died inside a drum of water.

It is difficult for that baby to open that drum and enter inside. We dont know what happened yet but it is a mystery Abubakar said.

A neighbour, who gave her name as Blessing Akpo, told NAN that it was only God that could unravel the babys killers.

I have never seen where a baby of eight months old will open a drum of water, enter inside and close it, she said.

Mother of the baby could not talk as she was still in shock.

NAN also noticed presence of some policemen from Aideyan Police station at the residence to investigate the incident.

When contacted, DSP Chidi Nwanbuzour, the Commands PPRO told NAN that he had just been briefed about the case.The deceased was reportedly slaughtered during a house war intended to establish supremacy to become "Point One" according to many reports.

Chuks, who was 20 years old at the time of passing, died on Monday, April 9, 2018, in a village close to ANSU.

He was in his third year in the university before getting nicked by death.

ALSO READ: 6 suspected cultists arrested for gang raping students

AAU undergraduate killed by suspected cultists in Obalende

Suspected cultists have reportedly killed an undergraduate of the Ambrose Ali University, Edo State, in an attack that occurred in Obalende, Lagos.

He was murdered on Monday, March 26, 2018, at the Obalende roundabout report says.

A report has been filed at a police station in Onikan in respect to the killing of the deceased who was slaughtered late in the evening.She described in a post shared on Wednesday, April 11, 2018, an encounter that saw her car window broken - a factor that has encouraged her to lose hope in the idea of a brighter country.

Msdaratayo seemed displeased concerning the failed assurances of the Lagos State Government as well.

According to her, the state fell short of a promise to make the bridge safe for motorists.

The narrator ended her emotional burst with Bible verses expressing her desires for the individual who assaulted her around 06:30 AM on the Eko Bridge.

"Today, I got robbed on Eko bridge. Not the beginning of eko bridge, Not the end of eko bridge but RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF EKO BRIDGE! Today I was mercilessly slapped around, harmed and beaten.

"Today, a fellow human being beat me up so bad because I refused to give them what I worked so hard for. Today, a fellow human being derived joy in stripping me of my hard earned money, bag and personal belongings.

"Today, a fellow youth looked at me, considered me a prey and broke my glass windows to rob me and went batshit crazy when I wont drop my phone or car keys."Thank you my Nigerian government for doing nothing about the menace that these trailers on eko bridge are causing that caused so much traffic at 6.30am which allowed these miscreants to achieve their evil plans"Thank you my Nigerian government for finally making me lose hope in looking forward to a better Nigeria."And most of all, Thank you Lagos Government and Lagos Police for lying to us about safeguarding this bridge, thereby giving us false hope that we were somehow safe."And for those thieves, I wish upon you Zechariah 5:3, Galatians 6:7 and most of all Proverbs 3:33!! Amen! #Lagos," writes Msdaratayo.

ALSO READ: Woman who stole mobile phone at wedding party stripped naked

Man who robs motorists on Oshodi bridge meets his end

A 27-year-old man, Oluwole Kayode, who reportedly robs motorists of their valuables on the Oshodi bridge, has been apprehended by law enforcement agents.

The suspect who pretends to sell refreshments in the heavy Lagos traffic, was nabbed after robbing a woman named Mrs. Hadizatul Jiddah, who was thankful to the Lagos State Environmental Sanitation and Special Offences Enforcement Unit.

According to The Nation News, the agency helped recover items stolen by the roadside thief.

She confirmed that the thief made away with two phones and a bag while she was driving on the bridge.

Kayode was able to do this after breaking the window of her vehicle with a hammer.

If not for the prompt intervention of personnel of the Lagos State Task Force, my bag and two phones would have gone, Jiddah mentioned in a news report.

A picture of the suspect who was seen holding exhibits has been shared online.The period following the Nigerian Civil War, is one of the best in the history of the Nigerian economy. The first drops of our oil windfall were trickling in.

It was also a period where Nigerian music and art blossomed into a variety of genres, including, perhaps most notably, psychedelic rock.

The middle class was also rich and sustained. Nothing reflects what it felt like to be in the average Nigerian home like the banners advertising the products that were a part of family life in Nigeria of the 1970s.

1. Guinness' "Guinness is good for you" banner

Guinness may not be exactly fantastic for you, but the Irish dark ale brand has been serving Nigerian men, young and old, for decades.

This ad from the cusp of the 1970s promoted the idea of Guinness as a drink for Nigerian professionals and active men.

2. Bournvita's "For Energy" Spread

More than half a decade after this ad banner was printed in the December 1966 edition of Reader's Digest, Bournvita is one of those few Nigerian household brands that even the youngest generation of Nigerians recognise.

The ad portrayed the nourishment and exuberance that was promised with the "Bournvita For Energy" line.

3. Bata's "The Best in Nigeria" banner

Although the name "Bata", Yoruba for "footwear" may have you thinking it's Nigerian, the original Bata Limited was reportedly set up as The T. & A. Bata Shoe Company in the Czech republic 123 years ago.

In the 1980s, Bata was one of Nigeria's most iconic brands. This ad reflects the spirit of the early 80s when its school shoes were the standard and work footwear also sold widely.

4. Phensic's "Pain Reliever" Magazine Spot

The culture of over-the-counter dispensing and self medication elevated Phensic to a point where, particularly during the 1980s, it was Nigeria's most commonly used painkiller.

According to Brandish, the drug was also used to treat fevers. Phensic was well circulated, which means you could have both it nearly anywhere at a relatively low price at the time. The introduction of Chloroquine reduced its popularity.

5. Blue Band Margarine "Extra Nourishment" banner

""B without BB is like a train without an engine", one of the more popular Blue Band adverts from the late 2000s sings. For decades, generations of Nigerians have grown up with a brand of margarine that is an invitation to eat bread of the sliced variety.

This ad from the 1980s features hand-drawn style of portraiture that defined Nigerian pop art through that decade till the mid-1990s.Home  Just In  Kathmandu police arrest two in possession of banned Indian banknotes worth Rs 5 million

Kathmandu, April 12

Police in Kathmandu say they have arrested two Nepali citizens in possession of banned Indian banknotes worth Rs 4.9 million.

Sunil Dev Baishya (53) from Katahari Rural Municipality-3 of Morang and Chet Bahadur Nepali (50) from Shivapuri Rural Municipality-5 of Nuwakot district were arrested from a hotel in Lazimpat of Kathmandu.

Police confiscated from them Indian notes of denomination Rs 500 and Rs 1,000. The Indian government had banned the notes in November 2016.

Acting on a tip-off that they were smuggling the currently from border areas to Kathmandu, the Metropolitan Police Range in Kathmandu had raided the hotel.

During the raid, police found that they were carrying 2,206 notes of Rs 1,000 and 5,451 notes of Rs 500.The 'Women In Business' event, which took place at Browns Cafe & Restaurant, Victoria Island, Lagos, sought to promote open conversations between leading women in business such as Co-Founder of She Leads Africa, Afua Osei and Director of CloudCover, Uchenna Agbo who shared their experiences with other career focused individuals or entrepreneurs with budding businesses.

Group Chief Operating Officer of CloudCover, Eleanor Potter made remarks on the success of Women in Business 2018, which happens to be the maiden event.

"The goal of this event was to empower business women in a shared community with their shared stories and we believe we were able to achieve that. We are aware of the harsh realities of running a business in Nigeria, this is why CloudCover set up this event to ensure that women are consistently supporting each other by helping to address the barriers to building businesses that women face today. Our vision is to provide Nigerians both men and women with constant connectivity, enabling business productivity and growth", she said.

Nigerian entrepreneurs such as Ore Onile-Ere of Lagos Talks, Tobi Jaiyesimi of The Book Banque, Atim Ukoh of Afrolems, Bola Awosika Adelaja were among the guests who attended the event.

CloudCover launched in Nigeria in 2017 with its flagship 4G/LTE device called the CC1 MiFi that allows its users to stay connected regardless of where you are and what network is available, using just one device.

Owing to its ground-breaking virtual SIM technology, CloudCover has been able to provide this multi-network service in Nigeria as well as in over 100 other countries including United Kingdom, US, Kenya and South Africa.Gucci . The luxury Italian label saw a resurgence in popularity thanks to the new Creative Director Alessandro Michele who turned the whole brand upside down and a variety of innovative point of reference for his collections most notably the inclusion of Harlem legend, Dapper Dan.

Aside from the all-over logo prints, high-end labels like Off-White, Burberry and Chanel have emblazoned sweaters, coats, bags, etc. with the name of their brands, a move that only not helps to build awareness in an over-saturated market as well as catering to what young customers want. With the popularity of streetwear and the desire to show off their designer goods on various social media platforms, logos seem to be the way forward.

Though 2017 was Gucci's year, Fendi's classic double-F print has been absolutely everywhere. Karl Lagerfeld, the Creative Director of the brand, has tapped into the youth market and certainly understands that these days, the people are all about logos and branded clothing. As a result, the luxury Italian fashion-house, primarily known for its luxurious furs and leather goods, has gone full speed ahead with the monogram clothing and accessories.

People purchase designer goods for a variety of reasons, among them because they convey a sense of status, wealth, and exclusivity. These purchases lead others to make rapid inferences about the character of the purchaser (e.g., successful, arrogant, rich etc). In today's society when more seems to be more, people are leaning towards logo brands which announce themselves so you do not have to.

Gone are the days of being subtle about wealth, thanks to today's pop culture and the look-at-me society we find ourselves in, people are no longer interested in being subtle. This goes a long way to explaining the resurgence of the Fendi logo which is instantly recognisable with a large price tag to boot.

Kim Kardashian, Hailey Baldwin, Rita Ora and Keyshia Ka'oir have all made appearances more or less looking like Fendi adverts, in the brown graphics from head to toe. Kim Kardashian whilst her sister Kourtney was seen grabbing dinner in a monogrammed sheer skirt. Once it appears on a Kardashian, you know it has been cemented as a trend and all of a sudden, Fendi is everywhere.

Our very own Tiwa Savage. She rocked a crop Fendi jumper with sheer logo tights and showed that she too, has her finger on the pulse of everything trending.

Most recently, Nicki Minaj announced her return to claim her throne as the number 1 female rapper by dropping rather racy artwork for forthcoming single 'Chun-Li'. On it, the New York native wore a cropped Fendi fur jacket and a tiny Fendi thong. The entire look was reminiscent of a vintage Lil Kim look but that comparison could fill another feature articl so we will end it there.

At the latest Milan Fashion Week, Fendi debuted their Fall 2018 collection and it included a logo-print dress, leggings, trench coat and bag which further proved the house's dedication to the theme.

With Fendi flooding the market, it may spell the end for Gucci. It's quite clear that both brands that are so well known cannot occupy the same space equally, one must come out on top. If the latest numbers are anything to go by, it seems Fendi might have Gucci pipped to the post.Anna Wintour, however, has expressed that everything has been handled in the most sensitive way and this year, fashion will meet Catholicism with help from the Vatican as the grand exhibition gets underway.

In her May Editor's letter, Anna Wintour writes:

The exhibition itself has been years in the making, and it will be not only the largest Costume Institute show to date but the biggest show ever at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its hard to not sound hyperbolic about it, but it is going to be an absolutely magnificent experiencespanning some 26 galleries and including work from the likes of Valentino, Gaultier, and Dolce & Gabbana along with more than 40 extraordinarily opulent liturgical garments and accessories on loan from the Vatican. For the first time ever, there will also be an extension of the show running at the Met Cloisters, a museum at Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan, where the more monastic examples of fashions inspiration from the Church, such as those from Cristobal Balenciaga, will be on view. (Should you be visiting New York and planning to see the exhibition, Id urge you to also take the time to head northward; the Cloisters element will be just as stunning.)Believe it or not, most of these countries boast a population of 900-1000 people. In this article we'll be measuring the smallest countries in the world by their square miles and population.

ALSO READ: 5 happiest countries in the world to travel to

1. State of the Vatican City, Size - 0.17 Square Miles

The Vatican City in Rome, Italy is the home of the Pope and 450 citizens. With a population of just 800, its sovereignty was recognized by Italian government under Lateran Treaty on 11th February 1929. The Vatican prints its own stamps, issues passports and number plates, mints its own euros and has its own flag and anthem.

The Swiss Guard protects the Vatican City, its main purpose is to protect the Pope and has been since 1506 when the then-Pope Julius II hired the Swiss as his own protectors.

2. Monaco, Size  0.75 Square Mile

Monaco is a wealthy country bordered by France and its flag is very similar to that of Indonesia. Their stadium is able to fit over half of the countrys population, which as of January 1, 2016, was over 37,500.

This beautiful coastal country is known for its upscale casinos, yacht-lined harbour and prestigious Grand Prix motor race, which runs through Monacos streets once a year.

Monte-Carlo is home to an elegant belle-epoque casino complex and ornate Salle Garnier opera house.

3. Nauru, Size  8 Square Mile

Nauru is the smallest island country east of Australia with a population of around 10,200 people as of January 1, 2016.

The country has a real issue with unemployment, only 10% of the residents are apparently employed, all of them are by the government. The island also has a serious problem with obesity and is often categorized as the most obese island nation.

4. Tuvalu, Size  10 Square Mile

Tuvalu was previously known as the Ellice Islands. Due to its tiny population of 9,000 people, there is just one hospital on the island. Tuvalu is a secluded nation with only 2,000 visitors in 2010 and 65% of those were for business.

5. San Marino, Size - 23.5 Square Mile

San Marino has a population of around 32,000 people as of January 1, 2016, and is a small country densely populated when compared to Saint Kitts and Nevis which has an extra 77.5 square miles and only 13,000 more people.

6. Liechtenstein, Size  62 Square Mile

As of January 2016, the population of Liechtenstein was just 37,000, thats 10 times smaller than the Maldives.

Located between Switzerland and Austria the country is safe, the crime rate is very low with the last murder occurring in 1997.

7. Saint Kitts and Nevis, Size  101 Square Mile

This two-island country is located in the Eastern Caribbean and has a population 6 times less than the Maldives at 55,000. Alexander Hamilton one of the founding fathers of the US was born here.

8. The Maldives, Size 116 Square Mile

The Maldives is an island of 1,192 coral islands of which 200 are inhabited, this makes it the most dispersed country in Asia. The Maldives became an independent country in 1965 and as of the January 2016, the population was just under 367,000.

9. Malta, Size  122 Square Mile

ALSO READ: 5 extraordinary discoveries in Nigeria

Malta has a population of over 419,500 people as of January 2016, this makes it one of Europes less populated countries. The Republic of Malta is made of 3 separate parts; Gozo, Comino and Malta. Malta is home to Calypso cave, a cave that overlooks Sandy Beach, Ramla Bay.

10. Grenada, Size  133 Square MileSoriano was concerned that his students had no access to books at home, so he decided to do something about it. With the help of his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, Luis created a makeshift mobile library and set off to take his books to children who didnt have access to reading materials. With that, the word Biblioburro was born.

ALSO READ: 5 happiest countries in the world to travel to

When Soriano Started

A primary school teacher by profession, Soriano developed the idea after witnessing the power reading had on his students, most of whom had lived through conflicts at a young age. Starting in the late 1990s, Soriano travelled to communities in Colombia's Caribbean hinterlands with a portable library, which began with 70 books.

Kids wise up when they pick up a book. Their surprise and imagination meet together, you see them starting to laugh by themselves, just by seeing the book, he told BBC.The couple's celebration this year includes an Instagram post shared by Edward earlier in the day. Posting a clip of romantic images and sweet moments from all through their married life, he writes:

"4 years today, it's been an awesome journey and experience with you my love.

"Thanks for all we share, for constantly standing by my side, for being my no one fan always"

The politician's marriage with the former president's daughter began after a grand ceremony in 2014 which had so much luxury on display that people reportedly got customised gold-plated iPhones as souvenirs! The movie was also televised on NTA.Here are five subject areas the president spoke on.

1. Nigeria has drastically cut down on rice importation

According to Buhari, "We have by about 90%, saving billions of dollars in the process.

2. Most people in Nigeria are now farmers

Buhari says the big boys are now flocking to the farms in Nigeria.

The president says Agriculture is now more lucrative than crude oil in his country.

People who rushed into petrol money have now gone back to agriculture. Even professionals have gone back to the land. Nigeria should be able to feed itself comfortably soon. I am so pleased," Buhari said.

3. Buhari declared for a 2nd term in office before leaving Nigeria, in order to put speculators out of business

In his words: I because Nigerians were talking too much about whether I would run or not. So, I felt I should break the ice.

We have many things to focus on, like security, agriculture, economy, anti-corruption, and many others. We needed to concentrate on them, and politics should not be a distraction. The majority of Nigerians appreciate what we are doing, and that is why I am re-contesting."

4. The herdsmen crisis in Nigeria isnt a religious one

Herdsmen of Fulani extraction have been blamed for a spate of killings in several States across Nigeria.

The herdsmen/farmers clashes have become a recurring one. President Buhari says the crisis shouldnt be given a religious colouration.

"The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of armed gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region.

These gunmen were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram.

Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons. The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions."

5. Dapchi schoolgirl Leah Sharibu will be back

When Boko Haram returned the kidnapped Dapchi schoolgirls on March 21, 2018,one was missing.

Leah Sharibu, a Christian girl, had been kept behind by captors Boko Haram because she refused to convert to Islam.

Buhari assured the Archbishop that Sharibu will return home to her parents.

We are managing the matter quietly. Making noise would not help. We are collecting as much intelligence as possible, working with the Red Cross and other international organizations.As part of the combined counter terrorism operations of the security agencies, the suspect, identified as Adamu Hassan aka Baale, was arrested during a stop and search operation along Bauchi-Gombe road.

In a statement signed by the Deputy Director Public Relations of Theatre Command Operation Lafiya Dole, Colonel Onyema Nwachukwu, a separate operation led to the arrest of a four-man raid team, belonging to Abubakar Shekau's faction of Boko Haram, while they were rummaging for food and logistics at Kudiye community, along Dikwa-Gulumbagana road.

Three other Boko Haram terrorists were killed in two separate encounters in the mountainous region of Bokko Hilde, along Ngoshe-Pulka road and Mujigine general area.

The statement read, "Combined Operatives of Operation Lafiya Dole and the Department of State Service conducting Counter Terrorism Operations in north eastern Nigeria have arrested a Boko Haram terrorist who specializes in making Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) for the terrorists group.

"Adamu Hassan aka Baale was nabbed by the operatives at Kaltungo in Gombe State during a Stop and Search Operation along Bauchi-Gombe road.

"In a separate operation, troops of operation Lafiya Dole in a joint operation with Vigilantes on Monday evening busted a raid operation by elements of the Boko Haram terrorists rummaging for food and logistics at Kudiye community, along Dikwa-Gulumbagana Road.

"The four man raid team was intercepted by troops following a tip-off that the insurgents were on their way to loot the community.

"The insurgents who revealed that they belong to the Abubakar Shekau faction of the Boko Haram terrorists group have been taken into custody and are making useful confessions. Troops also recovered two motorcycles, bags of grains and tamarin from the insurgents.

"Meanwhile, troops conducting clearance operations yesterday killed three Boko Haram insurgents in two separate encounters in the mountainous region of Bokko Hilde, along Ngoshe-Pulka road and Mujigine general area respectively.

"The troops neutralised the insurgents during clearance operations to rid the areas of elements of the Boko Haram insurgents who had escaped from troops' offensive operations in the Sambisa forest. Troops also recovered two AK 47 rifles and a motorcycle from the insurgents.

"It is expedient to bring to public awareness, that in its desperation to survive troops' onslaught and remain relevant in the eyes of the public, the Boko Haram terrorists group has continued to make frantic efforts to infiltrate communities with Person Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (Suicide bombers) to callously unleash terror and fear on the populace.

"Members of the public are therefore enjoined to remain vigilant and watchful while going about their normal activities and promptly report suspicious persons or activities to appropriate security agencies."

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.Aminu asked the court to upturn a magistrates courts decision which awarded the custody of his two children to Fatima as well as a N250,000 monthly upkeep.

Aminu told Justice Kazeem Alogba that the lower court disregarded his constitutional right of fair hearing before granting judgment in Fatimas favour.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that on Jan.10, Magistrate Kikelomo Ayeye sitting in Tinubu on Lagos Island awarded full custody of the ex-couples daughter, Ameera, 11, and son, Aamir, 7, to Fatima.

The lower court held that Aminu failed to file a response to Fatimas application for the childrens custody.

But Aminu, through his counsel, Oyinkan Badejo, filed an application to the high court seeking leave to appeal the lower courts judgment and another application for a stay of further execution of its terms.

The first application, a motion on notice, was brought pursuant to Section 70 of the Magistrates Court Law, 2009 and supported by a 16-paragraph application.

Badejo said: In response to whether the applicant has shown sufficient grounds for the grant of the application, there is not more sufficient ground than the partys right to fair hearing.

We arrived at the magistrates court at 12.30 p.m. believing the matter was for mention at 1.00 p.m.

She contended that the lower court erred by hearing and granting Fatimas application for custody on a date the suit was fixed for mention.

On the second application, Badejo urged the court to vary the conditions attached to the custody order.

Badejo said according to the lower courts order, Aminu would pay his ex-wife N250, 000 monthly for the upkeep of the children, beginning from January.

She also said that Magistrate Ayeye ordered Aminu to carry out medical insurance on each child among others.

But Badejo said: We are not seeking a stay of the execution of the judgment but some of the terms were onerous.

We were asked to pay N250,000 for the upkeep of two young children and medical allowances. We find that rather onerous.

Fatimas counsel, Mr O. N. Olabisi and Mr Ethel Okoh opposed her.

But in a bench ruling, Justice Alogba granted Aminu leave to appeal the lower courts judgment.The struggle for access and control of lands over which roaming herdsmen graze their cattle has led to conflict with local farmers all over the country, resulting in the death of hundreds just this year alone with herders credited with a majority of the attacks.

According to President Buhari, the conflict escalated due to Gaddafi's army of trained gunmen who escaped into Nigeria and started causing problems to local populations with their sophisticated weapons.

The president made his remarks in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, during a meeting between the two at the Abuja House in London on Wednesday, April 11, 2018.

He said, "The problem (herders/farmers conflict) is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of armed gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region.

"These gunmen were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram.

"Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons. The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions."

Gaddafi contributed to Boko Haram problem - Buhari

The president had earlier blamed Gaddafi for some of the menace of terrorist group, Boko Haram, while he was speaking to the Nigerian community in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire in November 2017.

He said the instability in Libya was responsible for the escalation of the terrorist insurgency as many Nigerians who returned from the North African country were recruited by Boko Haram due to the nature of their work in Libya.

The president said, "After 43 years of Gaddafi where he recruited so many people from the Sahel including Nigeria and so on, all they learnt was how to shoot and kill. They didn't learn to become electricians, plumbers or any other trade. So, when the Libyans stood against their leader those who are not their people, they chased them out.

"A lot of them came back home with their workers, some of them participated in Boko Haram and become part of Boko Haram."Private troupes take stage at natl drama festival

VietNamNet Bridge  Veteran and young actors of private troupes in HCM City are preparing for participation in the National Professional Drama Festival 2018, which will be launched by the culture ministrys Department of Performing Arts in the city next month.

Sprawling cast: Talented actress Trinh Kim Chi performs in Chau Ve Hop Pho (Reunion), a 60-minute play on the Mau Than Offensive in the spring of 1968. The play includes 70 actors, with young talents from Hong Van Drama Troupe, one of HCM Citys leading private drama troupes. Photo courtesy of the producer.



Hong Van Drama Troupe, one of HCM Citys leading private drama troupes, will stage Chau Ve Hop Pho (Reunion), a play on the Mau Than Offensive in the spring of 1968.

The 60-minute play features South Vietnamese liberation soldiers and their stories during and after the campaign, which occurred during the American War.

It portrays Chau and his wife, Pho, both Sai Gon residents, who awaken to revolutionary ideas. Chau moves to the north to join the Viet Nam Peoples Army, and Pho works as a secret agent in Sai Gon.

Both meet in the battle of Sai Gon in January, when the South Viet Nam liberation forces attacked the US Embassy.

My play tells true stories about the war, said director Meritorious Artist Tran Minh Ngoc.

Ngoc, who has more than 50 years in the industry, asked his young actors to research books, documents and films on the offensive by both Vietnamese and foreign filmmakers.

I wanted my production to be lively and to help young audiences learn as much about the countrys history and what Vietnamese generations fought for.

I hope young audiences will learn valuable things about war and peace after watching, said the 80-year-old.

The play, involving more than 70 actors, will be staged for free for students in 20 universities and colleges after the festival.

The TKC Drama Club will send its new play on young volunteers to compete at the festival.

Mot Thoi De Nho (A Time to Remember) portrays the lives of members of HCM City Young Volunteer Force who worked in remote areas in southern provinces during the 1980s.

"We wanted to spotlight the brave volunteers remarkable work for building our homeland after war, said the plays female director Trinh Kim Chi, owner of the troupe.

Chi spent VND120 million (US$6,000) to create costumes and dazzling sound and light effects.

To highlight the plays theme, she used revolutionary songs such as Co Gai Mo Duong (Young Female Volunteers Maintain the Roads), Em La Thanh Nien Xung Phong (Young Volunteer) and Em O Nong Truong Em Ra Bien Gioi (Working at a Farm, Going to the Border), written by famous musicians Xuan Giao, Quynh Hop and Trinh Cong Son, respectively.

Serious work: The TKC Drama Club will send its new play, Mot Thoi De Nho (A Time to Remember), to compete at the National Professional Drama Festival 2018 in HCM City this month. The work portrays the lives of members of HCM City Young Volunteer Force who worked in remote areas in southern provinces during the 1980s. Photo courtesy of the theatre





Rising stars: Young actors of the The Gioi Tre (World of Youth) theatre troupe. Photo courtesy of the producer



The director also invited Le Thi Mai, former member of the force, to help her staff improve their acting skills.

I was very happy to help young actors. I hope audiences will learn more about our work, said Mai, who volunteered to work in Kien Giang and Ca Mau provinces in 1976 when she was 21 years old.

Mai and her colleagues attended the plays premiere at District 6s Cultural Centre on December.

Mot Thoi De Nho is staged on Saturday and Sunday nights.

Another troupe, The Gioi Tre (World of Youth) Drama Troupe, is more involved in contemporary art.

The troupes young actors are working on Cuop Bien (Pirates), an experimental production by young director Ngoc Hung. The show features topics about urban women and social problems.

Director Hung has used both Eastern and Western styles to depict the plays theme.

Though my play is about a well-worn topic, love, it will bring new messages and include new concepts for the theatre, said Hung, adding that he knew how to dazzle audiences during and after performances.

Hung, also a reporter, has written and directed more than 20 plays on different topics.

Most of his works are stories about urban youth.

One of his well-known plays, Chuyen Tinh Bangkok (Love Story in Bangkok), has been performed 200 times since its initial show in 2014.

Thanks to Hungs contribution, the The Gioi Tre Drama Troupe is one of the citys leading private drama troupes, and is also a place for young actors to improve their skills at school.

The troupe offers quality shows at only VND30-50,000 (US$0.7) per ticket to attract young audiences.

IDECAF, the regions leading private drama troupe, will not attend this years festival.

It has opened its third theatre at 5 Tran Cao Van Street in District 1.

We do not have enough time to prepare for the festival, said Huynh Anh Tuan, the troupes owner.

Many theatregoers say they are eagerly awaiting the quality performances at the festival.

The National Professional Drama Festival begins on April 11.

by Thu Anh

Source: VNSAn Algerian military plane crashed and caught fire on Wednesday killing 257 people, mostly army personnel and members of their families.

In a statement issued by the president's Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, he sent his condolence to Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and the people of the country.

The statement read, "On behalf of the government and people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, President @MBuhari commiserates with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and the people of Algeria on Wednesdays military plane crash near the Boufarik military airport in Algiers which claimed many lives.

"The President also extends deepest condolences to the families and friends of bereaved Algerians and other nationals, who are in sorrow because of the tragedy.

"President Buhari assures President Bouteflika and those who lost their loved ones of the sympathy of all Nigerians in their moment of grief.

"The President affirms that the thoughts and prayers of all Nigerians are with all who mourn, even as he prays that God Almighty will comfort the bereaved, the nation of Algeria and grant eternal rest to the souls of those who died in the crash."

Algeria's worst-ever air disaster

The Ilyushin II-76 transport plane, which was bound for Tindouf, crashed about 25 kilometres southwest of Algiers, the capital city. The government has declared three days of national mourning for Algeria's worst-ever air disaster.Abaribe was reacting to President Buhari assertion that the killings across Nigeria were being carried out by those trained by former Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

The Abia lawmaker accused President Buhari of failing to protect Nigerians from external attacks.

This chamber has discussed the killings in Nigeria," Abaribe began. "I recall that on the matter of herdsmen and farmers clashes, two explanations were given by highly ranked security. The inspector general of Police said that these killings were as a result of laws being passed by states.

Secondly, the defence minister said these killings were as a result of the blockage of grazing routes. And we continued to look at all these explanations.

Yesterday, in London, the commander-in-chief and president of Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari said that these killings were as a result of the people who were trained by Muammar Gaddafi, implying that these people who are doing the killings in Nigeria are invaders from outside of Nigeria.

If so, it validates my last point that when a commander-in-chief says he cannot take care of invaders, why is he still a commander-in-chief? Why do we still continue to indulge this president that goes around to tell everybody outside this country that he is totally incompetent? It is obvious, Abaribe announced shortly before he was called to order by the Senate President, Bukola Saraki.

Senators loyal to President Buhari disrupted plenary with most of them calling for a withdrawal of words chosen by Abaribe.

Senate leader, Ahmad Lawan who came under Order 53 of the Senate rules, alleged that they did not insult the then President, Goodluck Jonathan as members of the opposition party.

His words:The President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is the leader of this country and deserves the respect and courtesy of this chamber and those of us in it. I was once a member of the opposition and I do not recall ever calling the then President or insult him. This is our institution. If we do not conduct ourselves with respect, nobody will. I want to ask my colleague to immediately withdraw his statement and apologies to this chamber, he added.

Again, Saraki urged Abaribe to be guided by the rules of the upper chamber.

In his concluding remarks, Abaribe apologized but not without a shade.

I am very well guided by you but there are words that there are no alternatives to. What I did was to interpret the words by Mr. President in London. If any word I used is misunderstood by anyone, I apologize. What I am saying is simple. The heads of security in Nigeria made several explanations for the killings of our people. It shows that there is a disconnect, he said shortly before being interrupted by the deputy Senate leader.

Abaribe's travails

Abaribe has been under pressure to produce the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, Nnamdi Kaku or risk jail term.

Kanu went missing after after the Army allegedly raided his residence in Abia state.He also sought for re-instatement and payment of his salaries and benefits from the time of the purported retirement till date.

Justice Sanusi kado, in his judgment, dismissed the suit for being incompetent and not conforming with the rules of the court.

Kado also held that the action was statute barred by virtue of Section 2(a) of the Public Officers (Protection) Act, 2004.

The section of that Act states that any counter-action against public officers should be instituted within three months.

The defence counsel, Felix Umar, had said that the claimant who received his letter of retirement on June 9, 2016, did not institute the suit until Jan. 7, 2017.

Umar further submitted that this action was instituted after seven months of the action, contrary to the provisions of Public Officers Protection Act.

The claimants counsel, James Abah, said that his client was compulsory retired because he restricted the movement of a certain individual during the 2015 election.But in February, almost four years after the audacious kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in April 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 111 schoolgirls from Dapchi, embarrassing the Nigerian military who failed to repel the militants and locate the girls.

The response from the authorities -- denials then contradictions -- was eerily similar to the confusion when the Chibok girls were kidnapped.

Though Buhari eventually declared the kidnapping a "national disaster", Nigerians wondered why it had taken so long for the government to get its story straight.

In a bizarre twist, the government struck a temporary ceasefire agreement with Boko Haram who dropped off 105 of the Dapchi girls to cheering parents in March, an act described by experts as a "propoganda coup" for the jihadists.

Five other Dapchi girls are believed to have been killed in the initial stages of the kidnapping, while one other, Leah Sharibu, is still being held for refusing to renounce her Christian faith.

"It was a very good ending compared to what happened in Chibok," Jacob Zenn, a researcher at The Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based research institute, told AFP.

The Dapchi attack, perpetrated by a faction of Boko Haram aligned with the Islamic State group, showed an evolution in the jihadists strategy, said Zenn.

"To see the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) being openly received with welcome in the village is a first in the insurgency."

The Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) wants to "win over the hearts and minds of the Muslim population," said Zenn.

"It's more dangerous in the long run."

Still in captivity

For those following Boko Haram, the Dapchi kidnapping wasn't entirely a surprise.

Over the past year, the jihadists have ramped up attacks, killing soldiers, kidnapping government workers and terrorising the northeastern city of Maiduguri with relentless suicide bombings.

Under pressure to live up to his election promise of beating Boko Haram, this month Buhari reiterated his support for the release of $1 billion in emergency funds to fight the Islamists.

Today over 100 of the Chibok girls remain in Boko Haram captivity.

Abubakar Shekau, the mercurial Boko Haram leader responsible for using girls as suicide bombers, has claimed in videos that the girls have converted to Islam and have been "married off".

Still, Buhari has promised to bring them back along with Sharibu, the Christian schoolgirl from Dapchi.

"I am very optimistic that all others, including the Chibok girls who are still in captivity will be safely released unconditionally to their families," said Buhari in his Easter address, "I urge you to continue to pray for their safe return."

Though Buhari's government has recovered scores of the girls, the negotiations with the jihadists -- which reportedly involved ransom payments and the release of high-ranking commanders -- rankled critics who questioned the wisdom of funding and rejuvenating the ranks of the extremists.

Less criticism

Even though some Chibok girls are still held in custody, Buhari is unlikely to face serious repercussions at the polls as a result of the Boko Haram insurgency, said Amaka Anku, Africa analyst at Eurasia Group, a Washington-based political risk consultancy.

The Bring Back Our Girls movement, once a fierce critic of former President Goodluck Jonathan's People's Democratic Party (PDP), has lost its bite, explained Anku.

"Even though they are speaking out, it's not with the same vitriol as they did against the PDP," she said.

The escalating clashes between pastoralists and farmers across the country has, for now, eclipsed Boko Haram in the national debate, Anku said.The Japanese Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr Sadanobu Kusaoke announced this at the commissioning of a 60MVAR Capacitor Bank at the Apo 132/33KV sub-station designed to improve electricity voltage in the FCT.

He said the government of Japan placed priority to support Nigerias power sector, given the sectors role at improving quality of lives of the people and promoting local industries.

According to him, the reasons for the support are hinged on the sectors ability to determine the level of influx for domestic and foreign investors.

Our support to Nigerias power sector will not end with this project, the government of Japan, in partnership with the Federal Government of Nigeria, is now signing an exchange of note.

The exchange is on Project Emergency Rehabilitation and Reinforcement of Lagos Transmission Sub-Substation.

I will like to take this opportunity to re-confirm the government of Japans commitment to continue to assist in Nigerias further development through enhancement of its electricity supply.

Kusaoke expressed belief that the Lagos project would also help to improve electricity supply in the state, attract more investors to Nigerias commercial capital and ultimately make life more comfortable for citizens.

The envoy noted that Japans cooperation in Nigerias power sector had spanned decades, adding that Japan had been involved in expanding electrification in the rural areas.

This, according to him is being done through the introduction of clean energy via solar electricity generation system, and training of experts among others contributions.

He said Nigerians national electricity output had substantially increased compared to two years ago, adding that the World Bank had identified Nigeria as one of the countries that made remarkable progress in the Ease of Doing Business index.

Kusaoke, however, expressed the hope that the trend would continue with the present implementation of the Economic Growth and Recovery Plan (EGRP).

In his remarks, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Alhaji Muhammad Bello thanked Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for providing the project in the FCT.

Bello was represented at the occasion by the Executive Secretary, Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA).

We express gratitude for this capacitor bank because of the anticipated positive effect in the management of electricity in Abuja and its environs.

We are hopeful that efficient transmission and distribution of electricity and the security of our power system will be guaranteed and prevent damage and reduction of transmission losses.

He said that Nigeria and JICA had enjoyed good working relationship.

The Minster said FCTA, in collaboration with JICA completed a 1.2 MV solar power project in the FCT water treatment plant at the lower Usman Dam.

This, according to him has helped reduce the cost of powering the plant to improve water treatment and supply.

Similarly with JICAs assistance, FCT water board has introduced payment metering system to stem revenue leakages.

We have also benefited from the agencys technical training programmes for our engineers, this is aimed at building capacity in the area of renewable energy and micro grid utility.Iwar made the call on Thursday in Barnawa and Narayi, all in Kaduna, in continuation of his stakeholders meeting on Community Policing.

He stressed that the neighbourhood watch groups were important component of the security architecture, as such they must be made to conform with the law.

There is already a structure to regulate all these security volunteer services in the state.

Kaduna State Vigilance Service has a structure established by the state government to regulate community neighbourhood watch.

I advise all the volunteer security services to take advantage of what the state government has provided to operate in tandem with laid-down rules.

Let them join the Kaduna state vigilance service, so that they can be trained and know what they are doing to work within the law, work in collaboration with the police and others security agencies, so that some of their excesses will be contained, he said.

The CP said that the recovery of firearms had been successful in the state as more people are bringing their illegal weapons.

As the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris has extended the period to another 21 days, the door is open for those who are in possession of illegal and unlawful weapons to return them.

For us here in Kaduna, we are working with community leaders, we are not only recovering firearms, but also working on criminals to renounce criminality and embrace positive aspects of existence, Iwar said.

A member of Barnawa community, Chief Anthony Ubani appealed to the police to deploy more personnel in the area, which has over 200 hotels and other businesses.

Also Yusuf Garba, the Village Head of Narayi, commended the CP on his effort to bring policing to the grassroots.The chairman of the state branch of NUT, Mr. Thomas Ayodele, made the call in Lokoja on Thursday, April 12, 2018, during the union's yearly solemn assembly.

He said that his members can no longer accept a salary of between 20 per cent and 30 per cent being paid to them since the beginning of the year.

Ayodele said the underpayment, inconsistent percentage payment and omissions that have so far characterised the payment of primary school teachers' salary must stop immediately.

He called on the state Ministry of Local Government and all the 21 local governments in the state to make necessary adjustments and make salary of teachers first line charge as directed by the state government since July 2017.

The union insisted that local governments hands off payment of teachers' salary henceforth, saying that the State Universal Basic Education Board, which is constitutionally saddled with this responsibility, be allowed to perform its function.

ALSO READ: This is why Governor Bello showed up at Aso Rock on crutches

Ayodele also called on the state government to undertake the harmonisation of teachers' payroll to include all pending cases currently being reviewed by SUBEB, in conjunction with the office of the state Head of Service.

While demanding immediate payment of all outstanding salary and allowances of teachers, the union requested that adequate instructional materials be provided in all schools to enhance teaching and learning.He said the recent increase in the tuition fees was alarming and beyond normal situation, adding that the development would be inimical to educational development of the state, if not reversed.

Okereafor said that students had been paying between N25, 000 and N30, 000 but noted that the fees had been increased to N120,000 and N180,000 respectively in state-owned institutions.

We are calling on Gov. Akeredolu to as a matter of urgency reverse the anti-students policies both in Rufus Giwa Polytechnic; Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba and other state-owned institutions as soon as possible, he said.

He stressed that otherwise; the national secretariat of NANS would be moved to Akure the state capital.

Unarguably, many female students may be lured into prostitution while the male students may be lured into cultism and armed robbery due to the inability of their parents to pay the proposed tuition fee, he said.

He said that NANS had been uncomfortable with the increase in the tuition fees without due consultations and consideration of the present economic realities in the country.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports that Ondo, the state capital, witnessed uneasy calm four days ago as students of the Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba, Akoko protested over 500 per cent hike in their tuition fees.Jimoh, however, urged the police and other security agents to always carry the VGN officers along while deliberating on security matters.

We are closer to the society because people relate with us and we do interact with them.

Anytime they notice any kind of suspicious movement, they inform us and we act, based on their tip off.

So we will appreciate it if the security agents can carry us along, so that we will join them in combating crime in the state.The president's Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, took to his Facebook account on Thursday, April 12, 2018, to narrate how the president made up for mistakenly making a grandfather miss his grandson's graduation ceremony.

President Buhari played host to Nigeria's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, George Oguntade, on Wednesday, April 11, in his first meeting since he arrived in the UK.

According to the president's aide, Ambassador Oguntade was on his way to his grandson's graduation ceremony when he was summoned to meet with the president on Wednesday.

When the president was informed of what had happened, Adesina said he apologised to the professor and called his grandson, Mofoluwaso Oguntade, to personally speak to him and congratulate him on his Master's degree.

The president also signed the congratulatory card that the Ambassador had bought for Mofoluwaso to apologise and congratulate him again.

Adesina's full account read, "I got to President Muhammadu Buhari's lodgings in London on Wednesday morning at about noon. He was billed to meet the Archbishop of Canterbury, His Grace Justin Welby shortly.

"At the waiting room was Ambassador George Adesola Oguntade, a retired Justice of the Supreme Court, now Nigeria's High Commissioner in London. We greeted cordially.

"Ambassador Oguntade is 78, but not looking a day older than 60. I told him so, and he promptly ascribed the glory to God.

"As we chatted, he told me he had been on the way to Southampton for the graduation ceremony of his grandson, when he got a phone call that the President would like to see him.

"'I was midway into the journey, but promptly turned back. My grandson, Mofoluwaso Oguntade, was taking a Master's degree in Information Systems, and I had wanted to share the joy of the day with him.'

"Mofoluwaso is the son of Foluso Oguntade, himself a Senior Advocate of Nigeria. Talk of a family of lawyers and eggheads.

"We were soon ushered in to see the President, and after genial greetings, Ambassador Oguntade told the story of his aborted trip.

"'Oh dear!' President Buhari exclaimed. 'The protocol people should have let you be, since I am still here for another week. My apologies. I will speak with the young man.'

"Ambassador Oguntade reached for his phone, and called up his son, the senior advocate. The President congratulated him on the graduation, and also asked to speak with the young man.

"Mofoluwaso Oguntade came on the line. The President expressed joy on his academic feat, and apologized that he inadvertently kept the grandfather away. From the smiles and laughters, you could see that the interlocutors were enjoying the conversation.

"That done, the President asked for the congratulatory card that the Ambassador had bought. For some minutes he wrote on the card, then disclosed, 'I have congratulated him once again, and apologized for keeping his grandad away.'

"Who says this President is only about iron and steel?"

The documentary showed senior officials and political associates of the president speaking rather glowingly about his admirable qualities that they insisted the public was neglecting to see.

Buhari in London

The president left Abuja for the United Kingdom on Monday, April 9, 2018, a full week ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings scheduled to hold between April 18 to 20.

He left Nigeria just hours after he officially announced his intention to seek re-election in the 2019 presidential election during a meeting with the National Executive Committee of the All Progressives Congress (APC) on Monday.

The president is expected to sit down with British Prime Minister, Theresa May, ahead of the meetings, to discuss Nigeria-British relations.

He'll also meet the Chief Executive Officer of Royal Dutch Plc, Ben van Beurden, in connection with the oil giant's plan to invest $15 billion in Nigeria's oil industry. He'll also meet with prominent British and Nigerians residing in the UK.This was sequel to a motion under matters of urgent public importance by Rep. Olayonu Danladi (Kwara-APC)), representing Ifelodun, Offa Oyun Federal Constituency of Kwara state.

Moving the motion, Danladi said the robbery was carried out by a gang of 30 which invaded the town in a convoy of 10 vehicles.

He stated that the robbers commenced their attack by invading the police station in Offa where some police officers were killed before they attacked various banks in the town, killing innocent civilians and bank workers.

He expressed displeasure that such scale of attack could occur because the security system was overwhelmed.

This is an issue that calls for serious concern. The citizens have the right to security and the right to life as guaranteed in the Nigerian constitution and this cannot be undermined.

This dastardly acts of robbery that occurred in Offa, Kwara state has become a recurring scenario for the armed bandits to first overcome the police before unleashing mayhem on citizens and workers.

It means the security operatives are not capable of protecting lives and properties of Nigerians. The banks in Kwara South are all closed as a result of the incident, which constitutes grave danger on the states economy, Danladi said.

Contributing to the motion, Rep. Beni Lar (Plateau-PDP) stated that the nation was becoming a beehive of crime that have remained unsolved.

She emphasised that the National Assembly must intervene to find out the truth about the state of the nations security apparatus.

Similarly, Rep. Ahman Pategi (Kwara-APC), stated that the fact that there was no reinforcement to back-up the police in Offa while the robbers carried out their operation.

Pategi said this cast doubts about the effectiveness of the security structure and painted them in bad light.

He said that the fear of the public needed to be allayed.

Deputy Speaker, Yussuf Lasun, in his ,said that there was a possibility that students in institutions of higher learning in Offa who were cultists might be responsible for the heinous crime.

Also, Rep. Toby Okechukwu (Enugu-PDP) said that there was an avalanche of criminal activities nationwide, saying the root causes of the problem seemed not to have been addressed.

Chairman, House Committee on Rules and Business, Rep. Orker Jev declared that the nation was becoming an urban jungle, insisting that it looked like both the citizens and the security forces were afraid of the criminals.

The motion was unanimously adopted when it was put to a voice vote by the Speaker, Mr Yakubu Dogara.

The House in its resolution condemned the robbery attack and mandated the House Committee on Police Affairs to carry out the probe.

It said it should investigate as to how such a deadly robbery took place which would assist the police to prevent a future occurrence.Besides, Alade said in a letter to Gov. Akinwunmi Ambode, that no such town as Isheri Olofin ever existed in the composite Map of communities in Idimu area drawn by late Herbert Macaulay in December, 1919.

Similarly, he contended that Isheri Olofin was never recorded among the 202 settlement communities inherited from the defunct Western Region by virtue of Decree 14 of 1967, which created Lagos State.

A copy of the letter dated March 5, 2018 and signed by Mr Bola Aide, counsel to Alade, was made available to News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Abuja.

In the letter, Alade also stated that it was only Isheri-Idimu that was recorded as one of the 20 customary tenants of Idimu village, and was duly paying rent to the community.

He said that Wahab Balogun, the Oba of the non-existent Isheri-Olofin, had openly declared that he was from Orile Agege, adding that the non-existence of Isheri-Olofin was evident in the governments Intelligence Report No. 29939 of 1935.

Alade said that Isheri-Olofin kingdom was an illegal political creation against all historical and documentary evidences.

He said that the illegal creation had given rise to unconstitutional and illegal arrogation of authority by Balogun to forcefully and unlawfully acquire peoples land in Idimu and displace many families.

According to him, by his action, Balogun has put the lives and property of over 650,000 inhabitants of Idimu in jeopardy.

Alade, therefore, urged the state government to quickly address the issue by declaring Isheri-Olofin non-existent and remove the Oba, saying that he would drag the government to court if it failed to act within 30 days.Premium Times obtained a copy of the letter the state police commissioner, Austin Iwar, addressed to Sani, who represent APC-Kaduna Central in the Senate.

In the letter, Iwar asked the lawmaker to appear on April 30 at the Command Headquarters in Kaduna for questioning.

"This is in connection with a case of criminal conspiracy and culpable homicide transferred to this office by 1 Division, Nigerian Army, Kaduna, alongside with exhibit audio CD in which your name was mentioned by the principal suspect," Iwar said in the letter.

The state police boss concluded that Sani's presence for questioning will "enable us fairly and timely conclude investigation into the matter."

The letter was said to have been sent to the Senator through the Clerk of the National Assembly - a copy of it was forwarded to Senate President Bukola Saraki.

The police, however, was not specific about the homicide case allegedly involving Sani.

It is believed that this may be connected to recent violent confrontations between supporters of Sani and those of the Kaduna state governor, Nasir el-Rufai.

The crisis also broke the APC chapter in the state into two factions.

But the police commissioner said the murder case is not politically-motivated.

"A case was transferred to me and I am handling the case," Iwar told Premium Times.

"The matter is currently under investigation and we dont think we have reached a stage yet where we could inform the public about it," he added.

According to him, if Sani honours the police invitation, he would not be detained. He said the command would have arrested him if that is the intention.

Sani blames el-Rufai

Reacting to the police action, the lawmaker accused el-Rufai of instigating the police against him.

Sani said he had been informed that the Kaduna government was plotting to frame him for murder.

"There is an attempt to frame me up with a murder case by the Kaduna State Government using the police. A letter has been written from the office of the Commissioner of Police office but it has not been delivered to us", the lawmaker said.

He added that the murder case is already before a court of law, alleging that el-Rufai wrote the judge in charge of the case to express interest in the case.Isa had been detained for his alleged involvement in the death of one Lawan Maiduna. He said the military tortured him to claim that Sani contracted him to murder the victim.

Speaking to newsmen in Kano on Thursday, April 12, he said: "I was not in Kaduna but received calls that the Military are looking for me on an issue so when I went back I was at our office in Kabala Doki when the military came and asked me to come with them.

"The Military told me that they arrested some suspects and I alongside another person we should come in our position as JTF to verified (verify) their identity at Badarawa so after an inquiry they allowed the other person to go and asked me to follow them.

"They now took me to Kukwa Ahmed Aruwa Firm, and kept me there I was there when a Military Captain came and left there after he sent an intelligent officer who now came and told me that I was the one who killed Lawan Bakin Ruwa.

"I told them as a civilian JTF how can I killed (kill) anybody, they now started torturing me that I most (must) accept that Im the one who killed him and Senator Shehu Sani was the one who contracts (contracted) us to do it.

"The Military at the firm insisted that I most (must) accept that Senator Shehu Sani gave Bashir Hamadada money to pay us for the killing of Lawan and I told them I neither knew Bashir no (nor) Lawan they are talking about."

Isa said that despite being detained for two weeks, he refused to frame the lawmaker.

"...later we were transferred to the Kaduna State State CID were I spent almost a month and from where I was taken to Prison," he added.

According to him, it was at a Kaduna State High Court that he got his bail.

Sani blames el-Rufai

The Kaduna Police Command had also on Thursday asked Senator Sani to appear before it on April 30 for questioning over a murder case.

ALSO READ: Senator Shehu Sani says APC and PDP are the same

Reacting to the police action, the lawmaker accused the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai of masterminding the plot to frame him for the alleged murder.According to a report by Channels Television, 10 people were feared killed in attacks on Akaanya and Nenchi villages on Thursday, April 12, 2018, according to Ukun LGA chairman, Tyokaa Iberlogo.

Even though Iberlogo couldn't provide details of the attacks, it was reported that the violence had spread from a similar attack in nearby Taraba.

According to a report by TheCable, gunmen had attacked Jandeikyula village of Wukari LGA around 7pm on Wednesday, April 11, 2018.

The chairman of Wukari LGA, Adi Grace, confirmed the attack while the former chairman of the Wukari Youths of Vision, Luka Agbo, reported that over 30 people were killed.

"It is true that Jandeikyula village was attacked night and from the reports we are getting, over thirty people were killed.

"The series of attacks in the state now make us to be living in fear because we can no longer go to bed with our two eyes closed," he said.

The spokesperson of the Taraba State Police Command, David Misal, also confirmed the attack but noted that the number of casualties was still sketchy.

Taraba and Benue are two of the states most affected by herdsmen violence in the country as hundreds have been killed in several attacks carried out, mostly in rural communities, in 2018.

Exercise Ayem Akpatuma

To combat growing unrest in the country amid a spate of worrying criminal activities, the Army launched Exercise Ayem Akpatuma in Benue, Taraba, Kogi, Nasarawa, Kaduna and Niger in February 2018.This workforce was made up of peasants who irrespective of their inputs to the English economy, had their lands coldly taken away from them.

Not just that, they were forced to work for long hours usually between 12-18 hours daily under poor conditions in the factories and mines in return for low wages.

This was around the historical 18th-century industrial revolution in Britain.

It was this struggle that birthed the earliest trade unions. But as expected, they were declared illegal and heavily subdued, but were later granted recognition by the government.

What is trade union?

According to the business dictionary, a trade union is an organization whose membership consists of workers and union leaders, united to protect and promote their common interests.

It goes further to state that its principal purposes consist the following:

1. Negotiate wages and working condition terms

2. Regulate relations between workers (its members) and the employer

3. Take collective action to enforce the terms of collective bargaining,

4. Raise new demands on behalf of its members

5. Help settle both internal and external grievances of members.

Be that as it may, it is right to affirm that trade unions in Nigeria have succeeded carving a unique spot in the country's history.

Unarguably, the trade unions in Nigeria have consistently been one of the largest and organised people force who has always presented a fighting force against the government and their policies.

But their fight hasn't gone well with the government who through constitutional acts, have tried to limit the scope and purpose of trade unions.

As a matter of fact, stories have it that they took part in the anti-colonial struggle. They also did their best to fight against military dictatorship.

And since the beginning of democracy in 1999, the labour movement has to some extent, acted as the guardian of the poor by protecting their interest.

However, there are other types of organizations that play the same role in the communities and educational institutions, such as social student organizations.

Owing to this, the government has tried to limit the range of unionism. And this effort was given Constitutional backing in the (Section 1 of the Trade Union Act of 1973, as amended in 2005); which prescribe the aim and purpose of a union are restricted to the representation of workers in the regulation of wages and working conditions within the industry.

This, however, has always been rejected by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) who has always gone ahead as a trade union to concern itself with all aspects of the lives of workers, not simply employment conditions.

Because a trade union is supposed to concern itself with the political life of the country, the economy, the social position of workers (education, health care, welfare), as they all affect the interest of workers.

It is important to mention that in times when the government has been unacceptably deaf, inconsiderate, bias, and intimidating, pressure groups such as the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASSU) and the numerous students union have either independently or together opposed the government.

And with brazen and constraining actions such as strikes, industrial actions, mass protest, deliberate disregard of government instructions and legal maneuvers, their demands have been met

ALSO READ: The unbelievable salary of Nigerian Senators will leave you in tears

Here are five influential trade unions in Nigeria

1. NLC- Nigeria Labour Congress

2. NUPENG- National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers

3. PENGASSAN  Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria

4. NMA- Nigeria Medical AssociationHe said that the state could not wait for the Federal Government which had to fix many of such roads across the country while the people of the state suffer.

We do not have federal citizens, we only have federal roads and our people have to make use of the roads, he said.

Amosun, who pleaded for a refund, called on the Federal Government to hand over some of the federal roads to states so that they could fix them through investors and toll them.

He said the rehabilitation would be more effective and faster if some of the roads were ceded considering the number of federal roads being handled by Federal Government.

Amosun commended the Federal Government for the ongoing rehabilitation of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, noting that  the project is up to 70 per cent completion.Buhari announced his second term ambition during the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the All Progressives Congress (APC) on April 9, 2018, the same day he travelled to London.

He said he made the declaration because the politics generated by his possible second term run was getting in the way of important issues like security, economy, anti-corruption among others.

The President stated this when he received the Archbishop of Canterbury, His Grace Justin Welby in London on Wednesday, April 11, 2018.

"I declared before leaving home because Nigerians were talking too much about whether I would run or not. So, I felt I should break the ice. We have many things to focus on, like security, agriculture, economy, anti-corruption, and many others. We needed to concentrate on them, and politics should not be a distraction. The majority of Nigerians appreciate what we are doing, and that is why I am re-contesting," Buhari said.

The President recounted some of the achievements in office to Archbishop Welby, with whom, he has built a deep friendship in recent times.

"We have cut the importation of rice by about 90%, saving billions of dollars in the process. People who rushed into petrol money have now gone back to agriculture. Even professionals have gone back to the land. Nigeria should be able to feed itself comfortably soon. I am so pleased," he said.

Speaking on the anti-Boko Haram fight, Buhari stressed the need for continuous education of the people, "so that they can be free from religious manipulation," adding that no true religion advocates the hurting or killing of the innocent.

Herdsmen crisis

Responding to the cleric's comment on the clashes between herdsmen and farmers in different parts of Nigeria, he said the crisis predated his administration.

"The problem is even older than us. It has always been there, but now made worse by the influx of armed gunmen from the Sahel region into different parts of the West African sub-region. These gunmen were trained and armed by Muammar Gadaffi of Libya. When he was killed, the gunmen escaped with their arms. We encountered some of them fighting with Boko Haram. Herdsmen that we used to know carried only sticks and maybe a cutlass to clear the way, but these ones now carry sophisticated weapons. The problem is not religious, but sociological and economic. But we are working on solutions," the President explained.

ALSO READ: More reactions trail Buhari's decision to seek reelection

He expressed displeasure over what he called "irresponsible politics" that has been brought into the farmers-herders conflict, but assured that justice will be served to all those involved.The bill seeks among other things, to reorder the timetable of elections.

The decision of the Senate was sequel to recommendations by the committee on ethics and privileges.

Omo-Agege alongside nine other Senators had staged a walkout after the Senate passed the bill.

The lawmakers had claimed that the electoral amendment bill was targeted at President Muhammadu Buhariand the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

Senator Dino Melaye then petitioned the Senate to investigate the claims of the those protesting the bill. The matter was referred to the Senate committee on ethics and privileges.

Omo-Agege instituted legal actions against the Senate. This was after the lawmaker apologized, at plenary, for his actions.

Presenting the recommendations of the committee, the chairman, Senator Sam Anyanwu, described Omo-Ageges statement as malicious, unfounded and aimed at smearing the institution of the senate.

The committee recommended that Omo-Agege be suspended for 181-legislative days for his actions.

The statement of Ovie Omo-Agege was malicious, unfounded and aimed at smearing the institution of the senate, Anyanwu announced.

He continued: At the committee, he responded that he would not be able to make any presentation before the committee because he had taken the matter to court. That the matter be postponed until it is discharged by the court.

After Senator Ovie had admitted guilt on the floor of the senate on the 21 of February by apologizing to the leadership and the entire senate. The committee was surprised that he changed his mind and took the senate President to court.

As a forthright member of the committee, this action infuriated the committee who fired questions from all directions at him. When asked if the court action came before or after the matter was referred to the committee, he kept mute.

After his apology, he and Senator Abdullahi Adamu published an advert on Vanguard Newspaper with the heading, Parliamentary support group in Senate for President Muhammadu Buhari suggesting that the Senate was biased.

The committee is of the opinion that the action by Senator Ovie going to court after apologizing to the senate was unacceptable especially as an experienced lawyer and a member of the committee and is conversant with the modus operandi therefore must be punished to serve as a deterrent to others who might contemplate to take the senate to court over its internal matters.

The senate immediately disengages Ovie Omo-Agege for 181 legislative days to serve as a deterrent to other senators who might contemplate taking the senate to court over its internal matters, he declared.

In a swift reaction, Senate leader, Ahmad Lawan urged his colleagues to pardon Omo-Agage for his action.

Lawan further called on the lawmaker to withdraw the legal action instituted against the Senate.

Other lawmakers spoke in the same line.

But, in his remarks, Senate President Bukola Saraki pleaded that his suspension be reduced to ninety legislative days.

Saraki also recommended a termination of groups within the Senate and a withdrawal of the case instituted against the red chamber in court.

Distinguished Colleagues, a number of points have been raised. One borders on the issue of preserving the integrity of this institution. To me, that is what I think is the most important thing for us, Saraki said.

Second, is where we take actions that are not sincere. I think in this chamber, if we want to talk about who has the right to say he is Chairman of a Parliamentary Support Group for Mr. President both by action and by what we have done, I think that I have the right to lead that  more than anyone else here.

Those of us that understand politics, understand that because of our own peculiar interest, sometimes some people decide to act like they are holier than thou or more committed  at the expense of others. This is not something that we should tolerate, and I believe that in an institution like this we must show discipline, but at the same time we must also show compassion.

Distinguished Colleagues, there must be discipline. We must show that such groups must be suspended and the case in court must be withdrawn.

If I can make recommendations from this chair, I would say that this issue before us, maybe we should reduce the number of days by half but with an understanding that we can revisit and look at this issue. We must send out a strong message. There are some people who are fanatics and such actions will expose a lot of people and allies.

The senator involved, Senator Agege should withdraw the case, the support group should be disbanded and out of compassion, we amend the recommendation of the committee to 90 days and we move forward.

Distinguished Colleagues I hope we will not have to come to these sort of situations again at this point in this democratic process. We can cue on this and move forward, he added.Most of 14 people wounded in the blast were in "critical condition", he said.

Officials said the injured could not be transported to a hospital outside the village as night had fallen and inhabitants feared being ambushed by IS.

The funeral was for five members of the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary units, which fought alongside the army to expel the jihadist group from Iraqi towns last year.

They were killed on Wednesday night in a jihadist attack on a military convoy in the village, 250 kilometres (150 miles) north of Baghdad, a police official said.

The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since a January 16 double suicide bombing in Baghdad that cost 31 lives.

The Iraqi government declared victory over IS in December after pushing the jihadists out of their final holdouts along the border with Syria.

But the group retains the capacity to strike despite losing control of vast swathes of Iraqi territory it seized in 2014.

It still clings to pockets of desert in war-torn Syria and appears to be able to cross the porous border between the two neighbours.

Jihadists sometimes manage to snatch control of roads at night, especially in the Salaheddin province where Thursday's attack took place, and Anbar province along the border with Syria, security experts say.President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced three days of national mourning after the plane slammed into a field near the Boufarik airbase 30 kilometres (19 miles) south of Algiers shortly after it took off on Wednesday.

Flags flew at half mast on public buildings and foreign embassies in the capital on Thursday as government departments observed a minute's silence.

There was no announcement regarding funeral arrangements, as many of the victims' bodies had yet to be identified.

Several large companies took out advertising space in newspapers to offer condolences to the families of the 10 crew members and 247 passengers who died.

Mosques across the country are set to hold prayers of mourning on Friday.

The Algerian authorities have announced an investigation into the crash, but so far there has been no details of any findings.

The plane, which came down shortly after being refuelled, erupted into flames before it hit the ground, witnesses told AFP.

Hundreds of ambulances and dozens of fire trucks with sirens wailing rushed to the scene of the crash, in an uninhabited area where one person was injured on the ground by debris.

Firefighters took two hours to extinguish the blaze, Algerian media reported.

The Ain Naadja military hospital in Algiers, where the bodies were transported, has set up a psychological support unit for victims' relatives and witnesses of the accident.

Several cultural events planned for the coming days were cancelled.

'Tragic!'

Images of the plane's burned-out frame dominated the front pages of Algeria's newspapers.

Francophone daily Liberte led with the headline "Tragic!", while the official Arabic language paper El Moudjahid quoted Bouteflika calling the accident a "painful test" for the country.

Several papers praised the pilot, Smail Doucene, citing witnesses who said he had managed to steer the plane away from nearby homes.

"The pilot saved hundreds of people from certain death," wrote Arabic-language El Khabar.

The Ilyushin IL-76 transport plane was bound for Tindouf in southwest Algeria near the borders with Morocco and Western Sahara.

The North African country has suffered a string of military and civilian aviation disasters, but Wednesday's was Algeria's deadliest ever plane crash and the world's fourth costliest in human lives in 20 years.

Despite no details emerging on the cause of the disaster, several newspapers underlined the poor state of the Algerian military's ageing aircraft.

Several previous accidents were due to "poor maintenance of the military air fleet" said Arabic-language daily El Khabar.

Liberte said that "to date... very little if nothing has filtered out regarding investigations" into previous accidents

Two Algerian military planes collided mid-flight in December 2012 during a training exercise in Tlemcen, in the far west of the country, killing the pilots of both planes."The nomination will be submitted on Saturday and the vote will take place on Monday," he added.

The pro-Moscow veteran politician -- who has already served as premier in 2007-2008 -- concluded his second and final term as president after his successor Armen Sarkissian was sworn in on Monday. They are not relations.

Armen Sarkisian's inauguration has allowed controversial 2015 constitutional amendments to come into force, turning the country into a parliamentary republic with a strong prime minister.

The political shift was initiated by Sarkisian and was approved in a referendum with 63 percent of the voters backing the changes.

The opposition has said the reform was designed by Sarkisian to remain in power after he steps down as president.

After the December 2015 referendum, thousands of opposition supporters rallied in protest against alleged mass violations at polling stations.

Council of Europe observers have said the referendum was marred by allegations of large-scale vote buying and multiple voting, among other irregularities.

A shrewd former military officer, Sarkisian, 63, has been in charge of the landlocked South Caucasus nation of 2.9 million since winning a vote in 2008.

After that poll, 10 people died in bloody clashes between police and supporters of the defeated opposition candidate."We are extremely worried that some countries confident of their military power are turning Syria into a scene for arm wrestling," Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara after an unprecedented upsurge of tensions between Washington and Moscow.

His comments came after US President Donald Trump warned Moscow on Wednesday that US missiles "will be coming" to Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack.

Ankara appears currently keen to keep its distance from one of the worst outbreaks of tensions since the Cold War between its NATO ally Washington and increasingly close partner Moscow.

Erdogan's comments echoed those of his Prime Minister Binali Yildirim who called on Russia and the United States on Wednesday to stop "street fighting" on Syria.

'Assad's black mark'

While Russia, alongside Iran, has been supporting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Turkey has repeatedly called for his ouster and supported Syrian rebels.

But Turkey and Russia in recent months have put their differences aside and have been working closely to find a political solution to the conflict.

Last week, Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani were hosted by Erdogan in Ankara for a tripartite summit to discuss the Syrian conflict.

The alleged chemical attack in rebel-held Douma near Damascus on April 7 sparked international outrage and warnings of possible military action.

Turkey's foreign ministry has said it strongly suspects Assad was to blame.

"God willing, the (world's) collective conscience will act together to end this crisis for sake of the the innocent children massacred in the chemical attack in Douma," Erdogan vowed.

Erdogan said the Assad regime already had "a black mark on its track record" after seven years of civil war in Syria.

Without naming the countries, he appeared to lash out both at Russia for backing Assad and the United States for helping the Syrian Kurdish group the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Turkey considers a terror group."He fell... fighting to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity," he said.

A Greek general staff source told AFP that the Mirage 2000-5 plane was returning from a mission to intercept Turkish fighter jets.

"The mission was over and the plane was returning," the source said.

"We still don't know if there was an actual engagement with the Turkish airforce," the officer added.

State TV ERT said the warplane disappeared shortly before it was due to land at an airfield on Skyros island in the central Aegean.

Greek fighter planes are regularly scrambled to intercept Turkish jets entering what Athens considers Greek airspace over the Aegean.

The accident comes at a period of heightened tension between regional rivals and NATO allies Greece and Turkey.

Earlier this week, Greek soldiers fired warning shots at a Turkish helicopter after it approached the small island of Ro, which is on Greece's border in the southeastern Aegean Sea.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and members of his government have escalated verbal attacks on Greece after its failure to extradite eight Turkish soldiers that Ankara said were part of an attempted 2016 coup."These two groups will arrive separately to Syria on Thursday as well as tomorrow, on Friday," Jaafari told reporters.

"We will facilitate the arrival of the team to anywhere they want, in Douma, to check wether or not there was use of chemical substances," Jaafari said.

The ambassador said Syria had "denied 1,000 times" reports that its forces had carried out chemical attacks.

He suggested that "terrorists" had acquired chemical weapons from Libya and that Turkish, Saudi, US and French intelligence had a hand in smuggling chemicals to the war zone.

Russia has said it had dispatched experts to Douma who had not found any evidence of chemical weapons use.

Jaafari spoke ahead of a closed-door Security Council meeting called by Bolivia, a strong supporter of Russia, to discuss the threat of military action against Syria."The intelligence provided certainly paints a different picture," she said of the Kremlin's theory. "The president holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack"

Trump is believed to be considering standoff missile strikes against facilities related to the production and delivery of chlorine and sarin or sarin-like agents.

But many of Syria's most sensitive military facilities are protected by Russian missile defense systems or are located at bases where Russian, Iranian and Syrian personnel cohabit.

Sanders pointedly refused to rule out the possibility of direct military engagement with Russia -- not shying away from the specter of clashes between two nuclear superpowers.

"Once again, all options are on the table," she said.

Still, despite Trump's tweets early Wednesday which promised "nice and new and 'smart!'" missiles were headed for Syria, Sanders said no "final decisions have not been made on that front."

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis as well as military personnel responsible for America's sea based Aegis missile defense system huddled at the White House on Wednesday to discuss options and game out the situation.

'Can't be allowed'

Since the attack in Douma on Saturday, Trump showed a visceral reaction to graphic images of pallid children struggling for breath and frantically being doused with water by first responders.

"As bad as the news is around the world, you just don't see those images," Trump said Monday, in one of a series of tweets and public remarks that appeared to telegraph the strikes.

"This is about humanity. We're talking about humanity. And it can't be allowed to happen," he said, surrounded by generals.

In April last year Trump ordered limited missile strikes on the Shayrat Airbase, in response to a similar chemical weapons attack on rebel-held Khan Sheikhun.

Official said at the time that he was moved by images brought to him by his daughter Ivanka and other White House officials.

But the pinpoint strike did not deter Assad. US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have since reported around 10 suspected chemical attacks of varying scale and certainty.

The same officials say Syria has continued to produce or procure chlorine, which is also has industrial and agricultural uses.

This latest chemical attack in Douma came days after Trump indicated a quick US withdrawal from Syria after defeating the Islamic State group.

Assad "likely calculated that the US would not respond if they escalated now," said Jennifer Cafarella of the Institute for the Study of War, "after President Donald Trump signaled his ultimate desire to withdraw from Syria."

Trump's predecessor Barack Obama had brokered a deal with Syria's ally Russia to remove chemical stockpiles from the country, a strategy which also failed.

Ned Price, a former CIA and National Security Council official during Obama's tenure told AFP the agreement led to the destruction of 1,300 tons of chemical weapons, but, he admitted, it was not enough.

"Even though the deal improved the situation considerably, we suspected the Syrians had failed to declare elements of their stockpile," he said.Two inmates were killed and a third was injured after the violence erupted in Bangui's Ngaragba central prison on Tuesday, the UN mission in CAR, known as MINUSCA, said in a statement on Wednesday. No detainee escaped.

Guards carried out a snap search of the cells, which led to a fight that then spread into a full-blown riot and attempted jailbreak.

"As the prisoners were determined to take over the jail and break out, and after attempts at negotiation failed, the domestic security forces, supported by MINUSCA, had to use force to restore order," it said.

Gunfire was heard from inside the prison, witnesses told AFP.

In a separate incident, 19 people, including a UN soldier, were killed and more than 100 wounded in clashes on Tuesday between peacekeepers and armed men in the volatile PK5 Muslim enclave of the capital.

The violence occurred two days after MINUSCA troops entered the PK5 district in a security sweep against gangs.

The clashes marked the bloodiest incident in Bangui since President Faustin-Archange Touadera was elected in 2016.

It was an event showcased as a turning-point in one of the world's poorest and most chronically unstable countries.

The former French colony of 4.5 million people spiralled into bloodshed after longtime leader Francois Bozize was overthrown in 2013 by the mainly Muslim Seleka rebel alliance.

France intervened militarily from 2013 to 2016 to push out the Seleka alliance but wound down the operation after Touadera came to power.

The country remains plagued by violence between ex-rebels and vigilante militia2s.Cuomo has expressed concerns about recreational marijuana as a gateway drug, although in recent months, as New Yorkers have signaled their growing support for legalization, he has suggested he is willing to consider the issue.

In a brief homemade video posted to Twitter on Wednesday, Nixon, seated in her living room, speaking over a faint but steady hum of background noise, said 80 percent of New Yorkers arrested in connection with marijuana use were black or Latino, despite roughly equal rates of use among white people and communities of color.

There are a lot of good reasons for legalizing marijuana, but for me, it comes down to this: We have to stop putting people of color in jail for something that white people do with impunity, she said.

She added, If there was more political courage coming out of Albany, New York, we would have done this already.

Cuomo signed a bill legalizing the use of medical marijuana in 2014, and he has proposed decriminalizing public possession of small amounts of marijuana, a measure that has not passed the state Legislature. But he has been reluctant to embrace full recreational legalization, a move that 62 percent of registered New York voters support, according to a November 2017 survey by Emerson College.

Asked about Nixons announcement, Cuomo dismissed the idea that New York was falling behind the eight other states that had legalized recreational marijuana use. He pointed to a study he had commissioned in January to study the effects on New York of legalization in those neighboring states.

There are many opinions, there are many cultural opinions, theres a lot of division in the Legislature, he said, adding, Im trying to depoliticize the issue and say, lets get the facts.

Nixon had declared her support for legalization at a small fundraiser in Manhattan in late March  pumping her fist in enthusiasm, one attendee said  but Wednesdays announcement was the first time she detailed her position. Regulating and taxing marijuana, she said, would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue and create jobs in the agricultural industry.

In a statement to The New York Times, Nixon also suggested that she would seek to mitigate the effects of past criminalization.

Ending the injustice of putting New Yorkers in prison for marijuana is a start, she said. But we also have to correct past injustices, by expunging prior convictions  particularly for nonviolent offenders whose only convictions are for marijuana use.

While her candidacy has attracted attention across New York and the country  Nixon, an actress, is best known for starring in the television show Sex and the City  polls suggest she faces a steep climb in her challenge to Cuomo, a second-term incumbent with $30 million in campaign funds. In a Siena College poll last month, 66 percent of Democratic voters said they would support Cuomo in a primary, compared to 19 percent who chose Nixon; among African-American voters, 77 percent backed Cuomo.

Bruce Gyory, a Democratic political consultant who is not working on either campaign, said Nixons selection of legalization as her first policy issue and her emphasis on racial inequities in marijuana arrests reflected her recognition of Cuomos bulwark of support among African-American voters.

By pushing for this, it not only helps her connect to younger minority voters but younger progressive voters. But the question is, will it be a motivator to vote? he said. Its a very interesting issue choice  Im not saying its crazy  but I dont know that it will on its own do the trick.

In 2014, when Zephyr Teachout, a little-known Fordham Law professor, challenged Cuomo for the Democratic nomination, she captured one-third of ballots in the primary  but failed to win a foothold among minority voters.

Gyory said Nixon, who, like Teachout, has positioned herself as a strong progressive alternative to Cuomos centrism, would face a similarly uphill battle.

The holy grail of New York politics has been the notion that white progressives can win a majority of minority voters, he said. And there have been very few who have been successful in that.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.Several members of the ANC, a constituent party of National Super Alliance (Nasa), had challenged the gazette notice which communicated to the members the decision to appoint Mr Muluka as the partys Secretary General.

Eight members of the party in November last year filed two petitions before Registrar of Political Parties Lucy Ndungu to quash the appointment of the political analyst and publisher.

The petitioners had protested the move by the NASA co-principal to appoint Muluka, saying the process was not procedural and not consistent with the party constitution.

ALSO READ: Central Bank makes new decision on printing currency notes

Contacted for a comment, Mr Muluka maintained that the decision to have him as the Secretary General was unanimous done by the party members, in fact, in his absence.

I did not chose myself as the Secretary General, I was handed the mandate by the party. They went to the Tribunal because they wanted to hold both the parliamentary seat and the Secretary General seat, which is impossible, Mr Muluka told Puselive.co.ke on phone.

He added: I am waiting for the next decision by the party. If it appeals, then it is fine; I hope they look into the legalities of the process itself.

A gazette notice dated October 30 indicated that Muluka had taken over from Godfrey Osotsi who was nominated to the National Assembly.

Muluka was appointed to the post on October 12 after a meeting of the partys National Executive Committee in Nairobi. The group said Muluka was imposed on members by the committee, demanding that a fresh election comprising of party officials be held to elect the secretary general.Moi had recently been discharged from hospital.

Despite the rather innocent explanation, there were heavy political undertones in the Kabarak "handshake".

Odinga's delegation

Odinga was accompanied by close political allies including Vihiga Senator George Khaniri and Mvita MP Abdulswamad Sharrif Nassir.

Nassir was recently awarded the powerful position of Chairperson of the Pbublic Investments Committee while Khaniri has been in Odinga's good books over his active role in the January 30th swearing in ceremony.

Host delegation

On hand to receive Odinga were a number of politicians allied to Baringo Senator Gideon Moi.

Gideon's individual presence would not raise much attention but there was also Jubilee rebel MP Silas Bowen who has recently fallen out with Deputy President William Ruto.

Timing

It does not help matters that the meeting between the NASA leader and the Mois has come in the wake of the famous unity deal between the Odinga and President Uhuru Kenyatta.The meeting was part of the many dialogues Mr Odinga has been holding with various leaders in the past few weeks.

Though the details of the meeting are still scanty, his party divulged that the two leaders consulted on the current state of political affairs in the Nation.

The former Prime Minister was accompanied by Mvita MP Abdulswamwad Shariff and Vihiga Senator George Khaniri to the meeting that lasted about one hour.

Baringo Senator Gideon Moi and KANU Secretary General Nick Salat welcomed the delegation to Mzee's home.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!GERMANY: Paribus Group has sold its Northrail Technical Service locomotive maintenance and repair business to Railpool Group, which is to operate it under the Railpool Lok-Service brand.UK: The inaugural scheduled freight service from DP Worlds London Gateway terminal east of London to the Duisburg freight hub in Germany set off on April 10, with the load including containers bound for China. This follows demonstration China to London and London to China services which ran last year.Direct Rail Services has called tenders for the supply of 10 mixed traffic diesel-electric locomotives and the provision of spare parts. DRS currently operates a fleet of more than 100 locomotives, and said it was seeking solutions to create benefits and efficiencies under a strategy of moving to a more ...Articles

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular articles.Moscow court to decide fate of Telegram on April 13

 RIA Novosti

11:37 12/04/2018

MOSCOW, April 12 (RAPSI)  The Tagansky District Court of Moscow will hold first hearings concerning a lawsuit filed by Russias media watchdog Roskomnadzor against Telegram messenger for refusal to provide the Federal Security Service (FSB) with information on user messages decoding on April 13, RAPSI correspondent reports from the courtroom.

In addition to setting a date for the hearings, a judge also granted a request of the watchdog and assigned FSB as a third party in the case. The court also dismissed a motion of lawyer Dmitry Dinze, who asked to move the date of pre-trial hearings.

Roskomnadzor demanded to immediately block Telegram in Russia if the lawsuit is granted, but the court ruled to consider that matter only after the final decision is made. This means that in certain circumstances the messenger may be blocked tomorrow.

In June 2017, the communications watchdog Roskomnadzor requested Telegram management to comply with the Russian legislation or face blocking of the messenger. Telegram founder Pavel Durov agreed to register the service in Russia. However, he refused to abide by laws incompatible with Telegram privacy policy, Durov wrote on his VKontakte (VK) page in late June.

In July, Durov received the FSB requests to provide information for decoding messages of six app users. In September, law enforcement authorities drew up administrative protocols against Telegram because of law violation, as Durov failed to reply for the request.

The Meshchansky District Court of Moscow has fined the company 800,000 rubles ($14,000) for refusal to provide FSB with information on message decoding concerning several users. The messenger insists that it is technically impossible to transfer encryption keys. Telegram has been found guilty of failure to store and (or) furnish information on users and their messages to law enforcement agencies. The ruling has become effective.

In December, Telegram Messenger LLP filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court of Russia seeking to cancel the Federal Security Services (FSB) decree establishing the procedure for provision of information on decoding of user data. On March 19, the lawsuit was dismissed. Telegram was obliged to comply with the FSB order within 15 days. The company filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against the fine, lawyer Damir Gainutdinov told RAPSI on March 22.

In early April, the Presidential Council for Human Rights called Roskomnadzor to refrain from blocking Telegram messenger in Russia and asked FSB to find other ways of legal access to the messages of users endangering the national security.

According to the Federal Law On Information, Information Technologies and the Protection of Information, organizers of information distribution on the Internet must submit information about users and their messages to the authorized governmental bodies conducting investigative activities and ensuring the state security.Investigators seek detention for ex-top manager of major Internet provider

 RAPSI

17:21 12/04/2018

MOSCOW, April 12 (RAPSI)  Investigators have filed a motion seeking detention of Aleksey Nashchekin, the former deputy CEO of Russian major Internet provider Rostelecom, who stands charged with accessory in abuse of authority, the spokesperson of Moscows Basmanny District Court Yunona Tsareva has told RAPSI.

According to media reports, from 2010 to 2013, the defendant acted as Rostelecom deputy director general of federal programs. Later, he was responsible for technological development of electronic toll collection system Platon. In 2015, he established the National Telematic Systems company engaged in developing information systems for transport.

Nashchekin was reportedly arrested as part of a case against CEO of AT Consulting information technology company Sergey Shilov charged with incitement to abuse of office.

Shilov has allegedly attempted to persuade the Interior Ministrys Chief Structural Engineer Andrey Nechayev to give him a right to execute a 1.4-billion-ruble government contract (about $25 million) and pay a contractor the work in progress.



Three defendants in Argentina drug case to remain in detention until July

 flickr.com / bloomsberries

17:45 12/04/2018

MOSCOW, April 12 (RAPSI)  Moscows Tverskoy District Court has extended detention for three defendants in a notorious case over attempted cocaine smuggling from Argentina to Russia, the courts spokesperson Anastasia Dzyurko has told RAPSI.

Vladimir Kalmykov and Ishtimir Khudzhamov will remain in detention until July 13, another defendant Ali Abayanov will stay jailed until July 12.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, law enforcement authorities of Russia and Argentina have collaboratively suppressed delivery of a large consignment of drugs (cocaine) from Argentina to Europe. The drugs ready for delivery were found in one of the Russian embassy buildings in Buenos Aires in 2016. Cocaine allegedly belonged to an embassy technical staff member, whose duty journey was over by that time. During the conducted operation, Russian and Argentinean citizens were arrested, the ministrys statement reads.

Kalmykov, Khudzhamov and Abayanov were arrested and detained in late February in Moscow. The fourth defendant Andrey Kovalchuk was arrested in Germany in early March. Russian prosecutors have reportedly forwarded a request for his extradition to German authorities.Property details:

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We're sorry, this article is not currently availableHow did marquee Dalal Street investors fare in the Jan-Mar quarter that saw the BSE Sensex tank 10 per cent?

Deepak Korgaonkar and Puneet Wadhwa report.



IMAGE: Rakesh Jhunjhunwala. Photograph: Shailesh Andrade/Reuters

A 10 per cent rise in the stock of the Titan Company during January-March 2018 (Q4FY18) helped Rakesh Jhunjhunwala outperform the market in the March quarter, as his net worth declined less than 1 per cent compared to three per cent fall recorded by the S&P BSE Sensex.

As on March 28, 2018, the combined net worth of Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and his family stood at Rs 130.21 billion, down 0.8 per cent or Rs 1.09 billion, as compared to Rs 131.30 billion at the end of December 31, 2017.

The figures are based on the family's holdings in companies where their total stake is more than one per cent (as publicly declared to exchanges), according to figures at the end of the October-December quarter source from CapitalinePlus database.

Among individual stocks, the Titan Company made Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and his family richer by Rs 6.39 billion during the last quarter.

The ace investor holds a 8.02 per cent stake in the company, translating to a total value of Rs 70.61 billion, as against Rs 64.22 billion at beginning of the year.

The scrip which gained 10 per cent during Q4FY18, surged to a record high of Rs 965 on Tuesday, April 10.

Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and his family increased their stake in the Titan Company and bought an additional 3.41 million, or 0.39 per cent, between October and December 2017, the BSE data show.

In the past one year, the stock has zoomed 107 per cent against 12 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex.

Going ahead, analysts expect Titan to benefit most among the organised jewellery players from the recently implemented policy initiatives like the goods and services tax.

Analysts at Reliance Securities, for instance, expect Titan to clock 23 per cent and 30.4 per cent compounded annual growth (CAGR) in revenue and earnings, respectively through FY17-20E.

Firstsource Solutions (up 30 per cent), TV18 Broadcast (9 per cent), Escorts (4 per cent) and CRISIL (0.4 per cent) from the Rakesh Jhunjhunwala's portfolio, too, have outperformed the market.

On the other hand, Dewan Housing Finance, Lupin, Federal Bank, Delta Corp, Rallis India, Edelweiss Financial Services and Karur Vysya Bank are among notable stocks from his portfolio that have seen market value erosion between 10 per cent and 20 per cent.

Meanwhile, the portfolios of other renowned investors such as Dolly Khanna, Ashish Dhawan and Ashish Kacholia have underperformed the market by falling in the range of 7 per cent to 18 per cent on account of sharp correction in mid-and-smallcap stocks during the quarter.

The S&P BSE Midcap and S&P BSE Small-cap indices slipped 10 per cent and 12 per cent respectively.

Political uncertainty due to state and upcoming general elections in 2019, oil prices and other global factors will keep the markets choppy over the next one year, suggests G Chokkalingam, founder and managing director of Equinomics Research.

Against this backdrop, he expects the mid-and-small-cap segments to underperform the larger peers.

Chennai-based marquee investor Dolly Khanna has seen her total net worth decline 11 per cent from Rs 8.97 billion to Rs 8.01 billion at the end of March quarter.

Except NOCIL and Rain Industries, some of the other stocks such as Manappuram Finance, Gujarat Narmada Valley Fertilisers & Chemicals, Nilkamal and Thirumalai Chemicals have seen a market price erosion of up to 26 per cent during the quarter.

Yusuffali Musaliam Veettil Abdul Kader's net worth slipped 20 per cent to Rs 8.75 billion from Rs 10.92 billion. He holds two banking stocks Federal Bank and South Indian Bank, data show.

Ashish Dhawan and Ashish Kacholia have seen their networth erode 18 per cent and 11 per cent respectively.The brand has survived by changing with the times.

Viveat Susan Pinto reports.

IMAGE: Horlicks is widening its appeal, targeting college-going youth as the recent digital campaign #FearlessKota emphasised .



Tune into any of the old Horlicks advertisements from the 1970s and the 1980s and a few things stand out; the distinctive glass bottles, a recurring narrative around a young mother, Suchitra, who looks after her family through summer, monsoon and ill-health and the unmistakable British accent of the voiceover.

Over the years nearly everything has changed, glass bottles have been replaced with more modern packaging variants, the positioning is around children's and women's health and the brand speaks in multiple tongues. But the brand's rise through the category has been steadfast; it continues to be the market leader more than 80 years after it was launched in the country with over 50 per cent of the market share.

One reason for the brand's longevity in the Indian market, say experts, is its ability to change with the times.

The most recent set of advertisements, for instance, play on the present dominant societal fear of stress. Be it height and stamina concerns around children, lack of energy among urban males or healthy bones, Horlicks has been quick to change.

And that believe many is among the many reasons it continues to be the leader in the 60-billion domestic health food drink market.

As the fate of Horlicks and other health food drinks in the portfolio of GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare India is decided over the course of the next few months thanks to a strategic review of the business, its position as India's favourite nutritional drink is likely to play a significant role in the deal making.

While Horlicks, developed by two British-born brothers William and James Horlick in the United States in 1873, came to India only in the 1930s at the end of World War II, it was only in 1960 that the brand began being manufactured and marketed in the country. Till that time, Horlicks was imported from Slough in Britain.

The first Indian factory in Punjab set the pace, say experts, for Horlicks' rapid adoption as a daily source of nourishment.

Horlicks faced its first crisis in the 1970s when India kicked off Operation Flood, the country-wide milk programme started by the National Dairy Development Board under Dr Verghese Kurien.

The campaign, which emphasised the nutritional properties of plain milk, apart from encouraging its production within the country, threatened to upend Horlicks' hold on the consumer.

This brought about a change in the communication around the brand. Ads featuring Suchitra, a fictional character, who would never hesitate to stir a spoonful of Horlicks in milk whenever possible, were visible through the 1970s.

The brand also set up its second plant in 1978 in Andhra Pradesh.

In the decades following the Suchitra ads, Horlicks reinforced its positioning with 'Why do I drink Horlicks?' in the 1980s and then focusing on specific consumer needs in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century.

In 2005, Horlicks came up with the 'Taller Stronger Sharper' campaign.

In 2010, Horlicks was repositioned as a wholesome food and beverage brand coinciding with its extension into biscuits and cereal bars (noodles were launched in 2009 and oats in 2011).

And in 2012, it was positioned as a drink fortified with 26 vital nutrients.

Cut to the present, Horlicks is reinventing again as rivals Bournvita (from Mondelez), Complan (Karft-Heinz), Milo (Nestle) and Protinex Grow (Danone) get more aggressive.

Ads talk of stress reduction, a common concern for most households and last month, a protein variant of Horlicks called Horlicks Protein+, targeted at adults, mostly, males, was launched.

It also appointed actor R Madhavan as brand ambassador. Madhavan's appointment preceded that of actor Tapsee Pannu's in November 2017, when she was brought on board to promote Women's Horlicks.

Vikram Bahl, area marketing lead, nutrition & digestive health, GSK Consumer Healthcare,India, said the launch (of Horlicks Protein+) tapped into a felt need for relevant products. 'It delivers on the benefit of quality proteins to help lead a healthier, more fulfilling lifestyle,' he says.

While Horlicks has been launching products beyond its core base of mothers and school-going kids over the last few years, this effort has been galvanised now. The brand is also widening its appeal, targeting college-going youth as a recent digital campaign '#FearlessKota' emphasised.Rooms at this Kolkata hotel are priced between Rs 7,000-8,000 per night. Gateway is a full-service upscale hospitality brand under the Taj Group of Hotels.

The Gateway, a 197-room Kolkata hotel managed by the Taj Group for over four years, has ended up at the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), having failed to repay its loans.

Edelweiss ARC has taken the owner, Jalan Intercontinental Hotels, to NCLT to recover its dues.

A round of bidding for the asset has taken place at the NCLT but the bids received are learnt to be lower than the liquidation value.

Launched in December 2013, this was the first Gateway hotel in Kolkata and the second Taj hotel in West Bengal after a gap of 24 years.

Its first property, the iconic Taj Bengal, was launched in 1989.

The Kolkata Gateway hotel, on the citys EM Bypass, is built on an area of 1.9 acre, under a long-term lease of 99 years.

Rooms at this Kolkata hotel are priced between Rs 7,000-8,000 per night. Gateway is a full-service upscale hospitality brand under the Taj Group of Hotels.

The Gateway Hotel, Kolkata is an asset owned by city-based entrepreneur, Aditya Jalan.

Edelweiss took Jalan Intercontinental to NCLT in August 2017, with a total claim of about Rs 127 crore.

Jalan maintains that the hotel faced a cost escalation which led to non-payment of dues.

The committee of creditors for the property has so far received two bids for the asset.

The bids received so far are lower than the liquidation value of the company. We have asked the bidders to revise their bids. There is no need to call for a fresh round of bidding, said a source from the Committee of Creditors. Kolkata-based real estate developer RDB Group and another real estate firm headed by businessman Pradeep Sonthalia are said to be the two prospective bidders.

Meanwhile, Jalan is looking to rope in an investor to bid for the property.

He is banking for amendments in the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code that may allow SME promoters to bid for their company and also the Supreme Court verdict on Binani Cement case, to bid for the property.

Jalan estimates that Rs 170 crore is a fair value of the property.

We are bringing on board an investor, and we are ready to pay the principal amount to every creditor. We are planning to propose a structured payment over eight years, Jalan said. Besides Edelweiss, other creditors to the hotel include Dhanalakshmi Bank.

Umesh Saraf, joint managing director at Saraf Hotel Enterprises, said his company, which owns nine hotels in India (most run under the Hyatt brand) had bid for the Kolkata Gateway Hotel.

A number of hotels are under stress. They were probably built by people who did not understand the business. They are all over the place with ARCs and BanksCall any ARC and you will see they have 20 hotels on sale.

"All are now going to NCLT. We have bid for a few. But our bids were low. We are not buying a monument. It has to make business sense, said Saraf, adding that valuations are high.

Hotels, which have now started seeing a revival in prospects, had seen a challenging phase in last few years due to low occupancy and tariffs.

Raj Rana, CEO (South Asia), Radisson Hotel Group said these instances are an outcome of softer industry performance in recent years and over leveraging by asset owners.

The Gateway Hotel, Kolkata, is a management contract and this remains valid. We continue to welcome all our guests to the hotel and it is business as usual, said a spokesperson at Gateway Hotel, Kolkata.

Photograph: Kind courtesy, The GatewayThe catch is the need for a supportive framework in place that allows free and fair use of such technology.

By the year 2021, around 60 per cent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is expected to be derived from digital products and services.

Created through the use of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things and cloud computing, among others.

So says a study commissioned by information technology major Microsoft.

It says digital transformation will add an estimated $154 billion to our GDP by 2021.

"India is clearly on the digital transformation fast track," says Anant Maheshwari, president, Microsoft India.

Organisations, he said, are increasingly deploying emerging technologies such as AI and that will accelerate this change-led growth even further, with the application of this in sectors such as education, health care and agriculture.

"(Such) Technologies can really solve some fundamental problems and if applied the right way, could unlock a lot of potential," Maheshwari told Business Standard.

The catch, he says, is the need for a supportive framework in place that allows free and fair use of such technology.

To illustrate, he said Microsoft had applied AI in Andhra Pradesh schools, where the government wants to address the issue of high numbers of students exiting in class 10.

"About 25 per cent of students drop out at 10th standard.

"If you can use AI to predict and identify why students want to drop out, you can pro-activel engage with the students or their families to keep them back in school...you can do so much for the economy," he said.

Similarly in health care. "Technology can play a role in providing facilities like preventive health care and augmented diagnosis to the needy. Then, there is agriculture, where productivity can be increased by 20-30 per cent, simply by using predictive technology."

The central government has formed a committee on AI to suggest a technical framework or platform for the emerging technology.

It is chaired by P P Chakraborty, a professor at IIT, Kharagpur, and has representatives from Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA and TCS.

Also, from Nasscom, the apex association of the information technology (IT) sector, beside the National Informatics Centre and the ministry of electronics and IT.

Its recommendations are expected by the end of this month.

Photograph: ReutersNow recognised as Kerala's official fruit, it may finally get the recognition it deserves.

Nikita Puri reports.

IMAGE: Former US President George W Bush (centre) holds up a giant jackfruit as he tours the Acharya NG Ranga Agriculture University .

Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

Every summer, with the afternoon sun streaming in from the glass tiles on her otherwise red tiled-roof in central Kerala, Thresiamma would sit on her back porch surrounded by her daughters and daughters-in-laws.

Having picked the ripest jackfruit from one of the many trees in her compound, they'd armour up with the single-finger rubber gloves popular in Kerala. Armed with kattis (knives), they'd dig into the chakkapazham (pronounced "chakka-param", the ripe form of the fruit).

Deseeding the fruit would continue over rounds of stories about the family, or the current price of the rubber crop.

The product of this bucolic afternoon scene would be chakka ada (mashed jackfruit with cardamom, jaggery and rice flour, wrapped in edana leaf and steamed), a summer delicacy Thresiamma insisted on making, while unripe jackfruit would be set aside for making chips.

From family rituals such as this, the jackfruit has steadily made its way over the years to festivals dedicated to the fruit.

With hundreds of jackfruit recipes still undocumented, the connection the fruit has with generations of Malayalis remains a powerful, albeit understated, one.

Recently, VS Sunil Kumar, the state's agriculture minister, announced in the state assembly that jackfruit would henceforth be Kerala's official fruit.

The aim is to promote the "Kerala Jackfruit" as a brand in markets across the country and abroad, Kumar said, besides showcasing its organic and high-nutrition qualities.

A revenue of 150 billion is expected through the sale of jackfruit and its allied products through branding of the fruit, he added.

Incidentally, Kerala isn't the only state to have an official fruit.

Telangana's, for instance, is the mango.

Apart from the self-proclaimed title of "God's Own Country", Kerala's branding also extends to the elephant being anointed official animal, the Great Hornbill as state bird and pearl spot (karimeen) as the state fish.

Also on the mandate is extensive research on jackfruit to be carried out in Ambalavayal, in Kerala's Wayanad district. "The jackfruit tree is kalpavruksha (a wish-fulfilling tree)," says P Rajendran, associate director at Regional Agriculture Research Station, Ambalavayal.

"It has proven medicinal and nutritional benefits but the drought-resistant jackfruit has been neglected for a long time. Recent years have made us more aware of our food, nutrition and health security. Jackfruit, being an indigenous food crop, doesn't require any maintenance," adds Rajendran.

The decision to give jackfruit its due began in earnest with a jackfruit festival last year where, in between pop-ups hawking jackfruit saplings and jackfruit unniyappams (fritters), agriculture scientists from over 12 countries presented research papers on the fruit.

Jackfruit festivals have gained prominence in recent years not just in Kerala, but also in Karnataka and Goa.

Organised locally in cities across Kerala, a thaali at one of these fests boasts a minimum of 10 dishes with jackfruit as the prime protagonist.

In between binging on jackfruit chips and payasam and bagging bottles of ready jackfruit pulp, you could also sign up for one of the many contests that have made these festivals popular, such as the jackfruit-eating contest where one gets plates of the ripe, golden yellow fleshy fruit.

For the braver among us, there are also contests that time you on how fast you can peel one of these (fair warning: expect a sticky ride owing to the obstinate sap).

Last year in Kochi, one of these festivals invited participants to lift and hold up a kingsize-jackfruit, a mammoth specimen weighing 50 kg.

The farmer-friendliness and medicinal benefits of the prickly jackfruit has made campaigners out of some men.

"Jackfruit was always looked down upon as a poor man's food but now it has become a part of royal wedding banquets in the North," says Shree Padre, a rainwater harvesting exponent known for his work in farmer-friendly journalism.

Based in Kasaragod, North Kerala, Padre is also the executive editor of a monthly Kannada agriculture magazine, Adike Patrike. Over the last decade, Adike Patrike has done 30 cover stories on why jackfruit deserves a place of honour among the world's most treasured pantheon of fruits.

Another vocal ambassador for the fruit is James Joseph, a former director for Microsoft and founder of Kochi-based Jackfruit365.

"Kerala is the largest recipient of jackfruit. I say 'recipient' because we don't cultivate jackfruit, it just grows on its own," he says.

Recent years have seen a change in attitude towards the fruit. People would put a jackfruit on their boundary walls and hope that someone would just take it away. Now, they use a weighing scale before the jackfruit is passed onto local shops, says Joseph.

"Every part of the jackfruit can be used," says Rajendran.

Besides the flesh, the jackfruit tree also provides high-quality timber and its roots and leaves reportedly have medicinal benefits.

"There is no farmer-friendly supply chain for jackfruit. Besides, unlike bananas or oranges, jackfruit doesn't have a ready market," says Padre.

A whole jackfruit is often too much for a family to consume, so packets with deseeded kathal, as it is known in North India, continue to be popular across India.

The development mantra best suited to promote jackfruit, feels Padre, falls in two categories -- ready-to-cook (RTC) and ready-to-eat (RTE).

"Mother Dairy's Safal has now introduced frozen tender jackfruit. That will go a long way in promoting jackfruit," he says.

A popular belief in Kerala, one that Joseph's uncle would often remind him of, is that a jackfruit tree in one's compound will add 10 years to a man's life.

Joseph's extensive advocation of how green jackfruit could fight diabetes landed him a meeting with the late APJ Abdul Kalam.

After going through all the scientific research that Joseph had put together, Kalam reportedly told him, "It makes absolute sense, combination of low glycemic index and high fibre of raw jackfruit can very well result in low absorption sugar to the body," Kalam said.

"Find a way to add jackfruit to regular eating habits," he added.

Joseph's Jackfruit365, now available everywhere from Nature's Basket to Amazon, specialises in flour made from green jackfruit.

The flour can be substituted for one cup of atta for chapattis and can be added to everything from idli-dosa to mathris, galauti kebabs and panna cotta.

In his documentation of jackfruit's uses are stories of a chef of a five-star hotel remembering the time his family survived on jackfruit for two whole months during communal riots.

Another story Joseph shares is of a diabetic man whose doctor discontinued his insulin prescription after he started using green jackfruit flour.

"When doctors ask diabetics to avoid jackfruit, they mean the ripe form," says Joseph. "English has only one word for jackfruit. But in Malayalam chakka is different from chakkapazham," says Joseph.

The antioxidant-rich chakka is the green, unripe form used in kathal subzis.

About 65 varieties of high-quality jackfruits have already been identified by the research team at Ambalavayal, says Rajendran.

"We'll study and recommend to farmers which ones to grow for commercial purposes. The challenge is also to identify what value additions we can make," he says.

Padre recognises this as a real challenge: while India, despite being the "mother country of jackfruit" has a negligible number of centres specialising in such value additions, Sri Lanka has 14.

As an example of an out-of-the box jackfruit product, he recalls two instances, one in Karnataka and the other in Kerala, where guests were served jackseed (jackfruit seed) coffee. "Not a single person was able to differentiate it from regular coffee. This kind of coffee doesn't even have caffeine," says Padre.

These seeds are also considered to be cheaper alternatives to cocoa beans used for chocolate.

Back in Thresiamma's household, the sickly sweet odour of ripe jackfruit continues to nudge the non-Malayali members of the family as far away from the fruit as possible.

Some non-believers even compare its distinctive scent to durian, a fruit that is reportedly banned on the Singapore Rapid Mass Transit because of its odour.

But as the industry begins to work around the rather forthright sap and odour of the ripe fruit, many have realised that somewhere in between the kitchen and dining table is an untapped repository of health and taste.

It was while he was negotiating a particularly succulent steak in the US many moons ago that Joseph realised how much the side-serving of mashed potatoes reminded him of chakka puzhukku, a dish made of unripe, mashed jackfruit.

The doors to a brave new world with jackfruit as a substitute food have only just been opened.'A dangerous and false binary is now surfacing in Indian political discourse, which must be firmly rejected.'

'It is that we have to choose between freedom and development.'

'For us freedom is neither merely an instrument for development nor to be subordinated to development.'

'It is, as our founding fathers proclaimed early in our freedom struggle, 'our birthright' on which we shall never compromise.'

'Growth, wealth and development are fruits of democracy, not substitutes.'

Dr Manmohan Singh's thoughts on democracy: A Must Read!



All Illustrations: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

Prof Arun K Grover, vice chancellor, Panjab University, Professor Upinder Sawhney, chairperson, department of economics, Professor Meenakshi Malhotra, dean, members of faculty, my dear students.

I am very grateful to Dr Arun Grover and Professor Upinder Sawhney for inviting me to deliver this lecture which commemorates the memory of Dr S B Rangnekar who along with Dr K K Dewett was the founder of the department of economics of the Panjab University after the Partition of India in 1947.

The department of economics in those days was located at Hoshiarpur along with many other university departments.

I joined the department of economics as an MA student in 1952. This was the first year of adoption of the new MA syllabus in whose preparation Dr Rangnekar played a pioneering role. He was a great teacher who inspired me to go to Cambridge after my MA examination.

On return from Cambridge, I joined the department of economics as a senior lecturer. Soon thereafter, the department of economics moved to Chandigarh and I had the privilege of working in the department with Dr Rangnekar as its head.

Dr Rangnekar and his wife treated me and my wife as a member of their family. That was the happiest period of my life and I recall it with gratitude to Dr Rangnekar.

An improbable tryst of an ancient people with their destiny, long suppressed has produced, over the last seven decades, an impossible triumph -- the flowering of the world's greatest democracy in a land rife with irreconcilable differences and unending conflicts; poverty and starvation, illiteracy and innumeracy; feudalism and serfdom, caste and hierarchy; suppression and exploitation; a democracy born in swirling, angry and turbulent rivers of hateful blood associated with partition of the country; a land that was lost in deep dementia about its great civilisational heritage of love, compassion and non-violence.

Seventy years ago, the world gave Indian democracy no chance for success. Our common people have proved the world wrong.

Democracy is more than a system of government. It is an ideology about how human beings ought to treat each other.

Democracy is based on a stubborn insistence that every human being should have an equal voice in the formation and operation of arrangements of governance -- based only on his or her humanity, irrespective of power and privilege, status and education, gender, caste or religion, language or culture.

It manifests itself in every dimension of the ordinary course of human life, in ordinary, daily human transactions.

Equality, freedom and fraternity are the three values that constitute the life breath of democracy -- its very essence.

Anniversaries are more than mere opportunities for celebration. They are also moments of reflection and introspection, for recommitment and rededication to basic goals and values.

I wish to take this opportunity to do more than engage in highlighting our achievements in economic, social and political spheres -- impressive though our achievements have been in this regard.

Sustained and equitable economic growth and high levels of employments are absolutely necessary for orderly functioning of any modern economy.

But I shall not dwell on this aspect. I propose, instead, to reflect very briefly on some vital pillars of democracy that need to be constantly secured and strengthened so that our democracy continues to grow from strength to strength in the decades and centuries that lie ahead of us: Equality, freedom, fraternity and our electoral system.

Equality

Equality is the keystone of democracy. And it is one of the greatest challenges faced by India in building our democracy because of the persistence in our society of feudal, hierarchical ideas of inequality based on caste, class and gender.

Speaking on November 25, 1949, to the Constituent Assembly about his concerns on the challenge of transforming India into a society based on equality, Dr B R Ambedkar said:

'In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one-man one vote and one vote one value.'

'In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one-man one value.'

'How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?'

'If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.'

'We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.'

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru warned in 1952 in one of his letters to his chief ministers, 'If poverty and low standards continue then democracy for all its fine institutions and ideals, ceases to be a liberating force.'

The strong commitment of the Republic to political equality has had its collateral impact on questioning the persistence of social and economic inequality.

The principle of one-person one-vote has put unprecedented political power into the hands of a hitherto marginalised 90% of India.

They have demanded and secured policies, including for affirmative action, that have reduced disparities and have created opportunities for upward social and economic mobility for traditionally discriminated communities.

Development planning, and the Planning Commission, were designed to ensure that while the economy grew, inequality did not grow.

With the abolition of the Planning Commission, fresh efforts have to be made to keep inequalities under control.

The economic liberalisation that I was associated with in 1991-1996 and 2004-2014 was, above all, a process of opening up new opportunities for people born without social and economic privilege.

This was for me the guiding vision behind our economic reforms.

While economic growth remains a high priority for the country, there is now a growing concern that the concomitant commitment to ensuring that disparities and inequality do not grow is weakening.

This can be a serious potential threat to our democracy.

Economists and development experts worldwide, including in India, are today emphasising the grave danger to sustained growth from growing inequality.

They point out that economic inequality and exclusion are threats not only to economic and social well being, but also to a cohesive functioning of the polity as a whole.

It is vitally important for us in India to maintain strong focus on containing the growth of economic inequality, and work actively to reduce it.

A range of economic and social policy measures are available to us.

What is required is stronger social and political reawakening to the principle of equality -- social, economic and political -- for the sake of equality and as a mark of our commitment to democracy.

In the short term, pro-equality policies may make growth more expensive, but the growing inequality is, in the long term, a far greater danger to economic well being and sustained growth.

Freedom

As much as equality, freedom is a pre-requisite for democracy.

The freedom of a country is not the freedom of its government. It is the freedom of people, which in turn, is not the freedom only of its privileged and powerful, but the freedom of every Indian.

Freedom is the freedom to question, the freedom to express one's views, howsoever troubling they may be for others.

The only constraint to freedom must be the freedom of others -- in other words, the freedom of one person or a group should not be used to constrain the freedom of other individuals or groups.

Without a firm commitment to this idea of freedom for which many of our forefathers made tremendous sacrifices, our democracy will not survive.

An integral and central component of our freedom is the independence of India.

Dr Ambedkar said, 'It is not that India was never an independent country. The point is that she once lost the independence she had. Will she lose it a second time?'

'Will Indians place the country above their creed or will they place creed above country? I do not know.'

'But this much is certain that if the parties place creed above country, our independence will be put in jeopardy a second time and probably be lost forever.'

'This eventuality we must all resolutely guard against. We must be determined to defend our independence with the last drop of our blood.'

The independence of a country is a collective expression of the independence and freedom of its individual citizens.

The loss of the independence of India means that the power to determine the policies of the country has been transferred outside our shores, away from our people.

There can be no democracy without national independence. Nor can we be independent without democracy.

We must preserve strategic autonomy in decision making processes and resist the temptation of rich rewards gained by becoming a tool in the great games of big powers in the pursuit of their imperial ambitions.

We need to rebuild our commitment to maintaining India's freedom and independence, based on individual freedom and independence of every Indian citizen.

A dangerous and false binary is now surfacing in Indian political discourse, which must be firmly rejected.

It is that we have to choose between freedom and development. It is not a new binary.

The argument was put to Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation, that good governance and development are better than swaraj.

The argument was also widely advanced by colonial and pro-colonial forces that India was not ready for freedom, and that continued British raj would be better for us for our development.

The choice of the people of India then was, and still is, clear and unambiguous. We will be free and independent.

For us freedom is neither merely an instrument for development nor to be subordinated to development.

It is, as our founding fathers proclaimed early in our freedom struggle, 'our birthright' on which we shall never compromise.

Growth, wealth and development are fruits of democracy, not substitutes.

Fraternity

Democracy is as inseparable from fraternity as is equality and freedom.

Only a fraternal people can maintain a democracy. And, conversely, only a democratic nation can maintain fraternity.

Fraternity is based, as powerfully and eloquently stated in the Preamble of our Constitution, on the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation.

I need not dwell long on the current deep concern that attempts are being made to divide the Indian people on the basis of religion and caste, language and culture.

Atrocities against minorities and Dalits are increasing.

If unchecked, these tendencies can only harm our democracy.

As a people, we must strongly reject divisive policies and politics.

India needs no lessons in the importance of fraternity.

Who can ever forget the epic tragedy of our own history -- when at the time of Partition in 1947 the ancient fabric of our deep rooted fraternity -- woven from sacred threads of love and affection seasoned over centuries -- was sought to be deliberately torn up and destroyed?

I bear personal witness to its unspeakable consequences. Hatred should never be allowed to enter our shores ever again.

Electoral system

We are all most proud of our democratic electoral system in which ruling parties have been defeated and power has been transferred peacefully.

This is a rare success in today's world.

Our electoral system has succeeded against great odds. It has destroyed feudal systems of government.

It has opened up opportunities for the aam aadmi without any social, economic or political privilege whatsoever by birth to occupy the highest positions of power.

There is, however, today widespread concern that our electoral system is being undermined by money power and muscle power.

The faith of people in democratic elections as the best system to select a government that would govern in the common interest is today being eroded -- as much by a sustained campaign to attack democratic institutions and elected representatives as by the increasing political corruption and the capture of political parties and elected office by vested interests.

Electoral reforms to cleanse elections of money and muscle power and to maintain the integrity of elected officials are another vital area for securing and strengthening of our democracy.

Like democratic political parties, the media and the judiciary also need to be strong guardians of the public weal.

Renew our commitment to democracy

Dr Ambedkar once worried that the day may come when people may prefer government for the people to government by and of the people. He saw that as a great danger.

On this 70th anniversary, we must ensure that we do not fall into the trap of choosing government for the people over government by and of the people.

We need to ask ourselves whether we are losing patience with democracy and turning to more authoritarian alternatives that may well yield superior short-term results, but in the long term will end up destroying our country and all the achievements of the last 70 years.

Governance is complex. It is messy. It is slow. Its benefits are long term. It requires great patience.

Above all, democracy is a system in which people without privilege have a decisive voice in governance.

If this is lost, democracy becomes meaningless.

Democracy requires not only that all of us must get involved, but that we must each ensure that everyone has an equal voice.

We must take a long-term view in which we always keep the interests of future generations as our highest concern.

That wisdom, that sagacity, that capacity for the long view is our true civilisational heritage.

Finally, as we celebrate this seventieth year of our independence I am extremely optimistic about our future as a nation and ask that we continue our journey on the path of democracy by imbibing these words from Pandit Nehru:

'I hope that we shall look into the future with a stout heart and with confidence in ourselves.'

Let us all join together, across all our differences, and renew our pledge to build a nation that would make not just our founding fathers, but generations of Indians yet to come, very proud.

Dr Manmohan Singh, the former prime minister of India, delivered the first S B Rangnekar Memorial Oration at Panjab University, April 11, 2018.'Amid the frequent cries that the defence budget falls short of what is needed, we tend to ignore the reality that any enhancement in the allocation is just not possible, and the armed forces have no option but to operate within this constraint.'

'So, unless deadwood -- especially manpower -- is identified and eliminated, we simply cannot have a modern military of the type that India needs,' says Vice Admiral Premvir Das (retd).



IMAGE: Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba, centre, flanked by army chief General Bipin Rawat, left, and air force chief Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh Dhanoa at the Amar Jawan Jyoti on Navy Day, December 4, 2017. Photograph: SpokespersonMoD/Twitter

Generally, when the highest military dignitaries take the public platform, they tend to be somewhat forceful in their articulations and the increasingly verbose media adds to the rhetoric.

It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise to hear the interview given by the navy chief, Admiral Sunil Lanba, to a television news channel some days ago.

Even though his candid and understated exposition of issues related to his own service and came as a breath of fresh air in the otherwise noisy medium that television has now become, these issues need to be viewed in a larger context.

Briefly, Admiral Lanba made six points.

First, India's security interests were becoming increasingly focused on the sea.

Two, in the context of possible adversaries, the Indian Navy was prepared to respond immediately to any misadventures by Pakistan, including incidents of the type that took place in the terrorist attack in Mumbai on November 26, 2008 through the coastal route; he also stressed the asymmetry in strength between the two navies.

Three, he pointed out that the navy was keeping a careful watch on the activities of Chinese naval units in the Indian Ocean Region while at the same time stressing the advantages that our navy enjoyed in the area.

Four, in the South China Sea, due to proximity and numbers, the Chinese were obviously better placed.

Five, the Indian Navy had increased its deployments in the Indo-Pacific.

Finally, he admitted that the acquisition of certain platforms had got delayed and hoped that steps would be taken to remedy the situation.

Let us critically analyse each one of these assertions.

Yes, India's interests are becoming more focused on the sea in the Indo Pacific region and the Indian Ocean Region is the major theatre for us.

The fact that at every conference or meeting this issue takes centre-stage bears witness to this fact.

Both at the heads of government meeting with ASEAN leaders in January and with the French president recently, maritime security figured highest on the agenda.

The same is true of our interface with the US, Japan and Australia.

It can be asked why this enhancement of security interests is not reflected in defence budget allocations; the answer lies in our inability to crystallise a holistic national security strategy that can identify what our interests are and how they can be best safeguarded or enhanced.

At sea, our superiority over the Pakistan navy needs no elaboration. But vigilance along the long coastline is important and it is satisfying to hear the navy chief say that the situation is far different from what it was a decade ago.

China merits a more detailed discussion. Its forays into the Indian Ocean Region are well known, but our ability to locate and track its ships and submarines in these waters is also quite substantial.

It is often not recognised that on its two coasts and in southern India, there are dozens of airfields from which the largest surveillance and attack aircraft can be operated; add to this the airfields in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and reconnaissance satellites.

These together can allow India to keep the northern Indian Ocean under watch.

Our interfaces with countries like Oman, Seychelles and France further extend this reach.

Our ability to interdict Chinese energy lifelines is not something that can be easily scoffed at.

So, both operationally and logistically, the Chinese will be hard put to match us in the Indian Ocean Region  subject to the caveat that we invest in a navy that can exploit these several advantages.

However, in this balance sheet there are also weaknesses.

The most serious of these is the poor availability of submarines.

With the first Scorpene submarine built at Mazagon Docks now delivered after a delay of several years, the total number stands at just over a dozen, but all are more than 20 years old.

Some have undergone modernisation, but that does not equip them for current needs. The plan to continue beyond the Scorpenes, termed P75I, continues to languish.

To this should be added urgently needed replacements for multi-role helicopters.

The decision-making process is slow and no improvement has been visible in the past four years.

The navy is ahead of the other two services in Make in India, but the submarine scenario has been damaging.

There is urgent need to make up for lost time as the navy chief has, himself, acknowledged.

But for the military to modernise in keeping with the challenges faced, resources are needed.

Amid the frequent cries that the defence budget falls well short of what is needed, we tend to ignore the reality that any great enhancement in the allocation is just not possible, given competing needs, and the armed forces have no option but to operate within this constraint.

So, unless several of its segments are revisited and deadwood -- especially manpower -- is identified and eliminated, we simply cannot have a modern military of the type that India needs.

Its existing 15 per cent share of the budget is not going to get the navy anywhere. Similarly, the air force needs more resources.

Unless the army revisits its present strength, it will continue to operate with nearly 68 per cent of its equipment being 'vintage', as bemoaned by its vice-chief recently, with only eight per cent of it suited to the needs of today.

The last several decades have seen little effort on the part of the political leadership of all hues, strong or mild, to bite this distasteful bullet; it leaves it to the chiefs of staff to take that jump, if at all.

This is not going to happen and so we will continue to see the services going before parliamentary committees every year and complaining about their inadequacies.

Unless determined steps are taken at the highest level to have our security concerns reviewed critically and a more viable and balanced force structure formulated for the armed forces, the status quo will continue and, in fact, further deteriorate to our disadvantage.

With the domestic environment being as fractious as it is, this is easier said than done.

Vice Admiral Premvir Das is a former Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Naval Command. He has also served as Director General, Defence Planning Staff, and as a member of the National Security Advisory Board.'I am hopeful of getting all six seats from Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, either for the BJP or with our allies.'

'The same is true about Meghalaya.'

'We will have to work hard in Mizoram and in Tripura.'

'In Assam, we won seven seats. In 2019 election, we will add to this number.'



IMAGE: Sunil Deodhar celebrates the BJP's historic triumph in Tripura with party workers.

In the second part of his exclusive interview with Rediff.com, Sunil V Deodhar -- the Bharatiya Janata Party leader who masterminded the BJP's historic victory in Tripura -- tells Prasanna D Zore how his party will sweep the north east in the next Lok Sabha election, why he believes Manik Sarkar is a "dishonest person" and more...

You mentioned the 'so-called' honesty of former Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar? Do you doubt his honesty?

I don't doubt it. I believe he is a dishonest person.

Honesty doesn't mean what amount you have in your (bank) account. Or if your wife is travelling by autorickshaw. These are not the criteria to define honesty.

If you are a chief minister, or when you are in power, and all your ministers are indulging in huge corruption and siphon off central government funds and depositing that money into the fake accounts of party cadres and you are doing nothing (about it). Isn't this dishonesty?

In the last 25 years, barring this (February 2018) election, they (the Communist Party of India-Marxist) won the elections only by rigging (them), by booth capturing and forcing people to vote for the CPM. This is dishonesty.

How can I call a person honest when this person gets elected dishonestly?

I don't believe in this illusion, and I would say an illusion specifically created by the media.

Earlier, I too thought in the same manner, but when I went to Tripura and stayed there for six months continuously, I met people, I discussed issues with them, and then I understood that whatever I had heard about Manik Sarkar in Mumbai or Delhi is not true.

If you say he travels by a cycle, then Tripura people have not seen him any day travelling on a cycle.

If you say he travels by train to Bangalore because flight tickets are costly and say that our state is a poor state... news came once that he travelled to Bangalore from Calcutta by train... but in Tripura, he would use a chopper even if he had to travel just 40 kilometres and the expenditure of Manik Sarkar's travel by chopper stood at Rs 10 crore.

How can you say that he is a poor chief minister?



IMAGE: Communist Party of India-Marxist workers celebrate the CPI-M victory in the 2013 assembly elections in Tripura.

Now that the BJP is in power in Tripura, how will you check the swindling of government money that you allege took place during the CPI-M's tenure?

Nobody will be spared. Our line all over the country is good governance and that means zero tolerance to corruption.

If there is corruption, then you cannot call it good governance.

Good governance means there should not be corruption.

That is why we will try our best to reduce corruption in the state. Whenever we find any past wrongdoings we will not spare them.

According to my information, three to four government officials are suspended by Chief Minister Biplab Deb because there were corruption charges against these officials.

Similarly, there was huge corruption by the government, its ministers and CPM workers in a scam called Rose Valley and definitely when an enquiry will be set up, anybody found guilty will be punished.

Now that you have got a strong foothold in Assam and Tripura and a backdoor entry into the government in Meghalaya and Manipur, how crucial will be the 25 north east seats Lok Sabha for the BJP given that the party seems to be losing its momentum in the Hindi heartland?

If you look at Assam, we won seven seats. In the 2019 election, we will add to this number.

I am hopeful of getting all six seats from Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, either for the BJP or with our alliance partners. The same is true about Meghalaya.

We will have to work hard in Mizoram and in Tripura. I am sure that both seats will go to the BJP; not the alliance, but to the BJP.

In Sikkim, the Sikkim Democratic Front is already a part of the NDA.

We will win more than 20 Lok Sabha seats from India's north east.



IMAGE: Sunil Deodhar celebrates the BJP's win in Tripura with Biplab Deb, now the chief minister.

Is your alliance with the IPFT (Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura) the main reason for the BJP's success in Tripura? How significant a role did this alliance play in the BJP sweeping the Tripura elections?

I will have to admit -- and it is the fact, the truth -- that our policy before the election was to unite all the anti-CPM votes.

To defeat the CPM in Tripura it was important that there should be no division of votes.

That is why when the Congress and Trinamool Congress (Mamata Banerjee's TMC) people (voters) realised that the BJP is the only alternative, both parties were almost dissolved and people (leaders) belonging to both the parties joined the BJP.

The only party remaining was the IPFT. The IPFT had their demand for a separate state (Twiparaland).

We convinced them to leave this demand and come with us and we had a joint declaration in which there was no demand for a separate state.

The joint declaration talked about addressing the linguistic, socio-economic, financial, and cultural problems faced by the tribals and find out why this demand (of a separate Twiparaland) had come.

That is why one communique was given by the home ministry that a committee will be formed in which all (political) parties, some NGOs, central government officials, retired judges and this committee will visit Tripura and listen to the people, all sections of society, tribals, non-tribals and they will table their report in one year.

The next course of action will be decided after the findings of this committee are tabled.

The IPFT was convinced, and now they are in the government.

The government is running peacefully and there is no conflict between the two parties. I am hopeful that this government, this alliance, will last for five years without any disturbance.

What are the most important steps the BJP government in Tripura will take to uplift the lot of the dukhito, vanchito and lanchito (the oppressed, the dispossessed, the discriminated against) as you have often been ridiculing Manik Sarkar for giving the same speeches from the time he became chief minister in 1998?

People said we are not interested in staying dukhit, vanchit, lanchit...

20 seats reserved for the scheduled tribes and 10 scheduled caste reserved seats, out of 30 reserved seats of the dukhit, vanchit, lanchit, 27 reserved seats were won by the BJP and the IPFT.

They have rejected the CPM. Now, why did these people reject the CPM?

In the last 20 years because of CPM policies, the indigenous tribals and people of the state completely lost their pride.

Their position was like that of third class citizens in their own state.

They knew that the BJP alliance with the IPFT will give them pride in their own state and along with their pride, their development, language, culture, importance and existence in Tripura will be secure.

The first thing we are going to do is include the Kokborok language in the Eighth Schedule.

Then there will be direct funding to the district councils from the Centre and many more programmes to uplift the state's downtrodden people.

The cost of training officers of the Tripura public service was borne by the government, but the Manik Sarkar government stopped it.

So, we may start it again so that dynamic youth from the scheduled caste (and scheduled tribes) will come ahead and get an opportunity to progress.

The CPM -- which is a commission-khor (corrupt) party -- would take commissions from the people to avail government loans. Our government will put an end to this practice.

The standard of living of the scheduled caste people will be at par with all other communities.

The main problem is that of unemployment and the unemployed registered.

Those who have passed the eighth class in the state, are at 7.25 lakh and 2.5 lakh of those who have not registered because they could not pass class eight.

Almost 10 lakh, or one-third population of the state, are unemployed.

Our agenda is development so that these people could get jobs and income.

With the development of bamboo farming, rubber, food processing units, tourism, floriculture and similar other sectors, Tripura can become self sufficient and self dependent.

In the next five years we are confident that we will achieve this goal.

The third issue is that of law and order.

Who suffers because of a deteriorating law and order situation in the state?

The dukhit, vanchit, lanchit... Poor people are dependent on police stations for every small thing.

During CPM rule the police stations were party offices.

Without intimating the CPM you could not even register an FIR. But that practice has come to an end now.

Now the police is free (of political pressure).

Now, the police do not belong to the BJP or CPM; they are independent.

A criminal is a criminal and a criminal has no party and this is our slogan (in the state).

Even if a criminal belongs to the BJP he will not be spared?

Obviously, (the criminal will) not (be) spared.

Talking about law and order in the state, just before the Tripura elections, two journalists -- Shantanu Bhowmik and Sudip Dutta Bhowmik -- were murdered in the state.

The BJP claimed that Sudip Dutta Bhowmik was killed by a Tripura state rifles commandant. Will these two journalists get justice?

Tapan Deb Barman, who is an IPS officer, is already under arrest.

Will you assure the people of Tripura that the investigation into these murders will be time bound?

For your information, a group of journalists, a group of NGOs, demanded a CBI inquiry into the deaths of the two journalists.

Manik Sarkar's was a double standard government and he was a chief minister with double standards.

When there was a rally for demanding a CBI inquiry into Gauri Lankesh's murder he walked with the rally in Agartala.

But when rallies came out demanding a CBI inquiry into the death of these two journalists, he stayed away. He did not accept the demand for a CBI inquiry.

We had promised we will have the CBI investigate the murders of the two journalists. I would like to happily inform you that at the very first cabinet meeting that decision has been taken and the cases have been handed over to the CBI.

But the government hasn't initiated a time-bound inquiry?

I don't represent the government. I represent the party.

***

Watch Sunil Deodhar's video interview below.

Videos: Afsar Dayatar/Rediff.com

On BJP's Tripura victory

***

'Manik Sarkar is a dishonest man'

***

BJP's agenda for Tripura and its alliance with the IPFT

***

On justice for journalists killed in Tripura

***

Is the BJP on backfoot over corruption charges?IMAGE: BJP president Amit Shah with party leaders B S Yeddyurappa, Jagadish Shettar and others during a day-long fast to protest against the disruption of parliament proceedings by the Opposition, in Dharwad, Karnataka on Thursday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who observed a fast along with fellow Bharatiya Janata Party MPs to protest the washout of the second leg of the budget session of Parliament, on Thursday travelled to Tamil Nadu to participate in several events.

On Tuesday, sources had said that while Modi would observe fast to protest Parliament disruptions by opposition parties, he would not disturb his official schedule, which included a visit to Tamil Nadu, meeting officials and clearing policy-related files.

The prime minister left Delhi around 8.30 am and inaugurated the Defence Expo at Thiruvidanthai in Tamil Nadu.

He later travelled to Chennai to inaugurate a hospital's extension building.

He returned to the national capital around 5.30 pm.

Most BJP MPs are holding fast in their respective constituencies.

BJP chief Amit Shah was in poll-bound Karnataka where he staged a sit-in.

Shah accused the Congress of dividing the nation and the society as he staged a sit-in at Hubballi near Dharwad to protest the recent washout of the budget session.

Shah, on the sixth round of his campaigning in poll-bound Karnataka, was joined by BJP's chief ministerial candidate B S Yeddyurappa, MPs Prahlad Joshi and Rajeev Chandrasekhar, former chief minister Jagadish Shettar and other senior party functionaries.

IMAGE: BJP MP Hema Malini along with Uttar Pradesh Power Minister Srikant Sharma observes fast in Mathura. Photograph: PTI Photo

Terming Parliament as the 'temple of democracy' and 'biggest panchayat in democracy', he alleged that because of the stand taken by the Congress and its president Rahul Gandhi, the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha could not function.

Launching a scathing attack on the Congress, he said the logjam in Parliament for 22 days led to a loss of Rs 250 crore.

Usually the government runs away from a debate, but here the opposition was unwilling to discuss important issues, he said.

The BJP chief said the government was ready for a discussion but the Opposition ran away from it, because 'the Congress did not have the guts to discuss (issues)'.

"We said we are ready to discuss the (Punjab National Bank) scam as none of our leaders or ministers was involved in it," he said.

"If the list of your (Congress) leaders involved in scams was to be brought out, the Congress would be empty," Shah said.

He said while running away from discussion, the Congress later got notices of no-confidence motion through smaller parties.

"We said we are ready to even discuss the no-confidence motion (if it was brought), because their no-confidence could not have done anything as the people of this country have confidence in Narendra Modi," he said.

Alleging that the Congress did not believe in democracy, Shah said, "Rahul baba is going around everywhere speaking about democracy. It looks like some NGO has handed over to him the word democracy."

IMAGE: Railway Minister Piyush Goyal raises slogan with BJP leaders during their day-long fast at collectors office in Thane. Photograph: PTI Photo

"Rahul baba, go through your party's history," he said, recalling the Emergency under 'his grandmother Indira Gandhi'.

"You come and preach us about democracy, while you had kept democracy imprisoned inside your home," he said, as he launched a sharp attack on the Congress.

"Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi...., (after that) we don't know which Gandhi next. Doesn't anyone else have credibility in this country," he said.

Shah alleged that there was no internal democracy in the Congress party.

"The Congress cannot protect democracy in this country," he said.

Accusing the Congress of toppling other governments through 'conspiracy' whenever it was out of power, he said by hiring a foreign company, 'some people had obtained data on castes'.

There were protests in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana, Andhra, also in Karnataka, he said.

He was apparently referring to the violence during the protests in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's recent ruling on the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

Conspiracies were being hatched to divide the society along caste and religious lines, he said.

"The Congress by dividing the society and the country on the basis of caste is trying to play its politics," Shah said.

"I want to tell Rahul Gandhi this is not the era of 70s-80s. You have lost your way, this is not 70s or 8os, you have come to 44 (seats in the Lok Sabha), if you continue like this the strength would plummet further," he said.

Asserting that the people clearly understood the Congress and its tactics, Shah listed out the states where BJP has gained after the 2014 parliamentary election win.

"It is Karnataka's turn now. The people of the state have made up their mind to form a BJP government under the leadership of Yeddyurappa (in the May 12 polls)," he said.

Shah told Gandhi that the kind of politics which attempts to divide the society, shut the voice of democracy, and not allow the Houses to function, would not continue for long.

"You may be thinking where will the BJP speak by not allowing the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha to function. We have come directly to the people as in democracy the people are supreme. We have come to the people's court," he said.

IMAGE: Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad with other BJP leaders sits on a day-long hunger strike in Patna. Photograph: PTI Photo

Stating that the people would teach a lesson to the Congress for following the "politics of divisiveness" by "slitting the throat of democracy," Shah said the first opportunity for it would come in Karnataka.

In Mumbai, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis also observed fast along with other BJP MPs and MLAs, and hit out at the Opposition saying it does not have any alternative to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Fadnavis, along with Lok Sabha members Poonam Mahajan (North Central Mumbai) and Paresh Rawal (Gujarat), local MLAs Parag Alavani, Amit Satam and Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar sat on the day-long fast at the party office in suburban Vile Parle.

The chief minister said, "People know contradictions of the opposition parties. They can't stay together. What is the alternative to Modi in terms of policies, programmes and leadership? The opposition only wants power...(but) they don't have an alternative to Modi."

He said the Congress has no moral strength to face Parliament because when the Prime Minister counters it. "They have no face to show."

He also alleged that most of the atrocities on Dalits took place during the Congress rule.

"The Dalit and tribal entrepreneurship is being encouraged by the Modi government," he pointed out.

Fadnavis said PM Modi is dedicated to the welfare of the people and the country.

"Public hai, public sab jaanti hai (this is the public, it knows everything," Fadnavis said.

Lashing out at the Congress, he said, "People have seen you and tolerated you."

"Until the Congress learns to respect and preserve democracy, don't send their members to Parliament," he appealed to people.

Fadnavis, while leaving the venue, said he was going to Nanded on official work.

"Don't worry, I will not have 'chole bhature'," he said in a dig at the Congress over its leaders 'seen having food' before their fast on Monday.

"Our struggle to preserve the democratic values will continue," Fadnavis said.

A street play was performed in front of him, highlighting the government's achievements, like demonetisation, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the Jalyukt Shivar campaign (aimed at improving irrigation facilities in Maharashtra) and other welfare programmes for farmers.

On the occasion, Rawal said the Congress did not allow Parliament to function as it does not have any issue to raise.

"We decided to forgo our salaries as the Congress did not allow Parliament to function. But, the Congress members have taken their salaries," he claimed.

Rawal mocked the Congress' fast on Monday as 'farce' over some of its leaders 'seen having food' before the protest.

Shelar accused the Congress of 'wasting Rs 430 crore of the taxpayers' by disrupting Parliament session.

Kirit Somaiya, the BJP MP from North East Mumbai, sat on the protest near the Bhandup railway station.

He said, "Today around 350 Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members of the BJP are observing the fast against the Congress' unruly behaviour in Parliament because of which the proceedings of Parliament were washed out."

"The Congress and other opposition parties did not allow Parliament to function for 23 days, and 17 important Bills were passed without debate. We wanted to discuss about the alleged bank scams of Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi, the non-performing assets (NPAs) of Rs 52 lakh crore, among other important issues," he said.

Railway Minister Piyush Goyal observed the fast in Thane city.

He alleged that the Congress had 'disgraced the Constitution' framed by Dr B R Ambedkar.

"Ambedkar's hard and noble work has been disgraced by the Congress by not allowing Parliament to function," he further said.

"Not only the BJP leaders and workers, but I think people across the country are appalled by the opposition parties, specially the Congress," Goyal said.

The social media cell of the BJP also ran a campaign called #FastWithPMModi.

'When the Nation wants us to talk, Congress takes our Democracy for a walk. We stand together with our Hon'ble PM Shri @narendramodi ji to remind them of the duties of the opposition! Join us today at District BJP Office in Vile Parle,' Mahajan tweeted.Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday described the rape and killing of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua as 'unimaginable brutality' that cannot go unpunished, and wondered how anybody can seek to protect the culprits.

He also lashed out at the politics being played over the crime.

'How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil,' he asked, adding that the violence against the child was a crime against humanity.

'It cannot go unpunished,' he said on Twitter.

'What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child,' he tweeted.

The minor, who belonged to the nomadic Bakerwal Muslim community, had disappeared from a spot near her house close to Rasana village in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir on January 10.

A week later, her body was found in the same area.

A Special Investigation Team formed to probe the incident has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destroying evidence.

Jammu has been on tenterhooks since the brutal rape and murder.

The city's bar association has opposed the action against the accused and alleged that minority Dogras were being targeted.

While the local local bar association held a bandh, the Valley saw protests demanding justice for the victim.

The Congress also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his 'silence' over the Unnao rape case and questioned why the accused BJP MLA was yet to be arrested.

Speaking to reporters in New Delhi, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal also alleged that Modi was 'not serious' about the crime against women across the country.

Sibal also asked the prime minister to observe fast over rape incidents and register his protest against Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over the Unnao rape case.

The BJP is holding a country-wide fast today to corner opposition over the recent washout of the budget session of Parliament.

Sibal, referring to National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report for 2016, also said that the BJP-ruled states have the highest crime rate against women.

The Uttar Pradesh police on Thursday registered a first information report against ruling Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged gang rape of a minor girl in Unnao, hours after the government said it would hand over the investigation into the case to the CBI.

"The victim did not name him (the MLA) because she was afraid. Why then was he not arrested? We charge he would never be arrested, said Sibal.

The former Union minister added that once the case is transferred to the CBI, the investigation agency would take its own time to conduct the probe and the MLA concerned would go 'absconding' meanwhile.

"After some months, the CBI would give a report that he had no role. Some people would again threaten the family (of the victim). We are seeing what's happening in the country," he said.

Sibal also referred to the reports on the Adityanath government's decision to withdraw a rape and kidnapping case against former Union minister Swami Chinmayananda.

"The chief minister wants to withdraw a case against a rape accused former minister this is their mindset the Prime Minister is silent," Sibal said without naming Chinmayanand.

Alleging Modi to be 'not serious' over such incidents, Sibal cited NCRB statistics to suggest that the BJP-ruled Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh reported highest crime against women in 2016.The Unnao police booked Sengar under various sections of the IPC and provisions of the POCSO Act, but said the CBI will take a decision about his arrest.

IMAGE: BJP MLA from Unnao Kuldip Singh Sengar, accused in a rape case, surrounded by media persons outside the office of the Senior Superintendent of Police in Lucknow. Photograph: Nand Kumar/PTI Photo

The police in Uttar Pradesh on Thursday registered a first information report against Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged gang rape of a minor girl in Unnao, hours after the government said it would hand the probe over to the Central Bureau of Investigation, which took over the probe on Thursday evening.

Earlier, Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar said, "Till the premier investigating agency takes over, the local police would continue with the probe, but a decision on whether the accused MLA from the ruling party would be arrested would be taken by the CBI."

However, the Allahabad high court came down heavily on the Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday, asking it whether it proposes to arrest the accused BJP MLA.

A bench of Chief Justice D B Bhosale and Justice Suneet Kumar, taking cognisance of the case on a letter to the court by senior lawyer Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi, heard the matter in detail and will pronounce its order on Friday.

The court also questioned the conduct of the police in the case, saying whom will a victim approach to register a complaint.

Advocate General Raghvendra Singh, who was present in the court on its direction, informed the bench that on August 17, 2017, an application was sent to the Chief Minister's Office in which allegations of rape was made against the MLA.

The application was forwarded to officers concerned in Unnao to take appropriate action, he said.

To this, the bench questioned what has been done in the case and whether any arrests have been made so far.

Singh replied that three of the accused have been arrested, including the MLA's brother.

The court then asked the Advocate General whether the government proposes to arrest Sengar.

Singh said that he was not in a position to make any statement in this regard and police will proceed in accordance with law only after recording statements of the complainant and witnesses.

The court referred to the SIT report and said, 'according to it, medical officers and police officers, all were hand in glove with the accused to save them and you acted on this report against those officers but for arresting rape accused you need to do further investigation'.

"Police was not ready to register FIR of the minor rape victim. In spite of the SIT report, you are repeating that we can only take any action after further investigation, if this is the conduct of the police in state, whom will a victim approach to register a complaint. If this is the stand you are repeatedly taking, then we will be forced to observe in our order that law and order has collapsed in the state'," it said.

According to Chaturvedi, the SIT conducted preliminary investigation and then filed a report after which an FIR was registered and still the state government wants to conduct further probe before arresting the accused MLA.

Chaturvedi has demanded a court-monitored investigation of the incident and also death of the victim's father in judicial custody.

The Unnao police earlier on Thursday registered the case against Sengar under various sections of the IPC and provisions of the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences Act in the Makhi police station area.

Under POCSO, an accused has to be arrested immediately after a case been filed.

The FIR has been registered under Sections 376 (rape), 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing a woman to compel her into marriage), 363 (kidnapping) and 506 (criminal intimidation).

WATCH: BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger leaves SSP office without surrendering

Principal Secretary (Information) Avanish Awasthi had said in an statement late Wednesday night that an FIR would be lodged under appropriate sections against Sengar and others and the investigation would be handed over to CBI.

To a volley of questions on whether Sengar would be arrested now that a case had been registered, Kumar said the CBI would take a decision on this depending on the merit of the case after investigations.

The principal secretary (Home) and state Director General of Police O P Singh said the MLA had not been named in the statement given before the magistrate earlier as the minor had said she feared for her life.

Kumar also dismissed allegations that police was trying to shield the MLA, and said it was because of these charges that the probe was being given to the CBI.

The government has also decided to extend security to the family of the 17-year-old girl, the DGP said.

He said no one found guilty would be spared and added that action had already been taken against some policemen and doctors for laxity and negligence.

Two doctors have been suspended and disciplinary proceedings initiated against three others for laxity in providing the victim's father with proper medical care and treatment prior to his judicial custody and at the district hospital, Kumar said.

Safipur Circle Officer Kunwar Bahadur Singh was also suspended for negligence in handling the victims repeated complaints, he said.

Kumar said the government had decided to transfer the case to the CBI after lodging the case into the incidents of June 4, 2017, (alleged rape) and since the two other cases of April 3 this year (cross FIRs on the beating up of the victim's father leading to his death) are connected, they be also transferred to the CBI.

WATCH: 'Who rapes a mother of 3 children?' BJP MLA defends Sengar

The officials also clarified why an FIR was not lodged against the MLA earlier saying this was because the teenager had not mentioned his name in the statement given before the magistrate.

Now that the girl and her family have told the SIT, which visited them on Wednesday, that they had not done so because of fear, a case has been registered against the MLA, they said.

The DGP was asked by the reporters why he continued to refer to the MLA as mananiya or honourable since he was an accused in a rape case.

He was according him respect because Sengar was a peoples representative and charges against him had not been proved, the DGP replied.

"The respect that is being given to the accused is because he is an MLA... he is not a convict so far. Only a charge has been levelled against him and the case is being handed over to the CBI for investigation. The CBI will now decide whether he has to be arrested or not on the merit of the case," he said.

Meanwhile, the Yogi Adityanath government came under opposition fire, with Congress workers protesting on the streets in Lucknow demanding the arrest of the accused lawmaker while Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati expressed apprehensions that the case might be put on the back burner after being handed over to the CBI.

In the state capital, Congress workers belonging to the party's women and youth wings even had a scuffle with police personnel deployed in strength to prevent them from marching to the chief minister's residence.

Congress workers raised slogans against the state government and demanded the arrest of Sengar.

BSP chief Mayawati targeted the BJP claiming that by ordering a CBI probe, instead of arresting the MLA, the issue could be put on the back burner like the Vyapam case of Madhya Pradesh.

In a statement, Mayawati also took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah for observing a fast over the stalemate in Parliament, saying they should instead hold a upvas (fast) of repentence on the ghats of Varanasi against the misdeeds of their party MLA.

"Modi needs to apologise to the people of the state, from where he is an MP, for the rampant 'jungleraj' because of which Sengar is not being arrested," she added.

The alleged rape case had come into the limelight after the victim tried to immolate herself outside Chief Minister Yogi Adityanaths residence alleging police inaction against the BJP MLA.

On Wednesday night, the SIT constituted by the government handed over its report to the government after which it was decided an FIR would be lodged against the MLA and the case handed over to the CBI.

The teen rape survivor has alleged that she was confined to a hotel room by the district administration, leaving her without a phone or water and guards at every corner.

On Thursday, she demanded the immediate arrest of the MLA, saying that the CBI probe could be conducted later.

"We have no objection to the inquiry but he should be arrested first...why is he being shielded," she told the electronic media.

"If the MLA is allowed to remain out he will not leave my uncle... He had earlier too hatched conspiracies against my kin," she said.

The teenager added, Only when he is arrested, I will be satisfied and I will be able to say that the BJP government is doing justice.

A purported video of the alleged rape survivors father before his death has also gone viral and was aired by several TV channels. In the video, he alleged he was mercilessly beaten up, including with rifle butts, by the MLAs brother and others.

It also showed the victims father -- who died on Monday -- with serious wounds on his back.

The veracity of the video could not be ascertained.

The wife of the accused, Sangeeta Sengar, had on Wednesday demanded narco-tests of her husband and the 17-year-old girl.

With ANI inputsPrime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday hit out at the previous United Progressive Alliance government for 'policy paralysis' in the defence sector and told foreign companies that it will not take a decade to take a decision on procurement of a batch of 110 fighter jets.

In his address after inaugurating the four-day Defence Expo in Thiruvidanthai, Tamil Nadu, Modi said 'laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives' of the previous government had badly impacted the defence sector.

Policy paralysis in the defence sector during the previous regime had affected the country's military preparedness, the prime minister said, adding that the National Democratic Alliance government's efforts to build a partnership with defence industries will be guided by the 'highest ideals of integrity and probity'.

"There was a time when the critical issue of defence preparedness was hampered by policy paralysis. We have seen the damage such laziness, incompetence or perhaps some hidden motives can cause to the nation. Not now, not anymore, never," he said.

Modi also took a dig at the UPA regime for failing to conclude a deal to procure 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) after a long-drawn selection process.

"You would also recall the long-drawn process of procurement of fighter aircraft that never reached any conclusion. We have not only taken bold action to meet our immediate critical requirements, but have also initiated a new process to procure 110 fighter aircraft. We do not want to spend 10 years in discussions without any tangible outcomes," he said.

The government last week began the process to procure around 110 fighter jets by issuing an RFI (Request for Information) or initial tender. It is the first mega procurement initiative for fighter jets after the government scrapped the process to acquire 126 MMRCA for the Indian Air Force about five years ago.

"We will work with you with a sense of mission to keep our defence forces equipped with state-of-the-art systems, and to create the necessary domestic manufacturing ecosystem to achieve this. And, in all our efforts to pursue efficiency and effectiveness in partnership with you, we will be guided by the highest ideals of integrity and probity," he said.

Following scrapping of the MMRCA deal, the NDA government in September 2016 signed a Euro 7.87 billion (approx Rs 59,000 crore) deal with the French government for the purchase of 36 Rafale twin-engine fighter jets.

Ramping up its attack on the government over the Rafale issue, the Congress claims that the deal negotiated under its rule was much cheaper than the contract signed by the Modi government to procure the Rafale jets.

The UPA government floated a tender in 2007 for the purchase of 126 MMRCA for the Air Force. After negotiations, only Rafale and Eurofighter Typhoon remained in the reckoning. However, the deal could not be finalised by the UPA regime

Modi said the government was committed to making India a leading manufacturer of defence equipment and building two defence industrial corridors, 'with room for everyone'.

"We are committed to establishing two defence industrial corridors: one in Tamil Nadu and other in Uttar Pradesh. These will utilize defence manufacturing ecosystems in the regions and further build upon it. The corridors will become engines of economic development and growth of defence industrial base," he said.

Modi said venture capital and start-ups in defence sector will be encouraged.To demand justice for the eight-year-old girl who was gang-raped and murdered in Jammu and Kashmir and the teenager in UPs Unnao, the Congress party led a candelight vigil to India Gate in New Delhi.

IMAGE: Congress President Rahul Gandhi takes part in a candlelight vigil at India Gate to demand justice for Kathua and Unnao victims. Photograph: Arun Sharma/PTI Photo

Congress chief Rahul Gandhi led a midnight march to the India Gate to protest the rapes of minors in Kathua and Unnao and said it's time for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to walk the talk on 'beti bachao' (save the girl child).

Amid slogans against the Bharatiya Janata Party and the prime minister during the march, Gandhi said the women of the country are afraid to go out today and the government must ensure their safety.

Gandhi was joined by his sister Priyanka and her husband Robert Vadra as also their children, besides scores of Congress leaders, party workers and others, who were seen shouting slogans, carrying candles and some even placards against the BJP governments at the Centre and in Uttar Pradesh and Jammu-Kashmir while demanding urgent action against the perpetrators of two heinous gang rapes -- one in Unnao, UP, and the other in Kathua, J-K.

WATCH: This is a national issue and not a political one, says Rahul at march

"We are here against crimes being committed against women, against rapes, violence and murder and the government must act on this. This is a national issue and not a political one," Gandhi said at the march in the heart of the national capital.

"This is about our women. Thousands are present here including the common people and people from all parties. This situation is such today that one after another incident of murder, rape and violence is taking place in various parts of the country. We are standing here against that and we want the government to act," he said.

Amid slogans being raised against the government at the protest march, Gandhi said the women of the country are afraid to go out today and the government must ensure their safety and help them live in peace.

On the Modi government's 'Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao' initiative, Gandhi said it was the right slogan and the PM must start work on 'Beti Bachao.

IMAGE: Priyanka Gandhi participates in the midnight march protesting against the violence against women in the country. Photograph: Arun Sharma/PTI Photo

"Today, India's women are afraid of coming out in public. Women and girls are being killed and raped. We want that the government should resolve this issue so that the Indian women can come out on the roads and live a life free of fear.

"This is a national issue and not a political one. It concerns our women. People of all parties, common people and women are here. I only want to say that the government should do something about the plight of women and the crimes against them," he said.

Several people were seen having brought their children as well, but at times, the chaotic crowd appeared getting out of control and Priyanka Vadra was shoved by some, prompting her to ask people to maintain calm and remember the 'cause' for which they had come there.

Her husband Robert Vadra said the country needs a change where women could feel safe.

Some Congress leaders asked the people in the march to keep it a 'silent' protest, even as a few were seen taking selfies as well.

WATCH: Priyanka Gandhi loses her cool when she's shoved during march

The Congress leaders present at the protest march to the India Gate, which in the past has seen a huge protest in the Delhi gang rape case, included Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Salman Khurshid, Ashok Gehlot, Ajay Maken, Sushmita Dev, Haroon Yusuf, Randeep Surjewala and Ambika Soni.

Azad said the Modi government was sleeping and those facing the biggest threat were the daughters of the country during the current regime.

Several Congress leaders also poked fun at the Modi governments Beti Bachao slogan, saying the daughters were not safe in the country.

Announcing the march, Gandhi had tweeted in the evening, 'Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does.'

IMAGE: Congress workers participate in a candle light march to protest over government's 'inaction' in Kathua and Unnao rape incidents near India Gate in New Delhi. Photograph: Arun Sharma/PTI Photo

Earlier in the day, Gandhi had expressed anguish and shock on the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua, and attacked the BJP government in UP for failing to act against its MLA, who is an accused in the Unnao rape case of a 17-year-old girl.

'How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil? What happened at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished. What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?' he said.

On Friday, Gandhi again hit out at the PM over his silence on violence against women and children, saying it was unacceptable and India was waiting for him to speak up.

Directly addressing the prime minister on Twitter on Friday, Gandhi also asked why accused rapists and murderers were protected by the state.

Mr Prime Minister, your silence is unacceptable.

1. What do YOU think about the growing violence against women and children?

2. Why are accused rapists and murderers protected by the state?

India is waiting, Gandhi tweeted, using the hashtag SpeakUp.

Gandhi also thanked thousands of men and women who stood with him in protesting the rising acts of violence against girls and women and said their battle for justice would not be in vain.

The Kathua girl, who belonged to the nomadic Bakerwal Muslim community, had disappeared from a spot near her house on January 10. A week later, her body was found in the same area.

A Special Investigation Team, formed to probe the incident, has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers and a head constable, who was charged with destroying evidence.

Jammu has been on tenterhooks since the brutal rape and murder. The citys bar association has opposed the action against the accused and alleged that minority Dogras were being targeted.

Gandhi joined the protest near the Man Singh Road at 11.55 pm.

The police had barricaded all the routes leading to India Gate.

Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee president Ajay Maken said, "Atrocities are being committed against women in the country and the government is sleeping. The BJP is not only involved directly, it is also protesting in favour of the culprits and stopping law enforcement agencies from doing their job. It is a sad state of affairs."The rape-and-murder of the eight-year-old Bakerwal community girl has created a controversy after lawyers in Jammu called for a shutdown on Wednesday, demanding the case be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation.

Union Minister V K Singh on Thursday said we as humans had failed the eight-year-old girl who was gang-raped and killed in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua district but she would not be denied justice.

The child from the nomadic Bakerwal Muslim community had disappeared from near her home in the forests next to Rasana village in Kathua on January 10. A week later, her body was found in the same area.

Expressing distress over the tragedy, perhaps the first reaction from a Bharatiya Janata Party minister, he said we have failed her as humans.

But she will not be denied justice, the minister of state in the external affairs ministry added in his tweet.

A Special Investigation Team formed to probe the incident has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers and a head constable, who was charged with destruction of evidence.

A chargesheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir Police said abduction, rape and killing of the girl was part of a carefully planned strategy to remove the minority community from the area.

The rape has polarised the state with the local bar association calling for a bandh against what it termed the targeting of minority Dogras, while the Valley saw protests demanding justice for the deceased.

Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti said her government will not allow law to be obstructed and justice will be delivered in the rape-and-murder case of the eight-year-old Bakerwal girl in Kathua district.

The law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions and statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track and justice will be delivered, Mehbooba said in a tweet.

On Monday, lawyers in Kathua had tried to prevent the Crime Branch from filing the chargesheet in the case. The chargesheet has revealed some chilling details about how the girl was allegedly kidnapped, drugged, raped inside a place of worship before being killed.

Oppositions National Conference leader Omar Abdullah, however, lashed out at the chief minister for not taking any action against two BJP ministers who had attended a rally held in support of the persons accused in the case.

What rubbish! They are HER ministers, not the Hon(ourable) PMs. The way for her to express her displeasure is to sack them in Jammu not come and leak her alleged displeasure in Delhi, Omar wrote on his Twitter handle.

He was responding to tweets by a journalist from a TV channel in which she had said Mehbooba had expressed displeasure over BJP ministers actions in regard with this case.

However, the journalist later pulled down the tweet.

So even her displeasure wasnt genuine and the tweet has had to be deleted so that a corrected version could be issued, Omar said.Disclaimer

This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.RUSSIA: Increasing land use fines "a lottery"

Publisher Forum 18 Publication Date 20 March 2018 Cite as Forum 18, RUSSIA: Increasing land use fines "a lottery", 20 March 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5acf21834.html [accessed 30 September 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

RUSSIA: Increasing land use fines "a lottery"

The number of fines for meeting for worship on land not designated for religious use (such as in homes) has increased sharply from 2016. One lawyer compared the legal situation to fining a driver whose passengers drink tea because a road is not designated for drinking tea.Search Refworld

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Publisher Forum 18 Author Felix Corley Publication Date 23 March 2018 Cite as Forum 18, TURKMENISTAN: Jailings of conscientious objectors resume, 23 March 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5acf56ae4.html [accessed 30 September 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

23 March 2018

TURKMENISTAN: Jailings of conscientious objectors resume

Two conscientious objectors, both Jehovah's Witnesses, were jailed for one year in January. One had just completed a corrective labour sentence. These are the first jailings of conscientious objectors since 2014. No prisoners of conscience are known to have been freed under the Novruz amnesty.KAZAKHSTAN: Raid, filming, fingerprinting, insults, criminal case

Publisher Forum 18 Author Felix Corley Publication Date 26 March 2018 Cite as Forum 18, KAZAKHSTAN: Raid, filming, fingerprinting, insults, criminal case , 26 March 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5acf59ae4.html [accessed 30 September 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

26 March 2018

KAZAKHSTAN: Raid, filming, fingerprinting, insults, criminal case

"Anti-extremism" police raided Kyzylorda's New Life Church, halted Sunday worship, filmed those present, and forced them to state why they attend. Teachers from a Special School questioned adult former students why they were present and insulted their faith. Pastor Serik Bisembayev faces criminal investigation for "inciting discord".Burundi: The Imbonerakure, including their activities and their ties to the authorities, specifically with the Bujumbura police; whether they are able to find a person in all parts of the country and abroad or prevent a person from exiting the country (2015-March 2018)

Publisher Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada Publication Date 22 February 2018 Citation / Document Symbol BDI106060.FE Related Document(s) Burundi : information sur les Imbonerakure, y compris leurs activites et leurs liens avec les autorites, notamment avec la police a Bujumbura; information indiquant s'ils ont la capacite de retrouver une personne a travers le pays et a l'etranger ou d'empecher le depart du pays d'une personne (2015-mars 2018) Cite as Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Burundi: The Imbonerakure, including their activities and their ties to the authorities, specifically with the Bujumbura police; whether they are able to find a person in all parts of the country and abroad or prevent a person from exiting the country (2015-March 2018), 22 February 2018, BDI106060.FE, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5acf833c7.html [accessed 30 September 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Research Directorate, Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Ottawa

For information on the profile and origins of the Imbonerakure, see Response to Information Request BDI104343 from March 2013.

1. Overview

Numerous sources identify the Imbonerakure as being among the principal human rights violators in Burundi, together with the security forces and the National Intelligence Service (Service national de renseignement, SNR) (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018; CPI 9 Nov. 2017; UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 82). According to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) [1] available on its website, out of a total of 2,038 cases of violence perpetrated against civilians in Burundi, for the period from 1 January 2015 to February 2018, 608 cases involved the Imbonerakure (ACLED 17 Feb. 2018). The International Federation for Human Rights (Federation internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme - FIDH) and the the Burundian League for Human Rights (Ligue burundaise des droits de l'homme - Ligue Iteka) [2], in a report from June 2017, state that since 2016, the Imbonerakure have played an increasing role in Burundian repression and that they have become more radicalized and militarized (FIDH and Ligue Iteka June 2017, 9).

A report published in March 2017 by Belgium's Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGRS) indicates that [translation] "the majority of Burundian refugees interviewed by [the International Crisis Group] and other sources in 2016 reported that they fled police violence, intelligence services and, in particular, the Imbonerakure" (Belgium 31 Mar. 2017, 39). Similarly, Amnesty International states that [Amnesty International English version] "[w]hen asked why they had left Burundi, almost everyone Amnesty International spoke to both in 2016 and 2017 said that it was due to insecurity, often mentioning that it was caused by the Imbonerakure" (Amnesty International 29 Sep. 2017, 13).

1.1 Activities

Among the Imbonerakure's activities, sources mention the following:

murders (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018; FIDH and Ligue Iteka June 2017, 17; IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 12);

extrajudicial executions (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018; UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 23);

torture (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018; UN 15 June 2017; FIDH and Ligue Iteka June 2017, 17);

sexual violence (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018; IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 7; Amnesty International 22 Feb. 2017);

enforced disappearances (Human Rights Watch 18 June 2018; UN 15 June 2017; FIDH and Ligue Iteka June 2017, 17);

arbitrary arrests (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018; IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 7; UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 23);

arbitrary detentions (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 12; UN 15 June 2017; FIDH and Ligue Iteka June 2017, 17);

extortion or illegal tax collection (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 13; FIDH and Ligue Iteka June 2017, 7; Human Rights Watch 12 Jan. 2017);

threats and intimidation (UN 13 Nov. 2017, para. 32; IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 3);

chants encouraging the rape of political opponents or their relatives (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018; UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 54).

1.2 Targets

According to a May 2016 report from ACLED, most of the victims of the crisis [related to Pierre Nkurunziza running for a third presidential term in 2015] have been civilians (ACLED May 2016, 4). Numerous sources report that the civilians targeted are political opponents [of the National Council for the Defence of Democracy - Forces for the Defence of Democracy (Conseil national pour la defense de la democratie - Forces pour la defense de la democratie, CNDD-FDD), the party in power], and members of their families (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 7; Human Rights Watch 9 Nov. 2017). Sources point out that the Imbonerakure also attack people who are perceived to be political opponents (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 7; UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 14). Human Rights Watch reported in August 2015 that the Imbonerakure arrest presumed opponents whom they accuse of trying to leave the country to join an armed rebellion (Human Rights Watch 6 Aug. 2015). In November 2015, the United Nations (UN) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) spoke of [UN English version] "hundreds of cases of arbitrary arrest and detention  targeting members of the opposition, journalists, human rights defenders and their families, people attending the funerals of those who have been killed, and inhabitants of neighbourhoods perceived to be supportive of the opposition" (UN 10 Nov. 2015). The French newspaper Le Monde reported in February 2016 that the people arrested could be [translation] "former protest leaders, potential members of armed cells, or anyone having the misfortune to arouse suspicion at a roadblock" (Le Monde 29 Feb. 2016).

The International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI) [3], in a report on Burundian asylum seekers' motives for exile, states that people whose family members flee Burundi become Imbonerakure targets (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 13). Similarly, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Burundi reports in its final report of 2017 that [UN English version] "[s]everal members of the families of individuals who left the country have been threatened and some have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention or have been reported missing." (UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 58).

IRRI also reports that a representative of the UNHCR in Nakivale confirmed that the Imbonerakure target people who return from exile (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 24). According to an April 2016 ACLED report, people returning from Rwanda and Tanzania were arrested or suffered mistreatment at the hands of the Imbonerakure (ACLED 8 Apr. 2016).

1.3 Impunity

According to an OHCHR report, [UN English version] "[m]ost of the human rights violations documented by OHCHR-Burundi, [allegedly] committed by members of the defence and security forces or the Imbonerakure, had not led to prosecution." (UN 13 Nov. 2017, para. 25). According to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2016 of the US Department of State, the Imbonerakure "arrested persons with impunity, despite having no legal powers of arrest" (US 3 Mar. 2017, 1). On the subject of murders and arrests committed by state agents, including the Imbonerakure, IRRI affirms as well that, even if the people interviewed knew the identity of the perpetrators, "accountability for such crimes is extremely rare" (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 15). Similarly, Human Rights Watch reports that "[i]ncitement to hatred, violence, and rape, particularly by the Imbonerakure, has become common in Burundi, almost always without condemnation by authorities" (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018).

For more information on the activities of the Imbonerakure, see Responses to Information Requests BDI105751 and BDI105750 from March 2017.

2. Relationships with the Authorities

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Burundi stated in August 2017 that it was able to establish, in some cases, [UN English version] "the exercise of 'effective control' by agents of the State over some Imbonerakure" (UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 26). According to IRRI, the Imbonerakure "regularly take over the role of state security agents and collaborate with them in committing human rights violations" (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 4). Sources report that the security forces and the SNR collaborate with the Imbonerakure (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018; UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 17 and 26). Similarly, the US Country Reports 2016 states that "[m]any members of the governing party's youth militia, Imbonerakure, collaborated closely with government security forces" (US 3 Mar. 2017, 20). The US Country Reports 2016 indicates that the Imbonerakure "sometimes operated in cooperation with police, but often acted independently of any identifiable oversight" (US 3 Mar. 2017, 1). The same source indicates that Burundi's Minister of Public Security denied to Human Rights Watch in June 2016 that the police in his country collaborated with the Imbonerakure (US 3 Mar. 2017, 4).

Articles from 2017 and 2018 published by Burundian media outlets describe arrests carried out jointly by Imbonerakure members and police officers (RPA 1 Feb. 2018; Iwacu 10 Oct. 2017). According to one of those articles, when the residents of an area in Bujumbura resist being arrested by the Imbonerakure, the latter "call agents of the  SNR or the police directly and police or SNR vehicles come immediately" (Iwacu 10 Oct. 2017). Corroborating information could not be found among the sources consulted by the Research Directorate within the time constraints of this Response.

3. Ability to Track a Person Down

3.1 In Burundi

The US Country Reports 2016 indicates that Imbonerakure members often sit officially on "mixed security councils," which are typically comprised of police, local administration and civilians (US 3 March 2017, 20). According to information provided in 2014 to Amnesty International by a former president of the Imbonerakure and the then Minister of the Interior, the purpose of the mixed security committees is to [Amnesty International English version] "oversee and report on security at the local level" (Amnesty International 29 Sep. 2017, 8). The US Country Reports 2016 also indicates that these committees, according to SOS Torture [4] and the Ligue Iteka, give them a strong role in local policing, allowing the governing party to "harass and intimidate opposition members on the local level" (US 3 Mar. 2017, 10). According to the same source, these committees "remained controversial because lines increasingly blurred between Imbonerakure members and police" (US 3 Mar. 2017, 10). According to the US Country Reports 2016, "[j]ournalists and human rights defenders accused Imbonerakure of acting as irregular security forces, using government resources to follow, threaten, and attack individuals they perceived as opposition supporters" (US 3 Mar. 2017, 20). Sources report that the Burundian authorities acknowledge that the Imbonerakure participate in the mixed security committees (Human Rights Watch 19 Jan. 2017; UN 9 Sept. 2016, para. 14). An article published by Human Rights Watch in January 2017 notes the following:

[Human Rights Watch English version]

In a five-page response to questions from Human Rights Watch, NancyNinette Mutoni, the executive secretary in charge of communication and information for the ruling party  said  [i]n these committees, the Imbonerakure "not only have the right but also the obligation to do surveillance and to signal all movements and suspect acts to the security forces." (Human Rights Watch 19 Jan. 2017)

Sources refer to roadblocks set up by the Imbonerakure throughout the country (US 3 Mar. 2017, 15; Human Rights Watch 12 Jan. 2017; Iwacu 1 Nov. 2016). According to Human Rights Watch, these barriers were erected [Human Rights Watch English version] "on main and secondary roads in several provinces, including Kirundo, Makamba, Muyinga, Muramvya, Ruyigi and Ngozi" (Human Rights Watch 19 Jan. 2017). Sources report that the Imbonerakure conduct night patrols in many provinces (Human Rights Watch 19 Jan Jan. 2017; FIDH and Ligue Iteka June 2017, 21).

According to the May 2016 ACLED report, at the beginning of the crisis, attacks against civilians by the Imbonerakure, among others, which were more centralized in and around Bujumbura, are now occurring across Burundi:

Of all reported incidences of violence against civilians in the past year, approximately 49% occurred in provinces outside of the capital areas of Bujumbura Mairie and Bujumbura Rural. Although there is an increasing trend of Imbonerakure beating civilians in Kirundo Provinces bordering Rwanda and in Ruyigi and Makamba Provinces bordering Tanzania, more than 20% of all violence tar-geting civilians outside of the capital provinces in the past 12 months has occurred in Bubanza, which borders [the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)] and Lake Tanganyika to the west. (ACLED May 2016, 4)

The August 2017 IRRI report indicates that "[t]he issues of proximity and high numbers of Imbonerakure members were mentioned by several [refugee claimants]" (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 23).

3.2 Abroad

According to Human Rights Watch, more than 400,000 Burundian refugees who fled the country since 2015 remain abroad, most in Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (Human Rights Watch 18 Jan. 2018).

According to IRRI, some of the Burundian refugees who were interviewed suspected that the Imbonerakure were present in refugee camps (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 20). The same source states the following:

A minority feared that Imbonerakure or intelligence operatives could be present in the settlement, presenting themselves as asylum seekers, but with the purpose of monitoring refugee activities. Two men told IRRI they recognised Imbonerakure who were involved in abuses against them in Burundi. A student who fled Burundi because of intimidation by Imbonerakure said he saw two Imbonerakure members who had ill-treated him in the reception centre in Nakivale. (IRRI 24 August 2017, 21)

Other sources also state that the Imbonerakure have infiltrated the refugee camps (International Crisis Group 5 Apr. 2017, 6; Belgium 31 Mar. 2017, 40). The Guardian, a British daily, reported in April 2016 that the government militias' campaign of terror has spilled over Burundi's borders and that thugs have infiltrated refugee camps in Tanzania and other neighbouring countries to launch attacks on exiles (The Guardian 15 Apr. 2016). According to the same source, secure areas have had to be created with the camps (The Guardian 15 Apr. 2016). An article in US magazine Foreign Policy, intitled "Fleeing Burundi Won't Protect You from its Government," reported in November 2016 that the Imbonerakure regularly cross the border into Tanzania, where they surveil and intimidate refugees (Foreign Policy 4 Nov. 2016). The same source says that they infiltrated the humanitarian organizations that are supposed to protect the refugees (Foreign Policy 4 Nov. 2016).

For further information on the activities of the Imbonerakure in Rwanda, the DRC, Tanzania and Uganda, including their relationship with Burundian refugees, see Response to Information Request ZZZ105754 from March 2017.

4. Ability to Prevent Someone from Leaving the Country

For information on the ability to travel from Burundi to neighbouring countries, see Response to Information Request ZZZ105753 from March 2017.

ACLED reports that the Imbonerakure patrol "border areas near Rwanda to the north (primarily Kirundo and Ngozi Provinces) and Tanzania to the east (Ruyigi Province) and south (Makamba Province), and DRC to the west (Bubanza Province)" (ACLED May 2016, 7).

Sources report that people who try to cross the Burundian border to flee are arrested by the Imbonerakure (Amnesty International 29 Sept. 2017, 18; ACLED May 2016, 7). The US Country Reports 2016 states the following:

Persons who attempted to cross the border to flee violence and reach refugee camps were sometimes stopped by police, the SNR, or Imbonerakure members at border crossings and turned back. Other persons feared being arrested if they attempted to cross and remained in hiding inside the country as internally displaced persons (US 3 Mar. 2017, 22).

According to the Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Burundi, [UN English version] "[a] number of persons have been arrested, ill-treated and, in certain instances, raped at roadblocks set up by police and Imbonerakure, or solely by Imbonerakure, near the borders, particularly with Rwanda and the United Republic of Tanzania" (UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 58). The CGRS reported the following in March 2017:

[translation]

According to testimony collected by the UNHCR in 2016, the authorities prevent citizens from leaving the country. Border crossings have become "filters for opponents," according to [International Crisis Group]. Since the end of 2015, numerous sources have reported refoulements, interrogations, extortion, arrests, ill-treatment and sexual abuse by government agents and Imbonerakure members.  Many refugees have bypassed border crossings to leave the country, according to [Refugees International] and the UNHCR (Belgium 31 Mar. 2017, 40-41).

Amnesty International reported as follows in September 2017:

[Amnesty International English version]

[Refugees and asylum seekers] described being beaten or stopped by members of the Imbonerakure as they tried to flee the country. Not all were seeking refuge but any cross-border movements, such as going into Rwanda to sell goods at the market, could provoke suspicion that they were going to join one of the armed opposition groups. (Amnesty International 29 Sept. 2017, 17).

According to media sources, arrests tied to the Imbonerakure have taken place at the Bujumbura airport (RFI 18 Aug. 2016; RPA 14 Apr. 2016; Agence Bujumbura News 3 Nov. 2015). According to Agence Bujumbura News, a news agency [translation] "based in Europe and the Americas that publishes news on Burundi" (Agence Bujumbura News n.d.), a businessman who is [translation] "well-known in Bujumbura" was arrested by the SNR at the Bujumbura airport on 1 November 2015 as he was returning from Rwanda and was ordered to give financial support to the Imbonerakure (Agence Bujumbura News 3 Nov. 2015). In April 2016, according to Radio publique africaine (RPA), a young women, because of her family relationship with the director of a Burundian radio producer in exile, was arrested by the SNR at the Bujumbura airport as she was preparing to leave for Rwanda (RPA 14 Apr. 2016). The article notes that [translation] "beginning the day before her arrest, messages on the [WhatsApp] network were sent to young 'Imbonerakure' from the CNDD-FDD asking them to intercept the vehicle identified as the one in which the young woman was travelling" (RPA 14 Apr. 2016). Radio France internationale (RFI) reported in August 2016 that Burundian soldiers posted abroad decided not to return to the country at the end of their mission because they feared being arrested by the SNR and the Imbonerakure on their return, [translation] "which is what happened to a soldier at the Bujumbura airport when he returned from a mission in Central Africa" (RFI 18 Aug. 2016).

Amnesty International reported in February 2017 that people trying to flee Burundi have been beaten and raped, often by members of the Imbonerakure (Amnesty International 22 fevr. 2017). Other sources indicate that women are raped by the Imbonerakure when they try to flee the country (IRRI 24 Aug. 2017, 16-17; UN 11 Aug. 2017, para. 49; Human Rights Watch 12 Jan. 2017). According to Human Rights Watch, these rapes are committed [Human Rights Watch English version] "apparently to deter them from leaving Burundi" (Human Rights Watch 12 Jan. 2017).

This Response was prepared after researching publicly accessible information currently available to the Research Directorate within time constraints. This Response is not, and does not purport to be, conclusive as to the merit of any particular claim for refugee protection. Please find below the list of sources consulted in researching this Information Request.

Notes

[1] The ACLED collects information about political violence and protest events across Africa, Asia and the Middle East (ACLED n.d.).

[2] The Ligue Iteka, created in 1991, is the [translation] "first Burundian human rights organization to be legally recognized and to have worked openly in Burundi" (Ligue Iteka n.d.).

[3] IRRI is a nonprofit organization registered in the US, the United Kingdom and Uganda for the purpose of hearing the voices of displaced persons and communities affected by conflict (IRRI Aug. 2017, 1).

[4] SOS-Torture/Burundi is a website that fights against [translation] "serious human rights violations [in Burundi], with the support of extensive civic engagement through testimony (from victims and eye and ear witnesses).  Data is collected, treated, verified and shared with stakeholders who can potentially use their influence to put an end to these violations and prosecute the perpetrators either in Burundi or abroad" (SOSTorture/Burundi n.d.).

References

Agence Bujumbura News. 3 November 2015. Theopiste Shakisha. "Arrestation d'un homme d'affaires a l'aeroport de Bujumbura." [Accessed 2 Feb. 2018]

Agence Bujumbura News. N.d. "Equipe." [Accessed 19 Feb. 2018]

Amnesty International (AI). 29 September 2017. Se soumettre ou fuir : la repression et l'insecurite poussent les Burundais a l'exil. [Accessed 12 Feb. 2018]

Amnesty International (AI). 22 February 2017. "Burundi." Rapport 2016/17 : la situation des droits humains dans le monde. [Accessed 8 Feb. 2018]

Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). 17 February 2018. "Data. Burundi." [Accessed 21 Feb. 2018]

Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). May 2016. Country Report : Burundi Crisis Year One. [Accessed 1 Feb. 2018]

Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). 8 April 2016. "Update  Burundi Local Data on Recent Unrest (26 Apr. 2015  3 Apr. 2016)." [Accessed 7 Feb. 2018]

Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). N.d. "About ACLED." [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018]

Belgium. 31 March 2017. Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGRS). Burundi : situation securitaire. COI Focus. [Accessed 1 Feb. 2018]

Federation internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme (FIDH) and Ligue burundaise des droits de l'homme (Ligue Iteka). June 2017. Le Burundi au bord du gouffre : retour sur deux annees de terreur. [Accessed 9 Feb. 2018]

Foreign Policy. 4 November 2016. Amanda Sperber. "Fleeing Burundi Won't Protect You From Its Government." [Accessed 15 Feb. 2018]

The Guardian. 15 April 2016. Emma Graham-Harrison. "Nowhere to Run: Burundi Violence Follows Escapees Across Borders." [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018]

Human Rights Watch. 18 January 2018. "Burundi." Rapport mondial 2018. [Accessed 7 Feb. 2018]

Human Rights Watch. 9 November 2017. "CPI : ouverture d'une enquete sur le Burundi." [Accessed 1 Feb. 2018]

Human Rights Watch. 19 January 2017. "Burundi : des attaques perpetrees par des membres de la ligue des jeunes du parti au pouvoir." [Accessed 8 Feb. 2018]

Human Rights Watch. 12 January 2017. "Burundi." Rapport mondial 2017. [Accessed 8 Feb. 2018]

Human Rights Watch. 6 August 2015. "Burundi : vague d'arrestations arbitraires et de torture." [Accessed 15 Feb. 2018]

International Criminal Court (ICC). 9 November 2017. "Questions et reponses relatives a la decision d'ouvrir une enquete concernant le Burundi." [Accessed 8 Feb. 2018]

International Crisis Group. 5 April 2017. Burundi : l'armee dans la crise. Rapport Afrique no 247. [Accessed 2 Feb. 2018]

International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI). 24 August 2017. "I Fled Because I Was Afraid to Die": Causes of Exile of Burundian Asylum Seekers. [Accessed 1 Feb 2018]

Iwacu. 10 October 2017. Fabrice Manirakiza. "Some Members of Ruling Party Youth Wing Accused of Mistreating Kanyinya Residents." [Accessed 1 Feb. 2018]

Iwacu. 1 November 2016. Christian Bigirimana and Fabrice Manirakiza. "Makamba : un recouvrement aux allures de forcing." [Accessed 8 Feb. 2018]

Ligue burundaise des droits de l'homme (Ligue Iteka). N.d. "Breve presentation de la Ligue Iteka." [Accessed 19 Feb. 2018]

Le Monde. 29 February 2016. Jean-Philippe Remy. "Dans les geoles de Bujumbura." [Accessed 15 Feb. 2018]

Radio France internationale (RFI). 18 August 2016. "Ces militaires burundais qui desertent en mission a l'etranger." (Factiva) [Accessed 9 Feb. 2018]

Radio publique africaine (RPA). 1 February 2018. "Burundi Cracks Down on Those Against Constitutional Reforms." (Factiva) [Accessed 7 Feb. 2018]

Radio publique africaine (RPA). 14 April 2016. "Jeanne Ndayishimiye, victime de ses liens de parente avec la directrice de la radio Isanganiro." [Accessed 9 Feb. 2018]

SOS-Torture/Burundi. N.d. "Qui sommes-nous?" [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018]

United Nations (UN). 13 November 2017. Human Rights Council. Compilation concernant le Burundi. Rapport du Haut-Commissariat des Nations Unies aux droits de l'homme. A/HRC/WG.6/29/BDI/2. [Accessed 2 Feb. 2018]

United Nations (UN). 11 August 2017. Human Rights Council. Rapport de la Commission d'enquete sur le Burundi. A/HRC/36/54. [Accessed 9 Feb. 2018]

United Nations (UN). 15 June 2017. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). "Burundi: Persistence of Serious Human Rights Violations in a Climate of Widespread Fear." [Accessed 1 Feb. 2018]

United Nations (UN). 9 September 2016. Committee against Torture. Observations finales du Comite concernant le rapport special du Burundi, demande conformement au paragraphe 1, in fine, de l'article 19 de la Convention. CAT/C/BDI/CO/2/Add.1. [Accessed 15 Feb. 2018]

United Nations (UN). 10 November 2015. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). "Le Burundi a 'un tournant extremement dangereux' - Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein." [Accessed 15 Feb. 2018]

United States (US). 3 March 2017. Department of State. "Burundi." Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2016. [Accessed 1 Feb. 2018]

Additional Sources Consulted

Oral sources: Associate professor working on the dynamics of conflicts in Burundi; Federation internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme, Africa bureau; historian at the Institut de recherche pour le developpement who focuses on the army and post-conflict actors in Burundi; independent consultant on Burundi who has worked with numerous NGOs advocating for peace, reconciliation, security and democracy; instructor/researcher in political science in Burundi; Ligue des droits de l'homme de la region des Grands Lacs; professor of politics and international studies who focuses on the Great Lakes Region.

Internet sites, including: BBC; Burundian Coalition for the International Criminal Court; ecoi.net; Freedom House; Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre; IRIN News; United Nations  Refworld.Burundi: Airport security screening procedures for passengers boarding international flights; reports of persons sought by the authorities being stopped at the airport by security services (2016-March 2018)

Publisher Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada Publication Date 14 March 2018 Citation / Document Symbol BDI106073.FE Related Document(s) Burundi : information sur les procedures de controle de securite dans les aeroports pour les passagers embarquant a bord de vols internationaux; les incidents signales de personnes recherchees par les autorites ayant ete arretees a l'aeroport par les services de securite (2016-mars 2018) Cite as Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Burundi: Airport security screening procedures for passengers boarding international flights; reports of persons sought by the authorities being stopped at the airport by security services (2016-March 2018), 14 March 2018, BDI106073.FE, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5acf88814.html [accessed 30 September 2021] Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States.

Research Directorate, Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Ottawa

Sources report that Bujumbura International Airport is the only international airport in Bujumbura (Gabon 28 Nov. 2017; Xinhua News Agency 15 Aug. 2017) or in Burundi (Burundi Eco 19 Jan. 2018).

1. Security Screening Procedures

Article 4 of Decree No. 100/117 of 2 May 2013 Concerning the Organization and Operation of the Burundi Civil Aviation Authority (Decret no 100/117 du 02 mai 2013 portant organisation et fonctionnement de l'Autorite de l'aviation civile du Burundi, "AACB") provides the following:

[translation]

The Authority is Burundi's competent body in matters of aviation safety, security and economics.

It also manages state-owned airports and air navigation services.

. (Burundi 2013)

The information in the following paragraphs is taken from an interview between the commander of Bujumbura airport and the communications unit of Burundi's Ministry of Public Security (ministere de la Securite publique - MSP), which was posted on the MSP's website:

[translation]

According to the commander, Bujumbura's Airport Police Station (Commissariat aeroportuaire) is responsible for

maintaining and restoring public order, securing civil aviation equipment, screening passengers and vehicles that enter the airport grounds, screening people transiting through the airport, combatting irregular migration, combatting document fraud and prohibited products, human trafficking, enforcing civil aviation regulations, co-operating with other services at the airport and ensuring the security of all people working at the airport.

Those activities are carried out by four services, namely, the security service, the cross-border service, the judicial police and the administration and logistics service. The various services that ensure security are described as follows:

[translation]

Security service



This service ensures security within the airport from the primary entrance, security in the parking lots (vehicles), North and South position markers for securing civil aviation equipment, etc. Male and female police officers are posted at the primary entrance to screen persons and vehicles entering the airport. Individuals are searched with metal detectors, vehicles are searched with telescopic mirrors, and luggage is passed through the controlix system to have its contents scanned.



Cross-border service



This service controls the travel documents of people entering and exiting the country. Burundians or foreigners wishing to travel must have a travel document (passport, pass, ECGLC [travel pass of the Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries]), an airplane ticket and, in some cases, a yellow card. We use a "passport-reader" device (their fingerprints) to check whether an individual's passport is in fact their passport. Furthermore, people who enter our country must have entry visas. Following the screening process, the police station then authorizes the entry or exit of passengers.



Judicial police service



This service oversees intelligence and the preparation of preliminary case records of alleged perpetrators of offences committed at the airport. The case records are then sent to the headquarters of the judicial police for thorough investigation. Those individuals include deportees, returned persons and voluntary returnees. Officers of the judicial police identify them to find out the circumstances of their deportation or refoulement. Judicial police are also on the lookout for drug traffickers, products smuggled through the airport, and any suspicious product or person (Burundi [2 Sep. 2015]).

According to an article posted on the MSP's website, the Air, Border and Aliens Police (Police de l'air, des frontieres et des etrangers - PAFE) is [translation] "one of the headquarters of Burundi's National Police (Police nationale du Burundi - PNB) that offers multiple services to Burundian citizens and foreigners living in Burundi or those transiting through Burundi on their way to other countries" (Burundi n.d.a). The same source states that, in an interview with the MSP's communications unit, the chief of the PAFE indicated that the PAFE was responsible for the following, in addition to issuing travel documents:

[translation]

[The PAFE] controls the movement of foreigners who enter and exit the country, controls travel documents at all borders (Rumonge, Nyanza-lac, Mabanda, Mugina, Gisuru, Mishiha, Gasenyi, Kobero, Giteranyi, Kanyaru [H]aut and [B]as, Kabarore, Ruhwa[,] Mutimbuzi, [V]ugizo, Port of Bujumbura and Bujumbura international airport), combats irregular migration, enforces aviation regulations, combats travel document fraud, combats child trafficking, and any other form of criminality. (Burundi n.d.a)

In a November 2017 article published by Yaga, a Burundian blogger collective that aims to change attitudes (Yaga n.d.) and that is supported [translation] "logistically by Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW)" via its Waza website (Le Monde 14 May 2015), a blogger describes his experience of going through Bujumbura airport:

[translation]

At 4:00 p.m., we were at the airport. There were five police officers at the entrance, where everyone has to get out of their vehicles and have their luggage scanned.

Before entering the airport, a police officer approached . I quickly stated that we were in a hurry, that our flight was in less than an hour. We were about to leave to be screened when the police officer and his colleague unexpectedly came up to me and whispered:  pay us a bribe and go through. 

I took out two 1000 Burundian franc (Fbu) bills [about C$1]. My trunk was full of luggage, and I went through without any checks. (Yaga 14 Nov. 2017)

In an Agence France-Presse (AFP) article, in which the Director General of the AACB comments on the seizure of ivory found in a backpack at Bujumbura International Airport, he also mentions that "scanners" are used (AFP 28 Oct. 2014).

On the website of the Logistic Capacity Assessment (LCA) [1], the information gathered on Bujumbura International Airport indicates that "police officers are present at the departure and arrival halls: both areas are fitted with scanning devices, in addition to close circuit cameras installed at strategic points. Also, army personnel can be seen around the airport" (LCA 24 Mar. 2016).

An article posted on the AACB's website reports that the AACB, which manages all of Burundi's airports, acquired the [translation] "Logyx software, which is an X-ray software" (Burundi n.d.b). Similarly, other sources report that, in July 2013, Bujumbura airport was equipped with the Logyx software, intended [translation] "for training and evaluating security X-ray screeners at the airport" (Iwacu 31 July 2013; Xinhua News Agency 30 July 2013).

2. Arrests of Individuals Sought by the Authorities

Information on reported cases of individuals who were arrested while trying to leave the country was scarce among the sources consulted by the Research Directorate within the time constraints of this Response.

2.1 In Burundi

Sources report that a woman, Jeanne Ndayishimiye, was arrested at Bujumbura airport in April 2016 for breaching state security (SOS Torture Burundi 16 Apr. 2016; RPA 14 Apr. 2016; Bwiza News 13 Apr. 2016) as she was about to board a flight to Kigali, in Rwanda (RPA 14 Apr. 2016). Sources report that she was arrested by the [translation] "airport commander" (SOS Torture Burundi 16 Apr. 2016; Bwiza News 13 Apr. 2016) or by the "head of airport security" (RPA 14 Apr. 2016). She was then transferred into the custody of the National Intelligence Service (Service national des renseignements - SNR), which detained her (SOS Torture Burundi 16 Apr. 2016; RPA 14 Apr. 2016; Bwiza News 13 Apr. 2016), then released her on 14 April 2016 (SOS Torture Burundi 16 Apr. 2016). Sources report that Jeanne Ndayishimiye is a victim of being related to the exiled Burundian radio director, Isanganiro (SOS Torture Burundi 16 Apr. 2016; RPA 14 Apr. 2016; Bwiza News 13 Apr. 2016). Radio publique africaine (RPA), located in Bujumbura, reported that a lawyer at the Bujumbura bar noted that the arrest and detention of Jeanne Ndayishimiye were illegal, because the young woman had not been summoned (RPA 14 Apr. 2016). However, Bwiza News reports that [translation] "[the] office[,] which did not want to comment for the time being, noted that due process was applied with respect to the arrest. According to a police source, an arrest warrant had been issued for 'breach of internal state security'" (Bwiza News 13 Apr. 2016). According to the RPA, [translation] "messages to young 'Imbonerakure' were posted on the Whatsap[p] network the day before her arrest  asking them to intercept the vehicle identified as the one transporting the young woman" (RPA 14 Apr. 2016). Similarly, according to an article published by Bwiza News, a Rwandan news website, [translation] "[t]he case of Jeanne Ndayishimiye was reported [on April 11, 2016] on social networks, along with a description of her and her vehicle, while people yet to be identified called for her arrest" (Bwiza News 13 Apr. 2016).

A joint report on Burundi by the International Federation for Human Rights (Federation internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme - FIDH) and the Iteka Burundi Human Rights League (Ligue burundaise des droits de l'homme Iteka - Ligue Iteka), published in November 2016, gives an account of the case of a Ligue Iteka observer in Burundi who was bullied by the Burundian authorities:

[translation]

In May 2016, men in police uniforms went to his home, although [he] had left his home for safety reasons and a warrant had been issued for his arrest. [He] indicated that he was followed into Bujumbura airport by Desire Uwamahoro, chief of the police riot squad, as he sought to leave the territory to evade the SNR. He finally managed to board his flight before the border police found out (FIDH and Ligue Iteka Nov. 2016, 120).

Sources report that Burundi riot squad chief, Desire Uwamahoro, was arrested on 29 October 2016 at Bujumbura airport by the SNR and charged with swindling in relation to gold trafficking (RFI 5 Nov. 2016; RPA 31 Oct. 2016).

2.2 Arrests of Individuals Returning from Abroad

In an article on 18 August 2016, Radio France internationale (RFI) reports that, following an investigation, at least 14 Burundian soldiers deployed abroad decided to desert the military and not return to the country out of fear of being arrested upon their return by the authorities, who target soldiers suspected of being close to the opposition (RFI 18 Aug. 2016). The article states the following:

[translation]

Thomas and three of his comrades claim that they found their names on a list of soldiers to be watched posted on social networks and that they had received death threats from their colleagues. They then decided to disobey: "We were afraid of being arrested, as was the case of a soldier a few days ago at Bujumbura airport, upon his return from a deployment to the Central African Republic," he explained (RFI 18 Aug. 2016, italics in original).

An article published by RFI on 21 August 2016 reports that, at a press briefing held on 19 August 2016 by the Burundian army, the spokesperson [translation] "spoke of 'political conspiracy'" to explain the desertions of military personnel and he "also recognized that two second lieutenants at the Higher Institute of Senior Military Officers (Institut superieur des cadres militaires) were arrested by the SNR  upon their return to the country. Colonel Baratuza remains vague about the motive for the arrests" (RFI 21 Aug. 2016). Corroborating information could not be found among the sources consulted by the Research Directorate within the time constraints of this Response.

Sources report that a non-commissioned officer in the Burundian army, Adjutant Major Elysee Nduwumukama, was arrested at Bujumbura airport by the SNR upon his return from a deployment to the Central African Republic (SOS-Torture Burundi 28 Jan. 2017; RPA 24 Jan. 2017).

In March 2017, the Burundian media group Iwacu reports that Master Corporal Leon Niyonkuru was repatriated from Somalia, where he had been on deployment; he was charged with driving alone in Mogadishu and was arrested by the military police upon his arrival at Bujumbura International Airport (Iwacu 14 Mar. 2017). Corroborating information could not be found among the sources consulted by the Research Directorate within the time constraints of this Response.

In April 2017, an article in Le Monde on a [translation] "purge" of the Burundian army following the attempted coup in 2015, reports that "there are troubling rumours in the country: Tutsi military officers, back from deployment, were arrested upon their arrival at Bujumbura airport and disappeared without a trace" (Le Monde 12 Apr. 2017). A joint report by the FIDH and the Ligue Iteka published in June 2017 also reports, in a section devoted to desertions in the Burundian army, that since January 2017, two former members of the Burundian Armed Forced (Forces armees burundaises - FAB) were arrested at Bujumbura airport upon their return from deployment (FIDH and Ligue Iteka Jun. 2017, 14).

This Response was prepared after researching publicly accessible information currently available to the Research Directorate within time constraints. This Response is not, and does not purport to be, conclusive as to the merit of any particular claim for refugee protection. Please find below the list of sources consulted in researching this Information Request.

Note

[1] The LCA is a tool of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) (LCA n.d.a). It provides a source of information related to the logistics infrastructure and services in a given country; it is made available to the WFP and the humanitarian community (LCA n.d.b). Members of the LCA team collect data from their sources in the field, then verify, compile and publish the data (Global Logistics Cluster 2017, 16-17). According to the LCA, the assessor for Burundi is Mohamed Musa, Head of Logistics at PAM (LCA 6 June 2016).

References

Agence France-Presse (AFP). 28 October 2014. "Burundi : un Malien arrete avec neuf kilos d'ivoire." (Factiva) [Accessed 26 Feb. 2018]

Burundi. [2 September 2015]. Ministry of Public Security (MSP). "Les activites du commissariat aeroportuaire de Bujumbura." [Accessed 22 Feb. 2018]

Burundi. 2013. Decret no 100/117 du 02 mai 2013 portant organisation et fonctionnement de l'Autorite de l'aviation civile du Burundi, "AACB." [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018]

Burundi. N.d.a. Ministry of Public Security (MSP). "Les services offerts par le Commissariat general de la Police de l'air, des frontieres et des etrangers (PAFE)." [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018]

Burundi. N.d.b. Autorite de l'aviation civile du Burundi (AACB). "AACB acquiert le LOGYx : logiciel d'imagerie radioscopique pour la surete aeroportuaire." [Accessed 26 Feb. 2018]

Burundi Eco. 19 January 2018. Melance Maniragaba. "L'aeroport international de Bujumbura pourrait changer de visage." [Accessed 19 Feb. 2018]

Bwiza News. 13 April 2016. Mecky Kayi. "Burundi : arrestation de Jeanne Ndayishimiye a l'aeroport international." [Accessed 27 Feb. 2018]

Federation internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme (FIDH) and Ligue burundaise des droits de l'homme Iteka (Ligue Iteka). June 2017. Le Burundi au bord du gouffre : retour sur deux annees de terreur. [Accessed 26 Feb. 2018]

Federation internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme (FIDH) and Ligue burundaise des droits de l'homme Iteka (Ligue Iteka). November 2016. Burundi : une repression aux dynamiques genocidaires. [Accessed 22 Feb. 2018]

Gabon. 28 November 2017. Agence nationale de l'aviation civile. "Burundi : approbation d'un projet de modernisation et d'extension de l'aeroport international de Bujumbura." [Accessed 22 Feb. 2018]

Iwacu. 14 March 2017. "Burundi Soldier Repatriated From Somalia for Driving Alone in Mogadishu." (Factiva) [Accessed 26 Feb. 2018]

Iwacu. 31 July 2013. Diane Uwimana. "L'aeroport de Bujumbura se dote d'un nouveau logiciel pour plus de securite." [Accessed 19 Feb. 2018]

Logistics Capacity Assessment (LCA). 6 June 2016. Jessica Cochran. "Burundi." [Accessed 7 Mar. 2018]

Logistics Capacity Assessment (LCA). 24 March 2016. Lucy Styles and Jessica Cochran. "Burundi Bujumbura International Airport." [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018]

Logistics Capacity Assessment (LCA). N.d.a. "LCA Homepage." [Accessed 13 Mar. 2018]

Logistics Capacity Assessment (LCA). N.d.b. "FAQ for LCAs and Rapid LCAs." [Accessed 6 Mar. 2018]

Logistics Cluster. 2017. Information Management Unit. IM Guide 2017. [Accessed 14 Mar. 2018]

Le Monde. 12 April 2017. Camille Lafont. "Burundi : la "purge" de l'armee racontee par des officiers en exil." [Accessed 26 Feb. 2018]

Le Monde. 14 May 2015. Emile Costard. "Au Burundi, la tentative de coup d'Etat en direct avec les blogueurs de Yaga Burundi." [Accessed 6 Mar. 2018]

Radio France internationale (RFI). 5 November 2016. "Pourquoi le chef de la brigade anti-emeutes a-t-il ete arrete?" [Accessed 26 Feb. 2018]

Radio France internationale (RFI). 21 August 2016. "Burundi : L'armee fait le point sur les desertions de militaires." [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018]

Radio France internationale (RFI). 18 August 2016. "[Enquete] Ces militaires burundais qui desertent en mission a l'etranger." [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018]

Radio publique africaine (RPA). 24 January 2017. "Deux membres des services de securite interpelles le weekend dernier." [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018]

Radio publique africaine (RPA). 31 October 2016. "Le Commissaire Desire Uwamahoro en detention suite a une affaire d'escroquerie." [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018]

Radio publique africaine (RPA). 14 April 2016. "Jeanne Ndayishimiye, victime de ses liens de parente avec la directrice de la radio Isanganiro." [Accessed 28 fevr. 2018]

SOS-Torture Burundi. 28 January 2017. Rapport n59 de SOS-Torture/Burundi publie le 28 janvier 2017. [Accessed 23 Feb. 2018]

SOS-Torture Burundi. 16 April 2016. "SOS-Torture / N 18." [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018]

Xinhua News Agency. 15 August 2017. "Le Burundi se dotera d'aeroports secondaires pour desengorger l'unique aeroport international de Bujumbura." [Accessed 6 Mar. 2018]

Xinhua News Agency. 30 July 2013. "28 kg d'ivoire saisis a l'aeroport de Bujumbura sur un Guineen." [Accessed: 27 Feb. 2018]

Yaga. 14 November 2017. Jean Ndikumana. "Aeroport de Bujumbura, domaine securise vous dites?" [Accessed 22 Feb. 2018]

Yaga. N.d. "Qui sommes-nous?" [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018]

Additional Sources Consulted

Internet sites, including: Amnesty International; Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project; Belgium  Service public federal; ecoi.net; France  France diplomatie; Freedom House; Human Rights Watch; Ikiriho; International Civil Aviation Organization; International Crisis Group; Jeune Afrique; Mediapart; People's Daily Online; La Tribune; UK  Foreign Travel Advice; UN  Refworld; US  Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Department of State, Embassy in Burundi.Denver, CO -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/12/2018 --Hundreds of Christian constituents from a local Colorado Springs church say they are fed-up with U.S. Senator Michael Bennet treating Christians and minorities like trash and are organizing together with advocacy organization A Just Cause to build a powerful grassroots juggernaut capable of unseating the Colorado Democrat.



According to parishioners of the Colorado Springs Fellowship Church (CSFC), Senator Bennet told them to get lost after receiving numerous complaints and irrefutable evidence from court documents showing how Denver federal Judge Christine M. Arguello and prosecutors from the Colorado U.S. Attorney's Office repeatedly committed various acts of malicious misconduct between 2003 and 2017, including viciously slandering them, CSFC and their Pastor Rose Banks as well as illegally seizing parishioner and church banking records in a criminal case (Dist. Colo. no. 09-CR-00266-CMA) that didn't involve them. Senator Bennet was provided with a comprehensive dossier (which can be seen online at http://bit.ly/2wBaCyJ detailing the misconduct which A Just Cause says he completely disregarded in favor of covering for Arguello and prosecutors.



"Senator Bennet, through his chief of staff, told me and hundreds of others from the Christian community, including many African-Americans and Hispanics, that we were not his constituents," says Cliff Stewart of A Just Cause. "He treated us like trash," adds Stewart. "Senator Bennet became squeamish and fearful after receiving the dossier with overwhelming evidence showing Judge Arguello's egregious abuses," says Cliff Stewart of A Just Cause. According to Lamont Banks, Executive Director of AJC, a staffer speaking on behalf of Senator Bennet said: "You are asking Senator Bennet to challenge a judge here, he is in support of the process."



"Senator Bennet's talk about process is pure chicanery," says Banks. "He has the backing of former federal appeals judge H. Lee Sarokin who publicly exposed Judge Arguello's misconduct in his Huffington Post blog (www.huffingtonpost.com/judge-h-lee-sarokin/the-case-of-the-missing-t_1_b_5340397.html) and what appears to indicate an orchestrated plan by Judge Arguello to destroy a critical portion of a trial transcript that implicated her in violating defendants 5th Amendment rights," adds Banks. "Transcripts just don't disappear in the technologically-driven 21st century and the excuses given on the record by Judge Arguello and by the clerk's office about the missing transcript prove there was collusion to conceal Judge Arguello's misconduct," says Banks.



"Does the Senator actually believe that a former federal appeals judge would lie about Judge Arguello and the prosecutors mishandling of the case?" asks Banks. "It is disgraceful and cruel that Senator Bennet would allow innocent men to continue languishing in prison and leave Colorado families and their children hurting to protect Judge Arguello and prosecutors after they abused them," adds Banks.



After Senator Bennet spit in the face of his constituents and Judge Sarokin, AJC took the dossier (http://bit.ly/2wBaCyJ) to members of Congress from other states. Four members from the House of Representatives, including a former judge from the Judiciary Committee and one from House Oversight and Government Reform committee, were so disturbed by the evidence in the dossier, they sent a letter (http://bit.ly/------) in November 2017 to the DOJ requesting answers to the "serious" allegations of misconduct in the dossier. The DOJ has yet to respond to their letter.



Prior to the DOJ letter being sent, Senator Bennet was contacted again to see if he would join his colleagues and sign on the letter to the DOJ, but once again he declined to help his own constituents. "It is shameful that Coloradans had no support and were forced to seek help outside of the state," says Stewart.



The dossier concerns the IRP6 case where six Colorado Springs technology executives of IRP Solutions Corporation were, as Judge Sarokin says, indicted, prosecuted and imprisoned for failing to pay corporate debt. The six men were faithful members of the Colorado Springs Fellowship Church. One of whom (COO David Banks) was Pastor Banks' son. When the Colorado U.S. Attorney could find no crime to charge the executives, it unsuccessfully attempted to gain an indictment with a 2007 grand jury by using the church and Pastor Banks as the central target of the investigation. When the government failed to gain an indictment with the first grand jury, it manufactured a new theory to gain an indictment and violated federal law and the Constitution to convict and imprison the IRP6. In another related proceeding in 2017, Judge Arguello took to the bench to slander the church, Pastor Banks and parishioner by saying CSFC was a cult who controlled the minds of the defendants and all church members.



"The 24-page dossier presents a compelling and truthful story about prosecutorial and judicial abuses perpetrated on Colorado families, a Colorado business and a Colorado church by Obama's Justice Department," says Banks. "All of which is corroborated by documentary evidence from the court, Judge Sarokin's writings, judicial complaints and more," says Banks. " Apparently, Senator Bennet is an elitist crony who cares more about protecting the reputations of corrupt friends in the government than defending his constituents against their abuses," adds Banks.



A Just Cause's goal is to ensure that every single Coloradan is aware of how Senator Bennet abandoned these Colorado families in favor of protecting corrupt friends. The wives, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters as well as CSF church members will hit the roads throughout Colorado to talk to other families and will be relentless on social media. AJC will disseminate press releases to each and every TV, radio station and newspaper in Colorado and AJC Radio will be dedicating numerous broadcasts to discuss Senator Bennet's lack of humanity.



"If Senator Bennet thinks our movement to unseat him will fade away because he's not up for election until 2022, he'd better think again," says Banks. "That gives us plenty of time to build a strong, cohesive grass roots organization to defeat him," adds Banks. "The families and parishioners of CSFC will never forget that he treated them like the scum of the earth when they asked him for help against Judge Arguello's abuse," says Banks. "I ask all Coloradans who are reading this to pass it to a friend," says Banks. "A Just Cause would like to talk to other Coloradans who Senator Bennet has ignored," concludes Banks.San Diego, CA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/12/2018 --Co-Production International (CPI) has announced its upcoming no-cost Tijuana Mexico Manufacturing Tour for April 27, 2018. This quarter's tour will take attendees inside Foxconn, Hunter Industries and Scantibodies maquiladoras. CPI offers several maquiladora tours a year, giving US manufacturers interested in expanding manufacturing to Mexico a chance to see the industries up close and learn how to get started south of the border.



"Manufacturing in Mexico is about freeing up capital and improving your bottom line, often allowing for new innovations at home. We also have US manufacturers who seek out places like Tijuana to effortlessly serve customers already in the region. Mexico and especially Tijuana are manufacturing megaregions. It's clear why companies continue to flock here," says Denisse Martinez, Marketing Director for CPI and tour organizer.



This quarter's comprehensive one-day agenda includes an educational session over breakfast, tours of three world-class Mexico manufacturing facilities, and ends with an exquisite dinner featuring Baja Mediterranean cuisine and award-winning regional wines. The educational session for this tour titled, "Mexico Soft-Landing Solutions: Have Full Control of Your Manufacturing Operation," will focus on the nuts and bolts of how to actually start manufacturing in Mexico.



"We chose three very different manufacturing operations to give attendees the chance to see a broad range of the high-quality products the Mexican workforce is capable of. From Foxconn Baja California, a leading electronics manufacturer, and Hunter Industries, the Southern California-based plastic valve and irrigation products manufacturer, to the innovative Scantibodies Laboratories, manufacturer of First Response pregnancy tests and other life-saving diagnostic testing kits," says Martinez.



In the last few decades over 5,000 major manufacturers have landed in Mexico with a large portion setting up manufacturing operations in Northern border cities like Tijuana and Tecate. Beyond Mexico's labor cost savings, proximity to North American markets and home-operations are major drivers for US manufacturers looking to free up capital while still maintaining production quality and oversight. The infrastructure, highly-trained workforce with direct ties to educational institutions and low-to-no tariffs have solidified Mexico as a manufacturing force keen on longevity. CPI's educational tours give manufacturers a chance to see these opportunities and benefits first-hand, as well as the time talk to companies about their experiences manufacturing in Mexico.



"Taking the tour as a team helped our organization in a decisive manner to move from the imaginary and visionary stage into a real and actual world class incremental analysis solution. It provided the synergy to step into the real and actual opportunity that manufacturing in Tijuana represents," said Danny Viales, the plant manager for an aftermarket exhaust systems manufacturer.



Almost every major industry is represented in Mexico including manufacturers in the aerospace and defense, electronics, medical device, plastics, automotive and auto parts sectors. If you're a manufacturer and are ready to see manufacturing in Mexico for yourself, this is an opportunity not to be missed!



More information: https://co-production.net/contact/mexico-manufacturing-tour.html



Don't Miss Out  Space Fills Fast!

Register by: April 20, 2017

You must RSVP to attend.



About CPI

Co-Production International is an administrative services provider located in San Diego, CA, offering successful business expansion solutions, shelter company services, management of the day-to-day administrative duties, site selection, and the complete set-up of your operation in Mexico.



For more information, or if you are interested in a labor cost analysis for expanding your operations to Mexico, visit http://www.co-production.net or call 619-429-4344.Share

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Note all articles are independently researched and written by myself. However, if you buy via one of the links it may be an affiliate and I may earn a small commission.

Thinking about a trip to Ikea? Well, if you are thinking retro too, I have picked out 10 of the best retro design pieces from the Swedish superstore from the current range.

However, we will have to keep updating the article as Ikea does have a track record of removing some of its more interesting and quirky pieces from its catalogue.

Recently we have seen the disappearance of the Mattram cat curtains and cushions as well as the Sotblomster paisley bedding, the Hogsten outdoor chair and the amazing 1950s-style Arjeplog three-light pendant lamps. The moral to this story? If you see something you like, get it quickly before it leaves the building.

Despite that, there are still plenty of retro options on the store, including what you see here.

1. Midcentury-style Ekenaset armchairs

Yes, this had to be the first entry. A blast from Ikeas past.

Part of the series of reissused designs from a couple of years back, the Ekenaset has been hugely popular and has thankfully stayed in the stores range since. 1950s Scandi design of course, with the option of a cloth or (I think) leather seat and both with a solid birch frame. Cheaper than you might expect too at 170.

More details at the Ikea site

2. 1960s-style Peppakorn vases

If midcentury Scandinavian glass is your thing, then you might be interested in this particular new arrival.

There are two vases in this particular range, both mouth blown glass in subdued vintage shades and with a retro design that could easily pass for 1960s originals. The difference is obviously the price, with these starting at just 6.

More details at the Ikea site

3. 1970s-style Vaxjo pendant light

Another new addition to this seasons catalogue is this rather colourful light fitting.

Not just the orange, there are plenty of other shades too. But I think the orange is the one that jumps out at me most and boosts the 1970s credentials of this particular retro design. Again, a design that could be a vintage designer piece, but is actually new and just 25.

More details at the Ikea site

4. 1950s Lovbacken side table

The table that started Ikeas mini retro revival is thankfully still available to buy.

Sadly the coffee table variations of this 1956 Ikea original are no longer available, so treasure this one. Grain pattern, poplar veneer and tapered legs all appeal, as does the 40 price tag. An essential buy.

More details on the Ikea site

5. Retro Stockholm chandelier

I think this is my favourite Ikea design right now, although I havent quite got the room height to allow the Stockholm chandelier to come into its own.

Inspired by the grand modernist chandeliers of the 1960s and early 1970s, this is a wonderful focal point for a room, adding drama, style and more than a touch of a bygone era. 85 is, once again, much cheaper than you might expect.

More details at the Ikea site

6. Retro Pugg wall clock

You can pay five times as much for a retro wall clock, but why would when the Pugg is just 10?

As you can see above, at that price you can go for the different time zones thing on the wall if you like, but this midcentury-inspired timepiece works just as well in the singular. A silent quartz movement too, so no annoying ticking sound either.

More details at the Ikea site

7. Midcentury-style Stockholm coffee table

It is always worth browsing the Stockholm range at Ikea, which has produced plenty of interesting midcentury pieces over the years. This coffee table is one of the few in there right now.

The table is a mix of walnut veneer and sold walnut, offering a typically 1950s shape and a good amount of storage / surface space too. Stylish and functional, but one of the more expensive items in this round up at 195.

More details at the Ikea site

8. Ringkrage Scandi-style bedding set

I got the moan about some of the more interesting retro bedding leaving the range out of the way early. So lets focus on one that is still available, the Ringkrage.

It has that midcentury Scandinavian vibe about it. Quirky, retro design that will brighten up any room. For more of the same, do check out the Malin Rund design too. Whatever you go for, expect to pay around 30.

More details at the Ikea site

9. Agen vintage-style rattan chair range

The kind of thing you might have seen in a house in the 1950s. Ikea has really just given it a splash of colour.

Actually, you can go for a plain finish, but the coloured versions of this hand-woven chair are by far the best option, updating a classic by imply brightening it up. Stackable too if you want more than one for emergency seating. 35 is the price.

More details at the Ikea site

10. Holjes ceiling light

Lets end with a safe pair of hands, with the Holjes just making the list ahead of the Knappa light.

Ikea has made a couple of versions of this, with the Holjes the only one in the current range. A timeless, mouthblown glass globe light that fits in with a variety of interiors across a range of eras. We have two in our living room and they just look good purely because of the simplicity of the design. 25 is something of a bargain.

More details at the Ikea siteA Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.South Korea's daily coronavirus cases remained in the 2,000s for the fifth day in a row Thursday in the aftermath of last week's extended holiday that has fueled a nationwide resur...Blockchain start-up Ripple has invested $25 million in ripple or XRP into Blockchain Capital Parallel IV, LP., a venture capital firm focused exclusively on the blockchain .

In a statement, Ripple, which owns about 60 billion XRP cryptocurrency, said the $150 million fund managed by Blockchain Capital will invest in entrepreneurial teams that are building businesses using blockchain technology.

Ripple, whose primary focus has been to remove friction from cross-border payments, said the investment will help identify new uses beyond payments for open source platforms XRP Ledger and Interledger Protocol.

Bart Stephens, co-founder and managing partner of Blockchain Capital, said, "Whether it's using XRP, bitcoin or just the underlying blockchain technology, our goal is to find the best projects and give them the resources to be successful companies that deliver value to customers for the long term."

Patrick Griffin, SVP of Strategic Growth at Ripple, stated that it is the first fund the company has contributed to, and it won't be the last. "We plan to be major players in shaping the future generation of blockchain or crypto companies," he said.

Ripple, which has partnered with MoneyGram, Western Union, American Express and Santander among others, reportedly said that it is looking for next Uber, Salesforce, or Instagram to be built on its platform.

According to Coinmarketcap, ripple, the third largest cryptocurrency based on market cap, was trading at $0.51, up 3.9 percent over the last 24 hours, with a market cap of $20 billion.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business NewsGold futures were lower Thursday morning, trimming recent gains as U.S. stocks were poised for another decent performance.

Still, gold's safe haven appeal has put a floor under gold prices amid geopolitical tensions and a possible trade war between the U.S. and China.

This morning the European Central Bank warned of the risks to the eurozone posed by high tariffs.

"There was widespread concern that the risk of trade conflicts, which could be expected to have an adverse impact on activity for all countries involved, had increased," the ECB said. "It was also cautioned that negative confidence effects could arise."

Gold was down $14 at $1345 an ounce.

In U.S. economic news, jobless claims dropped 9,000 to 233,000, staying near a 45-year low.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market AnalysisHong Kong's OKEx became the second major cryptocurrency exchange to announce its intention to expand operations to Malta after Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by 24-hour trading volume.

Binance announced plans to open in Malta in late March after it fell out of favor with the Japanese financial regulator for failing to get a license to operate in the country.

Big crypto exchanges are considering shifting base as regulators are increasingly tightening the noose around them. There are also increased concerns about Chinese regulatory actions in the cryptocurrency space, as the country recently banned Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).

Malta is welcoming cryptocurrency and blockchain businesses as the small Mediterranean island nation plans to transform itself into a fintech hub and a crypto-friendly "Blockchain island."

Malta is actively building a supportive regulatory and technical infrastructure for Distributed Ledger Technology (DLTs), ICOs and virtual currencies to become the world's first blockchain-regulated state.

OKEx, the world's second largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, said it has decided to make Malta a foundation for further OKEx growth based on the encouraging approach of the Maltese government and regulatory authorities.

"Malta's Virtual Financial Asset Act is a solid foundation for the industry and the government to work together in fostering the nascent blockchain/digital asset industry," said Tim Byun, chief risk officer at OKEx.

Chris Lee, CEO of OKEx added, "We look forward to working with the Malta government as it is forward thinking and shares many of our same values: the most important of which are protection of traders and the general public, compliance with Anti Money Laundering and Know Your Customer standards, and recognition of the innovation and importance of continued development in the Blockchain ecosystem."

The Maltese government announced plans earlier this year for the Malta Digital Innovation Authority, which aims to provide legal certainty for the use of blockchain , and by extension, cryptocurrencies.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business NewsThe Swiss stock market bounced back Thursday, following yesterday's drop. After fluctuating between gains and losses in early trade, the market turned higher following some comments from U.S. President Donald Trump around midday.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" Trump said in a post on Twitter.

The Swiss Market Index increased by 0.76 percent Thursday and finished at 8,774.76. The Swiss Leader Index climbed 0.98 percent and the Swiss Performance Index added 0.79 percent.

Lonza and Clariant were among the top performing stocks of the session, with gains of 3.7 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively.

Swatch increased 2.1 percent and rival Richemont advanced 2.0 percent. Hearing aid manufacturer Sonova rose 1.5 percent after it presented new products based on its wireless chip at an industry conference.

Julius Baer finished higher by 2.1 percent, while UBS gained 1.3 percent and Credit Suisse added 1.1 percent. Zurich Insurance climbed 1.9 percent and Swiss Re added 0.8 percent.

Among the index heavyweights, Novartis increased 1.2 percent and Roche rose 0.4 percent. Meanwhile, Nestle fell 0.5 percent.

In the broad market, Sulzer surged 19.5 percent. U.S. authorities approved a deal that would free the company from sanctions. Sulzer agreed to buyback 5 million of its shares from shareholder Viktor Vekselberg, which dropped his stake in the company below 50 percent.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market AnalysisCrude oil futures were flat Thursday, holding near 3-year highs as U.S. stocks rallied.

Fears of supply interruptions from the Middle East have eased. President Donald Trump clarified hawkish remarks about the situation in Syria.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'" Trump tweeted.

Yesterday, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said crude inventories rose by 3.3 million barrels (bbl) in the week ended April 6, compared with analysts' expectations for a decrease of 189,000 bbl. Rising imports contributed to the glut.

Also, OPEC said output from non-Opec countries including the U.S is "now expected to grow at a faster pace". It predicts growth by more than 1.7 million barrels a day this year, about double its previous forecast.

June WTI oil was up 20 cents, or 0.3%, at $67.02/bbl, the highest since 2014.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market AnalysisCanadian stocks were flat again Thursday, unable to follow U.S. stocks sharply higher despite steady oil prices and easing concerns about the Middle East.

Markets reacted positively to a tweet from President Donald Trump saying there is no U.S. timetable for getting involved in the Syria conflict.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'" Trump tweeted.

The TSX Composite Index was up 15 points to 15,273 at last check.

OPEC said output from non-Opec countries including the U.S. and Canada is "now expected to grow at a faster pace". It predicts growth by more than 1.7 million barrels a day this year, about double its previous forecast.

June WTI oil was up 20 cents, or 0.3%, at $67.02/bbl, the highest since 2014.

Shaw Communications Inc. (SJR_B.TO, SJR, SJR_A.TO) confirmed that it remains on track to meet its fiscal 2018 guidance. Shares surged up 9.2 percent.

CCL Industries Inc.(CCL_A.TO) said it acquired Bolt-on for its Avery division. Shares rose fractionally.

Prometic Life Sciences Inc. (PLI) announced positive clinical activity observed in Alstrom syndrome (AS) patients treated with PBI-4050 in the ongoing Phase 2 open label clinical trial being conducted in the UK. Shares rose 3.8 percent.

Ontario candidate Doug Ford says if elected he will fire the CEO of Hydro One (H.TO) and the company's board of directors after rate increases.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Market Analysis(Agencia CMA Latam) - The presidential elections scheduled for May are the main source of uncertainty in Colombia, and it is likely that the second round should be contested between Ivan Duque, supported by the former president Alvaro Uribe, and Gustavo Petro, the center-left former mayor of Bogota, according to a Scotiabank report.

The results in the primary elections held on March 11 seem to suggest that Duque currently has stronger backing. He got around 33% more votes than Petro in the primaries.

On the growth front, "activity remains slow but shows signs of improvement, we expect stronger world trade and higher oil prices to help boost growth to 2.5% in 2018 and 3.5% in 2019," the report said.

Finally, Scotiabank stressed that "local in Colombia have been firm, with the Colombian peso being the second strongest currency in Latin America so far this year."

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.(Agencia CMA Latam) - Colombian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Juan Guillermo Zuluaga confirmed that the country kept its sanitary status as a country free of foot-and-mouth disease through vaccination, despite the new cases recently detected in the national territory.

The statement was made after an official statement by the World Organization for Animal Health, OIE, which congratulated Colombia for the transparency through which it handled the recent case in Arauca.

In that instance, cattle smuggled in from Venezuela were slaughtered, and control measures were put in place to detect the illegal entry of bovines into its territory.

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.Report: Army's drone air force, ballistic missiles airstrikes targeted several Saudi targets [12/April/2018]











SANAA, Apr 12 (Saba)  Drone air force waged airstrikes, and missile force of the army and popular committees launched ballistic missiles on the ministry of defense in Riyadh and various Saudi targets in the past 24 hours, according to the army's military media.



In Riyadh, the missile force hit Saudi Ministry of Defense with Borkan-H2 missiles.

In Asir, the drone waged airstrikes with Qasif-1 on Abha airport, and the Saudi enemy media announced about disrupt flights at Abha airport and transfer them to the airports of Jizan, Jeddah and Riyadh.



In Jizan, the drone Qasif-1 waged airstrikes on Aramco company, while the missile force fired a barrage of Badr-1 missiles on King Abdullah Economic City and another targets.



In Jizan also, scores of Katyusha rockets were fired at gatherings of Saudi soldiers at al- Mashreq site and a Saudi soldier was shot dead in al- Khobah.



In Najran, Badr- 1 missiles fired on Aramco distribution building and other targets in Najran, a missile, Zilzal-2 was fired at the Saudi soldiers gatherings and their mercenaries at al- Sudais site.



A number of Saudi soldiers mercenaries were killed in a unique operation of the army and committees and artillery and missile attack on their sites in al- Talaa in Najran, while a Saudi military vehicle were destroyed and three others in al- Sudais site with rockets and artillery shells.



In Bayda province, the army inflicted the mercenaries casualties during repelling their infiltration attempt in Qaifah, a vehicle loaded of mercenaries were destroyed with a guided missile at Melh valley in Nehm district.



Army heroes and committees attacked the sites of mercenaries at al-Hijjah of al-Masloub district in Jawf province, killing and injuring in their ranks.



The artillery shelled troops of Sudanese forces mercenaries north of Medi Desert.



Eman

SABA

Prime Minister Narendra Modi Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said India's military aims and preparedness were driven not by a desire to conquer anyone's territory but to protect its own people. Addressing a gathering of mostly foreign dignitaries and captains of foreign and local military manufacturing companies, Modi said India, the land of Buddha, had always believed in winning hearts and not land.



"Thousands of years of history of India shows that we have never desired anyone's territory. Rather than winning countries through wars, India has believed in winning hearts.



"This is the land from where the message of peace and universal brotherhood has gone out since Vedic times," Modi said in a 30-minute speech at a defence trade fair that projects India as one of the major manufacturers of war machines in the world. The event is taking place in Kancheepuram district, about 40 km from the heart of Chennai.



"This is the land from where the light of Buddhism spread to the world. In fact, from the time of Ashoka The Great and even earlier, India has believed in using strength to protect the highest ideals of humanity."



Modi's remarks come amid China's heavy increasing claims over the South China Sea islands that has major strategic implications and Beijing's military deployment last year at the Doklam tri-junction that also connects India and Bhutan.



The Prime Minister praised Indian armed forces' contribution to world peace and said that in modern times more than 130,000 Indian soldiers sacrificed their lives in the two World Wars.



"India had no claim on territory. But Indian soldiers fought for restoring peace and upholding human values," he said and added that independent India had also sent one of the largest numbers of UN peacekeepers to places all over the world.



He said while maintaining peace was primary, at the same time, the State had an important responsibility to protect its own citizens.



Referring to Kautilya, he said the ancient Indian thinker wrote the 'Arthashastra' treatise more than 2,000 years ago, saying that the ruler must protect his people and that peace is preferable to war.



"India's defence preparedness is guided by these thoughts. Our commitment to peace is just as strong as our commitment to protect our people and our territory. And for this, we are ready to take all steps required to equip our armed forces, including through the establishment of a strategically independent defence industrial complex."



Cabinet has released the official programme for the state funeral of Member of the Council of Deputies, Tuiloma Pule Lameko, for tomorrow.

Having declared a national holiday and all flags flown at half mast to honour the long serving former Parliamentarian, the nation will come to a stand still tomorrow when the population bid farewell to one of their longest serving leaders.

The official programme starts when Tuilomas body arrives at Parliaments makeshift complex at Tuanaimato.

Programme for the State Funeral Service: The Late Honourable Tuiloma Lameko Gaee:

Friday 13th April 2018

8.15am: Funeral procession to be escorted by Police from Pau Sefo Paus funeral parlor at Motootua to the Parliament house at Tuanaimato.

The Honourable Member of the Council of Deputies, Honourable Prime Minister and Cabinet Ministers, His Honour the Chief Justice and the Honourable Speaker of the House in their vehicles will join the funeral procession.

8.50am: Arrive at the Parliament house.

Police pallbearers carry and position Tuilomas casket in the Parliament House to lie in State.

Police Sentries positioned alongside the casket.

9.00am: Pay respects according to the following order.

His Highness the Head of State and Masiofo The Honourable Member of the Council of Deputies The Honourable Prime Minister and Honourable Ministers of Cabinet His Honour the Chief Justice The Honourable Speaker of the House Members of Parliament Church leaders Members of the Diplomatic Corps Government Ministries and Corporations and the Private Sector Members of the Community Families and Friends

Note: Refreshments will be served at the tent behind the Parliament house for dignitaries and guests from 9.00am to 10.30am.

10.40am: Guests seated for the State Funeral Service in the Parliament House  Tuanaimato.

10.50am: Hon Member of the Council of Deputies arrives.

Hon Prime Minister and Hon Cabinet Ministers arrive.

His Honour the Chief Justice arrives.

Hon Speaker of the House arrives.

10.55am: His Highness the Head of State arrives

11.00am: State Funeral Service commences, led by the Council of Churches in Samoa.

Followed by the flag folding ceremony to be conducted by Police.

12.00noon: Police escort funeral procession to the burial site  Tuilomas residence at Alafua.

12.15pm: Burial ceremony followed by the Police gun salute.

1.00pm: Lunch at Gym 3 (Food Court) Tuanaimato.CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  Australia and New Zealand warned China on Tuesday against building any military base in the South Pacific, following media reports that the Chinese have proposed a permanent stronghold in Vanuatu.

Fairfax Media reported that China had approached the former French colony about building a permanent military presence in the South Pacific.

China and Vanuatu denied the reports. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Vanuatu also assured his government that "no such request has been made" by China.

"We would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific island countries and neighbors of ours," Turnbull told reporters.

New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern said her country takes "a strong position in the Pacific against militarization."

Vanuatu government spokesman Hilaire Bule said there were no plans to host a Chinese base in his nation of 280,000 people, which has received large sums of infrastructure finance from China in recent years.

"There are no such discussions regarding a military base in Vanuatu," Bule said.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman dismissed the report as "fake news" and referred reporters to Vanuatu's denial.

China is Australia's biggest trading partner, while the United States is Australia's most important defense ally.

Australia has a growing U.S. Marine Corps presence in the northern city of Darwin as part of the U.S. military pivot toward Asia. Darwin is not defined as a U.S. military base because the troops are not permanently stationed there and leave during the southern summer months.Dear Editor

As a frequent visitor to Samoa I would like to express my delight and relief at the vast reduction in the dog population.

Having been attacked a couple of years ago I have steadfastly avoided walking anywhere in Apia. It is now possible to stroll unmolested giving the opportunity to appreciate the wondrous natural beauty of this magnificent island.

My heartfelt thanks and congratulations to the Samoan Police for this great achievement in public safety.

John SmilesDear Editor

While the government and critics strongly debate the issue of customary lands, I can hardly hear the voice of our representative in Parliament regarding this matter. For your information, people of Faasaleleaga #4 didnt vote for you to go there to just sit and remain silent with Tuilaepas hands over your shoulders.

We, the citizens of Faasaleleaga #4 strongly and are really against the L.T.R.A. 2008 and you cant open your mouth to be our voice?

Have some heart and speak up for the sake of WHO youre representing by opposing, disagreeing and fighting against that unconstitutional law made for the benefit of those in the H.R.P.P. and the government, not us.

Speak up like others who are full of love. Be a visionary H.R.P.P. M.P. by opposing that illegal law.

Speak up against fake Chinese products causing so many diseases to Samoans, speak up against corruption, fraud, conflict of interest that evident everywhere and make people come first on your list.

If you think we dont know; the unconstitutional L.T.R.A. 2008 is mainly made to take customary lands to payback the mountainous debt of about 2.5+ billions created by the H.R.P.P.

On the same note, China will take and own what they made in your own back and front yard like hospital, airport, wharf, school and etc as payback to their cunning loans.

So no matter how the H.R.P.P., overseas lawyers and banks put this law into words, I stand firm that the H.R.P.P. wanting customary lands to pay back loans made for them.

Stand for the people, NOT for your cases, business and your H.R.P.P. Tuilaepa is not a living God.

A.L.

Concerned CitizenThe state funeral for Member of the Council of Deputies, Tuiloma Pule Lameko, has gotten underway at Tuanaimato.

His body has arrived at the makeshift Parliament complex where the formalities have started.

The Head of State, His Highness Tuimalealiifano Sualauvi II, Prime Minister Tuilaepa Dr. Sailele Malielegaoi, Cabinet Ministers and Members of Parliament have arrived to pay their respects.

Since Wednesday, the national flag has been flying at half mast to honour the passing of Tuiloma.

He died at the Motootua Hospital two weeks ago. He was 83.

A national holiday has been declared for today, when the nation will pause to pay tribute and remember the life of the longserving public servant.

He will be laid to rest at his Alafua residence, this afternoon.

Rest of the programme today:

10.40am: Guests seated for the State Funeral Service in the Parliament House  Tuanaimato.

10.50am: Hon Member of the Council of Deputies arrives.

Hon Prime Minister and Hon Cabinet Ministers arrive.

His Honour the Chief Justice arrives.

Hon Speaker of the House arrives.

10.55am: His Highness the Head of State arrives

11.00am: State Funeral Service commences, led by the Council of Churches in Samoa.

Followed by the flag folding ceremony to be conducted by Police.

12.00noon: Police escort funeral procession to the burial site  Tuilomas residence at Alafua.

12.15pm: Burial ceremony followed by the Police gun salute.

1.00pm: Lunch at Gym 3 (Food Court) Tuanaimato.Great leaders are made, not born.

While some are born with the natural ability to be confident and articulate, newly appointed President for Samoa Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Jennifer Marion Ula-Fruean, found herself out of her comfort zone when she began her journey of growing into the leadership about 10 years ago.

The eldest daughter of Tunumafono Faalata and Maria Ula and the late Jennifer Marion Lincoln Ula, graduated from Vaipouli College in Itu o Tane District in Savai'i.

Throughout her college years, she was not particularly confident in public speaking or taking lead roles, preferring instead to play a supporting role.

Eight years ago, she joined the Chamber at 30 years old feeling daunted at the prospect of engaging with and working alongside prominent business leaders.

With the help of experienced women from the private sector, Mrs. Ula-Fruean began her schooling in leadership by learning from the best.

I think back to when I initially joined the Chamber, it was really the women leaders who were there that were promoting it to me to come along, in the likes of Sheree Stehlin, the late Peseta Margaret Malua and Tuiloma Sina Retzlaff that encouraged me to join the S.C.C.I. executive council some 10 years ago.

Making the first move is always naturally the most difficult decision.This is often with us women, I think a lot of us take a step back when it comes to these sorts of roles. In taking up the presidency role for the Samoa Chamber of Commerce, I was fortunate to have a wider group of support from both female and male business leaders who encouraged me to take the nomination.

Over the years as a member of Chamber, Mrs. Ula-Fruean was the keen student who listened, learned and applied the knowledge gained from the business leaders in the organisation. Slowly but surely, Mrs. Ula-Fruean began to make her way to the front as she gained confidence,

I was privileged to be among business leaders and to learn from them and in the initial couple of years it was about listening and learning from them. Then slowly I took one step at a time and came out of my comfort zone by talking and articulating in the decision making process.

Part of gaining confidence is you also need to do your homework a lot. It was tough for me, but the more you do it you get better.

Taking the lead in 2018, Mrs. Ula-Fruean has identified the needs and challenges that face the private sector.

The private sector seeks for an enabling business environment that supports and stimulates business activities, she said.

A tax base system that supports the development needs of our country, equitable and fair and incites opportunities for business growth. The cost of doing businesses is another area of interest private sector promotes at all opportunities.

Frueans vision going forward is to be the organisation that leads and facilitates the empowerment of business potential growth as a key partner to Samoas private sector development.

She hopes they can be the organisation to advocate, facilitate and foster sustainable development of the private sector through effective leadership and meaningful dialogue.

Ultimately, looking back on her own journey, Mrs. Ula-Fruean knows that encouraging women into leadership roles begin from the simplest of things. From encouraging young women to take up any opportunities in public speaking within our communities and also to never forget our natural inclination as women to lift up each other.

Some people are born natural leaders and some are not. I think its a talent that you need to develop through that phase so you really have to kick yourself and stand in front of people.

I think it comes down to the small things like pushing your daughter to be a reader at church. Whatever opportunities that a young girl is able to get through the journey of life to be able to stand up in a crowd of people, its these types of experiences that have a gradual impact on creating that confidence in people.

Theres been a lot of great work been done in this whole space promoting and empowering women, but also women who are really inside leadership roles need to continue to put down the ladder with our other colleagues.Lauaki Jason Annandale has returned as the President of the Samoa Cancer Society (S.C.S.).

He was re-elected during the Societys Annual General Meeting on Tuesday.

Other office holders for 2018 elected include Vice President- Tauiliili Alise Stunnenberg, Treasurer- Lemauga Hobart Vaai, Secretary- Kilisitina Best, and Executive members: Susie Poort, Audrey Brown-Pereira, Dr. Malama Tafunai and Kerrie Punivalu.

A lawyer by profession, Lauaki acknowledged the Society for the honour for him to continue at the helm.

In his foreword in the Societys Annual Report for 2017, he thanked the outgoing Executive Board for their commitment and service.

He was grateful for the privilege to have been able to engage and work alongside a group of selfless and committed people and organizations.

He welcomed the new Executive Board members and is looking forward to working alongside them all.

A fitting quote he used in his foreword sums up how he views the relationships with and within the S.C.S. It reads: Teamwork is what makes common people capable of uncommon results and that ...collective determination and commitment, together with an appropriate vision, corresponding planning and resourcing and effective implementation will ensure that we achieve the best possible uncommon results for those that the S.C.S. serves.

In reflecting on 2017, both Lauaki and Shelley Burich, S.C.S. Chief Executive Officer, agreed that it had been a busy year, one marked by transformation and transition.

We continued to provide support to cancer patients and their families as part of our core mandate and continued to provide education on cancer signs and symptoms and risk factors to all sectors of the community, including schools, churches, villages, the private sector and Government, the Society said in a statement.

The success of the S.C.S. Vave Campaign, funded by the Civil Society Support Programme (C.S.S.P.) and Pinktober, the breast cancer awareness month, has helped raise the profile of the S.C.S. and raised awareness of the work of the S.C.S.

Both of these events, provided openings to share important messages and marked a change in attitude toward cancer discussions in general.

The generous support and contributions, both monetary and in-kind, from government, donors, partners, businesses and individuals, allowed the society to increase the level of awareness and contribution it was able to make towards providing education, support, leadership and advocacy in cancer control in Samoa.

Lauaki noted that the future looks positive and exciting, partly as a result of the platform that the past year has provided.

There were also challenges for the S.C.S., including determining how best to convert the positive attitudes toward S.C.S. to effective and meaningful outputs, leverage off initiatives and partnerships, remain relevant to all stakeholders, further build and transform the S.C.S. organizational capacity, and contribute to building the evidence.The annual Kyoto Prize, whose laureates deliver lectures in San Diego each March, has doubled in value to 100 million yen, roughly $930,000.

Kazuo Inamori, the retired Japanese industrialist whose Inamori Foundation oversees these prizes, increased the monetary award in preparation for the 35th anniversary of the prize, 2019. (While the prize was created in 1984, the first presentation did not occur until 1985.)

It is my sincere hope, modest though it might be, Inamori wrote in a statement released today , that the light of the Kyoto Prize will play a role in inspiring courage in humankind and offering hope for generations to come.

The prize, he added, should embody rita, the traditional Japanese concept of altruism.

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Inamori, 86, founded Kyocera, a global manufacturer of industrial ceramics, and KDDI, a Japanese telecommunications company. He established the Kyoto Prize to recognize groundbreaking achievements in three broad categories not recognized by the Nobel Prize: advanced technology, basic sciences and arts and philosophy.

The prizes are awarded each November in Kyoto, Japans ancient cultural capital. The ceremonies, often attended by members of the Japanese royal family, include speeches, lectures, musical performances and a gala dinner.

Since 2002, the recipients  known as laureates  have visited San Diego in March, for the Kyoto Prize Symposium, lectures and presentations hosted by UC San Diego, San Diego State University and the University of San Diego.

Although selected by Japanese judges, the laureates come from around the world. Previous recipients include Jane Goodall, the British primatologist; Noam Chomsky, the American linguist and political activist; Renzo Piano, the Italian architect; and Akira Kurosawa, the Japanese film director.

San Diego is home to Kyoceras North American headquarters. The area is also home to the Scripps Institution of Oceanographys Walter Munk, who received the basic sciences prize in 1999.

Besides cash, laureates receive a jewel-encrusted 20-karat gold medal. To date, there have been 106 laureates  105 individuals and one group, the Nobel Foundation.Eight additional influenza-related deaths were reported this week, bringing the total deaths to 334 in the declining weeks of what has been San Diego Countys worst flu season in years.

Health-care workers detected 264 new cases, bringing the total to 20,404 cases this season, according to the weekly report released by the county Department of Health and Human Services Agency.

No new intensive-care unit cases were reported, another indication that the unusually severe season at last is winding down.

Last year at this time, the total number of cases stood at 5,292, the county report states. The flu season goes from July 1 to June 30, and peaks in mid-winter.

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County officials recorded a total of 87 deaths and 6,810 cases in the 2016-17 season, 68 deaths and 6,279 cases in 2015-16, and 97 deaths and 7,395 cases in 2014-15.

The current flu season appeared to peak in December and January, when about 25 deaths a week were being reported. Some of the deaths in each report may have occurred more than a week earlier because of complications within the reporting system.

The high number of cases this year has been blamed on an unusually strong strain of the flu virus. Also, the flu vaccination has been less effective this year than most, though health officials still recommend that everyone get a flu shot.

Although a majority of the flu deaths have been people age 65 or older, victims have been as young as 1 years old. Last month, 19-year-old Alexa Barbin of Escondido died one day after she came down with a cough upon returning home from a trip to San Francisco and Big Bear.

Because of this years long, tough flu season, the county has extended by one month to April 30 a state order for health care workers who have not had their flu shots to wear protective masks when working with patients. Also this year, the county expanded the order to include emergency workers and people working in doctors offices.

Also this week, the countys report states that new studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that parotitis, which is the swelling of the salivary glands most commonly association with mumps, may be a complication of the influenza infection.

As a result, the report states, patients with parotitis should be evaluated for both mumps and flu, regardless of their vaccination status.

More than 95 percent of the people killed by the flu had some underlying health problems.

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Sixty-four percent of this years cases were the Type A influenza virus, about 32 percent were the Type B virus, and the rest were variations of those types.

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philip.diehl@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @phildiehlA community discussion on preventing and treating drug and alcohol addiction, including what is being done locally to fight the opioid epidemic, will be held April 16 in Rancho Santa Fe.

The free forum, organized by the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, will feature a panel of experts from the nonprofit foundation and San Diego County District Attorneys Office.

Collaborators on the event include The Nativity School, The Church of the Nativity, the San Diego Diocesan Mental Health Ministry and the Betty Ford Center in San Diego, an outpatient addiction treatment center that opened in early 2017 and is the newest of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundations 17 sites across the country.

The event also marks the 100th anniversary of late former first lady Betty Fords birth April 8, 1918, and recognizes her efforts to establish the foundation and its recovery centers.

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Attacking the opioid epidemic and the underlying issue of addiction requires we all work together  treatment providers, law enforcement officials and community residents, said chief medical officer of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, Dr. Marvin Seppala, who will be one of the speakers.

Other speakers include William Moyers, panel moderator, best-selling author and vice president of public affairs and community relations at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation; San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan; Kiersten Simon, executive director of FCD Prevention Works, which is part of the Hazelden foundation; Dr. Joseph Lee, medical director at the foundations Youth Continuum; and Terri Perez, deputy district attorney and narcotics division chief at the San Diego County District Attorneys Office.

The free event is open to the public; space is limited. Registration is at 6:30 p.m. followed by presentations at 7 p.m. and community discussion at 8:30 p.m. in the Nativity School Holy Family Activity Center, 6309 El Apajo Road, Rancho Santa Fe.

Pre-registration is recommended at hazeldenbettyford.org/letstalk.Inspired by an Olivenhain girl who loved music, a group of accomplished young musicians are set to perform in a once a year musical program to raise money for music therapy for hospitalized kids.

The Heart of a Child Concert on April 28, which benefits the Ariana Miller Music with Heart Program, features 17 acts (solo and group) from classical, pop, rock and country music by vocalists and instrumentalists in kindergarten through college. Many have won music awards and some have performed at Carnegie Hall, on TV and Broadway.

The celebrity guest performer is Merrick Hanna, a reality television and YouTube sensation known for his hip-hop flo-bot popping and animation-style dancing. (Courtesy Merrick Hanna )

The money raised at the concert will go to providing music therapy at Rady Childrens Hospital, where Ariana Miller had six open heart surgeries. It will also fund music therapy for local children who are not in the hospital, but are facing major illness.

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After Ariana died in 2008 at the age of 13, awaiting a heart transplant, Jeff Miller and his wife, Anita, wanted to provide music therapy for other children, who like their daughter might find joy in music as they fight illness.

When Ariana began music therapy, it was as if a switch in her soul was flipped to the on position and she was able to regain some control over at least this one aspect of her life, said Anita Miller.

Ariana played the piano and sang and produced two albums for friends and family. The couple has a recording of Ariana singing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star at 18 months old, and recalled that a day rarely went by when Ariana wasnt singing something.

Arianas health struggles had zapped some of her joy, and music therapy allowed her to once again create and experience something that had been such an integral part of her soul since birth, Anita Miller said.

The Olivenhain couple partnered with local nonprofit Resounding Joy to provide free music therapy for children with heart disease. They later expanded the program to include children fighting other significant illnesses and disabilities, in the hospital or at home.

Since it was established in 2010, the Ariana Miller Music with Heart Program, under the guidance of Resounding Joy, has raised more than $230,000, mainly through the annual Heart of a Child fundraising concerts.

The program has provided free music therapy to more than 1,500 children at Rady Childrens Hospital.

The benefit concert will be hosted by San Diego TV personality Pat Brown and Emmy-nominated television director Hal Grant.

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The celebrity guest performer is Merrick Hanna, a reality television and YouTube sensation who competed on Americas Got Talent, and is known for his freestyle hip-hop flo-bot popping and animation-style dancing. He was featured on the prime-time hit So You Think You Can Dance making it to the Academy Week Round at age 11.

The lineup of performers includes Anne Liu, who has performed at Carnegie Hall; Isabella McCormick, an award-winning harpist with the San Diego Civic Youth Orchestra; Sadie Duca, a vocalist who has been on Americas Got Talent; and Nikki Castillo, who is known for her role as Patty Logan in CBS Scorpion and Akina in Disneys K.C. Undercover along with more than a dozen other young musicians.

If you are feeling down on the world, this will reinforce your faith in humanity and our youth, Jeff Miller said.

The event begins with a reception and silent auction at 5:30 p.m. at the Irwin M. Jacobs Qualcomm Hall, 5775 Morehouse Drive in Sorrento Valley. Food trucks will arrive at 5 p.m. and the concert starts at 7 p.m.

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Tickets are $25 for general admission; $100 VIP (includes guaranteed preferred seating and unlimited beverages); VIP Ticket Packages (6 for $550 or 10 for $900).

Tickets are available at resoundingjoyinc.org/event/7th-annual-heart-child-concertThe Green Art House at Pala Mesa Resort, a not-for-profit art school and artist retreat, has opened on the grounds of the Pala Mesa Resort, 2001 Old Highway 395, in Fallbrook. The school occupies a cottage on the grounds and offers a variety of art classes, workshops and programs taught by master instructors locally and from around the globe. Students of all levels are welcome, from beginner to experienced professional. Co-founders Richard Stergulz and Leslie Sweetland started with the idea of opening a fine art gallery, but the more they discussed it, the broader their idea became. Ongoing classes include Life Drawing Sessions, Sculpting, Painting Fundamentals, Pastels, Mosaics and Plein Air Painting. Classes range from $15 to $150. Call (951) 526-8055 or (951) 264-1023. Visit www.thegreenarthouse.org.

U-Haul rentals are now available through La Vista Market in Vista. (Courtesy photo )

La Vista Market #1 has signed on as a U-Haul neighborhood dealer to serve the Vista community. The market, at 932 Vista Village Drive, will offer U-Haul trucks, towing equipment, moving supplies and in-store pick-up for boxes. U-Haul allows rentals to be transacted entirely on a smartphone at any hour, without membership fees. Visit uhaul.com to create an online account. Normal business hours are 8 a.m.-8 p.m. daily. Reserve U-Haul products at this location by calling (760) 945-9801 or visiting https://www.uhaul.com/Locations/Truck-Rentals-near-Vista-CA-92084/056432. La Vista Market partners Sivan Hurmiz, Diana Hurmiz, Sidl Hurmiz and Haydee Trijo also invite customers to take part in the U-Haul Famous promotion: Take your picture in front of a U-Haul product, send it in and your face could land on the side of a U-Haul truck. Upload photos through Instagram using #uhaulfamous, or go to www.uhaulfamous.com to submit photos and learn more.

Solana Beach-based Gracedbygrit has opened a pop-up shop at The Shoppes at Carlsbad. All of the companys products  active apparel for land and sea  are designed not only to flatter but to empower women and make them feel safe. Each item comes with a water-safe detachable safety whistle and hidden pockets. The high-performance, technical fabrics are imported from Italy and have an SPF of 50+. All are designed and manufactured in San Diego by women for women. Founded by San Diego residents Kimberly Caccavo and Kate Nowlan, the idea of Gracedbygrit was partly inspired by Finish Chelseas Run, a 5K honoring the late Poway teen Chelsea King. Hours are 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday-Saturday, and 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Sunday. Call (760) 828-9069.

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Health From Within Family Wellness Center is open at a new location: 1818 Marron Road, Suite 103, Carlsbad. Drs. Tania and Cordie Williams focus on holistic neurological chiropractic care. An Advance Health Care Class is being offered at 7 p.m. April 16, with light snacks at 6:45 p.m. Dr. Cordie Williams will discuss the top three reasons to do a nervous-system-centered workout. RSVP to Caiden@healthfromwithinca.com. Hours are 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 4-6:30 p.m. Monday and Thursday, 3-5 p.m. Tuesday, 4-6:30 p.m. Wednesday, and 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Friday. Call (760) 385-8352; visit https://healthfromwithinca.com.

The Carlsbad Integrative Medical Center recently opened at The Island, 5814 Van Allen Way, Suite 215. The medical center offers customized treatments that combine conventional medicine with evidence-based integrated treatments. Founded by Juergen Winkler, M.D., ABIHM, ABOIM, the centers medical team includes Carolyn Candido, M.D., and Kayla Biewer, D.C. The center offers family practice, primary care and chiropractic functional medicine and accepts most major PPO insurance plans and Medicare. Services include health exams, labs, specialized supplements, nutritional and lifestyle counseling, gynecological care, IV therapy, and musculoskeletal treatments for chronic pain, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis and more. Carlsbad Integrative Medical Center is open 8 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays. Call (760) 444-5544.

laura.groch@sduniontribune.comThree schools in the Encinitas Union School District came away with honors in the 2018 Civic Learning Awards, presented recently by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson.

The awards celebrate public schools efforts to engage students in civic learning. This year, 74 schools were recognized. The program, now in its sixth year, is co-sponsored by Torlakson and Chief Justice of California Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye.

EUSD Superintendent Dr. Timothy Baird commended school leadership, staff and students in a statement. Our students are tomorrows leaders and voters. By starting from a strong foundation of information literacy and then using that information to take meaningful action, they are demonstrating the core foundational concepts that created our nation.

All the winning schools provide examples of how to creatively and effectively teach civics, said Torlakson in a statement. Civics is a critical component of our education system. It helps prepare our students for college, and also to be active participants in civic life, which is critical to maintaining a vibrant democracy.

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Cantil-Sakauye will visit each school receiving an Award of Excellence, the highest level, which were:

El Camino Creek Elementary School, Encinitas Union School District, where all students participated in mock trials and built a mock courtroom on campus as part of a school-wide focus on justice.

where all students participated in mock trials and built a mock courtroom on campus as part of a school-wide focus on justice. Oak Grove Middle School, Jamul-Dulzura Union School District, which simulated congressional hearings in which students prepared and answered questions from adult judges to defend their positions on political or school policy issues.

which simulated congressional hearings in which students prepared and answered questions from adult judges to defend their positions on political or school policy issues. John Marshall Fundamental Secondary School in Los Angeles County, where students presented proposed legislation and requests for grant funding for specific local issues.

It is inspiring to see so many schools developing the next generation of leaders through civic education, said Cantil-Sakauye in a statement. In the end, civics education promotes civic engagement.

Besides the three schools given Awards of Excellence, six schools received Awards of Distinction, and 65 schools received Awards of Merit.

The other San Diego County schools honored were:

Distinction: Flora Vista Elementary School, Encinitas Union School District

Merit: De Portola Middle School, San Diego Unified School District; Dingeman Elementary, San Diego Unified School District; La Costa Heights Elementary, Encinitas Union School District; Liberty Charter High School, Literacy First Charter Schools District; Perry Elementary School, San Diego Unified School District; Spring Valley Academy, La Mesa-Spring Valley School District

For more on the Civic Education Initiative, visit courts.ca.gov/23201.htm or cde.ca.gov/eo/in/civiclearningaward.asp.

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laura.groch@sduniontribune.comGov. Jerry Brown agreed Wednesday to take money but not marching orders from President Trump in deploying 400 National Guard troops to various locations around the state, insisting any service members near the border would not enforce federal immigration law.

Your funding for new staffing will allow the Guard to do what it does best: support operations targeting transnational criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers along the border, the coast and throughout the state, Brown wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Defense Secretary James N. Mattis.

Brown was the last of the nations border governors to respond to Trumps request for a beefed-up presence. In his letter, he said that he wanted to be crystal clear in what he was agreeing to provide.

This will not be a mission to build a new wall, Brown wrote. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life. And the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws.

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Although Brown may have taken longer to act than governors in the other border states  Texas, New Mexico and Arizona all pledged assistance earlier in the week  only eight days passed between the California Democratic governors decision and the presidents off-the-cuff remark about assisting with border duties. Last week, Trump told reporters that his administration would be guarding our border with the military, a statement his staff later amended to focus instead on help from the National Guard.

By the weekend, Mattis had signed an order to send up to 4,000 National Guard troops from various states to the border, but barred them from interacting with migrants detained by the U.S. Border Patrol in most cases. At the time, a spokesman for Brown said the request was still under consideration.

Less than one-tenth of the United States 1,933-mile border with Mexico is in California. And the decision Wednesday does not guarantee that Californias 400 additional Guard personnel will be in any specific location. The states current efforts on transnational crimes include 250 troops, with 55 of them stationed at the border. A spokesman for Brown said Wednesday that decisions on staffing will be made based on needs as they are identified.

There was no immediate estimate of the amount in federal funds California would receive to cover the costs of the California deployment. A copy of the agreement signed by Brown says the operation will end Sept. 30 unless federal and state officials agree to extend it. The agreement also says that Brown or the Trump administration can cancel the effort at any time.

Trump is the third consecutive president to ask for National Guard assistance along the U.S.-Mexico border. Former President George W. Bush used assistance from the states to deploy 6,400 troops for a two-year period beginning in 2006, while former President Obama authorized 1,200 troops in 2010. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger approved the use of Guard troops in both instances, though he rejected one request from Bush, citing the need to keep the service members available for potential wildfires or earthquakes.

But in the Bush and Obama requests, the circumstances along the southern boundary with Mexico were different  they were in conjunction with efforts to get sweeping immigration reform through Congress. Trump administration officials have pointed to a surge last month in the number of unlawful border crossings, but immigrant rights groups have suggested the action is based more on political fear-mongering than a provable crisis.

Brown, who only occasionally pushes back on the presidents rhetoric, made it clear in his letter Wednesday where he stands on the current situation.

Here are the facts: there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California, the governor wrote to Nielsen and Mattis. Overall immigrant apprehensions on the border last year were as low as theyve been in nearly 50 years (and 85 percent of the apprehensions occurred outside of California).

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White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that the administration is glad to see cooperation from Brown, but did not address the specifics of the governors letter.

Seen in the context of Trumps insistence on sealing up our Southern Border, as he wrote on Twitter, Browns announcement was hardly a vote of confidence. In comparison, the governors of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona were more enthusiastic in their offers of help. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pledged to ultimately send as many as 1,000 troops to aid in the effort.

California officials, in contrast, have found little to applaud in Trumps approach to illegal immigration. The state has gone to federal court to block construction of a new border wall, and no state officials welcomed the president to Southern California last month as he toured prototypes of the barrier. Last year, Brown signed a state law to limit local law enforcement cooperation with immigration agents  a law the Trump administration is now challenging in court.

Times staff writer Noah Bierman in Washington contributed to this report.

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john.myers@latimes.com

@johnmyersAsk Jean Isaacs why Live Arts Fest matters, and she will tell you that its more than a series of entertaining choreographic performances  it represents the history and the future of contemporary dance in San Diego.

Thats the goal of the community here, Isaacs said about the multigenerational event hosted by San Diego Dance Theater, a nonprofit founded nearly 50 years ago. Its to be able to produce other artists and encourage them in their own work.

Now in its sixth year, Live Arts Fest offers 10 evenings of dance starting Friday at San Diego Dance Theaters White Box performance space at Liberty Station, with works inspired by themes of friendship, passing time, diversity and social relevancy.

The series begins with Coop, a work by married couple Gina Bolles Sorensen and Kyle Sorensen of the award-winning somebodies dance theatre.

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Besides operating their professional company, the Sorensens teach dance, and Coop, a timely work about the challenges of sharing space, includes more than a dozen top students from the San Diego City College Dance Program and Grossmont College Dance Department.

The festivals programming continues Saturday with the Alumni Concert, an evening of works by choreographers who began their professional careers with Isaacs and San Diego Dance Theater.

Since 1979, Isaacs has served as San Diego Dance Theaters artistic director, and over the years she has taught, danced, produced the annual Trolley Dances and worked with numerous local choreographers, many of whom have gone on to launch their own careers.

The Alumni Concert includes works by Liv Isaacs-Nollet, Jeans daughter; Mojalet Dance Collective founder Faith Jensen-Ismay; Bradley Lundberg; Daniel Marshall; San Diego Civic Youth Ballets Jessica Reed-Cancel, who helped curate the event; Alison D. Smith; and Sadie Weinberg, who recently launched LITVAKdance in North County.

Its fun to dance with my contemporaries and people from an older generation as well, said Weinberg, who will present Another Ezio Summer, accompanied by an epic violin concerto by composer Ezio Bosso.

Most of us are in our 40s. My husband and I both danced with San Diego Dance Theater, and I was a company member from 2008 to 2010. I also performed in Jeans Trolley Dances, a great project.

LITVAKdance, a company of multicultural dancers and teachers, will also stage Another Ezio Summer April 28-29 at the University of California San Diego.

Jensen-Ismay worked with Isaacs for nearly 20 years. Now the artistic director of Mojalet Dance Collective, she produces a series of summertime performances at The Vine in Rancho Bernardo.

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I appreciate what Jean has done for me, and I want to see us all do well, Jensen-Ismay said. I think its important to support what she has done for the community.

Jensen-Ismays choreography for Saturdays Alumni Concert is titled Moments and includes eight dancers.

I was inspired by the moments in our life where we have these intense experiences with people who shape our character, Jensen-Ismay said. You might be working with someone for months and then never see them again. Life is like that. So without being super heavy, the work is about the intensity in life and how we move on. Ive traveled to Ireland recently, and Ive been reading how peoples lives were. Im reflecting on the survival techniques in relationships and about the community surviving together.

On Sunday, choreographer Lavina Rich, who holds a degree in forensic science, explores the response to fear in a work titled Schreckstoff: What are you scared of?

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Schreckstoff refers to the chemical released by injured fish that warns other fish of danger.

Ron RJ Davis, who won last years Young Choreographers Showcase, presents Synergy on Monday.

And Lara Segura will restage last years popular Bee Conscious on Tuesday, a work that enlightens us about the life cycle of bees with dance, visual art and projections.

San Diego work study program participants dance in Aspect: Our Unique Angle on Wednesday, and on April 19, choreographers stage works that pay tribute to San Diego Dance Theaters Aging Creatively Dance Project, accompanied by Beatles music. The project began as a class for older adults and has ballooned, with multiple programs offered six days a week and performances celebrating seniors.

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Choreographer/teacher Matt Carney has created And I Love Her, a comical and poignant duet that incorporates senior dancers. And Isaacs created a solo for longtime San Diego Dance Theater dancer John Diaz.

Its called Hey, Jude, and its pretty great, Isaacs enthused.

The series winds up with works by artists who have traveled to San Diego to participate in Live Arts Fest.

Whispers of the Memory by Mexicali-based choreographer Manuel Torres is staged on April 20, followed by Coming to the Surface, a solo on April 21 performed by Katie Stevinson-Nollet, a professor of dance at the University of Hartford in Connecticut.

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The final concert on April 22 is titled Light in Dark, a solo choreographed for Christine Dakin by Jaime Blanc, and it includes the notable Tijuana-based Lux Boreal.

Christine lives in New York and shes bringing her cousin, who is playing classical guitar, Isaacs said. Im delighted to have Lux Boreal because the performance level is so high.

Live Arts Fest 2018

When: 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. April 13; 7:30 p.m. April 14-22

Where: White Box at NTC Liberty Station, 2590 Truxtun Road, San Diego

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Tickets: $20 per show; $150 for festival pass

Phone: (619) 225-1803

Online: sandiegodancetheater.org

Manna is a freelance writer.

AdvertisementTreat your taste buds to the cuisines of more than three dozen restaurants at the 17th annual Taste of Hillcrest on Saturday. The eclectic neighborhood of quaint cafes, French and Italian-style bistros and five-star dining will welcome visitors to sample signature bites like pad Thai, sashimi, Italian antipasto and classic American comfort food. Along the culinary journey, youll encounter beer tastings and, if you need to take a break, Richs Nightclub at 1051 University Ave., will serve as the refresher station for attendees to stop and have a drink before hitting the street again. Free shuttle service will be available to participants, including service for anyone with accessibility needs. You can request an ADA shuttle during the event by texting (619) 818-8897. Shuttles will run every 15 minutes.

Taste of Hillcrest: Noon to 4 p.m. Saturday. Fifth Avenue and Robinson Avenue, San Diego. $30 pre-sale, $35 day of the event. fabuloushillcrest.com

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carolina.gusman@sduniontribune.comThere is power in secrets  in keeping them, in sharing them and in letting them go.

Secrets can be doorways to change, Frank Warren said.

He should know. As the founder of the PostSecret art project, he has kept and shared more than a million anonymous secrets for the past 14 years.

The idea was simple: Hand out postcards that are blank on one side and ask people to write their secret on the other in a creative way. He started with 3,000 blank postcards in the Washington, D.C., area, when he was searching for meaning and purpose in life.

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Warren has been getting postcards ever since. Some are profound, others funny, anguished or romantic.

These glimpses into the souls of others will be shared in a new exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Man, opening on Saturday. The PostSecret exhibit will display 95 percent of the postcards he has amassed since 2004.

We want people to be enveloped in secrets, said Erika Katayama, the Balboa Park museums director of exhibits.

An important part is the quantity of postcards. It shows the universality of secrets, Warren said. Its not just individual voices. Sometimes secrets lead to shame and stigma. I see a lot of people struggle. Seeing others secrets lets people see they are not alone with their feelings.

PostSecret, " a new exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Man, will feature thousands of postcards submitted by people who wanted to share a secret. (Courtesy photo )

Visitors will have a chance to rifle through the postcards, see them large and small, and even arrange them to choose which ones they want the next person to see.

We want to make the secrets come alive, Katayama said.

They wont be arranged in any particular order.

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Theres no telling whats coming next because no one secret is more important than the other, she said.

Different secrets resonate with different people, giving people a chance to be connected yet alone with their thoughts.

The project has been so successful because writing down and letting go of a secret can be cathartic, Warren said. Yet it allows people to be vulnerable and protected at the same time.

Its the first step in a long journey, he said.

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Katayama has been working with a team to collect San Diegos secrets to add to the show. The San Diego portion of the exhibit will continue to change and grow throughout the shows two-year run as local postcards will be added and swapped. Visitors will have a chance to create a postcard at the exhibit or at various pop-up events throughout the county hosted by the volunteer PostSecret Street Team. The museum is also collecting audio secrets, which will be part of the exhibit. (To share a secret, call 619-269-3894.)

This is the first exhibit that is this extensive and dynamic, said Warren, who has published books and gives talks about the power of secrets. Theres also a theater piece based on the postcards called PostSecret: The Show.

The first person you are sharing a secret is with yourself, said Warren, who formulated the idea while volunteering at a suicide-prevention hotline. He said he has contributed his own postcards to the project.

That unburdening has been a positive force in my life, he said. The project is about breaking stereotypes, revealing a tapestry that unites us that often is invisible.

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PostSecret

When: Opening Saturday. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday through Sunday.

Where: San Diego Museum of Man, 1350 El Prado, Balboa Park

Tickets: $13, adults; $10, 62 and over, youth ages 6-17, military and students with ID

Phone: (619) 239-2001

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Online: museumofman.orgMost of the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group sailed home to North Island and San Diego Thursday, completing a three-month deployment highlighted by an historic visit to Vietnam.

The carrier Carl Vinson parked at the North Island Naval Air Station pier shortly after 9 a.m., with the destroyer Wayne E. Meyer arriving at San Diego Naval Base shortly after.

Homeported in San Diego, the guided-missile cruiser Lake Champlain and Hawaii-based destroyer Michael Murphy are slated to conduct exercises in the Pacific Ocean before wrapping up their truncated tours, too.

Carrier strike groups typically will deploy to sea for more than six months after revamping the ships and retraining crews for a year or more at home.

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The Carl Vinsons 46,000-mile tour across the Western Pacific began only six months after returning to North Island but the Navy capped the deployment at three months to ease the burden on sailors and their families.

It was a very smooth deployment, said Capt. Douglas Verissimo, the carriers skipper. I cant tell you how proud I am with the way they handled the visit to Vietnam.

Accompanied by the Lake Champlain and the Wayne E. Meyer, the early March port call in Danang marked the first time an American carrier had visited Vietnam since the fall of Saigon in 1975, which ended two decades of American efforts to defeat the communist government in Hanoi.

The nations normalized relations 20 years later and since 2003 have sought to boost ties through visits by American warships.

The now-mothballed frigate Vandegrift traveled to Ho Chi Minh City in 2003. In 2009, the dry cargo ship Richard E. Byrd docked in Cam Ranh Bay and seven years later the destroyer John S. McCain and submarine tender Frank Cable returned there.

Despite memories of the brutal war with America, Hanois leaders have inched closer to the Washington as neighbor China continued to encroach further into waters claimed by Vietnam.

The Carl Vinsons tour included a stop in the Philippines and maneuvers with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. Manila and Tokyo dispute Chinese territorial claims near their shores, too.

Our visit to Vietnam was about improving our bilateral relations with Vietnam, strike group commander Rear Adm. John Fuller said. Our visit to (the Philippines) was about improving our relations with our friends there. And while we were in theater we also operated with the French and the Japanese, so it was a routine deployment, what weve been doing for the past 70 years, increasing stability, security and prosperity in the region.

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The strike groups tour also was an evolving demonstration of Third Fleet Forward. Dreamed up by Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Scott Swift, the concept gives him two fists to shake in the region, the large Seventh Fleet based in Japan and a carrier strike group thats controlled from Third Fleets Point Loma headquarters.

Operating independently but under Swifts command, they can punch from multiple points on the globe to address threats from a nuclear North Korea and rising Pacific powers such as China and Russia.

Under the command of Rear Adm. James Kilby, the Carl Vinsons early 2017 tour of the South China Sea marked the first version of Swifts concept.

The staff and the processes are better because were more proficient, Fuller said.

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Although the bulk of the nearly 7,000 Marines and sailors in the strike group came home on Thursday, Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 4 flew to North Island on Wednesday.

The Black Nights recorded 95 days in the air  notching 1,340 flight hours and hauling 992 passengers and 372 tons of cargo.

With the Carl Vinson back in port, Third Fleet commanders continue to prep for this summers Rim of the World exercise. Nicknamed RIMPAC and held every two years, its the worlds largest international maritime maneuvers.

This years war games off the coasts of Hawaii and California are expected to draw at least 25,000 military personnel from 27 or more nations, including China and Vietnam.

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Four days before the Carl Vinson returned to North Island, Vietnam Peoples Navy Lt. Cmdr. Le Binh was at the events final planning conference in Point Loma.

Everything has gone very well, said the commander of the Vietnam Assimilation Center in a news release. We have achieved all of our goals and objectives for the conference. I have received a wonderful welcome to the RIMPAC planning community. I have gotten a lot of support from all my counterparts during the (conference). Every day I get more and more excited thinking about the exercise.

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cprine@sduniontribune.comAs fighting among drug trafficking groups drives up violence in Mexico to record levels, a new study released on Wednesday measures the economic impact in 2017 at $249 billion in losses  close to 21 percent of the countrys gross domestic product.

Authors of the study presented at the University of San Diego say that focusing on homicides alone fails to address the broad range of factors that drive the violence, and affect the well being of Mexicans on a multitude of levels. To bring down the violence will mean addressing issues such as corruption and the weak rule of law, the study states.

 End drug violence is not an actionable policy statement for peace building, states the Mexico Peace Index report by the Australia-based Institute for Economics & Peace, an independent non-partisan think tank. A much broader peace-building strategy is needed to address the causes as well as the symptoms of lawlessness.

The report was presented at the University of San Diego together with a separate report by USDs Justice in Mexico Project, Drug Violence in Mexico.

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With more than 29,000 murders, 2017 was Mexicos most violent year on record, with the peacefulness in Mexico deteriorating by 10.7 percent, states the institutes study, the fifth in a series of annual reports focusing on Mexico.

The study found that the economic impact violence in Mexico last year amongst the highest in the world. The total economic impact of violence was seven times higher than the education budget in 2017, according to the report. A one percent decline in the economic impact of violence would equal the federal governments investment in activities related to science, technology and innovation last year.

The researchers looked at eight critical pillars that contribute to positive peace, using them to analyze conditions int he country.

The study found Mexico scored low in the following categories: well-functioning government, low levels of corruption, and the free flow of information. The low scores are characteristic of the kind of institutional weaknesses that allow organized crime to thrive, the study states.

As the worlds 15th largest economy and as a prosperous and growing place where the infrastructure exists for legitimate and non-violent businesses, it also exists for illegitimate and violent business activity to take place, Talia Hagerty, one the the studys authors.

The study cities improvements in other areas: sound business environment, high levels of human capital, good relations with neighbors, equitable distribution of resources, and acceptance of the rights of others.

If you look at homicide numbers, you get a very limited story about what the people in Mexico are experiencing, Hagerty said

I think the big challenge for Mexico right now is the nation has succeeded in a lot of economic dimensions but they need to work on the human aspects, and give human beings an environment where they can prosper and succeed and take initiative to improve their society, Hagerty said.

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The researchers measured conditions in Mexicos 31 states and Mexico City through five factors: the total number of homicides, violent crimes, crimes involving weapons, those involving organized crime and the detention of suspects without a sentence. It found peacefulness conditions deteriorated in 25 states while improving in seven.

The five most peaceful states in the survey were the Yucatan, Tlaxcala, Campeche, Coahuila and Chiapas. The least peaceful: Baja California Sur, Guerrero, Baja California, Colima, and Zacatecas.

In Baja California, the study states: deadly gun violence has escalated: the rate of assaults with a firearm has fallen by two points but gun deaths have reached 45 per 100,000 people.

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USDs Justice in Mexico report is the ninth annual analysis of violent crime trends in Mexico. Though Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto pledged to bring down violence, homicide numbers during his term have been higher than his predecessors.

Mexicos recent violence is largely attributable to organized crime, according to the study. The 2016 arrest and 2017 extradition of former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquin El Chapo Guzman appear to be partly fueling violence, the study said.

The USD report points to the breakup of once powerful drug cartels as a key reason for Mexicos escalating violence. It states that regions across Mexico have experienced a spike in violence on the heels of Guzmans 2016 arrest and 2017 extradition. He is now awaiting trial in New York City.

The rise in violence comes as a younger group, Cartel Nueva Generacion Jalisco, moves to control more parts of the country. Its very clear that the places where were seeing the biggest surges of violence are the same places where the Nueva Generacion and other rival organizations are moving in to contest the territory previously controlled by Chapo Guzman, said David Shirk, a USD professor and one of the studys authors.

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In spite of public perceptions, Mexicos violence is average for the Western Hemisphere, according to the USD study, with homicide rates well below those of smaller countries, including Belize, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, and Venezuela.

sandra.dibble@sduniontribune.com

@sandradibbleAn off-duty Border Patrol agent was arrested in Oceanside on suspicion of possessing heroin and an illegal rifle after officers found him asleep in a pickup Sunday, police and Border Patrol officials said.

Brandon Herrera, 37, was arrested about 8:45 a.m. Sunday outside an apartment complex at Los Arbolitos Boulevard and Fredricks Avenue, Oceanside police spokesman Tom Bussey said.

Police had been patrolling the complex since early April after getting a report about a suspicious man loitering near a trash bin in the complexs parking lot.

Officers went to the complex several times. They had been told a Ford truck was parked near the bin, but they found a motorcycle parked in the spot that was registered to Herrera, Bussey said.

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When police returned to the complex Sunday  their third visit  they found a man sleeping in the truck, which was parked on Fredricks near the complex.

When the officers arrested him, Herrera identified himself as a Border Patrol agent, Bussey said.

During a search of Herrera and his vehicle, officers found about 5 grams believed to be heroin and a short-barreled rifle, Bussey said. The federal agent was booked into county jail in Vista but later released.

Border Patrol officials confirmed the arrest Wednesday, but would not confirm the agents name. A spokesman said the agent who was arrested had been employed by the agency since August 2007 and was put on administrative leave.

The U.S. Border Patrol serves the community with honor and integrity and has zero tolerance for illicit drug use,' San Diego Sector Chief Patrol Agent Rodney Scott said. Any allegation that tarnishes the badge and violates the public trust is taken seriously. We are cooperating with the investigating agency, and the employee in question has had his law enforcement authority revoked and has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.

Kucher writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.An Ocean View School District trustee is calling for the removal of a member of city and school district panels who is alleged to have referred to minorities as colored people in a YouTube video.

I defend her right to speak her mind, but the fact that shes been provided an elevated platform, shes done more harm than good, trustee Gina Clayton-Tarvin said of Gracey Larrea-Van Der Mark, whom Clayon-Tarvin appointed to Ocean Views Citizens Oversight Committee for Measure R in 2017.

Larrea-Van Der Mark of Huntington Beach was appointed to the city Finance Commission by Councilman Patrick Brenden last year.

Clayton-Tarvin said the colored people comment promotes bigotry and does not reflect the school district. She said she voiced her concerns to the school board president and superintendent this week.

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Board President Jack Souders and Supt. Carol Hansen did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Clayton-Tarvin said she also planned to contact Huntington Beach officials to request Larrea-Van Der Marks removal from the Finance Commission.

City officials declined to comment.

Larrea-Van Der Mark said Wednesday that neither Clayton-Tarvin nor city officials have contacted her about the incident.

OC Weekly reported last week that Larrea-Van Der Mark made the comment in a video she uploaded to YouTube in 2017 showing protesters crashing an anti-racism workshop in Santa Monica by a group called Committee for Racial Justice.

According to the paper, Larrea-Van Der Mark wrote: This meeting was being ran by the elderly Jewish people who were in there. The colored people were there doing what the elderly Jewish people instructed them to do.

It isnt clear when Larrea-Van Der Mark made those comments, which have since been deleted.

Larrea-Van Der Mark said she referred to the Committee for Racial Justice as it identifies itself on its Facebook page. The group currently lists an upcoming event in which a guest speaker will focus on the impacts of climate change policy on communities of color.

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But the groups About section on Facebook doesnt mention color but rather racial justice and cultural competency.

Vega writes for Times Community News.The parents of a man who was fatally shot by a Los Angeles police officer at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center will receive $3.9 million in compensation from the city.

In October, a jury awarded $3.5 million plus attorneys fees to the parents of Ruben Herrera. The family had alleged use of excessive force, negligence and other violations in a federal lawsuit. The Los Angeles City Council approved the payment Wednesday.

Dale Galipo, one of the Herrera familys attorneys, said the size of the award shows the jury did not buy the police account that Herrera reached for one officers gun.

Juries are realizing that these stories proffered by these police officers to justify these shootings are not credible, Galipo said.

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Herrera, 26, was taken to the hospital Dec. 19, 2015, after police officers put him in a chokehold and used a Taser on him outside his apartment in Torrance.

The officers had responded to a call about someone throwing glass bottles.

When they attempted to question Herrera, he repeatedly asked why, then lunged at an officer with clenched fists and kicked the officer, according to a report by the Los Angeles Police Commission.

In the fight that followed, Herrera punched the officer and attempted to take his gun, according to the report.

Herreras mother, Graciela Herrera, told the officers that her son had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

At the hospital, Herrera underwent a CAT scan and had his blood drawn. He was calm during the procedures, the medical staff said.

But after a second pair of officers removed Herreras handcuffs, Herrera threw a metal stool at them and charged at them with the stool, according to a Police Commission report.

The officers attempted to use a Taser to subdue Herrera, who began fighting with them, the report said.

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Officer Alejandro Downey, who had been with the LAPD for 10 years, told investigators that Herrera reached for his gun.

Downey said stop, or Ill shoot, but Herrera reached for the gun again, according to the report. Downey then shot Herrera in the back.

The Police Commission found that Downey acted reasonably, fearing that Herrera would shoot him, his partner or the hospital staff.

In their lawsuit, Herreras parents argued that the police officers should have known that Herrera was mentally ill and should have used less-than-lethal tactics rather than shooting him.

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Colleen Smith of the Los Angeles city attorneys office, who represented the city in the lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment.

Times staff writer Emily Alpert Reyes contributed to this report.

cindy.chang@latimes.com

For more news on the Los Angeles Police Department, follow me on Twitter: @cindychangLAAuthorities broke up an illegal cockfighting and breeding operation in Lancaster this week, seizing more than 1,000 game fowl.

Los Angeles County sheriffs investigators Monday searched a property in the 6300 block of East Avenue E, where they suspected people were breeding game fowl used for cockfighting, which pits two roosters against each other until one or both is killed.

Several people were detained and questioned, but no one was arrested, according to the Sheriffs Department. Detectives said they are still investigating.

Rooster handlers often allow birds injured in the fights to go untreated or throw them away, authorities said.

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Having animals fight to death along with letting them go untreated is not only cruel but often times goes hand-in-hand with gambling, drug dealing and other illegal activities, the Sheriffs Department said.

Animal control officers, along with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals of Los Angeles, are caring for the animals that were rescued. Photos taken at the property show rows of pens fashioned out of chain-link fences and plywood.

An animal cruelty investigation led authorities to a Lancaster property. (Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department )

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @AleneTchekA vigil for the victim of a fatal hit-and-run crash in South L.A. Wednesday afternoon was broken up in dramatic fashion by yet another hit and run that was captured on video.

As pedestrians and bicyclists gathered at Manchester and Normandie avenues to mourn a bicyclist who was fatally struck by a car just a day and a half earlier, a gold-colored sedan barreled through the intersection and hit a man crossing the street, sending his body flying through the air, video from KTLA-TV Channel 5 showed.

The vehicle had run a red light and did not stop after hitting the pedestrian. The collision occurred about 1 p.m.

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Police said no one had been taken into custody in connection with the crash and the injured pedestrian was taken to the hospital.

The fact that a KTLA news camera was at the intersection was not coincidental. Mourners had gathered at the location after a bicyclist was hit by an SUV there in the previous hit and run, said Officer Luis Garcia.

The vehicle in that incident was described as a white Porsche Cayenne. The driver has not been taken into custody, Garcia said. The investigation into both crashes is ongoing.

A program aimed at eliminating traffic-related deaths in Los Angeles, called Vision Zero, has been slow to bring change to the city, data show.

During the second full year of the Vision Zero initiative, aimed at eliminating traffic deaths on city streets by 2025, the number of pedestrians killed rose 17% over the previous year and was up 82% since 2015.

Overall, Los Angeles lowered traffic deaths by 3% last year. Officials had initially said the reduction was 6%, but the figure changed after state officials revised the number of deaths in 2016 to 254 from 260.

Mayor Eric Garcettis 2015 executive order that created Vision Zero called for a 20% reduction in deaths by 2017. The 3% reduction last year falls far short of that.

joseph.serna@latimes.com

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For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.

Staff writer Laura J. Nelson contributed to this report.Around here, we tend to take the 18th president for, well, granted.

His mythic-sounding name is engraved deep into our history -- into the US Grant, the citys landmark downtown hotel; into Grantville, ancestral neighborhood anchored by the Mission San Diego de Alcala; into Grant Elementary, the century-old school in Mission Hills.

Two years ago, Robert E. Lees name was stripped from a local school, a long overdue reckoning.

No such defeat awaits the Union general called Unconditional Surrender.

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I just finished Grant, the thousand-page biography by Ron Chernow, prolific author of Hamilton, inspiration for the musical supernova.

Son of a Midwest tanner, Grant -- imagine this -- could never stand the sight of blood. A West Point graduate whose in-law parents owned slaves, he was reduced to menial labor following his release from the Army for drunkenness on duty.

After Fort Sumter, Grant skyrocketed through the Unions officer ranks, thanks to Lincolns admiration for his aggressive leadership, and ultimately commanded the whole Union army.

In a haunting twist of fate, Grant and wife Julia declined an invitation to join the Lincolns at Fords Theatre on the night the president was assassinated, unleashing a chain of events, notably the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, that led to Grants landslide victories in 1868 and 1872.

After eight years in the White House, Grant sailed around the world, at every port greeted with pomp and ceremony. But he never set foot here.

And yet San Diego became a warm harbor for his family after Grants death to throat cancer, the wages of a lifetime of cigar smoking.

Bankrupted by a partnership with a Wall Street swindler, Grant spent the last year of his life writing his memoirs to ensure his familys financial security after he died.

In Chernows telling, the book was an act of stoic courage equaling Grants defeat of the Confederacy, itself a labor made more difficult by the alcoholism that Grant strove mightily to manage throughout his life.

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The memoir, finished five days before Grants death in 1885, was a literary and financial success of near-Biblical proportions. Mark Twain, the books publisher, would transfer to Julia Grant some $450,000 (more than $11 million in todays dollars).

In Chernows view, Grant was not only a military genius but an underappreciated president who, despite financial scandals in a period of federal expansion, fought for Americas better angels.

After Grant died, reformer Frederick Douglass, a former slave, wrote: In (Grant) the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.

If youd asked me a month ago to rate Grant as a president, Id have put him in the middle. Not now.

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News to me was his creation of the Justice Department and the resulting 3,000 indictments (and 600 convictions) of Ku Klux Klan terrorists.

Reconstruction was an admirable moral correction and Grant, with Lincoln gone, was a stalwart champion of universal equality.

Tragically, the reunited country, even in the North, would reject Reconstruction, allowing the southern states to work their malignant will. An apartheid system, legal slavery, metastasized for nearly a century and still infects minds today.

If Grant had prevailed, if Reconstruction had not been killed in its test tube, what a fundamentally different country ours would be today.

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After Grants death, San Diego opened its arms to Julia and two of Grants sons and their families. In 1895, Ulysses S. Grant Jr., took over the Horton House, downtown San Diegos finest hotel, tore it down and, with the help of San Diego investors, built the opulent US Grant in honor of his father.

Along with Grants Tomb in New York, the fundraising for which was led by the first black graduate of Harvard, the US Grant -- today owned by the original land owners, the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Indians -- is a fitting (and gorgeously restored) monument to a president who honored his famous campaign slogan: Let us have peace.

Entering the lobby from the parking entrance, the first thing a visitor sees is a portrait of the great, but proudly common, man.

This, my fellow San Diegans, is US.Two physicians in Tennessee pleaded guilty Wednesday in San Diego federal court, admitting to their role in prescribing expensive and unnecessary medications as part of a $65 million fraud against the militarys healthcare system.

Carl Lindblad and Susan Vergot, who worked for Choice MD in Cleveland, Tenn., wrote 4,442 total prescriptions in the span of a year and a half as part of the scheme, according to the investigation.

According to prosecutors, military members in San Diego were paid to recruit Marines and their family members to participate in a fake medical study, which included speaking to a doctor in a telemedicine session and being prescribed compound medication.

Lindblad, 53, and Vergot, 31, admitted to writing the prescriptions despite never examining the patients in person, and then sending the prescriptions to a pharmacy in Bountiful, Utah, which would bill TRICARE health insurance an exorbitant amount of money for the specialized medicine. Compound prescriptions are much more expensive than standard medicine because they are custom-made by pharmacists to tailor to a patients special needs. The medications have not been specified but many were in cream form, according to authorities.

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In May 2015, TRICARE put a stop to filling prescriptions using non-FDA approved ingredients  used in compound prescriptions  after an audit uncovered suspicion of fraud.

The two doctors pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit health care fraud. They are set to be sentenced June 29.

The medical clinics owners, Jimmy and Ashley Collins, are also charged in the investigation and have pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors allege the couple made $45 million dollars in the scheme, using the money to buy property around Tennessee, Aston Martin cars and a yacht.

CFK Inc., the owner of The Medicine Shoppe pharmacy in Utah at the time, is also charged. Prosecutors have not revealed the people behind CFK, although court records identify them by the initials T.S. and W.W. Business records identify one of the owners as Wade Walters of Walters Holdings. Walters is one of several people being investigated in Mississippi on TRICARE fraud allegations.

Last month, Joshua Morgan, a former San Diego Marine, pleaded guilty to his role as a recruiter in the case.

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kristina.davis@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @kristinadavisSan Diego is planning to ramp up its efforts to reduce pedestrian deaths and injuries under the citys Vision Zero pledge to end all traffic-related fatalities by 2025.

Municipal officials, joined by local transportation advocates, announced Wednesday that 15 of the citys most dangerous intersections would receive roughly $375,000 in upgrades in this years budget to pay for striping and walk signals, complete with countdown clocks and audible prompts.

For the city, creating and maintaining streets in a safe environment for all its residents is a top priority, said Kris McFadden, the director of the Transportation and Storm Water Department. Being able to move about the city safely in all modes is something that all San Diegans should expect.

More than 500 pedestrians in the city are wounded or seriously injured each year by vehicle crashes, while an average of 22 are killed. The worst intersections include a cluster of downtown locations, as well as University Avenue at Fourth Avenue and 52nd Street; El Cajon Boulevard at 36th Street and 33rd Street; and Euclid Avenue and Naranja Street.

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To address the problem, mayors and other elected officials across the nation have embraced the international Vision Zero campaign, which started in Sweden in the 1990s. Efforts in many American cities have been challenging because traffic incidents are often widely dispersed and require significant financial investments.

However, San Francisco and New York have made progress with ongoing upgrades to intersections, traffic calming measures and detailed data collection. Both cities reported their lowest numbers of traffic-related fatalities on record in 2017.

San Diego has yet to pursue its Vision Zero campaign with the same zeal and is now on pace to have one of its deadliest years for pedestrian deaths on record, with 11 people struck down so far.

Maya Rosas, advocacy manager with Circulate San Diego, praised the city for committing to the upgrades, which are scheduled to be completed by the summer of 2019. The city made eight such improvements last year at intersections also identified by the nonprofit group.

This is a vital step in making Vision Zero happen, Rosas said. These improvements will save lives.

Mayor Kevin Faulconers staffers assured members of the City Councils Audit Committee on Wednesday that they were responding to an independent auditors report that found the city needed to make major improvements to carry out Vision Zero.

We know we have a lot more work to do and we are committed to that. Greg Block, spokesman for Mayor Kevin Faulconer

Officials said the city will restart meetings of its Vision Zero Task Force next month after a hiatus of nearly a year.

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Mayoral spokesman Greg Block declined to say why the task force had been inactive, but he acknowledged that significant progress was necessary to make good on the citys pledge.

We know we have a lot more work to do and we are committed to that, he said in an email.

As the city continues to grow, its important to make infrastructure investments that help keep pedestrians, cyclists and motorists safe because no loss of life is acceptable, he added.

Officials also said Wednesday that the city is looking to hire a new position to oversee Vision Zero and would soon overhaul the campaigns website.

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The current Vision Zero website might be a little too wonky and doesnt really show what progress is being made or what our statistics are, but the data were accumulating right now, were  making sure that gets high visibility on the next Vision Zero website, said Lee Friedman, the mayors infrastructure policy manager, at the public hearing.

While traffic-related fatalities in the city declined last year, the number of deaths still eclipsed homicides, including 17 pedestrian deaths, 19 motorcycle and vehicle fatalities. No bicyclists were reported killed in traffic accidents.

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Twitter: @jemersmith

Phone: (619) 293-2234

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Email: joshua.smith@sduniontribune.comThe Department of Justice will not renew funding for a legal orientation program for detained immigrants  at least temporarily  beginning in May while it reevaluates the programs effectiveness.

The program, which began in 2003 nationwide and came to San Diego in 2008, provides basic guidance on how the system works to people who are held in custody while they wait for their cases to progress in immigration court. About 53,000 people participated in its orientation sessions last year across the country, and more than 3,500 of them were in Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego.

The DOJ intended for the orientation program to improve efficiency in immigration courts by helping people make better-informed decisions and avoid unnecessary appeals.

Because immigration court is a civil court, not a criminal one, those going through the system dont have a right to an attorney. Detainees often have trouble finding lawyers and most go unrepresented.

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Experience has shown that the LOP has had positive effects on the immigration court process, the DOJ website says about the program. Detained individuals make wiser, more informed decisions and are more likely to obtain representation; non-profit organizations reach a wider audience of people with minimal resources; and, cases are more likely to be completed faster, resulting in fewer court hearings and less time spent in detention.

While the Trump administration has pushed immigration courts to decrease a backlog of more than 680,000 cases and added case-completion quotas to immigration judge performance reviews, the DOJ decided to pause the legal orientation program during its evaluation of the programs cost-effectiveness.

An official for the Executive Office for Immigration Review said that immigration judges are required to inform people in proceedings about their rights, how the court works and how to contact free legal help.

The official declined to comment when questioned why a program pause was necessary during the audit.

It was not halted during the last review of the program. Published in 2012, that audit found that giving orientations to detained immigrants saved the federal government a net of $17.8 million per year after program costs were taken into account because immigrants who went through the program moved more quickly through the system.

The National Association of Immigration Judges, which has pushed back against the case quotas, criticized the pause on the program, saying it will exacerbate the court backlog and make it even more difficult for judges to meet department expectations.

Dana Leigh Marks, a spokeswoman for the judges union, said, immigration judges were completely shocked by this development.

The department didnt talk to judges before making the decision, she said.

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Once again, management has made a decision without fully exploring the ramifications as to how this could play out in the courts, Marks said. When someone has had a legal orientation program, theyre more familiar with what their possibilities are, and we generally can ask a few targeted questions and narrow issues much more effectively.

Marks, who hears cases in San Francisco, said the other big issue for judges is that if they move too quickly, some people will feel like they werent heard even if the judges make the right decision. That often leads to appeals that couldve been avoided if someone had been able to explain to them whats realistic under immigration law regarding their cases.

For people facing the reality that they dont have any options for trying to stay in the U.S., learning that through the orientation program rather than a judge can make the news easier to take, Marks said.

Monika Langarica, senior staff attorney at the Immigration Justice Project, which receives a grant through the Vera Institute of Justice to run the orientations at Otay Mesa Detention Center, said that about 80 percent of the people that the program helps locally are asylum seekers.

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The significance of having an LOP program in the border region I think cannot be overstated, Langarica said. It should startle everybody that the administration is taking away the basic guarantee of due process that those people have. Its devastating.

Judges often have only a matter of minutes to hear each case, said Adela Mason, executive director of the Immigration Justice Project.

People who participate in the groups orientations often work with staff members for weeks to understand their options and what information they need to gather to submit the appropriate applications for their cases. Immigration Justice Project staff provide different orientations and workshops at the facility three to four days a week.

Judges will sometimes reach out to her if they feel like someone they saw in court didnt understand what was happening, Mason said.

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Shes looking into whether the organization might be able to fund its work in detention centers through private donations.

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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

Follow me on Facebook for live updates about immigration news

kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on TwitterPope Francis has admitted he made serious errors of judgment in his handling of a sex abuse case in Chile, telling Chilean bishops that he feels both pain and shame for victims and will beg their forgiveness in person.

Francis letter marks a dramatic reversal in his handling of accusations that Chilean Bishop Juan Barros witnessed and covered up the sexual abuse of minors by Chilean prelate Fernando Karadima, who was removed from the ministry in 2011 and sentenced to a lifetime of penance by the Vatican.

Francis promoted Barros to bishop in 2015 and described his accusers as lefties, stirring outrage among Chilean Catholics who staged noisy protests when the pope visited the country in January. Several churches were firebombed during the visit.

After hugging Barros publicly during the visit, Francis called the accusations slander and said I cant condemn [Barros] because I dont have evidence, adding, But Im also convinced that hes innocent.

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On his return from Chile however, he appeared to have doubts, sending archbishop Charles Scicluna, an experienced Vatican abuse investigator, to interview 64 witnesses. Last month, Scicluna handed the pope a 2,300-page report.

Francis said that when he read the report he felt pain and shame and decided he should meet the victims to apologize to all those I have offended.

Scicluna and a second investigator, Father Jordi Bertomeu, were overwhelmed by the pain of so many victims, the pope wrote.

This is a remarkable admission by a pope that he got it wrong, said Austen Ivereigh, a papal biographer. Meeting victims one by one and asking forgiveness for his mistakes is an unprecedented mea culpa.

Francis also invited Chiles 32 bishops to a meeting at the Vatican, which he said would serve as a fraternal moment, without prejudice or preconceived ideas, with the sole objective of making the truth shine in our lives.

He did not mention whether he would remove Barros from the ministry, but said the meeting would be a chance to reestablish the trust in the Church, broken by our mistakes and sins, and to heal wounds that havent stopped bleeding in Chilean society.

The planned meeting could be an extraordinary gathering and would be larger than the summit when Pope John Paul summoned 12 U.S. cardinals to discuss sexual abuse in America, Ivereigh said.

Francis told the bishops that his mishandling of the situation was due to a lack of truthful and balanced information about the abuse, although Karadimas victims have been pointing the finger at Barros publicly for years.

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One victim, Juan Carlos Cruz, even wrote personally to Francis in 2015 to say that Barros had known about his abuse.

Vatican watchers have said that the pope may have been persuaded by Chilean Cardinal Francisco Errazuriz, a member of his advisory Council of Cardinals, not to take the allegations seriously.

Kington is a special correspondent.A new poll about the race to represent the 49th Congressional District shows that Asm. Rocky Chavez, R-Oceanside, has moved into first with a significant lead.

Businessman Paul Kerr has surged to 8 percent, up from 1 percent in February.

In the top-two primary, the race is turning into a contest for second-place.

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, of 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.

They are all running to represent the 49th District, an area that runs from La Jolla to Dana Point. Incumbent Issa, R-Vista, is not running for re-election.

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The survey, which was conducted April 6 through 10, shows several changes in the race since the last U-T/10News survey in February. Chavez has moved from second place to first, but dropped one percentage point as more candidates have entered the race since then.

Applegate has slipped from first to second and dropped six percentage points, a slide that came amid limited his public appearances. He saw the biggest drop among the candidates who appeared in both polls. Front-runners often make a strategic decision to avoid appearances alongside their opponents because they often turn into a punching bag.

Democrats Kerr and Sara Jacobs have both picked up ground after each aired a series of television commercials. In February Jacobs, a former non-profit executive, was sixth overall and third among Democrats with support from 5 percent of voters. The latest poll shows shes at 7 percent and remains at sixth overall, but is now fourth among Democrats.

Jacobs drop in her party was due to a surge by Kerr. In February he polled at 1 percent, but now hes at 8 percent, putting him right between Levin and Jacobs. A first-time candidate who is self-financing much of his campaign, Kerr aired early television commercials including one that focused on his childhood in a working-class family, a sick mother, and his time in the Navy and working minimum-wage jobs before becoming an immensely successful in real estate.

While she made multiple television appearances on Fox News to discuss her support for a Trump administration lawsuit against California laws that provide sanctuary for some undocumented immigrants, a move that could bolster her name identification, county Supervisor Kristin Gaspar, R-Encinitas, polled at 5 percent, a two-point drop. She was fifth overall in February, but is now tied for 7th alongside Councilman Brian Maryott, R-San Juan Capistrano. Maryott polled at 2 percent in the first survey.

The poll also found that this election is mostly a referendum on the president. Twenty-five percent of voters said that President Donald Trumps job performance is the biggest issue for them, the issue selected by more voters than any other.

In the congressional district, 49 percent of voters disapprove of how Trump is doing, while another 46 approve and 5 percent were not sure.

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After the president, the proposed wall along the U.S. border with Mexico was the biggest issue for 20 percent of voters, followed by the economy, which polled at 15 percent.

While the first series of vote-by-mail ballots will be shipped on May 7, 21 percent of voters are undecided, down from 27 percent in February. The election is on June 5.

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Twitter: @jptstewart

joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com

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(619) 293-1841Momentum slowed this week behind a $900 million housing bond for San Diego.

A hearing was canceled, potentially jeopardizing its placement on the November ballot.

The measure would raise property taxes to pay for low-income housing.

Momentum slowed this week behind a proposed $900 million bond measure to build low-income housing and pay for it with an increase in San Diego city property taxes.

In a move that supporters called a setback, City Council President Myrtle Cole removed the bond measure from the Wednesday agenda of the councils Rules Committee, potentially jeopardizing its placement on the November ballot.

Jimmie Slack, Coles chief of staff, said the bond measure was removed not due to lack of support, but because it wasnt ready.

We were expecting to have a draft ballot measure that had been put together by the city attorney, the independent budget analyst and the mayors office to look at and discuss and to add or subtract, Slack said by phone. It was done because we didnt have enough information.

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The Rules Committee, which endorsed the idea in a 4-1 vote in February, must approve the actual ballot measure by July so it can be forwarded to the full council for approval by an Aug. 7 deadline for the November ballot.

A two-thirds supermajority of the council  six of the nine members  must approve placing the measure on the ballot because its a tax increase requiring two-thirds approval by the electorate.

Stephen Russell, head of the San Diego Housing Federation and the man spearheading the bond measure, said this week that the delay doesnt give supporters confidence, but that they are still hopeful.

He has asked that it be placed on the agenda of the committees next meeting on May 16, adding that the delay could help improve the measure.

It will allow us the time we need to have the public discourse, Russell told the committee on Wednesday. Its extremely difficult to pass a measure requiring a two-thirds vote. And to pass, the measure needs to reflect community values and priorities.

The proposal would raise taxes on city property owners an average of $72 per year to pay for roughly 7,500 subsidized apartments for the chronically homeless, veterans, senior citizens, the disabled and low-income families.

Supporters say the measure would simultaneously help solve the citys homelessness problem and affordable housing crisis.

In addition to the local money it would raise, the measure would help San Diego secure a greater share of state money devoted to homelessness and affordable housing by providing local matching funds typically necessary for such assistance.

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Without such local funds, San Diego will be eligible for less state assistance than other California cities and counties that have approved similar tax hike measures addressing homelessness in recent years.

david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrickTwo cats and a dog died in a house fire in Linda Vista on Thursday morning, a blaze that good Samaritans tried to douse as firefighters headed to the scene.

The fire in the home on Goodwin Street near Wes Drescher Street was reported shortly after 9 a.m., according to San Diego Fire-Rescue Department dispatch logs.

When fire crews arrived, they saw smoke and spotted neighbors trying to put water on the fire.

No one was home, so firefighters had to force their way inside. There, they found the deceased pets.

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The fire was out within 15 minutes.

Three adults and one dog were displaced, a Fire-Rescue spokeswoman said. No one was injured.

Two cats and a dog died in a house fire on Goodwin street in Linda Vista. Several other pets were rescued. The owners were not home at the time. pic.twitter.com/6gZZddRS0c  John Gibbins (@JohnGibbinsSDUT) April 12, 2018

teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945

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Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUTSan Diego police said they raided two illegal marijuana delivery businesses operating out of apartments on Wednesday, seizing marijuana, concentrated cannabis, cash and business records, police said.

Officers in the police departments Narcotics Unit served search warrants at apartments on Huerfano Avenue near Karnes Way in Bay Ho and Oliver Avenue near Noyes Street in Pacific Beach, which were both operating as a cannabis delivery service called Pacific Highlife, said police Lt. Matt Novak.

Officers seized seven pounds of high grade marijuana, 1 pounds of concentrated cannabis, $3,000 in cash and business documents, Novak said. An employee was arrested on suspicion of operating a business without a license and selling marijuana. More arrests of operators of the business are expected, Novak said.

The city continues to crack down on unlicensed marijuana businesses operating within the city.

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There are 18 dispensaries that have been approved to operate in the city of San Diego, with 14 currently open. Only licensed dispensaries are allowed to legally deliver marijuana.

As was evident by yesterdays operation, SDPD and the City Attorneys Office are continuing to conduct enforcement on all illegal marijuana delivery services, as well as all other illegal marijuana businesses operating in the city of San Diego,' Novak said.

Twitter: @karenkucher

(619) 293-1350

karen.kucher@sduniontribune.comSan Diego police are investigating a shooting that left a 19-year-old woman with traumatic injuries in the Sunset Cliffs area Thursday morning, authorities said.

Someone called 911 about 7 a.m. after finding the victim bleeding and injured at the bottom of the stairs at Ladera Street and Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, said police Officer Billy Hernandez.

The caller said it did not appear that she had fallen. Officers later confirmed the woman had suffered multiple gunshot wounds.

She was rushed to a hospital, where she was reported to be in stable condition, Hernandez said.

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Twitter: @karenkucher

(619) 293-1350

karen.kucher@sduniontribune.com

UPDATES:

10:35 a.m.: This article was updated with additional details.

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This article was originally published at 9:30 a.m.House Speaker Paul D. Ryans decision not to seek reelection throws an already fractious House into further uncertainty and could deal another blow to Republican hopes of holding onto control of Congress.

The Wisconsin Republican, often seen as a future GOP presidential contender, announced Wednesday that he would not run in November and would leave the speakership after the election. Republicans fear they will lose a significant number of House seats, and perhaps their majority, in the midterm election.

Ryan insisted that his departure has nothing to do with fears of a Democratic wave or frustration over President Trumps administration. Instead he said that after securing his career-long dream of major tax-cut legislation in December, he wanted to spend more time with his teenage children.

He said that with tax cuts signed into law the party will be well-positioned by election day, and he suggested he saw no further challenges ahead. His decision was also an acknowledgment that odds are low during the reminder of the year to achieve any of his other long-standing priorities, such as cutting Social Security, Medicare and other domestic programs.

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Ryans early departure from a job few leave voluntarily  it is second in line to the presidency  also means that he wont be around to face the fiscal consequences of the tax cuts, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Monday would add $1.9 trillion to the nations budget deficit by 2028.

I have accomplished much of what I came here to do, and my kids arent getting any younger. And if I stay, theyre only going to know me as a weekend dad, he told reporters after breaking the news to his staff and fellow House members.

As for what his planned departure will mean to Republicans in November, Ryan brushed aside any negative fallout. I dont think it affects it, he said. Look, if we do our jobs  which we are  were going to be fine as a majority.

Realistically, his departure poses multiple threats to Republicans. Ryan, 48, has been one of the partys most prolific fundraisers, and his announcement dampened morale just as other Republicans are deciding whether to join more than three dozen GOP incumbents who already have decided not to run.

As Ryan made his announcement, one more name was added to the departure list as four-term Rep. Dennis A. Ross of Florida announced he would not seek reelection.

Republicans including Ryan pledged Wednesday that the fight to replace him would be on hold until after the election. But already, talk filled the Capitol of meetings to determine levels of support for Ryan lieutenants and others, as all parties waited to see whether Trump would anoint a favorite. That fight is also likely to reopen some of the internal GOP fissures Ryan worked to narrow as speaker after they drove out his predecessor, Ohio Rep. John A. Boehner.

Among the likely candidates were Ryans second and third in command, Reps. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield and Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, leader of the House Freedom Caucus  which helped push out Boehner  was described Wednesday as more likely navigating to be a kingmaker than a candidate.

The biggest issue now is trying to hold the majority. The last thing we need is a leadership battle, Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, one of the dozens of departing Republicans, told reporters.

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(Los Angeles Times )

Dent took pains to exclude Ryan from blame for possible poor results in November, but did little to soften his view of the difficulties ahead for Republicans.

We have a toxic political environment, with or without Paul Ryans decision, he said, adding that the election would be a referendum on the president of the United States and the party in power.

We can all read between the lines, he said of Ryans departure. This is not an easy administration to deal with.

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First elected to the House in 1998, Ryan was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012 under Mitt Romney, who on Wednesday praised Ryan for his love of country and integrity, honor and dignity.

While other Republicans joined in  some members were said to be in tears at Ryans announcement  Democrats called on the speaker to close out his tenure by working with them on bipartisan solutions to issues like immigration.

I hope the speaker uses his remaining time in Congress to break free from the hard-right factions of his caucus that have kept Congress from getting real things done, said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York. If hes willing to reach across the aisle, hell find Democrats willing and eager to work with him.

The speakers move came less than three years after he reluctantly took the leadership post as a compromise candidate after Boehners resignation. Like Boehners before him, Ryans tenure was plagued by divisions within the GOP, some longstanding and others exacerbated by the election of Trump.

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Both the Republican Party and Ryan himself have changed dramatically in the years since his arrival.

Ryan came into Congress as a devotee of Republican politics as practiced by another former House member and vice presidential candidate, Jack Kemp. Kemp espoused a more expansive Republican Party that would seek out minorities and other nontraditional GOP voters, and support immigrants and free trade.

When Ryan joined the 2012 presidential race, he was a young exercise fanatic and fiscal conservative who advocated drastic budget cuts to Medicare and other domestic programs.

The partys turn to Trump, and a narrower and more nationalistic view of the countrys direction, gave Ryan his greatest achievement legislatively, but also took a toll on his reputation and legacy.

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The tax-cut measure was made possible only because of Trumps presence in the White House, as Ryan acknowledged. But notably, in Wednesdays remarks he did not mention Trump until questioned by reporters.

Im grateful to the president for giving us this opportunity to do big things, to get this country on the right track, Ryan said. Hes given us that chance, so Im grateful to him for that.

The two were not always in policy lockstep, however: Trump helped put the brakes on Ryans goal of cutting Social Security, Medicare and other programs. After celebrating House passage of an early Obamacare repeal bill, Trump later described it as mean.

Ryan also lost luster for his handling of the president. Trump supporters castigated him in 2016, when Ryan put distance between himself and the then-nominee for president, reproaching him publicly several times. After the release of an Access Hollywood video in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by the genitals without their consent, Ryan vowed not to campaign for him.

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Once Trump was elected, however, Ryan worked with him, drawing criticism from Trump opponents for declining to speak forcefully when the president insulted various groups of Americans or turned his back on long-held Republican views like free trade. Neither did Ryan stand up to Trumps frequent attacks of his own Justice Department, intelligence community and the Russia investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

His accommodation of Trump seemed to rest largely on an awareness that the goal he had long sought, tax cuts, could only be accomplished with the signature of the Republican president.

For all the awkwardness of his last year as speaker, and policy failures that included an inability to make good on the GOP promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, Ryan will depart of his own volition, neither pushed out like Boehner, nor resigning under a cloud, like Rep. Newt Gingrich and others.

Speaking from Italy, where his wife, Callista, is the ambassador to the Vatican, Gingrich said he believed Ryan resigned because he does not particularly like managing and leading 240 Republicans and trying to cope with the Senate and the White House.

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The former speaker pointed out that Ryan is decades younger than some presidential candidates, should he eventually decided to reenter politics. Hes got at least six presidential elections in front of him, Gingrich said.

Ryan told House members Wednesday that he had no idea what hes going to do, according to Rep. Ryan Costello (R-Pa.). In media interviews later in the day, Ryan repeatedly said he had no plans to run for elected office again, including the White House.

Ryan vowed to do what he could to help his party face a growing threat in November.

According to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which analyzes political races nationwide, 96 congressional seats are in play. Of those, 80 are now held by Republicans, and only 16 by Democrats.

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Democrats need to pick up 23 seats to win control of the House. David Wasserman, Cooks House analyst, said 21 Republican-held seats are considered true tossups  that is, most likely to change hands  while only two Democratic seats are so described. On Wednesday, Ryans district was moved from solid to leaning Republican, a reflection of the uncertainty after his announcement.

Republicans have watched as a succession of their candidates have been walloped in formerly safe seats, the latest in a House special election in a Pennsylvania district that had gone for Trump by nearly 20 points.

Wasserman called Ryans announcement a deep blow to his partys morale in its uphill efforts to hold the House majority.

But Republican strategist Alice Stewart said that in an election likely to be dominated by Democratic aspersions on Trump and Republican warnings against returning House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) to the speakership, the impact of Ryans departure may be minimal.

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People are reading too much into his departure, she said. People are trying to create palace intrigue where theres not any.

Times staff writers Sarah D. Wire and Noah Bierman in Washington contributed to this report.

Does a rash of GOP retirements portend a Democratic wave in November? 

For more on politics from Cathleen Decker 

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cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Twitter: @cathleendecker

UPDATES:

3:35 p.m.: This article was updated with analysis and additional reaction.

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8:05 a.m.: This article was updated with comments from Ryan, Meadows and Gingrich.

7:25 a.m.: This article was updated with comments from Ryan and Dent.

This article was originally published at 6:55 a.m.Escondidos politics are broken; its governance is dysfunctional. The most recent example of this dysfunction was last weeks City Council meeting during which the council majority and mayor voted to join federal legal action against the State of Californias Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act. Mayor Sam Abeds efforts to convert police officers to immigration agents have reduced public safety and civic trust. This complicates police work and alienates much of the community when we need to work together to reduce crime in our city.

Related: Escondido mayor: Californias sanctuary immigration laws are unjust

The consequences of that action are endangering Escondido police and our residents. Since the founding of this country there has been natural friction between the roles of the federal and the state government. Abeds action wont alleviate that friction or resolve the complicated and difficult issue of immigration. It is election year political theater that unnecessarily divides our community.

The decision to join the lawsuit is troubling in many significant ways. Law enforcement experts warn the signal this action sends will force some citizens and immigrants into the shadows. It is well known, in Escondido especially, that there are many families in homes that have a blend of members who have legal status, and those without.

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This action forces a no-win choice in those homes when it comes to reporting criminal activity  report crime and then possibly be deported, or remain silent and have the criminal activity receive no consequence. It is no secret that when a segment of our community is reluctant to report crime, criminals will be emboldened, and crime will go up. Our police will then be faced with ever increasingly dangerous situations, all of which could be avoided with more thoughtful leadership. This runs contrary to Abeds statement after the vote that he was elected mayor to keep the community safe.

This action is linked to a larger, albeit failed, strategy. Abed claims that his approach, which targets the immigrant and minority populations of the city, by partnering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enforcing gang injunctions, and supporting traffic safety check points is what caused the lowest level of crime in our city since 1980. This argument ignores the success of preventative efforts by the Escondido Police Department and does not acknowledge the downward trend of crime nationally. Furthermore, evidence that his solution has not worked is shown by Escondido having a higher crime rate than our neighboring cities of San Marcos, Vista and Poway. Abeds approach has not reduced crime and has created a negative public image of this city in the county and beyond.

It is also inevitable that city personnel will divert their time (and, therefore, tax dollars) to an area that is outside the scope of the mayor, the council and the city staff. Abed and the council have plenty of consequential issues to address such as traffic, housing and economic development. Instead, they are attempting to distract the citizens of Escondido by drawing them into a national political drama. The citizens deserve a mayor and council that stick to what they were elected to do: fix the roads, clean up the water, attract much-needed industries and higher paying jobs, limit sprawl, help improve schools and services and provide help to our homeless population and others in need.

Under Abeds leadership it has become commonplace in Escondido to waste taxpayer dollars (approximately $1 million) on senseless and unsubstantiated lawsuits. And this decision, yet again, pits one group of neighbors against another. Furthermore, it deteriorates the citys reputation as a welcoming, values-based, family-oriented place, and misrepresents the majority of citizens to the surrounding communities. Abed intentionally and unnecessarily forced Escondido into the national spotlight in exchange for some perceived political gain.

We can have legitimate public conversations about the distribution of responsibilities among federal, state, and local governments on matters such as sanctuary policies. But using those conversations to peddle anti-immigrant sentiments is flawed, low politics.

Escondido is a city of faith and values. We should be using public debate to find ways to uplift our city. Abed could do this; after all, he is an immigrant and should know that it is better to take the high road. Lets stop making decisions that endanger residents, misrepresent us and destroy our reputation. Escondido will only begin to thrive when it embraces its rich, diverse heritage and people. We must do better.

McNamara, a retired Marine Corps colonel, is a candidate for mayor of Escondido.Imagine coming home from a vacation to find another family living in your home. They are poor, in need of work, and forced their way in to have somewhere to live. Their needs are obvious. You are a compassionate person. However, the fact remains, it is your home and you decide who may enter and stay. Normally, your first call is to the local police.

Related: Why Escondido joining the immigration lawsuit against California is so troubling

The State of California has turned this obvious reaction on its head. In the context of immigration, under the states view, you would be prohibited from calling the appropriate authorities and just have to live with these intruders.

Senate Bill 54, and related anti-immigration enforcement laws, are the latest petty salvo in the political war between California Democrats and President Donald Trump. It prohibits the long-standing practice of local police working with federal immigration authorities in most routine circumstances.

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If a cop in any California city pulls a driver over for a traffic offense and finds out the driver is in the country illegally, except in very limited circumstances, that same cop is now prohibited by Californias Legislature from calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It does not matter whether the officer wants to or not. It does not matter how potentially dangerous that suspect may be to innocent Californians. The law forbids the call.

This state micromanagement of our police goes even further. Every city police department in the state of California is now forbidden from providing office space to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department.

You read that correctly: forbidden. We clearly have too many legislators with too much time on their hands when they start worrying about the floor plans of Californias police department buildings.

The only reason for singling out Immigration and Customs Enforcement is to further decrease the chances local police will cooperate with federal immigration authorities to allow them to effectively do their job.

Senate Bill 54 does not stop with police departments. The law prohibits cooperation between private businesses and ICE as well. For generations, civil rights groups have been applauded for taking a stand against unjust state government laws.

Now, cities and citizens brave enough to stand up to the state are shamed and intimidated from voicing their legitimate concerns. Senate Bill 54 is unjust to anyone who believes that private citizens and local law enforcement should have the right to voluntarily assist the federal government in its efforts to enforce existing federal immigration laws.

The supermajority state Legislature, safe from having to compromise with alternative political views, has hijacked the direction of this state to a result that is rejected by millions of Californians who never had a chance to vote on the laws that directly affect their safety.

California has now effectively announced to the world that people trying to enter the country illegally will find protection and safe harbor from federal laws. Millions of Californians are left to wonder how this all happened; nobody asked their opinion and they were never given the opportunity to vote on something so important to their lives.

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Ironically, federal immigration authorities are not enforcing any new rules. The laws applicable to ICE today are pretty much the same as they were under the Obama administration. The difference is simply that the Trump administration decided that the laws should actually be enforced. The rule of law is fundamental to the continued existence of this country and has been that way for over 200 years.

Of course, Californias politically motivated laws also negatively impact the other 49 states in this country. By encouraging illegal entry and offering protection once here, the opportunity to stop this problem at the locations most advantageous  at the border and local jails  becomes more difficult.

Once in the country, these individuals may wish to move around the country, have children who become United States citizens, and potentially move on to other states doing the same. Perhaps if they wait it out long enough they will have earned the de facto status that is now used to demand that they be allowed to stay.

It is a shame when the union has to sue one of its own states to force compliance with the law. But in a nation of laws, the federal lawsuit against California to invalidate Senate Bill 54 is the appropriate step.

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Abed is mayor of Escondido and is running for re-election.Interim District Attorney Summer Stephan, a Republican, and Deputy Public Defender Genevieve Jones-Wright, a Democrat, are running to be San Diego County District Attorney. The office prosecutes felonies in the county and misdemeanors outside the city of San Diego, while managing about 1,000 employees, including some 300 prosecutors that handle 40,000 cases and 700 trials a year. The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board interviewed both candidates for more than an hour. Here are those interviews, lightly edited. The candidate who gets more than half the vote in the June 5 primary will be elected district attorney for four years.

Q: Why run for District Attorney?

JONES-WRIGHT: We need change. Its that simple. We need change and were not going to get it with the status quo. Weve seen this handpicking of successors all over the county for years and its time for change and its never going to happen if we continue to keep the same people in place. This is my opponent is a person who touts that she grew up in the D.A.s office. I dont think thats what we need. I dont believe that thats what San Diegans want. Weve decided where we wanted to go and the direction we wanted to go in the last few elections. The D.A.s office has been very obstinate regarding where we want to go and so putting in someone who will just continue more of the same would be a travesty for San Diegans who want to have their will respected. And so me being a public defender, a career defense attorney, I have a perspective that would be balanced because I see both sides of it, and I think that thats what we need in the D.A.s office.

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Weve seen this handpicking of successors all over the county for years and its time for change.

Q: Being in the Public Defenders Office for 12 years or so, looking back on that and even before then, what do you see as your biggest accomplishment? This is your first run for political office.

JONES-WRIGHT: So if were going to limit it to my work as a defense attorney I would say waking up every single day and honoring and respecting my clients rights under the Constitution. I take that very, very seriously. I have been a strenuous advocate for years. Ive been with this Public Defenders Office for going on 12 years. Itll be 12 years in July. I did a very brief stint as a public defender in Riverside County and I did some private work on my own where I never charged a client a dime and this was in federal court and also in state court because I really do believe that Im doing the work that Im supposed to do and helping the people that need the most help and so it comes down to people who are criminally accused and folks who dont have a lot of money. Im from San Diego. Im from Southeast San Diego, and so thats something thats very important for me and a part of my value system is helping where you see the need. And so I think that thats my biggest accomplishment as it relates to my career.

RELATED:

Interview with District Attorney candidate Summer Stephan

Q: You said you did some pro bono work. What did you do and how did you choose those cases?

JONES-WRIGHT: So my entire practice was pro bono. My mom actually said, you know what, Gen. Its called making a living. You have all these school loans and youre not charging anyone. But I really just couldnt bring myself to charge families. I remember a case that I had in Federal Court where I actually won back some of the money that they seized and the wife came to me with the money after they got it and tried to pay me. Her husband was still in custody and I said, no, keep it. You have two kids and so it was that type of thing. I never really picked and chose what cases I wanted. I grew up in a place where once people found out they knew an attorney they would call me and so thats really how I got my first cases. I started off doing felony work here in San Diego before I ever touched a misdemeanor. The first case that I took was a gun case and I still remember the judge that I did it in front of and I did a suppression motion and that was my first time appearing as a private attorney in San Diego. And so it was just a lot of people that I knew from growing up with and I took their cases. And so thats how I actually got started. Ive never told that story before.

Q: In 2012, I interviewed candidates for judge and one of the guys was a Deputy D.A. and he went on to be a judge in Riverside, one of the things he said has stuck with me ever since. He said it was shocking how many times cases were brought to him that he considered completely inadequate. That police would look at evidence, complete a pattern, and see recommend the charging of a crime and he would have to push back. Whats your perspective on this issue as a Public Defender?

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JONES-WRIGHT: I see it all the time. I see where cases are completely overcharged. I think weve seen this in the last round of cases that came out of the D.A.s office with trials that they lost. When you talk about bringing first degree murder charges against a Marine and the attorney whos representing that person is telling you, this is not worth first degree, but you push forward because you want the headlines or its a political cycle. Thats a problem. And Ive seen that day in and day out with the D.A.s office. Weve got to change the mentality and the culture in that office because there is far too much of that happening and as a Public Defender I see it. We go over. We try to negotiate cases. We sit across the table like this and you bring mitigating evidence or you bring witness statements and theres a lot of push back and theres really not a lot of give and I think that when youre in a position to impact someones life and liberty, you should probably be fair with charging things and you should not be a rubber stamp for law enforcement. We know that the D.A.s office has the job and the responsibility to levy charges. Thats not the role of the police officers. They cant recommend charges. They can arrest, but its up to the D.A.s office to actually prosecute and when we see the D.A.s office simply just become a rubber stamp you have to wonder if theyre really doing their job.

Q: You said the D.A.s office is ethically challenged and even corrupt. Can you kind of talk about that?

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely. Again, if you look at how my opponent was put into place, to me that smells and it smells of corruption. When you put in someone who has the obligation and it is an obligation of the District Attorney to look into allegations of corruption and you know that that person will not do it because you are the person that put them in the seat, thats a problem and Im talking about Bonnie Dumanis, right? So Ive talked about this a lot, from day one, that I dont believe that anyone is above the law and that includes the District Attorney herself. If you are hearing allegations, they are substantiated, theres been reports written about it, theres been filings in Federal Court that someone who was sitting as the D.A. who was running for the mayor of San Diego was engaged in some intentional going after illegal monies, the job of the District Attorney is to look into that. Thats never going to happen. And so Im seeing all of this corruption. Theres been a threat of it with just looking at what happened last year. It was sort of like God having a sense of humor and saying, oh, well you said, Ms. Stephan that your top priority is going to be public corruption because its like arsenic in the water. He gives you Bonnie Dumanis. He gives you Chris Cate. He gives you all of these things that can show the public that you are serious about being anti-corruption and she kicks the ball. And so I believe that weve seen where the District Attorneys Office has politicized certain things, where certain units were created in order to get back at political enemies. Thats corruption. That is absolutely corruption when you have a public integrity unit that will turn their eye when theyre cronies or their friends do something wrong, but then they target other people and thats the very definition of corruption, and Ive seen it happen a lot.

Q: Let me jump in because this is one of my favorite topics. So like this whole Dumanis, Azano affair, which I well, Im not going to try to shade the question. So would you open that if youre elected as D.A.?

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JONES-WRIGHT: Would I really be able to say that? Would I should I actually be answering that? I think that it is the obligation of the District Attorney to at least look into those allegations and to investigate. And when you dont do that, youre not doing your job. You at least have to ask the questions because the information is there. And to say, I wasnt there when that happened, thats a cop out. Youre not doing your job, so thats what I would say is that I would do my job as the District Attorney because I was elected to do a job and rooting out corruption in our county is a part of that job.

Q: So tell me the other half of that. You said that the public corruption unit had been focused like for score settling of somewhat. What do you mean by that?

JONES-WRIGHT: When Bonnie Dumanis introduced the Public Integrity Unit it was unveiled as this, were going to do great work. Its been lackluster, right? Theres been corruption and scandals all over this county and we can see where the D.A.s office have picked and chose what they there were actually going to enforce. And so things that you would see with, you know, Sweetwater School District, other things like that, she went after elected officials like Steve Padilla and we saw how those things shook out. We saw people be targeted based on where they stood with her or where they stood away from her and thats no way to run a Public Integrity Unit.

Q: Id like to follow up on So are you saying that are you knocking Summer for not investigating Bonnie? Are you saying that when you are elected you will reopen that case?

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JONES-WRIGHT: Im absolutely, to use your words, knocking her because she said that her top priority was going to be public corruption and after she said that the reporter asked point blank, well, what are you going to do about Bonnie Dumanis? This is as all of this Azano stuff was unfolding. You cant then respond after you say that public corruption is your top priority that you werent there and so you dont know. One criticism that I do have about Ms. Stephan is that she likes to divorce herself from things she she should take responsibility for. She takes a lot of credit for things that happen in the office. Things that happen outside of the office that she believes were good things, but theres no accountability and thats a problem. Ive never seen a D.A. be at the scene of a crime before they charge. So thats a cop out for her to say, well, I wasnt there? Well, you were her chief deputy and she was the sitting D.A., running to be the mayor of San Diego and you can look into that. You should look into that. You dont get to say, I wasnt there, I dont know what youre talking about. And now shes left that sort of framework of public corruption being her first and top priority because its not and now shes had to leave that because shes being pushed to say, oh, well are you going to actually investigate Bonnie? The answers no. Well, then public corruption cannot be your top priority, especially when weve learned more and more about straw donors and so the contributions are even more than we initially expected. Yes, I knock her for not doing her job.

Q: So, but youre not going to revisit that if you are elected?

JONES-WRIGHT: I wont say yes. I wont say no. I will say there is something there for Ms. Stephan to investigate and she should do it as the D.A.

Q: Does that also hold for the case the Chris Cate case? Would you also consider reopening the Chris Cate leaking thing?

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JONES-WRIGHT: So its already been kicked to the A.G.s. Shes made her decision that she wasnt going to do that based on April Boling being her treasury. I think that thats a very flimsy excuse. I did a Facebook Live last night where I was sort of responding to her last podcast that was done with the Voice of San Diego. My opinion is that if you want to show the people that you will do your job and that theres a transparent process, she would have acted the other way. You would have actually charged Chris Cate because that would actually show that you were, one, willing to do your job, two, hold people accountable and three, show that youre not showing favoritism when you kick the ball and you make a case to the A.G. for why theres a conflict. You actually dont engender public trust in the process because then people have to wonder when you give a vague statement about why youre not handling it, which contained no explanation really. We start to wonder as the public, well, is it because you share a consultant? Is it because your money comes from the same place? I think in order to have a transparent process and to restore public trust and confidence, which is another reason why Im running because of all this stuff thats been happening in the D.A.s Office that the public needs to know that youre going to do your job regardless if the person is a Republican or a Democrat and were just not getting that from here.

Q: This amounts to kind of indictment not just of Dumanis, but of all the county power structure because its so incestuous, the same handful of people involved in all these different campaigns and its an argument that I certainly agree with. Ive been writing critically about the county government for a long, long time. But for whatever reason that doesnt seem to have registered, at least so far, with voters. We dont see reform, throw the bum out, candidates tend to win in county office. Why do you think that is?

JONES-WRIGHT: I think because we have done a poor job and when I say we I would say that people who are more progressive minded and even Democrats. I mean if you look at the makeup of the county every single last position is held by a Republican and not a problem with Republicans, but thats not a representation of our county. We are more blue than red. There are certain values that are a part of the fabric of saying that you are Republican, saying that youre a Democrat. And so were not seeing this even representation at a county level. A part of that is the hand picking that I talked about a little earlier. Thats how Sheriff [Bill] Gore got into his position. Thats how my opponent hopes to get into this position permanently. Thats not going to happen and so we havent done a good job of actually, one, stepping up to the plate. We havent had a Democrat even run for D.A. since when, you know? And so you have Ed Miller who was a Democrat who was a longtime D.A. here for the County, a very good one, but after that, where were Democrats in the race? We havent had a Democrat run for Sheriff in 60 years and so were seeing now that people are people are stepping up now, so weve never stepped up before and thats a problem. You cant win if youre not in the race. Its sort of like how do you hope to win the lottery if you never buy a ticket? And we havent been engaging ourselves in the races. We have somehow made it okay to complain and not doing anything about it and so thats the first thing. Were now having people step up and since we have stepped up Ive been taking my message around the county and it has resonated.

Q: So how do you present a progressive message that doesnt fall on the ears of a lot of law and order types as that sounds like soft on crime?

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JONES-WRIGHT: Thats very interesting because Ive spoken with well I tell my team, throw me into the lions den, Ill go and speak with anyone. If it makes sense, it makes sense, right. So we know that nationally and statewide folks have wanted to help rehabilitate people instead of throwing money down the drain and thats something that everyone understands. Theyre reading headlines. Theyre seeing whats happening with their neighbors or family members and theyre thinking, gosh, why are we prosecuting homeless people? Isnt there something else that we could be doing? What about all that money that the county is sitting on? And so whereas the opposition frames it as being very lax on crime. When you talk to folks they really understand that its actually being smart on crime, that our jails shouldnt be our mental health facilities, that our jails shouldnt be housing homeless people. That we are literally wasting money by creating this revolving door where we say, you know, Im going to throw away your belongings and I may even throw you into the dumpster and Im going to ticket you, Im going to cite you and if I cite you too much Im going to arrest you for just being homeless, for just existing within our county lines. Youre going to go to jail. Im not going to do anything to put you in housing. Im not going to do anything that helps you get back on your feet. Im going to send you right back out with no services, no connections with anyone who can help you. Im going to give you a fine and youre going to be back on the street and Im going to pick you right back up again. Thats the revolving door. The revolving door is what we have and folks see that the revolving door hasnt worked and its not working. And so when I talk to people, even when they start off by saying, oh my gosh, youre a progressive. Youre reform minded or however they put it, by the end of our conversation they really understand that its one being humane and our justice system can be humane, but it can also be common sensible and thats what we need. We need our leaders to actually do their jobs and stop passing the buck to someone else. This is a failure of leadership at the county and the city level and this is what Ive been talking about with San Diegans and they know that its true. And so I believe the message is resonating and give me all the law and order types that you want, I would love to talk with them.

Q: So let me just ask you a question about that and I dont want to send us too off track, but because obviously Im sympathetic to what youre saying, but like when I leave this building at night, I just have to walk like a block over to the parking garage and there is, every night, a super sad party of homeless guys literally shooting up on the street, falling over, its super bad, right? So its bad mostly for them. So what is the solution there? I dont get the impression theres a revolving door. I got the impression there is no door. Im going to shoot up here and slump over and Ill still be here in the morning. Oh my God, nobodys helping these people and I dont know if thats a D.A. question in particular, but since you brought up, somebody has got to do something about this. This is really bad.

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely. I agree with you and I believe that weve just been passing the buck for so long and some of the solutions that weve had, if you look back, there was a housing ready sort of requirement. You had to be housing ready. So if you had a drug problem, well you couldnt get into housing because you need to kick your drug habit first. We now know that thats not how it works. We need housing first initiatives because when youre not on the street trying to survive and trying to protect yourself, I mean we know how much violence happens to women out on the streets when theyre unsheltered, if you give them housing first, then they can have the state of mind where they can go and get their mental health treatment and get their drug treatment, get alcohol treatment, whatever the other issues are and so I really see it addressing the root cause. But I see those people every day. Monday, theyre on the corner, but by Wednesday, theyre with me in court, right, and so they are getting picked up and when they are seen shooting up and

Q: Yeah. Because like to me like I feel like I guess just bring this up because of the idea of permissiveness, right? Like at that moment I feel like, oh my God, its too permissive, like how did the norm get to be that you can just like hang out and be a junkie that that this is new, right? That piece of it feels like too permissive to me. I feel like shouldnt a cop be riding his bike by here and saying, guys, you cant just be openly using drugs.

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JONES-WRIGHT: Well, they absolutely should be because youre not supposed to do that, that is a crime whether youre homeless or not and so I really think that the bottom line has to be that we get back to humanity and compassion and thats the only way that we are going to stop the revolving door because its just not going to happen if we continue to just simply incarcerate, to house and use our jails as a Band-Aid for our housing crisis. When we think about what the County Board of Supervisors have let go on neglected, thats why were seeing people in the situation that theyre in.

Q: So as D.A., how can you fix that because youre still going to have those same supervisors?

JONES-WRIGHT: Well, hopefully not. Hopefully, at least two of those seats get flipped this year, but great question, right. So for the city of San Diego for the most part, the city attorney does the bulk of misdemeanors. And so when you talk about illegal lodging and encroachment thats more of the city attorney. But everywhere else in the county it is the D.A. still enforcing those laws. So one I just wouldnt enforce what we call the quality of life offenses. I think that there are problems that should be expanded and again it goes back to the reallocation of the resources. Theres a wonderful program. Its called the Smart Program that the City Attorneys Office has and theres only 10 beds. Theres only 10 beds. Its a great program, but its always full. So if we can actually get the resources to programs like this where you get a bed, you get wrap around services, were actually addressing all of those things. And so what Ive seen is just this lack of concern enough to make it a priority for our leaders to put the money where it should go and I would like to see an expansion of those programs. I would like to see the D.A.s Office part of those programs because we know that homeless people are getting pushed out of downtown. Theyre getting pushed into South Bay. Theyre being pushed farther east. Were starting to see them more in Southeast San Diego. If you drive past the Malcolm X Library at night, theres theres a party of people just trying to sleep somewhere warm right under that awning and so theyre getting pushed out farther east. We need programs everywhere and it cant just be concentrated downtown because were pushing them out from where the services are. And we have to have enough beds and have enough resources to help as many people as we can and we should.

Q: Its been nearly two centuries since Europe had this collective realization that debtors prisons were a bad thing, that they hurt society and yet in America more than half the people in county jails theyre there because they cant pay bail. It just seems kind of on its face, nonsensical and strange that weve got to this point. Do you support [San Francisco Public Defender] Jeff Adachi and others who say its time for drastic changes on bail reform?

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JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely. So Ive been a bail ambassador with ACLU because I wholeheartedly believe that we have got to stop this bail system this cash bail system. I believe in SB 10. I would like it to pass. Im not sure what its going to look like after it is chiseled, but we absolutely have to do something about that. We have a lot of people who are sitting in jail and they havent been convicted of anything and poverty is not a crime. Ive said this time and time again. Weve sort of just criminalized being poor, going back again to the homeless population, but then by holding people in jail who cant pay bail and it doesnt make our community safe and the thing about the revolving door is that bail goes hand in hand with that.

The reality of it is that when someone sits in jail because they cant pay bail to get out, they cant go to work and then when they cant go to work, they lose their job and when they can lose their job, they cant pay their rent and when you cant pay your rent, you get evicted and when you dont have a place to go, youre on the streets and we see what we do to homeless people. And so theres that revolving door again. And so we have to be practical about these things because the flipside is that if someone is dangerous, but they have the money to get out, then theyre on our streets and were not keeping ourselves safe. And so what I would like to do see is that while were waiting for Sacramento to pass this bill, is for the D.A.s Office to actually implement a policy. Ive heard her say for the very first time, shes been on the campaign trail since January of 2017 and Ive never heard her talk about bail reform. Ive actually seen her make a mockery of it, but for the first time a couple weeks ago in a debate with me she said that she was for bail reform. My question to her was then why is it business as usual with your deputies? You dont have to wait for Sacramento to actually implement reform. You can do that as the District Attorney, which is why I want to be the District Attorney because we need change. And one of the changes can be a district attorney who is sensitive to those issues, understanding how those issues affect regular people who are not dangerous, who should not either be coerced into pleading because they want to get out or to sit in jail in order to have their constitutional right be respected and have a jury trial and at this point the D.A. hasnt changed anything. Im hearing talk, but Im not seeing any policies. Im seeing deputies coming in and theyre still arguing for bail on low level nonviolent crimes. Thats offensive when you say that youre for bail reform. There was a favorable case that came down January or February. Its a little hard to keep track of time on the campaign trail, but its the Humphrey case and this was interpreted to be very, very favorable. Not even interpreted. It was very favorable for defendants in regards to the bail issue. In light of that, in response to that, the District Attorneys Office is now arguing for no bail. Saying that that means that these people should not even be given the ability or opportunity to pay for bail. Its a gross misunderstanding and interpretation of the case and its honestly disgusting when someone says, theyre for bail reform and their answer to a favorable bill case is to say, well, then fine. You just dont get bail at all and thats whats happening right now in our San Diego Superior Courts.

Q: On that issue, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia said that he would never ask for cash bail in nonviolent cases. Would you go that far too or?

JONES-WRIGHT: So heres the thing, our cash bail system is very archaic. Before we had monitoring through ankle monitoring and drug monitoring, fine. You pay money to show that youre going to come back and that youre serious about wanting to fight your case, be held responsible and accountable, that you wont flee and youll return to court. And you also will be safe out on the streets. We dont need cash bail. We have other things that we can use to ensure, one, that theyll come back to court and, two, that theyre not being dangerous on our streets. And so every day in court when someone is charged with a DUI and theyre pleading not guilty and theyve walked themselves into court, the prosecutor can make the argument that they should be fitted with a SCRAM patch and this is something that will monitor their alcohol intake. Theres also something that can monitor their drug intake if it was a drug DUI. We dont need cash bail to make sure that someone is dangerous, especially on their or someone is not dangerous, especially on their first time DUI or these other nonviolent low level offenses. Certainly not with a petty theft. Certainly not with a lot of other crimes that I can think of. So I dont want to cast a wide net and say what I would never do, but I will say that cash bail should not be the first answer in a lot of cases.

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Q: When you look at like the big data picture and how other nations deal with crime and you see how America deals with crime, theres such a gap between what they get for their bang for the buck and what we get. Its not just bail and things like that, its warehousing people who are non-threats. Every single study criminologists have ever done shows crime is essentially a young mans game. And yet we dont have a legal system that acknowledges this, but in Europe its rare to see a prisoner over 40 years. So it just seems to me the gap between whats obviously working elsewhere and what we actually do is somehow a reflection on Americans. America likes this lock them up culture. America likes having a lack of compassion and empathy. So it seems to me that as much as what youre going up against as inertia.

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely. When you talk about the status quo, you talk about the political machine. I am absolutely going against it. I agree wholeheartedly with what you just said because if it wasnt true then we wouldnt hear the rhetoric surrounding my candidacy that were hearing. We wouldnt see the attacks on my very profession. If it wasnt the the lock them up type of mentality. The fact that Im a criminal defense attorney absolutely makes me qualified to be the District Attorney because Ive seen where we can improve. Ive seen how certain decisions that come out of the D.A.s Office impact lives and yet this was spun to say, well, youve made an entire career of defending rapists and murderers. Okay. So I honor the Constitution. Are we picking and choosing the parts of the Constitution that we actually want to respect? Thats the problem that I see from the opposition, from the status quo trying to protect themselves. There are other ways to get your voice heard and stay in power without actually belittling our Constitution or the justice system itself. And so we actually need someone who has respect for the justice system and someone who understands that the justice system can be just. It can bring dignity to all victims and it can still be fair for defendants and we can still have justice at the end of the day. And we dont have to overincarcerate our way out of problems because we cant overincarcerate our way out of problems. Weve seen the way that theyve treated juvenile offenders and when you talk about crime being a young mans game, yes, we understand that after a certain age people are just not in that same mentality. I mean, one, theyre more mature, but two, you think about a 60-year-old man and these are people that theyre still opposing parole for. Theyre still saying that, well, the crime. Well, if the crime was committed when they were a young man, we also should take that into account and Im also not seeing that. And so theres a lot of things where we have to change the mentality and how things are actually addressed and it starts with the D.A.s office.

The fact that Im a criminal defense attorney absolutely makes me qualified to be the District Attorney because Ive seen where we can improve.

Q: Police shootings have been in the headlines obviously across the nation and particularly here in California. In San Diego I cant remember the last time we prosecuted an officer for an officer involved shooting. So can you discuss that?

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JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely. So I actually talk about this a lot because between 2005 and 2015 we had 155 officer involved shootings throughout the county and not one was prosecuted. They all were deemed to be justified. And when you think about the odds of that you have to understand that those are great odds. And we have to get away from the District Attorney being a rubber stamp. I understand that the District Attorney, just by the nature of the work that has to be done, that the District Attorney has to work with police officers and sheriff deputies. But I do not believe that it engenders trust and confidence in a system where the D.A. is operating as the rubber stamp. We just saw the interim D.A. lump four office involved shootings that all involved sheriff deputies into one press conference. I think that thats terrible. I think that this was a way for her not to have to answer for each and every single time she said, this was justified. This was justified. Even when a man was shot 16 times and had 22 bullet holes in his body and the witnesses say he was lying prone on his stomach and that same sheriff deputy killed another man in similar fashion 11 months before that. I think it is a shame when community members dont believe they could ever get justice when the person has a badge. And I also think it is very shameful for a district attorney to lump all of these together to just answer to it once and not to call the family members beforehand and tell the family members what the decision was before she went in front of media.

I think that when we talk about care, compassion, and concern in the justice system thats what were missing. And her response is that the law says youre a victim and its defined a certain way. You cant tell me that these family members dont deserve a call because they dont fall under the rubric of the legal definition of a victim. You sit down with the family members, you let them know face to face what your decision is in the case of their family member that was killed and you give them that. You give them that dignity, so theyre not processing this along with the rest of the public. And so thats something that I would do differently. Even if youre not going to bring charges there still needs to be some sort of dignity and humanity in the process. I dont think that every single officer involved shooting is going to be unjustified. But when you make that decision you have to do it in a way that the public believes that the process was fair and that youre not just rubber stamping and that they can honor your decision because theyve seen you be fair and they see it be transparent. And so the other part of that is I would like to see an independent unit that is completely separated from trial attorneys in the District Attorneys Office, so that when they render the decision it is not based on personal relationships or having that person on speed dial because theyve been a witness in their cases. I want it completely separate and independent and I would like for that unit to also after theyve made a decision go to the A.G.s office and invite their review and say, this is what we decided, but let me know if you found anything else. I think thats how you get the public to trust your decision making. And its just no ones trusting that shes not a rubber stamp, especially when theres a banner on your website that says youre law enforcements choice and I think thats a very bad idea. We have to get back to representing the people. Thats what the D.A. is for. Its not to represent law enforcement. Its not to be law enforcements choice. It is to represent the people whose name you file your complaints with every single day.

We have to get back to representing the people. Thats what the D.A. is for. Its not to represent law enforcement.

Q: Who would appoint that independent panel? How would that composition come about?

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JONES-WRIGHT: I honestly believe that the District Attorney should absolutely have that decision-making ability. And I believe that when the public understands the District Attorney is going to do it in all fairness, they will understand whatever decision comes out. So I would see the D.A. being the person that plays the role, as to the panel or the unit whos going to make the decision. But something that Ive always thought about was to actually have the community play a part in some of the roles that are filled in the D.A.s Office. We talk about community policing a lot. I dont like this idea of community prosecution because I think that were prosecuting too much and that shouldnt be the focus. But something along the lines of bringing the community into decision decisions that the D.A. has. And so something like that I would love to see community members be a part of that. I would love to see the D.A. give more respect to grand jury findings. I would love to see the D.A. have invite community members to do a town hall with the folks who want to be their chiefs and let the community weigh in on that. I would love to see something like that.

Q: The ultimate choosing or appointments actually be the D.A.?

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely.

Q: Okay. Got it.

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JONES-WRIGHT: The buck stops here. The buck stops with me. But I would like to see community input because it affects community members every single day.

Q: But how would it distinguish itself from, you know, the mission of a grand jury when a grand jury is considering some of those cases.

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely. So the difference would be that these would be all deputy D.A.s. They would all have taken the oath. Theyd be sworn officers and they would be a part of the D.A.s Office. So it wouldnt be Joe Q. Citizen, but I would like for community members to at least know who those people would be and know their backgrounds and really believe that these were folks who arent working hand in hand with police officers every single day, so that their decision would be tainted. I wouldnt want some back door closed off room where the public didnt know who were making these decisions.

Q: But do you really have that much power with the Copley versus Supreme Superior Court decision? I mean it just feels like San Diego is ground zero for secrecy and a lack of accountability on police misbehavior.

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JONES-WRIGHT: I honestly believe that that particular idea can be inputted. I think it could be established. I dont see any problem with that. I think that when we talk about transparency and the need for openness in our government, that thats exactly what was envisioned. No. I I dont think there will be any problem with that.

Q: Proposition 64 seems to be being implemented the worst possible way at the county level. Theyve denied the ability to open up shops, but on the other hand they have countenanced illegal shops, the story in the Voice of San Diego about Spring Valley is amazing. In contrary to what has been represented to me, I dont believe that theres an aggressive response there and there are real community complaints about it, but the perverse thing about this is that it undercuts sales in the places where its legal and it undercuts tax revenue collection to places where its legal. So this is another example of an issue where the county is content with things as they are and I just say, why? What would you change if you could change, not just in your role of D.A., if you had some power to kind of change how the county is approaching Prop. 64?

JONES-WRIGHT: So Ive made it my mission to really educate myself and talk with folks who are in the cannabis industry, to meet Congress people like Dana Rohrabacher who has that wonderful amendment and thats what you have to do as an elected official. Thats what you should do as a public official. The things that Ive heard come from the dais from County Board of Supervisors and even some City Council members Im thinking, gosh, were still in the dark ages. When you make the decision that you are going to phase out the businesses that are already there and not permit new businesses to come to be I think that youre asking for the illicit market to thrive and with that you are asking for an impairment of public safety and also health healthy communities. I think that it is a very, very bad decision to allow for the illicit market to thrive when we have a way to allow for businesses to pay to the county coffers, state coffers, be legitimate, and actually give healthy products and thats what were missing. We always miss that part of the conversation that if you license someone theyre not only paying for that business, but theyre held accountable through the government to make sure that their products are safe. That theyre edible. Theyre not going to kill you and they have the right dosages. So it is a public safety and it is a health issue and I think that the D.A. should absolutely, after educating themselves on the issue, speak with the County Board of Supervisors. Were not talking about silos here. No one operates in silos. These people are all friends. And if you have some knowledge that they need then you should go and impart your wisdom to help them make better decisions because the District Attorney is the District Attorney for all parts of the county whether incorporated or unincorporated. And so when you have things like the illicit market that is dangerous for communities for a whole number of reasons and youre the D.A. and youre charged with keeping communities safe all across this county, it is your obligation to go and speak with Kristin Gaspar about why she believes that marijuana is just like heroin. So thats the thing. We cant operate in silos here. The D.A. should absolutely be speaking about these things and being a strong voice for commonsense practices all over the county.

Q: In addition to the questions on experience and prosecution history, theres another divide in the campaign being drawn by your opponent, which is management experience, right? So the D.A.s office has 1,000 employees, 300 D.A.s, 150 investigators. You dont have management experience. Why should San Diegans trust you with a job given that?

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I have shown that I have what it takes to be a good leader and the D.A., weve seen a failure of leadership on her end.

JONES-WRIGHT: I get the question, I get it over and over again. There is nothing that will replace just given the being given the opportunity to actually manage. Its the same opportunity she was given the first time she was handed her opportunity to manage. So Ive always believed that youre a leader regardless of title. I have management experience, not at that level, but I have shown that I have what it takes to be a good leader and the D.A., weve seen a failure of leadership on her end. Weve seen mismanagement. And so when we talk about that we have to talk about what the role of the D.A. really is. The role of the D.A. is not to micromanage. You have systems in place. You have staff. You have people who are under you who are in charge of certain things and they answer to you about those things. Its not you doing it personally. You set the tone. You set the vision. You set the policy. Thats what the D.A. does. And what I dont see from her at all and I never have is any vision for the D.A.s Office. No direction, no policies. Thats what the D.A.s job is. The D.A.s job is not to make sure that theres paper in the copy machine or to make sure that theres enough coffee for the meeting. You give orders and you put your vision out and thats what I will do as the D.A. Its the same thing that Ive been doing on the campaign trail. When I say something she listens and then she pivots. Thats what I would do as the D.A. I will set the vision, I will set the tone and so I think that if anyone has been looking at whats been going on the campaign trail with the pivoting to rape kits now being tested and readjusting the budget. Ive been talking about that from day one. Thats what a D.A. does. The D.A. says, this is what I see our office doing. Get in gear.

Q: Yeah, let me follow up on that a little bit because point well taken actually. I think I agree with that. But it is more than just coffee, right? Like so we need good leadership.

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely.

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Q: And we also need good administration.

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely.

Q: So who are who would you put in to replace sort of her crew so that we have both those things, right, not just the leadership because I think you are articulating a pretty clear vision. Im sort of interested in who are these administrators? Who are we going to have?

JONES-WRIGHT: You are trying to get into all of my secrets. Theres a recorder here. I will say this as a leader you have to know who to surround yourself with and I absolutely know who is coming with me to the District Attorneys Office and a lot of very experienced people who have more than 30 years doing work over a vast number of cases, very serious cases, folks who are in management and theyre willing to come with me. And so thats a part of being a smart leader, knowing who to surround yourself with when you dont necessarily have the experience, the the number of years, or the management at that particular level. And so thats why I believe that I am absolutely qualified because Im smart enough to know who I can bring on to sit at my right and my left.

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Q: So, but who are like we can see her crew. Who and I think thats the right answer, but who are they, so we can evaluate?

JONES-WRIGHT: Do you really want me to give you names?

Q: Yeah.

JONES-WRIGHT: Are you going to put these names in the paper?

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Q: Well, yeah, yeah, I guess.

JONES-WRIGHT: All I can say

Q: I mean like as a voter, I want to know.

JONES-WRIGHT: All I can say is there are some very high level people who are doing the work right now, who will come over and and be alongside of me, so we can implement a better vision for San Diego and create a more fair justice system.

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Q: Whats the background on these people? Are they deputy are they DDAs? Are they public defenders? Are they private attorneys?

JONES-WRIGHT: Im a person that picks from the best of the best and so all of those things are a part of my plan. Youre going to see some Deputy D.A.s who I believe who are absolutely wonderful, that have been in that office that have been overlooked or who just havent been promoted yet. Youre going to see some career public defenders. Youre going to see some defense attorneys. Youre going to see a wide array of people who have the knowledge base to make that office a better place.

Q: Are they people that can tell you youre wrong, dont do it, and youll listen to them?

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely. And thats thats what is so important to me is that I dont want I dont surround myself with any yes people because it doesnt make me grow. So yeah, lots of people push back. And thats what you need to grow and you need that as a leader. I mean were seeing what happens in Washington, D.C. when someone says, no and the president says, yes. Thats no way to have a democracy. Its no way to actually run anything. And so Im surrounding myself with people who have a lot of experience and when they say, you know what, Gen? I dont think we should do that. I will listen. But thats why theyre coming with because they will tell me no. But when Im doing it right they will be there and they will be my cheerleader.

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Q: In addition to the administration, I think getting back to the Philly situation, right, we talk about this wave of new D.A.s thats sweeping the country. There whats the statistic? Like 30 percent of his deputies left or were or he kind of told them to to head out. Do you have a plan in case your vision is so different than Summers, than Bonnies? Do you have a plan for if theres a mass exodus? How youd fill that and are you worried about that?

JONES-WRIGHT: Im not. You know, its been very interesting because it went from attack mode to Im a reformer like her. So if your if your platform looks like mine, then why would your deputies have a problem, right? So I dont think that Im doing anything that would make anyone not want to work under the rubric of true justice. Im just saying we need to actually bring voices to our victims, bring dignity to all victims, no matter what they look like, and treat people with fairness, humanity, and compassion. I really, honestly believe that most Deputy D.A.s wake up and they want to do justice. But whats being handed out to them and parsed out is not what justice looks like. In a lot of cases, I can tell you that there are times when they completely side with the defense attorney on a case and they go to a supervisor and say, I dont think we have a leg to stand on. I dont think we should be running this motion. And the supervisor says, go see what the judge does. Thats a problem when youre telling people to file frivolous motions or just to be combative for no reason. I think people will be relieved. One sticking point is that I believe that the deputies should actually have more discretion. And my opponent said in a debate that she doesnt really trust her deputies to have discretion because you may get a woman who just came back from maternity leave and she may want to go home early to be with her child and you may get a person whos having a bad day and Im thinking, wow, thats how you talk about your deputies. So I think people will be relieved to work for someone like me who believes that youve been trained. You know what to do. You know whats right and wrong. Youre working with the victims. Youve gotten the witness statements. Youve gone to the crime scene. You know this case better than anyone else. Your word should be valued just as much as a supervisors and be able to go to your supervisor and say, this is what I actually think this case is worth and Im not seeing that in the D.A.s office. So I think that people would absolutely love to work for me and I will say this there are more people than anyone could ever imagine that are rooting for me in that office, but because they learned from Bonnie Dumanis last run, theyll never say it publicly, which is why I would never say their name publicly.

Q: Ive heard you say that before. Put a number on that, how many people?

JONES-WRIGHT: Lets see. They have 1,068 employees. Lets see. Come on. I easily have 64 percent of those.

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Q: Okay.

JONES-WRIGHT: Seriously.

Q: Judge Alex Kozinski is a Reagan appointee and he did an essay three years ago that said, lets be honest, the criminal justice is an industry and its product is convicted people. And Alan Dershowitz, of all people, backed him up and said, yeah testalying is a part of life. This is an incredibly cynical view of American justice system, that its not about justice, that its about an industry. How much of that do you think is fair or you think goes too far?

JONES-WRIGHT: The statement itself or the industry?

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Q: Well, the idea that is an industry as opposed to somebody that has these ideals, you know, justice is blind.

JONES-WRIGHT: We have these ideals, but I dont believe that our system has actually worked that way. I dont think that weve lived up to what the ideals are, unfortunately, because we have incentivized full beds in jails. We had made for profit prisons a thing. Weve completely said in a society thats supposed to be decent that we are supposed to give to third parties who have no obligation to treat people with respect, humanity, or care, the ability to house our incarcerated people. We have privatized even the jails that are not run by private prisons. When you think about how lucrative it is for the companies that contract with the jails, through commissary, through visits, now through phone calls. Everything is about profit. When you think about the bail industry, look who at who opposes it. Its all the bail companies, you know. And so we have, weve completely made everything for profit and it is about churning out people who can fill the beds instead of having justice be rendered and administered. And it has to get back to justice being administered. And its just not happening right now and this is why were seeing certain populations be targeted. This is why were seeing the school to prison pipeline. This is why were seeing all the things that were seeing because it makes money. It makes money.

Q: You know, I think that is whats going on in America. But when I look at San Diego I try to figure out where do we fit in? And one of the thing thats really striking to me is crime seems super low here, which to me implies I guess arrests must be like the whole phenomenon seems very mild here, right. Like what is that about? Why is crime so low? Is it do our neighborhoods work better? Do our police just not record things the same way other people do? Whats really going on? I just think theres like an amazing untold story and this is sort of the other side of the corner I guess, but what I mean youre up close in all this. Whats your take?

JONES-WRIGHT: One thing that I can say as a commissioner on the Commission on Gang Prevention and Intervention is that we really do have a really nice working relationship and a lot of partnerships that have been built and so when we think about, for instance, gang homicides, we only had one for the whole year last year.

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Q: Amazing.

JONES-WRIGHT: Thats extraordinary and it really happens because we do sit at the table with SDPD and we do sit at the table with the Chief of Probation who is amazing. Hes absolutely amazing.

Q: Who is that?

JONES-WRIGHT: When you have commissioners who are community members Adolfo Gonzales.

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Q: Your future chief of staff. No. Im sorry. Go ahead.

JONES-WRIGHT: Thats hilarious, but no. Im going to keep him right where he was because hes doing great on the juvenile justice front. But we partner and we collaborate to do things and we have these programs like Success Agents, right and so thats the commission, partnering with the U.S. Attorneys Office, partnering with the D.A.s Office, partnering with commissioners who volunteer their time and mentor children to keep them out of gangs, right, in the neighborhoods where gangs are prevalent. Were doing things on the front end as opposed to saying, were going to concentrate on suppression. Were really finding as a city, especially, that collaboration works on those type of fronts and so its really not one thing. Its about collaboration. Its about everyone doing their job because public safety is everyones business. And so on the other side of that I would like to see more of that collaboration and bringing public defenders onto that as well because public defenders are the forgotten members of the public safety group. And so every time theres a reentry program or something thats being launched the public defenders were never at the table. I know because I ask. The public defenders are not there for the red ribbon cutting. I know because Im there. And Im not there as a public defender. Ive been invited because Im a commissioner and so I would like to see more of that. If we look at the commission itself there is a spot, these are dedicated seats for every single law enforcement head in the county. So you have the U.S. Attorney, you have the Chief of Probation, you have the Chief of Police Department, you have the D.A. and you have the Sheriff. Theres no seat for public defenders. You have no seats for criminal defense attorneys. I got the seat because I was appointed and so when we start to do that and were bringing in a different perspective and voices we will see even more of an increase in the decline of crime.

Q: Yeah and like how much of it is and this probably isnt a campaign question so much, but so theres all this law enforcement activity, but how much is just other social factors that somehow are endemic to our community?

JONES-WRIGHT: I think were really getting back to basics at least in the neighborhood where I live in. Not just with law enforcement agencies, but the commission also partners with community organizations and I always like to credit them because these are young men who were out doing violence themselves or a part of gang members and we partner with them to do job training. They have businesses where they teach people culinary skills and they do this crazy economic development and education series. Its like a six-part series and theyre going out and theyre teaching people how to be entrepreneurs and to how to use the skills that they used to use on the streets for something thats bad into making it good. And these are also the same people who are out, they canvas around the Gaslamp on the weekends when the clubs are out and they stop fights and theyre there. And this is a lot of stuff thats going on that people dont even know about. And so theyre stopping violence and I always love to give them credit because theyre really, really out there and helping. And so when you partner with community members, thats where you can see the change because its not just incumbent upon law enforcement. These are people who are cooperating with law enforcement and doing it out in neighborhoods and they never get the credit for it.

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Q: We should follow up on that.

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely. I can give you names.

Q: I would love to do that.

Q: Let me ask about the death penalty, on cash bail you said never say never, but I heard a Voice of San Diego podcast that you would never impose the death penalty or seek the death penalty. Why would you take a tool off the table?

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JONES-WRIGHT: I will absolutely always take a tool that is discriminatory, costly, and not non-effective off the table. The death penalty has no place in a civilized society. And it just doesnt make sense, no matter what side of the coin you look at it on. Its not a deterrent. No one says, oh, Im in a death penalty state, so Im not going to commit this crime. Its very costly. Its not foolproof. We execute innocent people. There are just so many reasons why the death penalty doesnt work and why we have other measures and alternatives that should be at our discretion, to be used before the death penalty.

Q: So you talked about calling victims of officer involved shooting cases, how would you it sounds like you would do the same thing then for a death penalty case. Would you and how like how to imagine that conversation going when the victim, you know, is so angry, they want the ultimate justice.

JONES-WRIGHT: Absolutely. So the other part of that interview that I did on the podcast it was the question was about how would I address it if there was a case that was eligible for the death penalty. And I stated and I still stand by this that I would have to be at a table with a lot of people. I always hate to close doors on things and when you think about victims I would like to have that conversation. And if there was a victim who believed that there should be the death penalty in a certain case I would have that conversation with them and I would listen to them. I would hope to have a fruitful conversation to talk about why the case for me would be inappropriate for the death penalty, but hopefully we could come out of that conversation with a mature understanding about the resolution and why either the death penalty was not asked for or that it was. But I dont think that the death penalty should be the first choice. And thats not going to be my go to. And I understand that some people have certain crimes where they say, well, this is just unforgivable and we should give the death penalty. I come from a place of morality with the death penalty. I really think thats a moral issue. And I just dont think that we have arrived as a society where were not executing innocent people or where the death penalty does what it purports to do. I dont think that Prop. 66 has addressed this and I wouldnt feel comfortable with saying, well, weve enacted Prop. 66. Well, the promise of Prop. 66 was to actually make it better. It hasnt done that, so I wouldnt be comfortable with using the death penalty as a tool yet.

Q: But are there cases in San Diego County where the death penalty is on the table and you would just take that off? Do you know the number of that?

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JONES-WRIGHT: I do not know the number of those cases. I do know that there are cases that are in my office that are death eligible cases and I know that are some negotiations going on. Heres heres reality and how it works with death eligible cases with the D.A.s Office. Instead of talking with defense attorneys first about what should happen in the case, they come and they say, were going death on this case, now make us change our mind. I dont think thats how that works. I think youve already closed your mind to any of the mitigating evidence about a persons history and why this case shouldnt be death eligible. I think it needs to be a conversation with everyone at the table and to really get the human story, to really talk about the evidence, to really talk about everything that a death case embodies. And so I would like to see that process change. If a deputy who was handling a case, obviously if theyre handling death cases, they have a lot of experience, if they came to me and said, I believe we should go death on this case. I would say, lets think about this and lets bring the defense attorney to see if there is mitigating evidence and lets talk about it before we simply say this is where we want to go. And I think that theres not enough conversations about this at all, at the front end or the back end. And so I would like to see more mature conversations about that.

Q: So let me just jump in because I think when we listen to this were going to say

JONES-WRIGHT: What did she say?

Q: Right. So like when he asked, Would you rule out death penalty? you said, I would have absolutely rule out something thats discriminatory and ineffective. It sounded like you were saying, I am not going to use the death penalty. Then you said like, no, we need to have mature conver ... so which is it?

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JONES-WRIGHT: So its both, and Ill tell you why. Ill tell you why.

Q: Okay.

JONES-WRIGHT: You know, I sat at a table for an endorsement very early on and the person said, well, what is your stance on the death penalty? And I said, I believe that it is blah, blah, blah and then he came back and said, well, no, Im not asking you for your personal opinion. Im asking you what you would do as the D.A. Theres the difference. Me personally, I am completely opposed to it, but I understand my role as the District Attorney and so its really hard to just answer the question and say, okay. Leave your personal opinion out of it because it is my opinion. But because I have that opinion, I believe that we have to have the conversations about it because the stakes are way too high when you go death on a case and so as the D.A., I recognize where we stand as a state, as it relates to the death penalty and [Prop.] 62 didnt win. I really wish that it did, but I can also say that [Prop.] 66 hasnt fulfilled its promises. And the death penalty is on the table in our state, but I would like to see it not implemented. But I would Im open to having those conversations because I understand that its not my personal opinion. Its my role as the D.A.

Q: I see. So youre not categorically ruling it out?

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JONES-WRIGHT: Im open to hearing, but I am starting on the side of the death penalty is wrong and I would like to not see the death penalty. So I will say, yes. Personally, I have foreclosed that off. Yes. I would be completely disingenuous, if I said I did not personally foreclose that off. Im not Im not okay with the death penalty.

Q: So as the D.A. you would categorically not entertain the death penalty option as a matter of principle?

JONES-WRIGHT: As a matter of principle, I would say that would look at the evidence. I would look at the facts. I would look at the human story and then we would make a decision based on those things. But that I am starting closer to no on the death penalty, absolutely.

Q: In the Voice of San Diego podcast, your exact quote was, Until we have something that makes it foolproof, I would not be willing to impose the death penalty because taking a life is too heavy.

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JONES-WRIGHT: Exactly.

Q: So that sounds like youve evolved [from] a categorical no to a Im opposed to it philosophically, personally, but would have a discussion?

JONES-WRIGHT: We can have the discussion, but understanding that we are still not foolproof. So that statement still remains.

Q: Okay.

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JONES-WRIGHT: I I honestly believe that when you kill an innocent person theres just no way around that. We have a lot of wrongfully convicted people who are in our prisons and a lot of people have died on Death Row that were innocent and folks who were exonerated after they died, not just because the death penalty was given to them, but because they died from cancer and then they were exonerated six months after. These are real stories. And so I would be very, very hard pressed to say that I was willing to go death on someone just as a moral matter and just where I am as a person. And I just think that theres effective ways to bring home the harshness of someones actions without giving it such finality.

Q: Well, national politics have seeped into this race. You called your opponent a Trump Republican through and through.

JONES-WRIGHT: Yep.

Q: And then at a debate or some kind of discussion or public forum you flipped the bird to showcase kind of your approach to Trumpism, I guess. So talk to me about your demeanor. Is that someone that what does that say about the person whos going to be running the D.A.s Office, that theyre quick to flip a bird to the president of the United States.

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JONES-WRIGHT: Okay. So didnt do that.

Q: What did you do?

JONES-WRIGHT: So, yes so the way that article was written was a little not the way that it happened. It wasnt in the sequence of events. So I spoke with people and I always speak very candidly and there was a question that was presented and I said that I would resist Trumps policies when were talking about immigration, when were talking about a lot of the hateful policies that are coming out of Washington D.C. The reporter came up to me after. I was not in front of an audience and he kept pressing the issue, what does that mean to resist? Resist means resist. Well, what does that mean? Okay, maybe I can show you through sign language. So thats how that came about. It really was me being a little silly because if you keep pressing me on what does it mean to resist Trump I mean I guess I could show you better than I can tell you sort of thing. But I absolutely think that people want a D.A. whos very real and thats what I am. Im a person who answers the questions. I dont skirt around things. I dont answer things like a politician. I take pride in that because we want a real D.A. and we want someone whos going to do their job and not worry about whether they owe someone or theres someone whos going to be mad at them and someone who stands firm on their beliefs. I think that I have been a breath of fresh air to community members who see me as someone who stands on her values and who has integrity and just says what she means and they know what theyre getting. Theyre not going to vote for someone and get something else in the office and I think that thats something thats absolutely amazing about my candidacy because I dont hide behind colorful words and flowers. And I say what I mean and everything that I say I do mean because Ive thought about it because its who I am.

Q: So let me follow up on that. For the Trump voters of which there are, I dont know, tens of thousands.

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JONES-WRIGHT: And some have endorsed me.

Q: So youre going to be their D.A. too. So thinking about that, I mean was that the right thing to do?

JONES-WRIGHT: It was probably not the most political thing to do as far as being a politician whos now and Ive never call myself a politician.

Q: I mean as a D.A.

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JONES-WRIGHT: But

Q: Not not politically. Like

JONES-WRIGHT: Well, I mean Im a candidate, right, and so as the D.A. I wouldnt do that, but I did that and it is what I did. It probably wasnt the most prudent thing, but again I dont apologize. I stand by it because I decided that I would do it and thats what happened, unfortunate or not. You know, however you see it, it happened, right. And I do understand that there will be Republicans who vote for me, but at the same time theres a difference between being Republican and being a Trump Republican and there are some people who voted for Trump, who changed their party affiliation after seeing what came out of the White House and there has been a lot of hate spewing from the White House. There are some people who believe that Trump is a great leader on certain fronts and not so great of a leader on others. But what I do know is that perhaps something like that could alienate them. I havent seen the fruits of that.

Q: I dont mean politically and obviously you wont find anybody in this room or at least on the editorial board side thats going to disagree with that perspective, but what I mean is like as D.A., when I come into court as the defendant wearing my Make America Great Again hat, arent I going to say, yes, she hates people like me like thats not fair. So that to me seems like I dont know. Maybe something to rethink.

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JONES-WRIGHT: Well

Q: Just to leave an opening here.

JONES-WRIGHT: Well, no one should be coming into the courtroom with any hats on, but, but I really I really honestly think

Q: T-shirt.

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JONES-WRIGHT:  that I really think that at the end of the day we have to separate what Im actually saying. Im talking about the policies that are coming from him. Im not talking about necessarily the person. When I call you a Trump Republican it is the fact that you are a Republican, registered and you will not denounce or renounce the policies that have come out of that. So I dont want that to be missed. Its not about him. Its about you saying, you stand for certain things, but you stand with him when what he stands for his completely opposite of what were saying we stand for in San Diego and thats what thats about. So I know that that probably got lost in translation, but it really is about, when I call you a Trump Republican, it is a Republican that is standing with him. And up until this day even with her last interview, [Stephan] has not denounced anything. When you talk about Charlottesville, it took me calling her out for her to make a statement when hate crimes are up 117 percent in San Diego after Trump said the very horrible things that he said about those folks who were being very racist. And this is within days of white nationalists coming to our County Administration Building, coming to Chicano Park, threatening violence, and dismantling a historic and sacred place. We need a D.A. whos going to stand up. So if I call you a Trump Republican, it really is about you being unwilling to take a stand against policies. Theres Republicans all over the place that dont believe the things that come out of that White House. So we need to have a D.A. who again represents all San Diegans and I think it alienates and it isolates people when they dont think that theyre safe in your community because you wont denounce your president when hes spewing hate, so I actually see the opposite of that.

Q: On that same issue, the kind of the micro question. ... Weve kind of seen this before. Theres a lot of parallels between your campaign raised broadly and the City Attorneys race of Mike Aguirre in it where public, the voice of the public coming in kind of talking smack to people, the way that you did with the bird. Thank you for explaining that, and that didnt go well for him. Hes kind of been vilified and he didnt win reelection. What do you say to San Diegans who say, weve seen this before. We know how it turns out and the office is going to be a mess and the person who comes in afterwards is going to have to go back to the way it was.

Im just saying we need to actually bring voices to our victims, bring dignity to all victims, no matter what they look like, and treat people with fairness.

JONES-WRIGHT: So Ive actually never had that comparison, so thats very interesting. I think that my track record speaks for itself. Again, I work with law enforcement every single day and I have a great relationship with them. I have a wonderful working and respectful relationship with law enforcement. So I think that my track record speaks for itself. I think that my reputation speaks for itself. And I dont think that were going to have that problem because I work well with others. I have years of working well with other people whether youre on the opposite side of the aisle or not and, again, it could have been seen as a very unfortunate thing, but it happened.

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Q: What do you think of Mike Aguirre as City Attorney?

JONES-WRIGHT: He was a city attorney.

Q: Anyone else have any questions? Do you get a close a brief close? We covered a lot here, but

JONES-WRIGHT: No. Did you have anything that was important for you?

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Q: I do have one ... but I ask this to most everybody that comes in. Youve been very clear on what your policies are but there is getting there to enact them. You mentioned that, you know, the status quo and the political machine, youre running against them. Theyre against you. Whats your path to victory?

JONES-WRIGHT: People.

Q: Its in a political sense now.

JONES-WRIGHT: People power. Thats it. Its going to be all about the voters and again Ive been going all around the county and the message is very, very inspiring. People are happy to see that there will be change. People are asking for change. People are begging for change and so really its the people powered the people power behind the campaign. If you look at the first six months of the campaign we had 64 percent of our donations were $50 and under. A lot of people give $5 a month because they believe in the campaign. We had over 250 volunteers the first two days when I announced my candidacy. People are ready to work on behalf of the campaign. And so this is why we are absolutely going to win because its not just me. Its not just my team. It is community members who heard the message, know who I am, believe in what we are trying to do as San Diegans and were going to get out to vote.

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Q: Piggybacking on that, a lot of the money that may come from outside of San Diego, Shaun Kings group is obviously involved. Do you want to talk about his involvement and kind of money from outside San Diego?

JONES-WRIGHT: Well, I wouldnt be able to talk about it because I dont know anything about it. So, you know, obviously

Q: Well, your opponent and her strategists say that someones coming in and trying to put their thumb on the scale of an election.

JONES-WRIGHT: Sort of like Bonnie Dumanis, you know.

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Q: That was a softball right there.

JONES-WRIGHT: Yeah, so I, you know, I hate that, you know, theres all this criticism about outside people. I am from San Diego. Im born in San Diego, started my education career here in preschool. I ended here with a master of law [from] California Western. I am San Diego. There is no amount of outside influence that can make me not San Diego. Thats just what it is. When you talk about a political machine, youre talking about someone who was given the advantage of the incumbency and all that comes with it, which means all of those commercials that shes doing now is on our taxpayer dime. Everything that shes doing around the community and campaigning, that is on our taxpayer time. Thats what happens when youre up against a political machine. Anyone who wants to help me and do it legally and theyre fine, Im fine. But I dont think thats a thumb on the scale. I think that this is what our system allows for and she cant be upset that she obviously wanted something that she didnt get from them.

Q: Thank you for coming in.

JONES-WRIGHT: Thank you.

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Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & OpinionFaced with an either-or choice, Gov. Jerry Brown chose a smarter third option to de-escalate a feud between California and the federal government over immigration: He will send National Guard members to the southern border  but with restrictions.

In so doing, Brown likely appeased President Donald Trump in a way that could seem reasonable to groups like the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce and The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board, which urged Brown to reject Trumps deployment request because of open questions.

When Trump first asked four Southwestern U.S. governors to deploy 2,000 to 4,000 troops to a border he sees only as porous, the governors of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas committed 1,600 National Guard members, but Brown was more circumspect. He deferred questions to the California National Guard, which in turn rightly asked important questions about funding, duration and end state.

Wednesday Brown said he would accept federal funding for the support operations of 400 Guard members statewide targeting transnational criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers but not to enforce federal immigration laws or build a new wall. Troop locations will be dictated by needs on the ground, a Brown spokesman said. Troop actions will be handled thoughtfully. On such an emotional issue, thats welcome.

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Related editorial: Why Gov. Jerry Brown should reject National Guard border deployment

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

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Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion

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.Weekly Newsletter The best of The Saturday Evening Post in your inbox! Join

Fifty years ago today, the Fair Housing Act  a long-filibustered civil rights bill  was swiftly signed into law following some historic events that framed racial integration as urgent and necessary. These were the publication of the Kerner Report, the findings of the Johnson-appointed National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, that cautioned, Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white  separate and unequal, and the even more recent assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Less than four years before the landmark legislation, California had voted to nullify its own Rumford Fair Housing Act with Proposition 14, a ballot proposition that guaranteed property rights over civil rights in the California Constitution. Stewart Alsop wrote of Proposition 14 in this magazine shortly before it passed, saying, It would place the whole subject of fair housing forever out of bounds for the state legislature. Proposition 14 faced opposition from Labor, the churches, farsighted Republican businessmen, the Hollywood community, and the whole Democratic leadership, but, as Alsop noted, the campaign against Prop 14 had everyone on their side but the voters. The proposition passed with over 65 percent of the vote, only to be struck down by the California Supreme Court in 1966.

The Rumford Fair Housing Bill was written by William Byron Rumford, the first African-American to hold state public office in Northern California. Rumford had led the passage of the Fair Employment Practices Act of 1959, and, as chairman of the Public Health Committee, he spearheaded regulation of air pollution and DDT. His fair housing bill was predicated, as Alsop put it in 1964, on the thesis that a Negros money is as good as a whites in buying real estate. The bill was unpopular for white homeowners and real estate brokers for pocketbook issues, and California Governor Pat Brown even remarked, the guy who votes for the Proposition as a pocketbook issue may vote for Johnson to salve his conscience.

For Alsop, however, the fair housing issue was national in scope: Either the Negro will be admitted to full citizenship, with the right to buy whatever he has the money to pay for, or there is much worse trouble to come. Sure enough, the year after Prop 14 passed, the Watts riots in Los Angeles brought urgent attention to the racially sequestered neighborhoods of the city.

President Johnsons Fair Housing Act prohibited the refusal to sell or rent a dwelling to any person because of race, color, disability, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin at the individual level, but modern critics claim that, after 50 years, it has done far too little to affirmatively promote integration, as promised. In The New York Times, Walter Mondale, a co-author of the 68 Fair Housing Act, decried the Ben Carson-led Department of Housing and Urban Developments decision to delay the Obama-era initiative that required communities to analyze and fix racial segregation or face funding consequences. Mondale holds that the Fair Housing Act ought to (finally) make good on its intentions of widespread change: The law was informed by the history of segregation, in which individual discrimination was a manifestation of a wider societal rift.

Despite continuing residential segregation that expresses itself in educational disparities, a life expectancy gap, and income inequality, the 50th anniversary of the landmark civil rights bill can serve as a reminder that integration policy, however incremental, is far from impossible.Lewes, DE -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/12/2018 -- As per International Monetary Fund (IMF) Albania's nominal gross domestic product is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.92% from it's 2015 level of ALL 1434.74 billion and reach ALL 2292.49 by 2022.



Albania is located in Southeast Europe, in the west of the Balkans, and shares common borders with Macedonia to the east, Greece to the south, and Kosovo and Montenegro to the north. It has access to the Adriatic and Ionian Seas in the west and southwest, being less than 72 kilometres away from Italy, across the Adriatic Sea.



Albania had estimated population of 2.885 million in the year 2016 and expected to reach 2.858 million by 2022. Albania's unemployment rate was 16.1% of total labor force.Albania's real gross domestic product (GDP) was around ALL 763.844 billions in 2016 whereas the nominal GDP was ALL 1505.03 billions.



This resulted in GDP deflator 197.033. Per capita GDP was estimated at USD 4203.42 whereas purchasing power parity (PPP) based per capita GDP was estimated to be at USD 11840.23.



In 2016, Albania government's revenue was ALL 401.082 billions whereas the expenditure was ALL 426.384 billions. This resulted Albania government's net lending / borrowing negative at ALL 25.301 billion in 2016 indicating that enough financial resources were not made available by the government to boost economic growth.



The current account balance for Albania was estimated to be negative at USD 1.465 billions for the year 2016 and is expected to decline at a CAGR of 4.20% and reach USD 1.635 by 2022. This negative current account balance indicates the Albania is a net borrower from the whole world.



Scope of the Albania PESTEL Analysis, SWOT Analysis and Risk Analysis Market Research Reports

- These reports provide information about key macroeconomic indicators for Albania.

- These reports provide PESTELE (political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal) analysis for Albania.

- These reports provide SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis for Albania.

- These reports provide risk analysis for Albania.



For more information and to purchase Albania PESTEL Analysis Market Research Report please visit: https://www.marketresearchreports.com/market-research-reports-inc/albania-pestel-analysis-market-research-report



For more information and to purchase Albania SWOT Analysis Market Research Report please visit: https://www.marketresearchreports.com/market-research-reports-inc/albania-swot-analysis-market-research-report



For more information and to purchase Albania Risk Analysis Market Research Report please visit: https://www.marketresearchreports.com/market-research-reports-inc/albania-risk-analysis-market-research-report



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Contact us for your market research requirements: http://www.marketresearchreports.com/contactPune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/12/2018 -- Market Overview:



Whole milk powder is manufactured by evaporating milk to eliminate its water content and convert it into solid powder with the purpose of preservation, longer shelf life, and economy of transportation, eliminate need for refrigeration and others. The global whole milk powder market is projected to generate a CAGR growth of 4.5 % till the reference period of 2022.



Dynamics of the Whole Milk Powder Market:



Drivers:

Rising consumption of milk and dairy products, growing per capita income, and developments of global trade and distribution chains are the strongest drivers of the market. The factors such as ease of reconstitution, longer shelf life, economy of storage and transportation due to elimination of water, growing awareness of milk nutrition, growing young population, and growing popularity of vegetarian protein use are also driving the market. Growing adoption of milk in packaged foods such as confectioneries such as chocolates, infant formula, baked goods, various sweets and others is a prime driver of the market. Powdered milk is also a common item in food aid supplies, during natural calamities and wherever fresh milk is not a viable option. Thus the organizations such as the U.N. and the armies of various states is a prime buyers of the products. The growing demand for whey based products due to their higher nutrition needed in health and fitness centers is also a driver of the market.



Get Exclusive Sample Copy @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1831



Restraints:

Presence of substitutes such as domestic supply of fresh milk in tropical countries, soy milk, and others is the critical constraint on the market. The presence of spurious and adulterated products is a serious threat to the market. Many children died after they consumed melamine adulterated Sanlu infant formula in 2008.



Bacteria especially botulism is another serious threat to the market represented by the scare generated due to false tests in August 2013. Owing to the threat China temporarily suspended all milk powder imports from New Zealand, harming the New Zealand dollar. Commercial whole milk powders have been reported to contain higher oxidized cholesterol levels than in fresh milk which has also created lot of concerns. Thus poor regulations in the underdeveloped regions is a prime market constraint.



Competitive Analysis:

The key players profiled in whole milk powder are Fonterra (New Zealand), Nestle (Switzerland), Lactoland (Germany), Alpen Dairies (Netherland), Gracia Hnos Agroindustrial SRL (Argentina), Synlait milk ltd (New Zealand), Miraka (New Zealand), Regilait (France), Lakeland dairies (Ireland)Rawa Pharm (Slovakia), DANA Dairy Group Ltd (Switzerland), and others.



Access Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/whole-milk-powder-market-1831



Regional Analysis:

Europe dominates the global whole milk powder market led by countries such as Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, France, Belgium, Netherlands and others. The highly developed dairy industry of Europe coupled with the large consumption of milk powder in its famous confectionary industry is the prime driver of the market.



The America market is led by the U.S. and the Canada, both of which report greater consumption than the world average consumption of milk. The Latin American nations such as Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay are very attractive markets and have high exporting potential.



Asia Pacific accounts for the third largest market owing to a large demand from deficient countries such as Japan, China and others. China is expected to generate largest growth on account on the large development of grasslands which account for greater than 25 % of its arable land.



The Middle East and Africa market is expected to be the second fastest growing market after the Asia Pacific region. The Gulf economies are the largest importers of whole milk powders. However the tropical and equatorial regions of Africa are restrained by their poor economic conditions and have the largest unmet needs.While some recovery has been seen in the shipbuilding market low priced competition was of great to concern to leading Japanese shipbuilders speaking at Sea Japan 2018.

Chairing a panel session of shipbuilding executives, Hiroaki Sakashita, advisor to Nippon Hakuyohin Kentai Kyokai, used an analogy of warming bath water to describe the state of the market. For the shipbuilding industry the water is getting warmer and warmer. But for it to exactly the right temperature to take a bath its going to take a bit more time, he said.

Top Japanese shipyard executives gave a similar view. I think the market was at its bottom in the summer of last year. More than half of the excess supply has been eliminated by 2020 it will be normalised said Yoshinori Mochida, president of ship and offshore structure company for Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

Since September we have started to see more enquiries and orders. Ship prices are still low but have started to increase.

Koji Okura, president of Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Co Ltd commented that in some segments ship prices were still sluggish, while some were rising but not by very much.

Okura raised concerns about low prices being driven by government subsidies to Chinese and Korean yards, which also mean they have a greater capacity to invest. He noted that Chinese yards were working with European partners to raise quality. Be subsidised by the Chinese government he said yards had no hesitance to make investments and so quality would continue to rise. He also said Korean yards had been able to receive large sized orders for LNG carriers because they were funded by the government.

On the issue of low priced orders he said it was a question for the WTO (World Trade Organisation) rules if subsidies should be accepted.

Tetsuro Koga, president of Mitsui E&S Shipbuilding Co Ltd commented that many Korean yards had faced managerial difficulties but now had government support. Looking to China he said that some yards had shut down but there was still some uncertainty as to what will happen next.

Japan Marine United Corp, president Kotaro Chiba, also noted the uncertainty facing some Chinese shipbuilders, while aid was still being offered to Korean yards.

Sea Japan 2018, organised by UBM, is being held at Tokyo Big Sight from 11  13 April.Mobility and healthy eating. Two important issues for Michiganders, and the focus of a small business competition for student entrepreneurs.Local business leaders and small business boosters selected the winners at this years UM-Dearborn Business Idea Pitch Competition. There were 24 teams that submitted to the contest, 11 teams that were selected for competition, and four that were chosen as winners of the scholarship money.Students at the University of Michigan-Dearborn College of Business competed for thousands of dollars in scholarship money, with two teams each taking home $2,000, splitting the top prize, and two runners-up each taking $500."This was an idea competition, not a business plan competition," says Timothy Davis, Director of iLabs at UM-Dearborn. "We wanted to see the students clearly describe their business idea and show that theres a need.""We want students to recognize problems because problems are what create opportunities."The winning students were judged on their ability to create a product, present it to prospective customers, take their critical feedback, and tweak the products based on those comments. Davis says that conversation is a hard skill to teach in the classroom, but one thats invaluable in the business world. Empathy and the ability to listen to customers is something that businesses want to see, he says.Business pitches included products that encouraged kids to eat healthily, a healthy food and recipe delivery service, and a short-term car rental service. Davis believes that at least some of the students plan on pursuing their products further, and perhaps try and bring them to market.For Davis, its not necessarily important that the students start actual businesses around their products, but instead learn from the process of identifying problems and attempting to solve them. Find your customers and make them happy, he says."If you dont have customers, you have a hobby."Got a development news story to share? Email MJ Galbraith here or send him a tweet @mikegalbraith

On Thursday, March 22, Mayor James R. Fouts presented this year's State of the City address from the Andiamo Italia restaurant in Warren. It's there where he announced his proposal for fixing Warren's lack of a downtown area, a $125 million project that would transform the 16 acres surrounding Warren's city hall into a brand new downtown on the site of the Civic Center.



"Finally, I think we're going to have a downtown," Mayor Fouts said at the event.



The story of Warren's traditional downtown, complete with a walkable, urban center, is a long and winding roador, rather, Main Street. Thanks to David Gifford for leading us to these facts, many of which are available on his blog, which is readable via the Medium platform.

1. Remember Beebe Corners? That's OK, it was before your time.

Warren started as a small village on the Red Run River in the 1830s, but was then known as Beebe Corners. The small outpost between Utica and Detroit included a tavern and distillery. It incorporated as the Village of Warren in 1893.

2. Before Mound Road became famous for potholes, it was famous for swallowing half of downtown Warren.

Warren's original downtown is located at the intersection of Mound and Chicago roads. While some of the older buildings remain, the entire west side of the business district was razed in favor of widening Mound Road.

3. Whats old is new. New downtown, old City Center.

A new City Center was built along Van Dyke Avenue in the mid-1960s, across from the General Motors Technical Center, between 12 and 13 Mile roads. The 'new downtown' promoted by Mayor Fouts in his most recent State of the City address would be built at the site of that then-new City Center.

4. Whats old is new. New downtown plan, (slightly older) downtown plan.

The plan proposed by Mayor Fouts is not the first downtown envisioned for the City Center site. A master plan for a new downtown was first developed in 2006, with renderings that reveal even more densityand less parkingthan the mayor's 2018 plan.

5. Warren's original downtown is still alive. And has great beer and vinyl.

Warren's original downtown still exists today and includes some of the city's more recognizable small businesses, including Kuhnhenn Brewery & Winery and Village Vinyl.



Mayor Fouts and his new downtown plans include a centerpiece: An upscale 7- to 10-story hotel from a nationally-recognized brand that would feature a restaurant, rooftop bar, business center, ballroom, and more.



Also planned for the downtown are restaurants; bars, breweries, and pubs; a large grocery store; electronics and appliance stores; and shoe and jewelry stores. Developments will also include loft-style residential living.



Another component of the proposal is a climate-controlled pedestrian bridge that would connect the new downtown to the General Motors Technical Center, leading pedestrians safely across the busy lanes of Van Dyke Avenue.

Got a development news story to share? Email MJ Galbraith here or send him a tweet @mikegalbraithMacomb County's COMTEC

Imagine trying to call a friend who doesnt have a phone. You can dial a number again and again, but if your friend cant answer, communication simply wont happen.The world of connected vehicles is much the same. To reach maximum potential, cars equipped with vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication require an infrastructure that can, in essence, answer the phone.Market experts suggest that 75 percent of cars shipped by 2020 will be connected, but will roadways and intersections be equipped and ready to answer the call?While many cities, towns, and counties are waiting to see how the technology rolls out, Macomb County has been steadily preparing for connected vehicles for the past 10 years. By planning and implementing a centralized traffic and communications center ( COMTEC ), colocated with 911 emergency dispatch and information technology services for the entire county, Macomb has created an environment poised to maximize V2I technology.In one scenario, if a connected car gets into a crash, an alert comes to the center immediately and sends information that the airbag was deployed, and the extent of the damage. The emergency dispatch center gets the information also, and we can deploy the right resources to the crash using the GPS location of the accident, says John Abraham, director of traffic and operations at Macomb County Department of Roads. COMTECs video wall can display images from 250 surveillance cameras that can be targeted to the crash.Motivated by the goal of increased safety, Abraham and his team are working to bring the annual number of vehicle crashes in Macomb County to zero. V2I and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications can inform drivers of unsafe situations so they can take action to avert collision.If there is a big benefit in the safety area, as a transportation engineer, I want to do everything to equip myself and be ready. Even when 10 to 20 percent connected vehicles make up the market, there will be a huge benefit, says Abraham.At the center of Macomb Countys connected technology is the roadside unit, or RSU, an antenna-looking box located at the intersection that gathers and broadcasts information to, among other things, control the signal timing. When programmed according to specific standards, the RSU can also communicate with connected vehicles equipped with on-board units (OBUs), to alert drivers of a changing signal through an audio or haptic alarm. Recently tested was active braking technology that signaled drivers when a traffic light was close to turning red.You have reduced the likelihood of collision by giving information to the driver inside the vehicle, says Abraham. Broadly, the broadcasted information is called SPaT, or signal phasing and timing.Currently, COMTEC engineers can prioritize traffic signals for emergency vehicles approaching an intersection, or maximize traffic flow during specific events, like fireworks shows, or freeway closures.Future innovations can program RSUs to offer speed guidance in corridors with short-distance speed limit changes, or to alert a driver that a lane is closing due to construction. Eventually, connected vehicles can provide information about vacant parking spots, and even communicate with other modes of transportation, like buses, pedestrians, even bicycles, all using the same technology.A biker on a trail may be approaching an intersection and need to cross. They can push a button from their smartphone as they approach for a walk signal to come on. Its just another example of how we can be more innovative, Abraham says.By controlling transit signal priority, COMTEC can extend a green light for a few seconds to allow a bus to maintain an on-time schedule, or keep a snowplow moving for better efficiency when clearing the roads.It may seem like every county in the country is developing this technology, but Macomb County is one of just a few dozen locations across the U.S. that have installed connected technology, and one of just a handful to have an operational RSU.Macomb County is working toward achieving what is called the SPaT challenge , a call for public sector entities to coordinate SPat broadcasts in one or more corridor, to include 20 or more connected intersections, in each state by 2020.Slowly the states are picking up, and at the county level there arent too many doing mainstream connected vehicle technology efforts, says Abraham. In Michigan, Oakland County, Washtenaw County, and the City of Detroit are working toward various levels of connectivity.Macomb County currently has five RSUs completely operational, and will install 20 to 25 additional units this summer. Federal grants will provide the funding to have 301 RSUs installed by early 2019, and the goal is to have all 740 traffic signals in the county connected within three years.Connected vehicle innovators and OEMs are already testing their programs on the RSUs, and a team at Macomb County is communicating with additional organizations to expand testing. This team presented information at the ITS World Congress in Montreal in 2017, and, while there, shared a booth with PlanetM to attract and collaborate with potential innovators to test their products--a prospect made easier due to centralized control by the county.Every one of the 740 intersection signals here are maintained by the county, so we have the luxury of a centralized system. We control what goes on the system, and therefore the reliability is very high, says Abraham.Within just a few years, Macomb County will be fully connected, and every communication-enabled vehicle that enters the county will be able to take full advantage of this technology.Its an exciting time to be in transportation, and to see all of these things unfold, says Abraham. We used to dream of the Jetsons age, and its almost coming to reality now.On First Fridays of the month at Fire the open mic is where all the feelings come out. Photo by Fran Dwight.

Executive Director Allison Kennedy in the circle at Fire. Photo by Fran Dwight

After the teens have gone home for the day at Fire. Photo by Fran Dwight

Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Edison series.Sometimes it can be a challenge to get teens where you want them to be when you want them to be there. Timeliness is not a problem for Fire Historical and Cultural Arts Collaborative. Its typical for teens show up there hours early, waiting for staff to open the doors.Earlier this year, the starting time for longstanding First Friday open mics at Fire were moved from 7:30 to 6:30 p.m. to accommodate teens who were getting there two hours before the show.Six days a week  every day but Wednesday  Fire invites teens to learn about themselves and to express what they have learned, often in spoken word poetry. Weekdays there are after-school workshops from 3:30 to 6 p.m. and Saturday youth travel to events across Kalamazoo.Fire, a fixture in the Edison neighborhood for 12 years, has served youth as part of its mission in the past, but in the two years since Allison Kennedy has become its executive director youth have increasingly become the focus of the organization.The former Portage Street Fire Station, Engine No. 2, built in 1903 is at the heart of the Edison neighborhood and has housed everything from a laundromat to a grocery store to a photography studio over the decades.It opened as a nonprofit in 2005, with a belief that cultural awareness generates social justice. Fire became an art gallery, poetry showcase, Creative Justice Press, culinary arts program, catering service, home to WFCR radio, and host of Youth Creative Productions. Under the direction of Denise Miller and Michelle Johnson, it partnered with a long list of area academics, businesses, and nonprofits. It was home to dance parties and open mics.Today, Fire describes itself as a youth-driven space for art and justice. During the April 6 open mic, an announcement from the stage reinforced that adults were to keep their presentations to three minutes so teens could have as much time as they needed for their spoken words, songs, or even short humorous skits.Such touches are part of an overall effort to create a space where teens can be themselves without judgment or shame. We dont shame you. We dont suspend you, Kennedy says.And after a recent incident got serious, the Fire team used restorative justice  a method justice of that seeks to build relationships and repair harm rather than impose punishment  to determine what they could do to prevent such a thing from happening in the future.It was a great meeting, Kennedy says. Young people are so wise.Thats in keeping with Fires attitude toward young people and their potential.We really trust that young people are building an interesting culture themselves, Kennedy says. And that its exciting. We dont assume that they are on their phones too much or dont have social skills or all the other things people say about kids.They dont expect teens to save the world either. The focus instead is on giving young people the time and space they need to build their identities.Theyre still trying to figure out who they are, Kennedy says. I think adults would be better justice leaders if we figured out who we were and what we really cared about before we got into this work. Theyre (young people are) not going to do it by themselves. We shouldnt give them the responsibility of changing our circumstances. Theres a lot of pressure that comes with telling them youth is our future.Ive also learned that a perfectly reasonable goal is to have fun, Kennedy says.Fire is a place youth from the neighborhood can be a part of and 60 percent of those who participate at Fire are Edison residents. Kennedy says she knows where all the Fire young people live in the neighborhood, from Stockbridge to Washington. On any given week, there could be 20 participants in workshops and another 30 who show up for an open mic. There were about 800 visits to Fire last year.Though Fires influence on the neighborhood may be hard to quantify, Kennedy is proud to lead a street corner organization that literally has no barriers for people to walk across as they enter the building.Kennedy attributes much of the popularity of Fire to its flexibility in responding to the youth who attend. When they tell us weve been doing the same thing for too long, the next week well switch it up, and make lavender lemonade, she says. We try to change and evolve our programs.Other afterschool programs have curriculum mapped out for six weeks, down to the minutes, but not at Fire where young people have a role in how the day proceeds.We ask them, Who wants to start the icebreaker? Does anyone have a good question? They do it and they get the feeling of ownership, Kennedy says. They have opportunities to be heard, and listened to, and see what they say become real very quickly. Not every organization responds quickly to the needs of youth. They tell us they would like condoms in the restrooms. OK. Theyre there.At the same time, Kennedy is quick to point out that offering such flexibility does not mean the teens are allowed to do anything they want. Teens learn they are to be accountable for their words and actions. They are asked to think and speak well of one another. They keep confidentiality and ask questions rather than making assumptions.Teens are also asked to be open to creating. Kennedy says workshops are very structured to allow teens to be creative. And a writing prompt is just as likely to result in a drawing or painting as it is in a new poem.Her work and that of her four part-time employees is trauma-informed, meaning it proceeds with the understanding the most of the young people have experienced some kind of trauma and any acting out they may do is the result of those experiences.All the youth know two or three people who have died. They are still at the point where the grief is theirs rather than recognizing it as a more global experience, she says.In addition to after-school creative writing workshop and open mics, Fire features lock-ins, retreats, its Summer of Healing program, participation in slam poetry workshops and Queer Prom. Young people also get a chance to learn many new skills on the Teen Advisory Council.The youth-centered nature of Fire grew out of the formation of the Teen Advisory Council in Kennedys first year as executive director. The eight-member council planned its first event  an open mic for youth only. Next came a lock-in. It was sooo good, Kennedy says.This space just feels really right in the hands of youth, she goes on to say. Youth always cleaned up after themselves after they used it. The young people also wanted the building cleaned out and made that happen. They cleaned six tons of garbage out of the building to open up more space. They just did the work, she says.The evolution in Fire has mirrored an evolution in Kennedy, who never knew how good she would be working with teens. In fact, when she was hired she told the Fire board of directors she would do anythingwork with young people.Then the first two people to contact her after she was hired  two teens. They liked every one of my profile pictures. They were checking me out, Kennedy says.Ultimately, her high school experience in a teen center called the Neutral Zone in Ann Arbor where she was part of a very competitive slam poetry program allowed her to envision the youth-centered space that Fire has become.She has been able to spread the gospel of slam over the past two years, too. This year there have been local competitions that led to the formation of two teams who will travel to Michigan Louder Than a Bomb , where they will compete against 20 other teams from across the state. The two Fire hosted competitions were recruiting tools for a six-week program where Kennedy says they will learn to love each other.Fire is the only organization to prepare students for the competition.Respected organizations such as the Wallace Foundation say afterschool programs can provide measurable benefits to youth and families. Such programs can improve academic outcomes especially if youth attend regularly and the program is of high quality.Kennedy has the data that shows Fire is offering that kind of programming and many of those who to come to Fire are devoted attendees. She affectionately refers to them as Fireflies on social media.Youth also have told Fire how much it has meant to them. One said: Im learning how to be more trusting here.Another reported: I was feeling suicidal for a few months but now have a much better sense of my own self-worth.And one more said: I have learned how to be shameless about my challenge.Parents, in turn, are equally supportive. When Kennedy put out a call for a paper cutter on Facebook, a parent had it covered within the day. Others talk about how much their teens have opened up since they started Fire programs.Suicide came up more than once in the poems of teens at a recent open mic. Kennedy says she and her staff are in regular communication with local mental health experts. The advice and speed with which it is given via text make Gryphon Place a resource she recommends.During workshops, teens are praised for lines that show resilience. We give warm affirming attention to youth who are not being intense. Sometimes the only way they have gotten attention in the past is through crisis. We want them to learn that is not the only way to get attention.Work in the community continues to evolve, too. Fire works closely with the Kalamazoo Poetry Festival and this week has been asked to collaborate with OutFront Kalamazoo.Afterschool programs are not about keeping young people occupied till their parents get home from work, Kennedy says. Theyre really, really, really about getting young people ready for the world and ready to love themselves and ready to love their neighborhood.The way we talk about youth development is  we are tenacious about getting youth into our program. I do friend youth on Facebook, I do holler at them on the street, I do say things to them at the bus stop because I think we need to be tenacious about investing in youth.If someone knows a young person who might be interested in the type of programming Fire offers, Kennedy encourages them to be tenacious in getting them there.And they can draw on the walls, Kennedy says.Kathy Jennings is the managing editor of Southwest Michigans Second Wave. She is a freelance writer and editor.Southwest Michigan Second Waves On the Ground Edison series amplifies the voices of Edison Neighborhood residents. Over three months, Second Wave journalists will be embedded in the Edison Neighborhood to explore topics of importance to residents, business owners, and other members of the community. To reach the editor of this series, Theresa Coty-ONeil, please email her here or contact Second Wave managing editor Kathy Jennings here The On the Ground program is made possible by funding from the City of Kalamazoo, LISC, the Fetzer Institute, the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, United Way of the Battle Creek and Kalamazoo Region, Michigan WORKS!, the Kalamazoo Community Foundation and the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo.That cast of "Mama's Girls."

"This is a time for theatre. It is a time to come together to celebrate, to question, to share stories that fill our hearts and minds. It is a time to learn about the lives of others whose experiences are different than our own. In a world of increasing isolation, how can we better feed our souls than by bonding with friend and neighbor and sharing an evening of laughter or tears? We must come together; we can do that in the theatre." -- Joan HerringtonIn a time when some political and cultural forces try to divide by instigating confrontation with an "other," the Kalamazoo theater world is encouraging open and non-antagonistic views of other lives on the safe space of the stage.Joan Herrington, Western Michigan University's Theatre Department chair, wrote the above quote introducing the university's 2017-'18 season.We ask Herrington, What inspired it?"When I look out at the world, I see division -- divisiveness," she responds. "There is a new and frightening energy-infusing fear of the other -- hatred for what is different. We are more encouraged to dismiss rather than engage with those who are not like us and opportunities to do otherwise are becoming rare."She continues, "For me, theater is a lightning rod of empowerment for young people. It enables them to see that they have power -- that their voices can move and inspire others. And those voices must speak out for tolerance, forgiveness, inclusion. For the artist and the audience, theater is an act of engaged citizenship."Second Wave is beginning a semi-regular look at theaters in Kalamazoo that include, explicitly or implied, "acts of engaged citizenship" in their spaces.The first theater we're looking at has been around since 2013, and is now cleaning up an old rec-room/storage space in the basement of the First Baptist Church downtown, creating a new home for itself.Church staff pointed us in the right direction, saying carefully, "Now, they're called -- I don't want this to sound the wrong way -- but they call themselves Queer Theatre Kalamazoo ."Downstairs, theater founder/executive producer Laura Henderson was preparing for rehearsal of the space's first production, "Mama's Girls," a drama about a family coming to grips with a transgender offspring."I have people I work with now who, in 2013 when they first heard the words 'Queer Theatre Kalamazoo' -- 'queer,' right?" she says emphasizing queer as if it were shocking, which it might have been at the time. "Which for me is normalization through exposure, which is why I brought that term forward as an umbrella term (for people who are LGBT)," Henderson says. "They were really uncomfortable at the beginning. And now they're some of our biggest supporters."When they hear that Queer Theatre Kalamazoo is moving into the church basement, "people are very surprised -- First Baptist Church, what?!? Pastor Dave (Nichols) came down, said, 'let me know what I can do to help you out.' They're totally supportive, they know our mission."Is that mission to help bring various people of the community together?"There are a couple of driving forces behind this theater. One is to create a safe space for audience members, for artists, for anyone whether you're LGBT or not," Henderson says. "And then we really want to do works that thread conversation. But it's an approachable form of social justice."As they did at their previous homes -- Fire, Park Trades Building, First Congregational -- QTK will hold after-show talks. "We've dealt with faith and religion, government and ageism, homophobia, and rape and all sorts of really important issues that need to be addressed, and it's really brought the community together just through finding a voice that's not normally represented, that's what we're here for."Henderson is joined by Jen Hebben, director of "Mama's Girls." Hebben has been active in local theater since she was a child performing in the Kalamazoo Civic's Black Theatre program.Of "Mama's Girls," she says, "It's a story that's not told a lot right now."By award-winning Michigan/North Carolina playwright Marilynn Barner Anselmi , the script shows what happens when the boy in a set of biologically male and female twins sees herself as a girl. Her mother is supportive, but father thinks it's just a phase a boy should grow out of.Hebben was motivated to work on this script because "I have a 17-year-old and a 12-year-old. And last summer both of them had non-binary friends, and this was a brand new concept to me. I didn't know that there was this conversation happening with the younger generations about 'maybe you're not this or that, maybe you're something untitled.'"This new gender-fluid talk , about an issue that's not that new -- people who don't fit social constructions of male/female -- has been educational for Hebben."We have a 17-year-old in the cast, she gave us a wonderful breakdown, drew a diagram, about people who don't identify as male or female, or people who are a little of this or a little of that."This is a topic that needs to be brought to an audience, "because that vocabulary is already out there and being used. Maybe it's not being used at the dinner table, but it's being used in the classroom," she says.Both Hebben and Henderson grew up in smaller towns -- Hebben in Plainwell and Henderson in Otsego. They know that in more-conservative areas the word "queer" is used in a very different way that is used by QTK."This is another way to make people feel included; we learn the new language, we recognize that the word 'queer' has been reclaimed as a positive umbrella term -- it isn't that mean, nasty cutdown that it used to be," Hebben says.Henderson says of Otsego, "There was just no representation, no diversity at all, no resource there."Her path to creating QTK came out of a masters thesis that focused on LGBT suicide prevention, "using media and performance as a catalyst for social change, finding a place of connection, a safe space," and developing " eLLe Kalamazoo ," an episodic lesbian dramedy for the stage."I was involved with 'eLLe' and it was a lot of really, just great, confident, amazing, talented women who also happen to be in relationships with other women, which for me, having come from a small town, I was still developing all of that."Henderson had no "place of connection" as she was growing up. She is now determined to make QTK everything she was missing from her world while growing up.Theater works to form connections, Henderson says, because "it's a show. It's a nice soft approach. If you are kind of questioning yourself or need a safe space, either as a performer or audience member, you want to open yourself up more."Hebben says, "One of the things I like so much about live theater is that the viewing of it is done in community. And the hope is that one feels more liberated to discuss and explore afterwards with those people they just shared the experience with. It isn't solitary like sitting at home watching TV. The community comes together, they view this work of art, and the idea is to plant seeds, promote dialog, and maybe make some folks feel a little less 'other' in the world, because they get to see their story represented, too.Mark Wedel has been a freelance journalist in Southwest Michigan since 1992. Hes covered a bewildering array of subjects, including a lot of Kalamazoo theater when writing A&E pieces for the Kalamazoo Gazette, 1992-2015. His website is herePress Release

April 12, 2018 ANGARA: PH NEEDS TO IMPROVE FINANCIAL LITERACY TO COMBAT SCAMS Despite the country's economic gains, Senator Sonny Angara underscored the need to improve the financial literacy of Filipinos to enable them to be a part of inclusive growth as well as equip them with skills that will protect them against scams. "Glowing reviews and optimistic projections have been heaped on the Philippine economy, particularly regarding its financial system. Opportunities abound on account of these developments but many Filipinos do not even have a basic grasp of economic and financial concepts," Angara said. According to the senator, the recent discovery of close to P1 billion in fraudulent bitcoin investments only illustrates that Filipinos are still lacking in financially literacy that they still fall prey to schemes that promise huge returns in a short span of time. The Philippine National Police on April 4 arrested Arnel and Leonady Ordonio following complaints from investors that the couple had scammed them into investing in bitcoins. The Ordonios were reported to have amassed P900 million in cryptocurrency investments from their alleged victims. "This is not the first time that we have seen such kind of scams that have victimized our hapless kababayan whose only intention is to earn legitimate income for their families. Their lack of knowledge of the financial system and investment, however, will only continue the cycle of victimization if we do not address this," Angara said. In the 2015 MasterCard Financial Literacy Index, the Philippines ranked second-worst among ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Countries) countries, ahead only of Indonesia. A study by the Asian Development Bank also revealed that the Philippines did not have a national strategy for financial education and literacy. "Such illiteracy hides recent economic gains from the minds of many people as it hinders them from participating meaningfully in the country's notable ascent and economic growth," he said. It will be recalled that Angara has authored a law that seeks to declare the second week of November of every year as "Economic and Financial Literacy Week" so as to develop national consciousness on economic and financial literacy. Under Republic Act 10922, the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) will lead the participation of government agencies and instrumentalities such as the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the Department of Finance (DOF), the Department of Education (DepEd), the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), the National Youth Commission (NYC), and the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) during the Economic and Financial Literacy Week. It is also tasked to plan, initiate, execute and encourage knowledge-expanding activities on economic and financial literacy which may be adopted by local government units, government-owned and controlled corporation and educational institutions. Furthermore, all public and private elementary and secondary schools under the DepEd, all state and private colleges and universities under the CHED, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA), and the NYC are mandated to conduct consciousness-raising and knowledge-expanding activities such as setting up literature corners, organizing fora and trainings, and conducting basic economic and financial management classes to improve the economic and financial literacy of students and the youth. "We must recognize the growth potential of our country through financially literate citizens who can make sound financial decisions, mobilize savings, and contribute ideas on improving economic and financial policies and programs," said the vice chair of the Senate finance committee. The DepEd is also encouraged under the law, to assess and revise the high school economics curriculum to make it more age-appropriate, and ensure that economic and financial education becomes an integral part of formal learning. Meanwhile, the Philippine Information Agency and the Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office are mandated to allot airtime for programs, and to produce and disseminate printed and online materials for economic and financial literacy awareness enhancement. As for the private sector participation, the NEDA, in coordination with the Philippine Economic Society and in partnership with other academic and professional institutions, shall plan, initiate and encourage activities which may be adopted by the private sector and civil society in their respective offices. "A concerted public-private effort must be launched to mainstream economic and financial concepts and boost such literacy among the populace at large," Angara said.Dengvaxia report a cover-up to government fiascos: Partido Liberal stalwarts

Partido Liberal stalwarts questioned the timing of the release of the committee report on the Dengvaxia issue, saying it could be a move to cover up controversies hounding the administration.

This is simply a smokescreen of the administration to hide the issues hounding its officials," said former congressman Erin Tanada, now Partido Liberal's vice president for external affairs.

"Why was the committee report released to the public before it has been filed or sponsored? Are not the signatures of majority of the committee members required before the report can be filed?" Tanada asked.

"What happens to the report if the majority disagrees? Wala pang pirma eh," he added.

Sen. Bam Aquino agreed with Tanada.

"Though this report has not been made available to the members of the Blue Ribbon Committee, if the final report reflects yesterday's statements and political leanings, we will have serious concerns with the conclusions made," Aquino said.

Moreover, the senator reiterated that no child has died due to the Dengvaxia vaccine. "Ang isang mahalaga na lumabas sa presscon kahapon ay wala pang napatutunayan na may batang namatay dahil sa Dengvaxia vaccine," he said.

Tanada pointed out that the release coincided with the impending closure of Boracay Island, the President's order to the House to hasten the impeachment process against Chief Justice Lourdes Sereno, and the rising prices of goods and services.

"Nais na naman nilang ilihis ang isyu mula sa kapalpakan at kontrobersyang bumabalot sa administrasyong ito para matuon sa LP ang galit ng taumbayan," said Tanada.

For his part, Ifugao Rep. Teddy Baguilat doubted the fairness of Gordon's report, saying that it focused mainly on the past administration, but did not dwell on the current government.

"Hindi lang sa nakaraang administrasyon ipinatupad ang bakuna sa Dengvaxia kundi sa kasalukuyang administrasyon. Nakakapagtaka na nakatuon lang ang report ni Sen. Gordon sa nakalipas na administrasyon," said Baguilat.Press Release

April 12, 2018 De Lima bewails impunity of fake news purveyors Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has bewailed the impunity of fake news purveyors who continue to spread false content and misleading information to advance their own personal and political agendas. De Lima, the staunch critic of the government's war on drugs, also abhorred moves by some pro-administration bloggers, such as Mocha Uson, Sass Sasot and RJ Nieto to hide behind the title "blogger" to avoid accountability for spreading disinformation. "You know, I have seen how they react to calls to hold them accountable: 'I'm just a blogger.' 'When I am posting and sharing information as a blogger, I shouldn't be held to be accountable for the consequences of my action,'" she noted. "It's a scary scenario when there are powerful people - and yes, these bloggers are powerful - who are aware of the power they wield, and yet are claiming to be entitled to wield it with impunity to further their own personal and political ends," she added. Uson, Sasot and Nieto of Thinking Pinoy as with other pro-administration bloggers can go far as to use crude language that could be considered offensive if it means defending the administration and attacking its critics. While several lawmakers and political pundits already pointed out that Uson's position as a presidential communications assistant secretary and as a blogger may overlap with the law, her camp reasoned out that her blog did not represent the views of her office. De Lima, a former justice secretary, lamented how there is a very explicit and apparent effort on several pro-administration bloggers' side to wash their hands of any responsibility, if not culpability, for the chaos they created. "By taking this stance, they are not just refusing to apologize or even recognize that they are instrumental in the spread of fake news, in the propagation of hate, intolerance and injustice, and in the damage being done to our democracy," she said. "By taking this stance, that means we cannot even expect them to repent, and make any dependable commitment not to commit the same acts in the future. They are, therefore, incorrigible," she added. In a recent Senate hearing on online fake news, Rappler Chief Executive Officer Maria Ressa underscored how De Lima has been systematically victimized and demonized by fake news peddlers across social media platforms. "You allege corruption. And then you repeat that exponentially. Because if you say a lie 10 times, truth can catch up. But if you say a lie a million times, that becomes the truth," Ressa told Senate probers. Ressa said this procedure or step is followed by using sexual violence as a weapon and finally, she added, "the last step before taking it into the real world--because there have been four waves of these types of attacks, #ArrestLeiladeLima." Last January 2017, De Lima delivered a fiery privilege speech to denounce the unabated proliferation of fake news on the Internet and other social networking sites, where she likened fake news to a "virus" that poisons and corrupts the people's mind.Press Release

April 12, 2018 Dispatch from Crame No. 281:

Sen. Leila M. de Lima's statement on the ongoing VP ballot recount 4/12/18 The Marcos propaganda machine is on full gear in the election protest case Bongbong Marcos filed against Vice President Leni Robredo. This was probably always Bongbong Marcos's gameplan. The key in this propaganda strategy is misinformation to undermine the 2016 elections. This is ironic not only for Bongbong, but for the Marcos family as a whole. These are the same elections that put Duterte in power and who, in turn, revived the moribund Marcos's claim to history by paying tribute to the Marcos legacy and allowing the dictator's burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani. What is sauce for the goose should also be sauce for the gander. But the Marcos argument is that while the elections reflected the true winner for President, its results produced a fake winner for Vice President. According to the spin, this is proven by wet ballots, missing audit logs and voters' receipts, pre-shaded ballots, and grass inside ballot boxes. The allegations are of course patently inconclusive to prove anything remotely related to cheating, much less cheating in favor of VP Leni, that no self-respecting election lawyer would repeat the Marcos propaganda. Only empty vessels like Mocha Uson are ignorant enough to echo the propaganda in copy-pasted form, without even bothering to change the Marcos propaganda press release for some semblance of originality. The truth is that up to the present, and at this late stage of the entire VP election protest saga, Bongbong Marcos is still unable to present any categorical evidence of cheating in VP Robredo's favor, whether perpetrated by her or on her behalf. Like Francis Tolentino's election protest against me, Marcos's protest relies entirely on the acoustics of a well-oiled propaganda blitz. Both are based on empty charges, and repeat the perennial election loser mantra that the evidence that proves that they were cheated is the fact that they lost. It is an argument based on the tautology that losing is equal to having been cheated, when the explanation can be as simple as the more probable occurrence, and which almost always is the fact, that more voters voted for their opponent than them. The bitter truth that cannot be accepted by election losers is the fact that they actually lost, and that their opponents can actually be incapable of cheating, unlike them. This is the second tautological argument of election losers. It goes like this: "Like me, everybody cheats. The fact that I lost means I was cheated." Well, maybe sometimes they lost because they didn't cheat enough. Regardless, whatever tautological argument Marcos uses, the law requires proof. Wet ballots are not enough. Allegations of pre-shaded ballots are not enough. So-called findings of audit logs and voters' receipts not found inside the ballot boxes are not enough. Grass inside ballot boxes is not enough. Resigning Head Revisors is not enough. Like Tolentino, Marcos cannot win his election protest by acoustics alone. Every election lawyer knows that. You win election protests by showing proof during the recount and revision that you actually got more votes than your opponent. Tolentino failed to do that, as I garnered more additional votes than him during the recount / revision. Let us see if Marcos can do better than Tolentino, although I highly doubt that. After automation, successful election protests became hard to come by, precisely because of the difficulty of vote-padding and shaving in the Statements of Votes, where wholesale election cheating was usually done in the past, i.e., during the canvassing of election returns. Not a lot of election protests were successful in proving such kind of wholesale cheating, the kind large enough to reverse election results, since the advent of election automation. There is no reason why this time it would be any different for either Marcos or Tolentino. They should stop exploiting their respective election protests for propaganda ends. They should just admit that they simply lost, and concede. That's what gentlemen would do.Press Release

April 12, 2018 Sen. JV Ejercito Inspects Typhoon Yolanda Housing Project in Tacloban City SENATOR JV Ejercito visits Tacloban City today (Thursday) to conduct an ocular inspection at the government housing projects intended for the victims of Super Typhoon Yolanda which hit and devastated the province in 2013. Ejercito, who chairs the Senate Committee on Urban Planning Housing and Resettlement, is personally assessing the structural stability of the permanent shelters that were already built after receiving numerous complaints regarding the use of sub-standard materials in building the houses. Previous reports in the media also revealed that mediocre structures were found in the designated resettlement areas. Senator Ejercito is also conducting consultations with stakeholders, especially those who are staying in various areas that continuously pose threat to the lives of the people. The areas of concern to be visited are Guadalupe Heights 2 in Barangay San Isidro where numerous sub-standard houses could allegedly be found; New Hope Village in Barangay Sta. Elena which is known as a flood-prone area; and Knightsridge in Barangay Camansihay which is reported to be a landslide-prone area. Ejercito has previously called on the National Housing Authority to fast-track the building of shelters to ensure the safety of the typhoon victims as priority beneficiaries of the project. Out of the 205,128 target units, 67,754 units have been fully completed (33%) and 23,414 units were occupied (11%) as of August of last year. Among the issues that were targeted to be resolved are the slow implementation of the housing project due to lack of sites for the housing, slow conversion of safe sites from agricultural to residential; difficulty in the titling of land; and securing the necessary permits and licenses and other bureaucratic processes. Also part of the pressing issues that needs to be resolved includes the low occupancy rate because of lack of basic utilities and services; no access roads and transportation and no employment and livelihood opportunities. To ensure the resolution of such problems, several recommendations were made, these are: establishment of a better responsive coordinating mechanisms in times of disaster and emergency situations; encourage citizens participation in determining the needs for the recovery and rehabilitation of communities; streamline the process for the issuance of permits and other documents; speed up the housing production; development of schemes in the provision of the housing units to be presented to the victims and immediate release of funds for rehabilitation and reconstruction. Apart from these, the creation of a Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development was proposed to serve as an umbrella agency for all key shelter agencies. This would also harmonize the efforts and streamline the process for faster response. A housing sector blue print will also help considering it conforms with the government transportation master plan. Housing sites should be located in places where the roads, railway systems and transportation structures are in place. This approach will ensure the creation of jobs and livelihood for the people. These areas will be treated as the priority growth areas.Gov't must hype reopening of new improved Boracay as big global event

Boracay's closure could be the "one step backward, two steps forward" strategy which would make the "world's best island better" and whose reopening in October the government should "drumbeat as a global event," Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto said today.

"I think government should market the six-month closure as needed beauty rest and that after 25 weeks, it will wake up more refreshed and rejuvenated," Recto said.

Makeovers are regular occurrences in the hospitality sector, Recto said. "When these facilities re-open, they attract more customers who are curious about the improvements or new attractions. In the end, the income lost during the renovation is immediately recouped," Recto.

"Kahit naman mga sikat na hotel, museums, parks, kapag nag-undergo ng renovation, inaabangan ang muling pagbubukas," he said.

The challenge to the government's communication team, Recto said, is "to hype Boracay's reopening so that the buzz created translates to more hotel and flight bookings."

Recto said government could use the Department of Tourism's P1.15 billion advertising budget for 2018 "to launch a promo blitz that will make Boracay's renaissance an anticipated event in our big tourism markets like China, Korea and Japan."

"Boracay has a huge global fan base who can be lured to revisit the island of their dreams. Pero kung paano gagawin, ito ay trabaho hindi lang ng pamahalaan, ngunit pati ng private sector," he said.

Government, he said, should harness the creativity of Filipinos who are some of the world's heaviest social media users.

"Ang gagaling nating gumawa ng memes. Gawin natin 'yan para sa Boracay. Pero yung positive, para maengganyo ang mga turista na bumalik pagkatapos ng anim na buwan na rehabilitasyon. Tap the social media influencers. At kung sinuman ang mga commanders ng troll armies, masabihan sila na tumulong din," he said.

"Maraming pwedeng gawin. Teasers, countdowns. All the bells and whistles. Pati YouTube posts, which can attract millions of views. Ngunit ngayon pa lang, dapat gawin na ito," he said.

"Government can even declare 2019 as Visit Boracay Year," he added.The New Zealand dollar rose against the US dollar after US President Donald Trump appeared to backtrack on his intention to attack Syria, reviving risk appetite and reducing demand for safe-haven currencies such as the yen.

The kiwi gained to 73.71 US cents as at 8am in Wellington from 73.58 cents late yesterday. It climbed to 79.06 yen, only the second time it has topped 79 yen since late February, from 78.68 yen yesterday. The trade-weighted index rose to 75.65 from 75.43.

Trump tweeted overnight that he "never said when an attack on Syria would take place" in retaliation for Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons against rebels in the country's civil war. That allayed fears of an imminent strike that could have escalated to clashes with Russian forces supporting the al-Assad regime and heightened tensions in the Middle East. Separately US defence secretary Jim Mattis urged caution on Syria. Brent crude oil has edged up to as much as US$72.49 a barrel, the highest since November 2014.

"These developments have supported risk appetite a little and, additionally, speaking to lawmakers, Trump sounded more optimistic on the US-China trade situation, buoyed by President Xis speech earlier this week," Jason Wong, currency strategist at Bank of New Zealand, said in a note. "Market movements have been modest although there is still a notable grind up in the NZD, supported by a better risk backdrop."

Xi talked about an open economy and reduced trade barriers in a speech to an economic forum earlier this week. Adding to more positive sentiment on trade, are reports that Trump has asked trade advisers to investigate a US return to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and comments from Trump that he is happy with progress over NAFTA negotiations.

In New Zealand today, traders will be watching for the March manufacturing PMI report, which is expected to show manufacturing remained in expansion mode last month.

The kiwi rose to 95.07 Australian cents from 94.95 cents late yesterday. It rose to 59.80 euro cents from 59.53 cents after figures showed euro-area industrial production declined for the third straight month. It traded at 51.82 British pence from 51.91 pence and rose to 4.6352 yuan from 4.6181 yuan.

(BusinessDesk)

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The New Zealand government will issue no new exploration permits for offshore oil and gas fields in a historic move to support its commitment to action on climate change.

While some 22 existing offshore oil and gas exploration permits remain in place, with rights to explore and potentially develop any commercial discovery unaffected, the decision signals the endgame for decades of attempts to find major new oil and gas deposits outside the Taranaki Basin, where the offshore Maui, Kupe, Maari, Pohokura, and Tui fields are all producing oil and gas today.

"The coalition government is taking an important step to address climate change and create a clean, green and sustainable future for New Zealand," said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in a statement issued at 5am in coordination with other Ministers and environmental groups.

Greenpeace and the Royal New Zealand Forest and Bird Protection Society both hailed the move.

The decision was " a huge win for our climate and people power," said Greenpeace director and former Green Party leader Russel Norman. "The tide has turned irreversibly against Big Oil in New Zealand."

While the government will again hold a Block Offer tender process for oil and gas exploration permits this year, it will only offer acreage onshore in the Taranaki region.

The announcements come just weeks after global oil giant Shell sold its last remaining oil and gas permits and producing assets in New Zealand to Austrian oil and gas company, OMV, and ending more than a century of activity in New Zealand.

Under the Block Offer system introduced by the previous government in 2012, onshore exploration licences were also offered and granted in other parts of the country, although none had yet led to a commercial oil and gas find.

Ardern stressed the decision had no impact on existing exploration and mining permit holders' property rights.

"We are protecting existing exploration and mining rights. No current jobs will be affected by this as we are honouring all agreements with current permit holders. We are providing certainty for communities and industry ... with a managed transition" away from the production of fossil fuels.

"There are 31 oil and gas exploration permits currently active, 22 are offshore. These permits cover an area of 100,000 square kilometres ... and run out as far as 2030 and go an additional 40 years under a mining permit."

These include deepwater prospects off the coast of Canterbury and Otago, including the Great South Basin, where exploration has occurred off and on since the 1960s in search for a massive oil and gas field that geological information suggests is probably there, but has never been found.

Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones last week announced a package of measures for the Taranaki region from the government's Provincial Growth Fund, in a move that can now be seen as having laid the groundwork for today's announcement, including support for turning Taranaki into a model province for " clean energy" production.

New Zealand First's support for the move was conditional on protection for existing oil and gas rights holders, said Jones.

"With 10 years' worth of natural gas consented, plus potentially billions of dollars of natural gas reserves permitted but yet to be consented, we can ensure economic returns and security of supply," he said. "This just transition will not happen overnight, so there is no need for scaremongering and while it will undoubtedly pose challenges, it also provides opportunity through investment in new technology and new industries."

(BusinessDesk)

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Ending new exploration permits for offshore oil and gas deposits uses the wrong tool for the right target, says the BusinessNZ Energy Council, a sub-group of Business New Zealand, the country's peak business lobby group.

The policy was "crude and unnecessary" and "blights New Zealands entire energy sector," the council's executive director, John Carnegie said. "There will be no overall reduction in global emissions and potentially an increase in emissions as a result of this ban as global exploration from places with lower environmental standards fills the gap left by our reduced output.

"This is a strong signal to investors that they will respond to immediately, not some time in the future. All plans, current and future, will now be reconsidered in light of this decision, especially when combined with the prospect of a higher future carbon price."

Government ministers announced the decision as a starting point for a 30-year transition away from fossil fuels in pursuit of a net zero emissions economy by 2050, arguing the announcement would assist a "just transition" and reduce the impact on affected communities by giving a long timeframe to adapt. No existing exploration or production rights are affected by the decision, which will see no new offshore exploration permits issued, onshore exploration permits issued only in the Taranaki region, and a review of onshore exploration in three years' time.

The decision sparked a snap debate in Parliament in which Opposition MPs sought to portray the government's coalition partner, New Zealand First, as a reluctant participant in the decision, despite Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones stoutly defending the policy as necessary if the country was to make serious efforts to prepare for a low-carbon future.

However, Carnegie said the policy undermined the emissions trading scheme, and that the BEC believed "market mechanisms are better than bans".

"We also wonder why this decision was not given to the about-to-be-established Interim Climate Commission, especially in light of the work it will do on the 100 percent renewable electricity target. Its options have been foreclosed and this potentially puts the political long-term durability that has been signalled as so important - and which business seeks - at risk."

Meanwhile, the chief executive of BusinessNZ, Kirk Hope, said the new policy would raise questions in investors' minds about the viability of investing in New Zealand.

"If a multi-billion dollar energy industry can be banned, what other industries might face the same fate? Confidence among both overseas and domestic investors may be the longer-term casualty of todays decision," said Hope.

With only around 10 years of known supplies of natural gas in domestic gas fields, major users could expect to face "higher gas prices because of the restriction in supply, raising costs for enterprises that use gas for their operations".

Companies such as Fonterra, NZ Steel, and Methanex "may find their products less competitive in world markets," he said.

Methanex, the Canadian-owned producer of methanol from natural gas at a Think Big-era plant and the country's largest gas user, has yet to comment. It began winding down production in New Zealand in the mid-2000s when it appeared that gas supplies were running low, but ramped up investment at its plants at Motonui and Waitara as gas supply improved.

Hope's statement made no mention of electricity companies, which use natural gas to fire fast-starting 'peaker' power stations to augment supply when hydro-electricity and wind resources are insufficient to meet demand.

The electricity industry has shifted away from investment in natural gas since the mid-2000s, investing heavily instead in geothermal and wind production, with numerous such projects unbuilt, awaiting increased electricity demand.

The National Party's energy and climate change spokespeople, Jonathan Young and Todd Muller, described the government's decision as "economic vandalism" that would "ensure the demise of an industry that provides over 8000 high paying jobs and $2.5 billion for the economy.

This decision is devoid of any rationale. It certainly has nothing to do with climate change. These changes will simply shift production elsewhere in the world, not reduce emissions.

Gas is used throughout New Zealand to ensure security of electricity supply to every home in New Zealand. Our current reserves will last less than 10 years  when they run out we will simply have to burn coal instead, which means twice the emissions."

BusinessNZ's Hope said the government faced an important test in its commitment to nurturing new, high value businesses to replace the oil and gas sector.

The decision to allow existing permits to continue was important "as doing otherwise would have had a potentially devastating effect on investment into New Zealand".

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the government has tasked the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment with coordinating plans to ensure new, high value, high wage industries emerge to replace oil and gas, saying that engineering firms currently working in the sector had transferrable skills into other areas of infrastructure.

(BusinessDesk)

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Banning new offshore gas exploration "has significant implications for long-term gas supply" says Methanex New Zealand, which uses around 40 percent of all natural gas produced in this country to manufacture methanol, mainly for export.

The Canadian-owned company operates plants built in the early 1980s 'Think Big' era of government-led petro-chemical industrial development, at Waitara and Motonui, using gas piped ashore from offshore Taranaki gas fields.

Those fields will continue to produce for as long as they are commercially viable, but official estimates of remaining reserves suggest New Zealand has only another 10-to-11 years of known gas reserves, although exploration and mining permits already issued and unaffected by this week's announcements run through, in some cases, to the mid-2040s.

Methanex echoed other major gas users, saying it was "disappointed over the governments decision to end offshore block offers and the lack of consultation with industry that has gone into making this decision".

"While the announcement does not affect production at our Taranaki sites in the short term, it has significant implications for long-term gas supply and electricity supply security in New Zealand," the Methanex statement said. The company wound back production in the mid-2000s when a shortage of natural gas was being foreshadowed, but with new supplies becoming available and reduced demand for gas from the electricity industry, it has more recently ramped production up again.

In a note to clients, Woodward Partners energy analyst John Kidd said there was increasing speculation of a significant pending downgrade to existing Taranaki Basin gas reserves.

If that occurred, that could "materially impact the forward investment decision-making of gas market super-heavyweight Methanex".

"Central to that decision-making is forward gas availability and its take on development and exploration pipelines.

"While we don't expect the announcement to materially impact Methanex's decision-making over its pending Waitara Valley turnaround, scheduled for late 2018, the next cycle of investment decisions in 2021-22 now likely face a higher hurdle."

In a separate statement, the Major Gas Users Group said: Our members rely upon a secure and competitively priced supply of significant quantities of natural gas to meet their energy and feedstock requirements. The announcement has cast uncertainty over the prospects for gas as the government seeks to transition the economy to address climate change.

MGUG represents fertiliser manufacturer Ballance Agri-Nutrients, pulp and paper maker Oji Fibre Solutions, dairy cooperative Fonterra Cooperative Group, New Zealand Steel, and New Zealand Refining, which operates the Marsden Point oil refinery.

The group would be seeking ministerial meetings to detail the significance of the decision for major gas users "so that the importance of gas, including within regional and the wider national economy is clearly understood," said the group spokesman, Richard Hale, from oil and gas consultancy Hale and Twomey.

"For example, uncertainty around supply in the context of long-term capital investments made (and pending) in gas plant, could see the need to import gas, something which has been proposed in the past."

Methanex's operations represent around a quarter of total production by the company, which is the world's largest methanol producer. The company says it contributes some $84 million annually to the New Zealand economy, and employs some 270 people directly and a wide range of Taranaki-based engineering and other services.

"We strongly believe that natural gas has a global role to play in reducing emissions and a transition to a lower carbon economy, and that the continued production of methanol in New Zealand plays a positive role in this transition," the company statement said.

The Council of Trade Unions, meanwhile, issued a statement calling on the oil and gas industry to "face the facts" and support a "just transition" that would give people employed in a sunset industry the opportunity to move into other sectors.

"We know change is coming, its inevitable, and we are going to create high-paying sustainable jobs that match peoples skills," said CTU president Richard Wagstaff. "You would almost think from the reaction from the oil and gas industry that the rug was being pulled out from under working people overnight. The government and the union movement have been very clear that a transition plan, particularly for affected regions is the right way to go."

The communications spokesman for New Zealand Oil & Gas, John Pagani, tweeted in response that "not a single worker in the industry supports the statement of the NZCTU today, supposedly on behalf of workers in the industry".

(BusinessDesk)

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Communications Minister Clare Curran wants to expand New Zealand's international cyber-security efforts and is considering publicly naming-and-shaming state-sponsored attacks as a deterrent in a review of the government's strategy.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet's National Cyber Policy Office will lead the review of the 2015 strategy as a rising volume of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats have coincided with greater connectivity. The strategy review will assess the nature of cyber-security risk, including the impact of new technologies and what constitutes international best practice.

"Its timely for us to step up New Zealands cyber-security efforts so that we are not left vulnerable to cyber intrusion and to refresh the 2015 strategy so we can deal with increasingly bold, brazen and disruptive threats," Curran said in a statement. "We must protect the information and network systems that are vital to our economic growth, ensure the integrity and security of our increasingly digitalised government services and make sure Kiwis can interact online without suffering harm."

The Government Communications Security Bureau's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recorded a 17 percent increase in cyber threats to 396 in the year ended June 30, 2017, and estimated its Cortex malware disruption defence saved the country almost $40 million from online attacks. Of those attacks, 122 were linked to state-sponsored groups.

In a March 27 Cabinet committee paper, Curran recommended expanding New Zealand's international cyber efforts, which would probably need additional resources, saying the country needs to be heard in a global dialogue on acceptable state behaviour in cyberspace.

"We will need to consider the mechanisms available to us to dissuade or deter malicious cyber activities, particularly where it is state-sponsored or state condoned," Curran said. "This includes the option of publicly attributing malicious cyber activity as a way of holding states to account."

If New Zealand attracts global recognition in managing cyber-security risk, it could "enhance New Zealands reputation as a stable, innovative and safe environment in which to invest, find business partners, and do research and development."

Curran said the government needs a "hand-in-hand partnership with the private sector and non-government organisations" and is considering setting up advisory boards or a cyber- security council.

She also wants the look at whether New Zealand Police can build closer ties with international cybercrime units, such as those in Europol and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and whether to accede to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, known as the Budapest Convention.

Curran intends to report back to the Cabinet External Relations and Security Committee - Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Deputy PM Winston Peters and ministers Grant Robertson, Andrew Little, and David Parker - by July 31 with a revised strategy, which she expects to see first in early July.

The review comes a week after Little, the minister responsible for the GCSB and Security Intelligence Service, told a security conference the government is currently considering how to best expand the Cortex services beyond the 66 nationally significant public and private sector organisations currently receiving them.

GCSB ran a pilot with Vodafone New Zealand rolling out the Cortex system, which uses top-of-the-line technology, to a small number of the internet service providers' commercial customers. The intelligence agency's report on the trial to Cabinet showed the system could significantly dent malicious software incursions.

Curran's cabinet paper said the GCBS unit would submit recommendations on the future form of the Cortex malware disruption capability in March 2018.

(BusinessDesk)

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The New Zealand dollar stuck to a tight range as global sentiment was weighed down by the threat of imminent US military action in Syria.

The kiwi traded at 73.58 US cents as at 5pm in Wellington from 73.53 cents at 8am and 73.46 cents late yesterday. The trade-weighted index edged up to 75.43 from 75.28.

New Zealand's currency spent the local trading session in a 24 basis point range after investors were rattled by US President Donald Trump declaring that missiles will be coming in Syria and that the White House said "all options are on the table" in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, according to the BBC. UK Prime Minister Theresa May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in action led by the US, the BBC reported.

"The market is on tenterhooks to do with the US response to Syria and the alleged gas attacks," said Michael Johnston, a senior trader at HiFX.

The kiwi may have also gotten some support from local data such as the stronger-than-expected lift in March spending on electronic cards. Seasonally adjusted total retail spending on credit and debit cards increased 1 percent in March, Statistics New Zealand said. Economists polled by Bloomberg expected a lift of 0.5 percent.

Johnston said, however, the main drivers remain offshore, something he expects to continue.

The kiwi rose to 94.95 Australian cents from 94.76 Australian cents late yesterday and had outperformed its trans-Tasman counterpart in recent sessions due to the potential impact of a global trade war across the Tasman being greater than in New Zealand. Johnston said the cross-rate looked "stretched and unstainable" around these levels and he expects it to "come right back," noting the historical average is closer to 85 Australian cents.

The kiwi gained to 4.6181 yuan from 4.6144 yuan late yesterday and rose to 51.91 British pence from 51.79 pence. The kiwi traded at 59.53 euro cents from 59.40 cents and was little changed at 78.68 yen from 78.62 yen.

New Zealand's two-year swap rate lifted 3 basis points to 2.28 percent and the 10-year swap rate eased 1 basis point to 3.13 percent.

(BusinessDesk)

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.-- Over 300 "Staten Island Hustle" supporters gathered at Angelina's Ristorante in Tottenville on Wednesday night for CNBC's official season premiere party.

The borough-based reality TV series follows five local business men looking for the next big idea to make big bucks: Dom Detore, Ron Montana, Adolfo LaCola, Tony D and Mike Palmer.

The show aired Wednesday night as hundreds of guests, cast, crew, fellow reality TV stars (i.e. Drita D'Avanzo of VH1's "Mob Wives," Angelina Pivarnick of MTV's "Jersey Shore" and Kareem Fathalla of MTV's "Are You The One?") enjoyed a glamorous premiere bash at the upscale eatery.

Michael Cox of the New York Giants -- who says he currently lives in Staten Island -- also attended the event in support of the homegrown "Hustle."

Walking in to the celebration felt like a slice of Hollywood on the South Shore. A photo-op "red-carpet" was set up for guests to enjoy before walking into the party hall. The premiere room had multiple flat screen TVs playing "Staten Island Hustle." (BTW: This event had TWO bars. That's how fancy this shindig was.)

'HUSTLE' CREW REMEMBER BIG ANG

Yep, they may be considered big names now -- but their heart will always be with their families on Staten Island. Bringing it back home: A photo of Angela "Big Ang" Raiola was framed for all to gaze upon once they walked into the party.

"She would've loved this," an event attendee told Janine Detore, Big Ang's sister. "She would be so proud."

BTW: Page Six reports Detore is in the process of writing her own book, revolving around her life with and without her Big sister.

"It's about what it was like to grow up with Big Ang," Detore tells SILive at the "Hustle" premiere. "I was never in the shadow. We always walked side by side and she still walks by my side, even if it is in spirit."

SO, HERE'S HOW THE EPISODE WENT DOWN

As many expected, it was full of off-the-wall ideas.

From a $20,000 investment in salad dressing to a machine that makes New York quality water (therefore insuring superior pizza dough), there is almost nothing off limits for these deep-pocket borough guys.

Keep reading for our play-by-play of the first-ever episode of "Staten Island Hustle." Fair warning: This post is full of spoilers. Sorry, not sorry.

DEEP DISH WITH DEEP IDEAS

"On Staten Island, New York, you're either a hustler or getting hustled."That's how the episode begins.

In a deep, raspy Italian accent, Dom Detore, introduces his long-time friends and business partners Ron Montana, Adolfo LaCola, Tony D and Mike Palmer.

Janine Detore, Dom's fashionista daughter, also joins the crew as a Staten Island Hustlette.

The camera pans to the guys at Angelina's in Tottenville, a place where they meet once a week to discuss business. Of course, there is an elaborate antipasto spread in the middle of the table. They dub this get-together the "Meeting of the minds."

FROM THE TABLE TO THE BANK

Mike, Adolfo and Ron recruit the help of Greencrown Water Systems in Belleville, N.J., to help make their water machine a reality.

The guys meet with microbiologist Dr. Emmanual Moya and Greencrown CEO Paul Errigo to decipher if it's possible to duplicate New York water. "It's about the character of the water," Moya says.

Moya, in a long-winded scientific explanation, says yes, New York water can be duplicated by using any outside agua by adjusting the pH levels. If they match New York standards, you've got yourself some good water.

The prototype costs $60K and between the five of them, they say it's chump change.

DID THE 'HUSTLERS' GET HUSTLED?

These guys may be street smart but when it came to the science, they got hustled.

Errigo manages to slip in that his company filed the patent weeks in advance and has full ownership of the "New York Water Maker." If you couldn't guess, the guys were not thrilled to hear this news.

"Who is this guy? What's he doin' right now?" says Montana, adding that he "saw red" in that moment. After a few moments (and a commercial break) to calm down, the Hustlers decided to play -- and pay -- along to buy machines from Errigo to sell to businesses outside New York, like the Denino's Pizzeria in Aberdeen, N.J.

The guys ventured to the Amish country (then back to New Jersey), bringing back a sample of New York water to test. The results were unsurprisingly noticeable. When the guy went to Mikey's Bagels in Tottenville for a consumer test, the results showed people love New York Water bagels.

INTRODUCING: '3-D' SALAD DRESSING

"Just Add Lettuce" is marketed as a "3-D salad dressing." Yes, you're reading that right. Detore says he invested $20K in this confusing idea that, in the end, seemed to have potential.

When he introduced his latest investment to his family, his seven children and wife were less than pleased. The overwhelming taste of oregano turned Janine off instantly, even saying she'd rather birth another baby than take a bite of "Just Add Lettuce."

Another critique the kids concerned the choice in spokesman, i.e. Dom: "You don't have that salad body. You have cookie dough gut," said one of Detore's children.

Wow, tell 'em how you really feel, kid. I will say, this scene encompasses this Staten Island family in true form. In the midst of chaos, shouting from across the kitchen table to each other, Dom's family gave him the honest advice he would otherwise have to go searching for.

Because if anyone is going to help you hustle, it's your fam.

To get some more feedback, Dom and Janine put the product out to the public, holding a tasting at Family Fruit in Midland Beach. To Janine's surprise, the reaction from customers was positive and some even snagged a jar right then and there.

Anthony Mongiello, who calls himself "The Big Cheese," explained the "3-D" aspect of this product comes from the height of the dressing compared to simply liquid-based dressing.

"Just Add Lettuce" contains olives, cheese and fresh produce, according to the infommercial. Detore thought it was high time to spruce up the marketing and shoot an updated commercial -- including, of course, Mongiello.

The crew consisted of Detore's filmmaker friend and college students as production assistants. And no, it did not go as smoothly as Detore hoped. But like all reality TV, everything works out in the end. At the end of "Staten Island Hustle's" first episode, "Just Add Lettuce" sold 10 cases to a local food supply store, which was a mini-victory for Detore.

MISSED THE EPISODE?

No worries. Visit CNBC.com/staten-island-hustle/ for air times and updates on the show. We'll be posting weekly recaps on new Wednesday episodes. "Staten Island Hustle" is on CNBC at 10 p.m. EST.WATCH THE VIDEO!

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- It's never too early to start planning your weekend: Keep scrolling for live music, theatre, visual art, restaurant deals, community spirit & more coming up around the borough.

But first: Check out our weekly ramshackle social media blast above. #SILive report. #EmbraceTheCheese #ItsAllAboutOptions

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Pamela Silvestri

Dine out for Hunger on the North Shore: April 12

Last year, Project Hospitality served more than 1.7 million meals to Staten Islanders in need.

Help the organization continue its mission by taking part in the 20th annual Dine Out Against Hunger event, which unites restaurants with people who are hungry to make a difference.

More than 110 participating restaurants will donate 20 percent of profits for the day to Project Hospitality.

All you need to do is order, eat and enjoy the fact that you're lending a hand to an organization that does so much for so many.

Sponsoring the event are Borough President James Oddo, the Staten Island Advance, Catering by Framboisee, Driscoll Foods, Northfield Bank, SYSCO Food Services of Metro NY and Ashkar Corporation.

Co-chairs are Claire Regan and Paul Montello.

April 12 is the Dine Out Against Hunger event takes place on the North Shore.

Can't make it? No worries: There will be Dine Out events on April 19 (Mid-Island) and April 26 (South Shore), as well.

For a full list of participating restaurants, visit

.

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'Queen' cover band at St. George Theatre: April 12

Legends never die; and with Gary Mullen & The Works, the music of Queen lives on.

The classic rock cover band takes to St. George Theatre Thursday, April 12.

Here's the band bio: In 2000, Gary Mullen won ITV's "Stars In Their Eyes" Live Grand Finale, with the largest number of votes ever received in the show's history. The record of 864,838 votes was more than twice that of the runner-up. Gary began touring on his own and in 2002 formed a band "The Works," to pay tribute to rock legends Queen.

St. George Theatre is located at 35 Hyatt Street. The show begins at 8 p.m., doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets range in price from $39-$59. More information at StGeorgeTheatre.com.

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Island Voice's Youth Empowerment Summit: April 13

The annual summit is hitting the road to alert the community about college readiness, technology, financial management and civic engagement from 3-8 p.m. Friday, April 13. This event is free but registering through EventBrite is necessary.

Here's the schedule:

3 to 4 p.m. St. George Theatre

4 to 5 p.m. 2018 Campus Locations ( St. George Library, Satander Bank, Staten Island Borough Hall, 120 Stuyvesant Place )

5 to 5:30 p.m. Dinner.

5:30 to 6 p.m. Awards Ceremony

6 to 8 p.m. St George Theater Technology Summit & Performances

St. George Library: WorkForce Development and Innovation at CSI Workshop.

Staten Island Borough Hall: Civic Engagement Discussion led by Mayors Office. Panelists will include representatives from Partnership For Parks, NYC Controller's Office.

Satander Bank: Financial Management workshop.

120 Stuyvesant Place: Department of Education - STEM /STEAM workshop.

BTW: First FIVE community and dance groups to sign up will compete and represent your school. The winning group will receive $1,000, trophy, and bragging rights. Music will be mixed by DJ Fussyman and DJ H20.

The 2018 Awardees: Shirley Chisholm Award - Tamar Mannaseh ( Founder of M.A.S.K - Mother Against Senseless Killing); Island Voice Cultural Enrichment Award - Wagner High School Multicultural Dance Club; Capt. John Jackson Award - Calvin Cress ( Organizer of Curtis High School and Port Richmond High School Youth Summit); The Habiba Halilu Cultural Excellence - Domenic Recchia (Original Supporter of the Youth Empowerment Summit).

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Also part of April 13's Youth Summit: William Starda Perry will lead "Social Media and Starting A Business (How Technology Can Help You Maximize Your Dollar)" from 4:30 to 4:40 at the St. George Theatre.

Look for more of Starda's #WeJustWorkin College Tour events on April 14 and April 22.

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Kathryn Carse

Arts & crafts for toddlers at the Greenbelt: April 12

This workshop is geared toward toddlers.

The Greenbelt Nature Center is holding this mix of crafts and storytelling so kids and their guardians can become familiar with the sights and sounds of the forest.

Admission is $3 for the public, free for Greenbelt members. The Greenbelt Nature Center is located at 700 Rockland Avenue at Brielle Avenue. For more information, visit NYCGovParks.org.

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Courtesy of Too Many Cats

Too Many Cats, BackUp perform at Cargo: April 13

Local bands Too Many Cats and BackUp are jamming out at 120 Bay Cafe -- fondly known as Cargo -- in St. George.

Too Many Cats, billed as "some guys formed a band in a basement," cite musical influences like Led Zeppelin and Smashing Pumpkins.

The rock band is led by Owen Loscar as vocals, Anthony Montagnino as lead Guitar, Johnny Viola on bass guitar and Backing Vocals and Nick Lippa on drums and percussion.

BackUp is self-described as a "softcore punk." Bandmates are Tim Brown, Pat, Weston Douglas and Kaitlyn.

The bar show takes place on Friday, April 13 (Yep. Black cats, Friday the 13th. It's gonna be CRAZY. Crazy good, I mean.) at 9:30 p.m.

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"Breaking Throught Barriers" art installation. Historic Richmond town. Autism Awareness month Posted by Scott LoBaido on Monday, April 9, 2018

LoBaido's art for autism awareness: Up through April

Patriot artist Scott LoBaido's "Breaking Through Barriers"

art installation is up throughout April at Historic Richmond Town in honor of Autism Awareness Month.

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Hamilton Park House Concerts welcomes "Bluebirds of Paradise" -- Chrissi Poland and Ari Hest -- as they perform at the unconventional concert space on April 15, 2018. Tickets are $25.

Hamilton Park House is located at 29 Harvard Ave. in New Brighton. For more information on any of the shows listed and how to snag your tickets, email rayheff@mac.com or call 718- 815-0815.

COMING SOON: "Darden Smith" performs on April 22, 2018. The show starts at 3 p.m. and tickets are $20.

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Restaurant deals for Autism Awareness Month: All of April

April is Autism Awareness month. And, as the Staten Island food community does, our restaurants rallied with deals and discounts on select days with highlighted food and drink items.

Click HERE for a full list of participating eateries.

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Staten Island Advance/Tracey Porpora

'Unheard Of' music at Flagship: Fridays

Want to hear new music and drink locally? Mike Levay of Flagship Brewing Co. has an option for you.

Every Friday, Levay will play new music releases for the gems that populate the playlist for "Unheard Of," a monthly evening of strictly new music at Flagship Brewery in Tompkinsville, 40 Minthorne Street.

Expect to hear March/April's best tracks (at a conversation-friendly volume) from all genres as you enjoy fresh brews directly from the source in the laid-back candle-lit taproom.

The selection will play from 8 to 11 p.m. at 40 Minthorne St. in Tompkinsville.

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Port Richmond is 'Our Town': April 13-22

SIST's American Classic Series' latest production of goes up April 13-15, 20-12 in the new stage space at the Reformed Church of Staten Island, 54 Port Richmond Ave.

"Our Town" transports the audience through time to a Port Richmond theatre in 1938, which is when Thornton Wilder wrote this meta-theatrical masterpiece.

Through the guidance of an analogue wizard/genius, and H.G. Wells-inspired Stage Manager, the story is told of the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners through the everyday lives of its citizens. Minimalist and tragic, "Our Town" is a microcosm of the cycles of life, which Staten Island is no stranger to, and reminds the audience of the preciousness and universality of daily life for all generations and cultures."

Showtimes: April 13-15 and April 20- 22. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m.

General admission tickets are $25 for adults; students and seniors, $20. For tickets and additional information, visit SIShakespeare.org.

Directed by Frank Williams and featuring:

Amanda Rose Benjamin

Gary Bradley

Phillip Cosentino

Nikki Dos Santos

Dan Duffy

Frank Duffy

Mitch Maglio

Ariel Marcus

Cheryl McLeod

Amy Puleo

Melanie Randall

Talia Saraceno

Barbara Scalici

Rina Sklar

Charles Sullivan

Robert Vaccaro

Israel Wasserstein

Frank West



Assistant Director/Stage

Manager: Keith Gregory Taylor

Assistant Stage Manager/Costume Design: Meredith Sladek

Lighting Design: Chelsea Smith

Sound Design: Joseph Pecora

Graphic Design: Christopher Sorrentino

Master Carpenter: Robert Yuzuk

Producer: Cara S. Liander

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We're ready to fill the house! Did you get your tickets to Our Town yet? Posted by Staten Island Shakespearean Theatre Company on Friday, March 30, 2018

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Gawk at 'Reflections' starting Friday: April 13

"Reflections," a borough-wide public art initiative was unveiled at the Staten Island Zoo this week.

Each of the featured 13 statues -- made possible via partnership of Richmond County Savings Foundation, the Zoo, Richmond County Savings Bank and the Staten Island Advance -- represent borough-centric design, created by Staten Island artists.

"The artists caught what we were trying to do," said Staten Island Economic Development Corporation CEO Cesar Claro at the unveiling ceremony. "They understand that it's about reflecting Staten Island to the world. The pieces reflect different things going on in the borough; different cultures, they really take everything in."

Starting Friday, Staten Islanders can visit these sculptures around Staten Island. Here are the locations.

Baseball : Richmond County Savings Bank, 1214 Castleton Ave.

Deer : Richmond County Savings Bank, 2875 Veterans Road West.

Dog : Richmond County Savings Bank, 645-100 Rossville Ave, Ste 100.

Eagle : Richmond County Savings Bank, 282 Port Richmond Ave.

Heart : Richmond County Savings Bank, 1270 Clove Road.

Horse : Hampton Inn & Suites 9/11 Memorial, 1120 South Ave.

Lighthouse : National Lighthouse Museum, 200 Promenade at Lighthouse Point.

Peacock : Richmond County Savings Bank, 1460 Richmond Ave.

Runner : Richmond County Savings Bank, 1785 Victory Boulevard.

Train : Richmond County Savings Bank, 2555 Richmond Ave.

Turkey : Richmond County Savings Bank, 1833 Hylan Boulevard.

Turtle : Richmond County Savings Bank, 4523 Amboy Road.

Wolf: Staten Island Zoo, 614 Broadway.

CONTEST ALERT: If you're an art lover looking to make some extra cash, this could be your time to shine. Richmond County Savings Foundation presents a "Reflections Family Contest" for those who visit all 13 locations and document their trips around Staten Island.

Whats up for grabs: A trip for four to Florida, valued at $5,000; a shopping spree at the Staten Island Mall, valued at $2,000; a bowling party at Rab's Country Lanes, valued at $1,000; a Costco shopping spree, valued at $1,000; and gift certificates to Gerald Peters and Casale Jewelers, valued at $1,000.

For rules and more information, check out our "Reflections" coverage here.

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Romance.com IRL at The Little Victory Theatre: April 12-14

BTW: For those living offline, IRL means "In real life."

"Romance.com," an original play written by Joe Simonelli, takes the stage of The Little Victory Theatre in Travis this weekend.

Here's the description: If ever there was a subject for musical comedy it's internet dating, When Alan Fisher meets Pam Bass on an internet dating service, the notes of love are found, keystroke by keystroke. Throw in Alan's pessimistic best friend Bill, his black-sheep father Steve, Pam's best friend Linda and skeptical mother Katie and you have a romantic mix that is sure to entertain. Eleven original songs.

Show times are April 12, 13, 14 at 8 p.m. Tickets go for $20, $17 for students and seniors. Call 347-355-8989 for reservations.

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Photo by Jonathan Blanc

Free 'Anti-prom' for teens in New Dorp: April 13

S.I. teens: This one is for you.

Come dance the night away at the New Dorp Library to kick off the first-ever Staten Island Anti-Prom on Friday, April 13.

Masks are not required, but awesome and welcome. In addition to a DJ, there will be a photo booth, snacks, crafts, games, and other activities.

Anti-Prom provides an alternative, safe space for teens regardless of your sexuality, gender identity, the way you dress or any other reason.

Also, this event will be videotaped and photos will be taken. By attending this event you agree any videos/photographs in which you appear may be used by the Library.

This event is free, welcoming those ages 12- 18 years old only. Proof of age required. All bags must be checked. New Dorp Library is located at 309 New Dorp Lane.

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Booze & bites with brainteasers

Need some bar trivia in your life? Here are our suggestions on Staten Island.

Up first: The Phunky Elephant Gastropub invites Staten Islanders to "The Office" themed trivia night, starting at 9 p.m. Thursday

Call to reserve your spot: 718-448-4282.

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Sea View Playwright's Theatre plays 'Good' this weekend: April 13- 21

Sea View Playwrights Theatre presents "Good," A Play with Live Music by C.P. Taylor.

Here's the description: "Set in pre-war Germany, it shows how John Halder, a liberal-minded professor whose best friend is the Jewish Maurice, could not only be seduced into joining the Nazism, but step-by-rationalized-step end up embracing the final solution justifying to his conscience the terrible actions."

The show is directed by Tina Barone & Andrew Monteleone.

Now, for the cast: John Halder- Michael Robert Anderson; Anne- Victoria Gullo; Mother- Regina Paleau; Maurice- Jim Walsh; Doctor/Dispatcher/Eichmann Patrick O'Connor; Helen- Jessica Davies; Hitler/Boq- Matt Provenzano; Bouller- Kenny Harvey; Major/Freddie- Nathan Ullrich and Sister/Elizabeth- Laura Grass.

Performances: April 13, 14, 20 and 21 at 8 p.m.; April 15 at 3 p.m. Tickets: are $22, $20 for students/seniors. For more information, visit svpt.brownpapertickets.com. Tickets are also available 20 minutes before showtime.

FYI: This production is made possible, in part, by an Encore Grant from Staten Island Arts with additional funding from NYSCA.

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Photo by Karen O'Donnell

'Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry' with Sundog Theatre: April 14-22

Sundog Theatre presents "Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry 2018," from April 14-22 at New Dorp Moravian Church Theatre.

"Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry" is Sundog Theatre's signature presentation of new, original, one-act plays about the iconic Staten Island Ferry boats.

Directors for this year's edition of Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry are Barbara Brandt, Joseph Daly, Karen O'Donnell, Paul Smith, Lisa Tinglum, and Ken Tirado. Scenes is designed by Stephen Fehr (set and lighting). Marisa Monte is Production Stage Manager.

"Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry in my opinion is a unique theatre experience," said O'Donnell. "It is an opportunity to view new work, each of the six short pieces offers comedy, drama, some life lessons and they are carefully chosen and well acted.

"But I do believe the best part is that just about every audience member has had some experience with the Staten Island Ferry so the plays are uniquely relatable to all who come to see them."

The cast for Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry features Mary St. Angelo, Doug Aspinwall, Peter Celos, Elizabeth Claflin, James Cunningham, Thomas Dieter, Jeremiah Jurkiewicz, Alexis Leary, Dori Levit, Yurika Ohno, Brandon Shockey, Michael Somogyi, and Javan Zapata.

Performances of Scenes from the Staten Island Ferry 2018 are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. at New Dorp Moravian Church Theatre, 2205 Richmond Road. Tickets go for $18, $20.

Want more info? Check out our preview of these "Ferry" tales set to hit the stage HERE.

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Phoebe Blue, Dolltits & more at Search Party Studio: April 14

Darkseed Entertainment hosts a live music show featuring a lineup of local artists at Search Party Studio in Stapleton on Saturday, April 14.

Those taking the stage are Phoebe Blue & the Make Baleaves (whose music could be found here! The video above was shot by Staten Island Advance/SILive's Shira Stoll), American Anymen, Dolltits, Clinical Trials and Timothy Dark & The Indestructible Characters.

The show begins at 8 p.m. at 71 Wave St. Admission is $6.

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Cause and the Effects at Play Sports Bar: April 14

Play Sports Bar welcomes veteran cover band Cause and the Effects to Annadale Saturday, April 14. Live music starts at 11 p.m.

A special addition: Steve LaRocca of The Bandulos will play the saxophone with one of the borough's best party bands.

Play Sports Bar is located at Sneden Ave.

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Tree planting at Conference House Park: April 14

Volunteer with the Stewardship Team this Saturday, April 14, to plant trees in Conference House Park from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Volunteers will be trained in proper planting techniques.

Come dressed in sturdy boots or shoes, long pants, and clothing that can get dirty. Please bring your own water bottle. Space is limited and registration is required for this event. Volunteers under 18 must be accompanied by a chaperone.

FYI: Trees provide many benefits to New Yorkers, including improved air and water quality, reduced pollution, and lower energy costs. So, Happy planting!

This event is free and open to the public. Volunteers should meet at Conference House Park, between Billop Avenue and Swinnerton Street. For more information, visit NYCGovPark.org.

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Art exhibit from World War II vet at Wagner College: April 10- April 15

Gregory Perillo, a World War II veteran, donated 33 paintings about the Holocaust to the Wagner College Holocaust Center in 2017.

Now, students and Staten Islanders can come see the collection on the Grymes Hill campus at the Horrmann Library Spotlight Gallery.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Perillo is best known for his paintings of Native Americans and the Vietnam war. He lived on Staten Island for 90 years.

He had been considering painting images of the Holocaust when he ran into Murray Berman. With encouragement from Lori Weintrob, he began to research images in photographs and in films like "Defiance" and "Schindler's List."

The mission of the WCHC is to awaken awareness of the ramifications of prejudice, anti-Semitism and racism and of the dynamism of Jewish culture.

The opening will be at Wagner College Hormann Library Spotlight Gallery at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 10. Gregory's son, Steve Perillo, and his sister Lucy Buttermark will be speaking on his behalf during an earlier event in Manzulli Board Room, Foundation Hall at 6 p.m., including a candle lighting and 30-minute film on Holocaust survivors created by SILive's multi-media specialist Shira Stoll.

This week marks Holocaust Remembrance and Heroism day.

Wagner College is located at 1 Campus Road. For more information contact Wagner College Holocaust Center director Lori R. Weintrob at 718-390-3309 or lori.weintrob@wagner.edu.

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Pride Center of S.I. celebrates SWAN Day: April 14

Pride Center of Staten Island in Tompkinsville celebrates women artists for SWAN Day on April 14 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

This year, the Pride Center is teaming up with youth from GRRL POWER, a group focusing on support for LGBTQ and allied young women and gender non-conforming youth ages 13-24, and local artists to bring a fully inclusive exhibit and open mic night to the community.

The exhibition features visual art created by members of GRRL POWER created during an Empowerment Series held during February-April by Elaine Mendez, Esperanza Santiago of Labyrinth Arts Collective, and Traci Timmons from La Familia Repertory Company. Visual art, performances and more! Local artists are invited to attend and participate as well. This is a free event for the community. Co-hosted by the Pride Center of Staten Island and Lisa Sloan, Program Director.

Pride Center of Staten Island is located at 25 Victory Boulevard. For more information, e-mail swandaystatenisland@gmail.com.

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SIEDC/ The New Dorp Business Improvement District

Free New Dorp Lane Concert Series: April 15- May 18

Live music and local business are coming together on New Dorp Lane to bring high quality --and FREE-- entertainment to Staten Island.

It's all happening under the curation of The New Dorp Business Improvement District and Steven Matteo.

Local artists of diverse genres are taking to eateries The Cookie Jar, SIPS & MAKER, Jade Asian Bistro, Trackside Bar & Grill and Brioso every weekend from April 15- May 18.

Check the flyer above for all the details.

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Carol Ann Benanti

Disco themed G.R.A.C.E. Foundation Gala: April 14

Get ready to boogie with the G.R.A.C.E. Foundation on April 14, 2018. The organization's annual Disco Night honors Michael Assenza, who will receive the inaugural G.R.A.C.E. Legacy award; Joseph Quattrocchi, who will be recognized as the Honoree of the Year; and Angela Conte, who will be honored with the Community Service Award.

The G.R.A.C.E. Foundation is also proud to announce this year's Shining Star Honorees: Joseph DeCandido, Robert Ellefsen, Joseph Fiorito and Jaclyn Tirone. The gala kicks off at 7 p.m.

Tickets are $150 per person. For additional information, call 718-983-3800 ext. 223, or email

. The Excelsior Grand, 2380 Hylan Blvd., New Dorp.

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Boogie down at Pastels in Charleston: Every Friday, Saturday

Some might say disco is dead -- but for loyal Pastels fans, legends never die.

And yes, there are a lot of local dance music enthusiasts who take weekly revivals of this Brooklyn-born disco that seriously. Over 200 of them, actually, are making sure it stays alive.

Every Friday and Saturday night starting at 9:30 p.m., Prestige Events transforms Z-Two restaurant into an all-night dance party at 2925 Veteran's Road in Charleston.

For diehard Pastels fans, it's like having a family reunion every weekend.

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'Wolfe Run 10k' in Prince's Bay: April 14

A 10K race around Wolfe's Pond Park in Prince's Bay -- hosted by Complete Race Solutions -- starts at 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 14.

Here's how it's going down: The race is two loops of a 5K course through wooded trails in and around beautiful Wolfe's Pond Park. There will be water stops along the course. Snacks, timing, race swag and music will be provided. All finishers will receive the third finishers medal of the Trail Triple Crown Series.

Don't want to run? We get it. There will be a one mile walkers course for those not doing the run but still want to help out this great cause. Walkers will receive a event shirt and a non chipped bib. Walkers will not receive a finishers medal.

Wolfe's Pond Park is located at 420 Cornelia Ave. Walkers can register for $25, runners are $35. For more information, visit CompleteRace.TicketLeap.com.

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'Looking for America' in Livingston: April 14-15, April 21-22

Here's a description of the collection, courtesy of CPG Gallery: "There are no fancy hotels, no glitzy neon lit pleasure strips and no over-developed, crowded suburban sprawl. Just a part of America most people don't know even exists. This is 'Looking for America' from a different perspective. I have made over eight cross country trips both throughout the United States and Canada. Each time I go, I find it fascinating to travel off the beaten path and discover the unusual and new things that most people are unaware of."

"Looking For America" features Robert Haber and a plethora of local artists. (See above!)

The collection is up until April 22. The gallery is located at 814 Richmond Terr. For more information, visit CPGGallery.org

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Kid-friendly 'The Wizard of Oz' performance in St. George: April 15

Billed as "Affordable Family Theater," St. George Theatre presents "The Wizard of Oz" on Sunday, April 15.

This show -- starring the film's classic characters Dorothy, Toto, Scarecrow, the Tinman and the Cowardly Lion -- is geared towards children ages four to 12.

Meet and greet with the performers in the lobby after the performance.

The show begins at 4 p.m., doors open at 3 p.m. Tickets go for $22 per person and are available at StGeorgeTheatre.com.

ALSO: "Curious George" comes the the Theatre on Friday, May 18. More info here.

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Jazz performance at the Staten Island Children's Museum: April 15

Staten Islanders are welcome to attend a student jazz ensemble performance from Brooklyn Youth Music Project at the Staten Island Museum in Livingston on Sunday, April 15 at 2 p.m.

The performance is free with Museum admission, put in place to celebrate Jazz Appreciation Month.

The Staten Island Children's Museum is located on the grounds of Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Gardens, 1000 Richmond Terrace, Building M. Museum admission is $8.

For more information visit www.sichildrensmuseum.organd www.bymp.org or call 718-273-2060

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Spring fair at Art on the Terrace: April 15

If you want to do the opposite of "Spring Cleaning," come to Art on the Terrace on Sunday, April 15 from noon to 6 p.m. for a arts and crafts fair.

Staten Islanders have their choice of: Local honey and lip balm from Lenny Librizzi; Soaps and potpourri from Skye Suter; Adorable baby sweaters and hats from Renee Soloway; Colorful jewelry from Linda Rossi, Joanne Lattanzio, and Rhoda Pierce; Fun pottery pieces from Terry Marks and Victoria Bellinger; Paintings from Philip Kohler; Soaps and body products from KomariBathBody.

Admission is a suggested donation of $2. Art on the Terrace Gallery is located at 776 Richmond Terrace.

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Brunch with live music, Joan Caddell and the Midnight Choir: April 15

Eat and embrace local music at Lacey's Bridge Tavern in Port Richmond this weekend.

During the Port Richmond spots brunch hours, Joan Caddell and the Midnight Choir will provide live music on Sunday, April 15.

Lacey's Bridge Tavern is located at 75 Innis Street. Brunch is from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. For more information and reservations, call 718-273-7514.

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Concert at St. Andrew's Church in Richmond Town: April 15

Soprano Kerianna Krebushevski performs at St. Andrews Church, 40 Old Mill Road, in Richmond Town on Sunday, April 15 at 4 p.m.

This performance is part of the Ambrosian Recital Series, supported by Staten Island Arts and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.

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Sea Shanty Sunday in Livingston: April 15

Sea Shanty Session, Sunday, April 15, 2-5 p.m.

Noble Maritime Collection, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, 1000 Richmond Terrace. Cost: Free

Swiftly gaining popularity, these sea shanties are still going strong. Led by the Folk Music Society of New York, they are your chance to learn authentic maritime tunes from ages past and you're more than welcome to sing along with them. The sessions are family friendly too, so don't be shy to bring the kids.

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Stroll through 'Native Soil' exhibit at Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art: April 13- Sept. 24

"Native Soil: Incidence and Homescapes" by Sarah Yuster continues to hang in the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art on the grounds of Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden in Livingston this weekend.

"Yuster's work is subtle and intimate, sparking sentiments from viewers that explain her propensity to invoke a sense of "home."

The collection will remain at the Center until September 24, 2018.

The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art is located at 1000 Richmond Terrace, Building C& G. Gallery admission is $5, $4 for students and seniors. More information is available at snug-harbor.org.

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'Shaolin' at Snug: April 13-May 6

"Shaolin: Into the 36 Chambers" hangs in the Newhouse Center of Contemporary Art until May 6, 2018.

Exhibit curator Jahtiek Long said the collection "pays homage to, explores and celebrates Staten Island's culture and identity," through paintings, portraits and other visual art.

Featured artists include: Hidden Grid by Kevin Barker, Raul Barquet, Ashley Benedict, HH Coatl, Christine Cruz , Chelsea Rae Fioravanti, Goyart, Stephanie Kosinski, Emily Long, Harry Magzul, Chris Malfi, Liz Manzolini, Shawn McArthur, J. Montana, Emily Perina, Gina Policastro, Tony Quera, Chris RWK, Katinka Sattar, Jay Sayers, Lawerence Schau Jr., Search and Rescue Productions, Keri Sheheen, Tabitha Lee Turchio, Gene Wagner and Wann.

The curator's talkback -- dubbed "Shaolin Narratives: The Power of Representation" -- is at the Newhouse Center on April 19 from 7 to 9 p.m. This event is free with museum admission.

Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, 1000 Richmond Terr. Admission is $5.

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Women of Achievement Luncheon in Bloomfield: April 19

Oftentimes, when someone does something nice for us, we forget to say thanks.

For 56 years, the Advance has given Staten Islanders the opportunity to say thanks at least once a year.

And you get to have lunch while doing it.

We call it the Women of Achievement program and this year, six selfless Staten Island women make up the Staten Island Advance Women of Achievement Class of 2018.

The awards program, which debuted in 1962, will salute Genevieve Benoit, Diane Buglioli, Margaret Grandstaff, Patricia Monahan, Josephine Marino and Zulma Cruz. Genevieve and Diane are founders of A Very Special Place, which empowers individuals with special needs to lead fuller lives. Margaret helps those in need all over Staten Island, whether it be with food, clothing or whatever else to help the needy survive. Patricia helps those through grief recovery, something she had to do for herself when she lost her grandson. Josephine is volunteer president of the 120th Precinct Community Council, organizing events all year. On paper, Zulma is director of the Food Advocacy office at Project Hospitality. In reality, she does so much more.

Salute these women with the many hundreds of others who attend each year. The gala luncheon will be held April 19 at 11:45 a.m. in the Hilton Garden Inn. Tickets are $68. If you prefer online registration, go to SILive.com/women-of-achievement/. Hilton Garden Inn, 1100 South Ave., Bloomfield.

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Earth-friendly art party at Staten Island Museum: April 19

The Staten Island Museum in Livingston, located on the grounds of Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Gardens, hosts an Art Party on Thursday, April 19.

Get into the spirit of Earth Day using everyday items to create beautiful jewelry! This workshop will guide guests through the process of upcycling unusual materials to make wearable art. All materials provided, however participants are encouraged to bring in additional materials they might like to work with. Registration required.

The Staten Island Museum is located at 1000 Richmond Terrace, Building A.

Teaching Artist: Jocelyn Mackenzie is a Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, songwriting coach, artist, stylist, art director, craftsperson, and all around maker of things. A graduate from the Fiber program at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, art and music have seamlessly integrated into her career for decades. Her bold and fearless work, both artistically and musically, combines elements of play, imagination, nostalgia, resourcefulness and craftsmanship. She is dedicated to a lifetime of learning to make something out of nothing. Jocelynmackenzie.com/

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Deana Martin plays 'timeless music' at Lorenzo's: April 20

Deana Martin "Deana Sings Dino" takes the stage Friday, April 20, at Lorenzo's Cabaret in the Hilton Garden Inn.

If you haven't guessed by now, her famous father is the Dean Martin, the legendary charter member of The Rat Pack who was nicknamed the "King of Cool" for his good looks, natural charisma and seemingly effortless stage presence.

Of course, she'll pay tribute to her father's career through song but Martin tells SILive timeless music is the star of her show.

"Everyone loves Dean Martin and it's such a thrill for me to sing my dad's songs. Remember, I learned from the very best in the business and I bring them to my shows when I sing at the smaller venues. And I remember sitting in the Copa Room at the Sands Hotel. It was really something the way my dad brought people in."

Advance tickets are $40 ($55 premium seating) plus the cost of dinner. Friday show reservations are required. Dinner: 7:30 p.m. Showtime: 9:30 p.m. at Lorenzo's Cabaret in the Hilton Garden Inn, 1100 South Ave.; 718-477-2400, ext. 5; LorenzosDining.com.

COMING UP: Lorenzo's Cabaret welcomes Vito Picone & The Elegants on Friday, May 4; Joe Piscopo on Friday, May 18; Jay and the Americans on Friday, June 1; and Louis Prima Jr. & The Witnesses on Friday, July 13. More information on LorenzosDining.com.

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Meals on Wheels Carriage Ball in South Beach: April 20

Meals on Wheels has been providing service to home-bound elderly residents for 46 years. Help the organization celebrate its good work during its annual Carriage Ball on April 20. The theme is April in Paris.

Attendees will be treated to cocktails. dinner and dancing. Live music performances will be provided by New York City Swing.

Honorees for the night are Michael Burke, of Denino's Pizzeria; Ed Canlon, of Canlon's Restaurant; and the Staten Island Giving Circle. The event is co-chaired by Mary-Beth Francis and Steve Gattullo. Cocktail hour begins at 6:30 p.m.; the rest of the party will follow. Tickets are $175 per person and can be purchased by visiting Mealsonwheelsofsi.org. Organizers ask those interested in attending RSVP by April 6.

For more information contact the Meals on Wheels of Staten Island office at 718-727-4435. The Vanderbilt at South Beach, 300 Father Capodanno Blvd., South Beach.

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Theaterworks USA Presents: Pete the Cat: April 21

Theaterworks USA Presents: Pete the Cat

Saturday, April 21, 3pm

Williamson Theater

Tickets: $20, 15

Theatreworks USA presents the Off-Broadway premiere of Pete the Cat directed by Tony-nominated Dan Knechtges. This groovy blue cat is on his way to stay with a new family and he's excited, but Jimmy Biddle is nervous about how their houseguest is going to shake things up. When Jimmy draws a blank in art class on the last day of school, it turns out Pete is the perfect friend to help him out. Join Jimmy and Pete on a new adventure of friendship and inspiration!

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Advance heads up: NYC Chili Cookoff: April 21

The Official New York State Cook-Off for the International Chili Society (ICS). Includes chili sampling, judging, cash prizes, amusements, and live entertainment. Yum! Winners at HRT go to the world championships!

Buy online and save: At-the-door tickets are $18 for adults and $10 for children.

Think you have what it takes to go head-to-head with the pros Looking to get your business in front of thousands of local foodies?

Call Frank Saulle at 718-351-1611, ext. 245, for more information.

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Hip-hop open mic at CANVAS: April 21

CANVAS Institute of Art, Culture and Civic Engagement presents an "Open Mic Artist Showcase" curated by The Commission, a hip-hop collective on S.I. on Saturday, April 21 at 6:30 p.m.

Featured artists include Jiggy Jada Mcclain Saxton, Nossis, & Cee (Calvin Bagby) of The Commission.

Admission is $5 and the CANVAS Institute is located at 150 Victory Boulevard.

The theme for the night is LADIES NIGHT. For everyone who brings a lady with them, you both will get $1 OFF ENTRY at the door.

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Family-friendly nature workshop at Clay Pit Ponds: April 21

COMING UP: Earth Day Eco Heroes, for families who want to help our planet for Earth Day and every day.

Participate in recycling projects, crafts, and games throughout the park. ages 5 and up. This event is free on Saturday April 21 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m at Clay Pit Ponds State Park Preserve Nature Interpretive Center; 2351 Veterans Road West.

For more info, call 718-605-3970 ext. 201.

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On Your Mark Spring Gala: April 21

On Your Mark is putting its Spring Gala Dinner Dance on your radar: April 21.

On Your Mark provides community-based services to people with developmental disabilities across their lifespans. Being honored at the event are Thomas Bencivenga, John Friscia, Bernardo Pace and Anthony Schioppo. Shaun Roberts will be awarded the Judge David G. Trager Memorial Community Recognition Award. Also being honored for their 20-or-more years of service and dedication to On Your Mark are Colleen Brown, Eileen Cunningham, Christine Ericson, Jennifer Larsen, James Mangin, Dayna Sammacro, Rhonda Schulz, Lara Shakirat Shutti and Ray Woolford. Gala chairpersons are Teresa Cirelli, Marissa Corio, Nicole DeStefano and Krista Fischer. Music is provided by Partners in Sound. The black tie optional event begins at 6:30 p.m. with registration and raffle sales; cocktails are served at 7 p.m.; dinner follows at 8 p.m. Tickets are $150 per person. Hilton Garden Inn, 1100 South Ave., Bloomfield.

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Photo by Dorothy Reilly

Guided Protectors of Pine Oaks Woods Events: April 22-May 27

Forest Restoration Workshop at Sharrott's Shoreline @ Sharott's Shoreline, Staten Island Assist the National Recreation and Parks Association in cleaning up one of Staten Island's picturesque shorelines.

April 22, 10 a.m. -- 2 p.m.

Protectors of Pine Oak Woods hosts its 260th Restoration. Meet at the bottom of Androvette Street (off Arthur Kill Road between The Tides complex and Killmeyer's Restaurant). Walk west through the parking lot at the end of the street to follow the access road into the DEC area where with our friends from the National Recreation and Parks Association will collect debris and bag trash for later disposal (our 260th monthly workshop). Protectors will supply gloves, bags and refreshments. Call Don Recklies at 718-768-9036 or Chuck Perry at 718-667-1393 for more information. Students will receive service credit.

Celebrate Earth Day at Buck's Hollow @ Latourette House Golf Course, Staten Island

Enjoy a Free guided walk through the heart of Staten Island's Greenbelt

April 22, noon -- 2 p.m.

Enjoy a spring hike through the heart of the Greenbelt. Participants will discuss the diversity of flora and fauna in this rich woodland along the Red Trail. Fresh blooms and early spring bird song will welcome park visitors. Meet at the LaTourette House Golf Course parking lot. Call Ray Matarazzo at 718-317-7666 for more information.

Corson's Brook Woods Wildflower Watch:

Witness a wildflower array identified by a guide during this FREE event

May 6, 10 a.m. to noon.

Join as to study the progress of wildflowers over the course of the spring in this unique and undisturbed natural area. Park at Jasper Street and Forest Hill Road and meet across the street at the corner of the entrance to the College of Staten Island. Bring field guides. Registration is required. Please contact Hillel at 718-477-0545 or email hillel5757@gmail.com. Please provide a cell phone contact.

The Richard Buegler Spring 10-Mile Walk @ Greenbelt Nature Center, Staten Island. In honor of PPOW Founder Explore the Staten Island Greenbelt with like-minded hikers on this FREE guided hike

May 12, 9:45 a.m. -- 3:15 p.m.

Participants will begin gathering at the Greenbelt Nature Center at 9:15 a.m. Guides will lead the hikers will traverse the Greenbelt in search of spring flowers and bird song. A favorite walk of Protectors of Pine Oak Woods founder, Richard Buegler, the 10-Mile Hike takes participants along the Meisner Avenue Pond, Loosestrife Swamp, Heyerdahl Hill and more. Explore the Greenbelt with like-minded hikers and enjoy a day afield on Staten Island. Call Dominick Durso at 917-478-7607 or Don Recklies at 718-768-9036 for more information.

Brookfield Park: Free guided natural history tour of S.I.'s newest open space park.

May 12, noon -- 2 p.m.

Natural history tour of S.I.'s newest open space park. View numerous salt creeks, freshwater wetlands, grasslands and beautiful scenery; a must for hawk watching. Brookfield Park stretches along the south eastern banks of Richmond Creek and runs from Richmond Avenue to Richmondtown. Meet in the main parking lot at 575 Arthur Kill Road, just north of Armstrong Avenue. For more information, contact Ray Matarazzo at 718-317-7666.

Sharrott's Shoreline: See this maritime environment in springtime during this FREE guided walk & talk.

May 13, 10 a.m. to noon.

Meet at the bottom of Androvette Street (off Arthur Kill Road between The Tides complex and Killmeyer's Old Bavaria Inn). Walk west through the parking lot at the end of the street to follow the access road into the DEC area to see what late spring looks like in this tough, maritime environment that is directly across the Kill from industrial New Jersey. More info: Call Don Recklies at 718-768-9036.

Forest Restoration Workshop in the Egbertville Ravine: Calling Volunteers to assist with the clean up ravine

May 19, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Meet at the entrance to the White Trail (on Meisner Avenue opposite the Bluebelt dam close to the intersection of Manor Road and Rockland Avenue). For our 261st workshop, we will cross the creek in order to remove English Ivy creeping up the trees and covering the ground adjacent to Rockland Avenue. Volunteers will uproot the vines where possible, and cut it where we cannot pull it out. If the work is completed early, participants return to the shed and cut oriental wisteria on the slope at Loosestrife Swamp. Protectors of Pine Oak Woods will provide gloves, bags, tools and refreshments. Call Don Recklies at 718-768-9036 or Chuck Perry at 718-667-1393 for more information. (Service credit is available.)

Weed and Herb Walk at Conference House Park: Learn to identify wild and cultivated medicinal and culinary plants

May 20, 11 a.m. -- 1 p.m.

Join Protector of Pine Oak Woods herbalist Gert Coleman for a FREE guided walk through the colonial paths and gardens at Conference House Park to identify both wild and cultivated medicinal and culinary plants. Learn through discussion the benefits of such herbs and weeds and maybe find a new appreciation for the "weeds" which take root in our own gardens. Meet in the parking lot at the end of Hylan Boulevard. Email Gert Coleman at gert.coleman@verizon.net for details.

Wildflower Watch at Corson's Brook Woods: Free guided exploration of a unique and undisturbed natural area.

May 27, 10 a.m. to noon.

Join us as we study the progress of wildflowers over the course of the spring in this unique and undisturbed natural area. Park at Jasper Street and Forest Hill Road and meet across the street at the corner of the entrance to the College of S.I. Bring field guides. Registration is required. Please contact Hillel at 718-477-0545 or e-mail hillel5757@gmail.com. Please provide a cell phone contact.

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Staten Island Advance/ Jan Somma-Hammel

Songs and snacks at Immanuel Union Church: April 21

Immanuel Union Church, standing at 693 Jewett Ave on the corner of Maine in Westerleigh, is sponsoring A Sing-A-Long Cafe by the Staten Island Ukes & Co. on Saturday, April 21. Show begins at 7 p.m. in the church Fellowship Hall.

Admission is $15 a person. Snacks, soda, dessert and coffee are provided and for those of age, it's BYOB.

For further information or to make a reservation, call the church office at 718-448-1584 or e-mail iuc1@verizon.net. Tickets also sold at the door.

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Catholic School Region of Staten Island awards: April 22

Join the Catholic School Region of Staten Island as it hosts the Golden Cross for Education Awards breakfast on April 22, 2018.

There will be a 8:30 a.m. Holy Sacrifice of the Mass celebrated by guest speaker Bishop John J. O'Hara, Episcopal Vicar of Staten Island, and a 9:30 a.m. ceremony and breakfast.

The Catholic School Region of Staten Island, which comprises of the 22 local Catholic elementary schools, will be celebrating individuals who have supported Staten Island Catholic School communities.

The 2018 honorees receiving the Golden Cross for Education Award are the state Sen. Andrew J. Lanza, and Monsignor Thomas J. Bergin, former chair of the Catholic School Region of Staten Island. Also, the 2018 Outstanding Catholic Community Award recipients are Mary Ann Keegan, Marie DeBenedetto, Melissa Abouabdallah, Joan Sclafani, Jo Ann Maldarelli, Jose Rossell, Jane Gentile, Catherine Houle, Francine Rizzuto, Lisa Sclafani, Angelo Piro, Elizabeth Browne, Joseph Ribaudo, Jessica Bonavita, Jeanmarie Kraft, Luis Melendez, Mary Ferro, Mary Quinn, Carolyn Esposito and Brian Lyons.

Live entertainment will be supplied by St. Adalbert's School, Fife and Drum Corp, and emcee and vocalist Terry Tarangelo. Tickets are $40 per person; tables of 10 are available for $375. To purchase tickets online, visit www.si-goldencrossbreakfast.org.

Tickets will not be sold at the door so make sure you RSVP by April 13. All ages are welcomed. Contact chairwoman of the event, Diana Gatto, at

or 718-667-3404 ext. 1007 for additional information. The Hilton Garden Inn, 1100 South Ave., Bloomfield.

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CASC luncheon in Rossville: April 25

For over 40 years, Community Agency for Senior Citizens (CASC) has been assisting Staten Island's older adults and their caregivers, providing vital services to help seniors continue to live as independently as possible in the community.

Celebrate all that CASC has accomplished during its annual luncheon on April 25, 2018. To be honored at the event are Dorothy Doran, retired executive director, Staten Island Center for Independent Living Inc.; Edward Rabowski, chairman, The Stella Orton Home Care Agency Inc.; and Jean Ringhoff, vice president and business development officer, Northfield Bank. Keith Cummings, owner of KCM Plumbing, will receive CASC's third annual Helping Hands Award.

Tickets are $65; please note, no tickets will be sold at the door. For more information, call Valerie Volpe via phone at 718-981-6226 ext. 112, or email at

. The Historic Old Bermuda Inn, 2512 Arthur Kill Rd., Rossville.

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'Small Fire' with Hemlock Theatre: April 27- 29

Hemlock Theatre Co. presents "Small Fire" at The Little Victory Theatre the weekend of April 27- 29.

Here's the description: The show, directed by Brendan Stackhouse, follows John and Emily Bridges, a long-married couple whose happy, middle-class lives are upended when Emily falls victim to a mysterious disease.As her five senses are slowly stripped away, Emily resolves to remain engaged with her community, relying on John to help her run her company and experience her daughter Jenny's wedding.

Cast call: Emily is played by Jenny Kelly; John is played by John Griffin; Billy is played by Gavin Bazalar; Jenny is played by Michelle Lynch.

Warning: There is strong language and content suitable for a mature audience.

Showtimes are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are available at htcsi.booktix.com and go for $20, $18 for students and seniors.

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Anthony DePrimo

Women, welding and wine at MakerSpace: May 1, 8, 15, & 22

Sure, welding and alcohol doesn't seem like the smartest pairing. But at MakerSpace in Stapleton, it works.

The MakerSpace solution? First comes work, then comes wine. A four week, female-centric welding class takes to the Stapleton shop every Tuesday of May.

Lorie Honor of Honor Wines will be offering a variety of wine after class attendees get an overview of a variety of metal fabrication tools, materials, and techniques. The class is two and a half hours each week, taking place at 450 Front Street.

Admission is $250, $200 for MakerSpace members. A material fee is $20. More information on how to snag your spot is on the MakerSpace Eventbrite page.

So, how should you prepare for this course? Here's the rundown via MakerSpace.

PREREQUISITES: Sorry boys, this time it is ladies over 21 only. No welding experience necessary. Please wear hair tied back, closed toe boots, jeans, and long-sleeved shirts. Your boots and clothing will get dirty and burned by small sparks so dress for safety, not for glamour.

MATERIALS: Your materials fee pays for steel and wine. We provide safety protection including welding masks, googles, leather jackets and gloves.

REFUNDS/CANCELLATIONS: Class size limited to 6 students. Minimum 4 students. We reserve the right to cancel the class if we do not have the minimum amount of students. If we cancel, we will refund you in full and notify you.

You may cancel and get a full refund up to three days before the class. After that, refunds are contingent on us being able to fill your seat. Under no circumstances do we offer refunds to individuals who cancel on the same day. This ruins the party for everyone.

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Staten Island's PrideFest 2018: May 11-19

Want to plan ahead? Pride Center of Staten Island's annual PrideFest -- aka a week of fun-filled events for those in the LGBTQ community and their allies -- goes from May 11-19.

Concerts, coffee outings and a march of resistance are all on the lineup for this week of love and pride.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL LINEUP.

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Courtesy of Michael Pelczar for The Nicotra Group

Mother's Day Brunch in Bloomfield: May 13

Consider this a friendly reminder that Mother's Day is coming up. You're welcome.

No plans yet? The Hilton Garden Inn has a brunch and dinner special to celebrate the wonderful women in your life on Sunday, May 13.

The Nicotra Ballroom serves brunch from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Lorenzo's Cabaret has dinner reservations from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Prices: Brunch and dinner reservations are separately priced at $54.95 per person. Children under 12 are half price. Call for reservations 718-477-2400 ext. 5.

The Hilton Garden Inn is located at 1100 South Ave in Bloomfield. More information is on NicotraBallroom.com.

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Richmond County Orchestra highlights 'Super Voices' at Snug: May 6

The 50-piece orchestra -- known on Staten Island as Riverside Opera Company -- perform with the 35-piece Curtis High School Chorus under the direction of maestro Alan Aurelia. The chorus is under Josh Steinhart as they perform "Skyfall," written and sung by Adele. The track was written for the popular James Bond film series.

The concert takes over the Snug Harbor Music Hall from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Kids get in for free but adults pay $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Students and seniors are admitted for $10.

More info: Snug-Harbor.org.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- If you told Frank LoGiudice, owner of a digital marketing company, five years ago that he'd be in the beauty business, he would have had a good laugh.

"I could have seen myself opening a restaurant, or a daycare -- anything other than a beauty salon," said the lifelong Bay Terrace resident.

But soon after his company, the South Beach-based Charge Media Group, obtained an account for a fairly new franchise -- Amazing Lash Studio -- in 2016, he began to believe in the brand.

So much so, he picked up the marketing accounts for 35 of the franchises.

But then the entrepreneur in him kicked in, and he went a step further. On March 30, he and his wife, Darcie, opened New York City's first Amazing Lash Studio in New Springville's Heartland Shopping Center.

He views the franchise as the perfect complement to the beauty landscape of Staten Island.

"I never, ever thought I'd be in the beauty business, but I fell in love with the concept and brand. ...Then an opportunity opened up here in Staten Island," said LoGiudice.

"I like to say, 'We are the lash masters.' ...It feels good to give people an opportunity to be part of a new concept here on Staten Island," added LoGiudice, who credits his team of about 20 with helping make the operation come to fruition.

Said Darcie LoGiudice, a teacher at PS 186 in Brooklyn: "I love teaching, but I am so excited for this new adventure -- making women feel and look beautiful. What a great business concept."

While the New Springville location is the first location for the brand in New York City, LoGiudice said he hopes to open two more locations on the Island, and there are 25 to 30 studios being opened by other franchisees across the city.

THE STUDIO

Clean, white lines with red accents make the 1,980-square-foot Staten Island studio immediately appealing to all who enter.

The upscale look carries through the hallways of the location, which is divided into 13 individual lash application suites. Here, clients lie down "and relax" while having their lash extensions applied via a special technique by a licensed aesthetician, said LoGiudice.

THE CONCEPT

This concept was founded by entrepreneurs Jessica and Edward Le, who have been franchising since 2013.

Clients of Amazing Lash Studio Staten Island have the option of becoming members, thereby making maintenance of their lashes a routine occurrence.

"We are here to help educate, and prevent the fall out, and just maintain the beauty and look... A lot of nail salons do this, a lot of women are doing this out of their basement, but we are taking this to the next level," said LoGiudice.

"We allow you to customize your lashes to your shape and style. ...We do one-by-one lash extensions," he added, noting there are four lash styles.

See inside Amazing Lash Studio 11 Gallery: See inside Amazing Lash Studio

AMAZING LASH STUDIO AT A GLANCE

Address: 2305 Richmond Ave.



Website: www.amazinglashstudio.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/amazinglashstudiostatenisland/

New Businesses in Focus is a weekly column that relates the stories of new Staten Island businesses owners.

If you have a new business on Staten Island, e-mail porpora@siadvance.com.

FOLLOW TRACEY PORPORA ON FACEBOOK and TWITTERSTATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A West Brighton man who authorities believed supplied the drugs which caused a Staten Island woman's fatal overdose 18 months ago has been sentenced to seven years in prison.

Mack (Butter) Patterson, 34, was among seven alleged narcotics traffickers charged last July, stemming from a seven-month probe launched after the 24-year-old victim's death in West Brighton in October 2016, said authorities.

Authorities said the defendants peddled heroin, fentanyl and cocaine on Staten Island, around the city and in Newark, N.J.

Over the course of six months, undercover cops bought more than $20,000 in narcotics - mainly heroin and fentanyl - on 11 occasions from Patterson and his co-conspirators, said Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget G. Brennan, District Attorney Michael E. McMahon and Police Commissioner James P. O'Neill in announcing the arrests last year.

The other Staten Islanders arrested under "Operation Smack Down" were Javier Solis, 42, and Robert Barbosa, 33, authorities said.

In his first three sales to undercover cops between Nov. 29, 2016, and Jan. 4, 2017, Patterson sold 330 packages containing cocaine and fentanyl, said officials. The packages were stamped with the brand name "Passion."

Solis participated in one of the sales, said authorities.

In setting up the drug deals, Patterson and an undercover officer met on Staten Island. They then drove to one of three locations in Newark where Patterson exited, and returned shortly thereafter with the drugs, said authorities.

In some cases, officers saw Patterson meet a supplier, officials said.

In a final deal on May 9, 2017, Patterson sold 843 glassines of heroin and fentanyl, marked with a variety of brand names, such as "Blue Magic, "Dope" "Family Guy," "Bull" and "Frank Lucas," to an undercover cop for $4,980 authorities said.

Authorities said "Passion" was stamped on empty glassine envelopes officers found at the overdose scene.

The envelopes are typically used to package heroin.

The woman was alive, but unresponsive, and officers administered naloxone, an overdose antidote.

She was taken to Richmond University Medical Center, West Brighton, where she died the next day, said officials.

Cops identified Patterson as the supplier of the deadly drugs by analyzing the victim's cell phone and through other investigative leads, said officials.

An autopsy showed heroin, fentanyl and cocaine were present in the woman's system, officials said.

A synthetic opioid, fentanyl is about 50 times stronger than heroin and is increasingly found mixed in with illegal drugs, authorities said.

Patterson was charged with multiple counts of criminal sale of a controlled substance and one count of conspiracy.

In February, he pleaded guilty in Manhattan state Supreme Court to felony counts of second-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance and second-degree conspiracy.

He was sentenced on Monday to seven years behind bars and five years' post-release supervision on the drug conviction and to two to six years in prison on the conspiracy conviction, said Kati Cornell, Brennan's spokeswoman.

Those sentences will run concurrently to each other and to a two-year sentence Patterson received on Wednesday in state Supreme Court, St. George.

Patterson was charged with selling heroin to a customer on July 6 of last year on the 800 block of Forest Avenue, West Brighton.

He pleaded guilty in February to third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance to resolve that case.

Solis, meanwhile, pleaded guilty in January to third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance and fourth-degree conspiracy to dispose of his case in Manhattan state Supreme Court.

He was sentenced to a year in jail and released on March 12, according to online state court and city Correction Department records.

Barbosa pleaded guilty in August to attempted conspiracy and was sentenced two months later to five years' probation, said Cornell.System error

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The next step that Sint Maarten has been waiting for is almost here. This Monday coming, the Minister of Finance Michael Ferrier and Prime Minister Leona Romeo-Marlin will travel to Washington DC to witness the signing of the agreement between the Netherlands and the World Bank. This agreement will establish a Trust Fund, which will be managed by the World Bank to help Sint Maarten build back better and increase its resilience. As announced by State Secretary Raymond Knops of the Netherlands, the Trust Fund will hold a maximum amount of 470 million Euros, which is about 580 million US dollars.

What is important for the people of Sint Maarten to understand is that the funding will not all become available next week, next month or even next year. The funding will be made available in tranches and only on a per-project basis. Between 2018 and 2022, decisions will have to be made on which recovery and especially resilience projects will be financed by the different tranches. Difficult choices lie ahead for the Government and people of Sint Maarten, because the damage far exceeds the scope of this Trust Fund. As a young country, we have to make these choices wisely, because we can only spend a dollar once.

To all of those who are saying that things are going too slow: I hear you. However, the reality is that World Bank processes need to be followed to get projects financed by the Trust Fund, said Prime Minister Romeo-Marlin.

Preparing projects under World Bank standards is new for this Government, and Sint Maarten as country, is an unknown territory for the World Bank. The cooperation with the World Bank and the Netherlands has progressed tremendously since the appointment of this Government in January 2018. The Trust Fund is going to be established next week. The urgent funding needed will become available in the coming weeks this country will build back better in the coming years.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How the West might strike Syria



Washington, United States, April 11 (AFP) Apr 11, 2018



US President Donald Trump vowed Wednesday that missiles would be launched at Syria following a suspected chemical attack, virtually ensuring a military strike against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

The question now becomes what the United States, probably with France and Britain, will hit in war-torn Syria, and what are the risks of escalation and miscalculation with Assad allies Russia and Iran.



- What will it target? -



The United States and its allies France and Britain want to send a clear and definitive message to Assad that the future use of chemical weapons will not be tolerated.

One way to ensure Assad cannot use such weapons is to conduct strikes on his chemical infrastructure, including by targeting factories and weapons holding areas.

However, such an action carries risks, including the possibility of unintentionally unleashing a cloud of toxic gas into the environment.

The strike could also target what is left of Assad's air force and air defenses, though the delay between Saturday's attack and an eventual retaliatory strike means he likely will have moved his warplanes to safety.

Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria analyst for the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, told AFP that one potential target would be Dumayr military airport northeast of Damascus, from where regime aircraft used in Saturday's attack may have launched.

Moscow has two air bases on the Syrian coast, Tartus and Hmeimim, protected by S-300 and S-400 air missile defense systems.



- How big will the strike be? -



Trump last year ordered a strike against Assad following a deadly sarin gas attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun.

The US Navy launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles from destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean, targeting Shayrat air base, its aircraft, ammunition supply bunkers, air defense systems and radars.

But the strike was limited and designed to not draw America into the chaos of Syria's bloody civil war.

Since then, the regime is alleged to have repeatedly used chlorine and other chemicals, forcing Pentagon planners to consider broader action.

Cafarella said the United States must decide how far it wants to go in terms of hitting Iranian proxy forces near US positions in eastern Syria, or even targeting Russian-supported facilities.

"The president has publicly stated that he intends to hold not just Assad but his backers accountable as well," she noted.



- How will it be launched? -



A strike against Syria will likely come in the form of missiles, as was the case last year.

The United States would not want to risk putting manned fighters over Syrian air defenses -- a shoot-down would send the conflict spiraling in unforeseeable new directions.

The USS Donald Cook, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, is within easy striking range of Syria, as is a French frigate with its own cruise missiles.

These two ships, possibly aided by a US submarine, are likely to play a role in a strike.

The US also has B-2 bombers at its disposal. These stealth planes were used in 2017 against the Islamic State group in Libya, having flown all the way from America on a 34-hour round trip.



- What are the risks? -



The reaction from Assad backer Moscow is unpredictable and Russia has threatened retaliatory action against the United States if missiles are fired at Syria.

The Russian army on Wednesday accused the White Helmets civil defense organization of staging a chemical weapons attack in Douma, where observers say more than 40 people died in a gas attack.

NBC News reported Tuesday that Russia has learned how to use GPS jammers to limit the capabilities of US drones operating over Syria.

"The US has to be very careful not to accidentally strike Russian targets or kill Russian advisors," Ben Connable, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told AFP.

"That significantly limits the number of options available to the United States, because the Russians are embedded in many cases with the Syrians."

Connable warned that if the US accidentally or purposefully kills uniformed Russian soldiers, there would potentially be a dangerous escalation between the two nuclear powers.Bank of America takes a stance on assault weapons



Washington, United States, April 11 (AFP) Apr 11, 2018



Bank of America will stop providing services to semi-automatic weapon manufacturers, a move that follows similar steps by other companies in recent weeks.

"We want to contribute in any way we can to reduce these mass shootings," the bank's vice chair Anne Finucane told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday, referring to the perennial scourge that is a hot-button issue in American life and politics.

"It is our intention not to finance these military-style firearms for civilian use."

Weapons control groups hailed the move.

"When the second-largest bank in the US takes concrete steps to prevent gun violence, it sends a clear message to the entire industry," said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety.

"It's time for every financial institution to do their part. We applaud Bank of America for walking the walk on gun safety."

In the days that followed a shooting at a Florida high school that saw a former student armed with a military-style rifle kill 14 students and three staff members, several major companies took measures to distance themselves from assault weapons manufacturers, or to increase the minimum age limit to purchase the firearms.

Citigroup has banned its clients from selling firearms to people under the age of 21.Trump warns Russia missiles 'coming' after Syria attack



Washington, United States, April 11 (AFP) Apr 11, 2018



US President Donald Trump warned Wednesday that "missiles will be coming" in response to an alleged chemical attack in Syria, raising the stakes in an increasingly perilous face-off with Russia.

With punitive US military action seemingly imminent, Russia scrambled to deflect blame from its ally Bashar al-Assad and, according to a monitor group, Syrian forces evacuated key defense buildings in Damascus.

Trump's warlike tweets came in response to a warning from Russia's ambassador to Beirut, who took to a television network run by the armed group Hezbollah to declare that any US missiles would be shot down "as well as the sources they were fired from."

If the US action follows the pattern of a previous punitive strike on Syria last year, it will begin with a salvo of cruise missiles fired from American warships in the Mediterranean, as Trump implied when he tweeted they would be "nice, new and 'smart'."

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the Pentagon is ready to provide options for a Syria strike in response to the suspected chemical attack, but noted the US and its allies are still gathering information.

Opponents of unilateral US action called an emergency closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council for later Thursday.

Meanwhile, Moscow said the formerly rebel-held district of Eastern Ghouta -- including Douma, the target of Saturday's attack -- had been "totally stabilized" and would soon be patrolled by Russian military police.

But the Russian army continued to deny their side's latest victory came after Assad launched a chemical attack on the last rebel-held pocket of the enclave in the Damascus suburbs, instead accusing the White Helmets civil defense organization of staging the massacre.

Trump's spokeswoman dismissed this idea, and pointedly refused to acknowledge that concern about the risks of a direct confrontation with Russia would hold the US military back.

"The intelligence provided certainly paints a different picture," she said. "The president holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack."

But while the Russian president's lieutenants continued to up the ante with threats and allegations, Vladimir Putin himself adopted a more statesmanlike tone, in remarks to new ambassadors presenting their credentials at the Kremlin.

"The state of the world cannot but provoke concern," he said.

"The situation in the world is becoming more and more chaotic but all the same we hope that common sense will finally prevail and international relations will take a constructive path."

Trump's tweets were more belligerent -- he told Russia "You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" -- and declared that US relations with Russia have plunged to a historic low.

But he notably also said there was "no reason for this," reiterated his hope for talks with Putin to halt a new arms race, and blamed his domestic political opponents for poisoning ties.

Assad's Damascus regime, which has long accused Washington of supporting its armed opponents in the country's bloody seven-year-old civil war, hit back at Trump's "reckless escalation."



- Air traffic alert -



Trump and other Western leaders have vowed a quick and forceful response to Saturday's alleged gas attack, which rescue workers say killed more than 40 people.

Efforts at the UN Security Council to find a diplomatic solution failed on Tuesday, with Washington and Moscow opposing each other's rival motions to set up an international investigation into chemical weapons use.

The United States, Britain and France say the incident bears all the hallmarks of a strike ordered by the regime, which has been blamed for previous attacks by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

Both Trump and his defense secretary Jim Mattis abruptly cancelled upcoming travel plans Tuesday, as the USS Donald Cook -- a guided-missile destroyer -- moved to within striking range of Syria.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has called an emergency cabinet meeting for Thursday to discuss how to respond to the Douma attack.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been coordinating closely with Washington, is to decide on a response in the coming days, having insisted he does "not want an escalation" and that any response would focus on Syria's chemical capabilities, not on allies of the regime.

As it looked to head off the threat of Western strikes, Syria said it had invited the OPCW to visit the site of the alleged attack.



- WHO demands access -



The OPCW said it would "shortly" deploy a fact-finding team to Douma for an investigation, but US officials said they were working from their own information and would not necessarily hold back.

Damascus agreed to hand over its chemical arsenal in 2013, narrowly avoiding American and French air strikes in retaliation for a suspected sarin attack.

That incident, which killed hundreds, also took place in Eastern Ghouta.

burs-dc/ecTrump warns Russia missiles 'coming' after Syria attack



Washington, United States, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



US President Donald Trump warned Wednesday that "missiles will be coming" in response to an alleged chemical attack in Syria, as the UN chief urged world powers to stop a face-off with Russia from spiraling out of control.

With punitive US military action seemingly imminent, Russia scrambled to deflect blame from its ally Bashar al-Assad and, according to a monitor group, Syrian forces evacuated key defense buildings in Damascus.

Trump's warlike tweets came in response to a warning from Russia's ambassador to Beirut, who took to a television network run by the armed group Hezbollah to declare that any US missiles would be shot down "as well as the sources they were fired from."

If the US action follows the pattern of a previous punitive strike on Syria last year, it will begin with a salvo of cruise missiles fired from American warships in the Mediterranean, as Trump implied when he tweeted they would be "nice, new and 'smart.'"

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis as well as CIA director Mike Pompeo huddled at the White House on Wednesday to discuss options and game out the situation.

"The president's national security team met today. That meeting was chaired by the vice president to discuss a number of options," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

With the UN Security Council failing thus far to find a diplomatic solution, Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned Wednesday time was running out.

"Today, I called the Ambassadors of the five Permanent Members of the Security Council to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse and stressed the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control," he said, referring to the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain.

Moscow and Washington have so far vetoed each other's motions to set up an international investigation into chemical weapons use.

Opponents of unilateral US action called an emergency closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council for later Thursday.

Meanwhile, Moscow said the formerly rebel-held district of Eastern Ghouta -- including Douma, the target of Saturday's attack -- had been "totally stabilized" and would soon be patrolled by Russian military police.

But the Russian army continued to deny their side's latest victory came after Assad launched a chemical attack on the last rebel-held pocket of the enclave in the Damascus suburbs, instead accusing the White Helmets civil defense organization of staging the massacre.

Trump's spokeswoman dismissed this idea, and pointedly refused to acknowledge that concern about the risks of a direct confrontation with Russia would hold the US military back.

"The intelligence provided certainly paints a different picture," she said. "The president holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack."

But while the Russian president's lieutenants continued to up the ante with threats and allegations, Vladimir Putin himself adopted a more statesmanlike tone, in remarks to new ambassadors presenting their credentials at the Kremlin.

"The situation in the world is becoming more and more chaotic but all the same we hope that common sense will finally prevail and international relations will take a constructive path," he said.

Trump's tweets were more belligerent -- he told Russia "You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" -- and declared that US relations with Russia have plunged to a historic low.

But he notably also said there was "no reason for this," reiterated his hope for talks with Putin to halt a new arms race, and blamed his domestic political opponents for poisoning ties.

Assad's Damascus regime, which has long accused Washington of supporting its armed opponents in the country's bloody seven-year-old civil war, hit back at Trump's "reckless escalation."



- OPCW to deploy -



Trump and other Western leaders have vowed a quick and forceful response to Saturday's alleged gas attack, which rescue workers say killed more than 40 people.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has called an emergency cabinet meeting for Thursday, while French President Emmanuel Macron is to decide on a response in the coming days, having insisted he does "not want an escalation" and that any response would focus on Syria's chemical capabilities, not on allies of the regime.

As it looked to head off the threat of Western strikes, Syria said it had invited the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which has blamed the regime for previous attacks, to visit the site.

The OPCW said it would "shortly" deploy a fact-finding team to Douma for an investigation, but US officials said they were working from their own information and would not necessarily hold back.

Damascus agreed to hand over its chemical arsenal in 2013, narrowly avoiding American and French air strikes in retaliation for a suspected sarin attack.

That incident, which killed hundreds, also took place in Eastern Ghouta.

burs-ia/mdoCalifornia deploys 400 National Guard troops to 'combat crime'



Los Angeles, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



The governor of California said Wednesday he would accept federal funding from President Donald Trump to boost the state's National Guard but said their mission would be to tackle cross-border crime, not detain unauthorized migrants.

In a letter addressed to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and the Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Governor Jerry Brown said California would add 400 personnel to its current total of 250 troops which includes 55 at the California border.

"But let's be crystal clear on the scope of this mission," he wrote. "This will not be a mission to build a new wall. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life."

"And the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws."

Instead, they would support operations targeting transnational criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers along the border, he added, "priorities for all Americans -- Republicans and Democrats."

He added that "there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California," citing statistics that showed immigrant apprehensions on the border in 2017 were at a near 50-year low.

California is at the forefront of what opponents call the "Resistance" to President Trump's administration, with the heavily Democratic state suing the federal government over numerous issues including the rollback of environmental regulations.

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, for his part, has sued the state over three statutes that support cities and counties that refuse to hand over unauthorized immigrants to federal immigration authorities for prosecution or expulsion.

Texas announced Tuesday it would send more than 1,000 National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border, in response to President Donald Trump's call for the military deployment to the southern frontier.

The border state of Arizona has also responded to the federal request, deploying 225 members of its Guard on Monday.

The deployments came after the US Defense Department last week signed an order calling for as many as 4,000 National Guard personnel to assist at the southern border.

Trump has indicated he might keep troops at the border until his promised border wall is built.UN calls urgent Syria meeting after Trump threat



Washington, United States, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



The United Nations warned world powers against letting the crisis over an alleged chemical attack against civilians in Syria from "spiraling out of control" after US President Donald Trump said "missiles will be coming."

As tensions mounted over a face-off with Damascus-ally Russia, opponents of unilateral US action called an emergency closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council for Thursday. Britain also scheduled an emergency cabinet meeting.

With punitive US military action seemingly imminent, Russia scrambled to deflect blame from Syria's Bashar al-Assad and, according to a monitor group, regime forces evacuated key defense buildings in Damascus.

Trump's bellicose tweets came in response to a warning from Russia's ambassador to Beirut, who took to a television network run by the armed group Hezbollah to declare that any US missiles would be shot down "as well as the sources they were fired from."

If the US action follows the pattern of a previous punitive strike on Syria last year, it will begin with a salvo of cruise missiles fired from US warships in the Mediterranean, as Trump implied when he tweeted they would be "nice, new and 'smart.'"

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis as well as CIA director Mike Pompeo met at the White House on Wednesday to discuss options, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

With the UN Security Council failing thus far to find a diplomatic solution, Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned Wednesday that time was running out.

"Today, I called the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the Security Council to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse and stressed the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control," he said, referring to the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain.



- 'Gas Killing Animal' -



Moscow and Washington have so far vetoed each other's motions to set up an international investigation into chemical weapons use.

Meanwhile, the Russian defense ministry said the Syrian regime flag was flying in Douma -- the target of Saturday's attack -- which it said indicated government forces have taken full control over the formerly rebel-held district of Eastern Ghouta.

"The raising of a regime flag over a building in the town of Douma signified control over this town and consequently over Eastern Ghouta as a whole," Major General Yury Yevtushenko was quoted as saying Thursday by the Interfax news agency.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the remaining rebels in Eastern Ghouta surrendered their heavy weapons to Russian military police and their leader left the enclave for the north.

The Russian army has continued to deny their side's latest victory came after Assad launched a chemical attack on the last rebel-held pocket of the enclave in the Damascus suburbs, instead accusing the White Helmets civil defense organization of staging the supposed gas assault.

Trump's spokeswoman dismissed this idea, and pointedly refused to say that concern about the risks of a direct confrontation with Russia would hold the US military back.

"The intelligence provided certainly paints a different picture," Sanders said. "The president holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack."

But while the Russian president's lieutenants continued to up the ante with threats and allegations, Vladimir Putin himself adopted a more statesmanlike tone, in remarks to new ambassadors presenting their credentials at the Kremlin.

"The situation in the world is becoming more and more chaotic but all the same we hope that common sense will finally prevail and international relations will take a constructive path," he said.

Trump's tweets were more belligerent. He told Russia: "You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" He declared that US relations with Russia have plunged to a historic low.

But Trump notably also said there was "no reason for this," reiterated his hope for talks with Putin to halt a new arms race, and blamed his domestic political opponents for poisoning ties.

Assad's Damascus regime, which has long accused Washington of supporting its armed opponents in the country's bloody seven-year-old civil war, hit back at Trump's "reckless escalation."



- OPCW to deploy -



Trump and other Western leaders have vowed a quick and forceful response to Saturday's alleged gas attack, which rescue workers say killed more than 40 people.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has called an emergency cabinet meeting for Thursday, while French President Emmanuel Macron is to decide on a response in the coming days, having insisted he does "not want an escalation" and that any response would focus on Syria's chemical capabilities, not on allies of the regime.

As it looked to head off the threat of Western strikes, Syria said it had invited the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which has blamed the regime for previous attacks, to visit the site.

The OPCW said it would "shortly" deploy a fact-finding team to Douma for an investigation, but US officials said they were working from their own information and would not necessarily hold back.

Damascus agreed to hand over its chemical arsenal in 2013, narrowly avoiding American and French air strikes in retaliation for a suspected sarin attack.

That incident, which killed hundreds, also took place in Eastern Ghouta.

burs-rlp/achCommunications line between US and Russian forces in Syria 'active': Kremlin



Moscow, Russia, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



A special hotline for the US and Russian militaries to communicate about operations in Syria is active and being used by both sides, the Kremlin said, as the US threatens missile strikes.

"This line exists and it's in an active state," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists, adding that the line intended to prevent accidental clashes and midair near misses "is used by both sides."

The hotline's suspension has been announced by Russia several times during periods of tension between the countries carrying out separate bombing campaigns.

The US in March said it had been used to narrowly avert a clash when Russian soldiers came too close to positions of US soldiers, without giving a precise date for the incident.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said that the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Dunford, contacted his Russian counterpart, General Valery Gerasimov, about the incursion.

The line, set up by a memorandum signed with the US in 2015, is also known as a "deconfliction line" because it is used to maintain a zone of "deconfliction" between the two sides.

The US used the hotline in April last year when it fired its first missile strike at a Syrian airbase.

The hotline was established between US officers monitoring the war from an operations centre at a base in Qatar and their Russian counterparts operating in Syria.

The link is a regular phone line staffed on the US side by a Russian-speaking colonel.

The hotline has become ever more vital as Assad's forces have gained ground over rebels in Syria.EU extends Iran rights sanctions as US nuke deal deadline nears



Brussels, Belgium, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



The EU on Thursday extended sanctions against Iran over its human rights record for another year, as Europe battles to stop the US ditching a landmark nuclear accord with Tehran.

The sanctions, first imposed in 2011, include an asset freeze against 82 individuals and one entity, plus a ban on exports to Iran of equipment "which might be used for internal repression and of equipment for monitoring telecommunications".

The European Council of member states said it decided to extend the sanctions -- which are not related to the 2015 deal to curb the Islamic republic's nuclear ambitions -- in response "to serious human rights violations in Iran".

The measures were first put in place following a crackdown during the 2009 election and subsequent protests sparked by the Arab Spring which inspired hopes of reform in Iran.

Britain, France and Germany -- the three European countries that signed the Iran nuclear deal -- are working to head off US President Donald Trump's threat to walk away from the accord and reimpose stinging economic sanctions by May 12.

Trump has repeatedly condemned the deal and demanded tough new restrictions on Iran over its ballistic missile programme and its role in conflicts around the Middle East.Greek fighter pilot killed in crash after Turkish intercept mission: officials



Athens, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



A Greek fighter pilot died Thursday when his plane crashed in the Aegean whilst returning from a mission to intercept Turkish jets, officials said.

"A Greek pilot (has entered) the pantheon of heroes," Defence Minister Panos Kammenos said in a tweet.

"He fell... fighting to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity," he said.

A Greek general staff source told AFP that the Mirage 2000-5 plane was returning from a mission to intercept Turkish fighter jets.

"The mission was over and the plane was returning," the source said.

"We still don't know if there was an actual engagement with the Turkish airforce," the officer added.

State TV ERT said the warplane disappeared shortly before it was due to land at an airfield on Skyros island in the central Aegean.

Greek fighter planes are regularly scrambled to intercept Turkish jets entering what Athens considers Greek airspace over the Aegean.

The accident comes at a period of heightened tension between regional rivals and NATO allies Greece and Turkey.

Earlier this week, Greek soldiers fired warning shots at a Turkish helicopter after it approached the small island of Ro, which is on Greece's border in the southeastern Aegean Sea.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and members of his government have escalated verbal attacks on Greece after its failure to extradite eight Turkish soldiers that Ankara said were part of an attempted 2016 coup.

In March, Turkey captured and is still holding two Greek soldiers who crossed the border, allegedly whilst getting lost in the fog on patrol.Use of chemical weapons in Syria 'simply inexcusable': Mattis



Washington, United States, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday the use of chemical weapons in Syria is "simply inexcusable," after a suspected poison gas attack in Douma.

The United States and allies France and Britain are currently finalizing plans for an expected strike against the regime of Syria President Bashar al-Assad after the alleged chemical attack that left more than 40 people dead.

"Some things are simply inexcusable, beyond the pale and in the worst interest of not just the chemical weapons convention but of civilization itself," Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee.

Lawmakers quizzed Mattis on what he made of President Donald Trump's confused messaging over Syria.

Trump last week said he wanted to pull out of the war-torn nation, but this week taunted Assad ally Russia with boasts of an impending missile strike.

The recognition of Syria's complexities "means you are at times ... going to see contrary impulses," Mattis said.

World powers have threatened a strong response to Saturday's attack, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying Thursday he had "proof" Syria's government was behind it.

Syria and Russia have both denied the accusations, and the global chemical watchdog said it would deploy a team to investigate.Erdogan worried by world powers' 'arm wrestling' on Syria



Ankara, Turkey, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday said Turkey was worried by the "arm wrestling" of world powers over Syria, as tensions soared between Washington and Moscow after threats of possible US air strikes.

"We are extremely worried that some countries confident of their military power are turning Syria into a scene for arm wrestling," Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara after Washington and Moscow traded accusations.

His comments came after US President Donald Trump warned Moscow on Wednesday that US missiles "will be coming" to Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria which reportedly killed dozens.

Erdogan said he would talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin about "how we stop this chemical massacre" after the suspected attack.

A Turkish presidential source later confirmed the call had taken place but said only that the two men "exchanged views on the latest developments in Syria" and agreed to maintain contact.

Ankara appears keen to keep its distance from one of the worst outbreaks of tensions since the Cold War between its NATO ally Washington and increasingly close partner Moscow.

Erdogan's comments echoed those of his Prime Minister Binali Yildirim who called on Russia and the United States on Wednesday to stop "street fighting" on Syria.



- 'Assad's black mark' -



While Russia, alongside Iran, has been supporting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Turkey has repeatedly called for his ouster and supported Syrian rebels.

But Turkey and Russia in recent months have put their differences aside and have been working closely to find a political solution to the conflict.

Last week, Putin and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani were hosted by Erdogan in Ankara for a tripartite summit to discuss the Syrian conflict.

The alleged chemical attack in rebel-held Douma near Damascus on April 7 sparked international outrage and warnings of possible military action.

Turkey's foreign ministry has said it strongly suspects Assad was to blame but Russia has denied that the Damascus regime was responsible.

In its readout of the Erdogan-Putin talks, the Kremlin said that "concern was expressed about the current escalation in and around Syria based on the overblown speculation concerning the purported use of chemical weapons in Douma."

Erdogan had in his speech urged the world "to act together to end this crisis for the sake of the innocent children massacred in the chemical attack in Douma."

Erdogan said the Assad regime already had "a black mark on its track record" after seven years of civil war in Syria.

Without naming the countries, he appeared to lash out both at Russia for backing Assad and the United States for helping the Syrian Kurdish group the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Turkey considers a terror group.

"Those who support the regime of murderer Assad are making a mistake. Those who support the PYD terror group are also making a mistake. Until the end, we will fight against both these mistakes."Chemical weapons use in Syria 'simply inexcusable': Mattis



Washington, United States, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday the use of chemical weapons in Syria is "simply inexcusable," after a suspected poison gas attack in Douma.

The United States and allies France and Britain are currently finalizing plans for an expected strike against the regime of Syria President Bashar al-Assad after the alleged chemical attack that left more than 40 people dead.

"Some things are simply inexcusable, beyond the pale and in the worst interest of not just the chemical weapons convention but of civilization itself," Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee.

Lawmakers quizzed Mattis on what he made of President Donald Trump's muddled messaging over Syria. Trump last week said he wanted to pull out of the war-torn nation, but this week taunted Assad ally Russia with boasts of an impending missile strike that "will" be coming.

The recognition of Syria's complexities "means you are at times ... going to see contrary impulses," Mattis said.

World powers have threatened a strong response to Saturday's attack, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying Thursday he had "proof" Syria's government was behind it.

Syria and Russia have both denied the accusations, and the global chemical watchdog said it would deploy a team to investigate.

Mattis insisted that Trump has not yet made a decision to strike Syria, after the president earlier had tweeted that action "could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

The Pentagon chief and other top security officials were due to head to the National Security Council after the hearing, where he said he would "take forward the various options to the president."

Several lawmakers grilled the Pentagon chief on the legal authorities the military has for action in Syria beyond the remit of its current mission, which is to work to destroy the Islamic State group.

The Pentagon is currently working under war powers granted in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, even though operations across the Middle East have morphed broadly since those early days of hunting for Al-Qaeda.

Mattis said a strike on the Assad regime in Syria would be authorized under presidential powers, and would not require Congressional permission.World stocks up as Trump appears to cushion Syria threat



London, United Kingdom, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



Global stock markets recovered their mojo on Thursday after US President Donald Trump appeared to take some of the sting out of threats to hit Syria with missiles.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" Trump tweeted.

European equities moved higher on relief that Trump seemed to have become more evasive, a move matched by US stocks at the opening bell in New York.

Frankfurt closed with a gain of 1.0 percent and the Dow was up 1.2 percent approaching midday in New York.

"A tweet-turnaround from Trump ... was the main driver of growth, lifting the majority of the markets out of the red and into the green," said Spreadex analyst Connor Campbell.

The US president had initially tweeted that "missiles will be coming", defying Russian warnings against a military strike.

Fawad Razaqzada at Forex.com added: "After stoking fears yesterday that an attack on Syria was imminent, today he appeared to backtrack slightly."

Nevertheless, markets remain anxious over the possibility of an uptick in violence in Syria involving the United States and Russia.



- Not so bullish -



Investors are already nervous over a potential trade war brewing between the US and China.

"With a possible trade war and conflict with Russia over Syria on the horizon, it's no wonder investors are not feeling particularly bullish right now," added OANDA analyst Craig Erlam.

"That said, I still believe the chances of either ... actually materialising are relatively slim which may stop the sell-off in equities getting out of hand."

Oil prices slipped back slightly as Trump appeared to cushion his threats, but remained underpinned by weeks of crude supply fears.

In its monthly report published Thursday, OPEC tied persistent crude strength to surging tensions in the Middle East and falling South American production.

"Oil prices climbed further to their highest level in several weeks as tension in the Middle East and the possibility of further drops in Venezuelan output helped offset the impact of growing US crude production," it said.

A weaker dollar also helped prices to resist gravity despite surging US crude production, while OPEC member states and Russia stuck to their 2016 pledge to pump less oil following a global glut that had sent prices crashing.



- Aiming for Norwegian? -



Away from geopolitical worries, there was eye-catching news in the aviation sector.

International Airlines Group (IAG), the owner of British Airways and Spanish carrier Iberia, is mulling a potential takeover of low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle after building up a minority holding, it said Thursday.

Norwegian's shares shot 47 percent higher on the Oslo stock exchange.

"Investors questioned the merits of a possible merger but recognised it could be a boon for other budget airlines," said analyst Jasper Lawler at London Capital Group.

"If one assumes IAG will lift the fares and cut routes operated by Norwegian, then it reduces competition for the likes of EasyJet, Ryanair and Wizz Air," he added.

Shares in EasyJet were among the top gainers on the FTSE 100 in London, climbing 3.2 percent, while shares in IAG declined 1.1 percent.

Shares in Ryanair were up more than 2 percent in late trading in Dublin.

In Asia, markets fell Thursday as fears about the standoff over Syria arrested a rally fuelled by Xi Jinping's conciliatory trade message earlier in the week.



- Key figures around 1530 GMT -



New York - Dow: UP 1.2 percent at 24,488.19 points

London - FTSE 100: UP 0.02 percent at 7,258.34 (close)

Frankfurt - DAX 30: UP 1.0 percent at 12,415.01 (close)

Paris - CAC 40: UP 0.6 percent at 5,309.22 (close)

EURO STOXX 50: UP 0.7 percent at 3,443.30

Tokyo - Nikkei 225: DOWN 0.1 percent at 21,660.28 (close)

Hong Kong - Hang Seng: DOWN 0.2 percent at 30,831.28 (close)

Shanghai - Composite: DOWN 0.9 percent at 3,180.16 (close)



Euro/dollar: DOWN at $1.2314 from $1.2367 at 2100 GMT on Wednesday

Dollar/yen: UP at 107.38 yen from 106.79

Pound/dollar: UP at $1.4230 from $1.4177

Oil - Brent North Sea: DOWN 63 cents at $71.43 per barrel

Oil - West Texas Intermediate: DOWN 50 cents at $66.32

burs-rl/je

IAG - INTERNATIONAL CONSOLIDATED AIRLINES GROUPGreek fighter pilot killed in crash after Turkish intercept mission: officials



Athens, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



A Greek fighter pilot died Thursday when his plane crashed in the Aegean while returning from a mission to intercept Turkish jets, officials said.

"A Greek pilot (has entered) the pantheon of heroes," Defence Minister Panos Kammenos said in a tweet.

"He fell... fighting to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity," he said.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said the pilot, a father-of-two named as Georgios Baltadoros, died "in the line of duty."

The Greek armed forces will observe a three-day period of mourning over the accident, the defence ministry said.

The Greek airforce said Baltadoros was fatally hurt when his Mirage 2000-5 fell into the sea while preparing to land "after concluding an operational mission."

Reports said the pilot may have blacked out during a combat exercise on the return home.

A Greek general staff source told AFP that the plane was returning from a mission to intercept Turkish fighter jets.

"The mission was over and the plane was returning," the source said.

"We still don't know if there was an actual engagement with the Turkish airforce," the officer added.

Citing military sources, state TV ERT said there had been no engagement with the Turkish airforce.

In Turkey, state-run Anadolu agency quoted Turkish security sources as saying there were no Turkish air force jets in the area at the time of the incident.

ERT said the warplane fell in the sea shortly before it was due to land at an airfield on Skyros island in the central Aegean.

Greek fighter planes are regularly scrambled to intercept Turkish jets entering what Athens considers Greek airspace over the Aegean, occasionally engaging in mock dogfights.

The accident comes at a period of heightened tension between regional rivals and NATO allies Greece and Turkey.

Earlier this week, Greek soldiers fired warning shots at a Turkish helicopter after it approached the small island of Ro, which is on Greece's border in the southeastern Aegean Sea.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and members of his government have escalated verbal attacks on Greece after its failure to extradite eight Turkish soldiers that Ankara said were part of an attempted 2016 coup.

In March, Turkey captured and is still holding two Greek soldiers who crossed the border, allegedly whilst getting lost in the fog on patrol.

In 2006, a Greek pilot was killed when his plane collided with a Turkish jet during a mock dogfight in the Aegean.

burs/cb-jph/harChemical weapons use in Syria 'simply inexcusable': Mattis



Washington, United States, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday the use of chemical weapons in Syria is "simply inexcusable," after a suspected poison gas attack that left more than 40 people dead.

The United States, France and Britain are finalizing plans for an expected strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They blame Damascus for the alleged chemical attack on the town of Douma in the devastated Eastern Ghouta suburb of the capital.

"Some things are simply inexcusable, beyond the pale and in the worst interest of not just the chemical weapons convention but of civilization itself," Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee.

He said a chemical attack had likely occurred and hoped inspectors would be in place within a week to prove it.

"I believe there was a chemical attack and we are looking for the actual evidence," Mattis said.

World powers have threatened a strong response to Saturday's attack, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying Thursday he had "proof" Syria's government was behind it.

Syria and Russia have both denied the accusations, and the global chemical weapons watchdog said its team would begin its investigation on Saturday.

Lawmakers quizzed Mattis on what he made of President Donald Trump's muddled messaging over Syria.

Last week, Trump said he wanted to pull out of the war-torn nation, but this week he has taunted Assad ally Russia with boasts of an impending missile strike.

The recognition of Syria's complexities "means you are at times ... going to see contrary impulses," Mattis said.

Mattis insisted that Trump has not yet made a decision to strike Syria, after the president earlier had tweeted that action "could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

The Pentagon chief and other top security officials were due to head to the National Security Council later Thursday, where he said he would present "various options to the president."

"We're trying to stop the murder of innocent people. But on a strategic level, it's (about) how do we keep this from escalating out of control," Mattis said.



- Buildup -



Since Saturday's attack in Douma, there has been a sustained military buildup in the eastern Mediterranean.

A French frigate, British Royal Navy submarines laden with cruise missiles and the USS Donald Cook, an American destroyer equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles, have all moved into striking range.

Several lawmakers grilled the Pentagon chief on the legal authorities the military has for action in Syria beyond the remit of its current mission, which is to work to destroy the Islamic State group.

The Pentagon is currently working under war powers granted in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, even though operations across the Middle East have morphed broadly since those early days of seeking to destroy Al-Qaeda.

Mattis said a strike on the Assad regime in Syria would be authorized under Constitutional powers granted to the president, and would not require Congressional permission.

But Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard disagreed, and said last year's strike on a Syrian airfield following a chemical attack in Khan Sheikhun was illegal.

"This is a complex area, I'll be the first to admit it," Mattis said.16 dead in attack at Iraq funeral of anti-IS fighters



Samarra, Iraq, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



At least 16 people died in a bomb attack Thursday during funerals in a northern Iraqi village for fighters killed by the Islamic State group, the village's mayor said.

"Two bombs exploded as the funeral procession was entering the cemetery" in Asdira, near the town of Sharqat, Salaheddin Shaalan told AFP.

Most of 14 people wounded in the blast were in "critical condition", he said.

Officials said the injured could not be transported to a hospital outside the village as night had fallen and inhabitants feared being ambushed by IS.

The funeral was for five members of the Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary units, which fought alongside the army to expel the jihadist group from Iraqi towns last year.

They were killed on Wednesday night in a jihadist attack on a military convoy in the village, 250 kilometres (150 miles) north of Baghdad, a police official said.

The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since a January 16 double suicide bombing in Baghdad that cost 31 lives.

The Iraqi government declared victory over IS in December after pushing the jihadists out of their final holdouts along the border with Syria.

But the group retains the capacity to strike despite losing control of vast swathes of Iraqi territory it seized in 2014.

It still clings to pockets of desert in war-torn Syria and appears to be able to cross the porous border between the two neighbours.

Jihadists sometimes manage to snatch control of roads at night, especially in the Salaheddin province where Thursday's attack took place, and Anbar province along the border with Syria, security experts say.

On Sunday, four people were killed and several wounded in an IS suicide attack on the headquarters of a political party in Anbar.Saudis intercept new missile fired by Yemen rebels: coalition



Riyadh, April 12 (AFP) Apr 12, 2018



Saudi air defences intercepted a missile fired by Yemeni rebels at the kingdom's southern city of Jizan on Thursday, the Saudi-led coalition fighting the rebels said, the latest in a series of such attacks.

"The missile was fired at Jizan indiscriminately with the aim of hitting civilian areas," a coalition spokesman told the official Saudi Press Agency.

"It was successfully intercepted... and the debris fell on a residential neighbourhood... but no casualties or damage was reported."

A missile was launched from Sadaa, the stronghold of Iran-backed Huthi rebels in northern Yemen, the coalition added.

The attack was claimed by the rebels via their news outlet Al-Masirah.

The strike comes after Saudi forces on Wednesday said they intercepted rebel ballistic missiles fired at Riyadh and the south of the kingdom, where two drones were also shot down.

Yemen's Shiite Huthi rebels have said their cross-border barrage marked the launch of what their leadership has dubbed "the year of ballistics".

Saudi Arabia has since March 2015 led a coalition of Arab states fighting to roll back the Huthi rebels in Yemen and restore its neighbour's internationally-recognised government to power.

Riyadh has repeatedly accused arch-rival Tehran of providing the missiles and threatened retaliation against Iran.

Tehran has denied making any arms deliveries and has said the Saudi accusations are a smokescreen intended to divert attention from its deadly bombing campaign against rebel-held areas.

Nearly 10,000 people have since been killed in the conflict, in what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Civilian casualties from coalition air strikes have drawn criticism from human rights groups, and in October the UN placed the coalition on a blacklist for killing and maiming children.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.Nouakchott, April 12, 2018 (SPS) - The President of the Republic, Secretary-General of the Frente POLISARIO, Mr. Brahim Gali, has Wednesday received a message of condolences from the President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Mr. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz following the military aircraft crash yesterday resulting in 257 people dead, including 10 crew members and thirty Sahrawi patients.

We learnt with great sadness and sorrow the news of the crash of a transport plane belonging to the Algerian Peoples National Army, lifting many Sahrawi citizen dead. the President of Mauritania said in his condolence message

Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, on this painful occasion, has extended to his Sahrawi counterpart and to the brotherly Sahrawi people and to the families of the victims his deepest condolences. SPS

125/090The experience of the past three years shows that a mere regime change is not good enough to ensure democracy and good governance in any tangible measure.





by Laksiri Fernando





( April 11, 2018, Sydney, Sri Lanka Guardian) Although the no confidence motion brought against the Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesighe , has been decisively defeated largely because of those who brought it were more culpable of corruption and misuse of public funds, the moral authority and legitimacy of both the PM and the Government are largely tarnished. Perhaps this pyrrhic victory of the PM would mark the end of Yahapalanaya in various meanings and for various reasons.





Betrayal of Accountability





Yahapalanaya or good governance first and foremost means accountability. If there is no one in the government, the President, the PM or any other Minister to undertake the responsibility for what happened under their political command, then that administration does not have any legitimacy to call itself Yahapalanaya.





It is true that even prior to the NCM debate, there was opportunity for the parliamentarians to freely debate on what has been termed as the Bond Scam and come to their conclusions. There was a Presidential Commission Report available. As usual, those debates were largely dominated by political agendas, rhetoric and political point scoring. However in respect of accountability, it should have been the task of the Cabinet, headed by the President to discuss the magnitude of the matter and determine who was politically responsible for the irregularities and in fact corruption, if the PM denies that he is innocent and not responsible. To all our knowledge, there has been no such a discussion in the Cabinet and no pronouncement by the Cabinet spokespersons like Rajitha Senaratne on the subject.





The Bond Scam is not something that the country can easily forget about. It will haunt the PM, the government and the country for many more years to come. It is not about a petty official swindling public money. This is about Treasury Bonds auctioned by the Central Bank, the bank of the banks of the country, amounting to colossal amounts money. It is not once, but at least twice that the insider trading, the manipulation of auction amounts and favouritism had happened. The end result has been the enrichment of family, kith and kin and their business interests.





It became also revealed that the main beneficiary, Arjun Aloysius, favoured the then Finance Minister, Ravi Karunanayake, with a Pent House. He had to resign after the revelations. He apparently had more gentlemanly quality than the PM. The PM may say that he was unaware of the first transaction or fraud in February 2015. But can he say the same for the fraud in March 2016?





Whose Responsibility?





The principle of accountability does not go by the notion of criminal or legal responsibility, but by the moral and political responsibility. Even if the PM is not criminally or legally responsible for the Bond Scam, he is politically and morally responsible. Otherwise, how could good governance or democracy operate? If he is not responsible, then who is responsible? The whole Cabinet, the President included, should be responsible. So far no one has even apologised for what has happened. There is some truth in what Kumar David wrote in his usual column to The Sunday Island on 8 April, despite showing his arrogant antipathy against non-elite groups in society.





I believe that Ranil could not have been ignorant of Mahendrans corruption but preferred to look askance. Political pundits think they know why. The UNP was not rich and the grama sevakaya did not have two kopeks to scratch his bottom with before January 8. It is alleged that Mahendran lent funds to match a small fraction of the Rajapaksa loot and RMB donations. It is then alleged that the scam was the way in which repayment was engineered. If this be true it does pose something of a moral dilemma.





Swindling of public funds for party purposes is equally bad as for personal or other purposes. There are strict legal prohibitions on these matters in other democracies. Sri Lanka is also known for foreign funding, or should I say international community funding, for election purposes! It may be true that the return of Rajapaksas would be a greater evil than the bond scam. But that cannot justify the protection of bond corruption or other corruption, if we are committed to good governance principles. There is more time for the presidential and parliamentary elections.





It is not the non-protection, but the protection of bond scammers that would lead to a possible Rajapaksa return. I am particularly saying this to the misguided civil society organizations.





Limits of Regime Change





The experience of the past three years shows that a mere regime change is not good enough to ensure democracy and good governance in any tangible measure. The changed regime should have the commitment and competence to ensure what is expected. One may even argue that although there was a change of government, there was no change of the regime. The regime in this sense means not only the government, but also the principles, the norms and rules governing that government. That is why the name tag Yahapalanaya or good governance came to be attached to the new government or the governmental change.





There is no doubt that the peoples expectations of the new government or change were quite high given the dramatic manner that the January 8th change came about. There are civil society activists who rightly blame and criticise the government for not fulfilling the political reform agenda of the President and the UNFGG . What is mostly forgotten however is the promises given both by the President and the UNFGG leaders, the PM in particular, in uplifting the peoples economic standards through tangible and equitable development.





Yahapalanaya or good governance was basically a concept put forward by the UNFGG (United National Front for Good Governance) which was in fact inscribed in its own title name. Therefore, most of the blame for its failures should go to its leading party, the UNP, and its leader, Ranil Wickremesinghe. What Sirisena promised was Compassionate Government and a stable country. His manifesto also gave much prominence to the need of fighting against corruption and to take appropriate action against all wrong doers . Therefore, the appointment of a presidential commission on the bond scam was in line with what he had promised. What was lacking however was to appoint another or a parallel presidential commission to investigate the past corruption.





In contrast, the UNFGG manifesto while castigating past corruption of the Rajapaksa era, was conspicuously silent on the bond scam which had already taken place under the UNPs ministerial responsibilities. It is intriguing to note what the UPFA manifesto said about corruption. While acknowledging that the previous UPFA government failed to ensure transparency in its development projects, it promised to investigate and expose baseless allegations! It was also the UPFA position that the wrongdoers should be punished under the existing law. However, there is no difficulty in deducing that the UPFA, even after the defeat of the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime, and now under the leadership of Maithripala Sirisena was directly and indirectly trying to safeguard the past practices.





National Unity Government?





It was in Presidents manifesto that the concept of a national unity government was first put forward. I am not aware who in fact initiated the concept. The Prime Minister Wickremesinghe also was floating the idea of a Lichchavi system for a quite some time. There must have been some consensus on the matter between the two. However, the concept of a national unity government never appeared in the UNFGG manifesto or the UPFA manifesto at the parliamentary elections. Presidents prior idea was to invite all parties to form a government and not just two parties. This is the idea he is still echoing, although such a broad grand coalition is now quite unrealistic. It was also his 100 day program that said Following that election, the Prime Minister will be appointed from the party getting the highest number of seats at such election, with a Deputy Prime Minister from the party getting the next highest number. This however never happened.





The two manifestos of the UNFGG and the UPFA were quite apart and mostly opposed to each other except in ritualistically highlighting the need for democracy, reconciliation, constitutional reforms and anti-corruption. The three areas where the policies appeared to be diametrically opposed to each other were on national security, foreign relations and economic development. While the UPFA was giving high priority to national security, the UNFGG emphasized more on Sri Lankas international commitments. On foreign policy, the UPFAs orientation was directed to the East while the UNFGG wanted to restore and strengthen the relations with the West.





The different strategies on economic development perhaps were the most conspicuous. The UNFGG committed mostly for the urban sector, the western province megapolis as the centre, emphasizing the priority for the private sector, liberalization of the economy through free trade agreements and FDI etc. In contrast, the UPFA was talking about economic development through continued infrastructure development and strengthening both the state and private sectors.





It is a known fact that both the UNFGG and the UPFA could not obtain clear majorities to govern the country on their own, and such was the need for a national unity government. This was possible under the leadership of the President and for that purpose a 10 point MOU was signed between the UNP and the SLFP (not the UNFGG and the UPFA) for two years initially, but the alliance continued fairly smoothly until it became ruptured in recent times even before the NCM. The reasons for this rupture has not properly been explained to the people and the country by the President, the PM or any other leader.





A careful analysis of this MOU shows it contains more of UPFA/SLFP or Presidents policies than of the UNP/UNFGG, particularly in respect of economic development, foreign policy and even on constitutional reforms. When it talks about a social market economy, it is qualified as one directed under the overall control of the State with the objectives of giving concessions to the people through price control and consumer protection. Some of the propositions can be called not only welfarist, but also broadly socialist. However none of these were properly implemented. It is undoubtedly a controversial question who breached this MOU?





Without going into much details, the point 8 of the MOU can be highlighted. It is a one sentence clause that emphasises Important economic policies and programmes should be decided by the Cabinet. Irrespective of who was right or who was wrong, a main controversy recently between the President and the Prime Minister was about the alleged kitchen cabinet that the PM was supposed to be running in the form of an Economic Management Committee. Therefore, it is no surprise now the national unity government is in tatters. There is no much point in now talking about a cooperative coalition after three years. The horse has already bolted.





NCM and Disarray of Yahapalanaya





The TNA leader, R. Sampanthan, has skilfully highlighted many inconsistencies and contradictions in the wording of the NCM. The purpose very clearly was to safeguard the PM and the government. Irony however is that he is the Leader of the Opposition! Overcoming many radical sounding statements by some backbenchers, the UNP and more broadly the UNFGG, except Ven Athuraliye Rathana, have manged to consolidate and defeat the NCM. The constitutional leftist, Jayampathy Wickramaratne, who secured a parliamentary seat through the UNP or probably through Ranil Wickremesighe , voted against the NCM pretending he is defending the President and the government! His murky legal arguments were most hilarious.





The most puzzling question is how did they all manage to get the moral courage to defend Ranil Wickremesighe who in simple logic of good governance principles is politically responsible for the bond irregularities, not to talk about a bond scam? How come we talk about a Yahapalanaya under such circumstances?





It is mostly the JVP who appeared to have taken a clear moral and a principled political stand on the NCM. There is no much point in talking about the dubious political motives of the JO, while they had every right to move such a motion under usual parliamentary procedures. Whatever the wavering, conflicts, indecision or discord, there was no option for the SLFP, in my opinion, other than either to vote for or abstain from the NCM. After that, they (at least the Ministers) dont have a right or moral possibility to remain in the government, not to speak of collective responsibility of the Cabinet. Such a behaviour would be mere hypocrisy even on the part of those who abstained, unless resign from the party and join the UNFGG or the UNP. The SLFP is now again split in the middle. The winners seem to be the JO thanks to Wickremesinghes bond involvement.



English11/04/2018

SRNA News Roundup /II/ - April 11, 2018





REPUBLIKA SRPSKA



BANJALUKA - Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik said today at a meeting with a delegation of Russian Duma members that Russia has always provided support to Republika Srpska positions and had understanding for them, as well as that it supported the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement.



BANJALUKA  The Speaker of the Republika Srpska Parliament, Nedeljko Cubrilovic, today in Banjaluka stressed the importance of improving interparliamentary cooperation and overall relations between Republika Srpska and the Russian Federation.



BANJALUKA  The Republika Srpska Government today got informed of a business plan of the Republika Srpska Airport for the period 2018-2020 which calls for governments subsidies of KM 1.9 million a year and for concluding an agreement with at least one low-cost company this year which would start its operations.



BANJALUKA  At a session today in Banjaluka, the Republika Srpska Government accepted a report on the implementation of a project of registration of real property in the FBiH.



BANJALUKA  The Republika Srpska Government today reviewed a report on the use of 5.5 million Euros donated by the Serbian Government.



TREBINJE  The Republika Srpska Minister of Refugees and Displaced Persons, Davor Cordas, and Trebinje Deputy Mayor Mirko Curic announced today the continuation of construction of a 48-apartment building for users of collective or alternative accommodation in Trebinje.



TREBINJE  The Republika Srpska Minister of Refugees and Displaced Persons, Davor Cordas, today paid a visit to the Old Age Home in Trebinje where 20 displaced persons are housed and officially announced its renovation.



BANJALUKA  The director of the Republika Srpska Institute for Urbanism, Construction and Ecology, Stevan Jovanovic, has told SRNA that a project for the repair of a landslide and beautification of the Tjentiste memorial complex should be drafted by the end of May.



BANJALUKA  The Banjaluka Stock Exchange today had a turnover of KM 442,000 in 125 transactions, reports the Stock Exchange.



NEVESINJE  Nevesinje Mayor Milenko Avdalovic has confirmed that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic promised that Serbia will donate KM 300,000 to the House of Culture in this municipality.



ROGATICA  The president of the Association of Berry Producers Rogaticka Raspberry, Igor Kusic, expects that the price of raspberry will grow in the coming period so that all producers of raspberry could have financial gain from it.





BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA



SARAJEVO  A session of the Constitutional Committee of the BiH House of Peoples was not held today due to the lack of a quorum and a new one is expected to be held on April 17.



SARAJEVO - Nikola Spiric, a member of the BiH House of Representatives, has told SRNA that judges of the BiH Constitutional Court today officially admitted that this judicial institution is being governed by foreigners headed by the high representative and thus called into the question the appropriateness of the highest judicial institution in BiH.



SARAJEVO  The HDZ and the SDA still have opposed positions on amendments to the BiH Election Law, Ljilja Zovko and Halid Genjac, members of the BiH House of Peoples, confirmed today.



SARAJEVO  The World Bank expects the economic growth of BiH to be 3.2% and expects the continuation of the implementation of the Reform Agenda, said Sandra Hlivnjak, an economist at the World Bank.



SARAJEVO  BiH citizen Fikret Zukic /58/, suspected of organizing a terrorist group, for whom Interpol issued a red arrest warrant on Monday, took the whole family to jihad and they joined terrorist groups in Syria, SRNA has learned from a source close to security structures.





FEDERATION OF BiH



SARAJEVO  FBiH Prime Minister Fadil Novalic spoke today in Sarajevo with a delegation of international businessmen interested in investing in BiH, headed by Haled Jarah, a business manager from Lebanon and a coordinator for visits of Arab investors to BiH.



BOSANSKO GRAHOVO  Around KM 19,000 of the needed KM 24,000 has been raised for 28-year-old Sladjana Simidzija of Bosansko Grahovo whose eye surgery is scheduled for April 14 in Belgrade, the Simidzija family told SRNA.





SERBIA



BELGRADE  Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said at a meeting with the OSCE representative on freedom of the media, Harlem Desir, that Serbia firmly supports principles and standards of media freedoms and freedom of expression, and that Belgrade will consult the OSCE when drafting a strategy for the development of public information system.



BELGRADE  Serbian Defense Minister Aleksandar Vulin has confirmed that a pilot of the Aircraft Test Centre died in a crash of Super Galeb G-4 aircraft after having been catapulted.



BELGRADE  Greece will not change its position regarding the territorial integrity of Serbia and will not recognize unilaterally declared independence of Kossovo and Metohija, Greek Foreign Minister Nikolaos Kotzias said today in Belgrade.





WORLD



MOSCOW /SRNA-Reuters/ - The Kremlin announced today it hoped that all sides in Syria would avoid actions that might destabilize an already unstable situation in the Middle East, stressing that it was strongly opposed to a possible American attack.



MOSCOW  A Russian presidential inauguration of Vladimir Putin will be held on May 7, and on that day the Government will resign, announced the Kremlin today. /end/sgChristianity Today Honored with Awards of Excellence by Evangelical Press Association

Contact: Cory Whitehead, Christianity Today,

630-260-6200 ext 4220, cwhitehead@christianitytoday.com



CAROL STREAM, Ill., April 12, 2018 /Standard Newswire/ -- Christianity Today was honored with top publishing awards32 in totalat the Evangelical Press Association's (EPA) annual convention April 4-6, 2018 in Orlando. For the second year in a row, both CT print magazine and website, ChristanityToday.com, won Awards of Excellence in the General Publication category.



Each year the Evangelical Press Association hold two contests to honor member publications, the Awards of Excellence for publications as a whole and the Higher Goals for individual pieces that were produced in the past year.



Christianity Today also won several first place awards, including in the General Article: Medium category for "In the Image of Our Choosing" about genetic engineering and Christian ethics, and in the Reporting category for "Bringing Light to the Trafficking Fight," an on-the-ground report from Cambodia about Christians leading the progress against the child sex industry.



"Our staff is humbled by this kind of industry recognition," said CT president and CEO Harold Smith. "And it is especially gratifying to know that the vision of our late founder Billy Graham to create content that speaks with both conviction and lovesomething we today call Beautiful Orthodoxyremains strong."



Below is the full listing of Christianity Today's 2017 EPA awards:



Awards of Excellence

Honors the best work done in EPA publications during the 2017 calendar year.

Higher Goals Awards

Honors the best work done in specific categories during the 2017 calendar year.

A full list of EPA 2018 awards can be found at the association's website:

www.evangelicalpress.com/



Christianity Today is a nonprofit, global media ministry centered on Beautiful Orthodoxystrengthening the church by richly communicating the breadth of the true, good, and beautiful gospel. Reaching over five million people monthly with various digital and print resources, the ministry equips Christians to renew their minds, serve the church, and create culture to the glory of God.

Biblica Looks to Resume Meeting 'Bible Hunger' Need in Cuba Soon

Spanish-translation ministry and distributor welcomes 'positive movements' in serving country's growing church



Contact: Ty Mays,

770-256-8710



COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., April 12, 2018 /Standard Newswire/ -- Biblica (www.biblica.com), the International Bible Society, is looking forward to more opportunities to make desperately needed Bibles available in Cuba, despite a setback.



Leaders of the Colorado Springs, Colo.-based ministry said that they hoped the return of a shipment of Spanish-language Bibles to island nation would be resolved soon, with further copies to be sent to support the growing church there.



"We are eager to work directly with the Cuban government, and through our current ministry partnerships in Cuba," said Stephen Cave, Biblica's chief ministry officer. "We expect we will continue to see many people reached with the Bible which we know, when placed in people's hands, has the power to change lives."



Cave was speaking after recent reports that in December 2016 the Cuban government had turned away a vessel whose cargo included a shipment of 17,000 donated copies of Biblica's Nueva Version International (NVI). Officials in the country have allowed distribution of an older Spanish translation that is less understandable for many present-day readers.



"We have seen positive movements allowing Bible distribution and more accessibility to Cuban believers and churches, said Cave. We are hopeful that this shipment of Bibles will get sorted out for distribution among those in need of Bibles in Cuba."



First published in 1999, the contemporary NVI has proved widely popular in the Spanish-speaking world. Biblica has been commercially distributing the translation throughout Latin America through its publishing partners.



Biblica has also previously shipped thousands of donated Spanish Bibles to Cuba, and sponsoring church training seminars.



"There is a great hunger for God's Word in Cuba, as in so many other countries, and we have been pleased to be able to play a part in making it available, and so helping build up the people there, and their country," said Cave.



About Biblica

Biblica (www.biblica.com) is committed to providing the Bible in accurate, contemporary translations and formats so that more people around the world may have the opportunity to be transformed by Jesus Christ. Copyright-holder of the best-selling New International Version, Biblica is involved in translation and publishing, distribution, and Bible engagement programs with hundreds of partner groups around the world.

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 (788)Anyone involved in climate research knows flying carries a huge carbon footprint. But researchers are also painfully aware that travel is often necessary to do the research in the first place and communicate that research to politicians, the public and businesses, especially when it comes to international negotiations.



To help staff consider their emissions, the centre has rolled out a new App to set emissions targets. The centres Carbon Tracker was developed by researchers at the UKs Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.



Unlike many tools to track emissions, the Carbon Tracker was designed specifically for academic staff and it allows staff to set emissions targets, for example in line with Swedens own emissions reduction targets, or following the Carbon Law pathway, proposed by centre researchers in 2017, of halving emissions every decade  though this is a global average and those in wealthy countries should go much faster.



It can take just 30-60 seconds to input a journey. People hate filling in forms so the tool was also designed to be as simple and quick as possible to complete, says Owen Gaffney from the centre who is managing the project.



The team managing the project will roll out a series of incentives to encourage staff to adopt the system. Data from the initiative will be used by climate researchers studying behavioural change.



The tool is also being used by Stockholm Universitys Department of Environmental Sciences and Analytical Chemistry (ACES) and the pilot scheme will run through 2018. Stockholm University is monitoring the pilot carefully with the possibility of creating a university-wide system.

IN this week's Herald we bring you the touching story of a special posthumous award for Stratford mum Rachael Martin who saved her daughter's life two years ago.

There's good news for two Shipston friends who have received a royal invitation, plus get an exclusive sneak preview behind the doors of the new Magic Alley attraction which opens in Bell Court on Saturday.

Also. . .

The controversial planned funding for Stratford's South Western Relief Road moves a step forward this week.

Urgent safety improvement work at a dangerous blackspot faces further delays.

Continued fears expressed for the future of Bidford Bridge where lorry drivers are still flouting the weight limits.

The journalist branded racist for his review of The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Fich responds to the RSC accusations.

We solve the mystery over felled trees which has sparked local anger.

It's the turn of our fortnightly Education Matters which includes news of a college student's allergy-friendly dining experience and Sibford students' close shaves for charity.

Special interview with the first Syrian family to arrive in Stratford.

Plus, in Arts, we hear from actress Daisy Badger who is currently appearing in The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich at the RSC and look ahead to Lilies of the Land which comes to The Bear Pit next week.

Our man on the touchline brings you all the very latest on the local sporting scene, including reaction from hurdler Andrew Pozzi following his commonwealth Games disappointment and Shipston rugby manager's angry outburst over the officials' handling of Saturday's game.

Plus, there is the usual round-up of reports from clubs and villages across the district as well as forthcoming local events and the chance to win tickets to The Merry Wives of Windsor and a live recording of an RSC Telegraph podcast.

All this - and so much more - for just 75p!Consumer Financial Protection Authority takes off By Bandula Sirimanna View(s): View(s):

In the face of the recent debacle of several finance companies, Sri Lanka is set to take more effective financial consumer protection measures to protect local and foreign consumers in the sophisticated and complex financial market at present, a senior Finance Ministry official divulged.

A Consumer Financial Protection Authority (CFPA) will be established to control Non-Bank Finance Institutions (NBFI) including finance companies as this sector has grown 20 percent at present and some of these firms are facing liquidity issues.

At present, Sri Lanka does not have a dedicated authority to protect the interest of the financial customers, promote fairness and transparency for consumer financial products and services.

The 2017 budget proposed to establish a CFPA which will have the capacity to protect the consumers, by improving the financial consumer rights, promote financial literacy, ensure competitiveness in the financial markets and firms thereby enhance integrity of the financial system of the country as a whole.

The establishment of this independent authority will not duplicate the Central Banks regulatory functions of Non Bank Financial Institutions, in fact it will facilitate the monetary regulators financial inclusion strategy, a top level CB official told the Business Times.

However he noted that modalities of the setting up of this authority are yet to be finalised as it requires cabinet approval and the enactment of necessary legislation in Parliament.

Its job is to stand up for consumer interests and ensure their fair treatment in the consumer financial marketplace and it will not duplicate the regulatory functions of the Central Bank, he added.

The main aim of the proposed authority is to protect the consumers, by improving the financial consumer rights, promote financial literacy, ensure competitiveness in the financial markets and firms thereby enhancing integrity of the financial system, Finance Ministry official said.

It will also help to increases bargaining power of consumers and further regulates banks in terms of marketing financial products.

The availability of information has grown both in quantity and complexity and the pace of change, in terms of new product developments, product innovations, and technological advances, has prompted the Finance Ministry to set up this agency.

Under the present circumstances, it is essential to build and maintain consumer confidence and trust in financial markets while promoting efficiency and stability to create positive outcomes for both financial institutions and their customers, he claimed.

Central Bank reiterated the need for continued strengthening of the existing regulatory framework of non-bank financial institutions to ensure the soundness of the sector and contain its spill-over effects on the whole system.

An independent CFPA would make and enforce clear rules for everyday financial products. It should vigorously enforce those rules; pay real attention to preventing the growth of harmful practices; be accountable to the public; and provide real consumer protection in financial products and services, several leaders of disgruntled depositors associations of failed finance companies said.

CBs protection for finance firm customers As a precursor to the Consumer Financial Protection Authority (CFPA), the Central Bank (CB) has issued directions to all Licensed Finance Companies (LFCs) to ensure the protection of rights and interests of all financial customers. According to these directions issued recently, customers should be given complete, clear, concise and not misleading information about financial products and services, and they should have the right to access and to have fully understood the terms and conditions of such products and services. Employees and appointed agents will have to act professionally with due skill and diligence when dealing with customers. Under this initiative, all customers shall be treated equitably, honestly and fairly at all stages of their relationship with the financial entity. All LFCs have been directed to take necessary steps to protect customer data and privacy.IFC invests in Senkadagala Finance targeting women entrepreneurs View(s):

IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, is investing US$15 million in Senkadagala Finance PLC to help the company expand access to finance for women entrepreneurs across Sri Lanka.

This loan is part of the Women Entrepreneurs Opportunity Facility (WEOF), launched by IFC through its Banking on Women (BOW) programme, and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women, IFC said in a media release last week.

This loan is expected to expand access to affordable financing for women-owned micro and small businesses over a five-year period, helping to narrow the credit gap for businesswomen. Of Sri Lankas one million businesses, over 250,000 are headed by women. Little over 90 per cent of these are micro and 4 per cent are small sized. The IFC Enterprise Survey in 2011 estimates that up to 65 per cent of small enterprises do not have access to a bank loan or credit.

Having started our relationship with the IFC in 2014, this project is timely given the expansion plans of the company. It will enable Senkadagala Finance to further extend credit to women entrepreneurs, said Sanath Bandaranayake, Director/Additional CEO of Senkadagala Finance, in the statement.

This is IFCs first investment in Sri Lanka targeted exclusively at women-owned entrepreneurs, and IFCs first local currency loan in the country.

This project fits well with IFCs strategy to promote sustainable, inclusive growth, and we are keen to help create more and better jobs for women and narrow the credit gap for women entrepreneurs, said Amena Arif, IFC Country Manager for Sri Lanka and Maldives. IFCs second investment with Senkadagala Finance will create opportunities for female entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka, enabling them to grow and prosper.

The WEOF is the first-of-its-kind global facility dedicated to expanding access to capital for 100,000 women entrepreneurs. It aims to help close the credit gap for women-owned businesses around the world. IFCs BOW programme is playing a catalytic role in helping financial institutions meet the needs of women entrepreneurs in a sustainable and profitable way. The programme has committed 53 investments globally, totalling $1.68 billion, and undertaken 39 advisory projects since its launch in 2010. Of these, WEOF has supported more than $930 million in commitments to financial institutions in 19 countries.

Goldman Sachs research shows that closing the credit gap for women-owned SMEs in emerging markets could push income per capita an average of 12 per cent higher by 2030; women entrepreneurs have real potential to impact Sri Lankas future growth. Through this partnership, we will help to build resilient, women-owned businesses and enable women entrepreneurs to reach their full potential with the capital and support they need, said Charlotte Keenan, Head of 10,000 Women.Modern Mercantilism View(s):

All of us would like to see Sri Lankas exports growing. For that matter, we want other countries to open their markets for our exports; if possible they can even grant us some concessions like GSP +. We appreciate the EU and the US for extending the GSP + and other concessions for Sri Lanka. However, at least for some of us  I believe there are many- the flip side of international trade is different. There are those who would like to see curbs on imports; that we should not open our market for exports from other countries, although we want their markets open for us.

Trade hypocrisy

It might be surprising and even embarrassing to know what the US has to say about Sri Lankas tariff regime, while extending the GSP concessions to Sri Lanka. The following is the way that International Trade Administration of the US Department of Commerce provides advice to their exporters who consider exporting to Sri Lanka:

Sri Lanka imposes a variety of import duties, which combined can result in high duty rates. US exporters should be aware that fees incurred when exporting to Sri Lanka include the customs-import tariff, Export Development Board levy, Value Added Tax (VAT), Port and Airport tax, Nation Building Tax, Port Handling charges, and agent commissions, all of which could add up to more than 100 per cent of the cost-plus-insurance-plus-freight (CIF) value for items at the higher tariff bands. The Embassy has received complaints from U.S. exporters regarding this prohibitive tariff regime. [Source: https://www.export.gov/article?id=Sri-Lanka-Import-Tariffs]

We want others to follow open market policies for us, but also want closed market policies for them. The two ideas, taken separately look sincere and patriotic. But actually they are hypocritical, when they are put together. Apart from this moral issue, we might easily get caught up in our own argument when we want to believe in a strategy of export promotion plus import protection.

This economic sentiment, which is known as a mercantilist idea is, however, not a new thing. It is historical and global. With recent global economic crises and the new US trade policies, the old mercantilism has been gaining momentum, opening the door for a new global economic rivalry.

Medieval mercantilism

Mercantilism, as it was called by the Scottish Economist, Adam Smith who attacked it in his pioneering book Wealth of Nations (1776), prevailed in Europe during 1600s  1800s. It was the dominant economic perspective of the then European businessmen who believed that the economic power of a nation should be built up by maintaining a positive trade balance; that is, exporting more and importing less. Because international payments were in gold, exporting more and importing less would keep the countrys gold stock growing. It was the sign of increasing economic power of a nation state.

The contemporary economic policies in Europe were based on this mercantilist ideology: It would ensure always a positive trade balance by exporting more and importing less.

One might ask a simple question: When every nation is trying to export to other countries and not to import from other countries, wouldnt world trade diminish and come to an end? The answer is clear if you look at European Mercantilism in the context. It was the time of European expansion and colonization over the rest of the world so that a few European nations were able to sustain Mercantilism.

Old mercantilism withered away after 1800s, and free trade gained momentum up this date. We are in a different world now. But we still hear that a modern version of Mercantilism has revisited from both political and business grounds.

Modern mercantilism

Modern mercantilism has two aspects as individualist and nationalist dimensions. A producer of a particular commodity might demand for protecting his particular product from competing imports. This is good for that particular producer at least temporarily, but bad for the economy as a whole. It is good for the producer because it keeps him from competition and efficiency with a guaranteed market. It is bad for the economy because, on the one hand the consumers have to pay for it with higher prices. On the other hand, industrial expansion and economic growth would be retarded.

The flip side is that the same producer under different circumstances might have to take a contradictory ideological position:

If he starts exporting the product he will choose the open market economies where he can easily get into business. If he has to import a part or a raw material which has come under tight import controls, now his own protectionist idea might be an obstacle to his own production; perhaps, he might consider moving his business to a more open economy where there is less import protection.

I should also emphasise that competitiveness and efficiency of production is determined by not only the degree of import controls. This is a result of multiple factors, while the quality, quantity and cost of many other inputs will affect it.

Nationalist dimension

Nationalist dimension of mercantilism is the development strategies based on mercantilist ideology, anticipating that it is the road to prosperity. Countries having trade deficits are often seen pointing fingers at the lack of import controls. This is a familiar case for us in Sri Lanka too, as we have a persistent trade deficit.

I dont think Sri Lanka is a country with an open economy because we have tariffs, para-tariffs, and domestic taxes on imports on the one hand, and numerous and complicated taxes and tax mechanisms on the other hand.

In fact, sometimes I wonder why we introduce Sri Lanka as an open economy. It may be comparable with South Asian standards, but Sri Lankas competitive position as an established open economy in the Asian region has eroded over the years.

While Sri Lankan government collects about 18 per cent of its revenue from taxes on international trade, it is 2 to 3 per cent in most of the Asia countries, listed in the above table. Singapore and UK have zero per cent share in taxes on international trade, and in the US it is only one per cent. This shows that, despite rhetoric, Sri Lanka is not so open; you may compare Sri Lanka with other South Asian countries, but not with fast-growing export-oriented economies in East Asia.

Wrong diagnosis

Let me give the economic explanation of Sri Lankas trade deficit; in short, I would call it living beyond means. This means that Sri Lanka has a trade deficit because our aggregate demand  mainly consumption expenditure and government expenditure, exceeds the level permitted by our income (GDP). It is similar to saying that when you keep spending more than what you earn, it is reflected through your growing loans.

Let me also elaborate another valid point here. Economic growth can be influenced either by growing exports or by growing government expenditure:

The countries which were able to sustain the former (growth influenced by exports), are able to maintain healthy trade performance and sound government budget; many East Asian countries fall under this category.

The countries which used to push their economic growth through government expenditure gradually plunge into the problem of both trade deficit and budget deficit; Sri Lanka falls under this category.

It is absurd to address the problem of trade deficit with mercantilist policies; it is based on a wrong diagnosis. Neither would such policies bring prosperity to the country. What is needed for Sri Lanka is to make a decisive shift from the latter to the former group of countries  from fiscal expansion to trade expansion as the driving force of sustainable economic growth.

(The writer is Professor of Economics at the University of Colombo. He can be reached at sirimal@econ.cmb.ac.lk).

Taxes of International Trade as % of Government Revenue China  2.8

Indonesia  2.8

Japan  1.5

South Korea  2.0

Malaysia  1.7

Thailand  3.3

Singapore  0.0

India  13.2

Sri Lanka  17.8

UK  0.0

USA  1.0

South Asia (average)  16.7

East Asia & the Pacific (average)  2.7

Source: World Development Indicators

Note: Figures are for the latest year as available, while for most of the countries it is for 2016.Young talent against experience View(s):

This was the topic of the telephone conversation I was engaged in on Wednesday. My (Thursday) deadline had changed because the printing of the newspaper had been brought forward, ahead of the Sinhala and Hindu New Year (our chaps at the printing presses who churn out millions of newspapers daily need a break, no! What about the printing machines; its stop the presses for once, at this delightful time of the year).

Anyway as I was saying, it was human resource pundit HR Perera trying to convince me, over the phone, that maturity, experience and seniority are better than young talent.

I had begged to differ, disagreeing that young talent is better than maturity but agreeing that young talent is better than seniority. Confusing? Read on, but also remember, HR Perera belongs to the old school where seniority matters and comes over efficiency and/or talent.

Before I proceed on this telephone conversation, it must be stated that Sri Lanka is at a crossroads on how to effectively manage its human resource capital. Actually, we are at sixes and sevens!

Consider this: We are building mega cities with massive construction of infrastructure on and in the pipeline and building potentially South Asias main business hub  the Colombo Financial City  where nearly 250,000 will work or enter for business and other purposes while another 75,000 will live there.

For all this, you need human capital but there lies the problem in Sri Lankas HR planning to meet these exigencies when one policy is to encourage Sri Lankan professionals to go abroad. Thus to meet the shortage, foreign labour and skills are hired.

This is the reality. Consider, as explained earlier, the state policy on outward migration for work: The focus is to encourage more professional and skilled migration and less unskilled labour like domestic workers so that their capacity to send more foreign exchange is much higher, and reduces the worrying social costs when unskilled women find jobs abroad.

What kind of policy is this? The shortage of unskilled workers  given the massive construction underway  has compelled companies to import labour from India, China, Bangladesh and Nepal. Another issue that arises  and something not considered so far by the authorities  is proper contracts and conditions of employment for these foreign workers, sound conditions of employment Sri Lanka is desperately campaigning for, for its own workers in West Asia. What is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander.

Leaving that discussion aside on decent working and residential conditions for foreign workers, the issue at stake is whether Sri Lanka has a proper labour needs and assessment policy in place to take us comfortably into the middle of the 21st century.

I was reminded of this by HR Pereras reference to a Business Times story last week on the government considering infusing young blood into key positions in the state sector due to the lack of efficient administrators.

Hello, Machan, says HR, in a rare exuberant way, as he is always grumpy; nay cautious, typical of people in his fraternity.

Yeh, why, I respond cautiously, wondering what surprise he is about to spring on me.

The labour issue that your papers have been talking about is all because there would be a lack of senior persons in the administration when the present lot retires.

Well yes , I say, again waiting for his full explanation.

This is a serious issue. Who will run the country after the present lot retires? he asks.

It appears that quite a few secretaries of ministries and heads of departments are about to retire and that the second level of management who would eventually take over lack the competencies and skills, particularly proper English language speaking and writing abilities and digital capabilities  which are important in todays public sector and particularly in a wired society.

Government thinking, according to last weeks story, is to bring in some young blood into the sector, give them positions of authority but working under the senior officials (so that the latter doesnt get offended as they are seniors) to drive the development agenda.

The challenge today given the pace of development in economies that are speedily getting digitised is for officials coming up the ladder and those who joined the public service in the 70s and the 80s (in Sri Lanka) to keep abreast of these developments. Their junior counterparts are more alive to these trends and engaging with such technology, giving them a head start over their senior colleagues and bosses. What they (younger staff) lack in experience is amply compensated with their knowledge and effective use of technology, which is a kind of drawback to the older generation of public servants.

While there are many reports and new ones coming out on assessments of human resource needs, there doesnt appear to be a clear understanding of Sri Lankas human resource needs in the next 10-30 years. Often these assessments are catering to short-terms of 3-5 years.

If not, why are we promoting Sri Lankan professional migration courtesy the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, essentially to make up for possible shrinking of foreign exchange remittances due to a policy of reducing the number going abroad for domestic work?

So while on one hand, Sri Lanka needs to build its foreign reserves through remittances from workers abroad, on the other hand, this results in a shortage of skilled and professional manpower at home. Thus, foreign remittances via professional migration come ahead of retaining this talent at home with jobs and attractive employment conditions. In the absence of skilled workers, Sri Lanka is compelled to import labour  unskilled and eventually skilled.

Then to import skilled workers, which Sri Lanka is likely to face in the near future if professional out-migration continues and intensifies, there are problems; professional associations here which are not in favour of the various trade agreements like the Sri Lanka-Singapore FTA and the upcoming Sri Lanka-India and Sri Lanka-China FTAs which have provision to allow services in the form of professional workers.

While this is still under debate as to what the right fit (and numbers) in terms of allowing foreign workers should be, already there are hundreds of workers from 3-4 countries working on construction sites. These have been permitted under Board of Investment rules which also allow a certain number of professional categories.

The authorities also have to be mindful of not allowing hotshot, young turks to upset the old guard in ministries and departments with bull in a china shop approaches; rather it should be creating an environment of live and let live.

Managing this human capital of seniority and experience versus talent and up-dated skills should be the order of the day, particularly with Sri Lanka moving up the ladder of development and aiming to reach middle-income status.

Does all this sound boring for a Sunday read? To be honest, I found it too, myself, yawning a couple of times while writing. HR is not the most exciting subject though the new science of HR is a different ball game. However, it is an important economic issue and the reason why we need to bring these issues to the table.

But something else is missing this week in providing that extra energy and zest to the column. Ah! Its the absence of Kussi Amma Sera who has gone home for the Avurudu holidays. Silence is golden, they say but this is one time, I wish, she were around with the noisy racket in the kitchen and over-the-fence loud gossip with her comrade-in-arms Serapina providing that inspiration for good Sunday topics.Battle after battle in CMC View(s):

The local councils are meant to be the miniature legislatures of the country and the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) is showing the way how true that is.

Already, the CMC is imitating the national Parliament with a heated contest for the post of Leader of the Opposition. Again, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) with 23 seats is the second largest party after the UNP in the CMC and is demanding the post  which is not a post prescribed by law, but one held by tradition.

In this case there is no TNA with fewer seats than the Joint Opposition, but there is the UPFA led by Azath Sally making a pitch for the post. The SLPP has written to Mayoress Rosy Senanayake stating that they have nominated Dr. Pradeep Kariyawasam, a former Chief Medical Officer of the CMC to the post of Leader of the Opposition. Here is a case of the UPFA-SLPP battling it out with the UNP to decide on the winner. Sallys UPFA has only 12 seats in the CMC.

The battle for the Leader of the Opposition post is not the only battle to have got the CMC going. At its first meeting, all manner of games went on in the appointment to the various Standing Committees of the CMC. For instance, Dr. Kariyawasam himself was shunted out of the Health and Sanitation Committee, where he would have been a useful and logical contributor given his previous role as an official of the council, but found himself in the Building Planning and Development Committee of which he probably knows little.

He has now sent a request letter for a mutual transfer and a separate letter to the Municipal Commissioner calling for an investigation into the use of expired chemicals in the anti-dengue programme in and around the shanty dwellers homes. He was clearly a victim of lobbyists who found him a threat in the Health and Sanitation Committee.

Then there is the case of the SLPPs Sharmila Gonawela, who once found corrupt activities in the Solid Waste Committee. She was placed in the Library Committee. After her vehement protests, she has now been put in the Women and Childrens Committee  but not in the Solid Waste Committee.

Another councillor, Kahandagama was to be in the Marketing Committee, but found himself left out, and after shouting and screaming found himself included. So, the CMC starts off with some square pegs in round holes, so to say. Not an auspicious start, what.

MiG deal: Slain editors name misused for political ends

The talk in the Mess Hall of a service arm early this week was about the 2006 MiG-27 deal. One senior officer sipping a local gin and tonic asked a colleague nursing a keg of beer, What is the latest in the investigation?

He responded by asking which investigation, one by the Financial Crimes Investigation Division (FCID) or the one by Health Minister and official Government spokesperson Rajitha Senaratne?

Whats the difference asked the questioner. The other replied; according to the FCID investigation lasting some three years, it has found that the agreement for the deal signed in Colombo and Moscow in July 2006 was fraudulent. He said just weeks earlier, FCID took possession of certified copies of the correct agreement. They were not known until then.

However, according to Minister Senaratne, the real agreements have been in circulation even in 2009. He claimed this was why journalist Lasantha Wickremetunga was killed. He had planned to publish them.

Mr. Wickremetunga would be turning in his grave to know that his name is being used for political ends. This is notwithstanding a string of B reports the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has filed in courts about the alleged murder. None of them speaks of the motive being the MiG-27 procurements or of him being in possession of any agreements.

That is not all. According to Minister Senaratne, the procurement agreements for MiG-27s have been signed by the two Defence Ministers, one from Sri Lanka and the other from Ukraine. If he is correct, it would have been then President Mahinda Rajapaksa who signed for Sri Lanka as he was the Minister of Defence.

In reality, there was no purchase directly from Ukraine of any MiG 27s. It has now transpired during the FCID inquiry that the purchase was made from Ukraine by Bellimissa Holdings Ltd., a British Virgin Islands registered offshore company and sold to the Sri Lanka Air Force (SLAF). A director of this company had also been a key player of D.S. Alliance, a Singapore registered company which supplied MiG 27 aircraft on two previous occasions. They have all been listed as key suspects in reports filed before Courts by the FCID.

Meanwhile, the extradition of Udayanga Weeratunga, a prime suspect and former Sri Lanka Ambassador to Russia now in custody in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) awaits the completion of legal formalities. A Sri Lanka team is expected to leave for Abu Dhabi for this purpose anytime now.

No escorts, but lady companion for outspoken politico

He arrived at the five-star hotel sans his escorts and thus caught the attention of a security sleuth serving there.

Recognising the man, he followed him covertly to the adjoining apartment complex. The purpose, of course, was to ensure the politico, who recently shot into fame, had no hassle.

It is only when he walked to the door of a closed apartment did he realise that he may be intruding into the newly anointed powerful mans privacy. He opened the door, a lady companion followed and the door slammed shut.

It is only then that the sleuth realised that going beyond the call of duty was out of bounds for him. He would be intruding into the government politicos privacy. So he kept himself out of range. He walked back and related the story to a senior.

Defence deals with Russia

A top level Sri Lanka delegation has just returned from Russia after high level talks on military procurements but it is not immediately clear how many deals were concluded.

The delegation was led by Defence Secretary Kapila Waidyaratne and included Navy Commander Vice Admiral Sirimevan Ranasinghe, the Defence Ministrys Additional Secretary Sarath Kumara and the MoDs Air Defence Advisor Air Commodore Dilshan Wasage.

Intelligence chiefs deny release of top Tiger Morris

Senior intelligence officials have flatly denied reports that a high ranking former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) operative who went by the nom de guerre Morris has been released.

He is one among a number of Tiger guerrilla cadres now awaiting trial. Morris, a close associate of then LTTE Intelligence Wing leader, Pottu Amman, has been responsible for some high profile attacks in Colombo. He is now being held in custody.

Morris was also one time leader for Point Pedro and was involved in attacks then on personnel of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF).Time to re-sit Uni cut off marks test View(s):

AVURUDU WISHES

The Sunday Punch wishes you all a very happy Sinhala and Hindu New Year. May the milk of prosperity boil to the brim and spill over the whole New Year through.

Take a bow, Aneesha Gitanjali Fernando, the Colombo 7 Ladies College 16 year old girl who was declared an island ranker at last Decembers GCE O Level examination after results were announced last week showing she had not only swept the board with all As in all nine subjects but also had scored the highest marks in all subjects sat. Congratulations. But Aneesha Gitanjali was not alone.

There were three others from Colombo, Nipuni Herath of Devi Balika, Risini Kumarasinghe of Samudra Devi and Sandith Siriwardana of St. Josephs. Congratulations to them too. But they were not alone either.

There were 11 others, too, who also scored the highest marks to find their place in the Brainy Bunch. And all of them were from the outstations. In fact, the first six of the elite top squad of 15 were all from outstation schools. They were Kasuni Seneviratne, Ravisa Subasinghe from Gampaha, Navodhya Ranasinghe and Limasha Wimalaweera from Kandy, Randhi Lakpriya from Matara and Kavisha Prabath from Ratnapura. All of them girls. The rest were Samadhi Wikcremesinghe from Gampaha, Dilru Mallikaarachchi from Homagama, Miruthi Sureshkumar from Jaffna, Kasundhi Gokarella from Kandy and Nayanthara Jayasuriya from Matara. To them all , the nations heartiest congratulations.

But they were not alone either in scoring As in all subjects. They were joined by another 9945 students who had all scored As in all subjects. Out of 437,795 students who sat for the GCE O Level exam, they were the elite with the topmost grades. And ninety per cent of them were from the outstations.

The good news is that this reflects the growing trend of student performance throughout the island with the outstation schools outdoing the so called Colombo elitist schools. And its not restricted to OLevels alone. It is also demonstrated in the A Level results. A steady increase, year after year. In 2016, 7,126 students got As for all three subjects. Last year the number rose to 8,267 with all As. All showing the outstation schools have come of age and have relegated Colombo to a sorry 4th or 5th place.

But though the capitals schools have been reduced to the status of a poor relative by the outstanding performance of the outstation schools not only at the O levels but also at the more important A levels, the perception that Colombos schools are far superior to the rural cousins still persists.

Last year for instance, the Northern Province with 68 per cent, Sabaragamuwa province with 67 per cent and the Uva province with 65 percent were the top three who passed the university entrance post with the Western Province not even in the frame.

But when it comes to the cut off marks to qualify for university entrance, Colombo students have to score higher marks even if they had secured all As than their rural counterparts. The cut off mark system to enter university was introduced in the 1970s during Mrs. Bandaranaikes SLFP- LSSP-Communist Party coalition. Earlier the procedure had been for students nationwide who had gained the necessary marks to qualify for university entrance to sit for a university entrance examination. Those who scored the best at this exam were the ones who were taken in, whatever their place of residence.

There would, of course, have been compelling reasons why this system was introduced: why it was considered vital at that time to weigh the scales and tilt the balance in favour of those who came from the underdeveloped rustic areas and offer them a handicap to enter university and gain a university education.

For over 45 years successive governments, instead of developing the schools in the provinces and upgrading them to the same status as the other schools in privileged areas, remained complacent in having a discriminatory system which arbitrarily determined campus entrance  not on how one performed at the exams but from which area one came from.

But even without successive Education Ministers playing a pivotal role, the seed and blossom of this nation have demonstrated that they have transcended their unfortunate circumstances and, with over 95 percent of the country now enjoying electricity, enabling students to study far into the night, are now not merely on equal par but far superior to those studying in the capitals so called prestigious schools.

Much water has flowed under the Pons Asinorum, the asss bridge, these last 45-odd years that, with the outstations arid groves of learning now greening more than Colombos wet zone, the time has arrived to rethink the Z score system and review the entire landscape: for the education authorities to re sit the cut off marks university entrance exam. And bring a system based on merit alone.

It seems the growing tide of outstation schools success at the A levels have turned the tables now. Contrary to a popular JVP slogan, now its kakiri for Colombo while its kiri or milk for the villages. Be they from the capital or from any corner of this island, let their achievements not be disparaged by reference to reverse discrimination: As second class students who entered the Groves of Academy only because they had studied in less privileged areas of the land and thus were shown institutionalized favoritism which dictated lower marks would be sufficient to creep into campus grounds and tread upon its hallowed grass, even though their results of three As made them first class.

Congratulations and the raise of the hat in salute to all the students who toiled through the night under an electric bulb or burnt the midnight kerosene oil and succeeded brilliantly whilst their fellow compatriots slept in ignorance. Well done.

I will not say Ranils a rogue, says Dinesh This Monday morning, five days after a great majority of Parliamentarians had expressed their fullest confidence in Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and defeated the no-confidence motion brought against him by the joint opposition based on his alleged involvement in the bond scam, an interviewer on a TV channel attempted to have Ranil for his breakfast. His guest was Dinesh Gunawardena, the leader of the joint opposition, the leader of his own Mahajana Eksath Peramuna Party, the son of Philip, the Boralugoda Lion of old. After describing Dinesh as a great politician of great substance and, after heaping fulsome praise upon him and hanging him on the murunga attha, the question put to him by the interviewer was indeed a loaded one: Can you honestly say that Ranil Wickremesinghe is a rogue?

Dinesh didnt blink. Even though he had been one of the main proponents of the no confidence motion against the Prime Minister based on his supposed guilt in the bond swindle, Dinesh gave a direct and succinct answer. He said: Ranil Wicremesinghe has to be proved to be a rogue. Its to the courts to decide that. 

How true. And how sad for the unfortunate interviewer. Though he did not touch the breakfast bacon on his plate, Dineshs answer left egg all over his chubby cherubic face. In all fairness, by the same coin and token, its up to the court to prove that the Rajapaksas are rogues as alleged by the coalition government, on which slogan they came to power.

The sooner they get on with their task using their powers to expedite the investigative process to bring alleged rogues to justice  which both Maithri and Ranil and their party members promised they would do in the run up to the 2015 presidential election no sooner they were elected; and still continue to parrot three years after  the better it will be. Repeated allegations without action have only served to bring the Governments credibility into contempt. Let those against whom allegations are made be brought to the final altar of justice: The Courts. And let the Courts decide on their guilt or innocence. After all, whats sauce for the goose must also be sauce for the gander.Why this obeisance paid to politicians in South Asia? View(s):

Some weeks ago, a ruling party politician in the Gampaha District was captured on national television becoming incandescent with rage on being asked to produce his identity card by a police officer. Working himself up to a veritable frenzy, that worthy representative of the people blustered and protested.

His fury boiled over as he spluttered to his equally furious supporters in pithy Sinhalese that, he could give his identity card but then, he would not be able to walk among the people with any clothes on.

A question of identity

There is, of course, more to this story. The fracas had occurred during an event marking the opening of a bridge when loudspeakers were used and the police had come to the scene to question as to whether correct authorization had first been obtained. The politician, whose speech was rudely interrupted in consequence, alleged that the disturbance was at the behest of local Rajapaksa pohottuwa supporters. Granted an element of pohottuwa provocation, the commonsensical response by the politician and his cohorts should surely have been to produce both the identity and the relevant loudspeaker use permit, neatly turning the tables on their political opponents, so to speak. But such dignified behaviour was far from evidenced.

So why do politicians maintained with tax payers money believe that they are exempt from legal requirements imposed on citizens? It was reported this week that the offending policeman had been transferred, reportedly with immediate effect following a complaint filed to the police senior command.

Assuming that this is not an ordinary transfer but a step arising from the incident in question, is such a consequence warranted? Is the National Police Commission, tasked with the appointment, promotion, transfer, disciplinary control and dismissal of police officers other than the Inspector-General of Police, (Article 155G (1) (a)) aware of this fact?

No peculiar privilege attaching to politicians

Indeed the routine punishment of police officers for insisting on the law being followed is a major reason as to why morale cannot be maintained in the police service. In such a context, is not talk of professionalizing the police, metaphorical hogwash to state the matter bluntly? From the former Minister of Law and Order calling the IGP to order that a Rajapaksa nilame should not be arrested to a run-of-the mill parliamentarian insisting that a lowly Sub-Inspector must recognise him is but a small and easy step. Was it not to refrain from such acts that this yahapalanaya Government was elected? Citing Rajapaksa transgressions which were undeniably of a worse character does not suffice to answer that question.

Does the law or the Police Departmental Orders (of which there are many, are all excellent in theory but contemptuously disregarded in practice) stipulate that parliamentarians should not be called upon to produce their identity cards? Does the Parliamentary Privileges Act impose such a condition?

So what exactly occasions such fury that is so palpably disproportionate to the Divulapitiya incident? Surely if someone is asked to show his or her identity card, it is a simple matter to comply. Certainly any Sri Lankan citizen has to do that as mandated by law. Lest one mistakes the matter, that is what the Rule of Law is all about. This is not a mere issue of production of an identity card. It is also not a legal question of the equal application of the law as mandated by Sri Lankas Constitution (Article 12 (1). Rather, this is an attitudinal and societal complex which deifies politicians, at which the media excels certainly but in regard to which, we are also to blame as citizens for our uncritical responses thereto.

Obeisance paid to politicians, unique to South Asia?

It may be recalled that some years ago, a shadow chancellor of the United Kingdom had to pay a fine for jumping a red light. Other instances of UK politicians caught by the long arm of the law are many, including a then deputy leader of the Labour Party who was, in fact, convicted of driving without due care and attention.

In contrast, what is our record here? Even when a politician is involved in a hit and run which results in fatalities, there is little accountability. In what proportion of cases in Sri Lanka is the ordinary law implemented against politicians? Or to put this question another way, can the Traffic Police enlighten us as to what percentage of politicians on both sides of the political divide has been hauled up for simple traffic offences?

Is this obeisance paid to politicians, uniquely South Asian? Perhaps this comes from the tradition of the ruled and the subordinated, first by kings and then by colonial rulers. Throwing off the yoke of oppression by rulers was the first principle of the democratic contract whereby the king became the servant of the people and those who governed a land became the trustees only, holding power for a finite period with all subject to the Rule of Law.

An unpalatable but hard truth

But such lofty standards taught in the classrooms of law faculties and law colleges are yet to seep into the democratic consciousness in this region. The nauseating sight of schoolchildren worshipping politicians at official events is yet another illustration where practice falls far short of the theory.

Indeed it was reported some months ago that a Zonal Education Director in Colombo had directed principals of Colombo schools to give due respect to Parliamentarians and Provincial Council members. A copy of the letter issued indicated that principals had been informed to invite Members of Parliament and provincial councils to special school functions. Where does this nonsense end? Afford respect to politicians when their behaviour invites anything but public respect? The ugly quarrels and horse dealing with money changing hands between newly elected councillors in local government bodies that we see each day establishes the fact that the rot runs deep.

Even so, there is a lot more wrong in this country than its politicians and political assemblies at local, provincial and national level who are more adept at playing petty political games rather than safeguarding the national interest. Perhaps it is opportune to reflect during this Avuruddu season as to how gradually, a degenerative political and media culture has come to reflect this very society and what Sri Lanka has become as a result of ruinous decades of conflict and institutional decay.

This is an unpalatable but hard truth.Whither the Commonwealth View(s):

A somewhat beleaguered President Maithripala Sirisena leaves for Britain over the weekend to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

Often Sri Lankas Heads of Government seek solace overseas either when their astrologers advise them it is time to do so, or when things get too hot at home. Escapism is a way around pressure.

Britain hosts this years CHOGM. The last time it did so in 1997 in Scotland, the star attraction was Nelson Mandela, the iconic South African leader who had just been released from prison to lead his rainbow nation. Much water has flowed since. In the intervening years, Britain  the primus inter pares of the group dumped the Commonwealth and looked to Europe for salvation. It was a thorough let-down  a betrayal of the former colonies of Great Britain. Two years ago, it chose to dump Europe.

Such then, is Britains interest in regaining its position within the group, Queen Elizabeth II, the titular head of the Commonwealth has offered Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, her estates in London for CHOGMs meetings and social engagements. There is little doubt that the Queen personally has a great attachment to the Commonwealth. It was Her Majestys politicians who opted for a tryst with new allies in Europe, at the expense of old friends. Funding of affiliated agencies was slashed as all eyes were on Brussels. The Commonwealth Press Union, for instance, was a casualty, forced to close down a day short of a century  a direct result of being cash-strapped.

In more recent times, the group led by Britain began taking questionable positions on what it called Commonwealth values. Genuine they might have been on paper, but in implementation they turned out to be serving only the interests of a group of the group. They quite rightly opposed military coups that toppled democratically elected governments. Pakistan was booted out for that, but re-inducted because there was a greater need to fight the Taliban that was at war with the West.

Britain, in particular, targeted Sri Lanka, adopting a hard line when this country was fighting a bloody separatist insurgency. In 2009, Britains Foreign Minister was despatched to Colombo, accompanying his French colleague, to ask the government to stop the fighting against an organisation already declared a terrorist group in their countries. They were unceremoniously albeit undiplomatically, shown the departure gate of the Colombo airport and Sri Lanka ended the scourge of terrorism.

We have referred to an incident many times before, about the then Secretary General of the Commonwealth Secretariat coming to Colombo to discuss the agenda for 2001 CHOGM in Brisbane, Australia. Sri Lankas then Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar had asked that terrorism be on the agenda. When the Secretary General, a former Foreign Minister of New Zealand, had asked if the Lankan Minister was insisting on it, and was told he was, the Sunday Times at the time reported how the Secretary General had made a face indicating he was not happy. That very night, 9/11 happened in New York. The Commonwealth fast tracked the inclusion of terrorism on the agenda. When they eventually met.

When it was Sri Lankas turn to host CHOGM in 2013, some member-states led by Canada meeting at the 2009 CHOGM in Trinidad and Tobago called for a change of venue or a boycott. The then Sri Lankan Government had made an utter mess of its foreign policy in those years, and was adamant about hosting the summit.

Eventually, some countries, including India did not attend at Head of Government level, and only 27 turned up even though 37 Mercedes Benz cars were imported for the VVIPs. The Queen found Sri Lanka too far to travel to, and her eldest son deputised, but the Prime Minister of Britain tried in earnest to embarrass and humiliate the host nation.

He visited the North in a side-show spectacle from CHOGM because what was important for him at the time was not the future of the Commonwealth but the votes he can garner at the next election back home. Driven by a vociferous Sri Lankan Diaspora, Britain and Canada  and coalition politics in India (then) , these countries and their governments gave priority to domestic political compulsions over any esprit de corps among the 53 nation group.

When the then Sri Lankan President attended the Queens Golden Jubilee celebrations, the British Prime Minister did not wish to see him. When the European Union took a decision to cut off the GSP plus duty concessions to Sri Lankan exports, Britain as one of the three Commonwealth countries did not speak up for Sri Lanka (the others being Malta and Cyprus). This trend continues to-date. At the UNHRC, Britain is adopting an uncompromising stance demanding an international war crimes tribunal against Sri Lankan Security Forces; yet its PM has rejected outright any such thing against the conduct of British Forces currently in West Asia.

Take the incident on February 4 this year, Sri Lankas Independence Day in London opposite its High Commission. A group supporting the banned terrorist group waving its flag and trampling the national flag of a fellow Commonwealth country was allowed to get away without a whimper. But all hell broke loose at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office warranting a formal protest against the Sri Lankan military attache for an inappropriate gesture blown completely out of proportion.

Terrorism now continues on the agenda of CHOGM 2018. It will, no doubt centre on terrorism in Europe and places such as Syria and Yemen where Britain and the West are facing the brunt of the scourge. The fact is that the agenda of the Commonwealth has been for too long dictated by the old Commonwealth known nowadays as the white Commonwealth and it needs to be re-calibrated so that the label of double standards does not stick to the Commonwealth as it does these days to the United Nations.

It is unlikely that Sri Lanka will have any input into the agenda  or the final draft Declaration that will be issued after CHOGM 2018. To cap it all, Sri Lankas High Commission in London which deals with the Commonwealth Secretariat on behalf of the government is headless.

A large contingent of businessmen is journeying for meetings on the sidelines of CHOGM 2018, hoping to gather some joint ventures as trade is now an increasing priority in world affairs. With Britains exit from the EU, it is looking for markets in the Commonwealth once again. Unfortunately, the chronic political instability in Sri Lanka with a government going in different directions, or probably going nowhere, is not going to be of help to these entrepreneurs in search of business opportunities and partnerships.

It is not with any great anticipation that one waits for the outcome of CHOGM 2018. If it is to be of any relevance in world affairs it must speak with one voice, and not be used selectively for domestic parochial political advantages. The Commonwealth comprises more than a quarter of the UNs membership and can be a more powerful influence if they do that. For that to be a reality, it should be a platform for the small member-nations, as well as the big.New Year Rituals By Shakya Wickramanayake View(s): View(s):

The fourteenth of April is a very significant day in Sri Lanka as it marks the dawn of Sinhala and Tamil New Year. The New Year which is known as Aluth Avurudha in Sinhala, and Puththandu in Tamil is celebrated by both communities through various rituals and customs. Lets take a look at some of these rituals and customs which are still followed by most people.

One such custom that Sinhalese follow before the New Year is spotting the moon on the last day of the Old Year, which is April 13. On this day people will also ceremoniously bathe for the last time in the Old Year. Before bathing, they will apply a herbal mixture called Nanu on their heads.

Both communities also clean their homes in preparation for the New Year. Its customary for Tamil households to spray saffron water in the front area of their homes. They also decorate this area with colourful Kolam which are made of coloured raw rice flour.

After the Old Year has ended and before the New Year has dawned, there is a transition period that is called Nonagathaya or inauspicious time. During this time it is against tradition to do any work or cook any meals. Instead most families engage in religious activities such as visiting the temple or kovil.

To mark the dawn of the New Year, families light the hearth for the first time. This is done, wearing clothes in the auspicious colours and facing the auspicious direction. Usually a clay pot full of milk is placed on the hearth and is allowed to boil until it overflows. The overflowing of the milk represents prosperity for the family and home.

Once this is done, the first meal can be prepared. This includes milkrice, jaggery rice, and sweetmeats such as kokis, aasmi, kevum and laddu. This food is later laid on a table and is eaten together by the family at the auspicious time.

New Year time is also for visiting relatives and neighbours. Its a custom to take gifts of sweetmeats and other festive food when making such visits. Relatives may also exchange gifts and elders are usually greeted with betel leaves.

In Tamil households the head of the family gives each family member money, betel leaves, paddy and flowers as part of the custom called Kai Vishesham. This is done for good luck. Similarly the Sinhalese custom called Ganu Denu is where people exchange money with each other, in order to bring luck in the New Year.

Another ritual followed by Sinhalese is the applying of oil on the head. Usually the eldest in the family will apply herbal oil on each member of the family. However, sometimes people go to the village temple instead, where the head priest will apply the oil on their heads. Similarly Tamils will apply a herbal mixture called Maruthu Neer on the head of each family member before they bathe for the New Year. This mixture is prepared by the Hindu priest and is made of herbal water, flowers, leaves, milk and saffron, as well as other ingredients.

It is also customary not to begin any work in the New Year until the auspicious time to do so. Then, the adults will start work according to their profession. If they are farmers they will start work in the fields. Children will also start their studies during this time. As many people go back to their villages and hometowns during this season, there is also an auspicious time for them to leave home for their jobs.

After the rituals are completed, families and neighbours, particularly in the villages, have fun participating in New Year Games. These include outdoor games such as Kotta Pora (pillow fights), Kana Mutti Bindeema (smashing the pot), climbing the grease pole, marking the eye of the elephant, Raban playing,

Onchili Padeema and so on as well as indoor games like Olinda Keliya and Pancha Keliya.ISSO COMPLETES 2 YEAR MILESTONE View(s):

Isso, a delightfully quaint dining spot nestled in Sulaiman Terrace, Colombo specialising in prawn-centric gastronomical experiences, is celebrating a milestone in the form of their second anniversary this year. Conceptualised and founded by Apinash Sivagumaaran, Fawaz Fassi and Shuaib Yusoof, Isso a local and currently growing brand, was established in an effort to re-introduce prawns with a novel concept, packaging it as a convenient and delicious quick-food option that is not only fresh and appetising, but also available within an affordable price bracket.

Named evocatively after the local term for prawns, the restaurant aims to consistently enhance an appreciation for this particular commodity, cleverly and artistically merging Sri Lankan, Thai, Japanese, Indian, Italian, Singaporean and Chinese cuisines into their menu. Customers are able to pick and choose from a wide variety of options, personalising their final dish according to their personal preferences.

The simple, 3-step process, includes first selecting the size of your prawns (Shrimp, Regular and Jumbo). Next, picking how you would like your prawns to be prepared, and finally picking your choice of crab. They also include a complimentary, freshly-tossed salad, for a wholesome and delicious meal in one. Complete with a charming wood effect, the restaurant itself is looking to expand, so as to facilitate an enhanced dining experience.

Open from 11.00am to 11.00pm throughout the week, Isso offers take-out, dine in and delivery services (within Colombo city limits), along with outdoor seating and reservations. Orders for on-demand or scheduled deliveries can be placed via their website, the ISSO app or hotline as well, after which an Isso delivery rider will deliver the food within 45 minutes of the order placement. Over the past year, the restaurant specifically noted that the delivery segment of the business has been a positive driver, with a growing demand for this service as a result. Having studied this pattern for a whole year, they are now gearing up for the introduction of their newly revamped delivery service, where they will also be investing in brand new Vespa bikes, delivering prawns to all neighbourhoods in style.

Customers can also expect the utmost convenience and efficiency via their online platform, where your favourite Issocombos can be ordered at your pleasure.

Furthermore, given that there are not many restaurants in Colombo apart from the popular international franchises that offer their own delivery services via their own app/ website, Isso is confident that by offering this service they will be able to present Colombos busy customers with a hassle-free option as the go-to restaurant for all prawn cravings.

Incorporating a fresh perception and a commitment to deliver an exceptional service every single time, Isso has rapidly grown into a resounding success within a short period. Steering clear of a supremely complicated menu has allowed them to embrace their main product wholly, whilst diversifying successfully.

The many enticing combinations ensure that customers are treated to a spectrum of culinary possibilities. Opt for sweet potato fries, isso wade or corn-on-the-cob, or better yet dive headfirst into their spicy Jaffna curry (Northern Twist) or their creamy Italian prawn pasta (The Italian Job) to name a few.

Isso is currently preparing for their highly anticipated launch in Male, Maldives, taking their love of prawns across borders.

Isso caters to a wide spectrum of taste palates, using only the best quality ingredients from the region. The core concept is prawn-centric, and the simple three step process allows you to customise your own combo meal by initially selecting the prawn size, followed by the preparation style and the type of crab.

For more information, call 777 0300 or hello@isso.lk.Bang goes the future of small-time cracker makers By Kasun Warakapitiya Blackmarket explosives dealing stymies attempts to manage industry View(s): View(s):

Traditional small-time firecracker manufacturers, who have exploded in numbers and mostly work in small, highly dangerous premises, face being snuffed out by tightened licencing procedures that favour the bigger manufacturers.

The government has restricted the issuing of chemical components needed to manufacture firecrackers to only 176 makers who have licences for the trade while thousands of makers are unlicensed.

On a visit to Kimbulapitiya, centre of the cracker industry, The Sunday Times observed manufacturers big and small preparing for one of the biggest sales periods of the year  the Sinhala and Tamil New Year celebrations.

Denied licences because they cannot meet the required space, equipment and other criteria needed for certification as legal manufacturers, the illegal makers, working mostly out of their homes, were busy at work despite the threat of police and legal action. Generations have grown up in these family businesses.

Many of the small-scale producers had their shops shut down this year by police for operating illegally but they are back at work secretly despite fear of arrest.

Investigation by this paper found that neither licensed nor unlicensed cracker makers use safety workwear and equipment to protect themselves and their employees from the chemicals used to make fireworks.

The bodies of the men and women making fireworks were covered in a silvery layer of aluminum powder. They had no face-masks or attire to protect them from inhaling aluminum powder, potassium nitrate and the other chemicals used.

Even licensed makers had poor provision of safety gear for their employees.

The unlicensed makers say they try to purchase chemicals from mass-scale licensed cracker producers who sell chemicals on the black market, or they use relatives licences to get the materials.

One small-scale fireworks maker in Kimbulapitiya, S.B.N.A. Perera, who has been in the business for 23 years, said he had been arrested more than 50 times and produced in court twice for operating without a licence.

Before me, my mother ran the business. Its not only I who engage in the business  the whole village of around 15,000 families, depend on this occupation. It was passed down through generations but now we are considered criminals and taken to the police station, he said.

He said that when small-scale cracker makers go to the authorities to obtain a licence they are presented with a long list of criteria that are impossible to meet.

Mr. Perera said this year, because of the licence restrictions, they were unable to purchase all the chemicals they needed.

Katana police confirmed they were taking action against people who make crackers illegally.

All-Island Fireworks Manufacturers Association President Dinesh Fernando said the problems in the industry had occurred due to poor regulation by the authorities.

He said although the entire village of Kimbulapitiya specialises in fireworks manufacture only about 170 people had licences to buy the components needed for their products.

Mr, Fernando said that initially there were only about 400 traditional fireworks producers, but afterwards the number had increased to about 4,000 as their children and villagers from other areas who worked in fireworks factories bought land and started their own businesses.

Numbers increased further when the large-scale producers started selling their excess chemicals to the small manufacturers.

This started with them giving raw material to their employees to make components of firecrackers at home. Now it has turned into another business, Mr. Fernando said. The authorities have now reduced the quantity of chemicals given to every licensed cracker producer, creating difficulties for everyone.

He said the government should take action against such producers as well as taking action against unlicensed makers.

A medium-scale fireworks producer, Lasitha Fernando, said the shortage of chemicals used for fireworks had forced makers to increase prices.

She said a cracker with a wholesale price of Rs. 3 this year  and which will retail for about Rs. 8  was sold last year for Rs. 1.50.

There is a shortage of material. We only had half the explosive material we obtained last year, Ms. Fernando said.

Because the reduced supply means the fireworks producers are making fewer crackers and raising their prices, she says imported crackers are invading the local markets and affecting business.

She said the government, specifically the Defence Ministry, which regulates the use of explosives, provided poor support and was unable to deliver on time the 150kg of potassium nitrate she required.

The government claims there is a shortage of chemicals, saying the Israeli company that provides chemicals has closed and that the State Trading Corporation is importing shipments from Chile, Ms. Fernando said.

Even with the imports from Chile there was still a shortage, she said. She added that a few large-scale fireworks producers were selling at high prices, stocks from Israel that had been held in storage for a long time.

Ms. Fernando said a shipment of low-quality explosive products had come in from Thailand and that these substances were reacting with the aluminum dust packed in the fireworks, causing them to heat up.

An official of the State Trading Corporation said potassium nitrate was in short supply because the government was providing it, via five dealers, for distribution only to licensed fireworks makers.

He admitted that the shortage was also due to the closure of Israel-based Haifa Chemicals Ltd, which specialised in fertiliser chemicals and industrial chemicals.

He said when the government was informed a few years ago that the plant would be closed it tried to buy chemicals from other countries but these attempts were blocked by protests by people in the local fireworks industry.

Recently, when the Israeli plant was closed, we brought a shipment of six containers of potassium nitrate from a company based in Thailand, he said. He admitted that the government did not test the products adequately.

One container contained chemicals of low quality and a recall notice was issued for this load. Part of it had, however, already gone into fireworks.

He confirmed that some of the main dealers sold material to unlicensed cracker producers.

A senior official of the Defence Ministry said the ministry tried to regulate the fireworks industry because explosive material was used in the products. He said that small-scale manufacturers had been urged to take out licences but were unwilling to do so.

He claimed that explosive chemicals were tested before being made available to cracker producers.

Assistant Explosives Regulator of Gampaha District, D.W.N.P. Pathirana said too many operators had entered the fireworks production industry and that they were not taking safety measures.

He said a fireworks manufacturing plant should be on at least 40 perches of land and have separate storage areas.

We are responsible for public safety and the safety of the producers who work with explosives and therefore we requested police assistance to stop illegal cracker producers, he said.

Mr. Pathirana said that although many people regarded government licensing as interference in a traditional occupation they had to comply with the law.Battling mosquitoes: Ex CMC official says expired chemical being used excessively, CMC medical chief says not so View(s):

Questions have been raised by a former senior CMC official about the alleged excessive use of a chemical with a passed expiry date, by the Public Health Department of the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) to control mosquitoes.

A complaint has been lodged with the Municipal Commissioner, that the chemical identified as ICON Lambda Cyhalthrin is being stored at various MOH offices and at the main pest control office at Maligakanda, the Sunday Times learns.

According to the complaint 62.5g of sachets of this chemical is being stored in barrels at the pest control office while another three barrels of sachets have been reportedly stolen.The stock had reportedly been manufactured in 2015 and carried an expiry date in 2017.

CMC sources also charged that they have been instructed to use three sachets in 16 litres of water for spraying purposes, instead of the normal practice of one sachet per 8 to 9 litres of water, in a move to finish off the expired stock.However, CMCs Chief Medical Officer Dr Ruwan Wijeyamuni said although there were some barrels containing the chemical with expired dates at the pest control office, orders had been issued not to use them.

He said, there was no reason to use those chemical stocks as they had sufficient stocks of fresh chemicals, adding that the Pesticides Department had already been informed about the old stocks.

Asserting that the allegations were false, Dr Wijeyamuni also explained that the ICON Lambda Cyhalthrin is used for dengue irradiation as a residue spraying chemical that sticks to the surface it is spayed onto.

He said, it was this same chemical that was successful in eradicating the Malaria mosquito and it has been in use for several years to control dengue too.He said the chemicals are used only after gaining approval from the World Hhealth Organisation on the recommendation of the Health Ministry.

 Every chemical has a toxicity level. Knowing that I cannot ethically allow the use of an amount that would be harmful to people. Therefore the workers are advised to use 62.5g in 8 to 9 litres of water. Even Public Health officers and others are instructed to use the correct amount, he said.

He said malathion too is another chemical that is being sprayed regularly especially outdoors to prevent an outbreak of dengue.Dr, Wijeyamuni further asserted that all these chemicals had been effective in controlling dengue last year in Colombo city. He claimed that although islandwide the reported cases of dengue were 180,000 and 480 deaths, in Colombo city there were only eight deaths and 5,700 cases.Minor cabinet changes, major reshuffle after President returns from London View(s):

President Maithripala Sirisena on Thursday swore in three Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) members and one United National Party (UNP) member as ministers to act for those who resigned, pending a major cabinet re-shuffle.

It will take place after he returns from London where he will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). He leaves on Sunday. Those who took oaths, will be in charge of new subjects in addition to their current portfolios. They are Malik Samarawickrema  Social Empowerment, Welfare, Kandyan Heritage, Labour and Labour relations; Sarath Amunugama  Skills Development, Vocational Training, Science, Technology and Research; Ranjith Siyambalapitiya  Disaster Management and Faiszer Musthapha  Sports.

They received the subjects ealier held by S.B. Dissanayake, W.D.J. Seneviratne, Chandima Weerakkody, Anura Priyadharshana Yapa, Dayasiri Jayasekara and Susil Premajayantha. Thursday evenings swearing-in ceremony was a closed-door event where only the official media personnel were allowed.

The subjects changed hands after the resignation of six SLFP ministers who voted in favour of the no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.President to attend CHOGM summit, key issues on agenda View(s):

President Maithripala Sirisena will leave for Britain today to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) 2018 which will be held from April 16 to 20 in London. This years summit with the theme Towards a Common Future comes at a time when Britain is finalising plans to pull out of the European Union (EU) and foster closer ties with Commonwealth nations.

On the agenda are pressing issues such as the reinforcement of cooperation in various areas, united efforts to deal with security issies, organised crime, cyber criminality, climate change, good governance, promotion of democracy and fundamental liberties.During his visit, President Sirisena is expected to meet British Prime Minister Theresa May and several other heads of Commonwealth states attending the summit for bilateral talks.

This is the Presidents second visit to Britain after taking office. He paid a four-day official visit to Britain in March, 2015. President Sirisenas participation at the CHOGM will be focused on reaffirming Sri Lankas firm commitment to the Commonwealth and deepening Sri Lankas partnership with the organization as well as with each individual member nation, the Foreign Ministry said.

The Presidents engagements will include the Heads of Government meeting on April 19, the leaders retreat on April 20, and addressing the Commonwealth Business Forum as the keynote speaker on April 18 on the theme Delivering the SDGs: Aligning Business, Society and the Governments.

More than 50 entrepreneurs from Sri Lanka, mainly from the small and medium enterprise sector, will participate in the Commonwealth Business Forum, positioning Sri Lanka as a trade and investment hub in South Asia to gain the Commonwealth trade advantage. The Business Forum is expected to make a compelling case for free and inclusive trade as the best way to promote higher living standards around the world. Foreign Minister Tilak Marapana will accompany the President.SLAF Combat Training School Diyatalawa awarded Presidents Colours View(s):

Sri Lanka Air Force Combat Training School Diyatalawa (SLAF-CTS), the oldest training school of the SLAF, was honoured with the award of the Presidents Colours in a colourful parade held at SLAF-CTS Diyatalawa recently.

President Maithripala Sirisena, who is also the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, presented the award, as the Chief Guest. He was received by SLAF Chief Air Marshal Kapila Jayampathy. The parade was commanded by Air Commodore Athula Kaluarachchi and the Presidents Colours was received by CTS Diyatalawa Commanding Officer Air Commodore Peterson Fernando.

Kfir and F-7 Jets flew past in tribute to the President, while Bell 212 and Mi 17 Helicopters flew past as the President formally conferred his Colours on the SLAF-CTS. The Presidents Colours is the highest accolade a military establishment could receive in its lifespan. It is presented in recognition of invaluable services to and sacrifices in the defence of the country.

Known as the Cradle of the Air Force SLAF-CTS Diyatalawa was established in 1952 as Royal Ceylon Air Force Station. In 1972, when Sri Lanka became a republic, this station became SLAF Station Diyatalawa. This school conducts Basic Combat Training Courses and Advanced Courses for SLAF officers and other ranks and Weapons Instructors and Drill Instructors Courses, including Physical Instructors Basic Courses.

The SLAF was first awarded the Presidents Colours in 1976. The SLAF-CTS, Diyatalawa, the latest Air Force Unit to receive this distinct honour, was so honoured for its role in empowering the officers and other ranks and arming them with the knowledge and wherewithal to serve the SLAF and the nation.

State Minister of Defence Ruwan Wijewardene, Chief of Defence Staff, Adm Ravindra Wijegunaratne, Sri Lanka Army Chief Lt Gen Mahesh Senanayake, Sri Lanka Navy Chief Vice Adm Sirimevan Ranasinghe, Members of the SLAF Board of Management, Past Commanding Officers of SLAF-CTS Diyatalawa, Senior Officers and other ranks of the tri forces were also present to witness the occasion.SriLankan, Civil Aviation Authority in dogfight over new aircrafts safety issue By Namini Wijedasa National carrier defends its Maintenance Dept, says engine defect a global issue; but regulator has questions over airline's safety management practices View(s): View(s):

SriLankan Airlines this week mounted an impassioned defence of its Maintenance Department, blaming Januarys in-flight shutdown (IFSD) of an engine on UL898 to Bangkok on a global issue that has occurred on identical engines fitted to aircraft of other airlines.

But the Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka (CAASL)the industry regulatoralso hit back strongly, questioning why the aircraft was dispatched by SriLankan management for commercial flights with known defects in its engines, without proper investigation for identification of causal factor and necessary rectification.

We observed that the airline had merely followed certain written procedures in the manuals without giving weighted attention to the sound maintenance practices that shall be applied based on sound Safety Management Principles which advocate proactive and predictive approach for identification of hazardous conditions with a view to eliminating possible risks, rather than being reactive which entails adverse ramifications, said H M Nimalsiri, Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), in written comments to the Sunday Times.

This newspaper exclusively reported last week that SriLankan Airlines lost certification to operate its new A320neo and A321neo aircraft for more than an hour outside the range of airports suitable for emergency landings after its Maintenance Department released one of the planes (registration 4R-ANE) for use despite having detected debris in the oil monitoring system of an engine.

As a result, the A321neo aircraft flying as UL 898 to Hong Kong on January 21, 2018, was forced to shut down the engine in question and divert to Bangkok on a single engine. After an investigation, the Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka (CAASL) immediately withdrew certification granted to the airline to conduct A320/321 aircraft on ETOPs [Extended-range Twin-engine Operational Performance Standards] with 90 minutes diversion time.

The CAASL said at the time that it did not find any cogent reason for the companys Maintenance Department to have released the A321neo aircraft for service after detecting debris in the oil monitoring system of one engine (which has direct impact on flight safety) without analysing the debris and taking appropriate preventive/corrective measures, in a letter to SriLankan.

Without ETOPS approval, a flight must always be within 60 minutes of an emergency or diversion airport. With certification, however, it may fly longerin the case of the A320-321neos, at least 90 minutesoutside the range of a suitable landing area.

The IFSD of a CFM LEAP 1A engine on aircraft 4R-ANE can in no way be attributed to a lapse on the part of the maintenance staff, the airline claimed, in a written response. Attributing the event to a manufacture design failure, it insisted, No serious lapses in procedures or working practices of Maintenance Department have been identified.

The company said the relevant department had an impeccable track record with multiple national aviation authority approvals for maintenance of third party aircraft. The initial investigations carried out by the engine manufacturer CFM International (CFMI) confirmed that the in-flight shutdown on 4R-ANE was due to an internal bearing failure, it continued.

The manufacturing defect could be attributed to a number of cases, it said, including (but not limited to) material failures, workmanship, manufacturing processes, improper tooling, quality escapes during assembly and damage during transportation, etc.

Four such failures (IFSDs) have been reported worldwide on aircraft of various airlines and CFMI is currently investigating the root cause, SriLankan said: CFMI continues to remotely monitor all aircraft operating the LEAP 1A engine using condition monitoring technology and will alert operators regarding any future issues.

The company also said it was in active discussions with the CAASL with regard to the restoration of its ETOPS certification for aircraft fitted with the LEAP 1A engines.

The regulator countered, however, that after detecting the engines to have developed a serious problem requiring shutting down engine in-flight, as a responsible civil aviation regulators, CAASL cannot just allow the airline to continue.

It has accordingly taken immediate action to withdraw the 90 minutes ETOPS approval and also commenced conducting detailed investigation to find out causal factor(s), Mr Nimalsiri asserted. During this process the entire episode behind the incident would be dissected for detailed analysis of system errors/deficiencies with a view to rectifying aiming at enhanced flight safety.

SriLankan also said in its statement that the airframe manufacturer Airbus Industrie has calculated that the in-flight shutdown rate of the A320neo/CFM LEAP 1A (including the last SriLankan Airlines event) to be 0.008/1000EH. It said this is well below the IFSD rate target of 0.0225/1000EH for ETOPS 180 minutes as defined by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

Responding to this technical point, the DGCA asserted that the statistics only help one understand the probability of occurrence of something in the absence of real time evidence about the possibility of its happening.

Of course, in granting ETOPS with 90 minutes diversion time, CAASL based its decision on world fleet statistics, he said. However, our assumptions were proven to be wrong with SriLankan Airlines own experience.

The 4R-ANE aircraft began operations on December 20, 2017, and had performed only 202 flight cycles and 595 flight hours when IFSD occurred on January 20, 2018. In relation to SriLankan Airlines own experience, it is much higher than the IFSD ratio, he pointed out.Tainted medicinal drugs: Urgent need for quality assurance labs By Chrishanthi Christopher View(s): View(s):

The lack of quality assurance labs to evaluate imported medicinal drugs has led to dozens of product recalls, adverse reactions among patients and also rejected or outdated stocks piling up in the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation stores, awaiting destruction. There are more than 8,000 registered pharmaceutical drugs and not every one of them is tested for quality. There is also no known drug formulary in Sri Lanka.

The only quality guarantee is registration with the drug regulator. A report by the Committee on Public Enterprises, presented in parliament early last year, revealed that pharmaceutical drugs worth more than Rs 47 million were in storage at Maguruwila and Gonawela in Kelaniya. Commenting on the report, COPE chairman and JVP lawmaker Sunil Handunetti expressed concerns about the waste and the appalling state of the storage facilities.

Public health safety issues and the possibility of outdated drugs entering the market were also raised in the report. State Pharmaceuticals Corporation Chairman Sarath Liyanage said substandard drugs were flooding the market because there were no quality assurance labs. He said a huge amount of substandard pharmaceutical drugs got cleared by the National Medicinal Drugs Regulatory Authority (NMRA).

The authority which monitors quality compliance at pre- and post-marketing stages and which issues recommendations on the findings ensuring quality, safety and efficiency, has just one quality assurance lab. As a result, the authority depends on the integrity of importers and suppliers. NMRA chief executive Kamal Jayasinghe admitted that quality assurance labs were needed.

We are planning to set up state-of-the art quality assurance labs. Until such time, we will accept quality assurances from quality accredited laboratories, Dr. Jayasinghe said. Former SPC Chairman S.D. Jayaratne said manufacturers usually submitted good quality samples for testing, but there were possibilities they could supply substandard drugs to the market.

Ideally, every stock of drugs must be checked for quality, he said. As for private importers, it is important that the NMRA should carry out post-marketing surveillance. Explaining how quality drugs remain in storage, Prof. Jayaratne said that sometimes excessive quantities were ordered. We order 10 percent excess to ensure that we do not fall short. Information is collected from all hospitals on a drug requirement for a particular year and sent to the SPC. After that, worldwide tenders are called. It takes around 24 to 30 months for a consignment to arrive and by this time the drugs ordered may be no longer be necessary, not in use, or ordered in excess. Sometimes, the health sector could have a shortage depending on the demand due to an outbreak of disease, he said.

Prof Jayaratne insisted that all pharmaceutical drugs must be tested. He suggested imports only from reputed companies until more testing laboratories were set up in the country. The cost might go up, but it is safer, he said. Dr. Renuka de Silva, nutritionist and NMRA member in the committee to review pharmacy laws, said the Government was responsible for setting up state-of-the art laboratories to test imports.

India and Pakistan have well developed quality assurance labs, he said, and questioned whether Health Ministry bureaucrats understood the importance of quality assurance labs. Such labs are also needed for the agriculture sector, quarantine departments, and for sports, he said. The Government must invest in quality assurance labs. If we cannot have state-of-the art labs, at least we should have clusters of labs, he said.

Although there are private quality assurance labs, government departments have misgivings about their efficiency and do not use them. Such conservative thinking should be shed and assignments given to private labs. If, in doubt, they should be monitored by the Government, Dr de Silva said. Private importers now depend on quality assurance certificates from facilities in Singapore for pharmaceutical drugs, he said.

Chinta Abeyratne, former president of the Sri Lanka Pharmacists Association, said the regulator should have a system whereby the pharmaceuticals were quality checked at the point of sale. Officials should visit pharmacies and take random samples and check quality, she said.

Also, the Government should form a network of regulatory authorities of exporting countries and request officials of those authorities to visit and determine the quality of the pharmaceutical drugs to be imported.University crisis settled; lectures to resume soon View(s):

All universities are likely to return to normal by Monday after the Government agreed to a key demand for the increase of an allowance to non-academic staff members.

Thereby the 48-day strike staged by the University Trade Union Joint Committee (UTUJC) was temporarily called off.

The universities are calling on students to return to their lectures and sit the rescheduled examinations disrupted during the strike period. UTUJC Co-Chairman Edward Malwattage said the Higher Education Ministry had agreed to increase the monthly compensation allowance by 10 percent from today.

He said other pending demands would be taken up by a three-member committee to be appointed by the Minister. The decision to call off the strike came after the Government issued an ultimatum for the return of some 16,000 employees who were on strike in more than 20 universities.A master laments the decline of Kandyan dance By L.B.Senaratne View(s): View(s):

The famed dancer who has danced in 70 countries had an important visitor last week, one who had come all the way from the US. Professor Nancy Wilkie of the United States Committee of Blue Shield visited Peter Surasena and also met the four famous families of Kandyan dance and drumming: Tithapagala, Amunugama, Nitawela and Thalgahagoda.

They danced and drummed for her. The Professor had known Peter Surasena for several years and travelled to meet him several times. The US Committee of Blue Shield is focussed on protecting cultural heritage.

Surasena has not viewed the Kandy Esala Pageant for the past few years: though his feet feel the throb of the drums he cannot dance anymore at the age of 79. Having given his best to this art and danced in countries that the present day dancers would only dream of, he is now pondering the future of Kandyan dance.

So what is the future? Take out the dancers and drummers from the Kandy Esala perahera, it would be elephants, their keepers and the Nilames. In fact dancing and drumming is the core of the national pageant. Beyond this what is the future for these dancers who had given their life and time for an art for generations, he asks.

Surasena abhors the half baked donning of the Ves in schools, where the parents, he alleges, are fleeced, being asked to pay Rs. 100,000 for it. Ves in the past was donned only when a dancer had grasped all forms of the art and was a master dancer. It is only at that time, that Ves is placed on the head of a dancer.

Surasena was initated into this art by the master Suramba Gurunanse. When he was in the eighth grade in a school in Wattapuluwe, he had told his mother that he wanted to learn dancing, because he yearned to go abroad.

One of a family of seven, with four brothers and three sisters, Surasenas eldest brother is Heen Baba Dharmasiri and his master was N.M.Gunaya. After Heen Baba donned Ves he travelled abroad frequently as ambassadors arranged performances for these artistes to perform before an international audience.

It was no easy task to approach a master in this field as he would not part with his knowledge to one and all. His mother arranged to send him to the famous dancer Suramba, and he had to go with a Pingo of milk rice, oil sweets and what not. After he arrived at Suramba Gurunanses home, he was put to the test as to whether he would fit into the lifestyle of a dancer. In those days, the income was not enough for a dancer. Most of them lived on the land offered to them by the Sri Dalada Maligawa for performing in the rituals for the Sacred Tooth Relic.

The history of Kandyan Ves Dancing goes back to the time of King Panduwasdeva and the courtiers had to bring down performers from India to perform  blessings (Shanthi Karmaya) on the King, which ultimately turned into the Kohomba Kankariya. That is the foundation of Kandyan Dancing or dancing in the country, says Surasena. Whether there was dancing in the pre- Buddhist era in the country has yet to be found.

This festival of dance is mentioned in the Kuveni Asana  a Sinhalese composition from the Kotte period. According to Dr. Nandadeva Wijesekera, Kohomba Kankariya was performed for King Parakrama Bahu VI of Kotte in order to dispel enemies, and illness and bestow power, valour, long life and success on him.

Surasena says that the Ves costume is a part of the costume of the King of Malaya and this was handed down to a selected group of persons, who are the four families of Amunugama, Tithapagala, Nittawela and Thalgahagoda. Whereever  Ves is donned, it would be a pupil from these four families, he added. But today unfortunately, Ves is given to schoolchildren who have just learned the basics of dancing, which brings  Was or the evil eye.

Surasena first participated in the Kandy Esala Perahera, as a Udekki performer and then as a Naiadi performer at the age of 12 years.

In 1959, when a State Dancing Troupe was formed, Surasena had not donned Ves so Suramba Gurunanse decided then to tie Ves on him. Ves was placed on him by Amunugama Suramba, Tithapagala Suramba and Nittawela Ukkuwa. This is a unique experience, where the four main Kandyan dancing family representatives had placed Ves on one individual and it has not happened again.

Surasenas first overseas performance was with the State ensemble to India  there were 17 performers, including six women artistes. Pani Bharatha led the troupe, Amaradeva was the vocalist and in the troupe was Vimala Amaradeva. He can never forget their performances in New Yorks Carnegie Hall and Londons Albert Hall. It is a dream for any artiste to perform in these two theatres, he said, recalling that flowers were just flowing onto the stage after the performances.

President J.R.Jayewardene began the practice of offering commendations for Kandy Perahera performers and Surasena is proud to have received commendations from Presidents R.Premadasa, D.B.Wijetunge, Chandrika Kumaratunge and Mahinda Rajapaksa. He could not receive any award for his performances from President Maithripala Sirisena, as by the time he assumed office Surasena had fallen sick and had said goodbye to the stage.

But his three sons, Susantha, Janaka and Nilantha have performed several times together in the Kandy Esala Perahera  the homeground of Kandyan dancing.Around the world with Graze Kitchen View(s):

They say the best way to experience the culture of a city is through its street food. Albeit messier and less refined than most dishes, street food is undeniably satisfying and true to its roots. The Hilton Colombos premier restaurant, Graze Kitchen now invites diners to take a globe-trotting culinary journey through the cities of the world every Monday night, with their Hawkers Market buffet. The buffet features street food from across Asia including Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, as well as from Turkey, Italy and the US. Each of which has been curated by their in-house chefs, specialising in national cuisines.

Guests will find quintessential street foods such as crisp Vietnamese rice paper rolls, Thai tom yum and laski, Malaysian roast chicken and rice, and American hotdogs. Youd also come across lesser known but no less delicious items, such as the Italian Agnolotti and the Japanese Tamago Yaki  the former, a delicious breaded and fried ravioli, while the latter is a sweet tasting omelette on a stick.

Invoking true street style, Graze kitchen also offers several live food stations, adding a visual element to the culinary experience.So take a stroll down Galle Face with their achcharu (pickle) stand, the bustling streets of Chennai, or the Italian piazza, and enjoy the best of street food the world has to offer at the Hawkers Market.

Graze Kitchen will be hosting their Hawkers market buffet every Monday from 7 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. The buffet is priced at Rs. 2888 nett per person.For more information or reservations at Graze Kitchen,contact them on 011 2492492 or email colombo@hilton.com.Its Bengali new year season too! View(s):

Visitors browsing through the Good Market on a rather hot Saturday morning last weekend would have chanced upon a stall with some very colourful exhibits. The exhibits were from Bangladesh, and the stall was there to highlight the Bengali New Year.

Not many Sri Lankans would be aware that Bangladesh also celebrates the New Year on April 14 and that the day is accompanied with all the same festive activities, visits to family and friends, traditional sweetmeats etc.

Bangladeshi High Commissioner Riaz Hamidullah and his team from the Embassy were also at the stall welcoming visitors and explaining the foods, including the decorative ricecakes that looked a more fancy form of Lankan kokis. The stall had a variety of food, bamboo crafts and of course, the countrys famous textiles- from handloom sarees to designer tshirts.

In Bangladesh, the New Year is a National holiday with fairs and festivals commonly held in the big cities. The traditional jatra plays are presented, often with puppet plays and folk singing.Raising a cuppa to a flavourful 25 years View(s):

Hidden flavours from a spectrum of colourful teas pervaded the Cinnamon Lakeside Lobby Lounge on April 5 as Dilmah celebrated 25 years of tea in collaboration with Cinnamon Lakeside Colombo launching the Silver Jubilee Afternoon High Tea.

An exquisite blend of tea mixology in a perfect marriage with afternoon delicacies was meticulously prepared by Cinnamon Lakesides executive chef Kapila Jayasinghe and his team. They aim to showcase the worlds finest tea from Sri Lanka with an unforgettable tea gastronomy experience.

The Dilmah Silver Jubilee Gourmet range will feature a range of fresh, homegrown Ceylon teas celebrating its diversity whilst also remaining true to its origins. Dinners can now sample twists of Dilmahs trademark teas like Silver Jubilee Earl Grey, Organic Sencha, Blood Orange & Eucalyptus and Mandarin & Marzipan Pekoe at the Cinnamon Lakeside Lounge.

With 18 varieties of teas from Dilmahs Silver Jubilee range, the Lobby Lounge has helped orchestrate a tea infused menu for afternoon high tea patrons. Desserts paired with complimentary teas, tea cocktails, chai, iced teas, and infusions to name are a few exciting variations in the menu.

Dilmah founder Merrill J. Fernando along with his sons Dilhan C. Fernando and Malik J. Fernando, CEO of Dilmah Ceylon Tea Company, graced the event with Dilhan speaking at a round table presentation of the eclectic selection of teas offered. You can combine tea with anything, Dilhan heartily shared, adding that at Dilmah the pairing of tea with food is done with respect to the tea allowing tasters to bask in the preserved character, structure and aroma of the tea.

Dilmah tea which is built on the heritage of Ceylon highlights the pureness of its teas giving each brew personality and complexion. Dilmah tea, Dilshan explains has the highest respect for the fundamentals of tea from the best of fresh handpicked tea, high in antioxidants, primarily consumed for wellness to even becoming an exemplary nightcap.

On Dilmahs collaboration with Cinnamon Lakeside Dilshan smiles Tea has an incredible synergy with food.

Over their 25 years of operations, Dilmah is known for encompassing a range of Sri Lankas finest spices and ingredients and teas like the Ceylon Ginger, Honey and Mint have multiple health benefits.

The lounge will be open daily from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. The menu will feature an array of hot teas varying from black tea, green tea to infusions along with a collection of tea inspired sweets, savouries, iced teas, chais, mocktails and digestives. A special Afternoon Tea Programme featuring tea gastronomy and mixology will be also available from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m, daily.Spa your way to a good nights sleep View(s):

Sleep is a luxury for most and on March 24, Spa Ceylon Luxury Ayurveda collaborated with the World Sleep Society for a workshop and deep sleep experience at the Movenpick Hotel to mark World Sleep Day, which fell on March 16.

A good nights sleep brings a multitude of health benefits. Deep sleep is a term used to describe Stage 3 sleep, a phase also known as slow wave sleep. Spa Ceylons Sleep and Sleep Intense ranges were specially formulated to create the multi-sensory experience necessary to indulge in this deep sleep. The team of doctors at Spa Ceylons research and development team that created the range drew from a wealth of knowledge and experience on Ayurvedic rituals associated with restful sleep, drawing from tested ingredients and rituals to formulate potions that are calming to the senses.

The morning workshop was themed The Natural Science of Deep Restful Sleep. The session began with a presentation led by Ayurvedic specialist Dr Chamathka Niroshini, who discussed the role of the science of ayurveda in capitalizing on the restorative powers of sleep for a happier, healthier life. Hatha Yoga specialist Rekha Krishnamoorthy then taught guests a set of calming chakra relaxation techniques towards achieving more restful sleep.

That afternoon, Spa Ceylon together with Movenpick Hotel invited 12 guests of varied backgrounds to experience deep restful sleep through the Spa Ceylon sleep ritual. The Sleep Ritual incorporates the range of products under the Sleep and Intense lines, such as the Sleep Body and Pillow Mist, Sleep Intense Herbal Tea, Sleep Intense Dream Balm and Soothing Body Elixirs together with the Spa Ceylon Sleep Candles and Sleep music specially crafted to promote deep restful sleep.

Guests were first given insight to overall wellness and the importance of deep restful sleep by Dr Chamathka after which the Co-Founder of Spa Ceylon, Shalin Balasuriya guided the audience through the Spa Ceylon sleep ritual. Once each participant was in their own luxurious bed with custom made pillows from the Movenpick Hotel, Hatha Yoga expert Rekha led them in a meditative session resulting in 60 minutes of undisturbed deep sleep.

Customers can indulge in the full home spa experience with products such as the Sleep Intense Shower Gel, Calming Body Massage Serum, Relaxing Body Cleanser, Soothing Body Elixir, the Eye Pillow and Dream Balm, and Herbal Infusion. Travellers craving for rest on the go will find the Dream Balm Roll-On and the Dream Essence Mist a breeze to use.The Sleep Intense range is available at all Spa Ceylon Outlets in Sri Lanka.Verses that make an unseen world jump out of the page Michael Roc Thomas, the author of a compendium of 56 verse stories Seeing Better Now tells Yomal Senerath-Yapa what inspired him to write View(s): View(s):

The Colony was where, after a long peregrination across the world, Michael Roc Thomas decided to lay anchor. This house in Tangalle, an elegant British seaside villa built in the early 20th Century, is now a hotel, but it is still a delight to wander through. The sea, the grass, the palms and frangipani lend their peaceful magic to the restful spaces decorated in black and white, bird of paradise-like Heliconia and exquisite taste.

Michael Roc Thomas settles down in the restaurant which has for its horizon the shimmering morning sea. We want to talk about his maiden oeuvre as a writer, but it all began with his daughter Steele, so we turn first to the story of the pretty blonde girl of 11, I glimpsed poring closely over a phone at breakfast.

Steele Sapphire Forbes-Thomas (whose first name comes from her celebrity grandfather Anthony Steel) was born prematurely, and so fell victim to retinopathy, which resulted in failing eyesight. Michael with his wife Alison launched a battle to make her see daylight. Thanks to surgery, Steele now has limited vision in her left eye, though she has to strain to see.

It was his attempts to help Steele make out the beauty of the world she was born to, that brought out the scribbler in Michael- long dormant since the days of composing love poems for girlfriends on backs of napkins. He progressed from one silly rhyme to one entertaining ditty, and found to his surprise that he was fast developing into an excellent versifier cum storyteller cum poet!

Over the years he was to write more than 450 stories to hone Steeles aural sense. The very cream of it is offered to you in the delightful book, Seeing Better Now; a charming, broad, flat square of a volume that is a gift to bring joy to anyone- child or adult- on Christmas (or even over the Avurudu table for that matter).

A compendium of 56 verse stories engulfed by colourful illustrations that reflect the quirkiness of the poems, the book at first makes you think of the Victorian poetry by Edward Lear, Rudyard Kipling, or Lewis Carroll. But unlike A Book of Nonsense or The tale of the mock turtle, most stories by Michael Roc Thomas have a firm relevance amidst all the wacky fun. True- theres playful, zany rhyming and lots of bizarreness, but most of them have embedded in their heart a meaningful story and message.

Take the section titled Survival, the third of the five sections. Here animals are the heroes. The verses celebrate the enigmatic sixth sense beasts and birds possess and we lack; moving, majestic stories of how they valiantly, nobly fight captivity and mass extinction at the hands of man; and the innocence and indeed the virtuousness of animals. Michael is deeply concerned about the disappearance of the natural world, flora as well as fauna, through the selfish acts of humans. Theres something profound encrypted in the simple two lines from Fishy:

If all the little fishies left the sea

Wed share their fate just wait and see.

Or from Gorillas Will Be Missed:

Its simple for folks to say

Its not our fault, its far away

What can we do? We cant assist

Yet how gorillas will be missed.

But rest assured Michael plays no doomsayer on a green crusade; just a naturalist in flip flops very much in love with nature, especially Sri Lankas natural splendour. Most of his poems have a humour that inevitably tickles you, though some have a bittersweet edge and others are doleful. But mostly its like a tonic for those who are world weary, lifting spirits that have lapsed into sad shades of grey. This is because the storyteller is delightfully young and enthusiastic at heart, spared of the cynicism and rancour that gather with age.

He believes that these poems should be savoured slowly- not more than three a day. And indeed he is right. They are of a huge variety of themes and so makes for slow degustation and absorption for maximum pleasure. Many make you think, but there are few that are blithely Learian, such as A Flamingo Called Liz who conquered the world of show biz.

While in all the great parts she played

From grand duchess to mischievous maid

She would always insist

The plot had a late twist

And the script was as sharp as a blade.

Though she lived to a splendid old age

When she didnt eat shrimp she turned beige

So instead of light snacks

She would feast to the max

Before making her way to the stage.

Many stories are Sri Lankan, celebrating the polecats that wander the ceilings and the mice that steal the soap from the bathroom; the joys of drowsing in the verandah in the heat of the afternoon and so on, but you will also find tales from Australia, the UK, Switzerland and Vietnam here.

Sally Hulugalle who illustrated the major part of the book has been uncannily intuitive in capturing the essence of these poems; Michael himself being pleasantly astonished at how she simply got it. She colourfully enhances on the childlike exuberance, the joie de vivre or the carefree island spirit woven into the verses. Ruwangi Amarasinghe, the other illustrator, has a poetic touch, her beautiful work of art for Tiger on the Run reflecting the horrors of captivity and the joys of freedom so dramatically.

Michael Roc Thomass own story is as colourful as- if not more so than- the book he has turned out. He was the only child born of the union between the famous British movie stars Patricia Roc and Anthony Steel; she the first British star to go into Hollywood and him the dashing hunk in uniform in so many English war films. This was the golden age of the cinema- the 40s and the 50s- when 30 million cinema tickets would generally get sold within the UK in one week. Born in Paris, Michael was barely nine months when his mother swaddled him and took him to Rome, where an Italian nanny cared for him. After studying at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, he became a fashion photographer working in Cape Town, London and Madrid.

It was his wife Alison who decided Sri Lanka would be an anchoring point in their birds of passage existence. Though the couple and Steele no longer live here permanently, they return frequently. None can deny that moving in was indeed serendipitous for Michael. It was here that he became a father and consequently a poet.

After all is said and done, Michael is happy that he gave up a career as a photographer to drift into writing. He usually waits for an idea to catch him, and that idea is kicked off with a title. That it is the title that triggers the whole poem for him, he defends firmly.

Its all in the title

Seductive or spiteful

Its all in the title for me

I think of the title

Which must be insightful

To bring back an old memory

Perhaps it sounds frightful

To start with the title

But thats how I like it to be.

I find it delightful to think of a title

Its all in the title for me

But this amazing book is not the only wonderful thing that came about through Michaels writing. Steeles own achievements, so remarkable for a pre-teen, show that having vision problems have not crippled her. Michael gives credence to the belief that when ones sense is affected, other senses rally up to compensate, and become sharper. It is obvious, however, that her fathers versifying must have helped open up an inner awareness in her, for she now writes short stories which Michael is proud to say are very mature, and she has been admitted to the MENSA, the British high IQ society. She also won a scholarship to the Centre for Young Musicians (part of Guildhall School of Music) in London to study voice & piano- both of which she excels at.

Another book, Michael says, is in the wings, and wont take long as theres plenty of material just waiting to go under the red pen; good news for the many fans he has garnered since the book was launched early this year at the Fairway Galle Literary Festival.

Seeing Better Now is available at Coco Tangalla in Tangalle, Barefoot, Colombo & Galle and Milk & Honey, Colombo. Parts of the profits from the sale of the book in Sri Lanka will go to NEST, a registered charity that looks after dispossessed Lankan children with chronic disabilities.When the land of the leopard lived upto its name Text and pictures by Viraj Senewiratne View(s): View(s):

The thrill of an impending safari never seems to wane, although one may have been through the familiar routine many a time before. It was no different this time either when my partner in crime, cousin Ajit broke the happy news that he would be in Sri Lanka in January this year. The ensuing visit to the Department of Wildlife was fruitful as I walked out with Manawila Bungalow booking safely under my belt.

Wilpattu-bound, we were making haste on the Puttalam-Anuradhapura road, when just past Karuwalagaswewa I received a call from Ajith of Eagle Safaris. Sir Borupanwila pataw balanna puluwan. Muwek allan thiyenawa. Ikmanata enna! Magic words indeed! We were at the park office of Wilpattu National Park in no time and picking up our tracker, an eager youngster, Tharaka, we headed there.

Borupanwila, is readily identifiable by the prolific growth of tussocks of a type of grass like plant used in Ayurvedic medicine called Borupan. We had gleaned that the kill was at a small water hole called Viradawila, in that vicinity. Taking the turn to Viradawila, we saw two rows of vehicles trying their best to spot the leopard which was to the right of us. A couple of them, in their over enthusiasm had got bogged down in a mushy area of the jeep track. The revving of the engines in their attempt to get out of the bog didnt help much with observing leopard. The kill, a young doe, was clearly visible about 50 yards away from the jeep track.

A little distance away, well camouflaged in the undergrowth with their rosettes being distinctly visible, lay the mother leopard and her two sub adult cubs  the Borupanwila clan. Her heaving flanks and sporadic twitch of her tail told us that she was trying to get some sleep after a full meal, but was unable to do so due to the mayhem created by her enthusiastic fans. Knowing fully well that she was not going to show herself for a long time and not wishing to add to her discomfort, we opted to head for Manawila.

As dusk steadily settled over Wilpattu, the familiar night sounds of the jungle were like a soothing chorus to our ears. Peace reigned supreme broken only by the occasional alarm call of sentinel spotted deer in the distance. The chuk-chuk-chukoor of the night jar and crick, crick, crick of undisturbed frogs were the only other audible sounds, except for the sound of happy human voices. The resident herd of spotted deer drew nearer the bungalow and settled down for the night.

Early next morning, after a hot cup of coffee, we all piled into the jeep for the mornings safari determined to make amends for the lost opportunity of the previous evening. Not too far from the bungalow, we came across the fresh spoor of a leopard. The pug marks were those of a smallish animal, probably a female. She had strolled right along the main road, leading away from the bungalow for a fair distance, most likely in the wee hours of the morning. But the drive through the park for the next hour and a half was fruitless. Disappointment was just setting in, when we turned into Kokkarivillu Uda Para.

All of a sudden we were sitting on the edge of our seats, for there right in front of us were around ten jeep loads of people totally engrossed in the action unfolding in the shrub jungle to the right of us. The trackers voice dropped to a whisper as he uttered kotiya and pointed in the direction of a dried branch of a dead sapling a few yards from the road. Framed in the lens of my video camera was the mischievous countenance of a large male leopard. His keenly observant eyes looked back at me searchingly as if saying, this is my domain, so I call the shots here. He kept looking intently at a spot a little to his left. There sprawled on the dry leaf litter was another leopard. Her smaller face told us that she was a female. Her unflinching gaze was a sight to behold. Over 60 people were mesmerized; moving only to relieve an aching muscle or to improve the angle of their camera.

A movement behind the two leopards caught my attention. A third leopard which had lain unnoticed all this while, then decided that nuffs nuff and got up from her concealed position to slink away into the brush behind her. This was a signal for the others to move on. This, they did, leaving a spellbound group of wildlife enthusiasts replete with the joy of having had the good fortune to experience such a thrilling morning. We later leant that this trio was the Nelumwila Clan. The presence of a big male with two females defied logic, though, according to leopard guru Rukshan Jayewardene, this is not an entirely uncommon form of bonding between leopards at Yala National Park.

The spell of good luck that we were blessed with that morning was not quite over. Right in the middle of the path of the jeep, crouched on the sand was that most elusive of Sri Lankan wildlife, a cute meeminna or mouse deer. Usually a nocturnal shy little animal possibly more difficult to observe in the wild than even a leopard, it appeared to be hypnotized and unable to flee, for this is its usual reaction when confronted by a perceived threat. Frozen with fear, the tiny fellow gave us ample opportunity to photograph it to our hearts content.

Wilpattu National Park renowned in the 60s and 70s as the best place in the world to observe the leopard is also steeped in history. Our visit to Kudiramalai confirmed this in no small measure. Kudiramalai is undoubtedly the cradle of the Sinhala race. I gazed at the aquamarine waters of Portugal Bay and lapped up the splendour and serenity of the terrain that is unique to Kudiramalai. The white sands of Wilpattu gradually give way to the red sands of Kudiramalai. As one proceeds, the vegetation becomes stunted, Bonsai-like, as the trees and shrubs bravely cling on to life in the face of forceful winds. Occasional clusters of grayish rock are surrounded by pitted red pigmented rock formations and these in turn gather in large mounds forming bigger hillocks, the likes of which are not found anywhere else in the island.

My minds eye took me back to 543 B.C., when Prince Vijaya of India and 700 of his followers landed here. The coppery red soil around the area inspired Vijaya to name this spot Thambapanni.

Legend has it that one of Vijayas men, in search of human habitation, wandered off after a dog and never returned from the jungle. This fate befell every member of Vijayas entourage. Finally, it was Vijayas turn, and his foray into the wilderness brought him in contact with Kuveni, the Queen of the Yakkhas. Close to Kalivillu, en route to Kudiramalai, one comes across four of five stone pillars. These ancient structures of architecture are said to be the ruins of Kuvenis Palace.

It is also recorded by Roman philosopher, historian Pliny, that around 44 A.D., a tax collector of the Government of Roman Emperor Claudius Caesar, was blown off course and ended up in the Port of Hippuros. This was the name the ancient Greeks had given Kudiramalai. A Malabar Queen Alli Rani, had ruled North and North Western Sri Lanka from the capital city of Kudiramalai. She is supposed to have despised men and all her warriors had been women. A true Amazon Queen indeed. She was known to have had a soft corner for pearls and horses. Pearls were plentiful in the surrounding seas. Alli Rani exchanged these pearls for Arabian horses. So, was born the legend of the horse mountain Kudiramalai.

To the west of the park abutting the now controversial Pallekandal church, lie the rolling plains of Pomparippu. In 1687, Catholic Missionary, Joseph Vaz visited Pallekandal and built a little chapel. Through the years it steadily grew in proportion to become the prominent church it is now. Pomparippu is best known for two reasons. It is an ancient archaeological site where a pre-Vijayan burial ground containing sealed urns holding human remains have been discovered. The other reason for its fame is the presence of elephants at any given time of the day, much like at Lahugala or Minneriya. It is home to a few large tuskers too. We were lucky enough to see two very young tuskers in a herd of six.

Our final morning and I was the only one on safari, the others opting to sleep late and take things easy while getting ready for the inevitable trip back to Colombo. We were at Mahapatassa. All of a sudden, the hoarse kharr kharr, the alarm call of a barking deer rent the air, prompting the tracker to say rather anxiously, weli muwa kae gahana paththata yamuda? In a trice we were at the spot where the barking deer had sounded its alarm, and there imprinted in the sand, were the fresh pug marks of a leopard, but it was gone. I cursed my bad luck. Disappointed, we drove back to Manawila, much to the joy of my companions who had given me strict instructions to be back in the bungalow by 9 oclock, the latest.

The mid-day heat of the dry zone and the reassuring purr of the jeep as it comfortably negotiated the rugged roads of Wilpattu had made me dozy. The trackers agitated thump, jolted me out of my reverie. Lying on the main Kumbukwila-Mahapatassa road, was the most gorgeous female leopard one could wish to see. Facing us with her paws stretched out in Great Dane fashion, was Cleopatra, or so my friend Tony enlightened me subsequently. She was all the while looking hard at a clump of trees close by. Her mint green eyes gleaming in the filtered sunlight, she rose up and sat on her haunches facing away from us. She commenced grooming herself, whilst contemplating her next move.

The advent of another vehicle from the opposite direction quickly made up her mind for her; whipping around, she faced us again. A few steps forward, and in a flash she disappeared, leaping effortlessly into the trees above her. The trees harboured something, probably some langurs which were a source of annoyance for her. Curtains, we thought. Not so fast! In under three minutes she emerged again from the undergrowth at a spot closer to us. This time there was no stopping her. She began to walk very purposefully towards us; every now and then stopping to listen to the jungle or to closely examine an imaginary object. She appeared to sense that she was the cynosure of all eyes, and seemed to say get a good look at me now, for I dont put on this show everyday!! She forced us into reverse mode for nearly a kilometre; right back to the swollen Mahapatassa Villu! Stopping by an animal trail, her tawny coat glistening and her blue-black rosettes glinting in the dappled sunshine, she gave us one last imperious once over, then was gone.

A fitting finale, if ever there was one. Eight leopards in four days! Wild Wilpattu, the land of the leopard indeed!Japanese embassy staffs spouses support educational causes View(s):

Two NGOs  Surangani Voluntary Service (SVS) and Only One World (OOW)  were the recipients of Rs. 342,400 in donations raised by the Association of Spouses of the Japanese Embassy Staff (ASJES) through the International Christmas Charity Bazar (ICCB) 2017 held at the Hilton Colombo Residences on 26 November 2017.

The donation was presented to them by Akiko Suganuma, spouse of Ambassador of Japan to Sri Lanka, at a ceremony held at the Japanese Ambassadors official residence recently. The Association has supported activities of many NGOs in Sri Lanka for more than 30 years. SVS, founded in 1992, supports mainly preschool and special needs education in Sri Lanka. The organisation was represented at the ceremony by its director Shigeko Baba, a Japanese national. The donation from ASJES will be utilised to buy copy equipment for SVSs Colombo office. This is the 17th donation from ASJES to SVS since 2001.

Ms. Baba said: We have been managing a lot of documents using an outdated photocopy machine for the programmes for children of poor families or those with special needs. We are grateful for the donation by ASJES as it will help in strengthening our administrative capability.

OOW was founded in 1991 by former Ambassador of Sri Lanka to Japan, Arthur Basnayake, and his wife Mrs. Damini Basnayake. OOW grants scholarships to bright and deserving students. This is the sixth donation from ASJES to OOW since 2013. The donation from ASJES will be utilised to award monthly stipends for four years to two students, Sulochana Maliduwa Liyanage of Sangamitta College, and Ishara Maduwantha Premaratne of Pinnawela Central College

The awardees expressed their gratitude to OOW and Japan at the ceremony.

Ms. Sulochana thanked the Japanese Embassy Staffs Spouses for the award and said: I intend to utilise the award wisely to reap maximum benefit from it to become a useful member of society. Mr. Ishara thanked the Japanese Embassy Staffs Spouses for helping Sri Lankan children realise their full potential through education and said: I intend to use this award to help prepare myself to serve my country well.Sri Lanka journalists for Global Justice condemn killing of Palestinian journalist View(s):

The Sri Lanka Journalists for Global Justice (SLJGJ) has called upon journalists and peace loving people worldwide to unite in condemning the killing of Palestinian journalist Yasser Murtaja while on duty. The SLJGJ in a statement also condemns comments by Israels defence minister justifying the killing and calls upon the Israeli authorities to hold to account those who shot and killed Murtaja and those who gave the orders.

The statement also says:

Murtaja, a journalist attached to Palestinian news group Ain Medai, died on April 7 a day after he was shot by an Israeli soldier, while he was covering the Palestinian Land Day protests. Five other journalists were injured in the firing.

It is the duty of every civilized nation to ensure the safety of journalists and recognize the role they play as messengers and watchdogs.

The killing of Murtaja only confirms the culture of impunity that exists in Israel with regard to Israeli troops crimes against the Palestinian people.

The deaths of Murtaja and scores of peaceful protesters in recent days belie Israels claim to be a democratic nation. Instead, they expose Israels apartheid nature and colonial mentality.

According to human rights groups, Israeli soldiers had orders from senior Israeli officials to use live ammunition against Palestinian protesters even if protesters did not pose a threat to the soldiers or civilians.

We back the United Nations call for an independent international inquiry into the killing of unarmed Palestinian protesters who are demanding that Israel withdraws from Palestinian land so that the evicted Palestinians could return to their land of birth.

We also note that according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), no one has been held accountable for the killings of journalists in Israel and occupied Palestine, though 16 journalists have been killed since 1992.In just one month the province has passed from drought to an abundance of water. The Mediterranean climate is marked by alternating cycles of low and high rainfall, but the problem in this case is that the population of the Costa del Sol continues to grow and so does the need for water resources. Economic sectors such as tourism and agricultura also rely on a plentiful supply of water.

At the end of February the lack of rain was so worrying that the regional government's Ministry of the Environment was preparing to restrict the use of water, especially in the Axarquia region. On 27 February the reservoirs held 205.30 cubic hectometres of water, which was just 33 per cent of capacity. La Vinuela was even worse, containing just over 35 hm3, 21.4 per cent of capacity.

After all the rain that fell in March, what is the situation now? As a general reference, the average measured at Malaga Airport, which is the official measurement for statistical purposes, is 550 litres of rain per square metre a year. Last month there were 224, more than a third of the rain which normally falls in twelve months, according to the Aemet meteorological centre in Malaga. However, the city was one of the places with the lowest rainfall in March. The wettest area was on the boundary between Malaga and Cadiz provinces. For example, around the Guadiaro river and Gaucin area there were nearly 650 litres per square metre.

The water reserves have almost doubled in a month and there is enough for two years

At a general level, the rainfall was between 205 and 386 hm3, according to the Red Hidrosur, which is part of the Junta de Andalucia's Environmental Department. That is enough water to last for two years, even if it doesn't rain again. However, although the situation has improved in general, it is not the same everywhere.

In the Axarquia, although La Vinuela now holds twice as much water as before, its use for irrigation is still restricted. The last committee meeting decided to maintain the same volume as last year (when the situation was almost identical to this year), at 1.5hm3 in April and 2hm3 in May. There will be another meeting at the end of May to see how much water the reservoir contains and decide on irrigation in the summer. In any case, there will be enough water for 24 months.

In Malaga city and the Guadalhorce valley there is enough water for more than two years and no restrictions are planned for irrigation this summer. The Conde de Guadalhorce, Guadalhorce and Guadalteba reservoirs have doubled their water content, and now contain 227 hm3.

Paradoxes of La Concepcion

That is one aspect. The other is that, once again, the situation has highlighted the lack of hydraulic infrastructure in the province. La Concepcion reservoir, which supplies much of the Costa del Sol, shows a series of paradoxes which emphasise the fragility of the system. This week, with 61 hm3 it was almost completely full, but its maximum capacity is only 61.85 hm3 and it has to supply one of the most populated areas of Spain. As a backup, Marbella also has a sea water desalination plant which is mainly used when demand is at its peak in the summer.

The second paradox is that the reservoir is very small compared with the basin which it supplies and is the rainiest in the province. And the third is that water which it could have used in the forthcoming months has had to be released from the reservoir to stop it overflowing. A total of 7.12 hm3 were let out from 16 to 18 March. That is almost the amount used in the province in a normal month.

The central and regional governments want to expand La Concepcion, but the ideal solution would be to build another reservoir lower down and expand its total capacity to 180 hm3, which would make it the biggest in the province. Alternatively, all the reservoirs could be connected, so water could be used and stored where needed.The fishing sector in Malaga province is facing important changes which are causing concern to fishing crews and boat owners and threatening to sink them even further in the downward spiral they've been suffering for years.

On one hand the European Commission wants to limit the capture of species such as mullet, hake and crayfish to enable the fishing grounds of the western Mediterranean to recover. In addition, in the near future all bivalve molluscs will have to be cleaned before being sold, because of a deterioration of water quality in the Malaga fishing grounds. These two measures are worrying the sector, which says it is already struggling to keep afloat.

In Malaga province alone the capture of the species that Europe wants to restrict represents a turnover of more than two million euros a year. Of this, hake (107,639 kilos) and red mullet (39,089 kilos) account for 1,306,483 euros. The 24,870 kilos of crayfish bring in 700,088 euros. Last year, Malaga's fishing boats sold 22,334, 566 euros' worth of fish, for a total catch of 7,024,000 kilos.

Much of the fresh fish sold in restaurants in Malaga comes from other provinces

The fleet, which catches 14,000 tonnes less than 30 years ago, provides work for 1,000 crew

In the last 30 years the local fleet has gone from catching over 22 million kilos of fish and shellfish to barely seven million in 2017. That is a drop of two-thirds. Income from sales has dropped considerably. While in 1987 the 21,404,000 kilos caught were worth 32.6 million euros, last year the fishing sector only earned 22.3 million euros, a difference of 10.3 million. The reduction would have been even greater if it were not for the fact that the average price of the fish at the auctions rose from 1.53 to 3.18 euros a kilo during that time.

Buying from other ports

The reduction in catch forces the market to buy fish from other places, ranging from Huelva to Alicante, as well as Galicia and other countries on the Mediterranean, because demand in Malaga province is far greater than the capacity of the fishing fleet. Much of the fresh fish and shellfish sold in Malaga comes from elsewhere, according to official sources.

Pablo Rojas runs the popular Marisqueria Jacinto seafood restaurant in Malaga. I've never had to look for large clams outside Andalucia before, but this Easter I had to get them from Galicia. We always try to serve fish and shellfish from the Alboran Sea, but it is becoming more difficult, he says. He believes it is hard to find certain products because the biological resting periods are not long enough for the species to recover.

In 2016, households in Spain spent 13.5 per cent of their food and drink budget on fish. According to a consumer report produced by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fishing, Food and the Environment, they spend 202.44 euros a head and consume 25.49 kilos per person per year.

In 2014 households in Andalucia consumed 199,500 tonnes of fish products, although only 43 per cent of them came from Andalucia. In 2017, only 48,124 tonnes of fish were caught in the waters off Andalucia.

The fishing sector in Malaga complains that it is being increasingly restricted and many boats have ceased to operate. The number dropped from 255 to 249 between 2016 and 2017. Employment has also dropped. Figures for 2016 show that the sector provided direct jobs for 1,005 workers, and indirect work for 2,485 (3,492 in total). In 1990, there used to be 1,500 fishing crew.

New fishing limits

Among the changes faced by Malaga fishermen is the new management plan for the Mediterranean, through which Brussels wants to limit the capture of species such as hake, mullet and crayfish because it considers that if it continues at the present rate 90 per cent will be over-exploited by 2025. As a result it wants to restrict the catch, reduce fishing during the first year of the plan and stop fishing on the seabed at a depth of more than 100 metres between 1 May and 31 July every year.

Spain, which wants to bring the European regulation forward and try to put the measures into effect within six months, says the plan focuses on effort (days and hours at sea), rather than imposing quotas. At present trawlers, which catch the species that the EC wants to protect, fish off Malaga from 6am to 6pm Mondays to Fridays, and the minimum depth at which they are authorised to trawl is 50 metres. For the sector, these limits are already sufficient.

Trawling captures species which are found on the sea bed, or close to it, such as prawns, crayfish, monkfish, octopus, cuttlefish, dogfish, mullet, spider fish, blue whiting, hake, whiting, sole, sea bream and mackerel, among others. In Malaga the trawlers are between 12 and 24 metres long, with a crew of between four and seven.

The Malaga fishing fleet currently consists of 249 boats, of which 36 are trawlers, 32 purse seine, 55 low power and 126 for shellfish.

For the regional government's Minister of Agriculture, Fishing and Development, Rodrigo Sanchez Haro, the profitability of the fishing fleet is of prime importance and he says the drastic and substantial reduction the EC is proposing is unacceptable.

Sanchez Haro says this year the minimum amount of time for fishing should be at least 210 days for trawlers, and that should not be reduced in forthcoming years. The central government wants to introduce successive reductions of ten per cent until 2020. For the regional minister, anything lower than an average of 190 days would seriously start to affect the fishing industry because of the loss of income for the sector.

The fishing industry in Malaga fears that if the limits proposed by Brussels are introduced, many owners of fishing boats could be forced to scrap their vessels, and that would seriously affect the quantity of fresh fish available on the coast.

The president of the provincial Fishing Federation, Miguel Angel Carmona, says the new limits would also be the death of the local trawling sector, and if boats are scrapped unemployment will rise.

Another change faced by the fishing sector in the near future is related to bivalve molluscs. The Junta de Andalucia is working on a decree which will mean that all types of clam and mussels will have to be cleaned before being offered for sale. This will be obligatory once the decree comes into force, and the cleaning will have to be done at least one day before selling the shellfish for human consumption.

The fishing industry is hoping that the Junta will pay for the cleaning, bearing in mind that the deterioration of the water quality is the result of discharges from the land into the sea.

They are also hoping that the regional government will not prohibit the fishing of bivalve molluscs anywhere off the coast of the province.PEMBROKE, N.Y. -- A Genesee County Sheriff's deputy shot and killed an armed suspect Wednesday night outside a restaurant in the town of Pembroke, according to media reports.

Genesee County Undersheriff Greg Walker told the Democrat & Chronicle that police responded to the Indian Falls Log Cabin Restaurant on Gilmore Road at about 11 p.m. for a report that shots were fired inside and outside of the restaurant.

The deputy made contact with the suspect in the parking lot and the suspect pointed his gun at the deputy, Walker told the newspaper.

The deputy shot and killed the suspect, according to the report.

There were about seven people inside the restaurant at the time and no one was hurt.

The newspaper reported that this was the first officer-involved shooting in more than 40 years in Genesee County, according to police.

New York State Police announced that the sheriff's office will hold a news conference at 8 a.m.

State Police will investigate fatal shooting of a man who police say pointed a gun at a deputy in a restaurant parking lot in Pembroke last night. This is the first shooting by a deputy in Genesee County in the 43 year career of the current Sheriff. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/l379vE5sK3  Doug Emblidge (@dougemblidge) April 12, 2018

Check back for more information on this developing story.WHITESBORO, N.Y. -- The Whitestown Police Department has identified an Oneida County officer who was killed in a car accident Wednesday night.

Killed was Officer Kevin Crossley, a part-time officer who was working in the village of Whitesboro, according to the town of Whitestown Police Department's Facebook page.

The department posted at 8:32 a.m. Thursday that Crossley was killed in the two-vehicle accident.

"Last night we lost one of our fellow part time Police Officers," the post said. "Officer Kevin Crossley who was working in the Village of Whitesboro was killed in a 2 car motor vehicle accident on Oriskany Blvd. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family, friends and co-workers, we will miss you brother......"

New York State Police said a Chevrolet Avalanche collided with the village of Whitesboro officer's patrol car at the intersection of Westmoreland Street and Oriskany Boulevard just before 8 p.m.

The officer was taken to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Utica, where he was pronounced dead, police said. The Avalanche's driver was taken to St. Luke's Hospital in Utica with non-life threatening injuries, police said.

Last night we lost one of our fellow part time Police Officers. Officer Kevin Crossley who was working in the Village of... Posted by Town of Whitestown, NY Police Department on Thursday, April 12, 2018

The men & women of the Oneida City Police Department sends our heart felt condolences to the Family, Friends and... Posted by Oneida City Police Department on Thursday, April 12, 2018

The crash is still being investigated, state police said.

A news conference is scheduled for later today.SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A Utica judge has insisted that former NASCAR racer Tony Stewart and the family of Kevin Ward Jr. appear in court to discuss a lawsuit settlement.

The parties announced last week they had agreed to settle the lawsuit between Stewart and the family of Ward Jr., the 20-year-old amateur racer who was killed in a race in 2014 at Canandaigua Motorsports Park.

U.S. District Court Judge David Hurd scheduled a hearing for Thursday, but lawyers for Stewart and the Ward family asked him to cancel the hearing.

The lawyers wrote that a conference wasn't necessary because they had privately and confidentially settled the lawsuit, and the law doesn't require a judge to approve the settlement. They also noted the parties wished for the settlement terms to remain confidential, and they wanted to avoid a hearing that would result in increased attorney's fees and travel costs.

Judge Hurd wasn't having any of it: "The attorneys have completely missed the point," he wrote in a court filing.

Hurd said that in order to close the case, he would need to determine whether a binding agreement had been reached, and agree to dismiss the case.

He said the parties would not be asked to reveal any confidential information, and the purpose of the hearing was not to approve the settlement.

Hurd directed Ward Jr.'s parents and Stewart to appear in-person with their lawyers on Thursday, or he would continue the jury trial scheduled for May.

Today, Stewart's lawyers wrote to the judge asking that Stewart be allowed to participate via phone. According to the lawyer, Stewart had a pre-existing commitment to host race team sponsors at an event in Columbus, Indiana tonight.

"The events will run late into the evening tonight ... with many of those representatives staying at Mr. Stewart's home. This event was scheduled several months ago," the lawyer wrote.

Judge Hurd has not yet responded to the request.

The hearing is scheduled for tomorrow at 2 p.m.

Public Affairs Reporter Julie McMahon covers courts, government and other issues affecting taxpayers. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992A dozen U.S. lawmakers are asking the Federal Communications Commission to investigate whether or not Sinclair Broadcast Group is "deliberately distorting" the news.

USA Today reports 12 Democratic senators have sent a letter to FCC chairman Ajit Pai calling for an investigation of Sinclair, which owns or operates nearly 200 TV stations, including CNY Central in Syracuse and stations in Buffalo, Rochester and Albany.

"We have strong concerns that Sinclair has violated the public interest obligation inherent in holding broadcast licenses," Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and others wrote Wednesday.

"Sinclair may have violated the FCC's longstanding policy against broadcast licensees deliberately distorting news by staging, slanting, or falsifying information (traditionally known as the news distortion standard)," the letter continued. "These Sinclair actions also undermine the legitimacy of non-Sinclair news outlets."

The letter cites recent reports about Sinclair forcing its local news anchors to read identical scripts accusing other news outlets of pushing "fake news," echoing President Donald Trump's frequent attacks on the media. Video went viral last week showing CNY Central anchors Michael Benny and Allison Bybee, reading the same promo as dozens of others.

"The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media," Benny and Bybee said on CBS 5 (WTVH) in Syracuse. "Some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda... This is extremely dangerous to our democracy."

The video was never identified as commentary or an editorial, and anchors did not disclose that the message came from Sinclair.

Sinclair, the nation's largest owner of local TV stations, has also been accused of pushing a right-leaning agenda by requiring its television stations to air video segments called "must-runs." Segments include a "Terrorism Alert Desk," criticisms of Democratic politicians, and conservative commentary by former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn.

"Must-run dictates from Sinclair harm the freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment by turning local journalists into mouthpieces for a corporate and political agenda," the group of senators wrote Wednesday.

According to USA Today, the senators are also asking the FCC to pause its review of Sinclair's proposed $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media, questioning whether it's in the public interest. The deal would expand Sinclair's reach to 223 TV stations, reaching 72 percent of U.S. homes.

Trump, who has met with Sinclair chairman David D. Smith several times including in the White House, has already publicly expressed his support for the company.

"The Fake News Networks, those that knowingly have a sick and biased AGENDA, are worried about the competition and quality of Sinclair Broadcast," Trump tweeted last week. "Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke."

Sinclair has similary criticized CNN in a new video released this week and promoted under large alert graphics on local TV news sites, including cnycentral.com. The video accuses CNN of being "hypocritical" for attacking their warnings about "fake news" when CNN's Brian Stelter similarly warned viewers about false reports on the cable news network.

"There's a huge difference between my coverage and Sinclair's mandatory promos," Stelter responded on Twitter. "No one tells me what to say. But these anchors were told exactly what to say."

Several Sinclair staffers told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday that they were dismayed to see the company use their local news sites as a corporate attack platform.

"Never have they done something like this," one anonymous producer wrote. "I'm mortified. Like on the verge of tears."

"Oh my god. This is ridiculous. It's so duplicitous," a reporter added.

Benny defended his participation in the promo video last week.

"I was never threatened with a consequence for refusing to participate in recording it," Benny wrote on Facebook. "The heart of the message is about a commitment to facts and fairness. I believe in the heart of the message. I lived it every day prior to the conception of the promotion at the corporate level. I can't imagine ever not living it. "

USA Today reports Wednesday's letter from senators is also requesting additional public comment on Sinclair's proposed merger with Tribune Media. The FCC inspector general recently began investigating whether Chairman Pai has acted inappropriately in assisting Sinclair, and the letter is calling for the results to be made public when available.Geddes, N.Y. - The Syracuse Food Truck & Craft Beer Festival returns to the New York State Fairgrounds on May 12.

And this year, first responders get in for free, according to the organizer, Food Truck Festival of America.

Many of the trucks coming to the May event were at the New York State Fair last fall. Get a preview in the link below.

The Food Truck Festival runs from noon to 5 p.m. Those with VIP tickets can enter at 11 a.m. The day includes music, lawn games and an artisan market.

The VIP tickets cost $25 in advance, and $30 at the date. That entitles guests to:

11 a.m. access

One free dessert from the VIP food truck

Unlimited bottled water

$1 off craft beer

General admission is $5 in advance or $10 at the gate. Children 12 and under are free. Police, firefighters and EMTs get in free.



Here's the list of food trucks planning on participating:SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- The owner of a Fitch Street home that erupted in flames last week, killing four people, failed to notify the city he had rented the home to the family, according to a Syracuse city official.

If the home had been registered as a rental unit, the home would have been subject to an inspection, a city official said.

Zach Sanford, who owns the home at 253 Fitch St., said Tuesday in a brief interview with Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard outside the house that the property was a rental.

Syracuse firefighters said the house's smoke alarms were not working. They did not say whether the alarms were tampered with, had dead batteries or stopped working some other way.

Sanford said the smoke detectors functioned the last time he looked.

"They were up," he said. "They were up."

He walked away, declining further comment. Sanford's Facebook page expresses grief and shock at the losses of the victims, whom he said were close friends he's known a long time.

Four people have died from injures from a fire at 253 Fitch St. in Syracuse on April 5. The victims are (rom left to right) Sue Wagner, 45; Hunter DuBois, 1, with his mom, Korrina DuBois, 18; and Michael DuBois, 16.

Police have arrested Charles DuBois, 20, who lived at the home, and accused him of setting two fires that killed his mother, two siblings and his nephew. The victims are Susan Wagner, 45, Michael DuBois, 16, Korinna DuBois, 18, and Hunter DuBois, 1.

Ken Towsley, the city's director of code enforcement, said the city has the Fitch Street home listed as owner-occupied, which presumes that Sanford lived there and did not rent it.

Towsley said, based on Sanford's statement to Syracuse.com that he rented the home, that Sanford did not comply with the city's ordinance to register the house.

Kristen Smith, the city's top lawyer, said the city has the option of bringing action against Sanford in city court, where he'll be fined $100 a day until he brings the property into compliance with the ordinance.

She said it's too early to say whether the city will bring Sanford to court.

Syracuse landlords who rent their properties to tenants are required to notify the city and enter the property in the city's rental registry and pay a $150 fee.

Such a notification should prompt an external inspection by the city within the property's right-of-way, in addition to a voluntary internal inspection, Towsley said.

The city also checks the history of the building and owner for back taxes, outstanding violations and other possible red flags, he said.

Also, landlords registering properties as rentals are required to affirm under penalty of perjury to the city that the smoke detectors are working in a document called an affidavit of compliance, Towsley said.

Landlords and tenants can decline to allow the internal inspections, which, among other things, make sure smoke alarms are functioning, Towsley said.

A law recently passed by the Common Council requires inspections every three years of rental properties. It still allows landlords or tenants to refuse internal inspections.

Also, the city's code enforcement division will be able to request a warrant that would mandate an internal inspection, thanks to a newly created municipal violations bureau.

Sanford bought the home from a Kevin Sanford for $1 in October 2013, when the DuBois family still lived there, according to county property records. Kevin Sanford bought it for $1 in December 2008.

A DuBois family member, RoseAnne, estimated they have lived there for about 10 years. She's lived in the home since February 2017 but happened to stay elsewhere the night of the fire, she said.

She also said the landlords were attentive to the family's needs, and, last she knew, the smoke alarms worked.

Towsley said Sanford will likely have to end up paying the city as a result of the fire. As the owner, he's responsible for the building's pending emergency demolition.

The Fitch Street home has been subject to 10 code violations for debris between October 2012 and September 2016, but all have been dealt with, according to the code enforcement division.

Common Councilor Khalid Bey, who has led the council's push to reform the rental registry, accused the owner of "negligence" and said the Fitch Street fire demonstrates the importance having an ordinance with teeth.

"There's certainly negligence on the part of the property owner," Bey said. "Without a doubt, the circumstances could have - I emphasize could have - been different."

Syracuse.com reporter Chris Libonati contributed to this report.UTICA, N.Y. -- The family of Kevin Ward Jr. agreed in court today to settle a wrongful death lawsuit, but Ward Jr.'s mother told the judge she felt like she had "no other choice."

Ward Jr. was 20 years old when he was killed in a sprint car race at Canandaigua Motorsports Park on Aug. 9, 2014.

He walked out on a live race track after his car was sidelined in a collision with Stewart. On Stewart's next lap around the track, his car struck Ward Jr., killing him.

The family filed a lawsuit a year later.

"Our ultimate goal in this process was to hold Tony Stewart accountable for what he did to our son on that night," mother Pamela Ward said today.

The parties did not state the terms of the lawsuit in court, except to say a sum would be paid in exchange for all claims being dropped. Lawyers said the parties agreed the settlement would remain confidential, but Stewart and the family were free to discuss the facts of the case.

For two-and-a-half years, Stewart and the Ward family were not able to reach a settlement. They were slated to go to trial in May.

U.S. District Court Judge David Hurd today characterized much of the parties' settlement negotiations as "not too pleasant or cooperative."

After court-ordered mediation was complete, Stewart asked Hurd to toss the case. Hurd declined, issuing a decision last year allowing the family's claims to move forward.

Last week, two months before a trial was set to begin, the parties alerted the judge they'd reached a resolution.

Hurd ordered Stewart and the family to appear in Utica today to discuss dismissing the case. Stewart asked to call into the hearing from Indiana because of previously scheduled plans, but Hurd insisted he appear in person.

In court, Hurd gave the parties a chance to speak. Stewart declined, as did Kevin Ward Sr.

Ward's mother Pamela, however, paused before responding to the judge's question of whether she was prepared to settle the case.

"I feel as though I have no other choice, your honor," she said.

The judge questioned whether she understood the private settlement agreement she'd already entered into with Stewart.

"I did understand what I signed your honor," she said. "I wanted this case to go to trial so he could be held accountable by a jury of our peers. That was our ultimate goal, to get justice for our son."

Tony Stewart, former NASCAR racer, leaves federal court in Utica, N.Y. Thursday, April 12, 2018, after a judge forced his appearance with Kevin Ward Jr.'s family for a settlement conference in Ward's death on the racetrack in 2014.

Today, the mother said she felt like she had no other options but to settle. She mentioned the family had "no other means," but did not elaborate.

She and other family members declined to comment after the hearing as they exited out the front entrance of the federal courthouse.

Stewart left out of a side door without responding to questions from reporters.

Hurd agreed to dismiss the case once the parties resolved a few technical issues. He asked the parties to file the settlement agreement with the court under seal, noting that was proper because no public entities were involved in the lawsuit.

As he concluded the hearing, he thanked Stewart for making arrangements to fly to Utica. He wished the Ward family good luck in moving forward from the tragedy.

Public Affairs Reporter Julie McMahon covers courts, government and other issues affecting taxpayers. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Syracuse University has suspended a student who was arrested and charged with rape, a university spokesman said Wednesday.

Miguel A. Caamano, 21, has been accused of raping a 19-year-old woman in a university-owned, on-campus apartment, according to court records.

The rape happened in September of 2017, according to a felony complaint filed in City of Syracuse court.

SU was notified Wednesday of Caamano's arrest, the spokesman said in a statement. It has issued an interim suspension against Caamano, effective immediately, the spokesman said.

Caamano is listed as a senior in the university's College of Arts and Sciences in SU's student directory.

"There is absolutely no place for sexual and relationship violence at Syracuse University," the spokesman said.

The spokesman declined to comment further because an investigation into the incident is ongoing.SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A Utica judge has, for the second time, insisted that former NASCAR racer Tony Stewart appear in court today to settle a lawsuit with the family of Kevin Ward Jr.

The parties announced last week they had agreed to settle the lawsuit between Stewart and the family of Ward Jr., the 20-year-old amateur racer who was killed in a race in 2014 at Canandaigua Motorsports Park.

After some back-and-forth, U.S. District Court Judge David Hurd ordered the parties to appear in court this afternoon so he could determine whether a binding agreement had been reached and dismiss the case.

Lawyers for both parties initially asked to avoid a hearing to save money on attorneys' fees and travel costs. They wrote to the judge to say they had reached a confidential agreement and the law didn't require the court's approval.

"The attorneys have completely missed the point," Hurd wrote, insisting the parties come to Utica in order to avoid a trial in May. He said they would not be asked to reveal confidential information.

A lawyer for Stewart then wrote to the court a second time, saying Stewart had a prior commitment and asking the judge to allow him to participate in the conference over the phone.

According to the filing, Stewart was hosting race team sponsors at an event in Columbus, Indiana last night and expected the event to run late into the evening. Stewart was personally hosting guests at his home, the lawyer wrote.

"This event was scheduled several months ago," according to the request.

Yesterday afternoon, Judge Hurd denied Stewart, insisting that he appear in Utica at 2 p.m.

"This late request is denied in full," Hurd wrote.

Public Affairs Reporter Julie McMahon covers courts, government and other issues affecting taxpayers. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992The political crisis confronting Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens appeared to deepen significantly on Wednesday with the release of a dramatic legislative report that outlines in sharp detail new allegations about the governor's behavior towards a woman who was his hair dresser.

The 24-page report, prepared by a special committee of the state's predominantly Republican House of Representatives, included detailed testimony by the woman, referred to only as Witness 1, who described a sexual relationship with Greitens that included a string of misconduct and started one day when he groped her.

Once considered a rising star in the Republican Party with a sterling resume, the former Navy SEAL has found his political fortunes badly damaged by the allegations and ensuing felony charge that he invaded the woman's privacy by taking a nude photo of her without her consent. His trial is set to begin in St. Louis circuit court next month.

The result of an investigation which the chamber voted 154-0 to launch, the report raised the specter of impeachment for Greitens and prompted another round of calls for Greitens to step down, including by the state's Republican attorney general and senate hopeful Josh Hawley and Democratic Senator Clair McCaskill. One Republican state representative called Greitens "an embarrassment."

While Greitens has described the extramarital relations as "consensual," the woman said it included unwanted and potentially coerced sexual acts that she felt afraid to say no to and physical violence, in addition to the threat of photographic blackmail.

Greitens, who has resisted calls to step down amid the scandal as he awaits trial next month, declined to participate or testify for the committee's report. In the hours before the report's scheduled release, he delivered a defiant speech in which he called the investigation into him a "political witch hunt," echoing the phrase used regularly by President Donald Trump.

"I will continue to serve the people of Missouri as their governor and to work for you every day," he said. "And they know, they need to know, that fake charges and falsehoods aren't going to stop us."

The special committee set up to investigate the charge, meanwhile, wrote that it found the woman a credible witness.

The woman said the physical contact began in 2015 with Greitens, who is married, after he had been her client on and off for a more than a year. During a haircut, Greitens moved his hand "all the way up," to her crotch without consent, the woman said, a move that left her "curious," and confused.

"Why did he feel like he could do that?" She told the committee.

About a week later, Greitens asked her to meet him in an alleyway behind a Starbucks when she phoned him, and invited her over to his house for a weekend when his wife would be out of town, she said.

The woman later asked if he wanted to meet at a cafe, but Greitens told her he couldn't been seen in public because he was running for office, the woman said, according to the report. Instead, she agreed to go to his house where he told her she could "come in through the back door, nobody will see you, we can talk."

When she arrived at 7 a.m., about 45 minutes before she was supposed to arrive at her job, Greitens took her keys, searched her purse and patted her down, checking outside to see if any one had seen her come in, the report said.

The woman said she wanted to talk to him but he asked to "take her through an exercise," for which he had her change into a white T-shirt with a cut at the top and men's pajama pants. He then told her he was going to show her how to do a proper pull up, she said.

The witness told the committee that she thought they were going to do some sort of "sexy workout," and that she was both "curious" and "confused."

After they went to the house's basement, Greitens taped her hands to the pull-up rings with gauze tape and put a blindfold on her, items which had been laying on a workout bench, the report said. He told her she needed to be hydrated and tried to spit water in her mouth multiple times though she spit it out, she said, "because I didn't even want to kiss him."

Greitens began kissing her neck and chest and ripped her shirt open to expose her, and pulled down her pants.

She said she heard him step back and then take what she believed was a picture on his phone, seeing the flash through her blindfold. She said Greitens warned her not to mention his name "to anybody at all, because if you do, I'm going to take these pictures, and I'm going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are."

The woman said she stayed silent, thinking that this was the "most embarrassing thing" that had ever happened to her, before finally saying she wouldn't tell anyone. He began kissing her again, at which she started "freaking out," and trying to rip down her hands, she said.

"I was like, 'Get me out of here. I'm not ready for this. I don't want this. I don't want this,' " she said.

Of her emotions at that point, she said she was "fearful," "embarrassed," and "ashamed," feeling bad about herself for letting him get her in that position.

She said, "I just kept saying, 'Get me out of here. I'm not ready for this.' It was also, too, that feeling of, I came here not wanting to do anything - nothing."

After she tried to leave, he grabbed her in a bear hug and laid her down on the ground in the basement, she said.

"So he was laying there and I was laying next to him just crying - like uncontrollably crying," she said. "And he was like, 'Shh, shh, it's OK, it's OK.' That's all he was really saying at this point. And he was trying to, like fondle my body."

Greitens eventually undid his pants and moved his crotch near her face, after which she gave him oral sex, she said, feeling that it was the only way she'd be able to leave.

"So this guy literally just wants me for this, and this is all he wants, and then he'll let me - because at this point, too, I also know I have to be at work, and he's not going to let me leave," she said, describing her thoughts to the committee. "So I gave him oral sex at this point."

She said she felt the act was "coerced, maybe," and that one of the emotions she felt was fear for her "physical self."

Two friends testified to the committee that the woman had told her many elements of the story that aligned with the account she gave the committee.

The woman told the committee that Greitens came in for other appointments with her after the first encounter. The first time, he said to her, "You didn't tell anybody, did you?" the woman said. In the next, he showed up early and the two shared a consensual kiss. They later had more consensual relations, including oral sex.

In June, during another encounter, he asked her if she had been intimate with anyone else and slapped her across the face when she said that she had.

She described her reaction as, "What? Eric, what in the heck? You're married. Why would - what do you mean? And he just said, No. Like, that was - you're mine. This is - what do you mean you slept with your husband? You are not supposed to be sleeping with him, you know? And I said, I think you're screwed up from being in the Navy."

Another time he smacked, grabbed and shoved her to the ground in the midst of a sexual act, she said.

"And I instantly just started bawling and was just like, 'What is wrong with you? What is wrong with you?' And I just laid there crying while he was just like . . . 'you're fine, you're fine.' "

The woman later told Greitens to leave her alone.

Greiten has hired a high-powered legal team to defend him and a lobbyist to represent him in the state legislature. His lawyers have sought to sow doubt about the woman's account as well as the case brought by St. Louis circuit attorney, Kimberly Gardner.

The committee asked the woman why she continued to have contact with Greitens after the first encounter.

"I've asked myself that so many times," she said. "I think it comes down to a few things. One, I felt really disgusted with myself that I allowed that first time to happen. Really embarrassed that he thought of me as a whore. And so after my - I told my husband and he was clear that he did not want anything to do with me, that he wanted to move into an apartment, and when Eric came back in and he was normal and so kind to me, that felt so much better and it allowed me to just ignore any of those bad feelings about myself, in particular. Because if I thought he was this horrible person, I really felt shameful of myself."Juanita Perez Williams on Thursday cleared her first hurdle in a last-minute attempt to force a Democratic primary in Central New York's 24th Congressional District.

Williams, 54, of Syracuse, said she submitted petitions to the state Board of Elections with the signatures of more than 3,200 registered Democrats from the district, exceeding the minimum requirement of 1,250 signatures to make in onto the ballot.

"We had such an amazing response," Williams told syracuse.com in an interview. "I'm pretty humbled by this."

Williams said a volunteer staff that grew to include 50 people collected petition signatures by going door-to-door across the four-county district in just nine days.

She acknowledged the effort was aided by a small number of paid canvassers from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington, the campaign arm for House Democrats. But she said local volunteers collected about 85 percent of the signatures.

"We had a small number of people who came in to help us and were being paid," Williams said. "I'm not going to turn any support away. But I'm looking at the numbers and seeing that we could have done this with the people we had as volunteers."

The filing does not guarantee that Perez Williams will earn a spot on the primary ballot against Democrat Dana Balter, of Syracuse, who won the party's designation in the 24th District. Balter submitted petitions on Tuesday with more than 8,000 signatures

Candidates will have three days to review the petitions filed by the opposing campaigns, and can file challenges with the state Board of Elections if they believe signatures are not valid.

Signatures can be ruled invalid if a person has signed for more than one candidate seeking the same office, and for other technical reasons that include how the forms are filled out.

If Balter and Williams end up facing each other in a Democratic primary, the election date would be June 26. The winner would face Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, in the November election.

The 24th Congressional District covers all of Onondaga, Cayuga and Wayne counties, and the western half of Oswego County, including the cities of Fulton and Oswego.

Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Former top governor's aide Joseph Percoco will be able to collect a $36,000 a year pension despite his recent conviction on corruption charges.

A jury on March 13 found Percoco guilty of three of six charges he faced in the eight-week corruption trial.

Yet, Percoco -- narrowly avoiding a new law passed by voters in the fall -- won't be stripped of his pension.

The law authorizes judges to cut or reduce pension payments for public officials who commit or have committed felonies after Jan. 1, 2018. Percoco's crimes occurred before that.

Voters in November approved the ballot measure, which applies to elected officials, governor's appointees and some other government employees.

Percoco, whose title was deputy executive secretary, was appointed to his role in the executive chamber in 2011 by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

A jury in March found Percoco conspired and sold his public office by accepting payments in exchange for favors.

U.S. Attorneys in Manhattan alleged that some of those favors involved Syracuse developers Steven Aiello and Joseph Gerardi, who stood trial alongside Percoco and were accused of bribing him.

Gerardi was acquitted. Aiello was convicted on one charge and acquitted on others. The Cor Development executives will face additional charges in a trial scheduled for June.

Prosecutors claimed Percoco helped get a raise for Aiello's son (who worked in the governor's chamber), free up state funds for a Cor project and get a potentially costly union agreement removed from another project.

The new law allows judges to cut off pensions to government employees whose convictions had a "direct and actual relationship to the performance of the public officer's existing duties."

Due to the nature of Percoco's crimes, a judge likely could have ruled he was not eligible for his pension if the new law applied.

But Percoco was convicted on charges that his bribery schemes happened between 2012 and 2016 -- so, he'll be able to collect a pension based on his salary during that time.

Percoco's highest annual salary was $158,563.86, which he earned in fiscal year 2014, just before leaving office to run Cuomo's re-election campaign. That's the same year prosecutors said Percoco launched the corruption scheme with Cor executives.

Percoco, a Tier 4 employee, worked for New York state just over 14 years. That includes his time as an aide to Andrew Cuomo as governor and attorney general, and as an aide to Gov. Mario Cuomo.

The New York State Comptroller's Office provided Percoco's employment information upon request. According to the comptroller, Percoco, who turns 49 this month, has not yet applied for a pension, so the office has not yet calculated the amount.

Syracuse.com used the available figures to estimate Percoco's pension using a New York State and Local Retirement System formula.

If Percoco retires at 62 years old, he would be able to collect a maximum of $36,651.91 a year. That number could be lower depending on a number of factors.

If he decides to begin collecting his pension as early as 55 years old, it would be $26,755.90 annually, accounting for a 27 percent reduction.

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A California teacher who unintentionally discharged a handgun during a class on gun safety has resigned.

Dennis Alexander, who teaches at Seaside High School in Monterey and moonlights as a reserve police officer in a neighboring town, submitted his resignation March 29 effective at the end of the school year, Marci McFadden, a spokeswoman for the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District said in an email to local news organizations on Tuesday.

He remains on administrative leave, she added.

Alexander fired his Glock handgun toward the ceiling of the classroom on March 13, officials said. It still isn't clear how that happened or what precisely Alexander was attempting to demonstrate about gun safety in his class on the administration of justice.

One student received minor injuries from debris dislodged by the bullet.

Alexander is trained in weapons handling and safety as a part-time reserve officer for the Sand City Police Department. The Glock 21 .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun was issued by that department, though the county superintendent said he was not authorized to bring it to school.

Alexander, who is also a Seaside City Council member, apologized at a council meeting after the event. He still faces possible prosecution in connection with the incident, which attracted national attention because it came shortly after the Feb. 14 mass killings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and at a time when the subject of arming teachers was being hotly debated.

Alexander, who is apparently popular among many students at the school, reportedly had brought his weapon to class on previous occasions, allowing students to handle it, according to local news media.

Alexander has also resigned from the Sand City Police Department. The chief there said Alexander broke rules requiring safe handling of weapons and keeping them out of the hands of others.Fort Lauderdale, Fla. -- Nikolas Cruz, charged in the Parkland, Florida school shooting, wants his victims and their families to receive any money he'll get from his late mother's estate.



Cruz's mother Lynda died Nov. 1 after contracting the flu, according to ABC News. Between her estate and his own financial accounts, Cruz could have access to up to $800,000.



Cruz, 19, has been charged with 17 counts of murder in connection with the February shooting rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He was in court on Wednesday for a hearing to determine whether the public defender's office representing him should be dismissed if he can afford a private attorney.



His lawyers said in court that he wants any inheritance to go to those affected by the shooting or an organization that will help the community heal, according to ABC.



It's still unclear exactly how much money Cruz has access to and how much, if anything, he'll get from his mother's estate, ABC said. A judge will make a decision on the matter later this month.



Cruz did not speak during Wednesday's hearing and he kept his head lowered, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. His brother, Zachary Cruz, also attended the hearing and did not speak.



Cruz faces the death penalty if convicted of the charges against him.



His attorneys have said he is willing to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison, according to the Sun Sentinel. ABC reported Cruz's attorneys told the court on Wednesday that he was ready to plead immediately.



Prosecutors haven't indicated interest in the deal yet.



"The state of Florida is not allowing Mr. Cruz to choose his own punishment for the murder of 17 people," prosecutor Shari Tate said, according to the Sun Sentinel.

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112Redistricting proposal places Tama County outside Rep. Hinsons district

New maps could lead to a remaking of the political landscape in Iowa  Tama County included. What is now a quadrant of four U.S. ...Nestle UK is launching a new flavor for its iconic 4-finger chocolate and Tesco will release it exclusively starting April 16.

KitKat fans in the UK will be the first to get a taste of this new offering while chocolate lovers across Europe will be next. Consumers in the United States will soon have it as well.

Nestle UK describes the new KitKat Ruby as its latest breakthrough innovation. The launch underlines the company's commitment to growing its confectionery brands for its millions of consumers.

"We know that a new type of KitKat is a really big deal and we are very excited to be able to offer a different type of chocolate for KitKat fans to try," says Alex Gonnella, marketing director for Nestle UK.

Alexander von Maillot, the company's global head of confectionery, highlights the speed on how Nestle developed KitKat Ruby. It only took the team four months to create the new variety after Ruby Chocolate was publicly introduced in September 2017.

Ruby Chocolate's Taste And Its Natural Pink Color

The new KitKat Ruby is coated with Ruby chocolate, which is made from Ruby beans. These chocolate beans have an intense berry-fruitness taste that is not bitter, milky, or sweet.

It requires no additional artificial flavoring or coloring to achieve the chocolate's pink color. Ruby beans come from different regions across the globe, including the Ivory Coast, Ecuador, and Brazil.

Swiss chocolatier Barry Callebaut dedicated more than a decade in inventing Ruby chocolate. The process involved in-depth research and collaboration with Germany's Jacobs University. The chocolate also underwent testing and validation process by various independent global research agencies in the UK, United States, China, and Japan.

"Ruby chocolate meets a consumer need no chocolate ever did before," says Haystack, an international research agency.

This same quality is integrated with the new KitKat Ruby.

"Consumers across the world will be intrigued by the unique taste of this crispy delight," says Pablo Perversi, chief innovation, quality, and sustainability officer at Barry Callebaut.

KitKat With Ruby Chocolate First Introduced In Japan And South Korea

Japanese KitKat introduced KitKat Chocolatory Sublime Ruby on Jan 19, 2018. The product joined other Japanese KitKat flavors, including the famous KitKat Maccha Green Tea, purple sweet potato, edamame bean, and wasabi.

The company has become the first consumer brand in the world to introduce Ruby chocolate following its announcement in 2017.

The launch of KitKat Chocolatory Sublime Ruby, on the other hand, is historical for the whole Nestle brand. Ruby chocolate is the fourth type of chocolate next to Dark, Milk, and White. For more than 80 years, people have only known these three types of chocolate.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Google is pulling out the first-gen Pixel and Pixel XL from its online store.

That means the 2016 predecessors of the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL will be more difficult to find, though it's not impossible.

Buh-Bye, Original Pixel And Pixel XL

As first spotted by Android Police, heading over to the product page of the Pixel and Pixel XL redirects users to the store's phone category. It's gotten pretty barren there, showing only two links, one of which is for the Pixel 2 line and the other for Pixel 2 accessories.

This is set in stone as well. The Verge reached out to Google to confirm this, and it learned that it's indeed the case: the original Pixel phones are no longer available directly from the Mountain View company.

Just to be clear, this doesn't mean that the Pixel and Pixel XL aren't available anymore. Through third-party sellers such as Amazon, Best Buy, and eBay, people can still nab one from them. Prices go anywhere from $279.99 for refurbished units to $499 for brand new ones.

Going Forward: The Pixel 3

When one door closes, another opens  or something like that. On that note, the future of Google's phones is presumably the so-called Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL.

To no one's surprises, the rumor mill is hard at work in churning out a ton of info regarding the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL's successor.

One thing worth mentioning is there could be a midrange version of the Pixel 3 in the works. It's safe to assume that it's going to roll out with the lowest price point among the trio. However, it's unclear whether or not this will be available in the United States. It's not even official to begin with.

There's a Pixel 3 coming, though. It could be coming soon too. This is evidenced by some code straight from the horse's mouth.

Long story short, the original Pixel phones are still around. It's just a little bit harder to find them, and that will only become more difficult in the future. Needless to say, this was only a matter of time. All phones eventually reach the end of their lives, after all. This is just the first step for the Pixel and Pixel XL.

Are you a Pixel owner? If so, feel free to hit us up in the comments section below and let us know your experience with it.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.A recent study suggests that the pheromones ants leave on their trail for communication may actually come from the bacteria living in their gut.

A particular species of ant called the leafcutters or Atta sexdens rubropilosa is found to be excreting a chemical called pyrazine, a key ingredient in pheromones.

Pheromones are similar to hormones in human beings, only that they work outside the body. These substances are secreted by ants' sweat gland to be left on the ground, which ants use as a tool for communication.

Biologists from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil discovered that the scent trail is produced by Serratia marcescens, a type of bacteria that live and breed in the leafcutter ant's abdomen. The same bacterium was also found in other colonies examined for the study.

Researchers said this new information might also explain the symbiosis that takes place between bacteria and the human body.

Accidental Answers

Coauthor Monica Tallarico Pupo, professor in the University of Sao Paulo's Ribeirao Preto School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FCFRP-USP), said that while they have discovered that pyrazine is created by S. marcescens, it is unclear whether the bacteria is the source of pheromones or it only helped in the production of the chemical.

Initially, Pupo's team was investigating for microbes that protect the ants from parasitic bacteria. The researchers collected samples from ant colonies, including the queen, and isolated and cultured the bacteria from the ants.

"We found both pyrazines and bacteria in the ants' poison glands. We don't know for sure if their synthesis is shared: maybe the microorganism produces the aromatic compounds and the ants store them in their glands," Pupo said.

The researchers used a special fiber material typically used in culture plates. The samples were then analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

As it turned out, other ant species also use pyrazine for different purposes. Fire ants or Solenopsis invicta use it for signaling against enemies, while the Madagascan ant Eutetramorium mocquerysi) uses it as a trail sign.

Lead author Eduardo Afonso da Silva Junior explained that when the bacteria were cultured in the lab, it released a smell that is similar to that of the ants. Pupo added that Leucoagaricus gongylophorous, the fungal species on which the ants feed, thrive in the leaves they carry in their nests.

Interestingly, another type of pathogen is set out to kill this fungus without necessarily eating away the source of food.

Pupo said they will continue exploring possibilities by removing the bacteria from the ant's body and then observing if it will produce pyrazine by itself.

"The bacterial associates of ants in the tribe Attine have recently been exploited as a promising source of antibiotics thought to protect their hosts. The production of volatiles - critical class of molecules that guides ant behavior - by these bacteria, however, remain[s] largely unknown," the researchers wrote.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Mark Zuckerberg once again appeared before Congress, this time taking questions from members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Facebook chief executive told House members that he was part of the data breach.

Zuckerberg appeared for a second time before Congress to talk about protecting private data, fake news, and foreign interference.

Zuckerberg's Personal Data Hacked

During his testimony to the House on Wednesday, April 11, Zuckerberg acknowledged that his personal data had been stolen by Cambridge Analytica.

Rep. Anna Eshoo from California asked Zuckerberg if he thinks that Facebook has a moral obligation to run the company in a way that protects democracy, to which he answered yes. Eshoo then asked Zuckerberg if his own personal data was included in the Cambridge Analytica data breach, and he said yes.





Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: "Yes."



Full video here: pic.twitter.com/TFRsY1V9hs @RepAnnaEshoo : "Was your data included in the data sold to the malicious third parties? Your personal data?"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: "Yes."Full video here: https://t.co/LNljvR9nIO  CSPAN (@cspan) April 11, 2018

She then asked if he was willing to change Facebook's business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy, to which he said that he's not sure what it means.

Cambridge Analytica reportedly accessed Facebook data of 87 million users. It was able to get the information through a Facebook-connected app along with the users' friends' data, even without their consent.

Another Zuckerberg Data Leak

Zuckerberg admitting that Cambridge Analytica had accessed his private information isn't the only recent revelation about the Facebook co-founder. During his testimony on April 10, Zuckerberg's notes for his testimony before the Senators were photographed. It was then posted on Twitter and went viral.

His notes show that Zuckerberg was well-prepared for the questions that were going to be asked by the 44 Senators who grilled him. The notes also include what not to say during the testimony.

One of the questions that weren't asked but he was prepared to answer was about his resignation. His notes told him to put down the question while acknowledging that he had made mistakes but they were being corrected.

His notes also urged him to keep talking away from breaking up Facebook. Zuckerberg's notes also say that if asked if the company should be broken up, he should say that a breakup of Facebook would benefit Chinese companies.

The notes also told Zuckerberg how to deal with Apple chief Tim Cook's comments regarding the social media platform. According to the notes, Zuckerberg should deflect by saying that Apple never notified users despite stories of apps misusing Apple data.

Zuckerberg previously took a long time to apologize for the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Google is planning to launch a new Gmail design, alongside new features for the popular email service, according to a message sent to G Suite administrators.

There are no official screenshots yet that show the new Gmail interface, but it appears that somebody already saw the service's new look.

New Look For Gmail Coming Soon

An email from Google to G Suite administrators, acquired by The Verge, revealed that a new design and several new features are coming soon to Gmail. Google promises a "fresh, clean look for Gmail on the web," which may be long overdue for the email service.

The features that will be added to Gmail with the new design include Smart Reply, which already exists in the mobile version of the service; easier access to G Suite apps; the option to snooze emails, which will make them reappear in the user's inbox after a certain time; and easier access to Google Calendar.

Google also said that it will be moving Gmail Offline, a standalone Chrome app, to the web. As part of this, native offline support will be added to Gmail by June, with further details to be provided at a later date. The update, however, might break off compatibility with popular browser add-ons for Gmail, at least until the developers roll out updates of their own.

What Will The New Gmail Design Look Like?

In October 2017, the web version of the Google Calendar was revamped with modern icons and colors, plus a cleaner interface that copies the service's mobile app. For the new Gmail design, it is expected that Google will do the same thing and draw inspiration from the Gmail app, with an interface that will follow its Material Design language.

To help with the guessing game for the new look of Gmail, a reader contacted TechCrunch. Apparently, he saw an employee of Google trying out the new Gmail interface while on public transport.

"It was a hybrid of Gmail and Inbox," a certain Sahil Bhutani told TechCrunch's Romain Dillet. Bhutani said that the left-side column looked like Inbox, with every folder coming with icons and featuring dividers for the categories, while the right side looked like a bigger version of Gmail. The background color also carried a blue gradient.

In any case, we will get the first look at the redesigned Gmail over the coming weeks, as it will be made available as an early access program to both G Suite customers and personal users.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Two salty lakes are found beneath the Canadian Arctic, the first in the region, and are believed to help scientists understand life beyond earth.

A team of scientists led by Dr. Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta, discovered the hypersaline lakes while looking for subglacial continents in the Devon Ice Cap.

The subglacial lakes were accidentally discovered through the radar data from NASA. The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics examined electromagnetic waves that were sent through and reflected back on the ice. The hypothesis is that there is a moving body of water underneath the glacial surface, which at the time seemed impossible in an environment that is minus 10 degree Celsius.

"We weren't looking for subglacial lakes. The ice is frozen to the ground underneath that part of the Devon Ice Cap, so we didn't expect to find liquid water," said Anja Rutishauser, coauthor and a PhD student at the University of Alberta.

The lake, which is located approximately 750 meters below the ice, spans 8 kilometers by 5 kilometers squared.

Hypersaline Water

Antarctica is home to the majority of the 400-plus subglacial lakes in this world, while a few can be found in Greenland. This is the first time that this type of subterranean formation is discovered in the Canadian icy lands. Most lakes under frozen lands are believed to be freshwater.

Rutishauser said that the salinity of the Devon subglacial lake, which is four or five times saltier than seawater, is due to the melting of the basal ice from the surrounding rock formations.

Scientists likened the salinity of the lake to that of Europa, one of Jupiter's moons. Images from space centers showed that Europa appears to be comprised of ice and salty liquid on its surface.

Although there is a network of subglacial lakes underneath the Devon Ice Cap, two stood out due to a number of geologic reasons.

"The DIC lakes are situated within bedrock troughs in mountainous terrain, exist at temperatures well below the pressure-melting point, do not receive surface meltwater input, and likely consist of hypersaline water derived from dissolution of a surrounding salt-bearing geological formation," the researchers reported.

Extraterrestrial Life

Rutishauser said they are collecting samples of the saltwater to determine the presence of microbes. She said that doing so would result in new information of how organisms evolved over a period of 120,000 years in isolation from the earth's atmosphere.

Collecting water samples would mean that the team has to drill into those ice caps, which the researchers said would take some time. Rutishauser said they will be implementing safety procedures to ensure that no water contamination will occur.

The Devon Ice Cap lakes are the first of its kind on the planet. There are only a few hypersaline aqua environments that exist, namely the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the Dead Sea, which is located on the border of Jordan and Israel.

Scientists initially thought that environments like these are void of life, but recent studies have shown that halophiles or the so-called salt lovers can actually survive and thrive.

Most halophiles found in the Great Salt Lake and the Dead Sea are classified in the Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya families. They usually have colored membranes that appear in pink or orange hues.

The study titled "Discovery of a Hypersaline Subglacial Lake Complex Beneath Devon Ice Cap, Canadian Arctic" was published in the journal Science Advances.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Some U.S. residents were lucky enough to witness the northern lights this week. The visual feast was actually the result of a pretty volatile phenomenon in the sun.

For much of last week, the sun was observed to have three significant coronal holes, NASA confirmed. The sun having holes in it might be enough to cause panic, but it's actually no big deal.

Coronary Holes On The Sun

These holes are common occurrences. Data from NASA revealed a vast region where the sun's magnetic field has opened up, creating a gap called the corona. They are open magnetic fields that cause high-speed solar wind to shoot outward into space, and when observed under ultraviolet light, they appear as dark regions. Images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory illustrate these dark patches in detail, showing where the solar wind originated. Current views of the sun are available on the observatory's website.

"The gaseous material is flowing from a wide hole in the sun's atmosphere, and could engulf our planet for several days," Spaceweather reports.

Auroras

When solar wind comes into contact with the Earth's magnetosphere, it can produce magnificent auroras, which are most commonly found in areas near the poles. The Space Weather Prediction Center classified the solar wind under the G1 minor geomagnetic storm watch on April 10. A similar event occurred last month that sent people into a panic frenzy, helped in large part by a number of publications who didn't do enough scientific research and spread misguided information instead.

The worst that a G1 minor geomagnetic storm can do is affect the planet's power grid systems and satellites, or degrade high-frequency radio waves. They're absolutely non-catastrophic, and they pose no great risk.

Solar winds can reach up to the G5 category, which is an extreme case. G1 storms, like the one discussed in this article, are extremely common. In fact, they happen once every two days.

This recent geomagnetic storm's auroras may have showed up to residents of Michigan, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.

"Coronal holes can develop at any time and location on the Sun, but are more common and persistent during the years around solar minimum. The more persistent coronal holes can sometimes last through several solar rotations (27-day periods)," says the Space Weather Prediction Center. "Coronal holes are most prevalent and stable at the solar north and south poles; but these polar holes can grow and expand to lower solar latitudes."

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.A Pokemon theme park will soon rise in Universal Studios Florida, according to rumors from a local news anchor and a blogger.

There are still many unknown details about the rumored Pokemon theme park, but if it will really happen, it will be a guaranteed hit.

Pokemon Theme Park, Coming Soon To Universal Studios Florida

Jamie Holmes, a news anchor from local station WFTV Channel 9, and Josh Young, Theme Park University blogger, learned from numerous sources that a Pokemon theme park will come to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida.

According to the report, the Pokemon theme park will be located in the KidZone section of Universal Studios Florida. There are other attractions in the area, and it is unclear if they will be moved or if the Pokemon attractions will simply be added there.

Universal Studios Florida originally intended to make that area part of the previously announced Super Nintendo World. However, it now appears that it will instead be established at a 400-acre location across the street. The Super Nintendo World, expected to be opened in 2023, will feature a Donkey Kong roller coaster and a Mario Kart ride.

The contents of the Pokemon theme park, meanwhile, are still unknown. Fans of the video game and anime franchise may have to wait a long while before finding out, too. With the Fast and Furious attraction set to open this year and a Harry Potter rollercoaster planned for 2019, the Pokemon theme park will likely not be ready for visitors until 2020.

Pokemon In Real Life

There is speculation that the Pokemon theme park in Universal Studios Florida will somehow tie up with the mobile game Pokemon GO. There is no official word on it yet, but it will make sense for the Pokemon theme park to offer various bonuses or tasks for Pokemon GO players.

Fans of the Pokemon franchise, however, are hoping that the real-world Pokemon theme park will not suffer the same fate as the first real-world event of Pokemon GO. The Pokemon GO Fest held last year in Chicago was a total failure, with developer Niantic Labs recently agreeing to pay out a $1.6 million settlement to attendees.

The Pokemon theme park, however, will still likely draw huge numbers of visitors, due to the popularity and staying power of the franchise. It is expected that the demand for the already popular Nintendo Switch will go further through the roof once the long-rumored Pokemon RPG for the hybrid console is announced, and the same hype will follow the Pokemon theme park in Universal Studios Florida once there is official confirmation.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Odyssey Uncharted  a World War II Childhood Adventure and Education Wrapped in mid-20th Century History

Written by: Flemming Heilmann

Available In: eBook|Paperback

Author Website:

Japanese invasion forces Flemming's evacuation from Malaya to Australia and eventually a perilous voyage home to Denmark. At school in England he leads a mutiny. Vacations surviving terrorist attacks in Malaya, meeting King Sobhuza of Swaziland, confronting apartheid. Cambridge years trigger rejection of religion, popular preconceptions and dogma before tackling the world of reality and risk.Three dozen homeless people who regularly camp out underneath the North Boulevard overpass in Baton Rouge now have a roof over their heads, at least for a while, thanks to a federally funded rapid rehousing initiative.

The effort, which has taken place over the past few months, occurred ahead of plans to install fences around the area starting next week. The fencing was requested months ago to house construction equipment being being used as part of the nearby redevelopment of a 6-acre former Entergy site into the mixed-use Electric Depot development.

Until a month ago, Michael Dillion would spend the occasional night staring up at that concrete bridge known as the Trevor J. Sims Memorial Bridge. He also liked to sleep in the woods off Highland Road.

Dillion remembers sleeping in the snow two nights in a row in December. Hed been homeless for about a year when finally he was able to move into a nearby apartment at what used to be Scott School.

I brought my little cot in on that first night, and I slept like a king, Dillion recalled.

Dillion, 61, and a janitor by trade, said he has a job now and is steadily getting his life back together. He said he still sees people who havent found a home.

I just tell them not to give up, Dillion said.

A total of 31 adults and five children are receiving short-term rental assistance because of the city-parish initiative at the North Boulevard overpass.

Silas Thomas, a community support specialist with Start Corp., a nonprofit group in Baton Rouge, said he is still working with another 12 to 15 homeless people and hopes to have them indoors as well. He said he was unable to persuade everyone whos been sleeping under the overpass to join Dillion and others, but hes still trying.

There are folks that just want to stay there; thats just what they want, Thomas said.

When the developers of Electric Depot requested to use that space in December, city-parish leaders elected to use the occasion as a way to ramp up rehousing efforts in Baton Rouge. Thomas and others have spent the past few months reaching out to people whove been living under the overpass, not only to find them housing, but also help determine what services theyll need to get permanently back on their feet.

Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up

We just couldnt put people in there without providing wraparound services, Mayor-President Sharon Weston-Broome said Wednesday.

Work set to begin before year end on Electric Depot Construction of the $20 million redevelopment of the former Entergy site on Government Street should start before the end of the year, one of 

Local officials are tapping into $16 million worth of Community Development Block Grants that have been used across the state since the August 2016 floods to help people recover more quickly from that disaster, said Nicole Sweazy, executive director of the Louisiana Housing Authority. The money also could be used to help those who were homeless at the time of flooding or shortly thereafter, she said, because they were negatively impacted as well by the floods. Shelters filled up and the available housing stock shrank dramatically, she said.

A lot of times, people forget about that population, Sweazy said.

The overpass, which is near where she works, has been on Sweazys radar for a while.

I can look right across and you see the people under the overpass, she said, and there was such an influx of people (after the flood).

Sweazy said the rapid rehousing model provides short-term rental assistance that is re-evaluated every three months and typically lasts no more than a year but can be extended. For the newly homeless, it may be just enough to do the trick, but for the chronically homeless, its a bridge to more permanent assistance programs, she said.

Dennis Caruso is one of the landlords who has agreed to help make that bridge work. He owns Leos Trailer Park, at 4250 Blount Road. His park, which has 119 lots, housed many of the immediate flood victims in mobile homes until they could return home. Now, hes agreed to help with the chronically homeless as well, saying hes just trying to help the people. So far, he said, its going well.

The people I have seen are very appreciative. Theyre really good people, he said. Theyve just had a hard time in life.

Dillions recent bout of homelessness was his fourth in the 23 years since he moved from Bogalusa to Baton Rouge and he said it was by far the worst. He said he has no plans to return to the street.

Everything is just looking up, he said, as long as I just keep doing what Im doing and dont turn back the hands of time.GB Sciences, the company partnered with the LSU AgCenter to produce medical marijuana, has tapped John B. Davis as president of GB Sciences Louisiana.

Davis, a lawyer from Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell and Berkowitz PC, also was named executive vice president and general counsel of GB Sciences, a penny stock company headquartered in Las Vegas. The LSU AgCenter selected GB Sciences as its partner for the medical marijuana program last summer, and the firm created GB Sciences Louisiana to manage the operation.

Davis holds a law degree from Loyola University School of Law and a bachelor's degree from LSU, according to a news release from GB Sciences.

GB Sciences selects former Pepsi distribution site for medical marijuana facility in Baton Rouge GB Sciences, the Las Vegas-based company handling medical marijuana operations for the LSU AgCenter, has leased a former Pepsi distribution si

GB Sciences Louisiana is turning a former Pepsi distribution center in south Baton Rouge into one of the state's two facilities to grow marijuana for medical use. The Southern University AgCenter is set to partner with another private firm to run another grow operation.

The medical marijuana program is expected to be up and running later this year, once the plant is in production, pharmacies are licensed and doctors begin recommending the drug. Marijuana will be available to patients with a handful of serious diseases in certain non-smokable forms.Purchases made via links on our site may earn us an affiliate commissionWendy Vitter vowed Wednesday to set aside her strong anti-abortion views if confirmed to serve as a federal judge in New Orleans, telling lawmakers her religious and political convictions would not affect her jurisprudence.

Vitter, who was tapped in January by President Donald Trump to fill a vacant judgeship in the Eastern District of Louisiana, sought to allay the concerns of several Democratic senators, saying she would be bound by U.S. Supreme Court precedents such as Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion.

"I am going to look at every matter, every case, based on the facts brought before me and the law," Vitter told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. As a U.S. District Court judge, she added, "It would not be for me to question a Supreme Court precedent, period."

Vitter, whose husband David Vitter served two terms in the U.S. Senate as a conservative Republican, also responded to accusations that she failed to disclose a number of past public remarks in response to a Judiciary Committee questionnaire, including a controversial 2013 panel called "Abortion Hurts Women" that she led for the Louisiana Right to Life organization.

The questionnaire asks federal judicial nominees to disclose extensive details about their personal finances, education and past public remarks, including listing every public speech they've given and article they've published.

Vitter, who serves as general counsel to the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans, also left out a speech she gave at a 2013 protest at the planned site of Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast's Uptown New Orleans clinic and remarks she gave to a north Louisiana Tea Party group in 2015.

Vitter, a longtime anti-abortion activist and former Orleans Parish prosecutor, told the senators Wednesday that her "intent was always to be responsible and forthcoming," adding, "I don't think I'd be exaggerating when I say my life has been an open book."

She said she made extensive note of her political activity in her submission to the committee, including highlighting the "Proudly Pro-Life Award" she received in 2017 from the New Orleans Right to Life Educational Foundation.

Vitter was grilled about her participation on the 2013 panel discussion but insisted she was "there just to facilitate a discussion." She said she had never heard  and does not endorse  some of the controversial and widely debunked opinions expressed during that panel. She tried to distance herself from a brochure she mentioned there that linked birth control pills to cancer, adultery and domestic violence.

"I was not aware what those speakers were going to speak about beforehand," she said.

Vitter dodged questions about which Supreme Court cases she believes have been decided correctly. She also sidestepped queries about public remarks she made accusing Planned Parenthood of "killing over 150,000 females a year."

"Do you stand by that statement?" Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, asked Vitter.

"My pro-life stance has been made very clear," she said.

Vitter told the committee she had been "humbled and awed" by her nomination to the lifetime position.

"My integrity means more than anything else to me," she said, "and if I say that I will take a conscious effort and put aside my personal views, my religious views, my political views, and judge a matter on the facts presented to me and the law, that's what I will do."

Vitter's responses were blasted by People For the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, which said that Vitter "did absolutely nothing to lessen concerns about her fitness for the federal bench."

"If anything, she gave the Senate more reason to oppose her confirmation by blatantly misrepresenting her previous remarks urging anti-choice activists to ask their doctors to distribute dangerous and factually inaccurate material about birth control," Marge Baker, the group's executive vice president, said in a statement. "Theres simply no way that someone with those failings should be entrusted to a lifetime seat on the federal bench."

Both of Louisiana's senators, fellow Republicans Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy, have expressed strong support for Vitter. Cassidy, in introducing her on Wednesday, said she also had been endorsed by a committee made up of "lawyers, business folks and community leaders from across the political spectrum, representing the diversity of Louisiana."

"You have to have a stellar resume to make it through the committee, but you must also have a good professional reputation and solid character to put you at the top of the list," Cassidy said. "It is the creme de la creme, if you will."

Senate Republicans have enough votes to confirm judges without Democratic support, as Vitter needs just 51 votes to win confirmation.

It's unclear when the Senate Judiciary Committee, which also has a narrow Republican majority, will vote on whether to advance her nomination to the full Senate.With Louisiana legislators joining the rush to file gun control bills after the Parkland massacre, comes news that London has had more murders this year as New York.

This was not supposed to happen. Civilians are not allowed to possess handguns in Britain, and a license is required for a rifle or shotgun, because nobody wanted the country to suffer the kind of bloodshed those crazy Americans put up with.

One of the standard NRA lines has been that banning guns will only increase stabbings. The knife is indeed the weapon of choice for the London gangs who are littering the streets with dead bodies.

If guns are used only in a minority of London murders, however, quite a few of the victims there were still shot. This would seem to chime with the other NRA argument that, if you make it a crime to possess a gun, only criminals will possess guns.

Meanwhile, the NRA is denouncing all gun control bills, whether they restrict semi-automatic sales to the over 21s, or ban bump stocks, say, as a raid on the constitutional rights of the law-abiding that will have little impact on public safety.

It is obviously nuts to deny that fewer guns would mean fewer gun deaths, but the London statistics do show that repealing the Second Amendment would not prove a panacea. Whether it would be a good idea anyway, as former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and others argue, is a purely academic question. It will not happen in the foreseeable future because the idea that citizens firepower is the only guarantee against government tyranny is too entrenched. How come stringent gun control has left liberty intact in a host of other countries is not a question the NRA is inclined to address.

Although the London stats are grist to the NRA mill, they hardly disprove the case for tighter restrictions as a response to the carnage. Parkland has evidently persuaded many young Americans that the time for action is now.

As for London, there is no telling how many more would have been murdered if guns were as freely available as they are here. Outside London, the British murder rate comes nowhere near matching America's, so it might be a big mistake to conclude that gun control is ineffective. The London numbers may be an aberration.

Besides, most gun deaths in America are not homicides, but accidents and suicides. While it is common for people handling guns to blow their brains out unintentionally, accidental knife deaths are extremely rare. And a handy gun makes it much easier to respond to suicidal impulses.

Moreover, those innocent bystanders who are always getting caught in crossfire, would be unscathed in the vicinity of a knife fight. And drive-by shootings are common in gangland  there was one last week in Tottenham, north London  but nobody ever got stabbed from a moving car.

Still, Londons experience suggests the NRA slogan might be slightly modified over there to read, Guns don't kill people; knives kill people. The government response to the spate of murders has, of course, been to propose knife control. Plans are afoot to outlaw zombie knives, which have 2' long serrated blades and to ban delivery of online knife orders to residential addresses.

Gang members have also taken to throwing products that contain hydrochloric or sulphuric acid in each other's faces. Now, you have to be 18 to buy them. That is one ban that might work in this country too, there being no constitutional right to keep and bear drain cleaner.

London's murder rate had risen dramatically following huge cuts in the police force while remaining officers have eased off stop and frisk for fear of being tagged as racists. Meanwhile, knives and black market guns are killing young black men in disproportionate numbers.

The English Bill of Rights, adopted in 1689, included several principles subsequently enshrined in the American constitution, and restored to Protestants the right to bear arms of which James II had deprived them. Having foreshadowed the Second Amendment, however, the British left it to the Americans to codify a perpetual, individual right to firearms.

Until now, New York had been more murderous than London ever since.

Email James Gill at Gill1407@bellsouth.net.if the people of Biafra want Republic of Biafra, it will be a reality during my administration. ----Donald Trump Donald Trump I wi...Ganges Part 11: The Last Leg I awoke at 4:30 a.m. with a terrible pain in my stomach. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized my back hurt worse than my stomach....

Ganges Part 10: Bojbasa Rest House It was torture. Linda and I had trekked over eight miles that day from 10,000 feet to 12,000 feet above sea level on our pilgrimage to the source of the...KELD NAVNTOFT/AFP/Getty Images

The brooch were focusing on today isnt the grandest piece of jewelry that belongs to our Magpie of the Month, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, but it is a jewel with a remarkable history that links three royal families: the Connaught Pearl Bar Brooch.

JAN WOITAS/AFP/Getty Images

The design of the brooch is simple: three natural pearls surrounded by diamonds and arranged in a horizontal bar formation, with extra diamonds studded between the clusters. The brooch appears to be set in silver and gold.

Princess Patricia wears the brooch on her wedding day in 1919 (Illustrated London News)

The brooch originally belonged to Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia, who married one of Queen Victorias sons, the Duke of Connaught, in 1879. She later gave the brooch to her younger daughter, Princess Patricia of Connaught. When Patricia married Alexander Ramsay in 1919, relinquishing her royal title in the process, she pinned the brooch to the bodice of her wedding gown.

ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images

In April 1958  sixty years ago this month  Patricia presented the brooch to her great-niece, Crown Princess Margrethe of Denmark, as an eighteenth-birthday gift. Margrethe has worn the brooch regularly in the six decades that have elapsed since. In May 2006, she chose the brooch for a press conference aboard the royal yacht at the start of an official visit to Greece. (Also of note in this photo: Margrethes massive toi et moi engagement ring, which you can read about over here!)

KELD NAVNTOFT/AFP/Getty Images

Margrethe often pairs the brooch with the same modern diamond earrings that she wore in Greece. Here, she wears the brooch and earrings together during an official visit from King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands in June 2013.

PIERRE-PHILIPPE MARCOU/AFP/Getty Images

Margrethe wears the brooch on a variety of colors. Here, she fixed the brooch on an orange-red ensemble for an IOC meeting in Copenhagen in October 2009.

DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/Getty Images

She also often wears the brooch with blue clothing, as she did for the start of the official Russian visit to Copenhagen in April 2010.

Jason Kempin/Getty Images

Although Margrethe often places the brooch traditionally on her chest, she has on occasion placed it in more unexpected ways. For a gala hosted by the Danish-American Society in New York in June 2011, she pinned the brooch in the center of her bodice.

Getty Images

Margrethe has also used the brooch as an enhancer ornament on one of her pearl necklaces. She wore the piece this way in May 2004 for the Spanish royal wedding in Madrid, fastening the brooch horizontally near her neckline. The brooch may not be a grand piece, but it has a grand family history  something we know Margrethe values just as much.The Philippines (winter 2014)Western US (fall 2011/2012/2013/2014)Turkey (fall 2010)France/Germany/Denmark/Hollan (summer 2010)Uganda/Tanzania/Kenya (winter 2010)China (fall 2009)France/Italy (summer 2009)South Africa/Lesotho/Mozambique (winter 2009)Southern U.S. (fall 2008/fall 2010/spring 2011)Spain and the Camino de Compostela (summer of 2008)Israel (winter 2008)Eastern U.S. (fall 2007)Great Britain (summer 2007)Venezuela (winter 2007)Japan (fall 2006)Croatia, Serbia, Czech Republic, Poland (summer 2006)Western US (fall 2005)Ecuador (winter 2005)Italy (spring 2004/summer 2009)France (summer 2004/2005/2006/2007/2008/2009/2010/2011/2012/2013/2014/2015/2016/2017/2018/2019)Iceland (summer 2003)Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia (Fall 2002)Minneapolis to Chicago (summer 2002)Bolivia (spring 2002)Scandinavia--Finland, Norway, Sweden (summer 2001)Hes followed the Tour de France seventeen times beginning in 2004 , riding much of each year's route, fully loaded, before or after the peloton and sent out regular reports during the race, also posted here.He has a long-running email list that he sends updates to every few days when he's on tour.You can write him at: george6567@yahoo.com. If you like, he'll add you to his e-list.He spends the rest of the year also on a bike, working as a messenger in Chicago.He's also an independent film enthusiast, attending or working at several major film festivals annually, including Telluride and Cannes. His coverage of Cannes is also included here in May of 2004-2015.For a "Chicago Tribune" article on George see the January 17, 2002 entry of the blog. There is also a "Hollywood Reporter" article posted October 25, 2005, and a "Streetwise" cover story posted on April 17, 2010 and stories in French newspapers the past few summers.(I'm Jeff Potter and I helped George get his blog going. I run OutYourBackDoor.com , where I report on a wide range of everyday, affordable, healthy outdoor action. I also sell some hard-to-find indy culture media and other goodies. Lotsa bike stuff!)Rumours have been circulating for a few months that Brad Pitt has a new woman.

The actor is now divorced from Angelina Jolie, but according to People magazine, Brad has a new woman in his life.

From colleagues at Texas Tech:

Texas Tech University School of Law invites applications from exceptional individuals for a Professor of Practice position teaching Oil and Gas, Energy Law, and related courses. Applicants must possess a J.D. degree and have an exceptional background and achievement in Oil and Gas and Energy Law practice for a decade or more. Academic experience is preferred. Once hired, faculty members are evaluated and advancement is determined by contributions in teaching, research, and service to the law school and the university.



Texas Tech University, located in Lubbock, Texas, is a state-supported National Research University with an enrollment that exceeds 36,000 students. The law school has approximately 445 students and 42 full-time faculty members. The law school is an integral part of the University and offers 10 dual-degree programs with other Texas Tech schools and colleges. The Lubbock metropolitan area is home to almost 300,000 people, enjoys affordable housing, abundant sunshine, friendly people, and offers easy access to other parts of the country. For more information, visit our website at www.law.ttu.edu.



As an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer, Texas Tech University is dedicated to the goal of building a culturally diverse faculty committed to teaching and working in a multicultural environment. We actively encourage applications from all those who can contribute, through their research, teaching, and/or service, to the diversity and excellence of the academic community at Texas Tech University. The university welcomes applications from minorities, women, protected veterans, persons with disabilities, and dual-career couples.



Further information about the law school is available at www.law.ttu.edu. Please submit your cover letter, resume, and contact information for three professional references electronically to the attention of the chair of the Personnel Committee, Stephen Black Professor of Law, at the Texas Tech Jobs website careers.texastech.edu or www.workattexastech.com. Please reference Requisition Number 13595BR. You may contact Professor Black directly at stephen.black@ttu.edu. Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled.Our heritage of foreign intervention is a new one, an innovation introduced by the progressives. To imagine a clean and humane progressivism is, simply, a fools errand.

Just how much imperialism is in the DNAso to writeof the American character? When Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, on an outrageously humid Chicago afternoon, July 12, 1893, he warned that what had been a healthy frontier expansion might well turn into bald-faced imperialism with the formal closing of the frontier. Though the last homestead in the continental United States would not be claimed until 1919, Turner believed the frontier over in 1890 as there was no visible frontier line on the census maps of that year. Americans, it seemed, had filled everything in, from Plymouth Rock to Rodeo Drive. Not quite, but close.

More recently, the University of Notre Dames Walter Nugent, an expert on frontiers and empires, confirmed Turners suspicions, arguing that our westward movement

instilled in the American people the habit of empire-building. All along, the United States was also a republic. Republic and empire have not always fit well together. Today there is a good chance that empire might eclipse republic. Old habits can become unthinking practices. Thus we have always been an imperial nation, and remain so, but the shape of the American empire has shifted over time. Its present form is different from either our own past ones or historic ones like Rome or Britain. It is still developing. The three historic American empires have all rested on an ideology of expansion. Military solution, overlain by rationales and high ideals, have consistently been considered effective and justified. [Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire (2008), xiv-xvii.]

Proving Turner correct, talk of foreign expansion filled the halls of Congress in the 1890s. The question was not if, but when and where. Into Latin America? Into the Pacific? Toward Asia and Russia?

Whether Prof. Nugent is correct or not in believing that Americans had always been expansionistic, America had certainly experienced at least one devastating and blatantly imperial moment prior to the 1890sin the Mexican War, 1846-1848. No one with any sense of dignity could defend Americas brutalization of the Mexican people during that war. Welcomed, generally, as liberators from the chaos and tyranny of 1840s Mexico, American soldiers stupidly and unethically abused, raped, and plundered the Mexican people. Only a few voices at the timemostly eccentric and lonely voices such as that of John Quincy Adams and Henry David Thoreauprotested the southward invasion into the northernmost realms of Latin America, but the moment did not seem to have any staying power. Cooler and more guilt-ridden soulssuch as of Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jackson, and U.S. Grantfeared that God would one day punish us for our crimes against the Mexican people, and they each believed the Civil War to be exactly that.

Upon hitting the Pacific coast in frontier settlement, though, Americans in the 1890s did again look outward, imagining a world under American domination. Of course, rarely did imperialists put it so crassly. Yet, they put it crassly enough. Even more tellingly, it was the progressives who put it most crassly. Indeed, historically, there is no separation of progressivism from imperialism, nor progressivism from racialism and desire to White-American-Protestant domination of the world.

In a widely influential speech, delivered on September 16, 1898, Indiana progressive Albert Beveridge explained exactly why America must prove itself worthy of Gods graceby remaking the world in our image. To do anything less would be sacrilege and dishonor, Beverage claimed. Beverages god, though, possesses the harshest aspects of the Old Testament God, but without the personality as expressed by Moses. Beverages language is so bad as to be little but a caricature of the evangelical, imperialistic progressive of the era. He is worth quoting at length.

He begins, not surprisingly, with an appeal to America as the new chosen people:

It is a mighty people that He has planted on this soil; a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history; a people perpetually revitalized by the virile, manproducing workingfolk of all the earth; a people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposesthe propagandists and not the misers of liberty.

Why would the almighty creator of the universe bestow upon us so many gifts were we not to use them to redeem the world, to make the earth the center of the New Jersualem, here and now. Not in some dark room confining, light years away, but here and now.

Beverage hopes we have the strength to enter his vision [with no apologies to Marty Haugen, the most wretched of modern hymnists]:

It is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon His chosen people; a history heroic with faith in our mission and our future; a history of statesmen who flung the boundaries of the Republic out into unexplored lands and savage wilderness; a history of soldiers who carried the flag across blazing deserts and through the ranks of hostile mountains, even to the gates of sunset; a history of a multiplying people who overran a continent in half a century; a history of prophets who saw the consequences of evils inherited from the past and of martyrs who died to save us from them; a history divinely logical, in the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves today.

Just as Jesus commanded his disciples to go two by two and convert the entire world, so God has called America to remake all in our image.

Therefore, in this campaign, the question is larger than a party question. It is an American question. It is a world question. Shall the American people continue their march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind?

Amazingly, Beverage even inverts the traditional notion that the Pacific and Atlanticby nature and Gods willseparate us from the horrors of Europe and Asia. To the contrary, Beverage rants, the oceans are highways and bridges, connecting America to the world. The ocean does not separate us from lands of our duty and desirethe oceans join us, rivers never to be dredged, canals never to be repaired. What nature left undone, man has ingeniously rectified. Steam joins us; electricity joins usthe very elements are in league with our destiny. Cuba not contiguous? Porto Rico not contiguous! Hawaii and the Philippines not contiguous! The oceans make them contiguous. And our navy will make them contiguous.

With the major exception of the unjust attacks on Mexico in the 1840s, the United States had resisted most foreign adventures. To be sure, American citizens had formed filibustering missions and had invaded California, Texas, Mexico, and several countries in Latin America, but these were private militias and groups, unsanctionedat least officiallyby the U.S. government. With Beverage, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and their malicious imperial progressive pretensions, the United States became addicted to power over, and suppression of, foreign peoples.

We often think of U.S. foreign intervention as beginning under Wilsons administration, but it had gone onrather virulentlycommencing a full decade-and-a-half before Wilson entered the White House, and it continued unabated for years and years. Most shockingly, the U.S. waged a jungle operationquite similar to our efforts in Vietnamin the Philippians for five years, beginning in 1898. During that half-decade, 4,300 U.S. soldiers died, but they also took with them the lives of nearly 60,000 Filipinos.

Closer to home, the United States, also, for example, invaded Cuba in 1902, 1906, 1912, 1917, 1922; the Dominican Republic in 1916; Haiti in 1915; Nicaragua in 1912; and Mexico, repeatedly, between 1913 and 1915. Indeed, the 1914 invasion of Vera Cruz led to the death of 200 Mexicans and the wounding of another 300. Even more famously (or infamously), Wilson sent a force of 11,000 troops against the Mexican pirate and folk hero, Pancho Villa. U.S. forces searched our southern neighbor for a full year, never finding Villa or his men.

It is well worth remembering in 2018, that our heritage of foreign intervention is a new one, an innovation introduced by the progressives. To imagine a clean and humane progressivism is, simply, a fools errand. There is no such thing as a non-racist and non-imperialist progressivism. There never has been, there never can be, and there never will be.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politicswe approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is War News from Mexico (1848) by Richard Caton Woodville, Sr. (18251855), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.Dying for a cup of coffee? You will feel right at home at Bangkok's new "death awareness" cafe, a macabre, Buddhist spin on the themed-cafe craze where customers are urged to confront their own mortality -- and live better lives as a result.

With drinks called "death" and "painful" on the menu and a skeleton splayed out on a couch in the corner, the meet-your-maker theme is alive and well at this open-air lunch spot in the Thai capital.

But the centrepiece of the "Kid Mai (Think New) Death Cafe" experience is a decorated white coffin where customers are encouraged to lay down for a few minutes to contemplate their final moments -- and secure a discount on a drink.

"I feel like I am in a funeral," 28-year-old Duanghatai Boonmoh said with a laugh as she sipped a chocolate "death smoothie" on a recent Saturday afternoon.

She and other curious customers took turns climbing into the wooden box as friends sealed the lid.

"The first thing that came to my mind was, what if no one opens it?" Duanghatai said after emerging from the coffin.

"How you going to tell everyone that 'I'm here, I'm still alive,'? I think that's probably the feeling you have when you know you're going to die soon," she added.

Read also: Navigating through grief to life

Buddhist cure

The sitting area and classroom at the Kid Mai Death Awareness Cafe. (AFP/Lillian Suwanrumpha)

The cafe's owner says his restaurant is more than just a gimmick or dark take on the cute and cuddly coffee shops common in the Thai capital, which boasts everything from cat, husky and meerkat cafes to unicorn and mermaid-themed eateries.

A professor and social researcher, Veeranut Rojanaprapa conceived of the cafe as a way to teach Thai people -- some 90 percent of whom identify as Buddhist -- about the benefits of "death awareness".

"We found that having an awareness of death decreases greed and anger," explained Veeranut, whose giggly demeanour belies his fascination with more morbid matters.

He believes the Buddhist concept, rooted in ideas of impermanence and selflessness, is the key to ridding Thai society of chronic problems like violence and corruption.

"When one is aware of their own death, they will do good. This is what our Lord Buddha teaches," he explained.

The casket experience is also a way to nudge the country's technology-addicted youth to step back and reassess their personal lives.

"When teenagers go down to the coffin and our staff close the coffin, because of the darkness, because of the small space, they will be aware of themselves... they will recall the things that they still haven't done," said Veeranut, adding that he makes a point of considering his own demise nightly.

The professor is not the first to offer a resurrection experience in Thailand, where a temple outside Bangkok is famous for hosting symbolic funerals for devotees looking to clear their souls of bad karma.

But his cafe and coffin sit squarely in the middle of a local community centre in northern Bangkok, offering a public -- and morbid -- reminder of mortality that not everybody in the neighbourhood is happy about.

The cafe has also spread out to a public walkway, which is now posted with signs asking questions like: "What is the purpose of your life?"

"This is so disturbing. I feel really strange walking there and might avoid this shortcut," one netizen wrote on a neighbourhood Facebook page.

Yet Veeranut says he welcomes any controversy as a sign of success.

"I love all of the complaints. Because if they are complaining it means they are thinking about death, they are aware of death."Suffering a traumatic brain injury from a blow to the head boosted dementia risk by 24 percent in a Danish study group of nearly three million people, researchers said Wednesday.

The survey of 36 years' worth of data -- collected from the Danish national patient register -- found that the risk of dementia rose with the number and severity of brain injuries, a team wrote in The Lancet Psychiatry, a medical journal.

"Individuals with a history of traumatic brain injury (TBI)... have an increased risk of developing dementia, even decades after the injury," said study leader Jesse Fann of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.

This included "less severe" injuries such as concussion.

But the team stressed the absolute risk to any individual remained low. In the study group, 5.3 percent of dementia sufferers had experienced a brain injury when younger, compared to 4.7 percent of people without dementia.

"Our findings do not suggest that everyone who suffers a traumatic brain injury will go on to develop dementia later in life," Fann said.

But it would be advisable for people who had suffered a severe knock to the head -- whether in a fall, car accident, through contact sport, or an assault -- to take extra precautions.

This could include regular exercise and avoiding other risk-boosting behaviours such as smoking, or eating and drinking too much.

Read also: Marriage can make you crazy, but it deters dementia too: study

'Best evidence yet'

"Importantly, a person who has sustained a TBI should do what they can to prevent further TBIs as the risk of dementia increases with the number of TBIs," Fann told AFP.

Previous studies on a link between brain injury and dementia yielded contradictory results.

According to the UN's World Health Organization, about 50 million people worldwide suffer from dementia, including Alzheimer's Disease -- the most common form with about two-thirds of cases.

There are about 10 million new dementia cases each year.

According to the study authors, more than 50 million people every year experience a traumatic brain injury.

One possible weakness of the study was that it looked at people from a single country with a "fairly similar ethnic population", said the authors -- meaning its findings may not apply to people of other ethnic groups in other countries.

Commenting on the research, University College London neurology professor Jonathan Schott said it provided "perhaps the best evidence yet that traumatic brain injury is a risk factor for dementia."A surrogate mother has given birth to a baby boy in China four years after his parents died in a car crash, Chinese media reported.

The deceased couple was undergoing fertility treatments before the fatal accident in 2013.

Their parents fought a drawn-out legal battle to gain access to the couple's fertilised embryos, kept in a hospital in the eastern city of Nanjing.

The baby boy -- nicknamed "Tiantian", or "sweet" in Mandarin -- was born on December 9 to a Laotian surrogate, the Beijing News reported Tuesday.

Surrogacy is illegal in China, forcing those who can afford it to look for potential options abroad.

Laos has become the latest impoverished nation in Asia to witness a flourishing but legally opaque commercial surrogacy industry after countries like Thailand, Cambodia and Nepal outlawed the practice in recent years.

"He's always smiling. His eyes are like my daughter's, but he looks more like his dad," new grandmother Hu Xingxian, told the state-run newspaper.

The grandparents had to clear several hurdles to transport the embryos out of China and prove the paternity and nationality of the baby once it was born.

"First we thought of using air freight, but none of the airlines were willing to take the thermos-sized bottle of liquid nitrogen where the four embryos were stored," Liu Baojun, a surrogacy expert who assisted the families, told The Beijing News.

So the families decided to transport their precious cargo by road to Laos, where commercial surrogacy is legal.

Read also: Gay Singaporean loses bid to adopt surrogate son

The next problem was getting the baby back into China. Children born through surrogacy outside the country need to have a DNA test proving that one of the biological parents is a Chinese national.

To get around the issue, the Laotian surrogate mother was brought to China on a tourist visa and the families arranged for her to give birth at a private hospital in the southern city of Guangzhou.

The child was kept in the hospital for 15 days, until all four grandparents gave blood and DNA tests, establishing the baby was indeed their grandson and that both parents were Chinese nationals.

The landmark ruling that allows parents to inherit frozen embryos created by their children has triggered a wide-ranging debate on Chinese social media.

Dozens of commentators said it highlights the plight of parents who have lost their only child under China's controversial one-child policy. Others discussed the need to legalise surrogacy.

"This is a family that is rich and capable. But, there are many others that have lost their only child. Shouldn't the government offer them any support (for the price theyve had to pay) for complying with family planning policies?" asked one commentator on Twitter-like microblog Weibo.

The three-decade-long restriction on family size was replaced by a two-child-rule in 2016.

Tiantian's grandfather Shen Xinnan told The Beijing News that he will wait until the boy is "older and wiser" before telling him what happened to his parents .

"In the meantime we will say his mum and dad are living abroad," Shen said. "We will definitely tell him what happened - what choice do we have?"Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg testified for nearly 10 hours over two days on Facebook's privacy and data protection issues before committees of the Senate and House on Tuesday and Wednesday. Here are key points:

- Protecting the platform -

"It's clear now we didn't do enough," Zuckerberg said on the protection of private user data and to prevent the hijacking of data on millions by Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg said Facebook was built as "an idealistic and optimistic company" to help people connect but failed "to prevent these tools from being used for harm... that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy."

He said that by the end of the year Facebook would have 20,000 people working on security and content review and would also step up use of artificial intelligence to weed out fake accounts and inappropriate content.

Read also: Facebook to offer 'bounty' for reporting data abuse

- Regulation -

Zuckerberg said regulation of social media companies is inevitable, but warned that rules could also hamper the industry's growth.

"The internet is growing in importance around the world in people's lives, and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation," he told lawmakers.

"But I think you have to be careful about putting regulation in place. A lot of times regulations put in place rules that a company that is larger, that has resources like ours, can easily comply with, but that might be more difficult for a smaller startup company."

Zuckerberg said the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to come into effect on May 25 was more stringent than what was currently in place at Facebook and suggested it could serve as a rough model for US rules in the future.

Facebook is implementing the GDPR standards for European users next month, and some of its rules will be extended to US and other users later, he confirmed.

"The GDPR requires us to do a few more things and we are going to extend that to the world," he said.

- Facebook model -

Zuckerberg maintained that Facebook users deserve protection of private data but appeared to argue that its controls make it possible to determine how information is shared.

He claimed that "there's a very common misperception... that we sell data to advertisers," adding that "we do not sell data to advertisers. We don't sell data to anyone."

But he maintained that advertising enables Facebook to offer a free service and that targeted ads based on user categories were more acceptable to users, even if they could opt out.

Zuckerberg also said the company believed in an ad-supported business model, but appeared to leave open the possibility of a paid version.

"There will always be a version of Facebook that is free," Zuckerberg told the hearing.

Read also: Alibabas Jack Ma challenges Mark Zuckerberg to fix Facebook

- Russian manipulation -

The 33-year-old CEO said Facebook was in a constant struggle to guard against Russian manipulation of the Facebook platform to influence elections in the US and elsewhere.

"There are people in Russia whose job it is to try to exploit our systems and other internet systems and other systems as well," he said.

"So this is an arms race. They're going to keep getting better and we need to invest in getting better at this too."

Zuckerberg has previously acknowledged the social network failed to do enough to prevent the spread of disinformation during the last US presidential race.

"One of my greatest regrets in running the company is that we were slow in identifying the Russian information operations in 2016," he said.

"We expected them to do a number of more traditional cyber attacks, which we did identify and notify the campaigns that they were trying to hack into them. But we were slow at identifying the type of -- of new information operations."

He added that Facebook is cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

"Our work with the special counsel is confidential. I want to make sure in an open session I don't reveal something that's confidential," he said.SAN DIEGO, April 11, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Heroin Detox Clinics provides access to news story & current updates on drug addiction in America and Heroin. Drug addiction ruins the entire metabolism and mental health of a person. It makes the person crippled with its lasting effects and often the relapse of side effects makes an addict stay on the drug for longer. With the increasing support system across the nation for the opioid crisis and drug abuse, it is now easy to receive support from certified and professional counselors with an assurance of maintaining confidentiality.



Heroindetoxclinics.com is one such place where heroin addicts or any opiate addicts can identify centers that offer quality treatment for opioid addiction. The impact of drug abuse is not only on the addict but on the entire family. The sooner the person focuses on becoming sober the better it would be for the individual and the people around them. The withdrawal symptoms are quite difficult on the person often leaving a distasteful feeling which is likely to draw the attention towards heroin. Heroin addiction should be treated as any other illness however an additional requirement would be provide moral support for the person to come back to a normal state of mind. The mind controls the need and it is absolutely essential to fall back on sources that can keep the addict inspired to stay away from it.

News stories on drug addiction and current news on heroin can help patients make informed choices on the right drug rehab center to approach for a quick solution. Heroic addicts can also reach out to the counselors who are available 24/7 and are eager to assist an addict out of their heroin addiction. The social taboo of addiction can cause an innate fear to even approach a heroine detox clinic; however, with this online counseling, an addict can discuss all the options they can explore in a confidential manner. There is a facility to request for a call back to discuss at convenience. The news stories help in knowing other success stories on how people were able to come out of heroin addiction and begin their lives with renewed energy. Heroin addiction should be addressed with proper care and by professionals who specialize in dealing with the detox process and the early and later withdrawal symptoms.

Heroindetoxclinics.com is a comprehensive website that offers information on heroin detox centers and clinics across America. The highly confidential services and counseling services offered enable addicts to have a dependable source of information all at one place. To understand the process of identifying a quality detox center contact the recovery helpline.

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A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/180da2ed-e405-46e6-a630-edf652ecc505



The extravagant lengths that males will go to to bed a member of the opposite sex can come at the risk of extinction for some species, researchers said Wednesday.

Sexual selection, how animals attract and choose mates, can be thanked for showy traits such as the elegant peacocks tail, the grand antlers of a stag, and the bushy mane of a lion.

A study published in the science journal Nature, however, found that some creatures take it too far.

US-based scientists analysed the fossils of thousands of ancient crustaceans called ostracods, tiny clam-shaped critters that have been on the planet for nearly 500 millions years.

Males of the group are easily identifiable by a shell that is more elongated than those of females, to accomodate their large sex organs.

Under their shell is a large muscular pump for discharging giant sperm, which on average measure around 20-30 percent of body length, but in some cases longer than the male himself.

The US-based researchers looked at 93 species of extinct ostracods that lived about 85 million to 65 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period.

Read also: How raising an eyebrow aided human evolution

They found that species died out quicker when the male had a much larger shell -- and presumably larger sexual organs that produced more sperm to aid successful reproduction -- compared to females of the same species.

The extinction risk was ten times higher for those with the largest difference in shell size between the genders.

"In the short term the males had an advantage, but it turns out in the long term, not so much," said lead author Gene Hunt, a paleontologist from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

It is possible that by devoting too much energy to successful reproduction, the creatures had little left for adapting to changes in the climate or their natural environment.

To date, it has been difficult for scientists to determine how differences between genders influenced species extinction as it is often impossible to tell whether a fossil was of a male or female animal.

But thanks to thousands of ostracod species still alive today, it is well documented how male shells differ from those of the females they seek to woo.

The finding may hold implications for conservationists managing animal species at risk from habitat destruction and climate change, the researchers said.This weekend, Ubud will turn into Indonesias gastronomy capital as more than 100 chefs, restaurateurs, foodpreneurs and producers descend on the idyllic town for the Ubud Food Festival, which is presented by soy sauce company ABC.

The three-day festival is the brainchild of Janet DeNeefe, an Ubud restaurateur and food writer, who is also the founder of the famed Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.



Taman Kuliner, a spacious compound of Balinese-style pavilions overlooking the scenic Campuhan Ridge, is the festivals main venue. Most of the events  cooking demonstrations, panel discussions, film screenings and nightly musical performances  will take place there.



Entrance to Taman Kuliner is free of charge and visitors will have ample opportunity to enjoy the diverse offerings from 100 food stalls while listening to some of the islands best musicians, including Zat Kimia, Orkes Analog, The Hydrant and Jun Bintang.



In its fourth year, the festival is presenting Generasi Inovasi as its major theme. Through the lens of this theme, the festival will celebrate innovative and sustainable ideas in Indonesias food industry, which are all about creating a distinct food culture unique to the archipelago.



Our 2017 theme, Every flavor is a story, explored Indonesias rich culinary heritage and the stories we tell through food, DeNeefe said.



This year, were shining a spotlight on the future of Indonesias food industry, from social media sensations to environmental solutions, successful startups to socially responsible enterprises. Whether emerging or established, were raising the voices of those at the vanguard of Indonesian food innovation, she continued.

Fresh: A chef prepares a dish in front of a live audience during the 2017 Ubud Food Festival. (JP/Anggara Mahendra)

The festival will also be paying tribute to the culinary icons who have paved the way and created a legacy for todays generation to embrace innovation, while also celebrating Indonesias diverse heritage and culture with pride. A lifetime achievement award will be bestowed to a yet-to be-disclosed Indonesian culinary figure when the festival opens on Thursday night.



One of the invited innovators is young chef I Putu Dodik Sumarjana. Part of the original Locavore team and now a chef at Nusantara, Sumarjana is proud to show what can be achieved with local ingredients and he regularly invents new dishes.



Foodies, chefs or even children these days are competing to innovate and create new foods, but they are forgetting traditional ingredients and authentic flavors. In my eyes, only a few of todays generation want to study traditional Indonesian cuisine and I think many of them believe that traditional dishes are easy and not too important, he said.

Connect: The festival is a platform for connecting people from across the food industry. (JP/Anggara Mahendra)

Sumarjana believes that if we study traditional foods, we obtain important basic knowledge, cooking techniques, the origins of ingredients and many other things.



At a special event at Nusantara in late December last year, I served dishes that play a significant role in Balinese ceremonies. I tried innovating with one of the components. I made rengginang or jajebegina (a thick cracker made from sun-dried glutinous rice), which usually has a plain or sweet flavor, with Balinese spices, without changing its basic form and ingredients,



Another innovator is Helianti Hilman, the founder of Javara, which works with over 52,000 farmers across Indonesia, selling over 700 artisanal organic products for the domestic and export market. She has been recognized as being one of Indonesias top social eco-entrepreneurs for her work.



We direct our innovation towards addressing any constraints faced by indigenous farmers in bringing back forgotten food to the wider market, she said.



Helianti added that the farmers realized that they have to innovate their business model and approaches in order to best address a number of issues, including limited plots and resources for revenue generation; climate change leading to crop failures; on-farm food waste due to market failures and the gap between what the farmers have and what the consumer wanted.



The festival also features top chefs from across the region, including Rydo Anton, the head chef at Bangkoks Gaggan, the first restaurant to maintain the top spot on Asias 50 Best Restaurants list for three consecutive years.



Rydo will be collaborating with Ubuds hometown heroes, Locavore, for a special event that serious foodies will not want to miss. Other notable, Michelin-worthy chefs are Koreans Sun Kim and Jun Lee, as well as Sri Lankan Rishi Naleendra.

Knowledge: Cooking demonstrations and panel discussions give the speakers and audience a chance to share their perspectives. (JP/Anggara Mahendra)

A strong contingent of innovative young chefs from Jakarta will also be making their way to Ubud. It features pastry queen Kim Pangestu of Kimmy Patisserie and Nomz Kitchen & Pastry, Gloria Susindra of Mother Monster, Hans Christian, chef de cuisine at View Restaurant by Fairmont Jakarta,MasterChef Indonesia judge Rinrin Marinka and Andrian Ishak, whose Namaaz Dining has been described as Indonesias first molecular gastronomy restaurant.



As ever, the festival puts the best of Bali on the table. Among them are Tri Sutrisna, the manager of Wanaprasta, coffee aficionados I Kadek Edi and Wayan Arca, Pengalaman Rasas Gede and Ayu Gayatri Kresna, KAUMs Wayan Kresnayasa, proud Balinese farmer Kadek Suardika, Street Food chef Will Meyrick, and Mejakawi by KU DE TAs Benjamin Cross and Stephen Moore.



In one of the festivals most diverse collaborations, DeNeefe will be sharing her kitchen with the Jungle Chef, Charles Toto, from the Papuan highlands and food activist and author Dicky Senda from West Timor, for a special long table lunch highlighting Indonesias lesser known eastern regions.



It will be an exhilarating adventure that will not only pamper your taste buds, but enrich your knowledge and understanding as well, DeNeefe promises.

The complete schedule of the event can be accessed at www.ubudfoodfestival.com.The wait for the highly anticipated exhibition 'Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow' in Jakarta is almost over.

Museum Macan, where the exhibition will take place, has announced that tickets are now available for purchase online.

Would-be visitors can now book tickets to see the exhibition that will run from May 12 to September 9.

Read also: Museum MACAN to host Yayoi Kusama exhibition in May

Life is the Heart of a Rainbow in Jakarta will be the third and final stop of Kusamas survey exhibition, following shows in the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, Australia.

This is an exceptional opportunity for people to visit a Kusama exhibition and to let themselves into her world, methods, ideas, inspirations and to experience the phenomena that is Yayoi Kusama, Aaron Seeto, director of Museum Macan, said in a statement.

Featuring more than 130 works created over 70 years by Yayoi Kusama, Life is the Heart of a Rainbow explores the development of the artists works throughout her career. Visitors may expect to see her signature use of dots, nets and pumpkins through work from the 1950s to the present.

"Dots Obsession" (2009) by Yayoi Kusama (JP/File)

Kusamas engagement with the body and her concept of self-obliteration, and her approach to space through large-scale installations are also slated to be on display.

The Obliteration Room, for instance, is one to anticipate. It is the interactive installation that has toured to more than 20 venues in 15 countries and viewed by almost 5 million people.

The Obliteration room by Yayoi Kusama. (Queensland Art Gallery/QAGOMA Photography)

The exhibition also includes My Eternal Soul, a major painting series, which launched in 2009. It comprises more than 500 paintings, and 24 of them will be showcased in Museum Macan.

Read also: Seven tips on how to enjoy Museum Macan

What makes Kusamas exhibition in Jakarta more exciting is the display of Museum Macans recent acquisition, I Want to Love on the Festival Night (2017).

Pieces not shown in the past exhibitions will also be displayed, namely Flower (1953) and Untitled (Child Mannequin) (1966). (mut)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 08:05 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce28f73 1 City low-cost-apartment,construction Free

The Jakarta administration has planned to build 14,564 low-cost apartment units in the next five years.

Jakarta Public Housing and Public Buildings Agency head Agustino Darmawan said that half of the target was expected to be completed this year.

The construction of some projects started two years ago. At least 7,000 units will be ready in 2018, Agustino said on Wednesday according to kompas.com.

The apartments are in Nagrak, Rorotan, KS Tubun, Semper, Rawa Buaya, Pengadegan, BLK [Pasar Rebo], Rawa Bebek and Penjaringan, he added.

According to its 2017-2022 mid-term regional development plan, the city aims to build around 250,000 homes for Jakarta residents. The 14,564 low-cost apartment units will be specifically offered to residents with monthly earnings under Rp 4 million (US$290). (vla)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 08:35 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce29f98 1 City transjakarta,operation Free

PT Transjakarta extended Wednesday the operating hours of the elevated Corridor 13 to 10 p.m. from 7 p.m. previously. The route connects Jl. Tendean in South Jakarta to Jl.Ciledug in Tangerang, Banten.

This is a trial that will be conducted for a month, said Transjakarta president director Budi Kaliwono on Wednesday.

Since the lighting system along the overpass has yet to be installed, Budi said the Transjakarta buses that operate at night would be guided by a car.

Budi said the extension of operating hours was initiated by Jakarta Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno, who hoped for the company to meet the demand, especially from those who commute at night.

The company had also planned to procure additional buses and hire more workers to optimize its service, Budi added.

Transjakarta buses that use the 9.4-kilometer overpass accommodate up to 15,000 passengers daily. (vla)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Hotli Simanjuntak (The Jakarta Post) Banda Aceh  Thu, April 12, 2018 17:34 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce43db4 1 National aceh,sharia,flogging Free

The sharia-based provincial government of Aceh has issued a gubernatorial regulation ending the practice of caning convicts in public.

Under the new regulation, issued on Feb. 28, the punishment can only be administered behind closed doors to prevent them from being witnessed by children or recorded and spread online, according to Aceh Governor Irwandi Yusuf.

The Aceh administration and the Law and Human Rights Ministry signed on Thursday a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to implement the new regulation.

Under the MoU, caning will now be conducted in prisons.

"For a long time, canings have been witnessed by children because they are conducted in public," Irwandi said.

Public canings are administered as punishment for people found guilty of violating the provinces sharia bylaws, including adultery, gambling and homosexuality.

Read also: Q&A: What you need to know about sharia in Aceh

News of such lashings often makes global headlines, prompting concerns that the practice would only foster Islamophobia and deter investors from coming to the province.

As the only Indonesian province to implement Islamic Law, Aceh, whose official name is Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, has its own version of the Criminal Code (KUHP) called Qanun Jinayat, which regulates public canings.

According to Qanun Jinayat, canings must be conducted in public so that they can be witnessed by residents, with the aim of creating a deterrent effect and prevent people from committing crimes punishable by lashings.

Under the new regulation, Irwandi said, only adults would be allowed to witness the punishment. Viewers are prohibited from bringing cameras or any kind of recording device to the venue, he added.

"This also serves as legal protection for the convict. Imagine if a caning is uploaded onto YouTube or other social media platforms, the convict would carry that shame for the rest of his or her life," said Irwandi. (mos/ahw)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Indonesia  Thu, April 12 2018

The South Korean Embassy in Jakarta has introduced multiple visas for Indonesians who regularly travel to South Korea.



The embassys counselor for visa applications, Park Jae-won, said the requirements for obtaining this visa were connected to the occupations and incomes of the applicants.



For example, he said, civil servants must attach their certificates of employment in addition to other documents such as ID cards and Family Cards. Meanwhile, professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, lecturers, or journalists, must attach their professional certificates or certificates of employment.



Citizens who have previously been in South Korea can also apply for this visa, he said, by attaching a copy of the previous visiting visa.



He said the multiple visa would be valid for five years, with a maximum 30 days per visit.



Park said the embassy no longer re...Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Arya Dipa (The Jakarta Post) Bandung, West Java  Thu, April 12, 2018 23:19 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce52ab8 1 National bootleg-liquor,oplosan,Cicalengka,Bandung-regency,West-Java,West-Java-Police,alcohol,alcohol-poisoning Free

A factory producing oplosan (bootleg liquor), which has caused the deaths of at least 58 people, has been found located inside the house of a suspect, identified only as SS, on Jl. Raya By Pass in Cicalengka, Bandung regency, West Java.

West Java Police chief Insp.Gen. Agung Budi Marwoto said the factory, which was located in the basement of the house, could produce 10 boxes of bootleg liquor every day. Each box contains 24 600 milliliter bottles.

We have named two suspects. JS, who sold the bootleg liquor, and HM, the wife of SS, who was also involved in the production and distribution of the alcoholic beverages. We have also put seven people, who acted as distributors of the beverages, on our most wanted list [DPO], said Agung on Thursday.

(Read also: Police vow to stamp out bootleg liquor by Ramadhan)

SS, the owner of the house who has not yet been arrested, hid the entrance access to the production facility under a gazebo beside a swimming pool.

[...] there are exhaust fans on the wall of the factory although they cannot be seen from outside. These were used to protect the workers from alcohol vapor, which is dangerous, said Agung.

Inside the factory, SS, with help from three others who are still on the lose, produced the bootleg liquor. They used mineral water, energy drinks, color additives and pure alcohol that could be easily obtained on the market.

The police have arrested six suspects in the bootleg liquor case in West Java. (ebf)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Callistasia Anggun Wijaya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 10:08 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce2d69e 1 City Kalibata-City-apartment,South-Jakarta,apartment,apartment-lawsuit Free

Despite Kalibata City's management having been found guilty of arbitrarily imposing high electricity and water charges on tenants, the victory does not guarantee fair and better maintenance in the buildings, the Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) has said.

YLKI complaint and law coordinator Sularsih said Kalibata City's Apartment Owner and Tenant Association (P3SRS) can still abuse the rights of tenants as it was established by the developer and building management company.

"Without reform, conflicts between the management body and residents would happen again," she said.

According to Law No. 20/2011 on apartments, the P3SRS, which should consist of representatives of tenants and the developer, is the highest authority of an apartment's management, which can determine water and electricity charges.

In Kalibata City, there are two P3SRS, one formed by the Kalibata City Residents Community and the other formed by the developer.

The South Jakarta District Court ruled on Wednesday that PT Pradani Sukses Abadi, the developer of Kalibata City, PT Prima Buana Internusa, the company that manages the building, and a management team were guilty of marking up residents' electricity and water bills.

(Read also: Kalibata City residents win lawsuit against developer)

Sularsih said the government should deliberate a regulation so that the Apartment Law can be better implemented.

Until now, the government has not deliberated an implementing regulation in support of the Apartment Law. The same conflicts will keep recurring without the regulation, she said. (wit)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Viriya P. Singgih (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 18:36 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce4abb1 1 Business Ignatius-Jonan,mining-law-revision,opposition Free

Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Ignasius Jonan has questioned the House of Representatives efforts to amend the 2009 Mining Law, saying that another change to the law would only bring uncertainty in the countrys mining sector.

After submitting the draft revision of the law to the House Legislation Body (Baleg) in March, lawmakers are set to start discussing the bill along with the government this month and complete the whole revision process by July at the latest.

However, Jonan said the revision might not be a good idea, especially considering that the law had only been in place for less than a decade, while the mining industry actually needed long-term stability.

I personally said, if it is possible, we do not need to amend the mining law, Jonan said on Wednesday.

The substance of the mining law is quite generic. Why do we need to amend this if we can accommodate [businesses] with other regulations? Otherwise, we will keep changing the law, which will be not good for the mining industry.

As stated in the draft revision dated March 7, the new mining law will provide several incentives for miners committed to integrating processing activities of mineral and coal from the upstream to the downstream sector.

For instance, miners that have integrated their operations with processing facilities will be granted a license for production and operation for a 20-year period, which will be directly extended for another 20 years, with an option to renew it for an additional 10 years. (bbn)SAN DIEGO, April 11, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Recover, a drug news outlet states that the opioid addiction and abuse has become a full-blown epidemic with devastating consequences on the health and well-being of individuals worldwide. Opioid epidemic statistics provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse shows just how vast the impact of this problem is.



The US is among the largest consumers of opiates. It represents 81% of the Percocet market and almost 100% of the Vicodin market. In 2010, prescription opioids represented 82.8% of the deaths caused by accidental overdose. Opioid overdoses in the Midwestern region increased 70% from July 2016 to September 2017. Incidents of opioid overdose also increased 30% in 52 areas in 45 US states.

The opioid epidemic is a public health crisis that requires serious attention. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is now working on improving access to recovery and treatment service and providing support for radical research on addiction and pain. HHS aims to improve better practices for managing pain, promote consumption of overdose-reversing drugs and reinforce understanding of the crisis through better public health monitoring.

The National Institutes of Health, the leading medical research institution in the US, is also working on finding better ways to treat opioid use disorders, manage pain and prevent opioid misuse. NIH met with academic research centers and pharmaceutical companies to discuss matters that may help solve the opioid epidemic. The discussion included effective and non-addictive ways to manage chronic pain and improved reversal interventions and overdose prevention to support recovery and save lives. They also talked about new technologies and medications to treat disorders associated with opioid use.

Getting Drug Addiction Help

Addiction help is available to individuals who want to stop their dependence on drugs or are facing a relapse. One study reported that almost 91% of those in the recovery stage will experience a relapse. The same study discovered that at least 80% of those who used opiates would relapse within a month after completing a detox program and 59% of those who experienced a relapse would do so in the first week of sobriety.

It is not uncommon for individuals to relapse at least once. A relapse is a normal part of the recovery process and can help one determine their triggers as well as learn techniques they didnt know before. People who relapse experience negative feelings and thoughts that can reinforce old patterns of substance abuse behaviors. Re-engaging with a proper treatment program can help them learn something new about their addiction and themselves, which will improve their ability to remain sober and clean. A person can return to a treatment center multiple times before enjoying permanent recovery.

Individuals who have relapsed dont have to deal with everything alone. They can contact a sponsor, friend, family member or therapist who can provide reassurance that they are loved and cared for as well as help them avoid situations that may trigger drug use. They can seek further treatment and find a treatment program that will give them the ongoing encouragement, support, accountability and awareness they need to avoid a future relapse.

Some treatment providers or groups offer programs that people can attend weekly to remind them of their strengths and their reason for remaining sober as well as how to stay firm in their decision to live a clean life. These groups can help them avoid feeling depressed and alone, which can lead to an opiate relapse. Some of the most common treatment approaches include cognitive/behavior therapy, motivational interviewing, anger management, contingency management, dialectical behavior therapy and relapse prevention. The treatment center will determine the right treatment approach for the patient and monitor their progress throughout treatment.

Contact Info:

Author: Kevin Leonard

Organization: TheRecover.com

Address: 27420 Jefferson Ave, Temecula, CA 92590

Phone: 888-510-3898

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/211b14b3-3e50-4e40-ba95-0a98189fe817Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Istanbul  Thu, April 12, 2018 06:50 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce28240 2 World Recep-Tayyip-Erdogan,Donald-Trump,Syria,Turkey Free

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US counterpart Donald Trump discussed the crisis in Syria during a telephone conversation late on Wednesday, a Turkish presidential source said.

Erdogan and Trump "exchanged views on the latest developments in Syria," the source added, without providing further details.

The talks come after Trump warned Russia over its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, saying US missiles "will be coming" in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim earlier in the day told Russia and the United States to end their "street fighting" over Syria, saying it was time to put aside a rivalry that risked harming civilians.

Turkey and the United States are key NATO allies, but their relations have been strained over a number of issues including Washington's support for Syrian Kurdish militia deemed as a terrorist outfit by Ankara.

And in recent months, Turkey has worked closely with Russia despite their differences.

Ankara backs rebel forces seeking Assad's ouster while Moscow remains major ally of the regime in Damascus.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 12:45 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce39870 1 Politics Gerindra-Party,PKS,PAN,Democratic-party Free

The Gerindra Party is intensifying its lobbying of other political parties to create what it has dubbed the elephant coalition" to back the presidential bid of its chairman and chief patron, Prabowo Subianto.

The party has so far secured only the support of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS).

Meanwhile, five major parties and two minor parties are backing President Joko Jokowi Widodo for reelection in 2019.

Gerindra is hoping that the National Mandate Party (PAN), National Awakening Party (PKB) and the Democratic Party, which have yet to enter into any formal agreements, will join its coalition.

We are maintaining intensive communication with PAN. We hope that it will eventually join us, like the PKS, said Gerindra deputy secretary-general Andre Rosiade late Wednesday.

We are also building our communication with PKB and Democrats. We predict that [we will see] a big 2014 rematch, he added, referring to the 2014 presidential election when Prabowo and Jokowi ran head-to-head.

Prabowo accepted his partys mandate to run for the presidency in next years election during Gerindras national coordination meeting on Wednesday in Hambalang, Bogor, West Java.

Gerindra executive Ahmad Riza Patria cited Prabowo as saying that he would only contest the election if he was supported by an "elephant-sized" coalition.

PKS chairman Sohibul Iman, PAN chairman Zulkifli Hasan and PAN patron Amien Rais attended the meeting, with several reports saying that PKB chairman Muhaimin Iskandar had also been invited, but did not show up at the event. (ahw)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Farida Susanty (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 18:25 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce476c7 1 Business Budi-Karya-Sumadi,shipment,port,efficiency Free

Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi promised on Thursday to improve the efficiency of ports with the aim of reducing logistics costs by between 20 to 30 percent.

"We believe efficiency at big ports in particular could be improved and that costs could be reduced by between 20 to 30 percent," he said on Thursday, adding that his ministry was calculating the loaded and unloaded costs incurred at Tanjung Priok Port.

Budi said the subsidized freightliner program, known as tol laut or the maritime highway, would commence full operations this month although he admitted there was an imbalance in the ship load between ports in the eastern and western parts of the country.

He believed the maritime highway program could be made more efficient by holding a tender to seek more efficient shipping strategies, by considering not only the number of ships but also the load carried by each ship.

"That way, it will be more efficient, because [the operator] will also offer the operation of big ships, meaning transportation costs could be reduced," he said.

The maritime highway, encompassing freightliners carrying staple goods, comprises 15 routes across the archipelago, seven of which are run by private operators. (bbn)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Viriya P. Singgih (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 15:47 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce3f9c3 1 Business Engie-SA,EVI-electric-Vine-Industries,Papua,solar-energy,project Free

French power utility Engie SA and energy company Electric Vine Industries (EVI) have to wait a little longer before realizing their plan to develop and operate solar photovoltaic smart microgrids in thousands of remote villages in Papua, as the government has not agreed to their electricity prices.

In mid-2017, the two firms signed a joint venture agreement in an effort to generate electricity for around 2.5 million people in 3,000 villages across Papua over a period of 20 years with a total investment value of around US$240 million.

However, Engie and EVI have yet to thrash out an agreement with the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry over the number of targeted villages and the electricity price.

They told us that the price of electricity to be sold to the public would be around Rp 10,000 [73 US cents] per kilowatt-hour. Then I asked them, would the public want to buy the electricity [at that price]? Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Ignasius Jonan said Wednesday.

If they still insist, just ask for a recommendation from the local administrations there [in Papua]. I dont want to be blamed if I allow them to set that price.

Johan De Saeger, Engies chief representative in Jakarta, said in March that the ministry had asked Engie to focus on electrifying 120 villages in Papuas Yapen and Sentani areas first over a one-year period.

Later we would like to roll out on a larger scale, De Saeger said. (bbn)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Beijing, China  Thu, April 12, 2018 13:11 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce3a1a1 2 Business IMF,Christine-Lagarde,China,Belt-and-Road-Forum,Beijing Free

IMF chief Christine Lagarde warned China on Thursday about saddling other countries with a "problematic increase in debt" through its ambitious global trade infrastructure project.

Lagarde made the comments at a Beijing forum on Chinese President Xi Jinping's signature Belt and Road initiative, a $1 trillion road, rail and construction project spanning dozens of countries -- from Asia to Africa and Europe.

But many of the colossal projects are being built by state-owned Chinese companies and financed by loans from China, leaving states billions of dollars in debt to Beijing.

"These ventures can also lead to a problematic increase in debt, potentially limiting other spending as debt service rises, and creating balance of payment challenges," Lagarde told the crowd of Chinese and foreign officials.

"In countries where public debt is already high, careful management of financing terms is critical," she said.

Some countries like Sri Lanka have already ended up deeply in debt and been left with little choice but to turn over crucial assets to Beijing as way to restructure the loans.

In Sri Lanka's case, the island nation handed over a long term lease on the strategically located and bustling Hambantota Port to pay down debt.

Lagarde advocated greater transparency and cooperation to get all stakeholders on the same page to avoid such problems.

"It's not a free lunch, it's something where everybody chips in, it's not just honey for bees," she said, warning that the large scale spending projects also come with corruption temptations for officials.

"Projects can always present the risk of potentially failed projects and the misuse of funds. In some corners, it's even called corruption," Lagarde told the officials, many of whom preside over Belt and Road projects.

The speech may ruffle feathers in Beijing where leaders have heaped praise on the project and been loathe to acknowledge any risks or pitfalls in the initiative, which is often described as a revival of the ancient Silk Road trade routes.

Speaking before Lagarde, China's central bank chief Yi Gang said Chinese banks had "achieved great successes" providing low cost financing to Belt and Road countries.

Yi said the banks do not rely on government subsidies but at the same time are "not purely commercial lending".

Xi struck back at criticism of his key initiative on Wednesday at the Boao Forum for Asia, a Davos-like meeting of international leaders held on the southern island of Hainan.

The Belt and Road "is neither the Marshall Plan after World War II nor an intrigue of China. It is, if anything, a plan in the sunshine," Xi said, according to the Xinhua state news agency.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Winda A. Charmila (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12 2018

Land owners affected by the construction of the first phase of the MRT project in South Jakarta seemed to be appeased when Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan met with them last year, but it turns out they have yet to receive any compensation due to problematic inventory results.



Rashmee Mahesh Lalmalani, a resident who met with Anies in October, allowed the city administration to dismantle his property after the governor talked to him, saying that he should not impede the national project.



At the time, Mahesh, who owned a carpet shop in the affected area on Jl. Fatmawati, said he asked the city to follow proper procedure even though it would likely take more time to execute the land acquisition.



He added that he had not received any compensation and was skeptical about obtaining it in the future.



How can I receive compensation if the land size [the adminis...Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Margareth S. Aritonang and Karina M. Tehusijarana (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 08:43 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce2ab5b 1 Politics #Prabowo,Prabowo-Subianto,2019-presidential-election,#2019PresidentialElection,Indonesian-politics Free

Gerindra Party chairman and chief patron Prabowo Subianto accepted his partys mandate to run for the presidency at its national coordination meeting in Hambalang, West Java, on Wednesday.



His decision ended speculation over whether he was considering sitting the election out to endorse another candidate in the 2019 race. It also increased the likelihood that the upcoming election sees a rematch between the former commander of the Armys Special Forces and President Joko Jokowi Widodo.



As the partys mandatary, as the holder of your mandate [...] I declare that I have submitted and complied with your decision, Prabowo said in a video of the closed-door meeting provided by a Gerindra politician.



Earlier in the day, the opposition leader made it clear that he would only contest the election if the party built a strong alliance with other parties.



Arriving to the meetings main stage on horseback, to the strains of a brassy rendition of traditional marching song The British Grenadiers, Prabowo cut an imposing figure in Gerindras trademark white shirt, khaki pants, and black peci fez.



With all my energy, body and soul, if Gerindra orders me to run in the upcoming presidential election, I am ready to carry out that task, he said, according to a Gerindra politician that was present, to the applause of the party members in attendance, who broke out in chants of Prabowo, president!



Prabowo cut off the chanting, however, and asked for patience.



I said if, if the party orders me, he said. There is one condition. Even if the party orders me [to run], I need the support of friendly parties.

Read also: Prabowo tells Gerinda's rank and file to be patient

Over the past few weeks, Prabowo has seemed hesitant over whether to run against President Jokowi again.



Maksimus Ramses Lalongkoe, the executive director of the Institute of Indonesian Political Analysis, said Prabowos apparent hesitation rested mostly on the lack of a clear coalition backing his candidacy.



The 2017 Elections Law specifies that political parties seeking to nominate a presidential candidate are required to secure at least 20 percent of seats at the House of Representatives or 25 percent of the popular vote.



Gerindra currently holds only 13 percent of House seats and 11.81 percent of the popular vote, which means it needs to join forces with other parties to be able to nominate Prabowo or any other potential candidate.



Four parties with significant vote shares have yet to officially back a candidate: the National Mandate Party (PAN), the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), the National Awakening Party (PKB) and the Democratic Party (PD).



PAN and the PKS have worked together with Gerindra in recent times, most notably during the contentious Jakarta gubernatorial election last year.



A Gerindra official has said that Prabowo might declare his candidacy in Banyumas, Central Java, should the party secure the support of PAN and the PKS.



However, PAN seems reluctant about unequivocally endorsing Prabowo, with its chairman Zulkifli Hasan, who attended the Gerindra meeting, saying that the party had yet to make a decision. If the PDI-P [Jokowis Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle] invited us, we would also come and speak, he said as quoted by Antara.



Gerindra and the PKS have enough seats at the House to nominate Prabowo, but it is likely that Prabowo is seeking more support to match a much bigger political alliance behind Jokowi, who has the backing of five parties.



Maksimus said Indonesias dynamic political landscape meant that parties were still looking to see what moves might give them the edge.

Read also: We could fight together, SBY tells Jokowi

Theyre still doing a lot of maneuvering, trying to see if one of their own members has a chance at running, he said.



Prabowo has struggled to match Jokowis electability, which is at 45 to 55 percent, but Maksimus said that such a challenge was unlikely to be the cause of his indecision. Electability can change very quickly, Jokowis electability can be high now, but who knows what it will be like on election day.



He added that Prabowo had no other choice but to run as other potential candidates, such as former Indonesian Military chief Gatot Nurmantyo and Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan, would not motivate the party machine in the same way that Prabowo would.



Nevertheless, he did not dismiss out of hand the possibility of Prabowo pairing up with erstwhile adversary Jokowi, once again citing the fast-moving nature of Indonesian politics.



If Prabowo is backed into a corner, then he might well decide to join forces with Jokowi, rather than leave empty-handed.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Nedi Putra AW (The Jakarta Post) Malang, East Java  Thu, April 12, 2018 17:39 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce450b3 1 National KAI,Idul-Fitri,idul-fitri-exodus,ramadhan,Kereta-Api-Indonesia,Holiday Free

Ahead of the Ramadhan fasting month, which will begin in the middle of May, state railway operator Kereta Api Indonesias (KAI) board of directors and commissioner members inspected railways connecting areas in both the northern and southern parts of Java.

The inspections aimed to ensure the companys readiness to carry out Idul Fitri holiday travel operations this year.

Me and several other board of director members were assigned to lead the inspection in the southern route, said KAI president director Edi Sukmoro at Kota Baru Station in Malang, East Java, on Wednesday evening.

He said ensuring the readiness of train tracks, stations and personnel was very important in providing comfortable and safe care services to passengers, especially during the Idul Fitri holiday season.

Gearing up: A specially designed train carrying state railway operator Kereta Api Indonesias (KAI) board of director and commissioner members prepares to depart from Kota Baru Station, Malang, East Java, on April 11. (JP/Nedi Putra AW)

Edi and his entourage began their inspection travel from Bandung, West Java, from where they bounded to Surakarta in Central Java and two cities in East Java, namely Madiun and Malang, and ended their trip in Surabaya.

There are two types of disruption-prone routes: first, routes prone to nature-related disruptions, such as landslides and flooding. Second, non-technical disruptions, said Edi.

He said he had identified several disruption-prone spots along the routes he had inspected. A number of measures had been readied to anticipate disruptions in the routes, such as preparing equipment and additional personnel provided by four regional operation offices in the southern route.

Edi said the Idul Fitri operation would be conducted for 22 days, from June 5 to 26, or 10 days before and after the Islamic holiday. (ebf)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 12:38 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce39784 1 City school,UNBK,computer,theft,North-Jakarta Free

A week before the computer-based national exam, Islamic junior high school Madrasah Tsanawiyah al Falah in Penjaringan, North Jakarta, has had its 40 borrowed laptops stolen.

The thief reportedly broke into the room where the laptops, borrowed from students and teachers, were stored on Monday afternoon.

Its all gone now, said a teacher named Thohir as quoted by kompas.com on Wednesday.

According to Thohir, however, instead of worrying about the material losses, the school was focussing on ensuring all its 109 students take the final exam.

Were working to find a solution, he added.

Umar, a teacher and the school's treasurer, said the Religious Affairs Ministry promised that Al Falahs students can still take the exam, either at another school or by using new computers provided by the ministry.

I have asked the students parents to wait for the ministrys confirmation on whether theyll be compensated for the losses, Umar said.

Penjaringan Police chief Mustakim said his officers have questioned several teachers and local residents about the incident. (vla)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 15:15 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce3e0bd 1 City app-based-transportation,crime,taxi Free

The East Jakarta Police have arrested two of three customers of a ride-hailing vehicle who allegedly attempted to steal the car from the driver by tying him up and throwing him out of the car in a cemetery in the Casablanca area in South Jakarta last week.

According to the police, the customers, Nurali, Edi and Robby, hailed the vehicle in City Mall Jatinegara, East Jakarta, at 12:30 a.m. on April 4.

Aan, the driver, picked up the passengers, who asked to be taken to Pisangan Lama, near the Cipinang Rice Market in East Jakarta.

Not long after boarding the car, the customers reportedly pointed two knives at Aan.

The victim was threatened. The perpetrators bound his hands, eyes and mouth with duct tape, East Jakarta Police crimes unit head Adj. Sr. Comr. Sapta Maulana Marpaung told kompas.com on Wednesday.

The customers then reportedly took the car and threw out Aan at Casablanca cemetery.

Sapta said the perpetrators attempted to take the car to Lampung through Merak Port in Banten.

Aan later reported the incident to the police.

By tracing the cars global positioning system (GPS), the police found Nurali and Edi at Merak Port. The police are looking for third suspect, identified only as Robby.

The police are investigating the case to discover any network committing such acts. (cal)KENNETT SQUARE, Penn., April 11, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Genesis HealthCare (Genesis, or the Company) (NYSE:GEN), one of the largest post-acute care providers in the United States, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to sell 23 Texas skilled nursing facilities (22 buildings owned by Genesis and one leased) to Regency REIT, LLC. The transaction is expected to close on or about July 1, 2018 and is subject to additional due diligence, regulatory and licensing approvals, and other customary conditions.



Genesis currently operates or manages a total of 24 facilities in the state of Texas. In addition to the 23 facilities expected to be divested in the Regency transaction, Genesis also plans to exit the operations of an additional leased skilled nursing facility. Aggregate revenue and EBITDA of all 24 facilities totaled approximately $173.7 million and $7.4 million, respectively, in 2017. Genesis estimates these transactions will result in the reduction of approximately $97 million of indebtedness and $1.8 million of annual cash lease expense. Closing of both transactions would mark the Companys complete exit of its inpatient business in the state of Texas.

We are constantly reviewing our portfolio with an emphasis on divesting underperforming assets or assets in non-strategic markets, noted George V. Hager, Jr., Chief Executive Officer of Genesis. This deleveraging transaction will allow for additional focus on our core markets and will strengthen our overall portfolio, noted Hager.

About Genesis HealthCare

Genesis HealthCare (NYSE:GEN) is a holding company with subsidiaries that, on a combined basis, comprise one of the nation's largest post-acute care providers with more than 450 skilled nursing facilities and assisted/senior living communities in 30 states nationwide. Genesis subsidiaries also supply rehabilitation and respiratory therapy to more than 1,600 healthcare providers in 46 states, the District of Columbia and China. References made in this release to "Genesis," "the Company," "we," "us" and "our" refer to Genesis HealthCare and each of its wholly-owned companies. Visit our website at www.genesishcc.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You can identify these statements by the fact that they do not relate strictly to historical or current facts. These statements contain words such as may, will, project, might, expect, believe, anticipate, intend, could, would, estimate, continue, pursue, plans, or prospect, or the negative or other variations thereof or comparable terminology. They include, but are not limited to, statements about Genesis expectations and beliefs regarding its future financial performance, anticipated cost management, anticipated business development, anticipated financing activities and anticipated demographic and supply-demand trends facing the industry. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and projections about future events, including the assumptions stated in this release, and there can be no assurance that they will be achieved or occur, in whole or in part, in the timeframes anticipated by the Company or at all. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance or results and involve risks and uncertainties that cannot be predicted or quantified and, consequently, the actual performance of Genesis may differ materially from that expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the following:

reductions and/or delays in Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement rates, or changes in the rules governing the Medicare or Medicaid programs could have a material adverse effect on our revenues, financial condition and results of operations;

reforms to the U.S. healthcare system that have imposed new requirements on us and uncertainties regarding potential material changes to such reforms;

revenue we receive from Medicare and Medicaid being subject to potential retroactive reduction;

our success being dependent upon retaining key executives and personnel;

it can be difficult to attract and retain qualified nurses, therapists, healthcare professionals and other key personnel, which, along with a growing number of minimum wage and compensation related regulations, can increase our costs related to these employees;

recently enacted changes in Medicare reimbursements for physician and non-physician services could impact reimbursement for medical professionals. Moreover, annual payment caps that limit the amounts that can be paid for outpatient therapy services rendered to any Medicare beneficiary may negatively affect our results of operations;

we are subject to extensive and complex laws and government regulations. If we are not operating in compliance with these laws and regulations or if these laws and regulations change, we could be required to make significant expenditures or change our operations in order to bring our facilities and operations into compliance;

our physician services operations are subject to corporate practice of medicine laws and regulations. Our failure to comply with these laws and regulations could have a material adverse effect on our business and operations;

we face inspections, reviews, audits and investigations under federal and state government programs, such as the Department of Justice. These investigations and audits could result in adverse findings that may negatively affect our business, including our results of operations, liquidity, financial condition, and reputation;

significant legal actions, which are commonplace in our industry, could subject us to increased operating costs, which could materially and adversely affect our results of operations, liquidity, financial condition, and reputation;

insurance coverages, including professional liability coverage, may become increasingly expensive and difficult to obtain for health care companies, and our self-insurance may expose us to significant losses;

failure to maintain effective internal control over financial reporting could have an adverse effect on our ability to report on our financial results on a timely and accurate basis;

we may be unable to reduce costs to offset decreases in our patient census levels or other expenses timely and completely;

completed and future acquisitions may consume significant resources, may be unsuccessful and could expose us to unforeseen liabilities and integration risks;

we lease a significant number of our facilities and may experience risks relating to lease termination, lease expense escalators, lease extensions, special charges and leases that are not economically efficient in the current business environment;

our substantial indebtedness, scheduled maturities and disruptions in the financial markets could affect our ability to obtain financing or to extend or refinance debt as it matures, which could negatively impact our results of operations, liquidity, financial condition and the market price of our common stock;

the holders of a majority of the voting power of Genesis common stock have entered into a voting agreement, and the voting groups interests may conflict with the interests of other stockholders;

exposure to the credit and non-payment risk of our contracted customer relationships, including as a result from bankruptcy, receivership, liquidation, reorganization or insolvency, especially during times of systemic industry pressures, economic conditions, regulatory uncertainty and tight credit markets, which could result in material losses;

some of our directors are significant stockholders or representatives of significant stockholders, which may present issues regarding diversion of corporate opportunities and other potential conflicts; and

we are a controlled company within the meaning of NYSE rules and, as a result, qualify for and rely on exemptions from certain corporate governance requirements.

The Companys Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, discuss the foregoing risks as well as other important risks and uncertainties of which investors should be aware. Any forward-looking statements contained herein are made only as of the date of this release. Genesis disclaims any obligation to update its forward-looking statements or any of the information contained in this release. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

Genesis HealthCare Contact:

Investor Relations

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Linkedin N. Adri (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 23:11 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce52942 2 National #BalikpapanOilSpill,#OilSpill,#environment,East-Kalimantan,#EastKalimantan,pertamina,#Pertamina Free

State-owned oil and gas company PT Pertamina plans to give the families of five people who were killed in a recent Balikpapan oil spill in East Kalimantan Rp 200 million (US$14,521) for compensation.

Pertamina regional manager for communications and corporate social responsibility (CSR) Yudi Nugraha said he hoped the money could be disbursed as soon as possible.

Five Balikpapan residents died following an oil spill that triggered a fire on March 31, namely Wahyu Gusti Anggoro, 27, Imam Nurokhim, 41, Agus Salim, 42, Suyono, 45, and Sutoyo, 52.

The five men had been fishing when they were trapped in the fire in the middle of Balikpapan Bay.

The family of Suyono also received Rp 160 million in insurance money from PT Jasa Indonesia.

We handled the fishermens insurance, said the head of Balikpapans Marine, Fisheries and Agriculture Agency, Yosmianto.

Fishermen insurance is part of the agencys program and some of the participants premiums are subsidized by government funds. But Suyono claimed he was paying the money out-of-pocket.

Siti Maghfiratul Jannah, 27, the widow of Wahyu, said her husbands life could not be replaced. She said if any legal action were taken against Pertamina, she would be willing to serve as a witness.

Authorities continue to investigate the parties responsible for the oil spill and fire.

Although the oil had come from Pertaminas burst pipeline, a government official said the spill was not Pertaminas fault.

The pipe was allegedly dragged by an anchor dropped by a vessel, though no vessel was permitted to drop anchor or even pass through the bay, Djoko Siswanto, the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministrys oil and gas director general, told reporters on April 5 in Jakarta.

Wahyus sister, Yuli Prasetya Ningrum, said she would let the authorities decide who was responsible for the fatal tragedy.

Earlier on Wednesday, Pertamina said they would wait until the investigation into the oil spill was complete to decide whether it would financially compensate the families of the five fishermen.

On April 9, lawmakers in Jakarta demanded that Pertamina provide the families with compensation.

On Wednesday, Yudi said the company would focus on mitigating the impact of the oil spill. The program is under the companys CSR, he said.

Separately, City Secretary Sayid MN Fadli said the administration was studying the need for compensation, both for human casualties and environmental damages.

He added that the administrations study was in line with the Balikpapan Councils call for residents to file a class action. (evi)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Sebastian Partogi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12 2018

The Fleur de Passion has gone through a fascinating evolution from a World War II German minesweeper into an expedition ship on a mission to mitigate climate change.

The Fleur de Passion, a ship navigating the globe under the flag of landlocked Switzerland, used to sweep mines to save the Germans during World War II. After its transformation into a vessel with a scientific and educational mission in the 1970s, the ship now scans the ocean to save the planet from the worst ravages of climate change.



On a four-year journey that began in 2015 and will conclude in 2019, the Swiss expedition seeks to mark the 500th annive...Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 16:00 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce3fdfb 1 City Tanah-Abang,Tasik-Market,relocation Free

Tasik Market vendors in Tanah Abang business district, Central Jakarta, have been relocated to East Cideng, Central Jakarta, after their designated space for trading was closed to make way for a transit-oriented development project.

Most of them have been relocated to East Cideng []. Yesterday, I arrived at around 9 or 10 p.m. and saw that the sellers had been there. There are up to 500 sellers who have been accommodated at the new spot, Jakarta Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno said on Thursday, as quoted by kompas.com.

He added that the city administration would provide toilets there and the sellers, who specialize in selling embroidered textiles, as well as customers should be able to use the mushola (prayer room) in the area.

Tasik Market, named after the vendors hometown of Tasikmalaya in West Java, previously was on a plot of land belonging to state-owned railway operator Kereta Api Indonesia. (wnd)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Jon Afrizal (The Jakarta Post) Jambi  Thu, April 12, 2018 19:09 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce4c284 1 National tapir,conservation,wildlife,wildlife-trade,Jambi,BKSDA,Suku-Anak-Dalam,orang-rimba Free

The Jambi Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA) is set to release a tapir into a customary forest in Merangin regency. The tapir was confiscated from Egok, a member of the Suku Anak Dalam tribe, or Orang Rimba, when he was about to sell the protected species in Bangko city last week. Egok reportedly aimed to sell the animal for Rp 15 million (US$ 1,088) to a Bangko resident.

The BKSDA Jambis Conservation Area I office head Udin Awaludin said the tapir was from an area near Manau River in Dusun Bangko sub-district, Bangko district, Merangin regency.

He said Egok had brought the tapir to Bangko city last Wednesday. After quite a long negotiation, Egok finally agreed to hand over the tapir to us, said Udin on Wednesday.

He added that the tapir was later handed over to the BKSDA Conservation Area I office in Bangko city on Monday. The tapir was in a healthy condition when it was handed over to the office.

The tapir is five months old. Its female and weighs around 50 kilograms, said Udin.

Based on a medical assessment they conducted, veterinarians at the Merangin Animal Husbandry and Plantation Agency suggested that the tapir needed to receive four months of treatment to ensure its condition was stable and it could adapt to living in the wild.

After handing over the tapir, Egok received financial assistance from several conservation NGOs and the Merangin Social Affairs Agency. (ebf)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Washington, United States  Thu, April 12, 2018 18:16 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce468ab 2 World trump,Syria,war,attack Free

President Donald Trump was evasive Thursday about when the United States might attack Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons assault, saying it could be "very soon or not so soon at all!"

A day after warning starkly that "missiles will be coming," Trump in another early morning tweet storm wrote: "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

He added: "In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'"

Trump's new tweet seemed to backtrack from the bellicose one of Wednesday in which he suggested to Syria and its ally Russia that a US attack over the alleged chemical weapons assault on civilians last weekend was all but imminent.

That one, which came after a warning from Russia, went like this: "Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and "smart!" You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

The tough talk between Trump and Russia has raised fears of the Syria conflict mushrooming into something even more serious involving America and its Western allies on one side and the Russians on the other.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned world powers Wednesday to keep the confict from "spiraling out of control."Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Devina Heriyanto (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, April 12, 2018 18:10 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce46665 2 City #PostScript,#Water,water-privatization,jakarta,Palyja,Aetra-Air,Soeharto Free

A group of Jakarta residents have clinched a victory in a long legal battle against tap water privatization after the Supreme Court ruled in their favor in October 2017. Why are they against privatization? The Jakarta Post has compiled the most essential information about the issue.

Whats the story behind privatization?

Jakartas water was managed by city-owned PT PAM Jaya. However, under the advice of the World Bank, in 1995 then-president Soeharto ordered water privatization, appointing two foreign companies without open bidding. The World Bank believed privatization was the cure for the failure of Jakartas public water delivery and unequal access to water. Private companies are expected to deliver better management, thus providing the necessary investment for the water company.

On June 6, 1997, PAM signed a 25-year agreement with French Suez Environment, which together with Salim group founded PT PAM Lyonnaise Jaya (Palyja) and British Thames Water with Soehartos son Sigit Harjojudanto through PT Kekar Thames Airindo, now PT Aetra Air Jakarta. Salim group was owned by Lim Sioe Liong, or Sudono Salim, a tycoon who was known as Soehartos close ally.

The contract said the two private firms would pay PAM Jayas debt. In 1991, the World Bank lent US$92 million for PAM Jaya to improve the service. Before privatization, in 1996, PAM Jaya recorded only 45.3 percent tap water coverage and 57 percent of non-revenue water.

There was an effort to make Palyja public by acquiring the shares via city-owned PT Jakarta Propertindo (Jakpro), which was aborted in 2015. Aetra was owned by Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno before he sold his shares to Salim to avoid conflicts of interest.

The battle to end Jakartas water privatization began in November 2012, when the Coalition of Jakarta Residents Opposing Water Privatization (KMMSAJ) filed a class action lawsuit to annul the 1997 contract on the basis that the partnership had failed to serve the people in the city.

What is the condition of water coverage in Jakarta?

Jakartas water distribution is unequal against the poor. Under the Dutch colonial administration, only affluent residential areas enjoyed direct water pipe access. After independence, the pattern persisted.

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, citing data from the Kampung Improvement Program (KIP) and the World Bank, found that in the 1970s, 90 percent of residents in kampungs did not have access to water pipes, despite being home to 80 percent of the population. Lack of sanitation exacerbated the problem, as clean water sources such as rivers or ponds degraded in quality due to human and household waste.

In 2015, tap water only covered 60 percent of Jakartas residents, according to PAM Jaya president director Sriwidayanto Kaderi. By 2016, the number of residents connected to a piped water system amounted to 3,420,000 people.

The Amrta Institute for Water Literacy, however, calculates that tap water only supplies 35 percent of Jakartas total water demand, because even though households and commercial buildings are connected to tap water service, they still use groundwater.

The urban poor in North Jakarta have it harder: they buy from local vendors, or use groundwater, surface water and others. The World Bank reported Jakartas poor households have to spend 13 to 25 percent of their income on water.

According to the Jakarta Water Resources Council, the country's capital can only supply 2.2 percent of its total demand for clean water from the Krukut River, with another 80 percent coming from the Jatiluhur Reservoir and about 20 percent from Cisadane River in Tangerang, Banten.

Jatiluhur Dam in Purwakarta, West Java. (JP/-)

How does privatization work?

Privatization means that PAM Jaya only acts as a supervisor, while the operations are in the hands of private companies. Palyja is responsible for water operations in the western half of the city, while PT Aetra Air Jakarta is responsible for the eastern half. Both share high-income customers in business districts.

The two water operators are responsible for ensuring the raw water supply, cleaning the raw water, pipe network and customer service.

PAM Jaya pays a water charge to the two private operators to supply water to the residents while customers pay water tariffs. Based on the contract, the water charge is increased every semester, but the water tariff cannot be automatically increased because it often involves a political process with the City Council. As a result, water charges are mostly higher than the tariffs, increasing PAM Jayas expenses. A former PAM Jaya director, Maurits Napitupulu, said if the rate continued, PAM Jaya would have to pay Rp 18.2 trillion by the time the contract ended in 2022.

Key dates on the water privatization debacle:

Why do Jakartas citizens reject water privatization?

The KMMSAJ said water privatization had failed to guarantee an adequate supply of clean, potable water in the capital. After almost 20 years of operations, the two private firms have failed to reach the target agreed in the 1997 contract.

The targets after privatization in the 1997 agreement were to have 98 percent service coverage and to decrease non-revenue water to 20 percent by the 20th year. In 2015, the water coverage for both private operators was 59 percent and the leakage 44 percent.

Meanwhile, the group complained the water tariffs were not affordable for the citys poor residents. Jakartans pay around Rp 7,000 (71 US cents) per cubic meter, with the exception of low-income residents who pay only Rp 1,050 per cubic meter.

The failure to reach the water coverage target has defeated the purpose of privatization as suggested by the World Bank: to provide affordable clean water also for the poor.

As a result, the poor have to buy expensive clean water from other sources. According to the World Bank, poor households in Jakarta have been spending an estimated 13 to 25 percent of their income on water. Ministerial Regulation No. 23/2006 on water rate adjustment states that a household should not have to spend more than 4 percent of its income on water necessary for daily use.

The Central Jakarta District Court approved the KMMSAJs lawsuit in 2015, ending water privatization. Presiding judge Iim Nurkhoim said water privatization had been negligent in fulfilling the human right to water for Jakartas residents. Article 33 of the 1945 Constitution states clearly that land and water and the natural resources contained therein shall be controlled by the state and shall be used for the greatest prosperity of the people.

In 2016, however, the Jakarta High Court overturned the lower courts decision, granting the rights once again for water privatization. The verdict was mainly based on technicalities of the KMMSAJs lawsuit.

What is the Supreme Courts 2017 verdict on water privatization?

The Supreme Court approved a cassation appeal filed by the KMMSAJ and annulled a 2016 verdict issued by the Jakarta High Court. The verdict states that privatization had not improved the service of water supply in term of quality, quantity and continuity.

The Supreme Court ordered the termination of water privatization, as it contravened Jakartas Bylaw No. 13/1992 on city-owned water company PAM Jaya. Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan has said he was committed to respecting the Supreme Courts ruling that ordered a stop to the privatization of pipe water supply in the city.

However, PAM Jaya has insisted that it would continue to cooperate with the two private companies, but would restructure the agreement, giving PAM Jaya more authority in the operation. The Jakarta administration will form a team pertaining to the controversial restructuring between city-owned tap water company PAM Jaya with private-run PT PAM Lyonnaise Jaya (Palyja) and PT Aetra Air Jakarta, an official said.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Bambang Muryanto (The Jakarta Post) Yogyakarta  Fri, April 13 2018

The building is a silent witness to the development of fine art in Indonesia.

Every time he visits the Jogja National Museum, Leo Mulyono, 73, says he always remembers the moment he was admitted to the Indonesian Fine Arts Academy (ASRI), where he majored in graphic illustration back in 1963.

The three-story building located in Gampingan, Wirobrajan district, Yogyakarta, was once the ASRI campus.

I remember the day when I was told to run around the square behind the building durin...Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 13 2018

The Taipei Economic and Trade Office (TETO) in Indonesia recently hosted a three-day exhibition called Taiwan Expo 2018 in Jakarta to showcase its world-class products, services and technology.

The expo is not only showcasing products, services and information but also creating platforms for Taiwan and Indonesia with further cooperation and interaction, TETO said in a press release.

According to the release, 230 Taiwanese exhibitors showcased 4,500 top Taiwanese products and services during the expo, which was held from March 29 to 31 at the Jakarta Convention Center in Jakarta. More than 20,000 people visited the expo. During the expo, which was held for the second time in Jakarta, business deals involving a combined total of US$64 million were clinched.

Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) chairma...Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Manila, Philippines  Thu, April 12, 2018 20:55 1267 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9ce50685 2 SE Asia Philippines,duterte,HongKong,apology Free

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday formally apologised over the deaths of eight Hong Kong tourists in a 2010 Manila hostage crisis that soured ties with the Chinese territory.

The incident happened under previous president Benigno Aquino who had rejected Hong Kong's demands for an apology because he said the hijacker caused the crisis.

However Duterte on Thursday said an apology to "the Chinese government and the people of China" was "only right" and necessary.

"From the bottom of my heart as the president of the Republic of the Philippines and in behalf of the people of the Philippines, may I apologise formally to you now," Duterte said in a speech before the Filipino community in Hong Kong.

"We are sorry that the incident happened and as humanly possible, I would like to make this guarantee also that it will never, never happen again."

Hong Kong had been infuriated by the Philippine government's response to the incident, in which a disgraced former police officer hijacked a tour bus in protest at his sacking.

Day-long negotiations to release the hostages trapped on the bus failed and, with the drama being broadcast live around the world, Philippine security forces bungled a rescue attempt.

A deeply emotional row was resolved in 2014 after the Philippine government expressed "its most sorrowful regret and profound sympathy" but avoided a formal apology.

An apology was instead issued by the Manila city government.

Duterte, 73, was elected in mid-2016 and had sought to improve his nation's relations with Beijing despite a territorial row over the South China Sea as he courted investments and trade from the world's second-largest economy.

He visited Hong Kong after participating in the Boao Forum -- dubbed the Asian Davos -- in China where he met with President Xi Jinping on Tuesday.

Thursday's apology came as Duterte declared the Philippines' "love" for China.

"I hope this would go a long way to really assuage the feeling of the Chinese people and government," Duterte said.Posted Wednesday, April 11, 2018 11:00 pm

After a motion to approve last month's minutes followed by a closed session, members of the Schram City Village Board agreed to hire summer help to replace existing water meters around the village during their monthly meeting on Monday evening, April 9.

The village will advertise the opening position, and is accepting applications through the end of April.

Board members reviewed the 2018 municipal maintenance expenditure statement, which shows a total of $15,102.46 to be utilized for road work, asphalt repair, oil, rock and culvert replacement. The statement is to be approved by the state, and the board will pass a resolution during next month's meeting.

Board President Albert Oberle noted that cross connection control surveys were distributed along with residents' monthly water bill, and reported that the village has received roughly a third of those surveys back. He encouraged community members to complete the surveys and return them by June.

Village Clerk Janet Stewart said the village received a thank-you note from Hillsboro High School Post Prom Committee for their $125 donation to help fund the annual event.

Oberle said that he received a letter from the village's attorney, Mike Glenn of Glenn & West, Attorneys at Law in Nokomis, informing the board he will retire in August. Oberle said prior to Glenn's retirement, the board will decide whether to continue working with the law firm.

Glenn's partner, Trent West, was present to introduce himself to board members and to remind them of Glenn's retirement. West will be taking over the practice once Glenn retires.

West stated that while retainer fees will remain the same, hourly rates will increase. He also added that there are three ordinance violations that will be prosecuted in April.

In area news, Tuetken asked if aforementioned roads have received attention, and stated that there are alleyways still in need of rock. Oberle said village employees will lay rock in some of those alleyways next week.

Tuetken also noted that a substantial amount of leaves have made their way into ditches, and asked if culverts could be opened during summer months to allow for better drainage.

Board member Pat Rhoades asked if a decision was made regarding the Route 66 Truck and Repair sign, and whether or not a permit would be required. Oberle said because there was already a pre-existing sign, they will not have to pay.

Hillsboro Police Chief Randy Leetham gave his monthly police report, noting the accident which occurred Thursday evening, April 5, within the village limits. The accident took place on the Big Four curve, resulting in a guardrail being destroyed and a vehicle in the water.

He said Curt's Towing in Litchfield was called to remove the vehicle, and that citations were issued and insurance information was obtained in hopes to repair damages made. The state has placed orange barrels near the guard rail until it can be replaced.

Rhoades expressed her gratitude for the Hillsboro Police Department's work in removing derelict vehicles around the village.

Oberle reported that he has yet to hear back regarding the grant that they applied for to help cover costs of the lift station upgrades.

He said the village applied for a new grant with the Montgomery County Economic Development, to aid in their purchase of a new village work truck, and that the village would not hear back for at least another six months.

Resident Bernard Groves asked the board if there would be a trash clean-up day, with Oberle reporting there will be one held the second or third week in May.

Resident Mary Martin was on hand to inquire about the legal process when it comes to breaking city ordinances, with Oberle and Leetham explaining how citations are issued and are taken to court.

An individual may wish to continue breaking ordinances, however, fines continue to grow if issues are not taken care of.

In a few final notes, Oberle reported that the "clean-up" or "work day" scheduled for Saturday, April 7, was canceled. With April's unpredictable weather, board members agreed to postpone until next month.

The next regular monthly meeting for the Schram City Village Board will be Monday evening, May 14, at the Schram City Village Hall. A fall festival meeting will follow.TORONTO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- dynaCERT Inc. (TSX VENTURE:DYA) (OTCQB:DYFSF) (DAX:DMJ) ("dynaCERT" or the "Company") is pleased and honoured to have received the prestigious Gold Medal of the 2018 Edison Best New Product Award for its HydraGEN Technology. According to the Edison Awards, finalists were chosen as the "best of the best" by 3,000 of the world's top senior business executives, academics, and innovation professionals. dynaCERTs invention is chosen as the top winner for Vehicle Advancements among contenders in the Energy & Sustainability category.



Since 1987, the Edison Awards have recognized and honored some of the most innovative new products, services and business leaders in the world. The Edison Best New Product Awards is an annual competition honoring excellence in new product and service development, marketing, human-centered design, and innovation. The competition is open to innovative organizations across the globe. The Edison Awards are focused on the innovators as much as the innovations  a unique distinction in the world of award programs. According to the Edison Awards, Award winners represent "game changing" products and services, as well as excellence and leadership in innovation around four criteria: Concept, Value, Delivery, and Impact. An Edison Award represents significant value to the award winner and to the cause of innovation and highlights the strong marketing value of an unbiased 3rd-party endorsement. The Awards are named after Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) whose extraordinary new product and market development methods garnered him 1,093 U.S. patents and made him a household name across the world. The Edison Awards symbolize the persistence and excellence personified by Thomas Edison and his Menlo Park team, while also strengthening the human drive for innovation, creativity, and ingenuity.

Jim Payne, CEO of dynaCERT said, After years of research, development, trials and innovation, our HydraGEN Technology is being recognized internationally by prestigious third-parties. I thank the Edison Awards for bestowing on dynaCERT such a significant recognition of our accomplishments. On behalf of the Board of Directors of dynaCERT, I also congratulate and thank the hundreds of people involved with us, our employees, our dealers, our suppliers, our end-users and many others around the world who, with resolve, contributed directly and indirectly to making the 2018 Edison Best New Product Award a great possibility for dynaCERT.

Robert Maier, COO of dynaCERT said, Having our HydraGEN Technology recognized by The Edison Awards, is a true acknowledgement of the hard work and dedication of our dynaCERT team. We look forward to accomplishing more in the near future with the introduction of new HydraGEN products into the hydrogen economy market - Driving Change for a Better Future.

About dynaCERT Inc.

dynaCERT Inc. manufactures, distributes, and installs Carbon Emission Reduction Technology for use with internal combustion engines. As part of the growing global hydrogen economy, our patent-pending technology creates hydrogen and oxygen on-demand through electrolysis and supplies these through the air intake to enhance combustion, resulting in lower carbon emissions and greater fuel efficiency. Our technology is designed for use with all types and sizes of diesel engines used in on-road vehicles, reefer trailers, off-road construction, power generation, marine vessels and railroad locomotives. Website: www.dynaCERT.com

READER ADVISORY

Except for statements of historical fact, this news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. In particular, forward-looking information in this press release includes, but is not limited to: the completion of additional tranches of the Financing and the potential uses of the proceeds from the Financing. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. We cannot guarantee future results, performance or achievements. Consequently, there is no representation that the actual results achieved will be the same, in whole or in part, as those set out in the forward-looking information.

Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking information. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause the results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information include, but are not limited to: uncertainty as to whether our strategies and business plans will yield the expected benefits; availability and cost of capital; the ability to identify and develop and achieve commercial success for new products and technologies; the level of expenditures necessary to maintain and improve the quality of products and services; changes in technology and changes in laws and regulations; the uncertainty of the emerging hydrogen economy; including the hydrogen economy moving at a pace not anticipated; our ability to secure and maintain strategic relationships and distribution agreements; and the other risk factors disclosed under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned that this list of risk factors should not be construed as exhaustive.

The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking information to conform such information to actual results or to changes in our expectations except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

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 the release.

On Behalf of the Board

Murray James Payne, CEO

For more information, please contact:

Jim Payne, CEO & President

dynaCERT Inc.

#101  501 Alliance Avenue

Toronto, Ontario M6N 2J1

(416) 766-9691 x 2

jpayne@dynaCERT.com

Investor Relations

dynaCERT Inc.

Nancy Massicotte

(416) 766-9691 x 1

ir@dynaCERT.comMore twists and turns yesterday in the long battle between Chinatown landlord Joseph Betesh and residents of 85 Bowery. The tenants, local advocates and elected officials erupted in anger after personal items ended up in a dumpster outside the building. The tenants, displaced since Jan. 18, are waiting for asbestos abatement to be completed in their building.

The first missive came at around 5 p.m. from Sarah Ahn, a local activist with Chinese Staff and Workers Association, who has been advocating for some of the 85 Bowery tenants. According to an email, residents had agreed to have their things placed into temporary storage, and were, making plans to remove their belongings. They were taken aback, to say the least, when workers started throwing items into the garbage.

This egregious act has sent shockwaves of anger and confusion among the tenants and neighbors, said Ahn, adding to their concerns that Betesh and the City have no intention of bringing the tenants home.

A spokesperson for Beteshs Bowery 8385 LLC, said, No usable items belonging to the families of 85 Bowery were intentionally discarded. Some items removed from the building were discarded because they were perceived to be perishable food or in contact with perishable food and/or other unusable items.

The spokesperson indicated that the personal items were being placed into storage at the owners expense. To avoid any misunderstanding on the part of either party moving forward, a statement explained, we will not discard any of these items unless they are obviously hazardous to health. All items taken from the building as part of this process will be brought to appropriate storage facilities, where the families will have direct access to those items.

Betesh and residents have been involved in a lengthy legal dispute. The January vacate order was issued after the Department of Buildings concluded that 85 Bowerys staircase was unstable. Its now been replaced, but last month residents learned they would be displaced for several more weeks, after asbestos was found in the building. Betesh is paying for tenants to stay in a nearby Chinatown hotel.

Elected officials responded forcefully yesterday upon hearing about the latest skirmish. State Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou said:

Joseph Beteshs actions today were beyond unacceptable. Carting out tenants belongings and dumping them into a garbage container on the street is not only disrespectful, but inhumane. 85 Bowery tenants had no option but to look through these garbage bags on the street and pick out personal belongings like medicine, books and even money. These families have been out of their homes for months now, and to be treated like this by their landlord is a slap on the face to not only them, but to everyone who has been working to get these tenants back home quickly and safely. Any efforts to move tenants property must be closely coordinated with tenants and the City, especially as asbestos mitigation continues at this building. I will continue to stand with the 85 Bowery tenants as we work to get them back to their homes.

City Councilmember Margaret Chin said:

Joseph Beteshs haphazard treatment of his tenants personal belongings is utterly disgusting. For nearly three months, through no fault of their own, the families of 85 Bowery have been forced to live a nightmare, and continue to face what seems like a never-ending timeline of repairs. There is no excuse for being careless with peoples precious belongings. To Joseph Betesh, we have a simple message: our entire city is watching you, and we will hold you accountable for your actions.

Tenants have long suspected that Beteshs real goal is to permanently displace them for their rent stabilized apartments. The landlord yesterday said he remains committed to moving residents back into their apartments as soon as possible.

UPDATE 4/13 After a day of bad press, Joseph Betesh released a new statement yesterday evening. A representative of Bowery 8385 LLC said:Increase in operating costs consistent with advancing clinical development of SENS-111 for acute unilateral vestibulopathy (severe vertigo) and SENS-401 for sudden sensorineural hearing loss;





Validating deal to study combination SENS-401 with Cochlear implants to treat hearing loss;





Cash position of 7.6 million at December 31, 2017;





2018 outlook: phase II clinical data for lead drug-candidate, SENS-111; initiation of phase II clinical testing for SENS-401

MONTPELLIER, France, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sensorion (FR0012596468  ALSEN), a biotechnology company specializing in the treatment of inner ear diseases, today announces full-year financial results for the year to December 31, 2017 and its outlook for 2018.

Nawal Ouzren, CEO of Sensorion, said: Our full-year results are aligned with the clinical development for both SENS-111 and SENS-401. In addition, we received the Orphan Drug Designation from the U.S. FDA for SENS-401 to prevent cisplatin-induced hearing loss in paediatric cancer patients, indication for which we are considering a phase II clinical trial in 2019. Finally, we signed an industrial partnership with Cochlear Ltd, the world leader in cochlear implants, for the preclinical evaluation of SENS-401 in combination with their implants.

In 2018, we will concentrate on advancing and further accelerating our important clinical-stage therapeutic-candidates for inner ear disorders with focus on two key objectives: data read-out from the phase II clinical trial with SENS-111 and the start of a phase II clinical trial with SENS-401 in patients suffering from sudden sensorineural hearing loss.

2017 financial results

Annual accounts to December 31, 2017, drawn up under IFRS and approved by the Board of Directors on April 10, 2018, have been reviewed by the statutory auditors, whose report is currently being prepared.

The simplified income statement at December 31, 2017 was as follows:

In euros - IFRS 31/12/2017 31/12/2016 Operating income 2 025 413 1 769 763 Research & Development costs 7 872 735 7 817 751 General costs 3 668 464 2 373 384 Total operating costs 11 541 199 10 191 135 Operating profit/loss - 9 515 785 - 8 421 372 Financial profit/loss - 170 379 - 412 054 Net profit/loss - 9 686 164 - 8 883 426

At December 31, 2017, Sensorions operating income  consisting mainly of Research Tax Credit (1.9 million) and subsidies (0.1 million)  totaled 2.0 million, compared with 1.8 million at December 31, 2016.

Operating costs increased by 13% from 10.2 million at December 31, 2016 to 11.5 million at December 31, 2017, reflecting the ongoing clinical development of the Companys two lead development candidates, SENS-111 to treat acute severe vertigo and SENS-401 for treating hearing loss, as well as by non-recurring costs related to the change of CEO in April 2017. R&D costs accounted for 68% of total operating costs, compared with 77% in 2016.

The operating loss at December 31, 2017 was 9.5 million, versus 8.4 million at December 31, 2016.

Once the financial loss (0.2 million) is taken into account, there was a net loss of 9.7 million over the year to December 31, 2017, compared with 8.9 million the previous year.

The Companys workforce increased from 17 staff at December 31, 2016 to 20 at December 31, 2017.

Financial position

At December 31, 2017, Sensorion had cash and cash equivalents of 7.6 million, versus 8.5 million a year earlier. This decrease was the result of 8.1 million (versus 7.7 million in 2016) used for operations, the receipt of a 950 thousand interest-free innovation loan by Bpifrance and the Occitania region of Southern France and raising 5 million via the exercise of a third tranche of OCABSA financing (convertible bonds coupled with equity warrants) from Yorkville Advisors Global, LP, a U.S. healthcare specialist investor.

Finally, our industrial partner Cochlear made a 1.6 million equity investment in Sensorion on December 21, 2017, to evaluate combining SENS-401 with their cochlear implants.

Of the 500 equity warrants issued for this third tranche, 460 were converted into ordinary shares in 2017.

All of the 40 remaining equity warrants that had not converted into ordinary shares by their holder at December 31, 2017 were converted in January 2018. Within the framework of this flexible financing line put in place in November 2015, Sensorion has the option to increase its cash position by up to approximately 9 million over the next 7 months (plus 3.75 million should all the associated equity warrants be exercised) to further support its product development activities.

During the current financial year, Sensorion expects to receive 1.9 million in Research Tax Credit reimbursement, booked at December 31, 2017.

2017 Highlights

 Research & Development:

SENS-111 AUV : Following authorization by the US regulatory authorities in 2016, the phase II clinical trial in acute unilateral vestibulopathy has been authorized in 2017 in Europe and South Korea. The first clinical centers have been opened and the first patients enrolled. The company expects results from this clinical trial around the end of 2018.





: Following authorization by the US regulatory authorities in 2016, the phase II clinical trial in acute unilateral vestibulopathy has been authorized in 2017 in Europe and South Korea. The first clinical centers have been opened and the first patients enrolled. The company expects results from this clinical trial around the end of 2018. SENS-401 SSNHL : Preclinical results confirmed that regular oral administration of SENS-401, even when starting administration up to 96 hours after an acoustic trauma, generates significant recovery of hearing. Results from the phase I clinical trial with SENS-401 support the start of a Phase 2 clinical trial in 2018. Additional data will be communicated at a congress in April 2018.





: Preclinical results confirmed that regular oral administration of SENS-401, even when starting administration up to 96 hours after an acoustic trauma, generates significant recovery of hearing. Results from the phase I clinical trial with SENS-401 support the start of a Phase 2 clinical trial in 2018. Additional data will be communicated at a congress in April 2018. SENS-401 CIO: In 2017, Sensorion received an Orphan Drug Designation from the FDA for SENS-401 in the prevention of platinum-induced ototoxicity in paediatric cancer patients. This may contribute to acceleration of the SENS-401 development cycle and provide for 7 years commercial exclusivity in the USA, following potential market approval.

 Scientific Communication

In 2017, Sensorion presented or published the results of its R&D activities at leading congresses or in leading publications:

February 15, 2017: Sensorion inner ear disease product candidates (SENS-111 and SENS-401) and its innovative technology platform were featured in three posters and during one podium presentation at the 40th Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO) annual meeting held in Baltimore, MD.



May 2, 2017: Sensorion presented preclinical results of SENS-401 for prevention of Cisplatin-induced ototoxicity in an oral podium presentation at the Combined Otolaryngology Spring Meetings (COSM), which took place in San Diego, CA.



May 11-13, 2017: Sensorion was invited as speaker in the 1 st joint meeting of the European Histamine Research Society and the Japanese Histamine Research Society.



joint meeting of the European Histamine Research Society and the Japanese Histamine Research Society. September 12, 2017: Data published in Otology & Neurotology showed that oral clinical-stage SENS-401 significantly prevented Cisplatin-induced hearing loss in preclinical models.

 Strategic Partnership

In December 2017 Sensorion and Cochlear Ltd initiated a collaboration to evaluate therapeutic combination of SENS-401 in combination with Cochlear implants in a preclinical setting, with potential mid-stage clinical testing to begin as soon as 2019. Cochlear made a 1.6 million equity investment in Sensorion. In exchange, Cochlear received a right of first negotiation for a global license to use SENS-401 in combination with certain implantable devices.

Recent events and 2018 outlook

Since the start of 2017, Sensorion has vigorously pursued the development of all its drug candidate programs, whose progress should mark this year:

SENS-111 : Results from the ongoing Phase 2 clinical trial, with the planed enrolment of 207 patients, shall be available towards the end of 2018.



: Results from the ongoing Phase 2 clinical trial, with the planed enrolment of 207 patients, shall be available towards the end of 2018. SENS-401 : Sensorion plans to initiate a phase 2 clinical trial by the end of the first half of 2018. An interim analysis of results shall be available mid-2019.



: Sensorion plans to initiate a phase 2 clinical trial by the end of the first half of 2018. An interim analysis of results shall be available mid-2019. SENS-401 CIO: A Phase 2 clinical trial in a paediatric population treated by chemotherapy is being planned and could start beginning of 2019.

Upcoming Events

COSM (Combined Otolaryngology Spring Meetings) , April 18-22, 2018, National Harbor, MD, USA

, April 18-22, 2018, National Harbor, MD, USA 52 nd Symposium of the International Society for Otoneurology , May 24-26 2018, Toulouse, France

, May 24-26 2018, Toulouse, France Shareholders Meeting , May 31, 2018 in Paris

, May 31, 2018 in Paris Half Year results 2018, October 19, 2018.

About Sensorion

Sensorion is a biotech company pioneering novel treatments of inner ear diseases such as severe vertigo, tinnitus or hearing loss. Two products are currently in the clinical development stage: SENS-111, in phase 2 in acute unilateral vestibulopathy (vestibular neuritis), and SENS-401, which has completed a phase 1 trial. The company was founded by Inserm (the French Institute of Health and Medical Research) and is utilizing its pharmaceutical R&D experience and comprehensive technology platform to develop first-in-class easy-to-administer, notably orally active, drugs for treating and preventing hearing loss and the symptoms of bouts of vertigo and tinnitus.

Based in Montpellier, Southern France, Sensorion has received financial support from Bpifrance, through the InnoBio fund, and Inserm Transfert Initiative.

Sensorion has been listed on the Euronext Growth Paris exchange since April 2015. www.sensorion-pharma.com

Contacts Sensorion

Nawal Ouzren

CEO



Tel: +33 (0)4 67 20 77 30 Investor Relations

LifeSci Advisors LLC

Chris Maggos, Managing Director, Europe

chris@lifesciadvisors.com

Tel. : +41 79 367 6254 Label: SENSORION

ISIN: FR0012596468

Mnemonic: ALSEN

Presse

Alize RP

Caroline Carmagnol & Wendy Rigal

sensorion@alizerp.com

Tel: +33 (0)1 44 54 36 66

Disclaimer

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements concerning Sensorion and its business. Such forward looking statements are based on assumptions that Sensorion considers to be reasonable. However, there can be no assurance that such forward-looking statements will be verified, which statements are subject to numerous risks, including the risks set forth in the Document de reference registration document filed with the Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF- French Financial Market Authority) on September 6th, 2017 under nR.17-062 and to the development of 5/5 economic conditions, financial markets and the markets in which Sensorion operates. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are also subject to risks not yet known to Sensorion or not currently considered material by Sensorion. The occurrence of all or part of such risks could cause actual results, financial conditions, performance or achievements of Sensorion to be materially different from such forward-looking statements.

This press release and the information that it contains do not constitute an offer to sell or subscribe for, or a solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for, Sensorion shares in any country. The communication of this press release in certain countries may constitute a violation of local laws and regulations. Any recipient of this press release must inform oneself of any such local restrictions and comply therewith.English Finnish

EVLI BANK PLC PRESS RELEASE APRIL 12, 2018 AT 10.00 AM

Evli Bank Plc will publish its Interim Report for the period January-March 2018 on Wednesday April 25, 2018 at approximately 10.00 am. The Interim Report will be available on the company's website at www.evli.com after publishing.

Invitation to investors and analysts

Maunu Lehtimaki, CEO, and Juho Mikola, CFO, will present the result to investors and analysts at Evli Bank (Aleksanterinkatu 19 A, 4 fl, Helsinki) on Wednesday April 25, 2018 at 11.00 am. The presentation will be held in Finnish. After the event, the presentation material will be available in English at www.evli.com/investors. To participate in the event, please sign up in advance to ir@evli.com on April 23 at 4.00 pm. at the latest.

Welcome!

EVLI BANK PLC

For additional information, please contact:

Mikaela Herrala, IR and communications manager, Evli Bank Plc, tel. +358 (0)9 4766 9823, mikaela.herrala@evli.com

Evli Bank Plc

Evli is a bank specialized in investments that helps institutions, corporations and private persons increase their wealth. The product and service offering includes mutual funds, asset management and capital markets services, alternative investment products, investment research, administration of incentive programs and Corporate Finance services. The company also offers banking services that support clients' investment operations. Evli is the highest ranked and most used institutional asset manager in Finland*.

*TNS Sifo Prospera External Asset Management Finland 2017, SFR Scandinavian Financial Research Institutional Investment Services, Finland 2017 (shared first place).

Distribution: Main media, www.evli.comHome >Police Enforcement > Checkpoints and Stops > Feds Bust New Jersey Cops For Ripping Off MotoristsVANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Novoheart (Novoheart or the Company) (TSXV:NVH) (FWB:3NH) is pleased to announce that Dr. Ronald Li, Founder and CEO of the Company, has been awarded with the 2017 Distinguished Alumnus Award by the University of Waterloo, Canada, from which he graduated with a B.Sc. in 1994. As one of two recipients of the award from the Faculty of Science, Dr. Li is recognized for his two decades of research on human cardiac tissue engineering, and his continuous efforts to translate and commercialize basic findings into tangible applications and community benefits, including the founding of Novoheart in 2014.



It is a great honor to receive this award from the University of Waterloo, said Dr. Li. Translating decades of research for commercialization by Novoheart has been a highly rewarding experience, and I look forward to leading the Company to realize the immense potential of our technologies to revolutionize modern medicine, and benefit patients, pharmaceutical and biotech clients, and shareholders in the process.

For more information about the awards, please refer to the following link: https://uwaterloo.ca/alumni/awardsandmedals/2017-alumni-awards

About Novoheart:

Novoheart is a global stem cell biotechnology company pioneering an array of next-generation human heart tissue prototypes. It is the first company in the world to have engineered miniature living human heart pumps that can revolutionize drug discovery, helping to save time and money for developing new therapeutics. Also known as 'human heart-in-a-jar', Novohearts bio-artificial human heart constructs are created using state-of-the-art and proprietary stem cell and bioengineering approaches and are utilized by drug developers for accurate preclinical testing as to the effectiveness and safety of new drugs, maximizing the successes in drug discovery whilst minimizing costs and harm caused to patients.

For further information, please contact:

Ronald Li, CEO

info@novoheart.com



Babak Pedram, Investor Relations

Virtus Advisory Group

Tel: 416-995-8651

bpedram@virtusadvisory.com



For media enquiries or interviews, please contact:

Josh Stanbury, Media Relations

Tel. 416-628-7441

media@novoheart.com



Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are statements that relate to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address expected future business and financial performance, and often contain words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", and "intend", statements that an action or event "may", "might", "could", "should", or "will" be taken or occur, or other similar expressions. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation; statements about the Companys future plans, its goals and expectations, and the potential applications of its MyHeartTM platform are forward-looking statements. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements, or other future events, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the risks identified in the management discussion and analysis section of Novoheart Holdings Inc.s interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings with the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable Canadian securities regulators. Forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made and the respective companies undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements.TORONTO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Poor energy policy choicesincluding Ontarios Green Energy Acthave increased electricity prices for residents, cost tens of thousands of manufacturing workers their jobs and produced only minimal health and environmental benefits, finds a new collection of essays released today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.



Ontario is a prime example of how not to manage energy policyextreme government interference in the electricity market has made life more unaffordable for Ontarians and damaged the provinces economy, said Kenneth Green, senior director of natural resource studies at the Fraser Institute and a contributing author of Understanding Changes in Ontarios Electricity Markets and Their Effects.

Among the policies that have created Ontarios electricity crisis is phasing out coal-power generation, granting wind and solar generators long-term guaranteed contracts above market prices, and the so-called Global Adjustment charge that, in part, actually pays generators not to produce any power.

These policies have hurt Ontario residents and the economy in several ways:

Residential electricity costs increased 71 per cent between 2008 and 2016, more than double the national average increase of 34 per cent.

In 2016, Toronto residents paid, on average, $60 more a month for electricity than the average Canadian.

Large industrial users in Toronto saw electricity prices jump 46 per cent between 2010 and 2016, while the average increase in electricity costs for the rest of Canada was only 14 percent for large industrial users.

Ontarios high electricity prices reduced employment in manufacturing by some 75,000 jobs between 2008 and 2015.

And crucially, research has shown the Green Energy Act has not produced the environmental or health benefits, nor the so-called green jobs that advocates and the government promised.

The recent history of electricity in Ontario has been pain without gain for residents and businesses alike, said Ross McKitrick, Fraser Institute senior fellow and economics professor at the University of Guelph.

Policymakers need to fully understand the nature of the bad policy decisions and their full effect before they can craft meaningful reforms that will actually lower hydro prices.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Kenneth Green, Senior Director, Natural Resource Studies

Fraser Institute

Ross McKitrick, Senior Fellow

Fraser Institute

To arrange media interviews or for more information, please contact:

Bryn Weese, Media Relations Specialist, Fraser Institute

Tel: (604) 688-0221 ext. 589

E-mail: bryn.weese@fraserinstitute.org

Follow the Fraser Institute on Twitter | Become a fan on Facebook

The Fraser Institute is an independent Canadian public policy research and educational organization with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal and ties to a global network of think-tanks in 87 countries. Its mission is to improve the quality of life for Canadians, their families and future generations by studying, measuring and broadly communicating the effects of government policies, entrepreneurship and choice on their well-being. To protect the Institutes independence, it does not accept grants from governments or contracts for research. Visit www.fraserinstitute.org

NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ImageWare Systems, Inc., a leader in mobile and cloud-based, multi-modal biometric identity management solutions, provides its first sales update for 2018.



Jim Miller, Chairman and CEO of ImageWare, said that We have sold additional licenses to an existing customer who is expanding the use of the IWS Biometric Engine and three of our partners have made initial sales of GoVerify ID (GVID). We continue to expect that many initial sales will often be made for enterprise/employee users and then adding users as services are rolled out to their customers.

Working with our partners, combined with anticipated sales from our own sales efforts, we now expect additional sales on a regular basis and look forward to the next sales update in May, concluded Miller.

Federal Government Customer

An existing Federal government customer, who has been using the patented IWS Biometric Engine for biometric authentication for more than five years, has made a $730,000 purchase of additional licenses.

Partner Sales

An ImageWare partner has made a sale to a privately held global corporation which has placed an initial order for enterprise GVID to serve the first 1,000 employees with plans to roll out GVID to its remaining 55,000 employees throughout the year.

Another ImageWare partner has made a sale of its new cloud-based product with GVID built-in to two federal government agencies for use by select employees.

Fujitsu has purchased licenses for 1,000 of its employees.

For all four of these partner sales, ImageWare generates revenue on a per user/per month basis.

GoVerifyID

ImageWares GoVerifyID technology provides turnkey solutions to secure enterprise systems from security infrastructure providers such as Fujitsu, Microsoft, IBM, CA, HPE and other vendors. GVID is flexible to support nearly any use case and business process for your employees, partners, and customers. GVID enables organizations and users to select the biometrics of their choice including face, voice, fingerprint, palm image, and palm vein to provide increased security and convenience. It deploys quickly either on premises, and with multiple public, private and hybrid cloud hosting options including Fujitsu Cloud Service K5., and AWS (Amazon Web Services).

About ImageWare Systems, Inc.

ImageWare Systems, Inc. is a leading developer of mobile and cloud-based identity management solutions, providing patented biometric authentication solutions for the enterprise. The company delivers next-generation biometrics as an interactive and scalable cloud-based solution. ImageWare brings together cloud and mobile technology to offer multi-factor authentication for smartphone users, for the enterprise, and across industries.

ImageWares products support multi-modal biometric authentication including, but not limited to, face, voice, fingerprint, iris, palm, and more. All the biometrics can be combined with or used as replacements for authentication and access control tools, including tokens, digital certificates, passwords, and PINS, to provide the ultimate level of assurance, accountability, and ease of use for corporate networks, web applications, mobile devices, and PC desktop environments.

ImageWare is headquartered in San Diego, California, with offices in Portland, Oregon, Ottawa, Ontario, and Mexico City, Mexico. To learn more about ImageWare, visit iwsinc.com; follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook.

For the complete interview with Jim Miller, Chairman and CEO, ImageWare Systems, please click, here or here: www.securitysolutionswatch.com/Interviews/in_Boardroom_ImageWare.html

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USA 1+914.690.9351Universal Cable Productions has optioned the AI-focused comic.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Another day, another comic to be adapted to the screen, with the latest being Injection. Published by Image Comics, Injection is written by Warren Ellis, with art by Declan Shalvey and colors by Jordie Bellaire.

The series revolves around a group of five specialized individuals who are brought together by the British government to hypothesize about the future of human culture. After discovering the results, the group decides to act on it by creating an unusual artificial intelligence using a combination of technology and shamanistic magic, which makes its way into our world.

Universal Cable Production has optioned the comic, but no network has been attached yet.$19M budget for 2022 approved by county commission

The 2022 budget weighs in at $19 million compared to $17.9 million this year. For comparison, the 2014 budget was $14 million.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: Investec Wealth & Investment (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.



N/A (c) Name of offeror/offeree in relation to whose relevant securities this form relates:

Use a separate form for each offeror/offeree



James Halstead plc (d) If an exempt fund manager connected with an offeror/offeree, state this and specify identity of offeror/offeree:



N/A (e) Date position held/dealing undertaken:

For an opening position disclosure, state the latest practicable date prior to the disclosure



10th April 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"



No

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:







Interests Short positions Number % Number % (1) Relevant securities owned and/or controlled: 5,027,099 2.42% (2) Cash-settled derivatives:



(3) Stock-settled derivatives (including options) and agreements to purchase/sell:



TOTAL: 5,027,099 2.42%

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



Ordinary Shares







Ordinary Shares

Ordinary Shares







Purchase







Sale

Sale







2,960







928

2,960



400p







396.001p

400p

NB: The additional change of 1,239 shares since our last disclosure on 9th April 2018 is due to the transfer in of a Discretionary holding.

(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





(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"



N/A





(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"



N/A





(c) Attachments

Is a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions) attached? NO





Date of disclosure: 12th April 2018



Contact name: Phil Beardwell Chartered FCSI Telephone number: 020 7597 1356

Public disclosures under Rule 8 of the Code must be made to a Regulatory Information Service and must also be emailed to the Takeover Panel at monitoring@disclosure.org.uk. 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.English French Dutch

Press Release

Brussels, 12th April 2018



Orange Belgium will publish its results for the first quarter of 2018 on Friday, April 20 at 07:00 CET.

Orange Belgium Investor Relations is pleased to invite investors and analysts to participate in a conference call hosted by:

Michael Trabbia, CEO

Arnaud Castille, CFO

Siddy Jobe, Director Investor Relations & Treasury

The conference call will start at 10:00 am CET (9:00 am UK / 4:00 am EST). To access the call, please dial one of the following numbers 5-10 minutes prior to the start of the conference call in order to avoid waiting time. Consequently register with following pin code: 27165134# and provide your name and the company you work for.

Belgium (EN) +32 24035816 Belgium (FR) +32 24015391 Belgium (NL) +32 24015392 Canada +1 4162164194 France +33 170710159 Germany +49 69222225429 Ireland +35 315060451 Italy +39 0236013841 Luxembourg +352 27300163 Netherlands +31 207095119 Spain +34 911140101 Switzerland +41 445831805 United Kingdom +44 2071943759 United States +1 8442860643

The recorded session will be available after the conference call and can be downloaded from our website. You will find the link to access the recorded session on the website below.

The press release for the first quarter of 2018 and the results toolkit will be available on Friday, April 20 on the financial section of the corporate website at : https://corporate.orange.be/en/financial-information/financial-results

Please note that the 2016 full year and 2017 quarterly financial and operational results restated under the IFRS 15 standard can be found in the financial section of the corporate website as well.

About Orange Belgium

Orange Belgium is one of the leading telecommunication operators on the Belgian market, with over 3 million customers, and in Luxembourg through its subsidiary Orange Luxembourg.

As a convergent actor, we provide mobile telecommunication services, internet and TV to private clients, as well as innovative mobile and fixed line services to businesses. Our high-performance mobile network supports 2G, 3G, 4G and 4G+ technology and is the subject of ongoing investments.

Orange Belgium is a subsidiary of the Orange Group, one of the leading European and African operators for mobile telephony and ADSL internet access, as well as one of the world leaders for telecommunication services to enterprises.

Orange Belgium is listed on the Brussels Stock Exchange (OBEL).

For more information: corporate.orange.be, www.orange.be or follow us on Twitter: @pressOrangeBe.

Press contacts

Annelore Marynissen (NL) - annelore.marynissen@orange.com - +32 479 01 60 58

Jean-Pascal Bouillon (FR) - jean-pascal.bouillon@orange.com - +32 473 94 87 31

press@orange.be

Investors contact

Siddy Jobe - ir@orange.be - +32(0)2 745 80 92Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.FORT LEE, N.J. and TEL AVIV, Israel, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OwnBackup, a data backup and recovery innovator, today announced the close of a $15.5 million round of financing co-led by new investor Vertex Ventures and existing investor Insight Venture Partners. Existing investors Innovation Endeavors, Oryzn Capital and Salesforce Ventures also participated in the round.



Since announcing its last round in July 2017, the company has driven exponential growth by expanding its market reach, continuing its technology innovation, deepening its investment in the Salesforce community, and adding strategic partnerships with Sage and Veeva. Already serving hundreds of mid-sized companies and large enterprises across every major industry, OwnBackup helps customers protect critical cloud datasecuring trillions of SaaS/PaaS records every day, preventing data corruption, ensuring business continuity, minimizing operational disruptions and meeting compliance mandates.

OwnBackup has emerged as a cloud-era leader in data protection by putting its visionary technology into practice, said Aviad Ariel, general partner at Vertex Ventures. Its impressive growth in the last year demonstrates that the company is primed to dominate the evolving SaaS/PaaS data protection industry as more companies realize the need to better secure critical application data in the cloud and comply with regulatory requirements such as GDPR and HIPAA.

As more companies embrace SaaS and PaaS environments, security and compliance challenges are intensifying. To meet the rising demand for additional cloud data protection, OwnBackup will use this investment to accelerate its global growth. The funding will drive continued product innovation and support aggressive recruiting efforts to double its team in the United States and Israel before the end of the year.

While companies often assume that the SaaS and PaaS vendors are responsible for the data, the company owning the data is still responsible when data is corrupted by accident, malicious intent or through bad code and weak integrations. With the support of our investors, we will continue to provide the ultimate in independent data protection peace of mind -- ensuring that companies have the same data protection in their cloud environments as their on-premise applications, added OwnBackup CEO Sam Gutmann. We look forward to building on our successes to date as we use the latest funding to break new ground in the data protection space and fill the security void that many companies were not even aware existed.

A pioneer in cloud-to-cloud backup, recovery and replication, OwnBackups award-winning technology is built on the Salesforce Platform and available on the Salesforce AppExchange. Advanced features in the latest version of the OwnBackup platform tighten SaaS data backup and recovery security, support regulatory compliance, offer greater control and access, and improve backup and recovery performancemaking data protection easier, faster and better integrated with existing security systems.

Vertex Ventures Aviad Ariel will join Nicolas Wittenborn of Insight Venture Partners and Ziv Kop of Innovation Endeavors on the OwnBackup Board.

For complete details on the latest OwnBackup offering, please visit: https://www.ownbackup.com/products

About OwnBackup

OwnBackup, a leading cloud-to-cloud backup and restore vendor, provides secure, automated, daily backups of SaaS and PaaS data, as well as sophisticated data compare and restore tools for disaster recovery. OwnBackup covers data loss and corruption caused by human errors, malicious intent, integration errors and rogue applications. Co-founded by seasoned data-recovery, data-protection and information-security experts, OwnBackup is a top-ranked backup and restore ISV on the Salesforce AppExchange and was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Business Continuity and IT Disaster Recovery. Headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with R&D, support and other functions in Tel Aviv and London, OwnBackup is the vendor of choice for some of the worlds largest users of SaaS applications.

For more information, visit http://www.ownbackup.com.

Media Contact:

Erica Camilo

Connexa Communications for OwnBackup

C: 610.639.5644

Erica@connexacommunications.com

remaining of

Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading.The International RescueCommittee helps people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflictand disaster to survive, recover, and gain control of their future. It wascreated by Albert Einstein more than 80 years and has been working in Ugandasince 1998. It has particularly working in the conflict zones where tens ofthousands of people have been kills and over 1.6 million displaced. Following apeace agreement in 2006, Ugandans are returning home and looking to rebuildtheir lives. The IRC is there to protect women and children from violence andexploitation by fostering a safe environment and encouraging education, and issupporting farmers and small businesses, and helping communities promote peaceand long-term development.The Office of the UnitedNations High Commissioner for Refugees was established on December 14, 1950 bythe United Nations General Assembly. UNHCRs mandate under the Statute of theOffice of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is to lead andco-ordinate action for international protection to refugees; seek permanentsolutions for the problems of refugees and safeguard refugee rights andwell-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 theReduction of Statelessness.English French

MONTREAL, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mason Graphite Inc. (Mason Graphite or the Company) (TSX.V:LLG) (OTCQX:MGPHF) is pleased to announce that Mario Felicetti has joined the Company as Vice-President, Sales effective immediately. In the immediate future, he will be based in Amsterdam and will eventually relocate to the Companys Head Office in Montreal.



Mario Felicetti, MBA, Eng., is a Chemical Engineer with more than 15 years of experience in Sales and Marketing in several industrial areas including the last 5 years with Johnson Matthey, a global leader in sustainable technologies, where he had a special focus on energy storage materials. He was instrumental in defining and implementing their global commercial strategy as he negotiated several multiyear contracts with Li-ion battery manufacturers. He managed five regional sales offices in Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Munich and Montreal through which he successfully commercialized new materials for cathodes and anodes.

As he joins the team, Mario will further advance discussions with customers, establish the required sales structure and develop the customers needs management system on which the production planning system will be based.

Benoit Gascon, President and CEO of Mason Graphite commented: We are very enthusiastic and eager to have Mario join us. After spending some time with our team in Montreal and reviewing the development work achieved so far, we all believe that he is the perfect fit for the Company and the upcoming commercialization of our battery materials. Having said this, his experience also includes several other industrial fields and Mario will be instrumental in the commercialization of our graphite products across all applications where he will be able to leverage our teams experience.

The management team of Mason Graphite has a proven track record in the commercialization of graphite products in all major applications and geographic areas. This is the result of a continuous effort to establish and maintain strong and long-term relationships with customers as well as properly understanding and meeting their specific needs. Flexibility to meet those needs, which can be significantly different from an application to another, was therefore incorporated right from the beginning in the design of Mason Graphites operations.

About Mason Graphite and the Lac Gueret Project

Mason Graphite is a Canadian mining and processing company focused on the development of its 100% owned Lac Gueret natural graphite deposit located in northeastern Quebec. The Company is led by a highly experienced team that has over five decades of experience in graphite production, sales, and research and development. For more information, visit www.masongraphite.com.

Mason Graphite Inc. On Behalf of the Board

Benoit Gascon, CPA, CA, President & Chief Executive Officer

For more Information:

Simon Marcotte, CFA, Director Corporate Development at +1 (647) 801-7273 and at info@masongraphite.com

For more information relating to local communities:

Luc Veilleux, CPA, CA, Executive Vice-President and CFO at +1 (514) 289-3582 and at info@masongraphite.com

Head Office: 3030, boulevard Le Carrefour, bureau 600, Laval, Quebec, H7T 2P5

Cautionary Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. All information contained herein that is not clearly historical in nature may constitute forward-looking information. Generally, such 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: (i) volatile stock price; (ii) the general global markets and economic conditions; (iii) the possibility of write-downs and impairments; (iv) the risk associated with exploration, development and operations of mineral deposits; (v) the risk associated with establishing title to mineral properties and assets; (vi) the risks associated with entering into joint ventures; (vii) fluctuations in commodity prices; (viii) the risks associated with uninsurable risks arising during the course of exploration, development and production; (ix) competition faced by the resulting issuer in securing experienced personnel and financing; (x) access to adequate infrastructure to support mining, processing, development and exploration activities; (xi) the risks associated with changes in the mining regulatory regime governing the resulting issuer; (xii) the risks associated with the various environmental regulations the resulting issuer is subject to; (xiii) risks related to regulatory and permitting delays; (xiv) risks related to potential conflicts of interest; (xv) the reliance on key personnel; (xvi) liquidity risks; (xvii) the risk of potential dilution through the issue of common shares; (xviii) the Company does not anticipate declaring dividends in the near term; (xix) the risk of litigation; and (xx) risk management.

Forward-looking information is based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable at the time such statements are made, including but not limited to, continued exploration activities, no material adverse change in metal prices, exploration and development plans proceeding in accordance with plans and such plans achieving their stated expected outcomes, receipt of required regulatory approvals, and such other assumptions and factors as set out herein. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the 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 forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking information. Such forward-looking information has been provided for the purpose of assisting investors in understanding the Company's business, operations and exploration plans and may not be appropriate for other purposes. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is made as of the date of this press release, and the Company does not undertake to update such forward-looking information except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.



The High Court of Justice has ruled if Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit does not approve the governments latest solution, the detained migrants will be released within five days. The court handed down its ruling on Tuesday, 25 Nissan pertaining to the ousting of the migrants to a third country, which is believed to be Uganda, pertaining to 200 illegals being held in the Saharonim Detention Facilty.

The court set the deadline at Sunday, 30 Nissan at 12 noon, stating if the matter is not closed and approved, the 200 illegals will be set freed at that time.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)The Israel Prison Authority has doubled the maximum permitted family visits for imprisoned terrorists, Walla News reports. About a year ago, the imprisoned so-called security prisoners ended their hunger strikes, and now, they are rewarded in with increased visitations. There were over 150,000 family visits in the last year, which translates to two monthly visits each for 6,200 imprisoned terrorists.

Dr. Simcha Goldin, who is the father of Lt. Hadar Goldin HYD, whose body is being held by Hamas since 2014 commented on this. He explained that prior to their hunger strike, the imprisoned terrorists were only entitled to one monthly visit, with transportation costs covered by the International Red Cross. Now they receive another monthly visit and the transportation costs are underwritten by the PA (Palestinian Authority).

The parents of Hadar are asking Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan to detail what perks these prisoners are receiving and he wants to know if they include access to this summers Mondial Games from Russia.

Walla News reports that talks with senior Palestinians to end last years hunger strike among the prisoners led by arch terrorist Marwan Barghouti, were held in the Ashkelon Prison. Talks lasted for 20 consecutive hours, but Israel Prison Authority (IPA) officials deny this was the case.

Walla adds, the hunger strike began on April 17th with 1,100 prisoners taking part. Most of the hunger-strikers were aligned with Fatah. According to the IPA figures, during the 40 days until the strike ended, the number of hunger-strikes climbed to 1,578 but during the process, 750 of the prisoners bailed out. On the 29th day of the strike, Barghouti announced a list of demands. The letter submitted to IPA officials contained no less than 19 pages. They wrote, Even Yigal Amir, the murderer of a Prime Minister, and even those who burned the Darawshe family to death are entitled to family visits.

The IPA rejects the Walla report, which it calls inaccurate. It explains anything to do with transportation for family members for visitations is handled by the International Red Cross. IPA officials add there has been no change, explaining imprisoned Hamas terrorists from Gaza do not receive visitations. The IPA adds the hunger strike was a failure, and most of their demands were not achieved despite reports to the contrary.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)Interior Minister Aryeh Deri on Wednesday, 26 Nissan, appointed Interior Ministry Director-General Mordechai Cohen to examine the way in which Dublin Mayor Micheal Mac Donncha managed to enter the country on Tuesday despite the order issued to prevent him from entering Israel due to his activities activity against Israel, which includes cooperating with BDS actions against Israel.

Minister Deri said this morning: The entry inspection is required to prevent such mishaps in the future and to draw lessons from what happened. In any event, upon the departure of the Mayor of Dublin from the country and in light of his activities against Israel, I ordered him to give him a letter in which he would be forbidden to enter the territory of Israel in the future.

The preliminary probe into the incident revealed an embarrassing simple error, the misspelling of the mayors name in the database banning his entry.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)My favourite reader comment this week comes from Navy Retired, in Merseyside.

Responding to our story about plans from British Gas to hike dual fuel energy bills by 60 a year, he says this:

If you are a British Gas customer, you might as well put 200 - 300 down the nearest drain. Switch - it is so easy.

Navy Retired, I think youre bang on the money, and 98 green arrows suggest Im not alone.

Price rise: More than four million households will see their bills rise by around 60 a year

When a company charges you more for something than you can get it easily elsewhere, in general it at least tries to justify the additional cost. Maybe it claims youll get better customer service, or benefit from greater reliability, or maybe the product youre buying is of a slightly higher quality.

But the gas that comes out of your pipes and heats your home or cooks your dinner is exactly the same, whether you buy it from British Gas or anyone else.

And there are countless energy suppliers that offer customer service that many would consider just as good.

So if you are one of the four million households on the British Gas standard variable tariff, its likely that youre paying hundreds of pounds more than you need to absolutely needlessly. Straight down the drain.

As usual a chorus of MPs, regulators and consumer champions have expressed their outrage. But chances are it wont make a blind bit of difference.

You can though. Tell it youre angry  switch.

Most households that havent switched for a while  British Gas customers or other  could probably make a saving by switching.

Do like Cheesed Off from London, my second favourite commenter of the week. He or she says: I havent change yet but will now. British Gas has lost my custom for sure this time.

Green arrow to that, Cheesed Off.Prospects for the survival of Sir Martin Sorrell as chief executive of WPP are not looking bright.

American law firm WilmerHale is under instruction from chairman Roberto Quarta and senior non-executive director Nicole Seligman to conduct the probe as swiftly as possible.

The probe relates to claims of personal misconduct and possible misuse of assets and could be completed next week. Sorrell rejects the allegations.

Speed is seen as the essence by the board. There is concern uncertainty at the very top, in a company dominated by Sorrell for three decades, could damage confidence in the advertising world.

American law firm WilmerHale is under instruction to conduct the probe into Sir Martin Sorrell as swiftly as possible

Sorrell is the glue that holds WPP together and spends a great deal of time schmoozing global clients.

In spite of the impasse there was a small victory for WPP offshoot MediaCom when Sky said that it would be renewing its 425million media buying contract.

The current atmosphere at WPP is described as that of a war room. WilmerHale, representing the company, is making regular demands on Sorrell and his team for information relating to the inquiry.

Sorrell has engaged co-managing partners Sue Prevezer QC and Richard East of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to work alongside employment specialist firm Lewis Silkin, to advise on responses.

In the past Sorrell has been able to count on a compliant board, which among other things signed off on big pay packets.

Under pressure from investors governance has been strengthened and the chief executive is no longer assured of support.

Indeed, there are suggestions that at least one non-executive has been singing like a canary and may be responsible for the leak of the inquiry to the Wall Street Journal.

Friends of Sorrell insist he has been scrupulous in keeping his personal and company expenses separate. Nevertheless, the probe has brought to a head concerns about what happens at WPP when Sorrell, 73, finally steps down.

WPP expanded through a dizzying number of deals as Sorrell, who predicted the migration of advertising online, sought to keep pace with Silicon Valley.

But with the share price under pressure critics are raring to dislodge him and believe that the time has come to simplify the group by selling its data management arm, valued at 3.5billion.

It now looks highly unlikely that Sorrell will be around to reshape the creative champion he so carefully assembled.

French sweetener

Brent Cross owner Hammerson is standing firm in the face of the onslaught from French shopping centre group Klepierre, which is seeking to gatecrash a sweetheart deal with Intu.

Hammerson is unimpressed by the 3 per cent uplift in the offer price to 635p per share which is 20 per cent below the current net asset value of the company of 790p in March.

That is the cash which could be released if properties were sold off piecemeal.

It contrasts the value of the French offer with the full asset price being paid for Westfield by another European shopping centre owner Unibail-Rodamco.

Hammerson looks vulnerable because investors are unsure of the value in Intu, owner of the Trafford Centre and other emporiums across Britain and in Spain.

Nervousness about the deal stems from concerns about online shopping and fears Brexit will hit consumer confidence.

Hammerson chief executive David Atkins needs to come out fighting and explain in detail how his know-how on broadening the social appeal of shopping can transform Intu.

More than that, it needs to offer an immediate benefit to investors in the shape of a special dividend, share buyback or some other device.

If the Melrose tussle for GKN demonstrated anything, it is how supposedly long investment funds, such as Legal & General and Aviva Investors, value the sugar rush of returns above all else.

True blue

Fears that would-be blue passport printer De La Rue might be the next victim of Melrose-style asset-strippers appear to be greatly exaggerated.

Investor Crystal Amber bought a stake after spotting an established and reliable British company with a modest valuation of 500million, which delivers 72million of profits.

Pity the civil servants who opted for European rival Gemalto failed to show the same confidence. Heigh-ho.RECORD HIT Passengers travelling through Gatwick Airport increased by 2.5 per cent in March compared with a year earlier as long haul flights soared in popularity  up 23.2 per cent.

The busiest March on record saw 3.5m customers pass through.

ROCK RISE Indoor climbing centre Rock Up is opening new sites at Intus Watford, and Rushden Lakes shopping centre in Northampton.

Sales grew 87 per cent last year. It hopes to reach 2.5million in sales this year.

CHINA RANGE Troubled department store House of Fraser is to sell upmarket Chinese brands previously unavailable in the UK.

SUN PROJECT Car maker Bentley Motors has started construction of a solar-powered car port with 10,000 solar panels over its workers car park at its HQ in Crewe.

The project will take around six months to complete and could help cover 24 per cent of Bentleys electricity needs.

ACCOUNTANT SUED A disgruntled business is suing accountant Grant Thornton over a tax avoidance scheme.

R&M Electrical used a programme developed by the bean-counter to offer its staff a low-tax award scheme that was later attacked by the tax inspectors HMRC.

R&M was landed with a 692,364 tax bill as a result and blames the debacle on Grant Thorntons negligence.

START-UP SLOWDOWN Investment in ambitious start-ups by venture capital firms slowed sharply in the first three months of 2018.

They pumped around 770million into fast-growing companies in the quarter, according to accountant KPMG, down from 2billion in the previous three months.

BANK BACKING UK trading tech firm Access Fintech has won a multi-million pound investment from Wall Street bank JP Morgan.

SCANDANAVIA SWITCH Producers of bitcoin are moving to Norway and Sweden to take advantage of the cheap hydroelectric power and low temperatures, which will mean that they will spend less on cooling their computers.

MIRROR PROBE The UKs competition watchdog is investigating Trinity Mirrors 126.7million deal to buy a string of titles from Richard Desmonds media empire.

The Competition and Markets Authority will weigh up whether Trinitys purchase of the brands, such as the Daily Express and the Daily Star, will hit competition in the UK media industry.Trial: Sisse Bohart allegedly submitted fake Euribor rates on behalf of Barclays

A Barclays trader was recorded bragging about how he rigged markets to boost his profits, a court heard.

Philippe Moryoussef, 49, boasted he fixed the Euribor rate used to set global trading prices.

A jury heard that in one case Moryoussef said: 'Don't you think that the fixing of Euribor was too low? Well that was me.'

In another recording, he said: 'I pulled off an absolutely massive one the other day, keep it to yourself.'

The other four defendants include 41-year-old Sisse Bohart, who allegedly submitted fake Euribor rates on behalf of Barclays - benefiting traders whose profits were linked to the benchmark's level.

Also on trial are Colin Bermingham, 61; Achim Kraemer, 53; and Carlo Palombo, 39.

They face one count of conspiracy to defraud between January 2005 and December 2009.

Jurors at Southwark Crown Court were told they did not need to consider whether a fraud had taken place, only whether the five defendants in the dock were involved after a sixth defendant, Deutsche Bank trader Christian Bittar, 46, described by the prosecution as 'the main defendant', pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud in March.

Prosecutor James Waddington QC told the jury: 'During this case you will learn how a few individuals gamed the system to rip off a lot of people they did business with.'

The court heard Bittar was friends with Frenchman Moryoussef, who is not in the dock and is being tried in his absence, and that there are dozens of recorded phone calls between the two.

Bittar was so successful in his deal making, the court heard, he earned millions in bonuses on top of his 130,000 salary.

The trial continues.English Lithuanian

Correct attachment of yearly Financial Statements in English (instead of Lithuanian) added.



By the initiative and decision of the Board of the company the Annual General Meeting of Vilniaus Degtine AB (company code 120057287) to be held on April 26th, 2018 at 10.00 a.m. at the company's premises in Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius is convened. Registration of shareholders starts at 9.00 a.m.

The shareholders attending the meeting must provide an identification document. The representatives of the shareholders must additionally posses a proxy approved by the procedure prescribed by law.

A shareholder may, by means of electronic communications, authorize a natural or legal person to participate and vote in his name at the General Meeting of Shareholders. Such a power of attorney of the shareholder need not be certified by a notary. The power of attorney issued through electronic communication channels must be confirmed by the shareholder by a safe electronic signature developed by safe signature equipment and approved by a qualified certificate effective in the Republic of Lithuania. The shareholder shall inform the company on the power of attorney issued through electronic communication channels by e-mail vd@degtine.lt no later than last business day before the meeting at 4 p.m. The power of attorney and notification shall be issued in writing. The power of attorney and notification to the company shall be signed with the Electronic Signature but not the letters sent via the e-mail. By submitting the notification to the company the shareholder shall include the Internet address from which it would be possible to download the software to verify an Electronics Signature of the shareholder.

The Meeting's accounting day  April 19th, 2018. The persons who are shareholders of the company at the end of accounting day of the General Meeting of Shareholders shall have the right to attend and vote at the General Meeting of Shareholders.

The rights accounting day  May 11th, 2018. The shareholders will use property rights arising from the resolutions accepted during the General Meeting of Shareholders on a ratio basis of number of shares at the end of the rights accounting day.

On the Agenda:

1. Auditor's opinion on the set of company's financial statements and on the company's yearly report.

2. Proposals and comments of the Supervisory Board.

3. Approval of the company's yearly report for the year 2017.

4. Approval of the set of company's financial statements for the year 2017.

5. Appropriation of the years 2017 profit of the Company

6. Election of the firm of auditors and establishment of terms of remuneration for audit services.

7. Revocation of chairman of Supervisory Board and election of new member of Supervisory Board.

8. Other questions.

The agenda of the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders may be supplemented by initiative of shareholders who own shares no less than 1/20 of all the votes. Proposals to the agenda of the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders may be submitted by e-mail vd@degtine.lt or delivered to the Company's office at Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius, no later than the April 12th, 2018. Please be informed that along with a proposal to supplement the agenda of the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders must be submitted the drafts of proposed decisions, or if the decisions shall not be adopted, explanations on each of the proposed issue.

Shareholders who own shares no less than 1/20 of all votes own the right at any time before the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders or during the meeting in writing (delivering proposals to the company at Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius) or by e-mail vd@degtine.lt propose new draft decisions related to the questions included into agenda, additional candidates of the companys organs, propose an audit company.

Shareholders own the right to ask the questions concerning the agenda of the Ordinary General Meeting of Shareholders. Questions may be submitted by e-mail vd@degtine.lt or delivered directly to the Company's office at Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius, not later than 3 working days till General Meeting. The Company may refuse to answer to shareholder's questions if they are concerned to the commercial (industrial) secrets or other confidential information. If it is possible to set the shareholder's identity, the Company shall inform the shareholder on the refusal to provide asked information.

Each shareholder or representative thereof shall have the right to cast his/her vote in advance in writing by filling in a general ballot paper. The general ballot paper form shall be announced in the company's website http://www.degtine.lt . no later than 21 days before the Meeting. Upon the shareholders request in writing, the company no later than 10 days before the Meeting shall send a general ballot paper by registered mail free of charge or hand it in person against signature. The general ballot paper filled shall be signed by the shareholder or his/her representative. In case the ballot paper is signed by the shareholders authorized representative, such person along with the filled ballot paper shall submit the document to confirm the voting right corresponding to the requirements set by the laws. The ballot paper filled and the document confirming the voting right (if required) shall be submitted in a written form to the company's head office Paneriu str. 47, Vilnius, by registered mail or by handing against signature no later than on the last business day before the Meeting.



The following information and documents during the whole period are available on the website of the company http://www.degtine.lt starting no later than 21 days before the Meeting:

- report on the convening of the Meeting;

- the total number of the company's shares and the number of shares with voting rights on the convening day of the Meeting;

- draft resolutions on each agenda issue and other documents to be submitted to the Meeting;

- general ballot paper form.



Attachments:

Draft Resolutions of the General Shareholder Meeting; Set of company's financial statements for the year 2017; Ballot Paper.

Authorized to provide additional information  General Manager Raimonda Pilke 8 5 233 0819

Raimonda Pilke

General Manager

8 5 233 0819

AttachmentsH.Res-128: A Pretext in Search of a Neo-liberal Colony

Excellencies Senator James M. Inhofe, and Mike Rounds Statement on H.Res. 128 supporting Ethiopia

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Following a relentless lobbying by certain US citizens of Ethiopian origin (a.k.a. Toxic Diaspora) who are hell-bent on proving their allegiance to their neo-liberal masters, numerous willfully ignorant and misguided US Congressmen, who are self-appointed advocates of democracy for the Ethiopian people, yesterday managed to pass an illegal, arrogant and shameful, albeit non-binding, bill labeled as HR-128 sponsored by Representative Christopher H. Smith from the state of New Jersey. This bill when it was first introduced back in Feb 2017 did not garner the needed votes, so why now (see 'conclusion' section for plausible reasons for the timing of this bill)? This bill will definitely be recorded in the history of Ethio-American relations as a turning point for the worse in the otherwise long and historic relationship between the two countries. Begs the question 'Is America a Friend or Foe?'

This bill is not only the latest demonstration of US's belligerence towards Ethiopia and a blatant meddling in the internal affairs of our Country but utter contempt for its sovereignty at the highest level. No international law allows the US Congress to possess extra-territorial jurisdiction and issue such illegal law on other sovereign countries such as Ethiopia. Except for their greedy and selfish neo-liberal interests, they don't even have the slightest concern for their own citizens particularly African-Americans and Hispanics at home let alone for a proud people thousands of miles away. Their behavior is driven by their sinister hegemonic desire to dominate others and sheer superpower arrogance stemming from 'exceptional and indispensable nation' status they arrogate to themselves. One thing should be crystal clear; HR-128 has nothing to do with the issues of freedom, human/democratic rights or political space in Ethiopia what so ever. These are all covers to mislead the public opinion of innocent Ethiopians and the international community at large. It has all to do with their determination to pressure, arm-twist, and force Ethiopian leadership to abandon its current very successful "independent foreign policy" and " developmental state economic policies" in favor of their bankrupt and failed neo-liberal ideology. They consider Ethiopia's success as a "bad" precedent to other African and Third World countries. Ethiopia's policies, which are all solely designed to safeguard its national interests, are clearly becoming obstacles to the Western neo-liberal forces from mercilessly exploiting the abundant natural resources and huge market of our Country. Credit is due to EPRDF leadership for its wise and farsighted vision and strategic objectives which it has brilliantly executed bringing Ethiopia to center stage of world economic and geo-political landscape. Ethiopia's achievements are attested to by none other than the World Bank and IMF neither of which could hardly be considered as Ethiopia's developmental partners. Ideally, the West wants to perpetuate stagnant economies led by corrupt vassal leaders across Africa and much of the rest of the developing world so that its supremacy is unrivalled and unchallenged. That's why the emergence of China in particular not only as an economic powerhouse but also its genuine desire to engage in win-win economic cooperation in Africa has ruffled the feathers of western dominated financial institutions. Former Secretary of State Tillerson openly criticized China's vision of 'national sovereign economic development' during his recent trip to Africa. His audacity to claim that Chinese development model is not sustainable is laughable at best for there is no sustainable development without the critical infrastructure to support it. One can ask the average Joe on the street to cite examples of some of the Chinese supported infrastructures in the country and they would very easily point to quite a few (Interstate Highways, Dams, Addis Ring Road, Industrial Parks, AU Headquarters, Addis-Djibouti, Dibaba Hospital to name a few). All of the above mentioned landmark infrastructures are the pillars of sustainable development Mr. Secretary. Ask the same question on the street regarding USA's contributions to Ethiopia's 'sustainable development,' and they would be hard pressed to come up with a single example of US's benevolent act or sizable investment in this regard. They have however given us surplus grain and powdered milk in the past which would have otherwise ended up in cattle ranches or garbage bins. The Chinese on the other hand are our number one developmental strategic partners without which our current economic and social progress would have been unthinkable. The bottom line is Ethiopia's only 'crimes' are its nationalist political and economic policies. While democratic rights and political space are all important issues that require proper addressing, they should, however, be home-grown but not coerced and imposed from outside. Their latest evil campaign against our Country is very much coordinated with certain self-appointed and pseudo human rights advocates such as "Amnesty International", "Human Rights Watch", "Freedom House", etc. and fake news media outlets such as BBC, VOA Amharic, CNN and of course the fake news factories, ESAT and OMN whose real and sole agenda is to advance the bankrupt and failed policies of neo-"liberalism at the expense and destruction of poor developing countries such as Ethiopia. The current passing of HR128 was well coordinated by a few but vocal individuals (naturalized US citizens of Ethiopian origin) who do not have any business or legal right to comment let alone meddle in the internal affairs of Ethiopia as they are pure foreigners who renounced their Ethiopian citizenship a long time ago for economic gains. These sellouts and "useful idiots" of the neo-liberal forces are so intoxicated with excessive hatred and boundless lust for power that they do not hesitate to offer their Country to the highest bidder if they believe it would lead them to achieve their unattainable wild dreams. When a US citizen of Ethiopian origin lobbies a US lawmaker to impose sanctions on Ethiopian Government, we consider it blatant meddling since the lobbyists and the lawmakers are both US citizens. All these groups have been working day and night separately and in unison to force Ethiopia, which follows the economic path of "developmental state" economic system into their bankrupt and failed camp of neo-liberal economic and social order so that they would be in a position to exploit its abundant natural resources and huge market or face the fate of disobedient countries such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen.

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These disruptive forces have endlessly called for the lifting of the state of emergency that was recently issued to quell and bring back peace and normalcy to our Country which it has already done so and for repealing the "Charities and Societies" and "Anti-terrorism" proclamations so that they would get complete liberty and free hand to foment divisions, unrest and disturbances in our Country and accomplish their evil missions through their infamous but by now exposed destructive strategy of "color revolutions" and "regime changes" like what they did to the unfortunate peoples of Libya, Syria, Iraq, etc.

These lawmakers didn't even see it necessary to give the newly-elected PM Dr. Abiy Ahmed enough time to demonstrate his leadership skills because their agenda is different from what they preached from the very beginning. Perhaps they wrongly, as they so often are, assumed this is the perfect time to intimidate and put pressure on the new PM in hopes of extracting some concessions that they can throw at their foot soldiers. There is no surprise that double standards have always been the modus operandi of American foreign policy under successive US Administrations. These Congressmen never considered to initiate any such draft law against notorious dictatorial regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Eritrea or condemn or even utter a word about the extended state of emergencies in France, Egypt and Turkey because they are all their obedient puppets. Furthermore, it was the American Government that has been keeping and operating many notorious prisons and torture chambers around the World such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib prisons to conduct secret, inhumane, and cruel investigations on suspects outside the radars of international media and in contraventions with its own "American values" and relevant international laws on torture. It is also the USA that has been terrorists' safe-haven and harboring and assisting many Ethiopian terrorist groups such as Ginbot-7, OLF and Juhar Mohamed's group who are openly preaching ethnic hatred, inciting deadly violence and trying to overthrow the legitimate and democratic Government by terror and force of arm from their comfortable sanctuaries in US cities of course with the tacit and covert support of the American establishments. This should not be a surprise as the USA is not known for pacifying countries to stability but rather it is infamous for amplifying certain humanitarian/ democratic shortcomings of 'non-vassal' countries (in the name of democracy) and for causing violence, chaos, civil war and state collapse as in the case of Libya, Iraq, Syria and this is what the USA is wishing and pushing for our country. The USA does not possess the legal right or claim the moral high ground to talk let alone dictate the state of affairs of Ethiopia's human and democratic rights. In a way, their current hostile Congressional actions clearly demonstrated that Ethiopia's economic and foreign policies are indeed free and independent which its genuine citizens should be proud of.

HR128 sponsors erroneously believe they picked an opportune moment to insert themselves in the national discourse and sway our leadership's position in the direction most amenable to US's foreign policy agenda. It is quite obvious that at this point, US is working tirelessly to undermine and disrupt the success of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as the new Silk Road) which passes through Ethiopia which is the designated critical gateway into Africa with the Addis-Djibouti railway being one of the arteries for this ambitious project.

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HR128 urges our government to listen and engage the citizens in important development issues etc. It is the height of hypocrisy coming from a country that never engages its citizenry but only its lobbyists in deciding important national issues such as healthcare, education, environment, privacy, campaign financing, wars of aggression, etc. In most third world countries, lobbying (euphemistic word for bribery) lawmakers is done under the table and it is considered bribery but in the US it is legal and institutionalized. The Congressmen who authored and voted on HR128 will be well advised to take a break from meddling and walk over to the well-stocked congressional library and read up about Ethiopian history. They will no doubt find that Ethiopia has never been a 'colony' or a 'neo-colony', and will never be a 'neoliberal colony either

However, it is quite refreshing to see some lawmakers such as Senator Inhofe who had the courage to speak the truth by chastising the bill as nothing more than an opportunistic interference at a time Ethiopia finds itself at a critical juncture. The honorable thing for the congressmen would have been to congratulate the new PM and also applaud and commend the peaceful transfer of power that was made possible by (1) EPRDF's time-tested internal deliberation and selection process for power transition, (2) the timely imposition of the State of Emergency that gave the government enough time to hash out its differences and reach a consensus regarding the selection of a new leader.

It should by now be abundantly clear to those that have been paying attention that USA has been pursuing a double-track policy towards Ethiopia since the coming to power of EPRDF in 1991. On the one hand, USA pretends to be a genuine friend and ally of Ethiopia (recent donation of Airport security screening equipment being an example of a token carrot) while on the other, it has been acting in a hostile manner by undermining and sabotaging our national security interests by harboring and letting loose openly hostile forces on social media and radio broadcast to spew venomous propaganda against Ethiopia from the comfort of their homes in the US. It is unfortunate that at a time when the US's former allies are dropping like flies and its sphere of influence shrinking worldwide, the last thing the US Congressmen should be doing is meddle in the internal affairs of not only a proud and truly independent nation like Ethiopia, but also a true and longtime ally of the US.

Finally, my earnest advice to our 'concerned' US congressmen is that Ethiopia has always pursued a peaceful balance in its geopolitical alliances with both East and West, albeit slightly tilted to the West. However, if current US foreign policy towards Ethiopia does not change course for the better soon, Ethiopia will have no choice but to urgently realign itself geopolitically with those that still believe in international law, mutual respect, the sanctity of sovereignty and non-interference, and also subscribe to the idea of a genuine win-win partnership.

Hence, I wish to offer my humble advice to EPRDF leadership as follows:

(a) It would be an understatement to say that despite its remarkable achievements in various sectors, EPRDF has been asleep at the wheel when it comes to public relations. The power of public relations has never been greater or more important than now thanks to media technologies that allow instantaneous dissemination of real and fake news alike to millions of audiences across the world. It is imperative that our diplomats and public relations officers both at the MoFA and in our overseas Embassies should immediately initiate a worldwide comprehensive public relations campaign (interactive town hall meetings, Radio, TV, Social Media, print media) to reach out to Ethiopians living abroad so as to raise awareness of Ethiopia's current economic, political, and social developments and challenges, expose and discredit, in real time, fabricated stories disseminated by these forces by countering with true facts in a timely manner so that they would not get a free ride to mislead and brainwash the innocent and unsuspecting public specially the youth as they have been doing for the past three years;

(b) Instead of pursuing "silent and reactive diplomacy," FDRE leadership should adopt proactive, unwavering, and resolute stance in dealing with belligerent and hostile public statements and belligerent actions coming from unfriendly countries;

(c) FDRE leadership should summon the American ambassador and demand to know why this unwarranted and illegal bill (HR-128) had to be voted on especially at this delicate and critical political juncture. Our leadership under PM Abiy should make it clear to the ambassador that this hostile act is blatant interference in the internal affairs of Ethiopia and a serious infringement of its sovereignty. It should also make known to the American Ambassador that Ethiopia as a sovereign state would review its existing overall relationship with the USA in due course in light of the current hostile initiatives of the US Congress including unilaterally reducing the size and level of its diplomatic relations and freezing of its anti-terrorism and other cooperation agreements in the future. If the US lawmakers based their final deliberations and votes on what they were fed through diplomatic cables originating from Addis, then the US embassy and its local cohorts should be put on notice that its relations with certain hostile local groups and its movements will be severely curtailed as the US State Department's routinely does on numerous occasions to limit the movements of diplomats that it viewed as hostile.

(d) Knowing from its nature and past history that the US government will not cease and desist from meddling in our internal affairs. FDRE leadership should urgently review its foreign policy objectives specially regarding major big powers and seriously consider forging a very strong and mutually beneficial economic and security/defense relationships with China and Russia in order to safeguard its national security interests. As the saying goes, there is no permanent friendship but only permanent interest.

(e) The current state of emergency, albeit belatedly, was decreed after much public outcry following the loss of innocent lives, destruction of property, and disruption of peaceful daily lives of ordinary citizens. As long as it is the only guarantee of peace and security in this country, it should not be subject to premature reversal regardless of sinister domestic outcries and outside pressure to do so.

May God bless and protect Ethiopia.MBABANE  Governments E3 billion arrears are not only causing businesses to crumble, but also slow down the economy.

The States arrears were a result of governments continuous cash flow challenges.



The Central Bank of Swaziland (CBS) has projected that economic activity could decelerate to 1.3 per cent in 2018, before picking up to 2.0 and 2.7 per cent in 2019 and 2020, respectively.



The slowdown in 2018 is mainly linked to the government cash flow challenges that have led to an accumulation of arrears from the previous two years.



This will weigh heavily on the performance of the construction, financial and wholesale and retail sub-sectors, said Sithole, when delivering his 2018 Monetary Policy Statement at Happy Valley yesterday.



An economist, who spoke to the Business Desk on condition of anonymity, explained that this effectively meant construction would be among the hardest hit by the projected low economic growth. He said due to the continued non-payment for services rendered construction companies, would end up unable to take up new business opportunities since they would also be faced with serious cash flow challenges.

By extension, the economist said the financial services sector, wholesalers and retailers would also be affected because construction companies would no longer be able to service either their loans or credit agreements.



The economy heavily relies on government. When government faces cash flow challenges, the economy easily suffers because a lot of sectors are directly linked to it, the economist explained.



The economic deceleration will be against an economy that surpassed expectations last year. CBS said preliminary estimates for Growth Domestic Product (GDP) reflect that overall economic activity expanded by 1.9 per cent in 2017 from 1.4 per cent in 2016, mainly supported by an improvement in the primary and secondary sectors.



These sectors mainly benefited from the improved weather conditions, particularly the above normal rains received in the last months of 2016 and early months of 2017 supported by a recovery in agricultural production, agro-processing, water supply and hydro-power generation.



In an effort to clear the arrears, Minister of Finance Martin Dlamini said government had introduced two new instruments that were offered to the market in 2016/17 and 2017/18, namely, the infrastructure bond and the suppliers bond.Press Release

First 'real-world' industrial applications of 5G for manufacturing trialed at the Nokia Conscious Factory in Oulu, Finland

Trial leverages ultra-low latency and high-bandwidth capabilities of 5G with machine-learning to enhance production in manufacturing environment

5G trial network uses Nokia AirScale, AirFrame and Multi-access Edge Computing together with Intel 5G Mobile Trial Platform and Finwe video analytics application

12 April 2018

Espoo, Finland - Nokia, Finnish operator Telia and Intel have successfully conducted an industrial trial leveraging the ultra-low latency, high-bandwidth capabilities of 5G to support time-critical applications and enhance production and efficiency in a manufacturing environment.

5G allows operators and businesses to connect assets and take advantage of new flexibilities and capabilities such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and widespread automation to efficiently transform operations.

The trial, which took place at the end of March, represents one of the first real-world applications of 'Industry 4.0', the industrial trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. Nokia and Telia worked with Intel and Finnish software startup Finwe at the Nokia base station Conscious Factory* in Oulu using a trial 5G radio access network operating in the 28 GHz frequency band.

Nokia deployed the network, leveraging its 5G AirScale and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) platforms. In this scenario, the Nokia AirFrame data center solution, equipped with Intel Xeon Scalable processors, delivered network edge and core cloud flexibilities and capabilities, which provide support for myriad applications in the 5G environment. The trial also utilized the Intel 5G Mobile Trial Platform as the end-user device as well as an integrated video analytics application from Finwe.

The use of Multi-access Edge Computing together with 5G allows data to be processed close to where it's needed, dramatically reducing latency. The Finwe video application was used to monitor and analyze a video feed of a process on one assembly line. The application leveraged machine learning to immediately alert the assembly line operator of any inconsistencies in the process so they could be corrected in real-time, ensuring high-performance, reliability and quality.

In a second trial, Nokia and Telia demonstrated the ability of the technology to enable Telia to offer cloud remote service delivery for business customers. This trial used the Nokia AirFrame data center solution, Nokia's Multi-access Edge Computing platform and Finwe's video analytics application at Telia's centralized data center in Helsinki, approximately 600 km from the Nokia Conscious Factory in Oulu.

Nokia will continue to use its Multi-access Edge Computing platform together with the Finwe video analytics application in the Oulu conscious factory over a 4G LTE network. The ability to upgrade the Nokia AirScale platform to 5G via software provides an evolutionary path for industries to expand automation across their business. The 28 GHz frequency band and Massive MIMO antennas deliver the low latency and bandwidth to enable high performance industrial applications.

Janne Koistinen, director of 5G Program at Telia Finland said: "Under our '5G Finland' initiative we are working with companies such as Nokia to accelerate the fourth industrial revolution in the country. In this trial we could show how we can extend our service offering to new industry customers to enable efficiencies that will advance their production capabilities."

Caroline Chan, vice president and general manager, 5G Infrastructure Division, Network Platforms Group, Intel said: "Utilizing the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor family and the Intel Mobile Trial Platform allows operators around the globe to provide the computing, connectivity, and analytics to launch new 5G services. We continue to work with Nokia to deliver the infrastructure needed to pave the way to broad market adoption of open, software defined networks for 5G."

Marc Rouanne, president of Mobile Networks at Nokia, said: "Nokia's 5G capabilities allow operators such as Telia to leverage machine learning and automation by opening up network data and intelligence. As we continue to deliver machine learning capabilities in Nokia's ReefShark chipsets and develop advanced algorithms we will further enhance our radio performance, allowing customers to take advantage of new business opportunities in the 5G and IoT world."

*To address Industry 4.0, Nokia has applied a 'Conscious Supply Network' concept at its factories leveraging digitalization, analytics, and robotics across the overall supply chain.

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Email: press.services@nokia.comEZULWINI  The proposed levy on banks gross revenue will not increase the cost of doing business.



Central Bank of Swaziland (CBS) Governor Majozi Sithole has assured the business community and all customers of banking institutions that the levy will not be passed on to them.



He said a committee had already been set up to collate a feasible strategy to ensure that end users do not find themselves forced to fork out more money for banking services to cater for the levy.



He said they were already engaging government to comprehend how the levy would be operationalised.

As CBS, we want to minimise a situation where the cost (of the levy) would be passed on to the consumer, Sithole promised in his 2018 Monetary Policy Statement address at Happy Valley yesterday.



Deputy Chairman of the Swaziland Bankers Association (SBA) Zakhele Lukhele said it remained unclear how the proposed policy change would be applied.

He said once they had been advised how the levy would be imposed; they would be better positioned to align themselves on how they would cushion their customers.



We also want to avoid a situation where the cost of the levy filters onto consumers especially businesses, said Lukhele who is Managing Director of SwaziBank.

SBA Chairman Dennis Mbingos is on record having said challenging banks to contribute to the fiscus through the levy implied that they do not at present.

A cold biting winter may have come well ahead of its season for the legal profession. Lawyers must be shivering at the mere thought of having to face Chief Justice Bheki Maphalala these days, who is throwing lawyers out of courtrooms like garbage, for failing to execute orders of the courts in respect to monies owed to clients.



Two law firms have felt this wrath in just a week and it would appear many more are in line to be left out in the cold if the number of public complaints against lawyers is anything to go by. Could we soon be saying dont talk to me, talk to my judge?



Its not for me to say whether the judge is right or wrong and we can expect the lawyers to challenge the CJ on how he has chosen to go about this, but the affected clients must be heaving a sigh of relief at the rare-as-snow in Manzini prospect of having somebody somewhere now looking out for them.

These are people who have exhausted all legal means to seek justice - Supreme Court included!

The lawyer watchdog, the Swaziland Law Society, has in all respects, become toothless with regard to calling its errant members to order and expediting disciplinary matters before its tribunal.



The CJs action comes at the backdrop of legislative changes to affect the legal profession in neighbouring South Africa. These have been brought about largely by the need for more transparency in the affairs of the legal profession, which members of the public are entitled to in order to make informed choices about their legal representatives.



There had been scathing attacks on the Law Society of South Africa on its handling of its affairs. Advocate Paul Hoffman, director of the Institute for Accountability in Southern Africa, was once quoted as saying that openness is a foundational constitutional value that applies to all governance, including that of errant attorneys.



In an editorial by William Saunderson-Meyer, who spent a considerable amount of time questioning the conduct of the SA legal profession leading to the ongoing legislative changes, University of Cape Town law Professor Hugh Corder described the secrecy in the affairs of the legal profession on conduct issues, as horrifyingly unconstitutional.



Saunderson-Meyer found that SAs four regional law societies and the over-arching Law Society of SA (LSSA) did not have much regard for the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA).



If one wants to check on ones doctors reputation, the Health Professions Council website details all disciplinary hearings against a practitioners name, including the full charge sheet and sentence.

But with attorneys there is simply no way of checking their vaunted professionalism on matters like failing to appear in court, not following client instructions, not responding to client correspondence, deliberate delays, financial mismanagement and overcharging, he found.



He said unlike in the United Kingdom where disciplinary rulings are searchable online by name of both practioner and firm, SAs law societies simply wont disclose the identity of disciplined attorneys.



Checking the status of a lawyer should be made easy by the publicising of any disciplinary cases pending or judgments issued against a lawyer, either on the associations website or on any platform easily accessible to the public.



Not all lawyers are bad apples, but it is the failure of their professional associations to rein in their members for unprofessional conduct that has given rise to public complaints. Given the experiences of South Africa, it would seem the scourge is contagious.



In eradicating it, our CJ seems to have chosen the national disaster emergency approach. South Africa has amended the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014 (LPA), where legal practitioners will - in the next few months or so - be governed by a single, national regulatory body called the Legal Practice Council (LPC).



Some of the members of the LPC may be non-practising legal practitioners, and will include ministerial appointments and academics. For the first time in the history of the profession, complaints against legal practitioners may be heard also by representatives who fall outside of the practising profession.



This is probably similar to our Council of the Law Society where we believe we are represented by no more than four members of the public and an officer appointed by the minister. What are they doing to protect the interests of the aggrieved clients, whose cries have invited the drastic action taken by the CJ?



We also need to ask what has become of the Law Society Fidelity Fund which, according to Section 43 (2) of the Legal Practioners Act, enables the Law Society to; make such disbursements therefrom as are in the opinion of the Law Society necessary to meet expenses incurred by the Fund and to pay for loss sustained by any person in consequence of an act of dishonesty by a legal practitioner as such or his employee in the course of employment. Does it still exist?



William Saunderson-Meyer once shared that a Durban man representing clients in fee disputes with lawyers, doctors and accountants had found that all professional disciplinary bodies share an identical modus operandi of Delay, delay, delay!

They know that most complainants lack the stomach or the wallet for protracted battles.

Is this what the chief justice is seeing in Swaziland to justify his actions? You be the judge...or should we say you be the CJ!



Sir,



Please give me space to voice my objection on the proposal by the National Maize Corporation in collaboration with the Swaziland Environmental Authority to import genetically modified (GM) maize into the country.

I am quite aware of the pros and cons of GM foods and at a distance one may conclude that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are the way to go until you do a thorough research on their long-term effects. Most research works favour GMOs mainly because most researchers are interested in the economic benefits of GMOs. Economically, they get my vote for the short run but after carefully researching on the long-term effects on health, I concluded that even economically they eventually become a setback since fighting the package of the ailments they will bring, will require more resources than they have contributed.



The million Dollar question that Swazis should be asking themselves is why do big countries like the USA run away from GMOs? The answer is simple; GMOs are very dangerous and unhealthy. Why does EU prefer our meat? It is because we produce clean meat from non-genetically modified cattle. The nation has not been educated about what exactly GMOs are. Many Swazis do not know what these GMOs are and what good versus bad they come with.

Instead of ambushing them, we must educate our people through the radio, newspapers, and community dialogues until we are sure they understand what we are talking about. It can be then that we ask them to allow or disallow importation of GMOs into our beautiful kingdom. How can you ask Swazis to object on something they know nothing about? Very few are enlightened about GMOs so NMC must not capitalise on that.



I will not keep quiet and watch the land of my forefathers, the land of my children and the land of my great grandchildren being sold for economic gains by selfish dealings that look not beyond the profit margin. I have already sent my two cents worth of formal objection to the relevant authorities but I found it necessary to also raise the alarm for the benefit of those who got eluded by the proposed move.

Soon the battle over AIDS will be won but I foresee another pandemic should these GMOs be allowed. We should think 20, 30 years to come. Already in America GM foods have increased obesity by more than 35 per cent in adults; diseases like diabetes and hypertension are rife thanks to GMOs. Is that what we want as Swaziland? According to some experts, people who consume GM foods have high chances of developing cancer.



The last time I checked, Swaziland did not have proper and fully functional national biosafety frameworks so it might be suicidal for us to rush to importing GM food. We are just not ready NMC, we are sorry. Think about the poor ignorant Swazi who is going to buy the GM maize for consumption and unknowingly use the same maize grains as seeds come planting time. Once planted, the GMOs will be propagated to pollute our maize, our animals (livestock, birds, etc) and the whole ecosystem. Is that what we want? Educate the nation first. Help government improve to fully functional national biosafety frameworks then you can import. Before that, from me it is a NO. I personally love agriculture, I love economics too but I am equally mindful of the health of our people and the environment.



Benele NxumaloMANZINI  Other versions of the story behind Magawugawus sons injury can stop as the record has been set straight.



Zweli Simelane (26) broke his silence for the first time after the accident that saw him lose one of his legs. He was speaking during a press briefing that was held at Raleigh Fitkin Memorial (rfm)Hospitals conference room yesterday.

The gospel artists son was admitted to the hospital last Tuesday morning, after he sustained injuries on both his legs the previous night when he was knocked by a train.



The accident happened near his parental home at Phuzumoya.

Prelude to Zwelis statement, his father, Mduduzi Gawuzela Simelane, said the decision to brief the media about what exactly transpired last Monday came about after he received numerous phone calls and questions from citizens and fans around Zwelis accident. Simelane said in all these, there were also different versions from unknown sources about why his son ended up in hospital.



To clear the air and to inform the concerned public, my son will relate what happened on the night he got injured. This is manifestation of the promise I made when the media enquired about the matter shortly after it happened, Simelane said.

He added that he was not hiding anything but that he was also not well-versed then and that Zweli could not speak for himself because he was still in a critical condition.



Addressing the media, Zweli said he met his near-death experience at Phuzumoya railway line after he decided to get some fresh air following a hectic day that he had. The Swaziland Christian Medical University (SCU) student said jogging in the afternoons was his daily hobby but on the day, he did not feel well so he decided to walk instead.MBABANE  Swaziland needs to get informed evidence on cannabis before legalising it.



This was the assertion made by World Health Organisation (WHO).



According to WHO Health Promotion Officer Dr Kevin Makadzange, they supported evidence-based decisions before approving them. Considering Dr Makadzanges statement, it looks like Members of Parliament ( MPs) might have to wait much longer as dagga would not be legalised anytime soon in the country.



Dr Makadzange said there was still a lot that the country was required to do before passing it into an Act and then into policy.

This follows the adoption of the report on dagga by MPs on Monday, after working on it for a year and six weeks. The legislators adopted the report during a debate that took place in the House of Assembly.



After a motion that was moved by Nkilongo MP Hans Steffen last year March, a select committee headed by Hhukwini MP Saladin Magagula was appointed to investigate the possibilities of the country issuing licences to special farmers for medicinal and commercial use of cannabis.



Makadzange said drugs are classified into different classes and some of the drugs were used for certain conditions.

He said with the use of cannabis in drugs, there were those benefits but there were other safer medications which could be used instead.

According to Makadzange, for treatment of cancer, they could use other drugs and also the treatment of asthma without the side effects that you get from cannabis.



He said you cannot compare Salbutamol with cannabis oil for the treatment of asthma, chronic bronchitis and emphysema.

Salbutamol is the international genetic name for Albuterol used to treat asthma. It relaxes the smooth muscle in the lung and dilates airways to improve breathing.



It is used in the treatment of asthma, chronic bronchitis and emphysema. The inhaler enables the drug to reach deep into the lungs for maximum benefit.

According to Makadzange, Salbutamol was as good as the cannabis oil but it was free from the side effects one could get from dagga.

He said if one treated asthma or cancer with dagga, it works but they end up being hooked to it.MBABANE  Lawyers who fail to remit clients- monies might just count themselves out of the legal profession.



This is a stance taken by the Chief Justice (CJ), Bheki Maphalala, who yesterday banned yet another lawyer from appearing in any court in Swaziland after he reportedly failed to remit monies belonging to his former client despite a court order directing him to make payment.



The lawyer, Muzi Simelane, is the second attorney to be debarred by the CJ in a space of two days. Simelanes proscription comes after he reportedly failed to remit a sum of E547 992.35 to his former client, Beauty Build Construction (PTY) Limited.



This amount was collected from Swaziland Government by Simelane on behalf of the company for work done.

In a statement, the CJ stated that Simelane kept this money since 2011 despite a court order directing him to make payment. The CJ said by so doing, Simelane acted contemptuously to the highest court of the land.



When your erstwhile client (Beauty Build) sued for payment, you refused and raised a dishonest defence that it was fictitious and not eligible for payment.



The CJ also pointed out that the Law Society of Swaziland (LSS) had not intervened as directed by the Supreme Court.

He also highlighted that, sometime in 2017, he (CJ) wrote letters to the Attorney General as well as the president of the Law Society for their intervention but there was no response.



Simelane, according to CJ Mapahalala, has defied the court order and consistently refused to release the companys money without lawful justification.

He told Simelane that his conduct in the circumstances could not be condoned or tolerated.



In exercise of powers vested in me by Sections 139 (5)| and 142 of the Constitution, your law firm and yourself are hereby barred from appearing before any court until you purge your contempt, reads part of the statement issued by the CJ yesterday.SEATTLE, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE--SinglePoint, Inc. (OTCQB:SING) is pleased to announce the companys delivery application has been approved for beta in Apple and Google application stores. The application has been jointly developed in collaboration with AppSwarm (OTC:SWRM). The two companies plan to have multiple different interested parties test the application in the coming weeks and provide feedback, followed by a full production version launch of LastMile. The application aims to meet compliance of state delivery laws as they are rolled out to ensure delivery businesses are able to easily stay in compliance.



We are very excited for the launch of LastMile. There have already been multiple cannabis businesses expressing interest in the platform. There is a real opportunity to provide the industrys first, true delivery platform that will give these businesses the insight and ability to easily track a delivery order through the completion of payment and drop off to a customer, all while knowing exactly where their driver and product is, states Wil Ralston President of SinglePoint.

Strengthening the companys outlook on providing cannabis services is the fact former Republican House Speaker John Boehner joined the advisory board of a U.S. based cannabis company. Vahan Ajamian, analyst at Beacon Securities Ltd, recently stated in a note, should send shockwaves throughout the industry and act as a positive catalyst for the sector as a whole, and went on to say U.S. cannabis businesses represent the next wave of outsized returns for investors... according to a recent Bloomberg article.

In addition to serving cannabis businesses the companies believe there is a lot of opportunity in the market to provide LastMile to small businesses of any sort. The application specifically focuses on the delivery operations of a business, providing efficiencies in dispatching, record keeping, customer satisfaction and more. LastMile has been developed with that in mind and plans to roll out to many industries in order to gain market penetration.

Lastly, SinglePoint subsidiary SingleSeed launched their new cbd focused ecommerce site SingleSeed.com. SingleSeed has already been receiving orders organically and plans to ramp up marketing in the coming weeks. The first of many campaigns is going through a Seattle based publication The Stranger, which has an online and print publication. Please follow the link to see a version of the companys ad: SingleSeed Stranger Ad

Parties interested in becoming partners for the LastMile Delivery beta are encouraged to reach out to sales@singlepoint.com to learn more.

In order to be selected as a beta partner you should meet the following criteria.

Dedicated delivery manager

Fulfill multiple deliveries daily

Multiple drivers preferred; not required

Use of iPhone or Android Device

Willing to timely provide feedback

About SinglePoint, Inc.

SinglePoint, Inc (SING) is a technology and investment company with a focus on acquiring companies that will benefit from the injection of growth capital and technology integration. The company portfolio includes mobile payments, ancillary cannabis services and blockchain solutions. Through acquisitions into horizontal markets, SinglePoint is building its portfolio by acquiring an interest in undervalued companies, thereby providing a rich, diversified holding base. Through its subsidiary company SingleSeed , the company is providing products and services to the cannabis industry.

Connect on social media at:

https://www.facebook.com/SinglePointMobile

https://twitter.com/_SinglePoint_

https://www.linkedin.com/company/singlepoint

For more information visit: www.SinglePoint.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Rule 175 under the Securities Act of 1933 and Rule 3b-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are subject to the safe harbor created by those rules. All statements, other than statements of fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding potential future plans and objectives of the Company, are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

Technical complications, which may arise, could prevent the prompt implementation of any strategically significant plan(s) outlined above. The Company undertakes no duty to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this release.

Corporate Communications Contact:

NetworkNewsWire (NNW)

New York, New York

www.NetworkNewsWire.com

212.418.1217 Office

Editor@NetworkNewsWire.comEnglish French

Gross merchandise sales run-rate reached $90.6 million as at February 28, 2018



Company to launch national platform in Q3 with opening of new Western Canadian facility expanding our addressable market by 11 million Canadians

Achieved EBITDA profitability in several core markets during Q2

Active subscribers grew to 61,000 as at February 28, 2018, a net increase of 16,000, or 36%, compared to November 30, 2017

MONTREAL, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Goodfood Market Corp. (Goodfood or the Company) (TSX:FOOD), a leader in the Canadian meal-kit industry, today announced strong financial results for the second quarter ended February 28, 2018.

Active subscribers reached 61,000 as at February 28, 2018, up from 13,000 as at February 28, 2017. During the second quarter, Goodfood added 16,000 net new subscribers, an increase of 36% from November 30, 2017.

We continued to experience rapid organic growth in Eastern Canada where our targeted marketing approach, combined with the launch of additional recipes and plan options, is generating strong results. As a result, our operations were profitable in several core markets and our gross merchandise sales for the last 12 months has reached almost $50 million. On an annualized basis, our gross merchandise sale run-rate is now approaching the $100 million mark, said Jonathan Ferrari, Chief Executive Officer of Goodfood.

With the launch of our national platform, the Goodfood experience will be available from coast to coast this quarter. Our Western Canada pre-launch has been extremely well received and we now have over 2,000 active subscribers in the region. The official launch of our service offering in Western Canada will significantly expand our addressable market, adding 11 million new potential customers. We are confident that as we roll-out our marketing initiatives, we will replicate the success we have achieved in Eastern Canada, added Jonathan Ferrari.

Financial Highlights

(Unaudited all amounts are in Canadian dollars)

For the periods ended February 28, 2018 and 2017



Q2 2018



Q2 2017



Change



YTD 2018



YTD 2017



Change



Revenue

Growth %



15,672,647 3,686,947 11,985,700

325% 26,908,529 5,879,415 21,029,114

358% Gross Profit

Gross margin %



2,823,860

18.0% 894,224

24.3% 1,929,636

(6.3) pts 4,884,124

18.2% 1,222,597

20.8% 3,661,527

(2.6) pts Gross Merchandise Sales1



18,840,295 4,280,431 14,559,864

340% 32,115,295 6,836,217 25,279,078

370% Adjusted Gross Profit

Adjusted Gross margin %1



5,991,508

31.8% 1,487,708

34.8% 4,503,800

(3.0) pts 10,090,890

31.4% 2,179,399

31.9% 7,911,491

(0.5) pts Net Loss



(2,394,604) (1,766,488) (628,116) (4,914,437) (4,879,302) (35,135) Adjusted net loss 1



(2,394,604) (207,887) (2,186,717) (4,801,340) (629,584) (4,171,756)



1See the non-IFRS financial measures section below

Revenue and Gross Merchandise Sales

Gross merchandise sale increased by 42% during the quarter while Selling, general and administrative expenses increased by only 15.9%. The gross merchandise sales run-rate reached $90.6 million at the end of the second quarter of 2018. Revenue for the second quarter grew 325% to $15.7 million compared to $3.7 million for the corresponding period of 2017 and grew 39% when compared to $11.2 million for the first quarter of 2018. Gross merchandise sales for the second quarter, which reflects the total retail value of merchandise sold by Goodfood before taking into account all incentives and credits, totaled $18.8 million compared to $4.3 million for the corresponding period of 2017 and $13.3 million for the first quarter of 2018.

Revenue for the first half of 2018 grew 358% to $26.9 million compared to $5.9 million in the corresponding period of 2017. The increase in revenue for the second quarter and for the first half of 2018 compared to the corresponding periods of 2017 is primarily driven by the continued growth in the number of Active subscribers. Gross merchandise sales for the first half of 2018 increased to $32.1 million compared to $6.8 million for the corresponding period of 2017.

Gross Margin and Adjusted Gross Margin

Gross margin was 18.0% and 18.2% for the second quarter and first half of 2018 respectively, compared to 24.3% and 20.8% for the corresponding periods of 2017. The decrease in gross margin primarily resulted from an increase in production labour costs, start up expenses for Western Canada operations and higher overhead costs coming from our new Eastern Canada facility. The company expects that fixed costs as a percentage of revenue will decrease over time with the Companys continued growth. Gross margin in the second quarter of 2018 decreased slightly from 18.3% to 18.0% compared to the first quarter of 2018. The Company saw an improvement in Eastern Canada gross margin while start-up costs related to Western Canada led to an overall decline in gross margin.

Adjusted gross margin was 31.8% and 31.4% for the second quarter and first half of 2018 respectively, compared to 34.8% and 31.9% for the corresponding periods of 2017. Adjusted gross margin in the second quarter of 2018, which included start-up costs related to Western Canada, improved to 31.8% compared to 30.9% in the first quarter of 2018.

Adjusted Net Loss and Adjusted Net Loss per Share

Adjusted net loss for the second quarter was $2.4 million, or $0.05 per share (basic and diluted), compared to an adjusted net loss of $0.2 million, or $0.01 per share (basic and diluted) for the corresponding period of 2017. The increase in adjusted net loss was mainly due to planned investments in administrative expenses to support continued subscriber growth and an increased marketing budget. Adjusted net loss excludes a loss on the remeasurement of convertible notes of $1.6 million recorded in the second quarter of 2017.

Adjusted net loss for the first half of 2018 was $4.8 million, or $0.10 per share (basic and diluted), compared to an adjusted net loss of $0.6 million, or $0.03 per share (basic and diluted) for Fiscal 2017. The increase in adjusted net loss was mainly due to planned investments in administrative expenses to support continued subscriber growth and an increased marketing budget. Adjusted net loss excludes a loss on the disposal of fixed assets of $0.1 million recorded in the first half of 2018 and a loss on the remeasurement of convertible notes of $4.2 million recorded in the corresponding period of 2017.

Management Appointments

During the quarter, the Company announced the appointment of Philippe Adam as Chief Financial Officer effective March 23, 2018. Philippe brings over 15 years of experience in corporate finance, accounting and operations. He has been involved in a wide variety of strategic matters over the years including mergers and acquisitions, cross border transactions and debt and equity financing.

Neil Cuggy, who has been acting as CFO since the inception of the Company, will focus on executing the Companys operational, strategic and growth plan as President and Chief Operating Officer.

Outlook

The meal-kit subscription service industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and remains relatively new in Canada. As a result, Goodfood believes that there are significant opportunities to rapidly grow its subscriber base by continuing to invest in highly targeted marketing campaigns, capacity expansion and in establishing a national platform. As the Company grows its subscriber base, it is confident that it can achieve further economies of scale which will lead to enhanced profitability. With the opening of its Western Canadian production facility in Q3, Management expects the Company to further expand its client base.

Second Quarter Fiscal 2018 Results Conference Call:

When: April 12, 2018 at 10:00 a.m. E.T

Dial in number: 647-788-4922 or 877-223-4471

Conference call replay available until April 26, 2018

416-621-4642 or 1-800-585-8367

To access the webcast and view the slide presentation, click on this link: http://www.gowebcasting.com/9226.

The conference ID is 1673089.

A full version of the Companys Second Quarter 2018 Managements Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) and unaudited Interim Financial Statements will be posted on http://www.sedar.com later today.



Non-IFRS Financial Measures

Certain financial and non-financial measures included in this news release do not have a standardized meaning under IFRS and therefore may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. The Company includes these measures because it believes they provide to certain investors a meaningful way of assessing financial performance. For a more complete description of these measures and a reconciliation of Goodfood's non-IFRS financial measures to financial results, please see Goodfood's Management's Discussion and Analysis for the three-month and sixth-month periods ended February 28, 2018.



Goodfood's definition of the non-IFRS terms are as follows:

An active subscriber is defined as an account that will receive a delivery or has elected to skip a delivery in the subsequent weekly delivery cycle.

Gross merchandise sales measures the total retail value of all goods sold by the Company before taking into account all incentives and credits.

Gross merchandise sales run-rate is defined as gross merchandise sales for the four-week period ended as at the date indicated multiplied by thirteen. Management believes that gross merchandise sales run-rate is a useful measure of financial performance because it is indicative of gross merchandise sales on an annual basis for the Company's current level of active subscribers.

Adjusted gross profit is calculated as gross merchandise sales less cost of goods sold.

Adjusted gross margin is calculated as adjusted gross profit divided by gross merchandise sales.

EBITDA is defined as net income or loss before net finance expenses, depreciation and amortization expense and income tax expense.

Adjusted net loss is defined as net loss adjusted for items that Management believes do not necessarily arise as part of the Companys normal day-to-day operations to better analyze trends in performance and financial results. These adjustments result in a truer economic representation of the underlying business on a comparative basis.

About Goodfood

Goodfood is Canadas leading meal kit company, delivering fresh ingredients that make it easy for subscribers to prepare delicious meals at home every week. Goodfoods objective is to take the hassle out of cooking, leaving subscribers with the fun part - cooking, sharing with family and eating. Subscribers select their favorite recipes from a variety of original dishes online. The Company prepares a personalized box of fresh ingredients and delivers it to the subscriber's doorstep with easy step-by-step instructions. Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, Goodfood had 61,000 active subscribers as at February 28, 2018. www.makegoodfood.ca

Except where otherwise indicated, all amounts in this press release are expressed in Canadian dollars.

For further information:

Philippe Adam, Chief Financial Officer

1(855) 515-5191

IR@makegoodfood.ca

Forward-Looking Information

This release contains information that may be considered forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Such forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, information with respect to our objectives and the strategies to achieve these objectives, as well as information with respect to our beliefs, plans, expectations, anticipations, estimates and intentions. Forward-looking information is identified by the use of terms and phrases such as may, would, should, could, expect, intend, estimate, anticipate, plan, foresee, believe, or continue, the negative of these terms and similar terminology, including references to assumptions, although not all forward-looking information contains these terms and phrases. Forward-looking information is provided for the purposes of assisting the reader in understanding the Company and its business, operations, prospects and risks at a point in time in the context of historical and possible future developments and therefore the reader is cautioned that such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. Forward-looking information is based upon a number of assumptions and is subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those that are disclosed in or implied by such forward-looking information. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the following risk factors which are discussed in greater detail under Risk Factors in the Companys Annual Information Form for the year ended August 31, 2017 available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com: limited operating history, negative operating cash flow, food industry, quality control and health concerns, regulatory compliance, regulation of the industry, public safety issues, product recalls, damage to Goodfoods reputation, transportation disruptions, product liability, ownership and protection of intellectual property, evolving industry, reliance on a single facility, unionization activities, reliance on management, factors which may prevent realization of growth targets, competition, availability and quality of raw materials, limited number of products, environmental and employee health and safety regulations, online security breaches and disruption, reliance on data centers, open source license compliance, future capital requirements, operating risk and insurance coverage, management of growth, conflicts of interest, litigation, and catastrophic events. Although the forward-looking information contained herein is based upon what we believe are reasonable assumptions, readers are cautioned against placing undue reliance on this information since actual results may vary from the forward-looking information. Certain assumptions were made in preparing the forward-looking information concerning availability of capital resources, business performance, market conditions, and customer demand. Consequently, all of the forward-looking information contained herein is qualified by the foregoing cautionary statements, and there can be no guarantee that the results or developments that we anticipate will be realized or, even if substantially realized, that they will have the expected consequences or effects on our business, financial condition or results of operation. In addition, any statements as to financial results (including without limitation, revenue, sales, margin and profitability in general or with respect to any aspect of the Company`s business) is made as at the time in question. There can be no assurance that past results will be repeated and future results may vary materiallyUnless otherwise noted or the context otherwise indicates, any forward-looking information contained herein is provided as of the date hereof, and we do not undertake to update or amend such forward-looking information whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required by applicable law.



[April 12, 2018] Atlas Dynamics Wins 2018 Red Dot Product Design Award with the Atlas Pro Professional Drone

RIGA, Latvia, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Atlas Dynamics (atlasdynamics.eu), a next generation aerospace company providing autonomous UAV solutions, today announced that the Atlas Pro professional drone has been named a 2018 Red Dot Award winner. Designers and manufacturers from 59 countries submitted more than 6,300 products for the Red Dot Award: Product Design 2018. The Atlas Pro distinguished itself throughout the evaluation process through its excellence of design and unparalleled capabilities. Dating back to 1955, the Red Dot Award: Product Design determines the best products created each year. The judging panel, comprising approximately 40 independent experts, assessed each product individually. The strict judging criteria included overall level of innovation, functionality, formal quality, ergonomics and durability. The Atlas Pro drone, developed fully in-house by Atlas Dynamics, serves professional commercial markets including security and reconnaissance, infrastructure inspection and emergency response. It provides a complete off-the-shelf UAV solution capable of fully and semi-autonomous VLOS (Visual Line-of-Sight) and BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight) drone operations. Key innovations of the Atlas Pro include a proprietary tri-copter aircraft, with unique wing forms designed to generate lift and a rounded structure to withstand high pressure. This first-of-its-kind design enables increased speed, altitude and agility while reducing overall power consumption and drag. Additional proprietary technologies include a Lithium-silicon smart battery with industrial standard BMS, a robust and light-weight carbon fiber construction capable of performing in extreme weather and a versatile exchangeable payload protocol. The drone's capabilities include 50 minutes of flight time, 50km range (12 km range wth 720 stream), 140 km/hour maximum speed and altitudes of up to 6000 meters.



"We are very proud to be selected as a Red Dot winner for this year's Product Design Award, recognizing the design innovation and superior capabilities of the Atlas Pro," said Ivan Tolchinsky, CEO and Founder of Atlas Dynamics. "The Atlas Pro, comprising multiple proprietary components, is the culmination of intensive research and the development of individual parts utilizing Atlas Dynamics' patented technology and aeronautical expertise. This award acknowledges, not just the product, but our unique vision and approach to development. We have brought together a dedicated team of experts committed to democratizing complex aerospace technology, enabling us to create a truly superior product." The winners will be celebrated at the Red Dot Gala and awards ceremony in Essen, Germany, on 9 July 2018.

About Atlas Dynamics Atlas Dynamics, founded in 2015 by Ivan Tolchinsky and Igor Zhydanov, is a next generation aerospace company providing autonomous UAV systems. Utilizing its proprietary aerospace technology, the company provides users with valuable data, quickly and safely, through highly resistant, intuitive and easy-to-use products. Atlas serves a range of visual-line-of-sight (VLOS) and behind-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) applications. Atlas drones can achieve longer flight times, wider ranges, faster speeds and greater altitudes with versatile sensors and payloads to serve key markets including infrastructure inspection, construction, security, first response, delivery and insurance. For more information, please visit: https://www.atlasdynamics.eu/

Please follow Atlas Dynamics on LinkedIn and Twitter. Media/Analyst Contact Finn Partners for Atlas Dynamics

Nicole Grubner

nicole.grubner@finnpartners.com

1-929-222-8011 About the Red Dot Design Award In order to appraise the diversity in the field of design in a professional manner, the Red Dot Design Award breaks down into the three disciplines of Red Dot Award: Product Design, Red Dot Award: Communication Design and Red Dot Award: Design Concept. The Red Dot Award is one of the world's largest design competitions. In 1955, a jury convened for the first time to assess the best designs of the day. In the 1990s, Red Dot CEO Professor Dr. Peter Zec developed the name and brand of the award. Ever since, the sought-after Red Dot award has been the revered international seal of outstanding design quality. Further information available at www.red-dot.de View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/atlas-dynamics-wins-2018-red-dot-product-design-award-with-the-atlas-pro-professional-drone-300628902.html SOURCE Atlas Dynamics

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] ChineseInvestors.com to Attend 'Invest 2018' Exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany

SAN GABRIEL, California, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ChineseInvestors.com Inc. (OTCQB: CIIX) ("CIIX" or the "Company"), the premier financial information website for Chinese-speaking investors, today announces that will be attending this year's 'Invest 2018' Exhibition on April 13th and 14th in in Stuttgart, Germany, the number one meeting point for the finance and investment sector in Germany. As one of the largest financial sector events in the Germany, this conference attracted more than 12,000 visitors and 144 exhibitors in 2017. Private and institutional investors use the platform to obtain information, compare assets, and invest in new opportunities. "After a successful presentation at Invest 2017 which sparked the attention of German investors, we look forward to the opportunity to update the German financial sector and potential investors on the Company's recent business developments including the expansion of its core media and education services business to cover cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, and the upcoming spin off of all of the Company's hemp related assets scheduled to take place on May 31, 2018," says Warren Wang, CEO. "For companies in attendance who are interested in reaching CIIX's unique data base of high net worth, Chinese investors, we also look forward to providing information regarding the Company's advertising and public relations related support services for emerging small cap companies and businesses in the cryptocurrency sector." The Company recently announced that it will be launching the Bitcoin Trading Academy, the world's first educational platform covering all aspects of the cryptocurrency market. The first course will be held on June 2, 2018 in our Flushing, NY office with additional offerings in Manhattan, San Gabriel, CA and Arcadia, CA. Just last week, the Company lunched Bitcoin Millionaire VIP Livestream, a cryptcurrency subscription offering live streaming of trading demonstrations and other cryptocurrency topics for 6.5 hours daily.



The Company's expansion into the cryptocurrency business began in November 2017 with the launch of http://www.newcoins168.com, a premier Chinese cryptocurrency and blockchain technology information and education platform providing straightforward explanations of cryptocurrency basics, trading guidelines, real-time market commentary and analysis regarding mining, blockchain technology, industry hotspots, sector related stock trends and ETFs, and other strategies and opportunities to capitalize on this growing market. About ChineseInvestors.com (OTCQB: CIIX)

Founded in 1999, ChineseInvestors.com endeavors to be an innovative company providing: (a) real-time market commentary, analysis, and educational related services in Chinese language character sets (traditional and simplified); (b) advertising and public relation related support services; and (c) retail, online sales and direct sales of hemp-based products and other health related products. For more information visit ChineseInvestors.com Visit and register:https://www.newcoins168.com Subscribe and watch our video commentaries: https://www.youtube.com/user/Chinesefncom Subscribe and watch our video commentaries: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCriTFjFHCvDW_LBhiIeuLlQ/featured Follow us on Twitter for real-time Company updates: https://twitter.com/ChineseFNEnglsh Like us on Facebook to receive live feeds: https://www.facebook.com/Chinesefncom https://www.facebook.com/Chineseinvestors.com.english Add us on WeChat: Chinesefn or download iPhone iOS App: Chinesefn. 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. Contact:

ChineseInvestors.com, Inc.

227 W. Valley Blvd, #208 A

San Gabriel, CA 91776



Investor Relations:

Alan Klitenic

+1-214-636-2548



Corporate Communications:

NetworkNewsWire (NNW)

New York, New York

http://www.NetworkNewsWire.com

+212-418-1217 Office

Editor@NetworkNewsWire.com

SOURCE ChineseInvestors.com Inc

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] From Californians for Consumer Privacy: Facebook Withdraws Opposition to California Consumer Privacy Act

SACRAMENTO, Calif., April 11, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, Facebook announced that it was dropping its opposition to the California Consumer Privacy Act, a November ballot measure that would provide basic protections for consumers and their personal information. Previously, Facebook had contributed to the million-dollar campaign opposing the ballot measure along with corporate giants Google, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. "We're gratified that Facebook has dropped its opposition to the California Consumer Privacy Act. Now that they have seen the error of their ways, we hope they will work with us proactively to protect the personal information of all Californians, and support us publicly and financially," said initiative proponent Alastair Mactaggart. "We believe that all consumers deserve the basic rights outlined in our initiative. We call on the remaining corporations who have contributed to the Super PAC opposing this common-sense measure to drop their opposition. Gogle, AT&T, Verizon & Comcast: if you are not selling our personal information, why are you spending a million dollars to oppose us? Voters overwhelmingly support this measure, and protecting consumers is not only a good business decision, but the right thing to do. It's time to stop business as usual and to step up and do the right thing."



About the California Consumer Privacy Act: The California Consumer Privacy Act on the ballot in November 2018 establishes new, groundbreaking consumer privacy rights and empowers consumers to take back control over their personal information.

The California Consumer Privacy Act is supported by Californians for Consumer Privacy, a coalition of consumer advocacy groups, business owners, technology experts, activists and parents. The California Consumer Privacy Act will allow California consumers: To see what categories of their personal information large businesses collect about them; To tell those corporations to stop selling their personal information, and to not discriminate against them for making that choice (i.e. the company couldn't then refuse service, or increase prices); and To hold businesses accountable to victims of data breaches when they are reckless with Californians' personal information. Contact:

Robin Swanson

(916) 440-0424 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/from-californians-for-consumer-privacy-facebook-withdraws-opposition-to-california-consumer-privacy-act-300628611.html SOURCE Californians for Consumer Privacy

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] Global Cloud Provider Selects Zayo for Dark Fiber in Canada

A global cloud provider has selected Zayo Group (News - Alert) Holdings (NYSE: ZAYO) for a high-capacity dark fiber ring in the Montreal metro area. Zayo will extend its existing dense network in Montreal, building a 60-kilometer (km) ring for the anchor tenant along the South Shore, the city's growing technology and data center hub. The deployment will support the customer's strategy to significantly expand its presence in Montreal, ultimately connecting multiple data centers. With its favorable location and cost-effective power, the South Shore has become an attractive location for data centers, cloud providers and webscale companies. Zayo was selected by the cloud provider because of its leading fiber network in Canada, deep experience in building high-performance fiber network and flexibility in planning for the customer's continued growth. The network will further densify Zayo's Montreal network, expanding it into several metro municipalities. The build will include an expansion cable, with ample capacity for expected follow-on sales in multiple sectors. Montreal is a leading North American commercial hub and a growing center for finance, media, artificial intelligence (AI), gaming and other large enterprise. "This project enables us to further expand our Canadian footprint and deliver the high-performance communications infrastructure that this long-standing customer merits," said Jack Waters, CTO and president of Fiber Solutions at Zayo. "We expect to capture the beefits of scale leveraging our dense Montreal footprint and these new success-based routes."



For more information about Zayo's network, visit zayo.com. About Zayo Group

Zayo Group Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: ZAYO) provides communications infrastructure solutions, including fiber and bandwidth connectivity, colocation and cloud infrastructure to the world's leading businesses. Customers include wireless and wireline carriers, media and content companies and finance, healthcare and other large enterprises. Zayo's 127,000-mile network in North America and Europe includes extensive metro connectivity to thousands of buildings and data centers. In addition to high-capacity dark fiber, wavelength, Ethernet and other connectivity solutions, Zayo offers colocation and cloud infrastructure in its carrier-neutral data centers. Zayo provides users with flexible, customized solutions and self-service through Tranzact, an innovative online platform for managing and purchasing bandwidth. For more information, visit zayo.com. Forward Looking Statements This press release contains a number of forward-looking statements. Words, and variations of words such as "believe," "expect," "plan," "continue," "will," "should," and similar expressions are intended to identify our forward-looking statements. No assurance can be given that future results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements will be achieved and actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. For additional information on these and other factors that could affect our forward-looking statements, see our risk factors, as they may be amended from time to time, set forth in our filings with the SEC (News - Alert) , including our 10-K dated August 22, 2017. We disclaim and do not undertake any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement in this press release, except as required by applicable law or regulation. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180411005428/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] Keysight Delivers First-to-Market 28 GHz Channel Sounding Solution to Japan's Leading Mobile Operator for 5G Research Project

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS), a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers, and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, announced it has provided a 28 GHz Channel Sounding Solution to NTT DOCOMO, Inc., Japan's Leading Mobile Operator, for a channel sounding research project. This project is part of an ongoing agreement between the two companies to develop next-generation 5G wireless communication systems by conducting channel sounding studies at mmWave frequencies. 5G channel sounding is required to characterize the air interface for the new 5G radio-communication system. It means measuring parameters such as path loss, power delay profile, reflection, and various fading profiles including Doppler shift. It is required to design efficient and robust 5G channel models. Using the Keysight 5G 28 GHz Channel Sounding Solution with wideband MIMO data capture techniques enables engineers to measure angular spread with fewer measurements and improve resolution of the multi-path parameters. The current high frequency channel-sounding project uses Keysight's 28 GHz 5G MIMO channel sounding reference solution. Keysight and NTT (News - Alert) DOCOMO recently cooperated on a similar project at a 60 GHz fixed use case. Results from that research were shared with the 5G industry to accelerate the development and deployment of 5G ("Scattering Characteristics of the Human Body in 67-GHz Bnd," IEICE Transaction on Communications).



"We knew that we needed a cooperative relationship with a test and measurement provider who specialized in high-frequency applications to develop and verify underlying technologies for 5G," said Yukihiko Okumura, Group leader of 5G Radio Access Network Research Group, Research Laboratories of NTT DOCOMO. "The technical support and expertise from Keysight in 5G channel sounding techniques for mobility helped us understand the channel behavior at mmWave frequencies, especially travelling at high speeds." "Keysight is enabling the 5G industry by providing a combination of technical expertise and solutions in mmWave frequencies," said Garret Lees, Director of Operator Solution Group, Keysight Technologies. "By partnering with NTT DOCOMO on 5G we're able to accelerate key testing capabilities, allowing the wider mobile ecosystem to gain insights and innovate early."

Additional Information More information about Keysight's 5G channel sounding reference solution can be found at www.keysight.com/find/5g. An image of the solution is available at www.keysight.com/find/solution-5G-images. About Keysight Technologies Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS) is a leading technology company that helps its engineering, enterprise and service provider customers accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world. Keysight's solutions optimize networks and bring electronic products to market faster and at a lower cost with offerings from design simulation, to prototype validation, to manufacturing test, to optimization in networks and cloud environments. Customers span the worldwide communications ecosystem, aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, semiconductor and general electronics end markets. Keysight generated revenues of $3.2B in fiscal year 2017. In April 2017, Keysight acquired Ixia (News - Alert) , a leader in network test, visibility, and security. More information is available at www.keysight.com. Additional information about Keysight Technologies is available in the newsroom at www.keysight.com/go/news and on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180411005511/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] Traditional PC Market Exceeds Expectations with Flat Year-on-Year Shipment Growth, According to IDC

Worldwide shipments of traditional PCs (desktop, notebook, and workstation) totaled 60.4 million units and recorded flat (0.0%) year-on-year growth in the first quarter of 2018 (1Q18), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. The results exceeded the earlier forecast of a 1.5% decline and marks the third consecutive quarter where traditional PC shipment volume has hovered around flat growth year on year. Although the numbers are preliminary, the data seems to indicate a continued build up in commercial renewal activity as the main driver for the stabilizing trend. Business uptake of Windows 10 systems appear to be steadily ongoing, benefiting commercially-focused PC OEMs such as HP, Dell, and Lenovo (News - Alert) . Demand for premium notebooks in both the consumer and commercial segments have also helped major vendors retain better margins and garner buyer interest. Furthermore, continued focus on gaming systems has injected slight improvement in pockets of the consumer space. Unlike the first quarter of 2017, an improved supply of key notebook components also loosened pressures on both supply and pricing, leading to some recovery of share for the smaller vendors. From a geographic perspective, mature markets uniformly fared positively. The U.S. market saw modest growth after six quarters of year-on-year declines and Japan continued with its seventh consecutive quarter of growth. Emerging markets were more of a mixed bag as Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) (APeJ) shrank for the quarter while Latin America continued to recover positively against a tough 2017. "The component shortage that initially impacted portions of 2017 led some vendors to stock up inventory to avoid expected component price hikes, and that led to some concerns of excess stock that would be hard to digest in subsequent quarters," said Jay Chou, research manager with IDC's Personal Computing Device Tracker. "However, the market is continuing on a resilient path that should see modest commercial momentum through 2020." "The year kicked off with optimism returning to the U.S. PC market, especially on the notebook side," said Neha Mahajan, senior research analyst, Devices & Displays. "A likely rise in commercial activity amidst a positive economic environment is expected to further strengthen demand. The retail platform too shows signs of stability especially with a fast-growing gaming community adding to the confidence." Regional Highlights The USA market saw a promising opening quarter for the year with almost all major vendors reporting increases in notebook sales. Overall, total PC shipments for 1Q18 stood at 13.5 million units. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), the traditional PC market showed stable growth for the quarter, benefiting from a positive performance across both product categories. Continued mobility adoption and increased customer awareness of the value proposition of more premium devices enabled notebooks to maintain a growth trajectory. On the other side, desktops posted strong results, driven by the growing gaming market as well as long-awaited commercial device refreshes in certain sub regions. The APeJ traditional PC market ended the quarter slightly short of expectations. India and Indonesia showed better than anticipated results, but the PC market in China performed below forecast with shipments weakened by a smaller number of promotions in the consumer segment and softer demand from the public sector. The Japan commercial market was a couple points below expectations due to slowing of the momentum seen in 4Q17, but it still maintained healthy growth in 1Q18. The consumer segment was slightly better than the previous quarter in term of growth, but IDC believes shipments during the first three quarters of 2017 affected future demand, causing growth to decelerate in 4Q17 and after. Company Highlights HP Inc. maintained a comfortable lead over all others in the market with its eighth consecutive quarter of overall growth (up 4.3% year on year) and growth in all regions except Latin America. Lenovo saw a flat quarter in 1Q18, the third consecutive quarter in which the company saw year-on-year volume stabilize with flat global growth and a slower pace of decline in the U.S. Dell Inc. posted the strongest year-on-year growth out of all the major companies, growing 6.4% and buoyed by strong performances in nearly every region. Acer (News - Alert) held onto the fourth position. Its ongoing expansion into gaming and continued investments in Chromebooks have paid dividends for the company, but also caused some tough going in other arenas. Apple (News - Alert) finished the quarter in the fifth position with a year-on-year decline in shipments of 4.8%.







Top Companies, Worldwide Traditional PC Shipments, Market Share, and Year-On-Year Growth, First Quarter of 2018 (Preliminary results) (Shipments are in thousands of units) Company 1Q18 Shipments 1Q18 Market Share 1Q17 Shipments 1Q17 Market Share 1Q18/1Q17 Growth 1. HP Inc 13,676 22.6% 13,108 21.7% 4.3% 2. Lenovo 12,305 20.4% 12,300 20.4% 0.0% 3. Dell Inc 10,190 16.9% 9,573 15.9% 6.4% 4. Acer Group 4,085 6.8% 4,428 7.3% -7.7% 5. Apple 4,000 6.6% 4,201 7.0% -4.8% Others 16,128 26.7% 16,787 27.8% -3.9% Total 60,383 100.0% 60,397 100.0% 0.0% Source (News - Alert) : IDC Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker, April 11, 2018

Table Notes: Some IDC estimates prior to financial earnings reports.

Shipments include shipments to distribution channels or end users. OEM sales are counted under the company/brand under which they are sold.

Traditional PCs include Desktops, Notebooks, and Workstations and do not include Tablets or x86 Servers. Detachable Tablets and Slate Tablets are part of the Personal Computing Device Tracker but are not addressed in this press release.

Data for all companies are reported for calendar periods. In addition to the table above, a graphic illustrating the worldwide market share of the top 5 traditional PC companies over the previous five quarters is available by viewing this press release on IDC.com. IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker gathers detailed market data in over 90 countries. The research includes historical and forecast trend analysis among other data. For more information, or to subscribe to the research, please contact Kathy Nagamine at 650-350-6423 or knagamine@idc.com. About IDC Trackers

IDC Tracker products provide accurate and timely market size, company share, and forecasts for hundreds of technology markets from more than 100 countries around the globe. Using proprietary tools and research processes, IDC's Trackers are updated on a semiannual, quarterly, and monthly basis. Tracker results are delivered to clients in user-friendly excel deliverables and on-line query tools. About IDC

International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC's analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading media, data and marketing services company that activates and engages the most influential technology buyers. To learn more about IDC, please visit www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter (News - Alert) at @IDC and LinkedIn. All product and company names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180411006338/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]English Dutch

Corbion has published its agenda for the upcoming Annual General Meeting of shareholders (AGM) meeting to be held on 25 May 2018.

The full AGM agenda together with explanatory notes is available on Corbion's website.[April 11, 2018] Australian and Chinese Millennials are set to disrupt Beijing

BEIJING, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Who would dare to disrupt the innovation landscape between Australia and China? Millennials. Young innovators from Australia and China are about to spend a week in Beijing. Finding solutions for large-scale corporates such as Swisse, Alibaba, Westfarmer and David Jones. Who, what, where, when, why: Australia/China relations are not only about consumer good trading and investment properties. It is also a breeding ground for those who think innovation. From 16-20 April 2018, a delegation of 80 millennials from Australia and China is going to lead an innovation week in Beijing, following the CAMPx2018 program for young pioneers. CAMPx2018's is an award-winning innovation program bringing 80 business consultants with global companies on the same platform between Australia and China. As part of the program the participants, set in Thinktank teams, have 100 days to solve cross-border challenges encountered by multinational organizations. The topic of these researches intentionally matches with the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. Who are these Australian Chinese Millenials? Civil Engineers, software consultants, lecturers at Macquarie University (Sydney), social entrepreneurs, business psychologists, R&D workers, business consultants, researchers, business owners a panel of high profiles with different industries and cultural backgrounds. All linked by a bright future China-Australia relations. Within a week this international innovator delegation will master the boiling innovation landscape of Zhongguancun, Beijing's Silicon Valley. They will connect with start-up related to their industry, open discussion panel, network with a panel of local investors, and bridge with major incubators like: Tsinghua SEM X-celerator a start-up acceleration platform which has already accelerated over 150 startups and has invested nearly 100 million RMB into startups.

into startups. Plug'n Play a China-based international investment institution jointly founded by Sias International University and Amidi Group.

and Amidi Group. Innoway, China's $36 million governent-backed startup village. Innoway has incubated a total of 878 companies, including 121 overseas teams with a total financing amount of 7.65 billion yuan ( $1.22 billion ).



Beijing in 2018 and feeling a new superpower catapult itself to new heights around you. The Beijing experience will provide CAMPers with an opportunity to touch China's massive innovation trend up close and be touched by it. This is a landscape which will reshape how the world thinks about innovation ," Andrea Myles , CAMP CEO and co-founder. A week for Australian and Chinese the face of tomorrow's collaboration and strengthen a cross-border dialogue.

To know more about their development, contact us:

General: info@australiachina.org

Media: morgan@australiachina.org

Partnership: andrea@australiachina.org

or follow CAMP's social media on:

Twitter: twitter.com/china_australia

Facebook: facebook.com/chinaaustraliamillennialproject/

Website: www.australiachina.org Few words about CAMP (China Australia Millennial Project): Being heralded as part of the solution to 'future-proofing' Australia , CAMP is equipping the next generation of Australian entrepreneurs with the Asia literacy and networks required to navigate the country's most important economic relationship -- that with China.

, CAMP is equipping the next generation of Australian entrepreneurs with the literacy and networks required to navigate the country's most important economic relationship -- that with China. CAMP is proudly powered by incredible international partners such as Swisse, EY, Alibaba and China Eastern .

. CAMP gain the trust and support of Australian institutions such as Macquarie University, the City of Sydney and the federal government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade via the Australia-China Council.

and the federal government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade via the Australia-China Council. CAMP or China Australia Millennial Project is an Australian-Chinese privately owned company. "CAMP delivered direct commercial business outcomes, a connection with leading edge influencers and were extremely useful in rounding out our stakeholder positioning and marketing to policy makers including politicians and bureaucrats." Justin Howden, Head of Government Relations. What does CAMP solve? China/Western countries cultural miscomprehension: can we find solutions? This Australian start-up decided to create a platform where millennials can connect with governmental and industries to find better ways to work and life together. CAMP aims to build the bridge between China and Australia millennials through innovation. How? By being a platform connecting Chinese and Australian millennials. CAMP gives them a voice, a stage. With CAMP they can express their vision, connect and develop. Together and with CAMP they find solutions for global issues. CAMP allows them to employ their inner potential. With CAMP participants connect with other brilliant innovative minds, coming from different industries and culture. What's its impact? CAMP helps millennials' speeches to scope a higher level and reach the right person to solve cross-cultural issues. The start-up is strongly connected to governmental and international private companies which are following the progress of CAMP's Millennials. What is their service? Each year CAMP organises a 100 days training for 100 participants. An award-winning cross-border innovation program unites dynamic young leaders who are passionate about business, social innovation and strengthening the Australia-China relationship, and provides them with the tools to address real-world global challenges. The program, with mentorship, workshops, design panel, design thinking tool and lectures work both online and offline between Australia and China. Few Words about Andrea Myles, CEO and Co-founder: Since her first encounter in 2002, Andrea Myles loves China and has pursued every opportunity to gain a deeper insight into this fascinating country.

loves China and has pursued every opportunity to gain a deeper insight into this fascinating country. Driven by her passion, slight frustration of the transactional nature of the Australia -China relationship and impatience for positive change, Andrea co-founded the China Australia Millennial Project, which connects leading talent in both nations.

-China relationship and impatience for positive change, Andrea co-founded the China Australia Millennial Project, which connects leading talent in both nations. Possessing a working proficiency in Mandarin, she has two bilingual Masters degrees, a BSc in Neuroscience and is a fellow of the School for Social Entrepreneurs.

She has been named one of Australia's 100 Most Influential Women by Westpac and the Australian Financial Review. Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180411/2102209-1 SOURCE China Australia Millennial Project (CAMP)

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] Logicalis Appoints Lim Tsu Pheng as Chief Technology Officer for Asia; Dewi Sanly as Managing Director for Singapore

SINGAPORE, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Logicalis Group, the international IT solutions and managed services provider, today announced two key appointments: Lim Tsu Pheng as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Asia, and Dewi Sanly as Managing Director (MD) for Singapore. Based in Singapore, Tsu Pheng and Dewi will take on their roles with immediate effect, reporting to Chong-Win Lee, Logicalis Asia CEO. In this newly created role, Tsu Pheng will be responsible for developing Logicalis' digital enablement solutions in Asia, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. He will engage closely with customers and partners, and lead Logicalis Asia in building world-class, fit-for-purpose IT solutions to deliver powerful business outcomes. Tsu Pheng joins Logicalis from Cisco Systems, where he headed the professional and consulting services for Asia. With more than 23 years of experience in the IT industry, he has held several leadership roles in sales engineering, IT consulting and product management. "I am excited to welcome Tsu Pheng to Logicalis to drive further innovation in Asia. Tsu Pheng's extensive technology experience and expertise will be an asset to our organisation and, most importantly, our customers," said Chong-Win Lee. "Tsu Pheng will be focused on ensuring hat Logicalis Asia is continuously evolving our skills and capabilities in alignment with new market trends, as we help our customers unlock business value through the application of new digital technologies."



Tsu Pheng holds a bachelor degree in Electronics Engineering from Nanyang Technological University.

As Managing Director of Logicalis Singapore, Dewi Sanly will be responsible for driving revenue and profitability growth for Singapore. She will lead the Singapore operations, including sales, pre-sales, services and engineering. Prior to this, Dewi was Vice President of Sales for the Telecommunications and Commercial sectors. With more than 23 years of successful sales leadership experience, Dewi has served in various leadership positions at Logicalis Singapore, driving sales, customer retention and service delivery. Dewi graduated from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering. "I am delighted to announce Dewi's promotion to MD of Logicalis Singapore. She has played an instrumental role in building Logicalis' success in Singapore, and is well-positioned to lead the team through our next phase of growth," said Chong-Win Lee. "With her strong leadership experience, I am confident that she will drive further success for Logicalis Singapore and contribute to our vision of being the digital enabler for our customers." About Logicalis Logicalis is an international multi-skilled solution provider providing digital enablement services to help customers harness digital technology and innovative services to deliver powerful business outcomes. Our customers span industries and geographical regions; and our focus is to engage in the dynamics of our customers' vertical markets; including financial services, TMT (telecommunications, media and technology), education, healthcare, retail, government, manufacturing and professional services, and apply the skills of our 4,500 employees in modernising key digital pillars; data centre and cloud services, security and network infrastructure, workspace communications and collaboration, data and information strategies, and IT operation modernisation. We are the advocates for our customers for some of the world's leading technology companies including Cisco, HPE, IBM, CA Technologies, NetApp, Microsoft, Oracle, VMware and ServiceNow. The Logicalis Group has annualised revenues of over $1.5 billion, from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific and Africa. It is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, with revenues of over $4 billion. For more information, visit www.ap.logicalis.com Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180410/2100938-1-a

Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180410/2100938-1-b SOURCE Logicalis

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] PHNIX Vows to Release More New Heat Pump Hot Water Products in Southeast Asia to Meet User Demand

GUANGZHOU, China, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Because of significant increasing demand from Southeast Asia for PHNIX heat pump hot water products in the last six months, PHNIX, a leading heat pump manufacturer in China, has announced that it will launch even more new products and market support resources in Southeast Asia. Peter Wang, Deputy General Manager in charge of PHNIX global overseas business, stated that PHNIX has developed a series of new hot water heat pump products specially developed for the Southeast Asian market, which will be unveiled at the upcoming HVACR Vietnam. The variety of new PHNIX hot water heat pumps launched in Southeast Asia this year are the results of PHNIX's mature product application integrating its experiences in both the Chinese market and the European market, specifically based on the climate characteristics and user habits of Southeast Asia.



PHNIX heat pump hot water solutions have found considerable success in countries throughout Southeast Asia in the last few years. Demand from Indonesia, India and Vietnam has recently increased significantly, with both the PHNIX HeatPlus Series with a 4.68 high COP and the HeatSpring Series with a high outlet temperature of 65C in especially high demand, according to Mr. Troy Wang, PHNIX product manager. About PHNIX HeatSpring Heat Pump

65C high outlet temperature PHNIX HeatSpring Heat Pump Series can produce outlet water constantly at a temperature as high as 65C by circulating heating, while most domestic water heaters in the local market can achieve only 55C. The 65C high outlet temperature increases hot water volume supply by 30%. Solar Collector + PHNIX Heat Pump For users that are currently annoyed by the unstable hot water supply of their solar heater system, this easily installed revolutionary system can be an ideal solution. It efficiently and consistently guarantees a plentiful supply of low-cost hot water. Utilizing the heat energy from both the sun and the air, this innovative system helps to increase the performance greatly. About PHNIX PHNIX, a leading manufacturer of heat pumps in China, is an international enterprise specializing in the R&D and production of heat pump products and energy-saving solutions. Nearly 50% of PHNIX products are exported to Europe, North America and other overseas markets. For more information about PHNIX and its products, please visit www.phnix-e.com. Contact Information John Zhu

+86-20-39067742

john_zhu@phnix.com Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180411/2102118-1

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] Malaysian Enterprises amongst the most advanced in Southeast Asia in Implementing Digital Transformation Strategies

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Senior Information and Operations Technology professionals from local enterprises and government agencies will gather at the 21st Edition of Asia IoT Business Platform, being held at the Hotel Istana Kuala Lumpur on 23rd & 24th April 2018. Endorsed by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, this year's event will focus on how Malaysian government agencies and enterprises address key challenges and pain points in the process of adopting and using IoT effectively, in order to tap on unexplored angles of potential business opportunities. Malaysia launched its National IoT Strategic Roadmap in 2015, with the goal of contributing RM42.5 (US$13.4) billion to Gross National Income by 2025. Several schemes have been implemented to provide relevant assistance for local enterprises to adopt IoT implementation projects and the results have been encouraging. In a survey conducted by Asia IoT Business Platform in 2017, 86% of Malaysian enterprises were found to be currently exploring or implementing IoT solution while 52% of enterprises were in the fact-finding stage of learning about IoT solutions. YB Datuk Wira Dr. Abu Bakar Mohamad Diah, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation (MOSTI), will be delivering the keynote address. Thillai Raj T. Ramanathan, Chief Technology Officer, MIMOS Bhd, Dr. Gopinath Rao Sinniah, Chairman of IoT Working Group, Malaysian Technical Standards Forum Berhad, Roberto Benetello, Chief Executive Officer, EU-Malaysia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (EUMCCI) and other leaders will also be present to share about their involvement in localpolicies to drive adoption of digital technologies.



"Our first IoT activities were conducted in Kuala Lumpur in 2014 and over the years, it is encouraging to see the growth in interest from local enterprises and government agencies in adopting technology to improve internal processes," Irza Suprapto, Director at Asia IoT Business Platform, said. The World Bank has been closely observing technological disruption from a development angle. In a published report, "Internet of Things: The New Government to Business Platform", it looks at ways that cities have begun using IoT, and considers how governments can harness its benefits while minimizing potential risks and problems. The report was produced by Prasanna Lal Das, Lead Knowledge Management Officer, Trade & Competitiveness of World Bank and his team. Prasanna will be presenting at the event in Kuala Lumpur.

With a focus on local issues, the 21st Asia IoT Business Platform will also feature a line-up of esteemed speakers from enterprises such as Maxis, Celcom Axiata, CIMB, Sime Darby Plantation, Malaysia Airlines, Petronas and Tenaga National Berhad. The conference will see a gathering of local and international IoT technology solution providers including ADLINK, ARM, Barbara, Dassault Systemes, Cumulocity, Fluidmojo, CarbookPlus, Parasoft, Quantum Inventions, Robustel, Software AG. Several home grown firms like N'osairis and Maxis will also be presenting about their own IoT journey. PR Newswire is the official News Release Distribution partner of Asia IoT Business Platform Malaysia. About Asia IoT Business Platform

With a focus on local telecommunication companies and verticals, the Asia IoT Business Platform is a premier business platform crafted by the industry for the industry, with the aim of addressing key issues facing the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in ASEAN. The program drives enterprises to understand and learn about the adoption of IoT technologies for their business. Since its inception in 2013, the event has secured strong support from local governments and telecommunication companies. The 12st edition of Asia IoT Business Platform will be held on 23 -- 24 April 2018 at Hotel Istana Kuala Lumpur and will focus on engaging IoT solution providers and enterprises to address pain points and key challenges in implementing IoT in businesses and government agencies About Industry Platform Pte Ltd

Industry Platform Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore incorporated firm focused on the global telecommunications sector. We are Southeast Asia's leading organizer of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) conferences and exhibitions. We work with local and global businesses, as well as public sector bodies and associations who are looking to expand their reach in Asian markets. We provide the best platforms for industry professionals to network and shape developments. For further details, please contact:

Irza Fauzan Suprapto

Director

Tel: +65 6733 1107

Email: irza@industry-platform.com

SOURCE Industry Platform Pte Ltd

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] New DesignSpark Toolbox app from RS Components available on iOS, Android and Windows

Free app simplifies access to electronic reference materials, calculation and conversion tools HONG KONG, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc (LSE:ECM), the global distributor for engineers, has unveiled a new app for iOS, Android and Windows devices. The DesignSpark Toolbox app is available to download free-of-charge, and provides a single point of access to common electronic reference materials, calculation and conversion tools in an easy-to-use format for electronics design engineers, makers and students. The app has been developed in conjunction with Marcus Roskosch, the creator of a range of highly successful apps for engineers, and replaces the RS Toolbox app, which was introduced in 2013 for iOS and achieved more than 65,000 downloads. DesignSpark Toolbox offers an extensive range of functions, which are grouped as icons on the main screen, including engineering calculators, converters and lookup tables. These functions include filter frequency calculators, a 555 timer configurator, calculators for a variety of voltage regulators and op-amps, and essential tools such as numbering systems converters, an Ohm's Law calculator, and lookup tables for battery types and sizes. The app offers a high level of customisation and is available in 17 different languages. Uses will also be able to access many DesignSpark community features within the app, placing thousands of member-contributed articles and projects at their disposal, covering everything from Arduino and Raspberry Pi to IoT and Blockchain.



The 'Make' section provides the perfect place to keep track of projects on the go with sections to store website links, images, technical documents and more. There is even access to the new DesignSpark Marketplace, where makers and start-ups can buy and sell their creations. The app aims to support engineers, makers and students by aiding design, BOM, procurement and stock keeping. In addition to the common calculation tools and component comparison tables it incorporates product search, barcode scanning, reference materials, 3D models and much more.

"This app places a vast amount of component data and online calculations at the fingertips of engineers, students and makers, enabling them to exploit creativity and innovation," said Mike Bray, Vice President of DesignSpark at RS. "It is yet another example of our mission at DesignSpark to deliver free, high-performance tools that make the design process faster, easier and more affordable." He added: "We have listened to feedback from our members with regards to our previous app, and in particular their desire for an Android version, and improved functionality. Thankfully we have now been able to deliver both for them, along with access to many DesignSpark features on their mobile devices. The app will always be free-of-charge to support our community, and will be regularly updated in the future to offer more and more functionality." The DesignSpark Toolbox App is available to download now from: App Store (iOS): https://itunes.apple.com/app/rs-toolbox/id747957895?ls=1&mt=8

Google Play (Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.roskosch.rstb

Microsoft Store (Windows): https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9WZDNCRCS18T About RS Components RS Components and Allied Electronics & Automation are the trading brands of Electrocomponents plc, the global distributor for engineers. We offer more than 500,000 industrial and electronic products, sourced from 2,500 leading suppliers, and provide a wide range of value-added services to over one million customers. With operations in 32 countries, we trade through multiple channels and ship around 50,000 parcels a day. Electrocomponents is listed on the London Stock Exchange and in the last financial year ended 31 March 2017 had revenues of GBP1.51bn. For more information, please visit the website at www.rs-online.com. Further information is available via these links: Twitter: @RSComponents; @alliedelec; @designsparkRS

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/company/rs-components Electrocomponents plc

www.electrocomponents.com

RS Components

www.rs-online.com

Allied Electronics & Automation

www.alliedelec.com

DesignSpark

www.rs-online.com/designspark Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180411/2102319-1

Logo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20150818/8521505364LOGO SOURCE RS Components

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 11, 2018] Aspect Software's Momentum Soars in APAC on New Logo Growth, Strong Partner Alliances

Region secures more than 40 new brands SINGAPORE, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Aspect Software, a leading provider of native consumer engagement, workforce optimization, and self-service solutions, today, shared details of their unprecedented growth in APAC, as they added more than 40 new logos to their portfolio in the region. Aspect's Customer Experience(CX) and Employee Experience(EX) centric solutions along with notable growth such in the ecommerce, utility, hospitality industries as well as in the BPO, BFSI and telco markets, significantly contributed to the company's momentum. In the last year, Aspect engaged with esteemed brands such as Bajaj Allianz, IIFL Group, Malindo Airways, and many more in the region. Speaking on Aspect's performance, Krish Arani, Senior Vice President APAC & Middle East said, "At Aspect, we are constantly innovating, researching and building newer ways to enable enterprises to more productively and effectively engage with their customers. Our role is not just build these solutions, but also to ensure our clients are prepared with right toos to engage with the changing customer preferences in this dynamic, digital, customer-centric world."



Aspect's award-winning customer service solutions has given the contact center industry a new dimension. Aspect shares its remarkable growth and expansion to its extended partner ecosystem, which includes Value Added Resellers(VARS), System Integrators(SI), Consultants, Business Process Outsourcing(BPOS), e-Sellers and telecommunication companies. Commenting on Aspect's growth, Shilpi Puri, Senior Director, Strategic Alliances and Partner, "It is extremely exciting for Aspect to experience such high growth in the APAC market in the past year, exceeding industry growth rates by a large margin. Our APAC success is a testimony of not just our solution offerings, but also of our partner community. This is when we stop and say thanks to our customers, colleagues and all our partners for their incredible commitment and continued trust throughout our journey."

Aspect's channel and partner program is designed to provide greater opportunities for existing and new Aspect partners to enable enhanced customer engagement capabilities through the deployment of Aspect's deep and wide solutions portfolio. Aspect's global partners are excelling at delivering exceptional customer experiences thereby bolstering Aspect's success not only in APAC but globally as well. To further fortify its position in 2018, Aspect plans to widen their partner reach by adding industry savvy, experienced firms from the contact center industry who have the ability to showcase Aspect's solutions for interaction management, workforce optimization and self-service over on-premise and cloud. 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 helping enterprises keep service levels high and operational costs contained. For more information, visit www.aspect.com Logo-https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20171123/1999787-1LOGO SOURCE Aspect

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Royal Capital Pro Becomes First Online Trading Site to Offer Shares in the Top 47 Saudi Stocks

TALINN, Estonia, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Aramco Will Be Added Following Its Anticipated IPO Royal Capital Pro, the leading internet-based brokerage serving the Arab gulf states, has announced that it has now become the only online platform offering shares in the top local 47 Saudi Arabian stocks. Those 47, moreover, will increase to 48 following the anticipated initial public offering (IPO) of Aramco. "By providing this unique opportunity to our clients, we are bringing trading close to home, which provides them with multiple benefits," states Nasser Hashem, Chief Broker at Royal Capital Pro. "For example, unlike offline trading, shares can be bought and sold on Royal Capital Pro's website at any time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week," he continues. "This significantly lowers the risk for investors because it enables them to respond to market fluctuations as they occur in real time, rather than wait until the stock exchange reopens at the beginning of thenext business day."



Royal Capital Pro has quickly earned a reputation for excellence among investors throughout the Arab gulf. Clients are provided with high leverage and accounts can be opened with a modest minimum investment of 10,000 riyals (US$2,500). "What is truly unique about Royal Capital Pro as an online trading platform is that our clients are entitled to consult with our savvy market experts absolutely free of charge," Nasser Hashem concludes. "Because we truly care about our clients, we provide this service as an expression of our commitment to provide them with all the information they need to maximize their profits."

About Royal Capital Pro Royal Capital Pro is the Arabian Peninsula's go-to broker for online trading. Any investor with a computer and an internet connection can take full advantage of its services. Its trading platform is dynamic but very user friendly and is fully equipped with all of the technical tools that are required to properly analyze global markets. In this way, Royal Capital Pro allows its clients to make the best possible trading decisions. The company employs strict security protocols to ensure monetary safety, and features and provides its customers with an exclusive rewards program to demonstrate its appreciation for their trust. Contact:

Tel: +44-2035195194

support@royalcapitalpro.com https://www.royalcapitalpro.com

Facebook - Royal Capital Pro

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Sensorion reports full year 2017 results

Increase in operating costs consistent with advancing clinical development of SENS-111 for acute unilateral vestibulopathy (severe vertigo) and SENS-401 for sudden sensorineural hearing loss;





Validating deal to study combination SENS-401 with Cochlear implants to treat hearing loss;





Cash position of 7.6 million at December 31, 2017;





2018 outlook: phase II clinical data for lead drug-candidate, SENS-111; initiation of phase II clinical testing for SENS-401 MONTPELLIER, France, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sensorion (FR0012596468  ALSEN), a biotechnology company specializing in the treatment of inner ear diseases, today announces full-year financial results for the year to December 31, 2017 and its outlook for 2018. Nawal Ouzren, CEO of Sensorion, said: Our full-year results are aligned with the clinical development for both SENS-111 and SENS-401. In addition, we received the Orphan Drug Designation from the U.S. FDA for SENS-401 to prevent cisplatin-induced hearing loss in paediatric cancer patients, indication for which we are considering a phase II clinical trial in 2019. Finally, we signed an industrial partnership with Cochlear Ltd, the world leader in cochlear implants, for the preclinical evaluation of SENS-401 in combination with their implants. In 2018, we will concentrate on advancing and further accelerating our important clinical-stage therapeutic-candidates for inner ear disorders with focus on two key objectives: data read-out from the phase II clinical trial with SENS-111 and the start of a phase II clinical trial with SENS-401 in patients suffering from sudden sensorineural hearing loss. 2017 financial results Annual accounts to December 31, 2017, drawn up under IFRS and approved by the Board of Directors on April 10, 2018, have been reviewed by the statutory auditors, whose report is currently being prepared. The simplified income statement at December 31, 2017 was as follows: In euros - IFRS 31/12/2017 31/12/2016 Operating income 2 025 413 1 769 763 Research & Development costs 7 872 735 7 817 751 General costs 3 668 464 2 373 384 Total operating costs 11 541 199 10 191 135 Operating profit/loss - 9 515 785 - 8 421 372 Financial profit/loss - 170 379 - 412 054 Net profit/loss - 9 686 164 - 8 883 426



operating income  consisting mainly of Research Tax Credit (1.9 million) and subsidies (0.1 million)  totaled 2.0 million, compared with 1.8 million at December 31, 2016. Operating costs increased by 13% from 10.2 million at December 31, 2016 to 11.5 million at December 31, 2017, reflecting the ongoing clinical development of the Companys two lead development candidates, SENS-111 to treat acute severe vertigo and SENS-401 for treating hearing loss, as well as by non-recurring costs related to the change of CEO in April 2017. R&D costs accounted for 68% of total operating costs, compared with 77% in 2016.

The operating loss at December 31, 2017 was 9.5 million, versus 8.4 million at December 31, 2016. Once the financial loss (0.2 million) is taken into account, there was a net loss of 9.7 million over the year to December 31, 2017, compared with 8.9 million the previous year. The Companys workforce increased from 17 staff at December 31, 2016 to 20 at December 31, 2017. Financial position At December 31, 2017, Sensorion had cash and cash equivalents of 7.6 million, versus 8.5 million a year earlier. This decrease was the result of 8.1 million (versus 7.7 million in 2016) used for operations, the receipt of a 950 thousand interest-free innovation loan by Bpifrance and the Occitania region of Southern France and raising 5 million via the exercise of a third tranche of OCABSA financing (convertible bonds coupled with equity warrants) from Yorkville Advisors Global, LP, a U.S. healthcare specialist investor. Finally, our industrial partner Cochlear made a 1.6 million equity investment in Sensorion on December 21, 2017, to evaluate combining SENS-401 with their cochlear implants. Of the 500 equity warrants issued for this third tranche, 460 were converted into ordinary shares in 2017. All of the 40 remaining equity warrants that had not converted into ordinary shares by their holder at December 31, 2017 were converted in January 2018. Within the framework of this flexible financing line put in place in November 2015, Sensorion has the option to increase its cash position by up to approximately 9 million over the next 7 months (plus 3.75 million should all the associated equity warrants be exercised) to further support its product development activities. During the current financial year, Sensorion expects to receive 1.9 million in Research Tax Credit reimbursement, booked at December 31, 2017. 2017 Highlights  Research & Development: SENS-111 AUV : Following authorization by the US regulatory authorities in 2016, the phase II clinical trial in acute unilateral vestibulopathy has been authorized in 2017 in Europe and South Korea. The first clinical centers have been opened and the first patients enrolled. The company expects results from this clinical trial around the end of 2018.





: Following authorization by the US regulatory authorities in 2016, the phase II clinical trial in acute unilateral vestibulopathy has been authorized in 2017 in Europe and South Korea. The first clinical centers have been opened and the first patients enrolled. The company expects results from this clinical trial around the end of 2018. SENS-401 SSNHL : Preclinical results confirmed that regular oral administration of SENS-401, even when starting administration up to 96 hours after an acoustic trauma, generates significant recovery of hearing. Results from the phase I clinical trial with SENS-401 support the start of a Phase 2 clinical trial in 2018. Additional data will be communicated at a congress in April 2018.





: Preclinical results confirmed that regular oral administration of SENS-401, even when starting administration up to 96 hours after an acoustic trauma, generates significant recovery of hearing. Results from the phase I clinical trial with SENS-401 support the start of a Phase 2 clinical trial in 2018. Additional data will be communicated at a congress in April 2018. SENS-401 CIO: In 2017, Sensorion received an Orphan Drug Designation from the FDA for SENS-401 in the prevention of platinum-induced ototoxicity in paediatric cancer patients. This may contribute to acceleration of the SENS-401 development cycle and provide for 7 years commercial exclusivity in the USA, following potential market approval.  Scientific Communication In 2017, Sensorion presented or published the results of its R&D activities at leading congresses or in leading publications: February 15, 2017: Sensorion inner ear disease product candidates (SENS-111 and SENS-401) and its innovative technology platform were featured in three posters and during one podium presentation at the 40th Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO) annual meeting held in Baltimore, MD.



May 2, 2017: Sensorion presented preclinical results of SENS-401 for prevention of Cisplatin-induced ototoxicity in an oral podium presentation at the Combined Otolaryngology Spring Meetings (COSM), which took place in San Diego, CA.



May 11-13, 2017: Sensorion was invited as speaker in the 1 st joint meeting of the European Histamine Research Society and the Japanese Histamine Research Society.



joint meeting of the European Histamine Research Society and the Japanese Histamine Research Society. September 12, 2017: Data published in Otology & Neurotology showed that oral clinical-stage SENS-401 significantly prevented Cisplatin-induced hearing loss in preclinical models.  Strategic Partnership In December 2017 Sensorion and Cochlear Ltd initiated a collaboration to evaluate therapeutic combination of SENS-401 in combination with Cochlear implants in a preclinical setting, with potential mid-stage clinical testing to begin as soon as 2019. Cochlear made a 1.6 million equity investment in Sensorion. In exchange, Cochlear received a right of first negotiation for a global license to use SENS-401 in combination with certain implantable devices. Recent events and 2018 outlook Since the start of 2017, Sensorion has vigorously pursued the development of all its drug candidate programs, whose progress should mark this year: SENS-111 : Results from the ongoing Phase 2 clinical trial, with the planed enrolment of 207 patients, shall be available towards the end of 2018.



: Results from the ongoing Phase 2 clinical trial, with the planed enrolment of 207 patients, shall be available towards the end of 2018. SENS-401 : Sensorion plans to initiate a phase 2 clinical trial by the end of the first half of 2018. An interim analysis of results shall be available mid-2019.



: Sensorion plans to initiate a phase 2 clinical trial by the end of the first half of 2018. An interim analysis of results shall be available mid-2019. SENS-401 CIO: A Phase 2 clinical trial in a paediatric population treated by chemotherapy is being planned and could start beginning of 2019. Upcoming Events COSM (Combined Otolaryngology Spring Meetings) , April 18-22, 2018, National Harbor, MD, USA

, April 18-22, 2018, National Harbor, MD, USA 52 nd Symposium of the International Society for Otoneurology , May 24-26 2018, Toulouse, France

, May 24-26 2018, Toulouse, France Shareholders Meeting , May 31, 2018 in Paris

, May 31, 2018 in Paris Half Year results 2018, October 19, 2018. About Sensorion Sensorion is a biotech company pioneering novel treatments of inner ear diseases such as severe vertigo, tinnitus or hearing loss. Two products are currently in the clinical development stage: SENS-111, in phase 2 in acute unilateral vestibulopathy (vestibular neuritis), and SENS-401, which has completed a phase 1 trial. The company was founded by Inserm (the French Institute of Health and Medical Research) and is utilizing its pharmaceutical R&D experience and comprehensive technology platform to develop first-in-class easy-to-administer, notably orally active, drugs for treating and preventing hearing loss and the symptoms of bouts of vertigo and tinnitus. Based in Montpellier, Southern France, Sensorion has received financial support from Bpifrance, through the InnoBio fund, and Inserm Transfert Initiative. Sensorion has been listed on the Euronext Growth Paris exchange since April 2015. www.sensorion-pharma.com Contacts Sensorion

Nawal Ouzren

CEO



Tel: +33 (0)4 67 20 77 30 Investor Relations

LifeSci Advisors LLC

Chris Maggos, Managing Director, Europe

chris@lifesciadvisors.com

Tel. : +41 79 367 6254 Label: SENSORION

ISIN: FR0012596468

Mnemonic: ALSEN

Presse

Alize RP

Caroline Carmagnol & Wendy Rigal

sensorion@alizerp.com

Tel: +33 (0)1 44 54 36 66 Disclaimer

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements concerning Sensorion and its business. Such forward looking statements are based on assumptions that Sensorion considers to be reasonable. However, there can be no assurance that such forward-looking statements will be verified, which statements are subject to numerous risks, including the risks set forth in the Document de reference registration document filed with the Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF- French Financial Market Authority) on September 6th, 2017 under nR.17-062 and to the development of 5/5 economic conditions, financial markets and the markets in which Sensorion operates. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are also subject to risks not yet known to Sensorion or not currently considered material by Sensorion. The occurrence of all or part of such risks could cause actual results, financial conditions, performance or achievements of Sensorion to be materially different from such forward-looking statements. This press release and the information that it contains do not constitute an offer to sell or subscribe for, or a solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for, Sensorion shares in any country. The communication of this press release in certain countries may constitute a violation of local laws and regulations. Any recipient of this press release must inform oneself of any such local restrictions and comply therewith.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Siyata Mobile Receives $400K Purchase Order from Leading Two-Way Radio Vendor

MONTREAL, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Siyata Mobile Inc. (the "Company" or "Siyata") (TSX-V:SIM) (OTCQX:SYATF) is pleased to announce that it has received a $400K Purchase Order (PO) from a world leading two-way radio vendor for its connected in-vehicle cellular devices.

Marc Seelenfreund, CEO and Chairman of Siyata Mobile, commented, We are now seeing major adoption of our 4G product portfolio with multiple customers purchasing our commercial vehicle and rugged mobile devices. Our strategy to replace aging two-way radio systems with cellular based Push-to-Talk solutions remains extremely relevant in the rapidly changing landscape of converting analog systems, such as two-way radios, to more advanced and robust cellular based systems such as PTT. We have yet to encounter any direct competitors with the dedicated in-vehicle features such as our UV350 and we are confident our experience gives us significant advantage of what we believe is a paradigm shift within the transportation industry. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, in 2015 there were over 12 million fleet vehicles in the United Sates. Siyata aims to be the leading provider of connected vehicle and mobile hardware solutions as these commercial fleets upgrade their communication platforms to be compatible with next-generation networks, PoC (proof of concept) solutions and other software applications. As a reminder, the company will a conference call on Thursday, April 26, 2018, at 9:00am Eastern Time (06:00am PST) to discuss year-end results, along with a Q&A session with Siyata Mobile CEO and Chairman, Marc Seelenfreund. Details of the conference call: Date: Thursday, April 26, 2018

Time: 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time

North Ameria dial-in number: 1-877-291-4570





: 1-647-788-4919 There will also be a playback of the conference call, available in MP3 format by contacting investor relations below.

About Siyata



A TSX Venture Top 50 Company, Siyata Mobile Inc. is a leading global developer and provider of cellular communications systems for enterprise customers, specializing in connected vehicle products for professional fleets, marketed under the Uniden Cellular brand. Since developing the worlds first 3G connected vehicle device, Siyata has been a pioneer in the industry, launching the worlds first 4G LTE all-in-one fleet communications device in 2017. Incorporating voice, push-to-talk over cellular, data, and fleet management solutions into a single device, the company aims to become the connected vehicle communications device of choice for commercial vehicles and fleets around the world.



Siyata also offers rugged phones for industrial users and signal boosters for homes, buildings, and fleets with poor cell coverage. Siyatas customers include cellular operators, commercial vehicle technology distributors, and fleets of all sizes in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Australia, and the Middle East. Visit www.siyatamobile.com and http://www.unidencellular.com/ to learn more. On Behalf of the Board of Directors of: SIYATA MOBILE INC. Marc Seelenfreund

CEO and Chairman Investor Relations:

Arlen Hansen

Kin Communications

1-866-684-6730

SIM@kincommunications.com Sales Department:

Glenn Kennedy, VP Sales

Siyata Mobile Inc.

416-892-1823

glenn_kennedy@siyatamobile.com 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. This news release may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements within, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward looking. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. There can be no assurances that such statements will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under the applicable laws.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] FocusVision Strengthens C-Suite Team Through Strategic New Hires

STAMFORD, Connecticut, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Thierry D'Hers, Mark Sonders and Chris Nagy to drive product, sales, marketing and finance innovation for insights technology leader. Insights and analytics technology provider FocusVision has bolstered its C-suite team with three key new additions to help scale the business and drive innovation. In an industry that has shifted toward agile working models and DIY empowerment, these hires represent a commitment to integrating the FocusVision suite of products into a single platform. Each new team member will play a key role in achieving this outcome. The new team includes Thierry D'Hers as Chief Product Officer, Mark Sonders as Chief Revenue officer and Chris Nagy as Chief Financial Officer. The appointments complement FocusVision's recent rebrand and significant technology investment. A tech industry veteran, D'Hers will be responsible for leadership of FocusVision's entie product development organization. He has previously led product teams at Microsoft and Tableau Software. Mark Sonders will lead FocusVision's global sales and marketing efforts, and his vast experience in scaling SAAS businesses will play well within the company's evolving business model. He has worked with Vertafore and Thompson Reuters. Chris Nagy brings more than 20 years' of experience to FocusVision, and will lead all financial strategies and resources for the company. He has worked with Vela Trading Technologies, Radianz, NYFIX and Blackrock.



Of the new hires, FocusVision CEO, Zlatko Vucetic, said, "FocusVision has experienced tremendous growth over the past 16 months, and has identified key areas for continued business evolution. Chief among such is a focus on providing solutions that deliver optimal experiences to our clients, and empower them to harness the critical customer insights that will drive their success. Thierry, Mark and Chris will be integral in leading these strategic initiatives, and overall business innovation. These important hires come on the heels of a successful rebrand, and foreshadow more business and product announcements to come." About FocusVision

FocusVision is a full-spectrum insights and analytics technology solutions provider. Established in 1992, they were the first company to live-stream focus groups. The company now offers premium tools to gather, analyze and share data for customer satisfaction surveys, brand tracking, focus groups, online communities, communications testing, segmentation, NPS, product testing and more. FocusVision has over 400 employees globally, with offices in the US, UK, Bulgaria and Singapore. They are trusted by 18 of the Top-20 Fortune 100 companies, and all of the Top-10 Healthcare and CPG companies. Learn more at focusvision.com.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alexa.com, the trusted source of competitor and audience insights, today announced the launch of the Alexa Agency Plan. The new plan will assist agencies with attracting key audiences for their clients and accelerating their growth. As a result, the plan is instrumental in helping agencies win new business, keep their project pipeline full, and reduce revenue fluctuations by becoming an indispensable contributor to their clients growth engine.



The Alexa Agency Plan is designed for small to mid-sized agencies offering SEO, SEM, and content marketing services who are challenged by the burden of continually demonstrating their impact on clients business growth. Agencies using the plan can build trust and play a leading role in clients ongoing marketing efforts by proactively uncovering new opportunities.

The new plan provides these agencies with uniquely holistic and actionable intelligence about clients popularity, traffic sources, audience interests, keywords, and backlinks  including side-by-side comparisons with clients competitors across all metrics. Strategic opportunities are instantly revealed, arming the agency with programs that help drive their clients business performance.

Access to this data can dramatically expedite the research process for agencies, eliminating the many hours of data collection and analysis otherwise required to establish knowledge of a clients industry, competitors, and audience.

Among the features in the Alexa Agency Plan:

Portfolio management and tracking. Agencies can view all client projects through one dashboard and quickly spot  and respond to  any negative trends or issues.

Agencies can view all client projects through one dashboard and quickly spot  and respond to  any negative trends or issues. Site audits. Twice monthly site audits for all clients enable agencies to monitor and address any issues impacting SEO.

Twice monthly site audits for all clients enable agencies to monitor and address any issues impacting SEO. Keyword tools. The plan reveals potential undiscovered methods for growing clients traffic through content marketing, SEO, and PPC. Agencies can also quickly find valuable new topics and keywords based on competitive research.

The plan reveals potential undiscovered methods for growing clients traffic through content marketing, SEO, and PPC. Agencies can also quickly find valuable new topics and keywords based on competitive research. People management. Agencies can easily assign team members to projects and collaborate on research.

Agencies can enjoy several benefits by leveraging the new plan:

Improve prospecting close rate . Agencies can find highly qualified client prospects that have untapped growth potential, determine their gaps, and craft compelling pitches that are highly relevant, personalized, and actionable.

. Agencies can find highly qualified client prospects that have untapped growth potential, determine their gaps, and craft compelling pitches that are highly relevant, personalized, and actionable. Reduce unbillable hours . The Alexa Agency Plan reduces agencies unbillable hours (otherwise spent on research) when pitching new prospects. Using Alexa.com, agencies can very quickly get detailed intelligence about the prospects industry, competitors, and audience  and present specific opportunities for improvement.

. The Alexa Agency Plan reduces agencies unbillable hours (otherwise spent on research) when pitching new prospects. Using Alexa.com, agencies can very quickly get detailed intelligence about the prospects industry, competitors, and audience  and present specific opportunities for improvement. Earn trust and loyalty. The plan is designed to make agencies the hero to their clients by arming agencies with continual, actionable insights that help brands grow their business.

To an agency, client relationships are everything, said Andrew Ramm, President of Alexa.com. When an agency knows as much or more about their clients audience than their client does, it cements their credibility as a trusted advisor. Everything about the Alexa Agency Plan is designed to help agencies build that knowledge, engender that trust, and ultimately help their client have the greatest possible share of voice with their target audience.

Im already saving about 80% of the time I used to spend when pitching ideas to new prospects, thanks to the insights I find in the Alexa Advanced plan, said Sean Hakes, CEO, Altitude Agency. For the past three prospects, I have a 100% close rate because I presented highly relevant and valuable opportunities that I unearthed from the Alexa.com service. With the new Alexa Agency Plan, the ability to scale that time savings and close rate across all clients and prospects is going to have a huge impact on my bottom line.

The Alexa Agency Plan supports up to 35 projects (or websites) and 20 users, and is priced at $299 per month. Agencies can learn more about the Agency Plan by visiting alexa.com/plans.

About Alexa.com

Alexa.com, a subsidiary of Amazon, is a trusted source of insights into digital behavior that marketers use to win their audience and accelerate growth. Subscribers to the Alexa Marketing Stack leverage rich competitor and audience insights that help them better understand their audience, discover opportunities for growth across multiple marketing channels, and manage the day-to-day workflows of planning, creating, optimizing, promoting, and measuring the effectiveness of their content marketing.[April 12, 2018] UST Global Wins Gold in 2018 LearningElite Awards

TRIVANDRUM, India, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- For the company's excellence in Learning and Development UST Global, a leading digital technology services company, today announced that it has won Gold in the prestigious 2018 LearningElite awards for the company's excellence in Learning and Development. (Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/540539/UST_Global_Logo.jpg )

UST Global's learning & development initiatives and its practices are aimed at building a 'Born to Learn' culture within the organization. The company supports its talent transformation needs for its current IT and digital services as well as to build the workforce of the future. The top priorities for the learning and development team at UST Global include, enhancing employee experience, being the 'one-stop-shop' for all learning needs; leading the talent transformation journey for its current and future associates, and bringing in a diverse workforce with initiatives like Impact India, Step IT Up and Network of Women Ussociates (NowU). UST Global won a listing in the Gold Category based on the company's superior performance in learning strategy, leadership commitment, learning execution, learning impact and business performance results. While the company scored way above the benchmark figures in all categories, its business performance results scored very close to the industry best. Chief Learning Officer magazine's LearningElite program honors the best organizatios for learning and development. This robust, peer-reviewed ranking and benchmarking program recognizes those organizations that employ exemplary workforce development strategies that deliver significant business results. Developed under the guidance of a group of Chief Learning Officers and senior learning and development practitioners, the LearningElite program utilizes best practices in evaluation to rank the best organizations based upon their impact, size and industries served.



Some comments from the jury who evaluated UST Global's L&D practice: Their four-pronged strategy for implementation - focusing on Expected Outcomes, Experience, Enablement and Engagement stands out as a most elite practice. This strategy focuses on ensuring outcomes are focused on business growth and client success while ensuring that a self-driven learning culture is provided to all employees.

Utilizing newer technologies, assessing directly to ROI, and having solid support of senior company leaders did not go unnoticed. However, UST is most commended for overcoming the obstacles and challenges related to changing internal cultural sentiment regarding successful implementation of self-driven learning. Very impressive accomplishment. Commenting on the prestigious win, Dr. Madana Kumar, Global Head of Learning and Development, UST Global, said, "Talent development has a strategic role within the organization, and we believe that it is critical to organizational success. Our leadership team is the catalyst in building an active learning culture in the organization. We are thrilled to be recognized by the LearningElite program and awarded Gold for our Learning and Development practice."

About UST Global UST Global is a leading digital technology company that provides advanced computing and digital services to large private and public enterprises around the world. Driven by a larger purpose of Transforming Lives and the philosophy of 'fewer clients, more attention', we bring in the entrepreneurial spirit that seeks the fastest path to value in today's digital economy. Our innovative technology services and pioneering social programs make us unique. UST Global is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California and operates in 25 countries. Our clients include Fortune 500 companies in Banking and Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Retail, High Technology, Manufacturing, Shipping, and Telecom. UST Global believes in building long-lasting, strategic business relationships through agile and client-centric global engagement models that combines local experts & resources with cost, scale, and quality advantages of global operations. For more information, please visit: http://www.ust-global.com

Media Contact:

Divya Singh

Divya.Singh@ust-global.com

+91-8552944004

UST Global





[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. Senior Advisor Bruce Barren Returns to the Nationally Syndicated "The Mick Bazsuly Show"

FT LAUDERDALE, Fla., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE --PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. (OTC Pink:POTN) On Thursday, March 12, 2018, PotNetwork Holdings Inc. CEO Dr. Richard Goulding and Senior Advisor Bruce Barren will return to the Beasley Broadcasting Production, The Mick Bazsuly Show.

The PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. leaders are expected to discuss a future uplisting to OTCQB, the growth of company brands over Q1 2018 and results of recently audited financial reports for 2017.



The Mick Bazsuly Show airs at 10:30 AM EST on 95.3 FM and `1470 AM in South Florida and is available live worldwide on AMP2.TV and WWNNRadio.com.



Watch a streaming video recording of CEO Goulding and Senior Advisor Barren of PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. appearing on The Mick Bazsuly Show.



PotNework Holdings, Inc. recently announced record breaking sales performance for March 2018. With over $2.2 million in sales revenue recorded across the month, the Company has posted a 152% year over year increase when compared with March 2017.



With over $6.3 million in revenues recorded for Q1 of 2018, PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. is well on track to exceed its performance from 2017. The company recently announced the release of audited consolidated financial statements reporting 2017 sales of $14.5 million, with gross profits of $5,180,865, and, despite making large reinvestments in its future growth, positive net income of $178,918.



The companys wholly owned subsidiary, Diamond CBD Inc., has been aggressively exploring new business development opportunities. In March, the company presented its products at the high profile industry leading trade shows ASD Market Week and Global Pet Expo.



Diamond CBD, Inc. announced the brands participation at the 2018 Telecom Review Summit held in Beirut, Lebanon. Taking place on April 13th of 2018, this years Telecom Review Summit will feature a keynote panel hosted by Exponential, Inc. (XPO2) founder and CEO, Dom Einhorn.







During his keynote address at the Telecom Review Summit, the XPO2 Founder and CEO will be discussing the importance of corporate social responsibility and impact investing and how these corporate values can strengthen brand recognition and develop new sales channels.



Between April 17th and 27th, 2018, Diamond CBD Inc. is contributing material support and resources towards community action projects across Kenya. Among the activities planned is a reforestation project in the Ngongs Hills, direct service projects at nonprofit organizations around Nairobi, and a range of other charitable endeavors near Mt. Kenya and other locations.





Diamond CBD, Inc.s efforts in Kenya support the companys business development strategy and organizational culture. By providing corporate partners with access to corporate social responsibility activities that lead to real world results, XPO2 is on a mission to give voice to the voiceless, disrupt fundraising, transform ecommerce and make the world a better place.



About Diamond CBD, Inc.: Diamond CBD focuses on the research, development, and multinational marketing of premium hemp extracts that contain a broad range of cannabinoids and natural hemp derivatives. Diamond CBDs team consists of hemp industry pioneers and natural product experts, chemists, doctors and scientists, dedicated to producing the finest and purest cannabidiol (CBD) oils. The result is a robust selection considered among the most powerful natural CBD oils, tinctures, edibles, and vape liquids found anywhere. For more information, please visit its website at www.DiamondCBD.com.



About PotNetwork Holdings, Inc: PotNetwork Holdings, Inc. (OTC Pink:POTN) is a publicly traded company that acts as a holding company for its subsidiaries, First Capital Venture Co., the owner of Diamond CBD, Inc., the maker of Diamond CBD oils.



About XPO: Exponential, Inc. (XPO) is a cause related technology marketing company that develops and promotes a white label e-commerce platform to drive fundraising revenue on behalf of charities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide. Via the platform, donors and supporters gain access to exclusive discounts and savings typically not available on the merchant site while helping raise incremental funds for their favorite cause with every purchase, at no extra cost to them.



Safe Harbor Act: Forward-Looking Statements are included within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements regarding our expected future financial position, results of operations, cash flows, financing plans, business strategy, products and services, competitive positions, growth opportunities, plans and objectives of management for future operations, including words such as "anticipate," "if," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "could," "should," "will," and similar expressions are forward-looking statements and involve risks, uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from anticipated results, performance, or achievements. We are under no obligation to (and expressly disclaim any such obligation to) update or alter forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Contacts PotNetwork Holdings Inc.

Investor Relations:

Marisol Elwell, 1-800-915-3060

investor@PotNetworkHolding.com

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] OpsRamp Offers Free IT Operations Management Assessment and Custom Migration Plan to Companies Using Operations Manager i and Operations Bridge from Micro Focus

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OpsRamp, the IT operations-as-a-service cloud platform for the modern enterprise, announces a program designed to help Micro Focus customers switch to OpsRamp to accelerate their transformation and modernization initiatives. The program is targeting companies that are using the Operations Manager i (OMi) and Operations Bridge products from Micro Focus.

The Micro Focus Migration Program is simple and turnkey. It starts with a free assessment provided by OpsRamp of a companys current IT operations environment, including total-cost-of-operations calculations. The customer will then receive a free, custom migration plan that can be implemented in weeks based on their unique requirements. In addition, OpsRamp is offering new customers a 30% discount on the OpsRamp Unified Service Intelligence solution and fixed professional services hours if they agree to switch from Micro Focus to the OpsRamp platform in the next 30 days. OpsRamp Unified Service Intelligence takes advantage of the companys SaaS platform, role-basd access controls and shared-service architecture, and includes a powerful combination of workload monitoring and event management for enhanced service delivery across the enterprise. It brings together best-in-class dashboards, operational intelligence and alert management in a cloud-based service that delivers central IT observability, asset visibility, and governance of hybrid, multi-cloud environments.



By moving from Micro Focus to OpsRamp, customers achieve seven primary benefits: Elimination of spend on maintenance fees and management packs

Reduced spend on IT infrastructure and staff time for supporting Micro Focus products

Dynamic auto-discovery and service mapping of hybrid environments, without the need for additional tools

Intelligent correlation for faster root cause analysis and mean time to repair

Best-practice monitoring templates for hybrid IT management built from our experience serving thousands of customers

A consumption-based pricing model thats flexible, scalable and efficient

Consolidation of Micro Focus and third party point tools into a single command center for modern IT operations OpsRamps Unified Service Intelligence solution combines the best of asset visibility, monitoring, and event correlation for actionable service intelligence. Enterprises use OpsRamp for modern incident management and SLA-driven service notifications without investing in costly perpetual licenses, maintenance fees, premium management packs, on-premises hardware, and dedicated staff, states Varma Kunaparaju, CEO of OpsRamp. And its delivered on a cloud-based platform thats built for hybrid workloads.

About OpsRamp

OpsRamp enables IT to deliver more workloads with less work. Built in the cloud, our operations management platform simplifies the management of diverse computing environments to accelerate the speed of IT. Now enterprise IT can discover, manage and optimize on-premises and cloud systems as one. With OpsRamp, IT can remove the shackles of legacy technology, automate service delivery and give business executives real-time visibility into the health of the systems they rely on. Hundreds of organizations use OpsRamp to unify service availability, transform contextual insight into action and replace routine tasks with intelligent automation. Learn more at OpsRamp.com. Media contact:

Kevin Wolf

TGPR

(650) 327-1641

kevin@tgprllc.com

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Halo Pharma Simplifies Topical Drug Product Development and Manufacturing

Halo Pharma, a rapidly growing contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), offers more than 30 years' direct experience in the production of topical drug products - from prescription dermatological drugs to over-the-counter (OTC) and high-value health and beauty products. Halo Pharma will be discussing its capabilities in topical drug products at CPhI NA, Booth 1549, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, April 24-26. Topical drug products, which Research and Markets predicts will reach global sales of $194.2 billion by 2024, target localized skin sites or offer systemic penetration by formulations that are easily applied and conveniently packaged. They are complex to formulate as they typically mix oil and water phases in various ratios with an active pharmaceutical ingredient and other ingredients to create a semi-solid or liquid formulation that is safe, efficacious, and patient friendly. With topical centers of excellence in its Whippany, N.J. and Mirabel, Quebec, Canada facilities, Halo Pharma provides a one-sop-shop for global pharmaceutical companies looking to develop and manufacture compliant, high-quality gels, creams, lotions, and sterile and non-sterile ointments for a range of indications. Because Halo Pharma can formulate, develop, scale up, manufacture, and package topical drug products in contiguous, end-to-end production areas, it eliminates unnecessary changes in process and equipment, as well as knowledge gaps, that can occur when topical products are transferred.



"Halo covers the full breadth of equipment, technologies, skills, and expertise when it comes to taking a topical drug product from formulation to market," says Lee Karras, CEO of Halo Pharma. "Our manufacturing and packaging facilities are co-located for seamless transition to commercial supply; we handle the bioequivalence (IVRT), chemistry, and microbiology testing that are essential for today's dermatological markets. Further, we have the supply chain expertise to source the best and lowest cost materials; our equipment and processes are state-of-the-art; and we offer a packaging range that includes tubes, jars, and bottles in various sizes, including trial or sample sizes that many customers desire." For a detailed analysis of Halo's topical development and manufacturing expertise, download a complimentary white paper, Aim for Quality, Simplicity, and Cost Efficiency in the Development, Scale-up, and Manufacturing of Semi-Solid Dosage Forms. The paper covers formulation selection, five key physical characteristics of product formulation, in vitro release testing (IVRT) and bioequivalence, bioburden and microbial testing, and technology and site transfer considerations.

A case study, Technology and Site Transfer of a Semi-Solid Product for Commercial Launch, is also available to learn how Halo Pharma was recently able to successfully transfer and scale up a topical ointment. Using a variety of analytical methods including IVRT, Halo was able to demonstrate bioequivalency with a reference drug without reliance on additional clinical studies. Halo manufactures the finished drug product in 900kg quantities that are packaged in 45g tubes and 2g sample packets. Halo Pharma is prepared to formulate, develop, manufacture, and package clients' topical prescription, OTC, and high-value health and beauty products for global distribution. To learn more about Halo Pharma's unique capabilities in topical drug products, visit halopharma.com/topicals or see them at CPhI NA in Booth 1549. About Halo Pharma Halo Pharma is a rapidly growing contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) that provides scientific and development expertise as well as a wide spectrum of manufacturing services from its locations in Whippany, New Jersey, USA and Montreal, Quebec, Canada to its international client base. Halo offers fully integrated capabilities in a variety of dosage forms including tablets, capsules, powders, liquids, creams, sterile and non-sterile ointments and suppositories. The company is registered to work with any of these dosages in the CI-CV DEA designations. Halo Pharma's capabilities in the areas of tech transfer, process and product development, production, scale-up/validation and analytical method development allow us to partner with clients from development through commercialization or at any point along the way. For more information please contact services@halopharma.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005201/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Oklahoma School Assurance Group (OSAG) and CompSource Mutual Are Pledging a Quarter of a Million Dollars to Support Safety Programs of OSAG Member School Districts

The Oklahoma School Assurance Group and CompSource Mutual Insurance Company are proud to announce they are pledging $250,000 to support the safety programs of OSAG member school districts. Grants will be awarded to OSAG members in the 2018-2019 policy year, with membership beginning on July 1, 2018, and will provide the necessary funding to invest in safety equipment for their district. "Our board unanimously approved funding the grants because school districts should not have to sacrifice investing in much-needed safety equipment because of the lack of funding. Maintaining an active, effective safety and loss prevention program ensures school districts can fulfill their commitment to providing a safe work environment for employees. Safety is worth the investment, even when budgets are stretched," said Dr. John Cox (News - Alert) , Chairman of the OSAG Board of Trustees. "When we began to discuss safety grants for our members it was a no-brainer to reach out to CompSource. Not only have they been our partner for providing workers' compensation insurance coverage since our inception, but they are also passionate about safety and protecting Oklahoma's workforce. Both organizations pride ourselves in giving back, and we are proud to support Oklahoma schools and the impact they make on our future leaders," said Dr. Cox. dditional information regarding the safety grants will be sent to OSAG members and will be available on the OSAG website at www.okschoolassurancegroup.org.



About OSAG: The Oklahoma School Assurance Group was founded in 1994 as an avenue for public school districts to obtain fully insured workers' compensation services. OSAG is the largest provider of workers' compensation services to Oklahoma public schools, with a current membership of 499 member districts. All OSAG members are owners of the program, sharing equity ownership in OSAG. Members have accumulated a total savings of $93,271,196 since 1994. This savings includes upfront premium discounts compared to outside markets, along with over $12,000,000 in refunds and performance dividends awarded to membership!

About CompSource Mutual: CompSource Mutual Insurance Company is the leading provider of workers' compensation insurance in Oklahoma. For more than 80 years, Oklahoma businesses have partnered with CompSource as a reliable, trusted source for workers' compensation insurance. Over the years the company has evolved, but our commitment to the Oklahoma business community has remained the same. This commitment is evident in everything we do and is a central focus of our mission, to lead the Oklahoma workers' compensation market by providing financial stability, delivering superior service and innovative solutions, promoting workplace safety and serving as a trusted partner to the Oklahoma business community. For more information about CompSource, visit our website at www.compsourcemutual.com and follow us on Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005294/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Kinesiologists to Demonstrate SantosLite at KIN@50 Workshop

WATERLOO, Ontario, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- During the KIN@50 conference at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada on April 27-28, 2018, attendees will be able to experience a 75-minute workshop on SantosHuman Inc.'s predictive digital human modeling tool, SantosLite. Prof. Steve Fischer has developed and will lead "Innovations in Ergonomicsan intro to digital human modeling using Santos." Prof. Steven Fischer is a Registered Kinesiologist and Canadian Certified Professional Ergonomist. To commemorate the inclusion of this Santos Lite-focused workshop within the conference, workshop attendees will receive a one-year license to Santos Lite for $96, a 90 percent discount off of the current annual fee. "Digital human modeling technology is the future of proactive ergonomics," said Dr. Steven Fischer, Assistant Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Waterloo. "This workshop will guide attendees in learning the fundamentals required to proactively, or reactively assess ergonomics hazards by using SantosLite, an affordable, user-friendly digital human model software." "Often, the deploymet of and education surrounding technology can be just as important as the actual development. Events like Dr. Fisher's workshop are a critical element in fully leveraging the value that tools like Santos can provide," says Dr. Tim Marler, SantosHuman's Chief Research Officer.



Santos Lite is a Windows-based program that was created to provide a valuable set of predictive digital human modeling capabilities at a budget-friendly price. It currently includes access to the world's most accurate and highly validated method of predicting exposure to risk of injury for manual material handling tasks. Its customizable predictive capabilities allow kinesiology and ergonomics practitioners to conduct critical human-centric evaluations quickly, including determining the percentage of the population capable of performing a task relative to duty cycle. "We are honored that Prof. Fischer, one of our most active Santos University Partners, has taken the initiative to develop and lead this hands-on Santos Lite workshop," said Steve Beck, President & CEO of SantosHuman, Inc. "The primary reason we created Santos Lite was to ensure these much-needed capabilities were available to ergonomics professionals and educators. Professor Fischer's workshop at this conference not only validates our efforts, but provides an excellent opportunity for others in his profession to see how easily our virtual human-in-the-loop solutions can estimate exposure to risk of injury for work tasks."

Upon completion of the workshop, attendees will receive a code to access Santos Lite for one year at a significant discount that is exclusive to this event. Media Contact:

Chris Olson

193260@email4pr.com

319-333-0918 ext 110

www.santoshumaninc.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kinesiologists-to-demonstrate-santoslite-at-kin50-workshop-300628559.html SOURCE Santos Human Inc.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Gritstone Oncology to Present First Data Bridging Tumor Antigen Identification and Potent Immunotherapy Delivery in Primates at 2018 AACR Annual Meeting

Gritstone Oncology, a personalized cancer immunotherapy company, today announced that preclinical data highlighting the company's tumor-specific neoantigen (TSNA) identification platform, EDGETM (Epitope Discovery in cancer GEnomes), and a novel, potent TSNA delivery approach will be presented during two poster presentations at the 2018 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting. The meeting is being held April 14-18, 2018 in Chicago. Gritstone Oncology will present prediction data from EDGETM demonstrating its ability to select tumor-specific neoantigens that have generated anti-tumor immune responses in humans. In an analysis of independently validated, tumor-relevant T cell responses against neoantigens (including from the US National Cancer Institute), EDGETM identified, with good specificity, the majority of neoantigens eliciting a CD8+ T cell response in patients with cancer. Further, the company will present the first preclinical data, including in non-human primates (NHP), highlighting a potent immunotherapy approach to deliver selected TSNA to patients. The delivery approach comprises a chimpanzee adenoviral vector (ChAdV) for the prime immunization, and a self-replicating, synthetic viral RNA vector (srRNA) for repeated boost immunizations. In preclinical NHP studies, delivery of selected antigens using this sequential (heterologous) prime/boost immunization approach, showed a quick onset of immune activation with induction of high numbers of antigen-specific T cells. In addition, co-administration of anti-CTLA4 further enhanced both the number and function of the elicited T cells, suggesting the system's potential in combination with checkpoint inhibitors. "In patients with solid tumors, the generation of a very large number of tumor neoantigen-specific CD8+ T cells is one of the major challenges associated with today's immunotherapies," said Andrew Allen, M.D., Ph.D., co-founder, president and chief executive officer of Gritstone Oncology. "To leverage the neoantigens selected by EDGETM, we have developed a potent immunotherapy regimen, which has produced high level CD8+ T cell responses in NHP. Historically, such models have been highly predictive of immune responses observed in humans, and these data support our plans o initiate clinical trials in the second half of 2018. We are excited to be presenting our research at this year's AACR meeting, demonstrating the applicability of our integrated platform for the development of personalized immunotherapies for difficult-to-treat-cancers."



Abstract Title: A novel heterologous prime boost vaccine system drives tumor specific and potent CD8 T cell responses for cancer immunotherapy

Date & Time: April 15, 2018 from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. CT

Abstract Findings: Gritstone Oncology has developed a potent heterologous prime/boost immunization approach to deliver predicted TSNAs to patients, which is comprised of a replication incompetent chimpanzee adenoviral vector (ChAdV) for the prime vaccination and a self-replicating, synthetic viral vector (srRNA) for repeated boost vaccinations. In a preclinical model, immunization with either vector resulted in strong antigen-specific CD8 T-cell responses and provided a statistically significant survival advantage to tumor bearing mice when compared to untreated mice. The potency was also tested in a non-human primate model, demonstrating quick onset of T-cell responses one week post ChAdV prime vaccination, with peak T-cell responses at two to three weeks and effectively boosted by the srRNA vector. In addition, co-administration of anti-CTLA4 with the vaccine demonstrated enhanced vaccine-induced immune response. Abstract Title: Antigen identification for cancer immunotherapy by deep learning on tumor HLA peptides

Date & Time: April 18, 2018 from 8:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. CT

Abstract Findings: Using a large dataset of tumor transcriptomes and immunopeptidomes, Gritstone Oncology has trained a deep learning model (EDGETM) to predict the presentation of HLA peptides on tumor cells. The model was tested on HLA presented peptides from held-out tumor samples and demonstrated an approximately 10-fold improvement in positive predictive value compared to standard tools. The model was also tested for its ability to predict neoantigens recognized by T-cells and included the majority (16/23, 70%) of validated neoantigens from an independent test set in a putative 20-mutation personalized immunization.

About Gritstone Oncology Gritstone Oncology is a privately-held, personalized cancer immunotherapy company. Gritstone brings together distinguished scientific founders, an experienced and diverse management team, a seasoned and successful board of directors and deep financial backing to tackle fundamental challenges at the intersection of cancer genomics, immunology, and immunotherapy design. The Company's initial goal is to leverage artificial intelligence to identify and deploy therapeutic neoantigens from individual patients' tumors to develop novel treatments for lung, gastric, colorectal, and bladder cancer. In addition to neoantigen therapy development, Gritstone is leveraging its unique antigen discovery platform, EDGE (Epitope Discovery of cancer GEnomes), to define targets for shared antigen immunotherapies, which would provide an opportunity to treat even more patients. Gritstone Oncology is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with key functions located in Cambridge, MA and Pleasanton, CA (News - Alert) . The company launched in October 2015 and has received funding from leading blue-chip biotechnology investors, including Versant Ventures, The Column Group, Clarus Funds, Frazier Healthcare Partners, RedMile, Casdin Capital, Lilly Asia Ventures, Trinitas Capital, GV, Alexandria Venture Investments, and Bay City Capital. More information can be found at www.gritstoneoncology.com or @gritstoneonc. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412005441/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] APT Systems Inc. Raises $600,000 in Seed Funding Led by TRITON FUNDS

Will Accelerate Growth of Trading Platforms with Focus on Handheld Devices

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- APT SYSTEMS, INC. (PINK OTC: APTY), a fully-reporting, publicly-traded, financial technology company, today announced it has raised $600,000 in its Seed funding round. Led by TRITON FUNDS, the new fund launched by students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the investment will drive the continued expansion of APTYs Intuitrader trading platform and stock charting application, KenCharts. The investment comes as the Company experiences solid acceptance with KenCharts iOS Version 1.0 and prepares to launch its Android version. Delivering a Kencharts 2.0 with real time data and proprietary indicators is soon to follow. We are excited to partner with TRITON FUNDS and support the student-led initiative to offer students real-world experience, said Glenda Dowie, founder and CEO of APT Systems. This is an enthusiastic vote of confidence in our company and we welcome the capital and millennial touchO the students bring to our business.



APTY provides convenient tools for traders to study charts. Through the Smartphone and tablet applications, users can access North America markets and equities charts while on-the-go. The company is also researching the demand for cryptocurrency and token charting tools. Mobile charting and trading is a highly disruptive industry, and Glenda has her team focused on applying their platform innovations across all mobile devices; APTYs technology platforms have broad applications that support their subscribers and drive growth. We are excited to lead this round of financing and assist them in shaping the future of the industry. said Yash Thukral, co-founder of TRITON FUNDS. Nathan Yee, co-founder of TRITON FUNDS, added, We were able to check all of the boxes, when conducting our due diligence on APTY, for our funds Q118 investment initiative  the company is located in California, it is utilized by alumni, and it is led by a female founder; not to mention, its mobile and has the potential to transform charting and trading as we know it today. APTYs senior leadership also has deep experience across the financial technology industry, including Joseph Gagnon, CTO, previously at Branagh Information Group, and Carl Hussey, CFO, a trader who previously served at the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). In addition to Glenda, Jseph and Carl had joined the Companys board of directors in its early days.



The emergence of fintech has only just begun. said Sam Yaffa, co-founder of TRITON FUNDS. As millennials learn the importance of investing to grow their money, companies like APTY provide us with the tools to do so with ease. Individuals can download and sign up to create their own watch list at www.kencharts.com/downloads or visit the Apple App Store.

About APT Systems Inc.: APT Systems Inc. is a financial technology company that provides platforms including trader access to proprietary charting tools, via the KenCharts application, and plans to launch its innovative trading application, Intuitrader, later this year. The Company is committed to delivering superior stock trading methodology that provides consistent returns while protecting principal. The application can be downloaded here . About TRITON FUNDS LLC: TRITON FUNDS LLC is a student-run private investment fund founded by undergraduates from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). TRITON FUNDS provides students the invaluable opportunity to gain real-world experience investing alongside experienced financial professionals. We invest in high performing teams with revolutionary aspirations to grow their company into industry leaders. TRITON FUNDS creates an ecosystem that assists talented entrepreneurs in successfully growing their ideas and maintaining strong community ethical standards. We provide strategic capitalization, business development support, and engineered exits to organizations we believe have a viable future in the modern economy. TRITON FUNDS LLC is not a subsidiary of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) administration or its student body. The fund is a separate entity from the school and should be treated as such. Disclaimer - Forward Looking Statements: This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. "Forward-looking statements" describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "may," "future," "plan" or "planned," "will" or "should," "expected," "anticipates," "draft," "eventually" or "projected." You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements; projected events in this press release may not occur due to unforeseen circumstances, various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K and other filings made by such company. APT Systems, Inc (APTY) may opt to disseminate information about itself, including the results of its operations and financial information, via social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Related Links http://www.tritonfunds.com http://www.aptsystemsinc.com http://www.aptsystemsinc.com/online-investor-kit-for-apt-systems-inc-apty/

Contact: Glenda Dowie, Chief Executive Officer 415-200-1105 info@aptsystemsinc.com On Twitter follow @APTYsys

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] iLOOKABOUT Announces Joint Venture with Cherre

TORONTO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- iLOOKABOUT Corp. (TSXV:ILA) (iLOOKABOUT or the Company) today announced the signing of a consulting agreement (the Consulting Agreement) with Cherre, Inc., (Cherre) developer of an inter-connected market platform that provides residential real estate data to investors and brokerage firms. Real estate is by far the worlds largest asset class in value, but has yet to meaningfully adapt to modern information exchange standards and trading platforms, resulting in limited accessibility, and disparate, contradictory data, said Gary Yeoman, Chief Executive Officer of iLOOKABOUT. Working with Cherres technological expertise  combined with its proprietary machine-learning application programming interface (API)  will allow us to build the blockchain infrastructure that will democratize real estate data across North America, and capitalize on the demand for secure, integrated and accurate property information. This collaboration represents an important next step in the future of real estate, as we work to create a decentralized marketplace that enables all stakeholders to seamlessly transact in the market, ushering in a new era of data integrity and usage opportunities, said Chief Executive Officer of Cherre, L.D. Salmanson. iLOOKABOUTs management team brings the necessary depth of insight and experience to lead the real estate industry in the development of a vital and vibrant ecosystem that will fundamentally change the way we consume and exchange information across both commercial and residential markets. We look forward to working together on this transformative initiative that will act as a catalyst for value creation  empowering property owners and industry professionals to participate in and benefit from improved data access, enhanced surety and security, greater efficiencies and lower costs.



The joint venture is effective immediately. iLOOKABOUT, while undertaking the blockchain initiative, will continue to provide its software, data analytics and visual intelligence services to its clients in the property assessment, property taxation, municipal, insurance and appraisal sectors. Cherrehas been engaged as a consultant of iLOOKABOUT to work collaboratively in the development of the joint blockchain initiative. Under the terms of the Consulting Agreement, Cherre will receive a fixed monthly fee as well as 1,000,000 stock options, such options having an exercise price of $0.30 and vesting on mutually agreed upon milestones. The Agreement also contains certain participation rights of each of the parties should the joint initiative result in an initial coin offering, with iLOOKABOUT retaining 70% ownership of such an initiative.



About iLOOKABOUT

iLOOKABOUT is a software, data analytics and visual intelligence company focused on real property. The Company primarily serves the property assessment, property taxation, municipal, insurance, and appraisal sectors, both public and private, in North America. iLOOKABOUT provides powerful data analytics to the real estate industry through its Real Property Tax Analytics software offering. The Companys proprietary StreetScape imagery and real property focused web-based application, GeoViewPort, unifies property related data and enables desktop review of properties. iLOOKABOUT has integrated analytics and workflow management applications into GeoViewPort which create highly valued service offerings for its clients. To augment its technology-based offerings, the Company provides real estate consulting services, with a focus on the Property Tax and Valuation sectors. iLOOKABOUTs common shares are traded on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol ILA.

About Cherre, Inc.

With offices in New York, Boston and Tel Aviv, Cherre is the data network for real estate. Led by a dedicated team of technology and real estate experts, Cherre is committed to empowering all stakeholders with an inter-connected data-driven platform. As the leading provider of residential real estate data, trusted by the worlds foremost investors, banks, insurance companies, and brokerage firms, Cherres proprietary platform allows customers to quickly access, verify and augment existing public and private data feeds to gain unparalleled insight and comprehensive coverage of millions of properties. Cherres data is constantly updated by observing and learning from countless user interactions, making it the most accurate and reliable real estate data source. Cherre is privately owned, and its investors include large real estate private equity firms and family offices. Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve assumptions and estimates that may not be realized and other risks and uncertainties. These statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect managements current expectations and assumptions which are based on information currently available to the Companys management. There is significant risk that forward-looking statements will not prove to be accurate and there can be no assurance that the joint venture will be carried out on the terms proposed above or at all. These statements are based on a number of assumptions, including, but not limited to, continued demand for iLOOKABOUT products and services. A number of factors could cause actual events, performance or results to differ materially from the events, performance and results discussed in the forward looking statements. The inclusion of this information should not be regarded as a representation of the Company or any other person that the anticipated results will be achieved and investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such information. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release, or as otherwise stated, and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. 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. Contact: Gary Yeoman, CEO gary.yeoman@ilookabout.com 1-416-347-7707 www.ilookabout.com Robin Dyson, CFO robin.dyson@ilookabout.com 1-519-931-6235 www.ilookabout.com

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] WeddingWire Announces Executive Team Appointments

CHEVY CHASE, Md., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- WeddingWire, the global online leader connecting engaged couples with wedding professionals, is proud to announce today three appointments to its executive leadership team. Emily Markmann is now Executive Vice President of People, Jessica Finnefrock is now Executive Vice President of Global Operations and Andy Ivanovich is now Executive Vice President of Strategy. These executive promotions recognize the achievements of three significant members of the organization's management team and reflect WeddingWire's continued growth as a global wedding industry leader. "We are delighted to welcome Emily, Jessica and Andy as key additions to WeddingWire's executive team," said Tim Chi, CEO, WeddingWire. "They have, and will continue to play, an integral role in scaling our global footprint and bringing great experiences to our couples, vendors and staff worldwide. Their progressive leadership and strategic discipline have been invaluable and I look forward to Emily, Jessica and Andy's continued contributions." Emily Markmann, Executive Vice President of People

Since joining the company in 2016, Emily has transformed WeddingWire's people operations into a world class organization, benefiting a global workforce of more than 900 employees. With support from teams across the globe, Emily will drive the transformation of WeddingWire's talent into a cohesive global team, creating shared values and goals, while understanding the unique needs of the company's eight offices worldwide. Emily has 20 years of experince leading award-winning, progressive human resources initiatives and strategic business operations for high-growth technology companies.



Jessica Finnefrock, Executive Vice President of Global Operations

Jessica has provided invaluable support and coordination across various departments, including product, sales, marketing and business operations, since coming to WeddingWire in 2016. She will be essential in streamlining operations across WeddingWire's global organization from the company's international headquarters in Barcelona, where she currently resides. Previously, Jessica was Senior Vice President of Development at Liaison International and spent 11 years at Blackboard as a senior executive managing product development and product strategy. Andrew Ivanovich, Executive Vice President of Strategy

Andy has led various strategy and finance functions since joining WeddingWire in 2013, and currently oversees corporate development, partnerships, financing and strategic initiatives. Under his leadership, the company has expanded its portfolio of brands to a global scale through both acquisitions and organic growth. He will continue to drive the strategic efforts for WeddingWire worldwide, deepening reach within the company's existing portfolio of markets while extending into new arenas. Prior to WeddingWire, Andy was with Spectrum Equity Investors in San Francisco and Oliver Wyman in New York.

Founded in 2007, WeddingWire is a trusted global brand with portfolio sites operating across 15 countries in North America, Latin America, Asia and Europe, including WeddingWire.com, Bodas.net, Casamentos.com.br, Matrimonio.com, WeddingWire.in and more. This past January, WeddingWire announced the launch of its website in the United Kingdom, and in July 2017 the company opened its India headquarters located in Guragon, New Delhi. About WeddingWire, Inc.

WeddingWire, Inc. is the leading global online marketplace, connecting consumers with local wedding professionals and a suite of comprehensive tools that make wedding planning easier. Operating within a $200 billion industry, WeddingWire helps 13 million couples every month find the right team of wedding professionals to personalize and pull off their special day. Consumers around the world are able to read more than 4 million vendor reviews and search, compare and book from a directory of over 400,000 vendors. Founded in 2007, the WeddingWire portfolio serves couples and wedding professionals across 15 countries in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. The company has more than 900 employees and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. with international headquarters in Barcelona, Spain. Media Contact:

Elizabeth Millett

Senior Public Relations Manager

WeddingWire

pr@weddingwire.com

301.231.9473 View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/weddingwire-announces-executive-team-appointments-300628377.html SOURCE WeddingWire, Inc.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Building on the success of last years inaugural Women in Leadership Forum, CPhI North America, the only event to bring the complete North American pharma supply chain together, today announced details of the 2018 Women in Leadership Forum, which will take place on Thursday 26th April, from 8:00 am to 11:30am at Pennsylvania Convention Center.



There is a full schedule of proceedings, including a keynote address by Lynn Taylor, Head of Corporate and Government Relations in the US and Head of Healthcare Global Government and Public Affairs for Merck KGaA, and a panel discussion - Empowering Women to Thrive - also featuring Taylor plus executives from Chromocell, DSM and Pfizer, who will discuss the vitality and importance of women leaders and progression within the pharmaceutical and specialty chemicals markets, as well as challenges women still face. Moderated by Alise Cortez, podcast host and a Consultant at Insigniam, an international management consulting firm, the panel includes keynote speaker Lynn Taylor, Tina Garyantes from Chromocell, Hugh Welsh from DSM, and Mike Kosko from Pfizer.

According to the most recent data from the National Science Foundation, 57.2 percent of all bachelors degrees, 59.9 percent of all masters degrees, and 50.1 percent of all doctoral degrees are all earned by women. Yet today we still see a discrepancy in employment in many places, the pharmaceuticals industry included. To put it into perspective, among the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the Fortune 500, only 17 percent of executives in those companies are women, and three had no women in an executive position at all. Furthermore, according to a Glassdoor report, even after adjustments to account for factors such as age, experience, and occupation theres still a notable and unexplained wage gap of 5.4 percent between men and women. On the bright side, however, the adjusted wage gap is amongst smallest in the biotech and pharmaceuticals companies.

The Women in Leadership forum seeks to address these issues head-on and provide constructive dialogue where experts in this industry share experiences and strategies helpful in establishing equality for everyone and unleashing untapped potential in the pharmaceuticals industry. As DSMs High Welsh has stated, Its pretty well understood that when youre in the majority cultureit could be by gender, by race, by national originyoure completely blind to your privilege. And I was blind to the privilege that I enjoyed until I built up a relationship with those who are part of the minority culture in the company who could help enlighten me.

The full schedule (subject to change) for the Forum is as follows:

08:00  08:30 | Breakfast & Networking - Start your day at CPhI North America by networking with like-minded women in Pharma

08:30  08:35 | Welcome from the Chair

08:35  09:05 | Keynote

09:05  10:10 | Panel Discussion and Q&A: Empowering Women to Thrive

How can you leverage your support systems to realize your potential? Topics to include:

Mentoring - helping each other to succeed

Corporate strategies & company culture

Self-empowerment - what can you do to create your own opportunities?

Paying it forward

10:10  11:00 | World Cafe (dynamic networking space) - Join group discussions focusing on answering your questions and discussing yours, the panel's and your peers' experiences.

11:00  11:30 | Coffee & Networking

The 2018 edition of the CPhI North America Women in Leadership Forum will focus on leveraging support systems, from mentoring to exploring inspiring corporate initiatives, commented Joseph Marks Brand Director for CPhI North America. This years speaker line-up  a highly experienced and diverse panel of Pharma experts - will share wisdom, personal experiences and advice throughout the discussion, enabling attendees to take away tangible tools to benefit both their own career and to help others career growth. The Women in Leadership Forum is an important opportunity for networking, personal development and promoting diversity in Pharma, issues that were passionate about.

To reserve your place at the Women in Leadership Forum, log onto http://cphinorthamerica.com/wilf.

About CPhI

CPhI drives growth and innovation at every step of the global pharmaceutical supply chain from drug discovery to finished dosage. Through exhibitions, conferences and online communities, CPhI brings together more than 100,000 pharmaceutical professionals each year to network, identify business opportunities and expand the global market. CPhI hosts events across Europe, Asia and, now, North America and co-locates with iCSE for contract services, P-MEC for machinery, equipment & technology, InnoPack for pharmaceutical packaging and Bioprocessing for biopharma. CPhI provides an online buyer & supplier directory at www.CPhI-Online.com. For more information, please visit www.CPhI.com.

About UBM Americas

UBM Americas, a part of UBM plc, delivers events and marketing services in the fashion technology, licensing, advanced manufacturing, automotive and powersports, healthcare, veterinary and pharmaceutical industries, among others. Through a range of aligned interactive environments, both physical and digital, UBM Americas increases business effectiveness for customers and audiences through meaningful experiences, knowledge and connections. The division also includes UBM Brazil's market leading events in construction, cargo transportation, logistics & international trade, and agricultural production; and UBM Mexico's, construction, advanced manufacturing and hospitality services shows. For more information, please visit www.ubmamericas.com.

Media Contacts:

Jess Schoenholtz, CPhI North America

jess.schoenholtz@ubm.com

609-433-8655

Mark Button, CG Life

mbutton@cglife.com

408-310-2168[April 12, 2018] Businessolver Quantifies Empathy In The Workplace: 87 Percent Of CEOs Agree That A Company's Financial Performance Is Tied To Empathy

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Businessolver, a leader in SaaS-based benefits administration technology, today released its third annual State of Workplace Empathy Study which revealed that both employees and business leaders alike see the unquestionable value of more empathy in the workplace. With 96 percent of employees believing it is important for their employers to demonstrate empathy (a 4-point increase since 2017) and 92 percent believing empathy remains undervalued (a 7-point increase year-over-year), empathy has solidified its position as a core workplace value that impacts culture, innovation, productivity and profit. According to this year's State of Workplace Empathy study results, 87 percent of CEOs - as do nearly 8 in 10 HR professionals - agree that the financial performance of a company is tied to empathy (and 43 percent strongly agree). However, even with this acknowledgement from leadership and years of progress, the study still reports an "empathy gap"  the difference between CEO and employee perception of empathy in the workplace  still exists related to the perceptions of workplace empathy. For example, more than half of employees (51%) struggle to demonstrate empathy at work daily, significantly more than HR professionals (34%) and CEOS (45%). Furthermore, only 33 percent of women believe today's organizations are showing empathy, compared to 71 percent of men. "This year's study found that empathy in the workplace is a key workplace value that has the power to motivate, unite, and connect people, customers, and organizations," said Rae Shanahan, Businessolver Chief Strategy Officer. "When embraced as an imperative business value, empathy can improve recruitment and retention, transform culture, and serve as a motivator for collaboration and innovation across industries." Bridging the "empathy gap"

Seven in ten employees along with HR pros and CEOs believe that empathy can be learned, and the study uncovered the specific behaviors that demonstrate empathy and can help bridge the "empathy gap" between employees and employers including: Offering the right benefits can demonstrate empathy. Employees, HR professionals and CEOs agree having flexible work hours, work location and extended leave are the top "empathetic" traditional benefits a company can offer. In terms of non-traditional benefits, employees and CEOs agree that the top two benefits that show empathy are empathy training and on-site medical care.

Employees, HR professionals and CEOs agree having flexible work hours, work location and extended leave are the top "empathetic" traditional benefits a company can offer. In terms of non-traditional benefits, employees and CEOs agree that the top two benefits that show empathy are empathy training and on-site medical care. Acknowledging employees' personal circumstances and individual professional motivations. Employees, HR professionals, and CEOs all agree that respecting the need for time off or family/medical issues (95%), offering flexible working hours (97%), and recognizing employee milestones contributes to an empathetic workplace.

Employees, HR professionals, and CEOs all agree that respecting the need for time off or family/medical issues (95%), offering flexible working hours (97%), and recognizing employee milestones contributes to an empathetic workplace. Creating a forum to teach and learn empathy. About eight in ten employees would be interested in participating in empathy skills training programs ranging from internal/external workshops, to online courses, to one-on-one coaching. Eight in 10 HR professionals and 9 in 10 CEOs expressed the same level of interest. Therefore, CEOs and HR professionals feel empowered to make the business case for more empathy skills training in their organization.



Dr. Adam Waytz, professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. "Workplace empathy means understanding each of your employees' feelings, needs, and motivations to create a better workplace experience and drive a more engaged workforce. Together we can close the empathy gap if we commit to prioritizing empathy at work." Building a culture with Empathy at the center

As employees seek positions in today's workforce with organizations and company leadership that align with certain values, this research underscores that increased workplace diversity makes organizations more empathetic, driving a richer cultural fabric, and in turn, stronger business performance.

Diversity can mean many things  gender, generation, race or other socio-economic factors that may impact attitudes, preferences, and expressions of empathy  each perspective makes a workforce richer, and, through shared experience, makes a business more empathetic. Yet, according to this year's State of Workplace Empathy, again, there is work to do. Millennials (81%) and minorities (89%)  two groups of talent that are priorities for organizations looking to build more diverse workforces  are willing to leave low-empathy work environments.

Nearly 90 percent of CEOs (86%) believe companies and organizations would be more empathetic as a result of increased diversity within leadership. Also, 91 percent of minority respondents agree that increasing diversity in leadership would lead to more empathetic companies.

of CEOs (86%) believe companies and organizations would be more empathetic as a result of increased diversity within leadership. Also, of minority respondents agree that increasing diversity in leadership would lead to more empathetic companies. Women believe organizations have a long way to go on empathy, as the gender divide widens from 2017 to 2018. There gap between men (71%) and women (33%) widened by 12 points this year (compared to a 26-point gap last year).

While more than three-fourths (78%) of employees rate their own company/organization as empathetic, which is significantly higher than last year (71%), men are 15 points more likely than women to agree.

(78%) of employees rate their own company/organization as empathetic, which is significantly higher than last year (71%), men are 15 points more likely than women to agree. All audiences view female employees as most empathetic. Gen X was rated as the most empathetic generation, Gen Z, the least. "It's no longer enough for CEOs to just run the business. Employees are demanding that CEOs use their platform to stand for something," said Jon Shanahan, Businessolver President and CEO. "Diversity is a foundational driver of empathy, and it's imperative for organizations to take notice, and identify ways to improve diversity in their workforce and leadership." Driving the bottom line starts with empathetic behaviors from the top down

There has never been a clearer business case for empathy in the workplace when it comes to maintaining engaged employees and recruiting top talent. In addition to financial performance, leadership agrees that empathy improves: Retention: 95 percent of employees are more likely to stay with an organization that empathized with their needs and eight in 10 (81%) would be willing to work longer hours for empathetic employers.

of employees are more likely to stay with an organization that empathized with their needs and (81%) would be willing to work longer hours for empathetic employers. Workplace productivity: Two-thirds of employees believe empathy improves productivity (66%) and morale (71%).

of employees believe empathy improves productivity (66%) and morale (71%). Business performance: Eight in 10 employees, HR professionals and CEOs agree that an empathetic workplace has a positive impact on business performance. To learn more about what organizations can do to become more empathetic and the impact empathy has on business results, read the 2018 State of Workplace Empathy Executive Summary at businessolver.com/empathy. Follow and contribute to the social conversation at #EmpathyAtWork. These findings are part of the third annual State of Workplace Empathy study a study of more than 1,500 U.S. employees, HR professionals and CEOs that evaluates the state of empathy in American workplaces, conducted by Businessolver. About Businessolver

Since 1998, Businessolver has delivered market-changing benefits administration technology supported by an intrinsic responsiveness to client needs. It creates client programs that maximize benefit program investment, minimize risk exposure, and engage employees with easy-to-use solutions and communication tools to assist them in making wise and cost-efficient benefit selections. Founded by HR professionals, Businessolver's unwavering service-oriented culture and secure SaaS platform provide measurable success in its mission to provide complete client delight. Learn more at www.businessolver.com. Media Contact Businessolver

Kristin Korzen

media@businessolver.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/businessolver-quantifies-empathy-in-the-workplace-87-percent-of-ceos-agree-that-a-companys-financial-performance-is-tied-to-empathy-300628497.html SOURCE Businessolver

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Data443 to Exhibit and Present at RSA 2018

RALEIGH, N.C., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Data443 Risk Mitigation, Inc., a leading data security company, is pleased to announce its presence at the RSA Conference 2018 taking place in San Francisco from April 16 to April 20. Data443 will exhibit at the RSAC Early Stage Expo to be held at the Marriott Marquis, Yerba Buena Ballroom, Salon 9, Booth #1, beginning Tuesday, April 17 through Thursday, April 19. RSA attendees are also invited to a special briefing  GDPR: Its not too late!  presented by Data443 founder and CEO, Jason Remillard on Wednesday, April 18 at 10:00 a.m. in the Marriott ESE Briefing Center on the expo floor.

One topic that will be widely discussed at RSA 2018: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance. With the GDPR enforcement deadline happening next month, many companies big and small are not ready to respond, and that could cost them up to 4 percent of net sales. GDPR will be pervasive across Europe and beyond, and as it rolls into place, other countries will institute similar regulations. The vast majority of companies affected by GDPR are not fully prepared if at all to meet the compliance deadline, said Remillard. Now more than ever, companies need to gain quick and easy control of all data assets to enable proper classification and governance to comply with GDPR. The scale of this issue and the growing trend is evident in Facebooks recent promise to extend EU GDPR protections to all its users worldwide. To better understand the markets readiness for GDPR, Data443 recently co-sponsored a comprehensive research study on GDPR compliance in partnership with one of the worlds largest online Information Security communities. The study to be released next Tuesday validates Data443s approach to deliver a single-product GDPR solution that covers data classification, governance, and eDiscovery, all within a user-first, user-centric interface. Access to this study will be available April 17 at https://www.data443.com/ra-pressroom/.



Data443s ClassiDocs Approach to GDPR: No Fear

Mounting a response to GDPR requires an accurate data inventory, data-classification scheme, and audit functions. Data443s ClassiDocs enables a rapid time-to-value response that covers 13 articles of the GDPR. The product supports over 200 file types and 400 databases, across all data points  local devices, network, cloud, and databases, at rest and in flight  for seamless, cost-effective GDPR compliance. #GDPRNoFear To schedule a conference or demo while at RSA, please use this link: https://data443.as.me/JasonRemillard About DATA443 Risk Mitigation, Inc.

DATA443 Risk Mitigation, Inc. (OTCPK:LDSR) enables secure data  across local devices, network, cloud, and databases  at rest and in flight. ClassiDocs, our award-winning data classification and governance technology, supports over 200 file types and 400 databases with a user-first, user-centric design that speeds ease of use and compliance-policy conformance without training. Data443 delivers classification, discovery, governance, GDPR compliance, and DSAR management coupled with DLP, CASB, SIEM, and cloud solutions to provide user-enabled, governance-enabled, up-to-date security for every data point, every time.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements and are subject to risks and uncertainties. See DATA443 Risk Mitigation, Inc.s filings with the SEC, which may identify specific factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For Further Information

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/data443Risk

Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/data443/

Signup for our Investor Newsletter: https://www.data443.com/investor-relations/

Signup for our Product Newsletter: https://www.data443.com/product-newsletter/ Contacts: On site @ RSA:

Jason Remillard

jason@data443.com

Office: 919.526.1070 Ext. 99 Main Press Contact:

Susan Payne

Susan.Payne@data443.com

Office: 919.526.1070 Ext. 103 Investor Relations:

ir@data443.com

Office: 919.858.6542 SOURCE DATA443 Risk Mitigation, Inc. ///***ClassiDocs Classification: PUBLIC ***///

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Lastline Honored as 2018 Fortress Cyber Security Award Winner for Best Network Breach Protection Software

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lastline Inc., the leader in advanced network-based malware protection, today announced that the Business Intelligence Group has named Lastline Breach Defender as the winner of the 2018 Fortress Cyber Security Awards as the best Network Breach Protection software. The inaugural program identifies and rewards the world's leading companies and products that are working to keep enterprise data and electronic assets safe among a growing threat from cybercriminals. Lastline Breach Defender uniquely provides a dynamic blueprint of a breach as it unfolds and moves laterally across a network. This innovative network threat protection system enables security teams to quickly understand the scope of the threat, including compromised systems, communication across local and external systems, and data sets accessed. Informed by unprecedented understanding of malware behaviors, Lastline Breah Defender provides the visibility, context, threat intelligence, and integration security analysts need to remediate breaches quickly and completely, with fewer resources, and at lower cost.



"We're honored by The Business Intelligence Group's recognition of our market leading breach protection technology, especially considering the business perspective shared by the judging panel," said Bert Rankin, Lastline CMO. "The business benefits of improved network breach protection are clear, from improved productivity and effectiveness of the security team to avoiding data loss and the tarnished brand reputation that typically accompanies it." The Business Intelligence Group was founded to recognize superior performance in the business world. These awards were judged by business executives using a scoring system that selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers.

"We are so proud to name Lastline Breach Defender as a winner in our inaugural Fortress Cyber Security Awards program," said Maria Jimenez, Chief Nominations Officer, Business Intelligence Group. "It was clear to our expert judges that the entire group of 35 innovators and innovations are the tip of the spear helping to prepare, defend and respond to the growing threat of cyberattacks. Congratulations to all!" About Lastline

Lastline provides breach protection products that are innovating the way companies defend against advanced malware with fewer resources and at lower cost. We deliver the visibility, context, analysis, and integrations enterprise security teams need to quickly and completely eradicate malware-based threats before damaging and costly data breaches occur. Headquartered in Redwood City, California with offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia, Lastline's technology is used by Global 5000 enterprises, is offered directly and through resellers and security service providers, and is integrated into leading third-party security technologies worldwide. www.lastline.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lastline-honored-as-2018-fortress-cyber-security-award-winner-for-best-network-breach-protection-software-300628787.html SOURCE Lastline Inc.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Velocidi Acquires ShiftForward; Brands Can Now Achieve Total Customer Privacy While Delivering More Relevant Experiences

NEW YORK, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Velocidi becomes the world's first private Customer Data Platform (CDP) by acquiring ShiftForward, a leading marketing automation and data platform company. Brands can now protect billions of customers by keeping precious data safely on a private, in-house CDP rather than relying on marketplace platforms on the public cloud. Velocidi, already a powerful customer data platform, is now enhanced with the integration of ShiftForward's capabilities. The company's clients now have greater deployment flexibility, an unmatched level of control over their first-party data, and a time and cost advantage over their competitors. This platform expansion is a compelling market differentiator for any brand that owns and covets first-party customer data and wants to bring it together with external marketing data in real time. Velocidi now offers a wider and deeper General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance solution for existing and new clients within the EU. The acquisition demonstrates Velocidi's commitment to the EU market with the addition of the Portugal-based ShiftForward team buttressed by its Dublin-based EU headquarters. "The timing could not be better. It is very rare to find an acquisition that can not only bring cutting-edge technology and deep talent, but also market differentiation, expansion and new vertical opportunities. ShiftForward is just that," said David Dunne, founder and CEO of Velocidi."Together we bring the market leading private CDP to clients. Marketers have unprecedented volumes of data available to make better marketing decisions, but realizing that promise has been an elusive goal. Velocidi solves this at the very moment when coveting customer marketing data is not only essential but required by regulators." Theacquisition fulfills Velocidi's vision of brands becoming masters of their customer marketing data. Velocidi enables any brand to achieve the same level of engagement with their customers as has been achieved by the leading companies in social, search and e-commerce. By becoming experts at managing their customer marketing data, these leaders deliver precisely the right information at the right time, enable engagement and relationships at scale, and deliver virtually any kind of product or service, where, when and how it is needed.



"Integrating our customer event level data process with Velocidi's marketing data platform is the foundation for the most innovative product in the market today. By joining the Velocidi team we give marketers full control of their data, bringing them closer to their customers and potential customers," said Paulo Cunha, founder and CEO of ShiftForward, who now becomes Velocidi's Chief Product Officer. "Today's marketers need to ingest all types of customer, event-based, media data. Now, they can do just that with Velocidi's private CDP. We look forward to continuing our outstanding work together for brands and agencies." A recent Velocidi customer deployed the platform for six months and recognized a 116 percent increase in ROI with 53 percent decrease in acquisition cost. The newly combined company will benefit both Velocidi and ShiftForward customers, who now gain access to a broader, integrated offering. For instance, ShiftForward customer Adality (a Bertelsmann Company) now can utilize Velocidi's customer data platform, while Velocidi customer Eagle Point Software can now take advantage of ShiftForward's private DMP and ad forecasting solutions.

"We are excited about Paulo and his team joining the Velocidi family. The time is now for brands to take control of their data, since at no greater time in history has the brand to consumer relationship been so threatened by middlemen, intrusive platforms and nefarious actors. Velocidi helps brands that deeply treasure their customers' private information to build a trusted relationship with those audiences by delivering more timely, relevant and useful information," commented Neil Callahan of Pilot Growth Equity. "With ShiftForward, Velocidi gives brands the ability to earn and maintain this trust by keeping this precious customer information inside the company - not with third parties. Now brands can protect their own customers while giving them the personalized experience they want by deploying the CDP." More information about this announcement is available at www.velocidi.com/shiftforward. About Velocidi

Velocidi is a customer data software company headquartered in New York. Its customer data platform empowers businesses to control first, second and third-party data and unlock the right marketing insights, decisions and actions at scale. The platform touches billions of dollars in media spend for leading brands across the globe. The company closed an investment round in early 2017 led by Pilot Growth Equity and Neuberger Berman Private Equity, and has offices in Dublin and Portugal. Please visit us athttp://www.velocidi.com, or call 1-212-884-9990 to schedule your demo. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/velocidi-acquires-shiftforward-brands-can-now-achieve-total-customer-privacy-while-delivering-more-relevant-experiences-300628977.html SOURCE Velocidi

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Internet Economy Summit 2018 Unlocked Insights on Digital Innovation

Global leaders from start-ups to internet giants shared views on the future of business HONG KONG, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Internet Economy Summit (IES) kick-started its annual conference at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre today. Co-organised by the Hong Kong SAR Government and Cyberport with the China Internet Development Foundation as the supporting organisation, this year's two-day Summit brought together thought leaders from MNCs, internet technology giants, investors, enterprises and up-and-coming start-ups to exchange unique insights and winning strategies in the global internet economy. Themed under "New Impetus for the New Economy", the Summit had attracted more than 1,400 attendees on the first day. Continuing the discussions at the Asia-Pacific Business Forum held at Cyberport just right before the Summit, IES 2018 switched course to dig into the digital economy's development opportunities in Hong Kong and in the region. The Summit celebrated an all-encompassing agenda -- including the Visionary Forum, Chambers Forum, Entrepreneurship Forum, and Technovation Forum, bringing together more than 50 notable speakers to spur discussions on internet technology applications, smart city development, next-generation of businesses, innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as technological advancement and business applications o artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity and internet of things.



The Hon. Mrs. Carrie LAM CHENG Yuet-ngor, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR Government, officiated the Summit's opening together with other guests of honor including the Hon. Mr. Nicholas YANG, Secretary for Innovation and Technology of the Hong Kong SAR Government, Ir. Allen Yeung, Government Chief Information Officer of the Hong Kong SAR Government, Dr. Shamshad AKHTAR, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, and Ms. QI Xiaoxia, Director General, Bureau of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Affairs. The Summit's Visionary Forum featured leaders from top notch technology companies including Mr. Winston CHENG, President of International of JD.com, one of China's largest online retailers; Mr. Zhong Xiangqun, Chief Operating Officer of Bank of China (Hong Kong); Mr. Yossi VARDI, the most influential serial entrepreneur in Israel and Mr. MU Rongjun, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President of Meituan-Dianping, the online lifestyle trading platform of US$30 billion valuation. Other prominent speakers on the list include representatives from Didi Chuxing, Illumio, Ping An Technology, Amazon Web Services, Facebook and Google; as well as founders of local unicorns such as GOGOVAN, an incubatee groomed by Cyberport, who have all developed unique value propositions and winning business strategies in the midst of internet economy.

As industry leaders shared at the Summit, digital technologies have both redefined enterprise business models and brought about drastic changes in consumer behaviours. Mr. Winston CHENG, President of International of JD.com, talked about the transformation of traditional business model with smart technologies as catalysts, and the enhancement of consumer engagement with AI and big data technologies. With FinTech redefining the banking industry, Mr. ZHONG Xiangqun, Chief Operating Officer of Bank of China (Hong Kong), shared his insights on how banks have been transforming in the path of digitalisation in order to provide clients with more personalised value-added services. Mr. MU Rongjun, Co-founder & Senior Vice President of Meituan-Dianping, also illustrated how the company has enhanced users' dining experience and created new business and job opportunities in the market riding on various digital applications. Dr. Lee George LAM, Chairman of Cyberport said, "The internet economy has redefined the world's social and economic landscape, transcending all geographical and cultural boundaries. It also has changed the way how businesses and organisations operate and succeed. As a key driver of Hong Kong's development of digital technology, Cyberport has been relentlessly incubating local start-ups and helping them succeed in the new economy. By working hand-in-hand with the Hong Kong SAR Government and industry partners, I am confident that the digital technology sector in Hong Kong will continue to thrive, become the new impetus for Hong Kong's economy, and create sustainable socio-economic value to our city." Dr LAM also expressed his gratitude for the tremendous support from industry partners and sponsors, such as Bank of China (Hong Kong), whose contribution was indispensable to the success opening of the Summit. Event photos of IES 2018 can be downloaded at:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1YcpztERSAwGnTyjz0T-ygiK6Vz_DzkC4 Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180412/2103707-1 SOURCE Hong Kong Cyberport Management Company Limited

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] OSE Immunotherapeutics Announces Evolution in Company's Board of Directors and Management

Dominique Costantini, MD, Appointed as Chairman of Companys Board of Directors, Alexis Peyroles Appointed as Chief Executive Officer



Natural, Seamless Evolution Follows Three Structuring License Agreements to Drive Next Step of Companys Growth NANTES, France, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OSE Immunotherapeutics (ISIN:FR0012127173) (Mnemo:OSE) today announces a new organization within its Board of Directors with the appointment of Dominique Costantini as Chairman of the Board and the appointment of Alexis Peyroles as Chief Executive Officer. These changes, effective immediately, are based on the recommendation of the Nomination and Remuneration Committee with the aim of positioning the Company for growth given the recent developments. Dominique Costantini, Companys co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer, is appointed as Chairman of the Board of Directors, and also will serve as Director of Early Development. Alexis Peyroles, former Chief Operating Officer, Operations, is appointed as Chief Executive Officer. Dominique Costantini succeeds Gerard Tardy who will not run for a mandate of Board member at the next shareholders general meeting.



Dominique Costantini, Chairman of the Company, said: "I thank the Board of Directors for their support and for their confidence. I thank also Gerard Tardy for his support during this pivotal period. The major agreement signed with Boehringer Ingelheim is the culmination of more than a year of teamwork involving the entire company. Alexis Peyroles has succeeded in forging this collaboration and significant agreement by integrating all the companys businesses in this partnership. His international managerial experience of more than 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry (Sanofi-Guerbet) and in biotechnology, in Europe, Japan and South America, developed his talents in strategy, finance, pharmaceutical marketing and in agreements and licenses. Since the founding of OSE, his strategic and operational skills have been critical in the companys development, its IPO, its external growth and in its meaningful partnerships driving the future of OSE, all key steps to value creation. Alexis Peyroles, CEO, said: The Board of Directors and Dominique Costantini have trusted me to steer a new step in the Companys growth and I thank them warmly. Together, with the entire OSE team, we will actively pursue the development of new immunotherapies to meet the patients unmet medical needs. I salute the outstanding expertise of our researchers and clinicians able to anticipate and identify targets of major interest and turn them into first-in-class immunotherapies. The management team around Alexis Peyroles has recently been strengthened with the additions of Berangere Vasseur, MD, Chief Medical Officer Immuno-Oncology (broad experience in oncology development while at Roche and at several biotechnology companies) and Emilienne Soma, PharmD, Ph.D., Director of Pharmaceutical Program Development (experience in R&D management and in alliances in several biotechnology companies) who have recently joined the company. The team also includes Bernard Vanhove Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer and Director of R&D and International Scientific Collaborations; Nicolas Poirier, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer; Frederique Corallo, MD, Chief Medical Officer Imunotherapies and Autoimmune Diseases; Jean-Pascal Conduzorgues, PharmD, Qualified Person; and Anne-Laure Autret-Cornet, Chief Financial Officer.



Maryvonne Hiance, Director of Strategy and Dominique Costantini, in her additional role as Director of Early Development, bring their expertise to this team.



Combining strong implementation in leading academic research, an impressive know-how in conceiving and developing innovative immunotherapies, and rich experience in medical and pharmaceutical development, the OSE Immunotherapeutics team is now ideally positioned to enlarge its presence in this promising sector of growth.





OSE Immunotherapeutics has three key strategic partnerships potentially generating more than 1.5 billion euros in revenues, assuming all pre-specified milestones are met. They will support the development of the Company's product portfolio, including both a product close to market with orphan status designation (Tedopi) and breakthrough clinical innovations conducted in partnership (in 2018 with Boehringer Ingelheim for OSE-172, end of 2016 with Servier for OSE-127 and in 2016 with Janssen Biotech for FR104).



Alexis Peyroles appointment as Chief Executive Officer supports the Company's strategic growth steps, serving in the best interest of patients, employees, shareholders and other stakeholders. ABOUT OSE Immunotherapeutics

OSE Immunotherapeutics is a biotechnology company focused on the development of innovative immunotherapies for immune activation and regulation in the fields of immuno-oncology and autoimmune diseases. Neoepitopes innovation (Tedopi) is today in Phase 3 in advanced lung cancers (NSCLC) after checkpoint inhibitors failure (anti PD-1 and anti PD-L1). A global license and collaboration agreement was signed in April 2018 with Boehringer Ingelheim to develop checkpoint inhibitor OSE-172 (anti-SIRPa monoclonal antibody), for the treatment of advanced solid tumors. An option to license was exercised in July 2016 by Janssen Biotech to continue clinical development of FR104 (an anti CD28 mAb) in auto-immune diseases after positive phase 1 results. A 2-step license option was signed in 2016 with Servier Laboratories to develop OSE-127 (monoclonal antibody targeting the CD127 receptor, the alpha chain of the interleukin-7 receptor) to develop the product up to the completion of a phase 2 clinical trial planned in autoimmune bowel disease and Sjogren disease. The company has several scientific and technological platforms: neoepitopes, agonist or antagonist monoclonal antibodies, ideally positioned to fight cancer and autoimmune diseases. Its first-in-class clinical portfolio offers a diversified risk profile. Click and follow us on Twitter and Linkedln

https://twitter.com/OSEIMMUNO

https://www.linkedin.com/company/10929673 Contacts OSE Immunotherapeutics

Sylvie Detry

Sylvie.detry@ose-immuno.com

+33 143 297 857



French Media: FP2COM

Florence Portejoie

fportejoie@fp2com.fr

+33 607 768 283 U.S. Media: LifeSci Public Relations

Matt Middleman, M.D.

matt@lifescipublicrelations.com

+1 646 627 8384



U.S. and European Investors

Chris Maggos

chris@lifesciadvisors.com

+41 79 367 6254 Forward-looking statements

This press release contains express or implied information and statements that might be deemed forward-looking information and statements in respect of OSE Immunotherapeutics. They do not constitute historical facts. These information and statements include financial projections that are based upon certain assumptions and assessments made by OSE Immunotherapeutics management in light of its experience and its perception of historical trends, current economic and industry conditions, expected future developments and other factors they believe to be appropriate. These forward-looking statements include statements typically using conditional and containing verbs such as expect, anticipate, believe, target, plan, or estimate, their declensions and conjugations and words of similar import. Although the OSE Immunotherapeutics management believes that the forward-looking statements and information are reasonable, the OSE Immunotherapeutics shareholders and other investors are cautioned that the completion of such expectations is by nature subject to various risks, known or not, and uncertainties which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of OSE Immunotherapeutics. These risks could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in or implied or projected by the forward-looking statements. These risks include those discussed or identified in the public filings made by OSE Immunotherapeutics with the AMF. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. This press release includes only summary information and should be read with the OSE Immunotherapeutics Reference Document filed with the AMF on 28 April 2017 under the number R.17-038, including the annual financial report for the fiscal year 2016, available on the OSE Immunotherapeutics website.



Other than as required by applicable law, OSE Immunotherapeutics issues this press release at the date hereof and does not undertake any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking information or statements.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Continental Leaders Inspire Next Generation of Women in Technology and Engineering

AUBURN HILLS, Mich., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Named one of FORTUNE Magazine's Most Admired Companies and one of America's Best Employers by Forbes, international technology company Continental continues to reinforce its commitment to diversity and leadership at all levels. Today, the company hosted a "Women in Unique Roles" lunch experience at its North American headquarters location in Auburn Hills. Moderated by Vickie Thomas, City Beat Reporter for WWJ Newsradio 950, four of Continental's female leaders held a discussion about the state of women in technology and engineering management. Aruna Anand, Head of Continental Engineering Services North America; Catherine Loss, Head of Retread Worldwide for Commercial Vehicle Tires; and Beyza Sarioglu, Head of Hybrid Electric Vehicles, North America, candidly discussed their career journeys. Mary Reardon, Head of Talent Acquisition for Continental in North America, also discussed how Continental is fostering flexible work practices and actively increasing diversity and inclusion in management. "As a leader in technology, Continental's growth is fueled by diversity and inclusion. We are committed to fostering opportunities for women and minority leaders in STEM and plan to continue to increase the percentage of women in technology management," Reardon said. "We are successful with this by creating and maintaining an inclusive culture with a positive work environment." An article on ASME.org reveals that currently 18 to 20 percent of engineering students are women, compared to the early 1980s when less than six percent of engineers in the U.S. were women. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women accounted for 14 percent of full-time wage and salary workers in architecture and engineering in the U.S. in 2016.



Continental actively supports various affinity organizations such as the Women of Color STEM conference and the Society of Women Engineers. At today's event, the company announced a $2,000 donation to assist Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) initiatives for Project Excel students in the Pontiac School District. Twelve female students from the school district participated in the lunch experience and gleaned motivating career advice. Continental also made a $1000 donation to the National Association of Black Journalists Ethel Payne Fellowship. Named after the first female, African-American commentator employed by a U.S. television network, the Fellowship provides opportunities for journalists to gain international experience. To help attract and support women in leadership roles, Continental has expanded its range of flexible work practices. The company now provides employees a longer paid maternity leave and offers dads paid paternity leave. Telecommuting - the most utilized flexible work option at Continental - allows employees to perform their work offsite. Continental also offers part-time positions and the option for employees to apply for an unpaid sabbatical for up to one year.

About Continental

Continental develops pioneering technologies and services for sustainable and connected mobility of people and their goods. Founded in 1871, the technology company offers safe, efficient, intelligent and affordable solutions for vehicles, machines, traffic and transport. In 2017, Continental generated sales of 44 billion and currently employs more than 238,000 people in 61 countries. Links For the latest Continental news and information, follow us on:

Facebook www.Facebook.com/ContiPress

Twitter www.Twitter.com/ContiPressNA View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/continental-leaders-inspire-next-generation-of-women-in-technology-and-engineering-300629170.html SOURCE Continental

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Kansas Enacts Enhanced Nurse Licensure Compact (eNLC)

CHICAGO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kansas has become the 30th member of the eNLC with the signing of the bill by Gov. Jeff Colyer, on April 10, 2018. The eNLC was implemented Jan. 19, 2018, in the existing 29* states. Kansas eNLC implementation date is July 1, 2019. Kansas is pleased to be the 30th state to pass legislation to join the eNLC. The Kansas Board of Nursing is committed to working toward a smooth implementation for nurses, employers and citizens of Kansas, comments Carol Moreland, MSN, RN, executive administrator, Kansas State Board of Nursing. The eNLC allows for registered nurses (RNs) and licensed practical/vocational nurses (LPN/VNs) to have one multistate license, with the ability to practice in person or via telehealth in both their home state and other eNLC states. Licensing standards are aligned in eNLC states so all nurses applying for a multistate license are required to meet the same standards, which include a federal and state criminal background check that will be conducted for all applicants for multistate licensure. The eNLC also enables nurses to provide telehealth nursing services to patients located in other eNLC states without having to obtain additional licenses. In the event of a disaster, nurses from multiple states can easily respond to supply vital services. Additionally, almost every nurse, including primary care nurses, case managers, transport nurses, school and hospice nurses, among many others, needs to routinely cross state boundaries to provide the public with access to nursing services, and a multistate license facilitates this process. Boards of nursing (BONs) were the first health care provider regulatory bodies to develop a model for interstate practice with the original adopion of the NLC in 1997 and its implementation in 2000. While other health care provider regulatory bodies are just getting started in this process, the NLC has been operational and successful for more than 15 years.



Additional information about the eNLC can be found at https://www.ncsbn.org/enhanced-nlc-implementation.htm. For the latest information, follow the eNLC on Twitter or Facebook About The Interstate Commission of Nurse Licensure Compact Administrators (ICNLCA)

The commission is a quasi-governmental and joint public agency of the party states created and established on July 20, 2017. The commission is the governing body of the Nurse Licensure Compact (NLC). The NLC was originally adopted in 1997 and a comprehensively updated version was adopted in 2015 to supersede it. Demonstrating leadership in innovation, nursing is the first licensed health care profession to develop an interstate compact for multistate licensure. The purpose of the commission is to facilitate the states responsibility to protect the public as well as the exchange of information between party states, hallmarks of the mutual recognition model of licensure. Through this model, multistate licensure enables interstate practice by nurses who meet uniform licensure requirements.

About NCSBN

NCSBN marks its 40th anniversary milestone in 2018 with the inspiring theme of Regulatory Excellence Surging Toward the Future. Founded March 15, 1978, as an independent not-for-profit organization, NCSBN was initially created to lessen the burdens of state governments and bring together BONs to act and counsel together on matters of common interest. It has evolved into one of the leading voices of regulation across the world. NCSBNs membership is comprised of the BONs in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and four U.S. territories  American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands and the Virgin Islands. There are also 30 associate members that are either nursing regulatory bodies or empowered regulatory authorities from other countries or territories. NCSBN Member Boards protect the public by ensuring that safe and competent nursing care is provided by licensed nurses. These BONs regulate more than 4.8 million licensed nurses. Mission: NCSBN provides education, service and research through collaborative leadership to promote evidence-based regulatory excellence for patient safety and public protection. The statements and opinions expressed are those of NCSBN and not the individual member state or territorial boards of nursing. *Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. Contact: Dawn M. Kappel

Director, Marketing and Communications

312.525.3667 direct

312.279.1034 fax

dkappel@ncsbn.org

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] PSC Group Named As One Of The Best Places To Work By Crain's Chicago Business

SCHAUMBURG, Ill., April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- PSC Group, LLC (www.psclistens.com), an IT business technology consulting firm, is proud to announce it has been ranked 48th in the Crain's Chicago Business 2018 Best Places to Work rankings. The honor is awarded based on a survey of employees and employers on various criteria including culture, compensation, advancement and training opportunities, benefits, and more. PSC Group's focus on employee development and engagement, community service and culture helped it earn the spot. PSC's Five Points of Excellence Program, Labs technology research projects and strong support and hosting of various technology users and trade groups drive employee engagement and support for ongoing employee learning opportunities.



North America and is a recognized Microsoft Gold and IBM Silver Business Partner in several cloud-based application and solution competencies. PSC enables strategic business technology driven tools, processes, and objectives that help companies improve and grow their value. The firm works with clients acrossand is a recognized Microsoft Gold and IBM Silver Business Partner in several cloud-based application and solution competencies. "PSC is very proud to be named as a Best Place to Work amongst all of these successful Chicago companies. This recognition reflects the success of the talented, client-focused and fun-loving team of professionals who have helped build and grow the firm for more than 27 years," said John Quirk, Partner. "We feel strongly about fostering a collaborative, energized and opportunity-rich environment for our employees because it helps everyone achieve excellent client experiences and maintain long term employee and client relationships."

In addition to PSC's focus on continuous improvement and supportive learning opportunities, PSC Group's employee benefits and perks helped the firm earn its place on the list. ABOUT PSC GROUP LLC

Founded in 1990, PSC Group, LLC is a business technology consulting firm focused on enabling strategic technology driven tools, processes, and objectives that help companies improve and grow their value. Our process begins in the way we listen and ends with our clients experiencing a greater return on their technology investment. With offices in Chicago and Kansas City, PSC has a proud history with our clientele that is based on mutual respect, integrity, and honesty. www.psclistens.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/psc-group-named-as-one-of-the-best-places-to-work-by-crains-chicago-business-300629221.html SOURCE PSC Group, LLC

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] ASAPS 2018 in New York City Invites Rosemont Media CEO to Lecture

SAN DIEGO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) will be holding its annual The Aesthetic Meeting conference in New York this year from Thursday, April 26th to Tuesday, May 1st. Among its attendees will be online marketing agency Rosemont Media, the founding Alliance Partner of ASAPS. Rosemont Media CEO Keith Humes will also be a presenter in the educational course schedule, covering the topics of online marketing and reputation managementthis will be his 20th year participating in the ASAPS event.

Rosemont Media to Attend and Exhibit at ASAPS 2018 in New York City



Keith Humes, CEO of Rosemont Media, is Lecturing at ASAPS 2018 in New York - Course #517







Humes will also be co-hosting the question-and-answer panel Controversies in Online Marketing with Expert Q&A on Sunday, April 29th from 2-4 p.m. ET. This course will focus on identifying questionable marketing tactics and educating professionals on how to gain patients through online efforts. Following this Q&A, Humes will be presenting in Course 517Taking Control of Your Online Reputationfrom 4:30-6:30 p.m. ET. During this session, attendees will learn how to create a thriving social media profile and implement successful SEO strategies on their websites. They will also be educated on methods to monitor their online reputation as well as how to use business citations to their maximum benefit. Those attending The Aesthetic Meeting 2018 can learn more about how to market their practice online by visiting booth #721, where Rosemont Media will be exhibiting. Humesas well as RMs National Sales Director, Chris Brown, and the firms medical sales teamwill be available for aesthetic professionals to learn how Internet marketing efforts can transform their digital presence.

Having just celebrated its 10th anniversary in business, Rosemont Media looks forward to seeing current clients, educating more surgeons about online marketing, and networking with other experts in the aesthetic surgery industry. About Rosemont Media Rosemont Media is a digital marketing firm based in San Diego, California that offers a comprehensive array of online solutions for plastic surgeons and other medical specialties. These services include responsive website design, content marketing, social media marketing, reputation management, media buying, and much more. Rosemont Media specializes in producing high quality solutions customized to each of its clients unique practice goals. The firm also gives board-certified plastic surgeons the competitive edge within their region of the United States, Canada, and beyond by offering market exclusivity. To learn more about Rosemont Media, visit rosemontmedia.com and facebook.com/rosemontmedia. To view the original source of this release, click here: https://www.rosemontmedia.com/keiths-corner/asaps-2018-in-new-york-city-invites-rosemont-media-ceo-to-lecture/ A video accompanying this announcement can be viewed at http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/182abe17-8ca4-489c-9877-36d1f8556649 Photos accompanying this announcement are available at http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/c68df445-978f-49e8-b23a-b66104987542 http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/00185610-fafd-47e9-aee4-068ee00fc8a5 Rosemont Media Keith Humes keith@rosemontmedia.com (858) 200-0044

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]English French

QUEBEC CITY, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- H 2 O Innovation Inc. (H 2 O Innovation or the Corporation) (TSX-V:HEO) (Alternext:MNEMO:ALHEO) (OTCQX:HEOFF) is proud to announce that it has partnered with Senrio, Inc., provider of the leading IoT visibility and security solution, to provide users of our proprietary IntelogxTM system, performance monitoring software with a greater level of awareness and visibility into IoT device health and safety. In addition to the collection of operational data from multiple devices on water and wastewater plants, the integration of Senrio Insight with IntelogxTM will allow customers to rapidly respond when atypical patterns of behavior are detected or when unauthorized devices are discovered by Senrios self-learning technology. After being analyzed by Senrios predictive analytics engine and the worlds largest device intelligence data store, it will provide the operators continuous surveillance on its infrastructure and trigger alerts when abnormal behavior is detected.



IntelogxTM uses remote access to operating parameters of industrial IoT devices in order to collect, normalize and analyze data, all displayed on a comprehensive dashboard. The program helps operators to optimize their plant, generate reports and graphs, and analyze trends. As its name implies, IntelogxTM brings intelligence and logical interpretation to operating data and uses the knowledge H 2 O Innovation has to monitor system health and predict maintenance requirements. The addition of Senrio in IntelogxTM addresses security and remote connectivity issues, one of todays critical topics of the global water infrastructure market. This combination of IT technologies will create a state-of-the-art monitoring solution available to the water municipal and industrial markets, stated Greg Madden, Vice President of Aftermarket and Digital Solutions at H 2 O Innovation.

Industrial IoT devices are a blind spot for most enterprises. This is especially true in situations where equipment is deployed into adverse environmental conditions where there is poor connectivity, potentially delaying awareness of abnormal device behavior, or a compromise that might pose a risk to operations or operator safety. Integrating Senrio Insight into IntelogxTM provides added value to end-users, gives them unprecedented visibility and enables them to more effectively deal with safety or security concerns, added Stephen Ridley, Senrio Founder.

This integration allows devices on systems built, serviced or operated by the Corporation to easily report their location, status, and behavior data over Wi-Fi or satellite links, from remote locations where network connectivity may be sparse or non-existent. It allows users to build profiles of device behavior, enabling IT administrators and security teams to establish a higher level of trust with these devices by understanding their usage patterns and determining if they are operating normally.

About Senrio

Senrio is an IoT security company that was founded on the belief that, with the right mindset and proper tools, we can bridge the gap between legacy security approaches and the new reality of the IoT. Our mission is to provide the visibility and actionable insights essential to ensuring the security and safety of all connected devices. We envision a world where our trust in connected devices matches the benefits they brings to our lives. Senrio is a trusted partner of global technology companies and government agencies. To see Senrio Insight in action visit: http://iot.security/.

About H 2 O Innovation

H 2 O Innovation designs and provides state-of-the-art, custom-built and integrated water treatment solutions based on membrane filtration technology for municipal, industrial, energy and natural resources end-users. The Corporations activities rely on three pillars which are i) water and wastewater projects; ii) specialty products and services, including a complete line of specialty chemicals, consumables, specialized products for the water treatment industry as well as control and monitoring systems; and iii) operation and maintenance services for water and wastewater treatment systems. For more information, visit www.h2oinnovation.com.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) nor the Alternext Exchange accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.[April 12, 2018] Rotech Settles Lawsuit

On April 11, 2018, Rotech settled a lawsuit brought in federal court in Texas related to a billing center the company closed in early 2015. The lawsuit was based entirely on facts Rotech identified and self-disclosed to the government and the public in 2012, repaying over $6 million in identified overpayments. In 2009, Rotech, under previous executive management, implemented a defective automatic billing program to meet new regulations for certain oxygen contents claims -- immediately upon identifying the error, this billing program was fixed. Since 2012, Rotech has conducted regular audits of oxygen contents claims and has discovered no further errors in this process. Rotch cooperated fully with the government's investigation and as part of the settlement, received a full release from any wrongdoing relating to the allegations.



Tim Pigg, President and CEO of Rotech since 2014, expressed satisfaction that this matter is now behind the company and is focused on the future. "We are pleased this matter has been resolved to the satisfaction of all parties," said Mr. Pigg. He continued: "Rotech is committed to maintaining the highest level of professional and ethical standards in business, and anything that deviates from the highest standards of integrity is not tolerated by my new management. Through a strict system of proactive checks and balances which involve ongoing internal audits, robust compliance training, significant investments in billing and coding technology, and an anonymous way for employees to report potential problems, Rotech continues to hold itself to the highest standards."

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412006250/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] California Virtual Academies Correct Factual Inaccuracies in Recent CTA Media Release

The California Teachers Association ("CTA")/California Virtual Educators United ("CVEU") issued a media release, dated April 11, 2018, concerning a tentative agreement recently reached between CTA/CVEU and the California Virtual Academies ("CAVA"). That release included factual inaccuracies, according to CAVA. The following information is meant to correct serious material misrepresentations made by CTA/CVEU in the media release; and to implore CTA/CVEU to work honestly and in good faith with CAVA toward the mutual interests that have been advanced by the parties' nearly two years of hard work in reaching a tentative agreement for an initial collective bargaining agreement. WHAT IS AT STAKE? Under the applicable legal framework, a tentative agreement is not effective until ratified by both parties. This means that CVEU members must ratify the tentative agreement, and then each of the nine separate and independent CAVA non-profit school boards must ratify the tentative agreement for it to become effective. Some of the highlights of the tentative agreement include: Changes to Working Conditions Work year reduced by fifteen (15) work days;

Removal of multiple certificated daily duties;

Reasonable minimum weekly teaching hours requirement; and

Establishment of caseload limits. Compensation Increases 17.6% pay increase on a new salary schedule containing equal steps for advancement in years of service and academic units/degrees;

Immediate increase in starting teacher salaries to $46,000;

Retroactive payment for each unit member to July 1, 2017; and

Prior Srvice Credit for new hires (up to three [3] years).



Job Security and Due Process Just cause/due process after a traditional two-year probationary period; and

A guarantee of no layoffs for the 2017-2018 school year. K12 INC. IS AN INVALUABLE SERVICE PROVIDER, BUT NOT A PARTY TO THE AGREEMENT

Contrary to the information provided in the media release, the tentative agreement is not between CTA/CVEU and K12 Inc. as publicized, but rather the agreement is between CVEU and the CAVA schools. CAVA schools are wholly independent legal entities that are supported by K12, which is a vendor/service provider. CTA/CVEU HAS MATERIALLY MISREPRESENTED A LEGAL SETTLEMENT INVOLVING K12 INC. According to CAVA, without any evidence to support its position, the media release claims a legal settlement between K12 Inc. and the State of California caused a serious decline in student enrollment throughout CAVA schools. Further, the media release seriously mischaracterizes that previous legal settlement by claiming that the State assessed a $168 million penalty against K12 Inc. However, this is simply not true. In fact, in that case, the court judgment reflects the parties entered a no-fault final judgment, stating, ". . . without adjudication of any fact or law and without admission of liability by K12 or the CAVA schools. The parties agreed that neither the Settlement Agreement nor judgment or any payment hereunder may be used as evidence of liability regarding CAVA or K12." In 2016, the organization K12 Inc. (not any of the CAVA schools) paid $8.5 million to the State of California to settle two complaints and those payments were not fines or penalties, but as the court specified in its final judgment, payments made largely to defray the cost to taxpayers for expenses related to the State's investigation. "STUDENTS FIRST" REMAINS CAVA'S CORE PURPOSE Each CAVA school and each of its service providers (including K12 Inc.) remain focused on placing the students they serve and their academic success first and foremost in everything they do. REQUEST THAT CTA/CVEU NO LONGER PROPOSES OR PROMOTES HARMFUL RESTRICTIONS ON (News - Alert) CHARTER SCHOOLS Now that CTA/CVEU represents hundreds of teachers in so many successful online charter schools in California, it is CAVA's sincere hope that CTA will not hereinafter sponsor legislation to eliminate or severely restrict funding for or the establishment of such important choices in public education. REQUEST THAT CTA/CVEU ACT IN GOOD FAITH CAVA hereby renews its commitment to work in good faith with CTA/CVEU, and requests that CTA/CVEU refrain from engaging in the types of harmful and reckless communication noted above. CAVA wishes to reiterate its continued desire to collaborate with CTA/CVEU on communications to the field to ensure that accurate and trustworthy information is conveyed to the CTA/CVEU members, parents and students of the CAVA schools. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180412006272/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Salesforce Co-Founder and CTO to Participate in Upcoming Investor Meeting

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced that Parker Harris, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, will participate in a Deutsche Bank Securities hosted investor meeting on Monday, Apr. 16, 2018 at 8:30 a.m. (PT) / 11:30 a.m. (ET) in San Francisco, CA. www.salesforce.com/investor.



About Salesforce

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information about Salesforce, visit: www.salesforce.com.

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/salesforce-co-founder-and-cto-to-participate-in-upcoming-investor-meeting-300629180.html SOURCE Salesforce

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][April 12, 2018] Edmonton's Oteenow Receives Funding for Indigenous Tech Job Creation

EDMONTON, April 12, 2018 /CNW/ - Oteenow Employment & Training Society (Oteenow) has been awarded $474,375 in federal funding from Western Diversification for its technology training and employment plans in Edmonton. The successful three-year project creates software testing skills and jobs for forty-five Indigenous youth and adults by offering a ten-month program that consists of eight months of classroom training and two months of internship with a company or government's IT department. Software testers run applications and programs to find bugs. The work can be done from anywhere where there is a reliable Internet connection. Much of that work has been going overseas until now. Meanwhile, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Council of Canada estimates that hiring requirements for ICT jobs in Canada will be 182,000 by 2019. The Oteenow Software Testing Program is a partnership between Oteenow and New Brunswick-based Professional Aboriginal Testing Organization Inc. (PLATOPLATO Testing provides outsourced testing solutions to clients throughout North America, with a focus on projects that would have previously been sent offshore. Established by industry veteran, and PQA Testing founder, Keith McIntosh, PLATO Testing addresses the technology talent shortage in Canada and brings meaningful training and employment to Aboriginal people.



PLATO Testing has trained 90 Indigenous software testers in British Columbia and New Brunswick. Sixty-five work for PLATO and the rest work for other companies. The partnership between PLATO and Oteenow is the first in Alberta. Roberta Bearhead, Executive Director of Oteenow Employment & Training, partnered with PLATO because she saw the need to focus on jobs and sectors of the future: "There is demand for tech jobs and we know there is Indigenous talent to fill those roles at all levels. Our first graduates are currently interning with Suncor, IBM, PLATO, and other companies. Doors are opening for them and Oteenow supports them through the entire process. We are very excited about this job creation program and the benefits it will bring to individuals, families, companies, and communities in Alberta."

Oteenow Employment &Training Society connects First Nations and Inuit people who live in Edmonton and area, and who are ready for meaningful careers, with a wide range of employment and training programs, services, and opportunities so that they can become self-reliant and lead productive lives. Established in 1992, Oteenow is the only employment service agency exclusively dedicated to finding First Nations and Inuit people living in Edmonton and area, careers that work. SOURCE Oteenow Employment & Training Society

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Green Spirit Industries Inc. (OTC Pink:GSRX) (Green Spirit or, the Company) announced today that it has entered into an operating agreement to form a new entity, Green Spirit Essentials LLC (GS Essentials), via a joint venture with Sunset Connect SF Inc. (Sunset Connect), a cultivation and branded extractions business headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. The operating agreement provides that Green Spirit will own 55% of GS Essentials, which will operate a cannabinoid extractions and processing business in California.



Sunset Connect is an established San Francisco-centric cannabis brand respected amongst industry peers and popular with regional retailers. Sunset Connect produces top-shelf indoor flowers and has created a portfolio of branded extractions including crumble, shatter, wax and rosin. Sunset Connect products are currently available in dispensaries, as well as through licensed delivery services.

GS Essentials plans to run a mix of volatile and non-volatile closed loop extractions as well as an ethanol distillation process to allow the company to manufacture a broad spectrum of products, including topical applications, cartridges, oils, wax, shatter, crumble and oral for sale in California. The state has experienced a predicted boom in sales since the legalization of recreational cannabis in California on January 1st. In an article dated February 28, 2018, Business Insider cited a report from BDS Analytics, which tracks the cannabis industry, estimating the California market to hit $3.7 billion by the end of 2018, increasing to over $5 billion in 2019. (Business Insider)

The public appetite in California for cannabis in forms other than flower continues to grow, said Les Ball, Chief Executive Officer of Green Spirit. We feel that offering consumers more varied ways to consume cannabis is a big part of the future of the industry. Our investment in GS Essentials puts our Company in a unique position to profit from multiple revenue streams, as GS Essentials develops and manufactures a varied menu of high-quality cannabinoid products to consumers eager for alternative delivery choices.

GS Essentials will be managed by Ali Jamalian, founder of Sunset Connect, and Sarah Rodriguez, co-founder of Spirulinex, and Mark Young. A former creative director who has championed such consumer brands as Chivas, Pantene, Colgate and Harrods, Jamalian brings a deep understanding of branding and marketing to the burgeoning cannabis industry and has developed the cannabis industry brands Spirulinex, Aqua Tetra Highdrate and Sunset Connect. Mark Young, GS Essentials Head Extractor, has received multiple industry awards for the quality of his extractions, including First Place for Best Wax and First Place for Connoisseurs Choice at 420 Hempcon 2016, and First and Second Place for Best Wax and First Place for Best Booth at Halloweed Hempcon 2016. Rodriguez, Green Spirit Essentials Chief Scientist, is a leading researcher with experience in strain development and metabolic engineering for terpene production, restructuring of carbon metabolic fluxes, cellular metabolic analysis, bio-separation, and fermentation engineering. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

About Green Spirit Industries Inc.

Green Spirit Industries Inc. (OTC Pink:GSRX), through its subsidiaries, is in the business of acquiring, developing and operating retail cannabis dispensaries, and is in the process of expanding its business to include the cultivation, extraction, manufacture and delivery of cannabis and cannabinoid products.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. Such statements include statements regarding our expectations, hopes, beliefs or intentions regarding the future, including but not limited to statements regarding our market, strategy, competition, development plans (including acquisitions and expansion), financing, revenues, operations, and compliance with applicable laws. Forward-looking statements involve certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from those discussed in any such statement. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking statements include the risks described in greater detail in the following paragraphs. All forward-looking statements in this document are made as of the date hereof, based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statement except where applicable law requires us to update these statements. Market data used throughout this prospectus is based on published third party reports or the good faith estimates of management, which estimates are based upon their review of internal surveys, independent industry publications and other publicly available information.

Contact:

Paul Gendreau

PGPR

paul@pgprmedia.com

678-807-7945Jackson County Executive statement regarding audit

I would like to thank State Auditor Nicole Galloway for agreeing to perform an audit of Jackson Countys financial policies and practices. It is our duty to hold ourselves, our policies and our practices up to the light, and if issues are discovered, it is our job to fix them. More importantly, taxpayers deserve to know that we are being responsible stewards of their dollars.





Additionally, I am grateful for the Legislatures support of my request to conduct an audit of the County. Our unanimous support is a testament to our shared commitment to operating a government thats effective, efficient and transparent. County staff and I look forward to supporting and participating in this process to help the auditors complete their scope of work.

KANSAS CITY, Mo.  Jackson County Executive Frank White, Jr. has issued the following statement in response to the Office of Missouri State Auditor Nicole Galloways acceptance to conduct a comprehensive audit of the Countys fiscal policies.Following the FY2018 budget process, the County Executive on January 3 recommended that the Jackson County Legislature request the Office of Missouri State Auditor Nicole Galloway conduct a thorough and independent audit of Jackson County. State law requires that such a request come from the County Legislature.On February 26, the Jackson County Legislature adopted Resolution #19745 requesting that the State Auditors Office conduct an audit of Jackson Countys financial records.###There Is No Photo





We've past the point where this argument matters . . . An alleged "revenge pr0n" photo is no longer the centerpiece of the public disgrace. A woman on record saying that the governor slapped her repeatedly and ALLEGEDLY wouldn't let her leave a basement until she performed oral sex on him is now the most important reason to distrust this public official.





The alleged incident occurred BEFORE he was elected Governor

There is no statue of limitations on public distrust and the inability to govern. The deets of the case coming to light have embroiled the Greitens Administration and rendered it untenable - Arguing imaginary time limits is trivial.





He deserves his day in court & due process





Absolutely , just not as Governor. If anything, Mr. Greitens needs to focus all of his efforts on the allegations confronting him. But he doesn't need to be Governor to do that. He is not entitled the privilege of serving in public office when his ability to govern has been completely decimated by this scandal of his own making.





The personal attack is politically motivated by Democratic Party consultants, George Soros, et. al.





So far there's no proof of this claim but the call to "rally around the leader" has fallen upon deaf ears among the Missouri GOP super-majority. Fact is, Guv Grietens is a newbie and unproven Missouri Republican with very little support outside of the people on his payroll and a record of bullying right-wing colleagues as well.





Prez Bill Clinton Did Much Worse And His Scandal Was Just As Disruptive





That's a very low standard and it basically has Republicans fighting for their right to be scumbags as well. On this point, rather than dive into the rabbit hole of American political history, we must simply make the practical argument that FORMER PREZ BILL CLINTON'S HOT MESS BLUE DRESS NASTINESS CAME TO LIGHT IN 1998 - 20-YEARS AGO!!! Times have changed and the forced-sex charges against The Guv are far more disturbing than Oval Office consensual cigar frolicking . . . Better than that, even the most die-hard libs now say that Prez Clinton should have resigned. Either way, the Clinton scandal is the distant past whilst the current Guv attempts to hold onto his "hero" credentials now that he's mostly famous for allegedly smacking, threatening and spanking some poor hairdresser who never wanted to come forward with her story in the first place.

In Fairness: 'Twas A Dream???

The reality here is that there is also documentation regarding the lady "dreaming" up the so-called "revenge pr0n" photo. While she seems pretty solid on the sordid sex beating she reportedly endured . . . Right-wingers held up the "dream" passage as their key to victory . . . Now, as physical abuse deets take the forefront - Supporters of the Guv are once again on the defensive and unable to do anything but attack the credibility of some broke-ass hairdresser who was allegedly smacked around. Good luck with that . . . Republicans higher up the food chain have already decided to forgo that bit of political suicide which threatens to alienate half of the voting public going into midterms.

New York Times: Sex Claims Against Missouri Governor Vividly Detailed in Report









New York Magazine: Woman Accuses Missouri Governor Greitens of Violent, Nonconsensual Sex Acts





























Given the horrific and vividly detailed allegations against Governor Greitens he must resign and dedicate himself to confronting non-consensual rough sex charges rather than continue to submerge all of Missouri into a cesspool of refreshing yet still sleazy tabloid gossip related to his admitted adultery which has destroyed his political career.A call for the Governor's resignation has now reached the tipping point among both Republicans and Democratic Party politicos, pundits and media denizens.Still, there are are few diehard supporters who continue their trolling and/or advocacy on behalf of this lost cause or just have a lot of spare time.And so, before the Guv takes his bow, we'd like tothe last remaining defense of his crumbling Administration amid cuckolding turmoil.Here's the run-down of arguments in defense of Guv Greitens along with our retort . . .And so . . .Now we wait to see if the Guv has some proof that the charges against him are "all lies" or if his defense is merely spin and another round of abuse against a woman who claims she was already victimized in this guy's basement not so long ago.Check the links:Developing . . .NEW YORK  Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum (KKJ) will host the fourth annual Greek Jewish Festival on Sunday, May 6 from 12-6 PM. The festival, a unique cross-cultural celebration, will take place in front of KKJs landmark historic synagogue on Broome Street between Allen Street and Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The Greek Jewish Festival celebrates and showcases the unique Romaniote and Sephardic heritage of Kehila Kedosha Janina. The festival will offer authentic kosher Greek foods and homemade Greek pastries; live Greek and Sephardic musical performances with four different bands; two different traditional dance performances; an outdoor marketplace full of vendors; arts and educational activities for kids; and much more. This is the only festival of its kind in the world.

More than 8,000 people attended the festival in 2017, and even more are expected this year. KKJ is proud to collaborate with more than thirty different community organizations that include local, national, and international partners. Long-standing local partners include the Tenement Museum; the Museum at Eldridge Street; the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy; and Saint Barbara Greek Orthodox Church, among others. National partners include the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America; the American Sephardi Federation; and Sephardic communities from Seattle, Portland, Indianapolis, Miami, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. KKJ is also excited to welcome the Greek and Israeli tourism offices, as well as leaders from the Jewish Community of Athens, Greece.

International performers include the Stavros Theodorou Orchestra, Avram Pengas and the Noga Group, Vasilis Kostas, Trio Sefardi, the Hellenic Dancers of New Jersey, and Layla Isis.

Theres no better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than celebrating the culture and beauty of Romaniote and Sephardic Jews, said Marvin Marcus, President of KKJ. As a Lower East Side native, I grew up experiencing different cultures among neighbors, and the Greek Jewish Festival is our way of sharing our traditions with the broader Lower East Side and New York community.

Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum will host the fourth annual Greek Jewish Festival

The Greek Jewish Festival, now in its fourth year, has become one of our most successful ventures to date, said Marcia Haddad Ikonomopoulos, Museum Director of KKJ. I have seen the Festival act as an in-gathering of our community. Greek Jews have come from all over the country to eat our traditional foods, dance to Greek music on the streets of the Lower East Side in front of the tenements where our families once resided, and to remember what makes us so special.

No matter your ethnic, cultural, or religious background, there is something for you at our Greek Jewish Festival, said Festival Director Andrew Marcus. Join us and learn more about a community you may not have known existed, while enjoying our delicious foods and energetic music and dancing.

The Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America is thrilled to continue to partner with KKJ, said Rabbi Nissim Elnecave, Executive Director of the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America. We are very proud of our heritage and this festival helps bring together our Sephardic and Romaniote communities in an incredible way. It is exciting to see the festival grow every year and we look forward to continuing the revitalization of our community.

We are proud to support our friends at Kehila Kedosha Janina and wish them great success at this wonderful gathering on the historic Lower East Side, said Toula Xiradakis, President of the Parish Council of Saint Barbara Greek Orthodox Church.

The Museum at Eldridge Street loves working with Kehila Kedosha Janina for this festival, said Hanna Griff-Sleven, Director of Cultural Programs at the Museum at Eldridge Street. The food, the music, the hood  its always a beautiful day down here!

International event that brings together the Greek Jewish community

First launched in May, 2015, the Greek Jewish Festival has quickly grown into an international event that brings together the Greek Jewish community as well as the broader Greek and Jewish communities. It is the newest and largest effort of KKJ to share the culture and traditions of this community in a major public way. The festival cuts across religious, cultural, age, and geographic lines. Situated within the historic immigrant neighborhood of the Lower East Side, the Greek Jewish Festival celebrates centuries of cultural exchange that occurred in Greece and the Balkans.

More information on the Greek Jewish Festival is available online at: www.GreekJewishFestival.com, on Facebook, and YouTube.

Kehila Kedosha Janina (the Holy Community of Janina) is the only Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. Romaniote Jews are a unique community of Greek-speaking Jews whose history in Greece dates back over 2,300 years to the time of Alexander the Great. The Romaniotes are historically distinct from the Sephardic Jews, who settled in Greece after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

The congregation was first organized in New York in 1906 by Greek-speaking Romaniote Jews from the city of Ioannina [sometimes spelled Janina] in Northwestern Greece. In the early twentieth century there were hundreds of other synagogues on the Lower East Side that served Ashkenazi Yiddish-speaking Jews or Sephardic Spanish-speaking Jews. Needing a place of their own where they could preserve their unique traditions, customs, liturgy, and language, property was purchased at 280 Broome Street and the congregation opened its doors to worship at its current location in 1927.

The synagogue is a designated New York City landmark and continues to hold services every Shabbat as well as all Jewish holidays. In 1997, a Museum was created within the synagogue to tell the story of the Greek Jewish community to a world that knew so little about them. The museum is open to the public every Sunday and serves as a repository for Romaniote and Sephardic history, both in Greece and on the Lower East Side. The museum hosts numerous educational programs including lectures, book signings, movie screenings, and concerts.

Today, KKJ is proud to be one of only a handful of active synagogues that remain on the Lower East Side.

For more information, visit www.kkjsm.org.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Source: thenationalherald.comWith an average age of just 25 this years social entrepreneurs who made Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list are proving that when it comes to social responsibility, the young are leading the way, Forbes magazine notes.

Among them, stands Greek-Australian Natalie Kyriacou, 29, the multi award-winning founder and CEO of My Green World, an organisation dedicated to educating and encouraging positive youth participation to assist charitable initiatives in wildlife and environmental conservation.

She is also the creator of the mobile game app, World of the Wild, which enables young people to take part in virtual wildlife conservation scenarios. In addition to being the Australian Director for the Sri Lanka based animal welfare NGO, the Dogstar Foundation, Kyriacou is also responsible for the global ban on elephant rides by Australias travel wholesaler, Tempo Holidays.

Read full story here.

Photo by mygreenworld.orgSaudi Arabia's air defences on Wednesday intercepted a ballistic missile fired from rebel-held Yemen at Riyadh, a military spokesman said, adding two others were shot down in southern Saudi Arabia.



The announcement came after explosions and blasts were heard over the capital, which has previously been targeted by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.



"An Iranian ballistic missile launched from Sadaa towards Riyadh was successfully intercepted by Saudi Air Defence at 7.40am today," Colonel Turki Al Malki, spokesman for the military coalition fighting the Houthis, said.



All air traffic was suspended in accordance with the international laws of aviation, which later resumed after neutralizing the threat, he stated.



Upon examining the debris of the object by Coalition specialists, it was found to be a hostile Houthi combat drone, with Iranian characteristics and specifications, which was attempting to attack the airport- an area protected under international law.



Col. Al-Maliki said Saudi forces also intercepted two missiles in the southern Jizan and Najran provinces close to the border with Yemen.



"At 5:30 pm today, the Coalition air defence spotted 3 missiles that were launched by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia from within the Yemeni territory of Sa'ada and the Northern part of the territory of Amran towards Saudi Arabia. One of these rockets was headed to capital Riyadh, while the other two were directed at the cities of Najran and Jizan, targeting civilian and populated areas. All of these missiles were intercepted by the Saudi Royal Air Defense forces," he added.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Imagin Medical (CSE:IME) (OTC PINK:IMEXF) (Frankfurt:DPD2) (STUT:DPD2) (the Company) announced today that, further to its press release of April 3, 2018, the Company is closing 11,722,783 units (the Units) priced at $0.22 per Unit for gross proceeds of $2,579,012 of its non-brokered Private Placement. The offering will remain open, and the Company expects to close additional amounts shortly.



Each Unit of this Private Placement will consist of one common share of the Company and one common share purchase warrant (Warrant), each Warrant entitling the holder to acquire one additional common share of the Company at a price of $0.38 for 24 months from the date of issue.

Finders fees, in the form of warrants and cash, will be paid upon final closing. Proceeds from the offering will be used for advancing the development of the i/Blue Imaging System, the government regulatory approval process, including clinical trials and general working capital purposes.

This Private Placement solidifies Imagins financial position and enables us to focus on driving the Companys milestones. Achieving our goals will continue to increase the Companys valuation, said Jim Hutchens, Imagin President and CEO.



About Imagin Medical

Imagin Medical is developing imaging solutions for minimally invasive surgical procedures where endoscopes are used. The Company believes it will radically improve the way physicians detect cancer and view the surgical field. Imagins initial target market is bladder cancer, a major cancer worldwide, the sixth most prevalent in the U.S., and the most costly cancer to treat due to a greater than 50% recurrence rate. The ultrasensitive imaging technology is based upon improved optical designs and advanced light sensors. Learn more at www.imaginmedical.com



Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements. These statements reflect managements 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 Companys control. 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. Specifically, there is no assurance the Companys imaging system will work in the manner expected, except as required under applicable securities legislation; the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information. The CSE has neither approved nor disapproved the information contained herein and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

U.S. HQ:

69 Longwood Avenue

Hyannis Port, MA 02647

USA

617-571-6006

CA HQ:

890 West Pender Street, Suite 600

Vancouver, British Columbia

Canada V6C 1J9

778-998-5000; 604-687-1327 (fax)Renowned hotel brand and management company Dream Hotel Group has appointed Abid Butt as chief executive officer for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.



In this role, Butt is responsible for the continued growth and global expansion efforts of Dream Hotel Group and its portfolio of lifestyle brands  Dream Hotels, Time Hotels, The Chatwal and Unscripted Hotels  in established and emerging urban and resort destinations across the region.



With more than 30 years of global experience in the hospitality industry, Butts strategic acumen and drive to innovate has been instrumental in the launch of several hospitality brands; Four Points, Angsana, Dhawa and Cassia. An engaged professional dedicated to making a difference, he has been an ambassador for the industry, having frequently spoken at global conferences and served as an advisor for several industry organisations. Prior to joining Dream Hotel Group, Butt served as chief executive officer of Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts making a return to the group after initially serving as the first vice president of operations in 2012.



Abid Butt joins us at a very opportune moment in our journey as we continue to focus on our international expansion efforts, said Dream Hotel Group CEO Jay Stein. Abid is known as a compassionate and results-driven professional who believes anything is achievable, and we are confident he will lead us through our next phase of international development and growth.



Dream Hotel Group has earned a stellar reputation within the hospitality industry around the world, added Butt. The Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa regions are hugely diverse with tremendous opportunity, and it is an honour to join this dynamic team and help build a global expansion strategy that will support the future growth of its lifestyle brands in these markets.



Dream Hotel Group recently signed its first hotel in the Philippines with SkyCity Leisure Resorts to develop Dream Carabao Island, set to open in March 2020. The news followed that of the signing of Dream New Delhi with Viiking Ventures chairman, Sachiin J. Joshi, on track to open in the Central Business District in 2019. The group also signed two hotels in the Maldives with local entrepreneur Mohamed Manik and Alpha Kinam Holdings. The Chatwal Maaga Maldives and Dream Gasveli Maldives are scheduled to open in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Dream Hotel Group also signed its first hotel in the Middle East with Qatar-based Al Alfia Holding to develop a Dream Hotel in Doha, the state capital, in 2020.



Dream Hotel Group plans to sign another 30 hotels and resorts worldwide across all its brands  Dream Hotels, Time Hotels, The Chatwal and Unscripted Hotels  over the next four years, continuing to solidify its burgeoning global portfolio. - TradeArabia News Service

Kuwait Airways has suspended flights to and from Beirut, Lebanon, citing security concerns, a report said.



The carrier announced on Twitter that the move is based on "serious security warnings received from the Cypriot authorities of the danger of flying in the Lebanon airspace".



It is unclear how long the suspension will last, with the company stating that all flights will be terminated until further notice." - TradeArabia News Service



This painting was done by Madison Brinkley of Rosman High School. It will be part of the student artwork on display at the Arts Council.

The Transylvania Community Arts Council will host the annual Transylvania County Public Schools Student Art Show from April 16  May 4. Enjoy artwork by students in Kindergarten through 12th grade. The Transylvania County Public Schools Student Art Show highlights creative projects undertaken in art classrooms across the county during the 2017 - 2018 school year.

The public is invited to join students, art teachers and parents for an evening reception at the TC Arts Council on Thursday, April 19, from 4:30 p.m.  6 p.m. Join TC Arts Council in recognizing the accomplishments of our local student-artists and their teachers with an evening of art and refreshments. Schools represented in the exhibit include: Rosman Elementary, Brevard Elementary, Pisgah Forest Elementary, TC Henderson Elementary, Rosman Middle, Brevard Middle, Rosman High and Brevard High.

Art teachers participating and helping to organize this event include: Sean Parrish, Amy Schoenacher, Nancy Frady, Elizabeth Ballard, Vernon Bryson, John Brinkley and Emily Atkinson.

TC Arts will host a second reception on April 27, from 5 p.m.  8 p.m. as part of Brevard's Fourth Friday Gallery Walk with the Davidson River Taiko Drummers performing in the yard at TC Arts at 5:15 p.m. followed by the Rosman Highlighters Chorus performing on the stage at TC Arts at 6 p.m.

The Transylvania Community Arts Council is located at 349 South Caldwell Street in Brevard. The TC Arts Gallery is open Monday  Friday from 9:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. For more information call (828) 884-2787. To learn more about the TC Arts Council go to http://www.tcarts.org. To learn more about the arts in our community go to http://www.artsofbrevard.org.Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College

President David Bridges will recognize 827 students who qualified for academic honors during Honors Day ceremonies on April 4 at 3 p.m. in Gressette Gym at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) in Tifton, Ga.

Faith E. Farmer of Penrose will be recognized for achieving honor status.

Honor status is bestowed on those students who have completed 15 or more academic semester hours at ABAC with an overall grade point average of 3.2 to 3.74.STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

Transylvania CO. FILE # 17 CVS 579

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION IN

THE COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

NOTICE OF EXECUTION SALE OF REAL PROPERTY

First South Bank, PLANTIFF

VS.

James B. Anthony, DEFENDANT

UNDER AND BY THE VIRTUE OF AN EXECUTION ISSUED TO THE UNDERSIGNED SHERIFF OF Transylvania County ON THIS THE 26TH DAY OF MARCH, 2018, FROM THE CLERK OF SUPERIOR COURT OF Transylvania County. IN THE ABOVE ENTITLED ACTION I HAVE SEIZED AND TAKEN INTO MY CONTROL AND WILL ON THE 2ND DAY OF MAY, 2018, AT 10 A.M. OFFER FOR SALE AT A PUBLIC AUCTION TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER FOR CASH ALL THE RIGHT, TITLE AND INTEREST THAT THE DEFENDANT(S) HAS OR AT ANY TIME FROM AND AFTER THE LEVY, HAD IN THE FOLLOWING DESCRIBED REAL PROPERTY.

LEGAL ADDRESS, TR 14 Indian Camp Mountain Road Rosman NC 28772

COUNTY TAX PIN: 8560-67-4674-000

PHYSICAL ADDRESS IS: TR 14 Indian Camp Mountain Rd Rosman NC 28772, Off State Road 178 South. Deed Book 435 Page 122

THIS PROPERTY WILL BE SOLD TO SATISFY THE INDEBTEDNESS SET FORTH IN THE ABOVE ENTITLED EXECUTION AND IS SUBJECT TO ALL TAXES, LEINS, MORTGAGES AND ENCUMBRANCES.

THIS THE 2ND DAY OF APRIL, 2018

BY: SGT. C.L. CLARK

DEPUTY SHERIFF

Transylvania COUNTY

T/4/5/2TC-68270

___________________________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

File No: 18-E-124

EXECUTORS  ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Executor of the Estate of William St. Clair Austin of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of William St. Clair Austin to present them to the undersigned on or before July 12, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter. All persons indebted to said estate, please make immediate payment.

This the 12th day of April, 2018.

Joan A. Keirstead, Exec.

41 Meadow Lark Dr.

Pisgah Forest, NC 28768

Attorney:

The Neumann Law Firm, PLLC

David C. Neumann, Atty.

9 Park Place West, Ste. 102

Brevard, NC 28712

828-884-6575

#13630

T/4/12/4TC-68341

___________________________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

FILE NO. 18-E-99

EXECUTORS - ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Executor of the Estate of Carl Morris Jackson of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of Carl Morris Jackson to present them to the undersigned on or before June 29, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter.

All persons indebted to said estate please make immediate payment.

Dated: March 29, 2018.

Attorney:

Brian P. Philips

Daniel Page Jackson

48 Round Page Jackson

Greenville, SC 29607

T/3//29/4TP-68185

___________________________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

File No: 18-E-102

EXECUTORS  ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Executor of the Estate of Marie T. Johnson of Tran-sylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of Marie T. Johnson to present them to the undersigned on or before June 29, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter. All persons indebted to said estate, please make immediate payment.

This the 29th day of March, 2018.

Mary M. Burkhardt, Exec.

125 Southview Drive

Brevard, NC 28712

Attorney:

The Neumann Law Firm, PLLC

David C. Neumann, Atty.

9 Park Place West, Ste. 102

Brevard, NC 28712

828-884-6575

#13630

T/3/29/4TC-68171

___________________________________________________________

NOTICE OF PRIMARY ELECTION

Transylvania COUNTY, North CAROLINA

Notice is hereby given pursuant to GS 163-33(8) that t a primary election will be held on Tuesday, May 8, 2018 in Transyl-vania County, North Carolina to vote on the candidates for the offices of: US House of Represent-atives 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 Transyl-vania 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.transylvania elections.org.

David P. Morrow, Chairman

Transylvania County Board of Elections

T/3/22/4TC-68141

___________________________________________________________

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,2 018.

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

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 Transyl-vania 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

___________________________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

FILE NO. 18-E-104

EXECUTORS  ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Administrator CTA of the Estate of Roger Lee Queen of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of Roger Lee Queen to present them to the undersigned on or before June 29, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter.

All persons indebted to said estate please make immediate payment.

Dated: March 29, 2018.

Christie DeMoss

430 Old Toxaway Rd

Brevard, NC 28712

T/3/29/4TP-68182

___________________________________________________________

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

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

COUNTY OF Transylvania

FILE NO. 18E125

EXECUTORS - ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Co-Executors of the Estate of Gaylord Oscar Shepherd of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of Gaylord Oscar Shepherd to present them to the undersigned on or before July 12, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter.

All persons indebted to said estate please make immediate payment. Dated: April 12, 2018.

Ann Shepherd Hertzberg

279 Virginia Brock Road

Lake Toxaway, NC 28747

Scott Brewster Shepherd

1680 Sacketts Drive

Lawrenceville, GA 30043

T4/12/4TP-68383

___________________________________________________________

STATE OF North Carolina

Transylvania County SUPERIOR COURT

File No. 17-E-386

NOTICE TO CREDITORS

I have qualified as Executor of the Estate of Charles R. Petit, Deceased, of Transylvania County, North Carolina. All persons, firms, and corporations having claims against the Estate must present them to me on or before July 12, 2018 or this Notice will be pleaded in bar of recovery. Those indebted to the Estate should make immediate payment to the Executor.

Dated: April 12, 2018

Roger Petit, Executor

80 Old Rosman Highway

Brevard, NC 28712

Donald E. Jordan

4 West Main Street, Suite 5

Brevard, NC 28712

(828) 862-8735

Attorney for the Executor

T/4/12/4TC-68384

___________________________________________________________Goller has an extensive background in social justice for underserved populations, particularly in the field of health care access. He is currently a Bernstein Fellow, a program of the Foundation for Health Leadership and Innovation.

The Smartly United Early Childhood Collective (SmartlyUnited) hired Lance Goller as its Collective Impact implementer. In this position, Goller will encourage conversations and collaboration across the county to facilitate children and their families in preparations for success in kindergarten. His work will draw on community members' experiences and situations to gain insights into current assets and needs.

"I'm very excited to build on the work that Smartly United has started and begin to coordinate the implementation of projects that improve the lives of young children in Transylvania County," Goller said.

Smartly United's goals include dissecting and mapping the complicated relationships between health, education and financial stability. Smartly United will then use the Collective Impact model to add energy to cross-sector collaboration for transformational change.

The Smartly United partnership is co-led by Smart Start of Transylvania County and United Way of Transylvania County. Smartly United provides a strong structure to implement countywide Early Childhood Initiative plans for success in kindergarten. A grant by The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina investing in early childhood in Transylvania County has allowed Smartly United to implement a Collective Impact model.

Transylvania County's Early Childhood Initiative, comprised of community wide organizations, government, schools and concerned citizens, has identified increasing affordable, high quality pre-school options as a top priority. Smartly United's mission in that process is to provide a community outreach, grant seeking, project management and business development role for any large project emerging from the Early Childhood Initiative.

Goller comes to this position with an extensive background in social justice for underserved populations, especially in the field of health care access.

He is currently serving as a Bernstein Fellow, a program of the Foundation for Health Leadership and Innovation, and is interested in the intersection of social determinants of health, societal outcomes and their relationship to spatial and geographic areas.

In his last role at Blue Ridge Health, Goller developed a process to screen all patients for social determinants of health, such as food and housing insecurity, transportation issues and lack of health insurance, and trained numerous staff on intervention methods to help patients address these needs.

Goller has worked in several nonprofit settings, including directing health insurance access projects in New York City and California, managing a residential facility for children receiving treatment at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., implementing and evaluating a tobacco control program in California which focused on smoke-free multi-unit housing, and developing training for a nationally recognized teen pregnancy prevention program in Durham.

Goller holds a bachelor's degree in culture and communication from the City University of New York, and a master's in public administration from Baruch College in New York with a focus on nonprofit administration. He speaks Spanish fluently and is conversational in ASL.

His spouse, Dr. Amy Marietta, is a family physician working in community and prenatal health in Hendersonville and Columbus.

About Collective Impact

The Collective Impact model for significant, positive, lasting social change offers structure to collaborative efforts across private and public agencies, governments, businesses and nonprofits. Collective Impact structures include a core, organization with a staff dedicated to assisting participating entities with working in concert to achieve their common agenda. Collective Impact groups communicate effectively and openly to coordinate, plan and conduct activities.

They collect and evaluate data to assess progress toward the stated objective(s).

About Smart Start

Of Transylvania County

Smart Start of Transyl-vania County is part of the North Carolina Partnership for Children (NCPC), a nationally recognized and award-winning early childhood initiative designed to ensure that young children enter school healthy and ready to succeed.

To volunteer or financially support Smart Start of Transylvania County, call (828) 877-3025 or email Deb Tibbetts at [email protected]

About UWTC

Left to right are Deb Tibbetts, executive director of Smart Start of Transylvania County; Lance Goller, Collective Impact implementer, Smartly United Early Childhood Collective; and Steve Pulliam, CEO, United Way of Transylvania County. The three edit a Smartly United project document during a recent project meeting.

United Way of Transyl-vania County (UWTC) empowers people to improve their lives. Goals are for all residents to achieve their full academic potential, maintain a financially stable household and live a healthy lifestyle.

UWTC has a particular focus on early childhood education and has established the Early Childhood Education Mobile Unit Fund to drive programs to families with young children in remote and underserved areas of the county.

UWTC funds programs preventing homelessness, abuse and neglect, and programs providing housing, adult day care, after-school and summer youth education, health services, financial education and counseling, conflict resolution training, and parenting education and support.

To volunteer or financially support the United Way of Transylvania County, call (828) 883-8822, visit the office at 101 W. Jordan Street, #4 below PNC Bank in downtown Brevard, send mail to P.O. Box 53, Brevard, NC, 28712, or visit http://www.unitedwaytransylvania.org.Rotary Club Of Pisgah Forest

For its April 18 meeting, the Rotary Club of Pisgah Forests guest speaker will be Page Lemel, Transylvania County Commissioner since 2012 and president of Keystone Camp. Lemel will describe the State of the Young Child in Transylvania County based the 2015 report and will update the club on progress made in addressing issues.

For the month of April, the clubs speaker chair is John Brown, and the Rotary International theme for the month is Maternal and Child Health.

The public is always welcome to attend the breakfast meetings, listen to the guest speakers and share a friendly and delicious buffet breakfast at the Pisgah Fish Camp every Wednesday at 8 a.m.

For information on Rotary service, contact Don Mozley at [email protected] or (828) 877-5820 or visit http://www.pisgahforestrotary.org.

Stitches Of Love Group

The Stitches of Love group has created and donated more than 22,000 handmade articles to local charities in the past 11 years.

The next meeting will be Monday, May 14, at New Hope Presbyterian Church, located at 3070 Sweeten Creek Road in Asheville from 7-9 p.m. All skill levels are welcome.

If you are interested in attending, contact Janet Stewart at (828) 575-9195.The county is planning to make repairs to the courthouse bell tower, with the fate of the spruce tree unclear.

No decision has been made yet on the fate of the large Norwegian spruce tree that sits in front of the courthouse in downtown Brevard, according to County Manager Jaime Laughter.

"We are working on a project to secure the courthouse bell tower," Laughter said Tuesday. "As part of that work, we must evaluate access to safely conduct the work and, while doing so, are also evaluating the landscaping.

"We know some landscaping will need to come out in order to access with scaffolding and equipment necessary to do the work. We have contractors, including landscaping and arborist professionals, who are working on this project to determine how best to address both achieving the work and the long-term health of the existing and future landscaping options."

There is a "possibility" the tree will be impacted, however, Laughter noted.

"We will have to see the result of those evaluations before a decision can be made," she said.

Laughter was reached for comment about the tree after concerns were raised about it during Tuesday's regular Board of Commissioners' meeting.

During the meeting's public comment period, John Wayne Hardison, owner of High Country Tree Services, spoke.

He said a county employee, whom he didn't name, had told him the tree could be coming down. Rumors about the tree coming down have started to swirl in the community, also.

Hardison said he also spoke to Laughter prior to the meeting about the tree.

He doesn't believe there are "valid" reasons to tear it down.

As far as the tree's health, Hardison said it is "one of the healthiest trees in the county."

A concern for an "untrained person," he said, may be the dead wood in the tree's interior but that is only because they are "shaded out" from the sun.

Hardison said the tree "says," "it's a waste of my energy to have foliage in the inside of this tree, where it's not getting any sunlight."

Spruces are susceptible to "needlecast"  a pathogen, Hardison said, but the tree has "very little" on it.

As far as setting up scaffolding for construction, he said standard scaffolding sites are 5 feet wide. No part of the tree's foliage is within 7-and-a-half feet of the building, Hardison said.

"Maybe it makes someone's job a little easier to take the tree out to do the construction," he said.

Hardison offered to "volunteer" his company's services to help save the tree.

For several years, High Country Tree Services has volunteered its time to put up the decorations prior to the Christmas holiday season in downtown. On Tuesday, Hardison said his business was willing to do the same for the county for the spruce tree.The Rosman Board of Alderman Tuesday night unanimously voted to kill an agenda item regarding a request from a town citizen to ban the wearing of baggy pants. Rosman Mayor Brian Shelton said a town resident made the ordinance request.

Alderman Mark Miller did some research and found that only one county, which he didnt name, in the state of North Carolina had attempted to enforce a dress code.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of North Carolina has stated that how you dress is an expressive activity and it is a liberty interest in being able to dress as you choose, Miller said. An ordinance of this sort can start getting into your civil rights and your way of expression. The proposed ordinance is vague and it could lead to selective and disproportionate enforcement. In regards to the town, it is not wise for us.

Alderman Jared Crowe asked how they would even enforce it.

Miller said that the ACLU suggests that businesses would need to enforce dress codes.

Jarretts, the restaurants  think private businesses, Miller said. Us, as a government, cannot enforce this.

Crowe said he didnt support any action in any regard.

The towns attorney, Don Barton, said there was no one to enforce it, and he asked what would be the metrics?

Is it 2 inches above the crack line? he asked. Is it 2 inches below the crack line? Were not going to go out with a measuring tape here. Its not going to happen. We dont have the means or wherewithal to go out and measure somebodys butt crack.

Crowe made a motion to remove the item from the agenda based on Bartons advice, and the board unanimously agreed.

We might lose half our plumbers, added Barton.Carson City, NV & Hong Kong, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 12 ReTech Corporation (OTC: RETC), announced today that it will be participating at the April 20  22, 2018 Scottsdale Capital Conference being held at the Westin Kierland in Scottsdale, AZ.



Company representatives will be meeting with investors in a series of one on one meetings at this event. Capital Event Conferences have previously hosted 47 similar events in 12 North American cities, where over $500M has been raised for participants so far.

Angelo Ponzetta, CEO, commented, We are pleased to participate at the Scottsdale Capital Conference where we will have one on one meetings with at least sixteen accredited professional investors that we believe will be very receptive to the potential represented by our technology and business plans.

The North American merchant is looking for help in competing against their toughest challengers which are Amazon and Walmart. 12 ReTech provides physical store solutions which will attract more customers through their doors, win a larger percentage of sales and build retail brand loyalty with their customer base. We also improve their e-commerce channels by helping them to acquire more customers at cost effective rates, reversing shopping cart abandonment and also getting shoppers willingly to spend more time on a merchants e-commerce site.

In addition, our microbrand rollup strategy will provide the operating profits to drive shareholder value and an effective benchmark to show the world's retailers how to improve their own operations.

About 12 ReTech Corporation:

At our core, we are a software company whose technology allows retailers to combat the dual threats of Walmart and Amazon  both online and in physical stores. Our microbrand rollup acquisition strategy allows us to demonstrate the effectiveness of our software, devise and test new products, while providing shareholder value through immediate revenue and earnings growth. The Company operates through our subsidiaries on three continents: 12 Hong Kong, Ltd., 12 Japan, Ltd., 12 Europe A.G., 12 Retail Corporation (and subsidiaries in North America) and E-Motion Apparel, Inc. For more information please visit our website at www.12ReTech.com.

12 Retech Corporation is publicly listed on the OTC Markets under the symbol RETC.

About Capital Event Conferences:

Our shows get your company results by connecting you with active investors from all over North America.

Capital Event Conferences get you and your company in front of active brokers, portfolio managers, institutional investors and high net worth individuals, so they can listen to your story and INVEST.

We produce 7 conferences per year across North America and the Bahamas. Attendees include leading public and private issuers and a range of investors consisting of large book brokers, fund managers, and high net worth investors. Capital Events unique format allows principals to establish new and lasting relationships that lead to financings, open market support, and increased awareness with key contacts in the investment community.

Please visit our website at www.capitalevent.ca for more information.

Safe Harbor: This document contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are intended to be covered by the safe harbors created thereby. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainty, including without limitation, the ability of the Company to successfully implement its turnaround strategy, changes in costs of raw materials, labor, and employee benefits, as well as general market conditions, competition and pricing. Although the Company believes that the assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements contained herein are reasonable, any of the assumptions could be inaccurate, and therefore, there can be no assurance that the forward-looking statements included in this letter will prove to be accurate. In light of the significant uncertainties inherent in the forward-looking statements included herein, the inclusion of such information should not be regarded as representation by the Company or any other person that the objectives and plans of the Company will be achieved. In assessing forward-looking statements included herein, readers are urged to carefully read those statements. When used in the Annual Report on Form 10-K, the words "estimate," "anticipate," "expect," "believe," and similar expressions are intended to be forward-looking statements.This forecast report lists the top competitors and provides the through industry analysis of the key elements influencing the market



(TRAVPR.COM) 90 STATE STREET - April 11th, 2018 - Albany, New York, April 11, 2018: In order to provide valuable insights on the recent happenings in the UKs beach holidays industry, Market Research Hub (MRH) has added a newly published report to its repository. The report, titled Beach Holidays-UK-February 2018 offers the UK beach travel industrys recent updates so as to help the participants and investors in the UKs holiday market strategize their businesses in near future.

Click here for Free Sample Report@ https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1666947

The global tourism industry has been flourishing over the past few decades and vacation or holiday travel is one of the key sectors in this industry. Travelers seem to choose beach holidays more often, which makes the beach holidays segment more popular than most of the others in vacation travel domain. More than any other reasons, holidaying currently seems to be one of the top reasons to travel, besides business tours. Leading holidaymakers in the United Kingdom have been offering several vacation plans for those who wish to travel abroad but evident rise in the number of staycations within the UK since the past few years is expected to provide a decent boost to the growth of holidays market in UK.

According to the report, a majority of UK consumers choose to travel with their friends and family just to relax, experiencing the sun and beach. This tendency will play a key role in strengthening the potential of UKs beach holiday industry. Italy, Spain, and France have been topping the list of consumers choices over the years. However, holidaymakers are now deliberately promoting local, nearby beaches, which could present a range of more convenient and affordable choices to those who are planning a beach holiday in coming years.

Browse Full Report with TOC@ https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/beach-holidays-uk-february-2018-report.html

Holidaymakers are strategizing based on the preference of consumers among only tourism, entire holiday package, or only a select of services. Online holiday booking has become immensely popular and will reportedly open up multiple lucrative opportunities of revenue generation in near future. However, as per the data provided by the European Commission, recommendations coming from personal contacts still seem to hold a strong influence on people, when it comes to choosing a beach holiday destination. Online comments and reviews are also identified to be important factors here.

Some of the British beaches have been recently honored with the coveted European Blue Flag status, which categorize them among the safest and cleanest beaches across the world. This factor is projected to hold a major impact on promoting beach holidays in UK, in the next few years. Moreover, leading companies are most likely to prefer providing longer beach breaks in summer over shorter breaks in the city, which will further create an opportunity to diversify the product offerings and extending the portfolio with more options to choose from. Customized beach holidays are also rapidly trending in the UKs beach holidays market.

Enquire about this Report@ https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=enquiry&repid=1666947

About Market Research Hub

Market Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports of different sector like travel services industry reports and analysis. MRHs expansive collection of industry 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 Us

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Read Industry News at - https://www.industrynewsanalysis.com/

###Meet the TI Infotech team during ATM, Dubai from 22nd to 25th April 2018



(TRAVPR.COM) DUBAI - April 11th, 2018 - TI Infotech, a Premier Travel Technology Company in the industry of travel technology solution providers is geared up; to participate in the 25th Arabian Travel Market which is going to be held from 22nd to 25th, April 2018 at Dubai World Trade Centre.

Arabian Travel Market, Dubai - The world being becoming more economically stronger as the days pass has in the due course fueled up the tourism industry. Tourism industry is the industry which is at its peak this time and so has eventfully provided travel companies with a golden opportunity to earn more than usual and serve people benevolently and presenting them the finest places on earth more graciously. The brand ATM Dubai has a firm place in the calendar of everyone who loves travel professionally & personally.

TI Infotech team is looking forward to welcoming you for the unique opportunity to network & discuss your technology requirements at Stand TT-1710 inSheikh Saeed Hall 1 from 22nd to 25th April 2018 at ATM, Dubai, said Ms. Meenu Sachdeva, Co-Founder & Managing Director of TI Infotech.



TI Infotech is a CMMi Level 3 appraised company & follows A Total Solution Approach in providing Travel Technology Solutions. The company has won Best Travel Technology Provider awards in 2017, 2016 & 2015 (three Consecutive years). The company is promoted by a dynamic team of techno-functional consultants with extensive experience in providing technology solutions to the Travel and Tourism Industry.

The two signature products of TI Infotech are:

Travel Cloud Suite: Its a real-time web based booking engine with transaction capability, real time inventory with instant pricing, booking status & confirmation online.

Travel Assist: Which is a Comprehensive Tour Management Software that enables an organization to efficiently manage the complete tour cycle.

Book your Appointment here: http://www.tiinfotech.com/book-an-appointment-ATM.aspx

###The induction of Djibouti as World Capital of Culture and Tourism will take place on April 18, 2018, on the occasion of the official handover ceremony to be held at Presidential Palace in Djibouti. H.E. Professor Dr. Anton Caragea, President of European Council on Tourism and Trade has publicly signed the official decision naming DJIBOUTI as WORLD CAPITAL OF CULTURE AND TOURISM on April 10, 2018, in the presence of the diplomatic corps accredited to the global tourism institutions: European Council on Tourism and Trade and European Tourism Academy.



(TRAVPR.COM) BELGIUM - April 12th, 2018 - The Spring 2018 Meeting of European Council on Tourism and Trade (ECTT) has taken place offering new opportunities for global cooperation and tourism development.

Among the decisions taken during Spring Council Meeting was the inscription of Djibouti on the list of WORLD CAPITALS OF CULTURE AND TOURISM.

Professor Dr. Anton Caragea, President of European Council on Tourism and Trade has stated: among the recently inscribed candidates for the world top cultural award Djibouti is standing out as a luminary example.

The country encompasses ten world heritage sites on tentative list ranging from natural treasures and natural protected areas such as: Lake Assal and Lake Abbe, National Park Foret du day to the tumulus of Awellos, cave paintings of Abourma.

The capital city: Djibouti is home to a treasure trove of architectural marvels from the historical Haji Hamoudi Mosque, European Quarter (Malik Square) and African Quarter, Djibouti Cathedral and Ethiopian Church Saint Gabriel of the Sun and the cultural blending space of Les Caisses etc.

Taking under consideration the large array of traditions blending in the country from Issa and Afar cultural heritage to the Yemeni, and French inspirations, the incredibly rich and fascinating natural landscape offered for tourists to discover and evaluating the government decisions inscribed in DJIBOUTI VISION 2035 to make tourism a pillar of development we have taken the decision to validate DJIBOUTI candidature for WORLD CAPITAL OF CULTURE AND TOURISM designation.

In the presence of the diplomatic corps and registered members of the Executive Board of the European Council on Tourism and Trade Professor Dr. Anton Caragea proceeded to the public signing of the decree to that effect.

European Tourism Academy Director, Academician Mircea Constantinescu presented for the diplomatic corps present for the occasion the LETTER FOR WORLD LEADERS OF TOURISM AND DEVELOPMENT that will be addressed to H.E. President Ismail Omar Guelleh marking his selection as the new Academician member of EUROPEAN TOURISM ACADEMY.

President Ismail Omar Guelleh has succeeded in carving out on Djibouti a space for international peace and security and in making Djibouti a key to African continent peace and security. Today Djibouti is ensuring security along the Red Sea, is opening African continent to trade and riches and commercial exchanges and has succeeded in making Djibouti in a pole of economic growth.

Djibouti has supported the building of Addis Ababa Djibouti railroad, has constructed Africa`s bigger deepwater seaport, has garnered top-notch investments and rise up on being number five economy in the world in term of annual growth.

These are the achievements of an adroit, powerful and visionary leader that is creating growth where it was only poverty and opportunities where there was only despair and a miracle where it was only desert, outlined the merits of the new academician Professor Mircea Constantinescu.

Dr. Emil Constantinescu, President of Romania (1996-2000) mentioned that recognizing Djibouti as a world center of culture and tourism and electing President Ismail Omar Guelleh to the highest academic rank are perfect connection supporting Europe and Africa cooperation and future relations.

Signing the official decrees for DJIBOUTI as WORLD CAPITAL OF CULTURE AND TOURISM and for H.E. President ISMAIL OMAR GUELEH as ACADEMICIAN member of EUROPEAN TOURISM ACADEMY concluded the ceremonies in the applause of the diplomatic corps.

Other decisions taken by European Council on Tourism and Trade where: the selection of a new diplomatic partner, the celebration of European Tourism Day on December 1st, 2018 and the closing of World Best Tourist Destination candidature list on May 15th, 2018.

###The Blue Walk Helps Guests Capture Pastel Hues of the Mediterranean and Lake Como Regions in New Tour With Artist Leslie Fehling



(TRAVPR.COM) UNITED STATES - April 12th, 2018 - Called a pastel-hued perfection by Lonely Planet, Cinque Terre is comprised of five cliff-side villages along the Italian Riviera whose colorful beauty draws thousands of visitors every year. It is also one of the inspirations for Art Walk Italy, a unique, seven-night walking vacation offered by The Blue Walk, a vacation specialist with tours in France, Italy and Greece. Led by American artist and teacher Leslie Fehling, Art Walk Italy features onsite sketching and watercolor classes combined with daily coastal walks and tours of villages steep in Old World charm. Fehling, recognized in the U.S. and Europe for her lively style, tutors guests in drawing, watercolor techniques, hand lettering, page design, and travel sketching  all while they absorb the scenic beauty of some of the worlds most stimulating environments.

Art Walk Italy is available September 22- 29, 2018, with rates starting at $3,350, based on double occupancy. In addition to art lessons, rates include daily buffet breakfast, a welcome dinner in Rapallo and farewell dinner in Lenno, all hotel taxes, fees, and service charges. The groups are small, allowing both the new and experienced sketchers to gain valuable insight into their craft through personalized instructions.

Going to these popular destinations during the shoulder seasons, when they are relatively free of crowds, is the best time to brush up on your creative nature, said Jeannette Candau, co-owner of The Blue Walk. If youre new to drawing, Fehling is experienced in helping students bring out their best to capture the essence of the quaint village scenes and stunning coastal trails.

After a night in Milan, Art Walk Italy guests spend three nights in the town of Rapallo, from which they visit Cinque Terre and Portofino. For the second half of the tour, they take a train and short ferry ride to Lake Como, a playground for the wealthy that sits at the foot of the Alps in Northern Italy. Guests will sketch the villas, mountain, and lakeside scenes of the towns of Bellagio and Lenno. Art Walk Italy also offers an optional three-night extension, September 29  October 2, which visits Venice, Verona, and Padua in Italy. Rates for the extension start at $1,095 per person, based on double occupancy.

The smaller crowds during our visit allow our guests to linger, individually or in groups, at almost any point in their walks to capture some of the worlds most magnificent views, said Candau.

Candau noted that The Blue Walk tours continue to grow in popularity. Spring tours are sold out, but there are still spaces in their fall tours. The company is also accepting reservations for their 2019 tours, typically offered in spring and fall.

About The Blue Walk

The Blue Walk offers small-group walking vacations in unique and undiscovered regions of France, Italy, Greece, and England. Its clients enjoy leisurely strolls along the beautiful coastlines, village squares and open spaces of Europe while staying at luxury four or five-star boutique hotels and resorts. Each tour includes daily one hour to half-day walks in some of the worlds most serene surroundings. The Blue Walk also offers themed vacations with well-known, talented and creative teachers. Hiking boots and backpacks are optional, as the routes are always people friendly, following safe paths that are a unique blend of gentle walking trails, coastal meandering, and urban strolling. For more information, contact The Blue Walk toll-free at 551-258-3955 or by email at info@thebluewalk.com, or visit them online.

###PLAINVIEW, NY, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Italian Food & Beverage Corp. (OTC PINK: IFBC) has submitted one of its fine wines for tasting by a very well-known Singaporean wine expert, Mr. George Wong. The wine, Barbera dAsti, from the Region of Piemonte Italy, was extremely well received in the tasting, which served to encourage IFBC to penetrate the Singapore market with its other fine Italian regional wines.



This successful first step caps a year-long effort by IFBC to gain acceptance in the Asian market and beyond. Mr. Wongs high marks will catapult IFBCs wine-purveyors reputation to a deserving respectability. Mr. Wong, the founder of The Asian Wine Lovers Club, is a professor at the famous Bordeaux Wine School. He holds a Wine MBA, and has been nicknamed by Asian Entrepreneur Magazine as The God of Wine. Mr. Wong has established a business in the wine industry to further educate oenophiles, and he works closely with local Asian wine distributors on brand development, market positioning and the elevation of brands to greater visibility.

Under the focused direction of Ms. Lai Chan Foo, IFBCs Director-In-Charge of The Asian Market, IFBC has established a promising foothold in Singapore and the rest of Asia for the importation of fine Italian wines, the evolution of which will result in the eventual penetration of the US market.

About Italian Food & Beverage Corp. Italian Food & Beverage Corp. establishes and develops brands committed to fulfilling customer needs throughout the world while providing the finest experiences based on the Italian wine and food culture. IFBC operates as an importer, exporter, merchant, distributor, and dealer of fine wine and food products. The Company and its subsidiaries have established wholesale distribution headquarters, offices and warehouses in several countries including Italy, Singapore, and the UK.

http://ifbcorp.com/

Forward-Looking Statements This release contains "forward-looking statements" and information provided by Italian Food & Beverage Corp. such as online, printed documents, publications or information available via its website. It may contain certain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors, which, if they do not materialize or prove correct, could cause the Company's results to differ materially from historical results, or those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. These statements may also include plans, strategies, and objectives of management for future operations; any statements regarding proposed new products, services or developments; any statements regarding future economic conditions or performance; statements of belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. There can be no assurance that the negotiations being considered by the letter of intent will be completed.



LAS VEGAS, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Players Network, Inc. (OTCQB:PNTV), a publicly traded diversified holding company operating in marijuana, announced today that they are investing in the development of MOTA coin, a cannabis-focused payment solution for the legal cannabis industry.



Last summer, PNTV started looking for an alternative for dealing with cash transactions and the inability to deposit cash into banks as cannabis companies. In November, 2018, PNTV, together with other founding members, retained Sophia Intelligence, a firm specializing in blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies to help address the ever-growing problem facing unbankable cannabis companies.

MOTA coin is intended to serve as the primary payment rail within the marijuana industry, facilitating electronic payments and receipts for legal marijuana businesses. Mota is a Spanish-language term for marijuana and is among the most commonly used terms for marijuana globally.

The MOTA Coin design and development team spent months studying previous attempts (most failed) by other cannabis related coins/tokens to find a workable, legal, user-friendly and safe blockchain solution for the marijuana industry. This research led the team to build MOTA coin around three primary criteria:

MOTA coin is rooted in simplicity; it will act only as an electronic payment rail and will not attempt to serve multiple purposes simultaneously. Previous cryptocurrency and blockchain based offerings in the industry have been unclear in their purpose or have acted like securities trying to raise money to finance the development of unrelated projects. MOTA coin is designed with ease-of-use in mind to encourage rapid user adoption. Consumers will be able to initially purchase MOTA coin using their regular credit or debit cards from any computer or smartphone. MOTA coin goes against the grain of most cryptocurrencies by setting a fixed, stable exchange price on a weighted algorithm based on the average price of marijuana in legal cannabis states as well as being pegged to the U.S. dollar. The supply of MOTA coin is allowed to fluctuate in response to demand. Price stability controls the risk of currency fluctuations, giving consumers and businesses the confidence of consistent purchasing power. This will also allow MOTA coin to function as a true high-velocity currency rather than as a speculative investment. In addition, there are practical peer-to-peer, b2c and b2b applications unlike previously failed cryptocurrencies built on hype.

MOTA coin is a tool to enable consumers and businesses to easily purchase cannabis products.

PNTV CFO Geoffrey Lawrence stated, I didnt realize how challenging it would be to operate an all-cash business. For example, we recently sent out an order for $140,000 to a dispensary and placed our employees in a potentially dangerous position of transporting that amount of cash. I quickly realized that an alternative to this risky business practice was needed. I felt cryptocurrency could solve these issues so MOTA retained Sophia Intelligence to create exactly that.

Sophia Intelligence CEO Dusty Wunderlich responded, When we first discussed a blockchain-based payments solution for cannabis, I was under the impression that such a solution already existed. But as we began to look at the existing offerings, we quickly realized they all suffered from major weaknesses which is why user adoption has been minimal. We realized there was still a huge opening for a simple, secure payments solution that people can use and manage easily without a need to learn about the complex world of trading in cryptocurrency. We believe MOTA Coin will be that solution.

PNTV Director Brett H. Pojunis stated, I have been a huge fan and supporter of cryptocurrency for a while. MOTA coin is positioned to offer a real, practical payment solution for the unbankable marijuana industry. I believe we will capitalize on this opportunity by creating a new, ongoing revenue stream through fair transactional fees. Due to our deeply rooted connections in the industry, I think we can quickly scale MOTA and achieve immediate market acceptance.

Additional details about MOTA Coin are available on its website, at: https://motacoin.io.

LIVE ONLINE WEBINAR

Lawrence, Pojunis and Wunderlich are hosting a live online webinar to introduce PNTV shareholders and the investment community to MOTA coin and answer questions its business model. Part of the webinar includes an ask us anything style video Q & A where participants will have an opportunity to ask questions about MOTA coin and its business model.



Date and Time:

Thursday, April 12, 2018

6:00 PM EDT





RSVP and Registration:

The first 100 people who register will reserve their place as an attendee. Visit this link and register now to reserve your spot:

The live online webinar will be recorded and available the next day. The video will be on PNTVs investor relations website located: https://ir.playersnetwork.com.

GET INVOLVED:

MOTA coin is currently signing up Merchants, Partners, and Users to participate in their BETA launch. Please visit https://motacoin.io for more information and to sign up.

To sign up for investor alerts, please visit: https://ir.playersnetwork.com/investor-alerts

About MOTA coin

MOTA coin is a blockchain based payment solution for the cannabis industry.

Please visit https://motacoin.io for more information.

About Players Network (PNTV)

Players Network is a diversified company operating in media and cannabis markets. PNTV owns approximately 89% of Green Leaf Farms Holdings, LLC (Green Leaf Farms), which holds cultivation and production license(s) awarded by the state of Nevada. The cultivation license enables Green Leaf Farms to grow marijuana and the production license enables them to create extracts which are used for cartridges, oils and edibles. WeedTV.com is developing the ultimate resource for the marijuana lifestyle within our media operations.

For more information please visit www.PlayersNetwork.com

Please visit our Investor Relations site https://ir.playersnetwork.com

Sign up for PNTV investor alerts: https://ir.playersnetwork.com/investor-alerts

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.

Players Network Contacts:

PR & Media Contact:

Matthew Bird, CEO

@1800pr

1-800-PublicRelations

Office: 646.401.4499

Email: matt.bird@1800pr.com

Investor Inquiries:

Brett H. Pojunis, Director

Email: ir@playersnetwork.com

Office: 702.840.3272

Blockchain and Crypto Inquiries:

Dusty Wunderlich

Email: what@motacoin.io

Office: 702.840.3272

European Media Inquiries:

Jeff Robinson

Email: jrobinson@playersnetwork.com

Office: 702.840.3298



monicakchauhan@gmail.com

New York, April 12

Proper implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in India can be worked upon and is not an "unfixable problem", former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has said, reiterating that demonetisation was "not a well-planned, well thought-out" move.

With the Modi government bringing in ambitious reforms like GST and demonetisation, Rajan said it would be good if such measures were better implemented.

"On the Goods and Services Tax, we will figure it out eventually. It will be nice if we could implement much better than we do. But it's (GST) not an unfixable problem. We can work on it. I wouldn't give up hope at this point on that," Rajan told an audience at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge yesterday.

Rajan, who is currently the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, gave the 2018 Albert H Gordon Lecture on the topic 'Leverage, Financial Crises, and Policies to Raise Economic Growth'. He was asked about the "shoddy implementation" of big ticket reforms like GST and demonetisation in India.

On demonetisation, Rajan rejected the claim that the Reserve Bank of India had not been consulted by the government before it went on to declare 1,000 and 500-rupee currency notes as illegal tender in November 2016. He, however, reiterated that the move to cancel 87.5 per cent of the currency value was "not a good idea".

"I didn't ever say that I wasn't consulted (on demonetisation). In fact, I have made it quite clear that we were consulted and we didn't think it was a good idea," Rajan said.

He said demonetisation "was not a well-planned, well thought-out, useful exercise and I told the government that when the idea was first mooted," he said adding that any macro-economist would say that if 87.5 per cent of the currency is being demonetised, then it better be made sure that a similar amount of currency is printed and ready to be put back in circulation.

"India went into it without having done that. It had a negative economic impact but also the idea was that somehow people who had money stored in their basements without having paid taxes on it would overnight see religion and come to the government and say 'sorry we were hiding this stuff, let me pay taxes on it'," Rajan said, calling it a "naive view".

"Anybody who knows India, knows that very quickly we find ways around the system," he said adding that with "essentially" all the money that was demonetised coming back into the system, the exercise did not have the direct effect that was sought.

While the longer term impact of demonetisation is yet to be seen, its negative economic impact included people not having currency, not being able to pay and economic activity plummeting especially in the informal sector.

"There may be some longer term impact that people think that if this sort of thing happens then the government is serious about collecting taxes. There may be greater tax payments but we still have to see strong evidence that that is true," he said.

Rajan also expressed concern that a lot of people probably lost their jobs due to demonetisation but that has not been counted well as it would be mostly in the informal sector.

"The positive impacts (of demonetisation) are out there in the future. We have no idea whether they will be important. To my mind it was not a policy that was useful at that time," he said.

To a suggestion that demonetisation could have positively impacted growth, Rajan said "you would have to find a new economic theory to explain how it helped the economy".

He said most estimates of the cost of demonetisation vary between 1.5-2 per cent of the GDP.

"It would be a really die-hard government advocate who would say that the growth benefits of demonetisation were immediate," he said.

"Most of the supporters of the move would say that the benefits of the move are coming by changing the incentive to pay taxes. I would say yes, we will have to wait and see whether that in fact is true," he said.

On the problem of non-performing assets and making a reference to the Nirav Modi-PNB scandal, Rajan said it is worrisome that some Indian banks have antiquated systems.

A part of the Punjab National Bank scam was cyber-related and there is a need to go into the details of how the fraud came to be, he said.

"It turns out that we don't need to be really clever in the Indian system to make away with a billion dollars. Some of these banks have antiquated systems also....Your worry is that the systems are not adequate to prevent rogue dealers, rogue employees colluding and making off with stuff. That is the fraud part," he said.

He added that bad loans do not necessarily come from fraud, they come from "irrational exuberance". PTIeditorial@tribune.com

Ishrat S Banwait

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 11

The district consumer forum here has announced two-year imprisonment to a builder for failing to comply with its orders. In January 2014, Udey Raj Singh Brar, Director of M/s UK Homes Private Limited, was directed to pay Rs 3.75 lakh to a complainant for deficiency in service. However, the order has not been complied with till date and hence the forum announced the jail term, along with a fine of Rs 10,000.

The original complaint in the matter was filed by Sector 49 residents Ruhi and Sumit Chhabra in October 2013. As per the complaint, they had booked two plots in a township in Zirakpur called Capital Green and had paid Rs 3.75 lakh for the same.

The builder had mentioned a clause in the agreement that in case allotment of the plot is not made within 12 months, the buyer could ask for a refund along with interest by giving 90 days notice. However, the company did not honour its commitments. Two post-dated cheques were received in reply to a legal notice sent by the Chhabras to the builder. It said they were being issued as security, to be realised if the project did not commence within 12 months.

However, the Chhabras said the same were issued without interest and that it was a violation of the terms and conditions. They thus approached the forum to demand the refund with interest and compensation. The forum ordered that the builder refund the Rs 3.75 lakh amount along with interest. However, even after more than four years, the same has not been done by the builder.editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 11

The Centre on Wednesday accepted the Punjab Governments proposal for setting up a Rs 374.86-crore government medical college at SAS Nagar.

The Chief Minister, Capt Amarinder Singh, welcomed the development, saying that the medical college would help provide health and diagnostic services to patients of nearby areas.

Under the terms of implementation of the centrally-sponsored scheme, the Centre will release Rs 113.40 crore in three instalments for equipment and infrastructural development of the college. The Punjab Government has already made provisions for the project in its Budget for 2018-19.

The medical college will be established at a cost of Rs 374.86 crore, of which Rs 325.26 crore will be spent on the building and infrastructure, and Rs 49.60 crore on equipment. The college, with 100 MBBS seats, will be developed on 20.85 acres, of which 9.81 acres has been earmarked for the Civil Hospital and 4.20 acres for the State Institute of Health and Family Welfare at Mohali. Besides, a stretch of 6.84 acres at Jujhar Nagar village has been acquired just 1.5 km from the district hospital.editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 12

After the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Chandigarh Police arrested OP Chopra, an accused in the Rs 84-lakh cheating case, on Wednesday, a court sent him to three-day police remand on Thursday. On the run for seven months, Chopra was produced in the court on Wednesday as well and was sent to one-day police remand.

Chopra, along with another accused Hari Mohan Bajaj, who is on bail, had allegedly cheated people by taking money and promising land since 1991. The FIR in the case was registered in December 2015 under Sections 420 and 120B of the IPC. There are a total of 49 complainants in the case. Allegedly, the duo had been targeting elderly people by registering them under a housing society and promising land in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh.

The complainants had informed that they had come to know about him through advertisements in newspapers. The advertisements had shown that as many as 346 commercial and residential plots were shown to be available. Their sizes ranged from 100 square yards to 250 square yards.editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 11

Prof Emeritus HS Shergill was in the last batch  1964-66  which former PM Manmohan Singh taught at Panjab University.

I remember giving him a farewell in February 1966, said Shergill who had topped MA Economics in 1966.

I have also worked all my life as a teacher. Dr Manmohan Singh was unparalleled. He was good in every way. He used to inspire his students, said Prof Shergill.

I hardly remember any student coming late to his class. There was so much respect for him among students, he said.

He used to walk really fast and never wasted a minute. We learnt punctuality from him, said Prof Shergill, who is working as the Director Research at the Institute for Development and Communication. He met Dr Manmohan Singh after the lecture on Wednesday.

Another old student Prof VK Gupta remembered the former PM as a nice and helpful teacher. He taught us in MA II year in 1962-63. I started doing PhD under him, but then he left for the United Nations in 1966. I then completed my PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada, said Prof Gupta.

He remained helpful throughout my career. He was sweet and soft spoken person, he said.VANCOUVER, B.C., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Aequus Pharmaceuticals Inc. (TSX-V:AQS) (OTCQB:AQSZF) (Aequus or the Company), is pleased to announce it has entered into a commercial agreement with Mynosys Cellular Devices, an ophthalmology focused medical device company based in Fremont, California, (Mynosys) for the Canadian distribution, sales and marketing of the Zepto Precision Pulse Capsulotomy System (Zepto) for cataract surgery. Zepto was approved for sale in Canada by the Therapeutic Products Directorate in February 2018, and through this agreement is expected to be launched in Canada by Aequus within the next quarter. Zepto will be marketed by Aequus current ophthalmology salesforce and is an attractive complement to its existing product offering.



The addition of the Zepto device expands Aequus ophthalmology portfolio into the cataract surgical space and reaffirms our commitment to this therapeutic area, said Anne Stevens, COO and Director of Aequus. In meetings with Canadian ophthalmologists, clinicians expressed a strong interest for this product, particularly in the premium intraocular lens market and the more challenging cases, which we estimate to represent over 20% of cataract cases performed each year in Canada.

Zepto has been used in thousands of cataract surgeries in Asia, Europe, and Central America since February 2017, and most recently in the US since August 2017.

John Hendrick, President and CEO of Mynosys, stated: I am delighted to have Aequus as our partner to bring Zepto to the market in Canada. We have seen a significant demand for Zepto around the world and fully expect that Zepto will be embraced by the Canadian market as well.

This agreement has an initial term of three years, with an automatic and continuous renewal of additional three year terms, provided Aequus meets minimum sales targets. Aequus will retain profits on the products sold in Canada.

About Zepto Precision Pulse Capsulotomy System

The Zepto capsulotomy system provides consistent, high quality anterior lens capsulotomies during cataract surgery in a convenient, cost-effective, disposable format. One of the key features is a collapsible super-elastic nitinol capsulotomy ring element with micron scale elements to create the unique and strong Zepto capsulotomy edge. It also has a clear silicone suction cup to enable suction and generate Zeptos proprietary capsulotomy action and to allow Zepto capsulotomies on the patients individual visual axis. The AMA has recently given a category III code in the US as they see the distinctive application and benefit of aligning on the patients own visual axis.

Zepto integrates seamlessly into the routine steps of cataract surgery with phacoemulsification. The surgeon does not need to alter his or her normal routine. Instead of capsulorrhexis forceps or a cystitome, the surgeon simply reaches for Zepto.

The Zepto Capsulotomy System consists of a disposable Zepto capsulotomy handpiece that is attached to a small control console. Zepto uses the precision pulse capsulotomy method, a proprietary combination of calibrated suction and a 4-millisecond multipulse energy algorithm to produce highly accurate capsulotomies. Zeptos unique single use hand piece can be inserted through incisions as small as 2.2mm, to create a perfectly circular and precisely placed capsulotomy that can be centered on the visual axis. Zepto is ideal for surgery using premium lenses as well as difficult cases and creates a capsulotomy with an edge strength greater than conventional methods or femtosecond lasers. For more information, please visit https://www.zepto-cataract.com/.

About Aequus Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Aequus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (TSX-V:AQS) (OTCQB:AQSZF) is a growing specialty pharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing high quality, differentiated products. Aequus development stage pipeline includes several products in neurology and psychiatry with a goal of addressing the need for improved medication adherence through enhanced delivery systems. With a focus in neurology and other specialty areas, our most recent addition to the development pipeline was a long-acting form of medical cannabis, where there is a high need for a consistent, predictable and pharmaceutical-grade delivery of products for patients. Aequus intends to commercialize its internal programs in Canada alongside its current portfolio of marketed established medicines and will look to form strategic partnerships that would maximize the reach of its product candidates worldwide. Aequus plans to build on its Canadian commercial platform through the launch of additional products that are either created internally or brought in through an acquisition or license; remaining focused on highly specialized therapeutic areas. For further information, please visit www.aequuspharma.ca.

About Mynosys Cellular Devices

Mynosys Cellular Devices Inc. is a medical device company providing innovative solutions to help surgeons achieve perfection in cataract surgery. Our product Zepto, is a unique micro-fabricated instrument that provides unmatched precision during surgery on a millisecond time scale to tackle routine and challenging cases with confidence and efficiency. Zepto technology is patented worldwide and is available in selected markets through local distributors.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This release may contain forward-looking statements or forward-looking information under applicable Canadian securities legislation that may not be based on historical fact, including, without limitation, statements containing the words believe, may, plan, will, estimate, continue, anticipate, intend, expect, potential and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on estimates and assumptions made by us in light of our experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments, as well as the factors we believe are appropriate. Forward-looking statements in this release include but are not limited to statements relating to: identifying barriers to current use and potential product offerings in specific therapeutic areas, the implementation of our business model and strategic plans, Aequus sales and marketing efforts. Such statements reflect our current views with respect to future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties and are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by Aequus, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors could cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In making the forward-looking statements included in this release, the Company has made various material assumptions, including, but not limited to: the success of Aequus sales and marketing efforts, general business and economic conditions, the assumption that the Companys current good relationships with its manufacturer and other third parties will be maintained, the availability of financing on reasonable terms, the Companys ability to attract and retain skilled staff, market competition, the products and technology offered by the Companys competitors. In evaluating forward-looking statements, current and prospective shareholders should specifically consider various factors set out under the heading Risk Factors in the Companys Annual Information Form dated April 29, 2016, a copy of which is available on Aequus profile on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com, and as otherwise disclosed from time to time on Aequus SEDAR profile. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties, or a risk that is not currently known to us materialize, or should assumptions underlying those forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this release and we do not intend, and do not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are inherently uncertain. Accordingly, investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Contact Information:

Aequus Investor Relations

Email: investors@aequuspharma.ca

Phone: 604-336-7906editorial@tribune.com

Bhartesh Singh Thakur

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 11

Quoting Dr BR Ambedkar thrice, former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh on Wednesday said the freedom of a country is not the freedom of its government... it is the freedom of people, which in turn is not the freedom only of its privileged and powerful, but the freedom of every Indian.

Returned to alma mater Panjab University in a more familiar role, the former Prime Minister delivered a lecture in memory of his mentor Prof SB Rangnekar, before a packed house.

Freedom is the freedom to question, to express ones views, howsoever troubling they may be for others. The only constraint to freedom must be the freedom of others  in other words, the freedom of one person or a group should not be used to constrain the freedom of other individuals or groups, he said in his lecture on The 70th anniversary of our Independence  Strengthening the roots of our democracy.

The former PM said a dangerous and false binary was surfacing in the Indian political discourse, which must be firmly rejected. It is that we have to choose between freedom and development. It is not a new binary. The argument was put to Mahatma Gandhi that good governance and development are better than Swaraj. The argument was also widely advanced that India was not ready for freedom, that continued British Raj would be better for us. The choice of the people of India then was, and still is, clear and unambiguous. We will be free and independent.

Stressing that hatred should never be allowed to enter Indias shores ever again, Dr Singh said: Who can ever forget when at the time of Partition in 1947, the ancient fabric of our deep-rooted fraternity was sought to be deliberately torn and destroyed? I bear personal witness to its unspeakable consequences.

On the electoral system, he said there was widespread concern it was being undermined by money and muscle power. The faith of people in democratic elections as the best system to select a government that would govern in the common interest is today being eroded  as much by a sustained campaign to attack democratic institutions and elected representatives as by the increasing political corruption and the capture of political parties and elected office by vested interests.

Dr Ambedkar once worried that the day may come when people may prefer a government for the people to government by and of the people. He saw that as a great danger, the former PM cautioned.

Governance is slow, complex, messy

Governance is complex. It is messy. It is slow. Its benefits are long term. It requires great patience. Above all, democracy is a system in which people without privilege have a decisive voice in governance. If this is lost, democracy becomes meaningless

False binary emerging

We need to ask ourselves whether we are losing patience with democracy and turning to more authoritarian alternatives that may well yield superior short-term results, but in the long term will end up destroying our country Dr Manmohan Singh, Former Prime Ministereditorial@tribune.com

Bhartesh Singh Thakur

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 11

Coming to Panjab University (PU) for a lecture after 53 years, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in reply to a question at the gate of the economics department building, said he was feeling very much nostalgic.

Dr Singh had not only studied at the economics department of the PU, but had also taught here.

After delivering the first Prof SB Rangnekar Memorial Oration, Dr Singh went to the economics department to sign a poster carrying his famous quote from his last address to the nation on May 14, 2014: I am confident about the future of India. I firmly believe that the emergence of India as a major powerhouse of the evolving global economy is an idea whose time has come. Blending tradition with modernity and unity with diversity, this nation of ours can show the way forward to the world.

He obliged faculty members and economics department students with photographs.

Dr Singh wanted to go upstairs, but couldnt

The economics department is on the second floor of Arts Block-III. Dr Singh had expressed the desire to visit the department. The Special Protection Group (SPG) had to count the stairs, which came out to be 47. There is no lift as it is an old building. Finally, the plan was dropped.

I asked him whether he wanted to visit the department, he said he wanted to, but couldnt, said Prof Upinder Sawhney, chairperson of the economics department.

Dr Singh has committed to donate about 3,500 of his personal books to the PU. On Wednesday, he went to Guru Tegh Bahadur Hall to see the site where his books would be displayed. PU VC Arun Kumar Grover explained him about the arrangements.

Our department will coordinate with him for his books, said Professor Sawhney.

Dr Singh did his BA-Economics (Hons) from the PU in 1952 with second class and first position in the university. In 1954, he did his MA (Economics) with first class and first position in the PU. He did his Economic Tripos (First Class Honours) from the University of Cambridge in 1957.

He did his DPhil from Nuffield College, University of Oxford, on Indias Export Trends and Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth.

In 1957, he joined the PU as a senior lecturer. After two years, in 1959, he was promoted as Reader and in 1963, he became a Professor. He left the PU in 1965.

Interactive session would have been icing on cake: Students

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh didnt take questions from the audience after his lecture on The 70th anniversary of our Independence  Strengthening the roots of our democracy, though students wanted to interact with him.

He should have taken questions from the students. I myself wanted to ask a question.

He is truly inspirational. He emphasised on the thought that democracy is not an idea, its an ideology and also that governance needs patience. He is a role model for all leaders of young India.  Vani Sood, Secretary, Panjab University Campus Students' Council

It was wonderful to listen to someone who is an alumnus of the department and had achieved the post of the Prime Minister. The question-answer session was planned, but probably he was short on time so he could not take questions  Mohit Kamboj, president, Economics Department Society

Manmohan Singhs lecture focussed on equality, freedom and fraternity. The dangers lurking in the democratic set-up of the country were discussed. Manmohan Singhs personal experience, such as the time he spent with his teacher Prof SB Rangnekar, was emotive. Had there been a question-answer session, it would have been wonderful.  Mukesh Kumar, Research Scholar

The topic of lecture was relevant in the wake of the ongoing tolerance issues in the country. He rightly touched upon the topics of freedom of expression, fraternity and equality. As a student of economics, whatever he says holds importance for me.  Sukhjinder Singh, Student, MA Economicseditorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 11

There is no stopping temple thefts in the city. A day after thieves struck at a temple in Sector 19, thefts from two temples in Sector 27 were reported on Wednesday where thieves made off with jewellery. The same gang of thieves is believed to be involved in all incidents.

The first incident was reported from the Sanatan Dharam temple in Sector 27, where thieves entered the temple at 1.40 am and left almost 30 minutes later at 2.09 am.

Sanjeev Sharma, general secretary of the temple management committee, said two thieves scaled the boundary wall and entered the temple from one of the corners.

After entering the temple, the accused changed the position of some CCTV cameras. Both accused then removed the glass window and entered the building. They then stole a silver sheet wrapped around the Shivlingam, weighing around 5 kg, and five mukuts (crowns) of 1 kg each.

In the meantime, the third accused entered the temple with a bag to fill the stolen articles, while the fourth accused waited outside the temple.

The theft came to light in the morning following which the police were informed. There are 24 CCTV cameras installed on the temple premises. The CCTV footage shows that all accused had their faces covered and one of them was wearing a cap. The accused did not remove their shoes while entering the temple.

The second theft was reported from the Digamber Jain temple opposite the Sanatan Dharam temple from where a chattar, weighing around 10 kg, was stolen.

Two miscreants entered the Jain temple after scaling the wall. They then broke the locks to climb up to the top of the Bahubali statue. The accused then stole the chattar.

Karun Jain, secretary of the management committee of the temple, said the security guard had gone to washroom when the thieves arrived. The security guard saw two persons escaping with the chhatar.

There are CCTV cameras installed at the temple in which two miscreants are seen walking. The police were informed about the incident, who rushed to the spot.

The CCTV footage of both temples has been collected by the police. Two separate cases of theft have been registered at the Sector 26 police station.

Timeline

1.40 am: Thieves enter Sanatan Dharam temple in Sector 27

2.09 am: They escape after stealing jewellery

2.12 am: Thieves enter the Digamber Jain temple

2.20 am: Escape after stealing a chhatar

Recent temple theft incidentsharinder@tribunemail.com

Lahore, December 21, 1919

FOREIGN TELEGRAMS.

THE JALLIANWALA BAG HOOTING.

"VIEWS OF THE "TIMES".

London, Dec. 16

The "Times" draws attention to the profound impression made throughout the country by the disclosures of what happened at Amritsar and says that the public has been shocked by the occurrence and the delay in publishing the facts. The "Times" recites the broad facts of the risings and expresses the opinion that they constituted open rebellion. The paper mentions that the secret leaders were associated with Bolshevism and, after detailing the events at Amritsar, says that the result of the firing on April 13 was massacre. It declares that General Dyer's conduct, on his own showing, was indefensible, the worst feature being the continued firing although the crowd instantly began to disperse. General Dyer's evidence suggested that he held an excessive and unwarrantable conception, both of his own powers and of the steps necessary to restore order.

The "Times" assumes that the telegram approving General Dyer's action from the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab was despatched on insufficient knowledge. While awaiting fuller information, the "Times" urgently inquires why Mr. (Edwin) Montagu (Secretary of State for India) and Lord (Frederic Thesiger) Chelmsford never alluded to the happenings in Amritsar.

Lahore, December 20, 1919

The British Press on General Dyer's Action.

As might have been expected, the progressive section of the Press in England is as strong in its condemnation of General Dyer's action at Jallianwala Bagh as all sections of the Indian Press. The Daily News says that "the impression created must be removed at all costs if our credit and honour are not to be fatally impaired." The Daily Herald describes the proceedings as "Imperial atrocities". The description is rather premature, because the Imperial government neither sanctioned, nor have so far publicly upheld, the action of General Dyer, and it will, we are confident, turn out to be incorrect, because it is inconceivable that either the Imperial Government or the Government of India will, after the disclosures now made, have any opinion of those proceedings except the opinion of those proceedings except the opinion of India herself and of the better mind of England. But it certainly shows what the great Labour party thinks of these proceedings. And thus the Manchester Guardian:-"The shooting at Amritsar is as though a mad man had been set loose to massacre at large." The paper gives General Dyer credit for honesty, but adds:-"If General Dyer and his procedure were to be regarded as precedents for the future government of India, we might well despair of success in that tremendous and difficult task." To which we will only add that the question of precedents for the future government of India, we might well despair of success in that tremendous and difficult task." To which we will only add that the question of precedent or of future is not the only or the most important question in this case. The only organ which supports the General the notorious Morning Post, the most anti-Indian of all English papers at the present time, and which has constituted itself the mouthpiece of Sir Michael O'Dwyer even since he left this country.

December 25, 1919

More British Press Comment on General Dyer's Action.

The latest comments of the British Press on the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy draw attention to an aspect of the affair that is as important as it is serious. The Pall Mall Gazette says that Mr. Montagu's statement that he was ignorant of the details of the Amritsar affair until they appeared in the papers in England is astonishing and leaves an almost indescribable impression of the mechanism of Indian administration. The paper urges full disclosure of the official communications....The Times goes further and is even more pointed in its comment, which is the Times way, when it is able to make up its mind as to what it should do. It says that "so far as can be gathered Mr. Montagu never received a detailed account of General Dyer's action at Amritsar on April 13." "How comes it, then," asks the paper, "that a British General can inflict nearly 2,000 casualties on an unarmed mob in the Punjab without the full facts being forwarded within a reasonable time by the Viceroy to the Secretary of State?" This, indeed, is the question which the people of England who, as Mr. Montagu stated in his recent speech in the House of Commons, are at present the sole trustees for the good government of India, must ask, and ask ceaselessly until the wrong is righted and things in India are put on the right footing. The Times has rendered a service of the greatest value both to India and the Empire by leading the way in this vitally important matter. For once its position as the greatest English paper stands truly vindicated. We can only hope the Times will go on hammering at it, as it always does when it lays it finger on an evil which it wishes to see eradicated. Only thus can it get an answer to the "How," and also make sure that the state of things to which it refers shall never again be repeated in India or in any other part of the Empire.

Lahore, December 25, 1919

Where the Shoe Pinches.

It was only to be expected that the righteous indignation exhibited by a number of British papers and especially by the Times, the greatest of them all, both at what occurred at Jallianwala Bagh and at the delay in making the facts known to the British public, would be keenly resented by such a journal as the Civil and Military Gazette. The paper charges the Times with being subservient to the political whims of Lord Northeliffe, and with taking Mr. Montagu under its wing and discrediting the Government of India. One does not know where subserviency comes in the direct and outspoken comments of the paper on an obviously indefensible proceeding, nor is there any question of protecting Mr. Montagu or discrediting the Government of India, if, as is alleged and has not yet been denied, the latter did not, for reasons with which we have nothing to do, disclose material facts in connection with the Amritsar affair to the Secretary of State who is responsible for all their doings, first, to Parliament and then to the British elector....We suppose the Times has just as much right to express its opinions on such material it has before itself. Nor is it at all clear that the material on which the Gazette bases its comments is at all fuller than the Times' material. The Times' "nearly 2,000 casualties" is not a wild guess, but is based on the evidence of General Dyer himself.laxmi@tribune.com

New Delhi, April 12

Under the leadership of Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC) president Ajay Maken residents of the Delhi Cantonment held a massive demonstration today to protest against alleged nexus of the BJP government at the Centre and the AAP government in Delhi, which has made their life a nightmare.

Addressing the demonstrators, Maken said in the name of Swachhta Abhiyan, tax, sealing and removal of the names from the voters list of people of five villages, the Union Government, Delhi Government, and BJP-ruled MCDs were relentlessly harassing the people of Delhi Cantonment.

He said the BJP and the AAP governments were keeping silent as the people were being harassed in the name of sealing drive.

Maken said the tax being charged from the people of Delhi Cantonment in the name of Swachhata Abhiyaan was putting a heavy burden on them, already weighed down by the all-round rise in the prices of essential commodities.

People of Delhi Cantonment were now in dread of the officials of the Delhi Cantonment Parishad, as they were issuing challans without any rhyme or reason.  TNSrchopra@tribunemail.com

Houston, April 12

A 38-year-old Indian engineer in the US state of Ohio, accused of funding a top al-Qaida leader, has pleaded guilty to concealment of financing of terrorism.

Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad, second of the two brothers, is accused of sending money to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was later designated a terrorist and killed by a US drone in 2011.

Mohammad is to receive an agreed-upon prison sentence of 60 months, although he would receive credit for the 30 months he already has spent in the Lucas County jail awaiting trial, The Blade newspaper reported on Wednesday.

US District Judge Jeffrey Helmick told him that due to his plea and conviction, he would be deported to India.

You ultimately will be removed from this country and told you are not welcome to come back, the judge said.

Mohammad had studied at the University of Illinois and lived in Toledo since 2006.

As part of a plea agreement, the four original charges brought by a federal grand jury in 2015 are to be dismissed at the time of sentencing, which was not scheduled, the report said.

Two co-defendants, Sultane Roome Salim, 43, and his brother, Asif Ahmed Salim, 37, are scheduled for a change of plea hearing before Judge Helmick later on Thursday. Mohammad and the Salims had been set for trial on April 23 with jury selection beginning on Monday.

A fourth co-defendant, Mohammads brother, Yahya Farooq Mohammad, 39, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to provide and conceal material support or resources to terrorists.

He had also pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit a crime of violence for a separate case in which he tried to hire a hitman to kill Judge Jack Zouhary. At the time, Judge Zouhary was presiding over the terrorism case.

Yahya Farooq Mohammad was sentenced to a total of 27 years in prison and ordered deported to India once he completes his prison term.

Michael Freeman, an assistant US attorney, outlined the factual basis for the charge to which Ibrahim Mohammad pleaded guilty.

Freeman said Mohammads brother and others raised money in 2009 in the United Arab Emirates to deliver to al-Awlaki in Yemen.

Freeman said Farooq raised some funds through credit card fraud, sought funds from others he knew, and enlisted his brother in the United States to help.

Two associates of Farooq delivered USD 7,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki in Yemen in late January 2009, Freeman said. In July 2009, Farooq delivered USD 22,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki.

Ibrahim knew, Freeman said, that al-Awlaki had expressed support for the killing of 13 US service personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, by Nidal Hasan on November 5, 2009, and that al-Awlaki had been involved in the attempt to destroy an airliner over Detroit on December 25, 2009.

When interviewed by the FBI in Chicago in 2011, Ibrahim lied about the financial transactions, Freeman said, and later deleted emails that contained words such as Awlaki, jihad, Taliban and Yemen from his email account. PTIeditorial@tribune.com

Bijendra Ahlawat

Tribune News Service

Faridabad, April 11

The death of an inmate of an old-age home here seems to have put the Civil Hospital authorities in the dock. She died on Saturday last week allegedly due to lack of timely treatment.

A complaint in this connection has been lodged at the CMs window, seeking action against the authorities.

The inmate, identified as Prakash Kumari (68), was living at Tau Devi Lal Vridhashram run by an NGO, Navjivan Morcha Samiti. She was a heart patient and reportedly died for want of a bypass surgery.

Prakash Kumari was among two women admitted to the Civil Hospital on March 17. The hospital staff did not attend to her properly. She required a heart surgery. So, doctors referred her to a hospital in Delhi, but failed to provide an ambulance, alleged Kishan Lal Bajaj, the manager of the samiti, in his complaint to the CMs window and the DC.

He also claimed the hospital authorities had turned down the request for an ambulance (available free of cost to BPL and other categories). She succumbed to her ailment in the old-age home on Saturday last week.

A complaint about the hospitals negligence was lodged with the DCs office last Friday, but no relief came, resulting in the death of Prakash Kumari, Bajaj said.

Faridabad-based Nav Prayas Sewa Sangathan, meanwhile, has written to Health Minister Anil Vij, alleging degradation of health services at the Civil Hospital and demanded transfer of officials.

Chief Medical Officer Dr Gulshan Arora refuted the allegation of negligence. Prakash Kumari needed a heart valve replacement surgery (bypass), which cannot be conducted in the Civil Hospital. So, she was referred to a Delhi hospital last Thursday.

The patient was not taken to Delhi. Instead, she was taken to the old-age home. Why? And no one asked for an ambulance on Thursday, he claimed.editorial@tribune.com

Suhail A Shah

Anantnag, April 11

After a 16-hour gunfight, in which four civilians and a soldier were killed and two houses were reduced to rubble, at least three militants were brought out alive by locals and paraded through the streets in Khodweni area of south Kashmirs Kulgam district on Wednesday.

The encounter is over and I am told the militants have been brought out alive by the people, Director General of Police SP Vaid said.

Vaid said four civilians were killed in the crossfire during the encounter: Sarjeel Ahmad of Khodweni, Aijaz Ahmad Palla of Bijbehara, Bilal Ahmad Dar of Hawoora near Khodweni and Faisal Ilahi of Shopian. At least 67 persons, two of them Army men, were injured. The slain Army man was identified as Sepoy Sada Gunaka Rao from Andhra Pradesh.

The gunfight erupted late on Monday night in Wani Mohalla area, which was cordoned off following inputs on the presence of militants.

As the area was being cordoned off, the militants fired in a bid to escape. The forces retaliated, confining the militants to a cluster of houses, a senior police official said.

He said the fire was halted soon after the initial burst and resumed in the wee hours of the morning. Three Army men were injured and one of them later succumbed to his injuries, the official said. The gunfight continued till late afternoon after which the guns fell silent even as security forces employed choppers to survey the site.

Bulldozers were brought in to rummage through the rubble to try and locate the bodies of the militants, the police official said, adding that the operation was called off as no bodies were found.

However, soon after the security forces withdrew, people marched to the encounter site and brought out three militants alive.

The militants, sources said, were paraded through the area in a celebratory fashion as two of them rode a bike and another one, injured, was carried on shoulders. The militants clicked selfies and then fled, sources said.

In the morning, hundreds of people had marched towards the encounter site. The forces used bullets, pellets and tear smoke shells to disperse the protesters, sources said.

Soldier killed as Pak targets Poonch posts

Jammu, April 11

A soldier was killed in a ceasefire violation by Pakistan on Wednesday in the Krishna Ghati sector along the Line of Control (LoC) in Poonch district. The Pakistan army initiated unprovoked and indiscriminate firing of small arms and mortars at 4:45 pm on forward posts to which the Indian Army retaliated strongly and effectively.

Naik Thorat Kiran Popatrao (31) was grievously injured and succumbed. Naik Popatrao belonged to Fakirabad Wadi village of Aurangabad, Maharashtra, and is survived by his wife Shrimati Aarti.  TNSrchopra@tribunemail.com

Srinagar, April 12

Authorities imposed restrictions in parts of Srinagar city on Thursday due to a valley-wide protest shutdown called by separatists against the killing of four civilians in a gunfight on Wednesday.

The shutdown has been called by the Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL), a separatist conglomerate headed by Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Muhammad Yasin Malik.

The police said restrictions were imposed in Srinagars old city and also in the uptown areas falling under the jurisdiction of Maisuma and Kralkhud police stations.

Cancelling a cabinet meeting scheduled for Thursday in Jammu, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti returned to Srinagar on Wednesday to take stock of the situation in the aftermath of the gunfight in Kulgam district.

Geelani and Mirwaiz Umer have been placed under house arrest while Yasin Malik is in police custody.

Authorities have ordered the closure of all educational institutes in the valley except north Kashmirs Ganderbal district.

Exams scheduled for Thursday have been postponed by the University of Kashmir.

Shops, public transport and other businesses remained closed in Srinagar and all other district headquarters of the Valley.

Heavy contingents of police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) have been deployed all across the Kashmir Valley.

Train services between Baramulla and Banihal towns were stopped.

Mobile internet facility has been suspended in Anantnag, Shopian, Kulgam and Pulwama districts.

Internet speed has been slowed in all other regions of the valley to prevent uploading of provocative pictures, videos and posts. IANSgspannu7@gmail.com

Mumbai, April 12

Director Nandita Das Manto, a biopic on celebrated short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto, has been selected in the Cannes sub section Un Certain Regard.

The film, which stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the title role, is Das second directorial effort after Firaaq in 2008.

The director shared the news via Twitter.

We are in Cannes!! #Manto is selected in the official section - Un Certain Regard. Exciting moment for the entire crew & cast, she tweeted.

Official Twitter handle of the French film festival also posted the announcement, which Siddiqui shared with his followers and congratulated his director and the team.

And it is possible that Saadat Hasan dies, but MANTO remains alive. Glad to inform that MANTO is selected for competition at #Cannes2018 in #UnCertainRegard section, the actor wrote.

Das, who has been a part of the Cannes jury twice  in 2005 and 2013  later took to Facebook to thank friends and followers.

Thank you for all your good wishes that have been pouring since the announcement... While Cannes is the most prestigious platform for the film, and a great start, the journey will be complete only when we get to share it with you, she wrote.

Having been on the jury twice, and an audience at Cannes many a time, I have to say, it is truly a haven for film lovers. I look forward to seeing how the audience there reacts to this film that I have lived with for almost 7 years. For me, this film and everything else that I do, will always remain a means to trigger conversations, a small step towards the world we want to see.

The director said she will give finishing touches to the film before it heads to the festival.

Das had unveiled the first look of the film at Cannes last May with stars Siddiqui and Rasika Dugal.

Manto, best known for his stories on Partition, was born on May 11, 1912, and migrated to Pakistan after 1947 and died at the age of 55 on January 18, 1955.

The film chronicles four years of Mantos life  two years before the Partition and two years after that  the most creative yet the most turbulent period for the writer.  PTIEnglish Estonian

Segments (EURm) Q1/18 Q1/17 yoy Supermarkets 105,6 99,6 6,1% Department stores 22,8 23,0 -1,0% Cars 27,6 24,2 14,0% Footwear 2,2 2,6 -16,5% Real Estate 1,3 1,2 7,6% Total sales 159,5 150,7 5,9% Supermarkets 3,1 2,8 12,6% Department stores -0,4 0,1 -944,2% Cars 0,9 1,2 -31,3% Footwear -0,3 -0,8 -60,6% Real Estate 2,9 2,9 -0,4% Total profit before tax 6,1 6,1 -0,5%

In the first quarter of 2018, the unaudited consolidated sales revenue of the Tallinn Kaubamaja Group was 159.5 million euros. Compared to the first quarter of 2017, when its sales revenue was 150.7 million euros, the growth accounted for 5.9%. The net loss for the period amounted to 0.2 million euros due to the income tax expense on dividends (6.2 million euros). The loss in the first quarter of 2017 was 0.3 million euros, including income tax of 6.4 million euros. The pre-tax profit  6.1 million euros  remained at the same level as in the previous year.

The beginning of 2018 was positive for the Group  there was a growth in sales revenue. The pre-tax profit remained at a solid level, comparable to that of the previous year. In terms of the important retail segments of the Group, a strong sales revenue growth was seen in supermarkets and car trade segments. In spite of the intensification of the competitive situation, the department stores managed to maintain the same level of sales revenue in essence. In estimated comparison with its direct competitors, based on the statistics published by the Tax and Customs Board, the sales revenue of the Groups segment of Kaubamaja stores can be considered good under certain market situation. The sales of the footwear segment decreased mainly due to reduced selling space. In the first quarter of 2018, the largest, nearly 1.5 times sales growth was recorded in the Group e-stores. The key to growth of Kaubamaja and Selver's e-stores is the fact that the e-shopping experience offered is of an equivalent quality with which the regular customers of the Group are accustomed to in physical stores. Investments in the user-friendliness, service and logistics development of e-stores as well as organizational changes in process reorganization have been successful and according to plan. Labour costs increased by 11.5% in the first quarter, including a 3.8% increase in the number of employees. Growth of 7.5% of the average wage per employee remained at the same pace with the trends of the wholesale and retail trade statistics of the Republic.

Selver supermarkets

In the first quarter of 2018, the consolidated sales revenue of the supermarket business segment was 105.6 million euros, being increased by 6.1% compared to the previous period. In the first quarter of 2018, the consolidated pre-tax profit of the supermarket segment was 3.1 million euros. The profit earned in Estonia amounted to 3.2 million euros of it, remaining at the level of the previous year (a decline of 0.1 million euros). The consolidated net loss of the supermarket segment was 0.9 million euros, which accounted for an increase of 0.1 million euros compared the first quarter of the previous year. The net loss in Estonia in the first quarter of 2018 was 0.8 million euros. The difference between net profit and pre-tax profit is a result of income tax expense on dividends  in 2018, the income tax on dividends was 0.4 million euros less than in the previous year. The pre-tax loss in Latvia in the first quarter of 2018 was 0.1 million euros. The loss was reduced due to the expiration of intra-group contracts. The business in Latvia is frozen.

The sales revenue growth of Selver stores in the first quarter, which was somewhat faster than the market segment, has been achieved with the support of new stores. In terms of comparable stores, Selver stores have managed to keep the sales revenue at the level of last year, despite the constantly increasing number of competitors stores and the re-distribution of loyal customers between the stores of Selver. In the first quarter, both the number of purchases and the average purchase has increased. E-Selver is still doing well: its sales in the first quarter, compared to the first quarter of last year, grew by 1.5 times. The comparison basis of the year 2018 does not include the five new supermarkets opened in Tallinn and the mobile store of Hiiumaa.

The profits earned in Estonia were mostly affected by revenue growth. In terms of operating expenses, the level of cost-efficiency was better than last year. As expected, investments have had a positive effect: they have enabled to save on administrative costs and efficiently manage labour costs in the pressurising wage situation.

This year, Selver plans to open at least two stores and extend the SelveEkspress service to these two stores, as well as fourteen existing stores. It is also planned to introduce electronic price tags in Selvers fruit and vegetable sections. We will continue to develop e-commerce to increase our capability to serve the rapidly increasing number of customers: it is also planned to install the first e-Selver food lockers, where customers of our e-store can pick up their deliveries. On 1 April, the e-Selver service expanded to Parnu.

Department stores

In the first three months of 2018, the department store business segment earned a sales revenue of 22.8 million euros, which is 1.0% less than last year. The pre-tax loss of the department stores in the first quarter of 2018 was 0.4 million euros, which is 0.5 million euros less than last year. In the first quarter, the sales results of the department store segment were affected by the long and cloudy winter, which had a negative impact on the sale of spring goods at the beginning of the new season. The sale of discounted goods in the winter weather conditions also negatively affected the marginal.In the first quarter of 2018, the sales revenue of OU TKM Beauty Eesti, which operates the I.L.U. cosmetics stores, was 1.1 million euros, which was 3.2% more than in the same period last year. The loss in the first quarter of 2018 was 0.1 million euros, which is 12.5% more than last year. In February, the Kvartal store in Tartu was closed due to unsatisfactory results. The final sale and costs related to the closing the store influenced the profitability of the I.L.U. chain.

Car Trade

In the first quarter of 2018, the sales revenue of the car trade segment was 27.6 million euros. Sales revenue increased by 14.0% compared to last year and the sales revenue of KIAs decreased by 5.9%. A total of 1,229 new vehicles were sold in the first three months of the year. The sales revenue and the increase in the number of cars sold was supported by the rapid growth of the Estonian car market, which continued in the first quarter of 2018. The pre-tax profit of the segment in the first quarter of 2018 was 0.9 million euros, which is 0.4 million euros less than in the same period last year. In January, Viking Motors AS, the Estonian retail seller in car trade segment, started selling and servicing Peugeot cars in Tallinn by opening a new showroom. Until now, the Groups Latvian car company Forum Auto SIA  has successfully sold Peugeot cars. This new business direction has shown better results than expected. The Latvian subsidiary Forum Auto SIA has also shown great results, winning several public procurements. The decrease in the car trade segments profit has, on the one hand, been a result of the launch of the new showroom in Tallinn. On the other hand, compared to the first quarter of 2017, the higher volume of fleet sales has lowered the sales margin of cars.

Footwear trade

In the first quarter of 2018, the sales revenue of the footwear business segment was 2.2 million euros, which accounted for a decrease of 16.5% compared to the same period of the previous year. Reason for the decrease compared to last year, five footwear stores have been closed during the selling space optimization. The loss in the first quarter decreased by 0.5 million euros compared to the previous year, staying at a level of 0.3 million euros. The goal of the segment in 2018 is to increase profitability through new procurement channels and an increase in margins. In 2018, it is planned to re-open the ABC King store in Kristiine shopping centre, which was closed in 2017, and to continue with the activities to increase the profitability of selling space. We have started working with the store concept innovations of ABC King.

Real Estate

In the first quarter of 2018, the sales revenue in the real estate segment outside the Group was 1.3 million euros. Sales revenue increased by 7.6% compared to last year. The pre-tax profit of the real estate segment in the first quarter of 2018 was 2.9 million euros, which is 0.4% less than last year. The growth in the segments sales revenue was positively affected by the gas station and store, completed in January 2018 for a partner outside the Group, which is located in Rae municipality, in the immediate vicinity of the Selver store in Peetri. Tartu Kaubamaja Centre and Viimsi Centre are showing good results and contributing to the segments sales growth. The decrease in profit was affected by previous contracts concluded inside the Group, related to Latvian real estate, which have ended by now. At the end of 2018, it is planned to open Kolde Selver, which is currently under construction. It is also planned to continue with the development works of the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian car centres, a new sales building of department store in Tallinn and the central kitchen of Kulinaaria.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION

In thousands of euros

31.03.2018 31.12.2017 ASSETS Current assets Cash and cash equivalents 40,529 33,662 Trade and other receivables 14,101 16,127 Inventories 79,760 75,816 Total current assets 134,390 125,605 Non-current assets Long-term receivables and prepayments 115 114 Investments in associates 1,776 1,724 Investment property 49,889 49,902 Property, plant and equipment 204,573 214,475 Intangible assets 5,543 5,675 Total non-current assets 261,896 271,890 TOTAL ASSETS 396,286 397,495 LIABILITIES AND EQUITY Current liabilities Borrowings 52,895 54,818 Trade and other payables 114,493 85,569 Total current liabilities 167,388 140,387 Non-current liabilities Borrowings 48,729 48,732 Provisions for other liabilities and charges 420 360 Total non-current liabilities 49,149 49,092 TOTAL LIABILITIES 216,537 189,479 Equity Share capital 16,292 16,292 Statutory reserve capital 2,603 2,603 Revaluation reserve 81,672 82,124 Currency translation differences -255 -255 Retained earnings 79,437 107,252 TOTAL EQUITY 179,749 208,016 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY 396,286 397,495

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF PROFIT OR LOSS AND OTHER COMPREHENSIVE INCOME

In thousands of euros

3 months 2018 3 months 2017 Revenue 159,547 150,688 Other operating income 713 482 Cost of sales -120,687 -113,666 Other operating expenses -13,837 -13,494 Staff costs -15,788 -14,155 Depreciation, amortisation and impairment losses -3,437 -3,281 Other expenses -308 -329 Operating profit 6,203 6,245 Finance income 0 0 Finance costs -170 -183 Finance income on shares of associates 52 51 Profit before tax 6,085 6,113 Income tax expense -6,249 -6,371 NET LOSS FOR THE FINANCIAL YEAR -164 -258 Other comprehensive income: Items that will not be subsequently reclassified to profit or loss Other comprehensive income for the financial year 0 0 TOTAL COMPREHENSIVE LOSS FOR THE FINANCIAL YEAR -164 -258

Raul Puusepp

Chairman of the Board

Phone +372 731 5000

Attachmentpardeepdhull@gmail.com

Visakhapatnam, April 12

BJP workers, led by Andhra Pradesh unit president K Hari Babu, observed a fast here on Thursday to protest the stalling of Parliament by Opposition parties.

Those who took part in the fast were BJP floor leader in the Assembly, P Vishnu Kumar Raju and MLC P V Madhav.

Tension prevailed when some CPI workers picked up an argument with BJP leaders over the fast.

This led to a clash between the two sides, the police said, adding that about 20 CPI workers were arrested. Hari Babu alleged that the Telugu Desam Party was responsible for stalling Parliament proceedings.

Elsewhere in the city, leaders of the Opposition parties, including YSRCP leaders B Satyanaryana, Malla Vijaya Prasad and others staged a dharna protesting against the fast by the BJP leaders. PTIrchopra@tribunemail.com

Chennai, April 12

Pro-Tamil outfits protesting over the Cauvery issue on Thursday showed black flags to Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he arrived to formally inaugurate Indias mega defence exhibition, Defexpo, at Thiruvidanthai, about 40 km from here.

The Tamizhar Vazhvuirimai Kootamaippu (TVK), an umbrella outfit of pro-Tamil outfits, and Manithaneya Jananayaga Katchi led by MLA M Thamimun Ansari were among the organisations that staged protests in the vicinity of the Chennai airport.

Veteran film director Bharathiraja and film-maker Ameer held a demonstration at the airport premises, raising slogans.

Police dispersed some of the protesters and detained others.

In view of the protests, traffic snarls were witnessed around the airport and in its surrounding areas.

Black flags were hoisted atop the residences of DMK chief M Karunanidhi, party working president MK Stalin, Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi and other leaders, in protest against Modis visit and for not forming the Cauvery Management Board.

In Erode district, DMK workers released black balloons and about 50 workers were detained.

Some opposition parties and pro-Tamil outfits had on Wednesday said they would hold black-flag protest against Modis visit to Tamil Nadu. PTIeditorial@tribune.com

Shahira Naim

Tribune News Service

Lucknow, April 11

The noose appears to be tightening around Bangarmau MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar after a purported video of the rape survivors father alleging that he was mercilessly beaten up by the MLAs brother and others went viral.

The clip was reportedly shot on April 3 when he was taken to the hospital. He died of wounds on April 9.

Reacting to the governments handling of the case, BJP spokesperson Dipti Bhardwaj in a tweet asked BJP chief Amit Shah to save UP. Aadarniye Amit Shah ji, UP ko bacha lijiye, sarkar ke nirnay sharmsaar kar rahe hain. Yeh kalank nahi dhulega. Aadarniye bhai Narendra Modi ji aur apke saath hum sabke sapne choor choor honge (Amit Shah ji, please save UP, the governments decision is shameful. This indictment cant be washed away. Our dreams along with your and Modi jis would be shattered).

Top court, HC take action

Both the SC and the Allahabad HC have taken cognizance of the alleged gang rape and the death of the survivors father.

The SC agreed to hear next week the plea filed by a lawyer seeking a CBI probe and compensation for the family. Taking suo-moto cognizance on Wednesday, the Allahabad HC directed the matter to be heard on Thursday and appointed amicus curiae in the case.

Political conspiracy: Wife

Sangeeta Sengar, wife of the accused MLA, met the DGP, demanding justice for her husband. Claiming that her husband was being implicated by his rivals, she demanded a narco test for her husband and the girl to establish the truth.

Meanwhile, the SIT handed over its interim report to Arvind Kumar, Principal Secretary (Home), who submitted it to the CM. Late at night, the Principal Secretary said the probe into incidents leading to the death of victims father would be handed over to the CBI and an FIR would be filed against the MLA and others.

Surrender drama by MLA

In a dramatic late night development, rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar made a surprise appearance outside the Lucknow SSPs residence, triggering speculation that he might surrender, but left the place without handing himself over to the police. I came here to show to the media that I am not absconding. I am here, tell me what to do, a visibly unrepentant Sengar said. I am a disciplined BJP worker. I am innocent. I am being implicated. PTI

Modi must fast on rape too

The barbarism inflicted on a father seeking justice for his daughter in UP has shamed humanity. Hope the PM will soon observe a fast over atrocities against women, failed law and order and increasing anarchy under the BJPs watch, Congress president Rahul Gandhi Gandhi tweeted.

(With agency inputs)editorial@tribune.com

Shiv Kumar

Tribune News Service

Mumbai, April 11

A suicide note by a farmer blaming Prime Minister Narendra Modis government for the extreme step set off a political storm in Maharashtra on Wednesday.

According to police, Shankar Bhaurao Chawre, a 55-year old farmer from Rajurwadi village in Ghatanji tehsil of Yavatmal district, committed suicide on Tuesday by drinking pesticide. A six-page suicide note recovered from his possession said Chawre was suffering from a loan burden of nearly Rs4 lakh and he had lost his cotton crop to a bollworm attack, which would worsen his financial situation. I am committing suicide because of the loans and the Narendra Modi government is responsible for my suicide, the note said.

According to the police, Chawre first tried to hang himself but after the rope snapped he drank some pesticide. The farmer was rushed to a hospital but died on Tuesday afternoon. Chawres relatives refused to accept his body and demanded compensation from the government.

Chawre is survived by his wife and four children. The government announced a compensation of Rs1 lakh to his family. District administration officials said they were still trying to convince Chawres family to carry out his last rites.

Political blame gameamansharma@tribunemail.com

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 12

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is in touch with authorities to locate whereabouts of four members of an Indian family missing in California.

Sandeep Thottapilly (42), his wife Soumya (38) and children Sidhant (12) and Saachi (9) have been missing since April 5. The family was reportedly driving back from Portland when all contact was lost with them close to Klamath-Redwood National Park area.

"We are in touch with the state police and the highway police. We are trying to locate the whereabouts," said Raveesh Kumar, MEA spokesperson.

According to initial information available, the Eel river close to where the family was driving by was flooded and police are probing possibility of an accident having occurred as well.

Babu Subramaniam Thottapilly, Sandeep's father , a resident of Surat in Gujarat, reached out to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Twitter for urgent help.

"I am in constant touch with our Consulate in San Francisco. They are coordinating with the Police. Rest assured. We will spare no effort," wrote Swaraj on Twitter on Wednesday in response.editorial@tribune.com

Jitendra K Shrivastava

Tribune News Service

Patna, April 11

Former Bihar CM Rabri Devi and her two sons, Tejaswi and Tej Pratap Yadav, on Wednesday returned their state security cover, protesting withdrawal of guards from her residence here.

The government withdrew 32 personnel of the Bihar Military Police posted at 10 Circular Road  the official residence of Rabri Devi and her husband Lalu Prasad  after the CBI raided the place on Tuesday in connection with a IRCTC hotel tender case.

After a few hours of questioning, the government withdrew guards from our residence in Patna. If the house guards are withdrawn, we dont require personal security cover as well, Rabri said.

It is a conspiracy being hatched by the BJP to get all members of Lalus family killed. But we are not timid. God will save us and people and party workers will protect us on the ground, she said.

Calling it political vendetta by CM Nitish Kumar and his ally BJP, Rabris son Tejaswi Yadav, also the Leader of Opposition, said he and his brother, former Health Minister Tej Pratap Yadav, also asked the bodyguards to return to the police headquarters on Wednesday. Just now at the stroke of midnight, Nitish has called back house guards deployed in the security of the two ex-CMs. Surrendering our security to Nitish ji so that he can increase his own security as he is the most namby-pamby CM of the country, Tejaswi tweeted.

The former Bihar CM said whatever security guards were allotted to her husband had already been withdrawn when he was sent to jail on December 23, 2017, and remaining security guards were manned as per her capacity as ex-CM.

Lalu enjoyed Z-category security. Since he was convicted and in jail, no law allows him to be provided such security cover. So, the state government recalled house guards and not security covers being given to leader of Opposition Tejaswi and other members of the family, said JD-U legislator Sanjay Singh.

(With agency inputs)editorial@tribune.com

Nitin Jain

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 11

In a surprise development, the National Conference of Governors scheduled to be held in Chandigarh from May 18 to 20 has now been shifted to New Delhi and will be held as per the precedent at Rashtrapati Bhavan on June 4 and 5.

Government sources said a formal communication to this effect was sent to the UT Administration on Wednesday. However, the UT top brass remained tightlipped over the development.

Even as Rashtrapati Bhavan cited no reason behind the shifting of the conference from Chandigarh, it is learnt that the closure of the local airport (from May 12-31 for runway repairs) during that period was one of the major reasons behind the move.

It was for the first time that the National Conference of Governors was scheduled to be held in Chandigarh as all the previous 48 annual conferences had been held at Rashtrapati Bhavan only.

Ever since the UT Administration had got the information that the conference would be held in Chandigarh, it had been busy making elaborate arrangements for the mega event, which is presided over by the President. Besides the Vice-President, PM all 27 Governors and three Lieutenant Governors take part in it.

On April 6, Punjab Governor and UT Administrator VP Singh Badnore had called a high-level meeting to discuss the preparations.editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Lucknow, April 11

Amid a row over Dalit atrocities and resentment among party Dalit MPs, BJP chief Amit Shah started his Lucknow visit by paying floral tributes to Dalit reformer Jyotiba Phule on his 191st birth anniversary at the Samta Moolak crossing on Wednesday.

He was accompanied by UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and BJP state president Mahendra Nath Pandey. This was the first time that any BJP leader had visited the memorial constructed by the Mayawati regime, which faced criticism for wasting public money on the Dalit memorials.

Later, Shah held a series of meetings at the CMs 5 Kalidas road residence. He also met RSS leader Shiv Praaksh and held one-to-one meetings with members of alliance partners  Apna Dal and Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party.

These meetings, lasted for almost six hours, were aimed at ironing out the wrinkles between the party and the government and resolving differences between Yogi and his deputy Keshav Prasad Maurya and issues with allies. Shah is believed to have asked the government and the party to work in tandem and send out messages that there are no differences.

Shah reportedly directed the CM and his deputies to pay attention to party workers and their problems while the party has been asked to ensure that the government achievements reach at the grassroots level. He also directed the government to improve the law-and-order situation and act firmly, especially while dealing with cases related to Dalit atrocities.

Sources said transfers could take place to improve the government functioning following discussions that some bureaucrats are trying to drive a wedge between the party and the government.gspannu7@gmail.com

Ravi S Singh

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 12

Independent MLA from Gujarat and Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani said here on Thursday he will continue his campaign against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, including in the upcoming Karnataka Assembly elections.

I am not deterred by the Karnataka Police filing an FIR against me for giving a call to disrupt Modis public meetings for not fulfilling his promise to provide jobs to youths, Mevani said.

Mevani had given the questionable call at a public meeting in Karnataka during his election tour in the state.

The Dalit leader had shot into limelight on account of his campaign against the Gujarat Government, a few months before the Assembly elections in the state against atrocities on Dalits by cow vigilantes.

Although it was not officially declared he was subsequently supported by the Congress in the state.

Mevani, who is presently in the national capital, said he will organise two conferences, on March 26 and 27, in Karnataka to highlight the failures of the Modi government in fulfilling the promises of jobs to youths, and on Dalit rights issues. He declined to divulge the venues.

I will support any candidate and party which will defeat nominees of the BJP in Karnataka. I will do the same in the other states, especially Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh where Assembly elections are due this year, he added.

Outlining his game plan against the BJP with electoral contest for Assembly elections in the states and in 2019 General Elections, he said he will mobilise Dalits and Muslim minorities on a common platform.rchopra@tribunemail.com

Shahira Naim

Tribune News Service

Lucknow, April 12

Uttar Pradesh Police has decided to hand over the alleged gangrape of the 17-year-old minor and the related custodial death of the survivors father to the CBI.

Addressing a joint press conference, Principal Secretary Home Arvind Kumar and DGP OP Singh said the CBI would decide whether to arrest Bangarmau MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar.

On Wednesday night, on the complaint of the survivors mother an FIR was registered against the MLA and his associate Shashi Singh at the Makhi police station in Unnao.

The FIR was registered against Sections 363 (kidnapping), 366 (kidnapping, abduction or inducing woman to compel her marriage), 376 (rape), 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC and Section 3 and 4 (penetrative sexual assault) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO Act).

However, despite the serious sections, DGP OP Singh continued to refer to the MLA as a manniya (honourable) saying that he was not a convict and merely an accused.

Will not take long to decide on fighter jets: Modi

Replying to a question about when he would be arrested, the DGP virtually ruled out his early arrest when he said that now the case had been handed over to CBI, therefore it was the prerogative of the central agency to arrest him based on the facts of the case.

Principal Secretary Home said three reports had been submitted to the government in the matter on Wednesday.

One was the interim report submitted by the SIT team headed by ADG Lucknow Zone Rajeev Krishna after the Unnao visit as well as a separate inquiry report of DIG Prison Love Kumar on the role of the Unnao jail administration for the period of the survivors fathers detention.

A third report had been obtained from DM Unnao on the lapses on the part of the Unnao district hospital where the deceased was sent for examination before and during his detention.

Kumar said it was on the basis of these three reports that the FIR was lodged against the MLA and others under the appropriate sections and the decision to hand over the case to CBI was taken to ensure a transparent investigation by a third agency.

The cross-case pertaining the April 2 incident of violence leading to the death of the survivors father is also being handed over to the CBI.

The Chief Medical Superintendent of the Unnao district hospital Dr D K Dwivedi and Emergency Medical Officer Dr Prashant Upadhyay have also been placed under suspension.

Disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against three more doctors, namely ortho-surgeon Dr Manoj Kumar, surgeon Dr GP Sachan and Emergency Medical Officer Dr Gaurav Agarwal, for laxity in giving proper medical care and treatment to the survivors father both prior to judicial custody and on referral from jail while still under judicial custody.

CO Safipur Kunwar Bahadur Singh has also been suspended for negligence in handling the repeated complaints given by the victim.

Principal Secretary Home also said that the survivor and her family had been provided adequate security.

He said the SIT would continue its work of gathering evidence till the CBI formally took over the case.Washington D.C., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Organic Trade Association this week ratcheted up its court battle against the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the agencys failure to put into effect new organic livestock standards, with two of Americas most influential animal welfare groups joining the association in its ongoing legal fight to uphold the integrity of organic standards.



In a new filing that revised the original complaint against USDA to reflect the departments move to withdraw the rule, the Organic Trade Association was joined by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) as co-plaintiffs in the suit.



USDA on March 13 announced its intention to withdraw the final regulation on May 13, contending that the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) gives the National Organic Program the authority to regulate only veterinary medications, not animal care, welfare or production standards. The Organic Trade Associations amended complaint --filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia -- argues that this new claim by USDA is a novel and erroneous view of OFPA that conflicts with every prior administrations approach to rulemaking under the OFPA and the National Organic Standards Board.



We welcome the critical support of our friends in the animal welfare community in standing up against the Administrations attack on this important organic standard, said Laura Batcha, CEO and Executive Director of the Organic Trade Association. In USDAs attempt to kill this fully vetted final regulation, theyve taken a radical departure from conclusions reached over more than 20 years of rulemakings regarding organic livestock care, and have assumed an aberrant view that has no historical basis or legal justification.



The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is North Americas oldest humane organization with roughly 2.7 million supporters nationwide. The Animal Welfare Institute is a non-profit charitable organization dedicated to reducing animal suffering caused by people, and has sought to improve the welfare of farm animals since the early 1950s.



The Organic Trade Association is also challenging USDAs assertion that it does not have to consult with the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) -- the advisory board to the National Organic Program established by OFPA  before withdrawing the regulation.



The organic standard-making process established by Congress requires consultation with the National Organic Standards Board to make or amend existing organic standards, said Batcha. The day the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices final regulation was published, it became the regulation of the National Organic Program. Withdrawal of this regulation requires NOSBs consultation and review.



The Organic Trade Association said that USDA continues to flagrantly disregard and refuse to consider the overwhelming support from the public for the organic animal welfare rule.



USDA knows the public overwhelmingly supports the implementation of the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices (OLPP) regulation. Indeed, in its announcement to withdraw the rule, USDA noted that out of the 72,000 comments it received, over 63,000 opposed the withdrawal of the final rule, and that only 50 supported its withdrawal, said Batcha. But despite the clear evidence of the public sentiment, USDA is acting against the will of the public, and the will of the organic sector."



The Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices final rule was published on Jan. 19, 2017, after more than a decade of extensive public input and a thorough vetting process. Before the final withdrawal, the government had attempted six times  either through the rulemaking process or through court filings -- to delay the implementation of the rule.



The regulation addresses four broad areas of organic livestock and poultry practices: living conditions, animal healthcare, transport, and slaughter. Most importantly, it stops the use of porches from being allowed in organic poultry production and requires producers to give their poultry access to the outdoors.



The Organic Trade Association filed its lawsuit against USDA last September over the departments delays in the implementation of the OLPP regulation. The lawsuit argues that USDA violated the Organic Foods Production Act by failing to consult with NOSB on the rollback of the final organic standard, and unlawfully delayed the effective date of the final livestock standards developed by industry and in accordance with the established rulemaking processes. The suit also argues that USDA issued its repeated delays without the required public process, and that USDA ignored the overwhelming public record established in support of these organic standards. Those arguments still stand.



Since the filing of the lawsuit, support for the legal action against USDA has grown. A host of organic stakeholders representing thousands of organic farming families, organic certifiers and organic policymakers  along with leading retail brands and groups speaking out for millions of consumers -- have supported the suit as declarants harmed by the USDA action. The declarants include:

George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley/CROPP Cooperative;

Gina Asoudegan, Vice President of Mission and Innovation Strategy for Applegate;

Jesse Laflamme, co-founder of Pete & Gerrys Eggs;

Robynn Schrader, CEO of National Co+op Grocers;

Kyla Smith, Chair of Directors for the Accredited Certifiers Association (ACA);

Tom Chapman, Chairman of the National Organic Standards Board and Director of Ingredient Sourcing at Clif Bar & Company.

In addition to the lawsuits co-plaintiffs, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) filed a separate lawsuit on Jan. 12 against USDA for withdrawing the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices regulation. HSUS is the largest animal protection group in the country with some 10 million members.

Support for our lawsuit is rapidly growing, said Batcha. Being organic is a choice, and all of our organic stakeholders  from farmers to retailers  work hard every day to voluntarily abide by organic standards. They want clear consistent standards. Consumers want clear consistent organic standards. We call upon the government to act responsibly as the steward of our federal organic program. That is what the organic community wants, what consumers expect and what the law mandates.

View the complete amended complaint from the Organic Trade Association.



For the complete background on this issue, see https://ota.com/livestockpractices.

The Organic Trade Association (OTA) is the membership-based business association for organic agriculture and products in North America. OTA is the leading voice for the organic trade in the United States, representing over 9,500 organic businesses across 50 states. Its members include growers, shippers, processors, certifiers, farmers' associations, distributors, importers, exporters, consultants, retailers and others. OTAs Board of Directors is democratically elected by its members. OTA's mission is to promote and protect ORGANIC with a unifying voice that serves and engages its diverse members from farm to marketplace. The Organic Trade Association does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, disability, political beliefs, sexual orientation or marital/family status. Persons with disabilities, who require alternative means for communication of program information, should contact us.gspannu7@gmail.com

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 12

India and UK hope to ink a revised pact on return of illegal immigrants when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits London this month for the Commonwealth Summit. The existing agreement ended in 2014.

The MoU seeks to ensure the return of persons who have no lawful basis to be in the territory of the other party after verification of nationality to its satisfaction.

The agreement will also help provide information to police about known criminals, including sex offenders, on both sides.

As and when we are informed that someone is illegal and the status has been confirmed by Indian High Commission in London, we have a mechanism to bring them back. We ended the process in 2014, but we still have the procedure in place, said K Nagaraj Naidu, Joint Secretary, Europe West.

However, India disagrees with UK Homeland authorities that number of Indians overstaying their visas run into several thousands.

Indian officials argue that once the individual claims to have lost their passport, ascertaining identity could be time taking and all South Asian migrants must not be profiled as Indians.

Officials also point out that post 2008 Indian Passport Issuing Authority has captured biometric data of individuals which is easier to compare with British database.

But passports issued prior to 2008 are complicated ones. In the last ten years, only some 5000 Indians have been deported back, said Naidu.

Most of these returning Indians belonged to Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu among others, he said.

The Cabinet that approved the MoU on Wednesday said it will streamline procedure of return of nationals who are caught to be staying illegally, belonging to the other party in a specified time-frame.

Under the revised Returns Agreement, if an individual is proved 100 per cent as Indian by authorities on both sides, then deportation must happen with 15 days. The time period is 70 days for individuals whose records are not found in the passport database, since it would require local administration ascertaining in such cases.

The nationals set to return are then issued emergency certificates instead of passports to fly back to India.

Modi who will hold formal talks with counterpart Theresa May during his Commonwealth visit, and will also call on the Queen and hold a diaspora interaction.pardeepdhull@gmail.com

New Delhi, April 12

Two Peru nationals, including a woman, were arrested by the NCB from the Mumbai airport for allegedly smuggling into the country over 4r kg of cocaine, officials said on Thursday.

Michael (35) and Mariya (25) were intercepted on Wednesday, when they landed in Mumbai from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, they said.

The operation was based on an input provided by the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the officials said.

They were arrested under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act and 4.3 kg of high grade cocaine was seized from them, they said.

This is the second instance of smuggling this year in which high quantity of cocaine, a party drug, was seized.

The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) had seized about four kg of cocaine in Cochin earlier this year.

In an another narcotics case, the agency had arrested three people and seized 56.8 kg of opium and 19.93 kg of poppy straw in Rajasthans Ajmer district yesterday.

This is the biggest seizure of opium in the country this year by any agency, they said.

The contraband was seized from the Piplaj Toll plaza on the National Highway-8 and the operation was conducted after surveillance of the area and the accused, they added.

The source of the contraband is suspected to be from Jharkhands Chatra district, the officials said. PTIamansharma@tribunemail.com

New Delhi, April 12

Congress chief Rahul Gandhi led a midnight candlenight march to the India Gate here to protest the Kathua and Unnao rape cases with the party leaders alleging that the daughters of the country were not safe in the Modi regime.

Gandhi was joined by his sister Priyanka and her husband Robert Vadra, as also scores of Congress leaders, party workers and students, who shouted slogans against the Modi government and the state governments in Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir and demanded urgent action against the perpetrators of two heinous gangrapes -- one in Unnao (UP) and the other in Kathua (J&K).

Several Congress leaders, however, asked the people in the march to keep it a "silent" protest.

Some people were seen having brought their children as well.

The Congress leaders present at the protest march to the India Gate, which in the past has seen a huge protest in the Nirbhaya rape case, included Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Salman Khurshid, Ashok Gehlot, Ajay Maken, Sushmita Dev, Haroon Yusuf, Randeep Surjewala and Ambika Soni.

Azad said the Modi government was sleeping and those facing the biggest threat were the daughters of the country during the current regime.

Several Congress leaders also poked fun at the Modi government's Beti Bachao slogan, saying the daughters were not safe in the country.

Announcing the march, Gandhi had tweeted in the evening, "Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does."

Earlier in the day, Gandhi had expressed anguish and shock on the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua, and attacked the BJP government in UP for failing to act against its MLA, who is an accused in the Unnao rape case of a 17-year-old girl.

"How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil? What happened at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished. What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?" he said.

Gandhi joined the protest near the Man Singh Road at 11.55 pm.

The police had barricaded all the routes leading to India Gate.

DPCC President Ajay Maken said, "Atrocities are being committed against women in the country and the government is sleeping. The BJP is not only involved directly, it is also protesting in favour of the culprits and stopping law enforcement agencies from doing their job. It is a sad state of affairs." PTImonicakchauhan@gmail.com

Yash Goyal

Our Correspondent

Jaipur, April 12



Congress leader Ashok Gehlot on Thursday said Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje should take moral responsibility over deteriorating law and order situation in the state and resign.

He condemned the police atrocities on the SC/ST in parts of Rajasthan on Dalits' Bharat Bandh on April 2.

"The police firing in Alwar in which one person was killed and Hindaun's arson incident in which BJP woman MLA and Congress leaders houses were set on fire were deplorable. The Chief Minister failed to control the situation and could not assess the unrest even after the intelligence inputs, he said.

He said the Bharat Bandh on April 10 was very peaceful and incident free.

The government had lost faith in public. The CM's tours are being cancelled time and again, and their ministers and MLAs cannot enter their constituencies as villagers and farmers are showing resentments, he said.amansharma@tribunemail.com

Lucknow, April 11

Two days after the father of a woman, who alleged rape by a BJP MLA, died in custody in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh, the politician's wife on Wednesday demanded a narco test on her husband and the survivor.

The 18-year-old woman, who had tried to kill herself outside the Chief Minister's house here, on the other hand alleged that she had been confined to a hotel room by the district administration and her uncle was killed by the MLA's brother and henchmen, who later also killed her father.

She said, "I want justice, why are they pressuring me for an apology? Do they want my (another) uncle to be killed too?" A purported video also surfaced today and was being run on TV channels showing the alleged rape survivor's father before his death saying that he was mercilessly beaten up by the MLA's brother and others, including with rifle butts.

The video, purportedly shot at a hospital, showed the deceased person's back with serious wounds.

Meanwhile in the state capital, Sangeeta Sengar, wife of the MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, told reporters after meeting DGP OP Singh that there was a political conspiracy against her family and accused the complainant of not being consistent in her statements.

"We demand that a narco test be conducted on my husband and the girl as well as her uncle. This will help in ascertaining the truth and presenting the correct picture.

"We have full sympathy with the girl, as her modesty was outraged... There are political reasons behind this and my husband has been made a pawn," Sangeeta Sengar said.

"My husband is innocent and it is my request that he should not be called a rapist. He has been in politics for the past 15 years and has been serving the society and people," she said, adding, her daughters were unable to concentrate on their studies in the wake of this incident.

She said the allegations against her brother-in-law Atul were false too.

On whether her husband should resign from the UP Assembly, she retorted, "Why should he quit even before he is declared guilty? Merely on the basis of charges, why should he resign?"

She said she wanted to meet Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and apprise him of the facts.

Besides the MLA's wife, the alleged rape victim has also demanded a CBI probe in the entire matter.

The victim claimed that the district administration in Unnao had virtually confined her to a hotel room "without a phone or water and guards at every corner".

"I can't charge my mobile, there is no TV, no water. We are told we can't go outside," the girl told a TV news channel.

"We are told we can't go outside, there are guards at every corner. When we ask them for help, they say it isn't their job. Is this justice?" the girl said.

The MLA's brother Atul was arrested yesterday from Unnao by a crime branch team.

A Special Investigation Team headed by Additional Director General of Police (Lucknow zone) visited Makhi village of the rape victim and collected information to submit a report to the chief minister.

"The SIT team will probe on all the aspects of the case and act accordingly. Security has been provided to the victim's family," ADGP (Lucknow zone) Rajiv Krishna said.

TV news channels ran the comments made purportedly by the alleged victim's father before his death in which he claimed that he was mercilessly beaten up by the MLA's brother.

The Supreme Court said today it will hear next week the plea for a CBI probe into the case. The Allahabad High Court has ordered that the deceased's body should not be cremated, if already not done so.

However, the mortal remains of the deceased were consigned to the flames yesterday, hours after his custodial death.

The Congress demanded the dismissal of Uttar Pradesh chief minister, dubbing his government a "Ravan" regime which has failed to protect women.

"The Yogi Adityanath government is a government of Ravan, which has failed to protect women," Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said in New Delhi. - PTIrchopra@tribunemail.com

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

Chennai, April 12

Within a week of the new tender from India to get 110 fighter jets for the Indian Air Force, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday assured foreign companies that they would not spend a decade on it.

The obvious reference has come as the foreign industry is skeptical that the tender is a re-run of the scrapped tender to buy 126 fighter jets. It was started in 2004 and scrapped in 2015 after years of trials, discussions and cost negotiations.

Speaking at the def-expo-2018, the Prime Minister mentioned the long-drawn process of fighter jets and took a dig at the previous UPA government saying issues which should have been long addressed are being resolved now.

We have not only taken bold action to meet immediate requirement (purchased 36 Rafale jets) we have started a new process for 110 jets, he said, adding, We will not spend 10 years without any tangible outcome.

Taking another dig at the UPA, he said the policy paralysis that had set in the defence sector is a thing of the past. It shall not happen again. He cited how the issue of bulletproof jackets to soldiers was kept hanging for years.

Addressing concerns of the industry, he said, Our goal is not merely to tinker but to transform. We want to move fast, but with no shortcuts. I am aware we need to do a lot more; we are committed to doing so. Our dream is to develop an eco system.

The PM said the government would undertake extensive consultation with all stakeholders with Indian and foreign companies for the defence production policy (a draft has been released and 100 suggestions have come) and also the defence procurement policy. Our aim is not just to discuss but to draw right lessons. Our intention is to listen and not merely lecture, Modi added.

It is strategically imperative to make in India, Make for India and supply from India.

He suggested the setting up of a defence industrial complex which would have room for public sector undertakings, Indian and foreign firms. I understand its not that simple. Many pieces of this puzzle need to fit together.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the def-expo showcased the best of equipment and military ammunition by leading producers.

She said, Not only are we going to buy from various manufacturers. Fifty per cent of this expo today has Indian manufacturers. On the defence production corridor, Sitharaman said, We hope to go with great speed to have these activated and performing so that India realised the dream of being a manufacturing hub.

We have allowed great flexibility for foreign companies and more policies are being relaxed, she said.

The programme was telecast live to 35 Indian embassies in Nepal, Bhutan, Nigeria and Afghanistan, among others.

Modi launched the innovation of defence excellence (IDEX), a new scheme that looks to work with start-ups doing technology.rchopra@tribunemail.com

GS Paul

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, April 12

In the wake of the outrage against the SGPC and Akal Takht for endorsing the film Nanak Shah Fakir for an all-India release, barring Punjab, SGPC chief secretary Roop Singh on Thursday apologised to the Sikhs through social media for granting permission to the film.

He said it was a blunder on his part to issue such a letter.

Referring to the letter issued under his signature on March 19, directing the gurdwaras to prominently display the posters of the film so that the devotees should get aware of the film based on Guru Nanak, Singh, in his message, submitted that the letter was withdrawn on March 29.

He clarified that he had issued the letter only on the basis of an earlier letter issued by his predecessor after a sub-committee had recommended it. To substantiate his claim, he also posted the letter dated May 13, 2016, which reads, It is in continuation to the letter number 31424 and now after the film is seen by the appointed committee of Shiromani Gurdwara Parbhandak Committee, we have no objection in granting you the permission for the release of the film Nanak Shah Fakir.

Earlier, On January 22, 2015, Akal Takht Jathedar Giani Gurbachan Singh had issued a congratulatory letter addressed to the film-maker Harinder Singh Sikka terming it as a praiseworthy step. This is a fine example of promotion of Sikh faith, it read.

However, following the protest, the Akal Takht Jathedar thought the screening of the film could create unrest and vitiate peace.

The Akal Takht Jathedar has called up an emergency meeting of Five High Priests over the issue, which is under way.amansharma@tribunemail.com

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, April 12

The Akal Takht on Thursday ex-communicated the maker of controversial film Nanak Shah Fakir from the panth.

The decision taken by five high priests on Thursday at Akal Takht secretariat. Akal Takht jathedar Gurbachan Singh pronounced the decision of clergy from the podium of the highest temporal seat.

Gurbachan Singh said despite repeated warnings film-maker Harinder Singh Sikka was adament to release the movie that has caused widespread outrage. So it was decided to boycott Sikka socially from all spheres.

The jathedar added that the members of SGPC's earlier sub-commmittee which had endorsed the film in 2016, too, would be summoned at the Akal Takht.

All earlier communications/circulars stood null and void, he said.

The Sikh community was appealed to stage protest if the film is released, but in a peaceful manner. The jathedar also issued a cautionary note for the cinema hall owners that they would be solely responsible for any loss to their property in case the film is screened.monicakchauhan@gmail.com

Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, April 12

The Supreme Court on Thursday once again refused to vacate its order for nationwide release of 'Nanak Shah Fakir' and posted Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee's petition against the film for hearing on Monday.

The controversial film -- based on the life and teachings of Sikhism's founder Guru Nanak Dev -- is slated for release on Friday.

After the Supreme Court, the Delhi High Court also refused to stay the release of the movie.

The Delhi High Court said it was unbelievable that the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC), which has filed the petition challenging the no objection certificate issued by the Censor Board, was not aware of the making of film till now.

A Bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar said the release of the film cannot be interdicted.

The court directed the Centre to ensure maintenance of law and order and made it clear that it was not granting any ex-parte relief to DSGMC without hearing the film producer.

Also read:

Nanak Shah Fakir row: SGPC chief secretary tenders apology

Akal Takht ex-communicates maker of Nanak Shah Fakir from panth

In Supreme Court, senior advocate PS Patwalia mentioned it again at 2 pm before a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and requested him to advance the hearing from Monday to Friday.

"Nothing would be left on Monday...Please hear it on Friday," he requested the CJI, who turned it down.

As the Bench told him that as a senior advocate he could not mention a case, advocate Satinder Singh Gulati tried to make the same request to the court.

But the Bench said, "You can't mention it twice."

The SGPC, which approached the top court against the release of the film, has contended that it was a statutory religious body having genuine religious grievance against anybody playing the role of a Sikh guru or his relative in the film.

The Bench -- which had on Tuesday criticised the SGPC for attempting to impose restrictions on the film -- said in the morning that a film certified by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) did not require SGPC's approval for its release for public viewing.

A statutory religious body like the SGPC cannot attack the certificate given by the CBFC to the film for screening in cinema halls, the Bench said in the morning while posting the matter for hearing on Monday.

Once the CBFC gives clearance to a film, no one can object to its release without taking recourse to lawful means, it noted.

Repeatedly requesting the top court to vacate its order for release of Nanak Shah Fakir, Gulati had mentioned the petition for urgent hearing before the CJI's Bench in the morning.The SGPC said there was a resolution of the statutory body adopted in 2003, which said no one should depict the role of any Sikh guru or any of their family members.

The top court had on Tuesday cleared the decks for a nationwide release of controversial film 'Nanak Shah Fakir' on April 13, saying there cannot be any obstruction to exhibition of a film after grant of certificate by the CBFC.

A three-judge Bench headed by CJI Misra had criticised the SGPC for attempting to impose restrictions on the film.

No group, body, association or individuals can create any kind of disturbance in exhibition of the film after the CBFC certification, it had said.

In any case, such bodies, groups or individuals cannot assume the position as if they are the authorities to grant certificate or unless they feel that the movie is to be released, it should not see the light of the day. The thought, the least said, is unacceptable, the Bench, which also included Justice AM Khanwilkar and Justice DY Chandrachud, had said.

Producer Harinder S Sikka, a retired Naval officer, had petitioned the top court claiming that the SGPC had recently banned the release of the film -- based on the life and teachings of Sikhism's founder Guru Nanak Dev -- even after the CBFC gave its nod on March 28.

Issuing notice to the Centre and all states, the Bench asked them to ensure that law and order was maintained and no one was allowed to create any disturbance in states where the film was released.

The Bench, which has been vocal in its support for creative freedom of filmmakers in recent times, posted the producer's for further hearing on May 8.

Once the film is granted certificate by the competent statutory board, unless the said certificate is nullified or modified by any superior authority, the producer or distributor of the film has every right to get it exhibited in a movie hall, the Bench had said. If such activities were encouraged, it could potentially bring in "anarchy and cripple the right of freedom of speech and expression", it had noted.

It is the duty of the state to facilitate the enjoyment of right, which has the sanction of law, the top court said and directed the petitioner to communicate its order via e-mail to all the concerned authorities, so that needful can be done.

The Bench had said it was yet another example of a private body attempting to curtail freedom of expression of an author who scripted an idea in celluloid language.

Sikka, in his plea, had sought protection of the fundamental right of speech and expression and propagation of religious views, which, he claimed, was being curtailed by certain sections having vested interests in scuttling the release of the movie.

The film was initially cleared by the CBFC on March 30, 2015, and slated for release in April 2015, but after large scale protests, it was banned in Punjab for two months. Thereafter, Sikka had withdrawn its worldwide release.

He had claimed to have carried out necessary modification as suggested by the SGPC and again approached the CBFC, which cleared the movie on March 28, 2018. But the SGPC is said to have withdrawn its support to the movie on March 30.  With agency inputsNotice is given that the Annual General Meeting of Norsk Hydro ASA will be held at the company's office at Vker, Drammensveien 260, 0283 Oslo, on Monday 7 May 2018 at 14:00 (CEST).



The full notice, agenda and appendices are attached.



All relevant documents can be found on www.hydro.com/generalmeeting



Investor contact

Contact Stian Hasle

Cellular +47 97736022

E-mail Stian.Hasle@hydro.comharinder@tribunemail.com

WE cannot help thinking that the Government of Bengal have made a blunder in taking undue notice of a part of the speech delivered by the President of the last session of the Bengal Provincial Conference which, so far as we are aware, excited no interest in any quarter except one. The exception is a certain Anglo-Indian journal of Calcutta which suggested both in its correspondence columns and otherwise that the President should be asked to explain what he meant. Extraordinary as this suggestion was, the Bengal Government have actually improved upon it. The journal asked that the explanation should be asked that the explanation should be asked by the President's European colleagues in the Council. The Government went out of its way to ask the explanation itself. This would have been unfortunate at any time.shalender@tribune.com

Kabul: The Taliban have claimed responsibility for a blistering attack on a government compound in Afghanistans central province of Ghazni that killed at least 15 members of the security forces and three officials. Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said over the telephone that after the attack in the Khuja Omari district, not far from the provincial capital also called Ghazni, all security posts in the district were under Taliban control. AP

6 Lankan ministers quit Sirisena govt

Colombo: Six ministers of President Maithripala Sirisena-led unity government in Sri Lanka resigned, days after they voted in favour of a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The ministers from the Sirisena-led ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which is a coalition partner in the unity government with the Wickremesinghe-led United National Party, sent their resignation to the President on Tuesday night. PTI

Uproar as no girls for Japan sumo event

Tokyo: Japans sumo association came under fire for sexism again on Thursday after requesting girls be prevented from participating in events showcasing the traditional sport. Sumo has been in the headlines in recent weeks after a woman politician was barred from giving a speech from the ring. In the past, girls and boys have both been allowed to get in the ring and grapple with the sports famously hefty stars. AFPpardeepdhull@gmail.com

Sydney, April 12

Australias Prime Minister admitted on Thursday bubbling tensions with China over allegations of Beijing meddling in domestic politics, but denied there was a deep chill in relations after reports ministers were being refused visas.

Bilateral ties took a dive late last year when Canberra announced wide-ranging reforms to espionage and foreign interference legislation, singling out China as a focus of concern.

It sparked a furious response from Beijing, which summoned Australias ambassador and attacked local media stories about infiltration, describing them as fabrications based on hysteria and paranoia.

The ice has yet to thaw, with another spat in January prompting Beijing to lodge a formal diplomatic protest after a senior Australian minister called Chinese infrastructure projects in the Pacific white elephants.

The Australian Financial Review said today Chinas leadership was so incensed by Canberras rhetoric that it was regularly refusing visas to ministers and a major annual showcase of Australian trade and business in China looked certain to be abandoned this year.

The newspaper characterised it as a deep chill with the countrys top trading partner, but Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was keen to play the story down.

There has certainly has been a degree of tension in the relationship that has arisen because of criticism in China about our foreign interference laws, he told the radio station 3AW in Melbourne.

All I would say is there has clearly been some misunderstandings and mischaracterisations of our foreign interference legislation in the Chinese media. He added that while his government had a very strong and respectful relationship with China, we do everything we can to ensure any foreign interference in our politics is open and declared.

Reforms to espionage and foreign interference laws were proposed after Australias spy agency raised concerns that China was interfering in local institutions and using the political donations system to gain access.

The frosty relations were highlighted by Australia not sending a minister to the recent Boao Forum - dubbed the Asian Davos - which Chinese President Xi Jinping attended and where Canberra usually has high-level representation.

The Financial Review noted that Foreign Minister Julie Bishop had not visited China for more than two years and Turnbull was last on the Chinese mainland to attend the G20 summit in September 2016.

When pressed on whether ministers had been declined visas to visit China, Turnbull replied: I wouldnt go that far, while declining to give a yes or no answer.  AFPshalender@tribune.com

Dhaka, April 11

Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina has decided to scrap the quota system in government services after thousands of students marched across the country in protest against a controversial policy of setting aside jobs for special groups.

In Dhaka, mobs of students blockaded major roads, bringing traffic to a standstill. Police were deployed to the Dhaka University where clashes in recent days left more than 100 students injured by tear gas and rubber bullets.

Hasina has suggested abolishing the quota system for government jobs altogether. The quota system will be abolished as the students do not want it, she said in parliament. An apparently annoyed premier added that, they have demonstrated enough protests, now let them return home.

She said classes and examinations were suspended at all universities while the protests exposed ordinary people to worst sufferings which they dont deserve.

The premier, however, said the government could make special arrangements for jobs for the people with disabilities and the backward ethnic minority ones.

The students began the protests on Sunday against discriminatory quotas for government jobs, leaving scores of people injured at the Dhaka University. A group of protesters broke into the vice-chancellors campus residence, forcing his panicked family to go into hiding.  PTIeditorial@tribune.com

Washington, April 11

Facebook is committed to ensure the integrity of elections in countries like India, Pakistan and the US, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said as he was questioned for nearly five hours by senators over the Cambridge Analytica scandal that has shaken the social media giant.

Zuckerbergs first day of testimony came after it was recently revealed that the British marketing firm Cambridge Analytica tied to US President Donald Trumps 2016 campaign improperly collected profile data of up to 87 million Facebook users.

The scandal shook confidence in Facebook.

Zuckerberg, 33, who is also the founder of Facebook, said data privacy and foreign interference in elections were topics that they have discussed at board meetings.

These are some of the biggest issues that the company has faced, and we feel a huge responsibility to get these right, he told lawmakers, adding that this is one of my top priorities in 2018.

2018 is an incredibly important year. Not just in the US mid-terms, but, around the world, there are important elections  in India, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan and Hungary. We want to make sure we do everything we can to protect the integrity of these poll, he said. What were going to do is to ask a valid government identity and were going to verify the location, he added.  Agenciesmonicakchauhan@gmail.com

Washington, April 12

The Cambridge Analytica scandal in which personal data of over 87 million Facebook users, including 500,000 Indians, was compromised, has not hit the social media platform in a significant way in terms of people deactivating their accounts, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said.

Zuckerberg, 33, also the founder of Facebook, acknowledged this during a Congressional hearing yesterday, his second in two days, on issues related on data privacy and security in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

"Yes," Zuckerberg said when Congresswoman Dana Louise DeGette asked whether Facebook has witnessed no significant increase in users deactivating their accounts.

"Yes, that's correct," he said when DeGette asked since the revelations, Facebook has also not noticed a decrease in user interaction on Facebook.

Zuckerberg said as a result of the scandal, and the questions raised, Facebook is going to put, at the top of everyone's app when they sign in, a tool that walks people through the settings and gives people the choices and asks them to make decisions on how they want their settings be set.

Everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls, he said.

"We have had a lot of these controls in place for years. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requires us to do a few more things, and we're going to extend that to the world, he told lawmakers.

The GDPR is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union.

Introduced by the European Union, GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation requires that the company's request for user consent in a clear and concise way, using language that is understandable,

It is prescription on how companies treat consumer data. And it makes it clear that consumers need to be in control of their own data.

I think we may be updating it a little bit. But, as you say, we've had the ability to download your information for years now. And people have the ability to see everything that they have in Facebook, to take that out, delete their account and move their data anywhere that they want," he said.

Responding to a question, Zuckerberg acknowledged that a lot of people probably just accept terms of service without taking the time to read through it.

"I view our responsibility not as just legally complying with laying it out and getting that consent, but actually trying to make sure that people understand what's happening throughout the product," he said.

That's why, every single time that you share something on Facebook or one of our services, right there is a control in line, where you control who you want to share with, because I don't just think that this is about a terms of service. It's contextual," he noted.

You want to present people with the information about what they might be doing and give them the relevant controls in line, at the time that they're making those decisions, not just have it be in the background sometime, or make a one-time decision," he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has the ability to detect when a foreign entity is attempting to buy a political advertisement. "This is an extremely important area. After we were slow to identify the Russian information operations in 2016, this has become a top priority for our company to prevent that from ever happening again, especially this year, in 2018, which is such an important election year with the US mid-terms, but also major elections in India, Brazil, Mexico, Hungary, Pakistan and a number of other places," he said.

Facebook is working on a number of things, including deploying new Artificial Intelligence tools that can proactively catch fake accounts that Russia or others might create to spread misinformation.

The social media company, he said, is not aware of any specific groups like that, that have engaged in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville last year.

"We are conducting a full investigation of any apps that had access to a large amount of data. And, if we find anything suspicious, we'll tell everyone affected," he said. PTIpardeepdhull@gmail.com

Kabul, April 12

Sales of Afghanistans ancient carpet-weaving industry have dropped by half in the past year as war with Taliban militants heats up and neighbouring Pakistan clamps down on border traffic.

Prized by buyers as much for their artistry as utility, carpets are still a chief export of the impoverished nation, but their share has shrunk to six percent from 27 percent within less than a decade.

War, poverty and the transport constraints of a landlocked country have shredded sales for an industry that experts say dates back at least 2,500 years. Legend holds that Alexander the Great sent a carpet from the area to his mother.

At a factory in Kabul, the capital, women weave on looms while men in dust-masks sort heaps of wool.

We have invited a lot (of buyers), said Diljam Manan Qassimy, a manager at the factory, Afghanistan Rugs and Carpet Center.

But they say, No, it is impossible to come, because of the blood and security problems. This is the sad tragedy. Violence has surged in Kabul, with attacks in the last year ranging from a truck bomb that killed at least 80 people and an ambulance bomb that killed 100, to a hotel raid that killed 20.

Carpets ranked fourth among Afghanistans legal exports at $38 million in the 2016-17 fiscal year, its Central Statistics Organization says. More than 85 percent went to Pakistan.

The export figure dropped by more than half from $89.5 million a year earlier. That in turn was a plunge from more peaceful times eight years earlier, when exports stood at $150 million.

Sales prospects are no brighter at home, as few Afghans can afford carpets that cost between $70 and $250 per square metre, outstripping the average monthly income.

Landlocked nations woes

Reliance on Pakistan and its seaports leaves Afghan sellers vulnerable to frequent border control changes over the neighbours mutual accusations of failing to rein in cross-border militant attacks.

Last year, a major border crossing at Torkham closed for 40 days, Qassimy said.

Traders from Pakistan can earn a premium ranging from 10 percent to 15 percent by buying Afghan carpets and re-exporting them, said Pervez Hussain, who owns a Pakistani retailer, Afghan Carpets.

People dont go to Afghanistan, and their washing methods are not that good, so the carpets come to Pakistan and are washed here and are exported from here, he said.

Both countries industries benefit by working together, he added.

There are a lot of big Afghan traders who are in Pakistan and they export directly from here, he said.

Qassimys Kabul factory has found ways to sell carpets to Australian, British and German buyers by opening showrooms in those countries. But his costs for air transport are triple those of a typical Pakistani vendor, who can use his countrys seaports instead.

The disparity keeps margins tight, forcing him to charge higher prices and pay workers lower wages, Qassimy said.

The industry spans many Arabic and Asian nations. But most Afghan carpets, best-known for their dark red colour, are hand-woven in dense knot patterns, and last longer than machine-made rugs using synthetic materials.

Ali Reza, 35, weaves at home, sharing 8,000 Afghani ($116) with three artisans for a carpet that takes a month to complete.

Its really difficult to meet the needs of your family with such amount, he said.

In Kabuls famed Chicken Street market, carpet merchant Ehsan, who goes by one name, has seen a steady decline in foreign shoppers.

Ten years ago, business was good, eight years ago OK, he said. The last two years, it stopped.

On sale in his Istalif Gallery are carpets hand-woven from sheep or camel wool, printed with elephant feet symbols or flowers. Some are 50 years old.

Before, it was two, three, five sales every day. Now, every week maybe its one, Ehsan said. Nobody comes here, because of security.

In Afghanistans latest effort to revive its carpet industry, the commerce ministry is preparing a plan to cut air transport costs to India and Dubai, offer financial help and boost marketing, ministry official Ahmad Zia SaydKhaili said.

An initiative announced in January will speed export customs procedures at Kabul airport.

Since buyers cannot risk coming to Afghanistan, boosting exports will be critical, Qassimy said.

We can take our carpets there, and this market will be famous. Reutersmonicakchauhan@gmail.com

Sevnica, April 12

Many in Slovenia's 13th-century town of Sevnica have taken offense after the American talk show host Jimmy Kimmel joked about first lady Melania Trump's accent on his show.

Melania Trump grew up in this very town.

It's very hard to speak English. Melania's been in the US so long and she still has some problems, but Jimmy Kimmel should come to Slovenia and see how hard it is to speak another language, USA Today quoted a meat processing factory worker, Helena Horjak (24), as saying.

Horjak makes the very popular "First Lady" sausages.

Brouhaha broke out on April 8 when Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity asked Kimmel to apologise for his joke on Melania Trump's Slovenian accent.

The brouhaha cooled off on April 10 after Hannity called Kimmel to his news programme where he later vowed to "no name-calling".

A nurse in Sevnica, Maya Kantuzar (24), said it is not fair in regard to the good work she is doing.

Melania is trying to help everyone. She is doing a really good job for children, USA Today quoted Maya as saying.

Melania Trump, the wife to 45th US President, Donald Trump, left Slovenia more than two decades ago to be a model in the US and hasn't stepped foot in Sevnica for over a decade. ANIrchopra@tribunemail.com

Kabul, April 12

Taliban fighters attacked a government compound in central Afghanistan overnight, killing three district officials and 15 security forces, authorities said on Thursday.

The attackers stormed the secure compound in Khuja Omari district on Wednesday night, setting off hours of fighting with security forces, Ramazan Ali Moseni, a deputy chief police in Ghazni province, said.

He said 25 Taliban were killed. The district is close to the provincial capital, Ghazni city.

Later, the Taliban claimed responsibility for the blistering attack. The insurgent groups spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told The Associated Press over the telephone that after the attack in the Khuja Omari district, not far from the provincial capital also called Ghazni, all security posts in the district were under Taliban control.

His claim could not be independently confirmed and the government did not immediately respond to it.

Mujahid gave a higher casualty figure among the Afghan forces, which the Taliban often do, and a significantly lower death toll among the insurgent attackers.

He also confirmed the governments statement that the assault killed three top local officials  the districts governor, intelligence chief and deputy police chief.

A lawmaker in the Afghan Parliament said three top district officials and several security forces were killed in a Taliban attack on a government compound in Ghazni province.

Lawmaker Mohammad Arif Rahmani said the attack early today morning in Khuja Omari district killed the district governor, intelligence service director and a deputy police official. Fifteen security forces were killed.

Rahmani said the Taliban planted mines to stop reinforcements from coming to help the government forces fend off the attack.

Rahmani said the district is very close to the provincial capital, Ghazni city.

Police say Taliban fighters attacked a district compound in central Afghanistan overnight, killing at least six government security forces in several hours of fighting.

Ramazan Ali Moseni, a deputy chief police in Ghazni province, said 25 Taliban were killed in the gunbattle that started Wednesday night and lasted into the morning.

Moseni said the Taliban fighters stormed the secure compound in Khuja Omari district and the security forces who were there were joined later by government reinforcements.

He said eight government security forces were wounded in the fighting.  APAUSTIN, Texas, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DoubleHorn, the Austin, Texas based cloud solutions provider and services broker, is inviting visitors to visit their recently redesigned website. The new website has been designed to provide the ultimate user-friendly experience with improved navigation and functionality throughout, allowing customers to access new customer tools and a real-time cloud modeling and pricing tool.

Improving our website was an initiative we prioritized for 2018 due to its direct impact on our customer experience, said Tab Schadt, CEO of DoubleHorn. Creating access to information on the cloud and interactive tools will enable visitors to our website to make informed decisions with data-based information.

The four-month redesign added new tools to the website in addition to fine-tuning the suite of services provided for visitors in the process of or interested in migrating to the cloud. These resources have in-depth, data-based information easily accessed by users to ease complicated cloud-based decision making.

Enhanced services include the ability to chat with a specialist directly, downloadable research information and industry whitepapers, cloud pricing and modeling tools, and a one-click process to schedule a consultation.

Also featured in the website redesign is the proprietary Cloud Modeling Tool, an all-inclusive cloud budgeting and forecasting tool. The tool helps businesses make cloud choices by scanning services from simple web applications to big data analytics to find the right services for your project needs.

The new website means that visitors can now benefit from richer online content that is easier to navigate and share with others, assisting the specification process. This is a result of talking with customers and gaining valuable feedback.

On the DoubleHorn website, visitors can also stay informed with the latest news of the company, and the whole cloud industry. The Liftr News section features the latest announcements from the Liftr Index, cloud industry round-up videos, and opinion pieces from industry experts.

About DoubleHorn

Austin, Texas-based DoubleHorn is a leading Cloud solutions provider and services broker founded in 2005. DoubleHorn is dedicated to helping companies navigate technology transformations using their Cloud brokerage and management platform. Learn more about DoubleHorns services at doublehorn.com.

Media Contact

Hope Ruiz

DoubleHorn

media@doublehorn.comAs the possibility of a trade war with China heats up, commercial vehicle tire retailers note theyve been long concerned about low-cost Chinese truck tires flooding into North America. Donald B. Rice Tire Co. Inc., which goes to market as Rice Retreading Inc., considers cheap Tier 4 tires its biggest competitive challenge today. We are constantly looking for ways to cut cost out of the retread process so that we can be competitive, says Chris Chase, president. Retread sales were flat year-over-year at the Frederick, Md.-based company.

Larry Lafreniere, Houston sales manager for Beasley Tire Service, explains the retreading process to one of its customers at the grand opening celebration for the companys 36,000-square-foot retread plant. Photo: Beasley Tire Service

Bill Ziegler, president of Ziegler Tire & Supply Co., says bluntly: Tier 4 tires are slowly killing the retread business. Retread sales were flat in 2017 versus 2016 for the Massillon, Ohio, based company. Ziegler says to be more competitive requires an increase in volume to spread costs over more units. We are trying to sell more retreads and casings versus selling Tier 4 new tires.

At Wonderland Tire Co. Inc., retreading made up 40% of company-wide sales in 2017. Our units were up about 4% over 2016 but this was mainly due to two acquisitions that we made in June of 2017, says Jon Langerak, president.

Pricing is very competitive in the retreading sector, and we see this trend continuing because of the cheap disposable Chinese truck tires being dumped into the United States.

Retreading volumes have declined year over year at Eastern Iowa Tire Inc. as well. In our area of the country the first quarter is always slow, says Gary Van Blaricom, president and CEO. However, 2017s first quarter was very good for Eastern Iowa Tire, making comparisons to 2018s first quarter challenging for the Davenport, Iowa-based company, which has five plants.

Van Blaricom attributes some of the loss to original equipment purchases made by his retreading customers. Tier 4 tires are responsible, too. Cheap Chinese import tires have greatly affected retreading. When you consider that the price of a cap and casing is about the same price as what you can sell a Tier 4 Chinese tire for, most customers are probably going to go with the new tire and just throw the casing away. To help boost retread sales, the company has incentivized its salespeople on retreading this year in addition to their normal commission programs. Van Blaricom also notes that Bandag has come out with some programs which have helped us a considerable amount.

Casing crunch causes concern

The volume of low-cost Chinese imports declined briefly last year, according to Brad Raben, vice president of commercial sales at Raben Tire Co. LLC of Evansville, Indiana. But when the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) voted to not levy duties on Chinese truck and bus tires in March 2017, the flow of imports resumed.

I dont think theres any relief in the near future, he says. Its a concern that retreading is falling to the Chinese tires, but the real surprise this year is casings. In contrast to a few years ago when medium truck tire casings were in short supply, this year they are plentiful.

Is there less demand for retreading or are we just kind of caught up on a cycle? wonders Raben. We were hoping lower prices with casings would make us more competitive with Chinese tires, but it seems like retreading is flat.

In contrast, casings are in short supply for retreaders of off-the-road tires. Jim John Jr. is president of Craft Tire Inc., which does business as Shrader Retreading in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He says theres a possibility of a slight shortage on some OTR tire sizes.

It does appear that some sizes, specifically larger sizes then moving down to the smaller sizes, may be short in the middle of 2018, he says.

Retreaders could step in to make up for a shortage of replacement OTR tires, but the availability of quality retreadable casings is a concern, according to John. Conversely, short supply of quality major brand casings along with increased retread rubber and material costs will continue to make competition against Tier 3 new tires difficult on smaller OTR sizes.

Retreading accounts for about 16% of Ziegler Tires business. Photo: Ziegler Tire and Supply

When the tire shortage ended and pricing fell in 2015 and 2016, folks just started running tires to destruction, says John. Equipment operators purchased low-cost Tier 3 tires that were not as retreadable as Tier 1 and Tier 2 tires. Running the major brands to destruction as opposed to retreading them and incorporating off-brand third tier tires is really going to put a strain on quality casing supply.

Today, Hickman says, his employees are pushing the value of products and services to their customers, and he agrees with Johns assessment of the casing situation today. Finding good quality casings is becoming more difficult, Hickman says. Were expanding our buying market to compensate.

Retreading represents approximately 50% of annual sales at BestDrive LLC. The Continental Tire Americas LLC subsidiary says that is the same mix as prior years, and overall sales have increased. In terms of making our products more competitive, we are seeing increased demand for retread tires that look like new, run like new, and thats the promise of the ContiTread brand, says Steve Postel, Continentals head of retail for commercial vehicle tires in the Americas region and head of BestDrive.

Many of the tread patterns and rubber compounds match what is used in a new Continental tire, which helps our customers feel confident that they can rely on their ContiTread retreads. Continental has also been offering a cap and casing promotion this year that is making the prices even more competitive, says Postel. He adds the company is focused on increasing its distribution network to make ContiTread premium retreads available to more fleets across the U.S.

Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations LLC, which does business as GCR Tires & Service, operates 26 plants, three less than last year and has introduced two Bandag-exclusive equipment innovations designed to improve non-destructive inspection to assure curing system integrity. Additionally, Bridgestone launched a Bandag Built for Better campaign aimed at educating fleet customers on the merits of retreading.

Commercial tire market realigns

As more Chinese tires enter the U.S. commercial tire market, both Tier 1 tire suppliers and dealer networks across the country have begun to make adjustments to deal with this, and other, new, low-cost competition. Michelin North America Inc. sold seven of its nine Tire Centers LLC (TCi) retread plants to commercial dealers in the last year. The buyers included Toledo, Ohio-based Shrader Tire & Oil Co., which bought one plant. Two plants were sold to T&W Tire LLC., based in Oklahoma City, Okla. Greensboro, N.C.-based Snider Tire Inc. purchased four TCi retread plants.

Petes Tire Barn renovated a storage area at its retread plant into a facility for steel rim powder coating services. Photo: Petes Tire Barn

Loves Travel Stops & Country Stores Inc., which does business as Loves Truck Solutions LLC, sells retreads as well as new tire brands at Loves Truck Tire Care and Speedco locations, which totaled more than 330 as of March 2018. The Oklahoma-based truck stop chain bought Bridgestone Americas Inc.s Speedco network, which provides quick lube and inspection services to the trucking industry, in September 2017.

In 2016, Van Blaricom organized a group of dealers into Tire Service Solutions, or TSS for short, to better compete against truck stop chains like Loves Travel Stops as well as the TA Truck Service Commercial Tire Network operated by Travel Centers of America LLC. TSS also enables its member dealers to compete more effectively against large dealers that cover a large geographic area.

TSS is a group of independent dealers that have banded together to provide service and product to all of our customers who travel the geographic area that we encompass, which is an eight-state area, says Van Blaricom.

Customers of TSS member dealers receive the same pricing regardless of their location. It gives us the ability to capture customers that might not be in our area. For instance, if Royal Tire has a large customer coming through here, that customer is going to get the same pricing as they would get at Royal Tire. Theyre not going to be taken advantage of with $200 used wheels and $400 cap and casings, says Van Blaricom. Additionally, if Royal Tire, for example, has the business of a large trucking company with a location in Iowa, then we will probably get that business as well.

TSS also is a buying group whose purchases represent about $600 million in sales. To further lower costs, the group is considering performing billing, payables and receivables functions for all the member companies.

Its a concept that is working well for us. It isnt new, but were actually going about it in a different way than some of the other groups that are out there, says Van Blaricom.REGINA, Saskatchewan, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With support from provincial sponsors, Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) and Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority (SLGA), MADD Canada is visiting schools around the province to talk to students about the dangers of impaired driving and how they can prevent it.



Road crashes are the number one cause of death among teens and young adults, and alcohol and/or drugs are involved in more than half of those crashes. MADD Canada produces a new School Assembly Program every year to educate students in Grades 7  12 about the dangers of impaired driving.

A special screening of the 2017-2018 program, titled The Pact, is taking place at Ethel Milliken Elementary School in Regina today. SGI and SLGA are long-time supporters of MADD Canadas School Assembly Program, directly sponsoring 20 and 40 presentations respectively at schools around the province this year.

Our goal is to show students how easily a tragedy can happen when someone drives impaired, and talk about what they can do to protect themselves and their friends, said MADD Canada National President Patricia Hynes-Coates. We want to get them thinking and talking about the dangers and consequences of impaired driving and how they can prevent it.

MADD Canada is honoured to welcome two very special guests to todays event  The Honourable Joe Hargrave, Minister responsible for SGI, and The Honourable Gene Makowsky, Minister responsible for SLGA.

"To beat the impaired driving problem in Saskatchewan, it will take people making decisions for themselves that impaired driving is no longer acceptable," said Minister Hargrave. "Young people, like the ones who will see this presentation from MADD Canada, can help lead that change."

The Pact tells the story of Zoe, who is at a new school and struggling to fit in. After landing in detention for skipping class, she meets James, Charli, Nisha and Will. When they invite her to a party, Zoe is happy that she is finally making friends. At the party, Nisha has too much to drink. Charli is sober and can drive her home, but is worried about leaving Zoe behind. James offers to drive Zoe. Even though James has been smoking pot, Zoe convinces herself and her friends that all will be fine because he wasnt drinking. When the car crashes, the whole group of friends is changed forever. Devastated by the tragedy but hoping to build something positive, the friends form a special pact.

In addition to the fictional storyline in The Pact, the presentation also features emotional real-life accounts of victims of impaired driving. In fact, it is the victim testimonials that have the most lasting impact on students.

This years program tells the stories of:



Carol Grimmond - Carol and her twin brother, Colin, were travelling to their mothers home when an impaired driver, going the wrong way on the highway, struck them head-on. Colin suffered minor injuries. Carol was seriously injured and airlifted to hospital where she died.





Carol and her twin brother, Colin, were travelling to their mothers home when an impaired driver, going the wrong way on the highway, struck them head-on. Colin suffered minor injuries. Carol was seriously injured and airlifted to hospital where she died. Craig Watson - After a day at the lake, Craig and three high school friends piled into a van for the 5-minute drive to one of the friends cottages. All had been drinking and no one was wearing seat belts. The driver lost control of the vehicle. Craig was ejected from the passenger window and the van rolled over him, killing him.





After a day at the lake, Craig and three high school friends piled into a van for the 5-minute drive to one of the friends cottages. All had been drinking and no one was wearing seat belts. The driver lost control of the vehicle. Craig was ejected from the passenger window and the van rolled over him, killing him. Maia Vezina - Maia and her mother Pat were hit head-on by an impaired driver. Pat suffered broken bones and internal injuries, was on life support for a time and required numerous surgeries. Maia broke both femurs, both ankles and both arms, her left knee, pelvis, right wrist, left clavicle, a rib and left cheekbone. Both women have had very long recoveries and still suffer the effects of their injuries.

For more information, or to view a clip from The Pact, please visit http://madd.ca/pages/programs/youth-services/school-programs/the-pact/.

Evidence shows that MADD Canadas strategies to reach young people are working. In a 2015-2016 survey of students who saw that years School Assembly Program, titled 24 Hours: 80% of respondents said the program was effective in delivering its message about not driving while impaired; two-thirds of respondents said the presentation will be effective in changing behaviours regarding impaired driving; and 97% of respondents supported seeing a similar presentation the following year.



About Saskatchewan Government Insurance

Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) is the provinces self-sustaining auto insurance fund. SGI operates 21 claims centres and five salvage centres across Saskatchewan with a head office in Regina. SGI is the traffic safety advocate for the province and the administrator of the Traffic Safety Act. Visit: www.sgi.sk.ca.

About the Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority

The Saskatchewan Liquor and Gaming Authority (SLGA) is responsible for the distribution, control and regulation of liquor and most gaming across the province. Visit: www.slga.com.

About MADD Canada

MADD Canada (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) is a national, charitable organization that is committed to stopping impaired driving and supporting the victims of this violent crime. With volunteer-driven groups in more than 100 communities across Canada, MADD Canada aims to offer support services to victims/survivors, heighten awareness of the dangers of impaired driving and save lives and prevent injuries on our roads. For more information, visit www.madd.ca.

For more information, please contact:

Patricia Hynes-Coates, National President, MADD Canada: 647-919-6233 or phynescoates@madd.ca

Tyler McMurchy, SGI Manager of Media Relations: 306-751-1837 or tmcmurchy@sgi.sk.ca

David Morris, SLGA Manager of Communications: 306-787-1721 or dmorris@slga.gov.sk.caHighlights include:



Production of 9,324 ozs of gold and 165,976 lbs copper in Q1 2018

The average grade treated through the Process Plant for Q1 2018 was 16.95 g/t Au and 0.44% Cu

Grade Control drilling commenced from the third underground diamond drill cuddy (DDC3)

Exploration drilling from underground is underway up dip and down dip from current Kora North Resource

No Lost Time Injuries (LTIs) recorded during Q1 2018 and none recorded for the entire 2017

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- K92 Mining Inc. (TSXV:KNT) (OTCQB:KNTNF) (K92) is pleased to provide an update on operations during Q1 2018 (Q1) at its Kainantu Gold Mine in Papua New Guinea.

During Q1, K92 produced 9,324 ounces of gold, 165,976 pounds of copper and 2,752 ozs of silver or 9,729 AuEq ozs (based on a Gold Price US$1,300/oz; Silver US$16.5/oz; Copper US$2.90/lb).

Mining operations focused on Kora North, comprising cut and fill stope mining from the K2 vein over a 200 metre strike length and development on the K1 vein over a 250 metre strike length.

The blend of K1 and K2 material provided an average grade treated through the Process Plant for Q1 of 16.95 g/t Au and 0.44% Cu. Recoveries for the quarter averaged 91.7% for gold and 91.5% for copper.

Grade control drilling from the first drill cuddy, DDC1 was completed during the quarter, while grade control drilling from the second drill cuddy, DDC2 located 125 metres to the south commenced during the quarter. In March 2018, exploration drilling from DDC2 was commenced and high grade results from the first exploration hole were reported. The third drill cuddy, DDC3 was completed during the quarter and grade control drilling from this cuddy commenced in early April.

John Lewins, K92 Chief Executive Officer and Director, states, This has been a momentous quarter for our Company with the declaration of Commercial Production on February 1st, following the production of ~2,700 ozs of AuEq in January and 7,000 ozs of additional AuEq during the balance of the quarter. During the quarter we were also able to declare an increased Kora North containing almost 160,000 ozs of AuEq, covering an area of just 300 metres along strike by 150 metres vertically. In addition we completed our first underground exploration diamond drill hole, which reported multiple intersections including a K1E intersection of 2.85 m at 53.39 g/t Au, 3 g/t Ag and 0.13% Cu (53.63 g/t AuEq), a K2 intersection of 3.70 m at 6.94 g/t Au, 13 g/t Ag and 0.56% Cu (7.97 g/t AuEq) and a K2 HW intersection of 3.70 m at 10.79 g/t Au, 25 g/t Ag and 2.83% Cu (15.44 g/t AuEq).

Further financial details regarding Q1 production will be available within the upcoming quarterly financial filing. Based on budget, K92 anticipates operations achieved positive cash flow in each of January, February and March 2018.

Table 1 below provides a summary of the Kora North Mineral Resource, Table 2 provides a summary of the results from the first exploration drill hole drilled into the Kora North Vein system and Table 3 provides details of collar location and hole orientation.

Table 1 Kora North Mineral Resource  Effective Date 1 February 2018 Category Tonnes Gold Silver Copper AuEq g/t Ozs g/t Ozs % 000's lb g/t Ozs Measured 33,200 10.3 10,900 31 33,300 1.2 890 12.5 13,300 Indicated 103,500 12.7 42,200 30 99,800 1.3 3,020 15.1 50,300 Total M & I 136,700 12.1 53,100 30 133,100 1.3 3,910 14.5 63,700 Total Inferred 183,500 14.4 85,000 27 159,300 0.9 3,640 16.1 95,000

Gold Equivalent (Au Eq) g/t was calculated using the formula Au g/t + (Cu% x 1.53) + Ag g/t x 0.0127

Gold Price US$1,300/oz; Silver US$16.5/oz; Copper US$2.90/lb

A top cut of 60 g/t was applied to the gold assays for the K1 and K2 lodes and 80 g/t for the KL1 lode

Mineral Resources which are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability.

The estimate of Mineral Resources may be materially affected by environmental, permitting, legal, title, taxation, socio-political, marketing, or other relevant issues.

The Inferred Mineral Resource in this estimate has a lower level of confidence than that applied to an Indicated Mineral Resource and must not be converted to a Mineral Reserve. It is reasonably expected that the majority of the Inferred Mineral Resource could be upgraded to an Indicated Mineral Resource with continued exploration.

All material mined from within the resource envelope up to the effective date of the resource have been removed from the model.

Wireframes were constructed to constrain lode positions based on geological mapping and logging of workings and diamond core coupled with the use of face and drill core assay results using a nominal +1 g/t Au cut-off to define the lode boundary.

Equal length composites of 0.5m were extracted from the database for each lode. A top cut to gold grade was applied to K2 of 60g/t, K1 and KL1 of 80g/t. The ordinary kriging modelling estimation method was then used with search radii of 35m and 130m for Au, Ag and Cu. At least 3 informing values with a maximum of 12 were used to estimate each model block.

The Resource was classified as measured if both drilling at 25m centres and workings were present, as indicated if only drilling or workings were presented and inferred for material 15m past the last drill hole or working.

Table 1.0  Significant Intercepts from Kora Exploration Hole KMDD0087 Hole_id From (m) To (m) Interval (m) True width (m) Gold g/t Silver g/t Copper % Gold equivalent Comment KMDD0087 46.50 49.35 2.85 1.56 53.39 3 0.13 53.63 K1E Including 46.50 47.60 1.10 0.60 135.50 7 0.18 135.87 Including 47.60 48.90 1.30 0.71 1.74 1 0.12 1.93 Including 48.90 49.35 0.45 0.25 1.86 2 0.04 1.95 KMDD0087 51.06 52.00 0.94 0.52 30.49 2 0.07 30.63 K1W Including 51.06 51.80 0.74 0.41 37.88 2 0.09 38.04 Including 51.80 52.00 0.20 0.11 3.16 1 0.01 3.19 KMDD0087 81.30 85.00 3.70 2.45 6.94 13 0.56 7.97 K2 Including 81.30 82.55 1.25 0.83 2.56 8 0.50 3.43 Including 82.55 83.00 0.45 0.30 5.56 4 0.31 6.08 Including 83.00 83.50 0.50 0.33 0.22 1 0.22 0.58 Including 83.50 84.00 0.50 0.33 9.88 4 0.51 10.72 Including 84.00 84.30 0.30 0.20 3.14 3 0.37 3.75 Including 84.30 85.00 0.70 0.46 19.97 48 1.20 22.42 KMDD0087 89.10 92.80 3.70 2.45 10.79 25 2.83 15.44 K2FW Including 89.10 90.20 1.10 0.73 10.79 25 2.83 15.44 Including 90.20 91.50 1.30 0.86 0.14 2 0.38 0.74 Including 91.50 92.60 1.10 0.73 0.11 1 0.03 0.17 Including 92.60 92.80 0.20 0.13 1.88 20 2.54 6.03

Notes

Gold Equivalent uses Copper price  US$2.90/lb; Silver price US$16.5/oz and Gold price of US$1300/oz

Table 2.0  Collar Locations for Kora Exploration Hole KMDD0087 Hole_id Collar location Collar orientation EOH depth (m) Lode Local north Local East RL Dip Local azimuth KMDD0087 59001.93 29876.38 1192.35 55.04 246.7 149.2 Kora

K92 also announced during the quarter that Bryan Slusarchuk has been appointed Advisor, Capital Markets while concurrently resigning as President and Director effective March 31, 2018.

John Lewins, K92 Chief Executive Officer and Director, states, On behalf of the Company I would like to record our sincere gratitude to Bryan for his very significant contribution to the establishment and development of our Company. I look forward to working with Bryan in his new role going forward to continue the successful development of our Company.

K92 has filed and made available for download on the company's SEDAR profile a technical report titled "Independent Technical Report, Mineral Resource Update and Preliminary Economic Assessment of Irumafimpa and Kora Gold Deposits, Kainantu Project, Papua New Guinea," with an effective date of March 2, 2017, that provides additional information on the geology of the deposits, drilling and sampling procedures, lab analysis, and quality assurance/quality control for the project, and additional details on resource estimates.

The PEA is preliminary in nature and includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the PEA will be realized. The technical report contains a full description of all underlying assumptions relating to the PEA. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability.

K92 Mine Geology Manager and Mine Exploration Manager, Mr Andrew Kohler, PGeo, a qualified person under the meaning of Canadian National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and is responsible for the technical content of this news release. Data verification by Mr. Kohler includes significant time onsite reviewing drill core, face sampling, underground workings and discussing work programs and results with geology and mining personnel.

On behalf of the company,

John Lewins

Chief Executive Officer and Director

Suite 488  1090 West Georgia Street

Vancouver, British Columbia

Canada V6E 3V7



Telephone: (604) 687-7130

Facsimile: (604) 608-9110

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: 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. Cash flow estimations for Q1 2018 are subject to change and subject to the finalization of financial 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, including statements regarding the realization of the preliminary economic analysis for the Project, expectations of future cash flows, the proposed plant expansion, potential expansion of resources and the generation of further drilling results which may or may not occur. Forward-looking statements and information contained herein are based on certain factors and assumptions regarding, among other things, the market price of the Companys securities, metal prices, exchange rates, taxation, the estimation, timing and amount of future exploration and development, capital and operating costs, the availability of financing, the receipt of regulatory approvals, environmental risks, title disputes, failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated, accidents, labour disputes, claims and limitations on insurance coverage and other risks of the mining industry, changes in national and local government regulation of mining operations, and regulations and other matters. 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.TORONTO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PIMCO Canada Corp. (PIMCO), the manager of the PIMCO Canada Funds has refiled the Management Reports of Fund Performance for the year ended December 31, 2017 (MRFP) for PIMCO Monthly Income Fund (Canada) to correct an inadvertent misstatement of the MER for the ETF series from 0.90% to 0.87% and for PIMCO Investment Grade Credit Fund (Canada) to correct an inadvertent misstatement of the MER for the ETF series from 0.83% to 0.86%.



For further information on PIMCO and the PIMCO mutual funds, please visit www.pimco.ca or call us at 1 866 341 3350 (416 368 3350 in Toronto).

About PIMCO

PIMCO is one of the worlds premier fixed income investment managers. With our launch in 1971 in Newport Beach, California, PIMCO introduced investors to a total return approach to fixed income investing. In the 45+ years since, we have continued to bring innovation and expertise to our partnership with clients seeking the best investment solutions. Today we have offices across the globe and 2,150+ professionals united by a single purpose: creating opportunities for investors in every environment. PIMCO is owned by Allianz S.E., a leading global diversified financial services provider.

Commissions, trailing commissions, management fees and expenses all may be associated with mutual fund investments. Please read the prospectus before investing. The indicated rates of return are the historical annual compounded total returns including changes in unit value and reinvestment of all distributions and do not take into account sales, redemption, distribution or optional charges or income taxes payable by any securityholder that would have reduced returns. Mutual funds are not guaranteed, their values change frequently and past performance may not be repeated. The information contained herein does not constitute an offer or solicitation by anyone in the United States or in any other jurisdiction in which such an offer or solicitation is not authorized or to any person to whom it is unlawful to make such an offer or solicitation. Prospective investors should consult their financial advisor to determine if the PIMCO Mutual Funds may be sold in their jurisdiction.

The products and services provided by PIMCO may only be available in certain provinces or territories of Canada and only through dealers authorized for that purpose. PIMCO has retained PIMCO LLC as sub-adviser. PIMCO will remain responsible for any loss that arises out of the failure of its sub-adviser.

Contact:

Agnes Crane

PIMCO  Media Relations

Ph. 212-597-1054

Email: agnes.crane@pimco.comfacebook like button Tweet tweet button for twitter

Published April 12, 2018

By Mark Henderson

Special to Marketing and Communications

A small unmanned aircraft with multiple propellers flies over a privately owned farm near Sterlington. Suddenly, it hovers feet above a field of soybeans.

Its mission: To capture vital information concerning the health of the crop.

For three years, two University of Louisiana Monroe faculty members have flown drones over the same piece of property.

One, a geographer, conducts research. The other, an aviator, puts his years of flight experience, many in the Air Force, to use operating and teaching the new technology. Together they have blazed a trail that holds benefits for both farmers in the field and students in the classroom.

The work of Dr. Paul Karlowitz, associate professor of aviation, and Dr. Sean Chenoweth, assistant professor of geosciences, is yielding information that would empower growers to practice precision agriculture, saving them time and money.

The size of the average farm has grown through the years. Its difficult, Chenoweth says, for farmers to know exactly whats happening on all the acreage at any one time.

Farmers often choose the easiest route and treat all of their land with fertilizer and chemicals.

The problems, however, usually are isolated  weeds over here, too much water over there. The alternative to expensive blanket treatment has been walking the rows of crops looking for problems  an inefficient use of time.

Chenoweths research proposes answers.

Eye in the sky

Chenoweth uses an assortment of cameras attached to the drones to determine the health of the crop. One of the cameras reads infrared reflection.

You can see a vegetations health, Chenoweth said. Healthy plants let off more infrared radiation, pinpointing where in the field crops may be suffering.

When data from the camera is downloaded on computer, darker areas of the field indicate healthier plants.

If theres a problem with a crop, the reduced radiation given off can provide a warning two weeks before the eye can detect it, Chenoweth said.

Another camera, which measures heat, can help a farmer determine the wetness of the soil across his fields, allowing him to make precision decisions on questions of irrigation.

Isolate the problems, save time and money.

Once, Karlowitz used a quad-propeller drone, flying on a late afternoon, to locate 20 to 30 feral hogs bedding down in a farmers field. The hogs had eaten several acres of corn. The drone told the farmer exactly where to find the hogs.

Recently, ULM added a hyperspectral camera to its arsenal. The camera attached to the eight-propeller drone can provide so much data, Chenoweth says, that it takes hours to download.

A seven-minute flight can provide 60 gigabytes of data, Karlowitz said.

This new camera can differentiate species of plants.

Each plant has a reflective signature, like a fingerprint, Chenoweth says. You can tell the sex of trees, and what specie of tree you have.

The technology can also help farmers determine where they might have weed issues, Karlowitz says.

Pigweed is hard to kill. Hyperspectral data can pinpoint where that pigweed is in the field, Karlowitz says. That cuts down costs and time because the farmer doesnt have to treat his entire acreage.

The technology also could prove valuable to law enforcement, Karlowitz says. A drone can fly over a field where police might suspect marijuana is being grown among other crops, and the reflective signature can spot it quickly.

Chenoweth is using the information gathered by the numerous drone flights for long-term research. Hes studying how short-term atmospheric conditions affect the field with an eye toward climate change.

He now has three years of data available from that soybean field near Sterlington, but with each generation of technology, the data at his fingertips expands. Over time hell be able to compare weather conditions of one year to another, and how that played out in the field.

Although the research points to how the technology can guide farmers to do their jobs more efficiently, Chenoweth says drones have not been put to use yet in northeastern Louisiana for many reasons.

On the cutting edge

The biggest hurdle is money, Karlowitz says. A farmer would have to invest in at least one drone, the cameras, software programs, a powerful computer and drone insurance.

A farmer wants to know whats the average cost per acre, but that information just does not exist yet, he says.

Drones could not be put to commercial use until just recently, when the Federal Aviation Administration released its rules governing their use. Previously, drone operators had to have a pilots license and file flight plans, so when Chenoweth needed to gather research, he relied on Karlowitz to operate the drone. Under the new rules, the FAA created a special license classification for drone operators, known as a Part 107 license. Because the rules are so new, there has not been sufficient time for many to study and take the exam.

The test consists of 60 questions drawn from a manual of 600 questions and answers covering such things as rules of restricted airspace. It costs $150 to take the test.

Most farmers dont want to study to take such a test, theres no time, says Chenoweth, who recently received his license and can fly the drone on his own now. The same is true about learning the ever-sophisticated software to optimize the use of data.

Karlowitz adds that the license only indicates you know the rules governing drone usage. A person can earn a license without ever having flown a drone. Flight training is additional cost and effort.

Embracing the coming wave

What might be cost prohibitive for individual farmers, however, provides opportunity for ULM students.

With the FAA releasing drones to commercial use, ULM is hoping to claim its niche in the emerging technology. Currently, ULM offers a concentration on drones within its general aviation program. In the fall, the university will offer a degree in Unmanned Aircraft Systems Management.

For ULM students, they will have an advantage in the market because large universities are just getting into the field, Karlowitz says.

Karlowitz sees the day a ULM graduate can invest in the technology and contract with many farmers to provide the service, recovering costs through many clients.

Although ULM has invested much effort in using drones for agricultural research, and those efforts will provide opportunities to train UASM students in flying drones, the potential uses go far beyond Chenoweths research, Karlowitz said. Among the possibilities:

Replacing crop-dusters with precision spraying.

Real estate surveying.

Plant inspections, seeking hazardous material leaks.

Laser 3D mapping

Levee inspections

Pipeline inspections.

One of our graduates who has his FAA drone license was hired by Dow Chemical. They said he had all of the skills they were looking for, Karlowitz says.

Growing exposure

The research efforts also are being incorporated into ULMs agribusiness studies.

Dr. Zach Moore, director of ULMs agribusiness program within the College of Business, says students are required to take a class on how the drones are being used by Chenoweth and Karlowitz.

We have a little motto we developed here. Put business in agribusiness. We want our students to be exposed to the precision technology. They take the course so that they know what the technology can do for you, Moore said.

Its a managerial tool, and we expect the students to use the information to make good decisions, how it can lower the cost by using prescriptive rather than blanket methods.

Moore says about 30 percent of the agribusiness students will go back to the family farm. The others intend to use their agribusiness degree to enter banking, real estate or commodities trading. They will still be introduced to the drones and their data.

For instance, an ag lender needs to know how a customers business works. Its important to have an ability to understand whats going on on the other side of the desk to best serve them, Moore says.

For Karlowitz, who is busy developing the curriculum for the new UASM program, its an exciting time. Its an emerging technology that is changing so fast. It will be our job to train students on how to fly and help researchers in their work.

And help farmers easily see the details hidden in the hundreds of acres  treat those weeds over here, cut down on the water over there.Geneva  Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of the Education Above All (EAA) Foundation and UN SDG Advocate, joined the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, at a high-level forum today to urge the international community to facilitate access to quality education for displaced children.

The forum, organized by EAA in cooperation with UNHCR, highlighted the worsening displacement crisis and the issues in delivering education to refugees and internally displaced children. Global leaders discussed the devastating effects of conflict on the educational opportunities of millions of children.

There are more than 65.6 million people forcibly displaced by conflict and persecution.1 Of the more than 22 million refugees, more than half are under the age of 18 with only 61 per cent of refugee children attending primary school, compared to a global average of 91 per cent.2

During the panel discussion, Sheikha Moza spoke about the barriers disrupting learning for refugees and internally displaced children, and preventing them from contributing to their communities, saying We must prioritize education Education is a tool that can equip children for their future and for the present as well We need to mobilize for a global approach to remove all institutional barriers for validating and recognizing education of refugees.

She continued: Unfortunately, today armed conflicts are increasingly targeting what we are all doing and destroying what we are building We should have one voice to stop any enablers of armed conflict, especially through stricter enforcement of UN sanctions.

During his remarks, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, outlined the particular challenges that refugees and internally displaced children face in accessing quality primary education, saying: Access to education is a fundamental human right, and one that no child should be denied, Grandi noted.

We all have a responsibility to ensure that displaced children can access quality education which allows them to develop skills and pursue opportunities. Barriers to primary education must be overcome, and comprehensive, practical and sustainable solutions found. Grandi added.

The high-level panel included interventions by Her Highness Sheikha Moza; Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; Honourable Nansubuga Rosemary Seninde, Minister of State for Primary Education, Uganda; Kate Gilmore, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, and George Srour, the Founder and Chief Dreamer of Building Tomorrow, Inc.

The EAA-UNHCR partnership has reached almost 770,000 vulnerable out of school children in countries across Asia and Africa. Quality education helps develop critical thinking, problem solving and analytical skills that are applicable in daily life. It can also foster social cohesion, provide life-saving knowledge and address psychosocial needs for displaced children.

To address barriers to education, the partnership has worked to improve access and retention of children in primary school through cash grants and vouchers, capacity building for teachers, expansion of safe learning spaces and strengthening partnerships with key education partners.

In the 12 countries where Educate A Child operates, UNHCRs partnership delivered tangible, life-changing results in the form of:

An initiative in Uganda called Boda Boda Talk Talk, motorbike which broadcast school information messages in several languages to raise awareness on education.

Electronic tablets in data collection and management distributed across refugee sites and urban areas in Chad improving education information.

A non-formal Home Based Girls Schools programme which is improving access of girls to education who would otherwise be excluded in Pakistan

A wide network of 500 community outreach volunteers, hotlines and 30 community centers in Syria which informs displaced students where they can access education.

Income generating projects in Sudan which are helping schools to meet recurrent administrative costs and improve the learning environment, through Parent Teacher Associations.

EBooks provided both for teachers and students in Ethiopia to help provide better access to reading and resource materials in Ethiopia.

Interviews available upon request

For all media enquiries, please contact:

Joelle Eid, Portland Communications

Notes to Editors:

1 Source: http://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2016/

2 Source: http://www.unhcr.org/uk/education.html

3 Source: https://www.globalpartnership.org/data-and-results/education-data

About Education Above All Foundation (EAA)

EAA is a global education foundation established in 2012 by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. The Foundation envisions bringing real opportunity to the lives of impoverished and marginalized children, youth and women, especially in the developing world and in difficult circumstances such as conflict situations and natural disasters. It believes that education is the single most effective means of reducing poverty, generating economic growth and creating peaceful and just societies, as well as a fundamental right for all children and an essential condition to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

With that in mind, the EAA Foundation aims to enable human development through the provision of inclusive and unbiased quality education. The Foundation is a current member of the UNESCO SDG-Education 2030 Steering Committee, which  in keeping with EAA Foundations core and founding principle  makes recommendations on how to achieve quality education for all. For more information, visit educationaboveall.org, follow us on Twitter @EAA_Foundation, Facebook and Instagram @educationaboveall_eaa.

About Educate A Child (EAC)

Launched in 2012, EAC aims to trigger significant breakthroughs in the provision of quality primary education to the 63 million children who currently have no access to schooling. Through EAC-supported programming, children overcome barriers to educational access and retention. With the overall goal of successfully completing an entire cycle of quality primary education, EAC strives to improve both individual and social outcomes for these children.

For more information, visit www.educateachild.org

About UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency

UNHCR leads international action to protect people forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution. We deliver life-saving assistance like shelter, food and water, help safeguard fundamental human rights, and develop solutions that ensure people have a safe place to call home where they can build a better future. We also work to ensure that stateless people are granted a nationality. For more information, visit www.unhcr.org, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.Please note this is an old version of the Northern Europe factsheets. The most recent version is available here.

How many asylum-seekers arrived last year to the different Northern Europe countries? Who were they and where did they come from? How many were granted protection in 2017 and how many refugees arrived under the resettlement programme?

The UNHCR Northern Europe factsheets  covering Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden  provide an overview of the 2017 data concerning asylum-seekers, refugees and stateless persons in the region. The fact sheets allow for understanding and comparing of the numbers of arrivals, resettlement cases, the percentage and total number of people granted protection, as well as arrivals over the last three years in the different countries.

You can download the full set of Northern Europe country factsheets (in English) here: https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/details/63732

Share on Facebook Share on TwitterDeclare ceasefire and initiate talks, Soz to Prime Minister

Srinagar, Apr 11 (UNI) Expressing concern over the deaths and injuries to civilians in security force action in Kulgam on Wednesday, former union minister and senior Congress leader Prof Saifuddin Soz demanded ceasefire and resumption of talks to restore peace in Jammu and Kashmir.

By killing three civilians and injuring to more than 20 civilians by the security forces in Kulgam today, the unrest in Kashmir has touched new heights. Prime Minister Narendra Modi Government must declare ceasefire and initiate talks, forthwith, Prof Soz said in a statement here.

He alleged the people of Kashmir have now raised a question as to how long Modi Government would allow the killings in Kashmir making it impossible to think of any democratic and electoral process in Kashmir, before the dispute is resolved.MONTREAL, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Valener Inc. (Valener) (TSX:VNR) (TSX:VNR.PR.A) and Energir, L.P., the new Gaz Metro, plan to announce their second quarter 2018 results on Thursday, May 10, 2018, at approximately 8:00 a.m. (ET).

A conference call to discuss the firms results will be held at 11:00 a.m. (ET) and will be open to the public.

Dial-in: 647-788-4922 or toll-free 877-223-4471

Webcast: accessible under Events and presentations in the Investors section of Valeners web site

Replay: A replay of the call will be available for 30 days at 416-621-4642 or toll-free at 800-585-8367 (access code: 1277528). The webcast will be available for 365 days on Valeners web site.

Overview of Valener

Valener is a public company held entirely by its shareholders and serves as the investment vehicle in Energir, L.P. Through its investment in Energir, L.P., Valener offers its shareholders a solid investment in a diversified and largely regulated energy portfolio in Quebec and Vermont. As a strategic partner, Valener, on the one hand, contributes to the growth of Energir, L.P., and on the other, invests in wind power production in Quebec alongside Energir, L.P. Valener favours energy sources and uses that are innovative, clean, competitive and profitable. Valeners common and preferred shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the VNR symbol for common shares and the VNR.PR.A symbol for Series A preferred shares. www.valener.com

Overview of Energir

With more than $7 billion in assets, Energir, L.P. is a diversified energy company whose mission is to meet the energy needs of approximately 520,000 customers and the communities it serves in an increasingly sustainable way. Energir, L.P. is the largest natural gas distribution company in Quebec; through its subsidiaries, it also generates electricity from wind power. In the United States, through its subsidiaries, the company operates in nearly fifteen states, where it produces electricity from hydraulic, wind and solar sources, in addition to being the leading electricity distributor and the sole natural gas distributor in Vermont. Energir, L.P. values energy efficiency and invests both resources and efforts in innovative energy projects such as renewable natural gas and liquefied and compressed natural gas. Through its subsidiaries, it also offers a wide range of energy services. Energir, L.P. hopes to become the partner of choice for those striving toward a better energy future. www.energir.comWASHINGTON, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Several top surgeons featured in the Trusted LASIK Surgeons Directory will be presenting the latest developments in ophthalmology at the upcoming 2018 annual meeting of the American Cataract and Refractive Surgery Society (ASCRS) in Washington, D.C. (April 13-17). Thousands of LASIK, cataract and refractive surgeons and other vision care professionals typically attend the ASCRS annual meeting.



Members of Trusted LASIK Surgeons who will be among this year's distinguished presenters, expert panelists, and attendees at ASCRS include Dr. Jon Dishler (Denver, CO), Dr. Brock Magruder (Orlando, FL), Dr. Edward Manche (Palo Alto, CA), Dr. Kerry Solomon (Charleston, SC), Dr. Shachar Tauber (Springfield, MO) and Dr. George O. Waring IV (Charleston, SC). To learn more about the contributions of each member of our directory at the ASCRS meeting, please visit our Trusted LASIK Surgeons Blog, or Facebook-Trusted LASIK Surgeons and LinkedIn- Trusted LASIK Surgeons.

"With several members actively contributing to a national meeting, this once again demonstrates the excellence of the surgeons who are part of our Trusted LASIK Surgeons and Trusted Cataract Surgeons directories, said James J. Salz, M.D., co-founder and CEO of Trusted LASIK Surgeons. Our distinguished members are true visionaries in refractive surgery, whether for LASIK, cataract surgery or another laser or vision corrective surgery procedure. Members of Trusted LASIK Surgeons are demonstrably patient-first doctors. These surgeons actively share their expertise with other eye doctors so that these doctors can help their own patients improve their vision."

About Trusted LASIK Surgeons

The primary mission of Trusted LASIK Surgeons is to help people find a vision correction expert among the best and most trusted eye surgeons in the worldone who can help patients improve their vision through LASIK, cataract or another refractive surgery procedure.

Trusted LASIK Surgeons utilizes a unique screening process to ensure only the best vision correction experts are featured in our LASIK and cataract surgeons directories. Each surgeon is screened based on their professional credentials, experience, accomplishments, and quality of patient care to give patients the confidence in selecting a surgeon found at Trusted LASIK Surgeons. Most of the professionals listed in the directory have participated in FDA clinical studies and have academic appointments at the top medical schools in the United States.

The goal of Trusted LASIK Surgeons is to educate patients as well as assist them in finding a premier vision correction surgeon to improve their eyesight. Because there are several options for vision corrective surgery beyond LASIK, our website endeavors to assist patients in exploring all available options, including premium lens implants, KAMRA inlay, cataract surgery (including laser cataract surgery) and other vision correction procedures.

To locate a LASIK surgeon and vision correction expert near you, please visit the Trusted LASIK Surgeons Directory. For cataract surgery, please visit our Trusted Cataract Surgeons Directory.Chief Justices and senior judges launch UNODC's Global Judicial Integrity Network

11 April 2018 - After two years of planning, seven regional preparatory meetings, and consultations with approximately 4,000 judges, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime launched its Global Judicial Integrity Network this week, in the presence of Chief Justices, senior judges and judicial professionals from around the world. The two-day launch event gave over 350 attendants the opportunity to discuss key topics with peers from other Member States, and to present recommendations on strengthening judicial integrity at the global level.

The Network is a platform for judges to share good practices and lessons learned, to support each other, and to join forces in developing new tools and guidelines for strengthening integrity and preventing corruption in the judicial system. As such, it will also provide access to a large online database featuring thousands of resources, good practices, and other judicial documents for immediate reference.

Participants were greeted by a video message by Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, saying: "This Network brings together lead institutions responsible for upholding the rule of law, and as such for attaining peace and justice." Her welcome remarks were echoed in UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov's message, who added: "Judges need the opportunity to share experiences, exchange good practices and support each other. The Network will continue to serve as a resource for addressing new and emerging challenges, such as those posed by social media and other technological developments."

Chief and senior justices from Austria, Brazil, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria and the United States addressed the opening session, declaring their support for the Network. Chief Justice Walter Samuel Nkanu Onnoghen of Nigeria stressed that the Network could not have come at a better time, adding: "It is time to develop global measures and mechanisms for the attainment and sustenance of the prescribed integrity. Accepted global standards and measures have persuasive force. They empower national champions of judicial integrity, providing ready tools and weapons."

Justice Elisabeth Lovrek, Vice-President of Austria's Supreme Court, which co-hosted with the Supreme Judicial Council of Qatar a social event at the beautiful Palace of Justice in Vienna, found the platform's very launching in Vienna to be a positive indicator: "The Network will strengthen judicial cooperation between courts and tribunals from different legal and cultural traditions. In an increasingly globalized world, this is more important than ever."

In additional to the representation from numerous judiciaries from around the world, there was strong support and participation from global institutions and judicial associations. The first plenary session on the Network's specific role in promoting judicial integrity was addressed by Diego Garcia-Sayan, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Christophe Regnard, President of the International Association of Judges, and Judge Rudolf Mellinghoff, President of the Federal Court of Finance of Germany and Member of the Judicial Integrity Group, which is the group of judges that initiated the dialogue on corruption in the justice system in 2000 and developed the Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct.

This first gathering of the Network spent the better part of two days discussing and seeking solutions for some of the key challenges confronting judiciaries today; this included undue political interference by the executive and legislature into judicial appointments and decisions, reducing budgets in the face of exploding caseloads and corruption in the justice sector, and diminishing public confidence. Substantive thematic breakout sessions covered an array of measures to help judiciaries tackle those challenges, such as developing codes of conduct, establishing functioning disciplinary bodies and proceedings, balancing accountability and independence, assessing integrity in the justice system, introducing financial disclosure rules for judges, educating judges on the use of social media, enhancing transparency, and the impact of digitalization on judicial integrity, judicial appointments and judicial training.

Speaking at the closing session, David Maraga, Chief Justice of Kenya, commented: "This launch gives us an opportunity to keep reflecting on our performance because it means a lot to our various countries. The buck stops with us, especially those of us who are in leadership."

The participants endorsed, by acclamation, the Terms of Reference of the Global Judicial Integrity Network, which outline its mission statement, objectives, participation and organization of work. The Terms also specify the role of the Secretariat (carried out by UNODC) and that of the Advisory Board, which will help identify priority challenges and emerging topics in judicial integrity, and assist judiciaries in addressing those challenges as they arise. The first members of the Board, selected by the Secretariat based on their active engagement in advancing judicial integrity, are:

Adrian Saunders: President-elect of the Caribbean Court of Justice, Chairman of the Caribbean Association of Judicial Officers

Duro Sessa: President of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Croatia, President of the Consultative Council of European Judges

Masood Bin Muhammad Al-Ameri: Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Council, Qatar

Maria Theresa Moura: Minister of the Superior Court of Justice in Brazil, Director-General of the Brazilian National Magistrates School

Zainun Ali: Judge of the Federal Court, Malaysia

Kashim Zannah: Chief Judge, High Court of Borno State, Nigeria

Nihal Jayawickrama: Coordinator of the Judicial Integrity Group

Jose Igreja Matos: Judge, Court of Appeal, Porto, Portugal, President of the European Association of Judges, and Vice President of the International Association of Judges.

Lynne Leitch: Justice, Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Representative of the Commonwealth Magistrates and Judges Association, Chair of the Association's Gender Section

Diego Garcia-Sayan: UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers

The conference concluded with the adoption, by acclamation, of the Declaration on Judicial Integrity and the invitation by Masoud Mohamed Alameri, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Council of Qatar, to hold the Network's next conference in Qatar. Addressing the participants, Chief Justice Alameri stressed: "We should remember that our efforts are of historic value to us, as it will be the first purely judicial project connecting and bringing together the world's judicial authorities under the auspices of the United Nations."

The meeting was closed by Dimitri Vlassis, Chief of the UNODC Crime and Corruption Branch, who congratulated participants on the fruitful and constructive spirit of the discussions, commenting: "The Global Judicial Integrity Network is an initiative of paramount importance in strengthening judicial integrity and preventing corruption in the justice system. This meeting has given consideration to numerous crucial issues and has shown the need to come together and help one another in addressing them. It will be an honour to work with you all as we continue to encourage other judiciaries and stakeholders to join us on this important journey."

Additional Information:

www.unodc.org/ji

Event photos on UNODC Judicial Integrity Flickr AlbumOTTAWA, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) will host a community town hall in Ottawa on Tuesday, April 17 as it winds up its national pharmacare tour. That same day, the Standing Committee on Health will release its recommendations on the creation of a national prescription drug plan.

If the Committees report is reflective of the nearly 100 expert witnesses they heard from, then it can be expected to confirm the need and economic benefit of a national pharmacare plan that is universal, comprehensive, and publicly-administered, said CLC President Hassan Yussuff.

The CLC launched a cross-country tour last fall to promote the expansion of Canadas medicare system to provide universal prescription drug coverage. The 23-stop tour attracted more than 2,000 people across the country and engaged nearly 50,000 others who signed petitions and sent emails to Members of Parliament.

What: Canadian Labour Congress Pharmacare Ottawa Town Hall When: 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m., April 17, 2018 Where: Delta Ottawa City Centre - Ballroom B & C, 101 Lyon St N Ottawa, ON Who: Hassan Yussuff, CLC President Dr. Danielle Martin, Vice President Medical Affairs and Health System Solutions, Women's College Hospital Dr. Danyaal Raza, Chair, Canadian Doctors for Medicare

Today, 3.5 million Canadians cant afford their prescriptions, and access to coverage often depends on where you live and how much you earn. Nobody should have to choose between paying for groceries and paying for the medication they need, said Yussuff.

The Standing Committee on Health report, titled Pharmacare Now: Prescription Medicine Coverage for all Canadians, is expected to lay the groundwork for the recently announced Advisory Council on the Implementation of National Pharmacare.

To learn more about the CLCs pharmacare campaign, visit:

aplanforeveryone.ca.

Journalists wishing to attend the event or to arrange an interview with an expert, please contact:

Chantal St-Denis

CLC Communications

613-355-1962

Email: cstdenis@clc-ctc.caVANCOUVER, British Columbia , April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rogers Sugar Inc. (RSI) will be holding a conference call to discuss their 2018 second quarter results on Tuesday, May 1st, 2018 at 17:30 (Eastern Time).

The conference call will be chaired by Mr. John Holliday, Chief Executive Officer and Ms. Manon Lacroix, Chief Financial Officer.

If you wish to participate, please dial 1-877-223-4471 . A recording of the conference call will be accessible shortly after the conference, by dialing 1-800-585-8367, access code 1776668#. This recording will be available until May 8, 2018.

For further information

Manon Lacroix

Chief Financial Officer

Tel.: (514) 940-4350

www.lanticinc.comAUSTIN, Texas, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Stratfor, the worlds leading geopolitical intelligence platform, announced the launch of Threat Lens 2.0 to dramatically expand the global situational awareness of corporate security teams charged with ensuring the security of people, assets and other interests around the world. As the companys premier protective intelligence solution for globally engaged organizations, this latest release of Stratfor Threat LensTM continues to help leaders better identify, anticipate, measure and mitigate risks that emerging threats pose to their operations. The latest Threat Lens platform enhancements and new features will be available for one-on-one demonstrations April 1820 during ASIS Europe 2018 in Rotterdam, Netherlands.



The response has been overwhelmingly positive since the launch of Stratfor Threat Lens and now, thanks to direct engagement and collaboration with our corporate security clients, were excited to make this significant investment and build upon the value Threat Lens offers, said Stratfor President Chip Harmon. This next generation Threat Lens platform delivers the customization, immediacy and the practical security context necessary for leaders of todays global enterprises to focus on whats most important to their organizations and make decisions with confidence.

New additions included in the launch of Threat Lens 2.0, Stratfors award winning protective intelligence solution for global organizations, include:

A customizable Risk Dashboard , enabling clients to monitor the rise and fall of threat environment trends within a country of interest, coupled with the most recent intelligence threat updates.

, enabling clients to monitor the rise and fall of threat environment trends within a country of interest, coupled with the most recent intelligence threat updates. A new Threat Monitoring map interface that highlights the locations and types of threats as they develop in real-time to enhance global situational awareness.

map interface that highlights the locations and types of threats as they develop in real-time to enhance global situational awareness. Significantly expanding the global reach and frequency of Intelligence Updates with immediate access to insight on emerging items of interest so corporate security teams can stay ahead of the news cycle and inform decision makers.

For organizations with the responsibility to better protect their people and assets around the world, todays security professionals need to be proactive and constantly ahead of the curve so they can anticipate threats before they materialize, said Stratfor Vice President of Tactical Analysis Scott Stewart who will be presenting on Risk Mitigation and the Importance of How at ASIS Europe on April 19. Enhancements such as the customizable risk dashboard and new threat monitoring indices, that highlight the directionality of specific threat trends by country, give todays security professionals the edge they need.

Additional product advancements include a redesign of the global threat map to enable better access to Stratfor Threat Lens in-depth analyses, the ability to personalize the user experience with custom options and more prominent alerts when incidents occur within a clients areas of interest. The upcoming Threat Lens API release will also enable even greater integration of Threat Lens analysis, alerts and other updates into existing client systems to allow faster, better informed responses to developing threats around the globe.

Corporate security teams and organizations with interests around the world rely on Stratfor Threat Lens to pinpoint which evolving global events are truly significant and it remains the only unified solution that integrates the full spectrum of security issues they face, spanning threats against people, infrastructure, intellectual property and business continuity. Advancements and expanded features included in the launch of Threat Lens 2.0 build upon the multi-layered analytical framework that has consistently and effectively allowed Stratfor analysts to evaluate the immediate significance and future implications of evolving situations so clients can anticipate threats and implement protective measures.

Stratfor analysts will demonstrate the latest developments with Threat Lens 2.0 at ASIS Europe (Booth A5) in Rotterdam, April 1820. Corporate security leaders and others seeking to identify, anticipate, measure and mitigate risks that emerging threats pose to their people, assets and interests around the world can also learn more at Stratfor.com/threatlens.

About Stratfor

As the worlds leading geopolitical intelligence platform, Stratfor brings global events into valuable perspective, empowering businesses, governments and individuals to more confidently navigate their way through an increasingly complex international environment. Stratfor Threat LensTM, a customizable, protective intelligence solution, helps corporate security leaders identify, anticipate, measure and mitigate risks that emerging threats pose to their people, assets and interests around the world. Learn more at Stratfor.com.

Media Contact

Joshua Cook

Stratfor Director of Public Relations

512-744-4309

pr@stratfor.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/417d60ef-4fd2-426b-a07a-dc2f24a2caf3Start your day with Sunrise, a roundup of B.C. news and opinions delivered straight to your inbox

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Sign up now>This is claimed to be the largest multi-level business swindle in Vietnam to date

According to Document No.3318, Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue directed the ministries of Industry and Trade (MoIT), Planning and Investment (MPI), Finance (MoF), Justice (MoJ), Public Security (MoPS), and the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) to check and handle the VND15-trillion ($0.66 billion) cryptocurrency swindling case.

In order to strengthen state management over Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has just issued Directive No.10/CT-TTg, asking SBV to direct all banks and credit organisations not to do all transactions related to cryptocurrency. They have to boost reviewing and reporting on suspicious transactions involving cryptocurrency.

The PM assigned MoPS to coordinate with other ministries to investigate, detect, and handle violations related to financial mobilisation, multi-level business, and swindling on the internet through cryptocurrency.

Earlier, on April 8, dozens of investors came to the headquarters of Modern Tech Co., Ltd. at Nguyen Hue Street, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City to protest against the companys appropriation of over VND15 trillion ($0.66 billion) in cryptocurrency. This figure was attained by the successful mobilisation of $650 million at the ICO (initial coin offering) by iFan, Pincoin, and other cryptocurrencies created by Modern Tech.

The company held many events in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to seek investors and call for investment into cryptocurrency, along with committing to payout 48 per cent of its profit every month and paying back the original investment within four months.

Modern Tech has yet to issue an official response to the accusations of investors. This company was established at the end of last October with a charter capital of VND100 billion ($4.4 million) pooled by eight founders. Modern Tech registered to operate in the fields of website design, development, software, and investment consultancy.1,000 CEO will hold congress on April 15

The 1,000 CEOs meeting will be organised by PDCA Training Consultant Co., Ltd. in collaboration with CEO K35 Group JSC in Hanoi on April 15.

Joining the meeting, CEOs will have an opportunity to connect with others operating in the same sector as well as suppliers. Especially, CEO of Tan Hiep Phat Beverage Group Tran Qui Thanh will share his successes and failures as well as the secret that boosted Tan Hiep Phats revenue to $2.5 billion in 19 years from the initial $100,000.

In addition, after the meeting, CEOs will join a business community thanks to the Zeniius app supplied by the board of organisation to continue to maintain the relationship with partners as well as expand participants relationships.

According to Hoang Dinh Trong, chairman of PDCA, along with the mission of connecting CEOs with each other, the lessons of large-scale enterprises at the meeting will help small- and medium-sized enterprises to skill up and gather management experience.

The 1,000 CEO meeting is an annual event organised for the first time in Ho Chi Minh in July 2017. At the event, thousands of enterprises connected with each other and hundreds of contracts were signed with the total value of nearly VND1 trillion ($43.8 million).English Norwegian

The Annual General Meeting of Orkla ASA was held today, 12 April 2018 in Oslo, Norway.



All proposals on the agenda were adopted, cf. the notice of the Annual General Meeting that was sent to the Oslo Stock Exchange on 22 March 2018.



The General Meeting approved the Board's proposal to distribute a dividend for 2017 of NOK 2.60 per share. The dividend will be paid on 25 April 2018 to shareholders of record as of the date of the Annual General Meeting.



A translation of the minutes from the Ordinary General Meeting is attached and available on www.orkla.com.



Orkla ASA

Oslo, 12 April 2018



Ref.:



Group Director Corporate Communications and Corporate Affairs

Hakon Mageli

Tel.: +47 928 45 828

Email: hakon.mageli@orkla.no



IR & Communications Manager

Elise Heidenreich

Tel. +47 951 41 147

Email: elise.andersen.heidenreich@orkla.noOne of AEON MALL subsidiaries in Vietnam

AEON MALL is operating four malls in Vietnam. What do you expect from new AEON MALL Hadong?

Since our establishment, we are still only at the beginning stage. With AEON MALL Hadong, we enter the growth stage of operations. This is one of the projects we will focus on in this stage.

Yasutsugu Iwamura, general director of AEON Mall Vietnam

This is the 5th mall of AEON MALL in Vietnam and the 2nd in Hanoi after AEON MALL Long Bien opened in 2015. AEON MALL Hadong is an important project to boost our presence in Vietnam. We are committed to bringing our expertise, experience, and passion to contribute to the local community and grow hand-in-hand with the locality. AEON MALL Hadong carries the same mission as our existing malls. It was designed as a place full of fun and excitement to enhance the enjoyment of life for everyone.

AEON MALL always respects traditional community, thus AEON MALL Hadong has the concept of Knitting Hadong's future.

Traditional silk weaving is very popular in Hadong district. The mall will celebrate this unique local custom, and with the concept of Knitting Hadongs future, it will offer the latest fashion and a new, fulfilling lifestyle to locals, hoping to become the No. 1 mall in the district.

AEON MALL Vietnam announced that it targets to have 20 malls across the country by 2025. As the deadline is already looming, do you think this goal is feasible? Besides, are there any barriers keeping you from meeting the target?

To reach our target, we have to open two malls each year, which is difficult as site space is lacking. Thus, we are looking for reliable local partners to introduce new site space to us. Surely, we cannot reach this goal alone. We are also making use of our experience in developing shopping malls to harmonise traditional values with modern lifestyle to preserve national identity.

Our philosophy of putting the customer first and bringing both tangible and intangible values has guided our continuing efforts to create malls that enhance the quality of life for local people, stimulate local economic activity, and contribute to community life and culture.

In the coming time we are also thinking of smaller space instead of the 9-10 hectare model as such large spaces are unavailable in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. We set the target and are looking for suitable space. Thus, there are two important points, which are finding reliable partners and good prospects.

Whether this is feasible or not, we are trying our best as challenges are what make life interesting.

How would you arrange the locations of your malls across Vietnam by 2025?

This is a difficult question to answer. In general, we are thinking of a three-pronged approach, dividing the market into northern, central, and southern regions. Each region will have a main centre and satellite malls. If possible, we would like to have 10 malls in the southern area, seven malls in the north and four malls in Central Vietnam.

It will take about 2-3 hours to reach these expected malls from the city centre. However, it needs to be clarified that this travel time is not time at present, but time when the malls are open and the infrastructure system is improved.

As you said, finding partners is one of the key steps to successfully carry out your plan in Vietnam. How are you doing in this area? Except for BIM Group that you are cooperating with for AEON MALL Hadong, are there any real estate developers that you are going to cooperate with?

For instance, we are cooperating with Viet Phat Import Export Trading Investment JSC in Haiphong for our upcoming mall. We are looking for partners that understand local customers habits. From my view and experience in Vietnam, there are great differences among the regions.

We are willing to cooperate with potential partners if we can find opportunities in the coming time.

AEON MALL is different from others because we build the malls and operate them for over 30 years. Thus, pursuing peace, respecting humanity, and contributing to local communities while focusing on the customer is the base of our activities, and this philosophy has never changed since our establishment. We are always creating new values for customers and the local community.

Is this the philosophy behind AEON MALLs success, as many others are forced to withdraw due to competition?

Actually, our malls take a slightly different approach than others. AEON MALLs are all about accessibility and safety. In the next three years, trends, stores, and customer demand may change, but our malls are built to adapt. We have a long-term vision.

Calling ourselves a Life Design Developer, we are creating a life for future by developing a unique shopping mall model with a focus on the localisation of middle-class population expansion, to not only innovate customer shopping experience, but also create an open environment for connecting people, fostering local culture and enhancing life quality by providing a variety of lifestyle functions.The study shows that only 57 per cent of shoppers in Asia are satisfied with the online shopping experience

Now in its sixth year, the research commissioned by UPS, a global leader in logistics, revealed enduring constants as well as emerging trends that are changing consumer behavior and preferences across China, Hong Kong and Japan, as well as the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Brazil.

The results have been categorized into three areas  Constants, Movers and Emergers.

Analysing the mindsets and motivations of thousands of shoppers around the world reveals that, far from being a sunk cost, clever shipping and returns solutions are actually an area where retailers can win and retain customers, drive repeat patronage, and encourage shoppers to add more items to their carts  both online and in-store, said Sylvie Van den Kerkhof, vice president of Marketing, UPS Asia Pacific.

We are seeing fast growth in Vietnams online retail industry, with annual e-commerce revenues expected to hit $10 billion and account for 5 per cent of all retail sales by 2020, said Daryl Tay, managing director of UPS Vietnam.

As e-commerce continues to grow, Vietnamese retailers looking to serve online shoppers from Asia and across the globe should look at providing customers with more flexible delivery and return options, as well as leveraging the growth of mobile commerce so as to provide a more dynamic online shopping experience, he added.

CONSTANTS: Asia online shoppers remain dissatisfied and continue to seek free, fast shipping and returns

The study shows that only 57 per cent of shoppers in Asia are satisfied with the online shopping experience, the lowest percentage compared to other regions surveyed, and an improvement of only 11-percentage points since 2015 when it was 46 per cent, demonstrating the slow pace of change in addressing customer satisfaction.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents in Asia indicated that free shipping is an important factor in the checkout process, with 46 per cent of shoppers adding items to their cart to qualify for it.

Whats more, about half of Asia online shoppers have abandoned a cart due to no delivery date being given or delivery time being too long, with the average delivery wait leading to cart abandonment being 11 days.

Meanwhile, a convenient and transparent return policy increases sales and customer satisfaction, with 67 per cent of shoppers in Asia indicating that free shipping on returns is important when selecting online retailers.

MOVERS: In recent years, consumers in Asia have become increasingly comfortable with shopping on smartphones

The usage of smartphones has become more prevalent amongst shoppers in Asia, with smartphone purchases becoming the norm as 77 per cent of shoppers have placed orders on their phones (the highest percentage globally), up from 55 per cent in 2015.

By way of comparison, only 48 per cent of American smartphone users made online purchases on their device.

Ship-to-store is growing in popularity with 37 per cent of shoppers using it in the past year and 59 per cent of those planning to use it even more this year.

The usage of smartphones has become more prevalent amongst shoppers in Asia, with smartphone purchases becoming the norm.

The research also found that 55 per cent of online shoppers in Asia are embracing international retailers. Among those, 49 per cent of buyers ventured to overseas retailers because the brand or product was not available domestically, or the quality (39 per cent) or price (38 per cent) was better internationally.

EMERGERS: Newer areas of retail that may play a bigger role in the future

Alternate delivery locations are most popular in Asia compared to other regions, with 71 per cent of consumers, particularly millennials and urban shoppers, interested in shipping packages to these locations with extended hours for reduced fees.

Shoppers preference for alternate delivery locations has grown considerably from 46 per cent in 2015 to 59 per cent of orders in 2018.

Asia shoppers also love their marketplaces with 98 per cent having purchased from one, and more than a third saying they will use them even more in the next year.

Better prices (64 per cent) and free or discounted shipping (42 per cent) are the top reasons for buying from a marketplace instead of direct from a retailer.

The UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper research shows time and again that as online shoppers gain the benefit of greater choice, they are increasingly dictating the terms of their buying experienceand it is vital that retailers know how to cater to and adapt to their changing needs, Van den Kerkhof noted.

The UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper global study evaluates consumer shopping habits and preferences from pre-purchase to post-delivery. The 2018 study was fielded in Q1, Q2 and Q3 2017 and is based on a comScore survey of more than 18,000 online shoppers worldwide.

In Asia alone, the survey included approximately 3,200 respondents in China, Hong Kong, and Japan.

With more than 3,200 clients and a global footprint in 70 countries, comScore is a leading cross-platform measurement company that measures audiences, brands and consumer behaviour.A perspective drawing of the Long Thanh International Airport. - Photo bnews.vn

During his field trip, Dung visited families involved with the project and offered gifts to kindergarten students in Long Thanh districts Suoi Trau Commune.

The deputy chairman of the Dong Nai Peoples Committee, Tran Van Vinh, said that the province was ready to implement the project, but was still waiting for the prime ministerial approval.

He urged the State Appraisal Council to quickly evaluate the feasibility of the project and submit it to the Prime Minister for approval.

The province has received VND4.5 trillion ($197 million) and plans to allocate a specific amount of capital resources, he said.

If the project is approved within the next month, the provincial peoples committee would have 30 months to complete land acquisition of 5,399.35ha and resettle 4,486 households.

The province plans to provide residents whose agricultural land is displaced by the airport project four to five times their monthly minimum salary at the time of land acquisition.

Quality transport infrastructure connecting Long Thanh International Airport to other areas should be emphasised, he said, particularly the expansion of Ho Chi Minh City  Long Thanh  Dau Giay Expressway and construction of Bien Hoa  Vung Tau Expressway.

Dung ordered further coordination between the Dong Nai Peoples Committee and relevant authorities to complete necessary project documents and prepare for implementation.Paying respects: Xang Khan, a traditional festival of the Thai ethnic group, where herbalists pay tribute to gods and ancestors who taught them to cure ailments, will be part of an event to celebrate the Viet Nam Ethnic Groups Cultural Day.

Xang Khan festival was recognised as a national intangible cultural heritage last year. It is an occasion for people to express gratitude for local herbalists who cure them from illness. It is also a rendezvous for young men and women. At the festival, locals and tourists will have an opportunity to enjoy a show of traditional costumes of ethnic groups, gong performances, dances and folk games.

The Xang Khan festival will take place on April 21.

It is part of a wide range of activities organised from April 19-22 at the Culture and Tourism Villages of Vietnamese Ethnic Groups in Son Tay district, 45km west of Ha Nois centre.

About 270 people from 30 ethnic groups across the country will show off their distinctive culture, traditional festivals and worship rituals at the event, according to Lam Van Khang, head of the villages management board.

The cultural event will help honour patriotism, the cultural diversity and national solidarity, he said.

Colourful: Xang Khan, a traditional festival of the Thai ethnic group, where herbalists pay tribute to gods and ancestors who taught them to cure ailments, will be part of an event to celebrate the Viet Nam Ethnic Groups Cultural Day

An art performance to celebrate 10 years since the first Viet Nam Ethnic Groups Cultural Day will be highlight of the event. It will be broadcast live on Viet Nam Television.

The performance will star troupes from the southern province of Soc Trang and the Central Highlands province of Kon Tum as well as of people residing in the village.

The cultural day of the Khmer people on April 20 will recreate the Chol Chnam Thmay, the Khmer New Year festival, and feature du ke, a style of musical theatre created by the Khmer people in Viet Nam in the early 1920s.

Du ke originated from workers in the Mekong Delta. In the early days, it was performed on land, under a simple roof. Actors were peasants who portrayed kings, queens and ogresses. The singing drama uses poetry based on Indian epics, for example, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

On the cultural day of ethnic people from the northwest, the Thai ethnic group in Nghe An Province will present Xang Khan festival and a series of cooking demonstrations of traditional dishes by the Tay of Thai Nguyen Province, the Dao of Ha Noi, the Mong of Ha Giang, the Muong of Hoa Binh, the Kho Mu of ien Bien and the Thai of Son La.

The culture and music of the Central Highlands will be featured on April 22 with the performance of the Gia Rai ethnic people. They will perform a ritual to pray for rain which is practiced in April and May every year to pray for rain and bumper crops. The traditional music of the region will also be played during the day.

A photo exhibition reviewing the activities taking place at the village during the 10 years implementing the Viet Nam Ethnic Groups Cultural Day will be held during the four-day festival.Grab expands its operation to compete with Go-Jek

Grab: Ambition to dominate

When people wake up, they will book vehicles via Grabs ride-hailing app, and then pay the fare via the Grab Financial app. At noon, they will pay for lunch via Grab Pay and book dinner via Grab Food.

This idyllic scenario was painted by Grab CEO Anthony Tan, when talking about M&A deals to expand the firms operations via launching a series of services, including Grab Food, Grab Pay, and Grab Financial.

Notably, after receiving $2 billion from Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-hailing company, and SoftBank from Japan in July 2017 to expand its operations, Grab has connected millions of people with its financial services. Notably, the Grab Pay app was launched in all countries of Southeast Asia.

When people wake up, they will book vehicle via Grabs ride-hailing service app, and then pay the fare via Grab Financial app. At noon, they will pay for lunch via Grab Pay and book deals for dinners via Grab Food

Besides, it co-operated with Credit Saison from Japan to establish Grab Financial Services and co-operate with insurance giant Chubb.

Earlier this year, Grab announced that it acquired India-based payments startup iKaaz to strengthen its payments platform.

Grab expected that, "The rich functionality of the iKaaz mobile payments platform and its experienced leadership team will accelerate the feature development and partner integration of GrabPay (its payments platform).

Grab Pay created a flush in development with 3.5 million transactions conducted per day, equalling over one billion transactions per year.

Go-Jek appears

With careful preparation to expand its operations, Grab will not be challenged by other ride-hailing service apps in its markets, excluding the heavyweight Go-Jek, the motorcycle ride-hailing transportation provider from Indonesia.

The withdrawal of Uber from Southeast Asia motivated Go-Jek to accelerate the plan to expand operations to overseas markets, including Vietnam.

Grab and Go-Jek are the heavyweights with each other in the race to gain the market share in the ride-hailing service. Both of them are backed by financial giants, notably Didi Chuxing from China and Softbank from Japan stood behind to supply financial support to Grab, while Go-Jek receives capital from Google and Tencent.

According to Go-Jek, Vietnam is considered an ideal destination to invest in motorcycle ride-hailing services as it has a population of 90 million and 45 million registered motorcycles. Besides, operating expenses in Vietnam are cheaper than in markets like Singapore and Malaysia.

Thus, in March, Go-Jek started to recruit experts to advise for its expansion in Vietnam to break the dominance of Grab.

In order to realise the strategy to set foot in other markets in Southeast Asia, Go-Jek has been collecting capital.

According to the latest movements, it succeeded in raising $1.5 billion in the latest round from a dozen investors including Google, Temasek, Chinese tech giant Tencent, and BlackRock.

Besides, Go-Jek has been investing in the finance technology sector and launched Go-Pay, with the aim to lure in a large volume of people customers with demand for finance technology services.

2018 will be the year of Go-Pay, announced Nadiem Makarim, CEO of Go-Jek.

Established in 2010 as a phone-based motorcycle ride-hailing service, Go-Jek has evolved into an on-demand mobile platform and a cutting-edge app, providing a wide range of services that include transportation, logistics, mobile payments, food delivery, and many other on-demand services. Go-Jek is valued at $5 billion.

With balanced financial potentials, Grab and Go-Jek are looking at an even race for market share in ride-hailing services. Both of them are backed by financial giants, notably Didi Chuxing from China and Softbank from Japan standing behind Grab, and Google and Tencent behind Go-Jek.

However, their business strategy sets them apart. Grab currently dominates the ride-hailing markets thanks to its deep understanding of the demands of residents and flexible technology applications. While with the advantage in terms of delivery speed, Go-Jek is known as the app meeting almost all demands faster than Grab.HDBank recorded strong growth in 2017 with a positive outlook for 2018 and onwards

HDBank went through a historic year in 2017, with VND2.4 trillion ($105 million) of pre-tax profit, up 110.6 per cent from the previous year, exceeding the goal set by its annual general shareholders' meeting by 85.9 per cent.

Thanks to these positive results, the bank decided to pay dividend to its shareholders at the ratio of 35 per cent, including 15 per cent in cash and 20 per cent in preferential shares. This is a rare case in the banking sector, as most financial institutions in Vietnam often pay dividends in shares only.

In a few extreme cases, some banks even fail to pay dividends due to poor results. HDBank, on the contrary, pays dividends regularly.

The regular dividend payout is testament to the banks commitment to serving shareholders interests. In fact, shareholders at HDBank get double profits this year from investing in the bank, as the banks ticker rose by 50 per cent since listing and they will receive a 35-per-cent dividend payout soon.

Within the next five years, HDBank plans to develop its customer base through Big Data and trade finance for Vietnams supply chain, cementing its strong relationship with major Vietnamese corporations such as Vietjet or Vinamilk.

HDBank aims to triple the number of its customers, reaching 15 million in 2021. Profit growth is expected to reach 37 per cent a year.

Recently, HDBank has released strong results for the first quarter of 2018. In particular, consolidated revenue reached VND1 trillion ($43.8 million), of which HDBank (the parent bank) alone recorded VND851 billion ($37.3 million), up 201.8 per cent year-on-year and reaching 27.5 per cent of the 2018 target. Returns on assets reached 1.5 per cent, while returns on equity stand at 19.2 per cent. The amount of bad debts is under control, standing at only 1.22 per cent.

HDBank has attracted 48,504 individual customers, 700 corporate customers, up 103 per cent since the end of last year.

HDBank has attracted 48,504 individual customers, 700 corporate customers, up 103 per cent since the end of last year.

Consumer finance company HD Saison has served 3.9 million customers, up 151.91 per cent year-on-year. Thanks to these results, HD Saison is currently the consumer finance business with the widest network of customers in Vietnam.

According to analysts from Ho Chi Minh City Securities Corporation, consolidated pre-tax profit at HDBank is forecast to reach VND3.95 trillion ($173.2 million) (up 63.79 per cent). Earnings per share stand at VND2,910 ($0.13). These forecasts are based on predictions that the outstanding loan amount at HDBank will reach VND130 trillion ($5.7 billion).

Analysts believe that HDBank and HD Saison will record VND188 trillion ($8.2 billion) and VND11.81 trillion ($517.8 million) of outstanding loans, respectively. Deposits are expected to grow by 20 per cent to reach VND144 trillion ($6.3 billion).

HDBank records one of the strongest growth rates in the entire banking sector and owns a strong consumer finance company. The HDBank ecosystem includes HDBankHD Saison and Vietjet.

Analysts believe that the parent bank and the consumer finance firm will boost their business results thanks to the good quality of assets, a widened network and commitment towards growth. According to Ho Chi Minh City Securities Corporation, HDBank and Vietcombank are the two listed commercial banks with space for foreign ownership, which will propel the stock price upwards.

HDBank initiative to raise next generation of chess masters On March 10, HDBank's first international chess tournament was held in the capital of Hanoi, following the bank's past seven tournaments hosted in Ho Chi Minh ...

HDBank looks beyond HSX listing Being listed on the stock exchange is not everything that HDBank has in mind, as the bank aims to seize a bigger opportunity to leverage ...Long Hung Phat Co., Ltd.s Bay Hien Tower is on the list

The most common violations in fire prevention are inaccessibility by fire trucks, sub-standard fire prevention solutions, and fire safety issues at the basements.

In addition, during the investigation, the citys authorities also detected many buildings where the fire prevention system was different from the approved design.

The eight buildings violating fire prevention regulations:

1. Hung Thinh Corporations Nguyen Quyen apartment building (Binh Tan districts Binh Tri Dong ward)

The fire prevention system of the 16-floor apartment building is different from the approved construction dossier, including uninsured number of exit stairs, security doors opening in the wrong direction, and inactive automatic fire prevention system and fire alarms.

These violations have been on-going for a long time. Binh Tan districts authority and the citys fire fighters have many times inspected and requested the investors to overcome the violations, in vain.

2. Long Hung Phat Co., Ltd.s Bay Hien Tower (Tan Binh districts Ward 11)

The buildings fire prevention system is not compliant with the approved file on fire prevention, while the investor has violated regulations on residential density and does not co-operate with the authorities to remedy the violations.

The 24-floor building was put into use with many people moving in to apartments between the seventh and the 19th floors.

3. No.8 Investment and Construction JSC (CIC8)s Bac Binh apartment building (Binh Thanh district's Ward 25)

The 14-floor building was completed in 2012 and was put into use without receiving the Fire Code certificate.

4. An Dien Investment and Construction JSCs Vien Ngoc Phuong Nam apartment building (District 2's Ward 8)

The 25-floor building has been put into use in 2016. The buildings fire prevention system has not been checked before the building was launched because the buildings construction unit cancelled the constructed contract.

5. No.8 Investment and Construction JSC (CIC8)s Green Building (District 9)

The investor sold 132 apartments of the total 156 since 2016. To date, the buildings fire prevention system has not been checked before the building was launched due to incomplete fire alarm and water supply system for fire fighting.

6. Kim Kim Hoan My Trade and Service Co., Ltd.s Ngoc Khanh apartment building (District 5)

The 20-floor building was put into use in 2017, but the 17th floor and 18th floor has no fire prevention system.

7. District 5 People Committees Block G apartment building (District 5)

The fire prevention system of the 12-floor building has not been constructed.

8. NBB Groups City Gate Towers (District 8)

The fire prevention system of this 29-floor building has not been checked as the building is significantly different from the approved construction design.Ho Chi Minh City and IFC officials pose for a photo (Photo: VNA)

At the meeting in the southern economic hub of Vietnam, Liem thanked the IFC for supporting the citys leaders during their working visit to the US in late 2017 during which Ho Chi Minh City and the IFC signed a cooperation agreement.

He asked the IFC to help Ho Chi Minh City learn smart city building experience from countries around the world, especially in the formation of a centre for research, simulation, forecast and building of socio-economic development strategies.

Liem proposed the IFC provide financial aid to assist Ho Chi Minh City in carrying out a feasibility study on the building of a highly interactive creativity centre linking districts 2, 9 and Thu Duc district so as to provide favourable conditions for the local start-up community to share experience and cooperate.

Ho Chi Minh City also looks forward to the IFCs consultancy on the implementation of public-private partnership (PPP) projects, the official said, inviting the IFC to attend an international workshop on state budget use and PPP held in coordination with the World Bank in the city in May.

Expressing her interest in bilateral cooperation, Stoiljkovic vowed that she and her colleagues will work with Ho Chi Minh City to implement the cooperation memorandum inked in late 2017. She also affirmed that the IFC will be a good partner of the city in supporting private businesses development.

She highly evaluated the citys strategic vision and efforts in building a smart city, noting that the IFC will help it study smart city building projects. She added the construction of financial and high technology development centres is important to developing a smart city as they will create connectivity and promote other fields like finance and human resources training.

Accepting the invitation to attend the workshop on PPP, Stoiljkovic said the IFC has high-quality specialists who are ready to advise Ho Chi Minh City in building the PPP structure and using capital in PPP projects effectively. Cooperation between the IFC and Ho Chi Minh City will open up new approaches in development cooperation and sponsorship, she said.

The IFC Vice President also expressed her delight at Ho Chi Minh Citys selection of Standard & Poors Rating Service as the consultant for credit and financial management rating. She considered this move as a fine beginning for the city to access loans without the governments guarantee, thereby helping to mobilise capital for local development projects in the future.The two layers weigh in their opinion about the Sabeco-Thai Beverage conflict

A case that may affect Vietnams reputation on global markets

On April 23, Sabeco will hold its extraordinary general shareholders meeting, less than six months after it held the share auction that saw Thai Beverage as the only buyer. According to Vietnamese laws and Sabecos charter, a shareholder with more than 5 per cent of the stake must hold the shares for six consecutive months or more before they are entitled to appoint nominees to the board.

In this case, as Thai Beverage only acquired 53.59 per cent of Sabecos shares last December, technically speaking, the Thai investor has not had the right to appoint and vote its representative to be on Sabecos board yet.

But should there be an exception in this case? Thai Beverage clearly wants to gain control of Sabeco as soon as possible, having forked out almost $5 billion to buy the shares. This is evidenced in their petition letter to the Vietnamese government last month, and Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue has asked the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) to deal with this issue.

For the time being, Sabecos board consists of four members, and three more seats remain empty. We believe that Sabeco may temporarily fill these three empty seats with representatives from Thai Beverage and hold an extraordinary shareholder meeting to cast a vote on this appointment. This is in line with Article 26 (6) of the companys charter.

There are a number of arguments, such as Article 26 (6) of Sabecos charter does not follow Decree No.71/2017/ND-CP by the Government and Circular No.95/2017/TT-BTC by the Ministry of Finance about corporate governance at listed companies. Article 26 (6) also clashes with Article 16(2) in Sabecos charter regarding the right of shareholders to nomination and selection of the board members.

We believe that these arguments are inaccurate. Article 26 (2) of Sabecos charter state that Sabeco needs to gain shareholders approval for its selection of board members, which must stand at seven people.

Also according to the charter, any decision must gain the approval of at least three quarters of the board, or five people. Up until now, Sabecos board operates with only four members, so does this mean the formality or validity of a number of board meetings and resolutions respectively must be re-examined due to the availability of only 4 board members?

As far as the Decree 71 and Circular 95 may be effective, the law only says that a firms charter must be passed by the general shareholder meeting and must not violate the Law on Enterprises, Securities Law, Decree 71, and relevant rules. The model charter is only for reference. There is no ground in stating that Sabecos Article 26 violates such pieces of legislation and regulations.

Moreover, MoIT and Sabecos board do not need to ask the State Securities Commission whether nominees from Thai Beverage are truly independent or not, and how Sabeco should appoint its board members. As long as the nominees can meet requirements stated in Article 151 (1) of the Law on Enterprises and stay clear from five situations listed in Article 151 (2), they can become independent board members.

Thirdly, Thai Beverage is a long-term strategic investor, rather than a financial investor for share price or speculator. The people that they nominate are supposed to be have with sufficient expertise and experience qualification to help move Sabeco forward.

In one extreme case, the Thai firm does not have any right at the moment to nominate board members, but as they have more than 51 per cent of Sabecos shares, they can therefore disqualify the quorum of the very meeting to come (by not attending it) and turn down all proposals or motions made in the next meetings. In other words, they can pull the brake even though they cannot touch the gear and driving wheel of the Sabeco vehicle.

Moreover, there are less than two months until Thai Beverage gains enough time and power to organise another extraordinary meetings, if they want, in accordance with Article 22 (3) of Sabecos charter, to make key decisions, except some reserved matters such as amendment of the company charter, re-structure or liquidation of the company.

As a matter of fact, Thai Beverage paid a huge amount of money to own more than a half of Sabecos outstanding shares, thus they naturally have the right to become part of Sabecos management team. This is why we believe that it is unlikely to be fair for Thai Beverage if certain rigid details such as the six-month holding period are emphasised.

The Vietnamese governments swift response to Thai Beverages motion is testament to Vietnams efforts to attract foreign investment and create a transparent and fair legal business environment for both domestic and foreign investors. This sends a positive message to such investors in Vietnam.

From this very case, if the situation can be solved properly, it will assist Vietnam in future IPOs and the equitisation processes of major state-owned firms in encouraging the participation of by foreign investors with ample financial capacity, good reputation, value chain, corporate governance, and technology.

This underscores how important it is for the Thai Beverage-Sabeco case to be taken seriously and solve effectively. It will affect Vietnams reputation as an investment destination, as investors are not afraid to incur additional costs and losses for struggling for the management powers after having acquired shares at Vietnamese firms.

Thai Beverage has every right to demand control at Sabeco. The main question right now is how to solve this complaint properly and preserve Vietnam's appeal as an investment destination

Legal amendment needed

In general terms, from the Thai Beverage-Sabeco case, we suggest that the Vietnamese government should consider amendmenting the Law on Enterprises, specifically the amount of share-holding time-limit that investors must have passed before they are legible to nominate their representatives to the board:

3 - 6 months are maximum period of time of holding 1 - 5 per cent for a shareholder or a group shareholders to have such right. 3 months of holding are mandatory of a group of shareholders with 510 per cent shares for the same purpose.. There should be no time requirement for a shareholder with more than 5 per cent or a group of shareholders with more than 10 per cent of the stakes to enjoy such right.

Alternatively, there should be no time-line requirement for the investors acquiring 1 per cent equity of a company from the state from the latters divestment from the company or state-owned company equitisation (or a fixed value number such as VND50 billion or more) to have right to appointing a candidate for board member. Of course, a minimum blocking time period of 3 - 6 months may be considered.

These amendments, in our opinion, would increase the attractiveness of major share sales, especially the IPOs of electricity and infrastructure firms. Investors will not have to worry that during the long waiting period the company may undergo significant adverse changes.

This rule will also help the government to prevent any corrupted managerial positions from sucking blood from the company before leaving the office or from having enough time to erase any wrongdoings previously conducted or arrange the posts in the company for their acquaintances before they lose control of it.

Moreover, when conducting share sales or divestment from a company, the government should ensure that the buyers will be entitled to to nominate representatives into the board by requesting an extraordinary meeting that the current board is not allowed turn down for any reason.

To facilitate this move, an escrow account for the share price payment or an obligation of share buy-back by the state (seller) to ensure the above rights for the buyer(s) should be also considered.

Sabeco asked to hold shareholders meeting on personnel matters The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) has requested the Saigon Beer-Alcohol-Beverage Corporation (Sabeco) to hold an extraordinary shareholders meeting to review personnel matters.

ThaiBev should wait for Sabeco's extraordinary meeting, says MoIT The Ministry of Industry and Trade said that the April 23 annual general meeting (AGM) will have the final say on who can manage Sabeco, ...Wireless HDMI equipment AnyCast M2 Plus sold on Lazada

According to a feedback from consumer Trinh Xuan Dieu to newswire ICTnews, Dieu ordered a wireless HDMI equipment AnyCast M2 Plus in black at the price of VND249,000 ($11) sold by Hola Hola company in Ho Chi Minh City.

Dieu said this item is new but faulty, and can not be used. Dieu claimed: After I complained, Lazada.vn told me to return the item and promised to pay my money back. However, after more than two weeks and after five complaints, Lazada has yet to return the amount that I paid for this poor-quality item.

In the last few years, ICTnews said it has been receiving many feedbacks and complaints from Lazada.vns customers. They were made angry enough by the slow and irresponsible service at Lazada to send letters to the Vietnam Competition Authority (VCA) of the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT). This authority also confirmed receiving numerous letters related to Lazadas quality of goods and services.

The complaints focus on delays in delivery, the items being different from the advertisement, delivery of used items, cancellation of orders, and price fraud. Therefore, MoIT has conducted an investigation to determine whether the platform observes the law on commerce and protects consumers interests. The results will be announced in the coming time.English French

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES, CANADA, AUSTRALIA OR JAPAN

Inventiva launches a capital increase to raise approximately 30 Million

Daix (France) April 12, 2018 - Inventiva S.A. ("Inventiva" or the "Company"), a biopharmaceutical company developing innovative therapies in nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), systemic sclerosis (SSc) and mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS), intends to issue new ordinary shares without preferential subscription rights (the "New Shares") for a total capital increase of approximately 30 Million by means of a private placement reserved to a specified category of investors as described below (the "Reserved Offering").

The Reserved Offering will commence immediately and is expected to be finalized before market open on Euronext Paris tomorrow, subject to acceleration or extension at any time. The Company will announce the results of the Reserved Offering as soon as practicable thereafter in a subsequent press release.

The Company intends to use the net proceeds from this capital increase as follows:

Ensure the clinical development of Lanifibranor and more specifically to launch preliminary works prior to (i) the potential NASH Phase III and (ii) future clinical developments in SSc;

Ensure the clinical development of odiparcil and more specifically (i) for the launch of the clinical Phase Ib in children with MPS VI; (ii) to ensure the development of the clinical package in MPS I, II, IVa, and VII and (iii) to launch preliminary workstreams prior to the potential Phase III in MPS I, II, IVa, VI and VII;

Ensure the development of on going discovery programmes; and

Use the remainder to finance other corporate purposes.

The net proceeds are expected to provide the Company with a cash runway based on the on-going programmes to mid-2020.

Key upcoming milestones include:

Lanifibranor 2 years carcinogenicity study results are expected by the end of the second quarter 2018;

Lanifibranor Phase IIb SSc study results are expected early 2019 and Phase IIb NASH study results are expected in the second half of 2019; and

Odiparcil : Phase IIa MPS VI study results are expected in the first half of 2019 and Phase Ib in MPS VI children study results are expected in 2019.

The capital increase will be carried out without shareholders' preferential subscription rights. Pursuant to Article L. 225-138 of the French Commercial Code (Code de commerce), it will be reserved to a specified category of investors as defined in the 15th resolution of the General Shareholders' Meeting of the Company dated 29 May 2017, i.e. (i) a natural or legal person (including companies), trust or investment fund, or other investment vehicle, in any form, established under French or foreign law, which regularly invests in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and the medical technology sectors; and/or (ii) a company, institution or entity, in any form, French or foreign, exercising a significant part of its activity in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic or chemical sectors or researching in such sectors; and/or (iii) a French or foreign service provider, or any foreign establishment with an equivalent status, likely to guarantee the completion of an issuance intended to be placed with the persons referred to in (i) and/or (ii) above and, in this context, likely to subscribe to the securities issued.

Detailed information on the Company relating to its business, results of operations, financial condition and prospects, as well as risk factors related thereto, are included in the 2016 Registration Document (Document de reference) of the Company registered with the French Autorite des Marches Financiers (the "AMF") on 26 April 2017 under number R.17-025. The 2016 Registration Document can be found, together with other regulated information (including its 2017 audited financial statements), Inventiva's press releases and investors presentation, on Inventiva's website (www.inventivapharma.com). The attention of the public is drawn to the risk factors section presented at section 4 of the 2016 Registration Document. If one or more of such risks were to materialize, this could have a material adverse effect on the business, financial condition or results of the Company or on its ability to meet its targets.

The Reserved Offering will be made, within the category of investors defined above, to institutional investors in France and elsewhere in a private placement via an accelerated bookbuilding process.

The fund Sofinnova Crossover I SLP ("Sofinnova") has expressed its intention to place an order and to subscribe for New Shares up to the value of 10,000,000 in the Reserved Offering. Subject to the effective subscription by Sofinnova for this amount or any other amount that the Managers may decide to allocate to Sofinnova provided that such other amount represents a minimum of 9,000,000 in the Reserved Offering, Pierre Broqua and Federic Cren have undertaken to propose to the board of directors of the Company the appointment to the board of a candidate proposed by Sofinnova and to vote in favor of such an appointment. The intention of Sofinnova to subscribe for New Shares does not constitute a firm purchase commitment and the Managers may thus decide to allocate, or Sofinnova may decide to subscribe for fewer or no New Shares in the Reserved Offering.

Application will be made to list the New Shares on the regulated market of Euronext Paris pursuant to a listing prospectus, which will be submitted for the approval of the AMF.

Simultaneously with the determination of the final terms and conditions in connection with the Reserved Offering, the Company will enter into a lock-up agreement ending 90 calendar days after the settlement and delivery of the Reserved Offering, subject to certain customary exceptions including transactions under the existing liquidity agreement entered into with Kepler Cheuvreux on 19 January 2018. Key executives and directors of the Company have also signed lock-up agreements with regard to the Company's shares that they hold, for the same period, subject to certain exceptions including the call option agreements entered into with BVF Partners L.P. and Perceptive Advisors, by which Frederic Cren and Pierre Broqua agreed to grant a call option on existing shares in the context of the initial public offering of the Company.

The Reserved Offering is being conducted by Jefferies International Limited, acting as Global Coordinator and Joint Bookrunner, and Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking and Gilbert Dupont acting as Joint Bookrunners (together with the Global Coordinator and Joint Bookrunner, the "Managers"). Namsen Capital is acting as Inventiva's Capital Markets Advisor.

Update of the Company's corporate presentation

An update of the Company's corporate presentation dated 9 April 2018, with a presentation of the Company's activities, including the progress status of preclinical and clinical programs, is now available on the Company's website.

This press release does not constitute an invitation to subscribe for shares of the Company and the offering of any New Shares does not constitute a public offering in any country or jurisdiction.

About Inventiva: www.inventivapharma.com

Inventiva is a biopharmaceutical company specialized in the development of drugs interacting with nuclear receptors, transcription factors and epigenetic modulators. Inventiva's research engine opens up novel breakthrough therapies against fibrotic diseases, cancers and orphan diseases with substantial unmet medical needs.

Lanifibranor, its lead product, is an anti-fibrotic treatment acting on the three alpha, gamma and delta PPARs (peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors), which play key roles in controlling the fibrotic process. Its anti-fibrotic action targets two initial indications with substantial unmet medical need: NASH, a severe and increasingly prevalent liver disease already affecting over 30 million people in the United States, and systemic sclerosis, a disease with a very high mortality rate and for which there is no approved treatment to date.

Inventiva is also developing in parallel, a second clinical product, Odiparcil (formerly IVA336), a treatment for several forms of mucopolysaccharidosis where dermatan and/or chondroitin sulfates GAGs accumulate: MPS I or Hurler/Scheie syndromes, MPS II or Hunter syndrome, MPS IVa or Morquio syndrome, MPS VI or Maroteaux-Lamy syndrome and MPS VII or Sly syndrome. Inventiva is also developing a preclinical stage oncology portfolio.

Inventiva benefits from partnerships with world-leading research entities such as the Institut Curie. Two strategic R&D partnerships have also been established with AbbVie and Boehringer Ingelheim, making Inventiva eligible for preclinical, clinical, regulatory and commercial milestone payments, in addition to royalties on the products resulting from the partnerships.

Inventiva employs over 100 highly qualified employees and owns state-of-the-art R&D facilities near Dijon, acquired from the international pharmaceutical group Abbott. The Company owns a proprietary chemical library of over 240,000 molecules as well as integrated biology, chemistry, ADME and pharmacology platforms.

Contacts

Inventiva



Frederic Cren



Chief Executive Officer



info@inventivapharma.com



+ 33 3 80 44 75 00

DISCLAIMER

This press release does not and shall not, in any circumstances, constitute a public offering nor an invitation to solicit the interest of public in France, the United States, or in any other jurisdiction, in connection with any offer.

The distribution of this document may be restricted by law in certain jurisdictions. Persons into whose possession this document comes are required to inform themselves about and to observe any such restrictions.

This announcement is an advertisement and not a prospectus within the meaning of Directive 2003/71/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of November 4, 2003, as amended (the "Prospectus Directive").

With respect to the member States of the European Economic Area (including France), no action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer to the public of the securities referred to herein requiring a publication of a prospectus in any relevant member State. As a result, the securities may not and will not be offered in any relevant member State except in accordance with the exemptions set forth in Article 3(2) of the Prospectus Directive, or under any other circumstances which do not require the publication by the Company of a prospectus pursuant to Article 3 of the Prospectus Directive and/or to applicable regulations of that relevant member State.

For the purposes of the provision above, the expression "offer to the public" in relation to any shares of the Company in any member States of the European Economic Area means the communication in any form and by any means of sufficient information on the terms of the offer and any securities to be offered so as to enable an investor to decide to purchase any securities, as the same may be varied in that member State.This press release does not constitute an offer to the public in France and the securities referred to in this press release can only be offered or sold in France pursuant to Article L. 411-2-II of the French Code monetaire et financier to (i) providers of third party portfolio management investment services, (ii) qualified investors (investisseurs qualifies) acting for their own account and/or (iii) a limited group of investors (cercle restreint d'investisseurs) acting for their own account, all as defined in and in accordance with Articles L. 411-1, L. 411-2 and D. 411-1 to D. 411-4 and D. 754-1 and D. 764-1 of the French Code monetaire et financier. In addition, in accordance with the autorisation granted by the general meeting of the Company's shareholders dated 29 May 2017, only the persons pertaining to the categories specified in the 15th resolution of such general meeting may subscribe to the Reserved Offering.

The distribution of this press release is only being distributed to, and is only directed at persons outside the United Kingdom, subject to applicable laws, (i) persons having professional experience in matters relating to investments who fall within the definition of "investment professionals" in Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 as amended (the "Order"); (ii) high net worth bodies corporate, unincorporated associations and partnerships and trustees of high value trusts as described in Article 49(2) (a) to (d) of the Order or (iii) are persons to whom an invitation or inducement to engage in investment activity (within the meaning of Article 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000) in connection with the issue or sale of any securities may otherwise lawfully be communicated or caused to be communicated (all such persons together being referred to as "Relevant Persons"). The Reserved Offering mentioned herein is only available to, and any invitation, offer or agreement to subscribe, purchase or otherwise acquire shares will be engaged in only with, Relevant Persons. Any person who is not a Relevant Person should not act or rely on, this press release or any information contained herein.

This press release has been prepared on the understanding that the offer of securities referred to herein in any Member State of the European Union or the members of the European Economic Area Agreement who have transposed the Prospectus Directive, as defined below, (each, a "Concerned Member State") will not require the publication of a prospectus in any Concerned Member State, and no action has been nor will be undertaken to allow the public offering of securities requiring the publication of a prospectus in any Concerned Member State. As a result, any person offering or intending to offer, in any Concerned Member State, the securities that are the subject of the Reserved Offering described herein may not do so except in a manner that will not create any obligation on the part of Inventiva or the Managers mentioned herein to publish a prospectus with respect to such offer under Article 3 of the Prospectus Directive, as modified by Prospectus Directive Amendment 2010/73/UE. Neither Inventiva nor any of the Managers has authorized, nor will authorize, any offer of the securities mentioned referred to herein in circumstances that would result in the obligation on the part of Inventiva or any of the Managers to publish a prospectus in connection with such offer.

This press release does not constitute a prospectus within the meaning of the Prospectus Directive.

This press release may not be distributed, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States. This press release does not constitute an offer of securities for sale or the solicitation of an offer to purchase securities in the United States or any other jurisdiction where such offer may be restricted. Securities may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), except pursuant to an exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements thereof. The securities of Inventiva have not been and will not be registered under the Securities Act and Inventiva does not intend to make a public offering of its securities in the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan. Copies of this document are not being, and should not be, distributed in or sent into the United States.

Investors may not accept an offer of securities referred to herein, nor acquire such securities, unless on the basis of information contained in the Prospectus. This announcement cannot be used as basis for any investment agreement or decision.This press release may not be distributed, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan.

The Managers are acting as financial advisers to the Company and no-one else and will not be responsible to anyone other than the Company for providing the protections afforded to customers of the Managers or for providing advice in relation to this communication or any other matter contemplated herein.Panduit representatives during the two-day roadshow

Chad Reynolds, vice marketing president at Panduit, told VIR that the US firm will open an office in Vietnam in 2019, as the firm strives to capitalise on Vietnams growing manufacturing capacity and urgent need for digital infrastructure.

Vietnams rise to be Asias manufacturing centre depends on its ability to build up Industry 4.0 and infrastructure for the Internet of Things, using data centres, enterprise and operational network infrastructure that can be developed to accommodate future growth as well as deliver superior performance, said Reynolds about the growth direction of the Vietnamese manufacturing sector.

According to the representative, Panduit is actively seeking partners and distributors in Vietnam to facilitate its operations here. The US firm has yet finalise details such as investment capital and the timeline of the opening.

Panduit, which provides physical, electrical, and network infrastructure solutions for businesses, has been exporting semi-finished products from Vietnam to other countries for final production. Reynolds revealed that these purchases can reach $10 million a year.

This week, Panduit held a two-day roadshow in Ho Chi Minh City, meeting Vietnamese firms and showcasing its infrastructure solutions to increase efficiency and enhance reliability in various industries, such as education, energy, financial services, food processing, healthcare, railways, and transport/heavy equipment.

Products on display at the event

We want to show how our data centre solutions, such as converged infrastructure, creativity solutions, cooling optimization, and thermal solutions, can help companies in Vietnam improve their efficiency, said Reynolds.

Panduit, headquartered in Tinley Park, Illinois, has been operating since 1955. The US firm runs offices in 112 locations around the world.

PM approves $921m infrastructure investment for economic, industrial zones Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has given the green light for infrastructure development worth up to VND21 trillion (US$921 million) for economic zones and industrial ...

Infrastructure development to be made foundation for the economy Vietnams demand for infrastructure development, including transport, energy, and urban development, is huge, while both public investment and official development assistance (ODA) loans are limited.Lufthansa Technik AG proposed developing an aircraft maintenance facility in the country

German Deputy Ambassador to Vietnam Wolfgang Manig shared at a meeting with Deputy Minister of Transport Le Dinh Tho recently that so many German firms want to invest in the Vietnamese transport sector, such as in seaports, railway modernisation, automobile, and mechanics.

In addition to transport in the aviation sector, aviation mechanics is also a potential area. Thereby, Lufthansa Technik AG and Vietnam Airlines Engineering Company (VAECO) are discussing co-operation opportunities in aircraft maintenance and they need the approval of the Ministry of Transport (MoT) for this plan.

The representative of Lufthansa Technik AG said that they plan to develop an internal maintenance facility for narrow-body aircrafts then evolve it into a maintenance and overhaul facility not only for Vietnamese but also regional customers.

Lufthansa Technik AG (Lufthansa Engineering) is one of the worlds leading providers of aircraft maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) services for civil aircrafts as well as its engines and components. It is a subsidiary of Lufthansa Group.

Tho confirmed the two-digit average growth (around 15 per cent in the last ten years) of Vietnams civil aviation. This sector holds great potential and MoT is working to approve and create favourable conditions for VAECO and Lufthansa Technik to seek co-operation opportunities.

Earlier, a delegation of foreign enterprises (including Greenland Holding Group, Vision Transportation Group, and VIPD Group) has come to look for co-operation opportunities in Vietnams transport infrastructure. The leader of MoT shared information of key transport projects.

According to the plan for the road sector, 2,000 kilometres of the North-South Expressway will be put into use by 2020. 654km of this is developed under the public-private partnership (PPP) format.

Vietnam is also formulating plans for the North-South high-speed railway to submit to the National Assembly in 2019. The Hanoi-Vinh and Saigon-Nha Trang sections will be developed first.

Several international airport projects such as Noi Bai, Tan Son Nhat, Long Thanh, Danang, Can Tho, and Cam Ranh are being developed, while the expansion project of Tan Son Nhat International Airport has just been approved.

Vietnam will build a new 20-hectare terminal with the capacity of 20 million passengers at the southern end of the airport, next to the existing terminals. It is estimated to cost a total of VND18 trillion ($0.8 billion).

The area at the northern end of the airport would be used to build supporting structures, such as more cargo terminals and plane maintenance, logistics, and food processing facilities. These are good chances for foreign investors to co-operate and invest in this sector.

Long Thanh International Airport has officially selected the lotus design. This airport will cover 5,000ha with an investment of $16.03 billion to raise the capacity to 100 million passengers and 5 million tonnes of cargo annually.Ministries disagree on solutions to collect tax from Google, Facebook

MOF has vowed to collect tax from Googles and Facebooks earnings in Vietnam, and is drafting a regulation on tax management over e-commerce activities.

Under the draft regulation, cross-border services must make payments via the national payment portal NAPAS. This will allow taxation agencies to control revenue from services to collect taxes.

The tax payments will be carried out under the withholding mode. Tax amounts will be deducted from revenue when making payments via NAPAS.

SBVs Governor Le Minh Hung said MOF has the legal right to issue regulations, guide tax declarations, and report and collect tax. SBV doesnt have the right or skills in this field.

Under current laws, credit institutions can deduct customers money only if they have consent from customers or receive instructions from agencies, he said.

MOF needs to release legal documents with detailed guidance on the issue, he added.

Lawyer Truong Thanh Duc believes that MOFs idea is a good solution allowing it to collect tax from Facebook and Google, which remains an impossible mission at this time.

However, Duc said that MOF would try to differentiate the nature of payment transactions via banks.

In many cases, payments are made for goods purchases, not for ads on Google and Facebook. If the nature of the transactions cannot be clarified, this will lead to overlapping taxation.

However, Duc said that MOF would try to differentiate the nature of payment transactions via banks.

In many cases, payments are made for goods purchases, not for ads on Google and Facebook. If the nature of the transactions cannot be clarified, this will lead to overlapping taxation.

Lawyer Tran Xoa from Minh Dang Quang Law Firm, said that it is not feasible to ask banks to deduct money from customers accounts when making cross-border transactions.

If remitting money via banks, individuals will have to prove the legal purposes of the transactions. But internet banking remittances via cards to pay for goods and services have no limit.

No official report about the amount of taxes that Google and Facebook have evaded in Vietnam exists, but experts say it is huge.

Deputy PM Vu Duc Dam cited official reports as saying that 67 percent of Vietnamese use the internet, with 60 percent using social networks.

Foreign social networks account for 95 percent of market share, search engines 98 percent and e-commerce 80 percent.

The revenue from ads that foreign companies, especially Facebook and YouTube, can collect is estimated to amount to 80 percent of total revenue. In 2017, they earned $320 million from the service.New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. (Andy WHARTON/AFP)

"(We are) taking an important step to address climate change and create a clean, green and sustainable future for New Zealand," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.

The oil and gas industry in New Zealand generates about NZ$2.5 billion a year (US$1.8 billion), including NZ$1.5 billion in exports, and employs about 11,000 people.

Ardern said existing drilling and exploration permits would not be affected, meaning no existing jobs would be lost.

She said there would also be limited new on-shore permits around the North Island's Taranaki region, where most of New Zealand industry is concentrated.

"We're striking the right balance for New Zealand - we're protecting existing industry and protecting future generations from climate change," she said.

Environmental groups welcomed the move, with Greenpeace declaring "the tide has turned irreversibly against Big Oil in New Zealand".

"This is a huge step forward for New Zealand and a landmark moment in the transition to a clean-energy economy," WWF New Zealand chief Livia Esterhazy said.

But the conservative opposition National Party accused Ardern of "economic vandalism" that could put thousands of jobs at risk.

Opposition energy spokesman Jonathan Young said gas helped ensure New Zealand's electricity supply and when existing reserves ran out in 10 years it would be forced to import emissions-heavy alternatives such as coal.

"This decision is devoid of any rationale. It certainly has nothing to do with climate change," he said.

"These changes will simply shift production elsewhere in the world, not reduce emissions."

Industry group Petroleum Exploration and Production NZ (PEPANZ) said it had been blindsided by the announcement and had not been consulted by the government.

Chief executive Cameron Madgwick said a well-managed trading scheme was the way to reduce New Zealand's emissions, not "arbitrarily banning" certain fuel types.

"We now join the elite club of Belize, Costa Rica and France that have banned exploration. I don't think that's really the way the world's going," he told TV3.

The government said there were currently 31 oil and gas exploration permits, with 22 of them offshore.The action came after the media reported an alleged cryptocurrency fraud involving VND15 trillion (US$666 million) and affecting 32,000 people in HCM City. - Photo venturebeat.com

The move comes after media reported an alleged cryptocurrency fraud worth VND15 trillion (US$666 million) affecting 32,000 people in Ho Chi Minh City.

Authorities have previously repeatedly warned about the risks associated with bitcoin and other digital currencies, as well as its use for criminal activity such as money laundering, terrorist financing, illegal remittance, tax evasion and fraud.

As these currencies are digital and pseudo-anonymous with no government backing, investment and trading activities, as well as raising capital through initial coin offerings (ICO) especially in a multi-level marketing mode, are getting complicated and risky and affecting the stability of the financial market and social order.

To limit the risks and adverse impacts on society, as well as promptly detect, prevent and handle fraud, the Prime Minister asked the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) to direct credit institutions and intermediary payment service organisations not to conduct illegal transactions related to digital currencies.

These organisations must also strengthen their management, review and report suspicious transactions related to cryptocurrencies.

The SBV will work with the Ministry of Public Securiy to handle acts of using cryptocurrency a means of payment, which is against Viet Nams law.

The Ministry of Finance will direct public companies, securities firms, fund management companies and securities investment funds not to carry out the illegal issuance, transactions and brokerage activities related to virtual money.

The ministry was tasked with researching international experience to propose practical measures to manage ICOs.

The import of hardware used to mine virtual money should also be restricted, the directive said.

The ministries of Public Security, Industry and Trade, Information and Communications, and Justice should also intensify the investigation, detection, prevention and handling law violations related to raising capital and financial activities in form of multi-level marketing scams online related to cryptocurrency.

Ministries and local authorities must increase the dissemination of information on the risks of investing and trading in virtual currencies.

Legal framework needed

The Government Office yesterday issued a letter conveying Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hues direction on improving and completing the legal framework for the management of virtual currency.

The Deputy PM assigned the Ministry of Justice to study and complete legal frameworks based on opinions from the ministries of Finance and Information and Communications and the State Bank of Vietnam.Superdry will enter the Vietnamese market soon

Superdry fires first shot in Vietnam

Superdry has a significant and growing presence around the world, operating through 515 Superdry branded locations in 46 countries. There are 139 owned stores across the UK and mainland Europe, 208 franchised and licensed stores, all but one outside the UK, and 168 concessions.

On April 21, Superdry will launch its first store in Trang Tien Plaza, one of the most crowed shopping centres in Hanoi, marking its first appearance in Vietnam in general and Hanoi in particular.

The store will showcase the latest menswear, womens clothing, footwear, undergarment, and accessories product lines, as well as products for kids at competitive prices.

Along with casual clothing products, Superdry will introduce customers other products, including accessories, perfume, and sportswear.

On this occasion, Superdry will display its latest perfume collection called Superdry SS18, which inspired by the summer of the 1990s on the Italian seaside.

Superdry is an exciting contemporary brand which focuses on high-quality products that fuse vintage Americana and Japanese-inspired graphics with a British style.

They are characterised by quality fabrics, authentic vintage washes, unique detailing, world leading hand-drawn graphics, and tailored fits with diverse styling. Such distinctiveness has gained the brand exclusive appeal as well as an international celebrity following.

Heating up competition

H&M plans to add more stores in Vietnam despite global losses

Once it officially enters the Vietnamese market, Superdry may have to compete with Zara because both fashion brands focus on young people and adults with competive prices, with Zara's average price being $48 (edited.com) and Superdry's $200 at most (superdry.com).

Furthermore, these two fashion stores are located in the centre of Hanoiwith Zara in Vincom Ba Trieu in Hai Ba Trung district and Superdry in Trang Tien Plaza in Hoan Kiem district. This will lead to consumers picking between Zara and Superdry when deciding on their shopping destinations.

Zara came to Vietnam last September by opening its first, 2,400sq.m store at Vincom Dong Khoi, Ho Chi Minh City. The store reportedly achieved sales of VND5.5 billion ($246,000) on its first day. Following the success of the store in Ho Chi Minh City, on November 11, Zara launched its store in Vincom Ba Trieu, marking its second store in Vietnam.

H&Ms first store was opened on September 9, 2017 in Vincom Dong Khoi, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, a two-storey 2,200sq.m flagship unit. According to the brands representative, the debut witnessed a record number of 4,000 customers queuing up for the opening and a total of 10,000 customers visiting on the opening day.

On November 12, the H&M fashion store in Hanoi welcomed more than 2,000 visitors and shoppers to celebrate its first official opening day.

Both Zara and H&M had impressive openings in Vietnam, however, there has been no official information about their business results in Vietnam alone, excluding bleak performance on global markets.

Notably, according to newswire Bloomberg, Zaras turnover in 2017 dropped significantly, reporting the lowest profitability during the past ten years.

Specifically, Zaras gross margin narrowed to 53.6 per cent in 12 months through January due to the USD exchange rate. Sales in the second half of 2017 increased to 5 per cent, the lowest rate over the past three years.

Similarly, H&M on March 27 also announced low global revenue, with high amounts of stockpiles worth $4 billion, equivalent to 17.6 per cent of its turnover in this years first quarter, while profit as at a 16-year low. As of this February, H&Ms net profit reduced to 44 per cent on-year, equivalent to $167.4 million.

During last years announcement of Zaras turnover, chairman of Inditex (owner of Zara) Paolo Isla said that he plans to open 93 stores in five markets, including Vietnam and New Zealand, upgrading the total number of stores to 7,292.

In early 2018, H&M also opened its third store in Ho Chi Minh City, suggesting its two previous stores have been successful.

In addition, H&M announced its plan to open 430 more stores globally and mainly focus on five markets, including Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Iceland, and Georgia.US Navy photo shows the USS Donald Cook, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer. (Handout/US NAVY/AFP)

US President Donald Trump warned on Wednesday (Apr 11) that "missiles will be coming" in response to an alleged chemical attack in Syria, raising the stakes in an increasingly perilous face-off with Russia.

With punitive US military action seemingly imminent, Russia scrambled to deflect blame from its ally Bashar al-Assad and, according to a monitor group, Syrian forces evacuated key defense buildings in Damascus.

Trump's warlike tweets came in response to a warning from Russia's ambassador to Beirut, who took to a television network run by the armed group Hezbollah to declare that any US missiles would be shot down "as well as the sources they were fired from."

If the US action follows the pattern of a previous punitive strike on Syria last year, it will begin with a salvo of cruise missiles fired from American warships in the Mediterranean, as Trump implied when he tweeted they would be "nice, new and 'smart'."

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said the Pentagon is ready to provide options for a Syria strike in response to the suspected chemical attack, but noted the US and its allies are still gathering information.

Opponents of unilateral US action called an emergency closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council for later Thursday.

Meanwhile, Moscow said the formerly rebel-held district of Eastern Ghouta - including Douma, the target of Saturday's attack - had been "totally stabilized" and would soon be patrolled by Russian military police.

But the Russian army continued to deny their side's latest victory came after Assad launched a chemical attack on the last rebel-held pocket of the enclave in the Damascus suburbs, instead accusing the White Helmets civil defense organization of staging the massacre.

Trump's spokeswoman dismissed this idea, and pointedly refused to acknowledge that concern about the risks of a direct confrontation with Russia would hold the US military back.

"The intelligence provided certainly paints a different picture," she said. "The president holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack."

But while the Russian president's lieutenants continued to up the ante with threats and allegations, Vladimir Putin himself adopted a more statesmanlike tone, in remarks to new ambassadors presenting their credentials at the Kremlin.

"The state of the world cannot but provoke concern," he said.

"The situation in the world is becoming more and more chaotic but all the same we hope that common sense will finally prevail and international relations will take a constructive path."

Trump's tweets were more belligerent - he told Russia "You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" - and declared that US relations with Russia have plunged to a historic low.

But he notably also said there was "no reason for this," reiterated his hope for talks with Putin to halt a new arms race, and blamed his domestic political opponents for poisoning ties.

Assad's Damascus regime, which has long accused Washington of supporting its armed opponents in the country's bloody seven-year-old civil war, hit back at Trump's "reckless escalation."

AIR TRAFFIC ALERT

Trump and other Western leaders have vowed a quick and forceful response to Saturday's alleged gas attack, which rescue workers say killed more than 40 people.

Efforts at the UN Security Council to find a diplomatic solution failed on Tuesday, with Washington and Moscow opposing each other's rival motions to set up an international investigation into chemical weapons use.

The United States, Britain and France say the incident bears all the hallmarks of a strike ordered by the regime, which has been blamed for previous attacks by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

Both Trump and his defence secretary Jim Mattis abruptly cancelled upcoming travel plans on Tuesday, as the USS Donald Cook - a guided-missile destroyer - moved to within striking range of Syria.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has called an emergency cabinet meeting for Thursday to discuss how to respond to the Douma attack.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been coordinating closely with Washington, is to decide on a response in the coming days, having insisted he does "not want an escalation" and that any response would focus on Syria's chemical capabilities, not on allies of the regime.

As it looked to head off the threat of Western strikes, Syria said it had invited the OPCW to visit the site of the alleged attack.

WHO DEMANDS ACCESS

The OPCW said it would "shortly" deploy a fact-finding team to Douma for an investigation, but US officials said they were working from their own information and would not necessarily hold back.

Damascus agreed to hand over its chemical arsenal in 2013, narrowly avoiding American and French air strikes in retaliation for a suspected sarin attack.

That incident, which killed hundreds, also took place in Eastern Ghouta.English French

See infographic and PDF version in attached file.



Rueil Malmaison, 12 April 2018

VINCI Airports - 2018 Q1 traffic

Continued traffic increase trend in passenger traffic in the first quarter of 2018 (+11.6%) compared to the first quarter of 2017

Very strong growth in Cambodia (+26.1%) and Portugal, particularly in Lisbon (+15.9%)

Sustained growth in airports managed in France (+10.6%), Japan (+10%) and Chile (+14%)

Good performance of Salvador airport in Brazil which joined the network in January 2018 (+6.0%)

In the first quarter of 2018, traffic across platforms operated by VINCI Airports increased 11.6% compared to the first quarter of 2017, with a total of 38.6 million passengers served in the network airports.

In Portugal, the 10 airports managed by VINCI Airports reported a 12.0% increase in traffic, with 10.4 million passengers. This growth notably reflects the good performance of the five main airlines operating in Portugal, which all recorded double-digit growth. Lisbon further comforted its position as an international hub with traffic rising 15.9% while Porto, which exceeded the 10 million passengers milestone in 2017, recorded a 12% traffic growth. In Faro, the bankruptcy of Monarch and Air Berlin in 2017 stabilized traffic volume.

In Cambodia, the country's three airports reported very sharp traffic growth. The Cambodian airports welcomed 3 million passengers, up 26.1%. Growth was particularly strong in Phnom Penh, as the capital's airport welcomed 1.4 millions passengers (up 34.5%), reflecting the arrival of new carriers like Malindo, Vietjet and Shenzhen Airlines, the growth of Chinese carriers such as Spring, China Southern Airlines and Xiamen Airlines, and the opening of major new routes by local airlines such as Singapore and Bangkok by JC Airlines and Lan Mei. Activity was also brisk in Siem Reap (up 17.4%) with travelers from China and domestic market being the main drivers of growth.

In France, traffic increased substantially at the 12 facilities managed by VINCI Airports (up 10.6%), with 4.2 million passengers welcomed.

High growth trends continued for Nantes Atlantique, with traffic up 18.6%. Both domestic and international contributed, with particularly strong growth in international traffic, reflecting the upturn in traffic with North Africa and the good performances of European traffic, notably from Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom.

2.3 million passengers travelled through Lyon-Saint Exupery, up 8.2%. Growth was driven by significantly higher load factors, the opening of 5 new routes during the quarter, and a sharp increase in international traffic, to North Africa, Turkey and Russia in particular.

After a transition year, traffic at Chambery returned to growth (up 16.0%) thanks to historic partners: TUI, British Airways, Titan Airways, which all increased capacities with additional frequencies and new routes from the United Kingdom.

In Chile, where traffic at the Santiago airport is up 14%, growth is driven by the new low-cost company JetSmart, which is continuing to stimulate domestic traffic and the dynamic performance from Sky Airline. International traffic also continued to expand significantly, boosted by strong performances from Aerolineas and Avianca and sustained growth in passengers travelling from Argentina and Brazil.

In Japan, the two Kansai Airports posted growth of 10%. As in 2017, the strong increase in traffic at Kansai International (up 13.6%) is due largely to continuing strong development of international traffic, notably with South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and ASEAN countries. Traffic with Europe is also up 4% with an increase in capacity expected to continue this summer. This performance was also driven by the opening in 2017 of several major new routes including Sydney by Qantas and Honolulu by AirAsia X and Scoot. Overall, Kansai Airports, which has started operating a 3rd airport with Kobe airport on April 1, 2018, welcomed 11.3 million passengers.

In the Dominican Republic, traffic at the six airports managed by VINCI Airports contracted by 2.9%, due to several adverse situations. Santo Domingo (-2.4%) was heavily affected by the bankruptcy of

PAWA Dominicana while PAWA's Venezuelan sister-carrier Aserca was grounded, further compounding the decline in passenger numbers. Traffic in Puerto Plata (-5.4%) was affected by the bankruptcy of Air Berlin and the exit of Arkefly from Amsterdam. Helping offset the declines in Santo Domingo and Puerto Plata is strong performance from Samana (up 8.4%) and La Isabela (up 18.6%), with new routes from Samana including Frankfurt with Condor and Andes from Argentina, and more flights from La Isabela to San Juan with Air Century.

In Brazil, where VINCI Airports officially started operating Salvador airport in January 2018, traffic was up 6.0%. Since taking over operations, VINCI Airports has created a new aviation marketing team in Salvador to work on traffic development, and implemented a new pricing policy incentive and incentive scheme to attract new airlines, with the support of local authorities. The strategy has already proven successful with the opening in January of a new route by Gol, connecting Salvador to Santiago, another airport of the VINCI Airports network, Azul upgauging routes to its main hubs, and the start of new operations by Avianca to Sao Paulo, Bogota and Fortaleza.

VINCI Airports passenger traffic on 31 March 2018

In thousand passengers Q1 2018 Change Q1 2018/2017 Cumul 12

months

y-o-y Change 12

months

y-o-y VINCI Airports 38,649 +11.6% 160,578 +12.3% Portugal (ANA) 10,369 +12.0% 52,912 +15.2% Japan (Kansai Airports) 11,275 +10.0% 44,589 +9.6% France 4,219 +10.6% 18,606 +9.8% Chile (Nuevo Pudahuel) 6,298 +14.0% 22,200 +12.8% Cambodia (Cambodia Airports) 2,976 +26.1% 9,403 +27.3% Dominican Republic (Aerodom) 1,385 -2.9% 5,081 +1.9% Brazil (Salvador) 2,129 +6.0% 7,786 +6.4%

PRESS CONTACT

VINCI Press department

Tel.: +33 (0)1 47 16 31 82

media.relations@vinci.com

About VINCI Airports

VINCI Airports, a top 4 global player in the international airport sector, manages the development and operation of 36 airports located in France, Portugal (including the Lisbon hub), Cambodia, Japan, Dominican Republic, Chile and Brazil. Served by around 250 airlines, VINCI Airports' network handled 156.6 million passengers in 2017. Through its expertise as a comprehensive integrator and the professionalism of its 12,000 employees, VINCI Airports develops, finances, builds and operates airports, leveraging its investment capability, international network and know-how to optimize the management and performance of existing airport infrastructure, facility extensions and new-build construction projects. In 2017, its annual revenue for managed activities amounted to 3.2 bn, for a consolidated revenue of 1.4 bn. More comprehensive information is available on www.vinci-airports.com

About VINCI

VINCI is a global player in concessions and contracting, employing close to 195,000 people in some 100 countries. We design, finance, build and operate infrastructure and facilities that help improve daily life and mobility for all. Because we believe in all-round performance, above and beyond economic and financial results, we are committed to operating in an environmentally and socially responsible manner. And because our projects are in the public interest, we consider that reaching out to all our stakeholders and engaging in dialogue with them is essential in the conduct of our business activities. VINCI's goal is to create long-term value for its customers, shareholders, employees, and partners and for society at large.

www.vinci.com

Appendix - Passengers and commercial movements on 31 March 2018

Passenger traffic by airport

In thousand passengers VINCI Airports stake (%) Q1 2018 Change Q1 2018/2017 Cumul 12

months

y-o-y Change 12

months

y-o-y Portugal (ANA) of which Lisbon 100 6,001 +15.9% 27,491 +17.7% Porto 100 2,381 +12.0% 11,043 +13.5% Faro 100 903 +0.0% 8,727 +12.7% Madeira 100 702 +2.4% 3,387 +6.1% Azores 100 382 +4.5% 2,262 +18.1% TOTAL 10,369 +12.0% 52,912 +15.2% Japan (Kansai Airports) Kansai 40 7,526 +13.6% 28,897 +12.7% Itami 40 3,749 +3.3% 15,693 +4.3% TOTAL 11,275 +10.0% 44,589 +9.6% France of which Lyon-Saint Exupery 31 2,333 +8.2% 10,457 +7.0% Lyon-Bron 31 3 -11.1% 12 +260.5% Nantes Atlantique 85 1,096 +18.6% 5,661 +16.3% Saint-Nazaire Montoir 85 6 -12.7% 21 -14.2% Rennes Bretagne 49 151 +6.4% 734 +8.9% Dinard Bretagne 49 14 +12.0% 123 +11.7% Grenoble Alpes Isere 100 254 +3.8% 355 +12.6% Chambery Savoie Mont Blanc 100 161 +16.0% 209 +16.1% Toulon Hyeres 100 87 +4.3% 508 +2.8% Clermont Ferrand Auvergne 100 93 +14.4% 408 +2.4% Poitiers Biard 100 20 +5.0% 118 +8.0% TOTAL 4,219 +10.6% 18,606 +9.8% In thousand passengers VINCI Airports stake (%) Q1 2018 Change. Q1 2018/2017 Cumul 12

months

y-o-y Change 12

months

y-o-y Chile (Nuevo Pudahuel) Santiago 40 6,298 +14.0% 22,200 +12.8% TOTAL 6,298 +14.0% 22,200 +12.8% Cambodia (Cambodia Airports) Phnom Penh 70 1,363 +34.5% 4,589 +29.7% Siem Reap 70 1,474 +17.4% 4,428 +22.0% Sihanoukville 70 138 +52.9% 386 +77.8% TOTAL 2,976 +26.1% 9,403 +27.3% Dominican Republic (Aerodom) of which Santo Domingo 100 941 -2.4% 3,904 +1.5% Puerto Plata 100 361 -5.4% 978 +2.9% Samana 100 71 +8.4% 155 +11.0% La Isabela 100 9 +18.6% 35 +12.3% Arroyo Barril 100 2 -65.5% 8 -51.6% TOTAL 1,385 -2.9% 5,081 +1.9% Brazil Salvador 100 2,129 +6.0% 7,786 +6.4% TOTAL 2,129 +6.0% 7,786 +6.4% Total VINCI Airports 38,649 +11.6% 160,578 +12.3%

Commercial movements by airport

VINCI Airports stake (%) Q1 2018 Change Q1 2018/2017 Cumul 12

months

y-o-y Change 12

months

y-o-y Portugal (ANA) of which Lisbon 100 46,975 +12.8% 204,776 +11.9% Porto 100 19,327 +7.3% 86,578 +8.5% Faro 100 6,559 -2.1% 57,334 +10.3% Madeira 100 5,845 -6.1% 27,926 -0.6% Azores 100 5,154 -3.0% 27,652 +11.5% TOTAL 83,870 +7.7% 404,314 +10.0% Japan (Kansai Airports) Kansai 40 47,471 +7.2% 188,368 +5.6% Itami 40 33,882 -0.3% 138,333 -0.3% TOTAL 81,353 +3.9% 326,701 +3.0% France of which Lyon-Saint Exupery 31 25,267 -0.8% 110,057 +0.1% Lyon-Bron 31 2,510 -3,8% 10,147 -2.0% Nantes Atlantique 85 11,766 +9.8% 55,968 +9.0% Saint-Nazaire Montoir 85 450 -18.8% 1,852 -10.4% Rennes Bretagne 49 2,909 -0.4% 13,038 +3.5% Dinard Bretagne 49 312 -1.0% 1,879 +5.5% Grenoble Alpes Isere 100 2,742 -0.3% 4,089 -1.6% Chambery Savoie Mont Blanc 100 4,377 +3,2% 6,955 +8.1% Toulon Hyeres 100 1,253 -2.0% 10,379 +4.8% Clermont Ferrand Auvergne 100 2,351 -9.2% 9,888 -9.4% Poitiers Biard 100 639 -2.1% 2,694 +0.4% TOTAL 54,576 +0.9% 226,946 +2.1%







VINCI Airports stake (%) Q1 2018 Change Q1 2018/2017 Cumul 12

months

y-o-y Change 12

months

y-o-y Chile (Nuevo Pudahuel) Santiago 40 40,381 +14.8% 145,715 +13.4% TOTAL 40,381 +14.8% 145,715 +13.4% Cambodia (Cambodia Airports) Phnom Penh 70 12,842 +38.7% 44,639 +30.7% Siem Reap 70 13,479 +11.5% 44,954 +16.3% Sihanoukville 70 2,036 +58.1% 6,323 +86.4% TOTAL 28,357 +25.2% 95,916 +25.9% Dominican Republic (Aerodom) of which Santo Domingo 100 8,538 -12.4% 36,746 -4.2% Puerto Plata 100 2,576 +1.7% 7,324 +4.7% Samana 100 508 +0.4% 1,307 +6.1% La Isabela 100 1,967 -10.1% 7,856 +3.9% Arroyo Barril 100 272 -50.5% 844 -41.1% TOTAL 13,878 -10.8% 54,135 -2.7% Bresil Salvador 100 21,577 +9.3% 78,489 +4.3% TOTAL 21,577 +9.3% 78,489 +4.3% VINCI Airports 323,992 +6.8% 1,332,216 +7.2%THIS NEWS RELEASE IS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWS WIRE SERVICES OR FOR THE DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES



VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- K2 Gold Corporation (K2 or the Company) (TSX-V:KTO) is pleased to announce that recent re-interpretation of the geochemical and geophysical data at Wels increases the gold system footprint to an area covering 3 km x 1.5 km and identifies additional structures that may be controlling the system. The Wels Gold Property (Wels or the Property) is located in west-central Yukon Territory in the Traditional Territory of White River First Nation (WFRN).

Re-interpretation of the existing rock, soil, and drill sample geochemistry was conducted by Chris Benn, a highly respected geochemist with 33 years experience including 27 years with majors, most recently with Gold Fields Ltd. Re-interpretation of the existing geophysical data was conducted by Mark Hanki, Project Geophysicist at Apex Geoscience Ltd in Edmonton.

Highlights:

Antimony (Sb), and arsenic (As) are pathfinder elements that show a clear affinity with the known gold (Au) in all rock-types at Wels. This may suggest that gold mineralization has affinity to orogenic style gold deposits which are typical in the 200 km wide and 1,200 km long Tintina Gold Belt that hosts the Goldcorps Coffee deposit (4.09M Oz at 1.38 g/t) located 65km north-east of Wels.

The dominant Sb signature shows a clear mineralisation footprint of 3 km x 1.5 km that includes the Saddle and Chai prospects. The boundaries of this footprint are likely to be significant for exploration in defining limits to at least one zone of mineralisation. Eleven geochemical anomalies have been defined that will aid in exploration targeting in 2018.

A series of dominant structures trending NW-SE were identified during the re-interpretation of the existing geophysical data and these structures correlate well with the geochemical footprints.

Please CLICK HERE to view figure related to this news release.

Jo Price, VP Exploration commented, The new geochemical and structural analysis has identified a potentially large gold system at Wels and the clarification of existing and new geochemical anomalies will help us zone in on covered high-grade gold zones during our 2018 exploration work.

Stephen Swatton, President and CEO commented, I am very encouraged at the increased size of the mineralization footprint at Wels and the potential for a large-scale discovery.

2018 upcoming exploration programs are currently being designed based on the re-interpretation. Program details and budgets will be released when available.

Jo Price, P.Geo., is the Qualified Person, in accordance with NI 43-101 of the Canadian Securities Administrators, and is responsible for the technical content of this press release.

For additional information please contact Stephen Swatton at 604-343-3530.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Stephen Swatton

President and CEO

K2 Gold Corporation.

Forward-Looking Caution:

This news release contains forward-looking statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results, performance, prospects and opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the mineral potential of the Flume Gold Property, Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, variations in the nature, quality and quantity of any mineral deposits that may be located, the Companys inability to reach satisfactory agreements with First Nations to facilitate its exploration and development plans for the Flume Property, the Company's inability to obtain any necessary permits, consents or authorizations required for its planned activities, and the Company's inability to raise the necessary capital or to be fully able to implement its business strategies. The reader is referred to the Company's public disclosure record which is available on SEDAR (www.sedar.com). Although the Company believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on these statements, which only apply as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. Except as required by securities laws and the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange, the Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of any of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful, including any of the securities in the United States of America. No securities of the Company have been or will, in the foreseeable future, be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933 (the 1933 Act) or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to, or for account or benefit of, U.S. Persons (as defined in Regulation S under the 1933 Act) unless registered under the 1933 Act and applicable state securities laws, or an exemption from such registration requirements is available.

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.This press release is also available in Francais (pdf) and Deutsch (pdf)

.............



Vevey, April 12, 2018





Nestle Annual General Meeting

All Board of Directors' proposals approved with strong majorities

Pablo Isla, Kasper Rorsted and Kimberly A. Ross elected as new members of the Board

1988 shareholders attended the Nestle S.A. Annual General Meeting today in Lausanne. They represented 54.6 percent of the capital and 78.2 percent of the shares entitled to vote. The annual review and the accounts were approved. The shareholders further approved the proposed dividend of CHF 2.35 per share and the proposed capital reduction.

All proposals of the Board of Directors were approved with strong majorities.

The shareholders elected Pablo Isla, CEO of Inditex; Kasper Rorsted, CEO of adidas; and Kimberly A. Ross, former CFO of Baker Hughes, as new members of the Board. Three directors, Andreas Koopmann, Steven G. Hoch, and Naina Lal Kidwai, did not stand for re-election as they have reached the term limit. The Board warmly thanked them for their highly appreciated services and important contributions as directors.

The shareholders elected the Chairman and all other members of the Board of Directors individually for a term of office until the end of the next Annual General Meeting. Henri de Castries, lead independent director, was appointed as Vice-Chairman of the Board.

The shareholders approved prospectively the total compensation of the Board of Directors and the Executive Board. They also accepted the Nestle Compensation Report 2017 in an advisory vote.

In his address to the meeting, Nestle Chairman Paul Bulcke emphasized: "Nestle's long-term orientation comes from the belief that we must constantly anticipate, adapt and invest to prepare for the future. It is through permanent innovation and by investing for the future that our company will continue to develop in a sustainable and profitable way." He also highlighted Nestle's roots in its home country: "The relationship between Nestle and Switzerland is deep and mutually beneficial. Nestle will continue to ensure a good balance between its roles as a business and as a corporate citizen at the national, regional and local levels."

Nestle CEO Mark Schneider said: "Nestle keeps innovating and developing its product portfolio to meet changing consumer demands and lifestyles. We are acting with a great sense of urgency, but also with prudence and always in line with our nutrition, health and wellness strategy. With this approach we target faster growth and greater profitability, in line with our 2020 objectives."

For the year to come, the Board and its different Committees will be composed as follows:

Board of Directors

Paul Bulcke, U. Mark Schneider, Henri de Castries, Beat W. Hess, Renato Fassbind, Jean-Pierre Roth, Ann M. Veneman, Eva Cheng, Ruth K. Oniang'o, Patrick Aebischer, Ursula M. Burns, Kasper B. Rorsted, Pablo Isla, Kimberly A. Ross

Chairman's and Corporate Governance Committee

Paul Bulcke, U. Mark Schneider, Henri de Castries, Beat W. Hess, Renato Fassbind

Compensation Committee

Beat W. Hess, Jean-Pierre Roth, Patrick Aebischer, Ursula M. Burns

Nomination and Sustainability Committee

Henri de Castries, Paul Bulcke, Ann M. Veneman, Eva Cheng

Audit Committee

Renato Fassbind, Henri de Castries, Eva Cheng, Kimberly A. Ross

The addresses to the Annual General Meeting of the Chairman and the CEO can be found on the Nestle corporate website.

For more information about Nestle in society, see our new Creating Shared Value report.

Contacts:



Media: Christoph Meier Tel.: +41 21 924 22 00

Investors: Dessi Temperley Tel.: +41 21 924 35 09GREENSBORO, NC, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gasboy, a division of Gilbarco Veeder-Root and the industry leader in commercial and industrial fuel and fleet technologies, is pleased to announce that Mexican fuel retailer Grupo Orsan has selected to deploy Gasboys Fuel Point PLUS vehicle identification technology at its network of fuel stations to offer better fraud protection and enhance loyalty with their fleet customers.



"The Gasboy Fuel Point PLUS system provides the high level of security and ease of use our fleet customers demand to ensure that the fuel they purchase is only going into their company vehicles, so we are standardizing on this technology across our network of sites, said Carlos Hernandez, Chief Financial Officer for Grupo Orsan. We support fueling thousands of fleet vehicles at our sites, and we needed a robust technology that would significantly reduce the possibility of fraud."



The Gasboy Fuel Point PLUS system uses secure radio communication between a vehicle and the fueling system to automatically identify and authorize a vehicle for fueling so that fueling can only occur when the correct nozzle is inserted in an authorized vehicle. As a completely wireless system, Fuel Point PLUS components are easily deployed both on vehicles as well as on the fuel site and can replace the need for cards or other manual inputs during fueling, which can reduce the amount of time spent fueling. Fuel Point PLUS can also automatically capture odometer readings directly from the vehicle, so fleet managers can proactively manage preventive maintenance for their fleet vehicles based on accurate mileage.



We are excited to support Grupo Orsan in delivering more value to their fleet customers, said Luke Grant, General Manager of Gasboys Commercial Business Unit. Innovative retailers like Grupo Orsan are utilizing our Fuel Point PLUS technology to build greater loyalty with their fleet customers and drive additional volume to their sites.

To learn more about Gasboys Fuel Point PLUS system and other fuel management solutions, visit www.gasboy.com.



About Gilbarco Veeder-Root

Gilbarco Veeder-Root is the worldwide technology leader for retail and commercial fueling operations offering the broadest range of integrated solutions from the forecourt to the convenience store and head office. For over 150 years, Gilbarco has earned the trust of its customers by providing long-term partnership, uncompromising support and proven reliability. Major product lines include: fuel dispensers, pump media, point-of-sale systems, payment systems, tank gauges, software development and integration, fleet management systems, and nozzles.

About Grupo ORSAN

Grupo Orsan is one of the leading Mexican companies in the domestic fuel sales market. Founded in 1968, it has more than 150 service stations, 1,400 affiliated service stations in its eWallet network, and a fuel distribution service for self-consumption facilities. Its experience has positioned Grupo Orsan as the top diesel distributor in Mexico

AttachmentsArmed conflict in Afghanistan killed 763 civilians and injured 1,495 in the first three months of this year, the United Nations mission there said Thursday.





All parties to the conflict in Afghanistan must do everything in their power to protect civilians from harm, said Ingrid Hayden, the Secretary-Generals Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan. Afghan

, caught in the conflict, in ways that are preventable; this must stop now.





The 2,258 civilian casualties, documented from 1 January to 31 March by the UN Assistance Mission in the country, known as UNAMA, are at the similar levels recorded in the first three months of 2017 and 2016. Anti-Government elements caused 1,500 civilian casualties, up six per cent from the same period last year.





Suicide improvised explosive devices (IED) and complex attacks were the leading cause of civilian casualties  a new trend. The Mission found that combats on the ground were the second leading cause, followed by targeted and deliberate killings, explosive remnants of war, and aerial operations.





The full report is available in English, Dari and Pashto



Dallas, TX, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Istation, a Dallas-based leading provider of educational technology, won the BESSIE Award for best Academic Management Website in the Teacher Tools category in The ComputEd Gazettes 2018 Best Educational Software Awards.



Now in their 24th year, The Gazettes annual springtime BESSIE Awards target innovative and content-rich programs and websites that provide parents and teachers with the technology to foster educational excellence. Submissions are judged on academic content, technical merit, subject approach and system management.

Istation is excited to be acknowledged for the sixth consecutive year by ComputEd Gazette, said Richard H. Collins, Istation Chairman and CEO. It is our mission to help pre-K to 8th grade students and teachers through our instructional technology and diagnostic tools. We are appreciative to ComputED Gazette for this award.

Istation received a BESSIE Award in 2017 in the Multi-Level, Multi-Subject category and three BESSIE Awards in 2016 for Early Learning Reading, Early Elementary Reading Skills and Multi-Level Reading Skills.



About Istation

Istation is an award-winning comprehensive e-learning program used by more than four million students around the world. Known for its accurate assessments, engaging curriculum and trusted teacher tools, Istation helps students in prekindergarten through 12th grade achieve academic growth. Istations computer-adaptive assessments (known as ISIP) immediately place students on personalized instructional paths unique to their needs. An animated, game-like interface effectively engages students so they dont even realize theyre being evaluated. Along with its highly interactive digital curriculum, Istation provides teachers with access to thousands of lessons perfect for instructing small groups or an entire class. Comprehensive progress reports are also immediately available for educators, administrators and parents. Istation offers its ISIP assessment in early reading, advanced reading, reading en Espanol and math. Istation instruction is available in reading, Spanish and math.

About The ComputED Gazette

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AttachmentsCavotec SA ("the Company") today held its Ordinary General Meeting ("OGM") in Lugano, Switzerland, chaired by Stefan Widegren.

Annual report, financial statements and consolidated financial statements for the year 2017, report of the Statutory Auditors

The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal that the annual report, the financial statements and the consolidated financial statement for the year 2017 be approved.

Appropriation of available earnings

The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal for the following appropriation:

CHF

Carried forward from previous year (19,612,363)

Net gain/ (loss) for the financial year 2017 (22,135,641)

Total earnings available (41,748,004)

Appropriation to general statutory reserves 0

Appropriation to other reserves 0

Proposed balance to be carried forward (41,748,004)





Grant of Discharge from Liability to the Board of Directors and Persons entrusted with the Management from Activities during Business Year 2017

The OGM granted discharge to all members of the Board of Directors as well as the other persons entrusted with the management.

Capital reduction through partial nominal value repayment

The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal:

a) to reduce the current share capital of 102'096'800.00 by CHF 1,570,720.00 to CHF 100,526,080.00 by way of reducing the nominal value of the registered shares from CHF 1.30 by CHF 0.02 to CHF 1.28 and to use the nominal value reduction amount for repayment to the shareholders;

b) to confirm as a result of the report of the auditors, that the claims of the creditors are fully covered notwithstanding the capital reduction;

c) to amend article 4, article 4ter, article 4quater para. 1, article 4quinquies, article 4sexies, article 4septies and article 4octies of the Articles of Association according to the following wording as per the date of the entry of the capital reduction in the commercial register (the proposed amendments are in italics):

Article 4

"The share capital of the Company is CHF 100,526,080.00 and is divided into 78,536,000 fully paid registered shares. Each share has a par value of CHF 1.28.

Article 4ter

The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 913,884.16 through the issuance of up to 713,972 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time.

Article 4quater para. 1

The Board of Directors shall be authorized to increase the share capital in an amount not to exceed CHF 20,105,216.00 through the issuance of up to 15,707,200 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by not later than April 22, 2018.

Article 4quinquies

The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 913,884.16 through the issuance of up to 713,972 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2013 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time.

Article 4sexies

The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 913,884.16 through the issuance of up to 713,972 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2014 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time.

Article 4septies

The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 1,005,260.80 through the issuance of up to 785,360 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2015 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange of that time.

Article 4octies

The share capital may be increased in an amount not to exceed CHF 1,005,260.80 through the issuance of up to 785,360 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by the issuance of new shares to employees of the Company and group companies. The pre-emptive rights and advance subscriptions rights of the shareholders of the Company shall thereby be excluded. The shares or rights to subscribe for shares shall be issued to employees pursuant to the Long Term Incentive Plan 2016 approved by the Board of Directors. Shares or subscription rights may be issued to employees at a 10% discount compared with the market price quoted on the stock exchange at that time.

Explanatory notes:

In the event of approval of the proposed capital reduction, the nominal value reduction amount shall be repaid to shareholders. The capital reduction will be implemented after publication of the general meeting resolution in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce in accordance with Art. 733 Swiss Code of Obligations and the expiration of the 2 months notice period provided therein. Subject to approval by the general shareholders' meeting and to entry of the reduction in the Commercial Register, CHF 0.02 per share will be repaid to the shareholders, holding shares on July 6, 2018 prospectively on July 13, 2018. The capital reduction amount is paid out without deduction of Swiss withholding tax.

Creation of authorized share capital

The OGM adopted the Board of Directors' proposal to create authorized share capital in an amount not to exceed CHF 20,105,216.00, enabling the issuance of up to 15,707,200 Cavotec SA shares by not later than April 12, 2020, by amending article 4quater, para. 1 of the Articles of Association with the following wording:

The Board of Directors shall be authorized to increase the share capital in an amount not to exceed CHF 20,105,216.00 through the issuance of up to 15,707,200 fully paid registered shares with a par value of CHF 1.28 per share by not later than April 12, 2020. Increases in partial amounts shall be permitted.

The decision referred to the agenda item 4 concerning the amendments to the art. 4quater para. 1 is therefore superseded by this motion.

Approval of Remuneration

The OGM approved the maximum aggregate amount (covering fixed and variable remuneration) each of:

the remuneration for the Board of Directors for the next business year

the remuneration for the CEO for the next business year.

6.1 Approval of Remuneration for the Board of Directors



The OGM approved the aggregate amount of EUR 1,000,000 for the remuneration for the Board of Directors for the business year 2019.

6.2 Approval of Remuneration of the CEO

The OGM approved the aggregate amount of EUR 1,500,000 for the remuneration for the CEO for the business year 2019.

7. Re-election of five Directors, election of one new Director, nomination of the Chairman of the Board of Directors

In accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal, Fabio Cannavale, Erik Lautmann, Patrik Tigerschiold, Helena Thrap-Olsen, Helene Mellquist were re-elected as Directors for a further one-year term of office expiring at the OGM to be held in 2019. Patrik Tigerschiold was elected as Chairman of the Board of Directors for one-year term of office at the OGM to be held in 2019. Roberto Italia was elected as Director for a one-year term of office expiring at the Ordinary General Meeting to be held in 2019.

Nominations for the Remuneration Committee

In accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal Erik Lautmann, Helena Thrap-Olsen and Patrik Tigerschiold were elected as members of the Remuneration Committee. With respect to the requirements in the Code that all members of the Remuneration Committee, apart from the chairman of the Remuneration Committee, are to be independent of the company and its executive management, the Nomination Committee has come to the conclusion that all candidates proposed by the Board of Directors are independent of the company and its executive management.

Re-election of Independent Auditor

In accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal, PricewaterhouseCoopers SA, Lugano, Switzerland was re-elected as Cavotec's independent auditor for the business year 2018.

Election of an Independent Proxy

In accordance with the Board of Directors' proposal, Mr. Franco Brusa, Attorney-at-law, Via G.B. Pioda 5, Lugano, Switzerland was elected as Cavotec's independent proxy for the OGM 2019.

ENDS

For further details please contact:

Johan Hahnel

Investor Relations Manager

Telephone: +46 70 605 63 34 - Email: investor@cavotec.com

About Cavotec

Cavotec is a leading engineering group that designs and manufactures automated connection and electrification systems for ports, airports and industrial applications worldwide. Cavotec innovative technologies ensure safe, efficient and sustainable operations. To find out more about Cavotec, visit our website at cavotec.com.

The information in this release is subject to the disclosure requirements of Cavotec SA under the Swedish Securities Market Act and/or the Swedish Financial Instruments Trading Act. This information was publicly communicated on 12 April 2018, 18:45 CEST.Glazer and Jacobson. Photo: Charley Gallay/Getty Images for HBO

Broad Citys fifth season will be its last, but that doesnt mean stars Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson are done with Comedy Central. The duo has signed a first-look television deal with Comedy Central parent company Viacom, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and they have three projects in development. Broad City has been our baby and first love for almost ten years, since we started as a webseries. Its been a phenomenal experience, and weve put ourselves into it completely. Broad Citys always had a spontaneous pace and feeling, and ending after season five honors that spirit. We are very excited to bring new voices and points of view to Comedy Central and continue our collaboration together in new ways, Glazer and Jacobson said in a statement. The first-look deal covers them individually and as a pair.

The shows in development are called Mall Town USA, Platinum Status, and Young Professionals. Glazer and Jacobson wont star in any of the series, but are set to executive-produce. Mall Town USA is an animated comedy about a 13-year-old girl. Platinum Status, written by Glazers brother Eliot, is about a gay man who hooks up with a woman after hes dumped by his longtime boyfriend. Young Professionals will follow young D.C. politicos, from a script by former Obama speechwriter David Litt.In honor of the House Speaker's decision not to seek reelection, #LSSC presents this look back at Paul Ryan's most courageous stances. #PaulRyan #Courage pic.twitter.com/mLPkMp5L0o  The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) April 11, 2018

On Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that hes retiring from Congress. Though he plans to stay through the end of the year, late-night hosts wasted no time bidding farewell to one of their favorite punching bags. In honor of the occasion, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert released a clip package of Ryans most courageous stances  a video full of Ryan avoiding commenting on Trumps scandals with statements like, I dont even know what all of these accusations are.

Over on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah ripped apart Ryans history of fiscal conservatism. He noted that though Ryan had demanded the U.S. government rein in the debt under Obama, when Trump came to office the Republican championed a tax bill that will reportedly contribute to a massive federal budget deficit. Still, the comedian paid his respects to the politician by pouring out a 40 (grams of a protein). Noah joked, Dont worry, just like Paul Ryans deficits, someone else is going to have to clean this up.

Jordan Kleppers Alex Jones-type conservative character had his own theory for why Ryan would want to leave. Taking out an X-ray, The Opposition host explained with faux concern, Paul Ryan is retiring because of a serious medical condition. You see, Paul Ryan has no spine. Its tragic.

Instead of writing a traditional monologue joke, Late Night with Seth Meyers sang a song about Ryans retirement. Writer Amber Ruffin spoofed Roy Orbisons Crying with her parody version, Roy Ambersons Ryan. She crooned, Retirement is what you choose / Cause if you run, youre gonna lose / People stopped listening to you / Oh I dont wish you well / Youre douchey I can tell.Very sad Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Oscar winner Alicia Vikander has many talents, including the ability to do pull-ups, as she demonstrated repeatedly in Tomb Raider, and Googling things. But she excels most at one specific thing: wearing sweaters and being sad at the same time onscreen. Especially if she is being sad in said sweaters near an ocean.

In this way, Wim Wenderss Submergence, based on J.M. Ledgards novel, marks a triumphant return to form for Vikander. Even if it isnt a particularly interesting movie, Alicia gets to wear more than half a dozen different knits over the course of its running time, while also experimenting with taking glasses on and off. Personally, as somewhat of a Vikander sweater aficionado, its thrilling. Im sure her moms friend would agree.

Submergence cuts between the brief romance between Danielle Flinders (Vikander), a biomathematician, and James More (James McAvoy), a British secret operative, and their separate adventures after the fact: Jamess capture in Somalia, and Danielles journey to the depths of the sea. The story hinges on metaphors about the ocean, which Danielle delivers while wearing glasses and a sweater and being deeply serious. James finds this all very sexy.

Now with glasses! Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Vikanders knitwear-and-ennui skills really broke out in The Light Between Oceans, a period drama about stealing babies that deserved more attention than it got, if only for the bountiful collection of coziness on display. Other memorable films about Vikander being sad in warm clothing include Testament of Youth, The Danish Girl, and Tulip Fever, though the primary thing knit in that movie was an intricate web of deceit and betrayal.

Its important to note that many actresses actresses similarly excel at the art of combining knits and feelings: Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep  heck, Nancy Meyers and Diane Keaton have created a whole genre by associating midlife irritations with ecru. But Vikanders sweater sadness has a specific valence, an eerie simultaneous warmth and depth. Her doll-like face, combined with her inner dramatic intensity, plays well against the comfort of knitwear, especially when combined with her characters inner Sturm und Drang. To borrow a metaphor from Submergence, think of Vikanders screen presence like the ocean: the calm surface giving way to a force primeval, deeper, and darker.

Happy, but sad deep inside. Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Submergence doesnt reveal much when it comes to its own depths, but it does put forth a convincing argument for putting Alicia Vikander in more grim seaside knitwear costume dramas  a category I would happily binge on Netflix. Perhaps theres a movie for her where she works as a novelist by the ocean and meets a handsome lobster fisherman (Dev Patel) and falls in love (while wearing knitwear and being sad). Or a period drama about her moving from the big city to care for her sister (Rachel Weisz) and discovering that they have access to mysterious magicks (and wearing knitwear and being sad). Theres a vast ocean of possibility for Vikander before us. Let us slip into our sweaters and stare off into it, filled with possibility, and yet, melancholy.Photo: Patrick McMullan

In Wednesday nights episode of The Americans, Urban Transport Planning, FBI Agent Stan Beeman finally starts to play a more central role in the final season: He once again connects with his former Soviet counterpart Oleg Burov and thereby, unbeknownst to Stan, becomes tangentially involved in spy activities that also involve Philip and Elizabeth Jennings.

It seems fair to assume that, before the drama comes to an end, Stan will inch closer to uncovering the true identities of his undercover Soviet neighbors. Noah Emmerich, the actor who plays Agent Beeman, took some time to talk to Vulture about how it feels to finally reach the conclusion of the series, how frustrating it has been for Stan to remain in the dark about the Jennings, why he was incredibly surprised by the way it all ends, and whether Stan is actually good at his job.

I want to talk first about the fact that the show is ending. How does that feel?

Its a really disorienting moment. Before this job, the longest job I ever had was four months. This is six years.

Acting is an odd life in terms of that continuity and consistency and predictability. Ive never had it. Now Ive had it for these past six years, and its been really nice. Ive acclimated to seeing the same people every October and having the semblance of a family, so its really hard to say good-bye to these people. I mean, Im definitely ready to move on from playing Stan  I dont feel conflicted at all about hanging Stan up. But saying good-bye to this crew, this cast, and this family that we assembled over the years  you know, well see each other, friendships will persist, but it wont be the same. That intimacy, its a special environment. I will miss it.

You said youre ready to say good-bye to Stan. Is that because you feel like there isnt much more to explore?

Theres always more to explore. But yes, in this Cold War dynamic, in his FBI life, in his personal life, weve explored quite a bit. Hes not the happiest of fellows, so its been a bit of a weight to be bearing his burden. I would love to do some comedy.

He does seem happy in his relationship with Renee, though. I think the thing with Stan is that hes not a particularly expressive person, even when he is happy.

He plays it pretty close to the chest. Obviously, I never imagined playing one character for such a long period of time. One of the things that drew me to acting is the ability to explore different worlds and different points of view and different universes of the human condition. The world of counterintelligence and the FBI is fascinating, but Ive been there long enough. Stans ready for a job change. Maybe he can open up a surf shop in Hawaii.

Showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields have said they knew the ending of the show from the beginning. Did they clue you in or was that something you didnt know until you got your final scripts?

I didnt know until I got the final script. I was happy not to know because once you know, you cant unknow. It does inform your sense of character and self in a way that maybe is inappropriate. I was happy not to know. And I was incredibly surprised by the ending. It was not what I expected it to be. I had a few scenarios running around in my head of what it could be but that was not one of them. And I love it. Im really happy with it.

Are you happy with it from a broader narrative standpoint, or in terms of how Stans story was resolved? Or both?

Both, really. I think the broader narrative is particularly beautiful and special and appropriate and feels organic to the show. I think Stans resolution is quite moving and human and feels good to me.

One of the big questions is, will Stan finally figure out whats going on with Philip and Elizabeth? I told Joe and Joel that I really want Stan to find out because I want that confrontation to take place, particularly between him and Philip. But I dont know that I want Philip and Elizabeth to actually be caught. What did you want to see happen?

I wanted Stan to put all the pieces together and figure it out. What he does with that and what that leads to, theres obviously lots of possibilities. I wasnt sure what would feel good, what would feel right. You know, its a tough one because you dont want anyone to die. It seemed quite inevitable that someone probably would.

As you were doing the show, were you ever frustrated that Stan hadnt figured this all out? From the beginning there was obviously suspicion, and then he dismissed it.

Yeah, its a really weird corner that we painted Stan in. At the end of the pilot, the very first hour of The Americans, Stan ends that hour snooping around their garage because hes suspicious that they might be the people that abducted [KGB defector] Timoshev. They might be these Russian spies. He comes to that suspicion through an acute sense of intuition and an intelligence that is extraordinary. And then the question is, What do you do with that? You cant have him be that close on their heels for five years without it being quite annoying and frustrating. You cant have him completely out of the picture because theres no jeopardy or sense of doom. You dont want to make Stan into someone foolish. You want him to maintain his intelligence and his abilities at his job.

I think some people are very frustrated by Stans inability to put the pieces together. Ive argued over the years with friends or people that watch the show [that] just because you live next door to someone doesnt give you any particular insight into what theyre doing inside their house. The proximity is not necessarily that illuminating. For the audience, it is like, Theyre right there! How can you not see that? But we dont know our neighbors at all, do we, really, in life?

Do you feel Stan is good at his job?

Yeah, I think hes good at his job. I mean, its hard because I have a myopic point of view on this whole thing. Im inside of it. I think his intuition and his instincts have been great. Hes usually pretty close to right. And then hes dissuaded himself  at the end of the pilot, he thought, What am I doing? This is crazy. These are my neighbors. His Spidey sense was tingling, but as I think is often true in life, we talk ourselves out of intuition. We tend to shoot down those feelings or those instincts because it just seems too implausible. From a logical standpoint, you wouldnt think that spies would be right across the street from an FBI agent. Its kind of the smartest thing that ever happened to Philip and Elizabeth that they are located where they are. Because it just seems too ridiculous.

Someone at FX told me the two of you have a running argument about whether or not Stan Beeman is a good person. Whats your side of that argument?

I think hes dedicated his life at great personal cost to serving his country and to making the world a better place. He sacrificed tremendously. The cheating on his wife element is a very divisive issue that, I think, cost Stan a lot of female fans who really hold it against him. And I understand that. When I read it in the script, I was like, Wait a minute, what? I thought he had a happy marriage. It was very surprising to me. But I also understand the loneliness and the secrets, you know, the notion that he really did lose his connection to his wife in those years undercover. Its quite upsetting, but I dont think it makes him a bad person.

Obviously, the worst thing he did was killing [KGB agent] Vlad in that first season. But, you know, [Stans] partner was murdered. He kidnapped a Soviet spy and said, If you dont help me with my partner, hes going to die. This was literally the enemy. I think he sees him as fair game in a way, but it definitely crossed a line.

Its funny, no one thinks that Philip and Elizabeth are bad people, right? Theyre killing all kinds of completely innocent people, completely innocent bystanders, but we know that theyre just doing the job they have to do. The weird thing about Stan killing Vlad is its not part of the job. But funnily enough, I dont see Vlad as an innocent person. Hes a Russian spy on American soil working to bring down the United States, so thats not exactly 100 percent an innocent person. But I get it. The vibe was like, Wow, youre a murderer. It is interesting how we couch things, how we contextualize them or not, and that really changes our tolerance of those acts.

Sometimes I think, what if you were reading The Americans as a news story? People would definitely see Stan as a hero and they would not see the good in Philip and Elizabeth.

Of course not. Thats one of the great points of the show, I think, peeling back the onion and looking at the humanity inside the news. I bet you 99 percent of Americans would want [the Jennings] to get the electric chair because theyre foreign agents that came here and slaughtered a bunch of Americans. How could you possibly be rooting for them? But thats one of the great aspirations of the show, to illuminate the humanity inside of every human being.

Obviously the relationship between Philip and Elizabeth is most important, but I think the relationship between Stan and Philip is really important, too. This season, it feels like theyre on parallel tracks.

Ive always seen them as mirror images of each other. Like theyre doing similar things, oddly.

What do you think they like about each other? And what have you liked about working with Matthew Rhys?

Oh, well, those are totally different questions. I think theres some intuitive connection between the two of them. They have similar secrets and lies. Its not conscious on Stans part  Philip is just the man and a compassionate ear and a supportive friend. Maybe theres some under-the-surface unconscious recognition of fraternity between the two of them.

As far as Matthew and my relationship, Matthew is a wonderful man. Hes wonderful to work with, hes generous and kind and talented and funny and just a pleasure to be around. I just have a deep affection for him and think hes a wonderful dance partner to work with as an actor. I always look forward to our scenes.

And sometimes you get to play racquetball.

Exactly. We get to have a little sport too. They pay us to have fun. Thats pretty great.

This interview has been edited and condensed.Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Upon its 2002 release, the raunch comedy Super Troopers didnt exactly set the world on fire, either critically or commercially. Written by and starring the sketch comedy team Broken Lizard (Jay Chandrasekhar, Steve Lemme, Kevin Heffernan, Erik Stolhanske and Paul Soter), the $1.2 million indie arrived with no bankable actors, required repeated viewings to catch many of its absurdist jokes (See if theyve got any chocolate bananas  Foster?; Afghanistanimation), and generally confused reviewers with its crude but deadpan tone. Plotted around a crew of prank-loving, syrup-chugging Vermont highway patrolmen, Troopers was defiantly weird  propelled not so much by a plot as pole vaulting from profane comedic vignette to profane comedic vignette.

Fox Searchlight bought the movies distribution rights at the Sundance Film Festival for $3.5 million and spent an additional $10 million on prints and advertising. So when Super Troopers grossed an unremarkable $18.5 million, studio executives basically shrugged and moved on  even while Broken Lizard continued to harbor dreams of a second film for years afterward.

Over the years, the movie found its core dude-bro audience on DVD through repeated viewings and word of mouth, evolving into a widely quoted, much beloved cult classic. In 2015, the comedy troupe launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to raise production funds for Super Troopers 2, taking in a startling $4.4 million from 500,000 subscribers over 30 days. And now, 16 years after its initial installment, that film arrives on multiplex screens April 20.

Once upon a time  specifically, from the dawn of the talkie in the 1920s until just a few years ago  Hollywoods calculus regarding how sequels got made was simple. A movie came out, did big business, won over fans, and the captains of industry in the studio C-suite called out for another one: the same again, only different. These days, however, the forces dictating which films get sequelized and which dont has become a much weirder science: Confounding almost all received wisdom about how this stuff is supposed to work, a number of films that failed to achieve blockbuster status  and some that lost significant money  have still managed to pave the way for the theatrical release of a part deux this year, Super Troopers chief among them.

The truth of the matter is, the studio wouldnt give us the money to make the movie and they owned it so we couldnt make it with anybody else. And we couldnt find investors, Steve Lemme explained at a Super Troopers 2 post-screening Q&A in Austin, Texas, last month. The feeling out there was, Hey, there are no fans out there anymore. Its been a while since the movie was made. Theres a two-fold thing: not only did we get the money to start making the movie, but also there was four-and-a-half, $5 million raised in that month. That also showed the studio the fans were still out there.

To hear it from Erik Davis, managing editor at Fandango, fan interaction on social media has become a crucial metric of audience engagement that studios increasingly take into account when green-lighting sequels  especially for movies with cultishly devoted followings like Super Troopers. With the rise of social media, were starting to see people taking another look at cult-movie hits, Davis says. They live on in dorm rooms. They live on on cable. Then the people go to social media and ask, Why isnt there another one of these? Its not only affecting Super Troopers 2. We got Dumb and Dumber To 20 years after the first one, another Anchorman nine years after the first. We also got another Zoolander 15 years later. And Wet Hot American Summer on Netflix. Theyre all cult hits. Like Super Troopers, they have dorky, likable characters; dorky, memorable lines that people are constantly saying to each other. So what happens is, you take that kind of love of that property to social media where you can find a lot of other like-minded people to make enough noise and write enough petitions, to warrant [studio executives] looking back and saying, Maybe we should do this.

Above and beyond crowdfunding and grassroots fan campaigns to resuscitate forgotten films into incipient franchises, however, another force far away from Hollywood is even more influential in getting sequels green-lit. In a word: China. Over the last half-decade, the burgeoning superpower has more and more frequently come to bail out Hollywoods box-office bombs  and is on track to overtake the U.S. as the most important movie territory.

Related Stories Pacific Rim Uprising Might Be the Most China-Bait Studio Release Yet

To wit: In 2013, Guillermo del Toros $190 million sci-fi thriller Pacific Rim arrived on multiplex screens and flopped domestically, grossing a disappointing $101.8 million in North America  a financial black eye for its distributor Warner Bros. But around the world, the giant-robots-versus rampaging-monsters movie proved to be a box-office draw  nowhere more than in the Middle Kingdom where Pacific Rim grossed a robust $111.9 million. That over-performance was enough to launch a franchise, despite the first films lackluster American drawing power. And last month, a second installment, Pacific Rim Uprising (featuring an almost all-new cast and not directed by del Toro) hit theaters, pulling in a strong $98.3 million in China.

Likewise, the Marvel Cinematic Universes 2015 Ant-Man  featuring Paul Rudd as an unlikely superhero with a super suit that can shrink him to the size of an insect  was made on a reported production budget of $130 million but only grossed $180 million domestically (to become a significant money loser for its studio distributor Disney when you factor in the films nine-figure prints and advertising budget). The thriller earned an additional $339 million internationally, though, with an impressive $105.3 million coming from China. And in July, the sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp will attempt to recapture that audience.

Scott Einbinder is president of Cristal Pictures, a Los Angeles production company backed by Beijing-based East Light Media that co-finances and produces predominantly English-language TV projects and feature films such as The Hitmans Bodyguard for the Chinese market. According to him, no foreign territory has ever exerted so much influence on how Hollywood sequelizes movies. The market potential in China is so strong, the potential monetization is so huge, I dont think theres ever been a marketplace outside the U.S. like that, Einbinder says. If you look at the territories, Germany, Latin America as a whole, they dont add up to nearly what the potential is in China. Look at XXX: Return of Xander Cage. The last one did very little business in the U.S. It probably wasnt worth releasing theatrically here. But it over-performed in China; the casting appealed to the Chinese. I understand theres a new one being prepped with a Chinese partner. The China component of any finance plan is increasingly taking a bigger and bigger and stronger point of view.

Viewed a certain way, the new sequel calculus represents a growing recognition by Hollywood that the movie market continues to fracture into unique, perhaps smaller but nonetheless dedicated constituencies for specific films. And while mass appeal and blockbuster building remain the industrys guiding lights, executives are realizing that giving failed films a second lease on life through sequelization can ultimately help the bottom line.

It allowed the movie to be put together the way we put together the first one, Broken Lizards Paul Soter said of the crowdfunding effort for Super Troopers 2. The first one was just us trying to make each other laugh and do what we thought was funny. So its nice to be able to do the second one without any studio imperative to do this or that.Several agencies spent the night and early morning tracking a murder suspect from Florida. The warrant stems from Pinellas County, Florida.



As of Thursday morning, investigators believe Steven Brooks, 45, is hiding in the area around the Limestone County Correctional Facility. He was last seen at Love Branch and Yarbrough roads.

Investigators said he is 5'8" and was last seen wearing black pants and a a black over brown shirt.

If spotted, law enforcement asks you to not approach him, but instead alert the Madison County Sheriff's Office at 256-722-7181.

The investigation began Wednesday evening in Madison County when members of the Madison County Sheriff's Office along with the U.S. Marshal's Office, Madison County SWAT and Madison Police tracked Brooks to a home on Loganberry Lane near Shortleaf Lane in the Harvest community around 6:30 p.m.

RELATED: Harvest-area schools on lockdown while police search for murder suspect

Brooks barricaded himself in the home with an elderly couple who were eventually let out of the home peacefully, Madison County Sheriff's Office Lt. Donny Shaw said. At around 9:35 p.m., Shaw said Brooks got into a car in the garage and barrelled out of the house, hitting two U.S. Marshals vehicles as he left. No one was injured.

Investigators said Steven Brooks then led deputies on a chase that ended over on Love Branch Road. He drove the car into a field and deputies said one of the car's rims was exposed and the vehicle caught on fire. Brooks ditched the vehicle and took off on foot.

Brooks, who Pinellas Park police said also goes by the name Siddeeq Ma'Shooq, is wanted for the murder of Caroline Morton-Hicks, 59, on Feb. 12 in Pinellas County. She was found shot to death about an hour after practicing with the Pinellas Park Civic Orchestra at a performance hall.

Pinellas County jail records show that Brooks faced previous charges of escape, resisting arrest and felony battery in 2006. In 2015, he was charged with possession of cocaine with intent to sell.Click here for updates on this story

Cincinnati, OH (WCPO) -- Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters is launching a comprehensive investigation to determine what exactly went wrong that led to the death of a 16-year-old Seven Hills student in the school parking lot Tuesday afternoon.

"The young man was trapped in the third row bench seat, and it is called positional asphyxiation," Deters said. "We are actively trying to identify experts to assist in us in this investigation."

Just after 3 p.m. Tuesday, 16-year-old Kyle Jacob Plush called 911 panicking. Over the course of a three-minute call in which he gasped, cried repeatedly for help and struggled to communicate with the operator, he relayed that he was trapped inside his car in the parking lot of Seven Hills School.

"I probably don't have much time left, so tell my mom I love her if I die," he said.

The call ended; when officers checking out the scene attempted to call back, it went to voicemail.

A deputy sent to the scene soon after called in to report that he couldn't find anyone trapped in a van. He questioned if the call had been a prank.

Plush was there. He called again.

"This is not a joke," he said. "I am trapped inside a gold Honda Odyssey van in the parking lot of Seven Hills. ... Send officers immediately. I'm almost dead."

At several points in the second three-minute call, during which the operator does not respond and loud banging or heavy breathing can be heard, he attempts to call on the Siri automated iPhone assistant without success.

Around 9 p.m., according to police, a family member discovered him dead inside the van -- a death Hamilton County Coroner Lakshmi Sammarco would rule accidental "asphyxia caused by chest compression."

Something -- neither Sammarco nor Lt. Steve Saunders indicated what -- had pressed so hard against Plush's chest that he suffocated.

The information released by police Wednesday afternoon did not clarify the reason the first deputy to respond was not able to find Plush's van or where Plush had been inside of it. Plush's uncle, who declined to share his name or speak on camera, said Wednesday night the 911 system failed the "great kid" who had been his nephew.

Plush was a student at Seven Hills, spokeswoman Christine Hedges said Wednesday morning. The school has grief counselors on hand for any student who needs them.

City Councilwoman Amy Murray, whose child also attends Seven Hills, also promised a full investigation into the incident on Thursday on WLW. She called it a "sad, sad day."

Mandy Gambrellmandy.gambrell@scripps.com513-852-4071

The-CNN-Wire

 &  2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.The Annual General Meeting of Thin Film Electronics ASA ("Thinfilm") will be held Friday 4 May 2018 at 9:00 (CET), at Hotel Continental, Stortingsgaten 24/26, Oslo, Norway.

Please find enclosed the notice including attendance forms (in English and in Norwegian). Shareholders wishing to attend the Annual General Meeting, in person or by proxy, are requested to complete one of the enclosed attendance forms. The attendance form must be received by the registrar DNB Bank ASA at the latest by 2 May 2018 at 12:00 (CET).

At 09:30 (CET) or after the Annual General Meeting has been adjourned, the CEO, Davor P. Sutija, will give a presentation and update of Thin Film Electronics ASA. The presentation will be open to the press and the general public, and will be webcast.

12 April 2018

Thin Film Electronics ASA

This information is subject of the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian securities Trading Act.Students were in class as normal Thursday morning while Madison, Limestone and federal authorities searched the Harvest area for a murder suspect from Florida.

Madison County Sheriff's Office spokesman Lt. Donny Shaw said they had been searching for Steven Brooks, 45, since he evaded deputies and U.S. Marshals Wednesday night near the Limestone Correctional Facility. Shaw said Brooks is wanted for killing a woman in Pinellas County, Florida.

Madison County Schools spokesman Tim Hall said via email that schools in the area are on "lock out" status, meaning students will not be allowed outside for recess or P.E. classes. Hall said school officials are getting updates on the search every 15 minutes.

Madison County Schools that are affected by the "lock out" are Sparkman High, Sparkman ninth, Madison Cross Roads, Monrovia middle and elementary and Legacy and Endeavor.

East Limestone High School, Creekside Primary and Creekside Elementary were all on a modified lockdown, meaning students were being kept indoors, said Limestone County Schools spokeswoman Karen Tucker.

Extended day activities were cancelled for the Limestone County schools that were affected by the search, Tucker said. Ball games at East Limestone High School were set to go on as scheduled, but Tucker said extra law enforcement officers would be on hand.MELBOURNE, Australia, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Australian stem cell and regenerative medicine company, Cynata Therapeutics Limited (ASX:CYP), is pleased to announce that it has been invited to present at the prestigious 6th Annual Cell and Gene Therapy Investor Day in New York.



The conference will take place on the 17th of April 2018 and is organised by the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM), the leading global industry body for regenerative and advanced therapies.

Around 350 delegates are expected to attend the conference, of which approximately 200 are active investors or analysts. A number of discussion panels will also be held that will see participation from leading analysts and executives from major pharmaceutical companies.

Dr Ross Macdonald, Managing Director and CEO, will present and take part in a fire-side discussion with leading industry analyst, Dr Reni Benjamin of Raymond James, to showcase the Companys regenerative medicine platform, Cymerus, and to discuss the positive progress in Cynatas Phase I clinical trial.

Participation in the highly sought-after event follows the excellent clinical trial data from the analysis of the first patient cohort in the Phase I clinical trial (announced on 22nd January 2018) and the recent granting of Orphan Drug Designation in the US by the FDA (announced 28th March 2018).

To find out more about the event, please go to: https://alliancerm.org/event/cginvestorday. The event is expected to be live streamed and will be available to watch at http://arminvestorday.com/webcast/.

CONTACTS: Dr Ross Macdonald, CEO, 0412 119343, ross.macdonald@cynata.com Daniel Paproth, Australia Media Contact, 0421 858 982, daniel.paproth@mcpartners.com.au Laura Bagby, U.S. Media Contact, 312-448-8098, lbagby@6degreespr.com

About Cynata Therapeutics (ASX:CYP)

Cynata Therapeutics Limited (ASX:CYP) is an Australian clinical-stage stem cell and regenerative medicine company developing therapies based on its proprietary Cymerus stem cell technology platform. Cymerus overcomes critical issues in the production of therapeutic mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) by enabling the economical manufacture of commercial-scale MSCs, independent of multi-donor limitations. Cymerus novel approach utilises induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from a single blood donation to generate mesenchymoangioblasts (MCAs), a precursor that is used to manufacture an unlimited number of therapeutic MSCs. Cynatas unique off-the-shelf Cymerus platform has the potential to create a new standard in the development and manufacture of stem cell therapeutics.TORONTO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nutritional High International Inc. (the Company or Nutritional High) (CSE:EAT) (OTCQB:SPLIF) (FRANKFURT:2NU) is pleased to announce the approval of its conditional use permit application ("CUP") by the City of Sacramento, Community Planning Department for a 9,000 square foot property located in Sacramento ("Sacramento Property") that is being leased by the Company. The CUP approval sets out the conditions of using the Sacramento Property to manufacture cannabis products using non-volatile solvents, which moves the Company closer to being licensed to manufacture cannabis products in-house, rather than relying on contract manufacturing partners. Aaron Johnson of JRG Attorneys at Law, who also serves as a director of the Company represented Nutritional High in Sacramento.



The next step for the Company will be the submission of an application for formal business operating permits ("BOP") with City of Sacramento, Office of Cannabis Policy and Enforcement, as well as building permits to commence construction at the Sacramento Property. Upon receiving requisite approvals and completing the build-out, the Company intends to commence manufacturing at the facility and continue to expand sales of its FLI branded products in the California market. Bringing the manufacturing capability in-house, the Company will be able to achieve higher product sales margins, exercise greater control over quality control and provide the flexibility in adding new product lines. The Company also has a purchase and sale agreement to purchase the Sacramento Property upon obtaining requisite regulatory approvals.

Manufactured cannabis products have experienced rapid sales growth since legalization in California, with sales of cannabis concentrates increasing 36% between January and February of 2018, from $43.2m to $58.7m according to BDS Analytics.

Jim Frazier, CEO of Nutritional High, commented, "We are very excited to achieve this significant milestone at our Sacramento facility. Municipal approval of our CUP application brings us one step closer to being able to manufacture our value-added extract products in California, a key strategic market for us.

Aaron Johnson, also added, "Establishing a location in Sacramento further exemplifies Nutritional Highs commitment to efficiency and logistics in a cannabis industry that is rapidly moving toward modern business models."

About Nutritional High International Inc.

Nutritional High is focused on developing, manufacturing and distributing premium and consistently dosed products in the cannabis-infused products industry, including edibles and oil extracts for nutritional, medical and adult recreational use. The Company works exclusively through licensed facilities in jurisdictions where such activity is permitted and regulated by state law.

For updates on the Companys activities and highlights of the Companys press releases and other media coverage, please follow Nutritional High on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ or visit www.nutritionalhigh.com.

For further information, please contact:

David Posner

Chairman of the Board

Nutritional High International Inc.

647-985-6727

Email: dposner@nutritionalhigh.com

About JRG Attorneys at Law

JRG Attorneys at Law; Johnson, Rovella, Retterer, Rosenthal & Gilles, LLP, is a full service law firm based in Monterey County, California. The firm represents a wide range of clients from industries including agriculture, hospitality and cannabis. Aaron Johnson leads the firms Cannabis Department and has been at the forefront of the cannabis industry in central California. www.JRGattorneys.com.

Contact:

Aaron Johnson

Partner, JRG Attorneys at Law

Director, Nutritional High

831-754-2444

Email: Aaron@JRGattorneys.com

NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR OTC MARKETS GROUP INC., NOR THEIR REGULATIONS SERVICES PROVIDERS HAVE REVIEWED OR ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

This news release may contain forward-looking statements and information based on current expectations. These statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. Such statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements. Risks that may have an impact on the ability for these events to be achieved include completion of due diligence, negotiation of definitive agreements and receipt of applicable approvals. Although such statements are based on managements reasonable assumptions, there can be no assurance that such assumptions will prove to be correct. We assume no responsibility to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances.

The Companys securities have not been registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the U.S. Securities Act), or applicable state securities laws, and may not be offered or sold to, or for the account or benefit of, persons in the United States or U.S. Persons, as such term is defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act, absent registration or an applicable exemption from such registration requirements. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in the United States or any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

Additionally, there are known and unknown risk factors which could cause the Companys actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information contained herein. All forward-looking information herein is qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement, and the Company disclaims any obligation to revise or update any such forward-looking information or to publicly announce the result of any revisions to any of the forward-looking information contained herein to reflect future results, events or developments, except as required by law. Some of the risks and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking information expressed in this press release include, but are not limited to: obtaining and maintaining regulatory approvals including acquiring and renewing U.S. state, local or other licenses, the uncertainty of existing protection from U.S. federal or other prosecution, regulatory or political change such as changes in applicable laws and regulations, including U.S. state-law legalization, market and general economic conditions of the cannabis sector or otherwise.COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HDI, the leading membership association and certification body for service and support professionals, announced the winners of the 2018 HDI Industry Awards. Each year, HDI honors the individuals, teams and organizations that have enhanced the image of the technical service and support industry through exceptional leadership, vision, innovation and achieving the highest standards of quality and customer satisfaction. Award winners were announced this week at HDI 2018 Conference & Expo.



To view the full details on each HDI award, visit: thinkhdi.com/events/awards.aspx

The Industry Award winners were evaluated through a meticulous selection process with more than 500 total submissions considered for five award categories. Submissions were judged by panels comprised of service and support industry experts, tasked with selecting the industry's top team, manager, analyst, desktop support technician and local HDI chapter officer. The HDI Hall of Fame inductees were judged through a committee process and chosen due to their outstanding contributions to HDI. Also recognized were the CSAT Elite 50 and the Circle of Excellence award winners.

Wed like to offer our congratulations to all of the 2018 HDI Industry Award winners for their impressive contributions to this industry, said Leslie Cook, Director of Membership, HDI. Each winner was selected from a large pool of talented individuals, teams and organizations and should be proud of this well-deserved recognition.

The 2018 HDI Industry Award Winners:

HDI Team Excellence Award*

Optum, Inc

HDI Manager of the Year*

Brittany Muxlow, Cerner Corporation

HDI Analyst of the Year*

Kristin Luebke, State of NE/Office of CIO, HDI Nebraska Chapter

HDI Desktop Support Technician of the Year*

Rob Allen, TCU, HDI DFW Local Chapter

HDI Local Chapter Officer of the Year

Kelly McLaughlin, HDI NY - Western & Central NY

HDI Hall of Fame Inductees*

Roy Atkinson

Jim Bolton

Mary Cruse

John Custy

Julie Mohr

*Award sponsored by Robert Half Technology.

Also recognized during the conference:

HDI CSAT Elite 50

#1 Top Ranked Support Center: Sonoma County Information Systems Department, The ISD Service Desk

This program celebrates top performing support centers around the world. These support centers are ranked based on customer satisfaction survey responses gathered by the HDI Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) Service, an independent, third-party tool that tracks and trends customer satisfaction. To see a full list of the HDI CSAT Elite 50, please visit: thinkhdi.com/services/customer-satisfaction-index/csat-elite-50.

HDI Circle of Excellence Awards

This award is designed to recognize those chapters who are meeting the standards for an HDI local chapter and are following the best practices which ensure they are providing value to members. To see a full list of the HDI Circle of Excellence Award winners, please visit: thinkhdi.com/Landing/2018-Circle-of-Excellence-Winners

For more information about each award recipient, please visit: hdiconference.com/conference/2018-award-winners.aspx

Follow us on Social

Facebook  Twitter  LinkedIn

About HDI

Founded in 1989, HDI is the first membership association and certification body created for the service and support industry. Since then, HDI has remained the source for professional development by offering the resources needed to promote organization-wide success through exceptional customer service. We do this by facilitating collaboration and networking, hosting acclaimed conferences and events, producing renowned publications and research, certifying and training thousands of professionals each year, and connecting solution providers with practitioners. Learn more at www.ThinkHDI.com. HDI is organized by UBM plc. UBM is the largest pure-play B2B Events organizer in the world. Our 3,750+ people, based in more than 20 countries, serve more than 50 different sectors. Our deep knowledge and passion for these sectors allow us to create valuable experiences which enable our customers to succeed. Please visit www.ubm.com for the latest news and information about UBM.

About Robert Half Technology

With more than 100 locations in North America and Europe, Robert Half Technology is a leading provider of technology professionals for initiatives ranging from web development and multiplatform systems integration to network security and technical support. Robert Half Technology offers online hiring and job-search services at roberthalf.com/technology.Port Adelaide midfielder Sam Powell-Pepper will miss the Power's clash with Essendon after being banned by the club for one game for breaking team rules.

The AFL and the club are investigating an incident involving Powell-Pepper at an Adelaide nightclub. A woman alleges he had put his hands up her skirt after Port's Saturday night win over Brisbane.

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While that investigation was ongoing, Powell-Pepper was found to have broken team rules by staying out past the 2:00am curfew and drinking excessively.

Late on Wednesday, the club's leadership group, led by skipper Travis Boak, handed down the sanction.Rio Tinto was forced to defend its handling of workplace safety, executive pay and climate change issues at its annual general meeting in London, and faced a shareholder protest over calls for more transparency surrounding its membership of business lobby groups.

Its new chairman, Simon Thompson, who will again face shareholders at the company's Melbourne AGM in three weeks, told the London meeting it was still too early to tell what impact, if any, Rio would face from new US sanctions targeting Russian company Rusal, its junior partner in Queensland Alumina.

Baptism by fire: Simon Thompson only took on the chairman role last month. Credit:Bloomberg

Mr Thompson, who took on the chairman role last month, acknowledged at the meeting that Rio Tinto's reputation had "been called into question" over the past two years, including by the current fraud probe underway by the US Securities and Exchange Commission into its acquisition and its subsequent write-down of Mozambique coal assets.

Rio denies any wrong-doing and is contesting the claims.Hainan, China: The freeze in diplomatic relations between China and Australia is on, despite official denials  and business executives are clearly despondent about it.

That was the message from the sidelines and back-room meetings at the Boao Forum in China this week.

Chinese president Xi Jinping in the spotlight at the Boao economic forum this week. Credit:Bloomberg

No Australian ministers attended. In fact, no Australian ministers have stepped foot in China this year, because the usual smooth process of invitations being issued and dates being confirmed by Beijing has ground to a halt.

This is a freeze.The worlds first detailed field study of one of most ancient turtles in the world shows Queenslands endangered Mary River turtle, once threatened by the Traveston Dam, remains in dire straits.

The in the field research, finished only weeks ago, found 92 per cent of the endangered species were now in a retirement home and only 8 per cent were teenagers or young breeding turtles.

Turtle researcher Marilyn Connell with a Mary River turtle. Credit:Mary River Turtle Catchment Group

The "punk" turtle has made its way on the Zoological Society of London's Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered Reptiles list.

It is like the living dead, Charles Darwin University turtle researcher Marilyn Connell said.MISSISSAUGA, Ontario, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In a release issued earlier today by Alectra Utilities Corporation, the company is updating this release to include an additional contact number for Brampton and an updated number for Missisauga.

The latest weekend weather forecast for the Alectra Utilities service area is indicating the possibility of significant freezing rain starting Saturday morning continuing through to Sunday. This weather event may result in lengthy power outages caused by significant ice build-up on electrical equipment, high winds and fallen tree limbs on overhead powerlines.



Downed powerlines may be energized and are dangerous. If powerlines are down, stay at least 10 metres away (the length of a school bus), and call 911 immediately. To report outages, Alectra Utilities customers should call:

Brampton: 1-844-797-7920

Hamilton: 905-522-6611

Mississauga: 905-273-7425

St. Catharines: 905-684-8111

York Region/Simcoe County: 1-877-963-6900

Alectra Utilities continuously monitors weather forecasts and storm models. Field crews and communications staff will be prepared to respond as the situation evolves.

If you experience a power outage or want Alectra updates, please access our Twitter channel @AlectraNews, download our app or visit the outage map through our website: www.alectrautilities.com

Alectra Utilities reminds all customers of the importance of having an emergency kit in the event of a sustained power outage. It is recommended that emergency kits include: medicine, first aid supplies, flashlights, new batteries, a battery-operated radio, a manual can opener, canned food, bottled water, blankets,food for pets and important telephone numbers for family doctors, schools, daycare and insurance companies.

About Alectras Utilities Corporation

Alectra Utilities Corporation serves approximately one million customers across a 2,200 square kilometre service territory and 15 communities including Alliston, Aurora, Barrie, Beeton, Brampton, Bradford, Hamilton, Markham, Mississauga, Penetanguishene, Richmond Hill, St. Catharines, Thornton, Tottenham and Vaughan. It is part of the Alectra family of companies, which also includes Alectra Inc. and Alectra Energy Solutions Inc.

Media Contact: Rachel Bertone, Media Spokesperson

rachel.bertone@alectrautilities.com | Telephone: 647.339.3826 | 24/7 Media Line: 1.833.MEDIALN



Australian consumers have less than three months until an online shopping tax, as experts warn the "protectionist tariff" will be passed on by businesses without any guarantee taxpayers will benefit.

From July 1, clothing, electronics and furniture bought overseas worth less than $1000 from companies such as Amazon and eBay will be slugged with a 10 per cent GST, as the volume of online shopping surges and local retailers struggle to stay afloat.

Online shopper Ryan McCaugherty. Credit:Nick Moir

It comes as a government inquiry into internet competition led by former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce recommends sweeping taxpayer-funded grants for small businesses to make them competitive internationally.

The Turnbull government has already had to revise down its estimates of the new GST takings in the mid-year budget update from $100 million to $70 million following delays in its roll out.When the Northern coal station in my home of Port Augusta was slated for closure by Alinta Energy in 2015, the end came rapidly, with only a year for workers, the community and the energy sector to prepare.

Despite missing out on a smooth transition, Port Augusta is now creating a new future in renewable energy and storage. Thats why its maddening to watch politicians scramble over the Liddell coal-fired power station in NSW  putting at risk a fair transition for working families who deserve better.

The Liddell power station in the Hunter Valley. Credit:Janie Barrett

After coal closures in South Australia and Victoria, a key recommendation of the Finkel review was for advanced notice of closure to be given, allowing workers and the community to plan for the future. To AGLs credit, this is what they have done with Liddell. In contrast, Alinta Energy who the Turnbull Government is now trying to force AGL to sell Liddell to, closed Port Augustas coal station with little notice.

Similarly, the lack of a strong emission reduction target in the National Energy Guarantee does not provide local communities with the certainty they need. What the country needs is investment in renewable and storage technologies to be in place when our remaining coal stations close and for transition plans to be in place for local communities, yet the NEG is predicted to send renewable investment off a cliff."This will, ultimately, have catastrophic results for sex workers who use the internet to find and screen clients, share resources, and communicate with other workers." Credit:Shutterstock

When I broke up with my boyfriend towards the end of last year, the first place I realised I needed to go was back to work.

Not in an office, or a cafe, or a shop, but in a brothel.

After only a few weeks of being single, I returned to brothel work and nestled myself in the safe embrace of the sisterhood that exists within dressing rooms across the world: for there are few men more universally hated in a brothel than a worker's bum ex-boyfriend.

Sex work has allowed me to take trips overseas, to pay for expensive university courses, and to furnish my life with luxurious things I otherwise would never have been able to afford. Sex work has also paid my overdue bills, put food on my plate, and put money in my pocket when I barely had enough in my bank account to top up my Opal card.The NSW government has committed to combating Sydney's heat island effect by planting 5 million trees over the next 12 years, in a bid to offset the cracking pace of development.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the government would spend $38.7 million over the next four years on its "Five Million Trees" initiative, as part of its plan to boost Sydney's existing tree canopy from 16 per cent to 40 per cent by 2030.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian committed $37.5 million to planting five million trees across Sydney over the next 12 years. Credit:Louise Kennerley

While Ms Berejiklian trumpeted the policy as a first for any Australian state government, dozens of councils across the country have also implemented canopy policies and targets.

"No other state government that I know of anywhere in Australia has ever talked about tree canopy," she said.Consumers are being warned to read the fine print after Optus began inviting select customers to sign up to a mobile plan that claims to offer "unlimited" data, but comes with some caveats.

The limitations include slower than usual download speeds, which one telecommunications analyst said would be "barely enough" to stream a standard definition video on Netflix.

Earlier this week, Optus re-launched its "Unleashed" SIM-only (without a handset) plan. First offered in March before the telco withdrew the offer, the plan offers "unlimited" data for $60 per month on a 12-month contract to selected customers directly invited by Optus. For an extra $50 per month, a second SIM can be added. A third SIM can be added for $40 per month.

An ad for Optus' new 'unlimited' data plan

The Unleashed package has led some to question whether it is too good to be true. Telco analysts seem to think so, warning that consumers should read the offer's fine print.Mr Turnbull said he had no doubt an agreement would be reached with the Victorian government. Loading "We will own and build the rail link together as partners," he said. "There's no politics here. I'm putting five billion on the table and I want to get on with construction and build it. "This is a very big deal. This has been in the too-hard basket for far too long." Mr Turnbull said suggestions the works could be underway in 2020 were "ambitious".

"We should be able to get it started not long after that." He said he did not favour a particular route and that the route needed to be "looked at carefully". Treasurer Scott Morrison rebuffed suggestions it was inappropriate to tell some media before writing to the Premier about the matter, saying the federal government was entering a "very new type of partnership". "What we're doing here with Tulla rail is the single biggest announcement I'll be making in this year's budget on infrastructure. I'll have more to say about that at the time of the budget," Mr Morrison told ABC radio. "We see the Tulla rail as big, in fact it's bigger, than that [Western Sydney Airport] project in New South Wales, and it's a project of national significance."

He said private sector investment would be welcomed. "The current estimates are that the project is around about a $10 billion cost - we also welcome private sector investment from this as well." Work on a preliminary business case for the airport rail line started last September, with $30 million of the project costs spent by the Victoria to be reimbursed to it by the Turnbull government. The study, which aims to recommend a preferred route, is due in September. A rail link to Melbourne Airport has been debated since Tullamarine first opened in 1970. The Andrews government's advisor Infrastructure Victoria has said the link would be needed within the next 15 to 30 years and would cost up to $5 billion. Will Melbourne soon get a rail link to the airport? Credit:Craig Abraham

The four rail link options the Prime Minister will outline on Thursday closely follow those discussed in a 2013 report completed by Public Transport Victoria. The federal government's preferred route is likely to be through Maribyrnong, via Highpoint Shopping Centre and Victoria University, and also through the former Maribyrnong Defence Site - which Canberra is trying to sell to the private sector for development of up to 6000 homes. Mr Andrews promised last November that construction on the rail link would be underway within the next decade, but the government has argued a train cant run until the Metro Tunnel opens in 2026. But Mr Turnbull said he wanted to start building the airport link within the next few years, well before 2025.

"The goal would be to get construction underway within a few years," he said. The Public Transport Users Association welcomed the airport plan, but said the rail line must be part of the suburban railway network or it would fail.The RSPCA has voiced concerns live export ships are continuing to operate with a "business as usual" attitude, despite footage showing horrific conditions aboard the Awassi Express shocking the nation and drawing emotive pledges from politicians to address the industry's failures.

Australia's peak animal welfare body pointed to the departure of the MV Maysora - which left Fremantle in the early hours of Thursday morning - as an example of the industry continuing to operate without any additional conditions.

The MV Maysora. Credit:donaldcee/Flickr

The ship is loaded with sheep and cattle and is currently north of Geraldton, on a voyage expected to take about three weeks.

The MV Maysora is one of the first live export ships to depart WA since disturbing footage of dead and dying sheep on board the Awassi Express from 2017 was aired on 60 Minutes on Sunday.Villers-Bretonneux: The most expensive museum built in France in decades is about to open its doors  and its Australian.

The $100 million Sir John Monash Centre, at Villers-Bretonneux in north-eastern France, is less than a fortnight from its official opening by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull  and visitors will be let through in a soft launch from Monday.

The Centre, tucked behind the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, commemorates Australias presence on the Western Front in World War 1 in a digital extravaganza of immersive video recreations, interactive touch screens and  here and there  historical relics.

Nearly ready for the public. The John Monash Centre sits below the old memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in France. Credit:Nick Miller

The project was announced at the site in 2015 on the day after Anzac Day by then-PM Tony Abbott, who said the story of Australia on the Western Front should be much better known.London: Having a new strong-willed, feminist, social media savvy member of the royal familys "Fab Four" generation is going to challenge the monarchy to up its game, biographer Andrew Morton predicts.

Morton  whose secretly-authorised biography of Princess Diana shook the monarchy at its highest levels 25 years ago  has written a new biography of Prince Harrys fiancee Meghan Markle, titled A Hollywood Princess.

The book covers Markles fractured and fraught family life and her precocious interest in politics and civil rights. It quotes a childhood friend saying she wants to be Princess Diana 2.0.

She is going to be far more active  and quite forthright, Morton predicted on Wednesday, a day ahead of the books UK publication (it will be published in Australia on April 19).London: British Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered British submarines in the Mediterranean to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Assad regime by the end of this week.

Whitehall sources said Britain was "doing everything necessary" to be able to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles from nuclear-powered submarines against military targets in Syria.

One source said that "if any action is going to happen, it is going to happen before Monday".

As of Wednesday night, May had not come to a final decision on whether Britain would join the US and France in any air strikes, but the Prime Minister wants to be able to act swiftly if and when she decides to join any offensive.RICHMOND HILL, Ontario, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lysander Funds Limited (Lysander) is pleased to announce that at the Special Meeting of the holders of Class A and Class F Units (Unitholders) of Canso Select Opportunities Fund (the Fund) held today, the Unitholders have voted in favour of the plan of arrangement (the Arrangement) involving the Fund, the Unitholders and Canso Select Opportunities Corporation (NewCo). A copy of the complete report of voting results for the Fund will be made available on SEDAR.



Accordingly, the Fund and NewCo will proceed with completing the Arrangement, which is expected to be effective on or around June 5, 2018. Completion of the Arrangement is conditional on the approval of the Ontario Securities Commission, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Commercial List), the approval of listing of the Class A Multiple Voting Shares and Class B Subordinate Voting Shares of NewCo on a stock exchange in Canada, and other customary closing conditions. In connection with the Arrangement, the Fund will replace Lysander as trustee of the Fund with individual trustees for the transitional period between the effective date of the Arrangement and the date of dissolution of the Fund.

Further details of the Arrangement are set out in the Arrangement Agreement and the Management Information Circular dated March 16, 2018, both of which have been filed by the Fund on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Lysander is the trustee and investment fund manager of the Fund. The head office of Lysander is located at 100 York Blvd., Richmond Hill, Ontario L4B 1J8.

For further information on Lysander, please visit www.lysanderfunds.com or manager@lysanderfunds.com or you can reach Lysander at 1-877-308-6979.

Richard Usher-Jones

President

Lysander Funds Limited

Tel. No. 416-640-4275

Fax No. 905-764-0000

Forward Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking statements and information within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the expressions seeks, expects, believes, estimates, will, target and similar expressions. The forward-looking statements are not historical facts but reflect the current expectations of Lysander regarding future results or events and are based on information currently available to it. Certain material factors and assumptions were applied in providing these forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements. Lysander believes that the expectations reflected in forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions; however, Lysander can give no assurances that the actual results or developments will be realized. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations, including the matters discussed under Risk Factors in the annual information form of the Fund dated March 23, 2018 and in the Management Information Circular dated March 16, 2018. Readers, therefore, should not place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements. Further, a forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which such statement is made. Lysander undertakes no obligation to publicly update any such statement or to reflect new information or the occurrence of future events or circumstances except as required by securities laws. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release.Dhaka: A Myanmar Cabinet minister visited a sprawling refugee camp for Rohingya Muslims in Bangladesh on Wednesday, where refugees described the violence that forced them to flee and presented a list of demands for their repatriation.

Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye met with about 40 Rohingya Muslims at the Kutupalong camp in Cox's Bazar for more than an hour, sometimes exchanging heated words.

Myanmars Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement Minister Win Myat Aye arrives at Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox's Bazaar on Wednesday. Credit:AP

A Rohingya leader, Abdur Rahim, said at least eight rape victims were among those who met with Win Myat Aye. Rahim said the group presented 13 demands for the government to meet for their return to Myanmar.Jakarta: An Australian man in Bali has been found guilty on drug charges, but will serve time in a rehab centre, rather than in jail.

Isaac Emmanuel Roberts was found guilty of the illegal use of category 1 narcotics for personal consumption and the possession of psychotropic drugs.

But the Bali court sentenced Roberts, a self-described drug addict who had pleaded for mercy last week, to undergo one year and three months of treatment at the Anargya rehabilitation centre.

Australian man Isaac Roberts has avoided a jail sentence on drugs charges in Bali. Credit:Amilia Rosa

Roberts has already served about five months in the centre, which means he will be free early next year.The tweet came as Trump administration officials have consulted with global allies on a possible joint military response to Syria's alleged poison gas attack. Mr Trump cancelled a foreign trip to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Russian lawmakers have warned the US that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime, saying it could trigger a direct military clash between the two former Cold War adversaries. Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted - a stark warning of a potential major confrontation in Syria. The US, France and Britain were in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, US officials have said. None of the three countries' leaders had made a firm decision, according to the officials, who were not authorised to discuss military planning publicly.

A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the US in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syria's political and military support from Russia and Iran. French President Emmanuel Macron said France, the US and Britain would decide how to respond in the coming days. He called for a "strong and joint response" to the attack in the town of Douma on Saturday. The Syrian government denies responsibility. Mr Macron does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the US-led coalition created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Multiple IS attacks have targeted French soil, including one last month. Mr Trump suggested on Monday that he had little doubt that Syrian government forces were to blame for what he said was a chemical attack, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. Officials suggested such evidence was lacking, or at least not yet at hand. This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which US intelligence agencies had video and other evidence of certain aspects of the actual attack, which involved the use of Sarin gas. Mr Trump responded by launching Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

One official said the US, France and Britain were considering military options that would be more extensive than the punitive, one-day strike last April. That strike did not appear to have had the desired effect of deterring Assad from further use of chemical agents. Asked whether France would take military action, Mr Macron said his country would continue discussing technical and strategic information with US and British allies and "in the coming days we will announce our decision". He said any action would "target chemical weapons" stocks. Under a 2013 agreement for which Russia was a guarantor, Syria was to have eliminated all its chemical weapons, but it has used chlorine and perhaps other chemicals since then. Mr Trump spoke by phone with British Prime Minister Theresa May. A British government statement said the two agreed that the attack in Syria was "utterly reprehensible" and that the international community must respond "to uphold the worldwide prohibition on the use of chemical weapons". The President also met at the White House with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who told reporters that he and Mr Trump "see eye to eye" on the Syria problem.Smoke rises after Syrian government airstrikes on Douma, in eastern Ghouta on Saturday. Credit:White Helmets/AP

Beirut: The Russian military announced on Thursday that the Syrian government is now in full control of the last rebel-held town on the outskirts of Damascus that was the site of a suspected chemical attack over the weekend.

The development would mark a major victory for Syrian President Bashar Assad as the United States and its allies consider punitive military attacks against Syria following the suspected chemical attack that killed 40 people.

US President Donald Trump said Thursday that an attack on Syria could take place "very soon or not so soon at all." Seeking to dispel criticism he had tweeted the time of an attack a day earlier, Trump argued he had never signalled the timing of retaliation.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Affinor Growers Ltd. (Affinor Growers) (CSE:AFI) (OTC:RSSFF) (Frankfurt:1AF). Affinor Growers is pleased to announce that our Exclusive license holder of the province of Ontario Urban Vertical Farms Inc has signed and accepted a term sheet for $6 million in equity from Zygoz Equity Partners Inc, The agreement was signed April 11th 2018, all funding will come from Zygoz Equity Partners Inc in exchange for a 20% stake in Urban Vertical Farms Inc, and will commence building in Ontario this summer, The facility will be approximately 45,000 square feet and will begin with sixty 10 level vertical towers capable of producing an estimated $ 300,000 gross monthly revenue at roughly 35% net margin, Urban Vertical Farms plans to grow the business with Zygoz Equity Partners Inc through further licencing and expansion as demand continues to rise around the world. Affinor Growers is expected to receive a purchase order for approximately $1.2 million in late Aug 2018 for 60 rotating vertical towers slated for the project that will complete before end of 2018.



Zygoz Equity Partners

Zygoz Equity Partners (ZEP) is made up of visionary men and women with decades of successful business experience on an international level, who have joined together, to invest in change  in a sustainable future. A key requirement is that the Company has or is a technology or innovation that helps people and the Planet. http://www.zygoz.info/

Brian Harris, Managing Partner at ZEP says, UVF is a perfect example the type of Company we want to invest in. It has assembled an impressive management team for the business, field tested the system and has clients for its products already lined up. It will cash flow from day one, has great margins with huge demand in Ontario alone. On top of that UVF is in discussions with Affinor Growers to expand the licencing as the operations grow  something that our international partners like to see. And because we will have a sizeable 20% equity position in the business, we intend to scale the business quickly to take full advantage of the market opportunity.

Jerry Stefaniuk, CEO Urban Vertical Farms Inc

I am very pleased working with Zygoz Equity Partners to begin the quest for vertical farming in Ontario, I believe this is the future of farming and am excited to be in the forefront as a pioneer assisting the world with clean safe sustainable food production for the world.

About Affinor Growers

Affinor Growers is a publicly traded company on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol ("AFI"). Affinor is focused on growing high quality crops such as romaine lettuce, spinach, strawberries and Cannabis using its vertical farming techniques. Affinor is committed to becoming a pre-eminent supplier and grower, using exclusive vertical farming techniques.

Neither 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.

This news release may contain assumptions, estimates, and other forward-looking statements regarding future events. Such forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties and are subject to factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control that may cause actual results or performance to differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.

AFFINOR GROWERS INC.

"Nicholas Brusatore"

Congratulations to both Urban Vertical Farms Inc and Zygoz Equity Partners Inc for getting this done, Affinor Growers is looking forward to working together with these two entities and sees larger opportunities going forward around the world as demand continues to rise.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- InZinc Mining Ltd. (TSX-V:IZN) (the Company) is pleased to announce it has commenced diamond drilling at the Companys 100% owned West Desert zinc-copper project in Utah. The large zinc resources contained in the WD deposit and outlined in the 2014 Preliminary Economic Assessment remain open for expansion in several directions. The Phase 1 program of approximately 3,500m will focus on exploration and expansion of the WD deposit and the highly prospective area to the east.



Silver-Rich Zinc Potential

Wide spaced drilling will explore for silver-rich mineralization previously intersected in both the upper east portion of the WD deposit (CC08-11 returned 7.4 oz/t Ag, 4.3% Zn over 10.8m at 200m below surface) and 650m east in historical drill hole CC-43 (5.1 oz/t Ag and 6.8% Zn over 4.9m) which is located below the past-producing Utah silver mine (2.7M oz silver).

Copper-Rich Zinc Potential

The holes testing the silver-rich zinc potential are planned to extend at depth into an area of high grade copper-rich zinc potential as intersected in historical hole CC-43 (7.6% Zn, 3.5% Cu and 1.0 oz/t Ag over 3.1m).

Higher Grade Zinc

An additional focus of the drill program is delineation of high grade zinc (C07-02 retuned 27.30% Zn over 17.37m) and associated indium mineralization in the western portion of the WD deposit.

Drill Program at Indy Project

Permitting has been initiated for a diamond drilling program this summer at the Indy zinc project in BC.

About InZinc

InZinc is focused on growth in zinc through exploration and expansion of the advanced stage West Desert project (100%) in Utah and exploration of the early stage Indy project (100% option) in British Columbia. West Desert has a large underground resource open for expansion and has district scale exploration potential. A West Desert Preliminary Economic Assessment completed in 2014 forecasted 1.6 billion pounds of zinc production over 15 years. Indy comprises both near surface exploration targets and regional discovery potential. Both zinc projects are well located with easy access and existing infrastructure. The Company is well financed to conduct 2018 exploration programs.

InZinc Mining Ltd.

"Wayne Hubert

___________________

Wayne Hubert

CEO and Director

Phone: 604.687.7211



Website: www.inzincmining.com

For further information contact:

Joyce Musial

Vice President, Corporate Affairs

Phone: 604.317.2728

Email: joyce@inzincmining.com



Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, forward-looking statements) within the meaning of applicable Canadian and US securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein. 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, plan, design, 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, performance, or actions and that actual results and actions may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including, but not limited to, those risks and uncertainties disclosed in the Companys Management Discussion and Analysis for the year ended December 31, 2016 filed with certain securities commissions in Canada and other information released by the Company and filed with the appropriate regulatory agencies. All of the Company's Canadian public disclosure filings may be accessed via www.sedar.com and readers are urged to review these materials, including the technical reports filed with respect to the Company's mineral properties.

The West Desert Preliminary Economic Assessment (2014) is available both at www.sedar.com and the Companys website at www.inzincmining.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.HAMILTON, Bermuda, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A 14-strong delegation of industry representatives will head to Canada next month to promote the corporate benefits of setting up a captive insurance company in Bermuda.



Led by the Bermuda Business Development Agency (BDA), the roadshow includes half-day executive forums in British Columbia and Ontarioin Vancouver on May 15 and Toronto on May 17as well as business development meetings. Emphasising the many elements that differentiate Bermuda as a blue-chip jurisdiction, the agenda covers topics ranging from reasons to set up a captive insurer, the nuts and bolts of how to establish a captive entity, and why Bermuda is the sensible domicile choice for captives.

Bermuda continues to see an encouraging number of captive insurance registrations from the Canadian market, so this initiative will allow us to speak to more risk managers and financial executives about the many captive benefits for companies, said the BDAs Jereme Ramsay, Business Development Manager for the risk sector. These types of forums facilitate an environment that allows risk professionals to find out more about the significant innovation happening around all types of risk transfer, and to exchange ideas with insurance managers as well as existing captive owners. Were looking forward to returning to Canada to continue this dialogue.

Since 2011, Bermuda has enjoyed a Tax Information and Exchange Agreement (TIEA) with Canadaa bilateral agreement that puts the island on equal tax footing with jurisdictions that hold tax treaties with Canada. The TIEA allows Bermuda subsidiaries of certain Canadian corporations with international operations to be eligible for Canadian tax benefits, including the tax-free repatriation of certain dividends to Canada.

The Vancouver forum takes place Tuesday, May 15, 8:30amnoon at the Fairmont Waterfront. The Toronto forum will be held Thursday, May 17, 8:30amnoon at the Toronto Westin Harbour Castle in the citys downtown. Registration is free, and parking will be validated.

Industry representatives participating in both BDA initiatives include: Mark Allitt, Managing Director, Advisory, KPMG; Tony Bibbings, SVP, Artex Risk Solutions; Janita Burke, Client Director, Estera Services; Daniel Carter, VP, Director of Risk Consulting, Western Canada, Aon Canada; Christianne Kenny-Post, ASW Law; George Leite, EVP, Head of Business Development, Aon; Jennifer McConnell, Manager, Assurance, PwC; Yanique Miller, Aon, Assistant Vice President, Business Development; Michael Parrish, SVP & Business Development Lead, Marsh; Danielle Paynter, VP, Head of Business Development, Wealth Management, Butterfield Bank; Stewart Ritchie, Director, Assurance, PwC; Leslie Robinson, Assistant Director, Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA); Dennis Silvia, President, Cedar Consulting; and Gavin Woods, Partner, Appleby. Industry partners from Deloitte Bermuda also assisted with the roadshows.

Bermudas captive insurance market is the global leader, with close to 740 companies generating nearly $55 billion in annual gross written premiums. The island is also one of the world's largest hubs for commercial re/insurance companies, making it a unique one-stop shop.

Interested Canadian corporations and industry representatives are also invited to attend the 13th annual Bermuda Captive Conference happening on the island June 1113.

MEDIA CONTACT:



Rosemary Jones

Head of Communications & Marketing

rosemary@bda.bm

441 278-6558

441 337-4696

CONNECTING BUSINESS

The BDA encourages direct investment and helps companies start up, re-locate or expand their operations in our premier jurisdiction. An independent, public-private partnership, we connect you to industry professionals, regulatory officials, and key contacts in the Bermuda government to assist domicile decisions. Our goal? To make doing business here smooth and beneficial.A third arrest in connection with a traffic stop that led to drug charges.

We told you earlier this week about Malcolm Lahage, 30, and Tyler Stairs, 31, both of Massachusetts, who were pulled over in Dover.

Police say they found more than 20 grams of cocaine in the car during a traffic stop.

Now, investigators have also arrested Jenna Scandone, 30, of Massachusetts, in connection with the bust.

Vermont State Police issued a search warrant for her car. They say they found 200 tabs of LSD, nearly 4 grams of ecstasy, cocaine, prescription meds and 15 grams of marijuana oil.TORONTO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- First Cobalt Corp. (TSX-V:FCC) (ASX:FCC) (OTCQB:FTSSF) (First Cobalt) and US Cobalt Inc. (TSX-V:USCO) (OTCQB:USCFF) (US Cobalt) are pleased to announce that US Cobalt has been granted an interim order (the Interim Order) authorizing various matters including the holding of a special meeting (the Meeting) of US Cobalts securityholders to consider the Transaction.



Under the terms of the previously announced plan of arrangement transaction (the Transaction), announced March 14, 2018, First Cobalt will acquire all of the issued and outstanding shares of US Cobalt. US Cobalt issued and outstanding common shares will be exchanged on the basis of 1.5 First Cobalt common shares for each US Cobalt common share issued and outstanding.

US Cobalts board of directors unanimously recommends that US Cobalt securityholders vote in favour of the proposed Transaction. If the Transaction is approved at the Meeting, subject to the receipt of final court approval and other regulatory approvals, it is anticipated that the Transaction will be completed on or about May 28, 2018.

The Transaction is intended to strengthen and de-risk both companys assets by strategically positioning First Cobalt as a leading vertically integrated, non-DRC cobalt company. The combined company will have three significant North American assets:

Ontario: 50 historic mines across 100 km2 in the Canadian Cobalt Camp Idaho: Iron Creek Cobalt Project in the U.S. with a historic mineral resource estimate (non-compliant with NI 43-101) of 1.3M tons grading 0.59% cobalt Refinery: The only permitted cobalt refinery in North America capable of producing battery materials

The Interim Order was issued by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in connection with the Transaction and in accordance with the Interim Order, the Meeting of US Cobalt securityholders to consider the Transaction will be held on May 17, 2018 at the offices of Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, Suite 2200, 885 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, BC V6C 3E8 at 11:00 a.m. (Pacific time).

The record date for determining the US Cobalt securityholders entitled to receive notice of and vote at the Meeting is April 13, 2018. All US Cobalt securityholders are encouraged to vote in person or by proxy at the Meeting. US Cobalt intends to mail the notice of meeting and the information circular in respect of the Transaction to US Cobalt securityholders of record by April 20, 2018. The information circular will also be available on US Cobalts profile on SEDAR (www.sedar.com) and US Cobalts website (www.uscobaltinc.com).

About First Cobalt

First Cobalt aims to create the largest pure-play cobalt exploration and development company in the world. The Company controls over 10,000 hectares of prospective land covering over 50 historic mines as well as mineral processing facilities in the Cobalt Camp in Ontario, Canada. The First Cobalt Refinery is the only permitted facility in North America capable of producing cobalt battery materials. First Cobalt seeks to build shareholder value through new discovery, mineral processing and growth opportunities, with a focus on North America.

About US Cobalt

US Cobalt is focused on the acquisition and development of high grade battery metal deposits in North America. The Iron Creek Cobalt Project, located in the prolific Idaho Cobalt Belt, is the focus of a 40-hole, 35,000 foot (10,700 metre) drill campaign to confirm a 1.3M ton grading 0.59% cobalt historical estimate (non-compliant with NI 43-101) and a NI 43-101-compliant Resource Estimate is expected on the Project in 2018.

As an exploration company with cobalt and lithium assets in both Idaho and Utah, US Cobalt is well positioned in the pipeline for potential future production of battery grade metals which are critical components to power storage solutions including lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and consumer electronics.

On behalf of First Cobalt Corp.

Trent Mell

President & Chief Executive Officer

On behalf of US Cobalt Inc.

Wayne Tisdale

President

For more information visit or contact:

Heather Smiles

Investor Relations

info@firstcobalt.com

+1.416.900.3891

www.firstcobalt.com

Wayne Tisdale

President

info@uscobaltinc.com

+1.604.639.4457

www.uscobaltinc.com

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.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release may contain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (together, forward-looking statements) within the meaning of applicable securities laws and the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, are forward-looking statements. Generally, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of terminology such as plans, expects', estimates, intends, anticipates, believes or variations of such words, or statements that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results, performance and opportunities to differ materially from those implied by such forward-looking statements. In particular, forward-looking information included in this news release includes, without limitation, the anticipated closing date of the Transaction, the receipt of final court approval and other regulatory approvals. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements are set forth in the management discussion and analysis and other disclosures of risk factors for each of First Cobalt and US Cobalt, filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Although First Cobalt and US Cobalt believe that the information and assumptions used in preparing the forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on these statements, which only apply as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed times frames or at all. Except where required by applicable law, First Cobalt and US Cobalt disclaim any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Historic Estimates

US Cobalt considers the cobalt and copper tonnage and grade estimates above as historical estimates. The historical estimates do not use categories that conform to current CIM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves as outlined in National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101) and have not been redefined to conform to current CIM Definition Standards. They were prepared in the 1980s prior to the adoption and implementation of NI 43-101. A qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the historical estimates as current mineral resources and US Cobalt is not treating the historical estimates as current mineral resources. More work, including, but not limited to, drilling, will be required to conform the estimates to current CIM Definition Standards. Investors are cautioned that the historical estimates do not mean or imply that economic deposits exist on the Iron Creek property. US Cobalt has not undertaken any independent investigation of the historical estimates nor has it independently analyzed the results of the previous exploration work in order to verify the accuracy of the information. US Cobalt believes that the historical estimates are relevant to continuing exploration on the Iron Creek property.BELLEVUE, Wash., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --



Members of the Investment Community,



Esterline Technologies (NYSE:ESL) plans to announce financial results for its 2nd fiscal quarter 2018 on Thursday, May 3, 2018. Esterline will host a conference call featuring remarks by Curtis Reusser, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Stephen Nolan, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following these remarks, there will be a question and answer session. The call is scheduled to start at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time (2:00 p.m. Pacific Time) and will last approximately one hour. A news release announcing the earnings results will be issued at market close on the day of the call.

To ensure that you are on the call when it begins, we suggest that you access the call approximately 5 to 10 minutes prior to the scheduled start time.

Date: Thursday, May 3, 2018 Start Time: 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time (2:00 p.m. Pacific Time) U.S. Dial-In Number: 1-877-307-0078 Outside U.S. Dial-In Number: 1-531-289-2890 Passcode: 2684866 Conference Call Host: John Hobbs

The conference call will be replayed for one week, starting approximately one hour after the call ends. For callers within the United States, the replay number is 1-855-859-2056. For callers outside the United States, the replay number is 1-404-537-3406. The passcode for both of these numbers is 2684866.



A live webcast and replay of the conference call also will be available on the company website at www.esterline.com. If you have any questions, please call Investor Relations at Esterline Technologies at 425-519-1873.

About Esterline:

Esterline Corporation is a leading worldwide supplier to the aerospace and defense industry specializing in three core areas: Avionics & Controls, Sensors & Systems, and Advanced Materials. Operations within the Avionics & Controls segment focus on high-technology electronics products for military and commercial aircraft and land- and sea-based military vehicles, secure communications equipment, systems and components, specialized medical equipment, and other industrial applications. The Sensors & Systems segment includes operations that produce high-precision temperature and pressure sensors, electrical power distribution equipment, harsh-environment connectors and other related systems principally for aerospace and defense customers. Operations within the Advanced Materials segment focus on technologies including high-temperature resistant materials and components used for a wide range of military and commercial aerospace purposes and combustible ordnance and electronic warfare countermeasure products.Denver, CO, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- At its retirement ceremony for outgoing Colorado Community College System (CCCS) president Dr. Nancy J. McCallin, the Foundation for Colorado Community Colleges announced the creation of a new $170,000 endowment to honor, recognize and celebrate Dr. McCallins fourteen years of service to the Colorado Community College System. The Nancy J. McCallin Endowed Scholarship will provide scholarship funding for CCCS students.

The event was attended by donors, friends, and community leaders, as well as System college presidents, executive staff, members of the State Board for Community College and Occupational Education, members of the board of the Foundation for Colorado Community Colleges, and the CCCS CEO Advisory Cabinet.

Dr. McCallin was lauded for her investment in fundraising and her commitment to access to education. Under Dr. McCallins leadership the System launched its most ambitious fundraising effort, The Campaign for Colorado Community Colleges. Originally envisioned as a $10 million campaign, it ultimately generated $26.5 million for student scholarships at the 13 CCCS colleges. Thanks to this campaign, thousands of students received scholarships enabling them to access a college education that might otherwise have been out of reach.

Dr. McCallins extraordinary leadership over the past 14 years has had a transformative effect on Colorados Community College System, said Michael Beasley, the longest tenured member of the Foundation for Colorado Community Colleges board. Her achievements form a lasting legacy that will benefit community college students for years to come, and this endowment further expands those benefits.

Dr. McCallin was also recognized for her numerous contributions to higher education in Colorado, which include the creation and strengthening of statewide transfer agreements; the expansion of concurrent enrollment in college courses for high school students, which is estimated to have saved Colorado families more than $100 million in tuition costs since 2009; and the passage of Amendment 50, which created a dedicated ongoing revenue stream for classroom instructional costs, lowering the tuition burden for students.

It has been an honor to work with Dr. McCallin, said Dr. Russell J. Meyer, Chair of the State Board for Community College and Occupational Education. As an economist, she has an intuitive understanding of the importance of strategic investments in community colleges, and that private support is critical to the Systems continued success.

Dr. McCallin will step down at the end of July. Before taking the helm at CCCS in October 2004, she served for nearly six years as the executive director of the Governors Office of State Planning and Budgeting, a cabinet level position. Prior to that, Dr. McCallin was chief economist for the Legislative Council of the Colorado General Assembly. From 1981 to 1989, she was an economist with United Banks of Colorado, Inc. (now Wells Fargo).

Dr. McCallin earned a Bachelor of Arts from Claremont McKenna College, and a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from the University of Colorado-Boulder.







###

About the Foundation for Colorado Community Colleges

The Foundation for Colorado Community Colleges seeks to advance the mission, vision, goals, and objectives of the Colorado Community College System. Specifically, the Foundation actively seeks contributions from public and private sources to make scholarships available statewide, advance key programmatic initiatives, provide training and support for CCCS college foundations, and develop partnerships with community stakeholders to implement state of the art programs that meet the workforce needs of the 21st century.

About the Colorado Community College System

The Colorado Community College System (CCCS) is the states largest system of higher education, serving 137,000 students annually at 13 colleges and 39 locations across Colorado. Our open access mission ensures all Coloradans who aspire to enrich their lives have access to quality higher education opportunities. The System Office provides leadership, advocacy and support to the colleges under the direction of the State Board for Community Colleges and Occupational Education (SBCCOE).

AttachmentsEnglish French

ROUYN-NORANDA, Quebec, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Explor Resources Inc. (Explor or the Corporation) (TSX-V:EXS) (OTCQB:EXSFF) (FSE:E1H1) (BE:E1H1) announce that there was a mistake pertaining to the number of shares to be issued by the Corporation in the Press Release dated April 11, 2018 announcing the acquisition of additional claims of the East Bay Property. This acquisition consists of 9 mineral claims located in the Hebecourt Township and in the Lac Duparquet and Rapide-Danseur Municipalities, in the Rouyn-Noranda Mining Division, Province of Quebec for a total of 383.30 hectares. These claims are contiguous to the East Bay Property. Explor will issue pay $5,000 cash and issue 400,000 shares to acquire a 100% interest in the additional East Bay claims.



This program is in line with the Corporations strategy of conducting exploration along the Porcupine Destor Fault Zone (PDFZ), where several notable gold deposits have been found in the past, including the Timmins mining camp which produced more than 80 million oz of gold. The Corporation now owns 11,389.20 ha of land along this section of the PDFZ. Explors East Bay property is contiguous and wraps around the western portion of the former Clifton Stars Duparquet property as shown on the attached plan. The East Bay property is approximately 0.5 km west of the former Consolidated Beattie and Donchester Gold Mines.The former Consolidated Beattie and Donchester Gold Mines, produced over 1.0 million oz of gold between 1933 and 1956. The former Clifton Star in a previous press release announced (Press Release dated April 09, 2014) significant proven and probable reserves of 1,895,530 oz at 1.50 g/t Au and a measured and indicated resource of 1,127,972 oz at 1.48 g/t Au on their property.

The East Bay Gold Property is located to the west of the Consolidated Beattie and Donchester Gold Property and contiguous to the ground on which the former Clifton Star Resources Inc. intersected wide width of gold mineralization (Press Releases dated June 19 and June 6, 2013).

Chris Dupont, P.Eng is the qualified person responsible for the information contained in this release.

Explor Resources Inc. is a publicly listed company trading on the TSX Venture (EXS), on the OTCQB (EXSFF) and on the Frankfurt and Berlin Stock Exchanges (E1H1).

This Press Release was prepared by Explor. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the Policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) has reviewed or accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

About Explor Resources Inc.

Explor Resources Inc. is a Canadian-based natural resources company with mineral holdings in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. Explor is currently focused on exploration in the Abitibi Greenstone Belt. The belt is found in both provinces of Ontario and Quebec with approximately 33% in Ontario and 67% in Quebec. The Belt has produced in excess of 180,000,000 ounces of gold and 450,000,000 tonnes of Cu-Zn ore over the last 100 years. The Corporation was continued under the laws of Alberta in 1986 and has had its main office in Quebec since 2006.

Explor Resources Flagship project is the Timmins Porcupine West (TPW) Project located in the Porcupine mining camp, in the Province of Ontario. The TPW mineral resource (Press Release dated August 27, 2013) includes the following:

Open Pit Mineral Resources at a 0.30 g/t Au cut-off grade are as follows: Indicated: 213,000 oz (4,283,000 tonnes at 1.55 g/t Au) Inferred: 77,000 oz (1,140,000 tonnes at 2.09 g/t Au) Underground Mineral Resources at a 1.70 g/t Au cut-off grade are as follows: Indicated: 396,000 oz (4,420,000 tonnes at 2.79 g/t Au) Inferred: 393,000 oz (5,185,000 tonnes at 2.36 g/t Au)

This document may contain forward-looking statements relating to Explors operations or to the environment in which it operates. Such statements are based on operations, estimates, forecasts and projections. They are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and may be beyond Explors control. A number of important factors could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements, including those set forth in other public filling. In addition, such statements relate to the date on which they are made. Consequently, undue reliance should not be placed on such forward-looking statements. Explor disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, save and except as may be required by applicable securities laws.FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich., April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ramco-Gershenson Properties Trust (NYSE:RPT) (Ramco, the Company) today announced that its Board of Trustees (the Board) has selected Brian Harper as the Companys next President and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Harper will succeed Dennis Gershenson, the current Chief Executive Officer of the Company, no later than June 15, 2018, and will also join the Companys Board of Trustees on that date.



Mr. Harper most recently served as Chief Executive Officer of Rouse Properties (Rouse). Mr. Harper also served as the Chief Operating Officer of Rouse from April 2015 to September 2016 and as Executive Vice President of Leasing and Acquisitions of Rouse from January 2012 to April 2015. Mr. Harper previously was the Senior Vice President of Leasing for General Growth Properties. Mr. Harper has over 18 years of experience in the retail real estate industry, and brings significant expertise in real estate operations, redevelopment and site densification as well as strong relationships with leading retailers. He has won several awards, including Chain Store Ages 10 Under 40 in Real Estate. Mr. Harper holds a Bachelors degree from the University of Kansas.

After a comprehensive search process, the Board is pleased to have found the best individual from a field of highly-qualified candidates to assume leadership of the Company, said Stephen R. Blank, current Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Company. Brians track record of strong leadership and value creation, combined with his deep industry knowledge, qualifies him to successfully lead Ramco in todays evolving retail landscape and into the future.

Mr. Gershenson, who will become Chairman of the Board, expressed confidence in the Boards decision. I appreciate the diligence and thoroughness with which the Board has approached the transition of the Companys leadership, said Mr. Gershenson. I am delighted that the Board has found an individual of Brians caliber to lead the Company going forward.

About Ramco-Gershenson Properties Trust

Ramco-Gershenson Properties Trust (NYSE:RPT) is a premier, national publicly-traded shopping center real estate investment trust (REIT) based in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The Company's primary business is the ownership and management of dynamic town centers, urban-infill properties and neighborhood shopping centers in key growth markets in the 40 largest metropolitan markets in the United States. At December 31, 2017, the Company owned interests in and managed a portfolio of 56 shopping centers and three joint venture properties. At December 31, 2017, the Company's consolidated portfolio was 93.3% leased. Ramco-Gershenson is a fully-integrated qualified REIT that is self-administered and self-managed. For additional information about the Company please visit www.rgpt.com.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/2c7bf611-a4f2-45f3-b0f0-f1dfa0d5f116By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 12, 2018 | 12:39 PM | WESTERN KENTUCKY





The U.S. House of Representatives is considering a balanced budget amendment today. Congressman James Comer of western Kentucky says he campaigned on the principle, and it's a much needed change in how government operates."I've been in Washington now for 16 months and I can say with 100 percent certainty, if you don't require the United States Congress to balance the budget, they're gonna continue to operate in a deficit. There's no fiscal responsibility up here by either party, quite frankly," Comer said.Comer believes the bill will get most of the votes, but a party-line vote won't be enough for the required two-thirds majority.He said, "If all the Republicans vote for it and all the Democrats vote against it, it's still going to come up short, so we're gonna see how many Democrats are serious about balancing the budget."If the House and Senate pass an amendment, the legislatures of three-fourths of the United States would have to ratify the amendment before it becomes part of the constitution. Comer said he thinks support is growing on the state level."I think Americans are starting to get pretty frustrated with Congress over the last decade. Both parties have had an opportunity to be in power and both parties continue to run the federal budget debt to the moon. We're looking at $20-21 trillion in federal debt, so I think this is something that has to happen and I think the support across America would be there for it, Comer said.When asked if this is one of those opportunities for a legislator to symbolically vote for unlikely change so they can remind their constituents about it during campaign season, Comer said that's likely.Comer said, "I'm thinking a lot of votes up here would meet that criteria. A lot of people that are proposing this amendment are the same ones that voted to pass the omnibus bill a few weeks ago that potentially ran up the deficit over a trillion dollars over a decade. I voted against that. I'm not voting for deficit spending. People in the 1st District told me when I was campaigning for Congress that they wanted me to cut the waste, fraud and abuse out and try to have some fiscal discipline. If this balanced budget amendment does not become law, I don't see a scenario where Congress is going to balance the budget anytime soon."Congress trying to stave off partial government shutdownPolice Seek Publics Help Locating Missing Man

Advertisement

By West Kentucky Star Staff

Apr. 11, 2018 | CALDWELL COUNTY, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 11, 2018 | 09:21 PM | CALDWELL COUNTY, KY

Police are asking for the public's help locating a missing Fredonia man.



The family of 79-year-old Paul Cockerham contacted Kentucky State Police on Wednesday after he went missing. He was last seen driving to a nursing home in Kuttawa.



Cockerham is a bald white man with brown eyes. He was last seen driving a 2012 Chevy Impala with a Dachshund license plate on the front of the vehicle and a Dachshund sticker in the back window. His license plate is a Vietnam Veteran license plate 232-8EE.



Police say Cockerham has dementia and is not supposed to be driving after dark. According to police, his family spoke with him earlier in the day on Wednesday but he was confused about where he was.



Troopers are working to track Cockerham's phone. He was last known to be in Calvert City and also visited Paducah. Anyone with information on Cockerham's whereabouts is asked to contact Kentucky State Police at 1-800-222-5555.By Kentucky News Network Apr. 11, 2018 | 08:13 PM | LOUISVILLE, KY

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit challenging a new law banning a certain type of abortion in Kentucky.

The law prohibits "dilation and evacuation," a common procedure that is performed after 11 weeks of pregnancy.

The ACLU says the law is forcing patients to travel hundreds of miles out of state if they need the procedure, and for some women that is an insurmountable obstacle. The lawsuit argues the law imposes serious harm on women's health and dignity.



A spokeswoman for Governor Bevin says the lawsuit is disturbing, but not surprising. Communications Director Elizabeth Kuhn says lawmakers "overwhelmingly voted to safeguard unborn children against the gruesome practice of live dismemberment abortion."By The Associated Press

By The Associated Press Apr. 12, 2018 | 10:04 AM | FRANKFORT, KY

An auditor in the Kentucky Attorney General's office is accused of smoking marijuana in a McDonald's drive-thru lane.

The State Journal reports that 51-year-old Elizabeth Anna Justus was arrested Tuesday and charged with two misdemeanors, following a traffic stop for allegedly failing to use a turn signal.

Frankfort police Lt. Dustin Bowman says the arresting officer detected an odor of marijuana and conducted field sobriety tests, followed by a search of her vehicle that turned up the remains of a marijuana joint.

Bowman says Justus is an investigator and auditor in the Attorney General's Office.Across the country, April is recognized as Child Abuse Prevention Month. State and local agencies and concerned citizens all work toward the common purpose of preventing child abuse and deliver a powerful, collective message about the importance of protecting children, supporting families and strengthening communities.

You will notice all around the State of West Virginia and right here in Wetzel and Tyler Counties, blue and silver pinwheels.

In 2008, Prevent Child Abuse America introduced the pinwheel as the new national symbol for child abuse prevention through Pinwheels for Prevention. What their research showed is that people respond to the pinwheel. By its very nature, the pinwheel signifies whimsy and childlike notions. In essence, it has come to serve as the physical reminder of the great childhoods we want for all children. WV Partners in Prevention/Wetzel County Center for Children and Families, The Lighthouse Child Advocacy Center, and Wetzel County Family Resource Network has placed several pinwheels at various schools, businesses, and agencies to promote awareness for prevention of child abuse. When you see them, smile and know that we all can work together to insure the children of West Virginia are safe.

WV Partners in Prevention is a unique model of communities working together to strengthen families and help West Virginias children grow up free from abuse and neglect. This model is based on the belief that child well-being hinges on the capacity of local communities to support families and protect children. This approach is built on a framework of collaboration between and among community groups, state and local organizations and local teams.

The Lighthouse Child Advocacy Centers mission is to meet the needs of children and families in our community by providing a community-based, child-focused Center that facilitates a compassionate, multi-disciplinary approach to the prevention, identification, investigation, prosecution, and treatment of child abuse.

The Wetzel County Family Resource Network is a local coalition of people working together to better meet the needs and improve services for children and families in its community.

We all have a role to play in ensuring every child in our community has an equal opportunity for healthy growth and development. You can be a part of the solution by learning about the needs of children and families in our community, speaking out on behalf of childrens issues, advocating for proven prevention, donating to charities that work to prevent child abuse and neglect, and supporting family or friends who are under stress. To learn about healthy child development and more ways you can help prevent child abuse and neglect in our community, visit http://www.preventchildabusewv.org>www.preventchildabusewv.org or www.thelighthousecac.org.

Together we can build a bright and prosperous future for our community  one child at a time.Saint Petersburg, FL, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Nuvus Gro Corp. (OTC PINK: NUVG), a provider of advanced Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) with sophisticated automation and analytical tools for the cultivators of legal industrial hemp and marijuana, announces today that FINRA has processed its corporate action to change its name from HempTech Corp to Nuvus Gro Corp, as of April 12, 2018. The company will be trading under the new ticker (NUVG).



Nuvus Gro is committed to bring cutting edge technology to cannabis growers everywhere. Through the perfect blend of technology and human experience, Nuvus Gro brings you the best in automation systems.

For more information on products offered by Nuvus Gro, please contact; info@nuvuscorp.com.

About Nuvus Gro

Nuvus Gro, a Nevada Corporation and Subsidiary of Nuvus Corp., provides Advanced Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), Precise Cognitive Automation, Sophisticated Analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Grow Systems, Modular Grow facilities, Power & Energy Services, Consulting Services and Financing for the cultivators and Medium to Large Scale Growing Facilities. Nuvus Gro is a subsidiary of Nuvus Corp.

To request further information about Nuvus, please email us at info@nuvuscorp.com, log onto our website at http://www.nuvusgro.com, http://www.nuvuscorp.com or visit us at our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/nuvuscorp or on Twitter @nuvuscorp.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain forward-looking statements covered within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements relate to, among other things, plans and timing for the introduction or enhancement of our services and products, statements about future market conditions, supply and demand conditions, and other expectations, intentions and plans contained in this press release that are not historical fact and involve risks and uncertainties. Our expectations regarding future revenues depend upon our ability to develop and supply products and services that we may not produce today and that meet defined specifications. When used in this press release, the words "plan," "expect," "believe," and similar expressions generally identify forward-looking statements. These statements reflect our current expectations. They are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, changes in technology and changes in pervasive markets. This release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 27E of the Securities Act of 1934. Statements contained in this release that are not historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain. Actual performance and results may differ materially from that projected or suggested herein due to certain risks and uncertainties including, without limitation, ability to obtain financing and regulatory and shareholder approval for anticipated actions.



STEINHAUSEN, Switzerland, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Transocean Ltd. (NYSE:RIG) announced today that it will report earnings for the first quarter of 2018, on Monday, April 30, 2018, following the close of trading on the NYSE.



The company will conduct a teleconference starting at 9 a.m. EDT, 3 p.m. CEST, on Tuesday, May 1, 2018, to discuss the results. Individuals who wish to participate should dial +1 323-794-2149 and refer to conference code 6863918 approximately 10 minutes prior to the scheduled start time.

The teleconference will also be simulcast in a listen-only mode at: www.deepwater.com, by selecting Investors, News, and Webcasts.

A replay of the conference call will be available after 12 p.m. EDT, 6 p.m. CEST, on May 1, 2018. The replay, which will be archived for approximately 30 days, can be accessed at +1 719-457-0820, passcode 6863918 and PIN 8405. The replay also will be available on the company's website.

About Transocean

Transocean is a leading international provider of offshore contract drilling services for oil and gas wells. The company specializes in technically demanding sectors of the global offshore drilling business with a particular focus on ultra-deepwater and harsh environment drilling services, and believes that it operates one of the most versatile offshore drilling fleets in the world.

Transocean owns or has partial ownership interests in, and operates a fleet of 47 mobile offshore drilling units consisting of 27 ultra-deepwater floaters, 12 harsh environment floaters, two deepwater floaters and six midwater floaters. In addition, Transocean has two ultra-deepwater drillships under construction or under contract to be constructed. The company also operates one high-specification jackup that was under a drilling contract when the rig was sold, and the company will continue to operate the jackup until completion or novation of the drilling contract.

For more information about Transocean, please visit: www.deepwater.com.

Analyst Contacts:

Bradley Alexander

+1 713-232-7515

Diane Vento

+1 713-232-8015

Media Contact:

Pam Easton

+1 713-232-7647



VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, the Pan-Canadian Electric Bus Demonstration and Integration Trial: Phase I is being launched at TransLink in Vancouver as part of a national coordinated effort to advance zero emissions transit technology, spear-headed by the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC).



With visionary investments by federal, provincial, and municipal governments, we are launching the Pan-Canadian Electric Bus Demonstration & Integration Trial: Phase I  which has a national project value of $40 Million and encompasses 18 standardized and interoperable electric buses, seven standardized and interoperable overhead chargers, and on five routes in three cities, says CUTRIC Executive Director & CEO Josipa Petrunic. Todays announcement is building the future of low-carbon smart mobility in this country.

CUTRIC has brought together manufacturers, transit agencies, utilities, funding partners, research teams, and technology development capacities to ensure a world-leading demonstration trial that is launching first in TransLinks system in Vancouver, B.C.

TransLink is joined by Brampton Transit and the Regional Municipality of York, with Brampton Transit having spearheaded the trial planning process back in 2016.

This funding investment will support the first global trial to integrate competitive bus manufacturers with competitive charging station manufacturers  all of whom are designing and delivering interoperable high-powered charging systems for on-route charged electric buses  across multiple municipalities and utility jurisdictions, says Petrunic. This type of collaboration, standardization and integration is proving to the country and the world that transit agencies can be at the forefront of technology development and job creation. And its happening in Canada first.

TransLink is working with two Canadian transit vehicle manufacturers (New Flyer Industries of Winnipeg, Manitoba and Nova Bus, of St. Eustache, Quebec) and two charging station manufacturers (ABB Group and Siemens Canada) to deploy four electric buses and two overhead electric charging stations that plug into an open protocol known as the OppCharge protocol (https://www.oppcharge.org/)  first jointly developed by Siemens and Volvo Bus Corporation. The protocol standardizes the design of the off-board pantograph that connects the high-powered charging station to the bus, communications between the bus and the charger, and performance metrics of the overall system.

To get this project going we had to sell a vision to a lot of sceptics. The vision is one in which publicly shared mobility services, like transit, can be faster, cheaper and greener than automobiles in all jurisdictions of the country in the future, continues Petrunic. TransLink, Brampton and York Region bought into that vision with us, and todays announcement is the first step in a multi-year effort to make it reality.

The project will continue to attract electric vehicle manufacturing in Canada among heavy-duty platform designers and manufacturers  helping to grow jobs in the low-carbon economy nationally.

This is good news for Canadian job growth in the manufacturing and tech sectors which must demonstrate that their e-buses and e-chargers work seamlessly with one another wherever they are used, states Petrunic. Growth in skilled trades will be aligned to electric bus manufacturing by Nova Bus and New Flyer, charging system innovation by ABB Group and Siemens, and electric mobility maintenance support in Canada.

The trial will also integrate neutral third-party vehicle and systems analyses by the National Research Council of Canada.

Our job is to change the world and to do it by radically transforming the transportation and mobility landscape in this country, Petrunic says. CUTRIC is proud to have spearheaded this Canadian first launching in Vancouver first. We are showing the world Canada is a leader in driving down emissions, improving transportation, and creating greener, cleaner and more liveable communities.

CUTRIC is a member-based innovation consortium that partners stakeholders in industry, transit and academia to develop the next-generation of low-carbon smart mobility technologies. Its mandate is to drive forward innovation in transportation across Canada, create jobs by doing so, and lead to significant GHG reductions.

For further information, please see the background document.

www.cutric-crituc.org

Twitter: @cutric_critucDAVENPORT, Iowa, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- At the most recent European Wrist Arthroscopy Society (EWAS) meeting held in Strasbourg, France on March 22  25, 2018, Dr. Tyson Cobb, a faculty member, participated as both a lecturer and a lab instructor. It was great, says Dr. Cobb, Although Im there to teach, I always learn so much from the participants and other instructors. There were surgeons from 26 different countries represented at this one meeting. The exchanges in expertise and experiences are so rich. I gain a global perspective in best practices for patient care.



A Quad Cities hand surgeon, Dr. Cobb has over 20 years of experience performing minimally invasive procedures in the hand, wrist, elbow, and shoulder. Wrist arthroscopy is a very specialized surgical technique that is performed using a small video camera to visualize the treatment area. Rather than opening the surgical site through a large incision, the scope and surgical instruments are inserted through small incisions, which allows for access to only the area needing treatment. With wrist arthroscopy, we can treat chronic wrist pain, arthritis, wrist fractures, ganglion cysts, and ligament tears through small portals, which allows for less postoperative pain, less scarring, and faster recovery. Its a win-win for the patient and the surgeon, says Dr. Tyson Cobb.

The EWAS is currently the leading organization to advance surgical techniques in minimally invasive wrist surgery. Dr. Cobbs research and specialized minimally invasive techniques for hand, wrist, and upper extremity surgery have given him international credibility as a foremost authority.

About Tyson Cobb, MD

Dr. Tyson Cobb is a board certified orthopaedic surgeon who specializes in hand and upper extremity surgery. He has designed and developed several patented medical devices to improve minimally invasive techniques. He is a member of several distinguished medical organizations, including the American Association for Hand Surgery, the American Society for Reconstructive Microsurgery, the American Society for Surgery of the Hand, and the European Wrist Arthroscopy Society. Dr. Cobb is available for interview upon request.

For more information, please call (563) 344-929 or visit the Orthopaedic Specialists, website for more information at osquadcities.com.

To view the original source of this press release, click here:

https://www.osquadcities.com/practice-news/quad-cities-hand-surgeon-teaches-minimally-invasive-wrist-surgery-to-surgeons-from-around-the-world/

Contact:

Orthopaedic Specialists, PC

Davenport Office:

3385 Dexter Ct.

Davenport, IA 52807

(563) 344-9292

Clinton Office:

2635 US 30

Clinton, IA 52732

(563) 243-4170

Rosemont Media

(858) 200-0044

www.rosemontmedia.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/c8a002ad-0309-4b6e-863b-7eb5cc8f26a7Santa Clara, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SANTA CLARA, CA (April 12, 2018)  Today, the Santa Clara County District Attorneys Office issued a statement (http://bit.ly/da-foster-charges) about new firearms-related charges against San Francisco 49ers star linebacker Reuben Foster. But California-based civil rights organization The Calguns Foundation (CGF) called the news release troubling and misleading.



The April 12 release stated that, during a search of Fosters home, police officers found a Sig Sauer 516  along with its large capacity magazine  both of which are illegal to possess in California. But those items are not necessarily illegal to possess in California.



The District Attorneys Office is clearly misrepresenting California law in their statement, said CGF Executive Director Brandon Combs. Worse, their assertions suggest that they may be prosecuting people for firearms-related conduct that simply isnt criminal.



There are likely tens of thousands of perfectly-legal Sig Sauer rifles, and many millions of similar AR-15 type firearms, in California today, Combs continued. As the DA should know, the statutory deadline for registering the new Bullet Button Assault Weapons category of firearms is not until June 30. And, at least while a federal injunction is in place, the mere possession of a lawfully-acquired large-capacity magazine that holds more than ten rounds is just not a chargeable crime.



The Santa Clara District Attorneys Office should be above lying to make its case, but apparently they are more concerned about pushing their anti-gun agenda than telling the whole story. The public deserves better than political spin  especially from its prosecutors. If the Santa Clara DAs Office, or any prosecutor, is improperly charging and prosecuting people for firearms issues, we definitely want to know about that, Combs concluded.



If you or your client believe that they may be wrongly accused of a California firearms law violation, please contact The Calguns Foundations Help Hotline at 800-556-2109 or by email at hotline@calgunsfoundation.org.



The Calguns Foundation (www.calgunsfoundation.org) is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that serves its members, supporters, and the public through educational, cultural, and judicial efforts to advance Second Amendment and related civil rights.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Squire Mining Ltd. (CSE:SQR) (Squire) is pleased to announce the appointment of David Rokoss to the Board of Directors. Mr. Rokoss has a twenty year career as an entrepreneur and consultant, working with a variety of private and publicly listed companies, focusing on concept development, finance and operational management. For the last decade, he has consulted with numerous early stage companies across the mining, clean tech, retail and technology sectors, focusing on business and corporate development opportunities.



During this period, he worked with the banking team at Kyoto Planet Capital Partners, a private fund established to find, fund and foster early stage companies across the sustainability space, which included investments in wind, waste, bio-fuels and energy technologies. He has considerable experience in due diligence, local and cross-border mergers, corporate acquisitions and compliance issues, having worked with companies in multiple jurisdictions including those publicly trading in Canada, the United States and Germany. Mr. Rokoss is currently a Director of Blackheath Resources, a TSX Venture listed mining company and a partner at Ptolemy Capital. He is a graduate of McMaster University.

Squire is also pleased to announce the appointment of Rich Wheeless as Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Wheeless has over 15 years of financial leadership and corporate management experience working across various industry sectors and in both public and private enterprise. He holds a Master of Business Administration with honors from Otterbein University and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Miami University.

Mr. Wheeless has been an active investor, advisor, and/or board member for numerous privately-held companies. Most recently, he was the Chief Financial Officer for the security software company Rivetz, Inc., which recently completed a $19 million ICO. Previous to that, he was CFO of LaunchKey, Inc. and CFO of Pilus Energy, a renewable energy company that was acquired by publicly traded company Tauriga Sciences.

Previously, he was Director of Finance and Assistant Treasurer of Xtek, Inc. (one of the United States fastest growing privately owned manufacturers of customer engineered steel replacement parts). He has also held managerial posts at Johnson and Johnson, as well as Cardinal Health, both Fortune 30 companies. Mr. Wheeless originally started his career in the private equity division at Citigroup, another Fortune 30 company. He has extensive experience in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, credit, treasury, corporate finance, financial reporting, and operations.

For further information contact:

Simon Moore, President and CEO

Telephone: (604) 929 0900

The Canadian Securities Exchange accepts no responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: This news release includes certain forward-looking information under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to, the Companys proposed plan for exploration properties. Forward-looking information is 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 information. Such factors include, but are not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties, uncertain and volatile equity and capital markets, lack of available capital, risks related to mineral exploration and the actual results of the Companys exploration programs. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.As protests continue to erupt in the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, and across the world in outrage against the horrific shooting of Jacob Bla Read moreHow the law can help change racist minds in South Africa

Much recent news and public discourse might seem to indicate that South Africas non-racial rainbow is fading.

Racism, its expression and its consequences, seem to be all around.

First prize goes to former real estate agent Vicki Momberg. She was recently sentenced to a three year jail term (one year suspended) for the vicious racial abuse of black traffic officers and police emergency call centre operators attempting to help her after a smash and grab incident.

Then there is the land reform debate. Its enormous complexity is swept aside by both black populist politicians demanding the return of land stolen by whites and the white right claiming that white farmers are under siege and fear for their lives.

In reply to Business Day columnist Peter Bruces stating that the extent of farm murders has been grossly exaggerated, a white correspondent to the newspaper cited approvingly the man generally accepted as the architect of the brutal policy of apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd:

Verwoerd felt that the only way whites in SA would survive would be if some system could be devised to that they could maintain control of their destiny within a Western framework. Otherwise, they would simply be overwhelmed Now we are experiencing what Verwoerd predicted. Whites are being bullied incessantly and deprived of their assets by black politicians.

How on earth should South Africans deal with all this? There is, frankly, no easy answer to this question. But here are a few considerations.

Complex problem

Journalist Joshua Carstens, writing in City Press, suggested that Mombergs crude racism was simply the tip of an iceberg. He had no quarrel with her sentence, but wondered whether it would work. He argued that while it might be possible to regulate peoples behaviour,

you cant legalise peoples minds and hearts.

Unexpressed racism may be even more dangerous if it is left lurking below the surface. He went on to encourage like-minded whites to take a stronger stand against racism in their private lives.

Nothing wrong with that at all. Indeed, its sentiment is highly commendable. But, would it really be better if racists displayed their honesty by roundly abusing black people? Or is it better if they curb their lips for fear of joining Momberg in jail?

Legislation changing minds

Its wrong, I think, to suggest that legislation cannot change minds. True, it might often take the long haul. But laws do more than reflect social norms: they mould them.

The law is meant to entrench what society thinks is right. If it prescribes that racism, sexism or homophobia are wrong, there is probably a better chance that people will come to accept it in genuine democracies (especially over the generations). But the law can also be used to effect structural change.

Take for instance black economic empowerment and equity employment legislation. Their pros and cons are much debated, yet it seems difficult to deny that without them, South Africa would have a much stronger white minority profile today than it would without them.

For all their faults, such laws and associated state pressures for demographic representivity would seem to have been a necessary element in decolonising society. This is not to deny that they come with numerous difficulties.

This is shown by the case of Mark Lamberti, chief executive officer of Imperial Holdings. He called Adila Chowan, a Muslim Indian woman who had become group financial manager at the companys subsidiary, a female employment equity candidate in the presence of other senior managers. Lamberti was convicted in the High Court of impairing her dignity and ordered to pay her costs and yet to be decided damages.

Lamberti has responded by insisting that he is not a racist. Whether or not his actions were racist were not dealt with by the court; the judgment was that he had offended the complainants dignity. Whether or not ones view is that he was racist and/or sexist, it is beyond doubt that his behaviour was thoroughly crass.

Nonetheless, it points to a dilemma.

Constructive ambiguity

Equity employment is designed to promote fairness in the workplace and black upward mobility in the face of white structural privilege. But the irony is, as Chowan has so bravely highlighted, black and female candidates resent being labelled as equity employment candidates.

They point out, correctly, that it is demeaning to any black or woman appointee to say that they got the job because they were black or female. They want to be recognised as having been appointed on merit. Yet the problem is that without such goads as equity employment legislation, progress towards racial equality in the workplace would almost certainly be a lot slower.

South Africas main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, is wrestling with this very issue . The party has long claimed that it has become increasingly racially diverse as the governing ANC has in practice and much rhetoric withdrawn from non-racialism. Yet although the DA now has a black leader in Mmusi Maimane, there has been rising discontent among its black membership that the party is still dominated by a conservative old guard of whites.

This has led to calls for the introduction of race-based quotas, which many in the party have resisted. They complain that such group determined racial categorisation would run against the DAs liberalism, which is based on the advancement of individual rights.

Reportedly, the partys senior leadership arrived at a compromise proposal for putting to the DAs federal congress which committed it to taking,

active steps to promote and advance diversity without recourse to rigid formulae or quotas.

Complex problem

What should be drawn from all this? Probably many things. But one certainty is that more humility is necessary from all those engaged in the debate. People must accept that there are no easy answers. The project of rendering South Africa more equal is one of enormous complexity, fraught with as many philosophical problems as structural and political ones.

Alas, there will be more Mombergs, more Lambertis and more people seeking to revive Verwoerd and render his memory respectable. There will be more black populism in response.

Yes, its almost certainly going to be a rough ride, but those South Africans who dont believe or dont want to believe that a better South Africa is possible should be honest about it  and bugger off elsewhere.

Roger Southall, Professor of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.In search of the real radical

To what extent does the Ramaphosa-Zuma contest (and to the extent that it has not been won yet) embody the real radical in South African society?

A motley bunch of radical economic transformation activists, a rogues gallery of discredited and fired members of Zumas Cabinet and former senior executives, and small business actors who force access into business opportunities  this was the South African face of radicalism that appeared alongside Jacob Zuma at his Durban court appearance.

It was an ambiguous reminder of the political capital that a small and self-selected collection of actors hope to make out of radical orientations and a radical label that is omnipresent in South African society. The benefit, to them, of capturing the label lies in the still largely veiled continuous advantages they draw from their association with former president Jacob Zuma.

It was reported that there were 11 of these activist groupings and organisations, gathered under the umbrella banner of Defenders of RET (Radical Economic Transformation). They included both established organisations and new pop-ups. In their ranks were, besides core Zumaist-Gupta acolytes in Black Land First (BLF), the Ngokubona Business Forum.

This forum is known for Mafia-style business operations where they force their way into allocated business contracts, for example, in construction. By now they have an established relationship with the Zumaist eThekwini Municipality.

Also prominent was the National Funeral Practitioners Association (which opened business opportunities for new practitioners after advocating black operator exclusivity for township funerals). They were joined by the National Taxi Alliance which conducts ongoing campaigns for the benefit of the taxi industry (read Aarto, e-tolls).

This brand of radicalism was explicated further through the presence of the Commission on Religious Affairs (CRA) and National Interfaith Council of South Africa (Nicsa), both with an interest in controlling attempts at the regulation of the church industry.

The National Unemployed Peoples Trust, a BLF associate, was another of the clone organisations that names itself after a better known similar organisation and then piggy-backs on the established reputation. The trusts biggest claim to recent fame was its assertion that firing Zuma could spark civil war.

Zuma, late-awakener to RET and accused No. 1 in the case of arms deal corruption and associated multibillion-rand bills to the taxpayer (on procurement that was the antithesis of anything radical), basked in the forged ideological endorsement. He and his RET apostles claimed martyrdom in the face of persecution for radical virtues. Zumas list of RET achievements comprise, they argue, besides generally launching the RET agenda, announcing free education and announcing land expropriation without compensation in defeat of white minority capital, amending the Competition Act to hold corporates personally liable for corruption, and launching the (now aborted) Revised Mining Charter. The strengthening of BRICS, and South Africas withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC), are further evidence, for them, of radical action.

This list lubricated the notion that Zuma is the innocent, persecuted Jesus-like figure. He is crucified for threatening RET and white minority capital. Zumas RET veil is held out as evidence of his innocence. It might have worked better if the corruption petticoat had not protruded.

Up to a point, it had been a clever form of ownership of radical. The motley and largely business-oriented bunch converged largely with the losing camp in the Battle of Nasrec. Several among them, in different capacities, were associated with the Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma campaign. The battle was lost and they were freed to pitch their star to the originator of that campaign, Zuma himself. The Defenders now had their central figure, and pretended to have unveiled the plot to persecute the great anti-white minority capital warrior  pity that the argument also lacked internal consistency.

The flaw was that Zuma was the belated convert to RET; the conversion unfolded when his back was against the wall. He procrastinated when he rose into ANC and state power in 2007-09, on the ticket of being more radical in restitution and connection to the people. He did excel, as I argue in my book Dominance and Decline, at creating networks of beneficiaries, linked legitimately to Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), but also more clandestinely to vast networks of capture, big and small. His secret was that he was the kingpin. To reap their fruits the beneficiaries had to remain close to JZ.

Zuma secured his second ANC term in 2012 at Mangaung on the argument that his pending Lula Moment would open the doors of radical economic transformation. The most notable radical that emerged was Zumas extreme amassment of riches via the Gupta machinery of accumulation. When he started running out of time, Zuma tried to position NDZ as the new lead apostle. It was a less than credible project, recognised for what it was  a front to remain out of jail.

When Zuma was out of time entirely he certainly did announce free post-secondary education and his ANC faction helped bring in a somewhat radical formulation on land expropriation. It was the baton of how to execute this radical  and simultaneously how to moderate it to be investor-business-rating agency friendly  that became at one level Cyril Ramaphosas blight. This account also exposes a hovering question: to what extent does the Ramaphosa-Zuma contest (and to the extent that it has not been won yet) embody the real radical in South African society?

Perhaps the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), with its semi-anarchist appeal to poor and deprived communities, has a natural resonance with radical as it exists on the ground in South Africa. Much of the anger of continuous and still growing economic desperation finds expression, however, beyond the Durban street stages, new ANC missives and weekend land invasions.

The real radical is probably in the petrol-bomb attack on the Burgersfort mineworker bus that targeted the few who still have jobs in that community.

The real radical (ethnic tones notwithstanding) is in Vuwanis school arson where communities saw livelihoods dissipate along with municipal boundaries.

The real radical is in the destruction of community-level infrastructure and moral fibre by fire, vandalism, crime and violence.

There is nothing left to hope for, nothing to gain. The desperate ones probably care neither about a new dawn ANC, nor about who shares the stage with Jacob Zuma.

Susan Booysen, Professor in the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand. This article was originally published on the Daily Maverick.Two US Navy destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles are in position and ready to be called into action, among other assets including jets and submarines should President Donald Trump make good on his threat to order a military strike on targets in Syria.

Trump caught most of his aides and the Pentagon off-guard on Wednesday by declaring on Twitter that "nice and new and 'smart'" missiles would soon be fired toward Syria -- an announcement that came before an agreement had been reached between key US allies, multiple American and Western officials said.

Top military officials were at the White House on Wednesday afternoon to discuss options for Syria, according to senior aides, and a decision on how to respond to the weekend's chemical attack had not yet been made when Trump took to Twitter, people familiar with the discussions said.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders insisted Wednesday that a missile strike remains one of the many options on the table and said the President's tweet does not complicate the planning of a US response.

Defense Secretary James Mattis said Wednesday that the US is "still assessing the intelligence" on the recent chemical attack but noted that the US military is on standby should Trump give the order for a strike.

"We stand ready to provide military options if they are appropriate as the President determined," he said.

Mattis also ignored a question about whether he was concerned about telegraphing US military moves in Syria, a question appearing to refer to Trump's earlier tweet on Wednesday.

Did Trump tip his hand?

Trump's tweet could force military leaders to modify their analysis related to "targets, timing and teamwork," according to CNN military analyst John Kirby.

Satellites and other US intelligence aircraft are watching closely for signs that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, as well as Russian units -- are using the advance notice to move aircraft, weapons and personnel out of the way of a potential attack.

However, warning of an imminent strike could force US military officials to modify their list of potential targets -- which could range from airfields or chemical storage sites to locations in Assad's backyard of Damascus depending on the intended message.

"It is possible that strike packages and potential targets should be adjusted based on what you see on the ground," Kirby said, noting that both the Russians and Syrian regime have been given plenty of indicators as to the type of strike the US may be considering.

Targeting air defense systems or locations closer to Damascus would send a stronger message but would risk more casualties as well as increase the chances of escalating the conflict, he added.

Russia and Syria quickly responded to Trump's threat on Wednesday. Syria's Foreign Ministry said it was not surprised by the US' "reckless escalation" via Trump's tweets, the state-run news agency SANA reported, while Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a Facebook post that "smart missiles should fly toward terrorists, not the legal government that has been fighting international terrorism for several years on its territory."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that Russia hopes all parties involved in Syria will avoid any steps that could "significantly destabilize" an already "fragile situation."

Peskov added there were no plans for Putin to call Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron or UK Prime Minister Theresa May amid the crisis.

The US did provide Russia with advance warning via military channels shortly prior to the April 2017 missile strike on the Syrian air base believed responsible for a previous chemical weapons attack. That warning was made to avoid casualties among Russian military advisers in Syria. Despite the advance notice, Russia made no effort to shoot down the American missiles.

What firepower is available?

In addition to having two destroyers nearby, it is possible the US also has unacknowledged submarines positioned off the coast of Syria ready to fire satellite-guided, highly precise Tomahawk cruise missiles -- the very type of smart missiles the President tweeted about.

"Don't discount the possibility of Tomahawk-capable submarines in the region," Kirby said. "It is not unusual for them to be in the Mediterranean, and they have been used to hit targets in North Africa in the past."

The US also has stealth F-22 fighter jets stationed in Qatar which could be used to evade the Syrian regime's Russian-made air defense systems, but the use of piloted aircraft comes with a substantial risk as those systems are considered very capable, Kirby said.

"Especially given deterrent threats from Russian officials, the United States will be hesitant to risk American pilots in these strikes and will most likely opt for long-range strikes from submarines or aircraft," according to Adam Mount, Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Posture Project at the Federation of American Scientists and a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

"New, stealthy JASSM missiles could be delivered by B-1B and B-52 (and now likely F-15E and F-16)," Mount said.

"JASSMs do target recognition and terminal guidance with infrared sensors, making them both 'new' and 'smart,' he added. "The United States has developed a new generation of electronic warfare munitions and decoys designed to help US strikes reach their targets, which could also see action."

However, the US does hope French and British aircraft as well as ships will be part of the strikes as both nations continue to weigh the possibility of a joint response.

CNN has previously reported that Trump discussed possible options on Syria with both French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Theresa May.

Macron has said that any French strikes against the Syrian regime would target chemical facilities, and a British government official told CNN on Wednesday that preparations are being made by the United Kingdom for possible action but cautioned the political decision has not yet been made.

The Daily Telegraph in London reported Wednesday that May has ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Assad regime that could begin as early as Thursday night.

May will host a Cabinet meeting on Thursday "to discuss the response to Syria," a Downing Street spokesperson confirmed to CNN.

Speaking in the British city of Birmingham on Wednesday, May said "all the indications" are that the Syrian regime was responsible for a chemical weapons attack in Douma, adding that the use of such weapons "cannot go unchallenged."

May has not confirmed whether the UK government is considering military action.

France has 10 Rafale fighter jets stationed in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates which could be armed with "storm shadow" missiles that can fly for more than 155 miles, according to the French Ministry of Defense and retired general Dominique Trinquand.

This means jets could strike without having to fly over Syria and avoid Russia's anti-aircraft defenses, they told CNN.

France could also launch strikes from the frigate Aquitaine, a warship equipped with 16 cruise missiles and 16 surface-to-air missiles or send Rafale jets from its national territory and organize refueling flights to get them to the area.

This article has been updated.UTICA  The $16.6 million construction project along a nearly one-mile stretch of State Route 5S/Oriskany Street is set to begin.

The project is meant to enhance safety for pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists along the .7-mile stretch of Route 5S/Oriskany Street from Broad Street to Broadway, just before the Adirondack Bank Center, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is calling it a new gateway to the city.



Project rendering photo provided by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office Project rendering photo provided by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office

Project rendering photo provided by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office Project rendering photo provided by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the plans is a roundabout that will be implemented at the intersection of Oriskany and John streets. Construction will also include enhancing accessibility for people with disabilities, realigning the roadway, reducing the number of driving lanes and adding bicycle and pedestrian accommodations.

"Upgrading the Route 5S corridor will enhance a major entrance to Utica and its neighborhoods, while improving safety for all travelers, Cuomo said in a news release. "We will continue to invest in improvement projects like this, helping to rejuvenate communities, support local businesses and make New York an even better place to live, work and raise a family."

The project will also include landscaping and cosmetic features such as trees and shrubs  more than 9,000 plantings in total, according to Cuomo  as well as park benches, bike racks and light fixtures.

The Route 5S project will improve the efficiency and safety of one of the most heavily- traveled areas in the heart of the City of Utica, Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente said in the news release. Along with the nearly-completed North-South Arterial project, the navigation of our county seat is being completely transformed and will go a long way toward enhancing the major economic development and improvements that are occurring in the downtown corridor. I thank Governor Cuomo for the funding that will make this great project happen and I look forward to its completion."

Construction on the project is expected to be completed in late 2020.

For more photo renderings of the project, click here.UTICA  The City of Utica and Oneida County will both take part in the eminent domain process for properties located within the new downtown hospital footprint whose owners refuse to sell, according to a joint release sent by Utica Mayor Robert Palmieri and Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente on Wednesday evening.

If needed, the City of Utica will use eminent domain to acquire properties within the hospital footprint through its Urban Renewal Agency, and Oneida County will use eminent domain to acquire properties within the footprint for the hospitals parking garage.

There are 72 properties that lie within the footprint for the new hospital and parking garage, which are represented by 35 different property owners. According to Mohawk Valley Health System officials, three property owners refuse to sell, and five property owners have received purchase offers but arent in active discussion with MVHS or Bond, Schoeneck & King, the law firm handling the property acquisition process.

From the very beginning of this project, we have believed in the potential to completely reinvigorate a major portion of the Citys downtown, Palmieri said in the news release. After careful and deliberate discussions with the County Executive, we have come to the decision that it is in the best interest of the City, region and healthcare for future generations, to advance eminent domain jointly with the County and the Utica Urban Renewal Agency, only where necessary. A consensus was reached between County and City officials, after extensive research and deliberations. Throughout the entire planning process, I have advocated strongly for the Citys best interests and that of its taxpayers, and we will continue to assist those impacted by this project within the Citys fiscal constraints.

Scott Perra, president and CEO of MVHS, said this decision is significant and important, and it will allow the hospital project to move forward.

MVHS will continue to reach out and work with all property owners to reach an agreement," Perra said. It is our desire to avoid the use of eminent domain if possible.

"I'll basically put everything I have into it," Joseph Cerini, owner of Citation Services on Lafayette Street said. "What we're being offered, money-wise, you can't rebuild a business that has 18,000 square feet."

"The mayor specifically said the city of Utica will not carry out eminent domain, we will not stop it, but we will not be part of the action," Shawn Corrigan, VP of Purchasing at Wilcor International said. "So that was a blatant lie."

Both Corrigan and Cerini say they will fight the city in eminent domain. No Hospital Downtown Co-Founder Brett Truett released a statement, saying he would be willing to help fund these legal battles.

"Anybody seeking to fight eminent domain will find a true friend and funding from me to fight the politicians on this disastrous hospital concept until the bitter end," Truett said. "Actually this official threat of eminent domain is very good news, as finally this 3-year old debacle as to who will bring eminent domain has been announced. This now becomes a national question regarding the right of government to take private property for private use."

"We shouldn't have to be taking the time out of our business to do this," Corrigan said. "We're bringing money into the area every day."UTICA  Foundations are now in place on Noyes Street for the first set of Small Houses.

Three 700-square-foot homes are being built by students in the Rescue Mission of Uticas Skills for Success program. The Small House initiative is a partnership between the Rescue Mission, the city of Utica, Mohawk Valley Community College, and the Community Foundation of Herkimer & Oneida Counties, which is funding the project.

The homes being built at 1014 Noyes Street will be rent-to-own for low-income families, and they havent yet been spoken for.

It's a great opportunity for someone who has never had that opportunity to have that piece of the American dream, to be able to have a property like this and to have it paid off in less than a third of the time of a traditional mortgage, said Jim Haid, executive director of the Rescue Mission of Utica.

Students in the program learn carpentry, masonry and lead abatement, among other trades, and get credit towards an associates degree through MVCC. This years class has 13 students, who have already pre-fabricated all of the walls for the three Small Houses, which will be put in place this week.

Skills For Success has enrolled more than 40 students over the last three years.The local community and first responders are mourning the death of Whitesboro Police Officer Kevin Crossley, on the 11-year anniversary of another local officers death.

Officer Crossley, 34, was killed in an accident while on duty in the village of Whitesboro on Wednesday night. Crossley was a seven-year member of the Whitesboro Police Department, and he also worked part-time with the Whitestown Police Department.

As Crossleys body was taken to the Onondaga County Medical Examiners Office in Syracuse Wednesday night, a police escort was met by dozens of police officers and other first responders from all over the region. Patrol cars lined the route with their lights on as officers stood at attention on the sidewalk outside Upstate Medical University.

And on Thursday afternoon, Officer Crossleys escort home was welcomed by dozens of officers, patrol cars and several ambulances outside of Dimbleby Funeral Homes in Whitesboro, which will be handling Crossleys funeral arrangements.

Officers were also seen along the Thruway overpasses en route to Whitesboro as Officer Crossley was brought home.

No stranger to dealing with the death of a local law enforcement officer, Oneida County Sheriff Rob Maciol joined NEWSChannel 2 in studio Thursday evening to shed some light on the aftermath of a local law enforcement officers death.

Thursday marks 11 years since Utica Police Officer Thomas Lindsey was shot and killed in the line of duty during a traffic stop in Utica. Other law enforcement deaths in recent years include Oneida County Sheriffs Deputy Kurt Wyman, who was shot and killed in the line of duty following a standoff in 2011, and New Hartford Police Officer Joseph Corr, who was shot and killed during a suspect pursuit in 2006.

No matter how large a department is  small, big  you still have to figure out how you can continue to police the community that youre charged with policing, Sheriff Maciol said.

Obviously youre dealing with the investigation, youre dealing with the family and friends who are in mourning, youre dealing with the police officers in that agency that obviously have lost someone very, very close to them. Thats very difficult, and then on top of that the calls for service continue to come in, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so I think its all about that thin blue line.

Maciol says that on Thursday he spent some time with officers he hadnt seen in years.

Its unfortunate that these circumstances bring us together, but when these tragic things happen, we do come together, stronger than anything else thats out there, Maciol said.

Maciol says law enforcement officers will come from across the nation for Officer Crossleys funeral, which has not yet been set.

I never thought in my wildest dreams that Id be dealing with so many officers deaths, Maciol said. In the line of duty deaths; just very, very tragic.UTICA, NY-- Roughly 87 million people have had their Facebook data stolen in a breach by Cambridge Analytica, and a local professor believes it could happen all over again if changes aren't made soon.

"It doesn't surprised me, Facebook operates in a largely unregulated portion of the internet," said Michael McCarthy, director of data science, at Utica College. "It's actually totally expected that this would happen, and likely happen again, unless they really begin to self-regulate or unless Congress acts to regulate them."

File - In this April 4, 2013 file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg walks at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File) File - In this April 4, 2013 file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg walks at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

The social media giant mishandled the breach that allowed Cambridge Analytica, the data analysis firm that worked with Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, to harvest information from as many as 87 million Facebook users. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finished two days of congressional testimony on Wednesday, about how his company protects - and does not protect - people's private information.

Zuckerberg thinks regulations of his company is "inevitable."

McCarthy said Facebook users should feel safe on the site, but warn them to be cautious.

"Facebook users should generally feel safe, but they should probably not feel that their data is any more private than it was before, until there is strong understanding of how exactly their data is being used and shared," he said. "Then they should feel safe, but they shouldn't feel any other data is private."

Utica resident Peter Pisani said his data wasn't compromised, but he's always been hesitant sharing his information using the social media site.

"I've always been wary of Facebook," Pisani said. "It's one of those things where you're going to make a choice, are you going to be on social media or not, if you're choosing to use Instagram Facebook what have you, understand that these things are happening and you're taking your own risks."

Rome resident Jennifer Stafford said she's tired of using the her computer to connect to others, and the recent data breach is just another reason to leave the site.

"I do use Facebook, but I'm more apt to leave it because of all the issues they're having," she said. "Everything seems like everybody is connected to Facebook instead of the world itself."

McCarthy said the company needs to comply with the European Union's privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation. Under the regulation, organizations are held to account for the personal data they hold and collect from people.

"There is a great model to follow the European Union is enacting the General Data Protection Regulation it starts May 25," he said. "It requires companies that collect data like Facebook or Facebook operating in Europe, to have a very clear consent language within their online user agreement. So that is probably where Facebook should begin to go and other online social media organizations as well."

Information provided by the Associated Press was used in this report.UPDATE: The Whitestown Police Department has identified the police officer who was killed in an accident on Oriskany Boulevard Wednesday night.

Officer Kevin Crossley was in his Whitesboro Police patrol car when his vehicle was struck by a Chevrolet Avalanche at the intersection of Oriskany Boulevard and Westmoreland Street in Whitesboro, just before 8 p.m.

Last night we lost one of our fellow part time Police Officers. Officer Kevin Crossley who was working in the Village of Whitesboro was killed in a 2 car motor vehicle accident on Oriskany Blvd, Whitestown police posted on their Facebook page Thursday morning.

The village of Whitesboro has also expressed their condolences over the loss of Officer Crossley.

"The Village of Whitesboro is deeply saddened at the loss of one of our police officers in an auto accident last night while on duty," the village said on its Facebook page. "Whitesboro is a small, close community, this strikes at the heart of all of us. We have lost a dedicated public servant to our residents. Our hearts are broken. Thoughts and prayers to the family and the Whitesboro Police Department."

State police say a joint press conference with the Whitesboro Police Department will be held at 1 p.m. at state police headquarters in Marcy to provide more details about the crash investigation. You can watch that here, or tune into CBS Utica,

The following video was posted by Michael Ryan on Facebook, which appears to show a procession in Syracuse on Wednesday night:

__________________________________

(Previous coverage)

WHITESBORO - A police officer has died after a crash on Oriskany Boulevard that occurred just before 8 p.m. Wednesday night near Tony's Pizzeria.

Several police and fire departments were called to the scene to assist. Witnesses say a medical helicopter was dispatched to the scene, but no one was put on board.

New York State Troopers say the officer was taken to St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Utica, where he was pronounced dead. Authorities have not yet released his name.

We are aware of the name circulating on social media but we will not report the name until we get confirmation and permission from police.

The driver of the pickup truck, which was an orange Chevy Avalanche, was taken to St. Luke's Hospital for for treatment of non-life threatening injuries.

Oriskany Boulevard was closed but re-opened sometime early Thursday morning.

State Police say they will hold a news conference Thursday morning to provide additional information on the crash. No word on the possibility of traffic tickets or other charges at this time.

We will continue to update you as more information becomes available.MARCY  New York State Police and the Whitesboro Police Department held a joint news conference Thursday afternoon at state police barracks in Marcy to provide more information on the crash that killed Whitesboro Police Officer Kevin Crossley on Wednesday night.

Just before 8 p.m. Wednesday, Officer Kevin Crossley was involved in a crash with a Chevrolet Avalanche at the intersection of Oriskany Boulevard and Westmoreland Street in Whitesboro.



Photo of Officer Kevin Crossley courtesy of Facebook Photo of Officer Kevin Crossley courtesy of Facebook

According to State Police Major Philip Rougeux, Crossley was traveling eastbound on Oriskany Boulevard in his Whitesboro police cruiser when a 2008 Chevrolet Avalanche driven by 26-year-old Nicole Moshier-Harris of Whitesboro, which was headed westbound, attempted to turn left onto Westmoreland Street from a left-turn-only lane, and the two vehicles collided almost head-on as Crossleys vehicle was traveling through the intersection.

Rougeux says a vehicle in the Tony's parking lot had to be moved aside by fire crews to gain access to Crossley's police car.

Crossley was then transported by ambulance to St. Elizabeth Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. Moshier-Harris was transferred to the St. Lukes Campus to be treated for injuries, and she was then released.

Rougeux says Crossley, who was working a 3-11 p.m. shift, was not responding to a call at the time of the crash. He was traveling in what Rougeux called a low-profile, slick vehicle, which did not have cruiser lights. Police are currently investigating why Crossley was headed in the direction he was going.

The area that the crash occurred is a 40 mph zone, and officials do not yet know the speed the vehicles were traveling at during the time of the crash. Rougeux said it's believed that both eastbound and westbound lanes had a green light at the time.

At this time, no tickets have been issued as the investigation is still in the preliminary stage. Rougeux says they are still investigating whether cell phone use or any other distractions played a part in the crash, and they say there is no indication of alcohol or drug use. Its also unknown at this time whether or not the two drivers were wearing seatbelts.

Whitesboro Police Chief Dominick Hiffa says Officer Crossley was a seven-year full-time member of the Whitesboro Police Department, and he also worked part-time with the Whitestown Police Department.

He was a lifelong resident of the village of Whitesboro, and Hiffa says Crossleys whole life dream was to be a police officer. He said Crossley loved coming to work every day and he was always upbeat.

Like many of us in local police departments, we want to police where weve grown up and protect our communities and serve, Hiffa said.

Hiffa says Crossley began as an intern with the Whitesboro Police Department and he was hired full-time in 2011.

He loved his job and he was a great guy to work with, Hiffa said. Always upbeat, a lot of fun. Very good to people that he served.

Hell be dearly missed by all of us and the community, and he served very well.

Police say they are currently contacting businesses in the area to see if any of them captured surveillance footage of the crash. Anybody who was in the area and witnessed the crash Wednesday night is asked to call state police at 315-366-6000.Nursing students at SUNY Polytechnic Institute are educating others on a variety of health topics.

At SUNY Polys Health and Wellness Expo on Wednesday, more than 130 exhibits educated the college community on topics such as fitness, nutrition and mental health. The college puts on the expo each year, and this years theme was, Splash into wellness, shower yourself with good health.

At the expo there were free samples given and health assessment screenings.

People are interested in learning more about personal health and wellness and the resources that are available in the community, said Stacey Genther, health promotion coordinator for SUNY Poly.

The event was held in the colleges Campus Center gym.WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI)  Ahead of the May 1 deadline for students to select a university for next fall, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels announced tuition will hold constant for the seventh year in a row at the West Lafayette campus. The university's current tuition freeze will continue through the 2019-20 academic year.

Daniels made the announcement Thursday morning. Tuition for the 2019-20 year will be nearly the same tuition paid in the 2012-13 year. Five graduating classes at Purdue will have earned Purdue degrees without an increase.

A Purdue education will be less expensive in 2020 than it was in 2012. This commitment to affordability has kept Purdue attractive to prospective students and has helped save families millions of dollars, Daniels said. Coupled with continued investments in the quality of our academic programs, we believe Purdue is delivering on our goal of higher education at the highest proven value.

According to Purdue University, total tuition at Purdues West Lafayette campus are $9,992 for Indiana residents, $28,794 for nonresidents and $30,954 for international students.

From 2013-19, Purdue university estimates students have saved $465 million through the freeze.Couple gives $1 million scholarships gift to encourage the great legal minds of tomorrow

For the Bold: Jim Penney J.D. 83 his wife, LauraLeigh Young, have provided a $1 million gift that will give tuition support to generations of law students. Courtesy photo Photo - of - Hide Caption

When Jim Penney J.D. 83 attended William & Mary Law School, he needed to take out loans to pay for his degree and to make ends meet. Thirty-five years later, Penney and his wife, LauraLeigh Young, have chosen to help reduce the financial burden for future William & Mary law students with a $1 million gift toward scholarships, the top priority of the universitys For the Bold campaign.

There was no other way I would have made it through law school  loans were a necessity, Penney said. We decided to contribute to scholarships with the goal of either reducing or eliminating the amount that future law students might have to borrow for tuition.

The couples generous gift will support the newly created James A. Penney and LauraLeigh Young Scholarship in Law Endowment and the Class of 1983 William B. Spong Jr. Scholarship in Law Endowment. The gift will provide tuition support for generations of law students.

Jim and LauraLeighs support of the law school is an extraordinary example of the impact private support plays in training the next generation of citizen lawyers, said Davison M. Douglas, dean of William & Mary Law School. We are grateful for their continued support of the first law school in the United States.

In recognition of the couples commitment, the courtroom in the Hixon Center for Experiential Learning and Leadership will be named the James A. Penney and LauraLeigh Young Courtroom.

The couple, who live in Seattle, have remained engaged with the law school over the span of several decades. Penney is currently a co-chair of his classs 35-year law reunion and has served on his classs reunion leadership team for 20 years. Both Penney and Young have participated in other programs, including Deans Council Dinners and law school events hosted in Seattle.

Ive remained a big fan of the law school since graduating, so I wanted to convey my enthusiasm to my classmates with the hope they also would choose to contribute financially to support the law schools mission and to enhance its presence in the academic community, Penney said.

Penney is currently the executive vice president and general counsel of Wave Broadband, a cable, internet and phone provider in Washington, California and Oregon. From 2000 to 2006, Penney was a partner at the Seattle law firm Cairncross & Hempelmann, where he practiced corporate finance and technology transactions law and represented clients including Microsoft Corporation, Starwood Corporation and Sealaska Corporation. In 2012, Penney was inducted as a member of the Cable Pioneers, an honor reserved for industry veterans that have made significant leadership contributions.

After a career as a corporate writer followed by 12 years as a full-time parent to the couples three children, Young worked at a public middle school in Seattle providing students with academic and social support services. When the couples older daughter was diagnosed with Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Strep (PANDAS) in 2014, Young became involved in advocacy work and education about the disorder.

Penney and Youngs investment advances For the Bolds $350 million scholarships fundraising effort, which affords exceptional students the opportunity to attend William & Mary.W&M Washington Center to offer hybrid classes this summer

Study in Washington: In addition to the DC Summer Session, the Washington Center offers five additional ways to Study in DC during the year. Photo - of - Hide Caption

As part of William & Marys Study in DC opportunities, a distinct hybrid learning experience is coming to Washington, D.C., in summer 2018.

The W&M Washington Center is offering courses in its DC Summer Session that allow students to earn three W&M credits through five-week hybrid courses of mostly online coursework  with one week of four consecutive evening sessions in D.C.

Additionally, Friday evenings of that week will feature an optional networking reception for faculty and students to engage with area alumni interested in the course topic. Students can take the online portion of the course from anywhere in the world  provided they have a connection to the internet.

Were excited to try a new academic model in the Washington Center, said Center Associate Director and Director of Programs Roxane Adler Hickey M.Ed. 02. Students, especially working students, want flexibility in their summer coursework. Our new DC Summer Session opportunity pairs three critical elements  the academic rigor of William & Marys traditional courses, the flexibility of online learning and the experiential benefits of engagement with D.C. area subject matter experts and alums  all guided by William & Marys experienced faculty.

The three courses include: GOVT 391, From Protest to Policy: Gender in Political Process (COLL 300) with Assistant Professor of Government Claire McKinney; KINE 356: Public Health: Nutrition Concepts and Controversies (COLL 200) with Professor of Kinesiology and Health Sciences Ken Kambis; and INRL 390/AMES 331: Political Violence in the Middle East: From Colonialism to ISIS (COLL 300), with Stephen Sheehi, Sultan Qaboos Professor Middle East Studies and Arabic Studies.

Students appear to be responding enthusiastically to the new model, according to Adler Hickey. Enrollments are near capacity for each course, up significantly over previous D.C. summer sessions.

In addition to the DC Summer Session, the Washington Center offers five additional ways to Study in DC during the year, through the DC Semester Program, the DC Winter Seminars, the DC Spring Break Seminars, the DC Summer Institutes and the newest DC Spotlight Series.



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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Town officials are considering a proposal to locate a 40-megawatt solar array farm on 200 acres of land behind Ralph Ferras Bernards Auto and Ironwoods Golf Practice Range off Iron Mine Hill Road. The plan would create what some say will be the largest such solar development in the state if it moves forward from an April 23 meeting of the Town Council.Spring is usually the busiest time of year for brokers in the buy/sell/trade business for Alaska salmon permits. But thats not the case this year.

Values for several salmon permits had ticked upwards after a blockbuster salmon fishery in 2017, but they have remained stagnant since last fall.

That sort of summarizes the salmon permit market. There is not a lot of excitement about any of them, said Doug Bowen of Alaska Boats and Permits in Homer.

A lackluster catch forecast for the upcoming salmon season - down 34 percent  has helped dampen enthusiasm.

Even at the one big bri...At right, Taylor Carey learns how to weave with sheep's wool while on a trip to Ecuador. Traveling with her brother and 26 other Palmer-area students last month, the class experience firsthand some aspects of life in the rural highlands.

A pair of Anchorage-area students were able to take the trip of a lifetime last month, heading to Ecuador with their class on a service learning trip.

Mother Kara Carey said her children, daughter Taylor and son Quinn, had been planning the trip for over a year, and had been able to go through a combination of fundraising, work and savings. A significant component of those funds had come from the community of Wrangell, primarily through a pair of fundraisers the Carey family had held during July 4 last year.

Born and raised in Wrangell, Kara said she still has a connection to the community...Council pulls peculiar EHIC & visa advert and starts investigation

This article is old - Published: Thursday, Apr 12th, 2018

Wrexham Council have pulled a directly served website advert on their website, as it promoted services charging for visa and health card services that should be free.

Wrexham Council runs automated adverts on their Wrexham.gov.uk website that are often customised to the user themselves, without much control from the Council itself via third parties.

Previously we had noticed a hard coded and directly served advert, with the background image directly served from Wrexham.gov.uk rather than a dynamic third party provider, active for several weeks. This appeared to be a specifically placed advert on the Councils site, and would be visible to all users, significant as it could not be served unknowingly by Wrexham Council.

The advert promoted services via links to third party websites, one provided by a company that had been subject to a ASA ruling against it after being found to be running a website that was found to be confusingly similar to an official NHS website.

One advert link on Wrexham.gov.uk pointed to a website selling visa application services via an official looking website, complete with american flag and reassuring green ticks. Another charged 35 for applications for European Health Insurance Cards (EHICs) , which are free from a UK official EHIC website.

The websites linked to are not illegal, however previously we have run Trading Standards eCrime warning video messages about look-a-like websites and the caution that should be exercised while using them.

We asked Wrexham Council for comment on the acceptance of promotion for such services that charge for what should be free applications.

After we sent our queries in with the ad still active, Wrexham Council told us: We have taken the advertisement down while we look into those concerns raised.

We then checked the site, and the ad had been removed.

The Councils own advert policy reads: All advertisements are subject to approval before they are placed on the Councils web site. The Council reserves the right to refuse to promote or to remove any individual advertisement, which, in the opinion of the Council is considered inappropriate. The suitability of individual advertisers may be checked with the Councils Trading Standards department.

It also adds: The Council would never knowingly run an advertisement that is misleading, offensive, untrue or fraudulent.

We have also asked Wrexham Council if the person or entity that placed the advert requested any specific instructions with the placement, such as non-cloaked and dofollow links, as authoritative websites such as local government websites can be very useful for those looking to rank websites in search engines and would likely be placed in this manner.

We will update further when Wrexham Council have finished looking into the issues raisedHealth Secretary to visit next week in move welcomed by health centre campaigners

This article is old - Published: Thursday, Apr 12th, 2018

Campaigners pressing for a new health centre in Cefn Mawr have welcomed a Welsh Government commitment to discuss proposals with local GPs.

Health Secretary Vaughan Gething has agreed to visit Caritas Surgery to meet with the practice manager, Clwyd South AM Ken Skates and Cefn councillors.

Mr Skates, who organised the meeting, said he was delighted the Health Secretary has committed to visiting the Cefn Mawr. He launched a petition in 2015 calling for the new facility the community deserves which was signed by more than 2,000 people.

Im really pleased the Cabinet Secretary for Health has responded so positively to my invitation and I look forward to welcoming him to Clwyd South next week, said Mr Skates.

Councillors Ken Bathers and Derek Wright have previously vowed they would not stop fighting for a new facility until there are spades in the ground.

They say the only hurdle left to clear is securing funding.

The current is not fit for purpose and it hasnt been for some time, said Cllr Bathers. The community badly needs this new facility and well keep on pushing for it.

Cllr Wright said: We have been fighting for this for a long time. As soon as funding is found its all systems go and patients in Cefn, Rhosymedre, Plas Madoc and further afield can finally look forward to having a health centre fit for the 21st century.

Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board funded immediate remedial work to improve the current Cefn premises on Well Street in 2016 after agreeing the building was not adequate and said it would also develop a plan for more modern premises.

Top pic: Ken Skates and local councillor Ken Bathers outside the current Caritas Surgery on Well Street.As the Socialist Equality Party candidates in the California midterm election, we unequivocally condemn Democratic Governor Jerry Browns decision to deploy 400 national guard troops to the Mexican border. We warn: Browns move emboldens Trump and his fascist aides and puts the livelihoods of the states millions of immigrants at risk.

The deployment proves the Democratic Party is collaborating with Trumps attack on immigrants. Browns statement announcing the deployment presents the move as benign: the National Guard will support operations targeting transnational criminal gangs, and will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people, Brown claims.

This is a lie. As Trump admitted, the entire premise of the National Guards mission is to provide logistics, surveillance and support to free up Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers who carry out the daily brutalization of immigrants in communities across California and the country. Trump first demanded this military deployment in a series of xenophobic tweets specifically targeting a symbolic march of refugees from Central America seeking asylum. Browns participation in Trumps deployment legitimizes this racist attack and demonstrates the fraud of the states sanctuary legislation, which does nothing to actually protect immigrants.

Thursday morning, Trump tweeted, California Governor Jerry Brown is doing the right thing and sending the National Guard to the Border. Thank you Jerry, good move for the safety of our Country!

The National Guard deployment comes in the face of an unprecedented threat to immigrants nationwide. Last week, Trump announced that the administration will indefinitely detain immigrants captured crossing the border. The memo announcing the policy change calls for the Attorney General and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to allocate all legally available resources to construct, operate, control, or modifyor establish contracts to construct, operate, control, or modifyfacilities to detain aliens for violations of immigration law at or near the borders of the United States.

While supporting Trumps attack on immigrants, the Democrats are focusing all of their political energy on opposing Trumps alleged ties to Russia and affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels. The anti-Russia campaign has brought the US to the brink of war with Russia, a nuclear armed power, in Syria. If a war does break out, the government will launch an anti-immigrant dragnet that exceeds in size and scope the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.

The anti-immigrant record of the Democratic Party

In 2018, Bernie Sanders, heralded as the left wing of the Democratic Party, said: If the president wants to work with us to make sure we have strong border security, lets do that. This March, Democrats voted for a budget that gave $641 million to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and $1.6 billion for the militarization of the border. They abandoned the 1.8 million people eligible for the now-expired Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

In 2010, Obama launched Operation Phalanx, sending guardsmen to the border for six years. Over his two terms, Obama deported 2.7 million immigrants, the most in US history, with the support of the Democratic and Republican Parties. Browns statement praises both Bush and Obamas earlier deployments.

In 2006 Californias current senator Dianne Feinstein voted for building a border wall with Mexico. She was joined by then Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who claimed that President Bushs measure did not go far enough. Bush deployed guardsmen to the border with Californias support for two years.

The bipartisan support for border fencing and military patrols has driven immigrants to cross along ever more dangerous routes. The government does not keep any accurate count of how many die in the humanitarian crisis along the border. It is anywhere between the official count of 360 to 1,300 every year. In some counties, officials simply throw bodies found into shallow graves without keeping records.

Today, more refugees are fleeing their homes worldwide than at any other time since the end of World War II. According to the UN, there were 65 million refugees in 2015. Many are fleeing US-led wars and instability in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The exodus of refugees from Central America is a direct result of US support for military dictatorships and death squads dating back more than a century. As recently as 2009, the US government under President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported a coup detat against the democratically-elected President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya.

No to chauvinism and racial divisions!

Socialists oppose efforts by both parties try to convince workers that they are suffering because of low wages for immigrants and foreigners. The financial oligarchy scapegoats immigrants for the social crisis to detract attention from the fact that the United States is the most unequal society on earth, where the richest three billionaires own as much wealth as the poorest 160 million, half of the country.

Immigrants are not to blame for deteriorating bridges, cuts to social programs, the rising cost of healthcare, stagnant wages, state surveillance, police brutality, mass shootings, or permanent war. It is the capitalist system, based on the exploitation of the working class and the constant drive to divide and redivide the worlds resources and cheap labor between the imperialist powers, that is responsible for these symptoms of the social crisis.

Mobilize the working class in defense of immigrants!

The Socialist Equality Party demands full, immediate citizenship rights for every immigrant regardless of when they came to the United States and regardless of their country of origin. We call for the right to return to their countries of origin without the threat of deportation.

The defense of the rights of immigrants must be based on the mobilization of the working class, regardless of immigration status. No worker stands to benefit when his or her co-worker can be dragged off the assembly line, construction site, school room, or warehouse floor by police and immigration agents. The terror tactics being employed against immigrants will be employed against workers of all immigration backgrounds who enter into struggle in defense of wages, benefits, and democratic rights.

It is in the interest of every worker, regardless of immigration status, to demand the abolition of ICE and CBP and to call for their massive resources to be spent to rebuild working-class neighborhoods in the US as well as countries damaged by US imperialism in the Americas and elsewhere.

The world economy and its inhabitants have never been more interconnected. Under capitalism, the nation-state system is the framework for war, ruthless economic competition, and deportation. Our campaign fights for socialist revolution which will abolish the nation-state system in order to bring the geopolitical organization of the world into harmony with the international character of the world economy.

We call for workers and young people across California to help us advance this program by joining our campaignsDavid Moore for U.S. Senator and Kevin Mitchell for House of Representatives for the 51st Congressional District.A new adaptation written by April de Angelis, directed by Matthew Xia, showing at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchesteruntil April 14.

Frankenstein playing at Manchesters Royal Exchange theatre marks two hundred years since the publication of Mary Shelleys remarkable novel on January 1, 1818.

Mary (1797-1851), wife of radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), was just 19 when she completed her novel, set in the Alps and the Arctic. It was a revelation to readers when first published, anonymously and in three volumes, reflected by its immediate success.

The story has been the inspiration for numerous stage and screen productions, including 58 theatre adaptations, television plays and numerous films. Actors forever linked to the story include Boris Karloff, who provided the monster in James Whales 1931 production and subsequent films, and Peter Cushing, who played Victor Frankenstein in Hammer Horror productions from 1957-74.

In 1974, Mel Brooks turned gothic horror into a wonderful spoof, with Gene Wilder playing a descendant of Frankenstein. In 1994, Kenneth Branagh created a close adaptation of the novel in his film Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, with himself as Frankenstein and Robert De Niro as the creature.

Mary Shelleys narrative continues to fascinate and resonate with audiences today. This latest adaptation in Manchesters Theatre in the Round remains faithful to the novel, managing to successfully capture the storys universal appeal.

The play begins with a clap of thunder, revealing Captain Robert Walton (Ryan Gage), an ambitious adventurer, on board a ship bound for the yet to be explored North Pole. His quest is in the country of Eternal light to discover the wondrous power [magnetism] that attracts the needle.

His ship entombed by ice, he takes on board a mysterious stranger on the brink of death. The stranger, Victor Frankenstein (Shane Zaza), is in pursuit of a demon over the icy wastes. Fevered, he is in a delirium peopled by loved ones long departed.

In a series of letters to his sister, Walton retells the misfortunes of Frankenstein, a man grief-stricken and broken, who declares himself a murderer.

Victor was 17 when his beloved mother died of scarlet fever, leaving him bereft. A burning passion for science, beginning with anatomy, led him to reanimate a being reassembled with body parts reclaimed from the dead. He says in the novel, If I could bestow life on inanimate matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had devoted the body to corruption.

One sight of the being he has created (Harry Attwell), however, fills him with horror and disgust, with its shriveled complexion and straight black lips. It is to him forever a monster, demon, wretch and, finally, adversary.

Cast out by his father, the creature observes from a distance the ways of men, even learning to read. Eavesdropping on a family of cottagers, he hears of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, and realises that being property-less made a person a vagabond and slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profit of the chosen few.

The creature dreams of becoming part of this loving family and, in secret, collects firewood for them. However, when they see him, terrified by his appearance and unable to appreciate his humanity, they drive him away.

Shunned by all, in despair he vows revenge, cursing his creator. In one chilling scene, employing puppetry, the creature meets Victors younger brother, William. The child/puppet screams hideous monster and the creature strangles him.

Later, Victor breaks his promise to his creation and destroys a female creature that was to be consolation to the demon in his loneliness. The latter responds that he will take revenge, with a prophetic, I will be with you on your wedding night.

The wedding night arrives. Petals fall on the heads of Victor and his new bride Elizabeth (Shanaya Rafaat), as the guests join them in dance. Their joy is short-lived and the creature makes good his threat.

The final scene is acted with much pathos. Frankenstein has shown us that the creature was not born evil but was treated inhumanely, a tortured soul condemned to live alone. His natural inclination towards kindness was not nurtured. A grave injustice was done, his villainy fashioned by the cruelty of men.

As he grieves over his creators lifeless body, the creature determines to end his own life by self-immolation: Some years ago when I felt the cheering warmth of summer I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation.

This fresh, energetic production of Frankenstein does justice to Shelleys novel, employing theatrical devices to dramatic effect. It looks darkly gothic, is well choreographed, and moves elegantly from scene to scene thanks to the combined efforts of director Matthew Xia, the actors and technicians. When the actors take on multiple roles it is barely noticeable. They become the different characters and take the audience with them, maintaining both pace and tension.

Critics have long pondered how someone so young as Mary Shelley could conjure up such a mature and enduring narrative as Frankenstein.

Mary grew of age against the backdrop of immense societal changes. The French Revolution of 1789 left the European ruling class reeling in horror and fear, while inspiring the oppressed. France suffered final defeat in the Napoleonic wars at Waterloo in June 1815, and the rule of monarchy was bolstered throughout Europe in the following decade.

At the same time, the influence of religion, already undermined by the materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment, was to suffer further blows at the hands of science. On the cusp of great developments, the possibilities for progress in science seemed infinite.

The influences of the age were refracted through Mary Shelleys remarkable parents. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1759, died just 11 days after Marys birth in 1797. Wollstonecraft is best remembered as the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) , though she also wrote a polemic against Edmund Burke in support of the French Revolution (The Vindication of the Rights of Men). Courageous and free-spirited, she travelled to France during the upheavals.

Heartbroken after her death, husband William Godwin (1756-1836) set about writing her biography, which proved scandalous to the hypocrites of the day because it revealed details of Wollstonecrafts non-conformist lifestyle.

Godwin was a well-known radical, educated in the works of the revolutionary Thomas Paine and author of Inquiry concerning Political Justice and its influence on Morale and Happiness. In the latter, he argued that human progress was impeded by private property, marriage and monarchy.

The young radical poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, sought Godwin out and this is how Mary met him. The same year, 16-year-old Mary and the already married Shelley eloped to France. Godwins response was to sever contact until they were able to marry in 1816after the death of Shelleys first wife.

Mary felt cast out by her father. An atheist and socialist, Shelley was socially ostracised for his beliefs and even refused custody of his children from his first marriage.

The origin of the novel Frankenstein is something out of fiction. The Shelleys had travelled to Geneva, to be joined by the poet Lord Byron and his entourage.

Both Byron and Percy Shelleys work were read widely and avidly by the working class. Byron was a fearless critic of modern societya defender of the Luddites and Irish Catholics, and later a fighter for first Italian, then Greek independence. Shelleys poem The Masque of Anarchy, which execrated the Peterloo Massacre in 1819in which 15 were killed and hundreds injured in Manchester by government troopswas adopted by the revolutionary Chartist movement.

Many and long were the discussions between the Shelleys and Byron. During one of these, Mary recalled, [V]arious philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life.

As tradition has it, one stormy night in 1816 found this extraordinary company sitting in a candle-lit drawing room, with a view over the lake to the mountains lit up by lightening, when talk turned to the supernatural, science and the possibility of reanimating a corpse.

In those days, early death was an ever-present threat with childhood mortality commonplaceMary herself had already lost one child and two more were to die.

The scientist Luigi Galvani had demonstrated in the 1780s that electro-stimulation could produce movement in a dead frogs legs. Shelley had experimented with electricity while a student at Oxford.

Byron challenged his companions to each write a ghost story. Thus were born the seeds of the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus .

To return to the contemporary relevance of Frankenstein, it is worth quoting from Percy Shelleys review of the book: Nor are the crimes and malevolence of the single Being, tho indeed withering and tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable propensity to evil, but flow inevitably from certain causes fully adequate to their production.  Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked.  It is thus that, too often in society, those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments, are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed, by neglect and solitude of heart, into a scourge and a curse.

These Enlightenment ideas speak forcefully to a modern audience. We can empathise with something created as an articulate rational being that is reduced by society to a monster. It is no surprise that the Murdoch press attempted a hatchet job to undermine the novel in its anniversary year. A March 5 article in the Sun sneered at snowflake students who, quoting Professor Nick Groom of Exeter University, are very sentimental towards the being. But he is a mass murderer.

In answer, Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University Catherine Spooner posted the following tweet:

Frankenstein has always been used as a metaphor for political rebellion. Is it really a surprise that The Sun devalues sympathy for the monster, particularly during the UCU [University and College Union] strike [by 40,000 UK lecturers]?

The play successfully evokes Mary Shelleys stand against prejudice, inequality and injusticeand also her warning to use science responsibly. These are very contemporary issues at a time when humanity stands at a crossroads.

If societys wealth remains under the ownership and control of the profit-driven ruling elite, disaster will ensue. Scientific knowledge is increasingly misused to build weapons of mass destruction and to oppress, rather than solve the worlds problems. The very existence of life on this planet is under threat due to global warming and, more immediately still, nuclear war. This raises the necessity to take the productive forces out of the hands of the capitalist oligarchy and to establish a socialist society run for the benefit of all.An Australian Federal Court heard this week that Geoffrey Rush was virtually housebound and taking medication for lack of sleep and anxiety, after the Daily Telegraph published anonymous and unsubstantiated allegations against him last year.

The tabloid, which is published by the Murdoch-owned Nationwide News, claimed he inappropriately touched a female co-star during a Sydney Theatre Company (STC) production of King Lear in January 2016.

The internationally acclaimed actor is suing the Telegraph and its journalist Jonathon Moran, for defamation. The newspaper implied that Rush was a pervert, sexual predator and his actions so serious that the STC had decided to never work with him again.

Geoffrey Rush

While Rush immediately denied the accusations, he was forced to step down as Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) president. A video of Rush, pre-recorded to be played at last years AACTA awards ceremony, was dropped, following demands by the television networks sponsors.

On Monday, Rushs barrister Nicholas Pullen told the Federal Court that the Telegraph and other Nationwide News publications had caused ongoing hurt to Rush and his family. The actor, Pullen said, believed that his worth to the theatre and film industry and the community at large is now irreparably damaged.

Pullen presented extensive documentation of the impact on Rushs career, citing scores of national and international news articles that repeated the Telegraphs accusations. One of these included a #MeToo-style blacklist, from the popular Rotten Apples movie review website, entitled, Want to Know if Youre Watching Something Made by an Alleged Sexual Harasser? Check this Database.

Last month, Federal Court Justice Michael Wigney struck out most of Nationwide News defence arguments in a detailed examination of the Telegraphs reporting methods and so-called evidence. He also rejected defence requests for the court to subpoena STC documents, describing them as abuse of process.

Undeterred, Nationwide News lawyers continue to insist that its reportage is not defamatory, and are appealing the judges ruling. On Monday News legal team submitted a modified defence naming a previously confidential source, whom, they claim, provided the Telegraph journalist with information on Rush.

The newspaper also wants to file a cross-claim against the STCi.e., enjoin it as a co-defendant in the defamation claimon the grounds that its statement to the newspaper was plainly intended for publication.

Rushs barrister, Sue Chrysanthou, opposed the cross-claim in the Federal Court on Monday. Defence barrister Alec Leopold, cynically, and without a hint of irony, responded by accusing Chrysanthou of using the court to muckrake.

A ruling on Nationwide News modified defence case is expected on April 13.

Running parallel with Nationwide News insistence that its articles on Rush were not defamatory, have been mounting calls for the reform of Australias defamation laws, which currently place the onus on defendants to prove their allegations are true.

In February, a federal parliamentary committee asked for a national review of the countrys defamation laws, which, it said, were curtailing journalists efforts to pursue public interest stories. In reality, the committees call had nothing to do with restrictions on public interest stories, but came after Australian actress Rebel Wilson last year successfully sued Bauer Media for more than $4.5 million, because it had defamed her in a series of stories. This was the largest ever defamation damages payout in an Australian court.

The same claims against the defamation laws have been issued by #NOWAustralia, a sexual witch-hunting lobby group, initiated late last month by Tracey Spicer, a former television and radio celebrity and a key figure in the local #MeToo campaign. Spicer has modelled #NOWAustralia on the Hollywood inspired #TimesUp formation.

The Murdoch press and other corporate media outlets have given #NOWAustralia wall-to-wall coverage, along with glossy publicity shots, video, advertorial-style commentary and a link to a national appeal for funds.

Spicer, without providing any verifiable evidence, insists there is an industrial level of sexual harassment in Australian workplaces and has called for government, business and legal support. [I]ts got to the stage in this movement where we need more than a hashtag. Its not enough to name names, she told the Guardian.

#NOWAustralia wants to make it harder to sue the corporate media, thus opening the door for newspapers, radio and television to take down anyone they decide to target via unsubstantiated allegations. Australias defamation laws, Spicer complained, were amongst the toughest in the world.

Legal action by Geoffrey Rush and former Rocky Horror Show lead actor Craig McLachlan, she continued, has frightened a lot of women from coming forwardand has made some media organisations more reticent about reporting it.

Last October, Spicer claimed to have assembled evidence of sexual misconduct by over 100 Australian actors, media personalities and political figures. Since then she has been collaborating with the big business media and the state-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation to expose the individuals she claims are guilty of inappropriate behaviour.

Not one of the actors or entertainers targeted by #MeToo in Australia, however, has been charged by police, let alone subjected to any form of legal process.

In fact, the allegations against Rush are the first and only #MeToo-style accusations that have been examined in any Australian court of law, and these were exposed as a shabby fraud by Federal Court Justice Wigneys exhaustive assessment on March 20.

Spicer wants #NOWAustralia to have a full-time staff and has appointed 30 female musicians and entertainers, along with multi-millionaire business chief Ann Sherry as its inaugural patron, to promote its anti-democratic agenda.

Sherry was a former First Assistant Secretary of the Office of the Status of Women before becoming a highly paid executive in banking and tourism. The multi-millionaire is currently CEO of Carnival Australia, the largest cruise ship operator in Australasia.

Like its American and global counterparts, the new lobby group is a right-wing, anti-democratic formation which wants to use unproven sexual allegations to further the careers and bank balances of a layer of affluent upper-middle class women.

Predictably, the formation has said nothing about Canberras brutal incarceration of hundreds of asylum seekers, and the documented cases of violence and sexual harassment against women and children in Australias offshore detention centres. That would undermine government and corporate financial support.

Utterly indifferent to the plight of ordinary working-class peopleboth women and men#MeToo and #NOWAustralia demand the freedom to hurl unsubstantiated allegations against anyone they decide to target.

In plain English, presumption of innocence should, according to these outfits, be replaced with presumption of guilt and due process abolished and replaced with lynch mob-justice and trial by establishment media. The agenda of such movements is predicated upon the evisceration of basic legal rights established in centuries of struggle against feudal oppression, aristocratic privilege and authoritarian rule.

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[7 March 2018]

Craig McLachlan accused as Australian media steps up #MeToo witch-hunt

[22 January 2018]

Australian actor Geoffrey Rush fights back, suing Daily Telegraph for defamation

[9 December 2017]With a potential trade war looming between the EU and the United States, the conflicts within the EU, and between Germany and the US over the planned expansion of the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream is escalating. Potential US sanctions against the project could dramatically intensify the economic and political tensions between the United States and Germany, in particular.

Since 2011, the Nord Stream pipeline, which has a capacity of 55 billion cubic meters per year, has been delivering gas from Russia directly to Germany via the North Sea, circumventing traditional transit countries like Ukraine and Belarus. In the summer of 2015, the Russian gas company Gazprom announced the construction of additional pipelines, known as Nord Stream 2.

The two Nord Stream pipelines currently in operation

Apart from Gazprom, the project involves Wintershall, a subsidiary of the leading German chemical company BASF, the German energy company Uniper, as well as the French firm Engie (formerly GDF Suez), Austrias OMV, and the British-Dutch Shell. Construction of the $11.5 billion project is scheduled to begin in late 2018 and be completed by 2019. Gas deliveries are set to start in 2020.

The project has, from the very beginning, sparked political tensions within the European Union as well as between Germany and the United States. Several Eastern European states, especially Poland and the Ukraine, as well as the United States, have opposed the project with growing hostility as a cornerstone for a German-Russian axis and a means to economically leverage Eastern European EU member states, which remain highly dependent on Russian gas deliveries and, as is the case with Ukraine, on revenues from Russian gas transit to the EU.

Now, the conflict has resumed renewed force amid conditions of an escalating war drive against Russia and a looming trade war between the EU and the United States.

In recent weeks, both the Finnish government and German authorities have given the green light to the construction of the pipeline. Permissions still need to be given by Finland (for underwater construction), Russia, Sweden and Denmark. According to Gazprom, the project is proceeding as planned.

Following the announcement by Finland that it would allow for the construction of Nord Stream 2 in its Exclusive Economic Zone, a member of the Ukrainian Rada declared the pipeline to represent a military threat, warning that Russia would use it as an opportunity to step up its military involvement in the ongoing civil war in East Ukraine. In March, Ukraine, along with Slovakia, Romania, Poland, and several other EU members, signed yet another statement urging the EU to halt the project.

The Ukraine is set to lose significant amounts of money. According to an expert questioned by Russia Today, only 15 billion cubic meters of gas would pass through Ukraine annually if Nord Stream 2 were built, down from currently 90 billion cubic meters per year.

The new German coalition government has essentially backed the project, while the European Commission announced that it could not support it, arguing that it violated the goals of diversifying the EUs energy supplies.

Russia has a high stake in the project. It is not only important politically under conditions of growing imperialist encirclement, which have propelled the Kremlin oligarchy to frantically search for allies in Europe, and especially Germany, but also on an economic level. Revenues from gas and oil exports are still a major component of the Russian budget. Attempts in recent years to expand exports to South East Asia, and especially China, have yielded limited results.

The European gas market thus remains critical for Russian companies like Gazprom. Well aware of the economic dependence of Russia on European gas revenues, the US launched gas exports to Europe in 2016, which, combined with other competitive pressures on Gazprom, have forced the Russian company to dramatically lower its priceswith significant implications for both the company and the Russian budget. Nevertheless, the company was able to increase exports to Europe, which reached a record 190 billion cubic meters in 2017.

However, the country expected to benefit the most economically from Nord Stream 2 is Germany. Through the Nord Stream pipelines, the country would become a central hub for gas deliveries in much of Europe, and particularly in the East. Such control over critical energy supplies always also means significant political leverage.

On April 3, US president Donald Trump openly attacked Germanys role in the project, stating at the White House:

Even now, Germany is paying 1 percent [of its GDP for military expenses] and theyre not even paying the full 1 percent. Germany hooks up a pipeline into Russia, where Germany is going to be paying billions of dollars for energy into Russia. And Im saying, Whats going on with that?

In a telephone interview with Bloomberg, Roderich Kiesewetter, a CDU member of the German parliaments foreign affairs committee, retorted that US interests would not dictate Europes energy policy. Timon Gremmels, a Social Democratic member of the German parliament, interpreted Trumps comments as part of his efforts to launch a trade war with Europe, saying: After his unsuccessful attempt to impose punitive tariffs on steel and aluminum in Europe, he ignites the next stage of escalation in order to safeguard national export interests.

With his position on Nord Stream 2, Trump is not alone in the US political establishment. A commentary in March by the Atlantic Council, an influential Washington think tank, encouraged the White House to prevent the project. The article cited Sanda Oudkirk, the deputy assistant secretary for energy diplomacy at the US Department of States Bureau of Energy Resources, who described the expansion of Nord Stream as a decision that has massive geopolitical import. Because it has such a potentially large impact on the national security of some of our largest partners in the world, it has an impact on our national security.

Earlier in March, 40 US senators wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, stating their opposition to the creation of Nord Stream 2 and urging Mnuchin to help prevent its construction by resorting to sanctions.

Such sanctions would be based on the Countering Americas Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) which designates Russian energy export pipelines as a potential threat. The US president could, based on this act, sanction non-US persons involved in the project, such as Gazprom and the European companies involved in the project, which count among the continents leading energy companies and the policies of which are often determined in close consultation with their respective national governments.

Such a step would be tantamount to a declaration of economic warfare on some of Europes largest energy companies.

The major geopolitical and economic issues raised by the pipeline are dividing the EU and the national bourgeoisies, especially in Germany where conflicts over the project run across all party lines.

In March, German members of the European parliament from the liberal FDP, the German Green party and the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) published a statement in the leading daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calling, especially upon the Social Democratic Party (SPD), to prevent the project as a threat to European unity. Among those who signed the statement were Manfred Weber and Norbert Rotgen (both CDU).

Several CDU and SPD members of the German parliament (Bundestag) responded to this statement in another contribution to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, defending the project and rejecting US interference. Arguing that Russias position on the gas market had already been weakened, the parliamentarians stated that Nord Stream 2 did not contradict the goals of a European Energy Union and would further competition.

Further, the article indicated that the project could be used to pressure Ukraine into making the reforms of its gas transport system that German business has long advocated. The article concluded with a fairly sharp statement about US interference in the project. Writing that the US was pursuing its own economic interests, the article said: It is, however, not the job of the EU to help shield American companies that try to sell their natural gas (which derives from fracking production) in Europe from potential competitors.

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[30 May 2016]House Speaker Paul Ryan announced his retirement from Congress Wednesday, exacerbating the political crisis of the Republican Party, which is threatened with historic losses in the November 6 mid-term election. Ryan told the Republican caucus of his decision at a closed-door session Wednesday morning, then disclosed it publicly at a Capitol Hill press conference.

Despite the ritual declarations about wanting to spend more time with his family and the routine denial that his decision had anything to do with the crisis of the Trump administration or the dismal prospects of the Republicans in the upcoming elections, there is little doubt that Ryan is leaving office to avoid going down with a sinking ship, preserving his own viability in some future national political campaign.

Ryan was Mitt Romneys running mate for vice president in 2012, when they lost to the Obama-Biden re-election campaign. He moved up from chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the chief tax-writing panel, to the speakership in October 2015, when then-Speaker John Boehner unexpectedly resigned amid mounting opposition from the ultra-right Freedom Caucus.

The Freedom Caucus also clashed with Ryan but never directly challenged his authority, joining forces enthusiastically in the tax cut for business and the wealthy enacted in December 2017, which was Ryans sole major legislative achievement as speaker as far as the financial aristocracy was concerned.

Ryans political career was a demonstration of the rapid and continual shift to the right on the part of the Republican Party, in particular, and the US two-party political system as a whole. First elected in 1998 as one of the youngest congressmen ever, he was notable mainly as an unreconstructed adherent of the ultra-right philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose books he would recommend with enthusiasm.

Over the years, he became part of the Republican Party establishment, elevated to head the Ways and Means Committee, where he drafted what were considered ground-breaking plans for the demolition of Medicaid and Medicare. In particular, his plan for privatizing Medicare was hailed as a breakthrough by the ultra-right, since it for the first time proposed the outright repeal of one of the core entitlement programs established under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.

While disguised with claims to advocate sharp reductions in the federal budget deficit, Ryans targeting of social programs was simply aimed at destroying benefits on which tens of millions of working people rely. When it came to tax cuts for the wealthy and big business, or gargantuan spending on the Pentagon, there was no such concern for the deficit.

This was demonstrated most clearly over the past four months, as the Republican-controlled Congress, with Ryan playing a major role, enacted first a $1.5 trillion tax cut for business and the super-rich, and then a budget that pumps an equivalent amount over two years into the military. This is what Ryan was referring to when he said he felt free to retire now, based on the accomplishments of the current Congress.

After the passage of the tax cut, Ryan declared that the 2018 session of Congress should be devoted to entitlement reform, i.e., cuts in Social Security and Medicare. However, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell rejected the suggestion, declaring that no such action was possible in an election year. In other words, the Republican Partyand the Democratswill take up cuts in these entitlement programs, but only in an odd-numbered year.

Commenting on Ryans retirement, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer adopted a conciliatory tone, praising this advocate of savage attacks on the poor and elderly as a good man who is always true to his word. Schumer continued, Even though we disagreed on most issues, in the areas where we could work together I always found him to be smart, thoughtful, and straightforward.

Schumer expressed the hope that Ryan would negotiate with the Democrats more openly than in the past, during his final eight months in the leadership. With his newfound political freedom, he said, I hope the Speaker uses his remaining time in Congress to break free from the hard-right factions of his caucus that have kept Congress from getting real things done. If hes willing to reach across the aisle, hell find Democrats willing and eager to work with him.

Whatever the personal motives involvedthe soon-to-be former speaker can expect to reap a huge personal financial reward from his two decades of political service to the wealthy, far more than a congressional salarythe deteriorating prospects for the Republican Party in the mid-term elections were clearly a factor in Ryans departure.

Dozens of Republican representatives have already announced their decision to retire, including at least half a dozen committee chairmen, wielders of considerable personal authority, who did not relish passing into a minority role next year. Ryan faced his own re-election challenge, with Democrat Randy Bryce, an official of the ironworkers union, having raised nearly $5 million for his campaign in Wisconsins First Congressional District.

The speakers retirement announcement was followed an hour later by another Republican congressman, Representative Dennis Ross of Florida, who will retire from the Tampa-area seat he has held for six years. Rosss departure likely opens the door for yet another in the wave of Democratic candidates from a military-intelligence background, who comprise the largest single group of Democratic challengers in competitive seats now held by Republicans.

Andrew Learned, an eight-year veteran of the Marines with three Mideast deployments, is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in the primary election set for August 28. According to his campaign website: He served as an officer in the US Navy for four years on active duty and remains an officer in the US Navy Reserve with Special Operation Command Centrals reserve unit at MacDill AFB. Hes led teams on boarding missions combating Somali piracy and led planning efforts with the 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade during the crisis in Yemen and Syria.

The next contest in the 2018 congressional election cycle is a special election April 24 in Arizonas Eighth Congressional District, vacated by the resignation of Republican Representative Trent Franks. The ultra-right congressman was forced to step down after it became known that he had been pressuring female staffers to become surrogate mothers to bear his child, which his wife was unable to do because of medical issues. Former Republican State Senator Debbie Lesko faces Democrat Hiral Tiperneni, an emergency room doctor, in a district in the Phoenix suburbs that is heavily Republican.

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[7 March 2018]More than two weeks have now passed since the Ecuadorian government of President Lenin Moreno made the decision to shut off WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange from the outside world by cutting his access to the Internet, cell phone and visitors.

For the last six years, Assange has been confined to Ecuadors embassy in London, where he was granted political asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden on trumped-up sexual assault allegations and ultimately to the United States, which is seeking to prosecute him for publishing documents that exposed war crimes.

Julian Assange

Under pressure from the United States and its imperialist allies, which are preparing to launch a new war in Syria that could result in a direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia, Ecuador cut Assange off from the Internet under the pretext that he was interfering in the politics of other countries. Silencing dissidents and those who question the official narrative has always been critical for the ruling elites in the lead-up to the launching of new wars.

The censorship of Assange has been met with an approving silence from the mainstream media, the pseudo-left and many human rights organizations. Very few in these upper- and middle-class circles have found it necessary or beneficial to stand up for the rights of the publisher and journalist.

Among those who have had the courage to speak out are documentary filmmaker and journalist John Pilger and barrister Julian Burnside, an Australian human rights and refugee advocate. They have written to the WSWS to denounce the silencing of Assange and demand the end to his persecution by the United States and its imperialist allies.

John Pilger

The United States, France and Britain appear to be on the brink of using their military power with breathtaking recklessness. An attack on Syria that further provokes Russia beckons world war. Yet, there is a malign silence, or the mantra of propaganda as news. Look below the surface and the evidence points to a traditional black ops campaign in collusion with or supported by the media, especially the respectable liberal media. A strikingly similar campaign led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the subsequent invasions of Libya and Syria, and the overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine.

John Pilger

The difference today is the intimidation of almost all mainstream dissent, the silencing of the few in newspapers and broadcast media. In my career as a journalist I have never known anything like it. I would call it a war on journalism, waged not by sinister purveyors of fake news but by the very institutions that claim journalisms highest mantle.

The most unbowed and courageous dissenters are WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. Remarkably, in spite of a vituperative smear campaign against him, Assange and WikiLeaks have continued to lift the rocks of criminal power and expose the lies that have sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths, along with the ties that bind organised jihadism with the likes of Hillary Clinton.

This is true journalism: telling the public what its rulers do behind their backs: calling great power to account without fear or favour. Of course, for those who walk on both sides of the street, who simultaneously snipe at and collaborate with corrupt power yet persist in describing themselves as left or as independent humanitarian agencies, Assanges courage is shaming. For the rest of us, it is an inspiration.

Julian Burnside

Julian Burnside

It is disturbing that Julian Assange has now been prevented from accessing the internet.

It is important to remember that America has been at the forefront of the campaign against Assange, since WikiLeaks published the Collateral Murder vision. It is also important to remember that Collateral Murder and other WikiLeaks publications have been seen by hundreds of millions of people because they have been republished by the mainstream press across the world.

No one in the mainstream media has been hounded the way Assange has been. There is not a shred of evidence that Assange has done anything but publish material: just as the mainstream media do every day.

Perhaps the Murdoch press should have their access to the internet cut, and we would see a genuine democratic response to the utterly undemocratic treatment of Assange.The National Union of Students (NUS) in Britain has sunk to new lows with its publication of a libelous report branding academic staff as the chief perpetrators of sexual harassment in higher education. The report, Power in the academy: staff sexual misconduct in UK higher education, was released last Wednesday.

Coming in the midst of a major strike at the universities, in which lecturers are already under intense hostile pressure from the media, the NUS might as well be a black propaganda department of the University UK (UUK) employers.

Leading nominally liberal newspapers published banner headlines denouncing university staff as sexual predators. The Independent ran with Sexual harassment of students by university academics is rife, survey suggests, while the Guardian screamed Sexual misconduct by UK university staff is rife, research finds. Murdochs Times, which led the demonisation of university staff during their strike, wrote gleefully, Academics are worst culprits, say students in sex harassment survey.

The 1752 Group, with whom the NUS partnered to conduct the study, describes itself as a lobby group and consultancy set up to address the issue of staff-student sexual harassment in higher education. Its spokespeople for the study, Hareem Ghani (NUS Womens Officer) and Anna Bull (1752 co-founder Group,) endorsed such assertions.

Ghani commented, We need to talk about the open secrets that plague academia, to challenge cultures of entitlement and stop abuses of power wherever they happen.

Bull said,  the evidence shows that this problem is systemic and of the most serious nature. It is particularly concerning that the majority of perpetrators of staff sexual misconduct appear to be academic staff

In truth, utterly inadequate so-called evidence is being used to justify such serious claims. A critical examination of the report and its methodology leads instead to the conclusion that it has been concocted to suit the narrative and interests of its creators.

Announcing the study last November, the NUS said, it would use the expertise of the 1752 Group to conduct a national survey of staff and students with an anticipated 3,000 responses as well as qualitative research examining how institutions respond to this issue.

This small survey pool was further skewed towards producing the desired results by the survey being specifically targeted at students who considered themselves victims of inappropriate sexual behaviour: The survey is for all current students, as well as ex-students who have experienced sexual misconduct. Would-be participants were then incentivised to participate by being entered into a draw to win five lots of 100.

According to the reports own methodology section, this sample was then deliberately weighted towards postgraduate students holding NUS cards, as previous research has shown that postgraduate students are particularly at risk of staff sexual misconduct.

Just 1,839 of the expected 3,000 students responded. Of these, 37 percent of respondents to the survey were postgraduates, though they make up only 24 percent of the student body.

Of these, just 16 students and former students (or 0.87 percent) claimed to have been the victims of actual sexual assault or rape.

The report itself acknowledges that, Due to lack of resources, it was not possible to make the sample representative. Therefore, this is not a prevalence study but a descriptive one, and this report does not make claims about the level of misconduct across students in the UK in general. Instead, this study captures the patterns of experiences of students.

This dishonest caveat, which is meant to allow the studys authors to simply ignore the results of their own study in favor of their own subjective criteria, contradicts the NUS and 1752 Groups own claims that the study shows that sexual harassment is systemic and of the most serious nature.

What are the patterns of experience of students so coyly referred to?

According to the report, 41 percent of respondents said they had faced unwelcome sexual advances and innuendo from university staff. Sixty five (65) students reported that they had experienced non-consensual sexual contact. Of the 1,535 respondents who are currently studying, one in eight said they had been touched by a member of staff in a way that made them uncomfortable.

All of these terms are deliberately vague. It is impossible to ascertain whether the reported experiences constitute a misstep in complex human relationships or are intentionally abusive.

The respondents themselves often made precisely this point. Of those who did not report sexual misconduct to their universities, exactly half did not do so either because they, in the words of the report, were unsure the behaviour was serious enough to report (the most common reason for not reporting) or did not recognise the behaviour as sexual misconduct (the second most common reason).

Further elaborations from students cited in the study include:

 It did not make me feel uncomfortable as we were joking so I did not need to report it

 I didnt feel threatened, just awkward, so didnt feel it necessary [to report]

 I felt uncomfortable about it but didnt think it was worth reporting. It was not a very big deal

 It wasnt that serious, a sharp no sufficed

 I dealt with it myself at the time

For the researchers, however, While such humorous incidents may not be received negatively by individuals, they can also contribute to a wider culture of sexism that normalises more severe transgressions.

These incidences are conflated by the media into incendiary statements typified by the Guardian: Sexual misconduct by university staff is rife on campuses, with more than four in 10 students reporting that they have suffered unwelcome advances and assault, including sexualised comments, inappropriate touching and rape, research shows.

What is motivating this filthy attack on lecturers?

The 1752 Group comprises academics and business people specialising in issues of gender relations and discrimination. The group takes its name from the 1,752 allocated to the organisations founding event in 2015.

Perhaps a name change is in order? If the same approach were applied today, the organisations title would run into the tens to hundreds of thousands.

The 1752 Group is involved in a number of well-funded research schemes. These include a project with the University of Portsmouth, looking into current university sexual policies and working with focus groups of those who have experienced sexual misconduct. This will take a share of a 2.45 million fund given by the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) Catalyst Fund to address sexual harassment. A further 50,000 has been allocated to the university to carry out a culture change programme.

1752 is also drawing on a second HEFCE fund (of 1.8 million), to tackle hate crime and online harassment, through another research project at the University of York. This is to develop an intersectional approach to training on sexual harassment, violence and hate crime.

Another up to 10,000 has been made available to the organisation through a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant into what universities can learn from workplace policies on preventing sexual misconduct.

The 1752 Group also works in close partnership with the international law firm, specialising in discrimination cases, McAllister Olivarius.

Its listed strategic priorities include the setting up of an independent national office for sexual misconduct advocacy and support, implementing an enforceable national code of conduct that clarifies professional boundaries, ensuring all institutions record data and make publicly available reports on all allegations of sexual misconduct and implementing comprehensive sector-wide and institution-level cultural change.

The purpose of this work, and of the manufactured report into academic staff, is twofold and taken straight from the reactionary #MeToo playbook.

First, by whipping up hysteria over supposedly systemic sexual harassment, an environment is created in which ample funds are made available for campaigning and research organisations, especially their upper echelons. Second, the strict policing of sexual relations that results from such campaigns provides leveragethrough the threat of sex scandals and witch-huntsthat aspiring academics can use against their colleagues in the professional rat-race.

The politics of the NUS aligns perfectly with this orientation. As a stepping-stone to well-paid roles in organisations like the 1752 Group, the careerists who make up the NUS are adept at using identity-based politics (be it gender, race or sexuality) to divert from their role in facilitating the marketisation of education.

The specious nature of the report, and its timing, makes clear that the NUS has allied itself with the government, vice-chancellors, right-wing media and big business against university staff fighting to defend their conditions, and the mass of students that support them.The US, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia and other American allies internationally continue to threaten military action against the Assad government in Syria over the unsubstantiated and dubious allegations that its armed forces used chemical weapons last weekend in the now re-captured city of Douma.

In response, the Syrian military, backed by Russian and Iranian forces, along with Shiite-based militias from Iraq and Lebanon, are preparing their defences and a potential counter-offensive, that could include attacks on US and allied forces in the Mediterranean, the Gulf states and Iraq.

Syrian forces are reportedly on high alert, and moving aircraft and other key military assets to bases that are protected by advanced Russian-manned missile defence systems. Senior government personnel, including Bashar al-Assad and his family, have been secured in safe locations out of fear of US assassination attempts.

Vassily Nebenzia, Russias ambassador to the UN, yesterday hit back at allegations of a chemical attack. Our military, radiological, biological and chemical unit was on site with the alleged chemical accident [in Douma] and it confirmed that there were no chemical substances found on the ground, he stated.

The Russian army has dispatched military police squads to protect the scene, ahead of Moscows proposed inspection of the site, and verification that the claims are false, by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)the Netherlands-based agency established in 1997 to monitor the international ban on chemical weapons.

Contradicting the Russian and Syrian government denials that any chemical weapons were used, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is continuing to assertbased on information from its local partnersthat up to 500 people were sickened by toxic chemicals and as many as 43 died. The WHO press release provided no details concerning its local partners.

The original source of the video purporting to show victims of a chemical weapon attack was the US-funded White Helmetspart of the anti-Assad and Islamist-dominated rebel militias who were defeated in Douma and agreed to withdraw just days after the alleged incident.

A leading Russian politician aligned with President Vladimir Putin, Andrei Krasnov, declared yesterday that if the allegations of a chemical attack are used as the pretext for an attack on Syria, it will be viewed not just as an act of aggression but as a war crime of the Western coalition.

Russias ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, yesterday stressed Moscows repeated warnings that it will retaliate against any attack that threatens its personnel in Syria. He told Lebanese television: Russia will execute the statement of its president related to any US aggression against Syria, knocking down American missiles and striking at the sources of fire.

President Donald Trump responded to Zasypkins widely reported remarks with a 7 am tweet on Wednesday. He asserted: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!

Behind such rhetoric, however, the US and its allies are acutely aware they are about to cross a Rubicon, into a devastating war across the Middle East that could cripple world oil production, a potential conflict with nuclear-armed Russia, and mass anti-war opposition at home.

The former head of the British Joint Forces Command, General Sir Richard Barrons, warned that the Russian statements meant that they are going to try and sink ships, sink submarines and shoot aircraft out of the skythats war.

According to French reports, a Russian fighter-bomber, fully armed with anti-ship missiles, flew over a French frigate at combat altitude earlier in the week, in a pointed reminder that the US and allied warships deployed off the Syrian coast can be targeted and destroyed.

The Iranian government has publicly vowed to support Syria against foreign aggression. An unknown number of Iranian military personnel are embedded with Syrian Army units. Thousands more are operating as part of Iraqi Army and militia units, in many cases in close proximity to American military personnel, mercenary contractors and their bases in Iraq.

Israel, which is believed to be responsible for a missile attack this week on a Syrian airbase that killed a number of Iranian advisors, has placed its military on high alert. Conveying the fears in the Israeli establishment, its former head of intelligence, Efraim Halevy, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: You have all the players locked in battle in a very, very small area of land. We have a gradual escalation in the region and the question is, who is going to blink first?

Trumps administration faces a barrage of demands from the American political and media establishment that it not blink. Trump has effectively been warned that the already concerted efforts to end his presidency will be dramatically escalated if he fails to order some form of major attack on Syriaregardless of the consequences. A significant factor in the calls for war is the desire in ruling circles for some means to divert and suppress the burgeoning wave of strikes by teachers, which threatens to trigger a broader movement of the working class against decades of falling wages and deteriorating social conditions.

In Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May, under no less intense pressure than Trump, has felt compelled to call a cabinet meeting today to try to get agreement that British forces will take part in any US-led attacks without any parliamentary votea politically-fraught decision.

The 2013 vote by the British parliament against involvement in a US-led attack on Syria is widely blamed by analysts for the Obama administrations backdown from taking any action. May, without even waiting for cabinet approval, reportedly ordered British submarines to join US, French and British warships already in the eastern Mediterranean.

The French government of President Emmanuel Macron, also confronted with mounting strikes and student protests, appears to have provided the US with a guarantee of French military participation. Internationally, other US allies are extending diplomatic support. These include Australia, Canada, and a number of European Union states, headed by Germany.Chinese President Xi Jinping offered virtually no concessions to US trade demands in a major speech delivered to the Boao Forum for Asia on Tuesday. Xi pledged a new phase of opening up and said China would broaden market access for foreign financial companies, reduce limits on foreign investment in the auto, shipbuilding and aviation industries, and lower tariffs on cars.

But most of the measures announced in the speech had been flagged earlier and there was no commitment as to how or when they would be implemented. He also said China would expand protection of intellectual property, but again without specific details.

With his administration under escalating attack in the US and besieged on all sides, Trump was eager to claim progress in his trade measures against China.

Very thankful for President Xi of Chinas kind words on tariffs and automobile barriers also, his enlightenment on intellectual property and technology transfers. We will make great progress together! he tweeted.

Xi did not mention Trump by name or comment on the moves by the US to impose tariffs on $150 billion worth of goods in support of demands that China reduce its trade surplus with the US and cease its alleged appropriation of US intellectual property through technology transfers, the buying up of US companies and outright theft.

Insofar as he referred to the US measures it was in very broad terms, seeking to present China as the champion of an open trading system.

Human society is facing a major choice to open or to close, to go forward or backward, he told the gathering on the resort island of Hainan, mainly comprised of investors. In todays world, the trend is peace and cooperation and the Cold War mentality and zero-sum-game thinking are outdated.

Without directly citing Trumps America First program, he said, Paying attention to ones own community can only lead into a wall. And we can achieve win-win results only by insisting on peaceful development and working together.

Xis remarks were not directed so much to the US as to Europe, with the aim of convincing the European Union not to join the US against China, but rather to stand with it against Trumps measures, which threaten to wreck the global trading order.

Since the US administration initiated its trade war measures last month, the essential driving forces behind its aggression have come into ever sharper focus. The central issue is not primarily the Chinese trade surplus against which Trump rails, but Chinas plan under its Made in China 2025 policy to become a major source of high-tech development in robotics, artificial intelligence, communications, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.

As the comment piece by White House National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro published in the Financial Times on Monday made clear, this is regarded as an existential threat to both US economic and military supremacy. Navarro directly linked the tariff measures directed against China to the US National Security Strategy, issued last December, which declared that the US had entered a new era of great power competition with revisionist states, singling out Russia and China.

However, China has made clear that US demands that it pull back from its high-tech drive are not going to be accommodated.

Bloomberg has reported that Liu He, a vice premier overseeing economics and a key figure in developing the Chinese response to the US measures, told a group of officials last Thursday that Beijing had rejected a US demand that it stop subsidizing industries connected to the Made in China 2025 project. The discussion took place before Trumps announcement that he had asked US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to consider the imposition of tariffs on a further $100 billion worth of Chinese exports. That followed Chinas threats to impose tariffs on US agricultural products after the earlier threat by the US against $50 billion worth of exports.

The issue of technology is gaining more attention in commentary on the developing trade war.

Speaking to Bloomberg television, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Robert Kaplan, warned that the trade issues between the US and China would not get resolved soon. While it was too early to judge how the conflict would affect the US economy, the rhetoric, if it goes on for too long at this level, could have a chilling effect, he said.

Kaplan called for direct private conversations at the top level, saying that intellectual property and technology issues could take years to resolve.

While financial markets have responded with an upswing to the positive rhetoric of the administration and the assertions that so far nothing has been done and a full-blown conflict will be averted, the underlying issues are irresolvable through negotiations.

In an article published on April 9, Financial Times journalist Shawn Donnan noted that it was very easy to see how a trade war could get started, saying it is hard to see how one can be averted now that the threats and counter-threats have been made.

For Donald Trump not to proceed with his threatened tariffs if China does not offer meaningful change to its intellectual property regime and economic model, he continued, would be an act of geopolitical weakness. Likewise, for Xi Jinping to bow to the threat of tariffs and now carry out the substantive reforms the Trump administration is demanding would be an act of political self-harm. There is no way out that does not involve conflict or some sort of capitulation.

He made the significant point that action against China did not begin with Trump. The Obama administration had sought to build alliances against China outside the framework of the World Trade Organisation in order to use those alliances to embed new rules for the global economy that Beijing would be forced to follow.

On his first day in office, Trump had scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the key alliance-building initiatives of the Obama administration, in favour of sharp confrontations to fight existential battles. But both administrations had the same strategic innovation war with China in mind and this conflict is yet another reason a trade war appears more likely than not.

Financial Times economics columnist Martin Wolf turned to the longer-term historical and geo-political implications of the conflict in a comment published yesterday. If China and the US failed to maintain reasonably cooperative relationships, he wrote, they have the capacity to wreak havoc not only upon each other, but upon the entire world.

Pointing to the military implications, he wrote that China and the US were rivals on two dimensions, power and ideology, and this combination might remind one of the clash with the Axis powers during the Second World War or the Cold War against the Soviet Union. China was very different, but it was also potentially more potent.

While he did not elaborate, Wolf pointed to the economic decline and consequent erosion of political leadership of the US that are key factors in the trade war drive.

It was right to insist that China abide by commitments it had made, he said, but then so must the US and the rest of the world.

China is not going to feel compelled to abide by agreed rules when pressed by any country that treats those rules with contempt, he wrote. This was a reference to the fact that it is the US that is declaring it can longer work under the rules of the World Trade Organisation and the system of international trading relationships it played the major role in developing. China was not the threat.

The threat is the decadence of the west, very much including the USthe prevalence of rent extraction as a way of economic life [a reference to the parasitism that characterises much of the US economy], the indifference to the fate of much of its citizenry, the indifference to the truth, and the sacrifice of long-term investment to private and public consumption.

And in a jibe against US policy over the past decade, he wrote that it was a tragedy that the best way we could find to escape from a financial crisis was via monetary policies that risked promoting new bubbles.

On the issue of technology, he wrote that every nation had the right to develop. The US can huff and puff about Chinese theft of intellectual property. But every catch-up nation, very much the US in the 19th century, seized the ideas of others and built upon them.

The idea that intellectual property was sacrosanct was wrong, and while the US could protect its intellectual property, any idea that it is entitled (or indeed able) to prevent China from innovating its way to prosperity is mad.

Economic madness it certainly is.

But contrary to the underlying assumption of Wolfderived in the main from John Maynard Keynes, who held that economic crises arose from muddled thinking rather than from the objective contradictions of capitalism itselfconflicts cannot be resolved if only reason and logic prevail, because the profit system does not operate on this basis.

The madness of trade warand the implicit and ever growing threat of military conflict, to which Wolf himself has pointeddoes not arise from Trumps head or from that of Obama before him.

It is an expression of the objective contradiction between modern-day globalised production and the division of the world by the archaic and reactionary system of nation-states and great powers, each of which seeks to enhance its position by striving for profits and markets at the expense of its rivals, threatening to plunge the world into economic catastrophe and world war in the process.

This contradiction cannot be resolved by the application of reason and logic within the framework of the capitalist system. That is impossible. Reason and rationality demand the ending of the capitalist profit and nation-state system and the establishment of international socialism, which alone can assure the harmonious development of the productive forces, including vast scientific and technological advances.Chkalov is a small village in Armenias Lori Province, named after a Soviet and Russian aircraft test pilot Valery Chkalov since 1939.

Village Mayor Roman Shakaryan says the village has 38 households, with only 14 pupils attending the village primary school.

Roman Shakaryan says that the village, with a history of 250 years, didnt have a drinking water system before 2015, when a 23.7km-long water line was built due to a 35-million-dram investment.

Nowadays, the village is covered with blossomed trees, but its not easy to find people in the streets to talk to.

We exchange a few words with Knkush Sargsyan, one of the villagers, who says that living in Chkalov is not easy, but they are optimistic and hospitable.

The villagers are mainly engaged in cattle breeding. Knkush complains that despite putting much effort into cattle breeding, the income is quite low. Its mostly women taking care of cattle in the village.

Alvard Hakobyan

75-year-old Alvard Hakobyan from Chkalov raises ten members of her family by cattle breeding. The family has thirteen cows and eight calves.

"We have ten pigs, sheep, goats, twenty chickens, as well as a donkey and a horse for transportation," her son Artavazd says.

All family members have their own responsibilities. Artavazdtakes care of pasture issues. Two of his sons help with agricultural production. Cow milk is filtered, and they use it to prepare butter and different types of cheese. Artavazd's wife, Hamest, is busy at home, and she looks after Alvards blind sister.

In May, the animals will be taken to mountains.

"Its mostly me taking care of livestock. Whoever wants to quickly get older, should head to the mountains. Women's health is deteriorating in the mountains. Physical labor is quite heavy in cattle breeding, especially for making dairy products, Alvard says.

She says that despite the quantity of the livestock, they hardly earn enough to live. However, she claims that Chkalov is a bright village, the air is clean, and people are very good.

KnkushSargsyan's husband had an accident last year, and now its mostly her son Varuzhan helping. Knkush sells agricultural products in residential buildings in Vanadzor.

Apres

Her husband Apres says that they spend four months a year in the mountains. They have nine cows now, since their 36 pigs died last year from a plague.

"The government has not thought of helping Apres. The country is a good one, and I love my country, but this government says Apres.

The budget of the Chkalov community in 2018 is 5.162 million drams. Of this, 4.5 million drams go topay municipal wages.

This budget is not enough to develop the village. According to the 5-year program of Community Development 2017-2021, village mayor Roman Shakaryan expects to improve the socio-economic conditions of the population. The village mayor believes its important to have a Cultural House and restore and expand street lighting network. The community budget does not have the means to solve these problems.

Roman Shakaryan

Shakaryan considers the gasification of Chkalov as a priority, together with the creation of a kindergarten. At present, there are 17 children of kindergarten age in Chkalov.

The enlargement of the community in Chkalov should take place in October this year. The village will join Dsegh community.In the aftermath of Mondays FBI raid on President Trumps personal lawyer and confidante Michael Cohen, the White House appears to be increasingly isolated. Media speculation is growing about possible impeachment, especially if the Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives in the November midterm elections, along with the possibility of indictments against both Cohen and Trump himself.

The extraordinary action, triggered by a referral from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has secured Cohens computer, cell phone and personal financial records, as well as a trove of emails and other communications for Muellers investigation into alleged Russian meddling and Trump campaign collusion. Cohen boasts of being Trumps fixer and, according to the New York Times, privately compares himself to Tom Hagen, the consigliere to the Corleone Mafia family in The Godfather film trilogy.

Mueller, the Democratic Party and the anti-Trump factions in the ruling class and state with which they are allied, as well as Trump himself, know very well that this material will include ample evidence of illegal activity by the billionaire real estate speculator and reality TV personality. Trump personifies the American financial oligarchy, with its backwardness, brutality and criminality.

A significant number of prominent Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, Senators Lindsey Graham, John Thune and others, have warned Trump not to go through with his new threats to fire Mueller, and only a few far-right Republican lawmakers have come to the presidents defense.

Senate Democratic Minority Leader Charles Schumer took to the floor of the Senate Tuesday to warn Trump against firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the Mueller investigation. The ousting of Rosenstein would be the first step in shutting down the special counsels probe. Schumer said, Mr. President, any attempt to remove Rod J. Rosenstein will create the exact same constitutional crisis as if you fired Special Counsel Mueller.

Both porn star Stormy Daniels and Trump lawyer Cohen said they were cooperating with federal investigators, and Cohen gave an interview with CNN in which he commended the FBI agents who conducted the raid against him as courteous and respectful.

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan chose the aftermath of the FBI raid to announce that he would not be running for reelection in November. This is widely seen as a sign that the Republicans anticipate a Democratic victory in the fall that will secure the Democratic Party control of the House. Asked about Trumps threats to fire Mueller, Ryan said he had been reassured by the White House that there were no such plans.

That Mueller is moving toward an indictment of Trump on charges unrelated to the concocted narrative of Russian meddling in the 2016 election is indicated by the reported target of the raids carried out on Cohens office and residences. The FBI agents executed warrants seeking records relating to hush money paid during the 2016 election to Daniels and a former Playboy playmate who claim to have had affairs with Trump. Cohen has acknowledged that he personally paid Daniels $130,000 12 days before the presidential election to secure her silence. He claims Trump was unaware of the payment and the president himself has said he knew nothing about it.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the agents were also seeking records related to the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced during the election campaign in which Trump made vulgar statements about groping women. It thus appears that Mueller is escalating his legal assault by honing in on the sex scandal angle, long a favorite means by which the American ruling class fights out its internal battles.

The actual policy issues driving the political warfare in Washington center on fundamental questions of US imperialist foreign policy. The Democrats and a section of Republicans, fronting for the dominant factions of the intelligence establishment, oppose Trump for being soft on Russia and insufficiently aggressive in carrying out the US military intervention in Syria. Their anti-Russia propaganda is aimed at whipping up a war fever and at the same time justifying Internet censorship and the suppression of political dissent in the name of fighting Russian-inspired fake news.

They do not oppose Trumps terror campaign against immigrants, his massive expansion of the military budget and stepped-up militarization of American society, his tax cuts for the rich or his attacks on social programs for workers and poor people.

Muellers move against Trumps innermost circle is an expression of a loss of confidence within the ruling class in Trumps ability to manage their foreign policy affairs, but also, crucially, his ability to deal with an increasingly tense internal situation. The upsurge in the class struggle, in the form of teachers strikes in a whole series of states and a growing rank-and-file rebellion against the corporatist trade unions, is a huge factor in driving the political crisis of American capitalism to a new level of intensity.

The increasing ferocity of the political conflict within the ruling class was reflected in the media response to the FBI raid. A reporter at Tuesdays White House press briefing asked if Trump was considering stepping down, prompting a snap reply from Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that the question was ridiculous.

The Morning Joe news program on the cable TV channel MSNBC on Wednesday began with a series of alternate shots of Nixon denouncing the Watergate investigation as a witch hunt with similar statements by Trump on the Mueller probe, implying that Trumps days in office were similarly numbered.

With a combination of triumph and euphoria, the New York Times celebrated the raid on Cohen in the lead editorial of its April 11 edition (The Law Is Coming, Mr. Trump). The Times in effect called the commander in chief and head of state of the United States a gangster. It wrote:

Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, hes gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado. Those methods may be proving to have their limits when they are applied from the Oval Office.

The Wall Street Journal distanced itself from the White House, declaring in its lead editorial Wednesday: Washington now seems headed toward a fight-to-the-end between the president and his enemies  Mr. Cohen knows as much about Mr. Trumps personal and financial affairs as anyone, and prosecutors could use an indictment to coerce his cooperation against the president.

It continued: Never underestimate the presidents capacity to hurt himself. But firing Mr. Mueller wouldnt stop the investigation, though it would cost him Republican support and probably guarantee his impeachment if Democrats take the House in November  Mr. Trump cant control Mr. Mueller, but he can control himself. That may be the only way he can save his presidency.Sweden has charged a 49-year-old Tibetan man with spying on fellow exiles on behalf of Beijing.

The man -- who has not been named -- is suspected of gathering information about exiles' family relationships, addresses, political affiliations and meetings with the intent to "pass this information to representatives of the Chinese state," authorities said Wednesday, according to CNN affiliate Expressen.

Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist said the man's alleged spying occurred between July 2015 and February 2017, and the information was transmitted to Chinese officials in Poland and Finland.

Ljungqvist said the man was himself of Tibetan descent and had been spying "for a long time, and may have caused or may cause a large number of persons serious harm."

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement Thursday it was "not aware of the situation." Swedish authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jamyang Choedon, president of the Tibetan Community in Sweden organization, told CNN many in the community were left feeling "very, very scared" by the news.

"We were all shocked," she said. "There are only about 140 Tibetans in Sweden. That the (Chinese government) is sending a spy for just 140 people is almost comical."

But many exiles still have family in Tibet, she added, and they could be at risk if they were deemed to be engaged in activities critical of Beijing.

Swedish citizen still in custody

Alleged spying by China on Swedish residents could further damage relations between Stockholm and Beijing, which were already damaged by the continued detention of Swedish citizen Gui Minhai.

Gui, one of several Hong Kong-based booksellers detained by China since 2014, was seized by plainclothes police on a train in January in front of Swedish diplomats.

"The brutal intervention in January against a Swedish support operation was conducted in spite of repeated assurances from the Chinese authorities that Mr. Gui was free at that time," Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom said in February after Beijing confirmed it had detained Gui.

"The current situation also raises questions about the application of the rule of law, including the prohibition of arbitrary deprivation of liberty. We demand that our citizen be given the opportunity to meet Swedish diplomatic and medical staff, and that he be released so that he can be reunited with his daughter and family."

Gui, 53, who wrote and published numerous titles critical of the Communist leadership, was traveling to Beijing to be examined by a Swedish doctor at the embassy when he was taken, his daughter Angela told Radio Sweden last month.

Cyber espionage

Swedish media reported on the arrest of a man last year for similar spying activities.

Tibetan exiles in Sweden have long complained of surveillance and harassment from China, which regards the community with suspicion, accusing them of supporting separatists within Tibet.

The Tibetan community in India -- where the majority of exiles live -- has been targeted for over a decade by cyber espionage operations most analysts link to China.

In January, the Toronto-based Citizen Lab uncovered a hacking operation that "ran for 19 months, and which targeted the Tibetan community, and potentially other groups including ethnic minorities, social movements related to China, a media group, and government agencies in South and Southeast Asia."

Choedon said she was aware of the hacking risk, but said it was just one element in a broader intimidation campaign against Tibetans abroad.

"Even though they are living in a free country, still they cannot really enjoy their full free democratic rights," she said.Chinese President Xi Jinping oversaw the largest naval parade in his country's history Thursday, as China concluded two days of military drills in the hotly contested South China Sea, a massive show of strength amid growing tensions with the United States.

At least 10,000 personnel took part in drills, which involved 48 naval vessels and 76 fighter jets, said the country's Defense Ministry.

Xi, dressed in camouflage military fatigues and speaking aboard the Chinese destroyer Changsha, called for further modernization efforts, and underlined his goal of transforming the country's navy into a "world-class force" under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

China's only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, took part in the parade with a display of J-15 fighter jets under Xi's observation.

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has overseen considerable growth in Chinese naval power. Whereas previously the country's navy was largely defensive and confined to its immediate coastal waters, today it boasts significant "blue-water" capabilities, meaning it can project force into areas such as the Indian and Pacific oceans.

But it's the South China Sea that represents the biggest potential challenge. The Chinese government claims a huge swath of territory across the sea, overlapping with claims of the Philippines and Vietnam, among others.

The massive PLA navy drills in the South China Sea sent a clear signal to the other claimants in the region, as well as the US, Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies' Maritime Security Program, told CNN.

"The PLA Navy is there and they're there to stay," he said.

Taiwan drills announced

In a foreshadowing of future drills, the Fujian provincial maritime authority on Thursday announced live-fire naval exercises for April 18 in the Taiwan Strait, the first Chinese naval exercise in waters off the self governing island since September 2015.

The announcement of drills in the Taiwan Strait comes after a month of growing tensions between China, Taiwan and the United States.

Taiwan has been self-governed since a bloody civil war ended in 1949. Though both Taipei and Beijing view the island as part of China, neither government recognizes the legitimacy of the opposing side, with Beijing warning that it could retake the island by force if necessary.

The US, which provides arms to the island, announced in the past week it would allow American manufacturers to market submarine technology to Taiwan.

In March, US President Donald Trump signed the Taiwan travel act to encourage visits by officials in both Washington and Taipei, triggering a stream a thanks from the Taiwanese government and recriminations from Beijing.

Xi had a blunt message for Taiwan during a nationalistic speech at the conclusion of the China's National People's Congress in March, where he warned against any attempts to "split the motherland."

"Every inch of our great motherland's territory cannot be separated from China," he said, drawing loud applause from his audience inside the Great Hall of the People.

US tensions over trade

The Chinese exercises are taking place amid rising tensions between Beijing and Washington over trade, but analysts have also expected the Trump administration to harden its policy on the South China Sea.

A US aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, arrived Wednesday in Manila, Philippines, for what was described as a "scheduled port visit."

The US Navy recently conducted several "freedom of navigation" operations with warships sailing near increasingly militarized man-made Chinese islands in the South China Sea, triggering strong protests from Beijing.

Earlier in the week, Xi gave a much anticipated speech at the annual Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan province on the northern edge of the South China Sea.

The forum is the Chinese equivalent of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, involving high-level talks among economic leaders.

Speaking Tuesday, Xi promised a new phase of economic "opening up" from China amid threats of a possible trade war with the United States. He also said China would stick to "the path of peaceful development" going forward.

Holding such large drills directly on the back of their economic forum sent a clear message to the world, Koh said.

"This is to highlight China is not just an economic power, but also a military and maritime power," he said.INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (WTTV)  Indianapolis Metropolitan police have arrested two people in connection with the shooting death of 1-year-old Malaysia Robson.

The department said Wednesday that two men were taken into custody for their alleged involvement in the shooting. Darrin Banks, 27, and Brian Palmer, 29, were arrested on preliminary charges of murder and aggravated assault, police said.

A big thank you to the community for all their help and patience, IMPD tweeted about the case Wednesday morning.

Police said the mugshots of both suspects are from unrelated arrests. IMPD hasnt commented on the circumstances surrounding their arrests in Robsons death.

According to IMPD, the little girl and her 19-year-old aunt were hit when someone fired shots into their home in the 3500 block of N. Wittfield St. on March 29. Malaysia died from her injuries while her aunt, Ana Fox, was wounded.

The little girls family responded with a statement about the arrests:

We have been waiting for this day since Malaysia was taken from us and are very happy these two men are now off the streets.

Malaysias family members

The shooting outraged the Indianapolis community, and family members said dozens of shots were fired into the home. Investigators said the shooting may have stemmed from an argument on social media.

Malaysia was laid to rest last week following a funeral at New Beginnings Fellowship Church.

The Rev. Charles Harrison with the Ten Point Coalition thanked IMPD for its work in solving the case.

We cannot tolerate this kind of senseless violence in our city, Harrison wrote on Twitter after news of the arrests broke.

This story was originally posted by WTTV CBS4indy.comCRAWFORD COUNTY, Ill. (WTHI) - Through the doors of an emergency room, survivors of sexual assault can seek help.

"We did have several last year, more than usual," said ER Nurse Tabitha Seaney.

Seaney, a registered nurse at Crawford Memorial Hospital, says they typically see a couple of cases per year when it comes to sexual assault.

According to the Illinois Department of Health, nearly 4,500 people sought emergency room treatment for suspected, alleged and confirmed sexual assault in 2016.

It's a large number, but some say that's not all of the cases out there.

"I think there's probably a lot more than what's reported," Seaney said.

"Too many people are scared of the stigma," said Registered Nurse Shelly Hillard, director of emergency services, "They just really don't even know who to turn to."

House Bill 5245 is looking to change that. The proposal would require hospitals to have a specially trained medical provider available within the first 90 minutes of a patient's arrival. The provider would have to go through training for sexual assault examinations and treatment. Hospitals would be required to implement the change by 2023.

"It will be very difficult to make sure we have a pool big enough to maintain some of the requirements that are coming up," said Chief Nursing Officer Tammy Fralicker, "but we're going to make sure we do everything we can."

Fralicker says it takes about 12 months to complete training for a sexual assault nurse examiner, or SANE nurse.

Because Crawford Memorial is a smaller facility in a rural community, Fralicker says it will be difficult to get nurses trained by the proposed timeline.

"Our biggest challenge is finding the training available to our nurses," Fralicker said, "A lot of it we can send off for training, but it's hands-on training. You have to have that interaction with the patient in order to be able to become a competent SANE nurse, and we just don't have that available in this area."

Currently, Crawford Memorial has one SANE-trained nurse.

"We also have one that is going to begin her training," Fralicker added, "Certification is the next level, which requires a lot more, extensive involvement. We don't have the cases here that they would be able to maintain a certification. So our nurses will become SANE-trained."

Some say they hope the new requirements would help see sexual assault cases through to the end, as well as encourage more survivors to come forward for treatment.

"It breaks down silos between hospitals and the police department, but also the patient too," Hillard said, "That they feel comfortable enough to come to some place to be able to say 'I need help'."

"I just want to make the patient feel safe and give them their control back," Seaney said.

According to the Illinois General Assembly website, HB 5245 is in the House and slated for a 2nd reading on the calendar.Burning coal used to be the primary way power companies generated the electricity needed to cool homes, run factories and brighten streets. But US electricity production is changing dramatically, as companies rely more on natural gas and renewable energy sources.

"I don't think coal is the future. I really don't," Geisha Williams, CEO of PG&E Corp., tells CNN's Poppy Harlow in a new episode of Boss Files. "I think coal played an important role. I don't believe it's economical. It's certainly not as clean."

Natural gas is cheaper and cleaner, she says. That's why PG&E, which is California's largest utility, now has three natural gas power plants and zero coal plants, Williams told Harlow.

The $30 billion firm, which employs some 20,000 employees, once used coal to generate electricity. But now it delivers some of the nation's cleanest power using natural gas and renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar and geothermal energy. Nearly 70% of PG&E's electricity comes from sources that are greenhouse-gas free.

In recent years, natural gas has surpassed coal as the leading source of electricity in the US. In 2017, natural gas accounted for nearly 32% of US power generation, up from about 22% a decade earlier, according to federal data. Coal, meanwhile, now accounts for 30%, after falling from 49% over the same time period.

Despite President Trump's promises that he would bring back coal jobs, the industry saw a net gain of only 400 jobs during his first year in office.

California still uses some coal to produce electricity, but barely any. The state's move away from coal is driven by its aggressive environmental goals.

PG&E, the parent company of Pacific Gas and Electric which serves some 16 million customers in the state, aims to boost the amount of power it gets from renewable sources like wind and solar energy from 33% to 50% by 2030, says Williams.

"We'll bank 50% by 2030. I'm confident of that, and actually, we've taken on a higher goal and said we want to be at 55% by 2031. I'm confident that we can do it. We have to do it," Williams declares.

Williams acknowledges that a large percentage of President Trump's base comes from coal country and voted for him because he promised to revive America's coal industry.

She said California's success with renewable energy can show them a different way. While not every state has the same wealth of natural resources, she believes California can serve as a model of how it can be done.

Related: Former refugee is now the first Latina CEO of a major US company

"I really believe it can be an example to the rest of the country in how to do this properly," Williams tells Harlow. "Our reliability has never been better. Our customer bills are 20% to 30% lower than the national average. Our system is safe, we've created jobs, our economy is booming."

She says it's up to the states to push for new plants fueled by renewable energy.

"When states are ready to go to higher levels of renewables, the market's going to be there, the costs are going to be more competitive, and it's going be more reliable," Williams said.COLUMBUS, Miss. (WTVA) - A Columbus woman is accused of stabbing another person and biting a nurse at the hospital.

Emma Jean Conner, 47, is being held in the Lowndes County jail for the April 10 incident. Police say the incident happend some time near 10 p.m. at her residence on 6th Avenue North.

Conner is accused of stabbing another person in the neck following an argument.

Police responded to the call and both the victim and Conner were taken to Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle. The condition of the stabbing victim is unknown at this time.

Police say Conner bit a staff nurse while in the emergency room. She may face additional charges for this.

Her bond has not been set.Preliminary vote results released by Azerbaijans Central Electoral Commission (CEC) show that Ilham Aliyev has been re-elected president by winning 86% of the ballots cast in yesterdays snap election.

This will be Aliyevs fourth term as president of Azerbaijan.

"I am grateful to my people for voting for our achievements and success," Aliyev said on state television, soon after the election commission announced the partial results. "People voted for stability, security, and development."

Azerbaijans main opposition parties boycotted the election.

Voter turnout was 74.51% according to the CEC.

900 international observers were on hand to monitor the voting, including those from the OSCE and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).

Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the election as not providing a viable choice for the voters.Today, April 12, is the 13th day of the Im Kayl (My Step) march.

The marchers are on their way from Abovyan city to Yerevan's Liberty Square.

"We have reached the last 20 km of our march. Tonight we will camp in Ptghni, and we will reach Yerevan tomorrow, around noon, stated march organizer Nikol Pashinyan on his Facebook page.

He added that they expect their supporters to join them in the north of Yerevan around noon tomorrow, to walk together to the Liberty Square to prevent outgoing Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan from becoming the countrys next prime minister.

Arayik Harutyunyan, a member of the Yerevan Municipal Council, said that he learnt that hashtags calling for boycotting classes were painted around the YSU territory. Harutyunyan welcomed this initiative, saying that students should show their position.

"We are just 16 kilometers away from Yerevan, and we started today's march with traditional tree planting. We plant a citizen's tree: citizens victory is the most important mission in this campaign," said Pashinyan during the tree planting.

Afterwards, Pashinyan addressed all the communities of Armenia, asking them to participate in the rally tomorrow.WORLAND  The Worland High School will be hosting their annual Worland Warriors Pageant at the Worland Middle School auditorium at 6:30 p.m. this Friday.

WORLAND  The Worland High School will be hosting their annual Worland Warriors Pageant at the Worland Middle School auditorium at 6:30 p.m. this Friday.

The pageant was originally scheduled for Monday but there was a conflict.

Student Council sponsors this fundraiser for the Wyoming Make-a-Wish foundation every year, using their funds from homecoming, according to advisor Christy Vickers.

The pageant has a male and female student from each class from the high school compete for the title of Warrior and Miss Warrior.

Vickers has been the advisor for four years.

Alongside this fundraiser, student council will also be holding a volleyball tournament April 24.Armenian Ministry of Defense Press Secretary Artzrun Hovhannisyan says that the Azerbaijani military opened fire on a civilian truck today near Baghanis, a community in Tavoush Province.

Hovhannisyan posted the news on his Facebook page, but made no mention as to casualties.Source: Xinhua| 2017-11-14 21:10:35|Editor: Mengjie

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (L), also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, shakes hands with President of the Lao National Assembly Pany Yathotu during their meeting in Vientiane, Laos, Nov. 14, 2017. (Xinhua/Lan Hongguang)

VIENTIANE, Nov. 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed the hope on Tuesday that the legislative bodies of China and Laos can step up exchanges to contribute to the good neighborly and friendly relations and all-round cooperation between the two countries.

When meeting with President of the Lao National Assembly Pany Yathotou, Xi spoke highly of the work of the top Lao legislature in developing China-Laos relations.

The exchanges and cooperation between China's National People's Congress and the Lao National Assembly constitute an important component in the comprehensive strategic cooperation between the two countries, Xi said.

He said he hopes that the legislative bodies of the two sides can maintain the tradition of high-level contacts, learn from each other in state governance, development planning and legislation experience, and enhance coordination and cooperation on multilateral occasions, thus making new contributions to the building of socialist countries ruled by law and to the China-Laos relationship.

Xi called on the two sides to implement the new consensus reached between the party and state leaders of the two countries during his visit, and jointly build a community of shared future with strategic significance.

He also briefed Pany on China's experience in advancing the rule of law in a comprehensive way.

On her part, Pany said the Laos-China cooperation has made important contributions to the national development of Laos, and the Lao National Assembly will earnestly implement the consensus reached by the party and state leaders of the two countries and help deepen a long-term, stable development of the bilateral comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation.

The Lao National Assembly is committed to strengthening the exchanges and cooperation with China's National People's Congress, she added.DHAKA, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Bangladeshi Prime Minister Minister Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday announced to abolish the quota system for government jobs amid students protests.

"The quota system will be abolished," Hasina said while addressing at the parliament Wednesday afternoon when thousands of students blocked many major roads in parts of the capital Dhaka, bringing traffic jams for hours.

It was not known immediately whether students rallying under the banner of the Council for the Preservation of General Students' Rights will discontinue their movement following premier's assurance to scrap the system.

In line with the Bangladeshi gouvernment's existing quota system, 56 percent government posts are reserved for the families of disadvantaged minorities and descendants of veterans from Bangladesh's independence war in 1971.BERLIN, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Austrian striker Marcel Sabitzer had extended his contract ahead of schedule, Bundesliga club Leipzig announced in an official statement on Wednesday.

Sabitzer has put pen to paper on a one-year contract extension, which will keep him with the "Bulls" until June 2022.

Sabitzer came from Salzburg in the summer 2015 to provide 22 goals and 15 assists in 100 competitive appearances for Leipzig. Moreover, he has large shares on Leipzig's promotion into Germany's top flight.

"Marcel has continued to evolve over the past three years. He has a very good mentality and is a leader on the pitch. Therefore, we are pleased that we have been able to retain another key player on the long term," Leipzig's sporting director Ralf Rangnick said.

The 24-year-old striker is, since 2012, part of Austria's national team where he scored five goals in 29 international caps.

"I still feel very well at Leipzig, I also feel great trust and I am pleased about my contract extension here. I am not yet at the end of my development and I want to continue to do my part to take the next step. I think a lot is possible with Leipzig," Sabitzer told the club's official homepage.

Leipzig sit currently on the 6th place of the Bundesliga standings. They clash with Werder Bremen at the 30th round in Bundesliga on Sunday.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 01:13:24|Editor: yan

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ADEN, Yemen, April 11 (Xinhua) -- At least 48 fighters of the Shiite Houthi group were killed Wednesday in armed clashes with the Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces and Saudi-led airstrikes in two locations of the war-torn country.

A total of 18 Houthi rebels were killed and nearly 30 others injured in the gunbattles with the national army forces in southwestern city of Taiz, according to a statement revealed by the media center of the pro-government forces in the city.

Meanwhile, the Yemeni Defense Ministry reported that 30 Houthi fighters were killed in the air bombardment by Saudi-led warplanes in central al-Bayda Province.

Two separate airstrikes hit a reinforcement convoy and another Houthi-controlled position in al-Bayda, the ministry said on its official website.

The Saudi-led coalition intervened in the Yemeni conflict in March 2015 to roll back the Iranian-allied Shiite Houthi rebels and support the internationally-recognized President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

The coalition imposed air and sea blockade to prevent weapons from reaching Houthis, who have seized control of the capital Sanaa militarily and most of the northern Yemeni provinces since late 2014.

More than 10,000 people, half of them civilians, have been killed with over two millions displaced in the three-year war.

The UN has listed Yemen as the country of the world's most serious humanitarian crisis, where seven million Yemenis are on the brink of famine and cholera has caused more than 2,000 deaths.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 02:43:49|Editor: Liangyu

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Britain's Prince Andrew (4th L), the Duke of York, unveils the multilingual versions of the second volume of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" with Jiang Jianguo (3rd R), minister of China's State Council Information Office, at the launch ceremony in London, Britain on April 11, 2018. The book was launched in London Wednesday. (Xinhua/Isabel Infantes)

LONDON, April 11 (Xinhua) -- The multilingual versions of the second volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China was launched in London Wednesday.

The book, unveiled during the ongoing London Book Fair, contains a collection of 99 articles, including Xi's speeches, conversations, instructions and congratulatory messages, dated between August 2014 and September 2017.

The new book, published in Traditional Chinese characters, English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Arabic and Portuguese, was launched at a ceremony attended by some 300 political and business leaders, academics, and representatives of publishing agencies from 14 countries and regions.

Britain's Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, said at the ceremony that the global launch of the book in London is a "milestone," and it will hopefully "enlighten readers about where China is going and what it is thinking."

"It takes a lifetime to understand China. And I am on that journey," said Prince Andrew, adding that he awaits more volumes of the book to come.

China and Britain, as two major countries in the world, share great cooperative potential on cultural exchanges, innovation, business, and the promotion of globalization, he said.

Jiang Jianguo, minister of the State Council Information Office, said he believes that through the book, international readers will better understand that the Communist Party of China is a party that seeks to improve the well-being of the Chinese people, to realize the rejuvenation of the nation and to promote common development for the whole world.

Jiang said that China will push for quality development, vigorous innovation, deeper reform and opening up in a bid to further share opportunities and benefits with the rest of the world.

Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to Britain, said that cultural exchanges between China and Britain have made important contributions to the development of bilateral relations.

The premiere of the book is a major event for China-Britain ties, and it is hoped that the two sides will take this opportunity to further strengthen cultural exchanges and mutual learning between civilizations so as to build the bilateral relations into a model of major-country relations featuring mutual respect, equality, mutual trust and win-win cooperation.

Martin Albrow, a renowned British sociologist, said the new book is a reinforcement of the first volume, which was published in 2014.

The new book is not only for Chinese readers, but for all those who care about the future of mankind, said Albrow.

Mario Monti, former Italian prime minister, said the book showcases the Chinese leader's global vision and his insights into governance of China, which will prove inspiring for readers across the world. He also believed that the book helps dispel some of the misunderstanding and prejudice about a rising China.

Felipe Gonzalez, former Spanish prime minister, said the book helps global readers understand China's vital role in pushing for globalization and building a community with a shared future for mankind.

The book also offers a perspective on how to tackle relations among European nations, how to participate in and push forward globalization and how to build a cooperative relationship with China, said Gonzalez.LOS ANGELES, April 11 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Governor of California, Jerry Brown, said Wednesday that the western state will send about 400 U.S. National Guard troops to the border with Mexico to combat transnational crime, but not for enforcing immigration laws.

At the request of the Trump administration, "the California National Guard will accept federal funding to add approximately 400 Guard members statewide to supplement the staffing of its ongoing program to combat transnational crime," said Brown in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

The program is currently staffed by 250 personnel statewide, including 55 at the California border.

The Guard will support operations targeting transnational criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers along the border, according to Brown.

But the governor also said "let's be crystal clear on the scope of this mission."

"This will not be a mission to build a new wall. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking better life," Brown said, noting that the California National Guard will not be enforcing federal immigration laws.

Trump said last week that he wants to send between 2,000 and 4,000 National Guard members to the southern border of the country.

The Republican governors of three southwestern border states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas have pledged to send 1,600 Guard members to the U.S.-Mexico border.

As the only southwestern border state led by a Democratic governor, California is engaged in an all-out war over immigration enforcement with the Trump administration.

The state is suing Trump administration in a bid to stop construction of the border wall.MEXICO CITY, April 11 (Xinhua) -- The Fitch Ratings agency said on Wednesday that it believed the U.S. would remain within the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), due to the severe damages certain states would face if it withdrew.

An exit from NAFTA would reduce economic growth, job creation and the tax income of states with smaller populations and greater economic diversity, said the director of Fitch Ratings, Michael D'Arcy.

A Fitch Ratings statement said that American states across the country could be severely affected. It explained that Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Michigan were most likely to suffer economic losses, due to a tight trading relationship with Mexico.

It added that those states would also be in the firing line if Mexico were to slap tariffs on American products.

The agency said that, while it was paying more attention to the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, it noted that there had also been an important deterioration in the commercial relationship between the U.S. and Canada.

It added that this downturn meant that Mexican and Canadian consumers and companies may seek to obtain the same goods and services in the future from the likes of China, Europe and South America.

Canada, the U.S. and Mexico have been modernizing NAFTA since August 16, at the demand of President Donald Trump, who feels the agreement has hurt the American economy.

After seven rounds of talks, only six chapters out of around 30 have been finalized. Discussions have become bogged down by certain sensitive topics, such as the U.S. attempt to significantly tighten rules of origin for the automotive industry.

The technical teams from the three countries have been meeting in Washington since Monday, instead of holding an official round of talks, to try and finalize a deal more quickly.BAKU, April. 12 (Xinhua) -- Voting wrapped up in Azerbaijan's presidential election at 19.00 local time on Wednesday with incumbent President Ilham Aliyev winning 86.09 percent of votes, according to preliminary data announced by the country's Central Election Commission on Thursday.

Chairman of the Whole Azerbaijan Popular Front Party Gudrat Hasanguliyev was a distant second with 3.4 percent, followed by self-nominee Zahid Oruj, who scored 3.07 percent of votes. The remainder was split among 5 other presidential candidates.

Ilham Aliyev was reelected for the next seven years. After the announcement of preliminary results he has appealed to nation to express his gratitude for the confidence.

"I always feel the support of Azerbaijani people. This support gives me strength. This support is the main condition for our development. The unity of people and government is the main factor of our development in Azerbaijan," said the Head of state.

Ilham Aliyev said that in this election, the Azerbaijani people voted for stability, security, development and progress and appraised the work that had been done over the last 15 years.

"The unity of people and government, our expedient policy, has today turned Azerbaijan into a strong country," added Ilham Aliyev.

The April 11 snap presidential election in Azerbaijan was conducted with heavy voter turnout (around 75 percent). Some 3,959,553 out of 5,3 million voters cast their ballots, according to the Azerbaijan' s Election Commission.

The election was conducted in 5,641 polling stations of 125 constituencies, some 5,426 of which were permanent. Web cameras have been set up in 1,000 polling stations (20%) to ensure the transparency of the voting.

The voting was monitored by nearly 900 international and 58175 local observers, as well as more than 50 foreign journalists.

"Presidential election in Azerbaijan was held in line with all standards," Secretary General of the Parliamentary Union of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Member States Mahmut Erol Kilic said at a press conference in Baku April 11.

"The election was held at a very high level, and high voter turnout was observed," he said. "I hope that the choice of the Azerbaijani population will further strengthen the country."

Deputy Prime Minister and Executive Secretary - Deputy Chairman of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party Ali Ahmadov said that the presidential election in Azerbaijan can be considered as valid. He noted that the next seven years will be a new stage of development in Azerbaijan.

"A large-scale government plan will be developed thanks to Ilham Aliyev's strategy, which will cause Azerbaijan to develop in all spheres and strengthen its positions in the international community. Ilham Aliyev's victory is the victory of all the people of Azerbaijan and I congratulate our nation on this occasion," Ahmadov added.

Zviad Dzidziguri, deputy chairman of the Georgian parliament, said at a press conference in Baku that Presidential election in Azerbaijan was held in line with democratic European standards. "We observed high voter turnout. We were encouraged by the fact that all candidates had their observers at the polling stations," he added. The Georgian official added that there were no significant deficiencies during the monitoring process.

Ilham Aliyev, 56, was first elected president in October 2003 as a successor to his father Heydar Aliyev. He won 76 percent of the vote in 2003 and was re-elected in 2008 and 2013 with 89 and 85 percent respectively.

Azerbaijan in September, 2016 voted in favor of extending the presidential term from five to seven years.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 08:30:32|Editor: Xiang Bo

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Participants attend the plenary session of IPQuorum 2018 International Strategic Forum on Intellectual Property in Svetlogorsk, Kaliningrad region, Russia, on April 11, 2018. The main idea of the discussion this year is the new strategy of the global IP market in the digital economy context. Over 500 participants from 30 countries take part in the forum this year. (Xinhua/Wu Zhuang)Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 08:50:13|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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UNITED NATIONS, April 11 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday asked the Security Council to take action to avoid further deterioration of the situation in Syria.

"Today, I called the ambassadors of the five permanent members of the Security Council to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse and stressed the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control," said Guterres in a statement.

"Let us not forget that, ultimately, our efforts must be about ending the terrible suffering of the Syrian people," said Guterres.

"Yesterday, I expressed my outrage at the reports of continued use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic. I have also been closely following developments in the Security Council and regret that the council has so far been unable to reach agreement on this issue," he said, referring to the fact that the Security Council failed to adopt any resolution on chemical weapons use in Syria.

On Tuesday, a U.S.-drafted resolution on a new mechanism investigating chemical weapons use in Syria was vetoed by Russia, whose draft resolution for the same purpose failed to win majority support in the council.

A third text tabled by Russia on the basis of a Swedish document also failed to be adopted over the weekend. The document aims to find common ground in the Security Council for an outcome in support of an investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons into the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria.

Guterres' statement came after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to launch a missile attack on Syria.

Trump ordered a strike on a Syrian airbase last year after a chemical weapons attack was blamed on the Syrian government.I am person who is uncompromisingly black and unapologetically gay. Deal with it.

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Law & Crime reports: A Florida man who agitated for a race-based civil war will spend more than three years for being a felon in possession of firearms...ISLAMABAD, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Pakistani army said at least five civilians were injured in an Indian forces' firing across the Line of Control (LoC) in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir region.

The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media wing of Pakistan army, said late Wednesday that Indian forces opened unprovoked fire at the civilian population in the Khoi Ratta sector of Kashmir.

Pakistan and India had declared ceasefire along the LoC in 2003, but both sides often exchange firings and blame each other for violation of the agreement.

The Pakistani army claimed to have responded to the Indian posts from where the firing was initiated, adding that it is the second ceasefire violation by the Indian forces in less than a week.

Earlier on Saturday, a woman was killed as Indian troops resorted to an unprovoked fire in the Nakyal sector along the LoC.

Following the incident, Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Indian Deputy High Commissioner and lodged a protest by calling on New Delhi to abide by the ceasefire agreement.

The ministry's spokesperson Muhammad Faisal said that unprecedented escalation in ceasefire violations by India is continuing from the year of 2017 when Indian forces committed 1,970 ceasefire violations.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 09:30:23|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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WASHINGTON, April 11 (Xinhua) -- The White House said on Wednesday that no "final decision" has been made and all options were still on the table concerning Washington's response to the suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria.

"We're maintaining that we have a number of options, and all of those options are still on the table. Final decisions haven't been made yet on that front," said the White House Spokesperson Sarah Sanders at a daily briefing on Wednesday afternoon.

Sanders' remarks came hours after U.S. President Donald Trump taunted Russia, saying that missiles "will be coming" to Syria.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'" said Trump in a tweet on Wednesday morning.

Sanders downplayed the possibility of an imminent strike at the briefing, saying that Trump "has not laid out a timetable."

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis also remained cautious about taking military action against Syria, saying Washington was still "assessing intelligence" about the alleged chemical weapons attack.

"We're still working on this," said Mattis on Wednesday at Pentagon when asked by reporters if there was enough evidence to blame the Syrian government for the deadly attack. ' Activists, local rescuers, and rebels in Syria claim that Syrian government forces used chlorine gas on Saturday in an attack in Douma, a rebel-held area near capital Damascus.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry has denied the accusation, calling rebels' claims "premeditated pretexts."OUAGADOUGOU, April 11 (Xinhua) -- African special forces from Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and their Western partners kicked off Wednesday military exercises here as part of the annual "Flintlock" drill.

The exercises, aimed at strengthening the training and intervention capabilities of the special units against terrorism, consist of close combat tactical exercises, firefighting and airborne operations.

"Flintlock 2018" is a unified multilateral military exercise coordinated by special forces of African nations, the United States and their European partners, said Colonel Remy Kabore, deputy division chief of operations from Burkina Faso.

The training, scheduled to last for about two weeks at multiple locations in West Africa, involves a total of 1,900 soldiers from 20 African and Western countries.

Flintlock exercises have taken place regularly since 2005.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 09:40:25|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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UNITED NATIONS, April 11 (Xinhua) -- The UN Security Council on Wednesday condemned "in the strongest terms" Tuesday's attack on peacekeepers in the Central African Republic (CAR), which left one Rwandan soldier killed and eight others injured.

In a press statement, the Security Council also condemned the violence that followed the launch of a joint operation by the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the CAR (Minusca) and CAR security forces on Sunday, which was aimed at disarming and arresting elements of armed groups in the 3rd district of Bangui, the capital city.

The council expressed deepest condolences and sympathy to the family of the peacekeeper killed, and their deepest sympathy to the families of the peacekeepers injured, as well as to Rwanda and to Minusca. They wished the injured a speedy recovery.

The Security Council also deplored that several other peacekeepers from various contingents were injured and that several civilians were killed and dozens more injured during the incidents that occurred in different districts of Bangui.

The council expressed support to the efforts of Minusca along with the CAR government to stabilize the situation in Bangui and protect all civilians.

It reiterated the demand that all armed groups in Bangui and in the rest of the country cease all forms of violence and destabilizing activities, lay down their arms, and engage constructively in the peace process immediately and unconditionally.

The council condemned all attacks, provocations and incitement to violence against Minusca by armed groups and other perpetrators.

It reiterated that attacks against peacekeepers may constitute war crimes and reminded all parties of their obligations under international humanitarian law.

It called on the CAR government to swiftly investigate this attack and bring the perpetrators to justice.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 09:40:26|Editor: Lifang

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MEXICO CITY, April 11 (Xinhua) -- The third largest Mexican airline Interjet announced on Wednesday it is seeking an alliance with China's Hainan Airlines in the second half of 2018 to attract more tourists from Asia.

Interjet's Executive Director Julio Gamero told the press the two airlines are negotiating details of the alliance, saying the cooperation follows the general trend of globalization in this industry.

"Mexico's economic development will not slow down, and we are going to further connect with the world through business and tourism," Interjet's Director General Jose Luis Garza said, adding that the prospect of Mexico's tourism is positive.

In 2017, Interjet transported 3 million passengers on international flights, a 35 percent increase compared with last year.

Hainan Airlines,a leading airline in China, opened its Beijing-Mexico City route on March 21 under the Mexican and Chinese governments' initiative to improve air connectivity.TRIPOLI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- A total of 65 foreign militants are holed up in the mountains of the eastern city of Darna, said Libyan eastern-based army spokesman later on Wednesday.

"The army had been in contact with tribal elders and leaders. We gave enough time to resolve the problem, but the young people still had links with IS and al-Qaida remnants," army spokesman Ahmad Mismari, said at a press conference later on Wednesday in the eastern city of Benghazi.

The 65 foreign militants holed up in the mountains are from Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan and Yemen, wanted by security and legal agencies in their countries, said Mismari.

"There is no way a terrorist group or organization can rule a certain city," and any foreign militants arrested would be returned to their countries "as they are competent to punish them," Mismari said.

Army commander General Khalifa Haftar said Tuesday that his forces would take over Darna as demanded by the local people.

Since 2015, Darna has been besieged by the army which demanded the armed group of the Shura Council of Mujahideen of Darna leave the city. The army accuses the group of being loyal to al-Qaida.CANBERRA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The amount of tax paid by Australian mining companies will collapse almost 50 percent before growing more than 200 percent in the space of 12 months, a report has found.

In a report for the Mineral Councils of Australia (MCA), Deloitte Access Economics found that weak commodity prices would hit profits, and thus tax paid, hard for the 2015-16 financial year before rebounding for 2016-17 ending June 30, 2017.

Deloitte estimated that mineral companies would pay 3.65 billion AU dollars (2.83 billion U.S. dollars) in tax for 2015-16, down from 7.9 billion AU dollars (6.1 billion U.S. dollars) in 2014-15, accounting for 5 percent of the total tax paid by all companies operating in Australia.

In 2016-17, the figure was tipped to soar to 12 billion AU dollars (9.3 billion U.S. dollars), or 15 percent of all company tax paid in Australia.

The report comes as the tax contribution of big businesses continues to be subject of a major political debate with the government seeking to cut the tax rate for Australia's biggest companies from 30 to 25 percent over 10 years.

"The dominant driver of higher company tax is higher profits," an MCA spokesperson told the Guardian Australia on Wednesday night.

"Reducing prior year losses also affects taxable income, which the MCA's 2017 tax survey found boosted taxable incomes to some extent in 2016."

The estimate for 2016-17 was based on Australian Bureau of Statistics' profit data.

According to the report, 12 billion AU dollars in tax for a single year would sill fall short of the 14 billion AU dollars (10.86 billion U.S. dollars) the sector paid at the peak of the mining boom.

The economic firm also predicted that state and territory governments would collect 11.2 billion AU dollars (8.69 billion U.S. dollars) in royalties from minerals companies in 2016-17, up from 8 billion AU dollars (6.2 billion U.S. dollars) in 2015-16.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 11:15:55|Editor: Lifang

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China on Thursday vows to fight till the very end if the Untied States insists on unilateralism and trade protectionism.

"By the time being, government officials of the two countries have never been engaged in any negotiations concerning the trade friction," said Gao Feng, spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 11:25:57|Editor: Lifang

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China's continued opening-up measures have nothing to do with the ongoing trade friction with the United States, said Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng on Thursday.

The major strategic decisions are made based on an accurate estimation of the country's current development level, in order to elevate opening-up in the new era to a higher level, Gao said.

He noted that China and the United States have not negotiated on the trade frictions yet.

"There are principles to follow for negotiations. The U.S. side has not shown any sincerity to negotiate yet," said Gao.SYDNEY, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The University of Melbourne in Australia unveiled a new autonomous vehicle on Thursday, as part of a technology project which aims to improve Australia's integrated transport systems.

Designed for low-speed urban environments, the driverless shuttle bus was developed in partnership with a EasyMile, a French company which specializes in autonomous automotive technology.

"Emerging transport technology is the next generation of opportunity and automation is a big part of that," Majid Sarvi, professor in transport for smart cities at University of Melbourne, told Xinhua.

"In Australia we missed a lot of opportunities with the dot-com and mobile boom, so that's why it's very important for us at Melbourne University to be one of the very first in the world to have this kind of collaboration in technology."

"By partnering with EasyMile through projects such as the University's Australian Integrated Multimodal EcoSystem (AIMES) - a world-first living laboratory based in the streets of Melbourne - we are able to test highly integrated transport technology that make a real difference to people's lives."

Fitted with open platform technology, the vehicle is able to be updated and improved by researchers as autonomous software advances.

"It has sensors in the vehicle that can detect the environment and then the shuttle bus is able to move within it," Sarvi explained.

"And you can program the destination very easily."

Melourne University's Vice Chancellor Glyn Davis said that having the autonomous vehicle on campus will give students and academics the opportunity to focus their research projects on real-life transport solutions to improve "safety, sustainability and reduce congestion."Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 11:56:01|Editor: Lifang

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China on Thursday vowed to fight "till the very end" if the Untied States insists on unilateralism and trade protectionism.

"As of now, government officials of the two countries have never engaged in any negotiations concerning the trade friction," said Gao Feng, spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce.

"Principles must be followed before negotiations get started. However, the U.S. has not shown any sincerity to negotiate," Gao said.

"Whether the two sides can negotiate under the WTO framework will depend on whether the U.S. side still respects the WTO and whether it still respects multilateral rules," Gao said at a press conference.

"If the United States clings obstinately to its own course and insists on unilateralism and trade protectionism, China will fight resolutely till the very end," the spokesman warned.

Gao noted China's continued opening-up measures have nothing to do with the ongoing trade friction with the United States.

The major strategic decisions are made based on an accurate estimation of the country's current development level, in order to elevate opening-up in the new era to a higher level, Gao said.DENARAU ISLAND, Fiji, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Senior officials from 46 FAO members in the Asia-Pacific region have agreed that the countries within the region have made great progress in the food and agriculture sector and reduced poverty and hunger.

According to a press release by Fiji's Department of Information on Thursday, the general consensus had been reached by the senior officials who concluded their meeting on Wednesday of the 34th United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific (APRC) on the Denarau island near Fiji's third largest city of Nadi with meaningful decisions and recommendations for the future.

Kundhavi Kadiresan, assistant director-general and FAO regional representative for Asia and the Pacific, said at the closing of the meeting that the senior officers'conference had provided an excellent opportunity to interact with members and understand their views, concerns and priorities under different agenda items.

"Our deliberations covered some of the most complex issues on the food and agriculture sector of mutual concern in a constructive and result-oriented manner in the traditional spirit of understanding and respect for different views and opinions," she said.

Meanwhile, the FAO also hailed on Wednesday 40 years of close on-the-ground presence and support to 10 of its members in Asia and the Pacific.

Between 1977 and 1979, 10 countries such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam agreed to host FAO representation offices in their capitals.

During a side event at the 34thSession of the FAO Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific, FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva thanked all 10 countries for welcoming FAO to their lands as a trusted partner on the ground and assured them that FAO would continue to work closely with them to ensure the future of agriculture and the safety and sustainability of food production.

In the Asia-Pacific region, FAO has prioritized improvements to nutrition and has taken action to ensure food security in the face of challenges posed by climate change and natural disasters, he said, adding that the development and implementation of Country Programing Frameworks (CPFs) have given greater focus to their technical and policy expertise, ensuring that country programs are closely aligned with government priorities.

The 34th session of FAO's regional conference for Asia and the Pacific (APRC) kicked off here on Monday with the participation of government ministers and delegates from members of the FAO.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 13:06:12|Editor: Xiang Bo

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MEXICO CITY, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Mexico is confident that the Chinese and U.S. governments will resolve their trade disputes and bring benefits to both nations and the world, a Mexican state governor has said.

Quirino Ordaz Coppel, governor of the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa, told Xinhua in a recent interview that both sides should sit down for dialogue and reach a trade agreement which benefits them both and the rest of the world.

"It is very important to sit down and talk, to find out the viewpoints of each side and reach important agreements," he said.

Last week, the U.S. government threatened to slap more tariffs on Chinese imports worth 100 billion U.S. dollars. The measure came days after Washington proposed a 25-percent tariff on Chinese imports worth 50 billion dollars.

"The important thing is that the relationship should be reciprocal, this is what must mark good agreements. China is very important, it is a great global player," said the governor, adding that strengthening trade and business is in everyone's interests.

He also warned that leaving these trade differences unresolved has severe implications.

Looking at Mexico's relationship amid this trade dispute, the governor said his country needs to reinforce its ties with China across the board, especially on trade and investment.

"Mexico has been very dependent on the United States ... We are accelerating and deepening the diversification of our trade with China, with South America, and with Europe, but especially with Asia," he said.

Furthermore, the Mexican government has always stood for an open global economy, a position also defended by China, as opposed to the stance of the U.S. administration, he added.

"I have always fought for a global economy. Trade relations must be strengthened but in ways that are fair and balanced and lead to good business for both sides. It must be a win-win for all," said the governor, who met this week with Chinese Ambassador to Mexico Qiu Xiaoqi.

During the meeting, Qiu highlighted China's stance as a defender of free trade.

The ambassador pointed out that Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated the country's determination to expand reform and opening-up in a speech Tuesday at the Boao Forum for Asia.

"We will certainly continue to promote free trade, economic cooperation with the countries of the world," said Qiu.

China on Thursday vowed to fight "till the very end" if the Untied States insists on unilateralism and trade protectionism.

"As of now, government officials of the two countries have never engaged in any negotiations concerning the trade friction," said Gao Feng, spokesman of the Ministry of Commerce.

"Principles must be followed before negotiations get started. However, the U.S. has not shown any sincerity to negotiate," Gao said.

"Whether the two sides can negotiate under the WTO framework will depend on whether the U.S. side still respects the WTO and whether it still respects multilateral rules," Gao said at a press conference.GHAZNI, Afghanistan, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Up to 12 people including the district governor of Khawja Omari district of eastern Afghanistan's Ghazni province were killed as the Taliban militants attacked the district headquarters early Thursday, a local official Ramazan Ali Mohsini said.

"A group of Taliban rebels launched multi-pronged offensives on security checkpoints in Khawja Omari district at 03:00 a.m. local time today triggering fierce fighting which lasted for hours during which the district governor of Khawja Omari and 11 more staff and security personnel unfortunately lost their lives," Mohsini told Xinhua.

The official also asserted that 40 militants were killed and injured in the firefight.

Meanwhile, Taliban militants have confirmed the fight and claiming they have captured the district headquarters of Khawja Omari district.

However, provincial police chief Mohammad Zaman has confirmed the fighting but rejected the Taliban claim, saying the Taliban attack has been repulsed.by Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, April 11 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday tweeted that he would strike Syria with missiles warning Moscow not to shoot them down, amid tensions with Russia.

Experts warned that Trump's move will further harm U.S.-Russia relations.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming," Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, in a jab at Russia.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua: "It would sour relations with (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and put Trump more on a path towards confronting Russia on a range of issues. In the long run, it would be more difficult for the two countries to work together."

This comes amid tense U.S.-Russia relations. The Trump administration earlier this month planned to slap more sanctions on Russian business elite, which may lead the "bad blood" between Russia and the United States to further deterioration.

The relationship between Washington and Moscow has plunged to a new low, as the United States expelled 60 Russian diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle in a concerted action with Britain and other Western nations over an ex-spy poisoning case, which took place last month.

Moscow's relations with the West has been sour over years amid disagreements involving the war in Syria, the conflict in Ukraine, and also the alleged Kremlin meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, which Moscow has denied.

While there has been talk of a meeting between Trump and Putin, it remains unknown whether the meeting will fix problems between the two nuclear powers, and some experts are negative about that possibility.

Dan Mahaffee, senior vice president and director of policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, told Xinhua that Trump's Twitter account has become a direct pipeline to the thinking of the president and, in this instance, the thinking of the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military at a time of international tension.

"U.S.-Russia relations are getting colder, and statements via Twitter and other proxies raise the risk of miscalculation on both sides," he said.

After the U.S. warmongering rhetoric against Syria and its allies, Russia warned the United States against striking Syria.

"Russia has warned U.S. representatives, publicly as well as through proper channels, over the grave consequences that could arise if these strikes happen and whether deliberately or otherwise Russian citizens are hurt," Russia's envoy to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov said.

Also, Russia's Ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin said Wednesday that his country would respond to any U.S. missiles fired at Syria by shooting them down and targeting their launch sites.

Activists, local rescuers, and rebels in Syria claim that Syrian government forces used chlorine gas on Saturday in an attack in Douma, a rebel-held area near capital Damascus.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry has denied the accusation, calling rebels' claims "premeditated pretexts."Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 14:36:23|Editor: ZD

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TIANJIN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Sun Zhengcai, former secretary of the Chongqing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), stood trial for bribery Thursday at the First Intermediate People's Court of Tianjin Municipality.

Sun is also a former member of the Political Bureau of the 18th CPC Central Committee.

Between 2002 and 2017, Sun took advantage of his posts to provide help for certain units and individuals in project procurement, enterprise operation and adjustment of official positions, and accepted money and property worth 170 million yuan (27.1 million U.S. dollars), either by himself or through "certain affiliated persons," according to an indictment by the first branch of the Tianjin People's Procuratorate.

During that period, Sun served as CPC chief of Shunyi District in Beijing, Standing Committee member and secretary general of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee, agriculture minister, secretary of the CPC Jilin Provincial Committee, Political Bureau member of the CPC Central Committee and Party chief of Chongqing Municipality.

Prosecutors as well as Sun and his defense attorneys examined the evidence. Both sides questioned the two witnesses who testified in court and fully expressed their opinions, according to the court's statement.

In his final statement, Sun said he deserved his punishment and he had no objections to the charges.

He admitted his guilt, repented for his wrongdoing and said he would sincerely submit to the court's judgement, according to the court's statement.

More than 130 people, including lawmakers, political advisors, journalists and others attended the trial.

The court ruling will be announced at a later date.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 15:41:37|Editor: Lifang

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PYONGYANG, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), dismissed his deputy Hwang Pyong So from his post as vice chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the country, official media reported here Thursday.

"At the proposal of the chairman of the State Affairs Commission (SAC) of the DPRK, Deputy Hwang Pyong So was dismissed from the post of its vice-chairman," said Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The dismissal was formally made at a full session of the Supreme People's Assembly on Wednesday, according to the report.

From 2014 to 2017, Hwang served as Director of the Korean People's Army General Political Department.

Three other deputies -- Kim Ki Nam, Ri Man Gon and Kim Won Hong -- were also sacked.

The top leader proposed to appoint deputies Kim Jong Gak, Pak Kwang Ho, Thae Jong Su and Jong Kyong Thaek as SAC members.VIENNA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Pharmaceutical wastes resulting from human and farm animal consumption are endangering the eco-system of rivers around the world, a new research says.

A large part of the world's rivers and lakes is potentially threatened by the high concentration of drug wastes, Francesco Bregoli, a researcher at the Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands, told the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2018 on Tuesday, presenting the research findings.

Bregoli's team used diclofenac, an anti-inflammation drug, as a proxy to estimate the concentration of other drugs in global river systems.

Diclofenac has been branded as a threat to the environment by both the European Union (EU) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The team found out that over 10,000 kilometers of waters contain an amount of the drug exceeding the 100 nanograms per liter standard set by the EU.

The spread of diclofenac reflects the spread of thousands of other medications and personal care products in water bodies.

Based on data collected from some 1,400 locations worldwide, the researchers are predicting that the amount of pharmaceutical wastes could surge by some 67 percent by 2050.

Technology can't solve the problem, Bregoli told AFP. "We need a substantial reduction in consumption."Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 15:51:39|Editor: Lifang

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TIKRIT, Iraq, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Four people were killed and eight others injured Thursday in two attacks by Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq's central province of Salahudin, a provincial security source said.

In one attack, IS militants attacked security outpost at the edge of Sdeira al-Suflah, a village in east of the town of Shirqat, some 280 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, sparking heavy clashes with local security forces, Colonel Mohammed al-Jubouri, head of the media office of Salahudin's provincial police, told Xinhua.

Many of the villagers took up their arms to support the security forces in their pursuit of the IS attackers. But four villagers were killed and four others were wounded in the explosions of several roadside bombs detonated by IS militants, Jubouri said.

The IS militants apparently used a different tactic in their attack, as they carried out the attack and then withdrew quickly to attract the villagers and the security forces into the trap of the roadside bombs, Jubouri said.

The attacks came despite repeated operations by Iraqi security forces to clear the areas around Shirqat of the remnants of IS militants.

Another attack occurred after midnight when IS militants attacked a police base in a desert area in the eastern part of Salahudin province, sparking heavy clashes with the police. Iraqi army sent helicopter gunships to intervene in the clashes, forcing the attackers to retreat, Jubouri said.

The clashes resulted in the wounding of four policemen, Jubouri said, without giving further details about the casualties of the attackers.

During the past few months, dozens of IS militants fled their former urban strongholds in Mosul, Salahudin province and Hawijah area in the west of Kirkuk after the Iraqi forces cleared these areas through major anti-IS offensives.

However, many IS remnants have resorted to hideouts in the rugged areas near the rivers of Tigris and Zab, as well as Himreen mountainous areas 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. But small groups of IS militants regrouped in the rugged areas and have been carrying out attacks against the security forces and civilians despite the repeated Iraqi military operations to hunt them down.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 15:56:42|Editor: Lifang

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China's continued opening-up measures have nothing to do with the ongoing trade friction with the United States, said Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng on Thursday.

The measures are major strategic decisions made based on an accurate estimation of the country's current development level in order to lead opening-up in the new era to a higher level, Gao said.

Similarly, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said unequivocally Wednesday that the measures China will take have nothing to do with the trade friction.

"Anyone who has some knowledge of how the Chinese government operates will understand that the rollout of such an important decision involving all these major measures will take some time to formulate, deliberate, and improve until everything is ready. It is impossible to make such a decision at short notice," said Geng.

Geng stressed that China will continue to adhere to its fundamental national policy of opening-up and pursue development with its door wide open.

"China's door of opening-up will not be closed and will only open even wider! This is our consistent position," Geng said.

Last year's 19th Communist Party of China National Congress report and this year's government work report drew up guidance and plans for future opening-up efforts. Tuesday's announcement of wider opening-up measures is a solid step to implement the two reports, according to Geng.

"It was made in line with our own needs, timetable and roadmap," Geng said. "China is determined to open wider to the outside world, no matter what others do." ' As of now, government officials of the two countries have never engaged in any negotiations concerning the trade friction, according to Gao.

"There are principles to follow for negotiations. The U.S. side has not shown any sincerity to negotiate," said Gao.

China will fight till the very end if the United States insists on unilateralism and trade protectionism, Gao said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 16:06:44|Editor: Lifang

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HEFEI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Anhui Higher People's Court in east China, has exonerated five people who were convicted of murder 18 years ago.

Zhou Jikun, Zhou Jiahua, Zhou Zaichun, Zhou Zhengguo and Zhou Zaihua were sentenced by Fuyang City Intermediate People's Court for murdering a woman called Zhou Suhua, and assaulting four other people in her family on Aug. 25, 1996.

The Higher People's Court upheld the sentence in October, 2000. The five continued to protest their innocence and appealed for a retrial. The higher court reviewed the case files, and ruled on Wednesday that there has been a miscarriage of justice as prosecutors lacked sufficient evidence to make the convictions.

Testimonies of key witnesses showed discrepancies, the court said.

By January of 2018, all five had finished their jail terms and had been discharged from prison. Zhou Jikun served 21 years, the longest.

The court has informed the five, saying that they are entitled for state compensation, and advised police to reopen the investigation.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 16:06:44|Editor: Lifang

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JERUSALEM, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Israeli fighter jets struck a Hamas military compound in northern Gaza Strip early on Thursday, but the casualties were not immediately known.

An Israeli military spokesperson said the strike was in response to an explosive device that detonated against a military vehicle on Wednesday. Gaza militants fired machine guns at an Israeli jet, but missed it.

A statement released by the Sha'ar HaNegev Regional Council in southern Israel said that stray gunfire fired from Gaza toward the Israeli jets hit a building in the area, causing only minor damages.

On Wednesday morning, the Israeli military said an explosive device was denotated near a military vehicle at the fence between Israel and Gaza Strip. In response, the army attacked Hamas positions in Gaza, injuring several people, according to Palestinian media.

No group has claimed responsibility for placing the explosive, but the Israeli military held Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, "responsible for all occurrences originating from the Gaza Strip," while vowing not to allow Hamas to turn the security fence parameter into a combat zone."Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 16:16:46|Editor: Lifang

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JERUSALEM, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Israelis across the country stood silence on Thursday morning as sirens wailed in commemoration of the Holocaust's 6 million Jewish victims.

The entire nation came to standstill as the two-minute sirens pierced the air at 10 am (0700 GMT) to mark the beginning of a series of memorial activities on the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day, an official day to commemorate the Jews that died in the hands of Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.

The traffic on all roads and highways abruptly stopped. Many drivers stepped out of their vehicles, standing still in contemplation.

Pedestrians halted their steps and stood in silence. In many homes, businesses, and offices, people stopped their activity and stood still to remember the victims of the Nazi genocide.

TV channels and radio stations in Israel were broadcasting solely Holocaust-related content, such as documentaries, interviews with survivors, and melancholic songs.

Memorial ceremonies were also held in schools across the country.

Later on Thursday, a wreath-laying ceremony would be held at the Yad Va'Shem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The annual ceremony would be attended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President of the Supreme Court Esther Hayut, representative of the security forces, and Holocaust survivors.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 16:31:48|Editor: Lifang

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Foreign direct investment (FDI) into the Chinese mainland saw steady growth in March and the first quarter of 2018, new data showed Thursday.

FDI inflow edged up 0.4 percent year on year in March to 88.14 billion yuan (14.03 billion U.S. dollars), Gao Feng, spokesperson with the Ministry of Commerce, said at a press conference.

In the first quarter, total FDI inflow rose 0.5 percent to 227.54 billion yuan.

The number of new overseas-funded companies established in the first three months surged 124.7 percent from a year earlier to 14,340, Gao said.

Investment into high-tech sectors rose 12.8 percent and accounted for 19.3 percent of the total FDI, data showed.

The high-tech manufacturing sector continued to see "relatively fast" investment growth, as it attracted 22.5 billion yuan in overseas investment, up 66 percent.

Central China saw an FDI increase of 46.7 percent, while western China used 23.4 percent more investment compared to the same period of last year.

Investment from countries along the Belt and Road increased 76 percent in the first quarter, Gao said.

Earlier this week, Chinese leaders unveiled new measures for expanding reform and opening up, including broadening market access, creating a more attractive investment environment, strengthening protection of intellectual property rights and expanding imports.

Gao said the new pledges showed China's "resolution and confidence to push forward the new round of high-level opening up."

The ministry is working with other departments to draft a series of policies, including those on improving the negative list on foreign investment, expanding opening up and optimizing the investment environment, Gao said.

"In the first half, we will work to complete the revision of the negative list on foreign investment," he said.

This year, China marks the 40th anniversary of the reform and opening up policy, which has been behind China's robust growth over the past four decades.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 16:31:48|Editor: ZX

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Afghan security force members stand near the site of Taliban attack in Khawja Omari district in Afghanistan's eastern Ghazni province on April 12, 2018. More than three dozen people including security personnel and militants have been confirmed dead as Taliban militants attacked Khawja Omari district on Thursday, deputy to provincial police, Ramazan Ali Mohsini said. (Xinhua/Sayed Mominzadah)

KABUL, April 12 (Xinhua) -- More than three dozen people including security personnel and militants have been confirmed dead as Taliban militants attacked Khawja Omari district in Afghanistan's eastern Ghazni province on Thursday, deputy to provincial police, Ramazan Ali Mohsini said.

"A group of Taliban rebels launched multi-pronged offensives on security checkpoints in Khawja Omari district at 03:00 a.m. local time today, triggering fierce fighting which lasted for hours during which the district governor of Khawja Omari and 11 more staff and security personnel unfortunately lost their lives," Mohsini told Xinhua.

The official, however, asserted that 27 militants had been killed and 13 others injured in the fighting.

Militants also burned parts of the district headquarters following rocket attacks, the official said, adding the situation has been brought under control and the militants have been evicted from the area.

Meanwhile, Zabihullah Majahid who claims to speak for the Taliban outfit, confirmed to the media about the clash. He claimed that the armed opposition group overrun Khawja Omari district early Thursday after killing 20 security personnel and district officials, including the district governor and police chief. It also lost seven fighters, he added.

However, Ghazni's police chief Mohammad Zaman rejected the claim, saying security personnel are in control of the situation and militants have fled the area.

Afghan observers predict that the Taliban group would increase activities in Spring ahead of a possible peace talk with the Afghan government for a strong position.MANILA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- An Indonesian national was rescued off the waters of Tawi-Tawi, an island province in Southern Philippines on Tuesday or three weeks after his floating cottage was cut off from its anchor in Manado, Indonesia, local military said Thursday.

Capt. Jo-ann Petinglay, spokesperson of the Western Mindanao Command of Armed Forces of the Philippines, said the victim, Erens Fiter, was sighted by a Filipino fisherman on the sea and the fisherman subsequently reported the presence of the distressed Indonesian to the police.

Petinglay said policemen helped Fiter get out of his cottage at 4 p.m. local time off Simunul town and promptly gave him medical attention at local police station, before turning him over to the military's Joint Task Force Tawi-Tawi.

The task force later coordinated with officials of the Indonesian Border Crossing Station for background investigation and then the Indonesian side confirmed the nationality of Fiter.

"According to Fiter, his floating cottage was cut from its anchor since March 19 due to the strong winds and his cottage was cast away from the shore (in Manado, Indonesia)," Petinglay said.

"He further revealed that he had been trying to get help among passing seacrafts (before he was seen by a Filipino fisherman). However, it seemed that he was not able to catch attention," she added.

Brig. Gen. Custodio Parcon, who is in charge of Joint Task Force Tawi-Tawi, said a military cooperation with Indonesia made the coordination with Indonesian authorities easier. He said Fiter is still with the task force, pending the formal turnover to the Indonesian officials.

"We are thankful that Fiter is well. Our troops are now currently processing his immediate return to his country with the help of concerned agencies," said Parcon.TOKYO, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Search and rescue officials on Thursday recovered another body from a landslide in southwestern Japan's Oita Prefecture, that engulfed a number of residential homes a day earlier, bringing the death toll to two.

The body is thought to be one of five women aged between 21 and 90 who are still accounted for in the ongoing search missions.

The operations have been severely hamstrung by the sheer volume of debris that need to be searched and removed amid the risk of more landslides, local officials said.

Around 600 Ground Self-Defense Force personnel have been taking part in the search and rescue mission, alongside local police and firefighters and heavy machinery has been used to shift the soil and mud.

Municipal officials in the city of Nakatsu confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that rescue officials had recovered the body of a 45-year-old man.

According to police and government officials in the city of Nakatsu, three houses in the town of Yabakei were buried by a landslide after a mountain slope collapsed at around 3:50 a.m. local time Wednesday morning.

The landslide is believed to have slid around 100 meters, with geological experts saying it might have been triggered by past rainfall or underground water.

The collapsed slope, which was covered in trees, according to local police, was about 200 meters wide and 100 meters high.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 16:41:52|Editor: Yurou

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- One of the UK's leading public schools, Wellington College, will open a new international school in Hangzhou, capital of east China's Zhejiang Province, in September, the school announced Thursday.

Wellington College International Hangzhou is located in Xiaoshan District of Hangzhou and aims to offer international education for children of expatriate families from ages 5 to 18. In the first phase of opening in 2018, the College will operate for students in Year 1 to Year 6, or ages 5 to 11, and then grow each year to offer a pathway to A-Levels or the IB Diploma.

This will be Wellington College China's third international school after Tianjin and Shanghai and the 13th new member of the Wellington College family worldwide.

According to Paul Rogers, Founding Executive Master of Wellington College Hangzhou, Wellington College has chosen Hangzhou as the location for its third international school in China because it sees a demand for high-quality international education following Hangzhou's successful G20 Summit in 2016.

"Hangzhou's reputation as a hub for innovation and creativity has attracted high-end foreign talent in fields such as technology and e-commerce. Many have moved to the city with families, and this has triggered high demand for international education institutions," said Rogers.

Statistics show that Hangzhou had more than 25,000 foreign students studying in higher education institutions in the city and 15,000 skilled foreign workers as of the end of February. The city rolled out new measures to attract foreign talent in late February. It also plans to introduce 10 international schools by 2022.

Rogers also believes that the new school is part of the increasing educational cooperation between China and the UK.

According to the UK Department for International Trade, there will be more than 20 British school brands with over 50 campuses in China by the end of 2020.

"Wellington College wants to combine the best of Chinese and British education and culture and provide an education that will produce truly global citizens," said Rogers.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 16:51:54|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China's Chang'e-4 lunar probe is expected to do many things unprecedented in space history after it launches later this year, such as touching down softly on the far side of the Moon and taking the first flowers to blossom on the lifeless lunar surface.

The probe will carry a tin containing seeds of potato and arabidopsis, a small flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, and probably some silkworm eggs to conduct the first biological experiment on the Moon.

The "lunar mini biosphere" experiment was designed by 28 Chinese universities, led by southwest China's Chongqing University, a conference on scientific and technological innovation of Chongqing Municipality has heard.

The cylindrical tin, made from special aluminum alloy materials, is 18 cm tall, with a diameter of 16 cm, a net volume of 0.8 liters and a weight of 3 kilograms. The tin will also contain water, a nutrient solution, air and equipment such as a small camera and data transmission system.

Researchers hope the seeds will grow to blossom on the Moon, with the process captured on camera and transmitted to Earth.

Although astronauts have cultivated plants on the International Space Station, and rice and arabidopsis were grown on China's Tiangong-2 space lab, those experiments were conducted in low-Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 400 kilometers. The environment on the Moon, 380,000 kilometers from the Earth, is more complicated.

Liu Hanlong, chief director of the experiment and vice president of Chongqing University, said since the Moon has no atmosphere, its temperature ranges from lower than minus 100 degrees centigrade to higher than 100 degrees centigrade.

"We have to keep the temperature in the 'mini biosphere' within a range from 1 degree to 30 degrees, and properly control the humidity and nutrition. We will use a tube to direct the natural light on the surface of Moon into the tin to make the plants grow," said Xie Gengxin, chief designer of the experiment.

"We want to study the respiration of the seeds and the photosynthesis on the Moon," said Liu.

"Why potato and arabidopsis? Because the growth period of arabidopsis is short and convenient to observe. And potato could become a major source of food for future space travelers," said Liu. "Our experiment might help accumulate knowledge for building a lunar base and long-term residence on the Moon."

The public, especially young people, are being encouraged to participate in the Chang'e-4 mission. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) launched a contest among students across China in 2016, collecting ideas on the design of the payloads.

The "lunar mini biosphere" experiment was selected from more than 200 submissions, according to the CNSA.

Tidal forces of the Earth have slowed the Moon's rotation to the point where the same side always faces the Earth, a phenomenon called tidal locking. The other face, most of which is never visible from the Earth, is the far side of the Moon.

With its special environment and complex geological history, the far side is a hot spot for scientific and space exploration. However, landing and roving there requires a relay satellite to transmit signals.

It has been reported that China plans to send a relay satellite for Chang'e-4 to the halo orbit of the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L2 in late May or early June 2018, and then launch the Chang'e-4 lunar lander and rover to the Aitken Basin of the south pole region of the Moon about half a year later.

The Von Karman Crater, named after a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer and physicist, in the Aitken Basin, was chosen as the landing site for Chang'e-4. The region is believed to have great scientific research potential.

The transmission channel is limited, and the landscape rugged, so the mission will be more complicated than Chang'e-3, China's first soft landing on the Moon in 2013, said Liu Tongjie, deputy director of the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of CNSA.

As the relay satellite will be sent to the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L2 about 450,000 kilometers from the Earth, where a gravitational equilibrium can be maintained, it could stay in stable orbit and operate for a long time.

"We will make efforts to enable the relay satellite to work as long as possible to serve other probes, including those from other countries," said Ye Peijian, a leading Chinese aerospace expert and consultant to China's lunar exploration program.

The Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the CNSA has invited the public to write down their hopes for lunar and space exploration, and those hopes and the names of participants will be carried by the relay satellite into deep space. More than 100,000 people have taken part, according to the center.COLOMBO, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Sri Lanka Navy, on Thursday apprehended three people for attempting to smuggle 24.2 kilograms of gold from the country via sea, the navy media unit said in a statement.

The three people, who were Sri Lankan nationals, were apprehended in the seas north of Mannar, in the island's north.

The navy said the 242 gold biscuits, each weighing 100 grams, were worth approximately 150 million Sri Lankan rupees (963,000 U.S. dollars).

During the apprehension, a dinghy boat used for the smuggling purposes was also seized by the navy.

The apprehended men, stock of gold, dinghy and other equipment were handed over to the Jaffna Customs Office for onward legal action, the navy said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 16:51:56|Editor: ZX

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ANKARA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump discussed the latest developments in Syria in a phone conversation late Wednesday.

The presidents exchanged views following a suspected chemical attack during the weekend in Douma, a Syrian town northeast of capital Damascus, Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

The phone conversation occurred after Trump warned Russia, which supports Syria's Bashar al-Assad government, saying U.S. missiles "will be coming" in response to the alleged chemical attack that reportedly killed dozens of people in Douma.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said earlier in the day that "the Assad regime must leave Syria," alleging the regime has killed nearly 1 million people with airstrikes and bombs.

In recent months, however, Ankara has been working closely with Moscow, a major ally of the Assad government, on Syrian issues.

Earlier this week, Erdogan also discussed the situation in Syria and Turkish-Russian relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone conversation. Erdogan reportedly expressed satisfaction with the tripartite summit on Syria, which was held in Ankara on April 4, with the participation of Turkey, Russia and Iran.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 17:01:58|Editor: Yurou

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China's continued opening-up measures have nothing to do with the ongoing trade friction with the United States.

The measures are major strategic decisions made based on an accurate estimation of China's current development level in order to lead opening-up in the new era to a higher level, said Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng Thursday.

Similarly, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said unequivocally Wednesday that the measures China will take have nothing to do with the trade friction.

"Anyone who has some knowledge of how the Chinese government operates will understand that the rollout of such an important decision involving all these major measures will take some time to formulate, deliberate, and improve until everything is ready. It is impossible to make such a decision at short notice," said Geng.

Geng stressed that China will continue to adhere to its fundamental national policy of opening-up and pursue development with its door wide open.

"China's door of opening-up will not be closed and will only open even wider! This is our consistent position," Geng said.

Both the report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, delivered on Oct. 18, 2017, and this year's government work report drew up guidance and plans for future opening-up efforts of the country.

Tuesday's announcement of wider opening-up measures is a solid step to implement the two reports, according to Geng.

"It was made in line with our own needs, timetable and roadmap," Geng said. "China is determined to open wider to the outside world, no matter what others do."

As of now, government officials of the two countries have never engaged in any negotiations concerning the trade friction, according to Gao.

"There are principles to follow for negotiations. The U.S. side has not shown any sincerity to negotiate," said Gao. "Concerning the U.S. statement, we will not only listen to the words but also watch the deeds."

China will fight till the very end if the Untied States insists on unilateralism and trade protectionism, Gao said.

While some are implementing protectionism, China's continued opening-up measures prove clearly to the world that China is embracing openness, said Niu Li, an economist with the State Information Center of the National Development and Reform Commission.

Thanks to the country's reform and opening up, overseas investment has become a crucial component of China's economy.

Foreign-funded companies accounted for nearly half of China's total exports and imports as well as nearly 25 percent of the country's industrial output, while contributing 20 percent to taxes and 10 percent of employment.

"Current conditions are already favorable for China to further widen market access, and have led to a critical window for China to continue opening up," said Niu.

The world's second-largest economy is now the biggest country in terms of industrialization, goods trade and foreign exchange reserves, said Niu.

China said Tuesday it will launch a number of landmark measures this year to significantly broaden market access.

The country will accelerate the opening up of the insurance industry, ease restrictions on the establishment of foreign financial institutions in China and expand their business scope, and open up more areas of cooperation between Chinese and foreign financial markets.

China also pledged measures, including significantly lowering import tariffs for vehicles, while reducing import tariffs for some other products, and enhancing protection of intellectual property rights.Buses transporting rebels evacuated from the Douma district are seen at a crossing in the Wafideen area in northeast of Damascus, capital of Syria, on April 2, 2018. (Xinhua/Ammar Safarjalani)

DAMASCUS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Russian military police have started deploying in Douma district in east of Syrian capital Damascus, after the Islam Army rebels handed over their medium and heavy weapons, a monitor group reported Thursday.

This came as the third batch of Islam Army rebels and their families left Douma toward the rebel-held city of Jarablus in northern Syria after midnight Thursday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

In Moscow, Russian Defence Ministry also confirmed Thursday that its military police had started patrolling Douma to maintain law and order there.

The Russian military police are expected to be deployed in all of Douma in accordance with the deal reached on April 8, under which the Syrian official flag will be raised in Douma, the last rebel bastion in Eastern Ghouta.

The SOHR, which relies on a network of activists on the ground, reported that the leaders of Islam Army left in the batch after midnight Thursday.

It added that other Islam Army rebels, who remained in Douma, asked for the Russian military police to enter due to the lawlessness that has prevailed in Douma.

Douma has grabbed headlines worldwide recently as the Western governments and media accused the Syrian army of using chlorine gas on people there, sparking the U.S.-led West's threat of military strikes on Syria.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 17:12:03|Editor: Yurou

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CHONGQING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Changan Automobile Company Limited, a Chinese car manufacturer, will partner with Tencent to form a subsidiary to develop the internet of vehicles (IoV).

The two signed an agreement for the joint venture Thursday at the ongoing 2018 China "Internet Plus" & Digital Economy Summit in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality.

A statement from Changan Automobile said the joint venture will develop an IoV platform and conduct big data analysis in facial recognition and driver drowsiness detection.

In 2016, Changan Automobile joined with search engine Baidu in cloud computing and artificial intelligence in traditional car making.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 17:12:03|Editor: pengying

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Russian military police forces are seen at the Wafideen area near the town of Douma, on the northeast of Damascus, Syria, on April 12, 2018. Russian military police has been sent to Douma, the town northeast of Syrian capital Damascus, where an alleged chemical attack on the weekend killed several civilians, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday. (Xinhua/Monsef Memeri)

MOSCOW, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Russian military police has been sent to Douma, the town northeast of Syrian capital Damascus, where an alleged chemical attack on the weekend killed several civilians, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.

The military police of the Russian armed forces have begun working in Douma to ensure law and order there after its liberation from the Islamic State (IS) terror group, the RIA Novosti news agency reported, citing a Defense Ministry statement.

Syrian government troops have captured Douma, previously held by IS, and gained control of the entire Eastern Ghouta suburb of Damascus, Yuri Yevtushenko, head of the Russian Center for Peace and Reconciliation in Syria, said on Thursday, according to TASS news agency.

More than 1,500 IS militants left Douma via a humanitarian corridor over the past 24 hours, raising the total number of evacuated rebels to about 13,500 in April, the Defense Ministry said, adding that the situation in Douma is now normalizing.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 17:12:05|Editor: ZX

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GUANGZHOU, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Hucais, a printing company in south China's Guangdong Province, is trying every means possible to find new workers.

"Recruitment in the first quarter of the year is never easy due to the Spring Festival vacation and we really need 15 percent more staff," said Hucais executive Sun Jinlong.

It is a busy time, as delivery on orders that came in between January and March is scheduled for as late as August. The company rewards workers who introduce new staff and tries to prevent the loss of senior staff through training and benefits.

Hucais is among many companies in Guangdong fighting for job seekers as orders flood in.

Guangzhou companies are recruiting more staff than this time last year and many have found themselves with no choice but to raise salaries. The demand for migrant workers is also on the rise.

Shenzhen Talent claims that more than 80 percent of Shenzhen companies have hired more new staff since the Spring Festival holiday than they did last year.

In Humen Township, electronics manufacturers are in dire need of workers, according to Deng Zhiqiang, deputy head of the township's human resources bureau.

"Following the vacation, 92 percent of our workers have returned, but that is far from enough," said Cai Zongming, general manager of Dongguan C.C.P. Contact Probes Co., Ltd., a cell phone component maker that supplies Apple and Huawei. "We are handing out leaflets on the streets to attract workers."

Recruitment personnel in some companies have traveled to central and western areas, such as Yunnan Province, to find workers, Deng said.

Employers are offering accident and critical insurance in addition to the five types of insurance required by the government, Deng said.

Humen, a district of Dongguan, a production base for garments and cables, had 88,000 market entities in 2017, up 16.3 percent. Last year, industrial electricity consumption grew by 10.8 percent. The number of high-tech companies rose from 76 to 170.

As manufacturers upgrade production lines, they need more skilled workers. At a job fair in late March, Dongguan companies made offers to 58,000 college students who will graduate this summer and, for the first time in Guangdong, the number of college graduates who found new jobs exceeded the number who received only secondary education.

"We ignored this fair in the past because it was full of migrant workers, but we came here this year since we are desperate to find some experienced, skilled applicants," said Yu Haibao, recruitment manager of Juhai Soft, a Guangzhou high-tech company.SEOUL, April 12 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Thursday that a denuclearization deal between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States can improve inter-Korean relations.

Moon made the remarks during a meeting with the elder advisory group of the presidential preparation committee for the upcoming inter-Korean summit, according to the Blue House.

The advisory group is composed of former ministers, presidential secretaries, intelligence agency chiefs and scholars who helped the former governments under presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun hold the first and second inter-Korean summits in 2000 and 2008.

President Moon agreed to hold the third summit with top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un on April 27 at Peace House, a South Korean building in the border village of Panmunjom.

"With the South-North agreement alone, inter-Korean relations cannot be resolved. The North (DPRK)-U.S. denuclearization agreement must be implemented, and then the inter-Korean relations can be resolved," Moon said.

Moon said South Korea must successfully hold the upcoming summit to help make the DPRK-U.S. summit a success, but he noted that neither of the summits will be easy to address.

The Moon-Kim summit would be followed by the first-ever meeting between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump, scheduled for late May or early June.

Moon emphasized that the upcoming inter-Korean summit must be taken advantage of as it is a rare opportunity, which is very hard to come again, to go toward the Korean Peninsula's complete denuclearization, permanent peace settlement and sustainable development of inter-Korean relations.

Citing the past agreements between the two Koreas, including those from the two previous inter-Korean summits, Moon said the upcoming summit can be pushed for only based on the past experiences and achievements.

However, he noted that the current relations between the two Koreas cannot be resolved by the government alone, asking the elder advisory group to help gain support and understanding from the public.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 18:07:17|Editor: ZX

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YINCHUAN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- In a classroom in rural northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, students turn on a large screen display, log in, and greet their teacher, who is 170 kilometers away in the regional capital Yinchuan.

During the painting class, Mu Yanan and her 47 second-grade classmates at Kuankoujing CNPC Hope School stare at the screen attentively.

"Who can give me an example of a symmetrical shape?" asks the teacher on the screen.

Mu immediately raises her hands to answer: "Bee!"

A storm of applause surrounds her.

The live-streaming course is the result of Ningxia's lesson-sharing platform established at the end of last year. The platform, which includes 200 schools, aims to narrow the gap between the quality of education in rural and urban areas.

Mu's school was a pioneer. It paired up with the No. 21 Primary School in Yinchuan to launch live-streaming courses in 2015, allowing urban students to share resources with their rural peers.

Depending on the day's schedule, live-streaming classes can include anything from arts, crafts and music to English and mathematics, all taught by teachers from urban schools.

"It's very interesting to interact with teachers and students in Yinchuan via the internet," said Mu. "I can get a glimpse of the world beyond my county."

"By sharing resources, we hope regional education will achieve balanced development," said Guo Kunyu, deputy head with Ningxia's regional education department.

Funded by China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), the country's largest oil and gas producer, Kuankoujing school has nearly 1,400 primary and middle school students, but only four full-time music teachers and two art teachers.

According to Wan Zhanwen, principal of the school, some Chinese language teachers have to work part-time to teach painting.

Kuankoujing's situation is not uncommon for China's rural schools, which lack teachers skilled in certain subjects and have a hard time keeping good teachers.

"Technology provides an alternative to improve the quality of teachers and make urban-rural education more equal," Wan said, adding that all of the school's 27 classes have been equipped with interactive whiteboards and broadband network.

As a part of the Chinese government's push to provide better connectivity to rural schools, live-streaming lessons have been launched across the country.

In Gansu Province, more than 64,000 classrooms in poor rural areas were equipped with screen displays and webcams to make live-streaming lessons possible by the end of 2017.

The benefits of the technology go beyond just learning about the arts. It also helps to make rural students more confident in their academic abilities.

Mu's father is a truck driver who supports the family of five with his monthly wage of 5,000 yuan (800 U.S. dollars). For the family, education is the only way they can take an active role in shaping their future.

"My daughter speaks and smiles more, and is performing better in school," said Mu Changjun, the father. "I'm happy to see that she is more confident now."GAZA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Egypt on Thursday opened the Rafah crossing on its border with the Palestinian enclave of Gaza Strip for three days, Gaza's Interior Ministry said.

The ministry, run by the Islamic Hamas movement, said in a statement that traveling is allowed for already registered patients seeking treatment outside Gaza, students studying abroad and people with residence permit in other countries.

Egypt reopens the crossing in both directions for a few days every month or two for stranded travelers.

Egypt's opening of the crossing is based on the security situation in the Sinai Peninsula where the country is launching a war against Islamic State terrorists.

Controlled by Egypt, the Rafah crossing is currently the only link between the Gaza Strip and the outside world.

The seaside enclave has been besieged by Israel since 2007, after Hamas routed the forces loyal to the Palestinian Authority and seized control of the territory by force.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 18:47:30|Editor: Yurou

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DUBAI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Emirates Telecommunications Corporation, known as Etisalat, said Thursday it has signed an agreement with three foreign companies to create "the first global cyber security alliance."

Etisalat, the most valuable listed company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said in an emailed statement that the three foreign partners include Singapore's Singtel, Japan's Softbank and Spanish blue chip firm Telefonica.

Etisalat, whose shares are traded on the Abu Dhabi stock market ADX, said the four-member alliance will share cyber risk intelligence and security capabilities to protect enterprises from cyber threats globally.

The firm claimed that this alliance "will be one of the world's biggest cyber security providers, with more than 1.2 billion customers in over 60 countries across Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and the Americas."

Etisalat said that, through the combined resources, "the group can protect enterprises against the rising cyber security risks as the information security environment becomes increasingly complex."

The group's members operate 22 world-class security operation centres (SOCs) and employ more than 6,000 cyber security experts.

To enhance their cyber security portfolio, the members will look into the possibility of developing new technologies such as predictive analytics using machine learning and advanced cyber security for the Internet of Things.

The alliance will also consider developing a joint roadmap for the evolution of their security portfolios and explore joint investments in security products and services, SOCs, platforms, start-ups and R&D.

Gartner, a U.S. information technology consulting company, forecast in last December that the worldwide security spending would reach 96 billion U. S. dollars in 2018, up 8 percent year on year.

In order to expand its global footprint, the alliance is open to bringing in new members over time, said Etisalat.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 18:52:31|Editor: Yurou

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CHENGDU, April 12 (Xinhua) -- A new China-Europe freight train service linking southwest China's Chengdu City with Vienna, capital of Austria, was launched Thursday.

The train, carrying 41 containers of goods valued at 1.5 million U.S. dollars, including LED displays, tires and lamps, departed from Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province Thursday morning.

The train will travel through Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Slovakia, spending 13 days on the 9,800-kilometer journey, and finally arrive in Vienna.

Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz attended the departure ceremony Thursday morning.

Van der Bellen said train, which is faster and more environmentally friendly than sea transportation, would play a significant role in China-Austria trade.

Austria will build a new station in 2020 as a terminal for the Belt and Road in the middle of the Europe, according to a memorandum of cooperation signed by Austrian OBB Holding AG and Chengdu International Rail Port Investment & Development (Group) Co., Ltd. on Thursday.

Chengdu is the last stop for the Austrian delegation's visit to China from April 7 to 12. On Sunday, leadership of the two countries agreed to establish a Sino-Austrian friendly strategic partnership and advance bilateral pragmatic cooperation.

China-Europe freight trains have made 1,000 trips in the first three months, up 75 percent compared with the same period last year, according to China Railway Corporation.

The cross-border rail network links 43 Chinese cities with 41 European cities in 13 countries.

Chengdu has 16 routes to cities including Nuremberg, Milan and Prague.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 18:57:32|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- While strengthening intellectual property rights (IPR) protection for foreign companies, China calls on foreign governments to improve protection of Chinese IPR.

"As Chinese firms expand overseas and participate in international competition, we need foreign governments to protect our IPR and the rights of Chinese companies," said Shen Changyu, head of the State Intellectual Property Office, in an interview with Xinhua.

In 2017, China ranked the second in international patent applications, with some 51,000 Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications submitted.

China is also the third largest applicant for trademark registration under the Madrid System with 4,810 applications in 2017, up 59.6 percent.

"China opposes abuse of IPR rules, and trade protectionism in the guise of protecting IPR," Shen said. "China is ready to work with other countries to build inclusive, balanced and effective international IPR rules."

Shen said his office will help build a unified, open market with orderly competition, and a stable, fair, transparent and predictable business environment.

Shen said his restructured agency would accelerate establishment of an IPR protection system of trademarks, patents, and geographical indications, and work with agencies overseas.

Shen said China encourages technological exchange to support high-quality growth.

In the last five years, China investigated and dealt with 192,000 patent and 173,000 trademark infringement cases. IPR courts and courtrooms have been set up across the country.

Shen said a fourth revision of the Patent Law will come faster than expected. "We are introducing a punitive damages system for IPR infringement to ensure offenders pay a big price."Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 19:17:35|Editor: Yurou

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GAZA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Islamic Hamas movement held Israel responsible for the military escalation in Gaza Strip after one of its militants was killed in an Israeli airstrike Thursday.

"Israel's targeting resistance sites reflects the bankruptcy of the occupation and its failure against the will of the Palestinian people to continue the Great March of Return," Hamas spokesman Abdel Latif al-Qanoua said in a press statement.

Hamas' armed wing al-Qassam Brigades said in a statement that one of its militants was killed in an Israeli airstrike earlier on the day.

Earlier, Israeli army said its fighter jets struck a Hamas military compound in northern Gaza Strip early on Thursday in response to an explosive device detonated against a military vehicle near the Gaza-Israeli border fence on Wednesday.

Palestinian militants fired machine guns at an Israeli jet but missed it, the Israeli army noted.SEOUL, April 12 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Thursday that a denuclearization deal between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States can only improve inter-Korean relations.

Moon made the remarks during a meeting with the elder advisory group of the presidential preparation committee for the upcoming inter-Korean summit, according to the Blue House.

The advisory group is composed of former ministers, presidential secretaries, intelligence agency chiefs and scholars who helped the former liberal governments under presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun hold the first and second inter-Korean summits in 2000 and 2007, respectively.

President Moon agreed to hold the third summit with top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un on April 27 at Peace House, a South Korean building at the border village of Panmunjom.

"With the South-North agreement alone, inter-Korean relations cannot be resolved. The North-U.S. denuclearization agreement must be implemented, and then the inter-Korean relations can be resolved," Moon said.

Moon said South Korea must successfully hold the upcoming summit to help make the DPRK-U.S. summit a success, but he noted that neither of the summits will be easy to address.

The Moon-Kim summit would be followed by the first-ever meeting between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump estimated in late May or early June.

Moon emphasized that the upcoming inter-Korean summit must be taken advantage of as it is a rare opportunity, which is very hard to come again, to go toward the Korean Peninsula's complete denuclearization, permanent peace settlement and sustainable development of inter-Korean relations.

Citing the past agreements between the two Koreas, including those from the two previous inter-Korean summits, Moon said the upcoming summit can be pushed for only based on the past experiences and achievements.

However, he noted that the current relations between the two Koreas cannot be resolved by the government alone, asking the elder advisory group to help gain support and understanding from the general public.

Moon added that the calling of this era given to South Korea is inheriting peace and prosperity of the peninsula to the next generation, asking precious advice from the advisory group.

Lim Dong-won, a former unification minister and intelligence agency chief who is leading the advisory group, told Moon that he wished this opportunity, created like a miracle, can be taken advantage of to make a great, historical change on the peninsula.

Lim said South Korea can turn a crisis into an opportunity by making the PyeongChang Winter Olympics a peace Olympic, praising Moon's efforts to restore inter-Korean communications channel and lead the inter-Korean summit into a DPRK-U.S. summit.

Signs of detente emerged on the peninsula as Kim, the DPRK leader, expressed willingness in his New Year's speech to participate in the 23rd Winter Olympics, followed by the high-level inter-Korean dialogue in which Pyongyang agreed to send its athletes, cheerleaders and artists as well as political delegations to PyeongChang, an east county of South Korea where the 23rd Winter Olympics was held in February.

In exchange for Kim's dispatch of his younger sister Kim Yo Jong as special envoy to PyeongChang who met with President Moon in Seoul, the South Korean leader sent his special envoys to Pyongyang.

After that, Moon's special envoys visited Washington to convey Kim's willingness to hold a DPRK-U.S. summit, which Trump had agreed for the purpose of the complete denuclearization on the peninsula.

Two former unification ministers with the advisory group proposed to Moon declaring the end of armistice between the two Koreas through the upcoming summits.

The Korean Peninsula remains technically in a state of war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended in armistice, not peace treaty.

Park Jie-won of the Party for Democracy and Peace, a former culture minister who contacted DPRK officials for the 2000 summit, told Moon that Trump's determination and Kim's willingness to implement the denuclearization deal will be important for the denuclearized peninsula.

Park noted that President Moon should safely play an arbitrating role between Trump and Kim with patience as it takes a significant time to achieve the goal of complete denuclearization.

Related:

Trump sees meeting with DPRK's top leader in May or early JuneMADRID, April 12 (Xinhua) -- As the number of immigrants and refugees trying to reach Spain rises, so has the death toll, according to the latest report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) released on Thursday.

The first quarter of 2018 saw a 13-percent rise in the number of arrivals compared to the same period last year.

One in every 27 people who tried to reach Spain -- mainly by crossing the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa -- died in the attempt, the report said. In 2017, the figure was one death in every 52 people.

But despite the dangers, the number of people ready to risk their lives for the chance of a better future has increased. In 2017, there were 28,000 arrivals in comparison with 14,000 in 2016.

Moroccans and Algerians remain the two main nationalities attempting to travel to Spain, although there has been a 67-percent increase in immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

"The journey to and through Europe continues to be filled with danger for refugees and immigrants," Pascale Moreau, director of the UNHCR's European office, said.

The long journey was not the only danger, "abuses and extortions" by traffickers and armed groups added to the risks, Moreau said.SKOPJE, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Macedonian government pulled through the vote of no confidence requested by the largest opposition party VMRO-DPMNE in the parliament session that lasted up to midnight on Wednesday.

Only 40 Members of Parliament (MPs) of the Macedonian opposition voted in favor of overthrowing the government, whereas 62 majority MPs voted against.

Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, in his address before MPs, called on the opposition to be constructive and uphold the country's interests.

"Macedonia is moving in the right direction by implementing important reforms and infrastructural projects," stated Zaev.

Meanwhile, VMRO-DPMNE MPs declared that the government does not have the necessary capacities to lead institutions and that it's taking political revenge, it is failing in terms of the economy and that it has pledged to change the country's name.

VMRO-DPMNE MPs accused Zaev's government of increasing criminality, other negative phenomena in the country, and the collapse of the economy.

In a reply to the accusation of the opposition the ruling Social Democratic League lawmakers replied that Macedonia was destroyed in the last 10 years by VMRO governments.

Zoran Zaev came to power on June 1 last year and this is the first no confidence motion against his government.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 19:42:44|Editor: Yurou

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TEHRAN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Iran's President Hassan Rouhani on Thursday congratulated his Azerbaijan's counterpart Ilham Aliyev on the latter's reelection win.

The result of the presidential election in Azerbaijan was an indication of the Azeris support for their incumbent government's programs and their country's pace of development and progress, said Rouhani.

He expressed the hope that the "brotherly" relations between the two countries would further continue by Aliyev's reelection, while wishing happiness and prosperity for the neighboring nation.

It was announced in Baku on Wednesday that President Aliyev had won 86.09 percent of the votes to allow him to rule for seven more years.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 19:52:46|Editor: Liangyu

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By Xinhua writer Wang Xiaopeng

NAIROBI, Mar 12 (Xinhua) -- The achievements made by China in the past few decades through the policy of reform and opening-up are so important to Africa because they give African people hope that such development can be realized, a senior Kenyan official said on Wednesday.

The problems we still face in Africa are so huge, said Raphael Tuju, Secretary-General of the ruling Jubilee Party of Kenya and a minister without portfolio, to Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

"There are problems of disease, problems of infrastructure and problems of poverty. Africa is just overloaded with problems," he said, adding that one of the biggest slums in Africa is in Nairobi.

"But if you look at what has been achieved in China, it gives us hope that something can be done in our lifetime," he said.

He stressed that China's experience in reform and opening-up is very significant, because it gives people in Africa an example of how things can be done.

The reform and opening-up policy has been behind China's robust growth over the past 40 years, which saw the country become the world's second largest economy and the largest contributor to world growth.

From 2013 to 2017, China contributed more than 30 percent of world economic growth, more than the combined contribution from the United States, Japan, and the eurozone, the World Bank data showed.

Accoridng to Tuju, who is 59, his first encounter with China was when he was doing the geography of the world as a children. He said, "The enduring image of China was mostly about the Chinese with straw hats in the rice fields."

Afterwards, the picture about China was about streets with thousands of bicycles, he said. "But now, if you ask any Kenyan about China, the first thing is about the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) linking Mombasa and Nairobi, and Guangzhou, where the Kenyans go to buy clothes and other things they need."

He stressed China's development was a template and a model of what has worked. Tuju was especially impressed by China's achievement in lifting more than 700 million Chinese people out of poverty in the past decades.

"There is no precedent in the history of mankind. If China can achieve that, it gives us a flicker of hope and light at the end of the tunnel," he said.

As it marks the 40th anniversary of the reform and opening-up policy this year, China will broaden market access, create a more attractive investment environment, strengthen protection of intellectual property rights, and take the initiative to expand imports.

He said it is very important for China to continue to open up its markets. The new measures will help ensure the trade between China and Africa is sustainable because of a two-way traffic.

Tuju expressed the hope that the industries which are no longer economical in China because of the cost of labor would be moved to Africa to be closer to the markets.

As for party-to-party exchange, he said the Jubilee Party has been working on enhancing the relationship with the Communist Party of China (CPC). The Jubilee Party will send members to China to study the experience of the CPC and it is planning to establish a party school, according to Tuju.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 19:52:47|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- A drug factory in Batangas province, the Philippines, was busted through joint efforts by Chinese and Philippine police on Thursday after seven months of investigations, according to China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS).

Police arrested seven suspects, including four Chinese nationals and three Philippine nationals at the drug factory on a farm.

Another four suspects were arrested in east China's Fujian Province.

Half-made methamphetamine,drug-making raw materials and equipment were seized in the joint operation.

Clue to the cross-border drug manufacture and sales case was uncovered last September by Fujian police, who learned that a drug baron was planning to hire Chinese workers to make methamphetamine in the Philippines.LJUBLJANA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Slovenian Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec said Thursday he did not think a U.S. military intervention in Syria would improve the situation in the country, and called for a diplomatic and political solution.

According to the Slovenian Press Agency STA, the minister expressed his "grave concern" in a statement to the nation's media in the wake of the U.S. military attacks on some Syrian targets.

The minister said that a potential military response to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria would "only escalate the tensions, in particular between the United States and Russia, and between Saudi Arabia and Iran."

He noted that due to the crisis in Syria, French Foreign Mminister Jean-Yves Le Drian cancelled his working visit to Slovenia scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

U.S. President Donald Trump warned Wednesday of a military strike on targets in Syria in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, which the West blames on Syrian President Bashar al Assad, said the STA.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 19:57:51|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- As discussions concluded at Asia's top economic forum, experts in multiple countries have hailed China's commitments to open trade, calling on the world to see the Asian country's strength as an opportunity for global prosperity.

In a keynote speech delivered Tuesday at the opening ceremony of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) annual conference in south China's Hainan Province, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised to further open up China's economy, lower tariffs and promote global prosperity.

"It is very reassuring that the Chinese president confirmed ... the commitment to a rule-based international economic system, for an open economy against protectionist measures," said Gerhard Stahl, a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, and former secretary-general of the European Committee of the Regions.

Stahl noted that the Chinese president made important proposals to deepen economic cooperation in the common interest, like reduction of import tariffs, further opening-up of the Chinese market, especially in the financial sector, and more improvements for foreign direct investment.

"European politicians and European business should see the benefits of increased cooperation with China," said Stahl.

"They should not fall into the trap of a geopolitical debate perceiving China as a threat, but understand that economic progress in the most populated country in the world creates benefits for the whole world," he added.

Carl Fey, a professor of international business at Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland, said he was very excited to hear from Xi's speech that China is committed to multilateral trade negotiations.

Referring to the trade frictions between China and the United States, Fey cited Xi's reaffirmation that China does not seek a trade surplus and is willing to increase imports, pointing out that the "positive" stance stands in contrast to recent U.S. moves.

"In my view, China's recent action will help continue to propel it to be an important global power which will increasingly play a leading role in international dialogue," said Fey.

Washington's recent tariff threats, however, "have not been helpful to the liberal trade regime that has become a global standard and which the United States until recently has ironically been the strongest proponent of," added Fey.

Gabriela Siller, director of economic analysis at Mexican bank Banco Base, said Xi's speech at the BFA conference helped to calm things down despite the shadow cast on the financial markets by the trade frictions between China and the United States, the world's two largest economies.

He stressed that it does not serve U.S. interest to enter into a trade war with China.

"A trade war does not benefit anyone," Siller said at a press conference.

Luigi Gambardella, president of ChinaEU, a business-led international digital association in Brussels, said that when Xi delivers a speech, not only China but the whole world is listening.

Xi's Boao speech, Gambardella said, shows that foreign investors will continue to be welcomed and China will further open up certain segments of the Chinese economy.

"Obviously, the reforms will not happen overnight," he said. "But the message is clear."Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 19:57:52|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang sent a letter of congratulations to the opening ceremony of 2018 ASEAN-China Year of Innovation held in Beijing on Thursday.

Li said in the letter that the new round of scientific revolution and industrial transformation is sweeping the world, and the role of innovation in supporting and leading economic and social development has become increasingly prominent. China is implementing an innovation-driven development strategy, accelerating to build an innovative country, boosting mass entrepreneurship, developing new driving forces of its economy, and upgrading its economic structure.

Li said deepening innovation cooperation is the common need for China and the ASEAN in dealing with global challenges and achieving sustainable development. In recent years, cooperation between China and the ASEAN has made substantial achievements, including exchanges in technology, building laboratories, and science parks.

Li expressed his hope that the two sides can take this year as an opportunity to upgrade innovation cooperation to boost China-ASEAN cooperation and East Asia regional development.

The China-ASEAN Forum of Innovation also opened in Beijing on Thursday.

Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong also sent a letter of congratulations to the opening ceremony of 2018 ASEAN-China Year of Innovation.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 19:57:54|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China has asked a number of major online video companies to strengthen the management of their content, and make sure their platforms are free of harmful information such as pornography and violence.

A total of 18 live-streaming and short video companies, including YY, Douyu, and Kuaishou, were contacted by the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications recently to underscore the issue.

They were told to stick to the guidance of good values, step up the examination of their content and security control, and not to spread inappropriate content that is vulgar or spoofing.

The companies were urged to fulfill their social responsibilities as enterprises, and attach significance to both economic and social benefits at the same time.

They were also asked to set up internal protection systems for juveniles, and intensify the clearing of content that does harms them.

Those that violate the laws or regulations will be investigated and strictly punished in accordance with the law, and those platforms that fail to fulfill their responsibilities will also be called to account, said the office.

Earlier this month, the Cyberspace Administration of China ordered two popular live-streaming sites, Kuaishou and Toutiao, to make changes to their practices. The two companies were accused of allowing juveniles to spread harmful content.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:07:59|Editor: ZX

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Representatives attend the 34th United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Regional Conference for Asia and the Pacific (APRC) on the Denarau island near Fiji's third largest city of Nadi, on April 12, 2018. Senior officials from 46 FAO members in the Asia-Pacific region have agreed that the countries within the region have made great progress in the food and agriculture sector and reduced poverty and hunger. (Xinhua/Zhang Yongxing)

DENARAU ISLAND, FIJI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Fiji reiterated on Thursday its support to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Asia-Pacific region.

"I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate that we will continue our support to the FAO and the region to deliver the ambition of inclusive growth and shared prosperity for all," Fijian President Jioji Konrote said here on Thursday at the 34th session of FAO's regional conference for Asia and the Pacific (APRC) which kicked off on Monday.

Many challenges remain ahead, but with steadfast commitment, Fiji could deliver on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he said, adding that no one can be left behind in their common quest for sustainable development.

The president described the regional conference as "very important and timely" to synchronise the work of the FAO with the needs of countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

Konrote also hoped that this regional conference would provide them with the opportunity to present and discuss issues and solutions relating to food and nutrition security that are specific to small island countries while keeping with their goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"Through this conference, we should also discuss how the FAO can best help member countries in planning and implementing actions, as well as in mobilizing financial support to build resilience of rural livelihoods," he said.

The president also urged this regional conference to focus on women in agriculture and employment for rural youth.

"This is a huge challenge for the Pacific as the contribution of women and youths are not always recognized, despite their playing a major role in agriculture," he said.

Established in 1945, the Rome-based FAO is the specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Its goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives. With over 194 members, FAO works in over 130 countries and regions.

The FAO Asia-Pacific regional conference will end on Friday.PHNOM PENH, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Cambodian police had arrested four men for allegedly trafficking 26.7 kg of illicit drugs in Phnom Penh, an anti-drug senior official said on Thursday.

Police arrested a group of four suspects and confiscated the large amount of drugs during raids on three different locations in Phnom Penh last week, said Loek Vannak, chief of the Interior Ministry's anti-drug department.

"The seized drugs include 18.1 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine, 8.38 kilograms of ketamine, and 217 grams of heroin," he said in a press conference here.

He said the suspects imported the drugs from Laos into Cambodia for manufacturing and packaging, and their final destination was a third country.

The Southeast Asian nation has no death sentence for drug traffickers. Under its law, a person who traffics more than 80 grams of illicit drug will be facing life imprisonment.

The country had arrested 17,795 suspects in 8,173 drug-related cases in 2017, and nearly 300 kg of illicit drugs had been confiscated, according to a government report.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:07:59|Editor: Liangyu

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Aerial photo shows Dongyang relic site in Weinan City, northwest China's Shaanxi Province. Chinese paleontologists believe rice cultivation arrived in northern China from the south during the Neolithic age. Researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences institute of vertebrate paleontology and paleoanthropology base their view on study of items found in the Dongyang site. Phytolith analysis of residue found at the Dongyang site shows rice was grown there 5,800 years ago. (Xinhua)

XI'AN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese paleontologists believe rice cultivation arrived in northern China from the south during the Neolithic age.

Researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences institute of vertebrate paleontology and paleoanthropology base their view on study of items found in the Dongyang site in Weinan City, northwest China's Shaanxi Province.

Rice growing is thought to have originated in the middle and lower reaches of Yangtze River in southern China at least 8,000 years ago, whence the practice spread north, said the institute's Wu Yan.

Phytolith analysis of residue found at the Dongyang site shows rice was grown there 5,800 years ago, said Wu.

Phytoliths are microscopic silica structures found in plants which persist long after the rest of the plant has decayed.

"We also found phytoliths of rice leaves, husk and straws, a complete chain of rice-growing," said Wu.

"It shows that the rice did not come from trade or exchange, but from local farming," said Xu Weihong of Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.

About 6,000 to 5,500 years back, weather in the southern part of Shaanxi was humid with ample rainfall, ideal for rice growing, said Xu.

The Dongyang relic site is part of the Neolithic Yangshao culture, dating back up to 7,000 years.File photo taken on Aug. 6, 2016 shows an industrial park near Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa. (Xinhua/Michael Tewelde)

ADDIS ABABA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopian government Wednesday said the recent resolution passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, which condemned the Ethiopia's human rights and governance record, was untimely and inappropriate.

The resolution passed on Tuesday called on the Ethiopian government to lift the state of emergency rule, end the use of excessive force by security forces, investigate the killings and excessive use of force that took place amid protests in Ethiopia's two largest regional states Oromia and Amhara regions.

It also stressed release of dissidents, activists and journalists "who have been imprisoned for exercising constitutional rights."

"This simple resolution is counterproductive and is against the important partnership between the U.S. and Ethiopia," the Ethiopian foreign ministry said in a statement.

"Those members of the House who cosponsored the resolution conspicuously failed to recognize the changing reality on the ground. Indeed, these members of the House merely wanted to please their constituencies," it said.

The ministry said the House ignores the positive strides the country has made recently.

According to the ministry, Ethiopia's ruling party and its government have been launching bold reforms aimed at increasing transparency and widening the country's democratic space -- some of these initiatives include releasing prisoners, and working on stabilizing the situation in the region.

Noting the commitments made by Ethiopia's new prime minister Abiy Ahmed to urgently undertake multifaceted reforms, the ministry stressed that "that is why the Government of Ethiopia believes H.Res.128 is untimely and inappropriate."

"At this crucial juncture, when the government is working to implement bold reforms, this resolution tries to undermine the new political dynamism and fails to recognize the call by the Prime Minister to create all inclusive political platform," the ministry said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:33:08|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China on Thursday expressed concern of rising tensions in Syria, and called on all relevant parties of the Syria issue to remain calm and show restraint.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang made the remarks at a routine news briefing.

According to media reports, a Russian official said that Russia is ready to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria by the United States, while the U.S. side threatened military options at any time.

"China is worried about the possibility of escalation of tension," Geng said.

He said Foreign Minister Wang Yi had exchanged ideas on the current situation in Syria with visiting United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

China maintains contact on this issue with other members of the UN Security Council including the United States and Russia, as well as other regional countries, Geng added.

"China always insists on a peaceful settlement of disputes, opposes usage or threats to use military force in international relations, and always advocates handling issues in accordance with the UN Charter," said the spokesman.

China called on all parties to the issue to ease the tension as soon as possible, Geng said.by Dragana Paulsen

OSLO, April 12 (Xinhua) -- As the United States repeatedly imposed steep tariffs on imports, Norway's industry and business sector has voiced its concerns about increasing trade protectionism and called for the preservation of a rules-based multilateral trading system.

"Predictable conditions and common rules for trade and investment are a prerequisite for economic growth, prosperity and development," said Tore Myhre, director of the International Department of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO), the country's major organization for employers and the leading business lobby.

"The World Trade Organization (WTO) is crucially important in promoting trade liberalization, predictability and legal security for the business sector," Myhre told Xinhua.

"Unilateral protectionist trade measures undermine the multilateral trading system. We want the WTO to be strengthened, not weakened", he stressed.

His remarks came after Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg last week came down heavily on the increasing trade protectionist measures by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, warning they might lead to "regression, war and conflict."

"A global trade war and increasing protectionism are the last thing the world needs now," Solberg said at her Conservative Party's annual national conference in Gardermoen, north of Oslo.

Harald Solberg, CEO of the Norwegian Shipowners' Association, said his organization is a strong supporter of free trade and is therefore very concerned about increasing protectionism.

"The removal of trade barriers and the opening of markets in recent decades have been crucial to the globalized trade that we all enjoy today. Globalization has contributed to economic growth, welfare, and innovation," he said.

Their concerns came after the United States last month imposed a 25-percent tariff on imported steel and a 10-percent tariff on imported aluminum, and later unilaterally decided to levy massive tariffs on Chinese products, aiming to start a trade war.

Halvor Molland, senior vice president and head of media relations of the partially state-owned aluminum and renewable energy company Norsk Hydro, said the company "strongly supports a free, fair and rules-based approach to international trade."

"Unilateral tariffs, wherever they come from, will lead to trade distortions and would negatively affect the industry. Countries affected could invoke retaliations, increasing this impact," Molland told Xinhua.

NHO's Myhre said tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, implemented by the U.S. administration, are "very regrettable."

"The tariffs will not only affect exports to the United States. They will also change trade flows, affect prices and trigger protective measures on key markets," he said. "A potential trade war between the U.S. and China or other trading partners could lead to a spiral of protectionist measures that will hit the world trade and the economic growth."

Norway, with its open economy, is heavily dependent on international trade and will thus also be affected by the protectionist measures, Myhre said.

Harald Solberg shared the same view, saying that "as a small and open economy, Norway is entirely dependent on open markets and, in practice, takes part in the world trade.

"A trade war will therefore also affect the world trade that Norwegian business is, to a large extent, a part of. We fear that a possible trade war could hit the global economic growth, endanger workplaces and hamper the innovation development," he said.

As a response to the U.S. trade moves, China has vowed to take "comprehensive countermeasures," including having filed a request for consultation under the WTO dispute settlement framework with the United States regarding the U.S. Section 232 measures that slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

"When one country introduces trade barriers targeting specific countries or regions, it is not unnatural that the latter pays it with its own coin. And that is exactly the danger of an escalating trade war we are very concerned about", said Harald Solberg.

"The multilateral justice system and the global trading institute WTO have well served and still serve the world trade. It is appropriate to refer to the WTO and its Dispute Settlement Body in the case of conditions and measures that challenge the world trade and which are considered to be in breach of obligations imposed through the WTO," he said.

Harald Solberg said a global trade war will not serve anyone, and "on the contrary, (it) will only create losers."

Myhre agreed. "Everyone loses a trade war," he said.

"We trust that the United States and China will be able to resolve all questions through dialogue and in accordance with their international obligations," said Myhre.BAKU, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Azerbaijan's incumbent President Ilham Aliyev looked all set for another term after the final results of Wednesday's presidential election declared here Thursday by the Central Election Commission (CEC) showed him to have won 86.03 percent of the votes.

His closest competitor was independent candidate Zahid Oruj, who scored 3.11 percent of the votes. There had been eight contestants in the fray.

Aliyev made a victory address to the nation, thanking Azerbaijanis for their "support and trust".

"Citizens of Azerbaijan have voted for security and progress," he said.

Aliyev will now have a seven-year term as a constitutional referendum in 2016 extended the presidential term from five to seven years. It also gave the president the right to call snap elections.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:43:12|Editor: ZX

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A Dhaka University student paints on a wall in preparation for celebration of Bengali New Year 1425 which falls on April 14, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, April 12, 2018.(Xinhua/Salim Reza)

DHAKA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- With the approaching of Bengali New Year of 1425, which falls on April 14, the entire Bangladesh has apparently gotten into a festive mood.

Shopping malls in capital Dhaka as well as marketplaces across the country are brimming with customers seeking items in preparation for new year celebrations.

Celebration of the Bengali New Year begins with the sunrise when people wearing new dresses gather in the main venues around the Dhaka University in the capital.

Like in previous years, hundreds of thousands of people irrespective of cast, color, sex and religion wearing masks and traditional dresses, mostly students of colleges and universities, are expected to join the colorful procession - Mangal Shobha Jatra - to welcome the new year with good spirits.

During the procession, students from Dhaka University usually carry large symbolic figures of birds and animals chasing evil spirits.

In Bangladesh, Pohela Boishakh, or the first day of the New Year, is a national holiday. Bengalis usually start the day with the traditional simple breakfast of panta-bhat (leftover rice soaked in water), fried fish and traditional curries.

Bangladeshi Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan has said that stringent measures will be put in place to prevent any disturbance in the festivities of the New Year.

Thousands of additional security persons including policemen, elite force Rapid Action Battalion and SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics) have been deployed to ensure security for the new year celebration venues including fairs in Dhaka.

Emperor Akbar of the Mughal Dynasty introduced the Bangli calendar year and the celebration of Pohela Boishakh, marking the advent of Bengali New Year, which is now considered as an integral part of the Bengalis cultural heritage and tradition and a day of merriment.

The Mughal Dynasty ruled most of the Indian subcontinent for three centuries from 1526.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:48:13|Editor: Liangyu

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A man reads a book of the second volume of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" before a seminar with the theme of "China in the New Era" in London, Britain, on April 11, 2018. An international seminar with the theme of "China in the New Era" was held in London on Wednesday, as part of a series of activities to promote the launch of the second volume of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" in nine languages. (Xinhua/Isabel Infantes)

LONDON, April 12 (Xinhua) -- An international seminar with the theme of "China in the New Era" was held in London on Wednesday, as part of a series of activities to promote the launch of the second volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China in nine languages.

The seminar attracted more than 70 senior scholars and media representatives from China, Britain, the United States and Singapore. Relevant discussions have covered topics of the historical positioning and worldwide significance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, as well as China and the world in the new era.

Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era has led the socialism with Chinese characteristics into a new era, has opened a new chapter in realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and has opened a new scroll that strengthens the integration of China with the world, said Jiang Jianguo, deputy head of Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and minister of the State Council Information Office.

Jiang stressed that in the new era, China will create more opportunities for global development, open the door of opening-up even wider to countries all over the world, enhance exchanges with different civilizations and contribute more deeply to the building a community with a shared future for mankind.

Zheng Bijian, chairman of China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, said the context of "China in the new era" comes from the development process of socialism with Chinese characteristics linked to economic globalization.

He said the important idea of building a community with a shared future for mankind proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping brought the concepts of convergence of interests and community of shared interests, developed through "interdependence" created in economic globalization, to a new historical height.

The fourth round of economic globalization where countries achieve shared growth through discussion and collaboration is approaching, Zheng said.

It is more important than ever that we follow the trends of our times, make concerted efforts to address challenges through global cooperation, and redouble our efforts to expand and deepen the convergence of interests of all parties and to develop all-dimensional and multi-level communities of common interests, he added.

Former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez said that in the face of the globalization process, isolationism should not be adopted. Instead, all countries should strengthen the coordination of global governance and explore the convergence of interests.

He highlighted that China, as a force for stability and support for cooperation in the process of globalization, is constantly opening up and seeking common interests with other countries to create a community of shared interests.

Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to Britain, said reading China in the new era is a necessity to seize opportunities in China, is the call of the times to build a community with a shared future for mankind, and is a necessary step to narrow down the "cognitive gap" between China and the West.

He appeals the public to fully understand the CPC, profoundly read Xi Jinping: The Governance of China and study China's national conditions, in a bid to better understand China in the new era.

Nathan Gardels, co-founder of the Berggruen Institute, said the West and China need to understand each other's development goals and seek common grounds for common interests. The starting point is an international seminar like this one that helps the West better understand Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

Martin Jacques, a senior fellow at the Cambridge University, told Xinhua that the world today lacks a sense of direction in the future. It is at this time that China has proposed its own new perspectives on the future.

He believes that the concept of building a community with a shared future for mankind proposed by Xi in the current era of globalization is an important foundation for the development of human society.

"China's own great changes and its perception of the future are very important. If we look at it in a more profound sense, China is the future," he said.

The event was jointly organized by China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, China International Publishing Group and 21st Century Council and supported by the Chinese embassy in Britain.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:48:15|Editor: ZX

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TEHRAN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- A senior advisor to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said Thursday that the gas attack allegations against Syrian government was the result of the U.S. failure in the country.

In an interview with Tasnim news agency, Ali Akbar Velayati slammed the U.S. allegations that Syrian government launched a chemical attack in Damascus' suburban district of Douma, were "repeated and fabricated propaganda trick" after the defeat of U.S.-backed militants in Syria.

Whenever the U.S.-backed mercenaries suffer a heavy blow in Syria, Washington resorts to recurring fabricated allegations of chemical attacks in Damascus, Velayati said.

Iran was committed to supporting the Syrian nation and its "legitimate" government, said Velayati, adding that Iran would help strengthen the axis of resistance including Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to launch a missile attack on Syria over the alleged gas attack in Douma, though no evidence has supported the allegation so far.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:48:16|Editor: Liangyu

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NANCHANG, April 12 (Xinhua) -- In a red robe and ferocious Nuo mask with popping-eyes and a long chin, Huang Jinhong moves among a group of dancers to the clanging of gongs.

Huang, aged 10, is a pupil of Fengquan Elementary School in Shangli County, in east China's Jiangxi Province. The Nuo Opera, a religious ritual to ward off evil spirits, has been practiced here for more than 1,000 years. Every week, he practices for four hours.

"We only rest for five minutes before proceeding to the next practice session," said the boy. "The most difficult part for me is the spinning, because I can never remember how many circles I should spin for."

Minister of Education Chen Baosheng recently said that the government will bring opera, traditional dance and calligraphy into campuses, and Huang is among more than 170 students in this school who take part in weekly classes.

The Nuo ritual has been practiced for thousands of years and involves sacrifices and ceremonies in tribute to ancestors, gods and goddesses, while exorcising demons. It spread among people of various ethnicities along the Yangtze and Yellow river valleys and southwestern areas. Nuo rituals were widely performed at Lunar New Year holidays to expel evil spirits.

Accompanied by drum and gong, Nuo performers with whips, dance in black, white or red masks bearing various expressions: amiable, ferocious or fearful. In recent decades the ceremony has become little more than a theatrical performance.

Jiangxi is famous for its variety of Nuo opera. Wherever there is a performance in an outlying village, farmers may trek dozens of kilometers along hillside paths to watch. Though some elderly folks are still in awe of the Nuo dancing "gods," few today fully understand the ritual.

The Fengquan Elementary School started teaching its pupils the Nuo dance in 2002. Teachers have written textbooks about Nuo culture and organized students to make Nuo masks. They also invested in Nuo costumes, masks and instruments, taking students to museums on the Nuo culture.

Huang started learning the Nuo dances only half a year ago.

"I play the Second King in the ritual," Huang said, referring to the god in charge of floods. "I mainly dance in the middle of the troupe."

Huang first got to know Nuo Opera through his uncle, who plays a minor character in a local troupe. The boy said he loves the dance because "it is very good exercise."

"I have to squat, and I put my sword on my shoulder a lot," he said. "Right now I can only perform with my sword, but I will learn how to use the ax next."

Xiao Fu plays Nezha, the Third Lotus Prince. Xiao said they have not only performed locally, but further afield in Jiangxi, in schools, temples and on stage.

"We perform on lunar holidays," Xiao said. "For example, this year, we performed on Lantern Festival."

Each performance lasts about three minutes, but it can be a lot of effort for a child. Huang said he sweats a lot after a performance, but is very happy because "not everyone in the school can perform."

"Even though all the pupils in the school practice every week, only the 25 best are picked out to perform in front of people," Huang said proudly.

In the past few years, students at the school have won wide acclaim for their performances. In 2011, for example, the little performers won an award at an evening gala in Pingxiang City, which administers the county. In 2013, the school was honored as a pilot area for the "excellent" culture in schools program.

Xu Qifa, school president, said that long practice has instilled Nuo knowledge in students.

"I believe that with our efforts, the Nuo culture will be passed on and gain more recognition," Xu said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:53:16|Editor: Liangyu

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WUHAN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Neelum-Jhelum project, one of the largest hydropower stations in Pakistan, will see its first turbine generator officially start supplying electricity to the national grid on Friday, said the Chinese contractor.

The project, roughly 200 kilometers northeast of Islamabad, has four generators with a total capacity of 969 megawatts. The second generator will start trial operation this month, followed by the third and fourth units in the latter half of the year, according to China Gezhouba Group Co. Ltd. (CGGC), also the main builder of the Three Gorges project.

Designed to generate 5.15 billion kilowatt-hours of clean energy annually, the project aims to ease power shortages in part of Pakistan and is estimated to generate a fiscal revenue of 45 billion rupees (442 million U.S. dollars) annually, said the Chinese construction giant.

The Neelum-Jhelum project is an engineering marvel as 90 percent of the project lies underground in high mountainous areas. The project involves constructing a dam on the Neelum River, a waterway system comprising 68-kilometer-long tunnels and an underground powerhouse on the Jhelum River.

Construction of the project began in January 2008 after a Chinese consortium that includes CGGC and China Machinery Engineering Corp. was awarded a 21-billion-yuan contract in 2007. CGGC said the project will provide about 8,000 jobs for locals.

CGGC, headquartered in central Chinese city of Wuhan, is also known as the builder of the Gezhouba Dam, China's first hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River.

Currently its biggest under-construction overseas projects include the 29.6-billion-yuan Caculo Cabaca hydropower plant in Angola and a 36.9-billion-yuan project on the Santa Cruz River in Argentina.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:53:17|Editor: Liangyu

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SHANGHAI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Shanghai and Edinburgh international art festivals on Thursday signed a memorandum of cooperation to commission and produce a Chinese contemporary dance performance "The Rite of Spring."

The Rite of Spring is the newest dance composition choreographed by Yang Liping, China's leading dancer and choreographer.

Based on Tibetan culture, the Rite of Spring, tells the enchanting love-hate story between a lion, a beautiful woman, and a senior monk, and pays tribute to the eternal theme of love and freedom.

As a signature character in all Yang Liping's works, an image of a peacock will also appear on stage. The peacock will be reborn from nirvana at the end of the production.

The Rite of Spring will make its international debut in October during the 20th China Shanghai International Arts Festival (CSIAF), and move onto the stage at the 72nd Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) in August 2019.

Joanna Baker, managing director of the EIF, said that the collaboration on a new version of the Rite of Spring marks a commitment to show contemporary Chinese works to global audiences in Edinburgh.

"We first talked about the project in Edinburgh in February 2017. Now we hope that it is just the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership." said Baker.

"Shanghai is becoming a city which is globally recognized for its culture. The CSIAF is huge, massively ambitious, and growing very fast," she added.

The CSIAF was established in 1999. It holds and invites theater performances from more than 60 countries and regions every year. The EIF is the world's most influential art event and celebrated its 70th anniversary last year.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 20:58:18|Editor: pengying

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French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian (L) meets with Romanian Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu in Bucharest, Romania, on April 12, 2018. Romania can count on France's support for its first presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said here Thursday at a press conference with his Romanian counterpart Teodor Melescanu. (Xinhua/Cristian Cristel)

BUCHAREST, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Romania can count on France's support for its first presidency of the Council of the European Union (EU), French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said here Thursday at a press conference with his Romanian counterpart Teodor Melescanu.

Le Drian underscored the strong connection between the two countries, "at an important moment" for the EU when Romania is preparing to take over the EU Council rotating presidency for the first time at the beginning of 2019.

According to Melescanu, the Romania-France Strategic Partnership "has had a major contribution to deepening the bilateral relation," and the two countries are discussing the joint demarche to update the road map, "which could be signed even at the end of this year."

"The renewal of the strategic partnership and its road map will be a reflection on the quality of our relation," said the visiting French minister.

Melescanu requested France's support on a swift decision, in respect to Romania's acceptance into the Schengen Area.

Le Drian arrived here on Wednesday for a two-day visit to Romania. His schedule also includes meetings with President Klaus Iohannis, Prime Minister Viorica Dancila, as well as the presidents of the two chambers of the Romanian Parliament.Two female engine drivers gesture before the operations of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) in Mombasa, Kenya, on May 31, 2017. Kenya began operations on the Chinese-built SGR in 2017. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo)

by Xinhua writer Wang Xiaopeng

NAIROBI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The achievements made by China in the past few decades through the policy of reform and opening-up are so important to Africa because they give African people hope that such development can be realized, a senior Kenyan official said on Wednesday.

The problems we still face in Africa are so huge, Raphael Tuju, Secretary-General of the ruling Jubilee Party of Kenya, told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

"There are problems of disease, problems of infrastructure and problems of poverty. Africa is just overloaded with problems," he said, adding that one of the biggest slums in Africa is in Nairobi.

"But if you look at what has been achieved in China, it gives us hope that something can be done in our lifetime," he said.

He stressed that China's experience in reform and opening-up is very significant, because it gives people in Africa an example of how things can be done.

The reform and opening-up policy has been behind China's robust growth over the past 40 years, which saw the country become the world's second largest economy and the largest contributor to world growth.

From 2013 to 2017, China contributed more than 30 percent of world economic growth, more than the combined contribution from the United States, Japan, and the eurozone, the World Bank data showed.

A man stands guard during the reception ceremony of the first batch of locomotives for the Mombasa-Nairobi standard gauge railway in Mombasa, Kenya, on Jan. 11, 2017. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo)

Accoridng to Tuju, who is 59, his first encounter with China was when he was doing the geography of the world as a children. He said, "The enduring image of China was mostly about the Chinese with straw hats in the rice fields."

Afterwards, the picture about China was about streets with thousands of bicycles, he said. "But now, if you ask any Kenyan about China, the first thing is about the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) linking Mombasa and Nairobi, and Guangzhou, where the Kenyans go to buy clothes and other things they need."

He stressed China's development was a template and a model of what has worked. Tuju was especially impressed by China's achievement in lifting more than 700 million Chinese people out of poverty in the past decades.

"There is no precedent in the history of mankind. If China can achieve that, it gives us a flicker of hope and light at the end of the tunnel," he said.

As it marks the 40th anniversary of the reform and opening-up policy this year, China will broaden market access, create a more attractive investment environment, strengthen protection of intellectual property rights, and take the initiative to expand imports.

He said it is very important for China to continue to open up its markets. The new measures will help ensure the trade between China and Africa is sustainable because of a two-way traffic.

Tuju expressed the hope that the industries which are no longer economical in China because of the cost of labor would be moved to Africa to be closer to the markets.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 21:33:25|Editor: Liangyu

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NANJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- "There's no such thing as a free lunch." -- except for those in Wuxi recently.

Chinese ride-hailing giant DiDi Chuxing launched its food delivery service Didi Waimai in the east China city on April 1, causing fierce competition among food delivery platforms.

Using a coupon for a 20-yuan discount given to new users, Wuxi resident Wang Lingling ordered a takeout meal of fried chicken and only paid the minimum cost of 0.01 yuan (one yuan equals about 0.16 U.S. dollars).

"The meal was priced at 15 yuan, and the delivery cost was three, which was all covered by the coupon," she said.

Didi's expansion in the food delivery market came after the food delivery company Meituan's move to launch a car-hailing service last month in Shanghai.

Facing competition from Didi, Meituan and other food-delivery service providers such as Ele.me have also been providing discounts.

"Meituan has announced free delivery within the city and Ele.me has offered discounts coupons ranging from 10 to 15 yuan," Wang said.

The competition has been intensified.

A user named "Jennifer" wrote on social messaging service WeChat that the service cannot keep up with the soaring demand caused by the discounts. "I ordered takeout and waited for about two hours."

Some restaurants said they were forced to leave one food delivery platform if they registered on another. Some said they had to cancel orders because they had too many to handle.

The local industrial and commercial department Wednesday held a meeting with Didi, Meituan, and Ele.me, calling for a halt to behavior suspected to be unfair competition and monopoly.

The companies said they would stop inappropriate acts and cooperate with the government to restore market order.

China has been witnessing a boom in the online food delivery industry.

Statistics show the online food delivery market reached 204.6 billion yuan last year, up 23 percent from 2016. The number of registered users is nearly 300 million.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 21:43:28|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday sent condolences to his Algerian counterpart, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, over a deadly military plane crash.

In his message, Xi said he was shocked by the news of the crash, which resulted in heavy casualties.

On behalf of the Chinese government and the Chinese people, and also in his own name, Xi expressed his sympathies to the injured and conveyed his deepest condolences to the bereaved families.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang also sent a message to his Algerian counterpart, Ahmed Ouyahia, to express his condolences over the accident.

The military plane crashed Wednesday morning in Algeria's Blida Province, 30 km southwest of the capital Algiers, killing all 257 people on board, including 10 crew members.

It is confirmed by Algeria's Defense Ministry as the worst air disaster in the country's history.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 21:48:29|Editor: ZX

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TEHRAN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- A Syrian lawmaker said on Thursday he did not believe the U.S. would attack Syria over the chemical attack accusations against Syrian troops.

"I don't think (U.S. President Donald) Trump would attack Syria," Nashaat al-Atrash said in an interview with Iran's Tasnim news agency.

Trump threatened on Wednesday to launch a missile attack on Syria in response to the alleged chemical attack by Syrian troops in the rebel-held Douma district on the outskirts of Syrian capital Damascus. Syria has strongly denied the accusations.

Event if Trump did, al-Atrash added, it could not disrupt the rapport among Syrian people, army and government.

The recent military victories Syrian army gained in Douma and elsewhere in Eastern Ghouta were the main reasons behind Trump's threat to attack Syria, al-Atrash said.

He pointed out that former U.S. President Barack Obama also threatened to take military actions against Syria over similar allegations, but did not carry out his threat.The 9999th Boeing 737-800 aircraft prepares to take off from the company's Seattle airfield in the state of Washington, the United States, March 24, 2018. China's air carrier Okay Airways witnessed Saturday the 9999th Boeing 737-800 aircraft delivered by the Boeing Company embark on a home-bound journey back to China from the United States. (Xinhua/Wu Xiaoling)

SAN FRANCISCO, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Any trade war between the United States and China is worrisome, but if it escalated and tariffs imposed, "it will hit Washington particularly hard," said a former business leader in the U.S. west Pacific state of Washington on Wednesday.

"Avoiding that possibility should be our primary goal," Don Brunell, retired president of the Association of Washington Business, the state's oldest and largest business organization, wrote in the state's weekly the Sequim Gazette, which was published on Wednesday.

Washington state is America's third largest exporter with more than half of the containers leaving the Puget Sound heading to China, he said.

"The Port of Seattle estimated that China trade alone accounted for 18 billion U.S. dollars last year and 40 percent of our state's jobs are now tied to trade," he said.

"For Washington the immediate threat is the 15 percent tariff which may be placed on cherries, apples and wine," he said, adding that with the cherry crop ripening in early summer, the impact would be the most noticeable.

Brunell's comments came after U.S. President Donald Trump's administration threatened early this month to slap 25 percent tariffs on a list of 1,300 Chinese products worth 50 billion U.S. dollars.

In response, China announced it would impose tariffs of between 15 percent and 25 percent on 106 types of products from the United States worth 50 billion dollars.

"If a 25 percent tariff was levied on Boeing commercial aircraft, it could hurt Washington and impact the company's orders, deliveries and production," Brunell warned.

He said the U.S. aerospace giant Boeing has delivered over 1,000 737 passenger jets to China, and it has recently listed 273 unfilled orders of 737 destined for China airlines.

"In addition to airplanes and farm products, our state exported over 1 billion dollars in vehicles and parts, wood products, medical and surgical equipment and other goods," Brunell said.

"A deal needs be worked out which will give us better protections for intellectual properties and a more even playing field for our products," he suggested.

The best approach would be to bring people to the bargaining table, he said.BUDAPEST, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Hungarian government qualified a critical report of the European Parliament's (EP) Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs as a work of George Soros and a tool for putting pressure on Hungary's anti-migrant position.

"The Soros Empire increases the pressure on the Hungarian people," Peter Szijjarto, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Thursday in Hungary in relation to the report.

Members of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) discussed the situation of the rule of law, democracy and fundamental rights on Thursday. Judith Sargentini (Greens, The Netherlands) presented her draft report and called on the Council to find out whether there was a clear risk of violating EU core values in Hungary.

The EP entrusted the LIBE Committee in May 2017 to study the Hungarian situation, in particular the first paragraph of Article 7 of the EU Treaty.

In a then resolution, MEPs considered that the situation in Hungary justified the initiation of proceedings, which could result in sanctions, including the suspension of the Council's voting rights.

However, this sanction needs to be voted in a unanimous vote, and Poland, an ally of Hungary already said it would veto such a sanction.

According to the rapporteur, "the Hungarian people can no longer rely on the fundamental rights that we take granted in the rest of Europe".

"In Europe, we commit ourselves to human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and the common values of human rights. Today, Hungarians cannot be sure their government will treat them equally and honestly. I could not conclude other than there was a need for a procedure under Article 7. We must stand by the Hungarian citizens whose rights are endangered, "said Sargentini.

During the debate, several representatives agreed that Hungarian democracy and the rule of law were threatened by systemic threats and thanked the reporters for their objective attitude towards drafting the draft. Other MEPs demanded that no one should use the procedure for political gain and criticized the attacks on the Hungarian government with broad support.

Szijjarto criticized LIBE for launching an "attack on Hungary just four days after the election."

On April 8, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in power since 2010, secured a third consecutive win in general elections. According to partial official results, his coalition Fidesz-KDNP obtained 134 of the 199 seats of the parliament.

The electoral campaign of Orban was focused against the Hungarian-born American billionaire George Soros. Orban accuses him of orchestrating the international migration process throughout his "Empire", i.e. a series of NGOs linked to Soros' Open Society Foundation.

"Despite the attempts of the Soros network to intervene, despite the attempts by the EU or the EP to intervene, the Hungarians have made a clear decision on their own," Szijjarto said, pointing at the fact that the Hungarian people said a clear no to migration in the election.

He underlined that LIBE had no authority over Hungarian people's decisions, which was the sole right of the Hungarian government: "the Soros Empire, those who intervened in the Hungarian election process, are now extremely disappointed, because despite all of their attempts, Hungarian people have said no to the immigration policy and the parties that took such a stance in the campaign.

He expected the international pressure to be increased on Hungary in Brussels, New York and Geneva, but due to the result of the election, the government will resist with a renewed effort.

He also said that a representative who was in favor of immigration, and who was an advocate of the relocation quota prepared the report of LIBE Committee.

"The protection of our anti-immigration policy and the protection of national sovereignty will continue to be at the heart of the government's policy, no matter what kind of pressure it will endure," Szijjarto concluded.HANOI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- National flag carrier Vietnam Airlines said that since April 11, it has diverted its flights from/to Europe away from the Black Sea area, which could be under influence of the rising tension in Syria, Vietnam News Agency reported on Thursday.

The diverted flights included those from Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh City to Paris/Frankfurt/London and vice versa.

A representative of the airline said although the current air routes are far away from the fighting region, Vietnam Airlines decided to adjust the flying routes to ensure safety for passengers.

The carrier will closely monitor the situation and devise suitable flying routes in the coming time.

Meanwhile, the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam announced that it has also made adjustments to avoid the area.ADDIS ABABA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopia supports an impartial, transparent investigation into the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, an Ethiopian official said on Thursday.

Speaking to Xinhua, Meles Alem, Spokesperson of the Ethiopia Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), said Ethiopia, a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for 2017-2018, is ready to support resolutions that support impartial, transparent investigation into the alleged Syrian chemical attack.

"Ethiopia condemns chemical attacks as it was a previous casualty of chemical attacks itself in the hands of fascists, Ethiopia won't allow it to be repeated on any side," said Alem.

He was referring to the five-year occupation of Ethiopia by Italian fascist forces from 1936-1941, which witnessed Italian forces using poison gas against Ethiopian resistance fighters and civilians.

On April 7, activists said the Syrian government used chlorine gas while bombing Douma, the last rebel-held area in the Eastern Ghouta countryside of Damascus.

The Syrian government rejected the claims, denying being in possession of such weapons.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 22:08:34|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The State Council, China's cabinet, on Thursday expanded the role of Internet Plus in medical care.

Hospitals on second and third levels, the bigger hospitals in China, should provide online services for appointments, checking examination results and others, according to a statement released after an executive meeting of the State Council presided over by Premier Li Keqiang.

Medical institutions should be allowed to consult online for return visits for some conditions, the statement read.

Telemedicine should cover all medical unions and county-level hospitals across the country, and connect the better medical resources in east China with the demands of the central and western areas.

The country should also further explore the sharing of the prescriptions and medicine sales by medical institutions, according to the statement.

Moreover, the statement asked for more fairness in education, including setting up more smaller schools in more remote and less populated villages, and setting up boarding schools in towns for left-behind children.

"Internet Plus" education and targeted voluntary teaching should also be used in rural schools, the statement read.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 22:28:37|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have launched joint laboratory program to enhance innovation cooperation, Ministry of Science and Technology said Thursday.

Wang Zhigang, the minister, said that China has built a series of excellent joint laboratories and promoted the opening of China's national laboratories to ASEAN countries.

Wang made the remarks at the opening ceremony of 2018 ASEAN-China Year of Innovation, at the China-ASEAN Innovation Forum held in Beijing Thursday.

Joint laboratories include the China-Indonesia joint laboratory for high temperature gas cooled reactors, the China-Thailand railway system joint research center, the China-Laos joint laboratory for new and renewable energy, and the China-Myanmar joint laboratory for radar and satellite communications, Wang said.

"Chinese innovation needs ASEAN, and ASEAN innovation needs China," he said.

China has cooperated with 158 countries and regions in science and technology projects and participated in more than 200 sci-tech international organizations.

"China will further promote openness and cooperation in science and technology innovation in a broader range and at a deeper level," Wang said.

China is willing to synergize the Belt and Road Initiative with ASEAN's development plan to build a community with a shared future for China and ASEAN, Wang said.

The innovation year and the forum were organized by China's Ministry of Science and Technology, Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the ASEAN Secretariat.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 22:33:38|Editor: pengying

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Iraqi Shiite Muslims gather at the Al-Kadhimiya Mosque in northern Baghdad on April 12, 2018. Millions of Shiite pilgrims on Thursday ended their week-long pilgrimage to a holy shrine in the Iraqi capital Baghdad to mark a major ritual amid tightened security measures. (Xinhua/Khalil Dawood)

BAGHDAD, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Millions of Shiite pilgrims on Thursday ended their week-long pilgrimage to a holy shrine in the Iraqi capital Baghdad to mark a major ritual amid tightened security measures.

During the past few days, more than 5.6 million Shiite pilgrims visited the shrine of the seventh of the most revered 12 Shiite Imams, Jamal Abdul-Rasoul, an official from the mausoleum, told a press conference after the end of the ritual.

The pilgrims marched on foot or by bus from places across Iraq and abroad to commemorate the death of Imam Musa al-Kadhim at his golden-tomb mausoleum in the center of the old part of the holy Shiite Kadhimiya district in northern Baghdad.

Dozens of tents were set up on the streets leading to the shrine to serve water, food and medication to the pilgrims.

People clad in black and accompanied by drummers were marching in lines in honor of Imam Musa al-Kadhim who was believed to be poisoned to death while in prison in A.D. 799 during the Abbasid era.

The Shiite ritual was held under tightened security measures as thousands of Iraqi soldiers, federal police and other security forces totally blocked Kadhimiya district for several days and deployed on the main routes that were assigned for the pilgrims outside and inside Baghdad.

The troops, backed by helicopter gunships, manned dozens of checkpoints and patrolled the pilgrims routes across Baghdad.

"Baghdad was secured before and during the ritual against any plan by the terrorists, and we have thwarted malicious rumors that sought to disturb the visit (of the mausoleum)," General Jalil al-Rubaie, Commander of Baghdad Operations Command (BOC) told the press conference.

Rubaie said that the security forces on Wednesday thwarted an attack against the pilgrims by two suicide bombers.

On Wednesday, a statement by BOC said that the security forces acted on intelligence reports and ambushed two militants wearing explosive belts in Tarmiyah area, some 40 km north of Baghdad, leaving one of the suicide bombers killed and forcing the other to detonate his explosive belt after wounding him.

The two suicide bombers were attempting to attack Shiite pilgrims who were walking in large numbers on the main road in north of Baghdad to the holy Kadhimiya shrine, according to the statement.

Extremist insurgent groups, including Islamic State (IS), frequently attacked Shiite pilgrims who perform communal rituals in Iraqi cities, killing and wounding hundreds of them in the past years in attempts to provoke sectarian strife in the violence-shattered country.U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin take part in a family photo at the APEC summit in Danang, Vietnam Nov. 10, 2017. (Xinhua/REUTERS)

by Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, April 11 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday tweeted that he would strike Syria with missiles warning Moscow not to shoot them down, amid tensions with Russia.

Experts warned that Trump's move will further harm U.S.-Russia relations.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming," Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, in a jab at Russia.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua: "It would sour relations with (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and put Trump more on a path towards confronting Russia on a range of issues. In the long run, it would be more difficult for the two countries to work together."

This comes amid tense U.S.-Russia relations. The Trump administration earlier this month planned to slap more sanctions on Russian business elite, which may lead the "bad blood" between Russia and the United States to further deterioration.

The relationship between Washington and Moscow has plunged to a new low, as the United States expelled 60 Russian diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle in a concerted action with Britain and other Western nations over an ex-spy poisoning case, which took place last month.

Moscow's relations with the West has been sour over years amid disagreements involving the war in Syria, the conflict in Ukraine, and also the alleged Kremlin meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, which Moscow has denied.

While there has been talk of a meeting between Trump and Putin, it remains unknown whether the meeting will fix problems between the two nuclear powers, and some experts are negative about that possibility.

Dan Mahaffee, senior vice president and director of policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, told Xinhua that Trump's Twitter account has become a direct pipeline to the thinking of the president and, in this instance, the thinking of the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military at a time of international tension.

"U.S.-Russia relations are getting colder, and statements via Twitter and other proxies raise the risk of miscalculation on both sides," he said.

After the U.S. warmongering rhetoric against Syria and its allies, Russia warned the United States against striking Syria.

"Russia has warned U.S. representatives, publicly as well as through proper channels, over the grave consequences that could arise if these strikes happen and whether deliberately or otherwise Russian citizens are hurt," Russia's envoy to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov said.

Also, Russia's Ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin said Wednesday that his country would respond to any U.S. missiles fired at Syria by shooting them down and targeting their launch sites.

Activists, local rescuers, and rebels in Syria claim that Syrian government forces used chlorine gas on Saturday in an attack in Douma, a rebel-held area near capital Damascus.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry has denied the accusation, calling rebels' claims "premeditated pretexts."MOSCOW, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Russia's only aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, will return to the navy in 2021 after its upgrading is completed in 2020, Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov said Thursday.

The vessel will be completely refurbished at the 35th Ship Repairing Yard in Murmansk in northwest Russia, Borisov said.

In June 2017, Viktor Bursuk, deputy navy commander in charge of procurement, said Russia would start repairing Admiral Kuznetsov in 2018 and arm it with new equipment.

Russia also plans to construct a new aircraft carrier and various engineering centers are working to determine the design of this ship, Bursuk said then, giving no more details.

The 305-meter-long Admiral Kuznetsov with a displacement of 59,000 tons was launched in 1985 and entered service in 1990.

The warship carried out its first-ever combat mission in 2016 in the Mediterranean fighting Islamic State terrorists in Syria.

Its aircraft carried out 420 sorties in two months, but two jets fell off the deck after the arresting wires snapped. The vessel returned to its home base in February 2017 after the deployment was completed.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 22:48:43|Editor: yan

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BEIRUT, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Senior military officials of Lebanon and the United States on Thursday held a meeting and discussed bilateral relations and U.S. support to Lebanon, said an army statement.

Lebanese Army Commander Gen. Joseph Aoun, U.S. Maj. Gen. Darsie Rogers, head of U.S. Central Command Special Forces, and U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard attended the meeting.

The army Guidance Directorate said in the statement that Rogers' current visit to Lebanon is part of an initiative to investigate how U.S. forces can "meet the needs of the Lebanese Army and enhance its military capabilities".

The meeting comes a day after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened via Twitter to launch attacks on Syria, following a suspected chemical use in the Syrian district of Douma.ISLAMABAD, April 12 (Xinhua) -- A 52-percent drop has been witnessed in violent fatalities in Pakistan during the first quarter of 2018 as compared to the same period last year, local media reported Thursday.

According to data compiled by the country's Center for Research and Security Studies, a total of 283 people have been killed in separate violent incidents in different parts of Pakistan during January-March 2018, as compared to 592 violent fatalities during the same period in 2017, the local newspaper Express Tribune said.

A total of 217 people have been injured in separate violent incidents during the first quarter of this year.

This year three provinces of the country including Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan showed decline in violent killings, but in northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, a slight increase in such fatalities was witnessed.

So far this year, Balochistan led the list of the violent facilities with 77 killings, followed by Sindh with 69 killings. Punjab witnessed 54 fatalities whereas 42 people were killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa between January to March 2018.

A total of 82 militants and 74 security personnel were also killed in the first quarter of 2018. The killed security personnel included 38 policemen, 22 army personnel, eight officials of the Frontier Corps, three Rangers, and a Levies official.

Proscribed organization Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed most of the attacks during the first quarter of the year.SKOPJE, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Macedonian and Greek Foreign Ministers Nikola Dimitrov and Nikos Kotzias agreed on Thursday during their meeting in Ohrid, Macedonia to continue talks and expressed their optimism to overcome more complex issues in the future.

Greek and Macedonian diplomacy chiefs talked for the first time on the legal framework and the steps to be followed.

"This was a dialogue with great understanding of each other's needs and our challenge is how to unite the concerns of both countries and find a way to overcome them," declared Dimitrov.

Moreover, Dimitrov underlined, that during the talk, bilateral working groups, on the basis of the progress made in Vienna, have harmonized the text for further cooperation in many areas and have worked on the text to remove extremism from both sides and in the preamble paragraphs of the future bilateral agreement.

Meanwhile, Kotzias confirmed that the negotiations will continue on May 4 and 5 in Thessalonik, Greece, he also noted.

According to Kotzias, there is a lot of progress made, especially in the marginalization of irredentism, but there are still few difficult issues to negotiate.

"Today we have made a positive step and we always hope that we will succeed in alleviating even the toughest problems," Kotzias said.

Macedonia is formally called the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) at the UN. However, Macedonia is also the name of a northern province in Greece and the Greek authorities are worried that the use of the same name by the neighboring state could lead to territorial claims.

During the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, Greece vetoed FYROM's application to enter the alliance without having resolved the name issue. While Macedonia has renewed its efforts to join the EU and NATO, Greece has signaled that its position remains unchanged.GABORONE, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Botswana's foreign affairs minister said on Thursday the country's new administration under President Mokgweetsi Masisi will not change its stance on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) until the country holds credible elections.

Vincent Seretse, Botswana's new Minister of International Affairs and Cooperation, told media in the capital Gaborone that the diamond rich Southern Africa nation will continue to reiterate her displeasure with DRC.

Botswana has taken step to directly criticize DRC President Joseph Kabila on his refusal to hold long overdue elections.

Seretse said the decision is driving deadly violence and a growing humanitarian emergency in the DRC.

"Botswana urges the international community to put more pressure on the leadership in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to relinquish power and pave way for the ushering in of a new political dispensation," said Seretse.

The newly appointed Seretse said the stance is in line with the country's foreign policy, adding that Botswana would continue to make her position known.

"We would wish DRC to reflect and hold elections. We want democracy to prevail in DRC," said Seretse.

Kabila has repeatedly postponed elections in what critics see as an attempt to retain power.

Meanwhile DRC is currently reeling under growing political unrest, some of it backed by the powerful Catholic Church.

The most recent round of protests saw some demonstrators killed by security forces and the arrests of several protesting clergymen.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 23:23:53|Editor: yan

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BEIRUT, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Lebanon's President Michel Aoun condemned Thursday Israeli airstrikes in Syria, saying the country's use of Lebanese airspace was an "attack on our sovereignty," the National News Agency (NNA) reported.

Aoun reiterated during a cabinet session an announcement made by the Foreign Ministry two days prior to that Lebanon was set to make a formal complaint to the United Nations Security Council over Israel's illegal use of Lebanese airspace to attack Syrian targets.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri also commented on current tensions during the session, saying "we are working to free Lebanon from any potential problems it might incur as a result of regional developments."

On Monday, Russia's Defense Ministry said that two Israeli F-15 warplanes had launched eight guided missiles from Lebanese airspace, targeting an air base near Syria's Homs.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 23:23:53|Editor: yan

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, reviews the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in the South China Sea on April 12, 2018. Xi made a speech after the review. (Xinhua/Li Gang)

SANYA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping reviewed the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in the South China Sea Thursday morning, saying that the need to build a strong navy "has never been more urgent than today."

The navy review is the largest of its kind in the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, called for efforts to build a first-class navy.

Taking part in the review were more than 10,000 service personnel, 48 vessels and 76 aircraft. They included the aircraft carrier Liaoning and latest submarines, vessels and fighter jets. More than half of the vessels were commissioned after the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012.

At around 9 a.m., Xi boarded the missile destroyer Changsha and sailed to where the review was to be conducted.

It started at about 10 a.m. after Xi gave the order.

Xi made a speech after the review, saying that it has always been China's aspiration to have a strong navy, which serves as a key guarantee to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

He pledged to speed up the modernization of the navy.

Xi said notable progress has been made and today's Chinese navy has "stood up in the East" with a brand new image.

"The Party and the people are proud of the PLA Navy," Xi said.

He asked naval officers and soldiers to fully implement the Party's absolute leadership over the military, be firm in ideals and convictions, and uphold the glorious traditions, while pushing for technological innovation, developing new types of battle forces, and building a modern maritime combat system.

Xi asked naval officers and soldiers to remain on high alert, answer the calls of the Party and the people at all times, resolutely defend the national interests, and strive to contribute more to upholding the peace and stability of the region and the world.KIEV, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Ukraine is expecting to receive a total of 2 billion U.S. dollars from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this year, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) said Thursday in a statement.

The first batch of the aid could be delivered to Ukraine at the beginning of the third quarter, according to Dmytro Sologub, deputy head of the NBU.

The funds will be used to replenish Ukraine's foreign exchange reserves, which stood at 18.2 billion dollars at the end of March.

Under the cooperation program launched in 2015, the east European country has received about 8.7 billion dollars from the IMF, which helped its economy to avoid collapse amid the crisis.

The disbursement of the aid was suspended since April 2017 over Ukraine's failure to implement the agreed reforms.

Ukraine's cooperation program with the global lender is set to end in March 2019.KAMPALA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Eleven lions in a national park in western Uganda have been poisoned to death by a neighboring community, a conservation official said here on Thursday.

Bashir Hangi, Communication Manager Uganda Wildlife Authority told Xinhua by telephone that three adult lionesses and eight cubs were found dead near Hamukungu fishing village in Kasese district. Hamukungu neighbors Queen Elizabeth National Park.

"We highly suspect poisoning but we shall confirm after carrying out tests," Hangi said.

Ephraim Kamuntu, minister of tourism, wildlife and antiquities, on Thursday travelled to Kasese to assess the situation.

Cattle keepers neighboring the park poison lions if they invade their kraals.

Hangi said before the death of the 11 lions, Uganda had an estimated 400 lions, with 100 of them residing in Queen Elizabeth National Park.

Lions are a key tourism attraction in Uganda's national parks.

Tourism is Uganda's main foreign exchange earner. It contributed up to 1.35 billion U.S. dollars to the export basket in 2016.ADDIS ABABA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopia will commission Chinese-built Kilinto industrial park (KIP) which will host pharmaceutical companies in June, an Ethiopian official said on Thursday.

Adenan Bere, Communications Director, Ethiopia Industry Park Development Corporation (IPDC), said KIP was built with a view to attracting world class companies, state-affiliated media outlet Radio Fana reported.

She further said IPDC is working with local banks to create financial incentives for local firms to invest in the pharmaceutical industrial park.

Kilinto industrial park lying on 270 hectares of land is being constructed by China Tiesiju Civil Engineering Group Co., Ltd. (CTCEGCL) at a cost of 204 million U.S. dollars. The World Bank is wholly financing the construction of the industrial park through a loan scheme.

KIP, when completed, will encompass 18 kms of asphalt roads, provision of basic social services, green spaces, warehouses, business centers and car parking space.

Ethiopia is currently constructing or has commissioned 15 industrial parks as part of plan to turn the country into a light manufacturing hub in Africa by 2020.CAIRO, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Egypt expressed its rejection of being blamed by Ethiopia and Sudan over the failure of their recent tripartite talks regarding the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) under construction, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

The Egyptian statement came in response to recent statements from the Ethiopian and Sudanese foreign ministries holding Egypt responsible for the failure of their talks in Khartoum earlier in April.

"Egypt took part in the nine-party meeting in Khartoum with a positive spirit and an earnest desire to reach an agreement that implements the instructions of the leaderships of the three states," Egyptian Foreign Ministry's spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said in the statement.

The meeting is referred to as "nine-party" for comprising the ministers of foreign affairs, those of water resources and the heads of intelligence services of the three countries.

He explained that Egypt participated in Khartoum talks with the purpose of reaching solutions that would overcome the current stalemate of the technical talks regarding the GERD.

Abu Zeid revealed that Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry sent on Wednesday letters to his Ethiopian and Sudanese counterparts inviting them for another meeting in Cairo to continue their discussions.BUCHAREST, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Romanian Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu said Thursday that the country firmly condemns the use of chemical weapons in any circumstances, "but particularly when they are used against civilians."

Melescanu made the remarks during a joint press conference with visiting French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

Melescanu said Romania strongly supported the investigation of Syria's chemical weapons issue and the provision of all data to a special body for clarifying facts, so that the international community can take corresponding measures.

He said the special body must be "impartial and independent."

Le Drian, who arrived here Wednesday for a two-day visit, said that a chemical weapon attack is "intolerable."

According to him, the use of chemical weapons in Syria is a "red line."

"This red line was crossed and we must make decisions in the days to come," Le Drian stressed, adding that "France is autonomous in its decisions."

Activists, local rescuers and rebels in Syria claimed that Syrian forces used chlorine gas in the attack on Saturday against Douma, the last rebel-held area near Damascus.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry responded to the rebels' claims as "premeditated pretexts" and announced Tuesday it has invited the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to send a fact-finding mission, according to state news agency Sana.

Meanwhile, the United States and its European allies are threatening military action on Syria on the pretext of alleged chemical weapons use by the Syrian army in the recent battles against the rebels in Douma.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-12 23:54:03|Editor: Lifang

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) meets with Indonesia's Presidential Envoy and Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan in Beijing, capital of China, April 12, 2018. (Xinhua/Rao Aimin)

BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang met with Indonesia's Presidential Envoy and Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan in Beijing on Thursday.

Li said China and Indonesia share broad common interests, and China is willing to link the Belt and Road Initiative with Indonesia's development strategies.

China and Indonesia lifted bilateral ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2013.

Li said China is willing to work with Indonesia to maintain close high-level visits, make use of their advantages of economic complementarities, cooperate more in infrastructure, investment, and industrial capacity to benefit the two peoples and contribute more to regional peace, stability and prosperity.

Pandjaitan said Indonesia is willing to promote the synergy of development strategies of two countries and deepen pragmatic cooperation to realize win-win results.

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi also met with Pandjaitan on Thursday.ATHENS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Greece's main opposition New Democracy (ND) party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis will promote a different economic policy mix for the post- bailout era, if he wins the next general elections, he said on Thursday in Athens.

As the current Left-led government is due to present to a Euro group meeting later this April its proposal for a post-bailout reform program in exchange for debt relief from international creditors after the expiry of the third Greek bailout this summer, the centre-Right leader told a foreign correspondents briefing that his party's plan for the day after will differ.

"The country is bound by fiscal targets after the end of the bailout. These cannot change unilaterally. However, we are not bound by a certain policy mix," he said.

Mitsotakis expressed doubt whether the plan the current government drafts, will be constructive.

"We will not be bound by a program which recycles outdated ideas," he said, stressing that ND's reform and growth plan will be "realistic and bold".

The conservative leader talked about a radical reconstruction of the public sector to reduce bureaucracy and improve efficiency, as an example, as well as the creation of a business-friendly environment which will bring more investments and much needed job positions.

The privatization program launched in 2010 when Greece signed the first bailout with international lenders to deal with the acute debt crisis, will not be focused to raising revenues, but boosting the competitiveness of the Greek economy, he added.

ND leads in opinion polls over the ruling SYRIZA party of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in recent months. The next general elections should be held by autumn 2019.NAIROBI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese firm extending Kenya's Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) from Kenya's Nairobi to Naivasha has said the project will not affect the health of the country's wildlife heritage and other ecological treasures along its corridor.

Steve Zhao, the spokesperson for the Kenya SGR Head Office, said sound environmental regulations will be observed during the construction of Phase 2A of SGR which passes through a national park and other biodiversity hotspots.

Zhao clarified that construction of the Super Bridge along Nairobi National Park that was previously opposed by environmental groups, was given a green light by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the environmental watchdog since it posed negligible threat to animals and plants.

"We are committed to adhering to the recommendations set by KWS in efforts to offer minimal disruption to the flora and fauna in the national park," Zhao told Xinhua in a recent interview.

"As for the super bridge construction organization, the electric fence enclosure to isolate pillar sites should be divided into two stages, in order to ensure that animals in the park will move freely during the construction period and their migration will not be affected," he added.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta in October 2016 launched the construction of 120-km Nairobi-Naivasha SGR project financed by China.

Zhao said construction of the modern railway line that is expected to open up Kenyan hinterland for businesses and investments has progressed well and could be completed next year.

"The construction of the Nairobi-Naivasha SGR Phase 2A is under various stages of completion under the respective section offices," said Zhao, adding that the contractor is committed to making sure the project is completed ahead of schedule.

Local and international environmental lobby groups have opposed construction of the 6-km super bridge along Nairobi National Park saying it could jeopardize the health of wildlife species.

Zhao said the contractor will implement best practices borrowed from phase one of the SGR project to ensure the Super Bridge does not harm iconic wildlife species at the Nairobi National Park.

"The CCCC (China Communications Construction Company) respects the efforts of wildlife protection contributed from all communities, institutions and organizations. What has been comprehensively acknowledged is that the Wildlife Protection practices implemented during construction of SGR Phrase 1 is effective," said Zhao.

He added that the contractor will strictly adhere to guidelines set by the KWS and the environmental watchdog to ensure the super bridge causes minimal disturbance to the soil, vegetation and animals.

"After the erection of the super bridge pillars is finalized, the SGR line over the national park will be fitted with an acoustic noise barrier whose specifications will be approved by the KWS to ensure that the noise do not increase significantly above the baseline levels," said Zhao.

He disclosed that the contractor will embark on vegetation and soil restoration along the super bridge corridor once it is completed.

"We have also worked with the KWS to screen the construction equipment to avoid the spread of invasive species such as Nicotiana glauca seeds attached to road construction machinery," Zhao said.

He added that adherence to globally accepted environmental standards will be extended to the escarpments and other scenic landscapes where the Nairobi-Naivasha SGR project will pass through.by Xinhua writers Wang Ping, Miao Zhuang

CHICAGO, April 12 (Xinhua)-- Rick Kimberley has been growing soybeans and corn for more than 40 years on the vast tracts of farmland in the northeastern part of Iowa in the United States.

Should a 25 percent import tax be imposed on his soybean, of which one third of annual output is exported to China, he would have to give up the business on which he had depended on for a living.

Home to a large portion of America's pork and grain products, Iowa is the second largest agricultural state after California. Its annual outputs of pork, egg and corn have long topped nationwide rankings.

"If we do have a trade war, the market will probably go down and that will affect my income as well as many other soybean producers. We have to change the acreage of the crop," Kimberly said. Assisted by another two engineers, Kimberly was fixing his planter in a cottage on his farmland.

As the spring planting season approaches, Kimberly is awaiting the frost to melt so that he can sow the corn and soybean seeds across the 4,000-acre (16 square km) farmland that he owns.

The U.S. administration last Tuesday proposed a list of products to be subject to a 25 percent import tariff, which will be imposed on Chinese exports worth 50 billion U.S. dollars.

Within several hours the unilateral move was met with China's proportional retaliation. Beijing said it will levy a 25 percent duty on 50 billion dollars' worth of U.S. products including soybeans, automobiles and chemical, among others.

"We are watching the market, if the trend keeps going like this, maybe we will have some adjustment," Kimberly said.

China is the world's biggest buyer of U.S. soybeans, having imported a total of 27.5 million tons of them in 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In money terms, it represents an approximately 14-billion-dollar business annually.

"If there were increased trade tensions, soybeans could likely be a powerful target in any Chinese retaliation," said Paul Burke, North Asia regional director for the U.S. Soybean Export Council.

That's a big worry for an industry that supports tens of thousands of jobs in the United States.

"China is our number one market and our most important market," Kimberly's son Grant said, adding that the Iowa Soybean Association, of which Kimberly Jr is the marketing director, has had "long-standing relationships" with China since 35 years ago when it established its China office.

"We were disappointed to see that these actions have been taken. Of course we did not want to see any kind of trade disruptions," he said about U.S. President Donald Trump's intimidatory tariff punishment.

Kimberley Jr said U.S. farmers are very concerned about the negative impacts brought about by the looming trade war, which he said "would make things worse" since the U.S. agriculture sector is already in a downturn trend.

"It already has a negative impact. We've already noticed that soybean prices have dropped from where they were about a month ago, that's partially due to trade war fear," he said.

If prices remain weak, Kimberly Jr said, farmers will have to abandon soybeans and instead grow other types of crops this spring.

Both Iowa State and U.S. agricultural officials have warned the White House about the negative implications of the proposed sanctions for the soybean industry. In just five years, farm income in the United States has declined 50 percent while crop prices have dropped 40 percent, according to data provided by American Soybean Association (ASA).

The ASA, a 95-year-old trade organization which boasts of representing 21,000 soybean producers across the country, cautioned that "retaliation by China will cost farmers their livelihoods," voicing criticism of Trump's tariff decision.

"Farm incomes are down nearly 50 percent from 2013. There is a real struggle in agriculture to keep everything going right now. It's extremely frustrating to have the administration taking aim at our largest trading partner," it said.

The soybean industry is by no means the only one that falls victim to the U.S.-China trade frictions. Many other fields in the U.S. agriculture sector suffer as well.

Jim Heimerl, president of the U.S. National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), said higher tariffs on Chinese imports will in turn harm U.S. producers and undermine the country's rural economy.

"No one wins in these tit-for-tat trade disputes, least of all the farmers and the consumers," said Heimerl.

"China is a very important market for U.S. pork producers. In 2017, China was the second largest U.S. pork export market by volume and the third largest export market by value," said Jim Monroe, senior communications director of the NPPC. The U.S. pork industry exported 1.1 billion dollars of products to China last year.

Moreover, Trump's tariff proposal also stoked fear among U.S. wine producers, who said they are concerned about the potential backlash from Chinese consumers.

"There could be (a) push back by Chinese consumers deciding to buy wines from other countries," said Michael Parr with Wente Family Estates, a California based winery.

Exports of American wine, 97 percent of which is produced in California, to China have increased 450 percent in the past decade. Last year alone, sales of American wine in Chinese mainland and Hong Kong were up 10 percent year on year, bringing in an additional 197-million-dollar revenue to American vintners.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture, American farmers exported about 22 billion dollars' worth of agricultural products to China in 2017, making agriculture a major source of surplus in bilateral trade.

"We do not want to be casualties of trade war, and we want to be stable soybean suppliers to Chinese customers, providing them with high quality protein." Kimberley said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 00:04:05|Editor: ZD

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang holds a welcome ceremony for Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte before their talks at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, April 12, 2018. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)

BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China and the Netherlands on Thursday agreed to make use of their advantages of complementarities to promote pragmatic cooperation.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang made the remarks while holding talks with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in Beijing.

Regarding the Netherlands as an important partner in the European Union (EU), the relations between China and the Netherlands have a sound momentum of development, Li said.

The two countries established a comprehensive partnership that stresses openness and pragmatism in 2014, Li said, expressing that China is willing to work with the Netherlands to strengthen high-level visits and expand cooperation in various areas.

Li said China is ready to give play to the advantages of complementarities to deepen cooperation in agriculture, finance, technology, people-to-people exchanges, and dealing with climate change.

China is willing to import more high-quality agricultural products and high-tech products from the Netherlands, Li said, noting that China welcomes more companies and investment from the Netherlands.

Li also expressed his hope that the Netherlands will actively participate in the Belt and Road Initiative to benefit the two countries and peoples.

At present, the international political and economic situation faces uncertain and unstable factors, Li said, noting that China hopes that the EU maintains unity and development.

Li said China is willing to work with the Netherlands and the EU to uphold the multilateral trading system, support multilateralism and free trade to promote economic globalization to be more open, inclusive, balanced, and mutually beneficial.

Li said he hopes the Netherlands will play the role of a bridgehead in China-Europe economic cooperation, and promote negotiation on an investment agreement between China and Europe.

Li said China will deepen its opening-up and he hopes that all countries worldwide will become more open to each other to achieve mutual benefits.

Rutte said the current bilateral ties are developing at a high level, and the Netherlands is willing to work with China to strengthen strategic communication and dialogue, and deepen pragmatic cooperation.

The Netherlands firmly supports free trade and opposes protectionism, Rutte said, noting that his country is ready to promote the synergy of development strategies with China.

Both sides also exchanged views on international and regional issues of common concern.

Prior to the talks, Li held a welcoming ceremony for Rutte.

Li Zhanshu, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), also met with Rutte on Thursday, and both sides agreed to provide legal guarantees for cooperation between the two countries and jointly promote globalization.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 00:24:12|Editor: yan

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DOHA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Qatar's tourist operators and hotels have taken steps aimed at providing convenience and comfort to Chinese tourists in a bid to stimulate Qatar's tourism sector, local media reported Thursday.

At a ceremony held Wednesday evening by Qatar Tourism Authority (QTA), six companies were approved as tour operators for hosting Chinese tour groups, and 15 hotels were issued the "Welcome Chinese" certificate, Qatar's Arabic newspaper Al-Rayah reported.

The ceremony was attended by Chinese Ambassador to Qatar Li Chen and several officials from the Qatari tourism and hospitality sector.

These companies and hotels expressed their readiness to meet the needs of Chinese tourists.

Among the measures taken to especially cater for Chinese tourists, the 15 hotels accept the payment by China UnionPay cards, provide hot water kettles to make Chinese tea, and have the channels of CCTV, the predominant state television broadcaster in China.

"We have been working closely with our partners in the tourism industry to offer our hospitality to Chinese guests and allow Chinese visitors to discover our cultural heritage and natural treasures with ease and comfort," a QTA senior official said.

Last August, Qatar announced visa-free entry for citizens of 80 countries including China, which helped drive up the number of Chinese visitors to Qatar by 27 percent in the first quarter of 2018.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 00:29:13|Editor: yan

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CHONGQING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Four people were killed and eight injured after a truss collapsed in a factory in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, local authorities said Thursday.

The accident happened in a welding workshop of the Chongqing-based Changan Automobile around 9:50 p.m. on Wednesday. Twelve people were hit by the truss that collapsed.

Two people died at the scene, two died in hospital, and eight others were injured.

The cause of the accident is under investigation.JUBA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan said on Thursday that the move by the United States to finally nominate a new envoy to the country will help improve relations between the two countries.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Mawien Makol said the decision by the Washington to finally nominate Thomas Hushek to fill the void as ambassador in Juba will improve ties between the two countries which recently deteriorated after the United States imposed a raft of sanctions on high ranking officials and companies.

"Juba and the U.S. have diplomatic relations. So we are happy that the U.S. is finally appointing someone to head its mission here. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs will welcome him and work with him," Makol told Xinhua in Juba.

This came after U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a confirmation hearing on Wednesday for Hushek who is President Donald Trump's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to South Sudan.

The previous U.S. Ambassador Mary Catherine Phee assumed the position of Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of International Organizations on Dec. 12, 2017.

Phee was the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan from 2015 to 2017.

Makol said that despite the unease relations between the countries over sanctions imposed on some officials in 2017 and 15 oil companies this year, South Sudan remains unwaveringly committed to working with the United States.

"These (sanctions) are some of the ups and down that we are going through and we hope that we shall understand ourselves and be able to push forward," he said.

South Sudan descended into violence in December 2013 after President Salva Kiir sacked his former deputy Riek Machar, leading to fighting between mostly Dinka ethnic soldiers loyal to Kiir and ethnic Nuer soldiers loyal to Machar.

The violence has killed tens of thousands leaving four million people living as refugees in neighboring countries.

The efforts by regional leaders to revive the 2015 peace agreement shattered in the wake of renewed violence in July 2016 are yet to bear fruit as they have been indefinitely suspended after the warring parties failed to make headway.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 00:34:14|Editor: Lifang

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (2nd L) inspects the planning hall of Lecheng international medical tourism pilot zone in Boao, south China's Hainan Province, April 11, 2018. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- On his fourth visit to the southern island province of Hainan since 2010, President Xi Jinping made an inspiring speech on opening-up earlier this week.

At the opening ceremony of the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) Tuesday, Xi spoke of "a new phase of opening up" for the shared prosperity of China and the world.

This year is the 30th anniversary of Hainan as a province and special economic zone. The island of more than 9 million people, once a backwater of fisherfolk and poor farmers, is now a vivid example of China's commitment to the future.

Being China's only province entirely within the tropics, at 35,400 square km Hainan is roughly the same size as Taiwan.

On his first visit to Hainan as president in April 2013, Xi recognized the island's promise as the country's largest special economic zone, the host of the BFA and a popular tourist destination.

By making full use of its geographic advantages, natural resources and special economic zone status, the island is now a vigorous center of tourism and green agriculture.

In the past five years, the island's GDP has increased by an annual average of 8.1 percent to 446 billion yuan (about 71 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017.

Since the 18th Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress in 2012, the number of tourists visiting the island increased from about 33.2 million to 67 million last year. Urban residents have seen their incomes rise by 9.6 percent every year. For rural residents the increase is 11.7 percent annually.

OPENING-UP BRINGS VIGOR

"Hainan has the advantage of being on the front line with ASEAN countries," Xi said. "It should be a pioneer in opening up."

Since the 18th CPC National Congress, Hainan has hosted a series of diplomatic, economic and cultural gatherings. Since 2010, Xi's participation in four BFA events have been the highlights.

These international events have greatly raised the island's profile and exposed the province to the very latest in business practices and pioneering services.

On the island, overseas investors are allowed to set up medical institutions. The threshold for imports of medical equipment and pharmaceuticals have been lowered, and foreign doctors are allowed to extend their practice.

In March, a new hospital opened in the Hainan Boao Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone, expected to be one of the first hospitals in China to provide the nine-valent HPV vaccine.

Moreover, people from 26 countries can now visit the island's beaches visa-free via 57 international air routes. The international airports in Haikou and Sanya received over 40 million passengers last year.

The province has a five-year plan for participation in the Belt and Road Initiative and trade between Hainan and countries along the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road increased by 14.8 percent last year.

COMING UP ROSES

In his 2013 visit, Xi dropped in on a small village named Bohou and made a statement that later became a catch phrase -- "whether Xiaokang is realized or not, only the ordinary folks can tell."

"Xiaokang," a moderately prosperous society, is set to be achieved by 2020 and one key indicator is the elimination of absolute poverty.

Bohou village has changed a lot since Xi visited five years ago. Since the president's visit, about 20 cooperatives have started running 70 hectares of rose plantations, earning the area the nickname of "rose valley."

"Five years ago I earned about 1,800 yuan a month. Now I make more than 3,000," said Bohou villager Huang Qi'na. She also leases out her family land for about 10,000 yuan a year.

Thanks to advances in agriculture, for the first time the annual per capita income of rural residents in all counties of Hainan exceeded 10,000 yuan in 2017.

About 617,000 residents, including all villagers of 517 villages, have been lifted above the poverty line over the past five years.

For the "ordinary folk" of Bohou village, Xiaokang is now just around the corner.BAKU, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Azerbaijan maintains constructive and friendly relations with all member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Azerbaijan's President llham Aliyev said Thursday, Azerbaijan State News Agency reported.

The head of state hailed the close cooperation between Azerbaijan and the SCO during the meeting with a delegation led by SCO Secretary-General Rashid Alimov in Baku.

Aliyev said that Azerbaijan-SCO relations are based on common history and interests, noting that Azerbaijan considers the SCO as an organization which plays important role in the international area, and hailed its contribution to the establishment of stability around the world.

Aliyev said Azerbaijan is interested in strengthening ties with the SCO and participating in a number of projects implemented by the organization.

The SCO's relations with member states contribute to the establishment of a common cooperation platform, adding that the development of cooperation with these countries is one of Azerbaijan's key foreign policy priorities, he said.

Alimov, in turn, congratulated Aliyev on his landslide victory in the presidential election and extended his gratitude for invitation to monitor the voting. Highlighting the importance of the SCO, Alimov said the organization maintains successful cooperation with its dialogue partner Azerbaijan.

Presidential election wrapped up in Azerbaijan on Wednesday evening with incumbent President Ilham Aliyev winning 86.03 percent of votes, according to the final results announced by the country's Central Election Commission.

The observation mission from the SCO, headed by Alimov, arrived in Azerbaijan last week to monitor elections in the country.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 00:39:15|Editor: yan

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LONDON, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The multilingual versions of the second volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China was launched in London Wednesday, followed by a high-profile seminar to discuss "China in the New Era."

The book, unveiled during the ongoing London Book Fair, contains a collection of 99 articles, including Xi's speeches, conversations, instructions and congratulatory messages, dated between August 2014 and September 2017.

The new book, published in Traditional Chinese characters, English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Japanese, Arabic and Portuguese, was launched at a ceremony attended by some 300 political and business leaders, academics, and representatives of publishing agencies from 14 countries and regions.

A MILESTONE

Britain's Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, said at the ceremony that the global launch of the book in London is a "milestone," and it will hopefully "enlighten readers about where China is going and what it is thinking."

"It takes a lifetime to understand China. And I am on that journey," said Prince Andrew, adding that he awaits more volumes of the book to come.

China and Britain, as two major countries in the world, share great cooperative potential on cultural exchanges, innovation, business, and the promotion of globalization, he said.

Jiang Jianguo, deputy head of Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), said he believes that through the book, international readers will better understand that the Communist Party of China is a party that seeks to improve the well-being of the Chinese people, to realize the rejuvenation of the nation and to promote common development for the whole world.

Jiang, also minister of the State Council Information Office, said that China will push for quality development, vigorous innovation, deeper reform and opening up in a bid to further share opportunities and benefits with the rest of the world.

Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to Britain, said that cultural exchanges between China and Britain have made important contributions to the development of bilateral relations.

The premiere of the book is a major event for China-Britain ties, and it is hoped that the two sides will take this opportunity to further strengthen cultural exchanges and mutual learning between civilizations so as to build the bilateral relations into a model of major-country relations featuring mutual respect, equality, mutual trust and win-win cooperation.

Martin Albrow, a renowned British sociologist, said the new book is a reinforcement of the first volume, which was published in 2014.

The new book is not only for Chinese readers, but for all those who care about the future of mankind, said Albrow.

Mario Monti, former Italian prime minister, said the book showcases the Chinese leader's global vision and his insights into governance of China, which will prove inspiring for readers across the world. He also believed that the book helps dispel some of the misunderstanding and prejudice about a rising China.

Felipe Gonzalez, former Spanish prime minister, said the book helps global readers understand China's vital role in pushing for globalization and building a community with a shared future for mankind.

The book also offers a perspective on how to tackle relations among European nations, how to participate in and push forward globalization and how to build a cooperative relationship with China, said Gonzalez.

CHINA IN THE NEW ERA

An international seminar with the theme of "China in the New Era" was held in London on Wednesday, as part of a series of activities to promote the launch of the second volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China in nine languages.

The seminar attracted more than 70 senior scholars and media representatives from China, Britain, the United States and Singapore. Relevant discussions have covered topics of the historical positioning and worldwide significance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, as well as China and the world in the new era.

Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era has led the socialism with Chinese characteristics into a new era, opened a new chapter in realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and opened a new scroll that strengthens the integration of China with the world, said Jiang.

Jiang stressed that in the new era, China will create more opportunities for global development, open the door of opening-up even wider to countries all over the world, enhance exchanges with different civilizations and contribute more deeply to the building a community with a shared future for mankind.

Zheng Bijian, chairman of China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, said the context of "China in the new era" comes from the development process of socialism with Chinese characteristics linked to economic globalization.

He said the important idea of building a community with a shared future for mankind proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping brought the concepts of convergence of interests and community of shared interests, developed through "interdependence" created in economic globalization, to a new historical height.

The fourth round of economic globalization where countries achieve shared growth through discussion and collaboration is approaching, Zheng said.

It is more important than ever that we follow the trends of our times, make concerted efforts to address challenges through global cooperation, and redouble our efforts to expand and deepen the convergence of interests of all parties and to develop all-dimensional and multi-level communities of common interests, he added.

Spain's Gonzalez said that in the face of the globalization process, isolationism should not be adopted. Instead, all countries should strengthen the coordination of global governance and explore the convergence of interests.

He highlighted that China, as a force for stability and support for cooperation in the process of globalization, is constantly opening up and seeking common interests with other countries to create a community of shared interests.

Liu, China's ambassador to Britain, said that reading China in the new era is a necessity to seize opportunities in China, is the call of the times to build a community with a shared future for mankind, and is a necessary step to narrow down the "cognitive gap" between China and the West.

He appeals the public to fully understand the CPC, profoundly read Xi Jinping: The Governance of China and study China's national conditions, in a bid to better understand China in the new era.

Nathan Gardels, co-founder of the Berggruen Institute, said the West and China need to understand each other's development goals and seek common grounds for common interests. The starting point is an international seminar like this one that helps the West better understand Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and the Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

Martin Jacques, a senior fellow at the Cambridge University, told Xinhua that the world today lacks a sense of direction in the future. It is at this time that China has proposed its own new perspectives on the future.

He believes that the concept of building a community with a shared future for mankind proposed by Xi in the current era of globalization is an important foundation for the development of human society.

"China's own great changes and its perception of the future are very important. If we look at it in a more profound sense, China is the future," he said.

The event was jointly organized by China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, China International Publishing Group and 21st Century Council and supported by the Chinese embassy in Britain.An incoming truckload of soybeans at Peterson Farms and See facility in Fargo, North Dakota, the United States, Dec. 6, 2017. (Xinhua/REUTERS)

by Xinhua writers Wang Ping, Miao Zhuang

CHICAGO, April 12 (Xinhua)-- Rick Kimberley has been growing soybeans and corn for more than 40 years on the vast tracts of farmland in the northeastern part of Iowa in the United States.

Should a 25 percent import tax be imposed on his soybean, of which one third of annual output is exported to China, he would have to give up the business on which he had depended on for a living.

Home to a large portion of America's pork and grain products, Iowa is the second largest agricultural state after California. Its annual outputs of pork, egg and corn have long topped nationwide rankings.

"If we do have a trade war, the market will probably go down and that will affect my income as well as many other soybean producers. We have to change the acreage of the crop," Kimberly said. Assisted by another two engineers, Kimberly was fixing his planter in a cottage on his farmland.

As the spring planting season approaches, Kimberly is awaiting the frost to melt so that he can sow the corn and soybean seeds across the 4,000-acre (16 square km) farmland that he owns.

The U.S. administration last Tuesday proposed a list of products to be subject to a 25 percent import tariff, which will be imposed on Chinese exports worth 50 billion U.S. dollars.

Within several hours the unilateral move was met with China's proportional retaliation. Beijing said it will levy a 25 percent duty on 50 billion dollars' worth of U.S. products including soybeans, automobiles and chemical, among others.

"We are watching the market, if the trend keeps going like this, maybe we will have some adjustment," Kimberly said.

China is the world's biggest buyer of U.S. soybeans, having imported a total of 27.5 million tons of them in 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In money terms, it represents an approximately 14-billion-dollar business annually.

"If there were increased trade tensions, soybeans could likely be a powerful target in any Chinese retaliation," said Paul Burke, North Asia regional director for the U.S. Soybean Export Council.

That's a big worry for an industry that supports tens of thousands of jobs in the United States.

"China is our number one market and our most important market," Kimberly's son Grant said, adding that the Iowa Soybean Association, of which Kimberly Jr is the marketing director, has had "long-standing relationships" with China since 35 years ago when it established its China office.

"We were disappointed to see that these actions have been taken. Of course we did not want to see any kind of trade disruptions," he said about U.S. President Donald Trump's intimidatory tariff punishment.

Kimberley Jr said U.S. farmers are very concerned about the negative impacts brought about by the looming trade war, which he said "would make things worse" since the U.S. agriculture sector is already in a downturn trend.

"It already has a negative impact. We've already noticed that soybean prices have dropped from where they were about a month ago, that's partially due to trade war fear," he said.

If prices remain weak, Kimberly Jr said, farmers will have to abandon soybeans and instead grow other types of crops this spring.

Both Iowa State and U.S. agricultural officials have warned the White House about the negative implications of the proposed sanctions for the soybean industry. In just five years, farm income in the United States has declined 50 percent while crop prices have dropped 40 percent, according to data provided by American Soybean Association (ASA).

The ASA, a 95-year-old trade organization which boasts of representing 21,000 soybean producers across the country, cautioned that "retaliation by China will cost farmers their livelihoods," voicing criticism of Trump's tariff decision.

"Farm incomes are down nearly 50 percent from 2013. There is a real struggle in agriculture to keep everything going right now. It's extremely frustrating to have the administration taking aim at our largest trading partner," it said.

The soybean industry is by no means the only one that falls victim to the U.S.-China trade frictions. Many other fields in the U.S. agriculture sector suffer as well.

Jim Heimerl, president of the U.S. National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), said higher tariffs on Chinese imports will in turn harm U.S. producers and undermine the country's rural economy.

"No one wins in these tit-for-tat trade disputes, least of all the farmers and the consumers," said Heimerl.

"China is a very important market for U.S. pork producers. In 2017, China was the second largest U.S. pork export market by volume and the third largest export market by value," said Jim Monroe, senior communications director of the NPPC. The U.S. pork industry exported 1.1 billion dollars of products to China last year.

Moreover, Trump's tariff proposal also stoked fear among U.S. wine producers, who said they are concerned about the potential backlash from Chinese consumers.

"There could be (a) push back by Chinese consumers deciding to buy wines from other countries," said Michael Parr with Wente Family Estates, a California based winery.

Exports of American wine, 97 percent of which is produced in California, to China have increased 450 percent in the past decade. Last year alone, sales of American wine in Chinese mainland and Hong Kong were up 10 percent year on year, bringing in an additional 197-million-dollar revenue to American vintners.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture, American farmers exported about 22 billion dollars' worth of agricultural products to China in 2017, making agriculture a major source of surplus in bilateral trade.

"We do not want to be casualties of trade war, and we want to be stable soybean suppliers to Chinese customers, providing them with high quality protein." Kimberley said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 00:49:19|Editor: yan

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ISTANBUL, April 12 (Xinhua) -- As the United States continues removing military equipment from the Incirlik air base in Turkey amid strain in bilateral ties, analysts are divided on whether the Turkey's NATO ally is considering permanently removing its forces there.

"I don't think the U.S. would leave the base (for good)," Cahit Armagan Dilek, head of the Ankara-based 21st Century Turkey Institute, told Xinhua.

Most recently, the U.S. military moved away a mobile weapons depot of 40 tons from the Incirlik base in southern Turkey at the beginning of April. According to Turkish media, this is the third weapons depot the U.S. has removed from the base.

Dilek, a former staff officer in the Turkish military, feels that the U.S. is simply aiming to bluff Turkey into acting in line with its wishes by making as if it could use Incirlik as a trump card against Ankara.

The U.S. would not think of leaving the base which is very conveniently situated for its military interventions and intelligence gathering around the surrounding region, he said.

Incirlik's location in southern Turkish province of Adana enables the U.S. to closely monitor Eastern Mediterranean, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Iran.

Washington has repeatedly denied the claim that it intends to permanently move its troops out of the base, calling the speculations unfounded and underlining Ankara's importance as a NATO ally.

The day the reports about the 40-ton depot appeared in Turkish media, Johnny Michael, a Pentagon spokesman, said that such reports aimed to boost the feeling of mistrust between allies at a time when joint action was necessary for common interests.

Turkish media reported at the end of March that the U.S. military withdrew its F-16, F-15 and A-10 fighter jets from Incirlik one day before Turkey launched a cross-border military operation on Jan. 20 to remove Kurdish militia from Syria's Afrin region.

According to a report by the pro-government Yeni Safak daily on March 28, there remained only tanker aircraft, drones and three helicopters of the U.S. military at Incirlik.

The bilateral ties between Ankara and Washington have been rather strained in recent years due mainly to U.S. military support for Kurdish militia in Syria which Turkey sees as a terror group.

Murat Bilhan, vice-chairman of the Istanbul-based Turkish Asian Center for Strategic Studies, sees the U.S. move as an indication that "Washington intends to move out of Incirlik for good."

Noting there is loss of confidence between the two NATO allies, Bilhan said: "The U.S. does not any longer see Incirlik as a secure place for itself and is therefore eliminating elements that make it dependent on Turkey."

According to Turkish officials, the U.S. has provided the Kurdish militia, which it has used as a ground force against the Islamic State, with a total of 5,000 truckloads of weapons including armored vehicles.

The move has angered Ankara, which sees the Kurdish militia, known as the People's Protection Units, as the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party outlawed for its three-decade fighting against the Turkish state.

Erdogan Karakus, a former general in the Turkish air force, does not think the U.S. would want to lose Incirlik on the grounds that its use in regional operations would imply Ankara at Washington's back.

By permanently removing its forces there, the U.S. would not only lose the possibility of using Turkish air space, but would have pushed Ankara further toward Russia, he told Xinhua.

Washington's apparent unwillingness to hand over Fethullah Gulen to Ankara is another point of friction in bilateral ties, as Turkey accuses the U.S-based Turkish cleric of masterminding a military coup attempt in 2016 that left 250 people dead.

The U.S. has often been accused by Turkish media of having backed the coup bid, with U.S. officers at Incirlik allegedly involved as well in the planning of the putsch.

In addition, the Turkish move to buy Russia-made S-400 air defense system despite U.S. opposition has heightened the tension in bilateral relations.

Ankara has vowed to go ahead with the deal, while Washington signaled sanctions in response due to a recent U.S. Congress decision to punish some Russian defense firms.

From the U.S. perspective, Turkey's axis in foreign relations has shifted, said Bilhan, a former diplomat.

"Turkey is now an undependable ally for Washington," he added.

Due largely to the U.S. support for the Kurdish militia, Ankara has acted since mid-2016 more in cooperation with Moscow in war-torn Syria rather than with Washington.

"The Americans have always wanted Turkey to remain as a little ally which they could manipulate," remarked Bilhan. "That is a wrong attitude."

As the tension increases following a U.S. threat of military strike on Syria in the wake of an alleged poison gas attack blamed on the Syrian military, Washington is seeking to mend ties with Ankara, according to Turkish media reports.

The U.S. is in search of a new path in Syria that would meet Ankara's security concerns, an unnamed high-level U.S. official was quoted as saying on Thursday.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 00:54:22|Editor: yan

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CAIRO, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Egypt expressed its rejection of being blamed by Ethiopia and Sudan over the failure of their recent tripartite talks regarding the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) under construction, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

The Egyptian statement came in response to recent statements from the Ethiopian and Sudanese foreign ministries holding Egypt responsible for the failure of their talks in Khartoum earlier in April.

"Egypt took part in the nine-party meeting in Khartoum with a positive spirit and an earnest desire to reach an agreement that implements the instructions of the leaderships of the three states," Egyptian Foreign Ministry's spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid said in the statement.

The meeting is referred to as "nine-party" for comprising the ministers of foreign affairs, those of water resources and the heads of intelligence services of the three countries.

He explained that Egypt participated in Khartoum talks with the purpose of reaching solutions that would overcome the current stalemate of the technical talks regarding the GERD.

Abu Zeid revealed that Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry sent on Wednesday letters to his Ethiopian and Sudanese counterparts inviting them for another meeting in Cairo to continue their discussions.

While Ethiopia and Sudan eye massive benefits from the GERD construction, Egypt is concerned it might affect its 55.5-billion-cubic-meter annual share of the Nile River water.

In January, the presidents of Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan met in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa on the sidelines of the 30th African Union summit and agreed to avoid misunderstandings by joint cooperation on common interests.

The meetings of a tripartite technical committee on the GERD have been fruitless over the past sessions.

Egypt's ties with Ethiopia have seen ups and downs since the latter started the dam project in April 2011 while Egypt was suffering turmoil following an uprising that toppled veteran President Hosni Mubarak.

When Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi took office in 2014, he showed understanding of Ethiopia's aspiration for development through the GERD that would produce around 6,000 megawatts of electricity to the country.

In March 2015, the leaders of upstream Nile Basin country Ethiopia and the two downstream partners Egypt and Sudan signed an initial cooperation deal on the principles of sharing the Nile River water and the construction of the GERD, which will be Africa's largest dam upon completion.

On the other hand, Sisi and his Sudanese counterpart Omar al-Bashir met in Cairo in mid-March and agreed to end all differences between the two African countries over a number of thorny issues.

In addition to the GERD issue, Egypt and Sudan have a territorial dispute over the border region of Halayeb and Shalateen, which is currently under Egyptian control.

In May 2017, Bashir also accused Egypt of providing military support to armed rebels in his country, which was strongly denied by Sisi.

In early January, Khartoum recalled its ambassador to Egypt for consultation over "potential security threats" from Egypt and Eritrea following reported military moves in Eritrea's Sawa area near the border with Sudan's state of Kassala.

The Sudanese ambassador later returned to Cairo.KIEV, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his Azerbaijan's counterpart Ilham Aliyev have agreed to deepen the strategic partnership between their countries during a phone call on Thursday, Poroshenko's press service said.

During the talks, Poroshenko congratulated Aliyev on his victory in the presidential election, according to a statement posted on the Ukrainian presidential website.

The two leaders discussed preparations for the 12th meeting of the Intergovernmental Ukrainian-Azerbaijani commission on economic cooperation and other bilateral events in strategically important areas, it said.

Particular focus was paid to the organization of the 6th meeting of the Council of Presidents of Ukraine and Azerbaijan within the framework of Aliyev's planned visit to Kiev, the statement said.

Besides, Poroshenko and Aliyev agreed to open the Trade House of Azerbaijan in the Ukrainian capital, it said.

Bilateral trade between Ukraine and Azerbaijan has almost tripled in 2017 to 770.4 million U.S. dollars, official data showed.PARIS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday regretted that the U.N. Security Council was unable to come out with a joint response on the suspected chemical attack in Syria, Macron's office said in a statement.

On Tuesday, a U.S.-drafted resolution on a new mechanism investigating chemical weapons use in Syria was vetoed by Russia, whose draft resolution for the same purpose failed to win majority support in the council.

A third text tabled by Russia on the basis of a Swedish document also failed to be adopted over the weekend. The document aims to find common ground in the Security Council for an outcome in support of an investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons into the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria.

Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia had argued that the U.S. draft prejudges the outcome of an investigation.

Nebenzia accused the United States of pushing for a vote as a pretext for possible use of force against Syria.

The two European leaders expressed "their common concern following the unacceptable attacks on Saturday (April 7) in Syria, and the threats posed by these new violations of chemical weapons," it added.

They also agreed by phone to remain " in close contact" to discuss the developments of Syrian situation.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 01:09:26|Editor: yan

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DAMASCUS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian Foreign Ministry has reiterated on Thursday the Syrian government's willingness to cooperate with an investigation team into the chemical attack allegations, according to the state news agency.

The team of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has planned to start its investigation into allegations of chemical weapons' use in the capital Damascus' eastern Douma district.

The ministry said the U.S. allegations of chemical weapons' use by the Syrian government forces in Douma is an attempt to mislead the public opinion to serve its "aggressive schemes."

Meanwhile, the ministry said that any delay in the arrival of the OPCW team would be blamed on the Western countries that want to hinder the mission.

The OPCW team has arrived in Beirut, Lebanon on Thursday and expected to come and start operating in Syria as of Saturday.

For his part, Bashar al-Jaafari, the permanent Syrian representative in the UN, said the Syrian government is ready to facilitate access of the OPCW team to any position in Douma, charging that the militants, who had been in control of that area, had obtained chemical materials from Libya in cooperation with Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Last Saturday, the rebels in the formerly rebel-held Douma district of Damascus accused the Syrian forces of using chlorine gas, which led to the death of 40 people.

The Syrian government totally denied the claims, saying the rebels were fabricating incidents to attract foreign strikes on Syria.

U.S. President Donald Trump has overtly talked about his country's willingness to strike Syria, garnering support and the participation of other Western countries to take part in the planned strike.

For his side, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said Thursday that any possible attack would only cause further instability of the region, which could threaten the international peace and security.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 01:09:28|Editor: ZD

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Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, reviews the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in the South China Sea on April 12, 2018. Xi made a speech after the review. (Xinhua/Li Gang)

SANYA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping reviewed the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in the South China Sea Thursday morning, saying that the need to build a strong navy "has never been more urgent than today."

The navy review is the largest of its kind in the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), called for efforts to build a first-class navy.

Taking part in the review were more than 10,000 service personnel, 48 vessels and 76 aircraft. They included the aircraft carrier Liaoning and latest submarines, vessels and fighter jets. More than half of the vessels were commissioned after the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012.

At around 9 a.m., Xi, clad in military fatigues, boarded the missile destroyer Changsha. Flags flew. The military band played the national anthem. Xi inspected the guard of honor on the deck before the destroyer set sail to where the review was to be conducted.

At 10 a.m., navy commander Shen Jinlong and political commissar Qin Shengxiang reported that the fleets were ready for review.

Xi gave the commencing order.

Vessels sailed in seven groups according to their combat functions: strategic strike, submerged attack, open-sea operations, aircraft carrier strike, amphibious landing, offshore waters defense, and comprehensive support.

Helicopters and planes flew in ten echelons. They can perform surveillance, warning, air-to-air strike, air-to-ship strike, long distance escort and other duties.

Soldiers saluted Xi as their fleets passed by.

"Salute to you, comrades," Xi called out to the soldiers.

"Hail to you, chairman," they replied.

Xi alternated the greeting with "Comrades, thanks for your hard work," to which soldiers replied "Serve the people."

The procession was directed by CMC Vice Chairman Xu Qiliang. Other senior military officials -- Zhang Youxia, Wei Fenghe, Li Zuocheng, Miao Hua, and Zhang Shengmin were all present.

"It is my utmost honor to be inspected by Chairman Xi," said Ma Xiaohui, a navy soldier. "I will maintain momentum, train hard, and always be Chairman Xi's good soldier."

Liu Furong, commander of an underwater attack combat group, said the review was a good demonstration of the navy's "historic achievements" under Xi's call for building strong armed forces.

FIRST-CLASS NAVY

Xi made a speech after the review, saying that it has always been China's aspiration to have a strong navy, which serves as a key guarantee to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

He pledged to speed up the modernization of the navy.

Xi said notable progress has been made and today's Chinese navy has "stood up in the East" with a brand new image.

"The Party and the people are proud of the PLA Navy," Xi said.

He asked naval officers and soldiers to fully implement the Party's absolute leadership over the armed forces, be firm in ideals and convictions, and uphold the glorious traditions, while pushing for technological innovation, developing new types of battle forces, and building a modern maritime combat system.

Xi asked naval officers and soldiers to remain on high alert, answer the calls of the Party and the people at all times, resolutely defend the national interests, and strive to contribute more to upholding the peace and stability of the region and the world.

The officers and soldiers reacted with long applause.

Later, Xi watched four J-15 fighter jets take off from the aircraft carrier.

At the end, Xi went to the chart room and wrote down his name in the logbook.

Xi had lunch with soldiers in a canteen and asked about their life and training.

Immediately after Xi left, the navy launched a full-scale live drill.

Liu Zhe, captain of the aircraft carrier Liaoning, said the carrier will leave for new waters to conduct combat drills.

"I am lucky to have witnessed the navy's great leap in development," he said. "We should keep working hard and dedicate ourselves to building a first-class navy."UNITED NATIONS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations Sacha Llorenti on Thursday asked the United States to refrain from military action against Syria.

"Our message to the U.S. government is for them to comply with international law, to at least first have a complete investigation of what happened, then ask the Security Council to adopt any measures that should be applied after that investigation," Llorenti, whose delegation requested consultations of the Security Council on the situation in Syria, told reporters.

He said he wanted all the 15 members of the council to agree that the UN Charter should be respected.

Asked what specific provisions of the charter he wanted the council members to respect, Llorenti said: "No unilateral action should be taken; any use of force should be approved by the Security Council."

He said unilateral action against Syria would be considered illegal by the whole UN system.

The Bolivian delegation requested Thursday morning's closed-door consultations after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to launch a missile attack against Syria at reports of chemical weapons use in the country.MADRID, April 12 (Xinhua) -- International Airlines Group, IAG, announced on Thursday it acquired a 4.61 percent stake in Norway's low-cost carrier Norwegian.

According to a statement, IAG, which includes Spain's Iberia and Vueling, Britain's British Airways and Ireland's Aer Lingus, considers that Norwegian is an attractive investment and plans to make a full offer.

This initial investment is "intended to establish a position from which to initiate discussions with Norwegian, including the possibility of a full offer," IAG said, although these discussions have not taken place yet.

The group explained that it is simply a strategic operation and that at the moment, no decision has been taken regarding the final purchase.

Following this announcement, Norwegian shares rose by more than 20 percent on the stock exchange, local media reported.

"IAG confirms that no such discussions have taken place to date, that it has taken no decision to make an offer at this time and that there is no certainty that any such decision will be made," the aeronautical holding company said.

Norwegian, meanwhile, stressed that they had no knowledge about the operation before it was announced this morning.

However, they said that the IAG movement confirms "the sustainability and potential of our business model and global growth".

The Scandinavian airline has seen significant growth in Spain due to its policy of long-range flights at low prices.

According to data from the Spanish Airports and Air Navigation (AENA), Norwegian was the eighth most used airline in the first quarter of 2018, growing by 6.6 percent when compared with the same period of last year.

The company launched an ambitious strategy of long-range flights at low prices with weekly departures to some U.S. destinations: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Miami.

However, this strategy of expansion meant losses of 30 million euros (36.9 million U.S. dollars) last year, according to the Spanish press.HONG KONG/MANILA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Thursday that he formally apologized for the 2010 hostage-taking incident in Manila that killed eight tourists from China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Speaking to the Filipino community in Hong Kong, Duterte said that Manila has yet to make an "official apology" over the incident.

"There has been no official apology coming form the Philippines regarding that incident that happened in August 2010," Duterte said.

"From the bottom of my heart, as the President of the Republic of the Philippines and on behalf of the people of the Philippines, may I apologize formally to you now," Duterte was quoted by Philippine media as saying in a meeting with Filipinos in Hong Kong.

"We are sorry that the incident happened and as humanely possible, I would like to make this guarantee also that it will never, never happen again," he said.

A bus with 21 Hong Kong tourists onboard was hijacked in the Philippine capital Manila on Aug. 23, 2010. The 11-hour hostage crisis ended with eight Hong Kong tourists killed in a bungled police rescue.

Duterte arrived in Hong Kong on Tuesday for a three-day informal visit after attending the Boao Forum for Asia in China's Hainan Province.NAKURU, Kenya, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Large-scale growing of drought tolerant tree species that have multiple uses in the arid and semi-arid areas (ASALs) will enable Kenyan communities to mitigate against negative effects of climate change, a research scientist at the Kenya Forestry Research Institute (Kefri) said on Thursday.

Angela Muthama, KEFRI's research scientist in forest pathology and mycology, said planting trees that provide shade and produce timber at the same time can increase soil fertility in the dry regions while boosting communities' revenue streams.

"Communities in the ASALs face great challenges from the prolonged drought periods. Soils in these areas are also relatively poor and mostly sandy hence drain very fast and crack when dry making agriculture difficult," Muthama told Xinhua during an interview in Nakuru.

She said that through research, Kefri has developed technologies and recommended multipurpose drought tolerant tree species for planting and the uptake has been very high especially in the eastern parts of the country.

"Kenya's landmass has been classified as over 60 percent arid and semi-arid; this means that the bigger part of our land resources are not arable unless there is adoption of hydroponics, fertilizer use in green houses and intensive agriculture under irrigation," said Muthama.

"For this reason, communities in ASALs can increase their soil fertility and provide shade for their crops by planting trees on their farms," Muthama noted.

She noted that farmers record increased productivity and diversify their sources of income when they grow trees on their farms.

Muthama said scientists at National Forest Products Research Program continue to train farmers on adding value to fruits from trees such as Tamarind and Vitex payos.

While Kenya's environment and natural resources management agencies strive to restore the degraded forest ecosystems, the scientist said natural forest reduction is the most pronounced degradation in the country due to fires, human encroachment and impact of diseases and pests.

"The losses incurred from this degradation include loss of biodiversity which cannot be quantified in monetary value but has cascaded effects," said Muthama.

With the changing climate previously non-threatening insect pests are becoming epidemics in the Kenyan forests and farms, a case in point being the last year's attack on maize plantations.

Muthama, however, noted that illegal logging in the forest plantations leads to 200 million U.S. dollar revenue.

On curbing forest degradation, she said there is need for extensive collaboration between Kenya Forest Service (KFS) and law enforcement agencies to ensure effective implementation of laws and policies related to management of this ecosystem.

At the sane time, Muthama emphasized that faster prosecution of illegal loggers would deter attempts to destroy forests.

"On the other hand, massive reforestation needs to be carried out in the coming years," said Muthama.

"That is to plant trees where they have been harvested and where there were none. This will help the country recover from previous degradation and help mitigate against climate change effects," she added.

The Kenyan government in February banned logging in all public forests in order to protect water towers which are the lifeblood of millions of farmers, pastoralists and fishermen.LUSAKA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Botswana President Mokgweetsi Masisi arrived in Zambia on Thursday for one day state visit.

The Botswana leader told reporters upon arrival that he was in Zambia to strengthen and broaden the existing bilateral relations between the two countries.

He further expressed Botswana's commitment to deepen and grow the existing relations and assured of his government's resolve to continue with joint projects embarked on by his predecessor.

He later held bilateral talks at State House with President Edgar Lungu where the two leaders pledged to strengthen the existing ties, according to state broadcaster, the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation.

Masisi took office on April 1, following the stepping down of former President Ian Khama ahead of next year's elections.

He is currently on a regional tour after assuming office.DAR ES SALAAM, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian National Assembly Speaker Job Ndugai on Thursday urged the east African nation's editors and media owners to be careful and avoid publishing hateful news about parliament, its leaders and Members of Parliament.

Ndugai said editors should be very careful in their duties and stop playing around with parliament, one of the pillars of the state.

He made the remarks while giving his ruling on a point of clarification sought by Ulanga Member of Parliament (MP), Goodluck Mlingwa, on April 9, concerning an article that was published by a local weekly called Raia Mwema, loosely translated into "good citizen".

In his point of order, the MP argued that the article written by one Pascal Mayalla and published in Raia Mwema of April 9 had a story headlined -- Is parliament kowtowing to government?

The legislator said in the story, the writer blamed the Speaker for submitting two reports on minerals conducted by parliament to the government, saying the august House had failed in its duties.

The Speaker said the writer said most MPs did not know what they were doing in parliament and they were only there to get allowances.

Ndugai ordered the writer and editors of Raia Mwema to appear before the Parliamentary Privileges, Ethics and Powers committee to respond to allegations against them.

"Let this message reach all editors that they should not joke around with the Speaker," said Ndugai, adding that the story was in bad taste and was aimed at tarnishing the image of parliament, MP, the government and it was ultimately aimed at inciting the public against the House.LUSAKA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Zambia will take over the presidency of the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN) with effect from July 1, a senior official said on Thursday.

Chilufya Sampa, Executive Director of Zambia's consumer body, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), said the country will assume the presidency from 2018 to 2019 and takes over from Turkey which assumed the presidency last year.

The official, who is leading a four-member delegation to the ICPEN High-Level Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, said during its presidency, Zambia's agenda will be to bridge the gap between the developed and Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to ensure that the organization becomes relevant to all members.

Although Zambia was the first African country in the 26 years of ICPEN's existence to hold the presidency, it will not only be focused on the country alone but on the entire African continent, he added.

Currently, only five African countries namely Nigeria, Egypt, Malawi, Kenya and Zambia are members of ICPEN.

"We would like to see to it that we expand and have more African countries participate. We have reached out through the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa and Southern African Development Community so that we can facilitate more African countries' participation," he said, according to a statement released by the Zambian embassy in Turkey.

During its presidency, he said Zambia would place emphasis on the financial sector to ensure that more people were financially included and bring to an end unfair trading practices against consumers in the sector.

"We will also be looking at issues of e-commerce, online retail and online education services. Most of the services we are using in developing countries are generated from developed countries hence the reason to be part of the network, which encourages cooperation and collaboration among consumer protection agencies," he added.

Bwalya Nondo, Charge d'affaires at the embassy described the country's ascendancy to the ICPEN presidency as a milestone for the country which will showcase its acumen in providing leadership in ensuring fair economic practices at international level.

He said the abuse of dominant market power, anti-competitive activities and other acts that eroded consumers rights and welfare, especially in Africa, were an economic menace which should be fought at all levels through networking.

He further urged the international consumer protection body to tighten measures to ensure that African countries were not used as dumping grounds of consumer protection laws.

ICPEN is an international network of 64 countries, which collaborate and cooperate in enforcement of consumer protection laws.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 01:49:43|Editor: yan

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SHENZHEN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China CITIC Bank on Thursday said its subsidiary has acquired an 18.18-percent stake in Yidao Yongche to get a slice of the booming car-hailing market.

CNCB Investment in Yingtan city, east China's Jiangxi Province, now holds the minority stake in the smaller rival to Didi Chuxing.

CITIC Bank gave no further details about the stake purchase, including the price.

CITIC Bank and Yidao also signed a strategic agreement on cooperation in car owner financing, payments, investment consulting, and big data in the southeast China city of Shenzhen Thursday.

Wen Xiaodong, CEO of Taoyun Capital, said Yidao is now back on the right track after the firm bought the majority stake from troubled tech firm LeEco last year.

With the help of the new shareholder, Yidao will explore cooperation between financial and car-hailing services, Wen said.COLOMBO, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena on Thursday suspended the parliament until May 8, a day after six ministers resigned from the nation's unity government.

President's Secretary Austin Fernando told Xinhua that the president had prorogued the parliament until May 8 and an extraordinary gazette notification had been issued by him.

The move comes after six minsters from the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which is lead by President Sirisena, tendered their resignation stating they could not continue work in the unity government.

The SLFP is a coalition partner in the unity government along with the ruling United National Party which is lead by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Four new ministers were temporarily appointed to replace the vacant portfolios on Thursday evening but a cabinet re-shuffle is to take place after the local New Year this month, the president's media division said.

The country's parliament was last suspended in May 2009.VALLETTA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Malta strongly supports initiatives that facilitate economic cooperation and free trade, especially at a time when international trade and global economic growth are being "threatened by protectionist policies," Maltese Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Promotion Carmelo Abela said on Thursday.

Abela was speaking at the China International Import Expo (CIIE) promotion conference, organized by the Economic and Commercial Counselor's Office of Chinese Embassy in Malta and the Malta Chamber of Commerce.

Abela said the exposition provided a perfect platform for countries like Malta to expand exports to one of the "most significant and dynamic markets in today's global economy".

He went on to say that economic cooperation was one of the "many common positions" the Maltese and Chinese governments have taken since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1972.

On his part, Chinese Ambassador in Malta Jiang Jiang said the exposition was intended to help the rest of the world export to China.

"It is a testament to China's desire to open its market to the world and its commitment to act as a responsible and major country in promoting economic globalization," said Jiang.

He added that China expected to import more than 10 trillion U.S. dollars worth of imports over the next five years, and that the country welcomed Malta to access the Chinese market, in order to benefit from its growth.

He took spoke of the "dynamic economic cooperation" between China and Malta, pointing out that bilateral trade had gained strong momentum recently.

The first CIIE will be held in Shanghai in November, which is expected to bring together thousands of enterprises from more than 120 countries and regions.OTTAWA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday began his trip to Peru, France and Britain, according to the Canadian Prime Minister Office.

Trudeau will visit Peru from April 12 to 14, France from April 15 to 17, and Britain from April 17 to 20.

In Peru, Trudeau will attend the VIII Summit of the Americas and speak at the III CEO Summit of the Americas on the benefits of investing in Canada.

He will then fly to France for an official visit, aiming to enhance trade and investment ties between the two countries, and create economic growth that benefits people on both sides of the Atlantic, the office said.

He will also discuss issues of importance to both Canada and France, including climate change, gender equality, diversity, and inclusion.

While in Paris, Trudeau will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, and Michaelle Jean, secretary-general of the International Organisation of La Francophonie.

He will also deliver an address to the National Assembly and give remarks at the Paris Institute of Political Studies.

During the visit in Britain, Trudeau will meet with British Prime Minister Theresa May for better economic and trade partnership.

The Canadian prime minister will also have an audience with Queen Elizabeth II, and attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting under the theme "Towards a Common Future", the office said.U.S military vehicles travel in the northeastern city of Qamishli, Syria, April 29, 2017. (Xinhua/REUTERS)

UNITED NATIONS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations Sacha Llorenti on Thursday asked the United States to refrain from military action against Syria.

"Our message to the U.S. government is for them to comply with international law, to at least first have a complete investigation of what happened, then ask the Security Council to adopt any measures that should be applied after that investigation," Llorenti, whose delegation requested consultations of the Security Council on the situation in Syria, told reporters.

He said he wanted all the 15 members of the council to agree that the UN Charter should be respected.

Asked what specific provisions of the charter he wanted the council members to respect, Llorenti said: "No unilateral action should be taken; any use of force should be approved by the Security Council."

He said unilateral action against Syria would be considered illegal by the whole UN system.

The Bolivian delegation requested Thursday morning's closed-door consultations after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to launch a missile attack against Syria at reports of chemical weapons use in the country.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 03:00:02|Editor: yan

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CAIRO, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi stressed on Thursday Egypt's keenness to promote economic and trade cooperation with Portugal.

Sisi's comments came during his meeting with visiting Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa in Cairo.

"Sisi lauded historic relations binding the two countries, expressing commitment to pushing forward bilateral relations," Presidential spokesman Bassam Rady said in a statement.

Rady noted that President Sisi held a session of talks with de Sousa, who is currently on a three-day visit to Egypt, adding that the session was followed by an expanded meeting grouping the delegations of both countries.

The two leaders urged accelerating the implementation of what was agreed upon by the two sides during the committee meetings in October 2017, Rady said, adding that Sisi updated his Portuguese counterpart on economic reforms in Egypt and promising investments in the under-construction mega national projects.

Sisi said regional and international circumstances and geographic closeness between Egypt and Portugal require more cooperation and coordination to address current serious and complicated challenges and threats that cannot be faced separately like terrorism, organized crime and illegal migration.

The Egyptian spokesman said Sisi's talks with the Portuguese president covered the situation in Libya and Syria and efforts to fight terrorism and dry up its funding sources.

For his part, the Portuguese president lauded progress realized by Egypt in its anti-terror war.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 03:00:02|Editor: pengying

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Photo taken on April 10, 2018 shows Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia attending a Security Council meeting on Syria at the UN headquarters in New York. Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia on Thursday warned the United States against military action on Syria. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

UNITED NATIONS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Russian ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia on Thursday warned the United States against military action on Syria.

"We hope that there will be no point of no return, that the U.S. and the allies will refrain from military action against a sovereign state," Nebenzia told reporters. "We are very concerned about the situation, about the dangerous escalation."

The Security Council members were holding closed-door consultations at the request of Bolivia.

The immediate priority of the Security Council is to avert the danger of war, said Nebenzia.

Asked whether there will be war between the United States and Russia in case of a U.S. military strike against Syria, Nebenzia said: "We cannot exclude any possibility, unfortunately, because we saw messages that are coming from Washington -- they were very bellicose. They know we are there (in Syria)."

"I wish there was dialogue through appropriate channels to avert any dangerous development."

He said any U.S. military action against Syria would be a violation of international law. Even the threat of use of force is against the UN Charter, he said.

Bolivia requested Thursday's consultations after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to launch a missile attack against Syria at reports of chemical weapons use in the country.

Russia has called for an opening meeting of the Security Council with the participation of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said Nebenzia.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 03:10:07|Editor: pengying

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Protesters gather to protest against the ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention) in Split, Croatia, April 12, 2018. Over 15,000 people gathered in Croatia's second largest city Split on Thursday to protest the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, which the Croatian Parliament is meant to adopt on Friday. (Xinhua/Ivo Cagalj)

SPLIT, Croatia, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Over 15,000 people gathered in Croatia's second largest city Split on Thursday to protest the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, which the Croatian Parliament is meant to adopt on Friday.

The Council of Europe's convention is aimed at protecting women from violence and domestic abuse and has so far been ratified by 24 countries, while Croatian conservatives believe that the convention aims to promote "gender ideology".

The convention, among other countries, has been ratified in Italy, Germany, Russia, Serbia, France, Norway and Turkey.

At the same time, counter protests were organized in Split by those who support the Istanbul Convention should be adopted and who think that it will not endanger the traditional views of the family and sexes.

During the vote over the convention in parliament, several representatives of the ruling party of the Croatian Democratic Party will vote against, but the convention will be supported by the opposition, primarily the Social Democratic Party of Croatia.

The government said the convention does not contain obligation to introduce "gender ideology" into the Croatian legal and educational system.Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia (L) listens to Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar Jaafari prior to the United Nations Security Council voting on a Russian-drafted resolution on an investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) into the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, at the UN headquarters in New York, on April 10, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

UNITED NATIONS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Russian ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia on Thursday warned the United States against military action on Syria.

"We hope that there will be no point of no return, that the U.S. and the allies will refrain from military action against a sovereign state," Nebenzia told reporters. "We are very concerned about the situation, about the dangerous escalation."

The Security Council members were holding closed-door consultations at the request of Bolivia.

The immediate priority of the Security Council is to avert the danger of war, said Nebenzia.

Asked whether there will be war between the United States and Russia in case of a U.S. military strike against Syria, Nebenzia said: "We cannot exclude any possibility, unfortunately, because we saw messages that are coming from Washington -- they were very bellicose. They know we are there (in Syria)."

"I wish there was dialogue through appropriate channels to avert any dangerous development."

He said any U.S. military action against Syria would be a violation of international law. Even the threat of use of force is against the UN Charter, he said.

Bolivia requested Thursday's consultations after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to launch a missile attack against Syria at reports of chemical weapons use in the country.

Russia has called for an opening meeting of the Security Council with the participation of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said Nebenzia.NAIROBI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- African states should ensure that they enforce a comprehensive ban of all forms of tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship and this should include any advertising or promotional materials related to single sticks in order to stop the spread of the tobacco epidemic, anti-tobacco lobby said on Thursday.

The African Tobacco Control Alliance (ATCA) said in a report released in Nairobi that when cigarettes are sold in single sticks, they become relatively cheap compared to when they are sold as a full pack.

"Consequently, the product is more affordable to young people and other individuals with limited resources," says the report.

The ATCA survey covered 10 African capital cities and sought to learn whether concern single tobacco stick sales existed within governments.

According to the study, out of all the tobacco retailers observed, Uganda had the most open cigarette packs followed by Togo and Nigeria despite these countries prohibiting the sale of single sticks.

The World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which most African states have ratified, has already identified measures to control the sale of single sticks of cigarettes.

The report shows that selling single sticks of cigarettes is one of the strategies used by tobacco companies to market their products in Africa.

The findings show that the sale of single sticks of cigarettes is widespread in Africa and poses a serious problem even in countries such as Burkina Faso, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Niger, Uganda and Togo where it is banned.

The survey also reveals that single stick cigarette sales facilitate experimentation among youth who have not yet become regular smokers.

The report also notes that the absence of laws regarding cigarette sales or the lack of enforcement of existing laws encourages retailers to sell sticks of cigarettes.

The report notes that selling single sticks of cigarettes undermines existing effective tobacco control policies by limiting an individual's exposure to health warning labels and lessening the impact of tobacco tax increases on cigarette packs.

Emma Wanyonyi, CEO of the International Institute for Legislative Affairs (ILA), said tobacco consumption remains a major public health problem and a serious threat to the development of countries around Africa.

"Unfortunately, tobacco companies seemed to be more concerned about making profits by getting as many people as possible to smoke, rather that the serious health, social, economic and environmental consequences of tobacco use," Wanyonyi said.

Wanyonyi added that Africa which is rapidly becoming an important business hub for tobacco multinational companies, consists mainly of low and middle income countries characterized by weak, poorly implemented and in some cases, non-existent tobacco control policies.

She noted that the tobacco industry has exploited this weak policy environment to target African populations with aggressive marketing campaigns.

According to ILA, the cost of tobacco industry far outweighs any benefit in form of tax revenues and job creation.

"For every one U.S. dollar earned by government in form of taxation, the country has to spend 3 U.S. dollars to cure diseases associated with tobacco consumption," she said.

Wanyonyi added that tobacco use is a major contributor to the growing burden of non-communicable disease, which currently contribute to between 50 to 70 percent of all hospital admissions, half of inpatient mortality and 55 percent of total mortality in Kenya.

Wanyonyi noted that in Kenya about 11.6 percent of the adult population while 9.9 percent of youth aged 13 to 15 currently uses tobacco products on a regular basis.BELGRADE, April 12 (Xinhua) -- France is supporting Serbia on every step of its path towards full membership of the European Union (EU), and looks forward to future joint economic cooperation projects, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said during his meetings with Serbian officials on Thursday.

Le Drian arrived in Belgrade in the afternoon and met his Serbian counterpart Ivica Dacic, Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic and President Aleksandar Vucic to prepare for the announced visit of French President Emmanuel Macron by the end of the year.

Vucic and Le Drian talked about bilateral and economic relations, Serbia's path towards membership in EU as well as improvement of cooperation in all fields, including military-technical cooperation, as well as the construction project for a subway in Belgrade, in which France has been showing interest in past several years, the president's office stated.

Vucic said that Serbia now has the financial capabilities to speed-up the process in order for the construction of subway to begin in 2020, while Le Drian reminded that France already invested significant means in order to participate in the project.

Le Drian voiced support of France and its president Macron to Serbia's European integration and expressed belief that the country will conduct required reforms and advance further in that process.

At a separate meeting, Brnabic thanked Le Drian for French support to Western Balkans that offers an additional incentive to regional cooperation, adding that France is one of the most important economic partners of Serbia and an important investor in Serbian economy.

Le Drian and Brnabic agreed that Macron's visit to Serbia means that both countries are dedicated to intensifying high-level dialogue, the government release said.

According to the release, Le Drian promised Brnabic that France will continue to support Serbia in the process of European integration and stressed "in the future, a great attention should be directed to reforms in the area of the rule of law and judiciary, as the most important issues in the accession negotiations".

Brnabic concluded that full EU membership is Serbia's strategic priority.LJUBLJANA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Slovenian gas wholesaler Geoplin and Russian energy group Gazprom will sign a gas supply contract for the next five years on Friday, Geoplin announced on Thursday.

Slovenian Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec, Russian Ambassador Doku Zavgajev and Gazprom Deputy Chairman Alexander Medvedev were present at the signing ceremony.

Under the contract, Slovenia will import 600 millions cubic meters of gas a year, the Slovenian national media Slovenian Press Agency STA reported.

Geoplin was quoted by STA as saying that negotiations on the deal had been completed in late 2017.

Natural gas accounts for 12 percent of Slovenia's energy consumption. About 40 percent of natural gas used by Slovenia is imported from Russia, which means that the gas from this deal will meet about 5 percent of Slovenia's energy demand, according to the news portal 24ur.com.NEW YORK, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. unilateral slapping of steep tariffs on China's goods undermines a rule-based multilateral trade regime which has been crucial for global growth, said Nobel Prize-winning American economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The approach taken by President Donald Trump to tackle the trade disputes with China is "primitive," said Stiglitz at a panel discussion at the Havard Club in New York City on Thursday.

After proposing steep tariffs on Chinese imports worth 50 billion U.S. dollars, the Trump administration has threatened to slap additional duties on Chinese goods worth 100 billion dollars. China has hit back proportionally by rolling out its retaliatory tariff plan.

"You cannot solve trade deficit overnight... actually it is stupid to do so," said Stiglitz.

The former World Bank chief economist was joined at the talk by John Lipsky, distinguished scholar, School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University and Scarlet Fu, Bloomberg anchor.

The U.S. unilateral action, which initiates a potential trade war with China, and eventually hurts American consumers as the tariffs will be reflected in prices, he said. And it poses threat to the way the global trade system operates because trade disputes were always done in the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and within international rule of law, he said.

The former World Bank chief economist expressed his concern that Trump, accusing WTO of bias against the U.S., has blocked the appointment of new judges at the organization's seven-member panel that overlooks international disputes. The panel currently only has four members.

The WTO has traditionally appointed new judges based on unanimity, said Stiglitz, who is currently a professor at Columbia University.

The U.S. has not filed any complaints against China with WTO, even though Trump and his cabinet members have cited Beijing's violations of WTO rules because Beijing is availing itself of the special treatment the biggest developing country received when it acceded to the international bloc, Stiglitz said.

The panel discussion is part of the one-day China Institute 2018 Executive Summit, "U.S.-China Business in the New World Order," which brought together hundreds of top U.S. and Chinese CEOs, government leaders, and experts to examine challenges and opportunities in the changing business relations between the two largest economies in the world.

Founded in 1926, China Institute is the oldest bicultural, non-profit organization in America to focus exclusively on China.BERLIN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and Christian Social Union (CSU) have backtracked on earlier German assurances to support French plans for swift and far-reaching Eurozone reforms on Thursday.

"I do not believe that we can achieve any substantial progress until the end of June," Ralph Brinkhaus (CDU), CDU/CSU parliamentary faction vice-president told press.

Brinkhaus said that he did not understand the urgency of French President Emmanuel Macron to achieve reforms with Eurozone reform prior to the next European parliamentary elections in 2019.

The CDU delegate argued that it was better to wait until a new European Union (EU) Commission had been formed before launching a reform agenda instead of settling for a "poor compromise" in the interim.

He emphasized that the CDU/CSU was not principally opposed to further development of the Eurozone but would insist on ensuring that the right framework conditions for change were established first.

At the same time, however, Brinkhaus departed from earlier supportive comments made by German Chancellor and CDU party leader Angela Merkel by opposing plans to transform the existing European Stability Mechanism into a permanent European Monetary Fund (EMF).

The CDU/CSU parliamentary faction vice-president criticized a lack of guarantees that transfers of European funds by the EMF would be tied to conditionality and hinge on the approval of national parliaments.

Brinkhaus further expressed scepticism towards ideas for a Eurozone budget to help cushion asymmetric shocks in member states for which he saw "absolutely no necessity", as well as ruling out a new financial backstop at the ESM for ailing Eurozone banks until Southern European financial institutes cleaned up their balance sheets and a Eurozone-wide insolvency law was created.

A shared deposit guarantee scheme in the monetary union was another topic which the CDU/CSU was "very, very far away" from supporting, according to the CDU politician.

The comments made by Brinkhaus underlined remaining divisions between the CDU/CSU and German Social Democrats (SPD) on EU policy. Earlier German Justice Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) announced that Berlin was ready to "finally embrace the hand which Emmanuel Macron has extended with his proposals for the renewal of Europe."

Nevertheless, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz responded on Thursday that he could understand Brinkhaus' concerns in light of Eurosceptic sentiment showcased by parties like the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as by many CDU/CSU delegates in the German federal parliament (Bundestag).

Scholz' noted that 63 CDU/CSU parliamentary rebels had voted against the party line over a third European bailout programme for Greece back in 2015.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 03:55:21|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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Wang Kejian, Chinese Ambassador to Lebanon (L), shakes hands with Tanya Chapuisat, UNICEF representative in Lebanon, during a signing ceremony of a protocol in Beirut, capital of Lebanon, on April 12, 2018. The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) lauded Thursday China's "generous donation" that helped 86,000 school-age Syrian refugee children in Lebanon in 2017. (Xinhua/Li Liangyong)

BEIRUT, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) lauded Thursday China's "generous donation" that helped 86,000 school-age Syrian refugee children in Lebanon in 2017.

Tanya Chapuisat, UNICEF representative in Lebanon, voiced her appreciation at the signing ceremony of a protocol between the UN body and China on the completion of the latter's 1-million-U.S.-dollar aid project to Syrian refugee students.

In February 2017, the Chinese government provided UNICEF with financial assistance of 1 million dollars for the UN children's fund's support for the Lebanese Ministry of Education.

The funding, aimed at guaranteeing "educational coverage of all children," has been used to provide essential supplies to the refugee students, including winter clothes and stationery.

Wang Kejian, Chinese Ambassador to Lebanon who attended the ceremony, announced that the program has been completed as all the supplies had been delivered.

He also reiterated China's consistent commitment to improving the humanitarian situation of the Syrian refugees.

"In the future, the Chinese government will continue to make its own efforts to ease the humanitarian situation of the Syrian refugees and to promote a political solution to the Syrian crisis," Wang said.

Since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis in March 2011, the number of Syrian refugee school-age children and pre-school children in Lebanon has continued to increase, placing a heavy burden on Lebanese education and medical institutions.

Chapuisat said that, with the Chinese donation, the UNICEF was able to provide clothes and different types of school supplies to the Syrian refugee students, and pay school tuition fees for them.

She also pointed to the winter kits that were delivered to about 700 Syrian refugee children in the remote areas in Lebanon during the winter.

Chapuisat said this is the first time that the UNICEF has benefited from a contribution of this type to help the refugee students around the world.

"So we hope it has been a good experience as it was extremely useful for us and we want to thank you on behalf of the UNICEF," she added.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 04:00:23|Editor: pengying

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Jon R. Taylor, a political science professor at University of St. Thomas in Houston, the United States, is seen in this undated photo provided by himself. China's determination of strengthening its opening-up policy indicates it wants to share its success with the world, Jon R. Taylor told Xinhua in an interview on Thursday. (Xinhua)

HOUSTON, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China's determination of strengthening its opening-up policy indicates it wants to share its success with the world, U.S. Chinese expert told Xinhua on Thursday.

"China's pledge to continue to deepen reform and opening-up by liberalizing market access and reducing trade barriers sends a clear signal that it wishes to not only improve itself, but to inclusively share in the benefits derived from China's development model," Jon R. Taylor, a political science professor at University of St. Thomas in Houston told Xinhua in an interview.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of China's opening-up policy. Taylor admitted that China has greatly benefitted from 40 years of reform and opening-up as well as from the economic globalization process.

"The continued pursuit of reform and opening-up policies, as well as the Belt and Road Initiative, helps both the Chinese economy and the global economy," he said, adding that it will be beneficial to China-U.S. trade relations, "particularly if the U.S. is earnest and willing to participate in multilateral trade and economic governance systems."

China's central bank governor on Wednesday fleshed out measures and disclosed a timetable to further open up the financial sector, signaling fast progress in implementing the country's opening-up promises.

China will encourage foreign investors to enter its trust, financial leasing, auto finance, money brokerage and consumer finance sectors, a move to take effect before the end of this year, said Yi Gang, governor of the People's Bank of China, at the Boao Forum for Asia annual conference in the southern Hainan Province.

Commenting on Yi's remark, Taylor said it confirmed Chinese commitment to accelerating the process of openness and access to the Chinese economy.

"I am encouraged by Yi's words, given the Trump administration's protectionist and anti-globalization rhetoric. It would be nice to see some indications of reciprocity on the part of the U.S.," he added.Russian military police forces are seen at the Wafideen area near the town of Douma, on the northeast of Damascus, Syria, on April 12, 2018. (Xinhua/Monsef Memeri)

MOSCOW, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan voiced concern over developments in and around Syria during a phone conversation Thursday, the Kremlin said.

The two presidents stressed the importance of ensuring necessary conditions for the work of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons mission sent to Syria to investigate an alleged chemical weapon attack, it said.

"Both leaders spoke in favor of stepping up the political settlement process in Syria based on UN Security Council Resolution 2254 and the decisions made by the (Syrian) National Dialogue Congress in Sochi," the Kremlin said.

On Saturday, rebels in the formerly rebel-held Douma district of Damascus accused the Syrian forces of using chlorine gas, which led to the death of 40 people.

The Syrian government totally denied the claims, saying the rebels were fabricating incidents to attract foreign strikes on Syria.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday threated to launch a missile attack on Syria over the alleged chemical weapon attack, but he tweeted Thursday that the attack "could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said at a news briefing Thursday that the threat to use force against a UN member state is a "blatant violation of the UN Charter."LOS ANGELES, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Dianne Feinstein, a senior United States senator from California, Thursday continued denouncing Trump administration's tariff policy to China, saying "the president's misguided actions are already causing real harm to our agricultural community."

The 84-year-old senator is the oldest currently serving United States senator and the longest current-serving female U.S. senator.

"President Trump's trade war means that 90 percent of California's leading nut and fruit exports are hit with retaliatory tariffs. The president's misguided actions are already causing real harm to our agricultural community, and additional tariffs could bring even more damage." Feinstein tweeted Thursday morning.

She attached a graphic released by the California Department of Agriculture and Food on her official tweeter page, which shows total value of California agriculture exports to China in 2016 was 2 billion U.S. dollars and China has become the third largest oversea market for California agriculture.

Two hours later, Feinstein posted another tweet, "China is a leading destination for California pistachios, almonds, wine and citrus products. The Trump administration must make it clear how they plan to protect American farmers from a costly trade fight with the world's second-largest economy."

It is not the first time that the Senate veteran queried Trump's trade policy in light of the dispute of the United States and China that ignited by Washington.

On April 4, Feinstein tweeted: "The president is putting obstacles in the way of American exports by inviting retaliatory tariffs from other countries. California farmers face enough challenges in the global market without Trump's unnecessary trade war."

"President Trump's trade war will hit California farmers hard. $2 billion worth of CA exports - including all exported almonds, walnuts, raisins, plums, grapes, kiwis, dates and figs - will now be subject to a 15% tariff when exported to China. How does that protect American jobs?" another tweet posted by her at the same day read.

She also wrote a public letter to Sonny Perdue, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, on April 4, calling on the administration to take steps to protect California's agriculture from Trump's escalating trade dispute with China.

"President Trump has stated that the recent tariff announcements are intended to protect American jobs, but so far the only concrete result appears to be fewer markets and higher costs for farmers and ranchers," Feinstein said. "International trade is increasingly important and I am concerned that the voices of our farmers are not being heard by the administration."

"Earlier this year, President Trump stated that in every decision his administration makes, he aims to honor America's strong farming legacy, but putting farmers in the crosshairs of an international trade dispute does just the opposite."

"Hardworking farmers in California and throughout the United States deserve better than to be a pawn in a global trade war." the letter concluded.WASHINGTON, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The White House is considering re-entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact that President Donald Trump pulled the United States out last year.

"It is good news that today the President directed Larry Kudlow and Ambassador Lighthizer to negotiate U.S. entry into TPP," said Republican Senator Ben Sasse in a statement after a meeting with Trump on Thursday.

The White House had no official announcement on this issue yet.

According to local media reports, Trump on Thursday told a group of lawmakers at the meeting which Sasse also attended that he has directed the U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer and National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow to study the possibility of re-entering the TPP if the terms are favorable.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump called TPP a "disaster". He pulled the United States out of the Pacific trade deal in January last year, one of his first moves as president.

Earlier this year, the remaining 11 TPP nations, including Japan and Canada, announced they struck an alternative agreement without the United States.

Although the United States has withdrawn from the TPP, Trump has signaled his interest in reconsidering the trade deal.

In January this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump told CNBC during an interview that "I would do TPP if we were able to make a substantially better deal."

Trump in February also suggested he was open to the trade pact during a news conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.An Orthodox priest conducts a blessing in front of the Soyuz MS-08 spacecraft set on the launchpad ahead of its upcoming launch with International Space Station crew, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan March 20, 2018. (REUTERS PHOTO)

MOSCOW, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Russia is actively implementing a lunar program through 2030, aiming to send astronauts to the moon, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday, Russia's Cosmonautics Day.

Putin said "yes" to the question "We are going to fly to the moon, right?" when he visited the Space Pavilion at the all-Russian Center of Achievements of the National Economy, according to the Kremlin.

Russia will first build a space station on the lunar orbit and then modules on the moon itself, he told cosmonauts and space industry veterans, saying he has no doubt that Russia will be able to do this.

The program will run until 2030 and the Federatsiya spacecraft is now nearing completion, while work has begun on creating a super-heavy rocket for the moon projects, Putin said.

According to him, Russia plans to test the super-heavy carrier rocket in 10 years and a special launch compound for the rocket's trials will be built at the Vostochny spaceport in the Russian Far East.

The Cosmonautics Day commemorates the first manned spaceflight on April 12, 1961 by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.by Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim expressed his and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's condolences over the death of a Greek Air Force pilot in the Aegean Sea on Thursday, in telephone call to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, the Greek government announced.

"The two Premiers agreed to keep communication lines open and to strengthen dialogue between the two countries," according to an e-mailed statement from Tsipras' office.

A single-seat Mirage 2000-5 type jet crashed off Skyros island while returning to base from an interception incident with Turkish Air Force planes, according to the Greek Defense Ministry.

The dead body of flight lieutenant Yorgos Baltadoros, 34, who was married with children, was recovered about nine nautical miles off the Greek island, according to an e-mailed press statement from the Greek Air Force.

The circumstances of the incident are under investigation. According to Defense ministry sources, the weather conditions in the area were fair and the Greek pilot was experienced.

In an e-mailed statement, Greek Deputy Defense Minister Fotis Kouvelis stressed that the plane's crash and the pilot's death are "in no way connected to the interception mission."

Such interception incidents are reported often in the Aegean Sea, and have increased lately amid increased tensions in the relations between the two neighboring countries over pending issues.

During Thursday's phone conversation, the Greek prime minister raised the issue of the two Greek servicemen, who have been detained in Turkey since early March for trespassing, and Yildirim briefed him on the judicial process and said he will keep him informed, according to Greek government sources.

The ties between Turkey and Greece have soured in the past two years also following the escape of eight Turkish military officers to Greece a day after the failed coup attempt.

Ankara has sought their extradition to be tried on charges of treason, but Greece's Supreme Court has ruled against it and the eight officers have requested political asylum in Greece.In this file photo, Chinese Ambassador to Lebanon Wang Kejian delivered school supplies to Syrian refugee students in a school in Beirut, Lebanon on Oct. 23, 2017. China donated 1 million U.S. dollars to the UNICEF for providing school aid to Syrian refugee students in Lebanon. (Xinhua/Li Liangyong)

BEIRUT, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) lauded Thursday China's "generous donation" that helped 86,000 school-age Syrian refugee children in Lebanon in 2017.

Tanya Chapuisat, UNICEF representative in Lebanon, voiced her appreciation at the signing ceremony of a protocol between the UN body and China on the completion of the latter's 1-million-U.S.-dollar aid project to Syrian refugee students.

In February 2017, the Chinese government provided UNICEF with financial assistance of 1 million dollars for the UN children's fund's support for the Lebanese Ministry of Education.

The funding, aimed at guaranteeing "educational coverage of all children," has been used to provide essential supplies to the refugee students, including winter clothes and stationery.

Wang Kejian, Chinese Ambassador to Lebanon who attended the ceremony, announced that the program has been completed as all the supplies had been delivered.

He also reiterated China's consistent commitment to improving the humanitarian situation of the Syrian refugees.

"In the future, the Chinese government will continue to make its own efforts to ease the humanitarian situation of the Syrian refugees and to promote a political solution to the Syrian crisis," Wang said.

Since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis in March 2011, the number of Syrian refugee school-age children and pre-school children in Lebanon has continued to increase, placing a heavy burden on Lebanese education and medical institutions.

Chapuisat said that, with the Chinese donation, the UNICEF was able to provide clothes and different types of school supplies to the Syrian refugee students, and pay school tuition fees for them.

She also pointed to the winter kits that were delivered to about 700 Syrian refugee children in the remote areas in Lebanon during the winter.

Chapuisat said this is the first time that the UNICEF has benefited from a contribution of this type to help the refugee students around the world.

"So we hope it has been a good experience as it was extremely useful for us and we want to thank you on behalf of the UNICEF," she added.KIGALI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- The UK ambassador to Rwanda Jo Lomas said Thursday that prosecution in her country has initiated investigations against five Rwandans accused of participating in the 1994 genocide against Tutsi.

The envoy announced this after a meeting with Rwanda's justice minister, Johnston Busingye in the capital Kigali.

Rwanda has demanded the extradition or trial in UK of the five suspects, including: Emmanuel Nteziryayo, Vincent Brown aka Bajinya, Charles Munyaneza, Celestin Mutabaruka and Celestin Ugirashebuja, according to the ministry of justice.

The envoy explained that this was a justice issue which will be handled by the judiciary.

She stressed that while this was not a political matter she had assured the justice ministry that initial investigations had started to determine whether the suspects can be prosecuted.

Minister Busingye stressed the need for speedy investigations and prosecution of the suspects to avoid impunity if they cannot be extradited.

Bajinya, Munyaneza, Ugirashebuja and Nteziryayo won a legal battle in UK court in 2008 against their extradition to Rwanda after judges ruled that there was a risk they would be denied justice.

But Busingye Thursday dismissed the claims, saying several countries have since been extraditing Rwandan suspects to Rwanda who receive fair trial.

Bajinya is said to have been part of the "inner circle" of then president Juvenal Habyarimana who later led a militia that he ordered to cut a suspected Tutsi into pieces to prevent all chances of recovery while Mutabaruka is alleged to have led a militia that used spears and machetes to kill genocide victims in a church.

Charles Munyaneza, Emmanuel Nteziryayo and Celestin Ugirashebuja were mayors in southern Rwanda during the genocide.KIGALI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda's Cabinet has endorsed the draft law ratifying the African Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA), paving way for parliament's ratification.

According to minutes of Wednesday's cabinet meeting, the cabinet also approved Protocol on trade in goods, Protocol on trade in services, and Protocol on rules and procedures for settlement of disputes which were signed in Kigali, Rwanda, in March 2018.

The African Continental Free Trade Area treaty is geared at increasing intra-Africa trade.

Up to 44 countries signed the deal in Kigali at the last 10th Extraordinary African Union Summit of Heads of State and Government.

The CFTA agreement will be adopted after being ratified by at least 22 countries.

The CFTA is envisaged to establish a single liberalized market of 1.2 billion people.

This is expected to spur trade, industrialization, infrastructural development, and economic diversification, according to economic experts.

In the East African Community, Kenyan cabinet also in March approved the Africa Continental Free Trade Area treaty for ratification.LOS ANGELES, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Although the trade dispute between the United States and China seems to mainly concern Midwest farmers and workers, who disproportionately voted for Donald Trump in 2016 elections, California and the West Coast could have lost the most, a latest report has warned.

A report of Sacramento Bee newspaper Thursday quoted analysis of the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan D.C. think tank, saying Los Angeles has the largest number of jobs at risk compared with any county across the country, with about 40,000 people working in industries that could be affected by the tit-for-tat tariffs between the two countries.

King and Snohomish counties in Washington state are closely behind, each with about 39,000 jobs that could be affected, while Ventura, Fresno, San Diego, Kern, Alameda, Napa, Sonoma and Monterey counties in California and Yakima County in Washington also rank among the top 25.

Brookings Institution released the results of the research this Monday, showing how China's proposed tariffs against a trade conflict ignited by Washington would affect the U.S. workers and industries.

Some parts of California, which have high concentrations of jobs in one of those critical California industries, could be affected, the research said, adding that the agriculture industry is only one of them.

For example, Napa, Sonoma, Stanislaus and San Luis Obispo counties top the country in the numbers of wine industry jobs, while fruit and nut growers would bear most of the impact of tariffs in Fresno, Ventura and Monterey counties.

The jobs at stake in Alameda Country are largely linked to Tesla's Fremont factory, Los Angeles and San Diego counties also employ thousands of people in aircraft manufacturing, as well as pharmaceuticals.

Politics are another part of the story, the report of Sacramento Bee mentioned since neither California nor Washington voted for Trump in the electoral college and the two states both clashed with the White House on a number of contested policies, such as immigration and environmental regulations.

"If President Trump follows through on his trade threats against China, it will open a broad new front in his administration's war with California." the report predicted.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 05:20:43|Editor: yan

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RIYADH, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Saudi air defense forces intercepted on Thursday evening another ballistic missile over border city Jazan fired by the Houthi militia, Al Arabiya local news reported.

On Wednesday, Saudi air defense forces intercepted three ballistic missiles over Saudi Arabia, including one that targeted the capital Riyadh.

The joint forces command of the Saudi-led coalition warned the Iranian-backed Houthi militias of targeting civilian locations or civilians and said that such terrorist acts would be firmly retaliated.

The joint forces command vowed to take all deterrent measures in accordance with international humanitarian law and its customary rules.

The intensity of such attack has increased since the completion of the third year of the coalition's war in Yemen against Houthis in March. The coalition has been accusing Iran of standing behind the militias through weapon supply and other supports.TRIPOLI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Libyan navy on Thursday rescued 137 illegal immigrants on two rubber boats off the coast of the city of Zawiya, some 45 km west of the capital Tripoli.

"A coast guard patrol rescued 137 illegal immigrants from different African nationalities and including one Syrian on two rubber boats that broke down 20 miles off the coast of Zawiya," navy spokesman Ayoub Qassem told Xinhua.

"The migrants include 19 women and 4 children," Qassem added.

The spokesman said the rescued migrants were provided with humanitarian and medical assistance and taken to Tripoli naval base, before they were handed over to the anti-illegal immigration department of Tripoli.

Libya is a preferred point of departure for migrants wanting to cross the Mediterranean towards European shores due to the state of insecurity and chaos that followed the 2011 uprising.

Improved weather conditions have increased the number of migrant boats travelling from Libya towards Europe, particularly off the west coast.The U.S. flag is seen in the wine section of a supermarket in Beijing, China, April 5, 2018. (Xinhua/REUTERS)

LOS ANGELES, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Although the trade dispute between the United States and China seems to mainly concern Midwest farmers and workers, who disproportionately voted for Donald Trump in 2016 elections, California and the West Coast could have lost the most, a latest report has warned.

A report of Sacramento Bee newspaper Thursday quoted analysis of the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan D.C. think tank, saying Los Angeles has the largest number of jobs at risk compared with any county across the country, with about 40,000 people working in industries that could be affected by the tit-for-tat tariffs between the two countries.

King and Snohomish counties in Washington state are closely behind, each with about 39,000 jobs that could be affected, while Ventura, Fresno, San Diego, Kern, Alameda, Napa, Sonoma and Monterey counties in California and Yakima County in Washington also rank among the top 25.

Brookings Institution released the results of the research this Monday, showing how China's proposed tariffs against a trade conflict ignited by Washington would affect the U.S. workers and industries.

Some parts of California, which have high concentrations of jobs in one of those critical California industries, could be affected, the research said, adding that the agriculture industry is only one of them.

For example, Napa, Sonoma, Stanislaus and San Luis Obispo counties top the country in the numbers of wine industry jobs, while fruit and nut growers would bear most of the impact of tariffs in Fresno, Ventura and Monterey counties.

The jobs at stake in Alameda Country are largely linked to Tesla's Fremont factory, Los Angeles and San Diego counties also employ thousands of people in aircraft manufacturing, as well as pharmaceuticals.

Politics are another part of the story, the report of Sacramento Bee mentioned since neither California nor Washington voted for Trump in the electoral college and the two states both clashed with the White House on a number of contested policies, such as immigration and environmental regulations.

"If President Trump follows through on his trade threats against China, it will open a broad new front in his administration's war with California." the report predicted.BUCHAREST, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and Prime Minister Viorica Dancila on Thursday called on France to support the country's bid to join the Schengen area, when meeting separately with visiting French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

Romania attached great importance to joining the Schengen area and hoped that France will support a decision in this respect, in line with what has been discussed in the latest years, including on the occasion of French president's visit in Romania in August 2017, said the Romanian head of state.

Iohannis hailed the level of excellence and positive dynamics in the Strategic Partnership between the two countries, emphasizing the bilateral efforts to update the founding documents of the strategic partnership, which should include the more and more elements of common interest, position and action of Romania and France.

Iohannis also expressed Romania's desire to cooperate as closely as possible and to coordinate with France in addressing the main issues of the Romanian Presidency of the EU Council.

Prime Minister Dancila also mentioned, among others, the country's goals regarding its bid for Schengen and OECD membership, in her talks with the French official.

She reiterated the special importance Bucharest attached to the country's joining the Schengen Area, highlighting Romania's substantial contribution to the EU's internal security.

Dancila praised the privileged bilateral relationship between the two countries and voiced the wish to take the Romanian-French cooperation even further, including by updating the Strategic Partnership Roadmap.

In his turn, the French foreign minister stressed that "there is no blockage on the part of France to Romania's prospects of becoming a member of the Schengen Area".

Schengen accession has been a long process for Romania, whose entry into the border-free area has been constantly delayed since 2011, despite Bucharest authorities' claims that they had done all the needed preparations.

Currently, citizens of the country are allowed visa-free entry into the Schengen zone, but the European Union member state is not full member of the Schengen system.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 05:35:51|Editor: yan

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LIMA, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra said on Thursday as he inaugurated the third Business Summit of the Americas that "the problem of corruption must be halted in a decisive manner, promoting a culture of integrity in our region."

This business summit is happening on the eve of the eighth Summit of the Americas to be held in Lima on Friday and Saturday.

Vizcarra recognized that the frequency of corruption cases has seen people lose all trust in authorities, creating damage to governance and the economy.

"Our citizens have demanded actions to face these circumstances," he said, adding that Latin America must take an active role in ending practises such as bribery.

Instead of their personal enrichment, Vizcarra called on those in power to put the interests of their countries first.

According to the Peruvian president, the private sector is an engine for economic development and called on entrepreneurs in joining governments in the fight against corruption.

He recalled the commitment to the fight against corruption made at the first Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994.

To follow this, this business summit will see a productive dialogue between the public and private sector to analyze challenges and opportunities in the region.

Vizcarra said these included achieving sustainable development, inclusive and quality growth, helping small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and showing a culture of regional integrity.

The Business Summit of the Americas has gathered over 1,200 businessmen from across the continent and will conclude on Friday. It will provide recommendations to the heads of state and government participating in the Summit of the Americas.HELSINKI, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Finland plans to terminate its taxation agreement with Portugal as an effort to stop tax exemption for Finnish pensioners living in Portugal has not made progress, the Finnish government said on Thursday.

Under the taxation agreement made in 1970, Portugal has the right to tax them or grant them tax exemption. The exemption in Portugal requires an application by the new resident. Finland had the right to tax pensions paid to government employee living in Portugal.

In 2016, Finland negotiated a new taxation agreement with Portugal, which would give Finland the right to tax all pensions paid from Finland to Finns living in Portugal. The new agreement would have affected some 200 to 300 Finnish retirees in Portugal, and with it Finland would have obtained tax revenue amounting to several millions annually.

However, the new agreement has not made progress in the Portuguese parliament.

On Thursday, the Finnish government submitted the plan to terminate the taxation agreement with Portugal to the Finnish parliament. If approved, the termination will take effect from the start of 2019.

In 2015, Finnish media revealed that several Finnish industrial executives had moved to Portugal for retirement. Their annual pensions range from 400,000 to 700,000 euros, which they are able to receive tax free.

Antero Toivainen, a governmental counsellor at the Ministry of Finance, told newspaper Helsingin Sanomat on Thursday that Finland has never before disengaged from a taxation agreement with another country. But Toivainen noted that Denmark has terminated tax agreements with both Spain and France as talks to enable Danish taxation rights failed.GABORONE, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Botswana's Ministry of Transport and Communications will host the Regional Information Society Technologies in Africa conference (IST-Africa 2018) from May 9 to 11 in Gaborone, capital of Botswana, said a press released by the Ministry.

IST-Africa 2018 is the 13th in a series of annual technology research and innovation conferences hosted by African governments.

The 3-day conference is organized by International Information Management Corporation (IIMC) and is supported by the European Commission and African Union Commission.

The conference will bring together over 300 senior representatives from around the world to identify opportunities for research and innovation collaboration within Africa and between Europe and Africa under Horizon 2020, which is the biggest EU Research and Innovation program with nearly 80 billion euros of funding available over 7 years (2014 to 2020), said the press released by the Ministry.

It promises breakthroughs, discoveries and world-firsts by taking ideas from the lab to the market.

IST-Africa and IST-Africa Week 2018 directly supports innovation, Science and Technology aspects of the Africa-EU Strategic Partnership and the Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa (STISA-2024).

The conference will provide a world class international forum to showcase existing Research, Innovation and ICT activities and capacity in Botswana, the rest of Africa and Europe.

It also aims to bridge the digital divide by sharing knowledge, experience, lessons learnt and good practices.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 06:10:58|Editor: pengying

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Venezuelan photographer Ronaldo Schemidt (2nd R) shows his trophy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on April 12, 2008. Ronaldo Schemidt won the Photo of the Year in the World Press Photo 2018 contest with his picture showing a protester catching fire in Venezuela, the World Press Photo foundation announced during an award show in Amsterdam on Thursday. (Xinhua/Sylvia Lederer)

THE HAGUE, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Venezuelan photographer Ronaldo Schemidt won the World Press Photo 2018 contest with his picture showing a protester catching fire in Venezuela, the World Press Photo foundation announced during an award show in Amsterdam on Thursday.

Schemidt took the picture, named Venezuela Crisis, on May 3, 2017 for Agence France Presse when the 28-year-old protester Jose Victor Salazar caught fire amid violent clashes during a protest in Caracas. Salazar was set alight when the gas tank of a motorbike exploded. He survived the incident with first- and second-degree burns.

"A classic picture, but with an enormous energy and dynamics," said jury chairwoman Magdalena Herrera. "The colors, the movement, the good composition. This picture has power."

The winning pictures were selected from a total of 73,044 images taken by 4,548 photographers from 125 countries. The jury of the of the 61st annual World Press Photo Contest gave prizes in eight categories.

Chinese photographer Li Huaifeng finished third in the category People, singles, with his picture, named Earth Kiln. He took the picture on Nov. 11, 2017, of two brothers living in a traditional "yaodong" -- kiln cave, carved into a hillside on the Loess Plateau in China.Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 06:21:01|Editor: yan

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DUBLIN, April 12 (Xinhua) -- China now ranks the second largest market both for Irish dairy and pork exports with huge potential yet to be tapped in the rapidly growing world's second largest economy, said an official here on Thursday.

James O'Donnell, Director Asia of Bord Bia (Irish Food Board), a state agency tasked to market Irish food and drink products overseas, told Xinhua that Ireland exported an estimated 900 million euros (about 1.1 billion U.S. dollars) of food and drink products to China in 2017, making China the second largest market both for Irish dairy and pork exports in the world.

Last year, Ireland's food and drink exports to China doubled compared with three years ago, said O'Donnell, who is also the head of Bord Bia China Office in Shanghai.

In view of China's population size, its rapidly growing number of middle-class people as well as its increasing demand for quality food and drink products, we see China as a rapidly emerging market for Irish food and drink exports with huge potential in the future, he said.

O'Donnell made the remarks during an interview with Xinhua at a food and drink expo held here by Bord Bia in Royal Dublin Society, the largest exhibition centre in Dublin.

Named "Marketplace International 2018", the week-long food and drink expo, is designed to provide a platform for doing business between food and drink buyers and sellers both from home and abroad.

Nearly 550 buyers, including 395 overseas buyers from over 50 countries, participated in the event which also includes field-trips for buyers in different parts of Ireland to help them get a first-hand insight into Irish farms, factories, retail stores and manufacturing facilities, said Bord Bia in a press release, adding that the event is expected to help buyers and sellers clinch 40 million euros of deals in the coming 18 months.

China sent to the expo the largest delegation of 75 members from different sectors of its food industry, said O'Donnell.

Last year, Ireland exported a total of 12.6 billion euros of food and drink products, of which nearly 70 percent went to European Union countries, a figure indicating a huge potential for the development of the Irish food exports in the other markets of the world including China, he said. (1 euro=1.233 U.S. dollars)Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-13 07:01:10|Editor: pengying

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BRUSSELS, April 12 (Xinhua) -- A new documentary about Przewalski's horses, last endangered species of wild horses, and their lengthy journey from Belgium to their original habitat at China's Xinjiang Wild Horse Breeding and Research Center, was premiered at the China Cultural Center in Brussels on Thursday.

The 33-minute documentary, named "Jardin Extraordinaire: Przewalski's horses", was filmed in Belgium, the Czech Republic and China.

The film will be officially broadcast on Belgium's largest television station RTBF on April 22.

Attending the event, Chinese Ambassador to Belgium Qu Xing said in his speech that the Przewalski's horses to be sent to China will act as symbolic "ambassador" of Belgium in China, similar to the importance attached to the two pandas that arrived in Belgium in 2014.

Tanguy Dumortier, presenter of the documentary, spoke at length about the importance of nature conservation in his opening speech.

"We want to convey such key messages through this documentary film produced in cooperation with China: protecting the natural environment is protecting the future of mankind. It can cross language and cross national borders. It is a cornerstone for amicable relations and friendship."

The Przewalski's horses are the only surviving wild horses on earth and were first spotted in the 1880s in the Junggar Basin in Xinjiang at the junction of Gansu and Inner Mongolia. However, due to western expeditions in the 20th century, the horses became largely extinct in China by the 1960s.

An international breeding program that began in the Caves of Han in Belgium now made it possible for these horses to once again trot across the vast steppes of Xinjiang. Moving forward, the aim for those involved with the program is to eventually reintroduce the horses back into the wild. EnditemThe European Jewish Association (EJA) has congratulated Prime Minister Viktor Orban on his resounding win and reelection, the PMs press chief said.

In his congratulatory letter, EJA Chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin praised Orban for having been a stalwart defender of Israel on the world stage.

During your previous term in office your steadfast assurances and commitments to protect Hungarian Jewry and their heritage were warmly welcomed and were an anchor to us in these turbulent political times, Margolin wrote.

The EJA chairman expressed his trust that Orbans previous positive and embracing stance to Hungarian Jewish citizens and Israel would be carried over into his new term and government. Europe stands at a crossroads, the letter said.

Margolin reassured Orban that he would enjoy the EJAs support as long as he continued to show the right way ahead when it comes to defending and upholding Jewish rights, and standing up for Israel.

Photo: Arvai Karoly / kormany.huHungary joined the European Unions initiative on artificial intelligence at an event marking Digital Day 2018 in Brussels on Tuesday.

Jozsef Palinkas, head of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH), signed the document under which member states will coordinate their efforts to do research in, make use of, and draft legal regulations pertaining to artificial intelligence, the office said.

The Visegrad Group member countries published a separate statement showing that they would jointly encourage developments in the field.

The NKFIH announced in January 2018 that it would allocate 1 billion forints (EUR 3.2m) to supporting research linked to artificial intelligence (AI).Opposition LMP would investigate the background to a flood of complaints the party has received, LMP co-leader Bernadett Szel (pictured on top) told a press conference.

Akos Hadhazy, LMPs outgoing co-leader, said a full recount of the votes could hardly be avoided.

Concerning problematic cases, Szel mentioned a constituency where there was a significant difference between votes on LMPs individual candidate and the party list, and noted that there were constituencies where the election committee did not include members delegated by the opposition. In those districts, she said, votes should be recounted in the presence of independent observers.

Hadhazy said that it seems obvious that there has been massive fraud, and wondered if the central register may have been interfered with. He said a breakdown of the system on Sunday morning was baffling and also noted the extremely slow reporting of results in the evening.

Szel was asked about her responsibility concerning the oppositions failure at the election, and she answered that I feel the responsibility; what happened on Sunday was a terrible slap in the face and said that she had initiated reelection of the leaders of her party, including the chairpersons.

Asked about press reports that LMPs Peter Ungar, who appears to have won a seat in parliament, is planning to purchase the daily Magyar Nemzet, Szel said that Ungars sole purpose is to prevent the paper from falling in the hands of (state) propaganda.

Meanwhile radical nationalist Jobbik will also request recount of the votes in the recent national election in constituencies where a violation of the rules is suspected, Jobbik spokesman Peter Jakab said.

Jakab said public opinion suggested that ruling Fidesz has faked the results and added that the choice for candidates of the governing parties was whether to go to parliament or to prison.

He insisted that apart from using all base means such as transporting voters, distributing food, threatening officials or ensuring fast crossing at the border for Hungarian citizens from Ukraine

Fidesz also received some extra assistance from the National Election Office (NVI). The spokesman criticised the NVI because its server had broken down several times during the voting and preliminary results were not published for hours after the polls closed. He added that in the last half hour of the voting some 170,000-180,000 votes disappeared.

MTI Photo: Bruzak NoemiAs a series of party leaders resign, admitting their failure to mount a credible challenge to the incumbent government, commentators try to figure out what the new age which began on Monday will bring to Hungary.

All left-wing leaders except DK founder Ferenc Gyurcsany, have tendered their resignations after their crushing defeat at the hands of PM Orbans Fidesz in Sundays parliamentary election.

Jobbik leader Gabor Vona, who made a sharp turn from radicalism to moderation over a short period of three years, has even withdrawn from Parliament. His radical opponents within Jobbik are preparing to steer their party back towards its original vocation on the far right.

If they have their way, PM Orbans famous strategy of ruling from the centre for 20 years with two incompatible opponents on either side will remain a viable prospect.

In 168 Ora, editor Akos Toth thinks the consequences of the Fidesz landslide are unpredictable, but fears an all-out government clampdown on opposition bastions in the media and in civil society.

He deems the current opposition incapable of protecting us and believes that the Left must start by devising a new language, both to make itself understood and to allow its disparate components to understand one other. The most difficult job of all, he writes, will be to overcome resignation and despair.

On Mandiner, Marton Bekes reads the result of the election as both a sign of support for PM Orban and an expression of discontent with the opposition.

The government side alone, he explains, had a message and a story and therefore no viable alternative exists to PM Orban today. National and democratic forces have the upper hand over internationalist and anti-democratic forces, Bekes concludes.

This opinion does not necessarily represent the views of this portal. Your opinion articles are welcome too, for review before possible publication, via info@xpatloop.comSeveral flights linking Budapest to Paris, Frankfurt and Munich were cancelled on Tuesday, due to strikes by airline personnel.

The Germany flights were among 800 cancelled by Lufthansa airlines yesterday.

Ground service workers and firemen went on strike Tuesday morning at airports in Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne and Bremen.

As staff of Air France also went on strike on Tuesday, the airline cancelled its 9.05 a.m. flight from Paris to Budapest and the 9.50 a.m. flight from Budapest to Paris.You're invited to network with the international community at our Spring social event, featuring unlimited tasting from a quality selection of 20 fine wines at Veritas in downtown Budapest.





Fling yourself in!



After all Spring is a time of renewal, when the flowers push through, and new website designs come to life, like XpatLoop :)



And its a great time to meet new folks, make fresh connections, and reunite with old friends.



The winemakers involved are from the most famous regions in Hungary, from five top wineries, here they are in alphabetical order:



Dubicz - Matra,

Gere Tamas & Zsolt - Villany,

Patricius - Tokaj,

Patzay - Badacsony,

Vida - Szekszard.



Timing: 6.30-10.30pm

Guests are welcome to arrive anytime between 6.30 and 8.30pm.

Snacks served at start, arrive early to enjoy a few tasty nibbles...

- remember it's a wine tasting event rather than a food club ;)



Ticket:

HUF 6.000 per person, payable upon arrival.



RSVP: Click here to register

In case of any issues email info(at)xpatloop.com



Dress code:

Smart casual



Venue:

Veritas Wine Bar

1074 Budapest, Dohany u. 58-62.



Registration:

ProHuman Hostesses



Notes:

Limited places available, so RSVP ASAP please.

Guests registered on a first come first served basis.

Those on guest list will get an email confirmation before event.



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Click to see a clip of an earlier event



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You might like to check-out the links below to know who attended previously, and what went on...by Muhammad Tahir

ISLAMABAD, April 11 (Xinhua) -- A recent decision by Pakistan and Afghanistan to operationalize a new mechanism for dialogue have raised hopes for bilateral comprehensive engagement on key issues including actions against irreconcilable elements in both countries.

During Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi's visit to Kabul and official talks with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on April 6, both sides reached an agreement on Afghanistan-Pakistan Action Plan for Peace and Solidarity (APAPPS), a joint action plan for cooperation in the areas of counter-terrorism and reduction of violence, peace and reconciliation, refugees' repatriation and joint economic development.

Tense relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan had badly affected cooperation, particularly in security area. Violence in both countries has led to a traditional blame game that has widened mistrust.

But the two neighbors have now agreed to "deny use of their respective territory by any country, network, group or individuals for anti-state activities against either country," according to the seven key points of the APAPPS.

They have also reached at understanding to "undertake effective actions against fugitives and the irreconcilable elements posing security threats to either of the two countries."

The two sides are expected to put in place a joint supervision, coordination and confirmation mechanism through Liaison Officers (LOs) in both capitals for realization of the agreed actions. If any side will have information about the activities of militants, the intelligence will be shared with the LO for a possible joint action.

Pakistani former ambassador to Afghanistan Qazi Hamayun highlighted the importance of the joint Pak-Afghan groups and said both countries have now agreed to act against those elements who refuse to join peace process.

But Hamayun told Xinhua that the U.S. and Afghan leaders should not use pressure tactics on Pakistan as the reconciliation process will remain a complicated matter unless the foreign troops issue, the main reason the Taliban has been fighting against, is addressed.

Defense expert Said Nazeer Momnad said the APAPPS has assumed importance as now both countries will pursue bilateral engagement and regional countries would have relatively little influence in either county.

Momand, a retired army brigadier, told Xinhua on Wednesday that the establishment of the new system is a tangible step to deal with all those issues which had been major irritants in relations.

"This is very significant that Pakistan and Afghanistan appoint groups for every problem. They would now regularly sit face-to-face to share concerns and find out a solution. This will help in bridging the trust gap," Momand said.

He said Abbasi's visit to Kabul has laid foundation for high level exchanges and now the Afghan leaders will visit Pakistan that will enable both sides to use the APAPPS to respond to mutual issues of contention and concerns and to avoid public blame game.

As Pakistan and Afghanistan have now defined terms of the future cooperation at the highest level, they should frustrate any possible attempt to derail the process by elements opposed to tension-free bilateral relations.

However, both countries still face serious security challenges, therefore the two governments should be prepared to make sure that any violent incidents in either country should not spoil the new mechanism, experts warned.Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia (C, Front) votes in favor of a Russian-drafted resolution on an investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) into the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, at the UN headquarters in New York, on April 10, 2018. The UN Security Council failed to adopt the Russian-drafted resolution on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

UNITED NATIONS, April 11 (Xinhua) -- Swedish ambassador to the United Nations Olof Skoog on Wednesday warned against military action against Syria after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to launch a missile attack.

"What the Syrian people want and need is peace and justice, not further military escalation or impunity. Let that also be a response to planned military intervention etc.," Skoog told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York.

"Whatever happens now has to be in line with international law," he said before walking into the Security Council chamber for a meeting on Mali.

Skoog refused to comment on a tweet by Trump early Wednesday morning.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" Trump tweeted.

Asked whether such military action against Syria requires Security Council authorization, Skoog said: "The (UN) Charter is very clear about military intervention."

Skoog expressed disappointment at the failure of the Security Council to adopt any resolution with regard to chemical weapons use in Syria. "The Security Council failed to shoulder its responsibility yesterday," he said.

Sweden supported the U.S. draft on a new investigative mechanism for chemical weapons use in Syria and thought it was the best way forward, he said. But the draft, which won the support of 12 of the 15 Security Council members, was vetoed by Russia.

A competing text prepared by Russia had no chance of adoption at all, he said.

Having anticipated the deadlock, Sweden on Monday circulated "a very credible, very assertive compromise resolution" in order to find common ground in the Security Council for an outcome in support of an investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) into the alleged chemical attack in Douma. Russia amended the Swedish work and tabled it as a third draft resolution for vote on Tuesday.

However, some Security Council members were not ready to engage -- for political reasons that have nothing to do with the substance of the draft, said Skoog.

The third text failed to be adopted as it won only five positive votes.

The Fact-Find Mission of the OPCW is going into Syria to probe the Douma attack. "There will be an investigation. The problem is that there is no follow-on, which is to establish responsibility, guilt, accountability. That has to be worked out," said Skoog.

The Joint Investigative Mechanism between the OPCW and the United Nations, which was set up by the Security Council for the purpose of accountability attribution for chemical weapons use in Syria, ceased to be in November 2017 after Russia blocked the renewal of its mandate.Coun Perez reiterates warning to barangay leaders involved in drugs

07 Aug 2017 Hits:37 Comments(0)

Liga ng mga Barangay President, Councilor Jerry Perez yesterday reiterated his warning to all barangay officials from using or selling drugs. Perez said he is closely monitoring the activities of all the barangay officials and vowed sanctions against erring leaders. Aqui gane na mio barangay ya quita ya iyo na puesto cunel dos barangay leaders quien mas temprano ya sale positivo na...New Delhi: Sanjay Dutt, who has been looking forward to the release of his biopic, 'Sanju', helmed by Rajkumar Hirani, is apparently in talks with director Mahesh Bhatt for the sequel to 1991 released 'Sadak'.

Earlier, reports said that the film would see Sanjay and Pooja reprising their roles in the movie. Words were also there Alia would also be a part of the project. And on Thursday, Sanjay and Alia were clicked outside the office of Mahesh Bhatt.

Check out the photos of Sanjay and Alia outside Mahesh Bhatt's office:

The film is expected to go on floors in 2019 and is also likely to feature Alia ina pivotal role.

While there has been no official confirmation from the makers or actors, several reports claimed that Pooja Bhatt is all excited about the project. The 46-year-old actress-filmmaker recently shared an old photo of father Mahesh with Sanjay from the sets of 'Sadak' and captioned it, "Flashback-First day of shooting for Sadak at Mukesh Mills.We were shooting an action sequence that I was not part of but was always more interested in what happened behind the camera hence tagged along!"

She further wrote, "Cant wait for Sadak2! Gratitude to @maheshfilm and Vishesh Films for giving us a film that will be mentioned in all our obituaries. Next up? Sadak part two of course! #Sadak #Sadak2 #cultfilm #smashhit #thosewerethedays #unafraidtostandout #theroaring90s #MaheshBhatt #Sanjaydutt #poojabhatt #behindthescenes #filmmaking #filmmakinglife #flashback #memories."

Flashback-First day of shooting for #Sadak at Mukesh Mills.We were shooting an action sequence that I was not part of but was always more interested in what happened behind the camera hence tagged along!Thank you @MaheshNBhatt for everything & more! pic.twitter.com/tJMTRRDqTc  Pooja Bhatt (@PoojaB1972) April 7, 2018

She also shared another photo, a recent one, of Sanjay and father Mahesh Bhatt sharing a candid moment on her Instagram handle.

Meanwhile, 1991 released 'Sadak' is also fondly remembered for the late Sadashiv Amrapurkar's award-winning performance as the film's villain Maharani.CHENNAI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi was greeted with black flags in Chennai by opposition parties and pro-Tamil outfits in Tamil Nadu who are holding protests against him. The PM is in Chennai to inaugurate the 10th edition of Defence Expo on Thursday,

The main opposition party, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) had on Wednesday asked people to hoist black flags atop their houses to oppose the Prime Minister's visit. DMK's working president MK Stalin appealed to people to hoist black flags and wear black badges as a mark of protest.

Among the other opposing parties, Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) general secretary Vaiko said his party would hold a black flag demonstration at Little Mount against Modi saying that he has "betrayed" Tamil Nadu on the Cauvery issue.

T Velmurugan, coordinator of Tamizhar Vazhvurimai Koottamaippu, an umbrella body of pro-Tamil outfits including 'May 17', has also announced a 'black balloon-cum-black flag' protest. As per their plan, they will release balloons at Meenambakkam in the airport's vicinity and "several other locations. The black flag protest would be held at the Alandur Metro Rail Station.

Manithaneya Jananayaga Katchi chief M Thamimun Ansari said black flag demonstration would be staged at Guindy which is near the airport. Ansari said volunteers from Tamizhar Kalai Ilakkiya Panpattu Peravai, a forum of art, literary and film personalities and Cauvery Rights Retrieval Committee, would also participate. Veteran film director Bharathiraja of the Peravai confirmed participation in the black flag demonstration.

Dravidar Kazhagam said its cadres would stage a black flag demonstration at Saidapet.

In view of the protests, tight security arrangements have been put in place including a multiple-layer security ring. The PM is scheduled to formally inaugurate India's mega defence exhibition - the Defexpo- at Thiruvidanthai, about 40 km from Chennai.

The expo, which will be attended by over 670 exhibitors, including 150 from abroad, will showcase India's capability in the export of defence systems and components.

Later in the day, the PM is also scheduled to attend an event at the Adyar Cancer Institute. The visit comes on a day when Modi along with other Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MPs are observing a day-long fast to protest against the washout of the just concluded Budget Session of Parliament.

(With agency inputs)New Delhi: Mayoral polls in the three BJP-controlled municipal corporations in Delhi will be held by the end of this month, senior civic officials said on Wednesday. "The elections for the posts of mayor, deputy mayor and three members of the standing committee of the South Delhi Municipal Corporation will be held on April 26," an SDMC official said.

The notification for elections of mayor and deputy mayor of the SDMC has been issued, the official said.

Sources said the mayoral polls in east and north Delhi municipal corporation (EDMC and NDMC) would be held on April 24 and April 27 respectively. The notifications are likely to be issued on Thursday. The Delhi Municipal Corporation Act provides for election of mayor and deputy mayor from among the councillors of the corporations in the first meeting of the House every year.

The mayors and deputy mayors get a year-long term in the cities of Union Territories.

The erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Delhi was trifurcated into North, South and East Delhi Municipal Corporations in 2012.

The mayoral five-year tenure sees five single-year terms on a rotation basis, with the first year being reserved for women, the second open category, third for reserved category, and the remaining two also being in open category.

Last year, the polls were held in the women category.

The incumbent mayors for the three corporations are Preety Agarwal (NDMC), Kamaljeet Sehrawat (SDMC) and Neema Bhagat (EDMC).New York: RBI's former governor Raghuram Rajan has said that he had made it quite clear to the government that the demonetisation was "not a good idea" and that its implementation was "not well-planned" since 87.5 percent of the currency was being demonetised.

On November 8, 2016, the Centre banned Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 currency notes to curtail the shadow economy and crack down on the use of illicit and counterfeit cash to fund illegal activities and terrorism.

Speaking at the prestigious Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge yesterday, 55-year-old Rajan rejected the claim that the Reserve Bank of India had not been consulted by the government before it went ahead with the demonetisation.

He, however, reiterated that the move to cancel 87.5 percent of the currency value was "not a good idea".

"I didn't ever say that I wasn't consulted (on demonetisation). In fact, I have made it quite clear that we were consulted and we didn't think it was a good idea," said Rajan who is currently the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

He said demonetisation "was not a well-planned, well thought-out, useful exercise and I told the government that when the idea was first mooted."

He added that any macro-economist would say that if 87.5 percent of the currency is being demonetised, then it better be made sure that a similar amount of currency is printed and ready to be put back in circulation.

"India went into it without having done that. It had a negative economic impact but also the idea was that somehow people who had money stored in their basements without having paid taxes on it would overnight see reason and come to the government and say 'sorry we were hiding this stuff, let me pay taxes on it'," Rajan said, calling it a "naive view".

"Anybody who knows India, knows that very quickly we find ways around the system," he said, adding that with "essentially" all the money that was demonetised coming back into the system, the exercise did not have the direct effect that was sought.

While the longer term impact of demonetisation is yet to be seen, its negative economic impact included people not having currency, not being able to pay and economic activity plummeting especially in the informal sector.

"There may be some longer term impact that people think that if this sort of thing happens then the government is serious about collecting taxes. There may be greater tax payments but we still have to see strong evidence that that is true," he said.

Rajan also expressed concern that a lot of people probably lost their jobs due to demonetisation but that has not been counted well as it would be mostly in the informal sector.

"The positive impacts (of demonetisation) are out there in the future. We have no idea whether they will be important. To my mind it was not a policy that was useful at that time," he said while speaking at the 2018 Albert H Gordon Lecture on the topic 'Leverage, Financial Crises, and Policies to Raise Economic Growth'.

To a suggestion that demonetisation could have positively impacted growth, Rajan said "you would have to find a new economic theory to explain how it helped the economy".

He said most estimates of the cost of demonetisation vary between 1.5-2 percent of the GDP.

"It would be a really die-hard government advocate who would say that the growth benefits of demonetisation were immediate," he said.

"Most of the supporters of the move would say that the benefits of the move are coming by changing the incentive to pay taxes. I would say yes, we will have to wait and see whether that in fact is true," he said.

Rajan, who joined the RBI in September 2013 when the country was facing its worst currency crisis since the 1990s, left the organisation after completing his three-year term in September 2016.A quick glance at the top news of the day:

1. Bihar government reinstates security at former CM Rabri Devi's residence

Bihar government on Thursday revoked an order which withdrew 32 Bihar Military Police jawans at former CM Rabri Devi's residence. The decision though was not enough for RJD scion Tejashwi Yadav who took the opportunity to hit out at CM Nitish Kumar for 'U-turns' galore. Read full report

2. CWG 2018 Live: Seema Punia wins silver, Navjeet Dhillon bronze in Discus final

While Sushil took just 80 seconds to win his 74kg freestyle final against the South African, Rahul Aware claimed gold in the men's 57kg freestyle wrestling with a dominating 15-7 win over his opponent from Canada. Read full report

3. Centre tells Supreme Court its verdict on SC/ST Act has caused anger, disharmony

The Central government on Thursday told the Supreme Court that through its verdict in the SC/ST Act, the apex court has resorted to "judicial legislation". Read full report

4. South vs North: Not biased against any region, says PM Modi in Chennai

PM Modi has said his government is committed to cooperative federalism. His comment came at an event in Chennai, and appeared to be an attempt to douse the rising flames of discontent in the South over the way the Centre shares money with state governments. Read full report

5. Phone call changed Yogi's decision to arrest Sengar, claims BJP leader

A Senior BJP leader in Uttar Pradesh has claimed that CM Yogi Adityanath had decided to arrest rape accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar but his decision was changed after the intervention of a 'prominent person'. Read full reportTaking cognisance of rape allegations against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, the Allahabad High Court on Thursday asked the Uttar Pradesh government counsel as to why the lawmaker had not been arrested yet. The court has sought a reply on the matter in the post-lunch session on Thursday itself.

The remarks of the Allahabad High Court come just hours after Uttar Pradesh Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar and Director General of Police OP Singh, in a joint press conference, said that its now up to the Central bureau of Investigation (CBI) to decide if Sengar should be arrested or not.

Confirming that the cases pertaining to the alleged rape of the complainant and her fathers death in police custody in Unnao would now be taken care of by the central investigating agency, the officials had denied allegations of Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government trying to protect the MLA.

The press meet was held by the senior officials after an FIR was registered against him. The case has been filed under POCSO Act and Sengar has been charged under sections 366, 363, 376 and 506. The FIR followed a midnight drama outside the office of Lucknow SSP where Sengars supporters clashed with mediapersons.

The MLA has claimed innocence in the case, saying false allegations are being levelled against him. He even refused to surrender before the police on Wednesday. Though he visited the office of Senior Superintendent of Police Lucknow late on Wednesday night, he walked away half-an-hour later.

Meanwhile, the authorities have said that a reference for CBI probe has been sent to the central government. The investigation at the level of the SIT and local police will continue till CBI formally takes over the case. Appropriate action will be taken against the MLA if more evidence is procured against him, said the Principal Secretary.

On the custodial death of the alleged victims father in Unnao, the administration conceded that his medical test was not conducted before being taken into custody. Pointing that a committee had been formed under the Chief Medical Officer to ascertain the cause of his death, the officials said that he was beaten up before he died.New Delhi: The Centre on Wednesday told Delhi High Court that the bar on differently-abled people from undertaking Haj was retained in the new policy for the annual pilgrimage as it was the practice for the last 30 years, since the journey is physically demanding. The purpose is also to strictly screen the disabled due to instances of such people indulging in begging, which is prohibited in Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Minority Affairs said in an affidavit filed before a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar.

The other reasons for the prohibition were that the pilgrimage is physically demanding, exhausting and in case of a stampede, disabled people would be more at risk, it said.

The affidavit, which was filed in response to a PIL against the bar on differently-abled people from performing Haj pilgrimage, further said the prohibitions in the earlier policy for the years 2013-2017 were retained in the new one as it was the practice for the last 30 years.

The ministry, however, said that it was sensitive to the issue raised in the PIL by advocate Gaurav Kumar Bansal, especially in view of the Rights of Persons With Disabilities Act of 2016, and has directed the Haj Committee of India (HCoI) to look into the matter and recommend necessary corrections or amendments in the Haj policy of 2018-22.

"Haj pilgrimage is physically demanding and involves arduous journey from one place to another on feet and by various other modes of transport and is to be performed on a foreign land in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

"In the new policy for HCoI pilgrims for 2018-22 there was no change with regard to eligibility criteria and the exact wordings about persons with disability used in previous policy for Haj 2013-17 was retained," the affidavit said.

"That retaining this provision also needs to be understood in the light of Consular General of India, Jeddah advice in 2012 for strict screening of disabled persons in view of instances of many such people indulging in begging which is strictly prohibited in Saudi Arabia," it said.

The affidavit also said, "It is because of the difficulties involved in Haj pilgrimage that as per quranic injunction, Haj is not cast upon as a duty for everyone but only on those who have the 'lstatah' (physical and financial capacity)."

"As per prevailing practice for more than 30 years, persons suffering from physical disabilities or suffering from specified diseases have been debarred from applying for pilgrimage through HCoI," it said.

The ministry has emphasised in its response that there was no intention to disrespect or hurt the feelings of any person by incorporating the said provisions in the Haj policy to bar people suffering from certain serious diseases or those categorised as disabled.

"This provision had been there in the policy since its inception and has been continued in the new policy as such," it reiterated.

The ministry also said that since it has initiated steps to redress the issue, the plea has become infructuous and unwarranted.

The petition by Bansal alleged that some provisions of the new Haj policy violated Articles 14, 21 and 25 of the Constitution pertaining to equality and freedom to practice religion.

The new policy guidelines under the 'eligibility for Haj' mentions that any Indian citizen who is a Muslim can apply for the pilgrimage except those "who do not have the mental or physical health to perform the pilgrimage, persons whose legs are amputated, who are crippled, handicapped, lunatic or otherwise physically/mentally incapacitated".

Bansal, in his plea, has contended that these provisions "blatantly discriminate" against persons with disabilities and violate the Rights of Persons With Disabilities Act, 2016.

The petition stated that those affected with polio, congestive cardiac, tuberculosis, respiratory ailment, acute coronary insufficiency, coronary thrombosis, mental disorder, infectious leprosy, AIDS or any other communicable disease or disability also cannot take undertake Haj, an annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca.

The types of disabilities added in the 2016 Act include mental illness, autism, spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, chronic neurological conditions, specific learning disabilities, multiple sclerosis, speech and language disability.

Disorders such as thalassemia, hemophilia, sickle cell disease, multiple disabilities including visual and hearing impairment, acid attack and Parkinson's disease have also been included in the legislation.Patna: Bihar government on Thursday revoked an order which withdrew 32 Bihar Military Police jawans at former CM Rabri Devi's residence. The decision though was not enough for RJD scion Tejashwi Yadav who took the opportunity to hit out at CM Nitish Kumar for 'U-turns' galore.

Security at the residence of Rabri was reinstated after the Nitish government over-ruled the withdrawal order. Demanding to know who was responsible for issuing the order in the first place, Tejashwi - son of Rabri and RJD leader Lalu Prasad Yadav - said it was a glaring example of how the Bihar CM keeps going back on his decision. "Not for nothing is Nitish Kumar known as 'Paltu Ram', again he has gone back on his decision," he told news agency ANI. "He should make it clear who issued the earlier order to withdraw security as the Home portfolio is with him."

Security personnel deployed at Rabri's residence were withdrawn and were seen packing their bags on Tuesday night. In protest against the move, Tejashwi and brother Tej Pratap too gave up their security cover. Their argument was that as Rabri was a member of the opposition, she was entitled to security. Rabri herself alleged that the state government was conspiring to get her and her family killed. "The security was revoked at 9 in the night. See what the government is doing? It is a conspiracy to get me and my family killed," she had said on Wednesday.

Rabri had also alleged that Lalu's life was under threat in prison. "It's a conspiracy by Nitish Kumar, Sushil Modi and the government. Lalu Ji is in jail and is dying every day. I don't know if he's dying due to disease or being killed using medicines. His sugar level is rising. How do I trust the government? If they ask us to vacate our house we're ready to do it," she had said. Lalu is in jail after being convicted in the infamous Fodder Scam.LUCKNOW: Amid ongoing incidents of statue defacing and vandalism, a sculpture of the Father of Indian Constitution, B R Ambedkar has been locked in an iron cage and a police personnel has been deputed for its protection in Uttar Pradesh's Badaun.

Earlier this week, the Uttar Pradesh Home Department had directed the state police to ensure the security of the statues of famous figures in the state. The police would monitor and ensure the security of the statues of famous personalities in the state, principal secretary of Home Department Arvind Kumar had said.

In addition, the Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police (DGP) Om Prakash Singh had written a letter to Superintendents of Police (SPs) of all districts regarding the issue and asked them to work in ensuring the statues' security.

Despite strong words by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and clear directives from the Ministry of Home Affairs, there has been no end to the incidents of vandalism of statues of iconic leaders and ideologues. Several incidents of statue vandalism have been reported from various parts of the country over the last few months.

The latest development comes after several incidents of vandalism of famous personalities, including Mahatma Gandhi, Syama Prasad Mukherjee, E V Ramasamy Periyar and Vladimir Lenin were reported across the country.

Statues B R Ambedkar have always been targeted along with the other eminent figures. His statues have been vandalised in places across the country including Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur, Bhind's Kheria Village of Madhya Pradesh and in Rajasthan's Achrol.

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 mob demolished a statue of Communist ideologue Vladimir Lenin in Tripura.

These incidents have sparked a war of words between political parties as well. PM Modi, however, had recently made an appeal to people to not indulge in the vandalism of statues. Following this, the Union Home Ministry had issued a directive to states to ensure that no such incidents take place.

(With inputs from ANI)The Uttar Pradesh administration has said that it is now up to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to arrest or not arrest Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who has been accused of rape. Following the registration of FIR against the lawmaker, details of the case were furnished by UP Director General of Police OP Singh and Principal Secretary Arvind Kumar.

Confirming that the rape case against the MLA and the custodial death case of the victims father have been transferred to the CBI for further investigation, the senior officials dismissed allegations of the government trying to protect Sengar.

#WATCH UP DGP OP Singh addresses BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger as 'Mananiye (honourable)', later clarifies after objection by journalists, 'there is no harm in giving respect to an MLA even if he is an accused, he is not guilty yet' pic.twitter.com/OEVmd4zvXF  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 12, 2018

Responding to a question in this regard, UP DGP said, He is an accused, he has not been convicted. I am not defending him. Every man is free unless convicted.

According to the officials, while the crime was allegedly committed on June 4, 2017, the victim went missing on June 11, 2017. A complaint in this regard was filed at that time by the alleged victims mother the next day. They added that the complainant did not name the MLA in their statement before the magistrate at that time.

Talking about the custodial death of the alleged victims father in Unnao, the administration conceded that his medical test was not conducted before being taken into custody. Pointing that a committee had been formed under the Chief Medical Officer to ascertain the cause of his death, the officials said that he was beaten up before he died.

They said that a reference for CBI probe has been sent to the central government. The investigation at the level of the SIT and local police will continue till CBI formally takes over the case. Appropriate action will be taken against the MLA if more evidence is procured against him, said the Principal Secretary.

Meanwhile, speaking to Zee News, a relative of rape accused Sengar said that the lawmaker was not running away from probe, claiming that the MLA himself had demanded a CBI investigation into the case. We are even ready for narco test. Truth always comes out in narco tests, the leader is ready to go for it. And CBI is the best investigating agency in the country, they must probe the case thoroughly, he said.

The uncle of the victim, however, said that though they are satisfied with the proceedings in the case till now, they still want the MLA to be arrested first. We are satisfied with the steps taken by Yogi Adityanath government, but we will be more satisfied if the MLA is arrested immediately. We will feel secured, he said.

An FIR naming the MLA was registered after midnight drama by his supporters at Senior Superintendent of Police office in Lucknow. The case has been filed under POCSO Act and Sengar has been charged under sections 366, 363, 376 and 506.An FIR has been registered against rape accused Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar while a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe has been ordered into Unnao rape and custodial death. The development was confirmed hours after Sengar and his supporters on Wednesday night indulged in scuffle with mediapersons who questioned him over the allegations. The case has been filed under POCSO Act and Sengar has been charged under sections 366, 363, 376 and 506.

The MLA has claimed innocence in the case, saying false allegations are being levelled against him. He even refused to surrender before the police on Wednesday. Though he visited the office of Senior Superintendent of Police Lucknow late on Wednesday night, but walked away half-an-hour later.

The scuffle, caught on camera, broke out between Sengars supporters and mediapersons outside the office of the SSP when the MLA made a visit in connection with the case. However, the MLAs response to mediapersons was in different taste, as he said that he was ready to appear wherever media wanted.

WATCH: Scuffle between media persons and supporters of Unnao BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger outside SSP office in Lucknow. pic.twitter.com/jxJevmRmj4  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 11, 2018

Aap (media) jahan kaho wahin chalen. Apke channel mai chal kar baithen. Main channel ke saathiyon ke kehne se yaha aaya hoon. Channel ke saathi jahan par kahenge wahan chaloonga. Namaste (I am ready to go wherever media asks. I can come on your channel also. I have come here at the behest of friends from channels.), said Sengar while speaking to mediapersons.

The late-night drama came after ADGP Lucknow Zone Rajiv Krishna confirmed that he had submitted the preliminary report in the matter.

While Sengar has claimed that allegations against him are baseless, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has asserted that no one found guilty in the case would be spared.

The investigation so far has revealed that the father of the rape survivor had suffered 18 internal injuries. The probing agency will see if at all the Uttar Pradesh Police acted under stress.

Earlier on Wednesday, Sengars wife Sangita made a visit to the Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police, seeking justice for her husband.NEW DELHI: The Central government on Thursday told the Supreme Court that through its verdict in the SC/ST Act, the apex court has resorted to "judicial legislation". The Centre also told court that its verdict dealt with a very sensitive issue which has caused anger, unease and a sense of disharmony in the country.

The Centre also told SC that there is a separation of powers between legislature, executive and judiciary which it is inviolable. The government said that the verdict has failed to fill gaps in the SC/ST Act and thus should be withdrawn.

The government had earlier also said that it is unhappy with the SC order adding that it "differs" with the verdict. It had also questioned why the Union of India was not made a "formal" party in the case.

Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had said that the judgement is "virtually redoing the entire architecture of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act".

"We feel that a sensitive case of this nature required a more in depth consideration with requisite consideration of objective data to come to a conclusion as to whether the law is being abused or there is a need to give protection to the continued, unfortunate instances of injustice against Dalits," he had said.

The apex court had on March 20 said that on "several occasions", innocent citizens were being termed as accused and public servants deterred from performing their duties, which was never the intention of the legislature while enacting the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

The top court had said that unless the exclusion of anticipatory bail is limited to "genuine cases and inapplicable to cases where there is no prima facie case was made out, there will be no protection available to innocent citizens".The crime branch of Jammu and Kashmir has recorded statements of 22 witnesses in connection with the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua is Jammu and Kashmir. As per the findings of the investigation, the motive of the crime was to drive away Bakarwal community.

The investigators have found that suspicion of cow slaughter by the Bakarwal community was one of the reasons leading to the brutal assault on the minor girl. Two charge sheets were filed against eight accused under various sections of the Ranbir Penal Code (equivalent of IPC) related to rape, illegal confinement, destruction of evidence and criminal conspiracy. The accused are Sanjhi Ram, his son Vishal, special police officers Deepak Khajuria and Surender Verma, head constable Tilak Raj, sub-inspector Anand Dutta, civilian Parvesh Kumar, and Sanjhi Ram's minor nephew.

The chargesheet filed reveals that a particular community had a general impression that the Bakarwals indulge in cow slaughter and drug trafficking, which led to hatred and made the culprits commit the crime.

The abduction, rape and killing of the girl, hailing from Muslim nomad community 'Bakerwal', was part of a carefully planned strategy to remove the minority community from the area, reveals a 15-page charge sheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir Police's crime branch in the chief judicial magistrate's court here on Monday.

Prime accused Sanjhi Ram, according to the findings of the investigation, always motivated the members of his community in the area to not provide land for grazing or any other kind of assistance. He even made attempts to stall the selling of land by one Harnam Singh to a member of the Bakarwal community.

According to the chargesheet, Sanjhi Ram, with the help of ex- Sarpanch of Kootah and Rasana area, stopped the payment on account of installation of telephone towers in his land through the tehsildar concerned, claiming that the land in question was a state land. Harnam Singh approached the High court and got the impugned order of Tehsildar quashed.

Another accused Vishal, who is pursuing B Sc in Agriculture at a college in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, had returned to his village after he was informed by his relative, Shubam Sangra alias ?Chuboo? about the kidnapping of the girl telephonically on January 11 and asked him to return in case ?he wanted to satisfy his lust?, the charge sheet presented by the crime branch in the court said.

On January 12, the investigators said that Vishal, another accused in the case, reached Rassana after which he raped the girl along with five others, besides helping in disposing of the body on January 17 after she was killed.

Many in the village had claimed that Vishal had appeared in an examination in Meerut and showed the attendance sheet allegedly bearing his signatures. The crime branch sent the attendance sheet for forensic examination and it was found that the signatures had been forged.

"We identified three students but all were already in custody over some medical scam in one of the colleges in Meerut. We will take their custody later," the official said.

In the charge sheet, the crime branch said "in the course of investigation, it transpired that the accused Vishal actively took part in the rape-and-murder of the victim, has tried to create an alibi by resorting to manipulation of records and creation of false evidence with the connivance and assistance of his father and relative Kishore, chairman of the college R P Singh and some other employees of a university in Meerut who as per the inputs have received huge amount as a kickback from Sanjhi Ram".

It said the investigation also showed that on the following day, the juvenile was apprehended and taken to police station for questioning, Sanjhi Ram visited him and directed him not to disclose the involvement of his son and promised him that he would get him cleared from the charges at the earliest.New Delhi: The MEA on Thursday said that it is still awaiting a response from authorities in Hong Kong on the request for extradition made for billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi - an accused in the multi-crore PNB bank scam.

Raveesh Kumar, the official spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs, has said that a formal request for Modi's arrest and extradition has already been made and a reply from Hong Kong is now awaited. "We are aware of the written reply submitted to Parliament which shared that Nirav Modi is in Hong Kong. We have requested Hongkong authorities to surrender Nirav Modi. We are still awaiting a response," he said during a press conference, adding that there is an agreement between India and Hong Kong for surrender of fugitive offenders.

Kumar also said that there has been no information provided about Modi or his arrest by authorities in Hong Kong.

Earlier this week, Chinese authorities had said that basic and relevant laws under the relevant judicial agreements with India would be followed. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang had said, "the ministry has sought the provisional arrest of Nirav Deepak Modi by the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the People's Republic of China. According to the one country two systems and basic law of the HKSAR, under the assistance and authorisation of the central government, the HKSAR can make proper arrangement on judicial mutual assistance with other countries. If India makes relevant request to the HKSAR, we believe the HKSAR will follow the basic law and relevant laws and under relevant judicial agreements with India with the relevant issue".

A provisional arrest is made pending a formal extradition request.]

(Also read: Mumbai court issues non-bailable warrant against Modi, Choksi)

Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi are wanted in connection with the multi-million Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud. In February 2018, it had emerged that the fraudulently issued Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) from the Mumbai branch of PNB in favour of Hong Kong branches of Allahabad Bank and Axis Bank. These letters helped facilitate Rs 280.7 crore fraud by jewellery designer Nirav Modi among others.

(With agency inputs)NEW DELHI: The National Commission for Women (NCW) on Thursday issued a notice to BJP MLA Bairia Surendra Singh over his comment on Unnao gangrape case. Defending the accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, another BJP lawmaker Surendra Singh had on Wednesday said that it was not possible to rape a mother of three.

BJP's Bangarmau MLA Kuldeep Sengar has been facing the heat after the Unnao gangrape survivor accused him as being one of the culprits.

The other BJP MLA Surendra Singh, who stood for the support of Sengar, categorically termed charges of rape against him as a conspiracy. "I am speaking from a psychological point of view, no one can rape a mother of three children. It is not possible," he was quoted as saying by news agency ANI. "This is a conspiracy against him (Sengar)."

In order to protest against the incident, Delhi Women's Commission chief Swati Maliwal will call on an indefinite fast. She will write to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding a law convicting the culprits for raping minors within the 6 months.

The development comes just days after the survivor tried to immolate herself in front of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's residence.

The 18-year-old woman alleged that BJP MP Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his associates raped her in June 2017 and that authorities had refused to register her complaint.

The teen also claimed that the BJP lawmaker is behind the alleged custodial death of her father. He father, aged around 50, was rushed to a hospital from the district jail on Monday night and died during treatment. He had been arrested on April 5 under the Arms Act.

A defiant Sengar, however, claimed innocence and dismissed the charge as a conspiracy by his opponents and said the complainant belonged to a "low class". "There is no allegation against me, I am open to any kind of investigation. Strict action should be taken against the real culprit," he has said.NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah along with top party leaders and union ministers will on Thursday observe a day-long fast against the complete washout of the recent Budget session of Parliament. The party leaders spread across the country will observe the fast.

The Prime Minister has said that the fast is being observed to "expose" those handful of people who "throttled" democracy by stalling Parliament proceedings during the budget session. The BJP has held the opposition, led by the Congress party, responsible for the washout of the budget session. The session was the worst in terms of productivity in about a decade.

As per the schedule prepared by the BJP for observing the fast across the country, Amit Shah will hold a sit-in at Hubli in poll-bound Karnataka; Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu will observe the fast in Delhi; Union Health Minister J P Nadda will be in Modi's constituency Varanasi, while Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad will travel to Patna for it, reports said.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is likely to observe the fast in Chennai, Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javdekar in Bengaluru, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel in Tamil Nadu and Minister of State for External Affairs MJ Akbar in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh. Tourism Minister KJ Alphons will observe the fast in Kerala.

All the party MPs will also be sitting on a fast in their respective constituencies.

Meanwhile, rubbishing social media messages that say that Modi will have lunch onboard during his tour programme today, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said that the schedule being floated was made before the fast was announced. The Prime Minister will visit the Cancer Institute, Adyar in Chennai on Thursday.

"An older version of the tour program of Prime Minister Modi's delegation of 12th April (Defence Expo 2018) is being circulated on social media. This version was prepared before Prime Minister Modi's fast was announced. "The current tour program has no breakfast or lunch on board," says PMO Source.

The Modi will also unveil the plaque inaugurating the diamond jubilee building, palliative care centre (Mahvir Ashray) at Sriperumbudur, Daycare center and nurses quarter at the Adyar Cancer Institute.NEW DELHI: Amid the ongoing controversies revolving around the Unnao and the Kathua gangrape cases, Congress president Rahul Gandhi is set to hold a candlelight protest at Delhi's India Gate on Thursday midnight. Asking his followers on Twitter to join him in a 'silent and peaceful' vigil, the Congress chief said he will protest against violence against women and demand justice for them.

Taking to Twitter, Rahul said, "Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does. Join me in a silent, peaceful, candlelight vigil at India Gate at midnight tonight to protest this violence and demand justice."

Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does. Join me in a silent, peaceful, candlelight vigil at India Gate at midnight tonight to protest this violence and demand justice.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 12, 2018

In another tweet, the supremo of the grand old party claimed that the culprits of such heinous crimes against women are being protected. "How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil? What happened to A#@&* at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished. What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?" his tweet read.

An eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua district was allegedly gang-raped by six men who had held her hostage in a village temple for a week in January 2018. She was sedated time and again before being killed. The victim was abducted on January 10, was strangled to death on January 14 and her body was found on January 17, according to reports.

Commenting on the Kathua incident, Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh had said earlier on Thursday, "Justice should be done to her. There shouldn't be politics on that. Criminals who did it have no religion like terrorists have no religion. All communities, Hindu and Muslims have fought for that girl and only disgruntled elements are trying to give a wrong message."

Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has said that the investigations are on the fast track, adding that justice will soon be delivered in the case.

Whereas there has been a massive uproar in the Unnao gangrape case, an 18-year-old woman has alleged that BJP MP Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his associates raped her in June 2017 and that authorities had refused to register her complaint. The teen survivor also claimed that the BJP lawmaker is behind the alleged custodial death of her father. Her father, aged around 50, was rushed to a hospital from the district jail on Monday night and died during treatment. He had been arrested on April 5 under the Arms Act.

Following a Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe on Wednesday, the matter has been handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).The Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust Shirdi has slammed Congress president Rahul Gandhi over one of his tweets targeting Union Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Piyush Goyal. Taking a dig at Goyal, Rahul had posted a tweet on Wednesday saying there is no limits to the miracles of Shirdi.

Reacting to it, Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust Shirdi chairman Dr Suresh Haware took to Twitter terming the Gandhi scion's tweet as painful. He tweeted, "Rahul ji, dragging Shirdi amid political allegations and counter-allegations is painful. This has hurt the sentiments of Sai devotees in India and abroad. We condemn it on behalf of all Sai devotees. You should apologise to Sai devotees for this insult."

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala has defended the party chief, saying he was just highlighting that the pious name of Shirdi was being maligned by Goyal and company who had used the same for swindling public money. He said that the trust must take up the matter with SEBI and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to demand a ban on the use of Shirdi by any private or public company.

This comes just days after the ruling BJP took potshots on Rahul Gandhi over the latter holding fast at Rajghat in New Delhi to show solidarity with the members of the Dalit community. As the fast began, BJP leader Harish Khurana shared on Twitter a picture of Congress leaders, including Ajay Maken, Haroon Yusuf and Arvinder Singh Lovely, eating at a restaurant in New Delhi.

The Congress, however, dismissed the attack saying that the photograph was clicked before 8 am on Monday, hours before the fast began.

The party also faced flak over Jagdish Tytler, who has been named in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, being asked to leave the stage during the event. Clarifying on the same, the party said that Tytler was asked to leave as he did not meet the criteria for participating in the fast.CHENNAI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said his government is committed to cooperative federalism. His comment came at an event in Chennai, and appeared to be an attempt to douse the rising flames of discontent in the South over the way the Centre shares money with state governments. Modi's visit to Chennai has been met with black flag protests, a huge black protest baloon, and with #ModiGoBack trending on social media.

PM Modi dismissed the concerns being raised by southern political leaders that his government's decisions would punish the southern states for successfully controlling their population growths. "A baseless allegation is being made about the Terms of Reference of the 15th Finance Commission, being biased against certain states or a particular region," he said.

"The Union Government has suggested to the Finance Commission to consider incentivizing States who have worked on population control. Thus, a state like Tamil Nadu, which has devoted a lot of effort, energy and resources towards population control would certainly benefit," he added, without offering details on how the southern states would be incentivised to make up for their loss of revenue because of the move.

A baseless allegation is being made about the Terms of Reference of the 15th Finance Commission, being biased against certain states or a particular region: PM  PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 12, 2018

The Union Government has suggested to the Finance Commission to consider incentivizing States who have worked on population control. Thus, a state like Tamil Nadu, which has devoted a lot of effort, energy and resources towards population control would certainly benefit: PM  PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 12, 2018

"The Union government is committed to cooperative federalism. Our mantra is 'sabka saath, sabka vikas'. Let us work together to build a new India that would make our freedom fighters proud," Modi said.

The Modi government has been faced with a consolidation of voices from all the southern states against its decision to ask the 15th Finance Commission to start using the population figures of 2011 Census as a basis for sharing money with state governments. Southern political leaders have said the move would reduce the money share of their states and instead incentivise the failure of northern states like Uttar Pradesh for failing to control population growth.

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had gone so far as to say that the South is subsidising the North. Similar, if not as direct, statements have come from Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu and Telangana CM Chandrasekhar Rao. Their contention has been that their state earns more tax revenue for the Centre than it gets in return.

DMK leader MK Stalin had written to the CMs of 10 states - not just the southern ones - who would be adversely impacted by the Modi government's move. The finance ministers of most of the southern states had also met in Thiruvananthapuram to discuss their concerns over the Centre's unilateral decision on this front.The Kolkata High Court has asked the state Election Commission to put all procedures for West Bengal panchayat elections on hold till April 16. The court has sought a factual report on the elections from the Election Commission.

According to the directive of the court, no nomination can be filed on scrutinised for the panchayat polls unless the report is submitted by the polling body. Notably, the polling for the three-phased elections is slated to be held on May 1, 3 and 5 while the counting of vote has been scheduled for May 8.

The nominations for the elections were earlier slated to be submitted between April 2 and April 9.

Voting will take place in close to 58,500 polling stations across 20 of the 23 districts of the state. Over 5.08 crore electors are eligible to cast their votes in the election.

The panchayat elections promise to be a heated affair. The ruling Trinamool Congress will look to consolidate its grip on power, while the Left will be fighting hard to expand its presence in a state that was once its fortress. The BJP too is making efforts to expand its footprint in West Bengal, where it has historically been present in name only.

The heated political climate can be expected to add to tensions and possible violence in some parts of the state, which have for long been prone to violence clashes between the cadre of the main parties.The crime branch of Delhi Police on Thursday arrested a woman in connection with the leak of Central Board of Security Education (CBSE) class 10 Mathematics examination paper. Earlier on Thursday, DCP Ram Gopal Naik had said that the department had solved the class 10 paper leak case.

The board is slated to conduct re-examination of class 12 CBSE Economic paper on April 25 while it has decided to not go for re-examination of class 10 Mathematics paper, claiming that there was no widespread leak of the paper.

Last week, three people, including a teacher, were arrested from Himachal Pradesh in connection with the leak of Class 12 Economics paper. Police were tracking the three persons - the teacher, a clerk and a support staff - and finally nabbed them from Himachal.

The police had earlier said that the leak of the papers happened either at the board level or at the time when they were kept in the banks. Suspecting that the leak might have happened from outer Delhi or Haryana, police had scanned CCTV footages from the banks in certain areas to see whether there was some suspicious activity around the time the papers were kept there.

The Delhi Police had lodged two cases over the CBSE question papers leak. The first case related to the leak of class 12 Economics question paper was lodged on March 27, while the other pertaining to the leak of class 10 Mathematics paper was lodged on March 28, following a complaint by the board's regional director.

The examinations for the class 12 economics papers and class 10 mathematics were held on March 26 and March 28, respectively.New Delhi: Search Engine giant Google has officially rolled out a "More results" feature in its search for mobile users. The new feature will allow users to load additional search results beyond the first set that are displayed.

"We've launched a new "More results" button that makes it easier & faster to get more search results on mobile. Now additional listings load below the ones already being viewed, rather than the old "Next" button that would load an entirely new page," Google's Danny Sullivan tweeted via @SearchLiaison.

We've launched a new More results button that makes it easier & faster to get more search results on mobile. Now additional listings load below the ones already being viewed, rather than the old "Next" button that would load an entirely new page.... pic.twitter.com/A4ZMXFlwd0  Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) April 11, 2018

Earlier this week, Sullivan had confirmed Google was running a test on the new "More results" button.

"The 'More results' button will appear for searchers using the Google app for iOS & Android or major mobile web browsers other than Chrome for iOS -- support for that is coming," the tweete further said.

The new button will load organic results first and then display ads relevant to them, Google added.

Google first tested the "more results" button in December last year, in a more limited fashion, displaying fewer search results on the mobile pages giving an option to click on a button labeled "more results."

WIth IANS InputsJammu: Faced with a challenge to bring to book the culprits behind the Kathua rape-cum-murder of a minor girl, police reconstructed the scene of the crime to gather vital clues. The body of the eight-year-old nomad Bakherwal community girl was recovered from Rassana forest on January 17, a week after she went missing while grazing horses in the forest area.

The Crime Branch of Jammu and Kashmir Police filed two separate charge sheets against the eight accused persons including a juvenile held in the case. According to investigators, the girl was held captive inside a 'Devisthan', gangraped, kept without food and administered sedatives.

Her cause of death was asphyxia leading to cardio-pulmonary arrest, the investigations revealed. "In the course of investigation, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) members along with Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) experts and naib Tehsildar (executive magistrate) again visited the scene of occurrence and tried to reconstruct the scene of crime," according to the charge sheet.

It said a minute examination of these locations led to the recovery of various items including blood-stained wooden sticks and hair strand which were seized, packed and sealed by the magistrate.

The sealed packets containing the exhibits were sent to FSL for analysis and report. Besides, few hair strands recovered from 'Devisthan' and nearby forest where the body of the girl was dumped by the accused were forwarded to experts in Delhi for DNA profiling.

"On the basis of opinion furnished by the experts, one of the hair strands recovered from the Devisthan matched with the DNA profile of victim which confirmed that she was kept in captivity at Devisthan which is exclusively manned by the mastermind Sanji Ram to the exclusion of any other person of the area," the charge sheet read.

Similarly, the hair strand recovered from the place of recovery of the body matched with the DNA profile of the juvenile who raped the girl several times after abducting her, it said.

Accused police officials - Sub Inspector Anand Dutta and Head Constable Tilak Raj - failed in their efforts to destroy the evidence by washing the clothes worn by the deceased after receiving Rs 4 lakh from the mastermind, it said.

FSL Delhi with updated technology was able to confirm the presence of blood stains on the clothes of the victim which matched with her DNA profile, it further said, adding DNA profiling also established presence of victims blood on the vaginal smears.

"As per the report of medical experts, the victim was found prima facie raped before being killed," the police said.

The crime branch said the investigation also established that the victim was raped by more than one accused with common intention. "The medical opinion also established the fact that the victim had been kept without food and administered sedatives and her cause of death was asphyxia leading to cardio-pulmonary arrest," the charge sheet said.

During investigation, call details of mobile phones used by the accused persons were obtained from quarters concerned.

The CDRs obtained have prima facie established the individual and common locations of all the accused in and around the scene of crime on crucial dates of occurrence.

The analysis of CDRs of accused Deepak Khajuria, a special police officer who raped the girl shortly before she was killed and her body dumped, revealed that he had remained in constant touch with his associate Surinder Kumar from the date of kidnapping of the victim," the charge sheet said.

"This necessitated the questioning of SPO Kumar who was summoned and questioned but he could not give any plausible and tangible explanation regarding his telephonic conversation with Khajuria and sudden spike in their frequency despite of the fact that Khajuria had disclosed that he had sent Kumar to ascertain the movement of Bakherwals in and around Devisthan on January 14 and also to inform him regarding the condition of victim who then was held in captivity in Devisthan.

"In response to which, Kumar visited the Devisthan and conveyed to him regarding the movement of Bakherwals and condition of the victim. Besides some of the witnesses examined corroborated regarding the movement and presence of Kumar in and around Devisthan," it said.

The charge sheet said Kumar was accordingly arrested and is at present in judicial custody. "Further investigation in respect of his involvement in the case is being conducted which may include his narco-analysis for which his consent has already been obtained," it said.

In the course of investigation, it said the statements of more than 130 witnesses were recorded.

"All the witnesses examined have unequivocally corroborated the facts that emerge in the course of investigation. The statements of all these witnesses form part of the challan (charge sheet)."GADAG: Charging the Congress with dividing the people over caste, creed and religion, BJP President Amit Shah on Thursday said the ruling party in Karnataka will stoop to any level to retain power but will not succeed this time.

"Though the Congress stoops to any level to retain power, the people who could see through its ploy will teach a lesson in the May 12 state assembly elections and bring the BJP to power again," said Shah at a party rally in the state`s northwest region.

Terming the Siddaramaiah government as the most corrupt in the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief said the ruling party had become an ATM (any time money) for its high command in Delhi.

"As the Congress government has gone into slumber, I am sure the BJP will form the next government under the leadership of B.S. Yeddyurappa and put an end to five-year misrule of Siddaramaiah," said Shah on his second visit to the erstwhile Karnataka-Bombay province ahead of the crucial polls.

The BJP, which came to power for the first time in the southern state in 2008, lost to the Congress in the May 2013 assembly elections after Yeddyurappa parted ways and formed the Karnataka Janata Party.

He returned a year later and won from the Shivamogga Lok Sabha seat in May 2014 general elections.

"As the Congress is a broken house and confused, I am confident of our party coming back to power with majority in the state," asserted Yeddyurappa on the occasion.

The party`s leader in the assembly Jagadish Shettar, BJP Dharwad Lok Sabha member Prahlad Joshi and Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrashekar also participated in the rally.

Blaming the Congress of fanning hatred in the country and playing divisive politics, Shah said the wise people understood its sinister tactics and defeated its candidates in state after state since 2014.

"It`s turn of the Karnataka people to free the state from the Congress and time up for (Chief Minister) Siddaramaiah to go home," said Shah at a party event at a village in Ron local body of Gadag district, about 60 km from here.

Holding the state government responsible for about 3,500 farmers committing suicide due to agrarian crisis over the last 5 years, the BJP chief said though the central government had released funds for irrigation projects, the farmers did not benefit as many of them could not be completed due to delays and graft.

Earlier in the day, Shah visited Siddharoodha mutt at Hubballi and took blessings of its seer Paramarooda for the party`s victory at the hustings. He also visited the memorial of Kannada poet Da Ra Bendre at Dharwad.The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday bagged all 25 seats in the Jamner municipal council corporation elections. Senior BJP Minister Girish Mahajan's wife and BJP nominee Sadana Mahajan won the President post of Jamner Municipal elections in Jalgaon district of Maharashtra by defeating her closest rival NCP candidate Anjali Pawar by 8,400 votes.

Recently, Mahajan had also emerged as a troubleshooter for the chief minister by resolving the farmer's protest and successfully meditating during Anna Hazares protest in Delhi.

NCP gave an initial fight but the results went in BJP's favour. While the NCP fielded a candidate from the Mali community, BJP fielded Mahajan who belongs to the Gujjar community. Mali community has a stronger presence in the area as compared to the Gujjar community.

Girish Mahajan dedicated the success to the people of Jamner. "People voted for the development of the Jamner city. They did not succumb to the caste politics and false propaganda of the NCP and the Congress. We will continue to work for the people, Mahajan was quoted in DNA. Girish is the closese aide of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis.

Elections to four municipal councils and nagar panchayats in Maharashtra, along with bypolls for six seats in various municipal corporations, including Mumbai, were held on April 6. Bypolls for seven seats in as many municipal councils/nagar panchayats and two seats in Wardha and Osmanabad Zilla Parishads were also held on the same day.

For the 17-member Aajra nagar panchayat, a total of 70 candidates are in the poll arena while three contestants for the panchayat president's post. 59 candidates were in the fray for 17 seats in Kankavli nagar panchayat and four candidates for the post of panchayat president.

In Jamner municipal council, a total of 57 candidates were in the fray with two contestants for the council president's post.

For 23 seats in Vaijapur municipal council, 54 candidates are are in the fray while five contestants for the post of council president, said Saharia.Mumbai: The newly-floated Maharashtra Swabhiman Paksh of former Congress leader Narayan Rane on Thursday won an election in Sindhudurg district of coastal Maharashtra, wresting the control of a local body from his erstwhile party.

MSP contested the municipal council polls at Kankavli in the district against BJP, which recently sent Rane to the Rajya Sabha as its candidate.

MSP won 10 out of 17 seats, the BJP and Shiv Sena won three each, while the NCP got one. The Congress, which controlled the municipal council earlier, drew a blank.

Rane was elected to the Rajya Sabha as a BJP candidate last month, while his son Nitesh Rane is a Congress MLA from Kankavli.

The former Maharashtra Chief Minister quit the Congress in September last year alleging that the state leadership had sidelined him.

He founded his own outfit, MSP, and declared support to the BJP-led NDA.

Nitesh Rane, though critical of Congress leadership, has not quit the party yet.

Results of elections to six municipal councils in Maharashtra were declared today, with the ruling BJP winning the post of chairperson in four places.Mumbai: Angry, ashamed and heartbroken is how the Indian film industry personalities described their feelings over the Unnao and Kathua rapes and demanded swift action against the perpetrators. Celebrities such as Javed Akhtar, Abhishek Bachchan, Swara Bhaskar and Hansal Mehta took to social media to condemn the two brutal incidents that have shocked the nation.

In Unnao, a teen rape survivor claimed BJP MP Kuldeep Singh Sengar had raped her and the death of her father in police custody. The Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government has filed a first information report (FIR) against Sengar.

While in Kathua, an eight-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped by six men who had held her in captivity in a small temple village for a week in January. She was drugged so that she could be sexually assaulted again before being bludgeoned to death.

Noted screenwriter Javed Akhtar said it was high time that people came forward in support of women rights. All those who wish justice for women should stand up and raise their voices against the rapists and their protectors in Unnao and Kathua.

In Unnao, the brother of the alleged rapist is arrested for beating the father of the rape victim which caused his death. So far police have not taken any action in the rape case. The MLA is walking free and has the audacity to call the victim and her family lowly people', he wrote.

Abhishek Bachchan shared the 8-year-old rape victim's picture and hashtagged her name. Director Hansal Mehta retweeted The New York Times piece which detailed how her rape and murder led to protests by Hindu nationalists who defended the accused in the case.

"Inhuman!!! Appalling !!!!! Justice has to has to be served!!!!!," tweeted Karan Johar.

Is this nationalism Mehta wrote alongside the link. Sonam Kapoor also shared the same article and called out fake nationals and fake Hindus in her tweet.

Ashamed appalled and disgusted by fake nationals and fake Hindus. I cannot believe this is happening in my country, she wrote. Actor-filmmaker Farhan Akhtar pleaded the case of an eight-year-old who was subjected to unspeakable brutalities.

Imagine what goes through the mind of an 8 yr old as she is drugged, held captive, gang raped over days and then murdered. If you don't feel her terror, you are not human. If you don't demand her get justice, you belong to nothing (sic) Farhan tweeted.

Anushka Sharma wrote, "The cruelest form of evil is harming an innocent child. What is happening to the world we live in??? These people should be given the most severe punishment there is! Where are we heading as humanity? Shaken to my core."

Anupam Kher tweeted, "Shocked, saddened & angry!!"

Parineeti Chopra posted, "HOW do human beings go through evil acts on another human? During an act, how do they not stop? Is there no concience? No guilt? No regret? No humanity? HOWWW do you allow yourself to go through raping and killing a child?! Cannot understand it."

Twinkle Khanna wrote, "I look at this first as a mother and its completely heartbreaking, as a woman I feel rage and as an Indian I am absolutely ashamed."

Swara wrote, An 8 year old girl was gangraped & murdered in a temple because she belonged to a Muslim tribe that Hindu right wing goons wanted evicted from their area! #Kathua #India this is on us!!!! If in #Delhi pls join TODAY(sic).

Actor-comic Vir Das asked the people to set aside political differences and unite to fight the perpetrators of the crime. I can't breathe after reading this. I need to share it. And so do you. Please do. Justice for the 8-year-old. Dear politicians, I'd like to see every one of you miserable scum and your army of slimy sycophants put your parties and your bullsh*t aside and do something to make sure that no child ever has to face what this girl did. But you won't. Because you don't deserve this country, he tweeted.

Riteish Deshmukh wrote, A 8-year-old is drugged, raped & murdered and another one is fighting for justice for herself and the death of her father in custody. We have a choice either raise your voice or be a silent spectator. Stand up for what is right even if you are standing alone.' #Kathua #Unnao

Filmmaker Shirish Kunder shared a news article and wrote, Please read this. If your blood boils, please share it. Because at a time when there's a section of people supporting these monsters, it'll mean some humanity is still alive.

Tisca Chopra also tweeted, So pained to read about #Unnao & #Kathua rapes.. How strongly the government responds will be its true test @PMOIndia... At least I won't vote for them coming elections if they don't take action this time.

Actor Rahul Bose called the incidents gut wrenching. Unimaginable depravity that is disturbing on so many levels. Our response will decide what we have become as a society, Bose added. Actors Ranvir Shorey and Richa Chadha attacked the people who defended the accused in the name of religion.

Designer Farah Khan tweeted, "To all the sickos out here who justify the Kathua rape I pray u suffer in this life more than she suffered in death.I pray u the worst harm comes yr way. I curse you from the bottom of my heart. May someone u love suffer immense pain so that u feel what it is to lose a loved one."

If these people had an iota of reverence and respect for Hinduism, they'd be up in arms against the people who used a temple to torture, rape and murder a child! These are slogans to be used when the people who have committed these crimes are hanged! Utterly appalling that slogans like 'Jai Shri Ram' and 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai' are being used to defend perpetrators of heinous crimes. These vicious beasts will destroy India and Hinduism. Unnao and Kathua, Shorey said.

These men fast on Navratras and pray to Devi Ma, yet they defend a man who plotted the rape, torture and murder of a child inside a temple. Look at them, Shame them. If a stray news report can make credible people. Hindu haters why are these fake Hindus not unemployed, Richa Chadha tweeted.Mumbai: Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh may remain tight-lipped about their marriage but rumour mills are abuzz with news of their wedding by the end of this year. Also, a news report almost confirms their marriage plans.

According to a DNA report, a source has said that Deepika and Ranveer will be getting married this year. The wedding preparations have begun and the jewellery company which has Deepika as its brand ambassador will play an important role in the celebrations.

"For the jewellery, the custodians of the brand that Deepika endorses have decided to design an exclusive collection, especially for her wedding. Given their association, it only seemed more natural for the jewellery company to come on board for the celebration," DNA quoted a source as saying.

The jewellery brand will launch the new designs inspired by Deepika's wedding collection after she wears them for her wedding ceremonies, the report suggests.

Speculations are rife about the power couple's wedding but DeepVeer fans aren't convinced. They want Deepika and Ranveer to give proof of their marriage plans.

For the unversed Deepika and Ranveer have been in a relationship for over 5 years. Interestingly, the two have neither admitted to nor denied being in love with each other. However, their PDA says it all.

From walking hand-in-hand at social dos to heaping praises on each other during interviews, Deepika and Ranveer have done it all.

In fact, the couple had flown to the Maldives to ring in the New Year. Since then, it is being speculated that their wedding will take place this year.

Deepika and Ranveer have worked in three films so far and all of them have been helmed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. They set the silver screen ablaze with their too-hot-to-handle chemistry in Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram Leela. They recreated the same magic in Bajirao Mastani, their second film together.

Padmaavat, earlier titled Padmavati was their third film with Bhansali but the two didn't share screen space in it. Deepika was paired with Shahid Kapoor.

And for the unversed, Ranveer and Deepika played man and wife in Homi Adajania's Finding Fanny in which the former had a cameo appearance lasting for a few seconds.New Delhi: Deepika Padukone, who is currently on a break, has been making headlines due to imminent wedding rumours with alleged beau Ranveer Singh. Even though the duo has never spoken about their relationship, the speculations around their wedding have refused to die down.

On Wednesday, Deepika was spotted at the Mumbai airport as she reportedly flew down to her hometown in Bengaluru to spend time with her family members.

A Times of India report has claimed that the actress's parents have chosen four dates between September and December 2018 for the wedding. The report said that the family is mulling to keep the ceremony extremely private with only close relatives and friends in attendance.

The report further claimed that Deepika-Ranveer's wedding preparations are going on with a full swing and the actress is fully utilising her free time to shop for her wedding with her mother and baby sister Anisha Padukone.

Only last month, several media reports claimed that Deepika went on a wedding shopping spree with her family and hitting several jewellery stores in Bengaluru to pick the perfect one for the big day.

Recently, Deepika was seen pampering herself as she was spotted at a salon in Bandra, Mumbai. As expected, the lady was soon joined by none other but Ranveeer. A report has claimed that apparently, Ranveer wanted to meet her before she left for Bengaluru for her wedding preparations.New Delhi: Ace comedian Kapil Sharma hogged the limelight of late but unfortunately this time, not for good reasons. First, his comeback show 'Family Time With Kapil Sharma' didn't flag off as expected followed by a shocking Twitter rant against a journalist and former managers Preeti and Neeti Simoes.

His sudden outburst on Twitter and use of expletives against a journo not only left his fans shocked but also threw light on the kind of pressure he was undergoing. Several celebs, who have worked with him previously came out in his defence and supported him.

Now, after all the hullaballoo, the actor-comedian has for the first time spoken about the controversies surrounding him. Talking about his current situation, he told Bollywood Hungama, The people who want my career destroyed can spread whatever lies they want. I am okay with it. I am not new to people piggy riding on my success. Let them. As long as it gives them the satisfaction that they want. I know what I am doing.

He even added that the channel which airs his show has been supportive. They believe in me, he said.

For the uninitiated, Kapil filed a complaint against the news agency and its editor along with his former managers Preeti and Neeti Simoes. He tweeted the copy of his legal document, claiming that these people are trying to tarnish his image and pull him down. However, Preeti clarified her stand and in a shocking statement revealed that she is afraid that Kapil is suffering from depression and requires immediate medical help.

Some people just want to defame you for few bucks but it will take ages to make a stand against the wrong.. I shall do it today n forever.. pic.twitter.com/Vg8bJoWwhF  KAPIL (@KapilSharmaK9) April 7, 2018

Several celebrities, who have worked with Kapil in the past such as Krushna Abhishek, Bharti Singh backed him and suggested that he needs a break and needs to get back in good shape.

Well, with so much happening around the ace comedian-actor, it's best to give him the much deserved space he needs right now.Mumbai: It is unfortunate that Kapil Sharma is making headlines for all wrong reasons once again. But people who have known and worked with him still care for him. Often referred to as Kapil's arch-rival, Krushna Abhishek, Shilpa Shinde, Bigg Boss 11 contestant Arshi Khan, Bharti Singh, his former colleagues Preeti & Neeti Simoes and Sunil Grover have expressed their concerns over his health.

And now, Sugandha Mishra, who has worked with him, has shared her thoughts about the entire controversy.

During an interaction with Times of India, Mishra, who was Kapil's junior in college said, "People used to ask me about Kapil and I used to proudly say that Kapil was still the same, helpful and caring about everybody. It was such a wonderful sight to see Kapil bhaiya's growth from the scratch. God has gifted him with talent and he deserves all the success and love. But this is not the Kapil I knew. He was the one who got me to Mumbai and helped me seek permission from my family to have a career in this stream."

Like Krushna, even Sugandha feels that the failure of Firangi led to Kapil's downfall. In fact, she has also alleged that there are some people who want to isolate him from his old team.

Heaping praise on the way Preeti Simoes managed Kapil's work, Sugandha said that she knew how to handle him. She said that Preeti has gone out of her way to take care of Kapil.

On being asked if she would team up with Kapil again she said he agrees and then disagrees. So neither she nor any of the old members can forcefully be a part of his team.

However, she feels that his family must understand the gravity of the situation and help him as soon as possible.Mumbai: Anurag Kashyap says he was "scared" when his family received threats for his tweets criticising the ban on Pakistani artistes from working in Bollywood in 2016.

The filmmaker says he now just posts his opinion and does not read the responses to it. This way, he says, he has been able to increase his productivity.

Kashyap had come out in support of his filmmaker friend Karan Johar, who faced protests during the release of "Ae Dil Hai Mushkil" (2016), which featured Pakistani actor Fawad Khan in a pivotal but small role.

In a series of tweets, Kashyap had asked why only Indian filmmakers should be targeted for casting Pakistani actors when Prime Minister Narendra Modi also visited Lahore.

The "Mukkabaaz" director says after he posted the tweets, people started targeting his personal life.

"During the 'Ae Dil Hai Mushkil' controversy, when I tweeted to the prime minister, people went after my personal life, (they) started threatening my parents. My family got scared. That was very, very scary," Kashyap told PTI in an interview.

"The trolling went on for six-eight months," he says.

The filmmaker says his opinion on the controversy over Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film "Padmaavat" also rubbed some people the wrong way.

"Social media has kind of levelled the field. People use it to bring others down, silence others and threaten them. During 'Padmaavat', it had happened, they put out my number on the social media because I had an opinion," he says.

The 45-year-old director, who will be seen in the finale episode of MTV Troll Police, airing this Saturday, has realised that the aim of trolls is to silence those whose opinions differs so he has stopped engaging with them.

"We are dealing with a country which is so over-populated, where there is so much resentment, so much repression, so many mouths to feed, so many people looking for work, so many disillusioned people.

"Sometimes I think when they are frustrated they want to take it out. And they feel better after abusing. So now when I put out a tweet, I don't read the response," he says.

By doing so, Kashyap feels, his productivity has increased since he is not wasting time and energy on people whose aim is to be after him.

"After I stopped engaging, I made 'Mukkabaaz', finished 'Sacred Games', 'Lust Stories' and I am shooting 'Manmarziyan'. Suddenly, the frequency of my work has increased because I have gone off social media," he says.

Kashyap has become a calmer person today, and says he has mastered the art of channelising his anger through work.

"Whatever I want to say, I will say it through my work. I am enjoying this process much more than anything else. I am actually in my best phase. I am only working and I am happy. My anger has found a better way to project itself through my work. I made 'Mukkabaaz' and put it all out there, in a way that is more effective. It says what it wants to say. I don't have to scream and shout.

"I want to reflect, evoke and provoke. I want to put it out there and see how people react to it," he says.New Delhi: The NHRC has sent notices to the Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry as well as the Telangana government, seeking detailed reports into a protest by a Telugu actress who stripped in public to highlight her complaint of sexual exploitation of women in the regional film industry.

The NHRC has asked the state government and the ministry to submit its reports within four weeks, it said in a statement today. Following her protest, the Movie Artistes Association (MAA), an apex body of the Telugu film industry, had said on April 8 the aspiring actress would not be made a member of the organisation.

The police had also booked the actress under Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code (obscene acts in a public place). "It appears to be an attempt to muzzle the voice of a whistle-blower both from the side of MAA and the state authorities," the apex rights body said.

The NHRC has sent the notices to the chief secretary of the state government and the secretary of the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

The state authorities have to intimate the NHRC about existing or proposed mechanisms to the deal with the issue, it said.

The commission is of the opinion that the "reported prohibitions imposed upon the actress", barring her from acting in films and stopping others from working with her, were a "violation of her right to livelihood and live a life with dignity".

The NHRC in the statement observed that the "issues raised by the actress demand action on the part of the state government in the form of a committee to address and redress the grievances of female actors and women employees, in case of any sexual harassment at the workplace i.E., the Telugu film industry in this case".

The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, has broadly laid down provisions to prevent sexual harassment of women at their workplace. Under the Act, a workplace includes not only government organisations or offices but also private ventures.

"The commission has also observed that reportedly, legal action has been taken against the actress under Section 294 of the IPC, but it is nowhere mentioned, if action on the serious allegations of a casting couch and sexual harassment, levelled by her, has been taken by the authorities," the NHRC said.

The actress had on April 7 staged a semi-nude protest outside the Telugu Film Chamber of Commerce. She had also alleged that local artistes were not given enough opportunities in the industry, and that the MAA had denied her membership.

Rejecting her charges a day after the protest, office-bearers of the MAA had said several Telugu actresses had over the years got adequate opportunities in their film careers.

"The MAA, reportedly, has even moved further stating that action will be taken against any artiste who decides to share screen space with her," the NHRC said.Washington: Scientists have created biodegradable shoes using mushrooms, chicken feathers and textile waste, paving the way for more sustainable fashion.

The researchers from University of Delaware (UD) in the US created a bio-composite material - sourced sustainably from common regional products - that forms the sole of their prototype shoe.

"The fashion industry produces a lot of waste, so sustainability is an issue everyone is trying to address," said Jillian Silverman, master's degree student at UD.

"It's hard to believe that people are going to change their consumption habits, but with this shoe, when someone gets tired of it or it wears out, it can go into the compost pile and not the landfill," said Silverman.

The project began in 2015, when researchers made fabric from mushroom mycelium, the interlocking root system from which the part of the mushroom that we eat on our pizza grows.

The researchers then experimented with growing different species of mushrooms and using different materials, known as substrates, in which the mycelium forms its network of roots.

They grew numerous samples, dried them and tested them for potential use as the sole of a shoe.

The nutrients in which the samples grew included chicken feathers and a textile waste product that is most often used as a packing material.

The team hopes to experiment in the future with discarded natural-fibre clothing, perhaps shredding it to create a fluffy addition to the feathers as a growth medium.

"The chicken feathers and the textile products provide the nutrients for the mycelium, and they also are a supporting material for it to grow in. They act like a kind of glue to form a matrix and create a network structure for the mycelium," said Huantian Cao, professor at UD.

Using textile waste from discarded clothing fits with another sustainability project that UD's fashion and apparel studies department has taken on.

Once the mycelium samples grown by the research team were tested and analysed for the best species and composition, work began on a prototype shoe.

Mycelium was grown in a soft mold in the shape of a sole, so that no waste was generated from cutting it into that shape, said Cao. The team used a type of vegan "leather" to cover the sole and make it more durable.

Researchers then designed and made the top of the shoe, using discarded scraps from the muslin fabric that apparel design students use in the clothing they create. She used a sewing technique called smocking, in which she gathered the fabric to give it bulk and shape.

"I used vegetable dyes and 100 percent cotton thread. The design looks like mushrooms look when they're stacked, and everything is completely biodegradable," said Wing Tang, undergraduate student at UD.

More work remains on moving from a prototype to a potentially marketable shoe, but the team is optimistic.Paris: The extravagant lengths that males will go to bed a member of the opposite sex can come at the risk of extinction for some species, researchers said Wednesday.

Sexual selection, how animals attract and choose mates, can be thanked for showy traits such as the elegant peacock`s tail, the grand antlers of a stag, and the bushy mane of a lion.

A study published in the science journal Nature, however, found that some creatures take it too far.

US-based scientists analysed the fossils of thousands of ancient crustaceans called ostracods, tiny clam-shaped critters that have been on the planet for nearly 500 millions years.

Males of the group are easily identifiable by a shell that is more elongated than those of females, to accomodate their large sex organs.

Under their shell is a large muscular pump for discharging giant sperm, which on average measure around 20-30 percent of body length, but in some cases longer than the male himself.

The US-based researchers looked at 93 species of extinct ostracods that lived about 85 million to 65 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period.

They found that species died out quicker when the male had a much larger shell -- and presumably larger sexual organs that produced more sperm to aid successful reproduction -- compared to females of the same species.

The extinction risk was ten times higher for those with the largest difference in shell size between the genders.

"In the short term the males had an advantage, but it turns out in the long term, not so much," said lead author Gene Hunt, a palaeontologist from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

It is possible that by devoting too much energy to successful reproduction, the creatures had little left for adapting to changes in the climate or their natural environment.

To date, it has been difficult for scientists to determine how differences between genders influenced species extinction as it is often impossible to tell whether a fossil was of a male or female animal.

But thanks to thousands of ostracod species still alive today, it is well documented how male shells differ from those of the females they seek to woo.

The finding may hold implications for conservationists managing animal species at risk from habitat destruction and climate change, the researchers said.New Delhi: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is all set to launch its next planet-hunting spacecraft on Monday, April 16 at 6:32 pm EDT (4.02 am IST, April 17). The spacecraft is scheduled to be launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission will study thousands of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, orbiting the nearest and brightest stars in our cosmic neighbourhood.

The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits.

TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbor life.

With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth, NASA said in an earlier statement.

Sixty days after the launch and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission. Four wide-field cameras will give Tess a field-of-view that covers 85 percent of our entire sky.

Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that Tess will observe one by one.

The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star's brightness.

NASA's Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away

(With IANS inputs)Actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan has appealed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to do his duty and follow the orders of the Supreme Court to set up the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB). In an open letter, Kamal questioned if the Centre's delay in constituting the CWMB is aimed at gaining benefits in the coming Assembly elections in Karnataka, where the BJP is a contender.

"All sections of people of Tamizh Nadu have started to believe that this delay is due to ensuing elections in Karnataka and your Party's interest in it. Sir, it is your duty as the Prime Minister of our country to prove this wrong by immediately acting as per the Supreme Court order," read Kamal's letter.

The BJP is in the fray to take back the Karnataka government from the Congress. Both parties have found themselves trying to put up a balancing act on this count. The Tamil Nadu state unit of the Congress, out of power in the state and Centre, took part in protests last week to demand the constitution of the CWMB, a demand that is strongly opposed by the Congress in Karnataka.

"The Supreme Court of India has already performed its constitutional role by delivering the judgement. It is now the turn of your Government to perform its constitutional duty and implement the order."

"I am sure that you will fulfil your duty towards the People and farmers of Tamizh Nadu by constituting the Cauvery water Management Board immediately. The states of Kerala and Puducherry should also get their rightful share as per the Supreme Court order and constituting of the Cauvery Water Management Board is of utmost importance to ensure this. Looking forward to immediate action," he added.

Kamal Haasan also pointed out that Modi himself, when the CM of Gujarat, had the experience of trying to sort out water sharing disputes with three other states for the waters of the Narmada.LUCKNOW: A Senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader in Uttar Pradesh has claimed that Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had decided to arrest rape accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar but his decision was changed after the intervention of a 'prominent person'. Senior party leader and former state minister IP Singh claimed: "Yogi Adityanath had taken the decision to arrest Kuldeep Sengar. He was to be arrested from the CM office. The CM had also decided to expel two MLAs from Unnao. But he got a call from a prominent person and the decision got deferred. The party has to suffer the consequence of this decision."

      

      

CM office   2       

                      IP Singh (@ipsinghbjp) April 11, 2018

IP Singh also claimed that anyone, whether they are a part of the ruling party or in the opposition, will have to bear the brunt if they do not follow the law.

While no action has been taken against Sengar yet, Yogi Adityanath has said that no one found guilty in the case would be spared.

His comments come at a time when an FIR has been registered against Sengar while a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe has been ordered into Unnao rape and custodial death. The case has been filed under POCSO Act and Sengar has been charged under sections 366, 363, 376 and 506.

Casting aspersions on the girl's character, BJP MLA Surendra Singh demanded that narco test should be done to find out the truth. "Narco test should be done of Kuldeep Singh Sengar and the complainant, truth will be out then. If MLA found guilty punish him, but I have heard this same girl had filed a false rape case against a man some years back. The man had to spend 6 months in jail," Surendra Singh said.

Sengar has claimed innocence adding that the allegations levelled against him are false. He had refused to surrender before the police on Wednesday. He visited the office of Senior Superintendent of Police Lucknow late on Wednesday night, but walked away half-an-hour later.

Meanwhile, Sengar and his supporters on Wednesday night got into a scuffle outside the office of the SSP. "Aap (media) jahan kaho wahin chalen. Apke channel mai chal kar baithen. Main channel ke saathiyon ke kehne se yaha aaya hoon. Channel ke saathi jahan par kahenge wahan chaloonga. Namaste (I am ready to go wherever media asks. I can come on your channel also. I have come here at the behest of friends from channels.), Sengar said while speaking to mediapersons.

The investigation so far has revealed that the father of the rape survivor had suffered 18 internal injuries. The probing agency will see if at all the Uttar Pradesh Police acted under stress.Lucknow: BJP president Amit Shah on Wednesday visited Uttar Pradesh to take stock of the preparations for the upcoming legislative council polls in the state and meet the party's 'sulking' alliance partners. The BJP national president, who took a day's off from the Karnataka assembly campaign, is understood to have taken a look at the names of probable party candidates for the legislative council polls.

The elections to the 13 seats will be held on April 26 with the ruling BJP being certain of winning at least 11 seats, going by its brute majority in the state legislative assembly.

Shah began his tour by garlanding the statue of Jyotibha Phule, sending a message that the saffron party did not want to keep the Dalits at an arms distance at a time when the Lok Sabha polls were barely a few months away.

"With party MPs Savitribai Phoole, Ashok Dohrey, Chhotelal, Yashwant Singh virtually raising a banner of revolt against Chief Minister Yogi Aditynath, Shah had a long discussion with the chief minister at the latter's 5 Kalidas Marg residence to assuage their hurt sentiments. The parliamentarians had written about their discontent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi," a senior party leader said.

UP deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma, and state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey were also present during the discussion, he said.

The party leader said the Lok Sabha bypoll debacle of Gorakhpur and Phulpur also figured in the meeting.

The outburst of the four parliamentarians and another BJP MP Udit Raj came at a time when the country witnessed a public outcry against the Supreme Court's order on the SC/ST Act, which the Dalit leaders said was an attempt to "dilute" the law.

After facing strident criticism from the Opposition on Dalit issues, the BJP is also grappling with a rising voice of discontent among its own MPs belonging to the Scheduled Castes in Uttar Pradesh.

Lok Sabha members from Etawah and Nagina, Ashok Kumar Dohrey and Yashwant Singh respectively, are the latest to join their Dalit colleagues from the party to criticise the UP government.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Dohrey had alleged that the Dalits and tribals across the country, especially in Uttar Pradesh, were being framed by the police in false cases after the protests, leading to growing insecurity among them.

Yashwant Singh, meanwhile, had reportedly said that nothing had been done for Dalits in the last four years.

Party insiders also said that the BJP's sulking ally, SBSP leader O P Rajbhar, who is also a cabinet minister, presented his case before Shah.

Rajbhar told PTI, "I raised the issue of quota within quota for the most backward classes. Apart from this, discrepancies pertaining to ration cards, housing, toilets, pensions and scholarship were also discussed.

Rajbhar-led Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) has four MLAs in the state assembly. He had threatened to boycott last month's Rajya Sabha biennial election.

Apna Dal (Sonelal) leader Ashish Patel also met the BJP president. "The meeting with the BJP chief was held in a very cordial atmosphere. We spoke for adequate representation of Dalits and backward classes at police stations and Tehsil offices, and we were told that our demands will be looked into," he said.CHENNAI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Chennai has been met with a wave of protests, especially over the Cauvery issue. Protestors have shown him black flags, launched giant black balloons and raised slogans like 'Modi go back'. This slogan has also been a top trend on Twitter.

The one protest that seems to have caught the imagination online is the giant black advertising balloon floated by the DMK. The black balloon had a simple message in stark white text: "Modi go back".

Protesters in pockets across the city held black flags and floated bunches of black balloons. The demonstrators who belonged to the DMK wore black shirts to make their point. They also released a photograph early in the day showing DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi, 93 years old and confined to a wheel chair, dressed in a black shirt.

The protest also consumed Twitter, where #ModiGoBack and #GoBackModi were among the top trends.

The protests and demonstrations against PM Modi are part of a demand from across the political spectrum that the Centre follow the orders of the Supreme Court and constitute the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) immediately to apportion the waters of the Cauvery. The Centre has skipped on deadline after the other for the establishment of the CWMB.

The protests also come amid rising awareness and discontent over the Modi government's decision to use the population figures of the 2011 Census to decide the proportion of money sharing between the Centre and state governments. The move will adversely affected all the southern states, with Tamil Nadu estimated to lose at least Rs 40,000 crore per year.

PM Modi is in Chennai for the inauguration of the Defence Expo 2018 and had also opened new medical facilities at the Adyar Cancer Institute. He had attempted to allay the concerns in a speech in Chennai, saying his government is not against any particular region.

Actor-turned-politician had also written an open letter to Modi, questioning if the Centre is dithering on setting up the CWMB with an eye on the coming Assembly in Karnataka. He urged the Prime Minister to do his duty and set up the board in line with the Supreme Court's repeated instructions to that end.Beijing: China is planning to send seeds of potato, a flowering plant and silkworm eggs with its Chang'e-4 lunar probe later this year to conduct the first biological experiment on the lifeless Moon.

The probe will carry a tin containing seeds of potato and arabidopsis, a small flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, and probably some silkworm eggs to conduct the first biological experiment on the Moon, state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

The "lunar mini biosphere" experiment was designed by 28 Chinese universities, led by southwest China's Chongqing University, a conference on scientific and technological innovation of Chongqing Municipality has heard.

The cylindrical tin, made from special aluminium alloy materials, is 18 cm tall, with a diameter of 16 cm, a net volume of 0.8 liters and a weight of 3 kilogrammes.

The tin will also contain water, a nutrient solution, air and equipment such as a small camera and data transmission system. Researchers hope the seeds will grow to blossom on the Moon, with the process captured on camera and transmitted to Earth.

Although astronauts have cultivated plants on the International Space Station, and rice and arabidopsis were grown on China's Tiangong-2 space lab, those experiments were conducted in low-Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 400 kms. The environment on the Moon, 380,000 kilometers from the Earth, is more complicated.

Liu Hanlong, chief director of the experiment and vice president of Chongqing University, said since the Moon has no atmosphere, its temperature ranges from lower than minus 100 degrees centigrade to higher than 100 degrees centigrade.

"We have to keep the temperature in the 'mini biosphere' within a range from 1 degree to 30 degrees, and properly control the humidity and nutrition. We will use a tube to direct the natural light on the surface of Moon into the tin to make the plants grow," said Xie Gengxin, chief designer of the experiment.

"We want to study the respiration of the seeds and the photosynthesis on the Moon," said Liu.

"Why potato and arabidopsis? Because the growth period of arabidopsis is short and convenient to observe. And potato could become a major source of food for future space travellers. Our experiment might help accumulate knowledge for building a lunar base and long-term residence on the Moon," he told Xinhua.

The public, especially young people, are being encouraged to participate in the Chang'e-4 mission. The China National Space Administration (CNSA) launched a contest among students across China in 2016, collecting ideas on the design of the payloads.

The "lunar mini biosphere" experiment was selected from more than 200 submissions, according to the CNSA.

Tidal forces of the Earth have slowed the Moon's rotation to the point where the same side always faces the Earth, a phenomenon called tidal locking. The other face, most of which is never visible from the Earth, is the far side of the Moon.

With its special environment and complex geological history, the far side is a hot spot for scientific and space exploration. However, landing and roving there requires a relay satellite to transmit signals.

According to reports, China plans to send a relay satellite for Chang'e-4 to the halo orbit of the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L2 in late May or early June 2018, and then launch the Chang'e-4 lunar lander and rover to the Aitken Basin of the south pole region of the Moon about half a year later.

The Von Karman Crater, named after a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer and physicist, in the Aitken Basin, was chosen as the landing site for Chang'e-4. The region is believed to have great scientific research potential.

The transmission channel is limited, and the landscape rugged, so the mission will be more complicated than Chang'e-3, China's first soft landing on the Moon in 2013, Liu Tongjie, deputy director of the Lunar Exploration and Space Programme Centre of CNSA.

As the relay satellite will be sent to the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L2 about 450,000 kilometers from the Earth, where a gravitational equilibrium can be maintained, it could stay in stable orbit and operate for a long time, he said.Washington: India is beginning to work with the US to find a solution to child abduction cases, a State Department official told lawmakers today, adding that she also pressed upon the Indian government to join the Hague Convention during her visit to the country.

"India is beginning to work with us to find practical solutions for children who are being abducted between our two countries," Suzanne I Lawrence, Special Advisor, Children's Issues Bureau of Consular Affairs at the Department of State, told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Sub-committee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organisations.

Lawrence said she believed the development was a result of her recent trip to India and her persistent engagement on the International Parental Child Abductions (IPCA).

India is not party to the Hague Convention and has demonstrated a pattern of non-compliance as defined in the Act, she alleged.

India is not a signatory to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (Hague Abduction Convention), nor are there any bilateral agreements in force between India and the United States concerning international parental child abduction, according to the US State Department.

"In February of this year, I travelled to India to encourage government officials there to resolve the numerous abduction cases they have, and for India to join the Convention," Lawrence said. She said the United States in its bilateral meetings with the governments of India, Brazil and Indonesia have been raising the issue of IPCA.

While in the US, it is called abduction, most of such cases are a result of marital dispute wherein one of the parents stays with the child in India and quite often gets a court order in their favour, Lawrence said.

The State Department in its travel advisor for India cautions the US citizens for acting forcefully to get back their kids while in India. "Parental child abduction is not a crime in India. Parents may wish to consult with an attorney in the United States and in the country to which the child has been removed or retained to learn more about how filing criminal charges may impact a custody case in the foreign court," the State Department says in its travel advisor on India.

According to an annual State Department report, the US, in 2016, had as many as 83 alleged cases of abduction of American children. In 2015, the number was 74. The competent authorities in India persistently failed to work with the Department of State to resolve abduction cases. As a result of this failure, 66 per cent of requests for the return of abducted children have remained unresolved for more than 12 months. India has been cited as non-compliant since 2014," it said.

Without the Hague Abduction Convention or any other protocols intended to resolve abduction cases, parents generally must pursue custody of abducted children in Indian courts, the report said.

It said due to absence of any clear legal procedures for specifically addressing abduction cases under the Indian law, parents efforts to resolve custody disputes in local courts are often unsuccessful.

In June, 2016, when former President Barack Obama met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the US and India in a joint statement committed to renew efforts to address a range of issues affecting their citizens, including issues related to child custody. The issue was also raised by the then Secretary of State John Kerry.Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg testified for nearly 10 hours over two days on Facebook`s privacy and data protection issues before committees of the Senate and House on Tuesday and Wednesday. Here are key points:"It`s clear now we didn`t do enough," Zuckerberg said on the protection of private user data and to prevent the hijacking of data on millions by Cambridge Analytica.

Zuckerberg said Facebook was built as "an idealistic and optimistic company" to help people connect but failed "to prevent these tools from being used for harm... that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy."

He said that by the end of the year Facebook would have 20,000 people working on security and content review and would also step up use of artificial intelligence to weed out fake accounts and inappropriate content. Zuckerberg said regulation of social media companies is inevitable, but warned that rules could also hamper the industry`s growth.

"The internet is growing in importance around the world in people`s lives, and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation," he told lawmakers.

"But I think you have to be careful about putting regulation in place. A lot of times regulations put in place rules that a company that is larger, that has resources like ours, can easily comply with, but that might be more difficult for a smaller startup company."

Zuckerberg said the EU`s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to come into effect on May 25 was more stringent than what was currently in place at Facebook and suggested it could serve as a rough model for US rules in the future.

Facebook is implementing the GDPR standards for European users next month, and some of its rules will be extended to US and other users later, he confirmed.

"The GDPR requires us to do a few more things and we are going to extend that to the world," he said.Zuckerberg maintained that Facebook users deserve protection of private data but appeared to argue that its controls make it possible to determine how information is shared.

He claimed that "there`s a very common misperception... that we sell data to advertisers," adding that "we do not sell data to advertisers. We don`t sell data to anyone." But he maintained that advertising enables Facebook to offer a free service and that targeted ads based on user categories were more acceptable to users, even if they could opt out.

Zuckerberg also said the company believed in an ad-supported business model, but appeared to leave open the possibility of a paid version. "There will always be a version of Facebook that is free," Zuckerberg told the hearing.

The 33-year-old CEO said Facebook was in a constant struggle to guard against Russian manipulation of the Facebook platform to influence elections in the US and elsewhere.

"There are people in Russia whose job it is to try to exploit our systems and other internet systems and other systems as well," he said.

"So this is an arms race. They`re going to keep getting better and we need to invest in getting better at this too."

Zuckerberg has previously acknowledged the social network failed to do enough to prevent the spread of disinformation during the last US presidential race. "One of my greatest regrets in running the company is that we were slow in identifying the Russian information operations in 2016," he said.

"We expected them to do a number of more traditional cyber attacks, which we did identify and notify the campaigns that they were trying to hack into them. But we were slow at identifying the type of -- of new information operations."

He added that Facebook is cooperating with the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. "Our work with the special counsel is confidential. I want to make sure in an open session I don`t reveal something that`s confidential," he said.The success of Gwadar Port could be more a strategic project for China than a commercially viable one, a report by a respected US think tank has said. Given its geographical location, Gwadar may help China cut down the total distance that oil has to travel from the Gulf states to the Chinese heartland, but it would be more expensive than existing shipping methods and comes with the risks of travelling through Pakistan.

The report also identified other major challenges for Gwadar to even glimpse success - availability of basic resources like water, connectivity the larger rail and road network and the profile and quality of services offered at the port.

The report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is titled 'China's Maritime Silk Road Initiative: Economic Drivers and Challenges' says these challenges are not only restricted to Gwadar, but also to other port projects under Chinese President Xi Jinping's pet Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) - Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Kyaukpyu in Myanmar.

"Gwadar's proximity to shipping routes is less optimal than it appears at first glance. It is located at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman Gwadar is too close to ports of departure to serve as an effective waypoint for ships traveling from the Persian Gulf to China."

"Beijing and Islamabad's longer-term vision for Gwadar includes high-speed rail and road networks that could carry oil from ships arriving at Gwadar to Western China. This would reduce the total distance that oil would travel from the Persian Gulf to China, but increase transportation costs while incurring other risks, namely those associated with traveling through restive western Pakistan," the report read. It said for these reasons that Gwadar could be more about providing berths to Chinese warships than to merchant vessels.

But the larger challenge, the authors of the report concluded were to do with connectivity, infrastructure and services.

"At Gwadar, port facilities have advanced faster than the area's supporting infrastructure An uptick in shipping traffic at Gwadar, particularly cargo destined for locations elsewhere in Pakistan, would result in serious delays due to the area's limited connectivity the appeal of building a "game-changing" port in an undeveloped area almost always brings with it broader connectivity challenges, most of which are not captured in the cost of the port itself," the report read.

It also noted that Gwadar faces a crunch in even the most basic of resources. "Importantly, connectivity isn't just limited to transportation. Ample water and power supplies are also critical. Reports also indicate a shortage of basic services at Gwadar, including potable water," the report read.

Not just Gwadar, the report noted that similar problems of connectivity and resources plague the nearby India-backed Chabahar Port in Iran.

The report however did concede to the possibility that Gwadar could turn out successful in the long run. "Maritime trade is a fluid business. Shipping lanes are slow to change, but they are not immune to revision... Individual ports may rise and fall, based not only on their location but also on their ability to compete and provide services," the report concluded.Amid the ongoing stand-off between US and Pakistan, the Donald Trump administration has now decided to impose restriction on movement of Pakistani diplomats deputed in Washington. According to Pakistani media, the decision has been communicated to Islamabad. However, there has not been any official communication so far.

A report in Dawn news said that as per the decision, diplomats working in Pakistan Embassy and consulates in US will not be allowed to travel beyond 40 km from their office without permission. Geo News reported that restrictions might be imposed on the diplomats if similar limitations on American diplomats in Pakistan are not eased.

Geo News further reported that Pakistani officials in US would need to seek the permission at least five days in advance for any travel beyond the permissible distance. The restrictions are likely to come into effect from May 1.

The Express Tribune, meanwhile, reported that the Trump administration had prepared a code of conduct for Pakistani diplomatic staff consisting of 200 people. As per the norms prescribed, the officials will have to reside within a distance of 32 km from their offices.

This comes days after the car of an official of the US embassy jumped red light and hit a motorcycle. While one person had died on the spot, the other had suffered injuries. The Pakistan Foreign office had summoned US Ambassador to Islamabad David Hale in connection with the incident.US President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Thursday to deny that he ever said his country will launch an attack on Syria. This after world security and peace suffered a damning blow in the past few days with US and Russia threatening each other over strong military action in Syria.

Trump had last week said that there would be a 'big price to pay' after dozens of people were allegedly killed by poison gas in the rebel-held town of Douma. The US President had then directly slammed Russian President Vladimir Putin for backing 'Animal Assad'. Bashar al-Assad is the current President of Syria and is facing enormous opposition from rebel forces. An already distressing situation in the country became even more alarming when Trump hinted at direct military strikes that could potentially being US face-to-face with Russian forces. Trump though denied having directly said anything about war. "Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America? he wrote on the micro-blogging website.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2018

Thanks, if any at all, would have to wait. The Russian Foreign Ministry has already warned of dire consequences if US resorted to military action in Syria.

The US and Russia are the two major countries either directly or indirectly involved in the Syrian crisis. While Russia is backing President Assad and already has military bases in the country, the US has been providing support to what it terms as 'moderate rebels'. As many as 400,000 Syrians have either died or are missing since the conflict began, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

(With agency inputs)Read the original text at kiis.com.ua.

Open source

Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) has performed an all-Ukrainian public opinion poll (5-21 February 2018). It has conducted 2,043 personal interviews with the respondents living in 110 settlements in all regions of Ukraine (except Crimea), using a stochastic sample, representing the population of Ukraine with the minimum age of 18-years and above. In the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, surveys were conducted only in the areas controlled by Ukraine.

The statistical sampling error (with a probability of 0.95 and with a design effect of 1.5) does not exceed 3.3% for indicators close to 50%, 2.8% for indicators close to 25%, 2.0% for indicators close to 10%, 1.4% for indicators close to 5%.

The survey in Russia was conducted by the research organization "Levada-Center" during March 23-27, 2018. The center has surveyed 1,600 respondents with the minimum age of 18-years, residing 136 localities.

In general, Ukrainians have a negative attitude toward Stalin: 42% treat him with hostility, fear or hatred, 30% are indifferent, and 14% have a positive attitude (respect, sympathy or admiration).

28% of the population considers Stalin to be "a wise leader" (52% disagree with this), but 77% agree that "Stalin is a cruel, inhuman tyrant guilty of destroying millions of innocent people." 60% of the population noted that they do not believe that "our people can never survive without a leader like Stalin, who would come and put things in order." Three-quarters of the respondents indicated that they did not want to live and work under someones (like Stalins) rule.

Ukrainians attitude towards Stalin is much worse than the Russians one (citizens of Russia). Only 14% of Ukrainians are positive about Stalin, while 40% of Russians think the same way. In Ukraine, 28% are considered Stalin wise leader who led the Soviet Union to prosperity, while in Russia, this figure reaches 58%. 23% of Ukrainians and 33% of Russians feel the need for a leader of the type, like Stalin. 77% of Ukrainians and only 44% of Russians consider Stalin to be a brutal, inhuman tyrant.

The population of Ukraine has a rather negative attitude towards Stalin and his role in history. For example, about half of citizens do not agree with Stalin's definition of either a wise leader who led the Soviet Union to power and prosperity or as a prototype leader, without whom the people cannot survive. A positive spectrum of emotions in relation to Stalin (14%) is three times less than negative.

People of older age with (incomplete and complete) secondary education and low level of prosperity are more positive about Stalin and support him; these are residents of the eastern region.

Compared with 2012, in 2016, a positive attitude towards Stalin declined, this decline continued in 2018. This is mainly due to a decrease in the proportion of those who respect Stalin. But compared with 2016, in 2018, negative and indifferent attitude towards him has slightly increased. The increase in the negative attitude was mainly due to the growth in the share of those afraid of Stalin.

The emotional spectrum of the Ukrainians towards Stalin tends to the negative pole  42% of respondents defined their attitude as "fear", "hostility, irritation" or "disgust, hatred." But the representatives of the older generation, including about 20% among respondents aged 70, demonstrate more respect for the Soviet leader.

More than half of the population (57%) noted that they certainly would not like to work with such a leader. This attitude is more typical for the western and central regions, as well as for the younger population (up to 49 years).

In addition, 28% of the population consider Stalin a "wise leader", 13% in the western region, and 48% in the eastern region. 77% of Ukrainians agree that Stalin was a "cruel, inhuman tyrant" (most of all, residents of the western region think this way - 90%). 23% of Ukrainians agree that the Ukrainian people would never be able to survive without a leader like Stalin, who would come and put things in order.

Attitude to Stalin within different socio-demographic groups

If we consider the age differences in the attitude towards Stalin, in general, we will see that the representatives of the older generation are more positive than the younger ones. For example, 32.5% of respondents over 50 years of age define Stalin as a wise leader, and 27% of respondents in this age group agree with the proposition that people cannot survive without a leader like Stalin (against 19% among the 18-49 age group).

Positive attitude to Stalin in the emotional spectrum of the eastern and southern regions differ: 15-17% of respondents in these regions expressed respect for Stalin. In the east, 5% treat Stalin with disgust, hatred, in the west, this category reaches 30%. In all regions, the majority of respondents would not have liked to work with a country leader like Stalin, this group of respondents is the most numerable in the western region - 86%. Stalin is more often considered to be a wise leader in the east, and in the west, he is considered as a cruel tyrant.

Also, the attitude to Stalin varies depending on the level of prosperity of the respondent's family: a more positive attitude toward the leader of the USSR is observed among the poorest sections of the population. Thus, the proportion of those who consider Stalin to be a wise leader among the respondents with very low and low incomes varies from 30% to 33%, but among respondents with an average and high level of income, such 20-25%. Also, respondents with a lower level of prosperity showed more respect for Stalin, expressed a desire to work with such a leader, and agreed with the assertion that people cannot survive without a leader like Stalin. 75% of the population with low incomes consider Stalin to be a cruel tyrant, and among the population, which has high incomes, this figure reaches 85%.

As for the differentiation by education, the following tendency could be traced: the higher the level of education of the respondent is the more negative attitude to Stalin he voices. In particular, among respondents with higher education 7% treat Stalin with respect, while among respondents with incomplete secondary education  twice as much. Conversely, there is a greater proportion of those who treat Stalin with hostility or disgust among people with higher education. The higher the level of education of the respondent is, the less he wants to work with such a leader and the weaker is the idea of the need for such a leader for the people. After all, 84% of respondents with higher education agree with the proposition that Stalin is a cruel, inhuman tyrant, this figure reaches 67-77% among other educational groups.

Attitude towards Stalin among the population of Ukraine and Russia: a comparative aspect

In Ukraine, the negative attitude towards Stalin's personality is more common (42%), and during the last two years, it has somewhat increased. In Russia, the positive attitude towards him dominates, and the experience of negative feelings, compared to 2016, has decreased (to 12%). At the same time, the proportions of respondents who are rather neutral to the leader, or those undecided, are almost identical in both countries. Significant differences can be traced in support of various judgments about Stalin. So, among the population of Ukraine (in comparison with the population of Russia), the share of those who agree with the statement that "Stalin is a tyrant guilty of annihilating millions of innocent people" is higher (77% versus 44%). More than half of Ukrainians disagree with the statements that Stalin is a wise leader and that people cannot survive without a leader of this type; among the residents of Russia, the share of those who disagree with such statements is 18% and 37% respectively.

Karina Pipiya, "Levada Center" expert, comments on public opinion about Stalin in Russian society:

"We can trace three periods In the dynamics of the attitude of Russians to Stalin: the dominance of negative perceptions (2001-2006), the dominance of indifferent attitude (2008-2012) and dominance of positive assessments (2014-2018). At the beginning of the survey almost every second Russian had a negative attitude toward Stalin (the total share of such feelings as "hostility", "fear," and "disgust" was 43% of respondents), in the period 2008-2012, they no longer exceeded a quarter of all thoughts about the leader. After 2014, negative attitudes toward Stalin were shared by about 17-20% of the respondents, in 2018 they reached a minimum value of 12% of the sample as a whole.

The trend of increasing the share of Russians with a positive or neutral attitude towards Stalin (in contrast to a clear decrease in negativity) is less stable and more cyclical. In 2001 the proportion of Russians with a positive attitude (the sum of three positions - "rapture", "respect" and "sympathy") was almost four times higher than the share of Russians with neutral perceptions, by 2008, indifference began to predominate in regard to Stalin's image, which was replaced by positive assessments in March 2014. Earlier, we repeatedly noted that "post-Crimean consolidation" contributed to the reassessment of many events and processes in the life of the country."

This press release was prepared by Liana Novikova.Most frequently, the import of anthracite from Russia was conducted via Switzerland and the United Kingdom

In 2017, Ukraine imported 2.66 million tons of anthracite coal from Russia, which made 78.6 percent of the entire annual import volume. The press office of State External Information Service reported that on Thursday afternoon.

The overall volume of anthracite imports in 2017 made 3.38 million tons - three times more than that in 2016 (933.4 thousand tons).

According to the State External Information Service, most frequently, the import of anthracite from Russia was conducted via Switzerland (1.50 million tons, with the average price of 164.7 dollars per a ton) and the United Kingdom (523.4 thousand tons, with the average price of 102.6 dollars per a ton). 21.2 percent of the annual import was conducted through South Africa (712.1 thousand tons, with the average price of 92.1 USD per a ton).The spending of the released funds is to be audited.

Open source

The government of Ukraine has agreed to cut the tax rate for the Boryspil international airport from 75% to 40% for a period of three years. According to the press service of the Infrastructure Ministry, this decision was made at a government meeting on Wednesday, UNIAN reports.

The rate of deductions payable to the state budget of Ukraine for the Boryspil international airport is going to be cut to 40%. Also, 35% of the corporations profits are to be allocated to fulfilling international commitments and capital investments.

The new arrangement shall enter into force on the date of the official publication of the resolution and remain in place until 31 December 2020, the press service said citing the Deputy Minister of Infrastructure. It is also noted that the use of the released money will be subject to mandatory annual state financial audit.

The governments decision should provide funding for a number of infrastructure development projects of the Boryspil international airport, which would allow to establish an international hub, the report reads.

The Boryspil international airport in 2017 received $157.6 million in revenues, which exceeds the previous years result by 11.7%. Last year, the company paid $73.3 million in taxes to the state budget, $48 million of which was dividends, another $10.8 million was income tax, $9.5 million was a tax on personal income and social security and another $4.9 million in other payments.

The Boryspil international airport is a state-owned enterprise, operating around 55% of all flights to and from Ukraine. The facility serves as the base for Ukraines largest airline carrier, Ukraine International Airlines.Read original article at 112.ua

"And why shouldnt we make a breakthrough?" Approximately in this vein, Ukrainian officials from the space industry argued, offering Australia to build a cosmodrome in the desert western part of the continent. Of course, the "Kosmozoo" could be a better name, but, apparently, it is decided not to contact the Australian Society for the Protection of Space Animals.



It should be noted that at the moment, the scalps of several cosmodromes are already hanging in the corridors of the Ukrainian space agency: for example, the bankrupt Sea Launch project, the Brazilian cosmodrome Alcantara, from which the new Ukrainian Cyclone-4 rocket carriers did not take off, and the cosmodrome in Canada, which might be built in the near future.



"This proposal is very realistic. Ukraine can start [launch missiles] at least tomorrow morning if we have a platform ... We offer our people and our experience if Australia has land for use, "according to the Australian press, said the Ukrainian ambassador in this country, Mykola Kulinich, in one fell swoop "lowering" the interlocutors to the level of a tree kangaroo. Like "we have rockets, you have land, - open the gate."



Judging by the publications in The West Australian, Australians took this proposal very seriously. It affects the age-old Anglo-Saxon diligence: what if they really could build, and we refused. Such proposals do not come every day. Or rather, for the first time in history. After all, how long they have been in British Commonwealth, but such a proposal was never received. Such heavy echoes of colonialism. And then unexpectedly, receiving of the message from a distant country, which many Australians knew only because of Eurovision song contest.



Under the future project on the green continent, they decided to allocate land near the air base Curtin near Derby. The construction of the facility will require an area of 5-7 thousand square km (well, this is because the rocket could be accidentally knocked down by a tomahawk). The desert places factor simplifies the procedure of public discussion with locals.



How much will the project itself cost, what is the participation of each of the parties, where to seek funding sources, has not yet been reported. Authors of the idea are modest, you can even say shy, asked only $ 500 thousand for design work. Let's just say, for a start. The very development of the feasibility study will take about two years, that is, it should be completed by 2020, when elections will be held in Ukraine, completely different officials may come to power, and the country is likely to survive some kind of default.



It is assumed that those new officials will consider the cosmodrome in Australia to be an exotic project. Well, or ask another 500 thousand for a new feasibility study.



If we consider the matter from the view of the theory, then it really has a rational part, because the northwest of Australia, based on its position relative to the equatorial part of the globe, is ideally suited for space launches: the earth's rotation force gives the rocket additional acceleration, and its withdrawal to outer space requires significantly less fuel, and therefore, you can take "on board" more useful commercial cargo.



A similar project is planned to be launched in Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. Local companies are ready to invest $ 148 million in the construction of the cosmodrome, from which the Ukrainian rockets will be launched. Canadians want to carry out up to eight launches per year.



It seems that in the next few years our space industry will be loaded if not by missile launches, then by the development of all sorts of projects. The decree of Olexander Turchynov, who declared that the State Space Agency should become a "powerful project institution", is being implemented.

By and large, space and aviation are exactly those headliners that have caused a feeling of constant pride in the country. It's another matter that in recent years all these complex technical clusters of the economy have received, probably, the most powerful demotivational blow. Yes, we still repair the giant airplane "Mriya", which ascended to the sky in 1988, and in 1994 even the engines and equipment were temporarily removed from it. But at the present time, we do not sell ready-made aircraft anymore, and we earn only on the freight transportation and sales of ready-made documentation, including intellectual property rights and production rights, as it happened with the construction of an An-132 plant in Saudi Arabia. Most of the best specialists have gone to different cities and towns of the global world.



And now in some strategic programs for the development of the country the place of space and aviation industries is already densely occupied by oilseeds and technical agricultural crops. And on the other hand, it's terrible to see the truth. It is possible to tell that we are a space power and can produce dozens of aircraft and rockets a year. But the truth is somewhat different. Ukraine already with colossal difficulty fulfills the existing contracts, for the implementation of which it lacks full-time employees, from turners to engineers.



As for new projects, in order to seriously consider them, they must first be consecrated at the highest state level - at least during the visit of the country's top officials to Canada or Australia. In the meantime, the main platform for communications between our ministers and external partners is Twitter.

In 2004, Ukraine was already trying to take part in the project of the Brazilian Alcantara cosmodrome and offered its Cyclone-4 launch vehicles, which had yet to be upgraded from Cyclone-3. But then everything began on a large scale, with the visit of President Leonid Kuchma to Brazil and the signing of intergovernmental agreements. For 12 years of participation in the project, our country spent UAH 4 billion, which were directed, among other things, to servicing loans attracted under state guarantees. Sum of loans amounted to 260 million dollars. As a result, Brazil officially abandoned the Ukrainian missile, and criminal cases were opened in Ukraine on the fact of using budget funds. The collapse of the project was then explained by the intrigues of Moscow, but, apparently, the reasons were much deeper.



As for cooperation with the Russian Federation, it has practically ceased due to the war, as a result of which such projects as Zenit (launch from Baikonur and Odyssey offshore platform - Sea Launch) and Dnepr (commercial re-launching of SS-18 ballistic missiles).



Lets look closer at the Sea Launch. It was a truly unique project, the only one of its kind that was supposed to launch rockets from a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean. As a result of a rather dark story with bankruptcy, the project was in the hands of Russians, and at the moment they plan to use Ukrainian missiles in the future. To circumvent the sanctions, Ukraine will be able to supply missiles separately from Russians to the United States, where Russian engines will be assembled to them, and from there the finished missile will be delivered to the offshore platform. The same plan to be implemented regarding the launches from Baikonur: the delivery of engines and rockets from two countries separately and assembly at an enterprise in Kazakhstan. Obviously, there are not many prospects for such cooperation, when the "partners" do not communicate with each other. Nevertheless, the fact that our country missed the opportunity to redeem the bankrupt Sea Launch (and for this, it only needed a few hundred million dollars), suggests that the space industry in Ukraine has always been perceived as a cash cow, but it has never been regarded as a prospective industry, strategic development. It was only about developing the old scientific and technical potential practically "to the end". Now our space and aviation are still relying on the "last of the Mohicans", many of which no longer stand morally and physically and leave either for rest or for other countries - the same Azerbaijan, China, Saudi Arabia.

In 2014-2017 years Ukraine carried out 20 launches of launch vehicles, and this is exactly as many as in period 2010-2013, although much less than from 2005 to 2010 (32 starts). Nevertheless, the industry continues to work, albeit with significant differences: in past years, most of the launches have been associated with purely Ukrainian rocket brands (Zenit, Dnepr, and Cyclone).

In 2017, the Ukrainian rocket (Zenith) had only one launch out of five. Three launches are connected with the Vega project and one with Antares. The Vega project is the offspring of the European Space Agency. Ukraine makes the march engine of the fourth stage for the rocket. As for Antares, it is developed by the corporation Orbital Science Corporation (USA), and our country participates in the construction of the first stage construction. That is, in these projects Ukrainian rocket builders act as contractors. One of many contractors. In fact, it is a program of smooth depreciation of the Ukrainian space complex by Western partners. In the conditions of sanctions against the Russian Federation, our space enterprises need to provide some alternatives, because otherwise domestic specialists and technologies may find themselves in the most unpredictable countries. With Western contracts, the industry will "die" naturally.



That complex, which we have still preserved, can only be pulled by Ukrainian planes and Ukrainian missiles that can take off from anywhere, at least from Australia.



If we take aircraft construction, the launch of a national low-coster, focused on the leasing of domestic medium-range aircraft, could be the beginning of the revival of Ukrainian aircraft construction. As for the space industry, the commercial launch market is now extremely competitive. As demonstrated by Ilon Mask, private rocket builders are more effective than state ones, and they do not need to look for millions to conduct a feasibility study. It is the private sector and the defense order that are the two levers that can give impetus to the further development of rocketry in Ukraine. In the first case, it is necessary to create effective mechanisms for private-state partnership, in the second - to learn to say "no" to Western curators who forbid Ukraine to develop medium-range combat missiles. As Volodymyr Gorbulin - the mind, honor and conscience of our rocket construction recently said, "Ukraine has the moral right to set before the Western allies the question of revising the current range limitations for medium-range strategic missiles in the interests of its own defense capability."



But this will not happen earlier than the formation of a real caste of service managers in our country, who will, first of all, think about efficiency and not the perfection of their decisions. Today, the same Gorbulin can be considered such a specialist.



Read original article at 112.ua

The convincing victory of Viktor Orban in the parliamentary elections in Hungary plunged the neo-liberal Europe into turmoil. In the main Western European media this victory is presented as "unexpected" and even "unnatural", but the facts say the opposite. Never in the past 15 years democratic elections in Hungary have been held at such a high voter turnout (about 70%). The right-nationalist coalition (the Fidesz Party and the Christian Democratic People's Party) received 48.5% of the vote, which provides it with the necessary majority of two-thirds of the seats (133 out of 199).



According to the Hungarian government, this is a kind of record, as Fidesz became the first party in the post-communist history of Hungary, which was able to win elections three times in a row. On the second place - the right-wing radical party Jobbik, which gained about 20% of the vote. This is considered an unfortunate result for Jobbik, but in the aggregate, the right and nationalist parties of Hungary received in the last elections almost 70% of the vote, which is a very serious indicator of sentiment not only for Hungary, but for the whole Central Europe.



We see a defeat of the liberal pro-European opposition in Hungary (socialists - 12.3%, "green" - 5.55%). This suggests that the pro-European liberal opposition is becoming a marginal force that retains the electoral base only in certain areas of large cities, primarily in Budapest. The marginalization of liberals and "progressives," observers say, is manifested as a trend everywhere - including in countries of Western Europe and Russia.



At the same time, the number of supporters of the "national revival" is growing. This trend fundamentally contradicts the ultra-liberal ideology of Brussels, which regards the peoples and states of Europe as only a material for building a supranational European empire. Now, according to analysts, for the European Commission it will be extremely difficult to implement penal measures against the government of Orban, since such wide support of voters gives him a large margin of safety for the coming years.



A new round of exacerbations between Budapest and Brussels may begin in the coming weeks, as the government of Orban intends to close non-governmental organizations that interfere in politics, primarily those financed by George Soros. The first blow is expected to be directed at the "forge of liberal cadres" - the Central European University, which was founded by Soros back in the early 90s. It is very likely that the authorities will continue to restrict the activities of mass media owned by billionaire Lajos Simiska, a former ally of Orban, who took the side of his political opponents. The European Union and the OSCE in this regard have already criticized the "significant reduction in pluralism" in the Hungarian press.



Orban has built his election campaign on the fight against illegal migration, which, in his view, is the main factor of instability in Hungary and Europe. He did not hesitate to adopt the conspiracy theories, which only right-wing radicals have used so far. According to these theories, Brussels and the UN set the task of replacing the indigenous population of Central Europe with migrants from the Middle East and Africa to create a new "multicultural" community, reminiscent of the social construct created in the Soviet Union called the "Soviet people".



Even ideological opponents recognize that Orban is a talented politician who has "straddled" a topic that has become the main thing in European politics of recent years. And so, despite allegations of corruption and poor management, people vote for him, as he will be able to protect them from external (migrants and Brussels) and internal (Gypsy) threats. In favor of Orban played the fact that the Hungarian economy has shown good results in recent years, which is confirmed by German investors who evaluated the promising Hungarian market.



It should be acknowledged that the EU and the leaders of Western Europe do not do enough to dispel Orban's accusations, rather the opposite. In the German government, the liberal wing, headed by Angela Merkel, is still trying to push the idea that "Islam belongs to Germany," and also to impose plans for the reunification of migrant families, which may lead to another massive influx of refugees from countries in Asia and Africa. The Bavarian Christian Social Union, also part of the ruling coalition, sharply opposes this. This suggests that an anti-immigrant conservative bloc is being formed in Central Europe, including Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland.

However, Orban's victory is welcomed not only in Central Europe; it has already been congratulated by the main right populist parties of the founding countries of the European Union. The leader of the French National Front, Marine le Pen, said that the Hungarians once again rejected the neoliberal values of Brussels and the mass immigration encouraged by it. This means that the national forces of Europe can win the next elections to the European Parliament in 2019. Members of the "Alternatives for Germany", representatives of the right-wing parties of Italy and the Netherlands expressed their solidarity with Orban.



The overwhelming majority of ordinary readers of the German-language press evaluate the victory of Orban positively. Most often there are the following statements: "The victory of Orban is a slap in the face of Merkel and the European Union"; "The people of Hungary said their word, and it's good"; "The victory of Orban is a blow to the plans of Macron and Merkel, but above all on the migration policy of the German government"; "The EU has expanded to the East under pressure from the United States and Great Britain, and now it has received a" decent response "; " If 70% of voters vote for right-wing and nationalist parties in the country, then this is not a trend, but a fact. "



According to most European observers, Orban's confrontation with the European Union will be increasingly fierce. The Hungarian Prime Minister is seeking to reform the EU, with weak regulatory and political functions. Practically, the European Union should return to its original role - the common market. In promoting this concept Viktor Orban counts on the support of all the national conservative forces in Europe. Naturally, Brussels will not agree to any weakening of its powers.It seems too early to be talking about the suspension of the arms race.

The President of the United States Donald Trump on 11 April urged Russia to get ready to deal with an attack on the Syrian territory. According to him, it is going to be carried out with new and smart rockets. That came as a response to the Russian partys statement on being ready to knock down American rockets and to target fire origins.

The American leader is confident that those who support the Assad regime  Iran and Russia  have a big price to pay for the chemical attack launched in the Syrian city of Douma on 7 April that killed at least 70 people.

Donald Trump also stressed that the U.S.-Russia relations are now worse than they have ever been, even during the Cold War period, but still urged to stop the arms race.

In response to Trump, the Russian foreign ministry said that the smart rockets should be launched on terrorists, not the lawful government. The Russian General Staff urged the United States and their allies to restore Rakka instead of threatening others. The head of the Russian state Vladimir Putin has called the current situation in the world increasingly chaotic, although he expressed hope that common sense would prevail and the relations would become constructive.

However, the escalation of the conflict between the two nations is obvious and the situation in the troubled region confirms that. So what is happening in Syria now and what could happen next?

Preparation of the U.S. operation

On 10 April, The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States has begun laying the groundwork for a strike on Syria in response to what happened in Douma. According to the newspaper, the Pentagon has prepared a series of military measures for Donald Trump.

CNN Turk has informed that USS Donald Cook destroyer (DDG-75), equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as with Aegis ballistic missile defense system, left the Larnaca port in Cyprus and departed toward the coast of Syria on 9 April. Soon after that, it was revealed that the destroyer has come within 100 km of Syrias Tartus, where the Russian Navy support center is located. Another guided missile destroyer USS Porter is also supposed to join Donald Cook, but, according to experts, it cannot arrive in the East Mediterranean area earlier than 16 April.

Also on Wednesday, a strike force of U.S. ships headed by the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) aircraft carrier is supposed to depart towards Europe and the Middle East.

According to Stars & Stripes, the strike force was expected to consist of the Normandy guided missile cruiser, the USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51), the USS Forest Sherman (DD-931), the USS Farragut (DD-348), which will be later joined by the USS Jason Dunham (DDG-109) and the USS The Sullivans (DD-537). Around 6,500 military servicemen are expected to be aboard the ships.

The Pentagon assures that the journey of the U.S. Navy strike force headed by the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75) to the Mediterranean is preplanned and is intended to ensure security at sea.

According to the estimates by the Russian General Staff, the ships are expected to arrive in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of May. Moscow points out that is now the common practice of the U.S. Navy presence in the region.

Along with that, the USS Georgia (SSGN-729), an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine is also located in the East Mediterranean.

The possible scope of the U.S. operation

According to the New York Times, the United States are going to conduct a larger operation than it did on 7 April 2017 (the first use of force by Americans against the Syrian government). Then, in response to the use of chemical weapons in Idlib, the U.S. fired 59 missiles on the military aerodrome, killing 15 people. However, the aerodrome resumed operation soon, while chemical attacks never stopped.

The scope of the operation may expand due to a selection of fire on several targets. At the same time, Washington does not intend to drag the operation on for a long time.

The main goals of the operation

The New York Times writes that over this year, the US has expanded the list of possible targets in Syria to include barns, warehouses and support centers.

The Stratfor claims that aerodromes around Damascus may be targeted, as well as a number of facilities that are vital for the Syrian chemical program.

The Los Angeles Times does not exclude that Syrias air defense system may become a target too.

Russian ships at the coast of Syria

On 11 April, Krymsky Kanal on Telegram informed that the occupational Russian Black Sea navy, which is based in the annexed city of Sevastopol, has been put on standby. According to the information, all military commanders of bases have been present at the Black Sea Navy headquarters since the morning. According to some information, the fleet has been on standby since mid-March.

Also, the Pytlivy with Smerch-2, the Admiral Essen and the Admiral Grigorovich with Calibers aboard, as well as large amphibious vessels the Cesar Kunikov, the Orsk and the Minsk large amphibious vessels are also already in the Mediterranean Sea by the coast of Syria.

Also, Russia may deploy the Admiral Makarov frigate with Caliber cruise missiles to the coast of Syria. The frigate is said to be located in Baltiysk as of right now.

According to Interfax, some 15 Russian military ships and logistics vessels are currently operating within the Mediterranean Standing Naval Force, as well as submarines that have repeatedly attacked the facilities controlled by the Syrian rebels.

Nonetheless, according to a message from the NOTAM air security system, from 11 April on, Russian ships are going to engage in an exercise in the international waters of the Mediterranean Sea by the Syrian coast. The exercise will take place in a closed area and will involve several stages including firing practice. The exercise is supposed to go on until 26 April.

Ally involvement

After the Douma chemical attack, Trump said the United States had multiple opportunities to carry out a military strike on Syria, and they were coordinating their actions with allies, mostly with France and the United Kingdom. For the time being, London has refused to carry out a strike on Syria, until enough evidence about the use of chemical weapons.

Open source

Paris has acknowledged the possibility of joining the operation, noting that warehouses with chemical weapons need to be targeted.

According to American media outlets, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates could get involved in the operation too. The participation of Turkey, Jordan, and Iraq also should not be excluded.

At the same time, Reseau International, citing sources, suggests that should the U.S. carry out a military strike on Syria, Chinese ships would become part of the Russian Navy.

Whats next?

On 11 April, the Pentagon claimed to be ready to go to war in Syria, although Washington continues gathering intelligence regarding the chemical attack.

If the United States decides to carry out a strike on Syria, it may be the beginning of a full-scale war with Russia. While half of the world is trying to figure out whether the U.S. President declared war against Russia today or changed his mind 40 minutes later (the amount of time between the two tweets), the other half of the world has braced for the final decision that Trump promised to make by the end of Wednesday.

Nonetheless, today, on 11 April, Eurocontrol warned airline companies about a possible airstrike on Syria within 72 hours.Open source

Theresa May has cleared the way for Britain to join a US-led military attack on Syria within days after national security advisers presented new evidence blaming President Assad for the barbaric gas attack in Douma. This was reported by The Times.

The Prime Minister is recalling cabinet ministers from their Easter break to seek approval today. She is set to defy calls, including from Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, to follow recent convention and allow MPs a vote.

May has said "all the indications" are that the Syrian regime of president Bashar al-Assad, which denies mounting a chemical attack, was responsible.

Theresa May is prepared to take action against the Assad regime in Syria without first seeking parliamentary consent, it was reported.

May said British planes were already on the runways in Akrotiri and they were ready, according to media sources.

Britain has six Typhoon fighter jets, eight GR4 Tornado aircraft and one air-to-air Voyager refuelling tanker based at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. Also operating in the region are armed reconnaissance reaper drones, and a Royal Navy type 45 destroyer on a Nato maritime mission.

As it was reported earlier, James Mattis, the U.S. Defense Secretary, said that they are ready to the provide military options for Syria.

Mattis also stated that the USA is still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies, we are still working on this.

Earlier U.S. President Donald Trump announced about a coming missile attack in Syria. Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!, he wrote on Twitter.

Related Video:Germany does not plan to actively participate in the military operation in Syria under the leadership of the US. Peter Beyer, the Coordinator for Transatlantic Relations claimed this today as Anadolu Agency reported.

Beyer claimed that the German government condemns the chemical attack in Douma, however, it urges to refuse from the escalation of the conflict and come to the diplomatic solution.

The murder of many people, including women and children needs to be answered. Assads regime, as well as Russia, should understand this, he claimed, however, emphasized that the military methods should be used as a last resort.

I hope that the sides will hold the diplomatic negotiations before the missile strikes, also, within the UN Security Council, Beyer specified.

In any case, the active involvement of Germany in the attack if it will take place is completely excluded. At the moment, Germany provided one ship for the escort of the U.S. destroyer in the Mediterranean Sea, however, nothing else is planned to be assumed.

On April 7, the volunteer organizations reported that the chemical attack at Douma, the East Ghouta took place. As a result of this attack at least 70 people died. The Syrian government and Russia called this information untrue, while the US and allies have blamed Bashar al-Assad for the attack.

Later U.S. President Donald Trump announced about a coming missile attack in Syria and urged Russia to be prepared. Also, the British troops prepare for the operation.

In its turn, Russia puts on an alert its formation and Syrian and counts to get coordinates of the possible attacks from the US to withdraw its military.The Polish side demands that Ukraine solve the issue of search, exhumation and building memorials of the Poles who deceased by the hands of Ukrainian nationalists in the 1930-1940s

Open source

Getting back to cooperation between the Ukrainian and Polish institutes of national memory is only possible if Ukraine lives up to certain conditions, Polskie Radio reports, quoting Jaroslaw Szarek, the head of the Institute of National Memory of Poland.

According to him, Poles, above all, demand that Ukraine releases warrants for search works, as well as exhumation and building memorials of the Poles who deceased by the hands of Ukrainian nationalists in western Ukraine in the 1930-1940s.

Another essential question is the work of Polish-Ukrainian Forum of historians, which is now postponed. Szarek noted that the Polish side was ready to resume the activity of the Forum, meeting with Ukrainian scientists, but not before the works, presented earlier during the Forum, are released.

'The Ukrainian side still has not given us the texts, though we could print them,' Szarek said.

As is known, Ukraine suspended the cooperation with the Institute of the National Memory of Poland after vandals took down the monument for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Grushovychi village, Prykarpattia region, western Ukraine. This and other incidents, involving desecration and destruction of Ukrainian memorial sites in Poland, added to the already complicated historical controversy between the two countries.He also stands for the closing of the Ukrainian office at the proper institutes in Minsk

Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine asks the government to stop the participation in the statutory bodies of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). He claimed this at 11th Kyiv Security Forum broadcasted by 112 Ukraine.

Taking into account that Ukraine has never been and it is not a member of the CIS and the refusal of the CIS to condemn Russias aggression, I would ask that we jointly with the government prepare the offer on the official stop of our participation in CIS statutory bodies as well as the final closing of the Ukrainian office at the proper institutes in Minsk, Poroshenko claimed.

The president also urged the foreign partners to reconsider the treaty obligations with Russia.

The whole treaty base concluded by Ukraine within the CIS should be inventoried for the correspondence to the national interests of the state. I urge our foreign partners to reconsider the treaty obligations with Russia, first of all, for the sensitive cooperation spheres, he said.These actions are connected to a possible U.S. missile strike on Syria

Open source

Russia has alerted its air defense forces, military intelligence and strike troops of the Armed Forces. This was reported by the chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee Vladimir Shamanov, reports Echo of Moscow.

According to Shamanov, these actions are connected to a possible missile strike by the United States in Syria.

Earlier this day, the Russian Armed Forces General Staff announced the deployment of military police in the Syrian city of Douma in Eastern Ghouta, which suffered from a chemical attack.

As it was reported earlier, Theresa May has cleared the way for Britain to join a US-led military attack on Syria within days after national security advisers presented new evidence blaming President Assad for the barbaric gas attack in Douma.

May has said "all the indications" are that the Syrian regime of president Bashar al-Assad, which denies mounting a chemical attack, was responsible.

Also, U.S. President Donald Trump announced about a coming missile attack in Syria. Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!, he wrote on Twitter.

Related Video:The president thinks that the cold war is taking place in the world for a long time

Russia encourages, manages and leads the international club of the dictators that decided to defy the whole civilized world. Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine claimed this at 11th Kyiv Security Forum broadcasted by 112 Ukraine.

Russia is not just mocking the international law, generally accepted principles of the international relations and democratic values, not respecting even Gods Commoments at this festive season of Easter. Russia encourages, manages and leads the so-called international club of the dictators that is like the crazy suicide club decided to defy the whole civilized world, he said.

Poroshenko urged the world to percept Russia in all seriousness.

If earlier somebody preferred to percept the actions of Kremlin as the pranks of the spoiled teenager, then now the time has come to treat it like the serious crime that needs strong, extend and well-coordinated reaction, the president added.

Poroshenko reminded that the cold war is taking place in the world for a long time.

We read the predictions that we are at the door of the cold war. But I want to disappoint you  it lasts for a long time  the cold war in its hybrid form made by Kremlin. This war has already crossed our doorstep and entered our homes, lives, networks, e-mails, Poroshenko said.Earlier the U.S. president reported on Twitter that Russia should expect nice, new and smart missiles

Open source

Donald Trump, the U.S. President claimed that the strike at Syria as the response to the chemical attack at Douma can take place soon or not on Twitter.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2018

On April 7, the volunteer organizations reported that the chemical attack at Douma, the East Ghouta took place. As a result of this attack at least 70 people died. The Syrian government and Russia called this information untrue, while the US and allies have blamed Bashar al-Assad for the attack.

Later U.S. President Donald Trump announced about a coming missile attack in Syria and urged Russia to be prepared. Also, the British troops prepare for the operation.

In its turn, Russia puts on an alert its formation and Syrian and counts to get coordinates of the possible attacks from the US to withdraw its military.Open source

Ukraine and Uruguay agreed to liberalize the visa regime bilaterally. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry reported that on Thursday afternoon.

As soon as the countries agree on certain formal details that need to be solved and the respective agreement takes force, Uruguay will become another country where Ukrainians can travel without visas.

'We make the world closer for Ukrainians, making travels more comfortable. This motto of ours opens new opportunities for our compatriots, and our passports will gain more points in the list of the world's most respected passports,' the Foreign Ministry said.

Last month, Ukraine and Qatar signed an agreement on the mutual abolition of visa requirements.

"The agreement provides that citizens of Ukraine who use passports for traveling abroad, valid for at least 6 months from the date of entry into the states of the other party, can enter, leave, transit and stay without visas on its territory for up to 90 days within 180 days," the press service of the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko noted.

It is expected that the signing of the document will promote the cooperation between the countries, both in the consular, economic and humanitarian spheres, will allow bringing to a qualitatively new level the protection of the rights and interests of legal entities and individuals, activate contacts of business representatives, open additional opportunities for national tourist industries.

As it was reported earlier, Petro Poroshenko held the meeting with Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Qatar during the official visit to the state.

It is noted that the sides positively noted the visible intensification of the Ukraine-Qatar relations and active development of the trade and economic cooperation. Particularly, during the negotiations, the sides noted the presence of the various goods of agricultural industry complex and products of the domestic metallurgy at the Qatari market.Trump insists that Russia and Iran are responsible for the chemical attack in Douma

The US has not made the final decision on the military strike at Syria as the response to the chemical attack in Douma as Sarah Sanders, the spokeswoman of the White House reported.

Washington considers a few variants of the actions against the Syrian regime and all of them are still discussed. The final decision has not been made yet, Sanders said.

She noted that the president insists that Russia and Iran are responsible for the chemical attack.

On April 7, the volunteer organizations reported that the chemical attack at Douma, the East Ghouta took place. As a result of this attack at least 70 people died. The Syrian government and Russia called this information untrue, while the US and allies have blamed Bashar al-Assad for the attack.

Later U.S. President Donald Trump announced about a coming missile attack in Syria and urged Russia to be prepared. Also, the British troops prepare for the operation.Russia's Foreign Ministry insisted that Ukraine took the crew members of Nord, the Russian vessel detained by Ukraine's border guards, as hostages. TASS news agency reported that with reference to Mariya Zakharova, the Ministry's spokeswoman.

The Russian side threatened to 'take action in response'.

'Every time people cross the border, Kyiv thinks of new reasons in order to keep the crew from going back home, to their families. We demand that Ukraine stop teasing the sailors and let them return to their native Crimea. We count on the international society, hoping for their adequate evaluation of the inhumane actions of the Kyiv government. Russia will reserve the right to respond until our citizens are let out of Ukraine', Zakharova said.

The crew of the Nord fishing ship, which was arrested in the Sea of Azov by the Ukrainian border guards, is now at liberty, as RIA News reported referring to Anna Sheveliova, the representative of the ships owner. According to her, the crew, except the captain, is at liberty. They are all in Mariupol now. But they have to be present in the SBU for questioning on April 10 due to the case on the captain, she said. As it was reported, the members of the crew were complaining that they are not allowed to reach the land.

Mariupol Prymorskyi District Court imposed a fine on most of the crew members on the Nord fishing ship on April 6.

As we reported earlier, Horbenko was arrested until May 31, 2018. At the same time, the court provided a possibility to bail him out for $1, 354, and his lawyers used this opportunity.

The Nord ship was detained on March 25.More than 400 international and Ukrainian leaders, representatives of political, business and civil society communities from over 20 countries are expected to speak

A two-day 11th Kyiv Security Forum starts in Kyiv.

More than 400 international and Ukrainian leaders, representatives of political, business and civil society communities from over 20 countries will discuss global security trends and challenges in contemporary international relations, as well as Ukraine's importance for regional and European security and democracy. Among them, Peter Balazs, Director, CEU Center for European Neighborhood Studies, European Commissioner for Regional Policy (2004), Hanna Hopko, the Chairwoman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Foreign Affairs, Rose Eilene Gottemoeller, Deputy Secretary General, NATO, are expected to have their speeches.

Kyiv Security Forum launched in 2007 is a platform for debates on the most urgent security issues in Europe and the Black Sea region. It aims at increasing security cooperation between the European Union and the Black Sea region, raising awareness of security development among key players, and strengthening the role of independent and non-governmental actors in solving security problems in Europe.She noted that the strengthening of the cooperation of Ukraine with NATO can provoke a negative reaction of Russia

Kay Bailey Hutchison, the U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO claimed that NATO is interested in the membership of Ukraine in the alliance. She claimed this during Kyiv Security Forum as Ukrainian News reported.

We want Ukraine to become a member of the alliance, I assure you, Hutchison claimed.

According to her, the fact that Ukraine fulfills the annual national plans is a good way to the membership. She also noted that the strengthening of the cooperation of Ukraine with NATO can provoke a negative reaction of Russia.

In the case with Montenegro, we saw that Russia becomes quite aggressive when the countries begin to join NATO, Hutchison said.

The U.S. Permanent Representative added that usually, Russia resorts to the methods of hybrid and cyber wars and destabilization of other states, attempting to change their attitude to the joining of the alliance.

As we reported on March 10, the NATO admitted Ukraines aspirations to obtain full membership in the Alliance and gave it a NATO aspirant status.Russian Energy Minister expressed the readiness of Russian Federation to provide solid supply of the natural gas

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak assured Vice-President of European Commission (EC) Maros Sefcovic in Moscows readiness to supply gas to the European Union through Ukraine after 2019. This was reported to TASS by the EC representative Anna-Kaisa Itkonen upon their telephone conversation.

Novak expressed Russias readiness to ensure solid supply of the natural gas to Europe through Ukraine after 2019, she said.

According to her, Sefcovic stressed the necessity to keep commercially profitable volumes of gas, supplied through the Ukrainian route.

He once again noted the necessity to find a solution according to Stockholm Arbitrage and to cooperate with both sides on both bilateral and trilateral base. In this context, after the bilateral meeting of Gazprom and Naftogaz, there could be further contacts, Itkonen added.

Earlier it was reported that Novak and Sefcovic held a telephone talk, during which they discussed current situation around Russian gas supplies to the European market.

As it was reported earlier, Alexey Miller, CEO of Gazprom said that Russian Gazprom may keep gas supply through Ukraine.

Earlier, Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko offered Germany an option to the Nord Stream 2, stating that the project is economically unjustified. He offered gas transit through Ukraine.

Poroshenko called Russia an extremely unreliable partner and expressed an opinion that the project implementation will lead to economic and energy blockade of Ukraine, which inflict enormous damage on the state. Moreover, Ukraines President believes that the gas pipeline does not have an economically efficient base. The gas transit through Ukraine, as Poroshenko said, will cost cheaper and can be easily and profitably modernized.

Related Video:My names Will Capers. For almost nine years, Ive blogged on various topics. I blogged as Blaque Ink first, and as Brotha Wolf second. The latter had a mu...

1 year agoIt is about a permit to use exclusive economic zone and waters of the country for the projects purposes

Finland gave a full approval package for construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. This was reported on the website of the Nord Stream 2 AG project.

Project developer Nord Stream 2 AG today received the second of two permits required to construct and operate the planned natural gas pipeline in the Finnish Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), completing the permitting procedure in Finland. Todays permit was granted by the Regional State Administrative Agency Southern Finland in accordance with the Water Act. The first permit received last week was the Governments consent for the use of the Finnish EEZ.

This is an important day for our project: following a very thorough analysis and extensive engagement the Finnish authorities have approved our detailed plans to construct and operate the 374-kilometre Finnish section of the 1,230-kilometre Nord Stream 2 Pipeline. We look forward to continuing the constructive co-operation with the authorities during the construction and subsequent operation phases of the project as they monitor the implementation of our plans, said Tore Granskog, Permitting Manager Finland at Nord Stream 2 AG.

It is about a permit to use exclusive economic zone and waters of the country for the projects purposes.

Earlier it was reported that all necessary permits needed for the project have also been received in Germany. The national permitting procedures in the other three countries along the route  Russia, Sweden and Denmark  are proceeding as planned.

It is noted that the process of receiving permits in Russia, Sweden and Denmark is going as scheduled.

Russias leading energy enterprise Gazprom and its partners intend to start implementing the Nord Stream-2 project worth almost 10 billion euros in April 2018. The 1,200-kilometers-long pipeline is to be laid through the Baltic Sea, linking Russia and Germany  bypassing Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic States. The capacity will be twice larger than that of Nord Stream-1. The construction is to be complete by late 2019.

Related Video:He also thinks that the treaty cannot be terminated completely

Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine intends to submit the draft law on the stop of the particular points of the Friendship Treaty with Russia to the parliament. He claimed this at 11th Kyiv Security Forum broadcasted by 112 Ukraine.

In such terms, the next step is the submission of the draft law on the urgent unilateral stop of the action of the particular points of the Friendship Treaty between Ukraine and Russia, in the part where the acting of the current treaty is incompatible with the national interests of the state and implementation of our Ukrainian right for the self-defense, Poroshenko noted.

He also thinks that the agreement cannot be terminated completely

Why we cannot terminate this treaty but only stop the action of the particular points? Because there are other points important for Ukraine in which the sides respect the territorial integrity of each other and confirm the inviolability of the existing borders between them.

The president noted that according to the norms of the international law, these points of the treaty remain in force independently from the future cancelation of the particular points by the parliament.

Ukraine and Russia signed the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership in 1997. The agreement stipulates the basic principles of bilateral relations - strategic partnership, recognition and respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity, and mutual commitments not to use each other's territory in the breach of each other's security.

The treaty was extended for 10 years in 2008. Its action expires in April 2019.According to her sister, the advocates do not escort Savchenko as they involved in other processes

MP Nadia Savchenko arrested on March 23 for two months was transferred from the remand center to the hospital for the examination as Vira Savchenko, her sister reported to 112 Ukraine.

The remand center informed me, telling that she was consensually taken to the hospital for the examination as I understood. I will ask for a date today to understand how it has ended, she said.

According to Vira Savchenko, the advocates do not escort Savchenko as they involved in other processes.

On April 11, the SBU held the search at the apartment of Savchenko and confiscated a PC server and gifted pistol with bullets.

As we reported Shevchenkivsky Court of Kyiv decided on the preventive measures for Savchenko, which is custody for two months until May 20, 2018, without a right for a bail. Besides, the Court decided that the detention on March 22 was illegal. On March 29, the Appeal Court of Kyiv kept Savchenkos arrest effective.

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.

Also, it was reported that 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.Enjoy the first large-scale museum exhibition dedicated to tramp art since 1975. More than 150 examples of tramp art, concentrating on works from the United States, with additional international examples.

For Immediate Release: October 24, 2016 (Santa Fe, NM) The Museum of International Folk Art presents No Idle Hands: The Myths & Meanings of Tramp Art, the first large-scale museum exhibition dedicated to tramp art since 1975. The exhibition will present more than 150 examples of tramp art, concentrating on works from the United States, with additional examples from France, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Canada, Mexico and Brazil to demonstrate the far reach this art form has had. Additionally, the show will analyze and dismantle the myths and misperceptions about tramp art, particularly as they relate to assumptions related to class, quality, and the anonymity of the makers.

Tramp art describes a particular type of chip-carved woodwork that was practiced in Europe and the United States between the 1870s and 1940s, making use of discarded cigar boxes or crates that were then notch-carved along the edges and layered. Objects made were primarily boxes and frames, but other household objects such as small private altars, crosses, medicine cabinets, wall pockets, clock cases, plant stands, and even furniture can be found.

"Tramp art's place in art history has been troublesome. It has had detractorspeople who regard it as 'the ugly duckling' of folk artbut also numerous champions," said Laura Addison, Curator of North American & European Folk Art at the Museum of International Folk Art, and the show's curator. "This exhibition will erase any doubts about the quality and craftsmanship of the work and situate tramp art as a practice at the crossroads of cultural transformation at the turn of the 20th century," she said. Addison also pointed out that by juxtaposing historic pieces with those by contemporary artists working in the tramp art style, the exhibition frames this art form as an ongoing tradition that continues to capture the public's imaginationmyths and all.

"The ingenious objects in the Tramp Art exhibition use recycled or repurposed wood, and highlight a moment in time a century ago when artisans, many of them immigrants to the US, created a new variety of folk art," said Khristaan D. Villela, Director of the Museum of International Folk Art. "They are a testament to the ability of untrained artists to produce objects of immense beauty and complexity," he said.

For many years, tramp art was believed to have been made by itinerants and hobos, thus its name. It has been demonstrated, however, that this belief, first put in print by Frances Lichten in a 1959 Pennsylvania Folklife article, is erroneous. Nonetheless, the name "tramp art" has remained the only terminology used for this practice, and the paucity of scholarly studies to dispel the mistaken notions about tramp art have allowed the myths to persist.

Whittling objects such as wood chains and ball-in-cage whimsies was a common pastime, including among railriding "hobos," and some examples of tramp art were likely by the hand of itinerant laborers or artisans. However, this style of carving was more commonly the practice of family men and blue-collar factory workers making functional domestic objects or gifts for the women in their lives. Efforts have been made in recent years to identify makers by name and unearth their biographies; these personal narratives illustrate a very different story of the makers of tramp art. As these makers and their stories come to light, it has become obvious that home and family are central to an understanding of the practice of tramp art.

No Idle Hands will present tramp art objects according to four primary areas: Introduction/historical context, home & nation, frames & boxes and devotional objects. Works in the exhibition will come from the Museum of International Folk Art permanent collection as well as loans from a number of private and museum collections across the country. An exhibition publication will accompany the exhibition, with essays by Laura Addison, Curator of North American & European Folk Art, Museum of International Folk Art; Leslie Umberger, a curator in the area of folk art and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; and Eric Zafran, a retired curator of European art, most recently at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

The Museum of International Folk Art Museum Shop is located in the museum at 706 Camino Lejo (Museum Hill just off Old Santa Fe Trail). 505-982-5186.

MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART

The Museum of International Folk Art is a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

The Museum of International Folk Art's mission is "to enrich the human spirit by connecting people with the arts, traditions and cultures of the world." Founded in 1953 by Florence Dibell Bartlett, the museum holds the world's largest international folk art collection of more than 150,000 objects from six continents and over 150 nations.

The museum's collections represent a broad range of global artists whose artistic expressions make Santa Fe an international crossroads of culture. For many visitors, fascination with folk art begins upon seeing the whimsical toys and traditional objects within the Girard Collection. For others, the international textiles, ceramics, carvings and other cultural treasures in the Neutrogena Collection provide the allure. The museum's historic and contemporary Latino and Hispano folk art collections, spanning the Spanish Colonial period to modern-day New Mexico, reflect how artists respond to their time and place in ways both delightful and sobering. In 2010, the museum opened the Mark Naylor and Dale Gunn Gallery of Conscience, where exhibitions encourage visitors to exchange ideas on complex issues of human rights and social justice.

Over 90,000 national and international visitors visit the Museum International Folk Art every year. Through folk art, the museum encourages all to find a common ground upon which to craft better lives for all.

Museum exhibitions and programs are supported by donors to the Museum of New Mexico Foundation and its Director's Leadership Fund, Exhibitions Development Fund, and Fund for Museum Education, as well as by the International Folk Art Foundation, also established by museum founder Florence Dibell Bartlett.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!)Are you one of those rare people who loved Downton Abbey but wished it had more gore? AMC has come to your rescue with the highbrow hybrid The Terror. Executive produced in grand style by movie bigwig Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Black Hawk Down, Gladiator) and based on Dan Simmons best selling historical horror novel from 2007, The Terror is prestige binge-watching at its best.

Simmons novel was based on the real-life story of the Royal Navys polar exploration ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. In 1854 Captain Sir John Franklin led an expedition to locate the mythical Northwest Passage. As a particularly harsh winter hit North America, Franklin and his crew of 129 men vanished without a trace. Simmons novel speculatesnot without a certain dose of historical evidencewhat happened to the crews of the two ships after they became icebound in the Canadian Arctic.

The shows stellar cast starts with Ciaran Hinds (best known as Julius Caesar in HBOs Rome) as Captain Franklin and Jared Harris (Lane Pryce on AMCs Mad Men) as his second-in-command, Captain Francis Crozier. Franklin is the more adventurous (we might say foolhardy) of the two, while Crozier is the more cautious. Its Crozier who recommends turning back when winter bears down on the expedition. But Franklin is determined to do the Queens Duty, and presses on. Its not long before the Terror and the Erebus are sitting on a shelf of ice, unable to move.

With food supplies dwindling and morale crumbling, the Captains debate various ways to escape. As a historical tale of survival, The Terror is gripping and down-to-earth. Some grim cinematography and the occasional, judicious use of CGI conjure up the dark and frozen atmosphere of the Arctic with deadly precision. But theres more than just frostbite and starvation preparing to take out these sailors. A haunting sequence in which a sailor braves the frozen sea to break a chunk of ice from the ships propeller is heavy with dread and hints at a dangerous world that wants nothing more than the quick and violent death of these intruding humans.

The story tips its hand toward the supernatural soon enough, when one of the expeditions looking for a way out of the ice field is attacked by what could be a polar bear. A very big polar bear. An impossibly big polar bear, in fact. In fear for their lives, the panicked sailors accidentally shoot a wandering Inuit shaman. Dragging the elderly shaman back to the ships, they try to save his life. But the doctor refuses to operate on a savage. When the old man expires, his daughter grows gravely concerned, knowing that he was the only one who could control Tuunbaq. Now the sailors have another problem to deal with, a bloodthirsty native demon who wants to munch on their internal organs.

The Terror has its fair share of monsters and gore, but the mysterious creature stalking our cast of Brits is actually only a small part of the horror laying in wait. Demon or no demon, these men are in deep doo-doo. Will it be the elements, the monster or their own dark natures that drags them down? Dont expect thrills on the level of John Carpenters The Thing. On the other hand, dont expect history lessons on par with Master and Commander. At 10 perfectly paced episodes, The Terror is a judicious balance of white-knuckle survival horror and classic historical drama.Ichabod explores the Age of Apostasy, predicted in 2 Thessalonians 2:3, with an emphasis on UOJ, Church Growth, and Emergent Church heresies. The antidote to these poisons is trusting the efficacious Word in the Means of Grace. John 16:8. Most readers are WELS, LCMS, ELS, or ELCA. This blog also covers the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the mainline denominations.Qatar Airways this week signed a letter of intent with aircraft manufacturer Boeing to purchase five 777 freighters valued at $1.7 billion.



Qatar Airways this week signed a letter of intent with Boeing to purchase five 777 freighters valued at $1.7 billion.

The addition of five 777 freighters is a significant moment for our cargo division, Akbar Al Baker, the airlines group CEO, said in a statement. As the worlds third-largest cargo operator, Qatar Airways continues to invest in fleet expansion.

Qatar Airways currently operates a fleet of nearly 100 Boeing planes and has about 100 more on order with the aircraft manufacturer.

The 777 freighter is capable of flying 4,900 nautical miles with a payload of 112 tons. The airplanes long range translates into significant savings as fewer stops mean lower landing fees, less congestion, lower cargo handling costs and shorter delivery times, Boeing said.YEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. Incumbent President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has won the April 11 presidential election by garnering overwhelming majority of votes.

Azerbaijans APA news agency reported that 3,723,278 ballots have been counted from the total 3,959,553, and the incumbent president has secured another term in office with 86%.

Zahid Oruc, an independent candidate, is 2nd with most votes  with only 3,11%.

The central electoral commission said 74,51% of eligible voters participated in the election.

Many reports on electoral fraud and violations were made during election day. Violations mostly included ballots stuffing, obstruction of reporters and multiple voting cases.

Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already congratulated Aliyev on winning the election.

Although eight candidates were running for office, Aliyev was widely expected to be re-elected to a 4th term as president. The authoritarian ruler was silenced the opposition, has obstructed freedom of speech in all forms, has jailed or expelled journalists, among many other human rights abuses.

The April 11 election was the first presidential election since the constitutional amendments of Azerbaijan, which Aliyev initiated to enable himself to maximally consolidate power and remain in office, and even run for office as much as he wants.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. Syrias government army has taken full control over the city of Douma that was held by the Jaysh al-Islam group and now entire Eastern Ghouta is under control of government forces, chief of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria Yuri Yevtushenko said on Thursday, TASS reports.



"Today saw a landmark event in Syrias history. A state flag hoisted on the Douma building heralded control over this settlement and, hence, over entire Eastern Ghouta," he said.

According to Yevtushenko, Russian military police units will be deployed in Douma following its liberation from militants to maintain law and order during its transition under control of Syrias legitimate government.

The Russian reconciliation center said earlier it is finishing evacuation of militants and their families from Douma. Yevtushenko said on Wednesday about 4,000 militants and members of their families had left the city during the past day, surrendering more than 400 pieces of weaponry, including large-caliber machineguns, grenade launchers, sniper and assault rifles.



English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, April 12, ARMENPRESS. Ankara's Republican Prosecutors Office filed a motion against eight lawmakers from the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), including ethnic Armenian MP Garo Paylan, Anadolu News Agency reported.

In addition to Paylan, the motion includes Osman Baydemir, Ailcan Onlu, Feleknas Uca, Sibel Yigitalp, Nadir Yildirimn, Dilek Ocalan and Mizgin Irgat.

The Prosecution is accusing the lawmakers of publicly mocking the Turkish nation, the Republic of Turkey, the government, soldiers of the state or the security system, spreading terror-related propaganda, violating rules of political parties and insulting the President of the Republic.

The motion filed against Garo Paylan in part mentions that the ethnic Armenian lawmaker had mocked the Turkish nation, the government and the republic and insulted the president in a May 1 2017 interview in Canada.

According to Article 83 of the Constitution, the motions can strip the MPs from their immunities. The prosecution submitted the motion to the ministry of justice.

A parliamentary committee is authorized to strip lawmakers from immunity.

MPs are entitled to appeal the committees ruling, and also appeal to the Constitutional Court.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. ARMENPRESS state news agency signed a cooperation agreement with Ruptly video news agency aimed at making its video content more in compliance with international standards.

The agreement was signed by Mihran Mirkhavoyan  Head of Foreign Affairs Service at ARMENPRESS state news agency, and Indira Zharova  Territory Manager for Russia and CIS at Ruptly video news agency.

Director of ARMENPRESS state news agency Aram Ananyan said the agreement will enable to develop the agencys video content in compliance with international standards.

In the activity of ARMENPRESS we attach great importance to the fact that all types of the content we produce are in accordance with international standards. In this sense this agreement will allow to make Ruptlys content available for us, as well as the content of ARMENPRESS available for our partner, and will enable to increase the quality of video production, Aram Ananyan said.

We are very happy for this new cooperation between ARMENPRESS and Ruptly. I think the cooperation between Armenias main state news agency and the Russian unique multimedia agency will be mutually beneficial for both sides. Armenia is a key strategic country, therefore, what is happening in Armenia, is also interesting in Russia and outside its borders, Indira Zharova said, adding that ARMENPRESS will have a chance to receive Ruptlys exclusive videos.

Mihran Mirkhavoyan also attached importance to the signing of this agreement and said ARMENPRESS news agency develops the direction of its video services. According to him, this cooperation will be a great impetus not only for exchange of materials, videos, but also for exchange of experience.

Having such partner, I think we will give new impetus to ARMENPRESSs video content. We will also transfer our videos. Such agreements not only suppose transfer of files, but also human interaction, exchange of experience and joint programs, Mihran Mirkhavoyan said.

SputnikPro project organized recently by Sputnik Armenia in Yerevan served as a platform for formation of this cooperaton. Head of Sputnik Armenia news agency and radio Dmitry Pisarenko informed that the project supposed a series of master-classes with the participation of leading Russian media managers and specialists.

The goal is to increase the professionalism of media outlets, create a competitive environment which leads to developments. Therefore, when Ruptly presented its projects at this platform, ARMENPRESS showed an interest which resulted in the signing of this agreement, Dmitry Pisarenko said.

Photos by Gevorg Perkuperkyan

English translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. The parliament approved the 2 million dollar loan agreement for improvement of irrigation systems between Armenia and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) on April 12.

62 lawmakers voted in favor of the agreement, while 31 voted against. The opposition Tsarukyan and Yelk factions voted against.

The agreement is an amendment to the 2013 loan agreement of improving irrigation systems which was ratified by the World Bank and Armenia. The program planned 30 million dollars in loan, an additional 7,5 million dollar co-financing for the improvement of the mechanical irrigation systems namely in Meghri, Kaghtsrashen and Baghramyan-Norakert.

But the new program will not be directed to the previous one, as it is a completely new project.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. Images posted by Armenian TV host, model and actress Nazeni Hovhannisyan showing a group of people who allegedly verbally abused her have gone viral on social media.

Hovhannisyan posted a photo of the vehicle belonging to the group of people, showing the license plates. The images were taken outside the Erebuni medical center.

The men, who are seen gathered at the rear of the car, are apparently drinking something and making toasts.

The model said she was visiting her friend at the hospital when the group of men verbally abused her as she got out of her car in the parking lot.

I parked, got out, began walking toward the entry when I heard very disturbing offensive language  You shouldve come to take a photo with us you [expletive].

Hovhannisyan said she responded to the men, and one of them replied: Whatever, get out of here.

The actress also mentioned that there were numerous passersby who didnt do anything when the incident happened.

She also thanked the security of the hospital, who, according to the actress, intervened immediately upon being notified.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. Todays closed-door Cabinet meeting proceeded with much debates and busy agenda, acting minister of economic development and investments Suren Karayan told a press briefing after the meeting.

The agenda of the first closed-door session was busy, 73 issues were debated, we had many discussions. Its not about us expressing ourselves more freely, we are always free, open and transparent. Todays meeting was special not only because it was closed-door, but also because it had a wide agenda, he said.

After several years of open sessions, the government had earlier decided to hold the Cabinet meetings behind closed doors.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. The tourism department of Artsakhs ministry of culture, youth affairs and tourism has developed a B&B (bad and breakfast) guesthouse development program, reports Armenpress.

Head of the tourism department Artak Grigoryan said the first stage of the program includes up to 15 communities of Artsakhs Martakert and Shahumyan regions.

The following communities were selected as they are located on the northern tourism route and Road Trail along the entire length of Artsakh. The program will be implemented by the assistance of Armenias Small and Medium Entrepreneurship Development National Center and in cooperation with the Artsakh Investment Fund. There is already an agreement with the SME DNC on involvement of respective specialists, Grigoryan said.

He also stated that the community residents interested in this program will pass respective lectures aimed at effectively organizing the guesthouse service in communities in the future.

As it is known, ecotourism is one of the prospective tourism directions in Artsakh. Artak Grigoryan believes that the establishment of B&B guesthouses will create preconditions also for ecotourism developments.

English translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. Tsarukyan faction of the Armenian Parliament will hold a session in coming days chaired by head of the faction Gagik Tsarukyan during which the issue of the candidate for the prime minister to be nominated by the ruling political force will be discussed, Tsarukyan faction MP Iveta Tonoyan told Armenpress, in response to a question whether they are going to support RPA leader Serzh Sargsyans candidacy for the PM or not.

The MP said the Republican Party only in the evening of April 11 announced that they will nominate party leader Serzh Sargsyans candidacy for the prime minister, therefore, the Tsarukyan faction didnt have any discussion on this issue yet. I think that discussion will be held in the coming days, the faction will hold a session chaired by Gagik Tsarukyan. We will discuss the issue of the candidate for the PM, will make a decision, and you will see our voting, Tonoyan said.

After the session of the Executive Body of the Republican Party of Armenia on April 11, Vice Speaker of the Parliament Eduard Sharmazanov announced that the party will propose the Board to nominate Serzh Sargsyans candidacy for the prime minister. Sharmazanov assured that no one elses candidacy except from that of Serzh Sargsyan has been discussed.

On April 9 Armenia transitioned to a parliamentary system. On the same day Armen Sarkissian was sworn in as 4th President of Armenia. The government has resigned, but the PM and ministers will continue fulfilling their duties as acting PM and ministers before the new government is formed. The election of the PM will be held in the Parliament on April 17.

English translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. The government has approved three investment programs, acting minister of economic development and investments Suren Karayan said after todays Cabinet meeting.

The total value of these programs is 21,5 billion drams [roughly 44,500,00 dollars] and 475 jobs will be created. Investments were made in winemaking, brandy production and light industry, he said.

Karayan highlighted the fact that the programs include both local and foreign investments.

This shows that there is economic activation in the recent period, and we hope the activation will continue in Armenia.

The decisions enabled Ararat Wine Factory to use customs privileges for importing equipment and raw materials, which the company will use in winemaking and brandy production.

860,000,000 drams are planned to be invested and up to 100 jobs will be created.

The government also granted ABC Textile a privilege of 3-year delay for VAT payments of imports.

ABC Textile will operate a plant in Artashat, with investment amounting more than 8 billion drams.

The same privilege was granted to another textile company  Anitex. The company will make nearly 8,6 billion drams investments.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. The verbal abuse incident involving Armenian TV star Nazeni Hovhannisyan is viewed as an insult, and since insult is not an offense with criminal liability, police cant take any measures in this case, Edgar Janoyan, director of the Press, Media and Analysis Department of the Police Force told ARMENPRESS.

The citizen can file a lawsuit to a court and solve the issue in the civil-legal arena, Janoyan said.

Asked whether or not this incident contains disorderly conduct, Janoyan said if a person thinks he or she has been a victim of disorderly conduct than the person should file a report in the police department.

The police will launch proceedings on the report and find out if it was disorderly conduct or an insult. I believe, according to Nazeni Hovhannisyans post, it was an insult, he said.

Ara Ghazaryan, international law expert and attorney, says the incident can be viewed as public insult. We are dealing with civil law relations here. A person can file a civil lawsuit and a court can deliver a verdict on public insult, demanding compensation for moral damages or a public apology from the person who made the insult, he said.

Images posted by Armenian TV host, model and actress Nazeni Hovhannisyan showing a group of people who allegedly verbally abused her have gone viral on social media.

Hovhannisyan posted a photo of the vehicle belonging to the group of people, showing the license plates. The images were taken outside the Erebuni medical center.

The men, who are seen gathered at the rear of the car, are apparently drinking something and making toasts.

The model said she was visiting her friend at the hospital when the group of men verbally abused her as she got out of her car in the parking lot.

I parked, got out, began walking toward the entry when I heard very disturbing offensive language  You shouldve come to take a photo with us you [expletive].

Hovhannisyan said she responded to the men, and one of them replied: Whatever, get out of here.

The actress also mentioned that there were numerous passersby who didnt do anything when the incident happened.

She also thanked the security of the hospital, who, according to the actress, intervened immediately upon being notified.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. US President Donald Trump didnt mention concrete dates for the attack on Syria, reports Armenpress.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!, Trump tweeted.

Earlier on April 11, Donald Trump warned Russia to get ready after Moscow vowed to shoot any missiles fired at Syria down.

They will be coming, nice and new and smart, Trump tweeted.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it, Trump tweeted.

English translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. Tsarukyan faction MP Iveta Tonoyan assures that there is no discussion in their faction on forming a coalition with the ruling powers. She told Armenpress that there is no such discussion also in the Prosperous Armenia party. There is no discussion on coalition in our faction, alliance and party, the lawmaker said.

Asked whether there is a possibility that Tsarukyan bloc will form a coalition with the ruling Republican Party of Armenia, Tonoyan said: I have never been guided by any kind of probability theories, I never answered to questions with if.

Recently some media reports are being circulated according to which the Tsarukyan bloc is going to form a coalition with the ruling forces ahead of the formation of the new government.

The Republican Party of Armenia and the ARF signed a memorandum on forming a political coalition on May 11, 2017.

English translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. The leadership of the Congressional Armenian Caucus today called on their U.S. House colleagues to join them in pressing US President Donald Trump to reject Turkeys gag-rule by honestly and accurately commemorating the Armenian Genocide this April 24th, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

Recep Erdogan is undermining U.S. interests, insulting U.S. allies, and threatening U.S. forces, yet hes still granted a veto over U.S. policy on the Armenian Genocide, said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. American complicity in Ankaras genocide denial is a relic of the Cold War. It didnt make sense then, and it makes even less sense now. Take a moment today to ask your U.S. Representatives to demand an end to Turkeys gag-rule.

In a Dear Colleague letter to U.S. Representatives, Armenian Caucus Co-Chairs Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Jackie Speier (D-CA), David Trott (R-MI) and David Valadao (R-CA) as well as Vice-Chairs Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) explained that: The Armenian Genocide continues to stand as an important reminder that crimes against humanity must not go without recognition and condemnation. Through recognition of the Armenian Genocide, we pay tribute to the perseverance and determination of those who survived, as well as to the Americans of Armenian descent who continue to strengthen our country to this day. It is our duty to honor those contributions with an honest statement of history recognizing the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians as the 20th centurys first genocide. By commemorating the Armenian Genocide, we renew our commitment to prevent future atrocities. They closed by asking that the President: appropriately mark April 24th as a day of American remembrance of the Armenian Genocide.

The ANCA has launched a nationwide online letter writing and calling campaign urging Members of Congress to co-sign the Armenian Caucus letter to President Trump.

Text of Congressional Letter to President Trump

Dear President Trump:

We are writing to urge you to properly commemorate the 103 rd Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide on April 24th.

In leading an honest and accurate American remembrance of this known case of genocide, you will stand with President Reagan, who recognized the Armenian Genocide in 1981, and the Eisenhower Administration, which did the same in a 1951 submission to the International Court of Justice. The House of Representatives has also commemorated the Armenian Genocide, through H.J.Res.148 in 1975 and H.J.Res.247 in 1984.

Armenia remains deeply committed to expanding the bonds of friendship that have long connected the American and Armenian peoples. Among the proudest chapters in our shared history is Americas remarkable record of protesting the Genocide and in caring for the survivors of this crime. The United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1915, Henry Morgenthau, helped to chronicle the brutal extermination of the Armenian people through a campaign of mass murder and violent expulsion.

In the years after the genocide, Ambassador Morgenthau and other concerned Americans launched the Near East Relief, a congressionally chartered humanitarian organization, which raised $116 million (over $2.7 billion in 2018 dollars) to aid the victims of the Ottoman Empires mass murder of millions of Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Greeks, Syriacs, and other persecuted peoples. The generosity of the American people saved countless lives and helped to ensure the continued survival of the Armenian culture.

The Armenian Genocide continues to stand as an important reminder that crimes against humanity must not go without recognition and condemnation. Through recognition of the Armenian Genocide we pay tribute to the perseverance and determination of those who survived, as well as to the Americans of Armenian descent who continue to strengthen our country to this day. It is our duty to honor those contributions with an honest statement of history recognizing the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians as the 20th centurys first genocide. By commemorating the Armenian Genocide, we renew our commitment to prevent future atrocities.

In the spirit of honoring the victims and redoubling our commitment to prevent genocide, we ask you to appropriately mark April 24th as a day of American remembrance of the Armenian Genocide.

Thank you for taking our views into consideration.

Sincerely. "

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. A large-scale article about Armenias travel and tourism opportunities has been published in the National Geographic Traveler China magazine with a total circulation of 1,000,000 copies, FB user Sona Sahakyan said.

The senior editor of the magazine visited Armenia at the invitation of Sahakyan for the article.

I am very proud to share the first ever article on Armenia as a tourism destination in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELER CHINA with the total circulation of 1 mln!!!! And this is just the beginning!!!, Sahakyan said on Facebook.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. The early presidential election in Azerbaijan took place within a restrictive political environment and under laws that curtail fundamental rights and freedoms, which are prerequisites for genuine democratic elections, the OSCE said in a statement, reports Armenpress.

Against this backdrop and in the absence of pluralism, including in the media, the election lacked genuine competition. Other candidates refrained from directly challenging or criticizing the incumbent, and distinction was not made between his campaign and his official activities, the statement says.

On election day the international observers reported widespread disregard for mandatory procedures, a lack of transparency, and numerous serious irregularities, including ballot box stuffing. More than half of the vote counts were assessed negatively, largely due to deliberate falsifications and an obvious disregard for procedures.

The statement says overall, the campaign generated limited public engagement. The ruling party campaign in favour of the incumbent was well-organized and well-resourced, while the candidate did not campaign himself but made visits across the country and received many high-profile foreign dignitaries in his official capacity. The campaigns of the other seven candidates were limited.

We have to consider that, in a political environment where democratic principles are compromised and the rule of law is not observed, fair and free elections are not possible, said Viorel Riceard Badea, Head of the delegation from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. On election day we observed several irregularities, but there is no way to know how this affected the outcome of the election.

Corien Jonker, Head of the Election Observation Mission from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said fundamental rights and freedoms, which are pre-requisites for genuine democratic elections, were severely restricted in practice. The authorities should deliver on Azerbaijans commitment as an OSCE participating State to respect, protect and support the democratic rights of its citizens, Jonker said.

English translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. The Archaeology Museum of Tigranakert of Artsakh is full of visitors throughout the year, Hamlet Petrosyan, head of the Artsakh archaeological expedition, said at a meeting with reporters on April 12, Armenpress reports.

He said mainly tourists from France, Germany, Italy, as well as Russia visit the museum. The Tigranakert museum hosts more visitors that an average museum of Yerevan, he said.

Hamlet Petrosyan said the museums exhibits increase every year. We do not immediately transfer the materials excavated from archaeological sites to the museum. The findings are sent to the Yerevan State Universitys Archaeology Laboratory where they are being processed, cleaned and then sent to museums. Of course, there are also some findings, such as separate stone monuments, which are immediately transferred to the museum, he said.

He noted that everything is created in the museum for the preservation of archaeological discoveries, except from a heat regulation system.

Hamlet Petrosyan said during 2017 archaeologists carried out excavations in 10 archaeological monuments of Artsakh. On April 18 the 2017 report of archaeological research will be held in Stepanakert.

English translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, 12 APRIL, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 12 April, USD exchange rate is up by 0.60 drams to 483.72 drams. EUR exchange rate is down by 1.24 drams to 596.72 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate is up by 0.29 drams to 7.81 drams. GBP exchange rate is down by 0.46 drams to 685.33 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price is up by 209.35 drams to 21006.81 drams. Silver price is up by 1.49 drams to 257.62 drams. Platinum price is up by 80.13 drams to 14509.98 drams.YEREVAN, APRIL 12, ARMENPRESS. Speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia Ara Babloyan has sent condolence letters to the President of the Council of the Nation Abdelkhader Bensalah and the President of the People's National Assembly of Algeria Said Bouhaja, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the parliament of Armenia.

It was with deep sorrow that we learnt about the tragic crash of the military airplane nearby Boufarik airbase in Algeria, which claimed lives of numerous people.

I extent our deep condolences to you on behalf of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia and personally me and the words of condole to the families and relatives of the victims, read the letters.

English translator/editor: Tigran SirekanyanNEW YORK CITYWhen FBI agents raided the offices of Michael Cohenthe personal attorney and fixer for Donald Trumpon Monday, they grabbed records related to the notorious Access Hollywood tape, as well as records related to the Stormy Daniels hush money payoff, according to a report Wednesday by The New York Times.

The Access Hollywood tape, which was obtained and published by The Washington Post just one month before the 2016 presidential election, revealed then-candidate Trump speaking in vulgar and abusive terms about women and appearing to brag about his own propensity for sexually assault. At one point Trump is heard to say that because he is a star he can simply grab women by the pussy, without their consent, and they let him get away with it.

But what is the connection between the Access Hollywood tape and the $130,000 payoff made to Daniels by Cohen in exchange for her silence about her alleged affair with Trump in 2006? That remains unclear. But the answer may be found in the lawsuit filed by Daniels against Cohen and Trump seeking to be released from the hush agreement.

In that lawsuit, Daniels draws a clear connection between the Access Hollywood tape release and her decision to speak publicly about her sexual relationship with Trump. And as a result, Cohens attempt to silence her about the affair was also sparked by the infamous tape, the lawsuit implies.

Within days of publication of the Access Hollywood tape, several women came forward publicly to tell their personal stories about their sexual encounters with Mr. Trump. Around this time, (Ms. Daniels) likewise sought to share details concerning her relationship and encounters with Mr. Trump with various media outlets, the lawsuit says.

How the tape connects to Cohen, or why prosecutors believed that Cohen would possess records about the recording of Trumps crude remarks remains unclear, based on information from the FBI search warrants obtained for the raids on Cohen, the Times reported.

But according to the Times story, federal prosecutors appear extremely interested in Cohens attempts during the 2016 campaign to put a lid on information that could prove detrimental to Trump.

Daniels lawyer, Michael Avenatti, said on Wednesday he believes the FBI raids on Cohen were sparked by Daniels lawsuit.

Theres no question that, that raid resulted in significant part from the filing of our case, Avenatti said in a CNN interview. They would not be raiding Michael Cohens offices a practicing attorney, it is a high bar to be able to go do thatthey would not be able to execute on the warrants without substantial evidence of wrongdoing. We have every reason to believe that wrongdoing stems from this $130,000 payment and the NDA.

Daniels herself will sit for her first nationally televised interview since her March 25 appearance on 60 Minutes when she appears on ABC TVs daytime talk show The View on April 17. She had been slated to appear in The View on February 1, but backed out of the interview at that time.

Photo via Wikimedia CommonsNEW YORK CITYFederal investigators who raided the offices of Donald Trump's personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen on Monday were looking for documents that could shed light on hush money payments made to Stormy Daniels, and to former Playboy Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal, according to information contained in the search warrants used to carry out the raids.

Now, federal investigators are demanding more documentsrecords of any communications between Cohen and two top executives of the tabloid National Enquirer newspaper, NBC News is reporting on Thursday.

Those two Enquirer executives are named as David Pecker, CEO of the Enquirers parent company American Media Inc., and Dylan Howard, the companys chief content officer. American Media also owns several other supermarket tabloids including the Globe, National Examiner and US Weekly.

Though Cohen himself has acknowledged arranging the $130,000 payoff to Daniels, claiming that he did so out of his own personal funds, it was American Media Inc. who signed a non-disclosure agreement with McDougal, paying her $150,000 to keep quiet about her alleged sexual relationship with Trump. McDougal is now suing to be released from that hush agreement, as Daniels is suing to be released from hers.

On Thurdsday, both the Associated Press and New Yorker magazine online reported another payoff made by the Enquirer, apparently to squelch an embarrassing story about Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

According to those two reports, the Enquirer learned a doorman at one of Trumps properties, the Trump World Tower skyscraper in Manhattan, knew of a rumor that Trump had fathered a love child with a woman who worked in the building. While the news outlets could not confirm the rumor, they did confirm that American Media Inc. paid $30,000 to the doorman to keep quiet about the supposed sixth Trump child.

In her lawsuit, McDougal alleges that her then-lawyer, Keith Davidson, colluded with Cohen to set up the $150,000 hush-money payoff to keep her silent about her affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007.

Cohen told the Associated Press, according to the AP report on Thursday, that he communicated with the Enquirer about the Trump love child story, but he denied knowing in advance about the payment to the doorman, Dino Sajudin. Cohen told the news service that he was simply acting as Trumps spokesperson when he talked to the tabloid about the story.

But according to Thursdays report, federal investigators appear to believe there may have been more to the story of Cohens contacts with the Enquirer on both the McDougal and love child stories.

American Media boss Pecker is a close friend of Trump, and The National Enquirer has frequently published sensational but largely unfounded stories attacking Trumps perceived enemies, some of which may be seen by visiting this link.

Photo via CNN Screen CaptureLOS ANGELESA new accusation of sexual assault has been lodged against porn icon Ron Jeremy, this one allegedly having occured at his own favorite haunt.

TMZ reports that a woman whose name was not disclosed filed a report with the L.A. Sheriff's Department claiming that Jeremy last December followed her into the bathroom at Sunset Strip landmark the Rainbow Bar & Grillwhich Jeremy is widely known to frequentand proceeded to grope her against her will. The case has been turned over to the district attorney's office for review.

This news comes on the heels of Jeremy being cleared of similar charges brought against him by a woman in Washington state following an appearance he made at a Tacoma area Castle Megastore.

AVN was not able to reach Jeremy immediately for comment on this new allegation.

Photo of Ron Jeremy from Adultcon in 2016 by Chris King/@ReelSeduction.LOS ANGELESStormy Daniels has signed an exclusive agreement with live video chat platform, Camster.com.

"I am so excited to be working with Camster.com for my live webcam shows, said Daniels, whose most recent live show was on April 7. It is going to be a great platform for me to interact with my fans!"

Camster spokesman Jeff remarked, "We have worked with Stormy Daniels for a long time on Camster.com, and were excited for the opportunity to formalize the partnership. She adds a lot of fun to the site, and the users have a great time interacting with her. And, especially lately with all the attention she has been getting. We have weekly live broadcasts scheduled with Stormy and the response has been amazing."

Daniels, a contract director for Digital Playground and AVN Hall of Fame member, has become an international figure in recent months on the heels of news of an alleged affair in 2006 with President Trump being covered up with a hush-money agreement worth $130K a month before the 2016 election.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.Political scientists Taylor and McLennan note the governor will appeal, keeping the battles over separation of powers alive

Gov. Roy Cooper took three strikes in Wake County Superior Court this week as judges ruled in favor of the General Assembly in a continuing battle over separation of powers.Political analysts say the rulings, while an immediate defeat for Cooper, aren't the end of the story. The setbacks involved legal fights between Cooper and lawmakers covering the Opportunity Scholarship Program, the number of judges on the state Court of Appeals, and spending a large legal settlement with Volkswagen.Andy Taylor, professor of political science at the School of International and Public Affairs at N.C. State University, said the squabbling between the governor and the General Assembly probably won't end anytime soon.Taylor said.But Cooper - who first sued the General Assembly in December 2016 - will appeal, so the fight continues.Ford Porter, Cooper's press secretary, said.David McLennan, professor of political science at Meredith College, said the recent court decisions are defeats for Cooper on policy and political fronts.McLennan said.Still, McLennan argued Cooper won't suffer as much in the long run.McLennan said.The respective parties are weighing in, nevertheless.House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, and Senate leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, shared their thoughts on the ruling in a news release.Moore said.Berger argued.In one instance, the governor grappled with General Assembly leaders over who was responsible for millions of dollars in a settlement with Volkswagen. The $183 million results from a settlement with the federal government over VW's violations of the Clean Air Act.Cooper argued that, through the Department of Environmental Quality, his office could control how the money was spent. Cooper also claimed constitutional authority over how to spend various federal block grants. Berger and Moore contended the legislative branch was responsible for appropriating those funds.Superior Court Judge Henry Hight Jr. ruled alone in the VW settlement case . Hight argued the General Assembly has the stronger claim to the settlement funds.Hight ruled.Hight argued there's no basis in the Constitution or in state court precedent to deviate from the budget and appropriation process.The other debates centered on the Opportunity Scholarships and the number of judges on the Court of Appeals. Cooper has argued House Bill 239, which reduces the number of judges on the Court of Appeals from 15 to 12, restricts his constitutional authority to appoint judges.Cooper has also objected to a provision in the 2017 budget law that includes funding for the Opportunity Scholarships for the next 10 years. Judges Jay Hockenbury and Nathaniel Poovey ruled for the General Assembly and rejected Cooper's argument that either act infringed on his constitutional duties. Hight dissented.Hockenbury and Poovey said the governor failed to prove the General Assembly acted unconstitutionally by reducing the number of positions on the Court of Appeals. H.B. 239 would eliminate the three positions as judges retired, so the law wouldn't affect Cooper's ability to appoint replacements for seats that no longer existed.The court also ruled Cooper's constitutional right to recommend a budget wasn't infringed by the legislature's requirement to include certain provisions, such as the Opportunity Scholarships, in the base budget.budget.Albaad USA, Inc. will invest $45 million to increase production and distribution capacity in Reidsville

Contact: Ford Porter

Ford Porter govpress@nc.gov

RALEIGH: Albaad USA, Inc., a multinational manufacturer of wet wipes and other hygiene products will expand its U.S. operations in Reidsville, creating 302 jobs, Governor Roy Cooper announced today. The company will invest $45 million to produce additional lines of personal care products in Rockingham County.said Governor Cooper.Albaad USA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Albaad Holdings, with headquarters in Israel. The company maintains manufacturing facilities in Israel, Germany, Poland, and the United States. The company produces products in two broad categories, wet wipes and feminine hygiene. Leading products include baby wipes, cosmetics and household wipes, and tampons.said Gidi Tenne, Plant Manager for Albaad.said North Carolina Commerce Secretary Anthony M. Copeland.The North Carolina Department of Commerce and the Economic Development Partnership of N.C. (EDPNC) led the state's support for the company's expansion.Albaad will add a variety of positions with this expansion, including engineers, technicians, and production and logistics personnel. Salaries for the new positions will average $38,300, which is higher than the current Rockingham County average wage of $34,620.Albaad's expansion in Rockingham County will be facilitated, in part, by a Job Development Investment Grant (JDIG) approved by the state's Economic Investment Committee earlier today. Over the course of the 12-year term of this grant, the project will grow the state's economy by an estimated $810 million. Using a formula that takes into account the new tax revenues generated by the new jobs, the JDIG agreement authorizes the potential reimbursement to the company of up to $3,688,200, spread over 12 years. State payments only occur following performance verification by the departments of Commerce and Revenue that the company has met its incremental job creation and investment targets. JDIG projects result in positive net tax revenue to the state treasury, even after taking into consideration the grant's reimbursement payments to a given company.Because Albaad chose to expand in Rockingham County, classified by the state's economic tier system as Tier 2, the company's JDIG agreement also calls for moving nearly $410,000 into the state's Industrial Development Fund - Utility Account. The Utility Account helps rural communities finance necessary infrastructure upgrades to attract future business. When new jobs are created in a Tier 2 county such as Rockingham, the new tax revenue generated through JDIG grants helps more economically challenged communities elsewhere in the state. More information on the state's economic tier designations is available here.said Senate Leader Phil Berger.said N.C. Representative Kyle Hall.Partnering with the North Carolina Department of Commerce and the EDPNC on this project were the North Carolina General Assembly, the North Carolina Community College System, Duke Energy, Rockingham County, the City of Reidsville, The Rockingham County Center for Economic Development, Small Business and Tourism, and the City of Reidsville Economic Development Department.Tom Campbell

If you could wave a magic wand and make one change that would provide the greatest benefit to rural North Carolina what would it be? I've been intrigued by that question ever since it was first posed during a panel discussion on rural issues.I thank the many readers, who gave some very valuable answers to that question, but will defer to Patrick Woodie, CEO of The North Carolina Rural Center. Woodie has just completed a tour of all 80 rural counties in our state, meeting people and viewing conditions. Patrick says if he could only choose one thing his top priority would be the completion of last-mile broadband Internet in rural counties. Our state has done a commendable job of completing middle-mile broadband to libraries, schools, hospitals and some state agencies, but hasn't finished the job.Why is this so important and why hasn't it been completed? The Internet is no longer a luxury but almost a necessity. With a scarcity of healthcare providers, especially in mental health, telemedicine is essential to make sure rural areas get proper healthcare. There are some hard-to-fill disciplines in our schools; the Internet can put a master teacher in every classroom. Our students need Internet access to complete homework assignments and do research without hanging around outside closed libraries or coffee shops, too frequently happens. No business can function well without the ability to contact customers, market their products and make purchases. And even though it is often competition to local merchants Internet access is a must-have for today's consumers to shop, learn and be entertained. If we have any hopes of people moving into or even remaining in rural North Carolina access to broadband Internet is essential.The reasons why broadband isn't universally available is economic. Most existing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are for-profit ventures and laying fiber optic cable is expensive in densely populated communities, but is cost prohibitive in rural areas where, by definition, there are fewer than 250 people per square mile.In accomplishing last-mile broadband availability to all areas we need to be creative, collaborative and cost effective. Each county's solution will be a bit different, some involving private for-profit enterprises, but others having a mixture of for-profit, non-profit and philanthropic organizations. And no one technology will be right for every area, so a mixture of fiber, fixed wireless and other technologies will be required. The ultimate test will be whether or not the service is affordable. $50 to $75 per month is accepted as the upper limit customers will pay for broadband.There are some examples where this is working in our state. In Northwestern Carolina Skyline telephone, a co-op, provides broadband for rural areas of Alleghany, Ashe and Watauga Counties, using a combination of landline and fixed wireless broadcast signals. East Carolina Broadband, a private group, provides ISP service using grain silos and other tall structures to broadcast fixed wireless signals. Rural electric co-ops are considering offering service and the City of Wilson's Greenlight project has worked very well, even though larger ISPs don't like the competition.We cannot tackle all rural issues at one time, but providing last-mile broadband Internet service is a goal we can and should pledge to complete for the wellbeing of all people.An epidemic of stabbings and acid attacks in London has gotten so bad that London mayor Sadiq Khan is announcing broad new "knife control" policies designed to keep these weapons of war out of the hands of Londoners looking to cause others harm.The "tough, immediate" measures involve an incredible police crackdown, a ban on home deliveries of knives and acid, and expanding law enforcement stop-and-search powers so that police may stop anyone they believe to be a threat, or planning a knife or acid attack.Khan announced Friday that the city has created a "violent crime taskforce of 120 officers" tasked with rooting out knife-wielding individuals in public spaces, and is pumping nearly $50 million into the Metropolitan Police department so that they can better arm themselves against knife attacks. He's also empowering the Met Police to introduce "targeted patrols with extra stop and search powers for areas worst-affected," according to a statement.The mayor took to Twitter to announce his new policies.Strangely enough, Khan is responsible for decreasing the number of stop-and-searches, having previously declared the tactic racist and potentially Islamophobic. It's also not clear what local Londoners will now use to cut their food.Parliament is also set to take up heavy "knife control" legislation when it resumes this week. The U.K. government is expected to introduce a ban on online knife sales and home knife deliveries, declare it "illegal to possess zombie knives and knuckledusters in private" - "zombie knives" are those defined as being manufactured for the purpose of being used as a person-to-person weapon - and ban sales of caustic materials to anyone under the age of 18, the Independent reports.London has seen a dramatic uptick in murder rates, surpassing even New York City in the number of homicides every month since the beginning of 2018. It has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world, and, technically, knives carried "without good reason" are off limits to anyone under the age of 18.Social orders exist throughout the animal kingdom. Comprised of dominant and subordinate individuals, these orders dictate how members of a group interact, influencing everything from food access to mating privileges.

Sometimes, the behavior of the dominant individual is more extreme, and the alpha actively inhibits interactions between other members of the group. This sort of monarchistic dominance has been reported in male laboratory mice and African lions. The behavior is not restricted to mammals, however.

In a 1962 study published in the Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences, researchers observed this monarchistic behavior in captive male mosquitofish. In a series of controlled experiments, the study authors witnessed a range of aggressive behaviors being used to establish the dominant individual, who then suppressed interactions between the remaining fish (Caldwell and Caldwell 1962).

Tanja Zerulla, a Ph.D. candidate at Florida International University (FIU), is currently studying social behaviors in the Eastern Mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki). While her research is specifically looking at the role of color in social interactions, this 1962 study offered valuable insight into broader mosquitofish behavior. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) provided Zerulla with easy access to the publication.

Ive been working on defining the social behavior of male Eastern Mosquitofish color morphs, explains Zerulla. While reading, I found references to a few older articles about the genus (Gambusia) behavior. While looking on Google Scholar, I found the article Monarchistic dominance in small groups of captive male mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis patruelis  and it linked me to BHL! I was able to read about how male fish interact with each other and now have a point of comparison for my own research.

Zerulla has been studying fish biology for over six years. Her research passion is understanding the underlying causes of biological behavior. Zerullas undergraduate research included studies on the effects of chemicals and compounds in water systems on fish swimming behavior and the impact of nucleotides on fish feeding behavior. For her graduate work, Zerulla applied to several programs with leaders in the field of behavioral biology.

In particular, I wanted to work with someone who studied behavior across biological levels  from genetics and physiology to ecology and evolution, explains Zerulla. I found my fit at Florida International University working for Dr. Philip Stoddard, where I now study how color pattern is linked to social behaviors in the Eastern Mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki).

Zerulla first discovered BHL through Twitter several years ago, when she began following scientists and other graduate students on the platform.

Some of the graduate students were tweeting about their efforts to transcribe field journals and label taxonomic images for BHL, recalls Zerulla. One of my first major interactions was helping someone figure out that the image they were working on was a fetal Squalus squalus (dogfish shark) and translating German on an image of an Axolotl.

While she has just recently begun exploring how BHL can support her current research, Zerullas primary interactions with the Library still occur through social media, where the publications  and particularly scientific illustrations  shared through BHLs feeds serve as a valuable source of inspiration and motivation.

I love seeing the historical drawings of animals and plants! Seeing beautiful images drawn by people who were curious about the world reminds me of my own love for science, affirms Zerulla. Grad school can be overwhelming, so little reminders of my passion for natural history and science renews my energy for research.

She finds these drawings so inspiring that she would love to have them displayed as a tab in the search results on the BHL website to allow easier discovery. But while she thoroughly enjoys these illustrations, for Zerulla, the best thing about BHL is its vast, open access collection.

I was surprised but really pleased to see so much scientific literature available for free to the public, lauds Zerulla. I personally have pushed for open access releases of my published papers because I think that everyone  whether a scientist in the US or Indonesia, or a person whos just really interested in fish  should be able to access scientific literature.

We couldnt agree more. We are proud to know that our commitment to open access is helping to advance global scientific research and inspire discovery of the natural world.

Follow Tanja Zerulla on Twitter at @TalkstoFish.

Reference

Caldwell, Melba C. and David K. Caldwell. 1962. Monarchistic dominance in small groups of captive male mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis patruelis. Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences 61: 37-43.The Pet and Women Safety (PAWS) Act would protect battered partners and their pets by extending current federal domestic violence protections to include pets and authorizing a small amount of grant money to help domestic violence shelters accommodate pets or arrange for pet shelter. Photo by iStockphoto

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As the U.S. House and Senate agriculture committees begin work on a new Farm Bill, the Humane Society of the United States and the Humane Society Legislative Fund are pressing for this legislation, which has the potential to affect the lives of millions of animals, to include key provisions on animal fighting, horse soring, the trade in dogs and cats for human consumption, and domestic violence against pets. A group of 40 Republican and 40 Democratic representatives recently wrote a letter to House agriculture committee leaders, urging that the bill include such pro-animal measures.

One of our top priorities this year is to defeat a bill thats an assault on states rights and their ability to create and enforce a wide range of laws, including those relating to animal protection and food safety. Its sponsor, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, pushed for similar legislation during the last Farm Bill debate, but we were able to mobilize broad opposition and keep it out of the final House/Senate package. Were working to do the same thing this time around, and have already marshaled a diverse set of opponents.

Kings legislation, H.R. 4879/H.R. 3599, could completely undermine the authority of states to pass laws to protect animals and their citizens, and could mean that if one state tolerates the way a particular agriculture product is manufactured or producedno matter how hazardous the product or unacceptable the production processevery other state may have to do so as well. This bill has the potential to wipe out state laws protecting animals used for food from intensive confinement, such as Californias Proposition 2, and could also negate states efforts to combat puppy mills and prohibit the sale of foie gras, shark fins, horse meat and dog and cat meat.

Here are some of the provisions were working to get into the Farm Bill:

The Prevent All Soring Tactics Act: H.R. 1847 would crack down on soringthe intentional infliction of pain on the legs and hooves of Tennessee walking horses and related breeds to force them to perform an artificial, pain-based show gait known as the big lick. This bill would close loopholes in the 1970 Horse Protection Act that have enabled horse soring to persist. It would also end the failed system of industry self-policing, ban the devices used in the soring process, and strengthen penalties against offendersall without additional taxpayer burden. PAST has the overwhelming support of the horse industry and 280 cosponsors from both sides of the aisle in Congress. The measure was introduced by Reps. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., and Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., both veterinarians with experience treating horses, along with Reps. Tom Marino, R-Pa., Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., Chris Collins, R-N.Y., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill.

The Parity in Animal Cruelty Enforcement Act: Current federal law has some ambiguities regarding the enforceability of prohibitions against animal fighting in the U.S. territories. The PACE Act, H.R. 4202, would amend the Animal Welfare Act to clarify that federal prohibitions against dogfighting and cockfighting apply everywhere in the United States, including the U.S. territories. PACE would protect animals from vicious cruelty, communities from related criminal activity such as drug trafficking and violent crime, and public health and the food supply from bird flu and other disease transmission. It was introduced by Reps. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., Rodney Davis, R-Ill., Rick Nolan, D-Minn., Kevin Yoder, R-Kan., Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., Steve Knight, R-Calif., Brad Sherman, D-Calif., and Vern Buchanan, R-Fla.

The Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act: H.R. 1406 would amend the Animal Welfare Act to prohibit interstate commerce in the trade of dog and cat meat and the import of dogs and cats for human consumption, and establish penalties for involvement in the dog or cat meat trade. This bill would prevent the cruel trade from taking hold in the United States, serve as a symbol of unity with countries that have already enacted bans, and give us greater standing to encourage other nations to follow suit. The bill was introduced by Reps. Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., Dave Trott, R-Mich., and Brendan Boyle, D-Pa.

The Pet and Women Safety (PAWS) Act: H.R. 909/S. 322 would protect battered partners and their pets by extending current federal domestic violence protections to include pets and authorizing a small amount of grant money to help domestic violence shelters accommodate pets or arrange for pet shelter. One-third of domestic violence victims delay leaving a violent situation out of fear for their pets safety, while 84 percent of women entering domestic violence shelters reported that their partners abused or killed the family pet. The bill was introduced by Reps. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., Rick Nolan, D-Minn., Jeff Denham, R-Calif., Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., and Mimi Walters, R-Calif., and Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Dean Heller, R-Nev.

Please call your U.S. representative and two U.S. senators and ask them to reject Kings egregious legislation and do all they can to have the Farm Bill include the PAST Act to bring an end to horse soring, the PACE Act on animal fighting, the Dog and Cat Meat Trade Prohibition Act, and the PAWS Act on domestic violence against pets. Theyre appropriate for inclusion in the Farm Bill package and every one of these measures has the support of millions of Americans.Hassan al-Kontar doesn't know when he is going to get out of the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Syrian man understandably doesn't want to go back to Syria, but no other country is willing to take him. He sleeps under a staircase in Terminal 2, and subsists on prepackaged airline rice and chicken meals. He washes up in the airport washrooms.

From The Washington Post:

"I'm desperate for help. I can't live in this airport any longer. The uncertainty is driving me crazy. It feels like my life hit a new low," he told the broadcaster. Kontar told the BBC that he has spoken with airport officials and the United Nations. Human Rights Watch has gotten involved. (Malaysia's Immigration Department has not commented publicly on Kontar's case.) He has been interviewed, he said, and filled out some paperwork. But he does not know whether that will lead to anything.

The story brings to mind the case of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who lived in Terminal 1 of Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, France, for 18 years, from 1988 to 2006.I grew up watching Star Wars. I was bought Star Wars toys for Christmas. I had Star Wars sheets on my bed. At some point, those sheets were made into a quilt that I proudly took along with me to university. Despite having science fiction bed clothes, I still managed to have a respectable amount of sex during my four-year degree program. I love Star Wars!

But I'm kinda worried about what Solo: A Star Wars Story is gonna be like.

What I've seen of the movie, so far, has me less than excited for the film. I say this, having loved The Force Awakens and Rogue One. I enjoyed The Last Jedi as well. They felt like a part of the same universe that I've been immersed in my entire life. But the way this trailer for Solo is cut along with the other trailer for the film, has me worried. Watch this thing and tell me that you couldn't remove Han, Lando and Chewie out of the story and still have the same damn movie. It looks and feels like every heist movie and every sci-fi film I've seen over the past few decades.

Don't get me wrong: I'll still go and see it. Alden Ehrenreich's turn in Hail Caesar is one of the funniest things that I've ever seen:

Will he be believable as Han Solo? I don't know. But I feel like I want to give him the chance to fill Harrison Ford's massive boots. Donald Glover? As a young Lando Calrissian? Hell yes! I can't think of anyone else who's a better fit for the role. And because Ron Howard directed this thing (after the original directors were cannedI worry about this, too,) Clint Howard's, Ron's brother, is in the movie as well. We have to go see this film, guysClint Howard's gotta eat. The rest of the cast looks really solid too. I'm hoping that Emilia Clarke, who's brilliant on Game of Thrones, will have the chance to shine in a huge film like this after being involved in that last turd of a Terminator movie.

What do y'all think? Will this thing tank or swim?Sean Simpson is a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who had expressed an openness the idea of arming teachers to prevent school shootings.



On Sunday, he used a public bathroom on Deerfield Beach Pier and forgot his loaded pistol in the stall. He realized his mistake after leaving the bathroom, upon hearing his gun being discharged. He then raced back to the bathroom and discovered an apparently drunk homeless man holding his 9mm Glock.

Mr Simpson has been arrested for failing to safely store a firearm, as has Joseph Spataro, the man who fired the gun, who was charged with discharging a firearm while intoxicated.

Simpson's views on guns were apparently complex; while he had cautiously publicly endorsed the idea of arming teachers, he also attended the March for Our Lives.

A spokeswoman for the Broward County School Board said the district is not expected to take disciplinary action against him, according to WPLG-TV. On Tuesday, the Broward School Board unanimously rejected the state's new programme to arm school staff, according to the Miami Herald.

Parkland teacher arrested after leaving gun in public lavatory [BBC]News / National

by Staff reporter

Government is keen to learn from Rwanda's development model and yesterday the chief executive of the Rwanda Development Board, Ms Clare Akamanzi, arrived in Harare to share her country's experience at the request of President Mnangagwa.Ms Akamanzi's deputy, Mr Emmanuel Hategeka, is expected to arrive today.Ms Akamanzi is set to address Cabinet members, the private sector and civil servants on how Rwanda managed to attract huge foreign direct investment within a short space of time.Rwanda's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Co-operation and East African Community confirmed the visit to Zimbabwe by members of the Rwanda Development Board."The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cooperation and East African Community of the Republic of Rwanda presents its compliments to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Zimbabwe and, with reference to the letter dated 29th March 2018 from His Excellency President Emmerson D. Mnangagwa, has the honour to confirm the visit of the top officials of the Rwanda Development Board, the chief executive (Ms Clare Akamanzi) and chief operating officer (Emmanuel Hategeka) during the week of 09-13 April," reads part of the letter written to Zimbabwe's Foreign Affairs Ministry.Speaking to The Herald on Monday, presidential spokesperson Mr George Charamba said President Mnangagwa was impressed by the strides made by the East African country on the economic front."When we went to the extraordinary summit for the signing of the Continental Free Trade Area in Kigali, one key question we raised bilaterally was, 'How have you been able to raise so much FDI in so short a time and so successfully?' and President (Paul) Kagame said, 'I have an institutional home where investors arrive and are received and that is called the Rwanda Development Board and you are free to interface with its CEO', and for a good two hours the President had a whole meeting with the CEO of the Rwanda Development Board," he said."We discovered that this Rwanda Development Board is led by a CEO 'deceptively' because in reality this is a man or woman who is of Cabinet status and that person reports straight to Cabinet. The person has executive powers to provide answers and decisions to an investor regardless of fiscal consequences."He or she can decide to grant a waiver or tax holiday. He or she can give an environmental impact assessment there and then because Rwanda has done a national environmental impact assessment, which is enterprise based such that you don't trigger the environmental impact assessment upon request."If they give you an area to operate from, before you start business, the land is available to you on 99-year lease, secondly there is electricity, three, there is internet facilities, fourth, there is water and a factory shell, which is designed to your requirements and you only move in with your capital, machinery and skills to set up shop under those conditions."All this was explained to the President and the ministers who accompanied him. The President went back kuna vaKagame and said, 'Munhu wenyu zvaataura ndazvinzwa (I have heard what your official has said) except, you have convinced the President and a few ministers'."'I want this person to come to Zimbabwe to address my Cabinet, private sector, parastatals, civil servants and everyone. President Kagame's reaction was, 'If I don't give you this person you end up poaching so I will rather give you. You have requested for few days, but she will be in your country for two weeks during which she will have a soaking interface with your various echelons'."President Mnangagwa has set Zimbabwe on a developmental path that includes attracting foreign investors, hence his popular mantra "Zimbabwe is open for business".News / National

by Stephen Jakes

MDC-T official Amos Chibaya has said thousands of people are expected to grace the MDC Alliance rally in Masvingo on Friday."Thousands Expected At Nero's Masvingo Smasher. Thousands of MDC Alliance supporters are expected to attend two rallies scheduled for Jerera and Nyika Growth Points respectively," he said."MDC leader Nelson Chamisa will address both rallies.""This weekend the People's President Advocate Nelson Chamisa will be in the rural districts of Masvingo Province."On 14 April he will address another rally at Jerera Growth Point. All the Wezhiras let's support the People's President."Opinion / Columnist

Nelson Chamisa is trying to pick up and collect legacies, like a child collects things. He uses people no longer with us and tries to paint himself as their ideological heir, knowing full well that the dead can not talk.However, the living can.The most recent example was when he attempted to ride on the legacy of the late MDC-T Vice-President Dr Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo, a strategy that has been well-worn by most opposition parties in an attempt to lure the Matabeleland vote.He told party supporters that before coming to a rally he had earlier visited Dr Nkomo's house in Matsheumhlophe, which has since been turned into a museum in honour of the revolutionary icon. He claimed the Nkomo family had told him that he was the first "national leader" to visit the museum ever since Dr Nkomo's death in 1999, and suggested the family wanted to give him the late leader's knobkerrie.However, it now appears, at least according to Michael Sibangilizwe Nkomo, Joshua's son, that this whole event simply didn't happen, it was a figment of Chamisa's vivid imagination."I live in the Pelandaba house and it is a lie that he met any of the family members unless he came here as a ghost. In actual fact, I have never met Chamisa in my life," said Sibangilizwe.It is clear that this was an egregious attempt to appropriate the memory of a good leader for Chamisa's own narrow political purposes.This episode also casts a shadow on Chamisa's frequent pronouncements that Morgan Tsvangirai anointed him the party leader in his absence. We never heard anything like this emanate from Tsvangirai's lips and we know that Chamisa was hardly an ever-present presence by the late leader's side as he lay dying in a hospital in South Africa.Chamisa knows that dead men can't talk.However, again, living relatives can.Lydia Tsvangirai, Morgan's mother, was so disgusted by Chamisa's political machinations surrounding the death of her son that she declared she will kill herself if the young leader attends her son's funeral.Of course, we know that when Chamisa is caught out in these types of situations, his army of social media fanatics lashes out to preserve his honour, even when he has lost his integrity.The abuse of Lydia Tsvangirai online was brutal and disgusting. She was superimposed onto a picture of a baboon and an ape, and other such dirty and low-handed tricks.It became so bad that MDC-T secretary-general Douglas Mwonzora had to make a formal apology and said the late MDC-T leader's mother did not deserve the abuse she suffered on social media platforms, after she aired out her views on who she wanted at the funeral.Two things become clear from these episodes.One, it doesn't matter who is lying or telling the truth. Chamisa tries to appropriate the memory of any deceased leader he can get his hands on. It is a very un-Christian thing to do, and he knows well that the dead can not give him a retort or criticism.Secondly, it is clear that this policy is extremely aggrieving to family members of the deceased. They, who just want to remember their loved ones, and are rightly protective of their memory, do not accept Chamisa and in fact violently and aggressively reject him and his intrusions.These episodes show that this goes far beyond lies and truth and speak to the personality of Chamisa, one who wishes to lead our country.He has been caught out in the lies he tells.The only question that remains is "What else is Chamisa lying about?"I have a bad feeling we will find out about far more lies in the coming months.Residents and businesses in Dieppe are feeling the effects of a major detour on the Route 15 exit to Harrisville Boulevard.

The busy interchange is being revamped to widen the Route 15 underpass to four lanes, add a sidewalk and build two tear-drop shaped roundabouts.

Suzanne Sauve, administrator at the Dental Health Centre on Dieppe Boulevard, said she is getting calls from lost patients looking for directions.

"They're caught off guard if they're not aware of it," she said.

Found new route

Sauve said she encountered the detour on her way to work a little over a week ago. Since then, she's adjusted her route and uses the Scoudouc exit.

"There was so much traffic (there) this morning," she said.

According to Sonia Landry, customers at Big Fish Seafood market haven't voiced any concerns yet about the detour, which will last at least three months.

"It hasn't affected business so far," she said, adding that might change as the project goes on.

Ex-Montrealer didn't see need

At a nearby veterinary office, receptionist Meagan Irving said the detour is adding about 15 minutes to her morning commute.

Coming from Montreal, she said, she didn't notice any problems with the area in the first place.

But Monique Melanson said she is happy to see changes to the interchange.

"It's going to cause probably chaos this summer, but I think it's going to be an improvement when it's all done."

The Department of Transportation and Infrastructure said it held information sessions with local businesses last month and has a web page dedicated to keeping the public up to date about the project.

Weeks to go

The disruption in traffic could go on for several months, the department has said.

The following traffic restrictions are in place until further notice:

- Northbound traffic on Harrisville Boulevard, heading toward Kent Building Supplies, will not be able to turn left onto Route 15.

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- Southbound traffic on Harrisville Boulevard, heading toward Dieppe, will not be able to turn left onto Route 15.

- Westbound traffic on Route 15, heading toward Moncton, will not be able to take the Harrisville Boulevard exit ramp.

- Eastbound traffic on Route 15, heading toward the Route 2 interchange, will be able to take the exit ramp and turn right toward Dieppe but will not be able to turn left on Harrisville Boulevard.Digby County shipyard promises 40 new jobs with help of government cash

The bustling A.F. Theriault & Son shipyard in Meteghan River, N.S., is launching a $6.65-million expansion  propelled by a healthy tailwind of federal and provincial government assistance.

The expansion will create another 40 "skilled manufacturing and engineering" jobs at the company. A.F. Theriault currently employs 120 people.

Located in western Nova Scotia, the 70-year family-owned business builds a wide range of vessels, including fishing boats, ferries, pilot boats, barges and patrol boats.

"Today is a good day for rural Nova Scotia," third generation CEO Gilles Theriault told several dozen workers, politicians and local dignitaries who assembled Wednesday at a shipyard for the funding announcement.

The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency is lending the company $2.3 million and the province will provide a $1.5-million rebate once the expansion is completed in three years.

Go big or go home

"Twenty-five years ago we knew we had to diversify or scale down to a much smaller operation. Scaling down would have had a negative impact on the local and regional economy. Instead we reinvested in infrastructure, research and development and human resources," Theriault said.

The company will double capacity by building a new marine railway and buying new equipment including software.

The expansion will enable it carry out refits on vessels over 1,500 tonnes.

"This is a very exciting time, to know the federal and provincial government are on our side," Theriault said. He said it makes him feel that rural Nova Scotia can thrive, including by hiring people from the Digby, Yarmouth and Clare areas.

"It makes us feel we can move forward to make our rural Nova Scotia, which we are in Meteghan River right now, thrive forward with hiring people from ... Digby, Yarmouth and Clare."

The company is the first recipient under a new provincial government Innovation Rebate Program. Expansions of between $2 million to $15 million are eligible for a rebate of up to 25 per cent of project costs.By Massimiliano Di Giorgio ROME (Reuters) - President Sergio Mattarella may appoint a neutral institutional figure to mediate between Italian political parties, which have failed to break a deadlock since inconclusive elections last month, a source close to the president said. Mattarella will hold formal consultations with all the parties on Thursday and Friday, the second round of talks since the March 4 vote produced a hung parliament. The anti-establishment 5-Star emerged as by far the largest single party, while a conservative coalition of smaller groups, led by the far-right League, has the most seats in parliament but not enough for an absolute majority. If, as expected, the parties maintain their irreconcilable positions during their meetings with Mattarella, his next move may be to appoint someone else to hold more flexible, informal talks aimed at brokering a deal, the source said. A so-called "exploratory mandate" has been used before at times of stalemate, and whoever is given the task would not be expected to form a government themselves. The president could give the job to anyone with a high profile institutional role, such as one of the speakers of the two houses of parliament or a judge from the constitutional court. Political sources say the impasse is unlikely to be broken before local elections later this month in the small regions of Molise in the south, and Friuli Venezia Giulia in the north. Both 5-Star and the League look unwilling to compromise while campaigning, with 5-Star hoping to win control of its first ever region in Molise and the League the hot favorite to win a clear victory in Friuli Venezia Giulia. 5-Star leader Luigi Di Maio has called for a German-style coalition policy agreement with either the League or the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), which was a big loser at the election, but his proposal has so far been rejected by both. The PD says it wants to go into opposition, while League leader Matteo Salvini has refused to break with his coalition ally Silvio Berlusconi - a condition posed by Di Maio. The 5-Star Movement, which bases its appeal on a promise to clean up politics, refuses to countenance a deal with the 81-year-old media billionaire who has a conviction for tax fraud and is on trial for bribing witnesses - a charge he denies. If Mattarella, with the possible help of his appointed mediator, fails to break the impasse, he would have to call new elections, almost certainly in the autumn. But the source in his office said he was determined to avoid this. (writing by Gavin Jones; editing by David Stamp)By Fabian Cambero and Philip Pullella

SANTIAGO/VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis acknowledged on Wednesday that he had made "grave mistakes" in the handling of a sexual abuse crisis in Chile, saying he felt shame and inviting victims he had once doubted to Rome to seek their forgiveness personally.

"I have made grave mistakes in the assessment and my perception of the situation, due in particular to a lack of truthful and balanced information," he wrote in an extraordinary letter to Chilean bishops.

The letter followed a visit to Chile by one of the Vatican's most experienced sexual abuse investigators, Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta.

Sciluna was investigating claims surrounding Bishop Juan Barros, appointed by the pope in 2015 despite accusations that Barros had covered up sexual abuse of minors by his mentor Father Fernando Karadima.

Francis wrote the letter after receiving Scicluna's 2,300-page report and in the missive to the bishops he summoned them to Rome for a meeting. He did not say when it would take place.

Such gatherings are rare and usually take place in a period of crisis in a national Church. A similar meeting took place in Rome with American bishops in 2002 during the papacy of Pope John Paul after a sexual abuse crisis exploded in the United States.

In the three-page letter in Spanish, issued simultaneously at the Vatican and in Chile, the head of the Roman Catholic Church said he wanted to "re-establish trust in the Church, trust that was broken by our errors and sins, and heal the wounds that continue to bleed in Chilean society."

Reading Scicluna's report caused him "pain and shame," he added.

Controversy over Barros, bishop of the city of Osorno in Chile's south, dominated a recent trip the Argentine pontiff made to South America. Critics accused the pope of not understanding the depth of the crisis after he initially defended Barros and said he was the victim of slander.

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"I apologize to all those I have offended and I hope to be able to do it personally in the coming weeks, in the meetings I will have (with victims)," the pope said in the letter.

A number of men have accused Barros of protecting his former mentor, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, who was found guilty in a Vatican investigation in 2011 of abusing them and others when they were boys. Karadima always denied the allegations, and Barros said he was unaware of any wrongdoing.

The letter gave no clue about Barros' future.

During the pope's trip in January, a Chilean reporter asked a question about Barros.

"The day I see proof against Bishop Barros, then I will talk. There is not a single piece of evidence against him. It is all slander. Is that clear?" the pope replied.

On the plane returning from Chile, Francis told reporters he believed the bishop was innocent.

Days later, the pope did a turnaround and sent Scicluna to investigate.

In his letter, Francis said the Chilean Church now had "to repair the scandal as much as possible and restore justice."

In a statement Osorno parishioners said they appreciated the Pope's change of heart and accepted his plea for forgiveness. Still, they said specific measures, including the resignation of Barros, were needed to restore confidence in the Church.

Related Video: Is Trump Immune to Sex Scandals?

Watch news, TV and more on Yahoo View.



(Reporting by Fabian Cambero and Philip Pullella, additional reporting by Felipe Iturrieta; writing by Philip Pullella; editing by David Gregorio and Rosalba O'Brien)Start early and be open: talking to your kids about cannabis

North Vancouver School District has booked a non-instructional day on April 20  a day when tens of thousands of people celebrate a drug that could be legalized in Canada as early as this summer.

The annual "4/20" cannabis festival in Vancouver, which attracted 35,000 people in 2017, has sparked controversy over crowds, garbage, commercialization and selling products to minors.

After the 2016 event, Vancouver Coastal Health's chief medical officer urged organizers to stop selling pot edibles to minors after 100 people ended up in hospital  some as young at 15  with edible cannabis products suspected.

A NVSD principal emailed a warning to parents about the coincidence of dates.

Brad Baker said it was an oversight that won't happen again.

"We will obviously look forward in the future when we set our calendars to ensure we do not do that again," Baker told CBC.

Day off in Coquitlam, Port Moody and Delta

Baker advised parents to be proactive.

"We don't condone the use of cannabis or marijuana," he said.

While the professional development day only affects five North Vancouver schools, other districts  such as School District 43 which encompasses Coquitlam and Port Moody, and the Delta district  have also listed April 20 as a pro-d day on their calendars.

Kathleen Whyte, whose daughter attends high school in North Vancouver, chuckled when she received the warning email.

"OK, I did think it was kind of funny. It was surprising to me. I hadn't made that connection between those two events before and I think they probably did that same thing. They hadn't really thought about it and suddenly thought, 'Oh! That might be a problem."

Whyte agrees school districts should change the date next year, but does not condemn administrators for the innocent mistake.

"I'm not worried for my own child," said Whyte, whose daughter attends Handsworth Secondary, is off on a band trip the same day.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said part of the goal of legalization is to restrict access of marijuana to minors, in the wake of concerns coming from parents, politicians and the Canadian Paediatric Society, which released a study last year warning of potential dangers of weed use for developing brains.The remarkable recovery of striped bass in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence reached unprecedented levels in 2017, according to the latest assessment from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

Department scientists say the spawning population tripled between 2016 and 2017 and is now estimated at one million fish  a 100-fold increase from the 1990s.

In addition to the population rebound, tagged striped bass from the Gulf were recovered from Rimouski, Que., north to Labrador for the first time in 2017.

In the Forteau Bay area of Labrador, catches of tens of thousands were reported.

"I think this is unusual," said Trevor Avery, a marine biologist at Acadia University who is tracking the expanded range of Gulf striped bass. "This seems to be a first-time sighting in, let's use the term, in living memory."

Until last summer, the northern limit of the confirmed distribution for southern Gulf striped bass had been the Gaspe Peninsula.

'Something changed in 2017'

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans said the most significant finding was a large movement of striped bass in the Gulf beyond their normal distribution north to the Quebec and Labrador coasts.

"Something changed in 2017 that motivated striped bass to swim [farther] north during the summer months than previously known," Moncton-based DFO scientist Scott Douglas said in an email statement.

Douglas, one of 11 scientists who contributed to the report, has no explanation as to why this happened but said ocean temperatures are likely a factor.

"There has been some suggestion that it may be linked to climate change and warming waters which 'opened' habitat which was previously too cold for the fish to occupy," he said in the statement.

Avery said a combination of variables can contribute, including survival of larvae, a healthier ecosystem and more bait fish. He too points to a warming ocean.

"It allows things to produce faster, grow larger in shorter seasons. There are all kinds of things that are tied to temperature," he said.

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The comeback story

When the spawning population collapsed in the 1990s, DFO started closing fisheries.

The commercial fishery was shut down in 1996, followed four years later by recreational and Indigenous fisheries.

In 2004, Gulf striped bass was listed as a threatened species by federal authorities.

But the population came back and in 2012, First Nations food, social and ceremonial fisheries were reinstated and a recreational fishery reopened in 2013.

2017 marked the seventh straight year striped bass met species recovery targets.

Trap nets overwhelmed

For several weeks every year, the epicentre of the Gulf striped bass population is the northwest Miramichi River, where hundreds of thousands return to spawn in May and June.

That's where scientists count them, tag others and make population estimates based on models.

In 2017, modelling produced estimates ranging from 450,000 spawners up to two million. The department settled on an estimate of 994,000.

The run coincides with a commercial gaspereau trap net fishery on the northern Miramichi which is used to monitor striped bass.

'Something strange going on'

Nathan Wilbur, New Brunswick program director for the Atlantic Salmon Federation, said the striped bass explosion was part of a bizarre 2017 off New Brunswick.

"Last year there was something strange going on in the Gulf of St. Lawrence," he said, pointing to the appearance of endangered North Atlantic right whales in large numbers. "Fishermen in Newfoundland were seeing species they'd never seen before."

Wilbur argues striped bass are now so numerous it's time for a small, First Nations commercial fishery in the Miramichi. He said striped bass entering the system were already taking a toll on Atlantic salmon smolts on their way out to sea.

"With the population of spawning bass tripled, our fear is predation may have increased quite a bit as well," Wilbur said.

Recreational fishery worth millions

Jeff Wilson co-hosts the Striper Cup, an annual striped bass tournament in the Miramichi.

He said reinstatement of a commercial fishery is premature and could jeopardize a recreational fishery that he said generates millions of dollars in the Miramichi area.

"We have to be careful. The population could crash quickly," Wilson said. "We have to make small adjustments to our harvest program in order to make sure we have this fish for years and years to come."Regulations for short-term rentals approved by the City of Vancouver in November will take effect April 19.

Under the policy, short-term rentals of a secondary suite or laneway house will only be allowed if the property is the owner's principal residence or if it is rented long-term, and the tenant wishes to operate a short-term rental, with approval of the owner.

Homeowners caught listing secondary suites or commercial units on short-term rental websites will face a fine of up to $1,000 per day for each infraction.

Homeowners and primary residents who wish to list properties on websites like Airbnb will be subject to an annual licensing fee of $49 and a one-time application fee of $54.

Users have until Aug. 31 to apply for the licence. Homeowners caught listing units without a licence will also face fines of up to $1,000 per day come September.

According to city staff, there are about 6,600 short-term rental postings on websites like Airbnb in Vancouver  up 12 per cent since the beginning of 2017.

The city estimates that around 1,000 units currently listed on Airbnb are commercial units or listings that relate to dwellings that are not legal properties.

"The goal of the city is to restore long-term rentals," said Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson at the announcement on Wednesday.

City partners with Airbnb

Vancouver has partnered with Airbnb  the most popular short-term rental website used in the city  to crack down on the illegal listings. Airbnb represents about 88 per cent of units listed in the Vancouver market.

The website will soon require Vancouver operators to display a business licence in their listings. New users will also have to include a business licence in their profile. Licences can be applied for online.

Airbnb will also provide the city with a list of all Vancouver licences and associated addresses.

"It's the first agreement of its kind in Canada," said Robertson. "We're talking about many thousands of rentals that will now have to meet the terms of this new agreement."

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Robertson says he hopes this agreement will set the tone for other short-term rental companies to ensure users are following the rules.

The partnership marks the latest effort to clamp down on short-term rentals in B.C..

Last month, the province announced that Airbnb will be collecting the eight-per-cent provincial sales tax  amounting to an estimated $16 million annually, which government will earmark for affordable housing  and up to three per cent municipal and regional district tax, an estimated $5 million, which will go toward promoting tourism.HANOI (Reuters) - Vietnam on Wednesday urged greater vigilance against cryptocurrency transactions and investments, as officials in its economic hub asked police to investigate what could prove to be the country's largest cryptocurrency fraud. In a directive, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc told the State Bank of Vietnam, the Ministry of Public Securities and other bodies to tighten the "management of activities related to bitcoin and other cryptocurrency", the government said. "Cryptocurrency investment and trading and raising money through initial coin offerings are evolving in a more complicated manner," it said in a statement on its website. These developments threaten to affect the stability of the financial system, social order and safety and posed great risks to corporate and individual participants, it added. The statement followed a report by the official Vietnam News Agency that authorities in Ho Chi Minh City had asked police to investigate accusations that a company, Modern Tech JSC, raised money from token sales of Ifan and Pincoin cryptocurrency. The request followed a weekend protest by dozens of people who accused the company of "the largest ever cryptocurrency fraud involving 15 trillion dong". This sum is equivalent to $658 million. The mobile telephone of the firm's general director, Ho Xuan Van, was turned off on Wednesday. Reuters was unable to trace contact details for other company officials to seek comment. "All cryptocurrencies and transactions in cryptocurrencies are illegal in Vietnam," said Le Dong Phong, the police chief of Ho Chin Minh City. "We are gathering information about the case, but officially we haven't launched an investigation until we receive accusations from any of the alleged victims," Phong told Reuters. He declined to provide further information. According to a copy of the directive seen by Reuters, the prime minister told the State Bank of Vietnam to instruct banks not to provide any payment services related to illegal cryptocurrency transactions. He told the Ministry of Public Security to investigate detect and prevent illegal activities related to money laundering and terrorist financing through cryptocurrency. He also told the Ministry of Justice to complete the legal framework for managing and dealing with virtual assets. (Reporting by Khanh Vu; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Alison Williams)Online Learning

NYC Data Science Academy Launches Online Bootcamp

NYC Data Science Academy, a provider of bootcamp-style data science and data engineering training in New York City, has launched a remote option for students who are not able to attend in-person classes. The Remote Intensive Bootcamp offers live-streamed lectures plus access to prerecorded modules and more than 1,000 practice questions. Students attend full-time, five days a week; the first cohort began this week and runs through June 29.

Course discussions occur in real time, allowing students to communicate with professors, teaching assistants and peers. In addition, TAs are available via a Slack channel to answer questions from both on-campus and remote students.

Topics covered include R and Python coding, machine learning theory, big data and deep learning. Students work on real-world projects to develop the skill sets they'll need to work in the data science industry. The program also provides students with personalized job support, including resume and LinkedIn profile review, workshops on interview skills and elevator pitches, mock technical interview and coding tasks, mentorship and more.

For more information, visit the NYC Data Science Academy site.Online Ed

Research: Online Courses Associated with Improved Retention, Access

Online courses are associated with higher retention and graduation rates, increased access and cost savings of as much as 50 percent, according to a new study from Arizona State University.

The research is built on case studies from a half-dozen institutions "with a strong track record of using digital learning to improve student outcomes," according to information released by ASU. In addition to ASU, the other schools examined for the study include Georgia State University, Houston Community College, Kentucky Community and Technical College System, Rio Salado Community College and University of Central Florida.

Key findings of the report include:

Among four institutions in the study that offered face-to-face and online courses, three reported higher retention and graduation rates for students who took at least come online courses;

At Houston Community College (HCC), for example, retention for first-time freshman was 9 to 10 percentage points higher among students who took an online or blended course;

HCC students who took at least some digital courses were 17 percentage points more likely to graduate than those who only took face-to-face courses;

At the University of Central Florida (UCF), students who took 41 to 60 percent of their courses online finished earlier, in 3.9 years, on average, than students who took no course online, with an average of 4.3 years needed to graduate;

Student performance as measured by grades was mixed, ranging from 3 percentage points more likely to end with an A, B or C among those took online or blended courses to 12 percentage points lower;

Students at two-year institutions, unlike four-year schools, were more likely to earn lower grades for online or blended courses, though retention and graduation rates were still often higher for those students;

At the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTC), for example, students who took at least some online courses were 18 percentage points more likely to persist and 21 points more likely to graduate, though their grades were 8 to 9 points lower, on average, than their peers who took only in-person courses;

Adaptive courseware correlated with smaller achievement gaps for minority students and those who qualified for Pell Grants, with only 8 percent of minority students earning a D, F or withdrawing from all sections of an adaptive introductory writing course at Georgia State University (GSU), compared to 19 percent of minority students in the same course but without adaptive courseware;

Among those eligible for Pell Grants the numbers were similarly skewed, at 7 percent and 21 percent, respectively;

Among the five institutions studied that offered both online only and face-to-face courses, the share of students receiving Pell Grants was at least 5 percentage points higher among those who were fully online than those whose courses were fully in-person; and

Online undergraduate students were, on average, six to eight years older than their on-campus peers.

"We are now seeing how scaled digital learning environments circumnavigate barriers of time and space, decrease time to completion amidst a radical demographic shift and provide pathways for unprecedented program completion," said Lou Pugliese, who oversaw the study and serves as managing director and senior education fellow for EdPlus at ASU, in a prepared statement. "The maturity of digital technologies has given way to new design methods that now allow institutions to more effectively address the unique set of specific learner needs in order to sustain in their academic journey."

The full report is available at edplus.asu.edu.Agile Cigar Reviews are cigar assessments where we use a lightweight, shorter format. These will never take the place of our comprehensive reviews. They are only used on blends we have previously assessed. This might be a blend we are re-scoring or giving a score for the first time. It might be a blend we are looking at in a different size. Today we look at the DCrossier Selection 512 Lancero This is a cigar we last assessed back in October 2015.



Wrapper: Ecuadorian Habano 2000

Binder: Not Disclosed

Filler: Nicaraguan

Country of Origin: Costa Rica

Lancero: 7 1/2 x 38

One can make the argument that 2015 was a breakout year for Santana Diaz and DCrossier Cigars. One of the cigars that was a part of that year was a limited production lancero release known as the DCrossier Selection 512 Lancero. It was a cigar that would land DCrossier Cigars on the 2015 Cigar of the Year Countdown. Today we revisit this cigar. The cigar used for todays assessment has about 30 months of aging in the Cigar Coop humidor.

When the DCrossier Selection 512 Lancero was announced, DCrossier Cigars provided some context for how this cigar became an inspiration for his father.

As a child in Cuba, Santana-Diaz fondly remembers watching his father while he studied for his economics degree. He sat on his favorite green couch with a large text book in front of him and a cigar burning nearby. His fathers cigar of choice was the lancero. That image remained with Santana-Diaz for more than 35 years. Inspiring him to release this homage to his father, whom Santana-Diaz credits with instilling both patience and his pursuit of perfection; traits that he proudly practices with his cigars.

Diaz opted to create his lancero using a classic 7 1/2 x 38 format. The blend itself consists of an Ecuadorian Habano 2000 wrapper and Nicaraguan fillers. As for the binder, that leaf has not been disclosed. Diaz is known for his outstanding packaging and this pearl colored box is no exception.

The DCrossier Selection 512 Lancero delivered notes of cream, berry sweetness, natural tobacco, cedar, and pepper. Early on the cream and berry notes moved to the forefront. As the cigar experienced progressed, the natural tobacco became more prominent and toward the end there was a slight uptick in the pepper. Throughout the smoking experience, the DCrossier Selection 512 maintained a nice amount of sweetness.

One thing that I noticed with this aged version of the DCrossier Selection 512 Lancero was the strength and body was more dialed back. This time I found the Selection 512 Lancero to be a cigar that was mild to medium in strength and mild to medium in body.

What I really like about the DCrossier Selection 512 Lancero is that it was a blend constructed from the ground up  in other words, this cigar was blended with the lancero size in mind. A lot of times lanceros are off-shoots of other blends and either some tobacco has to be subtracted from the blend to get it to the 38 ring gauge or the cigar is blended to be a 40 or 42 ring gauge. In the case of the DCrossier Selection 512, I found the blend worked great with 38 ring gauge. Its a cigar that delivers subtle, yet enjoyable flavors. This is a cigar that can be smoked by any cigar enthusiast any time of the day. At $13.00 per cigar, the Selection 512 Lancero is not cheap, but its high quality. Its a lancero I enjoy smoking  and its one that garners box worthy consideration.

Summary

Burn: Excellent

Draw: Excellent

Complexity: Medium

Strength: Medium

Body: Medium

Finish: Excellent

Rating

Value: Box Worthy Consideration

Score: 91

References

Original Assessment: DCrossier Selection 512 Lancero

News: DCrossier Selection 512 Lancero

Price: $13.00

Source: Cigars Sent from Manufacturer: n/a

Brand Reference: DCrossier

Photo Credits: Cigar CoopFindLaw, a part of Thomson Reuters, is the most popular source for free legal information on the internet. FindLaw also provides varied services for lawyers, businesses, and individuals.

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THURSDAY, April 12, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- "Night owls" might pay a price when it comes to their health and longevity, a new study reports.

Folks who stay up late and struggle to wake in the morning have a 10 percent higher risk of dying sooner than so-called "morning larks" who are early to bed and early to rise, said lead researcher Kristin Knutson. She's an associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

"It is important for people who are night owls to learn there may be health consequences, but there may be things they can do to help overcome those problems," Knutson said. "There's hope, but it may take some effort."

This finding is based on a study of more than 433,000 British adults. As part of the study, they were asked to place themselves into one of four categories -- definite morning or evening types, or moderate morning or evening types.

"For morning lark types, the clock is set to have things happen earlier in the day -- go to sleep earlier, wake up earlier, eat earlier," Knutson said. "And then, of course, the reverse is true for night owls."

About a quarter of folks identified themselves as morning larks, and about 9 percent said they were definitely night owls, Knutson said.

The researchers then tracked the health of all participants for 6.5 years, to see whether sleeping patterns were associated with an increased risk of death and illness.

Night owls were slightly more likely to die during the study period compared with morning larks, after researchers controlled for other health risk factors, Knutson said.

Night owls also had more health problems -- twice the risk of psychological disorders, 30 percent more risk of diabetes, 25 percent increased risk of neurological problems, 23 percent higher risk of gastrointestinal disorders and 22 percent increased risk of respiratory disease.

The study only found an association, and it couldn't say why night owls have poorer health, but researchers have a couple of theories, Knutson said.

It might be that being up late gives people more opportunity to engage in less healthy behaviors, such as drinking, smoking, snacking or taking drugs, Knutson said.

But a more intriguing theory posits that the health of night owls reflects the fact that their internal clock is at odds with the rest of the world.

"The problem may be that a night owl is trying to live in a morning lark world," Knutson said. "They have to get up earlier for work, perhaps, or if they want to socialize with friends and family that might occur earlier than their biological clock would want.

"There may be this misalignment between their internal clock and their behaviors or environment, and that may lead to problems in the long run," she added.

Previous studies support this theory, said Dr. Andrew Varga, an assistant professor of sleep medicine with Mount Sinai Health System in New York City.

"We've known for a very long time that people who are shift workers -- who are mostly awake during dark hours and sleep during light hours -- are at risk for all sorts of bad things to happen to them, including increased mortality and increased cardiovascular risk," said Varga, who wasn't involved with the study.

Body rhythms affect health in other ways, too. For example, the timing of eating and sleeping can impact the amount of insulin that's secreted in response to food intake, potentially influencing a person's risk of diabetes, Varga said.

The best thing night owls can do is adapt to the more normal morning lark rhythm of the world, Knutson said.

"Gradually try to advance your bedtime, which means going to bed a little earlier each night to move out of that night owl zone," Knutson said. "It's important to do this gradually. If you try to go to bed two to three hours earlier tonight, it's not going to work. You're not going to be able to go to sleep, and you might give up."

Once you've managed to gradually advance your bedtime, you must keep to a regular sleeping schedule and avoid drifting back into your night owl habits, Knutson said. Otherwise, you'll just have to start all over again.

For those who are night owls by choice or by circumstance -- shift workers, for example -- Knutson recommends focusing on other lifestyle choices that can influence their health. These include eating right, exercising and getting the right amount of sleep when they do manage to hit the sack.

"That might help ameliorate any potential health problems," Knutson said.

The new study was published April 12 in the journal Chronobiology International.

More information

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Brussels, April 12, 2018A delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists this week met with senior European Union officials, including European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans, to urge them to ensure EU institutions uphold press freedom in member states.

The delegation included Kati Marton, Hungarian-American journalist and author and a CPJ board member, Tom Gibson, CPJs Brussels-based EU representative, and Shazdeh Omari, CPJs senior program officer. The team met with eight EU officials and called on them to ensure the safety of journalists working in EU countries: in Poland, where journalists face legal threats, and in Malta and Slovakia where investigative journalists Daphne Caruana Galizia and Jan Kuciak were murdered in the past year. CPJ also highlighted dangers to press freedom in Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban was elected on Sunday for a third term.

Orban continues to defy all EU norms and stifle free expression. Sundays election results confirm that the opposition never had a chance as it was robbed of the oxygen of a free and fair media, said CPJ Board Member Kati Marton. The EU should now react with the seriousness that the Hungarian erosion of basic democratic standards urgently requires.

A CPJ delegation meets with European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans, second from left. (CPJ)

In an hour-long meeting with Commission Vice President Timmermans on Tuesday, CPJ urged him to apply pressure on Poland and support critical journalists there and in Hungary. Timmermans told CPJ that a democracy cannot exist without independent journalism. CPJ also urged him to continue calling for thorough investigations into Caruana Galizia and Kuciaks murders, as press freedom groups have documented that investigative journalists in Europe are facing risks each day while doing their jobs.

CPJ also called on Timmermans to issue a directive against Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) that would protect journalists from being forced to pay exorbitant legal fees designed to burden them financially and silence their criticism.

CPJ meets with Hungarys permanent representative, Oliver Varhelyi. (CPJ)

The delegation also met with Hungarys permanent representative, Oliver Varhelyi, to discuss press freedom following the recent re-election of Orban. In a full and frank discussion, CPJ aired its concerns, including about the vital role of independent journalism in the country, and Varhelyi asked CPJ to share research with his office. He told the delegation, In Hungary, and we all take huge pride in this, journalists should be writing about scandals they discover. Varhelyi added that Hungary was committed to European values, that the country is a member state where public support for EU membership and being a European nation is strong.

CPJ meets with EU Commissioner Vera Jourova, at left. (CPJ)

CPJ on Wednesday met with Vera Jourova, commissioner for justice, gender equality, and consumers, urging her to continue pushing for the killers of Kuciak and Caruana Galizia to be brought to justice. The delegation also discussed the need for rule of law in Poland and a more free media environment in Hungary.

CPJ urged Jourova and Timmermans to consider the legal threats against journalists as the Commission engages in the Article 7 procedure that followed Polands contested judicial reforms. CPJ also called for a comprehensive overview of press freedom in Poland and to ensure that EU values are upheld, including the protection of independent journalism. CPJ visited Poland in February and documented some of the threats in a Mission Journal last month.

Polish journalists have told us that while the independent media are already marginalized in the country, the environment could deteriorate further, said Tom Gibson, CPJs EU representative. Critical journalists in Poland need to know they have the support of the European Union.

CPJ meets with Marlene Bonnici, Maltas permanent representative. (CPJ)

The recent murders in Malta and Slovakia show how journalists investigating corruption in EU countries are not safe. In meetings with Maltas permanent representative, Marlene Bonnici, and Slovakias permanent representative, Peter Javorcik, CPJ reiterated the necessity of thorough and effective investigations into Caruana Galizia and Kuciaks murders. Bonnici pledged to bring CPJs concerns to the relevant authorities. Everyone wants the people who did this to be brought to justiceall people, including the masterminds, she said.

CPJ meets with Slovakias permanent representative, Peter Javorcik. (CPJ)

The European Union must continue to push Malta and Slovakia to independently investigate and prosecute these appalling murders. It is a matter of priority that full justice is delivered. CPJs Gibson said. But this is also a wake-up call: EU institutions need to work out how to better support, reach out, and protect journalists at risk.

The CPJ delegation also met with a spokesperson from the German permanent representation to the EU, as well as with journalists who report on press freedom issues in Brussels, Poland, and Hungary. Marton was interviewed by regional media, including Le Soir, Belgian Television Radio (RTBF), and Politico.

Media contact:

Tom Gibson

EU Representative

tgibson@cpj.org

+32-492-10-57-24India and Morocco have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in the field of Mining and Geology for a period of 5 years to promote mineral exploration. It was signed in New Delhi after the bilateral discussions between Mines Minister Narendra Singh Tomar and his Moroccan counterpart Aziz Rabbah.

Key Facts

Under this MoU, focus will be laid on evaluation of potential mineral resources and promoting exploration and mining through participation of both public and private sector. The focus of MoU is on development of geological infrastructure for Geoscience Maps and geochemical maps, strengthening geological research and evaluation of potential of mineral resources. Geological Survey of India (GSI) will assist Morocco in geological mapping and mineral exploration.The Union Cabinet has approved Memorandum of understanding (MoU) between India and United Kingdom and Northern Ireland on the return of Illegal Migrants. Decision in this regard was taken at Union Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Key Facts

The MoU will facilitate that Visa Free Agreement for holders of Diplomatic passports as well as liberalization of UK Visa Regime travelling to UK legally, after its conclusion. It will ensure return of persons who have no lawful basis to be in territory of other Party after verification of nationality to its satisfaction. It will help in streamlining procedure of return of nationals who are caught to be staying illegally, belonging to other party in specified time-frame.Gujarat: 11 Gujarat fishermen abducted by Pakistan

April 12,2018 | Source: The Times Of India

The Pakistan Maritime Security Agency (PMSA) has abducted 11 Gujarat fishermen and seized their two boats from her the International Maritime Border Line (IMBL) off the Jakhau coast in Kutch. National Fisherworkers Forum secretary Manish Lodhari said, We received confirmation of two boats being apprehended by PMSA. One boat with six persons was apprehended on Sunday, while second one on Monday. Both the boats are from Porbandar.

 2018 Bennett, Coleman & Co. LtdIran Human Rights (Apr 6, 2018): A prisoner was hanged at Maragheh Prison on murder charges in March.





According to a close source, on the morning of Sunday, March 4, a prisoner was hanged at Maragheh Prison. The prisoner, identified as Jalil Khademi, was sentenced to death on murder charges.





Jalil Khademi, who was from Marand city in East Azerbaijan Province, was arrested in 2014 and had been held in prison ever since.





A close source told IHR, Jalil murdered a man named Khosro Asghari over financial disputes. He had not been able to win the consent of the plaintiff.





It should be noted that the execution of this prisoner has not been announced by the state-run media so far.





According to Iran Human Rights annual report on the death penalty, 240 of the 517 execution sentences in 2017 were implemented due to murder charges.





There is a lack of a classification of murder by degree in Iran which results in issuing a death sentence for any kind of murder regardless of intensity and intent.





Man charged with murdering 3-year-old boy executed





Iran Human Rights (April 10, 2018): A man who was charged with murdering a 3-year-old boy was hanged at Rasht Central Prison.





According to ISNA, on the morning of Tuesday, April 10, a man who was charged with murdering a 3-year-old boy, named Ahoura, was hanged at Rasht Central Prison.





The murderer was earlier identified by the media as Meysam, 27. He was charged with physical harassment of a 3-year-old boy which led to his death on October 14, 2017. The forensics announced that the cause of death was cerebral hemorrhage.





Branch 3 of the Criminal Court of Guilan sentenced Meysam to death on December 7, 2017 which was approved by the Supreme Court on January 23, 2018.





According to Iran Human Rights annual report on the death penalty, 240 of the 517 execution sentences in 2017 were implemented due to murder charges.





 | 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



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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Global figures





Amnesty International recorded at least 993 executions in 23 countries in 2017, down by 4% from 2016 (1,032 executions) and 39% from 2015 (when the organization reported 1,634 executions, the highest number since 1989).





Most executions took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan  in that order.





China remained the worlds top executioner  but the true extent of the use of the death penalty in China is unknown as this data is classified as a state secret; the global figure of at least 993 excludes the thousands of executions believed to have been carried out in China.





Excluding China, 84% of all reported executions took place in just four countries  Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.





During 2017, 23 countries are known to have carried out executions  the same as 2016.





Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) resumed executions in 2017. Amnesty International did not record executions in five countries  Botswana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Sudan and Taiwan  that carried out executions in 2016.





Executions noticeably fell in Belarus (by 50%, from at least 4 to at least 2), Egypt (by 20%) Iran (by 11%), Pakistan (31%) and Saudi Arabia (5%). Executions doubled or almost doubled in Palestine (State of) from 3 in 2016 to 6 in 2017; Singapore from 4 to 8; and Somalia from 14 to 24.





In 2017, two countries  Guinea and Mongolia  abolished the death penalty in law for all crimes. Guatemala became abolitionist for ordinary crimes only. Gambia signed an international treaty committing the country not to carry out executions and to move to abolish the death penalty in law.





At the end of 2017, 106 countries (a majority of the worlds states) had abolished the death penalty in law for all crimes and 142 countries (more than two-thirds) had abolished the death penalty in law or practice.





Amnesty International recorded commutations or pardons of death sentences in 21 countries: Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco/Western Sahara, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tunisia, UAE, USA and Zimbabwe.





Fifty-five exonerations of prisoners under sentence of death were recorded in six countries: China, Maldives, Nigeria, Taiwan, USA and Zambia.





Amnesty International recorded at least 2,591 death sentences in 53 countries in 2017, a significant decrease from the record-high of 3,117 recorded in 2016.





At least 21,919 people were known to be on death row at the end of 2017.





The following methods of execution were used across the world in 2017: beheading, hanging, lethal injection and shooting. Public executions were carried out in Iran (at least 31).





Reports from 2017 indicated that at least five people were executed in Iran who were under 18 at the time of the crime for which they were sentenced to death.





In many countries where people were sentenced to death or executed, the proceedings did not meet international fair trial standards. This included the extraction of confessions through torture or other ill-treatment, including in Bahrain, China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.





Regional analysis





 Americas





For the 9th consecutive year, the USA remained the only country to carry out executions in the region.





The number of executions (23) and death sentences (41) in the USA slightly increased compared to 2016, but remained within historically low trends of recent years. For the second year in a row, and the second time since 2006, the USA did not feature among the top five global executioners, with its position in the global ranking dropping from 7th to 8th.





The number of US states carrying out executions increased from five in 2016 to eight, with Arkansas, Ohio and Virginia resuming executions after a hiatus. Four states  Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri and Nebraska  as well as US federal courts, imposed death sentences in 2017, after a hiatus, bringing the number of US states imposing death sentences to 15 (2 more than in 2016). Kansas, North Carolina and Oregon, which imposed death sentences in 2016, did not do so in 2017.





Only three countries in the region imposed death sentences  Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and the USA.





Guatemala became the 142nd country to have abolished the death penalty in law or practice.





 Asia-Pacific





At least 93 executions in nine countries were known to have been carried out throughout the region in 2017  down from at least 130 in 11 countries in 2016. The decrease was linked to a decline in Pakistan, where executions reduced by 31%. These figures do not include the thousands of executions that Amnesty International believed were carried out in China.





Singapore doubled its number of executions (from 4 to 8) compared to 2016. All its executions were for drug-related offences.





At least 1,037 new death sentences were imposed, a slight decrease from 2016. This number is down to a variation in figures for a number of countries, and because of information provided to Amnesty International by authorities. Figures for death sentences in India, Indonesia Pakistan and Thailand, among other countries, were lower compared to 2016.





Increases were recorded in countries including Bangladesh (from at least 245 to at least 273), Singapore (from at least 7 to 15) and Sri Lanka (from at least 79 to 218).





Eighteen countries across the region were known to have imposed death sentences, the same number as in 2016. Brunei Darussalam imposed a new death sentence after it did not impose any in 2016; Papua New Guinea did not impose any death sentences in 2017, after it did so in the previous year.





Across Asia Pacific, the death penalty was extensively used for offences that did not meet the threshold of the most serious crimes, going against international law.





 Europe and Central Asia





In Europe and Central Asia, Belarus was the only country to execute people. The country carried out at least two executions in 2017; at least four new death sentences were imposed.





One man remained under sentence of death in Kazakhstan.





Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation and Tajikistan continued to observe moratoriums on executions.





 Middle East and North Africa





There was a small reduction in the use of the death penalty in 2017. The number of executions recorded in the Middle East and North Africa decreased by 1%, from 856 in 2016 to 847 in 2017.





Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq remained the top three executing countries, accounting for 92% of executions in the region.





Iran executed at least 507 people, accounting for 60% of all confirmed executions in the region. Saudi Arabia executed 146 people, representing 17% of all confirmed executions in the region.





At least 264 executions were carried out for drug-related offences (27% of all recorded executions in 2017).





Amnesty International confirmed that at least 619 death sentences were imposed in the region in 2017, a reduction on the 764 death sentences recorded in 2016. Egypt imposed at least 402 death sentences, the most in the region.





 Sub-Saharan Africa





Positive steps were taken across Sub-Saharan Africa, with a reduction in the number of executing countries recorded.





Two countries (Somalia and South Sudan) recorded executions in 2017, compared to five countries recorded in 2016.





Twenty-eight executions were carried out, 24 in Somalia and four in South Sudan, a slight increase compared to at least 22 recorded in 2016.





Death sentences decreased, from at least 1,086 in 2016 to at least 878 in 2017.





Nigeria imposed the highest number of death sentences and had the highest number of people under death sentence in the region at the end of the year.





Guinea abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Burkina Faso, Chad, Gambia and Kenya made important strides towards abolition of the death penalty.





Read about our Global Report: Death Sentences and Executions 2017

 | 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



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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Mumbai: Bollywood actor and international star Priyanka Chopra was in Delhi on Wednesday and met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in regards to an upcoming conference of Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH).

The Quantico star took to Instagram to inform about the meet and posted a photo too.

Donning a white traditional outfit, the 35-year-old beauty is looking ethereal while standing next to Prime Minister Modi.

She, along with the delegation, including Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda and former President of Chile and incoming chair of PMNCH Board Michelle Bachelet, invited the Prime Minister to join the upcoming PMNCH Partners' Forum, to be held in New Delhi on December 12-13.

In her post, the actor, who is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, has expressed gratitude to PM Modi for meeting them and described the conversation with the Prime Minister as "insightful".

"Very grateful to the honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi to meet me, Shri J.P. Nadda (Indian Health Minister) and Mrs. Michelle Bachelet, (former President of Chile, incoming #PMNCH Chair) in regards to being a patron for the Partners' Forum which is being held in New Delhi in December this year. The aim is very important - the improvement and transformation of access to quality healthcare at at every life stage for women, children and adolescents, in an effort to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030," she wrote in her post.

"This year, India will play host to the largest ever Partners' Forum, with more than 1,200 delegates from more than 92 countries.

"It was an insightful, positive conversation which was very heartening and inspiring because of the personal commitment of everyone at the meeting. We covered a lot of ground from the various efforts being taken by individual countries & partners to building a collective environment that could help propel the change we seek for a better world.

"We started something important today and I am looking forward to what is being set in motion," the post further read.Unmanned Systems

Army mulls options for Robotics Innovation Center

The Army is considering opening a Robotics Innovation Center at Fort Benning, Ga.

Don Sando, deputy to the commanding general at the Maneuver Center of Excellence, announced the plan at the Ground Robotics Capabilities Conference hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association.

Whether physical or virtual, the Robotics Innovation Center will be a chance for the Training and Doctrine Command's Maneuver Robotics and Autonomous Systems Office to work with other Defense Department groups, academia and industry. The center might not bring these groups together physically, Sando told GCN, but its goal is to unites them around a shared purpose  integrating robotics and autonomous systems into current and future combat teams.

Within the year, details will be available on the Robotics Innovation Center launch and membership, Sando said.

One of the first opportunities to bring these groups together will be at an industry day the Army plans for June. When the event is announced it will include a challenge related to autonomous systems, and if you think you can be a part of the solution to that problem come on down [to the industry day] and lets talk, Sando said.

A second event is being planned for October, aptly named Bot-tober Fest, that will include two challenges: directed or kinetic energy and underwater operations. Shooting robots and swimming robots, Sando explained. Itll be neat.

The Army demonstrated robotic systems' potential at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany this week when remote-controlled vehicles breached a barricade, Sando said.

We did a robotic breach today, which has never been done before. This is a historic moment, 1st Lt. Cody Rothschild told Stars and Stripes. The demonstration involved using remote-controlled U.K. Terrier engineering vehicles to clear a simulated minefield and breach a tank trench. The Robotic Complex Breach Concept demonstration also used unmanned aerial vehicles for observation, targeting and sensing of air conditions.

There are already plans for a second demonstration this fall at Fort Benning and a third a year from now at Fort Lewis in Yakima, Wash. These demonstrations will be informed by the results of the exercise in Germany, Sando said.

The Defense Department has developed an Unmanned Systems Roadmap that is currently undergoing review before its release, according to Jose Gonzalez, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.

Autonomy and robotic systems are both listed as priorities in the National Defense Strategy, a summary of which was released earlier this year.

The drive to develop new technologies is relentless, expanding to more actors with lower barriers of entry, and moving at accelerating speed, the summary said. New technologies include advanced computing, 'big data' analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics, directed energy, hypersonics, and biotechnology -- the very technologies that ensure we will be able to fight and win the wars of the future.C4ISR

Marine Corps awards $104M contract for vehicle C4I services

ManTech International has booked a pair of contract awards worth roughly $104.5 million combined for engineering and integration services on Marine Corps ground vehicles.

The first contract has a potential $82 million value over up to five years for systems engineering, software integration and acquisition management support services.

This work covers implementation of so-called C4I functions -- command, control, communications, computers and intelligence -- on ground combat vehicles.

ManTech received the contract through the Navys Seaport-e contract vehicle for professional services.

Under the second $22.5 million award, ManTech will perform design upgrades and other lifecycle management work on tactical vehicles. This work focuses on safety and protection measures, fuel efficiency and performance in all driving conditions.

Vehicles covered under this contract include light, medium and heavy tactical vehicles; legacy wheeled vehicle systems; and ancillary equipment.

ManTech received the second contract as a task order through the Defense Systems Technical Area Task multiple-award vehicle, which is managed by the Defense Departments Information Analysis Center.In what will be a major boost to cancer patients across Europe, Digital Day 2018 saw the signing of a major declaration between 15 Member States to commit to a One Million Genomes Project.

This one-day event at the Square venue in Brussels brought together high-level stakeholders in the fields of digital technology, telecommunication and healthcare including cancer, organised by the European Commission under the Bulgarian Presidency of the EU.

Mariya Gabriel, the Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, oversaw Member States representatives co-signing a Joint Declaration indicating political support for linking existing and future genomic databanks, on a voluntary basis, in order to reach a cohort of at least one million sequenced genomes accessible in the EU by 2022.

16 Member States of the European Union have so far endorsed the political Declaration.

14 Member States signed on April 10th; Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, Finland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Sweden and the U.K. Bulgaria and Croatia to sign in the coming days as well.

Said David Byrne, former European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection, and EAPM co-chair: We have fought long-and-hard to get this project off the ground and todays declaration is highly significant for the future of the EUs patients.

We applaud this coalition of the willing Member States and hope others will join the project down the line.

In a joint statement, Alexander Eggermont, Director of Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus, Grand Paris, Mark Lawler, Chair in Translational Cancer Genomics, Queens University Belfast, Carin Smand, Executive Director, European Haematology Association (EHA), eCancers Gordon McVie and Tom Van der Wal, former Board Member of the European Cancer Patient Coalition said We and our multi-stakeholder colleagues at the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine have long discussed the idea of a project that would bring together genomic data that would benefit cancer patients throughout Europe and, with input from key partners and with excellent leadership from the European Commissions DG CONNECT, the political will has been found. We are convinced that this Declaration will deliver tangible benefits to the EUs cancer patients going forward.

The quartet of cancer experts added Increasingly, evidence is emerging that the appropriate and responsible use of Big Data in many medical contexts including cancer can help save lives, as well as saving the public sector an estimated 100 billion in operational efficiency improvements. Access to genomic, clinical, epidemiological and patient outcomes data, acquired using appropriate ethical standards and ensuring responsible data storage, can lead to improved survival and better quality of life for cancer patients, and allow patients to donate their data, in order to facilitate more and better cancer research.

Many are agreed that cancer research needs more flexibility and less obstacles, ensuring that the undoubted quality of Europes cancer research is translated into meaningful benefit for the European citizen. Population-based cancer registries seek to provide reliable information on cancer, including population-level indicators on, among other things, incidence, prevalence and survival rates. All vitally important pieces of information. The Declaration signed yesterday represents a huge leap forward.

EAPMs executive director Denis Horgan said; There are is much evidence now available (and more doubtless on the way) that genetics is having a hugely positive effect in certain disease areas, such as various forms of cancer, inherited heart disease, and for rare diseases.

We already know that the majority of patients are happy to donate their data - under the right circumstances - to help not only themselves but other patients down the line. This Declaration is an excellent development based on hard work, interaction and a will to cooperate.

With rising healthcare costs and individual health systems being increasingly challenged, Big Data has the potential to have a positive impact on the health of all European citizens and provide diagnostic, economic and efficiency benefits, ensuring that patients receive the right information and the right treatment at the right time, while containing costs.

This will lead to a healthier and, thus, wealthier, Europe.

The potential for bettering the health of the EUs millions of citizens across Member States is therefore substantial.

There are still numerous challenges, and the need for cross-border, pan-European collaboration is greater than ever before.

Hence the general delight at this significant breakthrough.

Source: EAPMNaftogaz to recover losses through court if Gazprom fails to fulfill gas transit obligations

Gazprom is obliged to fulfill the gas transit shipment contract signed in 2009.

If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+EnterSBU, Prosecutor General's Office conducting raid in Ukrzaliznytsia office

Ukrzaliznytsia says it is creating all conditions for law enforcement agencies' work.

If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+EnterWhen all else fails, stick on some Alaska.

Picture this: its late, youre among friends, and youve taken control of the music. Its beyond a reasonable time to be awake, so its beyond time for reasonable songs.

But youre in Spain  a place where No Scrubs and Come on Eileen can not be relied upon as never fail songs to get everyone dancing.

You need a new, country-specific playlist. A playlist full of passion and energy, guaranteed to encourage over-enthusiastic participation from Spanish revelers.

Here is that playlist.

1.Celia Cruz - La vida es un carnaval

Its hard to overstate the importance of Celia Cruz - one of the best-known and most-influential figures in Latin music history. Feel the salsa. Allow yourself to be swept away by the infectiously uplifting chorus.

2. Rafaella Carra - Hay que venir al sur

A throwback to a simpler time, when a video could consist solely of somebody giving their all in front of a glitzy curtain. The lyrics are great fun too: Sin amantes, quien se puede consolar; Sin amantes, este vida es infernal. Disco, eh?

3. Las Grecas - Te estoy amando locamente

The Hendrix-inspired beginning is epic, and if youre not throwing your soul into lines like Prefiero no pensar, youre not doing it right. Check out the dance moves too  Las Grecas were champions of doing things your own way.

Te estoy amando locamente was a huge success in the early 1970s, and reached a new generation as a cult classic when it was covered by the mysterious El Chaval de La Peca in the late 1990s.

4. Los Del Rio - Sevilla tiene un color especial

Feeling bold? It may be time for Los Del Rios ringtone classic, Sevilla tiene un color especial.

A word of warning: this song can go one of two ways. Ive seen rooms embrace dodgy sevillana dancing, and Ive also seen rooms nope their way out of the excessively Southern vibes.

Know your audience. But put it on anyway.

5. Gipsy Kings - Volare

A song of pure beauty. Show me someone who doesn't like Gipsy Kings and Ill show you a liar. There are so many options from the rumba group - Volare, Bamboleo, Djobi Djoba... Choose one. Choose them all. This entire playlist could probably consist solely of Gipsy Kings and youd still be on safe ground.

6. Alaska - A quien le importa

Alaska rocks a sort of Boy George-vibe, backed by Dead or Alive synths, but this song goes a way toward explaining what Spanish people mean when they talk about punky music.

Alaskas style and sound were at the heart of the Movida  the period of pure creative freedom across Spain in the years after Francos death  and the lyrics here are synonymous with freedom. Over time, A quien le importa has become a go-to gay anthem.

If your crowd digs the Movida, theres a ton of material to play with. Famed cinematographer Almodovar even had a go.

7. Los Manolos - Amigos para siempre

Its tropical, its bright, its got a bit of English in it. Happy-clappy good times. A song for cementing those burgeoning friendships.

8. Sevillanas - El Adios

There are a million versions of this song, and whichever one you choose will be perfect. Particularly relevant if somebody is leaving, and you dont want them to go yet. Because, obviously, algo se muere en el alma cuando un amigo se va.

9. Camilo Sesto - Vivir asi es morir de amor

A personal favorite. From lines like ya no puedo mas, which demands to be bitten off and spat back out  to the desperate cries of MELANCOLIA!, the song carries the perfect blend of high-stakes drama and love-struck passion. When this comes on, theres nothing to do except jump headfirst into Sestos unrequited love.

10. The Refrescos - Aqui no hay playa

No playlist would be complete without a bit of ska  the playfully subversive playground of the 1980s and 1990s. Bonus points for playing this in Madrid, because its full of references to the capital. Once youre on this road, theres a whole host of choices to go for. Maybe even something  gasp  slightly political.

11. Bongo Botrako - Todos los dias sale el sol

A new-ish song, but come on  watch this without a smile on your face. I dare you.

Many a chipiron will be feeling it.

12. Raphael - Mi Gran Noche

If in doubt, put on Raphael. First song of the night, song to attract people back to the dance floor, song to go out on a high  Ive said it before, and Ill say it again, Raphael is the man for any occasion. That whisper of mischief  on full display in the chorus  also makes a stunning outing in Raphaels charmingly hortera and unnecessarily intense video for Escandalo.

Bonus extra track

Ill say nothing. Paquito el Chocolatero. Use at your own risk.Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has proposed preparing proposals together with the Ukrainian government on the official termination of Ukraine's membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) activities.

"Considering that Ukraine has never been and is not a CIS member now, and that the CIS refused to condemn Russia's aggression, I would propose that we, together with the government, prepare proposals regarding the official termination of our participation in the CIS charter bodies as well as the definitive closure of Ukraine's mission in the relevant institutions in Minsk," Poroshenko said at the 11th Kyiv Security Forum on Thursday.

Poroshenko also called for inventorying the entire set of agreements and regulations concerning Ukraine's participation in the CIS activities for their compliance with Ukraine's national interests.

Poroshenko also urged Ukraine's foreign partners to review their agreements with Russia concerning "sensitive areas of cooperation."The research associate of the Space Research Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the author of the educational portal about space and a member of the expert council of the LuckyBooks project Tetiana Skorokhod gave her opinion about the situation in the space sector of Ukraine.

"Our laboratory is preparing a state satellite project. It has been preparing for 10 years, because of the constant "swings" with funding. Programmers and a theoretical physicist resigned due to the delay with the financing. Those, who stayed are working on enthusiasm. This project, unfortunately, is impossible to implement without money," Skorokhod said. "Our generation must change the approach and the structure of management in the industry, how the financing is distributed. Then the doors will open to work with space for the new generation in our state. Otherwise we will lose specialists. They will leave to the countries that recognize their "brains." Only scientists from Ukraine will be known in the world, but not those who develop science at home."

However, Ukrainian enthusiasts do not leave a hope for a breakthrough in the industry. In the National Technical University of Ukraine Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (NTUU KPI) students have created CubSanta - the smallest artificial satellite of the Earth. It flew into space with 50 other satellites. There are fans of astronomy and astrophotography, who discover new space objects and receive awards for this.

"It seems to me that we are just now in the times when something completely new is beginning to be created in Ukraine. In a year or two we will hear about it," Skorokhod said.

The LuckyBooks project, which is a joint initiative of the "Ya Maibutnie Ukrainy" (I am the future of Ukraine) charity foundation and the IT company Lucky Labs, decided to brief students on the starry sky by organizing an excursion to the observatory on the Day of Cosmonautics to support the interest of modern youth in space.

Knowledge of the Astronomical Observatory of Kyiv University and the museum under the Observatory began with an important point. After all, all those present simply stood on the Kyiv meridian, which passes through the building of the observatory. In the museum schoolchildren asked a lot of questions: how to find stars that cannot be seen even through the best telescopes, whether the entire world emerged from one explosion, and if we all consist of stellar particles. But the main event was the contemplation of stars through a huge telescope.

"The admiration and joy with which a person looks at the stars will, probably, never fade. The more stars we can call by name, the more constellations we can discern, the closer and closer the sky becomes for us. After a student stood on the Kyiv meridian could he or she forget about it? I think that deep and sincere interest in the subject arises from romance, poetry and fairy tales," Kateryna Vasylenko, a natural science teacher at the alternative Kiterra school, who was taking a tour in the observatory with the children, said.

The space topic has for many years remained one of the most interesting for science fiction writers and scientists. The stars are interesting for adults and children. In the near future, teenagers from the eastern regions of Ukraine will also be able to "touch the stars", having received books about the space and the universe written by one of the most brilliant modern scientists of our age, Stephen Hawking, from the LuckyBooks project.Poroshenko greets Aliyev on winning Azerbaijani presidential elections, invites him to Kyiv

Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has congratulated incumbent President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev on his victory in the early presidential elections held on Wednesday, April 11.

"I sincerely congratulate Ilham Aliyev on a confident victory in the presidential elections in Azerbaijan! I believe the Ukrainian-Azerbaijani strategic partnership will become even stronger," Poroshenko wrote on Twitter.

The Ukrainian president also invited his Azerbaijani counterpart to visit Ukraine. "I look forward to seeing President Aliyev in Kyiv!" Poroshenko added.

As reported, incumbent Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is winning the early presidential election with 86% of the vote with 92% of the ballots counted. The turnout was 74.5%.

Aliyev has been president of Azerbaijan since 2003. According to the 2016 amendments to the country's constitution, the president of Azerbaijan is elected for a 7-year term.Getting rid of our nuclear weapons was a mistake, Ukraine must presume on itself  Turchynov

Ukraine's decision to turn over its nuclear arsenal was a mistake of historic proportions, National Defense and Security Council Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov has said.

"Taking into account recent events, including Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and occupation of Donbas, we can see that disarming was a historic mistake. Security guarantees given in return are not worth the paper they were printed on. No one takes weaklings seriously. They are humiliated and used," Turchynov said in an interview with the Gordon.ua e-zine published on Wednesday.

In the interview, Turchynov said in the interview that Ukraine's prospects for quick NATO accession are bleak and that Ukraine will have to presume on itself militarily until then.The Solomiansky District Court of Kyiv has cancelled the decision by Ukrainian Deputy Prosecutor General and Head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) Nazar Kholodnytsky of June 1, 2017 to suspend the pretrial investigation in criminal proceeding No. 52016000000000166 (on the so-called "black ledger" of the Regions Party) of May 30, 2016.

According to the single register of judicial decisions, by a ruling of April 3, Judge Maksym Vyshniak partially granted a complaint by Svitlana Baidan, lawyer for Chairman of the Central Election Commission of Ukraine Mykhailo Okhendovsky.

This decision is not subject to appeal, and the court was to announce its full text on April 10.

The SAPO told Interfax-Ukraine that it expects the full text of the court's decision and then the investigation will be resumed.

At the same time, the SAPO drew attention to the fact that further actions by the prosecutor's office "will depend on the content of the full text of the ruling, in particular, what motivated the judge to cancel the decision on suspension."

"Currently, these motives remain completely unknown to us," the SAPO added.

As reported, NABU detectives and SAPO prosecutors started a pretrial investigation into the so-called "black ledger" of the Regions Party on the basis of documents handed over by Viktor Trepak, a former first deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine, on May 30, 2016.

As part of the investigation, on December 13, 2016, Head of the Central Election Commission Mykhailo Okhendovsky, whose surname and signature appeared in the documents sent, was notified of a suspicion in obtaining unlawful gain of $161,698, which was equivalent at the NBU exchange rate at the time of the commission of the crime to UAH 1.294 million (Part 3 and Part 4, Article 368 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has met with Moldovan Prime Minister Pavel Filip and signed the law on the ratification of the agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Government of Moldova on the joint control of individuals, vehicles, goods and items at joint border crossing points through the Ukrainian- Moldovan state border, reads a report posted on the official website of the head of state on Thursday.

During the meeting the parties discussed topical issues of the bilateral agenda and praised the growth of trade between the two countries, which increased by 13% in 2017. The sides also agreed to strengthen the coordination of positions as part of the Eastern Partnership in order to accelerate the process of integration into the EU.

"The parties called for the speedy completion of the negotiation process on the signing of an intergovernmental agreement on the functioning of the Dniester integrated hydroelectric complex. Particular attention was paid to certain aspects of the Transdniestrian settlement. The Ukrainian president thanked the Moldovan side for helping improve the health of Ukrainian children from Donbas in Moldova," the report says.

As reported, the Verkhovna Rada ratified the agreement between the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine and the Government of Moldova on joint border control on March 1. The agreement was signed in Chisinau on October 6, 2017. After the document comes into effect, the agreement of March 1997 between the governments of Ukraine and Moldova on the organization of joint control at the checkpoints through the Ukrainian-Moldovan state border will be terminated.Ukrainian non-faction parliamentarian Nadiia Savchenko, who was placed in a Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) detention facility and who announced a hunger strike on March 23, has been transferred to the detention center's hospital for a medical checkup, her sister Vira Savchenko said.

"She has been moved to the detention facility's clinic for a checkup," Vira Savchenko said on the television channel 112. Ukraine on Thursday.

Nadiia has agreed to a medical examination, Vira said.

"Detention center employees have told me she will undergo a checkup with her own consent," she said.

Lawyers are not accompanying Nadiia to the hospital, as they are busy with other trials, she said.

Vira said that on Thursday she would again ask for permission to see her sister, adding that she had already submitted such a request.

"They promised to allow me to see her after lunch," Vira said.

On March 22, the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada granted the prosecutor general's recommendation and gave its consent to prosecute, detain, and arrest Savchenko. The same day, law enforcement officials notified Savchenko that she was being treated as a suspect at parliament, after which they escorted her to the offices of the SBU branch for Kyiv and Kyiv region.

The recommendation that Savchenko be deprived of immunity from prosecution was made as part of criminal proceedings opened on counts of preparations to violently change or dismantle the constitutional system or for the seizure of power by a group of individuals acting in concert, preparations for assassinating a statesperson or a public figure by a group of individuals acting in concert, preparations for a terrorist attack by a group of people acting in concert, the establishment of a terrorist group, and the illegal handling of weapons, ammunition, or explosives by a group of people acting in concert.

Kyiv's Shevchenkivsky District Court ruled on March 23 to place Savchenko under arrest pending trial for 59 days, until May 20.Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said that it's time to develop a mechanism for global cooperation to counter Russian interference in elections.

"In the next two years, about 20 election campaigns will take place in Western countries. For example, the elections to the European Parliament that will have an impact on the future composition of the European Commission, or presidential and parliamentary elections in Ukraine, Moldova and Lithuania," the president said at the 11th Kyiv Security Forum on Thursday.

In this context Poroshenko noted the need to develop a cooperation mechanism of ensuring the integrity of elections, preventing external interference and protecting the free democratic choice.Rada to consider bill on Anti-Corruption Court most likely in May  Parubiy

The Verkhovna Rada will most likely consider the draft law on the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court at the second reading in mid-May this year, Chairman of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada, Andriy Parubiy, has said.

"Theoretically, if the committee [on legal policy and justice in the Verkhovna Rada] finishes its consideration in the next plenary Wednesday, this issue may appear on the agenda on Thursday [April 20], but most likely it will be the first plenary week of May," he said, speaking at the 11th Kyiv Security Forum on Thursday, answering a question from the Interfax-Ukraine agency.

The speaker of the parliament noted that after the conclusion of the profile committee, the deputies, according to the regulations, need time to get acquainted with the table of amendments and the committee's decision.

Parubiy also added that last week he sent a letter to the Venice Commission (the European Commission for Democracy through Law), in which he asked to send their expert to Ukraine, who would help prepare the bill for the second reading.Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze expects Ukraine to receive the first tranche of macro-financial assistance from the European Union in early autumn this year.

"As far as I understand, the discussion in the European Parliament on this issue should be completed in June. After that, I think, the EU Council will support this decision finally, and we can then expect the decision to be made in the middle of summer. I hope this means that at the beginning of autumn we will receive this first tranche of macro-financial assistance," she said in a comment to Interfax-Ukraine on the sidelines of the 11th Kyiv Security Forum.

At the same time, she noted that Ukraine should understand that there are a number of conditions that it must continue to meet.

"I am sure that we will see a marker [the requirement] that concerns an analysis of e-declarations, since it is very difficult to process qualitatively and quickly the array of declarations that are currently stored in the NACP system," Klympush-Tsintsadze added.

In addition, she noted that Ukraine had already fulfilled a number of conditions, in particular, the adoption of the law on the credit register.

"I think that we are in a good condition to have a positive decision," she said.Ukraine and India have signed new contracts worth $20 million to expand bilateral military and technical cooperation as part of the 10th international defense exhibition Def Expo 2018, which is taking place in Chennai (India) on April 11-14, the press service of the Ukroboronprom State Concern reported on Thursday.

According to the report, following its participation in the first two days of the exhibition, Spetstechnoexport, part of Ukroboronprom, signed contracts worth about UAH 500 million.

"Representatives of the state-owned enterprise Spetstechnoexport, as part of Def Expo 2018, signed an agreement on cooperation with Indian state-owned company Bharat Electronics Limited. The agreement outlines cooperation between the parties as part of programs for the modernization and localization of the production of components for armored vehicles. Representatives of the Ukrainian and Indian defense industries are to be involved in the creation of a new a tank for the needs of the Indian Defense Ministry, the modernization of radar and air defense systems produced by the former Soviet Union, and joint research and engineering development, including in the sonar and radar directions," reads the statement.

Bharat Electronics Limited is one of the largest Indian suppliers of defense products for the Indian Defense Ministry.

Spetstechnoexport is one of the leading special exporters of Ukraine. It has been part of the Ukroboronprom State Concern since December 2010.Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has held a telephone conversation with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to discuss the deepening of bilateral relations and the development of the trilateral format of cooperation between Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

"The head of state congratulated Ilham Aliyev on a confident victory in the early presidential election in Azerbaijan. The sides confirmed their mutual willingness to deepen the relations of strategic partnership, especially on the restoration of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of both countries," the press service of the Ukrainian president said on Thursday.

The two presidents also noted the importance of developing the trilateral format of Ukraine-Azerbaijan-Turkey cooperation as an additional platform for the implementation of joint projects.

Particular attention was paid to the organization of the sixth meeting of the Council of Presidents of Ukraine and Azerbaijan as part of the Azerbaijani leader's expected visit to Ukraine.

"They also discussed preparations for holding the 12th meeting of the joint Ukrainian-Azerbaijani intergovernmental commission on economic cooperation as well as a number of bilateral events in strategically important spheres of cooperation. The parties agreed on the opening of the Trade House of Azerbaijan in Kyiv," the report says.A Ukrainian delegation led by President Petro Poroshenko will attend the NATO summit in June, but the question of holding a meeting of the Ukraine-NATO commission at the presidential and governmental level is still open, Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has said.

"Ukraine has already been invited to participate in the summit of [NATO]. Now, whether the Ukraine-NATO commission is to be held at the level of the heads of state and government is being decided. So, the Ukrainian delegation headed by the president will attend the summit, since we've received an invitation already," Klympush-Tsintsadze said in a comment to the Interfax-Ukraine agency on the sidelines of the 11th Kyiv Security Forum in Kyiv on Thursday.

She noted that Ukraine intends to work with international partners on this issue to make the committee meeting possible.

"I hope that Hungary has enough common sense to switch the issue to the bilateral agenda," she said, responding to a question about the possible blocking of a meeting of the relevant commission by Hungary.

She added that Kyiv would still be able to enter into a constructive dialogue with Budapest.

"It seems to me that it is still too early for us to talk about the timing of the MAP [in NATO], but certainly we hope that the summit to be held in Brussels, will confirm the intentions of the Alliance member countries, declared in Bucharest in 2008, concerning the fact that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of the Alliance, and that the next step is the MAP," the deputy PM said.

At the same time, Klympush-Tsintsadze expressed confidence that Ukraine would receive not only the MAP in the future, but will be a welcome member of NATO.By RFE/RL

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Iran not to test Israel and compared Tehran to Nazi Germany on the day Israel commemorates the murder of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II.

"I have a message to the Iranian rulers: do not test the determination of the state of Israel," Netanyahu said on April 11 at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. "These are not empty words," he said.

"During the Holocaust, we were helpless, defenseless, and voiceless. In truth, our voice was not heard at all. Today, we have a strong country, a strong army, and our voice is heard among the nations," Netanyahu said.

The Israeli leader's speech came two days after an air strike on a Syrian military base that Syria and Iran blamed on Israel. The strike killed at least 14 pro-government fighters, including seven Iranian soldiers.

Netanyahu has repeatedly warned Iran against trying to establish a permanent military presence in Syria, where it has been President Bashar al-Assad's staunchest ally in a seven-year civil war against Sunni rebels.

After the air strike, Tehran warned that it would retaliate against Israel, prompting Tel Aviv to put its military forces on high alert.

Israel appeared to justify the air strike afterward by citing an alleged chemical weapons strike by Syrian forces in the town of Douma over the weekend that killed at least 40 Syrian civilians.

The United States and European allies are currently threatening to carry out retaliatory air strikes over the incident.

Netanyahu said in his address that every generation must "confront evil and aggression."

"We saw the Syrian children being slaughtered with chemical weapons. Our hearts were torn from the horror," he said.

"Today...a murderous regime threatens us... This regime explicitly declares that it intends to annihilate us, the Jewish state," Netanyahu said.

He said a big lesson of the Holocaust is that "murderous evil" that goes unchallenged "spreads quickly and gradually threatens all of humanity."

Israel considers Iran an archenemy because of Tehran's repeated calls for destruction of the Jewish state and support for violent anti-Israel groups like the Palestine's Hamas and the Lebanon's Hizballah.

Netanyahu compared Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers to the 1938 Munich Agreement, which was seen as a failed attempt by European powers to appease Nazi Germany.

The Iranian nuclear deal lifted sanctions on the country in exchange for limits on Tehran's nuclear activities. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, such as power generation.

Also on April 11, Netanyahu in a phone call told Russian President Vladimir Putin that Israel "will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria," his office said.

The Kremlin said the two leaders "discussed recent Israeli air strikes against the T-4 air base," and Putin called on Netanyahu not to take any action that could "further destabilize" Syria.

Putin "stressed the importance of respecting Syria's sovereignty," the Kremlin's website said.

With reporting by AP, AFP, and dpaBy RFE/RL

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has signaled that the United States may impose very strong sanctions on Iran as President Donald Trump seeks to address what he called the "disastrous flaws" in the 2015 nuclear agreement between Tehran and world powers.

Mnuchin, testifying before a House appropriations subcommittee, said on April 11 that the measures would include sanctions against both Iran and entities that do business with the country.

He said he believed such sanctions would have a very strong impact on the Iranian economy.

Trump has set a May 12 deadline to either improve or scrap the accord, which was negotiated under his predecessor Barack Obama. The deal granted Iran relief from economic sanctions that have crippled its economy in exchange for limits on its nuclear activity.

Following the hearing, Mnuchin told reporters that the U.S. administration was considering both a fresh round of sanctions and the return of previous sanctions that have been periodically waived as part of the nuclear accord.

Trump is very concerned about Irans behavior and wants to have a better deal, Mnuchin told U.S. lawmakers.

He also said that the Trump administration was in talks with U.S. allies and would "not do anything abruptly."

The U.S. president accuses Tehran of violating the spirit of the nuclear deal, and called on European powers to "fix" what he says are the "terrible flaws" of the agreement. He wants new restrictions to be imposed on Tehran's nuclear and missile programs.

France, Britain, and Germany  which are also signatories to the nuclear agreement along with Russia and China -- are seeking to persuade their EU partners to back new sanctions on Iran, mainly on its missile program, in hopes of persuading Trump not to pull the United States out.

On April 9 Iranian President Hassan Rohani warned that Washington "will regret it" if the United States violates the accord.

"We are much more prepared than they think, and they will see that if they violate this accord, within a week, less than a week, they will see the result," Rohani said.

With reporting by Bloomberg and ReutersThe UNEC scientists participated in the international conference in Russia.

The topic of the XII international conference organized by the Branch of the Russian State Humanitarian University in Domodedovo was on The Legal, management, humanitarian problems of the state structures and enterpreneurship entities: Russia and the international experience.

The representatives of Bugaria, Czech Republic, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, as well as, the leading universities of other countries participated in the international conference, which was attended by the head of the Science Department of UNEC, the professor Zahid Mammadov and the dean of the Business and Management faculty, the associated professor Miragha Ahmadov.

The professor of UNEC, Zahid Mammadov sopke about the strategic goals of the socio-economic policy carried out in Azerbaijan. He drew to the attention of the conference participants the fact that the state created the enourmous oppotunities for the formation of the modern enterpreneureship subjects at the expense of the state in all spheres of ecopnomy, and created the favorable environment for efficient use of their potential. Z.Mammadov noted that, the economic policy implemented in Azerbaijan focused on the accelerating the development of enterpreneurship and strengthening the role of enterpreneurship in solving the socio-economic problems of the country.

The associated professor of UNEC, Miragha Ahmadov spoke about the Mortgage credit system in the real estate market of Azerbaijan. Speaking about the large-scale, successful economic and social reforms implemented in the country, the UNEC scientist pointed out that the strategic roadmap for the development of housing at the reasonable price in the Republic of Azerbaijan played the important role in the provision of housing for young families and the families with the need in social protection. M.Ahmadov emphasized the positive impact of the state  owned housing projects on the regulation of prices in the real estate market of Azerbaijan.

The participants of the conference expressed their interest and satisfaction with the speech of the UNEC scientist and noted the importance of studying the Azerbaijani experince in this area.

Within the framework of the visit, the UNEC delegation also met with the chairman of the council of deputies of Domodedovo city administration. In the meeting the views on the development of the social sphere were exchanged.

The UNEC delegation visited the the Gymnasium No.5 in Domodedovo, as well. During the meeting, the students were given the detail information about the steps taken by UNEC in the direction of becoming the worldwide scale university.

There was noted that, the UNEC was the only university among CIS countires, that had the branch in Russia. There was noted , that the reception of foreign students at the UNEC, the largest economy-oriented university of the South Caucasus and the only university providing the education in 4 languages,was electronicized completely. The pupils, interested in the education in Russian and English languages were informaed about the specialties taught at the Russian Economic School and the International Economic School of UNEC.

The implemention of double degree diploma program by UNEC with the influential univerities of the world caused the special interest of the pupils. They were also talked about the Electronic University Model and the exchange program.

The UNEC representatives answered the questions the pupils were interested in. The Russian pupils expressed their interest in studying at UNEC, taking into consideration that the position of Azerbaijan in the world education space, including the influential international ratings, had significantly increased.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Assistance in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is one of Russia's priorities, said the Russian Foreign Ministry, responding to the request of "Vestnik Kavkaza" on the outcome of the two-year work of the mediators for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

First of all, the Foreign Ministry noted that the South Caucasus is very important for Russia. "One thing is certain: the strategic course for close cooperation with partners in the CIS space has been and remains unchanged. At the same time, the South Caucasus is one of the most important regional directions of the foreign policy line of Russia", the ministry stressed.

"For us, of course, it is deeply indifferent what is happening in this neighboring region with Russia. We are consistently interested in restoring peace and tranquility, opening borders, resuming trade and economic relations. That is why assistance in the settlement, in particular, of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, is one of our priorities fixed in the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation", the ministry added.

It has also noted that Russia will continue to conduct the mediation work taking into account the Russian co-chairmanship in the OSCE Minsk Group, as well as the agreements reached with the leadership of Azerbaijan and Armenia in the trilateral format.

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, April 12

Trend:

Over the past 24 hours, Armenias armed forces have 115 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said April 12.

Armenians 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.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Ilkin Izzat  Trend:

The presidential election was held in democratic conditions in Azerbaijan, said Jiri Valenta, a member of the Czech Chamber of Deputies (Parliament of the Czech Republic) and deputy chairman of the Committee on European Affairs, at a press conference dedicated to the election in Baku April 12.

Valenta noted that no violations of law were recorded during the voting process.

The Czech MP added that he together with his counterpart, Jaroslav Holik, visited 14 polling stations and did not see any violations of law.

According to the results of the processing of ballots from 5,201 polling stations, incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86 percent of votes in the presidential election in Azerbaijan.

On the voting day, 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in the country.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Ilkin Izzat  Trend:

Equal conditions were created for voters and everything was in line with the law in Azerbaijans presidential election, Taalaibek Masabirov, a member of the Kyrgyz parliament and deputy chairman of the Kyrgyzstan-Azerbaijan inter-parliamentary friendship group, said in Baku April 12.

He noted that the Kyrgyz parliaments delegation observed the voting process at about 10 polling stations.

Masabirov went on to say that Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan are friendly countries, and congratulated Ilham Aliyev on his reelection as president of Azerbaijan.

According to the results of the processing of ballots from 5,201 polling stations, incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86 percent of votes in the presidential election in Azerbaijan.

On the voting day, 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in the country.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Ilhama Isabalayeva - Trend:

The presidential election in Azerbaijan was held in a highly competitive, democratic, transparent conditions, said Rashid Alimov, a member of the mission of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), at a briefing dedicated to the results of the election in Baku April 12.

The people of Azerbaijan have identified their future and this future is bright, he noted.

Alimov said that they came to Azerbaijan at the invitation of Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry on April 5 to observe the election.

He also noted that 16 experienced observer missions visited polling stations in Baku, Ganja, Sumgait cities and Absheron District. The results of the missions monitoring will be presented today to the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Azerbaijan and then will be published on the organizations website.

All the conditions were created for holding the presidential election in Azerbaijan; the participation of disabled people was also ensured in the election. Observation with web cameras was carried out at the polling stations and this allowed citizens to observe the election, added Alimov.

According to the results of the processing of ballots from 5,201 polling stations, incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86 percent of votes in the presidential election in Azerbaijan.

On the voting day, 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in the country.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.Details added (first version posted on 09:34)

Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Ilkin Izzat  Trend:

The presidential election was held in democratic conditions in Azerbaijan, said Jiri Valenta, a member of the Czech Chamber of Deputies (Parliament of the Czech Republic) and deputy chairman of the Committee on European Affairs, at a press conference dedicated to the election in Baku April 12.

Valenta noted that no violations of law were recorded during the voting process.

The Czech MP added that he together with his counterpart, Jaroslav Holik, visited 14 polling stations and did not see any violations of law.

According to the results of the processing of ballots from 5,201 polling stations, incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86 percent of votes in the presidential election in Azerbaijan.

On the voting day, 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in the country.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has congratulated Ilham Aliyev on the landslide victory in the presidential election in Azerbaijan, said a message posted on the Belarusian presidents website.

"I am sure that your activity at the presidential post will further strengthen the country's economic strength and its international authority and promote the all-round development of friendly Belarus-Azerbaijan relations, the message said.

President Lukashenko also wished President Aliyev robust health, happiness and success.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Azerbaijans Defense Minister Colonel-General, Zakir Hasanov, has congratulated the Azerbaijani army on the occasion of the successful completion of the presidential election held on April 11 and reelection of Ilham Aliyev as the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

According to a message from the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry, Minister Hasanov said that the military personnel participated in the voting process with great enthusiasm and made the right choice for the sake of the security and democratic development of Azerbaijan.

Colonel-General Zakir Hasanov once again assured that the staff is ready and capable of executing each order of the Armed Forces Supreme Commander-in-Chief to ensure the liberation of occupied territories and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

According to the results of the processing of ballots from 5,201 polling stations, incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86 percent of votes in the presidential election in Azerbaijan.

On the voting day, 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in the country.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

President of the Republic of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon congratulated President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev on the landslide victory at the presidential election in Azerbaijan, said a message posted on the Tajik presidents website.

Through their will, Azerbaijanis once again demonstrated high confidence in the policy carried out under your leadership aimed at sustainable prosperity of the country and strengthening its authority in the international arena, the message said.

Thanks to your hard work and efforts, Azerbaijan has made significant progress in its social and economic development, and we sincerely rejoice at these achievements of our friends, President Rahmon said.

We are convinced that in the coming years the cooperation between Tajikistan and Azerbaijan will be further developed in the interests of the two countries, the message said. Tajikistans side is ready to work with you to make all the necessary efforts.

I wish you robust health, happiness and further success in your state activity and new achievements for the benefit of the friendly people of Azerbaijan," President Rahmon said.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Farhad Daneshvar  Trend:

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has sent a message of congratulations on the occasion of his counterpart Ilham Aliyev being re-elected as president of Azerbaijan.

I express my sincere congratulations on the occasion of your re-election as president of Azerbaijan. This election is the indication of support of the people of the Republic of Azerbaijan for the governments plans and their interest in continuing the development path of the country under your leadership. I have no doubt that the process of expanding friendly and brotherly ties between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan will continue thanks to the efforts by the authorities of the two countries, said Rouhani in his message.

The Iranian leader also wished health, success to the Azerbaijani president and prosperity to the people of the Republic of Azerbaijan.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a congratulatory message to Ilham Aliyev on the occasion of his re-election as president of Azerbaijan, said the statement posted on the Kremlin website April 12.

The landslide victory in the presidential election testifies to the high political authority of Ilham Aliyev, as well as recognition of his merits in solving the relevant socio-economic and foreign policy tasks facing Azerbaijan, President Putin said in the message.

President Putin appreciated Ilham Aliyev's efforts to strengthen friendly, good-neighborly relations between Moscow and Baku.

The Russian president expressed confidence that by joint efforts, Russia and Azerbaijan will further intensify fruitful bilateral cooperation in all areas, as well as partnership in regional and international affairs, which undoubtedly serves the fundamental interests of the Russian and Azerbaijani peoples.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev phoned President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev on April 12.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev congratulated President Aliyev on his landslide victory in the presidential election, and wished him success in his presidential activities towards ensuring the development of Azerbaijan and well-being of its people.

President Aliyev thanked Shavkat Mirziyoyev for his attention and congratulations.

The heads of state expressed confidence that the friendly relations between the two countries will continue to develop.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko phoned President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, the press service of the Azerbaijani president said in a message.

President Lukashenko congratulated Ilham Aliyev with a confident victory, and wished success in the presidential activity for the well-being of the Azerbaijani people and development of the country.

President Aliyev expressed gratitude to Alexander Lukashenko for his attention and congratulations.

The heads of the two states expressed satisfaction with the development of friendly relations between Azerbaijan and Belarus and expressed confidence in the further expansion of ties.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Ilhama Isabalayeva  Trend:

The European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center (ESISC) with its head office in Brussels confirms that the presidential election in Azerbaijan is fair and legitimate, ESISC CEO Claude Moniquet said at the press-conference in Baku April 12.

The presidential election was held freely and in a positive atmosphere on April 11, Moniquet said. There were no violations during the voting process.

He stressed that ESISC representatives monitored 20 polling stations in Baku.

"While monitoring the voting process, we saw that the election was conducted peacefully and in compliance with international standards, Moniquet added. The election was transparent. No pressure was exerted on the voters.

During the election, the registration lists were prepared in accordance with the legal procedure, Moniquet added. Special colorless inks were used. Web cameras were installed at the polling stations.

"All this increases the transparency of the electoral process, he said. The election results expressed the Azerbaijanis will.

Azerbaijan held a presidential election on April 11.

Eight candidates were registered for the election. Six of the candidates were nominated by political parties, one candidate was a self-nominee and another candidate was nominated by an initiative group.

The incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86.03 percent of votes in the election, according to the votes counted in 5,641 polling stations.

On the voting day, 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in the country.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili congratulated Ilham Aliyev on the landslide victory in the presidential election held in Azerbaijan on April 11.

My congratulations to my friend, President Ilham Aliyev on his re-election as the President of Azerbaijan, Margvelashvili tweeted. Looking forward to active cooperation for the welfare of our brotherly nations.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

Ambassador of Israel to Azerbaijan Dan Stav has congratulated President Ilham Aliyev on the overwhelming victory in the presidential elections in Azerbaijan.

Ambassador Stav expresses confidence that during this term of Ilham Aliyevs presidency Azerbaijan will develop further and achieve its goals and that close and friendly relations between Azerbaijan and Israel that developed a lot under the leadership of Ilham Aliyev since 2003 will be developed in the future.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

President of Russia Vladimir Putin phoned President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev on April 12.

The Azerbaijani presidents press service said in a message that President Putin congratulated President Aliyev on the convincing victory in the election and wished him success in the presidential activity for the prosperity of the Azerbaijani people and the development of Azerbaijan.

Putin expressed confidence that the Russia-Azerbaijan relations will continue to develop successfully in all spheres.

President Aliyev expressed his gratitude to Vladimir Putin for the attention and congratulation.

The head of state expressed his confidence that the relations between Azerbaijan and Russia will further develop and the two countries will cooperate closely.

During the phone conversation, the two presidents exchanged views on the prospects of the Azerbaijan-Russia bilateral relations based on strategic partnership.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban has made a phone call to President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.

Orban congratulated President Aliyev on his victory in the presidential election and wished him success in the presidential activity for the prosperity of the Azerbaijani people, the press service of the Azerbaijani president said in a message.

President Aliyev expressed gratitude to the Hungarian prime minister for his attention and congratulations.

During the phone conversation, the sides underlined the successful development of bilateral relations between the two countries and stressed the good opportunities for further expansion of the relations.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Ilkin Shafiyev  Trend:

The presidential election in Azerbaijan was held in the holiday atmosphere, Deputy Speakers of Parliament of Serbia Veralyub Arsich said at a press conference on April 12.

"In Serbia, election is a holiday, a similar atmosphere was observed here. I think this is due to the success of your country. We have visited 14 polling stations, including 11 in Baku and three in the regions. We did not record any violations, which could affect the electoral process. Citizens were not subjected to pressure, the secrecy of the vote was respected. In short, the election was held in accordance with international standards," he said.

Azerbaijan held a presidential election on April 11.

Eight candidates were registered for the election. Six of the candidates were nominated by political parties, one candidate was a self-nominee and another candidate was nominated by an initiative group.

The incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86.03 percent of votes in the election, according to the votes counted in 5,641 polling stations.

On the voting day, 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in the country.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.

The voter turnout was 74,51 percent. That is 3,962,123 of 5,332,817 voters cast ballot in the election.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Ilkin Shafiyev  Trend:

The presidential election results in Azerbaijan are the guarantee of the country's development, Predrag Kozhul, representative of the parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said at the press conference in Baku April 12.

"We accepted the invitation to observe the presidential election with pleasure and carefully monitored the voting process," he added. All conditions were created for international observers and representatives of the non-governmental organizations to monitor the voting process."

During the election, no violations were observed, citizens actively voted, Kozhul said. The voting process was rather organized.

The youth's activity in the voting process and the creation of opportunities for people with disabilities to vote in the election are positive facts, he said.

Azerbaijan held presidential election on April 11.

Eight candidates were registered for the election. Six of the candidates were nominated by political parties, one candidate was a self-nominee and another candidate was nominated by an initiative group.

The incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86.03 percent of votes in the election.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.

The voter turnout was 74.51 percent.Details added (first version posted on 13:12)

Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Opening of the Haji Javad Mosque as the first event after the presidential election is a clear example of state-religion relations, said Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev.

He made the remarks at a ceremony of opening of a new building of the Haji Javad Mosque in Bakus Yasamal District April 12.

"This is a wonderful event, a beautiful mosque. The mosque has been built in the traditional architectural style of Azerbaijan. Its interior design, appearance please the eye," said the president.

He went on to note that the previous building of the mosque wasn't in good condition.

This question arose when construction work began around the mosque, when public zones, road junctions were created; the mosque was in an unusable, emergency situation. After I was informed, I immediately ordered that a new building should be built near the Haji Javad Mosque, and the new building was given the name of Haji Javad, because this mosque is the Haji Javad Mosque, just a new building, the head of state added.

At the same time, President Aliyev said that the previous mosque didn't have a minaret, while the new one does.

"An administrative building has been constructed, and the adjacent territory has been landscaped. According to information I have, 500, and maybe 600 people can perform a prayer at the same time in the mosque, the head of state said.

President Aliyev added that the mosque has been built through state funds.

As you know, lately all our historical mosques have been thoroughly renovated by the state and new mosques have been built. Bibiheybat mosque, Tezepir mosque are among them. Currently, great creative work is being carried out around the Tezepir mosque. You know it well, because the Haji Javad Mosque was located there. The territory is cleared in front of it, a large park will be set up here, and a road infrastructure will be created, said the president.

The president went on to add that other historical mosques have been overhauled as well. Among them are the Ajdarbey Mosque, the Shamakhi Juma Mosque, which is one of the oldest mosques in the Caucasus, built in 743.

"Another ancient mosque was fully renovated recently in the Demirchi village of Shamakhi district. It was built in the same period. The complete reconstruction of the religious and historical complex, Imamzadeh, was a major historical project. We, having saved the ancient place for the prayer, built a new mosque. Public buildings were also built there, the adjacent territory was landscaped. The Heydar Mosque was built at my initiative in Baku several years ago, and it is a beautiful, majestic mosque, added President Aliyev.

The head of state noted that after liberation of the Jojug Marjanli village from the occupation, a mosque similar to the Shusha mosque was built in the village.

I participated in the opening of the mosque. It can be said that I have personally participated in the opening of all mosques built and reconstructed in recent times, he added.

The Azerbaijani president said the states carrying out this work demonstrates a high level of relations between state and religion.

These relations in Azerbaijan are exemplary. As you know, the presidential election was held yesterday, and today this is the first event after it. This is also a clear example, the embodiment of relations between state and religion. I am very glad that our religious and cultural monuments are being protected, restored in Azerbaijan. This is our history, added the head of state.

President Aliyev noted that religious values are an integral part of the countrys national and spiritual values.

The Azerbaijani people is loyal to their roots, their traditions, said the president.

He added that 2017 was declared the Year of Islamic Solidarity in Azerbaijan.

During the year, we held conferences and events not only in the country, but also, it can be said, all over the world. At the end of last year, Baku hosted a big final conference, which attracted the attention of the world. The Islamic Solidarity Games were held in Baku. We received the whole Muslim world in Baku, demonstrated our hospitality. In other words, Azerbaijan is carrying out a very big work for Islamic solidarity. This work is highly appreciated throughout the Islamic world. This is highly appreciated by the Muslims of Azerbaijan. Our policy manifests itself in practical activities. Today, this fine monument of architecture is being given to the community of the Haji Javad Mosque. I congratulate you on this remarkable event. I wish you success, concluded President Aliyev.Headline changed, details added (first version posted on 11:19)

Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has received a delegation of members of the parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia led by Steven Georganas, a member of the House of Representatives of the Australian Parliament, a member of the Australia-Azerbaijan interparliamentary friendship group.

Members of the delegation expressed satisfaction with the visit to Azerbaijan, and noted that during the briefing held immediately after the closure of the polling stations, they said that the entire electoral process was conducted transparently and that they witnessed the activity of voters at polling stations and holding of voting in democratic conditions.

Ilham Aliyev said that all conditions were created in Azerbaijan for open and transparent holding of the election in accordance with the legislation and thus for the free expression of the will of the people.

President Ilham Aliyev noted with satisfaction the very active participation of voters in the election and also stressed that the election was held in full compliance with Azerbaijans commitments to the Council of Europe as its member country.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has congratulated President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.

"I sincerely congratulate you on the re-election as the President of Azerbaijan and wish you success in your work," President Vucic said in his congratulatory message.

"The high confidence of the Azerbaijani citizens in you proves that they deeply believe in the strength of your ideas and your thoughts on the further progress of Azerbaijan. I am sure that the people's confidence will strengthen your iron will in order to lead them along the successful path," the Serbian president said.

President Vucic further voiced gladness that he will soon visit Azerbaijan again.

We will continue the informative discussions that were held during my previous visit and other events, the president of Serbia said. We wish to continue joint efforts for further development of traditional friendly relations and strategic partnership between Serbia and Azerbaijan. Taking this opportunity, I once again express my deep respect to you.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev has congratulated Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

"Dear Ilham Heydarovich, on behalf of the people of Kazakhstan and on my own behalf, I congratulate you on the confident victory in the presidential election in Azerbaijan. Your victory in the election proves that the Azerbaijani people are providing high support to your policy aimed at increasing the well-being of the people and strengthening of the country's authority on international arena," Nazarbayev said in his congratulatory message.

"On this high state post, I wish you new success on the path of Azerbaijan's further prosperity and effective implementation of all the forthcoming plans. I want to note your great contribution to the strengthening of relations between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, based on unbreakable friendship and trust," the Kazakh president said.

Nazarbayev further voiced confidence that the strategic cooperation between the two countries will continue to develop dynamically for the bright future of Azerbaijani and Kazakh peoples.

"Dear Ilham Heydarovich, taking this opportunity, I wish you good health, inexhaustible energy, success in all initiatives, and friendly Azerbaijani people - peace and prosperity," the president of Kazakhstan said in his message.Details added (first version posted on 15:11)

Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has received a delegation led by co-chair of the Turkey-Azerbaijan Interparliamentary Friendship Group of the Turkish Parliament Necdet Unuvar.

Congratulating President Ilham Aliyev on confident victory in the April 11 election, Necdet Unuvar noted that he came to the country with a big observer delegation and that they conducted observations at polling stations.

He also noted that the people showed great interest in the election and they didnt face any offense during the voting.

President Ilham Aliyev recalled with satisfaction the telephone conversation with President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan after the election and a congratulatory letter sent to him by Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.

Ilham Aliyev said that every effort was made to ensure that the election is held as transparent as possible and reflect the will of the Azerbaijani people.

Stressing that the number of people participating in the election was quite high, President Ilham Aliyev noted that this gives additional strength to further confidently lead the country forward.

Ilham Aliyev expressed confidence in further successful development of the Azerbaijani-Turkish brotherly, friendly ties.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

President of Mongolia Khaltmaagiin Battulga made a phone call to President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.

Khaltmaagiin Battulga congratulated Ilham Aliyev on his victory in the presidential election, and wished him success in his presidential activities towards ensuring the well-being of the people and state of Azerbaijan.

President Ilham Aliyev thanked Khaltmaagiin Battulga for his attention and congratulations.

The heads of state expressed confidence that relations between the two countries will continue to strengthen.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Ambassador of the Czech Republic to Azerbaijan Vitezslav Pivonka upon the termination of his diplomatic tenure, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a message on April 12.

During the meeting, the sides exchanged views on the current state of bilateral relations, progress achieved in recent years and cooperation prospects between Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.

Ambassador Pivonka said that he did his best to contribute to the strengthening of bilateral relations during his tenure and thanked the Azerbaijani government for the support of initiatives in this direction.

He emphasized that he enjoyed the beauty of Azerbaijan and leaves the country with pleasant impressions.

Mammadyarov thanked Pivonka for his contribution to the development of relations between Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic and wished him every success in his future endeavors.(Details added 18:33)

Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Azerbaijan does not consider the preliminary conclusions of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the presidential election held on April 11, as fair and objective, Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hikmat Hajiyev told Trend April 12.

Hajiyev made the remarks when commenting on the preliminary conclusions of the International Election Observation mission.



He noted that representatives of the observation mission were received at the Foreign Ministry today and the protest of Azerbaijani side was presented.



In the preliminary conclusions subjective allegations and biased political considerations dominate the methodological and technical approach to observe the elections, according to Hajiyev.

"The allegations that presidential elections took place within a restrictive political environment are completely groundless. All the necessary conditions have been provided for registered candidates to carry free and open pre-election campaign. Presenting inactions of some marginal political forces owning to their political weakness and lack of political support base and passive election campaign of some candidates as shortcoming is totally incorrect," he said.



Hajiyev stressed that media in Azerbaijan is completely free. In the pre-election period, along with the media, there were active environment of political debate, even beyond any ethical norms in the social networks as well, he noted.



"Election process took place under the conditions of voters active turnout in a free manner pursuant to the requirements of law. Contrary to this, without any substantiated facts allegations such as disregard to mandatory procedures, lack of transparency and numerous serious irregularities do not withhold any criticism," Hajiyev said, adding that the Azerbaijani side demanded from the OSCE/ODHIR to present such facts, if they have any.



Hajiyev noted impossibility to perceive such information serious when elections were unrestrictedly monitored by more than 60,000 domestic and international observers and 1,000 web cameras in an online regime.



"Occurrence of technical irregularities during the election cannot be excluded. However, overgeneralization of individual technical irregularities and applying them into the entire election is assessed as overstepping the mandate and biased political attitude," he said.



While reviewing the preliminary conclusions, one can easily witness contradictory and self-disproving paragraphs, according to him.

"For instance, it is completely incomprehensible that at one point the preliminary conclusions note the positive conditions provided by Government of Azerbaijan for international observers, professional work of the Central Election Commission, but in another point claim about lack of transparency and disregard for mandatory procedures," he said, stressing that such cases are sufficient in the document, and anyone who reads it can clearly see it.



Hajiyev emphasized that the attitude displayed by the International Observation Mission is, in the first place, disrespect to the millions of Azerbaijani voters, who freely expressed their right to vote.



"In accordance with the laws of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the elections are primarily held for the citizens of the Republic of Azerbaijan. In the free, democratic, fair and transparent presidential elections the citizens of the Republic of Azerbaijan once again expressed their political will," he said.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Leman Zeynalova, Azad Hasanli  Trend:

Russia will continue developing relations with Azerbaijan in various directions, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at a briefing April 12 answering Trends question.

Undoubtedly, we will continue to develop relations with Azerbaijan, and these relations will be aimed at implementing the interests of the peoples of our countries in various directions, in various sectors on a mutually beneficial and mutually respectful basis, she said.

Zakharova noted that the Azerbaijan-Russia relations have great prospects.

Last year, Azerbaijan and Russia marked the 25th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations. Russia is one of the main economic and trade partners of Azerbaijan. More than 170 documents were signed between the two countries, including about 50 documents on economy.

Russian investments in the Azerbaijani economy exceeded $3.7 billion over the period of the two countries' cooperation. Entrepreneurs from Azerbaijan invested more than $1 billion in Russias economy.

According to Azerbaijans Customs Committee, trade turnover with Russia amounted to $2.14 billion in 2017. The Azerbaijan-Russia trade turnover rose by 4.3 percent compared to 2016.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim made a phone call to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, the press service of the Azerbaijani president said in a statement.

Binali Yildirim congratulated Ilham Aliyev on convincing victory in the presidential election and wished him success in his presidential activity for the welfare of the Azerbaijani people.

President Ilham Aliyev expressed gratitude for the attention and congratulations.

Ilham Aliyev and Binali Yildirim expressed confidence that friendly and fraternal relations between the two countries will continue to successfully develop in the future.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

Trend:

Azerbaijan's Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov has received the ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to Azerbaijan, Moussaid bin Ibrahim al-Sulayman, upon termination of his diplomatic tenure in Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in a message on April 12

The ambassador congratulated President Ilham Aliyev on the occasion of the election as the president by Azerbaijani people at the presidential election held in the country. The ambassador noted that his country attaches great importance to the development of relations with Azerbaijan.

At the meeting the sides underlined that the political relations between Azerbaijan and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are at an excellent level and are pleased with the development of the economic, trade and tourism cooperation.

It was noted that more than 35,000 Saudi Arabian citizens visited the country last year and this indicator will increase further this year by signing an air link agreement and direct air flights.

Mammadyarov highly appreciated Saudi Arabia's consistent position with regard to Armenia's aggression and occupation of the Azerbaijan's territories, as well as support for Azerbaijan's fair and just position in the international organizations.

The minister emphasized that the humanitarian aid provided by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the refugees and internally displaced persons as a result of Armenia's aggression against Azerbaijan in difficult times in the early 1990s has never been forgotten.

The envoy expressed his gratitude for the support to the development of cooperation between the two countries during his tenure, noting that Saudi Arabia's stance on the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will consistently continue.



Mammadyarov highly appreciated the efforts of the ambassador made for the development of traditional friendly and partnership relations between the two countries and wished every success in his future endeavors.The OIC Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Dr. Yousef bin Ahmed Al-Othaimeen, congratulated the people of Azerbaijan on the successful conclusion of the presidential elections on 11 April 2018, and congratulated President-elect Ilham Aliyev on his victory. He expressed satisfaction with the electoral process conducted in a transparent, peaceful, orderly and competitive manner and in an atmosphere of national harmony.

Dr. Othaimeen commended the huge turnout of voters in the presidential elections in Azerbaijan who demonstrated a high sense of responsibility and commitment towards strengthening democracy. He also commended the Central Election Commission of Azerbaijan for administering an orderly and transparent election process, including provision of equitable access to all contenders.

While praising the maturity of democracy and effectiveness of the electoral system in Azerbaijan, Dr. Othaimeen reaffirmed OICs commitment to further developing its longstanding relationship with Azerbaijan and its people.Baku, Azerbaijan, May 5

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

The Russian Export Center (REC) may support export of various Russian equipment to Azerbaijan, Nuri Guliyev, head of the local representation of the REC, told Trend.

In particular, REC may support projects as part of insurance of railway and machine-building products supplies to Azerbaijan for a total of $322.5 million, he said.

Guliyev added that Eximbank of Russia (Roseximbank), a member of the REC group of companies, is considering a number of projects to provide credit support for Russian supplies of railway and aviation equipment.

He noted that since the opening of the representation in Azerbaijan [December 25, 2017] business activity on both sides has doubled. Thus, the number of inquiries of the Azerbaijani business to search for manufacturers of Russian products almost doubled, he added.

Guliyev noted that at the same time, for the first quarter of 2018, one can clearly observe the dynamics and increase in the number of applications of Russian exporters with a wide range of issues related to export of products to the Azerbaijani market.

There are requests for clarification of Azerbaijani legislation, certification standards, logistic support, detailed search for a partner and requests for funding, he added.

Speaking about the growing activity of the Azerbaijani-Russian business relations, Guliyev also noted that four new members, Russian companies in the field of machine engineering, agriculture, electrical equipment and construction, joined the Russia-Azerbaijan Business Council.

This is also an indicator of the activity and interest of Russian business in cooperation with Azerbaijan, he added.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Maksim Tsurkov  Trend:

Azerenergy JSC, Azerbaijans electricity producer, and Iran's state energy company Tavanir signed an agreement on the sale-purchase of electricity, the Azerbaijani Energy Ministry said in a message on April 12.

The agreement was signed within the visit of an Azerbaijani delegation led by Deputy Energy Minister Natig Abbasov to Iran, the ministry said.

During the visit, a meeting was held at the Iranian Energy Ministry, where the sides discussed electricity trade between the two countries, regulating the joint activities of energy grids of Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia, as well as the energy transit to other countries.

Further an agreement was signed on sale and purchase of electricity between Azerenergy JSC and Tavanir, a company engaged in production, distribution and transmission of electricity in Iran. The deal was signed by Azerenergy JSC President Etibar Pirverdiyev and Head of Tavanir Arash Kordi. Under the agreement, Azerenergy JSC will start importing 180 MW of electricity for the regions of Mugan and Astara in June 2018, the ministry said.

The sides also agreed to hold a trilateral meeting on realization of a project to unite the energy grids of Azerbaijan, Iran and Russia in Baku on April 26, and discussed the development of the Iran-Azerbaijan-Georgia energy corridor.Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, April 12

By Huseyn Hasanov Trend:

Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov has appointed Myratgeldi Meredov as deputy prime minister in charge of the fuel and energy complex, the Turkmen government said in a message.

Prior to this, Myratgeldi Meredov was the department head at the Turkmen Cabinet of Ministers.

The decision was made at the last government meeting. Noting that a number of unresolved issues accumulated in the oil and gas industry, the Turkmen president gave a number of instructions regarding the increase of oil production and its processing in the country.

It is necessary to actively develop the natural gas processing industry to establish ammonia, carbamide and technical carbon production, as well as to systematically increase the production of liquefied gas, which is in great demand in global markets, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov said.

It was also said that it is necessary to continue work on the technical re-equipment of spheres of the fuel and energy complex, accelerate construction of plants, development and commissioning of newly discovered oil and gas fields.

Maksat Babayev, former deputy prime minister in charge of the fuel and energy complex, will be appointed to the post related to the construction of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline.

Turkmenistan holds one of the key positions in the supply of natural gas in the region, which is exported to China and Iran.

The worlds second largest gas field, Galkynysh, is located in eastern Turkmenistan. According to an audit held by the UKs Gaffney, Cline & Associates, reserves of the Turkmen Galkynysh field, together with reserves of the Yashlar and Garakel fields, exceed 27 trillion cubic meters of gas.Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, April 12

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov by his decree has appointed Khoshgeldi Mergenov as minister of industry of Turkmenistan.

It was earlier reported that the Turkmen Industry Ministry, along with the Academy of Sciences, Energy Ministry and the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, are entrusted with creating a number of facilities by 2020 in line with the Turkmen state program on development of domestic electronics industry and implementation of measures for import substitution.Baku, Azerbaijan, April 12

By Khalid Kazimov  Trend:

In order to renew its car part manufacturing industry, Iran needs to lure a total of $5.3 billion in foreign and domestic investment, said a senior industry representative, IRNA reported.

Mohammad Reza Najafi-Manesh, the secretary of Auto Parts Association of Iran, has said that the industry in order to renew needs to lure $3 billion in foreign direct investments and 100 trillion rials ($2.3 billion) in domestic investment.

He added that the country imported $2 billion worth of car parts over the last Iranian calendar year which ended on March 21.

The senior manufacturer estimated the value of the countrys car market at 600 trillion rials ($14.2 billion).

Over 1.718 million of various new vehicles were sold at Irans market in 2017, according to the latest report of the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (OICA).

The figure which indicates a rise by 19 percent year-on-year, is the highest volume of sold vehicles in the country in recent years.

Iran was the 12th biggest car market in the world in 2017 with 7.1 percent share of global market.The Government of Georgia has recognized the 26 centuries of Georgian-Jewish relations as intangible cultural heritage, Agenda reports.

PM Giorgi Kvirikashvili said at a special event dedicated to the announcement that Georgia has addressed UNESCO to also recognise the unique relations and give them the status of intangible cultural heritage.

The PM made the statement in Tbilisis David Baazov Museum of History of the Jews of Georgia to mark the important day and the decision.

"26 centuries ago, the Jews settled in Georgia and since then we have jointly created a common cultural heritage, which has made both Georgian and Jewish cultures diverse. A 26-century friendship is impossible without the strongest love. Anti-Semitism has never existed in Georgia, and the two countries centuries-old bond and love speaks to this, Kvirikashvili said.

Kvirikashvili stated that the government of Georgia is waiting for the international recognition of the friendship as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO.

Georgian Jews are one of the oldest communities in Georgia, tracing their migration into the country during the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BC.United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a statement on Wednesday the situation around Syria runs the risk of getting out of control and called to spare no effort to avoid it, TASS reports.

"Yesterday, I expressed my outrage at the reports of continued use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic. I have also been closely following developments in the Security Council and regret that the Council has so far been unable to reach agreement on this issue," he said.

"Today, I called the Ambassadors of the five Permanent Members of the Security Council to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse and stressed the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control," he underscored. "Let us not forget that, ultimately, our efforts must be about ending the terrible suffering of the Syrian people."

Some non-governmental organizations, including White Helmets, claim that chemical weapons were used in Douma, Eastern Ghouta, on April 7. According to the statement uploaded to the organizations website on April 8, chlorine bombs were dropped on the city to kill dozens and poison other local civilians who had to be brought to hospital.

The Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed that as fake news. The Russian Defense Ministry stated that White Helmets were an unreliable source, notorious for disseminating falsehoods. The Russian center for the reconciliation of conflicting parties on April 9 examined Douma to find no traces of chemical weapons. Earlier, various official Russian agencies repeatedly warned that preparations had been underway in different parts of Syria for provocations and simulations of chemical attacks that would be blamed on government forces.China will remove import tariffs on cancer drugs from May 1, state media reported on Thursday, citing a meeting of the State Council, or cabinet, chaired by Premier Li Keqiang, Reuters reports.

China will also strengthen intellectual property right protections of drugs, the report said.The municipality of Paris has asked a French court to urgently fine Airbnb and two other small companies for unauthorized short-term letting, said an official with the citys administration, Reuters reports.

A hearing at a Paris court is scheduled for June 12.

Founded in 2008 in San Francisco, Airbnb matches people wishing to rent out all or part of their homes to temporary guests, via a website.

Ian Brossat, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of housing, told Le Parisien newspaper that Airbnb and other competitors had failed to take down listings lacking official registration numbers.

The registration number, he said, helps ensure the companies do not rent out properties for more than the 120 nights a year allowed.

Brossat said the municipality had asked for fines ranging from 1,000-5,000 euros ($1,236.4-$6,182) per day and per advertisement.

Officials with Airbnb were not immediately available for comment.

Earlier this month, a Singapore court fined two Airbnb hosts a total of $45,800 each for unauthorized short-term letting.

Several cities throughout the world have expressed concerns that platforms such as Airbnb might stand as unfair competitors to hotels.

France is Airbnbs second-largest market after the United States. Paris, one of the most visited cities in the world, is its biggest single market, with around 65,000 homes listed.Paris has evidence to prove Damascuss use of chemical weapons last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with the TF1 TV channel, TASS reports.

When asked if France had evidence of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, Macron said "Yes, we have evidence."London has called for a UN Security Council meeting on a report on the Salisbury incident released by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the UKs mission to the UN said on Twitter on Thursday, TASS reports.

"The UK has called for a UNSC meeting on the OPCW report on the Salisbury incident. We expect this to be held next week," the tweet reads.

The OPCW earlier released a report confirming the United Kingdoms findings that former Russian military intelligence officer-turned-British spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia had been poisoned with a nerve agent.

According to the report, "the toxic chemical was of high purity. The latter is concluded from the almost complete absence of impurities." "The name and structure of the identified toxic chemical are contained in the full classified report of the Secretariat, available to States Parties," the OPCW added.

Russias mission to the OPCW acknowledged the receipt of both documents but declined from commenting on the matter, saying that "it will take time to study them."

According to London, on March 4, former Russian military intelligence (GRU) Colonel Sergei Skripal, who had been convicted in Russia of spying for Great Britain and later swapped for Russian intelligence officers, and his daughter Yulia suffered the effects of an alleged nerve agent in the British city of Salisbury.

Claiming that the substance used in the attack had been a Novichok-class nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union, London rushed to accuse Russia of being involved in the incident. Moscow rejected all of the United Kingdoms accusations, saying that a program aimed at developing such a substance had existed neither in the Soviet Union nor in Russia.

In the wake of the Skripal incident, the UK, as well as a number of EU member countries, the United States, Canada and Australia, expelled more than 100 Russian diplomats, forcing Moscow to respond in kind.Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned on Thursday that steps on stirring up tensions around Syria are very destructive, calling to avoid them, TASS reports.

"We still believe that it is very necessary to avoid any steps which can trigger mounting tensions in Syria," Peskov told reporters.

"We believe that this could have a very destructive impact on the entire Syrian settlement," he stressed.Russian and Turkish Presidents Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan have discussed the situation in Syria over the phone and pointed to the importance of ensuring the necessary conditions for the work of inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in that country, TASS reports.

"[The two presidents] expressed concern over the current aggravation of the situation in and around Syria amid allegations about the use of chemical weapons in the city of Douma," the Kremlin press service reported. "[They] stressed the importance of ensuring the necessary conditions for the work of the OPCW inspectors travelling to Syria."

The two leaders spoke out in favor of intensifying the Syrian political settlement process based on UN Security Council Resolution 2254 and the decision made by the Syrian National Dialogue Congress. "[They] agreed to continue bilateral contacts at different levels," the Kremlin press service added.US President Donald Trump has claimed to have never said when an attack on Syria would be carried out, TASS reports.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?" Trump wrote on Twitter.U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the trade negotiations between Washington and Beijing were going well, conflicting with Chinese official statements on the dispute, TASS reports.

Were doing really well with China. I think were having some great discussions, well see what happens, Trump said at a meeting with governors and lawmakers, attended by reporters.

We want more trade. We want no barriers, Trump said.The White House said Thursday that President Donald Trump has not made any final decisions regarding a U.S. response to a deadly chemical attack in Syria after convening with national security advisers at the White House, NBCNews.com reports.

The president told reporters ahead of the meeting that he was reviewing all options amid growing international calls for action against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was among the top U.S. officials attending Thursday's White House meeting with the president.

No final decision has been made," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said upon its conclusion. "We are continuing to asses intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies."

Sanders said that President Trump is scheduled to speak with France's President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May later Thursday.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 - Apr 12, 2018 - 08:17 | World, All

North Korea convened its annual legislative session on Wednesday, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Thursday, just as security tensions have eased following Pyongyang's sudden shift toward diplomacy.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was not present at the session of the Supreme People's Assembly, the nation's top legislative body, according to the KCNA report.

(File photo)

The session came ahead of Kim's envisioned talks with South Korean President Moon Jae In on April 27 and with U.S. President Donald Trump possibly by the end of May or in early June.

In the run-up to the summits, observers are looking to see whether there will be any indication from the assembly of a change in Pyongyang's policy of pursuing ballistic missile and nuclear weapon programs.

During a meeting with Moon's special envoys in Pyongyang in early March, Kim agreed to refrain from missile and nuclear tests during the period of dialogue with Washington on denuclearization and normalization of bilateral ties, according to South Korea.

Kim was also quoted by South Korean officials as saying there is no reason to possess nuclear weapons in the presence of security guarantees and the absence of threats.

North Korea has intensified diplomatic efforts recently, at a time when inter-Korean relations have been improving since the North decided to take part in the Feb. 9-25 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics hosted by the South.

(Xi-Kim meeting on March 26, 2018. Photo courtesy of Korea Media)

Late last month, Kim held a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing during his first foreign trip since becoming North Korea's leader following the death of his father Kim Jong Il in 2011.

Kim promised Xi that Pyongyang will move forward with denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.KYODO NEWS - Apr 12, 2018 - 21:50 | All, World

Japan plans to avoid expressing direct support for actual U.S. military action against Syria, in an attempt to avoid damaging negotiations with Russia over a decades-long territorial row, government sources said Thursday.

Japan will only support U.S. President Donald Trump's "resolve" to prevent any further use of chemical weapons in Syria, the sources said.

Russia is a major backer of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country's civil war, and strongly opposes the U.S. claim that Syrian government forces attacked a rebel-held town near Damascus on Saturday with chemical weapons.

Having pledged to put an end to the dispute over the Russian-held, Japan-claimed chain of islands, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hopes to make progress on the issue in talks with President Vladimir Putin during a visit to Russia next month.

Before that, Abe will meet Trump in the United States next week, with the aim of getting Japan's interests on the agenda of a proposed meeting in May or June between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Trump posted a tweet on Wednesday warning Russia to "get ready" because missiles "will be coming" to Syria. Then Thursday he tweeted that an attack on Syria "could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

According to the sources, the specific response being considered in the event of U.S. military action against Syria is Japan's "support for the U.S. resolve to fulfill its responsibility to prevent the use of chemical weapons."

Tokyo issued a similar response in April last year when the United States conducted a missile strike on a Syrian air base that was the alleged source of a chemical attack that killed dozens of civilians.

"Japan cannot make a judgment on whether Assad's government forces really used chemical weapons," a senior Foreign Ministry official said of the latest attack.

Japan has also refrained from joining the United States and other countries in alleging Russia was responsible for the nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain last month.KYODO NEWS - Apr 12, 2018 - 12:18 | Feature, All

Japanese police took action against a record 3,008 people in cases involving marijuana in 2017, up 472 from the previous year, National Police Agency data showed Thursday.

The data showed a notable increase in marijuana cases embroiling people aged below 20, raising concern that use of the drug is becoming more widespread among juveniles.

(Cannibis and marijuana confiscated by police)

The number of people that came to the police's attention per 100,000 doubled to 3.0 in 2017 from 2013, while the number of those aged between 14 and 19 saw more than a five-fold increase to 4.1 from 0.8 and that of people in their 20s increased to 9.4 from 4.8.

The figure for people in their 40s and 50s came well below the overall rate of 3.0, standing at 1.8 and 0.3, respectively.

In a separate survey conducted last year covering some 500 people investigated for involvement in marijuana related-cases, only around 30 percent of respondents said they thought marijuana use to be dangerous compared to some 70 percent for stimulant drugs.

While 42.9 percent of respondents in their 40s said they started using marijuana out of curiosity, a larger 66.3 percent of those aged below 20 cited the same motivation.

"It is possible that more people are shifting to marijuana on the back of declining number of people using so-called 'dangerous drugs' against which measures have been bolstered," an agency official said.

The Japanese government defines dangerous drugs as those containing chemical agents that can cause hallucinations or have a stimulant effect.

In all age groups combined, 63.7 percent said they began using marijuana after being influenced by peers while 22.6 percent decided to try it independent of others.

More than 80 percent of respondents aged under 20 said they were offered the drug compared with around 70 percent of people in their 20s and about 50 percent of those in their 30s.

Among the cases that came to the police's attention, 2,505 involved people in possession of marijuana, 168 were involved in dealing, 67 smuggling and 138 cultivation.

Police specifically noted some cases that saw a Japanese crime syndicate partnering with a Vietnamese criminal group to grow marijuana.

Police took action against 13,542 people in drug-related cases last year. The number investigated for stimulant drug cases slightly fell from a year earlier to 10,113. Cases related specifically to cocaine saw an approximate four-fold rise since 2013 to 177.

Stimulant drugs seized by authorities stood at 1,118.1 kilograms last year, topping the 1,000 kg mark for the second consecutive year. Synthetic drugs including MDMA, often an ingredient in the drug commonly known as ecstasy, stood at 3,181 pills and cocaine at 9.6 kg.25% of 15,914 COVID-19 cases in Kerala on Thursday unvaccinated

The state government has said that there are no reports of anti-COVID vaccination taken by at least 4,031 of the fresh cases.The inventors of the flight simulator and SPANX are among this year's innovators elected

TAMPA, Fla. (Apr. 11, 2018) - Sara Blakely, a graduate of Florida State University and the inventor of SPANX, and the late Edwin Link, the man who invented the flight simulator in the 1920s, are among the seven inventors announced today as the 2018 inductees of the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame.

This year's class also includes Florida native Emery Brown, a member of all four National Academies whose research has advanced anesthesiology; Phillip Furman, whose discoveries have led to treatments for viral diseases such as AIDS; Richard Houghten, for his groundbreaking research that advanced the field of drug discovery; Sudipta Seal, whose work has led to nano-medicine breakthroughs; and Herbert Wertheim, an optometrist whose eyeglass lenses have helped prevent cataracts and other eye diseases.

All will be inducted at the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame 5th Annual Induction Ceremony & Gala on Sep. 7, 2018, at the Hilton Tampa Downtown.

"We are delighted to announce this outstanding class of inventors whose work has had enormous impact on the state of Florida and our nation," said Randy Berridge, who serves on the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame advisory board and as chair of the selection committee.

Nominees, who must have at least one U.S. patent and a connection to Florida, were nominated through an open nomination process and elected by a selection committee comprising distinguished leaders in research and innovation throughout Florida.

"Collectively, the 2018 inductees hold more than 180 U.S. patents," said Berridge, "Among them are celebrated industry leaders and alumni and representatives of six Florida universities."

"As we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame, we are honored to be inducting such a distinguished group of inventors," said Paul R. Sanberg, chair of the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame advisory board and senior vice president for research, innovation and knowledge enterprise at the University of South Florida. "The 2018 inductees' accomplishments have advanced fields ranging from aviation to health care to fashion."

The Florida Inventors Hall of Fame was recognized by the Florida Senate in 2014 with a resolution sponsored by Senator Jeff Brandes that commended the Hall of Fame "for its commitment to honoring inventors and celebrating innovation, discovery, and excellence." The Hall of Fame is located at the University of South Florida in Tampa and supported, in part, by the Florida High Tech Corridor Council.

The 2018 inductees of the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame:

Sara Blakely, Tampa Bay native and graduate of Florida State University who invented the renowned undergarment SPANX, a billion dollar enterprise that has influenced fashion worldwide. Blakely holds 3 U.S. patents.

Emery Brown, Massachusetts General Hospital anesthesiologist-statistician, MIT and Harvard professor of anesthesia, born and raised in Marion County, Florida, who made significant contributions to the advancement of the science and practice of anesthesiology, enabling physicians to accurately monitor and safely control the anesthetic state of patients. Brown has been elected to all four national academies: the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Inventors. He holds 3 U.S. patents.

Phillip Furman, past president of the International Society for Antiviral Research and distinguished alumnus of the University of South Florida (USF), whose revolutionary discoveries led to the development of antiviral drugs that are used to treat some of the most insidious viral diseases in the past 50 years including AIDS, herpes, and Hepatitis C. Furman holds 20 U.S. patents.

Richard Houghten, founder and CEO of Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies (TPIMS), headquartered in Port St. Lucie, Florida has made a significant impact on the pharmaceutical industry through his research and patents related to groundbreaking approaches of screening compounds that have revolutionized drug discovery across the nation. Houghten holds 81 U.S. patents.

Edwin Link, (1904-1981) former trustee and vice president for Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), was a pioneer in aviation, underwater archeology, and submersibles who is most recognized for inventing the flight simulator commercialized in 1929 that trained countless pilots, including 500,000 airmen during World War II. Link is a named inventors on 27 U.S. patents.

Sudipta Seal, Trustee Chair and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Central Florida (UCF), who discovered the antioxidant properties of nanostructured cerium oxide that led to groundbreaking therapeutic applications in regenerative nano-medicine. Seal holds 46 U.S. patents.

Herbert Wertheim, Florida optometric physician, alumnus of the University of Florida (UF) and Florida International University (FIU), and CEO of Brain Power Inc., who was first to discover and produce ultraviolet light dye absorbers for eyeglass lenses, helping millions avoid cataracts and other eye diseases. Wertheim holds 7 U.S. patents.

###

More information is at http://www.FloridaInvents.org or contact info@FloridaInvents.org.

The Florida Inventors Hall of Fame (FIHF) recognizes and commends Florida inventors whose achieve-ments have advanced the quality of life for Floridians, the state and the nation. Founded in 2013 and housed in the University of South Florida Research Park in Tampa, FIHF was recognized by Florida Senate Resolution 1756 in April of 2014. FIHF encourages individuals of all ages and backgrounds to strive toward the betterment of Florida and society through continuous, groundbreaking innovation, and, by commending the incredible scientific work being accomplished in the state, to further the growth of Florida's innovation sector. FloridaInvents.orgCybersecurity

National cyber strategy could come by summer

The long-awaited national cyber strategy could materialize this summer.

Defense Department Assistant Secretary for Domestic and Global Security Kenneth Rapuano hinted during an April 11 House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilitieshearing that the much-anticipated national cyber strategy should be forthcoming in the near future.

Its very hard, Rapuano said when asked about the lack of a national strategy. "There are a lot of evolving dynamics at play and we still have a relatively new administration, and there are competing views as to what the right trade space is associated with a variety of equities and risks."

Rapuano told legislators the White House has the national cyber strategy, adding that DOD in the meantime is looking to enhance its cyber posture review, which he said is set to be released in August to sync with the impending national cyber strategy.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said, Its absolutely incumbent upon this administration in light of this threat to provide some guidance...and its hard because were in a whole new world and our adversaries are moving forward.

Cheney said the inability to define the threat, outline how the U.S. will operate, and tell adversaries these are the kinds of things that will result in a response from us is affecting deterrence.

Committee members also homed in on the potential legal and policy gaps, and lack of interagency coordination, when it comes to the services and DODs role in cyber conflict.

The challenge associated with defining traditional military activities in the cyber domain is typically that is done by looking historically, Rapuano said, adding that the Trump administration is looking to understand the implications of changing the current definition of a traditional military operation, if warranted.

Integrating the force

For Cyber Commander and National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers, who also testified on April 11, there needs to more integration at the sector and center levels that ties into a broader Cyber Command strategy.

To address the lack of common operating procedure, Rogers said, there are several questions that must be answered first.

The mission set that Im directly responsible for within the broader DOD effort is the critical infrastructure piece," he said. "So how do we get to an integrated real-time picture that enables us to have accurate sense of what is going on, that enables decision making and helps to speed [up] that decision making. Thats what I would recommend as a first focus, for integration.

Rogers added that DOD is in a supporting role and shouldnt lead the conversation, just be a part of it.

Subcommittee chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) responded, saying the status quo was unsustainable and interagency cooperation needed a jumpstart.

Rapuano pushed back, saying the existing cybersecurity framework drives how we organize and operate within the federal government in terms of our engagement with industry and other players. Everyone has their role, he said: the Department of Homeland Security with asset response, the Federal Bureau of Investigation on threat response, and the Director of National Intelligence for intelligence integration function.Regularly drinking more than 100 grammes (3.5 ounces) of alcohol per week -- about five or six medium glasses of wine or pints of beer -- was linked to a shorter life expectancy for men and women, according to research in The Lancet (AFP Photo/FRED TANNEAU)

Paris (France) (AFP) - Recommended limits for safe alcohol consumption are too high in many developed countries and should be lowered to save lives, a study suggested Friday.

Regularly drinking more than 100 grammes (3.5 ounces) of alcohol per week -- about five or six medium glasses of wine or pints of beer -- was linked to a shorter life expectancy for men and women, according to research published in The Lancet medical journal.

"Recommended limits in Italy, Portugal, and Spain are almost 50 percent higher than this, and in the USA, the upper limit for men is nearly double," the researchers found.

The international team analysed data on nearly 600,000 drinkers aged 30-100, from 83 studies in 19 high-income countries. The participants had been observed for at least a year after signing up.

The researchers factored in other health-related data such as the participants' age, gender, diabetes history, their socio-economic status, and whether they smoked.

Among the group, the team recorded 40,310 deaths, and compared this with the participants' self-reported levels of alcohol intake.

Drinking the equivalent of 100-200g of pure alcohol a week shortened life expectancy by about six months compared to drinking less than 100g, they found.

Consuming between 200-350g per week lowered life expectancy by one to two years, and more than 350g by up to five years.

"This study has shown that drinking alcohol at levels which were previously believed to be safe is actually linked with lower life expectancy and several adverse health outcomes," said study co-author Dan Blazer of Duke University in North Carolina.

On average, each unit of alcohol consumed over the 100g threshold, slices about 15 minutes off a person's life -- about the same as a cigarette, David Spiegelhalter, a professor in the "understanding of risk" at the University of Cambridge said in a comment on the report.

"Of course its up to individuals whether they think this is worthwhile," he said via the Science Media Centre in London.

Story continues

- Higher risk of strokes -

Alcohol guidelines vary substantially from country to country.

In the United States, for example, the recommended cutoff for men is 196g or 11 glasses of wine per week, and for women 98 grammes.

Limits in Italy, Portugal and Spain are about 50 percent higher than in Britain, where the threshold for safe drinking was recently lowered to 112g.

"These data support adoption of lower limits of alcohol consumption than are recommended in most current guidelines," the report added.

The team found no evidence supporting a lower alcohol limit for women than for men.

Commenting on the report, Petra Meier, a professor of public health at the University of Sheffield in Britain, urged caution in interpreting the results.

"Guideline developers tend to recognise that, in line with many other voluntary behaviours, drinkers are likely to be willing to accept some level of risk and have set guideline thresholds accordingly," she said.

The researchers found that the more alcohol a person consumed, the higher their risk of stroke and heart failure.

By contrast, alcohol consumption was associated with a somewhat lower risk of non-fatal heart attacks, they said -- echoing previous research.

However, "this must be balanced against the higher risk associated with other serious -- and potentially fatal -- cardiovascular diseases," said lead author Angela Wood from the University of Cambridge in Britain.The Aussie dollar has gone back and forth during the Wednesday session, testing the 0.7750 level for support, and finding it rather quickly. We rallied from there and it looks as if we are going to go towards the 0.7775 level in the short term.

The Australian dollar has been rather noisy during Wednesday trading, pulling back to the 0.7730 level, but finding a support level near the 0.7350 level overall. By doing so, we had formed a W pattern on the hourly chart, and it looks as if we are ready to continue going higher. With that in mind, I believe that the market will eventually go looking towards the 0.78 level above, and then the 0.79 level after that. We had recently tested a major uptrend line and found it to be supportive, so I think that we will continue the same upward grind that we have seen since December 2016, and therefore I believe that we will not only reach the 0.81 level again, but we will eventually break above there.

Pay attention to the gold markets, they always have their influence on the Aussie dollar, but in general right now it looks as if the US dollar is being sold off in a bit of a risk on move. If trade tensions dont get worse between the United States and China, that should help the Aussie as well, as Australia is such a major exporter of raw materials to China. All things being equal, this trade comes down to the trade tariffs, or lack of, between the United States and China more than anything else. If tensions fall, this pair rises and of course vice versa. I think at this point; the 0.77 level should be thought of as a bottom.

AUD/USD Video 12.04.18

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

More From FXEMPIRE:Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony to the House yesterday was a mostly bland performance, punctuated by frequent claims not to know or remember certain fundamental aspects of his own business. But he gave a curiously specific and aggressive response to a question from congressman Eliot Engel.

Starting from the premise that Facebook had been "deceived" by other players in the data misuse scandal it's embroiled in, the congressman wondered whether Facebook intends to sue Cambridge Analytica, professor Aleksandr Kogan and Cambridge University -- perhaps for unauthorized access to computer networks or breach of contract?

"It's something that we're looking into," replied Zuckerberg. "We already took action by banning [Kogan] from the platform and we're going to be doing a full audit to make sure he gets rid of all the data that he has as well."

But the Facebook founder also seized on the opportunity to indulge in a little suggestive shade throwing which looked very much like an attempt to blame-shift responsibility for the massive data scandal embroiling his company onto, of all things, one of the UK's most prestigious universities. (Which, full disclosure, is my own alma mater.)

"To your point about Cambridge University what we've found now is that there's a whole program associated with Cambridge University where a number of researchers -- not just Aleksandr Kogan, although to our current knowledge he's the only one who sold the data to Cambridge Analytica -- there are a number of the researchers who are building similar apps," said Zuckerberg.

"So we do need to understand whether there is something bad going on at Cambridge University overall that will require a stronger action from us."

Video: Zuckerberg Admits His Data Harvested by Cambridge Analytica

For more news videos visit Yahoo View.

What's curious about this response is that Zuckerberg elides to mention how Facebook's own staff have worked with the program he's suggesting his company "found now" -- as if it had only discovered the existence of the Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre, whose researchers have in fact been working with Facebook data since at least 2007, since the Cambridge Analytica story snowballed into a major public scandal last month.

Story continues

A Facebook data-related project that the center is involved with, called the myPersonality Project -- which started as a student side project of the now deputy director of the Psychometrics Centre, David Stillwell -- was essentially the accidental inspiration for Kogan's thisismydigitallife quiz app, according to testimony given to the UK parliament by former Cambridge Analytica employee Chris Wylie last month.

Here's how the project is described on the Centre's website:

myPersonality was a popular Facebook application that allowed users to take real psychometric tests, and allowed us to record (with consent!) their psychological and Facebook profiles. Currently, our database contains more than 6,000,000 test results, together with more than 4,000,000 individual Facebook profiles. Our respondents come from various age groups, backgrounds, and cultures. They are highly motivated to answer honestly and carefully, as the only gratification that they receive for their participation is feedback on their results.

The center itself has been active within Cambridge University since 2005, conducting research, teaching and product development in pure and applied psychological assessment -- and claiming to have seen "significant growth in the past twelve years as a consequence of the explosion of activity in online communication and social networks".

And while it's of course possible that Zuckerberg and his staff might not have been aware of the myPersonality Facebook app project -- after all 4M Facebook profiles harvested is rather less than the up to 87M Kogan was able to extract, also apparently without Facebook noticing -- what's rather harder for Zuckerberg to deny knowledge of is the fact his company's own staff have worked with Cambridge University researchers on projects analyzing Facebook data for psychological profiling purposes for years. Since at least 2015.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch yesterday, the University expressed surprise at Zuckerberg's remarks to the house.

We would be surprised if Mr Zuckerberg was only now aware of research at the University of Cambridge looking at what an individuals Facebook data says about them," a spokesperson told us. "Our researchers have been publishing such research since 2013 in major peer-reviewed scientific journals, and these studies have been reported widely in international media. These have included one study in 2015 led by Dr Aleksandr Spectre (Kogan) and co-authored by two Facebook employees."

The two Facebook employees who worked alongside Kogan (who was using the surname Spectre at the time) on that 2015 study -- which looked at international friendships as a class marker by examining Facebook users' friend networks -- are named in the paper as Charles Gronin and Pete Fleming.

It's not clear whether Gronin still works for Facebook. But a LinkedIn search suggests Fleming is now head of research for Facebook-owned Instagram.

We've asked Facebook to confirm whether the two researchers are still on its payroll and will update this story with any response.

In its statement, Cambridge University also said it's still waiting for Facebook to provide it with evidence regarding Kogan's activities. We wrote to Facebook on 21 March to ask it to provide evidence to support its allegations about Dr Kogan. We have yet to receive a response, it told us.

For his part Kogan has maintained he did nothing illegal -- telling the Guardian last month that he's being used as a scapegoat by Facebook.

We've asked Facebook to confirm what steps it's taken so far to investigate Kogan's actions regarding the Cambridge Analytica misuse of Facebook data -- and will update this story with any response.

During his testimony to the House yesterday Zuckerberg was asked by congressman Mike Doyle when exactly Facebook had first learned about Cambridge Analytica using Facebook data -- and whether specifically it had learned about it as a result of the December 2015 Guardian article.

In his testimony to the UK parliament last month, Wylie suggested Facebook might have known about the app as early as July 2014 because he said Kogan had told him he'd been in touch with some Facebook engineers to try to resolve problems with the rate that data could be pulled off the platform by his app.

But giving a "yes" response to Doyle, Zuckerberg reiterated Facebook's claim that the company first learned about the issue at the end of 2015, when the Guardian broke the story.

At another point during this week's testimony Zuckerberg was also asked whether any Facebook staff had worked alongside Cambridge Analytica when they were embedded with the Trump campaign in 2016. On that he responded that he didn't know.

Yet another curious aspect to this story is that Facebook hired the co-director of GSR, the company Kogan set up to license data to Cambridge Analytica -- as the Guardian reported last month.

According to its report Joseph Chancellor was hired by Facebook, around November 2015, about two months after he had left GSR -- citing his LinkedIn profile (which has since been deleted).

Chancellor remains listed as an employee at Facebook research, working on human computer interaction & UX, where his biography confirms he also used to be a researcher at the University of Cambridge...

I am a quantitative social psychologist on the User Experience Research team at Facebook. Before joining Facebook, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, and I received my Ph.D. in social and personality psychology from the University of California, Riverside. My research examines happiness, emotions, social influences, and positive character traits.

We've asked Facebook when exactly it hired Chancellor; for what purposes; and whether it had any concerns about employing someone who had worked for a company that had misused its own users' data.

At the time of writing the company had not responded to these questions either.(Adds Micro Focus, HCL, Wynn Resorts; updates Thyssenkrupp, Genuine Parts)

April 12 (Reuters) - The following bids, mergers, acquisitions and disposals were reported by 2000 GMT on Thursday:

** General Electric Co is exploring a public offering for one of its divisions and discussing hybrid deals with public companies to combine assets, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

** British Airways-owner IAG said it is considering making an offer for Norwegian, a low-cost carrier worth about $1.2 billion, in a deal which would expand its budget offerings and give it control of a struggling rival.

** Walmart Inc is likely to reach a deal to buy a majority stake in Indian e-commerce player Flipkart by the end of June in what could be the U.S. retail giant's biggest acquisition of an online business, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

** Britain's takeover regulator ruled that Walt Disney must make an offer for the whole of Sky if it succeeds in buying Twenty-First Century Fox assets, including its 39 percent stake in the European pay-TV company.

** Takeda Pharmaceutical has sounded out its major creditors for loans, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said, as it moves closer to a bid for London-listed rare disease specialist Shire that could hit $50 billion.

** Spain's Banco Sabadell is in talks to sell two toxic real estate asset portfolios worth around 7.5 billion euros ($9.27 billion), a source with knowledge of the deal said.

** Genuine Parts Co said it would spin off its wholesale distribution business S.P. Richards and merge it with Essendant in a tax-free transaction for shareholders, as it focuses on its industrial and auto parts businesses.

** A steel joint venture between Thyssenkrupp and Tata Steel will be delayed by ongoing talks between the Indian group and its British and Dutch workers, the German company said.

** Casino operator Wynn Resorts Ltd is in talks to sell its partially built Boston Harbor resort to rival MGM Resorts International, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Story continues

** Micro Focus shares surged, with traders citing a Bloomberg report that hedge fund Elliott Management has taken a stake in the UK software firm.

** Danish shipping company DFDS has agreed to acquire Turkish freight shipping operator U.N. Ro-Ro from Turkish private equity firms Actera Group and Esas Holdings for 950 million euros ($1.17 billion) on a debt free basis.

** GlaxoSmithKline is divesting its rare disease gene therapy drugs to Orchard Therapeutics, it said, as Chief Executive Emma Walmsley makes good on her promise to prune the drugmaker's pharmaceuticals portfolio.

** Indian IT services company HCL Technologies Ltd and private equity firm Sumeru Equity Partners will buy U.S. data management firm Actian Corp in a $330 million deal, the companies said.

** Europe's biggest utility Enel is actively looking for mid-size acquisitions of mainly regulated assets outside Europe, with Latin America a focus, its chief executive told Reuters.

** The U.S. Justice Department called an economist on Wednesday to testify that allowing AT&T to purchase movie and TV production company Time Warner would cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars, as the government wrapped up efforts to convince a federal judge to halt the proposed deal.

** British gambling technology company Playtech said it agreed to buy a 70.6 percent stake in Italian betting and gaming firm Snaitech for 291 million euros ($359.2 million) in cash, in a move to source most of its revenue from regulated markets.

** U.S. co-working space provider WeWork Cos said it would buy China-based rival Naked Hub to boost its footprint in the world's second largest economy.

** British bus and rail operator FirstGroup has rejected a takeover approach from U.S. private equity firm Apollo Global Management, becoming the latest company to be swept up by a wave of bids in the UK.

** Malaysian investment holding firm IHH Healthcare Bhd plans to bid for India's Fortis Healthcare Ltd at a price marginally better than Manipal Hospitals Enterprises Pvt Ltd's offer, Bloomberg reported, citing people aware of the matter.

** Denmark's Financial Services Authority has approved Chinese carmaker Zhejiang Geely Holding Group's offer to buy a majority stake in the Denmark's Saxo Bank, which develops and operates online trading platforms.

** China's HNA Group is selling Hawker Pacific, an aircraft management services firm, to General Dynamics Corp unit Jet Aviation for $250 million, the latest in a long line of asset sales for the debt-laden conglomerate.

** Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest lender, has signed a deal to sell most of its private banking business in Switzerland and Luxembourg to the J. Safra Sarasin Group for 20-23 million Swiss francs ($21-$24 million).

** Troubled South African retailer Steinhoff, raised 3.75 billion rand ($314 million) from the sale of a 6 percent stake in Steinhoff Africa Retail (STAR), another step in its efforts to shore up its finances and pay down debt.

** China International Capital Corp Ltd (CICC) said its biggest shareholder, Central Huijin Investment Co, has put up for sale a roughly 9.5 percent stake in the company worth about 5 billion yuan ($796.80 million).

** Maersk Drilling and Maersk Supply Service, both part of Danish shipping group A.P. Moller-Maersk, said they will establish a joint venture to provide decommissioning services to oil and gas operators.

** Swiss pumpmaker Sulzer is free of U.S. sanctions after authorities approved its buyback of shares that has reduced Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg's stake to less than 50 percent, it said. (Compiled by Mrinalini Krothapalli and Akankshita Mukhopadhyay in Bengaluru)Police in Florida say they've arrested a Sarasota man in connection with a violent road rage incident, captured in a viral video, that injured a motorcyclist.



Authorities charged Magdiel Medrano-Bonilla, 30, with operating a motor vehicle without a valid license and aggravated battery. He is being held at the Sarasota County Jail, according to media reports.



The incident occurred Sunday in Sarasota and was captured in cellphone video footage by a passenger in another vehicle. It shows Darin Hendrickson, the motorcyclist driving alongside a gray Mazda 3, motioning to the driver and then slamming the passenger-side window with his fist. Then, the Mazda abruptly veers into the 2008 GSRX 1000 Suzuki and rams Hendrickson off the road, knocking him off the bike and briefly dragging him. Hendrickson is then seen on foot running into the traffic lanes and pleading with motorists for help.







It's not clear what precipitated the attack. Hendrickson told ABC affiliate WFTS-TV that he was traveling on Beneva Road in Sarasota when the driver of the Mazda 3 brake-checked him. He said the driver was throwing change at him.



"What I'm doing, I'm essentially trying to follow him until we get to a stopping point," he told the station.



The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports that Hendrickson has a history of traffic violations including speeding, careless driving, leaving the scene of an accident without giving information, operating a motorcycle between lanes and failing to stop at a red light. He's also been charged with criminal theft and burglary with assault.



Hendrickson reportedly suffered broken bones in the incident.



Related Video:Simply Wall St.

DraftKings (NASDAQ:DKNG) is having a volatile few months and the stock is currently down 20.79% from six months ago. It seems that the company is still establishing its business and would be hard to find a fundamental baseline. Sometimes, looking at large trading activity is more informative, especially for younger companies. That is why, we will review which large players are optimistic for the stock and get a better indication of the potential for DraftKings.A project by campaigning organization "Reporters Without Borders" that put messages criticizing world leaders on billboards that appeared on Google Street View has had the images removed by the tech company.

Earlier this week, people browsing Moscow's Red Square via Street View on maps.google.se would have seen a huge black-and-white billboard right next to St Basil's Cathedral stating: "Being gay is normal."

The quote is from an interview with a school teacher who stated "homosexuality is normal" in Russian newspaper Molodai Dalnevostochnik. Editor Alexander Suturin was fined by Russia's Federal Mass Media Inspection Service for breaking a law that bans "gay propaganda" among minors.

TWEET

The billboard wasn't there in real life, however. The posters are by the Swedish arm of Reporters Without Borders, which digitally altered Street View in cities around the world. It worked with agency Akestam Holst on the campaign, which promotes freedom of speech.

Now, they have been taken down by Google in a move that Jonathan Lundqvist, president of Reporters Without Borders Sweden, said amounts to censorship.

"We find it ironic that a campaign on free speech has been silenced so quickly. And we have officially received information that the campaign has been shut down because it violates Google Map's policies," he wrote in an email to CNBC on Thursday.

"That's the thing about censorship, it doesn't call itself censorship, or may even not be intended as one. But the consequences remain the same, important voices for free speech have been silenced in the places where they are needed the most."

Another huge poster "appeared" on Broadway, right by Times Square in New York City, stating "Russia won the White House for you, Donald Trump," taken from a statement on Twitter from writer Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, who was blocked by the president after she tweeted a message at him. She was then part of a group that filed a lawsuit against the president for the block.

Story continues

The posters were intended to combat censorship, Reporters Without Borders said. "By altering billboards in Google Street View we gained access to locations where people could never say certain things in real life without facing consequences, far beyond both borders and censorship," the organization stated on its Billboards Beyond Borders website.

"To fight government censorship, we put silenced words on the map again," it stated in an online video.

TWEET

Another poster, in Istanbul, called Turkey's President Erdogan "a megalomaniac dictator." It had the subhead: "Wrote Ebru Umar and got arrested and blocked from leaving Turkey." Umar was arrested in 2016 after she criticized the president in a newspaper column. The poster, along with the others, has been removed from Google Street View.

Reporters Without Borders Sweden said it downloaded 360 spheres in Google Street View, altered them in Photoshop and re-uploaded them.

But creating such content goes against Google Maps' policy, which states: "Contributions must be based on real experiences and information. Deliberately fake content, copied or stolen photos, off-topic reviews, defamatory language, personal attacks, and unnecessary or incorrect content are all in violation of our policy. If you see this behavior, please report it."

Google was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC about the accusations of censorship.





More From CNBC

 Indiana University track and field head to Knoxville, Tenn. this weekend to compete in the three-day Tennessee Relays. The Hoosiers will be represented by 52 athletes at Tom Black Track.Day one of competition, Thursday, April 12, will feature junior, redshirt freshmanand redshirt seniorin the hammer throw. The women are scheduled to start at 4:00 pm ET with the men following around 6:30 pm ET.Juniorand freshmanwill kick off day two for the Hoosiers in the 400m hurdles at 2:45 pm ET. Sophomoreand sophomorewill compete in the men's 400m hurdles, scheduled to start at 3:00 pm ET.Friday's field events will start at 3:00 pm ET with men's and women's long jump featuring juniorand junioron the men's side and junior, sophomoreand sophomoreon the women's side.Sophomoretravels to Knoxville with the ninth best shot put mark in the nation, which she earned at the Pac-12/Big Ten Challenge when she set a personal record and brought home the gold with the mark of 16.72m (54' 10.25"). The women's shot put is scheduled to start at 4:00 pm ET. Dawson will also compete in the discus on Saturday at 10:00 am ET.On the men's side of the shot put, juniorcurrently has the No. 16 mark in the nation from his performance of 18.82m (61' 9") at the Pac-12/Big Ten Challenge. Morrison will compete in the discus on Saturday at 1:00 pm ET. He will be joined in both events by junior, who will be opening his outdoor season.Saturday's track scheduled consists of all relays. The first event will start at 12:00 pm ET with the women's 4x200m and close with the men's 4x400m that is scheduled to start at 3:30 pm ET.Day three in the field will feature juniorin the triple jump at 1:00 pm ET. Bethea is currently ranked No. 9 in the nation from his performance at the Florida Relays where he came home with the bronze with the mark of 15.76m (51' 8.5"). Sophomoreis scheduled to compete in the women's triple jump, which also starts at 1:00 pm ET.In the vertical jumps, sophomorewill compete in the invitational pole vault at 11:00 am ET. The men's high jump will feature seniorand freshmanLive results will be available here Friday and Saturday will be streamed on WatchESPN. For complete coverage of everything Indiana track and field and cross country, make sure to follow the teams via Twitter Facebook and Instagram #GoIUAnother major cryptocurrency exchange is about to set up shop in Malta, cementing the small Mediterranean island nations status as a burgeoning hub for cryptocurrency startups.

OKEx, the worlds second-largest cryptocurrency exchange as measured by daily trading volume, on Thursday announced that it will open an office in Malta and make it a foundation for further OKEx growth.

Maltas Virtual Financial Asset Act is a solid foundation for the industry and the government to work together in fostering the nascent blockchain/digital asset industry. More specifically, Maltas sound risk-based approach will help cultivate a responsible, compliant, and healthy ecosystem, explained Tim Byun, chief risk officer and head of government relations at OKEx.

We look forward to working with the Malta government as it is forward thinking and shares many of our same values: the most important of which are protection of traders and the general public, compliance with Anti Money Laundering and Know Your Customer standards, and recognition of the innovation and importance of continued development in the Blockchain ecosystem, added Chris Lee, CEO of OKEx.

Currently, OKEx is one of several exchanges that are based out of Hong Kong, which is known for its business-friendly climate but has lately begun to take a harder line against cryptocurrency exchanges and initial coin offerings (ICOs).

Malta, on the other hand, has begun actively courting cryptocurrency firms. Government officials have said that they want to transform the EU member state into a Blockchain Island through the passage of blockchain-friendly legislation.

Last month, it saw the first major fruits of those efforts, as fellow Hong Kong-based exchange Binance  currently the largest in the world  revealed that it would relocate its headquarters to Malta, rather than Japan as it had once planned.

Maltas prime minister personally welcomed the company to the region, and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has said that he is aware of more than 20 cryptocurrency projects considering a move to Malta.

Story continues

Notabaly, though OKEx and Binance are not the only Hong Kong-based exchanges plotting to relocate their operations. Bitfinex, the sixth-largest cryptocurrency exchange, is reportedly planning to move its headquarters to Switzerland.

Featured image from Shutterstock.



The post OKEx to Become Second Major Cryptocurrency Exchange to Move to Malta appeared first on CCN.

(Adds comments, context)

LONDON, April 11 (Reuters) - The British parliament should be given a say on any military action Prime Minister Theresa May wants to take in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, said on Wednesday.

U.S. President Donald Trump has warned of imminent military action in Syria in response to an attack on Saturday in which the World Health Organisation said 43 people died from symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals.

May has faced calls to join the United States in any military action. But she has not committed to doing so nor ruled the option out.

On Wednesday she said all the indications were that the Syrian authorities were responsible for the attack, and that she was working with allies on how to hold those responsible to account.

"Parliament should always be given a say on military action," Corbyn, a veteran anti-war campaigner, told the BBC when asked about Syria.

"Obviously the situation is very serious, obviously there has to be, now, a demand for a political process to end the war in Syria. We cannot risk an escalation even further than its gone already."

May is not bound by law to seek parliamentary approval for offensive military action, but recent interventions in Libya and Iraq have been put to a vote. Many now believe lawmakers should always have a vote before the government takes military action.

Corbyn said countries involved should get around a negotiating table to find an end to the civil war by political means.

"What happened last weekend was terrible. What we dont want is bombardment which leads to escalation and leads to a hot war between Russia and America over the skies of Syria," he said. (Reporting by William James; editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Richard Balmforth)Paul Ryan Is Stepping Down. Here Are All the Republicans in Congress Not Seeking Re-Election

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) announced Wednesday that he will not seek re-election this fall, making him just the latest of more than two dozen Congressional Republicans who have decided against running for another term.

Ryans departure leaves 24 Republican-held seats open for the 2018 midterms. Another three Republican senators are also not seeking re-election.

The resignations mark the largest combined number of incumbents from a single party to step down since 1996, when 28 left Congress. It also exceeds the 21 who resigned during the Watergate scandal in 1974.

Many attribute their decision to leave Congress to the hyper-polarized environment, poor approval ratings and difficulties the Trump administration has created for Republicans in re-election campaigns. Republican lawmakers were more likely to resign or retire if Trump was less popular in their district in 2016, according to CNN.

Heres a list of all the Republican lawmakers who have announced their resignation from Congress, where the GOP currently holds a 51-49 majority in the Senate and a 237-192 majority in the House:

Senate Republicans not seeking re-election

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.)

After flirting with the idea of a third term, Corker decided against re-election in February. The announcement came after several public feuds with President Trump beginning in May 2017, in which the president tweeted that he advised Corker on his plans to run in 2018.

Strange statement by Bob Corker considering that he is constantly asking me whether or not he should run again in '18. Tennessee not happy!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2017

One of the wealthiest members of the Senate, Corker was criticized for reversing his opposition to the Republican tax cut plan in December after raising concerns about the federal deficit. He has since called the Trump Administration fiscally irresponsible and said the tax bill was one of the worst votes hes made during his tenure.

Story continues

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.)

Senator Jeff Flake said in Oct. 2017 that he would not seek re-election. Mr. President, I will not be complicit, he said in a speech on the Senate floor that sharply criticized President Trump. Flake, who has served in the Senate since 2013, has been one of the most outspoken members of the GOP when it comes to the Trump presidency along with fellow Arizona Senator John McCain, who is not expected to run again.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R- Utah)

Hatch announced in January that he would not run for a third term. The 86-year-old is the longest-sitting member of the Senate. Ive always been a fighter, he said in a statement. I was an amateur boxer in my youth, and I brought that fighting spirit with me to Washington. But every good fighter knows when to hang up the gloves. Former Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will run for Hatchs open seat in Utah.

House Republicans not seeking re-election

The midterm elections will include battles for 24 open House seats currently held by Republicans, with six of these races in Texas, three in Pennsylvania, and three in California:

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Calif.)

Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.)

Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fl.)

Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fl.)

Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-Kans)

Rep. Dave Trott (R-Mich.)

Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ)

Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ)

Rep. Ryan Costello (R-Penn.)

Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Penn.)

Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Penn.)

Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Penn.)

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC)

Rep. Jimmy Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.)

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas)

Rep. Gregg Harper (R-Texas)

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas)

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas)

Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas)

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas)

Rep. Dave Reichert (R- Wash.)

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.)

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.)

House and Senate Republicans who have already resigned

Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)



The 80-year-old stepped down after four decades in Congress, citing his ongoing health problems. A special election in November will decide who takes his Senate seat.

Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio)

After serving for 17 years, Tiberi resigned from Congress to take a new position as president of the Ohio Business Roundtable. His seat will be filled after a special election on May 8.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.)

Franks resigned from the House in December after it became public that he asked a staffer to bear his child. He had originally planned to serve through Jan. 2018, but announced his immediate resignation amid an investigation by the Ethics Committee into the allegations that the congressman repeatedly offered an aide $5 million to act as his surrogate. Either Republican Debbie Lesko or Democrat Hiral Tipirneni will replace Franks after a special election on April 24.

Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Penn.)

The pro-life congressman said in Oct. 2017 that he would not seek re-election after it was revealed that he had been accused of verbally abusing aides and pressured his mistress to get an abortion. His seat was taken by Democrat Conor Lamb in the special election on March 13.

Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas)

The four-term congressman, currently under investigation for using taxpayer money to settle allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination by a staffer, said in December that he would retire at the end of his term. Then on Friday, Farenthold accelerated his plan by announcing his resignation. While I planned on serving out the remainder of my term in Congress, I know in my heart its time for me to move along and look for new ways to serve, he said in a statement. Texas Governor Greg Abbott will have to decide whether to schedule a special election on November 6 to decide Farentholds replacement or call for an emergency election before then to fill the seat.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah)

The House Governmental Oversight Committee Chairman had said he would retire at some point during his term, but resigned abruptly in May 2017. His seat was filled by Republican John Curtis after a special election in November.MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's election victory in 2016 did not rely on information bought from anybody and his campaign team did not hire political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, his spokesman said on Tuesday.

The Britain-based Cambridge Analytica is at the centre of a controversy over harvested personal data about users of Facebook (FB.O), which was used to target voters in the U.S. presidential election and Britain's 2016 referendum on European Union membership.

A report last week in the South China Morning Post newspaper said that Cambridge Analytica's parent firm, Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), had made the claim that it helped put Duterte in office.

But presidential spokesman Harry Roque said that was far from the case and Duterte's win was "fair and square". He said his then campaign treasurer and current finance minister, Carlos Dominguez, had assured him no transactions had taken place with Cambridge Analytica.

Duterte's victory should not be undermined with "unsubstantiated allegations", Roque said in a statement.

British legislators have questioned Alexander Nix, the suspended Cambridge Analytica chief executive, over his role in harvesting data from millions of Facebook users.

Outside the United States, the largest amount of user data acquired by Cambridge Analytica was from the Philippines.

The country's National Privacy Commission, citing information it was given by Facebook, said it had data from 1.17 million Filipino accounts.

In a statement posted on its website on Monday, Cambridge Analytica said it did not "hack" Facebook and that a research company "licensed the data to us, which they legally obtained via a tool provided by Facebook".

"To be clear: Cambridge Analytica did not illegally or inappropriately collect or share data with anybody else," it said.

The South China Morning Post report said Nix had dined in Manila a year before the election with Jose Gabriel "Pompee" La Vina and Peter Tiu Lavina, who played key roles in Duterte's campaign, which relied heavily on social media, mainly Facebook, to get him elected.

Story continues

Recent research has shown Filipinos spend more time on social media than people of any other country.

La Vina described the newspaper report as "not entirely accurate" saying he met Nix during lunch served at a May 2015 news conference, but had not since been in contact. The newspaper included what it said was a photograph of the meal.

Jose Joel Sy Egco, currently an undersecretary at the presidential communications office, confirmed that Nix was in Manila in May 2015 as guest speaker at a media forum his group organised on the role of information technology in elections.

"That was the first and last time that I met Nix," Egco told ANC news channel.

The Philippines' National Privacy Commission said it was seeking updates from Facebook on measures taken to mitigate the risks that ensued from the controversy.

(Reporting by Enrico dela Cruz; additional reporting by Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Martin Petty)BEIRUT, April 11 (Reuters) - Russia's ambassador to Lebanon has said any U.S. missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted.

Alexander Zasypkin, in the comments broadcast on Tuesday evening, said he was referring to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian chief of staff.

"If there is a strike by the Americans then ... the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired," he told Hezbollah's al-Manar TV.

(Reporting by Dahlia Nehme; Writing by Tom Perry)TOTAL S.A. TOT announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco) to develop a giant petrochemical complex in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Aramco will own 62.5% of the project and TOTAL will possess 37.5% of the complex.



This complex will be located next to the SATORP refinery, to fully exploit operational synergies from the existing refinery. The project will be developed with a total investment of $9 billion, out of which $5 billion will come from TOTAL and Saudi Aramco, and the rest $4 billion from third-party investors.



The new petrochemical complex will comprise a world-size mixed-feed steam cracker with a capacity of 1.5 million tons per year of ethylene and related high-added-value petrochemical units.



Demand for Ethylene



Per IHS Markit report, the demand for ethylene for the next five years is going to exceed the average world GDP growth rate. The lions share of the demand is expected to come from India, China and Middle East; so setting up an ethylene producing unit in Saudi Arabia makes sense.



A major share of ethylene production goes toward production of polyethylene, a widely used plastic on a global scale. Per a report from IHS, demand for ethylene is likely to touch 200 million tons by 2020, with a chunk of it coming from North America and Middle East.



TOTAL Continues to Expand



TOTAL continues to expand its operations through acquisitions and strategic partnerships. Last month, the company expanded its operations in the Middle East, entering into a partnership with the Supreme Petroleum Council of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. (Read more: TOTAL Expands Operation in the Middle East With Partnership)



TOTAL continues to make strategic acquisitions and agreements with existing operators in high-potential areas, and divest assets that are not in sync with its long-term objectives. The company acquired assets worth $313 million while disposing assets totaling $1,119 million in fourth-quarter 2017.



TOTALs expanding global operation through organic and inorganic methods makes it a formidable competitor for global players like Exxon Mobil Corporation XOM, Eni S.p.A. E and Chevron Corporation CVX.



Price Movement



In a years time, TOTALs shares have returned 19.5% compared with the industrys rally of 17.2%.

Story continues





Zacks Rank



TOTAL has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment ResearchNantHealth, Inc. (NH) delivered earnings and revenue surprises of 23.08% and -10.83%, respectively, for the quarter ended September 2018. Do the numbers hold clues to what lies ahead for the stock?

For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  April 12, 2018  Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include Facebook FB, Autohome Inc ATHM, Limelight Networks LLNW and Match Group MTCH.

Here are highlights from Wednesdays Analyst Blog:

Facebook Roundup: The Privacy Issue

The data privacy scandal has hit Facebook in a way that it hasnt any other technology company despite the fact that there have been a considerable number of data breaches in recent times that were far more serious than this one. One reason could be the political leanings of most publishers leading them to react rather strongly to the political mileage that the current President may have gained through the platform.

At the center of the controversy is Global Science Research (GSR) former co-director Aleksandr Kogan, who collected data on people and their friends under the garb of a personality test app and later sold that data to British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica (which also handled President Trumps election campaign).

The consulting firm said that it received data on 30 million people according to its agreement with GSR, but Facebook estimated the number of users affected could be closer to 87 million based on the maximum number of friends those people may have had at the time. In any case, the firm said that the data had been deleted on Facebooks request and hadnt been used in the 2016 elections.

Also, while Facebook claimed that the data transfer was without its knowledge, Kogan said that the company was well aware of the changes it made to the terms of service to reflect the intention to use the data commercially. Even then, the data was removed when requested.

Thats one part.

A longer standing issue is with respect to the purported Russian meddling in U.S. elections through agencies that posed as different interest groups to create disharmony amongst the voting public. Facebook has said on multiple occasions that actual influence on people was negligible even as it revised its initial estimate of 10 million users that may have seen the offensive ads to 126 million (when organic posts were included).

Story continues

Mr. Zuckerberg Goes to Washington

Senators figured that all this was enough to warrant a conversation with Zuckerberg, who made a calm and collected impression while sticking to his ground. He accepted responsibility and blame for the mishaps and detailed what the company was doing to change the situation.

On the question of regulation of the social network, Zuckerberg said that Facebook wasnt opposed to the right kind, especially regarding transparency guidelines on data use, rules providing for greater user control over personal data and protections for innovation.

One of the major revelations was that Facebook isnt ruling out the possibility of a paid version of the app although there would always be a free, ad-supported version to help people connect with each other on an affordable platform.

Facebook Taking Action

1. Starting Apr 9, Facebook has started telling people, in a notice at the top of their news feeds, if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica

2. Facebook is suspending apps and subjecting them to an audit when any improper use of personal information is suspected. Zuckerberg says that if any such activity is discovered, the apps will be banned from Facebook. To this end, it has suspended AggregateIQ, a Canadian advertising tech and audience intelligence company because of its connections with Cambridge Analytica parent SCL while it is investigated. Another app that was recently suspended was data-analytics firm Cubeyou. While Cubeyous website says that it has more than 10 million panelists contributing consumer opinions, interests and traits throughout the U.S. that is used by more than 1,500 marketers, the company tells Facebook users that their data will be used for academic research.

3. For Facebook users, the company now has a bulk app removal tool for both mobile and desktop users that they can use to select the apps they no longer need or want and remove them. If the apps have made any posts to your profile, these too can be removed.

4. Facebook is now offering users additional information about publications, such as their Wikipedia pages, related articles about the same topic, how many times the article has been shared and where, and a button for following the publisher to help them determine whether they could be a reliable source of information and avoid charges of bias. Of course, an article isnt untrue just because no one shared it. But more information is always a good thing.

5. Facebook is backing new legislation -- The Honest Ads Act -- that basically extends some general advertising rules that already apply to other platforms like TV and radio. This is a change from its earlier stance of self-regulatory measures. The Act requires social media sites to disclose the identities of buyers of online political campaign ads. Digital platforms with at least 50 million monthly views are also required to maintain a public file of all electioneering communications purchased by anyone spending more than $500. All reasonable measures will also have to be taken to see that foreign nationals dont get to influence American voters. Facebook has added that managers of Facebook pages with large followings will also require verification. Facebook will also require verification for issue ads, i.e. those that dont mention any political leader but spread opinion on a list of key issues developed and updated over time by the company in consultation with third parties.

6. To remove the influence of Russian government agencies through "inauthentic accounts to deceive and manipulate people", Facebook has taken down 70 Facebook accounts, 65 Instagram accounts as well as 138 Facebook Pages run by Russias government-controlled Internet Research Agency (IRA). The accounts had spent a combined $167,000 on ads since the beginning of 2015. Facebook has said that 95% of the accounts operated in Russia and other Russian-speaking regions in nearby countries like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine.

International Reactions

Australia's privacy watchdog (OAIC) has opened a formal investigation into Facebook after the social networking company confirmed that 300K of the people that might have been affected by the Cambridge Analytica data issue were Australian.

The UK's data watchdog, the ICO, has been investigating Facebook on the data analytics issue since May 2017 (1.1 million Britons were affected).

An Indonesian cabinet minister has threatened to shut down the app if a privacy breach is discovered or if there is spread of fake news during the soon-to-be-held elections. Indonesias Communications Minister Rudiantara has asked the chief of the National Police, Tito Karnavian, to investigate the matter. Facebook employees in the country could be imprisoned for up to 12 years or fined by as much as 12 billion rupiah ($871,000) if there is any breach of Indonesias privacy rules. Indonesia was the third most affected country after the U.S.

Privacy is a matter of considerable concern in Germany where an ARD public television poll found that 61% of Internet users were concerned about the misuse of their data, with 12% saying they had reduced their Facebook usage while another 2% stopped using it altogether. So it isnt surprising that the German Justice Minister Katarina Barley has expressed a desire to meet with Facebook on the way its algorithms categorized users, because this data misuse was unlikely to be an isolated case.

What Users Say

As Zuckerberg struggles to satisfy legislators and pacify privacy advocates, pollsters have jumped into the scene to gauge user reaction.

The first poll, conducted by IBD/TIPP found that most of the 902 participants nationwide whether young or old, male or female, rich or poor, democratic or republican (or neither), think that Facebook is having a bad effect on society, although the percentages vary slightly between these groups on whether they are likely to use Facebook less as a result. Most people are concerned about the privacy of their data on Facebook.

A Deutsche Bank survey found that of the 500 people it surveyed, few are actually deleting Facebook although they intend to use it less, with Facebook-owned Instagram likely to be the biggest beneficiary. The survey also found that people trust Google slightly more than Facebook, although most arent interested in an ad-free paid version that will guarantee privacy.

Yahoo Finance spoke to 4,000 respondents on whether they would pay $5 a month for a Facebook account if it meant nobody could access their data. Only 13% said yes, with 87% saying no.

Facebook has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). Companies worth buying instead include Autohome Inc, Limelight Networks and Match Group, all of which have a Zacks Rank #1.You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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Zacks Investment ResearchINDUSTRY INSIGHT

How to improve services during unpredictable times

In todays rapidly evolving and highly uncertain environment, government procurement leaders find themselves in both an admired and unenviable position. As in the private sector, expectations for federal, state and local procurement continue to rise to improve or maintain levels of education, infrastructure, public safety and much more. In many ways, the quality of life of future generations depends on the ability of public-sector leaders to adapt technology to their approach to procurement.

Ultimately, public- and private-sector procurement leaders have similar objectives. First and foremost, they must deliver maximum value by providing the best goods and services at competitive costs. Second, they must do so while effectively managing risk.

The failure of U.K. government procurement to do so in the case of Carillion is a case in point. Despite repeated profit warnings, the British government continued to award contracts to the company. Carillions ultimate liquidation carries implications for U.K. public services, the companys 43,000 current and former employees and the British taxpayer. The 450 projects the company was working on for the government now face an uncertain future, as do food service in over 900 schools and prison maintenance in various corners of the country. Moreover, the financial viability of hundreds of suppliers to Carillion is now in jeopardy. It's a chief procurement officer's nightmare.

Public-sector procurement officials also must increase transparency and consumerize the procurement experience for buyers and suppliers (who are also constituents in many cases) because the impact of inefficiencies and vague processes flow through the supply chain and ultimately to the community. And lastly, leaders must demonstrate agility to do all of the above as well or better tomorrow, when new and uncertain conditions and requirements will exist. Failure to do so can mean any progress is short-lived, sending teams scrambling to cope with the new reality.

While these objectives parallel those in the private sector, public-sector leaders face unique challenges. Rising public expectations are matched by steadily declining budgets. At the federal, state and local levels, the funding squeeze is only expected to worsen as pension and other unmanaged costs consume an ever larger share of budgets. The political constraints, such as geographical preferences for suppliers, further bind procurement officers hands, even as trade agreements such as NAFTA are suddenly reopened for negotiation. And constantly changing policies, regulations and directives create extra uncertainty.

So, what are savvy CPOs to do?

The key is to adopt best practices already being leveraged in the private sector while still addressing unique public-sector requirements. Innovative private-sector procurement leaders are well on their way to transforming their organizations to tackle their broader and more strategic objectives. The key to their success has been building smart, collaborative and agile organizations.

Working smarter. Being smart is not a reference to IQ levels. Employee profiles are one aspect, and boosting analytical capabilities either by changing profiles for new hires or upskilling existing employees is an important part of building a smarter organization. But equally important is freeing team capacity to focus on more strategic initiatives. Digitization of the source-to-pay process is key here and where the public sector generally lags far behind. The goal should be to eliminate manual and paper-based processes, minimize exceptions and streamline the process for all users, including suppliers. Technology must be evaluated to ensure not just leading capabilities, but true integration of user and supplier workflows, consistent user experience and underlying data.

At the Ardent Partners CPO Rising event last November, New York City's deputy CPO explained how the city has digitized its supplier registration process, eliminating 12 pounds of paper per supplier and reducing the average registration cycle from over a year to a few weeks. This benefited both staff and suppliers, while also addressing one of the city's key environmental objectives.

Being smarter also means bringing actionable insights to ones fingertips, taking advantage of integrated platforms that also connect to third-party sources and leveraging innovations in areas such artificial intelligence. An effective system can, among other things, provide true 360-degree visibility into suppliers to help CPOs better manage risk. It is hard to imagine Carillion being awarded contracts if decision-makers had access to a scorecard on the company's financials and payment history during evaluations.

When digitizing source-to-pay, look for integrated project management capabilities and supplier-friendly networks that make it easy for suppliers to connect. That means going beyond PO and invoice digitization to supporting collaboration on new products and services and sharing documents. Enabling such digital collaboration provides scale, transparency and improved accountability.

Collaboration. Building a culture of collaboration with team members that know how to engage both internal departments and suppliers and pulling them together for different projects is essential. Key to New Yorks success to date has been the central procurement teams ability to build alignment with the 40 mayoral and 175 non-mayoral agencies involved in procurement. With relationships in place, technology can then play a supporting role, empowering teams to collaborate at scale with improved transparency.

Agility. Lastly, do not forget the importance of agility, both in terms of meeting tomorrows requirements and the unique needs in ones own agency. Todays leading software solutions have embedded many best practices, and in general organizations should look to adopt those. Be advised that some agency requirements are truly different, so be sure any system can accommodate them and still meet future needs. For example, supplier requirements constantly change, so any system should quickly allow users to survey suppliers for new information, build and monitor improvement plans and modify workflows to fit new processes or projects. Such an approach provides auditability as well as structure.

Todays public sector procurement leaders have the potential to improve the lives of millions of citizens as well as the health of supply chains. It is a daunting responsibility with many obstacles, but success is possible with the right people, processes and systems. Much can be gained by replicating private-sector innovations while maintaining the agility to address government's unique and evolving requirements.Helsinn Provides Grant for ESMO's Preceptorship Programme for Supportive and Palliative Care



Lugano, Switzerland April 12, 2018 - Helsinn, a Swiss pharmaceutical group focused on building quality cancer care products, today announces that the Group has provided a grant to the European Society for Medical Oncology ("ESMO") for a multi-supported Preceptorship Programme for supportive and palliative care.

The preceptorship programme for physicians will take place in Lugano, Switzerland on April 16-17, 2018 and will touch on a broad range of aspects related to cancer supportive and palliative care. The key learning objectives of the preceptorship are to:

Understand mechanisms, risk, prevention and treatment of the key symptoms and syndromes such as pain, fatigue, anorexia, cachexia, dyspnea, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, skin toxicities, mucositis, neurotoxicity, venous thromboembolism, febrile neutropenia, anemia, bone complications and their association with cancer-disease and anti-cancer treatment

Understand integration of screening for and assessment of anti-cancer toxicities, symptoms and other palliative and supportive care needs, and integration of their management in routine oncology care

Describe required competences of multidisciplinary and inter-professional teams for multimodal management

Understand key steps to prepare patients and family members for end-of-life and care of the dying person

Understand how to communicate with patients about illness, prognosis, coping, hope, and decisions, reflect about your own role, and how to address cultural differences

Know the ESMO clinical practice guidelines relevant for the topics discussed

The Chair of the event will be Dr Karin Jordan who, since 2010, has been Associate Professor of Medical Oncology and Supportive Care in the Department of Oncology/Hematology at the University Hospital, Halle, and who has just recently changed position and is now working at the University of Heidelberg. The Co-Chair will be Dr Florian Strasser MD, Associate Professor in the Clinic Oncology/Hematology at the Cantonal Hospital St.Gallen, Head of Oncological Palliative Medicine at Cantonal Hospital St Gallen, Switzerland, where he is responsible for the clinical and research activities in Palliative Oncology and in Geriatric Oncology. He is also substantially involved in Geriatric Oncology, Supportive Care and Cancer Rehabilitation for both in- and out-patients in the Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The event is expected to be attended by members of ESMO from around the world. The aim of these educational programmes, which focus on teaching standard of care in specific areas, is to provide "state of the art" lectures in an interactive setting including formal presentations and interaction between experts and attendees presenting clinical cases.

The full meeting program is available here.

Dr Karin Jordan, Associate Professor of Hematology, Medical Oncology and Supportive Care in the Department of Hematology and Oncology at the University Hospital, Heidelberg commented: "Supportive and palliative care is an area of oncology that does not receive enough merit. Increasing attention in modern, personalized oncology and this event will help to address this problem. I am grateful to ESMO and the companies supporting this event to increase the knowledge on these important topics within the international community of young oncologists ".

Sergio Cantoreggi, Helsinn Group Chief Scientific Officer, said: "Supportive and palliative care is an area that is becoming more and more prevalent as cases of cancer increase. With the advent of new treatments and, as cancer becomes more like a "chronic disease", supportive cares are becoming ever more important as they can help improve quality of life during treatment and potentially assist patients tolerate treatment cycles. We are delighted to support the ESMO Preceptorship Programme, an event that brings together physicians allowing them to work collaboratively to benefit patients in the long term.

About the Helsinn Group

Helsinn is a privately owned pharmaceutical group with an extensive portfolio of marketed cancer care products and a robust drug development pipeline. Since 1976, Helsinn has been improving the everyday lives of patients, guided by core family values of respect, integrity and quality. The Group works across pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, medical devices and nutritional supplements and has expertise in research, development, manufacture and the commercialization of therapeutic and supportive care products for cancer, pain and inflammation and gastroenterology. In 2016, Helsinn created the Helsinn Investment Fund to support early-stage investment opportunities in areas of unmet patient need. The company is headquartered in Lugano, Switzerland, with operating subsidiaries in Switzerland, Ireland, the U.S., Monaco, and China, as well as a product presence in approximately 190 countries globally.

To learn more about Helsinn Group please visit www.helsinn.com

For more information:

Helsinn Group Media Contact:

Paola Bonvicini

Group Head of Communication

Lugano, Switzerland

Tel: +41 (0) 91 985 21 21

Info-hhc@helsinn.com

For more information, please visit www.helsinn.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Vimeo.IE or ESADE? Fall 2018 [ #permalink

Hello, everyone!



I recently got accepted at both IE and ESADE, and I'm so confused about which one to pick. I've always wanted to do the Msc. in Innovation and Entrepreneurship program at ESADE, but just for safety (in case I didn't get into ESADE) I applied to IE's MiM (specialisation in Marketing and Sales). I've always wanted to go to Barcelona, but I don't want to throw away an opportunity to study at such a highly ranked university (IE). I am not extremely passionate about the course at IE, but I think I would be a great fit for it.



I'm honestly so confused, and I'm sure I'm not being very clear with the details of my issue.. Could you guys please help me decide?Hello!I'm a non-traditional applicant and would appreciate your feedback and tips.Current location: Chicagoland areaUndergrad: University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignMajor/Minor: Molecular Biology/ChemistryGPA: 3.61 (Graduated early in 3 yrs, while working part-time.)WE:~ 7 yrs in Pharma as a data reporting/analytics consultant. In between, I took nearly 4 yrs off to be a stay at home mom. I was also married into the military at the time so had to relocate every 2-3 years and therefore was a teleworker for 3 of 7 yrs. I did advance/promote every 2 yrs, but I do believe teleworking limited my networking and advancement opportunities. While I don't regret putting my career on hold to care for my children when they needed me most, I am concerned by how admissions committees may view this (and my older age, 34).I've been told that my strengths include delivering under pressure, being resourceful, and taking ownership. Being a military spouse taught me that I could handle more than I thought possible, and it encouraged me to dream bigger. I think an MBA is the logical next step mostly due to timing - I've hit the ceiling in my teleworking role and must either relocate to the company headquarters in order to advance or switch jobs. I like my current company, but it makes more sense for me to relocate my job than to relocate my entire family. I don't want to overestimate their resiliency. Despite how dedicated I am to my job and career goals, my family is my biggest priority. When I learned more about the PT programs at Kellogg and Booth, I felt like they were flexible enough for a working mom. It would be a stretch and take longer than I'd like, but I could do it.I think an MBA would give me the credibility and exposure needed to potentially switch industries/jobs OR convince my current company to break the ceiling for me as a teleworker. I also genuinely enjoy learning and am curious about entrepreneurship. Chicago is home to 2 top programs, and the prospect of being in a program with an amazing, diverse cast of peers is sooo exciting, especially in light of being a teleworker.Also, not sure this matters, but I immigrated to the US as a child, and I definitely lived the immigrant experience with my parents. However, I didn't mention this anywhere on my app since I've been a naturalized citizen for decades.Extracurriculars: In college, I did a lot of volunteering but none with leadership/resume quality. I was on the judicial committee for the university, which was a really amazing experience.Currently, I'm the head of our version of the parent/teacher association in Kg and teach Bible study each Sunday. I've read so many impressive extracurriculars on here that I'm afraid admissions might laugh at mine. However, I chose those 2 bc my faith is central to who I am and also bc it allows me to spend quality time with my kids. Sometimes you can do something that reaches millions but I think there's also value in influencing a handful.The weakest part of my app:GMAT: 620. I didn't plan to do it this way but had to take the test cold. I ran out of time in each section except AWA (5). I've since studied and have been scoring 700+ in practice. I used to tutor part time in college for 3 entrance exams so was quite peeved that I did so poorly here. I understand no one likes excuses, so won't share them, but effectively, I plan to retake this soon.Thanks for reading!AstroIceCream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UN Photo/Manuel Elias

New York, Apr 12 (IBNS): While Malians must ensure the successful holding of elections this year, their priority should be the implementation of the 2015 peace agreement, a senior United Nations official said Wednesday.

The peace process is complex, but it is time to move from promises to action to meet agreed deadlines, Mahamat Saleh Annadif, Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), told the Security Council, adding that advancing the peace process and holding the elections must go hand in hand.

He noted that the entire political class agreed that elections must take place on time, with the utmost transparency and credibility. Just as the 2013 elections re-established constitutional order in Mali, those in 2018 must irreversibly anchor democracy.

Presidential elections are scheduled for 29 July and 12 August, and legislative elections in November and December.

In terms of preparations, he said, an agreement is in place to revise the electoral law and an order has been placed for eight million voters cards.

In line with its mandate, MINUSMA has started to lend technical and logistical support, including the distribution of election materials and deployment of electoral personnel, while also preparing for any potential violence.

The Special Representative said the Security Council must call upon the Malian political class to respect the adopted timetable and encourage them along the path to consensual, peaceful and credible elections.

The alternative would mean adding one crisis onto another, with the enemies of peace emerging the victors, he said. They do not merit such a gift.

The security situation has deteriorated, particularly in the centre of Mali, he said, noting that an independent expert recently voiced concerns about serious human rights violations in the country.

With the UN country team, MINUSMA has launched an initiative to promote the restoration of State authority in central Mali, as well as economic growth and the provision of social services.

Emphasizing that a purely security approach is not enough, he said the Mission is continuing to support the specialist judicial system tackling terrorism, money-laundering and cross-border crime.

He emphasized the need for the training of peacekeeping troops, adding that the Mission remained about 100 armoured vehicles short. Troop- and police-contributing countries have been asked to do what they could to fill the equipment gap. Canadas offer of six helicopters, while welcome, fell short of what is needed.

Turning to the ongoing strategic review of MINUSMA, he said the Mission is awaiting the Secretary-Generals recommendations with the hope that ensuing discussions will lead to a better alignment between its mandate and the realities on the ground.



Kabul, Apr 12 (IBNS): At least eight people, including Ali Shams Dost, the district governor of Khwaja Omari district of eastern Ghazni in Afghanistan, were killed in a Taliban attack, local media reports said on Thursday.

The incident took place early Thursday at around 2 am.

According to Tolo News, the militants attack the Governor's residence, killing the latter along with seven other security personnel.

Additionally, nine other policemen were wounded.

The militants also resorted to arson, setting fire to the Governor's compound.

Confirming the news, an official statement read, "Ali Shams Dost was killed with seven other policemen during the clashes and some parts of the district governors compound was also torched.

It said that in retaliation, 27 Taliban militants were gunned down in airstrikes.

After the attack the forces called for air support and 27 Taliban were killed during the airstrikes and clashes, it added.

Reacting to the development, the Taliban reportedly said that it has captured the district, a claim which was rejected by local law enforcers.

Image: Google MapsKabul, Apr 12 (IBNS): Four suspected Islamic State terrorists were killed when their own bomb blew up in Afghanistan's Chapa Dara district, media reports said on Thursday.

The deceased reportedly included a key IS commander.

Brig. Gen. Mirwais Sapi, a military commander based in the province, told Afghanistan's Pajhwok Afghan News the explosion took place in the Digal village of the district lat on Wednesday.

He told the Afghanistan-based news agency that four Daesh militants, including a commander named Musafar, were killed when one of the landmines they were planting went off prematurely.

Meanwhile, at least eight people, including Ali Shams Dost, the district governor of Khwaja Omari district of eastern Ghazni in Afghanistan, were killed in a Taliban attack, local media reports said on Thursday.

The incident took place early Thursday at around 2 am.

According to Tolo News, the militants attack the Governor's residence, killing the latter along with seven other security personnel.

Additionally, nine other policemen were wounded.

The militants also resorted to arson, setting fire to the Governor's compound.

Confirming the news, an official statement read, "Ali Shams Dost was killed with seven other policemen during the clashes and some parts of the district governors compound was also torched.

It said that in retaliation, 27 Taliban militants were gunned down in airstrikes.

After the attack the forces called for air support and 27 Taliban were killed during the airstrikes and clashes, it added.

Reacting to the development, the Taliban reportedly said that it has captured the district, a claim which was rejected by local law enforcers.

He said that a family of four who live in an urban area with a monthly income below forty million rials (roughly $1000) is living in poverty. In rural areas, families with an income of less than 20 million rials per month also live in poverty, according to Raghfar.

The bar for a poverty level income is set much lower by Irans Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor, and Social Welfare, who claims that a family of five living on seven million rials (roughly $160) per month has enough to live on. He said that his calculation takes into account the cost of all necessary commodities, including food, when setting the poverty line.

The task of setting official poverty level income figures has been made move difficult than in the past with the contradictory approaches to measuring the poverty line.

The Financial Tribune published in Iran wrote on January 21st, Absolute poverty measures poverty in relation to the amount of money necessary to meet basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. The concept, therefore, fails to recognize that individuals have important social and cultural needs. They added This, and similar criticisms, led to the development of the concept of relative poverty, which defines poverty in relation to the economic status of other members of the society. As per this concept, people are poor if they fall below prevailing standards of living in a given societal context.

30 million Iranians were living in relative poverty and twelve million in absolute poverty, Raghfar estimated two year ago. Based on current statistics he provided, 33 percent of Irans population, or nearly 26 million people, are suffering from absolute poverty, and six percent, close to five million people, are unable to feed their families.

Raghfar pointed out that there are other expenses, such as housing, transportation, and clothing.

The Imam Khomeini Relief Committee (IKRC) is a tax-exempt state institution launched by the Islamic Republics founder, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, to assist poverty stricken people. On March 5th, the president of the IKRC, Parviz Fattah, said that the number of applicants seeking assistance from the charity has gone up nearly 50 percent. He insinuated that not all those seeking assistance were genuinely in need.

Fattah, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commander and energy minister under President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, also said, The IKRC has nearly five million clients, of whom three million are directly covered and receive monthly allowances, while two million are receiving assistance according to their needs.

An October 2017 report by the World Bank states that, Iran is the second largest economy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region after Saudi Arabia, with an estimated Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2016 of $412.2 billion. Iran ranks second in the world in natural gas reserves and fourth in proven crude oil reserves. Economic activity and government revenues still depend to a large extent on oil revenues and therefore remain volatile.As expected, the NIAC hit back, but interestingly not directly at Ebadi. Maybe because shes a Nobel prize winner  the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to receive the honour  and they knew that she commands respect around the world.

Whatever the reason, the NIAC attacked Donald Trump, his new national security advisor, John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and accused the men of being with pro-war advocates. What was striking about the NIAC statement is that it didnt disagree with Ebadis statements, not even her denouncement of the NIAC.

Its no secret that since the Iranian nuclear deal was agreed in 2015, Iranhas proven false almost every claim that the NIAC made about it, from human rights advocacy to a broken economy to government corruption. This has meant that many mainstream media outlets no longer trust the group and has left it mostly isolated.

The NIAC needs to save the Iran nuclear deal if it has any hopes of remaining relevant, but even NIAC president Trita Parsi admits to being pessimistic about the deal remaining intact, in a recent interview.

Parsi tries to pin the blame for the nuclear deals failure on Trumps rhetoric, which has put businesses off investing in Iran and, in turn, caused Iranian to riot over the failing economy.

This is a classic tactic of the Iran Lobby: blame anyone but the mullahs. We all know that the nuclear deal is failing because the Regime cannot keep their promises and the people are rising up against a corrupt and brutal regime that has oppressed them for far too long.

Luckily, the NIACs echo chamber is crumbling and so too will the Iranian Regime

Now the Iranian Regime is trying to ban the Telegram messaging app, which is used by almost half of all Iranians, because it was used by many to communicate during the protests. This reactionary move will only cause more people to rise up against the Regime.

Censorship, a failing economy, human rights abuses, and support for the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad who uses chemical weapons on civilians. Is it any wonder that the Iranian people are calling for regime change?Thursday, April 12, 2018 Under The Gun: Guv's Machine Targets Auditor Candidate McCamley's Questionable Financial Forms; Mystery Over His Income And Employment Bill McCamley The Governor's political machine is going to work on



In



So where did McCamley get $45,000 if he doesn't have a job or any assets? That was the question that former State Senator Rod Adair, a charter member of the Guv's machine,



McCamley, 40, isn't required to reveal if someone other than himself loaned him the money and he in turn loaned it to his committee, but for someone who is running for the position that audits agencies across the state and given his self-reported circumstances, how he came up with this loan will raise suspicions. Still, McCamley ignored a request for comment, leaving it to speculation whether he received a loan, for example, from someone who might do business with the state auditor's office and which could represent a conflict of interest.



McCamley responded to this report Thursday and offered an explanation for the loan, saying it was from personal funds. His full response is below.



But if McCamley loaned himself the money where did it come from? If he is being straight on his state financial disclosure forms for the past several years he has had no income or employment. And if it's true he had no employment during this long stretch what does that say about him wanting to become State Auditor? And if he has a trust fund and gets at least $5,000 a year from it, that must be reported.



We asked Brian Colon, McCamley's opponent for the auditor nomination, for comment but he did not respond. But current GOP State Auditor Wayne Johnson, who was appointed by Gov. Martinez when Tim Keller was elected ABQ mayor and whose campaign for election we're told is being handled by none other than Guv Machine leader Jay McCleskey, jumped at the chance to take McCamley down. Seemingly out of the blue he issued



Certain candidates and elected officials are required to file Financial Disclosure Statements, which reveal their sources of income and potential conflicts of interest. Officials are required to disclose any income over $5,000 and identify its source, using a list of broad and general categories. The report found that not all elected officials have complied, concluding, Despite this requirement, four (4) financial disclosures contain no reported sources of income at all for either the elected official or the officials spouse in this category.



And, of course, McCamley, a potential Johnson general election foe, is one of those only four officials who reported no sources of income. We get the point, Wayne, but in case we didn't Johnson helpfully



Johnson condensed the disclosure forms that are filed with the Secretary of State so to make sure his information was true we looked at the McCamley statement



McCamley is a former Dona Ana County Commissioner. During his campaigns for the legislature we recall him reporting several jobs he had, including one in the solar industry. On his candidate



Well, the political community eagerly awaits McCamley's explanation of his financial resources as they assess the candidates qualifications for the financially sensitive position of state auditor. Meanwhile, Rod and Jay have got Bill pinned to the mat. And he may not get back up.



McCAMLEY EXPLAINS



Here is Rep. McCamley's explanation of the loan which came after our report was posted.



Yes, Ive lived off of my legislative per diem and a few small contracts for the last few years. Ive done this by keeping my expenses low. I live in a studio apartment, drive a used car, and havent had a vacation in a year and a half because I take my role as a Legislator seriously. Ive devoted my time to work on serious policy issues and respond to my constituents when they have problems.



Furthermore, Ive never hid the fact from my constituents and even documented how and why I do this in a 2016 Facebook video.



The $45k loan I gave myself to run for Auditor? That is half of my life savings. Some of it came from an inheritance I got a decade ago when my grandmother passed away. Most of the rest came from my work selling solar panels in 2014-15, combined with the markets growing in the last few years of the Obama administration. It did not come from anyone else but me. I view public service as one of the most valuable things we can do to make our communities better, and am proving it by being willing to put half of what I own into the process.



The fact that I am being attacked by Jay McCleskey and Wayne Johnson on ethical grounds is hilarious.



I have been known for my work on ethics as a legislator, co-sponsoring a bill to establish our first ethics commission. I also am one of two legislators that has not taken meals, ski or golf passes, etc, from lobbyists. Because of this, I have received the highest grade possible from New Mexico Common Cause.



Wayne Johnson was appointed State Auditor on Dec 1. Instead of resigning his seat on the Bernalillo County Commission immediately, he stayed on for a few months. This not only gave him two taxpayer funded salaries, it allowed him to vote on Dec 12th to give a $13 Million County contract to Yearout Electric. The company's CEO has been a large and regular donor to Mr Johnson in his races for County Commission and Albuquerque Mayor. The later is now under discussion with the City ethics panel.



Its no secret I have been one of the toughest fighters against Susana Martinezs terrible term as Governor and when information came out that she and the Jay McCleskey-run Susana PAC were possibly getting illegal campaign contributions last year, I asked the Attorney General to investigate. And this wasnt the first time McCleskey has had run-ins with the law, being investigated by the FBI for similar problems in 2015.



So whats happening here is obvious. Wayne Johnson has ethical issues and is scared that I am the strongest candidate who can defeat him in November. So he hired the Governors attack dog, with his own history of problems, to attack me in order to cover up his own ethical lapses.



THE BOTTOM LINES



From BernCo:



The County Commission is accepting applications from individuals interested in filling the vacant District 22 seat of the NM House. Governor Martinez will appoint a replacement for James E. Smith who resigned from the legislature to fill the Bernalillo County District 5 seat on the county commission. The County Commission District 5 seat was vacated by Wayne Johnson who is now the State Auditor. Bernalillo, Santa Fe, and Sandoval Counties will each send nominees for the Governors consideration. Nominations from interested individuals in Bernalillo County will be accepted until Tuesday, April 17, at 5 p.m.



This week we identified Kristin Haase as the PIO for the Public Regulation Commission. Her correct title is assistant to PRC Commissioner Sandy Jones . . .



ABQ Journal reporter Dan McKay tweets out:



Cross another one off the list: NM Supreme Court rules former Representative Idalia Lechuga-Tena can't run in the ABQ district she hadn't lived in for a year.



This is the home of New Mexico politics.







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( c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2018 The Governor's political machine is going to work on Bill McCamley , the Dona Ana County state representative and Dem state auditor candidate, and it appears he has no one to blame but himself.In his finance report this week McCamley reported he loaned his campaign $45,000 but on the financial disclosure form state officials are required to file, McCamley reports no employment, no source of income that provides him with more than $5,000 a year, no spousal income or employment and no financial interests that may present a conflict of interest.So where did McCamley get $45,000 if he doesn't have a job or any assets? That was the question that former State Senator Rod Adair, a charter member of the Guv's machine, p osed on social media.McCamley, 40, isn't required to reveal if someone other than himself loaned him the money and he in turn loaned it to his committee, but for someone who is running for the position that audits agencies across the state and given his self-reported circumstances, how he came up with this loan will raise suspicions. Still, McCamley ignored a request for comment, leaving it to speculation whether he received a loan, for example, from someone who might do business with the state auditor's office and which could represent a conflict of interest.But if McCamley loaned himself the money where did it come from? If he is being straight on his state financial disclosure forms for the past several years he has had no income or employment. And if it's true he had no employment during this long stretch what does that say about him wanting to become State Auditor? And if he has a trust fund and gets at least $5,000 a year from it, that must be reported.We asked Brian Colon, McCamley's opponent for the auditor nomination, for comment but he did not respond. But current GOP State Auditor Wayne Johnson, who was appointed by Gov. Martinez when Tim Keller was elected ABQ mayor and whose campaign for election we're told is being handled by none other than Guv Machine leader Jay McCleskey, jumped at the chance to take McCamley down. Seemingly out of the blue he issued a news release that compiled the financial disclosure statements required for elected officials. He said:And, of course, McCamley, a potential Johnson general election foe, is one of those only four officials who reported no sources of income. We get the point, Wayne, but in case we didn't Johnson helpfully posted all the disclourse forms , including McCamley's.Johnson condensed the disclosure forms that are filed with the Secretary of State so to make sure his information was true we looked at the McCamley statement filed with the SOS and it matches what Johnson put out.McCamley is a former Dona Ana County Commissioner. During his campaigns for the legislature we recall him reporting several jobs he had, including one in the solar industry. On his candidate website he says "he has had many diverse jobs."Well, the political community eagerly awaits McCamley's explanation of his financial resources as they assess the candidates qualifications for the financially sensitive position of state auditor. Meanwhile, Rod and Jay have got Bill pinned to the mat. And he may not get back up.Here is Rep. McCamley's explanation of the loan which came after our report was posted.From BernCo:This week we identified Kristin Haase as the PIO for the Public Regulation Commission. Her correct title is assistant to PRC Commissioner Sandy Jones . . .ABQ Journal reporter Dan McKay tweets out:This is the home of New Mexico politics. E-mail your news and comments. (jmonahan@ix.netcom.com)The March 6 arrest of Shirazi by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which has caused protests in Iran and the Arab world, has reignited the debates over whether Khamenei can claim that his absolute power in Iran is sanctioned by Allah.

The debate over the power of the Supreme Leader has been going on in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but with the recent uprising in Iran, more people are questioning the clerical rule.

Shiite communities are indeed arguing that these monarchical-like powers are antithetical to the Shiite tradition and recommended scrapping the position of the supreme leader.

Protests

The protests began in Iran, but after Shiite clerics in Kuwait and Iraq condemned the arrest, protests sprang up in Karbala, Najaf, Basra, and Kuwait City.

Soon protests even spread to the Iranian Embassy in London, where four demonstrators were arrested for climbing onto the porch and taking down the Iranian flag.

They were not large protests, ranging from several dozens to several hundred participants, but they are still notable, especially against the backdrop of the ongoing anti-regime protests in Iran.

Prosecutor-general Mohammad Jafar Montazeri has attempted to minimize the influence of those who support the Shirazis views, but as the protests spread this has become significantly more difficult.

There are even reports that the Iranian authorities released Shirazi on March 18, retracting the 120-year sentence,

Geneive Abdo wrote on Awwsat: [This] illustrates the Islamic Republics struggle to balance a growing sense of vulnerability with the fear of alienating the body of clerics upon whom its legitimacy ultimately rests.

The Shirazi family

The Shirazi family are incredibly influential within Iran, having been clerics since the 19th century. Shirazis father Grand Ayatollah Sadiq Shirazi is also a strong opponent of Khameneis rule and maintains a large media presence, giving lectures in Persian and Arabic with English subtitles that are broadcast on 18 television channels and three radio stations across the Muslim world.

Some leading figures in the Shirazi school have advocated for the total separation of religion and state, while others merely oppose the Supreme Leaders absolute power.

Even outside the Shirazi school, there are many clerics who oppose supreme clerical rule on theological grounds. They simply do not believe that a living person should have divine and absolute powers and so, the supreme leader cannot represent God on earth.

The widespread protest movement in Iran is encouraging these religious leaders to speak up against the Regime and soon the Supreme Leader and the Regime will fall to the people of Iran.This transfer was the result of an unprecedented campaign by the Iranian opposition and its supporters in Europe and the United States. It took place under the noses of the theocratic fascist regime while the mullahs in Tehran had put all their efforts into preventing their transfer and orchestrating either their surrender or their annihilation, said Struan Stevenson, an international lecturer on the Middle East, and the president of the European Iraqi Freedom Association (EIFA), who was also a member of the European Parliament for 15 years.

In a statement that warned of activities by the agents of the Iranian regime in the European Parliament that are what he called a political cover for terror acts against the Iranian opposition in Albania, Stevenson, who is also the Coordinator for Campaign for Iran Change (CIC) added, The Iranian regimes officials have now acknowledged that the main opposition movement, the Peoples Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI or MEK), played a key role in launching the recent nationwide protests and anti-government demonstrations. According to AFP, on 2 January 2018, President Hassan Rouhani called President Macron and asked him to take action against the Paris-based Iranian opposition and their leader Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, which he accused of fomenting the recent protests. President Macron rejected his demand.

Irans Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei stated on January 9th, 2018 that MEK had organized the uprising and implicitly threatened to execute the arrested protesters. Now, the Iranian regime is citing these events as a reason to exert pressure and instigate terrorist acts against the MEK in Albania, according to Stevenson. In fact, he said, The appointment of Gholam Hossein Mohammad Nia and Mostafa Roodaki, two senior officials of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS), as the ambassador and first secretary of the embassy in Tirana has been a clear indication of the mullahs malign intentions. Ostensibly, their role is to create religious and cultural institutions, which in fact are guileless covers for the sinister activities of the two branches of the Iranian MOIS in Albania, functioning under the names of the Habilian Center and the Didban Institute.

It is alleged that local Albanians are employed and trained to demonize the MEK. They have launched websites and purchased several nationwide TV programs on channels in Albania.

The Albanian media reported on March 22nd, that two Iranians had been arrested on suspicion of preparing acts of terrorism. Ten others were detained for questioning. Purportedly, the MEK was a possible target.

The Iranian regime have used similar tactics over the past four decades, say observers. Lies are spread, and misinformation sets up repression and acts of terrorism. A campaign of demonization and missile attacks were routinely aimed at terrorizing the unarmed and defenseless MEK refugees in Camps Ashraf and Liberty in Iraq.

Now Iran is focusing on Albania where the pattern will inevitably be repeated. The MOIS and its affiliated agents, lobbies and pro-regime politicians are determined to undermine the Iranian oppositions status in Europe and to portray them as a threat to Albania and the Balkans. It is interesting and not surprising to see that many of the main actors of this recent campaign in Albania and Europe are the same ones who worked against the Camps Ashraf and Liberty residents when they were stuck inside Iraq. This is despite the fact that Western security services in 2017 and 2018 found new signs of credible threats against Iranian opposition activists. In 2017, two Iranian dissidents were assassinated in Turkey and the Netherlands, Stevenson stressed.

Regarding a meeting organized by Portuguese MEP Ana Gomes, who is seen as pro-Iran and hostile towards the MEK, Stevenson stressed, We are alarmed to learn that a meeting is planned to take place in the European Parliament entitled: Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK) a threat in Albania. Gomes has recently returned from a visit to Tehran.

Stevenson recalled experience as the former president of the European Parliaments Delegation for Relations with Iraq, saying, In April 2009 when we were going to vote in favor of a resolution in the European Parliament calling for the protection of Ashraf residents, Ms. Gomes proposed 7 amendments to damage our efforts. Had her amendments been adopted it would have given give a free hand to the Iraqi government to suppress the residents. A majority of MEPs rejected all her seven amendments. But her strange behavior and open hostility towards the Iranian opposition raised a lot of protests in the European Parliament and even in the British Parliament at the time.

Stevenson added, After her recent visit to Iran, Ms. Gomes said in the meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee on 22 February 2018,  I met with relatives of the victims of a terrorist organisation, called the MEK, Mojahedin of the People, and National Council of whatever revolutionary Iran! They are creating troubles in Albania, trouble that will come to haunt us (and) are keeping people hostage namely in Albania. These remarks are clearly defamations and judicially prosecutable, he said.

Public information shows that during her stay in Iran she had meetings with the Habilian Institute and Nejat Association, two branches of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence known as MOIS.

According to Stevenson, The list of speakers scheduled for her meeting on 10 April 2018 clearly reveals the nature of this farce, as it includes Anne Singleton (Khodabandeh), an Iranian agent exposed by a US Pentagon & Library of Congress report in December 2012.

Win Griffiths, a former Labour Member of the British Parliament, travelled to Tehran in June 2004, to meet a prisoner in Evin prison. He testified in a witness statement: When I went to Evin, expecting to meet the detainees in private, I was surprised to see Anne Khodabandeh (Singleton), Ebrahims sister-in-law, in Evin Prison. She later claimed that she was there as part of an NGO visit. Yet it was clear to me that the prison guards treated her as a friend and on their side, rather than as a member of an independent NGO.

In fact, Anne Khodabandeh (Singleton) is reported to have visited Tirana no fewer than three times in November 2017. She is said to have discussed, the threats of the PMOI in Albania during a meeting in Ms. Gomes office in the European Parliament in Brussels on December 5th 2017. Outside Camps Ashraf and Liberty in Iraq, Anne Singleton was seen and photographed prior to deadly attacks that took place in both camps.

Olsi Jazexhi and Migena Balla plan to speak at the meeting. The Albanian couple are believed to advocate for the Iranian regime and work closely with Singleton, as well as Vanna Vannuccini, an Italian journalist who has been living in Iran since 1997. Vannuccini is also said to be an advocate of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Her Facebook profile photo shows her next to an Iran Air plane.

I believe it is very unwise to allow the Iranian regime and its agents to misuse the European Parliament. The 1997 decision of the European Union to expel Iranian intelligence agents from Europe must be implemented in the European Parliament with greater emphasis and these agents should not be allowed to appear there, Stevenson concluded.Iraq invaded Iran on September 20, 1980, following repeated provocative border crossings by Iranian forces and warmongering military actions ordered by Khomeini, then supreme leader of regime. Nonetheless, majority of Iranians, including the MEK, went into battle to defend their homeland.

By January 1981, the tide on the war had turned against Iran, and by June 1982, Iran had reclaimed almost all of its lost territory. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein proposed a ceasefire and the withdrawal of his troops from Iranian land, but by then the Iranian mullahs could smell blood in the water and refused to agree to the peace talks.

How was the MEK involved?

In 1986, four years after the peace talks were rejected, the Iran-Iraq war was still going strong and the MEK, the Iraqi government, and the people of Iran all wanted to end the conflict, but the mullahs held out, hoping to export their Islamic republic into Iraq and make Iraq into an Iranian province.

At the same time, around 1,000 members of the MEK had arrived in Iraq from France and Iran and many other countries in order to set up a new base of operations for their fight against the clerical dictatorship in Iran. The Iraqi government granted them a small patch of barren land in the desert on the border between Iraq and Iran, which had only a few partially-constructed buildings, no running water, and no electricity. Still, the base attracted hundreds more Western MEK supporters, mainly students and professionals, and had to expand quickly.

In order to bring an end to the Iran-Iraq war, the MEK began an international campaign and formed the National Liberation Army (NLA), which eventually resulted in a UN ceasefire.

How did the MEK do in battle?

The MEKs NLA was independent of the Iraqi army and was not involved in the conflict between the Iranian and Iraqi armies. Instead, the MEK targeted Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeinis Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in a series of cross-border raids, whilst the Iraqi army took on a defensive formation.

In 1988, the MEK deployed tanks and armoured vehicles ten miles into Iran in its first major strike, before it battled two Iranian divisions along a 31-mile front. Then, the MEK took part in another battle against the IRGC, which caused large numbers of IRGC casualties and resulted in the capture of over 2,000 IRGC fighters.

This growing campaign by the MEK terrified the mullahs, who worried that the next offensive would spark a second revolution and cut the Regime down. Khomeini didnt want to risk the fall of the Regime and so accepted a UN ceasefire.

What happened to the MEK after the war?

When the war ended, the MEK turned their focus to making Camp Ashraf into a liveable city and fighting for the removal of the undemocratic mullahs regime from Iran. Sadly, they were subjected to many brutal assaults, which killed dozens and injured hundreds, from both the Iranian Regime and, after the fall of Hussein, the Iraqi government, who were merely Irans puppets.

After 28 years of horrific abuse, the MEK was evacuated to Albania in 2016, where they continue their struggle for a Free Iran.



East African Court of Justice Nairobi, 12th April 2018 : The Court Plenary which is a courts activity that takes place twice a year commenced yesterday in Nairobi, Kenya.





The President of the Court, Justice Dr Emmanuel Ugirashebuja congratulated the new Judge Justice Charles Nyachae from the Republic of Kenya, upon his appointment as Judge of the First Instance Division who will replace Justice Isaac Lenaola whose term will end in June 2018.





His Lordship, the President also congratulated Justice Dr Faustin Ntezilyayo who was designated by the EAC Heads of State in February this year, as a Deputy Principal Judge the same position that Justice Lenaola is holding. The President paid tribute to Justice Lenaola for his dedicated service for the last seven years and to his contribution to the development of the jurisprudence of the Court.





The Plenary received reports from two Divisions of the Court headed by the President and the Principal Judge and the Registrar on the progress, achievements, challenges and new developments of the Court.





The Plenary considered the courts contribution in training of the bar associations in the region on the rules and procedure of the Court, such as the Rwanda Bar Association and that the rest will also be trained upon their requests. The Court further recommended to strengthen the collaboration of the Court with the Bar Associations in order to engage them as legal fraternity to support the court in raising the quality of advocacy.





Their Lordships during the Plenary, raised and deliberated on several concerns that affect the Courts performance, including, the Court not holding sessions as scheduled due to budgetary constraints. The Plenary also recommended to the management to look for alternative funding and proposals to the Development Partners to fund the courts activities.



At the Amazon Web Services Summit in Sydney this morning, AirTree Ventures co-founder, Daniel Petre, delivered a well-received presentation on what was important for innovation in the world and (in particular) Australia. However, his comment, If you cant raise capital for your start-up, then your idea is probably $hit would have split the field  while it drew laughter in the auditorium, you can bet that the overwhelming majority of Australias start-up starters of the past decade or so would have been baulking. Hard.

What is more of an issue, however, is that yet again, an Australian audience was presented with assertions that the Australian start-up scene is healthy and successful with the proof being the existence of the same old examples.

The subsequent start-up success stories slide was shown.

Those who have sat through any start-up presentation in Australia in the past decade would have guessed that Atlassian would have been there. But just look at when it and the other companies started out (while remembering that Facebook was founded in 2004 and AWS in 2006):

Atlassian: founded 2002

Pet Circle: founded 2011

Canva: launched in 2012 with roots in 2007

Seek: Started 1997(!) ASX-listed 2005.

Safety Culture: Founded 2004

Hyper Anna: Founded 2015

So of this start-up-success-story list, only HyperAnna is actually a start-up. Its also one that Petre has personally helped to grow via Airtree Ventures. Seek is older than some of the people reading this article.

Surely this must stop.

It would be unfair to single out Petre for doing this. Most of these companies represent a kind of bingo card that can be handed out at any announcement regarding Australian start-ups and innovation.

I spoke to Atlassian management at one such event at Sydney Town Hall several years ago (where Sydney was talked up as the home of Australian innovation at the opening keynote while an announcement at the end of the conference said it was being moved to Melbourne) and they said that they hated being referred to as a start-up but were somewhat resigned to it in Australia. Those who actually use key Atlassian products, like Jira and Confluence, wouldnt think of them as new and innovative. Both have already been targeted by other start-ups which have released rival products that have subsequently matured.

But surely the main issue is that the continued use of these examples  coupled with a near-inability to cite any successful, genuine Australian start-ups  is proof that there are huge problems with the start-up and innovation ecosystem in Australia. Ive mentioned this in the industry many times over the years and routinely hear the same thing: The government is making the right noises over and over, but nothing changes. The same articles get written and the powers-that-be think all is well while they beam over headlines which suggest theyre champions of innovation. If all of this is alien to you, remember the Ideas Boom and the expensive ad campaign that went with it? How many Aussie start-ups could have been funded with that budget?

Meanwhile, scores of genuine Australian start-ups  some of which are very, very good  are stuck without funding and no ability to get any because the ecosystem of incubators, competitions and pitch-fests-with-no-tangible-prizes has let them down and left them disillusioned.

At this rate, it wouldnt be a surprise if Atlassian was still being cited as the posterchild of start-ups in 10 years time.

Wouldnt honesty be the best policy? Call the Australian start-up ecosystem the toilet that it is and stop congratulating and parroting every policymaker and commentator who hypes it up. Especially if they mention Atlassian.Microsoft's certification as a Protected provider of its Azure Cloud and Office 365 services to the Australian Government has literally come under a cloud, with the Australian Signals Directorate issuing a consumer guide containing a number of fiats about the service.

But the disquiet is not limited to the ASD, with a highly-placed source in the IT industry, who has intimate knowledge of the procedures involved in gaining such certification, claiming to iTWire that the certification had been granted despite the company allegedly not meeting all the needed criteria.

The Protected status, which was publicised by Microsoft on 3 April, means it can now handle government data with the highest security clearance.

Microsoft became the fifth provider to be certified to offer such services, with the others being Dimension Data, Vault Systems, Sliced Tech and Macquarie Government.

The source, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter involved, said: "It's... understood that they (meaning Microsoft) have not been required to have things cleared in the way that others have." The others referred to are the four other companies that have obtained Protected status.

The source pointed out that anyone who was handling data that resided within services offered by these organisations would have to be Australian nationals who were resident within the country and had obtained security clearance from the Defence authorities.

But, the source said, these requirements appeared to have been put temporarily on hold for Microsoft, adding that there were some indications that it might be not enforced at all.

"The effect is that national security stands compromised," the source said, adding that this devalued the entire accreditation system which had been set up to give confidence to government agencies and not require them to have to carry out any additional procedures before using the services of a provider that had gained Protected status.

The time taken for Microsoft to gain Protected certification was also cited by the source, with the company taking six months to obtain the certification which the source said would normally take at least two years.

When iTWire asked Microsoft whether any special dispensation had been granted to the company so that employees from outside Australia who did not have Australian Government clearance could attend to Australian data stored by the company, a company spokesperson responded: "Microsoft has not been granted a special dispensation around personnel, our personnel security practices and policies are compliant with the Australian Governments personnel security requirements under the Protective Security Policy Framework."

The ASD consumer guide adds some fiats which appear to indicate that Microsoft's service is not up to the mark.

In its consumer guide, the ASD says: "Residual risks attached to this delivery model can be reduced through agency implementation of additional configuration and security controls to be developed by Microsoft in conjunction with the ACSC (the Australian Cyber Security Centre).

"This will provide agencies with a pragmatic level of assurance and confidence in Microsofts public cloud offering to the Australian Government. More technical detail will also be provided in the ACSCs finalised certification report of the services on offer."

In its announcement last week, Microsoft made no mention of any additional security measures that needed to be taken to make its Azure Cloud and Office 365 services suitable for use by government agencies.

The IT industry source attributed the ASD's issuing of the consumer guide as a reaction to the fact there "huge gaps in Microsoft's meeting the accreditation norms".

However, the source, termed the issuing of the consumer guide a cowardly act as it came well after Microsoft trumpeted its being issued Protected status and "was issued at take-out-the-trash-time on a Friday".

But Microsoft contested the fact that the consumer guide had cast any doubts over its Protected status, with a spokesperson telling iTWire: "As part of the recently awarded ASD Protected certification for Azure and Office 365, ASD published a consumer guide along with the listing on the Certified Cloud Services List.

"The consumer guide stated that residual risks 'can be reduced through agency implementation of additional configuration and security controls to be developed by Microsoft in conjunction with the ACSC'. In the interests of clarity, ASD has not asked Microsoft to develop additional security controls into the Azure and Office 365 services. There are no engineering level changes required by Microsoft associated with the award of the Protected certification. The development here refers to configuration guides and blueprints for controls that Microsoft has already built into the services but that need to be turned on and configured by the Government customers.

"Under the Microsoft shared responsibility model, there are controls that Microsoft handles for all customers, controls where responsibility is shared (i.e Microsoft implements a control in the Service but the customer controls its activation and configuration) and controls that are solely the responsibility of the customer. The focus of the guides is the latter two categories."

The spokesperson added: "Whilst Microsofts services on the CCSL are the only ones ASD has produced a Consumer Guide for, consumer guides are not new. The ASD Evaluated Products List includes a consumer guide with many of the evaluation outcomes. A specific example is the use of Apple iOS devices by government at the Protected level. To operate those devices at Protected, Australian Government agencies need to configure them in accordance with the hardening guide issued by ASD. That does not mean the Apple iOS devices need to have new controls developed, this is the same for Microsofts Azure and Office 365."

iTWire contacted the ASD on Wednesday, asking why the consumer guide had been issued, pointing out that the other four companies which had gained the Protected certification had had no such fiats issued. A response was sought by close of business yesterday.

When the ASD was contacted this morning, iTWire was told that a response was being worked on and would be available as soon as possible. Any response will be added here as soon as it is received.

iTWire also sought comment from the four vendors who have gained Protected certification  Macquarie Government, Dimension Data, Vault Systems and Sliced Tech. A Dimension Data spokesperson responded, saying: "Thank you for your inquiry but Dimension Data does not comment on other companies and their products or services."

Update, 5pm: Following publication of this article, a Microsoft spokesperson added the following comments: "Firstly, Microsofts certification was awarded 14 months after we first lodged our IRAP Assessment recommending Protected with ASD  not six months. Additionally, the Microsoft service complies with all requirements for certification, including personnel security requirements. No policy has been changed." (IRAP stands for Infosec Registered Assessor Program)

"The governments position under the Protective Security Policy Framework on personnel security as it relates to outsourced services and functions is clearly outlined in the Attorney-Generals 2015 publication: Australian Government protective security governance guidelines  Security of outsourced services and functions

"It should be noted that under the governments information security manual, certification is followed by a process of accreditation, which is an agency responsibility and it must undertake its own due diligence and accept any risks before using any cloud service regardless of the cloud services certification.

"When comparing security of different services, its important that youre comparing like for like. A simple infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering in a private cloud is far less complex than a hyperscale cloud platform like Azure or a software as a service (SaaS) offering like Office 365.

"In IaaS, the cloud provider simply provisions the infrastructure and then the agency has to implement everything on top of that  authentication, encryption and applications  in a way that complies with the Information Security Manual.

"Microsofts cloud services operate further up the stack and offer a diverse range of configurable services at the Protected level (Over 35 services across Azure and Office365 have been certified to Protected), so an agency implementing our service does require some guidance about how to configure the service in a way that complies with their security requirements."Call 2 Worship

Southern California Region of the CME Church holds their Spring Convocation and Quadrennial Celebration on April 13-14, at Lewis Metropolitan CME Church, 4900 S. Western Ave., in Los Angeles, said Bishop Bobby R. Best, 9th District presiding prelate, and the Rev. Travis Morris, host pastor. The agenda includes worship services, business sessions and leadership development training. Bishop Clement W. Fugh of the AME Fifth District will speak on April 13 at 1 p.m. On April 14, at 6 p.m., a quadrennial celebration and banquet will be held for Best and his wife, Mrs. Jacqueline Howard Best at The Foundation Center, 11633 S. Western Ave., in Los Angeles. For details, call Herb Titus at (714) 365-4004 or Richard E. Lee at (323) 514-4412.

Carson Community Deliverance Center Church holds a Womens Prayer Service on April 14, 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.

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Save Our Sons Prison Justice Ministry hosts Jobs Create Peace on April 15, at 2:30 p.m., at Crenshaw United Methodist Church, 3740 Don Felipe Dr., in Los Angeles, said Pastor Royce Porter, Sr. Deputy Probation Officer Brad Carson will discuss employment programs for people involved in the justice system, and affordable housing for families. Call (323) 292-0141 for details.

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.

Brookins-Kirkland Community AME Church sponsors a Prayer Breakfast on April 21, at 9 a.m., at 3719 W. Slauson Blvd., in Los Angeles, said Pastor Mary S. Minor. The Womens and God Answers Prayer Ministries sponsor the event. The ticket donation is $25. For tickets or information, call (323) 296-5610.

Mount Tabor Baptist Church hosts A Salute to Tony Coleman on April 21, at 4 p.m., at 6614 S. Western Ave., in Los Angeles, said Pastor Ticey Brown. Dr. Henry Jackson and Mt. Tabors Music Ministry sponsor the event. The theme is We Love You in 100 Ways and More. Performers include BeBe Winans, Henry Jackson Company, Brookinaires Gospel Choir, Sherwood Sledge, Denise Williams and more.

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Westwood Presbyterian Church presents a concert featuring the compositions by Antonin Dvorak on April 22, at 5 p.m., at 10822 Wilshire Blvd., in Los Angeles. Maria Newman will direct and organist Dr. Namhee Han, soprano Christina Borgioli, mezzo-soprano Nandani Maria Sinha, tenor Scott Noonan, baritone Dimitri Smith and bass baritone Matthew Lewis will perform. The donation is $20. To learn more, call (310) 474-4535.

First United Methodist Church of Compton celebrates its 150th anniversary on April 29, at 3 p.m., at 1025 S. Long Beach Blvd., in Compton, said the Rev. Dr. Arnetha Inge, pastor. The theme is 150 years of Praising God in Every Place, With Every Voice and in Every Way based on Psalm 150. The guest preacher will be Pastor Walter R. Tucker III of Truth and Love Christian Church, a former mayor of Compton and U.S. Congressman. Last year, he released his autobiography, From Compton to Congress  His Grace for My Race. Refreshments will be served following the service. For details, call the church at (310) 639-0775.City Offers Relocation Assistance to South LA Tenants Facing Homelessness After Room-For-Rent Scam

Caption2: An undated photo of Giovanna Wilkerson accused of running a rent scam.

The nearly one dozen tenants facing eviction after a woman running a transitional housing scam in a dilapidated, ramshackle house in South L.A. took their money and failed to pay rent to the landlord, announced with their attorney Nana Gyamfi that theyd been given relocation assistance through the city of Los Angeles. Through the help of Eighth District Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the tenants will now receive relocation assistance alleviating their worries about becoming homeless overnight.

Because of the conditions of the property, a motion carried by South L.A. Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson and seconded by Councilmember Gil Cedillo was passed in City Council on Mar. 27., to provide advanced funds to the tenants for relocation. The motions direct the City to report, with the assistance of the appropriate departments, including the Department of Building and Safety and the City Attorney, relative to whether an Order to Vacate or similar action is necessary; determine the eligibility of the tenants to receive relocation assistance; identify funds to provide relocation assistance to the tenants, subject to eligibility requirements; and report with the authorities required, including any necessary findings, to provide assistance to the tenants.

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While fighting their eviction, the tenants continued to live in absolute wretchedness and uninhabitable conditions.

Tenants say that Code Enforcement inspectors told them on numerous occasions during inspection visits that they would issue an Order to Vacate and that the tenants would be immediately evacuated and provided relocation assistance if either the lights or gas were turned off. However, after two weeks of no gas or hot water, the tenants continued to live in the nearly 5,000 sq. ft. home with an active gas leak that the fire department has deemed a hazard severe enough to require a 24-hour fire watch.

On a recent inspection visit at the house, HCIDLA Senior Housing Inspector Marcel Nicholas told residents that his office found 120 code violations.

A 19-page inspection report dated Feb. 20, from Code Enforcement 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. A similar report was issued by the county of Los Angeles Department of Public Health.

At a press conference on Tue., Apr. 3, in front of the ramshackle house on Crenshaw Blvd., the tenants along with their attorney Nana Gyamfi and Councilmember Harris-Dawsons Chief-of-Staff Solomon Rivera, detailed for the news media the horrible condition of the house as well as the elaborate and ongoing scam run by Giovanna Wilkerson. The tenants and attorney Gyamfi urged City Attorney Mike Feuer to stop Wilkerson and prosecute her for her crimes against unsuspecting low-income tenants looking for housing.

This is not the only place Ms. Wilkerson has done this in, said attorney Nana Gyamfi. These are not the only people who have been victimized by this scheme. Shes done it before. Shes doing it now, and unless shes stopped, shes going to keep doing it.

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Gyamfi continued, Think of how lucrative it is. If you can get ten people in one room and theyre paying $300 to $350 a piece, thats $3500 per month for just one room. Now if you multiply that times five per month, thats over $15,000. Thats a lot of money.

Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson added, The slum conditions are inhumane and inexcusable. I am grateful that we were able to secure relocation assistance for these residents. However, in a time of severe housing and homelessness crises, we cannot allow people to take advantage of the most vulnerable without repercussions.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters made an impromptu visit with the tenants on Monday and saw the conditions of the house firsthand.

Headed back to Washington D.C. the next morning, Congresswoman Waters spent the evening working with the tenants to make sure that they had short-term housing available to them and would not be homeless once they left the house on Crenshaw. Waters directected her staff to make finding the tenants temporary housing a priority.

A condition of receiving relocation assistance from the city of Los Angeles is that the tenants must leave immediately.

All of the tenantswhich 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 as part of a transitional housing program for low-income adults. Several tenants claim they were brought 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.

Current and previous tenants say that in exchange for renting a bed in a shared room, 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 programs where she targets indigent and low-income people. In one home, shes presently 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. Calls made to the landlords of these properties were not returned.

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 tenants warn that if she isnt stopped in the very near future, the city of Los Angeles will be facing another similar situation where Wilkerson has skipped out on paying the rent and left tenants behind.

Attorney Gyamfi says that the City Attorney was alerted over a month ago about Wilkersons scam and hasnt done anything about it.

This city is facing one of the worst affordable housing and homelessness crisis in the country, added Gyamfi. The City Attorney has a responsibility to make sure that people who are just trying to keep a roof over their heads are not taken advantage of and hes not doing that in this case.

The tenants for their part thanked Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, their attorney Nana Gyamfi, the community, and media. The tenants specifically praised the Los Angeles Sentinel, L.A. Watts Times, L.A. Weekly, KNOCK-LA and The Front Page with Dominique DiPrima on 102.3FM KJLH for rallying around them and helping to get their story out. They continue to urge the City Attorney to stop Giovanna Wilkerson before there are additional victims.Cuba Excursion And Science Extravaganza Set Escuela Plus Apart

Some of the travelers excited to spend their Spring Break in Cuba. Approximately fifteen additional travelers are not pictured. Top (left to right): Monique Earl (Escuela parent), Flint Hinton, Dr. Sandra Roussell. Bottom (left to right): Milan Earl, Blaze Hinton, Maya Bell, Elise Harris, Lola Jefferson, Sasha Jefferson.

Families from Escuela Plus, a progressive school (K through 6thGrade) in Baldwin Hills, spent Spring Break in Havana, Cuba. Escuela families visited museums, art galleries, Morro Castle, Old Havana, and the beach, and saw where author Ernest Hemingway lived and often spent time writing. They also enjoyed delicious Cuban cuisine and the lively music for which the country is famous. As they toured the city, they had the opportunity to marvel over automobiles from the 1950s and stunning art deco architecture.

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Brilliant young scientists who won Escuela Plus Science Fair, Science Fair Chair Dhaujee Kelly, and assistant Jasmine Johnson. Student winners are named in the article.

Escuela Plus was founded by Dr. Sandra Roussell, who was the founder and Head of School of Escuela de Montessori and Escuela Elementary Center. Escuela Plus is a spin-off of those schools and is following in the stellar tradition of its predecessor. A key part of that tradition has been annual international excursions. In the past, Escuela families have traveled throughout Europe and to China. When asked why Cuba for this years trip, Dr. Roussell said, Why not? Cuba is a major player in todays global market. Our students will be at an advantage having been exposed to Cubas culture, language, and people.

Congresswoman Karen Bass chats with students on Escuelas Cuba trip. Back (from left to right): Maya Bell, Congresswoman Bass, Milan Earl, Jaxton Jordan. Front: Arlington Jordan.

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In addition to international travel, Escuela Plus sets itself apart academically from other elementary schools in the southern California. Students are working at least a year to two years above California state standards. The school held its first graduation in June 2017, and the graduates matriculated to some of the most desirable, academically-challenging middle schools in southern California, including the Archer School for Girls, Army and Navy Academy, Campbell Hall, Chadwick School, Geffen Academy at UCLA, and Immaculate Heart.

One of the activities that prepares them to excel at such institutions is the annual Science Fair. This year, the Science Fair took place on March 22 and was chaired by Dhaujee Kelly, the upper school Science and Math teacher. Students completed projects in biological, chemical, and physical science to test their knowledge. All students, even the Kindergarten students, had an opportunity to develop public speaking and scientific research skills by participating in the fair. Escuelas winners in each category were:

Biology  1st-3rdGrade

1stNia Guillemet  The Tasteless Tongue

2ndGia Upshaw  Real vs. Gluten Free Brownies

3rdRobert Ball  How to Make Geodes

Chemistry  1st-3rdGrade

1stBlaze Hinton  How Thieves Reuse Your Checks

2ndMilan Earl  What Makes Eggs Sink or Float?

3rdSasha Jefferson  How to Make a Lava Lamp

Physical Science  1st-3rdGrade

1stMaya Bell  How Volcanoes Erupt

2ndPhoenix Armstead  Potato Power

3rdAngelo Sparrow  Tornado in a Bottle

Biology  4th-6thGrade

1stJustin Pouncey  How Does Water Type Determine Plant Growth?

2ndMichelle Oppong  Can You Absorb Your Medicine?

3rdCaitlyn Oppong  Which Disinfectant Prohibits Bacteria Growth?

Chemistry  4th-6thGrade

1stKevin Hall  Mentos Geysers

2ndFlint Hinton  Secrets of the Homemade Lava Lamp: Revealed

3rdGavin Frye  Which Solution Will Dissolve Skittles?

Physical Science  4th-6thGrade

1stAlexandria Campbell  Thermal Expansion of Water

2ndLola Jefferson  Egg Shelter Structure

3rdChristopher Anderson  Aluminum vs. Wood, Which Bat Yields the Best Hit?

Escuelas faculty continues to push beyond conventional pedagogy and provide rigorous, rewarding experiences for students and their families. The small private school at the top of the hill has already established its reputation as pioneers in primary education and whole-student Montessori method.

To learn more, including about the summer program, visit www.escuelapluselementary.com, or call (323) 903-6049.Howards PR Director Inspires Young, Black Media Professionals

As a rising star in the public relations field, Alonda Thomas has always sought to inspire young, Black women who want to break into the industry.

Earlier this year, Thomas was named the Director of Public Relations in Howard Universitys Office of Communications.

At Howard, my goal is to continue to promote the brand of this amazing institution, Thomas said. [Howard University] has a lot of really great things happening that the public and media dont know about and my mission is to really bring those things to the forefront and shed additional light on such a dynamic institution.

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Prior to joining Howard Universitys staff, Thomas worked as the senior public relations manager at TV One.

In 2017, Thomas was honored as one of the Top 25 African American PR Millennials to Watch.

One of my favorite quotes is by Henry David Thoreau: Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you imagined, Thomas said. I discovered this quote back in high school, and it always reminds me that I have to be a willing and active participant in making my dreams come true. Since there is a plan already designed for my life, why wouldnt I move confidently in the direction of making those dreams attainable?

Thomas continued: I think we, as a society, spend way too much time trying to justify why we cant achieve success instead of just operating in faith that it is already done.

Hailing from Miami, Florida, it wasnt until Thomas attended the historically Black college Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), that she knew that she was destined for a career in public relations.

PR was a passion I stumbled upon while attending Florida A&M, after a fellow classmate told me they thought I would be really good at the job, Alonda said. I pretty much took off from there. College was where I got my start, however I believe my success comes from my willingness to continuously keep learning.

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Thomas said that young, Black women who are considering a career in public relations, shouldnt be afraid to take direction and try something new.

I went through a lot of internships and worked for free many times, but it was all worth it, Thomas said, advising Black millennials to, Zoom into what you want and then go for it.

Thomas resume includes work on successful projects like ABCs black-ish, Spike Lees Chi-raq, and CNNs United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell.

The Miami native said that working at TV One was an amazing opportunity, where she was able to grow and learn.

I worked on a lot of amazing projects including TV Ones Unsung where I secured interviews with [rhythm and blues trio] SWV, and [celebrities] like Wyclef Jean, hip-hop artist Fat Joe and the R&B group Jagged Edge, Thomas said.

Thomas also booked actor and hip-hop legend Ice-Ts first-ever interview with Essence magazine.

Thomas said that she is heavily-inspired by media mogul Cathy Hughes.

I believe her story of perseverance despite personal obstacles is inspiring and demonstrates that you can accomplish anything no matter the challenge, Thomas said. As it pertains to where I am at in my own career path, she reminds me that the skys the limit and that the only person who can hold me back is me.

Thomas continued: Cathy Hughes story is the American dream. It is so motivating to know that a woman from humble beginnings could take a vision and buy a radio station and grow it into a successful multi-faceted media company. If she did it, so can I. If she made it, so can you.

Gwendolyn Quinn, a global media and communications strategist, called Thomas a star.

Quinn, who partnered with Antonice Jackson, the president of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the National Black Public Relations Society, to develop the Top 25 African American PR Millennials to Watch list.

She represents so many great qualities as a writer, communicator, worker and personality, Quinn said. We received over 200 applications. Out of the 200, only 25 people were selected. Out of that 25, I was only involved in hand-picking five and Alonda was one of my first picks.

Quinn continued: This business can be very strenuous, but Alonda always keeps a cool head and that trait alone is invaluable.Kamala Harris Inducted Into Links, Inc.

The resume of U.S. Senator Kamala D. Harris expanded with her induction into The Links, Inc., one of the nations oldest and largest volunteer service organizations for women.

During a ceremony in downtown Los Angeles on April 6, Dr. Glenda Newell-Harris, The Links national president, joined with nearly 300 Links from throughout the country to welcome Harris as one of the groups 15,000+ members.

Visibly emotional about her new membership, Harris said, This is a true honor. This is an organization that for decades has been dedicated to Black women and Black professional women and dedicated to service and the service to others.

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When I think of [being] a Link, [I think of] so many amazing women. I stand on their shoulders and I cant wait to work in service with you. When we are connected together, we are stronger as individuals, we are stronger as a community and we are stronger as a country.

Harris noted that under Dr. Harris leadership, the organization is tackling a number of pressing concerns such as STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education, poverty, supporting working families and criminal justice reform.

These are such important issues that need to be addressed and need the leadership of the women in this room, Harris told the audience. All of us together are united knowing that we have to speak up and speak out and know that were all in it together and none of us are alone.

Offering similar comments, President Harris stressed the enduring impact of the Links, which was established in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1946 and now boasts 285 chapters located in 41 states, Washington D.C., and the Bahamas. Collectively, the membership has contributed more than 2 million volunteer service hours in the past three years.

We are no longer the organization that just tutors after school. We are involved in a lot of things, explained Dr. Harris, who cited the Links current campaigns focused on mental health education and awareness, Hepatitis C and HIV education and awareness, Black Lives Matter and eliminating human trafficking.

We are getting into the deep water, really getting into the community and really working with a different population now, where everybody doesnt have all of the benefits and its tougher to get jobs and to purchase homes and you just cant make it on the minimum wage, said Dr. Harris.

On an international level, the Links adopted several schools in Jamaica where the members donate computers, STEM education, anti-bullying education and health and human services.

As a physician, Harris said, my focus has been on health  healthy memberships, healthy chapters, healthy relationships and healthy financials to improve the quality of life for individuals, families and communities.LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, Actor Forest Whitaker to Receive Honorary USC Degrees

Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck, actor Forest Whitaker and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize- winning book about cancer, are among five recipients to receive honorary degrees at USCs 135th commencement ceremony next month, the university announced last Friday.

Beck has served as chief of the LAPD since 2009 but announced recently that he will be retiring in June.

For four decades, [Beck] has modeled integrity and resilience for all the women and men of the LAPD, while mentoring countless law enforcement officers. Indeed, his insightful leadership has effected meaningful institutional change, furthered the cause of justice and revitalized hope in our neighborhoods, USC said in a statement announcing the honorary degrees.

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Whitaker, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of former Ugandan President Idi Amin in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland, is also a director, producer and peace activist.

Over the past decade, Mr. Whitaker has raised awareness of the human cost of conflict and violence, while building pathways to peace for people around the world. He founded the Whitaker Peace and Development Initiative to support reconciliation in communities impacted by conflict on three continents, according to USC.

Mukherjee is an oncologist and author best known for his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Retired Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden, Jr. and biochemist Jennifer A. Doudna will also receive honorary degrees at the May 11 ceremony.

Bolden is an aviator and astronaut who logged nearly 700 hours as a shuttle pilot and mission commander before being appointed to the position of NASA administrator, making him the first African-American to lead the agency on a permanent basis; and Doudna is a biochemist, scholar and inventor who also wrote the book A Crack in Creation, which addresses the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.

About 15,500 degrees will be handed out during USCs commencement at Alumni Park, including more than 1,500 doctorate degrees. More than 60,000 people are expected to attend the event.LGBT Activists Plan First-Ever Pride March in Swaziland

Activist Gazes Through LGBT Pride Flag (courtesy photo)

LGBT activists in Swaziland are taking hopeful steps towards official recognition in the conservative nation of Swaziland, where male homosexuality is outlawed and members of the government have denounced it as satanic.

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The activists hope to win over some hearts and minds by holding a Pride march and festival in June.

If the application by The Rock of Hope for the march and festival is approved, the history-making event will coincide with Pride marches worldwide. The June event marks the anniversary of New York Citys Stonewall riots of 1969.

This first event is small scale, but we cannot hide forever, Melusi S. Simelane, communications manager for The Rock of Hope, told The Daily Beast. We cannot do advocacy if we are not visible. One of the key aspects of any form of advocacy is ensuring visibility: to say, We are here, we exist.

There are no LGBT bars or LGBT-specific gathering places in the country. The June event would be the first time LGBT people gathered together en masse.

Swaziland is not the only African country where the LGBT community has met opposition. Uganda Pride events were the subject of a brutal crackdown by police in 2016 and 2017.

Isaac Mugisha, coordinator of Pride Uganda, is determined and optimistic that Ugandan LGBTs will hold a Pride event in Kampala later this year, without it being shut down by the authorities.

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The momentum is so different, Mugisha said. Now we are looking at hundreds of people wanting to gather for a Pride event.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, the High Court has begun hearing a case that may decriminalize homosexuality.

Its a significant step in East Africa, where homosexuality is illegal in almost every country in the region and in 38 countries in total across the continent, according to Amnesty International.

The fact that we are being heard is an indicator that our democracy has come of age, said Eric Gitari, founder of the National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, one of the organizations which brought the case in 2016.

The presiding judges have adjourned until April 26, when they will announce a date to reveal their judgment.Presidential Race Takes an Unexpected Twist in Nigeria

Pres. M. Buhari, left, and O. Sowore, right (courtesy photo)

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Next years race for the presidency in Nigeria just got a lot more interesting as a crusading journalist  an upstart known for exposing the millions and billions stolen by a national loot-ocracy  announced his candidacy for the nations top job.

As news spread that the journalist, Omoyele Sowore, was testing the waters for national office, President Muhammadu Buhari, age 75, reminded Nigerians that he too would be a candidate, ending months of speculation that the President might step down.

At a recent meeting with ruling party leaders, President Buhari explained that he heard the clamor by Nigerians urging him to run again in 2019.

Until this weeks announcement, President Buhari was considered a candidate for retirement. Serious health issues took him to doctors in the UK for a total of five months last year. A campaign promise to stamp out the Boko Haram insurgency fell short as militants raided a school in February in a reprise of a similar attack in 2014.

Speaking to a reporter, Omoyele listed problems of the current regime starting with unemployment. Over 20 million Nigerians who are qualified to have jobs, most of them young people, have no jobs and unemployment rose in 2017.

The economy is in shambles Healthcare is a disgrace. When the President has to go overseas for treatment, what do you think the quality of care is for ordinary Nigerians?

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Our political system continues to be defined by corruption. Not a single major conviction for corruption has been achieved under Buhari.

Nigerian analysts also give Buhari an uphill battle to win another term. There are multiple factions in his party who dont want him to have a second term, said Cheta Nwanze at the Lagos-based risk advisory SBM Intelligence. They will coalesce against him now.

New third party movements are the Coalition for Nigeria, touted by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the Nigerian Intervention Movement headed by human rights lawyer Olisa Agbakoba, and the Red Card Movement led by Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former minister and ex-vice president of the World Bank.

I will be contesting for the presidency of this nation whose development has been arrested, said Omoyele, founder of SaharaReporters.com  a website of citizen journalism, supplying videos, photos, news stories and commentaries that expose official corruption and abuse in Nigerias government.

What I have learned in my 47 years on earth is that if you want to see things change you have to do it yourself.Wesson, Price, Harris-Dawson and Sentinel host LAPD Town Hall

Statistics show people of color are most effected wrongly by law enforcement. As the city of angels embarks on selecting its next police chief, people of color provide input, concern and suggestions as to who will lead LAPD, as Charlie Beck prepares to retire.

The Los Angeles Police Commission held its last listening session regarding the selection of the next police chief of Los Angeles on April 4 at the Museum of African-American Art located at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Macys on the 3rd Floor.

Pastor Craig Worsham stated, I think this is a great opportunity for community leaders and the citizens of the community to come and share their thoughts and to give input on what we need in our community. Personally, I think as it relates to our young people, we need to seek a chief that is heavily engaged socially and civically, that will cause us to build a bridge that has been broken between community and law enforcement.

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The forum was presented by Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson, Councilmember Curren Price Jr., Marqueece Harris- Dawson and the Los Angeles Sentinel Newspaper. The session was moderated by Los Angeles Sentinel managing editor and L.A. Watts Times managing editor Brandon I. Brooks, and included police commission president Matthew M. Johnson, executive director Richard M. Tefank and police commissioner Shane Murphy Goldsmith.

While the commission chose the theme of transparency, the audience questioned why the candidates remained anonymous. More than 30 people have applied to become Los Angeles next police chief. The full list of candidates may never be known. The citys personnel department does not publicly release the names of the candidates being considered.

Although most candidates will never be known, Deputy Chief Phil Tingirides, who oversees the departments South Bureau, confirmed he has applied for the top position along with Michel Moore, an assistant chief who was a finalist for the job in 2009; Sandy Jo MacArthur, a former LAPD assistant chief who retired in 2015, but is still a reserve officer; and Robert Arcos, a deputy chief who heads the LAPDs Central Bureau.

Michael Ellison, who attended the session had his own thoughts as to who should be the next chief of Los Angeles, when I think of someone that is doing something thats out of the box, I think of public servants like the current deputy chief Phil Tingirides who is already engaged in the community and who doesnt need a tutorial about where to go or what to do because he already knows.

The search for Chief Charlie Becks replacement began in January, when he announced that he would retire from the Los Angeles Police Department this summer.

Mayor Eric Garcetti, will make the final selection from the list of applicants narrowed down by his appointees on the Police Commission. The City Council must then confirm the mayors choice. Police commissioners have said they hope to finish evaluating the candidates and offer Garcetti their top three suggestions in early June, a few weeks before Becks last day, June 27.

The next head of the LAPD will be responsible for the solutions to many problems including concerns of how officers use force, a rise in homelessness and racial profiling to name a few.Whats at risk for Americas ethnic communities with the 2020 Census?

The biggest threat to a complete count in the 2020 Census, civil rights advocates agree, is public distrust of the government, fueled by the Trump administrations anti-immigrant policies, and the just announced decision by Commerce Dept. Secretary Wilbur Ross to include a question on citizenship status  a question that hasnt been included since 1950.

Advocates from Americas diverse communities held a national press briefing to educate ethnic media about the 2020 Census count and just what is at stake.

Speakers were Arturo Vargas, executive director, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund, John Yang, president and executive director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League (NUL), and Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

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They outlined inclusiveness of the count, adequate funding concerns, ramifications of an incomplete count, and the impact of an additional question on citizenship. Advocates say the question could have a chilling effect on a complete count.

Data collected is used to determine how Congressional seats are set and informs decisions about the allocations of funding to support state and local communities resources, like schools, hospitals, education, and transportation, explained Gupta.

The session came as Congress nears approval of the questionnaire and budget for fiscal year 2019.

Put simply, the Census is foundational to our democracy. It is one of the most significant civil rights issues facing the country today and in fact we must ensure that the 2020 Census is a fair and accurate count, said Gupta.

Another factor putting that at risk is chronic underfunding for fiscal year 2019, she added.

Advocates say the citizenship question has created significant alarm among the civil and human rights community. The underfunding has meant delayed preparation and outreach, which will mean an inaccurate count, they say.

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As congress begins the process of budgeting funding for the census many locally are as equally concerned as those in our nations capital. Everything is at risk if African Americans in L.A. are under counted in the 2020 census. We stand to lose our great Congresswoman and our share of $600 billion in funding for healthcare and education. Each of us is worth $1,950 per person each year over 10 years in federal funding. These are real dollars for real services and thats real talk stated Assemblymember Reginald Jones-Sawyer who is a member of the Assembly Select Committee on the Census.

The citizenship question is unwise, untimely, and an expensive decision, said Vargas. His organization and partners are calling for Congressional oversight hearings, and for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to meet with Ross to determine the basis for his decision to add the question.

Historically, the Black population has been undercounted since the first Census in 1790, when enslaved Africans were counted as three-fifths of a person, said Morial.

The prospect of an epic undercount of African Americans and all people of color in the 2020 Census is becoming more of a reality each day, Morial stated.

In 2010, African Americans were undercounted by more than two percent; African American children by an astonishing 6.5 percent, according to the Census Bureaus own statistics, Whites, however, were over counted by 1.1 percent in 2000 and nearly one percent in 2010, Morial stated.

He added, Underrepresentation and a Black undercount is an insidious form of racial discrimination, because it denies an entire swath of the American population access to privileges, protections and rights. The same is true for all people who may be undercounted in this Census.

Resources in housing, voting, employment and education are all at stake, Morial and the other advocates said. To add insult to injury, the Census Bureau will continue its policy of prison-based gerrymandering by counting nearly two million incarcerated persons as residents of the jurisdictions of their prisons, rather than their homes, said Morial.

He urges Blacks to participate in the count to ensure they get their fair share of federal funding and distribution of legislative, Congressional, and judicial seats.

Generally, given the historical skepticism of the Census data gathering and reluctance by some in the Black community to participate, Morial said more education about the process is necessary.

By not participating in it, we shortchange ourselves. By not participating in it, we disempower ourselves. We have to understand its not a count for the sake of a count, said Morial in a follow-up phone interview.Womens History Month Remembrance: International Black Womens Public Policy Institute (IBWPPI) celebrates its 10th Anniversary in Nassau Bahamas

The International Black Womens Public Policy Institute (IBWPPI) hosted its annual International Womens Conference in Nassau, Bahamas. Women convened at the beautiful Melia` Nassau Beach Resort from all over the nation and internationally to celebrate IBWPPIs 10-year anniversary milestones and participate in dialogue on issues affecting Black women, their communities and the world around them.

Given the globalized state of affairs, This is a unique time for change throughout the world. We are organizing women who are in powerful leadership roles to join us and take action now to pool our resources, identify priorities for coordinated action that confronts public policies, and social customs that hinder the development of women, said Barbara A. Perkins, co-founder and President of IBWPPI. The IBWPPI conference was founded with the mission of advocating on behalf of Black women and girls globally, with an intent focus to utilize the annual gathering to educate, compel, and inspire involvement in the organizations current initiatives to impact legislative response to the growing concerns affecting Black women, their families, socio-economic conditions and overall communities.

This years theme Expanding the Circle, Expanding the Message, Expanding the Impact. Featured speakers included: President of the Senate, The Hon. Katherine B.

Turning up the volume during the kick-off session, The Impact of Black Womens Leadership in a Global Society was McGhee Williams Osse firmly encouraging the next generation of Black women to Have the right tools, know how and dont stick to doing what youre comfortable withdevelop new skills for growth, make an agenda and financially stick with women you support.

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Along the 10-year journey IBWPPI wanted to motivate young women by the legacies of women like Dr. Dorothy Height, Mary McLeod Bethune and the illustrious women who make up the IBWPPI Board of Directors. The Young Ambassadors Program (YAP), led by mothers, sisters, daughters and innovative executive thought leaders, was created to support and collaborate with distinguished community thought-leaders who have answered the call to lead by service and example. Chief Ambassador Ebonee Rice states, IBWPPI has changed my life in addition to provide me a platform to benefit from the knowledge of our elders and a safe place for dialog among my peers.

The community highlight was the IBWPPI Reading Room Initiative Project Ribbon Cutting ceremony held at Lillian G. Weir-Coakley Library. Dedicated to the Bahamian community in Nassau, The Reading Room Initiative Project is dedicated to create a literacy enriched environment that is safe and secure for youth of all ages, develop their reading skills promote leisure reading as a key to unlocking a youths full potential.The democracy monitoring group Freedom House says governments from Central Europe to Eurasia are showing disrespect for independent agencies and open discussion. It adds that the European Union, or EU, and the United States have little time left to stand up to the areas anti-democratic forces.

Freedom House released the findings in its latest Nations in Transit report, which is called Confronting Illiberalism.

The report defines illiberalism as thinking that rejects the need for independent agencies to monitor the government and dismisses the idea of publicly disagreeing with those in power.

Freedom House said that, in 2017, illiberalism established itself as the new normal in the former Soviet Union and some of its allies. The U.S.-based group noted attacks on independent media and government critics in a number of countries. And it observed a never-ending push in some areas to combine the ruling party and the state.

Very dramatic changes

Nate Schenkkan is project director of Nations In Transit for Freedom House. He said his group has been speaking out about these issues for a long time in places like Russia, Central Asia and Belarus.

Schenkkan told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that increasingly, we see this now in Central Europe, in countries like Hungary and Poland. We see it starting to have an effect at the level of institutions. So, very dramatic changes, especially in Poland," he said.

The report said that 19 out of the 29 nations in the study received lower democracy ratings than last year, the sharpest drop in the projects 23-year history. It also found that for the second time in two years the number of consolidated authoritarian governments was higher than that of consolidated democracies.

The report said that Turkmenistan was the areas worst performer for what the report calls Eurasias entrenched autocracies. An autocracy is a system of government where one person has unlimited powers.

The report identified entrenched autocracies in five other countries. They are Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.

Russia moving towards authoritarianism

The report said that Russian President Vladimir Putin won reelection last month in a political campaign where he faced no real competition. It said his only real opponent, anticorruption activist Aleksei Navalny, was barred from being a candidate after he was found guilty of corruption charges. The report questions the believability of the ruling, however.

In addition, the report noted that Russia is facing economic decay. It said this has resulted from a lack of structural reforms, its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine, and international actions against Russia for taking control of the Crimean Peninsula.

Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Kyrgyzstan have the areas highest risk of moving into authoritarianism, the report said.

The window for fundamental reforms may not have closed in Ukraine, the report said. But it noted political resistance to anticorruption reforms, attacks on civil society, and the media. As a result, the report said Ukraines democracy rating was lower for the first time since 2014.

"It was a relatively small decline, but it was meaningful, Schenkkan said. He added that the main cause is the pressure leading Ukrainian politicians have put on civil society and independent media.

Largest declines

The report said the weakening of democracy was most striking in two Eastern European countries: Poland and Hungary. It noted the two were successful in separating from authoritative systems in the 1980s.

In 2017, the Polish government passed laws that give the ruling party-controlled parliament more influence in choosing Supreme Court members and other judges. In addition, Hungary passed laws in 2017 to limit the freedom of people to publicly critique the government.

Some positive performers

However, not all countries received poor ratings in the new report. It noted progress over the past year in Macedonia and Uzbekistan.

The report has found that since the death of President Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan has made small, but noticeable improvements in the freedoms of civil society and the media.

In addition, Macedonia formed a new government, Schenkkan told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). The new leadership has started on a plan to find peace with its neighbors Bulgaria and Greece. Macedonia hopes to eventually be a candidate for EU membership.

Freedom House is a U.S.-government-financed non-government organization. RFE/RL and VOA are each part of the U.S.-government-supported Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Im Phil Dierking.

Eugene Tomiuc reported this story Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Phil Dierking adapted the report for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

How do you feel your countrys democratic performance is? Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

decay - v. to slowly lose strength, health, etc.

decline - v. to become lower in amount or less in number

dramatic - adj. sudden and extreme

confront - v. to oppose or challenge especially in a direct and forceful way

consolidate - v. to join or combine together into one thing

authoritarian - adj. expecting or requiring people to obey rules or laws

entrenched - adj. to place (someone or something) in a very strong position that cannot easily be changed

fundamental - adj. forming or relating to the most important part of something

monitor - v. to watch, observe, listen to, or check (something) for a special purpose over a period of timePope Francis has admitted he made grave mistakes in dealing with reports of sexual abuse by clergy members in Chile.

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church discussed his concerns in a public letter.

He said he felt, in his words, pain and shame in an unusual letter released on Wednesday.

In the letter, he called Chiles church leaders to Vatican City for an emergency meeting to discuss the issue.

Francis also invited abuse victims he had once doubted to come to Rome to seek their forgiveness personally.

He said a lack of truthful and balanced information was the reason that he strongly defended Bishop Juan Barros.

Barros has been linked to a priest accused of abuse, Reverend Fernando Karadima.

During his visit to Chile in January, Francis voiced support for Barros. Victims had accused Barros of witnessing and ignoring their sexual abuse.

In Chile and on his return trip to Rome, Francis accused the victims of calumny, or making false statements in order to hurt someones image. He also said they should present proof of their claims. He said he had twice rejected Barross resignation.

I am convinced he is innocent, Francis said at the time.

One of the Vaticans most experienced sexual abuse investigators went to Chile to find out more. Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta later presented Francis with a 2,300-page report on the issue.

Francis wrote his letter after receiving the report. The letter does not discuss the future of Barros.

In a statement, three victims said they appreciated Franciss request for forgiveness. They said they were considering his invitation. They also said they would continue fighting for payment and forgiveness until zero tolerance about abuse and cover-up in the church becomes a reality.

Im Mario Ritter.

Smita Nordwall reported this story for VOA News. Mario Ritter adapted it for VOA Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

_________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

grave adj. very serious

convinced adj. to be completely certain of something

appreciate v. to be grateful for something

tolerance n. willing to accept somethingWhen Noah Ready-Campbell was a young adult, he worked for his fathers construction company.

Back then, he dreamed of a day when robots might take over the dirty, repetitive parts of his job, such as earthmoving and leveling.

Years later, Ready-Campbell left his job as an engineer with Google to make that dream come true.

Ready-Campbell formed a start-up called Built Robotics. The San Francisco, California-based company develops technology to produce self-driving heavy equipment. Ready-Campbell says the companys goal is to make construction safer, faster and less costly.

The construction industry has fallen behind others when it comes to the use of new technologies such as robotics. Built Robotics is part of a new wave of automation.

Investors are putting more and more money into start-ups that are developing robots, software and other technology for construction.

The industry struggles to find skilled workers and faces a growing number of unfinished projects. But self-operating machines are changing the nature of building.

Michael Chui is with the McKinsey Global Institute, a business research organization in San Francisco. Chui told the AP, We need all of the robots we can get, plus all of the workers working, in order to have economic growth.

He added, As machines do some of the work that people used to do, the people have to  transition to other forms of work, which means lots of retraining.

Workers at Berich Masonry in Englewood, Colorado, recently spent several weeks learning how to operate a robot called SAM, or the Semi-Automated Mason. SAM is a $400,000 machine from the company Construction Robotics, based in Victor, New York.

The machine can lay 3,000 bricks in eight-hours, a normal workday. That is several times more than a human bricklayer can do in the same period. But humans are still needed to load bricks into the SAM and make sure it works right.

Todd Berich is president of Berich Masonry. He wants the improved technology to permit the company to accept new projects.

Right now I have to tell them no because were at capacity, he said.

Bricklayer Michael Walsh says the SAM lessens the load on his body. But he does not think it will take his job.

Brian Kennedy agrees. He is the policy director for the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers. His organization supports the rights of construction workers in the United States and Canada. Kennedy says the union is not worried that machines will replace human workers any time soon.

There are lots of things that SAM isnt capable of doing that you need skilled bricklayers to do, said Kennedy. We support anything that supports the  industry. We dont stand in the way of technology.

The rise of construction robots comes as the building industry faces a severe decrease in labor supply.

One recent study showed that 70 percent of construction businesses have a difficult time finding skilled workers.

Mike Moy heads a mining operation for the building materials supplier Lehigh Hanson in Sunol, California. He says it is difficult to find people who even know how to operate some of the necessary equipment.

Nobody wants to get their hands dirty anymore. They want a nice, clean job in an office, he noted.

Moy saves time and money by using a drone to measure the huge amounts of rock and sand his company sells. The machine can measure the materials on the whole 36-hectare place in 25 minutes. The same job takes a human a full work day to do.

Im Pete Musto.

The Associated Press reported this story. Pete Musto adapted it for VOA Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor.

We want to hear from you. How do you think smart technology will change the construction industry? What other industries do you think will face similar changes? Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

construction  n. the business of building things such as houses or roads

start-up  n. a new business

automation  n. a system of operation that uses machines and computers instead of people to do the work

transition  v. to make a change from one state, place, or condition to another

brick(s)  n. a small, hard block of baked clay that is used to build structures such as houses and sometimes to make streets or paths

capacity  n. the largest amount that a factory or company can produce or manage

capable  adj. able to do something

drone  n. a type of small aircraft that flies without a pilot

Would you take a trip if you could not use your cellphone during it? Not even as a camera?

A new travel company is asking customers to do just that. The company is called Off the Grid. Zach Beattie is its founder.

When youre somewhere new, theres a lot to soak up, a lot to see, a lot of cool, interesting people to meet, Beattie said. Your phone can distract you.

Beattie says Off the Grid trips are meant to be fully unplugged and very social.

The companys first trip is to Lisbon, Portugal, in July. It is also planning trips to the Croatian coast; Barcelona, Spain; Lima, Peru; and Tulum, Mexico.

The seven to 10 day tours are for small groups, no more than 16 people. Trip prices begin at $1,500. The cost includes stays in hostels, some meals and ground transportation. It does not include airfare.

Trip schedules include at least three activities and two social events. Off the Grid favors special experiences over more traditional sightseeing. The Lisbon trip, for example, includes surfing lessons, exercise by the sea, a day of boating and dinner with a local family.

Beattie says he does not want the travelers to be too busy going from one place to another. He says the goal is mindful travel instead of, in his words, cramming every single site into your trip.

The cellphone ban will not be forced upon the travelers. We want it to be volunteer," Beattie said. "Were not collecting phones..."

Travelers will be able to use a simple cell phone that does not connect to internet. It will be loaded with useful local phone numbers.

Off the Grid travelers are permitted to bring usual cameras to take photographs. But the company also employs a photographer to take lots of pictures during the tour.

Once the trip is over, travelers can post the images on social media.

I think its interesting and challenging to say, Can I enjoy this moment without a camera? Can I soak up this memory and have it be part of me without instantly sharing with someone else in order for the moment to be real?

So far, people who have registered for Off the Grid tours include young people just out of high school as well as people in their 60s. Most of them, though, are professionals between the ages of 24 to 35, Beattie says.

Beattie started the business using money he saved from a technology job at a mapping company. He employs guides to lead each trip. But he will help lead the first few tours himself.

Kensey Neely is 30 years old and from St. Joseph, Missouri. She is set to go on the Lisbon trip. She says she had been trying to find a way to step out of my comfort zone.

Neely says giving up her phone may be hard, but she says Im hoping once I do it during the trip, I wont be as tied to it when I get back.

She plans to take a camera with her to Portugal. But she hopes she does not use it very often. I want to enjoy the experience and not take pictures of every little thing," Neely said.

Im Ashley Thompson.

The Associated Press reported this story. Ashley Thompson adapted it for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

soak up - phrasal verb. to enjoy feeling or experiencing (something pleasant) in usually a slow or relaxed way

distract - v. to cause (someone) to stop thinking about or paying attention to someone or something and to think about or pay attention to someone or something else instead

unplug - v. to disconnect (something, such as a lamp or television) from an electrical source or another device by removing its plug

hostel - n. an inexpensive place for usually young travelers to stay 

surf - v. to ride on ocean waves using a special board (called a surfboard)

cram - v. to fill (something) so that there is no room for anything else : to fill (something) completely

challenging - adj. difficult in a way that is usually interesting or enjoyable

instantly - adv. without delayEnQuest PLC operates as an oil and gas development and production company, explores for, extracts, and produces hydrocarbons in the United Kingdom, North Sea, and Malaysia. It primarily holds interests in the Magnus, Kraken, the Greater Kittiwake Area, Scolty/Crathes, Alba, Thistle/Deveron, Heather/Broom, Alma/Galia, and the Dons area. The company also has interests in the PM8/Seligi and PM409 production sharing contracts in Malaysia. In addition, it holds interests in 10 operated production licenses and 3 production hubs. As of December 31, 2020, the company had proved and probable reserves of 279 million barrels of oil equivalents. Further, it is involved in the construction, ownership, and operation of an oil pipeline; marketing and trading of crude oil; and leasing activities. EnQuest PLC was incorporated in 2010 and is based in London, the United Kingdom.

Read More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Altiplano Metals Inc., a junior resource company, focuses on evaluating and acquiring exploration projects. The company explores for copper and gold deposits. Its flagship property is the Farellon project located near the town of La Serena, Chile. The company also owns interest in the Maria Luisa project located near the town of La Serena, Chile. The company was formerly known as Altiplano Minerals Ltd. Altiplano Metals Inc. was incorporated in 2010 and is headquartered in Edmonton, Canada.

Read MoreEnergy Transfer Partners, L.P. engages in the natural gas midstream, and intrastate transportation and storage businesses in the United States. The company's Intrastate Transportation and Storage segment transports natural gas from various natural gas producing areas through connections with other pipeline systems, as well as through its ET Fuel System and HPL System. This segment owns and operates approximately 7,900 miles of natural gas transportation pipelines and three natural gas storage facilities in Texas. Its Interstate Transportation and Storage segment provides natural gas transportation and storage services; owns and operates approximately 11,800 miles of interstate natural gas pipelines; and has interests in various natural gas pipelines. The company's Midstream segment gathers, compresses, treats, blends, processes, and markets natural gas. It owns and operates natural gas and natural gas liquids (NGL) gathering pipelines, natural gas processing plants, natural gas treating facilities, and natural gas conditioning facilities. The company's NGL and Refined Products Transportation and Services segment transports mixed NGLs and other hydrocarbons; stores mixed NGLs, NGL products, and petrochemical products; and separates mixed NGL streams into purity products. This segment owns and operates various NGL pipelines, NGL and propane fractionation facilities, and NGL storage facilities. Its Crude Oil Transportation and Services segment engages in the transportation, terminalling, and acquisition and marketing of crude oil; and operates crude oil trunk and gathering pipelines. The company's All Other segment engages in the natural gas compression equipment business; provides natural gas compression equipment and compression services; manages coal and natural resources property, sells standing timber, and leases coal-related infrastructure facilities; and generates electrical power. Energy Transfer Partners, L.P. was founded in 1995 and is based in Dallas, Texas.

Read More2 hours ago

Jabil Inc. Q4 Results: More Than Meets The Eye

Jabil Descends Into A Buying Opportunity Jabil Inc. (NYSE: JBL) reported a mixed bag of results and outlook for the Q4 and Q1 period sending shares down 10% from their recent high. As mixed as the news is, it is the guidance that really counts and the guidance is positive.

Read Articlethyssenkrupp AG operates in the areas of automotive technology, industrial components, plant technology, marine systems, steel, and materials services in Germany, the United States, China, and internationally. The company's Automotive Technology segment develops and manufactures components and systems and automated production systems for the automotive industry. Its Industrial Components segment manufactures and sells forged components and system solutions for the resource, construction, and mobility sectors; and slewing rings, antifriction bearings, and seamless rolled rings for the wind energy and construction machinery sectors. The company's Plant Technology segment builds plants for the chemical, cement, and mining industries. Its Marine Systems segment provides systems in the submarine and surface ship building, as well as in the field of maritime electronics and security technology. The company's Materials Services segment distributes materials and offers technical services for the production and manufacturing sectors. Its Steel Europe segment provides flat carbon steel products, intelligent material solutions, and finished parts. thyssenkrupp AG was founded in 1811 and is headquartered in Essen, Germany.

Read MoreA military plane carrying soldiers and their families crashed soon after takeoff in a farm field in northern Algeria yesterday, killing 257 people in what appeared to be the worst plane crash in the North African nations history.

Algerias Defense Ministry said that those killed included 247 passengers and 10 crew members.

The cause of the crash was unclear, and an investigation has been opened, the ministry said.

The ministry said that most of the victims were soldiers and their relatives and that the victims bodies were transported to the Algerian armys central hospital in the town of Ain Naadja for identification.

Local media reported that the plane crashed just after taking off. Emergency services converged on the area near the Boufarik military base after the crash. Footage from the scene showed thick black smoke coming off the field, as well as ambulances and Red Crescent vehicles arriving at the site.

It was the first crash of an Algerian military plane since February 2014, when a U.S.-built C-130 Hercules turboprop slammed into a mountain, killing at least 76 people and leaving just one survivor.

In 2003, 10 people died when an Algerian Air Force C-130 crashed after an engine caught fire shortly after it took off from the air base near Boufarik, according to the Aviation Safety Networks database.

The previous deadliest crash on Algerian soil occurred in 2003, when 102 people were killed after a civilian airliner crashed at the end of the runway in Tamanrasset. There was a single survivor in that crash.

The flight had just taken off from Boufarik, about 30 kilometers southwest of the capital Algiers, for a military base in Bechar in southwest Algeria, according to Farouk Achour, chief spokesman for the civil protection services. It was scheduled to make a layover in Tindouf in southern Algeria, home to many refugees from the neighboring Western Sahara, a disputed territory annexed by Morocco.

The Soviet-designed Il-76 military transport plane crashed in an agricultural zone with no residents, Achour said.

The Il-76 model has been in production since 1970s and has an overall good safety record. It is widely used for both commercial freight and military transport. The Algerian military operates several of the planes. APThe brewing China-U.S. trade conflict features two leaders whove expressed friendship but are equally determined to pursue their nations interests and their own political agendas.

But while President Donald Trump faces continuing churn in his administration and a tough challenge in midterm congressional elections, Chinas Xi Jinping leads an outwardly stable authoritarian regime. Xi recently succeeded in pushing through a constitutional reform allowing him to rule for as long as he wishes while facing no serious electoral challenge.

A look at some of the issues that could determine the outcome of the trade spat:

FRIENDLY TALK

Although Trump sounded tough on the campaign trail and has challenged Beijing over trade and Taiwan, he professes admiration for his Chinese counterpart and complimented him on his ability to remove term limits on his presidential rule.

President Xi and I will always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade, Trump said in a tweet Sunday. Chinas great and Xi is a great gentleman, he said in remarks at a Republican fundraiser last month obtained by CNN.

Xi has generally limited his comments to emphasizing the benefits of a close China- U.S. relationship and thanking Trump in a phone call on March 10 for congratulating him on his obtaining a second term as president. A pair of summits between the leaders in the U.S. and China over the past year were also hailed by China as successes.

FAMILY

BACKGROUNDS

Both Trump and Xi come from privileged backgrounds, although their routes to political power were decidedly different. Both, however, have built their reputations on a robust form of nationalism, with Trump promoting America First and Xi identifying himself with the Chinese Dream of rising prosperity accompanied by muscular defense and foreign policies.

Trump was born the son of a New York City real estate mogul and rose to the presidency on a populist wave after a career as a property developer and reality TV star. Xis father was a colleague of Mao Zedong, whose influence is believed to have aided his rise through a series of military, government and Communist Party positions before he was named party leader in 2012.

Both also show an affection for strong-man leadership, and while American democracy is far removed from Chinas one-party authoritarian system, Trumps verbal attacks on the mainstream media and certain judges have drawn criticism. They both also place a strong emphasis on the military, including increased defense budgets and an appreciation for military parades, two of which Xi has led during his time in office.

DRIVING FORCES

Xis plan to create Chinese global competitors in fields including robotics, electric cars and pharmaceuticals is seen as precipitating the current crisis, while Trump appears motivated by a desire to shore up Americas manufacturing strength.

Neither wants to be seen as backing down, and though Xis usually soft-spoken manner contrasts Trumps trademark bravado, both are thin-skinned bullies who place a lot of value on portraying strength, said Liz Economy, a leading academic on China and author of The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State.

This makes it difficult to ramp down in this one-

on-one tariff death match, although both have the capacity via Twitter or state media to trumpet their success and ignore any failings once the dispute has concluded, Economy said.

LETS MAKE A DEAL

While the current dispute has focused on trade, many other factors are in play, bringing out the bargaining qualities and transactional natures of the two leaders and their administrations. Opinions on who has the upper hand differ widely.

By pursuing the tariff threat and backing complaints about intellectual property theft, Trump has successfully changed the fundamentals of [] U.S.-China relations, said Miles Yu Maochun, a China politics expert at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Yu also points to recent U.S. policy on North Korea, particularly Trumps acceptance of an invitation to talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as early as next month that appeared to catch Beijing off guard.

Shortly afterward, Kim paid an unexpected debut visit to China as leader in what some saw as an attempt by Beijing to reassert its centrality in resolving tensions over the Norths nuclear weapons and missile programs.

CHINAS CARDS

Yet, as North Koreas most important trade partner and political ally, China wields considerable influence and its willingness to enforce United Nations sanctions has built up its credibility as a reliable international partner.

China also stands to bring additional pressure on Taiwan, the self- governing island democracy it claims, and which is closely linked to Washington despite technically unofficial ties.

While it responded mildly to Trumps early outreach to the islands independence-leaning government, recent moves such as the appointment of hawkish new National Security Adviser John Bolton, the passage of a U.S. law encouraging more intergovernmental exchanges and an agreement to pass Taiwan submarine manufacturing technology are hardening views among anti-American nationalists in China.

Beijings Taiwan Affairs Office yesterday warned against additional moves to strengthen relations with Taiwan, amid reports that Bolton could visit the island this year.

Any attempt to play the Taiwan card would only be futile, spokesman Ma Xiaoguang said at a bi-weekly news conference. China, Ma said, would not hesitate to protect our core interests.

CHALLENGES

AT HOME

While Yu cites domestic support for Trumps trade approach to China, Xi can likely command even stronger backing at home for a muscular approach toward what Beijing portrays as a conflict resulting from U.S. unilateralism and hegemony.

Xi also faces no electoral challenge such as the one Trumps Republican party will confront in midterm congressional elections later this year, when Trumps handling of the U.S. economy and a host of other issues will be in the mix. Mindful of voters, especially in the agricultural and industrial sectors, Xi appears set to use such leverage for maximum gain.

Xi will follow a tough but well directed path designed to hurt specific interests that will complain loudly, said Joseph Fewsmith, a Boston University expert on Chinese foreign policy.

While Xi is broadly considered the most powerful leader since Mao, China only appears to be united and confident in its approach, said Economy, the academic, adding that the outside world has limited insight into policy debates within China. Christopher Bodeen, Beijing, APThe president of Anima (Macau) says that the animal welfare organization may have to shut down because the government contribution is not enough to balance the budget.

Albano Martins, who co-founded the animal welfare association back in 2003, says that the current allowance from the government is not enough to provide for the 700 cats and dogs in its care. He says that the association may have just six weeks to secure more funding.

Speaking to the Times yesterday, Martins said that Anima faces annual expenses amounting to about MOP10.5 million but receives just MOP3.8 million from the local government via the Macao Foundation. He said it is impossible to balance that budget.

The Macao Foundation does not allow a surplus at the end of the year. If we have a surplus, we have to return that to the Macao Foundation. But when there is a deficit, the funding from the following year cannot be used to clear the [previous years] liabilities.

I want the government to be aware, Martins said,  that it is impossible to finance [our activities] with only MOP3.8 million. We need more than that.

Since the government recognizes Anima as a public utility company, it should do more to support the associations activities, he added. We are doing a public service that should be done by the government.

Anima has historically sought sponsorship from benefactors in the casino sector. Among them is Wynn Resorts  the associations second-largest contributor after the Macao Foundation  whose philanthropy came about on the back of Steve Wynns personal interest in animal rights.

But since Steve Wynn stepped down from his role as company chairman, Anima has been scrambling to speak to Wynn Resorts new top dog, Matt Maddox, in the hope that the firm can continue to support local animal welfare.

Another problem for Anima is the question of the Canidrome greyhounds. Though Anima has requested the local government pressure the Canidrome into surrendering its greyhounds, the association is still none the clearer on what will happen to the racetracks animals once the facility closes in July.

Martins said that not knowing whether the association is to take charge of the animals is also making it difficult to secure adequate funding.

Unless a new financial package can be quickly negotiated, the association president says he will take the possibility of Animas closure to association members as soon as next month.

What will happen to the hundreds of animals in the associations care, and the thousands more treated across Macau, remains to be seen.

Though Martins does not believe that the government is legally obliged to step in, he said that it was likely that the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau would assume responsibility in the event of Animas closure.

That would likely cost the government more than Animas MOP10.5 million per year, he argued, and  in any case  Anima is asking for just half of that.Prabowo Subianto, a former Indonesian general with a checkered human rights record (pictured), announced that hell run for president in an election due next year, confirming an establishment challenger to current President Joko Jokowi Widodo. The nationalist politician made the announcement at his expansive residence in Bogor in West Java. It will be his second attempt at the presidency of the worlds largest Muslim-majority nation after being defeated by Jokowi, a maverick candidate, in 2014. Subianto heads the opposition Great Indonesia Movement Party, known by its Indonesian acronym Gerindra, and is likely to win support from Islamic parties. Jokowi was the first Indonesian from outside the countrys political and military elite to win the presidency. The 2014 campaign was marred by dirty campaigning and wild internet rumors that Jokowi was a secret communist, an accusation often used in Indonesia to discredit or intimidate political opponents. Gerindras secretary-general, Ahmad Muzani, said a meeting of more than 3,500 party officials and cadres had officially given a mandate to Subianto to run for the presidency in 2019.

Bangladesh: Myanmar official meets Rohingya refugees

A Myanmar Cabinet minister has visited a sprawling refugee camp in Bangladesh for Rohingya Muslims, who told him of the violence that forced them to flee Myanmar and presented a list of demands for their repatriation. A Rohingya leader, Abdur Rahim, said at least eight women rape victims were among about 40 refugees who met yesterday with Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye at the Kutupalong camp in Coxs Bazar (pictured). Rahim said they presented 13 demands for the government to meet for their return to Myanmar. Bangladesh refugee commissioner Abul Kalam said the minister listened to the refugees and replied to their questions. About 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled army-led violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar since last August. The two countries have agreed to begin repatriations.

Cambodia: Govt deports 89 suspects in online scam to China

Cambodia has deported nearly 100 Chinese citizens accused of defrauding people in China in an internet scam. A senior Interior Ministry official, Gen. Ouk Haiseila, said yesterday the 89 suspects, including 15 women, were flown out of the Cambodian capital on two planes sent by the Chinese government. He said members of the group contacted women in China over social media and tricked them into sending nude or erotic photos, then extorted money by threatening to spread the images online. Ouk Haiseila said their deportation Tuesday came after their arrest last month. Online scams by Chinese gangs that operate from foreign countries and target mainland Chinese are common throughout Southeast Asia. Since 2012, Cambodia has sent at least 1,000 Chinese and Taiwanese residents involved in such schemes to China.A set of measures to promote business tourism in Angola is being introduced, facilitating access to the country and domestic transport, as part of government efforts to stimulate the economy, according to the latest report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

In the document, the EIU highlights the project to create a new airline for domestic flights, Angola Expresso, under a public-private partnership between state airline TAAG and a private company and/or civil aviation companies yet to be selected.

New services and lower costs can boost domestic tourism and business travel, which should have a positive impact on stronger economic growth, said the EIU, adding that the size of this stimulus was unlikely to be enough to ensure a substantial change in their growth forecasts.

The transport minister, Augusto da Silva Tomas, will direct the commission responsible for setting up the company, which will be run by private interests, starting in 2019.

TAAG has experienced operational difficulties due to economic and financial constraints facing the country since 2014, which were exacerbated by the devaluation of the currency in 2018.

Faced with strong criticism from consumers over high domestic prices, the company announced in early February that it would reduce domestic tariffs by 10-20 percent and adopt a variable pricing model.

Foreign airlines have also been experiencing difficulties due to Angolas retention by of revenues valued by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) at USD500 million, including TAP  Air Portugal, South African Airways and Emirates.

The Africa Monitor Intelligence newsletter recently wrote that a consortium of some of Angolas private aviation companies is assessed by industry sources as the move most probable to end in the creation of Angola Expresso.

Among the companies in the best position to be part of this consortium are Airjet, Aerojet  Transporte Aereo, Heliang  Transporte Aereo and Air Guicango, which have Embraer 135, Beechcraft B200, Citation and Embraer 120 aircraft.

While working on a solution for domestic flights, the Angolan government has been moving forward with the introduction of visa facilitation measures and, since the end of last week, citizens from 61 countries, including the European Union (EU), who wish to travel to Angola, may apply for a tourist visa upon arrival in Luanda, and must present only proof of accommodation and means of subsistence. MDT/Macauhub

Public tender to build airport in Mbanza Congo

The public tender for the construction of the new Mbanza Congo airport will be launched within two months, said the chairman of the Board of Directors of Angolas airport management company, Empresa Nacional de Exploracao de Aeroportos e Navegacao Aerea (ENANA).

Manuel Ceita also told daily newspaper Jornal de Angola that the construction of the new airport in an inhospitable area will allow for the development of the region with the construction of houses and businesses to provide services to residents.

The future airport of Mbanza Congo will be located in Nkiende II, 35 kilometres from Mbanza Congo, the capital of the province of Zaire. When it is in operation, it will be able to receive Boeing 737 and Ilyushin Il-76 aircraft and have a terminal with capacity for 600 passengers.Business projects involving China and Portuguese-speaking countries have been receiving official Chinese funding, but the deepening of this cooperation in the era of the New Silk Road requires innovative financial mechanisms, the president of the Fund for Cooperation and Development between China and the Portuguese-speaking Countries said in Lisbon.

Chi Jianxin, who travelled to Lisbon for a conference of the Friends of the New Silk Road Association on March 23, said this instrument with an initial allocation of USD1 billion, jointly funded by the China Development Bank and the Macau Industrial Development and Trade Fund and managed by the China-Africa Development Fund, is actively involved in supporting projects in all Portuguese-speaking countries.

The Belt and Road initiative is highly compatible with the development plans of many Portuguese-

speaking countries and has a strong complementarity in terms of capital, technology, resources, markets, etc., stimulating new opportunities for commercial, economic and investment cooperation expansion between China and Portuguese- speaking countries, Chi said.

The head of the fund also said that trade and investment cooperation between China and other Portuguese-speaking countries and regions is also increasing, with China becoming one of the most important trading partners and the fastest growing export market for those countries, with the trade balance exceeding $100 billion in 2017, for the first time.

There are currently around 1,000 companies with capital from Portuguese-speaking countries in China, while Chinese companies have more than $50 billion in investments in Portuguese- speaking countries.

Chi Jianxin also referred to what he called the asymmetry of information and ideas between companies and financial institutions, as well as the lack of access to finance for small and medium-sized enterprises, which make up the majority of the business community in countries such as Portugal.

We still have good projects and good investment opportunities for companies, but we cannot find adequate financial support. At the same time, financial institutions have funds, but they cannot find suitable projects, he said.

In order to solve these problems, it is necessary to improve the innovation capacity of financial institutions (including insurance agencies and consultancy services), which requires financial institutions to create new financing models to better understand the needs of companies.

At the Lisbon conference, Wu Shiwei, vice president of the China Development Bank (Shaanxi branch), also said that the financial institution, actively supports cooperation between Chinese and Portuguese companies under the Belt and Road.

Among the suggestions he made was an improvement of the mechanism of public-private cooperation.

At the conference, Portuguese Foreign Minister, Augusto Santos Silva, said he would go to China in October or November and that the Chinese Foreign Minister will visit Portugal in May.

The mutual visits later this year are yet another step in the growing relationship between the two countries, whose relations, according to the Chinese ambassador to Portugal, Cai Run, are experiencing, the best moment in history. MDT/MacauhubThe founder of a Chicago-area evangelical church that grew to become one of the largest in the nation is stepping down, calling allegations that he touched and made lewd comments to female congregants a distraction.

The Rev. Bill Hybels, 66, announced his immediate retirement at a meeting yesterday (Macau time) with members of the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. He has said since 2012 that he planned to retire this October.

The Chicago Tribune last month reported details of the misconduct allegations against Hybels stretching back to the 1990s. A church inquiry cleared Hybels. He has said he has been accused of things he simply did not do and that the allegations are flat-out lies.

Hybels told congregants Tuesday that the allegations have become a distraction from the churchs mission and work. He apologized for making choices that put him in situations that could be misconstrued, and for reacting in anger when the accusations were made public.

I realize now that in certain settings and circumstances in the past, I communicated things that were perceived in ways I did not intend, at times making people feel uncomfortable, he said.

He said the decision to step down now was mine and mine alone after a lot of prayer.

Heather Larson, executive pastor, will take over as the churchs chief executive.

This is going to take time for all of us to process, Larson said. This is not the end of the story. Its not the end of Bills story. Its not the end of Willows story, and its certainly not the end of Gods story.

The church that Hybels started in Palatine, Illinois, in 1975, now has eight Chicago-area locations. Leaders say it draws 25,000 people each week. APDeaths from drinking toxic bootleg alcohol in Indonesia have surpassed 100 this month, police said yesterday as they vowed a scorched earth crackdown on the makers and distributors of black- market liquor.

Deputy National Police Chief Muhammad Syafruddin said deaths have been concentrated in populous West Java and Jakarta, the capital, but there were also cases in South Kalimantan and other regions that brought fatalities to more than 100.

Indonesian TV has broadcast images of distraught relatives in several cities and lines of gurneys bearing dead bodies in hospital hallways as the death toll relentlessly climbed since late last week. There were 31 deaths in Jakarta and satellite cities at the beginning of the month followed by a dramatic surge in deaths in West Java and hospitalizations of dozens of people suffering nausea, blurry vision and loss of consciousness.

This is a crazy phenomenon, said Syafruddin, standing in front of seven handcuffed suspects at a news conference. If we let it continue, it will harm the nation.

I have ordered all the police chiefs in Indonesia to make these cases stop, zero victims, meaning to reveal the roots ranging from the producers, distributors, sellers to those who have the idea of mixing alcohol with fatal chemicals, Syafruddin said.

Police displayed huge quantities of confiscated alcohol at the news conference, some of it in the small clear plastic bags its sold in for about 25,000 rupiah (USD1.80) as well as professionally labeled bottles purporting to be whiskey or wine.

Syafruddin said production of illegal alcohol must be eradicated completely with a scorched earth campaign and called for the cooperation of the Cabinet and government agencies.

Its unclear how effective the crackdown will be. Curbs on sales of legal alcohol in Muslim-majority Indonesia, including a ban implemented in 2015 on sales at tens of thousands of convenience stores, have created a significant black market for bootleg liquor among the countrys poor.

If what is needed is limited in the legal market because of [government] policies, then the need would be fulfilled by those who want to make a profit from the black market, said Sugianto Tandra, a researcher at the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies.

The current incidence of rampant bootleg alcohol is because there is a need to drink but the product is not available in the legal market, he said.

Potentially lethal methanol can be a byproduct of bootleg distilling and the tainted alcohol is also sometimes mixed with soft drinks. In the recent spate of deaths, police said pure alcohol was sometimes combined with ingredients such as cough mixture and insect repellant.

Syafruddin said laboratory testing of black-market alcohol sized by police in several raids in Jakarta showed it contained methanol.

Construction worker Andri Rizal, who was hospitalized near the West Java capital, Bandung, said he and three friends fell ill after drinking palm wine mixed with an intoxicating ginseng drink hed bought for $1, an unusually cheap price.

We purchased and mixed it with the palm wine just to make it feel better and slower to get drunk. Ginseng by itself is too hard, said the 28-year-old. It was not like usual when its instantly delicious. I felt limp and dizzy.

Deaths from toxic alcohol are common in Indonesia and foreigners are occasionally among the victims. Some governments warn travelers to the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok to be cautious about consuming local spirits and alcoholic beverages.

But the latest cluster of fatalities is extreme, leading to speculation that a single large distributor was responsible. But West Java police said they have found no evidence to support that.

The Kompas newspaper said there were 32 deaths last year from bootleg liquor. Niniek Karmini, Jakarta, APThe local government has trusted the MTR Corporation Limited (MTR), Hong Kongs subway system operator, to provide operation and maintenance assistance services to the Taipa Line of the Macau Light Rapid Transit (LRT) system for a period of 80 months, in order to cope with operations in 2019.

The scope of the services includes the testing and activation of systems prior to the start-up of the Taipa Line, the formation of operation teams and the development of pre-employment training.

MTR will also be responsible for the day-to-day operations of train services within the first five years, and the repair and maintenance of trains, signaling systems and infrastructures.

The price for the services as a whole is estimated at MOP5.88 billion.

At the same time, the government is preparing to establish a wholly-owned company which will run the Macau LRT operations. The aforementioned responsibilities will be handed over to the government company for follow-up management.

Taking into account MTRs extensive railway experience, it is expected that the company will conduct highly efficient operations on the Taipa Line, as well as provide residents and tourists with quality public transportation services.

MTR CEO Lincoln Leung Kwok-Kuen expressed that he is happy to participate in the operation of Macaus first railway project.

In Leungs opinion, MTR has many years of operational experience in Hong Kong and overseas railway projects.

Leung is confident that MTR will provide quality services to Macaus LRT passengers, and also that MTR will provide major contributions to the development of Macaus railway network.

The Macau LRT will run as trains of two or four cars, each car being able to carry about 100 passengers. If the train runs in groups of four cars, the total passenger capacity will be about 400 people.

In the initial phase of LRT whole-length operation, the line will transport 7,800 people per hour and can be expected to reach 14,100 on an annual basis.

The Secretary for Transport and Public Works, Raimundo Rosario, said: As next year we will start operating the LRT, we told the public we would set up a company. We awarded [chose] MTR, [] we can learn something [from MTR], after all, the LRT is a new thing to us.

The government announced it will open the company by 2019 at the latest. Regarding the reasons why the government awarded MTR a five-year contract, Rosario said we must have some time to learn something about the operations. [] We need some time to work with MTR.

The government will pay approximately MOP100 million per month to MTR.

I hope we all understand that despite LRT providing a 24-hour service, it does not mean it will be available 24 hours per day, because, at night, maintenance will be carried out. We have 11 stops and we have the depot, said Rosario. JZMacau will not operate a large number of electric buses in the near future, according to Director of the Transport Bureau (DSAT) Lam Hin San.

On the sidelines of a talk at the University of Macau, Lam told the media that currently authorities are testing some electric buses. However, it is not economical for us to run such buses to serve the people [at the current stage], he said, because I think the facility requests a high subsidy relative to that of the traditional buses. Second [is] the weight of the buses. Sometimes the battery can be tonnes extra as compared to traditional buses, added Lam.

We notice that in the market, there are many more new electric buses available, we want to test, and make sure they are good for Macau, because in Macau, its very difficult for us to make the charging stations, said Lam.

According to the Director, DSAT will try to launch some [new type of] electric buses by the end of this month or next month, to see the results.

Regarding whether Macau will introduce a large number of electric buses, Lam said at the moment, there is no plan yet, we want to make sure that the test of these buses is okay for us. Dont forget that we have also coordinated work with the casinos to test some new e-buses. I think they can also share their experiences with us.

He also remarked that the government will use more electric buses in the long run, yes, but not in the near future. [] At least, five to 10 years.

The problem is the charging stations, and that is very difficult to make charge stations, said Lam.North Koreas parliament was scheduled to convene yesterday amid a series of diplomatic moves by leader Kim Jong Un that could have a major impact on the direction the country takes in the months and possibly years ahead.

Meetings of the full Supreme Peoples Assembly are usually brief, once-a-year affairs intended to approve budgets, formalize personnel changes and rubber-stamp Kims policy priorities.

But this years session was being watched more closely because it was to begin just two weeks before Kim is to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and as Pyongyang and Washington are working out the details of a summit between Kim and President Donald Trump in late May or early June.

Kim just completed his first summit, with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. His foreign minister is currently in Moscow, reportedly exploring the possibility of a summit with President Vladimir Putin.

Kims seemingly sudden switch from launching missiles at a record pace last year to exploring dialogue has generally been welcomed. But questions remain over how willing Kim might be to make serious compromises on his nuclear weapons program in return for security guarantees and the lifting of economic sanctions that are taking a big bite out of his countrys economy.

Pyongyang has been careful not to reveal its hand.

The first significant news of the overtures in its official media came this week, when they reported that Kim laid out his plans for dialogue with South Korea and the United States at a pre-assembly gathering of top ruling party officials on Monday. But even those reports were cautious: Trump wasnt mentioned by name and Kim was said to have talked about the prospect of dialogue with Washington.

It was not immediately clear what was on the agenda for the assembly or how much of it would be made public.

State media, which only announced the date of the assembly session last month, do not generally report about the meetings until they are over. Foreign media in Pyongyang  including The Associated Press  were not allowed to cover the session independently.

North Koreas supreme assembly is a far cry from the Western democratic idea of what a parliament should be.

The assembly, which has had 686 members since the most recent elections in 2014, generally holds one and sometimes two sessions each year.

Its headed by Kim Yong Nam, the Norths 90-year-old senior statesman who accompanied Kims sister to South Korea in February to attend the opening of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. He has been the head of the assembly since 1998, and although he seems to be in good health, speculation that he may retire has been circulating for years.

The assembly is technically the highest organ of state power under the Norths constitution. In practice, it serves more to formalize whatever decisions and policies that are put before it. But it is an important means of keeping the deputies updated and informed of national priorities so that they can in turn pass that information on to their districts.

When the assembly is in session, it is common to see long caravans of buses filled with deputies being taken around the capital for tours of museums and visits to historical sites  probably a rare experience for some of the representatives of the more remote or rural areas.

State media reported Tuesday that this years deputies toured a revolutionary history museum, a cemetery for revolutionary martyrs and a teachers university. Eric Talmadge, Tokyo, AP

Russias foreign minister to visit North Korea

Russias Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said he has accepted any invitation to visit North Korea. Lavrov said in televised comments after talks with his counterpart from North Korea, Ri Yong-ho, that he has agreed to visit Pyongyang. Lavrov said, however, that there was no word on a possible meeting between President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Lavrov said that Russia welcomes Kims plan to meet with the South Korean president and U.S. President Donald Trump as a step toward resolving the tensions around North Koreas nuclear program. Kim visited Beijing last month to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping  the first time Kim has left the North since assuming power in 2011. It was also his first meeting with another head of state.Defying Russian warnings against U.S. military strikes in Syria, President Donald Trump said yesterday that missiles will be coming in response to Syrias suspected chemical attack that killed at least 40 people.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria, Trump tweeted. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Trump did not detail what a strike would look like, or whether these would be U.S. missiles. The tweet came as Trump administration officials have consulted with global allies on a possible joint military response to Syrias alleged poison gas attack. Trump canceled a foreign trip in order to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The tweet drew a quick response from Russias Foreign Ministry. Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Facebook that smart missiles would destroy any evidence of a suspected chemical weapons attack.

The term smart missile dates to the introduction decades ago of weapons with advanced guidance systems  for example, using GPS  to achieve greater precision in targeting. The term was meant to contrast with dumb bombs lacking such technology. Virtually all U.S. missiles now have advanced guidance systems.

Russian lawmakers earlier warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime, saying it could trigger a direct military clash between the two former Cold War adversaries. Russias ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted  a stark warning of a potential major confrontation in Syria.

Trumps tweets yesterday also delivered a mixed message, not unusual for the mercurial president.

Shortly after warning that missiles were coming, Trump tweeted that the U.S. relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War. Then, striking a more conciliatory tone, he said: There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?

Trumps administration has sought to show they are being tough on Russia, with a series of economic and diplomatic actions, including new sanctions last week against government officials and oligarchs. But Trump has also largely avoided criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, though he singled him out in a tweet over the weekend for supporting Bashar Assad.

In the past Trump, has condemned forecasting military plans. During a speech on foreign policy in 2016, he said: we must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything. Were sending troops. We tell them. Were sending something else. We have a news conference. We have to be unpredictable.

The U.S., France and Britain were in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, U.S. officials have said. None of the three countries leaders had made a firm decision, according to the officials, who were not authorized to discuss military planning publicly.

A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the U.S. in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syrias political and military support from Russia and Iran.

President Emmanuel Macron said France, the U.S. and Britain will decide how to respond in the coming days. He called for a strong and joint response to the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday, which Syrian activists and rescuers say killed 40 people. The Syrian government denies responsibility.

The French president does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the U.S.-led coalition created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Multiple IS attacks have targeted French soil, including one last month.

Trump suggested Monday he had little doubt that Syrian government forces were to blame for what he said was a chemical attack, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. Officials suggested such evidence was lacking, or at least not yet at hand. This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which U.S. intelligence agencies had video and other evidence of certain aspects of the actual attack, which involved the use of Sarin gas. Trump responded by launching Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

One official said the U.S., France and Britain were considering military options that would be more extensive than the punitive, one-day strike last April. That strike did not appear to have had the desired effect of deterring Assad from further use of chemical agents. So the three countries are discussing a range of options, including preventing Assad from conducting future attacks by striking military capabilities involved in carrying out such attack, the official said.

Asked whether France would take military action, Macron said his country will continue discussing technical and strategic information with U.S. and British allies and in the coming days we will announce our decision. He said any action would target chemical weapons stocks. Under a 2013 agreement for which Russia was a guarantor, Syria was to have eliminated all its chemical weapons, but it has used chlorine and perhaps other chemicals since then.

Trump spoke by phone with British Prime Minister Theresa May. A British government statement said the two agreed the attack in Syria was utterly reprehensible and that the international community must respond to uphold the worldwide prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. Trump met at the White House with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who told reporters that he and Trump see eye to eye on the Syria problem.

We cannot tolerate with a war criminal, the emir said, adding, This matter should end immediately. Qatar hosts the United States main air operations center for the Middle East, which would coordinate any American air attack in Syria.

A watchdog agency, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, announced that it will send shortly a fact-finding mission to Douma, after receiving a request from the Syrian government and its Russian backers to investigate the allegations. It was not immediately clear whether that visit would delay or avert U.S. or allied military action.

The Russian military, which has troops in Syria, said on Monday that its officers had visited the site of the alleged attack and found no evidence to back up reports of poison gas being used. Robert Burns, Josh Lederman & Catherine Lucey, Washington, APIn a televised interview this week, President Tsai said Taiwan is not a pawn, but rather a chess player, official Taiwan News reported.

Asked by TV journalists if Taiwan is like a pawn, Tsai said that she had been asked this question by a large group of young foreign people before.

Dont underestimate Taiwan. A population of 23 million is not a small number, it is not a small country. Taiwan has economic strength and even to a certain extent Taiwan has military strength. In fact, Taiwan itself has considerable strength. She then concluded by saying that, Many people say that we are a pawn of others, you should not forget that we ourselves are a chess player.

One of the hosts of the show then said, Therefore Trump is our pawn and were in between the two big ones.

In response to the hosts comment Tsai said, Im just going with the flow.

Yesterday, President Tsai named a key ally to head her office and lead communications efforts aimed at shoring up her wilting approval ratings in the run-up to local elections this year, Reuters reported.

The appointment comes a day after Chinese President Xi Jinping urged Taiwans business community to shun any idea of independence for the self-ruled island and promote peace and stable ties with the mainland.

Chen Chu, now the mayor of Taiwans southern city of Kaohsiung, takes charge on April 23, as dissatisfaction with some economic policies has pushed Tsais approval rating to its second lowest level since she took office in 2016.

We very much look forward to the important role of Sister Chu, Tsai told a news conference.

During the process of pushing reforms, to have sufficient communications and dialogues between the government and society is very important, she said as cited by the news agency.

Taiwans mayoral and magisterial elections are set for Nov 24 this year. Chen, the manager of Tsais successful 2016 election campaign, is a colourful figure of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) who has visited China twice, in 2009 and 2013.

As a former political prisoner at the forefront of Taiwans struggle for democracy, Chen has not shied from irritating Beijing, but has repeatedly called for better communication with China.

At the press conference, when asked about relations with China, Tsai said communication applied to anybody to balance interests and conflicts, but did not elaborate, Reuters said.

Beijing claims Taiwan as its sacred territory, part of one China, and has never renounced the use of force to bring under Chinese control what it considers to be a wayward province.

Chen, who fills a position left vacant after Joseph Wu became foreign minister in February, met Susan Thornton, the U.S. State Departments senior diplomat for East Asia, during a trip to Washington last month.

According to the Reuters dispatch, she has also urged greater international support for Taiwan and welcomed the opportunity for high-level visits between the island and the United States. MDT/AgenciesFormer Meteorological and Geophysical Bureau (SMG) director Fong Soi Kun and former deputy director Florence Leong have been held accountable for failing to exercise their managerial responsibilities during Typhoon Hato, according to the results of the special investigation commissioned by the Chief Executive, Chui Sai On, announced yesterday.

Fongs punishment was retrospective dismissal from office. Since he has retired from public service, the applicable penalty will be substituted by a four-year suspension of pension payments.

Late last month, it was announced that Fong would receive a pension of approximately MOP80,000 per month. According to a notice posted in the Official Gazette at the time, the government had approved the pension granting an amount reflecting Fongs 35 years of serving in the SMG.

Leong was also found guilty of neglecting her duties and convicted to a 130-day suspension from current duties. Leong had already resigned from the SMGs deputy director post (after being briefly appointed director, before Raymond Tam took office) and is now a staff member of the Bureau.

According to a statement issued yesterday by the Government Information Bureau, no further disciplinary action against the two persons will be conducted under relevant regulations and laws. The reason for this is that their acts of misconduct associated with the period of Typhoon Hato had [have] already been reviewed in the special investigation, the statement reads.

Chui authorized a special committee in September 2017 to investigate whether public departments and civil servants had acted appropriately during preparation for Typhoon Hato and investigate the relief work done in its aftermath.

Typhoon Hato battered Macau on August 23, causing 10 deaths and resulting in heavy economic losses.

Secretary: Fong had no connection to Hato deaths

RAIMUNDO DO Rosario has declared that he does not find a connection between the victims of typhoon Hato and the responsibilities of the former director of the Meteorological and Geophysical Bureau (SMG), Fong Soi Kun. During a talk at the University of Macau, Rosario was asked by a student whether it is enough to punish Fong by just taking away four years of his retirement pension. On the sidelines of the talk, Rosario repeated his answer to the media, saying that the student put the death of 10 people together with the actions of the former director [of SMG]. [] I want to clarify that I dont want the student to have the misconception that Fong Soi Kun has a relationship with the [deaths of] 10 people. I havent seen any document [indicating such connection] I will not make any comments [regarding yesterdays announcement of Fong and Leongs punishments], said Rosario, adding that we will see later whether Leong will return to the SMG as a deputy director or not.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Vermilion Energy Inc., together with its subsidiaries, engages in the acquisition, exploration, development, and production of petroleum and natural gas in North America, Europe, and Australia. It owns 81% working interest in 642,300 net acres of developed land and 87% working interest in 376,700 net acres of undeveloped land, and 613 net producing natural gas wells and 3,034 net producing oil wells in Canada; and 96% working interest in 248,900 net acres of developed land and 91% working interest in 222,100 net acres of undeveloped land in the Aquitaine and Paris Basins, and 325 net producing oil wells and 3.0 net producing gas wells in France. The company also owns 49% working interest in 930,000 net acres of land and 51 net producing natural gas wells in the Netherlands; and 36,900 net developed acres and 965,900 net undeveloped acres of land, and 61 net producing oil wells and 8 net producing natural gas wells in Germany. In addition, it owns offshore Corrib natural gas field located to the northwest coast of Ireland; and 100% working interest in the Wandoo offshore oil field and related production assets that covers 59,600 acres located on Western Australia's northwest shelf. Further, the company holds 138,000 net acres of land in the Powder River basin, and 136.6 net producing oil wells in the United States; and 951,200 net acres of land in Hungary, 244,900 net acres of land in Slovakia, and 2.4 million net acres of land in Croatia. Vermilion Energy Inc. was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

Read MoreInternational Business Machines Corp. is an information technology company, which provides integrated solutions that leverage information technology and knowledge of business processes. It operates through the following segments: Cloud and Cognitive Software, Global Business Services, Global Technology Services, Systems, and Global Financing. The Cloud and Cognitive Software segment provides integrated and secure cloud, data, and solutions to the clients. The Global Business Services segment provides clients with consulting, application management, and business process outsourcing services. The Global Technology Services segment provides comprehensive IT infrastructure and platform services that create business value for clients. The Systems segment provides clients with innovative infrastructure platforms to help meet the requirements of hybrid cloud and enterprise AI workload. The Global Financing segment provides client financing, commercial financing, and participates in the remanufacturing and remarketing of used equipment. The company was founded by Charles Ranlett Flint and Thomas J. Watson Sr. on June 16, 1911 and is headquartered in Armonk, NY.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Moody's: Administracion de Calificadoras S.A. de C.V., BlackBox Logic, Bureau van Dijk EP DMCC, Bureau van Dijk Editions Electroniques S.A.S., Bureau van Dijk Editions Electroniques SRL, Bureau van Dijk Editions Electroniques Sarl, Bureau van Dijk Edizioni Elettroniche S.p.a, Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing AB, Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing ApS, Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing B.V., Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing Beijing Co. Ltd., Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing GmbH, Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing Hong Kong Limited, Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing Inc., Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing K.K., Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing LLC, Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing Ltd., Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing Pte. Ltd., Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing Pty. 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A new Tel Aviv University study addresses the challenges of nanoparticle-based cancer-targeting strategies. It also suggests ways of refocusing the collaborative work of cancer researchers and clinicians to move the field forward from "the bench" to the patients.

The study follows landmark research published 10 years ago in Nature Nanotechnology that reviewed the full potential of actively targeted nanocarriers to revolutionize cancer care. The opinion piece garnered over 5,000 citations, making it one of the most influential analyses on the subject to date. That study was written by Prof. Dan Peer, director of the SPARK Tel Aviv Center for Translational Medicine at TAU's Faculty of Life Sciences, and Jeffrey Karp, principal investigator at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University.

The updated review by Prof. Peer, Prof. Karp, Daniel Rosenblum, a doctoral student in Prof. Peer's lab, and Dr. Nitin Joshi, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, was published recently in Nature Communications.

A hard road from the lab to the clinic

"When Dan and Jeff's paper was published 10 years ago, there was great hope that nanocarriers in general and actively targeted nanocarriers in particular would transform cancer therapy," Rosenblum says. "We've made significant progress towards understanding the interaction of nanocarriers with tumor cells and tissues since then, but the clinical translation has been limited."

"Few nanocarriers have been approved for clinical use, and none of the actively targeted nanocarriers have advanced past clinical trials," Dr. Joshi adds. In the new paper, the authors discuss several reasons for this, including a lack of preclinical models that accurately mimic human tumors. They also emphasize the need not only for patient evaluation before treatment with nanocarriers, but also for clinical trial pathways appropriate for this new generation of drugs.

"We detailed what existed in the arsenal at that time, the challenges that lay ahead and how we wanted the future of specific tumor-targeting to look," says Prof. Peer. "We explored all the available nanoparticle options with which to penetrate tumors. We were sure the future was bright.

"But in the past 10 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved only 15 passively targeted nanocarriers. There have been some 40,000 studies published about active cellular targeting, but none of the approaches have advanced past clinical trials. What's wrong with this picture?"

It's complicated

According to the new review, what's wrong is that cancers have flummoxed researchers by being even more complex in nature than previously believed. "They change and evolve all the time, are heterogeneous in composition and eventually gain resistance," Rosenblum says. "We need to be able to target many kinds of cancer cell types, and we need the systems to be as simple as possible. But they have to be versatile too. We emphasize the idea of developing personalized nanocarriers based on the type of cancer and its biomarker profile."

The authors suggest that to move the field forward, the FDA and European Medicines Agency (EMA) must change their regulatory processes. "We have to adopt the regulation process to the new type of drugs," Dr. Joshi says.

"We need to conduct trials on humanstrials that provide more insights into the interaction of nanocarriers with human biology," Prof. Karp says. "We can then use these to drive the development of next-generation nano-targeted platforms."

Rosenblum says the key to future success also lies in developing animal models that better resemble human tumors and preselecting patients with a high likelihood of responding to nanocarrier-based cancer treatments.

The authors argue that technological solutions such as focused ultrasound and companion diagnostics, coupled with biological solutions such as overcoming the cellular barriers and increasing particle payloads at the target site, will also increase the likelihood of successful treatment.

"The field continues to offer great potential for patients, and significant progress has been achieved. But new challenges have emerged during the past 10 years, and more support and work are required," Prof. Karp concludes.

Explore further Drug-loaded nanocarriers in tumor targeted drug deliveryPsychological distress is common in the aftermath of a traumatic injury. Symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress can make it harder to re-establish one's social and family life, work performance, and wellbeing after injury.

Despite the prevalence and impact of psychological symptoms, United States trauma systems do not routinely integrate psychological evaluation and mental healthcare as a mainstay of post-injury care. This shifts the responsibility for help-seeking to injured people who must identify their symptoms and find mental health support and services. This gap is especially troubling for populations disproportionately affected by traumatic injuries, like black men, who are less likely to use mental healthcare after physically and psychologically traumatic events.

A new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) has explored how injured black men in Philadelphia perceived their psychological symptoms after injury and the factors that guided their decisions to seek professional mental health help. The study, 'Sharing things with people that I don't even know': help-seeking for psychological symptoms in injured Black men in Philadelphia,' has recently been published in the journal Ethnicity & Health.

"Our focus on urban black men is intended to bring greater attention to a population highly vulnerable to trauma, injury, and suboptimal outcomes after injury," explains the study's senior author, Therese S. Richmond, PhD, FAAN, CRNP, the Andrea B. Laporte Professor of Nursing and Associate Dean for Research & Innovation.

"By understanding help-seeking in urban Black men and others at high-risk for psychological challenges after injury, we are better positioned to create individually-responsive programs that can be seeded within the continuum of trauma care," noted the study's lead-author Sara F. Jacoby, PhD, MPH, MSN, an Assistant Professor in Penn Nursing's Department of Family and Community Health. "What we learned from study participants was that despite suffering from often severe psychological symptoms in the months that followed hospitalization, very few men would seek professional mental healthcare citing both personal and system-based barriers like lack of health insurance, as well as preference for informal or faith-based support."

This study suggests the need for research to identify interventions that will diminish the impact of barriers to care, and identify from whom, where, and how professional mental health help might be more effectively offered to injured black men who live in recovery environments like Philadelphia.

Explore further Understanding emotional responses to traumatic injury key to planning, treatment efforts

More information: Sara F. Jacoby et al. 'Sharing things with people that I don't even know': help-seeking for psychological symptoms in injured Black men in Philadelphia, Ethnicity & Health (2018). Sara F. Jacoby et al. 'Sharing things with people that I don't even know': help-seeking for psychological symptoms in injured Black men in Philadelphia,(2018). DOI: 10.1080/13557858.2018.1455811Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

Researchers engineered a donor cornea, introducing two genes intended to prevent new blood vessel formation following transplantation, and have shown this novel approach to be safe, well tolerated, and effective at reducing the risk of tissue rejection in a high-risk rabbit model. These conclusive findings support angiogenesis as a valid target for treatment to prevent corneal graft rejection in high-risk patients, accord-ing to the study published in Human Gene Therapy.

Tim Stout, Baylor College of Medicine (Houston, TX), Scott Ellis, Oxford BioMedica (Ox-ford, U.K.) and coauthors from Baylor, Oxford Biomedica, and Oregon Health and Scienc-es University (Portland) describe the study design, the outcomes, and the implications of their results in the article entitled "Safety and Efficacy of OXB-202, a Genetically Engineered Tissue Therapy for the Prevention of Rejection in High Risk Corneal Transplant Patients." The researchers used a lentiviral vector to transfer the genes for the human proteins endostatin and angiostatin into the donor corneas. These secreted proteins inhibit vasculari-zation, helping to prevent an immune reaction to the transplanted tissue and rejection of the cornea.

"The work from Drs. Stout and Ellis and their colleagues represents yet another example of how gene therapy for disorders of the eye has led the way in clinical translation," says Editor-in-Chief Terence R. Flotte, MD, Celia and Isaac Haidak Professor of Medical Education and Dean, Provost, and Executive Deputy Chancellor, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA. "Gene modification of corneal transplants could provide a unique approach to filling a pressing unmet medical need."

Explore further Positive clinical trial results on gene transfer to treat macular degeneration

More information: Naghmeh Fouladi et al, Safety and Efficacy of OXB-202, a Genetically Engineered Tissue Therapy for the Prevention of Rejection in High-Risk Corneal Transplant Patients, Human Gene Therapy (2018). Journal information: Human Gene Therapy Naghmeh Fouladi et al, Safety and Efficacy of OXB-202, a Genetically Engineered Tissue Therapy for the Prevention of Rejection in High-Risk Corneal Transplant Patients,(2018). DOI: 10.1089/hum.2017.184Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research of St. Michael's Hospital, led this analysis. Credit: St. Michael's Hospital

Higher cigarette prices would save millions of people from extreme poverty and poor health around the world, while also cutting health treatment costs for families across the globe, suggests a comprehensive study published today in The BMJ.

The analysis, led by Dr. Prabhat Jha and Patricio V. Marquez, concludes that those with lower incomes would benefit the most from higher cigarette prices. Examining 500 million male smokers in 13 countries, they found that a 50 per cent price increase in cigarettes would result in 67 million men quitting smoking, with the biggest benefit in low-income men.

The higher price would also lead to 15.5 million men avoiding catastrophic health spending in the seven countries studied without universal health coverage. This would result in 8.8 million men avoiding extreme poverty, half of whom are in the bottom income group.

"Our study debunks the current narrative that higher cigarette prices would negatively impact the poorest among us," said Dr. Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research of St. Michael's Hospital. "This analysis shows the opposite - a higher price would encourage cessation, lead to better health, and save money much more strongly for the poor than the rich."

Cessation would result in 449 million years of life gained, the study showed. Higher tobacco costs would also benefit households globally, with about $157-billion USD averted to treat the four main tobacco-attributable diseases examined: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, heart disease and cancer.

Despite more awareness of the risks, Dr. Jha said, if we don't deflect the current trends, smoking will be responsible for one billion deaths in the 21st century. Most of these will be in low and middle-income countries. Previous research by Dr. Jha, who is also a professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, has shown that raising taxes on tobacco is the single most effective intervention to lower smoking rates and to deter future smokers.

Building on his earlier research, Dr. Jha and the team undertook this new analysis to understand the true impact of higher cigarette prices around the world. They conducted an assessment across 13 middle-income countries with diverse socioeconomic characteristics, tobacco use and health care coverage. Focusing on male smokers - who make up 90 per cent of smokers in the selected countries - the researchers used mathematical models to quantify the effect of a 50 per cent increase in prices.

"The findings of our new analysis will have a far-reaching impact," said Marquez, lead health specialist at The World Bank. "Not only does increasing tobacco taxation reduce smoking and its health consequences, but the study's findings are also relevant to the United Nations sustainable development goals to reduce poverty and improve health."

This study will add to a growing body of knowledge that higher cigarette pricing, though not yet universally adopted, has significant health benefits. Small steps taken by governments can lead to unprecedented health gains and poverty reduction, Dr. Jha said.

Explore further Higher tobacco taxes needed to reduce smoking rates in South Asia, new analysis saysHepatitis A viruses (HAVs) circulating in an ongoing outbreak among men who have sex with men (MSM) in the Lombardy region of Italy are predominantly attributable to strains linked to two other recent outbreaks in Europe, according to a study presented today at The International Liver Congress 2018 in Paris, France. The study found that earlier cases in the Lombardy outbreak were related to an HAV strain reported in the Netherlands, while later cases were more frequently linked to a strain seen in the UK.

Although HAV is rarely fatal, 10-15% of symptomatic patients experience an illness lasting several months, and comorbidities increase the chance of serious liver complications. HAV is generally transmitted through the faecal/oral route, although sexually transmitted outbreaks of HAV have occurred among MSM. Genetic sequencing of the HAV circulating in a particular outbreak can help determine its source and potentially help identify at-risk populations. Effective vaccines have become available within the last 25 years and routine vaccination is widely recommended.

'We wanted to understand the ongoing HAV outbreak within a large group of patients including MSM from seven hospitals in the Lombardy region', explained Dr. Massimo Iavarone from the Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Maggiore Hospital in Milan, Italy, and lead author of the study. 'We used viral phylogenetic analysis to see if this outbreak was linked to other recent European outbreaks'.

The study prospectively analyzed 244 cases of acute HAV between January and May 2017 (median age 33 years, range 18-76; 94% male; 59% MSM). The incidence rate of HAV in Lombardy was also analyzed and was found to be 9.512 per 100,000 inhabitants during the study period, compared with 1.069 in 2016 and 0.750 in 2015. The phylogenetic correlation between the viruses currently circulating in Lombardy and other HAV strains was assessed by sequencing the VP1/2A region.

Hospitalization was required by 80% of patients (median stay 7 days, range 2-44), and the median (range) alanine aminotransferase and bilirubin peak levels were 2,652 (47-8,914) IU/mL and 6.6 (0.4-18) mg/dL, respectively. Severe liver injury according to the EASL definitions occurred in 14% of patients, with no cases requiring liver transplants.

The molecular phylogenetic analyses revealed that 93% of patients were infected by HAV genotype IA and 7% with genotype IB. All of the genotype IA infections matched strains from one of three European outbreaks (UK, 54%; The Netherlands, 45%; Germany, 1%). Interestingly, the proportion of cases infected by each strain varied with time; the strain from the Netherlands accounted for 100% of the January cases, but the strain from the UK dominated the later months of the outbreak (May 68%, June 70%). 'There is a high hospitalization rate for the patients in these linked HAV outbreaks involving young active workers, which may impact admissions to liver and infectious disease units and have significant direct and indirect economic consequences', said Dr. Iavarone. 'Efforts to increase hepatitis A vaccine coverage in high-risk groups must be taken to strengthen population protection from HAV'. 'This study emphasizes the risk of acute HAV infection via sexual transmission in risk groups such as MSM', said Prof. Markus Cornberg from the Hannover Medical School, Germany, and EASL Governing Board Member. 'Awareness campaigns for the prevention of sexually transmitted infections are important, and in this case of HAV, vaccination can prevent infections'.

Provided by European Association for the Study of the LiverCredit: University of Arizona

Why do humorous dating profiles get more right swipes? Can being funny help solve problems? Is laughter really the best medicine?

Humor and the "good life" seem to go hand-in-hand. Funny people seem to move effortlessly through the world. Business articles and gurus prescribe humor as a key to effective workplace performance. The website for the African country of Eritrea even describes humor as "a tremendous resource for surmounting problems, enhancing your relationships, and supporting both physical and emotional health."

"Humor, Comedy and Consumer Behavior," a paper by Caleb Warren, assistant professor of marketing in the UA Eller College of Management; Adam Barsky of the University of Melbourne; and A. Peter McGraw of the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business, looks beyond advertising to highlight how and when humor helps people reach their goals.

The paper, forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research, breaks people's goals into three broad categories: hedonic goals (maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain), utilitarian goals (optimizing long-term well-being) and social goals (getting along with others). The researchers integrate insights from psychology, management, linguistics, anthropology, medicine and neuroscience to propose a framework that summarizes the current scientific knowledge about humor.

The authors argue that humor appreciation (laughter and amusement) helps people feel better by making positive experiences, such as watching a movie or dining at a restaurant, more pleasantand negative experiences, such as going for dental work or waiting in line, less unpleasant. Sharing a laugh also can help people bond and get along better.

But humor appreciation does not always improve utilitarian outcomes, such as decision-making or health. For example, laughing tends to make people more creativebut also more careless. Similarly, watching a funny movie may help someone recover from emotional ailments, such as depression or an anxiety disorder, but there is little evidence that humor will help with cancer or even a common cold.

Similarly, comedy production (trying to make others laugh) sometimes helps people reach their goals but other times gets in the way. For example, cracking a joke can help people capture attention, but it also can make a message seem less important.

One notable conclusion from the paper is that the effects of comedy production depend on the type of joke people tell, as well as whether the joke actually makes an audience laugh. Teasing and telling insulting jokes are less likely to help people cope with loss or navigate an awkward social interaction than joking about the weather or creating an amusing pun. But even jokes about the weather and puns won't help if no one laughs.

Explore further Relationship success tied not to joking but shared sense of humor, researcher saysElectron micrographs of hepatitis C virus purified from cell culture. Scale bar is 50 nanometers. Credit: Center for the Study of Hepatitis C, The Rockefeller University.

A prospective, longitudinal study involving more than 1,000 people who inject drugs has identified a promising role for linkage to care specialists in facilitating rapid access to hepatitis C treatment. The study, which was conducted in Texas, USA, ensured that individuals newly diagnosed with hepatitis C were contacted by a linkage to care specialist within 48 hours of being referred to the service, thereby ensuring that almost 50% of patients referred to a medical practitioner made it to their first appointment and that 60% of those seen were initiated on treatment.

"We have a major problem with injection drug use in the USA," explained Zohha Alam from the Austin Hepatitis Center in Texas, USA. "At least 75% of new hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections result from injection drug use, and it is often difficult to engage with the users and ensure that HCV infection is both diagnosed and treated."

The prospective study, which was presented today at The International Liver Congress 2018 in Paris, France, evaluated 1,038 patients who were screened and entered into an electronic database in Austin between January and October 2017. A total of 503 individuals were found to be HCV RNA positive and were referred to the linkage to care service. Of those referred, 398 (79%) were contacted within 48 hours by a linkage to care specialist who provided education and linked the individual to a care provider. Of the 249 individuals referred to a medical practitioner, 116 (47%) attended their first appointment, and 69 (59%) had initiated HCV therapy at the time of the analysis.

"Linkage to care is the missing link in the treatment of chronic HCV infection," said Zohha Alam. "Our study demonstrates a promising role for linkage to care specialists in engaging with people who inject drugs and, importantly, connecting those individuals with HCV care providers."

The importance of increasing the number of HCV-infected individuals screened and linked to care was highlighted in another study presented at The International Liver Congress 2018. The study by a team from the CDA Foundation's Polaris Observatory in Lafayette, Colorado, USA, used data from 53 countries in Europe to forecast the current and future burden of HCV in the region and to estimate the levels of HCV diagnosis and treatment required to achieve World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Sector Strategy Goals for Hepatitis by 2030.1

"Based on our analysis," said Sarah Robbins from the Polaris Observatory, 'we predict that given the current standard of care for the next 15 years, the total HCV-infected population in Europe would increase by an estimated 1% by 2030 and that, in order to meet WHO goals, the number of individuals diagnosed annually would need to increase to at least 800,000 by 2022, with 900,000 being treated each year by 2025. Improving linkage to care coupled with increased access to DAA therapy is needed to achieve such goals."

Unfortunately, progress towards establishing national policies to support the necessary scale-up of HCV diagnosis and treatment to achieve these goals remains slow, according to the results of a third study presented in Paris. The 2017 Hep-CORE study, which was conducted in 25 European countries, found that an approved national hepatitis C strategy and/or action plan was in place in just 12 (48%) of those countries. Hepatitis C treatment was reported to be available in non-specialist settings in five (20%) countries, although treatment was available in prisons in 18 (72%) countries. Although an improvement from 2016, 52% and 32% of countries in the 2017 Hep-CORE study still restrict access to direct-acting antiviral agents based on the degree of fibrosis and/or current injecting drug use, respectively.

"HCV can be cured in more than 95% of patients," said Prof. Markus Cornberg from the Hannover Medical School, Germany, and EASL Governing Board Member. "However, in order to prevent complications such as HCC, patients first need to be identified and treated accordingly. Screening and linkage to care are fundamental if WHO elimination targets are to be achieved, and the data presented here are important in improving these measures."

Explore further UK elimination of hepatitis C in jeopardy unless more patients found

More information: World Health Organization. Global Health Sector Strategy on Viral Hepatitis 2016-2012. June 2016. Available from: World Health Organization. Global Health Sector Strategy on Viral Hepatitis 2016-2012. June 2016. Available from: www.who.int/hepatitis/strategy  16-2021/ghss-hep/en/ . Last accessed: February 2018.

Provided by European Association for the Study of the LiverWhile global rates of mental disorders in children have remained stable over time, the decline of infectious diseases will place mental disorders among the main causes of disease in children aged 4-15 years, according to a study published in the open access journal Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health.

Marie-Laure Baranne and Bruno Falissard at INSERM, France described the prevalence of mental disorders among children aged 5-14 years in each of the six regions of the World Health Organisation - Africa, the Americas, South-East Asia, Europe, the Easter Mediterranean, and the West Pacific Region. They found that even in emerging regions, the prevalence of mental disorders is high and constant over time.

Marie-Laure Baranne said: "We found that the prevalence of mental disorders in young people remained stable between 2000 and 2015, which suggests that mental disorders are not decreasing in young people despite the global improvement of their physical health. In the future, the decrease of other, preventable diseases, such as diabetes, will lead to an increase in the importance of treating mental disorders for public health."

The authors found that in 2000 in the Americas and Europe, mental disorders ranked third among the causes of disability adjusted life years (DALYs). DALYs can be thought of as lost years of healthy life due to disease or disability. They are a measure of disease burden - the impact of a health problem in a population. By 2015, mental disorders had reached second place as causes of DALYs in the Americas and Europe, while the impact of infectious diseases decreased. The change from infectious diseases to mental disorders as the main cause of DALYs in children is called an epidemiological transition. The impact of mental disorders on child health is going to become more important in the future as more countries make the transition from infection diseases to mental disorders as major causes of ill-health, according to the authors.

Marie-Laure Baranne said: "Our study is intended as an urgent signal of alarm to international public health institutions and policy-makers. Given the impact of these mental disorders in the long term, organising a global policy to address this issue requires careful preparation."

In most regions, four mental disorders ranked among the 20 diseases associated with the most DALYs: conduct disorders, anxiety disorders, major depressive disorders and austism-Asperger syndrome. Among boys, the most common mental disorders associated with DALYs were conduct disorders, autism-Asperger syndrome and anxiety disorders. Among girls they were anxiety disorders, conduct disorders and major depressive disorder.

In addition to an effect over time, the authors also noticed an effect of income: regions with the highest gross domestic product were found to have fewer problems with infectious diseases and more problems with mental disorders.

The authors caution that that the calculation of DALYs relies on parameters that are only known as approximations and based on multiple sources of information containing potential errors that may introduce some uncertainty into estimates.

Explore further Rates of mental disorders and service use differ by immigration status and ethnicity of American adolescents

More information: Marie Laure Baranne et al, Global burden of mental disorders among children aged 514 years, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health (2018). Marie Laure Baranne et al, Global burden of mental disorders among children aged 514 years,(2018). DOI: 10.1186/s13034-018-0225-4Credit: CC0 Public Domain

In a two-year community randomised trial involving more than 15,000 children in Tanzania, a long lasting insecticidal net treated with piperonyl butoxide (PBO LLIN) reduced the prevalence of malaria by 44% and 33% in the first and second year respectively, compared to a standard long lasting insecticidal net (LLIN) treated with pyrethroid only.

The study, led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), also showed unprecedented malaria control through indoor residual spraying (IRS) with the insecticide pirimiphos methyl, which after a single spray round reduced malaria infection by 48% for an entire year.

LLINS and IRS are the cornerstones of malaria control in sub-Sahara Africa, and have been estimated to reduce malaria disease by 41% and malaria deaths by 62% between 2000 and 2015 globally. Despite this public health success, malaria still kills nearly half a million people annually, and for the first time in many years the World Health Organization (WHO) reported an increase in malaria cases and no change in the number of malaria deaths in 2017.

There is concurrent evidence that resistance to pyrethroid insecticide is growing in the Anopheline mosquitoes which transmit the disease. Only a limited range of alternative insecticides are available, particularly for LLINs for which pyrethroids are the only class of insecticide fully recommended by the WHO.

Anticipating the possible failure of current control tools due to resistance, WHO and LSHTM have been collaborating with the chemical industry for almost 20 years to develop new types of LLIN and new insecticides for IRS. One of these is a novel LLIN which incorporates piperonyl butoxide (PBO), a chemical which blocks the natural defence mechanisms of insects - the oxidase enzymes that would otherwise metabolise insecticide - which means the pyrethroid on the LLIN remains potent against mosquitoes despite resistance. This chemical synergist stops insects from breaking down the pyrethroid within their bodies, so the insecticide stays toxic to the insect.

Dr Natacha Protopopoff from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who led the field research operations in Muleba, Tanzania, said: "It's imperative we try and remain one step ahead of insecticide resistance which threatens to reverse the great gains made in combating malaria. We must develop an improved strategy based on new classes of LLIN to control malaria transmitted by pyrethroid resistant mosquitoes."

This new study involved randomly selected children aged six months to 14 years from villages in Muleba district of North West Tanzania, where high levels of resistance to pyrethroids have been reported. In 2015, 48 villages were randomised into four groups with different preventative measures. Altogether 45,000 standard LLINs and 45,000 PBO LLINs were distributed. Children were then tested for malaria at the end of each rainy season.

After nine months, malaria infection was considerably lower in the group that received just the net treated with piperonyl butoxide - PBO LLIN - (31.1%, 275/883) and the group that received indoor residual spraying and standard LLIN (28.7%, 252/877), compared to the group that received standard LLIN alone (55.3%, 515/932). Twelve months later, the PBO LLIN effect was still persisting relative to the standard LLIN.

To strengthen the evidence for the interventions, mosquito traps were placed in each study arm. The number of malaria infected mosquitoes captured in the PBO LLIN villages was reduced by 87% and 67% during the first and second years respectively compared to the standard LLIN villages.

Professor Mark Rowland from LSHTM and Principal Investigator, said: "This project is a game-changer. The trial is the first clear evidence that nets treated with piperonyl butoxide can significantly improve personal and community protection from malaria compared to standard pyrethroid-only nets in areas where there is high pyrethroid resistance. It also demonstrated that pyrethroid resistance is now a significant problem in some areas and standard LLIN are less effective than before, and that the new IRS controlled malaria for an entire year before needing to be re-sprayed."

As a direct consequence of the trial, WHO revised its reccomendations on LLIN in September 2017, giving an interim policy recommendation to PBO LLIN as a new class of LLIN1.

Dr Jan Kolaczinski, Coordinator for Entomology and Vector Control in the WHO Global Malaria Programme said: "WHO recommends PBO LLINs should be deployed for malaria prevention in areas where mosquitoes are pyrethroid resistant, provided that full coverage is maintained. This would include many endemic areas in Africa where standard LLINs are currently used."

Professor Rowland said: "We are pleased that the WHO has already revised policy on the basis of this trial. This will ensure insecticide treated nets will remain an effective intervention for malaria control, and justifies the continued investment and research on alternative insecticides for use on nets."

The authors acknowledge the study does have limitations, including the short buffer distance between villages; however, any spill-over between villages would tend to underestimate the intervention effect rather than increase it.

The authors also stress that it is important to always sleep under a bed net in areas of malaria transmission, and until PBO LLIN are deployed more widely in areas of resistance, standard pyrethroid-only nets will be more protective than non-use of nets and should continue to be used.

Explore further How does an insecticide treated bed net actually work?Credit: CC0 Public Domain

"Night owls"people who like to stay up late and have trouble dragging themselves out of bed in the morninghave a higher risk of dying sooner than "larks," people who have a natural preference for going to bed early and rise with the sun, according to a new study from Northwestern Medicine and the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom (UK).

The study, on nearly half a million participants in the UK Biobank Study, found owls have a 10 percent higher risk of dying than larks. In the study sample, 50,000 people were more likely to die in the 6 -year period sampled.

"Night owls trying to live in a morning lark world may have health consequences for their bodies," said co-lead author Kristen Knutson, associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Previous studies in this field have focused on the higher rates of metabolic dysfunction and cardiovascular disease, but this is the first to look at mortality risk.

The study will be published April 12 in the journal Chronobiology International.

The scientists adjusted for the expected health problems in owls and still found the 10 percent higher risk of death.

"This is a public health issue that can no longer be ignored," said Malcolm von Schantz, a professor of chronobiology at the University of Surrey. "We should discuss allowing evening types to start and finish work later, where practical. And we need more research about how we can help evening types cope with the higher effort of keeping their body clock in synchrony with sun time."

"It could be that people who are up late have an internal biological clock that doesn't match their external environment," Knutson said. "It could be psychological stress, eating at the wrong time for their body, not exercising enough, not sleeping enough, being awake at night by yourself, maybe drug or alcohol use. There are a whole variety of unhealthy behaviors related to being up late in the dark by yourself."

In the new study, scientists found owls had higher rates of diabetes, psychological disorders and neurological disorders?

Can owls become larks?

Genetics and environment play approximately equal roles in whether we are a morning or a night type, or somewhere in between, the authors have previously reported.

"You're not doomed," Knutson said. "Part of it you don't have any control over and part of it you might."

One way to shift your behavior is to make sure you are exposed to light early in the morning but not at night, Knutson said. Try to keep a regular bedtime and not let yourself drift to later bedtimes. Be regimented about adopting healthy lifestyle behaviors and recognize the timing of when you sleep matters. Do things earlier and be less of an evening person as much as you can.

Society can help, too

"If we can recognize these chronotypes are, in part, genetically determined and not just a character flaw, jobs and work hours could have more flexibility for owls," Knutson said. "They shouldn't be forced to get up for an 8 a.m. shift. Make work shifts match peoples' chronotypes. Some people may be better suited to night shifts."

In future research, Knutson and colleagues want to test an intervention with owls to get them to shift their body clocks to adapt to an earlier schedule. "Then we'll see if we get improvements in blood pressure and overall health," she said.

The switch to daylight savings or summer time is already known to be much more difficult for evening types than for morning types.

"There are already reports of higher incidence of heart attacks following the switch to summer time," says von Schantz. "And we have to remember that even a small additional risk is multiplied by more than 1.3 billion people who experience this shift every year. I think we need to seriously consider whether the suggested benefits outweigh these risks."

How the study worked

For the study, researchers from the University of Surrey and Northwestern University examined the link between an individual's natural inclination toward mornings or evenings and their risk of mortality. They asked 433,268 participants, age 38 to 73 years, if they are a "definite morning type" a "moderate morning type" a "moderate evening type" or a "definite evening type." Deaths in the sample were tracked up to six and half years later.

Explore further Night owls face greater risk of developing diabetes than early risersHPV causes a range of cancers, including cervical, penile, anal and throat cancer. Credit: Tatiana Shepeleva/Shutterstock.com

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a sexually transmitted infection that causes diseases that affect both men and women. In the UK, girls are vaccinated against HPV but boys are not.

There are more than 100 types of HPV. Two of the low risk types (six and 11) cause more than 90% of genital warts. Other high risk types of HPV (especially 16 and 18) can cause cervical, vulval, vaginal, head, neck and throat, anal and penile cancers. While the incidence of cervical cancer in the UK has fallen since the 1990s, thanks to the NHS cervical screening programme, the incidence of those cancers that affect both men and women is on the rise.

More than 80% of sexually active people will be exposed to HPV in their lifetime. Genital HPV infection is spread during sexual intercourse and skin-to-skin contact of the genital areas. Wearing a condom reduces the risk of infection but does not provide complete protection. Once a person has been infected, their immune system will fight the virus and, in most cases, the virus will have no ill effects. But, for some people, the virus will progress to cause warts or cancer.

Since 2008, 12- and 13-year-old girls in most of the UK (11 to 13 in Scotland) have been offered the chance to be vaccinated against HPV via a school-based programme. In a phased rollout from April 2018, men aged 45 or younger who have sex with men will be offered the HPV vaccination in England at sexual health clinics and HIV clinics, bringing England in line with the rest of the UK. But boys are not likely to be offered the HPV vaccine any time soon.

Too little, too late

One rationale for not vaccinating boys is that if enough girls are vaccinated (currently, around 85% of girls have the necessary two doses in England), this provides "herd immunity" to men, meaning that if women don't have the virus, men will not be able to catch it either.

The main problem with the herd immunity argument, when it is girls rather than boys who are vaccinated, is that it doesn't provide protection for men who have sex with men, or for men who have sex with unvaccinated women  for example, women from countries without a vaccination programme, or women who are too old to have been eligible for the vaccination.

Men who have sex with men are particularly vulnerable to HPV-related anal cancer. Although they can now opt to have the vaccination, it is too little, too late.

The HPV vaccination is most effective when it is given before exposure to the virus (before sexual activity starts), and also when it is given before puberty, when immune systems are able to provide a stronger antibody response.

Gender-neutral vaccination has wide support among the medical community with professional organisations such as the British Dental Association and The Faculty of Public Health favouring vaccination for both boys and girls.

Survey results

It is not just professionals who want to see the vaccination extended to boys. A recent Wellcome-funded survey of 186 parents of teenage boys in North Staffordshire that we conducted found that many of the parents were not aware of the health consequences of HPV for men. The research, published in PLOS ONE, revealed that once they were provided with this information, however, most parents wanted the vaccine to be available to their sons.

Several countries vaccinate both girls and boys against HPV, including the US, Canada, Austria, Australia and New Zealand. It is unacceptable, as society strives for equality in so many areas, that the UK should not extend the protection afforded by the HPV vaccination to boys as well as girls.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.Two presentations given this week at The International Liver Congress 2018 in Paris, France illustrate the impact that DAAs can have in averting HCV-related liver disease, and reducing the clinical and economic burden of this chronic infection. The first presentation summarized data from Scottish national records providing country-level evidence of a reduction in HCV-related decompensated cirrhosis since the introduction of DAAs in 2014. The second presentation described modelling data based on clinical trials of glecaprevir/pibrentasvir and UK patient tracker data, and suggested that the health and economic benefits of DAAs may be increased if treatment is initiated at an earlier stage of disease.

Rapid advances in the field of HCV treatment have led to the availability of several DAAs that now offer a cure, in the form of a sustained virological response (SVR), for more than 90% of people with chronic HCV infection. The impact of DAAs on the incidence and cost of liver morbidity and mortality at the population level is not yet known. Scotland is home to an estimated 34,500 people chronically infected with HCV and is regarded as a world leader in facing this problem. The Hepatitis C Action Plan (2006-2011) and the Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus Framework (2011-2020) have resulted in significant increases in HCV diagnosis and treatment over the past decade. Informed by modelling work, Scotland set the ambitious target of reducing the incidence of HCV-related decompensated cirrhosis by 75% between 2015 and 2020.

The Scottish HCV Clinical and Diagnosis databases, linked with the national inpatient hospital database, provided data on the use of HCV therapy up to March 2017 and on the numbers of patients with a chronic HCV diagnosis that had presented and been admitted to hospital for the first time with decompensated cirrhosis during 2000-2016. Among 4,800 people initiated on HCV therapy in Scotland between April 2014 and March 2017, 83% were treated with DAAs and 94% achieved SVR. This scale up of therapy, compared with the 3 preceding years, was associated with a 29% and 39% reduction in first-time presentations for decompensated cirrhosis among those previously diagnosed with chronic HCV and those with chronic HCV at the time of admission, respectively.

"Scotland's national surveillance of HCV treatment and disease means we are ideally placed to examine the early impact of DAA treatment on HCV-related disease progression at a population level," explained Professor Sharon Hutchinson from Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. "We have been able to show that scale up of therapy has resulted in substantially fewer patients presenting with decompensated cirrhosis but has highlighted the need to address comorbidities that pose a continued risk of liver disease progression in those clear of the virus."

In the second study, a health state transition model of the natural history of HCV was developed to forecast liver-related clinical and economic outcomes over a lifetime. The model population and treatment efficacy data were based on clinical trials of glecaprevir/pibrentasvir. Genotype, fibrosis distribution and costs were based on Scottish patient tracker data and on literature review. Rates of decompensated cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, liver transplant and liver-related death were predicted to be lower if treatment was initiated when disease was mild (F0-1) rather than delayed until compensated cirrhosis was present. As a consequence, early versus delayed treatment resulted in lower lifetime costs, including those associated with extrahepatic manifestations (F0-1: 33,297; compensated cirrhosis: 61,204), and greater lifetime quality-adjusted life years (F0-1: 16.20; compensated cirrhosis: 10.05).

"This study shows the impact that delayed treatment can have on a patient's life, including consequences such as liver morbidity and mortality, as well as extrahepatic complications," said Dr. Sammy Saab, Professor of Medicine and Surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Beyond benefits to the patients, early treatment can generate significant savings by reducing clinical risks and allowing for a shorter, 8-week duration of treatment across all genotypes."

"The studies from Scotland are important because they discuss the impact of HCV therapy and cure on patient-relevant outcomes," said Prof. Markus Cornberg from the Hannover Medical School, Germany, and EASL Governing Board Member. "Recently, the value of DAA therapies has been challenged by a Cochrane review. These data are therefore very important in documenting not only sustained virological response, but also the prevention of morbidity and mortality."

Explore further Screening for hepatocellular carcinoma likely to be cost effective

Provided by European Association for the Study of the LiverHFES congratulates Marisa Grayson, a master's student in the Integrated Systems Engineering Department at Ohio State University, on taking first place in the 2018 "Mobile Health Applications for Consumers" Student Design Competition. The results of the competition were announced on March 26 during HFES's International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care in Boston.

Grayson's app, RecorDr. - Facilitating Patient Self-Advocacy and Enabling Large-Scale Human Factors Research, is used by patients to record conversations with physicians to aid in deciding whether to undergo contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer when CPM is not indicated. It serves as both an aid to the patient and a research tool to gather data about decision-making in such cases.

Grayson employed user-centered design techniques with a multidisciplinary team. Development began with contextual inquiry to learn about users' needs, followed by development of a patient persona (Judith) for the purposes of prototyping and usability testing.

"Our initial observations and interviews that led to the creation of Judith were invaluable to our design process," said Michael F. Rayo, adviser on the project. "We needed to know how to help her as a patient so that she would continue to help us a researcher. She's not the kind of 'person' who would annotate and send audio recordings just for fun."

The app goes beyond those already available because it records patient-physician conversations and also enables bookmarking and transcription for easy recollection. Privacy concerns were addressed in its development. RecorDr is available now in the Google Play store, with plans to be in the App Store by the end of April.

"The most rewarding aspect of this project was seeing people interact with the app during rounds of usability testing and explain how they would really use it in their own health care visits," reported Grayson. "I look forward to our app making a positive impact for both patients and the HF/E research community."

The developers of two competition finalists were also recognized at the symposium:

Care Connect - Coordinating Wound Care, by Kristen Webster, Johns Hopkins University. This app addresses coordinating care team members and provides consistent and reliable instructions for wound care at home. Webster interviewed health care professionals, examined apps on the market, and created prototypes to meet the needs not addressed in existing apps.

by Kristen Webster, Johns Hopkins University. This app addresses coordinating care team members and provides consistent and reliable instructions for wound care at home. Webster interviewed health care professionals, examined apps on the market, and created prototypes to meet the needs not addressed in existing apps. EasyHealth - An Integrated Health Monitoring and Management App for Seniors, by Sommayah Soliman, Harshada Tupe, Mai Chee Vang, and Javy Wang, San Jose State University; Adviser: Anthony D. Andre. The team conducted interviews with older adults to discover needs and challenges such as impaired physical and cognitive capabilities, as well as success criteria to develop a high-fidelity prototype. The app aims to make medication and appointment reminders easier for this population, for whom apps of this type are lacking.

Explore further Efforts to transform healthcare led to better asthma outcomesA conceptual illustration of how a protein can adopt different conformations upon mutation. The colored landscape represents the proteins free energy, from high stability (yellow-green) to low (red). The all-atom details on the ribbon models depict mutated protein residues. Credit: Cecilia Clementi, Rice University

For years, computational biologists have sought ways to model how proteins change shape in real time. In the past decade, they've glimpsed the possibilities as new programs and powerful computers came on line, letting researchers learn more about disease mechanisms that once eluded them.

That includes novel techniques to simulate dynamics of proteins involved in autoimmune diseases, the interest of Rice University's Cecilia Clementi, a computational biophysicist, chemistry professor and senior scientist at Rice's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics.

With groups headed by Frank Noe at Freie Universitat in Berlin, Shantenu Jha at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Jeremy Smith at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Clementi's Houston-based team has focused on the major histocompatibility complex class II (MHC II), which helps our immune system distinguish disease-related protein fragments from those belonging to our own cells.

Before our immune system can attack a pathogen, such as a bacteria or virus, our bodies first process these intruders into smaller protein parts called antigens inside specialized antigen-presenting cells. Once the antigen is properly bound to the MHC-II protein on the cell surface, it signals to T-cells, which ultimately fight the infection.

In autoimmune conditions, however, the body's immune response has difficulty seeing the difference between foreign cells and self. Researchers have long suspected an error in loading the proper antigen onto MHC II is behind most autoimmune conditions, such as type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease. But exactly what changes occur, and how, during this exchange remain unknown.

Autoimmunity therapies  including over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs, steroids, and newer biological antibodies  seldom target a condition's root causes and come with wide-ranging side effects. Clementi and her colleagues hope that studying MHC-II protein dynamics, especially how the antigen is loaded onto the protein in normal and disease states, will ultimately help find new drug targets.

But the MHC-II protein is complex and all of its possible configurations are difficult to predict without extensive computational resources. The DOE's INCITE program (for Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) has supported Clementi and her collaborators since 2017 with millions of processor hours on DOE machines. So far, Clementi and her collaborators have logged 81 million processor hours on Titan.

Cecilia Clementi. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Their approach, called Adaptive MD, generates a system that can iterate through a large number of possible protein conformations on thousands of graphics processing units  or GPUs, computer chips related to those used in video games. The method combines adaptive sampling, which periodically restarts many parallel simulations to explore a large number of protein structure configurations, and Markov state modeling, which enables analysis of shapes already sampled to determine where new simulations should be restarted. The team runs its algorithms on Titan, a Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility. Titan incorporates nearly 19,000 GPUs, letting computational biologists observe protein dynamics for microseconds  a timescale in which these biological processes unfold in nature.

Clementi likens the technique to scouting for a way across a mountain range without trails. "If you're alone and don't have a map, you will start walking in random directions, and it's going to take forever. There are just too many paths. But if you have a large group of people who go off in all different directions but can still communicate with one another, they can tell each other what they've seen, which will dictate where they go the next day based on the most promising path."

To date, Clementi and her associates have investigated the dynamics of 14 MHC-II variants. Noe's group at Freie Universitat found two mutants, beta N82A and alpha Q9A-alpha E11Q; experimental collaborators showed the mutants have biomedical significance. This work resulted in a 2016 paper in Nature Communications. Researchers had already found that beta N82A formed an unstable complex with HLA-DM, the protein that loads an antigen into MHC II.

Although crystal structures can be useful to better understand proteins, it's becoming increasingly clear their overall dynamics  not just a single snapshot  are important to their function, Clementi says, and capturing information between the snapshot frames requires the most powerful high-performance computing. "These are massive simulations that we cannot do if not on Titan."

Designing MHC-IIcentered therapies is a long way from the basic science, but Clementi and colleagues' early findings already suggest potential ways to target the protein.

"It's clear that it's not just one conformation that's important," she says. Instead, "it's the tendency of the protein to explore different configurations that is modified in mutants. Since we know that dynamics are important, one could potentially think about using allosteric drugs drugs that modify conformational switches  to target MHC in the future."

Next, Clementi and collaborators want to use their computational methods to assess the dynamics of 21 other clinically relevant MHC-II mutants. They will also release their Adaptive MD software later this year.

Explore further Study predicts, verifies protein foldingCredit: CC0 Public Domain

The ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research (CEPAR), in collaboration with Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), has released new findings on cognitive ageing and decline trends in Australia.

The report, led by UNSW scientist Professor Kaarin Anstey, CEPAR Chief Investigator and NHMRC Principal Research Fellow at NeuRA, highlights seven key modifiable lifestyle factors which are attributed to dementia; the rising numbers of people with dementia; and the increasing cost to families, carers, and the economy.

Dementia is the leading cause of disability among Australians over 65 and the second leading cause of death in Australia. In 2016, the direct costs alone of dementia were close to $9 billion in Australia, with a predicted increase to $12 billion by 2025.

Professor Anstey said the critical report highlights the prevalence of dementia in Australia, which doubles every five years between ages 70 and 84, and how our ageing population trends will result in greater numbers of people with dementia.

"Australia's ageing population is leading to an increasing number of Australians with the disease which will further impact individuals, society and the economy over the next decade," said Professor Anstey.

The report also found that the knowledge-base around the cause of dementia in the senior community varied greatly, raising the need for in-depth dementia awareness workshops and community involvement.

"While some detrimental attributing factors to dementia such as smoking and alcohol consumption were known, other factors connected to cognitive health were unknown to over 95% of the sample population," Professor Anstey said.

"This highlights the need for increased local community engagement and advocacy."

Anstey has estimated that close to 50% of dementia cases can be attributed to seven key modifiable lifestyle factors; midlife hypertension, diabetes, low educational attainment, smoking, physical inactivity, midlife obesity, and depression.

The impact of dementia goes far beyond individual health. The report noted there were direct, indirect and intangible costs of dementia for the wider society and significant indirect costs to Australia's economy. For example, dementia patients and those who care for them often have to withdraw from the workforce.

For someone with moderate dementia, the care hours are 17 per week on average, while severe cases involve hours similar to a full-time job. In 2016, the cost of foregone work hours was estimated to be $5.5 billion.

The report also brought attention to an under-researched area of cognitive ageingfinancial frailty. CEPAR Director, Scientia Professor John Piggott, said what was clear from the 2018 CEPAR report was that those with cognitive impairment were more susceptible to poor financial decision-making.

"Our retirement income system is very complex and requires a lot of active decisions. We are only beginning to think about how population ageing will affect the decision-making ability of older cohorts and what insights psychology and behavioural finance can bring," said Professor Piggott.

More than 400,000 Australians are currently living with dementia. These figures have been revised upward from past projections. More accurate projections of dementia rates out to 2030 are critical to enable government policy makers and community services to better plan for the impact of cognitive decline in the future.

Commenting on the outcomes of the report, Professor Anstey said further investment into ageing research is needed to identify more risk factors, adapt the workplace for older workers, and develop strategies to guide financial decision-making in older age.

"We need to develop better diagnostic tests and assessments, increase community education to ensure risk factors attributed to dementia are better managed, and support carers to reduce carer distress in the broader community," Professor Anstey said.

Explore further Report highlights scale of dementia epidemic in Africa

More information: Cognitive ageing and decline: Insights from recent research: Cognitive ageing and decline: Insights from recent research: www.neura.edu.au/neura-cepar/Important stuff you won't get from the liberal media! We do the surfing so you can be informed AND have a life!Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Ground Force commander warns Azerbaijan

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PM: Hayko was one of bright representatives of contemporary Armenian art of musicYEREVAN.  Fourth President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian will give his entire salary to charity. Hasmik Petrosyan, the person in charge of Sarkissians office, told this to Haykakan Zhamanak (Armenian Times; HZh) newspaper.

According to the latter [Petrosyan], Sarkissian has decided to get his salary and do charity [with it], but it is not clear yet as to which organizations the amount will be transferred to. (). Armen Sarkissian had turned down his salary also during his years of working as ambassador [to the UK].

To HZhs other questionWill Armen Sarkissian live in the [presidential] service apartment?Hasmik Petrosyan informed that, for now, he will live at his [own] home in the capital city [Yerevan].

The Presidents service house is located at the address of 74 Dzorap [Street] (). Also, he will have a state-owned summer residence in Sevan [town] (). He will be provided with a special motor vehicle. A personal doctor is set aside to track the Republic presidents health condition, wrote Haykakan Zhamanak.The ruling New Azerbaijan Party has announced incumbent Ilham Aliyevs victory in Wednesdays presidential election in the country, but without waiting for the voting results.

Accordingly, Aliyev will remain president of Azerbaijan for another seven years.

According to the partys data, consistent with the results as of Wednesday evening, 80 percent of voters cast their ballots in favor of the current President.

The Central Election Commission (CEC) of Azerbaijan, however, will announce the preliminary official results in the coming hours.

As per the CEC data, voter turnout was 74.51 percent.The US does not rule out the possible missile attack on Russian targets in Syria, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

According to her, the US President Donald Trump holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack.

Asked whether Washington consider Russia to be an enemy today, the press secretary did not give a definite answer.

Thats something that Russia needs to play a role in determining. We hope that they will continue  or not continue, Im sorry, to be a bad actor, and make some changes in their behavior. But thats something that Russia will have to play a role in determining, the statement reads.

As reported earlier, Syrian opposition activists, rescue workers and medics say at least 49 people dead and dozens more injured on Saturday in a suspected chemical attack on the Syrian city of Douma. The US President Donald Trump promised to take the decision over Syrian chemical attack within 48 hours. According to him, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Syria over the chemical attack on the Syrian city of Douma. Trump told Russia to get ready for a missile attack on Syria after Russian ambassador to Lebanon said any US missiles fired at Syria would be shot down. Russia rejects all accusations.

Trump tells Russia to get ready for missile attack on Syria

Trump offers Russia to stop arms race

Zakharova responds to Trumps warning to get ready for attack on SyriaYEREVAN.  We are closely following the sanctions being imposed on Russia, because Russia is our largest trading partner.

Suren Karayan, the acting Minister of Economic Development and Investments, said the abovementioned at a briefing after the Cabinet meeting of the government of Armenia.

In his words, fluctuations in the exchange rate of the Russian national currency, the ruble, may have the greatest impact on Armenia.

It doesnt pose any danger yet in the short term, stressed the acting minister. But we are following [the developments] as well as holding [respective] consultations with our Russian associates.

If necessary, the [Armenian] government will come up with its [relevant] mechanism for assistance [to Armenias exporters].

The Russian ruble has fallen sharply in recent days.The situation in Azerbaijan tends to be forgotten due to the Wests obsession with Putins Russia, but its regime is one of the most corrupt and authoritarian in the region, says an article on Foreign Policy which is co-authored by former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan, Richard Kauzlarich and US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, David J. Kramer.

According to them, the Azerbaijani 2018 election ctions in Azerbaijan can not be called real election in any sense of the word. Unlike Putins Russia and Aleksandr Lukashenkos Belarus, against which sanctions have been imposed for human rights abuses, Azerbaijan has escaped similar scrutiny from the United States and Europe. Azerbaijan has avoided sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act, too, which the Trump administration implemented for the first time last December. Thats because Baku benefits from being a significant oil producer and part of the northern supply route for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

"But the policy of quiet diplomacy has failed. By giving Aliyev a pass for so many years, the U.S. government has done no favors to the people of Azerbaijan or to U.S. interests in the region. The United States and other Western countries have become enablers of Aliyevs domestic policies, destroying any hope of democratic evolutionThe United States and other Western countries have become enablers of Aliyevs domestic policies, destroying any hope of democratic evolution, the advancement of human rights and religious freedom, the elimination of corruption, and the creation of a true strategic partnership with the United States," authors noted.

The calling of snap elections for president on April 11 and the suppression of serious opposition to his regime should be the final straw.

"These moves have revealed the charade practiced for over two decades in Azerbaijan to the detriment of the Azerbaijani people and the countrys image in the world. President Aliyev advanced the date of the presidential elections at a moment when more than 100 political prisoners remained under illegal arrest and detention," the article reads.

For all the rhetoric about economic reform and diversification, Azerbaijan remains a Soviet-style economyFor all the rhetoric about economic reform and diversification, Azerbaijan remains a Soviet-style economy dominated by state- or oligarch-owned enterprises responding to presidential orders rather than market forces.

"The Aliyev government has yet to account for over $120 billion in earnings from offshore energy development. Prestige construction projects line the pockets of elites and their families, giving them villas on the Caspian seashore or high-end apartments in London while average Azerbaijanis live in substandard housing with inadequate medical care and poor education for their children. Azerbaijans leaders are looking out for themselves, not the country as a whole.

In the run-up to the elections, Aliyevs government has also been beating the drums of war with Armenia. Large-scale, live-fire maneuvers continue, and the government has even labeled Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, part of Azerbaijan in an effort to rally citizens around the flag, just as Putin did with interventions in Ukraine and Syria," the authors of the article summed up.Extraordinary presidential elections in Azerbaijan took place in an atmosphere of restriction of the basic rights and freedoms that are necessary for a truly democratic election campaign, stated international observers from the OSCE, the OSCE PA and PACE at a press conference in Baku on April 12. The international mission included short-term OSCE observers, a long-term mission of the OSCE/ODIHR, delegations of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assemblies and the OSCE, contact.az reported.

Against the backdrop of restricting rights and in the absence of pluralism, including the media, there was no genuine competition in the elections. The candidates refrained from direct contestation or criticism of the incumbent president. At the same time, there was no difference between the election campaign and the activities of the president, according to a statement by international observers.

On election day, observers noted massive ignoring of mandatory procedures, lack of transparency and numerous serious violations, including massive ballot stuffing into ballot boxes.

More than half of the vote counts by observers were assessed "negatively, due to deliberate falsifications and obvious disregard for the procedures."

Reading the text of the statement, Nils de Sena, head of the OSCE short-term observation mission, called on the authorities to "carefully review the recommendations that the ODIHR will make in its final report."

The elections took place under the dominance of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party (NAP). The opposition boycotted the elections due to a non-competitive environment and lack of time.

The campaign of the ruling party was provided with resources, and the candidate himself made visits throughout the country and hosted high-ranking guests. But the campaigns of the remaining seven candidates were limited, and they did not have regional structures and resources, she noted.

"In a political environment where democratic principles are compromised and the rule of law is not respected, fair and free elections are impossible," said Viorel Riceard Badea, head of the PACE delegation. "On election day, we observed violations, but it is difficult to say how this affected the outcome of the elections," he added.

Restrictive laws restrict freedom of expression and the press, including websites and social networks. Defamation is a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment and additional sanctions for insulting the president. "A few weeks of campaigning during which candidates could present their views on TV cannot compensate for years, during which restrictions on freedom of expression were drowned out by political debates," said Margareta Kiener Nellen, head of the OSCE PA delegation.

"The fundamental rights and freedoms that are prerequisites for genuinely democratic elections are in practice severely limited," said Corien Jonker, head of the long-term OSCE/ODIHR mission. "The authorities must fulfill the obligations of Azerbaijan as a member state of the OSCE to respect, protect and support the democratic rights of its citizens," she said.

This was the first presidential election since the constitutional amendments in 2016 further increased the authority of the president. A number of constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights and freedoms related to elections are subject to restrictions in practice. None of the priority recommendations of the ODIHR and the Venice Commission was accepted by the authorities, the mission statement concluded.

The statement of the mission members was interrupted by the cries and aggressive actions of the supporters of the authorities in the person of members of the Press Council and NGOs working with the authorities.

So, the editor of the newspaper "Iki Sahil" Vugar Rahimzade called the conclusion of the mission - "an insult to the Azerbaijani people, written on the order of anti-Azerbaijani forces and far from reality."

He gave a lecture for a long time about the achievements of Azerbaijan and the hostile activities of certain circles served by international observers.

He was echoed by the editor of the newspaper "Syas" Bahruz Guliyev, who demanded to provide evidence of the violations mentioned in the report. "You brought with you a ready report written by the enemies of Azerbaijan," he said in conclusion.

After listening to the emotional statements of the supporters of the authorities, the mission members noted that all the facts and conclusions will be presented in the final report of the mission. In the meantime, we can say that 12% of the polling stations recorded very serious violations. On a number of sites, international observers were subjected to pressure and could not work.

In Azerbaijan, they block websites, put journalists who expose corruption of the authorities, the media work only on the authorities - all these are indicators of bias. According to the CEC, you have one number of voters, and according to State Statistical Committee, another. The authorities create the privileges of their party and actively use students for propaganda purposes. All this says and does not correspond to international standards and commitments that Azerbaijan voluntarily accepted and invited us to evaluate the elections according to these standards, Nils De Sena said in conclusion.The leadership of the Congressional Armenian Caucus called on their U.S. House colleagues to join them in pressing President Donald Trump to honestly and accurately commemorating the Armenian Genocide this April 24.

The Armenian Genocide continues to stand as an important reminder that crimes against humanity must not go without recognition and condemnation, they said in a letter to Trump.

Armenias ruling party said Serzh Sargsyan is their candidate for a seat of the Prime Minister.

Speaking after a meeting of the Republican Party of Armenia on Wednesday, the spokesperson for the party Eduard Sharmzanov said there were omissions and shortcomings during Serzh Sargsyan's presidency, however, it is obvious that Armenia of 2008 differs greatly from Armenia of 2018.

No other candidacy was discussed, Sharmazanov said.

U.S. President Donald Trump has not yet decided when the attack on Syria will take place.

On Thursday Trump tweeted that an American attack could come very soon or not so soon at all.

Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Theresa May summoned ministers to an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss possible response. According to some sources, May is expected to join military actions without the prior parliament consent.

President of France Emmanuel Macron said he would decide on the attack when they gather all the necessary information on chemical attack in Syria. Angela Merkel, in turn, said Germany would not join any military actions.

Armenia is closely following the sanctions being imposed on Russia, because Russia is our largest trading partner, acting economic development minister Sergey Karayan said after the Cabinet meeting.

Fluctuations in the exchange rate of the Russian ruble may have the greatest impact on Armenia, he said. If necessary, the Armenian government will come up with its mechanism for assistance to Armenias exporters, Karayan assured.

The ruling New Azerbaijan Party has announced incumbent Ilham Aliyevs victory in Wednesdays presidential election in the country, but without waiting for the voting results. The election commission later said that Aliyev polled 86 percent of votes.

A scandal erupted during a press conference of OSCE/ODIHR observers. A group of pro-government reporters and representatives of the regime stirred up a scandal when the observers spoke about numerous violations recorded during the elections.

Real Madrid and Bayern Munich advanced to the semifinals of the Champions League.

Real lost to Juventus 1-3, but won on aggregate (4-3). Bayern Munich played at home against Sevilla, but no goals were scored. The German champions, however, made it to the semifinals thanks to their 2-1 first-leg win in Spain.Home | News | General | Customs Unit remits N1.6bn to federation account in three weeks

Impounds Indian hemp, 64 exotic cars, 10 trailers of rice, others

By Godfrey Bivbere

lagosThe Federal Operations Unit, FOU zone A of the Nigeria Customs Service, NCS yesterday said it had generated N1.6 billion into the federation account in the last three weeks.

According to the Customs Area Controller, CAC of the Unit, Garba Uba Mohammed, the Unit also impounded 570 parcels and 98 sacks of Indian Hemp (Cannabis Sativa) weighing 1,550 kilograms, 6003 bags of rice which is equivalent of 10 trailers of imported rice, 64 exotic cars, 963 cartons of frozen poultry products, 431 jerry cans of vegetable oil, second hand cloths and other items.

He equally informed that 10 suspects had been arrested in connection with the seizures.

Speaking with journalists in Lagos, Mohammed said that the Unit between 19th of March and 9th of April intercepted various contraband goods with Duty Paid Value, DPV, of over N1.461 billion.

He noted that the Unit recovered N116.207 million as duty payments and Demand Notices, DN on general goods from seaports, airports and border stations through wrong classification, transfer of value and short change in duty payments meant for the coffers of the federal government.

According to the Customs boss, Among the 13 detained vehicles are one Toyota Land cruiser (2018), one Escalade Cardillac (2017), one Range Rover (2014), three Toyota Camry (2009, 2010 and 2017 models), one Toyota Rav 4, one Toyota Highlander (2014), one Honda CRV, one Honda Accord, one BMW Salon car, one Toyota Sienna, one Hyundai, among others.

The vehicles are still under detention pending the grace period allowed for the owners to bring relevant Customs document. The interception was done while on information patrol at various locations within our areas of jurisdiction. These 13 detained exotic vehicles alone have a DPV of over N258 million.

It will interest you to know that among the detained vehicles in our previous briefing, 64 of them have been converted to seizure after all necessary legal procedures were followed within the week under review, awaiting Court condemnation.

Additionally, four containers 3 x 40 feet and I x 20 feet were seized for different Customs breaches in the importation process. The I x 20 feet container no: CSNU 106087/4 carried 2,260 cartoons of Gonca Spagetti made in turkey and 530 package of Rifle Energy drinks made in Europe as against baking powder declared in the Single Goods Declaration, SGD.

Further investigation revealed that the container was never exited, we are still investigating and all those, found culpable will face the full wrath of the law. While I x 40feet container no: PCIU 865957/l was seized for carrying 200 cartons of ladies shoes, 134 cartons of children among other items as against keyboard and mouse declared in the SGD, Ix40ft container no: FCIU 80992/0 was seized for carrying 2300 cartons of tiffany chocolate, 385 cartons of tiffany crunch and cream biscuit.

as against Tapet for fuel pump complete. These are clear cases of false declarations, liable to seizure and forfeiture, he stated.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | $1bn for security equipment to fight Boko Haram

The problem stems from misinformation on the part of the government. At a time, they stated that Boko Haram had been degraded. Later, they told us that it had been technically defeated. So, the public is wondering why a government that said it had defeated the sect, needs $1bn to fight the same sect it claimed to have defeated.

Olaolu Oladipo, Analyst

Nigerian Army

Having claimed to have fought Boko Haram to a standstill, what do they need the fund for? I am sure they are looking for money to finance the 2019 election. It is an equivalent of N360bn, which can be used to reduce the rate of unemployment in the country.

Mr. Henry Ohanugo, Businessman

If the money is what is needed to defeat Boko Haram, the government should go ahead with its plan. The truth is that we cannot totally condemn the governments action. Since the funds are needed for the good of the country, there is no problem about that.

Anthony Olajuwon, Self-employed

Questioning the $1bn for security equipment is not necessary. I am not sure it will specifically be used in the fight against Boko Haram. However, from a historical perspective, Nigerian governments always do anything whenever an election approaches. What Nigerians need to focus on is grassroots mobilisation that could be effective enough to elect people who would govern selflessly for the common good.

David Lanre Lijadu, analyst

It is very necessary considering the nature of anti-insurgency war required to defeat Boko Haram. All hands must be on deck in the fight against insurgency.

Nelson Ekujumi, Self-employed

I suspect that some people are making money from the Boko Haram issue. It is now a commercial venture. It has become an ATM machine for some people. I cannot be convinced that there is no relationship between the 2019 election and the $1bn.

Oyakunle Michael, Self-employed

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | Urhoghide to FG: Dont ignore Danjumas call for self defence

By Gabriel Enogholase

BENINCHAIRMAN of the Senate Committee on Appropriation, Senator Matthew Urhoghide, has advised the Federal Government not to discountenance the call by former Minister of Defence, General Theophilus Danjuma (retd), to Nigerians to defend themselves against attack by herdsmen, but should study the import of the statement.

He spoke with newsmen in Benin City, Edo State, yesterday while reacting to sundry issues affecting the country.

He said: First and foremost, General Danjuma is a citizen of this country and of course his rights and privileges are completely protected by provisions of our constitution, his fundamental rights are protected, so he is entitled to his opinions.

It is another thing to consider the merit of the statement. But I want to say that as a responsible Nigerian, General Danjumas statement cannot be discountenanced. A government worth its salt should investigate the full import of such statement and see how relevant it is with respect to contemporary happenings in Nigeria when it comes to the question of insurrection and insurgency.

Government should look at it more closely because this is somebody who is not overtly partisan, he is an objective and responsible citizen of this country, so he knows what he is talking about.

All the things are seeing still point to the fact that these were things that were predicted about our country that by 2015, Nigeria would have disintegrated, whether it is by an international conspiracy or by an internal conspiracy.

By virtue of our ethnic nationalities, we are now wanting to go apart or international conspiracy is capitalizing on our diversity along the lines of ethnic nationalities and wants to divide us. Government must be aware at all times that its responsibility is to put us together, if really we are honest and want to live as one country.

So what has been happening in the Boko Haram issue that started like childs play, after Boko Haram, we are talking about herdsmen. What do we mean by herdsmen? A herder is somebody who take cattle, who is doing his animal farming, that is a herder. We read about the Fulanis in history many years ago, cattle Fulani as a Nigerian has always been known that it is his occupation but are you really saying that these people who are natural cattle Fulani are the ones we are calling herdsmen?

Are they really the ones or people who disguise and are armed to the teeth with sophisticated weapons, disguising as the cattle Fulani or that you now call herdsmen that are causing this mayhem across the country? Have you really wondered the cruelty in the killing of Nigerians by these people, do they have any natural relationships with Nigerians? That is another thing.

 So, when you are killing a woman that is pregnant, tearing her abdomen and bringing the child out and killing the child with vexation, it only means it is more than what we know.?

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | NAF begins medical outreach in Rann, as NGOs withdraw following Boko Haram attacks (photos)

- The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) has commenced a 3-day medical and surgical outreach for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)

- The programme commenced on Tuesday, April 10 in Rann IDP camp, Borno state

- The medical outreach would last till Friday, April 13

The Nigerian Air Force (NAF), on Tuesday, April 10, commenced a 3-day medical and surgical outreach for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Rann IDP camp, Borno state.

NAIJ.com gathered that the medical outreach, which would last till Friday, April 13, was initiated by the NAF leadership to avoid humanitarian catastrophe due to the recent withdrawal of humanitarian services by Non-Governmental Organisations from Rann, following the recent attack by remnants of Boko Haram terrorists.

Locals receiving mosquito treated nets from NAF medical officers during the outreach for IDPs in Rann. Photo credit: NAF

The outreach which is at the instance of the Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar, would provide free primary healthcare and curative services, medicated glasses, mass deworming as well as general and eye surgeries.

OPINION: Nigerian Army still proving its strength on the counter-insurgency campaigns by Richard Murphy

Over 3,350 IDPs are expected to benefit from the outreach. Photo credit: NAF

According to a statement sent to NAIJ.com by the NAF spokesman, Air Vice Marshal Olatokunbo Adesanya, treated mosquito nets would also be distributed to the IDPs as the outreach is projected to cater for over 3,350 IDPs while between 40 and 65 would benefit from surgeries.

On the first day of the medical outreach, patients with major complications that required surgeries were airlifted by the NAF Agusta 109 LUH Helicopter to the NAFs 105 Composite Group in Maiduguri.

So far, 9 IDPs had benefitted from general surgeries while 8 others also benefitted from eye surgeries, all at no cost to the beneficiaries, the statement said.

Those with major complications were flown to the NAF hospital in Maiduguri. Photo credit: NAF

While speaking during the outreach programme, the Chief of Medical Services, Headquarters NAF, Air Vice Marshal Saleh Shinkafi, noted that medical and surgical interventions were part of NAFs humanitarian gesture to the IDPs towards ameliorating their health challenges and giving them the opportunity to live normal and productive lives again.

Some of the beneficiaries expressed their profound appreciation to the CAS for the show of love and urged other organisations and well-spirited individuals to emulate the NAF.

Some of the beneficiaries of the eye surgery at the hospital. Photo credit: NAF

The programme is expected to go a long way in wining the hearts and minds of the locals, who were displaced from their ancestral homes by the Boko Haram.

READ ALSO: Boko Haram: Nigerian Army rotates 3,000 troops in Operation Lafiya Dole

Meanwhile, special forces of the NAF, in conjunction with some Nigerian army troops, successfully foiled a bombing attack by Boko Haram terrorists at the University of Maiduguri, Borno state on the night of Sunday, April 8.

According to a statement sent to NAIJ.com by NAF's spokesman, Air Vice Marshal Olatokunbo Adesanya, the terrorists tried to gain access into the university but were quickly detected by the NAF special forces.

Nigerian Air Force operations against Boko Haram on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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The Kaduna state police command has named Senator Shehu Sani as a person of interest in an ongoing investigation relating to a case of criminal conspiracy and culpable murder.

Premium Times reports that the police commissioner in the state, Austin Iwar, has asked the senator to appear on April 30 at the command headquarters in Kaduna for questioning over the issue.

This is in connection with a case of criminal conspiracy and culpable homic1de transferred to this office by 1 Division, Nigerian Army, Kaduna, alongside with exhibit audio CD in which your name was mentioned by the principal suspect," the Kaduna state police commissioner stated in a letter addressed to Senator Sani.

Iwar said the invite is to enable the police fairly and timely conclude investigation into the matter.

The letter from the police was reportedly delivered to the senator through the clerk of the National Assembly, while copy of the letter was also forwarded to Senate President Bukola Saraki.

The police commissioner has insisted that the case against the senator was not politically motivated.

A case was transferred to me and I am handling the case, Iwar said when asked by Premium Times.

The matter is currently under investigation and we dont think we have reached a stage yet where we could inform the public about it, he added.

The police said the senator will not be detained if he honoured the invitation, adding that Sani would have picked him up at the Senate if the police had any intention of arresting him.

However, the senator has accused the Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, planning to frame him up with a murder case.

There is an attempt to frame me up with a murder case by the Kaduna State Government using the police. A letter has been written from the office of the Commissioner of Police office but it has not been delivered to us, he said on Thursday, April 12.

This is a case that is before the court of law. The governor wrote the judge expressing his interest in the case.

Meanwhile, the Senate has suspended Ovie Omo-Agege, an All Progressives Congress (APC) Senator from Delta state, for 90 legislative days.

The upper legislative chamber took the decision after it considered a report by its ethics committee, The Cable reports.

The committee had recommended that the senator be suspended for 181 days but the senate reduced it after pleas from lawmakers. Omo-Agege was one of the senators who kicked against the election reordering bill.

Although, he apologised for his stand he still went to the court to get a restraining order against any move by the senate to suspend him.

Lets talk about salaries of Nigerian senators | NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | Corps members will be posted to farms as part of primary assignment - NYSC coordinator

- NYSC FCT coordinator, Bello Ballama, says the scheme is putting all its farms in good condition in readiness for corps members to commence its use

- He says some employers still rejects corps members

- Female NYSC member is in detention for alleged fraud

The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) says it will include farming and crop production as part of the one year primary assignment for corps members from the next service year.

Bello Ballama, the NYSC FCT coordinator, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Thursday, The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.

He said that the move was to help address corps rejection by some corps employers through the engagement of more corps members in all aspects of farming and crop production.

READ ALSO: Police reportedly name Senator Shehu Sani as a person of interest in murder case

The coordinator said that the move was also aimed at boosting the NYSC Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) Programme.

Ballam said the scheme was therefore putting all its farms in good condition in readiness for corps members to commence its use.

Corps members will be involved in all aspects of farming and crop production.

This will not only support skills acquisition of NYSC but also governments plan of boosting agricultural production to improve self-reliance and achieve national growth and development.

From this 2018 Batch A Stream I set of corps members who are commencing orientation on April 19, we are going to look into all the farm formations and centres to be able to post corps members there.

We have farms in the FCT and many other states of the country; the present leadership of the scheme is poised to ensuring the revival of all NYSC facilities including the farms.

The NYSC is faced with the challenge of engaging the increasing number of corps members mobilised every year.

PAY ATTENTION: Read the best news on Nigerias #1 news app

We therefore, have to take proactive steps towards achieving our mandate and supporting the federal governments plans for youth development, he said.

He said that the scheme was still faced with the challenge of corps members being rejected by organisations they were posted to carry out their one year primary assignment.

The coordinator said that in spite of discussion the scheme had with corps employers not to reject corps members, the NYSC was still faced with the problem every year.

He said that some corps employers do not provide accommodation and transportation to corps members who are left to suffer harsh living conditions.

We have held a workshop with corps employers and have interacted with them and we look forward to a better relationship and working environment for corps members in the next year,he said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the NYSC had stated that the scheme would adopt agriculture as the major job creator for corps members.

NAN also reports that some of the farms owned and run by the scheme are located in Benue, Plateau, FCT among other states.

Meanwhile, the Gombe zonal office of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has arraigned one Maduako Ugonma Chinomso before Justice Abubakar Jauro of the state high court on two count charge bordering on conspiracy and obtaining money by false pretence.

Madueke, a serving corps member posted to Kaduna and later redeployed to Akwa Ibom state was reportedly arrested at Uyo by the EFCC operatives following a petition by one Yusuf Idris of Tumfure quarters in Gombe stated.

According to the EFCC, the petitioner stated that on March 21, 2017, the defendant and others, now at large, conspired and obtained the sum of N63,000 under false pretence that the said sum was to secure a job for him with the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) which they never did.

The EFCC stage a walk against corruption on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | House of Rep orders recall of suspended NEMA directors, accuse agency's boss of squandering N3.1billion

- The House of the Representatives has continued its spotlight on the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA)

- The lower house has ordered that the suspended directors of the agency be recalled

- The House had earlier accused the Director General of NEMA, Engineer Mustapha Yunusa Maihaja, of corruption

The House of the Representatives has ordered an immediate recall of directors of NEMA suspended by the governing council of the agency on a purported recommendation of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

NAIJ.com gathered that the affected officers recalled are Director of Finance and Accounts, Akinbola Gbolahan; Ag. Director, Special Duties, Mr. Umesi Emenike; and Director, Risk Reduction, Mallam Alhassan Nuhu.

Others are pilot in charge of Air Ambulance and Aviation Unit, Mr. Mamman Ali Ibrahim; the Chief Maintenance Officer, Mr. Ganiyu Yunusa Deji; and the Director of Welfare, Mr. Kanar Mohammed.

The NEMA boss continues to face the heat from parliament due to his activities in the agency. Photo source: Twitter

READ ALSO: Presidency says protesters in London are agents of looters

The House while ordering that the officials be immediately reinstated back to their former offices posited that Nigeria's civil service rule was grossly abused, and natural justice turned upside down in the way and manner the directors were placed on suspension.

Deputy Chairman of the House committee on emergency and disaster preparedness, Honourable Ali Isa gave the order today, Thursday, April 12 during the continuation of an investigative hearing on breach of public trust brought against NEMA and its boss, Engineer Maihaja.

The House committee agreed that the affected officers have been denied fair hearing as required by law before they were sent out of their offices.

Meanwhile, for the second time in 24 hours, the House uncovered another contract scandal involving a whopping sum of N3.1billion in NEMA.

The money was said to have been approved and released for the agency by the office of the Accountant General of the Federation for procurement of rice for the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the north-east region of the country being ravaged by the deadly activities of Boko Haram insurgents.

At the continuation of the alleged breach of public trust in NEMA by the House committee, the NEMA boss was found to have expended the huge sum on companies that have no legal qualifications to get contract awards from the federal government.

Two of the companies Olam Limited a foreign firm and Three Brothers Rice Mill were said to have been award huge rice supply contract without meeting the pre-qualification conditions.

Apart from the contract scandal, the House committee also uncovered that only 110 containers out of 271 containers of rice donated to IDPs by the Chinese government have so far been cleared at the port since July last year when the donation was made.

The committee specifically took a swipe at the NEMA DG for paying over N400 million as demurrage on 110 rice containers due to the delay by the inefficiency of NEMA.

The committee members were visibly upset with the NEMA boss over his claim that documents relating to the rice donation by the Chinese have been scattered and tampered with by unknown persons.

The committee was also angry with Maihaja that he expended as much as N400 million taxpayers fund on the demurrage on the rice due to the long delay in clearing the containers by his office.

The committee therefore ordered Maihaja to go back to his office and get all relevant documents relating to the rice donation and bring them to the committee to enable the lawmakers take appropriate steps that would facilitate the evacuation of the huge quantity of rice from the Lagos port to the north-east where they are needed to feed the IDPs.

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The committee had on Wednesday, April 11, accused Maihaja of mismanaging N1.6 billion released to the agency by the Federal Government in July 2017 for relief intervention to flood victims in 16 states.

According to the lower house, the huge sum was expended on contracts awarded to 216 companies that were not qualified for contract awards in the country.

The EFCC stage a walk against corruption on NAIJ.com TV

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | Breaking: Prepare to pack out of government house - Shehu Sani tells El Rufai

Senator Shehu Sani has declared his intention to contest for the Kaduna state governorship election.

The Senator representing Kaduna central made his intention known on Thursday, April 12, when accusing the Kaduna state governor, Nasir El Rufai, of conspiring with the Nigerian police in an attempt to blackmail him.

In a Facebook post written in Hausa but translated by NAIJ.com to English, the lawmaker alleged that he had received a report about conspiracy being cooked by the Kaduna state governor against him and insisted that the conspiracy will fail.

READ ALSO: Breaking: Senate suspends Omo-Agege for 90 days, disbands Buhari support group in the House

Sani asked Nasiru El-RufaI to prepare to pack out of the government house. The lawmaker alleged that the autocratic government oppressing the poor people of Kaduna state has come to an end.

Read Senator Sani's post below:

NAIJ.com had earlier reported that the Kaduna state police command named Senator Shehu Sani as a person of interest in an ongoing investigation relating to a case of criminal conspiracy and culpable murder.

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The police commissioner in the state, Austin Iwar, has asked the senator to appear on April 30 at the command headquarters in Kaduna for questioning over the issue.

Iwar said the invite is to enable the police fairly and timely conclude investigation into the matter.

The letter from the police was reportedly delivered to the senator through the clerk of the National Assembly, while copy of the letter was also forwarded to Senate President Bukola Saraki.

The police commissioner has insisted that the case against the senator was not politically motivated.

Lets talk about salaries of Nigerian senators | NAIJ.com TV

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | Senate investigates renewed oil well agitation in Kogi, Enugu, Anambra

Abuja  The Senate has mandated its Committee on Petroleum (Upstream) to investigate alleged renewed agitation over ownership of oil wells being claimed by Kogi, Anambra and Enugu states.



This followed a Point-of-Order raised by Sen. Chukwuka Utazi (Enugu-PDP) at plenary on Thursday.

Referring to Order 43, the lawmaker alleged that Anambra Government had used one of its appointees, Mr Prince Emu, to grant an interview, stating that Anambra was an oil-producing state.

Utazi said that the Federal Government realised that it was an error for former President Goodluck Jonathans administration to refer to Anambra as oil-producing state and withdrew the status.

According to him, withdrawal of ownership status from Anambra follows the fact that the state has not been confirmed as oil-producing.

He sought the intervention of the Upper Chamber in the matter to stem brewing crisis among the three states laying claim to the oil wells.

Utazi said, President and distinguished colleagues, the oil producing status on Anambra state has since been withdrawn.

This is already brewing violence among communities laying claim to the oil wells.

We know what we did in the past to restore peace among those warring communities and election period is around the corner and we do not want any crisis.

In his contribution, Sen. Andy Uba (Anambra-APC) insisted that Anambra was an oil producing state, saying what my colleague, Utazi, is saying is not correct.

They said any state that produces 120,000 barrels of oil per day is qualified as an oil-producing state and that is why Anambra was conferred with that status.

In his remarks, President of the Senate, Dr Bukola Saraki, referred the matter to the Committee on Petroleum (Upstream) with an order to turn in its report in two weeks.(NAN)

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | Death Toll Rises To 41 In Fresh Benue Attack As Armed Men Strike Villages Overnight

The death toll from the fresh attack on innocent people in Benue State, has now reportedly risen to forty-one.

Armed intruders have struck again in Benue, one of the troubled states experiencing deadly attacks and destruction of properties in central Nigeria, killing 41 villagers in simultaneous assaults overnight, residents and officials have told Premium Times.

Residents who informed Premium Times in separate exchanges between Thursday morning and afternoon said the killings occurred in two communities in Logo and Ukum Local Government Areas, Benue State.

The residents also said the death toll may rise sharply in the coming hours, as more bodies are still being removed from nearby bushes.

The attacks come a day after 10 people were killed by gunmen said to be wearing military uniform.

The first attack happened in Tse Hwer in Ukemberyge/Tsweray Council Ward in Logo Local Government around 6:30 p.m. to this morning, said a senior state government official who did not want to be named, saying he had been warned by federal authorities for talking to the media in the past. Some people are saying their families are missing, but we havent been able to confirm how many exactly.

The victims were said to be two men and one woman.

When they arrived at about 6:00 p.m. in Jande-Ikyura in Ukum Local Government Area, the gunmen appeared determined to wipe out the entire community, said a resident of the area who said he had been to the village Thursday morning to witness the aftermath. Jande-Ikyura is a border community between Ukum LGA in Benue and Wukari Local Government Area in Taraba State.

It was like they wanted to be sure that all the villagers were killed before they would run back to their hideouts, said 48-year-old Isaac Ihiev. They killed 22 people who were living there.

Mr Ihiev said three of the attackers who were killed when some youth responded to the assault were found in military uniform.

Three of them were killed and they dressed like soldiers when their bodies were moved out from the bush, Mr Ihiev said, adding that he lives in a nearby village that falls under Wukari LGA in Taraba State.

He said efforts were underway to find the missing people. Mr Ihiev had mistakenly described Jande-Ikyura as being in Wukari LGA due to its proximity, but government officials have now clarified this confusion to Premium Times.

A resident of Zaki Biam, seat of Ukum LGA, who arrived at the scene around 12:15 p.m. told Premium Times the corpses have risen to 41 as at 2:09 p.m. Thursday, and still raised fears the number could unavoidably rise.

According to Premium Times, the claims could not be independently verified as at 2:49 p.m. Thursday, but they have a history of raising alarms about their ordeal that would later be corroborated by security agencies.

Terver Akase, a spokesperson for Governor Samuel Ortom, said he had heard of the killings and expressed sadness about the shocking death toll.

David Akinremi, the police commissioner in Taraba, and his Benue counterpart, Fatai Owoseni, did not immediately return Premium Times requests for comments about the attacks early Thursday afternoon.

Emmanuel Bello, a spokesperson for Governor Darius Ishaku, said news of the killings had spread to Jalingo, Taraba State capital.

He, however, said he didnt have all the details as yet. He said a military panel probing alleged complicity by soldiers in the ongoing killings has arrived the state and is sitting in Jalingo.

The killings come two weeks after the Nigerian Army ended Exercise Ayem Akpatuma and withdrew troops from the villages in Benue, Kogi and Taraba, despite pleas from residents that doing so would expose them to wanton killings by gunmen.

Although the Army denied withdrawing the troops, residents across three states insist there is no evidence to show that the exercise was extended as announced, and Premium Times requests to the Army for the location of the troops participating in the exercise were rebuffed. The residents, including a local government chairman, told Premium Times the troops left their villages on March 31, exactly the same day the exercise was initially billed to end.

***

Note: Apart from the updates of the killings, this story has been corrected to reflect that the scene of one of the attacks, Jande-Ikyura, is in Benue and not Taraba State).

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralOver 120 members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) across six states could not join their colleagues who passed out from the scheme.

Thousands of corps members, part of the 2017 Batch A stream 1, passed out in ceremonies held across Nigeria on Thursday.

However, the over 120 members had their service year extended for various offences.

Some of the affected corps members are to repeat the entire year for absconding from service while others will stay back for periods ranging from two weeks to three months, truancy and other offences.

Those repeating the scheme include 23 in Lagos, 19 in Delta, 13 in Ondo, 10 in Ogun and another 10 in Osun.

The Ondo State NYSC Coordinator, Grace Akpabio, at the passing out parade for the corps members in Akure said the corps members were sanctioned for breaching the schemes rules and regulations.

She said 2,088 corps members completed the scheme in the state, with three of them receiving state awards for outstanding performance.

Mrs. Akpabio charged the members who have successfully completed the scheme to be creative so as to be self-employed in the face of the economic realities.

Permit me to stress that gone are the days of being expectant of a life-time job immediately after service, she said.

It is deception of oneself if you think along that line, it is better for you to brace up and think of what you can do yourself.

Do not align with people that put up attitude as if creative thinking and individual initiative ended with graduation, this is absolutely wrong.

The state governor, Oluwarotimi Akeredolu, in his address to the corps members, congratulated them on their successful service to their fatherland.

The governor who was represented by the Secretary to the State Government, Ifedayo Abegunde, charged them to be creative and entrepreneurial in the pursuit of their goals.

He also urged the corps members to apply the knowledge and experiences they had garnered in the course of their service year in order to be effective and productive in their future endeavours.

In Anambra, the coordinator, Ebenezer Olawale, said that of the 2,814 corps members posted to the state, 2,801 satisfied the requirements of service and were accordingly issued discharge certificates.

The state coordinator said seven members won the Governors Award while five won the Chairmans Award and 13 went home with the State Coordinators Award.

He prayed for the repose of the souls of one corps member and a staff of the NYSC in the state who died during the service year.

The state coordinator wished the discharged members well as they moved into the larger society.

We are, indeed grateful to Gov. Willie Obiano and the people of Anambra for their support to the scheme and enabling environment that contributed to our success story today, he said.

Fourteen outstanding corps members were presented State Honours Award and cash prizes in Lagos State.

Momammed Momoh, the state coordinator, also announced the death of three members during the passing-out parade of the corps members at the NYSC Orientation Camp, Iyana-Ipaja, Lagos.

Mr Momoh said that the awardees received cash prizes ranging from N150,000 to N200,000.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the awardees include 11 corps members of the 2016 Batch A and B  and three corps members in the 2017 Batch A, Stream I.

On a sad note, we lost three corps members of this batch to the cold hands of death. May their souls rest in peace and may God give their families the fortitude to bear the losses, he said.

He said that 4,876 corps members successfully completed their service.

Mr Momoh said six corps members received chairmans commendation while 20 corps members got the state coordinators attestation.

Just as NYSC recognises and rewards excellence, the scheme also punishes corps members, who breach its rules and guidelines.

I wish, therefore, to report that 23 corps members absconded from service and they are to repeat the service.

Seventeen others are to serve various periods of extension of service.

Mr Momoh said that the successful corps members contributed their quotas to the overall development of Nigeria through their primary assignments and various community development services.

He said that the contributions were in the areas of education, healthcare and constructions.

Mr Momoh commended E-Insurance Solutions Centre Ltd., Ikoyi, for sending four corps members to Kenya for training and employing two of them after their service.

In his address, Governor Akinwunmi Ambode commended the corps members for their contributions to the development of the state.

Mr. Ambode was represented by Oluseye Oladejo, Lagos State Commissioner for Special Duties and Inter-Governmental Relations.

He listed areas where the corps members made their marks to include education, health, sensitisation and awareness campaign against child abuse/domestic violence, drug abuse and HIV/AIDS.

Nigeria is looking forward to you as future leaders that have been equipped with what it takes to achieve the vision of a stronger, more secure, stable and prosperous nation.

As you prepare to commence another phase of livelihood, I urge you to keep in mind the lesson of this programme, which is the awareness and appreciation of the diversity of your nation, Mr Ambode said.

In Osun, 2,086 outgoing corps members participated at the ceremony.

Emmanuel Attah, the NYSC Coordinator implored them to be committed to a lifelong service of rebuilding Nigeria as well as make use of their skills, intellect and development to better the lives of people around them.

The state Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, in his farewell address, urged the corps members to be self-reliant and not to wait for white collar jobs.

The governor who was represented by his Deputy, Grace Laoye-Tomori, also charged them to arm themselves with skills gained in the course of the service year as they stepped into the larger society.

Do not yield to frustrations and desperation orchestrated by scourge of unemployment and youthful restlessness but stay tuned to your course.

Be discipline, accountable and patient and not be in a hurry to achieve in a day what will take years to achieve.

Shun every temptation to do those things of which you and your family and the nation will not be proud of, he said.

The 19 corps members repeating the exercise in Delta State were accused of absconding from their service-year programme and would repeat it whenever they presented themselves to the authority.

The State Coordinator, Benjamin Omotade, said 16 others would have their service year extended for between two weeks and four months.

He, however, said three corps members who distinguished themselves in their primary places of assignment during the service year had been selected for recognition and awards.

He said that two who belonged to Stream 1 would receive the Chairmans Award while one would be conferred with the state Honours Award during the 2017 Batch A Stream 11 passing out.

He advised the corps members to go home and re-unite with their families after a meritorious service to the nation.

Governor Ifeanyi Okowa admonished the corps members not to be deterred by security challenges and unemployment.

The governor was represented by the Commissioner for Youth Development, Oghenejaro Ilolo.

He said that their participation and experience in the scheme was to equip them with the necessary skills and strategies for survival as adults in a competitive world.

Governor Ibikunle Amosun in Ogun called on corps members to always imbibe the ideals of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) everywhere they find themselves.

Mr Amosun made the call at the passing-out parade held at the M.K.O Abiola International Stadium, Abeokuta.

The governor, who made a surprise entry at the event having already delegated a representative, inspired the youth to aspire to be the best they could be.

I am here today because I see you as leaders in your own right and because of the exemplary report I got of your stewardship during your service year.

I have been reliably informed that you have not only upheld the track record of your predecessors, but surpassed them in every way possible.

I therefore advise our youths to leverage on our worthy endeavours in the interest of the nation and for the sake of the future.

Let the long-standing experience and training you have had in your different institutions and places of assignment continue to reflect in your lives and interactions.

In doing this, we would create a more formidable and unified basis for articulating and executing more enduring policies which will ultimately draw youths away from self-destructive activities.

Even as we approach the electioneering period, I urge you not to lend yourselves as instruments of violence, he said.

Mr Amosun further urged the youth to build on the personal development they acquired during the service year in pursuit of their life goals.

One opportunity opened to you is entrepreneurship which has become the centerpiece of self-empowerment as preached by the NYSC scheme.

It is my earnest hope that a large percentage of you will become job creators rather than job seekers, he said.

The governor reiterated his administrations commitment to supporting the scheme through positive disposition to the welfare and security of corps members.

Earlier, the NYSC State Coordinator, John Okpo, urged the corps members not to involve themselves in illegal activities that will tarnish their image.

Continue to imbibe the spirit of humility, service and dedication as you enter into the larger society, Mr Okpo said.

Mr Okpo said a total of 3, 900 corps members successfully completed the programme, while 10 absconded from service.

He added that one person, who ran afoul of the NYSC bye-laws, would be punished accordingly.Home | News | General | Breaking: 48 hours after, Nigeria police saves Syrian teenager abducted in Kano

Nigerias police authority in Kano state has confirmed that its men rescued of an abducted Syrian teenager, Muhammad Ahmed, who was kidnapped by some gunmen that ended up killing his father, Ahmed Abu Areeda, in the operation.

Daily Trust reports that the 14-year-old syrian teenager was abducted on Tuesday, April 10.

READ ALSO: Breaking: Senate suspends Omo-Agege for 90 days, disbands Buhari support group in the House

The report said the late Areeda was shot dead by the gunmen as he tried to resist the abduction of his son.

The report said the police public relations officer, SP Magaji Musa Majia, confirmed the rescue of Mohammad saying no ransom was paid.

The boy was rescued hale abd hearty and he was taken to hospital for check-up, he said.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that unknown gunmen reportedly attacked and killed a Syrian businessman, Ahmed Abu Areeda, in Kano state on Tuesday, April 10 while Muhammad Ahmed was also abducted.

It wad learnt that the tragic incident happened when the deceased, accompanied by two of his children, went to the Kano state office of the Nigerian Red Cross Society on Hospital road to pick his car.

An eyewitness claimed the gunmen were waiting for him at the location.

He said: He closed his shop around 8pm and went to pick his car at the Red Cross office compound where he parked his vehicle.

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"Unfortunately, the gunmen, who parked outside the office in a green Peugeot car, with tinted glass, were apparently waiting for him. Some of them followed the deceased into the compound while others remained behind."

Offa bank robbery: Why some residents were shot by armed robbers. Naij.com TV

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | We spend N1.5 billion on the poorest Nigerians monthly - VP Osinbajo reveals

- Professor Yemi Osinbajo says 300,000 very poor Nigerians benefit monthly from the N5,000 monthly programme

- Osinbajo says the beneficiaries cut across party lines

- He also tells residents of Abia more about President Buhari's activements

Nigerias vice president, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, has revealed that the Muhammadu Buhari administration pays N5,000 monthly to over 300,000 of the poorest families across the country totaling up to N1.5 billion.

Daily Trust reports that Osinbajo said the payment was being done without discrimination along party lines.

The report said the vice president spoke in Umuahia at the launch of Abia state Tele-Health support centre, adding that the federal government was giving loans to over 300,000 traders and artisans and feeding 125,624 pupils in 742 schools.

READ ALSO: Breaking: Senate suspends Omo-Agege for 90 days, disbands Buhari support group in the House

We have 1,569 cooks in total; for micro-credit loans under our GEEP scheme, we have given loans to 7,585 small businesses, he said adding that the government had so far invested about N2.4 billion of the social investment programmes' funds in Abia state.

And specifically in healthcare, we have the Saving One Million Lives Initiative, which has made available $1.5 million to each state government - including Abia state - to improve the quality of basic healthcare available especially to our women and children.

Health insurance is the most effective way of ensuring access to healthcare when needed and at the same time funding our healthcare system, and ensuring that healthcare personnel are well rewarded.

This commitment has meant two things. First is President Buharis determination to break from the past where the federal government only supported states where the party in office was their own.

At the inauguration of the NEC in 2015, he publicly declared that our own NEC will assist every state because poverty in our nation is no respecter of ethnic group, religion or party affiliation.

Consequently, as of today the federal government has supported states without discrimination along party lines to the tune of N1.91 Trillion.

"The second is that the federal government has prioritized social and economic policies and programmes that will bring the greatest benefit to the greatest number of our people.

We have examples of these in our social investment programmes. Today, we are feeding 7.5 million children in our home-grown school feeding programme in 22 states.

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We have employed 200,000 graduates in our N-Power scheme, 300,000 more are waiting to be formally engaged. Every single local government in Nigeria is covered, Osinbajo added.

According to him, the creation of the Abia state Tele-Health support centre would reduce the time spent travelling in search of healthcare, or waiting in line to see a doctor in healthcare facilities and close the access-to-healthcare gap between urban and rural areas.

It will also make Abia state standout, within and outside Nigeria, as a forward-looking, people-centred state; one that is open to new ideas and to life-changing innovation, he said.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo visited Abia state in the eastern region of Nigeria where he received a chieftaincy title as the 'Enyioha 1' from traditional rulers.

Buhari to Contest for Presidency in 2019! Naij.com TV

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CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | News | General | Ondo: Crisis brewing over Oba-elect in Arogbo-ljaw

By Dayo Johnson

CRISIS seems to be brewing in the riverine Arogbo- Ijaw, in Ese-Odo area of Ondo State over the plan to install a new monarch for the community, 11 years after the demise of its traditional ruler.

Reports had it that some indigenes of the community have elected Chief Zacchaeus Doubra Egbunnu as Agadagba-elect to replace Pere D. M. E. Eperetun, who died in 2007.

However, the Perebiri Ruling House of Arogbo has asked the state government to halt the installation of the monarch as there were cases over the authentic name of the Ruling House.

Secretary of the ruling house, Ronland Oriamaja, while addressing newsmen in Akure, disowned Egbunnu as the Agadagba-elect.

Oriamaja called on the Ese-Odo Local Government and Governor Rotimi Akeredolu to prevail on some agents of the state government not to pervert justice in the kingship process of the community.

He disclosed that the stool had been subjected to a series of litigations, which some were still pending in court, while the Peribi House was a judgement creditor in Suit No: HOK/1M/2009.

Oriamaja alleged that some persons were making efforts to subvert the Chieftaincy Law and order of succession to the throne by creating Perebiyenmo Ruling House, which he said, was a contravention of the customs and traditions of the community.

The Secretary lamented that the Ese-Odo LGA and some influential persons disregarded the judicial process by electing Egbunnu as Agadagba-elect at a meeting last Saturday, and to be crowned within 14 days.

Some mischief makers in and outside government, for selfish reasons, are misinforming the government and using the cloak of government to brew crisis in Arogbo Ibe on the subject of the Agadagba of Arogbo Chieftaincy.

He disclosed that armed security personnel, including soldiers and naval officers, were deployed to the community allegedly by Chief Bibopere Ajube, whose cronies and allies supported Egbunnu.

He said it did not make sense that Mr. Donald Ojogo, the Commissioner for Lands and Housing, who is not the Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs attended the meeting and purported election as a representative of the state government.

It is manifest that he is collaborating with Chief Bibopere Ajube to set Arogbo Ibe on fire over the Agadagba vacant stool, he said, describing it as an affront on the judicial process and is condemned in strong terms.

The Perebiri Ruling House emphasized that pending the outcome of the matter in court, its members would continue to be law-abiding citizens, saying we wont fight; whosoever it favours, we will support. We are all brothers.

The indigenes implored Governor Akeredolu to call to order all the agents of government and their cronies in order to avoid a breakdown of law and order over an attempt to impose Chief Doubra Egbunnu as Agadagba-elect.

Govt dispells rumours

In his reaction, the Commissioner for Lands, Donald Ojogo, dispelled the allegations against the government and its functionaries, saying the emergence of Egbunnu as the Agadagba-elect was in accordance with the Chieftaincy Law and tradition of the community.

Ojogo said: The government followed due process. When government follows due process to do anything, there is bound to be aggrieved persons. Those people making these allegations are only trying to raise eyebrows where there is no issue.

He acknowledged the fact that he was present during the meeting where a new Agadagba-elect was picked, but stressed that he didnt go there as a Commissioner. I went there as a member of the ruling house.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: GeneralHome | World | Africa | Mugabe's son-in-law and Zim's mysterious new airline?

Robert Mugabe's son-in-law Simba Chikore was on hand to welcome a Boeing 767 which arrived Wednesday at Harare's international airport recently named after the former president.

Chikore, wearing captain epaulettes, although there is no record of him having been promoted to this rank, was first named last year as one of the negotiators for the purchase of several second-hand aircraft from Air Malaysia.

He has refused to take calls since last year, and again on Monday this week, although his assistant in his Harare office confirmed he was "around".

There is considerable mystery about the purchase of this aircraft as bankrupt Air Zimbabwe is still operating although it only has two aircraft.

Zimbabwe Airways is allegedly owned by a company known as Zimbabwe Aviation Leasing Company (ZALC) but the registrar of companies in Harare said this week that the file with the details was not available for "security" reasons.

However, information emerging via various well-placed sources about ZALC is that two of its directors are connected with, or related to senior government and aviation officials in Harare.

Chikore was trained as a pilot for Air Zimbabwe and then moved to Qatar Airways and was a first officer but failed tests to qualify as a captain, and left the airline and returned to Harare and later married Bona Mugabe, the former president's oldest child.

Airline officials say the elderly former Malaysian plane - another one is due to arrive shortly - will not be able to be maintained in Harare as there is neither equipment nor qualified engineering staff.

As far as can be established there are also no qualified Zimbabwean airline staff, including pilots, registered to fly this aircraft.

One experienced pilot who has previously flown routes ex-Harare and is now in South Africa, and asked not to be named, said: "They are not suitable for Air Zimbabwe's present routes nor customers. It will never be allowed to land at Gatwick Airport because that route belongs to Air Zimbabwe which is banned from flying in Europe. The UK link was previously Air Zimbabwe's most profitable route."

Zimbabwe is desperately short of foreign currency but as far as can be ascertained the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe allowed more then US$43m to be transferred to troubled Air Malaysia for the purpose of purchasing aircraft.

In recent years Air Malaysia lost two aircraft and all passengers on board - one which disappeared mid flight and another which was shot down over Ukraine.

Reuters reports that Zimbabwean finance minister Patrick Chinamasa confirmed that the aircraft were bought with the intention of leasing them to a local airline until national carrier Air Zimbabwe returned to profitability.

So far neither Zimbabwe's civil aviation authority nor the ministry of transport have explained the circumstances surrounding the purchase nor the connection, if any, with the Mugabe family.

Bona and Simba Chikore are presently building a mansion on top of a hill in northern Harare, near their parents palatial home, on land originally owned by the government which had planned to build a school there.

There is no explanation how either of them could afford to acquire that land and then build a palatial home in the side of a hill which needed massive excavations.

Chikore was controversially made head of operations at Air Zimbabwe after he married Bona, even though he had neither the qualifications nor experience for the job, according to airline insiders.

He quit after his father-in-law was ousted from power last November.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: AfricaHome | World | Africa | Bulawayo spurns King Mzilikazi statue bid

THE Bulawayo City Council has spurned demands by secessionist party, Mthwakazi Liberation Front (MLF), to erect the statue of the late Ndebele king, Mzilikazi KamaTshobana Khumalo, along Robert Mugabe Way and rename the street after the monarch's name.

MLF chairman, David Mpofu told Southern Eye that they had submitted the proposal to the local authority on March 19 this year.

"We wanted to have one of the streets [Robert Mugabe Way] named after Mzilikazi and our late King Mzilikazi statue being erected along the same street. The council told us there is a committee that deals with such issues, but our question is when President Emmerson Mnangagwa took over government, they have removed Mugabe's portraits from their offices, was it the committee which dealt with that?" he said.

"We are asking if the council has become more powerful than its ratepayers. By right, we residents have power to demand what we want in our city and these issues we took to the council are some of our demands."

Mpofu said they did not expect the council to block their idea, but hoped it would assist them.

A letter of response dated April 3, 2018 in response to MLF's request, town clerk, Christopher Dube acknowledged receipt of their letter.

"We would like to advise that the naming of streets is council's responsibility guided by the names (Alteration) Act Chapter 10:14 and the local authorities circular 4 of 2012 which gives guidelines for the naming and renaming of public features which include government buildings, parastatals, local authority buildings, other official structures and installation and major roads and streets," he wrote.

"We note that your organisations cannot demand to rename the street, but may submit a proposal through your councillor for consideration. The City of Bulawayo further notes your demand for a statue of King Mzilikazi. We would like to advise you that due to financial constrains, council cannot accede to your demand, but the city would be grateful to receive a donation of the statue."

Dube said the naming of the streets was dealt with by a naming sub-committee.

He said residents should meet with councillors and submit proposals for names of streets and schools in their suburbs.

He said the names can be of deceased local heroes, historical events, national goals, local aspirations and events, natural features, international events, flora and fauna and numerals.

"Once these have gone through, the street naming committee and are approved, they are submitted to the town lands and planning committee and then to council for approval. These are submitted with recommendations of the Provincial administrator," he said.

"In the naming/renaming of public feature, no living person may have a public feature named after him/her except the prime minister or international leaders who Cabinet wish to honour. The following categories should comprise an index to be stored in a repository form from which to draw when selecting names, heroes buried at the heroes acre, some of those accorded state funerals and those who made significant contribution to the liberation struggle."

Dube said local authorities stand guided by Cabinet decisions on the renaming of streets and roads.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: AfricaHome | World | Africa | 'Mnangagwa never promised to end cash shortages in 100 days'

PRESIDENT Emmerson Mnangagwa never promised the nation that cash shortages will end in his first 100 days in office after Operation Restore Legacy, Justice minister Ziyambi Ziyambi told Parliament yesterday.

Ziyambi had been asked by Glen View North MP, Fani Munengami (MDC-T) to explain why Zimbabweans were still sleeping in bank queues, yet the new government had promised to deliver changes within 100 days in office after removing President Robert Mugabe from office.

"The President even promised that we will see him at bank queues, but we are yet to see him queuing and receiving his coins, and 100 days has since elapsed without him solving the cash crisis," he said.

Ziyambi responded: "Government never promised that cash shortages will end overnight and it was never written in black and white that cash shortages will end overnight."

He said Mnangagwa only promised that there will be a new culture of implementation of government projects and accountability.

Ziyambi then told MPs that the issue will best be referred to Finance minister Patrick Chinamasa.

But opposition MPs refused to let go of the issue with Munengami, saying the new dispensation had now clocked around 300 days without delivering on their promises.

"We have RTGS money and United States dollars in circulation and there are $500 million US notes and about $1,5 billion money exchanged through RTGS. We have several projects to be initiated that are going to come into the country and when foreign currency starts flowing there will be a balance between cash and RTGS money," Ziyambi said.

MPs were not impressed and said Chinamasa should attend Parliament to respond to the issue of failure to resolve the cash shortages.

Norton MP, Temba Mliswa (independent) said if the government was clueless about solving the cash crisis, they must let the nation know.

"Chinamasa has not been in this House for two months, yet the issue of cash shortages is critical. If the government cannot solve the cash crisis, then they have failed," he said.

Mliswa then directed his questions to Health minister David Parirenyatwa, asking him to explain if the Zanu-PF government had built 2 000 clinics, as was espoused in their 2013 elections party manifesto.

Parirenyatwa promised to give a breakdown of the clinics built.

But MDC-T legislator, Ruth Labode said in the breakdown, Parirenyatwa should refrain from including those clinics that were built during the colonial era.

Meanwhile, MPs yesterday began to put pressure over payment of their outstanding allowances, as their parliamentary terms are nearing to an end.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: AfricaHome | World | Africa | 'Mnangagwa delivers impassioned 90-minute address to visiting US senators'

I had a chat with an amiable insider who was in the delegations that met with President Emmerson Mnangagwa last week on Saturday.

In what has been described as a spirited but calm performance to help his administration come out of the cold, President Mnangagwa delivered an impassioned ninety-minute address to the visiting US senators on Saturday.

Fresh from his five day Chinese state visit, President Mnangagwa surprised the US senators and their staffers when he turned on the charm offensive, only stopping once to give way for remarks in his 90 minute address punctuated by calmness which has always been an essential part of his persona and style.

The visiting American legislators had expected the Zimbabwean president to mount a dogged defense against their Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA) Amendment bill.

To understand the seriousness of this meeting to the Zimbabwean government, it is important to know who was there.

Flanked to his left by his Vice President, General Constantino Chiwenga and Foreign Minister SB Moyo and to his right by the American senators accompanied by the US embassy senior diplomats, President Mnangagwa held court in his conference board room sitting at the center of the oval presidential table.

The room also had senior staffers from both teams.

The president explained to the American senators what was at stake and what he needed to deliver to fulfill his part of the bargain.

He proactively addressed the issues in the ZIDERA Amendment bill without referencing to it by name not even once.

He explained that the allegations that he had deployed 5000 troops in rural Zimbabwe were mythical and rooted in the fact that he had appointed Generals Chiwenga (and SB Moyo and the Agriculture minister Perence Shiri) into his government.

All of them former soldiers who were instrumental in removing Robert Mugabe and making way for President Mnangagwa to rise to the top in a dramatic culmination of a life long ambition to succeed his former boss and veteran dictator, Robert Mugabe.

The president argued that there was no evidence of such a military deployment as alleged.

The opposition and former ZANUPF luminaries have accused the Mnangagwa administration of deploying thousands of troops in rural Zimbabwe to mobilize villagers to vote for ZANUPF in the upcoming watershed election in July.

The President reaffirmed the principle of protection for individual rights of citizens to choose a political party and presidential candidate of their own choice.

The Americans are said to have decided that the issue of the alleged military deployment in rural Zimbabwe was a cul-de-sac sideshow because there was no evidence to back up that accusation at that moment.

The delegation insider told me that the Americans realized it wouldn't be productive to enter into a tit for tat and back and forth with President Mnangagwa on the basis of gossip and dinner table talk which they were told without verification.

The other issue brought up by the American senators was that of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission staff members and its acting Chief Elections Officer, Utoile Silaigwana who once served in the military.

The president said that all these people working at ZEC had retired from the army and as such, they were now deemed civilian and had a right to employment in government like any other Zimbabwean.

This was one important opportunity the president of Zimbabwe had gotten to deliver his message to the nerve center of the American legislative political system, the senate, through its visiting members.

He wasn't going to allow anything to get in the way, even the President's waiters who wanted to serve food on the onset of the meeting were told to wait until the main discussion was out of the way.

The president's delivery to the American senators turned out to be an impassioned plea for Zimbabwe to be given a chance after two decades of international isolation.

As the agenda issues were unraveling one by one, President Mnangagwa took on the issue of peace and reconciliation. He said that the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission, which will present its findings on completing its investigations, would research the dark past.

This was in response to the ZIDERA Amendment bill's demand for the Zimbabwean government to pay compensation to the victims of Gukurahundi.

The Americans realized that their demand was running ahead of the ongoing process underpinned by the National Healing and Reconciliation Act that was signed into law in January this year.

President Mnangagwa said that the commission would find out what happened during these dark periods of Zimbabwe's history and then release a report.

He emphasized that the political players will have to stare these findings in their face and proceed from there. The Americans said that there was nothing to argue about as the Zimbabwean law underpinned President Mnangagwa's expression to resolve the dark past.

However in an intervention, senator Chris Coons said that all these things were not a one-day affair.

He said that political reforms should go beyond free and fair elections and address economic reformation and not only focus on election specific issues.

The senators had prepared for a tough engagement with the Zimbabwean delegation but instead, they got a very warm reception from a president who had read the ZIDERA Amendment bill and understood it, although he made a tactical move of not referring to it.

He didn't want to seem reactive, he was proactive as he kept emphasizing to the visiting American senatorial delegation about the need to look ahead.

The President touched on the issues that have now started to become the political bogeyman to his free and fair election pledges and to his administration. He mentioned that all political parties would get equal access to the state media after the day of election proclamation.

He also said that before the election proclamation, access would have to be availed through paid advertisements. He jokingly said that in the past when the opposition was given that access, they had nothing much to say anyway.

He also rhetorically wondered how the equal access doctrine was going to be implemented when there were over one hundred political parties taking party in the 2018 election.

The last time the opposition got equal access to the state media was during the 2008 elections when former president Robert Mugabe lost the election to Morgan Tsvangirai.

That dismal election defeat was followed by a one-month delay in releasing the election result and a brutal violent campaign against opposition supporters.

The then Chief Executive of the state broadcaster, Henry Muradzikwa, unceremoniously lost his job after the March 20 elections in 2008.

Muradzikwa said that he was dismissed from the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation on 14 May of 2008 for defying a ministerial order to deny the opposition favorable coverage in the run-up to the 29 March elections in 2008.

This was now a thing of the past the president told the Americans, a past he said Zimbabweans should move away from.

The president's people need to make sure that this contentious pledge is seen to be true indeed according to the Americans, otherwise the process of delegitimizing the election would be made easier by pointing out to unfulfilled electoral promises.

One of the American senators, Cory Anthony Booker spoke passionately about the excitement of having a front row seat witnessing the historic changes taking place in Zimbabwe. Senator Booker from New Jersey spoke about the history of slavery and the courage of Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass was a 19th century African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman who escaped from slavery and became an eminent American.

In quintessential black American style, Senator Booker told President Mnangagwa that if there was No Struggle, There was no Progress. He was quoting from the "West India Emancipation" speech by Frederick Douglass, which he delivered at the Canandaigua in New York in 1857.

The Yale and Oxford graduate, Senator Booker, spoke after senators Chris Coons and Jeff Flake had put in a conciliatory word after the president had given way to them to make remarks. President Mnangagwa continued ploughing through with his charm offensive, explaining that there was corruption and rot in the diamond industry.

He said that he was already working to turn around the country and put an end to all these corruption evils. This again the senators later said would only be taken seriously if the implementation process of slowing down corruption was genuinely started and that the removal of known corrupt government ministers had taken place.

The senators were happy with the president's commitment to change but they have said that they now wanted to see the delivery taking place that would help in the opening of a new chapter with Zimbabwe.

An insider in the delegations said that if the Zimbabwean government delivers their part of the bargain, the Americans would also reciprocate by removing the politically "toxic" elements in the ZIDERA Amendment bill and instead, turn it around as a point of departure from the many years of an acrimonious relationship.

The senators said that they would not take the promises at face value but will have to wait for the signs that the Zimbabwean government was serious in implementing all the good intentions that underpinned the president's address to the American senators.

The President and his team must now start working on plucking the low hanging fruits, this election is the determinant factor whether Zimbabwe will emerge from the 18 year old discomfort of banishment or remains a broken pariah State.

The communication strategies must hinge not only on the foreign policy but also on domestic policies. After all, it is locals that will vote. So far there is a dearth of Information on what is happening in government and their intentions for the future.

Barack Obama spoke about the audacity of hope, citizens must be given something to help them see into the future and envision a better life for themselves and their families.

The vision must not be a closely held secret, it must be shared for it to make sense and more importantly to be effective by bringing citizens together and having a point of reference to where they could be in a better Zimbabwe.

ZBC shouldn't be allowed to be the Waterloo for the president's vision and urgent and primary task of turning around the economy and bringing back Zimbabwe into the family of nations.

There must be creative ways to allowing many voices to be heard even before the election proclamation.

That will recede the legitimate noises demanding space on the national broadcaster's news platform, and questioning the president's sincerity to delivering a level playing field for all political players.

The Americans have argued that elections are not only rigged on Election Day, they consider refusal by the national broadcaster to cover the opposition rallies, a form of election rigging.

Zimbabwe is groaning under the weight of a moribund and unresponsive economy that has been battered and bruised for two decades by corruption, incompetence, economic and political sanctions, misdirected policies and a president who had overstayed.

The turning around of this country will require all hands on deck, so the last thing we need is a delegitimized election over something that can be amicably resolved. The political elites know what needs to be done, they also know the political and economic implications of not doing it.

They must now act as leaders and distinguish themselves from Robert Mugabe who was a ruler! This talk of changing the political direction must be accompanied by a resurgence of positive actions on the ground.

In the past before the November military intervention, government ministers and their bureaucrats ran roughshod over important elements of good governance. They just didn't care, some still do to this day and such incorrigible political behavior is what will slow down the president's movement towards achieving his political and economic objectives for the country.

President Mnangagwa and his advisors must make sure that those they have entrusted with pushing their agenda must realize that the Mugabe ways of doing business must be thrown into the ocean, otherwise the coming in from the cold will be painfully slow and unachievable in the desired time frames.

Time will tell.

Hopewell Chin'ono is an award winning Zimbabwean journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is a CNN African Journalist of the year and Harvard University Nieman Fellow. His next film, State of Mind looking at mental illness in Zimbabwe is coming out soon. He can be contacted on hopewell2@post.harvard.edu or on twitter @daddyhope

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: AfricaJapans FSA has released data on cryptocurrency use in the nation. And Texas has issued a warning to its residents regarding the use of cryptocurrencies.

Japans Infatuation with Cryptocurrencies Confirmed by FSA

The Financial Services Agency of Japan has published data regarding the nations involvement with cryptocurrencies, and the numbers confirm massive involvement in digital assets via its citizens. There are at least 17 cryptocurrency exchanges operating in Japan, and almost 85% of the people trading are between the ages of 18 and 40. It also highlights that in 2014 approximately two million U.S Dollars in the value of Bitcoin was being traded using margin, and the number soared to over 543 billion U.S Dollars of value via margin accounts as of late 2017.

Ripple Stays above November 2017 Price Ratios & Raises Eyebrows

There is no denying Ripple has been affected by the bear trend in digital assets. XRP continues to trade near forty-eight U.S cents and its forty-two cent support level remains in plain sight. However, intriguingly Ripple has not sunk below it mid-December 2017 price levels. Meaning the cryptocurrency has not challenged its November lows when euphoric buying started to grip the wide marketplace. Traders can look at this one of two ways, either XRP will eventually relent and move lower and lurch towards thirty cents per coin. Or this plateau Ripple has achieved  shows some type of fundamental strength and a solid juncture in which to build. And speculator certainly has reasons to consider both possibilities as they position themselves.

Ripple Daily Chart

Texas Warns its Residents and Retails to be Careful of Cryptocurrencies

The state of Texas has warned its residents many promoters of cryptocurrencies are engaged in fraud. The Texas State Securities Board also told retailers to avoid allowing its clients to purchase good with digital assets. The agency has warned that without a physical address, companies promoting the use of cryptocurrencies and their exchange remains difficult to supervise and pursue in cases alleging criminal activity.

Story continues

Blockchain Conference at the University of Texas in Austin Tomorrow

The University of Texas will host a Blockchain conference tomorrow in Austin which will focus on Blockchain opportunities and realities.

April 13th, U.S, McCombs Blockchain Conference in Austin

Yaron Mazor is a senior analyst at SuperTraderTV.

SuperTraderTV Academy is a leader in investing and stock trading education. Sign up for a class today to learn proven strategies on how to trade smarter.

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

More From FXEMPIRE:Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian man during clashes at the Gaza border on Thursday evening, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said.

It named him as Abdullah al-Shahari, 28, and said he was shot east of the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis.

The Israeli military told AFP it was not aware of such an incident.

Mass demonstrations along the border since March 30 have sparked clashes in which Israeli forces have killed 33 Palestinians.

Most died during protests along the border but others have been hit by tank fire.

Islamist movement Hamas has controlled Gaza since 2007 and fought three wars with Israel since.

A Hamas fighter was killed by an Israeli strike in the Gaza Strip earlier Thursday, the health ministry said.

Israel said the air raid was in response to gunfire at an Israeli warplane carrying out earlier strikes, which followed a bomb blast at Israel's border fence on Wednesday.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have gathered at five main sites along the Gaza Strip's border with Israel on the past two Fridays in what has been dubbed the "Great March of Return".

More mass protests are planned for April 13.

While the majority of the protesters have been peaceful, smaller numbers have approached Israel's border fence, throwing stones and rolling burning tyres towards troops.

Israel accuses Hamas of using the protests as cover to carry out violence.Facebook

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RAMBLER&Co ID

By logging in to LiveJournal using a third-party service you accept LiveJournal's User agreementi saw black and thought this was about michael ian black and i'm like uhh why is he an oscar winner

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lmao i always have to google when i see this guys name cuz i'm like when did michael ian black win an oscar

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how dare u he should be

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Idgi shop security will sometimes stop people to check their bags. It's not really a race profiling situation is it

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lmao he's white

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i heard australia has been targeting white ppl

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Lmaoooo! God, I hope this isn't sarcasm.

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well it was a prison colony in the first place /shrugs

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where? i've never seen this happen unless security suspects someone has been shoplifting (and they usually were) and i used to work retail.

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Yeah it's happened to me before - probably not at Woollies, granted, but loads of other places.

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You know he pulled the "do you know who I am?!" card.

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Lol, that would have been great because whats the chances of some random security guard at Woolies having the vaguest idea who he is.

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Exactly = I wouldn't even know who he was and I actually know who he is!

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Not a way to treat anyone, particularly in a time when youd think AUSTRALIA would like to show its best to world.



Oho, I actually had a chuckle at that.

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Ugh this house of wax extra is always doing the most

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isnt he white...

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THE AUDACITY!!!!!



...its a bag check. It happens around the world. Get over it damn

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Honestly, his reaction reminds me of the youtube meme

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Today I learned that Woolworths is still a thing

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It's a shock to me too! LOL!

If I'm gonna shoplift, I'm going Winona in Macy's... not fucking Woolworths.

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lol it's one of the big two grocery stores

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It doesn't exist anymore in the U.K; it went into liquidation a few years ago.

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lol same. I only know of this store because it's the one George Clooney got kicked out of in O Brother Where Art Thou.

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apparently the australian one isn't related to the defunct american chain??



all i know about woolsworth is that we got our first christmas tree there and it's older then my sister, lol.

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Im jealous as fuck.

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I honestly dont know Woolworths tbh

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They exist in South Africa too. They were the ~fancy grocery store near our rental in seapoint.

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Lol we got it in Germany too

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woolworths is a big chain in south africa/ australia/british colonies south of the equator

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it's where I buy my Chloe by Chloe perfume dupe!!!

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Same lol

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probably thought someone was making off with a mannequin before they realized it was just a "human" leaving the store

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lmaoooo

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Omw

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Shrieking

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God damn!

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HA   

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screaming

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AHHHAHAHAHA

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Really though treating people like thieves isnt a good look. If you think somebody is stealing something, alert the cops. Those fake mall security arent even legally allowed to go through your belongings in America for example.

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When I worked in a mall we weren't allowed to confront people directly at all, even if they were obviously shoplifting. We had to wait until they were out of our store and then alert mall security.

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This fucking snow flake. Most places in Australia ask if they can check your bag.

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Really? That's so OTT. Why?

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Australia itself is OTT by default.

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Just a security measure in big stores. They ask quite nicely, you hold your bag open for them, they glance inside, smile and wish you a nice day. It's all very casual and friendly, generally.

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lol whites

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lmfao does he think he's like facially famous? White people should def get bag checked more often - look at Winona and Jax.

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Agreed. A lot of privileged people shoplift for the "thrill". The queen of Denmark (not sure if she's still alive) used to shoplift shit.

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huh? I'm Danish and have never heard of her shoplifting - and yes, she's still alive. omg she's not THAT old hahaha



Edit:

I had to Google and apparentely you are talking about Queen Ingrid. I know absolutely nothing about her, but Queen Margrethe has been our queen since 1972



Edited at 2018-04-12 04:24 pm (UTC)

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margrethe????? (shes still living, her husband passed away in february)

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ITA. I constantly see people on facebook bragging about random shit they stole and what most of them seem to have in common is the fact they're white/white passing. They know they'll get away with it bc store security is usually checking for black people.

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I mean, he did rob the cradle so...

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You sound jealous tho...

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"youd think AUSTRALIA would like to show its best to world."





australia's best are their killer animals. he should be grateful security didn't throw him in a pit with a crocodile and 17 huntsman spiders to prove his innocence

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and a buff kangaroo

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those poor things are harmless and so many people are happy to kill them :(

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i loathe the way they move. I'm going to be paranoid for the rest of the day now

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"What gives you the right to condemn? Are you perfect? Sit down." https://t.co/uRjtKXnBEf  Teen Vogue (@TeenVogue) April 12, 2018

RIVERDALE HIGH PRESENTS CARRIE THE MUSICAL  As Riverdale High begins rehearsals for its upcoming production of Carrie the Musical, the arrival of an ominous letter from someone claiming to be the Black Hood forces director Kevin to make a difficult decision about recasting. Jughead uses his cover as the musicals documentarian to solve the mystery behind the letter as well as to completely avoid singing.Meanwhile, tensions between Betty and Veronica because Veronica lied about how complicit she was continue to escalate just as Alice announces she is joining the musical to spend more time with Betty.Elsewhere, Hiram enacts a devious plan to further drive a wedge between Fred and Archie (like rubbing it in that he bought a sweet convertible for his sugar baby), while Cheryl gets her theatricality on in order to scare the absolute shit out of her horrible mother.Directed by Jason Stone and written by Arabella Anderson & Tessa Leigh Williams. Original airdate 4/18/2018 aka the day after TAX DAY in the US---THE BEGINNING OF THE END  After someone got violently murdered during the school play, Archie leads the charge to uncover the culprit.Meanwhile, the reveal of a devastating secret leads to a violent showdown between Chic, Jughead, Betty, and Alice.Elsewhere, Veronica takes matters into her own hands whencomes to town seeking revenge.Finally, Hermoine and Cheryl conspire to take down Sheriff Keller who is as incompetent as he is hot.Directed by Jennifer Phang and written by Cristine Chambers. Original airdate 4/25/2018. --- What Camila lacks in acting she makes up for in hustle as she's just announced that she's partnering with John Frieda for a new campaign--- While actor KJ Apa is a mess in many other ways (fat shaming and allegedly dating a 16-year-old), he recently did an upstanding thing by responding to recent homophobic comments made by rugby player, Israel Folau in his IG stories--- And apparently there's a Mean Girls musical that's hit Broadway that I only know exists because Casey went to the premieresource: 1DOL Hosting Event for Ames Laboratory Workers This Month

Representatives of the Department of Labor's Office of the Ombudsman for the EEOICPA, the Ombudsman to NIOSH for the EEOICPA, and DOE's Former Worker Medical Screening Program will be on hand. After the presentation, staffers will answer questions regarding existing claims, provide claim status updates, and help workers file new claims.

The U.S. Department of Labor will host an outreach event in Ames, Iowa, on April 17 for former and current nuclear weapons workers and their survivors. Federal representatives from the Division of Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation will discuss the new Special Exposure Cohort class of employees at the Ames Laboratory.

The event will take place at the Holiday Inn Ames Conference Center at Iowa State University beginning at 9 a.m., followed by staff availability from 10 a.m. to noon and from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. CDT.

Staffers from the DEEOIC Cleveland District Office will provide a brief presentation about the new class, as well as information about the medical benefits available to approved claimants under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, which provides compensation and medical benefits to employees diagnosed with qualifying illnesses as a result of their work in the nuclear weapons industry. Survivors of qualified workers may also be entitled to benefits.

Representatives of the Department of Labor's Office of the Ombudsman for the EEOICPA, the Ombudsman to NIOSH for the EEOICPA, and DOE's Former Worker Medical Screening Program will be on hand. After the presentation, staffers will answer questions regarding existing claims, provide claim status updates, and help workers file new claims.

To date, the compensation program has paid more than $258 million in compensation and medical benefits to eligible Iowa claimants and more than $14.7 billion nationwide.The Philippine Embassy in Riyadh has cautioned overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the region following another missile attack.

According to a report received by the embassy, the Houthi rebels from Yemen have fired three ballistic missiles above the capital and the southern cities of Jizan and Najran.

Nevertheless, these were intercepted by the Saudi Arabian air defense system.

This is the fourth attack of the Iran-aligned rebels on Riyadh.

The Philippine Embassy is calling on OFWs to remain calm and alert.  UNTV News & Rescue

The post PH Embassy cautions Riyadh OFWs amid missile attacks appeared first on UNTV News.Vietnam has vowed to tighten regulations on cryptocurrencies as authorities investigate an alleged multi-million-dollar fraud in the country, where digital units are traded in a shadowy and unregulated market. Paying with cryptocurrencies is illegal in Vietnam, where they are not recognised as a legitimate tender by the central bank. However there are currently no laws explicitly banning the possession of assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Regulators have battled to gain control of cryptocurrency markets across Asia, from China to South Korea and Thailand, amid fears that Bitcoin and others -- untaxable assets that are exchanged independent of governments and banks -- could be used to launder money and fund criminal or terrorist networks. A directive signed by Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Wednesday requested to "strengthen the management of activities related to cryptocurrencies". It comes after a Vietnamese company, Modern Tech Jsc, was accused of scamming $660 million from tens of thousands of people who bought iFan and Pincoin cryptocurrencies, according to state media. The Ho Chi Minh City-based company promised to repay clients monthly interest -- and more if they could attract other customers -- but has been slow to pay them back as the value of iFan and Pincoin slumps, VNExpress reported. City authorities have asked police to investigate. Investing and trading the currencies is "increasingly complicated and threatens to affect the stability of the market, social order... (and) can pose great risks to organisations and individuals involved", the new directive said. It warned financial institutions against accepting the currencies and said authorities would "detect and handle" those dealing in the illegal units. Vietnam said last year it would consider developing a legal framework to manage virtual currencies and digital assets as they increase in popularity in the country. With a booming startup sector staffed by young talent, Vietnam has gained a reputation as a hub for homegrown blockchain tech development. Several Bitcoin cafes have also opened to cater to a growing class of local cryptocurrency investors. But while regulation may help build confidence in the sector, some say a heavy-handed approach in Vietnam could quash ambition -- and income for the government. "If there's too much regulation, that's going to hamper a very interesting, unique, and potential innovation stream for Vietnam, which could be a great source of foreign direct investment," said Thomas Glucksmann, head of Asia-Pacific business development at Gatecoin, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency and blockchain token exchange. In addition to fears over using cryptocurrency for criminal means, analysts have warned of a Bitcoin bubble after its price soared to record highs near $20,000 in December. The price has now dipped to about $6,800 amid fears of a crackdown on trading. The directive announced in Vietnam chilled some cryptocurrency investors in the country, including one who said he may consider moving business elsewhere. "Since the government wants to tighten regulations on cryptocurrency, I may not invest in cryptocurrency in Vietnam, maybe... in other countries," he told AFP, asking not to be named.Ready player one? Credit: Wikimedia

Games have long been used as test beds and benchmarks for artificial intelligence, and there has been no shortage of achievements in recent months. Google DeepMind's AlphaGo and poker bot Libratus from Carnegie Mellon University have both beaten human experts at games that have traditionally been hard for AI  some 20 years after IBM's DeepBlue achieved the same feat in chess.

Games like these have the attraction of clearly defined rules; they are relatively simple and cheap for AI researchers to work with, and they provide a variety of cognitive challenges at any desired level of difficulty. By inventing algorithms that play them well, researchers hope to gain insights into the mechanisms needed to function autonomously.

With the arrival of the latest techniques in AI and machine learning, attention is now shifting to visually detailed computer games  including the 3-D shooter Doom, various 2-D Atari games such as Pong and Space Invaders, and the real-time strategy game StarCraft.

This is all certainly progress, but a key part of the bigger AI picture is being overlooked. Research has prioritised games in which all the actions that can be performed are known in advance, be it moving a knight or firing a weapon. The computer is given all the options from the outset and the focus is on how well it chooses between them. The problem is that this disconnects AI research from the task of making computers genuinely autonomous.

Banana skins

Getting computers to determine which actions even exist in a given context presents conceptual and practical challenges which games researchers have barely attempted to resolve so far. The "monkey and bananas" problem is one example of a longstanding AI conundrum in which no recent progress has been made.

The problem was originally posed by John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of AI, in 1963: there is a room containing a chair, a stick, a monkey and a bunch of bananas hanging on a ceiling hook. The task is for a computer to come up with a sequence of actions to enable the monkey to acquire the bananas.

McCarthy made a key distinction between two aspects of this task in terms of artificial intelligence. Physical feasibility  determining whether a particular sequence of actions is physically realisable; and epistemic or knowledge-related feasibility  determining which possible actions for the monkey actually exist.

Determining what is physically feasible for the monkey is very easy for a computer if it is told all the possible actions in advance  "climb on chair", "wave stick" and so forth. A simple program that instructs the computer to go through all the possible sequences of actions one by one will quickly arrive at the best solution.

If the computer has to first determine which actions are even possible, however, it is a much tougher challenge. It raises questions about how we represent knowledge, the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowing something, and how we know when enough knowledge has been acquired. In highlighting these problems, McCarthy said: "Our ultimate objective is to make programs that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do."

Until computers can tackle problems without any predetermined description of possible actions, this objective can't be achieved. It is unfortunate that AI researchers are neglecting this: not only are these problems harder and more interesting, they look like a prerequisite for making further meaningful progress in the field.

Text appeal

To operate autonomously in a complex environment, it is impossible to describe in advance how best to manipulate  or even characterise  the objects there. Teaching computers to get around these difficulties immediately leads to deep questions about learning from previous experience.

Rather than focusing on games like Doom or StarCraft, where it is possible to avoid this problem, a more promising test for modern AI could be the humble text adventure from the 1970s and 1980s.

In the days before computers had sophisticated graphics capabilities, games like Colossal Cave and Zork were popular. Players were told about their environment by messages on the screen:

They had to respond with simple instructions, usually in the form of a verb or a verb plus a noun  "look", "take box" and so on. Part of the challenge was to work out which actions were possible and useful and to respond accordingly.

A good challenge for modern AI would be to take on the role of a player in such an adventure. The computer would have to make sense of the text descriptions on the screen and respond to them with actions, using some predictive mechanism to determine their likely effect.

More sophisticated behaviours on part of the computer would involve exploring the environment, defining goals, making goal-oriented action choices and solving the various intellectual challenges typically required to progress.

How well modern AI methods of the kind promoted by tech giants like IBM, Google, Facebook or Microsoft would fare in these text adventures is an open question  as is how much specialist human knowledge they would require for each new scenario.

To measure progress in this area, for the past two years we have been running a competition at the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, which this year takes place in Maastricht in the Netherlands in August. Competitors submit entries in advance, and can use the AI technology of their choice to build programs that can play these games by making sense of a text description and outputting appropriate text commands in return.

In short, researchers need to reconsider their priorities if AI is to keep progressing. If unearthing the discipline's neglected roots turns out to be fruitful, the monkey may finally gets his bananas after all.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.New images from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope are revealing the dusty discs surrounding nearby young stars in greater detail than previously achieved. They show a bizarre variety of shapes, sizes and structures, including the likely effects of planets still in the process of forming. Credit: Photographs: ESO/H. Avenhaus et al./DARTT-S collaboration

With an instrument at the Very Large Telescope in Chile scientists of ETH Zurich observed planet-forming disks around young stars similar to the sun 4,5 billion years ago. Surprisingly, the disks are very different. The data will help to shed more light on the formation processes of planets.

An instrument, which was partially developed and built at ETH Zurich, has now been particularly successful at studying new born stars still surrounded by gas and dust. With SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), astronomers of ETH Zurich and Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg were able to take images of planet-forming disks around the young stars: these disks, called protoplanetary disks, exist around so-called TTauri stars  the progenitors to our Sun  as well as around the more massive siblings called Herbig Ae/Be stars. So far astronomers focussed mostly on Herbig Ae/Be stars in their studies, but with a new, ambitious program called DARTTS-S (Disks Around TTauri Stars with SPHERE), Henning Avenhaus and Sascha Quanz, former and current members of the NCCR PlanetS at ETH Zurich, have now been able to use the capabilities of SPHERE to undertake a survey of TTauri disks.

The results for the first eight stars are released in a paper published by the Astronomical Journal. "Not only were we able to clearly detect all eight disks," summarizes Henning Avenhaus, "but, surprisingly, they looked all very different in particular with respect to their size." While some of them could only be detected with a radius of 80 au (80 times the distance Sun-Earth and about twice the average distance Sun-Pluto), others could be traced out to an astounding 700 au. "Most of the disks were found to display rings, a phenomenon known from previous observations of more massive stars," explains Sascha Quanz: "However, none of them displayed spiral structures, which is a phenomenon seen regularly in Herbig disks." A key question is now to understand where this difference is coming from and what it means for planet formation around different types of stars.

Start on a bad footing

As successful as the project was, it started on a bad footing, as Henning Avenhaus remembers: "While the first proposal to undertake such observations was already written in March 2013 and highly rated (back then using the older NACO instrument), unexpected works that had to be performed on the instrument made it impossible to take data." The same happened again in September 2013. Again, the instrument was not available. A third attempt in March 2014 did yield the requested schedulingin March 2015, when Henning Avenhaus flew to the telescope just to find out that the instrument (still NACO) had a malfunction the night before the observations were scheduled to start. Not that it mattered: Wind and clouds made it impossible to observe anyway.

At this point, the team decided to switch to the new instrumentSPHEREand got their first observations scheduled in March 2016. This time, it worked: Both the instrument and the weather were well-behaved, as Henning Avenhaus remembers: "I was present at Cerro Paranal, the location of the Very Large Telescope, working through the nights to perform the observations and occasionally peaking out of the control room to head to the telescope platform and marvel at the impressive display of stars."

The data taken over the course of several nights in March 2016 and in the following year were of very high quality. More than five years after the idea for the program, the researchers are now rewarded with results that will help to shed more light on the formation processes for planets. "This high-quality dataset impressively shows the power of SPHERE for these observations and significantly increases the number of planetary nurseries studied at high resolution enabling us to eventually get a statistical grasp on planet formation," summarizes Sascha Quanz. Further results of the DARTTS-S programme and similar observations with the ALMA radio telescope in Chile should contribute to this.

Explore further SPHERE reveals fascinating zoo of discs around young stars

More information: Disks ARound TTauri Stars with Sphere (DARTTS-S) I: Sphere / IRDIS Polarimetric Imaging of 8 prominent TTauri Disks: Journal information: Astronomical Journal Disks ARound TTauri Stars with Sphere (DARTTS-S) I: Sphere / IRDIS Polarimetric Imaging of 8 prominent TTauri Disks: arxiv.org/abs/1803.10882v2Illustration of charismatic animals in the city. Credit: Zoo Portraits. All Rights Reserved. 2018.

Many of the world's most charismatic animal species - those that attract the largest interest and deepest empathy from the publicare at high risk of extinction in part because many people believe their iconic stature guarantees their survival.

A new international study published today in PLOS Biology suggests that the popularity of tigers, lions, polar bears and others may actually contribute to the species' downfall.

The researchers used a combination of online surveys, school questionnaires, zoo websites and animated films to identify the 10 most charismatic animals. The top three were tigers, lions and elephants, followed by giraffes, leopards, pandas, cheetahs, polar bears, gray wolves and gorillas.

"I was surprised to see that although these 10 animals are the most charismatic, a major threat faced by nearly all of them is direct killing by humans, especially from hunting and snaring," said William Ripple, a distinguished professor of forest ecology at Oregon State University and a co-author on the study.

"This killing by humans seems sadly ironic to me, as these are some of our most beloved wild animals."

Many of these animals are so frequently depicted in pop culture and marketing materials that they may constitute a deceptive "virtual population" that is doing better in the media than in nature, noted lead author Franck Courchamp of the University of Paris.

The researchers found, for example, that the average French citizen will see more virtual lions through photos, cartoons, logos and brands in one month than there are wild lions left in West Africa.

"Unknowingly, companies using giraffes, cheetahs or polar bears for marketing purposes may be actively contributing to the false perception that these animals are not at risk of extinction, and therefore not in need of conservation," Courchamp said.

In their paper, the researchers propose that companies using images of threatened species for marketing purposes provide information to promote their conservation, and perhaps part of their revenue for protection of the species.

Endangered species conservation efforts are numerous, though splintered. The researchers note that 20 million Americans took to the streets in 1970 to demonstrate on the first Earth Day, but there hasn't been a similar mobilization for conservation since.

Oregon State's Ripple said the concept of charismatic species is pervasive in conservation literature and the public may assume that efforts to ensure their survival are in place and successful.

"Even much of the literature emphasizes the need to go beyond charismatic species and focus on the lesser known ones," Ripple said. "The public may be taking for granted that we're doing all we can to save them, when we don't even know for certain how many elephants, gorillas, or polar bears exist in the wild."

The status of most of the top charismatic species is cause for alarm, Ripple pointed out.

The abundance of tigers in the wild is estimated to be less than 7 percent of their historic number, and at least three sub-species - Bali, Javan and Caspian tigersare now extinct.

Lions are declining almost everywhere in Africa, with populations estimated to be at less than 8 percent of historic levels; only 175 individuals are thought to exist in Eurasia - all of these are in India.

The African forest elephant has declined by 62 percent in the last nine years, while savannah elephants are thought to be at less than 10 percent of their historic numbersmostly because of poaching.

Fewer than 2,000 pandas remain, occupying less than 1 percent of their historic range and their future is uncertain because of climate change.

"The top 10 charismatic animals are all mammals and include some of the largest carnivores and largest herbivores in the terrestrial world," Ripple said. "The fact that humans are also large mammals might explain why the public has a strong affinity for these 10 mammalsit seems like people also love large animals much more than small ones."

Nearly half (48.6 percent) of all the non-teddy bear stuffed animals sold in the United States on Amazon were one of the 10 charismatic animals, while in France some 800,000 "Sophie the giraffe" baby toys were sold in 2010more than eight times the numbers of giraffes living in Africa.

"The appearance of these beloved animals in stores, in movies, on television, and on a variety of products seems to be deluding the public into believing they are doing okay," Ripple said. "If we don't act in a concerted effort to save these species, that may soon be the only way anyone will see them."

Explore further Global analysis of large carnivore habitats

More information: Courchamp F, Jaric I, Albert C, Meinard Y, Ripple WJ, Chapron G (2018) The paradoxical extinction of the most charismatic animals. PLoS Biol 16(4): e2003997. Journal information: PLoS Biology Courchamp F, Jaric I, Albert C, Meinard Y, Ripple WJ, Chapron G (2018) The paradoxical extinction of the most charismatic animals.16(4): e2003997. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2003997Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Britons are less happy with restaurants' food and service, and with their dining companions, than they were 20 years ago, research says.

The British Sociological Association's annual conference in Newcastle heard today [Thursday 12 April] that ratings given by diners for restaurants' food, decor, service and value for money have all fallen.

And while people are more likely to eat out with their families, they say they are less happy with the conversation and company during the meal.

Three researchers compared ratings given in 1995 and in 2015 by 2,100 people in London, Bristol and Preston for their last meal out at a restaurant or cafe.

Professor Alan Warde, of The University of Manchester, told the conference that the proportion saying they were satisfied with the meal's value for money fell from 69 percent to 56 percent, a drop of 19 percent (13 percentage points).

Professor Warde, who worked with Dr. Jennifer Whillans, also of Manchester, and Dr. Jessica Paddock, University of Bristol, found that:

the rate of those satisfied with the food fell from 81 percent to 72 percent, an 11 percent drop (9 percentage points)

for the service, the rate of those satisfied fell from 65 percent to 57 percent, a drop of 12 percent (8 percentage points).

for the decor it fell from 57 percent to 48 percent, a fall of 16 percent (9 percentage points).

The researchers also found that the rate of people dining out with just their partner fell from 23 percent to 16 percent, a fall of 30 percent (7 percentage points). The proportion eating out just with friends fell by 9 percent, from 23 percent to 21 percent (2 percentage points). Dining as a family rose by 21 percent, from 29 percent to 35 percent (6 percentage points).

During the same period, diners were less happy with their companions. The proportion who said they were satisfied with the company at the meal fell by 5 percent from 91 percent to 86 percent (5 percentage points), and the proportion happy with the conversation fell by 4 percent, from 82 percent to 79 percent (3 percentage points).

The proportion eating alone doubled, from 3 percent to 6 percent (a rise of 3 percentage points).

"The results show some important changes over 20 years in how happy people are with dining out," Professor Warde told the conference.

"We see that people are generally less satisfied with the last meal they ate in a restaurant, with lower rates of satisfaction for the food, decor, service and value for money.

"And while people are more likely to eat out with their family, and less with just their partner or just friends, the survey found that people's satisfaction with their dining companions also fell during the 20 years."

The researchers found that the most frequent styles of food eaten at the last meal out were traditional British (41 percent); Italian (13 percent); and Indian (9 percent), with other types comprising the rest.

The researchers also found that people were 23 percent more likely to eat just one course, (43 percent compared to 35 percent, an 8 percentage points rise), 11 percent less likely to eat at weekends (58 percent compared to 65 percent, a 7 percentage points fall), and 33 percent less likely to dress up for the occasion (26 percent compared to 39 percent, a 13 percentage points fall).Advancing the design of drugs for better medical effects takes a combination of experimental and computer simulation research. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Toronto, Canada, University of California, San Diego and Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan are exploring how cellular components communicate with various nearby molecules. In this image, calcium bridges two parts of a cell receptor, possibly regulating its activity. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

A multi-institutional project to understand one of the major targets of human drug design has produced new insights into how structural communication works in a cell component called a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCRs), basically a "doorbell" structure that alerts the cell of important molecules nearby. Understanding the structure and function of the receptor more deeply will enable better drug development.

"It's a huge field of active research in academia and industry because if we can figure out precisely how GPCRs work, then we can more easily design drugs to change their behavior and thereby control pain, hunger, and more," said coauthor Christopher Neale, a researcher with the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "This work helps us in understanding the receptors' function as a means to enable future drug discovery. For instance, if calcium binding can turn off a GPCR, then one may use that knowledge in a guided search for drugs that either promote or inhibit calcium binding depending on the desired health outcome."

GPCRs are a family of membrane proteins that transmit information into our cells. They respond to things like adrenaline and opioid drugs, and they are the largest class of human drug targets. The research reported this week in Nature Communications describes the regulation of GPCRs by physiological ions such as sodium, calcium and magnesium.

The paper outlines in vitro nuclear magnetic resonance experiments done by Scott Prosser's group (University of Toronto, Canada) that identified changes in these receptors based on divalent cation concentrations. The paper includes confirmation of these effects in live cells by Roger Sunahara's group (University of California, San Diego) and computer simulations run at Los Alamos by Neale and Angel E. Garcia to define atomic-resolution mechanisms that can explain the experimental results. Finally, additional theory by Adnan Sljoka (Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan) showed that the mechanisms that Neale proposed involve feasible types of structural communication through the receptor.

Explore further New structure of key protein holds clues for better drug design

More information: Libin Ye et al, Mechanistic insights into allosteric regulation of the A2A adenosine G protein-coupled receptor by physiological cations, Nature Communications (2018). Journal information: Nature Communications Libin Ye et al, Mechanistic insights into allosteric regulation of the A2A adenosine G protein-coupled receptor by physiological cations,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03314-9Whatever you might have heard, Facebook doesn't listen in on everything you do through the microphone on your phone, mining the information for clues on what ads to send you.

"No," CEO Mark Zuckerberg told members of Congress on Tuesday, addressing a conspiracy theory that doesn't seem to want to die.

The theory has been floating around since at least 2016. It posits that Facebook surreptitiously records audio using the microphones on users' smart phones, then uses voice recognition software to turn it into searchable terms that the site can use to place ads in the user's news feed.

An example would be if someone were discussing lawn mowers near their phone, then suddenly started seeing lawn mower ads in their Facebook news feed.

Facebook addressed the rumor in June 2016 in a post, saying this:

"Facebook does not use your phone's microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in News Feed. Some recent articles have suggested that we must be listening to people's conversations in order to show them relevant ads. This is not true. We show ads based on people's interests and other profile informationnot what you're talking out loud about."

However, the rumor isn't going away. In a hearing before Congress on the Cambridge Analytica scandal Tuesday, Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan asked Zuckerberg, "Yes or no, does Facebook use audio obtained from mobile devices to enrich personal information about users?"

"No," Zuckerberg responded.

He continued, "Senator, let me get clear on this, you're talking about this conspiracy theory that gets passed around that we listen to what's going on on your microphone and use that for ads. To be clear, we do allow people to take videos on their devices and share those, and videos have audio, so we do while you're taking a video, record that and use that to make the service is better by making sure your videos have audio, but I think that is pretty clear. But I just wanted to make sure I was exhaustive there."

For those who might still be concerned, a simple solution is to go into phone settings and turn off the permissions that allow the Facebook app to access the microphone. Note that this will make it impossible to record live videos with sound on Facebook, so you'll need to turn it back on should you want to do so.

Instructions on cutting the link:

For iPhone users, go to Settings >> Privacy >> Microphone >> look for Facebook, then toggle off the setting that allows the Facebook app to access the microphone.

For recent Android versions go to Settings >> Apps >> Facebook >> Permissions, then toggle off the setting that allows the Facebook app to access the microphone.

Explore further What to do if Facebook says your info was used by Cambridge Analytica

2018 USA Today

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.As the ways we obtain energy change power grids need to evolve to keep up with the new demands. Credit: pxhere/923295, licensed under CC0 Public Domain

Renewable energy is on the rise in Europe as the economy develops away from the use of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, but an ageing electricity grid is struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of developments.

Originally designed to obtain and distribute energy from a few large sources, Europe's power grid must now cope with an emerging class of energy sources, such as solar, wind, tidal and thermal, from a number of different suppliers. Renewables can also have intermittent availability or produce surges in electricity.

This irregularity can stress the network of distribution lines and substations which make up the grid, causing faults which may result in frequent power outages, damaged equipment and productivity loss to the economy.

For such reasons, independent power producers may not be allowed to connect renewable energy sources until the grid is upgraded, creating a bottleneck for energy suppliers.

'Connections can be delayed by years or they may not happen at all,' said Yoram Valent, the co-founder of Israeli company GridON. 'This has a negative impact on the power capacity utility operators can offer, while delaying the potential revenue stream from desirable low-carbon renewable sources.'

GridON makes devices called fault current limiters (FCLs), which are installed at key points on the grid to limit abnormal electric currents.

By reacting instantaneously to faults and current spikes, FCLs improve the resilience of the network and allow the energy capacity to be increased  which can include adding new sources from independent producers  without the very costly and time-consuming task of revamping the whole grid.

Renewable producers

Valent and his colleagues have created a FCL that has been on the market since 2013. However, it proved to be too large and expensive for renewable producers such as wind farms that feed into the distribution level of the grid.

As part of an EU-supported project that ended last year, they combined the core technology used in their large-scale device with a power electronics system, to create a much smaller and lighter FCL suitable for renewable energy production. It is designed to be installed in the utility substations or at the power generation sites and mitigate excessive fault currents from the renewable source. Reducing the FCL's size also helped lower its cost.

This means that in the future, new energy sources should get approval to connect to the grid much faster. In the UK, one of the countries where the grid is outdated and needs a major upgrade, Valent and his colleagues are aware of hundreds of requests from renewable producers who want to link up.

'By using our FCL, we guarantee that the grid won't be exposed to excessive faults and connection approvals may go through faster,' said Valent. 'It's an enabler for connecting new sources, renewable or any, to the grid.'

The use of superconductors  materials that conduct electricity without losing any energy  could also improve FCL technology. Conventional materials such as copper wire lose a portion of their energy as the charge passes through the metal. Superconductors don't themselves allow energy to be lost in transmission, although operational superconductors consume energy through expensive cryogenic cooling systems.

Super-conducting fault current limiters (SCFCLs) should be much more effective where high voltages are involved, combining low-power dissipation, high-sensitivity and a high-speed of operation.

The biggest challenge is to make the superconductors work at higher temperatures  usually they have to be close to absolute zero to operate effectively. This means SCFCLs are too costly for widespread commercial use.

Power transmission

Professor Pascal Tixador and his group from Institut Neel, one of the laboratories for French National Center for Scientific Research, and partners, are aiming to make SCFCLs more affordable and robust as part of the FASTGRID project to develop better power transmission.

In order to bring down the cost of SCFCLs, the team is engineering better versions of the ReBCO (rare earth, barium, copper oxide) wires now used in their devices.

They are pursuing the application of novel superconducting wires with a component of sapphire for use in SCFCLs. Recent breakthroughs have allowed thin layers to be produced from the mineral. When a superconductive coating is added, these wires have an outstanding ability to limit abnormal current and carry many times more current than their copper predecessors, properties that has been validated in the lab.

The next step is to evaluate how they could be implemented in SCFCLs on an industrial scale and to find a way to make them cost-effective.

The technology could be vital to plans to create a European supergrid and a single energy market. At the moment, each country has their own energy infrastructure and energy doesn't flow freely across borders. But a new network to pool electricity that spans Europe and the surrounding region has been proposed. It should help with the adoption of renewables, where short blackouts are an issue. An area depending on energy from a wind farm, for example, could use energy produced elsewhere by solar in times of low wind.

Direct current

Developing a supergrid will require a new high voltage direct current (HVDC) grid system. Direct current is required to transport electricity over long distances instead of alternating current, which is more efficient in smaller networks. However, fault current can be more severe when direct current is used, making FCLs even more crucial. 'FCLs can reduce the fault current that needs to be cut by a factor of 10,' said Prof. Tixador.

SCFCLs are the only viable solution to limit abnormal currents produced by high voltages, according to Prof. Tixador. The goal of the EU-funded FASTGRID research is to provide high-voltage superconducting transmission lines that can be used in the next generation transmission network. SCFCLs, together with future energy storage systems, would be an important element in assuring the safety and reliability of the network.

Explore further Superconducting material limits short-circuit currentsThis is a sample of the glowing nanogold protein clusters, which luminesce a bright red. Credit: Canadian Light Source

Peng Zhang and his collaborators study remarkable, tiny self-assembling clusters of gold and protein that glow a bold red. And they're useful: protein-gold nanoclusters could be used to detect harmful metals in water or to identify cancer cells in the body.

"These structures are very exciting but are very, very hard to study. We tried many different tools, but none worked," says Zhang, a Dalhousie University professor.

But synchrotron X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy, or XAS, done at the Canadian Light Source and its partner facility CLS@APS, provided the necessary insight to identify the surprisingly elegant structure of the glowing protein gold nanoclusters.

"Synchrotron XAS is the perfect tool, because it is very flexible, and can give you structural information about specific elements," he says.

The structure of these clusters had been a long-standing question in the field, in part because of their potential uses.

In the lab, researchers have shown that introducing other metals to the protein gold solution can quench the nanogold's bold glow, a property that could be used to detect metal pollution in rivers and other water bodies. Where metals existed in a water sample, the nanogold would stop glowing.

Even more exciting are the potential health applications for these clusters.

Nanogold and proteins are a natural fit for health technology, since proteins are a naturally-occurring part of the human body, and gold is completely non-toxic (which is why it can be used to decorate chocolates and can be found in some types of schnapps)

Coupled with the right "detector" or "linker" proteins, glowing nanogold could be used to precisely visualize, for instance, cancerous tumours. The right linker protein would simply attach nanogolds to diseased cells, which could then be located with a fluorescence microscope.

All of this is possible because of the nanogold's ability to glow.

Gold as we usually know it, in bulk, doesn't glow, or luminesce, under UV light. Add protein as a base for gold nanoclusters, and they will glow a bright red under UV light. In fact, the nanogold is a million times more luminescent than bulk gold.

This gold luminescence is enabled by its specific structure in protein gold nanoclusters: what Zhang describes as a "beautiful and surprising structure" of ten gold atoms, forming two interlocked rings.

The protein-gold structure. The protein, which both builds and holds in place the gold cluster, is shown in grey. Credit: Canadian Light Source

The protein acts as a scaffold of sorts, giving the gold a strong structure with strengthens its glow.

These clusters can self-assemble under the right conditions, offering a low-cost, low-energy production method.

A typical nanocluster is made with a precise array of chemicals put through specific steps, and might result in pollution. The production for these clusters, by contrast, couldn't be simpler.

Zhang's team heated a mixture of a commercial gold compound and proteins in water up to body temperature, 37C. And after 10-20 hours, the luminescent nanogold clusters formed. No other steps are required to create the luminescent clusters.

The process is known as green chemical synthesis, and cuts out the pollution that could otherwise be associated with these clusters.

"We used the synchrotron to follow how these beautiful structures are formed within the protein," says Zhang. The protein essentially works as a mini reactor, with its cysteine amino acids linking to the gold molecules and pulling them into shape. These experiments were conducted by Daniel Chevrier, a Ph.D. student in the Zhang's group.

The team also created clusters more conventionally, to verify their technique.

"If you don't use protein, yes you get a very similar structure, but you don't see the strong fluorescence. What happened?" asks Zhang.

To answer this question, his team compared conventionally-produced and self-assembled gold clusters, both with and without proteins.

Using the synchrotron, they showed that the protein not only enables self-assembly, but holds the clusters in place.

"Essentially the protein freezes the gold cluster so they cannot freely move, and then you can see the strong fluorescence," says Zhang. A freely-moving cluster, by contrast, twists and moves, which weakens the fluorescence.

"We are so excited about these new findings. Both gold and protein are highly interesting materials and when you combine these two you get something even more interesting, and potentially useful," says Zhang.

Explore further Researchers study nanogold's potential in biomedicine

More information: D. M. Chevrier et al. Structure and formation of highly luminescent protein-stabilized gold clusters, Chemical Science (2018). Journal information: Chemical Science D. M. Chevrier et al. Structure and formation of highly luminescent protein-stabilized gold clusters,(2018). DOI: 10.1039/C7SC05086KGabriel Leventhal (right), a postdoc in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, works with UROP students Sarah Weidman (left) and Lindsey McAllister (center) to analyze samples from The Herman Project, a citizen-science sourdough project. Credit: Allison Dougherty/Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Researchers from MIT are taking their microbial research out of the lab and into the kitchen.

Their new Herman Project modernizes a longstanding tradition, with a digital network that tracks the evolution of sourdough starters as they are shared by home bakers around the world. By crowdsourcing information from the project's participants, the researchers, based in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), are investigating how the starters' microbial communities change in different conditions and environments.

Sourdough startersa mixture of flour and water that, through the growth of bacteria, is responsible for the unique taste of sourdough breadhave traditionally been shared among friends and families. The starters, known affectionately as "Herman," are typically shared with paper instructions for "feeding" the sourdough starter, and an accompanying letter to track the sourdough starter's path as it is passed from person to person.

Gabriel Leventhal, a postdoc in CEE and creator of The Herman Project, grew up participating in starter networks. Now, working with CEE Assistant Professor Otto X. Cordero and undergraduate students Sarah Weidman and Lindsey McAllister, Leventhal launched The Herman Project to create a more modern, online way to track the spread of the sourdough starters and to leverage the resulting data for science.

"The Herman Project isn't just doing citizen science and asking people to help us gather data. We're giving people the opportunity to participate in the scientific process," Leventhal says. "We plan to have feedback with the data that's generated from the [sourdough] samples, where we can share the data and the genetic makeup of a starter, so participants can see how the starter changes over time, and potentially also do little experiments at home with their starters."

To help kick-start the project, Cordero and Leventhal hosted two first-year students, Weidman and McAllister, in their lab over MIT's Independent Activities Period as part of CEE's mini-Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Weidman and McAllister fine-tuned the instructions for participants, designed an accessible online platform, tested The Herman Project in its beta phase, and conducted online research for The Herman Project website.

"My primary part was working on the instructions, and we wanted to make it more visual and look as easy as possible," McAllister says. "We tried to make it very simple and easy to follow. I learned graphic design tools and made a big wheel that we later ended up animating to make it more interactive and highlight where in the wheel you were. Then at the end, it gave you a way to find out what our next steps would be."

Meanwhile, Weidman translated the complex, scientific details of sourdough into more understandable blurbs for the website. "I really liked how we were able to take what we were learning and present it to the community," she says.

The Herman Project works by giving each sample of "Herman," the sourdough starter, an identification number, and using an online platform to instruct users for how to feed Herman. Herman needs to be fed with additional flour and water over four days to acclimatize to its new kitchen environment and to let the mixture ferment. Herman is then ready to be mixed with baking ingredients and cooked. Not all of the starter is used, however, and participants save some of Herman to use for future baking.

A sample of sourdough starter from The Herman Project. MIT researchers are studying the samples from participants to see how microbial these communities change in different conditions and environments. Credit: Allison Dougherty/MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

As Herman is passed between friends, the new participants also log information on The Herman Project website, noting their location and type of flour used while growing their new starter. Each user thus adds data for the researchers to study and expand the network. In addition to participants logging their approximate location and environmental conditions of Herman as it is fed, they are also asked to share a sample of Herman with Cordero's lab. The researchers, assisted by Weidman and McAllister, will isolate the microbes and study how the microbial communities differ across time and environments. The project's network is currently centralized in the greater Boston area, as members of Cordero's lab begin to share Herman with their peers.

"The Herman Project allows us to study microbial evolution in the context of communities, where multiple species coexist and interact," Cordero explains. "This is one of the frontiers in our field. I found it really elegant and exciting that we can take advantage of the social dynamics around sourdough to 'crowdsource' an evolution experiment through the Herman Project."

The utilization of microbes such as bacteria and yeast is essential for the creation of sourdough and other fermented foods like wine and beer. For sourdough, microbes break down complex carbohydrates in the flour and water mixture and ferment the dough over a series of days. This creates carbon dioxide and produces air bubbles to help the dough rise. The process also produces lactic acid, which gives the dough its sour flavor.

For The Herman Project, combining the networked information about the spread of different sourdough starters with the microbial data from the dough samples allows the researchers to analyze how microbial communities change as they transfer between different environmental conditions.

A lot is known about how individual microbes evolve, but Leventhal and Cordero are seeking to use The Herman Project to ask questions about if and how being part of a microbial community impacts the way microbes evolve in different conditions.

"I think The Herman Project could help us address many important questions," Cordero says. "For instance, what is the impact of strain-level (within-species) diversity with respect to stability and function, are there alternative trajectories for evolution, and if so, what controls them? These are important questions to address if we want to learn how to control and design microbial consortia."

"Microbial communities have been used as biotechnology by human societies for millennia. A key difference between using microbes as engineering tools and inert components, however, is that "microbes are 'alive'they grow, they get mutations, and they evolve. We need to understand how this influences their function as a community if we want to use them sustainably," Leventhal says.

Under Leventhal's guidance, Weidman and McAllister are planning to conduct analyses of the bacteria and yeast genomes to get a complete understanding of the microbial community of each sample as part of their UROP.

"The Herman Project is a really cool way to take something that a lot of people know about, and to investigate what's actually happening," McAllister says.

Explore further Microbiotas characterized for 19 traditional Italian sourdough breadsOverview image of a self-organized molecular network. Right: Enlarged image extracted from the left image. It shows a single molecule (center) surrounded by six partly visible ones. The faint lines between the molecules indicate dominant sites of the molecule-molecule interactions. Credit: 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.

In a recent study published in the scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology, physicists and chemists of the University of Munster (Germany) describe an experimental approach to visualising structures of organic molecules with exceptional resolution. The key to this newly developed microscopic method is the high stability of a particularly sharp and atomically defined probe tip.

The new method, which can be used to image the structural and chemical properties of organic molecules with extreme precision, was developed by physics researchers in the labs of the Center for Nanotechnology (CeNTech) at the University of Munster. The experiment is based on atomic force microscopy where sample surfaces are scanned with the apex of a needle-like probe. As the lead author of the study Dr. Harry Monig explains: "Our special technique involves a copper-based probe tip that is passivated by a single oxygen atom at the tip termination."

Here, passivation means that the oxygen atom reduces undesired interaction between the atoms of the tip and the atoms in the molecules under investigation. This greatly increases the imaging resolution. In contrast to previous methods, the bond between the oxygen atom at the tip and copper base is particularly strong, thereby reducing imaging artefacts to a minimum.

Prof. Dr. Harald Fuchs, co-author of the study, emphasises: "The potential of the new method is considerable as it allows us to investigate bonding structures of molecular networks with exceptional accuracy." Providing fundamental insights into the interactions between molecules is important for the development of new so-called nanostructured materials. Such materials take advantage of the fact that very small deviations on the nanoscale can significantly alter the material properties. The difference between diamonds and graphite is a well-known example of such nanoscale deviations. Although both consist of pure carbon, diamond is extremely hard whereas graphite is comparatively soft. Only the structural arrangement and bonding between the carbon atoms are different.

Explore further Optical nanoscope images quantum dots

More information: Harry Monig et al. Quantitative assessment of intermolecular interactions by atomic force microscopy imaging using copper oxide tips, Nature Nanotechnology (2018). Journal information: Nature Nanotechnology Harry Monig et al. Quantitative assessment of intermolecular interactions by atomic force microscopy imaging using copper oxide tips,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-018-0104-4

Provided by University of MunsterGoogle engineer Supasorn Suwajanakorn (l) has developed a tool which, fed with the right input, can create a realistic fake video that mimics the way a person talks by closely observing existing footage to create the perfect lip-sync

In an era replete with fake news stories, you might expect video evidence to provide a clearer picture of the truth.

You'd be wrong, according to Google engineer Supasorn Suwajanakornwho has developed a tool which, fed with the right input, can create a realistic fake video that mimics the way a person talks by closely observing existing footage of their mouth and teeth to create the perfect lip-sync.

Like any technology, it has great potential for both good and mischief.

Suwajanakorn is therefore also working with the AI Foundation on a 'Reality Defender' app that would run automatically in web browsers to spot and flag fake pictures or videos.

"I let a computer watch 14 hours of pure Obama video, and synthesized him talking," Suwajanakorn said while sharing his shockingly convincing work at the TED Conference in Vancouver on Wednesday.

Such technology could be used to create virtual versions of those who have passed - grandparents could be asked for advice; actors returned to the screen; great teachers give lessons, or authors read their works aloud, according to Suwajanakorn.

He noted a New Dimensions in Testimony project that lets people have conversations with holograms of Holocaust survivors.

"These results seemed intriguing, but at the same time troubling; it concerns me, the potential for misuse," he said.

"So, I am also working on counter-measure technology to detect fake images and video."

He worried, for example, that war could be triggered by bogus video of a world leader announcing a nuclear strike.

Step forward 'Reality Defender', which will automatically scan for manipulated pictures or video, as well as allow users to report apparent fakes to use the power of the crowd to bolster the defense.

"Video manipulation will be used in malicious ways unless counter-measures are in place," he told AFP.

"We have to make it very risky and cost-ineffective."

While writing fake news may be cheap and easy, it is tough to manipulate video without any traces, according to Suwajanakorn.

Videos, by design, are streams of thousands of images, each of which would have to be perfected in a fake, he reasoned.

"There is a long way to go before we can effectively model people," said Suwajanakorn, whose work in the field stems from his time as a student at the University of Washington.

"We have to be very careful; we don't want it to be in the wrong hands."

 2018 AFPThrough NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate's Flight Opportunities program, six promising space technologies have been selected to be tested on commercial low-gravity-simulating aircraft and suborbital rockets. The opportunity to fly on these vehicles helps advance technologies closer to practical use by taking them from a laboratory environment to the real world.

"The selected institutions will be able to demonstrate their technologies that are of interest to NASA in a much more realistic environment than what can be done using ground-based simulation facilities," said Stephan Ord, the program technology manager for NASA's Flight Opportunities program. "This program is a valuable platform for NASA to mature cutting-edge technologies that have the potential of supporting future exploration and agency mission needs."

Two topics were included in this call for research. Under the first topic, which requested demonstration of space technology payloads, NASA selected five proposals:

CubeSat Articulated Boom Option Optimization in Microgravity (CABOOM)

David Miles, principal investigator, University of Iowa, Iowa City

Demonstration of deploying a CubeSat boom arm with a magnetometer for surveying the Earth's magnetic field. The zero-gravity test flight, which includes a test model mounted with optical sensors, will be used to characterize the deployment system and its repeatability. The flight provider will be Zero-G Corp.

Investigation of Gravity Effects on Electrically Driven Liquid Film Boiling: A Microgravity Flight Campaign in Preparation of ISS Flight Experiment

Jamal Yagoobi, principal investigator, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts

Demonstration of a new type of thermal management technique that moves liquid and evacuates vapor by applying an electric field to the system. This approach could significantly enhance heat transfer when compared to current pumped-loop systems and enables the next generation of high power electronics. The proposed work is planned to be used to advance a NASA-funded experiment on the International Space Station in 2021. The flight provider will be Zero-G Corp.

Suborbital Testing of Liquid Acquisition Devices for Cryogenic Fluid Management

Kevin Supak, principal investigator, Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio

Principal Investigator Steven Collicott (left) and his colleagues from Purdue University observe their experiment during a previous 2016 parabolic flight test onboard Zero Gravity Corporation' G-Force One aircraft (February 2016). Credit: Zero Gravity Corporation

Liquid acquisition devices are crucial for cryogenic fluid management in space to properly feed propellant from a tank to the rocket engine. This demonstration flight will validate models and predictions for a new technology using a tapered screen configuration to passively remove vapor bubbles from the liquid. The launch provider will be Blue Origin.

Small-sat Propellant Management Technology

Steven Collicott, principal investigator, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

Demonstration of a suite of propellant tank shapes with propellant management devices to evaluate the zero-gravity control and draining performance of the system. The flight provider will be Zero-G Corp.

Lightweight Strain-energy Deployed Spacecraft Booms

Mark Pankow, principal investigator, North Carolina State University, Raleigh

Demonstration of a new and potentially more reliable boom deployment system for spacecraft using a strain-driven mechanism. The booms could be applied to deploy systems such as solar arrays or solar sail arms. The flight provider will be Zero-G Corp.

NASA selected one proposal under the second topic, demonstration of vehicle capability enhancements and onboard research facilities for payload accommodation:

Human Tended Space Biology: Enabling Suborbital Genomics and Gene Expression

Robert Ferl, principal investigator, University of Florida, Gainesville

Demonstration of Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tubes on a suborbital vehicle that could be used to study gene expression changes during transition from Earth gravity to microgravity and better understand flight effects on organisms. The launch providers will be Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.

The selected demonstrations will receive awards for payload integration and flight costs, as well as limited payload development costs. These investments take technologies from the laboratory to a relevant flight environment, facilitate technology maturation, validate feasibility, reduce technical risks and enable infusion of key space technologies into multiple future space missions. The most recent call for proposals in this series, called the REDDI Flight Opportunities, opened on March 30, 2018.Airbnb wants Paris to follow the lead of London, Berlin and Barcelona in deciding on regulation

Paris is taking home-sharing giant Airbnb to court for failing to remove ads from people who have not properly declared their properties, city authorities said Thursday.

The French capital is also suing the smaller German website Wimdu for the same reason, with the court hearing in Paris set for June 12, Ian Brossat, deputy mayor for housing, told AFP.

"The noose is tightening," he said.

Airbnb said the decision was "disappointing".

"The regulation of furnished tourist rentals in Paris is complex, confusing and more suited to professionals than individuals," it shot back in a statement.

It said it was willing to work with city authorities on developing "simple, clear rules appropriate for everyone".

Paris authorities, like other cities around the world, have been toughening restrictions on Airbnb, faced with complaints from hoteliers as well as residents who believe holiday rentals are fuelling property speculation.

In November 2017, Paris capped the number of days an individual can rent out their home as a short-term let at 120 per year.

Since December, home-owners have been required to display a registration number on their ads listings that authorities can check they are sticking to that 120-day limit.

The French government announced last month that it is drafting a bill to fine Airbnb for carrying numberless ads1,000 euros a day, plus 5,000 euros ($6,200) a day for any such new listings appearing on the site.

Yet Airbnb and Wimdu "have not removed the listings", Brossat said, adding that "an overwhelming majority of 85 percent of ads" were flouting the rules in this way.

"In reality, Airbnb is disrespecting the law," Brossat said, adding that the website had been sent repeated warnings.

"It's incredible that this company is able to break all the rules."

Airbnb called on Paris to follow the lead of other European cities in deciding how to regulate its rentals.

Berlin has previously had one of the strictest regimes for regulating the site in Europe, but announced last month that they would allow residents to rent out their main home without time limitations.

"We encourage Paris to follow the path of other cities such as London, Berlin and Barcelona, with whom we have worked efficiently on common-sense measures to promote responsible furnished tourist rentals," Airbnb said.

Paris is the world's third-most visited city, according to a Mastercard ranking, and one of Airbnb's top markets with some 65,000 homes listednot much lower than the capital's 80,000 hotel rooms.

Another 35,000 are available on rival platforms.

Explore further France cracks down on undeclared Airbnb listings

 2018 AFPPortrayals in the media and academic research suggest that females act like queen bees. When they succeed in male-dominated settings they mistreat subordinate women and stop their professional advancementcontributing to gender inequality in the work place. The latest study on the "Queen Bee" phenomenon, published in The Leadership Quarterly, presents a different perspective altogether.

The "Queen Bee" phenomenon is widely documented in the world's press. For example, Margaret Thatcher, the UK's first female prime minister, received the "queen bee" label for not promoting the careers of other women in her cabinet.

"Previous research on the queen bee phenomenon stems from illustrative case studies that are not representative or surveys that do not establish the true causal effects of appointing women to power," commented lead author Paulo Arvate, Professor of Economics and Strategy at the Sao Paulo Business School of Getulio Vargas Foundation. "These studies have reinforced the stereotype that women do not make good leaders."

The authors in this study advise that the "Queen Bee" phenomenon may be a myth. In environments where top leaders are afforded more power and discretion, female leaders act benevolently over their subordinate women. They chose more subordinate females at high managerial levels, which also reduced pay inequality relative to men in similar roles.

The researchers' study took into account 8.3 million organizations distributed over 5,600 Brazilian municipalities. From this sample men and women who had won an election race with a very small margin of victory were compared to mimic a randomized experiment. The study took account of time, to allow for leaders to solidify their power and impose their will, and finally whether the leader was from a public or private organization based on the assumption that public leaders command more authority. The results showed that when a woman was elected leader there was in fact an increase in the number of women occupying top- and middle-management positions in public organizations.

"Our research has many methodological advantages relative to previous research and presents an entirely different picture," Dr. Arvate said.

Explore further Study suggests ways to close CEO pay gap

More information: Paulo Roberto Arvate et al, The queen bee: A myth? The effect of top-level female leadership on subordinate females, The Leadership Quarterly (2018). Journal information: Leadership Quarterly Paulo Roberto Arvate et al, The queen bee: A myth? The effect of top-level female leadership on subordinate females,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.03.002Scientists created a bioinspired gradient in mechanical properties. The range is achieved by programming the density of a special interaction between metal ions and electron-donating ligands. The left image is a polychaete worm jaw that uses metal-ligand interactions to create a mechanical gradient, which can prevent damage to the jaw tip during biting and venom injection. The bioinspired polymer-metal material developed in the laboratory (right) contains zinc (Zn), copper (Cu), or cobalt (Co) (all are blue) and a network of nitrogen-based ligands (green).

Known as the polychaete worm, it uses the tip of its jaw to inject lethal venom. The design of the jaw, with a gradient of hard materials at the tip connected to softer tissues, dissipates force and prevents serious damage to the jaw. The gradient in mechanical properties is correlated to the number of metal ions available for bonding. This mechanism inspired a novel approach to generate stiffness gradients in human-made polymers. Through a simple process, scientists controlled the density of the metal ions along a sample. The gradient in metal ion interactions created a continuous gradient in mechanical properties that spanned over a 200-fold change in stiffness, approaching that of biology.

Mechanical gradients (that is, from hard to soft) can prevent damage from large forces. It's difficult to design materials with large gradients. The sample has the largest continuous span in human-made materials to date. Because the material is made using ordinary lab equipment, it could be made widely available for a broad range of uses. Such materials may find use as more resilient parts in vehicles, batteries, and power production devices. Further, the findings address long-standing issues in the design and formation of resilient polymer materials.

Mechanical gradients are often employed in nature to prevent damage from large forces by creating a smooth transition from strong to weak biological materials. This process enables living organisms to withstand tremendous forces. The incurred stress is dissipated as it is transferred from hard exterior appendages to weaker, easily damaged, interior soft tissues. Synthetic mimics of these natural structures are highly desired to improve distribution of stresses at interfaces and reduce contact deformation in human-made materials. Current synthetic gradient materials commonly suffer from non-continuous transitions, relatively small gradients in mechanical properties, and difficult syntheses.

Scientists at the University of California-Irvine have addressed both the design and synthetic challenges by taking inspiration from the polychaete worm. The worm creates a mechanical gradient that prevents damage to its jaw during biting and venom injection. The worm's jaw employs a system of an increasing number of crosslinks between metal ions and proteins able to selectively bind to those ions. In the new human-made material, zinc, copper, or cobalt ions interact in a dynamic, non-permanent way with motifs that mimic the protein chemistry. The binding ligands are covalently attached to polymers and derived from nitrogen-based moieties (imidazoles). The extent to which a specific region is stiff or soft depends on the density of metal ionsa higher density produces a stiffer material. Varying this density over the length of the material generates a range of mechanical properties much like that present in the worm's jaw.

This metal ion gradient was created using a very simple process. A polymer was attached to a device that slowly raised the polymer out of a metal salt solution. At the same time, additional metal solution was injected into the original solution. This combination along with the dynamic metal-ligand interactions is what enabled the continuous metal ion gradient to be formed along the length of the polymeric material. The highest stiffness occurred at the end that remained the longest in the metal solution and gradually decreased in a manner that correlated well with exposure to the salt solution. The largest and most well-defined gradient span displayed a 230-fold increase in stiffness. The magnitude of this range closely resembles that seen in squid beaks, which is a standard for many gradient materials.

The correlation between metal concentration and mechanical gradients indicates that the metal-imidazole interactions increase resiliency. This simple approach could be generalized to create a variety of materials.

Explore further Material gradients could strengthen polymer components

More information: James A. Neal et al. Large Continuous Mechanical Gradient Formation via Metal-Ligand Interactions, Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2017). Journal information: Angewandte Chemie International Edition James A. Neal et al. Large Continuous Mechanical Gradient Formation via Metal-Ligand Interactions,(2017). DOI: 10.1002/anie.201707587Ph.D. student Sally Yunsun Kim works on the AFM-IR device in the Faculty of Pharmacy. Credit: Louise Cooper/University of Sydney

Researchers at the University of Sydney have established a method to identify individual nanoparticles released by human cells, opening the way for them to become diagnostic tools in the early-detection of cancers, dementia and kidney disease.

The particles, known as extracellular vesicles, or EVs, are routinely released by cells and play a central role in cell communication, sharing vital information such as DNA, RNA and proteins.

"This really is at the cutting edge of our knowledge of cellular development," said Associate Professor Wojciech Chrzanowski, co-author of a new paper on EVs published in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Nanoscale Horizons.

"EVs could not only be used to identify cellular pathologies but because they carry essential information about cell development, we could engineer them for purposes of tissue repair."

Associate Professor Chrzanowski from the University of Sydney Nano Institute and the Faculty of Pharmacy said the ability to identify individual EVs will provide biomarkers for diverse diseases such as cancers, cardiovascular, kidney and liver disease as well as dementia and multiple sclerosis.

He said it will also allow scientists to engineer EVs for use in tissue regeneration and help start a new chapter in stem-cell therapies and regenerative medicine.

"The human body naturally directs EVs from stem cells to damaged tissue to assist in its repair. By harnessing this knowledge, we could create a new generation of cell therapies," said Associate Professor Chrzanowski, who is the industry theme leader for Health and Medicine at Sydney Nano.

Understanding the particular nature of EVs is therefore essential for developing their application for diagnostics and therapeutics. For instance, early-stage cancerous cells release EVs that indicate the presence of malignant tissue in the body.

The study of extracellular vesicles is a relatively new field. It is only in the past decade that it has been known that cells communicate and transfer molecular and genetic information using EVs.

Atomic force microscopy image of extracellular vesicles, scale bar at 200 nanometers. Credit: University of Sydney

The full potential to harness this knowledge for biomedical use has been hampered due to difficulties in establishing the heterogeneous nature of EV populations. Until now, they have only been analysed as large-scale populations with insufficient sensitivity.

Lead author of the paper, doctoral candidate Sally Yunsun Kim, said: "To unlock the true potential of EVs, what is needed is a new approach to unequivocally define nanoscale differences at a single EV level - and that is what we have done."

This is because it is the individual nature of the EVs as released by cells - affected by cellular morphology, genetics and environment - that give them their agency in human tissue repair.

Ms Kim, Associate Professor Chrzanowski and their team have developed a way to identify individual EV nanostructures, through examination of human placental stem cells provided by co-author Dr Bill Kalionis from the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne.

In the Nanoscale Horizons paper the team details a new method to identify the nanoscale composition of EVs using "resonance-enhanced atomic force microscope infrared spectroscopy" (AFM-IR).

This involves isolating singular EVs, thermally agitating them and then reading the particular signal or 'fingerprint' from this thermal activity using a 20-nanometre-wide detector.

Ms Kim, said: "We can do this using small amounts of human material, such as blood or urine samples. When cells create EVs they are spread throughout the body."

Associate Professor Chrzanowski said this ability to determine the particular nature of EVs will also allow scientists to continue fundamental research into how and why EVs are created by cells.

"This is a new and exciting field for biomedical research. And Australia is playing a leading role in this area," said Associate Professor Chrzanowski, who is a joint organiser of an international conference on extracellular vesicles that will take place in Sydney in November.

"The best people in the world will be here sharing their knowledge in a field with such promise for biomedical treatments," he said.

Explore further Australia needs a nanosafety authority, say experts

More information: Sally Yunsun Kim et al, None of us is the same as all of us: resolving heterogeneity of stem cell-derived extracellular vesicles using single-vesicle, nanoscale characterization with high-resolution resonance enhanced atomic force microscope infrared spectroscopy (AFM-IR), Nanoscale Horizons (2018). Sally Yunsun Kim et al, None of us is the same as all of us: resolving heterogeneity of stem cell-derived extracellular vesicles using single-vesicle, nanoscale characterization with high-resolution resonance enhanced atomic force microscope infrared spectroscopy (AFM-IR),(2018). DOI: 10.1039/C8NH00048DCredit: CC0 Public Domain

UConn researcher Angran Li, a doctoral student in sociology, has found that one size does not fit all students when it comes to parents helping with homework, and that parental involvement in homework can be particularly beneficial among economically disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic students.

His findings, along with research collaborator Daniel Hamlin, a former doctoral student at the University of Toronto who is now at Harvard University, upend the conclusion of a 2014 study that found parents who help their children with homework hurt their performance at school.

Li will present their research at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) this week in New York City.

The earlier study out of the University of Texas-Austin and Duke University, was the largest ever at the time on how parental involvement affects student achievement. It was the subject of several stories and opinion pieces in news outlets in the U.S. and Canada, including The Atlantic and New York Times.

Li and Hamlin challenged those findings by adding another, more rigorous layer of analysis that showed the impact of parental involvement in homework is more nuanced than the earlier study suggests and can actually be beneficial among economically disadvantaged African-American and Hispanic students.

The researchers sensed that parental involvement alone did not drive poor performance. And their study concluded scientifically that their hunch was correct.

"We knew that with scientific studies, correlation is not causation," Li explains. "We looked at it from a different angle, employing different quantitative methods, trying to disentangle why these things happen."

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Li and Hamlin conducted their research on a nationwide sample of 11,471 students. They used parental help with homework in the first grade as a predictor of student achievement in the third grade, applying controls for student background and prior achievement. Variables such as the student's gender, race, ethnicity, the age of their parents, and the number of siblings were also considered, as were the socioeconomic status of parents in relation to education, income, and occupation. Parental expectations, beliefs, communication, school involvement, and educational activities in the home were also factored into their statistical analysis. They even looked at the number of days parents offered help to a student each week.

What they found was that socio-economically advantaged parents and those with a greater number of children in the family had a lower propensity to provide daily help with homework. Higher math and reading scores also were shown to significantly decrease a parent's propensity to help with homework  a pattern that suggests that lower relative performance by students may prompt parents to provide daily homework assistance.

"The poor performance kids, they required more help," Li notes. "But when they were really helped, they actually improved."

The debate about parental involvement has intensified in the wake of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, he says. These educational improvement initiatives of the second Bush and Obama administration respectively, both call for increased levels of parental involvement.

"There is all this debate over parenting and how American parents spend too much energy on their children's education. That's true. That works for well-off families," says Li. "But we're now seeing that for disadvantaged families, we still need to encourage them to be involved, because it can be really beneficial to their kids.

"We talked about those articles that encouraged parents not to help their kids," Li continues. "We thought they were making the wrong suggestion, but we really wanted to provide some scientific evidence to prove they are wrong. So we started this project and found something really interesting  they were dead wrong."

The takeaway for educators, policymakers, and parents, Li says, is that one size does not fit all students when it comes to parents helping with homework.

When kids are not doing well at school and parents are helping with homework, it may look like they are having a negative effect on their children when parental involvement is evaluated in relation to performance alone.

Li's research suggests the opposite may be true, and that low student performance may actually explain parental involvement  a conclusion that runs counter to assumptions about parents of economically disadvantaged, lower-performing students being less engaged with their children's education than those of more economically advantaged, higher-performing white students.

"When kids are not doing well at school, parents are more likely to help with their homework. That's why we observe this negative correlation between parent help with homework and student achievement," says Li. By factoring in other variables, he and Hamlin found parental homework help can be beneficial for students in disadvantaged families, especially when compared to advantaged families.

"So we are encouraging especially parents from disadvantaged families to help with homework, to get actively involved at school, and stay actively involved in your child's education to compensate for this disadvantage," says Li.

Explore further Low motivation in parents results in academically unmotivated childrenAerosol filter samplers at sunset on the Australian Marine National Facility (MNF) research vessel, R/V Investigator. Credit: Kathryn Moore

By ship and by plane, Department of Atmospheric Science researchers ventured to the stormiest place on Earth, the Southern Ocean, to collect cloud, aerosol and precipitation data for a project called SOCRATES. Knowledge gained during the Southern Ocean Clouds, Radiation, Aerosol Transport Experimental Study is expected to enhance weather and climate modeling and forecasting capabilities across the globe.

Data collection

Graduate student Kathryn Moore, stationed aboard the research vessel RV Investigator, collected data and samples to document primary ice nucleation and its influence on cloud phase. Primary ice nucleation is the formation of the first ice crystals in a cloud, which usually occurs on atmospheric aerosol particles known as ice nucleating particles. Cloud phase is the state of the cloud, liquid or ice.

"The SOCRATES project was designed to collect samples and observations to provide new datasets and parameterizations with which to test and improve weather and climate models," Moore explained.

Hands-on data collection was necessary to advance understanding of cloud formation over the Southern Ocean because current assessment is based almost entirely on satellite observations. This gap in knowledge leads to inaccurate climate models.

"The Southern Ocean is one of the most remote regions on Earth, far from anthropogenic and terrestrial aerosol sources, and so it is an ideal place to study natural aerosols and their interactions with clouds and radiation," Moore said.

A multinational campaign

CSU's team of scientists had instruments aboard both the RV Investigator, an Australian Marine National Facility research vessel, and HIAPER, or the High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research. HIAPER is a highly modified Gulfstream V jet that is owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder (NCAR). The project is a collaboration among U.S. universities and Australian scientists, with the U.S. portion funded by the NSF and supported by NCAR.

"It was truly a multinational campaign," said Senior Research Scientist Paul DeMott, who led the group from CSU. "Our team's role was to collect data that ultimately helps explain errors in global climate model predictions of solar radiation reaching the ocean surface."

Findings

Ice nucleating particles are suspended in the atmosphere and provide the foundation for the most common method of ice formation in the atmosphere. Though the ice nucleating particles are very rare, they have strong control over the liquid or ice phases of a cloud. Once a cloud has glaciated, or turned from predominantly liquid to ice, its reflective properties and radiative effect change significantly, and it can begin to precipitate as snow or ice, rather than just rain.

DeMott shared flight scientist duties with recent CSU graduate Christina McCluskey, now an NCAR Advanced Study Program postdoctoral fellow. DeMott and McCluskey utilized two methods for assessing ice nucleating particle concentrations and a bioaerosol detector while flying over the Southern Ocean, just as Moore was collecting similar samples using the same methods at sea level, along with water samples.

"As expected, the concentrations of ice nucleating particles over the Southern Ocean were some of the lowest on Earth, both in the marine boundary layer at the surface and higher up in the troposphere," Moore said.

Still, the extraordinarily low numbers of the particles in the air were somewhat surprising to DeMott, as were some other discoveries.

"Clouds were also more multilayered than we anticipated, and this has implications for radiative transfer and satellite detection," DeMott said.

Given the broad scope of the expedition and the vast amount of analysis yet to perform, discoveries and definitive conclusions are still on the horizon. However, according to DeMott, the SOCRATES project already has been a success.

"We performed the most comprehensive characterization of Southern Ocean clouds and aerosols yet undertaken, our data sets are rich, and we will be able to answer our major hypotheses."

Explore further Salty sea spray affects the lifetimes of clouds, researchers findCredit: JoanDragonfly / Flickr

The idea that we learn better when taught via our preferred modality or "learning style"  such as visually, orally, or by doing  is not supported by evidence. Nonetheless the concept remains hugely popular, no doubt in part because learning via our preferred style can lead us to feel like we've learned more, even though we haven't.

Some advocates of the learning styles approach argue that the reason for the lack of evidence to date is that students do so much of their learning outside of class. According to this view, psychologists have failed to find evidence for learning styles because they've focused too narrowly on whether it is beneficial to have congruence between teaching style and preferred learning style. Instead, they say psychologists should look for the beneficial effects of students studying outside of class in a manner that is consistent with their learning style.

For a new paper in Anatomical Sciences Education, a pair of researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine have conducted just such an investigation with hundreds of undergrads. Once again however the findings do not support the learning styles concept, reinforcing its reputation among mainstream psychologists as little more than a myth.

At the start of term, Polly Husmann and Valerie Dean O'Loughlin asked hundreds of undergrads on an anatomy course (which involved lectures and practical lab classes) to take one of the most popular online learning styles surveys, the VARK. Taken by millions of people worldwide, the VARK categorises students according to how much they prefer to learn visually, via auditory information, through reading and writing, or through kinaesthetics (by doing or by practical example).

The VARK website also offers study tips based on your supposed preferred learning style(s). The researchers encouraged their student participants to take the survey and to adopt the study practices consistent with their dominant learning style. Later in the term, the researchers surveyed them about the methods they'd actually used when studying outside of class, to see if they used methods in line with their supposed dominant learning style. Finally, the researchers accessed the students' end-of-year grades to see if there was any association between grade performance, dominant learning style, and/or studying outside of class in a way consistent with one's dominant learning style.

The results are bad news for advocates of the learning styles concept. Student grade performance was not correlated in any meaningful way with their dominant learning style or with any learning style(s) they scored highly on. Also, while most students (67 per cent) actually failed to study in a way consistent with their supposedly preferred learning style, those who did study in line with their dominant style did not achieve a better grade in their anatomy class than those who didn't.

Instead, there were specific study strategies, such as practising microscope work and using lecture notes, that were associated with better grade performance, regardless of students' learning style. Other activities, such as using flash cards, were associated with poorer performance, perhaps because they were a sign of learning by rote rather than deeper learning.

Husmann and O'Loughlin don't pull any punches in their conclusion. Their findings, they write  especially when considered in the context of past research  "provide strong evidence that instructors and students should not be promoting the concept of learning styles for studying and/or for teaching interventions. Thus, the adage of 'I can't learn subject X because I am a visual learner' should be put to rest once and for all."

Explore further Learning StylesA once hot debate redshifts

More information: Polly R. Husmann et al. Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students' study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles, Anatomical Sciences Education (2018). Polly R. Husmann et al. Another nail in the coffin for learning styles? Disparities among undergraduate anatomy students' study strategies, class performance, and reported VARK learning styles,(2018). DOI: 10.1002/ase.1777Tesla objects to government restrictions on releasing accident data on a fatal crash in California late last month

Tesla said Thursday it withdrew from participating in a US probe of a fatal crash last month that killed a driver who was using its "Autopilot" feature.

Tesla said the decision was due restrictions on disclosing information about the accident.

The company exited a party agreement governing a National Transportation Safety Board probe into the fatal March 23 crash in California.

The NTSB demands participants in investigations to not release information about the probe before the agency and reportedly balked at Tesla's public statements about the deadly crash.

The agreement with the NTSB "requires that we not release information about Autopilot to the public, a requirement which we believe fundamentally affects public safety negatively," a company spokesperson said.

"We believe in transparency, so an agreement that prevents public release of information for over a year is unacceptable."

However, Tesla will "continue to provide technical assistance to the NTSB," the spokesperson added.

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt told Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk in a phone call Wednesday that the agency decided to remove Tesla from the investigation due to the disagreement, Bloomberg News reported.

An NTSB spokesman said the agency would comment publicly on the issue later Thursday.

Tesla has released several statements on the accident, including in a March 30 blog post that expressed sorrow for the family, but defended its technology and pointed responsibility for the crash on the driver, Walter Huang.

Huang's hands were "not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision," Tesla said.

"Tesla Autopilot does not prevent all accidents - such a standard would be impossible - but it makes them much less likely to occur. It unequivocally makes the world safer for the vehicle occupants, pedestrians and cyclists," the company said.

The company also noted that the accident occurred at a confusing highway interchange, and the protective shield on the concrete barrier involved in the crash was not in proper condition.

Huang's family has hired the Minami Tamaki law firm to "explore legal options" following the fatality, the firm said.

"The firm's preliminary review has uncovered complaints by other Tesla drivers of navigational errors by the Autopilot feature, and other lawsuits have also made this complaint," Minami Tamaki said in a strongly-worded statement.

"The firm believes Tesla's Autopilot feature is defective and likely caused Huang's death."

"The family wants to investigate this incident and help ensure that this tragedy does not happen to other consumers who buy semi-autonomous vehicles," said Mark Fong, a partner at Minami Tamaki.

Explore further Elon Musk makes light of Tesla's woes in April 1 Twitter prank

 2018 AFPA three-dimensional representation of a norovirus virion, based on electron microscopic imagery. Should astrobiologists also be considering virions and viruses when looking for life beyond Earth? Credit: CDC/Jessica A. Allen/Alissa Eckert

They are the most abundant form of life on Earth, but viruses  or their seed-like dormant state, known as virions  are outliers in our search for life on other planets. Now, one group of scientists are pushing for astrobiologists to consider searching for viruses beyond Earth more seriously.

In NASA's current astrobiology strategy, viruses are mentioned six times in its 250 pages, write the authors of a recent paper Astrovirology: Viruses at large in the Universe. They call for the study of viruses to be incorporated into extraterrestrial science missions and astrobiological research at home, and have a checklist for the actions needed to put viruses on the interplanetary map.

"Viruses are an integral part of life on Earth as we know it," saysKen Stedman, a virologist at Portland State University's Center for Life in Extreme Environments and a co-author on the paper. If we are going to be thinking about life on early Earth or ancient or current life on other planets, we need to be thinking about viruses, he says.

It has been more than a century since scientists discovered the first virus, and for decades it was known simply as a "very small disease-causing agent". Late Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar even referred to them as "a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein", Stedman and colleagues write.

Their current definition is more complicated, and less defamatory: viruses are entities whose genome replicates inside living cells, and are able to transfer that viral genome to other cells. As this definition implies, viruses comprise the whole reproduction cycle  and they need other living cells to reproduce. Virions, on the other hand, are the viral seedsthat could become viruses if they happen upon compatible living cells in which to replicate. On Earth, virions and viruses go hand-in-hand with life, and if we find the former on other planets they could point to cellular life once having existed on them.

On Earth, viruses are thought to outnumber cellular life forms by a factor of 10. And our planet is teeming with virions. In fact, a teaspoon of sea water can contain up to 50 million virions.

Future missions to sample the plumes of Enceladus (seen here pictured in silhouette against Saturns rings by the Cassini spacecraft) or Europa should carry with them experiments to detect virions and viruses. Credit: NASA/JPLCaltech/Space Science Institute

"It makes sense to be looking for the things that are likely to be the most abundant," says Stedman, who also chairs the Virus Focus Groupwithin NASA's Astrobiology Institute. "If an alien intelligence came to Earth looking for life, they would probably get a sample of sea water, loaded with virions. The alien life would come to the conclusion that Earth is inhabited by virions."

However, there are currently no extraterrestrial missions planning to hunt for virions in the water plumes on Jupiter's moon Europaor the jets of Enceladus.

"Astrovirology is no more, nor less, valid than astrobiology," says Don Cowan, director of the Centre for Microbial Ecology and Genomics at the University of Pretoria. "There is no reason why astrovirology should not be considered with the same emphasis as 'prokaryote' [i.e. bacterial] astrobiology, particularly since the lesson from Earth's biology is that every known organism has one or [sometimes many] more virus parasites."

Part of the reason for astrovirology's absence from space science agendas, Stedman says, is that virologists have not been reaching out to astrobiologists and pushing the case for virion hunting. Another major reason is technical: virions are tiny (with diameters ranging from 20 nanometers to over one micrometer), and so scientists need transmission electron microscopes to see their unique and varied shapes.

"While this may not be difficult on Earth, it seems unlikely that a transmission electron microscope will be put on a spacecraft in the foreseeable future," the authors note.

That was one of the authors' aims in writing their paper  to stimulate the development and testing of technologies that scientists could use in remote locations to discover virions.

Ken Stedman (right) working in his lab. Stedman is a virologist and Chair of the NASA Astrobiology Institutes Virus Focus Group. Credit: Joseph Thiebes

"We need to look for biosignatures, and the morphologies of these virions are extremely distinctive," says Stedman.

However, another challenge is finding a way to look for unknown virions. "We have to be careful when trying to find genomes of things that we don't know are there," Stedman says. While there are techniques to identify known viruses, such as high throughput sequencing or high density microarrays, identifying truly novel virions could pose a problem, the authors write.

Scientists can hunt for extraterrestrial cellular life forms, such as bacteria or more complex life, by looking for certain chemicals on a planet or in its atmosphere, but virions do not create by-products like methane or oxygen. But, the authors hypothesize, if viruses had once infected life on other planets, perhaps those viruses changed the host organism's metabolism and this could be remotely detected from Earth. One possibility is that host organisms' chemical by-products may be slightly different to those that had not been infected by viruses. If this was the case, this could be a proxy for detecting cellular life and viruses.

In the short term, the astrovirologists suggest that, among other things, researchers need to find distinctive virus biosignatures; consider virus-detection experiments for Europa and Enceladus; and include virus models in our models for ancient oceans and other planets.

However, Stedman says that even if there were no virions on other planets, it would be an important discovery. "If we find somewhere else where living cells don't have viruses associated with them, [then] that would be something very different from Earth and very interesting."

Explore further Viruses are everywhere, maybe even in space

This story is republished courtesy of NASA's Astrobiology Magazine. Explore the Earth and beyond at www.astrobio.net .The gender compensation gap between women and men is well-documented, and research shows that the gap is wider in the top positions.

Recent research from UT Dallas' Naveen Jindal School of Management examines how cultural perceptions affect the compensation of female CEOs in China, where women CEOs earn significantly less than their male counterparts.

Overall, the researchers suggested that the gender gap in CEO pay in emerging economies may result from a perceived mismatch between cultural perceptions of female gender roles and perceptions of leadership traits.

"That the gender pay gap exists even in top positions is a known problem, but the reasons for this pay gap and possible solutions to address this problem are still debated."

Dr. Livia Markoczy, associate professor of organizations, strategy and international management

Joyce C. Wang, a Ph.D. candidate in international management; Dr. Livia Markoczy, associate professor of organizations, strategy and international management; and Dr. Mike Peng, O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chair of Management, are co-authors of the study, which was published in the Journal of Business Ethics.

"That the gender pay gap exists even in top positions is a known problem, but the reasons for this pay gap and possible solutions to address this problem are still debated," Markoczy said.

The researchers wanted to explore how female CEOs are compensated in emerging economies. China was chosen in part because an increasing number of women are rising through corporate ranks in Chinese companies. Also, the process for determining CEO pay is less formalized and transparent in China compared to developed economies.

Using a sample including 1,667 firms in China, the researchers studied CEO compensation between 2004 and 2010. They gathered data from publicly listed firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges.

Although a higher percentage of women serve as CEOs in China than in the United Statesabout 5.6 percent of firms there were headed by women compared to 3.3 percent in the U.S. as of 2010the study found that the female CEO compensation gap is still substantial in China.

Clash of Expectations

The study examines how, in emerging economies, leaders are typically associated with agentic traits, or those more focused on outcomes, including aggressiveness, competitiveness and independence. In contrast, women are stereotypically considered more compassionate, inclusive and sympathetic.

These communal traits, which consider group dynamics in decision-making, are often seen as incompatible with the agentic requirements expected of a leader.

"The stereotypical views toward women and leaders may be translated into lower pay to female CEOs relative to male CEOs," Wang said. "This is more likely in firms with less-formalized pay-setting rules, such as those in China."

Closing the Gap

The researchers proposed that the perceived mismatch for female leaders may be altered by two mechanisms. Female CEOs may narrow the pay gap by undertaking one of the following:

Exhibiting agentic qualities, such as taking more risks, thus demonstrating traits desirable for leaders.

Working in female-dominated industriessuch as broadcasting, retail, publishing, textiles or tourism, in which more than 50 percent of the employees are femalesa context where communal traits are valued in leadership positions.

However, for female CEOs, the researchers advised against doing bothtaking risks in female-dominated industries.

"While our findings on the substantial compensation gap between female and male CEOs are sobering, we also offer a silver lining to successful women," Peng said. "There are ways for female CEOs to reap the fruits that their hard work justifies."

Explore further Women CEOs more likely to be targeted by activist shareholders

More information: Joyce C. Wang et al. She'-E-O Compensation Gap: A Role Congruity View, Journal of Business Ethics (2018). Journal information: Journal of Business Ethics Joyce C. Wang et al. She'-E-O Compensation Gap: A Role Congruity View,(2018). DOI: 10.1007/s10551-018-3807-4Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election and data privacy. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Wednesday that regulation of social media is "inevitable" and disclosed that his own personal information has been compromised by malicious outsiders. But after two days of congressional testimony, what seemed clear was how little Congress seems to know about Facebook, much less what to do about it.

Statements from representatives facing re-election this year ranged from complaints of anti-conservative bias to questions about whether Facebook could improve broadband speeds in their state.

Facebook shares rose more than 1 percent after climbing 4.5 percent on Monday. Rather than putting a dent in his well-prepared armor, two days of unfocused questioning helped Zuckerberg restore more than $25 billion in market value that the company has lost since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in mid-March.

Facebook's stock remains 10 percent below where it stood before the scandal, a decline that has wiped out about $50 billion in shareholder wealth.

Wrapping up his four-minutes of questioning, Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida commended the platform, saying "it's wonderful for us seniors to connect with our relatives."

Other lawmakers were similarly stymied by the rapid-fire format, unable to probe beyond surface-level accusations that Facebook had breached users' trust.

Anna Eshoo, a California congresswoman whose district is adjacent to Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters, pressed Zuckerberg on whether the company would be willing to change its business model to protect individual privacy. Zuckerberg said he wasn't sure what that meant, and Eshoo was forced to say she would follow up with written questions.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election and data privacy. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

His remarks came amid a second day of a congressional inquisition in the wake of the worst privacy debacle in his company's history. At the close of Wednesday's hearing, Zuckerberg had spent roughly 10 out of the previous 24 hours testifying before Congress.

A day earlier, Zuckerberg batted away often-aggressive questioning from senators who accused him of failing to protect the personal information of millions of Americans from Russians intent on upsetting the U.S. election.

Lawmakers in both parties have floated possible regulation of Facebook and other tech companies amid privacy scandals and Russian intervention on the platform. It's not clear what that regulation would look like and Zuckerberg didn't offer any specifics.

"The internet is growing in importance around the world in people's lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation," Zuckerberg said during testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "So my position is not that there should be no regulation but I also think that you have to be careful about regulation you put in place."

Larger, more dominant companies like Facebook have the resources to comply with government regulation, he said, but "that might be more difficult for a smaller startup to comply with."

Zuckerberg was answering a question from Eshoo when he informed lawmakers about his personal data, a reference to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that has rocked his company over the past several weeks.

Rep. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., left, greets Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, right, as he arrives to testify before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election and data privacy. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

The stakes are high for both Zuckerberg and his company. Facebook has been reeling following revelations last month that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which was affiliated with Trump's 2016 campaign, improperly scooped up data on about 87 million users. Zuckerberg has been on an apology tour for most of the past two weeks, culminating in his congressional appearances this week.

But what comes next is unclear.

Lawmakers said repeatedly they think Facebook should probably be regulated. But there was no consensus at all on that pointwhat exactly should be regulated, or even what the biggest problems are.

Members pressed Zuckerberg on the company's privacy policies and often declared that Facebook needs to do more to protect user data. Several lawmakers touted bills they've introduced. But there was no clear thread among them as to how, or if, the government should step in.

Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the committee's top ranking Democrat, sounded pessimistic that Congress will pass anything.

"I've just seen it over and over againthat we have the hearings, and nothing happens," Pallone said.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election and data privacy. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., the committee chairman, asked Zuckerberg if it ever crossed his mind several years ago when user data was being extracted from Facebook "that you should be communicating more clearly with users that Facebook is monetizing their data." Information about users "is probably the most valuable thing about Facebook," Walden added.

Zuckerberg said that Facebook allows people to decide whether and how they want their information shared. But he said his company "can do a better job of explaining how advertising works."

After a testy exchange with Zuckerberg, Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., said Congress should consider imposing "really robust penalties" for social media companies that repeatedly compromise user information.

"We continue to have these abuses and these data breaches," DeGette said. "But at the same time it doesn't seem like future activities are prevented."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election and data privacy. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

During roughly five hours of questioning by members of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday, Zuckerberg apologized several times for Facebook failures. He also disclosed that his company was "working with" special counsel Robert Mueller in the federal probe of Russian election interference and said it was working hard to change its own operations in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations.

Seemingly unimpressed, Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said Zuckerberg's company had a 14-year history of apologizing for "ill-advised decisions" related to user privacy. "How is today's apology different?" Thune asked.

As for the federal Russia probe that has occupied much of Washington's attention for months, he said he had not been interviewed by special counsel Mueller's team, but "I know we're working with them." He offered no details, citing a concern about confidentiality rules of the investigation.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, center, arrives to testify before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Earlier this year Mueller charged 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies in a plot to interfere in the 2016 presidential election through a social media propaganda effort that included online ad purchases using U.S. aliases and politicking on U.S. soil. A number of the Russian ads were on Facebook.

Zuckerberg said Facebook had been led to believe Cambridge Analytica had deleted the user data it had harvested and that had been "clearly a mistake." He said Facebook had considered the data collection "a closed case" and had not alerted the Federal Trade Commission. He assured senators the company would have handled the situation differently today.

 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.PRAGUE -- On April 16 and 17, the Director of RFE/RLs Kyrgyz Service, Venera Djumataeva, spoke at two events in Washington. Streamed video of both are shared below.

On Monday, April 16, Djumataeva discussed the implications of President Almazbek Atambayevs return to politics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) with CSIS Central Asia expert Jeffrey Mankoff.

On Tuesday, April 17, she spoke at the book launch of Jeffrey B. Lilleys Have the Mountains Fallen? Two Journeys of Loss and Redemption in the Cold War, at the Open Society Foundations, alongside Muhammad Tahir, RFE/RL's Washignton-based Media Relations Manager for Asian Affairs and Host of RFE/RLs Central Asia and South Asia podcasts Majlis and Gandhara.

Atambayev Returns: What Next for Kyrgyzstan?

Venera Djumataeva

RFE/RL Kyrgyz Service Director

Jeffrey Mankoff

Deputy Director and Senior Fellow at CSIS, Russia and Eurasia Program

Monday, April 16, 2018

2:00 pm - 3:30 pm EST, 8:00 pm - 9:30 pm CET

Center for Strategic and international studies, Washington D.C.

Kyrgyzstans former President Almazbek Atambayev is back in politics following his unchallenged appointment as head of the ruling Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan (SDPK) on March 31. His return to politics comes amid rumors of tensions between him and current President Sooronbai Jeenbekov, his handpicked successor elected just over 100 days ago.

In his first comment after the inauguration, the former president suggested that the presence of Jeenbekovs brother in parliament doesn't look good. His comment followed an earlier decision by his top lieutenant, Farid Niyazov, to resign as President Jeenbekov's chief of staff. What is driving the apparent tension between Kyrgyzstans current and former presidents? And what does Atambayev's return to active politics mean for the future of the Atambayev-Jeenbekov alliance, the current Kyrgyz government, and Kyrgyzstan's political future?

Book Launch: Have the Mountains Fallen? Two Journeys of Loss and Redemption in the Cold War

Jeffrey B. Lilley

Author, Coordinator of a British-funded parliamentary support program in Kyrgyzstan.

Muhammad Tahir

RFE/RLs Media Relations Manager for Asian affairs in Washington, D.C., and Host of its weekly Central Asia and South Asia podcasts, Majlis and Gandhara.

Venera Djumataeva

Director of RFE/RLs Kyrgyz Service.

Alex Johnson

Moderator, Senior Policy Advisor for Europe and Eurasia at the Open Society Foundations.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018, 10:00 am  11:30 am EST, 4:00-5:30 pm CET, 8:00-9:30 pm KGT

Open Society Foundations, Washington, D.C.

After surviving the blitzkrieg of World War II and escaping from Nazi prison camps, Soviet soldier Azamat Altay fled to the West. He was charged as a traitor in his homeland in Soviet Central Asia. Chingiz Aitmatov became a hero of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, propelled by family loss to write novels about the everyday lives of his fellow citizens.

Altay became a voice of democracy on Radio Liberty, broadcasting back into his shuttered homeland, while Aitmatov rose through the ranks of Soviet society. Yet just as they seemed to be pulled apart by the divisions of the Cold War, they found their lives intersecting in compelling ways, joined by a common mission to save their people. Through narratives of loss, love, and longing for a homeland forever changed, a clearer picture emerges of the struggle for freedom inside the Soviet Union during the Cold War." " The Galapagos penguin, an endangered species that can live on the equator due in part to cool water flowing from the Humboldt Current, takes a swim off Bartolome Island, Galapagos Archipelago, Ecuador. Wild Horizon/UIG/Getty Images

In December 1802, a small sailing ship called the Causino set sail from Callao, Peru northward along the South American coastline toward Guayaquil in present-day Ecuador, a trip of about 700 miles, or 1,127 kilometers. One of the ship's passengers was a 33-year-old Prussian aristocrat, Alexander von Humboldt. A mining engineer by training, Humboldt had an insatiable curiosity about nature that led him to roam the planet, studying plants and animals as well as phenomena ranging from magnetic rocks to river systems and ocean currents.

Fresh from studying the value of bat guano as manure in Callao, Humboldt used the sailing trip to investigate a powerful, cold current that flowed from the tip of Chile to northern Peru, ranging from just offshore to about 600 miles (966 kilometers) off the coast. As an 1873 biography of Humboldt details, the current's existence had been known for centuries to sailors and fishermen. But no scientist had ever systematically studied the flow. Humboldt carefully measured the water temperature and the speed, and continued on his journey, which eventually would lead him to Mexico.

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" " Daguerreotype of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). ullstein bild Dtl/Getty Images

Humboldt's work was the beginning of scientific understanding of the Humboldt Current, also known as the Peru Current. The current helps hold warm, moist air off the coast, keeping the climate cool. It also pulls plankton-rich water from deep in the Pacific to the surface, feeding a vast number and variety of fish and birds, and creating the richest marine ecosystem on the planet. Its fishing grounds provide about 6 percent of the world's catch.

And as the World Wildlife Fund website notes, the Humboldt Current's nutrients support the marine food chain of the Galapagos Islands and influence its climate as well. It has helped to make possible the archipelago's incredible biodiversity. In that sense, the Humboldt Current also helped shape the development of evolutionary theory. The Galapagos provided the living laboratory for another 19th-century scientist, Charles Darwin, whose paradigm-shifting work "On the Origin of Species" was published in 1859, the year of Humboldt's death.

Darwin himself was inspired by the work of Humboldt, who might be the most important scientist that you've probably never heard of. In the early to mid-1800s, though, he might have been the most renowned researcher on the planet, a scientific mind of such esteem that Thomas Jefferson corresponded with him. Humboldt was the first to investigate the relationship between mean temperature and elevation, and came up with the concept of maps with isothermal lines that delineate areas with the same temperature at a given time. He did important early work on the origin of tropical storms.

More importantly, Humboldt altered the way that scientists see the natural world, by finding interconnections. As Humboldt biographer Andrea Wulf wrote in this 2015 article, the scientist invented the concept of a web of life, what he called "this great chain of causes and effects." Some consider him to be the first ecologist, a thinker who paved the way for the likes of Rachel Carson. He was ahead of the curve on understanding environmental problems such as deforestation and its effect upon climate, which he first observed around Lake Valencia in Venezuela back in 1800.

Aaron Sachs, a history professor at Cornell University and author of "The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism," thinks that rather than focusing on Humboldt's specific discoveries, it's more important to look at the insights and approaches to the work that were based upon his research and observations.

"To me, his version of ecology was significant, not just because he stressed interconnection but because he combined it with a social and ethical perspective," Sachs writes in an email. "The fact of interconnection had certain implications with regard to human responsibilities toward each other and the environment. It was a cosmopolitan, open-minded ecology."

Now That's Interesting Humboldt also was a predecessor to Albert Einstein as a scientist with a strong interest in social justice. As Andrea Wulf notes, he was a critic of colonialism and supported revolutionary movements in South America, and also criticized the U.S.  a country he otherwise admired  for its institution of slavery.It said an office in Singapore didn't make "long term sense" as the rest of its operations are in Kuala Lumpur.

Streaming giant iflix is closing down its digital team in Singapore and returning it to Kuala Lumpur to "centralise all marketing operations in one office," a spokesperson told Singapore Business Review.

The office in Kuala Lumpur will serve as iflix's global HQ under a newly appointed chief marketing officer, Johan Buse, who is based in Kuala Lumpur. Buse was the chief commercial officer for Qatar telco Ooredoo.

"Most businesses benefit from having a Head of Marketing or CMO to manage it's marketing operations across the business, especially when the business is so diverse and extensive as ours is both from a geographic and customer/business segmentation outlook. Johan is the best candidate for that role," the spokesperson added.

The move will also "maximise departmental efficiency, cooperation and communication. Upon evaluation it didn't make long term sense to keep one part of the global marketing team in Singapore when the rest of the department is in KL," she added.

When asked what will happen to the team members in Singapore, she responded, "We are currently in discussion with team members who are considering relocating as a part of the shift."





More From Singapore Business Review

April 12 (Reuters) - Malaysian investment holding company IHH Healthcare Bhd is proposing a rival offer for Fortis Healthcare Ltd, valuing the Indian company at as much as $1.3 billion, Bloomberg reported https://bloom.bg/2HtCIxX, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

Manipal Hospitals Enterprises Private Ltd on Tuesday raised its offer to Fortis Healthcare's hospital business by about a fifth in an attempt to win over minority shareholders opposed to the deal.

Both IHH and Fortis were not immediately available for comment. (Reporting by Tanvi Mehta in Bengaluru; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier)Azerbaijan strongman Ilham Aliyev on Thursday secured a fourth consecutive term with 86 percent of the vote in elections that international observers said were marred by "serious irregularities" and lack of competition. Aliyev's crushing win in Wednesday's poll was widely seen as a foregone conclusion with the downtrodden opposition unable to mount a serious challenge to his authoritarian rule boosted by the steady influx of petrodollars into his government's coffers. Aliyev, who has been in power for 15 years, addressed the nation on Wednesday evening, thanking Azerbaijanis for "support and trust". "Citizens of Azerbaijan have voted for security and progress," he said in a televised address. The Central Election Commission put the turnout at 74.5 percent. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first foreign leader to congratulate Aliyev. Russian President Vladimir Putin also hailed his "decisive victory". In a message to the president-elect, the Kremlin said Putin "praised Ilham Aliyev's efforts aimed at strengthening friendly, good-neighbourly relations between Moscow and Baku". But the OSCE said Thursday that its observers at the polls reported "widespread disregard for mandatory procedures, lack of transparency, and numerous serious irregularities". Observers "often reported indications of ballot box stuffing" as well as "seemingly identical signatures on the voter lists" and "group, proxy and multiple voting", the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said. The polls also "lacked genuine competition", the international election and war monitor said, with opposition candidates refraining from challenging or criticising the incumbent. - Opposition boycott - The main opposition parties in the tightly controlled Caucasus nation boycotted the vote, calling the elections a sham and accusing the authorities of electoral fraud. They also condemned Aliyev's surprise -- and unexplained -- decision to hold the election six months ahead of schedule, saying it was aimed at shortening the campaign period and hampering efforts to stop vote-rigging. But authorities rejected the criticism, insisting the vote was free and fair. "Azerbaijan is on a firm and irreversible path of democratic development. A free, open and transparent environment has been created in Azerbaijan for the presidential elections," foreign ministry spokesman, Hikmet Hajiyev, told AFP. "All the candidates enjoy equal rights and opportunities," he added. Not a single election held in Azerbaijan since Aliyev came to power in 2003 has been recognised as free and fair by international observers. - 'Unprecedented' powers - Aliyev, 56, was first elected in 2003, after the death of his father Heydar Aliyev. A former KGB officer and communist-era leader, Aliyev senior had ruled Azerbaijan with an iron fist since 1993. Ilham Aliyev was re-elected in 2008 and 2013 in polls that were denounced by opposition parties as fraudulent. In 2009, he amended the country's constitution so he could run for an unlimited number of presidential terms, a move criticised by rights advocates. Azerbaijan adopted fresh controversial constitutional amendments in 2016, extending the president's term in office from five to seven years. The changes drew criticism from Council of Europe constitutional law experts as "severely upsetting the balance of powers" and giving the president "unprecedented" authority. Cementing his family's decades-long grip on power, the president last year appointed his wife Mehriban Aliyeva as first vice president. Apart from the incumbent president, seven candidates ran in the poll -- all low-profile figures who barely carried out any campaigning. Supporters have praised the Aliyevs for turning a republic once thought of as an ex-Soviet backwater into a flourishing energy supplier to Europe. But critics argue they have crushed opposition and used their power to fund a lavish lifestyle for themselves and their family. Aliyev has denied accusations of rights abuses and corruption. International observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe were to release their assessment of the elections' conduct later on Thursday.Cuba is preparing for the end of an era next week when Raul Castro steps down as president, ending his family's six-decade grip on power and paving the way for a younger leader. But analysts say his replacement, expected to be 57-year-old Miguel Diaz-Canel -- currently Cuba's first vice president -- won't quite be alone at the helm of the communist island. Castro steps down on April 19th, when the National Assembly will pick Cuba's new leader, but even at the age of 86, he will still have a pivotal role as head of the all-powerful Communist Party of Cuba until its next congress in 2021. It's a powerful perch from which he can keep a watchful eye on Cuba's restive old guard who, some fear, could try to put the brakes on his more ambitious reforms. The incoming president "will have less power in his hands than Raul or Fidel Castro," said Jorge Duany, head of the Institute of Cuban Research at the University of Florida. "He will have to share it with other political figures and high-ranking military." Cuba watcher Arturo Lopez Levy said the incoming president will "need a collegial style of management" and need to be able to strike a balance between various competing factions in the new government. Key figures who have risen through the party like 60-year-old Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, or Marino Murillo, the 57-year-old who is a key architect of Cuba's economic reforms, could play important roles in the incoming administration. Much speculation also surrounds Raul's son, Colonel Alejandro Castro, and his ex-son-in-law Luis Alberto Lopez-Calleias, who heads the powerful military-controlled Business Administration Group (GAE). - Continued presence - Cuban political scientist Esteban Morales said Diaz-Canel would benefit from Raul's continued presence at the head of the communist party. "Raul has the experience, the leadership, and the recognition to advise the government and provide coherence," Morales said. Even if Cuba will be without a Castro as leader for the first time since Fidel Castro led the 1959 revolution, little is likely to change immediately with the accession of Diaz-Canel. Though he faces high expectations of deepening Castro's reforms along a set of guidelines endorsed by the party last year, analysts expect him to take a softly-softly approach. "It won't be done in two days," said Morales, who said he doesn't see "Diaz-Canel immediately launching into a series of actions." Having worked his way through the ranks of the party, his key task will be to ensure that the revolution is "maintained," said Morales. For that to happen, "he has to take a series of extraordinarily important measures. Otherwise, we simply don't know what could happen." Only once since 1959 has Cuba undergone a transition at the top, when Fidel, stricken by illness, passed the baton to Raul in 2006. "Few transitions in the history of Latin America and communist countries have been so carefully organized," said Lopez-Levy, of the University of Texas Grande Valley. Fidel died in 2016, and now it falls to Raul, at 86, to hand over power to a new generation, the first not to have participated in the revolution. Morales believes Diaz-Canel, with Raul looking benevolently over his shoulder, is well equipped for the challenges ahead. "He is the youngest among the top leaders, he has many years of experience, was leader of the party in two provinces, and has been integrated in a coherent way into public life."Poland and the European Union are now engaged in a "genuine dialogue" toward ending a row over Polish reforms Brussels fears undermine judicial independence, a top EU official said Wednesday. European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans welcomed talks he had Monday with the right-wing government in Warsaw and said he was "encouraged" by changes to the reforms Poland's parliament was debating. "I am glad that we are now in a genuine dialogue," Timmermans told a news conference in Brussels. "I see willingness of the Polish government to find a solution," the Dutchman said. "I hope we can make substantial steps forward in the days and weeks to come." Brussels on December 20 launched unprecedented legal action against Warsaw over "systemic threats" to the independence of the Polish judiciary, and gave it three months to say how it will comply. Warsaw handed Brussels a reply on March 20, which the commission is now studying. Timmermans called for ending the two-year-long standoff "as quickly as possible" when he met with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Foreign Minister Jacek Jacek Czaputowicz and others in Warsaw on Monday. "This is actually for me the first time that in Warsaw we actually went to the concrete discussion about the issues," Timmermans said upon returning to Brussels. He said the "Polish government has a vision" about how to resolve the differences with Brussels. He said the goal is to "find solutions so that there is no longer a systemic threat to rule of law in Poland," rejecting the notion of a compromise. "We have seen that in the Polish parliament over the last days and weeks some changes and amendments have been introduced and I was encouraged by some of them," he said. For example, he said he understands that the parliament no longer supports a difference in the retirement age between male and female judges. "If that than becomes law that is already a good step in right direction," Timmermans said. The stakes are high if Warsaw fails to satisfy Brussels. It could be stripped of its voting rights in the bloc under the Article 7 procedure of the EU treaty -- covering systemic threats to the rule of law -- which had never been previously used against an EU state. However, Poland's ally Hungary, which has also clashed with Brussels over democracy issues, has vowed to veto any sanction.Police have arrested a fugitive in southeast China after facial recognition technology helped identify him in a crowd of about 50,000 people attending a pop concert, a news website reported.

The wanted man was detained while attending a show by the Hong Kong pop star Jacky Cheung last week in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, Kankan News reported.

China is viewed as the world leader in adopting facial recognition technology for various uses, including law enforcement.

China to build giant facial recognition database to identify any citizen within seconds

The initiatives include the creation of the worlds most powerful facial recognition system by law enforcement agencies. The project, launched by the Ministry of Public Security in 2015, was under development in conjunction with a security company based in Shanghai, three people familiar with the matter told the South China Morning Post in October.

The 31-year-old man detained last week, who is wanted for unspecified economic crimes, was said to be in shock when police took him away, according to the report.

He had driven 90km (56 miles) from Zhangshu to Nanchang just to see the concert with his wife, the report said.

The man, who was only identified by his family name Ao, was quoted as saying he felt safe among such a huge crowd and would never have gone to the concert if he knew the police were capable of identifying him.

Ao was suspected to be involved in an economic crime and was listed on a national online system, police officer Li Jin was quoted as saying. He was very shocked and had a blank face when we caught him.

From travel and retail to banking, Chinas facial-recognition systems are becoming part of daily life

Uses of facial recognition technology in China include people paying at some restaurants or boarding planes after their faces are scanned for identification.

Jacky Cheung is one of Hong Kongs biggest pop stars and has been on a world tour since 2016, performing more than 140 concerts across China and the rest of the world.

This article Facial recognition tech catches fugitive in huge crowd at Jacky Cheung Cantopop concert in China first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.A former top Chinese Communist Party official who was once tipped for a leadership post pleaded guilty to accepting millions in bribes at his trial Thursday, the latest senior cadre to fall in President Xi Jinping's sweeping anti-corruption crusade. Sun Zhengcai, a former Politburo member and party chief of the southwestern mega-city of Chongqing, was accused of taking advantage of his position to seek profits for others and illegally accepting money, according to the court's Weibo account. Sun and his alleged associates were also charged with accepting money and goods worth 170 million yuan ($27 million) in return for providing help to unspecified organisations and individuals with engineering contracts, business operations and other matters, according to the No.1 Intermediate People's Court in the northern city of Tianjin. Sun pleaded guilty and "expressed penitence", the court said, adding that it would make a ruling at a later date. The court said more than 130 people attended the trial, including members of the country's top political advisory body and media. But some 20 plainclothes officers prevented an AFP reporter from entering the court and surrounded the journalist for more than 20 minutes, saying she should have registered to attend the hearing in advance. One officer pushed the journalist and shouted. Sun, 54, had once been tipped for promotion to the Politburo's elite seven-member standing committee, which rules the country and is presided over by Xi. As the youngest Politburo member, Sun was even seen in some quarters as a potential successor to Xi. Sun was the first serving member of the 25-person Politburo to be placed under investigation since Bo Xilai, another former leader of Chongqing, who was jailed for life in 2013. Xi has presided over a popular anti-graft campaign since coming to power in 2012 that has punished more than one million officials, but critics have compared it to a political purge. Xi, who has become China's most powerful leader since Chairman Mao Zedong, now has a path to rule for life after the country's rubber-stamp legislature lifted presidential term limits last month. Xi's second presidential term expires in 2023. The National People's Congress also expanded Xi's anti-graft campaign by creating a national supervision commission that will look beyond party officials and scrutinise millions of public servants at all levels of government. - Plot 'to seize power' - Sun's case showed that the party had some concerns about potential vulnerabilities to its rule. In October, senior party official Liu Shiyu congratulated Xi for foiling the efforts of powerful officials who "plotted to usurp the party's leadership and seize state power." Liu listed former security czar Zhou Yongkang alongside Sun and Bo as part of the conspiracy, which was rumoured to have involved military officials. All three have been ousted from the ruling Communist party (CCP) and arrested or jailed on corruption charges. Sun was expelled from the CCP in September after an investigation by the party's disciplinary body found the politician had abused his position by taking bribes and trading power for sex. Sun was also accused at the time of nepotism, sloth, leaking confidential party information and betraying party principles. As the country's fourth largest city and an industrial metropolis in the southwest of the country, Chongqing is a major post for ambitious politicians. When Sun became Chongqing's chief in 2012, he was tasked with erasing Bo's influence on the city. But last year the party's discipline inspectors publicly rebuked Sun for failing to get the job done, and his downfall came months later. Sun was replaced in the city by Chen Miner, a former Xi aide whose profile was elevated by the move. Chen was given a spot on the powerful 25-member Politburo at the Communist Party Congress in October.Chinas king of titillating content Jinri Toutiao issues apology for providing what the people want

Venture capital investors who called on Jinri Toutiaos chief executive Zhang Yiming last year wanted to know why so much of the news aggregators content focused on societal ills, celebrity gossip and off-colour jokes.

Every time we run internal tests the results show that viewership drops off precipitously when alternative content like international current affairs, science and technology is served up, said Zhang, according to investors present at the meeting, speaking on condition their names not be revealed due to the confidential nature of the discussions.

Breaking down Chinas most popular news app, Toutiao

On Wednesday Zhang issued a self reflective public apology after the news aggregator, known as Todays Headline in English, was ordered by central government authorities to close its popular Neihan Duanzi app, know for its off colour jokes, a week after it separately singled out the same site for vulgar content. The company was also ordered to take down its eponymous news app Jinri Toutiao from app stores for three weeks, although existings users still have access.

We let our users down by over emphasising growth and scale over quality and responsibility, Zhang said in an open letter reminiscent of the self criticism of wrongdoers during the era of Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

Zhang said Toutiao would correct the flaws in its algorithms and machine vetting, expand its vetting team from 6,000 to 10,000 people, and permanently ban creators whose content was against community values.

Chinese media regulator clamps down on Toutiao news site for posting vulgar content

Beijing Bytedance Technology, the parent company of Toutiao, did not immediately reply to emailed requests for comment on the investors meeting.

Founded in 2012 by Zhang, Toutiao has become one of the most popular news apps in China, using artificial intelligence algorithms to deliver personalised, and often titillating, content to more than 120 million daily users. However, unlike many tech start-ups in the country, it is not backed by any of the three internet giants  Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent  which have launched or invested into news and short video services to counter the rise of Toutiao in the content industry.

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Bytdance is a rock star. It went from nothing to an operator of multiple, very successful content products in a very short period of time, said Jeffrey Towson, a Peking University professor.

Once you become very significant in news or in social media in China, you are going to work with the government, because those are areas of government concerns, he said, adding that it was more like growing pains for the company.

Viewership drops off precipitously when alternative content like international current affairs, science and technology is served up

Zhang Yiming

Bytedance reportedly raised at least US$2 billion in August 2017, giving it a valuation of US$30 billion, putting in the league of tech unicorns like Airbnb, according to CB Insights.

Its shareholders include Sequoia China funds, CCB International, DST Global.

Chinas video app to add 3,000 content reviewers, Communist Party members preferred

Other Chinese internet content companies planning to list overseas have flagged the risks of government censorship to investors.

To the extent that PRC regulatory authorities find any content on our platform objectionable, they may require us to limit or eliminate the dissemination of such content on our platform in the form of take-down orders or otherwise, US-listed Chinese video streaming site Bilibili said in its prospectus last month.

Huya, a game streaming site, flagged similar warnings in its prospectus filed to the SEC on Monday as the company seeks to raise up to US$200 million on the New York Stock Exchange.

The latest crackdown on internet companies ranging from live streaming sites to news providers has seen executives from the offending companies issue apologies to the public and regulators.

After Chinese state media shamed the live-streaming platform Kuaishou earlier this month for hosting videos that featured teenage mothers, CEO Su Hua wrote in an open letter than the platform was a bad influence on society and the problem was the result of long-term neglect.

We wont dodge the responsibility or regulation, he said.

The crackdown has seen investors become more cautious towards the live streaming and content industry because featuring more positive content drags down web traffic and subsequently valuations, according to Zheng Linghui, founder of Jianyihui, a Beijing-based community for private equity and VC investors.

Even though the punishment is only temporary, regulatory risks have began to unravel in front of their eyes, he said. The exit pressure for early-stage investors increases, so seeking IPOs in the US and Hong Kong seems a logical choice.

Last year Bytedance went on an overseas buying spree, bagging the popular teenager app Musical.ly, news and video aggregation site News Republic that is popular in Europe, and US video creation app Flipagram, on its way to creating a global user base to build up its content empire.

At an internal meeting held last month Zhang told employees that globalisation was the keyword for the companys development in 2018, adding that about 10 per cent of the companys users are from overseas, with the goal is to have half of its users from outside China in three years, according to reports from mainland Chinese media.

Chinas largest news aggregator shamed by state media for misleading medical ads

The 35-year-old Zhang, who also serves as chairman of Bytedance, is a self-made billionaire with a net worth of US$4 billion, according to Forbes.

Zhang grew up in Chinas southern Fujian province as the only son of parents who are civil servants.

After graduating in 2005 with a major in software engineering, he helped start four companies, including a social media platform Xunku, micro blogging site Fanfou and real estate site 99Fang.com. Before setting up Toutiao in 2012, Zhang worked for Microsoft China.

Zhang, who describes himself as a serious absorber of information, saw that smartphones would replace newspapers as a means to convey news and information. The launch of Toutiao was also well timed, with Chinas mobile internet exploding from 356 million users at the end of 2011 to 753 million by 2017.

Bytedance has seen several of its star content platforms attract unwanted attention from Beijing authorities recently. Besides Toutiao and Neihan Duanzi, the companys short video site Huoshan was criticised for featuring low brow content from underage users while Douyin, the popular short video site for Chinas Generation Z, was closed temporarily so it could upgrade its content policing systems.

This article Chinas king of titillating content Jinri Toutiao issues apology for providing what the people want 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:Cross-border clashes between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan in Kashmir have reached the highest levels in 15 years, figures from both sides show, with hundreds killed or wounded and no solution in sight. The de facto border dividing the mountainous territory had been relatively quiet in the wake of a 2003 ceasefire between the South Asian neighbours, each of whom rule part of Kashmir but claim it in full. But recently the number of ceasefire violations -- loosely defined as shelling, gunfire or fighting -- at the heavily militarised Line of Control (LoC) has been steadily increasing. Independently confirmed data is virtually non-existent, and figures given by both sides can vary wildly. But both show the same trend - a powerful, sustained surge over the past two years that has intensified since the beginning of 2018. According to India, the number of Pakistani violations rose from 152 in 2015 to 860 in 2017. Delhi recorded 351 incidents in January and February 2018 alone. Pakistan claims even higher numbers: 1,970 violations in 2017 against 168 two years earlier, and 415 until the beginning of March 2018. Happymon Jacob, author of a 2017 report on ceasefire violations for the United States Institute of Peace, said he has no reason to doubt the figures. An Indian analyst based in Delhi, Jacob has been monitoring violations through reports in Indian and Pakistani media, as well as conducting field visits and interviews with military officials on both sides. Islamabad's figures are higher as "India is firing more than Pakistan. There is far more firepower, soldiers, posts, on the Indian side," he said. At least 500,000 Indian soldiers are believed to be mobilised in Kashmir, against 50 to 100,000 Pakistani soldiers, according to analysts -- with both sides refusing to confirm the size of their presence. - Hatred as a political tool - The escalation appears to be driven by myriad complex, interlinked factors. Among them, Jacob noted in his report last year that the LoC is more peaceful when Pakistan and India are holding constructive dialogue. There were hopes of a new era when Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid a surprise Christmas Day visit to Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in 2015. But relations swiftly unravelled, derailing any attempts at dialogue -- and creating a fertile environment for ceasefire violations. The tit-for-tat element is strong, and fuels hostility. "None of (the violations) go unpunished," an Indian official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "We always respond to dissuade the other party from doing it again," said General Muhammad Akhtar Khan, commander of the Pakistani troops in Kashmir. Adding to the tension is the separatist insurgency, and the Indian military's counter-insurgency, that have destabilised Indian Kashmir since the late 1980s and left tens of thousands dead, including about 20 on April 1. New Delhi regularly accuses Pakistan of stirring up this movement, which Islamabad denies, using the counter-insurgency to fuel anger at India on its side. The political situation in both countries similarly weighs in the balance, with legislative elections due this year in Pakistan and in 2019 in India. Kashmir is something both can capitalise on, said Jacob. "Hatred is used by both governments, it is short-term political calculation," he told AFP, adding "negotiating means being weak". - 'Worst I have seen' - The endless calculations translate to fear for Kashmiris on either side of the LoC. "I have never seen such intensity in shelling and firing by Indian troops," said Mohammad Siddique, a 70-year-old Pakistani. AFP visited his house in Madarpur, now nothing but a ruin after a shell landed in his hallway. The feeling is shared across the LoC. Residents of Uri district said in February they were bombarded with a "shower of shells" from Pakistan. "It was the worst (exchange of fire) I have seen in my life," Mushtaq Ahmed, a 38-year-old official, told AFP by telephone. "We are living in terror," said Zahoor Ahmed, 26, in Silikote, Indian Kashmir. "Never have I seen such horror raining from the skies... Firing happens almost daily now." Both sides claim more than 100 of their citizens have been killed and hundreds more wounded in ceasefire violations since 2015. A Pakistani labourer named Inzaman was among the recent victims, his father Muhammad Amin told AFP through tears at his son's funeral in Tatrinote village. - Safety in silence? - While security advisers from both countries reportedly met in late December in Bangkok to reduce the pressure, official statements remain bellicose. In Islamabad, fear of escalation is real within the foreign diplomatic community. No country, however, dares to tackle the subject. The United Nations also remains silent, despite the presence since 1948 of an observer mission on both sides of the border. "It is not the question of Kashmir which is at stake, it is the stability of the region," observed one Western diplomat. The threat of nuclear war and the reluctance of the global community to quarrel with rising giant India and its billion-plus consumers are to blame for the silence, he explained. The calculation is that the less noise made on Kashmir, the fewer dead there will be. burs-jf/ahe/st/kaf/aphSome $14,000 in cash and luxury items purchased with stolen money were recovered by the police. (PHOTO: Yahoo News Singapore/Nicholas Yong)

After he allegedly assaulted two men and robbed them of $365,000 with the help of an accomplice on Monday (9 April), Mohd Abdul Rahman Mohamad began luxury hotel hopping in Sentosa and the Orchard area the next day, said the police.

The 36-year-old also went on a shopping spree with friends, buying some $80,000 worth of luxury items such as branded shoes, jewellery and a Rolex watch worth $45,800 for his ex-wife, Yogeshwry Raman. This item was later discovered hidden in a container of washing powder at the 33-year-old womans home.

After an extensive investigation, Abdul Rahman  who is unemployed  was arrested in the lobby of Shangri-Las Rasa Sentosa Resort and Spa on Tuesday. His accomplice, 36-year-old private hire driver Syed Mokhtar bin Syed Yusope, had been detained the day before at Woodlands Checkpoint, and $5,000 in stolen cash was recovered from him.

More than half a million stolen

The assault and theft on Monday was not Abdul Rahmans first alleged offence: he was already suspected of breaking into a house along Chuan Walk on 7 March and stealing some $150,000 in cash and valuables.

Abdul Rahman bin Mohamad is alleged to have used stolen money to purchase a Rolex worth $45,800. (PHOTO: Yahoo News Singapore/Nicholas Yong)

At a media briefing at the Police Cantonment Complex on Thursday morning, Assistant Commissioner of Police Arthur Law said investigations showed that the two victims of Mondays assault  one Malaysian and the other Singaporean  were bitcoin brokers. Syed Mokhtar had posed as a prospective seller as a pretext for meeting them.

The victims were left with facial injuries after Abdul Rahman and Syed Mokhtar assaulted and robbed them at a hotel in the Bugis area. To us, its quite unusual for someone to carry such a large amount of cash, said Law, who is also commander of Central Police Division.

Along with the purchased luxury items, some $14,000 in cash has been recovered from the two suspects. The police are still working to recover the rest of the money.

Abdul Rahman was charged in court with robbery with hurt and housebreaking and theft on Thursday (12 April). If convicted of the first offence, he could be jailed up to 20 years and will be given at least 12 strokes of the cane. The second offence carries a penalty of up to 14 years in jail.

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Syed Mokhtar was charged in court on Wednesday with robbery with hurt. Yogeshwry Raman has also been charged with dishonestly receiving stolen property.

Related stories:

3 Egyptians who visited Singapore to commit theft jailed

Suspected 63-year-old underwear thief in Bukit Batok arrestedWASHINGTON  Secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo is well-known for his militaristic foreign policy stances and for his cozy relationship with President Donald Trump. As a member of Congress, Pompeo railed against a diplomatic agreement with Iran. As CIA director, he floated the idea of regime change in North Korea. During the early months of his presidency, Trump reportedly asked for Pompeos help in scuttling part of the Russia investigation.

But during his confirmation hearing on Thursday to be the nations next secretary of state, Pompeo tried to convince Democratic lawmakers that he was a forceful advocate for diplomacy over military action and that he would remain independent from the president. To make this pitch, Pompeo was forced to reverse several of his previous publicly stated positions  or claimed to have forgotten them altogether.

Over and over again, during exchanges with various members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pompeo dodged questions about his most controversial stances, the investigation into Russias 2016 election interference, his relationship with the president, and how he plans to counter Americas adversaries.

Rescinding the Iran Deal

Shortly after Trump won the election, Pompeo celebrated the opportunity to kill the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran, the U.S., and five other countries. I look forward to rolling back this deal with the worlds largest state sponsor of terrorism, he tweeted in November 2016.

Following Trumps lead, Pompeo has since adjusted his stance on the Iran deal. Instead of threatening to walk away from the agreement outright, Pompeo told senators on Thursday that he was committed to working with the other countries that are party to the deal and fix what he and Trump have described as its flaws. Specifically, Trump and Pompeo want to remove sunset provisions that allow some of the limitations on Irans nuclear program to expire, and to tie Irans ballistic missile program to the nuclear deal.

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The problem with this plan it requires the United Kingdom, France and Germany to go along with a U.S. effort to unilaterally rewrite the terms of the deal  and for Iran, China and Russia to accept those new terms. So when Pompeo told lawmakers he wanted to fix the agreement rather than kill it, he was making a distinction without a difference. That became clear when Sen. Ben Cardin (D- Md.) asked Pompeo what he thinks the U.S. should do if there is no new deal by May 12, the next time Trump has to waive sanctions against Iran or risk tanking the agreement.

I cant answer that question, Pompeo said. I want to fix this deal. Thats the objective.

Regime Change In North Korea

As CIA director, Pompeo has openly mused about the U.S. overthrowing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

I am hopeful we will find a way to separate that regime from this system  The North Korean people, Im sure, are lovely people and would love to see him go, Pompeo said of Kim last July.

In October, Pompeo answered a question about what would happen if Kim died by making a quip about the CIAs history of assassination attempts. Someone might think there was a coincidence if, you know, there was an accident, Pompeo said, speaking at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish think tank in Washington.

But when Cardin asked if Pompeo advocated for regime change in North Korea, Pompeo appeared offended by the suggestion. I have never advocated for regime change, he said.

Questioning The Russia Investigation

In March 2017, during a meeting at the White House, Trump asked Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to intervene and get then-FBI Director James Comey to stop investigating former national security adviser Michael Flynn as part of the bureaus Russia probe, The Washington Post reported last year.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked Pompeo on Thursday to confirm the Posts reporting. Pompeo first refused to answer questions about his private conversations with Trump. Then he said he didnt recall whether Trump had asked him to intervene in the Russia probe. Pressed further, Pompeo said Trump had never asked me to do anything I considered remotely improper.

But Pompeo, who confirmed that he has been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller, did not deny outright that Trump had asked him to interfere in Comeys investigation.

At the CIA, Pompeo developed a close relationship with Trump and sometimes appeared to support the presidents characterization of the Russia investigation as a politically motivated witch hunt. Last October, Pompeo met with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned whistleblower who claims that the DNC hack was an inside job rather than an attack by Russia. That same month, Pompeo incorrectly claimed that U.S. intelligence agencies had found that Russian election interference did not alter the elections outcome  a statement that contradicted the intelligence communitys public reporting, which said it considered such a conclusion outside the scope of its investigation. A CIA spokesman later had to clarify that Pompeo did not mean to suggest that the intelligence communitys assessment had changed.

By the end of the hearing, Democrats were practically begging Pompeo to tell them that he disagreed with Trumps repeated attacks on Mueller. Each time, Pompeo refused to engage.

Asked by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) if he would resign if Trump fired Mueller, Pompeo said, My instincts tell me no. Pompeo also declined to comment on the legality of the president firing the special counsel.

Islamophobia And Homophobia

Throughout his political career, Pompeo has worked with some of Washingtons best-known Islamophobes. He has appeared multiple times on a radio show hosted by Frank Gaffney, an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist who has praised white nationalists on his show and said that Muslim members of Congress shouldnt serve on sensitive committees because they might leak information to the Muslim Brotherhood. Pompeo has also attended events put on by Act for America, a group that opposes the construction of mosques and frets about Sharia law. The groups founder, Brigitte Gabriel, claims that Islam is an inherently violent religion.

Asked by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) if he ever called out Gaffney or Gabriel for their comments about Muslims, Pompeo said he could not remember every statement he had made in his 54-year-long life. But he assured Booker that he did call out Fred Phelps, the now-deceased anti-gay preacher in Kansas who was behind the website www.godhatesfags.com.

Pivoting to Phelps was a curious strategy for Pompeo, who has made homophobic remarks. When Booker asked Pompeo whether he believes that being gay is a perversion, Pompeo said he continues to believe that same-sex couples should not be allowed to get married.

Pompeo told Booker that despite believing that LGBTQ people should have fewer rights than straight people, his respect for every individual, regardless of their sexual orientation, the respect is the same.

View Of WikiLeaks

Like Trump, Pompeo was a big fan of WikiLeaks during the presidential campaign. Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by Wikileaks, Pompeo, then a congressman, tweeted in July 2016 from an account that is no longer active.

Asked by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) if he agreed that WikiLeaks is a hostile nonstate actor, Pompeo said that he did.

Prospects for Confirmation

Its too early to tell whether Pompeos testimony will convince enough skeptical senators to support his nomination. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has already said he intends to vote against Pompeo. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is battling brain cancer, is not expected to return to the Senate before the vote. That means that if Paul and every member of the Democratic caucus put up a united front against Pompeo, they could tank his nomination.

Its far from certain that every Democrat will vote against the secretary of state nominee, however. Last year, 15 members of the Democratic caucus voted to confirm Pompeo to run the CIA, a job that is arguably higher-stakes and comes with less oversight. This time, hes likely to win over at least a few moderates who are up for re-election this year, like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) or Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.).

But Democrats are under intense pressure from human rights groups to block both Pompeo and Gina Haspel, who has been nominated to replace Pompeo at the CIA. There are already some indications that the pressure is working.

I voted YES on Pompeo for CIA on the theory that he would be the adult in the room. I was wrong, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted on Wednesday. I am voting NO on Pompeo for Secretary of State because our top diplomat should believe in diplomacy. He has an alarming tendency towards military provocation and brinkmanship.

Menendez, who voted against Pompeo last year, said at the end of the hearing that he wasnt sure whether to evaluate Pompeo based on his past record or what he said on Thursday during his confirmation hearing. The Pompeo I hear today, much more different than some of the Pompeo of the past, Menendez said. And so Im trying to figure out which is the one that is going to act if he gets confirmed as the secretary of state.

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani at the White House in Washington D.C U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani (not pictured) at the White House in Washington D.C., U.S. April 10, 2018. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

By Susan Heavey, Makini Brice and Tom Perry

WASHINGTON/BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump warned Russia on Wednesday of imminent military action in Syria over a suspected poison gas attack, declaring that missiles "will be coming" and lambasting Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The White House pushed back against suggestions that Trump had broadcast his plans for military strikes via Twitter, saying he had not laid out a timetable for action, that all options were still on the table and he was assessing how to respond.

Trump's tweet was reacting to a warning from Russia that any U.S. missiles fired at Syria over the deadly assault on Saturday on the rebel enclave of Douma near Damascus would be shot down and the launch sites targeted.

His comments raised the prospect of direct conflict over Syria for the first time between the two world powers backing opposing sides in the seven-year-old civil war, which has aggravated instability across the Middle East.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'," Trump wrote on Twitter.

"You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" Trump tweeted, referring to Moscow's alliance with Assad.

In response, Russia's foreign ministry said: "Smart missiles should fly towards terrorists, not towards the lawful government".

Damascus and Moscow have denied any responsibility and say the incident is bogus.

Dozens of people in Douma died and hundreds were injured in the attack, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, striking a cautious tone after Trump's threat of missile strikes, said the United States was assessing intelligence about the suspected attack.

Asked if he had seen enough evidence to blame Assad, Mattis said: "We're still working on this."

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The U.S. military was ready to provide military options, if appropriate, he added. It was unclear if his remarks reflected unease about Trump's apparent move toward military action.

Two U.S. government sources told Reuters the United States still did not have 100 percent solid evidence of what nerve agent was used in Syria and where it came from. However, there is some evidence it was sprayed from helicopters, they said.

In Moscow, the head of a Russian parliamentary defence committee, Vladimir Shamanov, said Russia was in direct contact with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff about the situation.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said pro-government forces were emptying main airports and military air bases. The Syrian military has also been repositioning some air assets to avoid possible missile strikes, U.S. officials told Reuters.

The Russian military said it had observed movements of U.S. Navy forces in the Gulf. Any U.S. strike would probably involve the navy, given the risk to aircraft from Russian and Syrian air defences. A U.S. guided-missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, is in the Mediterranean.

The Syrian foreign ministry accused the United States, which has supported some rebel groups in Syria's conflict, of using "fabrications and lies" as an excuse to hit its territory.

"We are not surprised by such a thoughtless escalation by a regime like the United States regime, which sponsored terrorism in Syria and still does," the state news agency SANA cited a ministry official as saying.

After the Douma attack, the insurgent group dug in there, Jaish al-Islam, finally agreed to withdraw. That sealed a huge victory for Assad, crushing a long rebellion in the eastern Ghouta region near the capital Damascus.

BRITAIN READY

In London, British Prime Minister Theresa May said all the indications pointed to Syrian government responsibility for the attack and such "a shocking and barbaric act" could not go unchallenged.

May has called ministers to a Thursday cabinet meeting on Syria, which media reports said was likely to lead to London joining in a military response to the suspected chemical attack.

The BBC reported that May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in military action. She would not seek approval from parliament, the BBC said, despite calls from the opposition Labour Party for parliament to be given a say.

She also ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military that could begin as early as Thursday night, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported.

Oil prices jumped to their highest level in more than three years on Wednesday after Trump's warning, and U.S. stock index futures fell sharply due to alarm about a possible Russian-U.S. conflict over Syria.

HIGHLY TOXIC

The WHO said 43 people had died in Saturday's attack on Douma from "symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals", and more than 500 had been treated.

The WHO cautioned that it has no formal role in forensic inquiries into the use of chemical weapons. International inspectors are seeking clearance from Damascus to visit Douma under safe conditions to determine whether globally banned munitions were used, though they will not assign blame.

Moscow and Washington blocked attempts by each other at the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday to set up international investigations into chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

The Security Council is scheduled to meet on Thursday at the request of Bolivia, which wants to discuss the escalation of rhetoric over Syria and threats of unilateral military action.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he called the ambassadors of the Council's veto-wielding powers, the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, "to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse and stressed the need to avoid the situation spiraling out of control."

Moscow's threat to down U.S. missiles came from its ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, who said it was based on previous statements by President Vladimir Putin and the Russian armed forces chief of staff.

The Russian military said on March 13 that it would respond to any U.S. strike on Syria by targeting any missiles and launchers involved.

Russia is Assad's most powerful ally and its devastating air power has helped him wrest back large areas of territory from rebels since 2015.

Zasypkin also said a clash between Russia and the United States over Syria "should be ruled out and therefore we are ready to hold negotiations".

Putin spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday and urged him to do nothing to destabilise Syria.

AIRLINES BEWARE

With tensions growing, however, European air traffic control agency Eurocontrol warned airlines to exercise caution in the eastern Mediterranean due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria over the next 72 hours.

Both Russia and Iran, Assad's other main ally, have in recent days warned his enemies against military action, underlining their commitment to the Syrian government they have armed and supported through years of conflict.

Ali Akbar Velayati, the top adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said during a visit to Damascus on Tuesday that an Israeli attack on an air base in Syria on Monday would "not remain without response".

Israel held top-level security consultations on Wednesday on the possibility it could be targeted by Syria or Iran if the United States strikes Syrian government forces.

Syria's Russian-supplied air defences shot down an Israeli F-16 jet in February during a bombing run against what Israel described as Iranian-backed positions in Syria.

Last year, the United States carried out strikes from two Navy destroyers against a Syrian air base after another toxic gas attack on a rebel-controlled pocket.

(Additional reporting by Dahlia Nehme in Beirut, Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem, Michelle Nichols at the United Nations, Andrew Osborn and Maria Kiselyova in Moscow, William Schomberg in London, Anthony Deutsch in Amsterdam, Steve Holland, Idrees Ali, Mark Hosenball, Phil Stewart, Jeff Mason and Yara Bayoumy in Washington, Jamie Freed in Singapore and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Mark Heinrich, Editing by Angus MacSwan, Alistair Bell, Toni Reinhold)Ubers Hong Kong team says it is working really hard to prove to US senior management that the business has a future in the city, following the ride-hailing services withdrawal in Southeast Asia.

Kenneth She Chun-chi, general manager of the companys Hong Kong operation, stressed the changes elsewhere in Asia would not affect Ubers day-to-day business in the city.

Regionally the Uber brand has continued to shrink, leaving just Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan with a presence following the firms announcement two weeks ago that it would exit Southeast Asia after a merger with arch-rival Grab.

In 2016, Uber sold its mainland China business to local ride-sharing giant Didi Chuxing.

Among the issues facing Uber, which has 30,000 registered drivers in Hong Kong, is that it remains illegal in the city.

Hong Kong will still operate as usual regardless of the Southeast Asia merger a few weeks ago, She said. We launched here in 2014 and were not affected by the merger in China in 2016. What happened elsewhere will have no impact on our daily operation.

The Uber boss added: Our team in Hong Kong is working really hard to prove to our senior management and to the entire world that we are a very high demand service.

The company, which has faced opposition from the Hong Kong government and traditional taxi drivers, has had serious issues with law enforcement since its launch.

The citys Uber drivers risk being prosecuted for offences such as driving without a permit and third-party insurance. Five drivers were convicted last March and in December another 23 were charged with carrying passengers for reward.

To prove to management the businesss worth, the local operation commissioned Chinese University, one of Hong Kongs top higher education institutions, to find out peoples views on the citys transport services. The survey last summer found 76 per cent of the 540 respondents wanted more choice, including Uber.

Story continues

I think competition is a good thing. I think we are one of the entrants in the broader transport industry in Hong Kong, She said.

What I am seeing here is strong demand and people liking the service. Of course we will continue operating in Hong Kong and do our best to serve.

There are also other initiatives. Uber Hong Kong celebrated the one-year anniversary of its UberAssist service which caters to expectant mothers, the disabled and elderly. Specially trained drivers and vehicles that can handle wheelchairs are used. Passengers seeking special help are charged the same rate as a basic service, Uber X.

Uber also said it will offer free rides to NGOs, setting aside HK$1 million (US$128,200) to help transport needy people.

For Uber in Southeast Asia, however, the ride-hailing competition is over. It agreed to swap its business in the fast-growing region  home to more than 630 million people  to Singapore-based Grab for a 27.5 per cent stake in its rival.

This article Uber Hong Kong boss Kenneth She Chun-chi says its business as usual despite regional upheaval first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.The United States said Thursday it was considering revoking import preferences for India, Indonesia and Kazakhstan over concerns about trade barriers and worker rights. Exports from those countries could lose duty-free access to the US market if the US Trade Representative decides the countries have violated the conditions of the Generalized System of Preferences. "GSP provides an important tool to help enforce the Trump Administration's key principles of free and fair trade across the globe," Deputy USTR Jeffrey Gerrish said in a statement. "We hope that India, Indonesia and Kazakhstan will work with us to address the concerns that led to these new reviews." President Donald Trump has made trade central to his presidency, roiling markets and upsetting fellow Republicans by threatening to impose steep tariffs and scrap trade deals he says have undermined US workers and industry. He has yet to act on his harshest threats, however. The USTR said it has concerns about trade barriers in India and Indonesia "that create serious negative effects on US commerce," thereby violating criteria for GSP eligibility. In addition, the US dairy and medical device industries have complained that India blocks their exports, USTR said in statement. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, the largest US trade union federation, has accused authorities in Kazakhstan of denying workers there the right to unionize and has harassed labor organizers. The administration is reviewing GSP eligibility every three years, and later this year will look at countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the Western Hemisphere.By Jeff Mason and Michelle Nichols

WASHINGTON/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - President Donald Trump and his national security aides on Thursday discussed U.S. options on Syria, where he has threatened missile strikes in response to a suspected poison gas attack, as a Russian envoy voiced fears of wider conflict between Washington and Moscow.

Worries about a confrontation between Russia, Syria's big ally, and the West have been running high since Trump said on Wednesday that missiles "will be coming" in response to the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on April 7, and lambasted Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Trump tempered those remarks on Thursday.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!" Trump wrote on Twitter.

Trump met with his national security team on the situation in Syria later in the day and "no final decision has been made," the White House said in a statement.

"We are continuing to assess intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies," the statement said.

Trump spoke to British Prime Minister Theresa May on Thursday, and the two agreed "on the need to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime," May's office said in a statement.

He was also due to speak with French President Emmanuel Macron, who said France had proof the Syrian government carried out the attack near Damascus, which aid groups have said killed dozens of people, and will decide whether to strike back when all the necessary information has been gathered.

"We have proof that last week ... chemical weapons were used, at least with chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad," Macron said, without offering details of any evidence.

Two U.S. officials familiar with an investigation of samples from Douma and the symptoms of victims said initial indications that a mix of weaponized chlorine gas and sarin were used in the attack appeared to be correct. But U.S. intelligence agencies have not completed their assessment or reached a final conclusion, the officials said.

Story continues

Russia said it deployed military police in Douma on Thursday after the town was taken over by government forces.

"They are the guarantors of law and order in the town," RIA news agency quoted Russia's defence ministry as saying.

There were signs of a global effort to head off a direct confrontation between Russia and the West. The Kremlin said a crisis communications link with the United States, created to avoid an accidental clash over Syria, was in use.

FEARS OF WAR

Vassily Nebenzia, Moscow's ambassador to the United Nations, said he "cannot exclude" war between the United States and Russia and urged Washington and its allies to refrain from military action against Syria.

"The immediate priority is to avert the danger of war," he told reporters. "We hope there will be no point of no return," the envoy said.

A team of experts from the global chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was travelling to Syria and will start its investigations on Saturday, the Netherlands-based agency said.

It was not clear whether Trump and U.S. allies would wait for the results of the investigation before deciding on a possible strike.

In Washington, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told Congress he believed there was a chemical attack in Syria, but added a short while later that the United States had not made any decision to launch military action.

"I don't want to talk about a specific attack that is not yet in the offing. ... This would be pre-decisional," Mattis told the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee.

Moscow is estimated to have dozens of aircraft at its Hmeymim air base in Syria including fighters and bombers, as well as 10 to 15 warships and support vessels in the Mediterranean.

The Syrian government and Russian forces in Syria possess truck-mounted surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery weapons systems.

Russia, Syria and its other main backer, Iran, have said reports of the Douma attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers and have accused the United States of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the Syrian government.

Nervous world stock markets showed signs of recovery after Trump's signal that military strikes might not be imminent.

Britain's May won backing from her senior ministers to take unspecified action with the United States and France to deter further use of chemical weapons by Syria.

May had recalled the ministers from their Easter holiday for the meeting to discuss Britain's response to what she has cast as a barbaric attack that cannot go unchallenged.

Russian ships had left the Tartus naval base in Syria, Interfax news agency quoted a Russian lawmaker as saying. Vladimir Shamanov, who chairs the defence committee of the lower house, said the vessels had departed the base for their own safety, which was "normal practice" when there were threats of attack.

Any U.S. strike would probably involve the Navy, given the risk to aircraft from Russian and Syrian air defences. A U.S. guided-missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, is in the Mediterranean.

The Syrian conflict has widened the rifts between Moscow, Washington and European powers and inflamed the bitter rivalries that run across the Middle East.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason in Washngton and Michelle Nichols at the United Nations; Additional reporting by Angus McDowall in Beirut, William James, Guy Faulconbridge and David Milliken in London, Andrew Osborn, Maria Kiselyova and Jack Stubbs in Moscow, John Irish in Paris, Graham Fahy in Dublin and John Walcott, Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali in Washington; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Will Dunham and Peter Cooney)An Australian woman has been jailed for three months after she scammed thousands of dollars by pretending to have cancer, the BBC reports.

Hanna Dickenson accepted 22,000 (approximately $31,000 U.S.) in donations after she told her parents that she needed vital medical treatment overseas.

Hanna Dickenson has been jailed for accepting thousands in donations by pretending she had cancer. (Photo: Facebook)

Money poured in from friends, and the 24-year-old spent most of it on vacations and socializing with friends.

Melbourne Magistrates Court was told that one person donated nearly 5,500 (about $7,800 U.S.) after he was discharged from the hospital following his own cancer treatment.

Dickenson pleaded guilty to seven counts of obtaining property by deception at Melbourne Magistrates Court. (Photo: Google)

Dickensons scam was only discovered when a donor saw pictures of her on Facebook and alerted police to the possibility of fraud.

Dickenson has now pleaded guilty to seven counts of obtaining property by deception.

Magistrate David Starvaggi said Dickenson had engaged in conduct that tears at the very heartstrings of human nature.

Peoples desire to assist and social trust has been breached, he added. These are people who worked hard and dug into their own pockets.

Dickensons lawyer, Beverley Lindsay, argued that her client should be spared jail because she had turned her life around and said that they would probably appeal the sentence.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.



WeWork, the New York-based co-working space start-up, is making a big push into China with an acquisition of a local competitor, putting it on a collision course with market leader Ucommune.

WeWork is acquiring Chinas Naked Hub, according to a person familiar with the matter, in a move that will add co-working spaces in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong as well as in Vietnam, Australia and London to its portfolio. WeWork did not immediately respond to a request for comment, while Naked Hub declined to comment.

Bloomberg earlier reported WeWork will pay about US$400 million for the three-year-old Chinese business, citing people familiar with the matter.

Chinas booming sharing economy may be about to have its own day of reckoning amid growing evidence that financing activities have reached their high water mark. The industry raised a record 216 billion yuan (US$34.28 billion) last year, an increase by more than a quarter compared from a year earlier, according to a report by the State Information Centre, which predicted that competition among platform companies will intensify and drive the number of mergers and acquisitions.

WeWork to leverage China partners to fend off rising competition

Bicycle-sharing has been among the most prominent sectors that have seen weaker players drop out as funding dried up. At its peak, there were about 100 companies offering similar short-term bicycle rental services in China. Now the industry has come down to two major players, Mobike and Ofo.

The consolidation in bike-sharing follows that in ride-hailing, which saw fierce competition between rival platforms before Didi merged with rival Kuaidi to take on and eventually beat back Uber. Co-working space may be the next sharing sector to see a wave of consolidation.

WeWorks acquisition of Naked Hub is rivalled by main competitor Ucommune, which acquired New Space and Woo Space in the first quarter of this year. Ucommune also completed a strategic investment in Wedo last July and announced a strategic partnership with Vanke, the Chinese property developer.

Story continues

Without mentors, Hong Kongs co-working spaces are just space fillers

I think its reasonable that companies sharing similar cultural genes and development strategy merge together for further growth, Mao Daqing, Ucommunes founder and chairman, said in a statement. Ucommune will remain committed to our globalisation strategy and we foresee major moves on M&A front from our side in the near future.

This article New York start-up WeWork just made a big play for Chinas co-working crown first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.Better Life Lab is a partnership of Slate and New America.

Last summer, while psychological scientist Julia Shaw was visiting San Francisco with three other friends for July Fourth, inspiration struck. They had all been discussing the harassment-related firings at Uber. In some cases, complicity extended beyond the perpetrator to the human resource department: Instead of supporting the employees who came forward about the abuse, it dismissed or ignored them. Other tech companies followed the same old fashioned script: Societally, we tend to disbelieve, blame, or retaliate against victims of sexual harassment and abuse.

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Its no wonder, then, that 75 percent of sexual harassment incidents go unreported, according to the EEOC. That data point intrigued Shaw. She wonderedcould her research on memory, combined with her friends skills in artificial intelligence and development, make it easier for victims to report abuse?

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While other San Franciscans were celebrating Independence Day, Shaws team got to work on the concept that would eventually become Talk to Spot, a platform that allows users to report abuse or harassment they experienced at work anonymously, to an A.I. chat bot named Spot. Bouncing between co-working sites across the city, Shaw and her team finally took a break to watch fireworks from a rooftop. It felt like the beginning of a new era, she recalls.

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Indeed, it was: people have been bungling some of the messiest sexual harassment-related problems for yearsin part because those who are tasked with the problem-solving, HR representatives, are torn between advocating for vulnerable employees and watching out for a potential lawsuit. Two recent examples: Former Uber engineer Susan Fowler reportedly took her experience to HR only to be dismissed because her harasser was a star performer, while the complaints filed against Harvey Weinstein were allegedly channeled back to him.

Could a suite of technical tools designed to override human biases have done a better job?

In February, Shaws team launched their bot, which uses a cognitive interviewing style, the kind that police use when theyre trying to get information from victims, suspects or witnesses in a neutral, non-leading way. Instead of making assumptions about an interviewees credibility or their story like a non-scripted human might do, this style seeks to simply gather information rather than push the interviewee or ask leading questions. With 40 years of research behind it, cognitive interviewing is also  the best practice for interviewing for highly emotional memories, Shaw says. Peoples memories can be questioned if they dont have supporting evidence. Its a way of gathering evidence thats more standardized than an untrained HR representative asking questionswhich may re-traumatize the victim or impact their retelling of their story. Once Spot gathers the story , users can decide whether they wants to keep it for themselves, or forward a PDF of the story to an HR representative or someone else. Spot also allows users to stay anonymous by sending the file from a separate email.

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And even if it can, should tech replace humans in these tasks?

Shaw is part of a larger group of entrepreneurs who have launched harassment and discrimination specific platforms over the last year to empower victims and to capitalize on many HR departments ineptitude. Although many entrepreneurs like Shaw characterize their products as complementary to people in HR, these tools still raise big questions: How much can tech replace humans? And even if it can, should tech replace humans in these tasks?



The phenomenon of underreporting assault is also part of what inspired Jess Ladd to launch her nonprofit Callisto back in 2015.

What weve found from our work with victims and survivors is that not everyone wants to go in and talk to a human, she says. As a first step that often feels big and scary.

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Callisto began as a platform for college students to find information about assault, and to determine whether their assailant was a repeat offender: Through the platform, a victim could submit their assailants name and a unique identifier, and if another person had also submitted the same unique identifier, the contact information of both victims would be sent to the school for follow-up and investigation.

To Ladd, this is a key innovation because knowing you arent alone decreases risk in eventual reporting. When victims know they arent alone, this can help motivate them to come forward, especially when they are worried about retaliation. In March 2018, Callisto announced plans to expand that system to tech company founders.

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She sees a future in which electronic case recordings will prove to be more effective than in-person investigations or reporting processes. Citing research that suggests people disclose more, and sometimes feeling more open with computer platforms, Ladd says that in the case of talking about harassment, a victim may be less likely to fear judgment when talking to an automated program. (See this story, for instance).

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But experts say the lack of judgment may come with a trade-off: an empathy deficit.

Theres an emotional dimension many times to the harassment that victims have experienced, and they cant have an empathetic relationship with a website, explains Safiya Noble, a University of Southern California professor and the author of the book Algorithms of Oppression.

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Indeed, says Michelle Miller, co-founder and co-director of the workplace organizing and problem-solving platform coworker.org, reliving a trauma in the presence of a robot rather than a human could further isolate a person from a system of support. Its not just about the data and the legal liability, she says, its about creating a space for support and comfort.

Miller and others I spoke to also worried about users and companies assuming that tech tool would automatically be free of bias.

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No matter how unbiased a technology seems, chances are it has still imported the biases of its founders in the way it was designed, says Miller. Data collection and reporting through tech could have a really positive impact. But the idea that an algorithm has less bias than a human is tremendously dangerous. At least if you have a human making a decision, we know enough to really be thoughtful about second guessing, checking, having some backup, whereas users of a tech tool may not take that extra step.

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Still, many experts see potential in platforms that hope to augment, rather than replace, human interactions. Take, for instance, Empower Work, a nonprofit founded by Jaime-Alexis Fowler. It allows users to talk through a workplace problem with actual trained professionals via a text and web-chat platform, rather than risk being overheard on a harassment hotline. Since launching the platform in June 2017, Fowler says shes been surprised by what users seem to value most: conversation with another human. I thought people would want additional resources, and for us to connect them to more information, she says. In most cases, thats not what people want, which, Fowler acknowledges, could also be due to the way that Empower Work advertises itself as a place for people having challenges at work to connect with one of our peer-trained counselors.

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Ladd, the Callisto founder, has found something different. She says that the most visited part of the Callisto site besides the home page is the information on reporting options and how to help a friend. People just want clear information about what their options are, along with information about what sexual misconduct is, and what will happen if they come forward to report it, she says.

Maybe there are things that we need in order to keep us safe that are never going to turn a profit, and thats OK .  Michelle Miller, coworker.org co-founder

Tech as simply a source of information isnt sexy, she acknowledges. But its crucial. And that introduces a larger point: that perhaps the things that workplaces and victims need most are ones that wont present a lucrative market opportunity.

Maybe there are things that we need in order to keep us safe that are never going to turn a profit, and thats OK, says Miller.

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In the end, any targeted or narrow approach will only do so much: a problem as complex as sexual harassment must be solved systemically, through a suite of reforms and policies. These could include changing policies or norms that reward (or implicitly condone) aggressive or inappropriate behavior, revamping management practices that dont take inappropriate behavior into account for promotions or raises, and developing and consistently analyzing metrics for change (say, a lower attrition rate for female employees) to hold everyone accountable. Whats most likely to make workplaces safer will be an interplay between smart tech tools and well-trained humans.

In the meantime, Ladd suggests that the influx of new tools and resources on the market will help guide us towards that augmented future. By giving victims a sense of what options are out there other than going to HR, HR will suddenly have to exist in a competitive market, she says. It will face economic and social pressure to improve.All eyes were on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today as sat through his second Congressional hearing on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And Mark Zuckerbergs eyes werewait, hang on. Have you ever really looked at Mark Zuckerbergs eyes?

On Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, a significant segment of the American population did. As Zuckerberg dodged stupid questions from U.S. senators and representatives, observers wondered about the two dark bulbs in his head. People on Twitter compared his eyes to those of anime characters, robots, sharks, and dolls. According to others, they are bloodshot, bulging, vacant, and weird lil black marbles. Poet and Weird Twitter celebrity Patricia Lockwood posted a photo of Zuckerberg at Tuesdays hearing with his eyes so subtly enlarged, they looked almost real.

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adore my incredible dad who loves his family so much that he got eye enlargement surgery so he can look at us more pic.twitter.com/EAnILTmib2  Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) April 10, 2018

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Sure, it seems possible that Zuckerbergs eyes are perhaps slightly larger than average in relation to the shape and size of his face and nose. But they look exactly the same as they have since he came on the scene in the 2000s as a wee billionaire with a website. Why havent his eyes so captivated the public until this very week?

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Part of the answer may be that we generally spend a lot more time thinking about Mark Zuckerberg than we do looking at him. His name has been in the news a lot lately, because his company is being taken to task for doing bad things. We sometimes see his face in newspaper photos or in online images, but we rarely have reason to stare at it, head on, for protracted periods of time. During a Congressional hearing, thats all you do. You listen to interminable questions that never end and answers that end too soon, waves of self-serving chatter saturating your body, as your mind fixates on two of the few moving objects onscreen: the eyes of the man at the table.

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Babies are entranced by facesthey are one of the first things our developing brains learn to grasp when we dont understand anything else going on around us. The same principle applies to the Facebook Congressional hearings, which were certainly not scripted to be accessible, interesting, or useful for the vast majority of viewers. When our brains drift, they drift toward faces. Were also used to watching people on TV whove been well-lit, made up, and filmed by top-of-their-game camera operators. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, had the misfortune of testifying in office buildings with fluorescent lighting on the ceiling, while his image was streamed in videos that greyed and flattened his face. (No one ever went to C-SPAN to be a cinematographer.)

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But the publics concern with Zuckerbergs eyes was also a matter of his humanitywindows to the soul, and all that. As he tried to convince legislators and Facebook users of his reliability and remorse, viewers decided that his beady eyes made him seem untrustworthy, that they looked like they belonged to some not-exactly-humanoid creation of a buggy neural network, that they might glare straight into a persons brain, through screen and skull, to devour the juicy personal data thats made him one of the richest men in the world. We are getting the creeping sense that we dont entirely understand the full breadth of Facebooks powers, and we are digging into the softest things in front of useyeballs!for clues.

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This is the tactic Americans took when faced with the unthinkable, unknowable Donald Trump as a credible presidential contender, too. In 2016, two separate illustrators edited photos of Trump to replace his eyes with two tiny replicas of his mouth. A photo that depicted him squinting and pouting looked uncannily alike in the before and after versions. The other picture, in which Trumps eyes became toothy, bellowing holes into his head, made the then-candidate into a kind of demon figure. Both images were undergirded by a morbid interest in the particular facial features of a person whose humanity observers were still trying to suss out, as if his face were a riddle that could explain the emptiness it masked.

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By 2016, Trumps picture had papered over the public consciousness so thoroughly, his likeness was more pop art than person. But Zuckerbergs face is still something like fresh meat to people outside the tech press. His youthful persona, which camouflages a cutthroat capitalist, has been propped up in part by the smooth, unwhiskered, easily flushed body part weve been made to stare at during this weeks proceedings. He and his company have benefited from a face that is white, but that has neither the punchability of a Martin Shkreli nor the scheming air of a Travis Kalanick. This week, Zuckerberg discovered that his guileless mug has its limits. Given the opportunity to scrutinize the eyes of a powerful person in the spotlight, the public will rarely like what it sees.Are you a woman in D.C. with at least $2,350 in annual disposable income? If so, youre in luck: On Thursday, the Winga social club that explicitly excludes men from membershipopens its D.C. location, a lush space featuring a cafe, gym, art gallery, and library. Applications are open now. Founded by Audrey Gelman, the Wing already has three locations in New York City and a reported 8,000-member waiting list. (Access to multiple Wings costs an extra $350 a year.) The company describes itself as a network of co-working and community spaces designed for women to promote their professional, civic, social, and economic advancement.

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Gelman describes the Wing as an effort to revive the fading tradition of womens clubs, arguing that women-only spaces are especially important in the #MeToo era. That may be a noble goal, but Gelman has gone about it in a rather strange wayby flagrantly violating human rights laws in both New York and D.C. Perhaps no one (apart from mens rights activist trolls) much cares about the Wings unlawful sex discrimination. But the club does provide a revealing glimpse into a strand of contemporary feminism, one that has strayed far from the legal foundations that undergird feminist law.

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The Wing might not have legal troubles if it had set up shop in cities with relatively lax nondiscrimination laws. But it operates in two cities that happen to have the most robust civil rights regimes in the country. New York Citys Human Rights Law prohibits sex discrimination in public accommodations, which encompasses most social clubs, even if they call themselves private. Clubs can apply for an exemption based on bona fide considerations of public policy, but the city has clarified that requests rooted in discomfort, intolerance, or perpetuating prejudice or division do not count. In interviews, Gelman has explained that she barred men from applying because some women are more comfortable in social situations when no men are present. Thats surely truebut its also the exact kind of discomfort with one sex that cannot justify sex discrimination under New York law.

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In D.C., the Wings illegality is equally clear-cut. Like New York, the Districts Human Rights Act forbids sex discrimination in social clubs, with a few exceptions for small nonprofit associations that do not apply to the Wing. There is, alas, no provision that permits gender-based membership rules when its women doing the discriminating. Gelman seems to believe the Wing is exempt from the Districts law because we are a private membership club. That, however, is not actually how this works. If the Wing were a true private association of like-minded people coming together to express their beliefs, it would have a First Amendment right to ban men. But it is not. Rather, its a for-profit company that provides members goods and services in exchange for moneymore like a country club than the Boy Scouts. This profit motive subjects the Wing to New York and D.C.s public accommodations laws, which clearly proscribe sex-based exclusions.

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In April, the American Civil Liberties Union criticized the Wings membership policy in a thoughtful post asserting that true gender neutrality is a more effective means of promoting equality. The ACLU also noted a second way the club is likely running afoul of human rights laws: By screening out applicants on the basis of their sex, the Wing will almost inevitably run afoul of provisions of both cities laws that protect residents across the gender spectrum. The club says it will accept members who are living as a woman and will review applicants social media to determine whether they fit the bill. Yet both New York and D.C. prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression. Can nonbinary and gender-fluid people join the Wing? Surely not, as these individuals are not living as a woman. And by barring them from membership, the Wing is infringing upon their rights under local law.

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By excluding men (and gender minorities who dont identify as women), the Wing is departing from the feminist ideas that led to the passage of New Yorks and D.C.s nondiscrimination protections. These ideas also underlie the constitutional guarantee of gender equality. The club is fond of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgshes featured on its wallpaper in Brooklyn, and a cocktail named after her is served at the cafe in its D.C. location. But Ginsburg spent much of her career fighting for the proposition that men and women should be treated equally in the eyes of the law, with no perks for either. As a litigator with the ACLUs Womens Rights Project, Ginsburgs genius was to challenge laws that burdened men by relying upon stereotypes about gender roles. This way, Ginsburg persuaded the court to lay down neutral principles against sex discrimination that benefited men and women equally.

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Ginsburg has also long asserted that men and women should work together to advance social progress, contradicting the Wings claim that women may be more effective when they work by themselves. Just last week, the justice reiterated this belief during a talk at Georgetown Law. Explaining why she joined the ACLU, she noted that the organization employed both men and women to litigate womens rights. It was important to me to show that this is not just womens business, Ginsburg said. It should be high on any human rights agenda. And that meant that men had to care about it. I think that the people who wanted to keep things the way they were wouldve been happy if the women had gathered in their own groups with no men.

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Luckily for the Wing, the agencies responsible for enforcing New York and D.C.s nondiscrimination laws appear poised to give the club a free pass. After Jezebel reported that the New York Human Rights Commission was investigating the Wing, several of its celebrity members protested, and the commission seems to be backing off. (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio cautiously defended both the club and the commission.) Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser attended the Wings opening party in D.C., and Stephanie Franklin, director of policy and communications for the D.C. Office of Human Rights, voiced no concerns about the club. D.C. is a place where people can start innovative projects and businesses that might be ahead of the curve, she told WAMU. I think that its all a learning curve, and well see how this pans out.

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There is a case to be made that these agencies should not spend their limited resources investigating a club that no resident has yet complained about. But at some point, a male applicant will probably file a grievance alleging that he was denied membership on the basis of his sex. When that happens, the Wing will have to stop flouting local nondiscrimination measures and, presumably, alter its rules to comply with the law. Would a mixed-gender Wing be less valuable to its members? Its impossible to say, but its worth noting that the club can still exclude members who reject its mission, feminism, and core values, as well as those who demean women in any way. A legally compliant Wing might turn out to be largely the same, helping its members pursue social justice in the company of friends and colleagues of any gender.California Democrats performed some addition by subtraction this week when congressional candidate Michael Kotick ended his bid to unseat Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, and endorsed a fellow Democrat. Kotick, a former Nestle executive, said he decided to drop out in the name of party unity, the second Democratic candidate in Rohrabachers district to call it quits in the past few weeks.

Kotick was one of seven Democrats vying for the nomination, and, in any other state, his withdrawal would count as only minor news. But in California, where nonpartisan primaries mean the top two candidates advance to the general election, Democrats are worried that having too many good candidates might lead to losses in some winnable districts.

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California Democrats hope other congressional hopefuls follow suit, both in Rohrabachers district and in more than a half-dozen others where Democrats are hoping to flip seats from red to blue. If they dont, the quirks of the states unique primary system could leave Democrats without a candidate on the ballot come November. As Eric Bauman, chair of the California Democratic Party, put it at his state party convention earlier this year: We have an overpopulation problem.

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The so-called jungle primary system, in which all the candidates appear on the same ballot, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the general election, can be a boon to Democrats in statewide electionssee the all-Democratic Senate race in 2016 or the soon-to-be all-Democratic Senate contest in 2018but this year its threatening to spoil the partys chances to reclaim the majority in the House. Democrats have found some recent success in culling the herd, but not nearly enough to ensure its survival.

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Nowhere is that more evident than in Californias 48th Congressional District, where Rohrabacher is running for his 16th term. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has his seat on its ambitious wish list, and non-partisan handicappers see the race as a toss-up. But that wont matter if the six Democrats still running to unseat the incumbent split the vote in such a way where none of them survive the June 5 primary.

Democrats cant seem to rally behind a single challenger there. Kotich and Laura Oatman, who dropped out last month, are both backing businessman Harley Rouda, but the state Democratic Party voted in February to endorse Roudas rival, stem-cell researcher Hans Keirstead. Making matters worse for Democrats was the late entry last month of Scott Baugh, a former county GOP chairman and state assemblyman. With his deep political ties in the district, Baugh entered the race as the clear leader among the pack of five Republicans hoping to set up an all-GOP showdown with Rohrabacher in November.

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Its not just Rohrabachers district where Democrats are facing this nightmare scenario. The DCCC is also targeting nine other California seats that are currently held by Republicans, including three where Democrats appear to have even-odds of upsetting an incumbent and another two where they have better-than-even odds of claiming a seat of a GOP congressman who is retiring. But in more than half of those districts, there are at least four Democrats running, setting up the same risk of intra-party cannibalization on primary day. (Republicans face similar problems with so many candidates of their own in many of those races, but they are far less likely to get shut out, given the advantages of incumbency and the conservative tilt of those districts.) According to analysts at the political research firm California Target Book, theres a very real possibility Democrats could get shut out in six of those races, including Rohrabachers. That could prove particularly costly to Democrats hopes of winning control of the House, given partisan gerrymandering and geographical quirks have already made that task more difficult than it should be.

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There are no easy answers for Democrats. Standing by doesnt seem like much of an option, but it isnt clear Washington Democrats have either a carrot or a stick to thin the field. The DCCC hasnt ruled out getting involved directly, but they risk muddling the race further if they are seen as putting their thumb on the scale from Washington. Meanwhile, as is the case nationwide, many of the Democrats running in California are first-time candidates with little connection to the establishment, making it more difficult to entice them to bow out for the good of the party. In the big picture, having too many credible candidates is a good problem to have, of course. But in a state with 53 congressional seats, its still a pretty big problem.This piece was originally published on Just Security, an online forum for analysis of U.S. national security law and policy.

Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trumps nominee for secretary of state, is facing Senate confirmation hearings this week. Though the U.S. Senate confirmed him last year as the CIA director, albeit with significant objection, his new role would be much different and raises a host of new concerns.

One is the influence he could exert over U.S. overseas rendition policyhow the U.S. handles the transfer of people from American custody to the custody of other governments or nonstate armed groups abroad. U.S. rendition practices in the years following the September 2001 attacks resulted in numerous abuses. In addition to unlawfully detaining and torturing scores of men in American custody, the U.S. also sent an unknown number to countries where they faced torture and many indeed were torturedviolating the Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is party.

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Even after formally revoking authorizations for many of the practices that took place under the George W. Bush administration, the Obama administration refused to take as strong a position as it could have on whether the United States is legally bound by that treatys prohibition on transferring people to places where they face a substantial risk of torture when that transfer takes place outside of U.S. territory. Its position remained shrouded in secrecy.

Only after it released an unclassified portion of U.S. overseas transfer policy as part of a summary of its legal positions at the end its second term did it become clear that the Obama administration had adopted the Bush administrations position that the U.S. is not legally bound by the treatys transfer provisions when those transfers take place outside the U.S. However, it did state that the U.S. applied convention obligations as a matter of policy to all transfers regardless of location.

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The position is contrary to international law and went against the advice of many key senior Obama officials, including the State Department legal adviser, Harold Koh. In 2013 Koh wrote a 90-page memo urging the administration to reject the untenable legal position that the U.S. is not legally bound by this treaty provision concerning a transfer outside of U.S. borders.

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Given the integral role the State Department plays in these transfers, along with Pompeos past expression of support for CIA torture and his apparent frustration with laws barring it, senators should make this issue a major focus of his confirmation hearings. Does he consider the U.S. to be bound by the conventions transfer provisions outside the U.S.? If not, will he commit to apply the conventions standards on transfer as a matter of policy as the prior administration did? If so, how will he ensure this policy is enforced? Will he ensure that the U.S. never transfers people from U.S. custody to a government or nonstate armed group when they are likely to face torture?

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Though senators questioned Pompeo about his attitudes on torture during his CIA confirmation hearing, those questions focused mostly on whether he would abide by a 2015 law enacted after he made his views in support of the CIAs use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques known. During his confirmation hearing, he did recognize the validity of that 2015 law and promised to respect it but in written follow-up questions and during interviews while CIA director said he would look at the possibility of revising that law or finding ways around it if he found that U.S. interrogators were unduly constrained.

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There are strong safeguards against revising the 2015 law, which requires U.S. interrogators to use only those techniques listed in the U.S. Army Field Manual. The manual, which has its flaws, explicitly bans many unlawful practices the CIA used in the past, including waterboarding. Any revisions would have to be approved by Defense Secretary James Mattis, an outspoken critic of the use of torture, who at one point seemed to have convinced Trump that using it was ineffective, if not necessarily wrong.

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This time around, senators should focus their questions on the U.S. overseas transfer policy given how much influence on these matters Pompeo could exert at the State Department. According to former senior State Department and National Security Council officials, the State Department is deeply involved in negotiating these transfers, determining their legality and appropriateness, and ensuring certain safeguards are in place when they do occur.

These questions are more important than ever given the shifting dynamics of U.S. military operations. The U.S. is engaged in major military operations around the world, yet it has drastically reduced its detention operations in these locations. It relies more than ever on partner forces that detain and interrogate people in their custody. Just days ago it was revealed that the U.S. military is spending about $1 million to help detain thousands of Islamic State fighters and their family members in makeshift camps run by Kurdish militias in northern Syria.

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The only new detainee the Trump administration says it is holding is an unnamed American citizen in Iraq. This detainee requested a lawyer, but the U.S. refused to provide one until a court ordered it months later, after the American Civil Liberties Union sued to represent him. It also sought to transfer him to Saudi Arabia despite that countrys well-known record of torture. In Yemen, U.S. interrogators have questioned detainees in secret prisons run by the United Arab Emirates and UAE-backed Yemeni forces where torture is widespread, and in another undisclosed location where the detention conditions were not known.

In this environment, the line between where partner custody ends, and U.S. custody begins, as well as what constitutes a transfer to another governments custody, should be closely watched. Pompeos expressed frustration with laws banning torture, the leading role the State Department plays in overseas transfers, and the limited domestic legal constraints on them, should make these issues and questions an important focus of Pompeos upcoming nomination hearing.

More from Just Security:

Does Congress Really Think Its Reasserting Its War Powers by Giving Them Away to Trump?

The Downsides of Bombing SyriaWhen Neil Gorsuch was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court on April 10, 2017, Senate Republicans believed they had found another Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch has not disappointed them. Judging by his voting record, he is a fitting successor to Scalia. Gorsuch has voted with Clarence Thomas, a bona fide originalist like Scalia, about 88 percent of the time. Scalia himself sided with Thomas in roughly 91 percent of cases.

If we want to understand Gorsuchs first-year record, its also important to study his behavior during oral arguments. These public performances serve a very important purpose, revealing the justices personalities, judicial philosophies, and interpersonal dynamics as they explore salient legal issues with the lawyers and among themselves.

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Two dimensions of the justices participation in oral arguments shine light on their judicial styles. First, the amount of time they speak during oral presentations reflects their desire for the limelight. Some suggest that justices behave like peacocks by trying to garner attention. Thomas, who once maintained a 10-year streak of silence during oral arguments, criticizes his colleagues tendency to interrupt the lawyers. He feels that the justices should listen to lawyers who are arguing their cases, and  should allow the advocates to advocate.

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The second dimension pertains to how the justices apportion their time between the two sides. Scholars note that the justices view oral argument as an opportunity to persuade their colleagues to support their viewpoints. In theory, a justice could try to do so either by throwing softballs to the lawyers they support or by arguing with the lawyers they oppose. However, Lee Epstein, one of the Supreme Courts foremost empirical scholars, notes that Hostile questions  are more effective than softball questions pitched to the side the Justice favors. Hence, a justice interested in persuad[ing] the undecided during an oral argumentthat is, building a coalition for his or her viewswill pose more questions [to] the lawyer for the party whom they plan to vote against.

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To understand Gorsuchs approach, I examined oral arguments in the 59 Supreme Court cases hed heard as of March 31. Using a text-analysis program written in Java, I analyzed official transcripts to count the number of words spokena proxy for speaking timeby every justice and lawyer.

To assess whether Gorsuch is really a fitting successor to Scalia, I benchmarked the formers performance against the latters during the final year (February 2015February 2016) of Scalias tenure. Why choose Scalias last year as my baseline? Because Republicans wanted to nominate a replacement who would mirror Scalia as closely as possible, not one who would grow into another Scalia in 30 years time. Furthermore, given that justices participation in oral argument is influenced by their colleagues demographics and ideology, it makes sense to compare Gorsuchs first year with Scalias last because the courts composition is largely identical.

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Judicial participation might also be influenced by the rookie effect. As the justices themselves admit, they behaved differently in their first years on the bench (likely due to nervousness). Accordingly, I also compared Gorsuch with Elena Kagan, Obamas most recent appointee, who joined the court in August 2010.

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My statistical analysis reveals that Gorsuch spoke, on average, for about 3.8 percent of the total 60 minutes allotted to oral argument while Scalia spoke for 4.8 percent of the allotted time in his last year. Thus, Gorsuch is less of a peacock (so far) than his predecessor. However, Gorsuchs first-year speaking time is statistically comparable to Kagans, which measured in at 4.4 percent of the allotted time. Gorsuch could grow more talkative over the years. Indeed, Kagans volubility increased to 5.9 percent as of 2016. If Gorsuchs talkativeness increases similarly, he could become even more voluble than Scalia. (For what its worth, the most talkative justice on the current Supreme Court is Stephen Breyer, who spoke for 8.3 percent of the allotted time in the 2017 term. The least talkative: the aforementioned Thomas, who has not spoken since February 2016.)

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When it comes to time apportionment, Gorsuch is not evenhanded. He speaks almost 2 times as much during the argument of a lawyer with whom he disagrees. This contrasts sharply with Scalia, who apportioned his time equally between both sides. Again, on this dimension, Gorsuch behaves similarly to how Kagan did in her first year.

The similarities in the first-year volubility and time apportionment of Gorsuch and Kagan are interesting because these two justices have such different profiles. Gorsuch is a staunch originalist and a former appellate judge. Kagan is a liberal former Harvard Law School dean with no prior judicial experience. The extent of their jurisprudential disagreementsthey disagreed at thrice the rate of Gorsuch and Thomas, for instancemakes the similarity in their styles at oral argument all the more striking.

Republicans who wanted to place a Scalia-like successor on the court should not be disappointed. Gorsuch not only votes like Scalia but also works hard to build a winning coalition on issues that Scalia would have supported. To truly become Scalia-esque, though, Gorsuch is going to have to learn to talk more and to speak to the lawyers on both sides.In Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979, neo-Nazis and Klansmen attacked an anti-racist rally convened by Communists, who were in town to support striking textile workers. The Nazis and Klan members killed five people in 88 seconds of gunfire. The ensuing trials of the white supremacists by all-white juries didnt return justice, Kathleen Belew told me. People said things like, I always thought it was less of a crime to kill a Communist,  Belew said.

The Greensboro massacre is one story Belew tells in her fascinating new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, a history of the white-power and militia movements of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Belew connects seemingly disparate events like the killings at Greensboro, the persecution of Vietnamese fishers in Texas in the early 1980s, and the siege at Ruby Ridge. She shows how hatred of the federal government, fears of communism, and racism all combined in white-power ideology and explains why our responses to the movement have long been woefully inadequate.

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Belew spoke to Slate about the lasting impact of Vietnam on white supremacists, the secret cohesiveness of the white-power movement, and the many ways women in the movement acted as social glue, connecting factions and groups. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rebecca Onion: I had not thought that preoccupation with VietnamVietnam angst?might have a direct connection with racism. How widespread is that connection?

Kathleen Belew: Well, let me say this first. Im not trying to argue that the experience of war necessarily drove people to the white-power movement, especially because the people Im talking about represent such a small percentage of returning veterans. And its not a statistically significant number in that direction. But the thing that kept emerging for me out of the archive was how much white-power activists who did serve talk about that experience as being formative, both personally and for their white-power worldview.

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The narrative that the white-power movement tells about the war is very similar to what you see in a lot of memoirs, in most movies, and in the betrayal narrative of the war that rises across American society in the 1980s. So I think the difference is that this is a place where you can see it crystallized. Where in many instances theres sort of a subtext about defending whiteness, its overt [in these cases]. And its a place where you can sort of see how racism and anti-communism and anti-statism come together in that feeling of betrayal that really works for recruiting.

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I can hear from your explanation that its sort of difficult to frame this project in a way that doesnt accuse Vietnam veterans of being racist.

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Exactly! Also, frankly, I dont have the source space to even get into the causes of peoples racism. Im not a psychologist. I dont have psychological records. I dont have enough confessional materials from these people to pinpoint exact causal force in that way. What Im looking at is how do people describe their own activism, and how do we take seriously what they say their motivations are.

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The book is making an argument, but its also a collection of stories. How did you choose your characters?

One of my central characters is Louis Beam, who returns from the Vietnam War in 1968, founds his own paramilitary training camp, and the book ends up following him as a central actor partly because his biography is so accessible and his writings are so prolific that I can actually follow what hes doing from site to site. But partly because hes so involved in the movement for his entire life. Its really from 1968 up to the time I conclude my study in 1995, and he continues his activism well into the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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Beam founded his own paramilitary camp to train Klansmen and a group of white fishermen in the early 1980s, in order to carry out a campaign of harassment against Vietnamese refugees. And then when a court injunction stopped that activity, he moved to Idaho part time to be involved with Aryan Nations. And in Idaho he formulated a strategy called leaderless resistance, which we might recognize today as cell-style terrorism, or terrorism without direct orders from a central leadership but instead actions connected in common cause. So he pioneers this theory, then travels around the country setting up white-power groups on early computer message boards.

People really want to make sense of violence and hate by sorting it into neat groups.  Kathleen Belew

That fascinated me.

It was sort of a proto-internet called Liberty Net. And it takes the FBI a few years to crack the code, and in that time, these guys are using this infrastructure to coordinate with one another, to connect with one another and cement their social ties, and in order to circulate hit lists and other plans for action.

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So Beam is involved through all of that, then appears again in the early 1990s as a public figure, responding to the siege at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City bombing.

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One of the revelations of the book for me was the connection you made between the 1980s and the 1990s. Without having thought about it too much, I construed the 80s white-power movement and the 90s militias as separate. And youre arguing that theyre connected.

There are a lot of misconceptions about this, and I think our failure to understand white power as a social movement more broadly is what has prevented a coherent public response or decisive victory against this kind of a movement. So one of the problems in the scholarship is what I would term overcategorization. People really want to make sense of violence and hate by sorting it into neat groups. So a lot of the scholarship has divided the skinheads from the Klansmen from the Aryan Nations from the militias.

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And there are differences between those ideologies. There are different symbols. There are finer points of doctrine. There are different cultures. But the thing that emerges from the archive is that this is a movement with flexible ideologies and a ton of interpersonal circulation. So its very likely that somebody whos in the movement in the 1980s would circulate between Klan meetings, neo-Nazi meetings, early militia activity. And once you have an archive that shows the actions of these figures rather than just what they say they are doing at a given point, its clear to trace the connections one to another.

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So what you see is that in funds, in the movement of weapons, and in the people involved, there is a direct link between white power in the 1980s and the militia movement in the 1990s.

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The other part of that has to do with a sort of popular idea that militias are somehow less racist than the white-power movement. And this is a misconception that persists into the present day, I think. The clearest way to understand it is that the militia is an outgrowth of the white-power movement. So, its not a one-to-one historical transition, its that the people who are in white power in the 1980s have moved into militias in the 1990s. As have the weapons and the money.

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How are you, as the historian, making these connections?

Actually, the movement has a huge archival footprint. Im looking at previously classified government documents, from the FBI, ATF, and U.S. Marshals. Im looking at newspaper reporting from all of the places that white-power violence is reported at the time that it happened in the United States, Mexico, and Central America. Then Im looking at this huge groundswell of production of white-power printed materials. Newspapers, zines, newsletters. There are womens publications, mens publications, things produced by prisoners  and it really is a huge amount of material.

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So when you were doing the actual work of reading this stuff, were you keeping lists of people? Or did you have a giant pinboard with a bunch of strings tied together?

I have often thought that a pinboard would have been appropriate! I didnt. I had a note-taking system. I did track interpersonal connections. That actually led me to one of the breakthroughs of this study, which is the extent to which alliances between these groups were held together by marriages and other social relationships that depended on women. And one of the things I tried to trace was the way marriages connected people across ideologies and across geographies, so you can see how this movement worked as a national and transnational force.

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Was your sense that the people you were looking at wanted to be known, archived, and written about, or not?

This is tricky and varies person to person. On the one hand, a lot of white-power activists were attempting publicity stunts during the period of my study. So people like David Duke ran for office and were very open about their beliefs. On the other hand, there were a lot of people in the movement who would never have classified themselves as leaders. So almost uniformly the women who were playing major roles in the movement say that theyre not leaders of the movement, even when they are doing work that is absolutely essential to the movements success. So it really varies a lot, how people want to be depicted.

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And one change point is the strategy of leaderless resistance in 1983, which sort of changes the way that we think about leadership and recruitment. So to have a cell working without leaders, without direct orders from leadership, you no longer need to have a big mass Klan rally. You need a small group of two to six people who are wholly committed to the cause, so its a different kind of recruitment. Declining numbers dont necessarily mean declining violence, given that the strategy actually relies on fewer people but people who are much more committed to the cause.

So then you get, in the contemporary scene, someone like Dylann Roof.

Hes a very good example of how this kind of radicalization works and how you dont have to be in real-life contact with a whole bunch of other activists in order to do substantial politically motivated damage as part of this movement.

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Your study stops in 1995. To what degree can we use this history in trying to understand whats going on today?

The history of the white-power movement can reframe how we think of activists like this. Thinking of people as people with an ideology, even if its something we dont agree with, changes the way that we think about opposition. It discredits the idea of lone wolf operatives or single incidents with mad gunmen and calls on us to try to understand peoples own stated motivation, and to find the connections when they exist between different actions and between different groups.

People often have a narrative of the 20th century that things were somewhat bad at the beginning. With my undergraduates, people are very comfortable with the idea that we began the 20th century with lots of sexism, racism, poverty, and other big social problems. Child labor, no limits on work, things like that. Then when they get into the late 20th century, people start to expect that some of this will be resolved. We see this in the left with the exaltation of the 1960s. We see it in the right with conversations about color blindness. People think that a lot of this got solved. The white-power movement shows the many ways that violent racism held on as a sustained element in American political life.The gunman who is accused of killing 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School wants to donate his six-figure inheritance to the families of the students he slaughtered during his Valentines Day rampage.

At a court hearing Wednesday, the lawyer for Nikolas Cruz said, Mr. Cruz does not want those funds, whatever money that he is entitled to, lawyer Melissa McNeill told a Florida judge, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He would like that money donated to an organization that the victims family believes would be able to facilitate healing in our community or an opportunity to educate our community about the issues that have ripened over the last four or five months.

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The 19-year-old Cruz stands to inherit $800,000 from a trust fund when he turns 22 and is due to receive $25,000 from his late mothers life insurance policy, multiple news outlets reported. In addition to a personal bank account in which he has just more than $350, he may also have a claim to $2,227 in shares of Microsoft stock. However, Cruz may no longer be entitled to that money, and it is unclear if the victims would accept such a gesture.

Wednesdays court hearing was scheduled to determine whether Cruz has enough money to pay for a private lawyer. He is currently represented by the Broward Public Defenders Office, which uses taxpayer money to represent clients that cannot afford their own lawyers. Broward Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer has not yet made a ruling.

In previous court appearances, Cruz has remained quiet with his head bowed. His attorneys have said he is sad and remorseful, and the offer to donate his money has been the most apparent sign of his contrition.I always liked Paul Ryan. Six years ago, when he was tapped as the GOPs vice presidential nominee, I wrote him a love letter. Then, when I scrutinized his record, I had to take the letter back. He sees himself as a statesman, but thats not what he is.

Wednesday morning, Ryan announced that hell retire from the House in January. His press conference lasted just nine minutes. But in that short time, Ryan distilled a career of piety, cowardice, and disappointment. He demonstrated the difference between a man of principle and a politician who thinks hes a man of principle.

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In his prepared remarks, Ryan told the press:

Some of you wonder why I cant just do the normal politician thing, which is to run and then retire after the election. That is what Im told is the politically shrewd thing to do. I considered that. But just as my conscience is what got me to take this job in the first place, my conscience could not handle going out that way. I pledged to serve the people of Wisconsin, the 1st District, honorably. And in order to serve the people of my district honorably, I have to serve them honestly. And for me to ask them to vote to re-elect me, knowing that I wasnt going to stay is not being honest. I simply cannot do that. So thats why Im announcing this today.

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Conscience. Pledged. Honorably. Honest. All these words are gratuitous. Ryans decision to retire at the end of his term is, in fact, the shrewd course. If he were to seek re-election, he would risk defeat in a blue wave. If he managed to survive, and if Republicans kept control of the House, their losses would still jeopardize his speakership. So theres no courage in his decision not to run. Only a fool or a cad would take that risk and then, if he won, betray his constituents by leaving afterward. Yet Ryan praises himself for not doing so. He sees himself as a man of high standards precisely because his standards are so low.

After delivering his remarks, Ryan took a question about the fiscal crisis he has created:

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Q: Mr. Speaker, you got your long-sought tax-cuts and tax-reform legislation approved, which you say you consider to be your greatest achievement. However, youre not sticking around for its biggest consequence, which is trillion-dollar deficits as far as the Congressional Budget Offices eye can see. Whats your response to that? Ryan: So, entitlement reform is the one thing, the one other great thing that Ive spent most of my career working on. I am extremely proud of the fact that the House passed the biggest entitlement reform bill ever considered in the House of Representatives. Do I regret the fact that the Senate did not pass this? Yes. But I feel from all the budgets that Ive passed normalizing entitlement reform, pushing the cause of entitlement reform, and the House passing entitlement reform, Im very proud of that fact.

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Ryan has just engineered and passed into law two monstrosities. One is a massive tax-cut bill that wasnt paid for by spending cuts. The other is a massive spending bill that wasnt paid for by tax increases. Theres no mathematical universe, on the left or right, in which that combination can be excused. Rather than take responsibility, Ryan blames the Senate for not passing entitlement cuts that he willingly separated from those two bills. And he credits himself for normalizing entitlement reform, which is a nice way of saying that he talked about it a lot, and that he voted for it in bills he knew would never pass, but that he never did the work necessary to enact it.

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The next reporter asked:

Q: Mr. Speaker, did the chance that you might not be speaker come November, if Democrats possibly take the House, factor at all into this decision? Ryan: No. None whatsoever, actually.  This really was two things: I have accomplished much of what I came to do, and my kids arent getting any younger. And if I stay, theyre only going to know me as a weekend dad. And thats just something I consciously cant do.

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Its great that Ryan wants to be with his kids. But theyre teenagers now. Having chosen to spend 16 years in Congress while they were small, he asks us to believe that he has suddenly decided they need him in a way that requires him to retire. And he denies that this years inauspicious polls, which have driven dozens of other Republicans to leave Congress, played any role in his decision. He injects the word consciously, quite consciously, for heroic effect.

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The next reporter asked about the effect of Ryans announcement on the midterms. Ryan seized on this question to extol President Donald Trump. Im grateful for the president [giving] us this chance to actually get this stuff done, said Ryan. Im grateful that we have unified government that the president, with this victory, gave us. Another reporter asked: To what extent was your decision influenced by the way President Trump has changed the character of Washington and the character of Republican Party? Ryan replied: Not at all. Like I said, Im grateful to the present for giving us this opportunity.

This completes Ryans capitulation. When Trump first ran for president, Ryan shunned him. But as Trump surged to the front of the Republican pack, Ryan found reasons to embrace him. If I lead a schism in our party, then Im guaranteeing that a liberal progressive becomes president, he told reporters in June 2016. To reject Trump, Ryan argued, would be to disrespect the voters, the Republican primary voters of America. When Ryan was asked about Trumps proposal to shut down Muslim immigration, he shrugged: Look, no two people agree on everything.

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Since Trump entered the White House, Ryan has enabled and defended him at every turn.

Ryan has pledged not even to allow a floor vote on any bill Trump wouldnt sign. He has yielded to Trumps authoritarian maneuvers, excusing the presidents decision to fire thenFBI Director James Comey, who was leading the Russia investigation Trump wanted to shut down. And now Ryan shrugs off calls for legislation to protect the investigations new leader, special counsel Robert Mueller, despite Trumps clear signals that he wants to fire Mueller too.

Trump has been openly talking about firing Bob Mueller, potentially firing the deputy attorney general, a reporter pointed out as the press conference neared its end. What are your thoughts on that? Ryan batted the question away. I have no reason to believe that thats going to happen, he said, adding, I have assurances. When the reporter asked Ryan why he was so confident, the speaker replied: Because Ive been talking to people in the White House about it.

Thats a fitting coda to Ryans speakership. After more than a year of overt corruption and Trumps assaults on every institution that might constrain himcourts, the Justice Department, the special counsel, the filibuster, the pressthe speaker of the House declares that the legislative branch doesnt need to constrain these assaults, because it has assurances from the very White House that is waging them. The vacancy Ryan leaves behind isnt his office. Its the hollowness of what he claimed to be.During his secretary of state confirmation hearing Thursday, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said that a couple hundred Russians were killed by the U.S. in Syria a few weeks ago, an unexpected boast about an incident that both sides have been reluctant to discuss.

Pompeos remark came in response to a question from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen about whether the Trump administration was doing enough to hold Vladimir Putins government accountable. Pompeo answered:

It hasnt just been sanctions, the largest expulsion of 60 folks was from this administration. This administration announced a nuclear posture review that has put Russia on notice that we are going to recapitalize our deterrent force. In Syria, now, a handful of weeks ago the Russians met their match. A couple hundred Russians were killed.

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Pompeo seems to be referring to a Feb. 7 incident in which the U.S. launched an airstrike against pro-Assad forces near Deir al-Zour, Syria, after U.S.-backed Kurdish troops believed they were under attack. This is one of several incidents in which the U.S. has attacked pro-regime forces in self-defense over the past year. Reports quickly began to trickle out that a number of Russians embedded with the Syrians, ranging from dozens to 300, were killed in the attack.

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Russia initially admitted that five Russians had been killed but in a later statement said that several dozen had died in a recent armed clash. The Russian statements have stressed that these were volunteers rather than Russian army personnel. They were most likely affiliated with the Wagner Group, a Russian military contractor. (One of Wagners key investors Yevgeny Prigozhin, nicknamed Putins chef, is currently under U.S. sanction, partly due to his role in the troll farm International Research Agency.) As with the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian government prefers not to discuss the role played by Russian mercenaries in Syria, though the recent incident has provoked an unusual public outcry from the families of those killed.

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The U.S. has not pressed Russia on the role of its citizens in the incident and has been mostly reluctant to discuss it. A U.S. military spokesman told the New York Times that the U.S. was in contact with Russian forces during the attack and that Russian officials assured coalition officials they would not engage coalition forces in the vicinity. Secretary of Defense James Mattis said on Feb. 11 that the Russians profess that they were not aware when we called about that force that had crossed [the deconfliction line], adding that we go out of our way to ensure that we do not endanger the Russians.

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Brig. Gen. Jonathan Braga, director of operations for the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition, recently discussed the incident with NBC News. When asked about reports that 200 or 300 Russians had been killed, he said, Weve seen that in open reports as well and thats I would say close to our estimates as well.

Its understandable that Pompeo would want to highlight the range of actions the administration has taken against the Russian government, Trumps own comments notwithstanding. But given that the risk of the U.S. striking Russian personnel and further escalation of conflict between the United States and Russia is a major concerns as the U.S. contemplates new airstrikes against the Assad regime, this was an odd moment to bring up an incident that both governments seem anxious to sweep under the rug.Forty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court cemented the judiciarys status as above the law. The issue at stake in Stump v. Sparkman was absolute judicial immunity, a legal doctrine that has its origins in common law dating back to the Middle Ages. The idea here is to protect judges from having to worry about potential litigation arising from their decisions, a possibility that might lead them to approach their jobs too cautiously. If we want a judiciary that issues rulings without fear of punishment, the argument goes, absolute immunity is a necessary trade-off.

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The obvious problem with this doctrine is that the judges who stand to benefit from a system that ensures their legal lack of accountability are the ones who decide whether they themselves should get immunity. The case of Stump v. Sparkman offers a glaring example of how this framework can subvert the very idea of justice. In 1971, a judge from Indianas Dekalb County Circuit Court, Harold D. Stump, ordered 15-year-old Linda Sparkman to be surgically sterilized.* Sparkmans mother had been worried that her daughter was hanging around with older boys. And so, in what I can only assume was an effort to prevent her daughter from getting pregnant, she went to the court and asked Judge Stump to order the operation.

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Stump said yes. Really, thats all he did. He didnt file any paperwork with the courts clerk or open a case file. There were no hearings, no presented evidence. He didnt even tell the 15-year-old Sparkman the truth about her operationshe was told she was going in for an appendectomy. It was only four years later, two years after shed been married and was trying to have kids, that she discovered what had really been done to her.

Sparkman and her husband sued Judge Stump (as well as her mother, the doctor who performed the surgery, and the hospital where the surgery took place) for damages under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which states (the bold is mine):

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Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress, except that in any action brought against a judicial officer for an act or omission taken in such officers judicial capacity.

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Sparkman argued that when Judge Stump ordered that she be permanently sterilized without going through any of the proper judicial channels his actions didnt fall within his judicial capacity. He was using his judicial authority, maybe, but his actions were more administrative that judicial.

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It was that argument the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited in siding with Sparkman and unanimously reversing a lower courts decision. This couldnt have been a judicial act, the appeals court reasoned, because there were no statutes on the books that could have justified sterilization.

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But when the case made its way to the Supreme Court, the 53 majority ruled Sparkmans judicial immunity was absolute. And they did so in a way that redefined, in a broad way, the definition of a judicial act. Writing for the majority, Justice Byron White ruled that a judicial act must be one undertaken by a judge in his official capacity and must be one a judge normally performs (in this case, not the specific act of issuing a sterilization order but the act of issuing orders more generally). The court ruled that Stumps behavior passed that test, and so, despite the appeals courts ruling that hed violated Sparkmans due process rights, the judge was off the hook.

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This case is chilling not just because of what was done to Linda Sparkman. Its also an example of the high court exercising its judicial authority to immunize itself from repercussions for violations of law.

The Stump v. Sparkman ruling had an immediate effect on how judges approached the concept of judicial immunity. Consider the many instances, among them Blackwell v. Cook in 1983 and Forrester v. White in 1988, in which circuit courts used Whites litmus test to rule that judges who hired, fired, or discriminated against court employees were immune from litigation, as these administrative moves had been judicial acts.

The courts have basically determined that, when dealing with police violence, everything is a gray area.

Sadly, the abuse of the concept of immunity hasnt been quarantined to the courts. Remember Section 1983 of the 1871 Civil Rights Act? That was an example of Congress passing legislation that held government officials accountable to the people they serve. You might think Section 1983 would allow citizens to sue police officers who violate the law. For a while, thats how it worked. In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled in Monroe v. Pape that 13 Chicago police officers could be sued for breaking into a house without a warrant. But in 1982s Harlow v. Fitzgerald, the court used Section 1983 to extend what they called qualified immunity to the same government officials the 1871 Civil Rights Act meant to hold accountable. To its proponents, qualified immunity is basically a narrower, more limited version of the type of immunity judges enjoy. In instances of clear right and wrong, with firmly established law, officials wont be protected. But in any sort of legal gray area, qualified immunity is supposed to kick in.

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The Supreme Court took on a series of cases in the 1980s that specifically addressed the issue of police violence and immunity. Malley v. Briggs in 1986 and Anderson v. Creighton in 1987 both chipped away at an officers ability to be sued after performing a search without a proper warrant. Time and again, the court has sided with officers, offering them wide latitude to violate civil liberties without fear of being held liable. Just last week, the Supreme Court ruled 72 in Kisela v. Hughes that an Arizona police officer was protected by qualified immunity after he shot a woman standing on her own front lawn. Recall that qualified immunity was only supposed to apply in legal gray areas. The courts have basically determined that, when dealing with police violence, everything is a gray area, which means no officer will be held responsible for his actions.

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Kisela v. Hughes is just the latest example of judges using the doctrine of immunity to shield themselves and other government officials. For Linda Sparkman, that meant no one would be liable for tricking her into getting sterilized. For the countless victims of police shootings, it means having fewer legal avenues to ensure offending officers answer for their actions in court.

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In his dissenting opinion in Stump v. Sparkman, Justice Potter Stewart argued, A judge is not free, like a loose cannon, to inflict indiscriminate damage whenever he announces that he is acting in his judicial capacity. Just as judges shouldnt be granted total immunity because they happen to be wearing robes, police officers must not be allowed to use their badges to shield themselves from justice. Congress passed legislation in 1871 that should give citizens a recourse when theyre wronged by government officials. Nearly 150 years later, the judiciarys reliance on immunity has ensured that legislation is entirely toothless.President Trump dialed back Wednesdays threats of missile strikes against Syria in a tweet this morning, saying they Could be very soon or not so soon at all! Secretary of Defense James Mattis asserted meanwhile that the U.S. is still assessing the intelligence on whether the Syrian regime conducted the recent chemical attack, a charge that the Bashar al-Assad regime and Russia both deny.

But at the same time, French President Emmanuel Macron was dialing up the rhetoric, saying France already has proof that the Syrian government carried out the attack on the town of Douma and would decide in due course whether to respond with airstrikes. Its not clear what evidence Macron is referring toOPCW inspectors are currently deploying to Doumabut Macron has previously declared chemical weapons use to be a red line that would result in reprisals and an immediate riposte, at least where France is concerned. Macron is among the leaders with whom Trump has discussed potential reprisals, and France is likely the other country that will play a role in any strikes. A French warship equipped with 16 cruise missiles and 16 surface-to-air missiles is currently operating in the Eastern Mediterranean and there are also French fighter jets stationed in Jordan and the UAE.

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Many Americans have an outdated view of France as dovish and anti-interventionist, dating back to the freedom fries era leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In fact, the country has emerged as one of the more aggressive Western powers when it comes to intervention in the Middle East and North Africa, sometimes even more aggressive than the United States.

Then-President Nicolas Sarkozy was the most enthusiastic proponent of NATO intervention Libya in 2011. (This looks a bit fishy in retrospect given whats since been alleged about his relationship with former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.) Francois Hollande launched an intervention during his presidency to counter Islamist militants in Mali in 2013hundreds of French troops remain on the ground thereand launched a major raid on ISIS in Syria after the 2015 Paris terror attacks. Hollande also supported military action against Assad after the 2013 chemical attack in Syria, but was unwilling to go it alone after both the United States and Britain decided against it. He later criticized Obama for failing to enforce his red line on chemical weapons use.

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Before last years election, Macron criticized his predecessors for contributing to the destabilization of the Middle East, but theres been a fair amount of continuity in his approach, says Manuel Lafont Rapnouil, a former foreign ministry staffer who is now head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Macrons toughness echoes Hollandes, he told me. He has settled for a very realist policy, even more security-driven given the rise of the terrorist threat.

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Lafont Rapnouil said that Macrons own chemical weapons red line was about France confirming that its ambition remains to play an active role in the Middle East on par with great powers, i.e., to continue to punch above its weight. Given that Macron initially declared that red line last May during a visit from Russian President Vladimir Putin, it should also be read in the context of French-Russian relations. Macron had promised to repair relations with Russia that had been badly damaged under Hollande, but he wanted to show that he could discuss with Putin and still be firm, Lafont Rapnouil said. Stating two red lines on Syriachemical weapons and humanitarian accesswas meant to show he remained uncompromising. In any event, not much has come of Macrons efforts to engage Putin. France recently expelled four Russian diplomats, part of a coordinated global response to the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.

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Macrons decision to stand with the U.S. on the need to punish Assad is also interesting given his generally wary stance toward Trump. Macron has differed sharply with Trump on issues including climate change, EU integration, the Iran nuclear deal, trade policy, and Jerusalem, and at times has seemed to positioning himself as a sort of anti-Trump, defending the liberal world order and traditional institutions from the U.S. presidents wrecking ball.

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On the other hand, he has also sought to maintain good personal relations with Trump, inviting him to Paris as a special guest for Bastille Day last year, which included a military parade that so wowed the president that he has sought to emulate it in Washington. Since the very start, Macron has been able to reconcile a strong bilateral relationship with the U.S. and major disagreements with Trump, Lafont Rapnouil says. Independence is still a central idea in French foreign policy.

Trump will host Macron in Washington for a state visit this monthhis first official state visit of Trumps presidency. They will have plenty to talk about.From 201317, Akbar Ahmed led a group on a listening tour of Europe, aimed at discovering exactly what was going wrong in the relationship between the continents Muslims and the larger societies they inhabit. During the course of his research, the situation worsened, with the rise of right-wing demagoguery, the refugee crisis, and increasing concerns about jihadi terrorism. The book that resulted from his tour, Journey Into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity, uncovers the economic and social discrimination faced by Muslims, which are sparked in part by European nations insecure in their own identities and exacerbated by the extremism of certain immigrant communities.

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I recently spoke by phone with Ahmed, the Ibn Khaldun chair of Islamic Studies at American University, and a former Pakistani diplomat. His latest book is a follow-up to 2011s Journey Into America: The Challenge of Islam, which took a similar look at the United States. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed how 9/11 changed the perception of Muslims living in the West, the different ways in which Americans and Europeans perceive their own identities, and how to apply the lessons of Jewish history to Muslim integration.

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Isaac Chotiner: What made you want to write a book about Islam and Europe, specifically?

Akbar Ahmed: When I proposed this project, people asked exactly what youre asking. They said, Look, its all happened here, 9/11, the war on terrorists. Europes kind of an appendage, if you like, of American policy. No. Europe has a very complicated, sophisticated, and an even inspiring story to tell us, in terms of relations between Europe and the Muslim world.

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Ive known Europeans. I was actually born when the king of England ruled my part of the world, thats India-Pakistan so you know. We have had those things, those literatures, those scholarships, and my hunch was right, because when I actually went off to the field with my young American students, and now assistants, we discovered that the links with Europe are very deep, which go back to the eighth century, literally 711 and onward in Spain, and then go over the next 1,000 years, and into the Enlightenment, the Renaissance. Everywhere, Muslims are involved. Sometimes theyre contributing. Sometimes there are clashes, but theyre there.

What are the differences between how Europe, broadly speaking, and America are integrating Muslims?

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Straightaway, you have one huge difference. Muslims coming to America were very different from Muslims coming to Europe. Immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia to America, coming after the 60s and 70s, are largely middle-class, educated. They are very often doctors. Even today youd have, I dont know, what, 20,000 Pakistani doctors in the United States. They come in, and they become part of the American dream. Muslim immigrants coming to Europe, at the same time, are coming in a very different capacity. They are coming as subjects of the former colonies, so the Muslims coming from North Africa are coming to France. The Muslims from South Asia are coming to England, because thats the old relationship. The Muslims from Turkey are coming to Germany, as guest workers. Again, a different category. Guest status is very different, because theyre there for a short time. They are there on a contract, and they are expected to make some money, send some money home, and then go back home.

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The problem arises when, one generation later, they stay on, and their kids are going to school. Theyre born in European countries, and they have citizenship, and they began to feel theyre not really being accepted as citizens.

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And so you think this was different than what we see in America?

America is not a colonial power, doesnt have any imperial hang-ups, and until 9/11, there was no problem in America. Until 9/11, Muslims lived here, they were as comfortable as any other group, they were doing well, they were being integrated, and so on. 9/11 did something to both communities. And so here theres a similarity. It created a new identity. After 9/11, Muslim became a category. You couldnt be a professor, or a scholar, or a multimillionaire, but here, youre a Muslim, because of your name. In Europe, you could have been a clerk, [but] in France, you were Algerian. In Britain, you were Pakistani. After 9/11, the category in which all Muslims were cloned was that of Muslim.

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Europeans are still seeing these Muslims as somehow representative of the millions in the Muslim world, and ISIS , and all those horrible things happening there.  Akbar Ahmed

OK, but even if you see a similarity developing between European and American responses to Muslims after 9/11, it seems like what you are saying in your book is that the rise of Muslim immigration called into question the way white Europeans saw their identity and led to an uncertainty about it in a way that it didnt in the United States.

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Europeans are very sure of their identity. They were very sure of the identity that they had inherited, and their legacy, and their traditions, and they did not want these Muslims. In this case, they were not all Muslims, but Muslims, Africans, Middle East people coming from outside, just storming into their country and upsetting that identity.

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Lets take Germany. The Germans are proud of their language, whether youre East German, West German. They have a very highly sophisticated language and culture, of which theyre rightly proud. They have a sense of soil and blood. Its not, by the way, something that pops up in the 1930s. It is there for the last so many centuries. Its captured by all these German writers and philosophers of the 17th, and 18th, and 19th centuries, before theres a Germany, so theres already a sense of Germanness, a German identity.

Ive given you language, culture, soil, and blood. I will be clear here, [blood] doesnt mean that [if] I come there, I get citizenship, I speak German, I love German culture as well, and Im accepted. At the most profound level, I will never be accepted, because I am not of the blood. Tribal societies have a charter, a lineage. Everyone knows whos who on that charter. When outsiders come, and they settle in at the particular tribal area, they can be affiliated, but they are never actually part of the tribe, because they dont have the lineage. Theyre not descended from the ancestry.

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People are now looking at these immigrant communities, even if theyve been here three generations, under a microscope. Theyre saying, Why do they do this? Why do they still have beards? Why do the women wear a hijab? Why dont they assimilate into our identity?

How does this differ from the American conception of identity, in your mind?

The problem here is, Isaac, what is identity? On my American tour, when we went around, my team and I, the American students, asked what American identity was. I challenge you just do this over lunch, and youll see how interesting this question is, because people will have very different answers. If you talked to an average liberal white American, they would say Plymouth and the Mayflower, and the Constitution, and the Founding Fathers. We talked to an African American, and hed very often cite Malcolm X, who said, Plymouth Rock landed on us. You talk to Latinos and Mexicans, theyll say to you, This is our land. We lived here, and the Americans have come in. Suddenly, youre saying, Wait a minute. The dominant narrative that I thought was settled is not that settled.

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If you talk to a German, he knows that his identity goes back 2,000 years. Its not that simple, because over the 2,000 years, you had Germany breaking up, and uniting, and you had the wars, and you had Catholicism, and then Protestantism, and then you had the defeat in the last two wars, and so on, so there has been a change. Its not that pure tribalism, but its recognizable, as I told you. When a nation has a recognizable tribalism, you best deal with it in respecting that.

Dont forget that this is immediately followed by anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is now already rearing its very ugly head, and its throughout Europe, and its right behind Islamophobia. Why? Because when tribalism is rampant, it then sees one, two, three victims down the road, and thats what youre seeing. The Roma example, another minority I think we overlooked, the Roma are being treated disgracefully.

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If 9/11 was a hinge moment, do you think Merkels decision to accept so many refugees was as well? This is a country that, as you say, had recognizable tribalism?

It was something that exacerbated a movement that was already in full slope. You can see this from all the incidents leading up to that moment. That moment is as interesting for the character of Merkel as for the actions she took, because if you recall, take your mind back to the incident just before that decision of hers, when the Palestinian girl cried in front of her and said, I dont want to be deported. Merkel looked stone-faced and said, Im sorry. Those are the rules. You have to leave.

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From there, suddenly you had this incredible decision, which, to my mind, Im talking personally, can only be matched by someone like Pope Francis in its magnanimity, and its generosity, and its compassion. Its like the kind of almost religious embracing of the other. Ill feed you, and Ill look after you, and you may share my home. Its very, very religious, almost.

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But the movement was already in place [during my research]. If you look up the timeline, you get all of the AFD and all these right-wing parties already picking up steam, already being active in the field, and making a dent. I mean, they werent in full flow as they are now, but the momentum had started.

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How much of the responsibility for integrating do you put on Muslim communities themselves?

Its a very valid question. I asked the same question of one of the legendary chief rabbis of Europe, called Bent Melchior [former chief rabbi of Denmark]. I asked him for an interview for the book, and he invited me to his flat up on the fourth floor. I spent a couple of hours with him. He said, when I asked him, heres what you tell [Muslim communities]: Look. Let me tell you. Compared to the Jewish community, because you know, theres some parallels, theyre not exact parallels, but some parallels. We were here much earlier. Weve been here in Denmark for several hundred years. You people have just come here, just settling down, and youre finding a problem, because the Danish tribe, again, he said, Tribes, theyre very closed. Theyre like a tribe. It will not be easy.

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No. 1, he said, When we arrived in Denmark, 200 or 300 years ago, the first thing we did was create a school. That school wasnt to teach Jews about Judaism. That school was to teach them about Danish culture, language, literature. That struck me, because our guys do the opposite. Our guys will open up a school, and then theyll have the imams, and theyll have Islamic teaching, and Quran, which is fine. Im not saying it shouldnt be done, but equally, they should be learning about local culture. Thats not happening, No. 1.

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No. 2, he said that there is a Jewish community, and we have our rights. But theres also a majority, and they have rights. The majority has its rights, and you cant simply say, Well, we want our rights, and ignore the majority.

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The third item he said was, If one Jew, one of us did something wrong, we know theres a fraud case, a criminal case, a sex assault, or something happened, the entire community would be blamed, so the people would say, You see? All Jews are like this.  He said, This is what is happening to you.

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You outline both a lot of the ways that Muslims are being discriminated against in Europe, and some of the extremism we see in European Muslim communities. Is there a danger in looking at the latter as a result of the former, rather than as its own phenomenon?

The response is to be divided into European Muslims, who are living in Europe, who have made Europe their home, and those living in Muslim-majority countries. The fight there is very different, and the fight there must be fought and won. In Europe, its much different than whats happening in the Muslim world, but it can be fought and can be won if, if, if the European administration, the scholars, the commentators understand whats going on. Theyre not fully understanding.

This was the disappointing part of my study, that I found that they werent fully getting it, because they were still seeing these Muslims as somehow representative of the millions in the Muslim world, and ISIS, and all those horrible things happening there, and linking them up with them, and therefore creating a cancer in their own society, because they have to deal with these Muslims.

There may be, I dont know, 40 or 50 million Muslims, and they continue to multiply. What will happen in the future? That society will have a lot of people, who then, actually, become fifth columnists. In order to prevent that, they have to integrate them, like the Jewish community.The allegations made against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens to a state house investigative committee are serious ones: A woman outlined how Greitens pursued her, physically and sexually assaulted her, and then took compromising photos to blackmail her with if she told anyone about their encounter. The graphic description of nonconsensual sexual encounters, made under oath by a woman who was Greitens hairdresser, could be the impetus for state legislators to initiate impeachment hearings for the first term Republican governor, who is currently facing a felony invasion-of-privacy charge for taking and transmitting the image of the woman without her consent.

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Greitens, a one-time Republican rising star who was a Navy SEAL, Rhodes scholar, and author, is set to go to trial for the invasion-of-privacy charge on May 14, but his political fate could be determined sooner. The statehouse investigation was launched by a unanimous vote after Greitens was indicted for invasion-of-privacy in February. The testimony of the woman, released Wednesday, added graphic detail to the allegations against the governor; the members of the committee said they found her to be a credible witness.

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According to a report issued by the committee, the woman testified Greitens was a customer at her hair salon in 2013, well before he announced his candidacy for governor. She said she had a crush on Greitens, who later grabbed her crotch during an appointment in March 2015. Greitens then invited her to his home when his wife was away.

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From the Associated Press:

After she arrived through the back door, the woman testified, Greitens searched her purse and patted her down from head-to-toe. He then asked if she had exercised and had her change into a white T-shirt with a slit on the top and pajama pants. I thought, oh, this is going to be some sort of sexy workout, the woman testified. But once in his basement, Greitens taped her hands to pull-up rings, blindfolded her, started kissing her, ripped open the shirt and pulled down her pants, the woman testified. She didnt give consent to be disrobed or kissed, the report said. The woman testified that she then heard a click, like of a cellphone picture, and saw a flash. The woman testified that Greitens told her: Dont even mention my name to anybody at all, because if you do, Im going to take these pictures, and Im going to put them everywhere I can. They are going to be everywhere, and then everyone will know what a little whore you are. After telling Greitens, I dont want this, the woman testified that Greitens unbound her hands. She said she started uncontrollably crying. She said Greitens then grabbed her in a hug and laid her down. She said he put his penis near her face and she gave him oral sex. Asked by the committee whether the oral sex was coerced, she responded: Coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave.

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The woman testified that she had several more sexual encounters with Greitens that turned violent, including one in June 2015, when she says he slapped her in the face for sleeping with her husband. During another encounter, she said out of nowhere just, like kind of smacked me and grabbed me and shoved me down on the ground, and I instantly just started bawling.

The allegedly abusive sexual relationship became public years later after the woman confessed to her husband at the time she had an affair with Greitens. The couple later divorced and, she said, her then-husband said he was going to get this guy one day. Two years later, he leaked an audio tape to the media on which the woman discussed the affair. In January, Greitens admitted to having an extramarital affair, but denied slapping or blackmailing the woman and refused calls that he resign, including some within his own party. This is a political witch hunt, Greitens said shortly before the report was released Wednesday. This is exactly like whats happening with the witch hunts in Washington, D.C.In her opening remarks at Tuesdays Senate hearing, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein impressed upon Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg the importance of preventing foreign actors from interfering in U.S. elections.

Throughout the hearings on both Monday and Tuesday, we were reminded again and again that for members of Congress and the U.S. media, the threat of Russian interference in American elections is the story. After all, it could indeed be the watershed event that sets Congress on a path to regulating social media companies.

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But as Zuckerberg himself acknowledged, the problem at hand is not unique to the U.S. With Facebook boasting 2.2 billion active users in nearly every country, the problem is incredibly global and thus much harder to solve than policymakers may realize. While their priorities naturally lie in the U.S., their actions will have consequences for the entire world.

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In all five of the countries with the largest populations of Facebook usersIndia, the U.S., Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexicothere is compelling evidence that people and companies are either buying or exploiting Facebooks vast data troves and easy-to-use advertising and information-sharing services in an effort to influence election outcomes. While foreign actors may be at the root of some of these cases, in others, all signs indicate that national political parties are using these strategies against one anotherthere is no foreign actor to blame.

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In Brazil and Indonesia, authorities are launching investigations into the unlawful use of Facebook users personal data by Cambridge Analytica. In India and Mexico, local media have shown how Cambridge Analytica and its parent company, SCL Group, have contracts in data mining, analysis, and strategy for local and national political campaigns in major upcoming elections. These findings have raised more questions than answers.

The U.S. government has more power over this hyperglobal company than any other institution of power on Earth.

In Mexico, Cambridge Analytica appears to be under contract to aid the campaigns of gubernatorial candidates in seven of the 31 states where elections will take place this July, including the federal district, home to Mexico City. Bloomberg reported that as part of the consulting firms strategy, Cambridge Analytica partnered with local mobile app Pig.gi to offer Mexican Facebook users free internet access in exchange for taking surveys and watching advertisements related to the upcoming elections. This strategy appears strikingly similar to the now-infamous personality quiz that helped fuel Cambridge Analyticas work in the U.S.

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Apart from this, there is still relatively little information about what the company is or isnt doing in Mexico. What we do know is that public corruption and drug-related violence in Mexico are at record-high levels and that these electionsin which a total of 3,000 seats are being contested at local, state, and federal levels, including the presidencycould bring about a sea of change in Mexicos political power structure. The stakes are incredibly high.

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In India, it is clear that SCL Group has a presence in the country, but beyond that, there is even less concrete information about what they may or may not be doing there.

Ovleno Business Intelligence (a local offshoot of SCL Group) boasted on its website of having worked on behalf of the countrys two major political partiesuntil the Indian government suspended the website in late March.

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A former employee of the company told NDTV that SCL Group developed user surveys in an effort to gather data (and potentially influence user opinion against the Indian National Congress) but that the surveys were never deployed. He said this effort was abandoned after the suspension of Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix, who was caught on camera bragging of the companys ability to bribe politicians. (He has since been suspended from the company, though he remains CEO.) Right now, little more information about the situation has been released publicly. But the abrupt disappearance of Ovlenos website suggests that there may be more happening behind the scenes.

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One other example can be found in Kenya, where during the 2013 election campaign Cambridge Analytica conducted 47,000 on-the-ground surveys for Uhuru Kenyatta and the National Alliance, the forerunner to the incumbent Jubilee Party. According to the consulting firms own website, the data collected allowed them to create a profile of the Kenyan electorate and come up with a campaign strategy based on the electorates needs (jobs) and fears (tribal violence).

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In a report for Global Voices (the organization I work for), Kenyan blogger Njeri Wangari Wanjohi wrote, This begs the question of what type of strategy the company might have proposed (as stated in their materials) that would be based on the electorates fears of tribal violence. She then pointed to the very real threat of ethnic violence in Kenya, recalling the 2007 general election, when tribal clashes led to 1,500 deaths and left more than 600,000 people homeless.

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Everything we know from Kenya and the U.S.and dont know about the companys activities in Mexico and Indiasuggests that Cambridge Analytica and companies like it may be having a profound impact on the integrity of information about political candidates and elections worldwide, and that it may even be using data analysis to pit voters against one another on the basis of ethnic or other cultural divisions.

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U.S. leaders have spent many decades evangelizing about democratic institutions and free and fair elections around the world, at least in countries where these things serve the best interests of the U.S. In theory, they should be deeply disturbed by these revelations.

Because Facebook is incorporated in the U.S., it is primarily beholden to U.S. law. This means that the U.S. government has more power over this hyperglobal company than any other institution of power on Earth. If U.S. leaders truly care about promoting and protecting democracy around the world, they are now facing a historic opportunity to practice what theyve preached for so long.

Read more from Slate on Cambridge Analytica.In Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergs second session with lawmakers this week, there were a few high points, many low points, and an absurd number of deflected or unanswered questions. But between all of the bromides and promises to get back to members of Congress with answers to questions that he claimed he didnt know, a pair of exchanges stood outand revealed the limits of the companys promises that it gives people complete control of their data.

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In a line of questioning from Rep. Ben Lujan, a Democrat from New Mexico, Zuckerberg allowed that his company creates profiles on people who dont actually use Facebookwhat are sometimes referred to as shadow profiles. This was important for a number of reasonschief among them because across two days of testimony to Senate and House committees, Zuckerberg repeatedly hammered on the point that Facebook doesnt own user data and that users have control over how their data is shared on Facebook.

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I believe that everyone owns their own content online, and thats the first line of our terms of service if you read it, Mark Zuckerberg told Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, about an hour into Wednesdays hearing. The idea that people who use Facebook own their data and can choose how that data is used was a frequent Zuckerberg talking point on Tuesday and Wednesday (not to mention one that his PR team had included in his notes, which the public caught a glimpse of on Tuesday after he left them visible long enough for a journalist to snap a photo).

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But about an hour and a half later, Lujan drilled down on the issue, pushing Zuckerberg on whether his platitudes about not owning our data squares with reality. Facebook has detailed profiles on people who have never signed up for Facebook, yes or no, the congressman asked, noting that these non-Facebook user profiles are often called shadow profiles, a term Zuckerberg claimed he wasnt familiar with. Then the congressman asked again: Its been admitted by Facebook that you do collect data points on average nonusers. My question is, can someone who does not have a Facebook account opt out of Facebooks involuntary data collection?

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To that, Zuckerberg gave a nonanswer. Anyone can turn off and opt out of any data collection for ads, whether they use our services or not, the CEO said. But in order to prevent people from scraping public information, which again, the search feature you brought up only showed public information, peoples names and profiles and things theyd made public. Nonetheless, we dont want people aggregating even public information. So, we need to know when someone is trying to access our services. Beyond the fact that this wasnt coherent, it also wasnt an answer to the question, which Lujan picked up on right away, noting that when people who arent Facebook users visit Facebook to opt out of data collection, Facebook directs them to sign up for Facebook in order to opt out. Having a Facebook account appears to be the only way to do that.

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Another representative, Republican John Shimkus of Illinois, asked Zuckerberg why Facebook tracks people who are logged off Facebook across different devices, to which the CEO replied that its for security and ad reasons. The security reason, he said, is that Facebook wants to know how many public pages someone is looking up or scraping, even when theyre not logged in, which ostensibly is useful to prevent mass harvesting of public profile data. For ads, the reason is that they run an ad network off Facebook, and collecting data of people off Facebook is one way that ad networks target people and make money. Zuckerberg said that if people want they can opt out of the ad network. Of course, as Lujan pointed out, to opt out Facebook asks that you log on.

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All of which means that Zuckerbergs repeated cries that people who use the internetnot even just people who use Facebookhave control over their data on Facebook isnt really true in practice. To opt out of Facebooks data collection, first youd have to even know a service youre not on is collecting your information, and then youd have to sign up for that service to opt out of it. (Theres a joke about Kafka to be made somewhere in there.) And, of course, to be on Facebook means the company is collecting data about you no matter how restrictive you make your settingsunless you delete your account, but even then, it may be collecting data about you anyway. The whole thing is a head trip, and more than anything it reveals how we can never really control how Facebook collects data. If you cant even evade the companys data collection by abstaining from having a Facebook profile, what choice do you really have?

Hopefully, Congress will continue to worry about thisand consider how to make companies that collect data on people without their consent or knowledge to quit it. But doing that would require some kind of lawmaking or directive from our elected representativessomething that, to judge by this weeks hearings overall, may be something theyd rather not have to do.

Read more from Slate on Cambridge Analytica.We believe that everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls, Mark Zuckerberg told the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. Weve had a lot of these controls in place for years. The [EU General Data Protection Regulation] requires us to do a few more things, and were going to extend that to the world.

Until recently, U.S. discourse largely claimed new EU privacy rules were more about European protectionism than data protection. But in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the idea of a U.S. data protection law is suddenly appealing to many American legislators. Zuckerberg said repeatedly before the House as well as the Senate that he is open to regulation, but he also seemed to suggest that, thanks to Facebooks embrace of the new European law, it was almost unnecessary. He promised that Facebook will ensure that all the same controls will be available around the world. Such a pledge sounds appealing, particularly given the fact that much of Congress has a self-regulatory soft spot. But what it actually means is neither straightforward nor as protective as it may sound.

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The controls he was referring to are part of Facebooks implementation of the EU General Data Protection RegulationGDPR for short. The blocs refreshed rules on privacy and user control of personal data will become enforceable from May 25. Fearing headlines of fines of 4 percent of global turnover in the preceding year or 20 million euros (about $24 million), whichever is higher, firms the world over are scrambling to get their houses in order. All organizations that are either based in the EU or process personal data relating to EU residents, including U.S. firms, must narrowly define and properly communicate what they want to do with the data and ensure they have a lawful basis for doing it. The regulation spells out rules for explicit consent, which cant be bundled up with other terms and conditions, when sensitive data is collected and inferred, and it has to be as easy to withdraw permission as it was to grant. Companies must also swiftly comply with requests to obtain copies of personal data, to object to particular uses of it, or to have it erased (forgotten).

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When it comes to Zuckerbergs claim, the core thing to understand is the distinction between two types of Facebook user: the 239 million located in the U.S. and Canada, served out of Facebook in Menlo Park, California, and the 1.89 billion located elsewhere and served from Facebook Ireland. The 89 percent of users served from Facebook Irelandeven those who dont live in EU countrieswill already benefit from the GDPRs legal protection, regardless of public promises, and can seek redress through European regulators and courts.

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Zuckerberg may want you to think that Facebook has decided to bring the remaining 11 percent up to parity. But thats not whats going to happen. Whenever asked to confirm whether Facebook would extend GDPR protections to the few locations they are not legally required, Zuckerberg was careful to respond that yes, they would extend GDPR controls. The difference is critical. Facebooks chosen controls are not the same as the GDPR. Instead, they are a highly restrictive interpretation of data protection law that does not reflect the depth of transparency, accountability, and control the regulation demands.

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Take the GDPRs right of access to personal data. Zuckerberg claimed to the House that everything users have in Facebook is available to download. Yet Facebook itself admits that this is untrue. Facebook Pixel code chunks, which make your browser reveal your identity on non-Facebook pages, are strewn across 30 percent of the web, and the company can also track users across smartphone apps. That information is stored in a nonanonymized format alongside user IDs in Facebooks Hive big data analysis system. Even trivial examination of such data can reveal intensely private and intimate information on individuals characteristics, lifestyle, and preferences. And this is an organization capable of far more than trivial analysis. This year, Swiss mathematician Paul-Olivier Dehaye submitted a written request to Facebook for data about the websites he had visited and what had been inferred about him. In response, the company said that while it could retrieve the information, pulling it out of the many parts of the complex Hive analysis system it had been placed across would entail multiple hours of total computing time, across thousands of servers running in parallel. If Facebook offered everyone the ability to understand and control this data, it claimed, the required computer processing power would greatly exceed that available to the Facebook group. The notion that the sheer amount of data and sophistication of analysis is so great as to limit a firm with a market capitalization of $400 billion (roughly the same as Norways GDP) from finding a way to access it easily is worrying.

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Even in Europe, using access rights to find out what firms actually process about youusually highly fine-grained data about your habits, behavior, and location that you might not have imagined they even hadis bewildering and time-intensive. First, you have to prove your identity, cope with countless attempts to defuse your request, and petition the EU regulator to take your concerns seriously. After that, you might get either an arbitrary selection of data (often in a lengthy but nevertheless incomplete PDF) or a legally suspect dead-end refusal. The penalties for violating European data protection law are now high, so if it applies to you and you truly know how to push, companies might give eventual consideration to your concerns.

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But in the U.S., there is no data protection authority to back you up. The idea that the voluntary controls Zuckerberg invoked will truly shine light on shadowy profiling practices is almost laughable. Facebook is far from the only villain: Similar we cant find your data, but a hacker could excuses are commonly rolled out by even privacy-protective companies such as Apple, which stores all audio and transcripts users dictate to Siri for analysis but stubbornly refuses to provide user control.

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Facebook claims that access to such detailed data is not of use to the average consumer. Let us run our algorithmic systems over it, company leaders say, and we will give you a basic overview of the result. Its true that not all consumers are interested in or have a use for gigabytes of information about themselves. But that shouldnt be an excuse to let the firm paint a rosy picture about its tracking practices and the inferences they enable on both users and nonusers. Transparency around complex data and processing practices is useful, particularly to regulators and to civil society groups, who translate that information and ignite true public debate.

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If Facebook truly wanted to, it could give joint data controller status to Facebook Ireland with regard to U.S. and Canadian users as well as the 89 percent it currently serves. This would give all Facebook users recourse to justice, enforcement of the GDPR, and legal rights beyond that of Zuckerbergs promised controls. Yet its easy to imagine that politicians like Sen. Ted Cruzwho in 2016 claimed that a largely bureaucratic change involving the organization that assigns domain names was tantamount to giv[ing] away control of the internetwould bristle at that: Why should European courts determine the remedies available to American residents, for an American firm? Better would be to pass a similarly strong piece of legislation in the U.S. The global data protection agreement Convention 108, whose signatories extend beyond the European Union and the content of which is currently being modernized, provides a good start for this process. If the U.S. wants to steer the direction of digital policy in the global arena, it needs to step up to, not back from, the regulatory table.

Read more from Slate on Cambridge Analytica.Mark Zuckerbergs tactics to survive 10 hours of questioning by members of Congress included diversions, technical quibbles, and filibusters designed to run out each lawmakers four-minute clock. His overall strategy for the hearings, which focused on Facebooks privacy and data security practices, was to say as little as possible beyond a handful of scripted talking points. Still, there were times when he had no choice but to say something. And on at least a few of those occasions, he said things that strained the credulity of anyone who follows Zuckerberg and his company closely. Here are five of the least plausible claims he made to Congress this week.

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1. Facebook users consented to letting their friends share their personal information with the likes of Cambridge Analytica.

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A 2011 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission required Facebook to obtain users express consent via clear and prominent notice before sharing their data in new ways. Yet the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that as many as 87 million Facebook users could have had their profile data scraped via an app that only 270,000 signed up for. Thats because Facebook allowed such apps to obtain data not only from their users, but from their unwitting friends. And it emerged this week that some users even had their private messages harvested.

Multiple lawmakers this week pressed Zuckerberg on whether that apparently nonconsensual data harvesting amounted to a violation of the FTC agreement. Each time, Zuckerberg repeated the companys official stance that it does not believe it violated the agreement. But on one occasionunder persistent questioning from Kansas Republican Jerry Moran on TuesdayZuckerberg went further, suggesting that Facebook users did in fact consent to having their data scraped by third parties anytime their friends signed up for an app. We explained, and they consented to it working that way, Zuckerberg said. He later added, We made it clear this is how it worked. When people signed up for Facebook, they signed up for that as well.

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Well soon find out whether the FTC agrees: Some observers are expecting it to levy record fines on the company. Regardless, Zuckerbergs claim that Facebook users understood that their friends could give away their data seems pretty disingenuous.

2. Facebook users prefer targeted ads to nontargeted ones.

Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, asked on Tuesday what happens if a user doesnt want to receive targeted ads based on their online behavior. Specifically, he asked if Facebook is really considering letting users pay to opt out of ad targeting. But Zuckerberg rejected the questions premise:

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What we found is that even though some people dont like ads, people really dont like ads that arent relevant. And while there is some discomfort for sure with using information in making ads more relevant, the overwhelming feedback that we get from our community is that people would rather have us show relevant content there than not.

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But a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted just last month suggests the opposite. In that poll of U.S. adults, 63 percent of respondents said theyd like to see less targeted advertising, while just 9 percent said theyd like to see more. Just 21 percent considered targeted ads better than traditional ones, while 41 percent considered them worse. Granted, the polls methodology could be flawed in various ways. Still, its hard to believe Facebook users are anywhere near as enthusiastic about trading their privacy for more relevant ads as Zuckerberg claimed.

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A more likely reason that Facebook users havent opted out of various forms of ad targeting is that Facebook makes it really confusing to do so.

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3. Zuckerberg is not familiar with shadow profiles.

In one of Wednesdays sharpest interrogations, New Mexico Democrat Ben Lujan pressed Zuckerberg on the fact that Facebook collects data even on people who dont use Facebook. The dossiers that the social network builds on non-Facebook usersknown in the industry as shadow profileshave been widely reported on over the years, including in a recent investigation by Gizmodo.

The term is hardly new: It dates to at least 2011, when an advocacy group in Ireland filed suit against Facebook alleging that its shadow profiles violated the Irish Data Protection Act. It made headlines in 2013 (including in Slate) when Facebook mistakenly leaked private contact information from users address books, and the company issued an apology. So Zuckerberg must have known what Lujan was talking about when he described the dossiers and then asked, So these are called shadow profiles, is that what theyve been referred to by some?

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Zuckerbergs response: Congressman, Im notIm not familiar with that. He continued to divert, deflect, and plead ignorance for the duration of Lujans questioning on the topic. My colleague April Glaser has more on the dishonesty of his position, and why it matters.

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4. He doesnt know whether Facebook tracks logged-out users or tracks users across devices.

Zuckerberg was asked multiple times whether Facebook tracks people around the web who arent logged into Facebook. On most occasions, he deflected the question in one way or another. At least once, on Wednesday, he answered it in the affirmative. But when he was first asked it on Tuesday, by Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, he pleaded ignorance. Senator, I want to make sure I get this accurate so it would probably be better to have my team follow up afterward, Zuckerberg saideven though Facebooks own website makes it clear that the company does indeed track logged-out users.

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The Facebook chief similarly claimed to Missouri Republican Roy Blunt on Tuesday that he didnt know whether Facebook tracks users across devices outside the Facebook app:

BLUNT: Do you track devices that an individual who uses Facebook has that is connected to the device that they use for their Facebook connection, but not necessarily connected to Facebook? ZUCKERBERG: Im notIm not sure of the answer to that question. BLUNT: Really? ZUCKERBERG: Yes.

5. Hes not that familiar with what Palantir does.

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Palantir is a major Silicon Valley data analysis firm with connections to law enforcement, the military, and the NSA. Its co-founder, Peter Thiel, was an early Facebook investor and a mentor to Zuckerberg, and he sits on Facebooks board. Palantirs headquarters in Palo Alto are in the same building that used to be Facebooks headquarters. Yet when Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, asked Zuckerberg about Palantir, the Facebook CEO said, Im not really that familiar with what Palantir does. Odd that it has never come up in any of his conversations with Thiel!

Whether any of these evasions amount to lying to Congresswhich is punishable by jail timeis not clear. What is clear is that Zuckerberg repeatedly erred on the side of ignorance and naivete rather than delve into some of the less savory aspects of Facebooks business. What can Congress do about it? Probably not much. But heres an idea for where to start: Make sure that Zuckerberg really does follow up with lawmakers on all 43 things he promised to follow up with them on.

Read more from Slate on Cambridge Analytica.Among the more painful moments for Mark Zuckerberg in his second day of Capitol Hill grilling was the angry dressing-down he got from Rep. John Sarbanes. The Maryland Democrat zeroed in not on Facebooks relationship with the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, but on the fact that Facebook (like Twitter and Google) had employees embedded with the Trump campaign to help craft its digital advertising strategy. For free.

That arrangement may have violated long-standing campaign finance rules that prohibit even in-kind donations from private companies to candidates. Perhaps more than any exchange Zuckerberg had with lawmakers, it is a clear reminder that everyoneincluding the big tech companieswould benefit from better, clearer rules.

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Sarbanes questions were prompted by revelations in an October 2017 peer-reviewed study that documented the role employees from Facebook, Twitter, and Google played in actively shaping campaign communications through their close collaboration with political staffers on the Trump campaign. The companies have said they offered the same services to the Clinton campaign, which apparently declined the same level of help. That turned out to be a big mistake.

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Both Trump and Clinton spent millions on Facebook ads, but the companys own internal analysis concluded that Trumps campaign, developed with the help of Facebook employees, was far more targeted and complex than Clintons, and better leveraged Facebooks ability to optimize for outcomes. In the new world our campaigns have entered, in which behavioral algorithms can spin data collected by social media platforms on their billions of users into political gold, that gave the Trump campaign a critical advantage.

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Companies like Facebook are not supposed to provide valuable services for free to presidential campaigns. Under federal law, if you provide goods or services to a campaign without charging fair market value, its classified as a contribution in-kind. Corporations have been prohibited from making such contributions since the days of Standard Oil. This is one area of campaign finance law thats fairly rock-solid even in the post-Citizens United, dark money-fueled free-for-all that now characterizes US campaigns.

It probably doesnt matter (at least for purposes of campaign finance law) that Facebook offered Clinton the same service. Campaign contribution rules do exempt certain benefits (like price discounts) offered to both political and nonpolitical customers as part of a companys ordinary course of business. But it seems doubtful that the sort of tailored assistance Facebook provided to the Trump campaign would qualify.

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Of course, Facebook didnt necessarily want Trump to win. Despite the bromides about connecting the world, Facebook is in the business of selling ads, and it offered this service to help it do just that. The companys obviously commercial motivations could create enough gray area to provide it with some cover (especially since tech companies reportedly helped the Obama and Romney campaigns in 2012 without being called out).

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Even if Facebook broke the law, however, its far from clear the restrictions makes sense in this case. We arguably want companies like Facebook to work with campaigns and help them mobilize their supporters. That could, for example, result in more people turning out to vote and in more small-dollar donations to help counter the baleful influence of super PACs and shadowy dark-money groups that raise their millions from a handful of megadonors.

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The bottom line is that Facebooks business model is profoundly different from that of the print and broadcast media companies that used to dominate the political ad market. Left completely unregulated, that model poses significant risks to our political system. But existing rules, many of which are decades old, can often be a poor fit for technology thats still, in the grand scheme of things, quite new.

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Its time to bring campaign spending and other laws governing Facebooks conduct into the digital age. Zuckerberg made clear this week that he agreesas he should, since whatever benefits Facebook gleaned from its relationships with the Trump campaign and Cambridge Analytica pale in comparison to the roiling PR disaster the company now faces.

Facebook and Twitter have both announced their support for the federal Honest Ads Act, a package of reforms that would bring more transparency to political ads on the Internet and help combat foreign meddling in our elections. As this weeks theatrics make clear, though, there is much more to do. It is in Facebooks best interest, as much as anyones, to have clear rules of the road for everyone to follow. Hopefully the company and its Silicon Valley peers will take that lesson to heart.

Read more from Slate on Cambridge Analytica.Small independent grocery store in 2018 need a new edge against growing competition from national chains and even online giants like Amazon. But with so much change in the industry, it is still possible for small businesses to thrive? You just need to find smart ways to set your stores experience apart. Here are 10 tips to help small grocery stores survive this challenging time.

Tips for Grocery Store Owners

Personalize Messaging to Your Customers

As a business thats specific to one local community or neighborhood, you have the benefit of catering your product line and messaging to the people who are most likely to come to your store, rather than sticking to generic supermarket fare. This means you can take hyper-local flavors, preferences, and shopping habits into account when stocking your shelves.

For example, Constantinos Market in Ohio caters its offerings to active young professionals and college students due to its location in the midst of college and trendy neighborhoods, as outlined by Crains Cleveland Business. So its offerings include plenty of grab and go options that are centered around convenience rather than large, family meals.

Tell the Story Behind Your Products

Local shoppers also tend to appreciate when their food options come from farms or producers that are also part of the community. But it isnt enough to just include local brands on your shelves. You also need to call attention to those items and really let customers know the stories behind those products and the people making them.

Laurie Rains, group vice-president of U.S. retail consumer and shopper analytics with Nielsen explained to Food Business News, Over 8 in 10 independent shoppers spend more than 50% of their fresh food spend in supermarkets versus other outlets where fresh foods are bought. To win the trip, independents need to tell the story of the local fresh products they are selling. This includes everything from craft beer to locally churned ice cream. Flag it on the shelf. Tell the story.

Add a Unique Experience

Millennials especially seem to be eschewing the traditional grocery store experience. So for independent stores that want to stay relevant with this generation of consumers, you have to offer more than just a decent selection of products. Add a coffee shop, free product samples daily, a restaurant where people can eat before picking up items for the week, or some other unique element to make their trip more memorable.

Pam Danziger, author of the book Shops That Pop told Credit.com, I find more and more that millennials are looking for special experiences. They are not just looking for products. They want a better quality service experience from people who really know their stuff.

Educate Employees on Your Products

Furthermore, Danzinger emphasized the importance of having experts on staff who can actually help people make buying decisions. For the consumers who are prone to online shopping, one of the reasons they might choose a brick and mortar store is because they want help making their buying decisions.

Danzinger added, Theres nothing like going to specialty wine store where [workers] can really advise you on what you are getting. This has happened with food now.

Think Mobile

Another way you can improve the shopping experience is by adding features of convenience. Since so many consumers are using their smartphones for shopping and various other purposes, creating an app for your store can be one way for you to stay connected and create great experiences. Consider an app that lets customers have their orders set aside for pickup at a specific time, or one that includes a roadmap to all the in-store specials or even one that provides exclusive coupons.

Use Coupons and Deals Creatively

One of the factors that can always help to attract customers is a great deal. While independent grocery stores normally cant compete with big chains based on price alone, you can offer some coupons or special offers via email or mobile devices to provide a better value to customers on specific types of products.

Rethink the Traditional Store Layout

Another area where independent stores dont necessarily have to try and emulate what the big chains are doing is store layout. The traditional layout where produce and meats are arranged along the perimeter, with dry goods in the middle, works for stores where people buy all of their groceries for the week in one trip. However, if you have a more specialized store that focuses on a niche like health food or prepared meals, you can cater your layout to call attention to your most popular products and make it as convenient as possible for customers.

Offer Some Online Options

You may not be able to compete with Amazon in terms of price or volume. But recent research has made it clear that more and more customers are turning to online outlets for certain grocery items. Neilsen found that 70 percent of consumers will be shopping online by 2024. So it could certainly be to your benefit to get in on this trend early and offer some kind of online options where it makes sense to do so. You can then potentially set your store apart by offering same-day delivery or curbside pickup.

Make Use of the Gig Economy

Actually handling the logistics of grocery delivery or pickup might seem like a challenge for store owners. However, gig economy based platforms like Roadie offer solutions for managing these functions without having to hire tons of extra employees.

Focus on Personal Service

Finally, theres one area where independent grocery stores have always seemed to have a leg up on national competitors  individual service. If you and your employees take the time to really help employees, get to know them, learn their names and provide really high levels of service, they are much more likely to pay more to shop with your business. And thats likely to remain the case no matter what new technology or competition enters the market.Zilina to experience musical feast of the year

The annual festival of classical music this time around presents eleven laureates of international performing competitions, as well as the local Slovak Sinfonietta, State Slovak Philharmonic Kosice and Slovak Youth Orchestra.

The 28th edition of the Allegretto Zilina 2018 music festival offers eleven international soloists  from France, Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Hungary, the Netherlands/Australia, Japan and Taiwan  between April 16 and 21, 2018. Most of these musicians have already won respected international competitions but are still at the beginning of their career. Six evenings offer three orchestral concerts (with Zilina-based Slovak Sinfonietta, State Slovak Philharmonic Kosice and Slovak Youth Orchestra).

Bruno Philippe (Source: Natacha Colmez Photography)

In the Fatra House of Arts, Slovak trumpeter Stanislav Masaryk will play Haydn  with the Slovak Youth Orchestra conducted by Australian/Dutch Benjamin Bayl who, apart from conducting, is also a multi-instrumentalist.

This time, Russian Sergey Malov will not play viola but rather violin and violoncello of violin-maker Dmitry Badiarov. Malov will play with the Musica Aeterna ensemble and their programme will include, among other pieces, Vivaldis Four Seasons.

12. Apr 2018 at 7:55 | Compiled by Zuzana VilikovskaBusinessman Basternak faces seven to 12 years in prison

District court now handles the charge filed by the Special Prosecutors Office, involving criminal offence of tax- and insurance premium evasion.

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The well-known businessman Ladislav Basternak is facing seven years in prison in the case of an unjustified VAT refund, the Dennik N daily reported on April 10.

The Bratislava II District Court is dealing with the charge of the Special Prosecutors Office, which cites the criminal offence of tax- and insurance premium evasion.

Read also:

Read also: Tax fraud suspect Basternak returns millions to the state Read more

This involves a VAT payment to the company BL 202 for the purchase of apartments in the Five Star Residence complex. Judge Maria Szaboova will preside over the case, Dennik N wrote, who was appointed as judge by President Andrej Kiska in 2015.

The court will conduct all initial acts in accordance with the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code  i.e. delivery of the charge  according to Bratislava Regional Court spokesman Pavol Adamciak.

Court to study the case

While deciding in other criminal cases, the courts senate will study the case file in this matter, Adamciak said. Only after thoroughly studying the file, can the senate, in accordance with the Criminal Procedure Code, determine further procedural steps in this criminal case.

Read also:

Read also: Businessman Basternak is suing SaS MP Jozef Rajtar Read more

Basternak, highly publicised for his ties to top politicians, may receive a prison sentence of somewhere between seven and 12 years, the daily reported.

12. Apr 2018 at 13:30 | Compiled by Spectator staffSlovak protest organisers send open letter to the EP

They are calling on the European Parliament to send an investigative team to look into the double murder, to check on the steps of the new Slovak government and approve the investigation of the abuse of EU funds in the country.

Protests following the mruder of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova were hedl aorund Slovakia - and also abroad (e.g. in Paris, March 9) (Source: AP/TASR)

The protest organisers attended by Slovak nationals from 12 European countries in the wake of the murders of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova sent an open letter to the European Parliament on April 11. In the letter, they asked MEPs to include three specific items in a resolution on Slovakia set to be approved in Strasbourg on April 19, the TASR newswire reported on the same day.

The authors of the letter pointed out that the double murder of Kuciak and his fiancee occurred more than a month ago. The murdered journalist was writing about corruption and sought to uncover connections between Italian Mafia members active in Slovakia and senior political representatives of the country. His murder sparked the largest street protests in Slovakia since the fall of communism in 1989.

What are the requests about?

First, the letter asks the European Parliament (EP) to initiate the establishment of an international investigative team in cooperation with Europol in order to ensure a just and transparent investigation into the murders of Kuciak and Kusnirova. The EP should address such a request to the Slovak prosecutor-general, Police Corps president and Slovak Parliament, since only Slovak lawmakers can greenlight legislation to enable the creation of such a team.

The second request is to look into specific measures taken by the new Slovak government that stem from the conclusions and recommendations of the European Parliaments two-day investigative mission to Slovakia that followed the murder.

Finally, the signatories of the call are asking the EP to approve an external and independent investigation into the misuse of the European Unions financial resources in Slovakia.

In the letter the authors warned MEPs that the situation, in which all state administration branches are controlled and abused by criminals and in which the journalist who was writing about this was murdered, is indeed critical. They cited the report of the EP special mission, according to which the Slovak public has lost its confidence in law enforcement and state institutions in general.

Save the date

Were afraid that no solution is in the offing without external help, the letter reads. Therefore, we ask you to take all of our concerns into consideration during the vote on April 19.

The letter has been signed by the Slovak organisers of public protests in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

12. Apr 2018 at 13:39 | Compiled by Spectator staffThe train parade lures locals and visitors to Kosice

The 18th edition of the Rusnoparada event hailing historical and modern trains presents the finest selection.

More information about travelling in Slovakia

Please see our Please see our Spectacular Slovakia travel guide

Railways may have several celebrations, but in eastern Slovakia, the biggest is called Rusnoparada, the train-engine parade. On the weekend of April 14 and 15, the Kosice train depot will open to fans of trains, engines and rails.

Within the Terra Incognita project promoting the eastern part of the country, Rusnoparada offers the most up-to-date engine  Vectron  as well as star trains from Slovakia and foreign countries, the SITA newswire wrote on April 11.

Organised by the state Railway Company Slovakia (ZSSK) and the Detska zeleznica (Childrens Railway) Kosice civic association, the event opens normally not accessible unusual spaces to the public.

What is on offer?

Last year, visitors of Rusnoparada  presenting modern and historical trains in one place  could enjoy the newly-introduced InterCity train, said Filip Hlubocky, board chair and CEO of ZSSK, as quoted by SITA. This year, we offer them the chance to see the most up-to-date engine, Vectron. Part of the show will be a concert by the S Hudbou Vesmirnou band and a carriage of the T.R.A.M. 'art train.'

video //www.youtube.com/embed/sRmQLJAwOYA

Stars like the Zabotlama, Papagaj (Parrot), Hurvinek, Mravec (Ant), Usata, Sergej, Karkulka, Vectron, Albatros and Orchestrion will arrive from all over Slovakia as well as Hungary and the Czech Republic, Lubomir Lehotsky, chairman of Detska zeleznica Kosice, added. So more than twenty steam, diesel and electric engines will come together in a single place this weekend  and I'm sure visitors have a lot to look forward to.

The Hungarian engine from 1910, Krutwig  the last steam engine model produced in former Czechoslovakia, and Sergej the Hollywood star from The Peacemaker, will be available at the Kosice railway depot the upcoming weekend.

12. Apr 2018 at 13:44 | Compiled by Spectator staffWhat is happening with the public-service broadcaster?

The RTVS managements criticism of the #allforJan badges is just the tip of the iceberg, showing a divide between journalists and their managers. Here are some basics to understand whats going on.

It started with management changes

The situation at the public-service RTVS has been a cause for concern among media freedom watchdogs after its current general director, Jaroslav Reznik, was elected to its top post in June 2017. There have been rumours of tension between Rezniks management and the journalists working for the RTVS news desk, both for the TV and the radio service.

In January 2018, RTVS management decided to scrap the broadcasters only investigative show. After the critical response among the media community and the public, Reznik pledged to reintroduce the show on screens in September.

In February, head of the news desk and publicist journalism, Juraj Rybansky, and head of the TV newscast, Boris Chmel, announced they were leaving, the former for alleged health reasons, the latter for private reasons. But background information implies disputes between the newscast management and the journalistic team was behind this step.

Chmel and Rybansky were both former spokespeople who got positions in RTVS management. Rybansky was formerly a spokesperson for the Economy Ministry, while Chmel served as spokesperson for the rescue service. Former spokesperson of the University Hospital Bratislava, Petra Stano-Matasovska, was appointed as head of Slovak Radio (SRo). Unlike Rybansky and Chmel, she still holds the post.

Read also:

Read also: Why (not) Reznik? Read more

Rybansky was replaced by former Education Ministry spokesman Vahram Chuguryan, another former ministerial spokesperson for Smer and SNS ministers.

Management frowns upon badges

Chuguryans name appeared in connection with the more recent controversy at the public-service broadcaster, when reporters said that he banned them from wearing the #allforJan badges on screen. Chuguryan argued that it was a recommendation rather than a ban. While he sees the badges as a political symbol that does not belong on the screen of a public-service broadcaster, journalists say the badges symbolise their solidarity with their murdered colleague and their determination to preserve media freedom in the country.

Nora Wehofsits, advocacy officer at the European Centre for Press & Media Freedom admits that there is a very thin line between activism and journalism and journalists do need to maintain their professional attitude and stay independent, but this case is different and they feel connected to the case.

As there was a murder of the young journalist, it is absolutely clear there would be a wave of solidarity, Pauline Ades-Mevel, Head of EU-Balkans desk at Reporters Without Borders, told The Slovak Spectator.

12. Apr 2018 at 13:55 | Michaela Terenzani , Radka MinarechovaNo trains from China to Slovakia for now

The plan was to have two Chinese trains arriving to Bratislava per week

It was a big celebration when the first trial train with containers from China arrived at the cargo port in Bratislava last November. The trains 11,000-km journey from the Chinese town of Dalian via Russia and the Ukraine to Slovakia lasted only 17 days. It brought textile and industrial components and showed the prospects of the route. The plan was to dispatch firstly one and later two trains per week, in total as many as 500 such trains this year.

To date this has been the only train from China that ended in Slovakia, said Helena Tomkova, spokesperon of the Bratislava cargo port Slovenska Plavba a Pristavy (SPaP), as cited by the Sme daily.

Read also:

Read also: First trial freight train from China arrives in Bratislava Read more

Dana Meager, state secretary of the Slovak Finance Ministry and governmental plenipotentiary for Silk Road, explains that there are no trains from Slovakia to China because the Chinese planning commission has not approved this. It approved the schedule of trains for 2018 even in September.

12. Apr 2018 at 17:00 | Jana LiptakovaWhat prominent guests has the Carlton hotel hosted?

The regular guests of this Bratislava hotel included composer Franz List, while the American inventor Thomas Edison and the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen also visited

The Hotel Carlton, whose history dates back as far as the 13th century, dominates Hviezdoslavo Square in Bratislava with its majestic facade. To this day it is one of the most prominent hotels in the Slovak capital, the visits of famous figures adding to its prestige.

In terms of visits this hotel belongs among the most important hotels in central Europe, said Jan Vyhnanek from the Bratislavske Rozky civic association dedicated to promoting Bratislavas history, during his lecture on prominent guests of the Carlton Hotel.

Vyhnanek, searching the archives for information about Bratislava history, has been making notes on who was accommodated where in Bratislava. The list of the Carltons guests is long, with many prominent names making this place even more interesting.

The Carlton Hotel The history of the Carlton hotel dates to the 13th century, when the At the Swan Inn stood in its place. Later in 1760, the roadside At the Three Green Trees Inn was established, providing its guests with both lodging and stables for horses. Johann Lowy, the director of the first Hungarian railway between Bratislava and Trnava, bought the building in 1838 and had it rebuilt. From 1844 through 1846, the original single-storey structure was turned into the modern At the Green Tree three-storey hotel. In 1857, the At the Green Tree hotel was taken over by the renowned wine merchant, Jakub Palugyay, who had already owned the hotel cafe. The Palugyay family managed the hotel until the owners death in 1912. The competitor of the At the Green Tree hotel was the next-door National hotel, situated on Mostova Street. The National was founded by the Speneder family in 1860, later rebuilt into a pompous corner building with its facade facing Mostova Street and Hviezdoslavovo Square, the famous Savoy cafe located on the ground floor. In 1908, the former manager of the Savoy in London, Heinrich Pruger, purchased the National hotel. In the following years, he acquired the adjacent Gervay House and, after the death of Karol Palugyay, the At the Green Tree hotel as well. Pruger had the three hotels rebuilt into the imposing Savoy-Carlton hotel complex, which opened in June 1913. The complex received a unifying facade during its reconstruction between 1925 and 1929. Source: Carlton hotel

They included the musicians Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and Johannes Brahms, explorer Fridtjof Nansen, inventor Thomas Edison, as well as the poet Allen Ginsberg.

Franz Liszt had many friends in then Pressburg, but he always stayed in At the Green Tree hotel, one of the predecessors of todays Carlton, said Vyhnanek, adding that Liszt visited the city repeatedly either to give concerts or attend the ceremonial premieres of his works.

12. Apr 2018 at 19:15 | Jana LiptakovaBank of Montreal provides diversified financial services primarily in North America. The company's personal banking products and services include checking and savings accounts, credit cards, mortgages, and financial and investment advice services; and commercial banking products and services comprise business deposit accounts, commercial credit cards, business loans and commercial mortgages, cash management solutions, foreign exchange, specialized banking programs, treasury and payment solutions, and risk management products for small business and commercial banking customers. It also offers investment and wealth advisory services; digital investing services; financial services and solutions; and investment management, and trust and custody services to institutional, retail, and high net worth investors. In addition, the company provides life insurance, accident and sickness insurance, and annuity products; creditor and travel insurance to bank customers; and reinsurance solutions. Further, it offers client's debt and equity capital-raising services, as well as loan origination and syndication, balance sheet management, and treasury management; strategic advice on mergers and acquisitions, restructurings, and recapitalizations, as well as valuation and fairness opinions; and trade finance, risk mitigation, and other operating services. Additionally, the company provides research and access to markets for institutional, corporate, and retail clients; trading solutions that include debt, foreign exchange, interest rate, credit, equity, securitization and commodities; new product development and origination services, as well as risk management advice and services to hedge against fluctuations; and funding and liquidity management services to its clients. It operates through approximately 1,400 bank branches and 4,800 automated banking machines in Canada and the United States. The company was founded in 1817 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada.

Read MoreHolocaust Remembrance Day:

Grieve or Rejoice?

By David Stolinsky. April 12th, 2018

April 12 is Holocaust Remembrance Day, also known as Yom Ha-Shoah. The day is marked by ceremonies in Israel and across the world, which are attended by members of Jewish organizations and a few non-Jews. In fact, except in Israel, the day is largely ignored.

Still, one must admit that there are various ways to observe such a holiday. Some grieve for the six million Jews (including one million children) who were exterminated by the Nazis and their helpers, and resolve to do whatever they can to assure that it never happens again. Others rejoice at the memory of the Holocaust, and resolve to do whatever they can to assure that it does happen again ? as soon as possible. Whether there are more rejoicers or grievers in the world is a question I leave for your consideration. .......

JPFO Founder Aaron Zelman believed in "Never Again. Always Armed."

Coincidentally, this week marks "Genocide Awareness Week," featuring commemorative events worldwide. One may wonder how many will be promoting the preservation of firearms ownership, maintaining the balance of power that keeps people free (and why America is still free).

Be sure to visit the JPFO Genocide Chart.

"You don't have to be Jewish to fight by our side."

You just have to love freedom.

 2018 JPFO All rights reserved.

jpfo@jpfo.org

1-800-869-1884

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

12500 NE 10th Pl.

Bellevue, WA 98005 USA

"America's most aggressive defender of civil rights"

We make the NRA look like moderates

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The following companies are subsidiares of Sanofi: A. Nattermann & Cie. GmbH, AO Sanofi Russia, Ablynx, Ablynx N.V., Allston Landing Limited Partnership, Aventis Inc., Aventis Pharma (Manufacturing) Pte. Ltd, Aventis Pharma Limited, Aventis Pharma S.A., Aventis S.A., Aventisub LLC, Bioverativ, Bioverativ Inc., Bioverativ Therapeutics Inc., Bioverativ U.S.LLC, Carraig Insurance DAC, Chattem Inc., Chinoin Private Co. Ltd, Francopia, Genfar S.A., Genzyme Corporation, Genzyme Europe B.V., Genzyme Flanders BVBA, Genzyme Global Sarl, Genzyme Ireland Limited, Genzyme Limited, Genzyme Polyclonals SAS, Genzyme Therapeutic Products Limited Partnership, Genzyme Therapeutics Limited, Genzyme de Argentina S.A., Hoechst GmbH, Kiadis Pharma, Limited Liability Company Sanofi-Aventis Ukraine, PT Aventis Pharma, Principia BioPharma, SSP Co. Ltd, Sanofi (Beijing) Pharmaceuticals Co.Ltd, Sanofi (China) Investment Co. Ltd, Sanofi (Hangzhou) Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd, Sanofi A/S, Sanofi AB, Sanofi Arabia Trading Company Limited, Sanofi Aventis NA Holding Inc., Sanofi Belgium, Sanofi Biotechnology, Sanofi Chimie, Sanofi Egypt, Sanofi Finance Ireland limited, Sanofi Foreign Participations B.V., Sanofi Healthcare India Private Limited, Sanofi Ilac Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S., Sanofi India Limited, Sanofi K.K., Sanofi Mature IP, Sanofi Medley Farmaceutica Ltda, Sanofi Nichi-Iko K.K., Sanofi Oy, Sanofi Pasteur, Sanofi Pasteur Asi Ticaret A.S., Sanofi Pasteur Biologies Co. Ltd, Sanofi Pasteur Europe, Sanofi Pasteur Inc., Sanofi Pasteur India Private Ltd, Sanofi Pasteur Limited, Sanofi Pasteur Ltd, Sanofi Pasteur NVL, Sanofi Pasteur S.A. de C.V., Sanofi Produtos Farmaceuticos Lda, Sanofi Romania SRL, Sanofi S.p.A., Sanofi Saglik Urunleri Limited Sirketi, Sanofi Taiwan Co. Ltd, Sanofi US Corporation, Sanofi US Services Inc., Sanofi Vaccine Technologies, Sanofi Winthrop Industrie, Sanofi-Aventis (Malaysia) SDN. BHD., Sanofi-Aventis (Suisse) SA, Sanofi-Aventis (Thailand) Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis A.E.B.E., Sanofi-Aventis Algerie, Sanofi-Aventis Argentina S.A., Sanofi-Aventis Australia Pty Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis Canada Inc., Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland GmbH, Sanofi-Aventis France, Sanofi-Aventis GmbH, Sanofi-Aventis Groupe, Sanofi-Aventis Gulf FZE, Sanofi-Aventis Healthcare Pty Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis Hong-Kong Limited, Sanofi-Aventis Ireland Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis Israel Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis Korea Co. Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis Liban s.a.l., Sanofi-Aventis Maroc, Sanofi-Aventis Netherlands B.V., Sanofi-Aventis Norge AS, Sanofi-Aventis Pakistan Limited, Sanofi-Aventis Participations, Sanofi-Aventis Philippines Inc., Sanofi-Aventis Private Co Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis Recherche & Developpement, Sanofi-Aventis S.A., Sanofi-Aventis Singapore Pte. Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Sanofi-Aventis Sp. z.o.o., Sanofi-Aventis U.S. LLC, Sanofi-Aventis UK Holdings Limited, Sanofi-Aventis Winthrop S.A. de C.V., Sanofi-Aventis de Colombia S.A., Sanofi-Aventis de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Sanofi-Aventis de Panama S.A., Sanofi-Aventis de Venezuela S.A., Sanofi-Aventis del Ecuador S.A., Sanofi-Aventis del Peru S.A., Sanofi-Aventis s.r.o., Sanofi-Synthelabo (India) Private Ltd, Sanofi-aventis Vietnam Company Limited, Shenzhen Sanofi pasteur Biological Products Co Ltd, Synthorx, VaxServe Inc., sanofi-aventis Puerto Rico Inc, and sanofi-aventis Slovakia s.r.o..Wall Street analysts have given Greencore Group 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 Greencore Group wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.Scotland is making wind energy news with an offshore wind project carrying high ambitions. The spotlight is on the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre (EOWDC), an offshore wind test and demo facility. It is Scotland's largest, and it is being developed by the Vattenfall-owned Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm Limited.

Their project is all about 11 turbinesthat is their schemein Aberdeen Bay. Once operational, it will be a boost to Aberdeen's global standing in energy innovation, supporters said.

The news is that one of these 11 turbines has already been erected. A video carried the announcement. It was a momentous day for the renewable energy industry in Scotland, said Adam Ezzamel, project director, for the EOWDC wind farm in Aberdeen Bay.

Ezzamel said that one rotation of this enormous structure was sufficient to power the average UK home for the entire day.

The other bit of news, as reported by David McPhee in Energy Voice: "Vattenfall are also claiming an industry breakthrough with the update of two of its turbines from 8.4MW to 8.8MW, which the company say is "first time" such a model has been "deployed commercially in the wind industry." That upgrade raises the output of a completed wind farm to 93.2MW.

Chris Green, Scotland editor, i News, said according to developers, when the wind farm was fully operational, it would be able to provide the equivalent of over 70% of Aberdeen's domestic energy needs.

Vattenfall issued a press statement that the turbine was one of two turbines significantly enhanced with further power modes to generate more clean energy from the EOWDC. "The two turbines have each increased from 8.4MW to 8.8MW" and the installation "represents the first time an 8.8 MW model has been deployed commercially in the offshore wind industry."

McPhee, meanwhile, noted that the wind farm is using new suction bucket jackets embedded in the sand off Aberdeenat commercial scale. Supporters say these can bring down the cost of offshore wind power. An article last year focused on the suction buckets on cutting costs and underwater noise. "Instead of monopiles, these giant upside-down buckets paired with jacket substructures will anchor the wind turbines to the seabed."

The piling method for offshore wind power foundations can cause a lot of noise and disturbance for sea mammals and fish and nearby coastal communities, said the article. Vattenfall adopted the suction-bucket technologyvirtually noiseless.

"The suction bucket technology is well known in the oil and gas industry but this is the first time it will be used at a commercial scale in the offshore wind industry. Water is pumped out of the buckets, creating a pressure difference that forces the buckets into the seabedwhen water is pumped out of the suction buckets, they sink in to the sea bed sediment. For decommissioning, water is pumped back in to retrieve the entire structure, said the article.

Explore further Wind turbines off coast of Scotland make waves in renewable energy

 2018 Tech Xplore(Mansoor Peer)

Srinagar, April 11:Two civilians, one hit by a bullet and another by a teargas shell in clashes during a gunfight at Khudwani in south Kashmir, are battling for life at SMHS and SKIMS hospitals.

The condition of both is stated to be critical after they received severe injuries.

Abdul Salaam Bhat, an embroidery artist, received a bullet in the neck that pierced through his right shoulder when Army fired at civilians near the gunfight site.

A resident of Hawoora village of Kulgam, 50-year-old Bhat was treated at emergency trauma theater at SMHS hospital and taken to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) where his condition is stated to be critical.

As Bhat was being treated, his wife Muneera Bano screamed outside the trauma theater of the hospital where women of her neighbourhood tried to console her amid sobs.

Who fired at you, O my dear, you are my only hope, an inconsolable Bano said. He told me that he will go out to see what was happening.

Muneeras neighbour, Shaheena said, Army fired at him when people were on way to see the injured in the locality, around 2 kilometres from Khudwani.

A doctor at the trauma theater said Bhat had suffered excessive blood loss.

He is critical, his heart vein seems damaged, the blood has gone inside his chest and we used the chest tube to take it out, he said.

Recounting the ordeal, Bhats nephew, Zahoor Ahmad told Rising Kashmir that he was at home when he heard bullet shots.

I rushed to the spot and saw his clothes soaked in blood, Zahoor said. I asked another local for help and we took him on a motorcycle for half a kilometre during which he suffered blood loss.

Bhat has no child of his own and the couple has adopted an eight-year-old girl.

Zahoor said Bhats wife would prepare the embroidery yarn for the husband and the couple worked shoulder-to-shoulder to earn livelihood.

Another youth, Adil Ahmad of Anantnag, who was hit by a teargas shell during clashes is critical at SKIMS, Soura.

Hit by the tear smoke canister, he received head injury and is critical, a doctor at SKIMS said. He is being operated.

At least five other youth hit by bullets have been admitted at SMHS hospital.

Yasir Abdullah of Frisal, a 9th standard student was hit by a bullet in his stomach.

He is stated to be out of danger.

Yesterday, he went to his cousins home at Khudwani village but was hit by a bullet when government forces targeted civilians during the gunfight, Yasirs uncle, Muhammad Ishaq said.

Yasirs relatives said doctors at the Government Hospital Bijbehara failed to stop the flow of blood of Yasir.

According to doctors, at least nine youth hit by pellets and bullets were admitted at SMHS hospital and are undergoing treatment.

Of the nine, four have bullet injury and five have been hit by pellets, a doctor said.

An ophthalmologist at SMHS said they had operated two patients who had been hit by pellets.

Medical Superintendent SKIMS, Dr. Farooq Ahmad Jan told Rising Kashmir that till Wednesday evening, the hospital received five patients including one in a critical condition.

Adil of Anantnag is critical, two youth have been hit by stones while another by a tear smoke shell, he said.

Station House Officer (SHO) Baramulla, Khalid Ahmad, who suffered head injury after he was hit by a stone in Baramulla during clashes, is also being treated at SKIMS.Srinagar, April 12: Authorities imposed restrictions in parts of Srinagar city on Thursday to prevent protests.

Resistance leaders have called for valley-wide shutdown and protests against the killing of four civilians in near a gunfight site at Khudwani Kulgam Wednesday.

The police said restrictions were imposed in Srinagars old city and also in some uptown areas falling under the jurisdiction of Maisuma and Kralkhud police stations.

Canceling a cabinet meeting scheduled for Thursday in Jammu, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti returned to Srinagar on Wednesday to take stock of the situation in the aftermath of the gunfight in Kulgam district.

Resistance leaders, Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwaiz Umer Farooqhave been placed under house arrest while Yasin Malik is in police custody.

Authorities have ordered the closure of all educational institutes in the valley except north Kashmir Ganderbal district.

Exams scheduled for Thursday have been postponed by the University of Kashmir.

Shops, public transport and other business is closed in Srinagar and all other district headquarters of the Valley.

Heavy contingents of police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) have been deployed all across the Kashmir Valley.

Train services between Baramulla and Bannihal towns have been suspended.

Mobile internet facility has been suspended in Anantnag, Shopian, Kulgam and Pulwama districts.

Internet speed has been slowed in all other regions of the valley to prevent uploading of provocative pictures, videos and posts.Sopore, April 12: Students of Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir (SKUAST) staged strong protest demonstration against civilian killings in South Kashmir at North campus Wadoora Sopore in north kashmirs Baramulla district on Thursday.

Witness said large number of students staged protest inside Campus and raised Pro freedom and anti India slogans and demanding stern action against the killers.

We are protesting today because against the innocent civilian killings as our innocent brothers were killed in Kulgam and Shopian and present government government should take necessary step to stop these killings,said a protesting students.

Four civilians, Sarjeel Ahmad, Bilal Ahmad, Fazil Illahi and Aijaz Ahmad were killed by government forces in Khudwani area f Kulgam during clashes which erupted amid a gunfight between militants and forces on Wednesday. At least 60 persons also sustained injuries in forces actions.

Protests rock a Kashmir valley yesterday against the civilian killings in Kulgam, forcing the authorities to close down schools and colleges today.Whilst those of us in Luxembourg may know of Juncker's funnier antics as European Commission President, John Oliver has only just discovered it.

The comedian John Oliver has delivered a segment on Victor Orban's re-election and showed yet more admiration for Jean-Claude Juncker.

In his skit, Oliver claimed that it isn't wrong to call the Hungarian President a dictator and said it would be even better, if someone actually called him a dictator to his face.

To Oliver's glee, there is in fact video footage of Juncker doing just that. As we know, Juncker did indeed greet Orban in typical brusque style at the EU Summit in Riga in 2015.

In the video, Juncker warns those standing with him that the dictator was coming. Following that, Juncker went on to greet Orban with "Hello, dictator!" and slapped him on the cheek.

Oliver clearly thought Juncker's actions were sensational and seems to be showing a growing admiration for the former Luxembourgish Prim Minister.

The comedian's punchline was:"My man from Luxembourg doesn't give a F***-xembourg!"

Another highlight of the Riga Summit was of course when Juncker kissed the Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel's bald head. Perhaps Oliver would enjoy that clip as well?

Oliver's admiration of Juncker and his deeds began last month. At the beginning of March, he did a segment on Trump's tariffs on EU products on his show "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver."

At the very least, it seems that some of Juncker's gaffes are now getting the international credit they deserve.Relaxing its visa policy could be Vietnams magic wand to attract more foreign visitors and transform itself into a top regional and global destination, experts say.

Nearly 13 million foreign tourists visited Vietnam in 2017, a year-on-year growth rate of almost 30 percent.

Experts attribute the remarkable growth to the countrys visa waiver program for citizens from five European countries  Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Spain.

First launched in July 2015, the visa-free policy immediately boosted tourism from these countries by 13.8-29 percent over the following year.

The yearly growth rate was maintained at levels between six and 20 percent in 2017.

Such growth is rare if not unprecedented, especially for tourists from countries as geographically distant from Vietnam as Western Europe, said Nguyen Van Tuan, director of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism.

It shows that the visa waiver program positively impacted Vietnams tourism.

Since Vietnam implemented a visa-free policy for Japanese passport holders in July 2004, the number of annual tourists from Japan has increased threefold, from 267,000 in 2004 to nearly 800,000 in 2017.

Japan is now Vietnams third-largest market for foreign tourists.

The numer of visitors from South Korea saw a tenfold rise from 233,000 in 2004 to more than 2.4 million in 2017, following the introduction of a visa waiver program for Korean citizens in 2004.

Similar results were seen for visa exemptions given to Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Swedish nationals in 2005 and Russian nationals in 2009.

Foreign tourists buy tickets for a cable car service to Fansipan Mountain, Vietnams highest peak, in Lao Cai Province, northern Vietnam. Photo: Sun Group

The fee for a single-entry tourist visa to Vietnam is currently US$25, a minimal fee compared to how much a tourist spends during their stay, said Nguyen Thi Huyen, CEO of local tour operator Vietrantour.

A tourist from Europe spends an average of $100-130 a day, and they tend to stay in the country for seven to ten days. It benefits the community by boosting the GDP and creating jobs for locals.

Despite the benefits, Vietnam only offers visa exemptions for citizens from 23 countries and territories as of April 2018.

In comparison, other popular tourist destinations in Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, have visa waiver policies for between 160 and 169 countries, even though not all of them hold bilateral visa waiver agreements.

Vietnams e-visa and visa-on-arrival policies are also considered less competitive than emerging regional markets such as Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.

Tour operators complain about the fact that some visa waiver programs, such as the one for citizens from five Western European countries, need to be renewed yearly, leaving travel agencies walking a thin line when targeting those markets.

These drawbacks contribute to Vietnams rank of 116 out of 136 countries in terms of visa requirements, according to a 2017 tourism competitiveness report published by the World Economic Forum.

For tourists from developed countries, what troubles them is not the visa fee but the arduous process of applying for a visa, said Dr. Luong Hoai Nam, deputy general director of Vietstar Airlines.

Vietnam reported tourism revenue of VND510 trillion ($22.36 billion) last year, a much larger number than the revenues it generated from visa fees, Nam said, citing statistics from the tourism administration.

With more relaxed visa policies, Vietnams tourist industry could be freed from its chains and become a popular destination, capable of competing with others in the region, experts say.

Two foreign tourists visit Fansipan Mountain, Vietnams highest peak, in Lao Cai Province, northern Vietnam. Photo: Sun Group

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Vietnams Ministry of Finance is collecting final feedback on a proposed master plan to establish three special administrative and economic zones projected to carry an enormous total price tag of VND1,570 trillion (US$69.16 billion).

The solicited feedback will be transferred to a final assessment report which will then be submitted to the lawmaking National Assembly for final approval during its month-long fifth session in May.

Vietnam has plans to set up the Phu Quoc, Van Don, and Van Phong special economic and administrative zones, which will function as models for the Southeast Asian country on its quest to stimulate growth and lure foreign investment.

The Phu Quoc special administrative and economic zone will be developed on the namesake island off the southern province of Kien Giang, whereas the Van Don and Van Phong economic zones will be located in the northern province of Quang Ninh and the south-central province of Khanh Hoa, respectively.

Ships are seen at a transshipment port off the Van Phong special economic and administrative zone in Khanh Hoa Province, south-central Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The administrations of the three affected provinces have developed their own establishment proposals, which are now awaiting assessment from the finance ministry.

Lawmakers are scheduled to pass a law allowing for these special administrative and economic zones during next months National Assembly sitting, paving the road needed to realize the plan.

According to the finance ministry, some VND270 trillion ($11.89 billion), expected to be funded equally by local budgets and foreign investment, is needed to develop the Van Don special zone alone.

The estimated investment for the Van Phong project is VND400 trillion ($17.62 billion), while Phu Quoc would need a whopping VND900 trillion ($39.65 billion), 59 percent of which would be domestically funded.

Incentives sought

Administrators of the three provinces are busy completing prep work for the projects, and at the same time calling for a number of incentives and preferential treatments for their respective facilities.

Phu Quoc, only an hour-long flight from Ho Chi Minh City, has so far attracted 377 investment projects collectively worth nearly $17 billion, according to Le Thi Minh Phung, deputy chairwoman of the Kien Giang administration.

Phung added that improving water supply and wastewater and solid waste treatment systems is among the urgent tasks necessary for completing the islands infrastructure.

A worker is seen at the construction site of an airport at the Van Don special economic and administrative zone in Quang Ninh Province, northern Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The Van Phong project also requires infrastructure development, including nine new major roads, a 20km railway, and other amenities.

The Quang Ninh administration has sought permission to retain 100 percent of its budgeted revenue from the Van Don economic zone from its opening to 2030 to fund its reinvestment, while Khanh Hoa seeks to keep 100 percent of its export taxes and budgeted revenue generated from within the Van Phong zone.

For its part, Phu Quoc wants to host luxury ecotourism areas worth more than $300 million, as well as small-scale casinos.

The finance ministry has responded that requests to keep budgeted revenues may affect the national governments revenues.

It also disapproved of the casino proposal.

Vietnam stipulates that an investor must have at least $2 billion in registered capital to be able to open a casino.Srinagar, April 11:Students of various colleges and Universities across the Valley Wednesday protested against the civilian killings in Kulgam.

The students of Islamia College of Science and Commerce in Hawal area of downtown Srinagar took to roads in the morning to protest the civilian killings in Kulgam.

Chanting anti-India and pro-freedom slogans, the protesting students attempted to take out a protest march. However, they were intercepted by the cops, triggering clashes.

The agitating students pelted stones on the cops, who lobbed tear smoke shells and resorting to baton charge to disperse them. The clashes continued for some time.

The student protest soon spread to other colleges and educational institutions.

Students of Bemina Degree College blocked the road outside the college. The students staged peaceful demonstration and called for an end to civilian killings.

As a precautionary measure, we closed the college in the afternoon, Principal Govt Degree College Bemina told Rising Kashmir.

He said they allowed the students to leave in groups to prevent any protests and stone pelting.

The students of Govt Women College also staged protests on the busy Residency road amidst chanting of pro-freedom and anti-India slogans.

The female students tried to block the Residency and MA roads but police swung into action and dispersed the girl students by using teargas sprays.

A girl student suffered minor injury.

Hundreds of students also staged protests at Kashmir University (KU) and Islamic University of Science and Technology (IUST) campuses against the civilian killings in Kulgam.

The students of IUST staged a protest demonstration inside the campus and later moved outside to block the Srinagar-Jammu highway.

In Kashmir University, students of various departments assembled outside the Humanity block and staged massive protest against the civilian killings.

Amidst anti-India sloganeering, the protesting students were demanding an end to civilian killings in the Valley.

Students of National Institute of Technology (NIT) Hazratbal also assembled in the campus and staged protest against the civilian killings.

The students of degree colleges in north Kashmir including Boys Government Degree College Baramulla, Government Degree College Handwara and Govt Degree College Bandipora also staged protest against the civilian killings in Kulgam.

The protest students called on the government to rein in the forces and stop civilian killings in the Valley, which has now become order of the day.

The students of Government Degree College Baramulla assembled within the college premises and staged a protest demonstration against the killings. They tried to come out of the college but were disallowed by the cops.

A police official said in order to stop students from blocking Srinagar-Baramulla highway, forces swung in the action and restricted the protesting students within the college premises.

He said protesting students threw stones on the police men, who retaliated.

Eyewitnesses said policemen fired dozens of tear smoke shells inside the college premises.

The students and teaching staff at GDC Baramulla accused police of using excessive force.

Police said Station House Officer (SHO) of police station Baramulla Khalid Fayaz received head injury after being hit by a stone during the clashes.

He said the injured officer was shifted to SKIMS Soura, where doctors have termed his condition as stabled.

A partial shutdown was observed in the main market Sopore against the civilian killings in Kulgam.

The students also clashed with the force personnel in the town. After the clashes, administration ordered suspension of class work at Government Boys Degree College Sopore.

Principal Government Degree College Sopore Mushtaq Ahmad told Rising Kashmir that class work was suspended in the college as precautionary measures.A high school student in Ho Chi Minh City is dead after jumping off the roof of his school, leaving behind a suicide note blaming his decision on the heavy burden he felt to achieve academic success.

The police bureau in Tan Binh District confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that a student at Nguyen Khuyen High School had committed suicide.

The young boy was identified as H.T.C., 16, from the Central Highlands province of Dak Lak, a boarding student in class 10E.

At around 5:15 am on April 10, Nguyen Khuyen High School students were performing a morning exercise routine when two teachers spotted C. standing on the roof of a four-story building on campus.

The teachers ask C. to come back inside and asked two of his classmates to assist in the effort.

One of the classmates climbed on the roof in an attempt to convince C. to reconsider jumping.

However, C. remained silent. Without warning, he smiled, cried, and ran off the building.

The boy was admitted to the My Duc General Hospital in Tan Binh at around 6:50 am that same day, but doctors stated he was already dead on arrival.

Police officers later arrived at the school to collect statements and carry out an investigation.

Initial reports state that C. had left behind a suicide note sharing that he had been under enormous pressure from schoolwork.

His family wanted him to achieve high scores in order to be a member of the best class in the school.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!A teacher at a public kindergarten in Ho Chi Minh City was suspended from work after a concerned parent sent a video clip of her physically and verbally abusing a student for not taking a nap.

During her suspension, which started on Wednesday, the teacher will be working with the kindergartens janitorial and kitchen staff, Vo Thi Thanh Loan, the headmaster of April 30 Kindergarten, where the event took place, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

According to Loan, a clip was sent to the school board last month showing one of their teachers, Tran Bich Ngoc, hitting a student with a stick for not sleeping during a midday nap.

The video also shows Ngoc asking the child are you a human or an animal? If youre a human, why dont you listen to me?

Though the incident took place during the last school year, the school board was only recently made aware of the situation when the parent who secretly filmed the clip submitted the complaint.

We called a meeting on April 6, during which we reached the decision to suspend Ngoc, she said.

This is only a temporary measure. We are taking steps to handle the case in accordance with laws on public employees.

At a meeting between the school board and the parents of the beaten student on Tuesday, the parents said they did not wish to press charges against Ngoc but demanded that the school take more responsibility for its teachers.

Other parents describe Ngoc as an experienced and kind-hearted teacher who loves her students, though she can be quiet hot-headed at times.

If you have a chance to see Ngoc take care of her students, you will understand how devoted she is to the job, one parent told Tuoi Tre.

Out of context, it may sound unacceptable for a teacher to suggest her student was an animal, but in fact Ngoc has a habit of giving animal nicknames such as squirrel, hedgehog, rabbit and kitty to her students, another parent explained after watching Ngocs clip.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!A university in Ho Chi Minh City is requiring undergraduates in their final year to be present at a health check held by the school in order to graduate, sparking a wave of discord amongst its students.

The University of Social Sciences and Humanities, a major higher education institution in southern Vietnam, has formally asked its seniors to undergo a health examination on its premises on April 20 in order to be eligible for graduation.

The students will be required to pay VND50,000 (US$2.2) for the service , which Nguyen Thi Loan, an officer of the school, said is significantly lower than the prices at medical centers and clinics across the city.

The charge, however, does not guarantee a truly reliable check-up result, which typically costs around four to ten times higher, according to Van Chi Nam, head of the student affairs office at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Science, a prestigious university in Vietnam.

The examination is expected to include an evaluation of each students physique, weight, internal systems, blood pressure, skin, eyes, ears, teeth, the mouth, and nose.

The announcement was quick to spark a wave of discord and questioning amongst the schools student body.

If I dont attend the health check event, will it affect my graduation? Whats the health check for? one student asked.

In my view, the university should let students go to the event on a voluntary basis, instead of forcing them to do it, another suggested.

Officer Loan said that the university is supposed to hold health examinations at the beginning of each academic year and regularly during a semester, in accordance with regulations set forth by the Ministry of Education and Training.

These checks are intended to help students care for their health, pursue timely treatments for illnesses, and enable schools to control disease on their campuses, according to Luu Trung Thuy, an education official in Ho Chi Minh City.

The school has to organize these sessions at least two times for students during the year of their entrance. Seniors can use results from the medical checkup as part of the documents they need for job applications, Loan said.

She further explained that students must all have their checkups on the same occasion to ensure that the results can be directly entered into the schools database.

It is very time-consuming for the university to input the information from medical certificates students obtain from different health facilities, she added.

Only in special circumstances are students allowed to be absent from the health check, and they can submit medical certificates to the school at a later time, the officer noted.

The University of Social Sciences and Humanities is not the first school to mandate the check.

In 2015, the Ho Chi Minh City University of Food Industry organized a health examination event for over 2,000 students.

In 2014, the College of Education in the central city of Hue retracted a similar rule, concluding that having medical checks prior to graduation is optional.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!People in Dak Lak Province in Vietnams Central Highlands may not be able to access a newly-built general hospital worth over US$48 million until the end of this year due to multiple reasons.

The provincial Peoples Committee previously ordered that the Central Highlands General Hospital, located in Buon Ma Thuot City, be put into operation by the end of this years first quarter.

However, the Department of Health assessed that the inauguration would have to wait till the end of the year.

Covering an area of 12 hectares, the infirmary is designed to have 800 beds, whose investment is estimated at VND1.1 trillion (48.4 million) funded by government bonds.

The project was developed by the Dak Lak health department and initiated in 2010. It was expected to be finished in 2013.

It has been delayed, however, because of financial difficulties and plan changes.

A road leading to the hospital is still under construction. Photo: Tuoi Tre

According to the original plan, the facility will become the new general hospital of Dak Lak Province, while the existing Dak Lak General Hospital would be only specialized in oncology, obstetrics, and pediatrics.

As the cost of brand new equipment would be too high, the developer decided to transfer all human resources and equipment from the existing Dak Lak General Hospital instead.

Competent agencies will also seek official development assistance (ODA) for purchasing new technology for the infirmary.

The construction is now basically completed with five buildings ready for use.

According to Nguyen Tuan Ha, vice-chairman of the provincial administration, sluggish road construction may also affect the opening of the new hospital.

All routes leading to the facility are still not finished.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Check out the news you should not miss today, April 12:

Politics

-- The border guard forces of Vietnam and China on Wednesday conducted their first-ever provincial-level joint patrol along the shared border line in the Lao Cai-Hekou International Border Gate area.

Society

-- Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc requested in a directive on Wednesday that the State Bank of Vietnam, the Ministry of Public Security and other bodies tighten the management of activities related to bitcoin and other cryptocurrency, in the wake of an alleged fraud in which 32,000 were swindled of US$660 million.

-- Police in the southern Vietnamese city of Can Tho said on Wednesday they will hand over dossiers relating to Rafael Vazquez Floresl, an American of Mexican origin involved in a fraud case in Vietnam, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the request of the U.S. agency.

-- Authorities in the south-central province of Binh Dinh are investigating a case involving three fishermen who were found dead in the hold of their cargo ship while it was docked at a local port on Wednesday.

-- A hot spell with temperatures ranging from 36 to 38 degrees Celsius is expected to continue to blanket southern Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta, at least until the first half of May.

Business

-- Vietnam needs a whopping VND1,570 trillion ($69.16 billion) to develop three special economic and administrative zones, according to a proposal on which the Ministry of Finance is collecting feedback for the last time before officially submitting it to the lawmaking National Assembly for approval.

-- Vietnam's leading meat processor Vissan admitted on Wednesday that it had had to close 60 retail stores in Ho Chi Minh City due to poor economic results.

-- Police in Ho Chi Minh City are coordinating with relevant agencies to probe an alleged cryptocurrency fraud involving over 32,000 people having been conned out of VND15 trillion ($660 million).

Lifestyle

-- The fifth Vietnam Book Day 2018 will be held at Hanoi-based Thong Nhat Park from April 18 to 2, showcasing 50,000 book titles of various genres, the organizers said on Wednesday.

Education

-- A tenth-grader of the Nguyen Khuyen boarding school in Ho Chi Minh City jumped to death on Wednesday, leaving behind a suicide note saying he could not stand pressure from parents to constantly stay on top at school.Police in Ho Chi Minh City said Wednesday that they had launched an investigation into a case where a small group of people attacked a Vietnamese man with guns and robbed him of many valuable possessions.

According to local authorities, 35-year-old Nguyen Thanh Nhieu, residing in District 8, failed to collect the VND40 million (US$1,754) loaned with interest on March 28 to an acquaintance named Bao, who even provoked anger from him.

At around 6:00 pm on Tuesday, a man identifying himself as Tam made a phone call to Nhieu, saying that he wished to discuss how to deal with Bao, who also owned him a debt.

Two hours later, Nhieu arrived in his car at the rendezvous in Ho Chi Minh Citys suburban district of Binh Chanh, where he met Tam, another man and a woman.

Coming nearer to Nhieu, the new man out of the blue took out what the victim described as a revolver, attempting to shoot him but the gun did not work.

Tam, using another revolver lookalike, fired multiple shots, all missing Nhieu.

The shooters then used threats and violence to rob the man of three mobile phones, two golden rings, one wristwatch, and a wallet containing VND60 million (US$2,632) and papers.

Police found at the scene a spent yellow cartridge and documents related to the criminal group.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!A Vietnamese man has been taken into police custody for building and distributing airguns, police said on Wednesday.

Police officers in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province arrested Ngo Cong Th., born in Dong Nai Province, while he was delivering an airgun and 1,000 tiny lead bullets to a customer.

The 107 centimeter-long weapon featured a plastic grip, black barrel, and telescope.

The 27-year-old man said he decided to build airguns after seeing a tutorial on the Internet.

Using YouTube, he was able to show off and advertise his guns.

By the time he was apprehended by police, he had already built five airguns, four of which he had already sold for VND14-23 million (US$614-1,009) apiece.

Two of the buyers have handed their guns over to the police while the other two remain unknown.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!A man in the north-central Vietnamese province of Nghe An has been arrested for throwing cow dung at a local reporters apartment.

Police officers in Vinh City, Nghe An Province, affirmed on Wednesday they had taken Hoang Khac Cong, 56, into custody for disturbing public order.

Cong is accused of throwing cow dung at the residence of Dang Thi Cam Tu, a 35-year-old reporter for Thoi Dai newspaper, known in English as The Vietnam Times.

The newspaper is under the management of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations.

On the morning of April 1, Tu was holding a funeral for her late father when a neighbor at the CT2B apartment building informed her that a large amount of cow dung had been dumped in front of her home.

Tu then reported the incident to police officers, stating she lives at the apartment with her child and has never had a conflict with her neighbors.

The journalist added that the incident might have arisen from an article she wrote about land violations committed by a brick and tile company in Thanh Chuong District.

Tu has received multiple threatening phone calls and text messages since the article was published on March 30.

On April 6, Tus house was once again the target of dung dumping.

Competent authorities were able to identify and arrest the suspect after reviewing footage from a security camera within the apartment complex.

Hoang Khac Cong is being held at the police station in this photo supplied by officers.

In the video clip, Cong was covered with a rain poncho and holding a white bag, which appeared to contain the cow dung.

The man threw the bag at Tus apartment before making his escape via the elevator.

According to Congs statements, a person from the brick and tile firm previously asked him to contact Tu to demand that she stop publishing articles about the business.

When the reporter refused to cooperate, Cong decided to throw manure at her house.

Competent authorities are coordinating with Thoi Dai to deal with the case and protect the journalists rights.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!ABC presenter and activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied has been denied entry to the US, after landing in Minneapolis ahead of speaking engagements in New York.

Theyve taken my phone, cancelled my visa and are deporting me, she said of border control, via social media.

Will follow up on messages once I understand whats going on.

Officials will not return her passport until she was in another country.

Roughly three hours since touch down in Minneapolis, Im on a plane back, she tweeted.

Well, guess that tightening of immigration laws business is working, despite my Australian passport. Were taking off now. What a time.

Abdel-Magied, who attracted headlines for comments surrounding ANZAC Day, is to present in the view series, Hijabistas! with Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

She also makes her acting debut in SBS on Demand series Homecoming Queens today .now a somewhat ironic title, perhaps.

Updated: According to News Corp, US Customs and Border Protection this afternoon issued a statement saying Ms Abdel-Magied was turned away because she did not have the correct visa.

During the inspection, CBP officers determined this individual did not possess the appropriate visa to receive the monetary compensation for the speaking engagements she had planned during her visit to the United States, it said.

As such, she was deemed inadmissable to enter the United States for her visit, but was allowed to withdraw her application for admission.

Source: FairfaxABC journalist Peter Greste will present a 2 part history documentary on Australias Greatest Anzac.

General Monash And Me re-evaluates the story of Sir John Monash, and the main battles that made him famous.

Walkley award-winning investigative journalist and war correspondent Peter Greste embarks on a journey to demystify the story of Australias Great War hero, Sir John Monash. While examining the battles that made Monash famous, Peter also discovers his own familys previously unknown role in Monashs First Australian Imperial Force. For Peter, Monashs war becomes personal.

Sir John Monash is a towering figure in Australias story of the Great War.

The ANZAC canon celebrates him as a larger-than-life hero whose new and highly innovative battle plans and strategies broke the stalemate of a war bogged down in the mud and massacres of the Western Front.

Today a raft of contemporary biographies build on this mystique: Monash was the outsider who single-handedly showed British High Command how to win the war in a superbly timed rush of brilliance. Monash himself was a great writer of his own history, but how accurate are these glowing accounts of him as commander of the Australian Imperial Force?

Was he, as his critics claim, vain, impulsive, egotistical, and prone to exaggeration? And how did he  a colonial German Jew and a civilian soldier  come to lead the Australian Imperial Force at the Western Front and be the first commander in 200 years to be knighted on the battlefield?

War correspondent, Peter Greste embarks on a journey through the ANZAC canon to re-evaluate the story of John Monash, and the main battles that made him famous.

By shining a fresh light onto Monashs triumphs and tragedies, Greste will offer up his assessment on Monashs legacy for contemporary Australia, and the wider impact  then and now  of his multiple achievements. A complex, talented and enigmatic man, fiercely intelligent and a brilliant tactician, Monashs engineering background put him in a unique position to see and solve problems on the battlefield. This approach saved thousands of lives on the Western Front, and also set the stage for how war is still conducted today.

Beginning at the Shrine of Remembrance, Greste discovers his own familys hitherto unknown role in Monashs Army corps, and through these moving stories Monashs war becomes close and personal.

Across two episodes Greste plays detective and military analyst, unearthing private letters, diary entries and unit histories from Monash and protagonists on each side of the conflict. These intimate accounts reveal a much richer and more detailed picture of the man himself, and this terrible conflict in which 60,000 Australians were killed.

Part I 8:30pm Tuesday April 24 on ABC.2 more arrested in connection with shooting of religious leader

Two more persons have been arrested in connection with the shooting of a religious leader at Jatuwa in Biratnagar Metropolitan City, Morang. Earlier, police arrested two persons for their alleged involvement in shooting and injuring Acharya Shree Niwas.Kevin Spacey may yet have to face some of the allegations that have been levelled against him.

The Los Angeles County District Attorneys Office is reviewing a sexual assault case against the former House of Cards star, Variety is reporting.

According to the Sheriffs Dept., an incident  involving an adult male  allegedly took place in October 1992 in West Hollywood. The Special Victims Bureau began investigating the allegation on Dec. 11.

Spacey has been accused of sexual misconduct by numerous men in the U.S. and England. While some media reports have even included engagement between consenting adults, Scotland Yard is nevertheless investigating at least three sexual assault complaints.

Star Trek: Discovery actor Anthony Rapp was the first accuser to go public with his story, dating back to 1986, now beyond the statute of limitations, but which drew an apology.

Spacey was later fired from House of Cards.

Spaceys reps declined to comment.In 2014 the Bjp led by Narendra Modi came to power at the centre with 282 seats. Modi promised a clean administration and a reduction in crimes against women. He also coined the slogan "Beti Bachao Beti padhao" meaning "save the girl child and educate her". This victory was followed by a thumping victory in the UP-state elections. Modi put into the chair of the chief minister in UP a Hindu Monk who had very little administrative experience. Over the year the victory of the BJP has soured and the plight of girls and women in States ruled by the BJP is pitiable.

The citizen has reported that both the rape cases involve a "cover-up" by the BJP governments.

Kathua crime

In Kathua, in Jammu region of Kashmir, a young 8 years old Muslim girl was kidnapped, drugged, and taken inside a Hindu temple and repeatedly gang-raped. She was then killed and her body dumped. it has now been learned that the men who committed this horrible crime were influential Hindus and the BJP including two cabinet ministers have come out in support of them. Politics could not have touched a lower graph with this sort of action. The criminals are even now roaming free and all promises of Narendra Modi for a better deal for the girl child seem to have evaporated into thin air.

Case in UP

Another Case in UP has caught the headlines. A girl who had applied for a job to a local MLA, Mr. Kuldeep Singh Senger was repeatedly raped by him and when she protested her father was thrashed by the brother of the MLA and killed. The situation was so bad that even the doctors in the local government hospital did not treat the badly beaten man properly.

The police refused to register an FIR against the MLA and the girl was left with no choice but to try and meet the Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. This man refused to meet her and she tried to commit suicide in front of his office. That is when the Chief Minister woke up and constituted SIT to investigate the case

In both the rape cases the BJP has shown itself in poor light.

The general public is aroused and a lot of credit for this must go to the TV channels who have taken up these cases and broadcast them around the country. In particular, Mr. Arnab Goswami of the Republic channel has waged a little war against Yogi government.

BJP in poor light

Even now only an FIR has been filed against the MLA and he has not been arrested. To get out of his responsibility, Yogi Adityanath has handed over the case to the CBI. By this act, it is clear that the BJP government in UP has avoided arresting Kuldeep Singh.

This is playing with fire and 2019 is not far away. Narendra Modi has proved to be a good orator and his game plan is simple, to polarise the division between Hindus and Muslims. The BJP government is not really concerned about crimes against girls and women, so long as they have MLA and MP who can back them.ASSAD has been blamed for the chemical weapons attack in Douma, the US and the UK both categorically blamed the Russian backed Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad. Jeremy Corbyn has called for caution before we decide to send the military into the region again, obviously, with the air of caution over the Iraq war in 2003, although, what is interesting is that unlike then, he is not definitively saying that this shouldnt be an option.

With Iraq, Jeremy Corbyn led and spoke at the largest demonstration of all time over the Iraq war and he was proved right.

This time, however, he has been more cautious over definitively ruling military action out, the history allows us to understand why.

The Syria struggles

Assad took over a sectarian dynasty from his father and complex domestic and regional geopolitical considerations underpinned the establishment of his rule over a minority sect in the country. Syria's relations with Iran and Russia on the one hand, and Israel's existence as a useful excuse on the other, provided the Syrian regime with a special geopolitical backdrop. US-Iranian cooperation after the Invasion Of Iraq only solidified Syria's position. Arab uprisings that triggered revolts in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt began with the focus on economic grievances that were related to the destructive tendencies of the 20th-century status quo.

In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi was able to use military power to quell revolts but without a greater understanding at what he was fighting against, led the country to be plunged into civil war. But in Tunisia and Egypt, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak werent able to use military force owing to the geopolitical axis and institutionalised state structures.

Furthermore, Syria was the missing piece within the Arab uprisings that erupted with incomparable bloody violence and it was in the early days that messages were written on walls by youths that stated: "The people want to topple the regime." Giving a political context and beginning the Syrian revolt.

With this in mind, we move onto the Hama rebellion in 1982, which saw the Muslim Brotherhood lead a major insurrection in Hama and take control of the region.

However, under orders from then-president Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian Arab Army and the Defense Companies, besieged the town of Hama and massacred around 1000 to 25,000 people, effectively ending a Sunni Muslim uprising that began back in 1976 and the Hama events marked the defeat of the Brotherhood, and the militant Islamic movement in general, as a political force in Syria.

This brings us back to Bashar al-Assad, who inherited his position off of his father, Hafez. For the last seven years since the 2011 uprising began, Assad has been trying to use military power to quell the uprising, much like his father did back in 1982 in Hama. But he is making similar mistakes to that of Gaddafi and not fully understanding as to why there is a revolt.

The idea that this would be down to pipelines is absurd, there are significant complexities involved that underline why the whole Syria uprising is geopolitical rather than over oil.

British involvement?

The chemical attack in Douma has, of course, caused the west to jump up in arms and push for military action, this however, should be the absolute last resort rather than what Donald Trump and Theresa May want, which is a first response. It is as Corbyn says, there needs to be clear evidence that Assad did indeed use chemical weapons, whilst it is likely as he has done in the past, although there has been significant evidence provided by aid groups and others that point the finger at Assad, they fall short of definitively naming him as the culprit for the chemical attacks in Ghouta in 2013 and Khan Sheikhoun in 2017.

There will always be an air about the Iraq war and there must be other means pursued before military action is taken place but without a strong voice in the region and Israel pushing Iran out of the region as well, it is only going to make the region worse for a long time to come. Furthermore, it was the west that supported the initial uprising in the first place with the US and the UK playing key roles in the formation of the Free Syrian Army but after their decline in 2014, this directly led to the rise in ISIL after former FSA members joined them. The US even helped fund the Syrian Democratic Forces, which consists of former FSA members as well. This has been directly responsible for the rise of Islamic terrorism, which shows that Britain must be wary about any military action.TOKYO (Reuters) - Some companies in the export-reliant Tokai central Japan region are expressing concern about uncertainty over U.S. trade policy, a senior Bank of Japan official said on Thursday.

"Some export firms are voicing worries about uncertainty over U.S. trade policy. But the direct impact on their profits has been limited so far," said Tokiko Shimizu, the BOJ's branch manager for Nagoya, central Japan.

(Reporting by Leika Kihara; Editing by Chris Gallagher)3 poachers held with loaded musket

Three poachers have been arrested in possession of loaded muskets from Bardiya National Park in Barbardiya-9 of Bardiya district on Thursday.Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein says the British economy is doing better than expected (Getty)

The chief executive of Goldman Sachs has said hes been surprised by the performance of the UK economy since the Brexit vote.

Lloyd Blankfein told an event in Brussels that his assumptions about the negative short-term effects of the decision had been proved wrong.

He said: Cassandra hasnt been proved right. Some people would say hasnt been proved right yet.

But I would say Im at least wrong in the fact that I would have thought there would have been a worse outcome by now.

Brexit supporters pounced upon the comments by Mr Blankfein, whose organisation gave 500,000 to the official remain campaign in the EU referendum

Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg told the Sun: It is a historic day when Lloyd Blankfein eats humble pie.

Mr Blankfein backed calls for a second referendum in November, saying: So much at stake, why not make sure consensus still there?

Here in UK, lots of hand-wringing from CEOs over #Brexit. Better sense of the tough and risky road ahead. Reluctant to say, but many wish for a confirming vote on a decision so monumental and irreversible. So much at stake, why not make sure consensus still there?  Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) November 16, 2017

Speaking to Politico EU today though, he said people who voted remain feel more reconciled to the fact that its going to happen and are in the mode of adjusting to it as opposed to mourning the current situation or trying to reverse it.

He also gave a boost to the City by confirming Goldman Sachs is going to keep its European headquarters in London.

However, he said Goldman Sachs may not have taken the decision to construct their new 300 million base if they had known about Brexit.

Were going to keep that building, theres a lot of reasons to have it and it works out economically, he said. The math works out.

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But thats not the same thing as saying that if we knew four years ago, when we made the decision to go ahead, that we would have had this outcome.

We probably would have delayed that decision, maybe we wouldnt have made the same decision at all.

And he warned companies making such decisions now could opt out of the UK because of Brexit  leading to a delayed hit on the economy.

He said: I would say that as of now the effect hasnt been dramatic. But decisions are being made today which take account of Brexit which may result in less economic activity three years from now.

While Goldman Sachs is keeping its European headquarters in London, he said the group would also be investing in Frankfurt and Paris.

Brexit will require more distribution of ourselves into more places than we otherwise would have, he said.



CAIRO, April 12 (Reuters) - Middle East carrier Kuwait Airways said on Thursday it had stopped all flights to Beirut after a warning about flying close to Lebanese airspace.

The security warning came from Cyprus authorities, the Middle East airline said on Twitter (Frankfurt: A1W6XZ - news) early Thursday morning.

The announcement came two days after Europe's air traffic control agency told carriers flying over the eastern Mediterranean to exercise caution due to possible air strikes into Syria. (Reporting by Hesham Hajali, writing by Alexander Cornwell; editing by John Stonestreet)LONDON (Reuters) - Base metals miner Central Asia Metals (CAML) <CAML.L> reported a 35 percent rise in 2017 core earnings as prices improved, allowing it to raise its dividend.

The London-listed miner said earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) rose to $53.8 million (37.9 million) from $39.9 million a year earlier.

Copper prices <CMCU3> on the London Metal Exchange jumped 31 percent in 2017 while zinc prices <CMZN3> gained 29 percent.

CAML acquired the Sasa mine in Macedonia in September for $402.5 million, which was funded through a combination of debt and equity.

Chairman Nick Clarke said CAML was still integrating the Sasa mine into the group, having taken economic ownership in the last two months.

CAML, which mines mainly copper, zinc and lead, reported that net debt jumped to $138.9 million from no debt and net cash of $40.3 million last year.

The company aims to reduce debt over next few years but is comfortable with a net debt to EBITDA ratio which will be close to 1 by the end of the year, incoming chief executive officer Nigel Robinson told Reuters.

The company appointed Robinson and Gavin Ferrar as chief financial officer while Clarke will move from executive chairman to chairman.

CAML proposed a final dividend of 10 pence, taking its 2017 total payout to 16.5 pence from 15.5 pence a year earlier.

Copper production at the Kounrad mine in Kazakhstan was marginally higher at 14,103 tonnes. Its 2018 output is expected to be between 13,000 and 14,000 tonnes. Zinc and lead output at Sasa mine is expected to remain largely flat in 2018.

Clarke said CAML was still considering buying new mines but that the priority would be to fully integrate the newly acquired Sasa mine into the group.

"Nothing is off the table and we look at lots of things," he said.

"Do we look at (acquisitions) in Southern Africa? Yes, but amongst lots of other countries in the world," Clarke said, adding that the main requirement was for the potential acquisition to be low cost.

(Reporting by Zandi Shabalala; editing by Susan Fenton and Jason Neely)(Refiles to add dropped word in paragraph 15)

By Tim Hepher

ABERDEEN, April 12 (Reuters) - Scandinavia's largest regional airline said on Thursday it aims to increase its order for E2 jets after it received the first of three new-generation aircraft from Brazil's Embraer (Sao Paolo: R2:EMBR3S.SA - news) to become its inaugural operator.

Wideroe's purchase of Embraer's upgraded E190-E2 marks its first foray into jets after decades linking communities near the Arctic Circle with turboprops. It has options to buy another 12.

"We will work extremely hard to ensure that we can receive the remaining 12," Chief Executive Stein Nilsen said during an Aberdeen stopover as the jet was being delivered to Norway.

He said Wideroe could also be interested in the smaller E175-E2, due to enter service in 2021 and currently prevented by union scope clauses from operating in the United States.

The boss of Norway's oldest airline shrugged off a potential offer by British Airways-owner IAG for budget carrier Norwegian, saying there was no direct competition with Wideroe which serves mainly small domestic airports.

"We are focusing on our niche," he told Reuters.

Embraer Commercial Aircraft CEO John Slattery said he sees "real and advanced" opportunities for sales as the E2 reaches its first operator, adding he would be disappointed if Embraer only sold as many of the overall family as it delivered in 2018.

The E190-E2 is the first of three new-generation aircraft in Embraers commercial jet line-up with new wings and Pratt & Whitney engines aimed at improving fuel efficiency.

Embraer is also expanding the size and range of its largest commercial jet, the E195, whose upgraded E2 version enters service in 2019, posing a challenge to Bombardier (Toronto: BBD-A.TO - news) 's CSeries.

Embraer expects a market for 6,400 jets in the 70-130 seat segment over the next 20 years.

"The pipeline of opportunities is as robust as I've seen in seven years at Embraer," Slattery said. The Brazilian company has gone through a slow patch in sales of the E2 model.

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He declined comment on reports Embraer is close to agreeing the sale of its commercial arm to Boeing (NYSE: BA - news) .

EXPANSION PLANS

Wideroe, which once linked rural networks with former owner SAS Scandinavian Airlines and is now run independently under a consortium of investors, plans to introduce the jet on April 24.

It will replace Bombardier Q400 turboprops on some routes and will hold 114 passengers in a single-class layout.

Nilsen said fewer domestic airports and sharp rises of up to 70 percent in airport fees had prompted Wideroe to scale up from smaller turboprops despite harsh winter conditions in Norway.

"It has been a real challenge to further the route developments in thee rural areas of Norway," he said.

Wideroe however plans to expand international flights and rent out some of the new jets with crews to carry passengers on behalf of Finnair (LSE: 0EG8.L - news) . (Reporting by Tim Hepher Editing by Alexandra Hudson)FILE PHOTO: A woman talks on the phone at the Airbnb office headquarters in the SOMA district of San Francisco, California, U.S., August 2, 2016. REUTERS/Gabrielle Lurie/File Photo

Thomson Reuters

PARIS (Reuters) - The municipality of Paris has asked a French court to urgently fine Airbnb and two other small companies for unauthorized short-term letting, said an official with the city's administration.

A hearing at a Paris court is scheduled for June 12.

Founded in 2008 in San Francisco, Airbnb matches people wishing to rent out all or part of their homes to temporary guests, via a website.

Ian Brossat, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of housing, told Le Parisien newspaper that Airbnb and other competitors had failed to take down listings lacking official registration numbers.

The registration number, he said, helps ensure the companies do not rent out properties for more than the 120 nights a year allowed.

Brossat said the municipality had asked for fines ranging from 1,000-5,000 euros ($1,236.4-$6,182) per day and per advertisement.

Officials with Airbnb were not immediately available for comment.

Earlier this month, a Singapore court fined two Airbnb hosts a total of $45,800 each for unauthorized short-term letting.

Several cities throughout the world have expressed concerns that platforms such as Airbnb might stand as unfair competitors to hotels.

France is Airbnb's second-largest market after the United States. Paris, one of the most visited cities in the world, is its biggest single market, with around 65,000 homes listed.

(Reporting by Myriam Rivet; Writing by Matthias Blamont; Editing by Dominique Vidalon/Sudip Kar-Gupta)

See Also:* Disney must make offer for Sky (Frankfurt: 893517 - news) on similar terms as Fox

* Fox awaiting ruling on its bid to buy all of Sky

* Disney agreed deal to buy Fox assets, including Sky stake (Adds Twenty-First Century Fox response)

By Paul Sandle

LONDON, April 12 (Reuters) - Britain's takeover regulator said Walt Disney (Swiss: DIS-USD.SW - news) must offer to buy all of Sky if it acquires Twenty-First Century Fox's 39 percent stake and if Rupert Murdoch's Fox is prevented from purchasing all of the European pay-TV company itself.

Fox agreed an offer to buy all of Sky 17 months ago but is still waiting regulatory approval, while Disney has agreed to buy Fox assets, including its stake in Sky, in a separate deal subject to its own regulatory clearance.

The ruling means that if Fox's bid to buy Sky is blocked by the government in June because of Murdoch's media influence, Disney will have to step in to make the same offer to shareholders if and when it becomes the owner of Fox's assets.

Disney had said it should not be required to make a bid for the whole of Sky in line with Fox's existing offer if it bought the Fox assets, but Britain's Takeover Panel ruled on Thursday that it must match Fox's 10.75 pounds-a-share price.

Analysts had said Disney wanted a special dispensation to give it more flexibility on whether or when it would bid for the rest of Sky if it only bought the 39 percent stake from Fox.

The Takeover Panel, however, said it considered that securing control of Sky might reasonably be considered to be a significant purpose of Disney's acquiring control of Fox, and it must make an offer within 28 days of buying the Fox assets.

FOX COMMITTED

The Panel's ruling will not stand if Fox has acquired 100 percent of Sky by the time Disney buys the Fox assets, or if Comcast Corp or any other third party has acquired a stake of more than 50 percent in Sky.

U.S. cable company Comcast (Swiss: CMCSA.SW - news) said on Feb. 27 that it was considering making an offer for Sky.

Story continues

Sky said it noted the Takeover Panel's ruling, and it advised shareholders to take no further action at this time.

Twenty-First Century Fox said that under the ruling, any mandatory offer by Disney would only be required after Disney's acquisition of Fox is completed, which Fox currently expects to occur after completion of Fox's offer for Sky.

"21CF (Fox) remains committed to its recommended cash offer for Sky announced on 15th December 2016," it said.

The offer was supported by revised remedies it had offered to Britain's Competition and Markets Authority, it added. (Reporting by Paul Sandle Editing by Kate Holton and Alexander Smith)Facebook recently announced dramatic data access restrictions on its app and website. The company framed the lockdown as an attempt to protect user information, in response to the public outcry following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

But the decision is in line with growing restrictions imposed on researchers studying Facebook and its photo-sharing app Instagram, which also began immediately restricting access to its data on April 4.

In fact, several limitations were put in place in February this year, before the Cambridge Analytica fiasco  in which data was allegedly harvested from 50m Facebook profiles  erupted publicly. Facebooks API, version 2.5, was scheduled to be retired this month, by  among other things  preventing access to the ID of users participating in public forums.

Social networks offer two main entry points for the collection of data: they work as interfaces for users and software interfaces designed for consumption by computer programs, known as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

While APIs are intended for programmers building apps that add to the growing ecosystem of services offered by social networks, researchers have also leveraged these interfaces to study social behaviour online.

Read more: Cambridge Analytica scandal: legitimate researchers using Facebook data could be collateral damage

Given the mammoth size of Facebooks userbase (2.13 billion at the last count), external scrutiny of the content on the social network is extremely important. In recent years, however, researchers have been fighting an uphill battle with the company to provide access to data. Now its latest decision has made it virtually impossible to carry out large-scale research on Facebook.

The changes make defunct software and libraries dedicated to academic research on Facebook, including netvizz, NodeXL, SocialMediaLab, fb_scrape_public and Rfacebook, all of which relied on Facebooks APIs to collect data.

Systematic research on Facebook content is now untenable, turning what was already a worryingly opaque, siloed social network into a black box that is arguably even less accountable to lawmakers and the public  both of whom benefited from academics who monitored developments on the site.

Story continues

Deen Freelon, the developer of fb_scrape_public which analyses large, publicly available datasets on Facebook, told us via email that the decision to restrict access to the Pages API could severely impair content-based Facebook research going forward, depending on how willing Facebook is to approve access. If it doesnt approve access for most research purposes, that could create incentives for researchers to scrape Facebook directly, which violates its terms of service. Data scraping or harvesting is a method by which a computer program extracts information from web pages.

Bernhard Rieder, an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam who developed netvizz  a tool that extracts data from Facebook for research purposes  believes the move was a consequence of the level of unfettered access given to anyone until 2015 and that there is a real possibility that these services will increasingly be inscrutable and unobservable.

Up until three years ago, Facebook allowed third-party apps to have access to data on the friends of app users. It was this function that was used by Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

Read more: How Cambridge Analyticas Facebook targeting model really worked  according to the person who built it

Kogan  through his Global Science Research startup, which was separate from his academic work  allegedly collected profile information from 270,000 Facebook users and tens of millions of their friends using a personality test app called thisisyourdigitallife. Its alleged that Cambridge Analytica used that data in an attempt to target political campaigns including the 2016 US presidential election.

Marc Smith, who led the Microsoft team that created NodeXL, which analyses social network data, told us that there was an opportunity to rethink the social networks people choose to use in light of the data scandal.

Why APIs matter

APIs allow researchers to retrieve large-scale data and curate databases associated with meaningful events. Without them, web interfaces have to be scraped to access the data, which is labour intensive and drastically limits the amount of information that can be collected and processed.

Locking researchers out of the APIs constrains them to human-intensive means of data collection that cannot produce representative samples of real-world events, such as social movements, elections and disinformation campaigns.

Twitter operates three well documented, public APIs in addition to its premium and enterprise offerings. Twitters relative accessibility leads it to being vastly overrepresented in social media research. But public and open APIs are an exception in the social media ecosystem. Facebooks Public Feed API, for example, is restricted to a limited set of media publishers.

Data lockdown

Facebooks API lockdown will widen the gap between industry researchers hired by social networks and researchers working outside corporations. Its a divide characterised as the gap between big data rich researchers, who have access to proprietary data and might be working only in the interests of the company they are affiliated with, and the big data poor or the broad universe of academic researchers.

Facebooks decision dramatically expands this pool of big data poor. It limits research to projects sponsored by the network and potentially jeopardises research that is critical of Facebook.

Shortly after the decision to drastically limit API access, Facebook vowed to help researchers gain access to social media data of public interest, starting with elections. The announcement was met with a mix of celebration and subdued support from researchers.

Luca Rossi, who is associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, cautioned that the data sharing model proposed by Facebook is deeply problematic and it will probably reinforce existing differences in terms of data access. The restriction is likely to continue the trend of researchers doing research they are able to as opposed to research they deem important.

The impact on data science education is also considerable. If researchers are unable to access data from social networks, they will be unable to train students in data science, social science, computer sciences and digital humanities on methods of data collection and analysis that are rigorous, critical and ethical.

Read more: Facebook data harvesting: what you need to know

Facebooks decision to render the API useless for meaningful research is a regrettable departure for collaboration between the social network giant and academics and its already having an impact.

The Events API, which researchers relied on to retrieve information about public events such as demonstrations, no longer permits access to users or posts on the event wall.

Facebooks Groups API and Pages API were the endpoints researchers queried to study public discussions on Facebook, but the recent policy shift seals off those online conversations by restricting access to posts, comments or members participating in a public page or group.

The changes made to Instagrams API are even more radical, with Facebook deciding to deprecate the API  a technical term for killing data access altogether.

Nasty side effect

Facebooks decision to restrict researchers is ironic because academics have long discussed the problems that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Rieder wrote about the risks of Facebook APIs wide open data door back in 2013.

He cautioned against how much data a third-party app could get from Facebook. Facebook, however, ignored those concerns until 2015, when management and policies regulating the sharing of Facebook data took a sharp turn and became increasingly more restrictive for researchers.

Since then, Facebook has become increasingly more cautious about external scrutiny. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Wired that the feedback it received was that having the data locked down is more important to people than having different kinds of experiences.

The public uproar clearly underscores how users data was poorly handled, but a lockdown is hardly the solution to a problem rooted in the weaponisation of social networks, where people use Facebook, Twitter and so on to spread disinformation.

Read more: Cambridge Analytica scandal: Facebook's user engagement and trust decline

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has created a worrying side effect: restricting access to data is likely to facilitate further weaponisation, by turning Facebook into a de facto black box that is largely unaccountable to external oversight.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.(This April 10 story has been corrected to show in eighth paragraph that suspects have been brought back from 18 countries.)

ANKARA (Reuters) - Three Turkish nationals detained in Gabon over links to the Fethullah Gulen movement that Ankara blames for a failed 2016 coup have been brought to Turkey, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday.

Speaking to lawmakers from his ruling AK Party, Erdogan vowed to continue to seek supporters of the U.S.-based cleric "no matter where they run."

"Gabon has returned three important Gulenists to our country. No matter where they run or how much they run, we will go after them," he said.

Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency, citing security sources, said the three suspects had been captured in an operation carried out by Turkish intelligence. It said the three were brought back to Turkey and handed over to authorities for questioning.

The suspects, identified as Osman Ozpinar, Ibrahim Akbas and Adnan Demironal, were involved in the administration of schools run by Gulen's network, Anadolu said, adding that they were also users of ByLock, an encrypted messaging app the government says is used by the cleric's supporters.

It said the three were detained by authorities in Gabon on March 23 and also faced charges of membership in an armed terrorist organisation.

Ankara blames Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, for orchestrating a failed coup in 2016 and has carried out a widespread crackdown on alleged supporters of the cleric's network. Gulen denies any involvement.

Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag, the government's spokesman, said last week 80 people suspected of links to Gulen's network had been brought back to Turkey from 18 different countries.

Last month, Kosovo authorities arrested six Turkish nationals linked to schools financed by Gulen's movement and extradited them to Turkey, prompting Kosovo's prime minister to dismiss his interior minister and secret service chief. Kosovo's parliament also voted to investigate the arrests.

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"We've gotten six Gulenists from Kosovo and three from Gabon. Let's see where the next ones come from," Erdogan said.

Since the abortive putsch in July 2016, nearly 160,000 people have been detained and a similar number of civil servants sacked from their jobs, a United Nations report found last month. Ankara says the measures are necessary given the extent of the security threats it faces, including from Gulen's network, which it considers a terrorist group.

(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu and Tulay Karadeniz; Editing by David Dolan)NIAMEY (Reuters) - Armed men on Wednesday kidnapped a German man in western Niger near the border with Mali, Niger's attorney general said.

Cheibou Samna said the kidnapping was carried out by men riding motorcycles about 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of the town of Inates. Samna identified the kidnapped man as Joerg Lange, a humanitarian worker.

He provided no further details. Germany's foreign ministry had no immediate comment.

Jihadist groups, including some affiliated with al Qaeda and Islamic State, have repeatedly attacked military and civilian targets along the porous border between Mali and Niger.

Islamic State's affiliate in West Africa claimed responsibility for an attack last October near the border that killed four U.S. special forces and at least four Nigerien soldiers.

Western powers, including France and the United States, have thousands of troops in the semi-arid Sahel region to combat what they see as a growing Islamist militant threat and also support a task force of five regional armies.

(Reporting by Moussa Aksar; Writing by Aaron Ross; Editing by Chris Reese and Matthew Lewis)5 held in Bharatpur blast, attack on ward chair

Chitwan Police arrested five people in connection to the explosion at Kalika Construction Pvt Ltd and assault on the ward chairman of Bharatpur Metropolitan City-10 in Chitwan on Wednesday.Szefei / www.shutterstock.com

Pollinating insects like bees, butterflies and flies have had a rough time of late. A broad library of evidence suggests there has been a widespread decline in their abundance and diversity since the 1950s. This matters because such insects are critical both for the reproduction of wild plants and for agricultural food production.

The decline of these pollinators is linked with destruction of natural habitats like forests and meadows, the spread of pests such as Varroa mite and diseases like foulbrood, and the increasing use of agrochemicals by farmers. Although there have been well documented declines in managed honeybees, non-Apis (non-honeybee) pollinators such as bumblebees and solitary bees have also become endangered.

There are more than 800 wild (non-honey) bee species in Europe alone. Seven are classified by the IUCN Redlist as critically endangered, 46 are endangered, 24 are vulnerable and 101 are near threatened. Collectively, losing such species would have a significant impact on global pollination.

Though much of the media focus is on honeybees, they are responsible for only a third of the crop pollination in Britain and a very small proportion of wild plant pollination. A range of other insects including butterflies, bumblebees and small flies make up for this pollination deficit.

Not all pollinators are created equal

Pollinators also vary in their effectiveness due to their behaviour around flowers and their capacity to hold pollen. Bigger and hairier insects can carry more pollen, while those that groom themselves less tend to be able to transfer pollen more effectively. Bumblebees, for example, make excellent pollinators (far superior to honeybees) as they are big, hairy and do not groom themselves as often.

Where they are in decline, honeybees suffer primarily from pests and diseases, a consequence of poor nutrition and artificially high population density. This differs from other pollinators, where the decline is mainly down to habitat destruction. It seems pesticides affect all pollinators.

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Save (all) the bees

Curiously, the issues facing non-Apis pollinators may be exacerbated by commercial beekeeping, and attempts to help honeybees may even harm efforts to conserve wild pollinators.

The problem is that there are only so many flowers and places to nest. And once the numbers of honeybees have been artificially inflated (commercial-scale beekeeping wouldnt exist without humans) the increased competition for these resources can push native non-Apis pollinators out of their natural habitats. Honeybees also spread exotic plants and transmit pathogens, both of which have been shown to harm other pollinators.

Over the coming decades, farmers and those who regulate them are faced with a tough challenge. Agricultural output must be increased to feed a growing human population, but simultaneously the environmental impact must be reduced.

The agriculture sector has tried to address the need to feed a growing population through conventional farming practices such as mechanisation, larger fields or the use of pesticides and fertiliser. Yet these have contributed to widespread destruction of natural landscapes and loss of natural capital.

Limited resources and land use pressure require conservation strategies to become more efficient, producing greater outcomes from increasingly limited input.

Cooperative conservation

So-called agri-environment schemes represent the best way to help insect pollinators. That means diversifying crops, avoiding an ecologically-fragile monoculture and ensuring that the insects can jump between different food sources. It also means protecting natural habitats and establishing ecological focus areas such as wildflower strips, while limiting the use of pesticides and fertilisers.

As pollinating insects need a surprisingly large area of land to forage, linking up restored habitats on a larger scale provides far more evident and immediate benefits. However, so far, connections between protected areas have not been a priority, leading to inefficient conservation.

We need a substantial shift in how we think about pollinators. Encouraging land managers to work cooperatively will help create bigger, more impactful areas to support pollinators. In future, conservation efforts will need to address declines in all pollinators by developing landscapes to support pollinator communities and not just honeybees.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Philip Donkersley receives funding from BBSRC and GCRF.By Loucoumane Coulibaly

YAMOUSSOUKRO (Reuters) - Ivory Coast inaugurated on Thursday its first senate, an upper house to the West African nation's parliament that President Alassane Ouattara called a "chamber of wisdom" but which the opposition says will tighten his grip on power.

Its creation was a provision of a new constitution enacted in 2016. Ivory Coast's main opposition groups boycotted the referendum that approved the charter as well as polls last month that elected 66 members to the 99-seat body.

"The senate is installed. It is an important chamber for the rooting of democracy," said Ouattara, addressing the newly elected lawmakers bedecked in green, white and orange sashes - the colours of the Ivorian flag. "It is a chamber of wisdom."

The senate will be headed by Jeannot Ahoussou-Kouadio, a former prime minister and member of the Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI), the main coalition partner of Ouattara's Rally of the Republicans (RDR).

Ouattara is seeking to solidify the alliance as Ivory Coast - the world's top cocoa producer - heads towards presidential elections in 2020.

Ivory Coast has emerged as one of Africa's fastest-growing economies in the wake of a decade-long political crisis that was capped by a brief 2011 civil war.

While Ouattara, a former senior International Monetary Fund official, has received praise for the revival, he faces growing criticism for not doing enough to heal the deep divisions left over from the crisis years.

The 2016 constitution was seen by many analysts and diplomats as a missed opportunity to foster constructive political dialogue between Ouattara's backers and supporters of former President Laurent Gbagbo.

Gbagbo is currently on trial before the International Criminal Court accused of crimes against humanity committed during the 2011 conflict.

Ruling coalition members say that the senate will improve checks and balances within the government. But opposition members say the body - a third of whose seats will be appointed by the executive - is little more than a power grab.

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The ruling coalition already dominates the existing National Assembly, which will become the lower house of parliament.

"This is the worst of democratic retreats. It's abhorrent," Boubakar Kone, a spokesman for one of the two rival factions of Gbagbo's Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party, told Reuters.

Ouattara has yet to name the final 33 senators, though it is expected the list will include some opposition figures.

(Additional reporting by Joe Bavier; Editing by Sofia Christensen and Hugh Lawson)SAN DIEGO (AP)  A man who was denied permission to return to the United States from Mexico sued the federal government Tuesday, saying he was misled by a little-known benefit aimed at keeping married couples together in the U.S. while a spouse waits for a green card.

Marco Villada, who came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 6 years old, got permission from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to leave the country for a green card interview at the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The waiver would let him quickly return to the U.S., avoiding the long wait in Mexico that others face.

The State Department permanently barred Villada from the United States after a visit to Mexico for his grandfather's funeral in 2000 came up during the green card interview, according to the lawsuit. Villada had told Citizenship and Immigration Services about the visit before obtaining the waiver.

Citizenship and Immigration Services didn't tell Villada that his Mexico visit in 2000 might damage his case, the lawsuit said. It gave other reasons he might not be allowed to return in "confusing, boilerplate" language.

"We did everything by the book," Villada said from Mexico on a conference call with reporters. "We thought that since we had the waiver nothing could go wrong but that wasn't the case."

The State Department and Citizenship and Immigration Services wouldn't comment on pending litigation.

Villada, 34, worked as a legal assistant in a Los Angeles-area law firm after qualifying in 2013 for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has temporarily shielded hundreds of thousands of young people from deportation and given them work permits. By going to Mexico for his green card interview, Villada lost DACA protection because the program prohibits leaving the United States.

He wed Israel Serrato, a U.S. citizen, in 2014, months after gay marriage became legal across the United States. Serrato, also a plaintiff, joined his spouse for the trip to Mexico and has returned to the United States.

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"Our hearts shattered (when the green card was denied)," Serrato told reporters. "One of our deepest fears came true. Marco is now stuck in the wrong country, away from me, away from the rest of our family, friends."

Under federal law, spouses are barred from returning for 10 years if they had been in the U.S. illegally for a year or more, but the Citizenship and Immigration Service waivers shorten the wait in cases of "extreme hardship." In 2013, the agency allowed people to obtain waivers before leaving the United States instead of having to wait months aboard for one.

Stacy Tolchin, Villada's attorney, said the waivers allow spouses to return to the U.S. when their visas are approved and typically go back to their native countries within two or three weeks to pick up the documents.

The number of people who got waivers and were later denied a visa is unknown, but Tolchin says her office has fielded calls from about six others.

"This is a problem that's been very frequent since the change of administrations," she said. "This is part of a larger problem."

See Also:TUNIS (Reuters) - A Libyan military spokesman declined on Wednesday to address directly reports that key coalition military commander Khalifa Haftar was in the French capital Paris for medical treatment.

Ahmed al-Mismari, spokesman for the Libyan National Army (LNA) that Haftar leads, gave a press statement in the eastern city of Benghazi late on Wednesday, after more than 24 hours of conflicting rumours and reports about Haftar's health and whereabouts.

One high-ranking East Libyan military source told Reuters on Tuesday that Haftar had been flown to Jordan, and would travel on from there to a third country for treatment for a critical health condition.

A second source close the East Libyan military command said on Wednesday that Haftar was in France, but gave no details on his condition. Both sources asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Libya's 218 TV channel, which is supportive of the LNA, reported that Haftar "was undergoing a medical inspection in Paris and that there was no real danger to his health".

Several French media also reported that Haftar was being treated at a Paris hospital.

Mismari spoke about the military situation in the eastern city of Derna, which the LNA has encircled, and took no questions.

He also made a general comment about "lies and rumours" which he said were spread by the Muslim Brotherhood and aimed at undermining the LNA. It was not clear if the comment was a reference to reports about Haftar's health.

Haftar, 75, has for several years been the dominant figure in Eastern Libya, and has widely been seen as seeking national power in the oil-rich nation of six million.

He has presented himself as a scourge of Islamist militancy, taking a hardline stance against the Muslim Brotherhood, mirroring the position of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a Haftar ally.

Critics, however, accuse Haftar of fuelling armed conflict in Libya.

Haftar is aligned with a parliament and government that moved to Eastern Libya after a major escalation of fighting in the capital, Tripoli, in 2014.

He has spurned the internationally recognised Government of National Accord (GNA), which arrived in Tripoli in 2016 as part of United Nations-led efforts to reunify the country.

(Writing by Aidan Lewis, editing by G Crosse)After his father died, Mr Williams said he was told it was due to lack of oxygen and his heart gave up. (PA)

An 80-year-old man died in hospital after waiting 23 hours for an ambulance and a further seven hours before being admitted, his son has said.

Darren Williams, 48, said his father John Williams died on Sunday, four days after being admitted to Morriston Hospital in Swansea, South Wales and five days after he fell at home, last Tuesday.

Mr Williams said he called 999 that morning but an ambulance did not arrive for 23 hours.

His father was then forced to wait another seven hours in the back of the ambulance outside the hospital before he could be admitted.

I cant help thinking that all this has contributed to my fathers passing, he said.

What should have happened in my view is a rapid response paramedic should have been with my dad within 40 minutes to an hour.

He should have been assessed on the kitchen floor and they could have made the call from there.

The Welsh Ambulance Service has said a full investigation will be carried out. (PA)

He might still be with us. It is just unbelievable.

How many people are going to lose their lives through this? Sooner or later it is going to be a child.

The Welsh Ambulance Service has said a full investigation will be carried out into the incident while Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board, which runs the hospital, said Mr Williams had been taken to hospital with minor injuries.

Claire Bevan, director of quality, safety and patient experience for the Welsh Ambulance Service, said: We would like to extend our sincere condolences to Mr Williams family at this very sad and difficult time.

We want to ensure a full investigation is carried out into the wait that Mr Williams experienced and we will be communicating with Mr Williams family.

Mr Williams said he went to his parents home in Gowerton, Swansea, after his mother phoned to tell him his father had fallen in the kitchen and was on the floor.

Mr Williams dialled 999 at about 8.25am, expecting a wait of an hour or so.

He said he called again two and a half hours later, and twice more, but an ambulance did not arrive until 7.30am on Wednesday.

Story continues

Mr Williams said his father was conscious but confused while lying on the floor and after 11 hours there, they decided to move him.

He said: Myself and my brother decided enough is enough, so against obviously medical wishes we picked him up because it was ridiculous.

We sat him in his chair and he went to sleep.

Mr Williams dialled 999 at about 8.25am, expecting a wait of an hour or so. (PA)

Obviously he hadnt had medication when he was admitted to hospital, that would have been about 36 hours, which equates to probably over 30 tablets.

We were told not to give him any medication.

Mr Williams believes this could have contributed to his fathers death because some of the tablets were for his heart.

After his father died, Mr Williams said he was told it was due to lack of oxygen and his heart gave up.

He said the ambulance crew, when they arrived, were brilliant and just trying to do their job in a very difficult situation.

Mr Williams said that about two hours after his father was admitted, the hospital wanted to discharge him.

He said: I said I want it put on the record that he is not right, he has obviously fallen for a reason, well be back here tomorrow and well have the same scenario again.

Mr Williams said he went to collect his vehicle but while he was gone his father fell again and the decision was made to keep him in.

He seemed fine, he said.

I was with him Saturday night and on Sunday morning when I saw the no-caller ID on my phone I thought its obviously a phone call to arrange to come and pick him up on Monday morning, not to be told get here fast he is short of breath, he said.

Mr Williams said his father died at the same time the call was made, 9.45am on Sunday.

Of the ambulance service he added: Those crews are doing two calls a day because they are stuck outside the hospital.

It is shocking.

An spokeswoman for Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board spokeswoman said with the permission of Mr Williams family, she was able to explain a bit about Mr Williams condition and care.

She said: Mr Williams was brought to Morriston Hospital with minor injuries after a fall at home.

Following a thorough assessment and observations in the Emergency Department, doctors couldnt identify a reason for this fall.

However, later on, Mr Williams general condition began to deteriorate and due to this doctors then decided to admit him to a ward for further tests and observation.

Unfortunately, Mr Williams health continued to deteriorate; staff did all they could to treat him but sadly he died a few days later.

She urged the family to contact the health board with further queries or concerns about his care and added: We would like to offer our sincere condolences to Mr Williams family and friends.It's been over a year since Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie called it quits, leaving the world to mourn Brangelina, and the true love that portmanteau represented. Since then, eyes have been on Pitt and who he might date next. Perhaps thats why speculation is building this week that Pitt is dating Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Neri Oxman. The Mr. & Mrs. Smith actor was first spotted on the MIT campus in November.

Oxman is a 42-year-old architect and artist, as well as an associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. In the architecture and design world, Oxman's a superstar. She may not have stacked up quite as many interviews as Pitt, but over the years she's been featured in many publications to discuss her work, which includes innovative uses of 3D printing.

Interestingly, in April 2017 (several months after Pitt and Jolie's divorce), Oxman publicly mentioned the man she is now rumored to be dating with W Magazine. The professor responded to a question about why she thought architecture was a male-dominated field. "For the same reason we have the Brad Pitts and the George Clooneys, its just part of human nature to idolize stereotypes. Such singularities are useful to the common perception of heroism," Oxman said.

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GettyImages-849114778

Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit

Oxman grew up in Israel, studying architecture at Technion  Israel Institute of Technology, and then later at London Architectural Association School of Architecture. In 2005, she moved to Boston and got her PhD in Design Computation as a Presidential Fellow at MIT, and stayed on as an MIT faculty member in 2010. She's won numerous awards with her team at MIT, including the Innovation by Design award from Fast Company in 2015 and the San Jose Forum's Visionary Award in 2017.

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According to her website bio, Oxman has work in the permanent collections of New York's Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and many more. She's known for her unusual blend of art, science, ancient and modern, which creates a "biologically inspired" design, as she once described it in an interview with Icon.

Don't miss: Top 50 Twitter Accounts With Most Followers

In 2015, Oxman delivered a TED Talk on "Design at the Intersection of Technology and Biology."

The physical evidence that Oxman and Pitt are romantically today linked is sparse. An Instagram photo from an MIT student shows that Pitt did visit the MIT Media Labwhere Oxman worksin November.

Besides that, there are only rumors from anonymous sources to publications like Us Weekly and Page Six, who claim the two have been a couple for months. Still, others say the relationship is merely a professional one.

Previously, Oxman was married to Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov. Oxman did not reply to Newsweek's request for comment by the time of publication.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekGettyImages-942031570

Scott Heins / Stringer

Supporters of the teacher walkout in Oklahoma grabbed some sidewalk chalk and wrote their feelings on two of Oklahoma officials parking spots in the Capitol.

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and Lieutenant Governor Todd Lambs Capitol parking spots were covered in words in sidewalk chalk in relation to the teacher walkout, Tulsa World reported.

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The messages read I do my job, now go do yours!, Give us our teachers back and Brenna was here but Mary Fallin wasnt. An outline of a body was also drawn with sidewalk chalk.

About 3,000 teachers in schools in Oklahoma City and Tulsa have been on strike for pay hikes since last Wednesday, causing the shut down of public schools, Reuters reported.

"Some have wrongly assumed that the governor has not been at the Capitol during the teacher walkout because no vehicle is parked in a space that has the word governor on the curb," Chris Benge, Fallins chief of staff, told Newsweek. Benge added that a previous governor stopped parking in the spot because of security concerns.

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Benge told Newsweek that the chalk messages were an inappropriate way to discuss the walkout.

"Visitors to the Capitol certainly have a right to express their opinions, but the chalk messages in the parking lot dont reflect the thousands who visited the governors office during the teacher walkout," Binge said in a statement to Newsweek. "The vast majority have been polite and professional."

Story continues

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Republican leaders in the state have already said they dont have any plans to increase funding after they approved $450 million to give teachers a pay raise.

Governor Fallin approved legislation that would raise teachers wages by $6,100 annually, but educators want a $10,000 raise over three years in addition to an increases in school funding.



Fallin has already approved legislation that would raise teachers wages by an annual average of $6,100, but teachers are holding out for a $10,000 raise over three years and other increase in school funding.

Fallin recently made comments about teachers and their demands during a CBS News interview, saying "Teachers want more, but it's kind of like a teenager wanting a better car."

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekBreakthrough ceremony held to mark completion of Melamchi Tunnel

A breakthrough ceremony was organised on Thursday to mark the completion of the excavation of the longest tunnel in Nepal.syria airspace cleared

Flightradar24

The skies around Syria are emptier than usual as airlines try to keep clear of a potential US airstrike on Syria.

Planes have been avoiding war-torn Syrian airspace for years, but new warnings expanded the danger zone.

Flight regulators told planes to steer clear of the eastern Mediterranean and Cyprus, where US and Russian naval assets are based.

Donald Trump told Russia to "get ready" for a punitive strike on Bashar al-Assad's regime in retaliation over a reported chemical attack.



The skies over and around Syria are even emptier than usual as commercial flights avoid the area in expectation of a potential US strike on the Assad regime.

Although flightpaths in the region have long avoided Syria itself, an even broader swathe of airspace was vacated as tensions ramped up.

Flight regulator Eurocontrol told airlines on Tuesday to avoid flying over the eastern Mediterranean to avoid getting hit or their communications jammed.

Eurocontrol said: "Due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria with air-to-ground and/or cruise missiles within the next 72 hours, and the possibility of intermittent disruption of radio navigation equipment, due consideration needs to be taken when planning flight operations in the Eastern Mediterranean/Nicosia FIR [Flight Information Region] area."

The eastern Mediterranean and the island of Cyprus, where Nicosia is the capital, are immediately to Syria's west.

eurocontrol syria flight warning

Google Maps/Business Insider

Civilian flights over or near Syria are already rare. Most commercial airlines already avoid Syria's north and northeast  where major battlefronts such as Aleppo and Deir Ezzor are located  due to the ongoing conflict, Flightradar24 said.

However, Eurocontrol's Tuesday warning to avoid the eastern Mediterranean shows heightened expectation of a US airstrike on Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Donald Trump is considering launching a punitive strike on Syria in retaliation over a reported chemical attack that killed dozens of civilians, for which he blamed Syria and Russia.

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The US president told Russia to "get ready" for a US strike on Syria in an early Wednesday morning tweet.

He is reportedly weighing a stronger strike than that of last year, when he ordered a strike of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles on military infrastructure following reports of a chemical attack.

The US president is skipping a major international summit in South America to weigh his options, and said on Monday that he would announce his decision shortly. Israel is reportedly anticipating a US strike.

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See Also:The recent kerfuffle over Britains post-Brexit passports being made by a Franco-Dutch company exemplifies the level of control that will be taken back by the UK government in March 2019. The UK might be leaving the EU, but it will remain a part of the global economy. Contracts  like who makes the countrys passports  will be beholden to business interests.

Similarly, rules on public procurement (if surprisingly omitted from a post-Brexit UK-EU trade deal), would still be regulated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) general procurement agreement, to which the UK is a signatory. This means public contracts will be open to competition. Indeed, it is the importance of existing and new post-Brexit trade deals which will expose the myth that meaningful democratic control can be taken back.

Three important aspects of international trade deals will limit the UKs democratic control over trade. They are: the use of investor-state dispute settlement arrangements; procurement arrangements; and the current UK governments Trade Bill.

This is about more than tariffs

The current focus on post-Brexit trade arrangements has tended to fall upon the level of tariffs imposed on imports. This fear has been reinforced by the dispute taking place between the US and China after Donald Trump announced tariffs on US$60 billion worth of Chinese imports and China prepared retaliatory tariffs of its own.

But, as economists Phedon Nicolaides and Thibault Roy have explained, this misses the point. Trade agreements are hardly about tariffs and border restrictions anymore.

Now, trade agreements are deep, in the sense that they are mainly about  domestic product standards, health and safety rules, regulation of establishment, and investment and public procurement.

With the UK as a member of the EU single market, the EU has exclusive rights for negotiating its trade deals. This extends to the current customs union arrangements, which countries outside the single market have with the EU.

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But, irrespective of whether new trade deals are negotiated post-Brexit by the EU (with the UK inside a customs union) or independently by the British government, two characteristics of the new generation trade deals raise issues of control.

Investor-State Dispute Settlement

The ultimate threat to democracy arises out of the so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) arrangements. These are enshrined in new trade deals negotiated outside of the WTO and permit transnational corporations to take governments to court if their profits, or even potential profits, are threatened by legislative action. And not just any court, these courts are independent of the national court system, using a secret dispute resolution apparatus instead.

The secrecy which surrounds settlement procedures makes analysis of their impact difficult to establish. But drawing on the the UN trade body, UNCTADs database, its possible to see the significant increase in ISDS cases in recent years, with 56 new cases in 2012, 59 in 2013 and 62 in 2016.

Notable cases relate to French company Veolia using ISDS to compensate for loss of profit when the Egyptian government raised the countrys minimum wage. And, in Europe, Swedish company Vattenfall is using ISDS to press for compensation of 3.7 billion following the German governments decision, post-Fukushima, to end nuclear power generation. The outcome of both cases are still pending.

The largest known settlement is the US$2.3 billion secured by US oil company Occidental against the government of Ecuador, over the latters (apparently lawful) termination of an oil concession contract. This was later negotiated down to a mere US$980m.

Bad competition

Most new generation trade deals now focus on the opening up of public services to competition. This allows overseas transnational corporations the opportunity to win contracts, usually based upon reducing labour costs through laying off staff and introducing worse terms and conditions of employment.

As the global labour foodworkers federation, the IUF, has noted, they do this by restricting the regulatory power of governments and locking the system into place to prevent new regulation or reversing privatisation.

This privatisation objective is likely to be at the heart of negotiations in post-Brexit trade deals. And this is in spite of the disastrous way that public services have been put out to tender in recent years  as with the recent collapse of construction firm Carillion.

An inauspicious start for the UK

A final problem with the negotiation of trade deals relates to the negotiation process itself. Most trade negotiations are held in secret, with governments subject to intense and expensive lobbying from transnational corporations. Citizens or even politicians have little access to the negotiators or the documents involved.

In this respect the evidence so far of the current governments approach to trade deals is concerning. The Trade Bill legislation, currently going through the UK parliament, seeks to implement into law any new trade deal the government negotiates with non-EU countries.

The TUC and the Trade Justice Movement have expressed concerns that the government is again  as with the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill  seeking to introduce legislative change without proper parliamentary scrutiny. Central to this would be the power given to the government at the expense of parliament when it comes to negotiating trade deals.

Claims that Brexit will allow power to be taken back from Brussels to Westminster, therefore, needs a far higher degree of scrutiny. The UK outside of the EU will still operate in a global economy characterised by trade deals, through which governments have ceded (or even abdicated) responsibility for economic management to the investment strategies of transnational corporations.

This means that any new trade deals which follow recent practice will lack democratic safeguards. And safeguards already appear to be excluded from the governments central legislation in this area, the Trade Bill.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Steve French does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.By Susan Heavey, Makini Brice and Tom Perry

WASHINGTON/BEIRUT (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump warned Russia on Wednesday of imminent military action in Syria over a suspected poison gas attack, declaring that missiles "will be coming" and lambasting Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The White House pushed back against suggestions that Trump had broadcast his plans for military strikes via Twitter, saying he had not laid out a timetable for action, that all options were still on the table and he was assessing how to respond.

Trump's tweet was reacting to a warning from Russia that any U.S. missiles fired at Syria over the deadly assault on the rebel enclave of Douma near Damascus would be shot down and the launch sites targeted.

His comments raised the prospect of direct conflict over Syria for the first time between the two world powers backing opposing sides in the seven-year-old civil war, which has aggravated instability across the Middle East.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'," Trump wrote on Twitter.

"You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" Trump tweeted, referring to Moscow's alliance with Assad.

In response, Russia's foreign ministry said: "Smart missiles should fly towards terrorists, not towards the lawful government".

Damascus and Moscow have denied any responsibility and say the incident is bogus.

Dozens of people in Douma died and hundreds were injured in the attack, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, striking a cautious tone after Trump's threat of missile strikes, said the United States was assessing intelligence about the suspected attack.

Asked if he had seen enough evidence to blame Assad, Mattis said: "We're still working on this."

Story continues

The U.S. military was ready to provide military options, if appropriate, he added. It was unclear if his remarks reflected unease about Trump's apparent move toward military action.

Two U.S. government sources told Reuters the United States still did not have 100 percent solid evidence of what nerve agent was used in Syria and where it came from. However, there is some evidence it was sprayed from helicopters, they said.

In Moscow, the head of a Russian parliamentary defence committee, Vladimir Shamanov, said Russia was in direct contact with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff about the situation.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said pro-government forces were emptying main airports and military air bases. The Syrian military has also been repositioning some air assets to avoid possible missile strikes, U.S. officials told Reuters.

The Russian military said it had observed movements of U.S. Navy forces in the Gulf. Any U.S. strike would probably involve the navy, given the risk to aircraft from Russian and Syrian air defences. A U.S. guided-missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, is in the Mediterranean.

The Syrian foreign ministry accused the United States, which has supported some rebel groups in Syria's conflict, of using "fabrications and lies" as an excuse to hit its territory.

"We are not surprised by such a thoughtless escalation by a regime like the United States regime, which sponsored terrorism in Syria and still does," the state news agency SANA cited a ministry official as saying.

After the Douma attack, the insurgent group dug in there, Jaish al-Islam, finally agreed to withdraw. That sealed a huge victory for Assad, crushing a long rebellion in the eastern Ghouta region near the capital Damascus.

BRITAIN READY

In London, British Prime Minister Theresa May said all the indications pointed to Syrian government responsibility for the attack and such "a shocking and barbaric act" could not go unchallenged.

The BBC reported that May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in military action. She would not seek approval from parliament, the BBC said, despite calls from the opposition Labour Party for parliament to be given a say.

She also ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military that could begin as early as Thursday night, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported.

Oil prices jumped to their highest level in more than three years on Wednesday after Trump's warning, and U.S. stock index futures fell sharply due to alarm about a possible Russian-U.S. conflict over Syria.

HIGHLY TOXIC

The WHO said 43 people had died in Saturday's attack on Douma from "symptoms consistent with exposure to highly toxic chemicals", and more than 500 had been treated.

The WHO cautioned that it has no formal role in forensic inquiries into the use of chemical weapons. International inspectors are seeking clearance from Damascus to visit Douma under safe conditions to determine whether globally banned munitions were used, though they will not assign blame.

Moscow and Washington blocked attempts by each other at the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday to set up international investigations into chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

Moscow's threat to down U.S. missiles came from its ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkin, who said it was based on previous statements by President Vladimir Putin and the Russian armed forces chief of staff.

The Russian military said on March 13 that it would respond to any U.S. strike on Syria by targeting any missiles and launchers involved. Russia is Assad's most powerful ally and its devastating air power has helped him wrest back large areas of territory from rebels since 2015.

Zasypkin also said a clash between Russia and the United States over Syria "should be ruled out and therefore we are ready to hold negotiations".

Putin spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and urged him to do nothing to destabilise Syria.

AIRLINES BEWARE

With tensions growing, however, European air traffic control agency Eurocontrol warned airlines to exercise caution in the eastern Mediterranean due to the possible launch of air strikes into Syria over the next 72 hours.

Both Russia and Iran, Assad's other main ally, have warned his enemies against military action in recent days, underlining their commitment to the Syrian government they have armed and supported through years of conflict.

Ali Akbar Velayati, the top adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said during a visit to Damascus on Tuesday that an Israeli attack on an air base in Syria on Monday would "not remain without response".

Israel held top-level security consultations on Wednesday on the possibility it could be targeted by Syria or Iran if the United States strikes Syrian government forces.

Syria's Russian-supplied air defences shot down an Israeli F-16 jet in February during a bombing run against what Israel described as Iranian-backed positions in Syria.

Last year, the United States carried out strikes from two Navy destroyers against a Syrian air base after another toxic gas attack on a rebel-controlled pocket.

(Additional reporting by Dahlia Nehme in Beirut, Jeffrey Heller in Jerusalem, Michelle Nichols at the United Nations, Andrew Osborn and Maria Kiselyova in Moscow, William Schomberg in London, Anthony Deutsch in Amsterdam, Steve Holland, Idrees Ali, Mark Hosenball, Phil Stewart, Jeff Mason and Yara Bayoumy in Washington, Jamie Freed in Singapore and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Mark Heinrich, Editing by Angus MacSwan and Alistair Bell)Russian military police have started patrolling the site of a suspected chemical attack in Syria as government forces took full control, according to Russia's defence ministry.

The ministry was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying they would act as "guarantors of law and order" in Douma, with the situation there now "normalising".

Moscow also said Syrian government forces have now taken full control of the town, which was the last rebel stronghold in the eastern Ghouta enclave outside the capital Damascus.

"The raised state flag over a building in the town of Douma has heralded the control over this location and therefore over the whole of eastern Ghouta," Major General Yuri Yevtushenko, head of the Russian peace and reconciliation centre in Syria, was quoted as saying.

Russian TV footage showed the Syrian government's red, white and black flag with two green stars hanging from an unidentified building, while cheering crowds waved flags surrounded by war-torn buildings.

The remaining Jaish al Islam rebels have surrendered their heavy arms and their leader has left for opposition-held territory in the north, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

There has so far been no comment from President Bashar al Assad's government and no independent confirmation.

Under an evacuation deal between rebels and the Russian military, more than 13,500 fighters and their families have left Douma.

But the agreement has been fraught with difficulties and it collapsed at one stage last week, with the Syrian government pressing ahead with its offensive.

This was then followed by the suspected chemical weapons attack that left a reported 70 people dead and 500 more injured at the weekend.

It has sparked the prospect of military action against Assad led by the US, France and Britain and ratcheted up tensions between Washington and Moscow, which is Syria's ally.

The Kremlin said a "de-confliction" telephone line between the US and Russia is active and is being used by both parties.

Story continues

There is no phone call planned between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump yet, Moscow added.

US defence secretary James Mattis said on Wednesday that the US military is ready to provide President Trump with options for military strikes.

It came after Mr Trump dramatically upped the ante, dismissing a warning from Moscow that it will shoot down any US missiles in the event of military action.

He tweeted that Russia should "get ready", because missiles "will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'"

The President added: "You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Prime Minister Theresa May will chair a special "war cabinet" on Thursday, with ministers expected to be asked to approve a form of British participation in military action targeting Assad's chemical weapons infrastructure.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has called for MPs to be given a vote in Parliament to authorise any involvement.

A Sky Data poll suggests the British public is split on the issue, with 36% supporting military action and 37% opposing it.

France's foreign minister has said the country will decide in the coming days whether to launch military action and suggested Paris could act unilaterally, declaring: "France is autonomous in taking its decisions".Serbian nationalist leader Vojislav Seselj speaks during a news conference in his Radical party headquarters in Belgrade, Serbia, March 31, 2016. REUTERS/Stringer

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - A U.N. war crimes court on Wednesday overturned an acquittal of Serbian politician Vojislav Seselj on charges of persecution and inhumane acts but the ultra-nationalist said he remained proud of what he did.

Judges in the Hague sentenced Seselj to 10 years on charges including deportation but since he spent 12 years in pre-trial detention the penalty was considered already served. He was given permission in 2014 to return to Serbia for cancer treatment.

"I am proud of all my war crimes and crimes against humanity and am ready to repeat them," Seselj told Reuters by telephone from Serbia, adding that the fresh verdict is not valid and the appeals court should only have had the power to order a retrial.

Seselj, 63, said he still wanted a Greater Serbia uniting all parts of Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia where Serbs live.

Seselj founded the Serbian Radical Party and was deputy prime minister under Slobodan Milosevic during the wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s in which more than 100,000 people were killed.

The case is one of the last to come before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ITCY) set up to prosecute major crimes resulting from the wars and closed last year.

The court acquitted Seselj in 2016 of charges including murder for stoking ethnic hatred at the start of the wars.

But appeals judges in a special chamber to handle outstanding ICTY cases ruled that Seselj was criminally responsible because of a speech he gave in Hrtkovci, Serbia, in May 1992, for "instigating deportation (and) persecution ... as crimes against humanity".

Prosecutors had called on the judges to reverse the acquittal or order a retrial.

The appeals chamber did not find a strong enough link between Seselj and other members of an alleged joint criminal enterprise to drive out non-Serbs from parts of Croatia and Bosnia.

"The initial verdict could have not been turned into conviction. The appeals court could have ordered retrial only," he said.

Story continues

Serbian anti-war organisation "Women in Black" said the verdict gave partial satisfaction to families of victims.

"Fighting hate speech and facing the past is a pre-condition for progress in Serbia and the region," it said in a statement.

(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg; Additional reporting by Maja Zuvela in Sarajevo and Ivana Sekularac in Belgrade; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)SOFIA (Reuters) - Washington has asked Bulgaria to extradite five of its citizens to the United States to face charges of exporting aircraft parts to Syria in violation of a U.S. embargo, officials in Sofia said on Thursday.

Bulgaria's chief prosecutor said he would not detain the citizens and the foreign office said it was seeking urgent consultations with Washington over the matter.

Prosecutors detained Zhelyaz Andreev, 29, following the U.S. request last week, but a regional court ruled on Wednesday that he should be released and banned him from leaving Sofia for 60 days until an extradition hearing.

Andreev worked in the Bulgarian office of Miami-based AW-Tronics, which shaped and exported aircraft parts and equipment to Syrian Aran Airlines, which the United States has placed on an embargo list.

Chief prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov said his office on Thursday received four more identical extradition requests for four other Bulgarians but he has decided not to pursue their detention, following the court's ruling on Andreev.

Andreev told the private Nova TV channel on Thursday he held a junior position at the company, which he joined in May 2013, and his managers asked him to execute deals between September 2013 and March 2016.

He said he was unaware at the time that he may have done anything wrong.

Dozens of Bulgarians holding "Justice for Zhelyaz" banners, gathered in the capital Sofia. A protest against Andreev's extradition was also held in the northeastern town of Dobrich.

"I would like to thank all these people for their support," Andreev told the protesters. "The court's decision (to release him from custody on Wednesday) is a small victory."

Bulgarian foreign ministry said in a statement it was urgently trying to clarify the situation.

Deputy foreign minister Yuri Sterk has sought a meeting with the U.S. ambassador to Sofia, while Bulgaria's envoy to Washington has asked for an urgent meeting with the State Department.

Bulgaria's justice ministry has also said it had sought consultations with the U.S. Department of Justice over the requests, hoping they would lead to "timely and successful solution of the concrete cases... as well as the defence of the rights of the Bulgarian citizens."

(Reporting by Tsvetelia Tsolova and Angel Krasimirov; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)Hundreds of people gathered in the Western Australian city of Perth on Wednesday to beg for persecuted white South African farmers to be given humanitarian visas.

Activists have been lobbying for months for white South African farmers to be allowed to live and work in Australia because the government in Pretoria is considering whether to expropriate their farmland without offering compensation. The move is meant to address the countrys longstanding racial disparities.

We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land, Julius Malema, leader of South Africas radical left Economic Freedom Fighters party, told parliament when he proposed the amendment to the countrys constitution. Malema was referring to the descendants of Dutch and German farmers who still own the land of their predecessors. Over two decades after apartheid ended in South Africa, most of the country's profitable farmland is still owned by white farmers.

Trending: LeBron Wants to Pass Like Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers

South Africa's new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has suggested that he plans to fast-track the transfer of land from white to black owners. The motion to take land from white South African farmers, known as Boers or Afrikaners, still needs to be approved by the South African Parliament's Constitutional Review Committee.

Australia has a large South African community, and many of these expats and immigrants have vocally complained that their relatives are being abused in South Africa. Some have suggested that South Africas government has sanctioned attacks on white South Africans.

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Officials in Australia have said that their countrys immigration system is flexible and that a number of options are being considered for the South Africans. Some politicians have floated the idea that Australia should take in around 10,000 South African farmers as refugees.

Story continues

The treatment of white South African farmers has been a hot-button issue in Australia ever since Minister Peter Dutton, a liberal member of the House of Representatives who controls immigration policy, said in March that the persecuted farmers deserve the protection of a civilized country, a comment that enraged politicians in South Africa. Some observers have also accused Dutton of racism for prioritizing white farmers over other refugees.

Meanwhile, some advocates have also started calling for President Donald Trump or the European Union to allow white South African farmers to move to the U.S. or European countries. Around 12,000 people signed a petition in March calling on Trump to enact emergency measures that would allow white South Africans to come to the U.S. as refugees. A similar petition addressed to European leaders obtained around 17,000 signatures.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekCabinet propels school education campaign

The governments drive to include children denied school education across the country has gathered momentum.Microsaic Systems saw its share price soar on Thursday as the company signed a heads of terms agreement with German's Knauer Wissenschaftliche Gerate over the AIM company's mass spectrometry technology.

The agreement concerns the integration of Microsaics mass spectrometry technology into Knauers liquid chromatography platform with the finished products to be sold on the German market via Knauers existing distribution network.

Glenn Tracey, chief executive of Microsaic, said: We are delighted to be working in partnership with Knauer, which is well known for product quality, breadth of applications' expertise, and commitment to customer quality. Integrating with our compact MS technology will enable Knauer to extend its reach into mass directed applications, where customers demand higher chemical elucidation.

Microsaic seeks to allow for agile sample detection and identification with its mass spectrometry technology through providing detailed sample data to improve decision making ability and productivity. Mass spectrometry is used to quantify materials, identify compounds within a sample and to understand the structure and chemical properties of different molecules, used in biology, chemistry, and physics, but also in clinical medicine and even space exploration.

Alexandra Knauer, chief executive of Knauer, said: Our customers in the field of liquid chromatography purification increasingly demand more confidence in fractionation than UltraViolet or Diode Array Detection based setups can provide. Microsaic offers an attractive MS detection system, which will perfectly complement our existing LC purification solutions.

As of 0846 BST, Microsaic Systems shares were up 68.57% at 2.95p.AIM-quoted exploration and production firm SDX Energy has discovered gas at its Ibn Yunus-1X exploration well in Egypt.

SDX encountered the 100.8 feet of net conventional natural gas pay with an average porosity of 28.5% after it drilled to a total depth of 9068 feet in the Abu Madi horizon.

The London-based group will shortly complete the well as a producer in the Abu Madi section, with testing to follow 30 and 45 days after the drilling rig has been moved off location, depending on the availability of testing equipment.

After a successful test, SDX intends to connect the well to its infrastructure, located adjacent to the original SDX discovery in the basin, SD-1X, where production start-up is anticipated in the second half of 2018.

Paul Welch, president and chief executive of SDX, said, "This highly positive drilling result further demonstrates the very significant natural gas potential the licence holds. Combined, these two successful wells confirm our views of the subsurface geology and demonstrate that we are on course to realise the full potential of the licence."

SDX holds a 55% interest in the Ibn Yunus-1X exploration well at South Disouq.

As of 0920 BST, shares had picked up 2.09% to 49.77p.Global trade and geopolitical concerns will likely continue to dominate the headlines at the end of the week, with traders likely to be carefully monitoring the news-flow heading into the weekend.

Against that backdrop, Chinese foreign trade figures for the month of March are scheduled for release overnight.

They will be supplemented later in the session by the preliminary results of the University of Michigan's US consumer confidence survey for the month of April.

Back in the euro area, the spotlight will be on final readings on consumer prices in Germany and Spain for the month of March.

On the company front, no results or trading updates were expected from FTSE 350 companies.

Neither were any major economic releases scheduled for release in the UK on Friday.

Friday 13 April

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RMBitcoin climbed back atop the $8,000 mark early on Thursday morning, running up by double digits in a less than 30 minute time span. It is currently up 11.17% trading at $7,724.

Having reached ($8,055.2), it was last at ($8,055.2).

It was the first time the crypto-currency had reached that level since 26 March, having traded in a range of between roughly $6,500 and $7,000 for over the past two weeks.

The move was also the largest price swing on record since 6 February, when the crypto-currency jumped from its 2018 low of $5,947.40 to $7,700.39 in one day.

To take note of, analysts at Barclays Research recently said that financial and economic theory give no guidance for fundamental valuation or expected price behaviour of crypto-currencies.

"Combined with the results of our theoretical modelling, survey findings suggest that, unlike the peaks in Bitcoin prices in 2011 and 2013, the most recent peak may have been the ultimate top and that speculative interest could decrease from here," analysts said.

Nevertheless, and on Thursday's unexpected surge, London Capital Group's Jasper Lawler said: "The price of Bitcoin surged double digits to break back over $8000. The renewed interest in cryptos might relate to the need for wealthy Russians and Chinese under pressure from new sanctions and tariffs to covertly send money overseas. Bitcoins price surge could well be enough to capture the imagination of traders in what is still a very speculative market."

Naeem Aslam, analyst at Think Coin also believes the sentiment has been improving in the crypto-currency market for the last few days: "This can easily be seen by looking at the number of positive headlines in the Blockchain space. Rating agencies have also started to become a supporter of blockchain technology, and remember Bitcoin is the religion when it comes to the blockchain."

Regarding the sudden price movement on Thursday, he added: "We have seen consolidation for the price for the last two days and when such patterns break, it usually explodes."The FTSE 100 was called to open 17 points lower at 7,240.

London Capital Group analyst Jasper Lawler said: "The chance of hot war in Syria with opposing sides backed by the US and Russia has understandably left investors cold. Wall Street closed lower with the Dow losing over 200 points as investors moved into government bonds as a haven. The increased likelihood of supply disruptions during any missile strike saw the price of oil reach its highest since November 2014. Both Brent and WTI crude contracts have breached significant resistance levels, indicating a new breakout trend could be emerging."

UK Prime Minister Theresa May has summoned the cabinet to discuss the governments response to the suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria and according to press reports, the meeting is likely to lead to a backing of US-led intervention.

May had already said that "all the indications" were that the Syrian regime of president Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the attack.

Investors will also be digesting the release of the latest Federal Reserve minutes late on Wednesday, which showed US central bankers were more confident on the economic outlook when they last met to decide on policy, with several of the belief that at some point in about two years' time rates would need to rise above their normal longer-run value.

There was little of note due on the UK macro front, with only the Bank of England Credit Conditions Survey at 0930 BST.

In corporate news, Intertek Group said it has agreed to buy Proasem, a provider of laboratory testing, inspection, metrology and training services, based in Colombia, for an undisclosed sum.

Proasem employs 190 people and in 2017 generated revenues of 4.5m, Intertek said. The deal is expected to complete in the next four weeks.

Countryside Properties has acquired Leicester-based partnerships housebuilder Westleigh for up to 135.4m in cash on debt free and cash free basis.

The deal, which is funded from existing cash balances and borrowing facilities, is expected to deliver high single digit accretion from the first full year of ownership.

LondonMetric Property announced the disposal of four distribution and two industrial warehouses for 36m on Thursday, reflecting a blended net initial yield of 5.9%.

The company said the properties were amongst the oldest within the LondonMetric portfolio, and were located in the Midlands and North of England, with a weighted average unexpired lease term to first break of 5.3 years.

Gambling technology company Playtech said it had agreed to buy 70.6% of Italian betting and gaming outfit Snaitech from two major shareholders for 846m.

Playtech added that it would have to make a mandatory takeover offer for the remaining stake in Snaitech after completing the initial purchase.

The deal, will be funded by Playtech's existing cash and new debt.Defence company BAE Systems has launched a 10m investment programme in order to fund upgrades at its Hampshire- based Maritime Integration and Support Centre (MISC) - a specialist facility that provides support to Royal Navy warships when researching its future combat systems and technologies.

Located on Portsdown Hill, Portsmouth, the Type 45 destroyer shaped MISC replicates real-life ship conditions using the same combat system technology found across the Royal Navy's surface fleet, including systems used to track threats, co-ordinate weapons and manage on-deck aircraft movements and enables engineers to develop and test key elements of combat systems before installing them on vessels and, once in service, provide them with through-life support.

BAE Systems' 10m investment will fund its research of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, information and electronic warfare, unmanned vehicles and new weapons.

As a result of the funding, the MISC will receive new facilities including a visualisation suite capable of displaying live tactical data from any Royal Navy warship anywhere in the world, further enhancing warship support.

Richard Williams, BAE's Naval ships combat systems director, said, "The Maritime Integration and Support Centre is a vital facility for ensuring combat systems equipment aboard the Royal Navy's fleet remains at peak operational performance and allows us to continue our work on the combat systems of the future. Our investment will ensure the MISC will build on the success it has enjoyed since opening in 2004 and help us understand how new technologies can be introduced to keep navies safe."Personnel recruiter Hays reported third quarter like-for-like net fee growth of 10%, although Brexit worries continued to dog the UK and Ireland which posted a 2% fall in a subdued market.

At the specialism level in the UK and Ireland, net fees in office support grew 2%, construction and property 1% and IT was flat, while accountancy and finance fell 9%.

Education was down 13%, as it continued to be impacted by tough market conditions, Hays said.

Consultant headcount in the division was down 1% in the quarter and flat year-on-year, it added.

UK companies have become more cautious about recruiting in the wake of Britain's decision in 2016 to leave the European Union.

There was strong growth in Germany, which makes up 27% of net fees, with gross income up of 16% despite increasingly tough comparatives, Hays said.

Hays rest of world division, which includes 28 markets, delivered net fee growth of 15%, with 17 markets growing by more than 10%, the company said.

Chief executive Alistair Cox said the company remained positive in the vast majority of our markets.

We continue to look to the future, including our five-year plan to broadly double profits by 2022, with confidence," he said.IP Group said on Thursday that its portfolio company, Enterprise Therapeutics, has announced a 29m fundraising.

Enterprise Therapeutics, which entered the IP Group portfolio following the combination with Touchstone Innovations, is developing muco-regulatory therapies to treat patients with respiratory diseases of high unmet medical need, where mucus obstruction reduces lung function, leading to difficulty in breathing and recurrent lung infections.

The oversubscribed financing was co-led by Versant Ventures and Novartis Venture Fund with funding from new investor Forbion and existing shareholders Epidarex Capital and IP Group.

IP has committed to invest 4.7m of the round, which is tranched and subject to the achievement of certain milestones. It has invested 2.5m in the first tranche of the fundraising.

The investment will fund Enterprise's drug discovery pipeline of muco-regulatory therapies into clinical development.

At 1245 BST, IP shares were up 2.1% to 129.60p.Trump warns 'missiles are coming' after alleged chemical attack

Syrian government forces have taken control of the city of Douma from rebels forces, Interfax reported citing the Russian Defense Ministry.

A significant event in Syria's history took place today. The state flag hoisted over a building in Douma signifies control over this populated locality and Eastern Ghouta as a whole, Major-General Yury Yevtushenko told reporters.

The ministry also said that 250 hostages held by the rebels were freed in the operation.

The area of Eastern Ghouta has been under siege by the Syrian government since 2013 and subject to relentless bombing since February 2018.

The latest strike occured on Saturday, where the suburb of Douma suffered a chemical attack with 500 people showing symptoms of being poisoned and having trouble to breathe. On Sunday, the rebel fighters agreed to hand over the area to the government.

Although Assads government and his Russian allies denied using chemical weapons, the US administration firmly believes they are to blame.

US President Donald Trump warned Russia on Wednesday of imminent military action in Syria in response to the suspected poison gas attack. He used Twitter to warn missiles will be coming.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May summoned an emergency cabinet meeting for Thursday and announced she does not rule out committing the UK to join coordinated military action with the US in Syria.

Oil prices increased as tensions in the Middle East increased. The price of Brent crude rose to $73, levels not seen since 2014.

Oil markets have already priced in the threat of disruption to supplies, Brent crude spiking above $73 a barrel for the first time since 2014. Even without Syria, there is plenty to underpin oil prices right now, not least missiles from Yemen targeting Saudi Arabia and possible US sanctions against key producer Iran over its nuclear programme, said Lee Wild, head of equity strategy at Interactive Investor.Close to 87 million people will be seeing a message at the top of their Facebook feed beginning on Monday, April 10, 2018, informing them that their private data information has been obtained illegally by Cambridge Analytica. To make matters worse, Cambridge Analytica is not the only company who picked up on this idea.

How was private information received?

Those personality quizzes, IQ tests, and which Disney princess you resemble tests, all require you to give them permission to your Facebook profile, friends, likes, and any other information that resembles who you are as a person.

If you or your friends ever participated in any of these quizzes, there is a great chance your personality traits have been cataloged and monetized by political operatives around the world.

This is exactly how personal data was illegally stolen from third-party groups. Facebook has recently banned CubeYou and AggregateIQ from using or having access to Facebook period. According to Gizmodo, AggregateIQ is under investigation with the Canadian government. Because of all this ruckus, Facebook has caused, many major companies are deleting their advertisements with Facebook such as the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, Tesla and SpaceX, and even Playboy has started to follow the same footsteps.

If your information was illegally taken by any of the companies through Facebook, Gizmodo claims you will see a message at the top of your news feed.

Cambridge Analytica fails to take the blame

Cambridge Analytica fails to take the full blame for the breach of personal data and puts it off on a psychology professor, Aleksandr Kogan, who taught at Cambridge University, and was able to create the app This Is Your Digital Life which gave Kogan authorized access to 270,000 profiles which contained private information.

While we learn of how companies are stealing our private data information, now is the time to go through your Facebook settings and update your security. Delete the access to the apps you no longer use. Protect yourself.

Mark Zuckerberg is having to attend court in front of the Senate Judiciary this week but yet fails to testify in London to satisfy the British government.

Zuckerberg has hired Reginald Brown, a former advisor to President Bush, as his legal counsel. It will be interesting to find out how Zuckerberg plans to protect his company and his users' privacy after getting everything straightened out, legally.Call to accelerate drafting of all Acts

The Parliament Secretariat has urged the government to complete drafting all Acts that the House has to endorse, latest by February next year, to implement fully the Constitution of Nepal.After the Cambridge Analytica data breach, Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to Capitol Hill. Facebook's CEO on Wednesday, faced a second day of questioning over the company's role in the data leak and to explain how 87 million Facebook users data was harvested by a third party.

The world's largest social network, Facebook, had Zuckerberg testify before the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees. There he answered all questions related to privacy stemming from the harvested data by the firm, Cambridge Analytica.

1) Zuckerberg explained to senators where Facebook was created

According to Newsweek, the exchanges between Facebook's founder and the senators seemed rehearsed. In other words, the whole thing was synonymous to a sound bite.

Zuckerberg went into great detail about the company beginnings. In addition, he repeated on multiple occasions that Facebook started out in his dorm room in Harvard. While telling the story of Facebook, Democratic Senator Gary Peters from Michigan made fun of it.

2) The Mueller special counsel has reached out to Facebook

The American presidential campaign in 2016 was unprecedented. The rise of misinformation through social networks like Facebook was problematic. Furthermore, the alleged Russian interference in the election led to Facebook being interviewed by special counsel.

Zuckerberg said during the hearing that the company had been contacted by special counsel Robert Mueller about the potential meddling by a foreign power.

3) A paid Facebook version may be in the works

As the above report mentioned Zuckerberg said on two occasions Facebook will always be free. However, it's possible that the social network may offer upgrades for certain privileges or maybe create a version of Facebook that features no advertising.

4) Senator Ted Cruz exposed Facebook's political affiliations

The Texas Republican senator, during his interrogation, stated some pointed remarks towards Zuckerberg. Cruz did not just make subtle hints but accused Facebook of being a biased platform against conservatives.

Cruz backed up his claims b saying that Facebook had shut down a number of conservative pages.

Among them, he mentioned Chik-Fil-A Appreciation Day, a Fox News Reporter, several Catholic pages and supporters of the president.

5) Facebook's CEO believes data is still safe with his platform

The data scandal by Cambridge Analytica brought to light problems with safeguarding private information. As we know the data firm harvested information from over 87 million. When Zuckerberg was asked by Senator Dean Heller if he believed the data from millions of Americans were safer with them than the federal government he had a long pause. He responded with a "yes" answer.Dean Unglert and Lesley Murphy seemed like a great couple. They got together during "Bachelor: Winter Games" and even though Dean didn't offer up a proposal at the end, they stayed together if only for a short time.

Dean joined Bachelor Nation when he tried to win Rachel Lindsay's heart on the most recent season of "The Bachelorette." He gained even more notoriety when he tried to juggle two women on "Bachelor In Paradise" soon after. Fans thought he may be settling down when Dean and Lesley hooked up. It turns out that isn't the case.

Dean explains

On Sunday, Dean Unglert posted a new photo on Instagram. In it, he's looking wistful. In the caption, Dean reveals that he and Lesley have broken up. Dean takes a moment to get philosophical, waxing poetic about how love is something that everyone deserves but not something that we're entitled to. He goes on to explain just how much work it can take in order to maintain a relationship. Then, as if he hasn't spent nearly the last year looking for love, Dean makes it clear that he just wasn't ready for a relationship with Lesley Murphy.

Dean never actually explains why he and Lesley decided to end their short romance aside from not being ready. Obviously, they had chemistry. Sometimes that just isn't enough.

So far there doesn't seem to be any bad blood between Dean and Lesley. If there was they probably wouldn't have posted what at least looks like coordinated break up posts.

Lesley takes a similar approach

The interesting thing about Dean Unglert's Instagram post is that Lesley Murphy posted one that was almost identical just one day later.

Also turned to the side and looking away wistfully (in her case, looking out a window) Lesley also took the time out to explain their recent breakup.

So why did they really split?

Dean Unglert and Lesley Murphy really looked like the perfect match on social media. Dean loves to travel. So does Lesley. They did a lot of traveling together and it looked like they were having a great time.

After the "Bachelor: Winter Games" finale aired on February 22nd, Dean and Lesley continued to be joined at the hip. They posted pictures of together through mid-March and then just stopped. Dean headed to India solo while Lesley spent time in Guatemala, Mexico, and Indonesia without her man.

It doesn't seem like Dean Unglert and Lesley Murphy had a dramatic split since their photos are still posted on social media. However, there is a little hint in Lesley's post that came one day after Dean's that may give us a hint as to why the popular Bachelor Nation couple split.

"Out with the old, in with the true," Lesley wrote after a multi-paragraph explanation. "It was a long winter, and Im excited for a new season."Khloe Kardashian was on top of the world. She finally was becoming a mom and constantly gushed about how great her man was but now we know the truth. Tristan Thompson was busted for cheating on Khloe over the weekend and now, more reports are coming in that claim the Cleveland Cavs player is a serial cheater and that he's been disrespecting Khloe for quite a long time.

After video footage of Tristan getting way too close to women who weren't Khloe came to light, many asked what the "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" star might do. So far, Khloe has remained silent on social media about the heartbreaking story.

She's so close to giving birth to Tristan's baby and the timing of Tristan's cheating to come out is tragic.

Khloe already has a plan

It's no secret that Khloe Kardashian was so in love with Tristan Thompson. Radar Online reports that after learning about what Tristan has been up to, Khloe "never wants to see his face again." That seems fair enough after what he's done. Khloe was finally happy and thought she was with the love of her life.

She feels sick inside, and her biggest dream has turned into her worst nightmare," a source told Radar.

With Khloe so close to giving birth, family and fans have been really worried about her. The insane amount of stress that she's been under could put her into labor early or cause complications.

As it is, Khloe has been waiting around in Cleveland because the plan was to give birth there. Now, all she wants to do is get away from her cheating boyfriend and be with her family in California.

The Radar source revealed that right now, Khloe doesn't know what to do. She is so disgusted with Tristan that she never wants to see him again.

The current plan is to have the baby and then move in with Kris Jenner temporarily until she decides what to do next.

Tristan has done this before

"Keeping Up With The Kardashians" fans didn't forget that it's not the first time Tristan Thompson pulled this dirty dog move. His ex-girlfriend Jordan Craig was pregnant with his son when he met Khloe Kardashian.

It's not clear what the timeline of the breakup with Jordan compared to when he started dating Khloe but it's still suspect and now, he's been caught on film cheating while Khloe carried his second child.

What makes this all so much worse is that Tristan was aware of how much heartbreak Khloe went through with Lamar Odom. She was so ready to commit herself to the man she thought she'd spend forever with and he turned out to be no better.

So far, Khloe hasn't removed any of the photos featuring Tristan from her social media. That doesn't mean she doesn't have a plan though. Right now, all eyes are on Khloe, who really needs her privacy right now. She's likely not making any moves since she's got way bigger issues to deal with... like the birth of their child.The newest member of the Kardashian/Jenner family has arrived! Khloe Kardashian welcomed her first child, a baby girl, on Thursday morning, April 12, and according to a new report, the 33-year-old "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" star allowed her cheating boyfriend, Tristan Thompson, to be present when their child was born.

While Kardashian's main residence is located in Los Angeles, she had been awaiting the birth of her baby girl in Cleveland, Ohio, where Thompson resides, when news of his encounters with other women were revealed. Then, after immediately hoping to leave town and be close to her family, she was reportedly informed that she was unable to travel due to her child's then-impending birth.

Tristan Thompson was caught cheating on Khloe Kardashian with three women

On Tuesday, less than 48 Hours before Khloe Kardashian's first child was born, Tristan Thompson was caught with three different women on two different occasions. During one encounter, in October of last year, Thompson was seen getting frisky with two women at once, one of which made out with him as another allowed him to play with her breasts. During the second encounter, Thompson was caught kissing a woman at a New York City nightclub before taking her back to his hotel.

Khloe Kardashian had family and friends at her side

On April 12, TMZ confirmed the child's birth with readers, revealing that Kardashian had given birth to her baby girl around 4:00 a.m.

this morning at a hospital outside of Cleveland, Ohio, surrounded by her family members, her friends, and her unfaithful partner, Thompson. The outlet revealed that Kris Jenner and two of Kardashian's sisters, Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, were present, as was her longtime best friend, Malika Haqq.

While Haqq has remained silent in regard to the child's birth, and Thompson's alleged cheating, her sister, Khadijah Haqq, seemingly weighed in on Thompson's behavior on her Instagram page.

In a meme on Wednesday, a message read, The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother."

Khloe Kardashian's relationship status remains unknown

Although it seems fairly certain that Khloe Kardashian will not want to continue on with her relationship with Tristan Thompson after the public humiliation she's undergone in recent days, neither party has addressed the situation quite yet.

The name of Khloe Kardashian's baby girl has not yet been revealed.Khloe Kardashian is about to become a mom. Unfortunately, as fans of the longtime reality star have surely heard by now, she's also believed to be newly single after her boyfriend, Tristan Thompson, was allegedly caught cheating with a number of different women in recent months.

Earlier this week, after the 33-year-old "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" star traveled to Cleveland, Ohio to give birth to her first child with the Cleveland Cavaliers player, a number of shocking videos of the athlete hit the web. In one of the videos, Thompson was seen making out and getting frisky with two women at the same time.

According to reports, the clip was taken in October of last year near Washington, D.C. when Kardashian was about three months pregnant.

Khloe Kardashian is expected to give birth early

Following the shocking reveal of the videos on Tuesday, rumors began hitting the web in regard to potential sex tapes and even a pregnancy claim from one of Thompson's other women. Then, on Wednesday, TMZ revealed that Khloe Kardashian had begun having early contractions as her family, including Kris Jenner, rushed to be by her side from their homes in Los Angeles.

On Wednesday, TMZ was informed about the contractions but could not confirm whether they were prompted by the stress Kardashian is likely under since learning of her boyfriend's infidelities.

As the outlet explained, the contractions reportedly began just hours after the videos of Thompson hooking up with numerous women began hitting the web. While Kardashian's due date isn't until the end of the month, TMZ said that it looks like the baby will be arriving sooner rather than later.

Khloe Kardashian's family is flying to Ohio to be with her

On Wednesday, less than 24 hours after Tristan Thompson found himself in the midst of a cheating scandal, Kris Jenner reportedly flew out of Los Angeles and headed to Ohio to be with her daughter as she prepares to give birth. As for the rest of the family, Kim Kardashian and her sisters are expected to fly to Cleveland on Thursday and Friday.

Needless to say, the entire Kardashian family is "extremely upset" about the recent revelations about Tristan Thompson and had no idea he was cheating until Tuesday.

Tristan Thompson is back in Cleveland

Following his recent tryst with a mystery woman in New York City, Thompson and his team traveled from the Big Apple to Cleveland for their latest game. That said, while Kardahian is often in attendance, it's safe to say she will not be showing any support for Thompson anytime soon.Netflix has decided to take its five films out of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival after a new rule was created that states a film is not allowed to compete if it has not been theatrically released. Cannes festival director Thierry Fremaux implemented the rule himself. He allowed Netflix to show their films outside of competition, but Netflix has decided to remove themselves from the festival altogether.

What Netflix's chief has to say

Ted Sarandos, Netflix's Chief Content Officer, did an interview with Variety Magazine. He said: "I don't think it would be good for us to be there" because he feels Netflix's films will be targeted and treated "disrespectfully," especially after the rule was created.

Sarandos wants Netflix's films and filmmakers to be on "fair ground" with other filmmakers, and this rule targeting Netflix makes it extremely hard to do so. Sarandos has decided not to screen the films out-of-competition because he says it doesn't make sense for the streaming powerhouse. Although Netflix won't have any films in the festival, a few other executives will be attending the festival to look for movies to pick up for distribution.

Not the first changes to the festival this year

Fremaux also infamously banned red carpet selfies this year. He said that when people on the red carpet stop to take selfies, it takes up too much time; things become "disorganized" and everything "runs late." In addition to the time constraints, Fremaux also believes that red carpet selfies are "grotesque" and "ridiculous." He hopes that by banning selfies, perhaps some "decency" can be restored to the festival.

Anyone who violates the no-selfie rule will not be allowed in, according to Fremaux.

Are Fremaux's rules too rigid?

Looking at these two rules that come into effect at this year's festival, it's easy to spot one thing: it fights against current technology. A ban against Netflix is a prejudice against streaming services and their ability to create good, meaningful content.

Just this year, Netflix had two movies up for Oscars grabs: "Icarus," which won best documentary, and "Mudbound," which was nominated for best adapted screenplay, cinematography, original song, and supporting actress. In the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Netflix's film "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore" won the jury prize.

With these accolades, Fremaux cannot be banning Netflix from competing because its movies aren't good, but rather, as a marker to stay with the traditional idea that a film must be theatrically released. Sarandos feels that Cannes has "chosen to celebrate distribution rather than the art of cinema."

Although the rule is very new, if the Cannes Film Festival wants to truly have inclusive movies, it will have to change its rigid structure to adapt to the changing world of cinema.Cisco is beefing up its cybersecurity portfolio, adding new enterprise-ready products. The US networking giant is about to receive a big update this week.

The San Jose, California-based company announced plans to combine its Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Stealthwatch, and Tetration into a single integrated data center solution. The goal is to provide a more effective protection for data center workload.

The tech giant claims that it is the only cybersecurity vendor that can protect workloads everywhere.

The planned integrated data center solution will include various capabilities and some major improvements, such as complete data center visibility. With Cisco Tetration, companies will now be able to detect vulnerabilities on servers by using the common vulnerabilities and exposure database. Using Cisco Stealthwatchs threat classifier and machine learning tech, they can now track and pinpoint security breaches much faster.

Tetration gets a major upgrade

First introduced by Cisco in 2017, Tetration system provides companies a more effective way for monitoring and analyzing the data center. Tetration gathers data from hardware and software and then analyze it using big data analytics and machine learning technologies to provide IT managers a birds eye view of the companys data center.

The company recently announced a major update for its Tetration data center analytics platform. It added additional layers of security tools to help IT administrators identify vulnerabilities and manage applications.

This week, Tetration is getting another huge update. The networking giant has added a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) version and virtual deployment option for customers who want to use Tetration platform for smaller deployments.

The newly announced Tetration SaaS is a cloud-based system for cloud-first enterprises. The new SaaS version will allow companies to deploy Tetration system quickly without having to worry about IT infrastructure. Tetration SaaS will be made available by next month.

In addition to Tetration SaaS, Cisco has also added a virtual deployment option for Tetration system.

The newly-introduced Tetration-V is a software-only version using a virtual appliance targeted at smaller deployments. The new system can run on both AWS and Microsoft Azure-powered public cloud deployments. But unlike Tetration SaaS, Tetration-V is now available on the market.

Thousands of Cisco's switches hacked

In other cybersecurity-related stories, around 200,000 Cisco network switches were reportedly hacked last week. The incident affected large internet service providers data center across the world, with hardest hit in Iran, China, Europe, India, Russia and the United States.

According to Bank Info Security, the overall impact of the cyberattack, including data loss, is not yet clear. Until now, it still not clears who carried out such massive cyberattack.Chand Maoist cadres loot ward office in Nawalparasi

Cadres of Netra Bikram Chand-led Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) looted Hupsekot Rural Municipality ward 3 office on Wednesday night.At least 257 people were killed in a military plane crash near an airfield outside the Algerian capital on Wednesday, the media reported.

An Ilyushin I76 troop carrier belonging to the Algerian Air Force crashed in the military airbase of Boufarik in Blida province, Xinhua news agency quoted the Defence Ministry as saying.

Ennahar private television channel said the plane carried over 250 troops and was departing for the southwest province of Bechar, before crashing in an unpopulated green field near the airport.

Footage captured by witnesses showed a huge plume of black smoke billowing from near the runway.

Army Chief of Staff Lt Gen Ahmed Gaid Salah extended condolences to the families of the victims but did not provide a death toll. The cause of the crash was unclear and an investigation was launched, the Defence Ministry said.

Authorities said that 300 fire-fighters equipped with 40 ambulances and 40 fire trucks were at the crash site.Foreign Minister Gyawali set to visit China on April 16

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has started preparing for Foreign Minister Pradip Gyawalis official visit to China that is likely to begin on April 16.Freeport-McMoRan, Inc. engages in the mining of copper, gold and molybdenum. It operates through the following segments: North America Copper Mines, South America Mining; Indonesia Mining, Molybdenum Mines, Rod and Refining, Atlantic Copper Smelting and Refining and Corporate, Other and Eliminations. The North America Copper Mines segment operates open-pit copper mines in Morenci, Bagdad, Safford, Sierrita and Miami in Arizona and Chino and Tyrone in New Mexico. The South America Mining segment includes Cerro Verde in Peru and El Abra in Chile. The Indonesia Mining segment handles the operations of Grasberg minerals district that produces copper concentrate that contains significant quantities of gold and silver. The Molybdenum Mines segment includes the Henderson underground mine and Climax open-pit mine, both in Colorado. The Rod and Refining segment consists of copper conversion facilities located in North America and includes a refinery, rod mills, and a specialty copper products facility. The Atlantic Copper Smelting and Refining segment smelts and refines copper concentrate and markets refined copper and precious metals in slimes. The Corporate, Other and Eliminations segment

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given CGI Group 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 CGI Group wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.For Subscribers Drought emphasizes Missouri river divide for South Dakota ranchers

Ranchers will have to make some tough decisions in the coming weeks, which could include stockpiling hay for the winter or selling calves early.Prithvi Man Shrestha is a political reporter for The Kathmandu Post, covering the governance-related issues including corruption and irregularities in the government machinery. Before joining The Kathmandu Post in 2009, he worked at nepalnews.com and Rising Nepal primarily covering the issues of political and economic affairs for three years.The long-awaited transformation of 12 blighted acres north of Central Avenue near Presbyterian Hospital will begin this summer.

Ground-breaking on two of a half dozen proposed phases of The Highlands development  a highly amenitized 92-unit apartment building and a hotel  is slated for August.

After a challenging year of sorting out grading and utility issues, tearing down derelict housing and coordinating with the ART project, construction crews are ready to roll on the $95 million mixed-used community.

Thats according to Kurt Browning, chief development officer of Titan Development, who provided an overview of the project Wednesday at a luncheon hosted by Commercial Real Estate Women of New Mexico.

These will be the first two out of the block, said Browning, describing a four-story, 92-unit apartment building called The Broadstone Highlands and a Marriott Springhill Suites Hotel. Browning said a Ronald McDonald House also will lease rooms on the third floor of the hotel. The Ronald McDonald House thats close to Albuquerque-area hospitals allows families to access specialized medical treatment by providing a place to stay at little or sometimes no cost.

The whole idea is to create a (future) neighborhood on the order of Nob Hill and EDo, east of Downtown, said Browning, adding that Maestas Development Group and Presbyterian are partners in the enterprise, which also includes builder Alliance Residential.

On the drawing board is a second Broadstone apartment community with 228 units. In the conceptual stages are a food hall called Highland Central Market, other retail tenants and construction of a skybridge linking The Highlands development to Presbyterian.

The build-out is estimated to be completed in the next five years.

Browning said 1,150 construction jobs and 425 permanent jobs will be created for the five-block development.SANTA FE  One of Thomas Fergusons ex-girlfriends said in a courtroom here Wednesday that she was held against her will by a demon for several days in 2014 while Ferguson beat and sexually assaulted her.

The woman addressed Santa Fe District Court Judge T. Glenn Ellington before he sentenced Ferguson, 42  now facing new charges for allegedly torturing and beating to death 13-year-old Jeremiah Valencia in Nambe in November  to serve the rest of a previously suspended multi-year prison for assaulting the woman in 2014.

Ferguson was given the suspended sentence in 2015 and was placed on probation. Last month, Ellington found that Ferguson had absconded from probation, meaning hed been out of contact with probation officers. His sentencing hearing in probation violation case was postponed until Wednesday so his victim could address the court.

In recent weeks, Ferguson was charged with 18 counts in the murder Jeremiah Valencia, the son of Valencias girlfriend whose buried remains were recovered in January. Ferguson has pleaded not guilty in that case.

The judge started Wednesdays hearing by expressing concerns over a lack of continuity and communications from the district attorneys office in Fergusons court proceedings.

While Ferguson was on probation in the 2014 case, he pleaded guilty to battery against a household member in Rio Rancho in July 2016. Ellington was never told about that conviction  an obvious probation violation  and instead a Santa Fe prosecutor told the judge in 2016 that Sandoval County prosecutors had said the Rio Rancho charges against Ferguson wouldnt move forward.

Again, we have a disconnect, Ellington told Chief Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Padgett, the fifth prosecutor to argue various parts of Fergusons case in front of him. Thats an ongoing concern. The concern is that the information the court gets is complete.

A probation violation finding in 2016 could have meant that Ferguson would have been in prison instead of free when Jeremiah Valencia was killed.

Padgett agreed with Ellington on all his points and said her office is coming up with solutions to make sure miscommunications dont continue. We will work to improve the process, she said.

In 2014, Ferguson was charged with criminal sexual penetration, kidnapping, aggravated battery against a household member and interference with communication after the female victim was able to escape from his Santa Fe home after being held there for five days.

He pleaded guilty to kidnapping and aggravated battery against a household member in May 2015 and was sentenced to nine years in prison, but with seven years, seven months and 23 days suspended, and was credited with the time hed served in jail. He was released on June 30, 2015. He will now spend the rest of that sentence with the Department of Corrections, regardless of what happens in the new murder case.

The woman who was assaulted in 2014 said the details what she went through are so bad that she didnt want to recount them in court. She said the windows of the house where she was held were closed and barred, and Ferguson had to clean up the blood around the house after he beat her beyond recognition.

I was with a demon, she said. There was no escape. She said she changed her story at one point because she was scared for her familys safety in case Ferguson didnt go to jail.

Michael Jones, Fergusons attorney, asked the judge to sentence Ferguson based on an absconding violation and not on the new charges Ferguson picked up for allegedly killing Jeremiah Valencia. Mr. Ferguson has some very good qualities, and he does try, Jones said.

Although Ellington said a lot of people in the criminal justice system feel responsible for what happened to Jeremiah  other chances to keep Ferguson behind bars for probation were missed, including when he pleaded guilty to a subsequent domestic violence charge  Ellington sternly told Ferguson that he was the only one to blame. Theres only one person responsible for any of this, and thats you, sir, Ellington said.SANTA FE  Mayor Alan Webber admits mistakes were made when top city management decided to give 37 city employees temporary raises for their additional work in helping to implement a $4.2 million software upgrade in key city departments without telling the City Council.

But he said it was ultimately the right decision, and he promised to take a direct role in seeing to it the project is implemented successfully.

Webber said the root of controversy over the raises, which has roiled city government the past few days, was poor communication.

In this case, the failure was a process failure and a communication flaw, both internal and external. Those arent small things. They matter. And they are things we can and will fix, he wrote in a report handed out to members of the City Council at its meeting on Wednesday. We can and will do better making our work and our inner workings accessible to the people of the City, and the people who work for the City.

But Webber said the raises were a proper way to compensate city employees doing extra work, given other options were to hire temporary employees or hire outside consultants.

Deputy City Manager Renee Martinez recommended the temporary increases of 10 and 15 percent of base salaries for a select group of employees to city manager Brian Snyder, who made the decision to approve them just days prior to Webber being sworn in last month.

The problem was that Webber, outgoing Mayor Javier Gonzales and the City Council were not told about the pay increases, which total nearly $400,000 and were financed from a contingency fund in the software project budget. A report by the Santa Fe New Mexican last week brought the raises to light.

City Councilors reacted strongly during Wednesdays meeting.

Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler said there were clearly opportunities for Martinez to inform the council about the raises when she gave a presentation on the Enterprise Resource Planning and Land Use Modernization Project at a March 28 meeting. The lack of communication is disingenuous, she said, adding that for her it created distrust in city management. I will be on the lookout in the future to turn over every stone.

Councilor Mike Harris agreed that Martinez and Snyder had opportunities to inform council members but didnt. He said he was offended by it. It really cuts to the quick. Im serious. This just does, he said, later adding, Lets move on. We have a lot of work to do, that much is clear and Im prepared to do it. But I have to say, this one rankles.

Webber said another breakdown was that the city didnt do enough to communicate the importance of the project.

Very simply, the city government has not told the people of Santa Fe or the people inside City government how critical this project is, why it is being done, how it will deliver more efficient and effective results  and why it is essential to our future, he wrote in his report. Inside City Hall it has left room for doubt, suspicion, and rumor to take root; outside City Hall, it has allowed Santa Feans to see this as another example of business as usual in the way the City operates.

Webber said from now on he would take a direct and ongoing role in the implementation of the project.

In other action, Snyders contract as city manager, which was due to expire this month, was extended to June 15. Webber said it was important to maintain transitional stability and continuity as the city enters into the budget process.Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  New Mexico revenue collections are continuing to soar after several cash-lean years, prompting Gov. Susana Martinez to assert on Wednesday that efforts to grow and diversify the states economy are paying off.

As we keep up the fight to reform our tax code, make our economy more competitive for jobs and investment  and veto every tax increase  our economy is growing and families and businesses are taking home more money to grow, save, and invest for the future, the two-term Republican governor said.

Overall revenue for the current budget year was up through January by $672 million  or about 13 percent  over the same time period a year ago, according to state Taxation and Revenue Department figures.

The numbers, which include both state and local government revenue collections through the first seven months of the budget year, show a recent growth in both personal and corporate income tax revenue, among other sources.

However, roughly 70 percent of the states revenue uptick is due to a surge in oil production in southeast New Mexico, according to the Legislative Finance Committee. The LFC also pointed out local governments, including Albuquerque and Santa Fe County, recently approved increases in their gross receipts tax rates.

Meanwhile, an influential lawmaker said the governors claim of broad economic prosperity might be premature.

Were still heavily, heavily reliant on the fossil fuel industry in the state of New Mexico, said Senate Finance Committee Chairman John Arthur Smith, a Deming Democrat. Were on the roller coaster of oil and gas.

Smith also suggested that Martinez, who is barred from seeking a third consecutive term as governor, might be trying to bolster her legacy in her final year in office.

The governor has pushed for an overhaul of New Mexicos tax code, favoring a plan to reduce the gross receipts tax base rate by eliminating dozens of allowable exemptions and deductions. But that plan has failed to gain traction in the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

Instead, Martinez last year vetoed a $350 million tax increase package the Legislature had approved to help plug a gaping budget hole. Lawmakers ended up enacting sweeping budget cuts and depleted the states cash reserves to balance the budget.

Since then, the states revenue outlook has improved dramatically and cash reserves have been largely replenished. The state is projected to have roughly $612 million in reserves when the new budget year starts in July.

The turnaround has been largely driven by a Permian Basin boom. New Mexico now ranks third nationally in oil production, and the bulk of the increase in state gross receipts tax collections has been due to activity in three energy-rich counties  Lea, Eddy and San Juan.

James Jimenez, the executive director of New Mexico Voices for Children, a nonprofit group thats advocated for more state spending on early childhood programs, said New Mexico faces stark challenges such as high unemployment and poverty rates despite the recent revenue rebound.

Less than one year ago, lawmakers were scrambling to pay for basic services like schools, roads and public safety, said Jimenez, who previously worked as chief of staff for former Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson.

New Mexico has become too reliant on the oil and gas industry to fund these services, which has created boom-or-bust cycles for our economy and, therefore, for all New Mexicans, he added. Right now were in a boom time, but we mustnt forget that the bust times may be right around the corner.

A report last year from the Pew Charitable Trusts ranked New Mexico as the seventh-highest state in terms of revenue volatility  Alaska ranked the highest, and South Dakota the lowest  over a recent 20-year period.With thousands of young people on the march, women activated by the #Me Too movement, and a new crop of candidates for state elections, this years elections could be an indication of our states appetite for reforming a system that my organization, Common Cause New Mexico, has often found wanting.

Common Cause is a non-partisan organization that does not endorse candidates, but like all ordinary citizens, we have a vested interest in a functioning democratic system which represents the voices of everyday people. Weve been focused on controlling the influence of big money and special interests on elections and the decision-making process, guaranteeing access for qualified voters, and holding our representatives to high ethical standards. We think its what democracy looks like.

This year we asked some different questions in our annual poll and found a few reasons to be optimistic.

First, the poll, taken by Research and Polling Inc. in January, found that only 24 percent of the 452 voters sampled felt New Mexico was on the right track, a much higher level of discontent than in the 2014 elections. It also showed an appetite for reforms never before taken seriously  things like paying legislators, which 54 percent support, and lengthening the legislative sessions, which 65 percent want to do. And along with the usual high level of support for things like transparency for PAC, lobbyist and campaign activities, there was something new  60 percent of respondents said that they would be more likely to support candidates who push for campaign reforms like these.

That gives us reason to hope. Campaign finance has never been a flashy issue. Its rarely mentioned in debates. But we think its foundational to a functioning democracy. Everyone deserves to have their own voice heard in decisions affecting their families, and to also know who is behind the curtain affecting the outcome.

With these poll results, we now think the public is listening, too.

This month were shouting our priorities from the rooftops, and circulating our pro-democracy agenda to candidates and political organizations of all stripes. According to polling data  our own and others  many of these issues have had the overwhelming support of voters for years, but they always have great difficulty crossing the finishing line.

Heres a sampling of what we think a pro-democracy agenda looks like:

 Online and automatic voter registration to allow people to vote easily.

 Open primaries to allow decline-to-state and independent voters to participate in primaries.

 An independent, non-partisan ethics commission to make sure elected officials, lobbyists and contractors play by the rules.

 Maintenance of state campaign contribution limits to stem the tide of big money in state elections.

 Disclosure of all political contributions and expenditures from lobbyists, PACs and candidates, in accordance with the constitution.

 Citizen-funded elections using small-donor public financing, which matches small citizen contributions with public funds to enable ordinary people to participate meaningfully and curb special interests and wealthy donors.

 Complete disclosure of activities, contributions and expenditures of lobbyists aimed at influencing the policy-making process.

 A two-year waiting period before lawmakers can become lobbyists.

 An independent, non-partisan redistricting commission to ensure competitive, fair elections where every vote counts equally and the outcome is not rigged by maps drawn to maximize partisan or incumbent advantage.

Voters need to know whether candidates running for office in New Mexico support these common-sense measures. At Common Cause New Mexico, we consider them buttresses to strengthen the pillars of our democracy  fair and equal representation of qualified voters, honest and accountable public officials, and a transparent government. The only way to find out is to ask them at the next candidate forum, fundraiser or community event.

Complete results of Common Cause New Mexicos 2018 poll can be found at http://www.commoncause.org/states/new-mexico/research-and-reports/2018-polling.pdf .

Viki Harrison is the executive director of Common Cause New Mexico, a nonpartisan grassroots organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy.LOS ANGELES  Dreamer Marco Villada Garibay left the country on the U.S. governments promise of a possible green card. Now hes trapped in Mexico and might never be allowed to return.

Villada, 34, came to the United States  the only country he knows  illegally from Mexico at age 6. This is where he went to school; where he worked and paid taxes; and, most significantly, where he met his husband, Israel Serrato.

From the beginning, Villada says, I knew that Israel was my home, that thats where I belong.

In 2013, Villada received protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. This was a huge relief to the couple. Among other things, it meant Villada could work lawfully  as a legal assistant at a Los Angeles-area firm. And he could do simple things, such as drive to the supermarket, without fear of being detained.

DACA gave them hope for a life of security together. So, too, did the Supreme Courts affirmation of gay couples right to wed. Just six months after the landmark Obergefell decision, they got married. They began planning a family and all the other things that blissful newlyweds engage in. They also had one critical, additional task: making Villadas immigration status permanent.

DACA, after all, was a temporary fix whose future was uncertain. Under U.S. law, citizens such as Serrato can sponsor spouses for green cards  a process that requires the immigrant spouse to return to his or her birth country to apply through a U.S. Consulate there.

Leaving the country is risky, though. Normally if youve spent more than six months here unlawfully and you leave, youre barred from coming back for years. Sometimes forever.

In select cases, such immigrants can get waivers if they can prove their absence would cause their family extreme hardship. Which Villada had no problem demonstrating, given the emotional and financial support he provides to his family in the United States.

Working with an immigration attorney, Villada applied for, and received, a provisional unlawful presence waiver. This basically said the government determined that he met the qualifications and that he should feel free to go to Mexico for a consular interview.

The couple planned a two-week trip to Ciudad Juarez in January, which they mostly viewed as a formality. Still, it was significant: When he left the country, Villadas DACA protections, which had been scheduled to last through 2019, automatically terminated.

Things didnt go according to plan.

The consular official interviewing Villada kept leaving the room and returning. At the end, she gave him a blue paper saying his application for a visa was denied  and that he could not return to the United States for at least a decade, if at all.

Villada and Serrato had planned a dinner celebration that night. Instead, they went to their hotel and held each other, sobbing, for hours. A few days later, Serrato returned to L.A., alone.

One of their new lawyers, Stacy Tolchin, said she has gotten a lot of calls lately like this one: from immigrants who left the country after receiving provisional waivers, only to be told at their consular interview that  oops!  the government found something disqualifying them from returning to the United States after all. The State Department told me it cannot comment on specific cases because visa records are confidential under U.S. law.

In Villadas case, the consulate told him, hed been disqualified by a short trip he took in 2000, at 17, to Mexico to attend his grandfathers funeral. The consulate said the problem was that he entered the country without inspection a second time. But Villada had already disclosed this trip to the government when he applied for that provisional waiver. Plus his lawyers argue that because an immigration official had looked at his school I.D. and waved him through, he didnt enter the country illegally according to recent case law.

Tolchin and co-counsels from the National Immigration Law Center and the firm Mayer Brown plan to file a federal suit challenging the consulates decision.

Meanwhile, Villada is crashing with relatives whom he barely knows. Things are not much better back home in L.A.

Without a second income and crushed by the weight of their prior legal bills, Serrato was forced to sell their furniture and move in with a friend. Villadas mother and U.S. citizen siblings  one of whom is about to deploy to Iraq  face the fallout, too. Villada had been helping provide financial support and care for his 7-year-old brother, who has autism.

We are all victims of this unjust decision, Serrato says. He belongs here. He belongs here with me.

Catherine Rampells email address is crampell@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @crampell. (c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group.Spaceport America  and in turn, New Mexico taxpayers  got some much-needed good news last week.

The oft-criticized $225 million Gov. Bill Richardson-era investment near Truth or Consequences in recent years has found itself on the outside looking in as uber capitalists Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos trumpeted successes in their privately funded efforts to launch into space from locations in Texas and Florida.

Thats been a depressing experience for New Mexico fans of Spaceport America, which once was the clear leader in the private space race courtesy of its primary tenant, Sir Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic.

That was before a tragic 2014 accident grounded the companys test flights for four years  allowing Bezos and Musk to grab the spotlight.

Spaceport America, meanwhile, has plugged along with many doubting it would ever be much more than an occasional rocket launch destination and an interesting venue for commercials and wedding photos. After all, whats a spaceport without spacecraft?

But all that may have changed last week, courtesy of a launch from Virgin Galactics testing facility in Californias Mojave Desert. The company launched its first rocket-powered space flight in four years; the Unity spacecraft reached supersonic speeds before landing safely.

Virgin Galactics larger WhiteKnightTwo carried the rocket-powered aeriel vehicle to an altitude of 46,500 feet before it was released. Unitys rocket engine then burned for 30 seconds in what Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides called a great day for our team and for the state of New Mexico as well.

The successful test means Virgin Galactic is closer to moving operations to Spaceport America, where its lease will increase from $1 million to $3 million this year and plans are in the works to grow the New Mexico staff from 30 to 100. There are challenges and risks, to be sure, but these developments have the potential to put New Mexico at the forefront of a new future in travel  one that could put any city in the world an hour or two away.

Virgin Galactic already has sold more than 600 tickets for thrill seekers who want to fly to the edge of space before gliding back to our planets surface.

The swashbuckling Branson tweeted last week after the flight that space feels tantalizingly close now.

Indeed.

So, perhaps, does a successful future for Spaceport America.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.BEIJING  Chinas government on Thursday denied President Xi Jinpings promise of market-opening measures this week was aimed at settling a tariff dispute with Washington and said negotiations are impossible under unilateral coercion by the United States.

A commerce ministry spokesman, Gao Feng, complained U.S. President Donald Trumps government has shown no sincerity, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Gao said the two sides have yet to start negotiations.

Gao repeated complaints that Trump acted improperly when he responded to Beijings protest over his plan to raise tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods by saying he might add another $100 billion of imports to the list.

Under unilateral coercion, it is impossible for the Chinese side to conduct any negotiations, Gao was paraphrased as saying.

Trumps proposed tariff hike was a response to complaints Beijing steals or pressures foreign companies to hand over technology. China has responded with its own $50 billion list of U.S. goods for retaliation if Washington goes ahead with the increase.

Gao denied Xi was making an overture to Washington when he announced plans in a speech Tuesday to cut import duties on autos, ease restrictions on foreign ownership in Chinas auto industry and make other market-opening changes.

Share prices of global automakers rose on investor hopes their China operations, while some economists said the positive tone of Xis comments might provide a basis for talks with Washington.

The measures to increase opening announced by China are a major decision to open to the outside and have nothing to do with Chinese-U.S. trade frictions, Gao was paraphrased as saying.MILWAUKEE  Newspaper publishers across the U.S. already strapped by years of declining revenue say theyre dealing with an existential threat: Recently imposed tariffs on Canadian newsprint driving up their business costs.

The tariffs are a response to a complaint to the U.S. Department of Commerce from a hedge fund-owned paper producer in Washington state, which argues that its Canadian competitors are taking advantage of government subsidies to sell their product at unfairly low prices. The tariffs, imposed in January and increased in March, are not permanent yet. But newspaper publishers are bracing for another blow to an industry that has shrunk with the loss of advertising revenue to the internet.

Critics of the paper tariffs say the businesses that will ultimately be harmed are not Canadian paper producers, but U.S. newspapers that will have to cut staff and reduce publication days to afford higher prices of newsprint  the sheets newspapers are printed on. The newspaper industry employs just over 150,000 Americans, which is about 276,000, or 65 percent, fewer than two decades ago.

To get an unbudgeted increase of this magnitude will be for many publishers very, very serious to catastrophic, said Tom Slaughter, the executive director of the Inland Press Association, which represents about 1,500 daily and non-daily newspapers in every state.

A large metro newspaper can expect annual increases of about $3 million in printing costs, according to Paul Boyle, senior vice president for the News Media Alliance. While larger papers might be able to survive the increase, Boyle said smaller publications might not.

Ive heard from small publishers whove said, Im worried about shutting my doors,' he said.

Boyle said his organization  formerly called the Newspaper Association of America  is compiling a survey from its member and nearly every publisher is exploring layoffs and scaling back news coverage.

Steve Stewart, publisher of The State Journal in Frankfort, Kentucky, told readers in a March 30 column that the newspaper they were reading cost 10 percent more to produce than a few weeks earlier and could cost as much as 40 percent more in a few months. He said this will result in fewer pages, higher subscription costs and less non-local content.

The newsprint tariffs reflect President Donald Trumps tough new approach to U.S. trade relations. Trump is engaged in a tense standoff with China over Beijings sharp-elbowed attempts to gain access to U.S. technology. Hes trying to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. And his administration has wrangled with Canada directly over low-priced Canadian timber imports, Canadian barriers to U.S. dairy farmers, and now cheap Canadian newsprint.

The International Trade Commission is expected to make a final determination on the tariffs in August or September.

Canadian newsprint producers began paying an average of 6.53 percent more to export their products to the U.S. in January, when the Commerce Department concluded that would help offset the foreign paper mills advantage over American companies. In March, the department increased the cost by another 22 percent after its preliminary investigation concluded that one Canadian company, British Columbia-based Catalyst, was underselling the uncoated groundwood paper newspapers use by that much less.

In response to the second increase, Catalyst said the tariff was without merit and that it will continue to vigorously defend itself against an unwarranted and onerous U.S. trade action.

The North Pacific Paper Company, which New York hedge fund One Rock Capital Partners bought in 2016, petitioned for the tariffs, arguing that Canadian companies had an unfair advantage. NORPAC, which employs about 300 people, is the only U.S. paper producer making that argument.

While our company understands the concerns recently surfaced by some newspaper publishers, which also face a challenging marketplace, we strongly disagree with the notion that their industry requires low-priced, subsidized newsprint from Canada to sustain their own business model, Craig Annenberg, the CEO of NORPAC, said in a statement. The statement went on to say that high-quality journalism in communities across the country should not depend on unfairly traded inputs that cause material injury to a U.S. industry and American jobs.

The U.S. currently has five operating mills, including NORPAC. Three are in Washington state, with one of them partly owned by a Canadian company. Canada owns the remaining two in Georgia and Mississippi.

Publishers say Canadian imports are not the reason for the decline of U.S.-based paper mills, but rather a 75 percent drop in newsprint consumption over the last two decades. That has led mills to switch to more profitable products such as the boxes Amazon uses for shipping, said Tony Smithson, vice president of printing operations at Bliss Communications, which owns multiple newspapers and radio stations in Wisconsin. The newsprint the company buys all comes from Canada.

Smithson said that even if every paper mill in the U.S. operated at full capacity, they still would only be able to produce about 60 percent of the newsprint consumed in the country. He said that raises another concern: A scarcity of available newsprint if Canadian producers decide to ship to other countries to avoid the new tariffs.

The hidden danger isnt just in the price.  The hidden danger is in availability, he said.

China, for example, doesnt accept mixed-waste paper from the U.S. or elsewhere to produce recycled newsprint, so Chines publishers buy their product from Canada and Chinese demand is high, Boyle said.

Before a final decision on tariffs is made, publishers can still make their case with the International Trade Commission, which has scheduled a hearing on July 17. Boyle said the ITC has the power to reject the tariffs, but Smithson isnt optimistic.

If you think about it politically, once tariffs are in place, theyre essentially permanent, he said. Theres no political capital in making a tariff go away, because then you put a target on yourself that says, Hey, this politician is getting rid of American jobs.'

___

This story has been corrected to reflect that the publisher of The State Journal warned that the tariffs would lead to less non-local news content, not less local content.

___

Follow Ivan Moreno on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ivanjournoWASHINGTON  The Senate on Thursday confirmed a former coal industry lobbyist as the second-highest official at the Environmental Protection Agency, putting him next in line to run the agency if embattled administrator Scott Pruitt is forced out or resigns.

Senators approved Andrew Wheeler as the agencys deputy administrator despite complaints from Democrats that Wheeler helped lead a fight by the coal industry to block regulations that protect Americans health and begin to address climate change.

The Senate confirmed Wheeler Thursday 53-45. Three Democrats  Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia  joined with Republicans to support Wheeler.

Until his nomination by President Donald Trump last fall, Wheeler worked as a lobbyist with a client list that included Murray Energy, one of the nations largest coal mining companies. He accompanied Murray CEO Robert Bob Murray during a series of closed-door meetings to lobby the Trump administration to kill environmental regulations affecting coal mines.

Andrew Wheelers coal credentials are without equal. He is, without question, a member of the coal industrys Hall of Fame, said Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

Sadly, I am concerned that Andrew Wheelers background means that he will never understand that saving coal is not the job of the EPA, Markey added. It is the EPAs job to regulate coal to protect public health and the environment.

Republicans countered that Wheeler, 53, is well-qualified to lead the agency, having worked at the EPA early in his career and serving as Republican staff chief of the Senate Environment Committee before becoming a lobbyist nine years ago.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, chairman of the Senate environment panel, said Wheeler has demonstrated his commitment to sound environmental policies and has exemplified excellence in his professional endeavors, both in government and in the private sector.

In the style of his boss, Trump, Pruitt tweeted his approval soon after the Senate vote.

Let me be the first to congratulate Andrew Wheeler as @EPAs new deputy administrator. Andrew has spent his entire career advancing sound environmental policies & I look forward to working with him to implement President Trumps environmental agenda, Pruitt wrote.

Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico had called for the vote to be delayed while lawmakers review Wheelers credentials, citing Pruitts uncertain status amid damaging ethics disclosures. His request was denied.

The problem with the Wheeler nomination is if (Pruitt) goes tomorrow, Wheeler is in fact the administrator. And thats a very, very serious problem, Udall said Wednesday.

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., said circumstances surrounding Wheeler have changed since the environment panel voted along party lines in February to advance Wheelers nomination. With the cloud over Administrator Pruitt, lawmakers are uncertain if they are voting on Wheeler to lead EPA or be the deputy administrator, Cardin said

Heitkamp, who faces a tough re-election in a state won easily by President Donald Trump, said she is confident Wheeler will be open to working on issues important to North Dakota in a pragmatic and fair way. And Ill hold him accountable to make sure he implements the mission of the EPA in a way that works for my state.

Heitkamp and Manchin, who also faces a tough race in state Trump won easily, broke last year with their partys leaders to vote in favor of confirming Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general aligned with the oil and gas industry. Since arriving at EPA in February 2017, Pruitt has worked relentlessly to scrap, roll back and rewrite pollution regulations opposed by the fossil-fuel industry.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the sole Republican to oppose Pruitt, supported Wheelers nomination. Mr. Wheeler has demonstrated that he understands the mission of the EPA and the role of Congress when it comes to oversight and accountability, she said.

Senators asked Wheeler about the meeting with the Trump administration on behalf of Murray Energy during a November hearing. Wheeler acknowledged he attended but said he couldnt remember any details.

Photos later emerged that showed Wheeler sitting at the table during an undisclosed meeting where Murray handed Energy Secretary Rick Perry a four-page action plan to revive the nations struggling coal industry. The Trump administration later carried out several of the recommended actions.

Like Pruitt, Wheeler has expressed public skepticism about the consensus of climate scientists that the continued burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming.

Environmental groups said the combination of Pruitt and Wheeler could prove devastating to the environment.

Before the Trump administration, it would have been inconceivable that a coal and chemical industry lobbyist with a long history of hostility toward environmental policy would be the No. 2 at EPA, said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Biesecker contributed to this storyNewly-appointed IGPs conferred insignia

Newly-appointed Inspector General of Police (IGP) of Nepal Police and Armed Police Force were conferred insignia on Thursday.WHITERIVER, Ariz.  Over 100 firefighters and other personnel are battling a wildfire burning in a remote area of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests in eastern Arizona.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs says cause of the fire that started Wednesday that has burned approximately 400 acres (162 hectares) of pine and grass by Thursday isnt known.

BIA spokeswoman Candy Lupe says no structures are threatened and that no injuries have been reported.

Four 20-member hotshot crews and two other crews are assigned to the fire, along with water tenders and other equipment.

The BIA says a Type 3 fire management team has been assigned to assume command of the fire Thursday evening.ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  Advocates are pressuring the University of New Mexico to give final approval on a plan to issue Chicano Studies graduate degrees.

Activists recently gathered signatures for petitions to convince the schools Provosts Office to forward the proposal to the Faculty Senate by April 18. That way the university can launch its graduate program next year.

Pamela Cheek, Interim Associate Provost for Curriculum and Assessment, says the office is evaluating the proposals.

Chicana and Chicano Studies became an official department at the school two years ago amid pressure from New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez to get state colleges to cut the number of hours needed to earn a degree.

The University of New Mexicos program is part of a nationwide movement to expand ethnic studies at colleges and in high schools.CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that there is one Tasmanian devil remaining at the ABQ BioPark Zoo.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.  With the death earlier this week of Makayla, the ABQ BioPark Zoo is down to a single Tasmanian devel.

Makayla died in her sleep Tuesday at the ripe old age of 8, exceeding the normal life expectancy of 5 to 6 years, according to zoo officials.

Makayla was among a group of four Tasmanian devils who came to the BioPark from the Healesville Sanctuary in Victoria, Australia, in December 2013.

A fifth member, Mia, joined the zoo in September 2015 but died about a year later from a brain disease.

The ABQ BioPark is one of only a few U.S. facilities chosen to house Tasmanian devils.

Jasper, a male Tasmanian devil, was the first of the original four to die. About a year after arriving he was found dead in his enclosure. A veterinarian-performed necropsy showed that Jasper died from a fractured skull and brain trauma.

A piece of asphalt found nearby led investigators to initially surmise that someone threw the chunk into the enclosure, knocking poor Jasper on the noggin and killing him.

People were outraged. The BioPark Society offered a reward of $6,000, a Corrales woman put up an additional $5,000, and the Crime Stoppers program offered $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of any individuals involved in Jaspers death.

The city of Albuquerque paid $9,000 to a private investigations firm that re-created the crime scene and concluded Jasper likely died when a propped up log in the exhibit space slipped off another log and hit him.

A second male, Sylar, was 5 years old when he died in October 2016 from pneumonia and heart disease, both considered common illnesses in older Tasmanian devils.

That leaves one female: Poppi, who is also 8 years old.

Tasmanian devils are native to the Australian island state of Tasmania. Zoo officials said they are currently in talks with the Australian government to get authorization for more of the animals.

Tasmanian devil populations have been decimated in the wild by a highly contagious cancer, Devil Facial Tumor Disease, or DFTD, which is spread through biting  a normal part of the animals competitive feeding and mating behaviors. There is no treatment or cure for DFTD.

The animals are listed as an endangered species, with no more than 25,000 mature adults remaining in the wild, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.SANTA FE, N.M.  Supporters of gun rights in New Mexico say they will rally outside the state Capitol building this weekend in coordination with demonstrations across the country.

Robert Overton of Sons of Liberty Riders said he and other organizers hope to attract several hundred people at midday Saturday to hear speeches in defense of the constitutional right to bear arms. He says the rally will reflect that individuals who carry firearms are responsible, everyday people.

A group called the National Constitutional Coalition of Patriotic Americans has been spreading word of the gatherings at state capitals across the country.

The rallies come less than three weeks after hundreds of thousands marched in Washington and other U.S. cities to demand tougher gun laws after the February school shooting that killed 17 in Parkland, Florida.MADISON, Wis.  Former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus took himself out of consideration Thursday as a candidate to replace retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan, as other Wisconsin Republicans contemplated whether to join the fray.

Ryan abruptly announced Wednesday that he will not seek re-election in November. Priebus was one of several Republicans from Ryans southeast Wisconsin congressional district floated as a possible candidate. The deadline for candidates to file is June 1, just seven weeks away.

Another potential candidate, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, said he intended to decide by Friday.

Its a once-in-a-generation opportunity, Vos said. Paul Ryan was there for 20 years, you have to think about that.

Priebus, who previously lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but now resides near Washington, D.C., categorically ruled out a run.

Im always interested in serving but the timing for me couldnt be worse, Priebus said on The Jay Weber Show. Its been a massive run politically, but the cost is, of course, you just havent been around.

Priebus was a mainstay in Wisconsin politics for years, running unsuccessfully for state Senate in 2004 and ascending to be state Republican Party chairman in 2007. After overseeing a Republican sweep in the 2010 election  when Scott Walker was first elected governor  Priebus became chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2011, a post he held until he took over as White House chief of staff in January.

He left that role in July and returned to work for his previous law firm.

Being a little separated from the daily political grind has been unbelievable, Priebus said. Ive got to concentrate on my career, building a retirement, all the things that most people listening to this have been doing for 20 or 30 years.

Priebus, Ryan and Walker formed a Wisconsin-centered political powerhouse that included a Walker run for president, Ryans ascendancy as speaker and Priebus rise to work in the White House. Priebus has now returned to the private sector, Ryan is about to join him and Walker must win re-election in November to stay in office.

Other Republicans considering a run in Ryans district in addition to Vos include: state Reps. Tyler August, Samantha Kerkman and Amy Loudenbeck; state Sen. David Craig, a former Ryan aide; and longtime Ryan friend Bryan Steil, an attorney and University of Wisconsin Board of Regents member.

Vos said he had not yet made up his mind.

I have a really good job where we can get a lot of things done versus being a congressman and being there for 20 years, Vos said.

The only declared Republicans so far are Paul Nehlen, who was banned from Twitter earlier this year for a series of posts criticized as racist or anti-Semitic, and Nick Polce, an Army veteran who also co-owns a security consulting firm. Ryans political director Kevin Seifert said Nehlen is not qualified to serve in public office.

Union iron worker Randy Bryce, who goes by the nickname Iron Stache, and Janesville teacher Cathy Myers are running on the Democratic side. Bryce raised $2.1 million in the first three months of the year and Myers raised $500,000. Bryce has raised $4.75 million to date compared with $800,000 for Myers.

___

Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sbauerAP

___

Sign up for the APs weekly newsletter showcasing our best reporting from Texas and the Midwest at http://apne.ws/2u1RMfvATLANTA  Expressing pride in his own record of peace, former President Jimmy Carter warned that President Donald Trump should steer clear of any military action involving Syria or other world hot spots and avoid a nuclear attack at all costs.

I pray that he would keep our country at peace and not exaggerate or exacerbate the challenges that come up with North Korea, in Russia or in Syria, Carter said in an interview Wednesday. I hope he realizes very profoundly as I did, and as other presidents have done, that any nuclear exchange could involve catastrophe for all human beings.

The 93-year-old former president added that even a lesser military attack is a dangerous thing than can spiral out of control.

His remarks come as Trump continues to threaten attacks on Syria in response to a suspected chemical attack on civilians. As recently as Thursday morning, Trump said on social media that an attack would come very soon or not so soon at all. Russia has countered that such a move would have grave repercussions.

Trump has previously had threatening exchanges with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un but now says hes in talks about having a summit with Kim. Carter has for decades advocated that the U.S. deal more directly with the insular communist dictatorship.

Carter made his comments as he touted a new book  Faith: A Journey for All  in an interview that touched on issues from Trump and the economy to disputes within American Christianity. An outspoken Baptist, Carter argues that Americans are experiencing the long erosion not just of spiritual faith but of confidence in public institutions.

A lot of folks have lost faith in the superiority of democracy, Carter told The Associated Press, noting widening wealth disparities, more open discrimination against minorities and immigrants, a political process controlled by money and an endless cycle of wars and international entanglements.

Carter, a Democrat, has been critical of Trump, a Republican, on some fronts, and he said a lot of people have realized they made a mistake supporting Trump. Yet Carter made clear that his critique is not about the current occupant of the Oval Office.

In fact, he said, Trumps election was a product of many ills Carter identifies, not their cause.

A lot of average Americans and working people in our country didnt feel that we were getting a fair shake from government  and they wanted to see something new, Carter said.

The problems that fueled Trumps rise, Carter said, are of graver concern than anything surrounding the administration, including whatever results from a widespread inquiry by special counsel Robert Mueller.

I pray that he will promote human rights, equality among all people, and that he will value the truth, Carter said, though he added that the long-term survival of democracy will turn on the resilience of the American public and our constitutional foundation.

Long a critic of U.S. policy toward North Korea, Carter actually aligns well with Trumps latest moves toward Pyongyang.

No sitting U.S. president has been to North Korea, but Carter has gone at least three times as a former president, most recently in 2011, when he tried to help spur North Koreans to engage in multilateral talks about dismantling their nuclear weapons program.

Carter said he still believes world powers can find a way to live in harmony and peace with people who are our enemies and with whom we have strong differences of opinion.

Thats going back to the basic principles of Christianity: love your neighbor and  even love your enemies, he said. We havent reached that point yet, but we have the potential to do it.

Carter is accustomed to flouting conventional wisdom on international affairs.

As president, Carter established official diplomatic relations with China in 1978  six years after President Richard Nixon made a landmark trip to Beijing. The same year, Carter drove peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt in the Camp David Accords, though he couldnt replicate the feat between Israel and the Palestinians.

I took a position of wanting to see balance between Israel and the Palestinians, he said, recalling that stance as an underappreciated factor in many American evangelicals shifting their allegiances to the Republican Party.

Evangelicals are naturally inclined from a religious point of view to be loyal to Israel, he said, because of their more literal interpretations of the Bible. Those Christians also hold that the Jews should also all become Christians  thats not often mentioned, Carter added.

Aided also by Democratic Party positions on everything from legalized abortion to womens rights, Carter said Republicans corralled most white evangelicals long before that voting bloc helped propel Trump into the White House. That long trend, Carter said, makes it less surprising that evangelicals would back a man with Trumps personal profile, from his two divorces to the more recent allegations of extramarital affairs with an adult film star and a Playboy model.

In his tenth decade of life, Carter said he remains confident that U.S. Christians and the wider electorate can navigate a factional era  the church by emphasizing its core doctrinal principle of faith in Jesus Christ, the nation by recommitting to a belief in fairness and equal opportunity.

There are reasons to have concern for the future, Carter said, but the moral principles and ethical principles that have been guiding lights are still there.

___

Follow Barrow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP .Maria Hinojosa and Simon Romero have built careers on telling stories.

Both journalists have stepped into the realm of border issues, among many others.

516 Arts, in partnership with the National Hispanic Cultural Center, is bringing the pair to explore issues of immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border at 7 p.m. Friday at the KiMo Theatre.

The event is also the final in a series of public programming for the exhibit The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility.

We knew we wanted to present public programs that really speak to the current moment in conjunction with the exhibition about the US-Mexico border, as the exhibition was curated over several years before the 2016 election, said Suzanne Sbarge, 516 Arts executive director. Maria Hinojosas name came up right away as someone who has her finger on the pulse and can speak to whats happening now. I reached out to her as a fellow alumnus of Barnard College and she responded right away. And our curator Josie Lopez contacted Simon Romero last year when she heard he would be relocating back to New Mexico after over a decade of reporting on Latin America with the NY Times. Both of these leading journalists focus on immigration as one of the key issues facing our region and the planet.

Romero is the national correspondent for The New York Times and focuses on immigration. He is based out of New Mexico.

Well be talking about the situation on the border, Romero said. I have a broad definition of it like borderlands. It reaches up here in Albuquerque and further north. And then even further south to Monterrey.

The development of National Guard troops being sent to the border as well as the decline of new immigrants crossing the border will be discussed, Romero said.

The pair will also discuss drug trafficking.

Some of what Romero and Hinojosa will speak about is the 516 Arts exhibit.

A lot of what we will talk about relates to the great works of art at 516 Arts, he said. Theyve organized an incredibly evocative exhibit. Well also be talking about the work we do as journalists and how crucial our work has become. Im looking forward to hearing from Maria about her body of work that is incredible and richly textured.

Romero returns to New Mexico after being posted out of the country for 11 years.

The Ribera native was based in Brazil from 2011-2017. During his time there, he covered Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. Romero was the Andean bureau chief, based in Caracas, Venezuela, from 2006 to 2011. He joined the Times in March 1999.

I was based in Venezuela and wrote about human migration in Latin America as well as political issues, he said. I had spent time on the (U.S.-Mexico) border and Im getting to know the region again. I spend a lot of my time in Texas and Arizona and its different from covering a foreign country. You have to play very close attention to what youre writing about and get everything right.

Lopez said free and independent press is an integral part of a functioning democracy.

At a time when journalists and journalism in both the U.S. and Mexico are under attack, it is more important than ever to be aware of obstacles facing the press and to understand the sources of information that are circulated through a widening array of media formats, Lopez said.

If you go

WHAT: Maria Hinojosa and Simon Romero in conversation followed by exhibition closing reception at 516 Arts

WHEN: 7 p.m. Friday, April 13

WHERE: KiMo Theatre, 423 Central NW

HOW MUCH: $12 general admission, $8 friends of 516 Arts at kimotickets.comOne killed, 8 injured in Nawalparasi jeep accident

One person was killed and eight others were seriously injured in a jeep accident at Bulingtar Rural Municipality of Nawalparasi district.Connects attention deficit mobile users to brands using immersive content experiences. mCanvas, the mobile storytelling ad platform, has extended its suite of storytelling formats by launching Smarticle - a measurable sponsored content solution that uses phone sensors and features to tell a brands story effectively.

Smarticle - short for smart article - is a first of its kind experiential content article solution created for mobile phones. While existing content marketing solutions only allow long-form text content, a Smarticle boasts of an array of visually appealing images, real-time content, animations, gifs, videos, and user interaction events blended with text content. This changes the user behavior from simple passive consumption to active participation. Creatively using all these elements enables a brand to communicate with its digitally connected consumers on comScore Tier 1 publishers in India. mCanvas provides a ready marketplace of over 50 publishers across different categories for brands to choose from. For the launch, mCanvas partnered with Tetra Pak and Webchutney to create a Smarticle that engaged over 2,20,000 consumers in India across 4 publishers. The article opened to an introduction of the poor practices of buying and storing milk in India before revealing the top 5 benefits of consuming milk in Tetra Pak cartons. Each of these 5 benefits was revealed to the user with a simple shake of the phone. Bite-sized and visually appealing content made the article snackable and eye-catching resulting in average time spent of around 47 seconds.

Commenting on the launch, Jaideep Gokhale, Communications Director, South Asia Markets, Tetra Pak said, Tetra Pak, always being open to new ideas, instantly recognized Smarticle as the way forward. We wanted to engage & communicate the benefits of milk in cartons to the audience with a contemporary approach and Smarticle has helped us achieve exactly that. We look forward to creating more such brand experiences for our audience in upcoming campaigns.

Gurjot Shah Singh, VP and National Media Head, Webchutney said,  With the digital economy moving towards mobile, as advertisers its our responsibility to maintain the thin line between spamming and personalized experiences keeping that in mind we continue to reach out to our consumers contextually and with experiential ad formats, one of our preferred partners mCanvas is helping us build this together. With this new experiential content format, mCanvas is bringing interactive content to audiences effectively. Having worked with 200+ brands over the last 3 years has helped us create a goldmine of data and given us insights into how millions of users in India interact with rich media mobile ads. We are applying these learnings to sponsored content pages and are excited about the prospects of creating a win-win-win result for consumers, brands, and publishers. mCanvas has always been at the forefront of mobile innovation and our investment in Smarticle is another step in that process, said Vishal Rupani, Co-founder & COO, mCanvas.

Smarticle provides in-depth analytics that measures time spent, scroll depth, video metrics, user interactions and events. Third-party trackers can be added for additional verification. The in-house creative team and engineering team at mCanvas use an advertisers campaign brief and creative assets to create a bespoke sponsored story. Smarticle is currently available only on mobile web. More information on Smarticle is available on www.mcanvas.com/smarticleThree agencies in India have five finalists spots in the global ADC 97th Annual Awards, announced today by The One Club for Creativity, the world's foremost non-profit organisation celebrating creative excellence in advertising and design.

Leading the way is McCann Worldgroup India, Mumbai with McCann Health, Delhi, who have three finalists spots for their work The Immunity Charm on behalf of the Ministry of Public Health, Afghanistan.

TBWA India, Mumbai is a finalist for its own Zoobar Pet Friendly Bar, and Black Swan Life Communications, Mumbai has one finalists spot for Amar Tea Pvt. Ltd. Tea Society.

To view the complete list of ADC 97th Annual Awards finalists by discipline, please visit http://www.adcawards.org/downloads/finalists/ADC_97th_Annual_Awards_Finalists.pdf.

Globally, leaders in the ADC 97th Annual Awards finalists count are BBDO New York with 31, Dentsu Tokyo with 23 and Hamburg, Germanys Jung von Matt with 20.

This years show has 514 finalists representing 34 countries. The US has the most finalists, followed by Japan with 51, Germany with 45, Canada with 26, the UK and China with 25 each, and France with 21.

The One Club for Creativity awards shows each have their distinct focus. The ADC Annual Awards maintains its historical concentration as the champion for craft, design and innovation, while The One Show focuses on creativity of ideas and quality of execution.

This years winners will be announced at the ADC 97th Annual Awards Ceremony on May 7, 2018, 6:00-11:00 pm at Industria in New Yorks Meatpacking District.

The show is part of The One Club for Creativitys Creative Week, May 7-11, 2018 in New York (http://www.oneclub.org/creativeweek/). The preeminent festival showcasing the intersection of advertising, innovation and creative thinking, Creative Week also includes The One Show over two nights, the dynamic Young Ones Education Festival, inspiring sessions with some of the biggest names in the industry at the Creative Summit and the exclusive Executive Creative Summit, open to a limited number of top-level leaders (founders, CCOs, managing partners).

The One Club for Creativity (http://www.oneclub.org), producer of the prestigious One Show, ADC Annual Awards, Creative Week and Portfolio Night, is the world's foremost non-profit organization recognizing creative excellence in advertising and design. The ADC Annual Awards honors the best work across all disciplines, including Advertising, Interactive, Design and Motion. Creative Week takes place in New York City every May and is the preeminent festival celebrating the intersection of advertising and the arts.

To Read More Visit Here.PepsiCo Indias flagship snack brand Kurkure is reinvigorating the collect category with launch of Kurkure Multigrain with Power-Grain Ragi, catering to the rising trend of consumers looking for tasty yet healthy everyday snacking options.

In line with PepsiCos global sustainability agenda of Performance with Purpose, Kurkure Multigrain with Power grain Ragi which is rich in calcium, fiber and is a good source of protein and has been formulated with 21.5 % less sodium.

Kurkure is Indias most loved snack brand which has been innovating and transforming to cater to changing consumer needs. As per our Performance with Purpose agenda we are working to improve our snack products through a stepwise reduction approach. In India, we have been successful in reducing 21 metric tonnes of sodium from our entire snack portfolio till last year and aim to reduce sodium in 75% of our foods portfolio by 2025. The recently launched Kurkure Multigrain with 21.5% less sodium is yet another step towards the actualization of this journey said Jagrut Kotecha, V.P  Indian Snacks, PepsiCo India.

The new Kurkure Multigrain will be available in the winning flavor Curry & Herbs at 3 price points (Rs. 5, 10 and 20) distributed across India through traditional trade and modern trade channels.

Further to delighting their consumers, PepsiCo India has revamped the packaging of their flagship brand Kurkure across its entire range of 40 variants with an aim to engage consumers at point of purchase. Research has shown that a consumer generally takes less than 7 seconds to make a purchase decision when buying a snack and the first thing he/she notices is the colour followed by the shape, brand name and finally the key ingredients that go into making the product. This consumer psychology was combined with design thinking to develop an entirely new design philosophy for the brand. The new packaging range stands out thereby re-appraising Kurkure as a lead player in the Salty Snack category.

The new packaging strongly reiterates Kurkures Kitchen ingredients story and noticeably sets apart one flavor from the other. The new packaging effectively displays product format on each pack, making it easier to distinctly understand the offering of each variant and distinguish it from other me-too brands. The new packaging design has been developed over the past 12 months by PepsiCos global design group, headed by designer Mauro Porcini along with an external agency and has been rolled out nationally.

To Read More Visit here.Vani Gupta has quit PepsiCo after a stint of 7 years. She joined PepsiCo in 2011 as Marketing Director  Indian Snacks and Food. At PepsiCo, Vani led Kurkure as category head and was responsible for the success of this Rs.1,000 crore brand.

Prior to PepsiCo, Gupta was associated with Unilever as Regional Marketing Manager, Hair, South Asia for more 5 years.

Gupta started her career in advertising with RK Swamy and laster in 1991 she joined Leo Burnett as Account Supervisor and for 5 years she worked with the Agency. She worked on Adidas, Coca Cola and Cosmopolitan brands among others. Later she shifted to Henkel as Brand Manager and after Henkel she joined RB as Brand Manager.Opening the market

The existence of syndicates and cartels in almost all fields of entrepreneurial activity has hampered economic growth and posed major challenges to the population.As President Donald Trumps May 12 deadline to sign sanctions waivers under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) approaches, Iranian media are reflecting on various potential responses by the government in Tehran.

On April 12, Javan daily, a newspaper affiliated with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) published a report arguing that a US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear accord is highly likely.

Europes unilateral [actions] and their pressures on the US government havent led Trump and his advisers to stand idly by on [their promises regarding the] scrapping of the JCPOA, and [they] are attempting to divert the JCPOA from its main path through increasing pressure and focus, reported the daily. In this game, they are trying to portray Iran as a threat to the region and the world and re-create the same old scenario about an Iranian effort to develop nuclear weapons," Javan wrote.

Of note, Trump has said he will exit the nuclear deal if it isnt fixed by May 12, pointing to the accords current limitations on Iranian nuclear activities and its non-inclusion of Irans ballistic missile program and regional policy.

The ultra-conservative newspaper also brought up the following question: In case of US withdrawal from the JCPOA, an act which has been described by all as the official destruction of this international agreement, what will be the reaction of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has stopped its nuclear activities for more than two years?

According to Javan, It seems that the most important [response] of Iran on its agenda is the beginning of a nuclear return: a process in which the centrifuges of the country will restart their activities in full power and the [uranium] enrichment process will begin in accordance with the needs of the country.

The IRGC-affiliated newspaper then offered another proposal by hard-line academic Fouad Izadi.

Izadi told Mehr News Agency on April 12, The cost of the US withdrawing from the JCPOA, an international agreement, can be that the president notes that if they want to withdraw from the JCPOA, we will not only leave the JCPOA but will also leave the NPT [Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons].

He added, If Rouhani brings up this issue in the next couple of weeks, they may take it seriously and make some changes to their decisions.

Iran signed the NPT in 1968 under the regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The treaty obliges its signatories not to pursue nuclear weapons while committing members who possess nuclear arms to getting rid of their atomic arsenals. Nuclear powers such as Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea are not members of the NPT, while the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have all signed on to the treaty.

It should be noted that it is not only hard-line commentators who have brought up the prospect of an Iranian exit from the NPT in case the United States abrogates the nuclear deal. On Nov. 1, 2017, parliament member Mojtaba Zolnouri, a member of parliaments foreign policy and national security commission, said, The Americans should know that if they dont comply with their obligations under the JCPOA and [if they] impose new additional sanctions, the representatives of the Iranian nation [in parliament] are ready to oblige the Islamic Republics government to put the [issue of] leaving the NPT on its agenda. Zolnouri is not just a prominent parliament member but has previously served as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameneis deputy personal representative to the IRGC.

Irans warnings about leaving the NPT are not limited to the past few years. In April 2013, more than two years before the signing of the JCPOA, parliament member Alaeddin Boroujerdi, chairman of parliaments foreign policy and national security commission, said, If the West does not adhere to issues such as the reduction of nuclear weapons and the recognition of Iran's nuclear rights, one of the options of the parliament is withdrawal from the NPT.The arduous path to independence in monetary decision-making from the government that many central banks have gone through remains the road not taken for Iran. But the new Iranian year, which began March 21, holds promise to prove the turning point bestowing the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) with its long overdue independence while also having the potential to yank the banking system out of its current state of limbo.

As President Hassan Rouhani vowed shortly after his second swearing-in ceremony last August following a landslide victory, his administration aims to become the first to instill fundamental banking reforms since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The previous government and parliament tried their hands but fell short with lackluster reform measures consigned to memory at a time when the country was hit with nuclear-related sanctions.

The Rouhani administration extensively reviewed and made changes to previous reform measures and devised what has been commonly referred to as the "twin bank reform bills"  one for bank reform and one for CBI reform. These were supposed to be presented to lawmakers about two years ago, but as the government kept procrastinating, parliament members came up with their own reform plan and tried to push it through. The latter effort was spearheaded by conservative cleric and two-time parliament member Mohammad Hossein Hosseinzadeh Bahraini and the Parliament Research Center.

As the government's twin bills were not fully ready at the time, which was during the previous summer, the Cabinet hastily made final reviews of a unified bank reform bill on July 23, which mostly gained attention in the media for its proposed change in the official monetary unit from the rial to the toman. If the monetary unit change measure is passed, the change will be mostly cosmetic, as it will only lop off one zero (each toman equals 10 rials) and make everyday transactions easier for the people who already use toman as their preferred unit.

The longstanding idea of knocking as much as four zeros off Iran's currency, which officially trades for 42,000 against the greenback, seems to have been postponed until at least after bank reforms have materialized.

Rouhani eventually submitted the government's final bank reform blueprint to parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani on Aug. 15, 2017. The blueprint was supposed to consist of the twin bills but was submitted as one bill that some posit was only a shadow of what it was expected to be.

In its review of the measures submitted by the government, even the Parliament Research Center found them to fall short of the mark on several issues, but it accepted the general framework put before the parliament. According to Amir Hossein Amin Azad, one of the architects of the governments bank reform scheme, this is because when parliamentarians were pushing their own measures through, they realized that their reform plan alludes to regulatory and supervisory entities that are currently nonexistent in Iran.

Amin Azad, who boasts a working experience of more than two decades at CBI and was its director of regulations and anti-money laundering until recently, broke down the current complicated state of bank reform during a recent event in Tehran. As he outlined, parliament members turned to the government's proposed bill for CBI and bank reform and coupled it with their own bank reform to come up with a final blueprint.

The latest government-proposed blueprint for CBI, which is similar to that of the parliament in terms of its general form, envisions a high council at the top that sits next to an independent council that will most likely play a similar role to the Money and Credit Council, Iran's highest financial decision-making body at the moment  which is a far cry from being independent in its current state because its members include four ministers and a slew of other top-tier government officials and advisers.

"The reform plan presented by the government is an avant garde plan when compared with the current state of things," a former high-level executive with the CBI told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity.

"The general tenets of the plan are positive, and if it's passed without any major changes it will be a big step forward and will be able to solve many of the existing hurdles," the source added.

But that will certainly prove much harder than it sounds, because parliament members and the government  who have been at each other's throats on multiple occasions recently, including over the handling of the fate of troubled unlicensed credit and finance institutions and surging foreign exchange rates  will first have to mold a unified vision that can be put to a vote. If approved, then they will require the green light from the Guardian Council, the highly influential constitutional watchdog.

On the bank reform front, proposals made by the government and parliament include corrections on conditions of establishing a bank or credit institution, ownership of banks' shares, banks' structure, usury-free banking, financial reporting of banks, transparency and accountability of the banking system, supervision, disciplinary regulations, association of banks, the deposits' guarantee fund, and bankruptcy and dissolution of banks.

Those are on top of measures underway with the aim of making Iranian banks conform to global regulations and standards, including International Financial Reporting Standards, anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism, corporate governance and compliance. In addition to that, banks are now working hard to clean up the myriad swept-under-the-rug problems in their balance sheets, namely by boosting their low capital adequacy ratios, shedding their excess assets  mostly held in the stagnant housing sector  and reducing their high ratios of nonperforming loans.

Furthermore, banks will need to clear their mounting debts to the CBI, which stand at more than 11.67 quadrillion rials ($277.85 billion) according to the latest statistics. The liabilities have stacked because when the government was barred from directly tapping into CBI resources to cover for its ever-present budget deficits some 15 years ago, it shifted to heavily borrowing from the banking system instead, which in turn forced the banks to become indebted to the CBI.

The latest manifestation of bank reform preparations came weeks ago, when the CBI's deputy for supervision announced the biggest consolidation in Iran's banking system in recent years, based on which unlicensed credit and finance institutions Mehr Eqtesad and Samen will soon be dissolved into Ansar Bank  and Hekmat Iranian, Kowsar and Ghavamin (two credit institutions and a bank) will be merged into a single bank. All aforementioned credit and financial institutions have ties to the armed forces and law enforcement.

The next few years and specifically the next few months  especially as the Donald Trump administration will announce its decision about whether to renew sanctions waivers  will prove immensely influential concerning Irans banking ties with the world at a time when lack of relations with major international banks is hurting the country in many ways. Iran will need tens of billions of dollars and a steely resolve to bring its banking regime on par with the rigorous and constantly evolving international standards. Under these conditions, the government would be well advised to focus on working closely with parliament to pass reforms that will give the CBI its independence and strengthen Iranian banks sooner rather than later.BAGHDAD  Amid Iraqi calls to reinforce the rule of law and strengthen Iraqi state institutions, the Ministry of Justice announced March 28 a new initiative for arbitration among tribes, allowing a team of tribal elders to intervene as arbitrators in resolving all possible disputes and conflicts between Iraqi tribes.

According to a statement by the Ministry of Justice, this team of 47 tribal leaders will be called al-Awaref, selected by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior in virtue of a memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Justice and to be charged with several tasks, most notably reducing the expansion of tribal conflicts and focusing on bringing about community peace in Iraqi provinces.

The 47 arbitrators will work voluntarily and receive no salaries from the Iraqi state. In addition to undergoing a background check by the Ministry of the Interior, their names were presented to tribal leaders for approval.

A March 28 statement issued by the Ministry of Justice noted that the ministry has adopted a team of well-known tribal arbitrators to resolve disputes, describing them as a safety valve for the community, which will have a major role in strengthening security and establishing community peace in all provinces of the country.

Abboud al-Issawi, the head of the tribal committee in parliament and a staunch supporter of the initiative, told Al-Monitor, [The initiative] will support the law, preserve tribal life and prevent any abuse by persons who have nothing to do with it and do not follow its religious and social criteria.

Issawi said, This initiative will neither be too different from Islamic law nor will it be contrary to human rights. In the coming phase, we will work on making it more organized and consistent with the work of the Iraqi state.

The arbitrators will be allocated to different Iraqi provinces: four arbitrators in Baghdad, two in al-Karkh and two in al-Rusafa, while other provinces will be assigned either one or two arbitrators, all of whom will be directly affiliated to the Ministry of Justice.

Sarhan al-Fatlawi, a sheikh from al-Fatla tribe, told Al-Monitor, Such a bill can be of use to highlight the role of tribes in building the community and supporting the Iraqi state, especially as Iraqi tribes have achievements throughout the history of the country. So we do not see any harm in such a bill that will put a stop to those who encourage tribal revenge.

He added, Tribal problems are aggressively developing into conflicts for simple and minor reasons, all because of those who considered themselves tribal sheikhs when  in fact  they were not. We believe that the tribal arbitration bill will be essential for tribes and will help end issues before they develop into armed clashes, such as those that occur in some areas of southern Iraq.

Meanwhile, the arbitration initiative comes at a time when conflicts between the Iraqi tribes dramatically escalate, especially in the provinces of southern Iraq where conflicts are constantly evolving and involving the use of medium and heavy weapons.

According to activist and blogger Ibrahim al-Fatlawi, this bill was not welcomed by civil society, which considered it to be propaganda for political parties, undermining the work of Iraqi state institutions.

He told Al-Monitor, We live in a country known to have enacted laws 7,000 years ago, so how can we accept projects and decisions that strengthen the power and influence of tribes within the institutions of the Iraqi state?

Fatlawi expressed his surprise with the lack of parliamentary action to undercut the work of the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Interior through the tribal arbitration project, which will abolish the role of law little by little.

The tribal arbitration initiative could violate the Iraqi Constitution, which stipulates in Article 45, paragraph 2, that the state shall seek the advancement of the Iraqi clans  in a way that contributes to the development of society. The state shall prohibit the tribal traditions that are in contradiction with human rights. Here lies the problem in some tribal traditions that violate the law and human rights principles.

Some of these traditions involve males preventing their first-degree female relatives from marrying someone else, should they wish to marry the females themselves. Other traditions that violate human rights include vengeance and separation, which give tribal sheikhs the right to determine how much money an offenders family should pay to the victims family as compensation, in the event of any problem.

Rahman al-Jobori, a senior researcher at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, told Al-Monitor, After thousands of years of Iraqi civilization, the state comes up with such an initiative for electoral purposes, instead of enacting a proper law approved by the state.

Jobori said, This project is substandard. The Iraqi state needs to work in accordance with international mechanisms for human rights and institutional work, and such an effort cannot enhance the role and authority of the law and treat everyone equally.

It seems that the work of the team of arbitrators will be parallel to that of the Iraqi judiciary; the 47 arbitrators will form a committee and the conflicting parties can either resort to the judiciary or to the arbitrators who were introduced, in training courses, to the need to issue decisions that do not oppose Islamic provisions and Iraqi law.The only thing we have to fear is fear itself  nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance, former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said.

As Israel was preparing to mark its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 12, the killer from Damascus presented his Jewish neighbors with horrifying scenes, massacres of children and women. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made it clear to survivors of the Holocaust and members of the second and third generations that genocide is still possible, here and now. The gut-wrenching photos from Douma must have failed to move Russian President Vladimir Putin, sponsor of the crimes against humanity that have claimed an estimated half a million lives over the past seven years. Moscow dismisses the evidence of a nerve gas attack on the Syrian town and at the same time castigates Israel, which is trying to distance the Iranian army from its border.

On Jan. 27, Putin stood at the side of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day at an event in the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. Netanyahu took the opportunity to announce, Seventy-five years after this hell, we are still determined to avert any attempts by such groups and ideologies, primarily Iran, which openly states that it wants to destroy us. Netanyahu went on, Our unwavering readiness to fight for ourselves and protect ourselves is an iron wall, a wall of steel that cannot be broken, and it will continue to protect us. Turning to Putin, he added, Mr. President, I am willing to testify that among the world leaders there are few who understand it as well as you do.

Putin must also have been unimpressed by this attempt to link the conflict with Iran and the Holocaust. On April 11, he protested Israels efforts to block Iranian entrenchment on its Syrian border, warning Netanyahu against destabilizing Syria. On the same day, Netanyahu once again invoked the Holocaust in his campaign against Iran. Speaking at the opening ceremony for Holocaust Memorial Day at Jerusalems Yad Vashem Memorial, Netanyahu once again compared the 2015 agreement between world powers on curbing Irans nuclear weapons program to the 1938 Munich Agreement between Adolf Hitler and European powers allowing Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia. Netanyahu once more preached against indifference in the face of this renewed threat to Jews, pledging that an independent State of Israel will know how to protect them against their bitter Iranian foe.

This recurring theme in Netanyahus speeches at Holocaust commemoration events signals a personal commitment that never again will there be another Holocaust. At last years Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu suggested that the tragic reality of the Holocaust was that the strong survive, the weak are obliterated. The lesson? That we must be able to defend ourselves by ourselves against all threats and any enemy guides me day-in, day-out, every morning and every evening.

Netanyahu is not alone. Sara Netanyahu, his loyal wife, helps him nurture fear of another Holocaust perpetually lurking in the shadows. At an event marking International Holocaust Day held in the northern city of Haifa on Jan. 27, she said, Our first obligation is to ensure that such a terrible tragedy never recurs.  Our nation will not go back to being weak and defenseless, a leaf borne by the wind. After Thank God we have a strong state, a strong and advanced army and superb security forces, she was sure to add, We also have a leadership, of course, that treats every threat seriously and protects us.

Fear of a second Holocaust is fertile ground for the cultivation of mistrust and hatred of the other, whether that other be Arabs, African asylum-seekers, leftist liberals, judges, human rights activists or journalists. Even Israels president, who espouses the ideology of a greater Israel but refuses to toe the nationalist line, is ostracized. Fear is a surefire recipe for the repression of hope, change and tolerance. And fear of losing a great leader, Israels one and only defender against annihilation, can defeat the rule of law and bring down the pillars of democracy.

Sometimes, I sense too much fear around me, said President Reuven Rivlin in a speech last month at a conference called 70 years of Democracy in Motion. Too many people fear disagreement and criticism, he warned. In a thinly veiled reference to Netanyahu and his colleagues in the Likud leadership, Rivlin added, We are strong enough to build strong institutions for our democracy, institutions such as civil rights, the courts, the police and a state army.  We are strong enough to criticize our leadership  provided it does not turn into incitement and delegitimization  without worrying that through this criticism we are also harming the strength of the State of Israel.

Israeli law calls for a five-year prison sentence for denying the acts perpetrated by the Nazi regime that constitute crimes against the Jewish people or against humanity, or for minimizing their extent with the goal of defending the perpetrators or expressing admiration for or identification with them. Israel rightly condemns Holocaust deniers in every corner of the globe and demands they be punished. While comparing the Iranian threat against the powerful State of Israel to the Nazi Holocaust perpetrated against powerless, stateless Jews cannot be considered denial of the Holocaust, this comparison does, nevertheless, belittle its uniqueness. As Israel marks 70 years of independence, it is time to stop cheapening and disparaging the Holocaust and to denounce politicians who use it to generate fear as an alternative to courageous policies.Police arrest a gang of forgers

The police on Wednesday arrested a gang of document forgers. The Metropolitan Crime Division officers arrested three persons including Bal Bahadur Raut of Nepaltar.RAMALLAH, West Bank  Ahmad Hassan Daraghmeh and his family were preparing to reap chickpeas from their farm when the Israeli army showed up March 8 and destroyed the crops, ostensibly because the soldiers needed to conduct military drills for two weeks.

After the military dredges were done with sweeping the chickpeas, tracked vehicles and heavy military vehicles raided the land  and then came the infantry," said Daraghmeh, who is from Khirbet al-Farisiya in the northern Jordan Valley. He has worked in agriculture for 30 years and provides for eight family members. Some 12 acres of crops "were completely ruined," he told Al-Monitor.

Daraghmeh now has to work for a farmer in exchange for a daily wage to reduce his losses. I have incurred 120,000 shekels [$34,000] in losses," he said. Officials at the Tubas governorate's Department of Agriculture, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture, aren't interested in resolving farmers' losses, he added, though the ministry disputes that claim.

The Israeli army started wide-scale drills March 7 in that part of the West Bank. It evacuated 16 families comprised of 80 members from their houses, saying that the soldiers needed to conduct the drills from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.

Another farmer in the area, Ibrahim Daraghmeh, also suffered losses because of the drills. He told Al-Monitor, The military drills destroyed 20 dunams [5 acres] planted with barley and corn, and the Department of Agriculture in Tubas offered no help."

What makes the situation worse for farmers is that they don't even own the land they plant; they rent it from Palestinian families living there.

Aref Daraghmeh, who heads the local council of Al-Maleh and Al-Madareb Bedouin areas, is also a field researcher at the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B'Tselem). He told Al-Monitor, Since the beginning of 2018, the army has destroyed 300 agricultural dunams and more than 10,000 pastoral dunams due to the use of heavy military vehicles in military drills. This is in addition to the damages of military ammunition and remains left by the army in training areas, including missiles and mines, and their negative impact on the land and citizens.

He and others say the damage is intentional.

The heavy Israeli vehicles aim at destroying the largest agricultural areas possible during drills. The tanks and armored vehicles make circular movements to kill the crops at their initial growth stage.  Besides, fear and terror haunt Bedouin families and cattle breeders, who don't dare go to the green pastures because of the drills.

A BTselem report published March 2 stated, The frequent training on pastureland and cultivated farmland reduces the area available to shepherds and destroys crops. Reduced pastureland hurts residents livelihoods, as they must buy animal feed as a substitute for natural grazing. Also, farmers cannot reach their crops and tend to them while military exercises are underway, and some crops are trampled by tanks and other armored vehicles.

Military drills are the main part of the Israeli strategy aimed at expropriating Palestinian lands for residential and agricultural projects for settlers.

Military drills are the main part of the Israeli strategy aimed at expropriating Palestinian lands for residential and agricultural projects for settlers, according to some observers. Jamal al-Amla, director of the Land Research Center, a nonprofit community organization, told Al-Monitor, Some drills last for a while. Trenches are dug and sand mounds are built to damage crops. Soldier caravans and camps are also set up, and when the damage is done, these camps are turned into settlements. This system led to the expropriation of 55,000 dunams since 1967.

Amla said, The drills are mainly held during the spring season, as crops ripen at this time of the year, and herbs grow in pastoral areas, especially in Tubas in the Jordan Valley, Masafer Yatta in the south of the West Bank and the eastern slopes that extend from Jenin in the north of the West Bank to Hebron in the south of the West Bank. They are all located in Area C, which constitutes [over 60%] of the West Banks surface area.

He added, The drills cement the control of settlers and Israeli agricultural companies on the Palestinian territories, especially in Tubas and the Jordan Valley, seen as the Palestinian food basket thanks to its fertile soil, water resources and convenient climate conditions.

The "food basket" is comprised of 1,600 square kilometers (618 square miles)  more than one-quarter of the West Bank  and around 44,000 Palestinians live there.

According to a November BTselem report, Palestinians can't access 85% of the Jordan Valley. They can't establish any construction or herd their cattle because of the Israeli government's various pretexts, such as declaring the area state property, a natural reserve or a military zone. Palestinians can only access isolated areas surrounded by training regions, settlements or reserves, where they can't build or make any developments.

Israeli drills harm 100 farmers yearly, Majdi Aoude, head of the Tubas Department of Agriculture, told Al-Monitor.

Farmers accused the official parties of neglecting them, but Aoude denied such allegations, saying, The Ministry of Agriculture and agricultural organizations support farmers. The ministry started in March implementing the first stage of the European project to help farmers who incurred losses because of Israel. The first phase of the project includes 28 farmers and grants them financial aid in the form of agricultural projects." Some 600 farmers had documented damages, she added.

Aoude noted that each farmer who has suffered damages chooses an agricultural project with a value equal to the amount of damage. The project of the Ministry of Agriculture, along with the Palestinian Agricultural Disaster, Risk Reduction and Insurance Fund, will secure 65% of the project value.

However, the project won't protect farmers from future damage.

Ongoing Israeli control over Area C will continue to harm agricultural land. For Palestinians, the area is doomed because of the lack of development and growth.

The land Ahmad Daraghmeh rents has faced intermittent damage since he began planting 30 years ago. But he plants again each time, as he will do this time.As stakeholders in Syrias seven-year conflict remain glued to US President Donald Trumps tweets, one group has remained noticeably silent: Turkeys biggest bugbear and the United States top ally, the Kurds.

Ever since the American leader vowed via Twitter to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over a suspected chemical attack on Douma, the dominant Kurdish political group in Syria, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and its armed affiliate the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) have refrained from airing views on whether or how the United States should respond.

Pro-PYD media outlets displayed similarly scant interest in a potential confrontation. Among the top stories on the popular Hawar news agency today was one about dozens of mothers gathering in Aleppo to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of Oweish, the mother of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned Kurdish leader exalted by the PYD and the YPG as the shepherd of Kurds worldwide. Another lead item was about the YPGs sister organization the Peoples Defense Forces carrying out an attack against Turkish soldiers in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The PYD-friendly Syrian Democratic Council did issue a statement on April 8 about the massacre of Douma [in] which chemical gases that are internationally banned were used and caused the martyrdom of dozens and civilians. But it refrained from pointing the finger of blame at the regime. We in Syria's Democratic Council condemn whoever participated in this ugly massacre against our people in Douma, the statement read. The cautious tone is very much in keeping with what the Kurds label the third way, which is maintaining a transactional peace with the regime and focusing on cementing autonomy in the estimated 20% of Syria under their control.

The councils invective was instead reserved for Turkey over its military offensive against the mainly Kurdish enclave of Afrin. The tragedies of our Syrian people, especially in Ghouta and Afrin coincided with each other, and the violations continue by the Turkish occupation army and its mercenaries against remaining civilians in their homes in addition to the suffering of thousands of people from [forced] displacement." The PYD calls Turkeys opposition rebel allies grouped under the Free Syrian Army mercenaries.

The YPG is the the United States top ally against the Islamic State in Syria. The Syrian Kurds are clearly smarting over the fact that Washington appears willing to go to war against Assad over Douma when it remained inert as Turkey gobbled up Afrin. Estimates vary, but at least 300 civilians are believed to have perished in the Turkish offensive and some 140,000 were forcibly displaced.

Ankara has justified the incursion on the grounds that the YPG's ties to Ocalan, who launched a violent campaign for Kurdish rights inside Turkey, threatens its security.

Sinam Mohammed, the council's Washington representative who formally registered as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act on Jan. 31, offered Al-Monitor a simple explanation as to why her movement has refrained from taking sides over the suspected chemical attack on Douma: We cant say anything until it's clear what is going on. Only God knows what will happen. In the meantime, Mohammed argued, the United States needs to speak up against Turkish and opposition rebel abuses in Afrin. Mohammed, who is from Afrin, told Al-Monitor, The mercenaries have occupied my home and are using it as their headquarters. All of my family has had to flee and are living in misery in camps.

Fabrice Balanche, a French academic and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution who has studied Syria for decades, believes that Kurdish disillusionment over Afrin plays a big part in the PYDs current stance. The Kurds are disappointed by the United States. They believed the sacrifices they made to liberate Raqqa and the Euphrates River Valley from the Islamic State would give them protection against Turkey. The Turkish attack against Afrin proved the opposite. If Turkey attacks another territory controlled by the YPG, the United States and the West will not react, he told Al-Monitor.

Ariz Kader, a Barcelona-based analyst of Kurdish affairs, reckons the PYD is hedging its bets in part because if the PYD lobbies for strikes and then there are none, that limits their future ability to negotiate in good faith with the regime. Moreover, Kader told Al-Monitor, the PYD realizes the Trump administration is far more fickle than the US military and may choose to disengage [from Syria] rapidly.

Kurdish confidence has certainly been shaken by Trumps recent assertions that he wants an estimated 2,000 US special forces to return from Syria as soon as possible. Sources familiar with the administrations decision-making told Al-Monitor on condition of strict anonymity that Trump wanted US forces out in six months at the very latest but that administration ideologues who advocate staying on to counter Iran and pragmatists who simply want to ensure IS is well and truly defeated before an orderly exit are continuing to push back.

Rebwar Rashed, the co-chair of the Ocalan-linked Kurdish National Congress, told Al-Monitor in a recent interview that the chances of a long-term US presence in Syria looked increasingly slim. Thus, rather than chase pipe dreams of pushing out Assad or containing Iran, the United States ought to leverage its control over energy-rich and agriculturally fecund northeastern Syria to extract political rights for the countrys 2 million-plus Kurds. And that, he argued, could only be achieved if the United States resumes contact with the Assad regime. Rashed said, Three months ago we came to the [Trump administration] with a proposal to talk to the Syrian government, but nothing came of it. While there is no love lost between the Kurds and the regime, Rashed predicted that should Assad fall in the absence of a negotiated peace, the Sunnis will start slaughtering Alawites. A bloodbath will ensue.

Still, hopes shimmer that US military action over Douma might alter Trumps decision to leave. Balanche disagrees. The Douma affair will not alter the US calculus in Syria. It may delay their departure a bit, but the process of disengagement has already begun. Balanche cited Trumps recent freeze on some $200 million allocated for stabilization in Syria, the push to restore relations with Turkey and the ceding of al-Bukamal, a strategic point on the Syria-Iraq border, to regime forces as signs that the United States is bailing out.

Balanche concluded, if Israels security remains a concern, the United States must reach an agreement with the Russians and the Turks to limit Iranian influence in Syria because the Iranian land bridge is already in place.KILIS, Turkey  On March 24, the Turkish army took control of Syrias Afrin province, with objective of securing the strategic border region from People's Protection Units (YPG) forces that fought in the US-led battle against the Islamic State in northern Syria.

As the Syrian war enters its eighth year, the bloodshed continues to rattle lives inside the war-torn country while forcing a continuing refugee spillover into the neighboring countries of Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. But as Ankara continues to advance in Syria, the climate in Kilis, one of Turkeys most strategic border towns, seems strangely harmonious. Unlike most other such cities in the region, Syrian refugees are living amicably there alongside the host community.

Rama al-Sheikh opened the door with a smile. She is one of the young Syrian refugee volunteers who teaches Turkish at a center called Kareemat in the heart of Kilis. She says it represents hope and integrity for the local Syrian refugee women.

Kareemat was officially formed in 2014 by Ramas older sister Najlaa. What started as regular gatherings for Syrian women in her modest home soon became a full-scale community center for refugees that was initially supported by international aid organizations such as the Danish Refugee Council and private donors.

The sisters are originally from Azaz, Syria, and fled to Turkey by way of Aleppo in 2013. Najlaa was one of the first female protesters to participate in the anti-regime demonstrations back in 2011  protests that led to the imprisonment of her husband and her expulsion from the university where she was studying psychology.

We wanted reform, change and equality for all Syrians, Najlaa said. With Kareemat, Najlaas goal is to create a safe haven for the many Syrian refugee women and girls in Kilis, many of whom have lost a father or husband in the war.

Many female Syrian refugees are at risk of falling into forced prostitution and sex trafficking  a common yet underreported practice  that stems from economic hardship and social vulnerability. Whether in Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey, the issue is seldom discussed within the Syrian refugee population. This third-rail topic also agitated Najlaa, but in a firm voice, she said, I didnt want these women to be given free fish. I wanted them to fish for themselves and teach other Syrian women how to fish to survive, to contribute and to build a life next to the Turks.

Najlaa and many other Syrians still hope they can one day return to Syria. She said, I never thought the war would end up like this. We all dream of our homes, but for now, Id be arrested again by the regime.

With the assistance of 18 volunteers to date, Kareemat has helped nearly 400 Syrian women with vocational training in areas such as English and Turkish, cosmetology, computer skills, sewing and knitting and other handicrafts. In an effort to empower women, the center offers free daycare services for working Syrian moms and offers Arabic and Turkish classes for those refugees who lack a basic education.

We want to work and be part of the society while we await the fate of our own home country, said Najlaa, adding that many Turkish women also take part in classes and act as local partners. I remember when we first started: I invited my Turkish neighbors and others from the neighborhood over and told them, 'We want to join your community and not be a burden.'

Starting in 2013, Kilis was a major hub for IS recruitment and the smuggling of Europeans who wanted to join jihadis in Syria. Mayor Hasan Kala told Al-Monitor the town is home to over 130,000 Syrian refugees and approximately 95,000 Turks who remain in this border town so close to the turbulence of the Syrian war.

From 2015 to 2016 Kilis was hit by over 97 IS rockets, and since January the Kurdish forces began shooting into Kilis and launched 37 rockets into our town, said Kala. He pointed to one of his security guards and said, A rocket fell right next to his brother's home. But despite all the chaos, it didnt disrupt our peace here in Kilis.

Political rifts, sectarian divides and historical feuds have posed many difficulties for displaced Syrians in assimilating within their host communities in Lebanon and Jordan, both of which are struggling to cope with the overwhelming influx of refugees. In particular, it's a complex problem in Lebanon, a country of 5 million officially hosting over a million Syrians, plus an additional 500,000 that local organizations say are not registered with the UN. Lebanon also hosts nearly 500,000 Palestinian refugees and continues to grapple with memories of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon that began in 1976.

In Lebanon and Jordan, you have Arabs versus Arabs; here, we dont have that attitude and divide, said Kala, who is well aware of the dangers of extremist sleeper cells. If we dont accept them, we will not only hurt them but will hurt ourselves in the long term. She explained the need to uproot terrorism and why its more important than ever to avoid division between the host community and the refugees, saying, Anyone who cant become part of a community can become mischievous. Acceptance is far better than casting out people. Harmonizing is the first step in preventing terrorism.

Najlaa's work in Kilis inspired the mayor, who opened 11 community centers over the past year to better integrate refugees within the Turkish community. Kala said the more than 400 employees  equally divided between Syrians and Turks  in the centers have served 5,000 Turks and Syrians to date. There are also 138 Syrian and Turkish volunteers who assist in teaching sewing, first aid, English and Turkish as well as computer courses for adults.

Najlaa opened up about Kareemats financial hardships, saying, I have never felt this low in my entire life. We were the first to open such a center in Kilis and inspired others  and the local municipality  to open up centers like ours  but look at us now. By the end of spring, Najlaa may be forced to shut the center down, unable to pay its rent. Najlaa is struggling to keep the doors open for the many local and refugee women who regard Kareemat as home.

Kala said donor fatigue and financial challenges for the local municipality and the Turkish government at large are spelling uncertainties for this amicable environment.

Im worried about the women. What will happen to them? said Najlaa, adding, Kareemat is like a tree. Its growing and we can see its growth and now suddenly we have to cut it.

Fearing a refugee spillover into Europe, the European Union in March promised 3 billion euros ($3.7 billion) to help fund the 3.5 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey  a country of 72 million that serves as a strategic gateway between the Middle East and Europe.

I want to be a journalist and tell the story of Syrian people, said Rama as she looked over into her sisters worried eyes. I dont think anyone is telling the real story of the Syrian people and how we are striving to survive.

On the second floor of the old building, Marwa (a pseudonym) was breastfeeding her newborn son, Jamana. She is a Syrian refugee who frequents the center with her mother, Nadia. They fled their homes in Aleppo and spend most of their days in Kareemat.

I have five children, said Mawra. We need to find a way to support our families. This place is like our new home. Her bright green eyes were filled with hope as she gave her son to her mother and resumed knitting.Mary George Farah Khoury, a researcher at the Modern University College in Ramallah, was surprised and disappointed at the lack of information available on the history of her village when she wrote a research paper three years ago.

Aware of the rich history of Taybeh, known as the last all-Christian village with Caananite roots in Palestine, Farah and her sister Nusra worked to compile a comprehensive database on the history of their village using local and international sources and interviewing villagers. The database grew into an encyclopedia on the history of the village that was published in January.

The village of 3,000, located 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) northeast of Ramallah, is indeed the only village solely inhabited by Christians. It's known for both its history that dates back 4,000 years and its Oktoberfest, which attracts tourists who come to enjoy the local Taybeh beer.

Landmarks of History and Civilization in Taybeh narrates the regions political and economic history along with the history of its agriculture, education and arts as well as the influential figures in the region.

We did not find a [comprehensive] reference that included information about the village and all its historical treasures, even though it is one of the oldest Palestinian villages. We collected information about the Canaanite history and civilization of the village and the Palestinian territories, Farah told Al-Monitor.

The sisters hope that the encyclopedia will inspire those in nearby villages to dig into their own history and ensure that the rich heritage of the region is not forgotten.

While compiling the information, Farah and Nusra built on existing information on the village with field research and interviews with families and documents such as municipal and church records, school registries and private and public libraries.

The 500-page encyclopedia is written in Arabic and English. The two sisters, who paid for its production out of their own pockets, printed 100 copies that they have distributed to schools, libraries, churches and other institutions in the village. Farah said that more can be printed, adding, We do not seek financial remuneration or profits out of this. We want each family in the village to have a copy of the encyclopedia and to keep it as a reference.

Its cover bears a picture of Khodr Church, the oldest and most important church in the village. The Byzantine church built in the fifth century is one of the oldest in the Palestinian territories and a key archaeological landmark in the village that dates back to the first Christians in Palestine.

Raed Abu Sahliya, a priest who worked in Taybeh parish for 10 years and published dozens of studies about the village in French, told Al-Monitor that the sisters have filled gaps in the documentation of the village's heritage and religious role.

He said that the village is mentioned six times in the Old Testament under the name of Ephraim. In the New Testament, John 11:54 reads, Jesus no longer moved about publicly among the people of Judea. Instead he withdrew to a region near the wilderness, to a village called Ephraim, where he stayed with his disciples.

Abu Sahliya shared a popular story about the village's name. According to the priest, the best documented story dates to the Crusades, when Saladin, the first sultan of Egypt and Syria, came to Jerusalem in the 12th century and the fighters defending a fortress in the village found out and ran away. When Saladin arrived, he entered with no resistance and the people welcomed him. He asked them about the name of the village and they said Afra, which means "dust." He then told them they were good people ("taybin" in Arabic) and that the name did not suit them. From then on, the village was called Taybeh.

Abu Sahliya stressed that the village must keep its Christian character. To keep the young residents from leaving, he has helped create jobs by encouraging the building of a home for the elderly and setting up candle and wood workshops. The village is also home to an olive press that exports high-quality olive oil, several hotels and a famous brewery.

Christian pilgrims who travel from Jerusalem to Nazareth visit the village because of its historical and religious importance. According to Abu Sahliya, an estimated 15,000 pilgrims visit Taybeh annually, a major source of income for the hotels and the village in general.Al Jazeera speaks to Neyaz Farooquee on his book, An Ordinary Mans Guide to Radicalism: Growing up Muslim in India.

New Delhi, India  India is home to roughly 172 million Muslims  the third-largest Muslim population in the world.

Since 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power, tensions between Muslims and Hindus have increased in large parts of the country.

Muslims, who make up about 170 million of Indias 1.3 billion population, have faced attacks after being accused of eating beef or killing cows, an animal considered sacred in Hinduism.

Modis rise has further pushed Muslims towards marginalisation, leading many to suggest the community should withdraw from politics.

According to some, the perception of Muslim is restricted to wearing skull cap, praying five times a day and so on and so forth. Neyaz Farooquee, author

The political situation in the country and increased anti-Muslim prejudice forced Neyaz Farooquee, a young Muslim scholar and journalist, to write his first book, An Ordinary Mans Guide to Radicalism: Growing up Muslim in India.

The memoir, Farooquee says, tries to clear the many myths and stereotypes about Muslims in India and highlights the diversity within the community and their lived reality.

Incidents  like the demolition of the medieval-era Babri mosque in 1992 by Hindu nationalist mobs and the 2008 police encounter in a Muslim ghetto in Indias capital, New Delhi  that the book mentions has changed the relations of Muslims with the Indian state.

The demolition of Babri mosque  a watershed event that mainstreamed Indias Hindu far-right groups  deeply affected the psyche of Indian Muslims leading to their distrust of the state institutions.

The memoir, Farooquee says, tries to clear the many myths and stereotypes about the community [Al Jazeera]

Published exactly 10 years after the 2008 New Delhi encounter, this work provides its readers with a transparent view of the making and unmaking of the controversial encounter, after which the generalisation of Muslims of the area as terrorists or terrorist sympathisers continues to haunt them.

The memoir evocatively depicts the atmosphere he grew up in, in a remote village in eastern Bihar state. His grandfather taught him about writings of Kabir, Allama Iqbal, Amir Khusru, Guru Nanak, Chanakya and many more, highlighting the plurality of knowledge sources.

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At 20, you dont understand the complexities of identity and citizenship. The work in a way focuses on how the 2008 encounter shook my trust in the state. I am sure its true for many people in the locality, Farooquee told Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera spoke to author Farooquee in New Delhi.

Al Jazeera: What is it like growing up as a Muslim in India?



Neyaz Farooquee: It is a very difficult question to answer in merely few words. There is something that forces you to write about discrimination or exclusion of Muslim and their identity in the society.

Growing up in the 1990s and 2000s India was peculiar in many ways  the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power for the first time. Though my generation is more confident about their identity, a discourse driven by the right-wing doesnt go beyond stereotypes of Muslims.

It bogs down young Muslims like us  where to draw a line between the assertion of your identity and defence of your identity.

Al Jazeera: Why do you think Muslims are under attack from Hindu far-right groups?

Farooquee: Anti-Muslim bigotry has been normalised in the democratic process of the country under Modi. It is an attack on the Constitution, not merely on the Muslim community. Muslims are not asking any special favour, they are merely asking what is provided by the Constitution.

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Hindutva (the Hindu supremacist ideology professed by the ruling party) needs an enemy to survive, and hence, Muslims are their prime enemy.

Al Jazeera: What do you mean by the word radical as you mentioned in your book?

Farooquee: There are many reasons why I used radicalism in the title. One was that after the 2008 police shoot-out in my locality, the media reporting had no nuance. They painted a picture of the locality as if it was a hotbed of radicalism [a euphemism for] terror activity, and residents as radicals and terror sympathisers.

So, my point is that if you are going to call me a radical, I will also call myself a radical  now go and deal with it, because I am tired of explaining my innocence and proclaiming patriotism.

But that was an angry reaction.

Muslims are usually slapped with terms like 'anti-national', 'Pakistani', 'terrorist', which I have rebutted in my book Neyaz Farooquee, author

On one level, I am trying to warn that if you ghettoise people, it will create a homogenous set of ideas and mindset. And this is true for every form of ghetto, be it of disadvantaged sections like Muslims and Dalits or of dominant castes like Brahmins. Thats not healthy for any society, thats a warning sign.

On another level, the title is more of a satirical take on the understanding of Muslims by society at large. What do you first assume when you see Muslim and Radicalism in one sentence? Why do you not assume its a satire and not really a guide to radicalism?

Al Jazeera: You have mentioned demolition of the Babri Mosque and controversial Batla House encounter. Why did you choose to talk about these two incidents?

Farooquee: The [Babri mosque] incident of 1992 was unfortunate and a landmark incident in Indias recent history. It was basically a betrayal of trust by the democracy and our constitution that guaranteed us (Muslims) safety and equality. Inherent in this guarantee was our dignity and safeguard of our culture and religious spaces. Babris demolition was a betrayal of that fragile trust.

As a byproduct of the incident, a few positives things came out, too. Enrolment rate of Muslims improved, they started demanding their rights, and began to question their leaders. It was in some sense politicisation of the community, which became aware of its place in the society.

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When the Babri mosque was demolished, we were too young to understand what was going on. Cases like the shoot-out in my locality, on a personal level, were a big reason for my politicisation, and I am sure its true for a lot of Muslims.

Al Jazeera: You refer to Jamia Nagar, a sprawling ghetto of Muslims in New Delhi, as The Hideout. Please elaborate.

Farooquee: I have used similar names for chapters for satirical reasons. As often is the case while reporting on terrorism  and I was a close witness to that in the 2008 police shoot-out  police and media used words like terrorists, hideout, cache of arms, sleeper cells, etc. When they used similar terms for my area, it was so hard for me to digest.

The area where I was living for more than a decade started looking scary overnight. I thought lets use that memory and connotation in my book. So, to describe my house, I am using hideout, to describe my memory of childhood when I was taught patriotism and jingoism by my grandfather, I am calling it cache of memory, and likewise.

I came to Jamia Nagar in 1997 and saw this place growing up with me. The Gujarat riot of 2002 brought demographic change in this area. Earlier, Jamia Nagar was full of lower middle class and was a populated with small-scale industries, but 2002 compelled the affluent Muslims, who lived in mixed colonies in other parts of Delhi to shift to the area, strengthening the ghettoisation process. It completed what had started after the Babri mosques demolition in 1992.

Al Jazeera: How have the last four years of Narendra Modi government been for minorities?

Farooquee: Cabinet ministers and other leaders from the BJP have been targeting the minority community, accusing them of being anti-nationals and terrorists. Muslims have been lynched over rumours of beef eating. Anti-Muslim bigotry has been normalised in the democratic process of the country under Modi.

Muslims are stereotyped as a dirty, uneducated, violent mass of people Neyaz farooquee, author

The saddest part is that the marginalisation of Muslims is happening through the democratic processes  the Modi-led lower house of the parliament has the least number of Muslim MPs since independence, and there is not a single Muslim representative from Uttar Pradesh, where the largest number of Muslims live. Democracy was not supposed to alienate, it was supposed to empower every individual.

Its not news any more that Muslims are being pushed to the margins. Even big Bollywood stars such as Aamir Khan or Shah Rukh Khan are attacked and trolled and dubbed anti-development after they question bigotry.

Al Jazeera: How do you think your book will help in dispelling myths and stereotypes about the Muslim community?

Farooquee: Though the book is about my experience, many Muslim youths will be able to connect with it. I have got feedback from many young readers and almost all of them said they could see themselves in my story.

As a Muslim, my upbringing was influenced by Kabir, Chanakya, Guru Nanak, Prophet Muhammad, Ram, Iqbal and so on. But according to some, the idea and perception of Muslims are restricted to wearing a skull cap, praying five times a day and so on and so forth.

In reality, Muslim children are taught Sare Jahan se Acha (The Most Beautiful Place on the Earth is India), Is khaak se uthe hai is khaak me mileng (Have Risen From This Soil, Will Mingle in This Soil) [written in Urdu language], but society does not recognise it, or is hardly aware of it. Muslims are usually slapped with terms like anti-national, Pakistani, terrorist, which I have rebutted in my book.

Al Jazeera: What is the message in your book?

Farooquee: Muslims are not seen as normal people who are in search of livelihood, education and dignity like millions of other Indians. They are stereotyped as a dirty, uneducated, violent mass of people. The whole point of the book is to treat an individual as an individual. Muslims are not playing victim, they are the victim.

I hope readers will empathise with the arguments that am making in the book.In the early hours of April 7, we received a message that Palestinian photojournalist Yaser Murtaja had succumbed to his wounds in a hospital. He had been shot by Israeli snipers in Gaza a day earlier.

The tragic news was delivered in a WhatsApp group for Palestinian journalists and activists, which was meant to provide updates on the situation in Gaza.

Just two days before his murder, Yaser, who was also in the group, messaged us to explain that he was working on a documentary on the Great March of Return. He never finished his documentary, never came home to his wife and two-year-old son and, instead of reporting news, he became the news.

The message came as a shock to us. His friends were in disbelief and those of us that never met Yaser but knew of him as a journalist comrade met the news with pain and a realisation that we are never truly safe. No press card, no shield can save us from murder.

That the Israeli army would shoot a journalist wearing a press vest was not really surprising to us. Theyve done it before. I myself have been beaten and injured while wearing my press vest. For Israel, it didnt matter that he was a journalist.

Being a Palestinian already puts a target on your back, even if it says press in big blue letters on it. As the Israeli defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said a day after Yasers death on behalf of the Israeli political and military establishment: There are no innocent people in the Gaza strip.

While the fact that Israel broke international conventions killing a journalist should be scrutinised, this is not how we should examine what happened in recent days.

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The Israeli army killed 29 people and injured more than 2,000 during the peaceful protests in Gaza. As such, Yasers death is no more outrageous of a crime than the murder of the other 28 people. Because just like them, he was killed for being Palestinian.

For Israel, international laws safeguarding journalists and freedom of the press have the same value as the conventions on basic human rights  they mean nothing. The entire state of Israel is built on violations of international conventions. It is for this reason that we must address Yasers killing outside the parameters of his journalism and put it in the context of the reality all Palestinians live in.

So yes, Yasers murder demonstrates yet again that Israel disregards the rights of journalists, But more importantly, it also shows that the Israeli state violates Palestinians rights, whether they are journalists or not.

The disregard by Israeli soldiers was not merely to Yasers press gear, but to the value of his life in its entirety, as a young Palestinian man from Gaza.

We Palestinians  simply put  are an impediment to Israels greater colonial project, and that means none of us is innocent in their eyes. We, by virtue of our existence, threaten their state.

But when we are murdered mercilessly by our occupier, we almost always die a second death  we are also killed by the mainstream narrative. Yaser got a short-lived spotlight for being a journalist, but the rest of the victims remained nameless and faceless. He was afforded a momentary uproar, but what if Yaser were not in journalist gear, where would his name, life, and story be?

We Palestinians have our rights violated on a daily basis; the targeting of Yaser is simply a symptom of the larger Israeli occupation and not an anomaly.

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However, any time Palestinians protest for the right to life and dignity, the mainstream narrative disregards the context of occupation and apartheid. Almost always it is suggested that our call for dignity and justice is part of the latest unrest in the region, without recognising that the unrest and tension began with the imposition of a colonial project on our lands, one that is built on our dispossession and the blood of our people.

When Palestinians hurl rocks and burn tires, media would not report this as us having no other way to challenge the military might of an occupier and desperately trying to hide from its snipers in the smoke; it would instead suggest that this is us rioting and being violent.

It is almost always implied that these are two equal sides in a conflict, and even worse  that one side has a civilisational mission, while the other is simply barbaric.

Having this type of media backing, the Israeli army spokesperson felt comfortable tweeting after the latest killings in Gaza: Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.

This not only means that Israeli forces are well aware of what theyre doing, but are consciously and actively shooting Palestinians, whether they are journalists like Yaser, or teenagers like 16-year-old Alaa Zamli and 14-year-old Hussein Madi.

Tragically, Yasers killing is the norm in Palestine. Whether we are protesting in the streets, hurling stones, or simply, as journalists, documenting the grave injustices of Israeli actions, we are being killed for it, incarcerated, beaten, held at checkpoints, our homes demolished, and our children abused in prisons.

Israel likes to promote itself as the only democracy in the Middle East. Yet it gladly tramples on the democratic rights of Palestinians. And when, today, Palestinians in Gaza are coming out in the thousands to resist without arms, to use the right of protest which any democracy should protect, they are met with Israeli bullets.

Yaser, like the other victims, did not deserve to die. His murder, like the rest, is a crime committed by an occupier who has violated for decades international law. They all deserve our outrage and our condemnation.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.Afghan refugees describe treacherous journeys to Turkey

Turkey is experiencing a new influx of migrants, this time from Afghanistan instead of Syria.Algerians pay homage to deceased as the country observes three days of mourning after 257 killed in plane crash.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has decreed three days of national mourning after 257 people were killed in the countrys worst plane crash, the state press service, Algerie Presse Service, reported on Wednesday.

Following the crash of an air force Ilyushin today, killing 257 people, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika declared three days of national mourning starting today, the statement said.

All the passengers were confirmed dead after the military transport aircraft crashed shortly after taking from the Boufarik airbase, 30km south of the capital, Algiers.

The defence ministry expressed condolences to families of the victims, and government officials observed a minute of silence on Wednesday.

The majority of the victims were members of the armed forces accompanied by their families, according to a defence ministry statement.

Ennahar TV quoted the ruling National Liberation Front partys secretary-general as saying that 26 people onboard were Western Saharans, without specifying whether they belonged to the Polisario Front, a separatist movement in the contested Western Sahara  a territory also claimed by Morocco.

The cause of the crash remains unclear and an investigation has been opened.

In this painful ordeal, the government members offer their deepest condolences to the families of the victims, a cabinet statement said.

Algerie24, a local news website, said the plane was heading to the western Algerian city of Bechar.

Images posted on an Algerian website showed thick smoke billowing from the site of the crash, as several people rushed to help.

#DIRECT  #Algerie

L'avion militaire etait a destination de Bechar et s'est ecrase quelques minutes apres son decollagehttps://t.co/Uxe6HUFi4X pic.twitter.com/LZpTKEDszH  Algerie 24 (@Alg24net) April 11, 2018

The crash at Boufarik would be the worst in Algeria since 2003 when an Air Algerie jet crashed shortly after takeoff from Tamanrasset, killing 102 people.

In 2014, more than 70 off-duty military personnel and their family members were killed when a C-130 plane crashed into the Djebel Fertas mountain shortly before it was to land in the northern city of Constantine.

In December 2012, two military jets conducting routine training operations collided in midair near Tlemcen, in Algerias northwest, killing the pilots of both planes.

A month earlier, a twin-turboprop CASA C-295 military transport aircraft, which was carrying a cargo of paper for the printing of banknotes in Algeria, crashed in southern France.

That plane was carrying five soldiers and a representative of the Algerian central bank, none of whom survived.No comment from Assads military yet but Russian official says last rebels pushed out of their former stronghold, Douma.

Syrian government forces have retaken the town of Douma, thus gaining full control of the former rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta, according to a Russian military official.

Syrian troops pushed the last rebel fighters out of Douma on Thursday, Major-General Yury Yevtushenko, head of Russias Centre for Syrian Reconciliation, told local news media.

Today, a landmark event in the history of the Syrian Arab Republic took place, he was quoted as saying by the Russian agency Sputnik.

The state flag flown over a building  in the city of Douma marked the regained control over this settlement, and consequently over entire Eastern Ghouta.

There has been no official statement from the Syrian government so far.

Russian military police have been deployed on the ground to take over Doumas security, Russian news agency RIA reported.

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The developments came after Jaish al-Islam, the last remaining rebel group in Eastern Ghouta, reached a deal with Russia on Sunday under which its fighters would abandon Douma and head for an opposition-held area in northern Syria.

The agreement includes a ceasefire and the evacuation of fighters and civilians from the area.

Under the deal, only the Russian military police, and not the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, are allowed to enter Douma after the evacuation.

Crossing points will be opened to commercial movement as soon as Russian military police enter the city.

The deal also ensures the release of all pro-government prisoners held in Douma.

The agreement came a day after a suspected chemical attack killed at least 80 people and affected hundreds of other Douma residents.

Eastern Ghouta has been under government siege since 2013 as part of its so-called siege and starvation tactics.

Assads next steps

Al Jazeeras Zena Khodr, reporting from Beirut in neighbouring Lebanon, said: This is no doubt a victory for the pro-government alliance because Eastern Ghouta has long been a thorn in the side of the government, right at the doorstep of the capital, Damascus, the governments seat of power.

Pro-regime media outlets are reporting that government forces are already planning their next steps, she said.

There are territories and districts that are under the control of ISIL (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group), and what we understand is that the pro-government alliance is going to focus on those districts to clear them from ISIL fighters in order to consolidate control of the capital and to put the government in a very comfortable position with help from its allies, Russia and Iran.









Douma and Eastern Ghouta have come under heavy ground and aerial bombardment by government forces in recent weeks.

The suspected chemical attack in Douma was the largest of its kind in Syria since last April, drawing international outrage and prompting a war of words between the US and Russia.

Syrias government and Russia have denied the attack took place, but rescuers and medics have reported the deaths of dozens of people, including many women and children.

Three rival draft resolutions to investigate suspected chemical-weapons attacks in Syria failed to pass in the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

However, the OPCW will go head with its fact-finding mission to Douma to investigate the alleged use of chemical weapons.

Al Jazeeras Rory Challand, reporting from Moscow, said the government takeover of Douma will have an impact on the OPCW fact-finding mission.

The region is now directly under the control of Russian military police and the Syrian government, he said.

That might have an impact on what they find on the ground when they look for evidence of what happened last weekend.Sun Zhengcai, a former top Communist Party official, was arrested as part of President Xis anti-corruption campaign.

A former senior Communist Party official who was once tipped to be Chinas future president has pleaded guilty to accepting millions in bribes at his trial on Thursday.

Sun Zhengcais case set the stage for one of the highest-level convictions in President Xi Jinpings campaign against corruption and political disloyalty.

In July, Sun was abruptly removed from his post as the ruling Communist Partys chief of the southwestern city of Chongqing and was replaced by Chen Miner, who is a protege of Xi Jinping.

Sun was also the youngest member of the Communist Partys elite 25-member Politburo before he was expelled and was widely considered a strong candidate to sit on the Politburo Standing Committee, made up of Chinas top leaders.

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Chen Miner also filled Suns post at the Politburo after he was expelled.

Xi has presided over a sweeping corruption crackdown since coming to power in 2012 and has vowed to target both tigers and flies, a reference to elite officials and also ordinary bureaucrats.

Suns case mirrors the downfall of another former Chongqing chief, Bo Xilai, whose arrest shook the previous party shuffle in 2012.

Bo, who was at the time considered a potential future leader, is now serving a life sentence in prison for corruption and abuse of power, charges that Sun is also facing.

Sun and his alleged associates were accused of accepting money and assets worth 170 million yuan ($27m) in return for providing help to unspecified organisations and individuals, business operations and other matters, the court said.

The official Xinhua news agency said in February that Sun took advantage of the privileges of his political career to gain benefits for others and illegally received money and items in extremely large amounts.

He has also been identified most closely with the China Youth League faction associated with Xis predecessor Hu Jintao, which Xi had effectively sidelined in the succession process.

He was certainly corrupt and no one doubts this, but this also indicates that Xi Jinping more or less wants to have the third term for himself, having rejected any secession arrangement for him in 2022, Joseph Cheng, a political analyst based in Hong Kong, told Al Jazeera.

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If a senior official, in this case, a politburo member, is prosecuted, then there is no doubt that the sentence will stay and he will be sentenced to prison, which will mean the end of his political life, he added.

Cheng also said that the anti-corruption campaign is essential to the main commands of the Communist Party regime.

He added that in China, an anti-corruption campaign is a very useful political instrument in the hands of Xi Jinping, generating a certain deterrence effect among his political enemies.Police rescue five Nepali women from Indian brothel

Five Nepal women, aged 17 to 24, have been rescued from an Agra-based brothel in India.CEO of Facebook admitted his profile was also among the data exposed in the Cambridge Analytica leak.

In his second hearing on Capitol Hill to provide answers following revelations of a massive data privacy breach, Mark Zuckerberg faced tougher questions from US Congress regarding the social media giants policies.

The Facebook CEO was also grilled about user privacy, data collection, political bias and the social networks business model.

Facebook has been in the spotlight since news broke last month that the personal information of 87 million users had been illegally harvested by consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica in an attempt to influence political outcomes.

During the five-hour testimony on Wednesday, Zuckerberg admitted that his profile data was among those exposed in the Cambridge Analytica leak.

He said Facebook is contemplating legal action, saying there might be a slew of apps that collected data on Facebook users in a similar fashion to Cambridge Analytica.

However, he rejected suggestions from Congress members that Facebook users did not have enough control over their data.

Every time that someone chooses to share something on Facebook  there is a control. Right there. Not buried in the settings somewhere but right there, Zuckerberg said.

What we saw at these hearings is that he is resisting changing the business model of Facebook, which is based entirely on harvesting user data and taking that data and use that data to help target ads, David McCabe, a tech reporter with Axios, told Al Jazeera.

He said hes in favour of some kind of regulation, but hes not behind some kind of sweeping regulation of Facebook that some critics of the company would like to see, McCabe said.

I think were not any closer to regulation of Facebook, but I do think Congress put Facebook on notice, basically saying Facebook has to clean up its act or we will come in and do it for you.

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The 33-year-old billionaire has apologised numerous times and promised to make meaningful reforms to protect data privacy.

Zuckerberg explained today that Facebooks audits of data harvesting by outside apps would take many months to complete.

One of the issues raised was about the alleged political bias of the platform, with conservative legislators asking about the removal of several popular conservative Facebook pages.

Republican congressman Fred Upton cited an example of a Michigan Republican whose campaign page was removed from Facebook. Others asked the CEO about Facebooks restriction of a page belonging to pro-Trump vloggers Diamond and Silk.

Diamond and Silk was deemed unsafe. What is unsafe about two black women supporting Donald J Trump? one of the legislators asked.

Nothing is unsafe about that, Zuckerberg replied, explaining that these were mistakes.

Facebook does limit some content that could be related to terrorism but, We dont think of it as censorship.

According to Zuckerberg, the company has 200 people working on efforts to combat the promotion of extremist content.

Does Facebook listen in?

Larry Buschon, a Republican from Indiana, brought up a concern about Facebook listening in on peoples conversations. Buschon explained that he and his mother had a conversation about her deceased brother and later on Facebook, his mother saw a memorial photo collage of her brother come up. He cited examples of ads showing up on Facebook relating to conversations they had just had.

Its pretty obvious to me that someone is listening to the audio on our phones, Buschon said.

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Zuckerberg responded that Facebook does not listen in on peoples conversations and that Facebook executives bring their phones into confidential meetings.

The only time we might use the microphone is when you use the video, but we dont have anything that is trying to listen to whats going on in the background, Zuckerberg said.

Facebook has regularly been accused of listening in on conversations using microphones on smartphones and then presenting ads related to recent conversations to its users.

The company has always denied these allegations.

Tracking people

John Shimkus, a Republican from Illinois, asked Zuckerberg whether users are tracked when they are logged out of Facebook.

Facebook tracks certain information for ads and security. Even if someone isnt logged in we track how many pages theyre accessing as a security measure, Zuckerberg said.

The company does this by using different techniques integrated into pages around the web.

Zuckerberg also confirmed reports on so-called shadow profiles, profiles of people who did not sign up for Facebook but are still being tracked.

In general we collect data on people who are not signed up for Facebook for security purposes, Zuckerberg said.

Lack of knowledge

Near the end of the session, Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan criticised Zuckerbergs lack of knowledge of his own company.

As CEO you didnt know some key facts, Dingell said.

You didnt know about key court cases regarding privacy and your company. You didnt know that the FTC doesnt have fining. You didnt know what a shadow profile is. You dont know how many apps you need to audit. You dont know what other companies were sold the Kogan data, even though you were asked that yesterday. You dont even know how many kinds of information youre logging.

Wednesdays appearance before Congress was Zuckerbergs second in two days. His first appearance was before a joint Senate committee.OPCW says it will investigate suspected chemical attack in Eastern Ghoutas Douma amid threat of US military action.

A global chemical weapons watchdog says it has deployed fact-finding teams to investigate a suspected chemical attack that hit Douma, a town in Syrias Eastern Ghouta and the last rebel stronghold.

The announcement came on Thursday, just days after the suspected attack which, according to activists and medics on the ground, claimed the lives of more than 85 civilians and injured at least 1,200 people.

The victims of the April 7 incident were mostly women and children, activists told Al Jazeera from Eastern Ghouta, a Damascus suburb.

The Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirms that the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) team is on its way to Syria and will start its work as of Saturday 14 April, 2018, the watchdog said in a statement on Thursday.

Later on Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country had proof that the Syrian government launched the gas attacks.

Earlier in the day, Bashar al-Jaafari, Syrian ambassador to the US, said in New York that two investigating teams from the OPCW were scheduled to arrive in Syria within the next 24 hours.

Al-Jaafari was quoted by SANA news agency as saying that the Syrian government was ready to facilitate the teams entry into any point in Douma, Eastern Ghoutas largest town.





Meanwhile, James Mattis, the Pentagon chief, has called for an American investigation into the suspected attack.

Speaking to Congress at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Mattis said he believed a chemical attack had taken place and blamed Russia for being complicit in Syrian governments possession of chemical weapons.

I believe there was a chemical attack and we are looking for the actual evidence, he said, indicating that a decision is yet to be made.

The remarks came a day after US President Donald Trump warned Russia that his country would launch missile attacks on Syria after the alleged chemical attack took place.

In response, Maria Zakharova, Russias foreign ministry spokesperson, said allegations of the use of chemical weapons in Douma were false and could not be used as a pretext to undertake any military action against Syria.





Peskov also expressed Moscows support for serious initiatives on the Syrian crisis and other international issues.

Russia has been involved in the Syrian conflict since 2015 and became Syrian President Bashar al-Assads main ally in the war against armed opposition groups.

With Russian military assistance, Assad launched a military offensive on Eastern Ghouta, which had been under rebel control since mid-2013.

Since the start of the aerial bombardment campaign, at least 1,600 civilians have been killed and more than 130,000 people displaced, mostly to other areas in the country, according to the UN.A close look at the recent arms agreements made by the different members of the Arab Gulf grouping.

The global trade in weapons is booming, with sales to the Middle East surging.

Amid regional instability, an arms race is under way among Arab Gulf countries. The members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)  Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait  have spent billions of dollars on weapons this year alone.

Heres a look at the recent deals made.

Saudi Arabia

So far in 2018, Saudi Arabia has allocated over $3bn to arms deals.

Spain: On April 12, Spain and Saudi Arabia signed a framework agreement to sell the Gulf Arab state warships under a deal estimated to be worth around $2.2bn.

Spanish state-owned shipbuilder Navantia will sell five small warships to the kingdom. The deal will include the Spanish army training military personnel in Saudi Arabia and building a naval construction centre there.

UK: On March 9, a memorandum of intent was signed between both countries aiming to finalise discussions for the purchase of 49 Typhoon aircraft.

US: On April 8, the state department approved a possible sale of $1.31bn of self-propelled Howitzer systems and conversion equipment to Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon reported.

US: On March 22, the state department said it had approved a possible sale of an estimated $670m in anti-tank missiles to Saudi Arabia, just hours after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met Pentagon leaders.

US: On the same date, the state department approved a possible sale of $300m in military spare parts and a $106.8m contract for helicopter maintenance. This proposed sale will support US foreign policy and national security objectives by improving the security of a friendly country, the statement read.

US: On January 18, the US government approved a $500m sale of missile system support services to Saudi Arabia.

Qatar

Qatar has allocated over $490m to arms deals in 2018.

US: On March 8, the US government approved a possible sale to Qatar of equipment and support to upgrade the Qatari Emiri Air Forces Air Operations Center at an estimated cost of $197m.

US: On March 9, the US approved a possible military sale to Qatar of Advanced Precision Kill Weapon Systems II guidance sections at an estimated cost of $300m.

Kuwait

So far in 2018, Kuwait has allocated over $300m to arms deals.

US: On February 21, the state department approved a possible foreign military sale to Kuwait of King Air 350ER Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance aircraft at an estimated cost of $259m.

US: On February 20, the state department approved a possible sale of patrol boats at an estimated cost of $100m.

United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates has allocated more than $200m for arms purchases in 2018.

US: On March 8, the US approved the possible sale to the UAE of 300 AIM-Sidewinder Block II missiles, 40 AIM-9X-2 Sidewinder Captive Air Training Missiles and 30 tactical guidance units at an estimated cost of $270.4m.

Oman

Oman has allocated more than $60m for buying weapons in 2018.

US: On January 5, Oman requested items and services to support an incremental Operational Flight Profile (OFP) software upgrade for its F-16 fleet, as well as an Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) suveillance system and secure communications equipment at an estimated cost of $62m.

Bahrain

Bahrain has not reported any arms purchases yet in 2018.

Military powerLegislator from PM Modis BJP party faces inquiry after public outcry over alleged administrative and police cover-up.

Following a massive national outcry over alleged administrative and police cover-up, a lawmaker from Indias ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will be investigated for alleged rape of a 15-year-old girl from Uttar Pradeshs Unnao district.

Police have filed a case against Kuldeep Singh Sengar that include provisions filed under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) on Thursday almost a year after the alleged assault took place.

We have filed an FIR (First Information Report) today under the sections 363, 366, 376 that deals with rape under the Indian Penal Code as well as the POCSO act. The Special Investigation Team has been probing the case, Kunwar Bahadur Singh, Deputy Superintendent of Police at Unnao Police Station, told Al Jazeera.

The girl has accused the 50-year-old politician of raping her in June last year.

In what activists allege is a glaring case of police collusion with the alleged rapist, the girls 55-year-old father who was fighting for justice was arrested by the police and died in custody on Monday.

Clamour for the lawmakers arrest has grown as mounting evidence points to the state police perverting the course of justice by initial attempts at shielding the accused and instead arresting the father of the complainant.

The top investigative body of the country, the Central Bureau of Investigation will now probe the case.

Extrajudicial killings

The police finally registered an FIR against the lawmaker on Thursday after dragging its feet for a week after the rape survivor tried to self-immolate outside Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanaths residence on Sunday protesting police inaction.

Adityanaths term in office has been marred by scandals over extrajudicial killings by the police and now sexual assaults.

Still so many questions are being raised on me, even after my fathers murder. How will I get justice? CBI probe is fine but first MLA should be arrested as he will influence probe, the girl told Indian news agency ANI on Thursday.

The girl has alleged that her father was beaten and killed following orders from the BJP lawmaker.

The father, brought to the hospital from jail, died on Monday, from wounds suffered during an alleged thrashing by the brother of the accused, Atul Singh. A toxicology report says he died of shock and septicaemia.

The accused lawmaker Sengar remains brazen. He told reporters earlier this week that the charges against him were a conspiracy and were levelled by low-class people.

At least six policemen have been suspended following allegations of collusion.

Uttar Pradesh is one of the poorest regions in India, and with a population of 208 million is larger than that of Russia.

Chilling picture

Amnesty International on Wednesday said the Unnao rape case painted a chilling picture.

Six years after the Delhi gang rape case that shocked the world, rape survivors in India face significant barriers to obtaining justice and critical support services, Human Rights Watch said in a recent report.

Indian women who report sexual assaults are still routinely harassed by police and bullied into silence and subsequent withdrawal of complaints, according to the report.

On social media, Indians pointed to the apparent disconnect between Prime Minister Narendra Modi governments flagship Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter) campaign and its failures to protect women, in this instance from its party lawmaker.

https://twitter.com/RichaChadha/status/983570461723447296?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Why does BJP say Beti Bachao and then do Balatkari Bachao  over and over again? @kavita_krishnan https://t.co/on8KUUJyAE  rama lakshmi (@RamaNewDelhi) April 11, 2018

Vrindra Grover, a supreme court lawyer who specialises in sexual assault cases, said in this case, the subversion of the law is being done by the lawmaker and the law enforcer.

Systems are manipulated from the investigation stage onwards, the processes of law are subverted by those in power. The Unnao case is the most brazen illustration of this, Grover told Al Jazeera.

The police facilitated the beating to death of the father of the girl. If the police is going to not act according to the law but at the behest of the accused, then there can be no hope for justice. Today law and justice are a mirage that we are offering the women of this country.

The state is supposed to protect the people. This lawmaker is shamelessly flaunting his power by saying that he has the blessings of the entire state government, she added.

According to National Crime Records Bureau data for 2016, incidents of rape of children in India increased by over 82 percent compared with 2015.

In 2016, police in India registered 38,947 rape complaints, an increase of 12.4 percent from the previous year.

In recent weeks India has also been jolted by the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old Kashmiri girl and the subsequent social and political divisions over the investigation of the case.

Leaders from the BJP, prime minister Modis party, have staged rallies in solidarity with the rapists.At least 34 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since they began holding Land Day protests on March 30.

A Palestinian man shot by Israeli forces during a mass protest along the besieged Gaza Strips southern border has died of his wounds.

Abdullah Mohammed al-Shuhri, 28, was shot in the chest in Khuzaa, near the town of Khan Younis, on Thursday, Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesman for Gazas health ministry, said in a statement.

Al-Shuhri died at the European Hospital, where he was transferred to receive treatment shortly after he was shot during a sit-in that is part of the Great March of Return.

Earlier on Thursday, Mohammed Abu Hajeela, 31, was killed in an Israeli air raid and succumbed to his wounds in Gazas al-Shifa Hospital.

A total of 34 Palestinians have now been shot dead since the start of the protests that began on March 30, when tens of thousands took to the border area with Israel demanding the right of return for Palestinian refugees.





Israeli forces fire live ammunition, tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets at protesting Palestinians.

They have also injured more than 3,000 people since the start of protests, according to Gazas health ministry.

The demonstrations will continue until the Nakba anniversary on May 15, which will mark 70 years since 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their villages and towns by Zionist militias in 1948.

Around 70 percent of Gazas two million population were forced from their homes and now live in a territory the size of the US city of Detroit  about 360sq km  which has been described as the worlds largest open-air prison.

Israel has drawn sharp criticism for its open-fire orders along the border, including its warnings that those approaching or trying to damage the fence would be targeted.

On Saturday, journalist Yaser Murtaja, 30, was killed by Israeli forces while covering the protests, despite him wearing a flak jacket clearly marked with the word Press.

Israeli officials, including Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, have praised Israels troops for guarding the countrys borders.

On April 1, Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli defence minister, rejected calls for an independent investigation into the killings.Court filing by police lays bare circumstances of eight-year-old Muslim girls death in mainly Hindu district of Kathua.

A retired government official and four policemen have been charged over the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Indian-administered Kashmir.

The retired official, Sanji Ram, ordered his nephew and a policeman to kidnap the girl in January to terrorise members of her nomadic Bakerwal community into leaving Kathua district in the regions mainly Hindu Jammu division, according to a court filing.

The girl was heavily sedated, kept in a Hindu temple, and gang-raped by at least three men over the course of four days in mid-January, the police said in the charge sheet made public on Tuesday.





She was later strangled and her body was found in the forest near the temple.

One of the three suspected rapists was a policeman.

Another officer, Anand Dutta, who was initially in charge of the investigation, took more than $6,000 in bribes to cover up the crime, according to the police.

Dutta even washed the clothes of the victim was wearing at the time of her death to remove any blood or semen stains, they said.

He is among a total of eight suspects who have been detained over the girls rape and murder. All eight are Hindu.

Residents of Kathuas mainly Hindu community, however, claim the men are innocent and have protested against their arrest for months.

Several officials of Indias governing Hindu nationalist BJP have also rushed to the suspects defence, organising marches against their detention, while lawyers of Jammus Bar Association blocked the entrance to a local court to prevent the police from filing charges against the suspects.

Land disputes

There have always been divisions between the Muslim and Hindu communities in Jammu and Kashmir state, Talib Hussain, a member of the Bakarwal community, told Al Jazeera.

But the situation has worsened since the BJP, led by Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, won national elections in 2014.

The eight-year-olds murder was a well-planned crime to create fear among the Muslims in Kathua and drive them away from their homes in the Hindu-majority area, Hussain said, noting an increase in conflict between local Hindus and the Bakarwals over land disputes in recent years.

The police, in the court filing, also said rivalry between the two groups had grown, with members filing various complaints against each other.

The Bakarwals, who herd goats and sheep, spend the winter months in the plains of Jammu and migrate to highland pastures to graze their animals.

In recent years, some of them have started to settle in permanent homes.

Ram, who planned the girls abduction, was against the settlement of Bakarwals in Kathua and always kept on motivating members of his community of the area not to provide land for grazing or any other kind of assistance, the charge sheet said.

Prior to the attack, he imposed fines at least two members of the Bakerwal community for using a pond and a forest near his land for watering and grazing their cattle, the police said.

Ram had even campaigned against one of his neighbours for selling land to a Bakarwal, the police said, adding that ultimately, the victim, being a child, became a soft target of the growing rivalry.

Rein in the mob

Himanshu Sharma, a Jammu lawyer who has rallied in defence of the accused, called the state polices investigation flawed.

He claimed Muslim policemen from Kashmir valley were involved in the probe, and demanded the federal Central Bureau of Investigation look in to the case instead.

The Bar Association, for its part, called for a general strike in Kathua on Wednesday, prompting a police investigation of disruption against them.

Hindu nationalists have protested against the arrest of the suspects in Kathua [File: Reuters]

There is only one reason men accused of such a heinous crime have widespread public support: like the majority of people in Kathua, the suspects are Hindu; the girl was a Muslim, wrote Samar Halarnkar in the Scroll on Thursday.

He said the victims rape and murder marked a defining moment for India.

The BJP must rein in the mob, he said, adding that it must stand for what is just and lawful, qualities they have frequently abandoned when minorities are involved.

Sunil Sethi, a BJP official in Jammu and Kashmir, denied the charge, saying they too demand justice for the victim.

Silence at the centre

While the BJPs defence of the accused has been loud at the state level, at the national level its silence has been deafening, wrote Monobina Gupta, managing editor of The Wire news website, referring to Modis lack of comment on the case.

The noise at the state level accompanied by the silence at the national level feed into each other, she said, promoting [a] culture of impunity for law-breakers who target Muslims and other marginalised sections.

Responding to the anger over the girls murder, Mehbooba Mufti, the chief minister for Jammu and Kashmir, whose PDP party rules the state in an alliance with the BJP, pledged on Thursday to introduce the death penalty for child rapists.

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We will never let another child suffer in this way, she wrote on Twitter.

Many others also took to Twitter to question why opposition leader Rahul Gandhis had failed to comment, after which the president of the Indian National Congress party called for a silent, peaceful, candlelit vigil in New Delhi.

Thousands joined the vigil at India Gate monument on Thursday night to demand justice for women.

Dozens of womens rights activists and students, already angered by what they called police reluctance to investigate a BJP politician over the rape of a 15-year-old in Uttar Pradesh, also took to the streets of New Delhi on Thursday in protest against the two cases.

But other Twitter users lamented what they called a muted response.

They noted how another attack in 2012, the fatal gang rape of a young woman dubbed Nirbhaya, had moved hundreds of thousands of Indians to take to the streets in protest.

The Kashmir girl is another Nirbhaya, wrote Shaili Chopra, a rights activist. We need collective disobedience against rape in India  if these cases dont shake the conscience of this nation, what will?At least 65 foreign invitees blocked from participating in meeting in Ramallah organised by the Palestinian Authority.

A number of international religious figures and politicians, including a Ghanaian legislator, have been denied entry by Israel after they were set to attend a conference in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

The 9th International Conference on the Holy City of Jerusalem kicked off on Wednesday, but there was a glaring absence of attendees, including a 13-member Indian delegation, a mufti from Sri Lanka, a Bosnian Muslim scholar, and the head of Australias Islamic Council.

Ras Mubarak, the Ghana MP, was due to deliver a speech at the conference but was turned away twice at the Allenby border crossing.

I arrived on Tuesday but was denied entry and told to return this morning only to receive the same harassment and be denied entry once again, Mubarak told Al Jazeera, adding that he was honouring an invitation by the Palestinian Authority to speak at the conference.

The Israelis asked me what I was going to do in Palestine, he continued. They had given me permission to enter, and then they revoked this authorisation.

They didnt give me any reasons for denying me entry.

Mubarak, a member of the National Democratic Congress party, said the Israelis turned away two buses of people, including academics and Muslim scholars, who had arrived at the border.

Mubarak described the ordeal at the border as unfortunate, but not surprising.

It is not the first time they have prevented a politician or activist from entering the West Bank, he said. It is part of an attempt to harass friends of Palestine.

It is incumbent upon all of us to show solidarity at the African Union and UN level to ensure that this doesnt keep happening.

There is no Palestine

Ami Mehl, Israeli ambassador to Ghana, told Ghanas Starr News radio that Mubaraks claims of being denied entry for no reason were just not true.

He came without a visa to the border, [and] was asked to wait, Mehl told radio host Naa Dedei Tettey.

I was in the middle of a conversation with Israeli authorities about his case and when I was notified he had decided to turn back and go back to his hotel in Jordan.

When Tettey mentioned that Mubarak said he had Israeli clearance to visit the West Bank, Mehl said that was a complete lie.

Mehl then lost his cool after Tettey quoted Mubarak as saying he had permission from Israel to enter the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories).

If you want to talk to me, you will use the terminology I use, he shouted. There is no OPT; there is no Palestine, there was never a Palestine. It is Israel.

Its bullsh**, its propaganda, the Israeli ambassador went on. [Mubarak] came to Israel without a visa. He is a propaganda machine for the Palestinians, so we do not take him seriously.

Travel permits revoked

Mahmoud Hamad, who is responsible for receiving the conferences guest delegations after they cross the Allenby border, told Al Jazeera that all the participants were issued Israeli travel permits to enter the West Bank.

Sixty-five internationals flew into Amman airport carrying travel permits from Israeli authorities, Hamad said. These permits were revoked upon their arrival to Allenby border.

They came from all over the world: Australia, Mozambique, Guatemala, UK, Nigeria, Bulgaria, Ghana, South Africa, Sweden, Italy, Sri Lanka, Zambia.

The Israeli border authorities told them all that as participants of the 9th International Conference on Jerusalem, they cannot enter.

Arrangements, including accommodation, were made for the invitees in Amman instead, and they participated in the conference through satellite video.

Jerusalem cause alive and well

The first conference was held in 1931 by Jerusalems Mufti Hajj Amin Husseini to counter the British Mandate policies affecting the status of Jerusalem.

The second conference was held in 2011, and has been hosted annually since then, with invitations extended to numerous delegations, mostly from across the Arab and Muslim world, to discuss the importance Jerusalem holds among the three Abrahamic religions in the face of Israels intransigence and occupation.

Khalil Karajeh, a member of the conferences preparatory committee, said this years conference was under the theme of Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine.

It was a challenge to US President Donald Trumps decision to recognise the city as Israels capital, Karajeh told Al Jazeera.

The conference is a message to the world that the Jerusalem cause is alive and well in the hearts of people.

Karajeh said a lot of our Muslim brothers, especially the Turkish people, feel that visiting Jerusalem is obligatory since it holds Islams third holiest site, referring to al-Aqsa Mosque.

For Ras Mubarak, it was his first attempt to visit the West Bank. He confirmed that he would file a complaint with the Ghanaian parliament.

What happened is unacceptable, he said. Israel is erroneously described as the only democracy in the Middle East, but when I see the gross violation of the rights of Palestinians and friends of Palestine, there is no way it can be described as so.

If Israel wants its citizens to be treated with respect and dignity, it must reciprocate.

Additional reporting by Arwa Ibrahim

Follow Linah Alsaafin at @LinahAlsaafinThere can never be peace until the Jerusalem file is satisfactorily resolved, says chairman of Jerusalem Endowment.

Palestinian interfaith officials have warned against monopolising the city of Jerusalem by the Israeli government and the effects that would have on Christianity and Islam.

Hanna Issa, secretary-general of the Palestinian Authoritys Muslim-Christian Committee said that more than 95 percent of Jerusalem had already been Judaised by Israel, and that Greater Jerusalem would alter the citys identity and importance to Christianians and Muslims.

Israel wants to establish its so-called Greater Jerusalem on an area of 600sq km, which would mean the destruction of the citys churches and mosques, Issa said.

The warning came during the 9th International Conference on the Holy City of Jerusalem on Wednesday, which kicked off in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

The conference was attended by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and numerous delegations from across the Arab and Muslim world.

Munib Masri, chairman of the Jerusalem Endowment, stressed Jerusalems importance for both Muslims and Christians.

The world must understand that there can never be peace until the Jerusalem file is satisfactorily resolved, he said.

He added: Jerusalem requires practical initiatives and financial support with a view to strengthening the resolve of its people.

Speaking at the event, Youssef Edies, Palestinian minister of religious endowments, described Jerusalem as the birthplace of religions.

We must focus on Arab, Muslim and international efforts on resisting the fierce Western onslaught against the Holy Land, he asserted.

Israeli control

Israel occupied and annexed East Jerusalem in the aftermath of the June 1967 War, in a move that was never recognised by the international community.

Since then, Israel has built more than a dozen housing complexes for Jewish Israelis, known as settlements, some in the middle of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem.

Israels settlement project, which is aimed at the consolidation of Israels control over the city, is also considered illegal under international law.

About 200,000 Israeli citizens live in East Jerusalem under army and police protection, with the largest single settlement complex housing 44,000 Israelis.

Such fortified settlements, often scattered between Palestinians homes, infringe on the freedom of movement, privacy and security of Palestinians.

Call for free access

Last Saturday, a United Nations envoy accused Israel of trying to block him and other diplomats from a pre-Easter Holy Fire ritual in the packed Jerusalem church Christians revere as the burial site of Jesus.

Robert Serry, the UNs peace envoy to the Middle East, said in a statement that Israeli security officers had stopped him and a group of Palestinian worshippers and diplomats in a procession near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, claiming they had orders to that effect.

Last month, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said church authorities had applied for around 600 permits for Palestinian Christians in Gaza to travel to Jerusalem to celebrate Easter, but none were granted.

Father Ibrahim Shomali, chancellor of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, said: We have to have free access to the Holy Land, free access to our holy places.A Kremlin spokesperson has said that Russia does not engage in Twitter diplomacy after US President Donald Trump used the social media platform to warn Moscow of imminent military action in Syria, the Interfax news agency reported.

We do not participate in Twitter diplomacy, Dimitri Peskov was quoted as saying by Interfax.

We support serious approaches. We continue to believe that it is important not to take steps that could harm an already fragile situation.

Trump told Russia in an early morning tweet on Wednesday to prepare for nice and new and smart!' missile attacks in Syria after an alleged chemical attack on the last rebel stronghold in the country.

In response to Trumps tweet, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said: Smart missiles should fly towards terrorists, not [Syrias] lawful government, which has spent several years fighting against international terrorism on its territory.

Peskov said his country, which has been involved in the Syrian conflict since 2015 and an ally to President Bashar al-Assad, is convinced that the allegations of the use of chemical weapons in Eastern Ghoutas city of Douma is false and cannot be used as a pretext to undertake any military steps against Syria.

Peskov also expressed Moscows support for serious initiatives on the Syrian crisis and other international issues.

UK discusses options

In London, British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her senior ministers to a special cabinet meeting on Thursday to discuss options for joining the United States in possible military action against Syria.

May is prepared to take action against the Assad government in Syria without first seeking parliamentary consent, sources have told the BBC.

May recalled the ministers from their Easter holiday for a special cabinet meeting in Downing Street later on Thursday to discuss Britains response to what she has cast as a barbaric attack that cannot go unchallenged.

The chemical weapons attack that took place on Saturday in Douma in Syria was a shocking and barbaric act, May told reporters on Wednesday. All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper said May had ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military.

On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council rejected rival draft resolutions by the US and Russia to set up a new expert body to probe chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

The US proposal called for establishing an independent investigative mechanism to conduct on-site inspections to find out who used chemical weapons, while Russia proposed its own plan to send investigators to the site of the alleged attack.CIA chief questioned on North Korea, Iran nuclear deal and FBI probe into alleged Russian meddling in 2016 US elections.

CIA chief Mike Pompeo has faced sharp questioning at the confirmation hearing in the US Senate for his nomination as secretary of state.

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, Pompeo was questioned on a number of different issues, relating to North Korea, the Iran nuclear deal and alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections.

He said a US attack on North Korea in response to its nuclear programme advancement would be catastrophic.

Pompeo refused to comment on the FBI investigation into Russian collusion in the US elections but did say he believed there was interference from Moscow.

If confirmed by the Senate, Pompeo said he would bolster the Iran nuclear deal, adding that fixing the 2015 agreement is in the US best interest.

Simple majority needed

Pompeo needs a simple majority in the Senate to be confirmed as secretary of state.

He was confirmed to his position as CIA director last year in a vote of 66 to 32, with 14 Democrats voting for his appointment.

Republicans hold 52 seats in the 100-seat Senate, but two Republican senators will not vote for his confirmation: Arizonas John McCain is away for cancer treatment, and Kentuckys Rand Paul has said he will vote no.

As such, at least one Democratic vote will be required for his confirmation.





However, Senate Democrats may refuse to vote in favour of Pompeo with US midterm elections approaching in November and Democrats eyeing sweeping victories due to the unpopularity of President Donald Trump.

Democrats are campaigning on an anti-Trump platform and attempting to distance themselves from his policies.

Trump has spoken highly of Pompeo, as has a group of 53 national security experts, who sent a letter to Republican Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying Pompeo is the sort of seasoned, accomplished and energetic national security policy practitioner our nation desperately needs at this juncture in the role of secretary of state.

If confirmed, Pompeo will replace Rex Tillerson, who was sacked by Trump in March.

Tillerson served as secretary of state until the end of March.Province 2 and 7 present their policies and programmes

The provincial executives in Province 2 and 7 presented policies and programmes on Wednesday for the remaining three months of fiscal year 2017/18. Both the governments have prioritised the use of local resources and develop infrastructure.Hama Amadou, who contested 2016 presidential poll, lost appeal against a one-year jail term, according to legal sources.

Niger opposition leader and former Prime Minister Hama Amadou lost an appeal against a one-year jail term for baby smuggling, legal sources said.

Amadou  who lives in France  was among a group of around 20 people, including one of his wives, who received one-year terms in March 2017 for allegedly smugging babies from Nigeria via Benin to wealthy couples in Niger.

He was tried and convicted in absentia, and would have to return to Niger in order to serve his sentence.

The case has become a long-running political saga in the country, with Amadous lawyers claiming the prosecution is aimed at sidelining President Mahamadou Issoufous biggest rival.

Amadou, nicknamed the Phoenix for his political comebacks, challenged Issoufou in Nigers presidential elections in 2016.

He was arrested on November 14, 2015, on his return from exile, and was forced to campaign for the presidency from behind bars.

He was released on medical grounds on March 16, 2016, four days before the second round of the voting, and flew to France.

Issoufou went on to win with 92 percent of the runoff ballot. With the opposition boycotting the election, Amadou only got seven percent of the vote.

Constitutional lawyer Amadou Boubacar confirmed that under Nigerien law, Amadou was now barred from elective office.

His appeal has been rejected, which means that his conviction is definitive, Boubacar told AFP. Unless and until he is declared innocent, he will not be entitled to vote or run for office.Critics and analysts urge President Moon to bring up violations and abductions in the upcoming summit.

Seoul, South Korea  The agenda for the third inter-Korean summit scheduled for April 27 is unlikely to have North Korean human rights issues despite calls for the inclusion by more than 200 NGOs earlier this week.

The NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, sent a joint letter to South Korean President Moon Jae-in earlier this week to urge his North Korean counterpart to follow the UNs human rights recommendations and facilitate human rights talks between the two Koreas.

The letter also pushed for regular reunions of separated families and increase inter-Korean people-to-people contact.

However, South Koreas Ministry of Unification confirmed human rights in North Korea was not on the agenda.

The main agenda will be denuclearisation, establishment of peace on the Korean Peninsula and improving North-South relations. Nothing more, nothing less, Baik Tae-hyun, spokesperson for the ministry, told Al Jazeera.

This will be the first inter-Korean summit since 2007 and only the third since the 1950-1953 Korean War.

It is scheduled to be attended by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon.

The human rights issues will not be given high priority because it is a sensitive issue and may cause a psychological discomfort at the summit, according to Hong Min, director of the North Korean studies division at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

The meeting is a tight one-day event. There wont be enough time to talk about everything. The focus will be on confirming each others stance on denuclearisation, said Hong.

North Korean human rights issues are likely to be discussed later at a wider international level with the participation of the international community.

The joint letter sent to President Moon reflects the NGOs concerns that human rights issues have been sidelined due to other major political issues.

{articleGUID}

The South Korean government has been reluctant to talk about North Korean human rights, said Ahn Myeong-cheol, head of the Seoul-based NK Watch which consists of survivors of North Koreas political prison camps and one of the 40 organisations that signed the letter.

President Moon was a human rights lawyer who had been fighting for democracy and human rights in the country.

North Korean human rights are as equally important as human rights in South Korea. It will be an irony if he doesnt bring up North Korean human rights in the summit.

The Korean War Abductees Family Union estimates that between 82,000 and 100,000 South Korean citizens were abducted across the border during the Korean War.

Family members of those individuals signed the letter sent to President Moon and urged North Korea to report the records of abductees and to return them.

Time is ticking by to resolve the human rights-related issues, said Hwang In-cheol, head of the 1969 KAL Abductees Families Association, whose father was kidnapped along with around 50 passengers on-board a Korean Air flight in 1969.

The inter-Korean talks will only have sincerity when it touches on the issues that North Korea feels uncomfortable with.Qatar seeks to double economic partnership with US worth $125bn

Qatars emir met with senior business and political figures, as he plans to further expand his countrys investment portfolio in the United States to counter the blockade imposed by four of its neighbouring countries.Last rebel fighters pushed out of Syrias Douma

Syrian government forces have pushed the last rebel fighters out of the town of Douma, according to the Reuters news agency quoting a Russian military official.The eastern city of Dammam is due to host the Arab League summit on April 15.

Twitter users across Saudi Arabia have welcomed a decision to hoist Qatari flags in public in advance of the Arab League summit, saying they hoped it could serve as a starting point for a return to brotherly relations between the two neighbours.

Dozens of Qatari flags were raised on lamp posts in the eastern city of Dammam on Thursday, which is due to host the summit on April 15.

Doha has not yet decided on its representation level at the summit.

Last summer, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain collectively severed ties with Qatar, creating one of the biggest crises in inter-Arab relations in recent history.

The four nations accuse Doha of supporting terrorism, a claim vehemently denied by Qatar.

Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, has repeatedly said he is ready for talks with the quartet, but has refused to give up his countrys sovereignty.

Thousands of social media users took to Twitter to support the developments in Dammam, with the Arabic hashtag #SaudiandQatarAreOne being the number-one trending topic in the eastern province city.

Heres how some users responded:

Twitter user Boozamal wrote:

Translation: #SaudiandQatarAreOne. No doubt about it. And the evidence is that we are happy to see the flag of Qatar waving in Saudi.

#___

  ..         pic.twitter.com/rBOGSRiN9d  . (@buzamil0) April 12, 2018

Saudi Twitter user @ii6vu wrote:

Translation: #SaudiandQatarAreOne. Our friends, wise people of Qatar, we are your brothers as a nation and leadership.

#___

    

      pic.twitter.com/fnPFsyamXl   (@ii6vu) April 12, 2018

Twitter user Muhammad al-Hussaini wrote:

Translation: #SaudiandQatarAreOne. May Allah reunite us.

Twitter user Basasaam, from Qasim in Buraydah, wrote:

Translation: This hashtag is for the people, those who have dirty policies can stand aside #SaudiandQatarAreOne.

https://twitter.com/bsomii6/status/984321676904206337?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

Mazaji Heel wrote:

Translation: #SaudiandQatarAreOne  This is the best hashtag of 2018.

Meanwhile, Egyptian journalist Samy Kamal Eddeen wrote:

Translation: We wish from God that Qatar and Saudi Arabia will return to a state of love, harmony and unity which will put an end to bickering and hatred.

    #  #          #_

#___     (@samykamaleldeen) April 12, 2018

Social media users in Qatar also welcomed the news, with Abdulaziz Ale Ishaq writing:

Translation: The people of the Gulf are one  And the people of the Gulf will not be separated by anyone.

    

        ..

#___     (@AbdulazizSay) April 12, 2018

Meanwhile, Amal Abdulmalik wrote:

Translation: I hope this hashtag is the beginning of the end of electronic attacks and bots against Qatar, its emir, and people. We pray to God to protect us from apparent and hidden evils.

        #_        #             #___    (@AmalAbdulmalik) April 12, 2018

Slogans in support of Qatar have been among the top topics discussed on Twitter in Arabic, which is a hugely popular medium of expression in the Arab world.The US president claims that an attack could happen very soon or not so soon at all!

US President Donald Trump tweeted that he never said when an attack on Syria would take place, claiming it could it could be very soon or not so soon at all!

The tweet, sent early on Thursday morning, comes after a previous message in which Trump told Russia to prepare for missile attacks on Syria, which Russians officials in turn promised to shoot down.

The tweet caused many across the world to suspect that a US attack on Syria was imminent.

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova responded to Trumps tweet by saying that missiles should fly towards terrorists, not [Syrias] lawful government, which has spent several years fighting against international terrorism on its territory.

The social media back-and-forth came as the United States and several European countries threatened to take action against Syrian government forces in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack on the rebel-held town of Douma.

Russia is the main ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has waged a seven-year civil war against rebel factions pushing for the overthrow of his government.

While tensions were high on Wednesday, Russia took steps to calm the situation, discounting Twitter diplomacy in a statement from Dimitri Peskov, a Kremlin spokesperson.

We support serious approaches. We continue to believe that it is important not to take steps that could harm an already fragile situation, Peskov was quoted as saying by Interfax.At the end of his tenure, Trump presided over the deaths of 13 prisoners. What will happen to the 2,500 on death row?Raiding the office of the personal attorney of the president of the United States is the most outrageous of the Deep State's unprecedented, unhinged, and relentless attempts to overturn the 2016 election. This raid should tell everyone that the Deep State will twist and bend the law to get rid of Trump. As stated by President Trump, the Deep State truly is engaged in a disgraceful witch hunt.

Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton are loyal Deep State operatives. They have been stealthily transforming America into a socialist-progressive nation in which the federal government controls every aspect of our lives. Trump is the new sheriff in town determined to crush the Washington, D.C. cartel by draining the swamp. The Deep State is determined to block and destroy Trump at any and all cost.

This is why the Deep State outrageously turned a blind eye to Obama's, Bill's, and Hillary's numerous unconstitutional acts, numerous confirmed lies, policies bad for America, bags of money under the cover of darkness, and extreme character and moral failures.

For example, the Deep State ignored the fact that their President Obama outrageously won PolitiFact's Lie of the Year award.

The Deep State ignored the semen-stained dress that surfaced after Bill Clinton lied about not having sex with intern Monica Lewinsky. The Deep State ignored revelations that Bill and Monica used his $1,000-each Gurkha cigars as sex toys.

The Deep State ignored the fact that Clinton had so many adulterous affairs that his campaign formed the Bimbo Eruptions team to immediately destroy women who considered going public about their sexual encounters with Bill Clinton. The Deep State ignored the fact that Hillary (Miss I'm a Champion for Women) Clinton headed the Bimbo Eruptions team in bullying, silencing, and destroying Bill's women.

The Deep State ignored credible women such as Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Bill Clinton of rape, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.

The Deep State ignored Hillary's blatant multiple crimes. The Deep State ignored Hillary illegally using an unsecured private server, deleting thousands of emails, and lying by saying the emails were not work-related. The Deep State ignored that Hillary deleted 1,000 work-related emails to General David Petraeus.

The Deep State ignored Bill's and Hillary's history of corruption unmasked in the documentary Clinton Cash. The Deep State ignored the Clintons' corruption exposed in Dinesh D'Souza's movie, Hillary's America.

The Deep State ignored the fact that Hillary paid for the disgusting, bogus Trump golden shower hit piece.

Folks, I could go on and on with documented prosecutable crimes by the Clintons that have been ignored by the Deep State.

Displaying extreme arrogance and glaring hypocrisy, these evil people in the Deep State are digging deep into the bowels of President Trump's life and businesses over the decades to find something to use to kick him out of office. The Deep State obviously believes that We the People will passively allow it to remove our president. In essence, the Deep State is saying: Screw you, America; we're taking this country back.

The Deep State, which is void of morals, seeks to play on our morals to remove our president. While the Deep State ignores the deviancy, lies, and crimes of its operatives, the Deep State will pressure Republicans to back away from Trump for moral reasons. Sadly, some Republicans will fall for the Deep State's dirty trick. I pray that We the People will stand strong, unwavering in our support of Trump and his vow to make America great again.

I agree with a dear conservative activist friend who said it is time we stop allowing the Deep State to control the public's focus. Let's get the Tea Party visible again with rallies in support of Trump's agenda, the border wall, ending sanctuary cities, and other important issues. We must inform the masses about Trump's remarkable achievements. Here's a taste: for each regulation that Trump has introduced, he has ended 66 of Obama's overreaching, job-killing, and insane leftist regulations.

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke

Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American

Help Lloyd spread the Truth

http://LloydMarcus.comTarun Dal cadre among four held for extortion

Police have arrested four persons from Kathmandu on the charge of extorting businessmen by issuing death threats.The United States is quickly turning "cashless," buying most things from automobiles to hamburgers via bank loans and credit cards. Americans carry more than a trillion dollars on such "debt cards." Banks for the moment still tolerate relatively small amounts of cash and cash-backed debit card transactions, but they would prefer to move solely to "cashlessness"  in which more and more of what we need is not earned or saved, but borrowed on credit for high interest.

Government is even happier with the fast arriving cashless society. Cash can be hidden, despite your bank being required to spy on you and report to the IRS any "unusual" financial activity. Government wants every transaction you make to be taxable, trackable, hackable, blockable, and used to empower Big Brother.

Cashlessness in surprising ways gives vast power to government. Days ago, for example, liberal Democrat and New York State comptroller Thomas J. DiNapoli, who controls where the state invests its $209.1-billion pension fund, sent out a letter. It went to institutions that control our credit cards  Visa, MasterCard, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, American Express, Discover Financial Services, and others.

DiNapoli's message was about as subtle as a guy wearing a pinstripe suit, black shirt, and white tie saying: "You gotta nice place here. Too bad if anything happened to it. But maybe I can provide you some protection."

DiNapoli suggested that these companies should consider whether gun transactions should be classified with restricted high-risk purchases like pornography, illicit drugs, and crypto-currencies. "If gun violence continues unabated in society," he wrote, "public outcry ... may grow and create significant financial risk for the company."

DiNapoli suggested that these companies look into implementing ways to block credit card purchases of firearms, ammunition, and gun accessories. The implied threat was clear: stop extending credit to gun- and ammo-buyers, or risk having New York State investment money taken away from your bank or credit company because the left wants to ban guns.

The federal government has already tried such intimidation, as Craig R. Smith and I explained in our 2014 book Don't Bank On It! The Unsafe World of 21st Century Banking. President Barack Obama implemented "Operation Choke Point," which threatened regulatory problems for financial institutions that did not withhold banking and credit services from firearms and ammunition-sellers, among others. Such sellers were to be cut off even if they had never been found guilty of any criminal wrongdoing.

This was the naked weaponization of regulatory power to injure or kill ideological targets. Consumer Research analyst Beau Brunson noted that Operation Choke Point "used reputational risk as a tool for bank coercion." Now so does DiNapoli. With "cashlessness," when customers have no other way to buy, such nuclear warfare can crush businesses and products.

In August 2017, President Donald Trump stopped Operation Choke Point, but as The Hill wrote, "a program terminated unilaterally can be resumed unilaterally." On the day Progressive Democrats regain power, this is one of ten thousand kinds of authoritarian force they immediately will reinstall.

Sweden had been enthusiastic about becoming the world's first "cashless" society. Now the Swedes are frightened at the power this gives government  not only their own, but Russia's should it launch an invasion by hacking, scrambling, or shutting off Sweden's computer networks as it did Ukraine's, leaving Swedes helpless, without access to either cash or credit.

If a "cashless" government becomes authoritarian, it can not only monitor and tax everything you buy, but also ban purchases  ranging from foods it deems unhealthful to guns it deems dangerous. Without approval of the beast, you will be denied the ability to buy what you want and need. Purchasing or repairing once legal firearms can instantly be made impossible.

This authoritarian step-by-step plan makes people depend on credit cards and on renting things instead of owning them. Then it outlaws cash as something only outlaws use. Then government can control what people are permitted to buy by regulating and intimidating banks and credit card companies. The future will eventually rediscover the Framers' constitutional money. We will return to the 5,000-year tradition of precious metal that needs no government or computer to give it value. We will learn again that gold and free are not "four-letter words," but two words that go together.

Lowell Ponte is a veteran think-tank futurist and author or co-author of eight books. His latest, co-authored with Craig R. Smith, is Money, Morality & The Machine, available free and postpaid by calling 800-630-1492. Lowell can be reached for interviews by email at radioright@aol.com.

Image: Gary Stevens via Flickr.Although the truly florid lunacy concerning the Trump presidency is confined to the political left, we can't forget the other breed of anti-Trumpism on the political right: the #NeverTrump movement. These folks are the conservatives, the libertarians, and (especially) the establishment Republicans who were staunchly against Trump from the moment he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015 to announce his candidacy.

NeverTrumps got heavyweight support from the February 15, 2016 issue of National Review, the cover of which was emblazoned with "Against Trump." Since "never" means never, there seems to be no assuaging these folks, many of whom are the stars of conservatism  i.e., intellectuals whom many right-wingers admire. Here's a list of well-known NeverTrumps. Some NeverTrumps, however, may be faux conservatives.

During most of the 2016 campaign, I was not a Trump-supporter, as I thought Trump would do nothing less than take down the whole Republican Party with him. In fact, I wrote maybe 15 articles for American Thinker urging primary voters, convention delegates, party committees, and anyone interested to back someone else. I my-damn-self voted for Ted Cruz in the Missouri primary, and not because I was hot and heavy for Sen. Cruz, but because I feared ruination of the party. And if primary voters didn't do as I urged, then I wanted them to be ignored by delegates. Even so, in the first of those 2016 articles calling for the GOP to go with someone else, I indicated that I would vote for Mr. Trump if he were the nominee, and that I did. So this kid was never a NeverTrump.

On Dec. 29, 2017, the New York Times ran "Why I'm Still a NeverTrumper" by Bret Stephens. Stephens starts his column well and even acknowledges the several successes of Trump's first year. But he then admits that he still wishes Hillary Clinton were president and wonders whether he's really a conservative. (My dear Bret, you seem to have gone over to the Dark Side.)

Some of President Trump's most visible and vocal supporters are on FNC, the Fox News Channel. Because Fox News has long been the bete noire of the radical left, when NeverTrumps rail against Fox News, they need to be aware of whom they're getting in bed with.

On March 30, the Washington Post ran "Why I left Fox News" by Colonel Ralph Peters. The article seems to have created a stir. When one Googles the first sentence of the article, 992,000 hits come back. The article was also run in McClatchy newspapers. Col. Peters is not a regular at the Post, but he does have his own column (archive) at the other Post, the New York Post, Alexander Hamilton's old newspaper, which happens to be owned by News Corp, a Rupert Murdoch company, as is 21st Century Fox, which owns Fox News. (Let's hope the good colonel doesn't burn all his bridges.)

Over the years, I've appreciated Col. Peters's appearances on Fox News, but this article has problems. Peters trots out Fox's attacks on institutions as though there are no problems with America's institutions. Don't pretend there's nothing wrong with our institutions, Colonel; they're the problem. Peters also talks about "Fox's assault on our constitutional order" but provides no examples of such.

What probably provoked Peters's article was the March 20 BuzzFeed leak of his Fox News resignation email, which was followed the next day by an article in the Post by Max Boot: "A conservative commentator revolts against Fox News." But whereas Peters showed some grace and equanimity in his article and even thanks his Fox colleagues, Boot isn't so nice. The last paragraph of Boot's article contains one of the more deranged statements I've encountered by a NeverTrump (italics added): "Fox News's creation in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was one of the most damaging developments in modern American history."

It's a pity that there are no editors at the once decent Washington Post charged with protecting their writers from making fools of themselves. Incidentally, you can find Mr. Boot on the list of NeverTrumps above. He supposedly endorsed Hillary Clinton (and yet he thinks he's a conservative).

The reason Boot might have it in for Fox is because he didn't acquit himself well there in July of last year when he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, which you can watch at RealClearPolitics. That appearance was the day after Col. Peters had appeared on the same show; watch the whole exchange at RCP, or just the fiery moments on Twitter. Tucker may be the most gentlemanly host on cable news, but don't call him a Nazi, a quisling, or a Putin accommodationist unless you're ready to rumble.

The reason some NeverTrumps have it in for Fox News is not because the company hired Tucker Carlson to take over the time slot of Mr. Big (i.e., Bill O'Reilly). Mr. Carlson isn't a Trump apologist (I can make that assessment because I watch the guy every night). Rather, the reason NeverTrumps have their panties in a bunch over Fox News is the guy who follows Carlson: Sean Hannity, who refers to the MSM as the "Destroy Trump Media," which he promises never to be.

Democrats and the radical left have put their hopes for getting rid of Trump in the Mueller probe. But that all seems to be boomeranging; what the Democrats have accused Trump of doing is what they actually did. For months now, Hannity's program has doggedly focused on Democrat scandals, and they hate him for it. Hannity's show may well be the tip of the spear in uncovering wrongdoing in the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. And it's the loons of the left whom NeverTrumps are now grouped with. The NeverTrumps are more concerned about possible crimes that candidate Trump may have committed than with the demonstrable undeniable crimes committed by candidate Clinton. They care more about getting Trump than cleaning up the corruption, the institutional rot, at the top of the FBI and the Department of Justice.

What happened in the 2016 general election still seems a miracle, especially when one factors in the GOP's success on the state level: Trump had coattails to burn. A cogent case might be made that the most important thing Trump did was to save us from the Dragon Lady. Had Mrs. Clinton won, it's doubtful that any of what we've been learning on Fox News about the DOJ, the FBI, the FISA court, the Steele dossier, etc. would have come to light. America will cease being America if we continue to have a two-tiered justice system. Mrs. Clinton, her campaign, and all Deep State malefactors need to face the music.

Trump could denuclearize North Korea, could get the economy humming along at 4-percent growth, turn water into wine, and many NeverTrumps would persist in their disdain of The Donald. Why? Could it be a deep fear of not being taken seriously, of being irrelevant? Perhaps they're more concerned about being shown to have been wrong than about everything blowing up.

A wise old defense secretary once said, "You go to war with the army you have." Well, you run a country with the president you have. If Trump has some deficiencies, then let us work to help him. He's done some fine things since he's been in office, some very conservative things. Even Bret Stephens admits it.

Without Fox News, America would be much deeper into socialism than she already is. Fox News is all we conservatarians have on the boob tube. If Rupert's son decides to lurch left in the programming on Fox News, it'll be enough for this kid to finally "cut the cord."

Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.Since Election Day, when the entire Washington, D.C. establishment was expecting a Hillary Clinton landslide victory, the establishment's goal has been to get rid of Donald Trump. It began the day after the election. Once Mrs. Clinton stopped throwing and breaking things in her hotel room, John Podesta and her team concocted the Russia collusion story to explain her surprising electoral loss.

The reality is that the Russia-Russia story was already being worked in the FBI and DOJ via investigations and FISA warrants constituting the infamous "insurance policy" in the unlikely event that Trump did win the election  or to ruin him if he lost, sending a message to any future outsider candidate who dares to challenge the Deep State nominees.

Since then, the entire goal of the Deep State has been to somehow get rid of President Trump. There has been a withering attack on Trump from the media, 24-7, with over 90 percent negative coverage. No other president, including other Republicans, have had monolithic media opposition day in and day out, including the constant stream of fake news.

The Deep State is working in concert with the media to destroy Trump, as evidenced by the ongoing revelations hopefully fully brought to light with the DOJ-OIG report. How ironic that Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein wrote a letter to the president recommending that FBI director James Comey be fired. Then, when Trump followed his recommendation, Rosenstein appointed a special counsel to go after Trump, in part as a reaction to Comey's termination. How's that for a Deep State trap?

Now, almost a year into Robert Mueller's Russian collusion investigation, there is no evidence of collusion or election-hacking. Despite a team of Democrat attorneys and investigators with an unlimited investigative scope and budget, Mueller has come up empty. If there were evidence of collusion or election tampering, we would certainly know it by now.

Does anyone believe that if Trump really did collude with Putin to hack the election, Putin wouldn't use that against Trump? Instead Trump has imposed sanctions and bombed Russian troops. And now Trump is on the verge of initiating military action in Syria, against Russian interests. If Putin had evidence of election collusion, he could end Trump's presidency immediately by releasing this evidence. Congress would happily take up impeachment, with alacrity not seen in any of its other legislative efforts.

There is no doubt Congress has the votes for impeachment. Now the congressmen are only waiting for a proper excuse. Democrats would vote as a unified block to impeach the president. Since election day, Maxine Waters has been talking about impeachment every time she gets near a microphone.

NeverTrump Erick Erickson recently reported a conversation with an unnamed GOP Congressman who told him, "Needless to say I think if the president were to fire Robert Mueller at this point the votes are there to impeach him." That's the excuse they are now looking for. A new tactic.

The collusion story is going nowhere. Mueller's petty indictments and plea deals are for process crimes or allegations not involving the president or his election. Time for a shift in tactics, specifically goading the president to fire Mueller, giving Congress the excuse they are waiting for.

The media this week is talking nonstop  not about Stormy Daniels, like last week, but pondering whether Trump will fire Mueller. Below is a tweet from MSNBC using a poll to raise the issue.

This is the new tactic, the latest scheme to get rid of President Trump. Create grounds for impeachment by goading Trump into firing Mueller.

Could the raid on Trump's attorney's office be part of the effort? Crossing a "red line," way beyond the mandate for the special counsel?

Interestingly, this tactic was attempted, unsuccessfully, last January. The New York Times played a major role, via fake news, publishing a bogus story about Mueller's office subpoenaing Trump's bank records from Deutsche Bank, crossing a "red line" in the investigation. At the time, Trump supposedly almost fired Mueller, but his advisers successfully got him to back down, avoiding the impeachment trap.

Is the Michael Cohen raid the latest attempt to goad Trump into firing someone, whether Mueller, Rosenstein, or Sessions? Even lefties like Michael Moore have joined the chorus, saying in a tweet, "President Trump! You let Mueller get away with breaking into your lawyer's office!! Mueller & Sessions & Rosenstein are laughing at you!" He went on to taunt, "I can't believe you're putting up w/ this! I thought u were a strong man. Americans want a strongman in the White House!"

Sure, far left-wingnut Michael Moore has Donald Trump's back and his best interests in mind. Instead, this is part of the new plan, goading the president into doing something that starts the wheels of impeachment.

CNN, always with a front row seat in all of this, headlined, "Donald Trump has never been more likely to fire Robert Mueller than he is right now." Based on what? Is this from their anonymous sources or their wishful thinking?

Impeachment is for "high crimes and misdemeanors," not necessarily overt criminal acts. It's a political, not a legal maneuver, and up to Congress to decide whether their hatred of Donald Trump rises to the level of impeachment.

All they need is the excuse, as the above mentioned congressman said. "A lot of Republican Congressmen are so frustrated and realizing they may lose their reelection that they are perfectly happy to take out the President with them because they all blame him."

Where I disagree is whether Republicans are going to lose re-election because of the president or rather because of their total lack of accomplishment and their resistance to the president's agenda. Is GOP establishment hatred of Trump so overpowering that they are willing to do anything to damage or remove Trump, including lose the midterm elections?

Republican congressmen are resigning or not running for reelection, including Speaker Paul Ryan, who just announced that he is calling it quits when his term ends. The GOP Congress has thrown in with the Deep State and donors over their voters. What better way to get rid of Trump than to flip the House to the Democrats, or make GOP control much slimmer?

After all, the collusion story is coming up empty. Impeachment is next, but the swamp needs a proper high crime or misdemeanor. Firing Mueller would rise to that level as many members of Congress have said.

Watch the media beat the drums for Trump firing Mueller, the next tactic to dump Trump. The President, however, is a smart guy and surely knows this. If he sticks to his agenda and shines the light of day on FBI-DOJ malfeasance, he will ultimately win. If he succumbs to taunting and temptation, firing anyone investigating him, Congress will pounce, and he will lose. Time for POTUS to keep a cool and focused head, sticking to the MAGA agenda.

Brian C Joondeph, M.D., MPS is a Denver based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.There are currently two worlds: one for the rich, leftists, and the Deep State actors, and one for the average American. Here are some of the differences:

Their World:

Hillary can pay Russians, who may be working for the Russian government, for unconfirmed dirt on Trump and use that dirt during the campaign as well as using it to get the government to spy on Trump for her, but it's not collusion.

Our World:

Trump is guilty of collusion even though there is not a shred of evidence that he did anything wrong.

Their World:

Bill Clinton meeting with Loretta Lynch while Lynch is supposedly investigating his wife is perfectly okay.

Our World:

Trump asking, but not ordering, James Comey to go easy on Flynn just as Comey went easy on Hillary is obstruction of justice.

Their World:

Obama can ignore federal court orders to restart issuing permits for drilling in the Gulf and to stop issuing DACA waivers.

Our World:

One random federal judge can stop the president from doing what the Constitution says the president can do.

Their World:

Obama can rescind every executive order Bush made.

Our World:

Obama is a super-president whose executive orders can't be overturned by Trump

Their World:

Supporting the mass murder of a million babies a year, disproportionately minorities, and sex-selection abortions where unborn women are killed because the parents want a boy shows how much they care about women.

Our World:

Objecting to killing the unborn shows that we are heartless sexist pigs.

Their World:

A Russian oligarch who contributes $25,000,000 to Hillary's foundation is cool.

Our World:

The same oligarch giving $150,000 to Trump's foundation is cause for a federal investigation.

Their World:

Hillary putting large quantities of highly classified information on an unsecured server that foreign governments can easily access is perfectly fine.

Our World:

A Navy seaman who put his life on the line to protect his country is sent to prison for taking photos of the ship he served on, which are classified but not highly classified.

Their World:

They can oppose school choice for black children, not care that black women are three times as likely to abort their babies as white women, bring in lots of cheap illegal labor to drive down black wages, and not care that thousands of blacks are shot each year in Democrat-run cities but still be pro-black.

Our World:

We want to end what Jesse Jackson called black genocide  targeting blacks for abortion, want to give black kids a choice on what school they go to so they can get a decent education, oppose bringing in cheap illegal labor, and want to make black neighborhoods safe, but we're racist to the core.

Their World:

They care about the middle class even though they want to raise taxes on them.

Our World:

We care about only the rich even though we want to reduce everyone's taxes.

Their World:

They push for ever increasing government spending and ever increasing taxation while giving little of their own money to help those in need, but they are the ones who care.

Our World:

We give much more of our own time and money to help those in need, but we're selfish and uncaring.

Their World:

Going easy on Putin as part of a reset of relations with Russia shows that Hillary is a great diplomat.

Our World:

Trump punishing the Russians for their actions shows that he colluded with them.

Their World:

Even though they reject the fact that life begins at conception and believe that DNA doesn't determine our sex, they have science on their side.

Our World:

We're anti-science because we don't believe that it's a proven fact that mankind is causing global warming, which will have devastating consequences. This in spite of the fact that we know that much of the "science" related to global warming is either just made up or fraudulent.

Their World:

A Democrat senator can be on trial for corruption for seven weeks, and the major networks don't cover it.

Our World:

Trump's "crimes" get 24-7 coverage even though there is no evidence he's done anything wrong.

Their World:

Even though they silence or bully every voice that doesn't agree with them, they are tolerant and inclusive.

Our World:

Even though we oppose censoring of leftist voices, we oppose diversity.

Their World:

Even though gun control has done nothing to stop crime and it violates the Second Amendment, their support of it shows that they care.

Our World:

Our support for Americans being able to defend themselves shows that we don't care about children.

Their World:

Even though they advocate censorship of political views they don't like and the legalization of pornography, which was not part of the First Amendment, they are fans of free speech.

Our World:

We are all haters because we believe we should be able to speak truth to power.

Their World:

Even though they attacked the women who said Bill Clinton attacked them, and even though they said Clinton's affairs had no bearing on his ability to be president, they care about women.

Our World:

That Trump had consensual affairs over a decade ago shows that he is unfit to be president.

Their World:

Facebook allowing Obama's team to access huge amounts of private user data was a great thing.

Our World:

Facebook not having taken steps to prevent a company hired by the Trump campaign to access the same data that Obama did is a monstrous crime.

Their World:

It's great that the same FBI that used unverified Russian-sourced dirt about Trump to obtain a FISA warrant enabling Democrats in power to use the full power of the government to spy on the Trump campaign now has access to confidential attorney-client communications between the president and his lawyer.

Our World:

It's unpatriotic that we question the impartiality of the FBI even though we have documentation of the agency's political bias.

Their World:

It's perfectly fine to force bakers, etc. to go against their religious beliefs when those beliefs conflict with the beliefs of gays.

Our World:

We're haters because we want to let people of all faiths exercise their First Amendment rights.

Their World:

No man would pretend to self-identify as a woman in order to get access to women's bathrooms.

Our World:

Even if the average person suffering from gender identity disorder won't molest women, there is no reason to believe that sex offenders won't lie about their "gender identity" in order to legally be able to harass women.

Their World:

Allowing teachers to preach atheism is a wonderful thing.

Our World:

Students or teachers who mention the God that 72% of Americans believe in outside of class are evil monsters who are trying to impose their beliefs on others.

Their World:

If Hillary had proposed the same temporary travel ban that Trump had, it would be legal according to our masters, federal judges, because her thoughts conform to leftist dogma.

Our World:

Trump's temporary travel ban is unconstitutional because Trump's thoughts don't conform to what leftists thought police require.

You probably felt a sense of deja vu in reading about these differences. That's because this two-world approach is nothing new to Democrats. It's just like the two-world system they set up in the South: one world for whites and another world for blacks.

But this time, who lives in which world is based on ideology not skin color. Make no mistake about it: leftists are demanding that in the public square, conservatives sit in the back of the bus and confine their religion to the four walls of their church buildings.

But the same fascist beliefs that leftists are more equal than other Americans justify both segregation policies.

It's time for us to rise up and say: enough. We need to refuse to submit to leftists' double standards.

You can read more of Tom's rants at his blog, Conversations about the obvious and feel free to follow him on Twitter.If Special Counsel Robert Mueller believed he had actionable grounds to suspect Pres. Trump of some crime that Mueller was authorized to investigate, he should have raided Trump's home and offices, not the offices of Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen. When Mueller seized Cohen's records, he was seizing privileged information between a lawyer and not only his one client, Donald Trump, but also such privileged information from Cohen and all his clients. Mueller was not only doing potentially serious damage to Cohen's profession, but also violating a bedrock principle  client-attorney confidentiality  on which our legal system stands. When Pres. Trump said that this is an attack on everything we stand for, he was not kidding.

Some have argued that Robert Mueller should be fired for this. It's possible, however, if not likely, that such a dismissal is exactly what Mueller is seeking, for it would eliminate the need to produce any incriminating evidence against Trump. It would instead  to a ready, eager and potentially violent audience  lend itself to the perception that there actually was such evidence, and that the supposed evidence, and not the raids against Trump's associates, was the real reason for this dismissal. Indeed, if Mueller actually has no such evidence, then  if he is unprincipled  it is a likely course of action to take.

If that is not the reason, then why was Cohen, who was cooperating with Mueller's investigation, raided? Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was also cooperating and was also raided. Mueller's investigators say it was because they had "high confidence" that neither man could be trusted not to move evidence outside their jurisdiction. But isn't that true for any guilty party under investigation? (And isn't a belief in the party's guilt the reason for an investigation to begin with?) The only distinguishing feature here is that the investigators weren't sure exactly what they thought Cohen was guilty of. Hush money to Stormy Daniels  which is legal? This justifies an FBI raid? Are you kidding?

Alan Dershowitz (at 2:30) suggests that, seeing no benefit from cooperation, others under investigation will stop cooperating. But that would a deterrent to Mueller only if he thought there was some evidence to be gained from it. If not, if his real purpose was simply to punish association with Trump, and so force his own firing, then Mueller will welcome any resistance, as it will make his punitive measures easier to (falsely) justify.

In such a case, what choice does Trump have? How many professional interests of close associates to him is he willing to sacrifice? And how many will be willing to associate with him? At some point, it seems entirely within Mueller's power to force Trump to fire him.

To guard against this possibility, a bipartisan group of four U.S. senators are currently advocating that any firing be put under judicial review. This would be potentially advantageous to Democrats, as it might prevent such a firing. On the other hand, if Trump did fire Mueller, it would, in theory, be advantageous to Republicans in that it would prevent charges that Trump himself was trying to suppress evidence. In theory. In reality, Democrats and media allies would charge the judge(s) with being partisan. Beyond that, it would  as if firing or not firing Mueller were simply a legal issue  take authority away from a duly elected president and hand it to the judiciary. Fortunately, it reportedly appears unlikely to be enacted.

There is nothing to stop Pres. Trump from taking the initiative to place himself under a similar kind of process, except that he, and not a judge, would ultimately retain the authority to dismiss Mueller or not. Prior to any such decision, he could prepare a public document giving the reasons for such a dismissal and present it to Mueller for public comment or rebuttal.

In particular (and with regard to an issue that probably could not be legitimately raised under a strictly judicial review), Trump might allege that, based on the (allegedly) unjustified raids conducted against Trump associates, Mueller appears to be attempting to provoke a dismissal. And Trump could support that allegation with the argument that, absent any evidence produced by the "investigation," Mueller's dismissal would, for Trump's enemies, be the most desirable way to end the "investigation" into the possible "collusion" between Trump and the Russians. On that basis, Trump may order Mueller, if he has any significant evidence against Trump that would justify his retention, to produce it at that time or be dismissed.

Such an ultimatum as that would presume that the raids had no legitimate justification. Mueller could argue that they did; if so, Trump could rebut, always giving Mueller the opportunity to respond.

Following this public, documented process, then Pres. Trump can make his decision. Whatever it may be, he will have a public, documented basis for it. If he fires Mueller, then Americans will be able to view the best arguments Mueller could make against such firing. With such a document, it would be more difficult for anyone to unfairly characterize the decision, one way or the other. And it's the kind of disciplined decision-making process that should be undergone in any case.

Bert Peterson operates a website focusing on health care and political education, www.4thofjuly.info.When we were in school, most of us probably knew several kids who always "talked tough." They were bullies and threatened "consequences" if their demands were not met. However, when they were confronted, or when someone stood up to them, they backed off, ran away, and hid until it was safe to come back. On the other hand, when those who were bullied continued to give in to their demands, their losses became more significant over time. While not all bullies are the same, one thing is clear: you can't defeat a bully by running away or by appeasement.

The policy of "running away" or appeasing others was implemented by some of our previous presidents. Red lines were laid out yet quickly "forgotten," although they were clearly and blatantly violated. For example, in or about 2012, President Obama made the following statement:

We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.

Notwithstanding President Obama's designated "red line," Bashar Assad, the president of Syria, subsequently ordered a devastating chemical attack against his own people. With his credibility on the line, and with the whole world watching, President Obama took no decisive action.

When bullies see that there are no consequences for their actions, they are emboldened. They have no fear, no reservations, and nothing deterring them from continuing or intensifying their attacks. President Trump expressed his thoughts about how this was handled:

I think the Obama administration had a great opportunity to solve this crisis a long time ago when he said the red line in the sand," Trump said. "And when he didn't cross that line after making the threat, I think that set us back a long ways not only in Syria, but in many other parts of the world, because it was a blank threat.

Blank threats hurt our credibility as a nation and serve to empower our enemies. Fortunately, the policy of the world's remaining superpower is changing. The United States no longer leads from behind or forgets about red lines. Approximately one year ago, President Assad launched another chemical attack in Syria. In response to that attack, President Trump stated:

When you kill innocent children, innocent babies, babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that is so lethal, people were shocked to hear what gas it was," Trump said, "that crosses many, many lines. Beyond a red line."

Shortly thereafter, President Trump responded to the chemical attack in Syria by ordering several pinpoint strikes meant to send a clear message to President Assad that the times of appeasement were over.

To bolster this point, President Trump recently appointed John Bolton as the new national security adviser. Mr. Bolton is an experienced, no-nonsense, hawkish individual who is well versed in foreign policy. The appointment of Mr. Bolton further evidences the country's shift in policy from one of appeasement to one of strength and leadership. Mr. Bolton's first day in office came at a difficult time, considering the recent chemical attack in Syria that resulted in the deaths of many innocent children and adults.

The world's remaining superpower cannot turn a blind eye. It cannot run away any longer. The stakes associated with inaction are significant, as the bully is not a child demanding lunch money from another child, but a leader of a country using dangerous weaponry on innocent children and adults.

If the United States and its allies do not deal with this now, the threat will only worsen and potentially impact more people in the future.

Mr. Hakim is a lawyer focusing on civil and commercial litigation.We are being played for fools by the law enforcement agencies investigating the Las Vegas massacre allegedly perpetrated by Stephen Paddock, a professional gambler and businessman, acting alone. The facts that have been released so far just do not add up. More to the point, the information that has been made public is minimal, and law enforcement is stonewalling the release of records that should be readily available.

Don't take it from me; take it from District Court Judge Stefany Miley. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports (hat tip: The Daily Wire):

A judge accused the Metropolitan Police Department of gamesmanship Tuesday before denying another agency request to delay the release of 911 calls and body camera footage from the Route 91 Harvest festival massacre. "I'm very frustrated, because I think that gamesmanship is going on here," District Judge Stefany Miley said in the contentious hearing. "It's now months since the shooting occurred, and it's still the same: delay, delay, delay. If one technique doesn't work, then you switch to another one. That's very concerning for the court."

Judge Miley is the second judge to rule against Las Vegas Metropolitan Police's efforts to stall release of public records. Last month:

District Judge Richard Scotti ruled that Metro was obligated to immediately begin handing over recordings from the Oct. 1 shooting to the Las Vegas Review-Journal and other media organizations suing for their release. Scotti said the records could be made public gradually, as they're processed  as opposed to releasing them all at once after additional delay  and gave Metro six months to complete the task. He also ruled that the department could not charge journalists hundreds of thousands of dollars for the production of those records.

Judge Miley's ruling rebuked the LVMP's efforts to stall Judge Scotti's order, after the police requested that a new judge review the case. Judge Miley rejected the legal maneuvers aimed at delay:

On Tuesday, Metro's attorneys asked to withdraw their motion for reconsideration and instead move forward with an appeal to the Supreme Court. "All you've done is prolong the proceedings even further than it should have been, and that's what's very concerning to me," Miley said. "It seems like a game." Metro lawyer Jackie Nichols then responded, "And I respect your honor, but I would disagree." Miley ultimately denied Metro's motion for reconsideration, despite the request to withdraw it. The judge also denied Metro's subsequent request to keep the body camera footage and 911 calls in limbo until police can seek relief from the state's high court.

The real question is why the authorities handling this investigation  and the FBI is coordinating with the LVMP  are stonewalling so much. The public has seen only a tiny amount of surveillance video from the Mandalay Bay Hotel, which is full of surveillance cameras, and which must have recorded hours and hours of Paddock's activities over the days he was checked into the hotel and stockpiling weapons and ammo in his suite.

I have two general suspicions of what might be causing this extraordinary cover-up of facts surrounding the worst mass shooting in American history.

1. There may be pressure from the gaming industry, which is, after all, the bedrock of the Las Vegas economy, to keep information from the public on the grounds that it would stoke fears of future danger. Perhaps the ease with which the massacre was planned and implemented would be shocking? Or perhaps there is negligence being covered up?

2. Maybe Paddock is not what we are being led to believe. His girlfriend's trip to the Philippines during the massacre might indicate some overseas ties. Or maybe he was some kind of informant or agent of the FBI or some other law enforcement agency? The fact that one of his homes was left unguarded and burglarized is suggestive that some sophisticated agency covered up some evidence.

I realize that this is wild speculation. But that is exactly what we are left with when we are kept in the dark unlawfully.

The FBI's reputation for integrity is in tatters. I don't know if the LVMP are acting on their own or at the behest of the FBI, their partner in the investigation, that no doubt does not want to be seen as covering up information.

But something stinks in Las Vegas, and the issue is not merely local.Much has been written in the days since the FBI, on Mueller's referral by the traitorous Rod Rosenstein to the SDNY, raided Michael Cohen's office, home, and hotel room. This has never happened before. Never before has the personal lawyer of a sitting president had his offices raided. Not even Nixon's lawyers were treated so viciously. Carl Bernstein said this was to scare Trump.

The left is hoping Trump will fire Mueller and make him a martyr. (Whoopi Goldberg is hoping for riots.) Mueller has to date produced nothing (it would have been leaked) and may be afraid to admit that to the swamp denizens who are hoping for a reason to impeach the president. Now Mueller is fishing in waters far beyond his task at hand.

Everyone knows now that it was Hillary who colluded, massively, with the Russians to defeat Trump. The "investigation" was a set up from the start by Deep State operatives like Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Yates, Strzok, Page, Rice, and Power. It was all orchestrated from the top, from Obama and his acolytes. Like the rest of the left, these people do not abide by the law or the Constitution. They believe themselves to be above all that nonsense, that old document to which they swear oaths. Laws and rules are for the deplorables, those peons who so stupidly elected Trump.

As Dershowitz and others have opined, this was prosecutorial overreach on steroids. It may well put attorney-client privilege at risk forever. Mueller and his band of reprobates have transformed our DOJ and FBI into Soviet-style police state agencies. They have destroyed the faith Americans once had in those institutions.

Mueller and Rosenstein know that the media will celebrate this outrageous act as the last nail in Trump's coffin of impeachment. The media are shameless and obscene in their unmitigated glee at what they see as Trump's impending downfall. All their eggs are in that basket. But reports of his demise are greatly exaggerated if not totally misguided. To their eternal chagrin, Trump is a very different kind of president.

Even more vexing for the left is Trump's success at the helm. Black and Hispanic unemployment is at the lowest levels in decades. Food stamp use is down. The economy is growing as it never did under Obama. The tax cuts are working. The left hates every one of these facts. Leftists hate the fact that Trump is an effective leader. That is what is so despicable about the left: it cannot abide conservatism and the demonstrable fact that less government actually works to help improve people's lives, to make them free. The progressives want an intrusive government that controls people's lives and limits their freedom. Trump's success is a serious threat. Of that we can all be sure. Hell hath no fury like Democrats who have been beaten at their own game.

Import those illegal immigrants! Release those extra-criminal illegals onto our streets. Make as many cities as possible "sanctuary cities"; protect those criminals, no matter how many innocents they kill or maim. Our left today is all about destroying America as founded. No borders. No gender. No free speech. Skin color reigns; black and brown people are victims; white people are toxic. All men are guilty of exuding "toxic masculinity." In short, the left intends to destroy every single Western, Judeo-Christian value by which the West has lived for over three thousand years and especially since the founding of America.

It is the progressive left that is toxic. Leftists are the superbug infecting our body politic. The more Trump succeeds, the more noxious they become, the more they disregard the Constitution.

The left is intent upon taking Trump down and out by any means necessary. Leftists are unable to accept the result of the last election, despite the well known deep corruption of their candidate. They took Clinton's victory for granted and have been acting like spoiled children since November 8, 2016.

When progressives lose, they regress to the days of the SDS. Blow them up! Accuse them of crimes. Defeat them into irrelevance. The CEO of Twitter advocates exactly that. Comically, he cites California  poverty-stricken, overrun by illegal aliens California  as the perfect example for the future.

Who are these people who so want to obliterate what has been the finest, most miraculous experiment of representative democracy ever implemented? They are our progressive left, and we must suffer their slings, arrows, and repudiation.

What Mueller and his acolytes are doing is a plague upon our republic. Let us hope the nation survives their plan. The left has been remarkably successful thus far. But the reputations of the FBI and the DOJ are in tatters.

Image: M J Richardson via geograph.In a case that looks likely to win in trial, a left-wing Obama-appointed judge has ruled that a 34-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, David Rodriguez, could lead a class action lawsuit to force a Fortune 500 company, Procter & Gamble, to hire DACA recipients on the same basis as Americans and legal residents.

So much for the idea that DACA is just a stopgap measure of mercy, buttressed only by President Obama's executive order, to help supposedly innocent children who were brought here illegally by their parents. The left-wing activists who brought this suit, the Chicano militants of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, are dogged and determined to institutionalize it and make DACA participation every bit as good as citizenship and green cards.

The plaintiff, David Rodriguez, an illegal alien from Venezuela, who had to have been brought to the U.S. as a near adult, given his advanced age now (negating the claim that America "is the only country he knows"), argues that Procter & Gamble's policy of hiring only citizens, green card-holders, refugees, and asylees discriminates based on "alienage."

I read the petition for the class action lawsuit, which will cost P&G millions, and the leftist judge's go-ahead for it here and here. The company has argued that the problem with Rodriguez's status is that it's temporary.

Anyone who knows anything about large Fortune 500 companies with large average salaries knows that that presents a problem for them. Companies, after all, invest a great deal of resources in training their paid interns, which is the position 34-year-old Rodriguez applied for, and probably spend that kind of money only if they intend to hire. Someone whose immigration status could require him to move back home would be a risk for them. DACA, after all, is held together only by an executive order, which can be rescinded (although the courts have stepped in to prevent that, too). It's a two-year reprieve that can be renewed for another two years as things stand now, and that includes the right to work. MALDEF has now extended it to a right to be hired, and the courts are going along, making the temporary executive order-designated status suddenly as good as a real green card.

The leftist judge used this reasoning for her go-ahead:

Section 1981 provides in relevant part, "AII persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory to make and enforce contracts ... as is enjoyed by white citizens...'' 42 U.S.C. j 1981 (a). The statute prohibits discrimination based on race or alienage in the making and enforcement of contracts, including employment contracts. See Anderson B. Conboy, 156 F.3d 167, 170, 180 (2d Cir. 1998).

So going from the soft, sappy "can work" of the Obama order to an ironclad "right to be hired" seems to be the name of the left-wing game. Will they win? Seems like it.

The judge in her ruling said she thought the case had merit and cited other court cases to support that. According to Judicial Watch, which brought the case to light:

Judge Kathleen M. Williams, a former public defender appointed to the federal bench by Obama in 2011, agrees, citing MALDEFs other lawsuit in her ruling. In denying Procter & Gambles motion to dismiss Rodriguezs lawsuit, Judge Williams claims the Venezuelan immigrants claims are strikingly similar to those in MALDEFs 2014 suit against insurance company Northwestern Mutual in New York. In that complaint, a Mexican illegal alien protected by DACA alleged that Northwestern Mutuals policy requiring him to have a green card because hes not a U.S. citizen discriminated against him. Requiring the Mexican national, Ruben Juarez, to provide proof of legal residency imposed an additional burden that constitutes alienage discrimination, according to the complaint filed on his behalf by MALDEF. The federal judge hearing that case in New York agreed and, in a federal courtroom more than 1,000 miles south, Williams used the decision to justify hers.

After MALDEF and Rodriguez win, millions will go to not just Rodriguez, but all of the illegals, given that it's a class action lawsuit, and P&G is a big company with a lot of applicants, and there have been similar rulings from other judges for this lawsuit to glom onto. The suit says they are seeking relief based on salaries that would have been paid, suggesting quite a payout to those who never bothered to apply for citizenship and then got a political favor in DACA as potential Democratic votes from Obama.

So much for rule of law. As the old Border Patrol saying goes, "it ain't over 'til the alien wins." Being a DACA recipient sounds profitable, indeed, but not exactly for "just doing the jobs Americans won't do." Not in this day and age of upside-down legal logic and left-wing judges.The Congressional Budget Office is now admitting that President Trump's tax cuts will pay for themselves and more, although we will never read that in most of the press.

Here is one instance, though, from the Wall Street Journal, with a few snippets: "Tax Cut Growth Dividend."

And here is what we learn from it.

The CBO says the economy will grow 3.3% this year, the most since 2005.

Revenues over 10 years are estimated at $44.1 trillion, which is about $1 trillion more than the CBO's estimate before the tax cuts.

The CBO also says the tax cut will make the economy grow faster  to 3.3% this year and 2.4% in 2019. The last time the economy grew this fast was in 2005 (which was after President George W. Bush's tax cuts). This produces more revenue that the CBO previously estimated.

The CBO says growth will fall back down to Obama-era levels starting in 2020, but the budget bureau's economists are Keynesians of the Larry Summers school. They give little credit to supply-side incentives from tax cuts but see a large growth effect from government spending. They haven't learned from their mistake in overestimating growth from the 2009 Obama spending spree.

For months, we have been hearing from experts, the media, and Democrats, all of whom have been yelling from their high horse that Trump's tax cuts would be a disaster and lead to a higher deficit because they would cost the government $1.5 trillion over ten years. Now, according to their latest projections, the tax cuts will produce more growth and will actually produce $1 trillion more in revenue, not $1.5 trillion less. Therefore, the CBO missed the projection by only $2.5 trillion in a few months. Does anyone think its ten-year projections are accurate?

Even in these more optimistic projections, somehow the idiots at the CBO don't understand the massive compounding of growth because of the people and businesses being allowed to keep more of their own money.

My guess is we will continue to see the mantra repeated that the tax cuts cost $1.5 trillion because the factual numbers are tremendously inconvenient when the media are pushing the Democrat agenda.

Studies also indicate that the rich will pay a larger share than ever, so why do we keep hearing that the tax cut was for the rich? In fact, the bottom 60% of Americans with earnings below $86,000 will pay zero in income taxes even though they earn 27% of the income. Does that sound fair? Does anyone thing these statistics will be widely reported?

Journalists like to pretend they are all about reporting factual news when in fact they mostly spout Democrat talking points instead of reporting actual facts.

Does anyone think journalists and other Democrats will stop saying the tax cuts are for the rich, that they add to the deficit and are bad for the economy in the long run? I certainly have no hope that they will start telling the truth. It is too inconvenient. Maybe Al Gore could write a book on tax cuts that is actually true and reuse the name "An Inconvenient Truth."

From The Hill:

An analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (TPC) estimates that under the Republican bill, high-income Americans will pay an even larger percentage of the country's overall income taxes in 2018 than they did before, while people in lower brackets will pay a smaller amount. Specifically, the TPC estimates that the 20 percent of Americans that earn $150,000 or more will account for 52 percent of the country's income, unchanged from last year, but will pay about 87 percent of total income taxes, up from 84 percent in 2017. Isn't that a "fair share"? The bottom 60 percent of Americans, with earnings below roughly $86,000, will account for 27 percent of the country's income but will not pay any income tax at all. In 2017, that lower tier contributed 2 percent of income taxes.

Why does anyone treat the CBO predictions as accurate when they are nothing more than a wild guess based on garbage input? How can they possibly miss ten-year projections of revenue by $2.5 trillion within a few months? Why do they continue to predict that tax cuts cost the government money when previous across-the-board tax cuts under Presidents Reagan and Bush both produced substantially more growth and substantially more revenue? Shouldn't the CBO bureaucrats actually use history as guidance instead of their beliefs?

The CBO also predicted that Obamacare would reduce the deficit when, within a few years they knew that it would add trillions to the deficit. The CBO also predicted that 26 million would be signed up on Obamacare exchanges by 2016. The actual number was around 11 million.

Why does the CBO always underestimate the positive effects of pro-growth policies and overestimate the positives of pro-government policies. I think we all know the answer. They are pro-government bureaucrats buttering their own bread.

Aren't journalists ever embarrassed by repeatedly acting as if the predictions are true when the numbers almost always are so far off?The country needs experts

So many things are happening so fast in Nepals foreign policy realm. Soon after Prime Minister K P Oli assumed office, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi paid an unusual visit to Nepal.There certainly are lots of unexplained coincidences going on:

The Chinese president has agreed to lower tariffs on vehicle imports but suggests that these tariffs were going to be reduced anyway and were cut not because of President Trump. I wonder why the tariffs weren't reduced during Obama's eight years.

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday said his government would "significantly lower" tariffs on vehicle imports this year as part of efforts to further open its giant economy to the world.

The other day, the Associated Press gave credit to China for holding North Korea to account and, once again, another coincidence, failed to give President Trump credit. It must be a complete coincidence that China is finally holding North Korea to account, one year after Trump took office, instead of during the administrations of the previous three presidents.

Oh, and there are some more coincidences.

The economy is growing much faster now than during Obama's eight years. It must be a coincidence and not related to President Trump's and the GOP Congress's lower taxes and fewer regulations.

Manufacturing jobs are increasing rapidly. That must be a coincidence and not related to Trump's policies of focusing day in and day out on manufacturing jobs.

Mark Zuckerburg says he tries his best to make sure Facebook is fair and unbiased. Then it must be a coincidence that the algorithms and employees block postings from black conservatives like Diamond and Silk and don't similarly block people supporting liberals.

Facebook blocking conservatives is as much of a coincidence as IRS targeting political opponents of Obama after he compared them to domestic terrorists and left-wing Senator Dick Durbin asking them to target conservatives.

The media and Democrats used to be proud of the data-mining by Obama. It must be a coincidence that all of a sudden, they care about people's privacy after a Republican won the presidency. Maybe someday they will again care about girls' privacy in locker rooms and restrooms.

On Monday, the FBI raided the office and house of Michael Cohen, President Trump's personal lawyer. (Isn't it amazing how the media know everything they were looking for since that should be secret?) The media are trotting out legal experts who say the FBI must have some serious stuff or a judge would never have issued the warrant. It must be sheer coincidence that the media and these legal experts have all lost their memory. Somehow they have already forgotten that the FBI got warrants to spy from FISA judges based on a fake Russian dossier funded by Democrats.

Was there ever any actual evidence of Trump people colluding with Russia on anything prior to the illegal spying?

Supposedly, they are looking at payments to two women to see if they were illegal campaign contributions. Why were there never any raids of the Clintons' house and the Clinton Foundation, since millions paid to Hillary, Bill, Chelsea, and the Clinton Foundation by foreign governments and others were essentially campaign contributions or kickbacks to buy political favors? It must be an absolute coincidence or innocent oversight that there were no raids or warrants.

It is truly amazing that supposedly curious journalists don't even question the integrity of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and others who have clearly protected Hillary and targeted Trump.

The bias and favoritism at Justice and in the media are just so hard to spot.

Everyone should remember that the Justice Department has the hammer. If those people want to get someone, they will.

As New York judge Sol Wachtler said in 1985, "if a district attorney wanted, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich."On Wednesday, April 11, 2018, millions of people solemnly observed Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Day of the Inferno in Hebrew). Yet many people still deny the existence of this most terrible of tragedies.

It is important to acknowledge that Holocaust denial is a cause embraced not just by fringe ideologues. Holocaust-deniers exist in all shapes and sizes throughout the world. Most egregiously, certain foreign governments affirmatively support this denial.

For me, international holocaust denial is personal, since one of the most widely reported deniers is my homeland: Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran, has called the Holocaust a "lie and a mythical claim." Ayatollah Khamenei has said, "No one in European countries dares to speak about the Holocaust[.] ... [It] is not clear whether the core of this matter is a reality or not. Even if it is a reality, it is not clear how it happened." An Iranian newspaper holds an annual Holocaust (Denial) Cartoon contest. The cartoonist who best mocks the Nazi genocide is awarded $50,000.

Such rhetoric has presented a negative image of Iran and Iranians around the world. But before the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, there was another Iran. This Iran not only acknowledged the holocaust, but even assisted Jews during World War II.

To many Iranian Jews like my father, Abdolhossein Sardari was, and remains, a righteous hero from that era. Sardari was the (Muslim) diplomat in charge of the Iranian consul in Paris in 1942, just as the Holocaust was coming to a climax in France. Sardari, also known as "The Iranian Schindler," protected the sizable Iranian Jewish community of Paris by issuing its members new passports that did not state the passport-holder's religion, thus saving their lives.

Furthermore, Iran welcomed hundreds of Polish Jewish children during a time when Nazi Germany was carrying out its systematic murder of the Jewish people in Europe. These children, who came to be known as the "Tehran Children," remained in Iran until they found safe passage to Mandatory Palestine.

Therefore, going forward, let us remind ourselves that the views of the government of Iran can be distinct from the views of the people of Iran. Let us condemn the government of Iran for questioning the existence of an event so unthinkable that a new word, genocide, had to be created to describe it. But let us also take time to remember the righteousness of the individual Iranians who did their part to mitigate this, and let us hope their example can be repeated by individuals in other nations facing genocidal killings throughout the world.

Jacqueline Saper is an author whose forthcoming book, From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Pre- and Post-revolutionary Iran, is scheduled to be published by the University of Nebraska Press  Potomac Books in spring 2019.Many members of Congress want Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to ban "hate speech" on Facebook. Zuckerberg agreed:

BY THE END OF THIS YEAR by the way WE'LL HAVE MORE THAN 20,000 PEOPLE WORKING ON SECURITY AND CONTENT REVIEW[.] ... SO HATE SPEECH IS ONE OF THE HARDEST BECAUSE DETERMINING IF SOMETHING IS HATE SPEECH IS VERY LINGUISTICALLY NUANCED. YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS A SLUR AND WHETHER SOMETHING IS HATEFUL. NOT JUST IN ENGLISH, BUT MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ON FACEBOOK USE IT IN LANGUAGEs that are DIFFERENT ACROSS THE WORLD[.]

Zuckerberg cannot define hate speech, but he will have 20,000 employees reviewing content to ban the hate speech he cannot define. He said artificial intelligence (A.I.) will sort out the offensive hate speech he is unable to define.

It will be interesting to see how the Facebook Employee Handbook will instruct the 20,000 employees on how to flag hate speech to delete and ban it.

Every group, especially politicians, will lobby Facebook to ban language it deems offensive or hate speech while protecting the language the group favors. For example, Planned Parenthood will object to language used by pro-life groups as hate speech, while pro-life groups will object to ads for access to abortion by Planned Parenthood.

Senator Cruz grilled Zuckerberg on Facebook's current "censorship" of conservatives to show the leftist bias of Facebook, citing Diamond and Silk as examples.

Given the existing bias which Senator Cruz demonstrated with his cross examination of Zuckerberg, guess how the 20,000 Facebook employees will analyze hate speech.

Congress cannot require Facebook or any other similar social media to ban hate speech for the same reason it cannot require ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, FOX, and the rest of the media to ban hate speech. Such a law violates the First Amendment.

Congress cannot define "hate speech" any better than Zuckerberg. But it is trying to force Facebook to do that which Congress cannot do. The term "hate speech" is too broad and vague; it cannot be narrowly defined to inform the public about what the law seeks to prohibit. The courts deal with First Amendment issues on a case-by-case basis limited to the facts at issue. A law prohibiting "hate speech" is a law of prior restraint trying to ban speech, and laws on prior restraint are subject to strict scrutiny by the courts.

Why is Zuckerberg so eager to ban hate speech? Why does he welcome some "regulation"?

He knows regulation will make it more difficult for new companies to compete with Facebook, which now enjoys a near monopoly.

Zuckerberg also does not want an investigation of how Facebook assisted Obama during the 2012 election through the mining of information.

Zuckerberg wants to be in the good graces of the D.C. swamp. He will do the dirty work of censorship that Congress cannot do.Several lawmakers on Capitol Hill are questioning the president's legal authority to launch a retaliatory strike on Syria for their use of poison gas on civilians.

The president's authority to use force in any situation without direct congressional authorization has been an issue since the Vietnam War. Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973, and it is drawn extremely broadly, giving the president vast authority to carry out military operations overseas for 90 days without seeking congressional approval. But the conditions under which the president can act are fairly specific. He can act only in response to an attack or if there is an imminent threat.

The expected Syria operation being planned meets neither of those criteria. But Syria represents an example of the extreme limitations of the War Powers Act.

NPR:

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who has become a leading voice advocating for Congress' responsibility to approve military action, said the president should release the memo before any strikes. "Without congressional authorization, any military action President Trump takes in Syria that isn't in self-defense is illegal," Kaine said in a statement on Wednesday. Continued Kaine: "And while he's at it, he should also release the secret legal memo that reportedly justifies the airstrikes on Syria last year  which clearly haven't deterred Assad  and that the president is apparently now using as precedent for unilateral military action." Kaine told NPR this week that while in general he would support airstrikes against Assad, he does not believe that the president can unilaterally bomb a sovereign country like Syria without congressional authorization. Another Trump critic, Connecticut's Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, told NPR that although he condemns the Assad regime's reported chemical attacks, there are obvious limits on Trump's authorities to act. "We're a nation of laws, and we have a Constitution that says very clearly that it's Congress who gets to decide who the United States can fight wars against," Murphy said. "The president can take military action without congressional permission if the U.S. is attacked or is at risk of imminent attack  but that's not what happened here," he said. "If the president thinks he a found a loophole that lets him attack other countries without authorization, he needs to show that justification and make that case to the people." Debate over the privileges and responsibilities of ordering military action have dogged presidents since Vietnam. In 2011, for example, Republicans complained that Congress hadn't been adequately consulted about the military operations then-President Barack Obama ordered against Libya. Later, when confronting the crisis Syria, Obama found himself painted into a corner after having declared the use of chemical weapons would cross a "red line." When Assad used them, Obama decided that he had the authority to order an attack against the Syrian regime, but also decided, out of principle, to ask Congress to authorize it. Lawmakers did not; the measure went nowhere. The United States joined a coalition of nations in attempting to remove Syria's chemical weapons, which ultimately did not stop chemical attacks there.

If anything, Libya was less of a threat than Syria to the U.S., but the "responsibility to protect" civilians from Gaddafi's brutality supposedly overrode other considerations.

Of course, Assad makes Gaddafi look like a Sunday school teacher when it comes to slaughtering civilians. And yet a far more important issue is upholding the ban on chemical weapons to prevent their use from being accepted. I feel certain that somewhere in the legal reasoning being considered by the White House is defending the Chemical Weapons Convention, which forbids the manufacture and use of poison gas. It may be a stretch legally under the law, but the flaws in the War Powers Act have made it virtually useless anyway.

No one has actually gone to court to challenge the constitutionality of the act, and for good reason; both the Executive and Legislative Branches of government are afraid of the outcome. And so a delicate balance is maintained where Congress can threaten and the president is somewhat constrained by the act.

A president should not have the authority to go to war without the consent of Congress. But an action like bombing the Syrian air force to prevent the further use of chemical weapons was never imagined by the Founders and has been justified in the past as falling under the president's authority as commander in chief. There will be some grumbling by some lawmakers if we attack Syria, but most members of Congress are resigned to the president's power to send our military in harm's way for just about any reason he sees fit.We learned that President Trump will not travel to Latin America this week because of Syria. Nevertheless, the U.S. will be well represented by V.P. Mike Pence and Senator Marco Rubio.

Normally, these summits are all about the economy or trade agreements. However, V.P. Pence and Senator Rubio have a golden opportunity to call on Latin America to do something about Venezuela.

I like the addition of Senator Rubio because he has taken a leadership position on Latin America issues, as we see in this report:

Rubio downplayed his role at the summit compared to Pence's, and he said policies related to Venezuela will take precedence at the event. "It's to obviously focus on the Venezuela situation, but also on some of the issues that other nations in the region are ready to work together and confront," Rubio said. Rubio also estimates that economic engagement will be an important issue at the summit. "The more economic engagement we have with these countries going both ways is mutually beneficial, the easier it will be to get policy makers in the United States to care about the Western Hemisphere because they'll have economic constituencies in the United States who care about the future of the region," Rubio said.

We should add that President Trump has relied on Senator Rubio for developing a policy toward Cuba as well.

Frankly, these summits usually produce very little. However, we may have a chance this time to tell everyone in the world what we think of what is happening in Venezuela.

PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.Amazon officially closed its acquisition of smart home startup Ring, the Seattle, Washington-based tech giant said Thursday. To commemorate the occasion, the firm is dropping the price of the Ring Video Doorbell which is now available for purchase for $99, down from $133. The discount is understood to be permanent in nature, with Amazon describing the move as the introduction of a new everyday low price. Originally announced in late February, the purchase of Ring is said to have set Amazon back in the ballpark of $1 billion, though the e-commerce juggernaut never officially disclosed any financial details of the transaction.

The Ring tie-up is meant to bolster Amazons home security and automation efforts, with the company now seeking to play a larger role in the hardware segment, especially as its simultaneously trying to strengthen the adoption rate of its artificial intelligence assistant Alexa. The company is also planning to stop retailing Nests products in the coming weeks so as to avoid providing Rings direct rival with its own growth platform, industry sources claimed in late March. All contemporary Nest-made offerings are still available for purchase on Amazon as of Thursday morning PST, with the online shopping service provider never confirming those reports in any capacity.

The consolidation with Amazon wont change Rings overall mission, with its team still striving to reduce crime in neighborhoods with affordable security solutions, albeit with the backing of one of the worlds most valuable companies, according to Ring founder and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Siminoff. Some two years prior to agreeing to sell itself to Amazon, the Santa Monica, California-based startup accepted funding from the tech giants Alexa Fund. Rings future products and services are now expected to offer an even deeper level of integration with the digital assistant thats presently the most popular solution of its kind in the United States, according to most industry trackers. Ring will continue operating under its own brand going forward as Amazon has no plans to fully absorb it at any point in the future.Honor will soon be adding another product category to its portfolio with the launch of its first notebook at an event next week. Dubbed MagicBook, its leaked images reveal a near bezel-less display packed inside a compact body. Honor already has an event scheduled for April 19 in China for Honor 10s announcement, and the company has confirmed the MagicBook to be launched alongside. The confirmation was provided via companys official Weibo account where a photo was posted including the laptops name, design outline, and release date. The Chinese brand had earlier teased the notebook on April 1, but it was taken as an April Fools Day joke considering the extremely thin bezels it carries. Besides a launch date and an image revealing its bezel-less design, no other detail of the device is known yet.

The design of the MagicBook notebook looks similar to the MateBook X Pro launched at the Mobile World Congress in February by Honors parent company Huawei. MateBook X Pros display measures 13.9 inches offering a screen to body ratio of 91-percent with a resolution of 3,000 x 2,000 pixels in the 3:2 aspect ratio. With its extremely thin bezels, Huawei embedded the webcam under a dedicated key on the notebook that can be popped up when needed, also taking care of privacy concerns. The Windows 10-powered laptop also takes some design elements from Apples MacBook Pro lineup to bring a superior build and finish. Weighing just under three pounds, the MateBook X Pro is claimed to offer a battery life of up to 14 hours on a single charge.

Honors foray into the laptop space will happen along with the launch of its next flagship Honor 10. The smartphone will be introduced in China on April 19, while an international launch will happen about a month later on May 15 at an event in London. A handful of its leaked photos have already confirmed two rear-placed cameras with a glossy finish on its back. The Honor 10 is expected to share some of its core specifications with the Honor View 10 flagship phone, including Huaweis in-house Kirin 970 chipset and 6GB of RAM. While, the Honor 10 is said to be considerably cheaper than the Huawei P20 series, and even the View 10.Former Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette returned to the technology industry after a three-year hiatus, having joined Canadian iNovia Capital in order to become a venture capitalist, Recode reports. Mr. Pichette quit Google in March of 2015 in order to travel the world with his wife, having now decided its time to return from what was then described as a temporary retirement. The new development comes as somewhat of a surprise for many industry watchers as Mr. Pichettes experience likely allowed him to take a CEO position at many prominent startups and companies, yet the executive opted its time for a career change. I just didnt want a boss, he said in an interview with Recode, having clarified that any CEO role comes with a pile of bosses attached to it.

Mr. Pichette also said he has no interest in working 24/7 any longer, which a venture capitalist career allows for, whereas being a CEO in the Silicon Valley is a position that usually warrants much longer hours. The ex-Googler never worked as a venture capitalist but his role at the Mountain View, California-based tech giant saw him preside over billions of dollars of acquisitions, with the firm completing north of 200 M&A deals under his financial oversight. Mr. Pichette spent seven years with Google and resigned in an unexpected manner, having been succeeded by Ruth Porat whom the company poached from Morgan Stanley shortly after his departure.

Despite the years-long hiatus from work, Mr. Pichette insists he isnt thinking about a permanent retirement but now simply wants to leverage his vast experience in the tech industry without being tied to a position with long working hours. Im going to work for another 30 years, with a bit of luck, the industry veteran says. The Canadian national joined the now-Alphabet-owned company in 2008 from McKinsey & Company and Bell Canada. Three months after leaving Google, he received the National Order of Quebec, one of the highest civilian honors for merit a person can be awarded in the Canadian province. His position of an iNovia Capital General Partner will see him circulate between the VC firms offices in Toronto, Montreal, and London.Facebook has created a dedicated page on its help center intended to help users check whether or not their data had been affected by the Cambridge Analytica data breach. The new help page is quite straightforward in explaining to users if their information was shared with the British data mining and political consulting firm via a personality quiz app called This Is Your Digital Life. The app was developed by Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American professor who acquired a large volume of information from the social networking site under the pretext of academic research and turned over the trove of data to Cambridge Analytica, a move that violates Facebooks privacy policies.

Cambridge Analytica then reportedly used the data of around 87 million users, based on Facebooks current estimate, as part of an effort to boost the presidential bid of Donald J. Trump during the 2016 U.S. elections. The massive data misuse prompted several regulators from the European Union, United Kingdom, United States, and Australia, among others, to launch investigations into the data privacy practices of the social media titan. Most recently, Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg testified before the U.S. Senates Commerce and Judiciary committees on Tuesday for approximately five hours to shed light on the controversy. The 33-year-old multi-billionaire answered repeated questions over how the Menlo Park, California-based company makes money and handles the data of its more than two billion users. Mr. Zuckerberg, however, failed to provide unambiguous answers to several queries including the question on the possibility of introducing a paid subscription service that would let people continue to use the social networking site without having any of their data collected or mined. In the end, the Senate inquiry revealed little information about Facebooks core operations and its plans post the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The help page is part of Facebooks way to address the data breach and make amends for its lack of strict privacy policies. Late last month, Mr. Zuckerberg announced a number of changes the company wants to introduce to its platform as part of a renewed effort to beef up its user data protection measures. Among others, Facebook said it would probe apps that may have had access to a trove of user data and may be suspected of any improper activity.According to an April 10 statement published to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) website, the agency has sent out letters of warning to no fewer than six unnamed companies about potentially illegal warranty policies. Although those companies have not been identified, that could change if those policies arent updated. Thats because the agency has requested that those policies be changed or rewritten in order to avoid legal action  with each being granted a 30-day period to enact changes. The companies are said to include those that sell automobiles, cellular devices, and video gaming systems in the U.S. It hasnt been specified whether those tech companies those are based in the country.

With regard to the violations themselves, the FTC has cited three warranty policies in particular that seem to place illegal conditions for the honoring of the warranties. Those conditions center around the policy that only company-made parts or services can be used or the warranty is void. For instance, one example warranty provided by the agency states that This warranty shall not apply if this product . . . is used with products not sold or licensed by [company name]. Another suggests that a damaged, removed, or altered warranty seal will void the warranty. In order for those types of warranty conditions to stand from a legal perspective, the company needs to provide the parts or services for free. Alternatively, although uncommon, a waiver can also be obtained by the companies from the FTC. Otherwise, they are considered harmful to both consumers and the continuation of a competitive and innovative industry.

Its not unusual for the FTC to make these kinds of requests but it is, more often than not, a good idea for companies to heed the warnings. The names of the companies involved here could easily become public knowledge and, as previous cases have clearly shown, warranty lawsuits and other legal ramifications can be extremely messy affairs. Litigation for big corporate cases tend to carry on for extended periods of time, which can result in damage to a companys reputation and market standing that isnt so easily measured. Moreover, that damage can occur regardless of the outcome of such cases is in favor of or against the company in question.Three arrested for charging people in free health camp

Three people have been arrested for illegally extorting people visiting a so-called free health camp.The OnePlus 6s announcement is just around the corner, and even though we dont know when exactly will the phone arrive, the fact that the OnePlus 5T is now out of stock in Europe as well, definitely suggests that the OnePlus 6 announcement is coming really soon. Those of you who have been thinking of getting the OnePlus 5T directly from OnePlus (via OnePlus.com) in Europe no longer can do that, as the device is not available across the continent, the UK included, though you can still get it through O2 in the UK, for example, while some unofficial channels are also still selling the device.

Now, the OnePlus 5T is the companys fastest-selling smartphone ever, and it seems like it sold out sooner than expected. A 6GB RAM variant of the phone sold out in Europe quite recently, and now its 8GB RAM variant is not available either. The same happened in the US, though sooner than in Europe, as neither of the two variants have been available in the US for the past couple of weeks (since March). Having said that, OnePlus has been teasing the arrival of the OnePlus 6 for quite some time now, the company has already confirmed that the phone will sport a display notch, while a repositioned alert slider will also be a part of the package. We also know that navigation gestures will be available on the device, thanks to OnePlus confirmation, while Evan Blass leaked the phones back side quite recently, and that image was probably legit as well, which means that the device will sport a wood-like back cover.

The OnePlus 6 is expected to sport a larger display than the OnePlus 5T, while the companys CEO claims that the two devices will be quite similar in terms of size. The OnePlus 5T is fueled by the Snapdragon 835, while its successor will arrive with the Snapdragon 845, and it will also sport an OLED panel, just like the OnePlus 5T. The OnePlus 6 is expected to ship with a 6.28-inch fullHD+ display (19:9 display aspect ratio), and the device will probably arrive in both 6GB and 8GB RAM variants, while OnePlus confirmed that the phone will top out at 8GB of RAM and 256GB of native storage, which probably means that the 6GB RAM variant will arrive in both 64GB and 128GB storage options, or at least the latter.

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Buy the OnePlus 5TSamsung is seeking to register the term Samsung Intelligent Display with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, according to a filing dated last Friday. The South Korean original equipment manufacturer officially related that name to TVs, monitors, set-top boxes, and general software for controlling multimedia devices. The lack of any mention of broader electronic device categories in the filing indicates that Samsung Intelligent Display isnt directly related to the companys smart speaker thats presently in the works, being planned for commercialization in the second half of the year.

After announcing its 2018 QLED TV lineup at a New York City-based event in early March, Samsung President and Head of Visual Display Business Jong-Hee Han specifically used the term intelligent display to refer to the capabilities of the next generation of the firms television sets. The technology is expected to be featured in all of the companies upcoming Q-series models, having been designed to deliver a refined media consumption experience and allow compatible TVs to serve as smart home and information hubs. The USPTO is presently in the process of reviewing the application and is likely to approve it or provide Samsung with a filing modification request in the coming months.

Much like LG started placing a larger focus on the artificial intelligence aspect of its latest electronics offerings with its ThinQ brand, its rival now appears to be set to pursue a similar strategy as it embarks on a mission to convince consumers to replace their existing appliances and gadgets with new models. The company as a whole is presently enjoying record growth backed by its booming semiconductor and display business, with its latest guidance forecasting profits in the ballpark of $14 billion over the first quarter of 2018. Samsung will publish its next consolidated financial report in late April and may also use it as an opportunity to inform investors about its immediate plans in the consumer electronics segment, as it often did in the past.According to new reports from the region, South Koreas Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning has now revealed that the countries carriers will be sharing the responsibility of building out the nations 5G network infrastructure. Whats more, once that infrastructure is completed, they will also be sharing in its use. While that may sound counter-intuitive, that will basically result in only enough infrastructure being built as is necessary to support each of the carriers and at least one ISP that is also taking part. It could also mean future cooperation when expansions on that network are needed. That means that there will be a reduction in unnecessary infrastructure redundancy and in overall costs. In fact, the overall savings, according to officials in the region, could come out to around 1 trillion won  or around $938 million in USD  over a ten year period. Companies taking part in the build-out will include SK Telecom Co., KT Corp., LG Uplus Inc., and SK Broadband Inc.

The Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning, meanwhile, has not released its own estimates for the cost of the infrastructure or how costs will be split  let alone how much the overall savings might be. However, the collaboration may not only be helpful in saving money. In the broader scope of the situation, the carriers working together may accelerate the rollout of 5G networking capabilities at a much higher rate than might otherwise be possible. That acceleration is another key aspect of the new partnership, as various countries around the globe continue competing to be the first to roll out the technology on a wider scale. According to one senior ICT official at the ministry, the goal is for South Korea to be the leader of a fourth industrial revolution.

In the meantime, testing of 5G networking has continued in earnest around the world, as has the construction of plenty of infrastructure in preparation for that. This years mobile events seeming to reflect that, as the focus seems to have shifted almost entirely to center around the new networks. Meanwhile, even device and technologies manufacturers appear to be intensifying efforts into new innovations that will take advantage of 5G almost explicitly. So this latest news is really just one step closer to the real-world realization of next-generation networking.Xiaomi has announced its April 25 press event, and it seems like the Xiaomi Mi 6X may get announced during that event. Xiaomi had announced this event via its official Weibo (Chinese social network) page, and even though the company did not mention the Mi 6X by name just yet, the device did get certified by TENAA (Chinas equivalent to the FCC) quite recently, and everything seems to point in the direction of its announcement.

The companys new device will be announced at Chinas Wuhan University, and if TENAA is to be believed, the Mi 6X will be made out of metal. The device will sport a rear-facing fingerprint scanner, and a vertically-aligned dual camera setup. The dual camera setup actually resembles the one on the Redmi Note 5 Pro and Mi MIX 2S, at least as far as the design is concerned, as an LED flash is placed in-between two cameras. Those two cameras will protrude a bit, and all the physical keys will be included on the right-hand side of the Mi 6X. A SIM card slot will probably sit on the phone left-hand side, while the Mi 6X will sport thinner bezels than its predecessor, thats for sure. The phone will also include a considerably larger display than the Mi 5X, as it will arrive with a 5.99-inch fullHD+ (2160 x 1080) panel, just like the Redmi Note 5 Pro.

Now, according to TENAAs listing, the Mi 6X will arrive in both 4GB and 6GB RAM variants, which will include 32GB and 64GB of storage, respectively, though it seems like a 128GB storage variant will also be available, and it will ship with 6GB of RAM, presumably. A 2910mAh non-removable battery will also be a part of the package, and the same can be said for fast charging. 20 and 8-megapixel snappers will be included on the back of the device, while it seems like a 20-megapixel camera could be included on the phones front side. Android 8.1 Oreo will come pre-installed on the device, while the companys MIUI skin will ship on top of it. The device will be fueled by an octa-core SoC clocked at 2.2GHz, and even though we dont know what chip is this exactly, its probably one of Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 series chips.

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Buy the Xiaomi Mi 5XXiaomi has announced that it is planning to change how quickly it rolls out the kernel source code for each of its devices. With Android being open sourced, and manufacturers like Xiaomi using the software, it needs to comply with open source standards like GPL or General Public License. Which means open sourcing the code for its kernels. Xiaomi has opened sourced the kernel code for many of its smartphones already, but hasnt been all that quick with doing so. However thats going to change. According to a Xiaomi spokesperson that reached out to XDA, Xiaomi is looking to release source code within three months after its launch.

The kernel source code isnt something that really matters for most users, as many might not even know what it means. But for those that are looking to develop for Xiaomis smartphones, this source code is needed for creating custom kernels, custom ROMs and much more. So Xiaomi likely doesnt see it as a huge priority, compared to rolling out updates to MIUI, or rolling out new versions of Android. But it is still an important aspect here, and rolling out the source code within three months is a huge improvement. But as you might expect, it is still quite a wait. Now Xiaomi might be doing a bit of underpromising and over-delivering, so well have to wait and see how long it takes Xiaomi to release the kernel source code for the Mi MIX 2S that was announced last month in Shanghai.

Xiaomi has released a number of devices over the years, as it has slowly grown to become one of the biggest smartphone makers in the world. In fact, Xiaomi just turned eight years old this week. And it has done a lot in eight years, including launching in India and becoming number one in the country. This has been the main catalyst for Xiaomis growth over the past few years, as its home country of China has become very competitive. And with that comes more users, and potentially more developers that want to mess around with developing kernels and custom ROMs for these devices. So its important to release the source code for developers to be able to do that.In response to Spains criticisms of the regional court of Schleswig-Holstein for its decision not to extradite Carles Puigdemont for rebellion and to release him, Brussels has made clear its support for the German justice system this Wednesday.

In response to a question from the Spanish press, the European Commissioner for Justice, Vera Jourova, stated that "Germany has acted in accordance with European rules".

Jourova believes that the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) works properly and that no changes are necesary. Following the failure of the first EAW against Puigdemont last year, the Spanish government proposed that more crimes should be added to the list of offences which merit automatic extradition.

The Commissioner of Justice, however, stressed that Brussels "is not considering" changing the list to include rebellion or sedition. "We had some debate with our Spanish colleagues last year, but at this moment we are not continuing this dialogue", she stated.Work on the Aspen Club and Spa could restart by June, according to President and CEO Michael Fox. The 130,000-square-foot project was stalled in 2017 due to financing, but ownership is said to be under contract with new equity partners and a new senior lender.Two held with banned Indian currency notes

Two persons have been arrested in possession of IRs 493, 1500 of the banned denominations of Rs 1000 and 500 on Wednesday.UN, global groups urged to fund TJs

Attorney General Agni Kharel on Wednesday urged the United Nations and global societies to financially support Transitional Justices burden of reparating victims of conflict.US govt hands over food storage building to NFC

The US government has handed over the food storage building to Birgunj-based office of Nepal Food Corporation (NFC) in order to respond effectively during emergencies. The facility has a capacity to store 1,000 tonnes of food.Allens has continued its long-standing relationship with Rio Tinto as it acted on the companys recently announced sale of its coal assets in Queensland.

The Anglo-Australian miner has committed to selling its stake in the Hail Creek coal mine and the Valeria coal project to Glencore for US$1.7bn. Rio Tinto has also agreed to sell its interests in the Winchester South coal project to Whitehaven coal for US$200m and its interest in the Kestrel underground coal mine to a consortium of EMR Capital and PT Adaro Energy for US$2.2bn.

According to the law firm, the divestment of Queensland coal assets is final step in a staged sell-down of Rio Tintos coal assets in Australia. The top law firm acted on Rio Tintos sale of Coal & Allied to Yancoal for US$2.69bn, which was the largest mining deal in Australia in 2017. The law firm also advised on the ownership restructure of Coal & Allied between Rio Tinto and Mitsubishi Development in 2016.The UKs Serious Fraud Office has let loose a robo-lawyer on the matters the authority is handling.

In the latest move by the office to use technology to enhance its operations, it has begun to use artificial intelligence across all of its new casework from this month. The system is augmented by Axcelerate, an AI-powered automated document review technology developed by OpenText.

This allows the SFO to investigate more quickly than when human lawyers work on the cases alone, and reduce costs and errors.Painters Supply & Equipment Co. (PSE) announced it has completed the acquisition of ACS of Georgia (ACS).

The acquisition adds nine locations in Georgia and Alabama and expands PSEs market reach into the Southeastern United States. ACS, based in Metro Atlanta, is the largest PPG Platinum Distributor headquartered in the Southeast, servicing customers throughout Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee.



Were pleased to welcome the ACS of Georgia team to PSE, said Patrick Mayette, President and CEO of PSE. ACS is one of the top-performing PBE Distributors in the country and they share the same high service model philosophy as PSE.



David Marlow and JP Uren, owners of ACS since 2007, will join PSE as equity partners and will assume the positions of Regional Vice Presidents. They will continue to deliver industry-leading products and services to their customers while focusing on expanding the PSE footprint throughout the Southeast.



JP and I are extremely excited about the future for all ACS employees as we join forces with PSE, said David Marlow.



Uren added that the decision was easy based on the relationship that they have developed with the PSE organization over the years.



PSEs model of high service and strong integrity, matched with their commitment to aggressively grow throughout the country, made this a perfect fit, Uren said.



Were excited about the future growth Dave, JP and their team will bring to the organization, continued Mayette. This acquisition marks a significant milestone for PSE as we expand our footprint outside of the Great Lakes Region. We continue to focus on being an active acquirer of strategic distributors in the Midwest, Southeast and nationally to support our aggressive growth initiatives.



Founded in 1952 and headquartered in Taylor, MI, PSE has grown to 36 branch locations across Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia and Alabama. PSE serves more than 6,000 customers, including collision repair shops, auto dealerships, fleet operators, and various other commercial and industrial accounts. PSE is the largest platinum distributor in North America and maintains strong market share across its footprint.Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

IIHS

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

The decision was made as a result of findings from both the) and Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) that shows a reduction in claim rates for Hondas equipped with this suite.Honda says that for the 2018 model year, 69 percent of the cars sold already have Sensing fitted. The Japanese also plan to make automatic emergency braking available across 95 percent of its fleet two years ahead of the industry-wide voluntary commitment, in 2020."Honda dreams of a collision-free mobile society, and the Honda Sensing technology has a crucial role to play in advancing us toward that goal," said Henio Arcangeli, American Honda vice-president."With the rapidly growing population of Honda vehicles applying these technologies, we hope to significantly reduce collisions involving Honda vehicles within the next three to four years."Hondas Sensing suite includes additional safety features and driver assistance technologies ranging from collision mitigation to lane keeping assist. For now, it is standard on several of the carmakers models, including the Clarity and the Accord In March 2016, theannounced it has agreed with 20 automakers, representing more than 99 percent of the U.S. auto market, to make automatic emergency braking a standard feature on virtually all new cars by 2022.The call for the implementation of such a system arises from the necessity to reduce the number of injuries and expenses caused by low-speed impacts. Studies have shown that even if a crash is not entirely avoided, it is likely the striking vehicle at least slowed before the crash by such systems.IIHS data regarding Honda vehicles equipped with the Sensing suite shows an 11 percent drop in property claims and a 28 percent decrease in injuries to people in other vehicles or pedestrians.The Department of Transportation (DOTr), upon orders from the President himself, are very serious about cracking down on corruption within their ranks these past few days with a wave of relieve orders, suspension orders and sacking officials from the main office as well as regional and satellite offices.

Following complaints from truckers and rice traders from Nueva Vizcaya that Land Transportation Office (LTO) employees had been extorting money from them as they transported their goods from the province during a stakeholder meeting with the rice industry, the President then contacted DOTr Secretary Arthur Tugade to relay the complaints.

The truckers and rice traders alleged that some of the LTO personnel were able to extort as much as PhP 1,000,000 a day from their illegal activities.

In a statement from the DOTr, Tugade was said to be fuming mad over the allegations, prompting the Transportation Secretary to instruct LTO Chief Edgar Galvante to execute a relieve order on the officials in the province, specifically their two satellite offices in Nueva Vizcaya: Aritao and Bayombong.

All in all, 11 officials and employees from the two offices were relieved of duty, with their offices and tasks subsequently reassigned to be undertaken by two of the closest LTO district offices. There was also an order recalling the deputation order of the personnel that manned the truck weigh bridge at Aritao.

Sec. Tugade extended a warning to the personnel under his purview that they should not involve themselves in these corrupt practices, and to not wait for him to remove them from their posts if he finds out that they are involved.

The DOTr also relieved and/or sacked officers from other agencies like the Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA), the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP), the DOTr's own Road Transport Planning Division and their Environmentally Sustainable Initiative Transportation Unit. Some of the charges included the acceptance of bribes, tampering with employment contracts for bigger paychecks, and even operating a pasalubong center in an airport.

According to the DOTr statement, the Secretary said that he will not tolerate or coddle termites in his ranks, and will not hesitate to terminate them.A Canadian company is barred from exporting animal foods to the U.S. after perpetrating a fraud intended to cover up a shipment of unsafe feed.

The Food and Drug Administration implemented the five-year ban on shipments from Meunerie Sawyerville effective March 1, a Federal Register notice states. The company received $80,000 in fines and a year of probation after pleading guilty in 2015 to two felonies related to false statements on a shipping manifest and importation of an unsafe drug with the intent to defraud and mislead.

A Meunerie Sawyerville truck containing cattle feed crossed into Vermont in September 2012. Sampling at the border showed the feed contained a higher-than-approved concentration of monensin, an antimicrobial, and Customs and Border Protection officials told the driver to store the shipment elsewhere for further tests by the FDA, the notice states.

Company president and owner Yves Bolduc "instructed the driver to deliver the feed to a Vermont farmer as planned, without informing the farmer that the feed had been sampled and ordered held by FDA," the notice states. "Mr. Bolduc then engineered a plan that a sham shipment of similar-looking cattle feed cross the border under false Customs documentation to be stored on an unrelated piece of land in Vermont until requested for redelivery by Customs and Border Protection."

The company created a shipping manifest for a fictional importer, "Ted Taft," for the second truck, the notice states. When federal officials would call for redelivery, the second shipment would be presented as the first.

The FDA proposed the debarment in July 2017. Company officials argued in response that the adulterated feed was no longer a problem because they had stopped mixing monensin into cattle feed, plus no harm occurred, and debarment would hurt Meunerie Sawyerville.

FDA officials countered that company officials failed to address the causes of the crimes and provide assurance against similar conduct. They noted that Bolduc conceived the fraud and remained in charge of the company.

"In addition to adulteration, there are also many other reasons an unscrupulous importer might attempt to deceive Customs," the notice states.An effort to allow pilots to share expenses of flights with strangers has resurfaced, with a bill introduced on Wednesday by Sen. Mike Lee, of Utah. The Aviation Empowerment Act would add definition and clarity to existing rules that will help unleash innovation in the aviation community, Senator Lee said in a news release. Cost-sharing services have proven to be safe and effective in other countries, Lee said. This is a job for Congress, not for the regulators, Marc Scribner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Reason. The problem here is that Congress has granted an incredible amount of authority over the decades to the FAA.

So far the courts have upheld the FAAs position that using apps or Internet posts to offer flight-sharing is equivalent to common carriage and off-limits for private pilots. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the judges declined to hear it, leaving in place the lower courts ruling. Senator Lees bill proposes to redefine the term compensation in the FAAs rules about flying for compensation or hire. The bill proposes that that the term compensation requires the intent to pursue monetary profitbutdoesnotincludeflightsinwhichthepilotand passengers share aircraft operating expenses or the pilot receives any benefit. The proposal would apply to flights in aircraft with eight or fewer seats and pilots with at least a private certificate.John Bogie, co-founder of the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association (COPA) and its first president and chairman, has died. COPA says Bogie has been an unswerving supporter of COPA, seeing it grow from modest beginnings to some 16,000 members. John served in most of COPAs executive capacities and continued as an honorary director and life member. The organization said he attended as many COPA events as he could, even into his 90s. The group listed his COPA accomplishments as simplified medicals for pilots, and aviation liability group insurance now used by commercial carriers.

Bogie helped to create the Experimental Aircraft Association Canada organization, as well as a civilian pilot group for Search and Rescue as an adjunct to the military. Another entity he helped bring into being was the Canadian Business Aircraft Association (CBAA), first as an arm of COPA and then as a distinct entity.

Born into an aviation family in the United States, Bogie made his home in Canada since the early 1950s, following service in the United States Navy. Later Bogie worked as an airport operator and charter pilot. In Canada, he made a name for his charter and resource exploration work for Laurentian Air Services (ultimately becoming president) and Spartan Air Services.

John passed away on April 6, 2018, we and the aviation community of Canada will dearly miss him, said Bernard Gervais, COPA president and CEO. The funeralisApril 21stin Ottawa.Pipistrel has sold 15 Alpha trainer aircraft to a flight school in California, the companys largest-ever U.S. order. The flight school, WorldWide Wings, operates facilities in California and Florida that train pilots from all over the world, especially India. WWW director Naushad Imam said his flight school had been looking for a suitable LSA ab-initio trainer for quite a while. They leased a few airplanes from various manufacturers and tried them out in the training environment. This provided a very good understanding of their suitability, said Imam. Finding the right airplane which provided the flexibility of conducting all training seamlessly from end-to-end on a standardized platform was the key. All of the Alpha trainers will be IFR equipped.

The Alpha trainer was introduced in 2012. Its powered by the Rotax 912 engine and can fly up to 324 NM at a cruising speed of 108 knots. More than 300 are flying in 35 countries, including almost 50 in the U.S., Pipistrel says. Deliveries to WorldWide Wings from Pipistrels Italian production facility will begin later this month, with commissioning in San Bernardino scheduled for the first week of June, the company said. AVwebs editorial director, Paul Bertorelli, went flying in an electric-powered Alpha in 2015.Although autogyros in the U.S. arent quite the thing they are in Europe, a new one is being shown off this week at Sun n Fun in Lakeland, Florida. The Rotorvox C2A, an all-carbon fiber design, is being pitched and an experimental amateur built aircraft for the U.S. market.

Its powered by a turbocharged Rotax 914 engine and the company claims the C2A is one of the advanced gyrocopters in the world. With a large bubble canopy and side-by-side seating, the C2A has a unique twin-boom design. Although sold ready to fly in Europe, the U.S. lacks approvals for light sport aircraft in this category.

Instead, the C2A will be sold as a fast-build kit and will establish a customer support center with Flight Design USA in South Woodstock, Connecticut. That company markets and supports the Flight Design line of light sport aircraft. Rotorvox Aero is based in Broomfield, Colorado.Trade: China puts U.S. energy in the crosshairs

Workers prepare panels that will be part of a large floating solar farm project under construction in 2017, in Huainan, China. Photo: Kevin Frayer via Getty Images

Over in our Expert Voices section, a new piece by ClearView Energy Partners managing director Kevin Book takes stock of U.S.-China trade tensions...

The new tariffs on U.S. steel imports were already poised to raise costs for steel-intensive domestic oil and gas production. But China's proposed retaliatory tariffs on ethanol and propane pose the greatest threat yet to the U.S. energy trade.

The big picture: If tensions continue to escalate, Beijing might target U.S. oil and natural gas, too. While all businesses could face weaker margins if tariffs, quotas and other barriers slow global GDP growth, a trade war with China would prove especially damaging to U.S. energy producers, which have grown increasingly dependent on overseas markets.

Click here for the whole item.NBC reported on Thursday that two U.S. officials said that blood and urine samples from victims of the chemical attack in Syria over the weekend tested positive for a nerve agent and chlorine gas.

The backdrop: A few hours earlier, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that the administration was "looking for the actual evidence" to support a chemical attack, which affected 500 people. Mattis also said there would be a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Thursday to discuss options for response in Syria.The National Transportation Safety Board revoked Tesla's status as an official party to the agency's investigation into a March 23 fatal crash of a Model X, citing Tesla's violation of an official agreement not to release information about the crash to the public while the investigation is ongoing.

Driving the news: Tesla said it withdrew from the agreement to cooperate with the investigation because it disagreed with the agreement's restrictions on what the company could share publicly about Autopilot, the company's semiautonomous driving system. Tesla said that requirement "fundamentally affects public safety negatively."

NTSB was unhappy with Tesla's decision to release detailed information about the crash while the investigation is ongoing. NTSB probes can take a year or longer.

What they're saying: NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said in a statement: "It is unfortunate that Tesla, by its actions, did not abide by the party agreement. While we understand the demand for information that parties face during an NTSB investigation, uncoordinated releases of incomplete information do not further transportation safety or serve the public interest."

Details: Tesla released information about the March 23 crash and blamed the driver, Walter Huang, who died when his Model X collided with a highway barrier in California.This morning, President Trump seemingly dialed back yesterday's tweets on Syria, which foreshadowed imminent military strikes despite Defense Secretary Jim Mattis saying the Pentagon was "still assessing" the situation.

A tweet previously embedded here has been deleted or was tweeted from an account that has been suspended or deleted.

Go deeper: A map of the groups that control Syria shows where ISIS has lost ground.The Trump administration has urged Israel several times in the last few weeks to try to solve the crisis that erupted with Poland over a controversial law which makes it illegal to attribute crimes committed during the Holocaust to Poland.

A senior official at the Israeli foreign ministry told me: "The Americans made clear they dont like the Holocaust law, think it is unacceptable and asked the Polish government to fix it. But at the same time they told us Poland is an important U.S. ally, especially in NATO, and also an Israeli ally and therefore there is a need to deal with the crisis carefully and not damage the alliance."

Senior Israeli officials told me the U.S. conveyed their messages in several channels both to the Israeli government and to opposition leaders and asked them to temper their public rhetoric against Poland:

The White House and State Department conveyed messages to Israel's ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, and to other diplomats at the Israeli embassy about the importance of relations with Poland. Similar messages were passed from Washington to the Prime Minister's office and the Foreign ministry in Jerusalem.

conveyed messages to Israel's ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, and to other diplomats at the Israeli embassy about the importance of relations with Poland. Similar messages were passed from Washington to the Prime Minister's office and the Foreign ministry in Jerusalem. Vice President Pence met with the head of the Israeli opposition , Itzhak Herzog, on March 5 in Washington and raised the Poland crisis. An Israeli foreign ministry official said Pence asked Herzog to temper his critical statements against the Polish government and help solve the crisis, and Herzog stressed that the bill and the rhetoric about it from the Polish government were highly offensive and unacceptable. Herzog refused to comment for this story, as did the VP's office.

, Itzhak Herzog, on March 5 in Washington and raised the Poland crisis. An Israeli foreign ministry official said Pence asked Herzog to temper his critical statements against the Polish government and help solve the crisis, and Herzog stressed that the bill and the rhetoric about it from the Polish government were highly offensive and unacceptable. Herzog refused to comment for this story, as did the VP's office. The State Department also asked the Israeli and Polish embassies to co-sponsor an annual Holocaust memorial day ceremony. Officials from both embassies also spoke at the ceremony on Wednesday.

The law:Uber has agreed to expand a proposed settlement with the FTC to include a 2016 breach that it didn't disclose until after it settled last summer over its privacy and security practices.

Backstory: In November, Uber disclosed that a year prior, hackers had accessed the account information of millions of customerssomething it had concealed because it had convinced the hackers to delete the data in exchange for $100,000 as part of its bounty program.

The initial settlement stemmed from a similar 2014 incident in which hackers accessed the information of more than 100,000 drivers. Earlier in 2017 Uber also settled with the FTC over claims it made about how much drivers can earn.

The new settlement proposal includes additional requirements, such as that Uber submit to the FTC all required third-party audits of Ubers privacy program instead of just the initial ones.By Rashid Shirinov

The long-standing Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has once again got into the spotlight of Russia  one of the three co-chair countries of the OSCE Minsk Group designed to find a peaceful settlement to the problem.

In his statement on April 9, Russian FM Sergey Lavrov noted that the parties to the conflict need to abandon their distrust of each other in order to advance in the negotiations, and to use the achievements of the Kazan summit in 2011.

Vladimir Lepekhin, Director General of the Institute of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), commented on Lavrovs statement, saying that, in general, he shares the FMs opinion, but it is necessary to pay attention to an important nuance.

In my opinion, the provisions of the Kazan document are outdated, and now it is not 2011 or even 2017. The region is at the stage of a planetary explosion. Therefore, Russias position today should be more certain, Lepekhin told Day.az.

He noted that the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict depends on the positions of the three presidents  of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

However, the assistance of regional powers is also necessary for the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It is they who can contribute to the formation of a constructive dialogue between the parties, bring Azerbaijan and Armenia to a dialogue, the political scientist mentioned.

He said it is necessary to choose the option of settling the conflict that will bring peace and stability to the region, and that regional powers will be more beneficial in resolving the conflict than external mediators.

Armenia broke out a lengthy war against Azerbaijan by laying territorial claims on the country. Since a war in the early 1990s, Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan's territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.

To this day, Armenia has not implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions.

Due to the reluctance of the Armenian side in the Kazan summit, breakthrough in negotiations was not achieved, since the Armenian troops were not withdrawn from the occupied territories in return for a gradual solution to the conflict.

Another famous Russian political scientist Dmitry Rodionov noted in his interview with Day.az that Russias position is to maintain peace in the region and prevent bloodshed from both sides. The expert noted that Russia cannot be on anyones side in this conflict, and the country is interested in cooperation with both sides.

Armenia is a member of the EAEU and CSTO, while Azerbaijan is Russias strategic partner. In this context, Moscow is extremely interested in preventing any war in the South Caucasus, Rodionov said.

The political scientist mentioned that the rejection of mutual distrust is the first and very important step without which there will be no progress.

In the current reality, this is the only way to avoid escalation, and today this is a strategic goal for all, he said. The final consensus is possible if it is possible to maintain a long-term lasting peace. Then there is a hope that some way out of this situation will be found in the future.

In conclusion, Rodionov drew attention to the fact that constructive proposals and experience of previous meetings and negotiations indeed exist today and they can and should be used, as Lavrov recalled.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has phoned his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev, the press service of the Azerbaijani president said in a statement April 12.

Erdogan congratulated Ilham Aliyev on confident victory at the presidential election and wished success in his presidential activity for the benefit of the Azerbaijani people.

Ilham Aliyev expressed gratitude for the shown attention and congratulations.

President Ilham Aliyev and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed confidence that relations of friendship and brotherhood between the two countries will continue to develop in all areas.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

The presidential election was held in democratic conditions in Azerbaijan, said Jiri Valenta, a member of the Czech Chamber of Deputies (Parliament of the Czech Republic) and deputy chairman of the Committee on European Affairs, at a press conference dedicated to the election in Baku April 12.

Valenta noted that no violations of law were recorded during the voting process.

The Czech MP added that he together with his counterpart, Jaroslav Holik, visited 14 polling stations and did not see any violations of law.

According to the results of the processing of ballots from 5,201 polling stations, incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86 percent of votes in the presidential election in Azerbaijan.

On the voting day, 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in the country.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

The presidential election was held in Azerbaijan in accordance with the European standards, Victor Ponta, member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Romanian Parliament, said at a press conference in Baku April 12.

"During the observation, we visited several polling stations, he said. The voting process was held in accordance with European standards."

Azerbaijan held the presidential election on April 11.

Eight candidates were registered for the election. Six of the candidates were nominated by political parties, one candidate was a self-nominee and another candidate was nominated by an initiative group.

On the voting day, 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in the country.

Incumbent President, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86 percent of votes in the election, according to the votes counted in 5,201 polling stations.

Web cameras were installed in 1,000 polling stations in 119 electoral districts. During the day, the voting process could be observed online from the website of the Central Election Commission (CEC).

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzAzerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev was overwhelmingly re-elected for the next seven -year term at Wednesdays elections. The incumbent head of state gained over 86 percent of votes, according to preliminary tallies announced by the Central Election Commission (CEC).

The convincing victory of Ilham Aliyev in the election testified to his high political authority and strong support that the people give him.

President-elect Ilham Aliyev appealed to the nation after the announcement of preliminary results of the vote to express his gratitude to the people of Azerbaijan for the confidence demonstrated in him.

I always feel the support of Azerbaijani people. This support gives me strength. This support is the main condition for our development. The unity of people and government is the main factor of our development in Azerbaijan, said the head of state.

Ilham Aliyev noted that in this election, the Azerbaijani people voted for stability, security, development and progress and appraised the work done over the last 15 years.

We have achieved all this success together with you. The unity of people and government our expedient policy have today turned Azerbaijan into a strong country, added Ilham Aliyev.

Ilham Aliyev was first elected the President of Azerbaijan in 2003 at the age of 42 years, thus becoming one of the youngest heads of state in the world. The years of his reign are characterized by dynamic development, and rapid modernization of the country.

The merits of President Ilham Aliyev, his high professionalism and ability to consistently achieve the set goals, outstanding personal qualities and exceptional nobility brought him recognition and appreciation throughout the world.

Ilham Aliyev gained respect and great authority in the world as a strong and flexible politician, successfully defending the interests of his country in all international meetings and high-level talks.

Aliyev takes a keen interest in pursuing a multi-vector international policy based on the national interests, maintaining a balance between the centers of power, which ensures the stability in the country even today, when a significant part of the Middle East and a number of post-Soviet countries are plunged into the zone of destabilization.

It is under his leadership that Azerbaijan today is rightly considered the political and economic center of power in the region. Thanks to his policy Azerbaijan became a country without the participation of which no transnational project is implemented.

Today Azerbaijan has become the most rapidly developing country in the world, and one of the most competitive world economies.

Political stability and high economic growth maintained in Azerbaijan during his presidency in the last decade are regarded as the major reason for his decisive victory. The countrys economy has grown 3.4-fold in the last decade, while the level of poverty reduced approximately 10 times. The country attracted $180 billion worth of investment to its economy.

This is the result of serious economic and social policy carried out in the country during Ilham Aliyevs presidency. This policy helped Azerbaijan considerably strengthen its economic potential in the past 15 years.

The purposeful program of reforms by Ilham Aliyev allowed the country in the shortest time to achieve serious progress in the development of different spheres including economy, especially, in the non-oil sector, and provide an economic growth being independent from the oil factor.

According to ratings of the leading international organizations, Azerbaijan has been developing even at a time the rest of the world faced economic and financial crisis. The countrys economy was ranked among the top 35 economies of the world in terms of competitiveness.

President Aliyev has been doing his utmost to preserve stability and the atmosphere of friendship in the country. Today, Azerbaijan is a real example of intercultural, interreligious and inter-civilization dialogue. The representatives of different ethnic groups and faiths have been living here throughout centuries in an atmosphere of peace, mutual understanding and dialogue.

Under the leadership of Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan has established itself as a brilliant organizer of international sporting events, including the 1st European Games, the 4th Islamic Solidarity Games and Formula 1 Grand Prix of Azerbaijan, the last of which was recognized as the most spectacular race of 2017 thanks to a track built in the heart of Baku.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Laman Ismayilova

Ramadan, which falls on the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar is the most sacred month of the year in Islamic culture.

This year the holiday will start on Wednesday, on May 16 and will continue for 30 days until Thursday, June 14.

The date of Ramadan may vary from country to country depending on whether the moon has been sighted or not. It begins and ends with the appearance of the new moon.

As the cycle of the lunar calendar does not match the solar calendar, the dates of Ramadan changes by approximately 11 days each year.

Ramadan draws a special feeling of excitement among Muslims. The origin of Ramadan is connected with the life of Muhammad, the founding prophet of Islam.

Ramadan was established as a Holy Month for Muslims after the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in 610 CE on the occasion known as Laylat al-Qadr, frequently translated as "the Night of Power".

During the holy month, Muslims around the world fast during daylight hours.

They refrain from eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset, and strive to avoid thoughts and behavior which are considered to be impure under the tenets of Islam.

In Islam, fasting is obligatory for all the faithful with the exception of minors, the elderly and ill, mentally ill, pregnant women and nursing mothers, travelers, and soldiers.

The holy Koran says, As morning comes and white thread distinguishes from black thread, you may eat and drink and then complete your fast till the night.

After the sunset prayer, Muslims usually gather in their homes or mosques to break their fast with a meal called iftar. Mosques also host large iftar parties, especially for the poor and needy.

After breaking the fast, but before eating dinner, Muslims offer the fourth of their five daily prayers and after dinner, they make their way to their Mosques to offer the fifth daily prayer, known as the Isha prayer.

The day ends with a special voluntary prayer, which is offered by the congregation. During this time, Muslims also play and read the Quran. Acts of charity are obligatory upon Muslims who are able to do so.

The final ten days of Ramadan are considered some of the most holy. The 27th night is of particular importance, known as "the Night of Power". This is the night when the Prophet Muhammad received his first revelation. Many Muslims spend this day praying.

The ending of Ramadan is marked by the celebration called Eid ul-Fitr (the Festival of Fast-Breaking), which takes place either 29 or 30 days after the beginning of the month.

It is one of the two major religious holidays of the Muslim calendar. During the holiday, Muslims enjoy time with their families and often exchange gifts.

Delicious pastries are baked for the occasion, the graves of relatives are visited, and people pray in mosques.

Azerbaijan, a predominantly Muslim country, has celebrated the Ramadan officially since 1993, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijani Muslims did not stop fasting even during the Soviet period when all religious holidays were banned.

Azerbaijan has always been one of the historical and cultural centers of the Islamic world, and for centuries the Azerbaijani people have been committed to their religious, national and moral values.

The freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are fully ensured in accordance with local legislation and international law.

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

The presidential election in Azerbaijan passed without any outside intervention in the voting process, ex-parliamentarian, head of a monitoring mission from Finland Juha Korkeaoja said at a press conference on April 12.

"Our observations showed that no election campaigns were conducted near the polling stations, entrances to polling stations were open for all, including foreign observers, which also proves transparency," Korkeaoja said.

The head of the Finnish group of observers noted that the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Azerbaijan also provided all necessary conditions for organizations from France and the United States to hold polls among voters.

"All of the abovementioned is the best indicator of openness of the presidential election in Azerbaijan," he said.

Azerbaijan held a presidential election on April 11.

Eight candidates were registered for the election. Six of the candidates were nominated by political parties, one candidate was a self-nominee and another candidate was nominated by an initiative group.

The incumbent head of state, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev has garnered 86.03 percent of votes in the election, according to the votes counted in 5,641 polling stations.

The election was observed by 894 international observers (61 organizations, 59 countries) and 58,175 local observers.

The voter turnout was 74,51 percent. That is 3,962,123 of 5,332,817 voters cast ballots in the election.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Kamila Aliyeva

BP and Azerbaijans state oil company SOCAR continue to work together to provide a long-term future for oil and gas production in Azerbaijan, BP reported on April 11.

The company said that the first gas from Azerbaijans Shah Deniz field will be delivered to Turkeys Eskisehir soon as part of the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) project.

Turkey's state-owned crude oil and natural gas pipelines and trading company BOTAS and Azerbaijan's state-owned national oil and gas company SOCAR are undertaking work to deliver first gas to Eskisehir, Turkeys Anatolian city in the middle of 2018 as part of the TANAP project, according to the message.

SOCAR holds a 58-percent interest in TANAP, BOTAS has a 30-percent share while BP owns a 12-percent stake.

The Southern Gas Corridor, worth $41.5 billion, is considered as one of the priority energy projects for the EU, which strives for diversification of gas supplies. The project envisages the transportation of of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey.

At the initial stage, the gas to be produced as part of Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field is considered as the main source for the Southern Gas Corridor projects. Other sources can also connect to this project at a later stage.

As part of Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz development, gas will be exported to Turkey and European markets by expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline and the construction of Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline and Trans Adriatic Pipeline.

The first gas within the Shah Deniz-2 project will be delivered to Turkey in 2018, and to Europe in 2019.

---

Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Kamila Aliyeva

Tajikistans Ministry of Transport has offered the government a draft route plan for the Tajik section of the Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Turkmenistan railway, a project which may turn Afghanistan into a regional hub.

The specialists have completed the work on determining the route of the Tajik section of the specified railway, and the project was given to the state commission for studying and making a decision on it, according to the ministry.

The route of the Tajik section runs through the districts of J. Balkhi, Jaihun and Nizhny Pyanj. After the state commission approves the project, the feasibility study for the project will begin, that is, the length of the road, the number of bridges, etc. will be determined, the source said.

A memorandum on the construction of the Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Turkmenistan railway was signed in March 2013 by the presidents of the three countries.

The role of the main coordinator of the project was assumed by the Asian Development Bank.

It was decided that ADB will assume this role and help not only Tajikistan, but also Afghanistan, the permanent representative (now former) of ADB in Tajikistan C. C. Yu told reporters in January 2014.

Later, the Asian Development Bank allocated $9 million of grant funds for the development of a feasibility study for the future railway.

Previously, there were controversial points about the choice of the route of this railway through the territory of Afghanistan. Two routes were proposed. The length of the short route that Tajikistan offered is 160 km. The route proposed by the Afghan side was more than 500 km. As a result, the parties managed to agree and sign the corresponding protocol.

The railway from Atamyrat in Turkmenistan to the Ymamnazar border crossing point (85 km) and Afghanistan's customs facilities at Aqina (3 km) - the first link of the Asian transnational railway - was officially opened in November 2016

The project is of great significance for all three countries. The Afghan and Tajik economies are suffering due to their isolated, landlocked nature, poor infrastructure, and slow economic growth.

Afghanistans transport infrastructure, which was destroyed over the course of decades of war, has to be rebuilt in order to benefit from the countrys trade and transit potential. Afghanistan shares borders of 744 and 1,206 kilometers with Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, respectively.

The construction of railway would play a major role in increasing trade and could enable Afghanistan to play the role of a bridge integrating the Central Asian region with global markets.

---

Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

India is considering building Russian Project 11356 frigates at one of its shipyards and the corresponding talks are underway, Deputy Director of Russias Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation Vladimir Drozhzhov said on Thursday, TASS reports.

"The experience of interaction in this sphere is very extensive. I hope that the Indian side will take all efforts jointly with Russia to maximally expedite the process of building ships at an Indian shipyard," he said, without giving any details.

In 2016, an inter-governmental agreement was signed on building Project 11356 missile-carrying warships for India at shipyards of both countries, he said.

As the defense official said, "this project is among priority undertakings and special attention is paid to its implementation."

Currently, talks are underway on the delivery of four Project 11356 frigates to India. Director for International Cooperation and Regional Policy at Russias state hi-tech corporation Rostec Viktor Kladov earlier said the planned contract would be implemented under the two plus two formula where two frigates were expected to be built in Russia and delivered ready-made to India while the other two warships would be built by the Indian shipbuilding industry at one of national shipyards.

Three hulls of warships laid down in Kaliningrad for the Russian Black Sea Fleet were earlier intended to be used for the construction of Indian frigates. However, Russian Navy Deputy Commander-in-Chief Viktor Bursuk later said these frigates will be built in the interests of Russias Navy.

Project 11356 warships displace about 4,000 tonnes, develop a speed of 30 knots and have an endurance of 30 days. Russia earlier built six Project 11356 (Talwar-class) frigates for the Indian Navy.

--By Kamila Aliyeva

The aviation authorities of Uzbekistan and Russia agreed on more than twofold increase in the number of frequencies of flights between the countries, according to the Russian Ministry of Transport. The talks were held in Moscow on April 11.

During the talks, an agreement on more than twofold increase in the number of frequencies for Russian and Uzbek air carriers was reached, and a road map to expand commercial rights on contractual routes was signed, the ministry said.

It is also noted that new directions are being introduced in the regular air service between the two countries.

In March, the media reported that the aviation authorities of the two countries could not agree on liberalizing air traffic.

Earlier, Moscow expressed concern that the number of flights carried out between countries has almost halved since 2014, noting that Russian carriers, for their part, are interested in expanding commercial rights of flights.

The Russian side offered to give the designated airlines the right to freely select the frequencies.

The Uzbek side then assured that it would assist Russian carriers in confirming flight programs and providing slots at Uzbek airports on a parity basis.

Uzbekistan Airways, the national air carrier of the Central Asian nation, operates flights from Uzbekistan to Russia, while the aircrafts of Aeroflot and UTair fly to Uzbekistan.

---

Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzSuzanne Kibodeaux dreamed about a brand new house, complete with a white picket fence and sparkling granite countertops. That is, until she fell in love with a 103-year-old home in Sour Lake with few modern fixtures but many stories to tell.

Built by oil tycoon Miles Frank Yount in 1915, Sunnyside, with its sliding pocket doors and wallpapered 12-foot ceilings, carries guests away to the time of the second Spindletop oil boom in 1925.

Located on Texas 105 West, Sunnyside now has its eighth owners - Suzanne and Michael Kibodeaux of A1 Filter Service.

PHOTOS: Historic homes of Southeast Texas

Michael, 63, said walking on original pine and walnut floors or sitting on antique furniture is sometimes like "living in a museum," but after two years at Sunnyside, he said it "just felt like home."

Now more than a century old, Sunnyside will receive a historical marker on May 19 from the Hardin County Historical Commission.

After seeing Sunnyside's golden tin ceilings and antique light fixtures, Suzanne said she realized her home wish list was "so cookie cutter."

She has since become captivated with scouting for period furniture pieces and making Sunnyside her own while maintaining the home's original grandeur.

RELATED: Texas Historical Markers in Jefferson County

Beaumont native and historian Greg Riley said the original Sunnyside featured Austrian rugs, a leopard skin "pliant as a lady's glove" and San Domingo mahogany furniture, according to a newspaper article from the time.

While some furniture is original to the house, like two bookshelves belonging to Frank Yount himself, most are period-style pieces.

"As long as it looks the part," said Suzanne, 48. Otherwise, she said she tries to "keep everything as old as possible."

Upkeep is no small task, said Suzanne, who vacuums every inch of the 3,768-square foot home daily with a cordless Dyson cleaner.

PHOTOS: Historic pictures of Texas oil fields and gushers

Yount and his wife, Pansy, lived at Sunnyside until Yount found his fortune near the site of the Lucas Gusher in 1925.

Both historian Fred B. McKinley and Suzanne were unsure about why the home was nicknamed Sunnyside, but Suzanne said she likes to think the Younts believed they were "living on the 'sunny side' of life."

The year before, the couple had relocated to a mansion known as El Ocaso, meaning "sunset," on "Millionaires' Row," as Suzanne called it, otherwise known as Calder Avenue.

Once located on 1376 Calder Ave., El Ocaso no longer stands after Pansy had the home demolished, saying she didn't want it to become a museum or funeral home after their deaths.

Yount deeded Sunnyside to his sister, Ima Belle, who turned it into a boarding house, renting the four-bedroom, three-bathroom home to oil workers and pipeliners for $1 a day.

The Yount-Lee Oil Co. took off and was sold after Yount's death in the 1930s in the country's third-largest financial transaction at the time, according to McKinley, 74, who co-wrote a book with Riley about the Yount family.

The Yount-Lee Oil Co. was nicknamed the "Financial Gibraltar of Beaumont," and Yount was referred to as the "Godfather of Beaumont."

Yount never laid off any workers, McKinley said, and twice loaned the city of Beaumont money to ensure city officials, policemen and firemen were paid.

"The human kindness of this man was unbelievable," McKinley said.

Phoebe.Suy@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/PhoebeSuyAUSTIN  Four years after Texas refused to embrace a Mexican-American Studies course in a state with a booming Latino population, the State Board of Education tentatively agreed Wednesday to usher in standards that will make the class easier to provide as a high school elective statewide.

But in a move that sparked a fresh backlash, the board voted to change the programs name to Ethnic Studies: An Overview of Americans of Mexican Descent, after one member objected to using hyphenated terms to describe people.

I find hyphenated Americanism to be divisive, said member David Bradley, a conservative Republican from Beaumont who proposed the name change.

Member Lawrence Allen, Jr., a Houston Democrat, said he opposed stripping the course of its original name.

So many people cant embrace just the concept of just America by itself because it seems to be that America is exclusively for whites, said Allen, who is African American.

The board approved the name change on a 10-4 vote, with four of five Democrats opposed.

The board then voted 14-1 for proposed standards to create an elective modeled after a Mexican-American Studies course taught in Houston. Allen was the lone vote against.

Dozens of people gave impassioned speeches before state education officials urging them to embrace a Mexican-American Studies elective course in Texas, a move advocates hope would pave the way for future discussion about encouraging other ethnic studies classes.

The State Board of Education will decide whether to adopt official standards proposed by The National Association for Chicana & Chicano Studies Tejas Foco Committee on Implementing Mexican American Studies in PreK-12 Education, largely mirroring standards used to teach the course in Houston.

Board Member Pat Hardy, a Republican from Fort Worth, bristled after the testimony, telling reporters, To try and bully the board into doing something because they feel like theyve been downtrodden kind of bugs me.

The Latino population is booming in Texas with more than half the states 5.4 million school-aged-children coming from Mexican or Latino backgrounds. However, the State Board of Education opted four years ago not to establish official standards for a Mexican-American Studies course, leading teachers and researchers to build a road map for the class from scratch.

Texas has a sad and tortured past of having to be here at venues like this at every critical juncture to argue for facts, to argue for history, to argue for inclusion, and to argue for the value and the beauty of diversity, Rep. Celia Israel, an Austin Democrat who belongs to the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, told a crowd of people gathered to rally for the standards before the board meeting.

Instead of approving the elective in 2014, the board known for strong political divisions asked for Mexican-American studies textbook proposals. That request would spin off into a controversy over an error-ridden text that referred to Mexicans as lazy that the board rejected. In all, the board rejected the only two book proposals publishers proposed.

MORE: Professors: Mexican-American history textbook is offensive

Advocates for the class say adopting official state standards will help students from Mexican and Latino backgrounds perform better in school by having them connect with stories of people who share their backgrounds. Advocates also say the move will signal to publishers that Texas has a market for Mexican-American studies texts.

The story of Texas has left a lot of people out and I think this that this an opportunity for the board to put those diverse stories into those classrooms so students see people who are like them in our history and understand how those people have shaped the state that we have today," said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a liberal-leaning watchdog of the state board.

Research out of Arizona has shown students who take MAS courses have higher graduation rates and score better on standardized tests.

Dozens of people gathered outside the Texas Education Agency building in Austin waving signs and stressing the course helps Mexican-American students connect with their history, and allows students of all races to understand Mexican-American culture.

Clara Perez, 15, fought tears as she told the crowd how the MAS class she took in eighth grade at KIPP Camino Academy in San Antonio helped her find her identity.

Im not white. Im not Mexican. Im Mexican-American, she said wiping tears from her cheeks.

The lack of textbooks or approved education standards hasnt stopped Houston Independent School District and other schools from teaching Mexican-American Studies. In the 2016-2017 school year 454 students took a MAS course here, according to the National Association of Chicana Chicano Studies committee focused on teaching Mexican-American Studies.

Advocates say Texas would be only the second state to implement the elective. Arizona had offered the course for years, although the Legislature banned the course because it was designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. Late last year, a federal judge permanently barred the state from banning the class.

The board is expected to vote tentatively Wednesday whether to approve state standards that closely mirror HISD standards. A final vote is expected Friday.

Andrea Zelinski covers politics for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook. Send her tips at andrea.zelinski@chron.com.

andrea.zelinski@chron.com

Twitter.com/andreazelinskiThe Texas Education Agency announced Tuesday it would create five-year benchmarks to allow schools and districts to better demonstrate progress toward meeting the states academic standards, a welcome change for educators who have complained the state too often moved the goal posts when it came to assigning its accountability ratings.

The change was one of several announced as the TEA begins implementation of an A-through-F letter grade rating system for individual schools and districts mandated by Texas lawmakers. Districts will receive the letter grades this fall, while individual schools will be given the new ratings in fall of 2019.

Districts that earn an A, B, C or D will have met the state's academic standards, while those earning F marks will not. The vast majority of campuses still will be rated on the existing two ratings: met standard or improvement required.

In calculating those new grades, cut scores  or the lowest acceptable scores  will remain mostly static for five-year stints. Previously, the agency tinkered with some of those scores every year from 2013 to 2017, according to TEA Accountability Manuals.

For example, the cut scores for passing a student achievement measure rose by 10 percentage points from 2013 to 2015. The TEA said keeping the minimum scores the same will allow for easier year-over-year comparisons and will make it possible for all campuses to earn an A in the new A-through-F rating system.

Linda Macias, associate superintendent for curriculum & instruction and accountability in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, said her district sets its own higher standards to soften any potential changes.

In the past, its been a year-to-year, we havent really known what were shooting for, Macias said. When we look at standards the state sets for STAAR assessment, its based on 60 percent passing, but we never set our district standard to 60. Its always been 70 to 75 percent and higher. Were going to set a standard higher than that and keep pushing toward that standard.

Perhaps nowhere are the accountability changes more consequential than in the Houston Independent School District, where 10 of the districts more than 280 schools are at risk of triggering a state takeover of the district. If those 10 schools do not improve their academic performances this year, they could be closed by the state or cause the state to appoint a board of managers to take over operations of HISD. The district is pursuing a third option that would allow those schools to stay open if they are operated by a third-party partner.

If the cut scores for a measure gauging post-secondary readiness had stayed the same from 2015 to 2017, HISDs Kashmere High school, which has been rated as improvement required for seven years, would have met the states standard in 2017. Instead, it missed the higher mark by 3 percentage points last year.

Officials in Houston and across the Gulf Coast also had hoped TEA Commissioner Mike Morath would grant a temporary accountability reprieve to districts and schools affected by Hurricane Harvey, essentially giving HISD another year to improve scores at its 10 longest struggling schools. The TEA announced Tuesday that decision would not be made until June.

Bob McPherson, dean of the University of Houston College of Education who has a PhD in counseling psychology, said thousands of local teachers and students who bore the brunt of the storms wrath have been exposed to chronic stress since September.

The ambiguity about the situation creates a new level of stress for teachers and principals in schools impacted by Hurricane Harvey, McPherson said. Whether chronic stress affects educational outcomes is a question we need to address.

The state's new accountability system will measure academic performance in three areas: student achievement, school progress and closing achievement gaps. The previous system included an additional measure on post-secondary readiness. Instead, the TEA rolled it into the other three measures in the new grading scheme.

Measuring student achievement in elementary and middle schools will be based solely on how well students score on the STAAR test. At the high school level, STAAR scores will count for 40 percent of a school's accountability rating. Another 40 percent will be based on college- and career-readiness, and 20 percent will be based on graduation or dropout rates.

School progress will be measured by how much students improved their STAAR scores from the previous year or how well schools maintained passing scores. High school ratings also will take into account student progress in terms of college- and career-readiness.

The final measure will calculate how well historically disadvantaged groups, such as racial minorities, English-language learners and economically disadvantaged students, perform on STAAR tests and college- and career-readiness measures.

HD Chambers, Superintendent of Alief ISD, applauded the added measures for college-and-career readiness, but said he worries the state did not give districts enough funding to carry out those new goals.

Next year, the district will open the $63 million, 200,000 square-foot Alief ISD Center for Advanced Careers in hopes of better preparing high school students for careers, post-secondary education and the military. The school was built with money from the districts 2015 bond, but Chambers said the annual costs associated with hiring skilled teachers and equipping the school will take a chunk out of his districts operating funds.

Those goals are very meaningful goals, but theres not resources to implement or meet them, Chambers said. Youre seeing districts, like Alief and large districts, putting money into workforce and military training, but weve used all the money weve had, and were not even close to meeting all the demands.

shelby.webb@chron.com

twitter.com/shelbywebbMedscape released its 2018 Physician Compensation Report examining compensation throughout the industry.

Medscape spoke to 20,000-plus physicians across 29 specialties for the report.

Here are 8 insights.

1. Primary care and specialty physicians had an average salary of $299,000.

2. Primary care physicians earned a pay raise in 2018. Last year, primary care physicians earned $217,000, while this year they will earn $223,000.

3. Specialty physicians also received a pay raise. They made $319,000 in 2017 and will make $329,000 in 2018.

4. Over the past seven years, physician salaries have increased steadily.

5. U.S.-trained physicians are no longer the top money earners amongst their peers. Canadian physicians have surpassed U.S.-trained physicians in terms of future earnings. Canadian-trained physicians earned $324,000 while U.S.-trained physicians earned $303,000 in 2017. However, both U.S.-and Canadian-trained physicians outearned their colleagues from the rest of the world.

6. White physicians continue to outearn their ethnic counterparts. White physicians earned $308,000, Asian physicians earned $293,000, Hispanic/Latino physicians earned $278,000 and African American physicians earned $258,000.

7. Concerning ethnicities, every ethnicity was well represented in the ranks of specialty medicine, but white physicians made up the majority of all specialists, while African American physicians make up the majority of all primary care physicians.

8. Geographically speaking, physicians in the North Central and Southeastern U.S. regions have the greatest earning potential, while physicians in the Southwest and Northeastern U.S. regions have the lowest earning potential.Here are eight gastroenterologists who made headlines in March 2018.

Nashua-based Southern New Hampshire Health appointed gastroenterologist Timothy Scherer, MD, its new CMO of Southern New Hampshire Medical Center in Nashua.

Fort Myers, Fla.-based Riverwalk Endoscopy and Surgery Center gastroenterologist Asif Choudhury, MD, allegedly sexually assaulted two women while conducting colonoscopies.

Rochester, Minn-based Mayo Clinic's Paul Limburg, MD, is joining Exact Sciences as the company's co-CMO.

Lewes, Del.-based Seaside Gastroenterology Consultants will add Heather Barton, MD, to its staff, effective in July.

Vallath Balakrishnan, MD, 83, died March 20.

Christina Ha, MD, performed Jimmy Kimmel's first colonoscopy at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Daniel Cornett, MD, joined the staff of Duluth, Minn.-based St. Luke's Gastroenterology Associates.

Continental Who's Who named Kevin Collier, MD, of Silver Spring, Md.-based Capital Digestive Care, its 2018 Gastroenterologist of The Year.Here are three practices with gastroenterology services making news:

Berlin, Md.-based Atlantic General Endoscopy Center is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Memorial Hermann Cypress (Texas) Hospital's recently approved $25 million expansion will include an endoscopy suite for GI procedures.

Supply, N.C.-based Novant Health Brunswick Endoscopy Center is set to open May 2.Epic will not challenge the Coast Guard over its plan to deploy the same Cerner EHR as the Department of Defense, FCW reports.

The Coast Guard announced in early April it would join the DOD's contract with Cerner to implement its MHS Genesis system.The DOD has slowly been transitioning to the new EHR in a series of launches beginning February 2017. It expects to complete the rollout in 2022.

In 2010, the Coast Guard signed a deal with Epic to replace its legacy EHR across 176 sites for $14 million. The agency terminated the contact in 2015 after spending nearly $60 million on the effort, which it has nothing to show for. Since the failed rollout, Coast Guard physicians have been forced to use paper-based processes.

Epic blamed part of the failure on government contractor Liedos, according to FCW. The EHR giant claimed the system's storage area network had been corrupted and then accidentally wiped during implementation.

The Department of Veterans Affairs also intends to transition to Cerner, though the agency has been tied up in negotiations that have been complicated by leadership changes and interoperability concerns. Between VA and DOD, there may be as much as $15 billion in contract spending on Cerner over the next 10 years, FCW reports.

Epic didn't protest that either.

"We've never challenged anything," company founder and president Judy Faulkner said. "We don't do that. We feel it's the customer's right to pick whatever they want."

More articles on EHRs:

CarePort Health to manage Allscripts' care management portfolio: 4 things to know

EHR tool prompts patient care for chronic kidney disease: 4 study insights

English hospital deploys Epic EHR alert to identify sepsis: 3 things to know

Here are eight revenue cycle management service expansions involving healthcare vendors and providers so far in April.

1. HealthCare Futures, Premier Healthcare Systems and RSI Enterprises joined forces to launch a revenue cycle management company.

2. MedData, a provider of RCM solutions, has a new patient financial platform.

3. Navigant Consulting and Miami-based Baptist Health South Florida created an RCM joint venture.

4. SCI Solutions, a Seattle-based patient scheduling, referral management and revenue cycle software provider, added DatStat to its portfolio.

5. Healthcare Administrative Partners, a provider of RCM solutions, launched a radiology-focused clinical data analytics and business service called Deep Dive Analytics.

6. Triad Radiology Associates, a Winston-Salem, N.C.-based radiology practice, picked Healthcare Administrative Partners for RCM and practice management services.

7. AdvantEdge Healthcare Solutions added to its healthcare finance offerings with the acquisition of Professional Management Inc.

8. QueueLogix, a provider of RCM software and services and a HealthChannels subsidiary, partnered with ReferWell, a cloud-based platform focused on the medical referral process.

More articles on healthcare finance:

Georgia hospital to close: 4 things to know

Texas church forgives $10.5M in medical debt

New York oncology practice files for bankruptcy following FBI raidNashville, Tenn.-based Envision Healthcare saw its stock price fall about 7 percent to roughly $36 after reports surfaced April 10 about UnitedHealthcare's decision to terminate its contract with the provider.

Envision's stock rebounded after the drop to $37.03 as of April 11 at 2 p.m. CT. Envision's stock closed at $38.70 on April 9, a day before the reports.

In an April 6 court filing, UnitedHealthcare  the health insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group  said it's terminating its contract with Envision no later than Jan. 1, 2019, because the provider has been "unwilling to address matters with UHC in a reasonable and satisfactory manner  demonstrated most recently by the filing of this lawsuit in blatant disregard of the parties' valid and enforceable arbitration provision."

Envision has previously argued "UnitedHealthcare is in breach of contract by failing to recognize Envision medical providers, unfairly adjusting rates it pays Envision and refusing to comply with the contract's process for handling disputes," the provider told Becker's. Envision said it hopes to "come to an agreement for 2019 and beyond that provides for fair and reasonable reimbursement for the care we provide to patients."



More articles on healthcare finance:

Georgia hospital to close: 4 things to know

Georgia hospital closure will result in 200 layoffsT

exas church forgives $10.5M in medical debtSaint Louis-based Mercy Technology Services, the IT arm of Aurora, Mo.-based Mercy health system, will launch a healthcare cloud service in spring 2018.

Mercy Technology Services, which provides and manages technology solutions for Mercy, plans to launch a cloud service powered by VMware's cloud infrastructure and management solutions. Mercy Technology Services said its cloud service is tailored to the healthcare industry and supported by its HIPAA-compliant data centers, where it hosts Mercy's estimated 1,200 healthcare applications, including its Epic EHR.

"Healthcare's tech leaders want to migrate to get the cloud's benefits without the cloud's risks, but a good solution has been hard to find," said Scott Richert, vice president of enterprise infrastructure at Mercy Technology Services. "This is the same equipment I'd buy for my enterprise data centers, with the same high service standard we hold for ourselves."Theranos, a healthcare technology company focused on blood testing, laid off about 80 percent of its workforce in an effort to avoid bankruptcy for a few more months, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The massive round of layoffs, which is the third round since the company was accused of being misleading about its technology, reduces the company's workforce from about 125 to 24 or fewer. In late 2015, the company had about 800 employees.

While Theranos received a $100 million loan from Fortress Investment Group to keep it afloat, it must abide by various terms of the loan agreement. One of these requirements is obtaining FDA approval for a blood test to detect Zika, which it did not receive. According to the WSJ, the company was still experiencing reliability problems with the test. In addition, another criteria is that the company must keep its cash reserves above $3 million until the end of July, which the latest round of layoffs should enable Theranos to accomplish, according to the report.

However, if the layoffs do not help and the cash reserves dip below the $3 million threshold, Fortress can seize the company's assets and liquidate them.

Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who recently settled fraud charges brought against her and the company for lying to investors, announced the layoffs at an employee meeting. To settle the fraud charges, Ms. Holmes paid a civil fine of $500,000 and agreed to not serve as a director of any publicly-listed company for 10 years.St. Louis, Mo.-based SSM Health tapped Mike Bowers to serve as COO of its St. Louis region.

Here are five notes:

1. Mr. Bowers previously served as president of SSM Health St. Joseph Hospital-St. Charles (Mo.).

2. He has worked at SSM Health since May 2014.

3. SSM Health's St. Louis region comprises eight hospitals, six urgent care locations, 25 SSM Health Express Clinic at Walgreens and 40-plus medical offices.

4. Lisle Wescott, who is president of SSM Health St Joseph Hospital-Lake Saint Louis (Mo.), will take on an expanded role and serve as president for St. Joseph Hospital-St. Charles as well.

5. Ms. Wescott joined SSM Health in June 2012.A Colorado physician is facing backlash on social media for displaying politically motivated statements disparaging President Donald Trump on the walls of his practice in Aurora, Colo., according to 9news.com.

Steven Chae, MD, is the sole owner of Family Practice of Aurora. He told 9news.com he considers himself a "political junkie" and has had political statements hung throughout his practice "ever since he can remember."

However, pictures of his office recently went viral and sparked outrage online. Among the photos was a picture of the practice's front desk area with the words "Morally bankrupt pile of crap in White House" and "For our country, for our children, fight this monster" displayed along the wall behind the front desk, the report states.

James Woodley, a former Republican candidate for state Senate who took the picture and posted it online, told 9news.com Dr. Chae's political statements were concerning because of his position in the community. He said he saw and took photos of the statements after visiting Dr. Chae's office with a friend whose child was Dr. Chae's patient.

"[I'm] just surprised that a business  any business, you know, let alone a doctor  would have not only political messaging but such hateful political messaging," Mr. Woodley said. "I believe everyone has a right to their opinion, it's just the manner in which it was done."

"It was clear that it was just derogatory toward the president in language that I would never teach my children to speak about anyone," he added.

Mr. Woodley's post had been shared nearly 7,000 times at the time 9news.com published its report.

Dr. Chae told 9news.com he should have been "a little more level-headed" before putting up the statements. However, he said the goal of those statements was not to disparage President Trump, but to motivate people to vote to induce change.

"There's a lot of fear among minorities, especially within the Hispanic community," Dr. Chae said. "I wanted to reach out. The way we address this  not necessarily fix but at least address  is by going out to vote. That was all my message was supposed to convey."

"I can see how some people who are on the other side of the aisle could be offended, so I decided, 'Hey, best thing to do is turn the temperature down a little bit, make it less personal, make it more issue-based,'" he added.

Dr. Chae said he does not believe the messages violate policies instituted by various medical associations, and therefore will not remove them. However, he said if he ever discovers that they come to violate the associations' policies, he will take them down, according to the report.

To access the full report, click here.Johnny B. Delashaw Jr., MD, the former chairman of the Seattle-based Swedish Neuroscience Institute, filed a lawsuit against The Seattle Times and a physician at the institute April 11, accusing the publication of reporting libelous and defamatory information about him and engaging in a conspiracy to undermine his reputation, according to The Seattle Times.

Here are six things to know about the lawsuit.

1. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Seattle, seeks unspecified monetary damages, an order enjoining the newspaper from publishing false statements about Dr. Delashaw, the removal of false statements about Dr. Delashaw, and a published retraction.

2. The lawsuit also seeks an order enjoining Seattle-based Swedish Health neurosurgeon Charles Cobb, MD, from issuing false statements about Dr. Delashaw. According to the complaint, Dr. Cobb and another physician at the institution allegedly engaged in a plot to undermine Dr. Delashaw because they resented the loss of income and authority under his leadership, according to The Seattle Times.

The lawsuit does not specifically connect the alleged actions of the two physicians to the articles published by the newspaper.

3. Dr. Delashaw resigned from Swedish Health in March 2017, roughly three weeks after the newspaper published an investigation called "The Quantity of Care" exposing widespread concerns about Dr. Delashaw's practices. The state medical board suspended Dr. Delashaw's medical license in May 2017. In December 2017, a judge ruled  at Dr. Delashaw's request  to postpone his appeal hearing until April.

4. The Seattle Times investigation spurred a state investigation into the institution, which revealed the health system's Cherry Hill campus faced a plethora of issues, including oversight failures and "numerous" issues related to patient safety, according to the report. Following the investigation, the health system's CEO resigned and CMS placed Swedish Health's Medicare and Medicaid funding at risk.

4. According to the lawsuit, Dr. Delashaw claims The Seattle Times falsely said he neglected patients by performing "concurrent surgeries" to increase his pay. The Seattle Times' investigation examined surgeries that had taken place between 2013 and 2015, and described how Swedish Health allegedly changed its contracts for surgeons in the Neuroscience Institute, including Dr. Delashaw, during that time so that their compensation was based on surgical volume.

5. The lawsuit also alleges The Seattle Times used incomplete data and failed to include other data illustrating excellent patient outcomes at the institution. However, according to the newspaper, neither Dr. Delashaw nor the health system had ever requested corrections to the stories.

"We are reviewing the complaint, but we stand by the accuracy of the 'Quantity of Care' series," said Alan Fisco, president of The Seattle Times. "As this is a legal matter, we will have no further comment at this time."

To access The Seattle Times' report, click here.

Editor's note: Becker's Hospital Review reached out to Swedish Health for comment and will update the article as more information is available.The U.S. could face a shortage of more than 121,000 physicians by 2030, according to updated data from the Association of American Medical Colleges. The estimate is higher than AAMC's 2030 projections published last year.

"This year's analysis reinforces the serious threat posed by a real and significant doctor shortage," AAMC President and CEO Darrell G. Kirch, MD, said in a statement. "With the additional demand from a population that will not only continue to grow but also age considerably over the next 12 years, we must start training more doctors now to meet the needs of our patients in the future."

Here are five key findings from the 2018 report.

1. The 2018 report projects a shortage of 42,600 to 121,300 physicians by 2030. This compares to the 2017 report, which projected a 2030 shortage of 40,800 to 104,900 physicians. This year's projections take into account recently revised federal Health Profession Shortage Area designations for primary care and mental health, the AAMC said.

2. The U.S. faces a potential shortage of 14,800 to 49,300 primary care physicians by 2030. This is higher than the projected shortfall in the 2017 report  a shortage of 7,300 to 43,100 primary care physicians by 2030. AAMC said differences in estimations regarding the projected growth in the supply of physician assistants and advanced practice registered nurses contributed to the higher numbers in the 2018 report, as did PCP supply and demand trends, among other factors.

3. The U.S. faces a potential shortage of 33,800 to 72,700 physicians in non-primary care specialties. This includes a potential shortfall of 20,700 to 30,500 physicians in 2030 for surgical specialties. AAMC attributed the projections to an aging population requiring more complex care as well as a stagnant supply of surgical specialists and other factors.

4. AAMC cites population growth and aging as the primary drivers of the projected physician shortage from 2016 to 2030. The AAMC analysis accounted for projections suggesting the U.S. population will grow nearly 11 percent by 2030, with the population of Americans older than 65 increasing by 50 percent. The organization also accounted for the potential influence of physician retirement in its projections. More than one-third of all currently active physicians will be older than 65 in the next 10 years.

5. Improved access to care would increase the need for physicians. The AAMC estimates suggest the nation would have needed 31,600 more physicians in 2016 if people living in non-metropolitan areas and the uninsured used care the same way as those with coverage in metropolitan areas.



Access the full AAMC report here.





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%MCEPASTEBIN%Tyler, Texas-based Christus Mother Frances Health System released a statement April 11 following the arrest of a former nurse who was charged with the murder of a patient and is a suspect in at least two other cases that left patients in vegetative states, according to a hospital statement obtained by KLTV.

The nurse, 34-year-old William George Davis, was booked into Smith County (Texas) Jail. Mr. Davis, who was formerly employed with the hospital system, was terminated Feb. 15. The Texas Board of Nursing suspended Mr. Davis' nursing license March 16. The TBN is investigating claims alleging Mr. Davis tampered with three patients at Tyler-based Louis and Peaches Owen Heart Hospital.

In the statement, Christus Mother Frances Health System officials said they believe Mr. Davis acted independently and of his own accord after finding an "unusual and unexplained patient outcome" in the facility's cardiovascular intensive care unit Jan. 25 connected to the nurse, according to the statement.

"Because of our strong commitment to high-quality care, we took swift action and performed a review of the circumstances, including reviews of any unanticipated outcomes," the statement reads. The review resulted in Mr. Davis' immediate removal from all care responsibilities and ultimate termination. "We believe the issues with Mr. Davis were isolated to him and he acted independently and of his own accord," the statement continues.

The hospital shared details on the case with the Texas Board of Nursing and Tyler Police Department and is actively working with them during the ongoing investigation, as well as working with state and national regulatory and accrediting bodies.

"Our policies and federal privacy regulations prevent us from sharing patient health information and the specifics of this active police investigation, but CHRISTUS Mother Frances Hospital - Tyler takes any and all concerns surrounding patient safety and security very seriously," the statement reads.The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment confirmed surgical infections in "a number of patients" who underwent surgery at Denver-based Porter Adventist Hospital. It is unclear if the infections are linked to the hospital's inadequate surgical equipment sterilization practices, which are currently under investigation, the department announced April 11, according to The Denver Post.

The possible exposures occurred at Porter Adventist Hospital between July 21, 2016, and Feb. 20, 2018. The hospital mailed letters to the patients notifying them of the risk, and issued a public statement on the matter April 4.

The state health department became aware of the sterilization breach Feb. 21 and subsequently conducted an on-site survey of the hospital Feb. 22. Department officials are in the midst of an ongoing disease investigation into the infection control lapse.

The hospital suspended surgeries scheduled to take place April 5 and April 6 after DOH officials uncovered issues with how the hospital was sterilizing its surgical instruments following surgeries. Health officials also raised concerns about residue on the tools after they were cleaned, an issue the hospital attributed to a possible water quality problem, according to an April 11 DOH statement.

Porter Adventist is scheduled to resume surgeries "on a limited schedule" beginning April 12.

The DOH statement also noted Porter Adventist has instituted several changes as requested by state officials. The department did not specify how many patients had incurred surgical infections during the 18-month period or the types of infections.

"It is unknown if these infections are linked to the breach, and we may not be able to determine linkage," Larry Wolk, MD, executive director of CDPHE, said in the statement.

The department's initial reports on the hospital's infection control breach intimated patients may have been at risk of contracting hepatitis B, hepatitis C or HIV.

Porter Adventist Hospital previously told Becker's Hospital Review it is providing potentially exposed patients with information about surgical site infections and offering testing to patients for bloodborne pathogens.

"We understand that this information may cause concern, and are working closely with our patient care team, doctors and staff to ensure any patients involved have the information and resources they need," said the hospital. "We want to assure patients that our team immediately acted to remedy the situation. Recent survey results released by The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals in the United States, revealed no errors in our process or protocols."John Chi, MD, presented 12-month outcomes data from Spineology's SCOUT clinical trial.

Dr. Chi serves as a neurosurgery associate professor at Harvard Medical School and director of neurosurgical spinal oncology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, both located in Boston.

Here are six things to know.

1. An investigational device exemption study, SCOUT sought to assess safety and effectiveness outcomes in instrumented lumbar interbody fusion procedures for degenerative disc disease treatment. The study investigated Spineology's OptiMesh, a porous graft containment mesh.

2. SCOUT involves 102 patients who have suffered from lumbar degenerative disc disease for at least six months. Dr. Chis report focused on 84 patients, with 60 completed six-month follow-up and 29 completing 12-month follow-up.

3. Researchers found statistically significant improvements for low back pain and functional limitation scores at six months and 12 months.

4. At 12-months, 100 percent of the patients experienced fusion. Ninety-seven percent of the patients reported "excellent" or "good" satisfaction with their surgery.

5. The study didn't reveal any serious device-related adverse events.

6. Dr. Chi presented the findings at the International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery annual meeting in Toronto, Canada.After losing his license due to a healthcare fraud conviction, Spyros Panos posed as an orthopedic surgeon to review workers' compensation cases under the name of a former colleague, according to the New York Daily News.

Here are six things to know.

1. Mr. Panos lost his medical license in October 2013 after being convicted of fraud; since then, he took on the name of a former colleague and posed as an orthopedic surgeon to illegally review workers compensation cases.

2. While posing as his colleague, Mr. Panos collected more than $860,000 from his work. The physician whose identity Mr. Panos took on hadn't spoken with him for the past year.

3. Mr. Panos spent time in jail after his first conviction and was released in 2016. In the first five months of working with a company called Excel O under the stolen identity, he received $239,000 before heading to prison and resumed the scheme after release.

4. From December 2016 to October 2017, Excel O received $636,000.

5. In the most current case, Mr. Panos is facing wire fraud, healthcare fraud and aggravated identity theft charges. He could be sentenced to 32 years in prison and ordered to pay a $500,000 fine upon conviction.

6. Stemming from his days as a practicing physician, Mr. Panos pleaded guilty to stealing from insurance companies and was accused of performing unnecessary surgeries and botched procedure; in February, 260 patients settled a lawsuit with Mr. Panos' insurance carriers for $45 million.Patients in Panama City, Fla., can now make appointments with an orthopedic surgeon for comprehensive conditions and treatments, according to My Pan Handle.

Here are three insights.

1. William Lennen, MD, is now offering patients at Panama City-based Bay Medical Sacred the opportunity to make appointments to visit the surgeon.

2. Previously, orthopedic surgeons were only available for surgery and often during trauma surgery.

3. Dr. Lennen is among orthopedic surgeons who does not initially recommend surgery. He suggests different medication and therapy injections to manage a patient's joint pain.Here are eight things for spinal surgeons to know for April 12, 2018.

Denver hospital may have exposed spine, orthopedic patients to HIV, hepatitis in infection control breach

An infection control breach at Denver-based Porter Adventist Hospital may have put orthopedic and spine surgery patients at risk for surgical site infections or hepatitis B, hepatitis C or HIV, according to a statement from the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment. Read more, here.

Orthopedic, spine device companies that may be affected by Trump's 25% tariff proposal

President Donald Trump recently proposed a 25 percent tariff on a list of products from China. Some of the items on the list include magnetic resonance imaging electro-diagnostic apparatuses, orthopedic or fracture appliances and artificial joints. Orthopedic and spine companies are among those who could be affected by the proposed tariff. While not all companies are based in China, many have distribution and manufacturing agreements. See which ones may be impacted, here.

Annual physician compensation for 29 specialties

Medscape surveyed more than 20,000 physicians across more than 29 specialties on compensation. Specialists earn an average salary of $329,000 in 2018, up from $316,000 in 2017, and primary care physicians earn an average salary of $223,000, up from $217,000. Click here to see the breakdown by specialty.

https://www.beckersspine.com/orthopedic-spine-practices-improving-profits/item/40667-annual-physician-compensation-for-29-specialties-orthopedics-no-2-at-497k.html

Neurosurgeon Dr. Akram Mahmoud brings neurosurgery back to Frye Regional Medical Center

Hickory, N.C.-based Frye Regional Medical Center hired neurosurgeon Akram Mahmoud, DO. With Dr. Mahmoud's addition, the medical center now offers neurosurgical services for the first time in more than a decade.

US News adds patient experience ratings to physician profiles

U.S. News & World Report collaborated with Binary Fountain to add patient experience ratings to online physician profiles. Through this partnership, U.S. News will now publish Binary Fountain's patient experience ratings on its physician profile pages.

Stryker employee admits to accepting $75k bribe to secure contract

Alleged Stryker employee Daniel Lawrynowicz pled guilty to one count of violating the Federal Travel Act, according to Patch. Eugene Ostrovsky sought out a $5.5 million contract with Stryker. He and two other individuals paid Mr. Lawrynowicz bribes to secure the contract. The Stryker employee faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He must also return the $75,000 bribe. Read more about the case, here.

Larry Nassar fined $1M, medical license permanently revoked

The Michigan Board of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery permanently revoked Larry Nassar's medical license and fined him $1 million, wlns.com reports. Mr. Nassar had his license temporarily revoked in January 2017.

US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams issues advisory on opioid overdose-reversing drug

On April 5, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams, MD, issued an advisory on HHS.gov regarding naloxone. The advisory urged more Americans to carry naloxone, an opioid overdose-reversing drug. Every state has expanded access to naloxone, and many passed laws that protect healthcare professionals prescribing the drug and citizens who administer the drug to those in an emergency.The Lansdowne Hotel on the Antrim road, Belfast is to undergo renovation its operator says. Pic: Charles McQuillan/Pacemaker.

A well-known Belfast hotel has moved to reassure customers it is not closing for business.

It's understood a post was placed on the Facebook page of the Lansdowne Hotel in north Belfast saying it was "closed for business" before it was later removed - sparking speculation over its future.

Despite repeated attempts, the Belfast Telegraph could not contact an official at the company, however, an employee said the Antrim Road business was only closing temporarily for planned renovation works which had been brought forward from July.

They could not say how long the work would take to complete, saying someone would return to us for comment.

Earlier, Q Radio had also reported that Metro Inns had told it that a decision to refurbish the building had been brought forward.

The hotel was bought by English budget chain Metro Inns in 2012 for around 700,000 after it suddenly went out of business when the former owners Welcome Hotels entered administration.

At the time around 30 staff were employed in the 25-bedroom hotel.

Chair of the Antrim Road Business Association, Paul Carlin welcomed the hotel's commitment to beginning renovation works.

"The Antrim Road is a fantastic place to do business and a flagship hotel should do very well. It is in a great location right at the foot of the Cave Hill and at the Belfast Castle estate," he said.

"The area is ripe for investment and an attractive prospect for shoppers and tourists. I try to tell people that we should consider the city centre business as our competition.

"With Crumlin Road Gaol, the development at the old law courts and the university to come, things are looking bright for the area.

"People always think about the doom and gloom of north Belfast, the reality is it is a great area for business."The Dalai Lama and Richard Moore of Children In Crossfire crossing the Peace Bridge in Derry on Thursday

Charity founder Richard Moore has been reunited with the stepson of an army major who gave him his first braille watch.

The pair were brought together following an appearance by Richard Moore in a BBC documentary by Patrick Kielty, in which the comedian looked at the murder of his father and the situation in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement.

After seeing the documentary, Richard was contacted by Ricky, the stepson of Major Rowland Bowen - the man who gave him his first braille watch.

Ricky said after watching the documentary, he wanted to know if it was the same Richard his stepfather had been in contact with in the 1970s.

"We were just curious, was it that boy or was it not. We thought the chances were very high that it was him. It was easy enough to trace him because he talked about his charity Children in Crossfire," he said.

Richard said he was first contacted by Major Bowen after being shot in 1972.

"If you take the background of the 1970s, my uncle Gerard was shot dead by a soldier on Bloody Sunday. Less than three months later I was blinded by the British Army," he said.

"And the conflict was going on, I lived in the nationalist Creggan estate in Derry. The conflict was going on outside the door. And my mother and father were open with everything that happen.

And this lovely, compassionate, caring letter arrived in from a man who was an army major. And it was in complete contrast to our experience of the British Army. My mammy and daddy loved to see the letters coming, and then the next thing the braille watch arrived. Richard Moore

"It means so much, it meant so much. That kindness and generosity. He didnt have to do anything really," he added.

Richard and Ricky said on the programme they would keep in touch.

Richard Moore is the founder of Derry-based charity Children in Crossfire which raises money for projects in the UK, Ireland, Tanzania and Ethiophia. He was blinded by a rubber bullet as a 10-year-old in 1972, and later participated in a documentary in which he tracked down the soldier who had shot him and forgave him.Around 300 jobs will be axed at Carpetright after the embattled retailer unveiled plans to axe another 81 stores and tap investors for 60 million under a sweeping restructure.

Five branches of retail giant Carpetright are set to close in Northern Ireland.

It comes as the store announced closures of 92 stores across the United Kingdom, resulting in a loss of 300 jobs to allow for a restructuring plan to be enacting.

There are eight branches of Carpetright in Northern Ireland, with stores in Londonderry, Coleraine, Ballymena, Cookstown, Bangor, Newtownabbey, and two stores in Belfast.

Stores in Northern Ireland expected to close by the end of September are located in Ballymena, Bangor, Newtownabbey, Coleraine and Derry.

The chain said that, overall in the UK, 92 sites had been earmarked for closure, although 11 have already stopped trading, with the rent on another 113 set to be slashed under the company voluntary arrangement (CVA) proposals being put to landlords.

It said it hopes to relocate staff where possible.

The group  which employs nearly 2,700 staff in total  also confirmed an investor cash-call to raise around 60 million through a rights issue to put the company on a firmer financial footing.

The details came as it revealed a technical breach of its banking arrangements, but the group said it was taking action to address this and ensure it is amended for the future.

Carpetright chief executive Wilf Walsh said: These tough but necessary actions will enable us to address the burden of a legacy UK property estate consisting of too many poorly located stores on unsustainable rents, and are essential if we are to restore our profitability and deliver a successful turnaround.

We will remain in close contact with all colleagues to keep them fully informed as we move through this process.

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Shares in Carpetright tumbled more than 23% at one stage after details of the proposals and rights issue.

The firm, which has 409 UK shops, said trading had remained difficult since its last update on March 1, with the group continuing to expect a small underlying loss for the year to April 28.

It said the CVA  which is a form of insolvency aimed at protecting a business from going bust by cutting its costs  will help it to address the competitive threat from a position of strength.

Landlords will vote on the plans on April 26, while shareholders will have their say on April 30.

The rescue deal, which is being handled by Big Four accountancy firm Deloitte, marks another dark day for the sector, which has already seen thousands of jobs axed following the collapse of well-known names Toys R Us and Maplin.

High street retailers have been hit by a drop in consumer spending, soaring costs and the increasing threat of online competitors.

The British Property Federation (BPF) praised Carpetright for taking early action to address its trading woes.

Stephanie Pollitt, assistant director of real estate policy at the BPF, said: These situations are never easy as landlords need to take into consideration the impact on their investors, including those protecting pensioners savings, as they vote on the CVA proposal.

She added: Ultimately, it will be for individual landlords to decide how they will vote on the CVA, but the proposal has sought to find a solution that works for all parties.RICS residential property spokesman Samuel Dickey said that despite the drop in sales, there was hope in the sector

Northern Ireland house prices experienced the strongest rise in the UK last month though sales and demand remain flat, according to research today.

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and Ulster Bank residential market survey showed that NI had the strongest pick up in prices across the first quarter of the year.

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However, newly-agreed sales and new buyer enquiries eased, with the bad weather potentially a factor.

The number of surveyors saying that prices had risen here alongside new instructions to sell in the past three months was 48% higher than those who didn't share the same views, making it the highest in the UK.

The industry sentiments follow the most recent statistics from Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (Nisra) which showed that house prices here were by up 17.6% in quarter four of 2017 compared to quarter one in 2015. The figures, which were released last month, showed that the average price of a house in the province was 130,482.

However, today's market survey shows that newly agreed sales fell into negative territory in March with -22% more surveyors saying that they had seen fewer newly agreed sales compared with last month. There was also a decrease in new buyer enquiries to -27%.

RICS residential property spokesman Samuel Dickey said that despite the drop in sales, there was hope in the sector.

He said: "For the second month in a row the survey indicates that there has been a dip in new buyer enquiries, but this is likely, at least to some extent, to reflect the bad weather in March.

"That said, the economic and political environment is not short of uncertainty, which could be causing some people to pause regarding their homebuying intentions.

"But whilst sales expectations for the next three months are flat, price expectations remain positive, which indicates that surveyors think prices will continue to edge upwards.

"Looking ahead to the next 12 months, there is a reasonable amount of confidence among surveyors for an increase in sales and prices."Dwayne Johnson has ruled out running for the US presidency in 2020.

There had been speculation the actor would throw his hat into the ring in two years time but he has now decided against putting himself forward.

Speaking at the premiere of his new film, Rampage, he told the Press Association: I think right now I am just learning as much as I can. I respect our political process.

I also do not have any delusions that its easy. And I have a tremendous respect, so 2020 is not going to happen.

Maybe 2024, maybe 2028, I dont know.

I think the best thing I can do now is to go to work and learn. Thats where were at.

Johnson, 45, boasts a massive social media following, with 12.8 million followers on Twitter and 58 million likes on Facebook.

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But he said the current privacy scandal engulfing Facebook, which saw millions of users details leaked to a private company, has not made him more wary of his own online presence.

And he jumped to the defence of the social media giants CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying he had earnest intentions.

He said: I know Zuckerberg, he is a buddy of mine, and I truly believe that the intentions are earnest so we will see where all this goes.

Johnson is starring alongside British actress Naomie Harris in Rampage, in which a gorilla explodes in size after being exposed to a rogue genetic experiment.

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Johnson, who was known as The Rock when he wrestled in the WWE, praised his co-stars.

He said: Its got to the point now where I really have the pick of the litter, where I am able to pick and choose who I work with. And I do have a rule that I dont work with assholes.

And James Bond star Harris, who plays a discredited genetic engineer in Rampage, was similarly effusive in her praise for Johnson.

She said: I loved working with Dwayne, he was so generous, he is such a kind-hearted person and really, really giving. Lots of the moments that were finally on the big screen were not actually in the script and it was Dwayne who put them in for my character, which is really generous of him.

 Rampage is out in UK cinemas now.The Oh Yeah Music Centre is looking for female punk stories.

The Oh Yeah Music Centre in Belfast is planning to tell the female side of the Northern Ireland punk story which will be launched at the upcoming Womens Work Festival.

Clothing, memorabilia, photographs, posters, badges and great stories are all being sought, with a selection being used to create a special exhibition at the Oh Yeah Music Centre.

This will be part of the centre's Northern Ireland Music Exhibition - the only permanent exhibition for popular music in NI.

The call-out for memorabilia takes place around the 40th anniversary of the big moments in the Northern Ireland punk story: the release of Suspect Device by Stiff Little Fingers (March 1978), the first punk gig at the Harp Bar on Hill Street (Victim and The Androids, April 21 1978) and the first single release on the Good Vibrations label (Big Time by Rudi, April 1978).

Organisers say much of Northern Ireland's punk history has been well documented and has featured in the film Good Vibrations, but added the role of female fans and musicians needs to be researched in depth.

Charlotte Dryden, from Oh Yeah, said: The story of Belfast punk is well documented and has inspired countless bands and music lovers around the world.

"The NI Music Exhibition has successfully celebrated and honored the bands and the scene, but admittedly very few females have featured. It has been an ambition of ours for a while to dig deeper into the story by seeking out the women from this particular era of punk.

"We have no idea how many stories will come to us, but we know they are out there. This is a very exciting project for us and we cant wait to see what comes from this call out.

The Northern Ireland Music Exhibition runs from June 5 - 10 as part of Women's Work Festival.The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Princess Charlotte in May 2015

Royal babies have been a source of fascination for centuries. The Duchess of Cambridge will soon give birth to her third child in the Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital in London, just as she did with Prince George and Princess Charlotte.

But this is a relatively short tradition for the royal family. Most princes and princesses through history have been born in palaces and castles.

If you think the media circus around royal babies is big now, it's always been a huge deal - in fact, probably even more so in the past because of the divine power and political importance that was traditionally placed on the monarchy.

16th and 17th century

Back in the 1500s, royal births in Britain were preceded with a royal procession to where the mother would give birth, and thousands of members of the public followed. The royal mum-to-be would address the crowds before going inside to give birth.

During this time, though, giving birth was considered pretty dangerous - many women died in childbirth. Around the time that Queen Elizabeth I was born in 1533, royal women were told to write a will before going into labour.

Protocol at the time was for the room to be kept dark. Tapestries were draped over the windows and very little fresh air was allowed in. It was supposed to replicate the womb, but it sounds like a pretty claustrophobic environment for the woman in labour.

18th century

Until the mid 1700s, childbirth was a women's business - men were never present.

Royal births were also very public, especially in France. It's been well documented that 200 people watched Marie Antoinette give birth in 1778 and that she was almost crushed by the huge group of people who poured into the bed chamber when the doctor called that the baby was coming. Apparently, people were climbing on furniture to get a better view.

In Britain, it was a more modest group, ranging from 40 people to a handful of VIPs, but most likely strangers to the royal mum-to-be.

19th century

There were two schools of thought around this time -intervention and non-intervention. Forceps to help free a stuck baby had been introduced, but were considered controversial.

When Princess Charlotte died in 1817 after giving birth to a stillborn baby following a 50-hour labour, there was a national outpouring of grief.

Her physician, Sir Richard Croft, was criticised for not using forceps. Afterwards, they came to be used as standard during tricky births.

Until the mid 19th century women were given no pain relief during childbirth (the pain was seen as punishment for original sin). Although chloroform was discovered as an effective relief in 1847, it was still seriously frowned upon.

Then Queen Victoria did something pretty important for women everywhere by demanding pain relief for her eighth labour in 1853. After that, chloroform was used widely to ease the pain, by inhaling it from a handkerchief. It also led the way for other pain relief methods, and royal and noble women were soon seen as too delicate to bear the pain of labour.

Most opted for what was known as 'twilight sleep' - a concoction of drugs to make them unconscious for a 'painless', drama-free birth. It's not as blissful as it sounds, though - it erased the memory of the birth altogether and there were reports of women becoming psychotic and screaming in pain under the influence of the drugs, as well as side-effects for babies.

Early 20th century

In 1926 Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to be born in a private house, rather than a palace or a castle, since the Middle Ages, and it was by caesarean section.

Traditionally the Home Secretary attended royal births (Sir William Joynson-Hicks was present at the Queen's birth). It was all down to a paranoia that the baby might be swapped, in the instance that the baby was stillborn, so a parliamentary member had to be there to confirm that the newborn was in fact a real heir.

This tradition ended in 1936 after the Queen's cousin, Princess Alexandra, was born.

Strangely, it was customary for fathers not to attend births. In 1948 Prince Philip did not attend Prince Charles' birth - he was said to be playing squash, followed by a swim.

Like many royal women before her, the Queen was reportedly put in a 'twilight sleep' for the birth, as depicted on the Netflix series The Crown.

Late 20th century to today

Princess Diana was a true trailblazer in the royal family. She was the first to break royal birth tradition when she opted to have Prince William in a hospital - the private Lindo Wing of St Mary's in Paddington, west London.

And it's become the new tradition, with the Duchess of Cambridge following suit for her three births. Prince Charles was present for the birth of his two sons, and the Duke of Cambridge, of course, followed suit.

Some traditions have never changed, though, and will continue for the birth of Kate and William's third child. News of the royal birth will be announced on an easel attached to the railings of Buckingham Palace, and each birth is usually marked with a gun salute by the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery.A Belfast schoolteacher is urging people not to ignore the symptoms of lung cancer as she prepares to run a race in memory of her mum, who died from the disease.

Elaine Donaldson (40) will be raising funds to help find a cure when she takes part in Cancer Research UK's annual Race for Life at Stormont in May.

Elaine's mum, Eleanor Donaldson, was 69 when she died on March 23, 2016, eight months after being diagnosed with incurable lung cancer.

In July 2015, after three chest infections, one after the other, Eleanor had X-rays and scans that showed she had small cell lung cancer, which is linked to smoking.

Even though her diagnosis was terminal and she was given nine months to live, she decided to fight the disease and had chemotherapy and radiotherapy which shrank her tumour.

Tragically, however, the cancer spread to her lymph nodes and brain, and Eleanor didn't get the chance to fight it.

Last year, a report into lung cancer in Northern Ireland revealed the number of cases had increased by more than a third over a 10-year period since 2006.

The increase in cases in women was more than four times higher (55%) than the increase in men (12%).

The report, produced by Queen's University and the Northern Ireland Cancer Registry, confirmed that lung cancer was the most common cause of cancer deaths in women, taking over from breast cancer.

Lung cancer symptoms include a persistent cough, a sudden change in a cough that has existed for a long time, unexplained weight loss, breathlessness and chest pain.

Elaine's mum's symptoms presented as chest infections.

Since her loss, Elaine has found it a struggle to carry on, but she found some solace in taking part in last year's Race for Life.

Race for Life is a hugely moving experience, with people coming together to remember loved ones lost to cancer, celebrate the lives of those dear to them who have survived and support those going through treatment.

Many women will be taking part with their mothers, while others will be participating to honour their memory, just like Elaine.

This is the second year Elaine has signed up to the 5k Race for Life event, and she is encouraging local women to follow her lead.

"I took part last year," says Elaine, "and although I have four sisters and a brother, I told no one - completing the course on my own. In fact, I cried the whole way round it.

"Mum's loss is still devastating. We were very close and I miss her so much.

"This year I will be joined by my two daughters, and taking part in Race for Life is our way of celebrating my mum's life and honouring her memory.

"I know that she'll be with us in spirit, and I hope she would be proud to see us raising awareness and money to help other people affected by this devastating disease."

Elaine, who teaches IT at Belfast Metropolitan College, has a partner, Paul Totten (39), a mechanic, and two daughters, Laura (13) and Louise (12).

She recalls the tough months after her mum's diagnosis: "Mum's diagnosis was such a shock and was compounded by the fact that she was given approximately nine months to live. Mum was very active and always on her feet and very fit. She was just too young to die.

"When they told her she had lung cancer and it wasn't curable, my dad just shut down. He just went into himself. Mum's attitude was, 'What can I do about it?'

"She was told that chemotherapy and radiotherapy might give her an extra few months of life and, because she had six children and 17 grandchildren, she said that she would do whatever it took.

"She started chemo in the August, and it was fine - she had no real side-effects.

"Belfast City Hospital has a room where patients losing their hair can get their head shaved, and she went to have it done.

"For me, that was one of the biggest shocks, seeing her with no hair.

"She then began radiotherapy, but it made her extremely ill. She was vomiting and lost her appetite. It absolutely drained her."

There was wonderful news after her gruelling treatment when Eleanor was told the tumour had shrunk by 70%.

For one day at least, the family celebrated, but it was to be a very short reprieve.

In January 2016, Eleanor woke one morning and couldn't get out of bed. She attended a review appointment in February 2016, when she was given the devastating news that the cancer had spread.

"Mum was told that while the tumour had shrunk, the cancer had spread to her brain and lymph nodes," recalls Elaine.

"The NHS staff were wonderful and offered her any treatment she was willing to take, but mum said she would never have radiotherapy again."

Eleanor's wish was to die at home, so the family had a hospital bed and wheelchair installed, taking turns to stay overnight with her.

Community nurses attended to administer drugs and offer support.

"Mum and I were very close," says Elaine, "and I saw or phoned her every day. She helped me raise my children. She was wonderful. The most difficult conversation I ever had with her was when she asked me to plan her funeral with her. She said I was strong and would be able to help her.

"She always said if she could get over Christmas 2015, she would be happy. Thankfully, she was able to achieve this.

"However, five days before she died, she said she was ready to go, to be with my brother, Frank, who died in a traffic accident in 2010.

"When she was diagnosed, I didn't want the cancer to take my mummy, but in the end, when I watched her suffering, I was praying for her to go."

The month Eleanor died, March 2016, was full of very special dates.

Her 49th wedding anniversary was on March 4, Mother's Day was March 6, her birthday was on March 8 and, sadly, she lost her battle with the disease on March 23.

Elaine says: "I remember in the lead-up to all these special dates, mum told me we were not to buy her any presents because it would be a waste of money.

"But I bought her 50 worth of scratch cards and she had a ball scratching them."

Eleanor was a heavy smoker and accepted that the habit had brought on her cancer.

However, every member of her family - her parents, her sister, two brothers and a sister-in-law - have all died as a result of different cancers.

As well as her grief, Elaine says she has been living in fear of the disease since losing her mum.

She adds: "Cancer absolutely terrifies me. Every person in my mum's family has died from it and it has left me terrified of getting it.

"I just hope by taking part in Race for Life that we can help raise awareness for others."

Cancer Research UK's Race for Life, in partnership with Tesco, is an inspiring women-only series of 5k, 10k and Pretty Muddy events which raise millions of pounds every year to help beat cancer sooner by funding crucial research.

Frances Kippax-Geary, Cancer Research UK's Northern Ireland event manager, says: "We are very grateful to Elaine for her support.

"By following her lead and signing up to Race for Life, women can make a real difference in the fight against cancer.

"The money raised will help Cancer Research UK scientists and doctors find new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat the disease, in turn helping save more lives.

"Taking part in Race for Life is a special and unique experience full of emotion, courage, tears and laughter.

"By joining like-minded ladies committed to the cause, local women can unite against a disease that affects us all in some way.

"Whether they plan to pound the pavements or amble to the finish line, every step participants take will help to support crucial research."

One in two people in the UK will be diagnosed with cancer at some stage in their lives, but the good news is more people are surviving the disease now than ever before.

Cancer survival in the UK has doubled since the early 1970s and Cancer Research UK's work has been at the heart of that progress.

"Every hour, someone in Northern Ireland is diagnosed with cancer," Frances says. "That's why we're calling on all ladies to sign up right now and join women from every walk of life at the start line this summer.

"Money raised through Race for Life is helping to drive research to help beat over 200 different types of cancer - that's why every step, every person and every penny raised counts."

Race for Life will be held at the Stormont Estate on Sunday, May 27. To enter, visit raceforlife.org or tel: 0300 123 0770Killer Rhys Magee, who has been jailed for a minimum of 10 years

The father of a man murdered in an altercation outside a house has told how his "life was turned upside down" when he heard the news of his death and that his "beautiful son was nearly unrecognisable" in the mortuary.

Newtownards man Richard Miskelly was 24 when he died in the early hours of Sunday, February 26, 2017.

Killer Rhys Magee, from Carrowdore Road in the town, kicked his victim so hard he thought he "broke his foot".

He must serve at least 10 years of his life sentence in prison.

Mr Justice Colton told the 20-year-old father-of-one that the "tragic, pointless and traumatic death" of Mr Miskelly had a profound impact on his family, whose "lives have been irreparably damaged... and will resonate with them for the rest of their lives".

Richard Miskelly senior said: "On the morning I was told my son had been murdered my whole life was turned upside down. It felt like a bad dream.

"Part of my life is missing and nothing is going to bring Richard back. I wanted it to be me, not him, lying in the mortuary. I was shaking and angry with so many emotions I can't explain. My beautiful son was nearly unrecognisable."

The Downpatrick Crown Court judge, sitting in Belfast, also told Magee: "I can only hope that the defendant, as he reflects upon his actions which caused Richard's death, will understand the extent of the damage he has caused."

Later in his judgment, Mr Justice Colton added that while Magee may not have intended to cause the death of Mr Miskelly, it was a clear case of murder.

He said Magee "will have had to confront the uncomfortable truth about this conduct, which was so reprehensible and unnecessary. He will have to face the consequences of his actions for the remainder of his life".

The judge also said that given Magee's guilty plea and expression of what he had taken as his "genuine remorse", he was entitled to a reduction in the sentence.

However, he said the 10-year tariff, the equivalent of a 20-year determinate sentence, was the minimum term he will serve before his case may be referred to the Life Sentence Review Commissioners for consideration.

He added: "I make it clear, however, that if and when he is released on licence he will, for the remainder of his life, be liable to be recalled to prison if at any time he does not comply with the terms of that licence."

Magee pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in January.

Last month the court heard Magee was high on a cocktail of drink and the drug ketamine when he launched the fatal attack, but initially claimed he'd just arrived at the scene and had tried to help Mr Miskelly.

However, prosecution QC Ciaran Murphy revealed the truth was that as Mr Miskelly attempted to sit up, Magee ran at him and "volleyed the deceased with his right foot".

The blow was so hard he told his friend he thought he had broken his foot.

Magee later admitted that in his drunken and drugged state he had "lost his temper... and later just saw red", and that Mr Miskelly was so "vulnerable that he could have pushed him over with a finger".

Defence QC Martin O'Rourke claimed that whatever occurred "this genuinely was a one-off incident which will not be replicated", and that it was "spontaneous and lacked any pre-planning".

The lawyer said that at the time of the attack Magee had taken ketamine, which experts recognised could cause people to suffer side-effects of violent and aggressive behaviour and to act in irrational ways.

Earlier the court heard that 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 10 minutes later Magee carried out the first of 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 attempted to distance himself from what had happened, initially telling 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 attempted to revive the victim.

However, despite his efforts and those of ambulance crews, Mr Miskelly died.

A post-mortem revealed death was due to a bleed on the brain caused by blunt force trauma.

He also suffered bruising and abrasions to his neck, two fractures to the jaw and other injuries, which could have been caused by punching or kicking or stomping with a shod foot, or a combination of all three.Kathleen Carragher has enjoyed a 35-year career with the BBC and took on her current role in 2011, since when she has overseen news content across television, radio and online

The BBC's head of news in Northern Ireland is to leave her post after seven years at the helm.

Kathleen Carragher has enjoyed a 35-year career with the BBC and took on her current role in 2011, since when she has overseen news content across television, radio and online.

Speaking about her departure, which will take place within the next few months, Ms Carragher said it had been a "huge privilege" to have led BBC NI's news service.

"It has not been an easy decision to leave a job I love, but it is the right time for me to have a change of direction and spend more time with my family and friends," she said.

Before taking over as head of BBC News NI, Ms Carragher was editor of Radio News at BBC NI since 1998 and also served as News Online editor from 2008.

She was educated at St Dominic's High in west Belfast and later studied at Sussex University and the University of Wales.

Peter Johnston, director at BBC NI, said: "She will be much missed as a senior colleague and we all wish her well in this new phase of her life."The newly founded Irish Republican Movement is reported to be made up of disgruntled dissident republicans who were former members of Oglaigh Na hEireann which called a ceasefire. Pacemaker

A new armed dissident republican group calling itself the "Irish Republican Movement" (IRM) have said they will "actively target crown forces" involved in policing republican commemorations.

The Irish News have reported that the group is made up of former Oglaigh Na hEireann members who declared a ceasefire earlier this year.

Read More

The group are understood to be based in Belfast and west Tyrone and have access to weapons.

In a statement released to the Irish News the group have said that "crown forces" involved in policing republican commemorations will be "actively targeted" by the group.

It comes after disturbances in Lurgan and Londonderry following Easter Commemorations earlier this month.

They also said that anyone who is involved in selling drugs within the nationalist community must stop immediately or "penalty is death".

The group have warned people involved in general criminality that they too will be at risk.

Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly has called on the group to "disband and get off the back of the community".

There is absolutely no place for this group, the North Belfast MLA said.

It seems this latest group has emerged from yet another split which is testament to the lack of any cohesion, strategy, support or credibility within dissident republican circles.

Instead of issuing threatening statements to newspapers, what they should be doing is getting off the stage and off the backs of the community.Belfast City Council defended its request for an extra 20k for investment trip to the French Riviera

Belfast City Council has defended requesting an extra 20k on a French Riviera trip that has already cost the taxpayer 60,000.

At a meeting of Belfast City Councils City Growth and Regeneration Committee on Wednesday night, a request for an extra 20,000 for the 2019 trip to one of the world's biggest property expos, MIPIM which is held in Cannes was approved.

MIPIM is described as the prime event in the European real estate calendar for many of the worlds investors, developers and funders from both private and public sector.

Sinn Fein described the spend on the conference as "excessive and unnecessary".

Read More

Last month, over 80 people from Northern Ireland - made up of representatives from the private and public sectors - attended the event in Cannes.

The total budget for this year was 329,825, of which 80% came from the private sector while the council covers the rest.

In a statement the council said the additional cash to attend next year would put it in a better location to promote Belfast as a place for business.

"The additional 20,000 funding sought for MIPIM 2019 is to take a larger and more strategic site," said a spokeswoman.

"This will enable us to attract higher footfall, allowing us to host greater networking opportunities and other events to ensure Belfast participants are able to better highlight the citys attractiveness for investors and property developers  creating an even greater return on investment.

"As a council, we are absolutely committed to getting the most out of MIPIM and have worked with the private sector to do this since our first appearance in 2016.

"Attending MIPIM allows us to showcase Belfast alongside other UK cities on an international stage and promote investment and regeneration opportunities to the international investment and development communities."

The spokeswoman said that following previous year's attendance, representatives from "major institutional investment funds" have visited the city.

Other areas of interest have included housing and office schemes as well as regeneration projects from companies and developers.

The spokeswoman continued: "We have successfully attracted major investment- we have had a commitment by Signature Living to create up to five hotels across the city, these include the 15million George Best hotel in the Scottish Mural Building, due to open later this year and the 25m Lanyon hotel in the listed Crumlin Road Courthouse.

"At the 2018 event, Signature Living also expressed interest in redeveloping the Floral Hall while a number of other investment opportunities, the Sixth development and submissions for Giants Park development  have also been highlighted by council."

She said the 23 cranes currently dominating the Belfast's skyline was "partly due to the success" of the council's role in marketing the city for investment.

"This is proactive marketing is essential given the current opportunities and challenges facing the city today and in the future," she added.

The council said that a core part of delivering the Belfast Agenda was to create jobs and investment as well as attracting over 1bn in private sector investment.

"The event gives us an ideal opportunity to fulfil our Belfast Agenda goals  giving us a significantly visible presence to sell Belfast."A protest against plans to shut seven out of 10 special schools in Belfast will be taken to the doorstep of the Education Authority (EA) in the city today.

The proposal is contained in the EA's Annual Action Plan for 2018-19 - along with plans to close or merge 27 schools.

It is part of a three-year plan which has already identified 40 schools which the EA has said are not sustainable.

Parents of children attending the seven affected special schools will be among those taking part in the protest, including some who are also considering a legal challenge against the EA.

Ciara Guiney, whose daughter Amy-Lou (7) attends Oakwood special school, said her daughter's needs will not be met in a bigger school.

She said it means Amy-Lou will have to go to another school which has over 300 pupils.

"She will never cope in a school that size and I do not believe for one minute her educational needs will be met, so I am actually going to take legal advice about challenging the EA and seek a judicial review," Ms Guiney said.

"The Education Authority are trying to ram through the decision to close down schools without a real understanding about how our children will be affected by it.

"My daughter has come on leap and bounds since being in Oakwood, she knows all the staff and they all know her.

"She has benefited massively from being in a small specialised school. I would be devastated if all this expertise would be thrown up in the air because the EA is trying to implement cutbacks.

"We have battled with them before and will continue to do so until they commit to protecting our children's schools."

The list of schools earmarked for either closure or merger in the EA Action Plan are across every level of education.

They come from all sectors which do not meet pupil number targets for sustainability, which are between 105 and 140 for primary schools and 500 for post primary schools.

A public consultation process will begin shortly to allow parents to have their say.

Sinn Fein education spokeswoman Karen Mullan has urged parents affected to make their voices heard.

"When people hear the EA referring to sustainability issues, that raises obvious concerns with parents, staff and local communities," said the Foyle MLA.

"However, the sustainability criteria covers six different areas and these will all have to be closely examined in any proposals that do come forward, so low numbers alone is not a reason to close a school.

"And while we recognise there are issues facing the schools estate, the primary focus has to be the educational welfare of children," Ms Mullan added.

"That is what should be driving any changes, not a desire to cut spending in the face of Tory-DUP austerity cuts."

People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll said: "The Education Authority's proposals to shut down seven out of 10 special needs schools in Belfast is outrageous.

"Parents and staff alike are outraged, and rightly so.

"It seems that the EA is the only body still supporting these closures.

"They should take heed of public discontent and put an end to these plans," he said.

The Education Authority was contacted for a response, but did not comment last night.A rally calling for Ulster Rugby to address the behaviour of players will take place tomorrow evening ahead of the club's first home match since the Belfast rape trial ended.

The demonstration, entitled 'Stamp out Misogyny at Ulster Rugby', is being organised by Belfast Feminist Network and will take place before the team plays Welsh side Ospreys.

Read More

It is the second in a series of rallies organised by the group since the trial verdict was delivered on March 28.

Ulster and Ireland players Paddy Jackson (26) and Stuart Olding (25) were acquitted of raping the same woman at a house party at Mr Jackson's south Belfast home in June 2016.

Mr Jackson was also cleared of sexual assault.

Belfast Feminist Network said it was part of "a movement to change how our criminal justice system deals with sexual assault crimes".

Last week 139 people took out a crowd-funded advert in this newspaper to demand that Mr Jackson and Mr Olding never play rugby for Ulster or Ireland again.

The advert described the content of social media exchanges involving the pair as "reprehensible".

However, an advert in yesterday's Belfast Telegraph, paid for by fans of Ulster Rugby, called on the club to reinstate the two players to the squad.

The full-page advert, funded by more than 100 supporters, described "the social media backlash" against the men as "cyber prosecution".

During the trial the court heard about a series of WhatsApp messages in which Mr Olding said "we are all top shaggers" and "there was a bit of spit roasting going on last night fellas".

Mr Jackson wrote: "There was a lot of spit roasting last night."

Olding told the WhatsApp group: "It was like a merry-go-round at a carnival."

Belfast Feminist Network said its members were "still angry at the underbelly of sexism and misogyny that was revealed in evidence given during the recent trial".

It added: "This rally is not about the future careers of the players currently suspended.

"We are sending a message that there needs to be action taken by Ulster Rugby and other institutions to stamp out misogyny."

The group is calling for reforms to the criminal justice system in cases of alleged sexual assaults, including changes to media reporting, and wants an education programme on "consent and toxic masculinity" to be taught in schools.

It also wants "adequately resourced support services for victims and survivors of rape and sexual abuse".

In a post about a placard-making workshop last night ahead of the rally at the Kingspan Stadium, the group said it had "some concerns about a confrontational attitude from a minority of fans, but equally we reckon there will be many who support what we're doing".

Commenting on the planned protest at the home of Ulster rugby, the PSNI said: "Police are aware and would ask anyone intending to organise a public protest or demonstration to contact local police at the earliest opportunity.

"This allows officers to work with the organiser to ensure that any demonstration is within the law, does not cause obstruction to footpaths or roadways, and that the health and safety of participants and members of the public are safeguarded."

Last night Ulster Rugby said: "The IRFU and Ulster Rugby have advised that a review process in relation to this matter is under way and it would be inappropriate to comment on any matter pertaining to that process until it is completed."Former Ireland rugby international Willie John McBride has faced strong criticism after calling for Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding to be allowed to play for club and country again.

The 77-year-old, who captained the British and Irish Lions team in the 1970s, said that both men had learnt a "severe lesson" during a traumatic couple of months.

Read More

"I think it is time they got back to doing what they do best and that is playing rugby," Mr McBride told RTE's Today with Sean O'Rourke.

"As far as I am concerned I think they have learned their lesson.

"All of them have issued their regrets and sadness about the affair and their apologies."

Jackson (26) and his 25-year-old Ireland and Ulster team-mate Olding were unanimously acquitted of rape last month.

Mr McBride, president of the official Ulster Rugby Supporters' Club, does not know either player personally.But he described their treatment post-verdict as "unfair".

His comments have drawn criticism from rape crisis agencies, with Noeline Blackwell, chief executive of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, saying that he missed the legitimate reasons for concern among many people.

"They don't seem to recognise that the behaviour of some of the most prominent rugby players in the country was extraordinarily disrespectful and failed to take any account of the humanity or dignity of the young woman involved," she said. "This is a matter which the IRFU and Ulster Rugby must address, as they have said they will do, not only in relation to those players but in relation to any culture within rugby that might in any way condone or encourage that behaviour." Concerns have also been raised by the director of Rape Crisis Network Ireland, Cliona Saidlear, who said questions needed to be asked if Mr McBride's comments and "dismissal" of the players' actions represent the wider views of the rugby world.

"The first question that has to be asked is: is Willie John McBride an outlier or is he a representative of the rugby world?

"His dismissal of everything as 'it's not that bad', of regret, it really shows that he doesn't comprehend what has gone on here.

"Willie John McBride talked about how he hopes we go back to the old days - I certainly hope that isn't the case."

Meanwhile, a petition calling on the IRFU to publish a review into the behaviour of Jackson and Olding has so far been signed by almost 70,000 people. The players have been relieved of their playing duties pending the outcome of the review by the IRFU and Ulster Rugby.The newly founded Irish Republican Movement is reported to be made up of disgruntled dissident republicans who were former members of Oglaigh Na hEireann which called a ceasefire. Pacemaker

A DUP MP said a new dissident republican group threatening to attack police and drug dealers will take encouragement from recent comments by former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams who said violence can still be justified in achieving political means in certain circumstances.

East Belfast MP Gavin Robinson said the group will have taken "succour from Gerry Adams words".

The former Sinn Fein leader was speaking to a German news organisation when he was asked if violence was a legitimate means to reach aims.

"I think in given circumstances. And the circumstances at that time in the north were that people were being denied their rights, Mr Adams told Der Spiegel.

Read More

The new armed dissident republican group, calling itself the Irish Republican Movement (IRM), said they will "actively target crown forces" involved in policing republican commemorations.

The Irish News reported on Thursday the group is made up of former Oglaigh Na hEireann members disgruntled over its ceasefire declaration earlier this year. The group are understood to be based in Belfast and west Tyrone and have access to weapons.

DUP MP Gavin Robinson said: "When a group of violent dissident republicans pose with weapons and ammunition they will have been aware of the words from Gerry Adams only a few days earlier."

"His provision of an excuse for terrorism can do nothing other than offer succour to those who seek to emulate the failed tactics and strategy of the Provisional IRA.

"Michelle ONeills condemnation of petrol bombers on Easter Monday was welcome, but people are left questioning whether Gerry Adams comments are designed to reassure the republican backwoods. In recent months Sinn Fein will criticise dissident republicans but in council motions fall in behind those who defend and justify dissident terrorism."

Mr Robinson continued: "Those pathetically posing with weapons in a bedroom today will fail in the same way those who engaged in terrorism previously failed. The current Sinn Fein leadership needs to step forward and be clear that they will not offer any comfort, cover or justification to these individuals."

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In a statement released to the Irish News the group have said that "crown forces" involved in policing republican commemorations will be "actively targeted".

It comes after disturbances in Lurgan and Londonderry following Easter Commemorations earlier this month.

They also said that anyone who is involved in selling drugs within the nationalist community must stop immediately or "penalty is death".

The group have warned people involved in general criminality that they too will be at risk.Lecturers in six FE colleges are still waiting on an annual pay increment they were owed in September last year

A lecturer from Co Antrim has accused further education colleges in Northern Ireland of dragging their heels over pay increases.

Lecturers in six FE colleges are still waiting on an annual pay increment of around 3,500 they were owed in September last year.

Corresponding pay rises have already been awarded to staff in the school and higher education sector.

The lecturer in beauty told the Belfast Telegraph: "We feel at a loss and frustrated because we're trying to educate but just not getting the pay rises.

"It's in our contract to get them but every year we're being asked to do more and more duties.

"It happens every year, last year it was January. This year it might be June, so what's going on with this and why isn't anybody being held accountable?

"It's about 3,500 each year and there are people taking a pay cut to take this job on the strength of that promise, so it is a lot of money."

Colleges here are required to submit a business case to the Department of Education, which is then passed to the Department for the Economy for approval. Business cases are usually submitted by June to get the pay through in time.

Colleges Northern Ireland said the delay was caused by the Department for the Economy not releasing its guidance until December 2017.

This has been rejected by the University & College Union, which represents FE lecturers, which called it "unacceptable" and noted this didn't stop school employers securing staff pay increases.

"The excuse they'll often use is that they're waiting on guidance from the department, which has been slower and slower every year," the union said. "But the guidance in December was only a repetition of what we'd see in previous years.

"That isn't a reasonable argument. If school employers can submit it in time and get the approval from the department there's no reason the FE employers can't do the same.

"We've been campaigning about this for years because we don't think government should have that level of involvement in pay.

"Our negotiations should be straight with the employer and shouldn't be dependent on controls, but affordability."

It advised that if members were kept waiting they should submit grievances to their employer, if necessary this would allow them to escalate the matter to an industrial tribunal for unlawful deduction of wages, or the County Court for breach of contract. "If they come to us we'll support them through that process," it added.

Colleges Northern Ireland said last week the payments were "imminent" and the business case had recently been submitted to the Department for Education.

It is understood that no definite date has been set for the payment but an update is expected within weeks.

The Department for the Economy said FE Colleges were responsible for seeking approval to implement pay increases in line with the guidance.DUP leader Arlene Foster has said republicanism's continuing justification of the IRA's terror campaign 20 years on from the Good Friday Agreement has let the public down.

Writing in today's Belfast Telegraph, the former First Minister said that while the Agreement was endorsed by practically all of nationalist Ireland, at best half of unionism supported it.

While admitting Northern Ireland "is an entirely different and a much safer place", she said some unionists might have been right in believing that Sinn Fein "didn't want Stormont to work" when the Agreement was signed.

"Efforts to justify the terrorism continue, whether it's Gerry Adams to the international media or speakers addressing republican commemorations," she said.

"There was never the justification for taking human life.

"That message of non-violence should have been then, and must be today, clear and unequivocal. Otherwise we risk impressionable young people and those who would exploit them seeking to claim some element of cover to replicate those actions and 'continue the struggle'."

Mrs Foster also expressed disappointment over Sinn Fein's support for the naming of a Newry play park after IRA gunman and hunger striker Raymond McCreesh. "No one would have imagined that in 2018 play parks and banners could eulogise an individual arrested with the weapon which killed 10 men in cold-blooded sectarianism at Kingsmill," she said.

"Sinn Fein-dominated councils block Armed Forces recruitment events, the sale of poppies and the Union Flag flying for even a few days, and their mayors snub members of the royal family and refuse to present awards to teenagers in the cadet forces.

"An independent three-person panel finding that the Army Council still runs the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein was deeply depressing.

"Paramilitary-linked groups continue to exert control on communities but work we instigated is seeking to change this and promote lawfulness.

"Victims are mocked. The consent principle is ignored when it doesn't suit. Even our actual name, Northern Ireland, is disrespected.

"Reconciliation has been limited, and attitudes have hardened since the tearing down of the Executive by Sinn Fein.

"The same question still remains for republicans. Do they genuinely want to make Northern Ireland work?"

But Mrs Foster - who is due to give evidence to the inquiry into the Renewable Heat Incentive, which led to Stormont's collapse - remains convinced that the Executive can get back up and running.

"We have overcome much greater challenges and I am confident we will overcome the present one too," the DUP leader said.

"If we begin to genuinely respect each other and our different outlooks, then we can achieve a settled community in a way we haven't experienced before."Former First and Deputy First Ministers, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness

Former First Minister Peter Robinson has said that he and former Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness never had a severe falling out with each other when they worked in government together.

The former DUP leader also said that he believed things may have been different had Mr McGuinness not been in ill-health when he resigned from his position in January 2017.

Mr Robinson, in his first major interview since his retirement told BBC Radio Ulster's Stephen Nolan Show that he got on well with Martin McGuinness when they worked together and that the pair always remained on speaking terms, even when they disagreed.

"I don't think I ever questioned Martin McGuinness adherence to the principles of the St Andrews Agreement," he said.

"I think he was someone who wanted Stormont and the agreement to work and wanted to make progress.

"Every day we were having to negotiate in the First Ministers' office, not just on the big issues and were able to make compromises every day.

He said the pair were able to keep disagreements and discussions between themselves.

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"We had disagreements of course, I can remember one occasion when I had a press conference I was speaking and he was shaking his head and he was speaking and I was shaking my head.

"Overall at that time we never had a shouting match or fell out to the point we couldn't pick up the phone and talk.

Expand Close DUP leader Arlene Foster (right) and former leader Peter Robinson attend the unveiling of a portrait of former deputy first minister Martin McGuinness in the Great Hall of Parliament Buildings, Stormont (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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"We still held each others confidence, if those issues go public before an agreement can be reached both sides are damaged.

"The ability to keep confidence is a big loss in the current time. There has been a lot of 'he said she said' issues which have damaged the confidence the parties have in each other."

"When Martin walked away he was very frail, I think a healthy McGuinness would have taken a different position."

He said that the DUP felt able to trust Sinn Fein during his time in government.

"There was no period where we found ourselves unable to trust them with confidences until more recent times," Mr Robinson said.

"We had a testing period as part of St Andrews to ensure they had ended violence and accepted police and courts.

"Any two parties sharing power must build up trust."

Mr Robinson said he felt Sinn Fein may have resigned from government whether the RHI scandal happened or not.

"None of us know what would have happened, if Sinn Fein were determined to bring down the institutions.

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"It wasn't really RHI because they've drifted to other issues and would have found another excuse to bring it down."

When asked what he would have done Mr Robinson told broadcaster Stephen Nolan compromise was essential to make Northern Ireland politics successful.

"Compromise is part of it, you don't succeed if simply looking after your own position. You have to remember that the other party has a constituency, it's not sufficient to solve your problems have to solve theirs too," he said.

"All I know is we don't have an Assembly, an Assembly a lot of people put hard graft into getting up and running and I think Northern Ireland is worse for not having an Executive and Assembly."

"I think there has to be a lot of work done to bring it back. It needs under the radar contact to try and build relationships again, there is no problem that cannot be solved."

He said that the supposed agreement reached by the parties in February did not offer enough to the unionist community.

"Any new agreement has to be more broadly based, I don't think there was an awful lot in it for the unionist community to be a good deal.

"It satisfied Sinn Fein but unionists have issues they wanted to be resolved too, you have to have a balance.

"You would think the only people who have problems at the present time are republicans, that's not the case."

Mr Robinson said he felt the media had been very hard on Arlene Foster and that her experience of IRA violence in the past had impacted her life.

"I think Arlene deserves more credit given particularly the background she had in her childhood and into adulthood," he said.

"I think everybody's present thinking is based on the experiences of life they have had but I don't think it diminishes her in any way.

"I think it gives her a wider understanding particularly to the victims of IRA terrorism."

Mr Robinson also revealed that he had voted in favour of Brexit and didn't see a hard border returning to Northern Ireland.

"I think whether good or not it's disruptive in present circumstances and has to be dealt with.

"I pondered for a long period on how to vote, there were number of issues if voting solely on economic issues I think I would have voted remain but a whole series of other issues made me vote to leave.

"Irrespective if good or bad thing and I tend to believe it's better to be out of EU but have good relationship with neighbours in Europe and the Irish Republic

"It opens us up to a range of other markets and opportunities, if clever about it can put us in pivotal position in the UK depending on the outcome of the NI-ROI-UK relationship

"There are no guarantees we would continue to get the same funding we have got before and I believe we can reach a trade agreement with the EU."

He said that he believed an agreement would be reached on a soft border.

"There is always an impasse until the moment an agreement is reached I have every confidence an agreement will be reached, the Prime Minister wants the least possible border between the whole of the UK and Europe," he said.

"It's in the interests of the whole of UK and EU to have the freest trade possible. There already is a border there are issues that are dealt with differently and we manage that without border checks, it doesn't have to change. We don't know what the end result of negotiations will be. I certainly wouldn't want hard border posts."

Mr Robinson said that the best way of preserving the union was to reach out to nationalists.

"I think the DUP needs to be reaching out to everyone, it's the job of a party to persuade and encourage people to give it support," he told Mr Nolan.

"I think the long-term preservation of the union depends on making Northern Ireland a comfortable place for people not from a protestant or unionist background.

"We need to make it a place where everyone can see the benefits of being part of the larger union with Great Britain."

He said he wouldn't consider a United Ireland.

"I wouldn't even contemplate a United Ireland. I am a unionist, I am going to convince people the union is the best thing," Mr Robinson said.

"There won't be a united Ireland people will want to remain within the United Kingdom, when they have to make those decisions they will see the massive benefits of being part of the union."Belfast council wants an additional 20k to fund a 80k trip to the French Riviera, it emerged last night.

At a meeting of Belfast City Councils City Growth and Regeneration Committee, the council voted through a request for an extra 20,000 for the 2019 trip to one of the world's biggest property expos, MIPIM which is held in Cannes.

The council has asked the current investment be increased to pay for a larger stand at the event.

Officers have also been requested to "scope out" options for re-positioning the Belfast stand to an area of higher footfall.

MIPIM is described as the "premier event" in the European real estate calendar where many of the world's investors, developers and funders from the private and public sectors gather to showcase investment opportunities.

Sinn Fein councillor Ciaran Beattie, who voted against the request, said: Sinn Fein is supportive of city council efforts to attract inward investment but we believe the proposal that was put before the monthly City Growth and Regeneration Committee meeting was both excessive and unnecessary.

Belfast City Councils existing allocation for this annual four-day trip to the French Riviera is more than sufficient and in my opinion, they shouldnt have even put this proposal before the committee.

All councillors and council officials have a responsibility to allocate council funds wisely and the additional 20,000 sought by the council simply cant be justified.

The party has voted against this proposal and we are disappointed that it was voted through by other parties.

Belfast City Council in a statement said: "MIPIM is the prime event in the European real estate calendar for many of the worlds investors, developers and funders from both private and public sector.

"Over 27,000 people attend the event in 2018 to examine investment and regeneration opportunities in cities across Europe.

"We are now planning for MIPIM 2019 and as part of this, took our proposal to increase the budget to the City Growth and Regeneration Committee for discussion on April 11.

"The additional 20,000 funding sought for MIPIM 2019 is to take a larger and more strategic site  this will enable us to attract higher footfall, allowing us to host greater networking opportunities and other events to ensure Belfast participants are able to better highlight the citys attractiveness for investors and property developers  creating an even greater return on investment.A new action plan from the Education Authority has identified 27 schools which could be set to close or merge due to sustainability issues in 2018/19. (David Jones/PA)

A new action plan from the Education Authority has identified 27 schools which could be set to close or merge due to sustainability issues in 2018/19.

The performance of schools is laid out in the document from the non-departmental body, which identifies areas of weakness and actions schools should take.

It adds to around 40 schools identified in last year's document.

"Sustainability issue" are identified for 27 schools, with the document aiming to advance the ministerial objection of addressing "school provision where sustainability is an issue".

The Education Authority's action plan states any action to close or merge a school would first be subject to consultation.

Besides sustainability, a range of other issues and areas of improvement are identified across 76 schools in 10 wider areas.

These includes: ensuring school places are located as required, establishing specific supports for autism, and developing sustainable Irish medium provision.

In many areas of Northern Ireland there are too many school places for the size of the population, while in other areas, there are not enough places," said Education Authority director of education John Collings.

"It may also be the case that there are not enough school places of the right type  perhaps demand for integrated or Irish medium education isnt being met in a particular area.

Area planning seeks solutions to these issues to ensure all pupils have the opportunity to fulfil their potential."

The plan has been produced by the Education Authority in partnership with the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS), Comhairle na Gaelscolaiochta (CnaG), the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE), the Controlled Schools Support Council (CSSC), Governing Bodies Association (GBA), and the Catholic Schools Trustee Service.

The Education Authority's document lists each local school, with the key issue for that institution and the action which should be taken.

In the list the key issue for 25 schools makes specific reference to sustainability.

It is possible sustainability issues may exist where other key issues are listed, such as "ensure school places are located as required".

Asked by the Belfast Telegraph specifically about the disparity between the 25 and its figure of 27, the Education Authority sent the following statement: Almost one-third of the work streams for primary and post-primary relate to sustainability issues across 27 named schools and 3 areas. Overall, there are 76 schools named in the plan and 10 wider areas identified.

"The Annual Action Plan includes schools where sustainability is now an issue but, also, includes some schools which are sustainable as it is these schools that may form part of the solution to sustainability issues in the area.

The following schools have this year been identified as having sustainability issues:

Antrim and Newtownabbey - Primary

Straid PS

Tir na nOg PS

St Macnissius PS

Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon - Primary

Derryhale PS

Mullavilly PS

Foley PS

St Michaels PS (Clady)

Causeway Coast and Glens - Primary

Barnish PS

Ballyhackett PS

Causeway Coast and Glens - Post-primary

Coleraine College

Dunluce HS

North Coast IC

Fermanagh and Omagh - Primary

St John the Baptist PS

Lisburn and Castlereagh - Post-primary

Laurelhill CC

Lisnagarvey HS

Mid Ulster - Primary

Ballytrea PS

Coagh PS

Stewartstown PS

Desertmartin PS

Mid and East Antrim - Primary

St Brigids PS

St Colmcilles PS

Fourtowns PS

Groggan PS

Longstone PS

Upper Ballyboley PSDamage caused to a door at the East Belfast Mission.

Thieves stole a safe containing staff and volunteer tips during a burglary at East Belfast Mission in the early hours of Thursday morning.

It was reported that at around 1.30am three people forced their way into the Community Cafe on on the Newtownards Road in East Belfast and made off with a safe containing a sum of cash.

It is believed the suspects made off in the direction of Belvoir Street.

East Belfast Mission is part of the Methodist Church and is involved in social engagement and renewal and transformation in the East Belfast community.

It moved into its 23m state of the art premises on the Newtownards Road in October 2012.

An East Belfast Mission spokesperson said: "At 1:30am a bunch of men in balaclavas broke into our Community Cafe.

"They smashed an external glass door, destroyed the Cafe office door and stole the staff and volunteers tips. May God forigve them!"

Police are appealing for witnesses following the burglary.

Police are appealing to anyone who witnessed the incident or anyone who has information that would assist with the investigation to contact officers at Strandtown Police Station on 101, quoting reference 163 12/04/2018.

Alternatively, information can also be provided to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111, which is 100% anonymous and gives people the power to speak up and stop crime.

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The East Belfast Mission has started a JustGiving page in an attempt to raise 200 to replace the money stolen.

The group have already raised over 100 towards their target.The Lansdowne Hotel on the Antrim road, Belfast is to undergo renovation its operator says. Pic: Charles McQuillan/Pacemaker.

Staff have been laid off at Belfast's Lansdowne Hotel as the premises has been shut down indefinitely to under go extensive renovations.

As the hotel will be closed for an unknown period all staff at the hotel have lost their jobs.

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However a spokesperson for English budget chain Metro Inns who bought the hotel in 2012 for around 700,000 has said that staff will be able to return to their jobs when the hotel finally reopens.

Metro Inns bought the hotel after it suddenly went out of business when the former owners Welcome Hotels entered administration.

At the time around 30 staff were employed in the 25-bedroom hotel.

It's understood a post was placed on the Facebook page of the Lansdowne Hotel in north Belfast saying it was "closed for business" before it was later removed - sparking speculation over its future.

A spokesperson for Metro Inns said that it was impossible to determine how long the hotel would be closed for.

"On April 11 the Lansdowne Hotel called an emergency meeting with all staff members to inform them that effective immediately the hotel would be shut for major refurbishment," the spokesperson said.

"This refurbishment was originally scheduled for early summer but had to be brought forward due to immediate health and safety concerns following a recent Environmental Inspection.

"Due to the seriousness of the safety issues involved, extensive investigations and work will have to be carried out and as such, it is impossible to judge the length of closure of the business.

"Due to this, all staff have to be laid off and when the hotel reopens for operation, those staff members will automatically be contacted to resume their duties."

They said it was unknown which banner the hotel would reopen under.

"The Northern Ireland regional director has suffered from serious ill health since Summer 2017 and this has had an impact on the level of standard at The Lansdowne Hotel," the spokesperson said.

"Due to the director's ongoing issues, they will step down formally from their role and will not be continuing at the Lansdowne Hotel in the future. At this time, it is not known if the Lansdowne Hotel, when reopened, will operate under it's former Metro Inns banner.

"Management are working on contacting all customers in the next couple of days who had future bookings in the Hotel. For enquiries about bookings made, please send an email, with your contact details and details of booking to Kirkpatrick.management@gmail.com."Heated words were exchanged at a meeting of Belfast City Council after a councillor appeared to defend a racist leaflet drop that police are treating as a hate crime.

Councillors reacted saying the comments were "atrocious".

The leaflet was put through the letterboxes of residents in the Ravenhill Road area of the city last week and purported to be from a group called Generation Sparta.

The leaflet warned against the 'Islamification' of Northern Ireland and contained several racist messages, one of which called for Catholics and Protestants to unite against the common threat of fanatical Islamists".

"Protestants and Catholics bled for this land, not Islamists, another read.

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The topic of the leaflets was brought up in the council chamber on Monday night by Alliance councillor David Armitage, who was discussing his work with minority communities in Belfast.

Now there are leaflets being delivered by race hate groups, by fascist, racist groups with links to Britain First. This disgusts me and a lot of people in my community, he said.

Im sure a lot of us here will condemn these fascist leaflets that have been distributed across south east Belfast.

Independent councillor Jolene Bunting, who has in the past been associated with Britain First and has previously spoken at a rally in Belfast organised by the group, defended the distribution of the leaflets.

I believe they [the leaflets] were information. It may not have been put in the most helpful way, but people in this city need to know information about all faiths in society, she said,

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If those faiths arent going to interact with people in this city, then people will take what they want from whats in the public and online.

She also made reference to the Telford grooming scandal exposed last month and said issues like this are not going to go away.

Its up to the leaders in this city to address peoples concerns and not just label them as racist or fascist. Fascists are the people who dont want anyone to speak out about Islam.

Ms Buntings comments were widely criticised by her fellow councillors. It was pointed out to her that parts of the leaflet contained incorrect information.

Alliance representative Kate Nicholl stated she could not believe something which is being treated by police as a hate crime could be described by a member of the chamber as information.

What councillor Bunting has just said is atrocious. Leadership is about condemning hatred and that is something all of us should be doing, she said.

Chris McGimpsey of the Ulster Unionists said the leaflets were racist, Islamophobic and should be condemned.

Sinn Feins Deirdre Hargey said racism and Islamophobia have no place in Belfast and challenged those who distributed the leaflets to come forward and explain themselves.

SDLP councillor Donal Lyons said it was time everyone recognised that words have consequences and he referenced several arson attacks across Belfast in recent times where minority communities have been targeted.

There is a clear line between freedom of speech and incitement to hatred. This has plenty of standards internationally and locally and I believe these leaflets and some of the comments made here cross over that line.

This really is a sordid little affair and some members of this room need to take cognisance of that and just stop.The Northern Ireland Secretary has voiced frustration that she cannot focus on her job promoting the region due to the need to sort out the problems left by local politicians.

Karen Bradley said instead of opening doors for local businesses overseas, she was having to do work that should be done by Stormont ministers, such as passing a budget for the regions rudderless public services.

Mrs Bradley told a business breakfast event in Belfast she was jealous of the secretaries of state for Scotland and Wales.

They have stable devolved government locally and that means they can go around the world promoting the places they represent at cabinet, and I cant do that because I have to come and try to sort out problems here, she added.

Mrs Bradley was addressing a gathering of entrepreneurs in the citys regenerated docklands.

My frustration is the missed opportunities and how much more successful we could beKaren Bradley

She later told the Press Association: My frustration is the missed opportunities and how much more successful we could be.

I want to be off promoting Northern Ireland, because I dont want to be doing a budget, and I have to do a budget because we havent got a devolved government at Stormont.

Thats the frustration for me and its a frustration for people here.

Because they can see the UK Government can really open doors for them but the UK Government cant do that if the UK Government is doing the job someone else should be doing.

Mrs Bradley and Irish deputy premier Simon Coveney are to engage in a series of bilateral meetings with the Stormont parties next week as they bid to find a way to resurrect the faltering negotiations to end the 15-month-long powersharing impasse.

A bitter stand-off between the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein on a number of key issues, including legislative protections for Irish language speakers, is preventing the restoration of an executive that crashed in January 2017 amid a row over a botched green energy scheme.

While the DUP has expressed doubt devolution can be restored this calendar year, Mrs Bradley said she was less pessimistic.

I genuinely believe there are people in all the parties, in leadership in all the parties, who really do want to make this work, she told the Press Association.

We cant wait, we cant sit back and say it will happen one day and we will just manage until then.

We cant limp along, you cant let Northern Ireland limp along, we have to get this right and we have to get those MLAs back up in Stormont in an executive with an Assembly holding them to account.

Mrs Bradley is currently examining a range of proposals to inject some fresh momentum into the stalled process, including the establishment of a form of shadow Assembly to scrutinise decisions taken in Westminster while the political impasse is ongoing.

All the parties have said that they want to go back into government, she said.

I have spoken to them all, they have all said they would like to continue to speak, to continue to talk, they are all looking at the different options.

I am looking at all of those, it would be wrong of me not to, but Ive got to find that thing that works for everyone.

Mrs Bradley said she hoped this weeks events to mark the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday peace agreement would reinvigorate the process.

I genuinely think the inspiration we have all had from the events of the last two days really is a kick-start again for people to recognise just how important this is and what having a functioning devolved government has brought to Northern Ireland and what more it could bring, she said.Irelands insistence that the Brexit treaty includes a backstop to preserve the islands open border enjoys the full support of Germany, the countrys foreign minister has insisted.

Germanys new federal foreign minister, Heiko Maas, made the pledge as he met Irish Deputy Premier Simon Coveney in Dublin.

The discussions happened ahead of Mr Maass scheduled meeting with UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnston.

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The minister said Germans understood the emotional sensitivities around the border, given his countrys own experience of division.

I do understand the need that we do whatever we can in order to avoid a flaring up of a historic conflict, he said.

We have to do everything we can to avoid the glimmer of seeing something like a hard border become reality.

Mr Coveney said the solidarity shown by Germany was very, very reassuring.

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We have got unambiguous solidarity today from the largest country in the European Union and that is hugely appreciated on the Irish border issue, he said.

I think the Germans do understand actually the significance of borders and barriers and the emotions that get stirred up by that type of imagery.

He added: The idea that anybody could be talking about the re-emergence of physical border infrastructure on the island of Ireland is something that we simply cant allow to go unchallenged or unchecked.

Mr Coveney reiterated his view that the backstop agreement struck between the UK and the EU in December, which would see Northern Ireland align with much of the EUs regulatory framework, was only a fall-back position and that the preferred option was for both parties to agree a wide-ranging post-Brexit trading agreement.

But he warned: There will be no withdrawal treaty if there is no a backstop on Irish border in that treaty.

Mr Maas added: We dont want to see anything close to a hard border, its not going to be a beneficial development for anyone, so he (Mr Coveney) enjoys our full support.

We believe that to be a question with regard to which Great Britain has to take a decision.Cambridge University has criticised Mark Zuckerbergs testimony before US Congress after the Facebook founder suggested something bad may have taken place in the way researchers used private data collected on his platform.

A spokesman said the university has been publishing research based on Facebook data for years, sometimes in collaboration with Facebook employees, and stressed the social media giant has yet to provide evidence for its claims.

The university said in a statement: We would be surprised if Mr Zuckerberg was only now aware of research at the University of Cambridge looking at what an individuals Facebook data says about them.

Our researchers have been publishing such research since 2013 in major peer-reviewed scientific journals, and these studies have been reported widely in international media.

These have included one study in 2015 led by Dr Aleksandr Spectre (Kogan) and co-authored by two Facebook employees.

We wrote to Facebook on 21 March to ask it to provide evidence to support its allegations about Dr Kogan. We have yet to receive a response.

Dr Kogan, who also uses his married named Spectre, is accused of giving the private information of tens of millions of Facebook users to controversial election consultants Cambridge Analytica (CA) after collecting it via a Facebook app in 2013.

A market research manager at Facebook, Pete Fleming, and Dr Kogan were among the co-authors of a 2015 study which used Facebook data on almost 60 billion friendships to understand issues around social class and relationships.

It used the same methodology to collect its data as Dr Kogan is alleged to have used to collect Facebook data which may have been shared with CA.

Mr Fleming is now head of research at the Facebook-owned photosharing app Instagram.

Mr Zuckerberg said he was looking into the prospect of taking legal action against Dr Kogan, Cambridge University and CA during questioning by the US Congress committee on energy and commerce in Washington on Wednesday.

He said: What weve found now is theres a whole programme associated with Cambridge University where a number of researchers, not just Aleksandr Kogan  [made] similar apps so we do need to understand whether there was something bad going on at Cambridge University overall that will require a stronger action from us.

Cambridge University has maintained that all of Dr Kogans work with CA, which is not associated with the university, was carried out through his own business Global Science Research.

Facebook began notifying 87 million users, including more than a million Britons, that their data may have been given to CA.

The company is accused of using such data to target political advertising during the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum.

CA, which was co-founded by former White House adviser Steve Bannon and funded by billionaire Robert Mercer, denies any involvement in the Brexit vote and that it used Facebook data during the 2016 election.

Dr Kogan, two former CA employees and Facebooks chief technology officer are all due to give evidence to the parliamentary inquiry into fake news in the coming weeks.

Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment.A former Catalan minister is due to return to court as her battle against extradition to Spain continues.

Professor Clara Ponsati will attend a preliminary extradition hearing at Edinburgh Sheriff Court on Thursday morning in the next step in her legal fight against political motivated charges.

Scotland-based Prof Ponsati, the ex-Catalan education minister, is being sought by the authorities in Madrid on charges of violent rebellion and misappropriation of public funds over her role in Catalonias controversial independence referendum last year.

Her solicitor Aamer Anwar said she utterly refutes the charges, which could result in a sentence of up to 25 years  and eight years respectively if she were to be extradited and convicted.

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The charges are contained in an extradition warrant from the Spanish Supreme Court issued last month.

Speaking before the hearing, Mr Anwar said: Clara views the charges as a political motivated prosecution and submits that her extradition would be unjust, oppressive and incompatible with her human rights.

Clara challenges the validity of the arrest warrant which accuses her of orchestrating violence at over 2,259 polling booths, yet fails to specify a single act of violence or incitement attributable to her.

We will submit that the warrant is not valid and should be dismissed. It will also be submitted that the crime of rebellion does not constitute an offence in Scotland.

Clara believes that the Spanish authorities in their eagerness to criminalise the desire of the Catalan people for independence are abusing the process of the European arrest warrant.

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Mr Anwar said if the warrant was not dismissed then a full extradition hearing would take place at a later date.

The academic appeared from custody at the court last month and was released on bail hours after she voluntarily handed herself in to Scottish police.

The case has attracted a huge amount of public support with more than 230,000 raised through an online crowdfunder set up to help her fight the extradition.

Prof Ponsati returned to Scotland earlier in March and resumed working at the University of St Andrews in Fife.

She had been in Belgium since fleeing Spain with Catalonias ex-leader Carles Puigdemont and three other former cabinet members, following an unsuccessful bid to declare independence from Spain in October.

Last week a German court rejected rebellion as grounds for Mr Puigdemonts extradition from the country and released him on bail.The international chemical weapons watchdog has backed Britains findings about the identity of the chemical used in the Salisbury nerve agent attack

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said an analysis of samples taken from former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia and a British police officer affected in the incident last month confirmed the assessment of the UK Government.

An executive summary released by the OPCW does not directly name Novichok  the military grade agent developed by Russia which Britain has said was used  or identify the source of the chemical.

The findings were welcomed by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson who said they backed Britains assertion that only Russia could have carried out the attack.

The OPCW has completed its independent analysis of the chemical substance used in the Salisbury attack. The report confirms the UKs findings. pic.twitter.com/4JAGJjJcYt  Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (@FCDOGovUK) April 12, 2018

This is based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world. All returned the same conclusive results, Mr Johnson said in a statement.

There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record.

We invited the OPCW to test these samples to ensure strict adherence to international chemical weapons protocols. We never doubted the analysis of our scientists at Porton Down.

He said Britain has called a meeting of the OPCW executive council in The Hague for Wednesday to discuss next steps, adding; The Kremlin must give answers.

In its executive summary, the OPCW said: The results of the analysis by the OPCW-designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirms the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people.

Salisbury incident: Foreign Secretary @BorisJohnson statement on OPCW report.



Full statement here: https://t.co/2Dsxgy6kbs pic.twitter.com/MyXFW5VOwT  Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (@FCDOGovUK) April 12, 2018

The OPCW said the name and structure of the chemical was included in the full classified report issued to the governments of member states.

It noted that the chemical was of high purity with an almost complete absence of impurities, seen as backing Britains assertion that a state actor was involved.

The head of the GCHQ intelligence agency, former MI5 officer Jeremy Fleming, described Moscows actions as particularly stark and shocking.

Speaking at a conference in Manchester hosted by the National Cyber Security Centre, he said: It demonstrates how reckless Russia is prepared to be. How little the Kremlin cares for the international rules-based order. How comfortable they are at putting ordinary lives at risk.

The UK invited the OPCW to carry out a technical investigation after Moscow strongly challenged its assertion that responsibility for the attack lay with the Kremlin.

 #OPCW issues report on technical assistance requested by the #UnitedKingdom #UK in regard to the #Salisbury incident on 4 March 2018. Find the executive summary here: https://t.co/N43P0trUiK pic.twitter.com/0LRNP7afza  OPCW (@OPCW) April 12, 2018

The OPCW said it had taken blood samples from the three affected individuals under full chain of custody for analysis at its laboratories, as well as checking their identities against official photo ID documents.

It also conducted on-site sampling from hot spots of contamination in Salisbury.

Samples taken by the British authorities were supplied to OPCW laboratories in Rijswijk in the Netherlands for comparative analysis to verify the UKs findings.

The release of the report came as Ms Skripal, 33, revealed she has rejected assistance from the Russian embassy, adding: I want to stress that no-one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

In a statement released through the Metropolitan Police, she said she has found herself in a totally different life as she continues to recover from the attack.

The Russian embassy said it doubted the authenticity of the statement and suggested it had been crafted to support Britains version of events.The international chemical weapons watchdogs report on the Salisbury nerve agent attack is expected to be revealed later, as a diplomatic battle continues to rage between the UK and Russia.

Former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent thought to have been ordered by Moscow more than a month ago, leaving the pair seriously ill in hospital.

The Foreign Office said it had asked the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to release an executive summary of its findings at midday on Thursday.

It comes as Ms Skripal revealed she has rejected assistance from the Russian embassy, adding: I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

The 33-year-old said she has found herself in a totally different life as she continues to recover from the attack.

The Russian embassy said that it doubted the authenticity of the statement and suggested it had been crafted to support Britains version of events.

This transparent and open approach, which we have pursued from the outset, is in sharp contrast to the Russian states ongoing tactics of obfuscation and distraction.Foreign Office

It is believed that British authorities immediately spirited Ms Skripal away to a secure location when she was discharged from hospital earlier this week.

The Russian embassy reacted angrily, suggesting in a series of tweets that the Russian national had been taken against her will.

Statement issued on behalf of Yulia Skripal who continues to receive police support following her release from hospital https://t.co/uIhxQPUbSw pic.twitter.com/0rIyWkPRgI  Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) April 11, 2018

The embassy is perturbed by a refusal from UK authorities to grant Ms Skripals cousin Viktoria a visa to visit her family.

It escalated the war of words on Tuesday, saying in a series of statements posted on social media: Secret resettlement of Mr and Ms Skripal, barred from any contact with their family will be seen as an abduction or at least as their forced isolation.

But Ms Skripal said in a statement: I have specially trained officers available to me, who are helping to take care of me and to explain the investigative processes that are being undertaken.

I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can.

I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time beingYulia Skripal

At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.

Most importantly, I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do.

Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being.

Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my fathers.

Embassy Press Officer's comment on interaction with the @foreignoffice on the investigation of the Salisbury incident: urge UK authorities to act in a transparent way and try fixing the damage they have caused to the international image of their country.https://t.co/B4Q17IGl7x pic.twitter.com/7oPIhtyALl  Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) April 10, 2018

The Russian embassy later said that the statement raises new questions rather than gives answers as it was unable to verify it.

The text has been composed in a special way so as to support official statements made by British authorities and at the same time to exclude every possibility of Yulias contacts with the outer world  consuls, journalists and even relatives, the embassy said in a statement.

The document only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen.

A Foreign Office spokesman said it had asked the OPCW to distribute the report to all state parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention, including Russia.

This transparent and open approach, which we have pursued from the outset, is in sharp contrast to the Russian states ongoing tactics of obfuscation and distraction, the spokesman said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly attempted to challenge Britains claims that it was responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals.

Theresa May has said that UK military experts at Porton Down found that they were poisoned by Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Russia, and that the only plausible explanation was that the Russian state was responsible.

Despite the denials from Moscow, Britain has received strong diplomatic backing from western allies for its stance, with more than 20 countries expelling in excess of 150 Russian diplomats in protest at the Russian actions.

Last week, a Russian call for a new joint investigation was voted down by 15 votes to six at a meeting of the OPCW executive council in The Hague.

Former double agent Mr Skripal was jailed in Russia for selling secrets to MI6 but was released as part of a spy swap deal in 2010 and settled in the UK.

It is hoped he will soon be fit for release from hospital, despite grave fears that the exposure to military-grade Novichok on March 4 would prove fatal.

Ms Skripal said she was treated with such kindness at Salisbury District Hospital, and is missing the staff there.

I have left my father in their care, and he is still seriously ill. I too am still suffering with the effects of the nerve agent used against us.

I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me, she said.An investigation has been launched following claims about the behaviour of a now-deceased Fellow (William Conran/PA)

An independent inquiry is being launched into allegations of misconduct and sexual harassment at the Prime Ministers former Oxford college.

St Hughs has confirmed that its governing body commissioned the investigation following claims about the behaviour of a now-deceased Fellow.

It is understood the Fellow is Professor David Robertson, who died in August last year.

The inquiry was set up after author Mel McGrath wrote an article on the website The Pool, accusing Professor Robertson of doing a Weinstein on me  a reference to Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein  when she was an undergraduate in the 1980s.

The inquiry will be chaired by Alison Levitt QC, who carried out a review into the crimes of the late Jimmy Savile and who has been tipped to become the new director of public prosecutions.

Ms McGrath wrote: David, who was my tutor, held tutorials in his flat on college grounds and had an uncanny knack for scheduling a shower, at whatever time of day, just before I arrived.

Hed open the door  as if innocently  dressed in his bathrobe and, one time, in a tiny towel.

For the next hour I would have to undergo the humiliating experience of reading my essay, on which I had laboured hard and with serious intent, while David sat opposite, half-naked and man spreading, often smelling of alcohol and sipping from a mug of what was never tea or coffee.

Ms McGrath was also critical of St Hughs, saying that if the authorities at the time had not heard the rumours about Prof Robertsons alleged behaviour they couldnt have been listening very hard.

The college confirmed that an investigation had been launched and released its terms of reference, but a spokeswoman said it would be inappropriate to comment until the investigation was complete.

The terms of reference given to Ms Levitt read: The College has recently received allegations of historic misconduct and sexual harassment about a now deceased Fellow from two former students.

The College requests you to carry out an independent investigation about these allegations and whether the circumstances of these or of similar allegations were known to the members of governing body or management staff of the College.

If so, to report on the adequacy and appropriateness of the Colleges responses and any action taken in respect of such allegations or circumstances, with any recommendations for action.

St Hughs was founded in 1886 to open up the opportunities of an Oxford education to poorer women. It accepted its first male students in 1987.

Former students include the Prime Minister Theresa May, Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi, Amal Clooney and suffragette Emily Davison.Police outside the home of Ah'Kiell Walker following his death in 2016. (Rod Minchin/PA)

A three-month-old baby boy may have been shaken and immersed in water by his parents  causing fatal injuries, a court has heard.

AhKiell Walker was cold and soaking wet when paramedics arrived at his family home in Archdeacon Street in Gloucester on July 30 in 2016.

Medics were unable to record AhKiells temperature as it was so low and he died in hospital the following day.

A post-mortem examination found the baby had suffered a brain injury shortly before his death, as well as four broken ribs and a fractured shoulder in the weeks before it.

AhKiells parents Hannah Henry, 22, and Alistair Walker, 27, deny manslaughter, causing or allowing the death of a child and cruelty to a person aged under 16.

Expand Close The family in Archdeacon Street, Gloucester, where Ah'Kiell Walker lived with his parents (Rod Minchin/PA) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp The family in Archdeacon Street, Gloucester, where Ah'Kiell Walker lived with his parents (Rod Minchin/PA)

Bristol Crown Court heard internet searches were made on Walkers phone in June and July 2016, including shaken baby syndrome, can I squeeze my baby, internal bleeding due to trauma and baby broken ribs.

One search, on June 14, asked: Can babies feel pain?, followed by baby burst liver.

Andrew Langdon QC, prosecuting, said neither of AhKiells parents sought medical attention for the baby until Henry dialled 999 on July 30, reporting that he was not breathing.

Paramedic Gary Mills arrived at the family home within minutes of the call, made at 10.05am, and found AhKiell freezing cold and wet.

Mr Mills noticed immediately that baby AhKiell was soaking wet including his hair, Mr Langdon said.

Mr Mills held him face down in an effort to clear his airways but he noticed as he was handling AhKiell that the baby was freezing cold. It was a warm time of year.

The baby was taking just four large gasps per minute instead of the 30-40 breaths expected for a normal baby, the court heard.

His heartbeat was just 30 beats per minute, when it should have been between 90 and 130.

AhKiell was taken to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, where a CT scan showed he had suffered a brain injury that was not survivable.

He was pronounced dead at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children at 1.44pm on July 31.

A post-mortem examination found AhKiells death was caused by a lack of oxygen to his brain.

Drowning cannot be excluded as a cause, Mr Langdon told the jury.

You will have to consider whether AhKiell was deliberately submerged in water or whether water was poured down his throat.

Mr Walker was obsessed with the babys constipation. You will need to consider whether the fatal event was part of a wholly inappropriate reaction to the obsession.

Bottles with teats cut to increase the water flow were discovered in the family home but this would not explain why AhKiell was soaking wet, Mr Langdon said.

AhKiell may also have been seriously shaken before death.

A pathologist found four older fractures to AhKiells ribs, which there was no credible accidental reason for, Mr Langdon added.

The medical picture is of a baby who had been significantly injured during his short life before the event that caused his death, he said.

Mr Langdon told the jury that accounts given in police interviews by Walker and Henry did not explain AhKiells injuries.

It is inconceivable that one parent was responsible without the other one knowing, he said.

The court heard Henry told friends she wanted to end her relationship with Walker by the time AhKiell was nine or 10 weeks old.

In a text message to her mother, Henry wrote: Hes so horrible to AhKiell, adding that he couldnt handle AhKiell crying.

On July 24, a neighbour heard terrible screaming coming from the family home, followed by a female voice shouting what have you done, what have you done?.

There was further shouting from the property on July 28 and 29, it is alleged.

Henry, of Tuffley, Gloucestershire, and Walker, of Lansdowne Green, London, deny all the charges against them.Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and ex-US President Bill Clinton grasp hands with one other as they attend an event to mark the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement at Queens University

The sun didn't really shine on the 20th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, either literally or metaphorically. On the eve of the anniversary Sinn Fein and SDLP councillors voted to retain the name of an IRA gunman on a children's play park in Newry and on the evening of the anniversary there was a gun attack in north Belfast.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein attempted to explain away what Gerry Adams had said about the "legitimacy" of violence, even as he was hobnobbing with the other 'peacemakers'. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton flew in for the anniversary but they are men with tarnished reputations.

The truth is that whilst the guns may be largely silent, we have not seen the emergence of the 'shared and better' society that many of us desire. Instead the 'long war' of Irish republicanism has moved on to new battlefields and has opened up new fronts.

Twenty years ago I voted against the Belfast Agreement because it was deeply flawed. Some of those flaws were 'big ticket' issues. Others were less blatant and immediate but after 20 years we can see the outworking of the flaws.

The current political impasse came when Sinn Fein collapsed the Northern Ireland Assembly over their demand for an Irish Language Act. This highlights the fact that 'culture is upstream from politics' and that Sinn Fein has been running a 'culture war'.

Back in 1995, three years before the Belfast Agreement, Professor Arthur Aughey wrote the pamphlet Irish Kulturkampf and in November 1999, the year after the Belfast Agreement, Professor Edna Longley used the same term for the title of a paper she gave to the Irish Association.

She started that paper with this advice: "More attention should be paid to the cultural dimension of the 'peace process'.

"The 30-years war over Northern Ireland cannot be separated from a longer-term Irish Kulturkampf or culture-war.

"The culture-war has been ugly too."

Unfortunately the Belfast Agreement contributed negatively to that culture-war.

In a section on 'Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity' it made a series of eight specific commitments to the Irish language, as demanded by Sinn Fein, with not a single commitment to any other cultural tradition. Yes, it was in a section about 'equality' but eight to nil is not equality.

The Belfast Agreement created a preferential position for Irish-Gaelic culture and embedded it in law and in practice.

As a result, good practice and good relations were cast aside at the behest of Sinn Fein.

Today another Sinn Fein demand, for an Irish Language Act, is at the heart of the impasse as Sinn Fein seek to build on the preferential commitments that they extracted 20 years ago.

We would do well to reflect on the words of Professor Longley that "more attention should be paid to the cultural dimension of the peace process" and that has to mean that we approach that cultural dimension in a holistic way. There are a number of cultural traditions here in Northern Ireland, of which Irish is one but only one, and that is where equity and equality must come into the conversation.

Another flaw in the Belfast Agreement was the imbalance in our relationships north-south and east-west. I have to concede that some north-south bodies may well be rather less exciting than others and I can recall sitting at North-South Ministerial Council meetings where we had lengthy explanations about the mollusc population of Carlingford Lough.

However, the fact remains that there are north-south bodies and not all of them are so benign. The creation of Tourism Ireland certainly diminished the ability of Northern Ireland to market itself internationally as anything other than a part of 'Ireland'.

On the other hand the British-Irish Council lacks the structure of the north-south bodies and in truth seems to have been a fig-leaf for unionist negotiators to help them concede the north-south arrangements.

It could have been something of real value but sadly the opportunity was lost.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the authors of the Belfast Agreement made some bad mistakes and we are living with that legacy.Every year we see our brightest young people out-perform their peers in other parts of the UK in GCSE and A-level examinations, although it has to be admitted that far too many pupils still leave school with no or very few qualifications (stock image)

Education, along with health, is one of the fundamental services provided by government. As such it is imperative that the education system is kept functioning at as high a level as possible.

Every year we see our brightest young people out-perform their peers in other parts of the UK in GCSE and A-level examinations, although it has to be admitted that far too many pupils still leave school with no or very few qualifications.

The current squeeze on the public purse has hit education hard and the Education Authority, along with the Catholic, integrated and Irish-medium sectors, have to attempt to improve efficiency given the budgetary constraints.

A review of the system has found 27 schools which could face closure or merger due to sustainability issues. These are on top of 40 schools which were similarly judged last year.

While any action will have to go to public consultation, and will be fiercely resisted by parents and probably politicians in affected areas, an even more emotive proposal is also on the cards.

The Education Authority has said that seven out of 10 special schools in Belfast should shut. This has so appalled parents that there are suggestions they could take legal action to challenge the proposal.

It is easy to understand the parents' anger. Children with special educational needs require intensive assistance in the classroom and many parents feel this is best delivered in schools designed to cater for such pupils.

They fear that their children will be upset if they are moved into mainstream schools and will not get the same intensive help due to competing demands from other pupils.

There is no doubt that the education authorities face dilemmas in the current financial climate.

Head teachers have warned that some subjects may have to be dropped or other school activities jettisoned because there is not enough money to go around.

Reducing the size of the schools estate is a tempting answer, but it will not be a quick fix as any closures or mergers would take a considerable time to implement.

This is exactly the sort of issue that needs the firm hand of government and a locally elected Education Minister to oversee. Of course, there is little likelihood of that post being filled in this school year, and even if devolution is restored the parties may regard it as a poisoned chalice.Prime Minister Theresa May (second from right) stands with First Secretary of State Damian Green (far right), Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster, and DUP Deputy Leader Nigel Dodds, as DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson shakes hands with Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury and Chief Whip Gavin Williamson inside 10 Downing Street in June last year

In 1998, I was still in my twenties and embarking on the early stages of my professional career. Like so many who have lived through the horrors of the terrorist violence, I desperately wanted a peaceful future, for the bloodshed to be behind us and for normal government in Northern Ireland.

But I was concerned at the price many seemed only too willing to pay. For decades the community had been ravaged by the men of violence. The prison gates being thrown open for scores of terrorist prisoners to walk free was a moral outrage. A proud police force was humiliated. And republicans could be in government while retaining their weapons, despite their recent use of tactical temporary ceasefires.

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Unionists didn't believe the words of Sinn Fein and didn't believe they wanted Stormont to work.

The text of the agreement was full of ambiguity, and deliberately so. Yet unsurprisingly it was endorsed by practically all of nationalist Ireland but at best half of unionism, and that only after additional promises quickly ditched by Tony Blair.

The UUP was divided but chose to support the agreement. Things only deteriorated for them over ensuing years. It was evident the Democratic Unionist Party was by far the best party to represent unionism and secure improvements, and I joined in January 2004.

Achieving any change to the content of the agreement was extremely difficult, and some argued impossible, but the DUP proved many wrong by persevering to ensure IRA decommissioning and support for policing and the rule of law.

Twenty years on now from the agreement, people would have expected better.

Undoubtedly Northern Ireland is an entirely different and much safer place for our children growing up.

We have made significant economic progress over recent years and begun the desperately needed rebalancing towards an innovative outward looking private sector-led economy.

But efforts to justify the terrorism continue, whether it's Gerry Adams to the international media or speakers addressing republican commemorations.

There was never the justification for taking human life. That message of non-violence should have been then and must be today, clear and unequivocal. Otherwise we risk impressionable young people and those who would exploit them seeking to claim some element of cover to replicate those actions and 'continue the struggle'.

No one would have imagined that in 2018 play parks and banners could eulogise an individual arrested with the weapon which killed 10 men in cold-blooded sectarianism at Kingsmill.

Sinn Fein-dominated councils block armed forces recruitment events, the sale of poppies and the Union flag flying for even a few days, and their mayors snub members of the royal family and refuse to present awards to teenagers in the cadet forces.

An independent three-person panel finding that the army council still runs the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein was deeply depressing. Paramilitary-linked groups continue to exert control on communities, but work we instigated is seeking to change this and promote lawfulness.

Victims are mocked. The consent principle is ignored when it doesn't suit. Even our actual name, Northern Ireland, is disrespected.

The evident progress in turning from violence is welcome but clearly there remains a great deal more to be done.

Reconciliation has been limited, and attitudes have hardened since the tearing down of the Executive by Sinn Fein.

Unfortunately, stable government has not become embedded. While some positive changes have been secured, we envisage further work to arrive at a more normal form of government.

And the same question still remains for republicans. Do they genuinely want to make Northern Ireland work? They are entitled to long-term political aspirations, however fanciful, but they must prove a willingness to govern in the here and now in the best interests of the people rather than their political project.

For all of the challenges, I remain optimistic about Northern Ireland. We are resilient. We have wonderful people. Our prospects are good and devolved government can improve them.

However, Stormont needs to be sustainable. We can no longer be at the whim of those fretting over tough decisions or who feel there may be electoral advantage in collapsing the government.

It is difficult to comprehend, after the efforts to secure devolved government, the manner in which it is being blocked today.

In the same way the people of Northern Ireland were right not to bow to the threats of the IRA, it would be wrong today to simply concede to threats and ultimatums of a political nature.

I believe there are some in Sinn Fein who want to get back to proper politics, who recognise the damage that is being done to the community, and our reputation to international investors; their voices are being drowned out by the hawks in their "movement".

We have overcome much greater challenges and I am confident we will overcome the present one too, and see devolution restored.

The Union today is secure.

The understandable siege mentality that existed throughout the Troubles and beyond need no longer apply.

Yes, opponents of unionism are only too keen to talk up the challenges of exiting the EU, but no one from any party is advocating an outcome that would damage Northern Ireland, and a sensible way through will be found.

And calls for border polls can be unsettling, but I have full confidence in the people of Northern Ireland who appreciate and recognise the strengths inherent in our United Kingdom.

In the coming months, I will be stepping up a campaign in Northern Ireland and further afield the benefits of the Union, and the safety, security and stability it offers, at this time of change in Europe and across the world.

The rhetoric of our opponents will not force unionists back into a bunker, into a negative or defensive mind-set.

Unionism has never been in a stronger position, or had greater influence.

Our Confidence and Supply arrangement with the Conservatives has been demonstrated to bring benefit to everyone in Northern Ireland.

Unionism succeeds through being confident and forward-looking, and indeed through embracing all our cultures and perspectives.

If we begin to genuinely respect each other and our different outlooks, then we can achieve a settled community in a way we haven't experienced before.6. A Removal of Shame

There is therefore no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. (Romans 8:8)

When we are saved, Christs death covers over all of our sin and reconciles us to the Father. No longer do we have to live under the weight of our sin, afraid we will never be worthy enough to reconcile with God. When we have sinned, all we need to do is confess our sin to the Lord, and repent from our ways. Christs death allow us to live without condemnation, free in our knowledge that we are worthy simply because we are Gods children.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

Photo Credit: UnsplashPlus, Bill's Message of the Day, is Joe Biden lying to us?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesUnder an Ayushman Bharat, government aims to set up 1.5 lakh wellness centre by 2022

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the aspirational district programme as well as India's first wellness centre under Ayushman Bharat on April 14 at Bijapur, Chattisgarh.

The two programmes are key initiatives of the NITI Aayog.

Under the 'Transformation of Aspirational Districts programme, the government aims to quickly and effectively transform the 115 districts based on real-time monitoring.

The broad contours of the programme are convergence (of Central & State Schemes), collaboration of Central, State level Prabhari Officers & District Collectors), and Competition among districts driven by a mass Movement.

The idea is to focus on the strength of each district, identify low-hanging fruits for immediate improvement, measure progress and rank districts.

Under an Ayushman Bharat, government aims to set up 1.5 lakh wellness centre by 2022 that will leverage on comprehensive primary health care for preventive, promotive and curative care.Sri Vallabhacharya: Life, Legends And Philosophy Faith Mysticism lekhaka-Subodini Menon

Sri Vallabhacharya Jayanti is celebrated to commemorate the day on which Sri Vallabhacharya saw Lord Sri Krishna in the form of Srinath Ji. Sri Vallabhacharya is a great saint who comes under the Vaishnava Sect, who are the devotees of Lord Vishnu and his avatars. He went on to give rise to the Vedanta sect of Pushti marg.

This year, Sri Vallabhacharya Jayanti falls on the 12th of April. According to the Hindu calendar, the Shukla Paksha Pratipada of the month Magha is the day on which Sri Vallabhacharya Jayanti is observed.

Lord Sri Krishna is a benevolent deity who comes rushing when his devotee prays to him. It doesn't matter what physical or spiritual form the devotee worships him in. Sri Vallabhacharya was a staunch devotee of Lord Sri Krishna and he worshipped his Lord in the form of Srinath Ji. Sri Vallabhacharya also spread his ways of worship as a method to attain Nirvana to all his disciples.

Today, we shall talk about the things that you need to know about the great saint Sri Vallabhacharya. Read on to know more.

The Story Of The Birth Of Sri Vallabhacharya

 Parents Leave For Pilgrimage

Sri Vallabhacharya was born to Lakshman Bhatt and Illammagaru. The legend says that the couple had performed 95 yagnyas as per their Guru's advice. The remaining 5 yagnays had yet to be performed. To perform the yagnya, the couple set out on a pilgrimage to North India. At Varanasi, they performed the remaining yagnyas, but were unable to perform the 'poornahooti' or the finishing ritual. They had to escape due to some issues in the area.

 Birth Of A Weak Baby

They reached Raipur in Madhya Pradesh. Here, Illammagaru gave birth to a weak baby, as she was under physical and mental stress. There was no way to bring the baby to health. Hence, the parents left the baby and returned to their ancestral village.

 Illammagaru Had A Dream

The unfortunate parents were walking back home and night fell on them. They lay down to sleep. The mother, Illammagaru, saw a dream while she slept, in which Lord Sri Krishna appeared. He said, "the boy that you left under the tree for dead is none other than me".

 The Parents Received A Surprise

Illammagaru woke up with a surprise and shook her husband awake. When she narrated the dream to him, he too was taken aback. Both of them ran back to the place where they had abandoned their baby. When they reached the place, they were surprised to see that the baby was surrounded by fire, as if it was protecting him from the elements of the night. In the midst of the fire lay the baby smiling mysteriously. The parents lovingly named their child Vallah. The name Vallah went on to become Sri Vallabhacharya.

The Story Of Sri Vallabhacharya Finding The Idol Of Lord Srinath Ji

It is said that Sri Vallabhacharya noted that a cow would go into the mountain and let her milk down at a particular place. Sri Vallabhacharya followed the cow for many days and saw this auspicious incident.

But no matter how much he thought about it, he couldn't decipher the mystery behind the incident. He then decided to dig that place up. Upon excavating that area, he found an idol of Lord Sri Krishna that Sri Vallabhacharya called Srinath Ji.

Sri Vallabhacharya established the idol in that very place and began to perform ritualistic worship there. It is believed that the specific idol was worshipped for the first time by none other than Sri Vallabhacharya himself.

Teachings Of Sri Vallabhacharya

 Vishuddh Advaitha Vedanta

The philosophy of Sri Vallabhacharya is called Pure Dualism or Vishuddh Advaita Vedanta. It basically revolves around bhakti in its purest form. He believed that the soul and God are not one entity. The soul has only one aim in its life, which is to be united to the God. Pushti Marg or the divine pathway was cited by him as the way to realize God. He said that the scriptures like the Bhagvat Gita, Srimad Bhagvat and the Bramha Sutra, all pointed to the Pushti Marg.

 Love For Lord Krishna

He described Pushti as the divine love for Lord Krishna. It is only the pure Love for Lord Krishna that will lead the soul to Nirvana or salvation. Sri Vallabhacharya said that the mere worshipping of Lord Krishna is not the Key. One must have such love that invokes Vatsalya or the feeling of maternal love for Lord Krishna. Such is the kind of pure love that attracts the Lord.

 He Did Not Agree To The Philosophy Of Adi Shankaracharya

Sri Vallabhacharya said that the soul exists the same way that God exists. The soul will not achieve peace unless it has bhakti. He said one must be self-sacrificing in the devotion to the Lord.

 He Believed That Renunciation Is Important

Sri Vallabhacharya believed that renunciation was important if the actions of Vedic bhakti had to be fruitful. To achieve the God, one should renounce material pleasures, affections and bonds. Ego and pride should be left behind. Everything that holds the mind in bonds should be sacrificed at the feet of Lord Krishna.

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Story first published: Thursday, April 12, 2018, 6:00 [IST]A Manitoba judge is calling for changes following the death of a 16-year-old girl who hanged herself while in custody at the Brandon jail in 2013.

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This article was published 12/4/2018 (1267 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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A Manitoba judge is calling for changes following the death of a 16-year-old girl who hanged herself while in custody at the Brandon jail in 2013.

Provincial court Judge Shauna Hewitt-Michta made five recommendations following an inquest into the girls death, including a review into the number of available secure foster placements for high-risk youth in crisis in Manitoba.

"(This girl) was a young Indigenous female. She was not murdered and is not missing, but she is lost all the same," Hewitt-Michta said in her report. "(Her) case is another reminder that Indigenous persons are vastly overrepresented in the child welfare and criminal justice systems and in correctional facility populations."

The girl, who cannot be named due to a publication ban under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, was a ward of Dakota Ojibway Child and Family Services at the time of her death. She became a chronic runaway from 14 foster placements, began abusing alcohol and illicit drugs and ended up on the streets of Winnipeg being sexually exploited.

DOCFS moved her to western Manitoba, where she was placed at Specialized Foster Homes, a private foster home business for high-risk youth. She initially did well with access to psychiatric medications and therapy, but access to drugs and alcohol sent her back on a downward spiral.

The girl was being held at the Brandon Correctional Centre after allegedly stealing Nytol from a drug store when she hanged herself in her cell in the juvenile unit at the Brandon Correctional Centre on Sept. 28, 2013, dying in hospital four days later.

Shed been at the jail for eight days, an unusually long stay for a youth at the BCC.

The length of time the girl remained in care was concerning, Hewitt-Michta said, as federal law forbids the incarceration of children as a substitute for child welfare.

"BCC arguably had care of (the girl) during the relevant period in the absence of a sufficiently secure foster placement. The offences with which she was charged were not crimes of violence and were not particularly serious. At sentencing, it is quite possible (she) would not have received a custodial disposition," Hewitt-Michta said. "(It is) tough to ignore the opportunity this inquest offers to draw attention to the need for adequate safe and secure foster placement options for high-risk youth in crisis."

Missteps in ensuring the girl was given her prescribed anti-depressant, anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety medications, as well as contradictions within child welfare agencies as to who was responsible for what once the girl entered BCC, were also highlighted.

Hewitt-Michta recommended child welfare agencies revamp policies and procedures to clarify the responsibilities of the agency should a youth be incarcerated and ensure a thorough background of the youth is provided to the correctional centre.

Hewitt-Michta also recommended that corrections review existing training related to suicide risk assessment, due to some correctional officers being reluctant or uncertain about when to override a computer generated risk designation.

She also recommended that corrections provide additional activity options in the juvenile unit at the BCC after evidence taken during the inquest suggested the BCC only had one exercise bike in the unit.

"I wish to express my sympathy to the family and friends of (hers)," Hewitt-Michta said. "She was by all accounts a bright young woman with abundant potential. Her tragic death has already served as impetus for important changes that may prevent similar deaths in future."

 edebooy@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @edebooyArnotts on Dublin's Henry Street is to get an 11m upgrade.

The city landmark will egt the fund injection from parent company Selfridges, with the northside department store set to be refurbised with an improvement to its IT systems.

The Irish Times reports that Arnotts will also open a new toy department soon, while it will collaborate with the Little Museum of Dublin for its 175th anniversary next month.

The Dublin Chamber of Commerce welcomed the investment, citing it as a "vote of confidence doe Dublin city centre".

The Chambers Head of Public Affairs Graeme McQueen said: This investment is one in the eye for those who say that city centre retail has no future. This investment will ensure that Arnotts remains at the heart of Dublin citys retail offering  as it has been for the past 175 years".

- Digital DeskBy Padraig Hoare

Cork will have more transatlantic flights to US destinations like New York in the future as more efficient aircraft become prevalent, according to Failte Irelands chairman.

Former Ryanair deputy CEO and current chairman of the tourism authority, Michael Cawley, said Norwegian Air Internationals suspension of its winter schedule to Providence, Rhode Island was a temporary blip for Cork Airport.

Mr Cawley was speaking as it emerged Aer Lingus owner IAG was not ruling out a bid for Norwegian after buying 4.6% of its shares.

Norwegian shares soared more than 47% upon the speculation.

Norwegian said it was suspending the Cork-Providence route from this November with a view to returning for the summer schedule of 2019. It also scaled back flights to Providence from Shannon, Edinburgh, and Bergen in Norway.

The suspension was met with anger from Irish political and business leaders, who accused Norwegian of using Corks first ever transatlantic flights as bait to gain a licence from the US Department of Transport.

Norwegian was finally given the go-ahead after a protracted battle with bipartisan political opposition in the US.

Stakeholders from Cork were credited by the airline as providing a persuasive argument for the granting of a licence.

Mr Cawley said Norwegians suspension of winter flights was a temporary blip for Cork Airport and that the suspension was due to the airlines own fragility rather than Cork.

They are about a third the size of Ryanair in volume terms but 3% of Ryanairs value. They are extremely fragile so they are making decisions that are not necessarily reflective of the destinations, but decisions for the short-term. With the advent of single-aisle aircraft that can fly across the Atlantic, Cork will get its share over time of transatlantic on a more solid basis. It is a temporary blip, he said.

The new Airbus A321Neo aircraft have been predicted by aviation experts to give a new lease of life to smaller airports like Cork because of their longer and more efficient range with less fuel used.

Airbus currently has over 6,000 orders for A320Neo aircraft and almost 2,000 of the related A321Neo so far.

Insiders have said Cork will see more airlines fly transatlantic once the Airbus aircraft become mainstream. Norwegian has used Boeing aircraft for its transatlantic flights.

Norwegian said it was unaware that IAG had bought shares in the company until the Aer Lingus and British Airways owner announced it publicly.

A spokesman for Norwegian said: Norwegian has not been in any discussions or dialogue with IAG about the matter. Norwegian believes that IAGs interest in the company confirms the sustainability and potential of our business model and global growth.

IAG said it considered Norwegian as an attractive investment and said it may bid for it in the future.

The minority investment is intended to establish a position from which to initiate discussions with Norwegian, including the possibility of a full offer for Norwegian, it said.

IAG confirms that no such discussions have taken place to date, that it has taken no decision to make an offer at this time and that there is no certainty that any such decision will be made.Aer Lingus and British Airways owner International Airlines Group (IAG) has confirmed that it is exploring a potential acquisition of low-cost carrier Norwegian Air Shuttle.

IAG said in a stock market announcement that it has acquired a 4.61% stake in the airline, which is "intended to establish a position from which to initiate discussions with Norwegian", including the possibility of a full offer for the firm.By Geoff Percival

Shares in Irish mining firm Kenmare Resources fell by more than 2% on the back of the company reporting a slow start to the year.

The Dublin-based company, which owns the Moma titanium mine in Mozambique, said its heavy mineral concentrate output fell by 12%, to 311,000 tonnes, on a year-on-year basis in the first three months of 2018.

A change of mining direction for one of the mines wet concentrator plants and some unforeseen stoppages meant first-quarter production was below the companys expectations.

Kenmares share price  down around 24% over the last 12 months  fell by almost 0.8% in Dublin yesterday and over 2% in London on the back of the trading update.

Managing director Michael Carvill said the firm still expects higher production volumes for the year and anticipates achieving the mid-range of its 2018 guidance. That target would equate to around 950,000 tonnes of ilmenite and nearly 70,000 tonnes of zircon being produced this year.

Davy Stockbrokers said demand for titanium feedstock and zircon remains strong and pricing is increasing as expected. Davy said it expects Kenmare to ship over 1m tonnes of final product in 2018.

Kenmare returned to full-year profit last year, posting an after-tax profit of $19.4m (15.6m) for 2017, compared to a loss of $15.2m in 2016.

A dip in first-quarter mining output, compared to recent quarters, reflects tougher mining conditions and stoppages. That said, with maintenance programmes completed and planned expansion work on track, annual mid-range production guidance for 2018 has been maintained, said Davy analyst Job Langbroek.By Eamon Quinn

French shopping centre owner Klepierre raised its takeover offer for rival Hammerson, but the London-listed company said it still undervalued its worth and advised shareholders to reject it.

Hammerson said the proposed offer, made up of 50% in new Klepierre shares and the rest in cash, was only a marginal increase on Klepierres offer, which was worth 4.9bn (5.6bn) and which it rejected in early March.

The company is a major retail owner in Ireland. In a business update, the property group last week hailed the strong performance of Dundrum  which at 124,000 sq metres is the countrys largest shopping centre  and its other Irish assets for delivering a particularly strong leasing performance. It has assets here worth 1.26bn, or around a 10th of its overall property value, of almost 12.1bn.

With Allianz, Hammerson owns half of Dundrum Shopping Centre; a half share with Iput and Irish Life in the 46,000-square-metre Swords Pavillions; and, with Irish Life, half of the 30,000 sq metre Ilac Centre. It also controls the nearby 1916 battlefield site.

It owns, outright, the Abbey Retail Park in Belfast and has a significant minority stake in the Kildare Village.

While Hammerson, which in December agreed an all-share offer to buy smaller UK rival Intu Properties, rejected the latest Klepierre offer, chairman David Tyler said it remained open to discuss any proposal which properly reflected the value of the company.

Klepierres approach has threatened to disrupt Hammersons own plan to buy Intu, which owns the Trafford shopping centre in Manchester.

In Britain, Hammerson owns large minority stakes in Brent Cross in London and in Birminghams Bullring. In France, it has a number of retail centres.

It said last week it was weathering the difficulties faced in UK retailing, including the restructuring and administrations of New Look and Toys R Us in Britain. Hammerson has net debt of 3.4bn.

Hammerson shares initially rose as much as 2.3%, but then fell back and were down 0.5% in late trading, valuing it at 4.16bn (4.77bn).

Klepierre is much bigger, at 10.36bn. Its shares fell slightly in Paris. Analysts were not surprised by Hammersons share price fall.

Broker Stifel noted the apparent lack of conviction from Klepierre, indicating that a substantially higher formal offer will not be forthcoming.

Liberum Capital called the Klepierre proposal underwhelming.

- Additional reporting ReutersBy Gordon Deegan

A 90m expansion of the Wicklow studios where the drama series Vikings is filmed is on hold after locals appealed the decision to grant planning permission.

Last month, Wicklow County Council approved Ashford Studios plans to build four new 40,000sq ft film studios, a television studio, new offices, support space, and a visitor centre.

Ashford Studios had been looking to commence work on the project in June but the appeal will, at the very least, delay works by four to six months.

Local residents Emily Olive Hill and Sharon Hughes lodged an appeal against the planning decision with An Bord Pleanala, stating that the scale and mass of the proposed development is not in keeping with the rural character of the area.

The proposed development will inevitably radically alter the existing rural landscape and the views of the unspoilt hills forming the site, says the appeal.

The appeal also raises concerns about the possibility of night-time filming, which is likely to result in night-time noise and light pollution within this rural area, which may have a significant negative impact.

While the objectors said they are not opposed to the expansion, in principle, they claimed the current plan does not conform with a number of requirements attached to the land zoning as set out in the Wicklow County Development Plan.

The most recent accounts for Ashford Studios show it recorded profits of 1.59m in 2016.By Natasha Reid

The barrister for a man charged with murdering another man in his home has suggested that his client was trying to wrestle the knife from his self-harming nephew when it entered the deceased mans chest.

Michael Bowman SC was cross-examining his clients nephew in the Central Criminal Court trial of a 37-year-old a father of five, charged with murdering that nephews friend in Co Waterford.

Tadhg Butler, with an address at Seafield in Tramore, is accused of murdering 25-year-old Michael ODwyer on 10th January 2014. He has pleaded not guilty.

Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, prosecuting, read out the statement made later that day by Mr Butlers nephew, Tony OGrady. He told the gardai that his uncle had simply walked up to the deceased and stuck a butchers knife into his chest during a party in Mr Butlers home.

However, the 25-year-old told the court that he had no recollection of giving that statement or of any of the events from that time, as he was on medication for mental disorders and was a drug addict at the time.

Under cross-examination by Mr Bowman, he agreed that his client had previously wrestled implements from him to prevent him self-harming.

He agreed that he would have been upset that night as it was approaching the anniversary of the death of his only sibling, who had died of a drug overdose outside a Dublin takeaway.

He agreed that he could have taken a knife from the kitchen with the intention of harming himself, and could have said that he wanted to end it all.

He agreed that his uncle could have tried to intervene and that he could have resisted.

And he (the accused) struggled to take the knife off you, and he forcibly pulled the knife out of your hand in circumstances where Mr ODwyer was standing beside him or behind him and the knife went into him? suggested Mr Bowman. Could that be possible. Could it reasonably be true?

Yes, it could, but Ive no recollection, agreed Mr OGrady.

The jury also heard that Mr ODwyer had died of a single stab wound to his chest.

State Pathologist Professor Marie Cassidy had carried out a post-mortem exam on his body following his death in hospital hours after receiving the wound.

She told Mr Vaughan Buckley that he had received the penetrating injury between ribs on the front of his body. She said that his hospital notes showed that a litre and a half of blood had been drained from inside his chest cavity and that blood had also been suctioned out of his upper airways.

He was taken to theatre, where a wound was also noted in the tissues around his heart. An attempt was made to stem the bleeding but the procedure was eventually abandoned. He appeared to have developed a blood clotting abnormality, the bleeding could not be controlled and he was pronounced dead.

She concluded that he died from a single stab wound to the left of his chest, that injured his heart and left lung

She said there had been a single forward thrust into body and that the direction appeared to be upwards towards the middle of the body. There were no defensive or other injuries.

She agreed with Mr Bowman that, once the skin was pierced, no extra force would have been needed to drive the blade in further.

The trial continues tomorrow morning before Mr Justice Paul Butler and a jury of six men and six women.Arlene Foster is to give evidence today to the inquiry into the Cash for Ash scheme.

The mishandling of the renewable heat incentive led to the collapse of the Northern Executive, after the then Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness resigned.

Talks on restoring power-sharing are due to resume this week, but DUP MP, Ian Paisley Jr, says his party will not "roll over" and give in to Sinn Fein's demands.

Mr Paisley Jr said: "We have always been open and up for any negotiation or any settlement that we can try to achieve that is fair and is balanced."

It comes after Mrs Foster yesterday confirmed she sought to keep a flawed green energy scheme in Northern Ireland open for several weeks.

The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) had been overspent and the decision was taken to close it as soon as "reasonably practicable", according to a witness statement from the DUP leader published by a public inquiry.

The minister in charge, Jonathan Bell, planned to close the scheme but it ran for a further fortnight after former First Minister Mrs Foster became involved.

She wrote: "Following the indication of a very early closure date representations were made by a number of public representatives that a little more time should be allowed before the scheme was closed.

"On this basis I asked the DETI minister to delay the closure by several weeks."

Mrs Foster had been enterprise minister when the scheme was established.

Power-sharing collapsed 15 months ago in a row over the DUP's handling of RHI.

Part of the problem with RHI was the failure to introduce cost controls, which were imposed on the scheme in Great Britain.

Mrs Foster wrote: "I had no influence whatsoever in relation to the cost controls introduced in 2015.

"However, in relation to the closure of the scheme in 2016 and with the agreement of the deputy First Minister, I suggested to the DETI Minister (Jonathan Bell) that the scheme should be closed as soon as reasonably practicable and certainly before the mid-March date that had been proposed."

Even after the First Minister requested a delay in closure it was still inside the original date proposed by the DETI minister.

She wrote: "I met with Minister Bell around this time in the presence of my special adviser Timothy Johnston.

"We discussed the need to allow a further two weeks for those with boiler installations in progress to complete the works."

She said she felt intimidated by Mr Bell's "aggressive" attitude at this meeting.

"Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister involvement in January and February 2016 regarding the timing of the closure of the scheme to new applicants was necessary and appropriate given the fact that the matter was by then cross-cutting."

The RHI ended up paying out more than it cost to fuel wood-burning boilers and led to the collapse of powersharing following a fall out between Sinn Fein and the DUP.

Earlier, Mrs Foster's former special adviser Andrew Crawford said he did not try to keep the scheme open.

He also said he thought minutes had been taken of a key meeting surrounding cost controls.

Mrs Foster and a senior civil servant have different recollections of a series of meetings on the issue while she was the powersharing minister responsible for RHI.

Mr Crawford said civil servants usually wrote in a blue book during discussions.

He added: "There were always people there who were taking notes.

"I cannot remember an occasion when they stopped recording those notes. I believed notes were always taken by officials."

- Digital Desk and PAIreland's insistence that the Brexit treaty includes a backstop to preserve the island's open border enjoys the full support of Germany, the country's foreign minister has said.

Germany's new federal foreign minister, Heiko Maas, made the pledge as he met Irish Deputy Premier Simon Coveney in Dublin.

The discussions happened ahead of Mr Maas's scheduled meeting with UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnston.

The minister said Germans understood the emotional sensitivities around the border, given his country's own experience of division.

"I do understand the need that we do whatever we can in order to avoid a flaring up of a historic conflict," he said.

"We have to do everything we can to avoid the glimmer of seeing something like a hard border become reality."

Mr Coveney said the solidarity shown by Germany was "very, very reassuring".

"We have got unambiguous solidarity today from the largest country in the European Union and that is hugely appreciated on the Irish border issue," he said.

"I think the Germans do understand actually the significance of borders and barriers and the emotions that get stirred up by that type of imagery."

He added: "The idea that anybody could be talking about the re-emergence of physical border infrastructure on the island of Ireland is something that we simply can't allow to go unchallenged or unchecked."

Mr Coveney reiterated his view that the "backstop" agreement struck between the UK and the EU in December, which would see Northern Ireland align with much of the EU's regulatory framework, was only a "fall-back" position and that the preferred option was for both parties to agree a wide-ranging post-Brexit trading agreement.

But he warned: "There will be no withdrawal treaty if there is no a backstop on Irish border in that treaty."

Mr Maas added: "We don't want to see anything close to a hard border, it's not going to be a beneficial develoment for anyone, so he (Mr Coveney) enjoys our full support.

"We believe that to be a question with regard to which Great Britain has to take a decision."

- Digital Desk and Press AssociationFarms and small businesses that straddle the Irish border could be given tax-free status, the UK's Brexit Secretary has said.

David Davis said "quite large exemptions" could be granted to businesses that are not given authorised economic operator status - "trusted traders" - to enable trade to continue between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Mr Davis also said the British Parliament is "unlikely" to sign off the withdrawal deal unless it is a "substantive" agreement.

"The withdrawal agreement involves payments of up to 39 billion. It's a lot of money and Parliament is unlikely to sign off such a deal unless we can be pretty substantive what's going to be there in the long run," he said.

In an interview with Gerard Baker, editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal, at WSJ CEO Council Europe in central London, Mr Davis was asked how he would avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.

He replied: "There's a tax border between the North and South, there's an excise border, there's a currency border. There is, in effect, no personnel border because of the Common Travel Area. The Common Travel Area was created in 1923, it's been there all the time, it's not going to go.

"So what we're talking about is, number one, how we continue to maintain a tax border - bear in mind we're looking for a zero-tariff outcome - a tax border and an excise border and so on, much as we do now."

Mr Davis said one "area of difficulty" was "very small businesses" straddling the border, such as farms and "tiny" companies.

"That is going to have to be addressed, we think, in the first case by quite large exemptions, so in effect we will give them tax-free status."

He told the conference he did not agree with the UK's shadow international trade secretary Barry Gardiner that the border issue is a "shibboleth".

Mr Gardiner was heard in a recording suggesting the row over the border issue and the accord had been "played up" and he described the deal as a shibboleth, a Hebrew term used to describe a long-held custom that is outdated.

Mr Davis said he was "old enough, I'm sorry to say, to have lived through it all, so I remember the beginning of the Troubles".

"I do not agree with one Labour politician who said this is a shibboleth - he's wrong, this is a massive deal for all concerned."Gardai have seized a double-barrel shotgun and drugs in Dublin.

The find was made as part of a planned day of action yesterday in the Tallaght area when a house was searched in the Bawnlea area by members of the local Drugs Unit.

Along with the firearm and controlled drugs found at the scene, a stolen motorcycle was also recovered during the search.

A man in his late teens was arrested and detained under Section 30 of the Offences against the State Act, 1939 at Tallaght Garda Station.

He is due to appear in court today charged in connection with the investigation.

- Digital DeskBy Gerard Cunningham

Former commissioner Martin Callinan told solicitor Gerald Kean that garda whistleblower Sgt Maurice McCabe "had not cooperated in any shape or form" with an internal garda inquiry into his complaints, the Charleton tribunal has heard.

The solicitor spoke by phone with the former commissioner several times before a panel appearance on the RTE Marian Finucane Sunday Show, on January 26, 2014.

"I mistakenly or otherwise believed the Commissioner was somebody beyond reproach," Mr Kean said.

The tribunal is looking at allegations that senior gardai were smearing the whistle blower to politicians, journalists and others.

Mr Kean said he met Mr Callinan in person only once, at a charity event in Cork. He later invited the commissioner to a dinner party, but Mr Callinan was unable to attend due to late notice.

Mr Kean said that when he spoke to Mr Callinan before his radio appearance, he was told that Sgt McCabe had not cooperated with an internal garda inquiry, and that he had breached the Data Protection Act.

"I believed I had access at that time to somebody who was beyond reproach," Mr Kean said. Mr Callinan asked Mr Kean not to disclose the fact that they had spoken.

"I was representing my own views, but very much based on the information was in the public domain since October and the information given to me by the Commissioner," Mr Kean said of his RTE appearance.

Mr Kean said that after he came off air in RTE, he was told by a producer that Sgt McCabe had called to complain. Mr Kean said this set off "alarm bells" and he rang Mr Callinan.

"He stuck to his guns, he said that's not correct, everything I said is correct," Mr Kean said.

"The commissioner didn't back down. He was standing his ground on the information he gave me, and I was happy to stand my ground based on that information," Mr Kean said.

Sgt McCabe later wrote and complained about the comments Mr Kean made on the programme, saying that he heard them at work and they left him "upset, annoyed and furious".

Mr Kean wrote to the commissioner about the complaint from Sgt McCabe, enclosing the sergeant's letter.

"I would be grateful if you could look at the letter that I have received and my proposed draft response," Mr Kean wrote. "I need to be factually correct and any assistance would certainly be appreciated."

"I felt the most appropriate step was to send that to the commissioner because he gave me the information, and ask him for his assistance in response," Mr Kean said.

The tribunal heard that Mr Kean had not disclosed the letter he wrote to the commissioner to its investigators. It was handed in to the tribunal by the garda commissioner's office during their discovery process.

Mr Kean told the tribunal he did not remember having the letter when he made discovery to the tribunal. He said at the time he was dealing with his defence to the defamation action, which had since been resolved, and apologised for the error.

The tribunal also learned that the garda commissioner, in response, prepared a draft containing suggested responses for Mr Kean.

Four paragraphs in Mr Kean's eventual response to Sgt McCabe were based on the draft from Martin Callinan, the tribunal heard.

The tribunal was shown a statement from Supt Frank Walsh who said he had met with Mr Kean in February 2014, and showed him the draft from the commissioner, but had not given it to Mr Kean. Afterwards, the handwritten draft and a typed copy were filed in Garda HQ.

Mr Kean said that he could have read the contents into the draft into his dictaphone, and this explained how his office was unable to locate a copy of the draft.

Mr Kean said that he relied on Mr Callinan's position as garda commissioner when he spoke to him.

"I believe in hindsight that he [Mr Callinan] used me to promote a position that supported his stance in the matter and that in my opinion was incorrect, and I ended up in the firing line," Mr Kean said.

The tribunal continues this afternoon.By Ann O'Loughlin

A High Court judge has set out 11 questions for determination by the Court of Justice of the EU concerning whether European Commission decisions approving EU-US data transfer channels are valid.

However, while Ms Justice Caroline Costello said she was anxious to send the matter on to the CJEU, she agreed to permit Facebook a short period to April 30 to consider whether to seek an appeal against her decision to make a reference in the first place.

The questions which the judge today approved for reference include one asking whether EU law applies to the transfer of data notwithstanding provisions of the Treaty of the EU (TEU) concerning national security and EC Directive 95/46/EC relating to public security, defence and State security.

The CJEU is also asked to decide, given findings by the Irish court concerning US law, whether personal data transferred from the EU to the US under the EC decision violates the rights of individuals under Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter.

A further question asks, if a third country data importer is subject to surveillance laws that a data protection authority (DAA) believes conflict with either Article 25 and 26 of the EC Data Protection Directive, clauses of the Annex to the EC decisions permitting the transfers and/or the EU Charter, then can a DAA use enforcement powers to suspend data flows or are such powers limited to "exceptional" cases or can a DAA use its discretion not to suspend data flows?

Ms Justice Costello gave her decision today on questions to be referred to the CJEU arising from her judgment last October on proceedings by the Data Protection Commissioner arising from a complaint by Austrian lawyer Max Schrems over the transfer of his personal Facebook data by Facebook Ireland to the US.

In her judgment, Ms Justice Costello concluded there should be a reference and later heard submissions as to the precise form of that reference.

After the judge issued the written reference today, Paul Gallagher SC, for Facebook, asked for time to consider that in the context of making a decision whether to appeal the October judgment directing a reference.

Michael Collins SC, for the DPC, said there was an issue whether there was any entitlement to appeal a High Court decision to make a reference but he was not objecting to a short time.

The judge said she would allow time to consider her decision and adjourned the matter to April 30.

The judge also provided copies to the sides of her October judgment as a number of corrections of factual errors had been made to that.

Several of the issues for reference concern Articles 25 and 26 of the Data Protection Directive. Article 25 requires EU member states to ensure, where transfers of data of EU citizens are transferred to third countries, the latter provides an adequate level of protection. Article 26 allows for a derogation from Article 25 and permits, once adequate safeguards are provided, transfers to third countries which do not provide adequate protection.

Commissioner Helen Dixon had sought the reference arising from a complaint by Mr Schrems that transfer of his personal Facebook data to the US was done in breach of his data privacy rights as an EU citizen.

The Commissioner brought the proceedings against Facebook Ireland, because its European headquarters are here, and Mr Schrems, who both opposed a reference for different reasons.

The US government, EPIC, the Business Software Alliance and Digital Europe were joined to the case as amici curiae, assistants to the court on legal issues.

Facebook argued US law and various measures, including the 2016 Privacy Shield data transfer agreement between the European Commission and US, afford adequate protection for data privacy rights of EU citizens.

Mr Schrems disputed that and opposed a reference on grounds the Commissioner had adequate information to decide his complaint.

In her October judgment, Ms Justice Costello agreed to refer after concurring with the Commissioner there are well-founded" grounds for believing the European Commission decisions approving the data transfer channels known as Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) are invalid.

Her judgment was primarily concerned with the EC Data Protection Directive and its focus on whether third country protections for EU citizens data privacy rights are "adequate".

She held the Commissioner had raised "well-founded" concerns about the absence of an effective remedy in US law compatible with the requirements of Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU for an EU citizen whose data is transferred to the US "where it may be at risk of being accessed and processed by US state agencies for national security purposes in a manner incompatible with Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter".The husband of Joanne Lee has been found dead in Mountjoy prison.

Keith Lee, who is accused of murdering his wife and leaving her body in a wardrobe, was found dead last night in Dublin.

A spokesperson for the Irish Prison Service told Independent.ie: "An inmate passed away in custody last night. Foul play is not suspected."

The 42-year-old was charged with his wife's murder after her body was discovered in a wardrobe at a house on Ranelagh Road, Dublin 6 on February 15.

Mr Lee had been previously hospitalised with serious injuries after her body was found when it is believed he jumped from a third-floor window at the scene.

He was brought to court in a wheelchair still suffering from injuries he sustained in the fall and was awaiting trial in Mountjoy prison.

This morning, when prison officers entered his cell, they found him unresponsive and he was later pronounced dead.

Gardai found Ms Lee's body wrapped up tightly in a sleeping bag and bedsheets.

She had been reported missing in the days prior to the discovery.

Joanne Lee.

- Digital DeskBy Sarah-Jane Murphy

A senior banker at Irish Life and Permanent ordered the 7.2 Billion transaction with Anglo Irish Bank be documented in case something goes pop, a jury has heard.

During a phone call in 2008 Peter Fitzpatrick, ILP Group Head of Finance, asked a colleague if there were any documents behind this deal.

Mr Fitzpatrick said ILP would be massively exposed if the deal was not recorded, and instructed standard banking language be used, to avoid fucking confusion in anyone's mind.

Today the jury at David Drumm's conspiracy to defraud trial heard audio of a phone call between Mr Fitzpatrick and Paul Kane, a former ILP liquidity manager, who was giving evidence.

Mr Drumm (51), former CEO of Anglo, accepts that multi-million euro transactions took place in between Anglo and Irish Life & Permanent (ILP) in 2008 but disputes they were fraudulent or dishonest.

Mr Kane was giving his evidence on day 53 of the trial, at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.

Paul O'Higgins SC, prosecuting, told the jury the phone call was recorded on Mr Kane's line on September 30, 2008.

Are we gonna be absolutely satisfied that if something goes pop we can stand over it as a binding agreement? Mr Fitzpatrick asked Mr Kane.

Mr Kane told Mr Fitzpatrick that he had written confirmation of the amounts of cash placed with Anglo by ILP.

So if Anglo goes bust next week and a liquidator walks in and he says give me the money back?

And we sort of say ah, but like, we had an agreement.

He'll say prove it, Mr Fitzpatrick said during the phone call.

He told Mr Kane that the deal had to be documented or ILP would be massively exposed.

Mr Kane said he would get that on the tapes straight away referring to his phone line, which was recorded for work purposes.

Use standard treasury speak so there's no fucking confusion in anyone's mind and we can stand over it, Mr Fitzpatrick said.

The jury also viewed an email written by Mr Fitzpatrick to ILP colleagues, approving a 1bn transaction with Anglo in March 2008.

To be absolutely clear, this is something which the Central Bank is encouraging us to do, he wrote.

He added that the transaction be kept fairly tight to senior management.

Mr Drumm (51) of Skerries, Dublin, has pleaded not guilty to conspiring with former bank officials Denis Casey, William McAteer, John Bowe and others to defraud depositors and investors at Anglo Irish Bank by dishonestly creating the impression that deposits in 2008 were 7.2 billion larger than they were.

The bank's former CEO has also pleaded not guilty to false accounting on December 3, 2008, by furnishing information to the market that Anglo's 2008 deposits were 7.2 billion larger than they were.

The trial, has now completed its tenth week, and continues before Judge Karen O'Connor and a jury of ten men and four women.Update 9.55pm: What has been described as a 'frosty' meeting has taken place between the Irish ambassador to Israel and government officials there.

Ambassador Alison Kelly was called before the Israeli Foreign Ministry to explain a visit by the Lord Mayor of Dublin Micheal Mac Donncha.

The Israeli government says the Lord Mayor is attending a conference in Ramallah in Palestine that they describe as 'anti-Israel'.

They also noted two recent votes of Dublin City Council to expel the Israeli ambassador and to support a boycott of the country.

Earlier: Israel summons Irish ambassador over Dublin mayor's visit

Update 5.09pm: Israel's foreign ministry has summoned Ireland's ambassador to express dismay over Dublin's mayor attending an "anti-Israel" event in Ramallah.

The ministry said in a statement that Israel expresses its "deep disappointment and shock" over the incident.

It said the event in the Palestinian city of Ramallah was "explicitly" against Israel and occurred as Israel commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day.

Israel expects a "public and formal" response from Ireland to his conduct, it said.

The Government of Israel expects an official public response from the Government of Ireland with regard to the conduct of the both the Dublin city council and of the lord mayor, who are waging a campaign of hatred and discrimination against the State of Israel.  Israel Foreign Ministry (@IsraelMFA) April 12, 2018

Micheal Mac Donncha participated in an Islamic conference about Jerusalem in Ramallah organised by the religious affairs adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The fate of the holy city is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mr Mac Donncha is a supporter of the movement to boycott the Jewish state.

Israel had tried to block his entry through its airport.

PABy Ruaidhri Giblin

Letters written by a man apparently bragging about his involvement in the murder of 16-year-old Melanie McCarthy McNamara were not reliable to safely convict him of murder, his lawyers have told the Court of Appeal.

Daniel McDonnell (23) of Brookview Lawns in Tallaght had pleaded not guilty to the murder of the 16-year-old at Brookview Way in Tallaght on February 8th 2012

The Central Criminal Court heard that Melanie was shot in the head as she sat in a car with her boyfriend and his friend in Tallaght on the date in question.

Melanie McCarthy McNamara

The trial heard that a stolen black Hyundai Santa Fe had pulled up alongside the car in which Melanie was sitting in the back seat. A shot was discharged from the Hyundai and Melanie was hit in the head.

McDonnell was one of two men arrested on suspicion of murder the following week. He maintained his right to silence in more than 20 Garda interviews but daubed incriminating graffiti on his cell wall that included: 2 in the head. The bitch is dead ha ha

A few weeks later, while detained in St Patricks Institution, McDonnell continued to brag about his involvement, according to the prosecution, this time in two letters.

The first one, addressed to his cousin, included the lines:

This war ain't stopping. Take my word for it. Close-range head shots. That's what I'm going for. If I get High Court bail I swear on my whole family, them four will be in the ground Little did he know I had a loaded 12-guage. Left his bitch all over the Sunday World front page.

In the second letter, to his former girlfriend, he wrote: That other thing wouldnt have happened if Id known she was in the car. It was meant for that other smell bag. He wont get away with bullying my Ma.

The then 19-year-old was unanimously found guilty by a jury after over four hours of deliberations and given the mandatory life sentence by Mr Justice Paul Carney on January 24, 2014.

McDonnell moved to appeal his conviction today principally over the reliability of the letters.

His barrister, Bernard Condon SC, said the prosecution's case turned on the two letters, without which, he said, there wouldnt have been a prosecution.

The only other supporting evidence was the graffiti he daubed on his cell wall.

Mr Condon said the letters should not have been admissible and further that, on their own, they did not meet the threshold for the case to go to a jury.

He said the letters were written by a 17-year-old on 23-hour lock-up, who had been on drugs since the age of 11, with a catalogue of personal circumstances which lead him to be the type of person who might be a fantasist.

In a case where there was no other evidence, Mr Condon said the letters were not the sort of material that could safely give rise to a conviction for murder.

Mr Condon listed a number of matters which ought not to have permitted the jury to consider the letters. These included McDonnells age and maturity and the circumstances in which he wrote the letter - he had been on 23-hour lock-up in a single cell for 10 days; His history of drug use since the age of 11; His level of education and emotional maturity; His ability to process information: His susceptibility to suggestibility; His poor self image and desire for attention and notoriety; The lack of other supporting evidence linking him to the crime and the lack of safeguards around how the letters were written (it wasnt video recorded).

Mr Condon said an important legal argument took place over a number of days involving evidence from four Gardai, a psychologist, in whose opinion the letters were not wholly reliable, and McDonnell himself. It resulted in a 24-line judgment, which wasn't adequate given the profound issues which were in play, Mr Condon submitted.

Further issues relating to the seizure and confiscation of the letters were also argued but, essentially, the appeal came down to the reliability of the letters.

Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Brendan Grehan SC, said the letters were manifestly voluntary, lucidly written and structured. He said they were highly relevant and of great probative value.

While the trial judges ruling was succint, Mr Grehan said it dealt with the issues that were before him.

He said the psychologist, in whose opinion the letters were not wholly reliable, accepted that there was nothing in his report to indicate that he discussed the letters with McDonnell.

Mr Grehan said McDonnell spent five days being interviewed by seasoned detectives and he maintained absolute silence throughout apart from writing graffiti on his cell wall which coincided with matters in the letters.

He said no issue had been made out in respect of the seizure of the letters and he asked what any agent of the state would do if they found a letter outlining what would happen to four people if the person who wrote the letter was released on bail.

Mr Justice George Birmingham, who sat with Mr Justice Alan Mahon and Mr Justice John Edwards, said the court would reserve its judgment.The Construction Industry Federation says there is an urgent need for the industry to attract more talent.

It comes after a new report by the Central Bank shows that one in every two workers who lost their jobs in Ireland during the recession had previously worked in construction.

However, it claims the industry has regained less than a third of all the jobs lost between 2007 and 2012.

The Construction Industry Federation is stressing the need for the industry to attract more talent to meet housing and infrastructure needs.

CIF spokesperson Dermot Carey explains what the report highlights about a lot of construction workers.

He said: "While there was a major decline in employment in the construction sector in the last number of years, that has recovered to some extent.

"But specifically, it has identified the fact that there still is a large cohort that would have worked in the construction sector - who no longer work in the construction sector, but are not within any other sector - so that it appears that they have emigrated."

He went on to say we need to entice emigrants home, as there is plenty of work.

Mr Carey said: "Well I think we need to indicate to them that the country is recovering, particularly the construction sector, and that the jobs that are available now and into the next number of years are sustainable, well-paid jobs.

"And indeed, there has been a lot of discussion about the availability of accommodation, all of those things that the jobs are sustainable, the accommodation is available."The former chief executive of the Road Safety Authority was told by the then Garda press officer Superintendent David Taylor that his phone could be monitored, the Charleton Tribunal has heard.

Noel Brett told the tribunal that he was later assured by then Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan that he was not on a list of intercepted phones.

Mr Brett said that in 2012, Conor Faughnan of the AA passed on to him information about irregularities with penalty points. He said he later met with whistleblower Sergeant Maurice McCabe about the issue and contacted the Comptroller and Auditor General, and GSOC as a result.

The tribunal is looking at allegations that senior gardai were smearing Sgt McCabe to politicians, journalists and others.

Mr Brett said that on one occasion he and RSA chairman Gay Byrne had to walk out of a meeting with former Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan that had become heated. He said that Sgt McCabe was not discussed during this meeting, which covered road safety issues.

Mr Brett said that there were rumours circulating about Sgt McCabe, and "you'd hear it in the civil service, you'd hear it from media people. It was as vague as "you can't trust him, he's got issues"."

Mr Brett said that he told then transport minister Leo Varadkar that there were rumours about Sgt McCabe. He said he did not hear the rumours from garda members.

Solicitor Gerald Kean told the tribunal that statements made on the Marian Finucane RTE radio programme on Sunday 26 January 2014 were based on information he got from former Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan.

Mr Kean was cross-examined by Micheal P O'Higgins, who represents an Garda Siochana and Mr Callinan.

Mr O'Higgins said his client had "a clear view" that Sgt McCabe had failed to avail of an opportunity to co-operate with the O'Mahoney internal Garda inquiry into his complaints.

Mr O'Higgins also said it was Mr Callinan's position that he did not tell Mr Kean not to mention his name, and that he only discussed facts in the public domain.

"No, that's simply incorrect," Mr Kean said.

Mr Kean said that he would have loved to have been able to say during the broadcast that his information came to him from the Garda commissioner. "I would have loved that opportunity," he said.

Mr Kean said that Mr Callinan told him that Sgt McCabe was a troublemaker, obstructive and difficult.

Mr Kean agreed that he had not been told anything about sexual allegations by Mr Callinan.

Mr Kean also said he did not recollect speaking to former Garda press officer Supt Taylor when he was trying to get in touch with the Garda commissioner.

Tribunal barrister Diarmaid McGuinness SC said the phone records available to the tribunal did not seem to support any contacts between Mr Kean and Supt Taylor. Mr Kean said he thought he had spoken to retired Chief Superintendent Diarmuid O'Sullivan, who suggested he contact Mr Callinan.

Mr O'Sullivan told the tribunal he did not recollect speaking to Mr Kean, but if he had been, he would have directed Mr Kean to contact the Garda press office.

Tribunal chairman Mr Justice Peter Charleton said it was "a very weird coincidence" a telephone conversation between Mr Kean and Mr O'Sullivan was followed by a phone call between Mr O'Sullivan and Mr Callinan.

Telephone records show contacts between Mr O'Sullivan and Mr Kean the Saturday before the RTE radio appearance, and on the Sunday afternoon subsequently.By Gordon Deegan

A warehouse workers action helping himself to sweets from a Celebrations box quickly turned sour after he lost his 32,306 per year job over his 'sweet tooth'.

The Slovak national brought an unfair dismissal case against his un-named employer, a food retailer here employing 3,000 people in over 100 stores.

However, the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has dismissed his action finding that the decision by the retailer to sack him was fair.

The warehouse worker was one of three workers to take some of the chocolate Celebrations sweets on the night of December 4th 2016 and a second was also dismissed with the third worker resigning.

The firm stated that it has a zero tolerance policy towards theft and that the monetary value of the sweets was irrelevant.

In her decision, WRC Adjudication Officer, Patsy Doyle said that while the dismissal was admittedly harsh for a first offence on a blemish free record, the worker was on proper notice of the zero tolerance policy no matter what the scale.

Ms Doyle said that she found that the retailer has established substantial grounds justifying the dismissal and found the dismissal to be fair in the circumstances.

The man commenced working for the retailer in August 2013 to the date of his dismissal in February 2017.

In the incident, the company report that the man took Celebration sweets out of a crate on the night of December 4th 2016 on three occasions and ate them.

The crate in question served as a container for the redistribution of damaged stock for charity, reprocessing or disposal purposes.

The food retailer spotted the worker taking the sweets on CCTV and the man was suspended on January 11th 2017.

At an internal disciplinary hearing at the retailer, the man admitted that he had taken the sweets without permission.

He went on to state that he presumed that he could take the sweets as they were in an unmarked box. He admitted that he had made a mistake, but denied that it was theft.

The retailer did acknowledge that in isolated incidents during Halloween 2013 and Easter 2014, surplus stock, including marshmallows, were distributed to staff but it stated this was not comparable to the incident before the WRC.

In February 2017, the retailer dismissed the man for gross misconduct for theft of company property on foot of his having removed and consumed stock without permission.

The retailer submitted that the warehouse worker was on notice that any type of theft of company property, regardless of the value of the item in question, to be an extremely serious matter.

A work colleague for the retailer told the WRC that when the warehouse operator was informed that he was going to be suspended, he said that was going to get the same lawyer as a colleague and obtain 50,000.

In his evidence, the worker recalled receiving surplus stock around Easter, Halloween and Christmas every single year and he understood that the loose sweets in the black crate were for general consumption on the night of December 4, 2016.

The mans solicitor told the WRC hearing that it was not unreasonable for his client to assume that a crate of mixed stock left outside an ambient office was for consumption.

The man said that he has not obtained any work since his dismissal from February of last year and that his dismissal was unreasonable.A child therapist turned fine arts student has created a collection of tiny porcelain hearts as a tribute to the babies of Tuam.

Mature student Bonnie Kavanagh, from Dublin, said her work was an attempt to acknowledge and recognise the loss of so many young lives who ended up buried in a mass grave at the site of a former mother and baby home in the Co Galway town.

The white hearts exhibit is one of a series of ceramic and glass pieces of art now on show in Dublin's Gallery Zozimus.

They are the creation of students from the National College of Art and Design.

Ms Kavanagh, a former child psychotherapist who is now doing a degree in fine arts specialising in ceramics, said the story of the Tuam babies resonated with her.

"The amount of grief and ritual and mourning that would normally be around a loss like that or around grief like that was missing in this - so this is really about grief and mourning," she said.

"Because in those times people weren't allowed to mourn, you just had to get on with it - no mourning, no recognition - so it's just a recognition or to acknowledge, I suppose.

"It's my reaction to it."

She said the hearts symbolised the souls of the lost children of Tuam.

The Tuam home for unmarried mothers, run by the Sisters of the Bon Secours, operated from 1925 to 1961.

Ms Kavanagh hailed amateur historian Catherine Corless, whose research helped discover the mass grave which is believed to hold the remains of around 800 children.

"I was just very taken by Catherine Corless and the way she kept going and was just so driven by this," she said.

"I suppose I am the same generation as Catherine so we remember that kind of secretness around that stuff in Ireland.

"But things are changing."

PAUse of chemical weapons in Syria must not go "unchallenged", says UK Cabinet

Update 8.30pm: Downing Street has said the UK Cabinet agreed the use of chemical weapons in Syria must not go "unchallenged" but gave no immediate details of UK involvement in any military action against the regime of Bashar Assad.

Following a two-hour emergency meeting summoned by Theresa May, No 10 said ministers had agreed Assad had a "track record" of using chemical weapons and that it was "highly likely" he was responsible for the attack on the rebel-held town of Douma on Saturday.

A No 10 statement said: "The Prime Minister said it was a shocking and barbaric act which killed up to 75 people, including children, in the most appalling and inhumane way.

"Cabinet agreed that the Assad regime has a track record of the use of chemical weapons and it is highly likely that the regime is responsible for Saturday's attack.

"The Prime Minister said it was a further example of the erosion of international law in relation to the use of chemical weapons, which was deeply concerning to us all.

"Following a discussion in which every member present made a contribution, Cabinet agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged."

The Downing Street statement added: "Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

"Cabinet agreed the Prime Minister should continue to work with allies in the United States and France to co-ordinate an international response."

Latest: Trump says decision on Syria will be made 'fairly soon'

Update 5.30pm: US President Donald Trump has told reporters that a decision would be made fairly soon on their response to a supposed chemical attack in Syria.

Mr Trump will be holding a number of meetings today with the US Security Council and said he will "see what happens".

These remarks follow and earlier tweet where he posted that he "never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

4.45: Italy follows Germany in excluding itself from military action

Italy's Prime Minister has announced they will not have any direct role in Western military action against the Syrian government.

Paolo Gentiloni said Italy "will not participate in Syrian military actions" but will "continue to offer logistical support to allied forces".

Meanwhile, UK minsters have begun arriving to Downing Street to attend an emergency cabinet meeting held by Prime Minister Theresa May.

LIVE: @theresa_mays Cabinet arrives at Downing Street ahead of meeting on action in Syria https://t.co/JWPCa8hrel  RT UK (@RTUKnews) April 12, 2018

4.30: US still "looking for the evidence" of chemical attack in Syria

Defence secretary James Mattis has said the US was "still assessing the intelligence" on whether Assad is to blame for the alleged chemical attack in Syria.

Speaking at a congressional committee hearing today, Mr Mattis said they believe there was a chemical attack but they are still "looking for the actual evidence".

"Some things are simply inexcusable, beyond the pale and in the worst interest of not just the chemical weapons convention but of civilisation itself," he said.

Asked what worries him most about possible military action in Syria, Defense Sec. Mattis says, "On a strategic level, it's how do we keep this from escalating out of control, if you get my drift on that." https://t.co/i96bPWCQUP pic.twitter.com/S85SOVIvLK  ABC News (@ABC) April 12, 2018

4.20pm: Chemical watchdog experts to arrive in Syria today

The first group experts from the international chemical weapons watchdog will arrive in Syria today and tomorrow, Syrian's ambassador to the UN has said.

Investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have been gathering information since the alleged chemical attack in Douma, and will undertake a fact-finding mission in the coming days.

#BREAKING First group of OPCW chemical weapons experts will arrive in Syria today: Syria's UN envoy  AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 12, 2018

5.25pm: Russia says the West should 'seriously consider' consequences of threats against Syria

Maria Zakharova, from the Russian Foreign Ministry, said today that the West should "seriously consider" the consequences of threats against Syria.

Nobody has authorised Western leaders to take on the role of global police - simultaneously investigator, prosecution, judge and executor, she said during a press briefing.

Our position is perfectly clear and defined. We are not seeking escalation.

1.45pm: France 'has proof' Syria used chlorine; Merkel says Germany won't be joining military action

France has proof that the Syrian government launched chlorine gas attacks, President Emmanuel Macron said.

Mr Macron said France would not tolerate "regimes that think everything is permitted".

Speaking on TF1 television, Mr Macron said "we have proof that chemical weapons were used, at least chlorine" in recent days by Syrian President Bashar Assad's government.

He did not say whether France is planning military action against Assad's government.

Mr Macron said he has been talking regularly this week with US President Donald Trump about the most effective response.

With increasing concerns about a US-Russia proxy war in Syria, Mr Macron insisted that "France will not allow an escalation or something that could damage the stability" of the region.

12.45pm: Merkel says Germany won't be joining military action; Trump says attack on Syria could be 'very soon or not so soon at all

Chancellor Angela Merkel has say that while it is "obvious" Syria didn't eradicate its chemical arsenal, Germany will not be taking part in any military action.

#BREAKING 'Obvious' that Syria didn't eradicate chemical arsenal: Merkel  AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 12, 2018

Mrs Merkel said in Berlin: "Germany will not take part in possible military action - I want to make clear again that there are no decisions - but we see, and support this, that everything is being done to send a signal that this use of chemical weapons is not acceptable."

11.20am: Trump says attack on Syria could be 'very soon' or 'not so soon at all'

US President Donald Trump has commented on the US response to an alleged chemical attack in Syria, saying that an attack "could be very soon or not so soon at all".

Mr Trump tweeted this morning that he "never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!"

He also said, that the US, under his Administration, "has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS".

"Where is our 'thank you America?'," he asks.

The US Security Council is due to meet later today.

10.20am: US says 'all options are on the table in response to Syria 'chemical attack'; Theresa May to hold emergency meeting

The US has said that all options are on the table in response to the suspected 'chemical attack' in Syria last week.

In a press conference held at the White House last night, spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters that a numver of options have been discussed by President Trump and his security team but no decision has been made as yet.

"The president and his national security team met today. That meeting was chaired by the vice president and they discussed a lot of options," White House Press Sec. Sarah Sanders says on Syria talks. https://t.co/YLYOTpuPzo pic.twitter.com/oVMgsjHSII  NBC News (@NBCNews) April 12, 2018

6.40am: Theresa May to discuss Syria 'chemical attack' at emergency Cabinet meeting, Airline suspends Beirut flights

Theresa May is to chair an emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the latest crisis in Syria amid signs she is preparing to join US-led air strikes against the regime of President Bashar Assad.

The British Prime Minister summoned ministers to No 10 after saying "all the indications" were that the regime was responsible for an alleged chemical attack on its own people last weekend.

The UK's Ministry of Defence refused to comment on a report in The Daily Telegraph that Royal Navy submarines had been ordered into range to launch Tomahawk cruise missile strikes as early as Thursday night.

"We don't comment on submarine movements," a spokesman said.

Separately, Downing Street would not be drawn on claims Mrs May was preparing to authorise UK forces to strike against Assad with first seeking vote in Parliament.

Syrian forces seize control of Douma, Russian media reports

In a development this morning, Russian media reported Syrian government forces had seized control of the city at the centre of the escalating tensions, Douma, where the attack is said to have taken place.

Kremlin-backed news agency Tass reported a Moscow official saying that Russian military police will be deployed to the city to maintain law and order.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had said it intends to send investigators to Douma to look for any evidence of a chemical attack.

"Today saw a landmark event in Syria's history. A state flag hoisted on the Douma building heralded control over this settlement and, hence, over entire eastern Ghouta," Yuri Yevtushenko, chief of Russia's centre for reconciliation of the warring parties in Syria, told Tass.

Earlier: Kuwait Airways suspends flights to Beiruit

An airline has announced it is stopping flights to Beirut amid safety fears as the prospect of US-led military action over chemical weapons in Syria grows.

Kuwait Airways said concerns for aircraft in the skies around Lebanon had prompted it to cancel flights to the country's capital from Thursday.

The carrier said it had received a warning from Cypriot authorities over operations in the area.

The move came after Middle East Airlines, Lebanon's national airline, said it was rerouting some of its flights "due to the recent security situation between US and Syria".

Yesterday, European aviation authorities issued a warning to airlines operating in the Eastern Mediterranean, which includes pilots flying from the UK to Cyprus, of possible military action.

The "rapid alert" told crews that "due consideration needs to be taken" of possible air-to-ground strikes or cruise missiles into Syria "within the next 72 hours".

The notification from the European Aviation Security Agency (Easa) covers the Eastern Mediterranean/Nicosia flight information region, which includes airspace over Cyprus.

Most carriers already avoid Syrian airspace due to previous warnings from aviation regulators in the UK and other countries, but the Easa alert could affect flights in neighbouring regions.

In July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over conflict-torn eastern Ukraine, killing 298 passengers and crew.

An international investigation found the missile used was taken into Ukraine from Russia, but the latter denied any involvement.

Earlier: UN Secretary-General stresses need to prevent situation 'spiralling out of control'

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has stressed the need to prevent the situation in Syria from "spiralling out of control".

Guterres expressed regret on Wednesday that the UN Security Council had been unable to reach agreement on the issue of chemical weapons in Syria.

He said he had called the ambassadors of the five veto-wielding permanent council nations - the US, Russia, China, Britain and France - "to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse".

He also renewed his "outrage" at reports of continued chemical weapons use in Syria.

In Australia, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull condemned the suspected chemical weapon attack on Douma.

Speaking to reporters in Melbourne, he said: "This is a shocking attack yet again, a war crime by the Syrian government.

"Russia has enormous influence with the Syrian regime and it should bring that influence to bear to stop the use of chemical weapons.

"We cannot accept the use of chemical weapons, whether it is in Syria by the Syrian regime or on a park bench in Salisbury, England, with the use of a nerve agent by Russian agents to seek to kill the Skripals."

- Digital Desk and Press AssociationLatest: Spokeswoman accuses UK of launching propaganda campaign against Russia

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, said allegations in relation to the Skripal poisonings are evidence of a "clear anti-Russian campaign, the like of which we have not seen in the world for a long time in terms of its scale and lack of principles".

12.25pm: International watchdog confirms Skripals poisoned with 'high purity' novichok nerve agent

The international chemical weapons watchdog has confirmed that Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a "high purity" a novichok nerve agent.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has released its report on the Salisbury attack this afternoon.

It noted that there was an "almost complete absence of impurities" in the toxic chemical.

 #OPCW issues report on technical assistance requested by the #UnitedKingdom #UK in regard to the #Salisbury incident on 4 March 2018. Find the executive summary here: https://t.co/N43P0trUiK pic.twitter.com/0LRNP7afza  OPCW (@OPCW) April 12, 2018

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson welcomed the findings, and said Russia have some questions to answer.

"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record," he said.

Earlier: International watchdog to release findings on Sergei Skripal nerve agent attack

The international chemical weapons watchdog's report on the Salisbury nerve agent attack is expected to be revealed later, as a diplomatic battle continues to rage between the UK and Russia.

Former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent thought to have been ordered by Moscow more than a month ago, leaving the pair seriously ill in hospital.

The British Foreign Office said it had asked the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to release an executive summary of its findings at midday.

It comes as Ms Skripal revealed she has rejected assistance from the Russian embassy, adding: "I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves."

The 33-year-old said she has found herself in a "totally different life" as she continues to recover from the attack.

The Russian embassy said that it doubted the authenticity of the statement and suggested it had been crafted to support Britain's version of events.

It is believed that British authorities immediately spirited Ms Skripal away to a secure location when she was discharged from hospital earlier this week.

The Russian embassy reacted angrily, suggesting in a series of tweets that the Russian national had been taken against her will.

The embassy is perturbed by a refusal from UK authorities to grant Ms Skripal's cousin Viktoria a visa to visit her family.

It escalated the war of words on Tuesday, saying in a series of statements posted on social media: "Secret resettlement of Mr and Ms Skripal, barred from any contact with their family will be seen as an abduction or at least as their forced isolation."

But Ms Skripal said in a statement: "I have specially trained officers available to me, who are helping to take care of me and to explain the investigative processes that are being undertaken.

"I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can.

"At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them.

"Most importantly, I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do.

"Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves.

"I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being.

"Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's."

The Russian embassy later said that the statement "raises new questions rather than gives answers" as it was unable to verify it.

"The text has been composed in a special way so as to support official statements made by British authorities and at the same time to exclude every possibility of Yulia's contacts with the outer world - consuls, journalists and even relatives," the embassy said in a statement.

"The document only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen."

A Foreign Office spokesman said it had asked the OPCW to distribute the report to all state parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention, including Russia.

"This transparent and open approach, which we have pursued from the outset, is in sharp contrast to the Russian state's ongoing tactics of obfuscation and distraction," the spokesman said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly attempted to challenge Britain's claims that it was responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals.

Theresa May has said that UK military experts at Porton Down found that they were poisoned by Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Russia, and that the only plausible explanation was that the Russian state was responsible.

Despite the denials from Moscow, Britain has received strong diplomatic backing from western allies for its stance, with more than 20 countries expelling in excess of 150 Russian diplomats in protest at the Russian actions.

Last week, a Russian call for a new joint investigation was voted down by 15 votes to six at a meeting of the OPCW executive council in The Hague.

Former double agent Mr Skripal was jailed in Russia for selling secrets to MI6 but was released as part of a spy swap deal in 2010 and settled in the UK.

It is hoped he will soon be fit for release from hospital, despite grave fears that the exposure to military-grade Novichok on March 4 would prove fatal.

Ms Skripal said she was treated with "such kindness" at Salisbury District Hospital, and is missing the staff there.

"I have left my father in their care, and he is still seriously ill. I too am still suffering with the effects of the nerve agent used against us.

"I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me," she said.A teacher at the Florida school where 17 people were shot dead has been arrested after authorities said he left a loaded gun in a public toilet, where a drunk homeless man picked it up and fired it.

No-one was injured but chemistry teacher Sean Simpson, from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, has been charged with failing to safely store his weapon.The writing was on the wall before the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry started. Now its being played through loud speakers on street corners: the big banks vertically integrated wealth management business is finished.

Without that integration  the ability of bank tellers to channel punters to bank-controlled advisers who guide them through bank-owned platforms into bank-produced products  its hard for banks to tie up valuable capital in wealth management. It was a rich ride for ticket clippers while it lasted.

The big banks' vertically integrated wealth management business is finished. Credit:Karl Hilzinger

The banks are belatedly facing up to reality after fighting a rear-guard action through what used to be a friendly government. (Anyone recall the 2014 FoFA wars?) Theyre exiting the business in dribs and drabs having long-since missed the peak of the market. Dumb boards and dumb management will do that.

The structural conflict of vertical integration has long been evident. Pay fat commissions for selling pups and pups will be sold. Put the incentives in place to steer trusting customers into bank products and steered they will be. Remember it was government policy that advisers were not required to do what was best for clients, but just what was OK.Identified by a distinctive 1875 bluestone cottage, 481 Melbourne Road sits on a 1606 square metre site zoned General Residential  which meant it could be marketed to non-hospitality users, including aged care, or education providers. After failing to sell following a campaign managed by another agency last year, CVAs Bradley Ellul recently auctioned the property, where it achieved a price of just over $3 million. Three bidders competed for the property which is about 400 metres from the Newport train station, seven kilometres south-west of Melbourne. Last year, a childcare operator paid a price speculated to be as high as $7 million for the ex-Returned Services League facility at the junction of Melbourne Road and Ferguson Street in Williamstown. The 2084 square metre site had been owner occupied by the RSL for 96 years. The Williamstown site traded following that RSL branch entering voluntary administration. Shortly prior, it planned to sell the site to Grocon for a reported price of about $4.5 million. The local developer had lodged plans to replace the site with a five level, 69 unit complex. Ex-Oz Post site reoffered

A major city site offloaded by Australia Post for $23.9 million in 2013 is being reoffered, with a residential redevelopment permit, and a price tag above $80 million. The Eliza Tinsley building at occupies a 2764 square metre plot within the western core of the CBD. An artist's impression of the Besgate development. In 2015 the owner, Besgate, put forward an indicative proposal for an 85-storey, 980-unit structure, for airspace above the historic c1925 building, which was to be retained. Instead, it obtained a permit for a 71-level tower which would also retain the heritage facade.

Importantly, this permit was attained under now-superseded planning guidelines, and as such has a plot ratio of 30:1. The permitted dense tower would not likely be approved under recent changes to planning laws (the maximum plot ratio is now 18:1). Both Besgate proposals were a substantial increase in density to a 43-level, 560 dwelling apartment complex, which Australia Post obtained a permit for, prior to offering the site for sale. CBREs Josh Rutman, Mark Wizel, Lewis Tong and Julian White are marketing the asset for Besgate, which is Sydney-based, but backed by Shanghai investors. This site is the second ex-Australia Post asset to be offered to the market recently. In December, a retail asset in Maling Road, Canterbury, sold for $8.45 million. The vendor paid Australia Post $7.4 million against price expectations of $6 million for the investment 18 months earlier. The Canterbury asset, and the Eliza Tinsley building, were sold while Australia Post was under the control of businessman Ahmed Fahour  at the time, the countrys highest paid public servant.

Last piece of St Kilda estate offered The local private investor who controls the prominent and historic St Kilda property known as Stafford House is offering it for sale or lease. The double-storey mansion at 42 Barkly Street, also known as the Stanthorpe Estate, and The Manse, is expected to rent for more than $250,000 per annum, or sell for a price of about $7 million. 42 Barkly Street in St Kilda is known as the Stanthorpe Estate or The Manse. Built for Scotland born merchant Andrew Sutherland in 1874, the mansion, which has in recent years been occupied as offices and medical suites, occupies an 1810 square metre block with a large area available for car parking.

This rarity allows the property to appeal to owner-occupiers or tenants including galleries, boutique businesses or child care. The backyard of this property, fronting busy St Kilda Road, was sold a few years ago to a development company part controlled by agent-turned-developer Henry Birner, who has since replaced it with an apartment complex. Another site in the immediate area  3-5 St Kilda Road  made way for a contentious 26-storey apartment tower after receiving planning ministerial approval by the now State Opposition leader, Matthew Guy. The suburbs colourful Icon building, dubbed the Lego tower rises 18-storeys across the road at 6 St Kilda Road. Beller Commercials Fred Nucara and Liam Rafferty are managing the 42 Barkly Street campaign. Brighton Bathing boxes

What could be amongst the last bathing boxes built on Brightons famous Dendy beach, are expected to sell for more than $300,000 each. The two new boxes were developed by the City of Bayside council which has been building and selling them, for revenue, in recent years. Nick Johnstone Real Estates Alan McGillivray and Nick Johnstone will auction the properties, known as 76B and 76C Dendy Beach, at the end of the month. Just one more bathing box is earmarked for sale and construction in the 2018/2019 financial year. Brighton Bathing boxes are in demand. Last December, a purchaser paid a $330,000 for a Brighton Bathing Box, surpassing the record of $326,000 set 12 months earlier.Westover's mother, Faye, was an unlicensed midwife but eventually concentrated on her talent as a herbalist, a move that turned into a substantial business. When Gene suffers an appalling burn after trying to remove a car's fuel tank without first draining it of petrol, his face is ravaged, lips burnt away, torso red raw. She treats him with her oils and he refuses painkillers because it is "the Lord's pain  and he would feel every part of it". Later he tells people of the heavenly visitations he had and how he had been ministered to by angels. The miracle becomes a "foundation myth" for the expanding business and her mother's employees become virtual disciples. Westover suffers appalling brutality at the hands of her elder brother Shawn, to whom she was once close but whose personality changes dramatically after a head injury. The arc of the book, as the title suggests, is Westover's decision to get an education; that education becomes her means of escape from a family, from whom  with the exception of three of her brothers  she is now estranged. She decides to follow her brother Tyler and go to the Mormon university, Brigham Young, in Utah. It is not an easy process for someone who hasn't set foot in a classroom, but she perseveres. A scholarship to do an MPhil at Cambridge is followed by a Harvard fellowship and a PhD at Cambridge. All within 10 years.

How does her father react? "The Lord has called me to testify," he says to her. "You have cast aside his blessings to whore after man's knowledge." In one of the book's two epigraphs, Westover cites John Dewey describing education as "a continuing reconstruction of experience". She says her book is "a renegotiation of memory and of narrative and who gets to tell a story  it is about story and how stories get constructed as you're experiencing them and in the years after". She wanted to write a story about education that was broader than the widely accepted institutionalised idea of it. "I do think we have collectively begun to conflate the institutions of education for education itself," she says. "Education is an individual's pursuit of understanding and has a lot of implications for that person, for the kind of person that they are. "In a way, I feel a lot of the most important bits of education for me in the book and the manifestation of that and the effect it had on who I was and the knock-on effects it had on the relationships I had with my own family, that had nothing to do with Harvard or Cambridge.

"Some of the most important elements were books I read on my own or they happened at BYU or people I met and conversations I had, so I wanted to offer this idea of education more than a narrow, political definition that we're starting to get." Her father always told her that she could teach herself more than anyone else could teach her. She found she had the patience to read books at home that she couldn't understand. "Anyone who grows up reading the Bible for spiritual reasons, you get accustomed to reading things that are too much for you, too profound for you  Having that belief that you should read them anyway gives you a great advantage over people who only read what they think they can understand." Not surprisingly, she had massive gaps in her knowledge of the world. Occasions such as in her early days at BYU when she asked what the Holocaust meant happened a lot. "Coming to terms with that just put me in shock, learning about something awful and learning about the depths of my ignorance. I had been brought up to believe I had received an education 

Another lightbulb moment was learning about the civil rights movement and the word "nigger", which Shawn often called her. "There was a massive gap that I could feel between how I heard that word just a few months before and how I was hearing it now. A very different understanding of what the word meant. But also of the kind of role my family was playing  passively or because of ignorance or because of wilful ignorance  just the role we were assuming in perpetuating this whole vernacular that had no purpose other than to dehumanise other people." The final break with her parents comes over brother Shawn's violence. Her parents would not accept what they had been told by her, by Tyler and her sister Audrey. They visit Harvard, wanting to take her to the Sacred Grove in Palmyra where God is said to have appeared to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Her father offers her a blessing, what she calls "terms of surrender" that she cannot accept because "what my father wanted to cast from me wasn't a demon: it was me". Westover had never written narrative until she started Educated four years ago. She hadn't read many novels. "I had to come to terms with the fact that I didn't have the skills I needed. Academic writing is such a different way of writing."

Discovering short stories helped. "They were a very good form for me. The way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have." She would listen to the New Yorker fiction podcast, on which there would be a discussion about a particular story. "I found that to be the best curriculum because they would point all the stuff out for you and once you'd seen it you'd start to recognise it in other places and pretty soon you can steal it effectively. This method of learning just really lent itself to the way I had been taught to learn." Writing Educated was therapeutic but not therapy. The difficult parts were not what she expected  the violence or the "more miserable moments with my parents towards the end"  but "the beautiful things, the way the mountain would look in the springtime, memories I had of canning with my mother; these were things that in my childhood that I'd loved the most and these were things than I'd lost. In a way I had reconciled the bad in my life, but I don't think I'd really reconciled the good." Her writing is powerful enough that there are frequent moments in the book when she is heading home and the reader wants to warn her, to tell her: no, don't go. "It took me a long time to come to terms with my decisions to let go of some of those relationships and it's taken me even longer to come to terms with, to in any way forgive myself for making that decision."Generally a concert hosted in the Melbourne Recital Centres intimate Salon inspires absolute attention and as little background noise as possible.

But audiences attending one show at the Metropolis New Music Festival will have to contend not with noisy food eaters or mobile phones going off (hopefully), but instead the crash of falling ice and other dislodged debris colliding with instruments.

Conceived by the Ad Lib Collective and performed with the Penny Quartet, Music for Our Changing Climate will see great frozen cylinders pocked with seeds and gravel  like the ice cores scientists drill for in the Arctic  hanging behind the musicians as they perform a suite of original music for soprano, strings and percussion.

Under the glare of the Salon lights, water will drip onto their instruments, eliciting a soft ting then a pop as small stones drop; or occasionally a startling crash as large sections of the ice sculpture collapse.Australian actors Don Hany and Andrew MacFarlane will star in the follow-up to Foxtel's critically acclaimed Secret City, a six-part thriller titled Secret City: Under The Eagle. Hany will play (fictional) Australian prime minister Ewan Garrity while MacFarlane will play Air Chief Marshall Wes Lockwood. The project will also star Joel Tobeck, Anna Torv, Jacki Weaver, Danielle Cormack, Sacha Horler, Marcus Graham and Justin Smith. The series, which is being filmed in Sydney and Canberra, is a Matchbox Pictures production for Foxtel.

New Zealand actor Karl Urban will star in a new series for the streaming platform Amazon, based on the Garth Ennis' comic series The Boys. Urban is best known for roles in The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek. The series will be set in a world where superheroes are vigilantes who capitalise on their fame; Urban will play Billy Butcher, part of a group of heroes out to take down their corrupt rivals. The series will also star Jack Quaid, Jessie T. Usher jnr, Erin Moriarty and New Zealand actor Antony Starr. The Boys comes from Supernatural creator Eric Kripke; the pilot will be directed by Seth Rogen. No airdate has been set.

Filming has commenced on the seventh season of Foxtel's critically acclaimed drama series Wentworth. The seventh season includes a number of additions to the show's cast including Leah Purcell, Rarriwuy Hick and Susie Porter; Porter will play Marie Winter, one of the characters in the original series Prisoner, on which Wentworth is based. Marie Winter was played in the original series by actress Maggie Millar. The sixth season of the show, meanwhile, will premiere in June, while the first season has been acquired by the ABC, who are screening it for the first time on free-to-air television.

Lord of the Rings to be retold

A stunning US$1 billion price tag has been put on the planned Amazon reboot of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The planned five-season adaptation would then become the most expensive TV series in history, dramatically eclipsing Netflix's The Crown. The rights to the book series alone have cost US$250 million with the remainder expected to be spent on production and special effects. The first season is expected to be set before the events in the books, serving as a de facto prequel. (The actual prequel, The Hobbit, notwithstanding).

Film company joins TV market

In a curious move given its parent company is being sold off to Disney, the film label Fox Searchlight has launched a television department, which is expected to carve a loud space in the market. Searchlight Television, as it is to be known, will produce original content and will also tap the Fox feature film library for titles to adapt for the small screen. Searchlight's presidents of production David Greenbaum and Matthew Greenfield will oversee both film and TV development for the label. "Searchlight has always been dedicated to bringing the unique stories of passionate creators to audiences worldwide," the pair said in a joint statement.The state government faces termination payments of more than $1 billion if it decides to sack the consortium charged with delivering Sydney's troubled light-rail project.

The government is hamstrung in its ability to fire Acciona, the Spanish contractor constructing the line from the CBD to the city's south-east, because the $2.1 billion contract to build and operate the light rail is with ALTRAC, a consortium of four companies.

The government has little idea when Acciona will complete the light rail line. Credit:Janie Barrett

While the laying of tracks has been completed in nine of 31 zones, civil construction has yet to be finished in any of the zones along the entire 12-kilometre route, highlighting the extent to which the project has become a debacle.

The original schedule was for all of the major civil construction, which includes poles and footpaths, to be finished this month.A man accused of threatening to rape and kill a Queensland magistrate because of a long-running neighbourhood feud has been granted Supreme Court bail.

Shane Christopher Toohey had been in custody for about a year after he was charged with five offences, including stalking and committing an indecent act, over allegations he made threats to Magistrate Catherine Pirie.

Shane Christopher Toohey was grant bail as the families were no longer neighbours.

It's also alleged Toohey had armed himself with a machete and indecently exposed himself.

The alleged threats were made after Ms Pirie's husband David allegedly hit Toohey's mother with a shovel.A 47-year-old Brisbane woman has been identified as the passenger who fell overboard on the P&O Pacific Dawn cruise ship on Thursday afternoon.

The vessel continued to head back towards the mainland on Friday night and was scheduled to dock in Brisbane about 6am on Sunday, according to police.

Investigators were expected to meet the Pacific Dawn at the Port of Brisbane and prepare a report for the coroner, but police said late Friday that there were no suspicious circumstances.

The search has been called off for a woman fallen overboard from the Australia-based P&O Pacific Dawn cruise ship in the Coral Sea.The appointment of Queensland's first Indigenous judge has been described as "historic".

But in a display of modesty, new District Court Judge Nathan Jarro said he was overwhelmed by well-wishers, with his daughter summing up the reaction by remarking: "Daddy, I didn't realise you had so many friends".

Queensland's first Indigenous judge, Nathan Jarro, has been welcomed at a ceremony in Brisbane on Thursday. Credit:QUT

Judge Jarro's appointment was marked during a welcome ceremony in the District Court on Thursday, alongside new Judge Michael Williamson.

The former barrister, who identifies as Ghangulu on his fathers side, with connections to Bidjara on his mothers side, acknowledged the significance of his new role, and said he was honoured by the achievement.A woman who was sexually assaulted in Perth's northern suburbs almost 16 years ago has finally seen justice after her attacker was jailed on Thursday.

The woman was just a teenager when Adam Prow attacked her on a Balcatta footpath in December 2002.

The victim, who was just 14 when the crime took place, spoke to WAtoday after Prow was jailed for three years.

Adam Prow was jailed for three years.

She sat in the back of the court room, supported by her husband, as Prow was sentenced in the WA District Court for the brazen crime.It's a problem which occupies me.

How to be good: how to be a decent human being and contribute to more than just my family and myself, how not to get distracted by stupidity.

Leigh Sales often gets criticised for her interview techniques.

I know that there are many others who feel the same way, including some of the people who attacked Leigh Sales this week, through a series of utterly appalling tweets, a couple of which included suggestions that Sales virtually engages in oral sex with politicians in the Liberal Party and another that she had become "angry since your husband left you". The tweeters didn't think Sales treated Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten equally harshly in interviews. I wonder if they've ever seen any of her interviews with Tony Abbott.

I have always read the tweets of both the tweeters: @EdwardJWHunter and @FightingTories and have observed tweets from these accounts which appear to support progressive values. I also assumed that progressive values would mean they would do their best to avoid sexism and misogyny, no matter how hard-wired it is.The decision by the ACT Legislative Assembly's Standing Committee on Economic Development and Tourism to hold an inquiry into building quality is as welcome as it is overdue.

Horror stories about home owners left in the lurch after broke builders walked away from half-finished, poorly-built projects, and body corporates reluctant to go public about leaky apartment blocks for fear of devaluing members' properties have done the rounds for well over a decade.

It is more than six years since specialist building consultant Ross Taylor, a 36-year industry veteran, told Fairfax: "Most new apartment blocks in Canberra leak badly - regardless of their price and location".

Mr Taylor warned a price-obsessed building culture, which saw consumers prize the bottom line over the quality of the finished product, was contributing to the problem.Australia will host a new round of trade talks with Britain with an eye to boosting exports, worth $12.6 billion, as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull heads to London next week to build momentum for a deal.

British officials will fly to Canberra within days for a working group on the free trade agreement, amid hopes on both sides that a deal will commence as soon as Britain leaves the European Union at the end of 2020.

Trade Minister Steve Ciobo hit back at fears of a flood of foreign workers under the deal with the United Kingdom in the wake of similar concerns about labour market testing under a free trade agreement with China three years ago.

Malcolm Turnbull with British PM Theresa May outside Number 10 Downing Street in London last year. Credit:Lukas Coch

Australian exports to the UK were worth $12.6 billion and the trade in services is one of the strongest areas of growth, but this has raised expectations that the flow of workers across borders will be a key issue once the formal negotiations begin.Many of the countrys wealthiest private schools are receiving bonus payments from a secretive fund the Turnbull government claims is necessary to help schools transition to its Gonski 2.0 funding model.

On Sydneys north shore alone, Loreto Kirribilli, St Aloysius College and St Ignatius' Riverview are among the 102 independent schools  most of them in NSW - receiving top-up payments from the $7.1 million pool in 2018.

From next year, these schools will also be able to claim extra money from the Commonwealth under the so-called National Adjustment Assistance Fund for historically overfunded schools that may find it unreasonably hard to adjust to the Gonski 2.0 arrangements.

Loreto Kirribilli, one of the country's most overfunded schools, will receive the bonus payment. Credit:Fiona Morris

The payments come on top of the annual per-student funding doled out by Canberra to private schools.Port Vila: Vanuatus Prime Minister has vowed to fiercely oppose" any push to build a foreign military base on the Pacific island nation, while also defending his government's close ties to "friend and global leader" China.

In his first major statement since Fairfax Media revealed China's ambitions to establish a permanent military presence in the South Pacific, Charlot Salwai also maintained that a Beijing-funded and constructed wharf capable of accepting warships was entirely Vanuatus idea and aimed at helping its people.

Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai. Credit:David White

The government will fiercely oppose any attempt to build a military base in the country that is the happiest place in the world and which is a direct affront of its policy to promote peace and security in the region, Mr Salwai said in a statement.

Fairfax Media revealed on Tuesday China was eyeing a permanent military presence in Vanuatu and had made initial approaches to the country. Beijing has been showering Vanuatu, which has a population of about 270,000, with hundreds of millions of dollars in development money over recent years.However, Indigenous child mortality rates had decreased over the past decade. Deaths from diseases and morbid conditions accounted for 75 per cent of Queensland's total child deaths in 2016-17, while 17 per cent were from non-natural causes. Suicide was the leading external cause of death for the third consecutive year, and accounted for almost half of all the deaths by external causes among young people aged 10 to 17. Five children died as a result of suspected or confirmed assault or neglect in Queensland during 2016-17, with four alleged to have been killed by a family member. In three of the five cases, the alleged perpetrator had a domestic violence history.

Last year, 19 children died from drowning, which was the equal highest number since 2004, and the second leading external cause of death. That included five children who drowned in bath tubs, seven children who drowned in swimming pools, three in lakes, ponds and rural dams and two in objects containing water. Commissioner Cheryl Vardon said young children had drowned during lapses in adult supervision. "Too often pool gates have been propped open leading to backyard pool drownings," she said. "It cannot be emphasised enough, a few minutes of inattention can have tragic consequences."

The deaths of 315 children and young people were the result of diseases and morbid conditions, with the majority occurring in the first days and weeks of life. Last year, 14 children and young people died in transport-related incidents, the lowest number since reporting began in 2004. Four deaths were in motor vehicle crashes and five children died as pedestrians - of which three died after being run over by a vehicle at low-speed. Child Safety Minister Di Farmer said the government would continue to make improvements to protect children from harm. Credit:Chris Hyde

Child Safety Minister Di Farmer said the death of any child was a tragedy and any harm to a child was unacceptable. "I offer my sincerest condolences to the families of the children who died," she said. "The safety and wellbeing of children is always our top priority and we will continue to work hard and make any improvements we can in order to protect Queensland children from harm." Ms Farmer said Queensland was employing an extra 292 Child Safety staff over the next two years, and caseloads for officers had reduced quarter after quarter. She said training was rolled out to ensure Child Safety staff and services had a comprehensive understanding of the risks from domestic and family violence.London: A former British defence minister has called on Theresa May's government to reassert itself in the Asia-Pacific, saying China's assurances that it poses no threat to the world order cannot be trusted.

Sir Gerald Howarth, who served as the under secretary of state at the Ministry of Defence before his retirement last year, has been pressing Westminster to take a more muscular stance against China.

Sir Gerald said Fairfax Media's revelations that Beijing has sought to establish a military base in Vanuatu showed President Xi Jinping's assurance that China "does not have geopolitical calculations" was hollow.

"Chinas actions speak louder than words," Sir Gerald told Fairfax Media.Mahindra Defence Systems, part of the Mahindra Group, on Wednesday signed a pact with Japan-based ShinMaywa Industries for manufacturing and assembling of amphibious aircraft ShinMaywa US-2 in India.

ShinMaywa US-2 an unique aircraft and the only in service open sea capable amphibian aircraft with state of art equipment suitable for rough sea operations.

Aircraft US-2 could be used in carrying out constabulary missions such as extended exclusive economic zone surveillance, maritime domain awareness missions of the Indian Navy.

In a statement, Mahindra said that both companies have entered into the partnership with a view to set up maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services in India and also undertake manufacturing, assembling of structural parts & components for US-2 amphibian aircraft etc.

Mahindra Group President for Aerospace & Defence Sector SP Shukla said: "This partnership between two companies familiar with the aviation business is positive especially for MRO and maintenance services in the Indian defence aerospace sector. Our partnership will enable us to leverage our strengths and consequently this will contribute to growing Indian aerospace ecosystem."

Speaking on the importance of this aircraft for India, ShinMaywa Industries Director Yasuo Kawanishi said: "This is a versatile aircraft ideally suited for Indian conditions. The US-2 with its unmatched capability is considered to be extremely useful for strengthening the safety and security of long range fleet support and off-shore assets."

The ShinMaywa US-2 fleet is deployed by Japanese Maritime Self Defence Forces across their remote islands chain for exclusive economic zones protection, surveillance and search & rescue operations.

India and Japan are now discussing the methodology of procurement of Amphibian Aircraft US-2 requirements of the Indian Navy.

The pact was signed on the side lines of DefExpo 2018 in Chennai.The DefExpo 2018, a biennial exhibition of weapons and military hardware, was formally inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mahabalipuram today. The four-day exhibition, which is based on the theme - India: The Emerging Defence Manufacturing Hub, will see over 670 defence firms, including 154 foreign manufacturers, participating.



This is the first exhibition of this scale which is aimed at transforming India into a hub for manufacturing military equipment and achieve a turnover of Rs 1,70,000 crore in military goods and services by 2025.



Speaking at the event, PM Modi lauded the Defence Ministry and said this was his first ever visit to such a defence expo. "In May 2014, the total number of defence export permission granted stood at 118, for a total value of $577 million. In less than four years, we have issued 794 more export permissions, for a total value of over $1.3 billion," Modi said.



Edappadi K. Palaniswami, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, O Panneerselvam, Deputy Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman were also present at the inaugural event.



"The expo will showcase India's defence production capability for the first time. We are living in an interconnected world, therefore the strategic imperative for Make in India and Make for India, is stronger than before," the Prime Minister added.

He further said that the Centre would establish two Defence Industrial Corridors, one in Tamil Nadu and one in Uttar Pradesh, which will utilise defence manufacturing ecosystems in the regions and further develop it.



Tamil Nadu CM K. Palaniswami thanked PM Narendra Modi and the Defence Minister for choosing Tamil Nadu for the defence industrial corridor and said the state will contribute in all its capacity for the development of defence production in India.



Yesterday while addressing the media, Defence Minister Sitharaman said her intention to hold such an exhibition is to promote India-made defence products elsewhere. On asking about purchases of India-made defence products by the Indian armed forces, the minister said the forces make their own decisions in purchasing weapons.



"Decisions about purchasing weapons and such items are taken by the Army and Navy. They take a final call on those matter. They are doing it, they are buying India-made products, but that may not be as much as you or me want," she said.



Agreements signed



On Day 1, a number of agreements were signed for 'Transfer of Technology. Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Adani, Larsen & Toubro, Bharat Electronics Limited, multinationals from United States, Europe, Korea signed MoUs and have agreed to transfer technologies to the Indian companies.

"About 1,500 companies are engaged with the ministry at the national level. As many as 712 technology transfer deals have been finalised. At the state level, 35 companies have signed Transfer of Technology for the supply of defence equipment," Sitharaman said.



Besides, Mahindra Group has signed a pact with Japanese company ShinMaywa Industries Limited to manufacture and assemble Amphibious Aircraft US-2. Mahindra will set up Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul units too.



Other major highlights about the event



Around 47 nations including Russia, US, UK, Afghanistan, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Madagascar, Myanmar, Nepal, Portugal, Seychelles and Vietnam will showcase at the event.



Major international companies at the event are Lockheed Martin, Boeing (US), Saab (Sweden), Airbus, Rafale (France), Rosonboron Exports, United Shipbuilding (Russia), BAE Systems (UK), Sibat (Israel), Wartsila (Finland) and Rhode and Schwarz (Germany).



Tejas fighter jets, advanced towed artillery gun systems (ATAGS) designed by the DRDO Arjun Mark 2 tank and Dhanush artillery guns are at display in the exhibition.

Besides, DRDO's Nirbhay missile system with launcher, autonomous unmanned ground vehicle (AUGV), MBT Arjun Mk-I tank, Astra missile, low level transportable radar (LLTR) system, medium power radar (MPR) system and Varunastra are at display.One of the main allegations against Mehul Choksi-owned Gitanjali group is that it defrauded the PNB to the tune of Rs 4,886.72 crore (or more) in the matter of issuance of unauthorised and fraudulent Letters of Undertakings (LoUs) and Foreign Letters of Credit (FLCs) in favour of foreign suppliers of the accused companies.

To avoid detection, the accused bank officials, the Gitanjali group companies and its directors deliberately omitted making entries of the LoUs in the core banking system (CBS) of the bank.

The funds raised through LoUs and FLCs were meant to be used for payment of import bills of the accused companies, whereas it was dishonestly and fraudulently utilised to pay for earlier liabilities on account of buyer's credit allowed by the overseas branches of Indian banks.

Taking note of the alleged fraud, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) filed its FIR and ECIR against Gitanjali's group companies i.e. Gitanjali Gems Ltd, Gili India Ltd and Nakshatra Brands Ltd.



Between 2015-2017, fraudulent LoUs and FLCs of around Rs 3,032 crore and Rs 1,799 crore (Rs 4831 crore) were issued against three companies.

"The PNB was thereby put to a wrongful loss of an aggregate amount of Rs 4,886.72 crore and corresponding wrongful gains to the accused companies, its directors and unknown others", the source within the investigative agency said.

Of late, the FLCs amount has increased from Rs 1,799 crore to Rs 3,106 crore during further investigation (now total stands at Rs 6,138 crore). The total defrauded amount of all the said three companies appear to be in the range of Rs 4,831 crore - Rs 6,138 crore.

Nepalia exposes Choksi

Indiatoday.in has accessed crucial statement of Avneesh Nepalia, the complainer and former official of the Punjab National Bank (PNB), given to ED team. In his recorded statement, he has explained the modus operandi which Choksi and his team strategised to defraud the bank.



The CBI FIR dated January 31, 2018 was based on a complaint filed by Avneesh Nepalia, the Deputy General Manager at Punjab National Bank.

According to Nepalia, Gitanjali group companies approached the bank with the request to send an LoU on their behalf to the overseas branch of Indian branches, against certain import documents raised by the overseas supplier.

"The officer of Brady House branch fraudulently and by cheating the bank, in connivance with the said three companies, without proper sanction/ cash margin etc., and without taking any import documents, bypassed the CBS accounting system of the bank and sent LoUs to the overseas branch of the Indian banks with request to fund the Bank's Nostro account", Nepalia stated.

The money received by the Bank in the Nostro account was supposed to be used for making a facility to the overseas supplier in retirement of the underlying import bills.

On the other hand, original FLCs were issued for small amount within the sanctioned limit. Once FLC number was generated, same number was used for enhancement of amount by 4-5 times higher than the value of the original FLC amount.

All such amendments were done outside the value of the original FLC amount and outside the CBS, thus, the transactions were not captured in the books of bank.

"Brady House branch is holding documents of original FLC amount and no import documents of such increased amount were found in the branch", Nepalia stated.

In effect, most of the transactions were for extinguishing the existing buyer's credit liabilities, availed earlier from Indian banks branches abroad.

On scrutiny of the said details, it was found that Rs 2,484 crore were utilized for settling earlier buyer's credit by the said three entities.

These buyers were: Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Abu Dhabi; Bank of India, Antwerp; Canara Bank, Manama; State Bank of India, Frankfurt; UCO Bank, Hong Kong and Union bank of India, Hong Kong.

In terms of FLC, investigation revealed that Rs 3,092 crore were paid to the alleged overseas suppliers, but before that it was issued in favour of overseas banks i.e. UCO Bank, Hong Kong and Union Bank of India, Hong Kong. The suppliers were: 4c's Diamonds Distributors and Crown Aim Ltd (both registered at Hong Kong).

As per the details, in 2015 - 118 LoUs worth Rs 1,399.93 crore, in 2016 - 116 LoUs worth Rs 1410.68 crore and in 2017 - 141 LoUs worth Rs 3014 crore were issued. Out of 375 LoUs worth Rs 5,824 crore, Rs 2,818 crore was utilised by three group companies i.e. Gitanjali, Gili and Nakshatra; and Rs 3006 crore were used for repayment of earlier dues of the banks.

The overseas entities which received the payments from three group companies are: 4c's Diamonds Distributors, Asian Diamond and Jewellery FZE (UAE), Gitanjali Ventures DMCC (Dubai), Shanyao Gong Si Ltd (Hong Kong) and Abbeycrest Ltd (Thailand) ltd, Thailand.

"Probe conducted so far revealed that many of these companies are having Indian directors, against whom probe is on", the investigator said. For instance Mayank Shah and Arvind Jadhav are the directors of 4c's Diamonds Distributors and Deepak Kulkarni is director of Shanyao Gong Si Ltd, Hong Kong.

Investigations are being conducted to ascertain the details of these companies which have received the funds through fraudulent modes.Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has signed a pact with a consortium of Indian oil companies to jointly develop and build a mega integrated refinery and petrochemicals complex, Ratnagiri Refinery & Petrochemicals Ltd. (RRPCL), in Maharashtra. When completed, it will reportedly be the largest single-location refinery complex in the world. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed on sidelines of the International Energy Forum (IEF) conference in the capital yesterday.

The strategic partnership brings together crude supply, resources, technologies, experience and expertise of these multiple oil companies with an established commercial presence around the world. Three state-owned oil marketing companies - IOCL, HPCL and BPCL - will own a 50 per cent stake in the joint venture while Saudi Aramco will hold the remaining half. It will reportedly supply at least 50 per cent of the crude to be processed at the planned refinery along with advanced technologies for the same. According to a statement by the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas, Saudi Aramco may also seek to include a strategic partner to co-invest in the project.

Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, said that this project, with an estimated investment of over Rs 3 lakh crore, would bring huge benefits to the region and the entire country in terms of large-scale employment generation, direct and indirect, as well as all-round economic development.

According to the statement, a pre-feasibility study for the refinery has been completed, and the parties are now finalising the project's overall configuration. The refinery will be capable of processing 1.2 million barrels of crude oil per day (60 million metric tonnes per annum). It will not only produce a range of refined petroleum products, including petrol and diesel meeting BS-VI fuel efficiency norms, but also provide feedstock for the integrated petrochemicals complex, capable of producing around 18 million tonnes per annum of petrochemical products.

Furthermore, the project will also include the development of associated facilities such as a logistics, crude oil and product storage terminals, raw water supply project as well as centralised and shared utilities. If things go to plan, RRPCL will go a long way in meeting India's fast-growing fuels and petrochemicals demand.

Currently the country has a refining capacity of a little over 232 million tonne, against the domestic demand of 194.2 million tonne in fiscal 2017. According to the International Energy Agency, this demand is expected to reach 458 million tonne by 2040.

Saudi Aramco President and CEO, Amin H. Nasser, said that the MoU marks a significant development in India's Oil & Gas Sector, adding that participating in this mega project will allow Saudi Aramco to go beyond the role of crude oil supplier to a fully integrated position which supports India's future energy demands.

At the IEF conference, Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Falih had said that "Large as this project may be, it does not by itself satisfy our desire to invest in India. We see India as a priority for investments and for our crude supplies". Along with pointing out that Saudi Aramco's entry would bring lower cost of financing due to the company's higher credit ratings, Falih had told reporters that the reforms introduced by the Modi government are "a game changer". He had added that "the transparency, ease of doing business, removing some of the hurdles have facilitated investment flow".

What's left unsaid is that this move will give Saudi Arabia a new outlet for its oil. In fact, according to Reuters, buying stakes in refineries is the strategy that the kingdom has adopted to expand its market share in Asia and fend off rivals. Saudi Arabia is competing with Iraq to be India's top oil supplier. That apart, Saudi Aramco, the world's biggest oil producer, is moving to invest in refineries overseas to help lock in demand for its crude ahead of an initial public offering expected later this year, or the next.

Meanwhile, the protests from the region against the project have gotten louder with the signing of the MoU. The locals, mostly fishermen and farmers, have been opposing the project on the grounds that it would take away their livelihoods, disturb the ecology of the entire region, and expose the Konkan region to further industrial exploitation.

According to media reports, the Konkan region is feeling betrayed since state industries minister Subhash Desai not long ago had promised that the project "will not be imposed on the locals in any circumstances". In February, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, too, had said that the project would be launched, but only after talks with all the stakeholders. He had previously pointed out that the upcoming project "is a greener refinery than the one in Chembur, Mumbai".

"The government has double standards and now stands exposed in front of the people of Konkan," Satyajit Chavan, Convener, Committee for Opposing Destructive Projects in Konkan told The Hindu. "It appears as though successive governments are hell-bent on destroying the natural wealth and beauty of Konkan. The earlier government brought in the Jaitapur nuclear power project and now this government is set to force this oil refinery on us."

With all political parties, including the ruling Shiv Sena, backing the locals, Chavan's warning that the protest will only pick up steam here on seems no idle threat. However, B Ashok, the CEO of RRPL, reportedly claimed that the project is well on its course and is expected to be ready by 2025.

With agency inputsAerospace major Boeing entered into an agreement with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and Mahindra Defence Systems for manufacturing F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets in India. The deal happened on the second day of the ongoing Defence Expo.

Boeing India president Pratyush Kumar, HAL Chairman and Managing Director T Suvarna Raju, and Mahindra Defence Systems Chairman S P Shukla exchanged a Memorandum of Agreement for 'Make in India fighter'. The proposal entails building a production facility in the country that can be utilised for other projects, like India's Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) programme, said a statement by Boeing.

"Boeing is excited to team up with India's only company that manufactures combat fighters, HAL, and India's only company that manufactures small commercial aeroplanes, Mahindra. This partnership brings the best of Indian public and private enterprises together in partnership with the world's largest aerospace company, Boeing, to accelerate a contemporary 21st-century ecosystem for aerospace and defence manufacturing in India," said Pratyush Kumar.

Kumar said that partnership with HAL and Mahindra will enable Boeing India to optimize the full potential of the country's public and private sector to deliver next-generation F/A-18 fighter capabilities.

"The plan addresses the infrastructure, personnel training, and operational tools and techniques required to produce a next-gen fighter aircraft right here in India. In addition, Boeing will work closely with India industry to ensure they have the very latest technologies, applying lessons learned from the current Super Hornet production line," the company statement further said.

The partnership will also work for the joint development of future technologies in India, Boeing said. The company, however, did not disclose how much it will invest in India under its deal with HAL and Mahindra Defence.

Boeing said the partnership is meant for production of an affordable, combat-proven fighter platform for India. The company said the deal will result in growth momentum to the Indian aerospace ecosystem with manufacturing, skill development, innovation and engineering and job creation.

As the most advanced and least expensive aircraft per flight hour of its kind, the F/A-18 Super Hornet will deliver on India's need for a carrier and land-based multi-role fighter, the Boeing said. The F/A-18 Super Hornet has a long life ahead, with the US Navy making significant investments in the latest evolution, the Block III, the company added.

"The Super Hornet does not only have a low acquisition cost, but it costs less per flight hour to operate than any other tactical aircraft in U.S. forces inventory. And with a plan for constant innovation, the F/A-18 Super Hornet will outpace threats, bolster defence capabilities and make India stronger for decades to come," it said.

HAL chairman T Suvarna Raju today said the partnership will create an opportunity to strengthen indigenous platforms in India thereby contributing to the Make-in-India activities.

This partnership is in preparation for a tender for 110 fighter aircraft from Indian Air Force (IAF). Boeing is among the leading contenders likely to vie for the deal which could be worth more than $15 billion. An RFI (Request for Information) or initial tender for the deal was issued on April 6 with officials saying that the procurement would adhere to government's 'Make in India' initiative in the defence sector.

Aircraft manufacturers have to send their proposals by July 6. Officials had said the jets will be produced jointly by a foreign aircraft maker along with an Indian company under the recently-launched strategic partnership model which aims to bring in high-end defence technology to India.

Other companies expected to contend for the IAF tender include Lockheed Martin, Airbus, and Saab AB. Lockheed Martin had formed a partnership with Tata Advanced Systems back in 2017 to produce F-16 aircraft.

(With PTI inputs)Punjab National Bank (PNB) is conducting an internal investigation into an alleged $2 billion fraud and more heads could roll, its chief executive said in an interview on Wednesday.

The country's second-biggest state lender disclosed in February that companies owned by two jewellers defrauded it by raising credit from overseas branches of other Indian banks, using illegal guarantees issued by rogue staff at a Mumbai PNB branch over several years.

The investigating authorities have arrested 20 people, and a court has issued non-bailable warrants against jewellers Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. The duo have denied the allegations against them, and authorities say they both left the country before the fraud was uncovered.

"We are examining every aspect of it, and if we find others involved we will not spare them," said PNB CEO Sunil Mehta, in his first interview with a foreign news outlet since the fraud was uncovered.

PNB has so far suspended 21 officials and Mehta said the bank was carrying out an investigation to find out how the fraud - the biggest in Indian banking history - went unnoticed for more than half a decade.

Several experts have also questioned the failure of external auditors approved by the central bank - known as statutory auditors - to detect the illegalities. These firms often only do top line reviews, not in-depth inspections.

"I don't blame them. They come only for a short period of time and they go and basically see data only on the CBS," said Mehta, referring to PNB's core banking software.

PNB has said the rogue bankers hid the fraud by issuing the guarantees via the SWIFT interbank messaging system, while not entering corresponding entries in the CBS.

The bank will soon finish integrating its CBS with SWIFT so this cannot happen again, Mehta said.

The banking regulator, the Reserve Bank of India, which has directed all banks to ensure this fix is implemented before the end of April, has not done any specific audit of PNB since the incident, Mehta said.

TIGHTER RULES



Mehta, who took over as PNB CEO last May, said the bank was adding more checks to prevent a handful of employees from carrying out a similar fraud. That would also mean centralising some tasks and cutting branches' powers to approve credit.

"Earlier we were dependent mainly on physical inspection of the branches. Now we're going to create an offline monitoring cell. Besides the physical inspection we will also monitor all exceptional transactions," he said, flanked by a team of media advisers in his spacious office.

PNB will route all its foreign exchange transactions through its back office at its New Delhi headquarters. Branches on their own will not be allowed to both receive and approve credit requests.

Reuters reported last month that PNB had stepped up controls on the use of SWIFT, allowing only senior staff to use the platform, and taking away the authority of clerks to do so.

Mehta said PNB grew its domestic deposits by 6.2 percent in the year ended March 31. Domestic credit grew by 10 percent, a figure he expects the bank will be able to replicate in the current fiscal year.

He declined to reveal any other financial figures for the January-March quarter, which could take a hit due to a hefty provision. The central bank has allowed PNB to spread the losses over four quarters, Mehta said.

In March, PNB agreed to pay 65 billion rupees ($996 million) to counterparty banks. It added it would assume any subsequent liability from the fraud, to prevent disruptions in the banking

"We have the capacity and the capability to bear the loss." he said, adding that privatisation of public sector banks was not the answer to the current crisis.Mark Zuckerberg spent two afternoons trying to explain his side of the story to the US Congress in the biggest data breach Facebook has faced till date. The Facebook chief executive answered questions - from Senate committees on commerce and judiciary, and a House panel on energy and commerce - over data privacy and transparency in his company. While Zuckerberg came clean on some questions, he could not answer all the questions thrown at him.

US lawmakers grilled Zuckerberg on a range of topics, from data privacy to lack of diversity in Facebook's C-Suite, even sale of opioids and restrictions on the social media website. Zuckerberg answered most of them but carefully avoided some, promising to follow up later.

The record will be open for 14 days after the Senate hearing and 10 days after the House testimony. During this time, Zuckerberg can make changes to his testimony, whereas, senators and representatives will be able to submit the questions they were not able to ask during the testimony.

Here are certain questions that Zuckerberg should have answered but did not during his testimonies:

Shadow profiles

Representative Ben Ray Lujan from New Mexico raised the question of shadow profiles during the second testimony, to which Zuckerberg said he was not familiar with the matter.

"Facebook has detailed profiles on people who have never signed up for Facebook. You know how many points of data that Facebook has on the average non-Facebook-user," Lujan asked. Zuckerberg replied that the Facebook does collect data on non-users for security purposes but was not sure whether these are referred to as shadow profiles.

He also could not answer how many data points Facebook has on its users and non-users. Lujan mentioned that Facebook keeps 29,000 data points on its users, whereas the other platforms only have 1,500 data points on their users.

Facebook has said that it deletes users' data once they opt out. However, in case of data collected for security reasons, it is also difficult to opt out of the process.

How long before Facebook removes data from former users

Zuckerberg was also not sure how long the data remains on Facebook after a user has deleted his or her account. The Facebook CEO did say that there is a feature that allows users to see all sorts of data collected by the social media platform. If the users want to, they can delete their data and prohibit Facebook from collecting any more of it.

Delayed response in Cambridge Analytica case

Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook came to know about the Cambridge Analytica scandal from a report by The Guardian in 2015. However, no details were divulged as to why the users were not notified about the data breach, or why Federal Trade Commission was not contacted right away.

Zuckerberg also failed to identify the firm who have got user data from Cambridge Analytica. He did identify Eunoia during the testimony on Tuesday.

Business model loopholes

Representative Anna Eshoo questioned Zuckerberg whether he was willing to change Facebook's business model to safeguard user data. "Are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy?"

"Congresswoman, I'm not sure what that means," was the reply from Zuckerberg.

Thorough data monitoring

Zuckerberg shared plans to add 20,000 people to the Facebook workforce and employ artificial intelligence to eliminate misinformation. However, in a reference to Russian interference during the 2016 US presidential elections, he was not sure whether the social media platform will ever be free from state actors. "As long as there are people sitting in Russia whose job it is to interfere with elections around the world, this is going to be an ongoing conflict," Zuckerberg said.

Also Watch:



Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact.

Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here.

Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing.

You are our people. You Care. We Care2.Financial Burden

The first and foremost point should be money. The MBA entrances such as CAT and SNAP will not come cheap though you cleared the exam with the best score. Starting from the exam fee to semester fee, everything is costly.

Of course, aspirants no need to worry about the quality of teaching. If you find the amount is beyond your limit, you can opt for other MBA entrance examination including the state-level ones. If you have a sponsor, you can eliminate this point.

Based On B-Schools

The final end point is to get an admission at a B-school and taking an entrance examination is just a medium. If an entrance examination provides you with a great opportunity for an admission to the perfect B-school, then you can choose that entrance exam without any second opinion. However, there will be a huge competition for such entrance examinations. Never forget this point.

Believe Your Dream

Many students aim to pursue their management studies specifically at one institute. Under such circumstances, candidates should keep their focus only on the required entrance exam. For instance, if you want to pursue your MBA at XLRI in Jamshedpur, then focus only on XAT. Choosing the institute prior to your application process saves time and money besides keeping you on track for the preparation.

Depending Upon Test Location

Not all the MBA entrance examinations are conducted at major cities in the country. There are a few MBA entrance exams where the test is conducted in only one or two cities. Aspirants are advised to consider this point because it involves both money and time.

If you find test centres farther from your location, you need to bear the travel expenses. If the date of an entrance exam clash or fall very close to each other, taking an exam at different locations will get extremely difficult. Hence, check all the exam and counselling dates prior to the application process.

Choose Based On Your Strengths

As we said above, each MBA entrance examination has its own syllabus and test format. You need to assess your skills and should opt only those entrance exams which match your strengths. You should also consider the test format before choosing an MBA entrance exam.

Opt The Fair One Between Two

If you've found that the institute opted by you accepts two or more entrance examinations, then, it is advised to choose the test which is easier for you. There are many institutes in India that accept more than two entrance examinations. Go to the official website of institute and verify prior to finalising your decision.



Apart from the above tips, aspirants can also choose the entrance exam based on the course or institute.1. Understanding The World Of Business

No matter how academically sound one is, it is virtually impossible for a person to understand the business scene unless and until they are actually part of the same. Management is not a theoretical subject and a major part of the same goes into establishing good public relations.

This is something that comes only with experience. That is why it is an absolute must that one has two to three years of experience before pursuing a master's degree in business administration.

2. Difference In Placement

Following your MBA, it is obviously expected that you will be seeking a job. For most of the top-notch colleges the profiles that are offered to an experienced candidate are much better than those offered to a fresher. (This is also true when both the candidates have similar academic records).

In fact, some institutes have noted that even when both the experienced and the inexperienced candidates are offered the same profile in a said company, the compensation package that is offered to the candidate with experience is far superior to that of his lesser experienced counterpart.

Thus, even if you somehow make it to the management college of your choice without having prior experience, if you really want to shine after your degree, you do need some experience prior to pursuing the same.

3. The Correct Years Of Experience

Any experience that is less than a year does not count as valid experience. This is because it is a well-known fact that in any organisation an employee takes the first year in merely understanding the work process and the relevant responsibilities. It is only in the second year that they take up the actual responsibilities.

Thus, for a basic MBA program, work experience of at least two to three years is desirable. The executive MBA program is one where the focus is on the more advanced, high-end management concepts. Thus, for this course one needs to have a minimum experience of five years to be able to grasp the concepts well.

4. Relevant Experience

Merely having a certain number of years added to your resume will not do you any good if you are planning for an MBA course. These days it is very common for somebody who has a degree in civil engineering to be working in the IT industry or vice versa. If you are one such person, this type of experience will not take you anywhere.

To make the most of your MBA learnings, what you need is experience in your field of study. That way you will know the magnitude of each managerial problem that you encounter in your path and will understand how to tackle it better with the managerial concepts taught to you.

5. Better Performance In Internships

For any MBA degree, internships are an absolute must. While this is no doubt important from an academic perspective, what is equally important is the fact that a good number of students rely on pre placement offers (PPOs) from the company they intern for. Now fresher students have a lesser probability of bagging such PPOs as compared to their more experienced counterparts.

This is because a fresher spends a major chunk of his internship period trying to understand how the company works. An experienced candidate is well-versed in this and from their first day they make it a point to dedicate all their time and efforts in completing the task that is allotted to them. Thus, experienced candidates perform better in internships and consequently end up with better jobs.

6. Ability To Connect The Dots

Irrespective of the profile one worked in or their field of study, when someone goes to the office it is obvious that they will encounter some problems. While some of these problems may be of technical nature, there are a lot of problems which will be simply managerial. A person who is well-versed with the real-world problems will be able to not just understand the concepts but also be able to apply the same in seeking solutions.

A fresher on the other hand has no idea of what the problems may be. Thus, when the same managerial concepts are taught to them, their approach to the same will be way more bookish in nature. To avoid such a thing from happening, it is always better to have prior experience before trying to learn management.Photo: Jon Manchester

Two Vancouver-area police officers have been arrested and released in Cuba.

Both the Vancouver and Port Moody police departments have confirmed by email that one of their members was taken into custody and then released during a personal vacation in Cuba.

The details don't make it clear when the two arrests occurred or whether they are connected.

Information provided by Port Moody Sgt. Travis Carroll says the department takes "all allegations of misconduct concerning our officers very seriously."

Carroll does not describe what allegations may have been made, or by whom.

He says the matter has been referred to the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner so it can monitor the situation.aThere is currently no cure for dementia, however, and several scientific findings indicate that degenerative brain diseases can be detected...Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment

According to a seminar at George Washington University, I've been getting "Christian Privilege" all my life! That's on top of my patriarchal, white, gluten/peanut tolerating privilege!

But is that really true? Or is it one of those #FirstWorldProblems things?

Globally, the idea of Christian privilege is pure sophistry. Christians are the recipients of up to 80 percent of religious persecution around the planet, making it the most persecuted religion in the world. Worldwide, Christianity is the opposite of privileged unless you consider it a privilege that the day your faith is discovered in Somalia is the day you die.

"But we're just talking about the evil empire  the United States, David."

OK  let's consider that. Christians in the United States don't blow people up; they don't riot in the streets; they do billions of dollars of good work. But they are still persecuted. Examples:

Facebook refused an ad from a Catholic University because it was too violent  it pictured a statue of Jesus on the cross.

Obama tried to force Hobby Lobby and The Little Sisters of the Poor to fund abortifacients against their Christian belief. Horrible people those "Little Sisters"  caring for the elderly poor and destitute as if they were family.

In 2012, Chick-fil-A owner Truett Cathy said he supports biblical marriage: one man/one woman. The mainstream media went ballistic, and his restaurants were vandalized and received threats of violence from homosexual groups.

A case is currently before the Supreme Court regarding a baker. The baker will sell homosexuals cupcakes, cakes and brownies, but, believing that same-sex marriage is a sin, won't bake cakes for their marriage ceremonies. So Colorado is trying to force him to violate his religious beliefs.

None of that sounds "privileged" to me. One could argue that Islam is much more privileged than Christianity these days.

After 9/11, when Muslim terrorists killed 3,000 Americans, U.S. leaders went to GREAT PAINS to distance Islam from those guys who claimed to kill in the name of Islam.

After 9/11:

We were told we must watch out for "Islamophobia." "Phobia" refers to an irrational fear  like the fear that one of the 100 million Muslims sympathetic to terrorism might fly a plane into a building in the name of their religion. Crazy.

George W. Bush, confronted with this act of terror, declared, "Islam means peace." Wrong. Who advised this guy? It's not a secret  Islam literally means, "submission." I guess "peace" sounded better.

Both Bush and Obama refused to say the term, "radical Islam." It's not radical Christianity (they handle snakes) or radical Krishnas (used to accost you with love and bald heads in airports) or radical Girl Scout cookie pushers that are the problem.

Obama invited dozens of real Islamic terror suspects to the White House.

Obama criticized Christianity for the Crusades, which happened 1,000 years ago, but never criticized Islam for the terror of today.

Trump banned travel from seven of 50 Muslim majority countries (they were terror incubators); the mainstream media was apoplectic calling it a "Muslim Travel Ban." Weakest ban in history since it left out 43 countries. "All Muslims are BANNED. Except for 86 percent of them. But it's BIG BEAUTIFUL BAN."

Bottom line?

Islamic terrorists kill 3,000 Americans, and everyone runs around making sure no one offends Islam.

Faithful Christians refuse to pay for abortion drugs or believe in biblical marriage, and they are the Taliban and must be destroyed!

So in one sense in 2018, anyone that goes around claiming Christians have special "privilege" is cloistered from reality.

But, I must admit, here in the U.S., every single person is a recipient of a specific type of Christian privilege. Here's the truth. The United States is:

the greatest country in the world,

the safest country in the world,

the most prosperous country in the world,

the most secure country in the world, and

the freest country in all of history.

Why? Because of the Christian values and principles that informed its founding and governance. Christian values led to the forming of a country unlike any in history  dedicated to protecting the individual's right to freedom and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

"But what about all the atrocities the U.S. has committed?" America has her flaws, but those flaws exist in spite of Christianity, when the U.S. has not fully embraced Christian values. And we work hard to right the wrongs: Slavery was the norm around the world, and we were the only nation in human history to fight a bloody civil war to end it.

In every election cycle, Barbra Streisand and her buddies declare they will leave the country if the conservative or Christian or Republican wins. And we wait, and we wait, but THEY NEVER LEAVE. THEY PROMISED! WHY WON'T THEY LEAVE?

Because there's nowhere better to go.

Instead of "Christian privilege" seminars, there ought to be seminars everywhere on how you should thank your lucky stars if you're an atheist, your lucky charms if you're a witch, or whoever it is you worship, that you live in a country that was founded by Christians and/or those who respected Christianity and the Bible. Because you are more blessed than the 95-plus percent of the world's population that lives elsewhere. You have freedom and liberty unlike any other people in history.

Posted with permission from ilikemycoffeeblack.comEmail Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment

Since President Trump was elected in 2016 with the help of white evangelicals, we have been told that in voting for him, we compromised our ethics and can no longer be taken seriously. The latest alleged evidence for this is found in reports that black evangelicals are leaving white evangelical churches because of the latter's support of Trump. What are we to make of this?

The charge of white evangelical hypocrisy has been leveled most recently by Michael Gerson, writing in the Atlantic's April edition. The title and subtitle of his major, nearly 7,000 word article read: "The Last Temptation: How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory."

According to Gerson, who speaks positively of his own experience growing up as an evangelical Christian and who claims to be jealous of our tradition, "One of the most extraordinary things about our current politicsreally, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political historyis the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received."

He notes that, "Trump's background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. . . . Trump's strength-worship and contempt for 'losers' smack more of Nietzsche than of Christ. Blessed are the proud. Blessed are the ruthless. Blessed are the shameless. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after fame."

In spite of this, "According to Jerry Falwell Jr., evangelicals have 'found their dream president,' which says something about the current quality of evangelical dreams."

To be sure, I share some of Gerson's concerns, and I have raised them frequently myself. See here, here, and here, for relevant examples.

But what Gerson seems to have missed  quite glaringly so  is that many of us who voted for Donald Trump did so because a vote for him was a vote against Hillary Clinton. In other words, we were not so much voting for Trump as against Hillary. Yet, in a 7,000 word article, the name Hillary Clinton does not occur once. How can this be?

I'm currently conducting polls on my Facebook and Twitter pages, asking if those who voted for Trump did so primarily because they were voting for him or against Hillary. Of the votes which have come in so far (about 2,000 on Facebook and 500 on Twitter), the Facebook vote is 56 percent for Trump and 44 percent against Hillary, while the Twitter vote is 40 percent for Trump and 60 percent against Hillary.

Now, go back to the last two elections and ask Democrats who voted for Barack Obama: Were you primarily voting for him or against his candidate. I'm confident the numbers would be overwhelmingly in the for Obama column, in stark contrast with the Trump numbers. This makes Gerson's omission of Hillary Clinton all the more surprising.

It also underscores a major blind spot in his article, namely, his failure to recognize how deeply many white evangelicals feel that our nation has lurched in a very dangerous direction, which calls for some extraordinary measures. That means that when we see a candidate (now, a president) who has the potential of changing the makeup of the Supreme Court (and perhaps helping to overturn Roe v. Wade), who is genuinely concerned about our religious liberties, who is in the process of relocating our embassy to Jerusalem, we say: That man will have our support, despite his many flaws and failings. What is so hypocritical about that?

As Roman Catholic columnist Monica Showalter noted, "Evangelicals (and most Catholics  something [Gerson] forgets to notice) voted for Trump because not only does he not hate them, but he is willing to defend their values."

In the confused and troubled days in which we live, that goes a long way.

As David French, himself a Never Trumper, pointed out, "While Gerson ably explains that Evangelicals feel as if they're under siege, he doesn't give an adequate explanation as to why. He communicates the reality that Evangelicals feel embattled without providing sufficient explanation for that belief, belittling their concerns as hysterical and self-pitying. The effect is to make Evangelicals appear irrational when, in fact, Evangelicals made their political choice in response to actual, ominous cultural and legal developments that jeopardized their religious liberty and threatened some of their most precious religious and cultural institutions."

I ask again, against this backdrop, what makes our vote for Trump an act of hypocrisy? And isn't it the height of hypocrisy to accuse us of betraying our values when Gerson, according to Showalter, voted for Hillary? Is this not a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black?

This brings us back to the question of black Christians allegedly leaving white evangelical churches because of the latter's support of Trump. According to African American pastor Van Moody, "The exodus of blacks from white evangelical churches is real and understandable. People tend to gravitate towards communities that they can identify with and that they believe identifies with them. Unfortunately, the political positions many white evangelical pastors and churches have taken have eroded that sense of identification for many black people."

Now, I'm not aware of any major studies that back up the anecdotal evidence supplied by the New York Times, and to my knowledge, most white evangelical pastors do not get into politics that much from the pulpit.

But even if these reports are true, doesn't the sword cut both ways? Haven't black evangelicals consistently voted for pro-abortion, pro-LGBT candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Haven't some African-American mega-churches even prayed by name for the election of candidates like Obama and Al Gore? Why then weren't they called on the carpet for hypocrisy? Why aren't they guilty of tarnishing the evangelical tradition?

Personally, I believe we all have blind spots and there's more than enough hypocrisy to go around. And I think leaders like Van Moody and Franklin Graham would profit greatly by spending time with each other, if they haven't already. Let us hear one another out, let us share our respective perspectives, and let us commit to being holistic in our ethics and concerns, with the help of God.

But I'm a little suspicious whenever left-leaning Christians (and/or the leftist secular media) raise charges against white evangelicals, people who just happen to be strong social conservatives.

Perhaps the bigger issue is not our alleged hypocrisy but rather our counter-cultural convictions? Could this be where the conflict really lies?Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment

Syria is one of the oldest countries in the world, with cultural artifacts in the region dating to 10,000 BC. It is also one of the newest countries in the world, achieving autonomy from occupying French troops in 1946.

This war-torn country is making headlines again with reports of a horrific chemical attack against civilians. According to this morning's New York Times, President Trump could order airstrikes in retaliation as soon as today.

What do you need to know about Syria? How can you pray in response?

Who is fighting? Why?

Hafez al-Assad became the Syrian ruler in a 1970 coup. After his death in 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad was elected president (he ran unopposed).

Peaceful protests, as part of the 2011 Arab Spring, were repressed by the Syrian army. The ensuing civil war has involved the Syrian Arab Republic (Assad's government), the North Syria Federation (primarily the Kurds), the Free Syrian Army (supported by Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, France, and Germany), Tahrir al-Sham (composed of al-Qaeda supporters and other jihadists), and the Islamic State.

Russia became engaged in 2015, lending crucial support to the Assad regime. Moscow seeks to protect its air base in the western province of Latakia and its naval facility at the Syrian port of Tartus (the sole Mediterranean base for its Black Sea fleet).

Iran is also a major supporter of the Syrian government, using the country as its main conduit to the Shi'ite militia Hezbollah in Lebanon. The US has supported anti-Assad rebel groups and led an international coalition bombing ISIS targets since 2014. And Turkey is involved in Syria primarily to block Kurdish territorial gains.

A "barbaric act"

Syria denies ever using chemical weapons during this protracted war and claims it eliminated its chemical arsenal under a 2013 agreement brokered by Russia and the US.

However, a UN investigation concluded that the Assad regime unleashed chemical weapons against civilians a year ago, targeting opposition forces. Last Saturday, Assad apparently used chemical weapons again, this time against a rebel group in Douma, northeast of Damascus.

Local activists told NBC News that they saw dozens of dead bodies, many of whom were children, in underground shelters across the city. One said he saw at least forty bodies in a basement and smelled very strong gas, adding that it was "definitely a chemical attack."

The Syrian American Medical Society said more than forty-two casualties were found in their homes. It added that more than five hundred cases were brought to local medical centers with "symptoms indicative of exposure to a chemical agent." Most of the victims were women and children.

President Trump has denounced the attack as a "barbaric act" and met late into Monday evening with senior military officers and national security officials as they plan a response. Yesterday, Israel reportedly targeted a Syrian air base with missile strikes. The United Nations Security Council met yesterday to discuss the chemical weapons attack; US Ambassador Nikki Haley said Russia's hands are "covered in the blood of Syrian children."

What can we do now?

What should be our first response to the humanitarian crisis in Syria? Dr. A. J. Gordon: "You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed."

So, how can we pray for Syria?

One: Pray for true peace.

Albert Einstein: "True peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of orderin short, of government." Pray for justice in Syria. Pray for wisdom for the world's leaders as they respond. Pray for an end to this horrific violence and for lasting peace in this war-torn country.

Two: Pray for the victims and those who serve them.

As of March 29, more than 5.6 million refugees have fled Syria. As many as 400,000 people have died in this civil war. Pray for those affected by this crisis and for churches, ministries, and relief agencies as they seek to help them.

Three: Pray for God to use you to answer your prayer.

In Matthew 9:38, Jesus asked his disciples to "pray earnestly" for the Lord to "send out laborers into his harvest." In Matthew 10:1, Jesus called his disciples to be such laborers. Clearly, the Lord made them the answer to their prayer.

Thousands of Syrian refugees have come to the US. One way God wants to redeem this tragedy is by using it to demonstrate his compassion for them and others in crisis.

You and I are the hands and feet of Jesus today (1 Corinthians 12:27). Have you asked your Lord how you and your church can extend his love and grace?

God's word succinctly summarizes God's expectations for God's people: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8).

What does the Lord require of you today?

Originally posted at Denison Forum.Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment

The 2017 U.S. Presidential election catalyzed a fresh, theological identity crisis for many Christians in Americaespecially those who identify as "evangelical." Several prominent leaders in conservative evangelicalism, such as Wayne Grudem, Franklin Graham, and Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., called upon the entire church to support the Trump administration. This alignment generally comports to a long and notorious tradition of religious fundamentalism's marriage to the Republican party.

But other Christians, especially younger millennials who haven't taken part in last generation's "culture wars," dissent from both this alignment and the urgency of political action in general. The detachment from more accepted political identities has become acute with deeper focus on issues surrounding racism, sexism, and various forms of social inequality. The cynicism so characteristic of much of today's post-modern world has carried into record-low election participation. All of these dynamics continue and give birth to different vistas of inquiry.

One such vista that has emerged from these tumultuous dynamics (among other discontents that have been brewing) is "Christian Libertarianism."

"Libertarianism," according to some studies, is the fasted growing political movement of the twenty-first century. It's entrance into mainstream thought is visible in numerous spheres. In academia, for example, one can observe the release of such projects as The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (SAGE), The Routledge Handbook to Libertarianism (2017), and other literary milestones. Libertarian's popular presence can be found in such places as ReasonTV (a popular Youtube channel), the Tom Woods Show (a podcast with over half a million views per month), and the 2009-2015 comedy sitcom, Parks and Recreation (which featured the outspoken libertarian, Ron Swanson). In the 2017 Presidential election, libertarian candidate Ron Paul achieved the same number of electoral votes (one) as Bernie Sanders. Some interpret this as irrelevant, while others, emblematic.

However, what really interests many is that libertarianism is gaining considerable traction in "post-evangelical" and Catholic Christian circlesat least enough to merit public outcry. Albert Mohler, the President of one of the largest seminaries in the world, has publicly criticized Christians for entertaining libertarianism as a viable political philosophy. Pope Francis did the same in September of 2017 during a plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

Christian libertarianism's abandonment of traditional social categories, political parties, and trust in political authority as a whole is viewed by some as a threat to both Western civilization and social stability. Despite these accusations, libertarian think-tanks with a strong theological presence, such as the Cato Institute, Acton Institute, and the Libertarian Christian Institute, continue to gain an audience through social media and alternative news outlets. January 2018 also saw the inaugural release of Christian Libertarian Review, a peer-reviewed journal produced by notable economists, theologians, and other scholars.

So, what is Christian libertarianism?

At the heart of it is a pre-modern, pre-Constantinian reading of the New Testament. The contemporary narratives about Jesus being a pro-gay socialist (on the left) or the great consumerist, pro-gun American (on the right) just don't seem to fit the Gospel accounts at all. The contemporary account about Christianity mindlessly approving whatever the government does (based on a misreading of Romans 13) is also a distorted picture. What fits the first-century picture best is that Jesus has a problem with political authority in general. It simply isn't right for one human being to rule over another. (This was a result of sin in Gen 3:16). This is precisely what politics isit is a license to initiate force against your neighbor. This ruling happens regardless of the political structure, whether it is through a chieftain, pharaoh, emperor, king, republic, democracy, parliament, or congress. The relationship between an exploited group and the exploited group is fundamentally the same. And this ruling/ruled relationship stays in place regardless if it is done in the name of "the public good," "national security," "America first," or anything else. The problem with all of this should be obvious: neighbors (even "enemies") are to be loved, not exploited by politicians.

Christian libertarians also note that that Christ-event was the culmination of the entire history of Israel. And from the time of kingship to the Roman Empire, there is a constant critique of empire-building, nationalism, and power-grabs through politics. Gideon seemed like a good guy at first, but politics and the license to kill eventually corrupt him (Judges 6-8). David, despite being a man "after God's own heart," wasn't allowed to build the temple because he shed "too much blood." Solomon had a peaceful kingdom...until his bureaucracy grew out of control and split the kingdom (2 Chron 10-11). Of course, none of this should be a surprise: God had a problem with kingship to begin with (1 Sam 8).

In contrast, the kingdom God in Jesus didn't even involve violence in the name of some public good or great nation. It didn't involve coercion at all. Power itself is not something to pursue and selfishly wield, but rather give up and voluntarily distribute for the good of others (cf. Lk 22:25-26). In the end, Jesus died as an enemy of the state for "perverting our nation and forbidding payment of taxes to Caesar" (Lk 23:2). What a testimony this is for today! The greatest empires in the world were threatened by someone who changed the status quonot through armies and violencebut through peace and forgiveness. How could this be so threatening? Because no politician or dictator can do anything about it. All the world knows is laws and guns. So they did what they knew: made him illegal, and then killed him. (Ironically, the Romans even failed this.) The world was never the same again.

The early church carried on this legacy until Constantine, and later made appearances in the Anabaptists and Quakers, and then made its way into the work of Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Walter Wink, and others like the equally obscure "Christian Libertarians."

So, the world should be alarmed: radical nonviolence is extremely disturbing. It disrupts the social order. It is political heresy to both liberals and conservatives. We're not allowed to just vote for some candidate and subcontract the gospel out to some up-and-coming "Christian politician." Instead, we actually have a responsibility as the church to restore the world with our own resources. A wild idea, indeed.

Jamin Hubner is Christian Studies Program Director and Director of Institutional Effectiveness at John Witherspoon College in Rapid City, SD.Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment

Carys Moseley shows that banning the ex-gay movement would be a form of tyranny and urges the government to step away from any plans to outlaw it.

The Home Office has allegedly told the LGBT website Pink News that it wants to look again at the possibility of banning psychotherapy for unwanted same-sex attraction, which it disparagingly terms 'conversion therapy'. It says there was a question asked about it in the government's LGBT survey conducted in 2017. The Home Office has said that the government is currently studying the responses to the survey and that it will publish a response later this year.

However, the government stated last year that it does not believe creating a criminal offence is right. This was in response to a petition by a gay journalist called Josh Parry, who attacked an African church in the Liverpool area helping people with unwanted same-sex attraction. Soon after the initial screening of Voices of the Silenced in London last month, after pressure by gay activists to have it cancelled, the government said that it was keeping the matter under review. Is this a coincidence, and what does all this mean?

Fifty years on from the Wolfenden Report

In 1954 Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the Conservative Home Secretary, commissioned Sir John Wolfenden, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading, to head a committee to report on homosexual offences. The background to the report was concern that gay civil servants might risk being blackmailed by the Soviet Union. This was because several British spies who were homosexual or bisexual had become traitors by going over to the Soviets in 1951 - Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. In other words, at the height of the Cold War, male homosexuality was considered a serious security risk. When the Wolfenden Report was published in 1954 the government did not accept its recommendation to decriminalise homosexuality. It later transpired that Wolfenden's son Jeremy was gay, and that he was a spy for MI6 who was then compromised by the KGB.

The Report's recommendations eventually became law in 1967 as the Labour government of Harold Wilson supported the Sexual Offences Act, a private member's bill tabled by MP Leo Abse. Many people have considered this law a compromise which focused on the right to privacy and freedom of speech. But since then, relentless gay rights campaigning has eroded the freedom of speech of those who disapprove of homosexual activity, and the right to private life of those who wish to move away from homosexuality with the help of therapy.

Today, forced celebration of homosexuality is promoted by the entire government and public sector, bankrolled by big corporations and punished by loss of employment, blacklisting and bullying in the press and social media. Yet the political context and the nature of the security threats to the United Kingdom have changed somewhat. Now the main designated enemy is 'extremism' - mostly but not exclusively Islamist extremism. As has been said many times before, there is a risk to Christians here.

Is therapy for unwanted same-sex attraction 'non-violent extremism'?

On 19 October 2015 the government published the Counter-Extremism Strategy, which invented a history of the development of 'British Values' which goes as follows:

'Our values are not exclusive to Britain, nor have they been arrived at by accident, or imposed from above. They have been shaped by our history. Our acceptance of the freedom of religious choice was born of religious conflict, which taught us that the alternative to tolerance is violence and bloodshed. Our support for democracy developed over centuries as a guard against the abuse of power. Our belief in equality followed a history in which we have seen injustice, misery and damage caused by discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender, disability or sexual orientation.'

The impression given here is that LGBT rights are the pinnacle of a long march to freedom and democracy in British history, and that they symbolise these things.

Speaking at the Pink News Awards on 27 October 2015, Nicky Morgan, the then Education Secretary, demanded that 'gay cure therapy', as she calls it, should be stamped out. In the same breath she said that the Prime Minister promised to 'do more to tackle...non-violent extremism that encourages intolerance and hatred towards LGBT people.'

It is highly relevant that the UK is the only western country to have seriously considered passing a Counter-Extremism Bill to restrict free speech and freedom of assembly on grounds of 'extremism'. This was first proposed back in May 2015, and a Counter-Extremism and Safeguarding Bill was promised in the Queen's Speech in 2016. That Bill was quietly dropped in January 2017 because it was impossible to invent a legally acceptable definition of 'extremism'. Sensible people had been warning against the Bill all along. No one less than Jonathan Evans, former Director General of MI5, had warned that it could be misused to target evangelical Christian street preachers. This is relevant because a lot of the targeting of street preachers has been precisely because they preach against homosexual activity. More recently a Christian teacher was reported under the Prevent Duty for telling a lesbian student 'God loves you'.

From Russia with hate speech and anti-extremism laws

It is vital to realise that laws against 'extremism' are newer versions of hate speech laws. The country that has led the way in this respect is Russia. It was the Soviet Union that pushed the idea of hate speech legislation at the United Nations, in order to restrict freedom of speech under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. At the time the United Kingdom resisted the Soviet proposals and defended free speech. Now we have hate speech laws and the concept of 'extremism' being used in public policy and the courts.

Under its current President Russia has an anti-extremism law, and what is deemed 'extreme activity' need not include threats or acts of violence. This law has been used against evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. This month, American human rights expert Evelina U. Ochab, who is an UN expert on persecuted Christians, drew a parallel between the Russian anti-extremism law and the UK Counter-Extremism Strategy which targets 'non-violent extremism'.

It was the Conservative governments of David Cameron and Theresa May that proposed a Counter-Extremism Bill. It is also the case that under these two prime ministers the Conservative Party has received major donations from Russian donors since 2010. It is during this time that the Conservatives came round to the idea of same-sex marriage, with Theresa May the biggest cheerleader, and it was they and not the Liberal Democrats who pushed for a Counter-Extremism Bill. Has the Conservative Party really learnt any lessons from the debates over the Wolfenden Report and the Sexual Offences Act 1967?

The Home Office is exceeding its remit

It speaks volumes for the illiberal and frankly sinister attitude of this government that it is the Home Office that should get involved in an attempt to outlaw a particular type of therapy. This is undoubtedly because Amber Rudd has inherited the Women and Equalities portfolio from Justine Greening. At the same time it is also relevant that Baroness Williams of Trafford, the Minister for Equalities, is also the Minister for Counter-Extremism.

The job of the Home Office is to deal with actual crime, of which there is plenty already, not to deal with mental health and psychotherapy. It is exceeding its remit as a government department in this respect. Having said that, given that the Home Office is responsible for hate crime, it is reasonable to suggest that the intention is to make therapy for unwanted same-sex attraction a hate crime. This fits perfectly with the fact that hate crime laws and anti-extremism laws are really the same thing. The Home Office needs to be reminded that outlawing psychotherapy is not part of its Single Departmental Plan for 2015-2020 (a new version of which was published in December 2017), nor was it in the Conservative Party manifesto at the last general election.

Government researchers selectively misinterpret research on therapy

On 23 July 2017 the Government Equalities Office announced an LGBT survey open to the general public. The reason given for that survey was that the evidence on inequalities faced by LGBT people in the UK was too patchy, according to a report published in July 2016 by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research. That report cited the paper from 2009 which surveyed UK mental health professionals to find out what proportion had been approached by clients unhappy with same-sex attraction. I discussed the findings of that paper in my previous article on the ex-gay movement.

The government-supported researchers in 2016 ignored the finding that the 2009 paper's authors reluctantly reported, namely that most mental health professionals who had seen such clients believed therapy for lessening unwanted same-sex attraction should be available to them. Instead the government researchers only cited the fact that four percent of mental health professionals would themselves help a client in this manner. This made it look as if far fewer mental health professionals supported the availability of therapy than actually did.

Most people want politicians to be free to say gay sex is sinful

In April 2017 a ComRes poll found that most people in Britain supported a politician's right to say that gay sex is sinful. This was in response to the attacks on Tim Farron for vacillating on the issue. The majority extended to people of all ages. Interestingly 62% of people aged 18-24 agreed, with the lowest percentage being 59% of those aged 25-34.

This is all very interesting because a few years earlier, in 2011/2012, the third wave of National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles found that 50% of people then aged 16-24 thought that male same-sex partnerships were 'not wrong at all'. The rest clearly thought they were sometimes or always wrong. The percentage was lower for all other age groups.

These two surveys suggest that most people do not think that same-sex partnerships are 'not wrong at all' and that most people want politicians to be free to say that gay sex is sinful. People want members of all professions, including politicians, to tell the truth. This clearly shows that the public will not tolerate censorship of views critical of homosexual activity. In this respect ordinary people clash with LGBT activists and those in government who want to outlaw the ex-gay movement.

Faced with public opinion on homosexuality being so mixed, and with most people in a survey in 2014 saying they supported a man married to a woman being allowed therapy, why are LGBT activists in government still determined to outlaw it?

Is there something to hide about same-sex marriage?

Last year, the Office of National Statistics conducted a little-noticed consultation asking the public if they wanted population estimates on same-sex marriage to continue to be published or to be merged with those for heterosexual marriage. This was a bizarre idea given that the Coalition government and LGBT groups had campaigned so hard to legislate for same-sex marriage, and that same-sex marriage is a protected characteristic under anti-discrimination law. Why suddenly decide that the estimates for the stock of people in the different types of marriage should no longer be made?

The list of respondents to the consultation shows that not one major LGBT campaign group bothered responding to it (though the Government Equalities Office did). Most organisations responding were churches, for the obvious reason that they wanted to scrutinise marriage policy in general, and that maintaining the status quo was necessary for maintaining data quality, accuracy and transparency.

Many gays and lesbians are in opposite-sex marriages

Despite the advent of same-sex marriage, official estimates for England and Wales suggest that more gays and lesbians are married to members of the opposite sex than are in same-sex marriages. This extraordinary finding comes from the Sexual Identity questions in the Annual Population Survey conducted annually between 2012 and 2016. These estimates need to be handled with care due to their wide margin of error. Nevertheless they appear to indicate a pattern that repays closer attention as it complicates our picture of marriage and sexual identity.

The Survey estimates that since 2014, the first year of same-sex marriage, the number of gays and lesbians who are in heterosexual marriages may have been as high as 24,000 in 2014 and in 2016 as high as 31,000. The same year 29,000 gay and lesbian people were estimated to be in same-sex marriages.

This extraordinary finding has never once been mentioned by the government or LGBT activists. Gay activists both inside and outside government undoubtedly know very well about this. It is clearly something that they want to stay hidden in plain sight. It is clear that the Core Issues Trust poll from 2014 addressed the situation of the potentially thousands of people with a gay or lesbian sexual identity who are in opposite-sex marriages.

Upholding personal freedom and marital commitment

One of the reasons that some people seek out therapy is that they have made a marriage commitment to someone of the opposite sex 'forsaking exclusion all others', and their unwanted same-sex attraction gets in the way of this goal.

Successive waves of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles conducted in 1991, 2001 and 2011 also clearly show that most people who have ever experienced same-sex attraction or had same-sex experiences subsequently move away from homosexuality and do not identify as gay or lesbian. This would make sense of the rise in the number of clients presenting for therapy due to confusion over sexual orientation since 1991.

Several fundamental freedoms are at stake here. These include the right to respect for private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Related to this is the right to marry and found a family under Article 12. Then there is the freedom of expression for both individual clients and therapists, under Article 10. Related to this is the freedom of thought, conscience and religion under Article 9, and the freedom of assembly under Article 11 which would include conferences, training events and suchlike.

How dare gay activists try to control ex-gays

It simply isn't up to people whose sexual identity is LGB to deny other people's desire to move away from same-sex attraction. Gay activists do not own everybody else who experiences same-sex attraction. They do not have the moral right to dictate to them how they handle their sexual feelings, their self-image, their bodies or their marriages.

To put it more starkly, many ex-gays who have received therapy are married to members of the opposite sex and have children. How dare gay activists talk in a way that undermines these people's right to respect for private and family life and even their right to marry! How dare gay activists demand the outlawing of the therapy that helped these ex-gays in life, just because the thought of it makes them feel uneasy! This is the very essence of tyranny across the entire history of political theory, to order public policy entirely around the desire of a few individuals at the expense of the common good.

The government has no mandate to outlaw the ex-gay movement

It is overstepping so many basic rights and fundamental freedoms in an outrageous manner. It is going against the best evidence on public opinion, and worst of all it looks as if it is ready to brand decent, upright citizens as extremists guilty of hate speech. There must be swift action against ministers and civil servants who overstep their remit in this manner, and a return to civility and respect for individual liberties, freedom of speech and the right to respect for private and family life for all British citizens. We must hear no more of this arrogant tyrannical totalitarianism about outlawing the ex-gay movement from this or any future government of the United Kingdom.

Originally posted at christianconcern.com



Christian Concern, which is based in London, has a passion to see the United Kingdom return to the Christian faith. Whilst engaging with the Church, it wants to work to infuse a biblical worldview into every aspect of society. It wants to be a strong Christian voice in the public sphere, arguing passionately for the truth of the gospel and defending the historic freedoms that people have enjoyed in this nation for so long.As early as 1882 the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared that as far as Western European civilisation was concerned, God is dead. The conviction that science and reason could explain everything meant the collapse of a divine foundation for absolute moral values.

Nietzsche anticipated the rise of lawlessness as more and more people discovered the non-existence of God. In principle he was correct about a growing practical atheism (Psalm 14 verse 1), but in practice human beings cannot function in a moral vacuum.

What no one predicted in advance was how social media would release the power of ordinary individuals to publically name and shame their peers.

Pride in the Fall

Human beings have basic needs beyond, food, drink and shelter. We need the glory of God to thrive (Romans chapter 3 verse 23). When deprived of this glory people are driven to be proud of themselves; this is at the heart of the social media craze. Not enjoying Gods glory people must glory in themselves.

In Jesus day the Pharisees boasted in their own righteousness (Luke chapter 18 verse 9), today people glory in the things Christianity has always seen as morally shameful (Philippians chapter 3 verse 19). Objects once taboo have become vehicles of pride. For instance, one of the lecturers at St Francis Theological College in Brisbane, is an openly a transgender woman.

Much fuss has been made of the fact that the current New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern will give birth to a child whilst in office. But since our society is devoid of moral symmetry woe betides anyone who draws attention to her unmarried status and the relational disorder which besets a child born out of wedlock.

Moral Police

When veteran journalist Charles Wooley interviewed Ardern for the 60 Minutes programme describing her as attractive the internet lit up with charges of creepy sexism. Some have defended journalistic freedom against todays thought police, but likely all in vain because the roots of this new morality go much deeper than reason.

We live in a society given over by God to a darkened understanding (Ephesians chapter 4 verse 18). As Victorian assistant police commissioner Brett Guerin found, even using an alias on YouTube wont protect your identity. Finding no mercy he jumped before he was pushed. This is not all about public figures.

A Christian lawyer friend has been defending a fellow believer whose Facebook post described the gay lifestyle as inherently wrong. The education department of the Northern Territory was seriously considering disciplinary action against him.

Hunted

The LGBTQI lobby is working strategically on partnerships with politically engaged millennials to ensure society never goes back to where it has been before. Ironically, the only way to ensure a morally uncensored lifestyle is through a new form of censorship.

Not a top down one imposed by government, but by the pressure to conform according to social media likes and dislikes. Those who openly maintain a traditional Christian position on topical moral issues, such as euthanasia, can expect to find out quickly who their true friends are.

In an age of increasing anti-Christian bias anyone with an online presence should expect to be hunted. This sounds very gloomy, but its nothing new; Of course, your former friends are surprised when you no longer plunge into the flood of wild and destructive things they do. So they slander you. (1Peter chapter 4 verse 4)

Blameless

When Bob Dylan sung, And the first one now will later be last For the times they are a-changin, he functioned as a secular prophet whose words echo Jesus description of the kingdom of God (Matthew chapter 20 verse 16). Its time for Christians to accept our lot as outcasts in this world. The most valid spiritual response to the vigilantism of our society is not better arguments, its a blameless life.

Jesus predicted (John chapter 15 verse 18) that Christians would to be attacked for their beliefs; but we must never give our opponents behavioural reasons to attack us. We must live without fault in a world whose rejection of Christ is growing stronger daily.

If the all wise God allows vigilantes to come your way you have the great privilege to repay reviling with blessing (1 Peter chapter 3 verse 9). My counsel to all Christian social media users; Dont keep your head down!

The Rev. Dr John Yates is an Anglican minister in Perth and has 5 children and 7 grandchildren. He spends time in praying, mentoring and writing.

John Yatess previous articles may be viewed at

http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/john-yates.html3 ways we disobey James 1:19

"So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God." (James 1:19-20)

The Bible is clear in regards to how we should respond to anything that comes our way, especially when we're angry. James 1:19-20 gives us clear instruction and warning that are both easy to understand.

Oftentimes, however, many of us will agree that it's not as easy to do as it is easy to read it.

James instructs all of us to be quick to listen, to be slow to speak in uttering words we might regret, and even slower to get mad at what's happening. This is because our anger does not automatically produce what pleases God, even if we've been Christians for a long time.

We may not want to admit it, but we're all stubborn. We don't do as we're told. And like I said, we may deny this and say that we're obedient to God's Word, but we're actually not as obedient as we think.

In this article we'll take a quick look at some ways we disobey James 1:19. These methods are common, yet many of us don't even realize we're doing them.

1) We don't hear all sides of the story

Many of us quickly jump to conclusions without trying to hear all sides of the story. We formulate our own opinions before we try to reach out to those we need to talk to and listen to.

Suppose we have a close and trusted friend come over to us and tell us something about someone. Since we trust this friend, it is likely that we ask their opinion and then eventually form our own even without asking that other person's side of the story.

This happens all the time, even in Christian circles.

2) We quickly complain or grumble about something

As mentioned above, many of us form our opinions without hearing the other side of the story.

Some of us aren't content with just forming opinions; we actually air them out.

Many of us will argue, "I'm not gossiping." That may be true, but that's not what we're looking at. We're looking at those who quickly release a careless word about something they see, hear, or feel, even without properly understanding it.

Many of us quickly complain without knowing what's happening. We grumble as we line up at the grocery store, failing to understand that there's a very old lady walking slowly towards the cashier.

We complain about traffic, not understanding that someone crashed into another car and needed to be taken to the hospital.

We complain about how the waiters take too long to serve our food, not realizing that the fast food chain's understaffed at the moment.

We need to listen more and be more concerned about others.

3) We are quick to hold grudges sometimes

Some of us are quick to hold grudges against people. We're quick to treat others with contempt, and quick to label them according to how unlikeable as we perceive them to be. At times, we're quick to hold on to the offenses that others make, even if they did so unintentionally.

We should stop doing that.

It's wrong to breed bitterness in our hearts. It's wrong to culture prejudice in our minds. It's wrong to cultivate unfair bias in our hearts and minds towards others.

We must be quick to forgive, quick to release the offenses, and quick to make peace.Brave nun said 'May God bless you' to carjacker as he held gun to her head

A nun became the victim of a carjacking in Washington D.C. but as the perpetrator held a gun to her head, she still had the heart to bless him when she handed over her car keys.

The unnamed Catholic nun, who belongs to the Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Matara Convent, was walking towards the convent minivan parked on Quincy Street last Monday at around 7 p.m. when she encountered a man whose face was covered with a bandana, according to court documents cited by NBC Washington.

The sister reportedly caught the young man in the act as he was taking the minivan's stereo. As the nun approached the vehicle, Brown demanded for the keys. When the nun didn't budge, he pointed a gun to her temple.

"May God bless you," the nun told the carjacker as he grabbed the keys and apparently sped off in the van.

The nun was able to run back to the safety of the convent where the incident was reported to the police. The police spotted the man driving the minivan some 3.5 miles from where he threatened the sister and he reportedly tried to evade arrest by rolling over and damaging other vehicles, including a police car.

The short chase, however, ended with the man in custody. Police charged the 20-year-old with carjacking and carrying a gun without a license.

During the investigation, the man told the police that he thought the sister was a regular person dressed up in a nun's costume and that he only realized she was a real nun when he heard her give him a blessing.

The perpetrator is being held without bond.

One resident who has lived next door to the convent for the last 24 years expressed concern over the carjacking. Tommie Robinson told the WUSA9 network: "If a person would approach someone associated with a religious organization, who knows what they would do to an ordinary person."Nvidia Turing GTX 11 series release date, specs & features news: To include GDDR6 memory

A lot of reports have surfaced this year regarding the successor to Nvidia's current GeForce GTX 10 series, with the most recent one suggesting that the upcoming GTX 11 line-up will boast a powerful GDDR6 memory. It was earlier tipped tip that the next high-end video card from Nvidia, based on the Turing hardware architecture, will be called the GTX 11, which will use a different naming system compared to the usual.

It is now speculated that the next-gen Turing GTX 11 series will use the GDDR6 memory, as the scheduled mass production of the said component conincides with the expected launch of the GPU this year.

For one, SK Hynix is reportedly starting with the GDDR6 mass production in the coming months, or sometime between June and July, after which it will be ready to be incorporated into the GTX 11 graphics cards.

On the other hand, Samsung was also reported to have its own GDDR6 memory developed this year. The South Korean tech firm has been teased to create a GDDR6 with speed up to 16Gbps, which may have already entered mass production last January.

Comparing Samsung's product with that of SK Hynix, it is believed that the former has the better performance. Thus, the GDDR6 memory from Samsung will be used in Nvidia's top-end GTX 11 graphics card, which might be called the GTX 1180. Meanwhile, SK Hynix's GDDR6 chip could find its way to GTX 1170.

The next family of video cards from Nvidia was initially thought to be called the GTX 20 series. However, it was rumored that Nvidia is going to name its next line-up as the GTX 11, using a different naming that would assign numbers to succeeding products in the increments of five. The usual naming of graphics card in the current GTX 10 series end with 50, 60, 70, and 80.

The Nvidia Turing GTX 11 series is expected to be announced sometime in July.On this day: Christendom's shame, the sack of Constantinople

On this day in 1204, the Crusaders decided that instead of pursuing the Holy Land they would sack the Byzantine city of Constantinople instead. Tens of thousands of people died. The city was taken amid great slaughter in an event that was regarded as shameful even at the time.

Widely regarded as a shocking betrayal of principles for greed, the diversion of the Fourth Crusade from the Holy Land to attack, capture, and pillage the city divided the Christians when it came to maintaining their war against the Muslims.

The background, as provided by Britannica.com, is that, in order to repay Venice for shipping most Crusaders eastward, they seized Zara on the Adriatic from Christian Hungary. At the same time, the exiled Byzantine prince Alexius offered a cash reward to be placed on the Byzantine throne. Therefore, the Crusaders sailed to Constantinople and, in July 1203, duly established Alexius as emperor. But in February 1204 Alexius was murdered and replaced by courtier Alexius Ducas, who ordered the Crusaders to leave.

In response, the Crusaders laid siege to Constantinople.

The initial assault on the city's defences was repelled with heavy losses among the Crusaders, but on April 12 they were successful. Men scrambled up the masts of ships and across catwalks to reach the tops of the city walls, while others on the shoreline hacked at a bricked-up gateway with picks and shovels.

After a gap was established in the walls, the armed cleric Aleaumes of Clari crawled in to find the street beyond practically deserted. Hundreds of Crusaders poured through, fought their way to a main gate, and opened it.

For the following three days the army pillaged freely, before the nobles imposed order and began a more systematic looting of the greatest city in Christendom.

Although the Crusader nobleman Baldwin of Flanders was established as emperor, most Byzantines refused to acknowledge him, and the empire fragmented into four feuding states.

The sack of Constantinople marks a major turning point in medieval history, with the Crusaders' decision to attack the world's largest Christian city, and reports of wild looting and brutality, wrecking relations between Catholics and Orthodox Christians for centuries. The Byzantine Empire never regained its former power and its overthrow by the Christian Crusaders paved the way for its defeat by the Muslim Ottoman Turks in 1453.'Prejudiced' parents withdraw children from RE because they don't like Islam

Ministers have been urged to stop 'prejudiced' parents from pulling their children out of religious education (RE) classes because they don't want them learning about Islam.

Delegates from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers' annual conference called on the government to clamp down on mothers and fathers who prevent their children hearing about specific religions, according to the Telegraph.

Richard Griffiths, from the union's Inner London branch, said 'rare cases' where a family's religious beliefs gave genuine grounds for withdrawal was 'very different to the cases of parents with certain prejudices, including Islamophobia and antisemitism, who wish to remove their children from certain lessons or visits to places of worship that would significantly hinder the ability of the school to prepare a child for life in modern Britain'.

He said that parents were abusing their right to withdraw their child meant they missed on an opportunity 'that allows for critical thinking, big questions, allows children to explore their own and other religious beliefs and non-beliefs'.

Griffiths told the conference: 'I'm sure you are well aware of the dangers of members of society closing themselves off to the rest of the world, the dangers of social media channelling an ever more extreme reflection of people's beliefs, without balance, and the dangers of those children who are ignorant of other religious beliefs and non-beliefs, and lack an understanding of the way that individuals, regardless of religion, can work together and make a positive difference to society are increasingly vulnerable to targeting by extremists.'Shane Claiborne on Jerry Falwell Jr, Donald Trump and a 'brood of vipers'

The Christian social activist Shane Claiborne has hit out at Jerry Falwell Jr's failure to challenge the 'un-Christian' policies and 'lifestyle' of Donald Trump, and invoked Jesus's words about the religious elite being like a 'brood of vipers'.

The powerful criticisms from Claiborne come after he was threatened with legal action by Falwell following a request to pray with the president of Liberty University on behalf of his progressive 'Lynchburg Revival' conference which took place last weekend in the Tennessee town that is home to the Christian university. The conference was run by 'Red Letter Christians' who are at odds with Falwell and all his works, and heard voices speaking out against guns, racism and Christian support of Trump.

And it was on the latter issue that Claiborne expanded on The Domenick Nati Show when interviewed by co-host and Liberty University student Nathan Flynn.

'When Jerry Falwell spoke of Trump as the dream president he didn't say this is my dream president; he said this is the dream president for evangelical Christians,' Claiborne said. 'And so when he speaks publicly he is not just represented himself  he is obviously representing Liberty University which is why it became concerning for many Liberty students who said "we want our college to be known more for its love of Jesus than for its love for Donald Trump".'

Claiborne added: 'I think many of us who love Jesus are very concerned right now about the public support of Christians leaders who don't challenge the un-Christian policies and I think lifestyle things as well. I am concerned about Donald Trump's affairs but I am just as concerned about his policies that are affecting people who we are called to love.'

On the snub by Falwell, he said: 'To say you are not welcome to pray on campus, the campus that is the biggest Christian college in the country  it is known, Liberty, for its championing of religious freedom and for putting prayer back in the public schools  and to say that we are not welcome to pray on campus was very troubling and I think that people needed to know that...

'Over and over we're getting a response from parents of current Liberty students and alumni and others [who] are really concerned...This isn't just about Liberty or Jerry Falwell  this is about the state of our country right now and Jerry Falwell is just a symptom of that.'

Pressed by the interviewer on whether it was right to expose the Christian leader, Claiborne said: 'One of the things Jesus does most consistently is challenge the chosen, and include the excluded, so his harshest words  like 'brood of vipers'  were reserved for the self-righteous, religious elite that thought they were the moral gatekeepers of society. Those are the folks he called "a brood of vipers".'

He went on: 'At the heart of our faith is this idea of grace, and forgiveness...But here's the other thing: grace has to go with repentance...and this is what's so important right now when it comes to the public witness of Christianity...we see no signs of repentance...And I don't care whether it's Bill Clinton or Donald Trump: we cannot compromise on the call to repentance. And when Donald Trump is asked about, have you asked God for forgiveness, he says essentially, '"That's not my relationship with God  that's not how we roll." [But] we roll with repentance. That's what we believe.'

Claiborne concluded: 'My concern is really that I want people to really know Jesus and I know that one of the biggest obstacles to Jesus is Christians who have a lot to say with their mouths and very little to show of God's love in our lives and it grieves me that much of our public voices of Christianity haven't always represented the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.'World Vision questions Penny Mordaunt's overseas aid policy relaunch, calls for focus on children

A leading Christian charity has called on the government to put the world's most vulnerable children at the heart of overseas aid policy following a speech from the international development secretary in which she shifted the emphasis onto British interests.

Launching an overhaul of British aid today with a speech in London which made no mention of children, Penny Mordaunt declared that aid should serve the British 'national interest' as well as that of developing countries, and said her department would work with the private sector, global business and the City of London.

Responding, World Vision's senior conflict adviser Sarah Pickwick told Christian Today that while the charity welcomed some of the government's approach, 'children were not the focus and that sounded alarm bells for us'.

In her speech, Mordaunt recommitted the government to spending 50 per cent of the aid budget on fragile states which, she said 'genuinely tackles the underlying drivers of instability'. She added: 'We will focus on building long-term stability, addressing the causes as well as the consequences of conflict. However, we will go further as part of cross-government efforts to directly tackle national security threats such as conflict, terrorism, violent extremism and organised crime.'

Pickwick said World Vision welcomed this as 'fantastic' in principle but asked: 'How does this translate for children in vulnerable areas on the ground?'

She added: 'Globally less than one per cent of aid goes on ending violence against children. Broken down, that is 46 pence per child. It is a pittance of what is needed in terms of what is needed to protect children who are at serious risk of violence.

'If you don't have the resources behind that you can't create change. If the UK wants to put the world's poorest at its heart, the clear way to show that is to focus on the most vulnerable  and one of those groups is children. We would want to see children kept at the heart.

'We were pleased that the secretary of state mentioned that aid should look at causes of conflict as well as consequences  if made a reality that should bring better outcomes for children.

Pickwick explained that World Vision works 'in a lot of contexts where children are very vulnerable, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan  places where there are massive needs and often a very high proportion of those in need are children.

For example: 'In Congo, there are 13.1 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and more than 60 per cent of those are children.'

And 'in Somalia, there are 2.8 million children in need of humanitarian assistance.

'In crisis after crisis on the ground we are seeing that children are the most vulnerable and need support not only to survive but also to adapt and even to thrive.

'The language in the speech very much said on the one hand that they wanted to show solidarity with the world's poorest and obviously children are among that group, but you need to call it out. It is not that the government isn't thinking of children at all  but it needs to be more explicit. You can say a lot of words but they are demonstrated by what you actually do.'

On Mordaunt's theme of the 'national interest', Pickwick said: 'When it comes down to the purpose of aid, if aid and development are used to serve national interests it ends up being less effective. UK values are better reflected by keeping the poorest at the heart of what we do, and children need to be at that heart  and any aid needs to be needs based on a poverty focus rather than anything else. Children and the most vulnerable children need to be at the heart of aid.'

She concluded: 'We are pleased that the UK is focusing on the most fragile and conflict areas where the most vulnerable are but it is about focusing even more on those who are at the heart of what we do and it is trying to see how we can better serve the most vulnerable and particularly the most vulnerable children.'

World Vision is not alone in issuing a warning over the contents of Mordaunt's speech.

Nick Dearden, the director of another campaigning group, Global Justice Now, said:'We've clearly seen the dangers that the big financial corporations in the City of London have done to the world over the last 10 years. We've seen the way that unregulated free trade has trashed poorer economies while boosting the profits of big business. What the developing world needs is the control and regulation of these institutions so they can gain some control over their own economic development. Unfettered free trade and free markets will not solve poverty. They will make the world more unequal, more insecure, more dangerous...

'We are deeply concerned by the idea that anything which helps British business and the City of London invest in Africa will help reduce poverty. This is trickle-down economics  pour money in at the top and it will eventually help those at the bottom. Sure, investment and trade can be useful, but only if properly controlled and regulated democratically by African governments. Otherwise, the flow of capital will simply enrich the bankers in the City and the elites of the recipient countries. Some African countries are already at risk of a re-run of the 1980s and 90s debt-crisis  simply flooding markets with more loans and finance could well exacerbate that.'5 minutes with A diamond ring and a pendant brooch by JAR

Daphne Lingon, Head of Jewellery at Christies in New York, toasts the exquisite design and craftsmanship of Joel Arthur Rosenthal, as illustrated by two sublime pieces offered in our Jewels sale on 17 April in New York

To have two important JAR pieces such as these in one sale makes for a very special auction, says Daphne Lingon, Head of Jewellery at Christies in New York, of a diamond thread ring and a gem-and-diamond pendant brooch by Joel Arthur Rosenthal. On 17 April, both pieces will be offered in the New York Magnificent Jewels sale at Christies. Born in New York City in 1943, Joel Arthur Rosenthal graduated from Harvard in 1966 before moving to Paris. After a brief period in the film industry he opened a needlepoint shop, where his clients included designers from Hermes and Valentino. After working with Bulgari in New York, he returned to Paris and in 1977 opened a store in the Place Vendome with his partner, Pierre Jeannet; his initials, JAR, were the only source of identification on its facade. Today Mr. Rosenthals imaginative, meticulously-crafted jewels are renowned worldwide. JAR produces only 70 to 80 designs each year, in the houses signature unique settings and unexpected colour combinations, often inspired by the natural world.

A diamond 'thread' ring, by JAR. Sold for $2,772,500 on 17 April 2018 at Christies in New York

The first of the two privately consigned JAR jewels offered at Christies on 17 April, the thread ring, is set with an elongated, oval-cut diamond weighing approximately 22.76 carats that is D colour, VVS1 clarity and Type IIa. The stone sits within a diamond-set two-tiered threadwork gallery and hoop, mounted in platinum. JAR is well-known for the complexity and intricacy of his thread designs, Lingon explains. The fine pave work beautifully showcases the stone, which is itself extraordinary in size, colour and quality. The mounting holds the diamond securely, but theres also a certain lightness to it. The designers ability to create this sense of balance is quite a feat. Previously, the piece was a highlight of the 2006 Magnificent Jewels sale at Christies in New York. Offered from The Collection of Ellen Barkin, it achieved $1,808,000 well over its high estimate of $1,200,000. Also offered in the 17 April sale is a multi-gem and diamond Moghul pendant-brooch, executed in 1999. The top, designed as a stylised bombe architectural turret, is pave-set with circular-cut amethysts. At its centre is a cushion-cut sapphire of approximately 14.77 carats, within a border of single-cut diamonds; a pearl tassel is suspended from its single-cut diamond cap. The brooch features a detachable neck-chain set with single-cut diamond stations, and the reverse is decorated with single-cut diamonds.

A multi-gem and diamond 'Moghul' pendant-brooch, by JAR. Sold for $432,500 on 17 April 2018 at Christies in New York

The pendant is not one weve seen at auction before, says Lingon. It is a fantastic example of Rosenthals exemplary workmanship  the quality is exceptional. The central cushion-cut sapphire, an untreated stone from Sri Lanka, gives the piece a beautiful burst of blue on a background of amethysts. You then have a wonderful, fluid drop of graduated pearls  something JAR is known for, but that you dont always see in jewellery today. So theres a beautiful sense of movement. Also key, adds Lingon, is the intricate pave diamond work on the reverse side of the piece. It's just as beautiful from the back as it is from the front. This is really done just for the wearer  no one else is going to see the detail. The fact that everything has been thought of and executed so beautifully is another hallmark of JARs work.



Daphne Lingon takes a closer look at these two magnificent piecesWhat started out as a night of bar hopping with friends two years ago has ended with a young woman's murder conviction.

Driving home from a night of drinking in her hometown of Oceanside, San Diego County, Esteysi "Stacy" Sanchez's impaired judgement caught up to her in a gruesome scene that eventually led to her second-degree murder conviction last week in San Diego.

The incident took place at dawn in June of 2016 when Sanchez, then 29, plowed into 69-year-old Jack Ray Tenhulzen, a homeless man who was reportedly either walking to or from a local soup kitchen.

Reports state Sanchez's Pontiac sedan was moving so fast that one of the man's legs was ripped from his torso, flew through the back window and landed on the car's trunk. The rest of his body slammed into the front windshield, shattering it and leaving him impaled in a jagged hole of glass.

But that didn't stop Sanchez, who kept driving with the man's body in her car and his severed leg on the vehicle's trunk for another three quarters of a mile until abandoning it in a cul-de-sac near her house and walking home.

When police eventually took her into custody two hours after the collision, her blood alcohol level was somewhere between .18 and .19 percent, prosecutors said, and she still had pieces of glass in her hair.

Sanchez's attorney, Herb Weston, argued that she was tired and fell asleep, causing the car to veer onto the sidewalk and strike the victim, the San Diego Tribune reported. Weston said his client had kept driving because she "freaked out" when she saw Tenhulzen's body.

But the jury was not persuaded by Weston's argument and found Sanchez guilty on April 6 of second-degree murder and gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated.

Charging a DUI defendant with murder is not typical, as most deadly drunken-driving crashes are charged as manslaughter, unless the defendant has a prior drunken driving conviction, which Sanchez did not have.

"I think this sends a message that if you are warned not to drink and drive, and you drink and drive anyway, you may be found guilty of murder," Deputy District Attorney Robert Bruce told the San Diego Union Tribune.

Sanchez faces at least 15 years up to life and is scheduled to be sentenced on May 31.The threat of trade war between the United States and China  potentially the world's fastest growing buyer of liquefied U.S. shale gas and petrochemical products  hasn't deterred Saudi Arabia's chemical company from investing in the growing American energy market, SABIC CEO Yousef Al-Benyan said in a recent interview.

Recently announced U.S. and Chinese tariffs have raised concerns for the Middle East's largest petrochemical producer, Benyan acknowledged, and as geopolitical tensions over trade rise, the Saudi Basic Industries Corp.'s biggest priority is making sure its customers don't face supply disruptions.

"We understand from time to time you get those hiccups," said Benyan, who is also vice chairman of SABIC. "But longer term, we think this isn't going to be a challenge for us to execute our strategy."

The Saudi executive said the U.S. shale gas boom has prompted a "complete shift" in the company's long-term strategy in North America. Only a few years ago, the United States was largely a buyer of SABIC products, but surging domestic natural gas production has turned the Gulf Coast into a global hub that has become integral to the Saudi company's strategy for future export growth, he said.

Last week, China said it plans to slap $50 billion worth of tariffs per year on more than 100 U.S. products, including lubricants containing oil and certain chemical products. In a recent analysis, research firm IHS Markit said increased tariffs "could derail a global economic boom that has benefitted the global petrochemical industry."

Related: Analysts say trade war could hurt U.S. petrochemicals boom

But Benyan said that hasn't discouraged SABIC and its American partner Exxon Mobil Corp., which together are building the world's largest ethane cracker near Corpus Christi in South Texas, a $9 billion project.

"This isn't going to be the only project we entertain," Benyan said, adding the company wants to expand its portfolio in the specialty chemicals and agriculture sides of the business in the United States. "There are other projects that are really under evaluation."

SABIC believes global demand growth for petrochemical products will remain strong through at least 2025, and the challenges of developing multibillion-dollar petrochemical projects will likely weed out some announced U.S. initiatives, leaving only serious players and a balanced market, in terms of supply and demand, for larger petrochemical companies.

Related: Saudi companies plan major Houston-area, U.S. investments

China has also become crucial for SABIC's growth strategy. The Chinese government's initiative to develop higher-end petrochemical products has opened new opportunities for the Saudi company, and Benyan said his company also isn't dissuaded by China's goal to become self-sufficient in petrochemical production in coming years.

"It's a challenge for a company who behaves continuously like an exporter," he said. "If you look at our strategy in North America and China, even in Europe, we started as a marketer and we converted our strategy to be a local player. We are building plants (in China) and have plans to grow there and become part of the local fabric."

The chemical maker, first established in Riyadh in 1976, opened its first Houston office in 1990; a decade later, it opened a local research and development center. It bought GE Plastics in 2007, building an international footprint in engineering thermoplastics; it started collaborating with automakers that same year to develop new technologies.

Last year, the company launched two new vessels to transport shale-based ethane from Houston to its cracker in the U.K. As of this year, the company has some 400 Houston area employees and around 3,000 in the United States.

The Saudi company is in the early stages of designing a new U.S. headquarters in Katy, near Houston, where it hopes to build its local headcount from 400 to 1,000. The company expects to open office in two or three years. On Saturday, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited a company event near the spot that SABIC plans to build its new headquarters to inaugurate plans for the site.

"We purchased the land but we are designing and going through the formality of permits and so on," Benyan said. "We are very keen on moving forward with that project. We're going to be consolidating and growing, so this is very important for us and the industry at large."

Related: Saudi crown prince wraps up U.S. tour in HoustonWASHINGTON - The Environmental Defense Fund said Wednesday that it planned to launch a satellite into space to track methane emissions from the earths surface, targeting the oil and gas industry as the advocacy group seeks to limit emissions that contribute to climate change.

Technology has advanced to the point where you no longer need to wait for government to deploy these kinds of tools, said Mark Brownstein, senior vice president of energy at the environmental group. We believe that reducing that oil and gas methane emissions is an urgent task.

Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a powerful greenhouse gas that is released from drilling operations and pipeline leaks.

The Environmental Defense Funds initiative shows that getting a satellite into orbit isnt as tough as it used to be. Estimates put the number of active satellites in the earths atmosphere at more than 1,000, allowing everything from GPS technology on cellular phones to weather forecasting to the transmission of television signals.

NASA says it maintains two satellites tracking methane emissions in the earths atmosphere. And last year, the European Space Agency launched the Sentinel-5p satellite, to monitor methane, ozone and other pollutants.

But the rate at which methane escapes from wellheads and pipelines and even city utilities underground pipes has been a point of contention for some time. While oil companies argue it is relatively minimal amount of natural gas that escapes into the atmosphere, groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund, have contended neither the industry nor government has fully assessed the problem.

Theres been a lot of infighting in the science community, said Amy Myers Jaffe, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington think tank. But its critical if you care about climate change. Methane is much more potent than carbon dioxide.

The Environmental Defense Fund believes its satellite, which it has named MethaneSAT, will help clear up some of that debate. It would be capable of tracking methane emissions from 80 percent of the worlds oil and gas facilities on a weekly basis. And it already has some high-profile endorsements from world policy experts.

An effective response to the problem of methane emissions requires good data, Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in a statement released by EDF. Todays announcement is a major step forward.

EDF is currently in talks with technology companies to build their satellite. The advocacy group has hired Tom Ingersoll, the former head of Skybox Imaging, the satellite company Google bought for $500 million in 2014, to manage the project.

But nothing is finalized. The nonprofit is still fundraising for the satellite, which it hopes to launch in 2021. Brownstein declined to give an estimate on the cost but said it would be substantially less than the multi-hundred million dollar projects that are typical of government space agencies.

The satellite was announced in Vancouver, British Columbia by EDF President Fred Krupp at a TED Talk event, in which figures from a variety of fields are invited to speak under the slogan, ideas worth spreading. EDFs satellite launch is one of a collection of projects vying for more than $400 million in funding through the TED organization.

The announcement by EDF comes as the oil and gas industry begins to take methane leaks and climate change more seriously. Last year, the American Petroleum Institute announced a voluntary program through which companies could employ advanced leak detection technology and replace older equipment prone to methane leaks.

Reducing emissions from the production and transportation of natural gas will be critical if companies are to convince policy makers worldwide that natural gas, which burns cleaner that coal, oil and other fossil fuels, is a viable source of energy as countries work to stop the planet from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius, Jaffe said.

Most of the companies are moving in that direction, she said.Dinner and a show  that's what Houston Arts Alliance concert gala-goers were treated to last week at Hotel ZaZa. But because this is Texas, where everything is bigger and better, guests were treated to a four-course feast, two Broadway performances and special swag courtesy of Southwest Airlines.

Not surprisingly, the fifth annual "An Intimate Evening" began and ended on a high note. A pianist welcomed an esteemed crowd including Mayor Sylvester Turner, honorary chairs Roland and Karen Garcia, Jo and Jim Furr, Phoebe and Bobby Tudor, and Dr. Yvonne and Rufus Cormier. The tony group passed through hallways lined with wearable artwork courtesy of Magpies & Peacocks, Tami Merrick and Nicola Parente; the latter artists are responsible for "Color Bursting Hermann Park," an HAA-grant funded project of rainbow tree skirts wrapped around live oaks on Marvin Taylor Trail.Rice University will transform the former Sears property in Midtown into an innovation center for technology companies as part of a broader effort to spur on the local startup community in the wake of Houstons failed bid for Amazons second headquarters.

The four-story, 190,000-square-foot landmark retail center and surrounding parcels of land will be renovated into a startup incubator featuring co-working spaces, classrooms, offices, as well as as restaurants, cafes, shops and other amenities.

The $100 million redevelopment, formally announced by university, city and business leaders Thursday morning, would revitalize a long-neglected stretch of Main Street by attracting new technology companies and venture-capital firms. It also would help the region further diversify from its blue-collar roots.

We can no longer be in the shadow of Chicago or Silicon Valley, Mayor Sylvester Turner said, adding that Houston has lagged in attracting startups. Weve got to tap into our collective resources, our collective talents and collective brainpower to compete globally.

City and business leaders have long envisioned a centralized tech hub where a creative work force can collaborate on cutting-edge technologies and tap into academic, financial and business expertise on site. The innovation would focus on such core industries as energy, health care, data and logistics.

Thursdays announcement sprang from a year-long effort to make that vision a reality. The leaders convened two task forces, commissioned consulting firm Accenture to develop a strategic plan and toured several technology hubs around the world, including 1871 in Chicago, Tech Square in Atlanta and Tech City in London.

However, when Amazon eliminated Houston in the first round of candidates for its HQ2 earlier this year, it exposed the citys chronic shortcomings in attracting technology companies and accelerated plans to develop an innovation district to foster startups.

Houston was the largest city nationally to be taken out of the running for the e-commerce giants coveted $5 billion campus and 50,000 jobs.

I think there is a growing realization that Houston needs to act and act quickly to build up the digital economy, said Bob Harvey, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Partnership. The Amazon result served as a catalyst for much more immediate action than we had previously anticipated.

Rice spurs effort

Rice Management, which oversees the universitys $5.8 billion endowment, last fall bought out the remaining 28 years of Sears 99-year lease at 4201 Main and acquired three adjoining acres that includes Fiesta Mart, the empty Sears Automotive Center and parking lots, in a last-minute play to accommodate Houstons bid to land Amazon.

Even before Amazons request for bids, Rice had imagined turning the 9.4-acre property into an innovation hub. The university now is spearheading city-wide efforts to bolster Houstons startup economy.

Our success as a university depends in large part on Houstons success, said president David Leebron. Its important to Rice that Houston gain the recognition as a place of innovation and entrepreneurship that will advance the economy, create jobs and raise the citys profile.

The Rice investment arm will fund the innovation districts creation, but Leebron stressed this is not just for the school but for the entire city. The university has sought partnerships with other local higher education institutions, including the University of Houston, Houston Community College, University of St. Thomas, Texas Southern University and Lone Star College. It has yet to have conversations with Texas A&M University or the University of Texas.

The overall vision, still being developed, would place the hub at the heart of a so-called innovation corridor, a roughly four-mile stretch between the Texas Medical Center and downtown that city and business leaders hope to populate with startups.

Rice and its partners were drawn to Midtown due to its proximity to light-rail lines, downtown companies, other universities, museums and the Texas Medical Center. The neighborhoods Millennial population and its concentration of apartments, restaurants and nightlife is well suited to attract startups.

A slew of community partners came together on the project.

Station Houston, a downtown incubator with more than 300 member companies, will be in charge of operations and organizing networking events to create a community of entrepreneurs.

The new, nonprofit Houston Exponential was created by city and business leaders to raise venture capital and coordinate efforts to build a stronger startup ecosystem.

TMCx, a medical startup accelerator managed by the Texas Medical Center, will place a data science division in the new center.

Universities will be tapped to offer coding classes and workforce training to educate students for the jobs of the 21st century.

Startups want to be in a place thats cool and welcome, and where they get all the resources they need to create, said JR Reale, co-founder and CEO of Station Houston. Those are the biggest drivers to activate a community.

The yet-to-be-named technology center on Main will be designed and developed by Hines in partnership with architects Gensler and James Carpenter. The first phase of construction is expected to be completed by early 2020.

New vision for historic site

Developers and architects are working out the details for reimagining the former department store as a high-tech work space. The startup incubator will charge varying rents to students, startups and more mature companies.

At the same time, developers plan to restore the iconic Sears buildings art deco facade  covered with a metal slipcover in the 1960s  and preserve the stores original terrazzo floors, antique machinery and 1930s-era interior murals depicting Houston history. When the Sears opened in 1939, it was one of the first department stores in Texas to feature air conditioning and escalators.

Developers plan to add windows and light wells to bring more natural light into the building. James Carpenter Design Associates, a New York-based architect recognized for its distinctive use of glass and natural light in its projects, was tapped to accomplish this task.

Ultimately, the innovation districts planners hope the new technology hub will propel Houston into a top city for digital startups. Houston Exponential has set out aggressive goals for the city to become a top-10 innovation ecosystem, generate $2 billion in venture capital annually and create 10,000 new technology jobs a year by 2022.

Although Houston faces several challenges, such as creating a pipeline of technology workers, the innovation district will be a key first step toward achieving those goals, said Gina Luna, chairwoman of Houston Exponential and the groups interim executive director.

The momentum is really starting to build, Luna said. The fact that this is under way and being developed further accelerates that momentum. Its a new era of collaboration to accomplish this goal.

John Kennedy, a 19-year-old Houston entrepreneur who founded an education technology startup called Mesa Digital, attended the innovation districts announcement on Thursday. His company is a member of Station Houston and plans to take at the space at the new center. Startup incubators and accelerators are instrumental for young businesses looking for seed funding and mentors, he said.

Though he plans to step away from his company after he enrolls in the University of North Carolina later this year, Kennedy said he is excited for his small business to grow inside the new innovation district and beyond.

Weve gotten so much value out of Station Houston, Kennedy said. But our goal is to expand. We want to outgrow these places.Oil companies put cybersecurity initiatives on hold while crude prices languished at multi-year lows in 2015 and 2016, falling behind in hardening their systems while state-sponsored hacking groups only got more proficient at probing U.S. energy networks, security experts say.

As oil companies cut thousands of jobs and pared back drilling operations in the downturn, cybersecurity teams faced funding shortfalls for projects to secure computer networks that run rigs, pipelines and other oil field assets, increasing pressure for a field already challenged by finite resources and competing priorities.

In an oil bust, "projects, capabilities and needs that aren't exactly on top of mind go to the bottom of the pile," said Paul Brager Jr., a cybersecurity professional at Houston oil field services firm Baker Hughes, a GE company.

Related: U.S. industrial cybersecurity efforts moving "at a snail's pace" despite rising threats

But among federal agencies and security professionals called in to respond to online attacks, there's no longer any doubt foreign adversaries in Russia, Iran and North Korea have planned and executed attacks to plant themselves in U.S. critical infrastructure, which includes pipelines, refineries and petrochemical plants.

Still, these experts said, there's little evidence of a political push in Congress to address the problem; there are still no regulations governing cybersecurity standards in the U.S. oil and gas industry, as there are for power, nuclear and chemical sectors.

Homeland Security said has begun gathering information on the recent cyber intrusions that shut down the electronic data systems used by four U.S. natural gas pipeline operators. But the agency doesn't disclose information that companies share, said Scott McConnell, a DHS spokesman.

Though federal agencies have said little about the attacks, security experts said the agency's recent acknowledgement of Russia's role in attacks on U.S. energy and industrial networks is a sign Washington may put more resources into tackling the lack of defenses protecting vital networks.

"For way too long, the U.S. government did not want to talk about that," said Galina Antova, co-founder and chief business development officer at cybersecurity firm Claroty.

Related: Hackers gaining access to U.S. energy systems "to test our response"

Still, though, most industrial security teams still lack the technology and personnel to monitor for cyberattacks affecting computer controls that run critical functions at energy and industrial plants, and many of these industrial control devices have been in operation for years or even decades, designed without security features.

"You'll be lucky if your windows machines are running on something better than Windows XP," Antova said.

Even companies that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on cybersecurity protections, she added, have become collateral damage of the accidental spillover of attacks on industrial networks, as was the case last summer when Merck & Co. and FedEx Corp. confirmed cyberattacks compromised their computer systems, intrusions that cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

"We have to do better," Brager of Baker Hughes said. Hacking groups, he added, "could cause the United States a lot of grief, and a lot of grief in a hurry."

Related: As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, energy industry's controls provide alluring target5 1 of 5 Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Show More Show Less 2 of 5 Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Show More Show Less 3 of 5 4 of 5 Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Show More Show Less 5 of 5









Three teenagers were arrested and one is wanted by deputies after the suspects allegedly tried to get away with a shotgun after a suspicious vehicle check on April 10 in the Champions area.

Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman's office said a deputy responded to the suspicious vehicle call in the 4900 block of Spanish Oak Drive in Fountainhead Village.A Clear Lake woman was reported missing Wednesday by Harris County authorities after her family members said she never returned home from a evening stroll Tuesday.

Sharon Lynne Goldstein, 54, was last seen around 7 p.m. near Space Center Boulevard and Bay Area Boulevard. According to authorities, Goldstein suffers from a mental health condition.Three teenagers face a slew of felony charges after allegedly leading police on a pursuit reaching speeds up to 120 mph, endangering students leaving school for the day Friday.

Noah Dennis, 17, of New Waverly, Luis Acosta-Chavez, 19, of Porter, and Logan Chambers, 19, reported as homeless, were arrested by Texas Department of Public Safety troopers in the wooded area near the Grand Parkway/99 and the Riverwalk subdivision in East Montgomery County.

Law enforcement received a suspicious person call to Porter High School around 4:40 p.m. Friday, April 6, where it was reported three males in a white SUV allegedly were throwing gang signs at the school, police say.

DRIVE-BY: Teen arrested in connection with 8-year-old's death

"Law enforcement located the vehicle and made contact with the driver identified as Acosta-Chavez and observed two other males in the vehicle," DPS Trooper Erik Burse said. "The officer determined the males were not students at the school, detained the males and returned back to his patrol car to run their information when the suspects allegedly fled onto FM 1314 heading west toward the Grand Parkway."

During the pursuit, speeds reached 120 mph as the driver swerved around several school buses filled with children leaving school to go home for the day, Burse said.

At some point, Dennis, Acosta-Chavez and Chambers fled the vehicle and ran into the woods, leading police on a foot chase near the Riverwalk subdivision.

At 5 p.m., all three suspects were arrested and transported to the Montgomery County Jail. The vehicle was reported stolen out of Porter and was returned back to the owner.

Acosta-Chavez was charged with evading arrest/detention with a vehicle, unauthorized use of vehicle and deadly conduct. He remains in the Montgomery County Jail on a total bond of $40,000.

Chambers was charged with evading arrest/detention on foot and possession of a prohibited weapon, namely a police baton; his total bail is set at $11,500.

Dennis was charged with evading arrest/detention on foot; his bail is set at $10,000.The trial of a San Antonio man accused of sexually assaulting two toddlers who ended up with a sexually transmitted disease, ended in a mistrial Tuesday  for prosecutorial failure to provide discovery.

Adrian Vigil was 23 years old when he was arrested and charged with super aggravated sexual assault of a child.

Authorities were contacted in October 2015 after one of the children, a 3-year-old girl, was hospitalized and tests determined that the child had gonorrhea. Subsequently, another child, a 1-year-old girl, also tested positive for the sexually transmitted disease.

RELATED: How many sex offenders live in San Antonio suburbs

The trial opened Tuesday morning in the 187th state District Court and the state was presenting evidence when a witness testified that one of the girls said Vigil, now 25, had done something to her sister. That information was reported to a Bexar County prosecutor who is no longer on the case, but it never was relayed to the defense, which is standard law practice.

Defense attorney David Woodard immediately asked Judge Joey Contreras for a mistrial for an unfair surprise and a discovery violation because the information had not been shared. He added that had he known the information beforehand, he would have planned his defense strategy differently.

Prosecutors Steve Speir and Trey Mims argued that with a stern warning for the jury to ignore the statement, they could continue with the trial, but Woodard objected.

We cant put the toothpaste back in the tube, its out, Woodard told the court Tuesday during a hearing outside the presence of the jury.

After hearing both sides argue, Contreras declared a mistrial.

Hes (Woodard) been put at a severe disadvantage, Contreras said. I dont think its fair for us to go any further based on the discovery.

Vigils case will be put back on the docket for trial at another time, the judge told the court.

Elizabeth Zavala is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | ezavala@express-news.net | @elizabeth2863For centuries, tai chi has allowed the common person to learn martial arts movements. Recently, studies have found that it helps to improve balance, mental focus, flexibility and overall health.

The Woodlands Tai Chi Group offers seniors and residents of Montgomery County a productive and safe activity to help improve their bodies and minds. Tai chi originated in China in the 1600s as a martial arts form that developed into a form of exercise over time.

Sesco Saegusa, co-founder of The Woodlands Tai Chi Group, said he first began practicing tai chi as a form of exercise to improve his health.

When I retired, I was completely out of shape and my doctor told me I needed to do some exercise, Saegusa said. We started with four people just practicing on our own and within years weve gotten about 55 members coming to class and practicing with us.

Saegusa teaches multiple classes each week  some at the Lone Star College-Montgomery campus and others at the South Regional Community Center. He offers both evening and morning classes to accommodate members schedules. Each practice usually lasts for two hours.

When Saegusa cannot attend a class, husband and wife duo Michael and Kathy Trahan lead the group. The pair have been tai chi practitioners for almost five years and are both blue sashes, which is the third highest of five sashes possible to attain.

I knew Sesco from years before and he invited me to come to the class. I did and enjoyed it very much. It really helps your health and improves your balance, Michael Trahan said.

Kathy added that although the group moves through the motions slowly and deliberately, the movements can be used in self defense if necessary.

More Information World Tai Chi Day When: Saturday, April 28 Time: Members will begin a demonstration at 9 a.m. The general public can join in at 10 a.m. Where: Creekside Park Village Green, 26400 Kuykendahl Road, The Woodlands See More Collapse

There are five major styles of tai chi. The Woodlands Tai Chi Group practices Yang tai chi, which is the most widely practiced worldwide. Yang style is characterized by gentle and slow movements, which are easier to learn and promote health.

Its actually really good for your health because youre using muscles and techniques you dont usually use. Its a wonderful way for people who are getting older to correct their balance, Saegusa said.

Tom Kurland, 80, who has been a member for two years, said his balance has significantly improved.

Ive had a lot of back problems (for) which I wear a patch on my back. Ive got heart problems and everything else. But since Ive started tai chi, Ive gotten better balance. I dont stumble as much anymore, and I just turned 80 years old so its been real helpful to me, Kurland said.

Member John Gray agreed with Kurland about the benefits of tai chi.

I started this to stay mentally focused, Gray said. I was able to balance better. Just being able to (balance on one foot) if youre in my age group, in the 70s, thatll keep you from falling down. It helps me stay focused and its physical exercise.

Sara Smith-Frings, who attends practice sessions twice a week, enjoys not only the health benefits of tai chi but also the social aspect of the group.

Ive been doing (tai chi) now for about a year. I think its really good for my muscles and my joints, not to mention my memory, Smith-Frings said. I do it for my health, but also its a social thing, too. The people in the group are just real nice and we laugh.

Smith-Frings originally began doing tai chi because of her breast cancer and subsequent surgery in 2016. She said the medication she was taking caused some side effects that she wanted to negate.

I tried yoga, but I hurt my back, Smith-Frings explained. It was even what they call restorative yoga. I was doing Zumba, too, and thats a good exercise but I needed something that was more stretchy and meditative. So I started doing tai chi.

Dianna Walker said the exercise provides her with peace of mind in a stressful and busy world.

Its peaceful. With everything around you so busy in every phase of your life, this is a quiet place, Walker said. It gives you that peace and you feel centered. You feel relaxed and you concentrate only on this. It takes you out of the world.

The Woodlands Tai Chi Group will host an open class on Saturday, April 28, for World Tai Chi Day. The event will begin at 9 a.m. with a demonstration, followed by audience participation from 10 a.m. until noon. The program will be held at Creekside Park Village Green, 26400 Kuykendahl Road, The Woodlands. Non-group members or anyone interested in tai chi are welcome to participate in the event.

For more information about The Woodlands Tai Chi Group and to register for classes, visit www.saegusa.com/taichi.Council OKs trash pick-up fees

The Oak Ridge North City Council on Monday, April 9, unanimously approved a schedule of fees for customers who use garbage services but do not pay water fees to the city.

City Manager Vicky Rudy said the problem has been getting those non-utility customers to pay for trash pickup. Most residents pay their trash fee with their water bill, but some customers who dont receive water from the city have not been paying for trash pick-up. These customers are in a special district. The new late fee for non-paying customers will be $10 after the 16th of the month and an additional $50 after 60 days. The customer is responsible for $50 per month for every 30 days thereafter. This new fee schedule only affects customers who do not pay a water bill with the city.

Council tackles water issues

The City Council also voted Monday to approve a third-party report on a financial audit presented by Belt Harris Pechaek contingent upon review of the city audit committee. The city is required to post the audit by March 31 for the Texas Water Development Board and for bonding purposes.

Oak Ridge North will reimburse the San Jacinto River Authority a total of $69,284.82 after the agency overpaid the city for costs for water plant improvements.

Candidate forum slated for April 18

The city together with the Voter Awareness Council is hosting a 2018 election candidate forum to let residents ask questions to those vying for a seat on the dais. The forum is scheduled for Wednesday, April 18, beginning at 6:30 p.m. Candidates include incumbent mayor Jim Kuykendall, mayoral challenged Dan Broyles as well as City Council hopeful Martha Stedifor and her opponent, incumbent Council Member Alex Jones.

michelle.iracheta@chron.comWith personal privacy front and center in the news, a Georgia lawsuit has gained notice as it tackles an area that previous generations never had to worry about: The legality of listening in on a conversation when you are accidentally butt-dialed.

The case surrounds an incident in 2016 when James Stephens was on his cell phone talking to his boss Mike Coan one evening. Then, after the two hung up, Stephens says he put his phone in his pocket and began speaking to his wife about Coan.Faced with a $4.4-million restitution bill stemming from an embezzlement case, Varnett charter school founders Marian Cluff and Alsie Cluff Jr. have dropped the list price of their south Houston mansion by $1 million in an effort to sell the estate faster, court records and online listings show.

The Cluffs, a husband-and-wife duo who admitted to embezzling $2.6 million in school-related funds and failing to disclose the money on federal tax returns, are seeking buyers for their six-bedroom, 7,000-square-foot estate as they try to pay back the government and local victims. After originally listing their Riverside Terrace mansion at $3.5 million, the Cluffs gradually have dropped the price to $2.5 million  still the most expensive listing in a 2.5-mile radius, according to the Houston Association of Realtors website.

The couple, who founded the 1,600-student Varnett school network in 1984, pleaded guilty last year to single counts of mail fraud and conspiracy to commit tax evasion after investigators discovered the embezzlement scheme. More than $1 million of the $2.6 million came from parents, who gave school officials money meant for field trips and fundraisers, according to a plea agreement. Investigators said other Varnett employees were not aware of the scheme. In addition to paying back the $2.6 million, the Cluffs agreed to pay $1.8 million in unpaid taxes, penalties and interest.

In a court filing ahead of a sentencing originally set for Friday  it since has been rescheduled for mid-June  lawyers for the Cluffs said the couple already has set aside $1.6 million for restitution. The Cluffs have consistently manifested their desire to pay full restitution before sentencing, with plans to sell their 1.95-acre estate and hand over the proceeds, their lawyers said.

Two years after the home went on the market, it still has not sold. In a court filing last week, the Cluffs lawyers said that partially is due to the publicity surrounding it, citing a May 2016 article by the Houston Chronicle about the listing. The filing does not cite any evidence that media coverage has contributed to the home remaining on the market.

Harris County officials appraised the Cluffs property at $1.7 million in 2016 and 2017. It was listed at $1.6 million in 2011 shortly before the Cluffs bought the estate. It is not clear what upgrades, if any, the Cluffs have made to the home since 2011.

The Cluffs lawyers, Dan Cogdell and Cordt Akers, wrote in court filings that the couple dropped the list price to $2.5 million as a gesture to show their serious intent to sell the home as quickly as possible. Attempts to reach Cogdell and Akers were not successful Wednesday.

The Cluffs originally founded the Varnett school as a private institution, converting it to a taxpayer-supported charter network in 1998. The organization has received about $11 million to $13 million in state funding annually over the past several years. Marian Cluff served as the networks board president, principal and superintendent, and Alsie Cluff Jr. worked as vice president and treasurer.

Prior to their indictments, the Cluffs engaged in pervasive conflicts of interest and questionable governance practices, a Texas Education Agency investigation found. The couple also received salaries that were significantly higher than average for leaders of similar-sized schools. In 2013-14, the final year with available compensation data for the couple, Marian Cluff earned $266,400 in salary and benefits, while Alsie Cluff Jr. received $184,000.

Terms of the plea agreement call for a maximum possible sentence of 10 years in prison. Federal prosecutors did not object to delaying the Cluffs sentencing as they try to sell their home.

jacob.carpenter@chron.com

twitter.com/chronjacobA Rosenberg mom says a drawing by her 7-year-old daughter brought her to tears, then rage.

The illustration, depicting her daughter getting slapped and stepped on by a substitute teacher, has resulted in an investigation by the Rosenberg Police Department, KPRC reported this week.

On Tuesday, Chron.com reached out to Angelica Reyes to talk more about the upsetting drawing made by her daughter, Lyric Luna.

Reyes said that when she first saw the drawing her daughter seemed hesitant to talk about the picture.

SIX YEARS LATER: Rice University studies how HISD students fare after graduating

"It seemed like she was afraid to tell me, like she would get in trouble," Reyes said. "I could see the fear in her eyes, then she explained that 'this is what happened at school today.'"

"I was angry and upset I didn't know what to do but cry," Reyes said. "It's something you don't ever want to think that could happen to your child."

On Wednesday, the principal at Bowie Elementary School in Lamar Consolidated Independent School District sent an email explaining a student had reported a substitute teacher for slapping her and stepping on her foot. The email said the substitute teacher was "immediately removed from the classroom" and that an investigation was pending.

RANKED: Texas' top colleges, according to the Wall Street Journal

Reyes said she hopes the situation ends with an apology and explanation to her daughter. In addition, she hopes the substitute has her teaching license revoked.

"Teachers need to listen and treat our kids with respect, and our kids need to know that in situations like this it's okay to speak up and say something, they shouldn't ever be afraid of their parents or teachers," Reyes said.

See what data reveals about child abuse in the Houston area above.

Fernando Ramirez is a reporter for Chron.com and the Houston Chronicle. You can follow him on Twitter at @fernramirez93.3 1 of 3 Godofredo A. Vasquez, Staff Photographer / Houston Chronicle Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Godofredo A. Vasquez / Houston Chronicle Show More Show Less 3 of 3





A federal jury Houston Thursday convicted former U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman of being the mastermind behind a wide-ranging fraud scheme, using hefty charitable donations from top-level conservative donors to cover personal expenses and campaign debts.

After deliberating more than 15 hours over three days, the jury found Stockman guilty of all but one of the 24 counts brought against him last year.Last month, two former Houston Police Department officers were among the 22 people charged with money laundering after a year-long investigation.

The illegal gambling bust resulted in the seizure of luxury cars and $2.3 million in cash.You may have heard by now that former Republican U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman, a champion for far-right causes, was convicted Thursday in a Houston federal courtroom on 23 felony counts related to a fraud scheme.

VERDICT: Former Congressman Steve Stockman convicted on federal corruption charges

Perhaps you recall Stockman stepping up for his pet issues during his two terms in office.

Stockman's four-week criminal trial opened a window into the unusual life of the Michigan-born politician, whose allies dating back to the mid-1990s range from staunch gun rights advocates to aid workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Stockman, 61, who previously lived in Friendswood and now lives in Clear Lake, was in Congress from 1995 to 1997 and again from 2013 to 2014, and then left office to mount an unsuccessful primary bid to unseat Republican John Cornyn in the U.S. Senate.

The far-right former lawmaker also explored a Senate bid in Alaska but abandoned that when he learned he was being investigated for fraud, according to testimony from a former aide.

In the 16 years between his congressional terms, he continued to work on his favorite causes and continued to use Congressman Steve Stockman letterhead as he traveled the world, meeting with dignitaries as a lobbyist.

He solicited huge donations from philanthropists and, according to witnesses, he spent it on a variety of mundane items in the period examined at trial, from 2010 through 2014.

RELATED: Charity donations paid for tanning salons and amusement parks, says FBI investigator in Steve Stockman trial

Defense lawyers said these foreign trips and assorted personal expenses were introduced as flashy distractions from the facts in the case. They said none of the activities themselves constituted any alleged illegal conduct.

Lawyer Sean Buckley portrayed his client as an absentminded visionary with good intentions.

He told jurors Stockman was homeless and living in city park in Fort Worth in the 1990s, Buckley said the ex-congressman lives in a modest home, drives "an old beat up van," eats at McDonald's and Taco Bell and ran his campaign for U.S. House of Representatives out of a "run down dirty motorcycle repair shop."

"This is not a case about fur coats, Rolexes and Mercedes Benzes," Buckley said.

MORE: Former Congressman Steve Stockman ran 'massive scam' with donations, prosecutors said

During three weeks of testimony, witnesses explained how Stockman, a trained accountant married to a NASA employee, used a large portion of the $1.25 million in tax deductible contributions from two major donors to cover personal expenses, debts and campaign costs.

RELATED: Stockman spent charity funds to collect dirt on political opponent, witness says

The government witnesses detailed payments for an amateur spy operation that set up surveillance of a perceived political rival around the state capital, and burner phones, allegedly to discuss a questionable expenditure.

In the slideshow, see some of the ways Stockman made use of the charitable money and some of the ventures he participated in, according to testimony.Central Texas will soon host a huge piece of history when Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition is unveiled at Baylor's University's Mayborn Museum Complex.

From June 2 to Jan. 6, 2019, history buffs will be able to see artifacts pulled from the wreckage, including luggage, the ship's whistles, floor tiles from first class spaces, a window frame and an unopened bottle of champagne. The exhibit also features a part of the ship's hull, a recreation of the Grand Staircase and a promenade deck complete with frigid temperatures that sets the scene of the fateful April night when the ship sank.Just in time to make summer plans, USA Today released their 2018 Readers' Choice 10 Best Beaches in Texas list.

Though the initial list of 20 beaches was put together by editors, the readers' votes helped determine the rankings, according to the list.Two Bexar County deputies have been indicted on accusations of assaulting an inmate they had been called in to subdue, Sheriff Javier Salazar announced Wednesday.

In addition, Salazar said they may face more charges in connection with allegations that they retaliated against fellow deputies during the investigation.

Salazar said during a news conference that deputies Michael Gomez, 30, and Joseph Anthony Hernandez, 26, have each been indicted on a charge of official oppression.

RELATED: Bexar County Sheriff's Office identifies deputies allegedly involved in hazing incident

The inmate had been put on the floor in a position of disadvantage and was in the process of surrendering his hands to be handcuffed, Salazar said, when one of the deputies struck the inmate several times with a stick, injuring him. The sheriff didnt identify which deputy hit the man.

Salazar said the other deputy punched the inmate in the face after he was handcuffed and was being led out of the cell.

The man, who was 25 years old when the incident occurred, was in jail on a charge of assault on a peace officer, the sheriff said. Salazar said his injuries were not severe.

People are entrusted to our custody, and they wont be treated in this manner, Salazar said. The man has since been released, officials said.

Gomez and Hernandez were placed on administrative duty and gave investigators their account of the incident.

But two other detention officers who were on the same team came forward to tell investigators what they saw, Salazar said.

RELATED: Bexar County Sheriff's Office identifies deputies allegedly involved in hazing incident

They believed it was a violation of the law, he said.

Salazar said Gomez and Hernandez retaliated against their colleagues, starting with verbal threats.

In one incident, Salazar said, one of the deputies was working in a master control room when he closed a door on a detention officer he believed had reported him to investigators.

This job is hard enough without somebody like that coming in and making it harder, Salazar said.

The sheriff said he is expecting additional charges to be filed in connection with the accusations of retaliation.

The public integrity unit, formed by Salazar at the start of his administration to look into crimes committed by public officials, is handling the investigation.

SERT teams are comprised of six highly trained detention officers. When they respond to an incident, four deputies are tasked with handling the out-of-control inmate. The fifth deputy coordinates their efforts while a sixth deputy traditionally has been assigned to hold a camera and record the operation from start to finish.

RELATED: 3 murder suspects who escaped Bexar County Jail

Since the incident, all SERT officers have been wearing body cameras as the department tests the devices, Salazar said. The sheriffs office is still searching for a body camera company, he added.

This incident in particular was one of the major driving factors behind my wanting to put body cameras on the SERT team, Salazar said. We want to have full coverage of an incident like that when it occurs.

Gomez served more than three years as a deputy until he resigned on March 30. Hernandez is two-year veteran of the force and has been on administrative leave since Jan. 11.

This isnt the first time Salazar has had to hold a news conference over the conduct of SERT members.

In August, seven deputies were placed on leave after a hazing incident at a house party that involved county-issued handcuffs, shackles and a stun gun and apparently occurred in the presence of a child.

Gomez was one of those deputies.

In addition, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards a week earlier, on April 4, issued a notice that the jail was in noncompliance. The finding was part of the states report on the factors that led to the March 2 escape of three murder suspects. Salazar said they have since addressed the two problems listed in the notice, which included having too many inmates in an exercise area and not enough contraband checks.

The day after the report, Salazar said deputies had foiled another escape attempt. That evening, Salazar announced in a news release that Deputy Chief Laura Balditt, assistant jail administrator, was retiring after 31 years with the office.

This is a developing story. Check back for more information.When Apple Inc.s HomePod smart speaker went on sale in January, it entered a market pioneered and dominated by Amazons Echo lineup of Alexa-powered devices. Apple has been touting the HomePods superior sound quality but so far hasnt enticed many consumers to part with $349.

By late March, Apple had lowered sales forecasts and cut some orders with Inventec Corp., one of the manufacturers that builds the HomePod for Apple, according to a person familiar with the matter.

At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. Even when people had the ability to hear these things, he says, it still didnt give Apple another spike.

Low-down: Did the HomePod's software update tone down its bass?

During the HomePods first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10 percent of the smart speaker market, compared with 73 percent for Amazons Echo devices and 14 percent for the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4 percent of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says. Inventory is piling up, according to Apple store workers, who say some locations are selling fewer than 10 HomePods a day. Apple declined to comment. The shares gained 1.4 percent to $173.83 in early trading.

Apple had an opportunity to put the HomePod at the center of a new ecosystem of smart home and other gadgets that arent glued to the iPhone. But the small, wireless speaker is not that product. Though the HomePod delivers market-leading audio quality, consumers have discovered its heavily dependent on the iPhone and is limited as a digital assistant.

Veteran Apple analyst Shannon Cross says consumers assumed the HomePod would be able to do many of things the Echo and Google Home can doanswering questions, orderings pizzas and much more. Instead the HomePod is mostly limited to playing tunes from Apple Music, controlling a limited number of Apple-optimized smart home appliances and sending messages through an iPhone. Thats a serious disincentive, Cross says, when the Apple speaker costs $200 more than than most smart speakers.

Review: Apple's HomePod is great, if you're into Apple Music

more techburger Get more tasty tech news at TechBurger. And follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to the Chronicle for regular access to TechBurger stories and to be able to comment. See More Collapse

Despite having all the ingredients to become a serious competitor to the Echoincluding Siri and the App StoreApple never saw the HomePod as anything more than an accessory, like the AirPods earphones, according to people who worked on the product. When the Echo debuted four years ago as Apple engineers were toiling away on early versions of the HomePod, their bosses continued to see the product as a high-quality speaker rather than a voice-controlled digital assistant for the home.

To make matters worse, the device missed its December release date, meaning the HomePod wasnt available during the pivotal holiday shopping season when smart speakers were among the most sought-after products.

When the HomePod finally shipped, consumers found they couldnt pair two speakers and create stereo sound or play music in multiple rooms. Apple has said these functions will be available this year, and the latest iPhone software update in beta with app developers suggests they are in advanced testing. Some HomePod buyers also complained that the device leaves marks on wood, a situation Apple is now working to rectify with a new material, according to people familiar with the work.

Apple often says it doesnt strive to sell the most units in any particular category and points to revenue and user experience instead. During the opening pre-order weekend, the HomePod grabbed 72 percent of revenue in the smart speaker category. But in February and March, its share of revenue slipped to 19 percent, according to Slice Intelligence, compared with 68 percent for Amazon. Google Home and Sonos Ones garnered 8 percent and 5 percent of revenues, respectively. (Slice estimates sales by monitoring credit card data, loyalty card use, e-commerce receipts sent to email inboxes and other information.)

Gene Munster, a co-founder of Loup Ventures and a long-time Apple watcher, expects HomePod sales to pick up in the holiday shopping season. He says Apple will probably sell 7 million HomePods this year and close to 11 million in 2019. By contrast, Munster predicts that Amazon will sell 29 million Echos this year and 39 million in 2019. Alphabet, he estimates, will move 18 million Google Homes in 2018 and about 32 million the following year.

The HomePod will almost certainly improve. Not every Apple product was a hit out of the gate. The Apple Watch faced challenges when it launched, too, and is now widely recognized as the top performing smartwatch on the market (although still a tiny part of its makers business).

The HomePod is part of Apples growing ambitions in music hardware, which will include upgraded AirPods this year and new over-ear, studio-quality headphones in 2019. So Apple can be expected to regularly update HomePod software alongside the iPhone. Just as the company revamped the Apple Watchs interface a few years after release, it could shake up the HomePods features. Siri remains a major weakness but the poaching of Googles artificial intelligence chief earlier this month could make a difference.

Still, Amazon and Google will keep ratcheting up the competition, coming out with regular iterations of their own smart speakers that sound better and do more.

2018 Bloomberg L.P.

Dwight Silverman is the technology editor for the Houston Chronicle and the grillmaster for the TechBurger tech news site. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Get more tasty tech news at TechBurger. And follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribe to the Chronicle for regular access to TechBurger stories and to be able to comment.The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era, by Sam Rosenfeld (University of Chicago Press, 336 pp., $30)

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, by Amy Chua (Penguin Press, 302 pp., $28)

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, by Yascha Mounk (Harvard University Press, 400 pp., $29.95)

Three new books, two of some virtue, try to explain the political polarization that has besieged the country. The best of the three, Sam Rosenfelds The Polarizers, is a dry but engaging exposition of President Franklin Roosevelts 1944 insistence that we ought to have two real partiesone liberal and the other conservative. In a similar vein, Wendell Willkie, FDRs opponent in the 1940 presidential election, had complained wistfully that both parties are hybrids. In the early 1950s, notes Rosenfeld, The American Political Science Association took up their plaints. Led by Wesleyan Universitys E.E. Schattschneider, the APSA sought, in the manner of European parliamentary democracies, to create ideologically accountable party governments. These responsible-party advocates of mid-century presumed that it would be possible to organize partisan conflict around contrasting issue agendas without igniting political warfare. As the Schattschneider-led APSA hopefully insisted, increasing concern with their programs would not cause the parties to erect between themselves an ideological wall. A half-century later, in the wake of the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election, the wall that Schattschneider feared had been erected.

In Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua, a better and more imaginative writer, takes a different view of political polarization. No other major power in the world, notes Chua, has ever elected a racial minority head of state. To be an American, explains Chua, is to be part of a super-group, into which membership is open to all, based on birthright citizenship. Canada is the only other advanced nation that grants citizenship to anyone born within its borders, regardless of parental citizenship or even legal residence. No Asian or European country, Chua notes, grants unconditional birthright citizenship (actually, Pakistan does).

Chua falters, though, when she tries to explain why American identity has begun to decompose. The culprit, as she sees it, is the rise of tribalismbut where does that come from? Her answer is incomplete and unsatisfactory, partly because this is not so much a book with a coherent argument as it is a collection of essays. The focus of her essays on Vietnam and Venezuela, among other sections that deal with American foreign policy, is on Americas inability to deal with tribal polities. Chua argues that America has a hard time understanding countries riven by tribal conflicts.

After five meandering chapters, which conclude with a brief discussion of the white tribal elite versus the white working class, she offers an insightful but off-point discussion of Occupy Wall Street. The bitter division between the wealthy white professional classes and their minority allies, on one side, and the white middle and working classes, on the other, she rightly argues, creates a state of pervasive political anxiety. Neither alliance is fully dominant nationally. The first, largely located in California and New York, dominates the academy, the media, Hollywood, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. Globalist in perspective, it deemphasizes the importance of citizenship. California, and to a lesser extent New York, have, through their sanctuary policies, done as much as possible to erase the meaning of citizenship; California has apparently given drivers licenses to 1 million illegal aliens. These coastal regions are centers of vast wealth but also concentrated poverty.

The other white tribe, according to Chua, is centered in the American heartland. It serves in the military and takes the symbols of patriotism seriously. Because of our bicameral system, this tribe exercises disproportionate influence over the Senate. Neither tribe is likely to concede to the other. Our seesaw political future will depend heavily on immigration, which is why its such a contentious issue.

Harvard political science professor Yascha Mounk has written The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, based in large measure on the World Values Survey, which purportedly reveals that support for a military dictatorship is as high in the United States as in nearly failed states like Yemen and Algeria. Mounks thesis is that President Trump represents a threat to democratic institutions; he glibly compares Trump with Hugo Chavez. What Mounk misses is that, according to his own surveys, millennials, the group most critical of Trump, are also the cohort most hostile to liberal democracy. Those born in the 1930s and 1940s are the most supportive of both Trump and liberal democracy.

Mounk takes the ahistorical viewcommon among cable news commentersthat 2016 was an extraordinary moment, when society was transformed. A system of government that had seemed immutable, he writes, looks as though it might come apart. But the real transformation began in the late 1960s, when American elites began to side with liberals while blaming the war in Vietnam on working-class whites. Mounk produces little evidence for his argument that, for instance, Trump represents a threat to an independent judiciary. If anything, the West Coasts Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has been a threat to the constitutional authority of the executive regarding immigration law. Federal judges have consistently blocked Trumps actions in this areaan area always regarded as an executive prerogativeand the administration has in every case respected judicial review.

Sticking with his coming-apart theme, Mounk notes that the losers of an election refrain from limiting the scope of an office to which an adversary has been elected in their last days in the job. Here, he rightly decries the egregious GOP action after the 2016 North Carolina gubernatorial election, in which Roy Cooper, the Democratic candidate, won by the narrowest of margins. But instead of recognising that this gave him a mandate to rule for the next four years, Republicans decided to rewrite his job description, Mounk says, dramatically diminishing his powers.

True enough, but Mounk seems unwilling to acknowledge a more egregious example of what he condemns. While Mounk was writing this book, and while Democrats were caught up in hysteria about Trumps supposed collusion with Russian president Vladimir Putin, elements of the FBI, CIA, and State Department were attempting to undermine the legitimacy of the new presidents election. Collusion was indeed revealedbut it was between Fusion GPS, a for-hire opposition- research firm paid for by Hillary Clintons campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and allies of Putin, who produced the infamous Steele Dossier. The Obama administration used the phony dossier to obtain FISA warrants that allowed it to spy on the Trump campaign, in an attempt to delegitimize it. For all his huffing and puffing, Mounk offers little to substantiate his argument that Trump poses a threat to democracy and its institutions.

The hyper-partisan hostilities of the present do pose a danger to our future, though. When partisan team spirit becomes reinforced by shared substantive beliefs on core issues, notes Sam Rosenfeld, peoples partisan identities become a more intensely felt component of their self-identities. Righteous passion for ones own side intensifies while distrust of and hostility toward the other side deepen. Hes right, and his admonition applies to both the Resistance and the MAGA contingent.

Photo: Aquir/iStockImagine if the head of a federal agency announced a new policy for its scientific research: from now on, the agency would no longer allow its studies to be reviewed and challenged by independent scientists, and its researchers would not share the data on which their conclusions were based. The response from scientists and journalists would be outrage. By refusing peer review from outsiders, the agency would be rejecting a fundamental scientific tradition. By not sharing data with other researchers, it would be violating a standard transparency requirement at leading scientific journals. If a Republican official did such a thing, youd expect to hear denunciations of this latest offensive in the Republican war on science.

Thats the accusation being hurled at Scott Pruitt, the Republican who heads the Environmental Protection Agency. But Pruitt hasnt done anything to discourage peer review. In fact, hes done the opposite: he has called for the use of more independent experts to review the EPAs research and has just announced that the agency would rely only on studies for which data are available to be shared. Yet Democratic officials and liberal journalists have denounced these moves as an attack on science, and Democrats have cited them (along with accusations of ethical violations) in their campaign to force Pruitt out of his job.

How could the party of science, as Democrats like to call themselves, be opposed to transparency and peer review? Because better scientific oversight would make it tougher for the EPA to justify its costly regulations. To environmentalists, rigorous scientific protocols are fine in theory, but not in practice if they interfere with the green political agenda. As usual, the real war on science is the one waged from the left.

The EPA has been plagued by politicized science since its inception in 1970. One of its first tasks was to evaluate the claim, popularized in Rachel Carsons Silent Spring, that the use of DDT pesticide was causing an epidemic of cancer. The agency held extensive hearings that led to the conclusion that DDT was not a carcinogen, a finding that subsequent research would confirm. Yet the EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, reportedly never even bothered to read the scientific testimony. Ignoring the thousands of pages of evidence, he declared DDT a potential carcinogen and banned most uses of it.

Since then, the agency has repeatedly been criticized for relying on weak or cherry-picked evidence to promote needless alarms justifying the expansion of its authority (and budget). Its warnings about BPA, a chemical used in plastics, were called unscientific by leading researchers in the field. Its conclusion that secondhand smoke was killing thousands of people annually was ruled by a judge to be in violation of scientific procedure and normsand was firmly debunked by later research.

To justify the costs of the Obama administrations Clean Power Plan restricting coal-burning power plants, the EPA relied on a controversial claim that a particular form of air pollution (from small particulates) was responsible for large numbers of premature deaths. To reach that conclusion, the agency ignored contradictory evidence and chose to rely on 1990s research whose methodology and conclusions were open to question. The EPAs advisory committee on air pollution, a group of outside scientists, was sufficiently concerned at the time to ask to see the supporting data. But the researchers and the EPA refused to share the data, citing the confidentiality of the medical records involved, and they have continued refusing demands from Congress and other researchers to share it, as Steve Milloy recounts in his book, Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.

Pruitts new policy will force the EPA to rely on studies for which data is available to other researchers, ensuring the transparency that enables findings to be tested and confirmed. So why is he being attacked? His critics argue that some worthwhile research will be ignored because it is based on confidential records that are impractical to share. They say that it would cost the EPA several hundred million dollars to redact personal medical information in the air-pollution studies used to justify the Obama administrations Clean Power Plan. But even if that estimate is correctit seems awfully highits a pittance compared with the costs of the EPAs regulations. The Obama EPA estimated the annual cost of its Clean Power Plan at $8 billion; others estimated it at more than $30 billion. Before saddling utility customers with those higher bills year after year, the EPA could at least pay for reliable research.

Pruitts critics have also excoriated him for insisting that the EPAs advisory boards consist of independent scientists, ending the practice of including researchers who receive grants from the agencyexactly the sort of conflict of interest that progressives object to when researchers receive money from private industry. He has also proposed an analysis of climate change using a red-team/blue-team exercise, an innovative technique that has been used to draw up plans at the Defense Department and the CIA and by private industry for industrial operations and projects such as designing spacecraft. A group of outside experts, the red team, is brought in to critique the work of the in-house blue team, which then responds, and the teams keep going back and forth, under the supervision of a moderator. Its an enhanced form of peer review, forcing researchers and bureaucrats to defend or reconsider their ideas, and ideally leading to sounder conclusions and better plans. A version of this exercise has already been used to bolster the case for man-made global warming, as noted by Joseph Majkut of the Niskanen Institute.

Given the high stakes and the many uncertainties related to climate changethe dozens of computer climate models, the widely varying estimates of costs and benefits of mitigation strategieswho could object to studying the problem carefully? Yet Pruitts proposal has been denounced by Democrats as well as liberal Republicans like Christine Whitman, the former New Jersey governor, who argued that the facts are so well-established that further examination is unnecessary. As a former head of the EPA, Whitman no doubt appreciates how much easier it is to make regulations without the nuisance of debate. But whats good for bureaucrats is not good for science.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty ImagesAmid a national debate about due process and fairness in campus Title IX adjudications, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently observed, theres been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and thats one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know: everyone deserves a fair hearing. Few academics have more powerfully made these criticisms than Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, whose 2015 Chronicle of Higher Education essay lambasting Title IXs application to campus sexual-assault and harassment allegations prompted a university Title IX investigationagainst Kipnis herself. Though Kipnis was exonerated, the investigation was a form of punishment, since professors normally arent questioned by lawyers hired by their school as the result of publishing in their area of expertise. The experience prompted Kipnis to write Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, which explores how Title IX has come to threaten the rights not only of accused students but also of faculty.

One chapter of Unwanted Advances took readers inside a Northwestern University sexual-assault and harassment hearing against philosophy professor Peter Ludlow. Though the university cleared Ludlow of his sexual-assault charges, it found him guilty of sexual harassment, and he resigned. Kipnis lawfully obtained the universitys investigative file and about 1,000 text messages between Ludlow and one of his accusers, a female graduate student.

The graduate student, Lauren Ledyon-Hardy, was a Kipnis critic before the book appeared, twice criticizing her in op-eds in which she charged Kipnis with violating the Northwestern faculty handbook by writing an alarmingly inaccurate essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She further denounced Kipniss repugnant moral and political views and hailed the parties who filed Title IX complaints against the professor as pretty reasonablewithout revealing that she was speaking of herself. Ledyon-Hardys conduct exemplifies Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gersens concern that Title IX is too often conscripted to serve purposes antithetical to the education of citizens in a democracy, in which disagreement, dissent, or disapproval should lead to argument, not to an infinite loop of institutional investigation.

After Unwanted Advances appeared, Ledyon-Hardy turned to the courts, alleging that Kipniss book was defamatory and improperly disclosed private facts. Her complaint faulted Kipnis for falsely portraying her as excessively litigiousa complaint that Ledyon-Hardy ironically sees as remediable through a federal lawsuit. The lawsuits core, which focused on Ledyon-Hardys disagreement with how Kipnis presented evidence, threatens both academic freedom and investigative work about Title IX. Yet U.S. District Court Judge Jack Blakey has greenlighted the suit. The judge tipped his hand when he allowed Ledyon-Hardy to litigate under a pseudonymdespite her previous op-eds, signed with her real name, criticizing Kipnis. (Kipnis and her publisher, HarperCollins, have filed a response to the complaint, and discovery has commenced in the case. The next stage, absent a settlement, would be motions for summary judgment before the district court.)

Blakey cites passages in Unwanted Advances that, he says, suggest that [Ledyon-Hardy] has committed a crime. This is an overstatement, to say the least. The book insinuates, at most, that she misled Northwesterns Title IX adjudicators. (A more plausible interpretation of Kipniss argument is that, in a frenzied campus atmosphere in which she received dubious guidance from Title IX activists, Ledyon-Hardy reinterpreted her relationship with Ludlow to conform to campus ideological assumptions.) Either way, though, Kipniss book didnt suggest that the student had committed a crimebecause its not a crime for accusers to lie to campus Title IX tribunals.

Even more troublingly, Blakey held the nature of Kipniss researchchiefly her obtaining the Title IX adjudication fileagainst her. As Kipnis recognized, this material showed how arbitrary and often outlandish tribunals are being conducted at colleges and universities all over the country, with accused faculty and students being stripped of their rights and, in many instances, simply hung out to dry to give the appearance that higher ed is mobilized against sexual assault. By tracking down the documents that exposed Northwesterns dubious conduct, Kipnis failed to rely, Blakey maintained, on only publicly available information, undermining her defense against Ledyon-Hardys claim of disclosure of private facts.

But this type of research has been critical to exposing many problematic Title IX adjudicationsincluding Emily Yoffes report on a miscarriage of justice at the University of Michigan, Cathy Youngs undermining of the claims of Columbia University mattress girl Emma Sulkowicz, Robby Soaves expose about a wrongly accused African-American student at Colorado State University-Pueblo, and my own work about a deeply flawed Title IX adjudication at Amherst College. Other examples come from cases where procedures unduly favored the accused, such as the Salt Lake Tribunes series about complainant-unfriendly procedures at Brigham Young University.

In virtually any other context, Blakeys ruling would have generated widespread condemnation from professors for infringing on academic freedom and from journalists for threatening their ability to report on biased campus tribunals. But in the context of alleged campus sexual assault, due process and the pursuit of truth take a back seat to preserving the status quo.

Photo: Elmhurst CollegeThis week on The Kicker, Meg sits down with Sam Thielman, CJRs new Tow Editor, to break down Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergs congressional hearings. Then, Senior Staff Writer Alexandria Neason and Delacorte Fellow Jon Allsop join Pete to discuss the some of biggest media stories of the week, including the fallout at the Denver Post and a preview of this years Pulitzer Prizes.

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Meg Dalton and Pete Vernon are CJR Delacorte Fellows. Find Meg on Twitter @megdalts and Pete @ByPeteVernon.THE DENVER POSTS recent, dramatic rebellion against its hedge-fund owner generated national headlines and heartened a few media watchers. According to a new report in The New York Times, the Posts move also prompted a group of investors called Together for Colorado Springs, chaired by the founder of the Colorado Springs Independent, to begin assembling a plan to try and purchase the paper from Alden Global Capital. But the Post is far from the only Digital First Media newspaper suffering deep cuts as its owner faces accusations of sucking money from its newspapers in order to make risky investmentssomething the Post alluded to in its own remarkable coverage.

Late last week, as part of a perspective package that included nine columns, some from outside contributors and former staffers, the Posts editorial board decried the business practices of its owner, Alden Global Capital, as a cynical strategy of constantly reducing the amount and quality of its offerings, while steadily increasing its subscription rates. That editorial, which urged Alden to sell the Post, also included a call for action that invoked other Alden-owned newspapers:

Consider this editorial and this Sundays Perspective offerings a plea to Alden  owner of Digital First Media, one of the largest newspaper chains in the country  to rethink its business strategy across all its newspaper holdings.

However, in the days following the Posts plea, the response from other newspapers owned by the nations second-largest newspaper chain has been mixed or muted. On Tuesday, senior editors throughout the chain who were on a regularly scheduled conference call spent some time discussing how they might respond in their own communities, according to Tony Adamis, managing editor of The Daily Freeman in Kingston, New York. Like a handful of other DFM papers, The Freeman ran an Associated Press item in print and online about The Denver Posts revolt.

ICYMI: Meet the journalist tracking Digital First Medias hedge-fund owner

Different people were taking sort of different approaches to try to report news of interest, Adamis said about the editors on the call. And in the uncomfortable position, to some extent, of reporting on yourself.

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After the cuts at Bay Area News Group papers, executive editor Neil Chase wrote, people in our community offered introductions to potential investors in the event our owners decide to sell.

CJR REACHED OUT TO other Digital First Media newsrooms to try and learn whether they planned to build on the Posts message and cover what has become a national story. Some editors didnt respond to calls or emails; of those who did, one was too busy to talk, another politely indicated he did not wish to discuss the matter. However, a handful explained their rationale for tackling the story locally or not.

Neil Chase, executive editor for the DFM-owned Bay Area News Group, voiced his support for the Posts efforts early on social media. The Bay Area News Group includes The Mercury News and East Bay Times, papers that were hit with two dozen layoffs in February.

Proud of the @denverpost team for confronting the very real existential threat to their news organization and their sister ones  including mine. https://t.co/Svmpy9v2Rb  Neil Chase (@chaseneil) April 6, 2018

This week, Chases support materialized in the pages of his own paper, where he published a column in The Mercury News addressing the uprising against Alden in Denver and called the Posts editorial extraordinary. After the cuts at his own papers, Chase wrote, people in our community offered introductions to potential investors in the event our owners decide to sell. In the piece, he explained that The Mercury News is planning public events to keep those conversations going.

In an interview before his column ran, Chase said his California papers dont have a Sunday editorial section, so he couldnt do something quite as ambitious as The Denver Post. However, Chase announced in his column that the Bay Area News Group will embark on a series of town halls in order to invite comments on changes to its newsrooms. If the goal in Denver was to raise public awareness of the situation theyre in, says Chase, I think this was a brilliant way to do it.

About 30 miles south, in Santa Cruz, the DFM-owned Sentinel newspaper re-printed The Denver Post editorial in full, with this note: This editorial was published in the Denver Post on Sunday. The Santa Cruz Sentinel is also owned by Alden Global Capital and has seen similar cuts in recent years. (Managing editor Kara Meyberg Guzman didnt respond to an inquiry by the time this story was posted.)

In an interview, Frank Pine, executive editor of the DFM-owned Southern California News Group, which includes The Orange County Register and the Riverside Press-Enterprise, said he felt The Denver Posts shot across the bow prompted a very necessary conversation about the state of journalism. He added that local newspapers have an obligation to be open with their audiences.

Here in Southern California, we have also had staff reductions and we have made significant changes to our publications, Pine said. Were thinking about how best to communicate that story to our readers.

In Massachusetts, The Berkshire Eagle also reprinted The Denver Post editorial, with a note that might give some hope to those wishing for DFM to sell its papers to local owners. In 2010, MediaNews Groupand therefore the Post and The Eaglecame under management and ownership of Digital First Media, reads the note. As of May 1, 2016, The Eagle has been owned by a locally based group. Thats in reference to a group of wealthy local businessmen, led by a retired judge, who pledged to increase local news coverage and bring back jobs that were outsourced by DFM.

So far, many of Aldens DFM-owned daily and weekly papers havent added their voices to the Posts plea.

JAMES CAMPANINI who edits the DFM-owned Lowell Sun and the 180-year-old Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise in Massachusetts, has seen his own newsrooms beaten down by cutbacks. In February, for the first time in its history, the Sentinel and Enterprise closed its office to save money.

After the recent sale of The Boston Herald to Digital First Media, Campanini says hes heard plenty about vulture capitalism in the journalism business. However, its doubtful his papers will follow The Denver Posts lead in aggressively covering it.

The challenges are difficult enough without just heaping on criticism everywhere, he says. Were trying to get this news industry to survive and to grow again, and maybe it is by doing negative stories of corporate ownership and stuff. But it doesnt seem like its abating. Everybody wants a piece of newspapers. When they go up theyre being sold. A revolution on the op-ed page isnt going to save the industry, says Campanini, but maybe a white knight in Denver will decide to buy the Post. It happened for The Berkshire Eagle, after all.

In Colorado, which has about a dozen DFM papers, at least twoThe Boulder Daily Camera and The Longmont Times-Callran the same front-page Associated Press wire story about The Denver Posts revolt. The Fort Morgan Times re-published a column about it by a former Post staffer now writing for the nonprofit Colorado Independent. In Saratoga Springs, New York, the DFM-owned Saratogian ran an AP report, and headlined its story to focus readers attention on Alden: Denver Post publishes harsh rebuke of its ownership, which also controls The Saratogian. (Saratogian editor Charlie Kraebel said he was swamped and couldnt talk.)

At The Freeman in Kingston, editor Adamis said running an AP wire report of such an unprecedented event met the test for newsworthiness in his community. But its probably not something his limited staff would tackle with original reporting. Its not like youre The New York Times when the Times has to report on itself they set up a little team and a firewall and they have the luxury of being able to do that, he said. Many of us are very small. Ive got a newsroom of 12 people.

So far, many (if not most) of Aldens DFM-owned daily and weekly papers havent added their voices to the Posts plea. Out on Colorados Eastern Plains, in the small town of Sterling, the Journal-Advocate has no plans to run any editorial coverage about the matter, says editor Sara Waites. That paper wont run a wire story because it no longer subscribes to AP content. Editors at other DFM papers in Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota didnt respond to inquiries.

Its possible that some editors might fear reprisal from DFM for critical coverage of Alden.

Chuck Plunkett, the Posts editorial page editor, orchestrated his papers coverage without notifying DFM or his own papers top editor, Lee Ann Colacioppo. Within hours of the Posts publication, DFM Chief Operating Officer Guy Gilmore called Colacioppo. They considered firing me and pulling sections, Plunkett tells CJR. Lee Ann talked them down.

Critical coverage of Alden seems easier from outside of DFMs purview. George Pyle, editorial page editor for The Salt Lake Tribune, noted a few improvements at his paper since it was purchased from Digital First Media. The Salt Lake Tribune is smaller than it used to be, in the size of its staff and the number of its pages, wrote Pyle. But it could be worse. We could all live in Denver.

One East Coast editor for a DFM paper asked not to be named because he worried about the potential for reprisal. After the Denver Post package went live last Friday, the editor says DFM journalists were forwarding links to them all over the place.

On a personal levelnot as a company level, as a company guyIm applauding it, the editor says. But the editor has no plans to cover what the Post did, or to run anything similar. Id love to tell our readers how this publication is suffering at the hands of this bloodletting, the editor says. Though the The Denver Post may find a savior, the editor went on, Were not expecting a miracle.

This post was updated on April 12 to reflect a developing story, and on April 16 to correct a geographic reference.

ICYMI: Denver Post cuts fit a disturbing pattern at hedge fund-owned newspapers

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Corey Hutchins is CJRs correspondent based in Colorado, where he teaches journalism at Colorado College. A former alt-weekly reporter in South Carolina, he was twice named journalist of the year in the weekly division by the SC Press Association. Hutchins writes about politics and media for the Colorado Independent and worked on the State Integrity Investigation at the Center for Public Integrity; he has contributed to Slate, The Nation, the Washington Post, and others. Follow him on Twitter @coreyhutchins or email him at coreyhutchins@gmail.com.A raging fire that tore through a 50th-floor apartment at Trump Tower killed a man inside and sent flames and thick, black smoke pouring from windows of the presidents namesake skyscraper.

New York Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said the cause of Saturdays blaze is not yet known but the apartment was virtually entirely on fire when firefighters arrived after 5:30 p.m.

It was a very difficult fire, as you can imagine, Nigro told reporters outside the building in midtown Manhattan. The apartment is quite large.

Todd Brassner, 67, who was in the apartment, was taken to a hospital and died a short time later, the New York Police Department said. Property records obtained by The Associated Press indicate Brassner was an art dealer who had purchased his unit in 1996.

Officials said four firefighters also suffered minor injuries. An investigation is ongoing.

Shortly after news of the fire broke, President Donald Trump, who was in Washington, tweeted: Fire at Trump Tower is out. Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!

Asked if that assessment was accurate, Nigro said, Its a well-built building. The upper floors, the residence floors, are not sprinklered.

Fire sprinklers were not required in New York City high-rises when Trump Tower was completed in 1983. Subsequent updates to the building code required commercial skyscrapers to install the sprinklers retroactively, but owners of older residential high-rises are not required to install sprinklers unless the building undergoes major renovations.

Some fire safety advocates pushed for a requirement that older apartment buildings be retrofitted with sprinklers when New York City passed a law requiring them in new residential highrises in 1999, but officials in the administration of then-mayor Rudy Giuliani said that would be too expensive.

Nigro noted that no member of the Trump family was in the 664-foot tower Saturday.

Trumps family has an apartment on the top floors of the 58-story building, but he has spent little time in New York since taking office. The headquarters of the Trump Organization is on the 26th floor.

Nigro said firefighters and Secret Service members checked on the condition of Trumps apartment. About 200 firefighters and emergency medical service workers responded to the fire, he said.

Some residents said they didnt get any notification from building management to evacuate.

Lalitha Masson, a 76-year-old resident, called it a very, very terrifying experience.

Masson told The New York Times that she did not receive any announcement about leaving, and that when she called the front desk no one answered.

When I saw the television, I thought we were finished, said Masson, who lives on the 36th floor with her husband, Narinder, who is 79 and has Parkinsons disease.

She said she started praying because she felt it was the end.

I called my oldest son and said goodbye to him because the way it looked everything was falling out of the window, and it reminded me of 9/11, Masson said.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.The federal agency handling workplace harassment complaints has become a crowded waystation in an overwhelmed bureaucracy, with wait times often stretching years. And as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission takes on renewed significance in light of the growing (hash)MeToo movement, lawyers worry the increased caseload will lead to even longer delays.

A federal worker filing a complaint with the EEOC last year waited, on average, 543 days for resolution. But cases can drag on much longer, often forcing employees to choose between enduring discrimination or abandoning their careers.

Employment lawyers say the cash-strapped agency is doing its best. But they also say the uptick of sexual harassment cases being brought to the EEOC could mean longer wait times.

We are totally inundated, said Cathy Harris, a Washington-area employment attorney whose practice focuses mostly on federal employees. I dont think theres more discrimination; I think people are just encouraged to do something about it now.

While the omnibus spending bill Congress passed last month gives the EEOC a $15 million budget boost, the commission is still without permanent leadership. President Donald Trumps choice to lead the five-person commission, corporate attorney Janet Dhillon, has inspired fierce criticism from civil rights groups. Neither Dhillon, who is married to a White House attorney, nor Daniel Gade, nominated for a seat on the commission, have come up for Senate confirmation votes.

The #MeToo movement, which began last fall, has empowered victims of sexual misconduct to come forward with complaints.

The EEOC operates on two parallel tracks: one for private sector workers, and one for federal employees. Both are struggling.

In 2017, the average wait time to resolve a private sector complaint was about 295 days.

The agency receives so many complaints that its 549 investigators must prioritize cases deemed likely to be strong.

Last year the agency closed 99,000 cases. In 70 percent of those cases, investigators determined there wasnt evidence immediately available to make a finding that discrimination occurred. But many were dismissed without a full or even cursory investigation; last year, just 2.9 percent of all resolved cases were found to have reasonable cause.

Were devoting our resources to charges where there seems to be more likelihood to find discrimination that we can attempt to resolve, and spend fewer resources on charges where it appears less likely to find discrimination, said EEOC Project Manager Nicholas Inzeo, who oversees the agencys 53 field offices.

Some lawyers say dismissing complaints without full investigations can discourage workers from pursuing their claim in court.

Its easy to say theres no reasonable cause if you dont do an investigation, said Richard T. Seymour, an employment lawyer.

Attorney Jacob Small said many workers dont want to go through the lengthy, emotionally draining and very public process of filing a lawsuit.

So many people realize its just easier for them to move on or to take a very small settlement that doesnt compensate them for the harm theyve actually suffered, he said.

The agencys handling of federal employee complaints often takes even longer.

Federal employees must first file a complaint with their agencys equal employment office, which conducts an investigation. The employee may then file a lawsuit or request a hearing with an EEOC administrative judge.

The average time to resolve a federal complaint with the EEOC is about a year and a half, though complaints filed in busy offices can take much longer. In 2016, just 73 judges were tasked with handling roughly 20,000 cases. By the end of the year, 13,500 were left in the queue.

I have some cases that have sat on judges desks for five years with no hearing date in sight, said Rosemary Dettling, the founder of the Federal Employee Legal Services Center.

Dettling said some clients endure years of harassment and retaliation. Others look for other jobs.

Our clients suffering is real, she said. Some leave the jobs they love, just to escape.

In 1993, Ann M. Garcia was an ambitious 34-year-old agent at the Drug Enforcement Agency with dreams of going overseas. But headquarters had told her that she shouldnt stray far from home because her husband might get bored and leave her.

She filed a discrimination complaint with the EEOC alleging her employer illegally denied female agents promotions and foreign assignments because of their gender. An agency judge ruled in her favor  in 2011.

She was 52 and had retired, along with more than 70 other female agents whod joined her complaint. While the action was pending Garcia did receive a foreign assignment, but many of the others didnt, she said.

All the emotional distress  the anger, the anxiety, Garcia said. They say time heals everything. But what happens if something just never ends?

Protracted cases can also prevent harassment victims from moving on and cause memories to become less reliable.

Try to litigate a case where youre taking depositions two or three years after the fact, said attorney Les Alderman. Those fuzzy memories turn into generalities. The delays really, really hurt victims.

Inzeo said the agency is in the process of hiring at least six more administrative judges to ease the burden. Currently, judges each can handle up to 200 cases a year.

Inzeo disputed that cases typically drag on for years, but said he recognizes the frustration many feel over long wait times.

We are working on projects that will reduce the amount of time, reduce the complexity of it and make it more efficient, for the parties and for us, and reduce inventory, and help us get through the cases more quickly, he said.

Despite its problems, Harris, the Washington employment lawyer, stressed that the EEOC is an invaluable resource.

They can literally change peoples lives and remedy harm, she said. Its an agency with an incredible power to heal wounds. Its a wonderful system. Its just underfunded, and completely broken.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.After partially faulting Tesla Inc.s automation system for a 2016 fatal crash, U.S. safety investigators last year called on carmakers to do more to ensure drivers stay engaged as next-generation cars start to steer themselves.

Since then, the National Transportation Safety Board has opened investigations of three new cases  two of them involving Tesla vehicles  that call into question the progress thats been made in guarding against motorist misuse of semi-autonomous driving technology.

Tesla, a pioneer in driver-assistance technology with its Autopilot system, has lagged behind automakers including General Motors Co. in embracing driver monitoring. While the electric-car maker still relies on technology that federal investigators said was too easy to sidestep, its now working on unspecified improvements to its vehicles, according to the NTSB.

They have indicated that they have already made some improvements and are working on additional improvements, agency spokesman Peter Knudson said, in the first indication that the company is contemplating more changes to its driver-assistance system. NTSB highway investigators have been in contact with Tesla technical staff, he added.

A Tesla spokeswoman declined to comment on the NTSBs recommendations for improved driver monitoring.

Growing Concern

The difficulty of keeping drivers in automated vehicles engaged  combined with the broader safety benefits of ensuring people in traditional cars and trucks arent peering at electronic devices or nodding off  is a growing safety concern thats spurred several car companies, including GM and Subaru Corp., to deploy infrared cameras in the cockpit trained on the driver to track head and eye movement.

Driver-monitoring technology is neJeded for any vehicle that needs humans to handle part of the driving task, said Bryan Reimer, who studies driver behavior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This includes conventional vehicles without driver-assist systems, cars that guide themselves for some periods without human inputs, such as Cadillac models featuring GMs Super Cruise, and self-driving cars with people serving as safety monitors.

Motorists today are bombarded by distractions, from cell phones to in-dash navigation systems, Reimer said. Drivers need help making better decisions, he said.

Tesla Crashes

The NTSB is investigating two crashes this year in which Tesla drivers were using Autopilot. The system can automate steering and follow traffic in some conditions, but the company warns drivers they must monitor it at all times. The system isnt designed to be fully autonomous and cant detect some objects in its path, according to the NTSB.

In the most recent case, a Model X slammed into a concrete highway barrier on March 23 in Mountain View, California, killing the driver. Tesla said in a blog post afterward that the man didnt have his hands on the wheel for six seconds prior to striking the barrier where lanes split on the freeway.

The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive, the company said in the March 30 blog post.

The NTSB is also investigating a Model S crash that occurred on Jan. 22 near Los Angeles. In that case, the car rammed into a fire truck that was parked on a freeway after responding to an emergency. The driver, who wasnt hurt, told people on the scene he was using Autopilot, according to a tweet by the union for Culver City firefighters.

Wheel Sensor

After the 2016 fatal crash involving a Model S driver, Tesla modified Autopilot to improve sensors and also increased the frequency of warnings to drivers who didnt have their hands on the wheel.

What Tesla has is basically a sensor that just detects whether your hands are on the wheel, said Mike Ramsey, an analyst at researcher Gartner Inc. If it doesnt detect anything on the wheel for a certain amount of time, it first gives a visual warning, then an audible warning, then the car starts slowing down. Its somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 seconds or longer. At 70 miles per hour, thats a long time  a lot can happen in that period of time.

The NTSB found last year that the driver in the 2016 crash had barely touched the steering wheel and ignored multiple warnings over a 37-minute period before his Model S plowed into the side of a truck. The agency  which has no regulatory powers but makes recommendations to government and industry  wrote to Tesla and five other car companies to recommend better means of driver monitoring.

Tesla has installed an inward-facing camera above the rear-view mirror in its new Model 3 sedan, but hasnt said whether it could be used to monitor drivers.

Uber Death

The issue of attentiveness also arose in the first U.S. pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. In that case, an Uber Technologies Inc. sport utility vehicle killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona, on March 18. The NTSB is looking at multiple issues related to how the cars software and sensors performed, and an interior video showed that the safety driver in the SUV wasnt watching the road for about five seconds leading up to the collision.

Ubers self-driving system wasnt covered under the NTSBs recommendations, but the agency believes its call for better monitoring is relevant for all autonomous vehicles that still keep a human in the loop, according a March 8 letter to Daimler AGs Mercedes-Benz.

Using technology to monitor driver behavior is beginning to gain traction with some automakers and safety organizations. The European New Car Assessment Programme plans to add incentives to its safety ratings regime for carmakers that equip new vehicles with driver-monitoring systems starting in 2020.

In March, Subaru said it will equip higher-end versions of its redesigned 2019 Forester with an infrared camera facing the driver. That will be paired with facial recognition software to monitor drivers for signs of fatigue or distraction, and to warn drivers with a beeping noise after three seconds of inattention. Ignoring the warnings will prime the Foresters suite of driver-assist technologies, such as automatic emergency braking, to slow or stop the vehicle to avoid or mitigate a collision.

The issue of driver attentiveness is really a critical area, said MITs Reimer, whose team is testing a fleet of vehicles rigged with cameras to observe how drivers perform in real-world situations. We are clearly picking up technology in the car, portable phones, et cetera, at rates that are far and above what should be socially acceptable.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.The U.S. government announced Tuesday that it will award $18.5 billion worth of disaster recovery grants to Puerto Rico to help repair homes, businesses and its crumbling power grid as the U.S. territory struggles to recover from Hurricane Maria.

It is the largest single amount for such assistance ever awarded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said Deputy Secretary Pamela Patenaude during a visit to the U.S. territory.

Our goal is to get people back into their homes, get people back to work and to build a stronger Puerto Rico for future generations, she said.

The money will be issued through the agencys Community Development Block Grant program.

Patenaude said that Puerto Rico planning officials will develop a disaster recovery plan in upcoming weeks.

The announcement comes as 54,000 power customers remain in the dark more than six months after the Category 4 storm hit. Officials have said they expect power to be fully restored across the island by May, just days before the Atlantic hurricane season starts.

HUD already had allocated $1.5 billion to Puerto Rico in February for post-hurricane recovery efforts.

Maria hit on Sept. 20 and caused more than an estimated $100 billion in damage. It destroyed around 70,000 homes and damaged another 300,000.

HUD also said it plans to award the neighboring U.S. Virgin Islands $1.6 billion in disaster recovery funds to help it recuperate from hurricanes Irma and Maria.

Both storms left the U.S. Virgin Islands reeling. Hurricane Irma passed near St. John and St. Thomas on Sept. 6 as a Category 5 system, killing three people and causing widespread and significant destruction to homes and businesses. Maria passed to the south of St. Croix two weeks later, resulting in major flooding and wind damage to homes there.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.The current method of programming autonomous vehicles may not be safe, according to Aviral Shrivastava, a computer science associate professor in Arizona State Universitys Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Google, Uber and others in the field are using humans to teach cars how to drive themselves, explained Shrivastava. And thats the problem. They are learning from human drivers, all of whom are fallible, and the autonomous cars are in turn mirroring our unsafe driving behaviors.

Shrivastava is known on campus for his embedded computing course, which challenges students to engineer a self-navigating, obstacle-avoiding toy race car complete with GPS, a laser surveying system (LIDAR), an inertial measurement unit to calculate distances and other sensing tools used in full-scale autonomous vehicles.

The autonomous car industry is trying to walk a line between a human-like driving experience and guaranteed safety. At the moment, the familiarity of human-like driving is the norm and puts safety at risk.

'Why we would try to simulate human driving in AVs, when human driving is inherently flawed?'

A fatal accident involving a self-driving Uber vehicle and a pedestrian earlier this month in Tempe, Arizona, caused Uber to suspend its driverless operations in Arizona. The video captured by the vehicle just before the March 18 accident illustrates the pedestrian was crossing the road, outside of a pedestrian walkway, in the dark. Lights from the car, streetlights and ambient lighting failed to illuminate the pedestrian.

Since the Uber car could not detect anything in the dark area, it did what a human driver might have done  proceeded as though there was no one in the road. When the cars lights brought the woman suddenly into view, the car was travelling too fast to stop, Shrivastava said.

Shrivastava asserts that an autonomous vehicle should travel only at the speed at which it can stop before its range of vision ends  the vehicle should be traveling slowly enough that it can instantly stop if an obstruction suddenly comes into view.

When encountering a situation like that on Mill Avenue, a safety-focused vehicles computer would assume there is an obstacle in the unlighted area and proceed accordingly, unlike humans who often assume that the path ahead is clear, he said.

Tempe police chief Sylvia Moir said, I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident, concluding that regardless of whether the vehicle was driven by a human or autonomously, its very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway.

However, expectations for a human driver and autonomous cars are very different, said Shrivastava.

If a human driver causes an accident, it is unfortunate but normal, he said. If an autonomous car causes an accident on the other hand, it is unacceptable, and it can shut down the whole autonomous car industry.

As long as human behaviors are the foundation of automated driving technology, safety will continue to be an issue, Shrivastava added. The priority for autonomous cars should be safety, rather than a human-like driving experience.

Shrivastavas research, funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation, focuses on cyber-physical systems designs  mechanisms like autonomous vehicles in which a computer controls a physical system  that guarantee the behavior of the systems.

For example, we look at how can we build a car in which there is a guarantee that if an obstacle is detected, brakes will be applied within one millisecond, explained Shrivasta.

Recently, Shrivastava developed an algorithm for autonomous cars that promises to more than double the throughput of traffic intersections, which are really the most important bottleneck in city traffic, he said. While the system will work only on roads that are fully autonomous, the communications and calculations weve developed will enable autonomous cars to zip through intersections at full speed or with just a minor slow-down.

Source: Arizona State UniversityIt's called "Day Zero": when Cape Town, South Africa's bustling port city, sees its water taps run dry, and its population thrust into a perilous situation. Originally projected for this year, the impending crisis has been delayed in part by severe measures  the city instituted restrictions that amount to less than one sixth of an average American's water consumption. Yet despite that effort, "Day Zero" is still projected to arrive next year. And when it comes, the crisis will see the government switching off all the taps and rationing the resource through collection points.

That future isn't just Cape Town's. It's a scenario cities around the globe may face, experts say. It may be hard to fathom just how cities could be at risk of a water scarcity crisis when approximately 70 percent of the world is made up of the resource. The stark reality, however, is that the percentage of fresh water probably only amounts to about 2.5 percent, according to often-cited assessments.

A public swimming pool, in a suburb of Cape Town has been emptied due to local water restrictions on March 6, 2018. Morgana Wingard | Getty Images

Even then, a significant supply is locked up in ice and snow, which means just 1 percent of all fresh water is easily accessible to the global population. Inequality in access to water is also quickly becoming a problem. While the affluent can find ways to get access to water through deliveries or in-built tanks  poorer populations are left to their own devices. That situation oftentimes leads to water theft  for profit, for survival, or for both.

A 'wake-up call'

A nation's development has frequently come at the cost of undercutting its sources of clean water, Betsy Otto, director of the World Resources Institute's global water program told CNBC. "For example, quite a bit of scientific evidence has shown that deforestation changed the hydrological cycle in the Amazon," she said. Although water scarcity is a very real and pervasive problem, experts said most cities are not immediately at risk of running out of water. Still, it is extremely important that water scarcity is acknowledged as a global problem because cities should begin working on unique solutions to local problems now, according to Rebecca Keller, a senior science and technology analyst at intelligence firm Stratfor "It won't be the same exact scenario that Cape Town is facing," Keller said. "It might be pollution, drought, drier climates or significant population growth."

An indian woman carries drinking water in steel and plastic containers, walking towards her temporary shelters in Rataiora Village on December 15, 2016. NurPhoto | Getty Images

The troubles faced by Cape Town should serve as a "wake-up call" for other countries about the realities of increasing water stress, Otto said. Water stress occurs when demand for the resource exceeds the available supply. It taxes the reserves and may lead to deterioration of fresh water resources. In recent years, California faced a drought that lasted years, Australia survived the millennium drought, and Sao Paulo faced a water shortage crisis in 2015 due to both drought and inefficient infrastructures. Otto summed up the global state of preparedness for water scarcity, saying: "We've either under-invested in measures or allowed existing structures to fall apart."

Water theft

The United Nations' 2010 recognition of water as a human right has complicated the issue of water theft, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the foreign policy program at think-tank the Brookings Institution. "The right to water does not mean the right to free water," Felbab-Brown explained, saying many people had misunderstood the UN. "In the same manner that people have to pay for food, they should expect to pay for safe water." That sentiment hasn't stopped outright water theft on a large scale in countries like Brazil, India and Mexico. Companies and individuals illegally tap into pipelines and reservoirs, or they find other ways to avoid water meters. There's no single solution to the issue, however, as the context of water theft varies between places, Felbab-Brown said. But, she pointed out, better law enforcement, water monitoring, and creating comprehensive databases, are good starting points for governments. "Governments need to recognize that they can't just apply law enforcement without providing legal alternatives," she added. As of now, water smuggling mostly operates within countries' borders, but it will eventually occur on an international scale, Felbab-Brown said.

Ethiopian construction workers working on the Grand Renaissance Dam near the Sudanese-Ethiopian border on March 31, 2015. Zacharias Abubeker | AFP | Getty Images

That could become a point of geopolitical tension between countries dealing with transboundary water issues, Keller said. For an example of international water tensions, take the construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam in the Nile, a $4 billion hydroelectric project financed by Ethiopia. It's left Egypt fearing a potential disruption to its fresh water supply.

Controling demand

Mitigating water scarcity has proven to be a tricky political subject because, in many countries, environmental or climate solutions tend to have a hard time gathering enough political support to become a reality. It is also extremely expensive to build out new water supplies, dams and desalination plants. "Unless there is an acute event  a severe drought for example  it is the [political] constraints that play out in a long time frame," Keller said. Consequently, many governments have done little to guide their citizens on water-efficient behavior. That can be implemented through price controls, Otto said, but it's rarely a popular measure. "There should be two tiers of pricing. Conservation pricing, which charges the minimum amount for water that is sufficient for basic needs, should be provided at low rates. Discretionary water use, which is anything beyond the necessary amount, should be charged more," Otto said. On a national level, she said, governments should encourage conversation about conservation issues. That is, saving water will always be cheaper than building or drilling for new sources, Otto added. The good news, experts said, is there will be time for governments to start preparing for a Day Zero scenario. "It's not going to be a surprise. The city is not going to run out of water suddenly," Keller said.

WATCH: Michael Phelps on the quest to 'Save Water'A Lincoln Navigator concept vehicle is on display during the 17th Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition at the National Exhibition and Convention Center on April 23, 2017 in Shanghai, China.

Ford Motor's premium Lincoln brand plans to build as many as five new vehicles in China by 2022, according to two U.S. sources, in a move to expand sales in the world's largest vehicle market that would also blunt the impact of trade U.S-China trade spats.

Ford has said it plans to build an all-new sport utility vehicle in China by the end of 2019, however the company has not detailed future production plans for the Lincoln brand in China beyond that.

"Our localization plans to support the China market are on track and will serve to further drive Lincoln's growth in China," Lincoln spokeswoman Angie Kozleski said. "Beyond that, it would be premature to discuss our future product and production plans or timing."

Sources familiar with Ford's production plans told Reuters the automaker now expects to begin building the new Lincoln Aviator in China in late 2019 or early 2020, along with replacements for the MKC compact crossover and the MKZ midsize sedan, followed in 2021 by the all-new Nautilus, which replaces the Lincoln MKX crossover.

A fifth model, a small coupe-like crossover, is tentatively slated for production in China in 2022, the sources said.

Ford has much to lose if the war of words over trade between China and U.S. President Donald Trump escalates into a full-blown tariff war. Last year, it shipped about 80,000 vehicles to China from North America, more than half of them Lincolns to support the brand's growth.

All Lincoln vehicles that Ford now sells in China are brought in from North America.

Even if China does reduce its 25 percent tariff on imported vehicles  as Chinese President Xi Jinping promised on Tuesday  it is not clear that would mean a big, long-term increase in Fords and Lincolns made in U.S. factories heading to Chinese showrooms.

Ford is pursuing long-range plans to build more vehicles in China to serve a market that is now roughly 60 percent larger than the U.S. market, and projected to keep growing. But it is playing catch up to hometown rival General Motors and German luxury brands including Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, which have invested heavily in Chinese production in recent years as a form of

insurance against trade, political and currency gyrations and to lower price points for their premium cars.

Chinese vehicle imports from all markets last year climbed to 1.2 million, but still represent less than 5 percent of total vehicle sales in the country, according to figures from the China Automobile Dealers Association. Less than a quarter of the imported vehicles sold in China - 267,473, according to Statista  came from U.S. auto plants.

The current 25-percent tariff rate makes it tough for Ford's American premium brand to compete with GM's Cadillac and the Germans, which avoid the import tariff on their locally built vehicles.

"As long as Lincolns are not manufactured in China, the brand's sales will no doubt suffer continuously," Zhu Kongyuan, Secretary General of the China Auto Dealers Chamber of Commerce (CADCC), told Reuters.Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is pitching a plan to end the investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

He proposed the plan to allies in Congress and senior White House aides, the Post reported, citing four people familiar with the conversations.

Bannon is suggesting the White House stop cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is managing the probe, and fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees Mueller's investigation.

FBI agents carried out raids this week on the home and office of Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Since then, Trump has heatedly discussed firing Mueller and supposedly deliberated firing Rosenstein.New York City is known for many things  Broadway shows, yellow cabs, Wall Street power brokers. But the most delicious thing it's famous for is its bread. "We're known for our pizza, our bagels," Ron Montana, a serial entrepreneur, hustler and lifelong New Yorker tells CNBC. "New York has the best pizza in the world, I would say. I mean, at least in the United States, that's for sure." Why is it so good? The theory goes it's all in the local water. Soon, diners across the country will be able to eat New York pizza made with the magic ingredient thanks to Montana and his investing buddies  Dom Detore, Mike Palmer, Tony DeCicco and Adolfo LaCola. They dreamed up the New York WaterMaker, a machine that can turn any H2O into NYC H2O, with "the exact hardness, molecular structure and chemical composition," according to the product's website.

Getty Image

The product is featured on CNBC's Wednesday-night prime-time show "Staten Island Hustle," which follows the group of businessmen and their entrepreneurial efforts. Every week the guys share a meal at Angelina's Ristorante in Staten Island and kick around ideas to make extra cash. At one gathering, while eating a slice of bread with butter, Montana discussed the idea of recreating New York water so people could bake the top-notch bread in other states.

The cast of CNBC's Staten Island Hustle NBC Universal | Staten Island Hustle

"You can't duplicate that in Florida, in Jersey, in California  anywhere," says Montana on the show. "If they ever had a sandwich with New York bread down in L.A. or in Florida, they would die," says Palmer. It is a common theory among foodies that New York's "'Champagne' of drinking water" (as the state's Department of Environmental Conservation has dubbed it) contributes to tastier dough. (Though there is some debate over the issue.) "What makes New York water so special is the fact that we run a pH level that's almost neutral, plus our total dissolved solids are all at the right level, which is conducive with making baked goods," LaCola says on the show. "Everyone knows that New York City water is the best in the world," Detore says on the show. "So Ron's idea ... he may be onto something." On the show, you see them test the theory. Palmer, LaCola and Montana drove to New Jersey to collect tap water from a truck stop. Then they asked the owner of Mikey Bagels in Staten Island to make one batch of bagels with the New Jersey water, and one using water from New York. The New York bagels rose higher and became more golden brown in the oven. And diners at the shop agreed the bagel made with New York water tasted better. "I definitely like this one better, guys," a customer at Mikey Bagels says, pointing to the darker bagel. "I'd pay slightly more for that."

Mikey bagels made with New York City water CNBC | Staten Island Hustle

Mikey Bagels made with New Jersey truck stop water CNBC | Staten Island Hustle

The Staten Island investors worked with Dr. Emmanual Moya, the head of research and development at Greencrown Water in New Jersey, to build a prototype of a machine that could replicate the properties of New York water. After months of testing and tweaking, a tasting of the machine-made New York water was a success. What started out as New Jersey water became indistinguishable from New York water after it was run through the system.

Mike Palmer, Adolfo LaCola and Ron Montana visit Greencrown Water. CNBC | Staten Island Hustle

"It smells like New York City water, it tasted like New York City water," says LaCola on "Staten Island Hustle" after a sip. To get started selling, the investors flew out to Los Angeles and met with local businesses, arguing the machine would pay for itself in new customers. "We spoke to people in bagel stores, bakeries, restaurants," Palmer says on "Staten Island Hustle." "We sold preorders for 20 units." A 10-year license to use the machine costs $28,900, says Paul Errigo, the CEO at Greencrown Water. The fee can be paid in full or financed. Errigo recently unveiled the machine to the public at the International Pizza Expo in March. There are dozens of orders for the machine underway, Errigo tells CNBC Make It, adding, "every single day there are more inquiries coming in." And a few shops across several states have machines already installed, Detore says. "The New York WaterMaker is working in several locations that we've placed it in, New Jersey and Connecticut, a couple of other places outside of New York, and to a lot of success," Detore tells CNBC. For Palmer, the New York WaterMaker is not just a side hustle but a project with the potential to strike it rich. "I have no doubt in my mind that this water machine will be not only a home run," he says, "but a grand slam." All new episodes of "Staten Island Hustle" air Wednesdays at 10P ET/PT on CNBC. Don't miss: How these 5 guys from Staten Island got their own TV show on CNBC Like this story? Like CNBC Make It on FacebookChina will not hesitate to fight back if the United States escalates its trade spat with Beijing, the commerce ministry said on Thursday, asserting that Chinese President Xi Jinping's pledge to cut import tariffs is not a concession to Washington.

Xi on Tuesday vowed to open China's economy further and lower import duties on goods such as cars. U.S. President Donald Trump responded in a tweet saying he was "thankful" for Xi's kind words on tariffs and access for U.S. automakers, as well as his "enlightenment" on intellectual property issues.

Washington is accusing Chinese firms of stealing the trade secrets of U.S. companies and forcing them into joint ventures to acquire their technology  the crux of Trump's current tariff threats against China.

It would be misleading to say Xi's pledge this week was a concession to the United States, commerce ministry spokesman Gao Feng said at a regular press briefing in Beijing.

Xi was merely outlining China's strategy to open up further, which had nothing to do with its trade friction with the United States, Gao said.their company fosters a culture of innovation  yet only a quarter of entry-level employees agreed, according to a new EY study.

Source: Office Space | Facebook

As Thomas Edison famously said, "Hell, there are no rules here  we're trying to accomplish something." In other words, we have to break out of our usual constraints in order to innovate. Think about your own workplace: Would it be considered innovative? The answer, of course, depends on where you work. But it also depends on whom you ask. EY recently surveyed more than 1,000 employees from a range of industries about their ability to innovate at work. The results show a significant disconnect between company leadership and employees on the ground. More than half of senior executives said their company fosters a culture of innovation, yet only a quarter of entry-level employees agreed. That chasm between perception and reality means fresh ideas are being left on the table, and opportunity, along with top talent, is being lost. In fact, 69 percent of those surveyed said they would leave their current position for a comparable role at an organization that is recognized as a leader in innovation. Innovation requires buy-in and effort for people at every level, from the C-suite to the summer interns. Here are four guidelines for solving the "innovation disconnect"  and making creativity standard practice across your organization.

1. Rethink your role.

Too often, we look to specific people or teams to drive innovation within a company. But innovation is everyone's job, and the most cutting-edge organizations tap into all of the brainpower at their disposal. Remember: Your great ideas don't mean anything if you keep them to yourself. If you have something to contribute, you have as much a right as a responsibility to share it. Of course, that's easier said than done, especially at the early stages of your career. Nine in 10 senior executives (91 percent) said new ideas are celebrated internally. But when we asked entry-level employees the same question, that number dropped to just 54 percent. Read more from @Work:

The cities vying for Amazon's HQ2 are fighting the wrong war

The dream job that's all the rage across America

Facebook data privacy scandal has one silver lining: Thousands of new jobs AI can't handle Managers should consider it part of their role to create a culture of inclusion, where everyone is encouraged  and expected  to express their ideas, and employees are rewarded for breaking out of the status quo and finding new and better ways of doing things.

2. Make time and space to ideate.

There's a reason the best ideas often come to us in the shower or on a long jog. Creativity requires us to break out of the inertia of day-to-day tasks and think about the big picture. So it's important to set aside time on a regular basis to ruminate, doodle or just daydream. Of course, many people don't feel like they have time to spare. In fact, more than half of our survey respondents said that while their company cares about innovation, they are more focused on the "daily grind." Managers can help change this by carving out a designated time  and space  for employees to step out of the day-to-day and work on long-term projects that excite them.

3. Break down silos.

We know that creative breakthroughs don't occur in a vacuum. Innovation happens when we are learning from one another. So it's critical that we take the time to meet face to face, exchange thoughts and build on one another's ideas. Companies can and should create opportunities for employees to get to know colleagues from across all teams and experience levels. To help accomplish this goal, management should consider reverse-mentoring, which at its core allows for the free exchange of ideas and transference of skills between more junior-level and senior employees. At EY we've put a special emphasis on reverse-mentoring, recognizing that senior leadership can learn a lot from more junior employees. This has been true for me personally  sitting down with our young professionals has informed my own leadership and decision-making. If your workplace doesn't have formal channels for collaboration, you can always create your own. There's nothing stopping you from grabbing lunch with a few colleagues from different departments or starting a task force to work through a specific problem.

4. Embrace failure.It's make-or-break time for the big banks this week as JPMorgan, Citigroup and Wells Fargo gear up for earnings Friday morning.

Financials were staging a comeback Thursday morning, with the XLF ETF rallying more than 1 percent. Despite the surge, the group is still the worst-performing sector in the past month. However, "Options Action" trader Mike Khouw says a recent spike in options activity for the group could suggest the tides are about to change.

"The XLF saw above-average activity this week," Khouw said Wednesday on CNBC's Fast Money. "[Thursday] we saw approximately 1.5 times the average daily volume."

Three of the financial ETF's top holdings  JP Morgan, Citigroup and Wells Fargo  are expected to move around 3 percent in either direction when they report this Friday. Of the group, Khouw suggests investors keep a close eye on Wells Fargo.

"I think Wells Fargo right here is the one we want to look at," Khouw said. "This is the one that has a little bit of idiosyncratic risk going on."

Wells Fargo has tumbled this year, now down more than 14 percent since January. The California-based finance company has struggled to maintain steady gains after its major fake accounts scandal broke back in 2016. However, Khouw points out that a recent trading pattern in the charts has demonstrated a resilience in the stock.

"Constantly, we have these controversies coming out and the stock sells off on the bad news but then actually recovers a little bit," he explained.

Wells Fargo surged more than 30 percent from its September 2017 low to its January 2018 high. Since then the stock is down more than 20 percent, but Khouw expects support to be held around $50 and for the stock to "catch a little bounce" off the level out of earnings.

Wells Fargo reports before the bell on Friday. Last quarter the bank missed on both revenue and earnings per share expectations and traded lower on the session.

Shares of Wells Fargo were trading around $52.55 early Wednesday afternoon.The U.S. has blood and urine samples from last Saturday's deadly attack in Syria that have tested positive for chemical weapons, two U.S. officials told NBC News.

The samples tested positive for chlorine gas and an unnamed nerve agent, according to the report. The officials told NBC that the Assad regime is known to have stocks of the nerve agent sarin and has previously used a mixture of chlorine and sarin in attacks.



The officials said they were "confident" in the intelligence, though not 100 percent sure, according to NBC.



Russia and Syria have denied any involvement in the alleged attack, however officials said the U.S. has compiled intelligence that indicates the Syrian government's involvement.



President Donald Trump condemned the attack after its occurrence, calling it "atrocious." He said on Monday that he plans to make "major decisions" following the attack and will not rule out military action. Trump has not confirmed when or if the attack will take place, stating in a tweet that it "could be very soon or not so soon at all."

The chemical attack is the latest in an escalating and deadly war in Syria that has garnered global attention and worry.

The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment on NBC's report.

Read the full NBC report here.It is helpful to consider China's long-term strategic thinking to understand how the authoritarian regime is pulling off this feat. After a century and a half of humiliations, China is re-emerging on the world stage. President Xi's simplest and broadest international goal is to create prestige, respect and influence for China worthy of its historical legacy. China also seeks to insure the party's continual dominance by signaling the legitimacy, equality and (at times) superiority of its political system vis-a-vis the United States and the West abroad and at home.

China works to project constancy and cooperativeness to accomplish these goals. When the U.S. exited from the Paris Climate accords, it afforded an easy and cheap opportunity for President Xi to present himself as an international statesman. China talks of global partnership and stewardship where the Trump administration publicly extols mercantilist self-interest as the guiding light of U.S. foreign policy. While the U.S. brags of building walls, China reforms its immigration system with little news coverage and no fanfare.

Under this oasis of calm, China quietly, but systematically, expands its influence. For example, China's One Belt, One Road initiative and creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank are both investment strategies to open up foreign markets that simultaneously serve as key instruments to increase Chinese diplomatic power (just as the Marshall Plan, the World Bank and the IMF served multiple purposes for the U.S. decades ago).

The irony of current trade frictions is that U.S. complaints about unfair Chines trade, especially regarding intellectual property protections, have obvious merit (something many Chinese observers would also grant). But rather than reach out to other trading partners to form an international coalition to place common pressure on China to alter its policies, the U.S. has been lashing out in all directions with a series of poorly aimed trade threats against China, against Canada and Mexico, against Europe and against allies like Japan and Korea.U.S.-China tensions over trade may have abated for now, but with China ready to escalate at any moment, CNBC's Jim Cramer wanted investors to be prepared for potential pain. "Stocks like Caterpillar have been rebounding nicely after getting absolutely eviscerated over the past few months. I say wait a second. Not so fast," the "Mad Money" host said on Thursday. While shares of Caterpillar have more than tripled since their early 2016 lows and business at the construction equipment giant is booming, Cramer warned that it does a lot of business in China. And despite the stock's rally after China President Xi Jinping struck a more conciliatory tone on trade in a recent speech, Cramer saw Caterpillar as an obvious target for Chinese retaliation. "You should swap out of CAT and swap into United Rentals, URI, the big domestic machinery rental play," he recommended. "United Rentals gives you the same great earth-moving and construction equipment exposure that Caterpillar does without any of the China related risk." Here's why Cramer would buy United Rentals' stock over Caterpillar's:

1. Geography

For one, United Rentals does 91.5 percent of its sales in the United States, with the remaining 8.5 percent coming from Canada. Caterpillar, however, gets less than 41 percent of its sales from the United States  the rest comes from overseas. "It's true that only an estimated 5 percent of CAT's current sales come from China," Cramer admitted. "But here's the thing: the Chinese market is a huge component of the company's long-term growth strategy." In the last year, the Asia-Pacific region grew at a rate of 40 to 51 percent, making it the fastest-growing region on Caterpillar's books. That gave Caterpillar a major boost when North American markets weakened, but the potential for a trade war threatens the numbers, Cramer said.

2. Exposure

Cramer also took a merit-based approach to United Rentals' business. Trade disputes aside, the rental giant has a better mix of end markets than Caterpillar for the current environment, he said. About 50 percent of United Rentals' business comes from industrial and non-construction rentals. Forty-six percent of that comes from commercial construction, which improves when the business cycle picks up, as it is now, the "Mad Money" host said. As for Caterpillar, roughly 40 percent of its sales are tied to construction, and about 50 percent are tied to the energy, transportation and natural resources industries. "Caterpillar has a lot more exposure to commodities, and while commodities have been trending higher of late, these resource-related industries are much more boom and bust," Cramer said. "When those industries drop off, they really drop off. That probably won't happen any time soon, but United Rentals is much closer to a pure play on the resurgent U.S. economy and that's what we like in Cramerica."

3. Fundamentals

Third, Cramer considers the equipment rental business to be stronger than the equipment manufacturing business. United Rentals' margins benefit from not having the fixed costs that Caterpillar has from actually making the equipment they sell and rent. "CAT's all about manufacturing and then selling big-ticket items, which is inherently a lot more risky," he said.

Conclusions

All in all, Cramer found United Rentals, the stock and the company, to be a much more attractive play than Caterpillar. Shares of United Rentals trade at just 12 times this year's earnings estimates while Caterpillar shares sell for 16 times. And although Caterpillar can grow faster, the risks, particularly the wild card of China, are piling up. "Let me give you the bottom line on these two: Caterpillar is a great stock to own in a world where everything's hunky-dory, but we're in a more challenging environment now. Even if the Chinese never slap tariffs on Caterpillar's machinery, the very fact that they might be willing to do so is enough to hold back this stock, at least until we get some kind of resolution to the trade dispute," Cramer said. "That's why I think United Rentals is the better buy here, and it's why its stock has been behaving so much better than CAT's for the past few months," he concluded. "I bet it continues to perform better, which is why you should swap out of CAT and into URI if you think that the president still wants to play hardball with the Chinese."

WATCH: Cramer on why URI is a better buy than CATA former Trump Tower doorman was reportedly paid $30,000 in late 2015 for his signing over the rights to a story about an unsubstantiated rumor that President Donald Trump fathered a child with a former employee, multiple outlets reported.

The doorman, Dino Sajudin, released a statement Thursday confirming that he had an agreement with tabloid publisher American American Media Inc. regarding the story.

Today I awoke to learn that a confidential agreement that I had with AMI (The National Enquirer) with regard to a story about President Trump was leaked to the press. I can confirm that while working at Trump World Tower I was instructed not to criticize President Trump's former housekeeper due to a prior relationship she had with President Trump which produced a child.

Sajudin's law firm, Held & Hines, later told NBC News that Sajudin's lawyers sent the statement, and that he has not released the information that is being leaked to news outlets.

On Wednesday, Radar Online, a sister publication of the Enquirer, revealed that Sajudin, was given the money for the rights to his story in late 2015, as Trump was running for president. However, Sajudin's account was not published by American Media, the owner of both Radar and the Enquirer, until Wednesday, long after Trump became president.

Sajudin's deal is at least the second case in which AMI is known to have paid for rights to a story about an extramarital affair about Trump that it did not publish.

In March, former Playboy model Karen McDougal who says she had an affair with Trump, sued AMI seeking to void her own alleged $150,000 exclusivity deal.

Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election for what she has said was her silence about an affair with Trump a decade earlier.

The New Yorker magazine and the Associated Press had reported earlier Thursday that the woman that Sajudin referred to was an employee at Trump World Tower, located near the United Nations building in Manhattan.Elliott Management founder and CEO Paul Singer speaks during the SkyBridge Alternatives conference in Las Vegas, May 9, 2012.

Hedge fund Elliott Management is pushing UK software company Micro Focus, which merged with Hewlett Packard Enterprise's software business last year, to sell to a private equity firm, according to people familiar with the matter.

Elliott has taken a stake in Micro Focus, said the people, who asked not to be named because the transaction is private. The stake is not quite five percent, which is the automatic disclosure threshold, said the people.

Micro Focus has already received inbound interest from several private equity companies, said the people.

Elliott has also suggested that Micro Focus carve out and sell Suse Linux, which it acquired as part of a $1.2 billion deal for Attachmate in 2014.

Micro Focus's market capitalization is about $5.5 billion. Elliott believes Suse Linux could be sold separately and is being severely discounted within the company. That could be appealing for a private equity firm looking to maximize its investment.

Suse is one of the leading distributions of the open source Linux operating system, which is used in many enterprise data centers. It competes most directly with Linux distributions from Red Hat, a publicly traded company with a market cap around $28 billion, and privately held Canonical, which is reportedly considering an IPO.

In general, these companies don't sell licenses to use Linux, whose underlying source code is available for free to anybody to use and modify, but sell consulting and support services around it.

A Micro Focus spokeswoman didn't immediately respond to comment. An Elliott Management spokesman declined to comment. The news that Elliot has a stake in Micro Focus was previously reported by Bloomberg News.

Micro Focus CEO Chris Hsu stepped down last month, less than a year after Micro Focus merged with some HPE software assets in a deal valued at $8.8 billion. Micro Focus also acquired Serena Software for $540 million from private equity firm HGGC in 2016.

Micro Focus shares fell the most in more than a decade after Hsu announced he was leaving and year-over-year revenue would be a greater decline than expected.Democratic lawmakers on Thursday released a pair of letters detailing pages of allegations leveled at embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt by a longtime Trump staffer who was reportedly sidelined for questioning Pruitt.

In one of the letters, the five lawmakers urge President Donald Trump to "hold Administrator Pruitt accountable for his serious ethical lapses and to restore honest, competent leadership to EPA so that this important agency may fulfill its critical mission."

Pruitt has been under fire following revelations that he rented a Capitol Hill condominium linked to an energy lobbyist whose firm had business before the Environmental Protection Agency. That sparked a series of leaks to news agencies that alleged the EPA purged the administrator's critics and expanded on previous reports of Pruitt's high spending.

In discussions with the lawmakers, Kevin Chmielewski, onetime deputy chief of staff for operations at the EPA, confirmed many of the details of those reports, which were previously attributed to unnamed sources. He also leveled new charges of "wasteful spending, unethical behavior and improper retaliation against EPA staff" on the part of Pruitt.

Those charges are detailed in a letter to Pruitt and attached to a separate letter to Trump.European markets closed higher on Thursday afternoon as President Donald Trump clarified his position on Syria and earnings season kicked off.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 closed 0.7 percent to the upside after a morning of mixed trade. All major bourses and most business sectors were in positive territory.

Technology surged ahead in afternoon trade to close as the best performing sector, 1.4 percent in the green. British software firm Micro Focus led the sector and was trading second on the Stoxx 600, pushing up in afternoon trade to close 7.6 percent higher.

Several other sectors, including banks and insurance, closed above 1 percent.

Oil and gas stocks swung lower in late afternoon deals, despite hovering at around 0.5 percent earlier in the day. The sector closed just 0.18 percent higher, despite oil prices supported by exacerbated geopolitical tension in the Middle East. London-based offshore contractor Subsea 7 was the top performer in the sector after RBC Capital Markets upgraded its stock recommendation to "perform" from "underperform." Its shares closed over 4.8 percent higher.

By contrast, basic resources rose in the last few hours of trade after a morning of losses, closing 0.72 percent in the green. Imerys was the worst performer in the sector after its U.S. unit, Imerys America Talc, and Johnson & Johnson were ordered to pay $117 million in damages by a New Jersey state court on Wednesday. The jury ordered the companies to pay punitive damages to a man who said he had developed cancer due to his exposure to asbestos in talc-based products. Shares of Imerys closed 4.3 percent lower.

The food and beverages sector was the poorest performer, down approximately 0.3 percent. Heineken Holding fared the worst, ending the day 1.2 percent lower.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced his second day of grilling from lawmakers on Capital Hill Wednesday. The near five-hour testimony was far tougher than Tuesday's proceedings with lawmakers of the House Energy and Commerce Committee questioning Facebook's fundamental business model, the way it uses data and what kind of regulation may be appropriate. Here are the key moments.

Zuckerberg's own data was acquired by Cambridge Analytica

Democrat congresswoman Anna Eshoo asked Zuckerberg whether his own data was "included in the data sold to malicious third parties," to which the Facebook CEO responded, "yes". A quiz app created in 2014 harvested the Facebook profiles of users and their friends before sending the data over to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. A full timeline of the story is here.

Will Facebook change its business model?

The short answer is no. Zuckerberg seemed startled when lawmakers asked whether his business model would change as a result of the recent scrutiny. Congresswoman Eshoo asked Zuckerberg if he is willing to change Facebook's business model "in the interest of protecting individual privacy." Zuckerberg said that he is continuing to make changes but was cut off by the congresswoman who reiterated her question. "Congresswoman, I'm not sure what that means," Zuckerberg responded, in one of the most heated moments of the hearing. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., then asked Zuckerberg if he could commit to change all user default settings to minimize "to the greatest extent possible" the collection and use of user data. "Congressman, this is a complex issue that I think is  deserves more than a one-word answer," Zuckerberg said. "Well, again, that's disappointing to me, because I think you should make that commitment," Pallone replied.

Regulation 'inevitable'

"I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation. So my position is not that there should be no regulation. But I also think that you have to be careful about what regulation you put in place," Zuckerberg said. His comments mirror what he said at Tuesday's hearing.

Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., asked whether there should be an entity "tasked with overseeing how consumer data is being collected, shared and used" and which could offer guidelines for internet firms to make sure their business practices don't violate the law. Zuckerberg said that "it's an idea that deserves a lot of consideration."

'As CEO, you didn't know some key facts'

Lawmakers took Zuckerberg to task on the fact he appeared to deflect many questions, often saying that his team would follow up. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., said "As CEO, you didn't know some key facts. You didn't know about major court cases regarding your privacy policies against your company. You didn't know that the FTC doesn't have fining authority and that Facebook could not have received fines for the 2011 consent order. You didn't know what a shadow profile was. You didn't know how many apps you need to audit," the congresswoman said. "You did not know how many other firms have been sold data by Dr. Kogan other than Cambridge Analytica and Eunoia Technologies, even though you were asked that question yesterday. And yes, we were all paying attention yesterday. You don't even know all the kinds of information Facebook is collecting from its own users." Dingell then asked how many "like" buttons there are on non-Facebook webpages. Zuckerberg said he didn't know the answer but said "we'll get back to you."

Elections

Zuckerberg repeated much of what he said Tuesday about how the company is working to prevent interference in future elections, after it was found Russian-linked Facebook accounts helped spread misinformation across the platform in the 2016 presidential elections. He said the company is deploying artificial intelligence tools to catch fake accounts that might spread false information, but admitted it wouldn't be possible to completely stop it.Mark Zuckerberg has been under intense scrutiny, testifying Tuesday and Wednesday to Congressional lawmakers about Facebook's privacy practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Former Facebook board member, Don Graham, spoke out Monday, defending Zuckerberg against those who think the Facebook CEO is a "bad person" or believe he's more interested in profits than users  and also to recall what Zuckerberg was like as a 20-year-old on the verge of something huge. Graham, who was on the board of Facebook for six years until 2015, first says he met Zuckerberg in January 2005. At the time, Facebook was only nine months old and Graham had never seen the site because it was only available to college students. Zuckerberg was shy and pensive, Graham writes in a Facebook post.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. Photo courtesy Bloomberg

"The youngest of my four children was two years older than Mark; through my kids and their friends, I had an extensive experience of shy, awkward 20-year olds. Mark was, by a mile, the shyest, most awkward 20-year-old I had ever met," writes Graham. "When I asked a question, there was sometimes a long, long pause before he answered. I wondered: had I somehow offended him? Did he not hear? "Actually, he was thinking. I'm from Washington, where opinions are on the tip of people's tongues," writes Graham, a former journalist and ex-executive of his family business, The Washington Post. "Listening  and thinking before answering  wasn't something I was used to seeing."

Graham, who attended Harvard like Zuckerberg, commented to the young founder that the rise of Facebook (95 percent of Harvard's students were on the platform at the time, Zuckerberg informed him) would be the downfall of the Crimson, the university newspaper. "Mark, wiser than I, laughed and said yes, Facebook could pause and pick up some ad revenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But it was much, much more important to reach other colleges before similar products could arise there and get entrenched. "Users before revenue," writes Graham. "We talked a little bit about Facebook as a business. The future tech titan did not then know the difference between revenues and profits."

Don Graham Photo by The Washington Post

Graham says he tried to invest in Facebook, but Zuckerberg turned him down for a better offer. Then Zuckerberg revealed a "moral dilemma," remembers Graham. "He worried he had been too encouraging in our earlier conversations. I was disappointed but quite impressed by the maturity with which he handled the matterpretty good for a 20-year old," he writes. Two years later, Graham says he met with Zuckerberg in Palo Alto and noticed the tech titan's spartan accommodations. "We met at his apartment, in which there were four pieces of furniture: a mattress (on the floor), a kitchen table and two wooden chairs. It was about at this time that Mark turned down a billion-dollar offer for Facebook. I noted that he wasn't letting success go to his head," says Graham. (In July of 2006, Zuckerberg rejected a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo.) Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, shared the post by Graham on her own Facebook page, noting Graham has been a trusted advisor. "Don's recommendation of Mark was a big part of why I joined Facebook," Sandberg wrote.

Graham is not an impartial observer of Zuckerberg: "Watching him close up, I came to believe he is someone of great decency and good character," he writes. But Graham does acknowledge the lack of foresight that caused the Facebook privacy breach. "Why was Cambridge Analytica permitted to make off with so much user data? Does Facebook tilt us towards polarization and political intransigence?" Graham writes. "There's much more. Slowly and patiently, Mark, Sheryl and their team will make Facebook much better. Should they have acted sooner? Of course. Do they understand how angry many of their users are? I would bet a lot that the answer is yes. Watch the changes they will make," says Graham. See also: Mark Zuckerberg's second day in Congress: Here are the key points you need to know

Mark Zuckerberg's testimony: Here are the key points you need to know

Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'Privacy to us is a human right...a civil liberty'Google cloud leader Diane Greene told employees that the company is drafting a set of ethical principals to guide the use of its technology in the wake of internal objections to its partnership with The Pentagon, according to a Defense One report.

In March, Google announced that it had partnered with the Department of Defense to develop artificial intelligence to analyze and interpret drone videos, which prompted than 3,000 employees to sign a letter urging CEO Sundar Pichai that "Google should not be in the business of war."

Google said that at the time that the so-called "Project Maven" was "specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes," though employees worried that the technology could be used to enhance the targeting of military drone strikes.

At a company meeting, Greene reportedly expressed regret that the company had no ethical guidelines in place before it took that contract and said that it would not commit to any similar work until it had written them.

Meanwhile, Defense One reports that Google is actively pursuing the Defense Department's enormous cloud contract. The final request for proposal for that deal, which is reportedly worth up to $10 billion, will be released in early May, with a decision expected in September.

Google declined to comment.

Read the rest of the Defense One story here.A project by campaigning organization "Reporters Without Borders" that put messages criticizing world leaders on billboards that appeared on Google Street View has had the images removed by the tech company.

Earlier this week, people browsing Moscow's Red Square via Street View on maps.google.se would have seen a huge black-and-white billboard right next to St Basil's Cathedral stating: "Being gay is normal."

The quote is from an interview with a school teacher who stated "homosexuality is normal" in Russian newspaper Molodai Dalnevostochnik. Editor Alexander Suturin was fined by Russia's Federal Mass Media Inspection Service for breaking a law that bans "gay propaganda" among minors.

TWEET

The billboard wasn't there in real life, however. The posters are by the Swedish arm of Reporters Without Borders, which digitally altered Street View in cities around the world. It worked with agency Akestam Holst on the campaign, which promotes freedom of speech.

Now, they have been taken down by Google in a move that Jonathan Lundqvist, president of Reporters Without Borders Sweden, said amounts to censorship.

"We find it ironic that a campaign on free speech has been silenced so quickly. And we have officially received information that the campaign has been shut down because it violates Google Map's policies," he wrote in an email to CNBC on Thursday.

"That's the thing about censorship, it doesn't call itself censorship, or may even not be intended as one. But the consequences remain the same, important voices for free speech have been silenced in the places where they are needed the most."There is one missile in the U.S. arsenal that is expected to rain on Syrian targets this week in response to a suspected chemical attack carried out by Syrian President Bashar Assad's government.

The Tomahawk cruise missile is half the length of a standard telephone pole, travels at the cruising speed of a commercial airliner, and can carry a 1,000-pound warhead the distance from New York City to Kansas City.

Tomahawks have been in the U.S. Navy's arsenal since the 1980s, but were first used in combat in 1991 during the Gulf War. Overall, the weapons have been deployed more than 2,300 times.

"Year in and year out, administration in and administration out, it's the long-range land attack cruise missile that presidents reach for first in a crisis," Thomas Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNBC.

"What distinguishes the Tomahawk from some other weapons is that it is sea-launched and has a significantly longer range," Karako said.

With an estimated cost of $1.4 million each, Raytheon's Tomahawk missile has an intermediate range of 800 to 1,553 miles and can be deployed from more than 140 U.S. Navy ships and submarines. In 1995, the United Kingdom became the second military to add the Tomahawk to its arsenal.

What makes the Tomahawk exceptionally lethal is its capability to carry a 1,000-pound conventional warhead and be reprogrammed midflight.John Bolton testifies on Capitol Hill on November 8, 2017 in Washington, DC.

Ricky Waddell, President Donald Trump's deputy national security advisor, is the latest official leaving the Trump administration, a White House spokesperson said Thursday.

"Rick will be leaving and his departure date has yet to be confirmed," the official told reporters.

New national security advisor John Bolton is seeking to replace Waddell  who was hand-picked by Bolton's predecessor, Gen. H.R. McMaster  with his own appointee, according to Axios, which first reported Waddell's departure.

Waddell is the latest in a growing wave of departures from national security agencies as Bolton becomes a top aide to Trump.

On Wednesday, the White House confirmed that Nadia Schadlow, a strategy advisor who worked under McMaster, is resigning and will leave her position at the end of the month.

The day before, Trump administration officials said that homeland security advisor Tom Bossert would be stepping down. "The President is grateful for Tom's commitment to the safety and security of our great country," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

And on Sunday, a spokesman for the national security council, Michael Anton, announced that he will be leaving the White House.

The White House did not immediately provide additional comment.Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg testifies during a US House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing about Facebook on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, April 11, 2018. Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images

TO SENATOR CHUCK GRASSLEY, REPUBLICAN OF IOWA ...

Improper transfer of data to third parties Mr. Zuckerberg said he would get back to Mr. Grassley on whether his team finds any new examples in which user data was improperly transferred to a third party in breach of Facebook's terms of service. He also said he would get back to Mr. Grassley on how many outside developers his team has audited to make sure they are following Facebook's rules.

TO SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN, DEMOCRAT OF CALIFORNIA ...

Number of fake accounts Mr. Zuckerberg said he would follow up with Ms. Feinstein on the exact number of fake accounts Facebook has removed from the social network.

TO SENATOR MARIA CANTWELL, DEMOCRAT OF WASHINGTON ...

Role with Cambridge Analytica and Donald J. Trump's campaign Mr. Zuckerberg said he would get back to Ms. Cantwell on whether Facebook employees ever worked with Cambridge Analytica to help the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.

TO SENATOR ROGER WICKER, REPUBLICAN OF MISSISSIPPI ...

Data on minors and tracking of browsing activity Mr. Zuckerberg said he would circle back to Mr. Wicker on whether Facebook collects call and text history on minors, and whether or not Facebook tracks a user's internet browsing activity even when they have logged off Facebook.

TO SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY, DEMOCRAT OF VERMONT ...

Russian misinformation operations Mr. Zuckerberg said he would tell Mr. Leahy whether a number of specific pages were part of Russian misinformation operations during the 2016 elections.

TO SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM, REPUBLICAN OF SOUTH CAROLINA ...

Tech regulation Mr. Zuckerberg's to-do item was answering how to have a broad discussion on where the tech industry should be regulated.

TO SENATOR ROY BLUNT, REPUBLICAN OF MISSOURI ...

Data collection from logged-off devices The Facebook chief said he would get back to Mr. Leahy on whether the company collects data from devices that are not currently logged in to the social network.

TO SENATOR RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, DEMOCRAT OF CONNECTICUT ...

Support for legislation Mr. Zuckerberg said he would follow up with Mr. Blumenthal on whether Facebook would support a number of pieces of legislation. (It was unclear which legislation.)

TO SENATOR ED MARKEY, DEMOCRAT OF MASSACHUSETTS ...

Privacy bill of rights for minors Mr. Zuckerberg said he would get his team to "flesh out the details" with Mr. Markey on a potential privacy bill of rights for minors on the internet.

TO SENATOR TOM UDALL, DEMOCRAT OF NEW MEXICO ...

Support for the Honest Ads Act Mr. Zuckerberg said he would get back to Mr. Udall on whether he, personally, would return to Congress to support the Honest Ads Act. (Mr. Zuckerberg added that he didn't visit Washington often and that he would likely direct his team to focus on support of the act.)

TO SENATOR JERRY MORAN, REPUBLICAN OF KANSAS ...

Investigating unauthorized data access The Facebook chief said he would circle back on whether Facebook's new bounty programon data sharing will also investigate unauthorized access to data.

TO SENATOR DEAN HELLER, REPUBLICAN OF NEVADA ...

Nevadans whose data was harvested; keeping of user data Mr. Zuckerberg had two to-do items with Mr. Heller, including answering how many people in the state of Nevada were part of the 87 million people who may have had their data harvested by the political research firm Cambridge Analytica and how long Facebook keeps a user's data after they have deleted their accounts.

TO REPRESENTATIVE FRANK PALLONE, DEMOCRAT OF NEW JERSEY ...

Changing default settings Mr. Zuckerberg said he would return with answers for Mr. Pallone on whether Facebook would change its default settings to minimize collection and use of user data.

TO REPRESENTATIVE FRED UPTON, REPUBLICAN OF MICHIGAN ...

Political ad rejection The Facebook chief said he would follow up on the circumstances behind the company's rejection of a political ad from a candidate for Michigan state senate.

TO REPRESENTATIVE ELIOT ENGEL, DEMOCRAT OF NEW YORK ...

Artificial intelligence tools Mr. Zuckerberg said he would get back to Mr. Engel on artificial intelligence tools and other procedures being deployed to identify fake accounts that spread misinformation.

TO REPRESENTATIVE GENE GREEN, DEMOCRAT OF TEXAS ...

Application of European data protection rules Mr. Zuckerberg's homework for Mr. Green was answering how Facebook would apply the European Union's coming General Data Protection Regulation privacy rules to users in the United States.

TO REPRESENTATIVE STEVE SCALISE, REPUBLICAN OF LOUISIANA ...

Data for security; Facebook censorship Mr. Zuckerberg told Mr. Scalise he would come back with details about data that is mined for security purposes and whether it is sold, as well as whether Facebook employees responsible for the perceived censorship of the pro-Trump video personalities Diamond and Silk faced repercussions.

TO REPRESENTATIVE CATHY MCMORRIS RODGERS, REPUBLICAN OF WASHINGTON ...

Content reviewers' treatment of users The Facebook chief said he would offer Ms. Rodgers more detail on how Facebook is ensuring fair treatment of users by content reviewers.

TO REPRESENTATIVE G.K. BUTTERFIELD, DEMOCRAT OF NORTH CAROLINA ...

Racial diversity in technology Mr. Zuckerberg said he would circle back on an idea to convene a meeting of chief executives of technology firms to boost racial diversity in the industry. He added that he would get back to Mr. Butterfield with data on employee retention broken out by race.

TO REPRESENTATIVE MORGAN GRIFFITH, REPUBLICAN OF VIRGINIA ...

More rural broadband Mr. Zuckerberg promised to look into the progress on extending broadband into rural areas.

TO REPRESENTATIVE DEBBIE DINGELL, DEMOCRAT OF MICHIGAN ...

Numbers of Facebook buttons; response to regulators Facebook's chief said he would follow up with the number of Facebook "like" buttons and "share buttons" on non-Facebook pages. He also said he would get back to the Congresswoman on the time frame within which Facebook would respond to regulators' requests for transparency.

TO REPRESENTATIVE BEN LUJAN, DEMOCRAT OF NEW MEXICO ...

Data points on non-Facebook users Mr. Zuckerberg said he planned to circle back on the average number of data points that Facebook keeps on non-Facebook users. Mr. Zuckerberg also said he did not know that number for Facebook users.

TO REPRESENTATIVE LEONARD LANCE, REPUBLICAN OF NEW JERSEY ...

Supporting online privacy legislation Mr. Lance, who is co-sponsoring a online privacy bill with Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, asked Mr. Zuckerberg whether Facebook will support the legislation after reviewing it. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would get back to him.

TO REPRESENTATIVE ADAM KINZINGER, REPUBLICAN OF ILLINOIS ...The New Zealand government announced it will not grant any new deep-sea oil and gas exploration permits in an effort to combat the effects of climate change.

The decision doesn't affect 22 active offshore licenses with the last one set to finish in 2030. Those existing permits could then transition to mining permits which would allow up to a further 40 years of drilling, according to the government release Thursday.

"There will be no further offshore oil and gas exploration permits granted," said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. The left-of-center ruling coalition has described the move as "an important step to address climate change."

"We're striking the right balance for New Zealand  we're protecting existing industry, and protecting future generations from climate change," Ardern added.

France, Belize and Costa Rica are also set to place bans on either fossil fuel exploration or production, but none are considered as notable energy producers.

New Zealand produces oil and gas from all of its 22 licenses in the Taranaki Basin, a site just off the west coast of the North Island.

After receiving no warning of the decision, the reaction from fossil fuel organizations has been scathing.

The Petroleum Exploration & Production Association New Zealand (PEPANZ) Chief Executive Cameron Madgwick told state broadcaster Radio NZ there should have been consultation before the decision was made.

"It shows a complete misunderstanding by the government of how our industry works ... These are multi-decadal decisions, there are people here today that are looking forward to the future and what that might look like for their business," he said.

The New Zealand Oil and Gas Company said in a statement it had not been made aware of the policy which it said appeared to contradict pre-election promises.

Shares of that firm finished lower by 2.4 percent on the day to hit a six-month low. The wider NZX 50, which represents the country's top stocks, closed 0.59 percent lower.

Opposition politicians have also weighed in. The center-right National Party described the move as "economic vandalism" which made no environmental sense.

New Zealand had 40 percent of its 2016 energy supply coming from renewable sources, the fourth highest renewable share in the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) member countries.

Government figures suggest the country produced 908 petajoules of energy in 2016. That was made up of oil, gas, hydro, geothermal and other renewables.

From the same data set, it was calculated that the country managed to supply 78 percent of its energy needs.A recent rally in oil prices to multi-year highs is about much more than the deepening crisis in Syria, analysts told CNBC Thursday.

Crude futures soared to highs not seen since December 2014 on Wednesday, underpinned by greater geopolitical uncertainty in the Middle East and heightened concerns over the prospect of imminent military action from Western powers. Ample crude supplies had pared some of the gains on Thursday, though crude futures remained in touching distance of levels not seen in more than three years.

"I think certainly some of what we are seeing is a little bit of geopolitical premium (but) I don't think it is just about Syria," Richard Mallinson, geopolitical analyst at Energy Aspects, told CNBC's "Street Signs" Thursday.

Instead, Mallinson argued crude futures had soared to multi-year highs on the back of two main price drivers  concern over the "wider ramifications" of heightened geopolitical tension in the Middle East and the looming prospect of the U.S. withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal.

Oil prices slipped away from 2018 highs on Thursday, with global benchmark Brent trading at $71.15 in early afternoon deals, down 0.8 percent, and WTI trading at $66.38, around 0.6 percent lower.Paul Jacobs, who was ousted as Qualcomm's chairman in March, is talking to strategic investors and sovereign wealth funds to chip in for a fully financed bid to take Qualcomm private in the next two months, according to people familiar with the plan. He would run the company after it's gone private.

One of the potential investors is mobile chip designer ARM, which SoftBank bought in 2016 for more than $30 billion, these people said. ARM's technology forms the basis for most processors used in smartphones and tablets, including Qualcomm's processors.

ARM denied that it has talked to Jacobs about a possible acquisition involving Qualcomm. " "There have been no discussions between Arm and Paul Jacobs on any potential acquisition of Qualcomm," a spokesperson said.

Jacobs has hired two banks and lawyers to work on the deal, the people said. When the deal is completed, he is hoping for fewer than ten owners to be involved. Economic ownership might not align with control of the company. Jacobs, himself, owns less than 1 percent of Qualcomm.

Control will remain in the United States under Jacobs' plan, which he believes would allow the deal to avoid the kind of scrutiny that sank Broadcom's attempt to buy Qualcomm for around $120 billion. President Trump blocked that deal in March after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States expressed concerns over potential national security risks. Broadcom was based in Singapore, but has since re-domiciled to the United States.

Still, Jacobs has been working with CFIUS behind the scenes to address potential problems, which theoretically could arise if a large amount of the economic ownership comes from foreign sovereign wealth funds. The SoftBank-controlled Vision Fund includes a major investment from Saudi Arabia's main sovereign wealth fund.

A person familiar with his thinking says Jacobs does not believe Qualcomm should be carved up, but he believes he can only implement his plan for it as a private company, because that plan will require significant investment and things that public shareholders would not like.

Jacobs' father, Irwin, was a co-founder of Qualcomm, and Paul Jacobs rose through the ranks to become CEO from 2005 through 2014. Steve Mollenkopf has been CEO since then, while Jacobs served as chairman. The board removed him in March after Jacobs informed them of his desire to take the company private.

The company has been involved in a complicated high-stakes legal dispute with Apple, which licenses core wireless technology from Qualcomm. Apple claims that the company overcharges for licenses and has sued it for patent infringement, while Qualcomm has sought to have Apple phones banned from China, among other things. Jacobs plans to settle the dispute with Apple and rely on his strong relationship with Tim Cook, the people said.

Jacobs plans to maintain Qualcomm's license business, unlike Broadcom, which would have shut that piece down, the people said. Jacobs feels the licensing business is actually the strongest part of Qualcomm if operated correctly, the people said.



Santander has launched a foreign exchange service that uses blockchain technology to make same-day international money transfers.

The service, called Santander One Pay FX, uses tech developed by blockchain firm Ripple. Santander said it is the first cross-border payments service using blockchain to be made by a bank.

Blockchain, or distributed ledger technology, is a decentralized network that records a growing list of transactions. It was originally used as the technology to underpin bitcoin but banks have become increasingly interested in other use cases, like clearing and settling payments.

Santander's blockchain-powered foreign exchange platform is currently live in four different countries  Spain, the U.K., Brazil and Poland. A wider roll-out is expected in coming months, the bank said.

Innoventures, a $200 million fintech, or financial technology, venture capital fund set up by Santander, was one of a number of investors to participate in Ripple's first round of funding in 2015.

Ripple has struck partnerships with multiple banks and other financial institutions, including Santander. Banks are less keen to use the firm's digital currency XRP, but earlier this year two money transfer firms, MoneyGram and Western Union, announced projects involving the cryptocurrency.

On Wednesday, Ripple invested $25 million into a fund started by Blockchain Capital, a venture capital firm dedicated to blockchain.Sears Holdings will later this year close its last department store in Chicago, where the company was based for more than 100 years, a spokesman told CNBC.

The Chicago Tribune first reported on the news Thursday afternoon.

The Sears location at Six Corners in Chicago was among the roughly 260 stores sold to real estate investment trust Seritage Growth Properties in a sale lease-back transaction three years ago, the spokesman said. Seritage has recaptured the space, based on their contractual agreement, and is able to bring in new tenants, he said.

Seritage didn't immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

The Sears store will stay open until mid-July, and the Sears Auto Center, also at Six Corners, will close next month. Liquidation sales at this location are expected to start on April 27.

"The Sears at Six Corners was the shopping district's anchor business since it first opened to large crowds on October 20, 1938," Sears said in a statement. "For more than 120 years, Sears has called Illinois home and that is not changing. Although we are disappointed by this last store closure in Chicago, by no means does this change our commitment to our customers and presence to Chicago's residents."

Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based Sears declined to comment on how many employees would be impacted by the closure. Though it said it would keep about 150 employees at one of its offices in Chicago "dedicated to serving our members and customers, as we pursue our vision of an integrated retailer."

Earlier this year, Sears announced a round of more than 100 store closures, all expected to be complete by this month. The company also recently raised enough money to pay $407 million toward its pension plan in order to unlock and allow for the sale of 140 other properties.

In selling unprofitable assets, Sears has said it hopes to raise liquidity and get back to profitability. The retailer's total revenue for the holiday period declined more than 25 percent.

CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to say Sears was based in Chicago for more than a century. It was founded in Minneapolis.Right now is a great time to be looking for your next job.

Unemployment is at 4.1 percent and industries like tech and healthcare are seeing tremendous growth. While wages have not increased significantly over the past few years, changing jobs can be a great way to advance your career and increase your earnings. As with most good things, there are a few caveats  some states have incredible job markets, while others are falling behind.

Job site Indeed analyzed data from 50 major metro areas and ranked them on job market favorability, salaries, work-life balance, potential for advancement and job security. They found that these 10 cities were the best places for job seekers in 2018:Killeen, TX (76540)

Today

Cloudy skies this morning will become partly cloudy this afternoon. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High near 90F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Variably cloudy with scattered thunderstorms. Low 69F. Winds E at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Locally heavy rainfall possible.President Donald Trump speaks about the passage of tax reform legislation on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, December 20, 2017.

The business model of the modern Republican Party does not produce real-world budget discipline. So today, GOP lawmakers turn to make-believe.

Within the last four months, the Republican president and party leaders in Congress took two actions that dramatically expand federal deficits. On a party-line vote, they cut taxes by $150 billion a year, then increased spending by $150 billion a year in cooperation with Democrats.

Now, as the Congressional Budget Office projects the return of $1 trillion annual deficits, congressional Republicans plan a gesture for constituents alarmed by rising debt. The House will vote on Thursday on a constitutional amendment requiring lawmakers to balance the federal budget.

The amendment lacks enough support to pass. Nor would GOP lawmakers want it to, since they have demonstrated unwillingness to make the policy choices the amendment would require.

In a second gesture, the White House is preparing to ask Congress to rescind some of the spending increases that Trump signed weeks ago. Bipartisan opposition from lawmakers who just affirmed them with their votes makes it unlikely such a proposal can pass.

Evidence suggests that gestures are the best the 21st century GOP can do. Decades of evolution have produced overlapping but disparate Republican segments whose priorities consistently drive deficits up.

Backers of supply-side economics dominate Republican tax policy. Urged on by GOP donors on Wall Street and in executive suites, they press continually to cut taxes.

Advocates of limited government welcome the resulting reduction of federal revenue. They want Washington to do less.

But proponents of strengthening America's military posture want more, so they pursue larger and larger Pentagon budgets. And older, working-class whites who disdain Wall Street and depend on government programs increasingly define the GOP voting base.

Specifically, those voters want to protect their benefits under Social Security and Medicare, both now ballooning as the massive baby boom generation retires. Conservative ideologues opposed those programs from their inception but have failed to roll them back.

No Republican faction openly disavows deficit reduction. But when President George W. Bush sought to fundamentally restructure Social Security in 2005, a Congress controlled by fellow Republicans declined.

In winning the presidency two years ago, Trump promised not to touch Social Security or Medicare benefits.

House Speaker Paul Ryan keeps exhorting his colleagues to curb them but hasn't succeeded, and on Wednesday, he announced his retirement.

The GOP has forced cuts to the narrow slice of the budget that finances other domestic spending, recently through the 2011 budget sequestration law. In practice, however, Ryan and other Republicans found those constraints too severe to sustain and acquiesced in Democratic attempts to relax them.

The central difference between the parties on budget discipline is that Democrats, while backing higher spending, have also backed higher taxes to finance it. Republicans keep supporting tax cuts even while failing to shrink spending.

The result: since Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, all three Republican presidents before Trump left office with higher federal deficits than they inherited. One Democratic president (Bill Clinton) departed with a budget surplus; the other (Barack Obama) saw the deficit decline by two-thirds as a share of the economy.

That record has not deterred Republican claims that their policies will eventually reduce red ink. Last fall, the Trump administration insisted its tax cut would stimulate enough economic activity to boost annual growth to 2.9 percent over the next 10 years.

"Not only will this plan pay for itself," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin predicted, "but it will pay down debt."

The CBO concluded this week that Mnuchin's forecast is a fantasy.

Its report projects annual economic growth of 1.9 percent over 10 years  mirroring the long-run outlook from before the tax cut passed. It projects the deficit growing from $665 billion in Trump's first year in office to $1 trillion in his fourth.

It envisions the national debt rising by $1.5 trillion above previous projections to reach $27 trillion by 2027.

When he backed the tax cut, retiring GOP Sen. Bob Corker cited his belief that it would not increase the budget deficit. After this week's CBO report, Corker fretted, "If it ends up costing what has been laid out here, it could well be one of the worst votes I've made."

Corker's House colleagues need not fear the same from their balanced-budget amendment vote Thursday. It won't change the deficit by even a single dollar.President Donald Trump met with his national security team on Thursday to discuss the situation in Syria, but has not made a final decision on whether or not to use military force, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said.

"We are continuing to assess intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies," Sanders said in a release.

Trump will speak with French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May this evening, Sanders said.

But a source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told CNBC the U.S. was considering striking eight potential targets. Those targets include two Syrian airfields, a research center and a chemical weapons facility.

The source also noted that Syria's military has repositioned a significant amount of air assets to Russian-controlled airfields in hopes that Washington would be reluctant to strike there.

"We're looking very very seriously, very closely at that whole situation and we'll see what happens folks," Trump told reporters Thursday.

Over the past five days, Trump has sharpened his rhetoric against Syria and its most powerful ally Russia and issued a threat via Twitter of a potential U.S. strike against the war-torn country.

"Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it," Trump said Wednesday.

TWEET

Trump's tweet, which has garnered nearly 65,000 retweets and 160,000 likes, break from national security procedures  as well as his own admonishments about tipping off enemies about attack plans.

The tweet, which telegraphed a military operation, broke with what U.S. national security policy refers to as Operations Security or OPSEC.

Approximately 24 hours later, Trump backpedaled his announcement and said that a U.S. missile strike on Syria may not be imminent.

Tweet Link

The tweets come on the heels of an alleged chemical weapons attack believed to be carried out by forces aligned with the Assad regime in Douma, a town that was held by Syrian rebels. The World Health Organization has since reported that approximately 500 people in Douma were treated for "signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals."

What's more, the U.S. now has blood and urine samples from last Saturday's deadly attack that have tested positive for chemical weapons, two U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence told NBC News.

The samples show a presence of both chlorine gas and an unnamed nerve agent. Typically, such samples are obtained through hospitals and by U.S. or foreign intelligence assets on the ground.

The officials said they were "confident" in the intelligence, though not 100 percent sure.

Last year, the Trump administration lobbed a total of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles from Navy destroyers USS Porter and USS Ross in the eastern Mediterranean.

The missiles hit aircraft hangars, ammunition bunkers, air defense systems and radars. Additionally, the Pentagon said Russian forces in Syria were formally notified before the strike, but Moscow was not involved in the military operation.

As chatter about possible U.S. retaliation grows, the White House said Wednesday that a timeline for striking Syria has not been set, and that "all options are on the table."

Similarly, a Pentagon representative offered the following statement: "The department does not comment on potential future military actions or specific military assets that might be associated with those actions."The chances of President Donald Trump giving an interview to Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia's role in the 2016 election, fell significantly following an FBI raid of Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen's home and office, NBC News reported Thursday.

Trump's legal team was preparing for a potential interview and working on setting terms for the president to talk to the former FBI director's investigative team, according to NBC, which cited people familiar with the discussions. However, talks between the White House and special counsel's office "collapsed" following the raid on Cohen, which frustrated Trump.

Mueller may be able to end an investigation into possible obstruction of justice more quickly if he does not need to prepare for a Trump interview or follow up on it, NBC reported.

Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer working on the Russia probe, called the report "untrue."

The special counsel's office declined to comment.

Read the full NBC News report here.Even before the current trade dispute with China is factored in, Heisdorffer said, the U.S. farm economy is feeling pain, and he offered a sober outlook.

"The prospect of an escalating trade war has already created significant uncertainty in the U.S. soybean market and has driven up premiums for Brazilian soybeans," testified John Heisdorffer, a fourth-generation Iowa farmer and president of the American Soybean Association.

However, that rosy assessment was not shared by a prominent farm leader who testified Thursday before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee about the negative impact of tariff increases.

President Donald Trump on Thursday sought to reassure farmers that they will "do fantastically well" despite the escalating trade dispute with China .

John Heisdorffer, president of the American Soybean Association, testifying before the House Ways and Means committee hearing on trade issues.

Heisdorffer said farm income has fallen about 50 percent since 2013 and is forecast to decline another 6 and 7 percent this year. He said U.S. crop prices also have fallen significantly in recent years.

"We're going to end up with losing farmers," said Heisdorffer. "It's already close to happening out there now."

Earlier this month, Beijing warned it might impose a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans as well as duties on other major U.S. agricultural products, including corn, wheat, cotton and beef. It followed the Trump administration threatening to slap tariffs on everything from Chinese consumer electronics and robotics to aerospace products.

"Retaliation is no longer a what if," said Heisdorffer.

Trump, in remarks during a meeting with governors and members of Congress, conceded that farmers "have been trending downward for a long period of time, and we're not going to have that. A lot of it is because of bad trade deals."

At the same time, the president insisted that "farmers are going to be  they're going to do fantastically well."

Besides farming soybeans, Heisdorffer also produces hogs  another agricultural commodity the Chinese have targeted.

Effective April 1, China slapped a 25 percent tariff on U.S. pork imports and a new 15 percent duty on other key agribusiness products, including apples, cherries, citrus and nuts such as almonds and pistachios. That retaliatory action followed Trump putting tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, citing national security concerns.

But Heisdorffer said trade with the world's second-largest economy has been a good thing for U.S. agriculture. He also said in testimony that trade actions threaten agricultural commodities and "have the potential to upend the farm and rural economy."

"We cannot afford to lose our valuable customer, China," the farm group leader said. "We have South America, who is more than anxious to take any of our trade that they can."

According to Heisdorffer, China imported 62 percent of total U.S. exports of soybeans last year and bought nearly one-third of the nation's annual soy production. Brazil is the world's top soybean exporter, including to China. Even so, value of U.S. soybean exports to China have jumped 26-fold since 1996, from $414 million to $14 billion last year.

Regardless, Trump said Thursday that "China has consistently treated the United States agriculture unfairly."

Heisdorffer said that for the last two decades the soybean industry has contributed more to the U.S. trade balance than any other agricultural product. He also said there is actually room for the U.S. soybean industry to grow its exports to China and added that the focus should be on finding "ways to expand trade rather than restricting it."

"We have more soybeans to sell; let us sell them to China," he said. "We've expanded that market over a number of years; it keeps growing. If we can continue to do that, it would put us in good shape."

Meantime, there were indications Thursday the Trump administration is looking at getting back into talks for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. A White House official confirmed the president's chief economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will be looking into rejoining the TPP negotiations.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation's largest agricultural trade group, hailed the development in a statement. "This is welcome news, especially for a farm sector that is experiencing the lowest income in 12 years," the group said. "We have long supported TPP  now known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership  and hope the United States can soon join the 11 countries that have already signed on."

Within days of taking office, Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the TPP negotiations and agreement. Trump opposed the Asia-Pacific deal by contending it would hurt domestic manufacturers, but major agricultural groups supported it because it would have slashed tariffs on a wide range of U.S. goods over time, including food and farm products.President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau walk down the West Wing Colonnade between meetings at the White House in Washington, DC, February 13, 2017.

A deal on NAFTA is "getting pretty close," President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday.

But, he added, a renegotiated trade deal with Mexico and Canada is probably "weeks or months away."

The seemingly contradictory guidance comes as Vice President Mike Pence is set to head to the Summit of the Americas in Lima, Peru, where he will meet with leaders from around the region this weekend. Trump canceled plans to attend himself earlier this week. He was expected to use the meeting to show a sign of progress with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts on renegotiating the 24-year-old trade deal.

Trump told the White House press corps on Thursday there wasn't a timeline for NAFTA talks. Signs of progress have emerged in recent days, as the parties push to get something finished before Mexico's presidential election in July.

GOP lawmakers have been concerned about the Trump administration's escalating trade rhetoric with China and its effect on American agriculture. The U.S. farm belt could be particularly hard hit by a trade war with China, which has threatened retaliatory tariffs on a range of farm products.

Trump said that although farmers have been hurt by bad trade deals, China is now selling a lot of U.S. beef because of a conversation he had with China's President Xi Jinping.President Donald Trump has told top economic advisors to look at the possibility of re-entering a massive Pacific trade deal, the White House said Thursday.

The president has asked chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to consider trying to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), according to White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters. He wants them to "take another look at whether or not a better deal could be negotiated," she said.

In a tweet on Thursday night, Trump said the U.S. would only join the TPP if the deal were "substantially better."

Trump Tweet

Earlier, Sens. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said the president told lawmakers about his directive. The senators were among the lawmakers from agricultural states who met with Trump on Thursday about the White House's proposed tariffs on China, which farmers worry would lead to retaliation that hurts their businesses.

After the meeting, Sasse told reporters the 12-nation trade deal agreed to by President Barack Obama and abandoned by Trump would be the "single best way" to counter alleged Chinese trade abuses. Trump has used the threat of tariffs to punish Beijing for alleged intellectual property theft by Chinese companies.

Trump withdrew from the agreement last year as one of his first acts in office.President Donald Trump waves to journalists after returning to the White House April 5, 2018 in Washington, DC.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that a U.S. missile strike on Syria may not be imminent.

"Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our 'Thank you America?'" Trump said on Twitter.

Tweet Link

Stock futures ticked higher and oil and gold fell slightly following Trump's tweet.

On Wednesday, stocks fell and oil and gold jumped after Trump tweeted, "Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'"

The president's tweets came after Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said Tuesday that Russia would shoot down American missiles headed Syria's way. The exchanges followed an alleged chemical weapons attack by Russia-backed Syria on a rebel town that killed dozens dead over the weekend.Britain's takeover regulator ruled on Thursday that Walt Disney must make an offer for the whole of European pay-TV company Sky if it succeeds in buying Twenty-First Century Fox assets, including its 39 percent stake in Sky.

The Takeover Panel also said Disney must match Fox's 10.75 pounds-a-share offer for the shares in Sky it does not already own.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox agreed an offer to buy all of Sky 17 months ago, but is still waiting approval. In the meantime, Disney agreed to buy Fox assets, including its stake in Sky, in a separate deal, which is subject to regulatory clearance.North Korea has told the United States that it's prepared to discuss denuclearization at a widely anticipated summit between its leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump next month. But the reclusive regime likely has an entirely different understanding of the concept than the White House.

For the U.S., the term means North Korea relinquishing nuclear weapons  but Pyongyang may agree to do so only if certain conditions are fulfilled, experts warn. Those prerequisites include terminating America's military presence in South Korea as well as ending the U.S. regional nuclear umbrella, a security arrangement in which Washington promises in-kind retaliation on behalf of close allies if they are attacked with nuclear weapons.

North Korea's concept of denuclearization, made clear through years of failed discussions with the international community, "bears no resemblance to the American definition," Evans J.R. Revere, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, wrote in a note this week.

In agreeing to meet with Trump, Kim is simply resuscitating the approach his country has pursued in previous negotiations, Revere warned. That is, Pyongyang will "launch a lengthy, complicated negotiation to get agreement on actions each party must take, and use this process to buy time for the development of the North's nuclear weapons program."

Answering a question at a Tuesday press briefing on whether Trump and Kim shared the same definition of denuclearization, State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert said, "That is something that the president has determined."

For the pariah state, denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula is a situation in which North Korea gives up nukes if the U.S. ends its alliances in Asia, its policy of extended deterrence and ground troops on the peninsula, Victor Cha, a Georgetown University professor and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies said at a Washington event on Monday.

Rather than bandy the term about, negotiators in Trump's administration should seek to obtain a commitment in writing that North Korea will abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs, Cha continued.

"That is a different phrasing from this very broad denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," he said.President Donald Trump has helped Europe in a way that his predecessor Barack Obama didn't, and Europeans should love Trump for it, an asset manager told CNBC on Thursday.

The European Union (EU) and the Trump White House have different views on key policies, with the most recent issue being trade. Trump has taken a tough stance on global trade that nearly resulted in new tariffs on European imports before the EU was "temporarily" excluded from them. The U.S. incumbent has also voiced support for populist and anti-European movements across the continent.

However, this divergence has led Europe to come together and work against Trump's policies and ideologies, Mark Dowding, head of investment grade at BlueBay Asset Management, said.

"We should, as Europeans, learn to love Donald Trump, because he's going to make Europe great again," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe."

"When we had Obama in the White House, he was such a European, we loved him to bits, Europe didn't have a reason to exist. But now Donald (Trump) is in the White House and we have got actually a cause to rally against  surprise, surprise, Europe is coming back to the middle again."The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission formMay preparing for Britain to join assault on Syria, Times claims

Mrs May is likely to make the case for military action on the basis that it is necessary to deter future gas attacks.  The Times

Submarines move within range of Syria  Daily Mail

Theresa May has cleared the way for Britain to join a US-led military attack on Syria within days after national security advisers presented new evidence blaming President Assad for the barbaric gas attack in Douma. The prime minister is recalling cabinet ministers from their Easter break to seek approval today. She is set to defy calls, including from Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, to follow recent convention and allow MPs a vote. Polling forindicates that only a fifth of voters believe that Britain should launch missiles on Syrian military targets. More than two fifths oppose action, with the remainder undecided. Senior ministers summoned to this afternoons emergency cabinet will be asked to consider the next steps, according to a Downing Street source.

More:

Outrage as Trudeau rules out Canadian support  Daily Express

Strike could put airbase in Moscows sights  The Times

Ministry of Defence denies Iranian claims that Special Forces have been captured  Daily Mail

Could Russias air defences stop Americas missiles?  Daily Telegraph

Fury as Corbyn plays into Kremlins hands by demanding peace talks  Daily Express

SNP call for Parliamentary vote on Syria  The Scotsman

Comment:

Syria is life or death for Putin, but will his oligarchs stand by him?  Mark Almond, Daily Telegraph

Action or inaction: what are Mays options?  James Strong, Times Red Box

Russias economy cant match its power posturing  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph

Editorial:

Trump needs to use mature judgement, not Twitter threats  The Times

>Today:

>Yesterday:

Brexit means a better trade deal for Britain, says Trudeau

Canadas prime minister says Britain can negotiate an even better or larger trade deal after Brexit. Justin Trudeau said he would be happy to open talks with Britain the day after Brexit next year and said he believed the best trade deals are the win-win trade deals. Speaking to the Times, he said the EUs free trade agreement with Canada should be seen as the starting point for negotiations with the UK. He said: The rolled-over or specific Ceta arrangement between Canada and the UK is just the floor, or the first step. After that, we very much look forward to negotiating an even better or larger or more impactful deal to encourage the deepening of trade ties between Canada and the UK. Canada is firmly of the opinion that the best trade deals are the win-win trade deals.'  Daily Mail

Doubts grow over deal with India  The Times

More:

German banking boss says London will remain financial hub  Daily Mail

Brexit fear over vulnerable EU citizens  The Times

EU Parliament seeks clarity on future relations  Daily Telegraph

Exports of goods and services soar by ten per cent  The Sun

>Yesterday: Priti Patel MP in Comment: A post-Brexit immigration system can support Britains global ambitions

as Remainers launch new 1 million campaign to block it

Pro-Remain groups are launching a 1million campaign to stop Brexit this weekend, The Telegraph can reveal. The campaign will call on Parliament to give the public a vote on the terms of the final deal, with the chance to stay in the EU if they vote against it. MPs from all three major political parties, including Anna Soubry, a Tory, and Chuka Umunna, from Labour, will join forces with anti-Brexit campaigners to demand the chance to remain  branded The Peoples Vote. Richard Reed, a businessman and the vice-president of the National Union of Students, is also expected to speak at a rally in central London to launch the campaign on Sunday. The Telegraph understands 1million has been raised by nine pro-Remain groups to fund the campaign, which already has a logo and poster.  Daily Telegraph

Tory MPs tell Barnier to stop meddling in British politics  The Sun

as he says the UK has one year to reverse Brexit  Daily Express

Britons in France grill ambassador over future rights  The Guardian

Comment:

Why I quit my Foreign Office job to found a new centrist party  Chris Coghlan, Times Red Box

Ministers 1) Mordaunt signals big shift in aid strategy

The UKs 13.9bn aid budget is set for its biggest overhaul in years, with plans to use development spending to push British exporters and pension funds to invest in poorer parts of Africa and Asia. Penny Mordaunt, the International Development secretary, said her department would experience a big shift. It has faced political pressure to justify its growing budget at a time when other ministries face sizeable cuts. Under the new strategy, aid money will be used to help African companies raise debt in local currencies through the City of London, and to facilitate British companies selling and directly investing in less familiar markets. Dfids aim is to facilitate pension funds investment in emerging countries, by helping to smooth regulations and to make companies creditworthy.  FT

UN officials consider ban on fast food giants charity work  The Sun

Ministers 2) Hancock hauls in Facebook executives

Zuckerberg refuses to curb data collection from Facebook users  The Times

Culture Secretary Matt Hancock today hauled in Facebook executives to warn them the social network is not above law. Mr Hancock told US-based Vice President of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert, and Global Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Stephen Deadman he would hold their feet to the fire over the privacy of British users. The Whitehall summit comes in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal and coincided with Mark Zuckerbergs second day of evidence to the US Congress. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said pressed Facebook on accountability, transparency, micro-targeting and data protection.  Daily Mail

More media:

Watson says EU commission raid puts Sky merger in doubt  Daily Mail

Nick Timothy: Its time to cut social media giants down to size

It was not quite the emperors new clothes, but the Zuckerberg cushion is a perfect metaphor for the ways in which Facebook  and other tech companies  dodge taxes, avoid regulation and refuse to take responsibility for their actions. They have convinced us all, politicians especially, that they are bigger than they really are: too big for nation states to handle, too complex to understand, and too virtuous for us to worry about. There is a lot to worry us. Because these companies are different to anything we have known before, and governments have been slow to react to the changes they bring. Many of these changes are complex, but they are serious and cannot be ignored.  Daily Telegraph

The legal vultures are circling for Facebook  Iain Martin, The Times

Tyrie appointed to head Competition & Markets Authority

Majority of voters back NHS tax rise

Andrew Tyrie, the former chair of the UK Treasury select committee, has been appointed as the new chair of the Competition and Markets Authority to lead the organisation through a major expansion in its responsibilities after Brexit The CMAs role will be substantially beefed up after Brexit when the European Commission ceases in its role as the leading competition regulator for the UK. The vacancy at the top of the organisation arose last September because David Currie, the current chair, said he wanted to leave his post early to allow a successor to prepare for Brexit. The business department made the nomination of the former Conservative MP, which must still be confirmed by parliament, as part of a package of measures to improve competition and strengthen consumer rights.  FT

Most voters now back tax rises to fund the NHS after a significant swing in favour of the policy among Conservative supporters, a survey has revealed. For the first time in more than a decade, a majority of Britons say that they are personally willing to pay more to increase spending, according to the respected British Social Attitudes survey. They are increasingly dissatisfied with the state of the NHS, with almost three times as many saying that it has got worse as say it has improved, a gap not recorded since the late 1990s. Theresa May has promised to set out a long-term plan for the NHS within months and the evidence that voters are willing to pay more will strengthen the case of those pushing her to commit to frequent budget increases.  The Times

Taxpayers seem willing to pay a bit more  The Times

Labour woo under-25s by pledging to spend billions on free bus passes

Corbynista councillor backpedals on claim that Tories are starving kids  The Sun

Opposition MPs back call to save Open University  Daily Mail

Jeremy Corbyn will today launch another bid to woo young voters by promising them free bus travel. He will pledge to offer up to 13million under-25s free bus passes at an estimated cost of 1.4billion. Mr Corbyn will say that young people deserve a break and the offer will allow them to travel to work, to study and to visit friends. But last night the Tories called the offer a bribe and claimed it would cost up to 13billion. The money will initially come from the budget used to maintain Britains roads, which have been described as being in the worst condition for years and riddled with potholes after the winter storms and snow.  Daily Mail

Comment:

We will help young people suffering from loneliness  Tracey Crouch, The Sun

Ignoring millenials has been the Tories big mistake  Robert Colvile, Daily Telegraph

Its far too risky for Labour to assume May will fail  Martin Kettle, The Guardian

New figures show council bosses getting huge payouts

A town hall boss got a redundancy pay off of 450,000 last year, new figures laying bare the sheer scale of bumper town hall salaries today reveal. Chris West was given the bumper retirement pot when he stepped down as executive director of resources at Coventry Council last year. He was one of 26 town hall fat cats who were given severance payments of 100,000 or more in the financial year ending in March last year. Over 2,000 council workers earn 100,000 or over, according to the town hall rich list, compiled by the Taxpayers Alliance. The bumper salaries are still being dished out even though local authorities have seen their budgets squeezed after seven years of austerity.  Daily Mail

Local authorities put 4 billion on property to save towns  The Times

Government tells councils not to fine for recycling errors  Daily Telegraph

>Yesterday: Harry Fone in Comment: Local councils cut to the bone? Not if our Town Hall Rich List is anything to go by.

News in Brief:Matt Kilcoyne is Head Of Communications at the Adam Smith Institute.

The papers might have been full over recent days of Amber Rudds inability to read a report from her own department about the impact of police cuts  but they missed the bigger picture. The Home Secretary is right to highlight the impact of drug gangs on our cities and young people, and on the rise of violent crime in the past twelve months  but shes missed the obvious solution.

Time and time again I come across policy stories like this. Whether its on housing, where people complain of a housing crisis and the Tories say theyll build more but ignore that its the Governments constriction of supply that leads to higher rents and less disposable income. Or on encouraging more women to remain in employment after childbirth without looking at the costs of childcare or how government can best reduce it. All too often the debate doesnt look beyond the obvious and the answers are unimaginative. We end up failing to solve the underlying problems.

Under Thatcher the Conservatives stood for simple and sellable principles: My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest days work for an honest days pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.

Simple principles give you wiggle room when it comes to actual policy. But they also help set the direction of what it is youre trying to achieve. And we have to remember, always, that politics is about achieving things. In this case, I suggest to the Conservative Party that it might want to go back to that mantra of Maggies, in particular the final point: Support the police.

It follows that the key question is how you support them. Do you funnel money in? Do you grant them sweeping new powers? Do you devolve power to local forces so that managers manage? Or something more imaginative?

The best thing that the Conservative Party can do now to support the police in tackling gang violence is to legalise drugs. I also think that doing so would be a profoundly Conservative move.

At the moment we have a prohibition on certain substances. In fact, a lot of substances. Everything from cannabis and cocaine, to snus and MDMA. We dont have bans on various strengths, what theyre used for, or who is using them. We just blanket ban. But at the same time we recognise the idiocy of recreating this approach for things like alcohol, sugar, or nicotine (despite the continuous pressure from busybody campaign groups).

The Home Offices Serious Violence Strategy explained many problems of prohibition. It showcased how grievances in illicit drug markets cannot be settled through legal channels, so participants may settle them violently. This can lead to escalation as dealers seek to portray themselves as excessively violent. In fact, gangs use violenceas a way of maintaining and increasing profits within drugs markets.

When you go to Tesco and buy a bottle of wine, or to the corner shop for cigarettes, you dont expect to be mugged and the odds are that you wont be. But suppose youre buying a substance that the state prohibits. You end up putting yourself in dangerous situations; whether thats getting into a dealers car or going down dark alleyways. The state is unwittingly encouraging this behaviour. All of us know that people buy these things, and saying that they shouldnt isnt good enough. Its deeply unconservative to put youngsters at greater risk of harm.

And it is young people who are being harmed. Not just those using illegal drugs, but those who are groomed by criminal gangs. Estimates by the Home Office suggest there are some 4,000 teenagers in London alone caught up in smuggling operations. The spillover effects are stark, too. Between 2014/15 and 2016/17, murders and manslaughters where either the victim or suspect was a drug user or dealer increased from 50 per cent to 57 per cent. We neednt be suffering this scourge of violence. In the USA, evidence suggests that legalisation of medical marijuana saw violent crime drop in states that border Mexico. Washington States decision to legalise cannabis in November 2012 caused a reduction in thefts of between 13 per cent and 22 per cent.

If, like Thatcher, you believe that Conservatives should support the police and that its our duty to look after ourselves, and then also to look after our neighbour, we have to do what works and what is right. In this case, thats legalisation.

The Black Market in drugs is worth around 5.3 billion to gangs in the UK. Lets starve them of their cash. We can give it to a legal and regulated industry. Importantly, it removes power from gangs dealing in other drugs; in the USA, states with cannabis legalisation saw a 14.5 per cent reduction in any opiate use, and 24.8 per cent fewer opioid overdose deaths in states with medical cannabis laws between 1999 and 2010. Meanwhile, more restrictive policies on opioids led to higher numbers seeking black-market alternatives. The best way for the police to tackle this is to have to implement laws that are most harm-reducing.

Itll be worth it. Adam Smith Institute research estimated cannabis legalisation alone could be worth 7 billion to the UK economy and up to 1.05 billion in tax revenue. Theres good reason to think this is a low-ball figure. Estimates of revenue in Colorado and in Washington were $70 million and $162 million respectively, but by the third year revenue reached $193.6 million and $314.8 million.

Support in the UK for medicinal cannabis is at 78 per cent, and support for recreational cannabis legalisation has now been over 55 per cent for half a decade.

The party that grasps the nettle and frees up the market will reap the political dividend, just as the Liberals did in Canada. The Tories can cut crime, support the police and boost business. Frankly they should be more Conservative and end prohibition.1. Yes. The district should offer a virtual learning option, even in a modified format.

2. Yes. The bill limits the number of students who use it, but it does provide state funds.

3. No. Its too late in the year for the district to try to rework its teaching platforms.

4. No. The bill only allows 10% of students to access it, and also has other restrictions.

5. Unsure. It seems like a half-measure, but it may be worth pursuing.

Vote

View ResultsDaniel Hannan: Corbyns first instinct in a national crisis is to treat it as a way to attack the Tories  much to Putins satisfaction

Daniel Hannan is an MEP for South-East England, and a journalist, author and broadcaster. His most recent book is What Next: How to Get the Best from Brexit.

A month after the outbreak of the Second World War, John Maynard Keynes wrote a famous letter to the New Statesman:

The intelligentsia of the Left were the loudest in demanding that the Nazi aggression should be resisted at all costs. When it comes to a showdown, scarce four weeks have passed before they remember that they are pacifists and write defeatist letters to your columns, leaving the defence of freedom and of civilisation to Colonel Blimp and the Old School Tie, for whom Three Cheers.

Keynes wasnt being entirely fair. There were plenty of patriotic Leftists in 1939, even among the intelligentsia. He was, though, describing a certain type of Leftist  the type for whom hatred of British military action trumped every other consideration, including basic human rights.

Can you think of anyone like that today? A vegetarian throwback to the 1930s? An abstemious, well-intentioned, republican, bike-riding, bearded, anti-colonial crank? Someone who would rather side with Putin or Assad than accept that the UKs intelligence services might have a point about something?

It is important to understand Jeremy Corbyns Weltanschauung, his way of looking at the world. It would be unfair to call the Labour leader pro-Putin. The Russian autocrat runs precisely the sort of nationalist, crony-capitalist, militaristic state that, in other circumstances, Jezza would loathe. But when its Putin versus May, he cant bring himself to back a Tory government  any more than he could bring himself to back Margaret Thatcher against Galtieris fascist dictatorship.

A conviction that Britain is always on the wrong side guides Corbos response to the latest barbarities in Syria. Im not suggesting that he has a duty to back military action. The issue of intervention was always a finely balanced one and, to be honest, Im not sure that the latest alleged chemical attack tips the scales either way. Assad has carried out far worse atrocities with conventional weapons. You can argue that we have a moral duty to intervene, or that a proportionate use of force now would serve our strategic interests; alternatively, you can argue that intruding will do more harm than good, or that it is none of our business. One more apparent use of poison gas doesnt alter the fundamentals.

The trouble is that Jeremy Corbyn is not simply making a case for non-intervention. He is, as over the Skripal affair, taking the Kremlin line, namely that this is all a very fishy business, that you cant trust claims made by the West and that Russia should be involved in the final settlement. Just as Sinn Fein spokesmen, asked to condemn Republican murders, would trot out platitudes about wanting all the killing in Ireland to end, so Corbyn speaks in deliberate cliche: I condemn all violence from wherever its come from.

Its reasonable to be cautious. In war, claims and counterclaims are brandished freely, and facts are hard to come by. The balance of evidence suggests, for example, that the Assad regime was responsible for the 2017 sarin attack in Khan Sheikhoun but, almost exactly a year on, we still dont know for sure.

Dictators have learned how to exploit the Wests slow verification processes. They know how mercurial public opinion is in democracies. They understand that, as the Player King puts it in Hamlet, what to ourselves in passion we propose, the passion ending, doth the purpose lose.

Britains authorities eventually showed, with impressive precision, who had murdered Alexander Litvinenko, but events had by then moved on. We may in due course find definitive proof of Assads complicity in breaching the chemical weapons convention but, again, the moment for direct retribution will have passed.

Putin is a master of delay and dezinformatsiya. He has pursued the same strategy over Salisbury and Douma. From the moment the chemical attacks were reported, bizarre counter-theories were concocted, some of them laughable  such as the suggestion, made by the Russian Embassy, that Britain had abducted the Skripals. The purpose of these preposterous claims is not to convince, but to confuse. Youre not meant to come away thinking that Britain has kidnapped Yulia Skripal (having first nearly murdered her and then, for some reason, nursed her back to health). Youre simply meant to shake your head cynically at all claims, to disbelieve the BBC and Fox and CNN as much as you disbelieve RT.

The former KGB officer in the Kremlin doubtless cant believe his luck at finding that Britains Opposition is led by a man who will gladly go along with such nonsense, a man whose first instinct in a national crisis is to treat it as a way to attack the Tories.

Ask one question. In what conflict has Jeremy Corbyn ever been on Britains side? He has shown himself willing to back any cause, however vile, provided it is sufficiently Anglophobic: the IRA, the USSR, Hezbollah. He couldnt even bring himself to condemn ISIS without tacking on a criticism of the American presence in Iraq. To repeat, its not that Jezza wants to emulate these movements. He disapproves of their human rights violations just as, during the Cold War, he used to urge Communist states to become more democratic. But, in the last analysis, he will always find a way of blaming the worlds problems on Britain, America and Israel.

When the Warsaw Pact was still in business, people who took such a line were called useful idiots. They would do the Kremlins work without needing to be bribed, it was said, because their idealistic Leftism blinded them to the true nature of the Soviet tyranny.

Now, though, Corbo doesnt have even that justification. In making excuses for Assad and Putin, he isnt backing some notionally Leftist cause. He is lining up, rather, with Frances National Front, Austrias Freedom Party, Hungarys Jobbik, Spains Falange, Greeces Golden Dawn and his own newest British supporter Nick Griffin. A useful idiot? Thats putting it kindly.Theresa Mays inclination will be to participate in American-led action against Bashar al-Assads regime. It would be surprising were it not. She will feel that the use of chemical weapons endagers the international order, and that the western powers cannot let it go without retaliatory action. This sense will be heightened after their use in Salisbury. America and France supported her call for a united front against Vladimir Putin then. She will want to support both in their planned action against Assad now  whatever Russia may say.

Furthermore, there will be a sense in parts of the Foreign Office, Whitehall, and her own party that we cannot fall behind our western allies as they march on, let alone stand still. The logic of the Governments post-referendum, pre-Brexit policy is that the country will be a Global Britain, no less engaged with the world as an independent country than it was as an EU member. Inaction over Syria would isolate us from our main allies abroad. It would leave Emmanuel Macron and France as Europes main military actor. It would do us no favours with a volatile American President from whom we hope for support for a free trade deal. It could conceivably have a knock-on in the Brexit negotiations. There may also be a belief in some Tory quarters that strikes against Assad would further highlight Jeremy Corbyns habit of appeasing Putin, so unmissably shown up after the Salisbury assault.

Now consider the other side of this coin. It is reported today that the Prime Minister is inclined to order some military engagement without first calling a Commons vote. She has every right to do so and we agree with James Gray and others that this is the correct constitutional practice: the executive should act and the legislature hold it to account for its actions. But it is far from clear what this engagement and its timetable might be. May will presumably be wary of Typhoon fighters or Tornados being shot down over Syria. However, it isnt clear how long it would take to deploy cruise missile-armed submarines to the region, or how the timetable of their deployment might dovetail with the return of the Commons next Monday.

The political difficulties are more knotty than the practical ones. Parts of Whitehall may want the Government to fall in behind America, but much of Parliament will not. Thirty Conservative MPs voted against military action in Syria in 2013. They included four present Ministers  Steve Baker, Tracey Crouch, Phillip Lee and one Cabinet member, David Davis. Their reservations about David Camerons intentions were shared more widely. Our judgement is that there will be more Julian Lewiss on the Tory backbenches (the Chairman of the Defence Select Committee, and opposed to strikes) than Tom Tugendhats (the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, and in favour of them). Ominously, ConservativeHome is told that the whips have not yet done a ring-round. They and other MPs are away from Westminster during this parliamentary recess, just as was the case in 2013.

Todays Times says that polling finds that a fifth of voters in favour of missile strikes, with two fifths against and the rest undecided. The legacy of Iraq is long. Trust in Ministerial and security services assurances about intelligence has been eroded. Social media allows conspiracy theories to get halfway round the world before government dossiers have got their boots on  and been denounced as dodgy. Public support for a clash with Russia over Syria will doubtless be lower than a fifth. Corbyns take on Russia is one thing when poisonings are taking place on British soil, but likely to be another if our armed forces go into action over the skies of Mesopotamia. He would proclaim that he had been proved right about Iraq. That view would find support among people more reputable than Nick Griffin.

The Labour leader will be able next week to denounce Trumps characteristic tweet yesterday as warmongering. (Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!) The Prime Minister will be asking herself what echo his words might have in marginal seats and among nervous Tory backbenches. She will want to be sure that any action she authorises isnt followed by ministerial resignations. Her leadership is not currently under internal threat, but her position is far from secure, in this Commons with no majority. No wonder she has called an emergency Cabinet meeting this afternoon. She wants to test the waters, bind its members in. Boris Johnson and Michael Gove will be for action. The Defence Secretary is a neophyte facing his first big test in office. Davis is unlikely to have shifted his view much since 2013. Most Cabinet Ministers will feel the competing pulls of wanting to support May but also distance themselves from potential political damage.

The Prime Minister will need to convince her colleagues that intelligence demonstrates Assads culpability beyond doubt. The questions that will follow from her colleagues will include those that this site asked yesterday. If there are further chemical attacks in Syria post-missile strikes, what would Britain do then? What is our strategic interest there, in any event? Where do we stand between monsters and maniacs, as Lewis has put it  between Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies, and Al Qaeda-aligned Islamists? Is there really a credible democratic alternative?

What response might Putin make? What is his capacity for cyber response or an asymetric riposte  in the Ukraine, the Baltic States? What is the danger to British personnel, and of the situation spiralling out of control? The potential interplay between an unpredictable American President; a belligerent but vulnerable Russia; a broken UN system; an appeasing Leader of the Opposition, a windy Commons and a weak Government is baleful for May. Her best option is a strictly limited missile response  no warplanes over Syria, let alone boots on the ground. She will be feeling a hand of history on her shoulder, and wondering if the other holds a knife at her back.With the debate about regulating the internet moving from whether to how, Conservatives and others on the political right and centre-right have a clear stake in the outcome.

As has been pointed out by several observers, the sort of data-driven targeting techniques which are now in the spotlight did not suddenly appear in 2016. Back in 2012 the Guardian was gushing over how Barack Obama had harnessed the power of friendship to see off that frightful monster, Mitt Romney.

Moreover, the leadership of Facebook and other social media giants live and operate in an environment with strong political currents too. As Nick Timothy points out in his Telegraph column, Mark Zuckerberg did not deny claims by whistleblowers that Facebook excludes stories popular with conservatives from its lists of trending topics when testifying before Congress.

Whatever your personal stance on Brexit or Trump, there is a definite sense that the political impact of social media has been thrust into the spotlight because the wrong people  which is to say, populists  are winning with it.

This creates a twofold danger. First, that if left to their own devices these companies will self-correct in a way which amounts to suppressing the right. Second, if that doesnt happen, is that regulation will be drawn up in the spirit of disdain and horror which has characterised the reaction of an important an influential part of the population to the events of 2016.

Even if youre a Tory who opposed both Brexit and Trump, as many did, that ought to be a hugely concerning development. For all that progressives say nice things about moderates like Romney at the moment, look at the way they ran against him when weighing the likelihood that building systemic anti-populist safeguards into some of the Western worlds most influential networks wont rebound on the mainstream right down the line.

Already there has been some important progress. As Iain Martin points out in todays Times, there is increasing acceptance that these websites are, by dint of moderating their content, publishers rather than mere platforms.

Next, Conservatives should get on the front foot when it comes to designing a fair and proportionate regulatory system, one which not only protects users from the invasive use of personal data but also recognises that sites such as Facebook and Twitter are important public spaces and, given their market share, should have attendant public responsibilities.04/12/2018

Photo (c) yanik88 - Getty Images In a state with a history of water quality issues, locals are questioning why Nestle will soon be able to speed up its bottled water operations.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality recently decided to grant a permit allowing Nestle to increase the amount of groundwater it pumps from a well in the Osceola Township.

Nestle, which sells bottled water under its Ice Mountain brand, currently has 50 water bottling plants across the state and pumps an average of 250 gallons per minute from the well in Osceola. In its permitting application, Nestle had requested to collect water at an even faster rate -- 400 gallons per minute.

The corporation, which makes billions from bottled water sales, only pays local officials $200 for permission to use their water, according to a Bloomberg News report published last year.

Nestle has defended its presence in the state, where the town of Flint continues to suffer from lack of access to clean water, by pointing to the jobs its plants create.

Public backlash

Nestles request to increase production sparked a massive backlash from locals, with over 80,000 people filing public comments to Michigan authorities urging them to reject the proposal; letters from nine tribal governments and eight citizens groups also urged action against the permit.

By contrast, only 75 comments were submitted in support of Nestles request.

Environmental groups blasted the states decision to side with the minority of people who submitted public comments, noting that Nestle pays limited costs for permission to use the water.

Michigan residents are putting up with unaffordable and sometimes unsafe drinking water, while Nestle, which had sales of $7.4 billion from water alone in 2016, pumps Michigan groundwater basically for free, the Upper Peninsula Environmental Coalition told a local news station.

Michigans authorities had already suggested last month that they would side with Nestle, claiming that the concerns presented by residents, even if valid, did not take the law into account.

We dont have the power to say no arbitrarily. We cant just say no for reasons that arent attached to the law, Matt Gamble, a Department of Environmental Quality supervisor for the state, told Michigan Public Radio last month.

Application complied with state laws

Officials for the township and the county have also tried to fight Nestles permit, but the company appealed and won a key ruling last year from a local judge.

In a statement to the Detroit Free Press, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality director Heidi Grether said that Nestle had a thorough application that complied with state laws.

The scope and detail of the departments review of the Nestle permit application represents the most extensive analysis of any water withdrawal in Michigan history, she told the paper.

We are hopeful that whether residents agree with the Nestle permitting decision or not, they will acknowledge and respect the work that MDEQ staff did to thoroughly and conscientiously apply the law in reviewing the permit.SUBSCRIBE

Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates straight in your inbox.CORNWALL, Ontario  Hope in Bloom is coming to Cornwall. The Cornwall Chapter of Parkinson Canada will be selling tulips at the Fermented Grape on Brookdale Ave. in Cornwall and at FreshCo on Ninth St. on Friday, April 20, 2018.

The money will be going towards Parkinson Canada to support research and support services for those suffering from Parkinsons Disease and their families.

Vernon Eccles has suffered from Parkinsons disease since 2011. He and his wife Penny have been involved in the local chapter of Parkinson Canada and say that while the Hope in Bloom fundraiser takes place in other parts of Canada, it has yet to be established in Cornwall, so they decided to help spearhead the project.

At first, we didnt know what it was, said Penny Eccles. He took part in a gait improvement course because we knew something was wrong.

It was only after going to a neurologist in 2012 that Vernon was diagnosed with Parkinsons Disease, but he and his wife recognized that he had been suffering from the symptoms of Parkinsons for at least a year.

I looked up the symptoms of Parkinsons and went down the checklist, tick, tick tick, said Penny.

Penny and Vernon hope to sell 60 tulips, each in their own pot during the fundraiser. The tulips will be available at FreschCo just for April 20, but they will be at the Fermented Grape for a full week.

Vernon explained that he has a close connection to Cornwall and very fond memories. Vernon trained in Cornwall for his career in business and took his oath of citizenship in Cornwall.

Cornwall has always been very kind to me, he said.

There are 25 new Parkinsons cases every day in Canada and there are around 300 people living with the disease in the Cornwall area.

For those looking for support, they can contact Parkinson Canada who will direct them to the local Parkinsons support group who meet the second Wednesday of every month.CORNWALL, Ontario  The Cornwall Community Police Service (CCPS) have charged one individual with violating the Highway Traffic Act and Cornwalls taxi by-law for operating a ride sharing service.

The Police Board heard an update on the ride sharing issue at their meeting on Wednesday, April 4.

The individual, who was not identified at the meeting, was charged roughly two weeks ago, and Police Chief Dan Parkinson said that charges could be expected for two more drivers.

Parkinson said that violators could be fined $375 per-offense.

He explained that the ride sharing service in question is known as R&B Delivery Soul-utions and they were first brought to the attention of the CCPS by Cornwalls existing taxi services. The Chief said that members of the CCPS then rode with the ride sharing service, which resulted in the charge against one individual.

In fairness, it is a situation where there is a high level or sensitivity on the part of the taxi operators, said Parkinson.

The CCPS had released a public notice last month in regards to Cornwalls Taxi By-Law, By-Law#01, 2008, prohibits anyone from transporting individuals within the city limits and charging a fee for it unless otherwise authorized to do so.

The Cornwall Community Police Service would like to remind members of the public that Choice Taxi and Tip Top Taxi are the only two licensed transportation service companies in Cornwall, said CCPS in their public statement. Any other unlicensed transportation service(s) that have not undergone these regulations may pose a risk to the safety of passengers.

The statement went on to say that the fine could be much steeper than $375.

In addition, unlicensed transportation services are subject to a penalty not exceeding $2000.00 as indicated in the By-Law and may also be found to commit an offence under Section 39.1(1)(b) of the Highway Traffic Act (HTA), the statement read. This offence can result in a fine of up to $20,000 and these offences will be enforced by police.UNITED COUNTIES of SD&G, Ontario  The Hydro One power outage map is showing that over 5,000 residents in parts of South Stormont and South Glengarry are currently without power.

The map currently shows that Ingleside, Lunenburg, Newington, St. Andrews, Long Sault, Apple Hill and Martintown are among the communities without power.

Hydro One currently is estimating that power will be restored to these areas by 5:30 p.m. this afternoon.

Hydro One states that the cause of the outages is still being determined, but there have been high winds up-to 90 km/h throughout the day.

Environment Canada continues to have a Severe Wind Warning in effect for Cornwall and SD&G.

Tagwi Secondary School issued a statement that they too were without power, but thanks to back-up generators that classes were continuing.WINCHESTER, Ontario  On April 2, 2018 at approximately 1:21 a.m., Stormont, Dundas & Glengarry Ontario Provincial Police officers responded to a report of a break-in at a business (LCBO) on Winchester Main Street, North Dundas Township.

Investigation indicated that culprit(s) entered the business and removed alcohol (multiple bottles of vodka and rum). Two suspects were captured on video(photo attached) and are described as:

Suspect 1  Male, Red hoodie under a black jacket and wearing gloves

Suspect 2  male, Navy blue winter jacket with a white stripe across the chest area, and white writing on the arm and wearing Blue gloves.

FRAUD CHARGES LAID

SOUTH STORMONT, Ontario  On April 2, 2018 at approximately 10:22pm, SD&G OPP officers responded to a report of a male breaching his release conditions in South Stormont Township.

Investigation indicated that a male had used false cheques in order to obtain funds and was breaching previous release conditions.

Christopher SABOURIN (26) of South Stormont is charged with;

 Use, deals, acts on forged document

 Fraud under $5000

 Fail to Comply with Recognizance

He was held in custody pending a court appearance (bail) at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cornwall.

PUBLIC MISCHIEF

MORRISBURG, Ontario  On April 4, 2018 at approximately 4:30pm, SD&G OPP officers responded to a report of an emergency at a business on Main Street Street in the Town of Morrisburg, South Dundas Township. Investigation revealed that a young male had falsely called 9-1-1 several times at the location.

A 13-year-old male of South Dundas Township was arrested and is charged with;

 Public Mischief (3 counts)

He was released and scheduled to appear at the Ontario Court of Justice in Cornwall on May 10, 2018.

ANYONE HAVING INFORMATION ON THE ABOVE OR ANY CRIME IS ASKED TO CALL SD&G OPP AT 1-888-310-1122 OR CRIME STOPPERS AT 1-800-222-8477.CORNWALL, Ontario  Prominent members of the Cornwall community found themselves under arrest this past Thursday, April 12.

It was all in good fun however, and for a good cause as a part of the second annual Jail & Bail fundraiser for the Hub for Beyond 21.

If someone was nominated for Jail & Bail, they would be picked up by the local police and brought to the jail at the Cornwall Square.

They would then be read their charge by the judge and given the bail amount they had to raise before they were released.

Bill Makinson for example, was charged with hiding from the camera. Big Brothers, Big Sisters Cornwall Executive Director Ron Graham was charged with being overly involved in the community.

There were 28 individuals brought-in in total, and organizer Shannon Savard hoped to raise a good amount of money for the cause.

Last year, Jail & Bail raised around $10, 000 for the Hub for Beyond 21.

The Hub for Beyond 21s goal is to provide a space and an opportunity for adults with developmental disabilities to live connected and respected lives while contributing to the community.

The Hub for Beyond 21 must raise around $300,000 annually to meet its operating budget.

I want people to know that we receive no government funding, said event organizer Shannon Savard. The money raised today will go towards participant activity fees, arts and crafts, lunches and more.

In all, Beyond 21 serves 50 families.Telarus wants to introduce the master agent model to Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

The Sandy, Utah-based master agent is expanding internationally and has elected to start in the South Pacific by building out the region's first full-service master agency offering cloud, contact center, security and connectivity services to telecom agent partners.

To that end, Telarus has brought on telecom and channel veteran Tony Heywood to lead its expansion efforts. Heywood, based Sydney, will serve as Telarus' vice president of international sales, Telarus CEO and co-founder Adam Edwards told CRN exclusively.

[Related: CRN Exclusive: Telarus Adds Outage Resolution To Circuit Monitoring Service, Letting Agent Partners Act As MSPs]

Heywood previously served as vice president and country manager for systems integrator AGC Networks. Prior to that, he ran Westcon Groups Cisco sales team and services business.

In his new position with Telarus, Heywood is taking on the roles of partner development manager, supplier manager, commissions analyst, marketing expert and events coordinator. As Telarus' presence grows in the region, Heywood will establish a permanent office in Sydney and hire staff to take over the partner support roles while he focuses his efforts on growing sales and vendor partnerships, according to the master agent.

Unlike the way most master agents got their start in the United States market with wireline products, Telarus is kicking off its international expansion with a cloud-first approach, Edwards said.

"We see a huge opportunity as these cloud companies expand into other geographies," he said. "If we can help partners embrace the broker model, it's good for suppliers and for partners."

Telarus is starting with several global suppliers in its AZN portfolio, including UCaaS providers RingCentral and Mitel, and cloud infrastructure providers such as Rackspace and Chinese cloud giant Alibaba.

While the reseller model is deeply entrenched in Australia, the broker model is a new concept in the ANZ region, said Patrick Oborn, Telarus' co-founder alongside Edwards.

Telecom services, unlike IT services and equipment, haven't been resold in other countries in the same way it has in the U.S. Telecom taxes and local regulations can make the sale challenging for channel partners. As such, the telecom brokerage model has taken off in the U.S. first with the model is set to take off outside of the U.S., especially as cloud services sales pick up steam, he said.

In addition to education, Telarus will be offering agent partners in Australia and New Zealand engineering support and financing resources. Partners will be paid out in a recurring revenue model.

From Australia and New Zealand, Telarus plans to expand into Asia.

"A good number of suppliers are expanding into these regions, and with a combined effort between these providers and master agents, we can educate partners and show them these opportunities," Edwards said.

Telarus said it will officially launch its presence in Australia by mid-year. The company will also reveal the new company name it will use for its Australian presence at the same time.Genting Cruise Lines announced a new collaboration with Okinawa Agricultural Cooperatives Association (JA Okinawa), and Leospo Incorporated, which will see the company's ships offer local Okinawa-sourced food.

This includes Okinawa Wagyu beef and Okinawa Agu pork for its summer cruise itineraries to Okinawa on select ships. These Okinawan specialties will be served on Dream Cruises World Dream, as well as Star Cruises, including the SuperStar Virgo, SuperStar Aquarius and SuperStar Gemini.

Upon arrival of World Dream in Naha, Okinawa, Thatcher Brown, President of Dream Cruises signed the agreement of intent on behalf of Genting Cruise Lines.

He said: The long history of Genting Cruise Lines with Okinawa dates back to 1997, when we first called upon Naha; today Okinawa is one of our most popular summer destinations. We are honoured to be the first cruise line to partner with JA Okinawa and Leospo Inc. on all of our 160 summer cruises to the picturesque islands of Ryukyu this year, where guests of Dream Cruises and Star Cruises will have the privilege to indulge in seasonal local produce and delicacies from Okinawa throughout their journeys from ship to shore.

Tsutomu Oshiro, President of JA Okinawa said: This agreement of intent will reinforce our working relationship with Genting Cruise Lines to promote Okinawas agricultural and livestock products. From now until the end of November, JA Okinawa will offer a wide variety of local produce, starting with Okinawa Wagyu beef and Okinawa Agu pork, both of which are bred in Okinawas warm climate and representative of Okinawas Safe and Trusted brand. Guests will also enjoy our fruits and vegetables, such as Goya (bitter gourd) and pumpkins, as well as signature Okinawan food such as Sheikwasha (flat lemon) juice and brown sugar. We are confident that our collaboration with Genting Cruise Lines will help promote our products to inbound cruise guests f and lead to the next surge in exports.

Ling Lin, Vice President of Leospo Inc. added: We are glad to connect Genting Cruise Lines and JA Okinawa on this collaboration to provide Okinawa specialties to cruise visitors from China. Upon the signing of agreement, we look forward to greet guests of Dream Cruises and Star Cruises with signature Okinawa food and produce, complementing their gastronomic cruise experience.

From April to November 2018, guests sailing on any of the Okinawa summer cruise itineraries with Dream Cruises or Star Cruises will enjoy specially designed thematic menus, using many of Okinawas delicacies such as the highly-acclaimed Okinawa Wagyu beef, which is primarily reserved for in-land consumption due to its scarce supply, as well as rOkinawa Agu pork, a signature ingredient in the regions cuisine, Genting said.

On the World Dream, signature Okinawa Wagyu beef and Okinawa Agu pork will be served in traditional Japanese dishes such as Shabu Shabu (hot pot) and Teppanyaki (iron grill); Chinese food lovers will enjoy BBQ Okinawa Agu Pork, as well as two varieties of wok-fried dishes  Okinawa beef with bitter gourd and garlic, as well as Okinawa beef rib eye with preserved sweet plum sauce.Holland Americas Westerdam arrived at the Ogden Point cruise ship terminal on Wednesday to kick off the cruise season in Victoria, Canada, that will see more than 600,000 visitors come to the city as part of a 245-call season.

Weve made some key changes to the operations here, to prepare for another successful season, said Greater Victoria Harbour Authority (GVHA) Director of Cruise Development, Lindsay Gaunt. Were looking forward to working with tourism and cruise operations partners across the region to provide a memorable experience.

The 2018 cruise season is the first operating year for bus operator Pacific North West Transportation Services, a joint venture between CVS Tours and The Wilsons Group, to provide a fleet of newer, greener, and cleaner buses to Ogden Point.

GVHA has also made a substantial investment in City of Victoria-approved wayfinding signage in James Bay for the close to 30 per cent of cruise passengers who leave the terminal on foot.

Among the highlights this year, Norwegian Cruise Lines Norwegian Bliss will be arriving almost weekly in Victoria, one of the largest ships purpose-built for Alaska cruising, with more than 4,000 passengers. She makes her inaugural call to Victoria on June 1.

In 2018, Victoria will have ship calls from cruise lines including Princess Cruise Lines, Holland America Line, Norwegian Cruise Line, Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruise Line, Carnival Cruise Lines, Oceania Cruises, Regent Seven Seas, Crystal Cruises, Seabourn, and Compagne du Ponant.TRUMBULL  Planning and Zoning Commission member Rich Deecken is running for state senate.

Deecken, a Republican who has served on the commission for the past nine years including as chairman, is campaigning for the 22nd District senate seat currently held by Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport.

Moore, who was first elected to the position in 2014, has filed to to run for a third term.

I am excited to bring a new generation of leadership to the state capitol that fuses the traditional Republican support base with Millennial values, Deecken said in a statement. The 22nd District is one of the most diverse districts in the state, not only demographically but also in terms of land use, development, education and infrastructure.

His campaign will focus on community development, reducing the weight of taxes on homeowners and renters and pushing for more education funding from the state, the statement said.

Deecken, a United States history and civics teacher at Bassick High School in Bridgeport, attended Trumbull public schools and is a graduate of Sacred Heart University. In Trumbull, he serves on the Inland Wetlands Commission, a school building committee and is a member of the Republican Town Committee. He is also a Connecticut Justice of the Peace.

The 22nd District covers parts of Bridgeport, Trumbull and Monroe. Moore was reelected to the state senate position in 2016 after receiving nearly 57 percent of the vote, according to the Connecticut Secretary of States office.Hows this for mad science: Within the next 15 years, people could elect to have their brains zapped to boost creativity in the workplace or classroom.

The process -- based on functional MRI studies -- is headed up by Adam Green, director of the Georgetown Laboratory for Relational Cognition and president-elect of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity. Greens team looked at blood flow as a measure of brain cell activity when people were doing creative tasks. The process pointed them to one region of the brain in particular (the frontopolar cortex), so they decided to test whether stimulating the area could make creative thinking easier.

We zap peoples brains in a targeted way based on these fMRI studies, Green says. The researchers hope to make creative neuroscience more available to the general public down the line.

If you dont have a brain-stimulation tool and are looking to think outside the box, good news: Weve got research-backed tips for upping your creativity outside the lab. Heres how.

1. Exercise your creativity like a muscle.

One surefire way to boost creative thinking: Try. No, really! Creativity isnt made out of a magical fairy part of the brain, Green says. Its essentially using all the same tools that go into doing everything else  but applying those tools in creativity-specific ways.

Research shows that when people try to think more creatively, they almost always can -- and those effects are both significant and repeatable. Green points to an age-old adage in neuroscience that cells that fire together, wire together. The idea is that the more you use your brain to do something, the stronger the connections between the cells involved become.

But the key to this is dedicating more time in your day to actively thinking, which usually means unplugging from email, social media and more. That's the way to unlock the digressive, slow, uncertain parts of ourselves that are key to our creativity," said Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention at The Atlantic's "Humanity + Tech" conference at MIT on Sept. 5, 2018.

Try implementing this idea in your everyday routine by avoiding bringing your phone to bed or to the bathroom. It's also a good idea to turn off notification settings for social media apps and email. Consider dedicating specific time in your day to thinking creatively -- and remind yourself to do so before any brainstorming session.

2. Change up your surroundings -- even minimally.

The best trick I know isnt very sexy, Green says. Data support that creativity nudges can come from changes as small as a warmer cup of coffee or different colors in the room. Try switching out some of the items on your desk, orienting yourself differently or doing an overhaul of the bulletin board you sit facing. Know that those nudges dont only pertain to your physical surroundings -- theyre also connected to your social setting.

Take advantage of opportunities to periodically work in different areas of the office, sit with new colleagues or invite people from different departments to lunch. Although you might not have much control over your work environment, making any possible adjustments could translate to a significant creativity boost.

You want your physical and social surroundings to change, says Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. If its the same old stuff on the walls and your desk -- and the same people youre talking to -- thats not necessarily good for creativity.

3. Go out on a limb with what you learn.

When was the last time you learned something about medieval architecture? Ancient Egyptian history? Edible herbs in the wild? Now might be the time to take an in-person course or dive down an internet rabbit hole. Research suggests that broadening your knowledge by way of unfamiliar topics fosters new ideas and divergent thinking.

New ideas come from interconnections among old ideas, says Epstein, who uses an exercise called the experts game to demonstrate this. In it, a few people in a group with extensive knowledge of an obscure topic give five-minute lectures. Then, after learning about topics such as how shoes are constructed or the history of Rolex watches, everyone comes up with at least three ideas for new products or services.

It is really mind-boggling what people will come up with, and thats based on 15 minutes of instruction they just received, Epstein says. You can DIY this approach by asking friends or colleagues in different industries about what they do -- or signing up for a course on something completely unfamiliar to you via sites such as Khan Academy, Coursera or Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC).

Theres a good chance it wont be immediately apparent how what youre learning could be useful in the future, but the pieces of knowledge youre collecting should come together naturally when youre faced with a certain challenge or brainstorming ideas later on. The more interesting and diverse the pieces, the more interesting the interconnections, Epstein says.

4. Pay attention to -- and record -- new ideas that come to you.

As people age, the number of creative ideas that come to them doesnt necessarily slow, but they tend to capture fewer of them. When an idea -- or a small component of an idea -- comes to you, start making it a point to preserve it. Jot it down in a smartphone note, write it in a pocket-sized notebook you carry around or sketch it on a napkin. Capture now, evaluate later, says Epstein, who says his research has shown over and over again that capturing your new ideas is likely the most valuable aspect of boosting creativity.

5. Challenge yourself in new ways -- especially when it comes to overarching issues in your industry.

If youve ever tried an escape room -- a physical adventure game where players complete goals by solving puzzles -- your creativity probably spiked. Thats because challenges act as a catalyst for us to think creatively and come up with simultaneous ideas or solutions. For example, if you turn a knob and find out a door is locked, you begin to automatically brainstorm ideas and solutions -- jiggling the knob, pounding on the door, trying your luck with a bobby pin.

You can stimulate yourself similarly at work by setting a time limit for a task or taking on an ultimate challenge in your industry, Epstein says. Think about the overarching issues and questions in your field (How do I end world hunger in one week? How can I invent a phone that doesnt require a charger?) and practice brainstorming open-ended solutions.

Related:

5 Science-Backed Ways to Boost Your Creativity

Idris Elba Shares 5 Pieces of Advice to Follow Your Ambition and Achieve Success

3 Ways to Unleash Your Creativity



Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedHARTFORD  Greta Stifel worries every day about whether she can afford her cancer medication, which can exceed $22,000 a month.

I have to continue on this for the rest of my life, said Stifel, of Berlin. The last thing I need to figure out is how to afford medications.

A new poll shows that Stifel is not alone in worrying about the high cost of prescription drugs, and that state residents want lawmakers to do something about it.

Conducted in February for the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, the poll found that 88 percent of those taking prescriptions are worried about paying for their medicine.

Other findings show that 20 percent those who responded skip taking their medicine or cut doses in half to save money, and 94 percent support the state taking legal action to prevent price gouging.

The poll shows very clearly that Connecticut residents want action, regardless of their political affiliation, said Frances Padilla, president of the foundation. They should not have to choose between taking their medications as prescribed and putting food on the table.

A bill before General Assembly seeks to rein in drug prices by increasing price transparency, establishing a trigger point at which manufacturers must explain cost spikes and forcing drug makers to reveal available rebates.

This survey confirms that concerns about the rising cost of prescription drugs cross party lines, and there is bipartisan support for legislative action, said state Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven.

When one out of five respondents reports skipping their medication or cutting pills in half to save money, we know we have a problem, Fasano said.

State Comptroller Kevin Lembo said reducing prescription drug prices is crucial for many state residents.

We have developed a plan, now progressing in the state legislature, to deliver financial relief directly to consumers at the pharmacy counter, Lembo said. This plan, to deliver drug pricing transparency for the first time in Connecticut, will shine a bright light onto a shadowy market and extend free-market fairness to the pharmaceutical marketplace.

Ross Kristal, a Yale physician, said he knows well the burden high prescription prices place on patients.

Ive seen firsthand the consequences of unfair prescription drug pricing, said Kristal, who described a patient who was prescribed an inhaler for her pulmonary disease but ended up back in the hospital because she could not afford to buy the medicine.

People in this state should not have to pay inordinate amounts of money to simply breathe, Kristal said.Before Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes became one of the most infamous corporate fraudsters of all time, she was an archetype of entrepreneurship. After getting a game-changing idea at the age of 19, she dropped out of Stanford and spent her 20s building a multibillion-dollar business. The size of her success was important, but so was the age at which she achieved it.

Youth seems to be a big part of the entrepreneurial narrative. When we aren't hearing about startup millionaires in their early 20s, were being regaled with stories of famous entrepreneurs who began hustling in adolescence. If success is a by-product of working harder and longer than others, getting started before finishing your college degree seems to be the ultimate badge of legitimacy.

Related: 3 Lessons a Young Entrepreneur Learned From Sir Richard Branson

The problem is that our conception of fresh-faced entrepreneurs isnt backed up by data. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), only 16 percent of small businesses are owned by someone under 35. The average age for startup founders is around 40, and for those behind the most successful exit strategies, it's 47.

In reality, Sara Blakely of Spanx fame is more representative of entrepreneurs than Holmes. Blakely built Spanx into an empire, largely thanks to the strength of her will rather than any entrepreneurial acumen. She didn't even start until she was in her late 20s, long after the prime age for entrepreneurial adventures.

This myth that entrepreneurs all start out by selling lemonade and hustling from an early age is not just incorrect -- it's counterproductive. It sends the message that entrepreneurship is less legitimate or attainable for late bloomers. That could keep a lot of exciting, innovative ideas out of the marketplace, and worse, it might prevent experienced older professionals from staking out on their own because they assume theyve missed their chance.

Better late than never -- my own entrepreneurial journey

I heard little about entrepreneurship growing up, and after college, I landed in a corporate job in publishing. Starting a business wasnt even on my radar; that seemed the exclusive province of geniuses with resources.

Later, I had a boyfriend who co-founded a successful startup, but even this up-close exposure to entrepreneurship didn't convince me that I was equally capable of starting my own business. He had built his first business in college, so his achievements appeared to be the product of brilliance and an entrepreneurial family background.

But I still was curious about this entrepreneurial thing. So, I started attending meetups and going to lectures.

I began to realize that entrepreneurship wasnt the elite club Id assumed it was. In reality, entrepreneurs come from various backgrounds and possess different skill sets. Eventually, I built up enough confidence to quit my job and start my own business, NY Book Editors.

Now, five years later, business is booming. The fact that I was late to entrepreneurship didn't hold me back. In fact, my age proved entirely irrelevant. What's important is not when you get started, but how you get started.

Unlocking the entrepreneur inside

I firmly believe that anyone is capable of becoming an entrepreneur. I'm also aware that data from the Small Bjusiness Administration supports the estimate that only 80 percent of new businesses survive past their first year, and less than half survive the five-year mark. If you decide to take the risk nevertheless, regardless of your age, it's important to cultivate the entrepreneurial skills that lead to long-term success:

Related: How Older Entrepreneurs Can Turn Age to Their Advantage

1. Run, dont walk, toward criticism. Uncertain entrepreneurs must surround themselves with other independent business owners. Exchanging ideas reveals whats possible and whats unrealistic while empowering new entrepreneurs to learn from the mistakes of others.

When Morgan Hermand-Waiche was still an MBA student, he pitched an idea to angel investor Fabrice Grinda -- who hated it. Instead of giving up, Hermand-Waiche was thrilled by the feedback. And he continued to pitch ideas to Grinda over the next several months until he found a winner. That winner was Adore Me, the 20th-fastest-growing private retail company in the United States.

2. Dont underestimate the power of positivity. I used to roll my eyes when Id hear about maintaining a positive outlook and practicing gratitude. But over the years, Ive learned that gratitude and positivity are not consequences of success -- they're precursors. Research from Harvard Medical School suggests that people who regularly feel and express gratitude are healthier and happier -- not to mention better at inspiring others.

Truly successful people make a point to practice gratitude. The other day, for instance, I was having lunch with a fellow entrepreneur when the server dropped an entire bowl of miso soup all over my companion's silk dress. Even her shoes were drenched. Instead of losing her cool, however, she took this inconvenience in stride and refused to let it ruin our lunch.

So, try to get in the same head space; maybe try a little mental exercise tomorrow morning: After hitting the snooze button, lie there and try to think of five things youre grateful for, both professionally and personally. This will start your day off from a place of gratitude so youre better prepared to tackle the days challenges.

3. Practice ruthless elimination. Many of us are so reluctant to choose whats essential that we end up spreading ourselves too thin and achieving nothing. But a study in the British Journal of Health Psychology found people are two to three times more likely to achieve goals if they make a specific plan and set one goal at a time.

For entrepreneurs, this means focusing on a few key things to accomplish. Everything else should be dropped or seriously scaled back. Give one idea a chance to succeed, and obsess over every detail. To start your journey to less, consider two books I recommend: Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More, by Morten Hansen, and Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown.

4. Burn your ship. In 1519, Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes ordered his men to burn their ships upon arriving in enemy territory (modern-day Mexico), where they were outnumbered. There was no option of retreat -- they had to give everything they had to the battle. I like that story because it reminds me that we humans have a way of figuring things out when there's no other way out.

I left my job in publishing, even though I was offered a 20 percent raise. Instead, I burned my ships and buckled down financially. Don't expect to indulge in creature comforts while starting a business. Be willing to live as lean a life as possible -- for as long as possible -- while investing every extra cent back into the business. The capital is important, but the sacrifice is what really matters.

Related: Where's the Love? Why You Should Work to Ingrain Gratitude Into Your Company Culture

Tales of entrepreneurs who once sold door to door as kids make for beautiful stories. And they make sense to us. We look for reasons or characteristics in young people that explain how they became successes. But despite what the myth might imply, it's impossible to "miss the boat" of entrepreneurial opportunities.

Finding success isn't about turning back the clock; it's about preparing for the future -- and that can start at any age.

Related:

This Huge Myth About Entrepreneurship Is Bad for Business

3 Entrepreneurial 'Realities' You Need to Understand Are Really Myths

Real Talk: Busting Six Myths About Entrepreneurship



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedTORRINGTON  The Torrington Civitan Club will sponsor a Scholarship Fundraiser Dance on Sat. April 28 from 7:30 - 11 p.m. at Chatterleys Banquet Hall, 371 Pinewoods Rd, Torrington. Dance to the music of popular Night Moves Band. There will be a cash bar, bring your own snacks. A gift basket raffle will be held. Proceeds benefit local college-bound high school seniors.

Tickets are $15 per person and can be purchased from any Civitan member or purchased at the door by cash only. For info or to purchase tickets, call Stephanie at 860-482-5655 or jwpeltier@yahoo.com.

Throughout the years, Civitan Club has awarded thousands of dollars in scholarships to Torrington area college bound seniors. Civitan Club is an international non-profit group of citizens who volunteer in a wide range of charity projects across their communities. They conduct fundraisers and participate in charity projects to help others in the community, with a special emphasis on helping people with developmental disabilities.

The club meets 6 p.m. the second Tuesday of the month at Marinos Restaurant in Torrington. For more information about Civitan International, go to www.Civitan.org. Follow us on Facebook @ Civitan International-Torrington CT.

H.O.R.S.E. of Connecticut plans Spring Horse Parade

WASHINGTON  The Humane Organization Represent-ing Suffering Equines, H.O.R.S.E. of Connecticut, now celebrating its 37th year, will hold a special Spring Horse Parade on Saturday, April 14, 1-3 p.m.

The Spring Horse Parade is an opportunity for folks interested in adopting, leasing or spon-soring (or volunteering), to meet the many horses; age 5 to 29, from mini to draft, with many available for the advanced-beginner to experienced rider. A leasing program is for people over 18 who ride regularly and want to find out what is involved in caring for a horse, while adoption is for the experienced horse owner looking for a lifetime companion. Sponsoring is an introductory option for those that would simply like to groom and hand walk a horse.

A few featured horses for the Spring Horse Parade include Legend is a 15 year old, 161 hand, Appendix gelding that rides English for an experienced rider. He is a very handsome boy that loves to go for strolls and get lots of attention. Legend will be shown under saddle and is available for sponsor and lease.

Mikey is a 22 years young Thoroughbred-Quarter horse cross, rides English in the ring or is solid on the trails. Great for an advanced-beginner rider, Mikey is available for adoption, lease or sponsor and has a weight limit of 175 pounds.

Star is a 13 year old, 133 hand registered Morgan/Arab cross gelding that rides English or Western and loves to ride for miles on the trails. He is easy to load, happy to lead or follow and loves water. Star is available for lease, sponsor or adoption, and requires an intermediate rider under 150 pounds.

Guests will meet severa volunteers and learn the many ways to help. From grooming and cleaning stalls to helping at fundraisers, many volunteers have learned so much from their four legged friends. Those interested in a career in the equine industry can gain valuable hands-on experience working with the farms many rescues.

H.O.R.S.E. of Connecticut is a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization funded only by charitable contributions. All funds raised go directly to the horses; from feed and blankets to farrier, dental and veterinary expenses. If youre looking for a lifetime partner, what better way to show your love than to support to a local equine rescue!

H.O.R.S.E. is located at 43 Wilbur Road, in Washington, Connecticut. For questions or more information, go to www.horseofct.org , call 860-868-1960 or email: hor-sectinfo@gmail.com.

Witkos applauds Animal Abuse Registry Bill

HARTFORD  Deputy Senate Republican President Pro Tempore Kevin Witkos (R-Canton) recently applauded the Connecticut Judiciary Committees support of a bill that would establish a statewide animal abuse registry. The Judiciary Committee today voted in favor of sending Senate Bill 523 An Act Concerning An Animal Abuse Registry to the State Senate to be voted on by all members of the General Assembly.

I believe Connecticut can and should be a national leader when it comes to protecting animals and being proactive about preventing crime and violence, said Witkos, who requested the Judiciary Committee raise the bill.

While certain county governments have implemented animal abuse registries across the country, currently only one state, Tennessee, has a statewide registry to keep track of those who abuse animals. Senate Bill 523 would implement a similar system to the Tennessee Animal Abuser Registration Act, which required the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) to post to an online registry a list of persons convicted of the following criminal offenses against animals: (1) aggravated animal cruelty; (2) felony animal fighting; (3) bestiality and related offenses.

The Tennessee registry, which was made public in 2016, includes animal abusers full legal names, photographs, and other identifying data the TBI determines is necessary to identify abusers and to exclude innocent persons. The list does not include abusers social security numbers, drivers license numbers, or any other state or federal identification number. In Tennessee, court clerks provide the TBI with a convicted persons information within 60 calendar days of a judgement regarding a qualifying animal abuse offense. Upon a first conviction of an animal abuse offense, a person will remain on the list for two years only, unless that person commits another animal abuse offense during that time. If a person is convicted of a second animal abuse offense that person will remain on the list for five years. If a sole offense is expunged a person would also be removed from the list.

The Connecticut proposal would adopt the same structure as the Tennessee registry, with the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection managing the program in Connecticut in the same capacity as Tennessees TBI. The bill now moves to the State Senate where it must be voted on and forwarded to the House of Representatives before May 9th, the close of the 2018 legislative session.The Supreme Court is likely to ban public sector unions from forcing non-members to pay agency fees to the union in Janus v AFSCME. So, what are those unions doing? Going private.

They are pushing to privatize government operations. The idea is simple. If the employer goes private, so does the union. Of course, it isnt real privatization.

Nevertheless, the huge public sector union, SEIU, has racked up its first privatization victory in Democrat-controlled Washington State in order to evade the Supreme Court ban on forced agency fees already in place for certain public unions pursuant to the Courts decision in the 2014 Harris v Quinn case.

In Washington, a sham private unit is being inserted between government and employees to handle human resource and payroll functions and, thereby, assume the role of legal employer.

The basis of the Harris, and, prospectively, the Janus decision, is a finding that public sector unions are predominantly political organizations, and that forcing non-members to pay agency fees forces them to support political speech with which they may disagree. The central issue is whether unionization has sufficient benefits for both employer and employees to offset the unions political nature and their infringement of non-members free speech rights.

The SEIU union being privatized in Washington is a Harris union, a so-called partial public employee, or PPE, union. The employees are not state employees. They are deemed partial because some of their income derives indirectly from government social welfare programs.

SEIU may be too smart by half. Starting with a PPE union may well backfire, since it puts a spotlight on the political way PPE unions were created and the fact that they dont provide real benefits for the state or employees.

Take the PPEs being privatized in Washington. They are private individuals who work as independent health care providers, or IPs, who are employed by the patients for whom they care  often, a disabled or elderly family member. Their patients (their employers) pay them with Medicaid and state health care benefit funds. For convenience and efficiency, the state pays IPs directly.

Washington and other mostly blue states, including Connecticut, have construed this payment function as creating co-employer status. This is curious. The very same states make Medicaid benefit payments directly to doctors, yet these states do not claim to be the doctors employer.

The purpose of this fantasy is straightforward. A union cannot bargain with tens of thousands of separate private patients. So, it was necessary to conjure a central employer - state governments. The unions recruited blue state governors to create the unions by executive order. Yes, you read that correctly, most PPE unions were organized by governors  Democrats, including Connecticuts Dannel Malloy.

Imagine. The governor with whom the union is going to bargain is the unions founder. Nothing could be more political  or corrupt.

On the government side, PPE unions just add bureaucracy, cost, complexity and non-transparency. Washingtons Office of Fiscal Management estimates that Washingtons new private IP entity will cost the state $11 million annually, money which could otherwise increase benefits for patients.

Employees dont benefit either. Real union contracts deliver job security. The PPE contracts do not. The patients who employ the IPs in Washington and Connecticut retain the right to hire and fire IPs, not the state or Washingtons private employer entity.

Real unions negotiate wages that the employer is bound by law to pay. Not the PPE unions. The state legislature can approve or reject funding to implement the wage rates in the contract.

Nevertheless, the unions argue that, if non-members dont pay agency fees, they are not paying their fair share of the unions cost of bargaining, that these non-members are free riding.

However, if the PPE unions dont provide traditional union benefits such as job security and legally binding wage rates, theres little to free ride and no reason to allow forced agency fee payments. Thus, the Courts decision in the Harris case.

Now, whats the relevance of the PPE unions to Janus, which involves real unions, which do negotiate contracts with binding job security and wage provisions?

The point is that these two types of unions are just different arms of the same central union organizations, SEIU and AFSCME, whose behavior in the case of the PPE unions provides overwhelming evidence of their inherently political nature and their cravenness in creating largely useless unions just to expand union ranks and collect dues and fees - all the evidence necessary for the Court to find in favor of Mark Janus in his case against AFSCME and to ban sham private entities, in the process.

Red Jahncke is president of The Townsend Group Intl, LLC, a Connecticut business consulting firm. An original version of this column appeared in The Hill. (Twitter: @RedJahncke)What is your credit unions strategy for continued growth? Has your credit union looked at providing greater engagement with the Hispanic members within the community? Now is a great time to review ways to embrace new members. Why not position your credit union to increase service to this vastly under-served membership? Reviewing the buying power and growth potential of this segment, may just be the call-to-action your credit union needs to take that next step.

The Hispanic buying power in the United States in 2016, was larger than the gross domestic product of Mexico, according to a report from the University of Georgias Terry College of Business. The report estimates the total buying power reached $13.9 trillion in 2016 and is estimated to reach $16.6 trillion by 2021. Credit unions can begin identifying with this consumer group to develop loyal member relationships. Authentic communication could pave inroads for serving this population for life.

This group enjoys their vehicles as much as any other cohort and are willing to spend. Research has found these buyers are about 30% more likely to purchase their first vehicle, and when they do they prefer new to pre-owned. Over 50% are more likely to purchase from the luxury category. Auto purchases by Hispanic buyers, according to Dealer Marketing magazine, are on track to double from 2010 to 2020, growing at a pace of 116%. The Hispanic community were reported to purchase nearly 2 million new vehicles in 2017. In the first two quarters of 2016, new vehicle sales to this demographic grew six times more than the general markets.

These numbers speak volumes. Capturing Hispanic member interest will take some homework, but the rewards can be great if done correctly. Here are some general steps to take that will position your credit union for increased engagement:

Marketing to the Hispanic community doesnt mean automatic translation of your existing English messaging into Spanish. Many of your members are bilingual, and too much can be lost in translation. Focus on crafting simpler messaging that can be understood by all, or creating original Spanish-language marketing material. While bilingual fluency continues to increase, these consumers enjoy speaking their language. Nearly 4 in 10 prefer to read online content in Spanish. Understand the difference between Hispanic and Latino. Hispanic is language and Latino is location. These terms are often used interchangeably but they dont mean the same thing. Learn about the social media patterns of Spanish-speaking members. CNN found that Hispanic was most often used on social media, and the term Latino was used more often on Twitter. Marketing to millennials or older immigrants. Each generation has a different focus and interests. Nearly six-in-ten Hispanics are millennials or younger. Some companies are successfully using a blend of both Spanish and English into marketing campaigns. By using English along with Spanish phrases, quote and other vernacular, is helping to create a connection. Tap into their culture to discover their values, and what fuels their decision making.

Get to know this audience and make the connections necessary to help your credit union become more relatable to their needs. The Hispanic community is very connected to their culture, yet most Hispanic millennials report they feel they are living between various cultures. Directing the message at their heritage will help to bring about more engagement and focus when it comes to doing business with this diverse population. Find the common denominators between these cultures, and focus on what unites all of your members.

To learn more about the Hispanic market please visit these sources used in the article:

Todays Auto Shoppers: How they research and why trust is so essential in winning them over:

Accelerate your Hispanic Success, by Univision Autos:Last week I almost burned my kitchen down. In my quest to get all the important things done on my list, I was working on several things at once. Although I teach leadership effectiveness for a living, I sometimes get drawn into the busyness of life and slip into bad habits.

I put my lunch on the stove, and then went into my office to answer a couple e-mails while simultaneously making an important phone call. I was so engrossed (and overloaded), that I completely forgot about my lunch. Mushroom kale soup bubbled over the stove, and onto the floor. As I was on the phone, I started to smell something burning from the kitchen. Sometimes I need a painful lesson to remind me of the importance of good leadership habits.

Despite what most leaders think, multi-tasking is overrated. We convince ourselves that we have so much to do that its the only way to get things done, but it has the opposite effect. Our attention is drawn in so many directions, that we end up doing a few things poorly (i.e., a soupy kitchen and an interrupted phone call) than doing one thing really well. Quality always suffers when we multi-task.

In fact, researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London found that multitasking caused a greater decrease in IQ than smoking pot or losing a nights sleep!

I often hear clients talk about multi-tasking like its the sought-after skill that will help them get more done in less time. I even see ability to multi-task in most job advertisements. We have become obsessed with trying to squeeze as much as possible into each minute of our day in the unrealistic quest of being perfectly efficient.

The skill of multi-tasking has become a popular buzzword in organizations. But its killing our business. Its killing our effectiveness. It actually has the opposite effect of what we are trying to achieve. And thats because our brains werent built to do more than one big thing at a time. Research has shown that workers can lose up to 40% of productivity when multi-tasking. Its costing businesses about $450 billion a year in lost productivity; not to mention stress, loss of composure, and sloppy work.

Remember the days before iPhones, Facebook, and e-mail? When you left work, you actually left work at the office. Technology is meant to make our lives easier, but thats not what happens for most professionals. We feel more stressed and overwhelmed than ever. We cant seem to pull ourselves away for a mental break.

Have you ever left your office at the end of the day and thought, What did I get done today? If you cant pinpoint what you accomplished, you probably spent a lot of the day multi-tasking. One of the best things professionals can do to boost performance is to focus on one thing at a time.

Here are six strategies for improving your focus (and your performance!):

Concentrate on one task at a time. Block out a specific time in your schedule to focus on one project. Make it a habit of scheduling your entire work day in chunks of time meant for focusing on specific tasks and projects.

Check e-mail only a few times a day. Turn off your e-mail and message alerts so they wont distract you when trying to focus. Schedule a few specific times in your day to check e-mail and messages and focus only on that task.

Say no and simplify your life. You dont have to volunteer for everything. Pick a couple things you really enjoy and do them well. When you are asked to take on a responsibility, tell the person you will think about it and get back to them.

Change your scenery. Most professionals I know cant get much done in their office because thats where most of their distractions are. Find a quiet conference room or go to a local coffee shop to get away from distractions and youll improve your focus.

Focus on two or three accomplishments a day. Executives often make a list of ten or fifteen things to accomplish in one day. We become too overwhelmed because our expectations are unrealistic. Pick two or three important tasks for the day and focus on accomplishing them (and doing them well). If you finish early, then you can move on to another task.

Delegate tasks and projects others can handle. Most managers Ive worked with dont use their employee resources effectively. They either feel they dont have the time to teach employees or that their staff will resent them for piling on more work. The truth is, most employees enjoy the challenge and want to help their boss. Keep only the major initiatives you must be involved in, and delegate other tasks.

Ive seen huge improvements in my efficiency and quality of work when I focus on one thing at a time. Learning to eliminate multitasking from your life is a work in progress and will take some time. But with practice and focus, you will feel less stressed and more accomplished.Child tax credit extension: What we know about if it'll last until 2025

newsIn a spectacular display of guts and gumption, five Dalit MPs from the BJP have lashed out against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the party leadership accusing them of discrimination, negligence, barbarity and injustice.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath may have trotted out several Dalit MPs in his favour a day ago, but the rebels have challenged and castigated the party forcefully and impressively. They have taken on the largely upper-caste party leadership, causing the latter embarrassment and discomfiture, even as the Dalit MPs lend support and sanction to the swell of Dalit pride and defiance that is blazing across the country.

Have the rebel Dalit MPs exposed Muslim leaders in the party, the other discriminated and hated community of Hindutva BJP, as being gutless and meek?

The roll call of Dalit MP rebels is impressive, four from caste-volatile Uttar Pradesh - Savitri Bai Phule, MP from Bahraich, who has been exploding on every available public platform; Chhote Lal Kharwar, MP from Robertsganj, who angrily wrote to Modi complaining he had been thrown out of Adityanaths office; Ashok Dohre, MP from Etawah, who has accused Uttar Pradesh police of ritually harassing Dalits ever since last weeks Bharat bandh called by Dalit groups; and Yashwant Singh, MP from Nageen, who has written to Modi accusing his government of doing nothing for Dalit empowerment and development.

The latest to join them is Udit Raj, MP from Delhi, who has lamented that Dalits in many states (all ruled by the BJP) were being tortured and having false cases slapped on them. It must be said that except for Yashwant Singh and Udit Raj, who joined the BJP only in 2014, others like Phule has been with the party since 2005, while the rest began their political career with the BJP.

The Dalit rebel MPs have been variously accused of being shrewd and calculating, for sensing the mood of defiance and hostility among the community against the upper caste UP CM and the BJP leadership.

Political savvy apart, the rebel MPs have risked party censure and reprimand by listening to their conscience and hitting out because of the glaring discrimination of the people of their community  from the rampant and widespread violence, ritual insults, atrocities, public floggings and murderous assault, from Una in Gujarat to Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh.

The last provocation was the dilution of the SC/ST Atrocities Act which was not challenged by the BJP, and was pushed to do so only after the eruption of Bharat bandh called by various Dalit organisations last week. Worse, the BJP state governments were seen to be lax in investigating the deaths of nine Dalits who were killed during the protests.

So, where does it leave the roll call of luminary BJP Muslim leaders who have mutely watched as Hindutva-affiliated goons began Modis tenure in 2014 with murderous assaults on the community, randomly picking on innocent members all over the country and killing them in the name of cow slaughter, love jihad, forced conversion, or hate crimes for just being a Muslim?

Leaders like Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, MJ Akbar, who are ministers in the Modi government; Najma Heptullah is a governor, apart from Shahnawaz Hussain, minority cell member Asifa Khan, Shazia Ilmi, Ijaz Ilmi who are spokespersons for the party, have remained mum on atrocities against their community.

Apart from murderous attacks and institutional biases and discrimination, the BJP leaders have been heaping insults and choice abuses on the community  from party president Amit Shahs hate speeches, calls for revenge and constant incitement of anti-Muslim sentiment in election campaigns, to Modis refusal, as PM, to condemn hate crimes against the community, to the rampant provocative speeches and verbal attacks of BJP leaders, all of which actively promotes Hindutva ultra-nationalism and communal rioting and murders.

Ministers like Naqvi have been more loyal than the Sangh when he publicly chided those who wanted to eat beef to go to Pakistan, while Akbar did a U-turn from asking his then PM Rajiv Gandhi to overturn Shah Bano verdict to appease the Muslim clergy, as opposed to pushing his present PM Modis Triple Talaq Bill despite reservation from women Islamic scholars and activists, Shazia Ilmi has been appointed independent director of Engineers India Ltd, a PSU; so has Asifa Khan been appointed on the board of Hindustan Petroleum Ltd.

Muslim BJP leaders have justified their allegiance to the Hindutva fold saying they have only contempt for the Congress and other "secular" parties for their "appeasement" of the community and using them as a "vote bank" whereas the BJP believes in "inclusive" politics.

Others who have joined the party recently say they were lured by Modis new avatar as "development man".

And even as a Shahnawaz Hussain justifies the refusal of tickets to Muslim candidates, from Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh, saying winnability is the sole criteria, no leader has asked why Muslims cannot be given tickets at election time when Hindu candidates have lost pretty majorly too.

So, will BJP Muslim leaders take the cudgel from Dalit leaders and finally challenge the hate campaign and attacks on the community?

Will they have the daring and spunk to crusade and lobby within the party organsiation for genuine inclusiveness, justice and empowerment of the hapless and disenfranchised within the community?

Its time Muslim leaders in the BJP lift the veil of duplicity and double-dealing.

Also read: Shielding rapists to legitimising extra-judicial killings: Adityanath's jungle raj has turned UP into a hell holeUnlike the Rajputs', the Marathas' was not a clan-based society. For the latter, the individual was a basic unit of the society as against the clan or the tribe. So the challenge the Mughals faced in the Deccan was that for every powerful leader who switched to their side, there would be ten others to take his place.

It was quite different from the Rajputana, where, if the leader accepted the overlordship, his entire clan followed. Thus, if Bharamal joined the Mughals, the entire Kachhawaha clan followed suit; when Amar Singh accepted the Mughal suzerainty, all the Sisodias followed him.

Therefore, for the Rajputs, appointing the leader of the clan to the mansab meant that the entire clan would follow him in fealty. This scenario was not possible as far as the Marathas were concerned: each individual was free to accept or reject an association; there was no leader of the clan. The Mughals were not in a position to satisfy the demands of each and every Maratha, so there was a social impediment.

A painting shows Jai Singh of Amber receiving Shivaji, marking the Treaty of Purandhar.

Secondly, the Mughals befriended the Rajputs during the reign of Akbar, when the emperor wanted to annex the whole of North India to the Mughal Empire. The services of the Rajputs proved of immense use to achieve this consolidation. Thus, concessions were extended by the emperor towards the martial ally.

By the year 1666, Akbar's great grandson Aurangzeb had not decided to annex the Deccan to the Mughal Empire. Hence, the importance accorded to the Marathas by the Mughals at the time could not be equated with that enjoyed by the Rajputs.

At the time, Mughal general Mirza Raja Jai Singh asked Aurangzeb to give concessions to the Deccan because he presumed that the region would be annexed to the Mughal Empire. If Aurangzeb had decided on this policy, he would have seen merit in granting them.

Thirdly, Shivaji had a burning desire to carve for himself a separate kingdom and political identity. It was this ambition that acted as the most attractive slogan for the Marathas who joined Shivaji.

Irrespective of whether he was given the exalted rank of panj hazari (commanding 5,000 troops) or haft hazari (commanding 7,000 troops), the Maratha could not be satisfied. Even if Shivaji accepted the overlordship and mansab of the Mughals, he was bound to lose his following in Maharashtra.

Perhaps, Aurangzeb knew his weakness. Even if Shivaji recanted, it would have no serious consequence. Shivaji was only a leader of the Marathas so long as he gave the slogan of a separate political identity in the south. That is why the indecision. The unfortunate result was that Shivaji was neither crushed nor conciliated. These were the basic reasons for Shivaji breaking away from the Mughals.

In addition, it was also an assertion of regionalism and the regional elite that created a problem in the process of reconciliation of the Marathas. Shivaji's movement can also be defined as one for regional Independence. That was the period of rise of nationalities, as has been pointed out by Reisner. Yet, the basic weakness of his argument lies in the fact that in the 17th century, India was not a nation.

A warrior insulted

There were also certain immediate reasons Shivaji's disenchantment with the Mughals.

After the Treaty of Purandhara, when the terms were dictated by Mirza Raja Jai Singh, the Maratha warrior accepted the those favourable to the Mughals and extremely humiliating to himself. Jai Singh persuaded Shivaji to pay a visit to Agra. He gave him the solemn assurance of safety at the Mughal bastion.

When Shivaji was entering Agra, Kunwar Ram Singh, son of Jai Singh, was directed by the emperor to go out to receive Shivaji in the outskirts of the city. It was mere accident that while Ram Singh had gone to receive the Maratha warrior at one of the gates, Shivaji entered from another. The Maratha resented this move as he thought it was a deliberate humiliation.

Shivaji ultimately reached the darbar, and he was immediately presented before the emperor. He was ordered to stand in the row of the panj hazari as per the court etiquette of the nobles, who were organised as per their ranks. When he enquired who was standing before him in the second row, he was told: "Maharaja Jaswant Singh." At this, Shivaji protested, "His back has been seen by my soldiers (in Shaista Khan's company). And he is standing in the front!" Upon hearing this, Jaswant Singh retorted that if every petty baniya was given the status of 5,000, it would be an insult!

One should remember that in 1665, his son had been given the rank of 5,000. Shivaji now sharply protested this so-called humiliation of being made to stand in the rank of the panj hazaris.

Upon hearing the commotion, the emperor asked what the furore was about. It was reported to him that Shivaji was not used to the heat of Agra, and as such was not feeling well. Aurangzeb ordered him to be taken to the Haveli to take rest. But subsequently Shivajis annoyance became clear to him.

Two parties developed at the court: one in favour of Shivaji and the other against him. The party in favour consisted of Kunwar Ram Singh, his father Jai Singh, Muhammad Amin Khan, the son of Mir Jumla of the Deccan (probably due to regionalism), and Murtuza Khan.

They pleaded for Shivaji and impressed upon the emperor that the Maratha should be pacified and all his demands conceded to.

The other group, which was more powerful, consisted of Princess Jahanara Begum, Maharaja Jaswant Singh and Jaafar Khan. They were opposed to Shivaji and pressured Aurangzeb to take stern action against him. Jahanara was hostile to Shivaji as Surat was under her jagir and it had been plundered by the Maratha warrior.

Jaswant Singh knew if the dispute with Shivaji was resolved, his own prestige would take a beating. Jaafar Khan was the son-in-law of Shaista Khan, who had been attacked by Shivaji and whose prestige had been broken, just like his fingers, by the Maratha warrior.

Aurangzeb could not decide what action to take against Shivaji. He was in the meanwhile imprisoned in a house, and its custody given to Faulad Khan, the kotwal of Agra. Later, Kunwar Ram Singh was put in charge of Shivaji's custody. But Shivaji made his escape from Agra in 1666 and Aurangzeb was deprived of the fruits of the Treaty of 1665.

Jai Singh's death led to the opening of a new chapter in Deccan politics. No Mughal noble could replace him, be it as a general, a diplomat or a statesman, and hence no one could succeed against Shivaji the way he did.

In 1672, the Afghans revolted in the northwest, and Aurangzeb had to leave for Hasan Abdal and stay there for two years. The bulk of the Mughal forces was withdrawn to be posted against the Afghans. At such a time, the absence of the emperor and the Mughal forces from the Deccan provided an opportunity to Shivaji.

The result was the grand coronation of Shivaji in 1674. Thus, he became an independent king, with the apparatus and prestige that monarchy brought. He could now talk to the rulers of Golconda and Bijapur on equal terms.

Shivaji was no longer dependent on the recognition of his authority by the Mughals, Adil Shah or Qutb Shah. He became a sovereign in his own right.

The theoretical framework that his movement lacked so far, the moral and legal albatross, was now removed. This way, Shivaji established the "Hindu pad padashahi".

Also read: An Indian historian on finding 'djinns' and shiny cobras during field tripsBuildings get dilapidated, lakes dissipate, technology becomes obsolescent and the body crumbles. Even societies decay and a nation suffers from a carcinogenic disease, from which recovery is sometimes near-impossible.

Mostly, the consequences are fatal. Or at best an excruciatingly torturous revival. It is happening. It is happening to India. My grim pessimistic take is based on two horrific incidents that have through some uncanny happenstance occurred simultaneously.

A young girl of eight is repeatedly raped with barbaric cruelty in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir. It involves adult men, so imbued with seething hate, that they plotted the violent conspiracy to rape and kill an innocent child for ulterior gains. A religious body, in fact, protested against the formal lodging of a chargesheet against those who committed the dastardly crime.

Several lawyers joined in to prevent the legal protocol to be effectuated. This stunning obstruction of justice and a brazen endorsement of child-rape had the public backing of two BJP ministers in the cabinet of chief minister Mehbooba Mufti. It is alleged that the bribery of police officers has emboldened the criminals and their raucous supporters. It was an astonishing manifestation of callousness in a society corroded of its moral texture, devoid of an iota of humanitarianism.

When bloodletting of a frail child by vicious killers is okay and the government chooses to insidiously subvert fair investigations, then it signals the beginnings of a catastrophic societal collapse.

In Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, a similar savage gang-rape was perpetrated on a hapless 16-year-old girl. The culprits, of course, remained free. She begged for help. She cried. But the UP government refused to budge. Her father was severely thrashed by goons and relatives of the accused. The law-enforcement officers sniggered, watching the ruthless atrocity with sadistic delight. He died. As I write this, the terrified victim is being given protection, but the alleged rapist, a BJP MLA, is sauntering around with cool aplomb, unaffected by the sordid brouhaha it has caused.

The UP government has also withdrawn a rape case against a former BJP minister. This is straight out of the BJP playbook, sell phantom dreams of "acche din", while knowing deep-down inside that it is nothing but cockamamie. This is not just political hubris, it is willful treachery.

In a mature, civilised society, such feral acts of sexual humiliation on women would result in more than mere templated condemnation. There is a transient media scrutiny (till the next uproarious story) and fleeting public outrage on social media where hashtags trend.

It is astounding that the government chooses to turn a blind eye to daylight subversion of law, where the police officers are themselves accused of being hand in glove with the nauseating sinners. It is a manifestation of impending apocalyptic doom, if the powerful establishment is working overtime to protect its own criminal den.

Crude vulgar violence against women is becoming quotidian under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose characteristic sloganeering fetish has produced "Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao", which seems like a cruel travesty, a sleight of hand meant to mislead unsuspecting people into believing that the government cares.

India is fed up of such cosmetic equivocation that is only advertising arsenal for Modi and his party. It is political immorality scraping bottomless depths. Doublespeak and vapid rhetoric are spoken from podiums by politicians who have zero commitment to fighting for womens rights, which are human rights, incidentally.

Modi waxes grandiloquently on GST, FDI and Make In India, but is mysteriously mealy-mouthed when it comes to Indias falling performance in gender disparity index . He remains on the mute button on the rising incidence of ugly crimes against women happening most disconcertingly in BJP-ruled states.

The system is brazenly suborned to suit the proteges of the political masters. We are being told to live in a psycho-bubble of statistical gobbledygook and a feel-good mirage, mostly manufactured by government mandarins. It keeps the prime-time buzzing and creates bespoke headlines. But what about our right to life, equality, safety, mutual respect, tolerance, secularism and oneness?

Lifes most valuable assets are intangible and immeasurable and cannot be quantified in business models and Sensex market capitalisation.

Modis falsetto speeches with the melodramatic flourishes have run their course. So, tomorrow Modi tries another act of political showmanship and will go on fast, which can be called as ad absurdum. Seriously, what is he protesting against? Himself, and his governments inept, incompetent and ineffective governance?

India has moved beyond 2014 when Modi usurped power on the back of fragile falsehoods that he knew was only like a snake-oil salesmans pitch.

I hope when Modi is basking in the concentrated attention of TV cameras tomorrow, he hears the desperate muffled cries of the poor child, sedated and sexually molested by a rapacious mob, struggling for life. Or the frantic shout for help of an aggrieved father pleading for punishment of those predators who defiled his daughter.

The tone-deafness of his government is ear-splitting. Modi may yet be supercilious enough to believe that he can change employment data, GDP numbers, launch fanciful schemes and sell his pseudo-nationalistic demagoguery to win elections, but he may have already destroyed more than a country.

He may have destroyed the soul of a great nation.

Also read: By shielding MLA accused of rape, BJP is propagating misogyny of the worst kindCentrica plc operates as an integrated energy company in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, North America, and internationally. The company operates through British Gas, Energy Marketing & Trading, Centrica Business Solutions, Bord GAis Energy, and Upstream segments. It supplies gas and electricity to residential customers, as well as offers energy-related services; and generates power from combined cycle gas turbines and nuclear assets. The company also provides installation, repair, and maintenance services for domestic central heating, plumbing and drains, home electrical, and gas and kitchen appliances; and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment, as well as offers breakdown services. In addition, it is involved in the procurement, trading, and optimization of energy; procurement and sale of LNG; and supplies energy efficiency solutions and technologies to residential customers. Further, the company produces and processes gas and oil; develops new fields to maintain reserves; constructs, owns, and exploits infrastructure; and engages in the social enterprise investment fund activities. Additionally, it provides vehicle leasing, commercial, and insurance services, as well as energy management products and services; and operates a gas storage and franchise network. The company was formerly known as Yieldtop plc and changed its name to Centrica plc in December 1996. Centrica plc was incorporated in 1995 and is based in Windsor, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreHSBC Holdings plc provides banking and financial products and services worldwide. The company operates through Wealth and Personal Banking, Commercial Banking, and Global Banking and Markets segments. The Wealth and Personal Banking segment offers retail banking products and services, such as current and savings accounts, mortgages and personal loans, credit and debit cards, and local and international payment services for ultra high net worth individuals; and wealth management services, including insurance and investment products, global asset management services, investment management, and private wealth solutions. The Commercial Banking segment provides credit and lending, treasury management, payment, cash management, commercial insurance, and investment services, as well as commercial cards, and international trade and receivables finance services; and foreign exchange products, and capital raising and advisory services to small and medium sized enterprises, mid-market enterprises, and corporates. The Global Banking and Markets segment is involved in the provision of financing, advisory, and transaction services, including credit, rates, foreign exchange, equities, money markets, and securities services, as well as principal investment activities to government, corporate and institutional clients, and private investors. The Global Private Banking segment provides a range of services to high net worth individuals and families with complex and international needs. HSBC Holdings plc was founded in 1865 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreDresser-Rand Group Inc. is a supplier of custom-engineered rotating equipment solutions for long-life, critical applications in the oil, gas, chemical, petrochemical, process, power generation, military and other industries around the world. The Company operates through two segments: New Units and Aftermarket Parts and Services. New Units segment offers standardized equipment, such as engines and single stage steam turbines. The Company's Aftermarket Parts and Services segment offer a range of aftermarket parts and services, including replacement parts, field service turnaround, service and repair, operation and maintenance contracts, rotor/spare parts storage, condition monitoring, controls retrofit, site/reliability audits, remote area energy solutions, equipment repair and re-rates, equipment installation, applied technology, long-term service agreements, special coatings/welding, product training, turnkey installation/project management and energy asset management.

Read More3 hours ago

Jabil Inc. Q4 Results: More Than Meets The Eye

Jabil Descends Into A Buying Opportunity Jabil Inc. (NYSE: JBL) reported a mixed bag of results and outlook for the Q4 and Q1 period sending shares down 10% from their recent high. As mixed as the news is, it is the guidance that really counts and the guidance is positive.

Read ArticleCyanConnode Holdings plc engages in the design, development, and sale of Narrowband radio frequency (RF) mesh networks that enable Omni Internet of Things (IoT) communications in the United Kingdom, India, Finland, Sweden, rest of Europe, and internationally. It offers wireless communication technology for smart metering, lighting, and IoT. The company provides Narrowband RF mesh technology that supports multi-application networks, enabling communication with any device, including gas, water, and electricity meters, as well as street lighting and traffic lights. In addition, it offers Narrowband RF modules and gateways; Omnimesh, a standard-based smart metering solution; and Omni IoT platform that allows customers to mix and match multiple communication systems under a single network management systems. The company was formerly known as Cyan Holdings plc and changed its name to CyanConnode Holdings plc in November 2016. CyanConnode Holdings plc was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Cambridge, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreGerresheimer AG, together with its subsidiaries, manufactures and sells specialty glass, plastic products, and drug delivery-devices and solutions primarily worldwide. It operates through three divisions: Plastics & Devices, Primary Packaging Glass, and Advanced Technologies. The Plastics & Devices division offers drug delivery systems, including inhalers, pen systems, and injection systems; sterile and non-sterile syringe systems for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries; and disposables for various analysis systems that are used in laboratories and medical practices, quick tests for patients in medical practices or hospitals, skin-prick aids and lancets for diabetics, disposables, and components for dialysis machines, and catheters and surgical devices. It also provides containers for the delivery of tablets and powders, liquid dosages, ophthalmic and rhinological applications, parenteral packaging applications, oral prescription medications, and cosmetics. The Primary Packaging Glass division offers glass primary packaging for pharma and cosmetics industries, such as ampoules, cartridges, vials, syrup and dropper bottles, tablet jars, and wide-neck jars, as well as injection, infusion, and transfusion bottles; flacons and pots for fragrances, deodorants, and care and decorative cosmetics; and bottles and jars for spirits and food. The Advanced Technologies division develops drug delivery products and platforms, such as micro pumps, which are used to self-administer medication for heart failure or Parkinson's for pharmaceutical and biotech customers. The company was founded in 1864 and is headquartered in DAsseldorf, Germany.

Read MoreCalix, Inc. provides cloud and software platforms, systems and services required to realize the unified access network. The firm offers broadband communications access systems and software for fiber and copper-based network architectures that enable communications service providers to transform their networks and connect to their residential and business subscribers. It enables communication service providers to provide a wide range of revenue-generating services from basic voice and data to advanced broadband services over legacy and next-generation access networks. The firm focuses on communications service providers access networks with the portion of the network, which governs available bandwidth and determines the range and quality of services that can be offered to subscribers. It also develops and sells carrier-class hardware and software products. The company was founded by Michael L. Hatfield and Carl E. Russo in August 1999 and is headquartered in San Jose, CA.

Read MoreRolls-Royce Holdings plc operates as an industrial technology company in the United Kingdom and internationally. The company operates in four segments: Civil Aerospace, Power Systems, Defence, and ITP Aero. The Civil Aerospace segment develops, manufactures, and sells aero engines for large commercial aircraft, regional jet, and business aviation markets, as well as provides aftermarket services. The Power Systems segment provides high-speed and medium-speed reciprocating engines, and propulsion and power generation systems for the marine, defense, power generation, and industrial markets. The Defence segment offers aero engines for military transport and patrol aircraft applications; and naval engines and submarine nuclear power plants, as well as aftermarket services. The ITP Aero segment engages in the design, research and development, manufacture and casting, assembly, and testing of aeronautical engines and gas turbines. It also provides maintenance, repair, and overhaul services for regional airlines, as well as business aviation, industrial, and defense applications. Rolls-Royce Holdings plc was founded in 1884 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of PPG Industries: AIPCF V Texstars Blocker Inc., AkzoNobel, Alermac Inversiones S.A. de C.V., Alpha Coating Technologies LLC, Alpha Coatings Inc., Broad Range Development Limited, Brown Brothers Distribution Limited, CG Holdings Manufacturing Co., Centro de Investigacion en Polimeros S.A. de C.V., Chemfil Canada Limited, Chorlton Trade Paints Limited, Comercial Mexicana de Pinturas S.A. de C.V., Comex, Comex Industrial Coatings S.A. de C.V., Consorcio Comex S.A. de C.V., Cristacol S.A., Cuming Microwave Corporation, Deutek SA, Dexmet Corporation, Dexmet Holding Corporation, Distribuidora Kroma S.A. de C.V., EPIC Insurance Co. Ltd., Eberle Design Inc., Empresa Aga S.A. de C.V., Ennis Canadian Holding Company, Ennis Flint Soluciones Seguras Para Trafico, Ennis Highway Traffic Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Ennis Manufacturing Sdn Bhd, Ennis Paint Australia Holding Pty Ltd, Ennis Paint Boya Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S., Ennis Paint Canada ULC, Ennis Paint Germany GmbH, Ennis Paint Netherlands Holdings LLC, Ennis Paint U.K. Holding Company Limited, Ennis Prismo Italio S.r.l., Ennis Traffic Safety Solutions Pty Ltd, Ennis  Flint Mexico, Ennis  Flint New Zealand, Ennis  Flint New Zealand Holding Pty Ltd, Ennis-Flint, Ennis-Flint Africa (Pty) Ltd, Ennis-Flint Inc., Foshan Bairun Chemicals Co. Ltd., Fpu Industrial S.A. de C.V., Grupo Comex S.A. de C.V., Hemmelrath Automotive Coatings (Jilin) Co. Ltd., Hodij Coatings B.V., Homax Products, Industria Chimica Reggiana I.C.R. SPA, Johnstones Paints Limited, Kalon Investment Company Limited, Kalon South Africa Proprietary Limited, Manchester Thermoplastics LLC, Masterwork Paint, MetoKote Canada Limited, MetoKote Corporation, MetoKote Mexico Holding Inc., MetoKote UK Limited, MetoKote de Mexico S. de RL de CV, PPG AC - France SA, PPG ALESCO Automotive Finishes Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., PPG AP Resinas S.A. de C.V., PPG Aerospace Materials (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., PPG Architectural Coatings (Puerto Rico) Inc., PPG Architectural Coatings Canada Inc., PPG Architectural Coatings Ireland Limited, PPG Architectural Coatings Italy S.r.l., PPG Architectural Coatings UK Limited, PPG Architectural Finishes Inc., PPG Asian Paints Private Ltd., PPG COATINGS SINGAPORE PTE. LTD., PPG Canada Inc., PPG Cieszyn S.A., PPG Coatings (Hong Kong) Co. Limited, PPG Coatings (Kunshan) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., PPG Coatings (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Thailand) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings (Wuhu) Company Ltd., PPG Coatings (Zhangjiagang) Co. Ltd., PPG Coatings B.V., PPG Coatings Belgium BV, PPG Coatings Danmark A/S, PPG Coatings Deutschland GmbH, PPG Coatings Europe B.V., PPG Coatings Manufacturing SARL, PPG Coatings Nederland BV, PPG Coatings S.A., PPG Coatings South Africa (Pty) Ltd., PPG DYRUP S.A., PPG Deco Czech a.s., PPG Deco Polska sp. z.o.o., PPG Deco Slovakia s.r.o., PPG Deutschland Business Support GmbH, PPG Deutschland Sales & Services GmbH, PPG Distribution S.A.S., PPG Europe B.V., PPG Finance B.V., PPG France Business Support S.A.S., PPG France Manufacturing S.A.S., PPG Guadeloupe SAS, PPG Hellas S.A., PPG Hemmelrath Coatings Inc., PPG Hemmelrath Lackfabrik GmbH, PPG Holdco SAS, PPG Holdings (U.K.) Limited, PPG Holdings Argentina USA LLC, PPG Holdings Latin America USA LLC, PPG Iberica S.A., PPG Iberica Sales & Services S.L., PPG Industrial Coatings B.V., PPG Industrial do Brasil - Tintas E. Vernizes - Ltda., PPG Industries (Korea) Ltd., PPG Industries (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., PPG Industries (UK) Ltd, PPG Industries Argentina S.R.L., PPG Industries Australia PTY Limited A.C.N. 055 500 939, PPG Industries Colombia Ltda., PPG Industries Czech Republic s.r.o., PPG Industries Delfzijl B.V., PPG Industries Europe Sarl, PPG Industries France S.A.S., PPG Industries International Inc., PPG Industries Italia S.r.l., PPG Industries Kimya a Sanayi VE Ticaret AS, PPG Industries LLC, PPG Industries Lipetsk LLC, PPG Industries Middle East FZE, PPG Industries Netherlands B.V., PPG Industries New Zealand Limited, PPG Industries Ohio Inc., PPG Industries Poland Sp. Z.o.o., PPG Industries Securities LLC, PPG Industries de Mexico S.A. de C.V., PPG Italia Business Support S.r.l., PPG Italia Sales & Services S.r.l., PPG Japan Ltd., PPG Kansai Automotive Finishes Canada LP, PPG Kansai Automotive Finishes U.K. LLP, PPG Kansai Automotive Finishes U.S. LLC, PPG Luxembourg Finance S.aR.L., PPG Luxembourg Holdings S.aR.L., PPG Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PPG Mexico S.A. de C.V., PPG Packaging Coatings (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., PPG Paints Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., PPG Performance Coatings (Hong Kong) Limited, PPG Powder Coatings (Shanghai) Limited, PPG Romania S.A., PPG SSC Co. Ltd., PPG Switzerland GmbH, PPG Trilak Kft., PPG Vietnam Co. Ltd., PRC-DeSoto Australia Pty Ltd., PRC-DeSoto International Inc., PT. PPG Coatings Indonesia, Painter's Supply, Paintzen, Peintures de Paris SAS, Plasticos Envolventes S.A. de C.V., Polymeric Systems Inc., Prismo Road Markings Limited, ProCoatings B.V., ProCoatings BV, Protec Pty Ltd. A.C.N. 007 857 392, Reno A&E LLC, Revocoat France SAS, Revocoat Holding SAS, Revocoat Iberica SLU, Revocoat S.A.S, Road Infrastructure Investment Holdings Inc., SEM Products Inc., Sealants Europe SAS, Sierracin Corporation, Sierracin/Sylmar Corporation, Sigma Marine & Protective Coatings Holding B.V., SigmaKalon (BC) UK Limited, SigmaKalon Group, SigmaKalon Middle East B.V., Sikar (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., Spraylat International Ltd, Texstars LLC, The Crown Group Co., The Crown Group Inc, The Homax Group, Tikkurila Group, Traffic Safety Intermediate LLC, Traffic Safety Parent LLC, United International Business NV, Vanex Inc., Vernisol S.p.A., Versaflex, Viasa S.A. de C.V., Whitford, Whitford B.V., Whitford Corporation, Whitford Jiangmen Ltd., Whitford Ltd. (HK), Whitford Ltd. (UK), Whitford Pte. Ltd., Whitford S.r.l., Whitford Worldwide Company LLC, Worwag Coatings, and Zaganite Industries Pty Ltd.CNA Financial Corp. operates as an insurance holding company. Its products primarily include commercial property and casualty coverages, including surety. The company's services include risk management, information services and warranty and claims administration. The firm operates through Property & Casualty Operations and Outside Property & Casualty Operations. The Property & Casualty Operations comprises of three segments: Specialty, commercial and international. The Specialty segment provides professional, financial and specialty property and casualty products and services. The Commercial segment includes property and casualty coverages sold to small businesses and middle market entities and organizations primarily through an independent agency distribution system. The International segment underwrites property and casualty coverages. The Outside Property & Casualty Operations consists of two segments: Life & Group and Corporate & Other. The Life & Group segment includes the results of the individual and group long term care businesses that are in run-off. The Corporate & Other segment involves in the corporate expenses, including interest on corporate debt, and the results of

Read MoreHelix Energy Solutions Group, Inc. is an international offshore energy company. It focuses on subsea construction, maintenance and salvage services to the offshore natural gas and oil industry. The firm also provides specialty services to the offshore energy industry, with a focus on well intervention and robotics operations. The company operates through three segments: Well Intervention, Robotics and Production Facilities. The Well Intervention segment offers vessels and related equipment that are used to perform well intervention services primarily in the Gulf of Mexico and North Sea regions. The Robotics segment involves four chartered vessels and also includes ROVs, trenchers and ROVDrills designed to complement offshore construction and well intervention services. The Production Facilities segment includes its investment in the Helix Producer I and Kommandor LLC. Helix Energy Solutions Group was founded in 1979 and is headquartered in Houston, TX.

Read MoreAVX Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, manufactures, supplies, and resells various electronic components, interconnect devices, sensing and control devices, and related products worldwide. The company operates through three segments: Electronic Components; Interconnect, Sensing and Control Devices; and Kyocera Electronic Devices Resale. The Electronic Components segment primarily offers surface mount and leaded ceramic capacitors, RF thick and thin film components, surface mount and leaded tantalum capacitors, surface mount and leaded film capacitors, ceramic and film power capacitors, super capacitors, EMI filters, thick and thin film packages of various electronic integrated components, varistors, thermistors, inductors, and resistive products. The Interconnect, Sensing and Control Devices segment provides automotive sensing and control devices and automotive, telecom, and memory connectors. The company serves various industries, such as telecommunications, information technology hardware, automotive electronics, medical devices and instrumentation, industrial instrumentation, transportation, energy harvesting, defense and aerospace electronic systems, and consumer electronics industries. It markets its products through its direct sales force and independent manufacturers' representatives to multi-national original equipment manufacturers, independent electronic component distributors, and electronic manufacturing service providers. The company was founded in 1972 and is headquartered in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. AVX Corporation is a subsidiary of Kyocera Corporation.

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given BlackRock Maryland Municipal Bond 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 BlackRock Maryland Municipal Bond Trust wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.Byotrol plc develops and commercializes infection control and prevention products in the United Kingdom, North America, and internationally. It operates through Professional and Consumer segments. The company offers hand sanitizers, sanitizing wipes, surface sanitizers, medical device cleaning, and disinfection products; and disinfectant for animal welfare and chlorine tablets. It also provides skin disinfection products, instrument and equipment cleaner products, animal scent absorber, odour control products, wall dispensers, and chemical mixing station. It serves human and animal health, facilities management, food and beverage sectors, as well as household, skincare, and pet care markets. Byotrol plc was incorporated in 2005 and is based in Chester, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Owens Corning: 0979301 B.C. ULC, AS Paroc, Asahi Glass - Composites Business, Crown Mfg. Inc., Deutsche Foamglas GmbH, Dutch OC Cooperatief Invest U.A., European Owens Corning Fiberglas SPRL, FOAMGLAS (Italia) SRL, FOAMGLAS (Nordic) AB, FiberTEK Insulation, Fibreboard Corp., Finefiber (Shanghai) Building Material Co. Ltd., Finefiber Insulation Co. Pte. Ltd., IBCO SRL, IPM Inc., InterWrap, InterWrap (Hong Kong) Ltd., InterWrap (Qingdao) Trading Co. Ltd., InterWrap Corp., InterWrap Corp. Private Ltd., International Packaging Products Pvt. Ltd., Inversiones Owens Corning Chile Holdings Limitada, Northern Elastomeric, OC Canada Finance Inc., OC Canada Holdings General Partnership, OC Celfortec Company, OC Latin American Holdings GmbH, OC NL Invest Cooperatief U.A., OC PRO CV, OC Steklovolokno AO, OCCV1 Inc., OCCV2 LLC, OCV (Thailand) Co. Limited, OCV Chambery France, OCV Chambery International, OCV Finance LLC, OCV Intellectual Capital LLC, OCV Italia Srl, OCV Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., OCV Servicios Mexico S.A. de C.V., OOO Paroc, Owens Corning (Australia) Pty Limited, Owens Corning (China) Investment Company Limited, Owens Corning (Guangde) Rock Wood Manufacturing Co. Ltd, Owens Corning (Guangzhou) Fiberglas Co. Ltd., Owens Corning (India) Private Limited, Owens Corning (Nanjing) Building Materials Co. Ltd., Owens Corning (Shanghai) Fiberglas Co. Ltd., Owens Corning (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Owens Corning (Tianjin) Building Materials Co. Ltd., Owens Corning (Xian) Building Materials Co. Ltd., Owens Corning Alloy Canada GP Inc., Owens Corning Alloy Canada LP, Owens Corning Argentina Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada, Owens Corning Automotive LLC, Owens Corning BM (Korea) Ltd, Owens Corning CV GP LLC, Owens Corning Canada GP Inc., Owens Corning Canada Holdings B.V., Owens Corning Canada Holdings ULC, Owens Corning Canada LP, Owens Corning Cayman (China) Holdings, Owens Corning Celfortec Canada GP Inc., Owens Corning Celfortec LP, Owens Corning Composite Materials Canada GP Inc., Owens Corning Composite Materials Canada LP, Owens Corning Composite Materials LLC, Owens Corning Composites (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Owens Corning Composites (China) Co. Ltd., Owens Corning Construction Services LLC, Owens Corning Corporate Services LLC, Owens Corning Elaminator Insulation Systems LLC, Owens Corning Enterprise (India) Pvt. Ltd., Owens Corning Fabrics (Changzhou) Co. Ltd., Owens Corning Fiberglas (U.K.) Pension Plan Ltd., Owens Corning Fiberglas A.S. Limitada, Owens Corning Fiberglas Espana SL, Owens Corning Fiberglas France, Owens Corning Financial Services ULC, Owens Corning Finland Oy, Owens Corning Foam Insulation LLC, Owens Corning GlassMetal Services (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Owens Corning Global Holdings II Limited Partnership, Owens Corning Global Holdings Limited Partnership, Owens Corning HOMExperts Inc., Owens Corning HT Inc., Owens Corning Holdings 1 CV, Owens Corning Holdings 3 CV, Owens Corning Holdings 4 CV, Owens Corning Holdings 5 CV, Owens Corning Holdings Holland B.V., Owens Corning Hong Kong Limited, Owens Corning Industries (India) Private Limited, Owens Corning Infrastructure Solutions LLC, Owens Corning Insulating Systems Canada GP Inc., Owens Corning Insulating Systems Canada LP, Owens Corning Insulating Systems LLC, Owens Corning Intellectual Capital LLC, Owens Corning InterWrap Canada GP Inc., Owens Corning InterWrap Canada LP, Owens Corning International Holdings C.V., Owens Corning Japan LLC, Owens Corning Kohold B.V., Owens Corning Korea, Owens Corning Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Owens Corning Mineral Wool LLC, Owens Corning Non-Woven - Blythewood LLC, Owens Corning Non-Woven Technology LLC, Owens Corning Receivables LLC, Owens Corning Reinforcements (Hangzhou) Co. Ltd., Owens Corning Remodeling Systems LLC, Owens Corning Roofing S. de R.L. de C.V., Owens Corning Roofing and Asphalt LLC, Owens Corning Sales LLC, Owens Corning Science and Technology LLC, Owens Corning Supplementary Pension Plan Limited, Owens Corning Technical Fabrics LLC, Owens Corning Treasury Services LLC, Owens Corning U.S. Holdings LLC, Owens Cornings (Hangzhou) Fiberglass Co. Ltd., Owens-Corning Britinvest Limited, Owens-Corning Cayman Limited, Owens-Corning Fiberglas Deutschland GmbH, Owens-Corning Funding Corporation, Owens-Corning Veil Netherlands B.V., Owens-Corning Veil U.K. Ltd., Paroc AB, Paroc GmbH, Paroc Group, Paroc Group Oy, Paroc Limited, Paroc Oy Ab, Paroc Polska Sp. z o.o., Pittsburgh Corning, Pittsburgh Corning (United Kingdom) Limited, Pittsburgh Corning (Yantai) Insulation Materials Co. Ltd, Pittsburgh Corning Asia Limited, Pittsburgh Corning CR S.R.O., Pittsburgh Corning Europe N.V., Pittsburgh Corning France, Pittsburgh Corning Gesellschaft m.b.h., Pittsburgh Corning LLC, Pittsburgh Corning Nederland B.V., Pittsburgh Corning Singapore Pte. Ltd, Pittsburgh Corning Suisse SA, Qingdao Novia Polymer Co. Ltd., SIA Paroc, Soltech Inc., The Modulo /ParMur Group, Thermafiber, Thermafiber Inc., Transandina de Comercio S.A., UAB Paroc, UC Industries, and Vitro Fibras. American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. All rights reserved.

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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.Jianpu Technology Inc. engages in the operation of open platform for discovery and recommendation of financial products. It provides users with personalized search results and recommendations that are tailored to each user's particular financial needs and credit profile. It also enables financial service providers with sales and marketing solutions to reach and serve its target customers more effectively through online and mobile channels. The company was founded by Da Qing Ye, Jia Yan Lu, Cao Feng Liu, Chenchao Zhuang and Zheng Yu Wu on June 1, 2017 and is headquartered in Beijing, China.

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.AirBoss of America Corp., through its subsidiaries, develops, manufactures, and markets rubber-based products for automotive, heavy commercial, construction and infrastructure, oil and gas, and defense industries in Canada and the United States. The company operates through three segments: Rubber Solutions, AirBoss Defense Group, and Engineered Products. The Rubber Solutions segment is involved in the development and manufacture of custom rubber compounds, calendered and extruded materials, and molded products for use in various applications and industries, including mining, transportation, industrial rubber products, military, automotive, conveyor belting, and oil and gas; and sources chemicals. The AirBoss Defense Group segment develops, manufactures, and sells chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive protective equipment and products for military, first response, and healthcare applications. The Engineered Products segment designs, engineers, manufactures, and sells rubber, synthetic rubber, and rubber-to-metal bonded products that are used to eliminate or control undesired vibration and noise. The company was formerly known as IATCO Industries Inc. and changed its name to AirBoss of America Corp. in April 1994. AirBoss of America Corp. is headquartered in Newmarket, Canada.

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Pengrowth Energy Corporation, a resource company, explores for, develops, and produces oil and natural gas assets in Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia provinces in Canada. The company explores for crude oil, bitumen, natural gas, shale gas, and natural gas liquids. Its principal producing properties are the Lindbergh thermal property covering an area of 20,800 net acres located in Alberta; and Groundbirch property totaling an area of 12,536 net acres located to the south west of Fort St. John, British Columbia. As of December 31, 2018, the company had 269 net producing oil and natural gas wells; and 586 net non-producing wells, as well as total proved plus probable reserves of 446.6 millions of barrels of oil equivalent. Pengrowth Energy Corporation was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

Read MoreZurich Insurance Group AG is a holding company. The Company and its subsidiaries provide insurance products and related services. Its segments include General Insurance, Global Life, Farmers, Other Operating Businesses and Non-Core Businesses. The General Insurance segment provides a range of motor, home and commercial products and services for individuals, as well as small and large businesses. The Global Life segment is engaged in providing unit-linked, protection and corporate propositions through global distribution and proposition pillars. The Farmers segment, through Farmers Group, Inc. and its subsidiaries, provides certain non-claims administrative and management services to the Farmers Insurance Exchange, Fire Insurance Exchange, Truck Insurance Exchange, and their subsidiaries and affiliates. The Other Operating Businesses segment includes the Company's Holding and Financing activities. The Non-Core Businesses segment includes its insurance and reinsurance businesses.

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Our apologies, unfortunately our website is currently unavailable in most European countries due to GDPR rules.Renault India has announced a new warranty and roadside assistance scheme for its best-selling car, the Kwid. Under the scheme, the French carmaker will now offer 4 years/1,00,000km (whichever is earlier) warranty along with roadside assistance as standard on the hatchback. This includes 2 years/50,000km standard warranty and a 2 years/50,000km extended warranty (the latter covers fewer services/parts). This warranty is applicable on all Kwid models.

Maruti Suzuki offers a standard warranty of 2 years/ 40,000 km on the Alto twins, Hyundai offers a standard warranty of 3 years/ 100,000 km on the Eon, while Datsun offers 2 years unlimited km standard warranty on the redi-GO. With the increased duration now, standard warranty on the Kwid lasts longer than any other car in its segment.

Renault has bettered its opponents as far as the duration or mileage of the standard warranty on the Kwid is concerned. While the redi-GO gets a 2 years/unlimited km warranty, we dont expect many private vehicle owners to do lakhs of kilometres in the first couple of years of ownership. On the other hand, there are a lot of owners who might not hit the 1 lakh mark on the odometer in the first 4 years of ownership, making the Kwids warranty more protective from a buyers standpoint.

Apart from the Kwids standard warranty package, Renault has also upgraded the Renault Secure program (includes extended warranty and RSA). The program now offers 5 years/1,00,000km warranty (whichever is earlier) along with RSA on all cars including the Captur, Kwid, Duster, and the Lodgy. So, if you plan to extend the warranty term of your Kwid, you can do so by purchasing Renault Secure. It will increase the duration of the warranty by one more year.

Other carmakers also offer extended warranty on their cars in the entry-level segment. The total warranty (standard + extended) on the Alto twins is 5 years/1,00,000km, on the Datsun redi-GO is 5 years/unlimited km and on the Hyundai Eon is 5 years/1,00,000km. This April, Renault is also offering various discounts on the 2017 Kwid. Both the manual and AMT versions of the entry-level hatchback are available with a cash discount of Rs 20,000 (Rs 15,000 off on the 2018 Kwid Super Hero edition). Cost of insurance for the 2017 Kwid has also been reduced - the MT variants get a 50 per cent cut and the AMT can be insured for Re 1.

Source: CarDekho.comThe US-based rating agency assesses management's ability and expertise to grow the business sustainably while rating banks.

New Delhi: The recent governance issues in India's banking sector involving ICICI Bank and Axis Bank reiterate the need to improve risk management and maintain strong governance practices, S&P Global Ratings said on Thursday.

"As a number of banks in India confront serious governance and risk issues, the 'tone at the top' is crucial. Leadership groups in Indian banks need to ensure that they enhance the risk culture, reputation, and financial strength of banks," S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Michael Puli said.

The US-based rating agency assesses management's ability and expertise to grow the business sustainably while rating banks.

"We view governance and transparency in Indian banking as a negative factor," it said.

S&P has 'BBB-' rating with a stable outlook for both Axis Bank and ICICI Bank. Recently the board of private sector lender Axis Bank had sought RBI nod for the reappointment of managing director and CEO Shikha Sharma for six months ending December 31, 2018.

This is after the central bank declined an earlier proposal to give her a three-year term ending June 30, 2021.

According to reports, the RBI's unwillingness to approve the initial request of three-year term was due to a number of risk management and governance issues that have emerged at the bank over the past year or so. These include a deterioration in asset quality and under-reporting of non-performing loans, S&P said.

Chanda Kochhar, the managing director and CEO of India's largest private sector bank, ICICI Bank, is currently under investigation for an alleged conflict of interest associated with the bank's loan to Videocon group in 2012.

The Central Bureau of Investigation is conducting a preliminary enquiry into whether the CEO's husband, Deepak Kochhar, benefitted from bank's decision to participate in the consortium loan.

"The ICICI Bank board has offered full support to the leadership team. However, if allegations against the management prove to be true, they could hit the bank's reputation and expose it to legal and financial risk," S&P said.

S&P had on December 21, 2017, revised down the assessment of Axis Bank's standalone creditworthiness to reflect higher risks associated with asset quality and under-reporting of non-performing loans.

"While the effect of our assessment is the same as ICICI Bank, we assess Axis Bank's risk management as weaker than that of private sector peer HDFC Bank," it said.

Axis Bank's gross non-performing asset ratio of 6 per cent is similar to ICICI Bank's 8 per cent but significantly higher than HDFC Bank's 1 per cent.GAIL had separately signed a deal with Royal Dutch Shell to sell about 0.5 MT of its US LNG.

New Delhi: State-owned gas utility GAIL India today said it will bring to India only half of the LNG it has contracted from the US as it has either swapped or sold the remaining volumes.

GAIL has a deal to buy 3.5 million tonne a year of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for 20 years from Cheniere Energy of the US and has also booked capacity for another 2.3 million tonne (MT) at Dominion Energy's Cove Point liquefaction plant.

"Of the volumes contracted, we have already sold 0.5 MT. The remaining volumes translate into 80 cargoes (or shiploads) of LNG in a year. Of this, 50 per cent will come to India," GAIL Chairman and MD B C Tripathi told reporters here.

The first US cargo arrived at the firm's Dabhol LNG import terminal in Maharashtra on March 30. Also, the firm's renegotiated LNG import deal with Russian supplier Gazprom will kick-in from May, with volumes gradually ramping up to fully contracted quantity of 2.5 MT in 5-6 year, he said.

"This year we will get 8 cargoes or 0.5 MT of LNG from Gazprom," he said.

GAIL, he said, had sold 81-82 million standard cubic meters per day of gas in 2017-18, which would rise to 91-92 mmscmd because of arrival of US and Russian volumes.

He said the company has swapped half of the 5.8 MT per annum of US LNG in a bid to rejig supply portfolio in line with domestic demand. GAIL sold 3.5 MT of the US LNG via time swaps, destination swaps and shipping optimisation.

Under the time-swap deals, the company got LNG from international companies in 2017 and will sell equivalent amount of Henry Hub-indexed volumes during 2018-19.

Also, it has entered into deals to take deliveries of gas from a nearer location and in exchange given its US volumes to company closer to the origin to cut shipping costs.

The contracted volume from Russia has been lowered from 2.5 MT to 0.5 MT in the first year 2018-19, 0.75 MT in 2019-20, and 1.5 MT in the third year 2020-21.

Also, the price indexation has been changed from the Japan Customs-cleared Crude to Brent, and the oil-linked slope of the contract formula lowered, and therefore the final price.

GAIL had contracted LNG from the US and Russia to meet the demand of growing Indian economy with power sector being considered a major buyer. But electricity produced using imported LNG is not finding buyers due to cheaper alternatives including renewables, leading to stranding of significant capacity out of 25,000 MW of installed gas-based power plants.

To mitigate the risks, GAIL explored opportunities to market Henry Hub indexed LNG volumes in the international markets.

GAIL had in May last year signed a first-ever time-swap deal to sell some of its US LNG. Under that agreement, it was to get 15 cargoes or about 0.8 MT of LNG from an unnamed trader in 2017.

In return, GAIL will sell 10 cargoes or about 0.6 MT next year from Sabine Pass on the US Gulf coast. GAIL had separately signed a deal with Royal Dutch Shell to sell about 0.5 MT of its US LNG.

The LNG that GAIL will receive this year between April and December under the time-swap deal will be at oil-linked prices. The sale of US gas next year will be at a premium to its pricing formula on a free-on-board (FOB) basis.Monsanto has been involved in a long-running battle in India over royalties paid by local seed companies for its GM cotton.

New Delhi: A court ruled on Wednesday that Monsanto cannot claim patents on its genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds in India, the Indian company that brought the case said.

Citing an Indian law that excludes seeds from being patented, Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd (NSL) argued that the US seeds company was not eligible to claim patents and charge royalties from Indian seed companies.

On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court agreed with NSL, ruling that Indias Patent Act does not allow Monsanto any patent cover for its GM cotton seeds, said Narne Murali Krishna, a company secretary for NSL.

A Monsanto India spokesman said the company was very disappointed with the court order.

Citing an Indian law that excludes seeds from being patented, Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd (NSL) argued that the US seeds company was not eligible to claim patents and charge royalties from Indian seed companies.

On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court agreed with NSL, ruling that Indias Patent Act does not allow Monsanto any patent cover for its GM cotton seeds, said Narne Murali Krishna, a company secretary for NSL.

A Monsanto India spokesman said the company was very disappointed with the court order.

Todays order will have wide-ranging, negative implications for biotech-based innovation across many sectors within India, and is inconsistent with other international markets where agricultural innovation has flourished, the spokesman said in a statement.

Monsantos false claim has got exposed today, Kalyan Goswami, director general of the National Seed Association of India, said in a statement.

Late last year, NSL said it would not settle a long-standing intellectual property dispute with Monsanto over genetically modified cotton, despite some other Indian companies doing so.

Monsanto has been involved in a long-running battle in India over royalties paid by local seed companies for its GM cotton.

In 2016, the Indian farm ministry cut Monsantos royalties by more than 70 per cent, triggering a long-running feud that drew in the Indian and US governments.

In March, India cut the royalties paid to Monsanto for its GM cotton for the second time in two years, potentially fuelling another row with the US company that threatened to leave India in 2016.

More than 90 per cent of Indias cotton crop is genetically modified.SAIL and Railways did not immediately reply to requests from Reuters for a comment.

New Delhi: Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL), the countrys largest state-owned alloy producer, failed to meet its target to supply rails for Indian Railways during the fiscal year for 2017-18, underscoring the problems of modernising the countrys rail network.

SAIL, which swung to profits in the October to December quarter after 10 straight quarterly losses, supplied 874,000 tonnes of steel in 2017-18, as against the revised target of 950,000 tonnes, according to a document the company prepared for Ministry of Steel that was reviewed by Reuters.

The 2017-18 target was lowered from 1.46 million tonnes, the initial aim for the last fiscal year. This is the third fiscal year in a row the company has missed its delivery target.

Railways, which is the worlds fourth-largest network, had trimmed the size of its first-ever global tender by more than 30 per cent after SAIL committed to meeting its target to supply rails for 2017-18 and 2018-19.

For Railways, the shortages could mean further delays in modernising its ageing tracks, which came under scrutiny after a spate of accidents last year.

Separately, Ashwani Lohani, the chairman of Railways, told Reuters earlier this week that the ministry was yet to finalise the supplier in the rail tender, for which another local steel firm Jindal Steel and Power Ltd, the only domestic alternative, has pitched its services.

SAIL attributed the fall in supplies due to the shortages of a semi-finished product called rail blooms, the component which is rolled into rails.

The company said the availability of blooms would not be a constraint going forward, the document showed.

However, that may do little for SAIL, which has been at loggerheads with Indian Railways since last year due to constant shortages.

In September last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had appointed a new railways minister to oversee a $130 billion, five-year modernisation programme and to replace some of the 92,000 km of tracks operated by Indian Railways.

SAIL and Railways did not immediately reply to requests from Reuters for a comment.Telecom tribunal TDSAT has asked DoT to grant approval to Airtel-Telenor merger without any bank guarantee, according to a Bharti spokesperson.

New Delhi: Telecom tribunal TDSAT has asked DoT to grant approval to Airtel-Telenor merger without any bank guarantee, according to a Bharti spokesperson.

The Department of Telecom on April 3 had asked Bharti Airtel to submit bank guarantee of around Rs 1,700 crore before approving its merger with Telenor India.

The guarantee included Rs 1,499 crore for one-time spectrum charge for the radiowaves allocated to Airtel without auction, and over Rs 200 crore for spectrum payment which Telenor has to make.

"Regarding the demand for bank guarantee, on Airtel's petition, TDSAT has yesterday directed the DoT to take the merger on record without the need to furnish a bank guarantee. We hope to get the final approval from the DoT soon," Bharti spokesperson said.

DoT has also sought undertaking from Airtel that the company will be liable to any pending dues with respect to merger of the two companies and all demands which may be raised by any wing of the department for Telenor India.

"A letter of compliance has already been submitted to the DoT on all the mentioned points," Bharti spokesperson said.

The merger will bolster Airtel's spectrum footprint in these seven circles, with the addition of 43.4 MHz spectrum in the 1800 MHz band. Telenor India runs operations in seven circles-- Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Gujarat, UP (East), UP (West) and Assam.

DoT has asked Airtel to reduce it market share based on adjusted gross revenue (money earned from telecom services) in Bihar service area to the limit of 50 per cent, within one year from the date merger of two companies is approved.

The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) had approved the proposed merger of Telenor India with Bharti Airtel on March 8.Walmart will buy both new and existing Flipkart shares, with the new shares expected to value the Bengaluru-based firm at at least $18 billion. (Photo: PTI)

Mumbai: Walmart Inc is likely to reach a deal to buy a majority stake in Indian e-commerce player Flipkart by the end of June in what could be the US retail giants biggest acquisition of an online business, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Reuters reported last week that Walmart completed its due diligence on Flipkart and had made a proposal to buy 51 per cent or more of the Indian company for between $10 billion to $12 billion.

A deal with Flipkart would step up Walmarts battle with Amazon.com for a bigger share of Indias fledgling e-commerce market, which Morgan Stanley estimates will be worth $200 billion in a decade. Local media have reported that Amazon is exploring a possible counter offer for Flipkart.

Both sources declined to be named as the talks are private.

Walmart will buy both new and existing Flipkart shares, with the new shares expected to value the Bengaluru-based firm at at least $18 billion, the sources said. The price for existing shares would value the firm at about $12 billion, one of the people said.

Japans SoftBank Group, which owns roughly one-fifth of Flipkart via its Vision Fund, is unlikely to sell any of its shares due to the low price being offered for the existing shares, this source said.

Reuters has previously reported that early investors such as Tiger Global, Accel and Naspers will likely sell their entire stakes in Flipkart to Walmart if a deal is reached.

A deal is not yet finalised, and talks between Walmart, Flipkart and its investors are ongoing, one of the people said.

Flipkart also counts eBay, Tencent Holdings and Microsoft Corp among its investors.

Flipkart did not respond to a request for comment, a representative for Walmart in India declined comment while SoftBank said it doesnt comment on speculation.

Big Indian battle

For Walmart, the worlds largest retailer known for its superstores, a deal with Flipkart would open up the vast Indian market.

Walmart has for years tried to enter India but has remained confined to a cash-and-carry wholesale business amid tough restrictions on foreign investment. It currently operates 21 such stores in India.

By comparison, Amazon closely trails Flipkart, which along with its fashion units controls nearly 40 per cent of Indias online retail market, according to estimates by researcher Forrester.

Flipkarts investors are concerned that any deal with Amazon would run into regulatory hurdles as a combination would have more than 70 per cent of Indias online retail market, one of the sources said.

Walmarts push into e-commerce comes as Amazon has embraced offline retail, with an affiliate of the Seattle-based company picking up a $27.6 million stake in Indian retailer Shoppers Stop Ltd.

In the United States, Amazon also bought high-end grocer Whole Foods Market Inc for $13.7 billion last year.

Walmarts investment would give Flipkart not just additional funds to fight Amazon, but also arm it with a formidable ally with extensive experience in retailing, logistics and supply chain management.

Former Amazon employees Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal founded Flipkart in 2007 in Indias tech hub of Bengaluru.

Like Amazons founder Jeff Bezos, they began by selling books, but have diversified rapidly, including by selling smartphones, such as those made by Chinas Xiaomi, through exclusive flash sales, and now compete with Amazon in almost all product categories.The borrowing, however, would remain under the limit of the budgeted plan of Rs 6.06 lakh crore for the current fiscal.

New Delhi: Stunned by an abrupt hike in crude oil prices that has the potential to worsen the fiscal deficit, the government is believed to be veering towards the idea of issuing international sovereign bonds of up to $4 billion during the current fiscal. The borrowing, however, would remain under the limit of the budgeted plan of Rs 6.06 lakh crore for the current fiscal.

The buzz in the finance ministry is that some preliminary discussions have already been held on the maiden overseas sovereign bond issue. Sources said the idea of issuing bonds overseas cannot be completely ruled out.

When contacted, finance ministry official spokesperson DS Malik said: There is no such plan immediately. A couple of senior officials also said it is not an immediate plan.

The ministry would have to discuss the idea with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) threadbare over the necessity and urgency for raising the offshore dollar bonds. It is a well-known fact that the RBI does not favour overseas debt.

The regulator abhors the idea of dollar bonds after the bad experience of the early 90s when the nation was heavily indebted to the IMF. The finance ministry had also stopped looking at offshore bonds as a borrowing source.

An economist, who requested anonymity said, the government should go for it as there a huge demand for Indian government debt papers. An analyst said it may be a good idea per se but BJP being a nationalist party with huge Make-in-India attitude, looking at foreign debt would be reversal of core policies.

Being indebted to foreign fund houses would be seen as compromise on sovereign issues, the Latin American countries which had borrowed from overseas and failed to repay is a case in point.

Sources said whether the government goes for it, the situation for overseas bonds today is ideal as Indias foreign exchange reserves are at a record high of more than $420 billion. The yield on benchmark 10-year bond has dropped to as low as 7.34 per cent from a high of 7.49 per cent.

Moodys Investors Service last year upgraded the sovereign to Baa2 from Baa3, the first increase since 2004. Fitch Ratings and S&P Global Ratings rate India at the lowest investment grade.

Global oil prices hitting a four-year high of $75 a barrel due to the volatile situation in Syria. China last October announced plans to issue $2 billion of dollar-denominated sovereign bonds in Hong Kong, the first such issuance in 13 years.New York: Proper implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in India can be worked upon and is not an "unfixable problem", former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has said, reiterating that demonetisation was "not a well-planned, well thought-out" move.

With the Modi government bringing in ambitious reforms like GST and demonetisation, Rajan said it would be good if such measures were better implemented.

"On the Goods and Services Tax, we will figure it out eventually. It will be nice if we could implement much better than we do. But it's (GST) not an unfixable problem. We can work on it. I wouldn't give up hope at this point on that," Rajan told an audience at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge yesterday.

Rajan, who is currently the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, gave the 2018 Albert H Gordon Lecture on the topic 'Leverage, Financial Crises, and Policies to Raise Economic Growth'. He was asked about the "shoddy implementation" of big ticket reforms like GST and demonetisation in India.

On demonetisation, Rajan rejected the claim that the Reserve Bank of India had not been consulted by the government before it went on to declare 1,000 and 500-rupee currency notes as illegal tender in November 2016. He however reiterated that the move to cancel 87.5 per cent of the currency value was "not a good idea".

"I didn't ever say that I wasn't consulted (on demonetisation). In fact, I have made it quite clear that we were consulted and we didn't think it was a good idea," Rajan said.

He said demonetisation "was not a well-planned, well thought-out, useful exercise and I told the government that when the idea was first mooted," he said adding that any macro-economist would say that if 87.5 per cent of the currency is being demonetised, then it better be made sure that a similar amount of currency is printed and ready to be put back in circulation.

"India went into it without having done that. It had a negative economic impact but also the idea was that somehow people who had money stored in their basements without having paid taxes on it would overnight see religion and come to the government and say 'sorry we were hiding this stuff, let me pay taxes on it'," Rajan said, calling it a "naive view".

"Anybody who knows India, knows that very quickly we find ways around the system," he said adding that with "essentially" all the money that was demonetised coming back into the system, the exercise did not have the direct effect that was sought.

While the longer term impact of demonetisation is yet to be seen, its negative economic impact included people not having currency, not being able to pay and economic activity plummeting especially in the informal sector.

"There may be some longer term impact that people think that if this sort of thing happens then the government is serious about collecting taxes. There may be greater tax payments but we still have to see strong evidence that that is true," he said.

Rajan also expressed concern that a lot of people probably lost their jobs due to demonetisation but that has not been counted well as it would be mostly in the informal sector.

"The positive impacts (of demonetisation) are out there in the future. We have no idea whether they will be important. To my mind it was not a policy that was useful at that time," he said.

To a suggestion that demonetisation could have positively impacted growth, Rajan said "you would have to find a new economic theory to explain how it helped the economy".

He said most estimates of the cost of demonetisation vary between 1.5-2 per cent of the GDP.

"It would be a really die-hard government advocate who would say that the growth benefits of demonetisation were immediate," he said.

"Most of the supporters of the move would say that the benefits of the move are coming by changing the incentive to pay taxes. I would say yes, we will have to wait and see whether that in fact is true," he said.

On the problem of non-performing assets and making a reference to the Nirav Modi-PNB scandal, Rajan said it is worrisome that some Indian banks have antiquated systems.

A part of the Punjab National Bank scam was cyber-related and there is a need to go into the details of how the fraud came to be, he said.

"It turns out that we don't need to be really clever in the Indian system to make away with a billion dollars. Some of these banks have antiquated systems also....Your worry is that the systems are not adequate to prevent rogue dealers, rogue employees colluding and making off with stuff. That is the fraud part," he said.

He added that bad loans do not necessarily come from fraud, they come from "irrational exuberance".The Department of Telecom will next week discuss the mobile phone cloning issue with global industry body GSM Association, an official said on Thursday.

New Delhi: The Department of Telecom will next week discuss the mobile phone cloning issue with global industry body GSM Association, an official said on Thursday.

"A meeting with GSMA is scheduled for April 17 to discuss various issues. The DoT will take up mobile phone cloning issues with them," an official source, who did not wished to be named, told PTI.

The meeting will be a follow-up to the issues raised by telecom minister Manoj Sinha during his visit to Mobile World Congress at Barcelona, Spain, in February.

He had raised challenges posed by cloning of unique identity number of mobile handsets, IMEI as well as SIMs. IMEI number - a unique 15-digit serial number of mobile devices - is allocated by global industry body GSMA and organisations authorised by it.

When a mobile phone is lost, the victim is required to mention the IMEI number of the handset for tracking. The DoT will also discuss SIM cloning issues with GSMA "but it is not the only body that can help in resolving fake SIMs. The issue of fake SIMs will be taken up with other bodies separately", the source said.

The government through C-DoT is developing a system, Central Equipment Identity Register (CEIR), which will block all services on stolen or lost mobile phones on any network even if the SIM card is removed or IMEI number of the handset is changed.

CEIR is also expected to protect consumer interest and facilitate for law enforcement authorities legal interception. The government has proposed to allocate Rs 15 crore for setting up CEIR which will bring down the number of counterfeit handsets and discourage theft, according to the Union Budget 2018-19.

"The DoT will seek help of GSMA help in implementation CEIR," the source said.

CEIR will connect the IMEI database of all mobile operators. It will act as a central system for all network operators to share blacklisted mobile terminals so that devices placed under the said category in one network will not work on the other, even if the SIM card in the device is changed, it said.

DoT and GSMA will also discuss the roadmap for capacity building, knowledge and global best practices sharing program.Far from employment generation, a few of them have actually recorded a fall in headcounts.

New Delhi: The government is trying hard to dispel the impression of economic growth sans jobs. But the data of job additions by top rung companies, including public sector units, in the last two financial years tell a different story. Far from employment generation, a few of them have actually recorded a fall in headcounts.

An analysis of the headcount in big companies  most of them stock exchange listed and BSE Sensex constituents  shows that the number of people on roll has mostly remained stagnant or grew at snails pace.

The total number of employees in case of corporates such as ITC, Reliance Industries (RIL) and Bharat Forge has been flat between FY15 and FY17. Real estate giant DLF and public sector power major NTPC witnessed a fall in the number of employees. Those who reported a slight increase included Punjab National Bank (PNB), Jet Airways and Maruti Suzuki (see chart).

In case of HDFC Bank, a rise was seen at the end of March, 2017 compared to FY15, but it was lower than the previous year. The total employees on rolls were 75,977 in 2014-15. It rose to 87,263 the next year but fell to 84,041 in 2016-17.

The big companies are the most important employers. They are the most preferred after the government with which people seek employment. So, if the government or large corporates do not hire or hire fewer, then it will cause a strain on the household sector, said Mahesh Vyas, managing director and CEO at leading research firm Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE).

So, it is important that these organisations do keep steady pace in employment. The unorganised sector is not the preferred source of employment in the country, he added.

It is not that just private sector jobs are vanishing. Government-owned companies such as NHPC, ONGC, Coal India and SAIL too have almost frozen hiring for the last few years. The public sector entities are major employers of both skilled and unskilled workers.

The Modi government has repeatedly locked horn with the main opposition party over job scenario in the country. While the government has claimed job growth and presented favourable data to support it, the opposition has shown a gloomy picture with regards to employment opportunity.

They have claimed that the governments economic policies such as demonetisation and hasty implementation of GST have actually resulted in job losses.

The government think-tank Niti Aayog has rejected the narrative of jobless growth in the country. It has questioned the data put out by the detractors. While maintaining that the last credible data was compiled by NSSO in 2011-12, it has asserted that jobs are currently being created in various sectors.

In India, over 90 per cent jobs are in informal and unorganised sectors. The companies for which the headcount figures have been taken form a very small part of the organised sector. So, you cannot extrapolate this for the entire country. It is quite possible that because of higher efficiency, big companies are hiring less but smaller companies are hiring more. How do we know that? said a top economist wishing not to be named.A parliamentary panel will grill finance ministry officials on April 17 amid rising NPAs, incidents of fraud and governance lapses in the banking sector.

New Delhi: A parliamentary panel will grill finance ministry officials on April 17 amid rising NPAs, incidents of fraud and governance lapses in the banking sector.

The Standing Committee on Finance, chaired by senior Congress leader M Veerappa Moily, had last met on March 9 in the aftermath of the over Rs 13,000 crore fraud in Punjab National Bank.

It had then asked the ministry to institute a comprehensive enquiry encompassing systemic elements in the case and submit its report within a month.

"The Standing Committee is scheduled to meet finance ministry officials on April 17 and challenges in the banking sector, including NPAs and stressed assets, would be discussed," an official said.

As per RBI's Financial Stability Report, gross non-performing asset (NPA) ratio of public sector banks was at 13.5 per cent at the end of September, 2017, 1 percentage points higher than six months ago. The government had in February announced a Rs 2.11 lakh crore recapitalisation plan for PSU banks to revive the banking sector.

The meeting assumes significance since the sector is dealing with governance issues also at two private sector banks -- ICICI and Axis. S&P Global Ratings had earlier in the day said that the recent issues in private sector banks reiterate the need to improve risk management, and maintain strong governance practices.

Chanda Kochhar, the managing director and CEO of the country's leading private sector lender ICICI Bank, is currently under investigation for an alleged conflict of interest associated with the bank's loan to the Videocon group in 2012.

Recently, the board of private sector lender Axis Bank has sought RBI nod for the reappointment of managing director and CEO Shikha Sharma for six months ending December 31, 2018. This is after the central bank declined an earlier proposal to give her a three-year term ending June 30, 2021.

According to reports, the RBI's unwillingness to approve the initial request of three years was due to a number of risk management and governance issues that have emerged at the bank over the past year or so. These include a deterioration in asset quality and underreporting of nonperforming loans, S&P said.Mumbai: Banita Sandhu, an NRI actress debuts on the Bollywood horizon with director Shoojit Sircars 'October'. In an exclusive rendezvous Banita expresses her happiness coming to India being her roots. Also she is open to working in South films as well and more.

During her initial days Katrina Kaif had told us that her boy, make up dada, hair dresser help her teach Hindi. Banita follows her footsteps of sorts as she mentions, I tell my drivers and makeup artistes to speak in Hindi with me. My fluency in Hindi language will then definitely improve change for better.

On her Hindi lessons, Banita says, "When you are in London and trying to pick up a language its hard to do it. I got worried and called Shoojit Sircar frantically and told him that this is not working. So we came up with the idea of Skype back and forth every single day. I packed my bags and came here. So here the Indian accent helped me get around. By the time I was on the sets I had picked it up everyone around was speaking Hindi around me and naturally I picked it up. I am confident and one thing, I was stubborn about not allowing anyone to dub on my face. There was so much more to my performance."

So was she able to pick up the exact Hindi accent? Banita tells, "I am not a good judge you will have to see October and then judge. When I speak English I have a naturally British accent and when I speak Spanish I have a Spanish accent. So when I speak Hindi I have Indian accent."

Speaking about her Indian roots, the young actress says, " This is not my first time in India, I was just 18 when I first landed here I was in my first year of University. I came to do arts and I have no family here. They are all either in UK or Canada. So it was not just a journey of my career. It has been an emotional and spiritual one. I felt happy as I had a connect to my roots. This journey helped me connect to the culture that I was lacking. I always wanted t come to India some part of me was missing and I discovered my roots here.

"I had lots of dal and rotis and dahi. I cant stereotype the entire nation each culture is diverse in nature. Each person is diverse and I had this regressive image of Indian culture but when I came here I refreshingly realized that I have so much in common with the culture as the world is becoming globalised. I found my connect and it restored my faith in humanity," Banita adds.

Talking about her fondness of Bollywood movies, she says, "My mom watched a lot of movies of her kind like Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. My idea of Bollywood is her generation. Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. I didn't know about Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt. Watching Bollywood films mostly I wanted be an actress at a very young age. I studied in London that's why. I never thought I would be able to work in Hindi cinema because of my Hindi. I never thought I would be able to work in Hindi cinema or. I said yes to this film because of a great team and great man helming the project."

Was the Indian crowd intimidating for Banita? "I went from a small village to London and it was a culture shock for me. I was lucky my mother was worried as I was going to stay here by myself. The team was good. I was very protected by Shoojit sir. I was blessed and everything was in my favour. I did not face any hiccups here and it was not intimidating at all," she asserts.

While speaking about her Bollywood aspirations, Banita says, "For me it's about the concept. It's not about I am going to capitalize on this film. My degree is in the last stages. I want to complete my graduation."

She also mentions about the actor from Bollywood she loves to work with. "I would love to do a film with Aamir Khan, Irrfan Khan and Alia Bhatt," tells Banita.

"I said yes to the film because Shoojit sir made sure that I was in that head space so I was not really worried. Only sometimes when I would talk to him while discussing my lines, he would look at me and I would ask him what was wrong. Slowly he would retort back. You speak so fast so speak slowly for me to understand what you mean? So I have slowed down and learnt a lot. I am so exited. It's an international film and the story is so universal. Given the age we live in with Netfix and Amazon times. language is no longer a barrier." Banita tells about her experience of working on 'October'.

Banita also open to work in South films, she says, "I wont take anything I cant do well. But I will definitely love to do it. However, if I take up any South films I will surely learn the language so that no one gets the opportunity to dub on my face. Language is no barrier for us actors to choose a film. We have various means of learning the language."

"I had a few offers and I signed this film because it was instinctive," she adds.

Banita is very fond of her director Shoojit Sircar. She says, "He never raises his voice and he's endearing and we make fun of each other. I make fun of his age and he makes fun of my fashion sense and lectures me on it."

On her inspiration to play a difficult character in 'October', Banita reveals, "I had cinematic references from Stephen Hawkings Theory of Everything that happens to be one of them. I was like Felicity Jones character that is crazy and yet retained that innocence. Then I modelled myself more on our writer Juhi Chaturvedi. I would watch the way she would talk and behave and the totally embodies the character I play."

Staring Varun Dhawan in the male lead, 'October releases on 13th April.Sonam Kapoor in a movie still from 'Neerja', Alia Bhatt in a still from 'Udta Punjab'.

Mumbai: The nation today woke up to a heart-wrenching story of an 8-year-old who was drugged, held captive, gang raped over days and then murdered.

Worse of all, the deeds were held in a Hindu temple, by people who claim to be godly and a person who worked for the law.

In spite of the latest reports, the BJP ministers have allegedly sought to defend those being accused.

The whole country, including Bollywood celebrities like Farhan Akhtar (who is also the founder of MARD  Men Against Rape And Discrimination), Sonam Kapoor, Abhishek Bachchan, Richa Chadha, Vir Das and others have reacted to it.

Attention famous people wt blue ticks.

Pls look at the face of this 8 yr old angel.

She was kidnapped, drugged, tortured, gangraped for days n murdered.



It is time to use ur clout to say something that pressures justice is swift, sure n as brutal as what this girl went thru pic.twitter.com/lvOiVqoX3D  atul kasbekar (@atulkasbekar) April 12, 2018

Ashamed appalled and disgusted by fake nationals and fake Hindus. I cannot believe this is happening in my country. https://t.co/V8tKoo6viX  Sonam Kapoor (@sonamakapoor) April 12, 2018

Dear politicians,



I'd like to see every one of you miserable scum and your army of slimy sycophants put your parties and your bullshit aside and do something to make sure that no child ever has to face what this girl did. But you won't. Because you don't deserve this country.  Vir Das (@thevirdas) April 12, 2018

Let that headline sink in for a second. pic.twitter.com/i7pN4fs5Wg  Vir Das (@thevirdas) April 12, 2018

LET THE WORLD KNOW WE DEFEND OUR RAPISTS,we commit atrocities in places of worship and desecrate the Flag. Thank God international press isnt for sale.Hopefully bad PR may get the administration to act?Also,a woman as a CM is such a poor joke @mehbooba.Aisi bhi kya alliance ? https://t.co/mGEOfZjxzy  TheRichaChadha (@RichaChadha) April 12, 2018

The act was performed in a temple. If you are a Hindu and you hold your faith dear, HOW ARE YOU NOT OUTRAGED BY THIS? https://t.co/CexY06A3Za  TheRichaChadha (@RichaChadha) April 12, 2018

So pained to read about #Unnao & #Kathua rapes.. how strongly the government responds will be its true test @PMOIndia .. at least I wont vote for them coming elections if they dont take action this time..  Tisca Chopra (@tiscatime) April 12, 2018

The religion of the victim and the religion of the rapist should never matter! It is of no consequence! Rape is a crime against humanity!!! Appalled that some people can actually support rapists!  Shocked beyond belief!

  ,     RIP humanity!!!   Renuka Shahane (@renukash) April 12, 2018

IN A TEMPLE! i Repeat... IN A TEMPLE!!!!!!!!! https://t.co/D4FJpNIn95  Swara Bhasker (@ReallySwara) April 12, 2018

A 8 year old is drugged, raped & murdered and another one is fighting for justice for herself and the death of her father in custody.

We have a choice either raise your voice or be a silent spectator.

Stand up for what is right even if you are standing alone.#Kathua #Unnao  Riteish Deshmukh (@Riteishd) April 12, 2018

So finally some took notice.I almost want to scream help to the media https://t.co/oDKSjosso6 8 yr old gets subjected to such inhuman torture and abuse.Equal pay equal status,we are still far from those things bcoz our basics are still shaky. - i refuse to shed a tear and move on https://t.co/lkUztVE7KU  Ali Fazal M (@alifazal9) April 12, 2018

A life is lost a childhood taken & yet everything is politically connected leading to a so called secular country getting divided on caste & religion because that digresses from the reality that our country, the silent government & its leaders still dont respect woman or lives. https://t.co/TRNyTB8E3r  Arjun Kapoor (@arjunk26) April 12, 2018

This is dark and demonic. Well put @Riteishd https://t.co/JXH5AFVqlk  Boman Irani (@bomanirani) April 12, 2018

Cant believe this is happening!!!! Shocked and appalled at what this has come to.. really hope justice is served! Really really really hope  https://t.co/m5LId8mAzi  Alia Bhatt (@aliaa08) April 12, 2018

The 8-year-old was kidnapped from Kathua, near Jammu by police personnel reportedly because she was a Muslim from the nomadic Bakerwal tribe.Its official! Wedding bells will soon be ringing for the lovely Sonam Kapoor, who will tie the knot with her very devoted boyfriend, Anand Ahuja at the end of this month.

The wedding will be held on April 29 and 30, when a closely-knit group of the Kapoor and Ahuja families will get together to bless the couple.

A family friend informs, It was never Switzerland or any destination wedding. We dont know who or where this came from. It was decided that the wedding would be in Mumbai and that it would be very low-key, as Sonams aunt Sridevi passed away only recently. Only a close group of family and friends are invited. Theyve been told not to speak about the wedding to the media at all.

Interestingly, Sonams parents were apparently in two minds about the wedding date. Says the source, They seriously thought about shifting the wedding to next year due to Sridevis sudden demise. But Boney Kapoor assured Anil that it was okay to go ahead. Anil relented after Boney promised to attend the wedding.

Sonam has been dating Delhi industrialist Anand Ahuja for two years now with her parents blessing, and by all accounts, the entire Kapoor family has taken a shine to Anand. He is already a part of the family. So the wedding is just a logical step ahead, adds the family friend.There appears to be no end to the Sri Reddy saga. On Tuesday morning, the aspiring actress, who is on a mission to expose the casting couch in the Telugu film industry for the last few weeks, threw the biggest bombshell yet by releasing intimate photos with top producer D. Suresh Babus son, Abhiram.

Sri Reddy alleges that Abhiram called her to his studio on the promise of a few roles in upcoming films after which he cheated her. Even as the industry reels under these shocking revelations, Sri Reddy is now urging the film fraternity to take action against Abhiram.

Its been an interesting last couple of days. On Saturday, Sri Reddy protested topless in front of the Telugu Film Chamber office prompting the Movie Artistes Association to deny her membership the very next day. Thats when she decided to release some intimate pictures with Abhiram, Rana Daggubatis brother, all the while alleging that Suresh Babu tried to prevent the pictures from coming out.

Meanwhile, director Teja openly announced that he wants to give a chance to the actress in his upcoming films, although it was reportedly Suresh Babus idea to give offers to Sri Reddy through Teja on the condition that Abhirams pictures would not be released. However, that offer no longer seems to be valid with Sri Reddy releasing not just Abhirams pictures, but also threatening to release some more intimate pictures with other top Tollywood celebrities. We hear, a top director who gave blockbusters with three big stars and a top writer who recently turned producer are in Sri Reddys list.Its been nearly three weeks since Vidya Balan was approached for the role of Basavatharakam (NTRs wife) in the NTR biopic. However, the Bollywood actress is still dilly-dallying over playing the role.

The delay in Vidyas decision has got the filmmakers feeling apprehensive as it is reminiscent of a similar case that happened last year.

Apparently, when the 39-year-old was approached for a Malayalam film in 2017, after giving it a lot of thought, she eventually backed out from the project. The disheartened filmmakers had to replace her with Manju Warrier.

In the present situation, although NTRs filmmakers are confident that Vidya will come on board, last years incident is still haunting them.

At the same time, during the discussion meeting, the Kahaani actress had pressed for a few things. A source says, Vidya had asked the filmmakers to shoot all her scenes in the script, and also ensure that those scenes were there in the final cut. The filmmakers are only too happy to oblige!

Meanwhile

In the wake of the Movie Artistes Association (MAA) banning actress Sri Reddy from acting in any Telugu films (following her topless protest in the middle of the street), director Teja has said that the actress is still welcome to join his films.

Teja had earlier offered Sri Reddy a chance to star in two of his projects  the NTR biopic and Venkateshs film. The director states, My offer stills stands good! It is up to her whether she takes it up or not and how she solves the issues.According to Dr OKonek, by re-directing the immune responses, the vaccine not only suppresses the response but prevents activation of cells that would initiate allergic reactions. (Photo: Pixabay)

Scientists have created a vaccine that has the potential to dampen the immune systems response to peanuts which means peanut allergy patients around the world would soon be able to start snacking on the nut without fearing for their lives.

Trials on mice have proven that it works - as researchers found the rodents given it were protected from an allergic reaction.

The study saw mice given three monthly doses of a nasal spray - the same way as children in the UK receive a flu vaccine each winter.

The experiment, conducted by researchers at University of Michigan, could lead to investigations conducted on humans with peanut allergies.

Patients who get severe reactions to the nut are advised to carry an EpiPen device that gives them a dose of adrenaline to stop the reaction.

Recommended treatment currently revolves around avoiding peanuts, as scientists battle to find an effective way to tackle allergies.

However, the new study, led by Dr Jessica O'Konek, may one day lead to them no longer needing to live in fear of being around peanuts.

According to Dr OKonek, by re-directing the immune responses, the vaccine not only suppresses the response but prevents activation of cells that would initiate allergic reactions.New Delhi: The idea of packing your bags and heading-off to an unknown exotic destination by yourself sounds thrilling, doesn't it? If the latest trends are anything to go by, it's just the thing that several Indian women are opting for.

Leading online platform for travel and leisure experiences, Cleartrip, revealed how more and more women in India are discovering solo travel in a new infographic, titled 'Women and Wanderlust'. What's more, these women are also increasingly becoming active decision-makers when it comes to choosing how to travel, where to go, and what to experience while on a holiday.

According to the infographic from Cleartrip, 75 percent of the travel bookings made by women were for solo travel, with a considerable share in overall mobile bookings indicating growing popularity of mobile as a preferred medium to search and make travel bookings online. While the share of women travellers in overall mobile bookings was 40-45 percent, their share was 30-35 percent for desktop.

In addition, with rising income levels among women professionals across the country, there has also been a marked increase of 22 percent in the number of women travellers taking international trips.

"With more women becoming financially independent and income levels rising, the concept of solo travel is increasingly gaining traction in the country. International travel has become affordable and accessible for Indians, prompting a large number of women to travel abroad on their own," said Balu Ramachandran, Head of Air and Distribution, Cleartrip. "Also, the overall connectivity has drastically improved and internet penetration is higher than ever. The proliferation of smart devices and greater social media exposure is allowing more women consumers to discover new destinations and travel experiences, and set-off on their own without any anxiety," Ramachandran added.

Furthermore, according to Cleartrip, the number of online travel-related searches by women has doubled, while the number of millennial women searching for travel-related information online has registered a 1.7x increase. In addition, maximum travel searches on the platform made by women originated from tier-1 cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai.

However, an increasing number of women from tier-2 cities are also emerging as independent decision-makers when it comes to travelling, with 40 percent of the total searches on the platform made by women users from these regions. Leading non tier-1 cities include Ahmedabad, Indore, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Jaipur and Patna.

The top international destinations visited by women solo travellers in 2017 include Dubai, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, London, Kathmandu, Colombo, Denpasar, Sharjah, and New York. Meanwhile, the top domestic destinations visited by solo women travellers in 2017 include Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, and Pune followed by leisure destinations such as Goa, Kochi, Jaipur, Guwahati, Vizag, and Trivandrum.Friday the 13th, the day that haunts and spooks out most of the world is almost here.

It may be considered a creepy or unlucky day for a lot of people, but have you ever wondered about its origin?

Well, how it really evolved is still a mystery. But there are plenty of theories about all the bad things that happened on this day.

Here are a few of them:

* A lot of people believe it was the crucifixion that initiated the superstition. It was on Friday that Jesus Christ was betrayed and there were 13 people present at the Last Supper.

* A novel by Thomas W. Lawson in 1907 is another cause for all the hysteria. He wrote a book called Friday, the Thirteenth, which is about a stockbroker who creates financial panic on the date to take advantage of the outcome.

* Others speculate it became a dark day when in 1307 King Philip IV of France ordered the arrest of a Catholic military order, Knights of the Templar.SOT Madhapur police nabbed three men in three autorickshaws who were smuggling in Rs 5 Lakh worth gutka from Bidar

Hyderabad: SOT Madhapur police nabbed three men in three autorickshaws who were smuggling in Rs 5 Lakh worth gutka from Bidar on Wednesday.

The accused were identified as Gangisetty Kumar, 37, Munugu Chandrudu, 35, and Mankala Srinivas, 28.

The arrests were made by SOT police while conducting a vehicle checking at RC Puram around 2 am on Tuesday.

We seized gutka worth Rs 5.38 Lakh from them and handed them over to RC Puram police for legal actions, said the SOT police.His wife received a call from the kidnappers, through her husbands phone, and they demanded a ransom of Rs 1 crore.

BENGALURU: The Parappana Agrahara police have arrested six people and rescued a kidnapped man. The accused had kidnapped him and had demanded a ransom of Rs 1 crore.

The accused have been identified as Sathyavelachari alias Sathya, 24, a resident of Bannerghatta, Yeshwanth Yadav C.S. alias Yeshu, 20, Vinod Kumar, 21, Sanjay Reddy, 20, Shekar, 20 and Jagannath, 23, all hailing from Kolar. The victim, Shivakumar, was rescued by the police.

On April 8, Shivakumar went out for work in the afternoon along with an interior designing contractor, but did not return home at night. His wife Sudha tried to contact his friends and relatives, but could not find him. The very next morning, she received a call from the kidnappers, through her husbands phone, and they demanded a ransom of Rs 1 crore.

Sudha immediately filed a complaint with the Parappana Agrahara police. The police formed six special teams for the rescue operation and collected all the information from the exit check posts in the city to trace the culprits. Based on credible information the police found that the accused were hiding in Srinivasapura in Kolar. The police chased the accused, Yeshwanth Yadav and arrested him.

While interrogating him, the police gathered all the information and arrested the rest and rescued Shivakumar. The accused, Sathya, is an interior designing contractor and was a friend of Shivakumar. He knew that Shivakumar had recently sold his property and deposited money in the bank.

Sathya was facing financial problems and had requested Shivakumar to lend him some money. However, Shivakumar had refused. An angry Sathya then plotted to kidnap Shivakumar, along with five friends. Sathya requested Shivakumar to introduce him to one of his friends for an interior designing contract.

On April 8, Shivakumar left home along with Sathya to meet his friend. Sathya, along with his friends, kidnapped him and took him to Kolar. Sathya later called Shivakumars wife and demanded Rs 1 crore in exchange. He threatened her to kill Shivakumar and send his body to her house if she tried to contact the police and disconnected the call. He later called her again and asked her to meet him near the Sarjapur circle to exchange the money. She went to spot but they did not turn up.

She returned home and he called her again and told her that he will send the dead body of her husband as he got to know that she had approached the police.

However, the police immediately traced the culprits and rescued Shivakumar.Hyderabad: Congress MLA A. Revanth Reddy has alleged a Rs 1.000 crore land scam in Kapra, in Hyderabad city, in connivance with members of the ruling party. Speaking to the media, he alleged that the land was allotted to relatives of Information Technology minister K.T. Rama Rao and the real estate firm My Home owned by Jupally Rameshwar Rao. He alleged that the scam happened with the knowledge of the state government.

He said in 2011, the Supreme Court had declared that this land was evacuee property and had questioned why the state government had not taken possession of it. According to him, minister Rama Rao ignored the rules and allotted the lands to Rameshwar Rao. In government records the land is listed as government land so how is Rameshwar Rao carrying out his real estate business on these 20 acres of land, he queried.

Mr Revanth Reddy said that one Bala Krishna has general power of attorney and by threatening him, the sale deed was made out in the name of Rameshwar Rao. If Mr Rama Rao is sincere, he should stop any land transactions on this land and the state government must become the custodian of this land, he added. Mr Revanth Reddy said he is ready to give any information required about the land to the minister but will not allow Mr Rameshwar Rao to loot the lands and is willing to go to court on this matter. Revanth Reddy also said that he is ready to go with the minister to inspect these lands.50 year-old-man working as a construction labourer was arrested by Medchal police on charges of sexually harassing a 12-year-old deaf and mute minor girl who was also mentally unsound.

Hyderabad: A 50 year-old-man working as a construction labourer was arrested by Medchal police on charges of sexually harassing a 12-year-old deaf and mute minor girl who was also mentally unsound. The suspect identified as Mohd Khaja Vali entered the hut where the victim resided and took her to the bath area behind the hut and sexually harassed her.

Neighbours who noti-ced abnormal sounds coming from the bath area, rushed to the spot, caught the suspect and alerted the police. According to the police, the victims parents worked as construction labourers at a site in Medchal. The suspect hailing from Nellore district in AP worked with them. The victims family resided in a temporary hut set up around 300 yards away from the work site.

Behind their hut was a bath area for the family, which was covered by mat sheets. On Wednesday, after the parents left for work, the girl was alone at home.

The accused residing in a neighbouring slum was walking towards the site when he noticed the girl and approached her.

Medchal Inspector S Venkat Reddy said as she was mute and deaf and mentally unsound, he made some signs to her and later took her to the bath area behind the hut.

The neighbours heard abnormal noises from the bath area and came to check and were shocked to find that he was sexually harassing the girl, said the inspector.

They caught him and beat him up before handing him over to the police. Later her mother lodged a complaint against the suspect and a case of sexual harassment under Sections 7 and 8 of Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (Pocso) was registered. He was arrested and sent to remand.A team from the D B Marg Police Station was patrolling the area which is known for prostitution activities. Two of the women tried to escape by climbing down from a third-floor window with the help of a rope and died eventually. (Photo: File | Representational)

Mumbai: Two women, allegedly sex workers, died after falling from the third floor of a building while trying to escape a police raid in Grant Road area of south Mumbai, an official said on Wednesday.

The incident took place at Om Building in D B Marg locality around 10.30 pm on Tuesday night, the police official said.

A team from the D B Marg Police Station was patrolling the area which is known for prostitution activities.

As the police team arrived to conduct "checking", a person on the ground floor alerted others which led to panic among the sex workers who were on the upper floors, said the official.

Two of the women tried to escape by climbing down from a third-floor window with the help of a rope, he said. However, while climbing down, they slipped and fell.

Police took them to the government-run J J Hospital in Byculla where both died during treatment.

While one of the women was 50 years old, the other was in her 30s. Both hailed from West Bengal, the officer said.

The D B Marg police have registered a case of accidental death and further probe is underway, he added.The police said a case of rape was not filed earlier because of discrepancies in the statement of the victim. (Photo: ANI | Twitter)

Lucknow: After filing a case against Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, for the rape of an 18-year-old in Unnao, the police and the state government defended the delay in action saying, "The government doesn't want to save anyone."

"Nobody is defending him (Kuldeep Singh Sengar), all we are saying is that we have to hear both sides. Now case has been given to CBI, they will decide on arrest," OP Singh, DGP Uttar Pradesh said.

BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar has been charged under a tough law for sexual crimes against children, after the allegations of the victim that she was raped by him in June last year. Asked when he would be arrested, the police said the case had been handed over to the CBI.

An FIR has been filed against the accused BJP MLA for raping an 18-year-old woman in June last year.

Also Read: UP govt orders CBI probe against BJP MLA for Unnao rape, custodial murder

"FIR has been registered against rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar under various sections of IPC and provisions of POCSO Act," Unnao SP said.

The case came to the public glare after the woman tried to immolate herself outside Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's house on Sunday, accusing the state government of shielding the accused politician. A day later, the victim's father died in custody, days after being beaten by the MLA's brother, who has been arrested.

The police said a case of rape was not filed earlier as she didn't mention rape in the complaint.

"The victim said she was scared therefore didn't mention rape in her first complaint...The SIT (Special Investigation Team) took this into consideration and then registered the complaint against the legislator," said the police chief OP Singh.

Late on Wednesday night, BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar made a dramatic appearance outside the house of a top police officer in state capital Lucknow.

After the midnight drama and amid outrage over the MLA's brazenness, the Yogi Adityanath government ordered the police to file a case against the ruling party lawmaker and hand over all cases related to it to the CBI.

The decision to ask the CBI to step in was taken after a SIT, constituted by the state government, found serious lapses not just by the police but also doctors in Unnao. The government has ordered security cover to the family of the rape victim.'Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal also asked the Prime Minister to observe fast over rape incidents and register his protest against Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over the Unnao rape case. (Photo: File/ANI)

New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged silence over the Unnao rape case and questioned why the accused BJP MLA was yet to be arrested.

Speaking to reporters in New Delhi, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal also alleged that Modi was not serious about the crime against women across the country.

Sibal also asked the Prime Minister to observe fast over rape incidents and register his protest against Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over the Unnao rape case. The BJP is holding a country-wide fast on Thursday to corner opposition over the recent washout of the Budget session of Parliament.

Sibal, referring to National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report for 2016, also said that the BJP-ruled states have the highest crime rate against women.

The Uttar Pradesh police on Thursday registered an FIR against ruling BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged gangrape of a minor girl in Unnao, hours after the government said it would hand over the investigation into the case to the CBI.

The victim did not name him (the MLA) because she was afraid. Why then was he not arrested? We charge he would never be arrested, said Sibal.

The former Union minister added that once the case is transferred to the CBI, the investigation agency would take its own time to conduct the probe and the MLA concerned would go absconding meanwhile.

After some months, the CBI would give a report that he had no role. Some people would again threaten the family (of the victim). We are seeing what's happening in the country, he said.

Sibal also referred to the reports on the Adityanath government's decision to withdraw a rape and kidnapping case against former Union minister Swami Chinmayananda. The chief minister wants to withdraw a case against a rape accused former minister this is their mindset the Prime Minister is silent, Sibal said without naming Chinmayanand.

Alleging Modi to be not serious over such incidents, Sibal cited NCRB statistics to suggest that the BJP-ruled Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh reported highest crime against women in 2016.The incident dates back to December 27, 1988, when Navjot Singh Sidhu allegedly hit one Gurnam Singh in an incident of road rage at Patiala, resulting in his death. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Punjab government on Thursday sought conviction of minister Navjot Singh Sidhu in a road rage case.

The lawyer appearing for the Punjab government told Supreme Court that the statement given by Sidhu denying his involvement in the case was false.

The incident dates back to December 27, 1988, when Sidhu had allegedly hit one Gurnam Singh, 65, in an incident of road rage at Patiala, Punjab, resulting in the death of Gurnam.

The trial court had acquitted Sidhu, whereas the Punjab and Haryana High Court reversed his acquittal, convicting him under Section 304 Part II, IPC, for culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

The victim's family has appealed to the Supreme Court that earlier imprisonment sentence of three years given by Punjab and Haryana High Court should be enhanced.

However, the Punjab government has appealed the apex court to uphold the three-year imprisonment.Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the inauguration of the Patient Care Facilities at Cancer Institute, Adyar, Chennai, in Tamil Nadu. (Photo: Twitter/@MIB_India)

Chennai: After southern states raised concerns over the 15th Finance Commissions Terms of Reference (ToR), Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said that the commission has been directed to consider incentivising the states undertaking measures to implement population control.

The Prime Minister also refuted the allegations levelled against the Centre of being biased against certain states or a particular region and termed them as baseless.

"The Union Government has suggested to the Finance Commission to consider incentivising states who have worked on population control. Thus, a state like Tamil Nadu, which has devoted a lot of effort, energy and resources towards population control would certainly benefit," Modi said at the inaugural function of the Diamond Jubilee building of a Cancer Institute in Chennai.

On Tuesday, the finance ministers of three southern states and one Union Territory highlighted loopholes in the ToRs prescribed by the 15th Finance Commission for allocation of funds to states.

At a conclave of finance ministers of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry, the ministers argued that with the present guidelines in place, states with higher population would be entitled to a larger share of tax resources, while those that undertook measures for population control would incur losses.

They also demanded an increase in power to state governments, as they were primarily responsible for undertaking developmental activities.

(With ANI inputs)The body of 8-year-old girl was found in the forests near her village on January 17. (Photo: Facebook | @justiceforasifa)

Srinagar: Amid renewed outrage in Jammu and Kashmir and beyond over the recent rape and murder of an 8-year-old nomad girl of the States Kathua district, the Minister of State for External Affairs, General (retired) VK Singh, on Thursday said we as humans have failed her.

Expressing distress over the gory incident, the Union minister, however, assured that the victim will not be denied justice. He wrote on Twitter, We have failed Ashifa as humans. But she will not be denied justice. #PunishTheSavages #RapeAndMurderOfHumanity #Kathua #JusticeForAshifa #GenerallySaying.

Read: VK Singh seeks Justice for Kathua victim, says 'we have failed her as humans'

The Union ministers word has generated hope back in the State that those involved in the heinous crime would be brought to justice. Though the State unit of the BJP has officially stated that it wont support the accused in the rape-and-murder case, some of the party leaders including two ministers have openly sided with them. Kashmir watchers believe that Singhs assertion, the first reaction from a BJP minister, may prompt the BJP and the government at the Centre to reign in such elements within the party.

However, Talib Hussain, a Jammu lawyer who is appearing in the case on behalf of the victims family termed it BJPs double-standard and an attempt to hoodwink those within and outside the country who has risen against the gory act.

If the government is serious on the issue and wants justice is delivered in the case why doesnt it stop those including BJP ministers who have openly sided with the accused and even instigated the local Hindus against the victims family and rest of the Muslim community in Kathua, Hussain asked.

He said, There has been outrage against the brutal murder after rape of this poor girl including outside the country and the statement of Mr. Singh who is minister of state for external affairs should be seen in that context too.

Earlier on Thursday, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, assured that the investigation into the rape-and-murder case is on a fast track and law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions.

She tweeted, The Law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions & statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track & justice will be delivered."

The J&K polices Crime Branch earlier this week filed two separate chargesheets against eight accused in the case in a court at Kathua in spite of resistance by a group of local lawyers.

Also Read: Kathua case: Meerut student travelled to J&K to rape 8-yr-old, says chargesheet

The victim went missing while grazing horses in Rasana village of Hiranagar tehsil of Kathua district on January 17. A week later, her body was found in woods near her village. The alleged rape and murder of the minor evoked widespread outrage in J&K.

However, the incident took a strange turn later when large number of local Hindus took to the streets, waving the national Indian national flag and demanding unconditional release of the main accused Deepak Khajuria who is a Special Police Officer (SPO). The photographs of the protest march went viral on social media and Chief Minister Mufti shocked over the abuse of the national flag hit out at the protesters and reiterated that the law will take its own course.

In huge embarrassment to the Chief Minister, two of her senior ministers Chander Prakash Ganga and Chowhary Lal Singh from ally BJP also joined the protesters to seek investigations into the rape-and-murder case instead of the Crime Branch of the local by Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on the plea the local people had expressed lack of faith in police investigation. But the Chief Minister out rightly rejected the demand.

Earlier on Monday, a section of Jammu lawyers had prevented the police from filing charge sheet against the accused, evoking sharp criticism of various quarters.

Inspector General of Police (Crime Branch) Afhadul Mujtaba said that the charge sheet was filed against the accused despite resistance shown by some Jammu lawyers who blocked the way of police officials while on way to the court on Monday. Reports said that the police had to meet Kathuas Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) late Monday night to submit the charge sheet.

The charge sheet was filed few days after DNA test confirmed that the victim was held captive inside Rasanas Deasthan temple before being strangulated and stoned to death after rape. The charge sheet says that before her murder, tfa was raped once more.

Among the accused is a former revenue official and the alleged conspirator Sanji Ram (60) who surrendered before the Crime Branch on March 20 after his son Vishal Kumar was taken into custody by the police in Uttar Pradesh.

Also Read: Ex-bureaucrat accused in rape, murder of 8-yr-old girl surrenders

The Crime Branch officials said that they had received the forensic test reports which confirmed that the girl was held hostage at a temple premises, drugged and raped several times before being murdered by a SPO Khajuria.

According to the CB officials, the viscera report of the deceased has established that she was drugged by the accused so that she would not cry for help. The viscera report is positive for clonazepam. This means that the victim was drugged by the accused, they said adding that the medical report has also revealed that the cause of the girls death was asphyxiation.

The police have arrested eight persons, including two SPOs and two other police officials in connection with the case. A police sub-inspector and a head-constable have been charged with destruction of evidence.

The police investigations have revealed that the the eight-year-old who belonged to nomadic Bakerwal (herdsmen) community was targeted with a view to force the eviction of the minority Muslim community from Kathua. The police have also said that even after the heinous crime was committed in connivance with local Hindu activists, her family was not allowed to bury her body in the local Muslim cemetery and it had but had to walk a long distance to perform her last rites in a different village.'Our mission in Hong Kong has informed that Department of Justice of Hong Kong are still examining our request for provisional order of arrest of Nirav Modi. We are awaiting response,' MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said. (Photo: ANI/Twitter)

New Delhi: India on Thursday said it is awaiting response from Hong Kong authorities on its request for provisional order of arrest of diamond merchant Nirav Modi, wanted in connection with PNB loan fraud.

Raveesh Kumar, Spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs, said India has requested the Hong Kong authorities to surrender Nirav Modi based on the extradition agreement for surrender of fugitive offenders signed between the two sides in 1997.

"Our mission in Hong Kong has informed that the Department of Justice of Hong Kong are still examining our request for provisional order of arrest of Nirav Modi. We are awaiting response from the Hong Kong authorities," Kumar told reporters.

In a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha last week, VK Singh, Minister of State in the External Affairs, had said the request for the same was submitted to the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on March 23.

Read: Nirav Modi in Hong Kong? Govt sends request for provisional arrest

Earlier this week, China said that Hong Kong can accede to India's request to arrest fugitive Indian diamond merchant Nirav Modi based on local laws and mutual judicial assistance agreements.

Also Read: Hong Kong can take decision on Nirav Modi's arrest: China

Asked whether the MEA has taken up the case of Mehul Choksi with the US, also wanted in the PNB fraud case along with Modi, Kumar said the ministry only comes into the picture after the location of any fugitive is ascertained. There were reports that Choksi is in the US.

"Normally, after we are informed by the (investigating) agencies....based on that we make a request. We have not done anything because we do not know his whereabouts," Kumar said.

When asked whether the issue of Vijay Mallya, liqour baron who is wanted in a money laundering case and an alleged bank fraud case in India and is currently in the UK, will come up in discussions Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have during his visit to the United Kingdom next week, K Nagraj Naidu, Joint Secretary (West Europe division) in the MEA, said "all issues" concerning India were on the agenda.

"On the question of agenda, it includes all issues. At the same time, the issue of economic offences is more under the domain of the Ministry of Home Affairs. There are two ongoing dialogues--one at the level of the Home Secretary and one at the level of the minister.

"Minister Kiren Rijiju (Minister of State for Home Affairs) was in the UK in January this year and the issue was discussed at great detail," he said in response to a question.Justice Chelameswar on Thursday said he had written a letter a few days ago to highlight affairs in the Supreme Court and in the country. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: The senior most judge of the Supreme Court after the chief justice of India, Justice Jasti Chelameswar, on Thursday once again expressed his anguish over affairs in the apex court and refused to hear a plea filed by former Union law minister Shanti Bhushan seeking regulation of the master of roster powers of the CJI on the ground that he was facing a relentless campaign against him just before his retirement.

Sorry I cannot take up the case, otherwise there would be one more reversal of order in the next 24-hours, Justice Chelameswar said when Shanti Bhushans son Prashant Bhushan mentioned the matter before him.

Chelameswar said he was facing a relentless campaign against him just before his retirement. Two months before my retirement, I dont want it to be said that I am doing certain things because I want to grab some office, said Chelameswar, and added that he did not want to leave the court with a tirade against him.

I am sorry, you please understand my difficulty, Chelameswar told Prashant Bhushan, news agency PTI reported.

Prashant Bhushan mentioned the matter in Chelameswars court as it concerned the master of the roster issue, and hence, could not be dealt with by the chief justice himself.

After Chelameswar turned down listing the matter, Prashant Bhushan rushed to Chief Justice Dipak Misras court and mentioned it there. The bench headed by CJI said, We will look into it.

Chelameswars remarks come after two recent letters written by him and Justice Kurian Joseph about alleged interference by the executive into judicial matters.

Ties between Justice Chelameswar and CJI Misra have been uneasy after he took up a plea for a probe into the alleged medical scam argued by Prashant Bhushan. That was eventually dismissed by the CJI.

Chelameswar's bench had ordered setting up of a larger bench, comprising five senior most judges, to hear a PIL of NGO Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms relating to alleged medical admission scam.

The CJI-led bench had then held that since the Chief Justice was the Master of the Roster, he alone had the prerogative to constitute benches and neither a two-Judge, nor a three-Judge bench can allocate the matter to themselves or direct the constitution of a bench.

On Wednesday, the apex court bench headed by the CJI had again ruled that the Chief Justice of India was the "first among equals" and occupied a unique position having the "exclusive prerogative" to allocate cases and set up benches to hear cases.

On January 12, with a warning that democracy is at risk, the four senior judges of the apex court, Justices Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, M B Lokur and Kurian Joseph mounted a virtual revolt against the CJI raising questions on "selective" case allocation and certain judicial orders, sending shockwaves across the judiciary and polity.

In an unprecedented move, these judges had convened a press conference and said the situation in the top court was "not in order" and many "less than desirable" things have taken place. Subsequently on March 21, Justice Chelameswar had shot off a letter to the CJI asking him to consider convening a full court to take up the issue of alleged executive interference in judiciary.

In that unprecedent letter, he had said the bonhomie between the judiciary and the government in any State "sounds the death knell to democracy".

The letter, copies of which were also sent to 22 other apex court judges, had questioned the probe initiated by Karnataka High Court Chief Justice Dinesh Maheshwari against District and Sessions Judge Krishna Bhat at the instance of Union Ministry of Law and Justice, despite his name being recommended for elevation twice by the Collegium.

In a latest development, Justice Kurian Joseph has also shot off a letter to the CJI expressing concern over the delay by the government in clearing the names recommended by the collegium in February for elevation.

The collegium had in February recommended the names of senior advocate Indu Malhotra and Justice K M Joseph, Chief Justice of Uttarakhand High Court, for appointment as judges of the Supreme Court.

Expressing concern over the independence of the judiciary, Justice Joseph has asked the CJI to establish a bench of seven senior-most judges to suo motu take up the matter of the government sitting on the two names. He has also said that the government's act of sitting over on the recommendations of the Collegium was "abuse of power" which sends a wrong message to all the judges not to cause any displeasure to the executive.

(With inputs from PTI)Kamal Haasan asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to follow the Supreme Court judgement, and also posted an open letter to him. (Photo: File)

Chennai: Actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan on Thursday recorded an open message for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking for justice to Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery water dispute.

Taking to his Twitter handle, the Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) chief said, "Sir, I am sure you are aware of the crisis that is gripping Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery water. I believe, from your past experience, you could easily deliver justice in the case of Narmada River Water Board."

Haasan further said, people of the state believe that there is a delay in Cauvery water issue because of the upcoming elections in Karnataka that are scheduled to take place on May 12.

"I want this belief to be dispelled. People are more important than elections," he added.

Haasan asked Modi to follow the Supreme Court judgement, and also posted an open letter to the Prime minister, in which he wrote "I am sure you will fulfill your duty towards the people and farmers of Tamil Nadu by constituting the Cauvery water Management Board immediately."

Also Read: Modi go back: Black flags greet PM in TN; he takes chopper, skips roads

On February 16, the court had ordered the Central government to set up the Cauvery water Management Board (CMB) and Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC) within six weeks, in regards to the Cauvery River water dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

The Centre's failure to constitute CMB led to various protests in Tamil Nadu. Earlier on Thursday, opposition parties held a black flag protest against the Prime Minister's visit to the city without constituting the CMB.(KSPCR) says that of over 120 cases of child rights violations reported since January till March this year, majority are of corporal punishment.

Bengaluru: Corporal punishment, though illegal, continues unabated across the state. The Karnataka State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (KSPCR) says that of over 120 cases of child rights violations reported since January till March this year, majority are of corporal punishment. The numbers were higher in November and December of 2017, when KSPCR registered 92 such cases. It is distressing that despite the ban on corporal punishment, such incidents continue to be reported, said Ms Veena Jadhav, UNICEF-legal consultant, KSPCR.

Article 17 from Chapter IV of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act prohibits any child being subjected to physical punishment and mental harassment. The section states, Educationists the world over are clear that what matters for creating a mature citizen is the provision of a learning environment in the formative years, which is what the school must become, and not a correctional centre, which has the connotations of a jail. Physical punishment and mental trauma are counter-productive, and may cause a child to become even more defiant and rebellious than before.

The Constitution also ensures protection for children against exploitation. The National Policy on Education (NPE) 1986/1992 states: Corporal punishment will be firmly excluded from education system. The Juvenile Justice Act prescribes a three-year jail for the accused teacher.

The commission receives a minimum of four complaints of corporal punishment every week on the Child Help line (1098). It increases during exams in non-government schools, said Nagasimha G. Rao, Nodal Supervisor and Director of Child Rights Trust.

But after complaining about corporal punishment, majority of students and their parents do not pursue the cases further as they are scared of retribution from institutions. Recently, a standard 11 boy of a private school in Hegade Nagar was beaten up by principal with a cane. The boy lodged a complaint with the child helpline, but later said it was accidental, Mr Nagasimha said.

Also, it takes a long time for such cases to reach a logical end as both parties dont turn up for hearing at the same time, Veena said. What is alarming is that nearly 30% of students changed schools because of corporal punishment, stated the National Commission of Child Right in its survey.

Teachers should be given psychosocial training, those indulging in it should be given exemplary punishment to stop others from practising it and awareness programmes should be organised on different innovative teaching methods. It is important for teachers to know the UNCRC Act, 1989, Posco Act, 2012, RTE Act, 2009 and Juvenile Justice Act, Nagasimha Rao said.

The most common reason for corporal punishment is pressure from schools and homes to perform better in exams, he said. The UN Convention on Child Rights (UNCRC), of which India is a signatory, also states in its Article 19 that state parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parents, legal guardians or any other person who has the care of the childThe Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday ordered registration of an FIR against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged rape of an 18-year-old woman in Unnao district. (Photo: PTI)

Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday ordered registration of an FIR against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged rape of an 18-year-old woman in Unnao district.

It also ordered to hand over the twin cases of rape and the custodial death of the victim's father to the CBI.

A separate inquiry report has been submitted by DIG (Prison) Love Kumar on the conduct of the Unnao jail officials during the detention of the victim's father, said an official statement issued on Wednesday night.

The district magistrate of Unnao has also submitted a report to the state government on lapses on part of the district hospital.

Also Read: My husband has isolated himself in room: Wife of BJP MLA accused in Unnao rape

Based on the SIT report submitted by ADG Lucknow Zone Rajeev Krishna, the BJP-led state government has decided to suspend D K Dwivedi, CMS and Prashant Upadhyay, EMO.

"Disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against three doctors namely Manoj Kumar (orthosurgeon), G P Sachan (surgeon) and Gaurav Agrawal (EMO) for laxity in giving proper medical care to the victim's father, both prior to judicial custody and on referral from jail to the district hospital while in judicial custody," said the statement.

"Circle Officer Safipur, Kunwar Bahadur Singh has been suspended for negligence in handling the repeated complaints given by the victim," it said.

The state government has also ordered to provide adequate security to the victim and her family.

An 18-year-old woman had created flutters after she accused the BJP MLA of raping her.

She tried to immolate herself in front of the CM's residence, seeking justice. Her father was arrested and later died in custody.Union Minister VK Singh on Thursday expressed disappointment over the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl from a minority nomadic community in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir. (Photo: File/PTI)

New Delhi: Union Minister VK Singh today expressed disappointment over the gangrape and murder of an eight-year-old girl from a minority nomadic community at Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir and said "we as humans" have failed the young girl.

Expressing distress over the tragedy, perhaps the first reaction from a BJP minister, he said we have failed her as humans. "But she will not be denied justice," the minister of state in the External Affairs Ministry added in his tweet.

Read: Kathua case: Meerut student travelled to J&K to rape 8-yr-old, says chargesheet

Earlier on Thursday, Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti assured that the investigation in regard to the Kathua rape case is on a fast track, adding "law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions".

CM Mufti took to Twitter and said, "The Law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions & statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track & justice will be delivered. #JusticeFor Asifa."

The Law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions & statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track & justice will be delivered. #JusticeForAsifa  Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) April 12, 2018

Earlier in January, the eight-year-old girl, belonging to a nomadic Muslim tribe in Kathua district of Jammu and Kashmir, was allegedly abducted, drugged, raped, and killed. Her body was found a week later.

A Special Investigation Team formed to probe the incident has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destruction of evidence.

A chargesheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir Police said abduction, rape and killing of the girl was part of a carefully planned strategy to remove the minority community from the area.

The rape has polarised the state with the local bar association calling for a bandh against what it termed the "targeting of minority Dogras", while the Valley saw protests demanding justice for the deceased.

The Jammu and Kashmir Police on Tuesday filed an FIR against lawyers of Jammu, who tried to prevent Crime Branch officers from filing a charge sheet in a court on Monday in connection with the Kathua rape and murder case.

Also Read: Kathua rape-murder case: Cops file FIR against lawyers for obstructing chargesheet

A special team of the crime branch has made a case of conspiracy, kidnapping, wrongful confinement, gang rape, murder and destruction of evidence against eight accused, which include: Sanjhi Ram, the suspected mastermind, who is a former revenue official and local strongman; his son Vishal Kumar, a college student; Ram's 16-year-old nephew who is the juvenile, and his friend Parvesh Kumar; Special Police Officers (SPOs) of Hiranagar police station Deepak Khajuria and Surinder Kumar; Sub Inspector of Hiranagar police station Anand Dutta, who was also investigating officer in the case, and Head Constable Tilak Raj.

Also Read: Jammu SPO investigating rape, murder of 8-yr-old, arrested for crime

Meanwhile, the family members of the accused and Hindu Ekta Manch members staged protest in Kathua on Thursday, demanding a CBI probe into the case.

Earlier, the members of Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party (JKNPP) and lawyers of Jammu Bar Association also protested with similar demands.

(With inputs from agencies)Late Wednesday, Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar went to the official residence of a senior police officer in Lucknow to claim that he neither raped the teenager nor had a role in her fathers death. (Photo: PTI)

Allahabad: The Allahabad High Court on Thursday said that it would pronounce its order on the Unnao rape case at 2 pm on Friday, news agency ANI reported.

Earlier on the same day, the high court questioned the Uttar Pradesh government's approach in handling the Unnao rape case, asking its counsel why the accused BJP MLA, Kuldeep Singh Sengar was not arrested even after an FIR.

The court also asked the counsel to clarify whether or not the government would arrest the MLA, and sought a reply after lunch.

It may be noted that the case has been handed over to the CBI, while a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of Lucknow zone police is also investigating it.

When the court convened after the lunch, UP government said, "it needs time to collect evidence."

Advocate general Raghvendra Singh, on behalf of the Uttar Pradesh government said there is no evidence against the BJP MLA in the alleged rape case.

The government further told the court that action was taken according to the law.

The court has taken suo motu cognisance of the case.

On Thursday morning, Uttar Pradesh police said that CBI will decide whether BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, accused of raping the Unnao woman, will be arrested.

Read: Unnao: BJP MLA charged with rape, CBI will decide on arrest, says police

On Wednesday, the court had ordered a stay on the cremation of the body of the girls father. The body had, however, already been cremated.

The girl has accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his brother of raping her in June 2017.

On Sunday, the rape victim tried to commit suicide outside Chief Minister Yogi Adityanaths house.

Her father, who was in custody since April 4, after getting into a fight with the MLAs brother, died on Monday.

On Tuesday, the police arrested the MLAs brother Atul Sengar and four others for assaulting the man.

The postmortem listed multiple abrasions near the abdomen, buttocks, thighs, above and below knee joints and arms  indicating that his death may have been caused by physical assault.

Also Read: Postmortem of Unnao rape victim's father reveals 14 brutal injuries

Late Wednesday, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, with a convoy of 20 vehicles full of supporters, went to the official residence of a senior police officer in Lucknow to claim that he neither raped the teenager nor had a role in her fathers death.

I just came here to prove that I have done no wrong and would be here anytime the police wants me, he told reporters, according to Hindustan Times.

The BJP MLA maintained that he was being framed, and told the police, When there is an arrest warrant, call me.New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged silence over the Unnao rape case and questioned why the accused BJP MLA was yet to be arrested. Showing pre-May 2014 tweets of Union ministers Sushma Swaraj and Smriti Irani in which they had attacked the then UPA government on crime against women, Congress' Kapil Sibal questioned the silence of these ministers. The Congress asked the Prime Minister to explain whether Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao is a slogan or a warning.

This is because BJP, earlier on Thursday, mentioned the Centres promise to the nation. ... When we say Beti Bachao, we really mean that. We are here to safeguard the interests of our daughters and we are committed to their safety. As far as Unnao incident is concerned, the law of justice will prevail, Culture minister Mahesh Sharma said. Mr Sibal questioned the prime ministers silence on Kathua and Unnao rape incidents, saying Modi talks of Mahatma Gandhi but the latter never remained silent on such issues.

He also took a dig at Amit Shah, saying he will only talk about animals and trees and things like that. What will he talk about? He is an animal lover, it is quite clear. Congress president Rahul Gandhi too described the rape and killing of the minor as unimaginable brutality that cannot go unpunished, and wondered how anybody can seek to protect the culprits. He also lashed out at the politics being played over the crime. How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil, he asked, adding that the violence against the child was a crime against humanity.The family of a 12-year-old girl who met an almost similar fate at the hands of a 22-year-old man, await justice.

Hyderabad: While the country vents its anger against the culprits who gangraped and brutally murdered an eight-year-old girl in Kathua province of Jammu and Kashmir, the family of a 12-year-old girl who met an almost similar fate at the hands of a 22-year-old man, await justice.

The young girl, Huda Begum, was lured into a under construction house in Bhavaninagar in the Old City by one Dastagir. He allegedly molested her and when she resisted, he strangled her to death. The body was found three days later. The murder occurred in August 2015.

The present DGP M. Mahender Reddy, who was commissioner of police, Hyderabad, at that time had held a press conference and announced the arrest of the accused. Nevertheless, a year later, in October 2016, Dastagir was acquitted by the court leaving the police red-faced. The police had said that they would challenge the acquittal in a higher court but almost a year has passed and no appeal has been filed.

Inspector Y. Nageshwar Rao of the Bhavaninagar police, said, The previous inspector did not challenge the acquittal in the court. I think there was no ground to challenge his acquittal. Is this an admission that the wrong man was caught or evidence was poor?

At the press conference, Mr Reddy had told media persons that during the course of the investigation, the accused Dastagir had confessed that he tried to rape the girl, but when she raised an alarm, he strangulated her.

While Dastagir was acquitted of this heinous crime, a local court sentenced him to three years imprisonment in another case for assaulting a police constable when the latter went to apprehend him.

Unable to bear the trauma and the failure of justice, the family of little Huda Begum has moved away from the locality. Nevertheless, the local residents have not forgotten the case and the sight of the innocent girl lying dead in a water sump in a thickly populated area still haunts them.

We had a lot of hope of getting justice for the girl. It never happened. If Dastagir was innocent, then who murdered the girl? Someone might have killed her, says Ahmed Khan, a local resident.

A woman of the locality said that harsh punishment in the case could have been a lesson to those persons who resort to such shameful crimes, a timely reminder that failure to solve murder and rape cases only encourages these crimes.New Delhi/Jammu: Congress president Rahul Gandhi and senior Congress leaders marched from the Congress headquarters to India Gate in the heart of Delhi at midnight to demand justice for the Kathua and Unnao rape victims.

The midnight march comes amid nationwide horror over the chilling details of the brutal gangrape of an 8-year-old being revealed in a chargesheet filed by Jammu and Kashmir police. In Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, the BJP MLA accused of rape has still not been arrested despite a case being registered under POCSO, which mandates immediate arrest. The case has now been transferred to the CBI.

Politicians across the divide on Thursday joined hands with showbiz celebrities and others to speak up for eight-year-old girl, a Gujjar from the minority Bakerwal community who was gangraped and killed in Kathua three months ago.

The brutal rape and killing of this child is being seen as a move by saffronists to push the Gujjar and Bakerwal community - the country's first line of defence against militancy - into militancy in a hitherto peaceful Jammu, where people refused to support militants.

An enraged nation demanded "exemplary punishment" for the culprits of the crime, even as the politics over the arrest of eight people in connection with the case continued to dominate the discourse in this city of temples.

The support for the eight-year-old girl was growing with politicians, cutting across party lines, seeking justice for her.

Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh said, "we as humans" had failed the eight-year-old girl, but she would not be denied justice. Congress president Rahul Gandhi described the rape and killing of the girl as "unimaginable brutality" that cannot go unpunished, and wondered how anybody can seek to protect the culprits. He also lashed out at the politics being played over the crime.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti said her government would not allow law to be obstructed and ensure justice in the rape-and-murder case.

Custodians of hate

8-year-old nomad Bakerwal (herdsmen) girl, went missing while grazing horses in Rasana village of Hiranagar tehsil of J&K's Kathua district on January 17. A week later, her body was found in woods near her village. The DNA and police investigations have revealed that she was held inside a local temple where she was drugged, repeatedly raped and killed. The police have arrested eight people including the custodian of the temple, his son and two Special Police Officers for their alleged involvement in the crime. A police sub-Inspector and a Head-Constable too have been arrested on charges of destroying evidence.Lucknow: Chief Justice of Allahabad High Court D. B. Bhonsle on Thursday observed that law and order had collapsed in the state. Taking suo motu cognizance of the Unnao rape case and the custodial death of the victims father, the Chief Justice observed that the rape survivor ran from pillar to post in search of justice for the last six months. He even asked advocate-general Raghvendra Singh if he was on the side of the rape survivor or the government.

The division bench comprising Chief Justice Bhonsle and Justice Sunil Kumar reserved the judgment till Friday. The advocate-general claimed that there was not enough evidence against the gangrape accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar. He said that the government was following the legal procedure and action would be taken against the MLA, who belongs to the ruling BJP, only when there was enough evidence on record.

The court wanted to know if the government collected adequate evidence before taking action in other cases as well. Earlier in the day the High Court had asked the state government why MLA Kuldeep Sengar had not been arrested so far. The court was not satisfied with the answer that the investigation had been handed over to the CBI.Bhopal: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to visit Chhattisgarhs south Bastar district of Bijapur on the Ambedkar Jayanti Day on April 14 to launch the first of the 1.5 lakh health and wellness centres mulled under the recently flagged off Ayushman Bharat scheme amid Naxals call to local villagers to stay off of the event. Mr Modi is scheduled to dedicate the centre at Jangla in Bijapur district on the day.

Incidentally, Maoists had blown up a bus carrying jawans of district reserve group (DRG), a counterinsurgency force of Chhattisgarh police, near Jangla recently killing two security personnel and injuring five others. Maoists were visiting villages in the region warning the locals not to attend the PMs meeting on the day, intelligence sources in Chhattisgarh police said.

The Naxals were threatening the villagers not to accept the offer by the political parties to carry them to the meeting in vehicles, a senior police officer posted in Bastar said quoting the intelligence reports. Maoist pamphlets were also found at many places in Bijapur-Bhopalpatnam road in Bijapur district warning the locals not to attend the meeting, the police officer said.HYDERABAD: Leader of the Opposition in Legislative Council Mohammed Ali Shabbir on Thursday slammed Prime Minster Narendra Modi on his fast and for blaming the Congress for the BJPs failure to conduct the Parliament during the recent Budget Session. He said the BJPs nation-wide campaign of dharnas and relay hunger strikes was yet an-other political gimmick to fool the people and pass the buck and blame the Opposition party and Congress for its dirty handling of minority quota issue of Telangana and the AP Special Status issue.

The PMs and BJPs agitation programmes remind one of popular proverb ulta chor kotwal to daante. The BJPs strategy to blame the Congress for all of its failures will not be beli-eved by the people, Mr Shabbir said. He said Parliament was not stalled by the Congress but by the partners and friends of the NDA like the AIADMK, TD and TRS. Mr Modi was silent throughout the Budget Session for 23 working days and had not made any efforts to bring normalcy, he said.

The BJP deliberately allowed disruption of the proceedings as it feared that the Congress would take up the burning issues like CBSE paper leak, bank scams. The Congress had also supported the critical public demands for special status to AP and the Cauvery water issue, he said. Mr Shabbir said the BJP was blaming the Congress in order to divert public attention from its failures on all fronts like PNB scam, failed poll promises etc. It is a shame that BJP is not giving due protection to the Dalits and also the minorities in the states ruled by them, he added.HYDERABAD: Senior Congress leaders in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are worried and the young leaders are happy with the decision of AICC president Rahul Gandhi in the selection of candidates for the coming Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Mr Gandhi has taken a decision to encourage young leaders in the party and also to give party tickets for the elections. Mr Gandhi has taken a decision to give 25 per cent of tickets to youth leaders in the coming Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.

Giving an indication about this, Mr Gandhi has given preference to young leaders by nominating 25 per cent young leaders as AICC members across the country. In the Congress circles, there is a speculation that the party leaders who are above 60 years of age will not be given party tickets for the next elections. APCC president N. Raghuveera Reddy said that the party High Command did not take any such decision but one thing is clear that Mr Gandhi wants to give 25 per cent of the tickets to young leaders in the next elections.

All these days, the Congress High Command gave preference to senior leaders than the young leaders while selecting the party candidates. It has become a habit during every election that the Youth Congress passes a resolution requesting the High Command to give some tickets to youth. Such resolutions are not required now as the High Command has decided to give more tickets to young leaders, a Youth Congress leader said.

Meanwhile, some senior Congress leaders want to bring their family members into politics so as to not lose the ticket. In some constituencies, whether it is Lok Sabha or Assembly, if strong young leaders are not available, seniors will be given tickets. Mr Jana Reddy and Geeta Reddy are sitting MLAs. A senior Congress leader said that youth leaders mean those between 45 to 55 years of age.Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhans sudden visit to RSS headquarters at Nagpur on Wednesday night has created a buzz in the ruling BJP circle here. Mr Chouhan who air dashed to Nagpur following a summon from the Sangh leadership had a closed-door meeting with Bhayaji Joshi, the number two in the RSS, BJP sources said on Thursday.

The unscheduled meeting comes in the wake of bloody violence witnessed during the April 2 Bharat Bandh called by Dalit outfits to protest against dilution of SC, ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, by the Supreme Court, that led to death of eight people. Sources said the Sangh leadership expressed serious concern over the growing incidents of conflict between the Dalits and others leading to social unrest in society.

Incidentally, the caste clashes occurred when the RSS was holding Samajik Samrasta Sammelan in Bhopal for the past months to bring the Dalits to the mainstream of society. Sources said the Sangh leadership also felt an unnecessary controversy was created by granting minister status to five religious leaders by the MP government.New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his silence over the Unnao rape case and questioned why the accused BJP MLA was yet to be arrested. The Congress also asked whether the Prime Minister would observe a fast on the rising crimes against women under BJP rule in the country.

Earlier in the day, Union minister V.K. Singh reacted on the Kathua rape case, saying we as humans had failed the eight-year-old girl who was gangraped and killed but she would not be denied justice.

This is perhaps the first reaction from a BJP minister on the issue. While the Opposition slammed the BJP top leadership including ministers for its silence on the Unnao rape case involving a party MLA, several Union ministers sought to defend the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh facing criticism over its response to the alleged gangrape of the minor in Unnao, saying it is committed to protecting women.Hyderabad: AIMIM Chief Asaduddin Owaisi fired another salvo at the Uttar Pradesh state administration on the Unnao rape case. Talking to the micro-blogging site twitter, Mr Owaisi recalled the observation of the Dharam Veer Commission that stated, Police in India are organised to enforce policy rather than law. This is especially true when the victims are Dalits and Muslims, he tweeted.

An 18 year-old- girl was raped, allegedly by Unnao MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in June 2017 at his house. The girl had left for Delhi after the incident and returned this month to Unnao.

Her father was arrested for allegedly possessing a firearm, but died under suspicious circumstances four days ago while in judicial custody.Chennai: BJP state president Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan has lashed out at MDMK chief Vaiko for criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi's helicopter travel and said his travel plans across the country were official and not like Vaiko's illegal boat trip to Sri Lanka.

Referring to his "famous" "illegal" boat trip to Sri Lanka in February 1989, she said Vaiko then slipped into the island nation. "Was it not cowardice on Vaiko's part then?" Dr. Tamilisai asked flaying the MDMK chief and reminded him that, "our Prime Minister Narendra Modiji dared to land in Pakistan."

She justified the helicopter visits of the PM, ahead of Mr. Modi's visit to the city to inaugurate the DefExpo 2018 at Thiruvidanthai on the East Coast Road near here on Thursday. "Protocol is followed for the PM's visits," she stressed.

On the DefExpo, the BJP chief said this mega event is a great opportunity for TN to ensure industrial growth and provide jobs for the youth. "It is unfortunate that the opposition parties are planning to show black flags at the PM. This is condemnable," Dr. Tamilisai added.

Asserting that there is no justification in staging violent protests that disrupt normal life or cause hardship to the people, the BJP state president claimed that protests could only bring out one's feelings but not fetch Cauvery water. "There is no doubt that Cauvery should reach TN. There will be a favourable solution in a month's time," she said and slammed the opposition parties and fringe elements that have been disrupting normal life in TN through agitations.

"How do you expect the Cauvery issue to be solved overnight when successive governments failed to take action to resolve this decades-old problem. The violent agitations only show that your feelings change with the political conditions," she said on Wednesday.Bengaluru: Leaving nothing to chance before the final leg of selection of candidates, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah stretched every sinew to make sure that voices of dissent do not mar the prospects of the ruling party, reaching out to leaders of several districts in north Karnataka during the last 24 hours.

The Chief Minister held back-to-back meetings with leaders of districts such as Ballari, Bidar and Belagavi to sort out differences between legislators and aspirants before emplaning for New Delhi to draw up the final list of candidates along with the top brass of the party. He put in extra efforts to pacify party loyalists in Ballari and Bidar who are upset with the induction of former minister Anand Singh and Nagendra along with their supporters, and Ashok Kheny, the latter an aspirant in Bidar (South) constituency. n Continued from Page 1

In Ballari, the entry of Member of Parliament and former minister BJP minister B Sreeramulu evidently upset the calculations of Mr Siddaramaiah in terms of winnable seats and therefore he asked district in-charge minister Santosh Lad to make sure that the party secures all nine seats in the district.

In Bidar, he was evidently treading on rough turf with veteran leader M Mallikarjun Kharge and his supporters batting for late chief minister Dharam Singhs son-in-law Mr Chandra Singh rather than allow new comer Mr Kheny to contest from Bidar (South).

In addition, in Belagavi, he addressed Jarkiholi brothers, Ramesh and Satish, and advised them to sink their differences or face the wrath of central leaders as the BJP could make the most of infighting to grab more seats in the border district.

Overall, he made sure that senior leaders would not have to waste time in mediating between warring factions or sorting out minor differences between local leaders but focus on a successful campaign strategy before polling on May 12, sources in the party told Deccan Chronicle.

With the partys election committee scheduled to meet on Friday to announce the names of 130-150 candidates later in the evening or on Saturday, Mr Siddaramaiah was invited by local leaders of Bidar and Bagalkote to contest from Basavakalyan and Badami respectively. While he reportedly rejected the invitation to contest from Basavakalyan, he told his colleagues that he would take a call on Badami after consultations with central leaders in New Delhi on Friday.

BALLARI

The entry of BJP MP, B. Sreeramulu into the poll scene seems to cause of concern for Mr Siddaramaiah. He held a meeting of Ballari leaders where he told district in charge minister, Santhosh Lad to ensure the victory of party candidates in nine seats. Highlighting the fact that he inducted Anand Singh and Nagendra much against the wishes of other leaders, Mr Siddaramaiah told the leaders to work for the victory of all those who joined the party recently. He felt that the contest should be tough to ensure that Mr Sreeramulu does not have an opportunity to campaign in other constituencies.

BELAGAVI

On Wednesday evening, Mr Siddaramaiah summoned Ramesh and Satish Jarkiholi and tried to assuage the feelings of the latter as he was dropped from the ministry. To make up for the loss of position, the party had made him AICC secretary, a fact which Mr Siddaramaiah reminded Mr Satish Jarkiholi as he instructed them to win all seats given to the family, and to counter the influence of Mr Sreeramulu who holds sway over voters belonging to the Scheduled Tribes.

BIDAR

The meeting with leaders from Bidar did not last long. When they invited Mr Siddaramaiah to contest from Basavakalyan, he reportedly turned down their invitation. He, however, had a tough task in convincing local leaders and securing their support for new comer Mr Ashok Kheny. With late CM Mr Dharam Singhs son-in-law, Chandra Singh, eyeing the ticket with the backing of Mr Mallikarjun Kharge, he tried his best to muster support for Mr Kheny.

BAGALKOTE

A delegation of Congress leaders met Mr Siddaramaiah and requested him to contest from Badami, a seat represented by B.B. Chimmanakatti, a fellow Kuruba leader. KPCC working president S.R. Patil and Mr Chimmanakatti said at the meeting that Mr Siddaramaiahs entry would bolster the partys prospects not only in Badami but in surrounding districts as well. Mr Siddaramaiah, however, said he would take a call after discussing the issue with central leaders.

T. NARASIPURA

Mr Sunil Bose, PWD minister, Dr H.C. Mahadevappas son, is reportedly upset with the party about hints that two tickets would not be given to his family. In the event of central leaders deciding to field only one of them, then either Dr Maha devappa or Mr Bose has to contest from T. Narasipura constituency. On learning about this possibility, Mr Bose reportedly mounted pressure on his father and even suggested that he find a new constituency for himself. The upshot: Dr Mahadevappa rushed to meet Mr Siddaramaiah before his departure for Delhi.The Narendra Modi government virtually allowed the dilution of the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. Hoping that the courts will rule on issues which the political executive is shy of addressing directly can be a recipe for disaster.

In the face of the rising dalit anger, however, the government has gone into damage control mode. The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have sent teams to various states to contain the political damage. Prime Minister Modi has asked all BJP MPs to spend two nights each in a dalit village.

And there will be a mega-event on Dr B.R. Ambedkars birth anniversary on April 14, with high rhetoric flowing from the Prime Minister himself.

However, the BJP is unlikely to remain unsinged by the dalit anger. The dalits perception seems to be that their fortunes are sliding as the legal and constitutional provisions safeguarding their interests are being systematically dismantled.

The Supreme Court ruling comes in the wake of the increasing atrocities against the dalits under BJP rule.

A dalit youngster can be beaten or even killed for daring to ride a horse to his own wedding or for sporting a moustache. The only time upper caste goons forget about untouchability is when they rape dalit women.

From Una, Shaharanpur and Bhima-Koregaon to Gwalior more recently, there has been an unprecedented display of arrogance towards dalits by politically emboldened upper caste Hindus. That is why the BJPs protestations about protecting dalit interests lack any credibility.

Given the partys largely upper caste support base, it has in fact been in favour of diluting the provisions of the SC/ST Act. This was one of the critical demands of the Maratha agitation after the rape of a girl from their community in Kopardi village in Maharashtra in 2016. Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had assured the agitators that he would recommend reviewing the provisions of this law to the Centre. Fearful of losing the Maratha vote, the BJP was keen to have a less stringent law.

Some in the Opposition have even suggested that the Central government was complicit in these developments. They point to the government not directing either of its two top law officers  the attorney-general or the solicitor-general  to defend the existing provisions of the law. The government was instead represented by the additional solicitor-general. He admitted that the government had received certain complaints about misuse of the provisions and argued that anticipatory bail should be granted in cases registered under the SC/ST Act.

Not only did the government not mount a vigorous legal defence in the Supreme Court, it also did not move a review petition immediately after the ruling. A senior dalit leader and a minister in the government, Thawar Chand Gahlot, who had immediately alerted the government to the impending trouble, was ignored. Only when the BJPs allies and ministers Ramdas Athawale and Ram Vilas Paswan began speaking out against the court ruling that the government decided to act. The ruling came on March 20 and the review petition was filed two weeks later, on April 2, with the attorney-general himself appearing in court, on the very day dalits across the country had called a Bharat Bandh against the order.

By this time, however, the ground had shifted. Even the dalit leaders of the BJP had started rethinking their future. Five dalit MPs from the party  Ms Savitribai Phule from Bharaich, Mr Chotelal Kanwar from Robertsganj, Mr Ashok Kumar Dohrey from Etawah,

Dr Yashwant Singh from Nageen and Mr Udit Raj from North-West Delhi constituencies  raised the red flag about the partys attitude towards dalits. While Mr Udit Raj vented his anger on the social media, the rest wrote angry letters to the Prime Minister. They alleged discrimination in the party against dalits, threats to removing reservations for SCs and STs and police brutality against those who had protested against the Supreme Courts order on April 2.

It is not surprising that four of the five protesting dalit MPs were from Uttar Pradesh, which has 21 per cent dalit population. They reflected the palpable fear in the party that the dalit vote which it had mobilised successfully in 2014 was likely to slip away. Not only could the dalit vote shift, it could also catalyse an alliance with the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and Muslims for the 2019 general election.

The OBCs also think that they are being targeted. The common perception of Yadavs in Bihar is that their leader, Mr Lalu Prasad Yadav, has been singled out for punishment while all upper caste leaders accused in the fodder scam were discharged; and that he continues to be denied bail while Salman Khan was given bail within 48 hours of conviction. These perceptions may not have a legal basis, but they have strong political implications. There is also a strong suspicion that the BJP-RSS combine is keen to do away with OBC and dalit reservations  RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has repeatedly called for a review of the policy. His statements have emboldened the upper castes to mount anti-reservation protests.

As for Muslims, who form 15 per cent of the total population, the Hindutva forces in the past four years have attempted to reduce them to second-class citizens by setting up a series of hoops they must jump through to prove their nationalism. Hate crimes against them have gone up and they have been targets of lynching in the name of cow protection. From 2012 till now, it is estimated that 97 per cent of all cow-terrorism deaths have taken place since the BJP assumed power in 2014  that is 76 people killed, most of them Muslims. And they have been killed mostly in North India.

The ground is fertile for forging political unity among dalits, OBCs and Muslims. In North India, that could make things very tough for the BJP in 2019. Such an alliance is already taking shape in Uttar Pradesh and could soon spread to other Hindi belt states. Its in this alliance of disgruntled communities which have borne the brunt of Mr Modis misgovernance that he may eventually get his comeuppance.Two recent horrific crimes that have jolted the nations conscience  one in UPs Unnao being the rape of a minor girl, allegedly by a BJP MLA, and the later thrashing and killing of her father in police custody as he had the temerity to complain; and the other at Kathua, near Jammu, where the abduction and rape of an eight-year-old child of the nomadic Bakerwal tribe by police personnel, apparently because she was Muslim, has caused tension and political unease  do not appear to have affected the BJP leadership very much.

At least there seem to be no signs of it. The Union home ministry hasnt spoken out, when at the very least there has been an open violation of the law on rape, which says if the complaint concerns a minor, the alleged culprit must be taken into custody rightaway. Key changes in the law on rape had been wrought following the infamous Nirbhaya incident of December 2012.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi can lead his flock on a protest hungerstrike on Thursday against the so-called irresponsible attitude of the Opposition parties, but he is not one to publicly nudge UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath or the two BJP ministers from Jammu in the Mehbooba Mufti government, who have tried to thwart action against those accused.

After the Unnao incident, the minor complained to the CM. As nothing happened, she tried to kill herself. She was removed to a local hotel and is apparently being held incommunicado there by the police. Her father was thrashed in police custody by the brother of the BJP MLA accused of rape, and succumbed to his injuries. Many days have passed. The rape incident dates back to June 2017.

A more self-respecting chief minister may have resigned by now, owning moral responsibility in such an extraordinary case; or may have been asked by his party to do so. But BJP spokesmen are being brazen. They speak of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) being constituted. This is a sure sign of causing delay to fix the evidence. The MLA being accused is free and smilingly gives media interviews. A few minor policemen have been suspended. BJP leaders still mouth the slogans that are now meaningless: Beti bachao, beti padhao and Sabka saath, sabka vikas.

In the Kathua case of January this year, a group of lawyers, whose political loyalties can hardly be difficult to guess, physically tried to stop the filing of a case against the accused persons recently. In doing so, they have dishonoured their profession. Lawyers are technically officers of the court. The poor child had been taken to a temple, violated and murdered. Yet BJP ministers have sought to defend those being accused. The communal card is all too apparent.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, April 11, 2018, about the use of Facebook data to target American voters in the 2016 election and data privacy. (Photo: AP)

Mark Zuckerbergs mea culpa moment before a joint hearing of the US Senate commerce and judiciary committees would have been a humbling experience for the young billionaire. The Facebook founder even shed his customary T-shirt and jeans for a business suit, but what he said may not have convinced everyone that companies like his can do much to keep peoples data and privacy secure.

The toxicity of personal data in todays age is a complex problem. The belated good intentions of new economy firms offering social connectivity in exchange for users personal details may not amount to much, particularly in exploitation of such data for purposes like fixing elections by targeting voters in democracies.

Admitting this is an ongoing arms race, Zuckerberg promised that the coming elections in India and Pakistan would be fair, and not subject to Russian-type intervention as in US President Donald Trumps election. He came away with a stern warning from the senators that if Facebook and others dont fix the privacy issue, the US government would intervene. The Indian government has also been trying to convince those handling Indian data to locate their servers in the country. While this may not help much as data can be stolen even from a server secured inside Fort Knox, server location might help legally in terms of territorial control.

A significant comment by the Facebook founder was that he wasnt against regulation, but it should be the right regulation. Owning up responsibility, as Zuckerberg seemed to, is great but how to regulate discretion over how people freely give away personal data is still a riddle. The question that arises from the Facebook inquisition is whether we are any nearer solving it.It is nothing more than a farce: Arjun Puri

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is diverting the peoples attention from his inability to resolve contentious issues with a day-long fast on April 12. This is ridiculous and an attempt to run away from crucial issues raised by the Opposition in the just-concluded Parliament session.

The TDP pulled out of the NDA in March over the Centres refusal to grant special category status (SCS) to Andhra Pradesh after 14th Finance Commission removed the SCS concept. The atmosphere of protests in the country was because of the BJPs ideology to divide the country and crush dalits, tribals and minorities. The Congress wanted to debate issues such as the PNB scam, CBSE paper leak, alleged dilution of SC/ST Act, special status to Andhra Pradesh and setting up of the Cauvery water management board.

We wont allow the politics of hatred and division aimed at garnering votes to succeed. The entire country knows that Mr Modi is anti-dalit. The BJP follows the ideology of oppressing dalits, tribals and minorities. The Congress will stand against it and defeat the BJP in 2019 general election. Even the BJPs dalit MPs say that Mr Modi is casteist.

To divert the peoples attention, Mr Modi and his team is staging a political drama of a one-day fast.

Its an irony for the country that Mr Modi is calling ruling party MPs to hold a day-long fast to protest against the disruption of parliamentary proceedings by Opposition parties. In a parliamentary democracy, it is the responsibility of the ruling party and its leadership to ensure the smooth functioning of Parliament, but the Modi government, instead of doing this, is blaming others for its failure.

Instead of keeping a fast, and blaming the Opposition for disruption in both Houses of Parliament,

Mr Modi must explain to the people why he ran away from a discussion or tried to silence voices raised against it. Due to the non-serious and dictatorial attitude of the ruling party, over 200 important hours of Parliament have been lost. No serious attempt was made by the government to end the logjam.

Knowing its role as the main Opposition party, the Congress wants to discuss and deliberate important issues. It wants to discuss the details of the Rafale deal, but the government deliberately avoided it by not allowing Parliament to function. To avoid a discussion on any subject of public interest, the government secretly promoted the disruption of the second half of the Budget Session, which also passed the crucial Finance Bill without any discussion. The Modi government should be ashamed of disrespecting Parliament and killing the voices of the Opposition in both the Houses.

Its the ruling partys own allies that did not allow Parliament to function. The government did not pay any attention to the demands of its allies.

Why is Mr Modi and his party observing a fast? Will they tell the people that they intentionally avoided a discussion on the floor of the House, which may have exposed their failure or misgovernance? The PMs fast is nothing more than a farce. The PM should instead apologise to the youth, dalits and other sections of society who have been let down by his government.



The writer is a Youth Congress leader

Mr Modi means business: Harish Khurana

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah, along with all BJP MPs, will observe a day-long fast on April 12 to protest against disruptions during the recently-concluded Budget Session of Parliament. The Lok Sabha lost nearly 128 hours due to disruptions and adjournments during the session. Only five bills were passed and another five introduced in the House.

Mr Modi will be doing his work from office while on fast and Mr Shah will be sitting in Hubli, Karnataka.

As usual, the Opposition is making a hue and cry of this and terming it as a political gimmick. It has now become a routine for the Opposition that whatever Mr Modi does is politics, which is wrong.

The Congress is doing divisive and negative politics  that is why the Budget Session witnessed only four per cent productivity in the Lok Sabha and eight per cent in the Rajya Sabha. If it was a gimmick, then why would BJP MPs forego their 23-day salary? If the Congress and other Opposition parties were worried about the Budget Session, even they would have surrendered their salaries.

The Congress is blaming the BJP for doing the same in the past, but this case is different. The UPA government at that time was not ready to discuss corruption and other issues. In our case, the NDA government was ready for a discussion, but the Opposition was not ready. In fact, they could not even unite to bring in a no-confidence motion on the floor of the House. This showed the seriousness of their motion, and it proved they only wanted to disrupt the House. This was for the first time that the Finance Bill was passed without a discussion because of disruption. There were a lot of bills which were to be passed, but due to disruption in Parliament nothing could be done. They say the government is doing nothing and is trying to abolish SC/ST Act, but the Opposition is not ready to discuss anything.

The country saw the seriousness of the Congress when they called a fast at Rajghat led by its president Rahul Gandhi against the atrocities towards dalits by the BJP, but their own Delhi president Ajay Maken, along with two other senior leaders, were caught on camera eating chola bhaturas before the fast. After this incident, we call it a symbolic fast. They have made a mockery of fasting and showed their seriousness towards sensitive issues of the country.

We have seen in the past too that Rahul Gandhi preferred to stay out of the country or spread rumours and lies and do immature politics on sensitive matters. Mr Modi means business. He has instructed that MPs should also focus on about 20,844 villages where Scheduled Castes and Tribes account for over half the population.

All BJP MPs will spend a night in these villages while ministers will spend two nights in different parts of the country.

The Congress and other Opposition parties have to understand that they have to respect the temple of democracy: Parliament. They have to discuss issues on the floor of the House, otherwise people will ask them why didnt they raise their points where they had to.

The writer is a Delhi BJP spokespersonThe fracas about a firm, Cambridge Analytica, misusing the data of over 87 million Facebook users to give an advantage to Donald Trumps election campaign in the United States reveals the large role that social media sites like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn now play in all our lives. The way they can be and are used for surveillance, and the power they give to these large corporations is something entirely new.

The mining of information about our hopes and fears is not restricted to America alone. Media reports have shown how this has spread to politics worldwide. From India to Brazil, from Germany to the UK, Facebook employees have become de facto campaign workers. Many political parties from the BJP to the Congress have used the campaign skills of Facebook staff, sometimes to spread misinformation or so-called fake news. These have specially helped train right-wing political groups.

In India, a Facebook subsidiary, reports Bloomberg, helped develop the campaign strategy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who now has more Facebook followers than any other world leader. In the Philippines, it trained the strategists of President Rodrigo Duterte, known for encouraging extra-judicial killings, in how to most effectively use the platform. And in Germany it helped an anti-immigrant party to win its first Bundestag seats, according to its campaign staff. In 2015, it helped Mauricio Macri of Argentina, and Polish nationalist President Andrzej Duda became one of the first world leaders to live-stream his inauguration on the social network.

India is arguably Facebooks most important market, with the nation recently edging out the United States as the companys biggest user base. The number of users in India is growing twice as fast as in America. And that doesnt even count the 200 million people who use the companys WhatsApp messaging service in this country, more than anywhere else on the planet.

Google (which is a part of Alphabet) and Facebook are among the largest companies in the world. They offer their services for free to users but make their money by selling profiles, including psychological profiles of their users, to anyone who might be interested. They are able to manipulate electoral preferences by sending fake news to people who fit the required profile.

There are now 2.2 billion (2,200 million) Facebook users around the world, which is a little less than double the population of India, and indicates the influence that it can command. A December 2017 Bloomberg report says: By the time of Indias 2014 elections, Narendra Modi relied heavily on Facebook and WhatsApp to recruit volunteers, who in turn spread his message on the social media. Since his election, Modis Facebook followers have risen to 43 million, almost twice Trumps count.

As Modis social media reach grew, his followers increasingly turned to Facebook and WhatsApp to target harassment campaigns against his political rivals. India has become a hotbed for fake news, with one hoax story this year that circulated on WhatsApp leading to two separate mob beatings, resulting in seven deaths. In the past year, several journalists critical of the ruling party have been killed. Hindu extremists who back Modis party have used the social media to issue death threats against Muslims or critics of the government.

It is significant that in her final editorial In the age of false news that Gauri Lankesh wrote for her newspaper before she was killed, she lamented how misinformation and propaganda on the social media were poisoning the political environment.

The social medias role can go far beyond that. Though it is bound by law to maintain the secrecy of emails sent for free by it, Google and other email service providers offer no guarantee that they cannot be bullied by powerful intelligence agencies to reveal the confidential email contents to them. The relationship and sharing of information between large social media firms and the security agencies is a murky affair, which is unlikely to be exposed since it would tread on sensitive ground. The social media offers many advantages to users, but it also imposes many limitations on them.

A research paper, Silicon Valley and the Threat to Democracy, by Niall Fergusson, argues that the real threat to democracies around the globe is the social medias inexorable and unavoidable destruction of common ground and shared perspective. It further goes on to say: The reality is, no matter how Facebook, Google and Twitter tweak their algorithms, a new kind of politics has been born. There are now two kinds of politicians in this world: the kind that know how to use the social media as a campaign tool, and the ones who lose elections.

Starting out as services that are able to fine tune characteristics of their millions of users to offer a well-defined set of consumers to their advertisers, the social media is able to do psychological profiles of each of their users, relating to their desires, hopes and deepest fears. This involves an ability to manipulate them by sending them fake news feeds, which makes it very powerful as it gives politicians what they want.

Only one guilty organisation, Cambridge Analytica, has so far been uncovered, and it has been told to go by Facebook. There must be many others which are involved in similar secret deals. The honeypot of manipulation of voters to benefit some political parties is too tempting for business interests to ignore, not because it gives them money but because it increases their political clout.

Images from the recent past showed how several authoritarian governments were caught off-guard when large numbers of their citizens, from Cairo to Tehran, armed with cellphones, took part in mini-rebellions that challenged their authority. Now governments around Europe, and elsewhere around the world, are more worried about the role that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have begun to play.Indian Space Research Organisations (Isro) navigation satellite IRNSS-1I, on board the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C41), lifts off at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh on Thursday. (Photo: AP)

SRIHARIKOTA: After facing unexpected setbacks and delays in putting up the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) or Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC), the Indian Space Research Organisation completed constellation of satellites by successfully launching the backup satellite IRNSS-1I on Thursday thus moving a step closer to having Indias own GPS.

Apart from providing position-based services, the indigenous constellation will help the various industries including the fishermen, merchant ships, transport operators, traffic management, tracking trains movement and alerting the road users at unmanned level crossings, land survey, port operations, agriculture and disaster management. It will also be extremely useful to the armed forces during the time of conflicts.

Following the 32 hour countdown, the PSLV-C41 carrying IRNSS-1I satellite blasted off from the first launch pad of Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota at 4.04 am on Thursday.

After a flight of about 20 minutes, the rocket has placed the navigation satellite Sub-Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit with the perigee of 281.5 km and apogee of 20,730 km. Subsequently, the satellite will be taken to geosynchronous orbit at the height of 36,000 km through four orbit raising operations.

Speaking after the launch, Isro chairman K. Sivan gave a call to

the industries and academic institutions to make use of the NavIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation) for bringing out several innovative applications to help the common man.With this launch, the first phase of Navic constellation is completed. The applications of this particular constellation for providing position-based services started. We should make use of the constellation to ensure that underprivileged and unreached people also getting position based services, Isro chairman Sivan told reporters after the launch.IRNSS-1I is the latest member of the Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) system.

NavIC, also known as Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), is an independent regional navigation satellite system designed to provide position information in the Indian region and 1500 km around the Indian mainland.

Isro is also planning to launch the second phase of navigation satellites. It is expected to have seven satellites. We are preparing the proposal for the next phase. The navigation satellites will have advanced technologies and indigenous atomic clocks, he said.

The success assumes significance after Isro faced setbacks in two of its last three missions. Scientists are still trying to establish the contact with the GSAT-6A satellite of which the ground station lost communication on April 1.

It will take a month for the satellite to reach its final destination. As

of now, the satellite is doing well. It has unfolded the solar panels and

was taken over by MCF control and it is receiving commands. We have nearly a month-long activity, including four orbit raising operations before putting the satellite into its final orbit, said M.Annadurai, director, Isro Satellite Centre (ISAC).

It is the 43rd mission of PSLV with 41 successful missions, said R. Hutton, mission director, PSLV-C41 rocket. It is the shortest time span between the two launches as Isro previously launched GSLV-F08 rocket with GSAT-6A on March 29.

NavIC is an independent regional navigation satellite system consisting of seven satellites. It is designed to provide position information in the Indian region and 1500 km around the Indian mainland.

The satellite system has already six functioning satellites. Following the atomic clock failure in IRNSS-1A, Isros attempt to send a backup satellite IRNSS-1H on August 31 last year ended in failure as the heat shield was not separated. This is the final and the 9th satellite of IRNSS series developed by Isro.

Landing test for reusable launch vehicle

Isro is planning to conduct landing tests on reusable launch vehicle land in the coming months.

In the previous mission, we have achieved the simulated landing on the sea. Now, we are planning to have the landing on the wheels. The trail will be done through helicopter drop tests that will validate the software, methods and algorithm for unmanned landing process, said S.Somnath, director, Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram.

Next step is to take it to the orbit and putting it to the few orbits and then do some useful experiments before come back and land on the earth. We are working on the first part of the mission with the available resources. The second part will be taken up after the due approval process, he added.

Indigenous atomic clocks

After facing issues with the imported atomic clocks in IRNSS-1A, the Indian Space Research Organisation has designed and developed indigenous atomic clocks for future missions.

Next series of IRNSS satellites going to have advanced satellite system, mostly it will have features of restricted services, Isro officials said.

There is much advancement in technologies. After going through the issues with the atomic clocks, we have indigenously developed this atomic clock, they added.

Before using the atomic clocks and we will demonstrate the accuracy of the clocks in the coming launches. It is a major development, officials said.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.Later this month in San Francisco, the ride-hailing firm will launch Uber Rent in collaboration with Getaround, a peer-to-peer car sharing service that offers privately owned cars for rent. (Photo: AFP)

Uber Technologies Inc is looking to be virtually a one-stop transportation shopping app, saying on Wednesday it will add new services, including car-sharing and train tickets.

Later this month in San Francisco, the ride-hailing firm will launch Uber Rent in collaboration with Getaround, a peer-to-peer car sharing service that offers privately owned cars for rent.

Were going beyond cars. We are about mobility - making mobility available to everyone, everywhere, Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi said at a forum on Wednesday in Washington. We want to be part of the solution.

Uber also announced a partnership with Masabi, which offers mobile ticketing services for public transport, to let customers book and use tickets for train, bus and ferry services in the app.

Uber is also expanding Uber Bike by JUMP to Washington, D.C., following its rollout in San Francisco earlier this year, and new efforts to promote car sharing.

Uber is vowing to work with US cities, which Khosrowshahi noted will see a rising percentage of the countrys population. The company has at times had a contentious relationship with some major cities.

He said the company backs a number of transportation solutions.

Thats going to include bikes, and thats going to include buses and subways, etc., and we want to be a part of the solution, he said, adding that Uber is sharing more data with cities to help them manage congestion.

Going forward, Uber will be less about simply booking a car but travelling from Point A to Point B in the best way with a variety of transit options, he said.

One big challenge, he added, is the future of the worlds 1.2 billion vehicles. We have to solve the issue of car ownership, Khosrowshahi said.

As an asset class, cars are very inefficient he added, noting that 95 per cent of the time cars sit unused. We have to work together to make sure that living in a city... doesnt require you to own a car.

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.HMD Global has announced the Nokia 3 will begin to receive the Android Oreo software update this week. With Nokia 8, Nokia 6 and Nokia 5 already updated to the latest version of Android, Nokia smartphones continue to deliver a vanilla Android with the latest updates.

With Android Oreo on the Nokia 3, it includes latest Oreo features that include Picture-in-Picture mode and 60 new emojis. Androids Instant Apps helps the Nokia 3s optimised battery to last longer by limiting background app use.

As well as updates, HMD Global promises to work closely with Google to ensure all new additions to the Nokia smartphone portfolio deliver the best possible software experience. The recently announced Nokia 8 Sirocco, Nokia 7 plus and the new Nokia 6, will all be available with Android Oreo out of the box, whilst the Nokia 1 delivers the latest OS experience through Android Oreo (Go edition).

The company claims to deliver an up-to-date Android experience with regular security patches.

Enterprise credentials:

Android Oreo also claims to boost the enterprise credentials of smartphones by streamlining the deployment of devices, creating personal and professional profiles, and improving security. With Google zero touch enrolment, a feature first introduced in Android Oreo, organisations can deploy a Nokia smartphone with enterprise mobility management settings pre-configured. The phones can be configured online and drop-shipped to employees so that they can start using their Nokia phones right out of the box. All Nokia smartphones with Android Oreo from Nokia 3 and up support zero-touch enrolment.

The Nokia 8 was one of the first devices included in Android Enterprise Recommended, a new Google-led programme that makes recommendations on the business devices and networks best suited for Android Enterprise deployments. The Nokia 8 Sirocco, Nokia 7 plus and the new Nokia 6 are also validated by Google to be part of the Android Enterprise Recommended programme.

With work profiles, IT administrators can separate work apps and data from the users personal profile, creating the best of both worlds. Organisations will be safe in the knowledge that all sensitive information is kept secure. And employees will have the freedom to use the personal apps and services they want, all on one device.

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.Trump suggested on Monday that he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. (Photo: File)

Washington: President Donald Trump on Wednesday warned Russia to "get ready" for a missile attack on its ally Syria, suggesting imminent retaliation for last week's suspected chemical weapons attack.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis took a more measured tone, saying the US and its military coalition partners were still studying intelligence on the attack.

At stake is the potential for confrontation, if not outright conflict, between the US and Russia, former Cold War foes whose relations have deteriorated in recent years over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine, its interference in the 2016 US presidential election and, most recently, its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russian lawmakers have warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime and that it could trigger a direct US-Russian military clash.

Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted  a stark warning of a potential major confrontation.

Trump, who has often said a commander in chief should never telegraph his military intentions, apparently did so himself, tweeting that missiles "will be coming" in response to the suspected chemical attack that killed at least 40 people near Damascus.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," Trump wrote. "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Defense Secretary Mattis, however, indicated that evidence of what happened was still being studied.

At a photo-taking session during a Pentagon meeting with his Dutch counterpart, Mattis was asked by a reporter whether he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian government.

"We're still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies," Mattis said. "We're still working on this."

Trump suggested on Monday that he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence.

This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which the US government had video and other evidence of certain aspects of an actual attack by Syrian aircraft, which involved the use of sarin gas. Trump responded then by launching dozens of Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

Asked whether the US military was ready to conduct an attack in Syria if ordered, Mattis replied, "We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the president determined."

Mattis was to meet with Trump later on Wednesday.

In the past, Trump has condemned others for forecasting military plans, repeatedly blistering President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign. During one speech, he said, "We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything."

Asked about Trump's tweet about an impending attack on Syria, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who ran the Pentagon for President Bill Clinton, said on CNN that it "compromises the mission somewhat."

Trump did not detail what a strike on Syria would look like, or whether these would be US missiles.

US officials have been consulting with France, Britain and other allies on a possible joint military operation, but the timing remained in doubt on Wednesday.

Trump cancelled a foreign trip in order to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Assad.

Shortly after his tweeted warning to Russia, Trump took a more conciliatory tone in lamenting that the US-Russia relationship "is worse now than it has ever been." There is no reason for this, he wrote, adding that "Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together."

Syria's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that Trump's threats to attack are "reckless" and endanger international peace and security.

Trump's administration has sought to show toughness on Russia, with a series of economic and diplomatic actions, including new sanctions last week against government officials and oligarchs.

Trump has largely avoided criticising Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, though he singled him out in a tweet over the weekend for supporting Assad.

The US, France and Britain have been in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, US officials have said.

A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the US in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syria's political and military support from Russia and Iran.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday called for a "strong and joint response" to the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday. The Syrian government denies responsibility.

The French president does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the US-led coalition created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Multiple IS terror attacks have targeted France, including one in March.Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad had studied at the University of Illinois and lived in Toledo since 2006. (Photo: toledoblade.com)

Houston: A 38-year-old Indian engineer in the US state of Ohio, accused of funding a top al-Qaida leader, has pleaded guilty to concealment of financing of terrorism.

Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad, second of the two brothers, is accused of sending money to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was later designated a terrorist and killed by a US drone in 2011.

Mohammad is to receive an agreed-upon prison sentence of 60 months, although he would receive credit for the 30 months he already has spent in the Lucas County jail awaiting trial, The Blade newspaper reported on Wednesday.

US District Judge Jeffrey Helmick told him that due to his plea and conviction, he would be deported to India.

"You ultimately will be removed from this country and told you are not welcome to come back," the judge said.

Mohammad had studied at the University of Illinois and lived in Toledo since 2006.

As part of a plea agreement, the four original charges brought by a federal grand jury in 2015 are to be dismissed at the time of sentencing, which was not scheduled, the report said.

Two co-defendants, Sultane Roome Salim, 43, and his brother, Asif Ahmed Salim, 37, are scheduled for a change of plea hearing before Judge Helmick later on Thursday. Mohammad and the Salims had been set for trial April 23 with jury selection beginning on Monday.

A fourth co-defendant, Mohammad's brother, Yahya Farooq Mohammad, 39, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to provide and conceal material support or resources to terrorists.

He had also pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit a crime of violence for a separate case in which he tried to hire a hitman to kill Judge Jack Zouhary. At the time, Judge Zouhary was presiding over the terrorism case.

Yahya Farooq Mohammad was sentenced to a total of 27 years in prison and ordered deported to India once he completes his prison term.

Michael Freeman, an assistant US attorney, outlined the factual basis for the charge to which Ibrahim Mohammad pleaded guilty.

Freeman said Mohammad's brother and others raised money in 2009 in the United Arab Emirates to deliver to al-Awlaki in Yemen.

Freeman said Farooq raised some funds through credit card fraud, sought funds from others he knew, and enlisted his brother in the United States to help.

Two associates of Farooq delivered USD 7,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki in Yemen in late January, 2009, Freeman said. In July, 2009, Farooq delivered USD 22,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki.

Ibrahim knew, Freeman said, that al-Awlaki had expressed support for the killing of 13 US service personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, by Nidal Hasan on November 5, 2009, and that al-Awlaki had been involved in the attempt to destroy an airliner over Detroit on December 25, 2009.

When interviewed by the FBI in Chicago in 2011, Ibrahim lied about the financial transactions, Freeman said, and later deleted emails that contained words such as Awlaki, jihad, Taliban, and Yemen from his email account.Many of the colossal projects being built by state-owned Chinese firms and financed with loans from China, are leaving countries with billions of dollars in debt to Beijing.

Beijing: IMF chief Christine Lagarde on Thursday warned China about saddling other countries with a problematic increase in debt through its ambitious global trade infrastructure project.

Lagarde made the comments at a Beijing forum on Chinese President Xi Jinpings signature Belt and Road initiative, a $1 trillion road, rail and construction project spanning dozens of countries  from Asia to Africa and Europe.

But many of the colossal projects are being built by state-owned Chinese companies and financed by loans from China, leaving states billions of dollars in debt to Beijing.

These ventures can also lead to a problematic increase in debt, potentially limiting other spending as debt service rises, and creating balance of payment challenges, Lagarde told the crowd of Chinese and foreign officials.

In countries where public debt is already high, careful management of financing terms is critical, she said.

Some countries like Sri Lanka have already ended up deeply in debt and been left with little choice, but to turn over crucial assets to Beijing as way to restructure the loans. In Sri Lankas case, the island nation handed over a long term lease on the strategically located and bustling Hambantota Port to pay down debt. Lagarde advocated greater transparency and coo-peration to get all stakeholders on the same page to avoid such problems.

Its not a free lunch, its something where everybody chips in, its not just honey for bees, she said, warning that the large scale spending projects also come with corruption temptations for officials.

Projects can always present the risk of potentially failed projects and the misuse of funds. In some corners, its even called corruption, Laga-rde told officials, many of whom preside over Belt and Road projects.

The speech may ruffle feathers in Beijing where leaders have heaped praise on the project and been loathe to acknowledge any risks or pitfalls in the initiative, which is often described as a revival of the ancient Silk Road trade routes.

Speaking before Lagarde, Chinas central bank chief Yi Gang said Chinese banks had achieved great successes providing low cost financing to Belt and Road countries.Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday warned that threats of Western military action in response to an alleged chemical attack would only lead to further chaos in the region. (Photo: AFP)

Damascus: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday warned that threats of Western military action in response to an alleged chemical attack would only lead to further chaos in the region.

"With every victory on the ground, some Western countries raise their voices and intensify their activities in an effort to change the trajectory of events," said Assad.

"These voices, and any possible actions, will only contribute to further destabilisation in the region," he said in comments posted on the Syrian presidency's social media accounts.

Assad spoke during a meeting with Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign policy advisor to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other officials. Assad and Velayati criticised Western threats to carry out strikes on Syria in response to the alleged use of toxic weapons at the weekend, the presidency said.

"The threats of some Western countries to attack Syria is based on lies that these countries fabricated along with terrorist organisations," Assad's office said.

Syrian troops have braced for Western strikes across the country, hiding assets and deserting key buildings.

A potential attack was looming on Thursday, with US President Donald Trump mulling over military options and British Prime Minister Theresa May holding an emergency cabinet meeting.Pakistan's National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq has asked the interior ministry to crack down on any individual or groups involved in posting blasphemous material about the Hindu religion. (Image: Facebook)

Islamabad: Pakistan's National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz Sadiq has asked the interior ministry to crack down on any individual or groups involved in posting blasphemous material about the Hindu religion, after the minority community leaders protested against a wave of online hate speech hurting their religious sentiments.

The directive came yesterday after a picture of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan depicted as a Hindu god was doing the rounds on social media. The Speaker issued the directive following a protest by Hindu legislators who said that their religion was being smeared in a wave of hate speech online, the Dawn reported.

The issue was raised by Ramesh Lal who presented an example of the blasphemous content  a picture of a Hindu deity with Imran's face, the report said. Such posts have deeply hurt the religious sentiments of more than four million Hindus living in Pakistan.

The lawmaker said that such offences were covered by cyber laws and should not remain unpunished, it said. Demanding legal action against the perpetrators for posting blasphemous content, he asked the speaker to order an inquiry into the matter.

Another parliamentarian Lal Chand Malhi said there was evidence of a malicious online campaign targeting the minority community and desecrating images that were revered by millions of Pakistani Hindus. In response to the complaints, Speaker Sadiq directed Minister of State for Interior Tallal Chaudhry to complete the inquiry within seven days.

He also directed the state minister to lodge a case against the culprits with the Federal Investigation Agency. Lal said he along with Malhi prepared a complaint letter which will be handed over to Chaudhry. He said that the social media campaign against the Hindu community had been going on for two weeks. Earlier in the house, PTI vice chairman Shah Mehmood Qureshi said his party fully supported the Hindu community.

He alleged that such content was being generated by the social media wing of a political party. Commenting on the PTI allegation, Chaudhry said the government strongly condemned all such acts. He said the internet was full of blasphemous content that was used not only to hurt the feelings of the Hindu community but also to insult Muslims.

Former interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan had in the past also taken up the issue of blasphemous content on Facebook and even asked the social networking websites to not allow such offensive posts. Tallal Chaudhry assured the house that his ministry would investigate the online attacks on the Hindu faith and seek out the culprits.SALT LAKE CITY  Former Utah Symphony associate concertmaster  who spent a number of years as a violinist with the Boston Symphony  and current University of Utah School of Music adjunct professor Gerald Elias is not content to hone just one artistic talent. After years of playing music, Elias now also writes about music, most often in the form of musical mystery novels. But recently, he's dipped into the world of nonfiction to write about his two tours to China with the Boston Symphony  once in 1979 and again in 2014  in his new book "Symphonies and Scorpions."

Three years before the 1979 tour, China's Cultural Revolution ended with the death of Chairman Mao Zedong, and the country was starting to open, tentatively, to the Western world. While Boston was not the first American symphony to play in China (the Philadelphia Orchestra toured there in 1973), it was the first to play in the post-Zedong years. Lead by Seiji Ozawa, a Japan native, the Boston Symphony, including Elias, spent a week giving concerts and master classes to Chinese audiences and musicians.

But oddly, it was the 2014 tour that almost didn't happen. The original conductor, Lorin Maazel, dropped out at the last second for health reasons and the tour was nearly cancelled. Thankfully for the musicians and staff that had put so much work into the tour, Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit stepped in and they went as planned.

But things didn't get easier, as the Japanese customs almost didn't let the musicians' instruments through  but that issue too resolved itself in the end and the Boston Symphony performed to audiences in Asia that paid upwards of $300 a ticket to see them.

Elias talks about these little dramas and the everyday struggles of a professional classical musician on tour in his book, sharing the highlights of his career and what he's learned along the way. The Deseret News recently spoke with the musician and author about his experiences and how he got into writing in the first place.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Deseret News: What would you say was the biggest difference between touring China in 1979 and 2014?

Gerald Elias: I would say the biggest difference is that the tour in 2014 was an artistic endeavor, bringing the great music of Europe performed by this great orchestra, the Boston Symphony, to a very appreciative audience, a music-loving audience. On that level it was wonderful, just an absolute success.

The tour in 79 was that plus the global ramifications of this cultural contact between America and China. It really was a profound moment. Looking back  we're almost 40 years removed from it  it's hard to really perceive how palpable that was. (Richard) Nixon had been president and opened up the door to China, which was a major accomplishment, but then there was the Cultural Revolution, which almost set things back in reverse. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, the big question was, "What's next?" That Boston Symphony tour answered that question, filled that gap and stimulated the whole detente between China and the U.S., so it really was a historically crucial moment in time. To be a part of that and to perform a concert with musicians of the Beijing Symphony was just an emotional high for everybody.

DN: Do you think there's a different or greater appreciation for classical music in Asia?

GE: I don't know if it's greater. I know that it's different because here classical music has been a focal point of cultural life for 150 years. In Asia it's more recent. As a result, (the appreciation) is perhaps more intense there now. I would say that (Asia's) enthusiasm for classical music at this point might be more focused than ours. Here, when you go to see symphony orchestras now, there are so many Asian musicians who have come here (to the United States). One of the reasons they come here is that we have a more deeply engrained appreciation of classical music, so there are more fine orchestras here. It gives me a great hope for the future of classical music to see the excitement in Asia, whether it's China, Korea or Japan.

DN: What would you say is your favorite part about touring as a musician?

GE: I would say my favorite part is connecting with people wherever we happen to be touring.  Wherever I go as a musician, getting to know the people in those places has been the most meaningful outcome, whether it's other musicians  or audience members who just want to meet the musicians and get some insight, or even people like waiters at restaurants who communicate through the food they serve. I think that kind of connection  is really the most important thing and the most meaningful thing that I feel I accomplish when I travel.

DN: How did you decide to write "Symphonies and Scorpions"?

GE: One of the hardest things to figure out was what format it should be, whether it should be more of an academic book about the nuts and bolts of symphony orchestras, or whether it should be a memoir or a travel log. I toyed around with it for a long time and finally decided it should be more lighthearted so that people who don't know much about the profession could really be entertained while they were reading about these things that they might not have known about before. I included a lot of anecdotes, not only about the tour but about life in general in symphony orchestras and some of the experiences I've had over the years.

DN: What got you into writing mystery novels?

GE: I've found out over the years that violin students around the world are confronted with similar challenges  not just how to play the violin but how to plan a career, how to prepare for auditions, how to find the right violin, things like that. So about 20 years ago, I decided I would write a book primarily for aspiring violin students about those very issues. But I also decided because I grew up reading and really enjoying mysteries that I would spice up that book so that it didn't bore everyone to death, by just weaving a storyline around that. The story was about a stolen Stradivarius (violin) and it took 10 years from the original draft until it was finally published.  It really morphed into a traditional whodunit within the world of classical music and that was my first mystery called "Devil's Trill."

I've also had some short stories published that are Westerns and currently I'm working on a Western novel because not only do I love music, but since moving to Utah 30 years ago, I've fallen in love with Utah wilderness and outdoors, so I'm expanding my literary horizons.Editor's note: Deseret News and Church News writers are chronicling the ministry of LDS Church President Russell M. Nelson as he and other church officials travel to Europe, Africa and Asia during the next two weeks. Tad Walch reports today from London.

LONDON  The aroma of roast chicken and the rich seasonings of Nigeria's famous Jollof rice whirled out the window, puncturing Wednesday's otherwise wet air on another gray day here.

While his delicacies cooked inside his east London flat, Paul Omo-Bamawo beamed broadly as he considered the prospect of meeting LDS Church President Russell M. Nelson in 24 hours.

"Its my first time meeting the prophet," he said. "Its something that will stay with me the rest of my life."

Omo-Bamawo, 51, is scheduled to say the opening prayer Thursday night when President Nelson speaks at a meeting on the first leg of a tour that will circumnavigate the globe over the next 11 days.

"Its quite symbolic for me in the sense that we talk about Christ all the time," said the native Nigerian who moved to England 21 years ago. "We preach about him, we think about him, but we dont really get to meet his mouthpiece here on earth. Yes, we listen to him, but we dont really get to see him in person. Thats one reason I envy the people in Utah; they get to see him all the time."

President Nelson and Sister Wendy Watson Nelson will speak at the historic Hyde Park Chapel on Thursday night in an event that will be broadcast to meetinghouses of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Melting pot

They will find a melting pot of Mormons.

The Hyde Park 1st Ward, one of three congregations that meet in the chapel on Sundays, has members from 45 different countries of birth.

"It's a huge mix of diversity from every continent," Bishop David Hooson said.

That medley of people also is reflected in the missionaries who serve in the area. The 170 missionaries in the England London Mission come from 67 different nations, mission President Mark Stevens said.

President and Sister Nelson will be joined by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quourm of the Twelve Apostles and his wife, Sister Pat Holland, as they speak to those missionaries on Thursday afternoon in the Hyde Park Chapel, a few floors below the mission offices. Many of the missionaries said they will come prepared for instruction on how to be more effective in England and to receive answers to personal questions.

Global Ministry Tour

Follow the Deseret News as we chronicle President Russell M. Nelson's travels through seven countries around the world."I want to find out why I would be called as an England visitors' center missionary," said Sister Jo-Ya Hsu of New Taipei City, Taiwan, who has been in London for six weeks. "I want to find myself and understand why I'm here at this time."

The Hyde Park Visitors' Center is an important nerve center for the LDS Church's online missionary work because of its time zone, President Stevens said. Hsu and others like her are the only Mormon missionaries in the world answering questions from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. London time  or from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. Mountain Time in Salt Lake City, Utah. That means they respond to people in dozens of countries each day.

"We're reinventing ourselves," President Stevens said. "We've become effective at giving lessons on Facebook Messenger and Skype. Some of our missionaries record lessons and send them to people on graveyard shifts so they can watch the lesson in the middle of the night when they get home from work."

Work to do

President Stevens said he feels a deep sense of responsibility. Outside his office on the Hyde Park Building's third floor are photos of past presidents of the England London Mission, including six former LDS Church presidents  Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, Joseph Fielding Smith, Heber J. Grant, George Albert Smith and David O. McKay.

England also once was the lifeblood of the early church  in 1850, nearly three times as many Mormons lived in the United Kingdom than in the United States. Today the 185,000 members here find themselves part of a Europe that is losing its connection to organized religion.

"I see the British people not going to church," said Richard West, a Mormon patriarch in the Chelmsford 2nd Ward. " I see people busy with their lives and their business. Religion really doesn't play a part. The mainstream churches are really struggling, because people aren't going to church any more. I'd think that'd give us an opportunity, and it does, but it's getting worse.

"The church is strong here," he added, "but gosh, there's a lot of work to do."

Stevens said Elder Holland and the acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, M. Russell Ballard, have visited recently and "told us that there's yet a great work to accomplish here. There are people seeking truth, and we feel that."

"The British are wonderful, good, proper, hard-working, respectful people, and they love their families," he added. "Many times they really respond to the missionaries' message, but they are concerned by a troubled world, war and disadvantaged people. When you start connecting them back to the Savior and help them know God loves them and is interested in them, many times that message fills those gaps in their lives."

Like M&Ms

One of Stevens' missionaries drew a colorful picture.

"The English people are like M&Ms," said Sister Kristiina Kai Koiv of Taillin, Estonia. "They have a hard cover, but inside they are really soft. Some are afraid to answer questions like, 'Is there a God?' That is a big question. But if you get to know them, they do have a lot of questions about God."

Between 20 and 30 people a month join the church through the mission's efforts. President Stevens said his missionaries find most of the people interested in learning about the church online, where "they coming in asking questions of us."

The missionaries hope President Nelson's visit compels more Brits, who President Stevens said want to raise their children in a world with values and morals, to take another look at what Mormons have to offer.

"The prophet's visit is just a part of the energy we're feeling about looking to the future," he said.

Some say the visit already has had an impact.

Uchay Omo-Bamawo recently turned 18. She is preparing for exams she hopes will qualify her for a spot studying English Literature and writing at the University of Birmingham. She and her brother, Osaro, 14  both born in England are the only Mormons in their school. That isnt as hard as some might think because the school has many Muslim students, who share a belief in God and many of the same values.

"Im quite happy," Uchay said. "Its an opportunity to share the gospel. I told my friends the prophet was coming, and they said, 'Whats a prophet?' They wanted to know more."

Quite unique

Local LDS bishops distributed the limited number of tickets to Thursday night's event. The bishop of the Whitechapel Ward gave much of his allotment to the youth in his congregation, so Uchay and Osaro will attend.

The bishop of the Brittania Young Single Adult Ward gave a ticket to an Asian learning more about the church from Elder Patrick Diener of Bonn, Germany, and Elder Mason Peters of Draper, Utah.

But after their afternoon meeting with President Nelson, Diener and Peters and Hsu and Koiv and the other missionaries will skip the evening meeting. They won't watch the broadcast.

"We'll be knocking on doors," Diener said.

West hopes LDS members and missionaries can help Brits make a connection with God.

"I feel like we could potentially see a great surge," he said. "If people would just listen to what President Nelson had to say, I think the work could really take off. It would transform their lives, if they felt there really was a prophet and he was speaking to God and connecting them to answers to life's problems. That's what the world needs."

Omo-Bamawo first learned about the church when his cousin knocked on his door in Nigeria to say goodbye to his grandmother as he left on a Mormon mission. He remembers his own baptism, 32 years ago last week, like it was yesterday. As a high councilor in the Hyde Park Stake, he now helps oversee congregations in a region of London.

"Ive come to love President Nelson," he said. "I love his enthusiasm, his energy, his drive. Its really quite unique at this time."SALT LAKE CITY  Becky Anderson was running around at home playing laser tag with her two sons, 4-year-old Eli and 2-year-old Isaac, when the phone rang. It was the doctor returning her call. She had undergone a lumpectomy three days earlier and came out of the surgery with a cough.

The doctor on the other line instructed her to see her primary care doctor if the cough continued. In that moment, Anderson remembers instinctively sitting down to prepare for what would come next: Becky, I dont know how to tell you this. 

This was the same doctor who had convinced her that the lump forming in her breast was benign and that I should get on with my life and just be happy, she said. Now, there was concern in his voice.

... You have cancer.

It hit like no other statement had hit in my life, recalled Anderson, who was then diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer. I felt like I was going to throw up. I was panicked. I didnt know what to do. From that moment forward, it was just nutty.

Nutty is the way Anderson describes her cancer journey that began with the diagnosis in January 2010. But thanks to support from family and friends, Anderson, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was able to overcome her life-threatening illness.

Anderson now works alongside her sister, Brenda Smith, to run Anything for a Friend, a nonprofit that has raised nearly $2 million and helped 37 participants since its humble beginning that started with a community fundraiser for Anderson.

God is in the details of our life, said Anderson, a native of Layton, Utah. He is absolutely concerned about our heartbreak and our heartaches. He sends tender mercies if were watching. I will consider myself one of the most fortunate people on the planet because on a daily basis, I get to see his tender mercies and the true goodness of his kids.

The beginning

Brenda Smith also remembers how she felt when she found out her sister, Becky Anderson, was diagnosed with cancer. Thirteen months to the day apart, Smith and Anderson have an amazing and unbreakable relationship, she said.

Shes really my best friend, Smith said. I just felt like, I really want to do something to help. Its hard for me to sit and its hard for me to ask for help for things, so it was really easy for me to be like, OK were going to do this for you.

Smith thought of Andersons two young boys at home and her husband who was trying to provide. She called Denise Parker, Andersons closest friend at the time, who was a three-time Olympian in archery and had experience with a community fundraiser.

We threw our ideas back and forth and she said, I have a wonderful idea. Were going to shave our heads and have people pay to watch, Smith recalled, laughing. And she and Parker did.

Though Anderson initially struggled with the idea of the event, thinking there couldn't be anything worse than people pitying her, "I soon found out that there cannot be givers if there are not receivers," she said. "And as gracious as we can be as givers, we have to be humble enough to be just as gracious of a receiver."

Anderson's fundraiser turned into a spaghetti dinner auction. Really, we were just making it up as we went along for that first one, Smith said. The whole idea was that I may not know 1,000 people per se, but I know at least 20 people, and those 20 people know 20 people.

And each one of those people has a different "anything" to give, Smith explained, as one person might be able to give service while another can give financially or donate something that can be auctioned off.

That was how we created the name Anything for a Friend, because I would have and would do anything for her, for my best friend," she said.

More than 1,000 people attended Andersons event in April 2010 and raised more than $30,000. Anderson was touched and knew she needed to pay it forward. In the six months that followed, Anderson, Smith and Parker helped organize fundraisers for five more people with cancer and raised $113,000 for treatment, according to the Deseret News. The organization continued to grow.

Through our faith and our hearts wanting to help people and give back to the community, this was our way, Smith said. This was our way to give back.

Fighting cancer

Part of Andersons treatment included 16 rounds of chemotherapy. One of the hardest times she remembers is half way through the treatment when she was hit with the Red Devil, the heaviest dose of medication her doctors had at the time, she said. She lost her hair, eyebrows and all of her eyelashes except for three, but remained upbeat going into the next scan.

She recalls sitting on the exam table in the hospital room with her husband, mom and dad. As the doctor walked into the room, her optimism faded as she could tell by the expression on his face that the results wouldnt be good news.

I sat there and in the most informal prayer that I ever offered in my life, I turned to my Father and said, If this is going to be my exit, I need you to help me help them, Anderson said. For the first time in the journey, I paused and just said, I dont want this to be about me anymore. If your will is that I am not to be here, then help me prepare them my boys, my husband, my mom and dad, my sister help me prepare them for whats ahead.

Anderson was told that, despite the heavy medication, the tumor was unaltered. Nothing had changed. Anderson knew her situation was grave as she watched the oncologist cry.

She remembers her mom choking back sobs and her husband, trying in his engineering way to figure out how he was going to make this right.

In that moment, a wave of peace enveloped her. That peace never left me, she said. The verbage behind that peace was, Its going to be OK. I knew, given what I just heard, that OK for me or any other person doesnt mean youre going to be healed physically. OK meant I am going to be OK and I am in my Makers hands.

Anderson felt the Spirit confirm that they needed to stay the course with her medication. Though she had a near-deadly reaction to the next round of chemo, the tumor was completely obliterated, and for the first time in 11 months, Anderson learned she was operable. She underwent a mastectomy.

Days after the surgery and scans, her husband received a call from the doctor with the results from the pathology report. Anderson anxiously watched as he reacted to the conversation.

This big, burly man, this engineer of mine, just slid down to his knees and was sobbing like a baby. For me, I thought it was more bad news, Anderson said. So I just crawled into his lap  he just cried for probably three minutes. He wasnt able to say a single thing. Then he paused and said, Beck, its gone. You have complete clinical response.

In a complete miracle, one even the oncologist said should not have happened in this circumstance, Anderson was cancer-free.

Anything for a Friend

Now, eight years later, Anything for a Friend is currently helping its 38th recipient feel the hope Anderson felt during her treatment. The nonprofit organization is run by a board of former recipients as well as family members and friends of former recipients. Everyone involved volunteers their time and no one is paid, Smith said. Smith, a development director at Weber State University, works as the co-founder and Anderson, a clinical social worker, serves as the executive director.

Its been interesting because now I can be in a situation and say, I really do know how these people are feeling, Anderson said. Her message for the recipients is that even though its uncomfortable to be a receiver, you are being used as an instrument to bring good things into your friends' and familys lives. And one day, they, too, will be able to pay it forward.

Todd White, Anything for a Friends 21st recipient, was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, just a week before his wife gave birth to their fourth child. He was nominated for an Anything for a Friend event by his wifes friend from high school.

Whites event held in 2012, similar to many other Anything for a Friend events, was a dinner with a live and silent auction, bake sale and kids' corner. It was an experience he described as nothing short of a miracle that impacted his testimony of the importance of service.

Its hard to describe the feeling when you know youre carrying this massive load around and you know its something youre going to have to carry for years and years and years, White said. And they just come along and magically erase that for you.

White, a West Point, Utah, resident and now a father of five, has been on the board for Anything for a Friend for a year and a half. Spending time with those involved in the organization, like Anderson and Smith, has changed his attitude about life and inspires him to seek out others needs.

You see humanity in a different perspective, he said. You go to these events and see kids that are sick that are the same age as your kids and you see what their family is going through. All of a sudden your trials dont look quite as intense as you thought they were, your little troubles that youre facing in life. There is always someone who has it worse.

Anderson said she knows a loving Father in Heaven placed this invading dark and yucky thing called cancer inside my body because he wanted to magnify my platform." For her, the greatest message of Anything for a Friend is that God loves his children.

I would just love to have people know if they could pause for a moment and feel and sense his tender mercy, maybe especially in the middle of all this hard stuff, then we will inherently become who we were designed to become," she said. "And that doesnt happen without hard.In the fall of 2014, Chris Sorensen, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Richmond, Virginia, invested in a license plate. It read RVA TMPL. Sorensen had become fixed on the idea that an LDS temple would eventually come to Richmond, and he wanted people to know he really believed it would happen.

I just wanted to kind of put out good vibes I guess, Sorensen said. I think it was to show people that Im serious, I think we could actually have a temple here, whether it was two years from now or 10 years from now or whenever but  let me put some good vibes out there. Im going to put my money where my mouth is.

Sorensen, a convert to the LDS Church who was introduced to the faith in Richmond as a teenager and was baptized his senior year of high school, says he has observed the desire for a temple in his community reflected in the lives of the members in the area and their increased focus on temple work.

People werent doing those things just to someday get a temple, but I think it certainly showed a faith and a desire and a hope, Sorensen said. We needed to remember that we can have the blessings of the temple now even though it might be further away because if we arent willing to take advantage of those blessings when its far away, whos to say were actually going to take advantage of them when its in our backyard?

Ashley Burton, who grew up in Henrico County and recently moved back to the area, says she always imagined that a temple would come to the area and has prayed for one for years. However, knowing it wasnt among the many locations for small temples announced in the late 90s and with the Washington D.C. Temple, the Raleigh North Carolina Temple and the Memphis Tennessee Temple all closed for extensive renovations, Burton wasnt expecting President Russell M. Nelsons temple announcement to include Richmond.

It was the only thing we could talk about the rest of the day, and I probably liked 100 posts about it the next day on Facebook, Burton said.

Sheryl Ellsworth was in her room preparing for Easter dinner guests when she heard her mother, Lea Garner, who now lives in Utah but raised her family in Richmond after moving there in 1986, scream.

Initially I thought she dropped the lasagna while trying to take it out of the oven, Ellsworth said. So I came out running and she excitedly told me, Richmond is getting a temple. Finally! Yes!

Matthew Coats, a native of Richmond who works for the city and serves as his wards Young Men president, was watching general conference with a recent convert from Brazil in his home. There was a slight delay in the Portuguese broadcast so Coats first received a text in his Young Men priest quorum group text that said RICHMOND! He then heard his wife crying from another room. Then he heard it, Richmond, Virginia.

I couldnt believe it! My heart was bursting out of my chest, Coats said, adding that his newly baptized friend also began crying. His wife had died sometime back and after attending a special conference with now Elder (Ulisses) Soares, the day after he was baptized mind you, we went out to eat and we talked about his wife and the fact that he could be sealed to her in the temple.

Before ordinances can be performed in the temple though, the temple will host an open house. Sorensen, whose parents are not LDS, is already excited for the opportunities the open house will bring to introduce friends to what he believes.

From my personal experience, the open house really is what draws in the community. It gives the church a chance to really teach what we believe and let people see, This is what our temples are, this is the spirit thats here. Theyre beautiful buildings and theres nothing silly, nothing crazy that happens here on the inside. We just use them to worship in. Im very excited to see how that plays out, Sorensen said.

Kaitlyn Smith lives in Utah now but grew up in Midlothian, Virginia. Having served as a missionary in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the open house and rededication of the Buenos Aires Temple, she witnessed firsthand the excitement that surrounds a temple while it is open to the public.

The two months devoted to the temple open house and the temple dedication were probably the two most sacred months of my mission, Smith said. I saw members connect with others from different wards and stakes, and they became united in one purpose. I also witnessed this desire emerge from them to share the blessings of the temple with their families, friends and neighbors.

While Coats is anxious to attend the open house, he says the temple will continue to contribute to the community long after it is dedicated.

After the initial spark of interest and open house and all the excitement wears away, I think the temple will still stand as a spiritual beacon here, Coats said, noting that more members will be able to work in the temple, attend more frequently and youths will be able to wake up early to do baptisms before school.

Shea McCartt, a young single adult who has lived in the Richmond area since she was 9 years old, says she thinks the temple will give members in the area many opportunities to share the gospel.

There are so many members whose personal lives and testimony will increase from having a temple so close to their homes. They will have more opportunity to do work for their ancestors. I know that it will help all the saints to be able to share the gospel more naturally and easily because people will be curious about the temple and it will be brought up in conversation. Doors will be opened and hearts will be softened, she said.

Until then, the Saints in Richmond will be anxiously awaiting their temple.

I feel like we're all so excited that we would help build it ourselves if the church would let us, just to make it go faster, Coats said.Editor's note: Deseret News and Church News writers are chronicling the ministry of LDS Church President Russell M. Nelson as he and other church officials travel to Europe, Africa and Asia during the next two weeks. Tad Walch reports today from London.

LONDON  In his first statements on his global tour, LDS Church President Russell M. Nelson told the Deseret News on Thursday why he chose to begin in London and then travel to Jerusalem.

"Everybody comes to London," he said of the diverse city, "so we might as well come, too. It's a melting pot, and ours is a global ministry, so at least we can get a sample. Most of the nations of the world are here in London."

Jerusalem is next because of its significance to his message.

"We want to focus on the Lord Jesus Christ," he said. "That's where his mortal ministry was. Thats where he was born. Thats where he was killed. (Sister Nelson and I) have been to the Holy Land many times, not together but independently. We felt that was where we wanted to be rooted. Then well go from there to parts of Africa and Asia."

Global Ministry Tour

Follow the Deseret News as we chronicle President Russell M. Nelson's travels through seven countries around the world.President Nelson's delegation will visit eight countries in 11 days during a trip that will last two weeks, also stopping in Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, Thailand, Hong Kong and Hawaii. He hinted at a future trip during a short interview after he arrived at the Hyde Park Chapel in central London in the early afternoon.

"No matter where we would go, we would neglect more than we'd serve," he said, "but well do all we can do in two weeks, and we'll go home and rest for a while, then tackle another journey."

He said he felt compelled to minister.

"The Lords message is for everyone," he said. "This is a global work. Whenever I'm comfortably situated in my home, I'm in the wrong place. I need to be where the people are. We need to bring them the message of the Savior.

"The message is to invite all of God's children on both sides of the veil to come unto their Savior and enjoy the blessings of the temple, have enduring joy and qualify for eternal life. And that will bring hope, help and lift to all people."

President Nelson briefly met four families representative of London's diversity then presided at a mission conference for six missions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

On Thursday night, the Hyde Park Chapel filled to overflowing as he spoke to a meeting that was broadcast to tens of thousands in 47 stakes and districts in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and Sister Patricia Holland joined President and Sister Nelson in speaking to the England London Mission Conference and at the evening meeting.

The 170 missionaries greeted them by singing "We Thank Thee O God for a Prophet."

One missionary was absent. Sister Anne Nicole Balgue of the Philippines had the chicken pox, so Elder Holland mentioned her by name and blew her a kiss.

Five other missions joined the conference via broadcast  the England Manchester, England Leeds, England London South, England Birmingham and Scotland/Ireland missions.

Elder Paul V. Johnson, the Europe Area President and a General Authority Seventy, joined the delegation on the stand with Don Staheli, President Nelson's personal secretary.

President and Sister Nelson and Elder and Sister Holland shook hands with every missionary before the meeting. Sister Megan Bain of Sandy, Utah, said she'd been advised to look into their eyes for the brief moment when she shook hands and told them her name and hometown.

"I made sure to do that," she said. "I saw light and love, in both Elder Hollands and President Nelsons eyes. Warm smiles, as well."

Sister Holland said it was a wonderful honor the Nelsons gave them to join the trip. Elder Holland said he hoped people all over the world hear about President Nelson's global tour.

"He really wants to reach out to the whole world," Elder Holland said. "There would hardly be a ward or a stake more international than the Hyde Park Ward or the Hyde Park Stake."

"We're hoping to do what the Nelsons want us to do," he added. "Thats our job. Their hope and their dream, literally and figuratively, is to reach out to the world to show the internationalization of the church and the growth of the church and reach out to the world. Our role is to sustain them in that."

Sister Nelson said she looked forward to seeing people throughout the trip.

"I love to see them, from brand-new converts to people who have been in the church from the start," she said.SALT LAKE CITY  Rep. Lynn Hemingway, D-Salt Lake City, announced Thursday he is no longer seeking re-election to his Utah House District 40 seat, citing concerns about his wife's health that kept him away from the 2018 Legislature.

"Life is always unpredictable, and sometimes we have to make difficult decisions," Hemingway said in a statement. "I appreciate all the support and understanding shown to me by my colleagues and constituents during this challenging time."

At the start of the year, his wife, Sherma, suffered what was described as an unexcepted health decline while visiting family in New York and underwent a series of major surgeries before and during the legislative session.

Hemingway filed for re-election, but has withdrawn as a candidate. The only other Democrat in the race, Stephanie Pitcher, had already qualified as a candidate for the June primary by gathering voter signatures.

Also running for the seat are Republican Peter Kraus and Independent American Party candidate David Else.

Hemingway served in the district for four, two-year terms from 2007 until retiring from the Legislature in December 2014. He was appointed to fill a vacancy left by former Rep. Justin Miller in November 2015.SALT LAKE CITY  Utah public schools' failure to comply with school fee and fee waiver policies has resulted in an "unreasonable system of fees, which jeopardizes equal opportunity for all students  based on their ability to pay."

That's according to a new audit released Thursday by the Utah State Board of Education.

The audit found that Utah public schools collected $71 million in school fees in 2017  a 29 percent increase in five years.

"It does sound staggering when you look at it in one lump sum," said Rachel Kitterer, parent of an East High School student and chairwoman of its school community council.

Kitterer said she has mixed feelings about fees because she appreciates that they help ensure classrooms will have the supplies they need. Fee waivers give students access to educational programs and extracurricular experiences they couldn't otherwise afford, she said.

That's a reality for many students who attend East High School, where 60 percent of the student body qualifies for free or reduced school lunch, she said.

The audit also found that despite a 20 percent increase in enrollment in Utah secondary schools, the percentage of students who received fee waivers or worked in lieu of paying fees decreased by just 4 percent over the same time frame.

The number of fees assessed between 2012 and 2017 increased by 18 percent. "However, it is important to note that not all fees are associated with mandatory activities; instead, many fees are associated with new opportunities within education," the audit states.

Absent a cap on fees, there is "specific probability of student exclusion from activities due to an inability to pay fees," the audit says. This could potentially lead to students becoming disillusioned, disassociating from school and eventually dropping out.

Beyond the fees assessed, auditors also raised concerns about how fee waivers are handled at some schools.

Among secondary schools examined by auditors, 17 percent "treated the students and parents differently from others and/or identified them to people who did not need to know they were on a waiver," the audit states.

Moreover, schools "informed coaches and teachers which students were on waivers without sufficient purpose," the audit found.

Nine percent of secondary schools reviewed did not discard confidential documentation after eligibility for fee waivers had been determined, the audit states.

It also found 6 percent of secondary schools reviewed did not obtain documentation to determine eligibility for fee waivers.

The audit also found a growing gap between households that qualify for fee waivers and those that participate in waivers.

"The estimated gap between students who qualify for waivers and students who participate in waivers has grown from just under 20,000 students to almost 29,000 students within six years, an increase of nearly 9,000 students," the audit states.

"Although the gap between qualified vs. participate isn't explained, it does raise questions regarding a qualified student's, parents', or guardian's opportunity and/or desire to participate in the waiver program."

Bryce Dunford, a member of the Jordan School Board, said he and his wife Jennifer have 10 children.

"So I've been paying student fees for a long time," Dunford said.

When he was first elected to the school board in 2016, he had many concerns about school fees.

"I felt like it was an unjust way to extract more money from the public. It's like, 'Wait a minute. Thi iss supposed to be a free public education. Why do I pay so many fees?'"

But as he's researched the issue, his opposition has softened because he recognizes that many people consider them user fees. People who support schools through their income and property taxes and do not currently have children in school support users paying their way, he said.

Still, they need to be carefully scrutinized by local boards of education, he said.

"My frustration is, I think some schools have just got used to these fees. They don't think about them any more. They don't ask the question 'What are they for?' That's what we need to do. We need to examine every fee and say, 'Should we still be charging that? Is that the right amount? Have we charged too much in the past and we have a surplus?'" Dunford said.

State School Board internal auditors found a wide array of academic fees ranging from 25 cents for library fines up to fees for textbooks as high as $225; to $162 for lab fees and $135 for internet connections. Driver education fees were as high as $260 and some schools charged up to $100 for parking.

Kitterer's two children attended East and both were involved in extracurricular activities. To start the school year, their school fees were about $300 each, and occasionally there were others as each school year progressed.

"There are a lot thing that make you wonder, like the lab fees, computer fees. OK, but these are core classes. Why aren't those funded?" she said.

Extracurricular fees for some activities were significantly higher than most. Some schools charged fees as high as $1,100 for cheerleading, $950 for drill team and $500 for student government.

Fees were as high as $350 each for band and orchestra and performing arts. At least one school assessed a fee as high as $2,600 for travel.

The audit found that 94 percent of 34 secondary schools with fee schedules inappropriately charged additional fees that were not included on their fee schedules, for items such as after-school programs, camps/clinics, field trips, dances, and student travel.

In anticipation of the release of the audit, the State School Board voted in March to create a school fees task force to review the findings and make policy recommendations to the board.

Deputy Superintendent of Operations Scott Jones said the audit raises serious concerns that will be tackled by a soon-to-be empaneled task force which will include members of state school board, child advocates, local superintendents, business administrators, educators and others.

"There's a high sense of urgency with this," Jones said.

"We're going to try to communicate if they do agree to participate that they do so at every meeting and commit to this just because it's so important along the lines of equity for the kids, well the family as a whole." he said.

Auditors made several recommendations to the board intended to address the audit findings and to "preserve equal opportunity for students within the public education system."

Among their state-level recommendations:

 Establish maximum fees a student or family can be charged. Auditors recommend consulting with local school officials when setting the fees.

 Identify and provide a comprehensive list of alternatives in lieu of fee waivers with a process in which local education agencies and schools can seek additional fee waiver alternatives.

 Identify and clarify areas of the Utah Administrative Code Utah that have led to confusion and misunderstanding.

For school districts and charter schools, auditors recommended establishing controls that ensure:

 Policies and procedures are comprehensive, implemented, and monitored;

 All school-sponsored or supported activities, classes, and programs with their associated fees are identified, discussed in a public meeting and adopted annually;

 And, staff responsible for implementing fee collection and fee waivers have the proper resources and training to carry out their responsibilities.SALT LAKE CITY  Yes, its a show about a man who cons an entire town into thinking hes a professional musician when hes actually not, but with Hale Centre Theatres upcoming production of The Music Man, theres no pretending: Professionalism is the real deal.

In addition to the theater companys 52 full-time and 150 part-time employees, HCT hires production team members tailored to each show it produces, including directors, choreographers and music directors. And for Meredith Willson's The Music Man, which runs April 16-June 9 in the Centre Stage Theatre, that team is anchored by a director with 45 years of experience in the theater industry. Also leading the production is a music director who has taught more than 80,000 voice lessons and a choreographer who has danced professionally with groups as varied as Ballet West, the Radio City Rockettes and the Guangzhou Ballet in China.

My choreographer, my musical director, all of the collaborators who are involved in this process, weve gotten along like a house afire, and I feel like that shows in the work, said Jim Christian, who directs The Music Man.

Christian, who retired in 2016 after 27 years as director of musical theater studies at Weber State University, began his theater career in 1973  a career that has taken him to theaters from California to Florida and everywhere in between. Hes worked as a director and choreographer for the Utah Shakespeare Festival, Pioneer Theatre Company, Utah Opera and Utah Symphony, had some of his original work produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and written five original musicals, among other achievements.

Ive known Jim for such a long time and consider him such a valuable mentor and such a good friend, said Gary Sorenson, music director for The Music Man, who was a student at WSU in the 90s when he first met Christian. I have so much respect for him and love him in many different ways.

Sorenson, who works as a full-time vocal instructor, likewise has an extensive resume. He has a bachelors degree in vocal conducting, vocal pedagogy and classical voice from WSU and a masters of music from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has also performed in more than 35 operatic roles at companies from California to Italy, been a part of the faculty at Weber State University and University of Utah, and worked as a music director, including assistant music director for the New York Musical Festivalsdebut of Colette Calls Harriet in 2014.

Joining Christian and Sorenson is choreographer Jennifer Hill Barlow, who, in addition to her choreography work at several local theaters, is the owner and artistic director of Barlow Arts Conservatory. Barlow, who holds an MFA from the University of Utah in ballet pedagogy/choreography, danced professionally for Ballet West, Cincinnati Ballet, the Guangzhou Ballet in China and with the Radio City Rockettes.

This is my first collaboration with Jenny and Ive been so impressed with her ability to diagnose and give instruction, Sorenson said. ... Its been a very nondramatic, (theater) experience because the cast has been so hardworking and so positive, and then collaborating with Jenny and Jim and with our production assistant Jamie Sanduk, everyone has been so kind and loving and generous, and thats the only way to be able to create good theater.

As the creative team has planned and rehearsed leading up to the opening of The Music Man, one challenge theyve worked with other theater personnel to overcome is how to use the myriad technological elements of HCTs Centre Stage Theatre on a classic piece of musical theater such as The Music Man.

It would be easy to superimpose the technology (on The Music Man) if we wanted to, but we looked for all the places where it would naturally support what was going on, Christian said.   (There) are some moments when the audience really gets to see the (technology) that can happen in that theater, but what happens is the magic happens and we get on with the story, as opposed to  (making) the magic happen at the expense of the story. Its always about the characters.

The flawed, imperfect characters at the heart of the story  especially the con artist salesman Harold Hill  are what Christian believes makes The Music Man a show the cast and crew are excited to perform and one audiences look forward to seeing.

(The characters) either have stubbornness, they have pride, they have a little bit of the con artist in them, theyve got something that kind of needs to be unlocked, and thats the gift that Harold has, Christian said.   What happens is even though (Harold) changes the town, the town changes him, and I think thats the heart of this story that people are so drawn to.

If you go 

What: Meredith Willson's "The Music Man"

Where: Hale Centre Theatre's Centre Stage Theatre, 9900 S. Monroe St., Sandy

When: April 16-June 9, dates and times vary

How much: $40 for adults, $20 for children and youths

Phone: 801-984-9000

Web: hct.orgOREM  One woman and three men have been selected as finalists to be the next president of Utah Valley University, according to a statement from the Utah State Board of Regents released Thursday.

A 24-member search committee recommended to the regents four finalists: Bradley J. Cook, provost at Southern Utah University; John R. Rosenberg, Washington Irving Professor of Spanish and American Relations at Brigham Young University; Astrid S. Tuminez, regional director for corporate, external and legal affairs in Southeast Asia for Microsoft; and Matthew J. Wilson, president of the University of Akron.

After an extensive national search, the Utah Valley University Presidential Search Committee has narrowed the applicant pool to these four highly qualified candidates. The committee is honored to recommend them to the board of regents for its consideration in selecting a new leader for the university, said Regent Steven Lund, search committee co-chairman, in a prepared statement.

The next president will succeed Matthew Holland, who is stepping down because he has been called as a mission president by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to serve in the North Carolina Raleigh Mission starting in July.

Holland was appointed UVU president in 2009, the first leader to hold that position after the institution attained university status in 2008.

The finalists will be on the UVU Orem campus next Thursday to meet with groups representing faculty, staff, students, and administration.

Each finalist will participate in a public meeting that afternoon, where attendees from the UVU community and the general public can ask questions of the candidates.

The candidates' meetings with constituency groups will be conducted in the Classroom Building on the Orem campus at 800 W. University Parkway.

The schedule of meetings is as follows:

1-1:50 p.m. John R. Rosenberg

2-2:50 p.m. Bradley J. Cook

3-3:50 p.m. Matthew J. Wilson

4-4:50 p.m. Astrid S. Tuminez

More information on the public meetings is available at uvu.edu/presidentialsearch.

On April 20, the board of regents will interview each of the candidates in closed session.

The board may convene a public meeting at UVU  Sorensen Center, Centre Stage  at 5:45 p.m. that day to select the president or conduct a meeting at another time.

Here's a more extensive look at the backgrounds of the four finalists:

Bradley J. Cook is also a professor of history at SUU. Prior to his current position, he served as president of the Abu Dhabi Womens College in the United Arab Emirates. He has had 25 years of administrative experience in higher education, eight spent at then-Utah Valley State College as vice president of College Relations and later as vice president of Academic Affairs.

Cook has special research interests in Islamic educational theory, comparative religion and international and comparative education. He has a bachelors and masters degree from Stanford University and a doctoral degree in Middle East Studies from the University of Oxford.

John R. Rosenberg is also associate director of BYU's Faculty Center, where he is responsible for training academic administrators. For two decades he has worked with the BYU-Public School Partnership where he currently serves as a senior fellow. He collaborated with the Institute for Educational Inquiry in Seattle in promoting the democratic purposes of public education and served as a leadership associate and as an Agenda for Education in a Democracy Scholar.

Prior to his current role, Rosenberg chaired the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at BYU and was dean of the College of Humanities. He earned his bachelors degree from BYU and his masters and doctoral degree from Cornell University.

Astrid S. Tuminez was previously vice dean of research and assistant dean of executive education at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. While in those roles she trained more than 2,000 government officials and private-sector professionals in leadership and organizational change.

Her previous positions include senior consultant to the U.S. Institute of Peace, director of research at AIG Global Investment, and program officer at Carnegie Corp. of New York. She previously ran the Moscow office of the Harvard Project on Strengthening Democratic Institutions.

Tuminez holds a bachelors degree from Brigham Young University, a masters degree from Harvard University, and a doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Matthew J. Wilson has nearly 30 years of international experience in academic, business and legal matters in the United States, Asia and the Pacific. He specializes in international business, intellectual property, commercial litigation, international dispute resolution, and Japanese law.

Prior to serving as its president, Wilson was dean of the Law School at the University of Akron. Before that, Wilson served as associate dean and professor of law at the University of Wyoming, distinguished international scholar at Kyung Hee University Law School in Seoul, and senior associate dean and general counsel at Temple University Japan in Tokyo. Wilson earned two bachelor's degrees from the University of Utah and a juris doctor degree at Temple University.At 1 a.m. on April 2, long after putting their children to bed, Konstantin Serebrennikov and his wife, Maria, sat in their home in St. Petersburg watching general conference via the Internet. It was the last session and President Russell M. Nelson was the final speaker.

Everybody was sleeping while we were watching the conference, and when President Nelson was telling about the temples  we were shocked, Serebrennikov said of President Nelson's announcement that a temple was to be built somewhere in Russia. We couldnt scream because everybody was sleeping, but in our minds we were screaming.

Shock and disbelief ran through their heads and for a moment, Serebrennikov said. He even thought it might be an April Fool's joke. And even a week later, they are still in shock because they still dont know where the newly announced temple is going to be located.

Russia is big, so even if they build a temple kind of in the middle, its still far away from us, Serebrennikov said. But still of course we are happy. We look forward to participation in the dedication and temple open house.

As residents in St. Petersburg, Serebrennikov and his family count themselves extremely blessed and even a little spoiled to live within a manageable driving distance of the Helsinki Finland Temple.

Many of the wards in St. Petersburg are able to plan temple trips a few times a year, but others are not so lucky. With only three stakes established in the country, all located in the western part of the country, many of the members are far removed from temple access, and with the expenses of visas and flights, accessing temples in nearby countries isnt always so easy.

For Renat Kashapov, a member living in Moscow, the news of the temple came a bit later.

I was sleeping, Kashapov said. And then in the middle of the night, I woke up to a text message from a friend who used to serve in Russia. Hes an American, and his text message was, A TEMPLE IN RUSSIA! with lots of exclamation points.

But despite the urgency and excitement of the message, Kashapov said he went back to sleep. Then, at around 5 in the morning, he woke up questioning if the text had been real. After searching through all of President Nelsons talks on LDS.org, he finally came to the announcement of the temple.

I cant believe we survived to live the day that announcement was made because we didnt believe that in the near future we would hear anything like that, Kashapov said. But the problem was, it was 5 in the morning and everyone was in bed, so I couldnt share with anybody.

It wasnt until he was headed out the door for work that his wife woke up, and he was able to momentarily celebrate the news with her.

On the way to work, Kashapov said he felt overwhelmed by the news and decided to start a Facebook live video where he shared his feelings and testimony.

I just shared my thoughts  that we need to prepare ourselves to be even better because if the Lord wants to build a temple here, he wants it to be busy, Kashapov said.

Nearly 4,000 miles away, members in Bengaluru, India, were having similar reactions to the announcement of the Bengaluru temple, which will also be the first temple in India.

Bob Anthony, a counselor in the Bengaluru India Stake presidency, woke up to a stream of emails, WhatsApp and Facebook messages at 5 a.m. after having decided to wait until Monday morning to watch the Sunday afternoon session of general conference with his wife.

When I got up at around 6 a.m. and read the messages, I thought I was still sleeping and dreaming, President Anthony said. When I saw a clip on WhatsApp where President Nelson announced the Bengaluru temple, I broke down. I just couldnt believe. I shouted for joy and wept.

After waking up his family and replaying the video to share the news with them, President Anthony said, We all immediately got on our knees and said a prayer filled with intense emotions. We thanked the Lord.

As a member of the stake presidency in the city where the site for the new temple is planned, President Anthony described how the announcement comes as a blessing in response to the hard work the members have put in doing family history work.

Following the example of saints in the Ivory Coast, where a temple was announced in 2015 following high numbers of names submitted to temples from the area, President Anthony explained the work and excitement of his entire stake.

Everyone is emotional, President Anthony said. Each of them want to contribute now in some ways for the temple.  I know that we have felt the Holy Ghost in great abundance.

While watching general conference together as a ward on Sunday, April 8, President Anthony described how they all shouted for joy when the temple was announced.

Immediately following the closing session, My first token of gratitude was to order two cakes with the temple picture that we cut together in the ward, President Anthony said.

Just north of Bengaluru, in Hyderabad, the city with the first ever stake in India, Manohar Mekala expressed his gratitude for the blessing of a temple.

Its a dream come true for me and my family, Mekala said. I had a strong feeling one day we would have a temple in India, but I never thought so soon that God would bless this great nation with the temple blessings.

Having been unable to attend a temple prior to serving his mission in 1988, Mekala said that as he taught others about the temple as a missionary, he developed an even stronger desire to visit a temple. In 1995, he was finally able to visit the Manila Philippines Temple where he was endowed and then sealed to his family.

Since then I have never been to a temple, Mekala said.

In the month of May 2017, my daughter got married and we planned to witness her sealing in Hong Kong, Mekala said. Many families are sealed in Hong Kong, but now to get visas to Hong Kong is a big challenge.

Despite having planned well in advance for their daughter, Monica Mekala, and her husband, Raj Kumar Ganaparam, to be sealed in Hong Kong, the family is still waiting for visas over a year later.

Saints in India go through a lot of visa problems, so we dont have a chance to visit a temple often, Mekala said. Now I can see the Lord is aware of all the difficulties we are going through, and thats why the Lord announced His house in India. I know many saints have prayed, and now He has answered our prayers.

In Salt Lake City, as gasps were heard throughout the Conference Center with each new temple locations announcement, Sister Reyna I. Aburto, second counselor in the Relief Society general presidency, sat smiling from her seat behind President Nelson as he announced the first temple for her hometown of Managua, Nicaragua.

Hearing the wonderful news about the Managua Nicaragua Temple was a pleasant surprise for me, Sister Aburto said. My heart is full of gratitude towards the Lord because I know that so many members in my home country will have the blessing of a temple closer to them.  It will be a source of revelation, comfort and peace for the faithful members in Nicaragua.

And for Rodolfo Aviles and his family, the announcement has already served as a comfort and an answer to their prayers.

After moving to Utah a year ago, Aviles said he had been feeling that perhaps a temple was in the near future for his hometown of Managua. After having told his sister, who still lives in Nicaragua, that he thought a temple announcement might be coming for them, she made every effort and sacrifice necessary to make a trip with her mother to visit Aviles in Utah.

We thought that it would be on Saturday that they would announce [temples], Aviles said, explaining that he and his family got tickets for the Saturday sessions of conference. So it was 3:55 p.m. on Sunday, the last session, and we thought, 'OK, well they didnt announce any new temples.'

Moments later, they were all crying after hearing the prophet say Managua, Nicaragua.

It was quite an emotional moment, Aviles said. It was just an answer to a lot of prayers.

Growing up in Nicaragua, the nearest temple for Aviles was in Guatemala, and it was never an easy trip to get there. Passports were often hard to come by and on some trips the buses would get stuck at the borders for hours.

It was quite difficult and challenging to get to the temple, Aviles said. But as soon as you could see that angel on top of the temple, it was all worth it.

As they pertain to the first temple for each country  Russia, India and Nicaragua  the announcements made on Sunday, April 1, 2018, by President Nelson mark a truly historic moment in Church history and signify a hastening of the Lords work around the globe.

Quoting George Q. Cannon, first counselor in the First Presidency, Mekala said, Every foundation stone that is laid for a temple, and every temple completed  lessens the power of Satan on the earth, and increases the power of God and godliness. And as we receive the temple of the Lord in our midst, the Lord will hasten His work.

The Church News is an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The publication's content supports the doctrines, principles and practices of the Church.Scientists Identify Best Locations for Southern California Wildlife Crossings

THOUSAND OAKS, Calif.  A new report offers recommendations on the location and type of wildlife crossing structures proposed for two of the busiest freeways in the world. Interstate 15 in western Riverside County and U.S. 101 in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties both bisect large areas of natural habitat and serve as major barriers to wildlife movement and gene flow, especially for mountain lions.

The report summarizes the input from some of the worlds foremost experts on wildlife connectivity and crossing structures and combines it with landscape characteristics and wildlife data to prioritize locations for wildlife crossings. The experts evaluated locations that would improve connectivity for all kinds of wildlife, including for the imperiled mountain lion populations in the Santa Ana and Santa Monica Mountains.

The loss of mountain lions in this area could have potentially harmful impacts on this ecosystem, said Seth Riley, report co-author and wildlife ecologist at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Wildlife in the Santa Monica Mountains is essentially trapped on an island of habitat, and a crossing structure would allow two-way migration to increase gene flow generally, and specifically increase genetic diversity for mountain lions.

Genetic diversity levels for mountain lions in the Santa Ana and Santa Monica Mountains are lower than have been measured anywhere else in the west. Only the endangered Florida panthers, which suffered from severe genetic defects before the introduction of females from Texas, have been found to have lower genetic diversity.

Right now, these busy highways have become nearly impenetrable barriers for mountain lions trying to travel into or out of both the Santa Ana and Santa Monica mountains, forcing them to sprint across many lanes of traffic, endangering their lives  and the lives of people in the cars, said Trish Smith, report co-author and ecologist at The Nature Conservancy. This report puts the power of science and data to work to identify the best locations for a network of crossings that will provide safe passage for mountain lions and other isolated and threatened wildlife. And we have already used the findings to inform the purchase of land just last week for a future I-15 wildlife crossing in the Rainbow Canyon area.

Wildlife crossing structures would allow juvenile mountain lions, among other wildlife, to move out of larger populations from east of the Santa Ana Mountains and north of the Santa Monica Mountains into the isolated coastal mountain ranges.

Our research has shown that the mountain lion population in the coastal Santa Ana Mountain Range is at risk of decline due to high mortality rates and restriction of gene flow by Interstate 15 and development, said T. Winston Vickers, report co-author and associate veterinarian at the University of California, Davis Wildlife Health Center. We hope that this report adds to the knowledge needed to make improvements that will allow wildlife to cross this busy highway.

The report, which can be found here (along with the appendices), evaluated eleven potential locations in the Santa Ana Mountains and seven in the Santa Monica Mountains. Each site was rated for evidence of wildlife use, including mountain lions, landscape connectivity, and the extent to which land was protected or at risk of development. Specific recommendations include:

Construction of a new wildlife overpass over I-15 south of Temecula Creek Bridge, as well as enhancements to the area underneath the existing bridge.

Construction of a new wildlife overpass over the 101 Freeway at the West Liberty Canyon site. A tunnel option was deemed inferior because constructing a tunnel large enough to serve a broad range of species would be prohibitively expensive and complicated from an engineering perspective.

Accompanying measures such as effective wildlife fencing to funnel animals to crossing points and appropriate vegetative cover on or near structures are critically important.

In both mountain ranges, additional locations offer the potential for new construction or enhancements that could provide secondary crossing sites.

Data from the study is already being used to optimize and inform planning.

Caltrans, along with numerous other partners, is currently working on a plan to build a wildlife crossing over the 101 Freeway in the Liberty Canyon area and last fall released the draft initial study and environmental assessment for the project.

Informed by this study, last week The Nature Conservancy acquired approximately 73 acres in the Rainbow Canyon area along I-15 near Temecula, a critical property needed for the placement of one of the highest priority wildlife crossings identified in the report.

UC Davis researchers are teaming with civil engineering faculty and students at Cal Poly Pomona and Caltrans, with the support of the NCCP Local Assistance Grant program and the San Diego Association of Governments, to better define the most feasible locations and types of crossing structure modifications that could improve the ability of mountain lions and other wildlife to cross I-15 in the future, including a future Rainbow Canyon crossing in the area where The Conservancy purchased land.

The Nature Conservancy is a global conservation organization dedicated to conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends. Guided by science, we create innovative, on-the-ground solutions to our worlds toughest challenges so that nature and people can thrive together. We are tackling climate change, conserving lands, waters and oceans at unprecedented scale, providing food and water sustainably and helping make cities more sustainable. Working in 72 countries, we use a collaborative approach that engages local communities, governments, the private sector, and other partners. To learn more, visit www.nature.org or follow @nature_press on Twitter.

Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (SMMNRA) is the largest urban national park in the country, encompassing morethan 150,000 acres of mountains and coastline in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. A unit of the National Park Service, it comprises a seamless network of local, state, and federal parks interwoven with private lands and communities. As one of only five Mediterranean ecosystems in the world, SMMNRA preserves the rich biological diversity of more than 450 animal species and 26 distinct plant communities. For more information, visit www.nps.gov/samo.

The UC Davis Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center seeks to advance the health of wildlife in balance with people and the environment. Through projects and programs, the center focuses on critical issues involving free-ranging and captive terrestrial and aquatic wild animals. As key components of the UC Davis One Health Institute and School of Veterinary Medicine, the center provides broad-based service, training and research activities as they relate to wildlife health and conservation.

Source: NPSShe's Really Lovely Lady Who Cares About People Around The World: Angelina Jolie On Queen Elizabeth II

Angelina Jolie shares six children with ex-husband Brad Pitt. The kids are stepping in their teenage years and they are already learning things from their mother who is also a humanitarian. The kids are Maddox (16), Pax (14), Zahara (12), Shiloh (11) and nine-year-old twins Vivienne and Knox.





The latest thing which the actress is teaching her kids is to conserve nature. In her latest documentary entitled 'The Queen's Green Planet', Queen Elizabeth II aims to teach the importance of forest conservation. On a visit to Namibia, Jolie praised the Queen for this message.





She said, "For us to come here and say to the children, 'This is why it's important to plant a tree,' that's the biggest message I can teach my kids, and it's something that they've certainly learned from Her Majesty and her message. They ask me, 'Why is it so important to her?' You know when you sit up at night in a tent with your kids and they say, 'Why does the Queen of England care about planting trees in Africa'"?





She further added, "But you try to say, 'You know she's just this really lovely lady who really cares about people around the world, and she really cares about the future, and she wants your grandkids and her grandkids to be able to be running around, enjoying nature and other cultures, and the importance of other cultures. She thinks that really matters and I agree with her."





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Source: media1.popsugar-assets.comAbout Me: Digit Desk authored articles are a collaborative effort of multiple authors contributing to the page. A combination of category experts and product database analysts together adding content to the page. Read MoreQualcomms top of the line Snapdragon 845 is already here and the company is said to be working on SoCs for mid-range smartphones. As per XDA Developers, the rumoured Snapdragon 670 SoC (sdm 670) may be rebranded to Snapdragon 710 (sdm 710) and is also said to power at least two upcoming Xiaomi devices. Firmware files for two Xiaomi devices code-named Sirius and Comet" surfaced online few days ago and the code mentioned the use of the Snapdragon 670 SoC on both the devices. Folks at XDA Developers were then able to get their hands upon some updated firmware files for the same devices and this time, all references to the Snapdragon 670 SoC were found to be replaced by the Snapdragon 710 chipset.

Initially, it was thought that the company couldve simply decided to use the upgraded processor on both the devices, but as per a reliable source, XDA Developers say that the yet to be announced Snapdragon 670 SoC is scrapped and will be released as sdm 710. This is also further reiterated by the commit changes found on Qualcomms CodeAurora forums. From what we know so far, the upcoming Snapdragon 670 chipset, now rebranded to sdm 710, is expected to be used in premium mid-range smartphones and also feature AI capabilities, tricked down from the high-end Snapdragon 845 SoC.

Qualcomm announced its 700 series of processors at the MWC 2018. They will be powered by Qualcomm's Kryo cores and Adreno GPUs. They will also feature the companys Spectra ISP, Hexagon vector processor and Adreno visual processing subsystems for handing AI related tasks. Qualcomm says that the 700 series chipsets will offer twice as fast AI computations than the Snapdragon 660, alongwith 30% increase battery efficiency and ability to charge 2750mAh battery from zero percent to fifty percent in 15 minutes, thanks to the Quick Charge 4+ technology.

As for the two aforementioned Xiaomi smartphones, both the Comet and Sirius will reportedly feature an OLED always on display feature but the latter might feature a notch on top of its display. They are said to dual SIM devices which could launch running on Android 8.1 Oreo. The Comet and Sirius might be powered by a 3100mAh and 3120mAh battery respectively, and the company might remove microSD card support for them.

Speaking of Xiaomi, the company will be launching its first gaming smartphone called Blackshark in China. The device is being released under the companys sub-brand by the same name and a recently teased poster of the device reads meant for gamers and reveals rounded rounded corners. The handset's design is in contrast with the Razer phone, which it is speculated to go up against, as the latter has a blocky design with sharp corners. The poster also shows the power key being placed on the right edge of the device.

As for the specifications, there is no official confirmation of it but it was previously spotted on AnTuTu. According to the listing, the device features a 6-inch display with 2160 x 1080p resolution and a taller 18:9 display aspect ratio and is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC. It also suggests that the phone could sport 32GB internal storage, which we are doubtful about as a smartphone aimed at gamers would ideally have ample ROM. Fresh reports point to this as it could actually come with 256GB ROM and pack a 3400mAh battery. It is also speculated to feature a 120Hz refresh rate, same as the Razer phone.Lockheed offers to set up F-16 unit, make Javelin missiles in India

Keen on securing the $15-billion Indian Air Force deal for 110 fighter jets, US defence major Lockheed Martin has expressed readiness to shift its F-16 fighter aircraft manufacturing facility to India and the transfer the technology for its third generation anti-armour guided missile system Javelin to India for its future manufacture.

The American aerospace and defence major said it has permission from the US government to shift the F-16 facility and for the guided missile technology transfer since the US Air Force is phasing out its F-16s.

An IANS report quoting Lockheed officials at the DefExpo 18 said the US company is geared up for the world's biggest fighter jet order and that it would also offer to transfer technology to local partners for sophisticated parts as well.

"We are offering a deal that is completely compatible with 'Make in India' - offering a stand-up production line in India," the report quoted Randall L Howard, head of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics International Business Development for aircraft.

The single-engine supersonic multirole fighter aircraft that has seen action in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, is currently being built around the world, and setting up facilities in India would not impact jobs in the US, he added.

The Lockheed official claimed that more than 4,000 F-16s have been sold to countries across the world. The US Air Force is not interested in buying these aircraft, forcing the company to look for other markets.

"We are offering to shift the manufacturing base and produce all of our F-16s in India; not just for India, but for the whole world  across South East Asia, across South America, across Middle East."

Howard said the company had "full support of the US government" for shifting the F-16 production line.

"So, whenever we have a situation, we will be able to build the entire aircraft in India. But we will continue to have parts that come from the US. That will continue to create jobs in the US. This absolutely supports American jobs," he said.

In fact, he said, Lockheed was also looking at the possibility of setting up the entire ecosystem, including one with a runway, to produce the fighters in flyaway condition.

The report quoted another Lockheed official, Haley Donoho, head of the business development of shoulder-fired anti-armour Javelin missile, said a possible joint venture for the system "is in good standing with the Indian government".

"Should the Indian government be interested in the third generation missile system, we are ready to sell Javelin under a foreign military sale contract which is the most transparent acquisition contract you can find. You can trace at every step where the money is going."

He said Lockheed has got the US government's nod to transfer its "high-degree" technology to its partners in India for the development of the 22kg, portable missile system that comes with a combination of "fire and forget" and "man in the loop" capability, with a range of up to four km.

The missile, which automatically guides itself to the target after launch, has been used by US forces in the cold mountains of Afghanistan and in the hot deserts of Iraq.

With its arched top-attack profile, Javelin climbs above its target for improved visibility and then strikes where the armour is weakest, he said.Mahindra partners Japanese, Israeli firms for sea planes, naval UAVs

Mahindra Defence, part of Mahindra and Mahindra Group, on Wednesday announced the signing of two major deals that would strengthen it defence footprint and make it a major supplier of Naval aviation equipment and parts.

The company on Wednesday signed an MoU with Japan-based ShinMaywa Industries to manufacture and supply the US-2 amphibious aircraft to Indian Navy. It also signed another MoU with Aeronautics of Israel to manufacture shipborne unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for the Indian Navy. The company on Wednesday signed an MoU with Japan-based ShinMaywa Industries to manufacture and supply the US-2 amphibious aircraft to Indian Navy. It also signed another MoU with Aeronautics of Israel to manufacture shipborne unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for the Indian Navy.

Under the MoU, signed on the sidelines of the Defexpo 2018, in Chennai, Mahindra Defence and ShinMaywa Industries will join forces for setting up MRO services as also facility for manufacture and assembly of structural parts and components for US-2 amphibian aircraft.

ShinMaywa US-2, manufactured by Japan-based ShinMaywa Industries, is a modern amphibious aircraft and a veritable force multiplier since it fulfils a multitude of missions in a single platform. It is an unique aircraft and the only in service open sea capable amphibian aircraft with state-of-art equipment that can be used for very rough sea operations (Sea state 5 up to 3m wave height), riverine/lake landing capability, STOL features, long endurance and extended radius of operations with large payload capacity.

US-2 could be an effective platform to carry out benign missions such as search and rescue (SAR), casualty evacuation (CASEVAC), humanitarian relief and disaster management, and constabulary missions such as extended EEZ surveillance, maritime domain awareness (MDA) missions of the Indian Navy etc.

The ShinMaywa US-2 fleet is deployed by Japanese Maritime Self Defence Forces across their remote islands chain for exclusive economic zones protection, surveillance and search and rescue operations.

India and Japan are now discussing the methodology of procurement of amphibian aircraft US-2 requirements of the Indian Navy. Both nations are working on the way forward to induct this aircraft in India.

Under the partnership, ShinMaywa and Mahindra Defence will set up MRO services in India and also undertake manufacturing, assembling of structural parts and components for US-2 amphibian aircraft etc.

Mahindra is the only Indian private sector OEM for small aircraft which is sold in many countries globally.

This partnership between two companies familiar with the aviation business is positive especially for MRO and maintenance services in the Indian defence aerospace sector. We are committed to absorbing maintenance TOT for this large amphibious aircraft in India. Our partnership will enable us to leverage our strengths and consequently this will contribute to growing Indian aerospace ecosystem, SP Shukla, group president, Aerospace and Defence Sector, Mahindra Group and chairman, Mahindra Defence, said.

This is a versatile aircraft ideally suited for Indian conditions. The US-2 with its unmatched capability is considered to be extremely useful for strengthening the safety and security of SLOCs, long range fleet support and island/offshore assets (both overseas and coastal) support functions. These missions when combined in a single multimodal platform such as the US-2 can earn for India the precious goodwill of nations of the Indian Ocean region commensurate with its identity as a responsible rising power. Japan Maritime Defence Force have extensively used this aircraft for many years now, Yasuo Kawanishi, director, ShinMaywa Industries Limited, said.

As per the MoU both the companies will build a strategic partnership for future versions of US-2 amphibian aircraft.

The ShinMaywa group has a product range of aircraft, industrial machinery, environmental systems, special purpose trucks and passenger boarding bridges. ShinMaywa products are exported to over 100 countries around the globe, including India.

Mahindra Defence also signed an MoU with Aeronautics of Israel to partner for Naval Shipborne unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Aeronautics and Mahindra will offer a UAV system which can be launched and recovered from Indian warships.

Aeronautics, a leading manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), is an Israeli public listed company, and is a key player in the defence domain. Aeronautics is the OEM of Orbiter series of UAVs, which is sold in many countries globally.

The Aeronautics Orbiter 4 is an advanced multi-mission platform with an ability to carry and operate two different payloads simultaneously. With an open architecture, the Orbiter 4 can be specially adjusted to the needs of each mission.

Among the different payloads the Orbiter 4 can carry are maritime patrol radar (MPR), cellular interception sensor, satellite communication, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), automatic identification system (AIS) and advanced electro-optic payload. Orbiter 4 capabilities include maximum endurance of up to 24 hours, maximum take-off weight of 50 Kgs and maximum flight altitude of 18,000 feet while operating different payloads.

Under the partnership Mahindra Defence and Aeronautics will offer the maritime version of Orbiter 4 for the Indian Navy. The UAV will carry state-of-the-art sensor payloads as required by Indian Navy. The UAV will be capable of being launched and recovered from small warships that do not have a helicopter deck, including small warships which are around 50 m in length. This UAV will be a force multiplier for the Indian Navy.

Aeronautics has entered into this partnership to offer the maritime version of Orbiter 4 to Indian Navy. We will work together with Mahindra Defence to manufacture Orbiter UAVs in India. We are ready for transfer of technology and transfer of production line in India. This is a sign of Aeronautics commitment to India by offering our newest and most advanced aerial solutions for operations by Indian Navy - one of the best navies in the world, Amos Mathan, CEO of Aeronautics LTD, said.

Mahindra group has been supporting `Make in India initiative whole heartedly. We always identify high quality products and enter into partnerships that we believe will bring maximum value to our defence forces. We believe that Indian armed forces should get the state-of-the-art products while we develop skill and competency for defence manufacturing indigenously. Specifically, we have entered into this partnership to address a range of possibilities from offsets to manufacturing in India, which includes transfer of technology and life time support of the product, SP Shukla, group president, Aerospace and Defence Sector, Mahindra Group and ahairman, Mahindra Defence, said.

With its UASs deployed by over 75 defence, military, and homeland security forces in more than 50 countries around the world, Aeronautics group provides unmanned aerial solutions for the most advanced defence, para-military and HLS missions. Integrating surveillance equipment with network information, Aeronautics unmanned aerial systems are ideal for land, sea and air operations, and have already accumulated hundreds of thousands of operational flight hours worldwide.

Mahindra Defence is engaged in catering to the needs of all three wings of the defence forces  Army, Navy and Air Force, supplying a range of products, including armoured vehicles, underwater warfare equipment, avionics and surveillance equipments etc.

Mahindra Defence has companies engaged in catering to needs of all three wings of Defence forces  Army, Air Force and Navy. Their product range includes armoured vehicles, underwater warfare equipment, avionics and surveillance equipments etc. Mahindra Defence is also poised to enter the field of defence aviation and has interest in building helicopters and aircraft for the armed forces.

Through Land Systems units in India and the UAE, Mahindra Defence has also been supplying customised armoured vehicles to the Indian Army, para military forces and overseas customers. Naval Systems unit based in Pune has been supplying decoy and torpedo launchers, large composite structures for defence applications to the Indian Navy etc. Mahindra Defence is also engaged in defence electronics and avionics through a JV with Telephonics.

The Mahindra Group also enjoys a strong presence in agribusiness, aerospace, commercial vehicles, components, defence, logistics, real estate, renewable energy, speedboats and steel, amongst other businesses. Headquartered in India, Mahindra employs over 2,40,000 people across 100 countries.From property damage to lost production: how natural disasters impact economics

When a natural disaster strikes, major disaster databases tend to compile information about losses such as damage to property or cost of repairs, but other economic impacts after the disaster are often overlooked  such as how a company's lost ability to produce products may affect the entire supply-chain within the affected region and in other regions.

Without using the right model to study these losses, the data may give an incomplete picture of the full financial impact of the disaster as it doesn't fully portray business interruptions incurred locally, or by trade partners, after the event.

As a result, a locality may receive less than it should in state or federal government recovery support.

In a recent study, published in Earth System Dynamics, an inter-disciplinary journal devoted to the study of Earth and global change, economists at the University of Illinois (U of I) partnered with atmospheric scientists and hydrologists from U of I and the University of California at Los Angeles, and with the Army Corps of Engineers to capture the characteristics of an atmospheric river  a transporter of water vapour in the sky  that hit the western part of Washington State in 2007. This event resulted in record flooding (a 500-year stream peak event in some parts of the river) and record damages.

The team hopes to show that carefully selecting the characteristics of the extreme weather event under study and the correct model to estimate losses  based on characteristics of the disaster and the affected region, and on the interdependence between one area and another  can help in determining vulnerability and preparing for future disasters, from an economic standpoint.

"This is quite different from what insurance companies do," explains Sandy Dall'Erba, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at U of I, and a co-author of the study. "After a disaster, when an insurance company comes, they basically say that your building has been destroyed by this particular amount. And because you were out of the building for, say, a week, you couldn't produce anything for a week. What insurance companies forget, and what our paper is trying to demonstrate is that the total amount of economic losses is much greater."

The ripple effects from a disaster can be significant if major industrial chains are disrupted when infrastructure is comprised. For instance, while the study finds that intersectoral and interregional linkages add up to around 10 per cent in standard economic damage estimates in the small rural area chosen in this study, that share could go up to 50-70 per cent for a major metropolitan area like Houston, Texas, because of its enormous transportation system and interregional trade.

"Let's say for instance that a company producing tires is flooded. Obviously, no tires are coming from that company," Dall'Erba explains. "The car company, which could be located in a place that wasn't flooded, suddenly is expecting a delay in the tires that are not coming on time anymore. There are all of these connections from one city to the next that are traditionally not accounted for after a disaster."

In his U of I lab, the Regional Economic Applications Laboratory (REAL), Dall'Erba studies very specific disaster events using a technique called input-output  a technique that shows the interdependencies between the sectors within a region and across different regions. He also teaches this technique in his home department (ACE) on a regular basis.

"We look at each industry. What kind of products and services do they buy? To whom do they sell their goods and services? In the case of Chehalis, Washington, that was flooded in 2007, it was mainly companies selling to other companies, not to individual households.

"Those are the kinds of links that we try to include in the work we do in REAL, how to understand that level of dependence between one location and other places. We also provide measurements that are very specific to each locality," Dall'Erba says.

Using the input-output technique helped the researchers calculate the actual losses after the event in Chehalis. "We rely on a huge amount of data to do it. We have information from each locality about how each industry is connected to every industry within that locality and outside of that locality so we can understand how dollars flow," he adds.

In addition, they must account for the timing of the event. "While the affected area is very agricultural, the luck it had is that the flood took place in December, way ahead of the growing season of the crop the locality depends the most on, corn. If it had taken place a few months later, the local economy would have experienced much larger losses," Dall'Erba says.

Finally, Dall'Erba's team is particularly careful to account for the location of the companies in charge of reconstruction. "Most of the literature assumes without evidence that reconstruction will dampen the local losses and boost employment.

It turns out that for small rural communities  like the one in our study  no local construction company is present or is large enough to be in charge of reconstruction. As such, reconstruction efforts are delivered by companies outside of the affected economy and it is these other localities that see an increase in output and construction jobs," Dall'Erba adds.

The latter part of their study focuses on the future. Assuming that climate change will result in 15 per cent more streamflow (water from rivers or streams) for all return periods, the authors find that the total losses would increase from $6.2 million, the figure seen during the actual event, to $8.6 million (a 39 per cent increase).

"Adaptation strategies could include, among others, larger floodplains in upstream locations, levees close to critical buildings, and/or developing a more resilient supply-chain," Dall'Erba says. "However it is particularly hard for small rural communities as they do not always have the budget necessary to implement large adaptation projects; yet they have already been more frequently affected by floods than urban areas over the last few decades."Isro successfully launches INRSS-1I navigation satellite

Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) today successfully launched navigation satellite INRSS-1I aboard its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from the Satish Dhavan Space Centre (SDSC), at Sriharikota, in Andhra Pradesh.

PSLV-C41/IRNSS-1I mission blasted off at 4.04 am from the first launch pad at the SDSC and injected the satellite into the designated orbit 19 minutes after lift-off, paving the way for India establishing its own satellite navigation system. PSLV-C41/IRNSS-1I mission blasted off at 4.04 am from the first launch pad at the SDSC and injected the satellite into the designated orbit 19 minutes after lift-off, paving the way for India establishing its own satellite navigation system.

After a flight lasting about 19 minutes, the vehicle achieved a sub-geosynchronous transfer orbit with a perigee (nearest point to earth) of 281.5 km and an apogee (farthest point to earth) of 20,730 km inclined at an angle of 19.2 degree to the equator, following which IRNSS-1I separated from PSLV," Isro stated in a statement.

It added, After separation, the solar panels of IRNSS-1I were deployed automatically. Isro's Master Control Facility (MCF) at Hassan, Karnataka took over control of the satellite. In the coming days, the MSF will perform orbit manoeuvres to position the satellite at 55 deg east longitude in the planned geosynchronous orbit with an inclination of 29 deg to the equator."

IRNSS-1I is the latest member of the Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) system. NavIC, also known as Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), is an independent regional navigation satellite system designed to provide position information in the Indian region and 1,500 km around the Indian mainland.

It was a normal lift-off, Isro officials said. Isro chairman K Sivan described the mission as a success and congratulated the scientists behind it.

"I am extremely happy to announce that the 8th navigation satellite of India was launched successfully into the NAVIC constellation. We are moving towards a major goal. This NAVIC constellation will create history," the Isro chairman said after the launch.

IRNSS-1I is expected to replace IRNSS-1A, the first of the seven navigation satellites that was rendered ineffective after its three rubidium atomic clocks failed. The seven satellites are part of the NavIC navigation satellite constellation.

The launch is Isro's second attempt at sending a replacement satellite.

See: The previous mission of a PSLV carrying IRNSS-1H in August last year failed after the heat shield covering the satellite failed to separate ( Isro's IRNSS satellite launch fails ).

A number of ground facilities responsible for IRNSS satellite ranging and monitoring, generation and transmission of navigation parameters, satellite control, network timing, etc, have been established in many locations across the country as part of NavIC.

Currently, only the US and Russia have fully operational GPS systems, while China and Europe are still deploying their own full systems. A native satellite-based navigation system is considered to be a deep strategic asset, useful in civilian and military fields.

The need for an indigenous GPS in India was identified after the Kargil conflict when India desperately needed services of satellite-based navigation system but did not have one of its own.

Till now, PSLV has successfully launched 52 Indian satellites and 237 satellites for foreign customers.Recent graduates from Donegal are being encouraged to apply for the governments 500,000 Competitive Start Fund.

Donegal TD Joe McHugh, Minister for the Irish language, the Gaeltacht and the Islands, has said the fund opened for applications on Tuesday April 10th through Enterprise Ireland, and will close a fortnight later on Tuesday, April 24th.

Mr McHugh, Government Chief Whip, said: I want entrepreneurial students and graduates to think hard about competing in this 500,000 fund. It will provide up to 50,000 in equity for up to 10 successful applicants.

This incentive is designed to accelerate the growth of start-up companies that have the capability to succeed in global markets.

We have a pool of talented and ambitious entrepreneurs in this country, including here in Donegal, who are still in university or recently graduated, and are making valuable contributions to the economy through their start-ups.

For these entrepreneurs, Government supports like this one are vital. While the funding is crucial, the competition opens the doors to valuable business support and networking opportunities to the business leaders of tomorrow at the start of their journey.

The Competitive Start Fund is part of the Governments strategy to increase the number and quality of High Potential Start-Up companies that have the potential to employ more than 10 people and achieve 1 million in export sales within three years.

Mr McHugh added: I would strongly encourage budding entrepreneurs from Donegal working in manufacturing and internationally traded services such as cloud computing, software, cleantech, gaming, mobile, apps and LifeSciences to check if theyre eligible and consider applying.

Final year students and graduates with a third-level qualification within the last three years are invited to apply online and prepare an online video pitch.

Full details on the Competitive Start Fund for Graduate Entrepreneurs, including the application form and eligibility criteria, can be found on Enterprise Irelands website at www.enterprise-ireland.com/graduatecsf.While Hyundais recent attention has been focused on its all-new i30 N hot hatch, the South Korean brand hasnt forgotten about its bread-and-butter models.

The i30 range has been given an overhaul for 2018, with new models and optional equipment to try and increase its appeal. The i30 is the third best-selling small car in 2018 but is falling behind its arch-rivals, the Toyota Corolla and Mazda3.

The updated 2018 i30 range sees the introduction of the 2.0-litre four-cylinder petrol engine, previous reserved for the cheaper Go and Active models, now added to the formerly diesel-only Elite and Premium models. The engine is exclusively mated to a six-speed automatic transmission in the Elite and Premium.

The other major change is the availability of Hyundais SmartSense suite of active safety features on the Go and Active models. Previously the entry-level i30 was unable to get the brands latest safety technology. SmartSense is a $1750 option but brings with it autonomous emergency braking, forward collision warning, blind spot monitoring with lane change assist, lane keeping assist, driver attention alert, rear cross traffic alert and active cruise control.

It also adds an electronic parking brake, a 4.2-inch TFT colour screen in the instrument cluster, rear air-conditioning vents, power folding exterior mirrors and chrome-effect front grille insert.

The SR and SR Premium models are largely unchanged, still powered exclusively by the companys 1.6-litre four-cylinder turbocharged petrol engine. However, the SR Premium and Premium models do get a new seven-speaker Infinity premium sound system as standard.Toyota could put hydrogen cars in customer driveways by 2025.

The opportunity for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to hit Australian roads is near as governments become increasingly eco-conscious and opportunities exist for commercialising charging stations.

Hyundai has already confirmed it will supply 20 of its new Nexo FCEVs to Canberra this year as part of the Hornsdale Windfarm project. Toyota is eyeing a piece of the pie with the Mirai FCEV, which outsold the number two-selling Hyundai Tucson FCEV globally last year.

The problem, much like early fully electric vehicle adoption, is a lack of infrastructure. But users cant simply fill up at home overnight and will need a properly equipped hydrogen fuelling station.

Speaking with Drive during a test drive of the Mirai (Japanese for future) in the US, Toyota Australia operations vice president Sean Hanley said the first steps could come from fleet buyers building a back-to-base hydrogen station, or even making use of the Japanese brands 280-strong dealership network that covers Australia.

Weve had a lot of interest in Mirai, particularly from governments and fleets, he said.

We need to work with government and within our own industry and indeed energy companies to bring forward the plans for infrastructure. Theres only one in San Diego and some in LA that have been setup, so infrastructure is the only delay in this technology coming forward.

Thats an option we are looking at [back-to-base hydrogen fleet cars] and that would speed up our opportunity to bring Mirai to market.

One of our strengths is we have approximately 280 dealer sites in Australia so going forwards, and even in this industry where there are disruptions, one of our great strengths is the fact we have these 280 dealer sites and the different ways of doing business.

While we dont have any plans for hydrogen fuelling or refuelling stations at our dealerships at this stage I would never rule that out as a possibility.The 2018 Swift being exported is manufactured at the new Gujarat plant. Earlier this year, Maruti Suzuki shifted the production of Balelo to Manesar plant to make way for the new Swift. Now, the exporting of the new Swift has started and the waiting period might go up.

The first batch of 2018 Maruti Swift was exported to South Africa from Mumbai on April 10, 2018. Maruti Suzuki is looking to expand the export markets to at least 100 countries and regions across Europe, Africa, Asia, Japan and Latin America.

Recommended Video - Watch Now! Maruti Swift 2018 - Full Specifications, Features, Price, Mileage, Colours & More - DriveSpark

The new third-gen Swift is based on the HEARTECT platform which is lighter and stronger. The new Swift is lighter and handing has improved a lot. On the design front, the new Swift gets radical changes to the front and the rear profile. You can also read our first look review for more details.

In India, the 2018 Swift is offered with the same 1.2-litre K-Series petrol engine producing 82bhp and 113Nm of torque and 1.3-litre diesel engine churning out 74bhp and 190Nm of torque. Transmission options include a 5-speed manual gearbox as standard and an optional 5-speed AMT gearbox.

The 2018 Maruti Swift comes loaded with features such as projector headlamps with LED daytime running lights, engine start/stop button, keyless entry and touchscreen infotainment system. Safety features include dual-airbags and ABS as standard.

Thoughts On The 2018 Maruti Swift Export

Maruti Suzuki has finally commenced exporting the new Swift from India. The 2018 Swift has been selling like hot cakes in India. And now with the exports, the waiting period is expected to go up. But we hope that Maruti will ramp up the production of the new Swift with the increase in demand for the hatchback.Dundalk solicitor, Eimear Hall has opened her own solicitors firm in the heart of the town centre.

Located at 8 Jocelyn Street, Dundalk, the offices are located beside her parents antique shop, Hall's Curio Shop.

The Halls are a long established Dundalk family and have been trading in one form or another from this location for in excess of 100 years.

The new firm is called Eimear Hall & Co. and will deal with all areas of general legal practice with a particular emphasis on litigation, family law and property matters.

Eimear hopes to provide an efficient, professional and reliable service and hopes that her many years of experience working in Dundalk and her wide variety of contacts, will help to establish and grow her new business.

In addition, Eimear was appointed as a Notary Public for the town of Dundalk and counties of Louth, Meath and Monaghan by the Chief Justice of Ireland, Mrs Susan Denham in 2016 and is the only female Notary Public in Dundalk.

Eimear is a former student of St. Vincents and has a law degree from University College Cork and a Masters from Queens University Belfast.

She qualified as a solicitor in 2001 having trained with local firm MacGuill & Company.

She subsequently worked with a number of local firms before she made the decision to set up her own practice.

She is married to Tony Curran who is a civil engineer employed by ABP Food Group .

They have three children, Oisin (7), Aoife (6) and Fionn (3) and reside in Blackrock.

Eimear is a board member of the Louth Volunteer Centre and is also an active member for her local community.13:45

GRAND PARTNER (14/1) can be competitive here going back up in trip after a good win last time out at Leopardstown. He enjoys soft ground and will enjoy this test. At 14/1, he represents a good each-way option.

14:20

SLATE HOUSE (14/1) is another each-way player here in a very open contest. This horse has not hit the heights once expected of him but he did beat the Supreme Novices winner Summerville Boy at Cheltenham last November on soft ground. He fell at last month's festival when Summerville Boy prevailed, but he can't be written off just yet.

14:50

This race may be an afterthought for SNOW FALCON (12/1) after he unseated midway through the Irish Grand National over Easter but before that he was just five lengths in arrears chasing home Monalee at Leopardstown. That horse went on to be second to Presenting Percy in the RSA at Cheltenham. A lot of these rivals were behind Monalee that day. Noel Meade's charge won't mind the soft ground and will stay.

15:25

MIN (13/8) hasn't done much wrong in his career to date. He's hugely consistent and has won six out of nine starts for Willie Mulllins. He lost one of those in the steward's room to Simply Ned after technically finishing ahead of that rival, and experienced his other two defeats at the hands of Altior, both at Cheltenham in two separate years. There is no Altior today and although fellow Irish raider Balko Des Flos beat Un Des Sceaux at Cheltenham, I think Min will be hard to beat at this distance. With Politilogue likely to be better than last month, this could be the race of the day.

16:05

Paul Nicholls has fallen down the training pecking order in recent years but he could certainly claim this race with ART MAURESQUE (18/1). His form with Waiting Patiently from earlier in the year worked out well with that rival going on to beat Cue Card. He may not be the yard's first string, but he can handle these fences and be there or thereabouts at the end.

16:40

If there's room for a crazy bet on Day 2 it is certainly here with ANOTHER STOWAWAY (66/1). You could virtually name your price on this horse but he may be lucky enough to steal a place. He has had a wind operation of late, with this being just his second run since. He was second on the comeback run, but before that was a close second to the hugely exciting On The Blind Side at this very track last October. That race was run on identical ground and at a silly price, he could spring a surprise.

17:15

A notoriously difficult race to dissect with a host of emerging talent, but the nod goes with DANNY KIRWAN (2/1) for Paul Nicholls. This horse was purchased by Offaly bloodstock agent Tom Malone, and he's been sweet on his prospects. Having bought the 2018 Gold Cup winner Native River, he knows a good horse, and this one has backed up the up so far with a sublime point-to-point win and a subsequent Kempton victory.Louth TD Fergus O'Dowd, has welcomed the news that a new 600 pupil post primary school will be established in the Drogheda-Laytown area.

"My colleague Minister Richard Bruton has confirmed to me that following on from the nationwide demographic report carried out by his department, that a new 600 pupil post primary school will be built in the Drogheda-Laytown area to address the ever increasing demographic demand."

"This is fantastic news and it is hoped the project will be completed by 2019 and will deliver a regional solution for the area. This decision is an endorsement of the Project 2040 announcement and Drogheda's inclusion as a vital cog earmarked for regional development in the plan."

"Another key element of this announcement is the process that will be run to establish parental preference for the patronage of the new school. Minister Bruton will announce a new online patronage process this year to determine parental preferences in the area in terms of preferred patron and their preference as to whether the new school should operate through Irish or English."

"In addition the large school will also secure employment for teachers locally and create jobs in the construction sector."

"I have also been re-assured that the Department remains fully committed to all projects on the existing building programme."DHAKA  The Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety has announced discussions are under way to develop a safety monitoring organisation which can take over it responsibilities when the Alliances five year jurisdiction comes to an end later this year.

Questions have been raised for several months regarding what structure any newly-formed regulatory body would take, as both the Alliance and Accord come to the end of their original terms in operation.

Speaking exclusively to Ecotextile News, executive director of the Alliance, Jim Moriarty said: For the peace of mind of those wishing to import from Bangladesh, there has to be an independent and credible oversight mechanism. Thats what were trying to build.By Alex Kirby

The Gulf Stream is slowing, the North Atlantic is cooling. An international scientific study has found new and harder evidence that one of the planet's key heat pumps, the currents which exchange warmth between the tropics and the Arctic, are weaker today than at any time in the last thousand years.



The currents, known as the Atlantic overturningits scientific name is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)bring warm water north from the tropics and return south with cold water.

Earlier studies suggested strongly that any weakening of the AMOC would speed sea level rise on the U.S. east coast and cool north-west Europe by up to 5C.

Those studies made use of computer simulations. But the latest research is radically different. It is based on direct observation of what is happening in the ocean. And it is, in non-scientific language, hard evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing down.

A team from Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has found evidence which it says not only supports the earlier predictions, but makes them hard to dispute.

In a study published in the journal Nature the researchers say analysis of sea surface temperature data shows that the AMOC has slowed down by roughly 15 percent since the middle of the 20th century, with human-made climate change a prime suspect.

"We detected a specific pattern of ocean cooling south of Greenland and unusual warming off the U.S. coastwhich is highly characteristic for a slowdown of the Atlantic overturning, also called the Gulf Stream system," said the lead author, Levke Caesar from PIK. "It is practically like a fingerprint of a weakening of these ocean currents."

For decades, computer simulations have generally predicted that the AMOC will weaken in response to human-caused global warming. But whether this is already happening has until now been unclear, because of a lack of long-term direct current measurements.

Most Robust

Not any more, though. "The evidence we're now able to provide is the most robust to date," said Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute, who conceived the study. "We've analysed all the available sea surface temperature data sets, comprising data from the late 19th century until the present."

"The specific trend pattern we found in measurements looks exactly like what is predicted by the computer simulations as a result of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream system, and I see no other plausible explanation for it."

The Atlantic overturning is driven by the differences in the density of the ocean water: when the warm, lighter water flows from south to north it becomes colder, denser and heavier, making it sink deeper and flow back southwards.

Global warming is not the only influence on the AMOC. Increased rainfall and meltwater from the Arctic sea ice and Greenland ice sheet are also diluting the waters of the northern Atlantic, reducing the salinity. Less saline water is less dense and so less heavy, making it harder for the water to sink from the surface to the ocean depths.

Second Study

There have been long debates about whether the AMOC could collapse, which would constitute a tipping element in the Earth system. The PIK study does not consider the AMOC's future, instead analysing how it has changed over the past century.

A second study, by a team including David Thornalley, from University College London, in the same issue of Nature, looks into the Earth's past climate to reconstruct Atlantic overturning changes over the past 1,600 years.

It provides independent confirmation for earlier conclusions that the weakness of the circulation today is unprecedented for more than a millennium at least.

"Several lines of evidence are coming together to a consistent picture now, all pointing at the same weakening since the 1950s," said Prof. Rahmstorf. "[They include] sub-polar Atlantic cooling, the warming inshore of the Gulf Stream, Thornalley's proxy data for subsurface Atlantic temperatures, and earlier proxy data from deep sea corals showing water mass changes in the Gulf of Maine."

Reposted with permission from our media associate Climate News Network.We can add volcanic eruptions to the list of potential climate change hazards.

In a presentation at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly held from April 8 to 13, University of Clermont Auvergne Ph.D. student Gioachino Roberti explained research indicating that melting glaciers could trigger eruptions, the Independent reported Wednesday.

According to Roberti, glaciers give mountains stability. When they melt, that stability goes with them, leading to collapses and landslides. And lack of stability means trouble for anyone living under a volcano.

"Volcanoes are a pressurised system and if you remove pressure by ice melting and landslide, you have a problem," Roberti told the Independent.

Roberti's presentation focused on a case study of Mount Meager in British Columbia, Canada. The volcano saw the largest landslide in Canadian history on its south side in 2010. By 2016, volcanic gases formed ice caves in the glacier, the first time that had ever happened on the mountain.

The researchers used mathematical models to conclude that another landslide could impact the magmatic plumbing of the mountain enough to trigger an eruption.

Roberti told the Independent that this is most likely an impact of climate change.

"We see a correlation between high temperature, ice melting and landslides," Roberti said.

If climate change does trigger more eruptions, it might offer some relief for global temperatures. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), volcanic eruptions release sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which leads to global cooling by converting into sulfuric acid, which condenses and forms sulfate aerosols that reflect sulfate radiation back into space. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 cooled the planet for three years, decreasing temperatures by as much as 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit during its peak.

A National Center for Atmospheric Research study published in 2017 found that global warming could mean that future eruptions have a more severe climate impact, leading to greater cooling than before, but not enough to offset global warming.

The USGS points out that volcanoes also release carbon dioxide, and in the deep past it is possible that massive eruptions did trigger global warming. However, today the carbon impact of volcanoes is minimal next to human impacts. The 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens emitted 10 million tons of carbon dioxide in nine hours; humans routinely emit the same amount in 2.5 hours.

Ice-capped volcanoes aren't the only ones vulnerable to climate change. Open University researcher Dr. David McGarvie said he didn't think there was enough evidence yet that glacier loss would trigger eruptions, but he told the Independent that climate change had historically impacted ice-buried volcanoes in Antarctica and Iceland.

"There is more and better evidence across Iceland that when the ice sheet underwent major reduction at the end of the last glacial period, there was a large increase in both the frequency and volume of basalt eruptedwith some estimates being 30 times higher than the present day," he said, though he said current ice melting was not at the same scale.Rising temperatures are causing glaciers in Alaska's Denali National Park to melt faster than at any time in the past 400 years, according to new research.

The study was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, a journal of the American Geophysical Union in March. The Earth science organization released details about the research Tuesday.

"We have not seen snow melt like this in at least four centuries," lead author Dominic Winski, a glaciologist at Dartmouth College, told USA Today.

For the study, Winski and 11 other researchers from Dartmouth College, the University of Maine and the University of New Hampshire examined ice cores drilled from the summit of Mt. Hunter in June 2013.

The ice cores gave the scientists a record of temperatures and climate conditions on the mountain dating back to the mid-17th century. For instance, dark bands of ice with no bubbles indicated that snow on the glacier melted in past summers before re-freezing.

When analyzing the bands, the scientists determined that the site's summers are at least 2.2-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer now than summers during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Additionally, rising temperatures are melting 60 times more snow on Mt. Hunter than at the start of Industrial Revolution 150 years ago.

The researchers concluded that the tropical Pacific Ocean, which is warming due to increased greenhouse gas emissions, is contributing to the unprecedented melting of Mt. Hunter's glaciers.

Winski explained that warmer tropics lead to higher atmospheric pressures and more sunny days over the Alaska Range, which contributes to more glacial melting in the summer.

"This adds to the growing body of research showing that changes in the tropical Pacific can manifest in changes across the globe," Luke Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey who was not involved with the study, said in a statement. "It's adding to the growing picture that what we're seeing today is unusual."

It is important to understand how mountain glaciers are affected by climate change because they provide fresh water to many communities and their melting can contribute to sea level rise, Winski noted.

"The natural climate system has changed since the onset of the anthropogenic era," he said. "In the North Pacific, this means temperature and precipitation patterns are different today than they were during the preindustrial period."It's no surprise that chemicals can get flushed into our water supply from the pills we take. But as the world's population grows, the rampant consumption of pharmaceuticals has become an emerging threat to the world's freshwater ecosystems, researchers said.

The research, presented at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly on Tuesday, warns that if no action is taken to mitigate the flow, the amount of drug waste entering waterways such as rivers and lakes could increase by 65 percent by 2050, endangering fish and other species' health.

Francesco Bregoli, a postdoctoral researcher at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands, and his international co-hort developed a model showing global "hotspots" of water with high concentrations of pharmaceuticals.

To do this, the researchers analyzed the global consumption of diclofenac, a common painkiller used by millions across the globe, and its occurrence in freshwaters.

Francesco Bregoli et al.

Diclofenac has been identified as an environmental threat by the European Union and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Its use as a livestock drug has been linked to the collapse of vulture populations in South Asia. Scientists have also observed the anti-inflammatory drug bioaccumulating in fish in the Great Lakes, but its impact is unclear.

According to the AFP's report on the new study, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) of rivers around the world have concentrations of diclofenac above the EU "watch list" limit of 100 nanograms a liter.

In the U.S., only half of the prescription drugs in sewage are removed by treatment plants. Contamination levels are higher in Latin American, African and Asian countries, where wastewater is not widely treated and filtering drugs can be technologically unavailable or expensive.

Francesco Bregoli et al.

The research team's model can also be applied to the presence and spread of other drugs besides diclofenac.

"Diclofenac emissions are similar to any of thousands of pharmaceuticals and personal care products," Bregoli explained.

The scientists suggested feasible mitigation strategies on consumption reduction, sewer connection and improvements of water treatment technology. However, Bregoli noted that improved water treatment will not be enough to solve the growing problem.

"We found out that technological improvements alone will not even be enough to recover from the current concentration levels," he said. "If a substantial consumption reduction is not implemented, a large part of the global river ecosystems will not be sufficiently secured."By Brett Walton

Anthony Spaniola knew something was off with his town's water. He read accounts in the Detroit Free Press and attended community meetings hosted by state health and environment agencies. Until last summer Spaniola was concerned but didn't think the situation was out of control.

Then he saw foam on Van Etten Lake.

The unsightly ivory-colored meringue that rimmed the shore is a visible illustration of an ongoing national health and environmental disaster related to perfluorinated compounds. PFAS, as this group of chemicals is collectively called, are used to manufacture rain-repelling, stain-deflecting, heat-resisting consumer and industrial products like Teflon skillets, Gore-Tex jackets and fire retardants. There's a good chance that every home in America has products strengthened with one of the compounds.

Spaniola and his family own a home on the east side of Van Etten Lake, a civic centerpiece in a town, nicknamed Paddletown USA, whose economy and identity is built around northern Michigan's natural bounty of lakes and rivers.

East of Oscoda is teal-hued Lake Huron, one of North America's Great Lakes. To the west is the Au Sable River, renowned for its cold water trout fishery and a 120-mile canoe race every July through unbroken forest that attracts paddlers from across the U.S. and Canada.

And to the north, ringed by modest vacation cottages, recreational camps and family homes is Van Etten Lake. Summer winds naturally froth the shore, according to those who live here. But what appeared last July and August, and throughout the fall, was unusual. Spaniola described the foam as sticky.

Greg Cole, who manages the dam at the lake's outlet, took pictures of the rumpled mass bunched against the barricade. Laboratory tests indicated worrisome concentrations of perfluorinated chemicals, at levels thousands of times higher than a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) health warning for drinking water.

Some studies have found that over decades of low-level exposure in drinking waterin parts per trillion eventhe chemicals are associated with a higher risk of kidney and testicular cancers, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, hormone disruption and other ailments. Developed for durability, they do not easily break down once set loose from the production line.

In Oscoda the source of contamination is well documented. The chemicals are flowing underground, mostly unimpeded, from the former Wurtsmith Air Force Base where PFAS compounds, sprayed for decades during training exercises to extinguish petroleum fires, soaked into the groundwater. The closer regulators look, the more they find groundwater contaminated with PFAS, not just in Oscoda, but nationwide on military bases and industrial sites, and in towns that border them.

Wurtsmith's location, a mile from Lake Huron and abutting Lake Van Etten is not exactly a hilltop. But it is one of the highest points in Oscoda. That's a problem because waterand groundwaterruns downhill. And downhill from Wurtsmith is Van Etten Lake, which flows into Van Etten Creek, which joins with the Au Sable River before emptying into Lake Huron.

For years Wurtsmith, which closed in 1993, has been recognized as one of the most polluted places in Michigan. The EPA proposed designating the base as a national Superfund site in 1994, but it was never officially listed. The EPA withdrew its oversight in 2016, leaving the Air Force and state agencies to handle the cleanup while the town and county redeveloped parts of the base. The public library is located there, as are homes, churches, play fields, a plastics manufacturer, an airplane maintenance company and a healthcare facility.



But groundwater contamination from PFAS and other toxic substances below the new facilities spreads largely unchecked. The steady dose of chemicals into the area's natural riches has upended lives in Oscoda. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality says that people should not eat fish that live year-round in the lower Au Sable River and in Clark's Marsh, a wetland adjacent to the base where some of the highest chemical concentrations have been measured.

Drinking water is affected, too. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has told more than two hundred households near Van Etten Lake that are on private wells not to drink their tap water. The state is providing bottled water or faucet filters, and the town is using federal grant money to extend public water to some of the homes.

But even the public water supply is at risk. Traces of the chemicals are now found downstream, in Lake Huron, the source for the regional water system. It is even in the treated water, at a few parts per trillion, that is supplied to 14,000 homes.

Current and former Oscoda residents and veterans who served at Wurtsmith have stories of odd cancers and a profusion of illnesses that have stumped doctors looking for a cause. They wonder if their ailments are connected to the relatively unstudied toxic residues in soil and water. They hope to be included in an upcoming Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assessment of PFAS exposure on military bases that could confirm or reject their fears.

After seeing the lake foam this past summer, Spaniola felt that the agencies responsible for managing the contamination were not as much in control as he had thought. "My antennae went up," said Spaniola, a business lawyer who has immersed himself in chemical literature. "This stuff is everywhere."

More and more people in Oscoda are coming to that conclusion. They see delays in promised cleanup actions. They read news reports from other parts of Michigan and outside the state of PFAS contamination from military bases and factories. They worry about being forgotten in the jumble. After seeing their town's magnificent waters tarnished and neighbors getting sick, they're starting to speak out against a system that is failing to accomplish what they want most: stopping the flow of contaminated groundwater from the base.

New Activists

On a chilly evening in mid-March about 60 people file into the Oscoda VFW building to listen to a law firm's pitch. The meeting was called by the Veterans and Civilians Clean Water Alliance, a group of about 1,800 Wurtsmith veterans and family members whose goal, according to its founder James Bussey, is to get health care coverage for people who were sickened while living on the base. The group is considering a class-action lawsuit against 3M, the company that produced the firefighting foam.

The alliance is one of several community groups that have formed in the last few years to inform residents and demand action.

Arnie Leriche, a veteran who did not serve at Wurtsmith but lives in Oscoda, lobbied the Air Force to restart a community advisory board that had been active in the decade after the base closed. The first meeting was Nov. 1, 2017, and Leriche was voted co-chair.

"The community needed to be a part of the equation," he told Circle of Blue.

Arnie Leriche, standing, talks with two men at a community meeting to discuss PFAS contamination. Brett Walton / Circle of Blue

Greg Cole and Cathy Wusterbarth head the local group Need Our Water. They hope it will be a source of information about a highly technical issue for a community that, despite the years of testing, still seems to be relatively unaware of the PFAS contamination, Wusterbarth said. After hearing the questions posed by some residents at the VFW meeting, she feels like there is still much work to do.



"None of us has done anything like this before. We're new activists," Wusterbarth, who used to lifeguard on Van Etten Lake, told Circle of Blue.

Paradise Lost

Greg and Vicky Cole sit at their kitchen table, flipping through photos of guests who have stayed at the three cottages on their property at the south end of Van Etten Lake. Clients come for the fishing: northern pike, black crappie, walleye, blue gill, perch and more. "They're from Ohio," Vicky says, pausing over one photo with three generations of family members. "They said, 'It's a piece of heaven, a piece of heaven.' That's how I've always referred to it: I live in heaven."

Between them, against the wall, is a Culligan water cooler, a noticeable reminder that their heaven, just a quarter-mile from the base, has changed.

In October 2016, the Coles received a letter from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Testing of their well water showed traces of PFAS compounds, but at levels lower than the EPA's health advisory of 70 parts per trillion in drinking water. That advisory, however, applies only to the two most well-known PFAS compounds. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of others.

The health department, taking a cautious approach, said in the letter not to drink the water, cook with it, wash vegetables, or brush teeth unless the water was filtered through a reverse osmosis system. After three months in which Greg hauled drinking water from a clean tap at the town hall, the state said it would pay for one faucet filter or in-home water deliveries. The Coles chose Culligan.

The Air Force, following protocol, paid for replacement water only for homes that tested above the EPA standard. To this point, it has aided only one home in Oscoda.

Greg and Vicky Cole sit at their kitchen table. Between them is their Culligan water jug. Brett Walton / Circle of Blue

Extinguishing One Problem, Igniting Another



Wurtsmith existed as a military aviation site in various forms since 1923. After the Air Force Strategic Air Command took over operations in 1953, one of the base's main function was to host a fleet of loaded B-52 bombers and other aircraft ready to take immediate flight in response to a nuclear attack. At the end of the Cold War, and no longer considered essential, Wurtsmith was placed into an economic redevelopment process called base realignment and closure, or BRAC.

Wurtsmith is one of 393 U.S. military installations, active or BRAC, where the Department of Defense reports a known or suspected release of PFAS compounds into water and soil. Through February 2018, the Air Force alone had spent more than $210 million on site investigations and cleanup activities for PFAS. Future cleanup liabilities for the Defense Department could run into the billions, according to government figures. The expense could soar if the government has to start paying out health claims similar to the $2.2 billion awarded in 2017 to veterans who served at Camp Lejeune, a Marine base in North Carolina whose water was laced with a different lineup of cancer-causing chemicals.

In a Feb. 29, 2016 letter, Robert Wagner, chief of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality's remediation division, asked David Strainge, then the BRAC environmental coordinator, to "prevent further off base movement" of PFAS contaminated groundwater because it was affecting well water. The letter said that the Air Force must 1) monitor residential wells for PFAS; 2) define the boundaries of the contamination plume; 3) monitor the plume's movement off base; and 4) deliver a cleanup plan to DEQ.

The Air Force's response on March 18, 2016, stated that it would comply with any applicable state and federal laws. The letter outlined the actions that the Air Force had taken to date. Officials began investigating PFAS contamination stemming from the former fire training site in 2012, after Michigan DEQ tests of fish in Clark's Marsh, downhill from the training site, showed high levels of the chemicals, more than 15 times the state limit. PFAS were in firefighting foams that were used starting in 1970. The Air Force said it did not know about their toxic potential until the EPA initiated a production phase out of the two most known chemicals in 2000. By that time, Wurtsmith had already closed.

The Air Force claimed in the March 18, 2016 letter that testing in 2012 determined that PFAS contaminated groundwater was contained on the base.

That turned out not to be the case. Subsequent testing has revealed traces of the chemical from at least 16 sites on the former base while the chemical plume has spread throughout the waterways around Oscoda. The Air Force built a treatment plant in 2015 to filter pollution coming from the fire training site, which is now an open field studded with monitoring wells.

But more than two years after the exchange of letters in the spring of 2016, the Air Force has finalized no additional actions to halt the advance of the contaminated plume. Matt Marrs, the current BRAC environmental coordinator, told Circle of Blue that a second treatment unit will come online by August 2018. The Michigan DEQ had ordered that facility to be completed by the end of 2017.

The treatment systems are a page from a well-worn playbook. Groundwater contamination, of all sorts, is the primary focus at Wurtsmith. The first chemicals to attract scrutiny at the base, back in the 1970s, were the chlorinated solvents TCE and vinyl chloride. A number of treatment systems dot the grounds.

Cleanup for those chemicals is, in a twist, spreading PFAS contaminants farther afield. Since 1981, so-called "pump and treat" systems have been drawing groundwater from the base, stripping it of chlorinated solvents, and discharging it into the base's storm sewer, which empties into Van Etten Creek. Marrs told Circle of Blue that the three-unit system does not remove PFAS compounds. Instead, they go into the storm sewer, then into the creek before being carried downstream. A spokesman told Circle of Blue that the Air Force has tested the outfall as discharging water with 800 to 1,002 parts per trillion PFAS. Locals call the treatment systems "pump and dumps."

Water from the Wurtsmith storm sewer pours into Van Etten Creek. The water smells strongly of benzene. Brett Walton / Circle of Blue

The military and the state are now in a dispute about the scope of the cleanup and which standards should apply to PFAS compounds found in Van Etten Lake, Van Etten Creek and the Au Sable River. The state standard for surface water not used for drinking is 12 parts per trillion of PFOS, a main ingredient in the firefighting foam. The Michigan DEQ notified the Air Force in a Dec. 14, 2017 letter that the treatment systems were inadequate. They are in a private resolution process that neither side will discuss publicly.



Oscoda residents are furious that the state has not been more forceful. To some extent, though, many of those residents bear at least some of the responsibility. Iosco County, home to Oscoda, is a rural Republican domain. A majority of voters cast their ballots for conservative state and federal administrations that have exhibited fealty to deregulation, animus to environmental enforcement, and disregard for investing in initiatives that protect public health. Michigan, after all, is where the Republican governor and his aides ignored warnings of contamination in the water supply for residents of Flint. To a large extent a political mismatch exists between what Iosco County residents want from government and who they helped elect to key government offices.

It's hard, in fact, to discuss water contamination in Michigan these days without conversation turning to Flint. Oscodans frequently mentioned that city's lead contamination and the slow state response. When they began holding meetings on PFAS in Oscoda, Spaniola thought state agencies might have learned something from the Flint crisis. After seeing the delays in response, he no longer has that opinion.

"I'm speechless with the lack of urgency I've seen in dealing with this issue," Spaniola said.

Just as with the Flint water crisis, the DEQ has failed to enforce its water pollution standards. Nearly a year ago, at an April 25, 2017 meeting, Air Force officials asked the DEQ for a letter clarifying the cleanup standards that apply. The response has been shuttled from DEQ to the governor's office to the attorney general's office, but according to the last available documents from base cleanup meetings it has not yet been delivered. The attorney general's office did not respond to repeated phone calls asking about the letter's status.

Aaron Weed, the town supervisor, has asked to meet with the director of the Michigan DEQ but no meeting has taken place. What would he request? "I'd say that action needs to be taken," Weed said.

The DEQ did not allow its field staff who are working on the Wurtsmith case to speak with Circle of Blue for this story.

Air Force officials, meanwhile, say they can only work with the money that is allocated to them. Congress appropriated an additional $84 million in the recent budget for PFAS cleanup, but directed it at naval bases. "We're in fiscally constraining times," Marrs said. "All BRAC bases are competing for limited funds."

The situation is not entirely hopeless. Soon the Coles and about 30 other homes will be able to hook into the public water system. Oscoda received a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to extend the water main down their road. Homeowners who want to connectit is not requiredwill have to pay to install a service line from their home to the main, which could run more than $1,000.

Weed, the town supervisor, told Circle of Blue that he's looking "for anyone who can write us a check" for $4 million to extend public water to another 230 homes affected by the plumes. Weed, like most Oscodans, had to educate himself quickly on PFAS chemicals once he found out they were disrupting the town. He took an online college course on environmental science.

Not even the public water system, however, is immune from the threat. In a sign of how far the contaminants have traveled, testing of treated water from Huron Shores Regional Water Authority, the local water system, in 2016 showed a range of results: from no detection up to 27 parts per trillion of PFAS. The authority's Lake Huron intake is about a dozen miles south of the mouth of the Au Sable.

A measurement in parts per trillion is almost inconceivably tiny. Imagine this: count back one trillion seconds in the course of human history. How far does that reach? More than 30,000 years ago, long before people tamed dogs or started row-cropping plants. Measurements in parts per trillion, essentially, are a sneeze in the span of human civilization.

Yet those sneezes are enough to worry public health professionals, who have convinced officials in Minnesota, New Jersey and other states that the EPA's guidelines are not strict enough to guard against long-term health risks.

Those risks are the town's worries, too. Residents are concerned that tourism may take a hit unless officials "stop the bleeding coming from the base," as Greg says. The Coles say that their cottages aren't booked up for the summer as they usually are by mid-March. The ordeal has changed their outlook and redirected their attention.

"I thought we were all set," Greg said, about life on their property. "We'll probably stay here. But now my passion comes from what I've seen. Even when we get city water, I'm going to fight for cleanup so that the next generation, the kids and grandkids can enjoy it."

Veterans and community members came to a March 12, 2018 meeting at the Oscoda VFW to discuss PFAS contamination. Brett Walton / Circle of Blue

They aren't the only Oscodans who feel a sense of loss, a disruption of place. For those aware of how deeply the chemicals are embedded in the area's waters, home is not what it used to be.



Tressa Thompto grew up in Oscoda and lived here until 1982. Her husband served in the Air Force and was stationed at Wurtsmith for four years starting in 1978. They now live in Des Moines, Iowa, but Tressa returned to the area for the meeting at the VFW. Her husband was diagnosed in 1991 with oligodendroglioma, a type of brain tumor. The growth, the size of her fist almost, was found behind his left eye.

"I have five brothers and sisters and we all wanted to come back here someday. But the way it is now  " Her voice trails off, then she picks up the thread again. "I always wanted to come back here, but it's like the town has been damaged by this."

Tressa's sister still lives in Oscoda, in a house on Van Etten Lake. She had planned to stay with her while in town for the meeting, but she ended up staying with her brother in Alpena, an hour drive to the north. She couldn't bear to stay so close to the lake, whose waters now carry new meaning. "I couldn't do it," she said.

Reposted with permission from our media associate Circle of Blue.

New Zealand will no longer offer new permits for offshore oil and gas exploration, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Thursday.

"The whole world is going in this direction," Ardern said. "We all signed up to the Paris agreement that said we're moving towards carbon-neutrality, and now we need to act on it."

The ban only affects future permits for offshore oil and gas exploration and will not affect the existing 22. This could allow exploration to feasibly continue in a 38,000-square-mile area until the existing permits expire, which could be "as far out as 2030," the government acknowledged. Permits for onshore oil and gas exploration will also continue.

The energy industry and the opposition party were alarmed by the announcement. New Zealand Oil & Gas told Reuters they were not warned about the new policy.

"We note that the announcement is a sudden change of policy, which has not been consulted on and appears to conflict with the government's pre-election promises," the company said.

The center-right National Party condemned the ban, calling it "economic vandalism" and claiming that it made no environmental sense.

Ardern noted, "Nothing will change overnight. These existing permits have very long lead times. We'll be seeing oil and gas exploration for a number of years to come. And the jobsthe four-and-a-half thousand jobs in this industrywill continue too."

"But we're putting a line in the sand and saying, now it's our job to plan for the future," Ardern said. "We will make sure we've got that transition plan in place, and what the future of clean, green, carbon-neutral New Zealand looks like."

The 37-year-old prime minister, who was elected in October, campaigned on an ambitious environmental agenda. Her government has pledged to power the country's grid with 100 percent renewable energy by 2035 and becoming carbon neutral by 2050.

Jacinda Ardern at the swearing of new cabinet in October. Wikimedia Commons

Greenpeace New Zealand celebrated the announcement. Executive Director Russel Norman praised Ardern for personally accepting a 50,000-strong Greenpeace petition to oppose oil and gas exploration.

"Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her Coalition Government have taken an historic step and delivered a huge win for the climate, spurred on by the tens of thousands of people and environmental NGOs like Greenpeace who have fought for years to end new oil and gas exploration," he said in a statement.

"While we will continue to demand a complete end to fossil fuel exploration on land and sea as well as the revoking of existing permits, this has been one of Greenpeace New Zealand's longest running campaigns and today marks a great success for so many people," Norman continued.

He added, "Greenpeace also supports the Prime Minister's commitment to a just transition to a clean energy future, which can provide jobs and a big boost to our economy."On April 5, EcoWatch reported on a rule change proposed by the Department of Interior (DOI) that the Center for Biological Diversity warned could remove protections for more than 300 threatened species.

Later that day, CNN obtained an internal document of the draft from Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) and reported Friday that the proposed rule change would not impact currently threatened species, but could still have major consequences for any species listed as threatened in the future.

At stake is the so-called "blanket rule"a 1978 regulation under the Endangered Species Act granting threatened species the same protections as endangered species unless the FWS decides on special regulations. Those protections prevent against "take," human-caused death or harm due to hunting, trapping or habitat destruction.

The proposal would do away with the blanket rule for all future species listed as threatened, instead deciding protection for each on a case by case basis.

"Species listed as a threatened species after the effective date of this rule, if finalized, would have protective regulations only if the [Fish and Wildlife] Service promulgates a species-specific rule," CNN reported that the proposal said.

But while all 300 species currently protected by the rule are safe, that doesn't mean it won't endanger animals that are already vulnerable.

The gopher tortoise, the Sierra Nevada red fox and the North American wolverine are among the animals currently proposed for threatened status who have not received it yet, Mother Jones reported Wednesday.

The endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, Noah Greenwald, explained to Mother Jones why the new rule change would be so harmful for species like these.

"If you're a threatened species and you don't have 'take' protections, you don't really have any protections at all," Greenwald said.

He feared the rule change was just another attempt on the part of the Trump administration to placate developers and corporations at the expense of the environment.

"It's going to turn every listing into a negotiation with industry," he told Mother Jones.

Trump's appointee to head the DOI Ryan Zinke has a record that justifies Greenwald's suspicions. As a Representative to Congress from Montana, he voted for exemptions from Endangered Species Act rules for water developers and agribusiness.

"Once again, [Zinke] is trying to pull a fast one," Florida Sen. Bill Nelson told CNN. "Now he's trying to weaken rules that protect animals and plants."

Deciding protections on a case-by-case basis would also worsen an already deadly bureaucracy that predates Trump. Currently, there is a backlog of more than 500 species proposed for protection, and the FWS takes an average of 12 years to protect each species.

"We know of at least 47 species so far that have gone extinct waiting for protection," Greenwald told Mother Jones.

In statements to both CNN and Mother Jones, FWS spokesperson Gavin Shire emphasized that the rule was still under review and could change.

"It is premature to discuss a rule that has not been completed and is subject to change while under interagency review," he told CNN.

If it does go through as currently written, Greenwald told Mother Jones that the Center for Biological Diversity will likely fight it in court.The fossil fuel industry's business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductionscausing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world's addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.

As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.

America's unsavory record of violent interventions in Syriaobscure to the American people yet well known to Syrianssowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.

As the New York Times reported in a Dec. 8, 2015 front page story, ISIS political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention which, they know from experience, will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.

To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians' perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.

During the 1950's, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalismwhich CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communismparticularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA's Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, We should do everything possible to stress the 'holy war' aspect."

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949barely a year after the agency's creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria's democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA's handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za'im. Al-Za'im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.Since revising its environmental policy last year, U.S. Bank financed more than $2 billion to companies building oil and gas pipelines, including an estimated $480 million to Energy Transfer Partners, new analysis released Thursday by Oil Change International concludes.



U.S. Bank CEO Andrew Cecere won praise from indigenous rights and climate advocates in April 2017 when he announced to shareholders that U.S. Bank would "not finance the construction of oil and gas pipelines." Days later, U.S. Bank issued a revised environmental policy significantly narrower in scope than what Cecere described, limited to only project financing which had never been a significant line of business for the bank.

New research conducted by Oil Change International shows that since Cecere's promise, U.S. Bank financing activity with oil and gas pipeline builders has continued apace. The analysis comes days ahead of the U.S. Bank annual shareholder meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico where pipeline opponents plan to question executives about Cecere's empty promise.

"U.S. Bank says trust and ethics are its core values, but its actions seem to show the opposite" said Brant Olson, U.S. program director for Oil Change International. "Adopting a meaningless policy to create the impression of care for the environment paints a troubling picture of U.S. Bank's priorities."

The analysis released Thursday finds that since announcing its commitment in April 2017:

U.S. Bank has participated in dozens of deals with pipeline companies, worth more than $40 billion, with U.S. Bank's estimated financial commitment totaling more than $2 billion.

U.S. Bank has served as a bookrunner or manager, meaning it was a lead financial institution, on numerous pipeline deals totaling more than $17 billion, of which U.S. Bank raised more than $930 million.

Of particular interest is financing for pipelines being built by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), a company notorious for its controversial role in building the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. In addition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners is seeking to build numerous oil and gas pipelines throughout the U.S. which have been met with massive resistance as well as numerous construction mishaps, violations and mandated work stoppages.

Oil Change International's analysis finds that U.S. Bank continues to finance ETP projects as follows:

U.S. Bank raised an estimated $480 million for ETP in transactions worth $7.25 billion since April 2017.

U.S. Bank underwrote two bond issues together worth $2.25 billion for Sunoco (a subsidiary of ETP), with U.S. Bank directly responsible for more than $280 million.

U.S. Bank was a lender on two revolving credit facilities for ETP, responsible for an estimated $200 million of $5 billion in total credit.

The analysis, "Empty Promise: U.S. Bank Continues Pipeline Finance" was published by Oil Change International in partnership with Indigenous Environmental Network, Earthworks, Greenpeace, MN 350, and Rainforest Action Network.

Reposted with permission from our media associate Oil Change International.

(Photo:  Sean Hawkey/WCC)Thousands of climate activists from across the world took to the streets of Bonn on Nov. 4 just before the start of the UN climate conference COP23 that start in Bonn Germany on Nov. 6, 2017.

The World Council of Churches, ACT Alliance and Lutheran World Federation that represent more than half a billion Christians worldwide are issuing a united call for action on climate justice, which they describe as the largest call of its kind in history.

In a joint video message released on Nov. 5, leaders of the three organizations called upon the decision makers at COP23 to follow up on the Paris Agreement to enable accountable and ambitious action.

"We must act together for climate justice", said Rudelmar Bueno de Faria, general secretary of ACT Alliance.

"Experts from many of our members will be advocating at COP to ensure that the outcomes reflect the needs and the rights of the most vulnerable".

COP23, the UN Climate Change Conference, begins on Monday Nov. 6 in the German city of Bonn and will be presided over by Fiji.

Climate change is a reality that needs to be addressed said Rev. Martin Junge, Lutheran World Federation general secretary.

"We hear the stories. We hear the pain, we hear the struggle", he said.

Nations have a lot to figure out at COP23 said the Scientific American.

Cara Horowitz, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law says the 2015 Paris accord "was a landmark agreement," said the publication.

"But it left many of the details about [implementation] still to be negotiated."

At COP 23, country representatives will work out the nitty-gritty of how to execute the accord, which will ultimately determine its long-term success. "This is quite a consequential meeting," the Scientific American quoted Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan as saying.

"It represents an important early test of [nations'] resolve to honor what they agreed on in Paris," he said.

WCC general secretary, Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, said, "Let us take this opportunity again in COP23 to make decisions that lead us in the right way. It is about who is affected today, who is living in livelihoods that are threatened by what is happening."

With special support for the people of Fiji, the three ecumenical leaders expressed their commitment to continue walking together with their churches and people.

They said they wish to address urgent questions and challenges on climate change in Pacific islands region and to advocate that climate finance is secured to enable developing countries to adapt, mitigate and address loss and damage.(Reuters/Ahmed Jadallah)Iraqi Christians return home to worship in desecrated churches.

More than 40 religious leaders from Iraq gathered recently in Beirut, Lebanon under the auspices of the World Council of Churches for three days of constructive interfaith dialogue.

Their goal was to identify and analyze opportunities and challenges related to cohesion and highlight the role of religious leaders in restoring inclusive multi-religious and multi-cultural communities in Iraq after years of conflict.

The leaders, representing Iraq's diverse religious and ethnic fabric, included representatives from the Shiaa, Sunni, Shabak, Sabean Mandaean, Yezidi, Kaka'i and Christian communities.

The overwhelming majority of Iraq's 39 million people are Muslims with between around 60 percent thought be Shiaa and 40 percent Sunnis and the other groups making up less that 1 percent each.

It was the first time in recent history that brought together minority and mainstream religious groups to share their vision and commit on working together for the future of the country.

'DIALOGUE STRENGTHENS TRUST'

"This dialogue strengthens trust among the religious and confessional leaders present, and enables us to interact positively," said Shia leader Sheikh Dr Yousif Al-Nasery, secretary general of the Shura Religious Scholars.

"It makes us closer to each other, which offers to our people in Iraq a beautiful example for coexistence and religious dialogue...

"When we meet and strengthen dialogue among us, we promote moderation and acceptance of others as well a recognition of mistakes  and these are necessary components to build an advanced civil state in Iraq."

The group met Dec. 11-13 and focused on the roles of four areas of society which have emerged as critical for advancing the national project of unity in Iraq.

This seeks to form an inclusive and diverse community: education, religion, the constitution and legal frameworks for inclusive citizenship, and transitional justice.

While the conference was an opportunity to plan for the future, it was also a practice in acceptance of the other and collaboration among participants.

Dr. Khaled al Mulla, a prominent Sunni Muslim cleric of Baghdad and head of the Iraqi Scholars Association and a member of the Iraqi National Alliance, addressed the participants.

"We should not deny that some of the violent acts that we have witnessed in our country have their roots in religion and religious texts. We have to accept this fact first and then affirm our role as religious leaders in finding remedies to it.

"Promoting positive readings of our religious texts, imposing moderate religious discourse in our sermons, training the clerics on accepting diversity and inclusivity so that they can transfer this into the people, are essential for the Iraqi society in order to restore a community where every religious and ethnic component is recognized, lives in security, and contributes to the political, social and economic life of the country."

The leaders also discussed the what is happening in their communities and many stressed the need to move from words to action.

YAZIDI MINISTER

Waheed Mandoo Hammo, prime minister of the provisional government of Ezidikhan in Iraq and representative for the Yazidi community, saw the conference as a first step in a continuing process.

He told of his community's great suffering from the conflicts in Iraq during which people were violated and killed because of their faith and traditions.

Waheed noted that the consultation provided a space for an honest dialogue, sharing of pain, and expressing concerns and fears regarding the future.

Archbishop Avak Assadourian, primate of the Armenian Diocese of Iraq and general secretary of the Council of Christian Church Leaders in Iraq, agreed.

"We all know what the ailment is but nobody has come up with a remedy for those ailments," he said.

"Therefore, I would like to see a subsequent event where we have more time to work together in small groups, in order to take on the issues that were brought to this conference and come up with actions," said Assadourian.

The conference issued a final statement of the conference calls for continuing dialogue among the group, to be accompanied by the development of the proposed strategic action plan, and corresponding activities with partners to address the challenges identified and prioritized by participants.(Photo: LWF /Stephane Gallay)Katrine Ringhus, advocacy officer for the Lutheran World Federation country program in Colombia.

A group of human rights defenders from Colombia that presented evidence to the UN Human Rights Council has voiced deep concern over increasing violence against environmental and civil society leaders.

The leaders are defending the rights of Afro-Colombian communities, indigenous populations and peasants they said when the spoke in Geneva during the Sept. 18 to Oct. 10 session of the HRC.

"People are being criminalized - especially environmental activists - for participating in social protests," said Katrine Ringhus, advocacy officer for the Lutheran World Federation country program in Colombia.

Ringhus spoke at a Sept. 21 presentation by the group on "The Nexus between Human Rights and Peace building in Colombia."

The Lutheran World Federation supports the Colombian Platform for Human Rights, Democracy and Development, which has called for government action in stopping the attacks.

The platform calls for guarantees to people's economic, social and cultural rights in the post-conflict era in the South American country.

The platform members spoke at a side event hosted by the LWF at Geneva's Ecumenical Center.

They spoke following a review of the human rights situation of Colombia at the 62nd session of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) of the UNHRC.

PROTESTS AROUND INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT PROJECTS

Ringhus said there has been an increase in social protests about international investment projects  agri-industrial, oil and mining. The use of violence by riot police during protests has also grown, she noted.

Ana Maria Rodriguez, representing the Colombian Commission of Jurists, and a member of the platform, which compiled the alternative civil society (or shadow) report to the UN committee said, "Social conflicts, environmental conflicts, are taking place, and those who lead protests and resistance against these projects, are being attacked."

Rodriguez said the shadow report counts 39 leaders and defenders of land and the environment who were killed last year in Colombia, adding, "this is really worrying." The report which took two years to produce draws on contributions by 120 civil society groups.

Ringhus described LWF's support to the work of the platform, as part of the contribution to the fulfillment of economic, social and cultural rights in post-conflict Colombia, and to the implementation of the October 2016 peace accords ending the war that began in 1964.

Social justice, human dignity and guarantees for the respect of human rights, are at the forefront of outreach efforts by the LWF and other faith-based groups in Colombia as the country struggles to recover from more than 50 years of conflict.

According to UN and local sources, the fighting pitting armed groups against state forces left over 600,000 people dead, 15,000 missing and more than 7.4 million displaced from their homes.

MINIMUM STANDARDS FOR LASTING PEACE

Rodriguez argued that while "stopping violence, dropping guns, is the main issue everyone wants to address," the platform, considers this as only the first step.

"If you want to build a lasting peace, it is important for Colombia to engage in many structural changes, including, guaranteeing a minimum of economic, social, and cultural rights," she said.

The Colombian jurist elaborated the idea behind the shadow report "is to show, we are still far away from achieving a minimum standard" of guaranteeing those rights. "We have 15 million people living in poverty, and we are still, the second most inequitable country in Latin America, after Haiti," she added.

Gabriel Urbano, deputy director of the Corporacion de Dessarrollo Solidario de Montes de Maria, a local organization working to protect land rights, said disputes over land and territory for many years have displaced many people and denied them their economic rights.

He cited the community in which he lives, saying despite an abundance of water and food production, 90 percent of the population does not have access to clean water and the palm oil industry was destroying food crops.

IMPORTANT TOOL FOR PUBLIC POLICY

Ringhus described a national action plan on business and human rights in the country as "an extremely important tool of public policy" but added it lacked consultation with civil society.

"It's a plan, as they say, that does not put the rights of the communities first. It does not recognize the power difference in a negotiation without the presence of the State between a multinational company and a small community. The focus is on capacity building with the private companies, not mainly with the local communities."

The message the group has been promoting at the UN Committee and internally in Colombia is that the discourse on human rights and protection "permits us to build the peace we want, and dream of," added Liliana Vargas, the platform's executive secretary.

In Colombia, the LWF country program collaborates with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Colombia.The Every Student Succeeds Act has maintained a core element of its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act, by requiring states to publicize the performance of students of color, children from low-income backgrounds, and others from important demographic groups, not just the overall student population. And although the 2015 law grants states and districts new flexibility in several essential ways, ESSA still requires states to connect the performance of key subgroups to decisions about schools.

But what exactly that means, and how states are interpreting it in their plans for the law, has proved to be one of the most divisive parts of ESSA, even as states begin reporting that sensitive data from the 2017-18 school year.

On the political front, the issue has evolved into one of the main strategies for congressional Democrats and others to attack U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

The crux of their argument: the connection between subgroup performance and how schools are rated, as well as which schools are targeted for specific improvement strategies.

States say theyve taken advantage of the flexibility theyve been given in ESSA while also ensuring that all students are given the attention they deserve, said Kirsten Carr, the senior program director for student expectations at the Council of Chief State School Officers.

This is a learning process, and as we go through it, state leaders are committed to continuous improvement, Carr said.

But critics of states approaches argue that parents and the public will get a false impression that some schools are doing well and dont need interventions, even though some groups of students are lagging behind.

Now that were getting into implementation and seeing what the plans had produced, [Democrats] are feeling disappointed that, perhaps, what they thought was in the bill isnt actually what they got, at least as far as how this administration is interpreting what the law requires, said Anne Hyslop, an independent education consultant who previously worked at the U.S. Department of Education in the Obama administration.

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In an analysis of state ESSA plans, the civil rights advocacy group The Education Trust said DeVos agency has not held states accountable for failing to protect many students from falling through the cracks, stating, We cannot depend on the federal government to protect or advance the rights of students of color, students from low-income families, English learners, and students with disabilities.

How Schools Are Judged

So far, DeVos has approved plans from at least 37 states, as well as from the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. In a speech to the CCSSO, DeVos ripped into states forgenerally speakingopting to merely comply with the law and not demonstrate how they planned to innovate. But shes insisted publicly that the plans shes approved comply with the law and therefore merited getting the official blessing.

One main point of contention has been how subgroups figure into states summative ratings for schools. Some states have chosen to implement and publish a text-based descriptor, index score, grade, or some kind of overall rating for schools, including Arizona, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, and Tennessee.

Now that were getting into implementation and seeing what the plans had produced, [Democrats] are feeling disappointed that, perhaps, what they thought was in the bill isnt actually what they got, at least as far as how this administration is interpreting what the law requires.

In a statement, the Education Department said that because ESSA does not explicitly require states to create systems that use a scale of stars or A-F grades to judge schools, it does not violate ESSA for states to include one set of criteria rather than another when states have set up those systems.

But the law does require states to put together a system of annual meaningful differentiation to distinguish how different schools are performing on state exams, graduation rates, and other indicators. Democrats in Congress and others are saying that states A-F and other ratings systems represent that requirement to differentiate schools. Therefore, theyve argued, those systems must comply with the laws requirement that they break out subgroups performance and factor them into ratings.

Your failure to implement this requirement will result in an incomplete picture of school performance that leaves communities of color, low-income parents, parents of students with disabilities, and parents of students who are English-learners in the dark, three Democratic caucuses representing heavily black, Asian-American, and Hispanic House districts wrote to DeVos in March.

Passed Over for Help?

The other big disagreement is about how subgroup performance affects which schools are tagged as needing some kind of improvement strategy.

States are supposed to identify schools as needing targeted support when a student subgroup is consistently underperforming. What does the latter term mean? Thats been left up to states. Theyre also supposed to identify schools requiring additional targeted support when a subgroup is doing as poorly as the lowest-performing students in the state.

Given states prerogative over which groups can be tagged as consistently underperforming, some have decided to merge the definition of schools requiring more targeted support with how they define consistently underperforming subgroups. or provide very similar definitions for both. Jurisdictions that have taken this approach include the District of Columbia, New Mexico, and Washington state, Hyslop said.

Although she didnt single out specific states for criticism, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate education committee, raised concerns about how some approached the matter, saying in a hearing earlier this year that, I believe in this law and Im not going to stop raising these issues until the department resolves them.

However, the Education Department said that the law provides no basis for the department to prohibit a state from selecting criteria (for consistently underperforming groups of students) that overlap with the criteria for additional targeted support.

Practical Impact

The CCSSOs Carr says that just because a state doesnt conform to a narrow interpretation of what the law requires doesnt mean it isnt taking the issue seriously, while also complying with ESSA.

Oregon, for example, will identify a school for targeted support if at least one student subgroup meets the same criteria used for identifying a school for comprehensive support.

And Louisiana will use more than one definition for a school needing targeted support. Schools with subgroups performing at the same level as schools with F grades for two straight years, as well as schools with out-of-school suspension rates more than twice the national average, will receive the urgent intervention required designation. (The Pelican State will use A-F grades for overall school ratings, in keeping with its pre-ESSA accountability system.)

Every state does account for subgroups in some way, Carr said. Every state is clearly paying attention to that issue, and then will work with their districts to see how those schools can improve.

ESSA does not give the federal government a direct role in which school improvement strategies districts and states use.

Hyslop, the education consultant, said she is less concerned about how those subgroups play into school ratings than about how school improvement decisions might not account for struggling student subgroups that deserve attention.

The practical impact of the second issue is larger than the practical impact of the first [issue], she said.Keeping up with current shopping centre trends, retail formats that erode traffic or simply, a strategic need to expand or improve certain aspects of a shopping centre are some of reasons why refurbishments are done.

Another reason to consider a refurbishment is Reillys Law or Commercial Gravity as it is known. According to this law, customers are willing to travel longer distances to larger retail centres given the higher attraction they present to customers. Developed by William J Reilly in 1931, it states that the attractiveness of the retail centre becomes the analogy for size (mass) in the physical law of gravity. The law presumes the geography of the area is flat without any rivers, roads or mountains to alter a consumer's decision of where to travel to buy goods. In analogy with Newton's Law of Gravitation, the point of indifference is the point at which the attractiveness of the two retail centres.

Moses Mushirivindi, an authority on mall refurbishments agrees with all the above-mentioned reasons. Speaking at the eighth Annual South African Council of Shopping Centres (SACSC) Research Conference, on 9 May 2018, at the Maslow Hotel in Sandton, Mushirivindi will be sharing his invaluable case study regarding the optimal time and stage in a malls life cycle when refurbishments must be done. It was established that the timing of a revamp or refurbishment is dependent on the performance of the shopping centre which is mainly deduced from; property net income trends, tenant turnover trends, foot traffic trends, vacancies and time it takes to fill up vacancies.

This will lead to a determination of the life cycle stage of the centre. The research established that management must plan a refurbishment at the maturity stage of the centre's life cycle. This is when there is a large number of shopping centres of the same type coupled with sharp competition and declining sales growth. It is important to therefore understand the stage of the life cycle stage in order to plan refurbishment, he said

Mushirivindi added that the motive for refurbishment must be established as well which then indicates which aspect of the centre should be refurbished first. Refurbishment can be undertaken to cure physical obsolescence, functional obsolescence and the order of works is dependent on the aspects requiring refurbishment, he said.

Mushirivindi was born in Zimbabwe where he obtained his B.Com Honours Degree in Management and a Graduate Diploma in Marketing. In 2015 he was awarded the MidCity Properties award for best student in Property Management. Upon arriving in South Africa, he enrolled for an MSc in Real Estate degree with University of Pretoria which he completed in 2016 and Graduated in 2017. He got a distinction in his research which was entitled Optimum Refurbishment Time for Shopping Centres, under the tutelage of Dr Dirk Prinsloo and Professor Chris Cloete.

Commenting on Mushirivindis research, University of Pretorias Professor Chris Cloete who is also the SACSC Chairman of Shopping Centre Studies, said that there has been a number of MSc mini-dissertations on shopping centre topics that had been completed over the past two years. The founding of the Shopping Centre Studies at the University of Pretoria in 2017 was a milestone in university education and research in South Africa. It served as a stimulus for a number of research projects by post-graduate students.

The characteristics of shopping centres as complex systems, and the divergent and important role it fulfils in modern society, are being investigated in a wide range of research topics in the Department of Construction Economics. A number of research papers have also emanated from post-graduate research on shopping centres. These outputs contribute to the increasing recognition of the SACSC/University of Pretoria initiative as the major focus of shopping centre research in South Africa and indeed in Africa, he said.

Chief Executive Officer for the SACSC, Amanda Stops, said that Moses Mushirivindi is just one of the many speakers at the 2018 SACSC Research Conference who will bring many important retail and shopping centre insights to light. We look forward to showcasing Moses, along with our other speakers to delegates next month, it is going to be an enlightening session for all, she said.

Established in 2011, the with the main objective of the SACSC Research Conference was to enhance and satisfy the need for more information on trends, technology and customer information with regards to retail and shopping centres. Now, eight years on, the conference has grown in leaps and bounds.

This year, attendees can look forward to presentations by:2018-04-12

Maeci

The Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Angelino Alfano: Italy firmly condemns further attacks against the territory of Saudi Arabia, for which the Yemeni Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility. Among the attacks were a new round of ballistic missile launches towards the capital, Riyadh.

Such attacks, which can cause further victims among defenseless civilians, already occurred on 26 March and can fuel a military escalation, moving away from the resumption of dialogue and the prospect of eventually negotiating a solution to the ongoing conflict in Yemen.

This spiral of violence must come to an end, enabling the resumption of negotiations under UN auspices, with a view to reaching a solution agreed by all sides involved in order to end the conflict and alleviate the suffering of the civilian population. Italy has supported the commitment of the United Nations for peace in Yemen from the beginning, and we will continue to strongly support the work of the new UN Special Envoy, Martin Griffiths.The ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine announces the recipient of the ACMG Foundation/David L. Rimoin Inspiring Excellence Award at the 2018 ACMG Annual Clinical Genetics Meeting in Charlotte, N.C.

The ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine is proud to announce that Priya Prasad, MD from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA is the recipient of the ACMG Foundation/David L. Rimoin Inspiring Excellence Award.

The David L. Rimoin Inspiring Excellence Award was created in memory of the late Dr. David L. Rimoin, one of the founders of ACMG who passed away in 2012. Dr. Rimoin touched the lives of generations of patients as well as trainees and colleagues. This award is a cash award given to a selected student, trainee, or junior faculty ACMG member whose abstract submission is chosen as a platform presentation during the ACMG Annual Clinical Genetics Meeting.

Dr. Prasad was selected to receive this award for her platform presentation, "Outcomes and Opportunities: Population Based Hereditary Cancer Risk Assessment During Screening Mammography." She is currently a second year Medical Genetics Fellow at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Earlier she completed her Obstetrics and Gynecology residency training from New York, where faced with genetics related questions from patients suffering from infertility, gynecological cancers and patients who were expecting, she realized the importance of genetics training for ObGyn Physicians. After completing her fellowship at UCLA, she is scheduled to join Maternal Fetal Medicine Fellowship at Wayne State University, Michigan.

"I am extremely honored and humbled to have received the David L. Rimoin Inspiring Excellence Award. Dr. Rimoin was an exemplary physician whose transcendent contributions will guide me throughout my professional life. I am so very grateful to the selection committee for this prestigious award, one that will always serve as an impetus to achieving excellence in all my future endeavors," said Dr. Prasad upon receiving the award.

"Dr. Rimoin was dedicated to the mentoring of trainees in all areas of medical genetics. We are proud to recognize this legacy through the David L. Rimoin Inspiring Excellence Award," said Bruce R. Korf, MD, PhD, FACMG, President of the ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine.

Ann Garber, Dr. Rimoin's widow said, "The Rimoin family is pleased to congratulate Dr. Prasad on her valuable research that points to opportunities to enhance the appropriate utilization of screening for hereditary cancers. We are proud to recognize and support her valuable contributions to medical genetics with the David L. Rimoin Inspiring Excellence Award."

###

The ACMG Foundation for Genetic and Genomic Medicine (ACMGF) is a community of supporters and contributors who understand the importance of medical genetics and genomics in healthcare. A non-profit organization established in 1992, the Foundation supports the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) mission to "translate genes into health"; to foster charitable giving, promote training opportunities to attract future medical geneticist and genetic counselors, to share information about medical genetics, to sponsor important research and much more.

To learn more and support the ACMGF mission to create "Better Health through Genetics", please contact Nicole O. Bell, ACMG Foundation Manager, at nbell@acmg.net or 301-718-9604 or visit acmgfoundation.org.A new Tel Aviv University study addresses the challenges of nanoparticle-based cancer-targeting strategies. It also suggests ways of refocusing the collaborative work of cancer researchers and clinicians to move the field forward from "the bench" to the patients.

The study follows landmark research published 10 years ago in Nature Nanotechnology that reviewed the full potential of actively targeted nanocarriers to revolutionize cancer care. The opinion piece garnered over 5,000 citations, making it one of the most influential analyses on the subject to date. That study was written by Prof. Dan Peer, director of the SPARK Tel Aviv Center for Translational Medicine at TAU's Faculty of Life Sciences, and Jeffrey Karp, principal investigator at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University.

The updated review by Prof. Peer, Prof. Karp, Daniel Rosenblum, a doctoral student in Prof. Peer's lab, and Dr. Nitin Joshi, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, was published recently in Nature Communications.

A hard road from the lab to the clinic

"When Dan and Jeff's paper was published 10 years ago, there was great hope that nanocarriers in general and actively targeted nanocarriers in particular would transform cancer therapy," Rosenblum says. "We've made significant progress towards understanding the interaction of nanocarriers with tumor cells and tissues since then, but the clinical translation has been limited."

"Few nanocarriers have been approved for clinical use, and none of the actively targeted nanocarriers have advanced past clinical trials," Dr. Joshi adds. In the new paper, the authors discuss several reasons for this, including a lack of preclinical models that accurately mimic human tumors. They also emphasize the need not only for patient evaluation before treatment with nanocarriers, but also for clinical trial pathways appropriate for this new generation of drugs.

"We detailed what existed in the arsenal at that time, the challenges that lay ahead and how we wanted the future of specific tumor-targeting to look," says Prof. Peer. "We explored all the available nanoparticle options with which to penetrate tumors. We were sure the future was bright.

"But in the past 10 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved only 15 passively targeted nanocarriers. There have been some 40,000 studies published about active cellular targeting, but none of the approaches have advanced past clinical trials. What's wrong with this picture?"

It's complicated

According to the new review, what's wrong is that cancers have flummoxed researchers by being even more complex in nature than previously believed. "They change and evolve all the time, are heterogeneous in composition and eventually gain resistance," Rosenblum says. "We need to be able to target many kinds of cancer cell types, and we need the systems to be as simple as possible. But they have to be versatile too. We emphasize the idea of developing personalized nanocarriers based on the type of cancer and its biomarker profile."

The authors suggest that to move the field forward, the FDA and European Medicines Agency (EMA) must change their regulatory processes. "We have to adopt the regulation process to the new type of drugs," Dr. Joshi says.

"We need to conduct trials on humans -- trials that provide more insights into the interaction of nanocarriers with human biology," Prof. Karp says. "We can then use these to drive the development of next-generation nano-targeted platforms."

Rosenblum says the key to future success also lies in developing animal models that better resemble human tumors and preselecting patients with a high likelihood of responding to nanocarrier-based cancer treatments.

The authors argue that technological solutions such as focused ultrasound and companion diagnostics, coupled with biological solutions such as overcoming the cellular barriers and increasing particle payloads at the target site, will also increase the likelihood of successful treatment.

"The field continues to offer great potential for patients, and significant progress has been achieved. But new challenges have emerged during the past 10 years, and more support and work are required," Prof. Karp concludes.

###

American Friends of Tel Aviv University supports Israel's most influential, comprehensive and sought-after center of higher learning, Tel Aviv University (TAU). TAU is recognized and celebrated internationally for creating an innovative, entrepreneurial culture on campus that generates inventions, startups and economic development in Israel. TAU is ranked ninth in the world, and first in Israel, for producing start-up founders of billion-dollar companies, an achievement that surpassed several Ivy League universities. To date, 2,500 US patents have been filed by Tel Aviv University researchers -- ranking TAU #1 in Israel, #10 outside of the US and #43 in the world.Super-concentrated electrolyte allows water molecules to lock onto the ions with less degradation

Chestnut Hill, Mass. (04/12/2018) - Harnessing the full electrochemical power of lithium-oxygen batteries requires an efficient, more stable electrolyte. Researchers from Boston College have applied a "water-in-salt" electrolyte that enables stable lithium-air battery operation, offers superior long cycle lifetimes and presents a platform that moves lithium-ion batteries closer to their full potential, the team reports in the journal Chem.

In an effort to find a suitable electrolyte system, the team's water-in-salt approach involves no organic solvents. It consists of super-concentrated lithium salt, known as LiTFSI, in which water molecules lock onto the ions and experience less degradation when in contact with oxygen molecules, according to the researchers, led by Boston College Professor of Chemistry Dunwei Wang.

The result is a "highly effective electrolyte that permits stable Li-O2 battery operations on the cathode with superior cycle lifetimes," the team reports in the article titled "Cathodically stable Li-O2 battery operations using water-in-salt electrolyte." Experiments showed the electrolyte enables stable lithium-air battery operations up to 300 cycles, making it competitive for practical applications.

Lithium-ion batteries operate by reversible insertion and extraction of lithium ions into and from a solid material, such as cobalt oxide. Here, lithium-air batteries operate by forming lithium peroxide during discharge and decomposing lithium peroxide during recharge.

Despite more than two decades of research, improving lithium-ion battery technology has fallen short of the theoretical potential for energy storage. As an electrochemical energy storage technology, upgrading performance requires improved stability of electrolytes.

The team found a way around the problem of instability that arises from the use of water in the development of aqueous electrolytes.

"We employed an unorthodox approach of using a water-based electrolyte for Li-O2 batteries," said Wang. "Previously, water was thought to be extremely bad for Li-O2 battery operations because it would promote parasitic chemical reactions to significantly undermine the desired chemistry. We discovered that when the salt concentration is high, most water molecules can be locked down so that they provide the right functionalities such as conductivity but exhibit little of the parasitic chemical reactions."

The team sought to overcome the limitations that have plagued earlier efforts to tame the complex chemical reactions within lithium-air battery prototypes, said Wang, who conducted the project with Boston College researchers Qi Dong, Xiahui Yao, Yanyan Zhao, Miao Qi, Xizi Zhang and Yumin He, and Hongyu Sun from the Technical University of Denmark.

"We studied a new concept for Li-O2 batteries," said Wang. "We used a combination of electrochemistry and materials characterization tools to carry out the study. Our goal is to enable stable, high-performance Li-O2 battery operations."

Wang said the researchers will next try to build upon the results for practical fuel cell applications and also work to reduce the cost of producing the electrolyte.

###What role does gesturing play as children learn to speak? What gestures do they use to complement their verbal statements? Can computer-assisted models of language acquisition help explain the different types of gestures? In the new project "EcoGest," researchers are investigating how children's use of gestures is connected to communication. Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC), from linguistics at Bielefeld University, and from psycholinguistics at Paderborn University are working together on the project.

"With a computer-assisted model, we want to simulate how children of a certain age use gestures when speaking," says Professor Dr. Stefan Kopp from the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC). Before this, his colleagues from linguistics will investigate how the use of gestures is integrated in different interactional and cognitive demands.

"When children speak, they use various types of gestures. In this project, iconic gestures take center stage. These gestures pertain to the forms, functions, and movements of objects," says Professor Dr. Katharina Rohlfing, a psycholinguist at Paderborn University and an associate member of the Cluster of Excellence CITEC.

Gestures go hand and hand with speech. Yet how these gestures look differs depending on the particular linguistic delivery. "A linguistic task makes different demands on children, which they manage in part by using verbal and gesture-based means," says Professor Dr. Friederike Kern, from the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Bielefeld University.

Over a period of three years, the researchers will record children aged 4-5 years old in various communicative situations. The children will be tasked, for instance, with explaining an activity, or telling a story. The researchers will then observe the context and grammatical constructions for which the children use gestures, along with what gestures they use.

This large, empirical pool of data will provide the foundation for quantitative and qualitative analyses of children's gesturing, as well as for computer-based modelling. "Taking the form of a virtual child, the computer model is meant to reproduce what we observe in the children, but also to produce new things," says Kopp. "How does gesturing develop, for example, if the virtual child is five years old and speaks comparatively little? Or, what happens when the model is confronted with a situation that we couldn't see from the data? Based on this, we can draw conclusions about the development of speech and gesturing in children." For this model, Kopp and his colleagues are developing a virtual working memory for gesturing and a conceptual working memory for speech. Using these, the cognitive processes involved in language acquisition can be modelled.

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) is providing 550.000 in funding for this project.

###

The EcoGest team is currently recruiting parents with 4-5 year-old children who would be willing to come to the SprachSpielLabor at Paderborn University to participate in the study, which includes telling stories and explaining games together. Interested parents can contact sprachspiellabor@uni-paderborn.de.

More information is available online at: EcoGest project website: http://scs.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/ecogest

Contact:

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan Kopp, Bielefeld University

Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC)

Telephone: 0521 106-12144

Email: skopp@techfak.uni-bielefeld.deImagine coming up with neat idea of something you want, and being able to utilize the power of social networks and the expertise therein to make it, on demand, by hitting a button.

That's the new concept of social manufacturing and service that proposed in the January 10th issue of IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica, a joint bimonthly publication of the IEEE and the Chinese Association of Automation..

"Social manufacturing and service are proposed as an innovative manufacturing solution for the coming personalized customization era," wrote the study's author, Gang Xiong, a professor at the State Key Laboratory for Management and Control of Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. "Social manufacturing can realize a customer's requirements of 'from mind to products,' and fulfill tangible and intangible needs of a prosumer."

This portmanteau of "producer" and "consumer" represents the trend of modern manufacturing--customers expect relatively low costs to obtain uniquely specific products.

"A personalized product can be made by pressing a 'make' button while the actual 'making' requires intelligent social manufacturing facilities like cloud-based virtual factories and the networked 3D printer," Xiong wrote. "It is likely that 3D printing and social manufacturing together represent a new wave of industrial revolution."

The recognition of a new level of industrial evolution helps build the industry type, according to Xiong. Consumption is no longer based solely on material need, such as body protection and warmth from clothes, but also on personal tastes and even spiritual need. Social manufacturing allows the consumer to satisfy both material and personal needs simultaneously, which saves material and energy.

"A social manufacturing mode can help the sustainable, healthy, and green development of human societies," Xiong wrote. "With the support of social manufacturing platforms, including a social network, cloud platform, and smart mobile terminals, all social manufacturing stakeholders, like consumers, designers, players, makers, suppliers, brokers, and different service providers, can join win-win collaboration by simply clicking those different function buttons."

"People can obtain products that they imagine and [be] involved in the manufacturing process," Xiong said. "Everything... people can think and draw in their minds can be produced timely and efficiently."

Xiong and his team plan to further research social manufacturing's key theories and technologies, and to construct and operate its key application platforms.

Other contributors include researchers from the School of Science at Aalto University in Finland, the Laboratory for Discrete Event Systems at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in the United States, the Beijing Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Systems and Technology at the Institute of Automation in China, the Qingdao Academy of Intelligent Industries in China, and the Cloud Computing Center in China. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China; TEKES, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation; and Chinese Guangdong's S&T project.

###

Fulltext of the paper is available: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8232589

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica (JAS) is a joint publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Chinese Association of Automation. The objective of JAS is high quality and rapid publication of articles, with a strong focus on new trends, original theoretical and experimental research and developments, emerging technologies, and industrial standards in automation. The coverage of JAS includes but is not limited to: Automatic control,Artificial intelligence and intelligent control, Systems theory and engineering, Pattern recognition and intelligent systems, Automation engineering and applications, Information processing and information systems, Network based automation, Robotics, Computer-aided technologies for automation systems, Sensing and measurement, Navigation, guidance, and control. JAS is indexed by IEEE, ESCI, EI, Inspec, Scopus, SCImago, CSCD, CNKI. We are pleased to announce the new 2016 CiteScore (released by Elsevier) is 2.16, ranking 26% among 211 publications in Control and System Engineering category.

To learn more about JAS, please visit: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6570654

http://www.ieee-jas.orgRather than singing to their mates, Costa's hummingbird males court females with musical, high-speed dives. Their "song" is produced as the wind whistles through their tail feathers. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on April 12 have found that the diving males twist half their tails as they whiz through the air, apparently to aim the sound in the direction of their potential mates.

Those acrobatic maneuvers make a phenomenon called the Doppler shift less audible, the new study shows. "Doppler effect" refers to a change in sound frequency as the source and observer move toward or away from each other.

"Doppler shift is the sound of an ambulance passing you by--the sudden down-shift in its tone when it goes from in front of you to behind you," says Christopher Clark at the University of California, Riverside. "Male Costa's dive in a way that minimizes how audible that sound is."

Clark and study co-author Emily Mistick used a device called an "acoustic camera" to record Costa's hummingbird dives. They also conducted experiments in a wind tunnel to examine how the birds' speed and direction influences the sounds they make.

Those videos led to interesting discoveries. First, males dive off to the side of females, in a way that minimizes the Doppler shift effect. High-speed video also showed that males aim their sound by twisting half of their tail vertically by up to 90 degrees.

Clark said he was surprised to realize how difficult it is to calculate velocity from sound. "Once I realized it wasn't trivial for a scientist to measure, I realized it wouldn't be trivial for a female to measure, either," he says.

He also finds it curious that the males spread only half of their tails for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It's possible, he says, that there may be an anatomical limitation such that they can't twist their whole tails around.

While Clark notes that they don't know exactly how these maneuvers sound to female hummingbirds, the findings suggest that males can strategically manipulate the way females perceive their displays, by diving in a way that conceals how fast they are going. Does this mean males are "cheating" to look better (or faster) than they really are? Not necessarily, the researchers say. As far as they know, all males twist their tails in essentially the same way.

"You could argue that this entire species is 'cheating,' although is it really cheating if everyone is doing it?" Clark asks.

###

Current Biology, Clark and Mistick: "Strategic Acoustic Control of a Hummingbird Courtship Dive" http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30322-1

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 12, 2018 -- A multi-institutional project to understand one of the major targets of human drug design has produced new insights into how structural communication works in a cell component called a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCRs), basically a "doorbell" structure that alerts the cell of important molecules nearby. Understanding the structure and function of the receptor more deeply will enable better drug development.

"It's a huge field of active research in academia and industry because if we can figure out precisely how GPCRs work, then we can more easily design drugs to change their behavior and thereby control pain, hunger, and more," said coauthor Christopher Neale, a researcher with the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "This work helps us in understanding the receptors' function as a means to enable future drug discovery. For instance, if calcium binding can turn off a GPCR, then one may use that knowledge in a guided search for drugs that either promote or inhibit calcium binding depending on the desired health outcome."

GPCRs are a family of membrane proteins that transmit information into our cells. They respond to things like adrenaline and opioid drugs, and they are the largest class of human drug targets. The research reported this week in Nature Communications describes the regulation of GPCRs by physiological ions such as sodium, calcium and magnesium.

###

The paper outlines in vitro nuclear magnetic resonance experiments done by Scott Prosser's group (University of Toronto, Canada) that identified changes in these receptors based on divalent cation concentrations. The paper includes confirmation of these effects in live cells by Roger Sunahara's group (University of California, San Diego) and computer simulations run at Los Alamos by Neale and Angel E. Garcia to define atomic-resolution mechanisms that can explain the experimental results. Finally, additional theory by Adnan Sljoka (Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan) showed that the mechanisms that Neale proposed involve feasible types of structural communication through the receptor.

Publication: Mechanistic Insights into Allosteric Regulation of the A2A Adenosine G protein-Coupled Receptor by Physiological Cations, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03314-9

Funding: The work at Los Alamos was supported through Laboratory Directed Research and Development funding.

About Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, BWX Technologies, Inc. and URS Corporation for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health and global security concerns.Philadelphia, April 12, 2018 - Chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) can progress to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). A study published in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics describes a new HBV assay that offers advantages over currently used methods because it has the capability to detect closed circular DNA (cccDNA) in serum, single cells, and preserved tissue samples. This assay can be used to diagnose HCC at an earlier stage to manage treatment more effectively.

"The development of HCC is strongly associated with HBV. Recently, several new antiviral strategies targeting cccDNA have been established to improve HBV clearance. It is of great clinical significance to provide an accurate and sensitive approach for cccDNA detection. With this method, more and more patients with chronic HBV will have precision treatment available to prevent or delay HCC occurrence, and HCC in patients could be diagnosed at an earlier stage," explained lead investigator Song-Mei Liu, MD, PhD, of the Center for Gene Diagnosis, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, China.

The new assay utilizes droplet digital PCR (ddPCR), which is highly sensitive and accurate for detecting trace molecules such as viruses. By combining ddPCR with PCR, the researchers were able to detect cccDNA in serum, single cells, and formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tumor issues. Southern blotting, currently considered the gold standard for this purpose, and other assays have important limitations like less sensitivity than ddPCR in detecting low copy numbers of cccDNA. Other methods require obtaining liver tissue through liver biopsy. "Compared to liver biopsy, serum can be obtained noninvasively, is widely used for clinical diagnostic purposes, and has a homogenous cccDNA distribution. The assay also improves the limit of detection of cccDNA," noted Dr. Liu.

ddPCR was useful to identify which patients might be harboring hepatocellular carcinoma. Researchers found that almost 90 percent of 68 HCC patients were cccDNA-positive compared to 53 percent of 79 non-HCC patients. Serum cccDNA copy number was found to be higher in HCC patients compared to non-HCC patients. Combined analysis of serum cccDNA and HBV-DNA distinguished HCC patients from non-HCC patients. "This implicates cccDNA as a risk factor for HCC," said Dr. Liu.

The investigators were also able to confirm that serum cccDNA was positively correlated with levels of cccDNA measured in liver samples. "Serum cccDNA is indeed a much better and useful diagnostic marker than intrahepatic cccDNA," said Dr. Liu. Recently, several new antiviral strategies targeting cccDNA have been found to improve HBV clearance. Therefore, providing an accurate and sensitive approach for cccDNA detection is of great clinical significance for earlier diagnosis and HCC prediction, targeted treatment, and evaluating treatment efficacy.

In an accompanying commentary Fan Shen, MD, PhD, of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, observed, "Quantification of serum cccDNA and HBV-DNA is an effective way to discriminate HCC patients from non-HCC patients with a sensitivity of 74.5 percent and a specificity of 93.7 percent. This is an important finding and could lead to earlier diagnosis of HCC and more accurate prediction of chronic HBV progress in a noninvasive manner."

According to the World Health Organization, 257 million individuals worldwide are infected with HBV, and in 2015 HBV resulted in 887,000 deaths, primarily due to liver complications. Chronic HBV infection can be treated with medications such as tenofovir or entecavir. In 2015, only nine percent of individuals living with HBV infection were aware they were infected.

###Geneva, Switzerland, 12 April 2018 - Alectinib provides longer symptom improvement than crizotinib in ALK-positive non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to results from the ALEX trial (1) presented at the ELCC 2018 (European Lung Cancer Congress) in Geneva, Switzerland. (2)

The phase III ALEX trial was a head-to-head comparison of the next-generation tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) alectinib versus the standard of care TKI crizotinib in patients with anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive NSCLC, dependent on a rearrangement of the ALK gene. Approximately 4% of NSCLC patients are ALK-positive and are at high risk of central nervous system (CNS) metastases. Alectinib improved progression-free survival and prolonged the time to CNS progression compared to crizotinib. Alectinib had a better toxicity profile than crizotinib despite a longer duration of treatment. (3)

Patient-reported outcomes in terms of health-related quality of life and lung cancer-related symptoms with alectinib and crizotinib are reported for the first time at ELCC. The EORTC QLQ-C30 questionnaire was used to evaluate health-related quality of life and the EORTC QLQ-LC13 questionnaire was used to assess lung cancer-related symptoms. Patients completed the questionnaires at baseline, every four weeks during treatment, within the four weeks after study withdrawal, and after disease progression. The reasons for withdrawal have been previously reported (3); very few were due to symptom deterioration in either group.

Around two-thirds of patients in both treatment groups completed the questionnaires (66% and 64% in the alectinib and crizotinib groups, respectively). Patients in both the alectinib and crizotinib treatment groups had clinically meaningful improvements in health-related quality of life. However, there was a longer duration of improvement in health-related quality of life for patients treated with alectinib (88 weeks) compared to crizotinib (68 weeks).

For the patients with CNS metastases at baseline, a lower proportion of patients in the alectinib arm had worsening in health-related quality of life compared with crizotinib starting at week four (10.8% vs. 20.6%) and persisting for most assessments through week 84 (0% vs. 16.7 %). In addition, a lower proportion of these patients reported worsening in cognitive function with alectinib compared to crizotinib (17.9% vs. 34.6% at week 32, respectively).

Regarding lung cancer symptoms, there was a clinically meaningful improvement in both treatment arms. But the duration of improvement was longer with alectinib compared to crizotinib (cough: 96 versus 84 weeks; chest pain: 96 versus 80 weeks; fatigue: 96 versus 68 weeks; pain in other parts: 96 versus 68 weeks, respectively).

Fewer patients in the alectinib group reported a clinically meaningful worsening in treatment-related symptoms such as diarrhoea, peripheral neuropathy, constipation, dysphagia, appetite loss, and nausea/vomiting.

Lead author Dr Maurice Perol, medical oncologist, Centre Leon Berard, Lyon, France, co-chair of ELCC 2018, said: "The patient-reported outcome data is consistent with the main results of the study. The primary analysis showed a similar response rate for crizotinib and alectinib, but a longer duration of response with alectinib. This is consistent with the improvements in health-related quality of life and lung cancer symptoms, which were of similar magnitude in both groups but lasted longer with alectinib."

"The high level of CNS activity shown with alectinib in the primary analysis is consistent with the fact that fewer patients treated with alectinib reported clinically meaningful worsening in health-related quality of life or cognitive function compared to crizotinib," he continued. "Finally, the superior tolerability profile of alectinib compared to crizotinib shown in this analysis is consistent with the adverse events profile recorded during the study."

Perol said: "The patient-reported outcome data supports the use of alectinib as a new standard of care in the frontline treatment of patients with ALK-positive lung cancer."

Commenting on the study, Dr Fiona Blackhall, Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology, The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester, UK, said: "The ALEX trial was a practice-changing study that firmly placed alectinib as a first-line palliative treatment for ALK-positive non-small-cell lung cancer patients. This secondary analysis strengthens the rationale for alectinib as the standard of care in first-line treatment."

Blackhall said that increasingly, because of the cost of conducting clinical trials, patient-reported outcomes are not measured. But she said: "In this context of palliating advanced lung cancer, living better is as important, if arguably not more important, than living longer. And for this reason, patient-reported outcomes and health-related quality of life are crucial to assess and analyse."

She continued: "In patients with advanced lung cancer the symptom burden is high, particularly cough, breathlessness and chest pain. And so to have meaningful palliation and improvement in symptoms is of paramount importance. So alongside wishing to identify drugs that improve progression-free survival and overall survival ultimately, we need to ensure that those drugs also allow patients to live better. Goals of care are important in the everyday management of patients with lung cancer and alleviating the symptoms it causes is a key goal."

Regarding the impact of alectinib on symptoms in the ALEX trial, Blackhall said: "The time to deterioration in common and difficult to palliate lung cancer symptoms including cough, dyspnoea, and chest pain was comparable between alectinib and crizotinib. However, alectinib prolonged the improvement in those symptoms. That fits in with the previously reported improvement in progression-free survival and favourable tolerability with alectinib."

###

Notes to Editors

Please make sure to use the official name of the meeting in your reports: ELCC 2018

Official Congress hashtag: #ELCC2018

The press release will be available once the embargo lifts via: http://esmo.org/Press-Office/Press-Releases/Alectinib-Symptom-Improvement-Crizotinib-ALK-positive-Lung-Cancer

Disclaimer

This press release contains information provided by the authors of the highlighted abstracts and reflects the content of those abstracts. It does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of ESMO or IASLC who cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the data. Commentators quoted in the press release are required to comply with the ESMO Declaration of Interests policy and the ESMO Code of Conduct.

References

1 Abstract 138PD_PR 'Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in ALEX: A phase III study of alectinib (ALEC) vs crizotinib (CRIZ) in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC)': presented by Maurice Perol during the Poster Discussion session 'Immunotherapy and next-generation TKIs: from second to frontline treatment' on Thursday, 12 April, 07:45 to 09:00 (CEST) in Room A. Journal of Thoracic Oncology, Volume 13, Issue 4, Supplement, April 2018.

2 http://www.esmo.org/Conferences/ELCC-2018-Lung-Cancer

3 Peters S, Camidge DR, Shaw AT, et al. Alectinib versus Crizotinib in Untreated ALK-Positive Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer. N Engl J Med. 2017;377(9):829-838. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1704795.

About the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)

ESMO is the leading professional organisation for medical oncology. With 18,000 members representing oncology professionals from over 150 countries worldwide, ESMO is the society of reference for oncology education and information. We are committed to supporting our members to develop and advance in a fast-evolving professional environment.

ESMO's educational resources support an integrated, multi-professional approach to cancer care. We have European roots and a global reach: we welcome oncology professionals from around the world and we seek to erase boundaries in cancer care as we pursue our mission across oncology, worldwide. Visit http://www.esmo.org

About the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC)

The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) is the only global organisation dedicated solely to the study of lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies. Founded in 1974, the association's membership includes more than 7,500 lung cancer specialists across all disciplines in over 100 countries, forming a global network working together to conquer lung and thoracic cancers worldwide. The association also publishes the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, the primary educational and informational publication for topics relevant to the prevention, detection, diagnosis and treatment of all thoracic malignancies. Visit http://www.iaslc.org for more information and follow us on Twitter @IASLC.

138PD_PR - Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in ALEX: A phase III study of alectinib (ALEC) vs crizotinib (CRIZ) in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC)

M. Perol1, S. Peters2, N. Pavlakis3, E. Levchenko4, M. Platania5, J. Oliveira6, S. Novello7, T. Karagiannis8, A. Zeaiter9, R. Dziadziuszko10

1Medical Oncology, Centre Leon Berard, Lyon, France, 2Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois - CHUV, Lausanne, Switzerland, 3Royal North Shore Hospital, St Leonards, Australia, 4Petrov Scientific Research Oncology Institute, St-Petersburg, Russian Federation, 5IRCCS MultiMedica Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico, Milan, Italy, 6Medical Oncology, Portuguese Oncology Institute of Porto - IPO Porto, Porto, Portugal, 7University of Turin, Orbassano, Italy, 8Genentech, San Francisco, CA, USA, 9F.Hoffman-La Roche Ltd, Basel, Switzerland, 10Medical University of Gdansk, Gdansk, Poland *

* on behalf of the ALEX author group

Background: ALEC showed superior efficacy versus CRIZ in patients (pts) with treatment-naive ALK+ NSCLC in the phase III ALEX trial (NCT02075840). PRO data (disease burden, symptom tolerability and health-related quality of life [HRQoL]) are reported here.

Methods: Pts (n=303) were randomised 1:1 to receive ALEC (600mg BID) or CRIZ (250mg BID). Primary endpoint: investigator-assessed PFS. PROs were collected using EORTC QLQ-C30/QLQ-LC13 questionnaires. Pre-specified endpoints: time-to-deterioration (TTD) in lung cancer symptoms and HRQoL, longitudinal analyses of mean score changes from baseline, and proportion of pts with clinically meaningful change (?10-point change from baseline) during treatment in the ITT population and patients with baseline CNS metastases.

Results: Baseline completion rates and characteristics were balanced between arms in the PRO-evaluable population (ALEC n=100, 65.8%; CRIZ n=97, 64.2%). Median TTD in composite symptom endpoint (cough, dyspnoea, chest pain) was similar between arms (HR 1.10 [95% CI 0.72-1.68]). On average, ALEC pts reported a clinically meaningful improvement in baseline lung cancer symptoms for a longer duration of time versus CRIZ (cough, week 96 vs week 84; chest pain, week 96 vs week 80; fatigue, week 96 vs 68; pain in other parts, week 96 vs 68, respectively). Differences in lung symptoms between treatment arms tended to favour ALEC from 11.1 months (45 weeks), which was around the time of median PFS with CRIZ. ALEC pts reported a clinically meaningful improvement from baseline in HRQoL for a longer duration of time than CRIZ pts (week 88 vs 68, respectively). Fewer ALEC pts experienced a clinically meaningful worsening in treatment-related symptoms (nausea/vomiting, diarrhoea, appetite loss, dysphagia, peripheral neuropathy) than CRIZ pts.

Conclusions: TTD for lung cancer symptoms was comparable between arms. Clinically meaningful improvement in lung cancer symptoms was maintained for longer with ALEC versus CRIZ, consistent with the improved PFS with ALEC versus CRIZ. HRQoL was improved with ALEC versus CRIZ. PRO data are consistent with ALEX safety data and confirm greater tolerability with ALEC versus CRIZ.

Clinical trial identification: BO28984; 15 April 2016

Legal entity responsible for the study: F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd

Funding: F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd

Disclosures: M. Perol: Advisory role for Roche and Pfizer. S. Peters: Education grants, provided consultation, attended advisory boards and/or provided lectures for the following organisations: Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Clovis, Eli Lilly, F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Janssen, Merck Sharp and Dohme and Merck Serono, Pfizer, Regeneron and Takeda. N. Pavlakis: Advisory role for Novartis, Takeda, Roche and Pfizer. S. Novello: Speakers Bureau for: Eli Lilly, BMS, MSD, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd and Astra Zeneca. T. Karagiannis: Employee of, owns stocks in and has taken part in company-sponsored research for Genentech. A. Zeaiter: Employee of F.Hoffman-La Roche Ltd. R. Dziadziuszko: Substantive relationships with Novartis, Pfizer and BMS. All other authors have declared no conflicts of interest.Geneva, Switzerland, 12 April 2018 - Investing in the continuity of care for lung cancer patients can bring tremendous benefits in terms of patient satisfaction and quality of life. In Quebec, Canada, this investment has taken the form of a dedicated role on the medical team: The Pivot Nurse in Oncology (PNO). A study presented at ELCC 2018 (European Lung Cancer Congress) in Geneva (1) has produced new evidence of the different ways in which this service improves patients' lives during treatment. (2)

"Introduced to oncology clinics in 2001, the position of the pivot nurse was enshrined by the Ministry of Health and Social Services of Quebec in 2005 as part of its Fight Against Cancer campaign," said study author Elie Kassouf, haematologist and medical oncologist at Centre Hospitalier de Lanaudiere (CHDL) in Saint-Charles-Borromee, Canada. "In over 15 years of existence, however, very little data has been collected about its impact on patients' lives. Our study's main goal was therefore to determine whether the continuity of nursing care has tangible benefits to patients treated for lung cancer, as compared to the usual standard of care without a coordinating nurse."

Lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer-related deaths in both men and women. (3) Although progress has been made with treatment, according to Kassouf, increased cure rates and survival have come at the cost of higher toxicity. The multidisciplinary teams required to administer combination therapy have also led to greater complexity in the care process. Quality of life during treatment has deteriorated as a result, and healthcare institutions are increasingly confronted with discontent about delays, service fragmentation or even misinformation - all of which are thought to lead to confusion, distress and compliance issues among patients.

"At the CHUM, patients who enjoy continuity of care have a treating pivot nurse in addition to their treating physician. Each pivot nurse cares for 50 to 60 patients, who all have his or her direct phone number," Kassouf explained. "The PNO has the patients' files and can take care of scheduling follow-up appointments with their physician as soon as they receive new test results. If a patient calls to report worrying symptoms, the nurse will also speak directly to their doctor, who may then see that person on short notice without the latter having to go through the regular emergency system."

To study the efficacy of this service, Kassouf recruited 65 patients with advanced lung cancer at Notre Dame University Hospital in Montreal three months after the start of their treatment. The patients were divided into two cohorts: 82% were assigned to the continuous care (CC) arm, and the 12 individuals who had not had access to a pivot nurse during their treatment constituted the usual care (UC) control group. Patients in both cohorts answered validated patient satisfaction and quality-of-life questionnaires, as well as questions to assess their understanding of their health status. The CC group additionally filled out a specific survey on the role of their pivot nurse.

"The size difference between the two cohorts is because the PNO program has been around for 15 years, and the vast majority of patients in Quebec today have access to a pivot nurse," Kassouf explained. "The reasons why the study participants in the control group had not used this service three months into their treatment were unrelated to the study." This made the data more difficult to compare, but, as Kassouf reported, the differences found between the two groups were so wide that the results are statistically significant nonetheless.

"The Princess Margaret Hospital Patient Satisfaction with Doctor Questionnaire (PMH / PSQ-D) that we used in the study covers four dimensions of a patient's relationship with his physician: interpersonal skills, empathy, information exchange and quality of time," said Kassouf. "The score difference we saw between the two cohorts was huge across the board: not because the usual care group scored poorly - their results were similar to those found in other studies based on the same questionnaire - but because the continuous care cohort produced exceptionally high scores."

In the so-called FACT-L scale, which is a validated questionnaire for evaluating lung cancer patients' quality of life in Canada, the results also favoured the CC cohort in all categories - including physical, emotional and functional wellbeing - although the difference between the two groups was less marked. "This can be attributed to the fact that, contrary to their level of satisfaction with care, patients' quality of life is heavily influenced by the disease itself," said Kassouf.

"A previous study of the PNO system (4) had shown no difference in patients' quality of life, but most of the nurses in its usual care arm had specialised oncology certifications and over 10 years of experience, which was not necessarily the case of the pivot nurses at the time," he added. "With the generalisation of the PNO program, this asymmetry had disappeared when we conducted our study, so the results are a useful addition to the literature on the subject."

In their assessment of the PNO service, a large majority of patients stated that they had a better understanding of the course of their disease and treatment side-effects, and that the presence of their pivot nurse gave them more strength in their fight against cancer. "The only concerns that many people felt were not sufficiently addressed by their PNO were those pertaining to intimacy," said Kassouf.

Due to its small sample size and confinement to a single hospital, it is difficult to generalise the results of this study. "Earlier data suggests, however, that lung cancer is the malignancy associated with the highest levels of psychological distress compared to other forms of cancer. (5) Presenting more unmet psychosocial needs, these patients could thus be particularly susceptible to the benefits of continuous follow-up and medical scrutiny," Kassouf remarked. "Our results certainly show that it is an avenue worth exploring."

Anja Kroner, a PhD-prepared nurse in oncology and member of the management team at the Comprehensive Cancer Centre in Zurich, Switzerland, commented: "Despite the small number of patients involved, which means we must be cautious with the results, this work shows a clear tendency of continuity of care improving when there is an established role similar to that of the pivot nurse on a patient's medical team," she said. "In Europe, too, we have seen promising signals: several clinics in Germany, for example, found it was beneficial to assign a case manager to cancer patients."

Kroner further underlined that the growing complexity of cancer treatment - from surgery to oral therapy and radiation -creates many breaks in the care process. "Parallel to this, we see patients with financial or social burdens who are at particular risk for low adherence to treatment," she said. "In oral therapy, for example, they have pills to take on their own at home that cause severe side-effects: The routine care process is not very good at detecting individuals who stop taking their medication without telling their doctor about it. That is where pivot nurses can make a real difference."

According to Kroner, however, cancer patients should not only be satisfied with their doctor, but rather with the entire care setting. "It would be interesting to take the research further by framing patient satisfaction more broadly, as well as considering other outcomes alongside quality of life, such as patients' ability to carry their own weight, or to work, throughout the process," she added. "In light of the financial pressure faced by many healthcare systems today, it would also be worth exploring whether pivot nurses can reduce the cost of cancer, as another study (6) has already suggested."

###

Notes to Editors

Please make sure to use the official name of the meeting in your reports: ELCC 2018

Official Congress hashtag: #ELCC18

The press release will be available once the embargo lifts via: http://esmo.org/Press-Office/Press-Releases/Coordinating-Nurses-Improve-Cancer-Patients-Quality-Life-Satisfaction-During-Treatment

Disclaimer

This press release contains information provided by the authors of the highlighted abstracts and reflects the content of those abstracts. It does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of ESMO or IASLC who cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the data. Commentators quoted in the press release are required to comply with the ESMO Declaration of Interests policy and the ESMO Code of Conduct.

References:

1 http://www.esmo.org/Conferences/ELCC-2018-Lung-Cancer

2 Abstract 231P_PR 'Impact of the continuity of nursing care delivered by a pivot nurse in oncology on improving satisfaction and quality of life of patients with advanced lung cancer': presented by Elie Kassouf during the Poster Display session on Thursday, 12 April, 12:30 to 13:00 (CEST) in Hall 1. Journal of Thoracic Oncology, Volume 13, Issue 4, Supplement, April 2018.

3 http://www.iaslc.org/about-lung-cancer

4 Strutkowski, M, Saucier, A, Eades, M, Swidzinski, M, Ritchie, J, Marchionni, C, & Ladouceur, M (2008). Impact of a pivot nurse in oncology on patients with lung or breast cancer: Symptom distress, fatigue, quality of life, and use of healthcare resources. Oncology Nursing Forum, 35: 948-954.

5 Zabora J, BrintzenhofeSzoc K, Curbow B, Hooker C, Piantadosi S. The prevalence of psychological distress by cancer site. Psychooncology. 2001 Jan-Feb;10(1): 19-28.

6 Wagner, EH, Ludman, EJ, Aiello Bowles, EJ, Penfold, R, Reid, RJ, Rutter, CM et al. (2014). Nurse navigators in early cancer care: A randomized, controlled trial. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 32(1): 12-19

About the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)

ESMO is the leading professional organisation for medical oncology. With 18,000 members representing oncology professionals from over 150 countries worldwide, ESMO is the society of reference for oncology education and information. We are committed to supporting our members to develop and advance in a fast-evolving professional environment.

ESMO's educational resources support an integrated, multi-professional approach to cancer care. We have European roots and a global reach: we welcome oncology professionals from around the world and we seek to erase boundaries in cancer care as we pursue our mission across oncology, worldwide. Visit http://www.esmo.org

About the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC)

The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) is the only global organisation dedicated solely to the study of lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies. Founded in 1974, the association's membership includes more than 7,500 lung cancer specialists across all disciplines in over 100 countries, forming a global network working together to conquer lung and thoracic cancers worldwide. The association also publishes the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, the primary educational and informational publication for topics relevant to the prevention, detection, diagnosis and treatment of all thoracic malignancies. Visit http://www.iaslc.org for more information and follow us on Twitter @IASLC.

231P_PR - Impact of the continuity of nursing care delivered by a pivot nurse in oncology on improving satisfaction and quality of life of patients with advanced lung cancer

E. Kassouf1, M. Tehfe2, M. Floresci2, N. Blais2

1Centre Hospitalier Regional de Lanaudiere, St-Charles-Borromee, QC, Canada, 2Notre Dame du CHUM, Montreal, QC, Canada

Background: Health care organizations around the globe have been implementing different strategies aimed at improving their care systems to obtain better patient- physician interaction and resolve underlying issues leading to patient dissatisfaction. In an effort to improve continuity of care inside a network of interdisciplinary teams, the Ministry of Health and Social Services of Quebec has implemented the recruitment of pivot nurses in oncology services.

Methods: This study was conducted at the Notre Dame university hospital in Montreal. Patients were selected from the outpatient admissions' list, three months after the start of their treatment, and divided into two cohorts: the continuity of care (CC) cohort, where patients were followed by a PNO, and the usual care (UC) cohort, who received standard care from the oncology clinic staff. Participants in both groups completed the Princess Margaret Hospital Patient Satisfaction with Doctor Questionnaire (PMH/PSQ-MD), the FACT-L Scale for quality of life assessment and questions evaluating the understanding of their health status and disease. Another ten questions were adressed specifically to the CC in regards to nursing care and the health care system in Quebec.Lugano-Geneva, 12 April 2018 - Further evidence that immunotherapy provides long-term survival benefit for patients with lung cancer was presented today at ELCC 2018 (European Lung Cancer Congress) in Geneva, Switzerland. (1)

Researchers presented the three-year survival results of the randomised phase 2 POPLAR trial in second line, (2) which is the longest follow-up reported to date with anti-programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) immunotherapy in patients with previously treated, advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The trial randomised 287 patients from 61 sites across 13 countries with advanced NSCLC to the anti-PD-L1 antibody atezolizumab or docetaxel (chemotherapy).

Overall survival was significantly higher with atezolizumab at two and three years compared with docetaxel. Nearly one-third of patients (32.2%) in the atezolizumab treatment group were alive at two years compared with 16.6% in the docetaxel group. Additionally, at three years, almost twice as many patients (18.7%) were alive in the atezolizumab group compared to the docetaxel group (10.0%). The long-term overall survival benefit with atezolizumab over docetaxel was observed across histology (squamous and non-squamous) and regardless of PD-L1 expression. Even patients with PD-L1 expression in less than 1% of tumour cells and less than 1% of immune cells had a promising rate of long-term survival.

The median duration of response was three times longer with atezolizumab (22.3 months) compared to docetaxel (7.2 months). Atezolizumab led to fewer adverse events than docetaxel.

Lead author Dr Julien Mazieres of Toulouse University Hospital, Toulouse, France, said: "Nearly one in five patients treated with atezolizumab was alive at three years. This places atezolizumab among the drugs with the highest landmark overall survival in previously treated lung cancer patients."

"The fact that all subgroups of patients benefitted to a similar degree is good in the sense that atezolizumab can be tried in all advanced NSCLC patients," he continued. "On the other hand, it means that we cannot predict which patients are most likely to live for three years. We need to find biomarkers to help us identify the long-term survivors with the drug."

Mazieres said the drug was well tolerated which meant that patients can keep taking it for several years. He said: "Some of my patients who were in the atezolizumab treatment group are now long-term survivors with lung cancer. They are not cured, but they have survived, have a good quality of life, and have returned to work. With immunotherapy we now have a new type of patient: long-term survivors with lung cancer who can go back to a normal life."

Commenting on the study, Prof. Solange Peters, Head of Medical Oncology, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), Lausanne, Switzerland, ESMO President-Elect said: "Before immunotherapy, the long-term survival of non-small-cell lung cancer patients was close to 0%. POPLAR supports the concept that long-term survival is possible with immunotherapy. The three-year survival results of POPLAR are consistent with the three- and five-year survival with the anti-PD-1 antibodies pembrolizumab and nivolumab, respectively, in phase 1 trials. These latest results are exciting because unlike the previous two trials, POPLAR was a large, randomised trial and provides convincing proof that long-term survival now exists in lung cancer."

Peters said there was now a strong argument that every patient with advanced NSCLC should receive immunotherapy. She said: "In the nivolumab phase 1 trial 15% of patients were alive at five years, which in cancer is usually considered being cured. We should offer all patients this one in six chance of five-year survival. However, this poses a financial challenge for healthcare systems."

To make this strategy sustainable, Peters said a method was needed to identify the patients who will not benefit from immunotherapy. She said: "That would enable us to treat only the patients with a high chance of long-term survival with immunotherapy. POPLAR shows that PD-L1 is not a useful biomarker to exclude patients from immunotherapy, since some patients with very low expression had an overall survival benefit. Rather than a single biomarker, I think it will be a signature of many biomarkers including tumour mutation burden that identifies the patients who should not be treated."

Peters said trials are needed to assess the ability of a combination of biomarkers to predict which patients with advanced NSCLC do, and do not, survive long-term with immunotherapy: "These trials should be conducted in patients with similar characteristics to the long-term survivors in the phase 1 and 2 trials with atezolizumab, pembrolizumab, and nivolumab. So the first step will be to describe these patients in terms of demographics, smoking history, tumour mutation burden, expression of immune genes, and PD-L1 expression. Focusing future studies on these patients will help us to discover a biomarker signature for use in clinical practice."

###

Notes to Editors

Please make sure to use the official name of the meeting in your reports: ELCC 2018

Official Congress hashtag: #ELCC2018

The press release will be available once the embargo lifts via: http://esmo.org/Press-Office/Press-Releases/Evidence-Immunotherapy-Long-term-Survival-Benefit-Lung-Cancer-Patients

Disclaimer

This press release contains information provided by the authors of the highlighted abstracts and reflects the content of those abstracts. It does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of ESMO or IASLC who cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the data. Commentators quoted in the press release are required to comply with the ESMO Declaration of Interests policy and the ESMO Code of Conduct.

References

1 http://www.esmo.org/Conferences/ELCC-2018-Lung-Cancer

2 Abstract 136PD_PR '3-year survival and duration of response in randomized phase II study of atezolizumab (atezo) vs docetaxel (doc) in 2L+ NSCLC (POPLAR)': presented by Julien Mazieres during the Poster Discussion session 'Immunotherapy and next-generation TKIs: from second to frontline treatment' on Thursday, 12 April, 07:45 to 09:00 (CEST) in Room A. Journal of Thoracic Oncology, Volume 13, Issue 4, Supplement, April 2018.

About the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO)

ESMO is the leading professional organisation for medical oncology. With 18,000 members representing oncology professionals from over 150 countries worldwide, ESMO is the society of reference for oncology education and information. We are committed to supporting our members to develop and advance in a fast-evolving professional environment.

ESMO's educational resources support an integrated, multi-professional approach to cancer care. We have European roots and a global reach: we welcome oncology professionals from around the world and we seek to erase boundaries in cancer care as we pursue our mission across oncology, worldwide. Visit http://www.esmo.org

About the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC)

The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) is the only global organisation dedicated solely to the study of lung cancer and other thoracic malignancies. Founded in 1974, the association's membership includes more than 7,500 lung cancer specialists across all disciplines in over 100 countries, forming a global network working together to conquer lung and thoracic cancers worldwide. The association also publishes the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, the primary educational and informational publication for topics relevant to the prevention, detection, diagnosis and treatment of all thoracic malignancies. Visit http://www.iaslc.org for more information and follow us on Twitter @IASLC.

136PD_PR 3-year survival and duration of response in randomized phase II study of atezolizumab (atezo) vs docetaxel (doc) in 2L+ NSCLC (POPLAR)

J. Mazieres1, K. Park2, C. Lewanski3, S. Gadgeel4, L. Fehrenbacher5, A. Rittmeyer6, J.Y Han7, A. Artal-Cortes8, F. Braiteh9, M. Gandhi10, W. Yu10, C. Matheny10, P. He10, A. Sandler10, M. Ballinger10, J. Vansteenkiste11

1Thoracic Oncology, Toulouse University Hospital, Toulouse, France, 2Samsung Medical Center Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 3Charing Cross Hospital, London, UK, 4University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, 5Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, Vallejo, CA, USA, 6Lungenfachklinik Immenhausen, Immenhausen, Germany, 7National Cancer Center, Goyang, Republic of Korea, 8Hospital Universitario Miguel Servet, Zaragoza, Spain, 9Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada, Las Vegas, NV, USA, 10Genentech, Inc., South San Francisco, CA, USA, 11University Hospitals KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Background: Atezo (anti-PD-L1) has demonstrated OS benefit over doc in a randomized Phase II study, POPLAR, in patients with advanced NSCLC. This benefit has been confirmed in the randomized Phase III study OAK (Rittmeyer, 2017). The 3-year survival analysis of the POPLAR study presented here describes the longest survival follow-up reported to date of an all-comer randomized PD-L1/PD-1 immunotherapy trial in 2L+ NSCLC.

Methods: Patients were randomized 1:1 to receive atezo (1200 mg) or doc (75 mg/m2) IV q3w. Tumors were prospectively evaluated for tumor cell (TC) or tumor-infiltrating immune cell (IC) PD-L1 expression using the VENTANA SP142 IHC assay. Landmark OS was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Data cutoff, April 7, 2017; minimum follow-up, 3 years.

Results: The 2-year and 3-year survival with atezo vs doc were 32.2% vs 16.6% and 18.7% vs 10.0%, respectively. The long-term OS benefit of atezo vs doc was observed across histology and PD-L1 expression subgroups (See table enclosed as picture). While the TC3 or IC3 subgroup derived the greatest OS benefit, the TC0 and IC0 subgroup also had improved long-term OS with atezo vs doc. The ITT ORR was 15% in both atezo and doc arms, but the median duration of response was 3 times longer with atezo (22.3 months [95% CI: 11.6, 31.1] vs 7.2 months [95% CI: 5.8, 12.2] with doc). Seven of the 11 doc-arm 3-year survivors received subsequent non-protocol therapy with anti-PD-L1/PD-1 agents. Atezo had a favorable safety profile compared with doc that was consistent with previous reports.

Conclusions: Atezo demonstrates superior 2-year and 3-year OS benefit compared with doc, and this benefit is observed across histology and PD-L1 expression subgroups (including TC0 and IC0). Atezo is well tolerated, and responses are highly durable. These results are consistent with long-term OS results from OAK (Satouchi, WCLC 2017).

Clinical trial identification: NCT01903993

Legal entity responsible for the study: F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd/Genentech, Inc.

Funding: F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd/Genentech, Inc.

Disclosure: K. Park: Consulting/Advisory Role: Astellas Pharma, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Clovis Oncology, Lilly, Hanmi, Kyowa Hakko Kirin, Novartis, Ono Pharmaceutical, Roche. Speakers Bureau: Boehringer Ingelheim, Research Funding: AstraZeneca. C. Lewanski: Consultant: MSD, Roche, AstraZeneca. S. Gadgeel: Speaker's bureau- Astra-Zeneca, Genentech/Roche Advisory Boards: Astra-Zeneca, Ariad, Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb and Genentech/Roche. A. Rittmeyer: Grants as an advisor or speaker by: Astra Zeneca, BMS, Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Roche Genentech. A. Artal-Cortes: Advisory boards: Roche, BMS, MSD Travel fees: Roche. F. Braiteh: Speaking and consulting fees received From Genentech. M. Gandhi: Genentech employee and Roche stock. W. Yu: Genentech employee and Roche stock. C. Matheny: Genentech employee and Roche stock, Roche/Genentech travel, accommodations, expenses patents, royalties or other intellectual property: Stanford University (patient with Stanford, do not currently receive royalties or have other intellectual property). P. He: Genentech employee and Roche stock. A. Sandler: Genentech employee; Roche and Amgen stock, Husband has stocks for Allergan and Gilead. M. Ballinger: Genentech employee and Roche stock. All other authors have declared no conflicts of interest.An instrument, which was partially developed and built at ETH Zurich, has now been particularly successful at studying new born stars still surrounded by gas and dust.

With SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), astronomers of ETH Zurich and Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg were able to take images of planet-forming disks around the young stars: these disks, called protoplanetary disks, exist around so-called TTauri stars - the progenitors to our Sun - as well as around the more massive siblings called Herbig Ae/Be stars.

So far astronomers focussed mostly on Herbig Ae/Be stars in their studies, but with a new, ambitious program, Henning Avenhaus and Sascha Quanz, former and current members of the NCCR PlanetS at ETH Zurich, have now been able to use the capabilities of SPHERE to undertake a survey of TTauri disks.

The results for the first eight stars are released in a paper published by the "Astronomical Journal". "Not only were we able to clearly detect all eight disks," summarizes Henning Avenhaus, "but, surprisingly, they looked all very different in particular with respect to their size." While some of them could only be detected with a radius of 80 au (80 times the distance Sun-Earth and about twice the average distance Sun-Pluto), others could be traced out to an astounding 700 au. "Most of the disks were found to display rings, a phenomenon known from previous observations of more massive stars," explains Sascha Quanz: "However, none of them displayed spiral structures, which is a phenomenon seen regularly in Herbig disks." A key question is now to understand where this difference is coming from and what it means for planet formation around different types of stars.

Start on a bad footing

As successful as the project was, it started on a bad footing, as Henning Avenhaus remembers: "While the first proposal to undertake such observations was already written in March 2013 and highly rated (back then using the older NACO instrument), unexpected works that had to be performed on the instrument made it impossible to take data." The same happened again in September 2013. Again, the instrument was not available.

A third attempt in March 2014 did yield the requested scheduling - in March 2015, when Henning Avenhaus flew to the telescope just to find out that the instrument (still NACO) had a malfunction the night before the observations were scheduled to start. Not that it mattered: Wind and clouds made it impossible to observe anyway.

At this point, the team decided to switch to the new instrument - SPHERE - and got their first observations scheduled in March 2016. This time, it worked: Both the instrument and the weather were well-behaved, as Henning Avenhaus remembers: "I was present at Cerro Paranal, the location of the Very Large Telescope, working through the nights to perform the observations and occasionally peaking out of the control room to head to the telescope platform and marvel at the impressive display of stars."

The data taken over the course of several nights in March 2016 and in the following year were of very high quality. More than five years after the idea for the program, the researchers are now rewarded with results that will help to shed more light on the formation processes for planets.

"This high-quality dataset impressively shows the power of SPHERE for these observations and significantly increases the number of planetary nurseries studied at high resolution enabling us to eventually get a statistical grasp on planet formation," summarizes Sascha Quanz. Further results of the DARTTS-S programme and similar observations with the ALMA radio telescope in Chile should contribute to this.

###

Reference

Avenhaus H, Quanz S, Garufi A, Perez S, Casassus S, Pinte C, Bertrang HMG, Caceres C, Benisty M, Carsten D. (2018). Disks Around TTauri Stars with Sphere (DARTTS-S) I: Sphere / IRDIS Polarimetric Imaging of 8 prominent TTauri Disks. eprint arXiv:1803.10882The divide that separates conservative and liberal values may be as wide now as it has ever been in our country. This divide shows itself in areas of everyday life, and health care is no exception.

But do doctors' political beliefs influence the way they practice medicine, choose therapies and treat patients?

Which treatments and how much care to provide at the end of a patient's life has been a notoriously contentious question in medicine. However, a physician's party affiliation appears to have no bearing on clinical decisions in the care of terminally ill patients at the end of life, according to a new study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School.

Previous research has looked at the role of physicians' personal beliefs in hypothetical scenarios. Results of the new study, believed to be the first to look at how doctors behave in real-life clinical practice, are published April 11 in The BMJ.

For this new analysis, Anupam Jena, the Ruth L. Newhouse Associate Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital, teamed up with colleagues from Columbia University, Cornell University, Stanford University and New York University to compare the end-of-life care and treatment patterns of doctors with different political affiliations.

Despite the dramatic rhetorical differences among members of the two parties on end-of-life care, the researchers found no evidence that a physician's political affiliation influenced decisions on how much and what kind of care to offer their terminally ill patients.

"Our findings are reassuring evidence that the political and ideological opinions of physicians don't seem to have any discernible impact on how they care for patients at the end of life," Jena said. "Physicians seem to be able to look past their politics to determine the best care for each patient's individual situation."

A 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggested that physicians' personal beliefs on politically controversial health care issues like abortion, gun safety and birth control were linked to differences in how they delivered care. That earlier study was based on surveys that combined questions about political opinions with questions about how a physician would react in hypothetical clinical scenarios.

In the new study, researchers compared clinical treatment data from nearly 1.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who died in the hospital or shortly after discharge against data from the Federal Election Commission on the patients' attending physicians' political contributions. The investigators looked for differences in treatment patterns among doctors who donated to either party or to no party. Comparing physicians working within the same hospital to account for any regional variations in end-of-life care, the researchers found no differences between the groups in end-of-life spending, use of intensive resuscitation or life-sustaining interventions such as intubation or feeding tubes or in how likely they were to refer their patients to hospice.

Jena and colleagues say that further study is needed to determine whether decisions about other politically controversial health care and medical issues might break down along party lines.

###

Co-authors Andrew Olenski, a doctoral student in the Department of Economics at Columbia; Dhruv Khullar, a physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and a researcher in the Weill Cornell Department of Healthcare Policy and Research; Adam Bonica, assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford; and Howard Rosenthal, professor in the Department of Politics at NYU, also contributed to the study.The International Astronomical Union (IAU), the internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies and their surface features, recently approved a dozen names proposed by NASA's New Horizons team, which led the first reconnaissance of Pluto and its moons in 2015 with the New Horizons spacecraft. The New Horizons team had been using many of the chosen names informally to describe the many valleys, crevices and craters discovered during the first close-up look at the surface Charon.

Charon is one of the larger bodies in the Kuiper Belt, and has a wealth of geological features, as well as a collection of craters similar to those seen on most moons. These features and some of Charon's craters have now been assigned official names by the IAU.

The New Horizons team was instrumental in moving the new names through approval, and included the leader of the New Horizons missions, Dr. Alan Stern, and science team members Mark Showalter -- the group's chairman and liaison to the IAU -- Ross Beyer, Will Grundy, William McKinnon, Jeff Moore, Cathy Olkin, Paul Schenk and Amanda Zangari. The team gathered most of their ideas during the Our Plutoonline public naming campaign in 2015.

The names approved by the IAU encompass the diverse range of recommendations the team received from around the world during the Our Pluto campaign. As well as the efforts of the New Horizons team, members of the public all over the world helped to name the features of Charon by contributing their suggestions for names of the features of this far-flung moon.

Honouring the epic exploration of Pluto that New Horizons accomplished, many of the feature names in the Pluto system pay homage to the spirit of human exploration, honouring travellers, explorers and scientists, pioneering journeys, and mysterious destinations. Rita Schulz, chair of the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, commented that "I am pleased that the features on Charon have been named with international spirit."

The approved Charon names focus on the literature and mythology of exploration. They are listed here:

Argo Chasma is named for the ship sailed by Jason and the Argonauts, in the epic Latin poem Argonautica, during their quest for the Golden Fleece.

Butler Mons honours Octavia E. Butler, the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur fellowship, and whose Xenogenesis trilogy describes humankind's departure from Earth and subsequent return.

Caleuche Chasma is named for the mythological ghost ship that travels the seas around the small island of Chiloe, off the coast of Chile; according to legend, the Caleuche explores the coastline collecting the dead, who then live aboard it forever.

Clarke Montes honours Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the prolific science fiction writer and futurist whose novels and short stories (including 2001: A Space Odyssey) were imaginative depictions of space exploration.

Dorothy Crater recognizes the protagonist in the series of children's novels, by L. Frank Baum, that follows Dorothy Gale's travels to and adventures in the magical world of Oz.

Kubrick Mons honours film director Stanley Kubrick, whose iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey tells the story of humanity's evolution from tool-using hominids to space explorers and beyond.

Mandjet Chasma is named for one of the boats in Egyptian mythology that carried the sun god Ra (Re) across the sky each day -- making it one of the earliest mythological examples of a vessel of space travel.

Nasreddin Crater is named for the protagonist in thousands of humorous folktales told throughout the Middle East, southern Europe and parts of Asia.

Nemo Crater is named for the captain of the Nautilus, the submarine in Jules Verne's novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) and The Mysterious Island (1874).

Pirx Crater is named for the main character in a series of short stories by Stanislaw Lem, who travels between the Earth, Moon and Mars.

Revati Crater is named for the main character in the Hindu epic narrative Mahabharata -- widely regarded as the first in history (circa 400 BC) to include the concept of time travel.

Sadko Crater recognizes the adventurer who travelled to the bottom of the sea in the medieval Russian epic Bylina.

###

More information

The IAU is the international astronomical organisation that brings together more than 10 000 professional astronomers from almost 100 countries. Its mission is to promote and safeguard the science of astronomy in all its aspects through international cooperation. The IAU also serves as the internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and the surface features on them. Founded in 1919, the IAU is the world's largest professional body for astronomers.

The New Horizons spacecraft is currently 6.16 billion kilometres from Earth, speeding toward a New Year's Day 2019 encounter with the Kuiper Belt object (486958) 2014 MU69, which orbits about 1.6 billion kilometres beyond Pluto. This flyby will be the centrepiece of New Horizons' extended mission through the Kuiper Belt, and will be the farthest planetary encounter -- with the most primitive object ever encountered -- in spaceflight history.

For more on the New Horizons mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons and http://pluto.jhuapl.edu.

Contacts

Rita Schulz

Chair, IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature / ESA

Netherlands

Tel: +31 71 565 48 21

Email: rschulz@cosmos.esa.int

Lars Lindberg Christensen

IAU Press Officer

Garching bei Munchen, Germany

Tel: +49 89 320 06 761

Cell: +49 173 38 72 621

Email: lars@eso.org

Michael Buckley

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Tel: +1 443 778 7536

Cell: +1 443 567 3145

Email: Michael.Buckley@jhuapl.eduJapan -- A study appearing in the in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences gives new clues into how cancers like leukemia form from the retrovirus HTLV-1, as well as insights into the possible creation of a vaccine.

HTLV-1 is a human retrovirus that mainly infects the CD4+ T cell. Such Infections can lead to a host of immune-related diseases including leukemia. Somewhat counterintuitively, the virus thrives by remaining at very low levels in the body, which is unlike its more notorious cousin, HIV.

"HTLV-1 RNA is rarely detected in the plasma of infected individuals, and it persists by evading host immune surveillance," says Jun-ichirou Yasunaga of Kyoto University's Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences, who led the study.

HTLV-1 encodes two oncogenic factors, Tax and HBZ. Besides its function as an oncoprotein, Tax also facilitates viral replication. "The precise role of Tax in pathogenesis is unknown, since it is so faintly expressed in infected cells," continues Yasunaga.

The researchers found that within populations of infected leukemic cells, only a tiny fraction -- less than 3% -- expressed Tax. Moreover, this expression in any given cell was transient, lasting less than 24 hours. However, while the cells that expressed Tax would change over time, more than 3% of the population would express this gene.

In fact, in vitro experiments showed that if Tax expression was suppressed in this small population, then almost all infected cells would vanish in less than a month. Furthermore, computational simulations found that it takes about five months for 90% of the infected cells to eventually express Tax. This transience is advantageous for the survival of the virus, since persistent Tax expression is associated with an immune response.

Yasunaga explains that keeping the expression of Tax limited to a small population allows the infection to flourish and prevent the infected cells from undergoing controlled death, known as apoptosis.

"There were clear differences in the gene expression between Tax-expressing and Tax-non-expressing cells. In the latter there were two populations, those with medium, and those with low levels of anti-apoptotic factors. This shows that Tax caused different degrees of sensitivity to apoptosis," he explains.

Further studies revealed that this effect on apoptosis sensitivity was found in cells with better overall survivability. Yasunaga hypothesizes that even if cells stop expressing Tax, those with medium levels of anti-apoptosis factors are more resistant to apoptosis, allowing these cells to survive.

"Transient Tax expression is a unique way through which enhances the survival and proliferation of infected cells, so it makes it a good vaccine target. Understanding its expression mechanism could be a key to new therapies," says Yasunaga.

###

The paper "Sporadic on/off switching of HTLV-1 Tax expression is crucial to maintain the whole population of virus-induced leukemic cells" appeared 22 January 2018 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, with doi: 10.1073/pnas.1715724115.

About Kyoto University

Kyoto University is one of Japan and Asia's premier research institutions, founded in 1897 and responsible for producing numerous Nobel laureates and winners of other prestigious international prizes. A broad curriculum across the arts and sciences at both undergraduate and graduate levels is complemented by numerous research centers, as well as facilities and offices around Japan and the world. For more information please see: http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/enGroup of researchers at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania are developing new generation sponge-like wound dressings with hyaluronic acid. Antimicrobial, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory wound dressings stimulate tissue regeneration and can be especially efficient in treating deep wounds that are difficult to heal.

According to data, of the total healthcare expenditure in the European Union, wound management makes up 2-4%. A single chronic wound can cost up to 10 thousand EUR to treat, and it is estimated that up to 1.5% of EU population has one or more of such wounds.

For deep wound to heal successfully, tissue regeneration is extremely important. Development of new generation wound dressings, which assist this process, is one of biggest challenges in tissue engineering. Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) researchers are developing sponge-like wound dressings based on hyaluronic acid, which is a well-researched polymer stimulating tissue regeneration and used in ophthalmology, bone regeneration and for other medical and cosmetic purposes.

"Hyaluronic acid is a natural polymer found in living organisms, which has anti-inflammatory properties and stimulates tissue regeneration. We are used to commercial hyaluronic acid based products, which usually are thick liquids or gels. Although quickly absorbed by the organism, in this form the polymer doesn't have the structure needed for tissue building", says Odeta Baniukaitiene, researcher at KTU Faculty of Chemical Technology.

Sponge-like wound dressings created at KTU have net structure, which is essential in developing wound dressings for tissue regeneration. Although biopolymers are often chosen for this purpose as they are compatible with biological systems, sponge-like wound dressings are mostly being made from alginate or collagen.

"We use freeze-drying technique to render hyaluronic acid sponge-like structure. The dressing fills in the wound, and is serving as a structure for cells to stick on; the active compounds, which have antimicrobial, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory or tissue regeneration stimulating qualities are in such a way fixed and carried through", says Baniukaitiene.

At the moment, KTU researchers have built hyaluronic acid scaffolds, which can be used for tissue regeneration. Collaborating with the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, the scientists are testing the prototype in vitro with different cells. According to researchers, the proof of concept stage research can take up a few more years.

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Video: https://youtu.be/72GL30lIGnITamas Terlaky from the Industrial and Systems Engineering department at Lehigh University has been elected to the Fellows Program of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

A professor from the Industrial and Systems Engineering department at Lehigh University has been elected to the Fellows Program of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

Tamas Terlaky, the George N. and Soteria Kledaras '87 Endowed Chair professor, was recognized for his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of optimization and exemplary service to the optimization community.

SIAM, founded in 1952, fosters the development of applied mathematical and computational methodologies in order to solve real-world problems.

"It is heartwarming to see my friends and colleagues take the time and effort to nominate me for such a great recognition, and for SIAM to value my contributions," Terlaky said. "Membership in the distinguished club of SIAM fellows comes with accolades but also the duty to humbly serve our community."

Terlaky will be honored for his achievements at SIAM's annual meeting in Portland, Oregon in July.

Terlaky and his team made headlines last year while working alongside the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to produce an optimization model for inmate assignment. The Inmate Assignment Decision Support System (IADSS) streamlines the assignment of inmates to the state's 25 correctional institutions and has been credited with saving the state millions of dollars. The team won the prestigious Daniel H. Wagner Prize in 2017 for Excellence in Operations Research Practice.

SIAM is an international community of over 14,000 individual members and 500 institutional members from more than 100 countries. With the inclusion of its latest publication, the SIAM Journal on Mathematics of Data Science (SIMODS), the organization now issues 17 peer-reviewed journals and holds conferences and events throughout the year.

Terlaky is an active contributor to SIAM. Since January 2017, he has served as the Chair of the SIAM Optimization subdivision as well as Co-Chair of the tri-annual 2020 SIAM Optimization Conference in Hong-Kong. In May 2017, along with colleagues Miguel F. Anjos of Polytechnique Montreal and Shabbir Ahmed of Georgia Institute of Technology, Terlaky produced a new textbook on optimization and engineering. The text, Advances and Trends in Optimization with Engineering Applications, is part of a prestigious series on optimization published by SIAM and the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS).

In February 2018, Terlaky presented the keynote speech at the KAUST Research Workshop on Optimization and Big Data in Saudi Arabia. This summer, Terlaky will deliver several invited lectures, including a plenary talk at the IFIP TC7 2018 Conference on System Modeling and Optimization in Essen, Germany and a keynote speech at the EURO 2018 Conference in Valencia, Spain.

Prior to his appointment at Lehigh University, where he served as department chair of Industrial Systems and Engineering from 2008 to 2017, Terlaky taught at Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary; Delft University of Technology in Delft, Netherlands and McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. At McMaster, he also served as the founding director of the School of Computational Engineering and Science.

Terlaky has published four books, edited more than 10 books and journal special issues and published over 180 research papers. Topics include theoretical and algorithmic foundations of mathematical optimization (for example, invention of the criss-cross method and its generalizations to oriented matroid programming), design and analysis of large classes of interior point methods, computational optimization, worst case examples of the central path, duality theory, sensitivity analysis, nuclear reactor core reloading optimization, oil refinery and VLSI design optimization, robust radiation therapy treatment optimization and inmate assignment optimization.

Terlaky is founding Honorary Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Optimization and Engineering. He has served as associate editor of 10 journals and has served as conference chair, conference organizer and distinguished invited speaker at conferences throughout the world. He was general Chair of the INFORMS 2015 Annual Meeting, a former Chair of INFORMS' Optimization Society and Chair of the ICCOPT Steering Committee of the Mathematical Optimization Society. He is a Fellow of the Fields Institute and Fellow of INFORMS. He received the MITACS Mentorship Award for his distinguished graduate student supervisory record and the Award of Merit of the Canadian Operations Research Society. In November 2017 he received the Wagner Prize of INFORMS and the Egervary Award of the Hungarian Operations Research Society.

Terlaky's research interests includes high performance optimization algorithms, optimization modeling and its applications.

###

Key Links:

Faculty profile: Tamas Terlaky

Department of Industrial Systems and Engineering, Lehigh University

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)

SIAM Fellows: Class of 2018

Article: Terlaky produces new textbook on optimization and engineeringWOODS HOLE, Mass. -- A longstanding mystery in biology is how the millions of molecules bumping around in a cell "find" one another and organize into functional structures. So it was a big surprise in 2008 when participants in the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) Physiology course realized that simple phase separations - like oil separating from water - may be one important way to create order inside a cell.

While not without controversy, this idea has taken cell biology by storm. In the past decade, scientists have watched protein and RNA molecules condensing into droplets, or membrane-free condensates, in many kinds of cells, from bacterial to human. They have also noted that the same proteins that form liquid droplets in healthy cells can "solidfy" in the context of disease, such as neurodegenerative disorders. But what makes certain molecules come together in the same droplet, while others are excluded, has been unexplained.

This week in Science, a team shows for the first time that RNA molecules recognize one another to condense into the same droplet due to specific 3D shapes that the molecules assume. The study's senior author, Amy S. Gladfelter of University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, began this work as part of the HHMI / HCIA Summer Institute at the MBL, a group of 70 scientists who explored this emerging paradigm of cellular organization over five summers of intense, synergistic research.

Working with fungus cells, Gladfelter (an MBL Fellow), Erin M. Langdon and colleagues show that RNA molecules end up in the same droplet if their 3D structures allow them to bind together through complementary base-pairing.

"RNA molecules will end up in different droplets if their secondary (3D) structures are shielding any complementarity. But with the RNAs that condense into the same droplet, their complementary sequences are really exposed, so they can find each other and base pair to make a higher-order interaction," Gladfelter says.

This finding is important in that it reveals a selective mechanism for forming these RNA-protein condensates -- which scientists are seeing everywhere in cells but whose function is still unclear. The condensates may serve as "crucibles" for enhancing biological reactions by concentrating specific molecules together. Or they may sequester molecules that the cell doesn't need for a particular biological process.

Gladfelter has previously demonstrated in fungus that it's critical that the cell undergo a liquid-liquid phase separation in order for two different biological process to occur. "But we need more examples of where it really matters for cell function," Gladfelter says. The field needs evidence "that this is not just something that proteins and RNAs can do, but that nature has selected for it," she says.

There are also indications that transition of these liquid condensates to a more solid state may be a factor in protein aggregation diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, ALS, and prion diseases. The current finding, Gladfelter says, "helps us understand how the right components get recruited to droplets so cells can potentially avoid this transition to an aberrant, solid state."

"This is one of many examples in which perceptive MBL students and faculty made a significant contribution to biological research. And, importantly, the initial observation was intensively followed up through an innovative, multidisciplinary collaboration, the HHMI/HCIA Summer Institute at MBL. These are the kinds of synergies that generate extraordinary science at MBL," said David Mark Welch, MBL's Interim Director of Research.

###

Citation:

EM Langdon et al (2018) mRNA structure determines specificity of a polyQ-driven phase separation. Science (doi to come)

The Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) is dedicated to scientific discovery - exploring fundamental biology, understanding marine biodiversity and the environment, and informing the human condition through research and education. Founded in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1888, the MBL is a private, nonprofit institution and an affiliate of the University of Chicago.First study to show 'owls' have higher risk of mortality

Switch to daylight savings time is much harder for them

They suffer from more diseases and disorders than morning larks

Employers should allow greater flexibility in working hours

Consider abolishing daylight savings time, scientists say

CHICAGO --- "Night owls" -- people who like to stay up late and have trouble dragging themselves out of bed in the morning -- have a higher risk of dying sooner than "larks," people who have a natural preference for going to bed early and rise with the sun, according to a new study from Northwestern Medicine and the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom (UK).

The study, on nearly half a million participants in the UK Biobank Study, found owls have a 10 percent higher risk of dying than larks. In the study sample, 50,000 people were more likely to die in the 6 -year period sampled.

"Night owls trying to live in a morning lark world may have health consequences for their bodies," said co-lead author Kristen Knutson, associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Previous studies in this field have focused on the higher rates of metabolic dysfunction and cardiovascular disease, but this is the first to look at mortality risk.

The study will be published April 12 in the journal Chronobiology International.

The scientists adjusted for the expected health problems in owls and still found the 10 percent higher risk of death.

"This is a public health issue that can no longer be ignored," said Malcolm von Schantz, a professor of chronobiology at the University of Surrey. "We should discuss allowing evening types to start and finish work later, where practical. And we need more research about how we can help evening types cope with the higher effort of keeping their body clock in synchrony with sun time."

"It could be that people who are up late have an internal biological clock that doesn't match their external environment," Knutson said. "It could be psychological stress, eating at the wrong time for their body, not exercising enough, not sleeping enough, being awake at night by yourself, maybe drug or alcohol use. There are a whole variety of unhealthy behaviors related to being up late in the dark by yourself."

In the new study, scientists found owls had higher rates of diabetes, psychological disorders and neurological disorders?

Can owls become larks?

Genetics and environment play approximately equal roles in whether we are a morning or a night type, or somewhere in between, the authors have previously reported.

"You're not doomed," Knutson said. "Part of it you don't have any control over and part of it you might."

One way to shift your behavior is to make sure you are exposed to light early in the morning but not at night, Knutson said. Try to keep a regular bedtime and not let yourself drift to later bedtimes. Be regimented about adopting healthy lifestyle behaviors and recognize the timing of when you sleep matters. Do things earlier and be less of an evening person as much as you can.

Society can help, too

"If we can recognize these chronotypes are, in part, genetically determined and not just a character flaw, jobs and work hours could have more flexibility for owls," Knutson said. "They shouldn't be forced to get up for an 8 a.m. shift. Make work shifts match peoples' chronotypes. Some people may be better suited to night shifts."

In future research, Knutson and colleagues want to test an intervention with owls to get them to shift their body clocks to adapt to an earlier schedule. "Then we'll see if we get improvements in blood pressure and overall health," she said.

The switch to daylight savings or summer time is already known to be much more difficult for evening types than for morning types.

"There are already reports of higher incidence of heart attacks following the switch to summer time," says von Schantz. "And we have to remember that even a small additional risk is multiplied by more than 1.3 billion people who experience this shift every year. I think we need to seriously consider whether the suggested benefits outweigh these risks."

How the study worked

For the study, researchers from the University of Surrey and Northwestern University examined the link between an individual's natural inclination toward mornings or evenings and their risk of mortality. They asked 433,268 participants, age 38 to 73 years, if they are a "definite morning type" a "moderate morning type" a "moderate evening type" or a "definite evening type." Deaths in the sample were tracked up to six and half years later.

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The study was supported by the University of Surrey Institute?of Advanced Studies Santander fellowship and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases grant R01DK095207 from the National Institutes of Health.CORVALLIS, Ore. - For steelhead trout, reproductive choices represent a collection of tradeoffs - whether spawning once or doing it multiple times, no decision comes without risks and benefits.

New research by Oregon State University and Purdue University shows steelhead that spawn repeatedly have greater than double the lifetime reproductive success of fish that spawn a single time, the benefit for making the daunting journey to sea more than once.

Findings, which could lead to more effective conservation efforts, were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Like salmon, steelhead - Oncorhynchus mykiss - are anadromous, meaning they travel to the ocean as smolts and return to their natal streams to spawn; unlike salmon, steelhead are not limited to spawning once and then dying.

Female steelhead build gravel nests called redds into which they deposit their eggs, and males vie to fertilize them.

The research by OSU's Michael Blouin and Purdue's Mark Christie involved more than 12,000 winter-run steelhead from Oregon's Hood River, with the researchers looking at number of lifetime spawning events and age at first spawning.

"We found that repeat-spawning fish had more than 2.5 times the lifetime reproductive success of single spawning fish," said Blouin, professor of integrative biology. "However, first-time repeat spawning fish - ones having the first in a series of spawning events - had significantly lower reproductive success than single-spawning fish of the same age. That suggests repeat-spawning fish hold some energy back from reproduction to devote additional energy to continued survival."

As with salmon, steelhead that spawn only once die after doing so.

"There's a tradeoff between saving energy to successfully survive that additional migration event to the ocean and putting all of their eggs in one basket, so to speak," said Christie, assistant professor of biological sciences at Purdue and a former Oregon State postdoctoral scholar.

The risk of going to sea is illustrated by the finding that less than 3 percent of the fish in the study were found to be repeat spawners.

In addition to the trip, it's also more dangerous for a steelhead just to be in the ocean than in freshwater - but months and years at sea also allow the chance to gain size, strength and improved reproductive prowess.

"The expectation is that the more time they spend in the ocean, the higher the payoff will be to offset the risk of predation and other hazards," Christie said. "We'd expect them to come back to their spawning grounds bigger and stronger, and that's definitely what we see in male fish."

Not so with females, who showed the highest reproductive success at age 3, despite being smaller than 4- and 5-year-old fish.

Why? Because of "negative frequency dependence," Blouin said: the idea that a rare life history strategy correlates with greater fitness.

A life history strategy is how an organism parcels out energy for growth, reproduction and survivorship.

"Negative frequency dependence dictates that selection favors the rarest life history strategies," he said. "In this study, we show that the older, larger female fish have higher reproductive success when they are less common, perhaps due to decreased competition."

"Fitness tradeoffs" are the other factor at work, Blouin said.

"The costs and benefits associated with each strategy prevent any one strategy from becoming permanent," he said. "If there is too high mortality associated with going out to sea, the repeat spawning strategy would never evolve. But if it's low enough, and if there's a fitness benefit, which we've shown there is, these two life history strategies can coexist."

Findings suggest that restricting the harvest of older, larger females when their numbers are lower than average might foster negative frequency dependent processes, thus helping to maintain population diversity and reverse declines in populations.

###

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife also collaborated on this research, which was funded by the Bonneville Power Administration and Purdue University.Integrated disease control programs, which combine resources to fight multiple diseases at once, can be effective and lead to financial savings in developing countries. Now, researchers have designed a simple web-based application which allows on-the-ground decision making about the integration of malaria and schistosomiasis control programs. The application is described this week in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Both schistosomiasis and malaria are endemic throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as certain regions of South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. They also have a similar demographic impact, with children experiencing the highest rate of morbidity. At an individual level, there is a high rate of co-infection of the diseases. The effusiveness of combining control programs, however, is dependent on specific infection patterns and population structure in a local community.

Claire Standley and colleagues at Georgetown University designed an application--available on the internet, with future plans to develop access for mobile devises, which lets the user input information on a community's age distribution, malaria patterns, schistosomiasis prevalence, and interventions. Then, the app models the impact of running integrated treatment programs or non-integrated treatment plans on malaria and schistosomiasis. By default, the model uses a population size of 2,000 and a time span of 365 days for the programs.

To present a proof-of-principle of the application, the researchers applied data from countries across sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. They showed that the app can differentiate situations in which integration of control programs is most effective, and give information on how to best implement integration. In addition, feedback from on-the-ground users in Mali, Uganda, and Yemen was strongly positive.

"By summarizing complex disease model outputs as a straightforward benefit comparison, in language and terminology familiar to disease control officers, our prototype tool provides the effective translation from academic research to support evidence-based decision making at national, regional, and local scales," the researchers say.

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In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases: http://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0006328

Citation: Standley CJ, Graeden E, Kerr J, Sorrell EM, Katz R (2018) Decision support for evidence-based integration of disease control: A proof of concept for malaria and schistosomiasis. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 12(4): e0006328. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0006328

Funding: This work was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/), grant number OPP1130092. The grant was awarded to Rebecca Katz as Principal Investigator. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: Dr. Ellie Graeden and Dr. Justin Kerr have read the journal's policy and declare a potential competing interest. Drs. Graeden and Kerr are employed by Talus Analytics LLC, a small consulting company whose services were paid for through a philanthropic grant awarded to Georgetown University. Talus Analytics has no competing commercial products and retains no copyright or other restriction on publication for any materials or products described in the accompanying manuscript.The most "charismatic" species have a high status in conservation biology and it is commonly claimed that these species experience a privileged level of attention, often at the expense of other, more ordinary species. However, in a study publishing April 12 in PLOS Biology, an international research team led by Franck Courchamp, CNRS Director of Research at the University of Paris Saclay, France, find that these animals' popularity may be their downfall, leading to inappropriate complacency about their chances of survival.

The researchers used a combination of online surveys, school questionnaires, zoo websites and animated movies to identify the 10 most charismatic animals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tiger, the lion and the elephant took the lead; however, the researchers were astonished to discover that these species are highly threatened in the wild, with greater declines in recent years.

The scientific community, in fact, knows little about these species; for example, the precise number of panthers, elephants or gorillas living on Earth is unknown, even though this information seems important to establish. The researchers also found that despite the public adoring these species, people paradoxically appear oblivious to the fact that these animals are close to extinction, and therefore fail to mobilize to protect them. Why might this be?

The authors of this study hypothesized that the omnipresence of these animals in our culture and in the marketing media that surround us might form a deceptive "virtual population" that actively biases the public's perception of the status of these animals in the wild, leading the public to believe that that they are more numerous that they actually are.

By continuously seeing virtual representations of these species in movies, books, toys, commercials, etc., people may receive the impression that these animals have healthy populations in the wild. For example, the researchers showed that a French person will see on average more virtual lions (photos, cartoons, logos and brands) in a month than there are wild lions left in all of West Africa. "Unknowingly, companies using giraffes, cheetahs or polar bears for marketing purposes may be actively contributing to the false perception that these animals are not at risk of extinction, and therefore not in need of conservation", says Franck Courchamp.

To rectify this unfortunate effect, the researchers propose that companies using the image of threatened species for marketing purposes should contribute to information campaigns to promote their conservation, and that a part of the (often substantial) marketing benefits be used to fund the protection of the species that represent them.

###

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Biology: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003997

Citation: Courchamp F, Jaric I, Albert C, Meinard Y, Ripple WJ, Chapron G (2018) The paradoxical extinction of the most charismatic animals. PLoS Biol 16(4): e2003997. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2003997

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.The rebranded and refreshed journal is now published jointly by Belgorod National Research University and scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft

Since 2015, Belgorod National Research University's forward-thinking open-access and peer-reviewed scholarly journal Research Result: Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacology has been filling an essential gap as a scholarly venue for publications dealing with long-year research outcomes in pharmacology and clinical pharmacology.

Now, having moved to the high-tech journal publishing platform ARPHA (abbreviation standing for Authoring, Reviewing, Publishing, Hosting and Archiving), the rebranded Research Results in Pharmacology demonstrates its refreshed format in its first issue jointly published with open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft via the journal's brand new website.

Continuing its tradition, the journal welcomes articles on various aspects within pharmacology, including papers devoted to molecular screening with the use of modern methods of proteomics, cellular technologies, results of experimental studies in modeling abnormalities in laboratory animals and clinical studies in the field of pharmacotherapy, pharmacokinetics, pharmacoepidemiology, personalised therapy, multicenter studies and evidence-based medicine. All articles are published in English, with versions in Russian published on Belgorod National Research University's official website.

Apart from the evolution in its look-and-feel, thanks to the partnership with ARPHA, Research Results in Pharmacology now provides a long list of services at the disposal of all users - editors, reviewers, authors and readers alike, in order to ensure that articles are submitted, reviewed, published and disseminated rapidly and conveniently. To do this, the whole publication process takes place within ARPHA's singular online environment.

Once published, each article is freely available in three formats (PDF, XML, HTML), enriched with a whole set of semantic enhancements, so that the articles, along with their data, are easy to discover, access and harvest by both humans and machines.

Amongst the high-tech perks greeting any online publication's visitor are the article-level metrics available thanks to the partnership between ARPHA and the revolutionary discovery and analytics tools Dimensions and Altmetric. By searching through millions of research articles, grant applications, clinical trials, as well as policy documents, news stories, blogs and social media posts, they allow for each article's references and citations in both the academic and the public sphere to be monitored in real time.

"I'm delighted to welcome this particular new member of the Pensoft's and ARPHA's family," says ARPHA's and Pensoft's founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev. "With our strong background in scholarly publishing, technology development and open science practices, I am certain that we are able to provide the right venue for a brilliant and enterprising journal such as Research Results in Pharmacology."

"I find our new partnership with ARPHA and Pensoft to be extremely advantageous for Research Results in Pharmacology, and this is already showing in our first issue since joining our efforts," says Prof. Mikhail Pokrovsky, Editor-in-Chief at Research Results in Pharmacology. "I would like to especially thank Lyubomir and his team for fully understanding and meeting our needs, resulting in a wonderful professional collaboration, as well as friendship."

Research Results in Pharmacology is the second Russian journal in ARPHA's and Pensoft's portfolios. Several new titles are expected to join them later this year.

###

Follow Research Results in Pharmacology on Twitter and Facebook.

Additional information:

About ARPHA:

ARPHA is the first end-to-end, narrative- and data-integrated publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring to reviewing, publishing and dissemination. ARPHA provides accomplished and streamlined production workflows that can be customized according to the journal's needs. The platform enables a variety of publishing models through a number of options for branding, production and revenue models to choose from.

About Pensoft:

Pensoft is an independent academic publishing company, well-known worldwide for its innovations in the field of semantic publishing, as well as for its cutting-edge publishing tools and workflows. In 2013, Pensoft launched the first ever end to end XML-based authoring, reviewing and publishing workflow, as demonstrated by the Pensoft Writing Tool (PWT) and the Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ), now upgraded to the ARPHA Publishing Platform. Flagship titles include: Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO), One Ecosystem, ZooKeys, Biodiversity Data Journal, PhytoKeys, MycoKeys, and more.

About Belgorod State National Research University:

Belgorod State National Research University is the leading University of Belgorod region targeted at solving research problems at international and national scale, as well as training highly qualified professionals capable of ensuring the competitiveness of the Russian Federation and Belgorod region on the global socioeconomic arena.

More than 23,000 students from all regions of Russia and 2,800 foreign students from 91 countries study there. BelSU is one of 29 national research universities of Russian Federation and a member of Association of Leading Russian Universities.

The University was also included in the list of the 19 higher education institutions and four scientific organizations, which are given the right to independently award candidate and doctor of science academic degrees, and create dissertation councils. BelSU is ranked 76-100 in the Global Ranking of Academic Subjects in Metallurgical Engineering (subject field "Engineering"). Since 2009 Belgorod State National Research University has been a head university of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Network University in the priority area of Nanotechnology.

Contacts:

Prof. Lyubomir Penev, ARPHA and Pensoft

Email: penev@pensoft.net

Prof. Mikhail Pokrovsky

Email: mpokrovsky@yandex.ruWEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A Purdue University-patented technology shows promise in using microscopic bubbles filled with oxygen to help with various medical treatments, including improving cancer therapeutics and helping wounds heal faster.

Samara Biotech LLC, a Purdue startup, has developed an easy-to-use method to inject oxygen "nanobubbles" intravenously so they can be targeted precisely at wounds or cancerous tumors. The bubbles do not actually do the therapies, but enhance other therapies, such as improving chemotherapeutics or radiation efficacy, said Pushpak Bhandari, Samara Biotech founder.

"It's an oxygen delivery system at its core that can be applied toward many diseased states," Bhandari said "Oxygen is critical in almost every biological process, so this helps in a variety of ways."

Studies have shown that a lack of oxygen in tumor cells changes how cells function, contributing to cancer growth. Low oxygen, or hypoxia, is a major challenge in treating some cancers because it is common in a majority of malignant tumors. Tumor cells are starved of oxygen, causing them to become resistant to conventional treatments such as radiation and chemotherapy. This can lead to a need to increase radiation doses or chemotherapy concentration, which often adversely affects patients.

The nanobubble shells disintegrate inside the tumor cells, increasing the cellular oxygen levels. The release of oxygen inside the hypoxic cells destabilizes the hypoxia-driven pathways and inhibit tumor growth, Bhandari said.

"Normal cells are two to three times more receptive to cancer therapies compared with hypoxic cells," he said.

Early testing published in the journals Scientific Reports and ACS Nano shows that the oxygen nanobubbles are effective in significantly delaying tumor progression and improving survival rates in clinical trials. The nanobubbles can be guided precisely to a tumor using an ultrasound beam, which can lead to better efficacy while using a 50 percent lower concentration of a chemotherapeutic drug.

"The ability to precisely steer oxygen nanobubbles offers considerable promise for a wide range of biomedical applications," Bhandari said.

Bhandari believes the oxygen nanobubbles could be particularly effective against brain cancer, bladder cancer and certain sarcomas that are most common in bones, muscles, tendons, cartilage, nerves, fat and blood vessels.

Bhandari, who earned a doctorate in biological engineering from Purdue in 2017, also believes the oxygen nanobubbles can be more effective at treating wounds than a hyperbaric chamber or topical oxygen therapy because the nanobubbles can be more precisely targeted.

Bhandari is continuing to look at other wound-healing applications, saying the method could be used to treat complications from diabetes and other illnesses.

He plans to begin his cancer studies in dogs initially because nearly half of all dogs die of cancer. He said he will be dealing only with naturally occurring cancer in dogs and hopes those studies will help advance and speed the research into human cancers. He said he has been working with Purdue's College of Veterinary Medicine.

The oxygen nanobubbles also act as contrast agents for ultrasound imaging, allowing researchers to create highly sensitive, highly reliable detection agents to monitor therapy.

Bhandari started Samara Biotech in 2015, taking the name from a winged seed that allows the wind to carry it further from the parent. He said in Eastern philosophy it also connotes the circle of life.

The Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization filed a patent on the technology. The Purdue Foundry and the Purdue Research Foundation have been working with Bhandari to commercialize his research.

"We're looking for potential strategic partners," Bhandari said. "We want to get the word out that there is a new technology that been evaluated quite well for a lot of different applications and we're looking for more."

Samara Biotech also plans to seek federal and private funding as it continues its research.

###

About Purdue Research Foundation

The Purdue Research Foundation is a private, nonprofit foundation created to advance the mission of Purdue University. Established in 1930, the foundation accepts gifts; administers trusts; funds scholarships and grants; acquires property; protects Purdue's intellectual property; and promotes entrepreneurial activities on behalf of Purdue. The foundation manages the Purdue Foundry, Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization, Purdue Research Park and Purdue Technology Centers. The foundation received the 2016 Innovation and Economic Prosperity Universities Award for Innovation from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. For more information about funding and investment opportunities in startups based on a Purdue innovation, contact the Purdue Foundry at foundry@prf.org. The Purdue Foundry is an entrepreneurship and commercialization accelerator in Discovery Park's Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship whose professionals help Purdue innovators create startups

Purdue Research Foundation contact: Tom Coyne, 765-588-1044, tjcoyne@prf.org

Source: Pushpak Bhandari, pushpak@purdue.eduA new RAND Corporation report finds that Russia is waging a social media campaign in the Baltics, Ukraine and nearby states to sow dissent against neighboring governments, as well as NATO and the European Union.

In addition to employing a state-funded multi-lingual television network, operating various pro-government news websites and working through Russian-backed "civil society" organizations, Russia also employs a sophisticated social media campaign that includes news tweets, non-attributed comments on web pages, troll and bot social media accounts, and fake hashtag and Twitter campaigns.

"Nowhere is this threat more tangible than in Ukraine, which has been an active propaganda battleground since the 2014 Ukrainian revolution," said Todd Helmus, lead author on the report and senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan research organization. "Other countries in the region look at Russia's actions and annexation of Crimea and recognize the need to pay careful attention to Russia's propaganda campaign."

In Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, according to the RAND report, Russia aims to divide ethnic Russian or Russian-speaking populations and their host governments.

RAND researchers recommend that to counter the Russian campaign, Western countries need to strengthen and expand means to track, block and tag Russian propaganda more quickly, to offer alternative television, social media and other media to help displace the Russian narrative, and to develop more-compelling arguments for populations to align with the west and better understand NATO troop deployments in the region.

The report also recommends the training of local journalists and funding the creation of alternative media content to counteract Russia propaganda campaigns.

"We paid special attention to the role of non-attributed social media accounts, which are frequently, but not solely, employed on Twitter and Facebook," said Elizabeth Bodine-Baron, an author on the report, engineer and co-director of the RAND Center for Applied Network Analysis and System Science. "Russia has established that during critical moments, such as during the Ukrainian conflict, it can flood news websites with tens of thousands of comments each day,"

The report finds that U.S., EU and NATO efforts to counter Russian influence in the region are complicated by the relatively high presence of historically marginalized Russian-speaking populations in the region, which gives Russia a unique opportunity to communicate with a sympathetic audience.

Host government policies giving priority to national languages have limited government outreach via the Russian language, thus complicating state outreach to Russian speakers. Furthermore, Russian broadcast media dominates in the region, particularly in the Baltics. Ukraine is the exception as it has censored Russian government broadcasting and social media platforms.

Finally, heavy-handed anti-Russian messaging may backfire given local skepticism of Western propaganda.

###

The report, "Russian Social Media Influence: Understanding Russian Propaganda in Eastern Europe," is available at http://www.rand.org. Other authors of the report include Andrew Radin, Madeline Magnuson, Joshua Mendelsohn, Bill Marcellino, Andriy Bega and Zev Winkelman.

The research was sponsored by the Office of Secretary of Defense's Rapid Reaction Technology Office and conducted within the International Security and Defense Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.For many people, one of the unspoken rules for being cool is maintaining an emotionally inexpressive attitude. This message is reinforced through advertisements where fashion models rarely smile and by quotes from celebrities. In an article in the Huffington Post, Kanye West said he doesn't smile in photographs because "it just wouldn't look as cool."

Researchers at the University of Arizona recently questioned whether this connection between concealing emotions and coolness was in fact true. In a series of experiments, the investigators showed participants photographs of celebrities and non-celebrities who were smiling or inexpressive, and their results call into question common assumptions about what makes someone cool. The study is available online in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

"We found over and over again that people are perceived to be cooler when they smile compared to when they are inexpressive in print advertisements," says Caleb Warren, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Arizona. "Being inexpressive makes people seem unfriendly or cold rather than cool."

The researchers asked participants to view print advertisements for a clothing brand, and the model in the ad was either smiling or not. The models included well-known celebrities such as James Dean, Emily Didonato and Michael Jordan as well as unknown models, and they were endorsing unfamiliar brands and well-known brands. Then the participants rated the extent to which the model seemed cool on a seven-point scale. The participants consistently rated the smiling models as cooler than the inexpressive models.

Warren was surprised that participants preferred the smiling pictures of James Dean, who is typically inexpressive in photographs and considered a cool icon. The study also showed that participants had a less favorable impression of the brand when the models were inexpressive.

Warren and his co-authors, Todd Pezzuti from the University of Chile and Shruti Koley from Texas A&M University, found one exception to the trend: competitive situations. When a news article showed mixed martial arts fighters who were going to face one another at a press conference, participants rated the inexpressive athlete as more cool and dominant than a smiling athlete. When the context changed to a friendly meeting with fans at a press conference, then the participants rated the smiling fighter as cooler. "This shows that being uncool or cool can depend on the context," says Warren.

The findings not only have implications for advertisers who are striving to make favorable impressions with consumers, but also for people as they relate to one another. While it may be difficult to change engrained societal assumptions about how to become cool, Warren hopes this research will increase awareness about how people perceive one another. In a world of social media, for example, individuals may want to consider posting smiling pictures rather than inexpressive photographs.

"This inaccurate belief about how to become cool can influence the way we communicate with others, and being inexpressive can hurt relationships," Warren says. "It also makes it more difficult to understand one another. For these reasons, being inexpressive isn't necessarily cool."

###

To view the abstract, see: To view the abstract, see: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1039

For more information, contact:

Caleb Warren

calebwarren@arizona.edu

Assistant Professor of Marketing

University of ArizonaCloud computing, "exhausted" T cells, breast cancer risk in childhood cancer survivors and clinical trial design for CAR-T therapy in solid tumors are among the topics St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators will discuss at the five-day American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting that begins Saturday, April 14, in Chicago.

Secure sharing and collaborative analysis of huge datasets are essential in the quest to discover cures for pediatric cancer. Scott Newman, Ph.D., group lead for bioinformatics analysis in the St. Jude Department of Computational Biology, will present St. Jude Cloud, a new publicly available data-sharing and collaboration platform. His talk is set for 3:05 p.m., Sunday, April 15, in Room N228, Level 2 of McCormick Place North. Abstract: 922

St. Jude Cloud is the world's largest public repository of pediatric cancer genomics data and also provides unique analysis tools and visualizations. The platform was developed by scientists at St. Jude in collaboration with Microsoft and DNAnexus. St. Jude Cloud allows scientists to explore more than 5,000 whole-genome (WGS), 5,000 whole-exome (WES) and 1,200 RNA-Seq datasets from more than 5,000 pediatric cancer patients and survivors. By 2019, 10,000 whole-genome sequences will be available on St. Jude Cloud.

Along with the presentations detailed below, St. Jude faculty and staff will also chair major symposiums, give educational talks and participate in forums and sessions on hereditary cancer surveillance and the regulatory horizon for development of CAR-T therapy for solid tumors.

April 14 Education Sessions

Paul Northcott, Ph.D., of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology, will give a 1:30 p.m. talk about subgroup-specific enhancer hijacking in the brain tumor medulloblastoma. The talk is part of the "Hijacking the Epigenome in Cancer: Challenges and Opportunities" session set for Room N427, Level 4, McCormick Place North.

Suzanne Baker, Ph.D., of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology, will give a 2 p.m. talk about cell context and consequence of oncogenic histone mutations in pediatric gliomas. The talk is part of a session titled "Genetic, Epigenetic and Cellular Context Driving Pediatric Brain Tumor Development," which will be held in Room S402, Level 4, McCormick Place South.

Zoran Rankovic, Ph.D., of the St. Jude Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics, will give a 3:15 pm. talk about the challenges and principles of drug design in neuro-oncology. He will speak at a session titled "From Chemistry to the Clinic: Part 3 - Approaches to Drug Design for Neuro-oncology," which will be held in Room S103, Level 1, McCormick Place South.

Other Sessions CAR-T therapy for solid tumors

Scientific and regulatory challenges for developing CAR-T therapy for treatment of solid tumors will feature Stephen Gottschalk, M.D., chair of the St. Jude Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy. The session will include an update on CAR-T therapy for sarcoma, brain and other solid tumors. The event is set for 10:30 a.m., Monday, April 16, Room S401bcd, Level 4, McCormick Place South.

Surveillance in hereditary cancer

The National Cancer Institute estimates inherited mutations play a role in 5 to 10 percent of cancers, and more than 50 cancer predisposition syndromes have been identified. The debate continues about how best to monitor individuals with the syndromes, which can affect multiple organs. This session will include Kim Nichols, M.D., a member of the St. Jude Department of Oncology and director of the Cancer Predisposition Division. The forum is set for 5 p.m., Monday, April 16, Room N227, Level 2, McCormick Place North.

Researcher tracks his discovery from the bench to the bedside

More than 25 years ago, research led by Charles Sherr, M.D., Ph.D., yielded a discovery that today is helping cancer patients live longer. Sherr chairs the St. Jude Department of Tumor Cell Biology and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. In 1991, Sherr and his colleagues discovered the cyclin D proteins and, one year later, identified cyclin D-dependent kinase 4 (CDK4), a key enzyme that regulates cell proliferation. Cyclin D-dependent CDK6 was discovered in 1994.

Today three FDA-approved CDK4/6 inhibitors are prolonging survival of patients with advanced breast cancer and are also in clinical trials for treatment of many other cancers. At the AACR meeting, Sherr will chair a major symposium on CDK inhibitors and will present an overview of how CDK4/6 inhibitors work in cancer therapy. "Combination targeted therapies with CDK4/6 inhibitors and certain other precision medicines durably arrest the proliferation of tumor cells, triggering the immune response that can kill tumor cells," Sherr said. "These combination targeted therapies can significantly prolong progression-free survival for cancer patients."

DATE: Monday, April 16

TIME: 10:30 a.m.

LOCATION: Room N227, Level 2, McCormick Place North

TITLE: CDK4/6 inhibitors: A paradigm shift in cancer treatment

ABSTRACT: None

Lethal brain tumor depends on common mutation for continued growth

Suzanne Baker, PhD, a member of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology, will present evidence that a mutation carried in about 80 percent of patients with a lethal brain tumor is important for tumor growth. "The mutation causes massive deregulation of the epigenome, but how that contributes to cancer had been unclear," Baker said. "Our models suggest the mutation is very important for ongoing tumor growth." Baker and others had previously identified the point mutation in a family of DNA packaging proteins called histone H3 in most patients with the brain tumor diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma. The tumor has a dismal prognosis. The mutation affects the epigenome, which helps to regulate gene expression. The research reflects an ongoing effort to develop effective chemotherapy and targeted agents. The laboratory models researchers used included patient-derived xenografts, which makes it possible for researchers to study patient tumors growing in the same organ in mice. Baker is chairing the major symposium, where she is presenting the research.

DATE: Monday, April 16

TIME: 2:05 p.m.

LOCATION: Room S102 (Grand Ballroom), Level 1, McCormick Place South

TITLE: Transforming chromatin: Oncogenic histone H3 in diffuse intrinsic pontine gliomas

ABSTRACT: None

Research reveals the surprising origins of rhabdomyosarcoma

Researchers led by Mark Hatley, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant member of the St. Jude Department of Oncology, have written a new origin story for rhabdomyosarcoma, the most common soft tissue cancer in children. Under the microscope, rhabdomyosarcoma resembles muscle cells. Scientists have long believed the tumor originates in immature muscle cells, even though the tumor can occur in tissue without skeletal muscle. Using genetic fate mapping in genetically engineered mice, Hatley and his colleagues have determined that rhabdomyosarcoma originates not in immature muscle cells, but in immature cells meant to line the inner surface of blood vessels. Evidence suggests that problems arise when genetic programs meant to drive muscle development are mistakenly activated in non-muscle cells. "Despite aggressive treatment, clinical outcomes have not improved in three decades," Hatley said. "Revealing the molecular underpinnings of this tumor is an important step for developing more effective treatments." Catherine Drummond, Ph.D., a St. Jude postdoctoral fellow, will present the findings.

DATE: Monday, April 16

TIME: 3:05 p.m.

LOCATION: Room S405, Level 4, McCormick Place South

TITLE: Location specificity in fusion-negative rhabdomyosarcoma driven by cell of origin

ABSTRACT: 3014

Researchers rank breast cancer risk for childhood cancer survivors

Researchers know female childhood cancer survivors are at increased risk for developing breast cancer, primarily due to their earlier cancer therapy. Now St. Jude scientists have combined whole-genome sequencing results with clinical risk factors such as prior treatment exposure to measure the breast cancer risk of individual survivors. The approach is an apparent first and calculates breast cancer susceptibility based on the presence of rare, high-risk genetic mutations in any of the well-established breast cancer predisposition genes as well as mutations in 172 genetic variants that individually confer more modest risk. Survivors with high-risk mutations had a 17-fold increased risk of developing breast cancer. The approach also helped to stratify risk among survivors without high-risk mutations. Among those survivors, those with the highest scores were three times more likely to develop breast cancer than survivors with the lowest scores. "Such individual risk profiles will help survivors and their health care providers better understand and manage survivors' risk, not only for breast cancer but possibly for other health risks with a genetic component," said Zhaoming Wang, Ph.D., of the St. Jude Department of Computational Biology. He is presenting the findings. The study involved 1,133 female St. Jude cancer survivors enrolled in the St. Jude Lifetime Cohort study (St. Jude LIFE).

DATE: Monday, April 16

TIME: 3:05 p.m.

LOCATION: Room S101, Level 1, McCormick Place South

TITLE: Monogenic and polygenic associations with subsequent breast cancer risk in survivors of childhood cancer: The St. Jude Lifetime Cohort Study (SJLIFE)

ABSTRACT: 3007

Progress reported in quest to 'revive' T cells for treatment of solid tumors

Benjamin Youngblood, Ph.D., an assistant member of the St. Jude Department of Immunology, will detail research that suggests reversing DNA methylation may be essential for effective immunotherapy against solid tumors. Researchers discovered that T cell "exhaustion" in mice was epigenetically regulated by DNA methylation, which functions as an off-switch for gene expression. Researchers also identified a chemotherapy drug that reversed the epigenetic process. Investigators checked pediatric solid tumors and found tumor-associated T cells that were similarly exhausted. The exhausted T cells failed to mount an immune response against the tumor. Youngblood and his colleagues are now exploring an epigenetic contribution to T cell exhaustion in cancer patients. "That may lead to combination therapy to enhance the anti-tumor immune response," Youngblood said.

DATE: Wednesday, April 18

TIME: 10:50 a.m.

LOCATION: Room S100 (Grand Ballroom), Level 1, McCormick Place South

TITLE: Epigenetic regulation of T-cell exhaustion: Implications for cancer immunotherapy

ABSTRACT: SY07-02

###The Green Revolution is credited with saving a billion human lives as we manicure crops with pesticides and weed killers. But a fatal contradiction lies at the heart of the innovation. The insects that are essential for pollinate one-third of the world's crops are also collateral damage, falling prey to the chemicals that are designed to protect crops; and honey bees are no exception. 'Honey bees have become very important in agroecosystems. Therefore, it is necessary to assess the effect of pesticides on pollinators', says Carolina Mengoni Gonalons from Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. However, returning honey bee foragers are not the only members of the hive that are exposed to these toxins. Newly hatched worker bees brush past foragers carrying weed killers, and handle pollen and honey that bear pesticides. Knowing that the workers' abilities to respond to sweet flavours and learn are key to their nurturing role, Mengoni Gonalons and Walter Farina decided to investigate the effects of a life-long exposure to weed killers and insecticides on young bees. They discovered that worker bees exposed to insecticides and weed killers partially lost their sense of taste and find it difficult to learn, potentially placing hives in jeopardy. The team publish the discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org.

Neonicotinoids are a family of insecticides that are popular in agriculture as they are virtually harmless to mammals but potent insect neurotoxins, and glyphosate is a commonly used weed killer, so Mengoni Gonalons and Farina decided to test the effects of both on worker bees. Nurturing workers from the moment they emerged from the brood comb, Mengoni Gonalons fed the youngsters on pollen and syrup dosed with imidacloprid (a neonicotinoid insecticide), glyphosate or a combination of the two in concentrations that the insects would encounter naturally in the wild. Then, when the bees were 5, 9 and 14 days old, Mengoni Gonalons cautiously tested their sense of taste and ability to learn.

'Honey bees are small and delicate, but also dangerous', she says, recalling how she had to gently restrain each animal before touching its antennae with a series of sugar solutions -- ranging from dilute (0.1% weight/volume) to a syrupy 50% solution -- and recording when each bee began sticking out its tongue (proboscis) to show that it could taste the sugar. Sadly, both the insecticide and the weed killer diminished the bees' sense of taste dramatically -- the insects responded only to 30% sugar solutions, in contrast to the 10% sugar solutions that the untreated bees could taste. However, the combination of the insecticide and weed killer did not make the decrease in sensitivity worse.

So, how did the pesticide, weed killer and combination of the two affect the bees' ability to learn? After training the bees at the age of 5, 9 and 14 days to stick out their tongues when they smelled the sweet odour of 1-hexanol -- in much the same way that Pavlov trained dogs to salivate when they heard a bell -- Mengoni Gonalons found that the insecticide affected the bees' ability to learn to recognise the scent, even at 5 days of age. However, the bees that had consumed both agrichemicals were perfectly able to learn their new trick. And when Mengoni Gonalons trained the bees to distinguish between two odours -- sweet-smelling 1-hexanol and fruity nonanal -= the 5 and 9 day old bees that had been fed the insecticide struggled to learn to distinguish between the two.

Young worker bees can be affected by pesticides, even though they have never set foot outside the hive, and even herbicides, which are not targeted at insects, can impair their sensory and cognitive abilities. Farina warns, 'The presence of hive bees that are unable to taste the sweetness of food or discriminate between scents will worsen the efficiency of beehives as a whole, possibly reducing the efficiency of pollination and honey production'.

###

IF REPORTING THIS STORY, PLEASE MENTION JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY AS THE SOURCE AND, IF REPORTING ONLINE, PLEASE CARRY A LINK TO: http://jeb.biologists.org/content/221/7/jeb176644

REFERENCE: Mengoni Gon?alons, C. and Farina, W. M. (2018). Impaired associative learning after chronic exposure to pesticides in young adult honey bees. J. Exp. Biol. 221, doi:10.1242/jeb.176644.

DOI: 10.1242/jeb.176644

This article is posted on this site to give advance access to other authorised media who may wish to report on this story. Full attribution is required, and if reporting online a link to jeb.biologists.com is also required. The story posted here is COPYRIGHTED. Therefore advance permission is required before any and every reproduction of each article in full. PLEASE CONTACT permissions@biologists.comPHILADELPHIA - (April 12, 2018) - Wistar researchers have identified a novel therapeutic vulnerability in NRAS mutant melanoma and an effective strategy to address it, using a combination of two clinically relevant inhibitors, according to study results published online in EMBO Molecular Medicine.

NRAS mutant melanoma represents about 25 percent of melanoma cases. The prognosis for patients is generally poor because NRAS mutant melanoma is aggressive and resistant to most therapies. In addition, development of secondary NRAS mutations represents a mechanism of acquired resistance to targeted therapies.

"NRAS is a very attractive therapeutic target but also an extremely challenging one," said lead researcher Jessie Villanueva, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Molecular & Cellular Oncogenesis Program at Wistar. "Despite years of efforts, we don't yet have effective ways to block the activity of mutant NRAS, and the picture is further complicated by the heterogeneity of resistance mechanisms."

"We have identified a novel vulnerability in NRAS-dependent melanoma and developed a combination therapy that may offer a valuable strategy to target therapy resistant melanoma," she added.

Because NRAS and the other members of the RAS family have proven to be difficult to target directly, the most effective approach is to discover other areas of vulnerability. In such an effort, Villanueva and her team found that elevated expression of BRD4, a member of the BET family of transcriptional regulators, correlates with poor survival in NRAS mutant melanoma patients and that BRD4 is required for cell proliferation.

Small molecule inhibitors of BET proteins decreased viability of NRAS mutant melanoma cells, and this sensitivity correlated with BRD4 expression levels. To potentiate the effects of this treatment, the researchers evaluated it in combination with other RAS-related inhibitors that are currently in clinical trials. The combination of BET inhibitors with MEK inhibitors, which block a fundamental signaling pathway for melanoma, had a potent effect on melanoma both in vitro and, more importantly, in vivo, slowing down tumor growth and increasing survival in a mouse model of NRAS mutant melanoma.

The mechanism of this combined effect was analyzed, and in-depth studies showed the combination treatment caused a much more robust perturbation in the expression of genes that regulate cell division and survival compared to the either treatment alone. The effect included a strong inhibition of the TCF19 transcriptional regulator.

To further establish the therapeutic and clinical significance of these data, the Villanueva Lab tested the combination therapy in different models of melanoma with intrinsic and acquired therapy resistance. The combination of BET and MEK inhibitors significantly affected tumor growth and prolonged survival of mice bearing melanoma resistant to several targeted therapies and immunotherapies, confirming that co-targeting BET and MEK elicits potent anti-tumor effects and may be a valuable salvage strategy for patients that have failed all currently available therapies.

"We are confident that clinical studies of BET and MEK combination therapy could be rapidly implemented, since BET inhibitors are in advanced clinical trials and MEK inhibitors are FDA-approved for BRAF mutant melanoma patients," added Villanueva.

###

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01CA215733, K01CA175269, P01CA114046, P50CA174523, and NCI NRSA T32CA009171. Additional support was provided by grants from the American Cancer Society, the V Foundation for Cancer Research, the Melanoma Research Alliance, the Melanoma Research Foundation, the Martha W. Rogers Trust, and the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation. Core support for The Wistar Institute was provided by the Cancer Center Support Grant P30 CA010815.

Co-authors of this study from The Wistar Institute include first author Ileabett M. Echevarri?a-Vargas, Patricia I. Reyes-Uribe, Adam Guterres, Xiangfan Yin, Andrew V. Kossenkov, Qin Liu, Gao Zhang, Clemens Krepler, Rajasekharan Somasundaram, Ashani T. Weeraratna, and Meenhard Herlyn. Other co-authors include Chaoran Cheng and Zhi Wei from New Jersey Institute of Technology; Giorgos Karakousis, Wei Xu, Jennifer J.D. Morrissette, Ravi Amaravadi, Lynn M. Schuchter, and Xiaowei Xu from the University of Pennsylvania; Yiling Lu and Gordon B. Mills from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; Ryan J. Sullivan, Miao Benchun, and Dennie T. Frederick, and Keith T. Flaherty from Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center & Harvard Medical School; Christin E. Burd from Ohio State University; and Andrew E. Aplin from Thomas Jefferson University.

The Wistar Institute is an international leader in biomedical research with special expertise in cancer research and vaccine development. Founded in 1892 as the first independent nonprofit biomedical research institute in the United States, Wistar has held the prestigious Cancer Center designation from the National Cancer Institute since 1972. The Institute works actively to ensure that research advances move from the laboratory to the clinic as quickly as possible. wistar.org.Things are getting real for researchers in the UC Santa Barbara John Martinis/Google group. They are making good on their intentions to declare supremacy in a tight global race to build the first quantum machine to outperform the world's best classical supercomputers.

But what is quantum supremacy in a field where horizons are being widened on a regular basis, in which teams of the brightest quantum computing minds in the world routinely up the ante on the number and type of quantum bits ("qubits") they can build, each with their own range of qualities?

"Let's define that, because it's kind of vague," said Google researcher Charles Neill. Simply put, he continued, "we would like to perform an algorithm or computation that couldn't be done otherwise. That's what we actually mean."

Neill is lead author of the group's new paper, "A blueprint for demonstrating quantum supremacy with superconducting qubits," now published in the journal Science.

Fortunately, nature offers up many such complex situations, in which the variables are so numerous and interdependent that classical computers can't hold all the values and perform the operations. Think chemical reactions, fluid interactions, even quantum phase changes in solids and a host of other problems that have daunted researchers in the past. Something on the order of at least 49 qubits -- roughly equivalent to a petabyte (one million gigabytes) of classical random access memory -- could put a quantum computer on equal footing with the world's supercomputers. Just recently, Neill's Google/Martinis colleagues announced an effort toward quantum supremacy with a 72-qubit chip possessing a "bristlecone" architecture that has yet to be put through its paces.

But according to Neill, it's more than the number of qubits on hand.

"You have to generate some sort of evolution in the system which leads you to use every state that has a name associated with it," he said. The power of quantum computing lies in, among other things, the superpositioning of states. In classical computers, each bit can exist in one of two states -- zero or one, off or on, true or false -- but qubits can exist in a third state that is a superposition of both zero and one, raising exponentially the number of possible states a quantum system can explore.

Additionally, say the researchers, fidelity is important, because massive processing power is not worth much if it's not accurate. Decoherence is a major challenge for anyone building a quantum computer -- perturb the system, the information changes. Wait a few hundredths of a second too long, the information changes again.

"People might build 50 qubit systems, but you have to ask how well it computed what you wanted it to compute," Neill said. "That's a critical question. It's the hardest part of the field." Experiments with their superconducting qubits have demonstrated an error rate of one percent per qubit with three- and nine-qubit systems, which, they say, can be reduced as they scale up, via improvements in hardware, calibration, materials, architecture and machine learning.

Building a qubit system complete with error correction components -- the researchers estimate a range of 100,000 to a million qubits -- is doable and part of the plan. And still years away. But that doesn't mean their system isn't already capable of doing some heavy lifting. Just recently it was deployed, with spectroscopy, on the issue of many-body localization in a quantum phase change -- a quantum computer solving a quantum statistical mechanics problem. In that experiment, the nine-qubit system became a quantum simulator, using photons bouncing around in their array to map the evolution of electrons in a system of increasing, yet highly controlled, disorder.

"A good reason why our fidelity was so high is because we're able to reach complex states in very little time," Neill explained. The more quickly a system can explore all possible states, the better the prediction of how a system will evolve, he said.

If all goes smoothly, the world should be seeing a practicable UCSB/Google quantum computer soon. The researchers are eager to put it through its paces, gaining answers to questions that were once accessible only through theory, extrapolation and highly educated guessing -- and opening up a whole new level of experiments and research.

"It's definitely very exciting," said Google researcher Pedram Roushan, who led the many-body quantum simulation work published in Science in 2017. They expect their early work to stay close to home, such as research in condensed matter physics and quantum statistical mechanics, but they plan to branch out to other areas, including chemistry and materials, as the technology becomes more refined and accessible.

"For instance, knowing whether or not a molecule would form a bond or react in some other way with another molecule for some new technology... there are some important problems that you can't roughly estimate; they really depend on details and very strong computational power," Roushan said, hinting that a few years down the line they may be able to provide wider access to this computing power. "So you can get an account, log in and explore the quantum world."

###FINDINGS

Researchers from UCLA and Long Beach Memorial Medical Center have found that two targeted therapies could be more effective if used in combination to treat squamous cell carcinomas of the lung. The two drugs, MLN128 and CB-839, individually target the metabolism of key nutrients glucose and glutamine, respectively, prohibiting the cancer from switching metabolic gears between glucose (a simple sugar) and glutamine (an amino acid) to tap vital sources of energy. This switch enables the cancer cells to adapt their metabolism and evade treatments.

BACKGROUND

Non-small cell lung cancer makes up about 85 percent of all lung cancers, and within this population about 20 percent of patients get squamous cell carcinomas. These carcinomas are aggressive and highly resistant to most current therapies -- including chemotherapy and targeted therapies. Although squamous cell carcinomas can rapidly adapt their metabolism to evade therapies, not much is understood about the mechanisms governing metabolic adaptation in these tumors. Because people with this disease have worse survival odds than those with other subtypes of non-small cell lung cancer, researchers have been working to better understand the mechanisms that drive these metabolic adaptations in order to improve treatment.

METHOD

Through positron emission tomography, or PET, scanning as well as mass spectrometry, researchers profiled metabolism in cancer cells to determine the molecules involved in cell functions. They then were able to identify a dual reliance on glucose and glutamine for metabolic needs, finding that squamous cell carcinomas typically rely on high levels of glucose to meet metabolic needs arising from rapid tumor growth. When glucose supplies are cut off, however, the cancer cells can make a metabolic switch that allows them to derive energy from glutamine. This switch uses cellular pathways that support the disease's spread. Based on this discovery, the team consulted The Cancer Genome Atlas databases to find molecular signals and markers of cell activity that could be pharmaceutical targets for new therapies. Specifically, the drug candidates CB-839 and MLN128, when used together, could reduce tumor growth in squamous cell carcinoma.

IMPACT

In uncovering changes in metabolic pathways that squamous cell carcinomas use to maintain their need for energy, researchers were able to identify potential ways to thwart the cancer cells in their switch from one energy source to another. Their findings point to metabolic signals that could be used to differentiate cancer patients by the nutrient-demands of their tumors. In addition, the researchers found at least two existing anti-cancer compounds that, when used in concert, could prove to halt the proliferation and growth of squamous cell carcinomas by blocking cellular metabolism changes in cancer.

###

AUTHORS

Lead author is David Shackelford, associate professor in the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. The first author is Milica Momcilovic, also with the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine. Other authors are Francesco Parlati and Susan Demo of Calithera Biosciences; Michael Gricoski, Robert Shuman and Julio Ibarra of MemorialCare Health System of Long Beach; Deborah Fridman of Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian of Newport Beach; and Sean Bailey of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Also of UCLA are Jason Lee, Michael Fishbein, Daniel Braas, James Go, Thomas Graeber, Rui Li, Tonya Walser, Michael Phelps, Karam Badran, Maie St. John, Noah Federman, Nicholas Bernthal, Jane Yanagawa, Steven Dubinett, Saman Sadeghi and Heather Christofk.

JOURNAL

The research is published in Cancer Cell.

FUNDING

The research was supported by the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, U.S. Department of Defense, American Cancer Society, American Lung Association, Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, Stop Cancer Foundation, National Cancer Institute, and National Institutes of Health.

The UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has more than 500 researchers and clinicians engaged in cancer research, prevention, detection, control, treatment and education. One of the nation's largest comprehensive cancer centers, the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center is dedicated to promoting research and translating basic science into leading-edge clinical studies.In 2013, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three scientists for their contributions to uncovering the mechanisms governing vesicle transport in cells. Their explanations provided both a conceptual and a mechanistic understanding of basic processes at the most fundamental level.

At the heart of this Nobel Prize-winning intracellular process lies SNARE (soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor attachment protein receptors), a superfamily of 60 proteins in mammalian cells that transport lipids and membrane proteins across the cells by facilitating the fusion of vesicles to their target membranes.

Biologists at UC Santa Barbara have now discovered a surprising, additional function for syntaxin 3S, a soluble form of a SNARE protein. The researchers found a new signaling pathway widely used by human and other mammalian cells. The team's results appear in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

"What we found was very unorthodox and hadn't been known before," explained corresponding author Thomas Weimbs, a professor in UCSB's Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. "Syntaxin 3S binds to transcription factors -- proteins involved in converting DNA into RNA -- and regulates the expression of the genes controlled by those factors. In fact, our initial results suggest that these genes play a role in cancer progression, but that remains to be definitively proved."

In a scientific first, the UCSB researchers showed that besides the well-established role of syntaxin 3 in membrane fusion, its novel soluble version is transported to the cell's nucleus and carries out a completely different function. In nature, many proteins have more than one function -- a phenomenon known as protein moonlighting.

That syntaxins -- and SNARE proteins in general -- are capable of moonlighting was unknown until now. Given that syntaxins are present in all cells and responsible for a large number of essential cell functions, the discovery that these proteins can carry out additional functions suggests that much more is yet to be discovered.

"Finding that syntaxin 3S functions as a nuclear regulator is the beginning of a story that opens up a new field of research," Weimbs said. "It's like a field of snow with no footsteps on it because nobody has done research on this, so we can pick and choose the most exciting directions to follow."

Weimbs and his colleagues identified similar nuclear-targeted soluble forms of other syntaxins, which indicates that this signaling pathway is a conserved, novel function common among these membrane-trafficking proteins.

In the future, the UCSB biologists would like to delineate how far-reaching the functions of these new soluble syntaxin versions are. Are there other unidentified forms of syntaxin that bind to similar nuclear import factors? Do they bind to different or similar transcription factors? Do they regulate different genes?

###

This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the University of California Cancer Research Coordinating Committee, the Cancer Center of Santa Barbara and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science.String of major recent grants underlines promise of new potential treatments for Epidermolysis Bullosa and other chronic skin wounds

AURORA, Colo. (April 12, 2018) - Scientists from the Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine are part of a consortium awarded $3.8 million from the U.S. Department of Defense to move discoveries in stem cell-created skin grafts into the manufacturing stage, bringing further hope to victims of debilitating inherited skin diseases.

The major grant for the Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) iPS Cell Consortium, which includes research teams from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Stanford University School of Medicine and Columbia University Medical Center, will move production of stem cells into the Gates Biomanufacturing Facility at CU Anschutz.

The $3.8 million grant follows recent awards for the same investigators by the 21st Century Cures Act and the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, boosting research that could not only benefit EB sufferers, but also countless patients with severe chronic skin wounds. In February, CU Anschutz's EB researchers reported a more efficient approach to reprogramming a patient's diseased skin cells into stem cells, raising hopes for future clinical trials and potential cures. The results were published in Nature Communications.

In announcing the new grant, Department of Defense (DoD) reviewers issued one of the most emphatic research endorsements possible, saying, "This study is based on the strongest cutting-edge scientific rationale in the field of wound care and dermatology. It is also a collaborative effort among top physician-scientists, scientists, health care providers, epidermolysis bullosa patients, families, and charities across the United States."

One evaluator wrote: "The proposed research has the highest probability of success of bringing gene-corrected tissue to patients in the hospital . . ."

The DoD award will allow the EB research team to further investigate best manufacturing practices for larger-scale production of stem cell-created skin grafts, utilizing the best-in-class resources of the Gates Biomanufacturing Facility on the CU Anschutz Campus.

The goal now is to move the technology from the laboratory into clinical trials. Gates Center Director Dennis Roop, PhD, is a lead researcher on the team making great progress on promising new corrective stem cell-based therapies for currently incurable diseases, such as Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB).

Dr. Roop has had a long-standing interest in finding a permanent cure for EB, a group of inherited skin diseases that results in severe blistering and scarring. EB affects thousands of people across the United States and worldwide, and is characterized by chronic skin wounds similar in property to thermal burns, and indistinguishable from burns induced by chemical agents such as mustard gas. Many children afflicted with recessive dystrophic EB, one of the most painful and disfiguring forms of the condition, do not survive their teens after lives compromised by chronic, debilitating pain.

The consortium is funded by the U.S.-based EB Research Partnership (EBRP),) and EB Medical Research Foundation (EBMRF) and the Sohana Research Fund from Great Britain.

"We are very excited to receive such a strong endorsement from the U.S. Department of Defense," said Dr. Ganna Bilousova, PhD, assistant professor of Dermatology at the CU School of Medicine and member of the EB Consortium. "It is extremely difficult to advance any type of novel therapies into the clinic without the benefit of compelling government interest and support."

###

About the Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine

The Gates Center for Regenerative Medicine was established in 2006 with a gift in memory of Denver industrialist and philanthropist, Charles C. Gates, who was captivated by the hope and benefit stem cell research promised for so many people in the world. The Gates Center aspires to honor what he envisioned--by conducting leading-edge research in stem cell biology and regenerative medicine to accelerate discoveries from the lab through clinical trials leading to effective cures and therapies for patients.

Led by Founding Director Dennis Roop, Ph.D., the Gates Center is located at the University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus, the only comprehensive academic health sciences center in Colorado, the largest academic health center in the Rocky Mountain region and one of the newest education, research and patient care facilities in the world.

The Gates Center shares its services and resources, with a growing membership of researchers and clinicians at the Anschutz Medical Campus, which includes University of Colorado Hospital, Children's Hospital Colorado and the future Veterans Administration Medical Center, as well as the Boulder campus, Colorado State University, the Colorado School of Mines, and business startups. This collaboration is designed to draw on the widest possible array of scientific exploration relevant to stem cell technology focused on the delivery of innovative therapies in Colorado and beyond.

Among the Gates Center's services and resources is the Gates Biomanufacturing Facility, one of six combined cell therapy and protein manufacturing facilities in the United States and the only one of its kind within an 800-mile radius: http://gatesbiomanufacturing.com/

About the University of Colorado School of Medicine

Faculty at the University of Colorado School of Medicine work to advance science and improve care. These faculty members include physicians, educators and scientists at University of Colorado Hospital, Children's Hospital Colorado, Denver Health, National Jewish Health, and the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The school is located on the Anschutz Medical Campus, one of four campuses in the University of Colorado system. To learn more about the medical school's care, education, research and community engagement, visit its web site.FINDINGS

Melanoma, a relatively rare but deadly skin cancer, has been shown to switch differentiation states -- that is, to regress to an earlier stage of development -- which can lead it to become resistant to treatment. Now, UCLA researchers have found that melanomas can be divided into four distinct subtypes according to their stages of differentiation. Cell subtypes that de-differentiated -- meaning that they reverted back to a less-mature cell -- showed sensitivity to a type of self-inflicted cell death called ferroptosis.

The research also showed that certain subtypes of melanoma cells could be successfully treated using multiple cancer therapies in combination with ferroptosis-inducing drugs.

BACKGROUND

Melanoma arises from melanocytes, cells that produce pigments. Although targeted therapies and a greater understanding of cancer immunology have significantly improved survival, many patients either relapse or do not respond to treatment.

METHOD

The UCLA team, led by Dr. Thomas Graeber, analyzed the gene expression of melanoma cells and compared them to information in public genetic databases to identify the four different subtypes of melanoma with different drug sensitivities. The team organized the melanoma cells according to characteristic patterns of genes turned on by the cells. Comparing the gene expression patterns to data from stem cells induced to differentiate into melanocytes, they found that melanomas can be categorized into four distinct differentiation states.

"This refined characterization improves our understanding of the progressive changes that occur in melanoma cells during dedifferentiation, which can help develop better strategies to target this form of therapy resistance," said Jennifer Tsoi, who was a member of the research team as a UCLA graduate student and now is a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA.

The investigators then searched pharmacogenomics databases for compounds that could best be used to treat melanomas characterized by the dedifferentiation expression pattern, either individually or in combination with other drugs.

IMPACT

The study introduces a new area of therapeutic possibilities for melanoma, because it is the first to link ferroptosis to melanoma differentiation states. It also more precisely defines different subtypes of melanoma, based on specific gene expression and metabolic profiles. Those subtypes characterize four steps along a trajectory taken by melanoma cells as they respond to exogenous stresses, such as drug treatments.

The approach for targeting dedifferentiated melanomas could complement existing standard-of-care therapies, since kinase inhibitors and immunotherapies are much more effective against differentiated cells than de-differentiated cells.

"Furthermore, these standard-of-care therapies can induce dedifferentiation, and thus in a co-treatment setting, ferroptosis induction can potentially block melanoma cells attempting to take this escape route," Graeber said.

###

AUTHORS

Graeber is a professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. Tsoi is the first author. Other authors, also of UCLA, are Dr. Lidia Robert, Kim Paraiso, Carlos Galvan, Katherine Sheu, Johnson Lay, Dr. Deborah Wong, Mohammad Atefi, Roksana Shirazi, Xiaoyan Wang, Daniel Braas, Catherine Grasso, Dr. Nicolaos Palaskas and Dr. Antoni Ribas.

JOURNAL

The research is published online in Cancer Cell.

FUNDING

The research was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the Melanoma Research Alliance, the Concern Foundation, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, the Dr. Robert Vigen Memorial Fund, the Garcia-Corsini Family Fund, the Ressler Family Fund, and the Grimaldi Family Fund, the V Foundation-Gil Nickel Family Endowed Fellowship, and the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology for Translational Research in Reference Centers.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

In collaboration with Dr. Graeber, UCLA Technology Development Group has filed a provisional application based on this work. For more information, please contact UCLA TDG at innovation@tdg.ucla.edu

The UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has more than 500 researchers and clinicians engaged in cancer research, prevention, detection, control, treatment and education. One of the nation's largest comprehensive cancer centers, the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center is dedicated to promoting research and translating basic science into leading-edge clinical studies.LAWRENCE -- In dark alleys of the Pacific and Indian oceans, new research shows some of the deadliest, armored fishes on the planet are packing switchblades in their faces.

A study from the University of Kansas appearing in the journal Copeia details for the first time evolution of a "lachrymal saber" unique to stonefishes -- a group of rare and elaborately dangerous fishes inhabiting Indo-Pacific coastal waters. The new finding rewrites scientific understanding of relationships among several groups of fishes and reveals a previously unknown defensive strategy -- also, it likely will fuel a few nightmares.

"I don't why this hasn't been discovered before," said William Leo Smith, associate curator at the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum and KU associate professor of ecology & evolutionary biology. "It's probably because there are just one or two people that ever worked on this group. We took five or six families and were able to resolve the problems in their classifications. To have this really strong anatomical feature visible from the outside is really helpful. To have a big map of how everything is related and evidence for it is what we're all hoping for. We have this feature and get into the genetics of how it could have evolved."

All stonefishes Smith examined in the study feature a mechanism he and his colleagues dub a "lachrymal saber" located on each cheek below the eye. Moreover, genetic analysis of 113 morphological and 5,280 molecular characters for 63 species reveals stonefishes possessing the lachrymal saber are closely related, producing a revised taxonomy of flatheads, scorpionfishes, sea robins and stonefishes.

Smith and co-authors Elizabeth Everman of KU and Clara Richardson of The Field Museum in Chicago found the switchblade-like devices in the cheeks of stonefish involve specialized modifications to several bones and muscles: the circumorbitals, maxilla and adductor mandibulae.

Fifteen years in the making, the new research began when Smith was dissecting a stonefish that had been his own pet -- he became the first researcher to understand the locking switchblade mechanism and how it worked anatomically.

"The outermost bone has a little peg, or a bump, or is heavily grooved. It is called the lachrymal and forms the bony ring around the fish's eye, and the underlying bone looks like it has a roly poly bug on it and is called the maxilla, part of the upper jaw -- in most land vertebrates the maxilla would be toothed," said Smith. "This roly poly piece of the switchblade is the first thing I saw when I started dissecting and recognized this mechanism -- these two roly poly things sit on top of each other and can ratchet at different levels. It can lock out all the way or can lock out at different places."

To help the stonefishes deploy the switchblade, an unusually large number of muscles and ligaments attach to bones comprising the lachrymal saber system compared with species outside the stonefish family, according to the researchers.

"There can't be any other reason for those muscles and ligaments except to control this mechanism," said the KU researcher. "This whole group of fishes is called the 'mail cheek fishes' or Scorpaeniformes, where the bones under the eye attach to the gill skeleton. Because all these muscles are attached to the gill skeleton, it allows for all this force which causes the lachrymal saber to deploy."

Smith said the switchblade only added to an already impressive array of defensive features that rank stonefishes among the deadliest fishes in the ocean, including spikes, camouflages and some of the world's most powerful venoms, which even could be fatal to an adult human being.

"Of all the fishes I've studied, I haven't yet been stung by any of these stonefishes," said Smith. "I'm just super paranoid. In some places they catch them for food -- the big ones, they're delicious -- there is an aquaculture for larger ones in Indonesia. That's mind-boggling to me. The venom breaks down in our digestive system. But people eat lots of venomous species all over the world, even in the U.S."

Smith said the lachrymal saber is most likely an additional defensive system in stonefishes, to avoid predation.

"If you find pictures of these stonefishes in the mouths of other things, the lachrymal saber is always locked out," he said. "The main thing people know about these fishes is they're venomous. Some people know them because they have these fingerlike appendages and drag themselves around like they're playing the piano; the appendages actually taste food as they go. These stonefishes can mimic leaves floating in the water -- they're super camouflaged. A lot of them have really bright pectoral fins on sides of their body, and when they're scared they flash them -- this drab fish will suddenly flash bright yellows and oranges. I always assume all of these features are defensive, but recent studies by other fish scientists suggest these could all be displays like a peacock."

Some of the specimens examined as part of the study were collected in the pet-fish trade, and others during fieldwork in Taiwan during which the researchers used the enormity of the Taiwanese fishing industry to their advantage.

"We had a trip to Taiwan three years ago where we caught 1 percent of all fish species worldwide," said Smith. "You can get deep-sea and shallow-water fish because it's a volcanic island -- and they send out a zillion boats to get shrimp -- their fishing industry is supported like our agricultural industry. You don't have to rent boats for research, you can sit on a dock and go through the fishes, they're going to just grind up and essentially, so we can collect these samples for free."

In addition to the specimens collected in the Indo-Pacific, to establish genetic relationships Smith relied upon a vast collection of fish tissue samples housed at KU's Biodiversity Institute.

"We have the most diverse tissue sample collection in the world at the institute," Smith said. "Some places have more individual tissues, but in terms of a diverse number of species, we have the largest."

###

High-resolution images and a video of stonefishes included in the study are available here. Credits and cutlines for photos are here.New research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provides valuable insight into the navigation and nesting behaviors of loggerhead sea turtles that could inform future conservation efforts. Loggerhead sea turtles that nest on beaches with similar magnetic fields are genetically similar to one another, according to a new study by UNC-Chapel Hill biologists Kenneth J. Lohmann and J. Roger Brothers. The study will publish in the journal Current Biology on April 12.

Key takeaways include:

Magnetic fields are the strongest predictor of genetic similarity among nesting loggerhead sea turtles, regardless of the geographic proximity or environmental traits of nesting beaches.

The findings support previous research from Lohmann and Brothers, which indicated that adult loggerhead sea turtles use magnetic fields to find their way back to the beach where they themselves hatched. The new research implies that sometimes the turtles mistakenly nest at a different beach with a similar magnetic field, even if that beach is geographically far away from the beach on which they hatched  like on the opposite coast of Florida.

Conservation efforts should note the importance of a beachs magnetic field for attracting loggerhead sea turtles. Sea walls, power lines and large beachfront buildings may alter the magnetic fields that turtles encounter.

"Loggerhead sea turtles are fascinating creatures that begin their lives by migrating alone across the Atlantic Ocean and back. Eventually they return to nest on the beach where they hatched  or else, as it turns out, on a beach with a very similar magnetic field, said Kenneth Lohmann, professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill. "This is an important new insight into how sea turtles navigate during their long-distance migrations. It might have important applications for the conservation of sea turtles, as well as other migratory animals such as salmon, sharks and certain birds.

Lohmann and Brothers are available for interviews if you'd like to arrange a time to learn more.

###

About the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation's first public university, is a global higher education leader known for innovative teaching, research and public service. A member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, Carolina regularly ranks as the best value for academic quality in U.S. public higher education. Now in its third century, the University offers 77 bachelor's, 111 master's, 65 doctorate and seven professional degree programs through 14 schools and the College of Arts and Sciences. Every day, faculty, staff and students shape their teaching, research and public service to meet North Carolina's most pressing needs in every region and all 100 counties. Carolina's more than 322,000 alumni live in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and 165 countries. More than 175,000 live in North Carolina.As the Trump administration considers military operations against Syria in the wake of a suspected chemical weapons attack Saturday (April 7) in the town of Douma, a University of Notre Dame Law School professor and world-renowned expert on international law on the use of force says a reprisal attack would be illegal.

Mary Ellen O'Connell, Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law and research professor of international dispute resolution, is author of "The Popular but Unlawful Armed Reprisal," forthcoming in the Ohio Northern Law Review.

"The use of chemical weapons is correctly characterized as a war crime, but there is an utter failure to recognize that a punitive military attack in response violates fundamental international law," O'Connell says. "Those who target citizens with chemical weapons should be held accountable, but the way accountability is imposed must also comply with the law. Attacking after such incidents amounts to unlawful reprisals, and unlawful reprisals in which people die belong in the same category of international crimes as the use of banned weapons."

Currently in residence at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, O'Connell says reprisal attacks are a serious breach of the United Nations charter.

"President Trump has warned via tweet that 'missiles will be coming' to Syria to enforce the norm against using chemical weapons," she says. "He is going to break the law to save it, reminding me of the old U.S. strategy in Vietnam of destroying a village to save it. And we know how well that turned out."

In her forthcoming research paper, O'Connell points to armed reprisals last year in Syria carried out by the United States and Iran in the wake of chemical and terror attacks.

"Despite support for their actions even by countries such as Germany and France, retaliatory uses of force are clearly prohibited under international law," she writes. "International law generally prohibits all use of armed force with narrow exceptions for self-defense, United Nations Security Council authorization, and consent of a government to participate in a civil war. Military force after an incident are reprisals, which have been expressly forbidden by the U.N."

Prior to the Trump administration, O'Connell says the U.S. consistently attempted to justify reprisals through creative characterization of the facts to fit the self-defense paradigm.

"Following the April 2017 attacks, the U.S. did not even offer one of these insufficient attempts at justification," she states. "Nine people reportedly died in last year's attack, including four children. What was achieved? The implications of these latest developments on international law for the U.S. and the world are grave. Human lives have been taken in violation of the law. The whole attempt to condemn chemical attacks and terrorism becomes at best counterproductive when the response involves a law violation as serious as the triggering offense."

###PHILADELPHIA - Metformin, the most widely used medication for diabetes, has also been shown to help treat dementia and some cancers. New research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins Medicine shows smoking cessation may be added to that list.

In a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the research team found that after giving mice metformin the animals displayed reduced symptoms when going through nicotine withdrawal.

"Although we are just beginning to characterize this new role for metformin, our study suggests that the protein it acts on could be a new target for smoking cessation treatment," said senior author Julie Blendy, PhD, a professor of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics at Penn.

Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, with more people dying from nicotine addiction than any other preventable cause of death. Even though quitting smoking brings many health benefits, the abstinence rate remains low with current medications, likely because of an array of undesirable withdrawal symptoms.

Metformin has a variety of targets, one of which is a protein called AMPK. This study showed that the AMPK pathway in the hippocampus of the brain is activated following long-term use of nicotine. But, this heightened AMPK activity is rapidly reversed during nicotine withdrawal, which is associated with negative symptoms such as anxiety.

Increasing AMPK levels using metformin decreases anxiety following nicotine withdrawal in the mice. Anxiety was measured in two behavior tasks that are designed to trigger relevant behaviors and contrast the tendency for mice to explore or engage in social investigation against the anxiety-producing properties of novel objects in the cage (the marble burying test) or an open, brightly lit space (a novelty-induced decrease in eating test).

This study provides evidence of a direct effect of AMPK on nicotine withdrawal symptoms and suggests that activating AMPK in the brain could be a therapeutic target for smoking cessation. The authors say that the well-established safety profile of metformin for diabetes should hopefully encourage clinicians to translate these findings into clinical trials to improve sustained abstinence rates in ex-smokers.

As part of a collaborative effort, clinical researchers Rebecca Ashare, PhD, an assistant professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, and Robert Schnoll, PhD, an associate professor of Psychology in Psychiatry and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Nicotine Addiction, are studying the effects of metformin on smokers to see if it attenuates negative mood and cognitive deficits during withdrawal - symptoms known to be associated with the ability to quit. If the current trial suggests withdrawal symptoms can be reduced, a larger study would evaluate its effects on smoking cessation.

At present, little is known regarding the molecular targets of the AMPK pathway following chronic nicotine use withdrawal. In the future, studies are aimed at using novel molecular approaches to selectively delete AMPK in specific brain regions associated with nicotine dependence to better understand the functional role of this protein in addiction.

###

Julia K. Brynildsen, Bridgin G. Lee, Isaac J. Perron, Sunghee Jin, and Sangwon F. Kim are coauthors. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (T32-GM008076, R01 DA041180, DK084336) and a National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences Award (TL1TR000138). The clinical project is supported by a grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $7.8 billion enterprise.

The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top medical schools in the United States for more than 20 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $405 million awarded in the 2017 fiscal year.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center -- which are recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report -- Chester County Hospital; Lancaster General Health; Penn Medicine Princeton Health; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital - the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, a leading provider of highly skilled and compassionate behavioral healthcare.

Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2017, Penn Medicine provided $500 million to benefit our community.Despite the prevalence and impact of psychological symptoms, United States trauma systems do not routinely integrate psychological evaluation and mental healthcare as a mainstay of post-injury care. This shifts the responsibility for help-seeking to injured people who must identify their symptoms and find mental health support and services. This gap is especially troubling for populations disproportionately affected by traumatic injuries, like black men, who are less likely to use mental healthcare after physically and psychologically traumatic events.

A new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) has explored how injured black men in Philadelphia perceived their psychological symptoms after injury and the factors that guided their decisions to seek professional mental health help. The study, 'Sharing things with people that I don't even know': help-seeking for psychological symptoms in injured Black men in Philadelphia,' has recently been published in the journal Ethnicity & Health.

"Our focus on urban black men is intended to bring greater attention to a population highly vulnerable to trauma, injury, and suboptimal outcomes after injury," explains the study's senior author, Therese S. Richmond, PhD, FAAN, CRNP, the Andrea B. Laporte Professor of Nursing and Associate Dean for Research & Innovation.

"By understanding help-seeking in urban Black men and others at high-risk for psychological challenges after injury, we are better positioned to create individually-responsive programs that can be seeded within the continuum of trauma care," noted the study's lead-author Sara F. Jacoby, PhD, MPH, MSN, an Assistant Professor in Penn Nursing's Department of Family and Community Health. "What we learned from study participants was that despite suffering from often severe psychological symptoms in the months that followed hospitalization, very few men would seek professional mental healthcare citing both personal and system-based barriers like lack of health insurance, as well as preference for informal or faith-based support."

This study suggests the need for research to identify interventions that will diminish the impact of barriers to care, and identify from whom, where, and how professional mental health help might be more effectively offered to injured black men who live in recovery environments like Philadelphia.

###

This study was co-authored by John A. Rich, MD, MPH, of Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health and Jessica L. Webster, MS, LPC, of Penn Nursing, and was funded by a National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Nursing Research grant R01NR013503 to Dr. Richmond.

About the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing

The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing is one of the world's leading schools of nursing. For the third year in a row, it is ranked the #1 nursing school in the world by QS University and is consistently ranked highly in the U.S. News & World Report annual list of best graduate schools. Penn Nursing is currently ranked # 1 in funding from the National Institutes of Health, among other schools of nursing. Penn Nursing prepares nurse scientists and nurse leaders to meet the health needs of a global society through research, education, and practice. Follow Penn Nursing on: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram & YouTube.When it comes to measuring fitness, no one gets it right, a new study led by the University of Southern California shows

An American, a Brit and a Dutch guy go for a walk. That may sound like the beginning of a joke, but it's actually the end of a USC-led study that could impact future research on physical activity.

With the help of fitness-tracking devices, an international team of scientists studied how physically active people consider themselves to be, versus how physically active they really are.

The research has revealed that no one gets it right. The American responses suggest they are as active as the Dutch or the English. Older people think they are as active as young people. In reality, though, Americans are much less active than the Europeans and older people are less active than the young.

Does this mean Americans are liars about their physical activity, or the Dutch and the English humbly underestimate theirs?

"It means people in different countries or at different age groups can have vastly different interpretations of the same survey questions," says Arie Kapteyn, the study's lead author and executive director of the Center for Economic and Social Research at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Kapteyn believes the differences in fitness perceptions are driven by cultural and environmental differences.

For instance, Americans are largely dependent on cars while the Dutch frequently walk or ride bicycles to work and for simple errands, Kapteyn says.

The study was published on April 11 in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.

Perception vs. reality

For the study, the scientists tracked 540 participants from the United States, 748 people from the Netherlands and 254 from England.

Men and women in the study, ages 18 and up, were asked in a survey to report their physical activity on a five-point scale, ranging from inactive to very active. They also wore a fitness-tracking device on their wrist (an accelerometer) so that scientists could measure their actual physical activity over a seven-day period.

The researchers found that the Dutch and English were slightly more likely to rate themselves toward the "moderate" center of the scale, while Americans tended to rate themselves at the extreme ends of the scale, either as "very active" or "inactive." But overall, the differences in how people from all three countries self-reported their physical activity was modest or non-existent.

The wearable devices revealed hard truths: Americans were much less physically active than both the Dutch and English. In fact, the percentage of Americans in the inactive category was nearly twice as large as the percentage of Dutch participants.

Reality bytes by age group

A comparison of fitness tracker data by age group reveals that people in all three countries are generally less active as they get older. That said, inactivity appeared more widespread among older Americans than participants in the other countries: 60 percent of Americans were inactive, compared to 42 percent of the Dutch and 32 percent of the English.

The researchers found that, in all three countries, the disparities between perceived and real activity levels were greatest among participants who reported that they were either "very active" or "very inactive."

"Individuals in different age groups simply have different standards of what it means to be physically active," said Kapteyn. "They adjust their standards based on their circumstances, including their age."

Kapteyn says that since physical activity is so central to a healthy life, accurate measurements are important to science. The findings indicate that scientists should proceed with caution when interpreting and comparing the results of international fitness studies that have utilized standardized questionnaires.

"When you rely on self-reported data, you're not only relying on people to share a common understanding of survey terms, but to accurately remember the physical activity that they report," says Kapteyn. "With the wide availability of low-cost activity tracking devices, we have the potential to make future studies more reliable."

###

The study co-authors include Htay-Wah Saw of the USC Dornsife College's Center for Economic and Social Research, James Banks of the University of Manchester, Mark Hamer of Loughborough University, James Smith of the RAND Corp., Andrew Steptoe of University College London, Arthur van Soest of Tilburg University, and Annemarie Koster of Maastricht University.

The U.S. portion of the research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Aging, including $243,170 (R-37AG25529 to James Smith at the RAND Corp., and one for $127,060 (R01AG20717) to Kapteyn at USC.

The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, led by Steptoe, is funded by the National Institute of Aging through a series of grants which in 2017 totaled more than $2.4 million (R01AG017644). That study is also supported by a consortium of UK government departments coordinated by the Economic and Social Research Council. The portion of the research in the Netherlands was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.The gender compensation gap between women and men is well-documented, and research shows that the gap is wider in the top positions.

Recent research from UT Dallas' Naveen Jindal School of Management examines how cultural perceptions affect the compensation of female CEOs in China, where women CEOs earn significantly less than their male counterparts.

Overall, the researchers suggested that the gender gap in CEO pay in emerging economies may result from a perceived mismatch between cultural perceptions of female gender roles and perceptions of leadership traits.

Joyce C. Wang, a PhD candidate in international management; Dr. Livia Markoczy, associate professor of organizations, strategy and international management; and Dr. Mike Peng, O.P. Jindal Distinguished Chair of Management, are co-authors of the study, which was published in the Journal of Business Ethics.

"That the gender pay gap exists even in top positions is a known problem, but the reasons for this pay gap and possible solutions to address this problem are still debated," Markoczy said.

The researchers wanted to explore how female CEOs are compensated in emerging economies. China was chosen in part because an increasing number of women are rising through corporate ranks in Chinese companies. Also, the process for determining CEO pay is less formalized and transparent in China compared to developed economies.

Using a sample including 1,667 firms in China, the researchers studied CEO compensation between 2004 and 2010. They gathered data from publicly listed firms on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges.

Although a higher percentage of women serve as CEOs in China than in the United States -- about 5.6 percent of firms there were headed by women compared to 3.3 percent in the U.S. as of 2010 -- the study found that the female CEO compensation gap is still substantial in China.

Clash of Expectations

The study examines how, in emerging economies, leaders are typically associated with agentic traits, or those more focused on outcomes, including aggressiveness, competitiveness and independence. In contrast, women are stereotypically considered more compassionate, inclusive and sympathetic.

These communal traits, which consider group dynamics in decision-making, are often seen as incompatible with the agentic requirements expected of a leader.

"The stereotypical views toward women and leaders may be translated into lower pay to female CEOs relative to male CEOs," Wang said. "This is more likely in firms with less-formalized pay-setting rules, such as those in China."

Closing the Gap

The researchers proposed that the perceived mismatch for female leaders may be altered by two mechanisms. Female CEOs may narrow the pay gap by undertaking one of the following:

Exhibiting agentic qualities, such as taking more risks, thus demonstrating traits desirable for leaders.

Working in female-dominated industries -- such as broadcasting, retail, publishing, textiles or tourism, in which more than 50 percent of the employees are females -- a context where communal traits are valued in leadership positions.

However, for female CEOs, the researchers advised against doing both -- taking risks in female-dominated industries.

"While our findings on the substantial compensation gap between female and male CEOs are sobering, we also offer a silver lining to successful women," Peng said. "There are ways for female CEOs to reap the fruits that their hard work justifies."

Dr. Sunny Li Sun PhD'10 of the University of Massachusetts Lowell is also a co-author on the paper.

###Insights from this study present an opportunity to develop approaches for early detection and early intervention in kidney cancer

The earliest critical genetic changes that can lead to kidney cancer have been mapped by scientists. The first key genetic change occurs in childhood or adolescence, and the resulting cells follow a consistent path to progress into kidney cancer four or five decades later, scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Francis Crick Institute and their collaborators have found.

The results, reported today (12 April) in Cell, suggest that whilst most of us carry these 'kick-starter' cells, they will not develop into cancer unless triggered by further mutations. The insights from this study present an opportunity to develop approaches for early detection and early intervention in kidney cancer, particularly in high-risk groups such as those with an inherited risk of the disease.

Kidney cancer was the seventh most common cancer in adults in the UK in 2014, with 12,500 new cases. Treatment options for the cancer include surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

To understand more about what kick starts kidney cancer, scientists used genomic archaeology techniques to dig into the genomes of kidney tumours and reconstruct the first genetic changes that take place.

Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Francis Crick Institute and their collaborators sequenced and analysed the whole genomes of 95 kidney cancer tumours from 33 patients. The team discovered the first significant genetic changes, or driver mutations, in kidney cancer take place very early in life, on average in early teenage years.

The scientists found there are initially only a few hundred cells with these genetic changes, and it is likely that most of us have some of these rogue cells in our kidneys. However, kidney cancer develops in one to two per cent of the population. The cells remain dormant for four or five decades and do not progress into kidney cancer unless triggered by further mutations. Risk factors for these cells progressing to full-blown cancer include smoking, obesity and an inherited risk of kidney cancer.

Dr Peter Campbell, corresponding author from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: "We can now say what the initiating genetic changes are in kidney cancer, and when they happen. What is remarkable is that the hallmark genomic event that characterises kidney cancer takes place on average 40 to 50 years before the cancer is diagnosed. These first seeds are sown in childhood or adolescence - knowing the sequence of events and their timings opens opportunities for early intervention."

Researchers discovered that the first mutation is the loss of chromosome 3p in more than 90 per cent of kidney cancer patients studied.

Dr Thomas Mitchell, joint first author from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Addenbrooke's Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, University of Cambridge, said: "We uncovered that the genetic change initiating kidney cancer in most people is the deletion of chromosome 3p, which takes with it several tumour suppressor genes. We also found around 35-40 per cent of patients simultaneously gain chromosome 5q in a process called chromothripsis - the shattering and rearrangement of chromosomes that causes several mutations at once."

Professor Charles Swanton, joint corresponding author from the Francis Crick Institute and Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said: "Understanding how cancers develop and evolve over time is likely to be critical in helping us piece together the information that will point the way to new treatment approaches and predicting outcomes. We hope that in the future this work will help tailor surgical and medical intervention to the right patients at the right time."

###

Notes to Editors:

This study is one of three papers published in Cell. The other two papers in this series are:

Turajlic, S. et al. (2018) Deterministic evolutionary trajectories influence primary tumour growth: the TRACERx Renal study. Cell

Turajlic, S. et al. (2018) Tracking renal cancer evolution reveals constrained routes to metastases, results from the TRACERx Renal study. Cell

The studies are a result of the TRACERx (Tracking Cancer Evolution through Therapy) Renal consortium: http://tracerx.co.uk/

Approximately 1 in 52 men and 1 in 87 women will be diagnosed with kidney cancer in their lifetime, half of which will be aged 70 and over. Around 50 per cent of those with the disease will beat the cancer and live for 10 or more years.

Kidney cancer statistics and information were sourced from the Cancer Research UK website. (http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/kidney-cancer/survival#heading-Three ; http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/kidney-cancer/about ; http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/kidney-cancer/treatment/decisions)

Publication: Thomas Mitchell et al. (2018) Timing the landmark events in the evolution of clear cell renal cell cancer: TRACERx Renal. Cell. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.02.020

Funding: This work was supported by EU FP7 (project PREDICT ID number 259303), Wellcome and Cancer Research UK.

Selected websites:

Francis Crick Institute

The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical discovery institute dedicated to understanding the fundamental biology underlying health and disease. Its work is helping to understand why disease develops and to translate discoveries into new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, infections, and neurodegenerative diseases.

An independent organisation, its founding partners are the Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, UCL (University College London), Imperial College London and King's College London.

The Crick was formed in 2015, and in 2016 it moved into a brand new state-of-the-art building in central London which brings together 1500 scientists and support staff working collaboratively across disciplines, making it the biggest biomedical research facility under a single roof in Europe.

The Francis Crick Institute will be world-class with a strong national role. Its distinctive vision for excellence includes commitments to collaboration; to developing emerging talent and exporting it to the rest of the UK; to public engagement; and to helping turn discoveries into treatments as quickly as possible to improve lives and strengthen the economy.

About Cancer Research UK

Cancer Research UK is the world's leading cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research.

Cancer Research UK's pioneering work into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer has helped save millions of lives.

Cancer Research UK receives no funding from the UK government for its life-saving research. Every step it makes towards beating cancer relies on vital donations from the public.

Cancer Research UK has been at the heart of the progress that has already seen survival in the UK double in the last 40 years.

Today, 2 in 4 people survive their cancer for at least 10 years. Cancer Research UK's ambition is to accelerate progress so that by 2034, 3 in 4 people will survive their cancer for at least 10 years.

Cancer Research UK supports research into all aspects of cancer through the work of over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses.

Together with its partners and supporters, Cancer Research UK's vision is to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured.

For further information about Cancer Research UK's work or to find out how to support the charity, please call 0300 123 1022 or visit http://www.cancerresearchuk.org. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

University of Cambridge

The mission of the University of Cambridge is to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. To date, 98 affiliates of the University have won the Nobel Prize. Founded in 1209, the University comprises 31 autonomous Colleges, which admit undergraduates and provide small-group tuition, and 150 departments, faculties and institutions. Cambridge is a global university. Its 19,000 student body includes 3,700 international students from 120 countries. Cambridge researchers collaborate with colleagues worldwide, and the University has established larger-scale partnerships in Asia, Africa and America. The University sits at the heart of one of the world's largest technology clusters. The 'Cambridge Phenomenon' has created 1,500 hi-tech companies, 14 of them valued at over US$1 billion and two at over US$10 billion. Cambridge promotes the interface between academia and business, and has a global reputation for innovation.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute

The Wellcome Sanger Institute is one of the world's leading genome centres. Through its ability to conduct research at scale, it is able to engage in bold and long-term exploratory projects that are designed to influence and empower medical science globally. Institute research findings, generated through its own research programmes and through its leading role in international consortia, are being used to develop new diagnostics and treatments for human disease. To celebrate its 25th year in 2018, the Institute is sequencing 25 new genomes of species in the UK. Find out more at http://www.sanger.ac.uk or follow @sangerinstitute

Wellcome

Wellcome exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive. We're a global charitable foundation, both politically and financially independent. We support scientists and researchers, take on big problems, fuel imaginations and spark debate. http://www.wellcome.ac.ukUSD/JPY exchange rate has room for more upside as trade fears ease

The US Dollar was lower against the Japanese Yen on Wednesday as worries over a US strike in Syria raised fears of a further deterioration in the relationship between the US and Russia, which had already been quoted as being close to Cold War lows.

Stock indices also struggled despite evidence that the risks of a full-blown trade war between the US and China may have been overblown.

In their FX report released on Wednesday, forex strategists at Maybank noted that there is a clear and concerted effort from Xi to appease Trump a little, and he appears to be reciprocating. In regards to Xis communication, the bank writes,

President Xi in his keynote address to the Boao Forum did not ratchet up tensions but instead pledged to cut vehicle import tariffs, ease foreign equity restrictions in the car industry, open shipping, aviation, financial sectors for more foreign investment, strengthen property-right protection, oppose monopolies, and use dialogue to resolve disputes.

Trump has responded positively to Xis words, something Maybank indicates may help to break down some walls and encourage constructive dialogue between the two major global economies,

Trump praised his counterparts kind word on tariffs and car barriers and enlightenment on intellectual property and technology transfers. This should allow trade negotiations between the two sides to move forward

Dollar-to-Yen exchange rate may head higher but capped by Abe scandal

So long as the good times continue, then some of the long positions built up in safe-haven assets could be set to unwind.

In particular, this might give a boost to USD/JPY exchangev rate, as some of the US-centric worries may come out of the pair as China looks open to discussions. Maybanks report acknowledges this, but also believes that the political scandal in Japan might keep the brakes a little on the upside potential in the major pair,

Easing trade tensions should see further unwinding of safe-haven trade plays, supportive of the USDJPY Further upside could be capped given the ongoing political scandal surrounding PM Abe that is simmering in the background.

Given the troubles for the Russian Ruble, it seems unlikely that Russia is going to sit idly by and not fight back quite strongly against the US sanctions imposed recently. For this reason, it could well be that trade wars take a back seat to actual war over the course of this week.A man from Niger stabbed to death his German ex-wife and their one-year-old daughter in a brutal attack in a busy train station Thursday, police said.

The bloody knife killings took place mid-morning in the busiest subway station of Hamburg, Germanys second-biggest city.

The crime was very, very terrible in its execution, very targeted and very, very extreme, said police spokesman Timo Zill.

We currently assume it was a crime of passion.

The 33-year-old suspect initially ran off but then phoned police, who arrested him inside the Jungfernstieg underground station.

Police said the child died immediately in the attack around 0850 GMT and the 34-year-old woman succumbed to her injuries in hospital.

Police and firefighters responded in large numbers, and trauma counselling was offered to witnesses and emergency responders.The new CEO of Germany's scandal-hit auto giant Volkswagen, Herbert Diess, is a former BMW executive known as a fierce cost-cutter who is unafraid to clash with labour unions.

The 59-year-old Austrian only joined VW in July 2015, months before the dieselgate emissions cheating revelations plunged the German corporate titan into its worst-ever crisis.

Taking over as chief executive from Matthias Mueller, Diess, the former head of Volkswagen-branded cars in the sprawling group, will be tasked with helping the worlds largest carmaker turn the page on the crisis.

In addition to his role as CEO and head of the VW brand, he will also be responsible for group research and development.

Born in Munich in 1958, Diess studied automotive technology and earned a PhD in mechanical engineering, began his automotive career at parts maker Bosch in 1989 after a brief stint in research.

He moved to BMW in 1996 and ran British plants in Oxford and Birmingham, then headed BMW Motorcycles and from 2007 became a member of the board of management.

He arrived at Volkswagen only months before it emerged the company had rigged the software of 11 million of its diesel cars to hide their real emissions of nitrogen oxides, which are associated with respiratory and cardiovascular disorders.

Mueller himself had been called to the rescue by Volkswagen at the height of the scandal that ended the career of veteran boss Martin Winterkorn.

Having joined from BMW, Diess has the advantage of being largely untainted by dieselgate  giving VW a chance at a fresh start.

In his time running the flagship Volkswagen brand, Diess could boast of having doubled profitability in two years, making him a favourite with investors.

While VW has not made large-scale job cuts, labour leaders in its powerful unions opposed his tough cost-slashing and efficiency drive.

Diess is acting in a deeply anti-social way, VW staff representative Bernd Osterloh charged in an open letter in early 2017.

Diess has no problem making enemies, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily wrote, recounting how the tough-as-nails executive drove a hard bargain with suppliers as head of purchasing at BMW.

Diess won the support of keys shareholders, the Porsche-Piech families, who allowed him to become head of both the core VW brand and the group as a whole, with its 12 makes of cars, trucks and motorbikes.

While Mueller recently made headlines with ill-advised remarks, saying that highly paid managers like him always had one foot in jail, Diess has largely avoided controversy.

One of Diesss biggest challenges as he takes the helm will be to clarify VWs vision for the future as the auto giant navigates between a pivot towards electric vehicles and clinging to the diesel technology it has invested so heavily in.

Just last month, Diess said: We need diesel, diesel has a future.

ys/fz/mfp/spmBerlin is poised to strip the names of streets linked to atrocities committed during its occupation of Namibia and dedicate them to liberation fighters, part of a late reckoning with Germany's brutal colonial history in Africa.

After more than a decade of debate, the three biggest parties in the Berlin Mitte district assembly voted Wednesday night to recommend new names for streets in the so-called African Quarter in the northwest of the German capital, spokeswoman Melita Ersek said.

The final decision by the district councillor could take another month or so  the date is likely to be announced at another hearing next Thursday, Ersek told AFP.

But it is quite common that the parties recommendation is adopted.

The motion to drop the names associated with Germanys bloody 1884-1919 occupation of what was then called German South West Africa marks a long-delayed victory for local activists.

The African Quarter in the multiethnic, working-class neighbourhood of Wedding has streets and squares named for the founder of German South West Africa, Adolf Luederitz, as well as Gustav Nachtigal, its imperial commissioner, and the founder of German East Africa in todays Tanzania, Carl Peters.

Wedding, for its part, was named for 12th century nobleman Rudolf de Weddinge.

 Glorifies colonialism 

The African Quarter still glorifies colonialism and its crimes, council members from the Greens, Social Democrats and Linke parties said in their joint motion.

That conflicts with our understanding of democracy and does lasting harm to the image of the city of Berlin.

Following a redesign based on traffic flows, the sites are now to be called Maji Maji Boulevard, Anna Mungunda Boulevard, Cornelius Frederiks Street and Bell Square.

Maji Maji was a battle cry used in the freedom struggle which gave its name to the biggest African uprising against the Germans.

Anna Mungunda was the first Herero woman to take a leading role in the independence movement. Cornelius Frederiks led the Nama peoples resistance.

And Rudolf Douala Manga Bell was a Duala king in todays Cameroon who, with his wife Emily, resisted land grabs by white colonisers.

Compared to European countries such as Britain and France, Germany had a relatively short if extremely violent period as a colonial power in Africa.

The German occupiers of Namibia killed tens of thousands of indigenous Herero and Nama people in 1904-1908 massacres, which historians have called the first genocide of the 20th century.

Germany has acknowledged that atrocities occurred at the hands of its colonial authorities, but it has repeatedly refused to pay direct reparations, citing millions of euros in development aid to the Namibian government.

 Far-right opposition 

Although the streets renaming looked set for approval, the daily Tagesspiegel reported that it could still run into resistance from residents and business owners complaining about the cost of address changes.

That argument has won backing in Berlin from the conservative Christian Democratic Union, Chancellor Angela Merkels party, while the far-right AfD has opposed the initiative outright.

The district assembly agreed in principle to changing the names in 2016 and appointed a jury to come up with suggestions, which included South African anti-apartheid activist and singer Miriam Makeba and Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai.

After a lengthy and sometimes heated debate on various candidates merits, the parties settled on the final list.

The African Quarter got its name on the eve of World War I when entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck planned a park there to display animals and human beings from Africa.

The plans were never realised due to Hagenbecks premature death but not before several streets were renamed in tribute to Germanys colonial adventures.

The landscape of the German capital has seen repeated renaming of streets and squares as the imperial era gave way to the Nazi period, then the citys Cold War division by the Berlin Wall and finally reunification.Israel's president on Thursday said there was "deep disagreement" between his country and Poland over the Holocaust and called on Warsaw to study its history -- an allusion to the responsibility of some Poles for the deaths of Jews.

Reuven Rivlins remarks were aimed at a controversial new Polish law that was meant to protect Poland from false accusations of complicity in the Holocaust, but has drawn strong criticism from Israel, Ukraine and the United States.

He made the comments near the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German death camp in Oswiecim, southern Poland, speaking alongside his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda.

Rivlin and Duda on Thursday led the March of the Living, an annual educational event held at Auschwitz-Birkenau marking Yom HaShoah, Israels Holocaust Remembrance Day, dedicated to the six million Jews killed by Nazi Germans during World War II.

Despite the exceptional relationship between our two peoples, we demand Poland take responsibility for the comprehensive study of the Holocaust, Rivlin told reporters.

The legislation penalises statements attributing Nazi German crimes to the Polish state with fines or a jail term of up to three years.

The main aim is to prevent people from erroneously describing Nazi German death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau as Polish, simply because they were set up on Polish soil.

There were no Polish extermination camps, nor a Polish Holocaust, 92-year-old Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg said at the closing ceremony.

But Israel has expressed deep concern that the law could open the door to prosecuting Holocaust survivors for their testimony, should it concern the involvement of individual Poles for allegedly killing or giving up Jews to the Germans.

The legislation came into effect last month, but Duda also asked Polands constitutional tribunal to rule on its constitutionality.

Rivlin on Thursday also insisted that politicians should not meddle in history.

Politicians have the responsibility to create the future, their states and nations, but historians have the responsibility and the duty to write about the past and to study it, Rivlin said, adding that you cant mix these two professions up.

Duda assured Rivlin that Polish lawmakers had no intention of silencing Holocaust survivors over WWII-era crimes against Jews that were worthy only of condemnation.

Rivlin again alluded to the subject at the closing ceremony.

The Nazi death machine would not have been able to achieve its terrible vision if it had not received help. If it had not found a fertile ground of hatred for Jews in which to take root, he said.

True, it was Germany that established the camps, but our people were not murdered only in the camps. The members of our nation were betrayed by the people amongst whom they lived. In France, in Holland, and in Belgium. They were murdered by Ukrainians, Lithuanians and yes, also by Poles.

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of Nazi Germanys genocide of European Jews, one million of whom were killed at the camp between 1940 to 1945.

More than 100,000 others including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters also died there, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.

An estimated 232,000 of Auschwitzs victims were children.

Poland was once home to Europes largest Jewish population, numbering around three million people, or 10 percent of the population in 1939.

But only about 300,000 survived WWII after Nazi Germany occupied Poland.German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday an alleged toxic gas attack blamed on Damascus showed that President Bashar al-Assad's regime failed to eradicate its chemical arsenal, but she ruled out joining any military action against Syria.

We must now acknowledge that it is obvious that the destruction was not completely carried out, she said, noting that there is strong evidence that Damascus deployed the chemical weapons.

Damascus narrowly avoided US and French air strikes in 2013 in retaliation for a suspected sarin attack by agreeing to hand over its chemical arsenal.

Following Saturdays alleged chemical attack in rebel-held Douma, US President Donald Trump this week ratcheted up the pressure on Damascus, warning in a series of tweets that missiles will be coming in retaliation.

Merkel said a full spectrum of measures will be considered in response to the gas attack, but ruled out any military deployment.

Germany will not participate militarily, but we will provide our support if the representatives in the UN Security Council  were to take steps beyond diplomatic measures, she stressed.

Germany has deployed reconnaissance and refuelling flights as part of the international anti-jihadist operation in Syria.

But any further military role would require parliamentary approval.Spanish and German prosecutors plan to meet soon in The Hague to discuss Madrid's request to extradite former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont from Germany, officials in both countries said Thursday.

The meeting will take place at the offices of Eurojust, the European Unions judicial agency in Dutch city, a Spanish judicial source told AFP.

It will involve prosecutors from both countries as well as Eurojust officials from both Spain and Germany, the source added.

The meeting could be held on Thursday and/or Friday, according to the source.

In Germany, the spokeswoman for the public prosecutors office confirmed that discussions between Spanish authorities and representatives of the Schleswig-Holstein public prosecutors office are planned shortly in The Hague. She did not provide more details.

The meeting comes after a court in Schleswig-Holstein on April 6 rejected extraditing Puigdemont to Spain on a charge of rebellion over his role in Catalonias separatist push and released him on bail.

The court ruled that rebellion was not punishable under German law, and that the closest equivalent, high treason, did not apply because Puigdemonts actions were not accompanied by violence.

But the court is still to decide whether to send the former Catalan president, who was detained in northern Germany near the Danish border in late March, to Spain to face trial for alleged misuse of public funds.

The German courts decision was a judicial and political setback for Spain, which has intensified its efforts to defend its arguments in favour of extradition.

A diplomatic source in Madrid said the ruling taints Spains image while Catalan separatists accuse Madrid of using courts against their cause.

European Union Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said Wednesday that Germany had respected the rules.

Spains foreign ministry organised a seminar in the Mediterranean port of Alicante on Tuesday with 17 Spanish ambassadors and two Spanish representatives at the European Union of the Puigdemont case.

They received instructions to multiply their efforts to explain Spains position, a diplomatic source said.

A second such meeting is planned for May, the source added.The Cannes film festival made a dramatic show of support for dissident directors in Iran and Russia on Thursday as it unveiled a strikingly political selection that mixed grit and glamour.

Festival director Thierry Fremaux included films by Iranian director Jafar Panahi and his Russian counterpart Kirill Serebrennikov in the competition for the top Palme dOr prize  even though neither can leave their country.

He pleaded with authorities to allow Panahi, who is under a travel ban, and Serebrennikov, who is under house arrest, to be allowed to fly to the French Riviera resort next month to show their new films, Three Faces and Leto.

US director Spike Lees movie about a black policeman who goes undercover to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, BlacKkKlansman, starring Adam Driver of Star Wars fame, also made the line-up of 18 often controversial titles.

The political tone went up another notch with the inclusion of a womens war film about Kurdish Yazidi female fighters taking on the Islamic State.

The French-made Les filles du soleil (Women of the Sun), features Iranian star Golshifteh Farahani  a pin-up for rebellious youth in her homeland  as a hero of the Yazidi Sun Brigade battling jihadists who enslaved her friends and relatives.

Meanwhile, veteran cinematic provocateur Jean-Luc Godard returns 50 years after he led a revolutionary takeover that halted the festival during the French student and workers protest of 1968.

Although Hollywood stars are thinner on the ground than usual, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Marion Cotillard and Andrew Garfield will walk the red carpet with Driver.

And the latest Star Wars spin-off, Solo: A Star Wars Story, will also be screened at the festival, which runs from May 8 to 19.

In a year when the movie industry has been dominated by the #MeToo movement, only three women directors made the selection: Lebanons Nadine Labaki for Capernaum, Frances Eva Husson for Les filles du soleil and Italian Alice Rohrwacher with Lazzaro Felice.

However, the jury that decides the Palme dOr will be headed by Australian actress Cate Blanchett.

Four Asian films are in the running, led by Ash is Purest White from Chinese creator Jia Zhangke and Shoplifters by Japans Hirokazu Kore-eda.

A documentary about the pope by the German master Wim Wenders, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, will also be shown out of competition.

 Netflix boycott 

The announcement of the line-up came just hours after streaming giant Netflix dramatically pulled out of the festival after a row with its organisers.

The US platform withdrew four films which were rumoured to be in the running to compete for the Palme dOr, including Paul Greengrass much-awaited Norway about the 2011 Utoya massacre, in which white supremacist Anders Breivik killed 77 people in twin attacks.

The move was a major blow to the worlds top film festival, already facing a revolt by critics furious at a shake-up in the way its screenings are organised.

Netflixs withdrawal was in retaliation for a new Cannes rule banning movies from the competition that are not first released in French cinemas.

The platform has been snagged by a French law stopping movies being streamed there until three years after their cinematic release.

French cinema owners protested last year at the inclusion of two Netflix films, Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories, in the selection. The outcry prompted festival director Fremaux to change the rules.

Netflixs chief content officer Ted Sarandos made no attempt to hide his irritation with Cannes and Fremaux in a scathing interview with the trade daily Variety on Wednesday.

 Disrespectful 

We want our films to be on fair ground with every other filmmaker, Sarandos said. Theres a risk in us going in this way and having our films and filmmakers treated disrespectfully at the festival.

It is not a coincidence that Thierry also banned selfies this year, he added, in a biting reference to Fremaux outlawing them on the red carpet.

I dont know what other advances in media Thierry would like to address.

However, Fremaux offered an olive branch to Netflix, saying lets continue to talk as he announced the line-up.

He also seemed to soften his selfie rule, hinting that offenders might be only barred for 24 hours.

Despite the row, Cannes has had no problem accommodating Netflix rival Amazon, which financed Polish-British director Pawel Pawlikowskis Cold War.

Amazons films are shown in cinemas before they go online and can be streamed individually four months after their release in France. It is Netflixs subscription-only model that falls foul of French rules.

fg/dlMoscow on Thursday called on the West to "seriously consider" the consequences of threats against Syria after the US and France said they would respond to an alleged chemical attack.

We call upon members of the international community to seriously consider the possible consequences of such accusations, threats and especially action (against Syria), Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

Nobody has authorised Western leaders to take on the role of global police  simultaneously investigator, prosecution, judge and executor, she said during a press briefing.

Our position is perfectly clear and defined. We are not seeking escalation.

Frances Emmanuel Macron said Thursday he had proof that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons, and would respond to it in due course.

US President Donald Trump had earlier warned regime-backer Russia that missiles will be coming to Syria over the alleged attack in Douma that rescuers said killed 40 people.

But on Thursday morning he wrote on Twitter: Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!

British Prime Minister Theresa May was due to hold an emergency cabinet meeting amid speculation she will support US action against the Syrian regime.Privacy Settings

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NOTE: These settings will only apply to the browser and device you are currently using.Britain said Thursday it has requested the UN Security Council meet to discuss a report by the world's chemical arms watchdog on last month's poisoning of a former Russian spy.

According to a declassified summary issued by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the body has confirmed Britains findings on the identity of the nerve agent used in the attack, although not on its origin.

The Security Council meeting is expected to take place next week, according to the British mission to the UN.

The OPCW executive council is due to meet on April 18.Swiss engineering company Sulzer on Thursday said that Russia's Renova, hit by US sanctions, no longer holds a controlling stake in the firm following a transfer of shares aimed at reassuring investors and the authorities.

Renova is now a minority shareholder, holding 48.83 percent of the shares in Sulzer, the Swiss company, which specialises in industrial pumping systems, said in a statement.

Sulzer confirms that it is no longer a blocked party or subject to sanctions under US law, it said, adding that it was free from US sanctions.

Sulzer moved swiftly to undercut Renovas control after the United States slapped sanctions on Russian magnate Viktor Vekselberg and his firm, as part of a drive by Washington to target businesses and oligarchs with close links to President Vladimir Putin.

Following the sanctions announcement, Sulzer said its bank accounts in the United States had been partially frozen.

But it explained that the decision to freeze its accounts had been the banks, rather than the US governments.

On Monday, Sulzer said it was buying back five million of its shares from Renova to guard against disruptions.

This share transfer has been completed, it said Thursday.

The business activities of Sulzer have been considerably disrupted, but the company does not believe that its long-term performance will be affected, it added.

Sulzer saw its share price dive nearly 16 percent on Monday and another 8.5 percent on Wednesday.

Then on Thursday, its shares soared back by 11.8 percent, signalling a return of investor confidence.

The buyback brought great relief to Sulzer, Baader Helvea analyst Reto Amstalden said in a market commentary.

Washington unveiled the sanctions targeting Putins inner circle last Friday.

President Donald Trumps administration has said the measures were aimed at punishing Russia for a range of actions, including election interference and support of the Syrian government.

The measures targeted seven oligarchs, 12 companies they own or control, 17 senior Russian officials and the state-owned arms export company Rosoboronexport.

noo/ser/jhUS President Donald Trump holds Russia and Syria responsible for a suspected chemical attack that killed more than 40 people, the White House said Wednesday, refusing to rule out direct military engagement with Russia.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders slapped aside Russian suggestions that Saturdays attack in Douma could have been faked and said Trump was still weighing military options in response.

The intelligence provided certainly paints a different picture, she said of the Kremlins theory. The president holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack

Trump is believed to be considering standoff missile strikes against facilities related to the production and delivery of chlorine and sarin or sarin-like agents.

But many of Syrias most sensitive military facilities are protected by Russian missile defense systems or are located at bases where Russian, Iranian and Syrian personnel cohabit.

Sanders pointedly refused to rule out the possibility of direct military engagement with Russia  not shying away from the specter of clashes between two nuclear superpowers.

Once again, all options are on the table, she said.

Still, despite Trumps tweets early Wednesday that promised nice and new and smart! missiles were headed for Syria, Sanders said no final decisions have not been made on that front.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis as well as CIA director Mike Pompeo huddled at the White House on Wednesday to discuss options and game out the situation.

The presidents national security Team met today. That meeting was chaired by the Vice President to discuss a number of options, Sanders said.

 Cant be allowed 

Since the attack in Douma on Saturday, Trump showed a visceral reaction to graphic images of pallid children struggling for breath and frantically being doused with water by first responders.

As bad as the news is around the world, you just dont see those images, Trump said Monday, in one of a series of tweets and public remarks that appeared to telegraph the strikes.

This is about humanity. Were talking about humanity. And it cant be allowed to happen, he said, surrounded by generals.

In April last year Trump ordered limited missile strikes on the Shayrat Airbase in response to a similar chemical weapons attack on rebel-held Khan Sheikhun.

Official said at the time he was moved by images brought to him by his daughter Ivanka and other White House officials.

But the pinpoint strike did not deter Assad. US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have since reported around 10 suspected chemical attacks of varying scale and certainty.

The same officials say Syria has continued to produce or procure chlorine, which is also has industrial and agricultural uses.

This latest chemical attack in Douma came days after Trump indicated a quick US withdrawal from Syria after defeating the Islamic State group.

Assad likely calculated that the US would not respond if they escalated now, said Jennifer Cafarella of the Institute for the Study of War, after President Donald Trump signaled his ultimate desire to withdraw from Syria.

Trumps predecessor Barack Obama had brokered a deal with Syrias ally Russia to remove chemical stockpiles from the country, a strategy that also failed.

Ned Price, a former CIA and National Security Council official during Obamas tenure told AFP the agreement led to the destruction of 1,300 tons of chemical weapons, but, he admitted, it was not enough.

Even though the deal improved the situation considerably, we suspected the Syrians had failed to declare elements of their stockpile, he said.

We worked assiduously through the final days of the administration to galvanize our allies and other international partners to help us address these omissions.US President Donald Trump holds Russia and Syria responsible for a suspected chemical attack that killed more than 40 people, the White House said Wednesday, refusing to rule out direct military engagement with Russia.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders slapped aside Russian suggestions that Saturdays attack in Douma could have been faked and said Trump was still weighing military options in response.

The intelligence provided certainly paints a different picture, she said of the Kremlins theory. The president holds Syria and Russia responsible for this chemical weapons attack

Trump is believed to be considering standoff missile strikes against facilities related to the production and delivery of chlorine and sarin or sarin-like agents.

But many of Syrias most sensitive military facilities are protected by Russian missile defense systems or are located at bases where Russian, Iranian and Syrian personnel cohabit.

Sanders pointedly refused to rule out the possibility of direct military engagement with Russia  not shying away from the specter of clashes between two nuclear superpowers.

Once again, all options are on the table, she said.

Still, despite Trumps tweets early Wednesday which promised nice and new and smart! missiles were headed for Syria, Sanders said no final decisions have not been made on that front.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis as well as military personnel responsible for Americas sea based Aegis missile defense system huddled at the White House on Wednesday to discuss options and game out the situation.

 Cant be allowed 

Since the attack in Douma on Saturday, Trump showed a visceral reaction to graphic images of pallid children struggling for breath and frantically being doused with water by first responders.

As bad as the news is around the world, you just dont see those images, Trump said Monday, in one of a series of tweets and public remarks that appeared to telegraph the strikes.

This is about humanity. Were talking about humanity. And it cant be allowed to happen, he said, surrounded by generals.

In April last year Trump ordered limited missile strikes on the Shayrat Airbase, in response to a similar chemical weapons attack on rebel-held Khan Sheikhun.

Official said at the time that he was moved by images brought to him by his daughter Ivanka and other White House officials.

But the pinpoint strike did not deter Assad. US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have since reported around 10 suspected chemical attacks of varying scale and certainty.

The same officials say Syria has continued to produce or procure chlorine, which is also has industrial and agricultural uses.

This latest chemical attack in Douma came days after Trump indicated a quick US withdrawal from Syria after defeating the Islamic State group.

Assad likely calculated that the US would not respond if they escalated now, said Jennifer Cafarella of the Institute for the Study of War, after President Donald Trump signaled his ultimate desire to withdraw from Syria.

Trumps predecessor Barack Obama had brokered a deal with Syrias ally Russia to remove chemical stockpiles from the country, a strategy which also failed.

Ned Price, a former CIA and National Security Council official during Obamas tenure told AFP the agreement led to the destruction of 1,300 tons of chemical weapons, but, he admitted, it was not enough.

Even though the deal improved the situation considerably, we suspected the Syrians had failed to declare elements of their stockpile, he said.

We worked assiduously through the final days of the administration to galvanize our allies and other international partners to help us address these omissions.Countries in sub-Saharan Africa have boosted the campaign to abolish the death penalty, contributing to a global drop in executions, Amnesty International said Thursday.

There was a positive trend recorded globally according to the rights group, which recorded a four-percent drop in executions from 1,032 in 2016 to 993 last year.

Guinea abolished the death penalty for all crimes, while Kenya no longer imposes the mandatory death sentence for murder.

Burkina Faso was also praised by Amnesty for its draft constitution which includes a provision to scrap the death penalty, and Chad for a new penal code which only allows such a sentence in the case of terrorism.

The progress in sub-Saharan Africa reinforced its position as a beacon of hope for abolition, said Salil Shetty, Amnestys secretary general.

The leadership of countries in this region gives fresh hope that the abolition of the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment is within reach, she added.

Twenty countries in the region have abolished the death penalty for all crimes, with Somalia and South Sudan being the only countries to record executions last year compared to five states in 2016.

The worlds top executioner continues to be China, the rights group said, with thousands of executions believed to have been carried out  but the figure is guarded by Beijing as a state secret.

Iran has the highest known figure despite an 11-percent drop on 2016, executing at least 507 people, with at least 31 death sentences carried out in public.

Although Tehran was praised for taking steps last year to reduce the death sentence for drug offences, Amnesty said authorities had breached international law by executing at least five people who were under 18 when their crimes were committed.

Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan were the next highest in terms of executions carried out, while the US moved from seventh to eight place in the global ranking.

The US was noted for putting people on death row who have mental or intellectual disabilities, a criticism also levelled against Japan, the Maldives, Pakistan and Singapore.

Mongolia was the second country last year to abolish the death penalty, bringing to 106 the number of abolitionist states. A further 36 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, Amnesty said.British energy major BP announced Thursday that it has agreed a "strategic" tie-up with Brazilian peer Petrobras to explore "areas of mutual interest" worldwide across their businesses.

BP today announced that is has signed a memorandum of understanding to explore areas of cooperation with Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras), the London-listed giant said in a statement which gave no financial details.

Through this strategic alliance, Petrobras and BP have committed to exploring potential joint commercial agreements in areas of mutual interest in upstream, downstream, trading and across low carbon initiatives, inside and outside Brazil.

The alliance is also expected to include the transfer of technology, as well as joint training and research.

BP chief executive Bob Dudley added that his company had built up a strong relationship with Petrobras over many years.

We are now excited to deepen our partnership and explore even more opportunities together across all our businesses  in the upstream, downstream, trading and low carbon  both in Brazil and beyond, he said.

We believe that working together in this alliance can deliver real value for both BP and Petrobras.

BP, which has been present in Brazil for over 60 years, added that it currently partners Petrobras in 16 exploration blocks in Brazil.

Downstream includes refining, marketing and distribution, while upstream comprises exploration and production.

rfj/rlThe UN Security Council is expected to meet next week to discuss a report by the OPCW chemical watchdog confirming Britain's findings that a nerve agent was used in an attack on an ex-spy, the British ambassador said Thursday.

Britain requested the meeting, which is likely to take place on Wednesday, just a few hours after the executive council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) meets in The Hague.

British Ambassador Karen Pierce said the OPCW experts agree explicitly with the UKs analysis. This was a military-grade nerve agent of high purity.

Pierce told reporters that the meeting next week would be to inform the council of the latest developments, suggesting no action would be taken.

Britain and its allies have blamed Russia for the March 4 attack that left former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in critical condition. Moscow has denied any involvement.

In an executive summary made public at Britains request, it said the toxic chemical was of high purity but did not name it.

Britain named it as Novichok, a group of powerful and deadly chemical compounds developed by the Soviet government in the 1970s and 1980s.History majors at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom learn time management, strong communication, teamwork and the ability to form concise, articulate arguments. Prospective students and employers find a list of those skills right on the universitys website  in addition to statistics on job placement.

By 2030, academic programs at Texas universities may well be marketed like these, with staff and faculty laser focused on communicating those so-called marketable skills to prospective employers and would-be majors.

More than 300 faculty and administrators from across Texas came to the University of Houston this week to brainstorm ways to boost job placement through promoting these nontechnical skills. Hosted by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Texas Workforce Commission, the two-day meeting was part of a larger push from the state to improve higher education outcomes by 2030.

The coordinating board wants all programs offered by Texas public higher education institutions to identify marketable skills already being taught in humanities and liberal arts majors. Students, then, would learn how to present themselves to businesses to get good jobs.

Your average psychology graduate knows a lot about marketing, said David Gardner, the coordinating boards chief academic officer. He urged universities to share solutions that work and learn from one another. Students clearly have a responsibility, but we do, too.

Universities across Texas have taken steps to become more transparent on student outcomes. For example, a landmark new tool from the University of Texas System tracks graduate salaries by major for alumni who move all over the country.

Speakers at the brainstorming meeting said faculty and staff, including career services offices, can collaborate to teach students how to market what they can contribute to an employer. University employees should also meet with employers to understand their desired skills.

Think about your first job. Think about your first resume, Ginger Gossman, a senior director in the coordinating boards innovation and policy department, asked the professors and administrators. Did it really reflect what you were capable of doing at that time?

Read more: What does the new UT data say about UTSA graduates?

Game changer

Kay Norman, director of student services at Prairie View A&M University, said one program described by UH staff made her want to rush back to campus and implement a similar program.

The effort, called the Scarlet Seals of Excellence, encourages students to submit a resume, cover letter and personal statement to a panel for a seal that shows competency in marketable skills, including diversity, leadership, personal development and thinking, and communication. After four seals are earned, students can wear a strip of fabric at graduation along with their academic regalia.

Norman said that type of programming is cost-effective, encourages student leadership and integrates career services into campus life.

Student focus on employment outcomes is nothing new, Norman said. But the conversation has shifted. Now, instead of asking what they can do with a certain major, students wonder what skills they will gain, she said.

Thats a game changer, she said.

One challenge universities must overcome is that students most in need of career services likely do not seek out help.

Related: UT releases data on what its grads earn  and what they owe in loans

Eluned Jones, director of student employability at the University of Birmingham, said the U.K. university requires students to answer survey questions on work experience and career goals before they register for classes. This allows the university to identify  and then contact  students who need services, she said.

Ethics component

A second challenge, Gardner said, is that liberal arts faculty often see conversations around degree marketability as an effort to undo them. Speakers on Tuesday spoke to the importance of integrating liberal arts skills into technical courses.

Fred Oswald, a Rice University psychology professor, is helping develop a data science minor at Rice. Along with quantitative skills, data visualization and communications, the degree will teach ethics, he said.

With Cambridge Analytica in the news, thats good timing on our part, he said. We have an ethics component thats totally critical to what were doing.AUSTIN  Four years after refusing to embrace a Mexican-American Studies course in a state with a booming Latino population, the State Board of Education tentatively agreed Wednesday to adopt standards to make the class a statewide high school elective as soon as the 2019-20 school year.

But in a move that sparked a fresh backlash, the board voted to change the programs name to Ethnic Studies: An Overview of Americans of Mexican Descent after one member objected to using hyphenated terms to describe people.

I find hyphenated Americanism to be divisive, said member David Bradley, a conservative Republican from Beaumont who proposed the name change.

Several Democrats spoke against switching the name, including board member Lawrence Allen Jr. of Houston.

So many people cant embrace just the concept of just America by itself because it seems to be that America is exclusively for whites, said Allen, who is African-American.

The board approved the name change on a 10-4 vote, with four of five Democrats opposed.

The board then voted 14-1 for proposed standards for an elective modeled after a Mexican-American studies course currently taught in Houston. Allen was the lone vote against. The board also approved a motion to establish a process for approving more elective courses in ethnic studies.

But board members who want to keep the name said the fight isnt over.

The board will revisit the standards in June and solicit public comment over the summer before giving final approval to the standards, likely in September.

Schools can offer the class now, but the state provides no standards for teachers to use in creating classes. The boards approval of the course may make it easier for teachers and superintendents to establish the class at their schools.

Overall, the day was a win for people who want schools to offer students more opportunity to connect to Mexican-American history, said Emilio Zamora, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin who testified before the board. Changing the name is an example of the board wanting to have the last say, he said.

They just dont want to grant us anything, said Zamora.

Donna Bahorich, a Houston Republican who chairs the board, said the state needs elective classes like this to help connect underserved students with their American story.

But she is torn over the name. These are American kids and we want them to be deeply American, she said but added that she wants to hear what people in the community think. If people dont like the name, they should tell their State Board of Education member, she said.

More than 30 teachers, students and advocates gave impassioned speeches to state education officials early in the day, urging them to embrace standards for the elective, which would provide a road map for schools and show textbook publishers theres a market for books on Mexican-American studies. No one testified against the MAS course.

Many speakers said adopting the class is important for other reasons: to promote equality, help Mexican-American students understand their identity and history, and teach all students about the contributions Mexican-Americans and their culture have made.

Its changed my life. Its given me a chance to identify myself and see who I am, said Clara Perez, 15, fighting back tears. She took a MAS class last year at KIPP Camino Academy in San Antonio.

My people, Mexicans, are seen as less because of our classrooms. You dont see our history in our classroom, she said. My people  should not be seen as the bad people. They should be seen as people.

Standing at the lectern with a large blue and red native Aztec headdress, Laura Yohualtlahuiz Rios-Ramirez lamented that it took her until college to gain an understanding of her cultural identity.

We just feel cheated we didnt learn this sooner, she said.

Board member Pat Hardy, a Republican from Fort Worth, bristled at the testimony. While she said some people had compelling testimony, to try and bully the board into doing something because they feel like theyve been downtrodden kind of bugs me, she told reporters after the testimony.

The Latino population is booming in Texas, with 52 percent of the states 5.4 million school-age children coming from Mexican or Latino backgrounds.

The State Board of Education opted four years ago not to establish official standards for a MAS course, leading teachers and researchers to build a road map for the class on their own from scratch.

Instead of approving the elective in 2014, the politically polarized board asked for MAS textbook proposals. That led to a controversy over an error-ridden book that referred to Mexicans as lazy and was ultimately rejected by the board. In all, the board rejected the only two book proposals publishers proposed.

Texas has a sad and tortured past of having to be here at venues like this at every critical juncture to argue for facts, to argue for history, to argue for inclusion and to argue for the value and the beauty of diversity, Rep. Celia Israel, an Austin Democrat who belongs to the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, told a crowd of people gathered to rally for the standards before the board meeting.

Advocates for the class say adopting official state standards will help students from Mexican and Latino backgrounds perform better in school by having them connect with stories of people with similar backgrounds. Research out of Arizona has shown students who take MAS courses have higher graduation rates and score better on standardized tests.

The story of Texas has left a lot of people out, and I think this that this an opportunity for the board to put those diverse stories into those classrooms so students see people who are like them in our history and understand how those people have shaped the state that we have today, said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, a liberal-leaning watchdog group.

The lack of textbooks or approved education standards hasnt stopped Houston Independent School District and other schools from teaching Mexican-American studies. The group proposed the state standards the board is expected to give final approval to on Friday.

Advocates say Texas would be the second state to adopt the elective. Arizona had offered the course for years, although the Legislature there banned the course because it was designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group. Late last year, a federal judge permanently barred the state from banning the class.Former U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman  a political maverick once viewed as a champion of right-wing causes  was convicted Thursday by a federal jury of masterminding a wide-ranging fraud scheme that diverted $1.25 million in charitable donations from wealthy conservative philanthropists to cover personal expenses and campaign debts.

After deliberating more than 15 hours over three days, the jury found Stockman guilty on 23 counts of mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, making false statements to the Federal Elections Commission and 11 counts of money laundering. The jury found him not guilty on one count of wire fraud.

Stockman, 61, of Clear Lake, who served two separate terms as a Republican congressman from different districts, showed now reaction to the jurys verdict. His wife, Patti, watched from the courtroom, as did U.S. Attorney Ryan Patrick.

Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal ruled that Stockman was a flight risk and she ordered him taken into custody by U.S. marshals. Stockman could face up to 20 years in prison on each fraud charge. Sentencing is set for Aug. 17.

Two former Stockman aides who pleaded guilty to participating in the scheme were among those who testified against the former congressman, who made an unsuccessful run in 2014 for the U.S. Senate against Republican incumbent John Cornyn.

The jury of seven women and five men in Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthals court heard testimony over three weeks from 39 witnesses and reviewed thousands of pages of documents, tracking donations through bank accounts, campaign finance reports, texts, emails and other correspondence.

Prosecutors presented a meticulously documented case, featuring flow charts and canceled checks, to illustrate how the two-time Republican lawmaker funneled charitable donations through a series of sham nonprofit organizations and shell bank accounts to spend on an array of personal expenses that included his brothers homemade Advent books, a dolphin watching trip and an amateur spy operation that trailed a perceived GOP rival around the statehouse in Austin.

The verdict drew a quick response from the Harris County Republican Party, which noted in an emailed statement that Stockman represented his constituents with genuine care and concern.

His conviction today in court is a sad and unfortunate conclusion to his life of public service, according to the email. Our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family as they deal with this challenging circumstance.

Read more: Former congressman blames "shadow government" for arrest on federal charges

Stockman's defense lawyers told the jury he never set out to commit fraud. They said two conservative donors did not care what he did with their contributions, they simply wanted to finance a politician with no strings attached.

The former legislator was arrested in March of 2017 at George Bush Intercontinental Airport as he was boarding a flight to the United Arab Emirates. He was charged in a 28-count indictment that accused him of committing wire and mail fraud, money laundering, federal election law violations and lying on tax return between 2010 and 2014.

Federal charges were also brought against top aides Jason Posey, 47, of Tupelo, Miss. and Thomas Dodd, 38, of Houston, who both pleaded guilty and gave extensive testimony against their former boss.

After his first appearance in federal court, Stockman told reporters he had been targeted for speaking out against the IRS, and was a victim of the deep state that allegedly exists within federal agencies.

Stockman served in Congress from 1995 to 1997 in District 9 representing an area that stretched from Jefferson, Port Arthur, Beaumont and Galveston to parts of Harris and Brazoria counties. He was defeated in a bid for re-election in 1996.

In a second term in Congress set to run from 2013 to 2015, he won election to the newly created 36th District, which included portions of Harris County including Stockmans then hometown of Friendswood as well as Liberty, Chambers, Polk, Tyler, Hardin, Jasper, Newton and Orange counties. During that term, he aligned with tea party Republicans and opposed the Affordable Care Act, the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and introduced legislation to repeal gun bans at schools.

However, his term was cut short when he mounted a failed primary challenge against Republican Sen. John Cornyn in 2014, one of a number of unsuccessful political campaigns.

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, called the case a cautionary tale for politicians who might try to use their authority to gain political power.

Steve Stockman was on track to be among the next generation of conservative leaders in Texas, formerly a rising star on the right undone by the hubris of ambition and selfish behavior, he said. The House of Cards style antics will almost always catch up to elected officials. No one is above the law and the number of indicted current and former elected officials proves that.

Witnesses in the corruption trial included wealthy Chicago-area Republican supporter Richard Uihlein, who gave $800,000 to nonprofit groups Stockman had helped set up. Uihlein said the donations were intended to pay for a massive tabloid mailing and for the rehabilitation of Freedom House, a live-in training center for conservative Capitol Hill interns.

But the tabloid mailing was directed by Stockman, meaning Uihleins expensidures was not independent as Stockmans team had represented, witnesses said. Stockman spent the leftover mailer funds on a laundry list of unrelated projects, including a number of personal expenses, and on campaign debt. The Freedom House project never materialized.

Testimony from the two aides was critical to the case. Dodd, who dealt with major donors, told jurors that he knew the money was intended for charitable purposes, and he also knew that Stockman was spending it on other expenses. He said he personally helped make those money transfers and Stockman used some of it to pay off Dodds credit card debt.

Posey testified that he had known Stockman since 1996 and worked for him on and off for decades. During Stockmans successful 2012 congressional campaign and failed 2014 bid for Senate, Posey said he helped filter charitable donations made to conservative nonprofits and set up sham charities and associated bank accounts.

Posey said he wrote checks, set up bank accounts and moved the money, as directed by Stockman, into shadowy charities, including one called the Egyptian American Friendship Society and another entitled Life Without Limits, supposedly dedicated to helping people recover from trauma, so the spending would look like it was coming from charitable groups.

While volunteering, Posey said he camped out for an extended period with several other campaign workers at an old motorcycle shop in Webster that served as Stockmans headquarters. Later, he and other Stockman aides lived at a church camp.

Related: Stockman fraud case not 'about fur coats, Rolexes and Mercedes Benzes,' lawyer says

Posey testified that he and the former congressman knew they were breaking the law by concealing the source of the funds. But Stockman instructed him to push forward with his plans to spend charitable money on hotel rooms, plane flights and burner phones for secret conversations, and he complied.

Posey testified that he and Dodd wrote checks with the charitable funds, donating $15,000 back to Stockmans fledgling campaign fund. Both men later agreed to have their parents names attached to their donations, after Stockmans accountant warned that their contributions would stand out as red flags on the campaigns federal election filings, since both men worked for Stockman.

The contributions did catch the eye of journalists and federal investigators, at which point Stockman and his staff began filing amended campaign reports, witnesses have said.

The defense called just two witnesses who were both peripheral to the prosecutions allegations. Stockman did not testify on his own behalf.

Gabrielle Banks covers federal court for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send her tips at gabrielle.banks@chron.com.Two Bexar County deputies have been indicted on accusations of assaulting an inmate they had been called in to subdue, Sheriff Javier Salazar announced Wednesday.

In addition, Salazar said they may face more charges in connection with allegations that they retaliated against fellow deputies during the investigation.

Salazar said during a news conference that deputies Michael Gomez, 30, and Joseph Anthony Hernandez, 26, each has been indicted on a charge of official oppression.

On June 6, Salazar said an inmate, whom he did not identify, was involved in a disturbance with another deputy at the Bexar County Jail when Gomez and Hernandez were called to subdue him. The two deputies are part of the Special Emergency Response Team, or SERT.

The inmate had been put on the floor in a position of disadvantage and was in the process of surrendering his hands to be handcuffed, Salazar said, when one of the deputies struck the inmate several times with a stick, injuring him.

The sheriff didnt identify which deputy hit the man.

Salazar said the other deputy punched the inmate in the face after he was handcuffed and was being led out of the cell.

The man, who was 25 years old when the incident occurred, was in jail on a charge of assault on a peace officer, the sheriff said. Salazar said his injuries were not severe.

People are entrusted to our custody, and they wont be treated in this manner, Salazar said.

The man since has been released, officials said.

Gomez and Hernandez were placed on administrative duty and gave investigators their account of the incident.

But two other detention officers who were on the same team came forward to tell investigators what they saw, Salazar said.

They believed it was a violation of the law, he said.

Salazar said Gomez and Hernandez retaliated against their colleagues, starting with verbal threats.

In one incident, Salazar said one of the deputies was working in a master control room when he closed a door on a detention officer he believed had reported him to investigators.

This job is hard enough without somebody like that coming in and making it harder, Salazar said.

The sheriff said hes expecting additional charges to be filed in connection with the accusations of retaliation.

The public integrity unit, formed by Salazar at the start of his administration to look into crimes committed by public officials, is handling the investigation.

SERT teams are comprised of six highly trained detention officers. When they respond to an incident, four deputies are tasked with handling the out-of-control inmate. The fifth deputy coordinates their efforts while a sixth deputy traditionally has been assigned to hold a camera and record the operation from start to finish.

Since the incident, all SERT officers have been wearing body cameras as the department tests the devices, Salazar said. The Sheriffs Office still is searching for a body camera company, he added.

This incident in particular was one of the major driving factors behind my wanting to put body cameras on the SERT team, Salazar said. We want to have full coverage of an incident like that when it occurs.

Gomez served more than three years as a deputy until he resigned March 30. Hernandez is two-year veteran of the force and has been on administrative leave since Jan. 11.

This isnt the first time Salazar has had to hold a news conference over the conduct of SERT members.

In August, seven deputies were placed on leave after a hazing incident at a house party that involved county-issued handcuffs, shackles and a stun gun and apparently occurred in the presence of a child.

Gomez was one of those deputies.

In addition, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards a week earlier, on April 4, issued a notice that the jail was in noncompliance. The finding was part of the states report on the factors that led to the March 2 escape of three murder suspects. Salazar said they have since addressed the two problems listed in the notice, which included having too many inmates in an exercise area and not enough contraband checks.

The day after the report, Salazar said deputies had foiled another escape attempt. That evening, Salazar announced in a news release that Deputy Chief Laura Balditt, assistant jail administrator, was retiring after 31 years with the office.

jbeltran@express-news.netThe Trump administration has suspended funding for legal orientation programs at immigration detention centers, a decision that could exacerbate court backlogs and undermine due process, immigration experts said Wednesday.

The Department of Justice has halted millions in grant funding for the orientation programs, which are sometimes the only legal advice immigrants facing deportation get before they appear in front of a judge, according to the organization that administers the grants.

Immigration proceedings are civil matters, and immigrants are not given the court-appointed counsel offered in criminal court.

Justice Department officials didnt respond to a request for comment Wednesday, but the Washington Post reported that the program was temporarily suspended to conduct an audit.

The nonprofit American Gateways will have to end its legal orientation program at three San Antonio-area detention centers, including some of the largest such facilities in the country.

At the end of April, American Gateways will stop providing legal orientation at the 1,900-bed South Texas Detention Complex as well as the 830-bed and 2,400-bed family detention centers in Karnes and Dilley, said Griselda Barrera, the director of the organizations San Antonio office.

The organization also will stop offering similar orientation programs at the San Antonio immigration court in July. Barrera said the programs were funded with $10 million in Justice Department grants.

The orientation programs explain to immigrants, many of whom particularly in the Pearsall center were picked up in the U.S. interior and may have legal status, what their rights are in immigration court and whether they might be able to stay in the U.S., Barrera said.

Immigrants who have good arguments to stay in the country are referred to pro bono representation. Others are given information about how to collect evidence to represent themselves in court. Those who dont have strong cases are more likely to accept a judges removal order if theyve been advised by a legal professional, Barrera said. In some cases, American Gateways staffers have found that people in detention were U.S. citizens but didnt know it.

Every single day we go, individuals say, Immigration is telling me if I dont sign deportation papers, Ill be waiting here for a year for a judge, and I dont want to be waiting here for a year, because I have family, she said. Were there to shed some light on what the process is. And sometimes that encourages people to continue with their cases and in other cases it helps them go ahead and decide they want to return to their countries.

I think without us being there, theres going to be so much confusion, and were going to go back to the day where (immigration officials) could give any information to these individuals, and theyre going to be making decisions in their cases that are going to hurt them.

The Vera Institute of Justice, which since 2003 has administered the legal orientation grants, which serve more 50,000 people annually in 38 detention centers across the country, said in a statement that past studies have shown the program saves money.

Dana Leigh Marks, an immigration judge who serves as president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said the decision to halt the program will likely increase the backlog in immigration courts. More people facing deportation will now appear in court unaware of their rights, leaving it up to judges to walk them through the process, said Marks, who stressed that she spoke as a representative of the union, not as a DOJ employee.

We have a legal obligation to assure that people are aware of their rights and that they have an opportunity to solicit any immigration benefit they might qualify for under the immigration and nationality laws of our country, Marks said. To have volunteer attorneys available to interview people, to tell them what their rights are, gives them a realistic expectation of whether can obtain some sort of status.

All of those things take a tremendous amount of time to figure out, she added. What is a persons criminal history? What is their immigration history? If you have volunteer lawyers giving these people orientation programs, the judge can ask a few questions and know that options have been explored and move on from there, and thats not the case if a person is unrepresented or hasnt been advised by a legal volunteer.

Vera offers legal orientation services in 10 Texas detention centers, more than any other state. The Rio Grande Valley-based nonprofit South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, which according to Vera provides legal orientation at the East Hidalgo Detention Center in La Villa and the Port Isabel Service Detention Center, didnt respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Sarah Vidal, a private immigration attorney based in Harlingen who previously worked for the organization, said ending the legal orientation program will hurt due process in immigration courts.

Its going to have an enormous, enormous effect on people who are detained, she said. The information provided at know-your-rights presentations is far more extensive than the information provided by the immigration judges. The immigration judge is required to give little talk on rights  but they dont explain the different forms of relief available, how to apply for forms of relief, how to know if youre eligible, what type of evidence to provide, and thats what ProBar does.

Legal orientation programs funnel detainees to pro bono representation, Vidal said. Now, those who might be able to legally stay in the country but cant afford an attorney are less like to be referred to pro bono lawyers, she said.

Jason Buch is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jbuch@express-news.net | @jlbuchAUSTIN  Gov. Greg Abbott staunchly defended the operation of the Texas Enterprise Fund in the face of recent concerns from Joe Straus, saying the House speakers hometown has had the highest approval rate for grants during his tenure as governor.

Straus, R-San Antonio, last month questioned whether the business-development fund actually closes deals as intended, and whether enough consideration has been given to projects outside North Texas.

While its true that San Antonios approval rate is higher, the Dallas-Fort Worth area has received more than three times as much funding and nearly three times as many grants.

Abbott, repeating a point made by his staff immediately after Straus wrote to him about his concerns, noted that unanimous agreement among the speaker, lieutenant governor and governor is required for a grant to be approved.

EARLIER: Speaker Straus concerned about enterprise fund overseen by Gov. Abbott

Of the nearly 50 projects I have submitted for your approval during my time as governor (some of which have not yet been announced), you have only withheld your approval on three projects, Abbott wrote to Straus, leading me to believe your assessment of each of those projects led you to the same conclusion I reached: the applicant represented a successful opportunity to create additional jobs for Texas.

Straus didnt back off his concerns, which included a focus on which projects are considered for grants.

The speaker made very clear that he believes the program needs improvement, Straus spokesman Jason Embry said.

While the review process for grants doesnt include the intended location of a business, Abbott said San Antonio has had the highest approval rate since 2015, at 70 percent.

That approval rating amounted to five grants totaling nearly $9.4 million to GM Financial, W.W. Grainger, Hulu, Ernst & Young, and  in nearby New Braunfels  CGT U.S. Unlimited.

The total for the San Antonio area was part of $70 million spent from the fund to create jobs over the past three years, Abbott told Straus in a letter dated April 4.

EDITORIAL: Abolish the enterprise fund

Abbott took office as governor in January 2015 and is seeking re-election this year.

The Alamo Citys approval rate was followed by 64 percent for applications from nonmetropolitan and rural areas, Abbott wrote.

By contrast, 57 percent of applications from the Dallas-Fort Worth region have resulted in offers of grants since 2015, Abbott said. The region received 14 grants with a total of nearly $37 million, including five in Irving alone.

Abbott said the average approval rate statewide is 53 percent.

In his March letter to Abbott, Straus had cited a Dallas Morning News analysis that found North Texas got $237 million in grant awards between 2004 and early 2017  39 percent of the total allocated. That was $100 million more than distributed in the Houston or Austin region, the newspaper stated.

Since then, this trend has continued, with 10 of the 21 project recommendations provided by your office going to this region, Straus wrote last month.

While companies decide which communities to consider, Abbotts office plays an active role in recruitment and is the initial arbiter of which projects should be considered for Enterprise Fund grants, Straus wrote.

Straus also said many North Texas project recommendations are in the districts of lawmakers who have wanted to eliminate the fund  although he added that politics shouldnt be part of a grant decision.

Abbott said the review process doesnt include legislative districts and that he doesnt advocate for one Texas community over another or allow political calculations to play a role.

Straus also questioned whether some projects fully intended to come to Texas and if receiving additional cash from the state was just an afterthought.

The speaker said awards have been made in recent years to companies with significant numbers of existing employees and capital investment.

Abbott responded that nearly every Fortune 100 company has a Texas presence. But the governor said an award only will be made for new jobs created and new capital investment where a single Texas site is competing with another viable out-of-state option.

READ MORE: Scathing audit rakes governor's office over Texas Enterprise Fund

Straus  a business-aligned Republican who has been at odds with Abbott on a number of issues, and who isnt running for re-election  added in last months letter that he consistently has supported the Enterprise Fund and other programs aimed at job creation and economic development.

He also praised Abbott for implementing recommendations from a 2014 audit that the speaker said had greatly increased transparency in grant awards. But Straus said there are opportunities to make the program work even better.

Besides implementing audit recommendations, Abbott said he had made other moves such as strengthening the grant contract to ensure job-creation commitments are met.

Abbott said the Texas Enterprise Fund helped close the deal on 27 projects in 2015-2017 that made a commitment to more than $820 million in new capital investments and more than 16,000 new, direct jobs.

Abbott said the $70 million from the fund that was invested over the past three years also helped close the deal on the relocation of six corporate headquarters to Texas.

I have stated repeatedly that I view this program as a critical tool in our ability to continue to grow the Texas economy and to grow jobs for Texans all across this great state, and I will work to ensure future Legislatures continue to support this critical economic development program, Abbott wrote.

Dale Craymer, president of the business-based Texas Taxpayers and Research Association, said the Texas Enterprise Fund is an important tool, but by itself is rarely sufficient to sway a project. After all, its a deal closing fund, not a deal making fund.

Property tax abatements are far more important in dollar terms for most projects, Craymer said. The Enterprise Fund, though, gets the governor directly involved in negotiations, who can then close the deal.

Peggy Fikac is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | pfikac@express-news.net | @pfikacWASHINGTON  House Speaker Paul Ryans surprise announcement Wednesday that he wont run for re-election set off a scramble for the top leadership posts in the GOP ranks, a shake-up that could change life for a number of ranking Texas Republicans.

Ryan, 48, a Wisconsin Republican who has served as speaker since late 2015, cited a compelling desire to spend more time with his three teenage children as his reason for retiring after two decades in Congress.

The truth is, it is easy for it to take over everything in your life and you cant just let that happen because there are other things in life that can be fleeting as well: Namely your time as a husband and a father, he told reporters.

Ryan has had a strained relationship with President Donald Trump. Republican efforts failed last year to rescind Obamacare, but the GOP then succeeded in passing the biggest overhaul of the tax system in a generation, which Ryan pointed to as his proudest achievement.

Ryans pending departure  and that of Florida GOP Rep. Dennis Ross announced Tuesday  marked the 24th and 25th retirements of GOP House members this cycle, possibly an indication of Republican concerns about losing control of the chamber, where the party holds a 23-seat majority, after the November elections.

Among those watching his departure closely is House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady of The Woodlands, who has been a close ideological ally of Ryan as his wing man on tax cuts and trade.

Related: Ryan's exit as House Speaker opens leadership hopes for influential Texans

Brady, in his 11th term, is not generally considered a candidate to replace Ryan. But a potential contest between House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and GOP Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana could present the well-liked Texan with a chance to slip into the third leadership spot.

Brady declined to speculate about the change of leadership, saying today is really all about Paul Ryan.

Like many other Republicans, Brady praised Ryans record on getting tax cuts and military spending increases through Congress.

No speaker of the House in history has achieved more in such a short time as Paul Ryan, he said.

A few other Republican committee chairs from Texas also are seen as possible contenders for higher leadership positions. They include the Houston regions Michael McCaul, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Dallas Pete Sessions, who chairs the Rules Committee, and Midlands Mike Conaway, chairman of the Agriculture Committee and the current head of the House panel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

McCaul, a regular TV news show guest, has shown ambition in toying with a possible Senate run. Conaway is considered more comfortable spearheading this years major multiyear farm bill. Sessions, for the time being, faces a spirited re-election battle in a district that fell to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.

At least two other powerful committee chairs from Texas, Lamar Smith of San Antonio and Jeb Hensarling of Dallas, are set to retire this year. One whos not retiring is Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry of Amarillo, though he has gained little national profile.

While Brady is the closest to Ryan, hes seen more as a policy driver than a political player.

If youre looking for a legislative leader, hes a good option, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. If youre looking for a political leader, hes not your best option.

Ryans departure also could be bad news for Brady and others close to the GOP leadership ranks if it signals the ascendancy of the partys hard-right Freedom Caucus, a bloc of three-dozen tea-party-inspired lawmakers who long have been clamoring for more influence in the Republican leadership.

While Brady symbolizes the Chamber of Commerce wing of the GOP, a handful of Texans in the Freedom Caucus represent a group that has been able to exert more rightward pressure on Ryan and his predecessor, former Speaker John Boehner.

In the Houston region, those with the strongest affinity for the Freedom Caucus include Randy Weber of Friendswood, Brian Babin of Woodville, and Louie Gohmert of Tyler. But other than Gohmert, who appears frequently as an outspoken conservative on Fox News, none of those Texans has his own power center in the Republican conference.

Read more: As Ryan retires, here's how previous House speakers left the job

Texas certainly has its share of folks in the Freedom Caucus, but theyre not the leaders of the Freedom Caucus, University of Texas political scholar Sean Theriault said.

The uncertainty surrounding the coming leadership struggle could confer advantages or disadvantages to those already clinging to the rungs of power, depending on who wins. A changing of the guard provides no guarantees.

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said that no matter who wins the battle to succeed Ryan, the basic fault lines in the House will remain the same.

I dont think this really changes the House as an organic whole, he said. You still have the various factions and interest groups, people with different places on the ideological spectrum. Its still going to be, for his successor, a challenging balancing act between sort of the main street Republicans and the Freedom Caucus and everything in-between.

Democrats, meanwhile, sense blood in Ryans departure, which comes in the midst of a difficult midterm election year for Republicans who will be tied to an embattled President Donald Trump.

The fact that youve got a captain of the ship bailing out midway through the sinking of the ship is not a good sign, Rottinghaus said. Even if its not a harbinger of losses in the House, the optics make it look so much worse.

To the extent that Ryans departure might augur poorly for Republicans chances of holding the House in November, it could raise the stakes for several potentially endangered Texas Republicans. Ryan has raised $54 million for the party this cycle, money he is expected to use to boost Republican candidates in competitive races.

Besides Sessions, Houstons John Culberson and San Antonios Will Hurd have been targeted by Democrats because they represent districts that went to Clinton. Democrats believe all three could be vulnerable in a big enough wave election. Two San Antonio Democrats, Gina Ortiz Jones and Rick Trevino, are in a May 22 runoff for the nomination and a chance to face off with Hurd in November.

The blue wave is rising while the Trump Republican Party is in full chaos, Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said. The Republican speaker of the House leaving Congress shows the rats are jumping off the sinking ship.

Brady, Cornyn and other prominent Republicans say theres nothing more to read into Ryans departure besides his stated desire to leave a job he took reluctantly and to now pursue new priorities in his life: his family.

Having been a seat mate with Paul Ryan on Ways and Means together for 16 years, and following him (to chair) the Ways and Means Committee, Brady said, he is exactly who he appears to be, which is an optimistic, bold thinker who cares deeply about his family in Janesville, Wisconsin.

As for the partys future - and his own - Brady demurred repeatedly. Todays all about Speaker Ryan, he said. Hes going to run through the tape. Weve got a strong record to run on in November, and so Im just focused on finishing this year out and preserving this majority.Last month, on the night he was trounced in the Democratic primary, Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood was audibly fazed when asked by a reporter whether he had become a lame-duck DA.

No, LaHood replied. What, are you calling me a lame-duck DA?  Ive never been a lame-duck anything. Im not going to be a lame duck.

Thrown off, perhaps, by the unflattering adjective, LaHood either was in denial about his diminished status or too prideful to see it. Having lost the election, though, LaHood had unavoidably become a lame duck: a once powerful figure in a sudden position of wielding far less influence over others.

This week, LaHood finally seemed to acknowledge his new status. Speaking to San Antonio Express-News Staff Writer Jasper Scherer, LaHood was venting about the hesitation of Bexar County commissioners to fund his legal fees when he goes before the state Commission on Lawyer Conduct for a hearing to decide a misconduct complaint filed against him.

Local attorney Mark Stevens filed the complaint after LaHood allegedly threatened to destroy the legal practice of defense lawyer Joe Gonzales, who later defeated LaHood in the primary. LaHood, as DA, earns a salary of more than $205,000 plus a $9,000 auto allowance.

If I would have won the primary, they would have been tripping over themselves paying for it, LaHood told Scherer.

Related: For LaHood, pride came before the fall

The chief of the civil division for the district attorneys office recommended last month that taxpayers foot an anticipated bill of $10,000 to $15,000 for outside legal counsel to defend LaHood.

Before commissioners voted on the issue Tuesday, LaHoods chosen counsel, local attorney Wade Shelton, offered to represent the DA even if the Commissioners decide not to pay, according to a memo from Assistant District Attorney Ed Schweninger to Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff.

That gave commissioners an opening to skirt the decision by approving Shelton to defend LaHood on the condition that he do it pro bono.

As soon as (Commissioner) Paul (Elizondo) made that motion, I almost heard a collective sigh of relief from my colleagues, Commissioner Kevin Wolff said on Wednesday.

And yet, this still was not good enough for LaHood. Perhaps, as he begins to recognize his diminished power as a public official, the DA has not yet accepted it.

He should; its the flip-side to the power LaHood wielded with an iron fist four years ago.

In December 2014, LaHood had just defeated former District Attorney Susan Reed, whose top lieutenant, Cliff Herberg, had little chance of keeping his job. Herberg and LaHood had clashed often during the contentious race.

Herberg, though, wanted to continue working for the county in some capacity. He needed just 14 more months to collect his retirement. At the time, Wolff was trying to find someone to coordinate the countys legislative agenda, and he was feeling pretty positive about Herberg landing the new job.

As DA-elect, LaHood wasnt having it. He made sure Herberg didnt land at the county.

LaHood made it pretty clear that hed be offended if we put Cliff in that position, Wolff said at the time, adding, Nobody wants to piss off the incoming DA.

Now, LaHood is the outgoing DA. And his reversal of fortune was only compounded last month when Gonzales stated publicly that he did not believe county funds should be used for LaHoods legal defense.

Read more: LaHood's infamous temper on display at town halls

After all, Gonzales will be the incoming DA should he prevail in November.

Its not (LaHood). This is our system, Wolff said on Wednesday. You dont want to piss off any incoming elected.  He shouldnt take it so personally.

Maybe, just dont use the word lame.

Or duck, for that matter.

bchasnoff@express-news.netThe Greenwich Historical Society will be the host of an outstanding fundraiser  an evening with Douglas Brinkley, CNN presidential historian and best-selling author. The $500 per person dinner and lecture will take place Wednesday, April 18, at 6 p.m. at a private home.

Douglas is also a professor of history at Rice University and co-author of JFK: A Vision for America, which tells the story of President John Kennedys life and presidency and depicts his compelling vision for the country. Brinkley has also written books on Theodore Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. CNN said Brinkley is a man who knows more about the presidency than any human being alive.

His 2016 bestseller Rightful Heritage chronicles Franklin Delano Roosevelts passion and drive, and analyzes the tension between business and nature with respect to our natural resources.

That speaks well for the upcoming lecture, which is an example of the outstanding events that the Historical Society gives us. I, for one, am looking forward to the evening in a big way. For information, contact Katrina Dorsey at 203-869-6899, ext. 15, or get a ticket online at www.greenwichhistory.org/adult.

All proceeds will go to the Fund for Program Enrichment as the Greenwich Historical Society completes a major expansion and renovation project.

As I sit at my desk and watch as winter fades, it seems that it is finally time to start thinking about springtime events.

The Greenwich Riding and Trails Association will hold its fabulous Horse Show and elegant country luncheon on June 10 at the beautiful Milliken estate on Pierson Drive.

Amazingly, the Horse Show will be the 97th show put on by the GRTA. The tradition began in 1914 at the Nutbourne Farm in Port Chester, with a luncheon held under a large tent on the show grounds.

In 1921, the show moved to Yale Farms off John Street, and then in 1925 to the Greenwich Polo Club grounds on Quaker Ridge Road. The show relocated in 1948 to the Blind Brook Turf and Polo Club on Anderson Hill Road in Purchase, N.Y., before returning to Quaker Ridge in 1950, and then back to Blind Brook for the 38th running in 1954. It was then held at the William Heron property on Lower Cross Road. When that space was sold, it went to Coker Farm in Bedford, thanks to Judy Richter.

This show, as well as the Day in the Country show held in the fall, arrived at its current location at the Milliken family property, bringing it full circle in 1982. Their property was once part of the original Yale Farms, where the show began in Greenwich in 1921.

I applaud the work of the GRTA and other organizations devoted to keeping as much land open as possible. These days, when I dare to walk on Riversville Road, even at lunchtime, the number of trucks is appalling. And I think of what is going on at North Street, Round Hill Road, and other roads, as trucks, unfortunately, bring whats needed to the many new houses being built in our backcountry.

I enjoyed hearing that close to town has become most popular for new homes, which makes me delighted.

Greenwich native Norma Bartol, a former Greenwich Time reporter and columnist, lives in the backcountry.WASHINGTON  Sen. Chris Murphy attempted to pin down President Trumps nominee for secretary of state, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, on whether Pompeo agrees with Trumps poisonous attacks on special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Trump-Russia connections.

Pompeo, Trumps choice to replace fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, dodged the question but promised that, if confirmed, he would continue to cooperate with the probe.

Murphy, D-Conn., is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which held a confirmation hearing on Pompeo on Thursday.

Murphy and other senators on the GOP-controlled committee peppered Pompeo with questions on a variety of foreign policy topics: consulting Congress before a possible strike on Syria; a nuclear North Korea and whether the Iran nuclear agreement should be scrapped.

A hardline conservative while representing a Kansas district in the House, Pompeo also faced questions on same-sex marriage, and whether he considered gay sex a perversion.

But it was the questions on Mueller that seemed most timely, given Trumps continuing grenade lobs against the special counsel on Twitter.

Before Murphy, Pompeo had similarly ducked a question from Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., on his views of the Mueller probe, saying hed been interviewed by Mueller and was a participant in the investigation.

During his first round of questions, Murphy pressed Pompeo on whether he agreed with Trump that the Mueller investigation was, as Trump phrased it, an attack on our country and an attack on what we all stand for.

I think it would be troubling if you couldnt say here today that you dont believe that the Mueller investigation is an attack on America, Murphy said.

But Pompeo wouldnt take the bait.

The West Point and Harvard law grad took up the same line of defense, saying hed cooperated fully with the Mueller probe as CIA director and did not want to become further enmeshed in it.

Its a minefield, Senator Murphy, he said. And I want to be on the far side of the line with making sure that I dont create challenges for the special counsels office.

Murphy did not like the answer.

By refusing to condemn the attacks  you are frustrating the work of the special counsel because youre associating yourself with some very poisonous political attacks, Murphy said.

Mueller is investigating whether Trumps 2016 presidential campaign had connections to Russian efforts to diminish Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and swing the election to Trump. On a referral from Mueller, FBI agents in New York raided the office and hotel room of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for information on hush payments to two women who had affairs with Trump.

Murphy appeared to be leaning toward a no vote on Pompeos confirmation, but after the hearing he said he was undecided.

Im going to think seriously about my vote on Pompeos nomination, but there was little in todays hearing that addressed my existing concerns, Murphy said.

dan@hearstdc.comby Ryan Patti | Jazz Correspondent | Thu, Apr 12th 12:15am EDT

Hassan Whiteside totaled 10 points (5-for-16 from the field), 12 boards, two assists and two blocks in 22 minutes during the Heat 116-109 overtime win versus Toronto.

Fantasy Impact:

Whiteside has recorded multiple blocks in six of seven games since returning from his hip injury. He only has two double-doubles in that span, however that's largely due in part to his lack of playing time. The big man's minute count should go up in the playoffs, so don't be afraid to stream him in all DFS formats.Appropriately enough, probably the first patent for a form of barbed wire was issued to Leonce Grassin-Baledans in 1860 in France, where the wire became a metaphor for the stalemate between the Germans and the Allies in World War I.

However, an Illinois farmer named Joseph F. Glidden is usually given credit for inventing barbed wire due to his 1874 patent for two twisted strands of wire that held a series of double, sharpened barbs in place.

Glidden meant his wire to keep cattle in or out, and after a few pokes from the sharpened barbs, most critters learned to respect the stuff.

Forged in war

It didnt take long for military men to realize that enemy soldiers probably had even thinner skin than most animals and that barbed wire should be just as effective against infantry and cavalry troops as on cattle.

British Army manuals of the 1880s told how to string barbed wire around perimeters and the wicked stuff was used in the Spanish-American, Boer, and Russo-Japanese wars around the turn of the 20th century.

An article in a 1918 issue of The Hardware Trade Journal tells the story under the headline: This Cruel Wars Abuse of Our Old Friend Bob Wire.'

After telling a little about Glidden and his invention, the article goes on as follows.

Quite naturally some animals enclosed by Gliddens fencing gashed themselves on the barbs. Just as naturally, men and boys tried to climb over or under those fences and had their clothes and flesh torn.

These wounds upon man and beast and the suddenness with which Gliddens barbs halted all living things came to the attention of military men, and the barbed wire entanglement of which we now read almost every day in the war news was born.

And it may be said right here that soldiers who have been halted by wire entanglements while making a charge say the devil never invented anything nastier.

Strategies

Soon, military engineers from armies all over the world were hard at work designing the most effective means of deploying barbed wire, most often as a defensive measure.

Broad (30 to 100 feet wide or more), zig-zagging belts of intertwined wire in front of a defensive position interfered mightily with an enemy assault; the attacking troops had to stop and take precious time to cut their way through the wicked stuff.

Of course, during this delay, those troops were perfect targets for rifle and artillery fire, and it was here that the machine gun really came into its own, providing covering fire for barbed wire barriers.

Often the wire would be laid out to funnel masses of charging troops into kill zones that were covered by pre-aimed artillery or machine gun fire.

One account of an attack on the first day of the battle of the Somme by a Newfoundland battalion tells the story:

Those Newfoundlanders who did reach their own wire  four well-laid belts in all  had to follow zigzag lanes between pre-cut gaps, which had been exactly pinpointed by German machine-gunners.

Those who managed to get through these gaps had to cross five hundred yards of open ground exposed to German positions. Those few Newfoundlanders who reached the German wire were shot down as they tried to cut their way through it with their wire-cutters.

That first day at Somme cost the British Army 19,240 soldiers killed and over 36,000 wounded  mind boggling!

Hard for horses, too

For generations, armies had relied on horse-mounted troops to reconnoiter enemy territory and to attack fortified positions en masse, providing the shock and awe we heard so much about a few years ago at the beginning of the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein.

Any experienced horseman knows that if one of these animals would run headlong into a mess of barbed wire it would panic and thrash around until it seriously injured itself, and its rider.

Fighting the wire

During World War I, various measures were developed to neutralize barbed wire entanglements. The Bangalore torpedo was a series of 5-foot lengths of pipe full of explosives that were screwed together and with a rounded nose at the far end were pushed under a wire entanglement. When exploded, a five-foot-wide path was cleared through the wire.

Various types of mats were thrown across the wire, allowing troops to walk over them, and instances were even reported of brave soldiers lying down across the wire and their buddies walked across their backs.

The final solution, however, was the tank; with its armored skin it was impervious to machine gun and small arms fire, and its wide tracks would ride right over and crush the wire.

Winston Churchill, who had served briefly in France as a battalion commander and was now part of the British government, said in a speech in 1914 that there must be some alternative to chewing barbed wire in Flanders, and he helped push forward the tank program.

Fencing people

The Great War finally ended, and bobbed wire returned to its peacetime duties of keeping in cattle, but wait! It wasnt long before our barbed friend was being used extensively by the Nazis to keep the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners they rounded up during the 1930s and 40s in concentration camps.

In this country, although they had the slightly different name of internment camps, thousands of Japanese-Americans were treated to the sight of barbed wire fences around themselves during the early years of World War II.

Todays fencing

Barbed wire has had a checkered history and is still around in quantity, although it has largely fallen out of favor with farmers for containing cattle. Several high-tensile wire strands, with one or two of those strands electrified, supported on treated wooden posts has become probably the most popular cattle fencing today.

So, although the cattlemen of the Old West hated barbed wire, they didnt hate it nearly as much as the Tommies, Poilus, Soldaten, and Doughboys of 100 years ago.Who knew that the best view of 21st-century agriculture would be from Darrin Qualmans farm office near Dundurn, Saskatchewan?

And yet, there it is, charted by Qualman, a data bloodhound who thinks graphically but writes plainly.

The long-time researcher for Canadas National Farmers Union appeared on my radar in February 2017 with a blog post titled Agribusiness takes all: 90 years of Canadian net farm income.

Farm income

In it, Qualman draws a bright blue/green/red chart that tracks the key elements of Canadas farm economy from 1926 to 2016; blue is farmers expenses, green is net farm income, and red is negative farm income.

The unmistakable feature of the graph is how its blue area  the color depicting the amounts [farmers] pay to input manufacturers  has grown from a small area that once steadily corresponded to net income into a yawning mouth that now devours nearly every cent of Canadian farm income.

In fact,  in the 32-year period from 1985 to 2016, inclusive, agribusiness corporations captured 98 percent of farmers revenues  $1.32 trillion out of $1.35 trillion[to make] themselves the primary beneficiaries of the vast food wealth produced by Canadian farms. They have left taxpayers to backfill farm incomes; approximately $100 billion has been transferred [through government payments] to farmers since 1985.

While that could be used as evidence to launch an indictment of Big Agbiz, Qualman uses it as a crowbar to pry farmers to consider alternatives to todays high-input, high-output, no-profit farm and ranch models.

Farm inputs

In subsequent blog posts, this avid observer of the big picture notes that the last century of agriculture  the century that brought high costs and low-to-no profits  is an outlier to the 100 centuries of agriculture that preceded it.

For 99 percent of the time that agriculture has existed there were few farm inputs, no farm-input industries, and little talk of high input costs,' notes Qualman in a January 2018 post.

The change, admittedly, has made todays agriculture high-output. But this last fact must be understood in context: the incredible food-output tonnage of modern agriculture is largely a reflection of the megatonnes of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals we push into the system.

Nitrogen fertilizer illustrates this process. To produce, transport, and apply one tonne of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer requires an amount of energy equal to almost two tonnes of gasoline.

Energy

This has made modern agricultureincreasinglya system for turning fossil fuel Calories into food Calories. And not efficiently, either.

Before petroleum, every unit of energy put into food production yielded five to 10 units of energy in terms of food, Qualman relates, quoting other research.

Today, however, (O)ur modern food system returns one unit of energy for every 13.3 invested. That energy return on investment works out to be an astonishingly tiny 0.081.

Given that diminished ratio, little in todays agriculture is either environmentally or economically sustainable.

But, he adds quickly, relax, Were not going back to horses.

Instead, Its time to question the input-maximizing production systems agribusiness corporations have created, and to explore new methods of low-input, low-energy, low-emission production.

Organic

A low-input, low-energy system, Qualman explains in an April 3 telephone interview, does not mean a stampede to organic farming. But it does mean, for example, that big, non-organic farms will likely need to learn the low-input fertilizer methods that organic farms have already figured out and use.

This cross-pollination between high-input/low-input farming, he offers, will be necessary if everyone in todays agriculture grasps the nettle to harness the change that is coming, ready-or-not, before it harnesses us.

Equally important is that We can do this, he adds wryly, because weve done it before.

Change

We have. In fact, weve changed from horses to tractors, from open-pollinated seeds to GMOs, from grandpas pencil to GPS. More recent changes have featured the cross-pollination that Qualman suggests; yesterdays windmills are todays wind turbines and every sunbaked acre can now grow electricity from solar cells.

Indeed, change is what farmers and ranchers do. We also know that its better to drive change before change drives us.I put a lot of value in fishing in general and even more value in learning how to do it right.

Not just to fish, but to develop the knowledge and skills to add a higher level of accomplishment and a deeper appreciation for the art as well as the function of gear and tackle as well as the details and techniques of lure presentation.

If that sounds like a lot of hooey, youll never be good at fly fishing, the single method of fishing that allows an angler to fully dive into the sport.

No kidding. To grasp the full depth of fly fishing, one must create the lures, develop, appreciate, and perhaps build the tackle, and of course, learn how to cast a lure that at times weighs less than a house fly.

The flies, or lures if you will, are constructed of feathers, threads, and strands of fur. For the most part, they range in size from small to smaller.

The combination of function and art are what fly tying is all about. Good flies look very much like the insect or bug they are intended to imitate.

Thats why fish eat them. And thats why fly fishers make them; one at a time and each one a matter of pride.Then there is the line, the rod and a simple hand-spooling real. Thats about it, sans a tweed hat and wicker creel of course.

Go small, four and five weight outfits, matched and light, just right for pan fish and trout. Or go big like seven, eight, or even nine weight for bass, steelhead or other muscle fish.

Course

Want to know more about fly fishing? Learn how to do it and try it out by attending a three-session beginners course offered by the Ohio Department of National Resources Division of Wildlife and members of the Clear Fork Chapter of Trout Unlimited.

Attendees can expect an introduction to the sport of fly fishing, a fly tying workshop, and best yet, a day on the Clear Fork of the Mohican River near Loudonville, Ohio.

This unique opportunity is the perfect time to try out new gear and new fishing challenges with expert guidance and hands-on experience.

No need to run out to the store either, because all gear and supplies will be provided. Session one will be April 19 at the Akron Division of Wildlife headquarters from 6-9 p.m.

Session two at the same site and time May 1. Session three will be on the water May 6 from 2-7 p.m.

Contact Joe Ferrara at the Division of Wildlife Akron office at 330-245-3003 to register. The fly fishing program is limit to the first 20 to register.

Hiking update

Appalachian Trail thru-hiker David Defer has reported his north-bound progress and it appears that he is well into the hike and making excellent headway.

Recall that Defer started his 2,000-mile hike just a few weeks ago, walking away from Georgias Springer Mountain. Right now, Defer is on one side or the other of the 350 miles mark, straddling the North Carolina and Tennessee state line.

He has joined a small group of like-minded trekkers and said that he is enjoying every step of the journey.Its a little early to hear bullfrogs and toads, but wood frogs always get a head start on spring. As soon as ice and snow melt, they emerge from woodland leaf litter and sing.

A wood frogs voice is more duck-like than frog-like.

A group always reminds me of a flock of quacking mallards. Wood frogs are active by day and lead solitary lives, except during the brief mating season, which has already begun.

They can grow to a length of three inches, but most are smaller. The best field mark is a dark mask that widens from nose to shoulder.

Otherwise, a wood frogs tan body blends in perfectly with the leaf litter on the forest floor. When air temperatures reach 50 degrees, males move to small ponds and even small depressions that collect snow melt and runoff.

Females arrive

Here they sing, and within a day or two, curious females arrive. Females lay as many as 700 eggs, which the males fertilize as females release them. Often many breeding adults visit these sites where masses of thousands of eggs are possible.

After about a week, the egg mass flattens out, allowing it to rest on the surface of the water. Individual eggs consist of small black spheres (the embryos) surrounded by a clear gelatinous mass. They incubate in the water for up to a month, though hatching depends on temperature.

At 45 degrees, for example, eggs hatch in about 20 days. Eggs in the center of the mass have an advantage that may explain the rush to breed. The temperature in the middle of an egg mass can be as much as 12 degrees warmer than ambient temperature, so those eggs hatch sooner than those on the perimeter.

Therefore, centrally located eggs hatch first. Wood frog tadpoles begin life less than a quarter-inch long and can reach a length of two inches over the next three months. Then they transform into adult frogs, which require two years to reach sexual maturity.

Under rocks

Red-backed salamanders are another amphibian that can be found in early spring. They spend about 90 percent of their time under rocks, logs, and leaf litter, so they are seldom seen  unless you look for them.

Flip rocks and roll logs when you walk in the woods (be sure to return them to their original position), and youll almost always find a few red-backed salamanders. Population densities of red-backed salamanders can range from 800 to 8,000 per acre.

In some Appalachian forests, the biomass of red-backed salamanders exceeds that of all the birds and mammals that occupy the same area. Red-backed salamanders measure three to four inches from snout to tip of tail and are found from Minnesota eastward to the Maritime Canadian provinces and south to North Carolina.

Curiously, they belong to a family of lungless salamanders. They respire directly across their moist skin. Because red-backs are so abundant, they play an important role in forest food webs.

Theyre active predators and eat just about anything they can catch. Their menu includes ants, termites, beetles, earthworms, spiders, snails, slugs, mites, springtails, centipedes, and millipedes. One study estimated that red-backs eat nearly _-million prey items per acre per year.

Food for others

On the other hand, red-backs are also important food for small forest snakes, shrews, voles, chipmunks, and birds that forage in the leaf litter. Towhees come immediately to mind.

Surprisingly, red-backed salamanders usually breed in the fall. Though males breed every year, females in the northern part of their range breed every other year. Apparently, it takes northern females more than a full year to generate energy-rich yolks for a full clutch of eggs.

The eggs, usually two to 14, are laid in grape-like clusters in natural cavities and crevices under rocks and logs. They are pale, less than a quarter-inch in diameter, and enveloped in gelatinous material.

The female coils around the eggs to protect them from predators and prevent them from drying out during the six-week incubation period. After hatching, juveniles remain in the nest with the female for several weeks before dispersing.We had a whole string of dogs before. When I was a very little boy we had big bird dogs, then two purebred English smooth-haired fox terriers. None of those other dogs ever came up to this one.

You could talk to him as well as you could to many human beings, and much better than you could to some. He would sit down and look you straight in the eye, a long mesmerizing gaze, and when he understood what you were saying he would turn his head sideways, back and forth, oscillating like a pendulum clock.

 My Dog Skip by Willie Morris

Years ago, my husband made a trip to the Cleveland airport to meet a co-worker and bring home a surprise. We had learned of an Oklahoma family who raised Yorkshire terriers of the tiniest scale.

With a business meeting coming up, he inquired of this co-worker from Oklahoma if she might be willing to be a courier on her next trip to Ohio. When Linda stepped off the plane, he was puzzled.

There was no crate, none of the tell-tale signs of a puppy in tow.

She approached him with a smile, letting him know all was well. She reached into her coat pocket and out came the newest member of our family.

Tiny

Chantico, the tiniest, mightiest little thing, sat in the palm of the hand. She was a lovely, shiny black puppy with touches of caramel brushed here and there.

I gasped in disbelief at how incredibly tiny she was. I named her after the drinking chocolate, sold in a single shot at Starbucks.

This tiny little thing should never have traveled any other way but in the caring hands of someone like Linda, to whom we were grateful.

Her weight a few days later registered at 8 ounces on our veterinarians scale. She was spunky, but when she wasnt playing or eating, she loved to be held.

Over the years, my family gave me a hard time about suddenly becoming a one-armed worker, because it seemed no matter what I was doing, Tico was tucked in against me, my left hand holding her close.

I have had some great dogs in my life, some intelligent and others who seemed to be greatly lacking in the scholarly department.

Smart

This Yorkie, who eventually tipped the scales at 2 pounds, was not only intelligent but filled to the brim with her own opinion about how things needed to be.

She would listen to conversation, tipping her head, taking it in. If I asked my husband if he would like a glass of milk, she went to the refrigerator well ahead of me, as if to help guide me.

If we mentioned it was time to go to the barn, she tugged on our boot strings.

She went through a time very early on that she didnt feel well, shivering and quivering. Rushing to the veterinarian, fearful of her limp little body that seemed cold to the touch, I knew there was no time to waste.

A blood test showed possible infection with kidney dysfunction. One vet said, I recommend you put her down. Spare yourselves the heartache.

I said I wanted to give her every possible chance. He told me to keep her warm since there just wasnt much to her, and to be sure she got a bit of food fairly often so she didnt fade.

Sweaters

A little dog sweater, they said, was not only a good idea but likely a necessity. This began the sweetest little wardrobe gathering you ever did see.

My daughter bought me a special little purse, designed to carry a dog anywhere. Chantico would have been lost inside the thing, so that became her closet filled with extra-extra small sweaters of all colors.

The challenge was to find sweaters small enough. It wasnt long until Tico began searching through that purse each morning, plucking out a certain sweater, bringing it to me as she walked backwards to drag the thing along.

It was the most entertaining thing any dog of mine has ever done. She showed off this skill to disbelieving friends, winning everyone over.

Sick

A second relapse of weakness prompted me to reach out to a scientific scholar friend near Chicago who believed kidney dysfunction could mean ehrlichiosis, a tick-borne disease the mother may have carried.

Her written studies helped convince my regular vet to try it. It perked her up and restored her appetite.

This life-saving information carried our sweet pup through many years with us.

Full of life

Tico spent her days chasing bugs and barn cats if given the chance and trying hard to snag a ball when my kids played catch. She thought my daughter lived just to toss a dog toy for her to retrieve.

She would stand up to dogs far bigger and was the spunkiest of them all.

As bedtime neared, Tico would search me out and stare at me, forcing eye contact. If I didnt catch on, she would walk to the bottom of the stairs and let out a single tiny bark.

When my great-niece Brynn began battling bedtime, I used Tico to make a point. After explaining how important it was for this small dog to get plenty of sleep, I asked for Brynns help.

Lets put her pajamas on and tell her its time to get ready for bed. Brynn lit up, eager to choose the right jammies.

Could you please tell her its time to go to bed? I asked.

Brynn grinned, carried her favorite little dog to the stairs and said, Time to go to bed. And dont be getting back up! We all got a good grin out of that sage command from a wise 3-year-old.

Tico had a pillow at the foot of our bed, and she had to scratch at it and turn in a hundred circles, it seemed, in order to get that pillow just so before she would lie down for a good nights sleep.

Aged

Ticos vision was fading with age, but her hearing remained sharp. If she heard a can being opened, she never failed to come see if it was anything worth begging for, and she ate with joy.

This summer we would have celebrated her 14th birthday. Every year with her was an amazing gift, something I must remind myself as I adjust to this empty place her passing has left in my home and in my heart.

Chantico was the tiniest dog Ive ever held, but her passing has left a hole in my heart that today feels enormous.WASHINGTON  Farmers and ranchers commit suicide at a rate five times that of the general population.

In an effort to address this crisis, National Farmers Union and a coalition of 36 prominent farm and rural advocacy groups are urging Congress to make mental health treatment more accessible to farmers through the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN).

Letter

The groups sent a letter to U.S. Senate and House of Representatives agriculture committees leadership, urging Congress to reauthorize FRSAN and to provide the program with adequate funding in the next Farm Bill.

Financial risk, volatile markets, unpredictable weather, and heavy workloads can all place a significant strain on a farmer or ranchers mental and emotional well-being. Due to the prolonged downturn in the farm economy, many farmers are facing even greater stress, noted the groups.

The 2008 Farm Bill established FRSAN to provide grants to extension services and nonprofit organizations that offer stress assistance programs to individuals engaged in farming, ranching, and other agriculture-related occupations.

Programs

Eligible programs include farm help lines and websites, community outreach and education, support groups, and home delivery of assistance.

Yet, despite the growing need, FRSAN has never received funding, leaving many producers without access to important behavioral health services, said the groups.

The groups pointed to a 2016 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that revealed farmers had a much higher rate of suicide than any other occupation.

And mental health issues are exacerbated by the fact that 60 percent of rural residents live in areas that suffer from mental health professional shortages.

Economy

Net farm income has dropped by more than 50 percent since 2013, and current projections indicate the rebound could be years away.

In fact, the Economic Research Service recently forecast net farm income to drop another 6.7 percent in 2018, its lowest level since 2006.

Farmers in personal financial stress can visit FarmCrisis.NFU.org to find out what resources are available to them. Visitors to the website also have the ability to advocate for FRSAN by selecting Take Action.ANDOVER, Ohio  The second annual Multidisciplinary Lyme Disease Symposium will be held May 5, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Veterans Memorial Performing Arts Center at Pymatuning Valley Schools, 5571 US Route 6 West, Andover, Ohio.

This event is being sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Lyme Foundation a nonprofit organization created to help those battling Lyme disease as well as other tick-borne illnesses.

Community members are invited to attend this event, which will be full of education and awareness.

Whats on tap

The featured speakers for this event include Dr. Bea Szantyr, from Maine, a Lyme disease specialist and member of the International Lyme And Associated Diseases Society. She will share her knowledge and years of experience researching and treating Lyme disease.

Local veterinarian Dr. Charles Curie will share his knowledge of Lyme disease in the animal population.

Also speaking is Sue Faber, RN, BScN, from Ontario Canada, has conducted extensive research on Lyme disease transmitted transplacentally, from mother to unborn child. Sue and her daughters have all battled Lyme disease.

Mary Kate Robertson from the Duck Dynasty family will share her personal story of her familys journey through Lyme disease.

Doug Priest will be traveling in from IGENEX Lab Inc. to share information about correct testing for tick-borne diseases, and Dr. Martin Gallagher, from Medical Wellness Associates, near Pittsburgh, will share his knowledge and expertise of integrative medicine.

There will be a question-and-answer session at the end of the day.

Tickets for this event are $20 per registrant and are available online until April 30. After this time, tickets may be purchased at the door but will not include a lunch, which will be catered from Panera Bread.

Tickets can be purchased at: https://neohiolymefoundation.eventbrite.com.Britain will remain a magnet for cutting edge research in agricultural techniques, a leading MEP told farming technologists this week.

Anthea McIntyre MEP also predicted that the UK government would put science at the forefront of future environment and agriculture policies.

Miss McIntyre, Conservative agriculture spokesman in Brussels, was addressing the Association of Agricultural Engineers in London this week.

She said that the recent government publication 'A Green Future' had highlighted how scientific knowledge would be at the heart of any future regulation alongside a focus on Integrated Pest Management for a more holistic approach.

Miss McIntyre outlined her series of reports on harnessing emerging technology to improve productivity and environmental protection.

She said the UK is a global leader in science and innovation, and developments in precision farming are "right on our doorstep".

"My region the West Midlands recently grew the worlds first entire crop using nothing but robot tractors and drones," Miss McIntyre said.

"This Hands Free Hectare, led by Harper Adams University and Precision Decisions, successfully grew a crop which was seeded, sprayed, monitored and harvested using off-the-shelf technology and open source software. This is the future for farming.

"We are in the early days of the big data and agri-tech revolution. Im hoping that with the right regulation and political will, the big winners of this revolution will be the producers, the environment, small farmers and consumers."

'Remarkable success'

Miss McIntyre said a promising sign for the UK in maintaining its status as a world leader in technology came last week when it was awarded more research grants than any other country, by the European Research Council in its 2018 Advanced Grants.

These prestigious EU grants, she said, were worth a total of 653m.

She added: The results are a remarkable success for Britain, which comes out well ahead of other countries, both in the nationality of the successful scientists and in the location of the university or research centre where they will work.

The UK took 66 of the 269 awards, followed by Germany with 42 and France with 34.

She said: It is very reassuring, that despite Brexit, we clearly remain a favourite destination for top European research funds.

The figures demonstrate the strength of UK science. When funds are allocated purely on excellence, as European Research Council Advanced Grants are, Britain emerges as Europes top scientific venue.

"Both the UK and EU have a huge stake in maintaining a very close relationship in research and innovation after Brexit. I hope we will continue with the same level of participation in European research programmes, as we currently have with Horizon 2020.A ban on live animal exports would be "remarkably shortsighted" given the uncertainty around a post-Brexit trade deal and agricultural tariffs, farming unions have warned.

The UK government launched a call for evidence on a UK-wide ban on the export of live animals for overseas slaughter - something not possible while the UK remains part of the EU, due to EU free trade rules.

The current legislation protecting animals during transport and related operations was introduced in 2005.

The standards within that legislation were developed based on scientific evidence on the welfare of animals during transport, with subsequent reviews failing to identify new evidence of a need for further change.

The Farmers' Union of Wales (FUW) said such a ban could cut off an "essential lifeline" for sheep farmers.

FUW President Glyn Roberts said the FUW's current position is that it would be "short sighted" to introduce a ban on live exports, as tariffs on meat exports to the EU might be introduced.

Mr Roberts said: "Given tariffs of around 50% of product value could apply on meat once we leave the EU, this would collapse the trade in sheepmeat exports, which currently represents around a third of Welsh lamb sales."

We fully appreciate peoples concerns about live exports, but we must bear in mind that the EU has legal welfare standards which are the highest in the world, and these apply both here and on mainland Europe, he added.

'Further difficulty'

Mr Roberts comments echo those of the Scottish Government, who also oppose a live export ban.

Responding to a similar proposal earlier this year, Scotland's Rural Economy Secretary Fergus Ewing said: "Let me be absolutely clear, this is one UK-wide framework the Scottish government will not be participating in.

"I will not support anything that creates further challenges or difficulty for our farming sector or puts Scottish agriculture at a disadvantage."

"The Scottish government will therefore not support the banning of live exports of livestock, but will remain committed to the welfare of all animals during transport adhering to the current rigorous standards which apply - standards and regulations provided by the EU, that are already world class and protect us all through animal, plant and chemical health measures and enabling our produce to be traded around the world."

Mr Roberts said the concerns surrounding the proposals in Scotland were identical to those in Wales, and that any such ban would be a "massive own-goal".

'Emotive issue'

NFU Scotland Livestock Chairman Charlie Adam said that as the UK is a "premier trading partner", it should not be seeking to dismiss the ability to export high quality and high welfare livestock.

He said: Livestock welfare is a top priority for Scottish livestock farmers and we appreciate that live animal transport is an emotive issue for many.

It is important that standards are in place to protect animal welfare during transport. Those standards must reflect the scientific evidence available, to deliver genuine benefits, and not be based purely on sentiment, delivering little benefit and damaging the livestock industry in the UK.

Mr Adam added: The UK Governments ambition to be viewed as a premier trading partner post Brexit means we need to be able to demonstrate robust, evidenced welfare standards delivering confidence to UK consumers and our trading partners.Criminals who slaughter sheep potentially for the illegal meat trade may still be operating in Suffolk and targeting farms, according to the police.

Police are warning farmers or smallholdings with livestock to be vigilant to suspicious activity as officers believe offenders, who slaughtered sheep on two previous occasions, may still be operating in Suffolk.

The first discovery was made on Saturday 23 December about 5pm in Sproughton by the owner who found the remains of one of the sheep by a stream.

The carcass had been taken, leaving the remainder of the animal behind.

The second incident happened at some point between Wednesday 21 February and Thursday 22 February, when an unknown offender had cut the throats of three sheep that were grazing in a field situated off Berners Lane, near Chelmondiston.

The offender then removed the carcasses and left them in a small wooded area next to the field where two of three sheep were also left partially skinned.

And on Monday 9 April, officers recovered a bag close to a flock of sheep in Tattingstone and believe the contents within may be linked to this type of illegal activity.

A statement by Suffolk police said: "Anyone living in areas where sheep graze should report any out of the ordinary activity such as individuals handling livestock. Members of the public should also be mindful of being offered meat for sale in suspicious circumstances.

"Please report anything suspicious contact Suffolk police on 101."Rural areas are vital to national economies and addressing global challenges, according to the OECD.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) held its 11th Rural Development Conference in Edinburgh this week.

The policy statement, which provides guidance to governments to support rural economic development, also declared that innovation will be critical to the future competitiveness and sustainability of rural economies.

The statement outlines the case for focusing on rural areas as engines of national prosperity and how policies should leverage this opportunity.

Jose Enrique Garcilazo, Head of OECDs Regional and Rural Policy Unit, said rural areas should be seen as "places of growth, opportunity and inspiration".

Yet rural is still not central to government policy. Rural areas have a key part to play in some of our major global challenges, Mr Garcilazo said.

They are best placed to develop new energy sources, to help sustain our natural environment and to ensure food security.

In an increasingly interconnected world, opportunities are emerging to promote rural prosperity.

Mr Garcilazo added: Digitalisation will propel rural economies forward, and the conference has highlighted that supporting innovation in rural areas will be key to the future prosperity and wellbeing of rural regions.

Rural innovation

The policy statement identifies 10 key drivers of change predicted to influence the future of rural economies and communities and their potential to prosper, including digital connectivity and drones.

The statement also recommends that, in addition to prioritising rural innovation, a robust rural policy should place social, environmental and economic wellbeing at the forefront of policy decisions and take an integrated view across policy sectors to avoid one policy detracting from another.

Alistair Prior, Head of the Scottish Rural Network, said: Scotland continues to be a world leader in rural development and innovation, and by bringing together the worlds leading policy officials and international experts to map out a framework, we can take inspiration from around the world.

We can continue to share effective practice and support our own rural communities  through policy decisions  to benefit from technological change and to promote job creation, economic growth and service delivery.

The 2018 Conference, Enhancing Rural Innovation, was hosted by the Scottish Government and co-hosted by the European Commission and the UK, to provide a forum for key policy officials and academics from OECD member countries to engage and share ideas and experiences on rural policy.Body Mass Index (BMI) Calculator Weight kg lbs

Height cm inch feet View BMI range and category chart X Classification BMI(kg/m2) Principal cut-off points Additional cut-off points Underweight < 18.50 < 18.50 Severe thinness < 16.00 < 16.00 Moderate thinness 16.00 - 16.99 16.00 - 16.99 Mild thinness 17.00 - 18.49 17.00 - 18.49 Normal range 18.50 - 24.99 18.50 - 22.99 23.00 - 24.99 Overweight > 25.00 > 25.00 Pre-obese 25.00 - 29.99 25.00 - 27.49 27.50 - 29.99 Obese > 30.00 > 30.00 Obese class I 30.00 - 34.99 30.00 - 32.49 32.50 - 34.99 Obese class II 35.00 - 39.99 35.00 - 37.49 37.50 - 39.99 Obese class III > 40.00 > 40.00 Recommended stories for you 9 ways to prevent diabetes

Is the Fast Metabolism Diet right for you? RESET

The beauty of yoga is that it can be traditional, sacred and deep but also playful, experimental and adaptable. There are some who are all for yoga and its Zen approach to life and then there are others who cant do without the instant rush of their treadmills and dumbbells. Theres a lot that has been said and written about yoga. This holistic approach to fitness and mental health has been evolving continuously to fit into our lifestyles and keep things fresh. If the classic hatha and ashtanga varieties dont work for you, Samreen Samad fills you in on the latest hybrid yoga trends.The West is obsessed with yoga and its benefits and apart from trying the classic styles, many trainers have come up with newer styles that certainly become a rage if they pack in the right amount of fitness and fun. While we may not have all of them in India right now, we are sure there will be classes very soon thanks to all the buzz these have created already. If traditional yoga bores you and you need some excitement in your workouts, here are the classes to sign up for and learn the modern way to do yoga.With the soaring temperatures in summer, hitting the pool seems the obvious choice and this yoga style combines your love for water and fitness. Water babies will love their yoga class moving into a swimming pool. Water reduces the stress put on joints and makes you more flexible. It is great for those suffering from back problems, arthritis and stiff joints. Stretching in water increases your lung capacity and also has a calming effect. Aqua yoga involves doing the same asanas in a pool and can be done by people of all ages. Even aged and pregnant women can try this yoga style as it is less intense in nature. Aqua yoga is also good for the differently-abled who need wheelchair assistance. It is a low-impact workout and helps in toning muscle and improving joint movements.While this yoga trend hasnt gained popularity in Indiablame it on the weather and lack of clean beachesit is a rage abroad. Stand up paddleboard yoga is a combination of yoga and surfing. One is required to do a sequence of asanas standing on a surfboard. By working on an unstable surface, you strengthen your core and muscles that are not used much in a regular yoga class. Instructor Sunaina Rekhi confirms this is very good for improving balance, concentration, strength and flexibility. SUP yoga is slowly gaining more followers especially during surfing festivals in the country. With the growing demand, many classes have come up in coastal areas like Goa, Pondicherry, where there is no dearth of beaches. Many tourists who visit these places also opt for a session or two of SUP yoga to learn the basics of balancing themselves on a surfboard.Anti-gravity or aerial yoga combines Pilates, dance, yoga andwait for itgymnastics! Performed on a hammock, this is a full-body workout. You fight gravity throughout the session and this helps improve balance and flexibility. You may have seen many popular Bollywood celebs take to this trend and share photos of themselves doing yoga poses suspended in mid-air with the help of the silk ropes. Even though it may look fun, anti-gravity yoga requires a lot of core strength and strong arms, to be able to lift yourself up. Sunaina says, Anti-gravity yoga involves lengthening and strengthening of your back and aligns your body from head to toe. This ensures all parts are stretched. Tanvi Mehra, yoga instructor and owner of Tangerine Arts Studios, Mumbai, says, Aerial yoga brings newness, fun and a new level of challenge and intensity to the traditional practice.The first thing that pops in your mind when you think of ballet is grace, flexibility and posture. Ballet dancers are known for their toned, slender built and they surely have amazing stamina and strength. Ballet yoga combines the fundamentals of both to create lean muscles. Sunaina says, Integrating ballet and yoga together helps in strengthening and toning the body. Ballet yoga is also a low intensity workout and can be performed by kids as well with some assistance. Since ballet dancers start young, it is encouraged that this yoga style be taken up by children as it can help them learn two forms at once. Ballet yoga is mainly done in a studio using a ballet barre. However, there are online tutorials as well that can help you get a start at home. The good thing about this yoga style is that it is relaxing but at the same time effective too.Get your groove on by incorporating this fun form of yoga into your routine. Hip hop is a fun but intense dance form and combining it with yoga makes it even more exciting. Sunaina says, This is for people who want to add a fun element to their class. The sessions have music blaring and are very energetic. The choreography is dynamic and meant to inspire you and lift you up while you move. Sunaina says, Its popular among the younger generation and it really stretches you out. Tanvi adds, Hip hop yoga inculcates a community spirit as it is done in tandem with another person or in a group which creates a beautiful, collective energy. Yoga and hip hop together offer the best of both worldsa total body workout and a release for the mind and spirit. The pumping beats and the fast-paced music makes this a high-intensity workout. Hip hop yoga is more popular with the younger generation who not only enjoy this style but also want a workout that burns more calories in a quick time.You must have seen two people performing yoga with one lifting the other with ease. This is what is Acro Yoga. This partner-based workout fuses yoga with acrobatics and elements of Thai massage. Even though it looks like a difficult task, with practice, you can get better very soon. Of course, assistance is required to get you and your partner to perform the poses correctly. Acro Yoga not just helps you tone muscles and improve strength, it also makes for a good bonding exercise between two people as you need to trust the other one to balance your weight using their body. it is not essential that the lighter person is always lifted in the air, with the correct technique, you can lift someone heavier than you. Sunaina says, Acro yoga uses gravity and your own body weight to enhance balance, stretching and strengthening. When done by couples, it builds a stronger connection.While traditional yoga focusses on holding the pose and breathing right, power yoga is more about doing circuits and repetitions of a set of poses that will help get your heart rate up, and burn more calories. This type of yoga is great for those who want to tone up and also lose weight. Usually, traditional yoga poses are incorporated in power yoga but the reps are more. So, be ready to do multiple rounds of sun salutations in one go. By the end of the session, you would have sweated it out and burnt more calories than an average yoga class. If you are looking for a relaxing yoga class, power yoga is not for you, but you want a fun session where you will sweat your way to fitness, you should give it a try.If you follow the fitness regimen of Bollywood celebrities, you will know that most of them swear by Pilates. While it has its own set of benefits, there is another workout that combines the best of Pilates and yoga. Aptly called yogalates, this exercise method is perfect to calm the mind while also toning the body. There are several benefits of doing this workout. From improving ones flexibility that will help keeping your joints in good condition, to toning of muscles thanks to the different poses and equipment, this is a great way to shape up. Yogalates also works on internal organs and that makes it even more beneficial for everyone. You flush out toxins and the poses help improve the blood flow that has several benefits for the body. Weight loss and burning of calories are other benefits of this workout.If the thought of working out in an extremely hot room with everyone sweating profusely catches your attention, hot yoga is for you. This unique yoga style is simply doing traditional yoga poses in a closed room where the temperature is higher than 40 degrees Celsius. While it does have benefits like being able to do the poses, not everyone can tolerate the heat. The rise in mercury makes your muscles warm and stretching them out becomes easier. Hot yoga also helps people flush out more toxins via their sweat but how much that is, is debatable. This style definitely tests your endurance levels both physically and mentally, and the endorphin release after a good session is usually higher than a regular class. With practise, it gets easier to adjust to the temperature and work out for longer.Now this is a quirky one and is mostly a fad that started in the West. Thanks to social media, it became a rage and beer lovers over the world wanted to give it a try. The video actually showed people doing yoga whilst drinking their favourite ale. The challenge is to balance your drink glass/bottle as you perform certain yoga poses. Even though fitness experts will diss this workout style, it seems to have its own set of followers, primarily those who wouldnt mind having beer during a workout. Apart from the yoga poses, there isnt any real benefit as such to this workout, and you probably wouldnt find any classes in India as yet. However, it is a trend now and looking at its demand, there might just be a class soon. Until then, you have other forms to try.Now that you know whats trending in the yoga scene, its necessary to keep a few things it mind before you incorporate any of these forms into your routine. Tanvi says, Its important to have a strong base and foundation in the traditional practice for you to be able to apply it to these different forms. She believes that one should never stop practising the traditional form of yoga and that all beginners should start with the hatha, ashtanga, Iyengar or Shivananda style. Its only after getting a grip on the traditional techniques, asanas and alignment that you can truly explore an experimental form. Since most new forms require high levels of strength, stamina and agility, it is important you acquaint yourself with basic yoga postures before trying anything complicated. If not done with complete awareness and intelligence, these could do some serious damage.Many people also like to mix things up and combine different styles. So they might be going for a power yoga class one week, and the next week it will be anti-gravity yoga. Whatever suits your style and gets you results, you can take it up. But remember, not to push yourself too much and stop if you feel too much discomfort. Even though you may find tutorials to these yoga styles online, we recommend going to an actual class and learning under a trained professional who knows the ropes of the workout. If you suffer from certain health problems, it is better to consult your doctor before you try any of these as these are relatively new styles and may have some implications on your condition. It is also important to inform your fitness trainer about any medical issues beforehand so that they can alter the workout keeping your health in mind.You can also read on 14 different types of yoga styles and their benefits you must know With inputs from Kriti Saraswat SatpathyPhotographs: Shutterstock, MasterfileRaid director Rajkumar Gupta is clearly in his best phase right now with the real-life based film being one of the highest grossers of 2018. After delivering Raid, Raj Kumar Gupta is all set to entertain the audience with his next thriller titled Most Wanted.As per the latest reports in Mumbai Mirror, the director has already finalised Arjun Kapoor as the lead in the film. Arjun will be seen playing the role of an Intelligence officer. Most Wanted is a story based on the real-life secret mission that took place in India during 2012 and 2014 to capture one of Indias most wanted terrorists.The same was confirmed by a source to a daily saying, A couple of weeks ago, Raj Kumar finalised Arjun Kapoor to play an intelligence officer and the hero of this do-or-die covert operation. The two have had a couple of narrations and long telephonic conversations about the project recently. Arjun loved the script and Raj Kumar has demanded start-to-finish dates because he wants to shoot in one go without any distractions. Since Arjun has already committed to three yet-to-release films  Vipul Shahs romcom Namaste England alongside Parineeti Chopra, Ashutosh Gowarikers Panipat with Sanjay Dutt and the Hindi remake of the Telugu blockbuster Arjun Reddy  he is working out his dates. They are both keen to take this story of a terrorist, who was eventually captured without a single shot being fired, to the world soon.Apparently, before Arjun, Raj Kumar Gupta had approached Varun Dhawan and later Sidharth Malhotra for the film. But it didnt work out.Are you looking forward to see Arjun in this interesting role? We sure are.An Angry Arjun Kapoor Slams The Website

"U know what Fuck u man fuck u as a website for highlighting or bringing it to anyone s attention...and it's shameful that ur eye would go searching for something like this shame on u...this is how our country looks at young women yet another shining example...ashamed by this..." [sic]

Earlier, Arjun Also Slammed The Govt. For Not Taking Stand For Kathua Rape Case

He had tweeted, "A life is lost a childhood taken & yet everything is politically connected leading to a so called secular country getting divided on caste & religion because that digresses from the reality that our country, the silent government & its leaders still don't respect woman or lives."

Arjun, On The Work Front

On the professional front, Arjun Kapoor is busy with the shoot of his upcoming two films - Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar and Namaste England and in both of the films, Arjun is paired opposite Parineeti Chopra.

Janhvi Is Also Busy With Dhadak Shoot

Just like her brother, Janhvi Kapoor is spending most of the time on the sets of her upcoming film, Dhadak, a film which will mark her debut in Bollywood. The film also casts Shahid Kapoor's brother, Ishaan Khattar and is helmed by Shashank Khaitan.

Dhadak Is In Tremendous Buzz

Be it the first look posters of the film or the amazing chemistry between Janhvi & Ishaan, the film has have the audience all excited and it's also good to see that Janhvi is finding solace in her work.

Dhadak Shoot Near Victoria Memorial

Not so long ago, the duo was also seen shooting near famous Victoria Memorial in Kolkata. Sporting a simple 'salwar-kameez', Janhvi looked everything pretty, while Ishaan looked cool in his casual wear.Katrina Approached To Pen A Book On Her Life?

As per a Mid-Day report, the actress has been approached by a leading publishing house to write a book on her life and her journey in the Indian film industry.

It Took A Lot Of Convincing

Reportedly the publishing house saw an inspiring story in her trajectory and reached out to her in January. The source told the tabloid, "When Katrina was approached initially, she felt it was too soon to write an autobiography. After much convincing, she has agreed to come on board."

Katrina To Share Her 'Barbie Dreams'

Buzz is that the memoir is tentatively titled Barbie Dreams, after her distinction of being the only Indian actor to have a Barbie modelled on her.

The Book Will Focus On Different Aspects Of Her Life

Katrina who is generally refrains from speaking about her personal life, will use this opportunity to open up to her readers about the different aspects of her life. "The book will focus on her childhood and growing up years. Since she lived in several countries, including Japan, Belgium and London, she will talk about the influence of myriad cultures on her personality," the source further added.

From Boom To Stardom

The actress will open up about her her meteoric rise in an industry that otherwise battles accusations of being nepotistic. The source revealed, "Despite starting with a controversial film like Boom (2003), she will decode how she bagged projects wisely to ensure a long innings in Bollywood."

But There's A Twist

Those looking for Kat baring her heart about her real-life love interests will be on for a major disappointment. "The story is pitched as a motivational one and anything about her personal life doesn't fit into the template," the source revealed. The publishing house is expected to make an announcement next week.Priyanka Chopra meets PM Modi , invites him for Partners' Forum | FilmiBeat

Priyanka Chopra is a Goodwill ambassador for the UNICEF and she got the opportunity to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi as he took part in the event which also included the former President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet along with a delegation which included Union Health Minister JP Nadda and his team. The conference was about Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH).

Amitabh Bachchan's Grandson Agastya Nanda To Debut In Bollywood? Read Details!

The event focused on the access to quality healthcare at every life stage of a women, child and adolescents life in an effort to help them achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. An excited Priyanka Chopra took to Instagram and posted a picture of herself standing alongside Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and former President of Chile, Michelle Bachelet and captioned the image in a lenghty post as,

"Very grateful to the honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi to meet me, Shri J.P. Nadda (Indian Health Minister) and Mrs. Michelle Bachelet, (former President of Chile, incoming #PMNCH Chair) in regards to being a patron for the Partners' Forum which is being held in New Delhi in December this year. The aim is very important - the improvement and transformation of access to quality healthcare at at every life stage for women, children and adolescents, in an effort to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030."

"This year, India will play host to the largest ever Partners' Forum, with more than 1,200 delegates from more than 92 countries."

"It was an insightful, positive conversation which was very heartening and inspiring because of the personal commitment of everyone at the meeting. We covered a lot of ground from the various efforts being taken by individual countries & partners to building a collective environment that could help propel the change we seek for a better world. We started something important today and I am looking forward to what is being set in motion," Priyanka Chopra summed it up.

Well, it looks like Priyanka Chopra is setting the ball roll and is doing her best in the role of Goodwill ambassador for the UNICEF. Kudos to her!

Here's What Kareena Kapoor Wants Taimur To Become When He Grows Up!Does It Get Monotonous To Be Part Of YHM?

When asked if it gets monotonous to be part of a show for a long time, she was quoted by HT as saying, "For me, the character I portray is colourful and has a lot of shades. Therefore, it doesn't feel like I am doing the same thing. There are so many variations every time I start shooting."

Anita Doesnt Care About Criticism If The Show Gets Ratings!

Regarding the criticism that the daily soaps get for being over-the-top and having illogical plot lines, she said, "I don't care about the criticism as long as the ratings are coming in."

You Have To Do Small, Illogical Things

"You can't justify (it to) everybody and please everyone. After 4-5 years (of a running show), you have to do small, illogical things. As long as they work (with the target audience), it's fine."

Which Excites Her  TV, Films Or Web?

When asked as to what excites her, television, films or the web, she told the leading daily, "As an actor, I don't mind the medium as long as I have a good part to do."

I Didnt Think I Would Enjoy It (Web) So Much

"The web is very different from the other two. There's hardly any makeup. In terms of acting, it's very different from a daily soap. I didn't think I would enjoy it so much. Web is a much more evolved medium."

Anita In Naagin 3

After introducing to the first Naagin (Karishma Tanna), Ekta Kapoor recently introduced to the second Naagin, Anita. The producer shared the picture and wrote, "NAAGIN 3 welcomes @anitahassanandani as the second shape shifting snake woman! It's V FOR VENDETTA this season in INDIA'S most watched folklore supernatural franchise !!! Wait for NAAGIN 3 only on Colors!" - (sic)

Comparisons With Mouni & Adaa

The actress is excited and thrilled to be part of Naagin 3. When asked whether the comparisons with Mouni Roy and Adaa Khan (who were part of two seasons of Naagin) have put pressure on her, she told Pinkvilla, "Not really because I always start off with a fresh mind. I've not gone through the way they have acted."

Anita Is Planning To Start From Scratch For Naagin 3

She further added, "I'm going to try and do my part and give my 100 percent from my end. Mouni and Adaa did a fantastic job. It makes you nervous when you are stepping into a show like Naagin but definitely, I am going with a fresh mind. I'm planning to start from the scratch and not really see too much."A day after it was reported that Tata Group was unlikely to bid for Air India, sources close to development have now said that Tatas have not pulled out

A day after it was reported that the Tata Group was unlikely to consider a bid for Air India owing to the governments onerous terms, sources close to the development have now reportedly said that the Tatas never pulled out and that the group is still in the race for the national carrier, and could put down a bid along with a foreign partner.

According to The Economic Times, apart from the Tatas, Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines are also in the race for the debt-laden national carrier. The newspaper said that potential bidders have sought a relaxation in the norms for consortia targeting Air India and its group entities.

Earlier on Wednesday, Reuters had said that the steel-to-auto conglomerate, which already owns stakes in two airline joint-ventures in India, does not see how a deal would be workable under current terms.

Deterrents to sale

Global aviation consultancy, the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA), pitching for more liberal norms for the sale of Air India said that brand, labour and higher-than-expected debt continue to be major deterrents for potential bidders.

The CAPA did not sound very hopeful of the government meeting the December 2018 deadline to complete the sale process, which New Delhi kick-started with the publication of the Expressions of Interest (EoI) document on 28 March. "[The] EOI released recently is well structured and largely aligned to generating interest from investors, which has attempted to balance the needs of different stakeholders while moving the process forward. As it happens in such complex transactions, being flexible and having an open mind on major issues is necessary. Revising EOI with more liberal terms will be required to further align it to investor interest," CAPA said on Wednesday.

CAPA's statement came after domestic carriers Jet Airways and IndiGo opted out of the Air India sale process, all owing to the current set of rules.

On 28 March, the Civil Aviation Ministry came out with the preliminary information memorandum on Air India's strategic disinvestment, as per which the government plans to offload 76 percent of the national carrier as well as transfer the management control.

The proposed transaction will involve Air India, its low-cost arm Air India Express and Air India SATS Airport Services, which is an equal joint venture with Singapore-based SATS.

Besides, the airline's employee unions too are not in favour of the move towards privatisation. On Wednesday, a joint forum of 10 Air India unions dubbed the move by potential investors as "arm twisting tactics" to force government sell the national carrier for cheap. In a statement released, the forum also reiterated its opposition to the privatisation of the loss-making airline, saying that "it (Air India) is our national pride and it served the nation many a times in need."

With inputs from PTIBoeing is looking to sell Super Hornet's to the Indian Navy and has initiated talks with the latter.

The Boeing Company, state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limted (HAL) and Mahindra Group arm Mahindra Defence Systems Limited (MDS), on Thursday, announced a three-way partnership to manufacture Boeing's F/A-i8 Super Hornet multi-role fighter jet in India. The firms made the announcement in Chennai, at the ongoing DefExpo 2018 weapons exhibition.

"Boeing is excited to team up with India's only company that manufactures combat fighters, HAL, and India's only company that manufactures small commercial airplanes, Mahindra," said Pratyush Kumar, President, Boeing India.

"This partnership brings the best of Indian public and private enterprises together in partnership with the world's largest aerospace company, Boeing, to accelerate a contemporary 21st century ecosystem for aerospace & defence manufacturing in India," Kumar added, IANS reported.

Boeing already sources components for the Super Hornet from HAL -- the two firms have an over 20-year old working relationship. Thursday's announcement will see the American firm leverage HALs assets, including a manufacturing base and an airfield in Bengaluru, and HAL's experience in licence-producing fighter jets in the subcontinent, to slash the cost of each Hornet it sells to India.

Boeing is looking to sell Hornets to the Indian Navy and has initiated talks with the latter, the company's vice president for defense, space and security, Gene Cunningham, told Bloomberg in February.

In December 2017, Navy Chief Admiral Sunil Lanba said that a request for proposal (RFP) for the purchase of 57 multi-role combat jets for the Indian Navy's aircraft carriers would be issued by mid-2018, the PTI reported.

Boeing and HAL first held exploratory talks, on building the Hornet in India in September 2017, according to a report in the Business Standard.IMF's deputy managing director Tao Zhang recently remarked banking reforms like insolvency code and recapitalisation will be ineffective unless governance standards are improved.

Mumbai: The recent crisis in the country's banking system has impacted investor sentiments, leading to some slowdown in the investment flow, a top official from IL&FS Financial Services said.

The crisis, however, gives an opportunity to improve the overall processes and to built up a strong system, IF&FS Financial Services managing director and chief executive officer, Ramesh Bawa, told reporters here today.

When asked about the extent of impact of the banking crisis, Bawa said, "Huge...It (crisis in banking system) has already impacted investors sentiments."

In February, second largest public sector bank Punjab National Bank detected fraudulent transactions at one of its branches in Mumbai. The biggest-ever banking fraud of more than Rs 13,000 crore was allegedly committed by billionaire diamantaire Nirav Modi and his associates in connivance with some officials of a Mumbai branch of the bank.

Besides PNB, private sector lender ICICI Bank is also embroiled in a controversy over alleged conflict of interest involving its chief executive officer Chanda Kochhar and business dealings of her husband Deepak Kochhar.

Another private lender, Axis Bank, recently saw curtailment of tenure of its managing director and chief executive officer Shikha Sharma to seven months following a nudge by the Reserve Bank of India in the wake high levels of non-performing assets (NPAs) in the bank.

Bawa termed the crisis as only a temporary phenomenon, adding, "The investment flow (into the country) has become slow, but it is only for the time being."

He said it is not possible to suppress investors concerns in such events. "They (investors) are certainly bound to ask you that even if you don't find a fault with an individual institution or a person, but the system seems to be weak," he said.

Last month, the International Monetary Fund's deputy managing director Tao Zhang had said banking reforms like insolvency code and recapitalisation will be ineffective unless governance standards are improved.

Without naming the Punjab National Bank, he had said the scam has "revealed the necessities and urgencies to improve the internal controls", which is crucial not only for improving banks but also "financial stability".

Bawa appreciated the steps taken by all the stakeholders, including the government in dealing with such situations in the banking system.

Referring specifically to the PNB fraud, he said, "The best thing the government or the finance ministry had done is that on the day-one they gave a statement that all the liabilities (arising out of the fraud) need to be borne by the PNB. This has given a relief to the investors."Malaysian investment holding company IHH Healthcare Bhd could make a rival offer for Fortis Healthcare Ltd in the coming days, valuing the Indian company at as much as $1.3 billion

Malaysian investment holding company IHH Healthcare Bhd could make a rival offer for Fortis Healthcare Ltd in the coming days, valuing the Indian company at as much as $1.3 billion, according to media reports that cited people with knowledge of the matter.

News of IHH's move comes two days after Manipal Hospitals Enterprises Private Ltd raised its offer for Fortis Healthcares hospital business, and over a week after ace investor and minority Fortis shareholder Rakesh Jhunjhunwala questioned an earlier offer by TPG-backed Manipal.

On Tuesday, Manipal Hospitals Enterprises Private Ltd raised its offer to buy Fortis Healthcare Ltds hospital business by about a fifth, in an attempt to win over minority shareholders opposed to the deal. The revised offer valued Fortis hospital business 21 percent higher at 60.61 billion rupees, or 116 rupees per share.

Manipal first offered to buy Fortis last month in a deal that would combine its 14 hospitals with Fortiss portfolio of 34 hospitals, creating a 150 billion rupees company and a formidable rival to Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd.

But the previous bid, which offered shareholders 10.83 shares in the combined company for every 100 Fortis shares held, was panned by investors. It knocked Fortis stock down 14 percent on the day the deal was announced and prompted Chief Executive Bhavdeep Singh to make conciliatory comments about keeping minority shareholders concerns in mind.

The older offer also met with disapproval from shareholders including from Jhunjhunwala, who along with his associates, holds around one percent of Fortis. The ace investor had said that Fortis should be sold via a 'fair' process that allows all interested parties to bid, hinting that a clutch of minority shareholders were hoping to hear from IHH.

Speaking to The Economic Times, Jhunjhunwala said that he had no plan to vote against the deal. First, let a stage come when the deal needs to be opposed. Today, its just an announcement. The board doesnt have the power to do the dealI think the stage where the deal will need to be voted upon will not come at all" he told the newspaper.

With inputs from agenciesNew Delhi: State-owned gas utility GAIL India on Thursday said it will bring to India only half of the LNG it has contracted from the US as it has either swapped or sold the remaining volumes.

GAIL has a deal to buy 3.5 million tonne a year of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for 20 years from Cheniere Energy of the US and has also booked capacity for another 2.3 million tonne (MT) at Dominion Energy's Cove Point liquefaction plant.

"Of the volumes contracted, we have already sold 0.5 MT. The remaining volumes translate into 80 cargoes (or shiploads) of LNG in a year. Of this, 50 percent will come to India," GAIL Chairman and MD B C Tripathi told reporters here.

The first US cargo arrived at the firm's Dabhol LNG import terminal in Maharashtra on 30 March.

Also, the firm's renegotiated LNG import deal with Russian supplier Gazprom will kick-in from May, with volumes gradually ramping up to fully contracted quantity of 2.5 MT in 5-6 year, he said.

"This year we will get 8 cargoes or 0.5 MT of LNG from Gazprom," he said.

GAIL, he said, had sold 81-82 million standard cubic meters per day of gas in 2017-18, which would rise to 91-92 mmscmd because of arrival of US and Russian volumes.

He said the company has swapped half of the 5.8 MT per annum of US LNG in a bid to rejig supply portfolio in line with domestic demand.

GAIL sold 3.5 MT of the US LNG via time swaps, destination swaps and shipping optimisation.

Under the time-swap deals, the company got LNG from international companies in 2017 and will sell equivalent amount of Henry Hub-indexed volumes during 2018-19.

Also, it has entered into deals to take deliveries of gas from a nearer location and in exchange given its US volumes to company closer to the origin to cut shipping costs.

The contracted volume from Russia has been lowered from 2.5 MT to 0.5 MT in the first year 2018-19, 0.75 MT in 2019-20, and 1.5 MT in the third year 2020-21. Also, the price indexation has been changed from the Japan Customs-cleared Crude to Brent, and the oil-linked slope of the contract formula lowered, and therefore the final price.

GAIL had contracted LNG from the US and Russia to meet the demand of growing Indian economy with power sector being considered a major buyer. But electricity produced using imported LNG is not finding buyers due to cheaper alternatives including renewables, leading to stranding of significant capacity out of 25,000 MW of installed gas-based power plants.

To mitigate the risks, GAIL explored opportunities to market Henry Hub indexed LNG volumes in the international markets.

GAIL had in May last year signed a first-ever time-swap deal to sell some of its US LNG. Under that agreement, it was to get 15 cargoes or about 0.8 MT of LNG from an unnamed trader in 2017. In return, GAIL will sell 10 cargoes or about 0.6 MT next year from Sabine Pass on the US Gulf coast.

GAIL had separately signed a deal with Royal Dutch Shell to sell about 0.5 MT of its US LNG.

The LNG that GAIL will receive this year between April and December under the time-swap deal will be at oil-linked prices. The sale of US gas next year will be at a premium to its pricing formula on a free-on-board (FOB) basis.There are allegations of conflict of interest and nepotism involving the bank and Kochhar in extending a loan to the Videocon Group.

New Delhi: Amid controversy of alleged conflict of interest involving ICICI Bank and its CEO Chanda Kochhar, former Sebi chief M Damodaran said on Wednedsay that one option is for her to step down for a period of "three or four months".

Damodaran said that there are three or four elements that need to be looked at, including that the reputation of the bank is on the block.

"Stakeholders are asking questions, institutional investors who are large shareholders are asking questions; the lay person who is reading newspaper reports is also asking questions. It could be a depositor also who is asking questions in the light of all of this and the fact that there is an investigation," he told business channel ET Now.

Responding to queries on whether Kochhar should be asked to step down, Damodaran said, "there are two ways -- one is for the CEO to step down and say I do not want any part of this. I will prove myself to be right as and when the procedure gets completed".

According to him, the other way is to "step down for a period of three or four months and say that alright while this thing is going on, I am not going to be there".

"...Get an external agency, request her to go on leave. She has worked hard enough all these years and I am sure could do with some leave. So, request her to go on leave for a while. She does not have to vacate the post forever and then see what is the outcome of the investigation," he noted.

There are allegations of conflict of interest and nepotism involving the bank and Kochhar in extending a loan to the Videocon Group.

According to reports, Kochhar's husband Deepak Kochhar had formed a joint venture with Videocon promoter Venugopal Dhoot for a business dealing in renewable energy and there were a string of transactions later which gave him full control of the venture after the exit of Dhoot.Lockheed Martin has expressed its readiness to shift its F-16 fighter aircraft manufacturing unit to India and US governmen twill allow it to do that

New Delhi: With the Indian Air Force (IAF) beginning the process of buying 110 fighter jets, in a deal that could be worth more than $15 billion, Lockheed Martin has expressed its readiness to shift its F-16 fighter aircraft manufacturing unit to India - and the US government, according to the manufacturer, will allow it to do that.

That apart, the American aerospace and defence major is also prepared to transfer the technology of its third generation anti-armour Javelin guided missile system to India for its future manufacture.

At least two Lockheed officials attending the DefExpo 2018 weapons exhibition, in Chennai, told IANS that if the defence procurement deals were signed with the company that is all geared to bid for the world's biggest fighter jet order, it would walk the extra mile and transfer technology to local partners for sophisticated parts of defence products.

"We are offering a deal that is completely compatible with Make in India - offering a stand-up production line in India," said Randall L Howard, who heads International Business Development for aircraft at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics.

He said more than 4,000 F-16s have been sold to countries across the world. "We are offering to shift the manufacturing base and produce all of our F-16s in India; not just for India, but for the whole world -- across South East Asia, across South America, across Middle East."

Asked if the Trump administration would allow it to do so, Howard said the company had "full support of the US government".

He said the single-engine supersonic multirole fighter aircraft that has seen action in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was currently being built around the world, and setting up facilities in India would not impact jobs in the US.

"So whenever we have a situation, we will be able to build the entire aircraft in India. But we will continue to have parts that come from the US. That will continue to create jobs in the US. This absolutely supports American jobs," he said, adding Lockheed was also looking at the possibility of setting up the entire ecosystem, including one with a runway, to produce the fighters in flyaway condition.

Another Lockheed official, Haley Donoho, who is business development head of the shoulder-fired anti-armour Javelin missile, said a possible joint venture for the system "is in good standing with the Indian government".

"Should the Indian government be interested in the third generation missile system, we are ready to sell Javelin under a foreign military sale contract which is the most transparent acquisition contract you can find. You can trace at every step where the money is going."

He said Lockheed has got the US government's nod to transfer its "high-degree" technology to its partners in India for the development of the 22 kg, portable missile system that comes with a combination of "fire and forget" and "man in the loop" capability, with a range of up to four km. The missile, which automatically guides itself to the target after launch, has been used by US forces in the cold mountains of Afghanistan and in the hot deserts of Iraq. With its arched top-attack profile, Javelin climbs above its target for improved visibility and then strikes where the armour is weakest, he said.

"The US government was ready to transfer high-degree technology under US-India Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI) when the previous deal was done. The US government has indicated to us, and to the Indian defence ministry, that we will continue on the discussion with similar levels of transfer of technology.

"I can speak for the US government, and they are interested in the same type of deal for transfer of high-degree technology, specifically for India. We have done this for no other country."

Asked about the future of India's fledgling indigenous defence-building capabilities, the two officials said it was only a matter of time before the country emerges as one of the major military manufacturers in the world. "I think it is coming. We will see whether it will take off quickly or slowly. But I think it is coming. This is India. Lots of engineers, lots of researchers, people with lots of capabilities. It is only a matter of time. We see it is coming," Donoho said.On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court agreed with NSL, ruling that Indias Patent Act does not allow Monsanto any patent cover for its GM cotton seeds, said Narne Murali Krishna, a company secretary for NSL.

New Delhi: A court ruled on Wednesday that Monsanto cannot claim patents on its genetically modified (GM) cotton seeds in India, the Indian company that brought the case said.

Citing a law that excludes seeds from being patented, Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd (NSL) argued that the US seeds company was not eligible to claim patents and charge royalties from Indian seed companies.

On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court agreed with NSL, ruling that Indias Patent Act does not allow Monsanto any patent cover for its GM cotton seeds, said Narne Murali Krishna, a company secretary for NSL.

A Monsanto India spokesman said the company was very disappointed with the court order.

Todays order will have wide-ranging, negative implications for biotech-based innovation across many sectors within India, and is inconsistent with other international markets where agricultural innovation has flourished, the spokesman said in a statement.

Monsantos false claim has got exposed today, Kalyan Goswami, director general of the National Seed Association of India, said in a statement.

Late last year, NSL said it would not settle a long-standing intellectual property dispute with Monsanto over genetically modified cotton, despite some other Indian companies doing so.

Monsanto has been involved in a long-running battle in India over royalties paid by local seed companies for its GM cotton.

In 2016, the country's farm ministry cut Monsantos royalties by more than 70 percent, triggering a long-running feud that drew in the Indian and US governments.

In March, India cut the royalties paid to Monsanto for its GM cotton for the second time in two years, potentially fuelling another row with the U.S. company that threatened to leave India in 2016.

More than 90 percent of the country's cotton crop is genetically modified.Ola's main competitor in the Australian market is Uber. Interestingly, SoftBank is also an investor in Uber.

New Delhi: Cab hailing firm Ola today said it has started operations in Melbourne, expanding its services in the Australian market.

In February, the company had kick-started its services in Australia with Perth. In January, the SoftBank-backed company had announced its plans to foray into the Australian market.

Ola continues to receive positive response from driver-partners with over 15,000 registrations across Australia, the company said in a statement.

Ola offers driver-partners in Australia 7.5 percent introductory commission rate and daily payments, helping them earn more money, it added.

"We've been humbled by the response from passengers and drivers alike in Perth and Sydney, and are incredibly excited about launching Ola in Melbourne", Ola Vice President (Head of International) Chandra Nath said.

The company said it is working with local stakeholders to continue its rollout in Australia, with future launch cities including Brisbane and the Gold Coast, Canberra, Adelaide, Darwin and Hobart.

Ola's main competitor in the Australian market is Uber. Interestingly, SoftBank is also an investor in Uber.

Uber launched its operations in Australia in 2012 and currently operates in 19 Australian cities including the major cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra.

The companies are already locked in an intense battle for leadership in the Indian market.

They compete not only in the ride-sharing space in India but also food delivery, with Ola acquiring Foodpanda's India business. US-based Uber runs on-demand food delivery app UberEATs in select Indian cities.PNB has so far suspended 21 officials and Mehta said the bank was carrying out an investigation to find out how the fraud - the biggest in Indian banking history - went unnoticed for more than half a decade.

New Delhi: Punjab National Bank (PNB) is conducting an internal investigation into an alleged $2 billion crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud and more heads could roll, its chief executive said in an interview on Wednesday.

The countrys second-biggest state lender disclosed in February that companies owned by two jewellers defrauded it by raising credit from overseas branches of other Indian banks, using illegal guarantees issued by rogue staff at a Mumbai PNB branch over several years.

Authorities have arrested 20 people, and a court has issued non-bailable warrants against jewellers Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. The duo have denied the allegations against them, and authorities say they both left the country before the fraud was uncovered.

We are examining every aspect of it, and if we find others involved we will not spare them, said PNB CEO Sunil Mehta, in his first interview with a foreign news outlet since the fraud was uncovered.

PNB has so far suspended 21 officials and Mehta said the bank was carrying out an investigation to find out how the fraud - the biggest in Indian banking history - went unnoticed for more than half a decade.

Several experts have also questioned the failure of external auditors approved by Reserve Bank of India- known as statutory auditors - to detect the illegalities. These firms often only do top line reviews, not in-depth inspections.

I dont blame them. They come only for a short period of time and they go and basically see data only on the CBS, said Mehta, referring to PNBs core banking software.

PNB has said the rogue bankers hid the fraud by issuing the guarantees via the SWIFT interbank messaging system, while not entering corresponding entries in the CBS. The bank will soon finish integrating its CBS with SWIFT so this cannot happen again, Mehta said.

The banking regulator, the Reserve Bank of India, which has directed all banks to ensure this fix is implemented before the end of April, has not done any specific audit of PNB since the incident, Mehta said.

Tighter rules

Mehta, who took over as PNB CEO last May, said the bank was adding more checks to prevent a handful of employees from carrying out a similar fraud. That would also mean centralising some tasks and cutting branches powers to approve credit.

Earlier we were dependent mainly on physical inspection of the branches. Now were going to create an offline monitoring cell. Besides the physical inspection we will also monitor all exceptional transactions, he said, flanked by a team of media advisers in his spacious office.

PNB will route all its foreign exchange transactions through its back office at its New Delhi headquarters. Branches on their own will not be allowed to both receive and approve credit requests.

Reuters reported last month that PNB had stepped up controls on the use of SWIFT, allowing only senior staff to use the platform, and taking away the authority of clerks to do so.

Mehta said PNB grew its domestic deposits by 6.2 percent in the year ended March 31. Domestic credit grew by 10 percent, a figure he expects the bank will be able to replicate in the current fiscal year.

He declined to reveal any other financial figures for the January-March quarter, which could take a hit due to a hefty provision. The central bank has allowed PNB to spread the losses over four quarters, Mehta said.

In March, PNB agreed to pay 65 billion rupees ($996 million) to counterparty banks. It added it would assume any subsequent liability from the fraud, to prevent disruptions in the banking sector.

We have the capacity and the capability to bear the loss. he said, adding that privatisation of public sector banks was not the answer to the current crisis.With the Modi government bringing in ambitious reforms like GST and demonetisation, Raghuram Rajan said it would be good if such measures were better implemented.

New York: Proper implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in India can be worked upon and is not an "unfixable problem", former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan has said, reiterating that demonetisation was "not a well-planned, well thought-out" move.

With the Modi government bringing in ambitious reforms like GST and demonetisation, Rajan said it would be good if such measures were better implemented.

"On the Goods and Services Tax, we will figure it out eventually. It will be nice if we could implement much better than we do. But it's (GST) not an unfixable problem. We can work on it. I wouldn't give up hope at this point on that," Rajan told an audience at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge on Wednesday.

Rajan, who is currently the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, gave the 2018 Albert H Gordon Lecture on the topic 'Leverage, Financial Crises, and Policies to Raise Economic Growth'. He was asked about the "shoddy implementation" of big ticket reforms like GST and demonetisation in India.

On demonetisation, Rajan rejected the claim that the Reserve Bank of India had not been consulted by the government before it went on to declare 1,000 and 500-rupee currency notes as illegal tender in November 2016. He however reiterated that the move to cancel 87.5 percent of the currency value was "not a good idea".

"I didn't ever say that I wasn't consulted (on demonetisation). In fact, I have made it quite clear that we were consulted and we didn't think it was a good idea," Rajan said.

He said demonetisation "was not a well-planned, well thought-out, useful exercise and I told the government that when the idea was first mooted," he said adding that any macro-economist would say that if 87.5 percent of the currency is being demonetised, then it better be made sure that a similar amount of currency is printed and ready to be put back in circulation.

"India went into it without having done that. It had a negative economic impact but also the idea was that somehow people who had money stored in their basements without having paid taxes on it would overnight see religion and come to the government and say 'sorry we were hiding this stuff, let me pay taxes on it'," Rajan said, calling it a "naive view".

"Anybody who knows India, knows that very quickly we find ways around the system," he said adding that with "essentially" all the money that was demonetised coming back into the system, the exercise did not have the direct effect that was sought.

While the longer term impact of demonetisation is yet to be seen, its negative economic impact included people not having currency, not being able to pay and economic activity plummeting especially in the informal sector.

"There may be some longer term impact that people think that if this sort of thing happens then the government is serious about collecting taxes. There may be greater tax payments but we still have to see strong evidence that that is true," he said.

Rajan also expressed concern that a lot of people probably lost their jobs due to demonetisation but that has not been counted well as it would be mostly in the informal sector.

"The positive impacts (of demonetisation) are out there in the future. We have no idea whether they will be important. To my mind it was not a policy that was useful at that time," he said.

To a suggestion that demonetisation could have positively impacted growth, Rajan said "you would have to find a new economic theory to explain how it helped the economy".

He said most estimates of the cost of demonetisation vary between 1.5-2 percent of the GDP.

"It would be a really die-hard government advocate who would say that the growth benefits of demonetisation were immediate," he said.

"Most of the supporters of the move would say that the benefits of the move are coming by changing the incentive to pay taxes. I would say yes, we will have to wait and see whether that in fact is true," he said.

On the problem of non-performing assets and making a reference to the Nirav Modi-PNB scandal, Rajan said it is worrisome that some Indian banks have antiquated systems.

A part of the Punjab National Bank scam was cyber-related and there is a need to go into the details of how the fraud came to be, he said.

"It turns out that we don't need to be really clever in the Indian system to make away with a billion dollars. Some of these banks have antiquated systems also....Your worry is that the systems are not adequate to prevent rogue dealers, rogue employees colluding and making off with stuff. That is the fraud part," he said.

He added that bad loans do not necessarily come from fraud, they come from "irrational exuberance".Walmart Inc is likely to reach a deal to buy a majority stake in Indian e-commerce player Flipkart by the end of June in what could be the US retail giants biggest acquisition of an online business

Hog Kong/ Mumbai: Walmart Inc is likely to reach a deal to buy a majority stake in Indian e-commerce player Flipkart by the end of June in what could be the US retail giants biggest acquisition of an online business, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

Reuters reported last week that Walmart completed its due diligence on Flipkart and had made a proposal to buy 51 percent or more of the Indian company for between $10 billion to $12 billion.

A deal with Flipkart would step up Walmarts battle with Amazon.com for a bigger share of Indias fledgling e-commerce market, which Morgan Stanley estimates will be worth $200 billion in a decade. Local media have reported that Amazon is exploring a possible counter offer for Flipkart.

Both sources declined to be named as the talks are private.

Walmart will buy both new and existing Flipkart shares, with the new shares expected to value the Bengaluru-based firm at least $18 billion, the sources said. The price for existing shares would value the firm at about $12 billion, one of the people said.

Japans SoftBank Group, which owns roughly one-fifth of Flipkart via its Vision Fund, is unlikely to sell any of its shares due to the low price being offered for the existing shares, this source said.

Reuters has previously reported that early investors such as Tiger Global, Accel and Naspers will likely sell their entire stakes in Flipkart to Walmart if a deal is reached.

A deal is not yet finalised, and talks between Walmart, Flipkart and its investors are ongoing, one of the people said.

Flipkart also counts eBay, Tencent Holdings and Microsoft Corp among its investors.

Flipkart did not respond to a request for comment, a representative for Walmart in India declined comment while SoftBank said it doesnt comment on speculation.

Big Indian battle

For Walmart, the worlds largest retailer known for its superstores, a deal with Flipkart would open up the vast Indian market.

Walmart has for years tried to enter India but has remained confined to a cash-and-carry wholesale business amid tough restrictions on foreign investment. It currently operates 21 such stores in India.

By comparison, Amazon closely trails Flipkart, which along with its fashion units controls nearly 40 percent of Indias online retail market, according to estimates by researcher Forrester.

Flipkarts investors are concerned that any deal with Amazon would run into regulatory hurdles as a combination would have more than 70 percent of Indias online retail market, one of the sources said.

Walmarts push into e-commerce comes as Amazon has embraced offline retail, with an affiliate of the Seattle-based company picking up a $27.6 million stake in Indian retailer Shoppers Stop Ltd.

In the United States, Amazon also bought high-end grocer Whole Foods Market Inc for $13.7 billion last year.

Walmarts investment would give Flipkart not just additional funds to fight Amazon, but also arm it with a formidable ally with extensive experience in retailing, logistics and supply chain management.

Former Amazon employees Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal founded Flipkart in 2007 in Indias tech hub of Bengaluru.

Like Amazons founder Jeff Bezos, they began by selling books, but have diversified rapidly, including by selling smartphones, such as those made by Chinas Xiaomi, through exclusive flash sales, and now compete with Amazon in almost all product categories.Madras High Court directed the Tamil Nadu government to clarify whether a governor has to consult the Centre over premature release of convicts.

Chennai: The Madras High Court on Thursday directed the Tamil Nadu government to clarify whether a governor under Article 161 of Constitution has to consult the Centre over premature release of convicts in cases handled by central agencies.

Posing the question on an appeal filed by Rajiv Gandhi assassination case life convict Nalini, a bench comprising Justices KK Sasidharan and R Subramanian posted the matter to 23 April for further hearing.

Nalini had filed the appeal against the 2016 order of Justice M Sathyanarayanan rejecting her prayer for premature release under a 1994 state government scheme under Art 161 (powers of Governor to grant pardon).

As per the scheme, life convicts who had served 20 years of prison term were eligible for pre-mature release.

The state government had opposed Nalini's plea before the single judge citing a similar matter before the Supreme Court.

The apex court in its order on the matter in March, 2016 had made it clear that for pre-mature release pleas under CrPc section 435, concurrence by the Centre was required in cases handled by central agencies such as the CBI.

When the appeal came up for hearing, counsel for Nalini argued that her plea did not fall under Sec 435 of CrPC and it was under Article 161. Hence, there was no need for consultation.

The bench directed the state government to answer the question whether the governor under article 161 has to consult the Union government.

Nalini had made a representation in February, 2014 seeking pre-mature release saying she had undergone imprisonment for more than 24 years.

She further submitted that her death sentence was commuted for life under article 161 of the Constitution on 24 April, 2000.

Nalini contended that she was eligible to be released under the scheme announced by the state government on 10 November, 1994.

She has been lodged in a special prison for women at Vellore for more than 26 years since her arrest in connection with the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumpudur by an LTTE suicide bomber on 21 May, 1991.The Marathahalli Police on Wednesday traced Atreyee Majumdar, an anthropologist who went missing on 4 April, to Hotel Taj Vivanta on MG Road in Bengaluru.

Bengaluru: The Marathahalli Police on Wednesday traced Atreyee Majumdar, an anthropologist who went missing on 4 April, to Hotel Taj Vivanta on MG Road in Bengaluru.

The hotel staff informed the local police station (Halasuru) about Atreyee Majumdar, who in turn, informed us. We reached Hotel Taj Vivanta at 11 am and took her to hospital for medical check up, said Marathahalli police inspector Sadiq Pasha. The police have not yet pieced together information on how she ended up the Vivanta.

Majumdar, 35, a resident of Bellandur in Bengaluru, had been missing for a week, prompting colleagues and friends to form search parties.

She became untraceable on 4 April, the day she arrived in the city from Toronto, where she is pursuing a post-doctoral fellowship. She stayed at Novotel Hotel on 4 April and her last known location was obtained from CCTV footage that showed her checking out of the Marriot Hotel on 6 April. She was alone, Pasha said

Her parents Biplab Majumdar and Paramati Majumdar were "happy to know" that their daughter was found safe. I cannot say much now. I am happy to have found my daughter, said Biplab.

According to her parents, Majumdar went incommunicado in Toronto and did not respond to their calls until 3 April, but she informed them on 4 April that she'd landed in New Delhi. She flew to Bengaluru the same day. Her father received her at the airport and brought her home around 4.30 pm. Majumdar left the house at 9 pm, and her parents said they did not know where she went.

I am very happy. My daughter is fine, her mother Paramati told Firstpost.

The police could not reach Majumdar on social media as she'd not carried her phone. The police had distributed pamphlets with her photo, informed hospitals, paying guest (PG) accommodations and hotels and asked them to inform Majumdar's parents if they spot her.

Majumdar is an alumna of National Law School in Bengaluru and Yale University. She was in Toronto pursuing a post-doctoral research with a fellowship from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation.

Y Maheshwara Reddy is a Bengaluru-based freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article quoted police inspector Sadiq Pasha's assessment of Majumdar's health condition. That portion of the piece has been edited out as Pasha is not qualified to offer his opinion about aspects related to medicine.The Delhi Crime Branch has solved the CBSE Class 10 Mathematics paper leak case.

The Delhi Crime Branch has solved the CBSE Class X Mathematics paper leak case, reported media outlets.

According to News18, Rakesh Kumar Sharma, the CBSE exam superintendent in Una, Himachal Pradesh had leaked the Class X Mathematics paper in addition to leaking the Class XII Economics paper. The Police said Kumar confessed to leaking the class X Maths paper during questioning. As per a PTI report, police has also arrested two men and a woman in connection with the leak.

Police had said the accused  Kumar, a teacher, Amit Sharma, a clerk and Ashok Kumar, a support staff in DAV Centenary Public School in Una  were arrested by the crime branch after lengthy investigations and questioning on Friday. While the arrested woman, who hails from Ferozepur in Punjab, was allegedly sent a copy of the leaked paper by Kumar, the police said.

Kumar had been teaching economics at the DAV Centenary Public School for the last eight years. He was the centre superintendent of the Jawahar Navodaya Public School in Una, where the CBSE exams were being held. Amit Sharma and Ashok Kumar worked at the DAV school as a clerk and a peon respectively.

The economics paper was leaked on March 23 - three days before the exam date - in Himachal Pradesh's Una town and was shared on social networking site WhatsApp by at least 40 groups. The leak was exposed after an envelope containing four images of a hand-written copy of the question paper was delivered to the CBSE Headquarters in Delhi on the evening March 26, the day of the exam. On March 30, the Central Board of Secondary Education announced it would re-conduct the Class 12 economics exam throughout the country on April 25.

The police had registered two cases in connection with the matter. The first case relating to the leak of the economics paper was filed on 27, while the other on the mathematics paper leak was lodged on March 28.

The Delhi Police will address a press conference soon where it will share more details about the investigation, reported India Today.

On Saturday, a Special Investigation Team of the Delhi Police had arrested Sharma along with a clerk and a support staff of a private school in Himachal Pradesh on charges of leaking the CBSE Class XII Economics paper.

The SIT had found that the Economics paper was leaked in handwritten format two days prior to the exam held on 26 March.

According to Delhi Police's Special Commissioner RP Upadhyaya, Rakesh Kumar was working as a teacher in the school since 2010 and had been made Central Superintendent of CBSE Examination Centre in Una, where he was responsible of conducting board examination in at least three schools including Jawahar Narvodya school, since the last three years.

"He had access to the Union Bank of India branch where sealed question papers were kept under his custody. It was his duty to further take these papers in schools," Upadhyaya had said, adding that two days before the Class XII Economics paper, he, along with Sharma and Kumar went to collect the question paper of computer science but also took out the economics question paper from the bundle.

While the other two took the computer science paper with them to the school, Sharma had clicked photos of the economics paper with his mobile and sent it through WhatsApp to his tuition student to prepare a hand-written copy, said the police officer. The teacher had put it back in the bundle and resealed it on the day of economics exam and since he was the superintendent, no one suspected him.

Sharma had subsequently sent the handwritten Economics paper to his relative, whose son was appearing in the exam, in Chandigarh and this student sent it to a WhatsApp group, from which it was circulated in over 40 such groups from Chandigarh to Pune, Upadhyaya added. Sharma had later deleted the pictures of the question paper so as to remove proof of his involvement, the police officer said. However, a majority of the members of such groups did not take the handwritten question paper seriously but hundreds found it beneficial.

"No monetary exchanges have been found so far in investigation. We are trying to ascertain how many question papers Rakesh Kumar and his associates had leaked so far. We are also examining the CCTV footage of the bank and the questioning with bank employees is underway," he had added.

Noting the SIT has worked out this case with the help of Cyber Cell and handwriting experts, Upadhyay had said that they will seek the trio's police custody to interrogate them in connection with Class X Maths question paper leak," he said. He had said that the SIT has interrogated over 70 people, including WhatsApp admins, school teachers, ground staff, students and others to trace the leak's point of origin and beneficiaries. "Finally on the basis of crucial clues and leads, the arrests were made from Himachal Pradesh," Upadhyaya had said.

DAV Centenary Public School principal Atul Mahajan had told IANS the police team came and questioned him about the paper leak, but since he was not directly associated with the exams and had authorised Rakesh Kumar to conduct them, the latter was arrested. "Police also collected certain documents from the school," he had added.

The investigators had sought the deleted chats and contexts shared by the group members and the WhatsApp admins amongst each others. Via an email to the WhatsApp Headquarters in California in the US, the team was able to revive the deleted conversation that cracked the case.

The Central Board of Secondary Education academic unit at Rouse Avenue had on 26 March received some sheets of handwritten answers of Economics paper in a blank envelope before the exam commenced. On 1 April, three others, including two teachers of a convent school, were arrested in the case.

With inputs from agenciesDefence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday said the government cannot walk a 'thin line' to compel Indian armed forces to buy indigenous weapons.

Thiruvidanthai (Tamil Nadu): Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Wednesday said the government cannot walk a "thin line" to compel Indian armed forces to buy indigenous weapons, after she opened a major defence trade fair that projects India  world's biggest global arms importer  as one of the major military equipment manufacturing hubs.

The four-day DefExpo India, themed "Emerging Defence Manufacturing Hub" and being held at Thiruvidanthai off the East Coast Road, is the 10th biennial exercise aimed at establishing Brand India and highlighting the manufacturing capabilities of the country's defence sector.

Asked about the huge export-import gap in the defence sector of a country that does not even figure among the top 25 exporters of arms with even its own forces hesitating to buy locally-manufactured weapon systems, Sitharaman said she could only tell the Indian armed forces to procure from indigenous companies "as much as possible".

She said she could not cross a "thin line" to impinge on the freedom of the Indian Army, the Indian Air Force or the Indian Navy "to make their own decisions" as per their operational requirements.

"When I am promoting Indian exports, Indian manufacturing, I am also telling the forces to procure domestically as much as possible.

"I would want to draw a thin line between the government's enthusiasm to make sure the production capabilities are such that they meet international standards and are export-worthy and the other side of the line where the Army, Navy or Air Force make their decision on what they want, what combination of equipment they want and in that combination if an India produced item fits in well.

"I can only go that far and not further, just as they can only go that far and not further without compromising each others' interests. I can't imagine prevailing upon them. We will only want them to give space to local manufacturers and buy indigenous products."

With the third largest armed forces in the world, India's defence market is one of the most lucrative in the world. According to estimates, the country is expected to lay out a $620-billion budget for defence procurements till 2022, offering foreign as well as local businesses immense opportunities.

Over 30 percent of India's defence budget goes on capital acquisitions and 60 percent of defence-related requirements are met by imports. The government is trying for import substitution and has offered foreign countries to "Make in India"  a key facet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's governance aspects.

The defence exhibition that targets India's futuristic goal of building a self-sufficient domestic arms industry comes even as the armed forces of India facing multiple security threats continue to be saddled with sub-optimal weapon systems.

At the heart of this is the country's inability to boost indigenous defence manufacturing, which is often blamed on inordinate procedural delays, making a product redundant by the time it gets market-ready.

For example, the advanced versions of the indigenous Tejas light combat aircraft and the Arjun main battle tank: while the aircraft is still not combat-ready despite being in the making for over three decades, the main battle tank is said to be too heavy and poor in serviceability.

At the defence exhibition, dozens of foreign and local companies and defence public sector undertakings are hard selling their products to the Indian armed forces and foreigners, including defence attaches.

Defence Secretary Ajay Kumar said the government was not targeting any specific number of deals or agreements expected to be signed at the exhibition that "showcases the strengths of India's public sector and also uncovers India's growing private industry and spreading MSME base for components and sub-systems".

Over 650 exhibitors, including some 520 Indian companies, are participating in the event.

The response from foreign companies this time, as compared to the previous DefExpo held in Goa in 2016, has not been that good. A total of 232 foreign companies had participated in Goa, while it is 154 this time.

Official delegations from nearly 50 countries, including the US and the UK, are attending the expo that has participation of some major global companies including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE Systems, Rafael, Saab, Airbus, Rosonboron Exports, United Shipbuilding, Sibat, Wartsila and Rhode and Schwarz.

Also on display at the 2.90 lakh-square-feet exhibition area along the sea coast are indigenously-developed land, air and naval systems.

These include Tejas fighter jets, advanced towed artillery gun systems designed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Arjun Mark 2 tank and Dhanush artillery guns.

The DRDO is showcasing the Nirbhay missile system with its launcher, MBT Arjun Mk-I tank, Astra missile, low-level transportable radar system, medium power radar system and Varunastra  the heavyweight anti-submarine electric torpedo.The Haryana government has decided to recover the benefit availed by people under 'Old Age Allowance Scheme' by suppressing true information.

Chandigarh: The Haryana government has decided to recover the benefit availed by people under 'Old Age Allowance Scheme' by suppressing true information, a government official said on Wednesday.

A decision to this effect was taken in a meeting of state cabinet, which met under the chairmanship of chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Wednesday. It was decided that the benefit given for the ineligible period would be recovered by the department by deducting 50 percent amount from the monthly pension of the beneficiaries.

Meanwhile, the government has also decided that notices issued and FIRs registered against such beneficiaries would be withdrawn.

In another decision, the Haryana Cabinet approved modified scheme for hiring of buses on kilometre basis by state transport department. The buses will be hired by inviting tenders or applications from an individual, firm, company or a registered society or any other legal entity, an official release said giving details of the cabinet decision. Before entering into an agreement with the state transport department, the owner shall get the buses registered in his or her or its name in Haryana. The driver of the bus will continue to be the employee of the owner of the bus.

The transport department then shall provide conductors for the operation of the bus under whose control the bus will ply from one destination to another. The owner of the bus will exercise absolutely no operational control over the bus. The buses shall be painted as per the colour scheme approved by the department, the release said.

In another decision, the state government has started the process to set up an international airport/civil aviation hub at Hisar as the cabinet approved the sale of land measuring over 23 acre belonging to Municipal Corporation, Hisar to the civil aviation department for its construction. It also approved the proposal of the technical education department to rename the University of Science and Technology by amending the YMCA University of Science and Technology Act, 2009. The change in the name of the university has been effected for its identification as a government university.

The YMCA University of Science and Technology, Faridabad will now be known as J C Bose University of Science and Technology YMCA, Faridabad.

In yet another decision, the cabinet was informed that a state-of-art rehabilitation centre for fitment of artificial limbs shall be set up at Nawada Tigaon in Faridabad district. The cabinet also gave its approval to amend the schedule of rates under the Haryana Value Added Tax Act, 2003 regarding provisions made under it for natural gas.An Army jawan was on Thursday killed in fresh ceasefire violation by Pakistan along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch and Rajouri district

Jammu: An Army jawan was on Thursday killed in fresh ceasefire violation by Pakistan along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district, a defence spokesman said.

Naik Thorat Kiran Popatrao (31) was grievously injured in the exchange of firing in Krishna Ghati sector of Poonch district on Wednesday evening and later succumbed to injuries, the spokesman said.

On Monday, two soldiers  rifleman Vinod Singh and rifleman Jaki Sharma, both hailing from Jammu and Kashmir  were killed in the ceasefire violation by Paksitan in Sunderbani sector of Rajouri, the official said.

"Paksitani troops initiated unprovoked and indiscriminate firing of small arms, automatics and mortars along the LoC from 14.00 hours in Nowshera sector of Rajouri and from 16.45 hours in Krishna Ghati sector," the spokesman said.

The Indian Army gave a befitting reply and the exchange of fire between the two sides continued for quite some time, he said.

Popatrao was a resident of Fakirabad Wadi of Aurangabad district in Maharashtra. He is survived by his wife.

"He was a brave and sincere soldier. The nation will always remain indebted to him for his supreme sacrifice and devotion to duty," the spokesman said.

His death took the number of Army personnel killed in the cross-border firing by Pakistan in the twin districts since Monday to three and 15 security personnel this year.The Jammu and Kashmir police is as competent as any investigation agency to handle the Kathua rape case, state DGP SP Vaid asserted on Thursday.

Jammu: The Jammu and Kashmir police has no objection if the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district is assigned to the CBI but it is as competent as any investigation agency to handle the case, state DGP SP Vaid asserted on Thursday.

He also rejected as "misconception" claims that the crime branch team probing the matter had no member from the Jammu region while emphasising that police officers perform their duties rising above regional or religious identities.

If we can we fight terrorism and stone pelting, why can't we carry out a professional investigation? Our officers are on deputation with the CBI, Vaid said backing the crime branch team that investigated the case and arrested eight persons.

He was responding to queries from general public in a Twitter broadcast.

To a question why the Kathua rape and murder case was not transferred to the CBI, Vaid said we have no objection but the police is as competent as anybody else".

The probe in the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl belonging to the nomadic Muslim Bakerwal community in Kathua has been questioned by the Jammu Bar Association who have alleged "targeting of minority Dogras" and demanded a CBI probe.

The police have arrested eight persons in the case.

In the interaction on Thursay, Vaid termed it a misconception that only officers from the Kashmir region were part of the special investigation team.

The SIT had officers from all ranks and regions. A police officer is a police officer and not a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Christian. That is what we believe in, he said adding that it was a misconception that no officer from Jammu area was part of the team.

Naming two of the officers, he said SSP, Jammu, Ramesh Jhalla and DSP, S Sharma, were actively involved in probing the case.The alleged murder and rape of an 8-year-old Kashmiri girl in Kathua and the alleged rape of an eighteen-year-old by a BJP MLA in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh have sparked much outrage.

Two of the most horrifying rape cases in recent times have shaken India. The alleged murder and rape of an 8-year-old Kashmiri girl in Kathua and the alleged rape of a seventeen-year-old by a BJP MLA in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh have sparked much outrage. Bollywood celebrities, too, have spoken against the atrocities and expressed their solidarity.

Celebrities have also called out 'fake Hindu nationalists' who were opposing the making of a chargesheet in the Kathua rape case. It was only after members of the Bakarwal tribe, which the victim was a part of, took to the streets to protest that the chargesheet was filed.

In Unnao, the survivor's father died in police custody after he reportedly urged the force to register a case against the accused. The survivor has now been going from pillar to pillar, while living in the fear of losing her uncle, too.

Members of the Indian film fraternity have condemned two rape incidents  in Kathua and Unnao  which have sent shockwaves across the country. Celebrities like Javed Akhtar, Farhan Akhtar and Nimrat Kaur and have called it a gut-wrenching, horrendous and disgusting act, for which they have demanded justice.

Here's what the celebrities tweeted:

Javed Akhtar: All those who wish justice for women should stand up and raise their voices against the rapists and their protectors in Unnao and Kathua.

Tisca Chopra: So pained to read about Unnao and Kathua rapes... How strongly the government responds will be its true test. At least I won't vote for them coming elections if they don't take action this time.

Farhan Akhtar: Imagine what goes through the mind of an 8-year-old as she is drugged, held captive, gang-raped over days and then murdered. If you don't feel her terror, you are not human. If you don't demand ***** get justice, you belong to nothing.

Renuka Shahane: The religion of the victim and the religion of the rapist should never matter! It is of no consequence! Rape is a crime against humanity! Appalled that some people can actually support rapists! Shocked beyond belief! RIP humanity!The alleged rape and murder of an eighrt-year-old girl by six men, who had held her in captivity in Kathua district, has shocked Jammu and Kashmir.

The alleged rape and murder of an eighrt-year-old girl by six men, who had held her in captivity in a small village temple in Kathua district for a week in January, has shocked Jammu and Kashmir.

Amidst the recent spurt in violence in Jammu and Kashmir, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Wednesday met Home Minister Rajnath Singh and discussed with him the security situation in the state and how to bring back normalcy.

An FIR was also registered against lawyers who attempted to prevent the police from filing chargesheet in the case.

The issue has already been politicised, as Opposition parties attacked the central government over this issue. "Modi should change his slogan from 'Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao' to 'BJP se beti bachao, beti ke pita ko bachao'. No woman is safe under his rule, be it in Unnao or Kathua. Helpless victims are crying for justice, and the government is busy protecting the culprits," Congress general secretary in charge of communications Randeep Singh Surjewala had said.

Bakarwal community protests, Uma Bharti asks people not to communalise issue

India Today TV reported that the Bakarwal community was on Thursday protesting in Anantnag. Union minister Uma Bharti reacted to the events following the case and said that people should not politicise the issue and give it a communal colour.

The family members of the accused, on the other hand, along with Hindu Ekta Manch members, also protested in Kathua and demanded a CBI probe.

#Kathua rape and murder case.: Family members of accused and Hindu Ekta Manch members stage protest in Kathua, demand CBI probe. #JammuAndKashmir pic.twitter.com/cgUKPBsIxu  ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2018

Allow rule of law and keep politics out, India Today TV quoted her as saying.

Crime Branch records statements of 22 witnesses

The Crime Branch of Jammu and Kashmir Police has secured statements of 22 witnesses before a judicial magistrate.

A senior police official said that the statements had been recorded under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code before a magistrate in which they gave details of the conspiracy hatched by accused Sanjhi Ram and others.

According to the laid down process, police approach a magistrate with request for recording the statement of a witness. After his or her production, the magistrate ensures that the statement is given according to the free will of the individual and the entire process is videographed.

In case the witness, who has registered the statement, turns hostile during trial, police can press perjury charges against him or her.

"The statements did help us in our investigations and we are hopeful that the guilty will be punished," a Crime Branch official said.

Two charge sheets were filed against eight accused under various sections of the Ranbir Penal Code (equivalent of IPC) related to rape, illegal confinement, destruction of evidence and criminal conspiracy.

The accused are Sanjhi Ram, his son Vishal, special police officers Deepak Khajuria and Surender Verma, head constable Tilak Raj, sub-inspector Anand Dutta, civilian Parvesh Kumar, and Sanjhi Ram's minor nephew.

National Conference takes out protest march

On a day the Jammu High Court Bar Association (JHCBA) struck work demanding a CBI probe into the Kathua case, workers of the National Conference (NC) staged a march in Jammu on Wednesday, demanding exemplary punishment to those involved in the crime.

Led by former MLA Bimla Luthra, a group of mostly women activists took out the march from the party headquarters towards the civil secretariat, but were stopped by police after some distance, a party spokesperson said.

Accusing the PDP-BJP government for the "growing lawlessness" and for "failing to instill a sense of security among the people", Luthra demanded exemplary punishment to the guilty in the rape and murder case.

Politics leads to polarisation

This brutal crime has polarised the normally peaceful town of Jammu, with the local Bar Association calling for a bandh against what it termed the "targeting of minority Dogras" while the state police lodged a case against lawyers who allegedly tried to prevent it from filing a chargesheet against the accused.

The high-profile case has even divided the state's polity, with at least two BJP ministers in the Mehbooba Mufti government questioning the role of the police.

The victim, who belonged to the nomadic Bakarwal Muslim community, had disappeared from near her home in the forests next to Rasana village in Kathua, 90 kms from Jammu, on 10 January.

A week later, her body was found in the same area, and medical examination pointed towards sexual assault.

During initial investigations, police arrested a juvenile. Later, the case was transferred to Jammu and Kashmir Police's Crime Branch with clear instructions from Director General of Police SP Vaid to catch the culprits, no matter how high and mighty.

Two special police officers (SPOs)  Deepak Khajuria and Surinder Kumar  and later, another five persons, including former revenue official and the alleged conspirator, Sanji Ram (60), who surrendered before the special investigation team, were among those arrested.

The Crime Branch team, which submitted a set of two charge sheets, faced a tough time when local lawyers allegedly tried to prevent them from filing the documents before the court.

On Tuesday, the police filed an FIR against a group of lawyers. "An FIR has been lodged against a group of lawyers who held protests and tried to prevent the Crime Branch officials from performing their duty," a senior police official had told PTI.

Political parties also traded charges over the handling of the case and the issue acquired a communal hue due to the alleged association of the accused with a right-wing group.

With inputs from agenciesThe rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Kathua and the subsequent support for the accused tell a chilling story of a people numbed by bigotry.

Events in Kathua, where a minor girl was raped and killed, allegedly to instil fear among nomads and drive them out of the area, have held up a mirror to our face. And the reflection is really ugly.

The rape and the subsequent support for the accused in Jammu tell a chilling story of a people numbed by bigotry. If a rape in a temple whose presiding deity is Maryada Purushottam Rama (the epitome of dignity) and blatant support to the alleged perpetrators in the name of religion, don't shock the nation, India needs to take a close look at its morality and sensitivity.

The details are horrifying. An eight-year-old girl was lured into the meadows of Kathua for a planned rape and murder. She was drugged and tortured. Men took turns to rape her. After ravaging her for days, they stopped for a while, not out of mercy but to let a cop rape her one last time. Then she was strangulated and bludgeoned to death. All this was done, according to the police FIR, to drive Bakarwal Gujjars  a nomadic tribe of Sunni Muslims  from the area.

The entire episode is reminiscent of the brutality of the Talibani and Islamic State regimes. These oppressive regimes raped, tortured and disfigured women to terrify their communities, bludgeoned them into submission and drove them out of their territories. Like the rape and murder under the Talibanis and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's caliphate, the inhuman act in Kathua, perpetrated in the name of religion, were triggered by bigotry.

The defining trait of inhuman people is that they let hatred subsume everything. Kindness, empathy and love are replaced by a maddening desire for violence, vengeance and injustice in the name of some pervert philosophy. Every act is directed towards serving some evil ideology even if it warrants complete surrender of humanity's ideals. The Kathua rape and its aftermath have all the trademark signs of inhuman behaviour.

The problem with Jammu and Kashmir is that it is now being split into two different directions by its own people. The Valley has embraced violence in the name of religion and separatism. In Jammu, there is counter-polarisation in the name of Hindutva and nationalism. As this battle wages, humanity and its ideals have been sacrificed.

The very idea of raping and killing an innocent girl to scare away a group of people is barbaric. It is more vicious than a rape because the perpetrator not only planned it but has also assigned it a socio-political motive, thus giving it some sort of higher legitimacy in his own mind.

Then, the crime was committed in a temple dedicated to Lord Rama in the belief that evil gets divine sanctity just because it was executed in a shrine. In another perversion of morality, the task was assigned to juveniles, in the belief that they would be let off with mild punishment even if they were caught. Ironically, the planners of this barbaric act not only destroyed the life of an innocent girl but also victimised their own children by using them as pawns.

On top of that, we have the ugly spectre of people marching in support of the accused, chanting religious slogans, waving the tricolour and calling for a bandh. A few years ago, it would have been unimaginable that protesters led by  of all the people  lawyers would shut down a city in India so that criminals are not arrested.

All this because they feel obliged to stand in support of bigotry and violence instead of humanity and justice. But, this sordid drama of the absurd was played out on the streets of Jammu on Wednesday. Such perversion of morality not only shames humanity but also the faith and the country it purports to represent.The Jammu and Kashmir government on Friday appointed two special public prosecutors, both Sikhs, for the trial in the sensitive Kathua rape and murder case

Jammu: The Jammu and Kashmir government on Friday appointed two special public prosecutors, both Sikhs, for the trial in the sensitive Kathua rape and murder case to ensure focussed attention and speedy conduct in the matter, a senior official said.

The state police crime branch which probed the alleged rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl belonging to the nomadic Muslim Bakerwal community had filed a main charge sheet against seven accused persons and a separate charge sheet against a juvenile in a court in Kathua district earlier this week.

The government hereby appoint S Bhopinder Singh, Chief Prosecuting Officer, Crime Branch, Jammu and Harinder Singh, Chief Prosecuting Officer, Samba as Special Public Prosecutors to conduct the case titles State Verus Sanji Ram and others and another title (involving the juvenile) in the case pending disposal before principal sessions judge/ court of chief judicial magistrate, Kathua, Law Department Secretary Abdul Majid Bhat said in an order issued on Thursday.

"This was done to ensure speedy conduct and ensure focussed attention to the case," a senior official said.

Jammu and Kashmir Police DGP SP Vaid had written to the government in this regard by recommending two officers as SPPs to conduct the case.

"We wanted two officers to pursue the case from police department as others may take the case casually," another official said.

Asked whether two Sikh officers were engaged as SPPs to ensure "neutrality" in view of Hindu-Muslim polarisation over the case, DGP Vaid said "please do not think on religious lines. It has not been done. Police does not think in terms of Hindu or Muslim or Sikh".

The body of the girl, from the Bakerwal community, was recovered from Rassana forest on 17 January, a week after she went missing while grazing horses.

On 23 January, the government had handed over the case to the crime branch of the state police which formed a Special Investigation Team and arrested eight people including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destruction of evidence.

The Bar Association of Jammu (BAJ) has demanded a CBI probe into the case.The last few days have seen the worst of the legal profession come out in the Kathua rape case as lawyers tried to block the chargesheet from being filed.

One of the core values that we hold dear as a democracy is that we live in a nation governed by laws. A nation governed by laws is one where the administration of justice is done in an orderly fashion without disruption. Advocates in this country are officers that serve in that system. It is a profession that was supposed to be noble once upon a time. It may not be noble now, but advocates, as officers of the court, still have a duty to ensure the course of justice is not perverted. They are not supposed to be judges, they are supposed to assist judges in coming to a conclusion that is in accordance with law.

This, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be the case in Jammu and Kashmir. When the incident happened at Kathua, one expected that everyone would come together to assist the judicial machinery in ensuring that the administration of justice was not disrupted. Lawyers would be there to represent the accused. other lawyers would be there to help the state in the prosecution. Some other lawyers would be there at the Bar of the High Court using their acumen to raise this matter as one of public interest.

But instead, the last few days have seen the worst of this profession come out. J&K Police have registered FIRs against members of the Kathua Magistrate's Court Bar Association who lodged a protest against the seven accused being chargesheeted for the rape and murder of an 8-year-old. They blocked the office of the Crime Branch to prevent the police from filing the chargesheet. A chargesheet is merely a charge, it is not proof of guilt or innocence. If they thought the accused were innocent, it is an argument that ought to have been taken up in court. The law after all presumes innocence. It is no excuse to block a chargesheet. It is no excuse to prevent the police from doing their jobs.

What makes matters worse is that the Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association has called for a strike on Thursday to protest. They aren't protesting the actions of their colleagues in trying to block a court proceeding. They are protesting the fact that the police took action against these lawyers.

At the outset, it needs to be remembered that lawyers don't have a right to strike. The Supreme Court in a catena of judgments has affirmed this position. In Ex-Captian Harish Uppal v Union of India, the Supreme Court (2003) 2 SCC 45 held:

"In conclusion it is held that lawyers have no right to go on strike or give a call for boycott, not even on a token strike.

The protest, if any is required, can only be by giving press statements, TV interviews, carrying out of Court premises banners and/or placards, wearing black or white or any colour arm bands, peaceful protect marches outside and away from Court premises, going on dharnas or relay fasts etc. It is held that lawyers holding Vakalats on behalf of their clients cannot not attend Courts in pursuance to a call for strike or boycott.All lawyers must boldly refuse to abide by any call for strike or boycott. No lawyer can be visited with any adverse consequences by the Association or the Council and no threat or coercion of any nature including that of expulsion can be held out. It is held that no Bar Council or Bar Association can permit calling of a meeting for purposes of considering a call for strike or boycott and requisition, if any, for such meeting must be ignored. It is held that only in the rarest of rare cases where the dignity, integrity and independence of the Bar and/or the Bench are at stake, Courts may ignore (turn a blind eye) to a protest abstention from work for not more than one day.

It is being clarified that it will be for the Court to decide whether or not the issue involves dignity or integrity or independence of the Bar and/or the Bench.

Therefore in such cases the President of the Bar must first consult the Chief Justice or the District Judge before Advocate decide to absent themselves from Court. The decision of the Chief Justice or the District Judge would be final and have to be abided by the Bar. It is held that Courts are under no obligation to adjourn matters because lawyers are on strike.

On the contrary, it is the duty of all Courts to go on with matters on their boards even in the absence of lawyers. In other words, Courts must not be privy to strikes or calls for boycotts. It is held that if a lawyer, holding a Vakalat of a client, abstains from attending Court due to a strike call, he shall be personally liable to pay costs which shall be addition to damages which he might have to pay his client for loss suffered by him."

Further, even if lawyers have to go on strike, they cannot go on strike to try and pervert the course of justice. They cannot strike because an FIR has been registered against people who tried to block the police from filing a chargesheet. This situation borders on the bizarre, but still manages to provoke disgust.

The lawyers who tried to block the chargesheet and those who went on strike on Thursday to prevent justice from taking its course are a disgrace to the profession. They should not be allowed to continue practicing. Their conduct has brought disrepute not just to the Bar at Jammu & Kashmir but to the entire Indian Bar. If they are allowed to remain in the profession, it will be a stain that will be hard to clean. Their bar cards need to be taken from them. The Bar Council needs to initiate disciplinary proceedings at the earliest.Amid the criticism over the alleged rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Kathua district, Mehbooba Mufti said her government will not allow the law to be obstructed.

Amid the criticism over the alleged rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti on Thursday said her government will not allow the law to be obstructed and assured that justice will be delivered.

The rape-and-murder of the girl from nomadic Muslim Bakerwal community created a controversy after lawyers in Jammu called for a shutdown on Wednesday, demanding the case be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Mehbooba responded to their concerns on the probe. "The law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions and statements of a group of people," she said in a tweet.

Opposition National Conference leader Omar Abdullah, however, lashed out at the chief minister for not taking any action against two BJP ministers who had attended a rally held in support of the persons accused in the case. He said:

What rubbish! They are HER ministers, not the Hon PMs. The way for her to express her displeasure is to sack them in Jammu not come & leak her alleged displeasure in Delhi. https://t.co/BVU3fGib61  Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) April 12, 2018

He was responding to tweets by a journalist from a TV channel in which she had said Mehbooba had expressed displeasure over BJP ministers actions in regard with this case. However, the journalist later took down the tweet and published another version. On this, Abdullah said:

So even her displeasure wasnt genuine & the tweet has had to be deleted so that a corrected version could be issued.  Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) April 12, 2018

Meanwhile, Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh also said that the Kathua rape victim won't be denied justice.

On Monday, lawyers in Kathua had tried to prevent the crime branch from filing the chargesheet in the case. The charge sheet has revealed some chilling details about how the girl was allegedly kidnapped, drugged, raped inside a place of worship before being killed.

An FIR was lodged against the agitating lawyers, which prompted the Jammu High Court Bar Association to call for the bandh on Wednesday.

With inputs from PTIThe 8-year-old victim of rape and murder in Kathua is not the new Nirbhaya, because there should be no Nirbhaya. Lets never forget that.

As India slowly wakes up to the horrors that were inflicted on an eight-year-old girl in January, collective outrage is gathering steam. New hashtags are trending every day. Horrifying details about the crime are emerging to shake us out of our consciousness. Armchair activists are leading the shout to get justice for the child.

Rightly so. It is impossible not to be moved to tears after reading the terrible details about the Kathua rape case. From being drugged, to being gangraped by men who wanted to satisfy their lust, to being strangled and bludgeoned to death in two horrific attempts, to her tiny withered body being dumped in a forest, the child was treated to inhumanity that is unimaginable. Like many others, I am also walking through my days unable to shake off her brutalised face. How can our nation produce such depraved souls? And how can they be protected under the guise of religion and nationalism? How did we go from #BetiBachao to #BalatkariKoBachao? Today, we are seeing the true face of India and it is ugly.

But what is even more disgusting is to call the little girl 'the new Nirbhaya'. Why? Because it shows us that we havent learnt our lesson. We havent had enough. We havent changed. When we call another rape victim by the name of Indias most brutalised rape victim, it shows us that weve made peace with the brutality of rape and with what happens to its victims. How can we reduce the victim of rape to a moniker?

When the Supreme Court awarded a well-deserved death sentence to the four convicts who brutally raped, mutilated and murdered 23-year-old Jyoti Singh Pandey, we called it a day of victory for India. The death sentence was supposed to send a strong message to rapists and perpetrators of sexual violence. It was supposed to stop them from committing further heinous crimes. It was supposed to set a precedent for India. It was supposed to demonstrate that India could protect its sisters, daughters and mothers in a dignified and fair manner. It was supposed to be the beginning of justice, equality and safety to all the women in our country.

But, did it? Look at where we are now. Back to square one. Where is the change? There is none. It would appear that Jyoti Singhs verdict has taught us nothing. Our candle marches, our protests, our outrage, has come to nothing. The relentless work of selfless activists, lawyers, citizens, and NGOs, who fought long and hard to ensure justice, has meant nothing.

Because today we are still seeing incidents like Kathua and Unnao. We are still reading about horrific cases like Rohtak, Jisha, Bilkis Bano, among many others.

Because we really havent had enough, have we?

We read incidents of rape every single day; obviously because a woman is raped every 20 minutes in our country. Yet, we react only when the rape is grossly heinous. Our anger is as cheap as our lives. As a nation, weve become desensitised to rape. We still need gross human violations to have our collective conscience shaken. We still need brutality to be inhumane for us to realise our humanity. We quantify rape as good rape and bad rape and make time only for the rarest of rare cases and the most brutal of brutal crimes. We forget that rape is rape, and should be met with revolt, no matter what the severity.

Kathua rape case: Eight-year-old's death exposes faultlines in Jammu and Kashmir's polity and social construct

In Saudi Arabia, they behead men for rape. In China, they castrate men. In North Korea, its the firing squad. And we  the rape capital of the world  just seem to love our rapists. We are lenient with the way we punish them. Our great Anti Rape Bill requires proving offense beyond a reasonable doubt, while giving the accused the benefit of doubt. We do not have effective laws; they exist but are not implemented, like the POCSO Act. We have a low rate of conviction. We do not use stringent punishment. We even fight against capital punishment for men who treat the lives of women as flimsy. We do not use fast track courts. We have only one judge for every one lakh people. Our schemes help women in distress after the crime is over, not to prevent crime. Knowing all this, the rapists take a chance. They continue raping, because they know theres a bigger probability that theyll walk away scot-free than be indicted. If theres no punishment to a crime, why will the criminal stop?

More so, we glorify rapists by saying boys will be boys. When Mulayam Singh Yadav says boys make mistakes, when Abu Azmi says even women are guilty (of being raped), when ML Sharma says there is no place for women in our culture, we make them household names instead of punishing them for incitation. We normalise rape in our culture. Bade bade deshon mein aaisi choti choti baatein ... hoti rehti hai, right?

This subversion is demonstrative in the new video by The Quint where we see the cavalier attitude of men and women, boys and girls, about rape. From saying it is consensual to saying ek haath se taali nahin bajti to saying that girls are responsible for getting raped, it shows us the pervasive attitude in Haryana about rape. Weve made it a culture. And, no. This is not about Haryana. Or Uttar Pradesh or Jammu and Kashmir. This is not about Hindu rape or Muslim rape. This is not even about the BJP or Congress. This is about what we've become. Nothing but animals. Because we continue to make women the repositories of shame in these matters. Because it is women who remain victims even after so-called justice has been delivered. Because the extent of violence and inhumanity of sexual assaults against women is not only continuing, it is increasing.

So what about Nirbhaya is there to really be proud of? Yes, the December 2012 case was considered a landmark verdict, the second of its kind in India after the Shakti Mills gangrape case. Yes, it provided retribution not just to the rape victim but also to our nations outraged citizens. Yet, one of Jyoti Singh Pandeys rapists, the juvenile who allegedly inflicted the most serious wounds, is now free. We havent even put to use the Rs 3,000-crore Nirbhaya Fund to improve the safety and dignity of our women. Isnt justice delayed, justice denied? Clearly not enough has been done in the case for us to nonchalantly evoke 'Nirbhaya' again.

'Nirbhaya' means fearless. The only people who were fearless in the Kathua case were the perpetrators  the rapists who did the crime and the police who covered up the crime. How can we equate the two? 'Nirbhaya' evokes dignity, at least in death if not in life. Lets give the eight-year-old girl that, in death if not in life, before we call her 'another Nirbhaya'. Let's scream and shout and protest until we get justice for her. Lets do that before we become dead as human beings. Let's do it before we fail all the women in our country.

The Kathua victim is not 'the new Nirbhaya', because there should be no 'Nirbhaya'. Lets never forget that.

The writer is an award-winning author, columnist, feminist and TEDx Speaker. She tweets @MeghnaPantThe family members of the Kathua rape and murder victim have abandoned their home in Rasana village out of fear amid rising communal tensions.

Kathua: The family members of the Kathua rape and murder victim, have abandoned their home in Rasana village out of fear after a strike call was issued by the Jammu Bar Association to protest against the investigation into the case by Jammu and Kashmir police's crime branch.

Late on Tuesday evening, after a general strike was called by the Bar association against the crime branch for "mishandling the case", the victim's father Muhammad Yusuf Pujwala, along with his wife, two children and livestock, left their house silently and suddenly, without informing anyone, only to surface at the house of his brother in Samba district.

The family was supposed to move towards Kashmir next month along with other nomads from the village. "But after the strike and protests were called in Jammu, they decided to abandon their home," Nisar Ahmad Khan, Pujwala's brother, said.

Khan told Firstpost that Pujwala did not want to leave his house but "felt insecure" living with his family, including his father and mother, at their home amid rising communal tensions in the district.

Pujwala had adopted the girl after his two daughters had met with an accident and died. His wife had asked Pujwala to adopt the girl, who was the daughter of his brother, Akhtar.

Akhtar told Firstpost that his family had tried to motivate them to stay back but they had been feeling alone since she died and were adamant about moving towards the forests. Akhtar said that Pujwala would often say he wanted to see the places, meadows and streams, where "his daughter played like a queen with her horses."

"They left late in the night when no one could see them. They are travelling with their livestock and must have reached Patnitop by now," Akhtar told Firstpost.

The Gujjar nomads in the region spend the summers crisscrossing the mighty Himalayan mountains with their flock of livestock, herding sheep on the lush green meadows, camping along fresh water-streams and selling milk from goats and buffaloes. As the winters set in, they descend on the plains in Jammu, a climatically warmer place during the period of intense chill and snow on the mountains.

Khan said Pujwala and his family feared that their single storied two-room house might be attacked by people from the majority community. "They lived in fear for months and were preparing to move out, but were stopped by our father, who lives near the DC office in Samba," he said.

The eight-year-old nomad girl was, according to the chargesheet filed by the investigators, drugged and raped repeatedly inside a temple in Rasana village of Kathua district  a Hindu majority district where nomads have lived in peace for decades  before she was strangulated and bludgeoned to death with a stone.

"She fell prey to a conspiracy hatched for months by Sanji Ram, the custodian of the temple, where she was held in captivity during the time of her abduction," a crime branch official told Firspost on Thursday in Jammu.

Officials in the state government told Firstpost that the district administration has been asked to look into the matter and ensure that the property of the nomads in Rasana is protected. "We will do everything to ensure that the nomads are not harmed and that their property is protected," an officer in Kathua district administration said.

"They are travelling with 20 horses, 200 sheep and a few dogs, Khan said, "They will return only in November, but the world which existed earlier for them will not be the same again."

"They were very sad; they lost everything, and we too are thinking of migrating from this place. It is a sad place which will haunt our community," Anwar Ali Gujjar, a resident of Rasna said.

Abdul Haq Khan, law minister in the PDP-BJP government, told Firstpost that no matter what happens, an exemplary punishment would be handed out to people those responsible for the heinous act

It is not about any religion or region or about politics, it is about dispensing justice. It is about giving justice to an 8-year-old who had no idea what her religion is...We all have to leave politics aside and stand for truth and justice. If we can't, then we should leave politics , he said.It seems that the term 'fascist terror', that TMC once used to overthrow CPM govt in Kolkata, is something they themselves have resorted to in West Bengal.

The term 'fascist terror', that the Trinamool Congress once used against the CPM to overthrow their government and wash out of the Communist party's existence in the state of West Bengal, is something they themselves have resorted to, it seems.

While at one time, visuals and footage from Nandigram provided by the media gave the then Opposition  led by Mamata Banerjee  a huge advantage to establish their point about 'a need to change', today the same party  now in power  wants to make the media impotent.

On Monday, the so-called fourth pillar of democracy in Kolkata was faced with the ugly side of the ruling party's planned and systematic atrocity in the city, once again. A freelance photojournalist, Biplab Mondal, on assignment for The Times of India was allegedly assaulted, stripped and threatened to death. He was covering how TMC cadres were conducting random searches and taking measures to filter Opposition candidates coming in to file nominations at the Alipore Treasury Building. All he did was click a few pictures  precisely the job he was assigned.

While briefing Firstpost about the incident, a senior journalist from The Times of India said: "We saw women being brutally kicked and punched by TMC men during the panchayat elections nomination filing in Hooghly. A woman was being dragged by her hair because she wanted to file a nomination. Had it been 10 years ago, such footage would've created much hue and cry... unlike the present situation, where people are getting used to such atrocities. It was media who brought up pictures from Nandigram, and it is the same media they want to control."

The state's law and order machinery has been on edge ever since TMC had allegedly directed its cadre to prevent Opposition candidates from filing their nominations, leading to clashes between members on both sides. Mondal, on reaching the Alipore Treasury Building, found that there were at least 200 TMC cadres spread across, scanning people irrespective of gender, age and stature to make sure not one nomination from the Opposition was filed.

They even made sure that no journalist or photojournalist enter the building and take pictures. It was at that point that Mondal's journalistic mind kicked in and directed him to click a few pictures on his phone before leaving the place.

"'Ei ke tui? (who are you), give us your phone,' they said. In reply, I said I am a photojournalist... why am I supposed to give you my phone? Before I could even understand what had happened, I was kicked in the back, then punched in the face... it kept coming for two-three minutes. I could only hear them saying as they were beating me, 'how dare you', 'you media people have gone far'," recollected Mondal.

His phone was snatched and all the photos on it were deleted. He was then searched thoroughly to see if he has any pictures on his camera. After deleting the phone pictures, they reportedly decided to teach him a lesson and set an example of sorts so that no one else from media ever dares to picture the cadres' alleged misdeed. He was taken to a nearby slum soon after.

"When they grabbed me by my collar to take me to the 'dera', I saw a few TMCP cadres whom I have known for a long time (this is also why I can say they were TMC people. They saw me and requested the gang to release me, but in vain). The leader of the gang shut them up and the torture began," he said.

Mondal was released post an hour of torture, only after other photojournalists brought a 'TMC leader's nod' to leave him. Post his release, his medical reports observed that Mondal had sustained a severe back injury, decreased hearing ability and trauma.

A report filed by The Telegraph on Thursday said that Mamata had claimed that the allegations were fabricated and said, "I got to know of the march and checked with the police. They told me that nothing of the sort had happened as they checked with the journalists concerned."

During elections or political rallies in the state, journalists and media persons have been beaten up a number of times. But what has shaken the media fraternity in Kolkata this time is the modus operandi  a journalist being stripped, taken away in front of the police. In order to stage a protest against what happened on Monday, the media fraternity of Kolkata gathered near the Press Club and held a silent protest.

Amid protests and criticisms from various sections of the society, Mondal's assault reminded people of last year's Nabanna Abhijaan (CPM's rally to the state secretariat that had taken place last year on 23 May, where at least 50 journalists were severely beaten up by police).

Video footage showed how the media was abused and intimidated by the police. The cameras of some media persons were also smashed. A reporter had said that she had seen how the police were marking journalists and asking the task force to beat them up. A few people even put forth the fact that it was the police's treatment towards media that, in a way, encouraged such hooliganism.

"It could have been a female photojournalist instead of Mondal... what would they be doing then? A tussle with the police or political parties has been part and parcel of the job but it looks like the trend of assaulting the media recklessly came in post-Nabanna Abhijaan," a senior photojournalist with Hindustan Times said.

In another such incident, on 2 January, 2014, several journalists were brutally beaten up by the police in front of Governor MK Narayanan and Mamata at Nabanna.

Every day, at least one case of atrocities on the media surfaces in various districts across the state. The fact that such attacks are becoming so reckless and regular is raising an alarm among the journalists. Pointing out at the police's mum gesture, an investigative reporter Soma Basu said that it is very natural that the police won't react as they happen to be the state's subject. "Political parties use police as their sarkari goons, that is the reason why they don't want to introduce police reform law here, which says the police stays independent and not a subject of the state."

If one digs up a little deeper, the fact that the TMC government has always retained a stance of intolerance becomes clear. Such is the extent of the problem that a Jadavpur professor was sent to jail for sharing a caricature of Mamata on his social media account.

It is the government of the same chief minister, who had called the Park Street rape case a staged incident. It is the same chief minister who, in a press conference, had threatened a photojournalist of slapping and throwing out of the room.

"Don't forget, it is the same Mamata who I have seen distributing boxes of sweets to journalists when I was at the Statesman. She has now become West Bengal's Narendra Modi. Not that I support CPM, but she has spread much filth across by her random assertions on media and journalists. Once, I happened to write about her comment on the characters of the girls from northeast after finding it gross. Since it was a press conference over muri and chai, she did not expect a blasting article on her comment. The immediate effect was a stone pelting incident at my Saltlake house... a 'Maa Maati Manush' bike following my taxi on my way back from office and what not. She and her party was one of the major reasons why I had to relocate," added Basu, who now works independently and is based out of Siliguri.

Basabdatta Sarkar, a female photojournalist, stated that in her long career in journalism this was the first time when her family had asked her to stop going to work for the time being.

"Kolkata was never like this. There have been major attacks in the districts but these hooligans never spread their wings in the city. Now that one incident has happened and the perpetrators are still roaming free, it would be nothing but a 'go ahead' for the others to thrash the media left and right" she said.

Reporters exposing corruption, nepotism and crime have always risked their lives and media organisations have always conveniently passed such news on to the most left corner of the fourth or fifth page. 'Incidents have been reported', they can always boast about it but one would wonder why in a manner so that no one notices. Political outfits trying to create a havoc, a sense of fear in the media are not that scary, what is scarier is how the rest of us are becoming used to it.The Maharashtra government's decision to ban 'manufacture, sale, use, distribution and storage' of several plastic goods and materials has attracted much attention with aggrieved industries terming it as an arbitrary step while environmentalists championing it as a much-needed effort to curb generation of plastic waste

Maharashtra government's decision to ban "manufacture, sale, use, distribution and storage" of several plastic goods and materials has attracted much attention with aggrieved industries terming it as an arbitrary step while environmentalists championing it as a much-needed effort to curb generation of plastic waste in the state.

Caught in this are people of Maharashtra, many of whom are suddenly finding themselves out of bags at shops, vegetable markets, hawkers, malls, almost everywhere. Many are equally unaware that being caught with plastic bag could force them to cough up anywhere from Rs 5,000 to Rs 25,000 in fine and a three years jail term.

And while the ban is in effect, reports are claiming that the government has extended the time to cope up with the 'withdrawal' of plastic by three months. Btu despite the temporary compromise, the state argued on Wednesday that plastic is a serious environmental hazard which affects the health of human beings and animals.

But this relaxation with the deadline on the plastic ban, has created a lot of confusion as to what exactly is this plastic ban and what does it encompass? Is everything made of plastic banned, or only certain items are banned? Let's take you through the basics of this ban:

What is banned?

Ideally, everything and almost anything that is made of plastic and choking the drains and the nallahs across the city during monsoon (and the roads outside your house as a result), and is somehow also finding its way to the digestive tracts of whales, cows, dolphins and every other creature, and thus killing them.

Replying to four petitions challenging the plastic ban at the Bombay High Court on Wednesday, the State gave the example of the dead whale recently found in Mumbai coast. "Autopsy report... confirmed the presence of plastic waste in its stomach. Plastic waste is also found in the stomach of dead cows," the State said in its affidavit.

And the government isn't lying (see it yourself). The government has prepared a list of banned plastic items, with the focus highly centred around disposable plastic items. The list at the moment includes:

Plastic bags (with handle and without handle),

Disposable materials made from plastic and thermocol (disposable dish, cups, plates, glasses, fork, bowl, container, disposable dish/bowl used for packaging food in hotels, spoon, straw, non-woven polypropylene bags, cups/pouches to store liquid, packaging with plastic to wrap or store the products, packaging of food items and food grain material, etc).

Thermocol items for decoration.

Where's the banned effective

Everywhere. Right from individuals to schools, colleges, clubs, cinema halls and theatres to offices, hotels, restaurants, shops, malls, hawkers, markets, usage of plastic is banned everywhere in the state. It's also banned near beaches, public places, bus stands and railway stations in Maharashtra. So, if you are taking the train (local or outstation), you are advised not to carry any plastic bags. Besides, plastic is also banned in all tourist places, forest and reserved forest as well as eco-sensitive areas.

So, problematic? Well, if the state has to reduce the nearly 1,200 metric tonnes of plastic waste that it generates every day, the ban appears to be the only way. Still, don't believe it? Ask what's living is like to those who stay near Mumbai's Deonar or one of the other dumping grounds in their city.

What is allowed

The list of allowed plastic items is not short, but each item comes with its own terms and conditions. Read carefully:

On 23 March, the government banned all plastic bottles with holding capacity of less than 500 ml while allowing PET or PETE bottles made of high-quality food grade virgin Bisphenol-A (BPA) free material and with liquid holding capacity not less than 0.5 litres.

However, after a body of plastic manufacturers met environment minister Ramdas Kadam, the order was adapted to include all bottles but with a buyback scheme. According to the revised orders, manufacturers, sellers, and traders will also get three months time to set up a recycling mechanism and plants in place to ensure timely collection of empty bottles. The buyback price was earlier set at Rs 2 for a bottle with the capacity of a litre and above and Re 1 for a bottle between 500 ml and one litre is Re 1. Buyback price for sub-500ml bottles is not yet announced.

Plastic used for packaging of medicines is allowed.

Compostable plastic bags or material used for plant nurseries, horticulture, agriculture, handling of solid waste, however, the purpose of use shall be prominently printed on it with use exclusively for this specific purpose only. A certificate from the Central Pollution Control Board Manufacturers will also be required prior to marketing or sale of compostable plastic carry bags for this purpose.

To manufacture plastic and plastic bags for export purpose in an SEZ or plastic cover/wrap use in manufacturing. But the guidelines to recycle or reuse should be printed prominently.

Milk pouches are allowed for the time being. However, the govt order would require all milk dairies to use food grade virgin plastic bags not less than 50-micron thickness for packaging of milk. These packets will also come with a buyback price of not less than Rs 0.50 for recycling. It will be the responsibility of milk dairies, retail sellers and traders to ensure that such buyback mechanism, collection and recycling system is in place and operational.

Garbage bags are also exempted from the ban for three months.

What's the deadline?

Though no official date has been announced, all rules regulating the use of plastic items (disposable items as well as PET or PETE bottles) will become effective in three months. Manufacturers, traders, sellers, as well as users, are expected to dispose existing stock of banned plastic items within three months after the order was notified and create a mechanism to recycle all the regulated-but-allowed items such as plastic bottles, milk pouches, etc.

With inputs from PTIA pillar in the premises of Taj Mahal collapsed on Wednesday night after heavy rain and strong winds lashed Uttar Pradesh's Agra.

A pillar on the premises of Taj Mahal collapsed on Wednesday night after heavy rain and strong winds lashed Uttar Pradesh's Agra, reports said. No casualties were reported.

Agra: Pillar in the premises of Taj Mahal fell due to heavy wind & rain. No casualties reported. pic.twitter.com/87kaCFQLJd  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 11, 2018

The 12-feet minaret on the southern entry gate, referred to as Darwaza-e-Rauza, fell as wind speed during the heavy rains crossed 130-kilometre per hour on Wednesday, The Times of India said. However, while few reports suggested that the incident occurred around midnight, The Times of India reported that it took place at 7.30 pm and one of the small white domes were hit during the incident.

Apart from Uttar Pradesh, pre-monsoon rains have also been reported in many parts of Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana. In Rajasthan, at least twelve people died on Wednesday in rainstorm-caused accidents.

According to Skymet Weather, the rains occurred due to the cyclonic circulation which is over North Haryana and adjoining Uttar Pradesh and a trough which was extending up to Assam. On Wednesday, the weather news and forecast service had expected scattered light to moderate rains to continue over the foothills of Uttar Pradesh for 24 hours.

The weather is expected to be completely dry by 13 April over Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the report added.

In March 2016, a pinnacle of one of the four minarets of the UNESCO World Heritage Site had reportedly fallen off during repair work. However, the Archaeological Survey of India had denied the incident and said that the pinnacle was taken out because of its weak condition.

Recently, the authorities had decided to restrict the entry to the 17th-century monument to 40,000 tourists daily and put a three-hour cap on each ticket in a bid to preserve the heritage site.Some Opposition parties and pro-Tamil outfits in Tamil Nadu said they would hold black flag protests against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the state.

Some Opposition parties and pro-Tamil outfits in Tamil Nadu on Wednesday said they would hold black flag protests against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the state on Thursday. This comes a day after the main opposition party, DMK, asked people to hoist black flags atop their houses to oppose his visit.

Modi is scheduled to formally inaugurate India's mega defence exhibition - the Defexpo- at Thiruvidanthai.

MDMK general secretary Vaiko said his party would hold a black flag demonstration at Little Mount against Modi's visit for his "betrayal" of Tamil Nadu on the Cauvery issue.

T Velmurugan, coordinator of Tamizhar Vazhvurimai Koottamaippu, an umbrella body of pro-Tamil outfits including 'May 17', announced a 'black balloon-cum-black flag' protest. The balloons will be released at Meenambakkam in the airport's vicinity and "several other locations," said Velmurugan who is also the chief of Tamizhaga Vazhvurimai Katchi. The black flag protest would be held at the Alandur Metro Rail Station, Velmurugan told reporters.

Manithaneya Jananayaga Katchi chief M Thamimun Ansari said black flag demonstration would be staged at Guindy which is near the airport. Ansari said volunteers from Tamizhar Kalai Ilakkiya Panpattu Peravai, a forum of art, literary and film personalities and Cauvery Rights Retrieval Committee, would also participate.

Veteran film director Bharathiraja of the Peravai confirmed participation in the black flag demonstration. Dravidar Kazhagam said its cadres would stage a black flag demonstration at Saidapet.

Tight security arrangements, including a multiple-layer security ring, are being put in place for Modi's visit, police said.

DMK's working president MK Stalin has appealed to people to hoist black flags and wear black badges as a mark of protest.Narendra Modi claimed recently that 8.5 lakh toilets were constructed in Bihar in one week. However, data indicates that this is improbable.

By Prachi Salve

In the past one week, over 8.5 lakh toilets have been constructed in Bihar, and that is not an easy task to do. The speed and development is not a mean feat. This proves that soon Bihar would catch up with the national average, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said during a rally in Motihari, Bihar on 10 April, 2018.

Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal was quick to retort with the following calculation:

PM claimed 8.50 Lacs toilets made just in a week in Bihar. 1 week= 7 Days

1 Day= 24 Hrs

7 Days= 168 Hrs

1 Hour= 60 Mins So 850000%168=5059 Toilets per Hr

5059/60 = 84.31 Toilets per min Such a big goof-up from PM Sahab. I believe even CM Bihar wont agree on such false claims  Tejashwi Yadav (@yadavtejashwi) April 10, 2018

The average weekly construction of toilets during 2017-18, which saw the highest-ever construction of toilets at 3.2 million in the state, was 61,581, according to official data from Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) (or the Clean India Mission-Rural).

This shows that the construction of 850,000 toilets in a week, quoted by Modi, is improbable.

The data for the week in question are not yet available, but we did find toilet-construction data for the past four years for Bihar.

Bihar has the lowest proportion of individual household toilets (52.73 percent) nationwide, followed by Odisha with 52.78 percent, according to the Swachh Bharat Gramin dashboard.

Under Swachh Bharat Urban, Bihar received 473,704 applications, of which 277,678 were approved and 95,921 toilets constructed, which translates to 34 percent of the states target, according to data available on the Swachh Bharat Urban dashboard.

The Prime Minister also mentioned in his speech that the Swachh Bharat Mission has transformed the lives of many women in the country. In Bihar, toilets are being called izzat ghar (house of honour), PM Modi said.

There are 8,030,117 households in Bihar that still do not have a toilet, which means nearly 32 million people, or 30 percent of the states population, dont have toilets at home.

More Indians than ever before have access to a toilet, but little attention to education and changing attitudes means that at least 522 million Indians still defecate in the open, leaving millions susceptible to disease and poverty, IndiaSpend reported on 31 January, 2018.

Bihar has the the lowest percentage of households (25 percent) with improved sanitation, and the state recorded an under-five mortality rate of 58 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2015-16, against the national average of 50, IndiaSpend reported on 26 April, 2017.

(Salve is an analyst with IndiaSpend and FactChecker.)

IndiaSpend is a data-driven, public-interest journalism non-profit/FactChecker.in is fact-checking initiative, scrutinising for veracity and context statements made by individuals and organisations in public life.Soon after an FIR was registered against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in Unnao for raping a minor in 2017, the Uttar Pradesh Police and officials from the state government held a press briefing in Lucknow and said that the case has been handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Soon after an FIR was registered against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar for raping a minor in 2017, the Uttar Pradesh Police and officials from the state government held a press briefing in Lucknow and said that the case has been handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The clamour for Sengar's arrest grew louder after the MLA's midnight drama at the SSP's office in Lucknow late on Wednesday. Sengar has been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, Superintendent of Police (SP), Unnao, Pushpanjali Devi said.

The FIR has been registered under Sections 376 (rape), 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing woman to compel her marriage,), 363 (kidnapping) and 506 (criminal intimidation) at the Makhi police station, the officer said.

Addressing the media, Uttar Pradesh home secretary Arvind Kumar and Uttar Pradesh DGP Om Prakash Singh told the media that investigation in the case was underway and the case would be handed over to the CBI. "We want a transparent investigation and I am sure so do you," Kumar told the mediapersons gathered at the conference.

However, the officials said that Sengar cannot be arrested unless the claims made against him are proven. Sengar and his brothers allegedly raped a 17-year-old girl in June 2017. The father of the girl died in police custody on 9 April. A defiant Sengar, however, had rejected the charge as a conspiracy by his opponents and said the complainant belonged to a "low class", even as six policemen were suspended and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath assured that the guilty will not be spared.

The woman's father, aged around 50, was rushed to a hospital from the district jail on the night of 8 April but he died during the treatment, an officials said. He was arrested on 5 April under the Arms Act, they added. Significantly, a case had been registered against four persons a few days earlier on a complaint by the deceased's wife that he was beaten up. "The four accused  Sonu, Baua, Vinit and Shailu  named in the FIR registered on 4 April for beating up the deceased had been arrested," Superintendent of Police, Unnao, Pushpanjali Devi was quoted as saying.

"They belong to a low status family ('nimn star ke log hain')...This is a conspiracy by my opponents," Sengar told reporters, but refused to comment on speculation about he being summoned by Adityanath.

'Honourable', says DGP and faces flak

During Wednesday's briefing, the DGP came under fire from the media after he referred to Sengar as 'Honourable MLA'. The mediapersons present at the briefing were quick to point out the irony of the situation to the top cop and asked him how was Sengar "honourable"? Singh said, "His (Sengar's) crimes have not been proven yet, and there is no reason why he shouldn't be given respect of his position."

Singh had been appointed as the new Director-General of Police of Uttar Pradesh by the Yogi Adityanath-led government in December 2017. Singh succeeded the then incumbent DGP Sulkhan Singh.

Singh was quick to add that saying "honourable" does not mean that the police or the state government was protecting Sengar. The DGP said that no one is protecting Sengar. "We are just saying that we have to listen to both sides. The matter has now gone to the CBI. In such a case, the CBI will decide on the arrest of the MLA. Action will be taken and enough protection will be given to the victim and her family," Singh said.

Nobody is defending him(#KuldeepSinghSengar), all we are saying is that we have to hear both sides. Now case has been given to CBI, they will decide on arrest: OP Singh,UP DGP #UnnaoCase pic.twitter.com/8vBYvJdn4x  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 12, 2018

The UP Police said that the FIR against Sengar was registered on Thursday morning. Late on Wednesday night, the Adityanath government had decided to hand the probe into the Unnao rape case to the CBI.

Facing heat and growing outrage over the alleged involvement of Sengar in the rape, the government had also decided to register an FIR against the legislator and the other accused and hand over the investigation to the agency.

The government has also recommended a CBI probe into the death of the victim's father allegedly in custody on Monday. The decisions were taken after the Special Investigation Team (SIT), constituted under additional director-general of police (Lucknow zone), to look into the matter submitted its report to the government.

The development came hours after the Allahabad High Court sought the Uttar Pradesh government's stand on the incident on a letter to the court by senior lawyer Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi detailing the case and posted the matter for hearing on Thursday.

Click here for LIVE updates on the Unnao Rape CaseAll of this would have been a bit convincing if perhaps the Supreme Court had not itself expressed doubts about how the CJI can be placed above the Constitution.

It's somewhat unusual for the Supreme Court to deliver a detailed judgement in rejecting a writ petition in limine, i.e., at the threshold stage itself, without issuing notice to the Union Government or any other party. More so when the petitioner, Asok Pande, is someone (in)famous for having filed over 200 Public Interest Litigation cases and has even had costs imposed on him in the past. Given that judgments delivered in limine are not considered to be binding precedent or prevent others from filing a Writ Petition on the same matter, one wondered what the Supreme Court hoped to achieve with this when a bench headed by the Chief Justice of India (and also featuring Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud) reserved judgement after hearing the petitioner for a few minutes on Monday.

The judgment delivered on Wednesday (11 April), authored by Justice Chandrachud, raises more questions than it answers. For a start, the court was appalled by some of the scandalous averments made by the petitioner against certain judges of the Allahabad High Court, but does nothing about it despite his previous history of filing frivolous and unfounded petitions. This from a court which imposed hefty penalties on public interest litigants for raising serious issues of criminality and conflict of interest, not to mention one which loses no opportunity to berate serial litigants, seems excessively mild.

That though is not the main thrust of the petition or the judgement. The petitioners main prayer in the writ petition is to seek a direction to the CJI to "evolve a procedure" which could constrain the Chief Justices power to constitute benches and allocate cases to such benches. The petitioner has certain very specific ideas on what such benches should be like, but far from going into any depth on the basis for such a demand, the judgement simply dismisses the very notion that the CJI can be asked to follow proper procedure in exercising her administrative functions.

The judgement places the Chief Justice of India in a pedestal that puts the office seemingly above such constitutional requirements as fairness and transparency. We are expected to, nay, ordered to believe that the conventions evolved and adapted over the years (but of which the court will tell us nothing about) are robust enough to ensure that there is absolutely no scope for arbitrary action. The note of resentment at questions are being asked of the office of the Chief Just of India is hard to miss especially when the whole of notion of requiring power to be exercised through rules and procedures is dismissed as based on a presumption of mistrust.

All of this would have been a bit convincing if perhaps the Supreme Court had not itself expressed doubts about how the CJI can be placed above the Constitution. Keep in mind that the Supreme Court effectively re-wrote the constitutional appointment process to ensure that it was not only the Chief Justice of India who had the power to recommend names to the President for appointment of judges to the High Court and the Supreme Court.

While paying homage to the high office of the Chief Justice, the Second and Third Judges do constrain the individual discretion of the Chief Justice of India in matters of appointment by making it mandatory to consult other judges on the court. Not only that, but the recommendation of the Chief Justice of India made without consulting fellow judges would not be valid at all.

More recently, the Supreme Court has directed other High Courts and the Supreme Court itself in the matter of rules and procedure for the designation of Senior Advocates. Though the power was given to courts to designate certain advocates as senior advocates, in practice the manner in which such designations were being carried left a lot to be desired on parameters of transparency and fairness. Keeping this in mind, the Supreme Court laid down detailed and elaborate procedures which will have to be followed.

Was the Supreme Court expressing mistrust of the Chief Justice of India or the judges in either case? Hardly. For better or worse, both cases proceed from an understanding that all power comes with the responsibility to exercise that power in a manner that is just, fair and reasonable. That in the absence of proper procedures, it is impossible for an observer to distinguish between an arbitrary and justified exercise of power. The fact that parties have a chance to be heard, that papers have to be filed in a certain manner, and evidence presented in a certain way is not the laws inherent mistrust of a judge  it is the understanding that justice, for it to inspire confidence in the public, must not only be done but be seen to be done.

It is unfortunate that the judgement of the Supreme Court in Asok Pande fundamentally misunderstands this facet about the judiciary. That it is not about pronouncing judgements in lofty rhetoric from empyrean heights but rather about instilling confidence in the public that their matters being heard in a fair manner and decided in accordance with the law.

When the credibility of the judiciary, and specifically the Supreme Court, is under serious question both from within and without, here was an opportunity to assure citizens that the Supreme Court believes in such things as transparency and fairness in its own administration.

Needless to say, the Supreme Court blew it.

The author is a Senior Resident Fellow of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. He is also an Executive Member of the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms.Congress chief Rahul Gandhi tore into the ruling BJP government for 'shielding' the villains in the Kathua and Unnao rape cases which have sparked widespread outrage for their brutality against innocent girls, one of them barely 8 years old. Gandhi led a midnight vigil at India Gate in New Delhi Thursday.

Congress chief Rahul Gandhi tore into the ruling BJP government for "shielding" the villains in the Kathua and Unnao rape cases which have sparked widespread outrage for their brutality against innocents, one of them barely 8 years old. Gandhi led a midnight vigil at India Gate in New Delhi Thursday.

A four time BJP MLA from Unnao in Uttar Pradesh Kuldeep Singh Sengar is prime accused in the gang rape of a young local woman and the custodial death of the victim's father just days ago. In Kashmir's Kathua, an 8 year old was raped, tortured and killed by many men in a bid to settle communal scores.

"This is not a political issue but a national issue. We are seeking justice", Rahul told reporters early hours of Friday under a dark sky in New Delhi as camera flashlights popped and outrage against the murder of soft targets swirled on social media platforms and in living rooms across the country.

"What happened in Kathua is beyond humanity, an 8-year-old was kidnapped, brutally raped by many men, including a juvenile and tortured till she died. This defies all human values we have grown with as a society", Rahul said.

Posters skewering the BJP's 'Beti Bachao' (Save the girl child) slogan rose above the crowd as grim reminders of the brutal rape and killing of *****, an 8 year old who was grazing her horses in a meadow in Kathua, Kashmir on the day she was led away to her death in the musty innards of a deserted temple.

Speaking at length on both the Unnao and Kathua rape cases, Rahul accused the BJP government of "shielding brutality".

"This brutality, instead of being punished, is actually being shielded. In Unnao an underage girl is raped by an elected representative of the BJP and members of his family. We have seen how her family has been threatened and silenced by the accused. The father of the victim was beaten to death in judicial custody. Only an outrage led to action from Adityanath government. In both the cases, we seek immediate action against the accused even if it involves those who hold positions of power", Rahul said.

Rahul, his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and a crush of Congress workers and senior party leaders laid blame on the BJP for failing to protect India's women. The decision to march to India Gate came together late Thursday evening via a Rahul Gandhi tweet: Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does. Join me in a silent, peaceful, candlelight vigil at India Gate at midnight tonight to protest this violence and demand justice."

"Our message to those who are allowing the Unnao and Kathua rape horrors to happen is this - don't try to divide our country on religious lines because that is the work of evil and such people will be shown the door when elections come," Congress spokesperson Rajiv Tyagi told Firstpost.

"We have all seen how the man who allegedly raped a girl in Unnao and got her father killed is laughing and talking to senior police officers in the state. The 2019 elections are not far away, the people of India will speak out. Our daughters are not safe while this government is in power," multiple Congress leaders said in unison as the crowds dispersed around 2:30am.

The 2019 general elections are less than 18 months away, Karnataka goes to the polls next month and the BJP's saffron stamp has only grown with each state election so far after the Bihar wallop in late 2015. Although Rahul Gandhi himself did not mention elections, Congress party acolytes are relishing the prospect that some of the outpouring of support from Thursday night may linger until 2019.

Reporting, visuals: Debobrat Ghose, Ravishankar SinghSC judge Justice Jasti Chelameswar refused to hear a plea of former law minister Shanti Bhushan against the authority of CJI as a master of roster.

Supreme Court judge Justice Jasti Chelameswar on Thursday refused to hear a plea of former law minister Shanti Bhushan against the authority of the CJI as a master of roster.

"I would not like to deal with Bhushan's plea, reasons for it are too obvious," Chelameswar, the senior-most Supreme Court judge after the CJI, told Shanti Bhushan's son and advocate Prashant.

Prashant mentioned the matter before Chelameswar on Thursday and said this was an emergency situation. He said he was referring the matter to Chelameswar's bench as the PIL challenges the master of roster concept and CJI Dipak Misra cannot deal with it.

"Someone is running a relentless tirade against me that I am up to grab something," Chelameswar said, adding that he would not want another reversal of his order in the next 24 hours. "This country will follow its own course but I'm sorry and I can't deal with this PIL," he said.

Denied urgent listing of his father's PIL, Prashant then rushed to Misra's court and mentioned the matter for listing expeditiously. The bench, headed by CJI said, "We will look into it."

The developments come a day after a bench comprising Misra, Justice AM Khanwilkar and Justice DY Chandrachud dismissed a PIL filed by Lucknow resident Ashok Pande, seeking the framing of guidelines for allocation of cases. The Supreme Court called the petition "scandalous" and ruled that the CJI is an institution himself and cannot be distrusted.

At an event on 7 April, Chelameswar had said that the allocation of important and sensitive cases to different benches should be done transparently and not in an arbitrary manner. "We are not questioning his (CJI Dipak Misra) authority as master of roster but it should not be exercised in an arbitrary manner but in a transparent manner," Chelameswar had said.

Bhushan had moved the apex court on 6 April seeking direction that the exercise of authority as a master of roster by the CJI in allocating the cases to different benches should be done in consultation with senior judges who are part of top court collegium.

In his PIL, Bhushan said that the authority of the CJI as a master of roster is not an "absolute, arbitrary, singular power" which may be exercised in his "sole discretion" and the CJI "must" exercise his authority in consultation with other senior judges who are also part of the collegium.

"Underlying principle of the collegium is that the collective opinion of a collegium of senior judges is much safer than the opinion of the CJI alone," the PIL said.

Bhushan has contended that the master of roster "cannot be unguided and unbridled discretionary power, exercised arbitrarily by the... CJI, by hand-picking benches of select judges or by assigning cases to particular Judges".

Any such power or its exercise, the petition said, would result in "a subversion of democracy and the rule of law as guaranteed under Article 14 of the Constitution".

Pointing to "extremely disturbing trend" of listing matters "subjectively and selectively" only before certain benches, the PIL said that the trend reflects "serious erosion of the independence of the Judiciary" by resorting to the method of "favoured listings".

"As a result, justice appears to be skewed and in many cases, justice may even stand denied," it said.

It said that the powers being exercised by the CJI and the concerned registry officials clearly reflect a "pattern of favouritism, nepotism and forum shopping".

Recounting the cases that came up before certain benches of the top court in recent months, the PIL said that the "pattern also suggests that certain matters which are politically sensitive and involve either Ruling Party Leaders and/or Opposition Party Leaders are assigned only to certain Benches".

Though the listing of politically sensitive matters appears to be "routine", they seem designed in a particular direction to exclude other benches from hearing them, it said.

Describing such selective listing as "unwarranted and unjustified", the PIL claimed that "such listings and/or allocations are not happening on account of computer allocation but appears due to human interference in the system".

With inputs from agenciesThree Indian nationals hailing from Himachal Pradesh who were kidnapped in Nigeria have been released, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said on Wednesday.

New Delhi: Three Indian nationals hailing from Himachal Pradesh who were kidnapped in Nigeria have been released, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said on Wednesday.

"We have secured the release of Sushil Kumar, Pankaj Kumar and Ajay Kumar who were abducted in Nigeria," Sushma Swaraj tweeted.

She also appreciated the efforts of Indian High Commissioner to Nigeria BN Reddy in this regard.

According to a media report, the family of one of those kidnapped, Sushil Kumar, last received a satellite phone call from him on 12 March, during which he said that Nigerian pirates had hijacked his ship, which also had two other Indian crew members on board.

All three worked in the merchant navy and hailed from Kangra district in Himachal Pradesh.Twelve people died in Rajasthan after large parts of the state were hit by a rainstorm on Wednesday, while seven died in Rajasthan's Dholpur, five others died in Bharatpur

Twelve people died in Rajasthan after large parts of the state were hit by a rainstorm on Wednesday, according to reports. While seven died in Rajasthan's Dholpur, five others died in Bharatpur, reports said.

The Times of India, put the death toll in Dholpur at eleven, stating that four more succumbed to their injuries on Thursday. Five children were among the eleven dead. The report also mentioned that at least 100 people were injured during the dust storm and rainfall in the two districts.

According to an NDTV report, roofs and walls of houses collapsed in at least six villages in Dholpur leading to most of the deaths. Reports indicated that a fire occurred due to a short circuit in seven houses, where four people reportedly died.

Normal life was disrupted as several main streets in Dholpur were waterlogged and train movement was affected on the Agra-Dholpur line, ANI tweeted.

Waterlogging after heavy rain in Rajasthan's Dholpur. (11.4.18) pic.twitter.com/hrWTYywBvy  ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2018

Recently, the northern belt of the country has witnessed heavy rains and storms as pre-monsoon conditions begin to set in.

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) had predicted the possibility of rain or thunderstorm or dust storm in Eastern Rajasthan for Wednesday. According to the forecast, the harsh weather conditions are expected to continue till Friday.

Meanwhile, farmers blocked the Mathura Expressway on Thursday to protest crop loss owing to hailstorms, according to ANI.

Ripe wheat and other rabi crops ready for harvest have been damaged by rain and hailstorm in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Farmers in Rajasthan complained that unseasonal rain had already delayed harvesting by a week.

"There is nothing left now, more than 80 percent of the crop has been destroyed," say farmers, according to the NDTV report.Ahead of the Ambedkar Jayanti on 14 April, the Centre on Thursday asked all states to beef up security and check any possible attempt to inciting violence during the event.

New Delhi: Ahead of the Ambedkar Jayanti on 14 April, the Centre on Thursday asked all states to beef up security and check any possible attempt to inciting violence during the event.

The Ministry of Home Affairs also said that Districts Magistrates and Superintendents of Police should ensure peace and check violence in their respective areas of jurisdiction. This is the advisory by the MHA within a fortnight. The first one was sent a day before the 2 April Bharat bandh, which was called to protest against the alleged dilution of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

Another advisory was sent before the 10 April strike called by people opposed to caste-based reservations in jobs and education.

The latest MHA missive came in the wake of massive violence in different parts of the country during the 2 April Bharat bandh, leading to the death of about a dozen people, and vandalisation of statues in some parts of the country.

An official of the MHA said the ministry has issued the advisory to all states to take necessary precautionary measures on the occasion on Ambedkar Jayanti on 14 April.

"The MHA has asked that patrolling should be intensified to ensure that no loss of life and property takes place and prohibitory orders may be issued wherever necessary," the official said.

The advisory stressed that District Magistrates and Superintendents of Police may be asked to take all necessary steps for ensuring that law and order remains firmly under control in the areas of jurisdiction.

The MHA asked the DMs and SPs to activate community policing initiatives to ensure peace and harmony.Two horrendous rapes  Unnao and Kathua  have grabbed the headlines, but the most shocking aspect of is that the two statutory bodies meant to protect the interests of these victims have not spoken out in their support.

Two horrendous rapes have grabbed the headlines across the country. The rape in Kathua district of Jammu earlier this year resulted in the murder of an eight-year old child. The second rape of a sixteen-year-old girl that took place in mid-June 2017, has resulted in the death of the victim's father, followed by the survivor threatening to immolate herself outside the UP chief ministers residence in Lucknow.

But the most shocking aspect of these crimes is that the two statutory bodies meant to protect the interests of these victims have not spoken out in their support.

The chairperson of the National Commission for Women (NCW) Rekha Sharma has not condemned either incident. When contacted, Sharma said, "Jammu and Kashmir does not come under (our purview). We do not go beyond Punjab." She went on to elaborate, "Both cases involve minor girls and therefore, come under the purview of the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR). We take up cases of those who are 18 years of age and above."

The chairperson of the NCPCR Stuti Kacker, a retired IAS bureaucrat, reiterated the views expressed by Sharma. "The NCPCR's purview does not extend to Jammu and Kashmir, but of course, I am saddened by the death of the girl. My heart goes out to her. After all, she was a bachcha," said Kacker. Questioned on why the NCPCR had not intervened in the Unnao rape case, Kackers position was that this case did not fall under the purview of the NCPCR either, since the survivor was not a minor.

The Unnao survivor's age remains a little tricky. Some newspaper reports claim she was 17 years of age when she was raped in June last year. Others report that she was 16 years of age at the time of the rape. But the fact is that even if she has entered her 18th year in 2018, there is little doubt that she was a minor when the rape occurred and the NCPCR was statutorily bound by law to have taken up this matter.

When this was pointed out to Kacker, she said, "The NCPCR did not receive any complaint, otherwise we would have looked into the matter. Maybe one of my members has been dealing with it. I will need to look into the matter. As of date, she is 18 years of age and the matter must be taken up by the NCW... Now that the National Human Rights Commission has taken up the matter of the Unnao rape case, we cannot get into it. You must not forget that we are a small organisation with limited powers."

Former chairperson of the NCPCR Shanta Sinha does not agree with this point of view. According to her, statutory bodies must speak out on issues of human rights abuse. Sinha also pointed out the NCPCR had been (during her tenure) given permission to work on child rights in Jammu and Kashmir. "The NCPCR had been given permission to work on child rights in Jammu and Kashmir. We couldn't issue orders, but we could put in requests. We worked in both Baramullah and Kupwara," said Sinha.

Sinha also believes that the NHRC should have handed the matter over to the NCPCR because it possesses the expertise to investigate the matter with a sense of urgency as also to protect the interests of the child and show sensitivity while dealing with such cases. Activists believes the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act is a tough law especially since it stipulates the onus to prove innocence is on the accused. "The accused in the Unnao case should have been arrested under POCSO," pointed out a Delhi-based activist.

If the Kathua rape case is in the public gaze, credit for this must go to Jammu and Kashmir state commission for women chairperson Nayeema Mehjoor.

Mehjoor, a former journalist, pointed out that she had been contacted by some Gujjar-Bakarwal families when the girl went missing on 10 January this year. "When her body was found in some forests near her home in the village of Rasana, I decided to visit her home. Members of both the Hindu and Muslim communities were extremely upset at her rape and murder, and expressed their feelings openly. But while they were talking to me, I could sense something fishy going on. There were people keeping vigil during my visit and listening in on my interactions," said Mehjoor.

"I shared my apprehensions with Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti who ordered an inquiry by the Jammu and Kashmir Crime Branch. The report is now in the public domain and everyone knows what a heinous crime has been committed," she said, adding, "We must look at it from that point-of-view and not communalise the death of a young child. There were some women who went on a hunger strike in Jammu demanding the investigation be conducted by the CBI. Anuradha Bhasin (senior journalist) and I went to meet them. We pointed out to these women that the Jammu and Kashmir police force is headed by SP Vaid, who is from Jammu. The earlier crime branch head was A Puri who was also from Jammu (he has been transferred recently). But there are some politicians who are leading this communal campaign."

Mehjoor believes the girl has been used as a 'soft target' by some right-wing elements. They want to intimidate the Bakarwal Muslim nomads who have built their homes in forest land in the Kathua district, in order to vacate them. Mehjoor raised this issue at the IAS Shastri Academy in Mussorie. "We cannot lose our humanity," I had told the IAS probationers.

Meanwhile, with regard to the Unnao case, Jamini Srivastava of the NHRC pointed out that the UP Police had failed to inform the commission of the death of the survivor's father in police custody as is mandatory under law. It was only when the NHRC took suo motu cognisance of the killing, based on media reports and asked the state government and the DGP UP to provide details of his health, that the UP Police took some belated action including the arrest of BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengars brother Atul Singh.

But social activists believe that both Sengar and Atul Singh should have been arrested under POCSO. So strong is the grip of the MLA and his family on the village of Makhi, around 15 kilometres from Unnao  where the survivor and her family live  that they have refused to return to their homes fearing for their lives. The Unnao rape survivor's frightened grandmother has written a letter to the Chief Ministers Office pointing out that despite the injuries her son had suffered, he had been kept in jail and was shifted to hospital only on Sunday (8 April) when he died.

"To force us to withdraw the rape complaint, Sengar and his aides implicated my son and daughter-in-law in several false cases. When we refused to succumb to their threats, Sengar's brother and his associates barged into my house with arms and attacked my son at 6 pm on 3 April threatening to kill us. They tied my son to a tree and thrashed him mercilessly," she wrote in her letter.

"I request the lawmakers to take strict action against the men as I believe Sengers men might eliminate my family."

The UP Police has set up a special investigation team (SIT) to look into the fathers death. The SIT probe is separate from the judicial investigation ordered into the incident.

Follow all the latest updates hereThe complicity of the State and its security forces, and the powerfully polarising force of religion were part of Unnao and Kathua cases.

By Sharanya Gopinathan

A strange alchemy of time, politics, placement and accident makes some photos just iconic. Like Nick Uts 1972 photo of the Napalm girl, The Terror of War, which became the face of the horrors of the already unpopular Vietnam War, or The Kiss, a 1945 photo taken in Times Square by Alfred Eisenstaedt, of a drunk naval soldier kissing a dental nurse, which quickly turned into the icon of celebration of Americas victory over Japan in World War 2. Many years later, the woman in the photo, Greta Zimmer Friedman, expressly said that the spontaneous kiss was not, in fact, consensual.

Here is the photo that'll describe the horrible times weve brought upon ourselves and are trapped in right now. Indian scholars of the future will pick apart every pixel of this frame, decoding the import lurking in every corner, the menacing weight of both those smiles, the sombre face of the Ganesha, the saffron and green sign board behind them, everything.

It is a picture of Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a BJP MLA from Unnao accused of raping a minor Dalit girl. Here he stands as he reaches the office of UP chief minister Ajay Singh Bisht (Yogi Adityanath) on Monday. Significantly, hes flanked by a beaming, indulgent guard on one side, a solemn, imposing Ganesha statue on the right.

Along with her family, the teenaged girl who accused Sengar of rape attempted suicide on 9 April outside Adityanath's office (the same office where Sengar stands grinning in arrogant joy). Her father was immediately arrested after the suicide attempt, and allegedly beaten so severely that he died in police custody. His post-mortem report reads that he had multiple abrasions near the abdomen, buttocks, thighs, above and below the knee joints and arms, and ultimately died of blood poisoning due to colon perforation.

On Wednesday night, Sengar drove to the house of Lucknows police chief with 100 of his supporters in tow. The media had been reporting that Sengar would surrender that night. Sengar turned up and said that the only reason he had come out here was to prove that he was not in fact a fugitive and did not intend to surrender. He was not arrested, and at the time of writing, still hasnt been.

So really, is there a better time to be a rapist of minorities in India?

Last weekend also saw reports of the breathtakingly horrifying rape and murder of 8-year-old ***** from Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua in a case so brutal its really difficult to get down to the details. ***** was kidnapped, drugged, held captive in a temple, brutally raped several times and violently murdered  with police involvement  way back in January. A member of the nomadic Muslim Bakerwal-Gujjar tribe, *****s rape and murder was likely part of an extensively planned attempt by a group of locals, including a retired government official, his son and juvenile nephew, to force this tribe out of the area. One of the men even temporarily halted the disposal of her tiny, 8-year-old body just so that he could rape her one more time.

The case finally blew up mainstream media headlines last weekend and caught the nations attention after we saw photographs of lawyers from Kathua attempting to stop police from filing a full chargesheet against those involved in the case, which include two police officers who were paid off to help cover it up. The police were physically barred from entering the court complex on Tuesday by violent lawyers from Kathua chanting Jai Shri Ram and other slogans.

The lawyers are being bolstered by members of the Hindu Ekta Manch, a right-wing party with links to the BJP, and have been holding protests in support of the rapists for over a month now. These protests have been attended by two sitting BJP ministers  the Minister for Forest Chowdhary Lal Singh, and Minister for Commerce and Industries Chander Prakash Ganga.

The similarities between these two events are harrowing. In both cases, the victims were members of minority groups: The Unnao survivor a Dalit, the Kathua victim a nomadic Muslim. In the latter case, it was her identity that singled her out as a target. In the former, this identity is being used to malign her words and the credibility of her family.

In both cases, powerful Hindu men are being shielded by other powerful Hindu men.

In the Unnao case, Adityanath did not deign to meet the rape survivor or her family, and yet the alleged rapist Sengar has his direct ear, given the speed with which he was granted an audience with the chief minister, and the joy the prospect of that conference brought to his face. As of Thursday morning, the Uttar Pradesh DGP has said that Sengar has been booked but will not be arrested until the allegations are proven against him, which is pretty much the opposite of how cases are supposed to work  the police should arrest an accused and bring him to court to prove the survivors allegations, not the other way around. The DGP has also called Sengar honourable while insisting that no one was trying to protect him.

Meanwhile, in Kathua, two police officers reportedly helped wash away blood and traces of DNA from the 8-year-old victims clothing. They failed completely at doing this successfully and getting away with it, but it is the thought that counts.

Which leaves the rest of wondering what we can even think right now.

Looking at the painful facts of these cases, its hard not to see them as anything but instances of the states complicity in crimes committed with impunity, thanks to armed guards on one side and the power of religion on the other.

There is, in fact, no other way in which these events could have played out like this: The complicity of the State and its security forces, and the powerfully polarising force of religion, were both integral components of these terrible events.

So where are we now? Sengar continues to roam around scot-free. Sitting ministers of the ruling party have been demanding that rapists not be arrested, the police are calling alleged rapists and suicide-inciters honourable, the rape of an 8-year-old Muslim girl is already being linked to cow-slaughter, the police have washed blood evidence away from the clothes of a childs corpse, and all our social media feeds are currently afire with before-and-after pictures of the face and corpse of *****.

Juxtaposing the photos of baby ***** and the grinning Sengar neatly and painfully encapsulates every sorrowful, confused, miserable, hopeless and dazed feeling the rest of us could have about these times were stuck in. But if you are a certain kind of Hindu man living in 2018, with god and State by your side, I guess you can't help but laugh maniacally.

The Ladies Finger (TLF) is a leading online women's magazine delivering fresh and witty perspectives on politics, culture, health, sex, work and everything in between.The police registered an FIR against Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the gangrape of a 17-year-old girl in Unnao district.

Lucknow: The police on Thursday registered an FIR against Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the gangrape of a 17-year-old girl in Unnao district.

The MLA has been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, Superintendent of Police (SP), Unnao, Pushpanjali Devi said.

The FIR has been registered under sections 376 (rape), 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing woman to compel her marriage,), 363 (kidnapping) and 506 (criminal intimidation) at the Maksi police station, the officer said.

Police said the FIR against the MLA was registered early Thursday morning.

Late Wednesday night, the Yogi Adityanath government had decided to hand over to the CBI the probe into the Unnao rape case.

Facing heat and growing outrage over the alleged involvement of Sengar in the rape, the government had also decided to register an FIR against the legislator and the other accused and hand over the investigation to the agency.

The government has also recommended a CBI probe into the death of the victim's father allegedly in custody on Monday.

The decisions were taken after the Special Investigation Team (SIT), constituted under additional director general of police (Lucknow zone), to look into the matter submitted its report to the government.

The development came hours after the Allahabad High Court sought the Uttar Pradesh government's stand on the incident on a letter to the court by senior lawyer Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi detailing the case and posted the matter for hearing today.

The Supreme Court has decided to hear next week a plea for a CBI probe. The plea also alleged that the woman's father was tortured and killed in police custody.

The wife of the accused BJP MLA, Sangeeta Sengar, had on Wednesday demanded narco tests of her husband and the 17-year-old girl.Rape accused and four-time Unnao MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar has the blind support of the villagers of Makhi

Unnao: Rape accused and four-time Unnao MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar has the blind support of the villagers of Makhi. So much so that the villagers took up cudgels against a special investigative team (SIT) formed to probe the Unnao rape case and the death of the survivor's father, Surendra Kumar Singh, in police custody. The villagers wouldnt let the team, headed by additional director-general (ADG), law and order, Lucknow zone, Rajeev Krishna, enter the village on Wednesday and held vociferous protests against the probe. Meanwhile, minor protests against the custodial death on 9 April erupted at some places in Unnao city.

The team reached Unnao at around 11.30 am on Wednesday and met the rape survivor at a hotel near the sabzi mandi. After recording statements from her and her uncle, the team reached Makhi village, around 20 kilometres from the district headquarters, to record the statements of the two parties and the villagers. The villagers came out in droves to protest in front of the lawmaker's house, shouting slogans that their vidhayakji (MLA) was innocent. Teachers of a school owned by the MLA also joined the protest.

The SIT refused to divulge anything to the media and left Unnao at around 1.50 pm on Wednesday, saying it would submit its report by evening.

This reporter, who visited the village, observed that nobody was ready to speak against the MLA and most of the people had locked the doors to their homes. However, Rakesh Singh, a supporter of the MLA present at the protest, told this reporter that Surendra was beaten up by an aide of the MLA as well as his brother Atul Singh Sengar. "He (the rape survivor's father) was drunk and hurled abuse at us. He abused Atul bhaiya, and then we gave him a taste of his own medicine. He was brought from the fields and beaten up in the presence of many people when he refused to apologise and continued hurling abuse at us," he said.

The villagers are unwilling to believe the MLA is capable of any wrongdoing. Saraswati Singh, a resident of Makhi, said she would commit suicide if anything happened to the MLA. "Hang me if vidhayakji is found guilty. I swear by Fod and my only son, vidhayakji has done so much for the village  he donates money, rations and whatever he can to help people marry off their daughters," she said. She added that instead of accusing the MLA, the police should first probe the "character" of the girl and her family. "There are several police cases against her family and everyone in the village will tell you about the girls character," she said.

The station house officer (SHO) of Makhi said both the families have criminal records and that the girl hadn't mentioned Sengars name in the FIR. "There were 29 criminal cases against the girl's father and 14 cases against her uncle. There are three cases against Atul Singh Sengar and two against MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar," said SHO Rajesh Singh. He also confirmed that the victim had once eloped with one Shubhan and later filed an FIR against the boy, his mother, and his sister at Makhi Police Station.

"The girl had eloped with a boy from our village last year. When she was caught, a rape case was filed against the boy and his family. The boy was sent to jail but his mother and sister were not charged by the police as they were not found guilty of any crime. Since that day, the girls family has been pressuring vidhayakji to get the innocent people booked, but he refused to do so as it was unethical," said another villager, Shailendra Singh, who claimed to be a relative of the MLA.

"Our netaji is being targeted for political benefits by people who want to malign his image. This is nothing but a political plot by the Opposition to defame this government," said Shailendra. He further said that the rape allegation had been levelled against Sengar to pressure him to withdraw a defamation case filed against the rape survivor and her family.

Earlier, on Wednesday morning, Sengars wife, Sangeeta Sengar, met Uttar Pradesh director-general of police (DGP) and pleaded for "justice".

"My husband is innocent and he should not be termed as a rapist. Me, my husband, and my entire family are ready to undergo a narco test if necessary," she told mediapersons while exiting the DGP's office. "Ladki kisi ke bahkaawe mein aakar apni izzat uchhaal rahi hai (The girl is maligning her own reputation under someone else's influence)," she said. Meanwhile, the victim told the media that she and her family are scared to go home. "They have killed my father and raped me. Their next move will be to kill me and finish my family. I have no place to go now and I don't feel safe in the village. The district magistrate has confined me to a hotel room and no-one is ready to talk to us," said the victim, while eating food in the hotel room where she has been kept under police protection.

District magistrate admits medical lapse:

District magistrate Ravi Kumar NG said the rape survivor's father's death was unfortunate and that his life could have been saved. "After going through the postmortem reports, I can say that the doctors who conducted his medical examination are at fault and there has been a lapse," Kumar said.

**

TIMELINE

4 June, 2017: The rape survivor alleges she was raped in the house of BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, when she had gone to meet him for employment along with her neighbour.

11 June, 2017: The girl goes missing. Makhi police registers a missing person FIR the same day.

20 June, 2017: The girl is recovered from a village in Auraiya and brought to Unnao on 21 June.

22 June, 2017: The police produces her before the court and her statement is recorded under Section 164 of the CrPC.

3 July, 2017: The girl is handed over to her family after 10 days. She leaves for Delhi alleging police harassment and starts living in her uncles house. She writes a letter to the chief minister to get an FIR registered against MLA Sengar and his brother Atul Singh Sengar alleging rape.

16 October, 2017: A poster against the MLA surfaces in Makhi village. Villagers say its the handiwork of the girls uncle.

24 October, 2017: Sengar files a defamation case against the girl's uncle for maligning his image.

24 February, 2018: The girls family moves to court to include the MLAs name in the FIR under Section 156(3).

3 April, 2018: The girls father, Surendra Singh, is allegedly thrashed by Atul and his cohorts in Makhi. Surendra is arrested under the Arms Act.

5 April, 2018: Surendra is sent to jail after a medical examination at the district hospital.

8 April, 2018: The girl attempts self-immolation at the CMs residence in Lucknow, demanding an FIR against the MLA.

9 April, 2018: The girls father dies at the district hospital hours after he is shifted from the district jail. Six policemen are suspended, a magisterial probe is ordered.

10 April, 2018: Atul gets arrested from Lucknow. District magistrate Ravi Kumar NG meets the victim and her family in his office.

11 April, 2018: SIT records statement of both the parties.

With inputs from Vishal Singh in Makhi village, Unnao

Follow all the latest updates hereFacing heat and growing outrage over the alleged involvement of MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the rape of an 18-year-old girl in Unnao, the Uttar Pradesh government also decided to register an FIR against the legislator and the other accused.

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The Yogi Adityanath government late on Wednesday night decided to hand over to the CBI the probe into the Unnao rape case in which a BJP MLA is among the accused, on a day when he made a dramatic appearance before the police but refused to surrender.

Two doctors, namely Dr DK Dwivedi and Dr Prashant Upadhyay have been suspended and disciplinary action initiated against three other doctors, Dr Manoj Kumar (Orthosurgeon), Dr GP Sachan (Surgeon) and Dr Gaurav Agrawal for laxity in giving proper medical care, Principal Secretary (Information) said in an statement.

Rape accused and four-time Unnao MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar has the blind support of the villagers of Makhi. So much so that the villagers took up cudgels against a special investigative team (SIT) formed to probe the Unnao rape case and the death of the survivor's father, Surendra Kumar Singh, in police custody. The villagers wouldnt let the team, headed by additional director-general (ADG), law and order, Lucknow zone, Rajeev Krishna, enter the village on Wednesday and held vociferous protests against the probe.

Speaking to CNN-News18 , BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar said rape accusations hurled at him were a political conspiracy. "I am innocent, everything will be cleared as the matter has been handed over to CBI.This is a political conspiracy against memy wife has been hospitalised and I am with her..i am ready for any probe," accused MLA said.

The case has been registered under several sections of the Indian Penal Code (including Section 376 for rape) and POCSO Act.

An FIR has been fired against the rape accused Kuldeep Sengar on Thursday, confirmed SO Rajesh Singh to ANI. The case has been registered at the Makhi police station in Unnao.

I screamed. I knew people were sitting outside in the corridor, but no one came to help me. After raping me, he asked me to leave and straightaway return home, she told The Print, adding that Sengar wiped her tears and said he would get her a good job. He also allegedly threatened to kill her father and four-year-old brother if she filed a complaint.

In an interview with The Print, the rape survivor, who has accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar of sexually assaulting her, said the incident took place on 4 June, 2017 when she was 16 years old. On that day, Sengar reportedly called her home, took her to his room and raped her, while accomplices sat outside the door.

Kuldeep Sengar told rape survivor he would get her a good job after assaulting her

On Thursday, rape accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar was booked under the following sections of the Indian Penal Code: Section 366 (Kidnapping, abducting), Section 363 (Punishment for kidnapping), Section 376 (Punishment for rape) and Section 506 (Punishment for criminal intimidation)

"I'm not a fugitive. I respect the CBI and the judiciary process," he said.

Speaking to CNN-News18, accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar said that he is confident he will be proved innocent after the CBI probe. "I have full faith in the Yogi Adityanath government. I have done no wrong. I will be proved innocent after CBI probe. I'm willing to cooperate. The rape allegations are baseless."

According to CNN-News18, the Congress party members will protest against BJP MLA Kuldeep Sengar in Lucknow at 2 pm on Thursday. Sengar is accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in June last year. An FIR into the same was filed on Thursday as well.

Allahabad High Court has sought the Yogi Adityanath-led state government's stand on the incident in a letter to the court by senior lawyer Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi detailing the case and posted the matter for hearing on Thursday.

Speaking to the media, Uttar Pradesh home secretary Arvind Kumar said on Thursday the rape survivor did not name the BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in her statement in 2017.

The case has been registered based on allegations, said OP Singh, DGP, Uttar Pradesh. "If there is evidence found, the CBI will take a call if the accused has to be arrested or not." He also added that the BJP MLA is an accused and not convicted yet.

'BJP MLA not being arrested yet as its only an allegation'

The home secretary and other officials addressing the media kept referring to Kuldeep Singh Sengar as "mananiy vidhayak" (honourable minister). As reporters pointed this out, DGP OP Singh said, "I'm not defending anyone. I referred to him as 'accused'."

During Wednesday's briefing, the DGP came under fire from the media after he referred to Kuldeep Singh Sengar as the 'Honourable MLA'. The mediapersons present at the briefing were quick to point out the irony of the situation to the top cop and asked him how was Sengar "honourable"? Singh said, "His (Sengar's) crimes have not been proven yet, and there is no reason why he shouldn't be given respect of his position."

After the Uttar Pradesh government decided to hand over the probe into the Unnao rape case to CBI on Wednesday night, the young rape survivor expressed her apprehensions and said the accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar must be arrested. "Still so many questions are being raised on me, even after my father's murder. How will I get justice? CBI probe is fine but first MLA (Kuldeep Singh Sengar) should be arrested as he will influence the probe. I now fear for my uncle's (father's brother) life," ANI quoted her as saying.

"They belong to a low status family ('nimn star ke log hain')...This is a conspiracy by my opponents," Sengar told reporters, but refused to comment on speculation about he being summoned by Adityanath.

The woman's father, aged around 50, was rushed to a hospital from the district jail on the night of 8 April but he died during the treatment, an officials said. He was arrested on 5 April under the Arms Act, they added. Significantly, a case had been registered against four persons a few days earlier on a complaint by the deceased's wife that he was beaten up. "The four accused  Sonu, Baua, Vinit and Shailu  named in the FIR registered on 4 April for beating up the deceased had been arrested," Superintendent of Police, Unnao, Pushpanjali Devi was quoted as saying.

BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his brothers allegedly raped a 16-year-old girl in June 2017. The father of the girl died in police custody on 9 April. A defiant Sengar, however, had rejected the charge as a conspiracy by his opponents and said the complainant belonged to a "low class", even as six policemen were suspended and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath assured that the guilty will not be spared.

Congress members led protests against the Bharatiya Janata Party and rape accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in Lucknow on Thursday. The Congress women's wing is also part of the protests.

Addressing the media, Congress leader Kapil Sibal said: "Someone who has raped and abducted, the chief minister wants to withdraw the case? This is their mentality. If they are in power, they will protect the accused. Unfortunately, the manner in which the prime minister has conducted himself suggests that he is not serious about the kind of things happening in this country."

PM's conduct suggests he is not serious about rapes happening in the country: Kapil Sibal

The Allahabad High Court on Thursday said that the rape charges against the BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar are very serious and sought a reply from the Uttar Pradesh government on the matter by 2 pm, reported India Today.

According to Prakhar Singh, the nephew of Kuldeep Singh Sengar, the MLA's family has welcomed the Uttar Pradesh government's move to hand over the probe to the CBI in this case and has also demanded a narco test be conducted on both the rape survivor and Sengar. "We are saying this from day one that CBI should investigate this matter as all the allegations are false and have been made for political interest," said Prakhar.

Sengar's nephew Prakhar Singh also confirmed that the BJP MLA's wife Sangeeta is admitted in the ICU of Mayo Hospital in Lucknow. "After watching the news Sangeeta aunty is in trauma and a team of three doctors is looking after her," he added.

The SIT has told the Allahabad High Court that they will arrest Kuldeep Singh Sengar. The court's order is expected to come by 3:30 pm.

When questioned that whether he will surrender to the police, Sengar said he would surrender when there is a warrant against him.

"I came here to show to the media that I am not absconding, and I am very much in Lucknow. I am here, tell me what to do," a visibly unrepentant Sengar told reporters. He said, "I am a disciplined BJP worker. I am innocent. I am being implicated."

Today morning, when Kuldeep Singh Sengar appeared at the residence of Senior Superintended of Police in Lucknow, word was that perhaps the MLA has come to surrender. However, Sengar came out looking confident.

Union minister Satyapal Singh said, "The SIT has submitted its report and strict action will be taken against those found guilty.I don't know how much is he (Kuldeep Singh Sengar) involved in the case. But sometimes such allegations are proven wrong also."

'Allegations are false sometimes, law will take its course,' says Union minister Satyapal Singh

However, since the victim is 17-year-old, Sengar is charged under provisions of the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act in the Makhi police station area. Under POCSO an accused has to be arrested immediately after a case been filed.

Even tough the Uttar Pradesh Police finally registered an FIR against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, it is still undecided on whether to arrest the accused MLA or not. It said that since the case has been handed over to the CBI, the premier investigating agency will take a call on the MLA's arrest.

AICC general secretary in charge of communications Randeep Surjewala told The Times of India , The media department has decided to refer to UP chief minister as only Adityanath. A chief minister who lords over the death of 200 infants and razing of Dalit houses, who protects MLAs and leaders accused of rape is not a yogi (ascetic) but a bhogi (materialist).

'Hes no Yogi, will just call him Adityanath': Congress slams UP CM over Unnao rape case

Advocate general Raghvendra Singh, on behalf of the UP government, told the Allahabad High Court that their is no evidence against Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the alleged rape case. The government told the court that action was taken according to the law.

The Allahabad High Court will give its order in the case at 2pm on Friday. The SIT investigating the case, meanwhile, has told the court that it will arrenst Kuldeep Singh Sengar if gathers enought evidence against him.

Delhi Commission for Women chief Swati Maliwal has sent a letter to the prime minister, demanding stern action in the two rape cases. She has said that she wil sit on an indefinite hunger strike from tomorrow at Rajghat in Delhi.

In the midst of Unnao rape case controversy that has dented the Uttar Pradesh government's claim of improved law and order, the burnt body of another body was found in the forest area in Asoha. the police have started their investigation.

"It's correct decision to refer the matter to CBI. If there're issues which are not meeting the eye then severe punishment should be given to those who did such an abhorrent act, there should be no false prosecution and the accused shouldn't escape," Lekhi said.

BJP leader Deepti Bharadwaj has said that the government has now made its stand clear in the Unnao rape case and justie will be served. She had earlier tweeted out her concerns about the government inaction in the case and had also written to party president Amit Shah.

Advocate General Raghvendra Singh told the court that the investigating agency will arrest Sengar if sufficient evidence is found against him. The court was, however, not convinced with the argument and the judge asked Singh whether this was a standard norm followed in all cases. Singh replied saying that the investigating officer takes a call on arrest on a case to case basis depending on the merit of the case. The investigation in this case is still underway.

The Special Investigation Team has reached the Unnao Hotel where the victim is staying. The investigation team will record fresh statements of the victim nd her family. Media persons have been asked to wait outside.

Chief food inspector, Unnao, KK Tripathi said that he has been asked by the DM to check the quality of items the victim family is consuming. Input by Saurabh Sharma

Uttar Pradesh Governor Ram Naik reacted to the accusation of gang-rape and murder against BJP MLA Kuldeep Sengar. "What has happened is shameful. But to say that no action has been taken is wrong. Actions taken by the police till now will provide a solution and will also set an example for the future," Naik said .

Wrong to say no action taken so far: UP Governor Ram Naik

National Commission for Women has issued a notice to BJP MLA from Bairia Surendra Singh over his comment on Unnao rape case. He had said, "I am speaking from psychological point of view, no one can rape a mother of three children."

NCW issues notice to BJP MLA Surendra Singh who defended Sengar saying its impossible to rape mother of 3

The CBI will now take a call on whether Kuldeep Sengar should be arrested in the case or not.

The Special Investigation Team probing the incident has formally handed over the case to CBI after Centre gave its nod to UP governments' recommendation seeking premier investing agencies help.

According to The Indian Express , the CBI detained BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, accused of raping a 16-year-old teenager last year, on Friday, a day after the Uttar Pradesh government handed over the probe to the central agency.

Rape accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar is currently being questioned at the CBI office in Lucknow, reported NDTV.

It was June 4 last year. I was asked to go inside a room, where he raped me. Later, I was told that my father and family would be killed if I opened my mouth. I did not speak about it to anyone until I was kidnapped by some of his people a few days later, on June 11. They gangraped me for a few days and sold me to someone from whom I was recovered, claimed the survivor.

In an interview with The Indian Express, the 17-year-old rape survivor from Unnao said that she used to called BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar 'Bhaiyya' till he allegedly raped.

'I used to call the BJP MLA Bhaiyya until he raped me'

BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar was taken into CBI custody for questioning in the wee hours of Friday morning. He was picked up by the CBI from his house in Lucknow at 4.30 am, reported News18 . The investigating agency also registered three separate cases late on Thursday after the case was taken up by the CBI following a notification by the personnel ministry.

The 17-year-old rape survivor told News18 she wanted Kuldeep Sengar to face strict action. "I want strict action to be taken against him and he should be given severe punishment."

The rape survivor's mother said, "I am happy (with CBI detaining him). I want him to get punishment, get death penalty. My husband is dead and he is not going to return now. The accused must be hanged. Kuldeep must be hanged. Both Atul and Kuldeep Sengar must be sent to jail and hanged."

Sources also said that the CBI has questioned the BJP MLA about the leaked audio tape of Sengar with the victim's uncle.

"I want CBI to take all accused into custody. and check Kuldeep Singh Sengar's call details from last year onwards to clarify his involvement in the case," the rape survivor's uncle told media persons.

WATCH: Unnao rape survivor's uncle wants all accused to be taken into custody

The TV channel also said the CBI might arrest one of the cops from Makhi police station and grill police officers over the alleged involvement.

The Uttar Pradesh Police has come under the CBI scanner after the BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar's call details suggested he kept in touch with police officers, reported India Today.

The CBI team reached Unnao hotel on Friday, where the rape survivor's family is staying, to investigate, even as accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar was being questioned in Lucknow.

Reports have emerged that the CBI may also investigate the Supreintendent of Police in Unnao, the Chief Medical Officer, Safipur Circle Officer, jail doctors and the other accused who have been sent to jail.

Main khud aaya hoon. Adhikari se pooch lo (I came on my own. Ask the officer), News18 quoted him as telling reporters while being taken inside the CBI head office.

After being to taken into CBI custody on Friday morning, rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar said he arrived at the central agency office in Hazratgunj in Lucknow of his own volition, and asked reporters to confirm it with the officers.

Kuldeep Singh Sengar denies being 'detained' by CBI, says he went to agency on his own

Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi demanded capital punishment for those who raped minors below 12 years of age, reported CNN-News18. She also said she will amend the POCSO Act to reflect the same. You can follow LIVE updates on the Kathua rape case here .

"Main khud aaya hoon. Adhikari se pooch lo," News18 quoted him as saying while being taken inside the CBI head office.

Despite being taken into CBI custody, BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar denied being held by the CBI and said that he had, in fact, arrived on his own at the agency's head office in Hazratganj.

"Investigation has been handed over to the CBI. I believe the CBI would have arrested the MLA also. Our government will not compromise on this. No matter how influential the accused is, he will not be spared," Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said, ANI reported.

One of the three FIRs filed by the CBI against the rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Kumar Sengar specify the charges he has been booked for. He has been charged under Section 363, 366, 376, 506 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 2 and 4 of the POCSO Act. The FIR mentions the survivor's mother as the complainant.

In a separate FIR, the CBI booked BJP MLA Kuldeep Sengar for rioting, voluntarily causing hurt and criminal intimidation under Sections 147, 323 and 504 of the Indian Penal Code.

In the third FIR, CBI booked MLA Kuldeep Sengar for voluntarily causing hurt, criminal intimidation, threat and unlawful possession of arms under Sections 323, 504, 506 of the Indian Penal Code and Sections 3 and 25 under the Arms Act.

Six policemen, who were earlier suspended, have reportedly been taken into custody by the CBI. The two police officers and four police constables were suspended after being accused of allegedly beating up the rape survivor's father in judicial custody.

In an interview with The Times of India , BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, accused of raping a 16-year-old minor, said he is open to narco and other medical tests and that he believed no rape took place. "Let CBI collect audio, video evidence and any witness's statements. I personally believe no rape took place in first or second case. But now let CBI or other agencies probe it. Why should I surrender before the CBI completes its probe?" the report quoted Sengar as saying.

"The Unnao incident took place 10 months ago. The police presented their case before the magistrate. In that the MLA was not named. The victim wrote letters to the prime minister and Yogi Adityanath, and in that she accused the MLA Kuldeep Sengar. Then, the probe began," she said.

Addressing the media, BJP leader Meenakshi Lekhi said the accused must be punished and the victims must get justice. "Accused must be punished and victims should get justice. The country is ours, the accused should not be allowed to escape. The government has condemned both Kathua and Unnao rape cases."

The Allahabad High Court is set to pass its order on the Unnao rape case at 2 pm on Friday. The court on Thursday strongly objected to the delay in BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar's arrest, as it sought details of the action taken by the government in the matter.

The Allahabad High Court on Friday ordered the CBI to probe all three FIRs, and cancel the bail of those accused. The court has directed the investigating agency to present the progress report on the same on 2 May at 10 am.

The Allahabad High Court on Friday passed an order stating that the CBI arrest BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and present the status report on the case on 2 May.

In the order, the Allahabad High Court also said it would monitor the probe while adding the Kuldeep Sengar should be arrested, and not just detained.

In the court, the Additional Advocate General was asked if the BJP MLA has been arrested or not. The AAG replied that he has been detained, said Sanjay Singh, one of the lawyers present in the courtroom. The court observed that detention will not serve the purpose, "Suppose I ask you to be in the court for 10 minutes, it amounts to detention but it does not mean he has been arrested," the court said, according to Singh.

The woman's body was found hanging in her cottage and a suicide note was also recovered from the spot in which she alleged that she was facing sexual harassment, SP rural Ajay Sehdev.

A 38-year-old Dalit woman committed suicide after facing sexual harassment by two men at Jolla village in Muzaffarnagar, police said.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi has instructed party members to hold candlelight march at capitals of all the states against the Kathua and Unnao rape cases, ANI reported.

Congress workers to take out candlelight march in capitals of all states

Voices from within the BJP are coming out against the brutal Unnao and Kathua rape cases. BJP MP from Assam RP Sharma also demanded death penalty for those found guilty, even if the accused hailed from his own party. "The guilty should be publicly hanged or shot dead. There should be no leniency with rapists. Even if the guilty is found to be a BJP member, he should be executed publicly," Sharma said .

Addressing the media, senior party leader Gopal Rai said the party would also launch a country-wide campaign after Sunday on rising attacks against women. Rai said the prime minister became silent whenever the country faced trouble. "Why is he silent? What is the reason? Even Manmohan Singh used to speak at times."

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will ' gherao ' prime minister Narendra Modi's residence in New Delhi on Sunday over what it said on Friday was his silence on the rapes in Unnao and Kathua.

Smriti Irani, who had been vocal at the time of Damini Singh's brutal rape and murder in New Delhi, had been silent on the Unnao and Kathua cases so far. Tody, speaking to reporters she said, "Rahul Gandhi earlier stood in support of Gayatri Prasad Prajapati. It's just his compulsion to take a stand this time but Amethi knows the truth. I have faith that justice will be provided."

Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi addressed the media over the Kathua and Unnao rape case. Targeting the BJP over Prime minister's silence, Singhvi said that the collective conscience of the nation has been shaken, and India is waiting to listen from three people. He said the prime minister and the chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh should answer.

"We have referred the matter to the CBI...Our government will not compromise on the zero-tolerance policy it has followed against crime and corruption since the beginning. We will firmly deal with criminals, however influential they might be," Adityanath said.

"As soon as the matter came to the notice of the government on 9 April, we immediately constituted an SIT (Special Investigation Team) and initiated action in the matter...The policemen and doctors found guilty in the SIT report were suspended," the CM told reporters in Chitrakoot.

Facing severe flak over the delay in taking action against his party MLA who has been accused in the Unnao rape case, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath today said his government had not deviated from its zero-tolerance policy on crime and that it would firmly deal with criminals, no matter how influential they might be.

Firm action will be taken against criminals, no matter how influential they may be: Yogi Adityanath

The court also rapped the investigating agency for allowing Sengar to influence their actions.

We fail to understand why the Investigating Agency instead of arresting accused persons, they arrested complainant, in connection with this case," the Allahabad High Court asked in its order.

It also said it appears that false cases were lodged against the family members.

The bench said the father of prosecutrix was "beaten up by the brother and the goons of Kuldeep Singh and was arrested and in the custody was beaten mercilessly".

In its 20-page order, the court also said, "The disturbing feature of the case is that the law and order machinery and the government officials were directly in league and under the influence of Kuldeep Singh. The doctor did not examine the prosecutrix, nor did the circle officer, Shafipur, register the crime, though hand written complaint of the prosecutrix was sent from the office of the Chief Minister."

The prime minister was speaking at an event to mark the inauguration of Ambedkar museum in New Delhi.

"Incidents being discussed since past two days cannot be part of a civilised society. As a country, as a society we all are ashamed of it. I want to assure the country that no culprit will be spared, complete justice will be done. Our daughters will definitely get justice," he said.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) continued the interrogation of BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar at CBI Zonal office in Lucknow. He is being questioned since past 15 hours . The premier investigation agency has also recorded the victim and her family's statements separately in Unnao and has called them to Lucknow tomorrow for further investigation.

Medical superintendent and casualty officer at Unnao District Hospital was suspended on Friday evening a day after CBI took over the case. A departmental inquiry has also initiated against 3 other doctors. The Allahabad High Court had also raised questions on the role of doctors on duty asking that why was the victim's father released to be taken into police custody again, if his injuries were serious.

The CBI has arrested BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar accused of assaut, murder and raping a minor was finally arrested by the CBI after the Allahabad High Court's order. Sengar was grilled by the investigation agency for close to 15 hours.

Meanwhile, ANI reports that a woman in Unnao alleges that a councillor from Safipur raped her while his accomplice filmed the act, an FIR has been filed in the case

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday demanded death penalty for those raping minors and also blasted the BJP for defending its MLA accused of raping a teenager in Uttar Pradesh. While visiting the Rajghat where Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) Chairperson Swati Maliwal's fast on the same issue entered the third day, Kejriwal said his government was ready to make amendments to the existing law to ensure death penalty to rapists of minors.- IANS

"People have been arrested only in the rape case, the murder case of my brother has not been touched yet," the uncle of Unnao rape survivor told ANI. He added that despite this the investigation is going "at a good pace" and that they are safe.

The University of Oxford India Society, London School of Economics India Society, University College London Indian Society, Imperial College London Indian Society and University of Birmingham Bharat Parivar are among the 19 signatories of the letter alongside NISAU UK, one of the UK's largest Indian student organisations. PTI

It urges the Indian government to take "extraordinary measures" in the horrific rape cases that have been reported in Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and more recently in Gujarat. "Hon Prime Minister, extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures. You have not shied away from taking difficult decisions in the past, such as with demonetisation. Please take similar extraordinary steps to prove that India's daughters matter," the letter reads.

The National Indian Students and Alumni Union (NISAU) UK, together with 19 India-related societies at leading UK universities, submitted the letter dated 14 April ahead of the Indian PM's four-day visit to the UK on Tuesday.

Indian students and alumni based in the UK have delivered a letter for Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Indian High Commission in London asking him to take "extraordinary measures" to ensure justice in rape cases reported from different states in India.

Indian students from leading universities in UK write to Narendra Modi ahead of his visit demanding justice in rape cases

There is also a sharp contrast between the strictly professional manner with which senior officers of the Jammu and Kashmir Police Crime Branch investigated the case in Kathua and the connivance of the state administration in Uttar Pradesh to protect the politically powerful from charges of rape and murder.

However, what happened to the eight-year-old girl in Kathua cannot be seen merely through the prism of the routine brutalisation of Indian women by sexual predators or political perfidy on display under Yogi Adityanaths rule since it has a larger and darker dimension.

Though both provoked a public uproar, the Kathua case correlates with the involvement of a BJP legislator and his cronies in the alleged rape of a 16-year-old girl and the murder of her father in judicial custody in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district.

Sharp contrast between strictly professional manner with which Kathua case has been handled in comparison to connivance of state administration in Unnao rape case

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday demanded death penalty for those raping minors and also blasted the BJP for defending its MLA accused of raping a teenager in Uttar Pradesh. While visiting the Rajghat where Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) Chairperson Swati Maliwal's fast on the same issue entered the third day, Kejriwal said his government was ready to make amendments to the existing law to ensure death penalty to rapists of minors.- IANS

The group has also demanded the convening of an all-party meeting "to deliberate on ways in which the phenomenon of hate crime can be tackled socially, politically and administratively". IANS

"This is a moment of existential crisis, a turning point  the way the government responds now will determine whether we as a nation and as a republic have the capacity to overcome the crisis of constitutional values, of governance and the ethical order within which we function.

Holding Modi responsible "more than anyone else" for the "terrifying state of affairs" and pointing out that both in Uttar Pradesh (Unnao) and Jammu and Kashmir (Kathua) it is his party (BJP) that is in power, the 49 former civil servants who included Aruna Roy, Harsh Mander, Wajahat Habibullah, Jawahar Sircar and NC Saxena, termed the present state of affairs an "existential crisis".

In a strongly-worded open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a group of former civil servants on Sunday asked him to check the nations "free fall into anarchy" by acting tough against the culprits of the Kathua and Unnao rape cases and the perpetrators of hate crimes across the country.

Group of former civil servants pens letter to PM, tells him to 'act tough' against culprits of Kathua, Unnao rape cases

All of this is difficult, and most politicians know that it is close to impossible. That is why the easy way is chosen and that is to demand that rapists be hanged. The fact that murderers are also hanged and it has no effect on murders does not seem to worry us.

The facts show that to prevent sexual crimes, we have to make large changes in our society and its treatment of women at the level of the family. And we need to ensure that the existing laws on reporting sexual violence are followed at the level of every police station across India. This is very, very hard work but it will ensure that the rate of reporting goes up, at least to the levels where it is in the rest of the world. After the rate of reporting goes up, the state needs to ensure that it conducts proper investigations (which need resources and cannot be done with the same force or budget) that increases the rate of convictions.

Gurgaon-based filmmaker Saba Dewan led the protest. The protest included artistes and students, who vented their anger over the incidents and claimed that Muslims in the country were living in fear. They said the rights of Dalits and Adivasis were being questioned.

Hundreds of people on Sunday participated in a protest march called "Not In My Name" at Parliament Street in the national capital against increasing incidents of rape and atrocities on Dalits and minorities.

Not In My Name protests launched after Kathua, Unnao cases; hundreds march over atrocities against minorities

People have been arrested only in the rape case. The murder case of my brother has not been touched yet. Several culprits are still free. The investigation is going at a good pace and we are safe: Uncle of #UnnaoCase victim pic.twitter.com/mFEChtzsKh

"People have been arrested only in the rape case, the murder case of my brother has not been touched yet," the uncle of Unnao rape survivor told ANI. He added that despite this the investigation is going "at a good pace" and that they are safe.

Unnao rape case latest updates: Congress President Rahul Gandhi will participate in a midnight candlelight vigil at India Gate. Congress workers will take out a march from AICC headquarters in New Delhi at 11 am till India Gate against the Kathua and Unnao rape cases.

The SIT visited the rape survivor and her family for a second time. The team reached the hotel in Unnao where they are staying and is recording a fresh statement of the victim and her family.

The SIT has told the Allahabad High Court that they will arrest Kuldeep Singh Sengar. The court's order is expected to come by 3:30 pm.

According to Prakhar Singh, the nephew of Kuldeep Singh Sengar, the MLA's family has welcomed the Uttar Pradesh government's move to hand over the probe to the CBI and has also demanded a NARCO test be conducted on both the rape survivor and Sengar. "We are saying this from day one that CBI should investigate this matter as all the allegations are false and have been made for political interest," said Prakhar.

The Allahabad High Court on Thursday said that the rape charges against the BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar are very serious and sought a reply from the Uttar Pradesh government on the matter by 2 pm, reported India Today.

Congress members led protests against the Bharatiya Janata Party and rape accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in Lucknow on Thursday. The Congress women's wing was also part of the protests against the alleged inaction by Uttar Pradesh government in the Unnao rape case.

Speaking to the media, Uttar Pradesh home secretary Arvind Kumar said on Thursday the rape survivor did not name the BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in her statement in 2017.

After the Uttar Pradesh government decided to hand over the probe into the Unnao rape case to CBI on Wednesday night, the young rape survivor expressed her apprehensions and said the accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar must be arrested. "Still so many questions are being raised on me, even after my father's murder. How will I get justice? CBI probe is fine but first MLA (Kuldeep Singh Sengar) should be arrested as he will influence the probe. I now fear for my uncle's (father's brother) life," ANI quoted her as saying.

The home secretary and other officials addressing the media kept referring to Kuldeep Singh Sengar as "mananiy vidhayak" (honourable minister). As reporters pointed this out, DGP OP Singh said, "I'm not defending anyone. I referred to him as 'accused'."

According to CNN-News18, the Congress party members will protest against BJP MLA Kuldeep Sengar in Lucknow at 2 pm on Thursday. Sengar is accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in June last year. An FIR into the same was filed on Thursday as well.

Speaking to CNN-News18, accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar said that he is confident he will be proved innocent after the CBI probe. "I have full faith in the Yogi Adityanath government. I have done no wrong. I will be proved innocent after CBI probe. I'm willing to cooperate. The rape allegations are baseless," he said.

An FIR has been fired against the rape accused Kuldeep Sengar on Thursday, confirmed SO Rajesh Singh to ANI. The case has been registered at the Makhi police station in Unnao. The case has been registered under several sections of the Indian Penal Code (including Section 376 for rape) and POCSO Act.

Speaking to CNN-News18, BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar said rape accusations hurled at him were a political conspiracy. "I am innocent, everything will be cleared as the matter has been handed over to CBI.This is a political conspiracy against memy wife has been hospitalised and I am with her..i am ready for any probe," accused MLA said.

In a midnight drama that unfolded after Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah returned to national capital from Lucknow, the rape-accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar reached the Senior Superintendent of Police's (SSP) office with two dozens supporters in tow. When confronted by the media, the MLA said that he had come to enquire whether his name had appeared in any of the First Information Reports (FIRs).

The Yogi Adityanath government late on Wednesday night decided to hand over to the CBI the probe into the Unnao rape case in which a BJP MLA is among the accused, on a day when he made a dramatic appearance before the police but refused to surrender.

Facing heat and growing outrage over the alleged involvement of MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the rape of an 18-year-old girl, the state government also decided to register an FIR against the legislator and the other accused.

"An FIR be lodged under appropriate sections considering the allegations of rape levied on MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and others and the investigation be handed over to CBI," the Principal Secretary (Information) said in an statement.

The government has also recommended a CBI probe into the death of the victim's father.

"Investigation into cross cases pertaining to incidents leading to the death of the victim's father be also handed over to the CBI," the statement read.

The decisions were taken after the Special Investigation Team constituted under Additional Director General of Police (Lucknow zone) to look into the matter submitted its report to the government.

The development came hours after the Allahabad High Court sought the Yogi Adityanath-led state government's stand on the incident on a letter to the court by senior lawyer Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi detailing the case and posted the matter for hearing on Thursday.

Meanwhile, in a dramatic late night development, Sengar made a surprise appearance outside the Lucknow SSP's residence, triggering speculation that he might surrender, but left the place without handing himself over to the police.

"I came here to show to the media that I am not absconding, and I am very much in Lucknow. I am here, tell me what to do," a visibly unrepentant Sengar told reporters.

He said, "I am a disciplined BJP worker. I am innocent. I am being implicated."

BJP MLA from Bairia in Ballia district, Surendra Singh, made a shocking remark while defending Sengar. He said, Tell me who will rape a mother of three? He is being falsely implicated."

Earlier in the day, Sangeeta Sengar, the wife of the accused MLA, demanded narco tests on her husband and also the 18-year-old victim, who alleged confinement by local authorities.

The Congress latched on to the case to hit out at the BJP government with party president Rahul Gandhi wondering if Prime Minister Narendra Modi would observe a fast on the alleged rape and death of the complainant's father in custody, which he said "has shamed humanity".

The victim, who had tried to immolate herself outside the chief minister's house just a day before her 50-year-old father died on Monday, alleged that she has been confined to a hotel room by the district administration, leaving her "without a phone or water and guards at every corner".

She also accused the MLA's brother and their henchmen of killing her elder uncle earlier. "I want justice, why are they putting pressure on me for an apology? Do they want my (another) uncle to be killed too?" she told TV channels.

A purported video of the alleged rape survivor's father before his death also went viral and was shown by several TV channels, in which he alleged that he was mercilessly beaten up by the MLA's brother and others, including with rifle butts. It also showed the deceased person's back with serious wounds, but its veracity could not be ascertained.

In the state capital, Sangeeta Sengar, the wife of the accused MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, told reporters after meeting state police chief OP Singh that there was a political conspiracy against her family and accused the complainant of not being consistent in her statements.

"We demand that a narco test be conducted on my husband and the girl as well as her uncle. This will help in ascertaining the truth and presenting the correct picture. There are political reasons behind this and my husband has been made a pawn," Sangeeta Sengar said. The narco analysis test is a type of psychological investigation.

"My husband is innocent and it is my request that he should not be called a rapist. He has been in politics for the past 15 years and has been serving the society and people," she said, adding that her daughters were unable to concentrate on their studies in the wake of this incident.

She said the allegations against her brother-in-law Atul, who was arrested on Wednesday, were false too.

The MLA's wife, as also the alleged rape survivor, has demanded a CBI probe into the entire matter.

The Congress party demanded the dismissal of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, alleging that his government was a "Ravan" regime which has failed to protect women.

Taking a swipe at the prime minister's proposed hunger strike over the non-functioning of Parliament, Rahul Gandhi separately tweeted, "The barbarism inflicted on a father seeking justice for his daughter in Uttar Pradesh has shamed humanity. Hope the prime minister will soon observe a fast over atrocities against women, failed law and order and increasing anarchy under the BJP's watch."

The Congress president also posted a purported video in which the woman's father is seen speaking against the BJP MLA.

In the Supreme Court, a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justice AM Khanwilkar and Justice DY Chandrachud said it would hear a plea next week for a CBI probe. The plea also alleged that the woman's father was tortured and killed in police custody at the behest of the "ruling party" in the state.

With inputs from PTIA BJP MLA from Bangarmau in Unnao, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who is in the eye of a controversy after the custodial death of the father of a rape victim who has pointed an accusing finger at him, is living up to the standards set by previous MPs

Sadak par todti patthar, dekha maine use Allahabad ke path par (She was breaking stones, I saw her on footpaths of Allahabad)".

This verse by Hindi poet Suryakant Tripathi Nirala is not alien to anyone conversant with elementary Hindi literature. Nirala revolutionised Hindi poetry by penning in simple words a complex concept of individualism and stood tallest among his contemporaries.

Nirala belonged to Unnao, a town sandwiched between two big cities: Lucknow and Kanpur. It stood dwarfed by the two, since Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, is also recognised as a cultural centre and Kanpur was the economic capital of the state on account of its industries. It is always seen as a backyard of the two cities in terms of political influence and financial muscle.

Yet, Unnao used to take pride in its literary heritage and patriotic lineage. Apart from Nirala, a host of Hindi poets and authors like Shiv Mangal Suman came from this region.Though it drew its patriotic lineage by claiming to have links with the revolutionary icon Chandrashekhar Azads forefathers, the district produced many other valiant freedom fighters. In the Indian Rebellion of 1857, people of the area, particularly subalterns, resisted the British Army before allowing it to enter either Kanpur or Lucknow.

But this illustrious history of Unnao is meaningless in todays context. Since Independence, Unnao has travelled far away from its path to become a hub of crime, casteism, and chaos. Few would remember that Unnao shot into the limelight when its Lok Sabha representative and minister of state for environment in the Rajiv Gandhi government, Ziaur Rehman Ansari, was accused of molesting an activist named Mukti Dutta inside his office in the late 80s.

The event came as a shock as the political culture had then not degenerated to promoting and protecting moral turpitude. Rajiv forced Ansari to resign within a few days. Ansari, an old man, could never revive his political fortunes and died in ignominy.

Since the 90s, Unnao has slipped into a political journey which is guided by intense casteism, criminality, corruption and communalism.

Being a Brahmin-dominated constituency, it attracted Brahmin mafia like Aruna Shankar Shukla. At the same time, the constituency accepted outsiders like Annu Tandon, whose sheer tenacity to work for the development of the region saw her tide over caste and communal divides till 2014.

Political parties have been pandering to the basest impulses of the regions electorate since the 90s. This reality was aptly summed up in an instance quite indicative of the degeneration that has taken hold of the polity. In October 2013, prior to the Lok Sabha polls, the Archeology Survey of India (ASI) carried out a massive excavation operation in Daundia Khera village to locate a hidden treasure.

Ironically, the ASIs operation was based on the premonition of a local seer named Shoban Sarkar who claimed to have dreamed of this treasure, containing 1,000 tonnes of gold. The entire government machinery was working at the whim of the seer. There was a race among all parties to win over Shoban Sarkar: Not for spiritual but political reasons.

It would be neither shocking nor surprising, then, to find that this constituency is represented in the Lok Sabha by Sakshi Maharaj of BJP, who at the time of contesting the 2014 elections had, in his affidavit, declared as many as eight criminal cases pending against him. The eight cases cover a wide range, from dacoity with murder to criminal intimidation to cheating and dishonesty.

In 2004, Maharaj was expelled from the Rajya Sabha (as a Samajwadi Party member) after a sting operation showed him misusing MPLADS fund. Once there was a gang-rape accusation against Maharaj and others, leading him to spend some time in the Tihar Jail, but eventually, he was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Kuldeep Singh Sengar, in the eye of the controversy after the death in judicial custody of the father of a rape victim who has pointed an accusing finger at him, is the MLA from Bangarmau in Unnao and lives up to the standards set by the MP.

His sordid saga must be seen as a logical sequel to political and moral degeneration that has consumed state politics. Coming from a criminal background, the legislator and his family members are cocksure of getting away with rape and murder despite overwhelming evidence against them. He is seen as close to the chief minister and a set of high functionaries who bear no compunction in allowing criminals to go scot-free. Yogi Adityanath, a seer himself apart from being the chief minister, cannot be deterred even by the curse of divinity.

And so far as Niralas evocative poem about the poor woman is concerned, let his district represent a perverse parody of it.After receiving heavy backlash from the media and the public, the authorities have initiated multiple actions in the Unnao rape case.

After being on the receiving end of major backlash from the media and the public over the alleged involvement of MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the rape of an 18-year-old girl, authorities have initiated multiple actions in the Unnao rape case.

The ADG (Lucknow Zone), Rajeev Krishna, filed the SIT report with the government which has since examined it. A separate inquiry report has been submitted by DIG, Prison, Love Kumar on the actions of the Unnao jail administration while the survivor's father was jailed. Another report has been filed by the district magistrate of Unnao on the lapses on the part of District

Hospital, Unnao.

A purported video of the alleged rape survivor's father before his death had gone viral and was shown by several TV channels, in which he alleged that he was mercilessly beaten up by the MLA's brother and others, including with rifle butts. It also showed the deceased person's back with serious wounds, but its veracity could not be ascertained.

Based on the reports and the recommendations, the authorities have ordered for an FIR to be lodged to investigate the allegations of rape levied on Sengar and others, and the investigation will be handed over to CBI. Further the investigation of the death of the survivor's father too shall be handed over to the CBI.

These orders were passed on a day when Sengar made a dramatic appearance before the police but refused to surrender. "I came here to show to the media that I am not absconding, and I am very much in Lucknow. I am here, tell me what to do," a visibly unrepentant Sengar told reporters.

Dr DK Dwivedi and Dr Prashant Upadhyay will be suspended, and disciplinary proceedings will be initiated against three other doctors, namely Dr Manoj Kumar, Dr GP Sachan and Dr Gaurav Agrawal for laxity in giving proper medical care and treatment both prior to judicial custody and on referral from jail to the hospital while in judicial custody.

The circle officer of Safipur, Kunwar Bahadur Singh will be suspended for negligence in handling the repeated complaints made by the survivor.

Finally, the family will be given adequate security.

Meanwhile, in a dramatic late night development, Sengar made a surprise appearance outside the Lucknow SSP's residence, triggering speculation that he might surrender, but left the place without handing himself over to the police.

The BJP MLA from Bairia in Ballia district Surendra Singh made a shocking remark while defending Sengar. He said, Tell me who will rape a mother of three? He is being falsely implicated."

Earlier in the day, Sangeeta Sengar, the wife of the accused MLA demanded narco tests on her husband and also the 18-year-old survivor, who alleged confinement by local authorities.

The survivor, who had tried to immolate herself outside the chief minister's house just a day before her 50-year-old father died on Monday, alleged that she has been confined to a hotel room by the district administration, leaving her "without a phone or water and guards at every corner". She also accused the MLA's brother and their henchmen of killing her elder uncle earlier. "I want justice, why are they putting pressure on me for an apology? Do they want my (another) uncle to be killed too?" she asked TV channels.

With inputs from Team 101Reporters

Follow all the latest updates hereTwo persons were killed in a suspected factional fight in the ruling Trinamool Congress during a victory procession in North 24 Parganas district on Wednesday.

Kolkata: Two persons were killed in a suspected factional fight in the ruling Trinamool Congress during a victory procession in North 24 Parganas district on Wednesday, police said.

The rally was organised by the party after it won the Falti gram panchayat in the Sasan area of the district uncontested.

Local party leader Saifar Rahman (52) was attacked with a knife when he was walking in the rally. He was taken to a hospital in Barasat where he was declared dead on arrival.

Police sources said local people beat 40-year-old Rajab Ali, a Trinamool Congress worker, to death alleging that he killed Rahman.

Meanwhile, in continuing violence over panchayat poll nominations in the state, houses of two Congress candidates were torched in the Ratua area in Malda district, police said.

Nine more houses, reportedly of Congress supporters, were also set on fire.

A Congress candidate was killed in a road accident in Malda district on 9 April and another person was shot dead earlier this month during a clash in the same district.

Meanwhile, the scrutiny of nomination papers for three-phase panchayat polls in West Bengal was completed on Wednesday, State Election Commission (SEC) sources said here.

There are 48,751 seats in 3,358 gram panchayats, 9,240 seats in 341 panchayat samities and 825 seats in 20 zilla parishads, the sources said.

The last date for withdrawal of candidature is 16 April.

The election would be held on 1, 3 and 5 May.

The police prevented CPM supporters and women Congress activists from going to the SEC office, where Section 144 of the CrPC is in force.Amit Shah said on Thursday that the opposition party has proved that its's priority is 'politics of disruption and instability' and not people's welfare.

New Delhi: Blaming the Congress for the impasse in Parliament's Budget Session, BJP president Amit Shah said on Thursday that the opposition party has proved that its's priority is "politics of disruption and instability" and not people's welfare.

As BJP leaders, including prime minister Narendra Modi, observed a fast to "expose" the Congress over the issue of disruption of Parliament, Shah accused the opposition of working to obstruct the prime minister's pro-poor and development agenda.

In an apparent reference to the Congress' claim that it was the BJP which deliberately sabotaged the session, he said the protest is to expose the "hypocrisy" of the Congress and the people will not "forgive" it for its conduct. "People should know that those sent by them to Parliament as their representatives are working to obstructing the government's development works instead of working in their interests," Shah, who is in Karnataka today where he joined his party's protest against the Congress, said in his blog.

The government advanced the budget session to quicken the pace of development but the opposition, especially the Congress, does not want it and that is why it has become an impediment to this, he said. He said the opposition's "irresponsible" conduct caused a loss of over Rs 333 crore of public money and the ruling NDA MPs' decision to forgo their salaries was a "call of conscience".

In the post, he noted that Rs 1.57 crore and Rs 1.10 crore are spent in running the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha per hour respectively when they are in session. Rs 200 crore and Rs 133 crore were spent in the two Houses respectively. "The way the Congress vitiated the atmosphere in the Budget Session's second phase and disrupted it, people in a democracy will not forgive it. The opposition's irresponsible conduct is aimed at obstructing prime minister Narendra Modi's efforts for the poor's welfare and the country's all-round development," Shah said. Parliament meets to discuss the policies for the country's progress but instead of showing concern for the people the Congress has excelled in disrupting it, he added.

"It appeared that the Congress was more interested in making noise outside Parliament than engaging in a constructive debate inside," he said. While Home Minister Rajnath Singh had assured the House that the government was ready for a debate on various issues, including bank scam, Cauvery row and no-confidence motions, but the Congress began claiming that the government was not keen on a debate, he said. People expect law-makers to take up issues concerning the country's development but the Congress set aside these concerns and began "lying", he alleged. It was clear that Congress members were coming to Parliament for creating ruckus and they would do it the moment its proceedings would begin and then they would do the same outside, Shah said.

The Rajya Sabha Chairman and the Lok Sabha Speaker always appealed for order but Congress MPs would always enter the Well of the two Houses, Shah said, adding that such a conduct does not behove a member. "The Congress has nothing to do with the people's welfare and it is only interested in creating a ruckus to do politics of disruption and instability," he said.

The BJP chief in his blog named only the Congress and added that a few opposition parties also joined it. Noting that Modi in his first speech as prime minister had said that his government was for the poor, backwards, women and youths, he said the BJP was committed to the welfare of peopleAmit Shah visited Uttar Pradesh to take stock of preparations for the upcoming legislative council polls in the state and meet the party's 'sulking' alliance partners.

Lucknow: BJP president Amit Shah on Wednesday visited Uttar Pradesh to take stock of the preparations for the upcoming legislative council polls in the state and meet the party's 'sulking' alliance partners.

The BJP national president, who took a day's off from the Karnataka assembly campaign, is understood to have taken a look at the names of probable party candidates for the legislative council polls.

The elections to the 13 seats will be held on 26 April with the ruling BJP being certain of winning at least 11 seats, going by its brute majority in the state legislative assembly.

Shah began his tour by garlanding the statue of Jyotibha Phule, sending a message that the saffron party did not want to keep the Dalits at an arms distance at a time when the Lok Sabha polls were barely a few months away. "With party MPs Savitribai Phoole, Ashok Dohrey, Chhotelal, Yashwant Singh virtually raising a banner of revolt against Chief Minister Yogi Aditynath, Shah had a long discussion with the chief minister at the latter's 5 Kalidas Marg residence to assuage their hurt sentiments. The parliamentarians had written about their discontent to Prime Minister Narendra Modi," a senior party leader said.

UP deputy chief ministers Keshav Prasad Maurya and Dinesh Sharma, and state BJP chief Mahendra Nath Pandey were also present during the discussion, he said. The party leader said the Lok Sabha bypoll debacle of Gorakhpur and Phulpur also figured in the meeting.

The outburst of the four parliamentarians and another BJP MP Udit Raj came at a time when the country witnessed a public outcry against the Supreme Court's order on the SC/ST Act, which the Dalit leaders said was an attempt to "dilute" the law. After facing strident criticism from the Opposition on Dalit issues, the BJP is also grappling with a rising voice of discontent among its own MPs belonging to the Scheduled Castes in Uttar Pradesh.

Lok Sabha members from Etawah and Nagina, Ashok Kumar Dohrey and Yashwant Singh respectively, are the latest to join their Dalit colleagues from the party to criticise the UP government. In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Dohrey had alleged that the Dalits and tribals across the country, especially in Uttar Pradesh, were being framed by the police in false cases after the protests, leading to growing insecurity among them.

Yashwant Singh, meanwhile, had reportedly said that nothing had been done for Dalits in the last four years.

Party insiders also said that the BJP's sulking ally, SBSP leader O P Rajbhar, who is also a cabinet minister, presented his case before Shah. Rajbhar told PTI, "I raised the issue of quota within quota for the most backward classes. Apart from this, discrepancies pertaining to ration cards, housing, toilets, pensions and scholarship were also discussed. Rajbhar-led Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) has four MLAs in the state assembly. He had threatened to boycott last month's Rajya Sabha biennial election.

Apna Dal (Sonelal) leader Ashish Patel also met the BJP president. "The meeting with the BJP chief was held in a very cordial atmosphere. We spoke for adequate representation of Dalits and backward classes at police stations and Tehsil offices, and we were told that our demands will be looked into," he said.Top BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, , observed a fast on Thursday to protest the washout of the second phase of Parliament's Budget Session.

New Delhi: Top BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his ministerial colleagues and party MPs and office-bearers, observed a fast on Thursday to protest the washout of the second phase of Parliament's Budget Session, for which they have blamed the Congress.

While many, including Modi and home minister Rajnath Singh, kept to their work while fasting, several ministers, among them Prakash Javadekar, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Piyush Goyal, travelled to different parts of the country to sit on a fast and attack the main Opposition party.

BJP president Amit Shah joined his party colleagues in Karnataka to protest against the Congress' "disruptions" of Parliament.

"The Congress knew very well that they cannot debate in any of the Houses so they did not let the Parliament function. The BJP was left with no choice but to go to the people as it is the biggest forum for us," Shah said at a public meeting in the state, which goes to polls month.

The main opposition party, he claimed, does not believe in democracy and it has held democracy "hostage" in its own household. It does not have internal party democracy and cannot save democracy in the country, he said.

The BJP's Lok Sabha members mostly sat on protest fast in their constituencies while most of the Rajya Sabha members did so in their states.

In his interaction with party leaders earlier, Modi had asked them to "expose" opposition parties which, he said, had "throttled" democracy by stalling Parliament proceedings during the Budget Session.

Health Minister JP Nadda travelled to Modi's constituency Varanasi, while Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and Minister of State for Rural Development Minister Ram Kripal Yadav were in Patna and Digha in Bihar respectively to sit on a fast.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was in Chennai while Prakash Javadekar was in Benguluru. Union minister Vijay Goel was in Tamil Nadu.

Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh was in Motihari in Bihar while Steel Minister Birender Singh was in Jind. Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu was in Delhi.

BJP general secretaries Bhupender Yadav, Anil Jian and Arun Singh were in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Odisha respectively.MDMK workers on Thursday held a protest with black falgs and balloons outside the Raj Bhavan in Chennai against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit.

Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) chief Vaiko and his party workers on Thursday held a protest with black flags and balloons outside the Raj Bhavan in Chennai against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the state over the Cauvery issue, reports said.

Protests against Modi's visit were also held near the airport in Alandur area.

Chennai: Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) Chief Vaiko & his party workers protest outside Raj Bhavan with black flags & balloons. #CauveryProtests pic.twitter.com/f2L5kxkveS  ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2018

This comes a day after the main Opposition party, DMK, asked people to hoist black flags atop their houses to oppose his visit.

MDMK general secretary Vaiko (a former DMK leader) had said that his party would hold a black flag demonstration at Little Mount against Modi's visit for his "betrayal" of Tamil Nadu on the Cauvery issue.

T Velmurugan, coordinator of Tamizhar Vazhvurimai Koottamaippu, an umbrella body of pro-Tamil outfits including 'May 17', had announced a 'black balloon-cum-black flag' protest.

Manithaneya Jananayaga Katchi chief M Thamimun Ansari had said that a black flag demonstration would be staged at Guindy which is near the airport. Ansari said volunteers from Tamizhar Kalai Ilakkiya Panpattu Peravai, a forum of art, literary and film personalities and Cauvery Rights Retrieval Committee, would also participate in the protests.

Tight security arrangements, including a multiple-layer security ring, were put in place for Modi's visit, police had said.

DMK's working president MK Stalin had appealed to people to hoist black flags and wear black badges as a mark of protest.

With inputs from PTIAmid reports of a tough battle in Chamundeshwari segment chosen by him, a delegation of Congress workers from northern Karnataka on Thursday met Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and urged him to contest the 12 May Assembly polls from Badami in their region.

Bengaluru: Amid reports of a tough battle in Chamundeshwari segment chosen by him, a delegation of Congress workers from northern Karnataka on Thursday met Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and urged him to contest the 12 May Assembly polls from Badami in their region.

Responding to the workers, who met him here under the leadership of state Congress Working President SR Patil and sitting MLA Chimmanakalti, the chief minister said he would convey to the party high command their demand, Congress sources said.

The workers and leaders are said to have tried to convince Siddaramaiah to contest from Badami in Bagalkote, stating that it would help party's prospects in the north Karnataka region.

Badami is dominated by the Kuruba community to which Siddaramaiah belongs.

According to party sources, Siddaramaiah has assured them that he will put forward their demand and opinion before the Congress high command.

The chief minister has already declared that he would contest the assembly polls from Chamundeshwari in Mysuru in south Karnataka.

Speculations are rife for some time now that Siddaramaiah is looking for another constituency amid reports it will not be an easy battle for him in Chamundeshwari.

Siddaramaiah, who represents Varuna in Mysuru after it became a constituency in 2008 following delimitation, has expressed intentions to contest from Chamundeshwari that gave him "political birth".

Making his debut in the Assembly in 1983, he got elected from Chamundeshwari on a Lok Dal Party ticket, from where he has won five times and tasted defeat twice.

Congress is expected to announce its candidates for all the 224 seats in one go, in a day or two.

BJP, which is going all out to unseat the Congress, has already announced its first list of 72 candidates.Right from the tussle over Andhra Pradesh special category status to Amit Shah distancing BJP from the Reddys of Bellary, the party seems to have jeopardised its prospects in Karnataka with its policies and decisions at the Centre

Bellary: The BJP, which has been painting India saffron one state at a time and is currently in power in 22 states, either on its own or in an alliance, has shifted its sight down south to Karnataka, where the Assembly election to 224 seats is slated for 12 May.

However, the party, which is trying to ride the anti-incumbency wave in Karnataka, seems to have jeopardised its prospects in the state with its policies and decisions at the Centre. To begin with, it may have to pay heavily for its breakup at the Centre with the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), led by Andhra Pradesh chief minister (CM) Chandrababu Naidu.

The TDP, which walked out of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) after the Centre refused to accord special category status (SCS) to Andhra Pradesh, has a significant support base among the Kammas, who are a deciding factor in at least 12 Assembly constituencies in the Hyderabad-Karnataka region in the ensuing election. These Telugu-speaking voters, mostly farmers hailing from Andhra Pradesh, migrated to the neighbouring Karnataka over 50 years ago, setting up over 1,000 camps in Bellary, Koppal, Yadgir, Raichur, and Kalaburgi districts of the state. They remain fiercely loyal to their homeland and the denial of SCS to Andhra Pradesh hasnt gone down well with them. Staunch TDP supporters, they usually vote for the political party or candidate selected by local Kamma sanghas.

On Social media: #BJPCheatedAP

Sources in the Akhil Karnataka Kammawari Sangham said that their population in Karnataka could be nearly about 35 lakh, with three to five lakhs concentrated in the Hyderabad-Karnataka border region. In Bellary Rural Assembly segment, 30,000 voters belong to this community. Their votes could also be the deal clincher in the Assembly constituencies in Koppal, Gangavathi, Kampli, Shiraguppa, Manvi, Raichur, Sindhanoor, and Yadgir districts.

Supporters of SCS for Andhra Pradesh have even started a social media campaign with hashtags like #APSpecialstatus, #BJPCheatedAP, #APdemandsSCS, etc. The community leaders are also engaged in spreading the word among the Kammas about the issue. Kamma community leader and advocate Koteshwar Rao said, There is no doubt that the community is in dissidence with NDA and BJP. We are having second thoughts about supporting a party that denied due rights of our state.

N Madhu, who owns an educational institution in Raichur, said, We are spreading awareness among the Telugu-speaking people of Karnataka and worldwide about how the Centre has done injustice to Andhra Pradesh. This will definitely have an impact (on the election). We are urging them to act against the party (BJP), which is cause for this injustice.

However, what may go in favour of BJP is the fact that the upper-caste and Hindutva-aligned Kammas are traditionally opposed to Congress. Bellary-based political analyst K Narasinha Murthy said, It is true that there is some level of dissatisfaction and anger among the Telugu-speaking people in Karnataka over the Centres decision. However, it is not easy for the community, which enjoys upper caste status in Andhra and strongly believes in Hindutva, to accept Congress either. The Centres stand on SCS should not have any impact on BJPs stronghold.

Keeping the Reddy brothers in tow

The other support base that the saffron party has in Karnataka  the Reddys of Bellary  also seems to be under threat with BJP national chief Amit Shah distancing the party from G Janardhana Reddy, prime accused in an illegal mining scam. The Reddy brothers  G Karunakara, G Janardhana, and G Somashekara  hold considerable clout in Bellary.

In a recent visit to Mysuru, BJP national president Amit Shah said the party has nothing to do with Janardhana. However, according to reports, BJP is planning to field the other two brothers  Karunakara and Somashekhara from Harapanahalli and Bellary City  whove been avoiding Janardhana in public.

Meanwhile, the party has fielded MP and former minister B Sriramulu, who was once a "close aide" of the Reddy brothers, from Molakalmuru (ST) constituency in Chitradurga district. Sriramulu had quit BJP in 2011 over the treatment meted out by the party to his mentor Janardhana but later rejoined it in the run-up to the 2014 election to contest from the Bellary Lok Sabha constituency.

In 2008, the Reddy brothers, including B Sriramulu, had helped the saffron party come to power for the first time in a southern state. While Sriramulu, Janardhana, and Karunakar Reddy had secured ministerial berths, Somashekhara got the post of KMF president.

However, the illegal mining scam hurt the equation between BJP and Janardhana, who is still facing a trial in courts in connection with the case. Since Congress chief minister Siddaramaiah has had a role to play in targeting illegal mining, particularly in Bellary, the Reddys see BJP as their only chance at settling scores. But, they are losing ground in strongholds like Vijayanagar and Kudligi where sitting MLAs Anand Singh and B Nagendra, respectively, have moved to Congress. Also, in Raichur constituency, Fakirappa of BJP has shifted loyalty to Congress.

While Janardhana has been promoting Yeddyurappa as the next chief minister, it doesnt seem viable for BJP to put the scam-tainted Reddy brother at the forefront of their campaign.

"Cases registered against Janardhana in connection with illegal mining are politically motivated because these were filed when the UPA was ruling. There are no accusations against me regarding illegal mining, and hence BJP leaders cant deny me a ticket," said Somashekhara.

Choosing not to respond to Shahs statement about there being no links between BJP and Janardhana, his other brother, Karunakara, said he was hoping to get a BJP ticket from the Harapanahalli Assembly segment. I have contributed much towards the strengthening of the party. So, (I think) I will not miss ticket, he said.

Bellary-based political analyst N Veerabhadragowda said the crucial role of Reddy brothers in de-establishing Congress in Bellary district cannot be ruled out. While BJP is trying to distance itself from their corrupt image in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the brothers do depend on the saffron partys fate in the absence of an alternate option to consolidate power in the region, he said.

Basavaraj Maralihalli is a Haveri-based freelance journalist and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters

Click here for live updates on the Unnao rape caseBS Raghavendra, who won Shikaripura bye-election in 2014 (vacated by his father BS Yeddyurappa - who entered as the MP from the region), was heavily speculated by the media reports as plausible candidature from Ranebennur or Varuna constituency.

Resting all speculation of his candidature at the upcoming Karnataka assembly polls, BY Raghavendra on Thursday said that he will limit his role only as a 'karyakartha' of the party.

"This election I am not going to contest at all. The party has entrusted me a responsibility as the co-convener of the district election committee in Shivamogga. I will stick to that," Raghavendra said in an interview for Firstpost.

Raghavendra, who won Shikaripura bye-election in 2014 (vacated by his father BS Yeddyurappa - who entered as the MP from the region), was heavily speculated by the media reports as plausible candidature from Ranebennur or Varuna constituency. However refuting such eventualities, Raghavendra said that he is willingly giving up his Shikaripura seat. "No one bothered to verify the facts with me, everyone spoke but no one clarified with me. If they did I would have clearly told them that I am not a ticket aspirant in 2018, but will only focus on the victory of the party and its chief ministerial candidate," he said.

According to the 45-year-old son of BJP Karnataka president and chief ministerial candidate Yeddyurappa, Shikaripura (Shivamogga) constituency has been close to the heart of his father.

"Being a former MLA of the region, he has connected to the people at the grass root level. Therefore, all the senior leaders and the party cadres in the local unit will put our heads together to secure a landslide victory at the polls for him," he said.

While former Karnataka chief minister Sarekoppa Bangarappa has secured over 45,000 votes during his tenure at Sorab (Shivamogga) constituency, Raghavendra said that the party is confident of securing over 1 lakh votes to Yeddyurappa. "Ours is a cadre-based party. Be it missed-call campaign, booth-samithi, navashakti samavesha, parivartana yatre. Being a cadre-based party, for over a year, we have left no stone unturned to connect with our booth-level workers. Our hard work is paying off and we are confident of securing a historic margin in the constituency, as well as across the state," he said.

Besides projecting the developmental accomplishments of Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Central government, BJP's Shivamogga district co-convener of election committee said that the election campaign will also highlight the milestones achieved by Yeddyurappa during his tenure as the Karnataka chief minister. "We will also showcase the shortcoming of the present Congress-led state government in resolving farmer issues and drought crisis in the state. Though even we had waived-off agriculturists' loan during BJP tenure, the Congress has been unable to provide a sustainable future to our farmers," he said.

While adding that he will not accompany his father Yeddyurappa on the campaign trail across the state, Raghavendra said he will coordinate the visits of BJP national president Amit Shah and Modi in the state. "While the BJP national president had recently visited our constituency, we may get maximum up to 10 days from the prime minister will campaign in the state after 29 April," he said. BJP plans to cover at least 50 campaign points during the run-up to the polls attended by national and state leaders.

Downplaying the recent party workers dissent over the first list of candidates released by the BJP, the Shivamogga district co-convener of election committee downplayed it as inevitable. "See, we must see the episode in a positive light, our party is growing, of course there will be more number of aspirants. However, we are confident that both state and national high command will reach out to everyone and take everyone into confidence before the election is to commence," Raghavendra said.

The author is part of www.storyinfinity.com, a collective of independent journalists.Overdrive

Audi has been working on launching three all-new EVs that it plans to launch globally by 2020. And if the infrastructure is ready in India till then, Audi India might bring one of those models in the country as well. We believe that should not be difficult considering the government ambitious plan of having only electric vehicles in India by 2030. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari too has confirmed it at the seventh annual SIAM convention last year.

In an interview to PTI, Rahil Ansari, head, Audi India, mentioned, "Globally Audi will launch three EVs until 2020. We will be ready to launch a EV in 2019-2020 in India but for that charging infrastructure needs to be there," He further added, "It will depend (introduction of EVs) in terms how far the infrastructure has developed. If the infrastructure is ready we will make a decision of launching in India otherwise we will have to delay it"

The German car manufacturer has already started working on that front and aims to have 30 percent market share by 2025 in EVs. And will introduce one EV every year starting from 2020. Audi took the 2018 Geneva Motor Show as a platform to showcase their first all-electric e-tron SUV prototype. Before the SUV enters full fledged production, Audi will be making 250 development vehicles that will complete testing under extreme conditions worldwide.

Audi has not mentioned the driving range that it plans to achieve on its first all-electric offering but states that it will have "a range suitable for everyday use.". The production version of the Audi e-tron launches on the European market at the end of 2018tech2 News Staff

Google is planning to redesign Gmail for the web with plans to integrate some of the features available on its mobile app, to make it more clean and user-friendly. The redesign brings features like quick reply, offline support to the web version of Gmail.

TechCrunch in a report posted the screenshot of a mail received by Google employees, that provides information about the upcoming redesign and the "Early Adoption Program" (EAP). The Early Adoption Program will be made available to personal users in advance of the public announcement.

The mail displayed in the report lists the changes that will be coming to the Gmail web interface. These include a fresh, clean look of Gmail on the web, easy access to apps, smart reply, option to snooze (and customise its future reappearance timing) and offline support. The offline feature of the Gmail for Web is expected to be available from June 2018.

Another report on Android Authority show the new changes that were mentioned in the TechCrunch report. The first image shows the new interface of the Gmail app, which looks clean because of the new icons and an auto-reply option at the bottom of the received email. The top right part of the web interface shows the icons to quickly access tools, plugins and apps such as Google Keep, Calendar and Gmail Tasks.

Another image shows the interface of these apps and plugins in Gmail. They sit below one another and the user can simply click on one of the icons to open it on Gmail on the web.

Last but not the least Google is also planning to add an option to choose different layouts. The three layouts include "Default", "Comfortable" and "Compact".

According to the report, the Default layout will show kind of attachment attached along with an email directly in the inbox.

The Comfortable layout only shows paperclip icon instead of showing the attachments. The Compact layout option is similar to the Comfortable layout but decreases the vertical white space mentioned the report.

There is no confirmation about the launch of the app but Google is expected to releases the beta version in coming months. We can expect to see a glimpse of this at the upcoming Google I/O developers conference in May 2018.tech2 News Staff

While we await the official launch date of the OnePlus 6, the Chinese smartphone brand has posted another image of the upcoming smartphone on its Twitter profile. The new flagship from OnePlus is expected to be launched with a notch and advanced full screen gestures. It is also expected to bring camera control to the alert slider as hinted in one of the earlier tweets posted by the company.

The new teaser tweet reveals a complete redesign of the upcoming flagship from OnePlus. The new phone appears to be hidden below the OnePlus 5T and almost looks like a reflection of the device above it.

Upon closer inspection, it's evident that the phone sitting below the OnePlus 5T is actually something different and not a reflection that many perceive it to be at first glance.

Delving deeper into the details, only the left side of the OnePlus 6 has been exposed.

For starters, the all-important alert slider has disappeared, or has been moved to the right side of the smartphone. A SIM card tray appears to have taken the alert slider's place and if you look closely you will notice a new antenna band layout with an extra strip running between the the SIM card tray and the volume rocker on the left side of the device.

The last time we saw such a layout it was on the Sony Xperia XZ1. The layout made for a clean back that is devoid of any antenna bands. Indeed, we can expect OnePlus to brag about its new design stance at its launch event.

More immersion in a refined form factor. Are you ready for the #OnePlus6? pic.twitter.com/2HR2YE5Jb6

As per previous leaks and rumours, the OnePlus 6 is expected to come with a 6.28-inch FHD AMOLED display (with a notch) that will differentiate it from the OnePlus 5T. Expected specifications of the smartphone includes a Snapdragon 845 SoC, 3,450 mAh battery and 6/8 GB RAM variants.

A dual-camera setup on the smartphone is expected to bring a 20 MP primary sensor and 16 MP secondary sensor. The front camera on the device is expected to come with 20 MP sensor. The smartphone is expected to come in three colours including black, blue and white colours. OnePlus 6 as per a previous leak is expected to be priced around $749, which is approximately Rs 48,000 in India.Jerry Brown accepted Donald Trump's call to send the National Guard to the Mexican border, but rejected the White House's portrait of a burgeoning border crisis

Sacramento: California governor Jerry Brown accepted President Donald Trump's call to send the National Guard to the Mexican border, but rejected the White House's portrait of a burgeoning border crisis and insisted that his troops will have nothing to do with immigration enforcement.

The Democratic governor broke a week of silence on Wednesday by agreeing to contribute 400 troops, though not all will be on the border. Brown's commitment brought pledges from the four states that border Mexico, just shy of the low end of the president's target to marshal 2,000 to 4,000 troops.

Brown cast his decision as a welcome infusion of federal support to fight transnational criminal gangs and drug and firearms smugglers.

"Combating these criminal threats are priorities for all Americans  Republicans and Democrats," Brown wrote in a letter to Defence Secretary James Mattis and homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Federal law, notably the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, sharply limits military involvement in civilian law enforcement, creating a supporting role for the National Guard. The Pentagon said last week that troops won't perform law enforcement functions or interact with people detained by border authorities without its approval.

Brown released a proposed agreement with the federal government that emphasizes the widely shared understanding of the Guard's limited role but explicitly bans any support of immigration enforcement. It says troops cannot guard anyone in custody for immigration violations or participate in construction of border barriers.

The White House praised Brown's decision without addressing his comments on immigration enforcement.

"We're also glad to see Brown work with the administration and send members of the National Guard to help secure the southern border," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.

Reaction in California was limited, with few of Brown's allies or opponents weighing in.

State senator Kevin de Leon, a Democratic US Senate candidate and author of California's so-called sanctuary state law, said National Guard deployment was unnecessary and not a good use of resources. But he said more can be done to combat border crime and that he appreciated Brown's design of "a clear and limited mission focused on real public safety threats."

"I am confident Brown will not use our National Guard to harass or tear apart immigrant families in California," he said in a statement.

Rob Stutzman, who advised former Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, praised the decision on Twitter, calling Brown's decision to accept money for using the National Guard to fight drugs and human trafficking "good government."

Immigration advocacy groups were generally quiet, although some were skeptical.

Pedro Rios, director for the American Friends Service Committee's US-Mexico border program in San Diego, questioned why Brown would send troops while rejecting Trump's premise that they are needed to help stop illegal immigration.

"If he's in disagreement with Trump about the justifications for having the National Guard on the border, then why would he accept it?" he said.

Unlike Republican governors in other border states, Brown disagreed with Trump's portrayal of a border spiraling out of control, noting that Border Patrol arrests fell to the lowest level in 2017 since 1971 and that California accounted for only 15 percent of the agency's arrests on the Mexican border.

"Here are the facts: there is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California," Brown wrote the Trump Cabinet members.

In contrast, Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott, who is contributing 1,000 troops, embraced Trump's mission the day it was announced, saying it would promote the rule of law and "help ensure we are doing everything we can to stem the flow of illegal immigration."

Brown said California's troops would join an existing program to combat transnational drug crime, firearms smuggling and human trafficking. About 250 California National Guard troops are already participating, including 55 at the border.

The new contingent of California Guard members being deployed could be posted at the border, the coast and elsewhere statewide, Brown said.

California deployed troops to the border under former Presidents George W. Bush in 2006 and Barack Obama in 2010.President Donald Trump on Wednesday warned Russia to 'get ready' for a missile attack on its ally Syria, suggesting imminent retaliation for last weekend's suspected chemical weapons attack.

Washington: President Donald Trump on Wednesday warned Russia to "get ready" for a missile attack on its ally Syria, suggesting imminent retaliation for last weekend's suspected chemical weapons attack. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis took a more measured tone, saying the US and its military coalition partners were still studying intelligence on the attack.

At stake is the potential for confrontation, if not outright conflict, between the US and Russia, former Cold War foes whose relations have deteriorated in recent years over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine, its interference in the 2016 US presidential election and, most recently, its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russian lawmakers have warned the United States that Moscow would view an airstrike on Syria as a war crime and that it could trigger a direct US-Russian military clash. Russia's ambassador to Lebanon said any missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launching sites targeted  a stark warning of a potential major confrontation.

Trump, who has often said a commander in chief should never telegraph his military intentions, apparently did so himself, tweeting that missiles "will be coming" in response to the suspected chemical attack that killed at least 40 people near Damascus.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria," Trump wrote. "Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!' You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Defense Secretary Mattis, however, indicated that evidence of what happened was still being studied. At a photo-taking session during a Pentagon meeting with his Dutch counterpart, Mattis was asked by a reporter whether he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian government.

"We're still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies," Mattis said. "We're still working on this."

Trump suggested on Monday that he had little doubt that Syria was to blame, but neither he nor other administration officials have produced hard evidence. This is in contrast to an incident one year ago in which the US government had video and other evidence of certain aspects of an actual attack by Syrian aircraft, which involved the use of sarin gas. Trump responded then by launching dozens of Navy cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield.

Asked whether the US military was ready to conduct an attack in Syria if ordered, Mattis replied, "We stand ready to provide military options if they're appropriate, as the president determined."

Mattis was to meet with Trump later on Wednesday.

In the past, Trump has condemned others for forecasting military plans, repeatedly blistering President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign. During one speech, he said, "We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything."

Asked about Trump's tweet about an impending attack on Syria, former Defense Secretary William Cohen, who ran the Pentagon for President Bill Clinton, said on CNN that it "compromises the mission somewhat."

Trump did not detail what a strike on Syria would look like, or whether these would be US missiles. US officials have been consulting with France, Britain and other allies on a possible joint military operation, but the timing remained in doubt on Wednesday. Trump canceled a foreign trip in order to manage a crisis that is testing his vow to stand up to Assad.

Shortly after his tweeted warning to Russia, Trump took a more conciliatory tone in lamenting that the US-Russia relationship "is worse now than it has ever been." There is no reason for this, he wrote, adding that "Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together."

Syria's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that Trump's threats to attack are "reckless" and endanger international peace and security.

Trump's administration has sought to show toughness on Russia, with a series of economic and diplomatic actions, including new sanctions last week against government officials and oligarchs. Trump has largely avoided criticising Russian President Vladimir Putin by name, though he singled him out in a tweet over the weekend for supporting Assad.

The US, France and Britain have been in extensive consultations about launching a military strike as early as the end of this week, US officials have said. A joint military operation, possibly with France rather than the US in the lead, could send a message of international unity about enforcing the prohibitions on chemical weapons and counter Syria's political and military support from Russia and Iran.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday called for a "strong and joint response" to the attack in the Syrian town of Douma on Saturday. The Syrian government denies responsibility.

The French president does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the US-led coalition created in 2014 to fight the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq. Multiple IS terror attacks have targeted France, including one last month.French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that he had evidence that chemical weapons were used in rebel-held enclave of Douma in Syria.

Paris: French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that he had evidence that chemical weapons were used in rebel-held enclave of Douma in Syria and that the regime of Bashar al-Assad was guilty, reiterating that attacking Damascus is necessary.

Macron was one of several Western leaders to enter the diplomatic crisis following last week's attack on Douma, which left 70 people dead, including 40 who showed signs of exposure to chemical toxins, Efe news reported citing a report by the World Health Organization.

"We have evidence chemical weapons were used and that it was the regime who used them," said Macron in a televised interview with TF1 broadcaster.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged against "any steps which could lead to an escalation of tensions". Also on Thursday, the UN Security Council was to hold an emergency meeting to discuss the crisis, the BBC reported.

One of Macron's closest European Union allies, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, distanced her country from the prospect of joining in any military action against Syria.

"Germany will not take part in possible military action, on which no decisions have yet been taken," she told a press conference alongside Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen.

She also added that Germany would continue to support measures to show that use of chemical weapons was "unacceptable".

British Prime Minister Theresa May was said to be organising a Cabinet meeting to discuss the steps her country would take if US President Donald Trump followed through on his threats to strike Syria.

Trump warned Syria and Russia on Wednesday that he was readying missile strikes on Syria in retaliation for the attack.

He had also blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as Iran for "backing Animal Assad" and warned they would have a "big price to pay".

Both the Syrian regime and its main international backers Russia and Iran have denied responsibility for the alleged chemical attack and insist "there is a Western conspiracy" aimed at justifying military action in Syria.North Korea's parliament has met to rubber-stamp Kim Jong-un's policies, but the leader himself was conspicuously absent as he prepares for two key summits with South Korea and the US.

Seoul: North Korea's parliament has met to rubber-stamp Kim Jong-un's policies, but the leader himself was conspicuously absent as he prepares for two key summits with South Korea and the US.

Kim had been present at six out of eight previous Supreme People's Assembly (SPA) sessions held since he officially became party head six years ago, according to the South's Unification Ministry.

But he appeared to skip the meeting, with the official KCNA news agency failing to mention his attendance in its report of the meeting on Wednesday.

Photos carried by the North's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper showed an empty seat at the centre of the head table in Pyongyang's cavernous Mansudae Assembly Hall, presumed to be Kim's.

Instead, the session focussed on North Korea's budget and changes in leadership personnel.

Kim is due to meet with the South's Moon Jae-in later in April, and is expected to meet US president Donald Trump weeks later.

On Monday, he briefed party members on talks with the South and the "prospect" of dialogue with the US, in an unusually well-publicised politburo meeting.

Officials in the South had earlier said they were watching the SPA closely for "any changes to policy directions".Some of the lawmakers talked to 33-year-old Facebook CEO as they would to their children or grandchildren, and were occasionally befuddled by the complexities of his company. Wrapping up his four minutes, Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., commended the platform, saying 'it's wonderful for us seniors to connect with our relatives.'

Washington: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged on Wednesday that regulation of social media companies is "inevitable" and disclosed that his own personal information has been compromised by malicious outsiders. But after two days of congressional testimony, what seemed clear was how little Congress seems to know about Facebook, much less what to do about it.

House lawmakers aggressively questioned Zuckerberg Wednesday on user data, privacy settings and whether the company is biased against conservatives. As they did in the Senate a day earlier, both Republicans and Democrats suggested that regulation might be needed, but there was no consensus and few specifics about what that might look like  or even what the biggest problems are.

New Jersey Republican Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the panel and a 30-year veteran of the House, said at the beginning of the hearing that he plans to work on legislation but is pessimistic that Congress will pass anything. "I've just seen it over and over again  that we have the hearings, and nothing happens," he said.

For Zuckerberg, who often found himself explaining what his company does in rudimentary terms to lawmakers twice his age, the hearings could be considered a win: Facebook shares rose more than 1 percent after climbing 4.5 percent on Monday. And his company regained more than $25 billion in market value that is had lost since it was revealed in March that Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump's presidential campaign, gathered personal information from 87 million users to try to influence elections.

Still, Facebook's stock remains 10 percent below where it stood before the scandal, a decline that has wiped out about $50 billion in shareholder wealth.

Zuckerberg agreed to the hearings as pressure mounted over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the company's own admission last year that it had been compromised by Russians trying to influence the 2016 election. Earlier this year, special counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies in a plot to interfere in the 2016 presidential election through a social media propaganda effort that included online ad purchases using US aliases and politicking on U.S. soil. A number of the Russian ads were on Facebook.

Zuckerberg told the Senate on Tuesday that the company has been working with Mueller in his Russia probe and apologised over and over again for the company's handling of data privacy. "I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here," he said.

House lawmakers were a bit tougher on Zuckerberg than their colleagues in the Senate, many of whom seemed confused by the company and what it does. Some of the House members curtly cut him off in questioning, trying to make the most of their four minutes each.

Zuckerberg mostly held his composure, repeating many of the same well-rehearsed answers: He is sorry for the company's mistakes. He is working on artificial intelligence technology to weed out hate speech and at the same time ensure that they don't block people for the wrong reasons. People own their own data, as far as he sees it. And he's come a long way since he created the platform in his dorm room almost 15 years ago.

Some of the lawmakers talked to 33-year-old Facebook CEO as they would to their children or grandchildren, and were occasionally befuddled by the complexities of his company. Wrapping up his four minutes, Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Fla., commended the platform, saying "it's wonderful for us seniors to connect with our relatives."

By the close of Wednesday's hearing, Zuckerberg had spent roughly 10 out of the previous 24 hours testifying before Congress. On regulation, Zuckerberg said he was open to it. "The internet is growing in importance around the world in people's lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation," he said.

Still, he said, lawmakers need to be careful, noting that new rules or laws could hurt smaller businesses more than a behemoth like Facebook. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden said the committee will look at what could be done.

"While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured," Walden, R-Ore., told Zuckerberg. "I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things."

Many questions focused on Cambridge Analytica, which gathered data several years ago through a personality quiz created by an academic researcher. The app vacuumed up not just the data of the people who took it, but also  thanks to Facebook's loose restrictions  data from their friends, too, including details that they hadn't intended to share publicly. Cambridge Analytica then obtained the data and was said to have used it to try to influence elections around the world.

Zuckerberg said at the House hearing that his own Facebook data was part of that sweep. He told the Senate that Facebook had been led to believe Cambridge Analytica had deleted the user data it had harvested and that had been "clearly a mistake." He assured senators the company would have handled the situation differently today.

That may be enough to satisfy lawmakers for now. But that could change if Democrats take control of Congress in midterm elections this year.

Pallone said that if Democrats were in charge, "then we would push all the more."New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern announced a ban on all new offshore oil exploration, describing her decision as a transition towards a zero-carbon economy.

Wellington: New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Thursday a ban on all new offshore oil exploration, describing her decision as a transition towards a zero-carbon economy.

"Transitions have to start somewhere and unless we make decisions today that will essentially take effect in 30 or more years time, we run the risk of acting too late and causing abrupt shocks to communities and our country," Ardern said during a press conference in Wellington.

The ban is applied with immediate effect to only new offshore oil exploration permits, and will not affect existing permits and onshore drilling, reports Efe news.

The transition "must start somewhere", said Ardern, who vowed to push for environmental measures when she won the elections last September, adding that the government was "taking an important step to address climate change and create a clean, green and sustainable future for New Zealand".

Arden also assured that her policy will not lead to job losses in the country's oil industry, which currently employs at least 11,000 workers and generates about $1.8 billion per year.

"We're striking the right balance for New Zealand...We're protecting existing industry and protecting future generations from climate change," she said.

Opposition leader Simon Bridges said that the measure "doesn't make any environmental sense", and called it "a wrecking ball" for the country's regional economy.

Greenpeace, a non-governmental environmental organisation, hailed Ardern's move in a statement, saying this was a "historic moment" for the country and "a huge win for our climate and people power".Bouthaina Shabaan, the political and media adviser to president Bashar al-Assad, that Syria is not fearing US threats of striking Syria.

Damascus: Bouthaina Shabaan, the political and media adviser to president Bashar al-Assad, said on Wednesday that her country is not fearing United States' (US) threats of striking Syria.

In an interview with pan-Arab al-Mayadeen TV on Wednesday, Shabaan said the US threats of striking Syria aim to practice more pressure to make more gains, Xinhua reported. She stressed that consultations are ongoing among the allies of Syria and they will not leave things to go Washington's way.

Her remarks come as the US is banging the drums of war on Syria over allegations of toxic gas use by the Syrian army against the rebels in the capital Damascus' Eastern Ghouta countryside. Last Saturday, the rebels in Douma district of Eastern Ghouta said the Syrian forces used chlorine gas in an attack on Douma, leaving many killed. The Syrian government has denied the allegations and said the rebels were fabricating the incident to give a pretext to the US and its Western allies to strike Syria.

Shabaan described the US threats as part of a psychological war launched by the West to show strength after their failure in Syria. She said the Syrian army's victory in Eastern Ghouta constituted a turning point in the course of the Syrian war. Shabaan added that the results of the Syrian war have come against the Western approach in terms of the emergence of the Russian, Syrian and Hezbollah alliance, calling it the "alliance of the future."

The "axis of resistance," referring to the Syrian allies of Iran and Hezbollah, has its choices in dealing with the US threats, Shabaan said, adding that the rule of clashes has changed in favour of the Syrian side. "The victory of Syria will change the map of the region and the world," she said, adding that Israel is feverishly trying to prolong the Syrian war.

She further added that Israel is the main ignitor of the war in Syria, adding the Syrian and Russian sides have made all preparations after the Israeli attack on the T-4 air base a couple of days ago.Tempests like the Russia collusion probe, Stormy Daniels allegations and tensions with Moscow have merged into a threatening maelstrom for Donald Trump

Washington: The Russia collusion probe. The Stormy Daniels allegations. The escalating tension with Moscow. The tempests that have separately buffeted the White House for months merged into a maelstrom this week and threatened to engulf president Donald Trump, who on Wednesday railed against members of the Justice Department by name and took to Twitter to threaten military strikes in Syria and taunt a nuclear-armed power.

While alarmed aides and allies worried that Trump was the angriest he'd ever been, the president saw conspiracies in the challenges facing his administration and hinted at more chaos. And as Trump's party was rocked by upheaval on Capitol Hill, White House staffers explored whether he has the legal authority to fire the men leading the investigation into his administration and, as underscored by the seizure of documents from his private lawyer, his business and personal life.

"Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama," Trump tweeted. "Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!"

Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama. Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

That message followed another provocative tweet, in which Trump laced into Russia for supporting Syrian president Bashar Assad, whose government is accused of launching an apparent chemical attack on its own people on Saturday . Disregarding his own insistence that he would never tip his hand to military strategy, he seemed to suggest that he would launch airstrikes.

"Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'" Trump wrote. "You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!"

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

The president's renewed public anger at special counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney-General Rob Rosenstein was prompted by the FBI raid on his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen, who acknowledged paying $1,30,000 to Daniels, a porn actress, to buy her silence about an alleged affair with Trump. Trump has warned that an investigation into his business would cross "a red line" and could lead him to fire Mueller, despite strong pushback from a number of aides and Republicans in Congress.

"It worries me because I realize how much he feels personally cheated and how much it feels like it's a personal witch hunt. And he's not the kind of guy that takes that lying down. He fights back," said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and an informal Trump adviser. "I think Trump doesn't know how to deal with it and is very frustrated by it, thinks it's totally unfair. And that's what you're seeing."

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made clear Wednesday that Trump was wary of investigatory overreach, saying, "He has a very deep concern about the direction that the special counsel and other investigations have taken."Although the president declared that his White House was "calm and calculated," aides said decisions happen fast and with even less warning than usual when Trump feels backed into a corner. Trump has continued to seethe about Attorney-General Jeff Sessions recusing himself from the Russia probe. And a number of those close to Trump say they worry about his reaction and the West Wing's lack of planning to yet another storm on the horizon: the release of former FBI director James Comey's new book.

The advertisements for the interviews have begun blanketing cable news, leading Trump to angrily surmise that Comey was "going to lie" and try to "make money" by tarnishing the president's reputation, according to two people familiar with the president's thinking but not authorised to speak publicly about private discussions.

The January publication of Michael Wolff's "Fire & Fury" caught the White House off guard, and the critiques leveled by former chief strategist Steve Bannon and other ex-officials left Trump enraged. Although Comey's book comes as no surprise, the White House as of Wednesday had no formal plan to respond to it, instead likely opting to let the Republican National Committee and outside surrogates handle most of the pushback.

Trump's decision to fire Comey was the product of weeks of discussion among his senior-most staff. A similar debate is unlikely to play out over the potential dismissal of Mueller or Rosenstein not least in part because those deliberations became a subject of Mueller's investigation of potential obstruction of justice.

But Trump, too, has grown more comfortable making decisions without seeking the counsel of his staff. That's what happened when he fired national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Although both decisions had been expected for months, Trump acted first and left it to his staff to pick up the pieces.

While a number of allies believe Trump's talk on Mueller and Rosenstein was largely venting, they acknowledged that Trump is increasingly unpredictable. White House lawyers have been considering Trump's authority to circumvent Department of Justice regulations and unilaterally fire Mueller. Trump could also direct Rosenstein or a potential successor to take action against Mueller. Republican representative Mark Meadows, a Trump ally, said he did not expect a purge. "The president is not talking about firing Mueller. I've had conversations with the president, and he's not talking about it," Meadows said.

Bipartisan legislation to protect the special counsel was introduced Wednesday, but its fate was uncertain.

White House aides also worried about the surprise announcement from House Speaker Paul Ryan that he will leave Congress at the end of the year. The move was interpreted by some in Trump's orbit as an acknowledgement of the rising likelihood that Democrats could gain control of the House this fall, imperiling the president's agenda and potentially sparking talk of impeachment.SLOT4D, DAFTAR SLOT 4D, LOGIN SLOT4D, LINK ALTERNATIF SLOT 4D Selamat datang di slot4d yang merupakan daftar situs judi slot deposit pulsa tanpa potongan resmi slot4d dan slot 4d Indonesia terpercaya. Selain itu slot4d juga merupakan agen judi slot deposit pulsa tanpa potongan terbaik serta terlengkap no 1 di Indonesia yang telah menjadi bandar judi slot4d terbesar di Indonesia. Slot4d juga adalah situs judi slot 4d online terbaik 2021 dengan nama nama situs judi slot online resmi deposit pulsa xl dan telkomsel tanpa potongan. Slot4d menyediakan banyak permainan judi online seperti taruhan bola online, casino, slot, togel, poker, balak play, idn poker, arcade game, sabung ayam, tembak ikan, dan masih banyak permainan menarik lainnya. Hanya dengan 1 user id anda sudah bisa bermain semua permainan. Slot4d akan memberikan banyak jackpot progresif dari mesin slot yang kami tawarkan kepada anda. Sebagai salah satu nya game slot ternama dan sangat terkenal di seluruh dunia sebagai tempat perjudian judi casino online yang terpercaya dan terbaik di indonesia saat ini. Seperti yang kita ketahui kalau permainan slot sudah menjadi permainan terpopuler di Indonesia, Dimana para pecinta judi slot online deposit pulsa tanpa potongan mudah sekali mendapatkan kemenangan lewat situs judi slot yang sering memberikan kemenangan untuk mereka. Tetapi anda tidak boleh salah dalam memilih provider slot dan situs slot, Karena tidak semua agen judi slot sering memberi slot gacor pragmatic play dan pg soft. Untuk anda yang ingin sering mendapatkan kemenangan besar dan jackpot besar hanya disini tempatnya yaitu slot4d situs slot4d terpercaya. Slot4d yakin kalau provider slot 4d yang kami sediakan mudah menang serta gampang menang dan bahkan akan memberikan jackpot terbesar untuk semua member baru dan member lama yang bermain di slot4d.

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After multiple trips and arguments with the dealership about the tank issue they finally looked up the TSB, but were still reluctant to admit it was actually an issue. They installed the new tank today and called me to let me know that there really was something wrong with the tank since they pulled almost 12 gallons out and it said 54 miles to empty. I had calculated it was about 6 gallons left at zero, but I had noticed that sometimes when it got to 2-3 miles left it would stay at the same DTE for several miles.



They must have the tanks in stock in Detroit or Kentucky or wherever because they got mine in in about a day.



Two rounds in and its 2-0 to Ferrari  not a situation many would have predicted three weeks ago. Can Mercedes respond at the Shanghai International Circuit, a track on which the world champions have not lost since 2013? Or will Sebastian Vettel steal China from their hands and make it a season-starting hat-trick? If he does, then history will favour him  and not Hamilton  becoming a five-time champion in 2018, as no driver has ever won the first three rounds and then failed to secure that years title. Indeed, you have to go back to 1982 to find the last driver who won the opening pair of races and lost the title - Alain Prost. The pressure is certainly on the Silver Arrows. While they could blame their first-round Australia loss on a software glitch, in Bahrain last weekend they were beaten fair and square by the Scuderia  in both qualifying and the race, and even with Vettel on the wrong tyres. And thanks to Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardos early exits in Sakhir, Red Bull remain very much the jokers in the pack. Yes, theyve been unable to match Ferrari and Mercedes on single-lap speed thus far, but we never got to see what had looked set to be some very competitive race pace in Bahrain

The form book Mercedes are unbeaten in China in the current hybrid era, with victories for Lewis Hamilton in 2014, 2015 and 2017, and for Nico Rosberg in 2016. Hamilton also won in Shanghai twice with McLaren, making this one of just four tracks he's won at five times (the others being the Circuit of The Americas, Hungaroring and Silverstone). The only circuit on which the Briton has won more often is the Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Canada (6). As for Ferrari, their last triumph was with Fernando Alonso in 2013. The Italian team have been on the podium every year since, but the closest theyve come to winning was Vettels second place last season. Nevertheless, after their Bahrain showing youd have to be brave to bet against that changing this Sunday. Red Bulls long-run simulations may have looked good in Bahrain, but its worth bearing in mind that theyve only ever won once in Shanghai, back in 2009 in what was their first ever victory. Max Verstappen made the podium last year, from 16th on the grid no less, though it was a very distant third place for the Dutchman, behind Hamilton and Vettel. There will be big interest in the midfield too this weekend, after the enthralling race that played out in Bahrain. Keep your eyes on Toro Rosso  Pierre Gaslys fourth place in Sakhir was won on merit, so it will fascinating to see if the Honda-powered Italian team can spring another surprise. Their strong form, along with that of the American Haas squad, is set to provide some real headaches for their more established rivals Renault and McLaren, neither of whom would have been expecting to play second fiddle to the young upstarts. And what of Force India? Last season they were best of the rest behind the big three. In Australia they were nowhere. Bahrain brought signs of progress and they scraped a single point. They really need their development work to pay off in China to kick start their season.

The stats that matter Mercedes qualifying record in Shanghai is better than on any of the other circuits on the calendar. This is the only track on which they have been on pole for the past six consecutive years, with 2013 being the only time they failed to convert that advantage into victory. But, in Bahrain no Mercedes topped any session over the weekend, even including Q1 and Q2. This was a first in the current turbo hybrid era.

How important is pole here? In 14 races, the winner has started from P1 nine times. The lowest winning grid slot was sixth, where Michael Schumacher started in 2006.

With third place in Bahrain, Lewis Hamilton equalled Kimi Raikkonens all-time record for consecutive points finishes. The Briton is looking for a 28th straight top-ten finish this weekend to make the record his own.

Vettels victory in Bahrain took him to 49 in total for his career. Only three drivers have scored 50 or more wins  Michael Schumacher (91), Lewis Hamilton (62) and Alain Prost (51). Prost was the last driver to win the opening two races of a season and not win the title (1982) and also the last man to win the opening race in consecutive years without winning either title (1987 &1988). No driver has won the opening three races and not been crowned champion that same year

Marcus Ericsson opened his 2018 account with ninth place in Bahrain, but the Swede has only scored consecutive points once in his career, back in 2015.

Williams are currently last in the Constructors Championship, and are the only team without a point so far. Theyve been knocked out in Q1 three times out of four opportunities, and they havent completed a single lap in a points position as yet this season. Aside from Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin, four other drivers are yet to score in 2018: Sergio Perez, Charles Leclerc, Brendon Hartley and Romain Grosjean.

Shanghai is notable for exceptionally high reliability. The 2015 Chinese GP was the sixth of seven races in history to pass without a single retirement. Prior to that, the 2011 and 2012 races featured just one retirement each, both caused by a loose wheel after a pit stop (Jaime Alguersuari in 2011, Michael Schumacher in 2012). There were two retirements in 2014 and only three in 2015. Of the five retirements last year, only three were due to mechanical failure.

Rain has affected the Chinese Grand Prix five times in 13 previous runnings, and qualifying was rain-affected in both 2015 and 2016. The 2009 China race was one of 11 races in history to have been started behind the Safety Car due to wet conditions. Despite the high presence of rain in this event, there have never been more than two Safety Car periods in any Chinese GP, although the Safety Car has been deployed at each of the last 3 races here.

How about this for some bizarre symmetry? The 2016 and 2017 races in Shanghai saw a Mercedes win, a Ferrari finish second, the Red Bulls finish third and fourth, and the other Ferrari finish. Surely we wont see the same pattern this year

When it joined the F1 calendar in 2004, the Shanghai International Circuit, with its stunning architecture, its unique lakes-and-pavilions paddock, and its imposing 29,000-seat main grandstand, was hailed as a race track for the new millennium. And the breath-taking venue can still make that claim. The 5.451km layout was constructed on marshland deemed unsuitable for housing. To shore up the wallowing wasteland more than 40,000 concrete pillars were inserted into the ground  something that the tracks designers, Hermann Tilke and Peter Wahl, described as a huge undertaking. The clockwise layout contains an eclectic mix of corners, from the 270-degree ever-tightening Turn 1 to the fast esses in sector two. The final sector incorporates one of the longest straights of the F1 season, at the end of which lies the best overtaking point on the lap, a second-gear hairpin. That never-ending Turn 1 / 2 combination is arguably the tracks trademark. After a very fast entry, it sucks the driver in, forcing him to shed speed as the corner gets tighter and tighter, before  after what seems like an eternity  spitting him out into the downhill, tight Turn 3. Elements like this make Shanghai a stern test of tyres, but its also tough on cars and power units. And then theres the weather, which is often precarious. It all adds up to a venue that can throw up a very unpredictable race weekend. The tyres China sees official tyre suppliers Pirelli take the somewhat unusual step of selecting non-sequential compounds. Teams can use the white-marked medium and the yellow-marked soft, but then there is a jump to the purple ultrasoft  available for the first time here  missing out the red supersoft, which was the softest compound in Shanghai last year. The new wider range of 2018 P Zero compounds have allowed us to come up with some nominations this year where there is a gap in the tyres selected, explains Mario Isola, Pirellis Head of Car Racing. Theres quite a big gap from medium to the softer compounds, which are quite close together (with the exception of the hypersoft). So, by missing out the supersoft in China, we end up with three choices that are quite evenly spaced out, which in turn opens up several different possibilities for strategy. These strategy calculations have, of course, already begun, with teams selecting different quantities of the ultrasoft heading into the race, and we could also see some different approaches to qualifying as well. With China being an unpredictable race anyway, thanks to a number of different overtaking opportunities and notoriously variable weather, this tyre nomination introduces another parameter, which should hopefully contribute to an even better spectacle.Max Verstappen showed a lack of respect. Thats how Lewis Hamilton felt after the duo collided in Bahrain last weekend. And, as Lawrence Barretto explains, the incident was still a hot topic as the F1 teams regrouped in China on Thursday

The crunch moment came on lap two as Verstappen attempted a bold pass on Hamilton into Turn 1. Both were trying to make up lost ground after being out of position on the grid. But both took very different approaches. While Hamilton was cautious at the start  overly so, as hed later admit - Verstappen was his usual attacking self. He made up four places and was going for a fifth when he got the reigning world champion in his crosshairs. Initially it looked like Verstappen would get the job done, but as they rounded the right hander the two collided, with Verstappen picking up a puncture that subsequently damaged his transmission and ultimately forced his retirement. Hamilton, meanwhile, survived and went on to finish third. Verstappen questioned the stewards. Hamilton mumbled an insult and later criticised Verstappen. To the Briton, it wasn't a respectful move. He said a driver like Fernando Alonso or himself would have scored points in that car, rather than ending up with nothing.

Verstappens take When asked in Thursdays press conference about Hamiltons criticism, Verstappen stood his ground. He remained bullish. He reckoned Hamilton was critical because it is quite simple and easy to blame the younger driver. He added: Thats the only way I can see it. In his mind, Verstappen doesnt feel he has done anything wrong. Would the incident force him to change his style? These things happen, said the 20-year-old Dutchman. There is no reason for me to change anything. I might have a talk with him if it's really necessary, but why should I change something? I don't think I did anything wrong in terms of my approach. I was just trying to overtake a car and I think it was a fair chance - I went for it. It is very simple. I don't understand why everyone is on top of the topic as these things happen in racing."

Hamiltons response Later on Thursday, Hamilton held his usual briefing in the Mercedes hospitality unit and gave his side of the story. Would he race Verstappen differently in the future? I dont think so, was the world champions response. As veteran of 210 Grand Prix starts and the third oldest driver on the grid, its perhaps unsurprising that Hamilton looked to defuse the situation. Look, I have a lot of respect for Max and I hope you can see that from the comments Ive said about him in testing where hes got great potential to be the champion, he said. As we all know hes such a talented driver. I mean, I was in the same place when I was young, similar age, or older actually. But, still its such a learning process being with all the pressure, being in a top team. Hes going to have some great races and hes going to have bad races, just as I will do today, even though Im much older than him. Reconciliation When asked by F1.com if he planned to speak to Verstappen about the incident or indeed if he felt it necessary to speak to a driver after such a clash, Hamilton revealed he had seen Verstappen and apologised for his role in the incident. I generally do my talking on the track. After this incident I didnt. But I mean I saw Max, for example, just now. I think its always good to show respect. More importantly, being that Im the older driver I felt that it was important that I went to him, so as we were just signing [autographs] just now, I just shook his hand and I was like, Look Im sorry about the last race. Regardless of if it is his fault or my fault, its in the past. Hopefully, that sign of respect shows a lot and helps you turn the page and move forwards, racing each other and hopefully keeps respect between you as I think thats important between drivers. What did Verstappen say? I dont really know, there was a lot noise around us, but he acknowledged me.I would have had a go. Thats what Daniel Ricciardo said when asked if he, in Valtteri Bottass shoes, would have attempted a final-lap pass on race leader Sebastian Vettel in Bahrain last weekend.

With fresher tyres than his rival, Bottas chased down Vettel in the closing stages of last Sunday's Grand Prix in Sakhir, as the Ferrari driver began to fade following a long stint on soft rubber.

But despite an apparent performance advantage - and access to the DRS overtaking aid - Bottas failed to make a serious move for the win and Vettel eventually hung on for his second successive triumph.

As the drivers reconvened in China, Ricciardo, who retired from the race in Bahrain and watched the closing stages from his hotel room, said he would have had a stab at victory regardless of the potentially disastrous consequences.

"I definitely would have sent it, 100%," he told UK broadcaster Sky Sports. "I would have gone. There's a gap, you're finishing second anyway, and if you overshoot you're finishing second.

"Last lap, for the win, you have to go. You have to go. Take them both out [if it goes wrong].

"How the race would have gone, I don't know. I don't want to say I would have won, but if that was me on the last lap you can bet everything that I was going for it."

Ricciardo said even if Bottas felt the best opportunity was at Turn 4, it was still worth a shot at Turn 1 first.

I was watching and I was like make a move, go, go, go! because obviously the fans want to see it as well but obviously, he didnt, he said when speaking to the media later in the day.

Maybe in Valtteris head he was like I will get him in Turn 4 in the end. For me, the first opportunity you have to take. If he locked up and went wide, hes still finishing second.

Anyway, I dont want to tell him all of my tips of what I would do, but I wouldnt be content. If its for a win, you just cant. Thats not in me at least, I dont think.

So there you have it  in a similar siutation in the future, Danny Rics not holding back. The question is, will last-lap heroics be called for this weekend?Luby's Announces Second Quarter Fiscal 2018 Earnings Release & Conference Call Schedule

HOUSTON - April 11, 2018 // PRNewswire // - Luby's, Inc. (NYSE: LUB) announced today that it will release its second quarter fiscal 2018 financial results on Monday, April 23, 2018 before the market opens. In conjunction with the release, Luby's has scheduled a conference call, which will be broadcast live over the Internet, on Monday, April 23, 2018 at 10:00 a.m. Central time.

By Phone:

Dial (412) 902-0030 at least 10 minutes before the call. A replay will be available through April 30, 2018, by dialing (201) 612-7415 and using the conference ID 13678419#.

Dial (412) 902-0030 at least 10 minutes before the call. A replay will be available through April 30, 2018, by dialing (201) 612-7415 and using the conference ID 13678419#. By Webcast:

Connect to the webcast via the Events and Presentations pages of Luby's Investor Relations website at http://lubysinc.com/investors/. Please log in at least 10 minutes in advance to register and download any necessary software. A replay will be available shortly after the call.

About Luby's

Luby's, Inc. (NYSE: LUB) is a multi-branded restaurant company headquartered in Houston, TX that operates 160 family-friendly restaurants nationally as of March 14, 2018: 86 Luby's Cafeterias, 67 Fuddruckers - World's Greatest Hamburgers, and 7 Cheeseburger in Paradise. The Company is also the franchisor for 110 Fuddruckers franchise locations across the United States (including Puerto Rico), Canada, Mexico, Italy, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and Colombia. Additionally, a licensee operates 34 restaurants with the exclusive right to use the Fuddruckers proprietary marks, trade dress, and system in certain countries in the Middle East. The Company does not receive revenue or royalties from the Middle East restaurants. Luby's Culinary Contract Services business provides food service management to 25 sites consisting of healthcare, higher education, sport stadiums, and corporate dining locations as of March 14, 2018. For more information, visit www.lubysinc.com.

Contact:

Rick Black / Ken Dennard

Dennard Lascar Investor Relations

713-529-6600

SOURCE Luby's, Inc.

###

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Disqus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.Thomson launches a new range of its smart TVs in India News oi-Priyanka The 43 UHD 4K Smart Tvs comes with default APK Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Netflix and runs on Android 4.4.4.0 and Aptoide with the feature to download any App.

The French-based television manufacturer, Thomson has announced the launch of its range smart TV's in collaboration with Business France (Trade Section of the Embassy of France), in New Delhi on Wednesday.

Avneet Singh Marwah, CEO, Super Plastronics Pvt. Ltd., the Indian Brand Licensee for Thomson, said "We are delighted to partner up with a leading and historic global brand like Thomson. It is SPPL's endeavor and commitment to promoting 'Make in India', generate employment and contribute to the Indian economy. With the launch, we aim to capture 6 percent - 7 percent of total TV market share and make Thomson, No. 1 Online smart TV brand in India."

The brand unveiled its 43 UHD 4K, 40 smart and 32 smart TV's, which will be exclusively available on Flipkart, starting April 13th. The brand will open its flash sale on April 13th, 2018, Friday, at 12 noon.

He said, "We have already planned to put one more manufacturing line of Led TV by next-quarter in order to offer Indian consumer products that are at par with global Standards i.e. quality, innovation, and elegance, at a competitive price. While technology and innovation remain the core of it, we have worked on many aspects of TV keeping in mind the Indian palate for aesthetics, color, and sound."

The 43 UHD 4K Smart Tv's comes with default APK Gmail, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Netflix and runs on Android 4.4.4.0 and Aptoide with the feature to download any App. The three products are priced very aggressively for the cost-sensitive consumer of today who is well-informed, uncompromising and discreet.

Amazon Echo Plus: How to Setup, Add Skills and Give Commands

"Thomson, a trusted brand worldwide, comes with a global legacy in technology and innovation. Our exclusive partnership with Thomson offers our shoppers a complete package of smart technology and great features at an aggressive price, making it a compelling offer and we are confident this would be another best seller on Flipkart. Replicating our strategy for smartphones, this launch marries well into our commitment of driving innovation in the market while we continue to be India's most trusted destination for TVs," Sandeep Karwa, Head of TV & Large Appliance Flipkart said.

Best Mobiles in IndiaReliance Jio 4G laptops reportedly in the making News oi-Abhinaya Prabhu Reliance Jio is said to be in talks with the chipmaker Qualcomm to come up with 4G laptops.

Reliance Jio created a buzz in the Indian mobile phone market with the launch of a 4G feature phone called JioPhone. Following the same, it looks like the company is in plans to focus on the laptop market. The next big move taken by Jio could be to launch laptops running Windows 10 along with inbuilt cellular connectivity.

A recent report by The Economic Times states that Reliance Jio is in talks with the US-based chipmaker Qualcomm in order to launch these 4G laptops. And, it goes without saying that these Qualcomm laptops will arrive with bundled 4G connectivity from Reliance Jio. Qualcomm is likely in talks with Jio to come up with a 4G feature phone.

Given that the Qualcomm powered laptops are yet to be released in the market, it might take a considerable time for the 4G laptops from Reliance Jio to hit the market. This is not the first time that we are talking about Reliance Jio 4G laptop with a SIM slot as the initial rumors regarding the same hit the web last year.

Google Home Unboxing and Setup process - GIZBOT

The report quotes Miguel Nunes, senior director, product management, Qualcomm Technologies stating, "...we have talked to Jio. They could take the device and bundle it with data and content."

Snapdragon 835 powered laptops

Qualcomm's Snapdragon Mobile Platform is touted to be the future of mobile laptop computing enabling Always Connected PCs. Already, a few laptop manufacturers such as Asus, HP and Lenovo have come up with Snapdragon-powered laptops. Also, Qualcomm is in talks with the homegrown IoT brand Smartron to bring laptops powered by the Snapdragon 835 chipset.

Benefits of SD 835 laptops

Apart from the LTE connectivity, the Snapdragon 835 SoC will provide increased battery life to the devices that use the chipset. It is touted that the laptops based on this processor can last for around 20 hours. And, these laptops are claimed to turn on instantly without taking a few seconds to come out of the sleep mode. And, the mobile connectivity will ensure better privacy and security than the public Wi-Fi hotspots.

4G laptops are on the horizon

Laptops with 4G connectivity and long-lasting battery life are on the horizon. Such laptops are considered to be the future of computing as mobile connectivity on a laptop will be convenient when we are on the go. Going by the current situation in the Indian telecom arena wherein the data cost per GB is estimated to be under Rs. 20. This will be more favorable for the users as they need not pay a hefty cost to use 4G connectivity on laptops.

Best Mobiles in IndiaSamsung Carnival Sale on Flipkart: Offers on Galaxy S9 Plus, J7 Prime 2, on5, on MAX and more Features oi-Harish Kumar Check out the deals and discounts during the Samsung Carnival on Flipkart until April 12.

Flipkart is hosting a three-day sale called Samsung Carnival on Flipkart from April 10 to April 12. During this sale, the online retailer is offering a slew of discounts and offers on a wide range of Samsung products such as smartphones and home appliances. The offers include discounted pricing, exchange offers, and no cost EMI payment options too.

Samsung smartphones such as Galaxy On Nxt, Galaxy On 5, Galaxy J3 Pro, and Galaxy On Max will be available at discounted pricing during this sale. Apart from these offers, there is an additional 10% instant discount on using an ICICI Bank credit or debit card for the purchase.

Apple iPhone Fest on Amazon: iPhone X, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 7 Plus and more

If you were looking forward to purchase any of these Samsung smartphones available under discount, then you can check out the deals from below and decide which one you would like to purchase.

Best Mobiles in India

Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow NotificationsApple reportedly bargaining for cheaper OLED panels from Samsung News oi-Vishal Kawadkar Apple wants to bring down the production cost of the iPhone X successor.

Samsung is the only company that supplies OLED panels for Apple's iPhone X. The South Korean company was expected to rake in around $22 billion in revenue this year by supplying OLED panels to Apple. Since it was the only company that supplied the display panels for the iPhone, they charged a premium amount to Apple. Well, this might not be the same for the next iPhone.

After the iPhone X saw a decline in sales and demand, has reportedly forced the company to lower the sales cost and cut down component orders from its suppliers, which also includes Samsung. To make things worse, Chinese manufacturers didn't move to OLED panels after the launch of iPhone X, as Samsung expected. This resulted in excess production capacity for Samsung.

Samsung is said to manufacture around 200 million OLED panels this year, out of which 100 million panels will be bought by Apple for the iPhone X and its successor due for launch this year. The production of the OLED panels will kick off next month with the company producing around 2-3 million panels before doubling the number in June.

The local reports claim that both Apple and Samsung are in negotiations over the pricing of the OLED panels, with Apple reportedly asking to slash the price for the panels. Last month, the CEO of Samsung Display had a meeting with Apple executives to settle the prices but failed to reach an agreement.

8 Ways To Make Your iPhone Battery Last Longer!

Although the numbers were never announced, Apple paid around $110 per OLED panel to Samsung, which is almost one-third of the total production cost of the iPhone X. Apple will surely be looking to bring down the cost of the iPhone X and is expected to pay around $100 per panel. There are also reports that Samsung is considering to slash the prices of the OLED panels to overcome the problem of production overcapacity.

Besides the low demand for iPhone X, Apple is also involved in legal battles. The company was recently slapped with a $502.6 million penalty to VirnetX Holding Corp. after the company lost a patent infringement lawsuit.

The verdict was announced by the grand jury in Texas after finding that Apple infringed patents that were related to secure communications, reports Bloomberg. The legal battle between the companies has been going on for past eight years.

(source)

Best Mobiles in India

Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow NotificationsGoogle might acquire Nokia's in-flight Wi-Fi business News oi-Sandeep Sarkar If the acquisition is successful, then it will add to the slew of connectivity related products and services on which Google and its parent Alphabet inc. are working on.

Google is reportedly in talks with the Finnish telecom giant Nokia in order to acquire Nokia's aeroplane broadband business. As per some sources from the web, the negotiation between both the companies are said to be on advanced stage and they can soon enter into an agreement. The acquisition is further said to help Google with air WiFi solutions which are faster than what the companies like Gogo offer at the moment.

Nokia had announced the airplane broadband technology last year and the company also unveiled its LTE A2G cellular-based system which 'creates a direct link between an aircraft and the ground instead of bouncing the signal off of a satellite' which in turn makes it fast then what is offered by in-flight internet company Gogo along with much lower latency.

Further it is also being reported that if the acquisition is successful, then it will add to the slew of connectivity related products and services on which Google and its parent Alphabet inc. are working on, however, most of them are still to be available for the masses. Most of us might have heard about the Google Fiber which was announced back in 2010; however, the service has not progressed much since then apart from a few cities in the US.

Google Home Unboxing and Setup process - GIZBOT

It would be interesting though to see how the Google's attempt to acquire Nokia's airplane broadband business goes. However, there is no official comment from Google or Nokia regarding the acquisition, we will keep you posted on the same, so stay tuned with us.

Also in one of our recent articles related to Google, we covered that Google is at last working on fixing the issue with Android Oreo Multi-touch which has been troubling the users for quite some time now. The multi-touch issue in Android 8.1 Oreo resulted in irregular touch behaviour while using it with two or more finger's on the display. The issue seems to be widespread and users from all around are experiencing this issue. Now that Google has fixed the issue, it will be rolling out the update in June as the security updates for the month of May has been already been locked down. Read the complete story here.

Best Mobiles in India

Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications3 1 of 3 Mohegan Sun / Contributed photo Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Mohegan Sun / Contributed photo Show More Show Less 3 of 3





For fans of a certain age, golden-voiced Frankie Vallis contributions to their lifes soundtrack are almost hallowed, from Sherry to Rag Doll, Walk Like a Man, Working My Way Back to You, Lets Hang On, Bye Bye Baby, Dawn and Opus 17 to Cmon Marianne.

And that was just the Four Seasons greatest hits; Vallis second act produced the disco era hits Who Loves You, My Eyes Adored You, December 1963 and the title track to the Grease movie.DERBY  A former Shelton Intermediate School student described to police 18 incidents of sexual abuse by his mentoring teacher over a three-year period and another incident years later, while the pair dined out.

The allegations are contained in Shelton Police Detective Richard Bangos 13-page affidavit, which led to Tuesdays arrest of David Munson, a 76-year-old retired teacher who in 1988 was honored as the citys Teacher of the Year.

Now Munson faces single charges of first-degree sexual assault and risk of injury to a child. The elderly teacher, wearing a blue windbreaker, black pants, a dark cranberry shirt with a floral tie, appeared Wednesday with his lawyer, Jason Lipsky, at Superior Court in Derby before Judge Karen Sequino.

Sequino continued the case until April 24, after Senior Assistants States Attorney Marjorie Sozanski told the judge the case was being reviewed for transfer to Milford Superior Court, where more serious charges are heard.

In the meantime, Munson is free after posting $100,000 bond. Sequino issued a protective order prohibiting the teacher from contacting or approaching the complainant, who is now 25 and living in Florida.

Outside the Derby courthouse, Lipsky said his client denies all the allegations. The lawyer declined to allow Munson to speak with reporters.

Bango reported in his affidavit that police interviewed three other males that Munson mentored, and each denied being sexually abused.

On Oct. 5, 2017, Shelton police were contacted by the Rape Crisis Center of Milford on the complainants behalf. Bango and Shelton Police Sgt. Matthew Kunkel then met with the complainant and Milford Rape Crisis Advocates Peggy Pisano and Shonna Carlson.

The man told them he was a 13-year-old student at Shelton Intermediate School when the abuse began in September 2005. At the time, he said, his mother was suffering from multiple sclerosis; he was sent to live with a grandmother and was having problems at school.

Munson, who retired from his regular teaching job in 1999, was assigned to work one day a week with the teen as part of a mentoring program. During one meeting, Munson walked the complainant to a wooded area across the street from the school and started to hug the boy, the affidavit charges. The complainant told police his pants were pulled down and he was fondled by Munson.

Upon meeting Munson again weeks later, he recalled the mentor saying: Im glad you wanted it. I know you enjoyed it.

A similar fondling happened in the schools computer lab a few weeks later, and eight times in all that school year, the complainant told police. The following year, the man told police, he was sodomized at least once, possibly twice.

He said he never touched Munson or saw him naked, according to Bangos affidavit.

After the second incident, the man told police, he stopped going to school, considered killing himself and eventually was admitted to a psychiatric ward. He later attended high school in another state.

Bango talked to a psychologist who treated the complainant on as many as 70 occasions between May, 2014 and October, 2016. The psychologist told Bango the complainant discussed being sexually abused by a male school employee during four or five sessions.

(The psychologist) did not press him for details about the sex abuse because he was suffering from other problems and he was very vulnerable at the time, Bango said.

Contact between Monson and the complainant and began again in December 2012, about two months after the teens mother died, Bangos affidavit reads.

The two exchanged emails, and dined out at least twice. On the second occasion, when other dinner guests were away from the table, the complainant felt Munson hands fondling his genitals and heard the mentor ask for sex, police said.

The complainant provided police with numerous emails sent from Munson which ended with an emoji symbol of a man blowing a heart kiss, Bangos affidavit reads.

Bango interviewed Munson, who denied inappropriate contact or putting emojis on the emails. While questioning Munson about the dinner he had with the former student, Bango said, the retired teacher admitted referring to gay sex because he had heard the victim had a boyfriend and felt he was gay.A high school in California has published a magazine featuring a bullet hole in it as a way to raise awareness around America's mass shooting problem.

Palo Alto High School's Verde Magazine published the April 7 edition in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting Feb. 14 that resulted in 17 deaths in Parkland, Florida.

The Verde cover story was titled "Up in arms." The article, written by Asia Gardias, Calvin Yan, Mara Smith and Abby Cummings, discusses the impact of the shooting in Florida and the subsequent walkouts nationwide.

POLICE: Snapchat video shows man shooting gun wildly from moving car

"This entire effort was made more poignant when we experienced a terrifying lockdown as we were about to review the final proof. Our printer's rep was in the room with us  to talk about how unusual the hole is  and got stuck with us for an hour and a half behind the barricades," Paul Kandell, teacher and adviser for Verde, told Chron.com Tuesday over email.

A photo of the magazine shot to the top of Reddit Monday where more than 2,700 comments largely praised the design.

"As a former school paper nerd, I would be honestly surprised if this doesn't earn them some kind of award. It's not only an innovative idea, it looks very well-executed. I'd be interested in how they adjusted the pages," Reddit user MrsMURICA commented.

A request for comment has been placed with the students who designed the magazine. This story will be updated with their information.

Fernando Alfonso III is a digital reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @fernalfonso.ST. MARYS, GA.  A New Haven peace activist is among a group of seven protesters being detained in jail after they were arrested at a nuclear submarine base in Georgia.

Mark Colville, 55, of the Amistad Catholic Worker group, was charged with possession of tools for the commission of a crime and interference with government property (both felonies) as well as criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor.

The seven members of the Catholic Plowshares movement broke into the Kings Bay Naval Base in St. Marys, Georgia, on the night of April 4, acting on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

According to a news release from the Kings Bay Plowshares, the seven timed it to the anniversary of Kings death because he devoted his life to addressing the triplets of militarism, racism and materialism.

The group carried into the base a statement quoting King: The greatest purveyor of violence in the world (today) is my own government.

The activists also were carrying hammers and baby bottles of their own blood. They had hammers because they wanted to make real the prophet Isaiahs command to beat swords into plowshares.

There have been 100 similar Plowshares actions around the world since 1980. The pacifists hammer nuclear weapons and pour blood on them.

Kings Bay Naval Base is the largest nuclear submarine base in the world. It has six ballistic missile submarines and two guided missile submarines, according to the Plowshares news release.

After the activists broke into the base, they split into three groups, targeting the administration building, the D5 Missile monument and the nuclear weapons storage bunkers.

They were arrested early Thursday morning. At the time of their arrest they read a statement: Nuclear weapons kill every day through our mining, production, testing, storage and dumping, primarily on Indigenous Native land. This weapons system is a cocked gun being held to the head of the planet.

The seven were detained at the Camden County Public Safety Complex in Woodbine, Georgia. The day after their arrest, they were brought to Camden County Court in front of Chief Magistrate Judge Jennifer E. Lewis.

Lewis acknowledged the activists did not pose a flight risk but she said they were a threat to the community because they might return to the base, according to the Plowshares news release. Thus she denied their efforts to be released on bond.

Colvilles wife, Luz Catarineau-Colville, said in a statement from New Haven released by the Plowshares group: Im so glad hes OK and is in the same block with one of the guys he acted with. So Marks not alone.

She added, Mark was able to pick up a few books from the library to keep him busy.

She also said the group is awaiting a trial date. Since they werent granted bail, they will be in for a while.

Catarineau-Colville said, We will pray for the members of the Kings Bay Plowshares during our monthly Mass and try to take up a collection to help cover the additional expense of staying in touch with Mark and getting him what he needs while in jail.

randall.beach@hearstmediact.comThese are the best offers from our affiliate partners. We may get a commission from qualifying sales.OnePlus just announced in an that the 5T is out of stock in the UK and the rest of Europe. The phone is currently unavailable to be purchased from the company website oneplus.com, but units can still be found at various retailers, including O2.

The OnePlus 5T being sold out in Europe is a good thing, the company says as it helped it double its YoY revenue to $1.4 billion. OnePlus said the 5T was the best selling device up to date.

OnePlus 5T

Pete Lau, CEO of OnePlus, thanked in the press release to the OP community for always communicating and constantly improving the phones. In 2018 two new partnerships will be introduced - with Telia in Sweden and Amazon in Germany. They will complement the already existing ones in the United Kingdom, Finland, and Denmark.

The next best thing, OnePlus 6, is already closing in. The upcoming flagship that was shown underneath its predecessor earlier will come with a Snapdragon 845 chipset and 8 GB RAM, while the screen will be notched, but at least there will be a switch to mask it out.

SourcePublished on 2018/04/12 | Source

Added episodes 19 and 20 captures for the Korean drama "The Great Seducer" (2018)

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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Published on 2018/04/11 | Source

Added episodes 29 and 30 captures for the Korean drama "Shall We Kiss First" (2018)

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Directed by Son Jeong-hyeon

Written by Bae Yoo-mi

Network : SBS

With Kam Woo-sung, Kim Sun-ah, Oh Ji-ho, Park Si-yeon, Han Go-eun, Kim Sung-soo,...

Mon, Tue 22:00 (2x35min)

Synopsis

A melodrama about a middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman who think that they're done with romance despite the fact that the man is afraid to die alone and the woman is afraid to live alone.

Broadcast starting date in Korea : 2018/02/20

MoreHannah Pate of Forward Montana Foundation talks to a small group of people during a get-out-the-vote event that the foundation had at Triple Dog Brewing Co. Wednesday evening, saying she already had registered 20 voters at Montana State University-Northern. The group is staffing a table at Northern today and Friday to get more voters registered.

Editors Note: This version corrects the tax designation of Forward Montana Foundation.

A nonpartisan group that registers students to vote and encourages them to take a more active role in the political process is ending a statewide campus tour this week with a four-day visit to Havre.

Hannah Pate, campus tour manager with Forward Montana Foundation, was at Triple Dog Brewing Co. Wednesday to talk with people about her organization and how people can get more engaged in the political process.

She said students know that elections and legislation have an impact on their lives, but often don't know how to get involved.

Pate said she began the tour in early March. In the tour she has visited students at Flathead Community College in Kalispell, University of Montana Western in Dillon, Montana Tech of the University of Montana in Butte, Helena College and Carroll College in Helena, and Great Falls College Montana State University.

Forward Montana is a 501(c)(3) non-profit with offices in Billings, Bozeman and Missoula, she said.The objective of the tour is to reach out to people on campuses outside the three cities where the group already has a presence.

If young people go to the polls, they can have an impact on elections and the priorities of lawmakers, Pate said.

"Millennials are 30 percent of the voting population, so if millennials got out to vote we could have a huge impact on how elections turn out," she said.

The goal is to register 200 people by the time she leaves Havre and as of Wednesday evening she said that she has already registered 173, including 20 people while she was up at Northern earlier this week.

She said that students at Northern are unusually interested in voting in November's midterm elections this year, but do not know how to get involved.

Pate said that, along with voter registration, she uses the tour as a chance to talk with people about volunteer, internship and political organizing opportunities.

The voter registration form that Pate distributes also has a survey that asks people what issues they most care about.

Pate said, based on her conversations with students, they are most concerned about public lands, education, equality and a lack of affordable housing.

Forward Montana will register anyone without question, Pate said. She doesn't talk about her political views when registering voters but people are free to talk to her about their views.

"I'm just there to register them to vote," she said.

Pate said that there are several questions she gets about voting.

Many students think they cannot register to vote if they pay out-of-state tuition rates, she said.

Many college students are registered to vote but do not re-register when they move to attend college in a new community.

People can legally register to vote in Montana once they have lived in a community for 30 days, she said.

Pate said she has often been asked about whether people who are homeless can register to vote. Homeless people can legally register to vote in Montana and when they do so they should just put the address where they most often reside on the registration form.

Felons can also register to vote in Montana, as long as they are not serving a sentence in a penal institution.

Pate said people who want to register to vote or learn more about other political activities can talk with her in the Student Union Building Ballroom on Northern's campus today and Friday from 8 to 9:30 a.m and 11:30 a.m to 6 p.m.

People can also visit the Forward Montana website at https://forwardmontana.org/.For one Saturday this month, the building that housed the former music store Creative Leisure will once again be filled with music lovers buying and selling their favorite tunes, as well as having the chance to buy a Montana bands album that is being released 50 years after it was recorded.

Radio station KNMC will host a Record Swap celebrating National Record Day April 21. According to the Record Store Day official website, this day is a party all over the world, because the fun of hanging out and buying records in a record store happens all over the world.

As of this year there are independent record stores participating on every continent except Antarctica. And this year Havre is one of the communities that will get the chance to celebrate this day.

Rick Linie, former manager of Creative Leisure, which was a music and movie store until it closed in 2014, said that he wanted to be able to celebrate National Record Day again this year in Havre. He said that Creative Leisure celebrated National Record Day while it was still operating.

Linie said he thinks this record swap is important because people are again starting to appreciate music on vinyl, tapes and cds.

We went through the shiny time of streaming music, he said, and now (people) want something to hold.

Linie said he talked to Mike Hamilton, the owner of the building that Creative Leisure used to be housed in, and Hamilton was very open to the idea.

Linie also said he is excited about The Frantics cd release, which will be happening that day and will be available for purchase at the Havre swap as well as independent record stores around Montana and online.

The Frantics were a band that formed in Billings in 1964. They recorded their debut album, Birth, in 1968; this album was never released. The Frantics broke up in 1970 but by that time they had performed with many celebrated performers including The Who, Alice Cooper and Jethro Tull.

Dave Martens of Havre-based record company Lost Sounds Montana, says in a press release that they would like to invite the public in on one of the best kept secrets in Montana music history by finally making this album available to listeners.

Martens said he wanted to make sure the album wasnt just left to rot in the archives; he wanted to make sure that the public could hear it

He said he knew he needed to make a deadline to get the album out and thought it would be great if it could coincide with National Record Day.

Linie said he is hoping any local people will (feel free to) come buy and sell their used vinyl, tapes or cds.

Any community members interested in participating can contact Matt Springer at 390-1364 or Linie at 265-8562 or can just come down on the day of the swap. It will be a $5 fee to set up a table and those wanting to sell at the swap will need to provide their own tables and chairs.Fish, Wildlife and Parks

The cold, snowy, and lingering winter weve had across the state has many citizens concerned about game birds such as pheasants, grouse, and partridge. Although these species are well-adapted to make it through even tough winters, there is something landowners can do to help birds next winter  plant a food plot.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks has two options to help landowners establish food plots for game birds: standing grain plots and new diverse seed mixes.

Standing grain plots: For standing grain plots, FWP will pay landowners $150 per acre to help offset the costs of seeding. Standing grain plots are most suitable if landowners have odd field corners or edges of crop fields near dense winter cover that they can leave unharvested.

Diverse seed mixes: With new seed mixes, the FWP is offering free bags of seed that will cover up to five acres, and landowners who plant the mixes will still receive the $150 per acre to offset planting costs.

FWP encourages landowners to try out the new free seed mixes. They are designed to provide critical brood-rearing cover for game bird chicks in summer, and they contain tall, stiff plants like sorghum and sunflowers that can stand up to snow and provide easily accessible food all winter long.

Whether planting one of the new mixes or leaving standing grain, all plots need to be located within  mile of dense winter cover such as a brushy draw, shelterbelts, or a cattail wetland. In return for seed and payments, landowners must sign a written agreement to leave the plots standing until the following spring, and to allow some public access for upland game bird hunting in the fall. Anyone interested in planting food plots for wildlife this spring can contact Region 6 FWP Game Bird Specialist Ken Plourde at 406-474-2244 before May 1.FINDINGS

Melanoma, a relatively rare but deadly skin cancer, has been shown to switch differentiation states  that is, to regress to an earlier stage of development  which can lead it to become resistant to treatment. Now, UCLA researchers have found that melanomas can be divided into four distinct subtypes according to their stages of differentiation. Cell subtypes that de-differentiated  meaning that they reverted back to a less-mature cell  showed sensitivity to a type of self-inflicted cell death called ferroptosis.

The research also showed that certain subtypes of melanoma cells could be successfully treated using multiple cancer therapies in combination with ferroptosis-inducing drugs.

BACKGROUND

Melanoma arises from melanocytes, cells that produce pigments. Although targeted therapies and a greater understanding of cancer immunology have significantly improved survival, many patients either relapse or do not respond to treatment.

METHOD

The UCLA team, led by Dr. Thomas Graeber, analyzed the gene expressions of melanoma cells and compared them to information in public genetics databases to identify the four different subtypes of melanoma with different drug sensitivities. The team organized the melanoma cells according to characteristic patterns of genes they had turned on. Comparing the gene expression patterns to data from stem cells induced to differentiate to melanocytes, they discovered that melanomas can be found in four different differentiation states.

This refined characterization improves our understanding of the progressive changes that occur in melanoma cells during dedifferentiation, which can help develop better strategies to target this form of therapy resistance, said Jennifer Tsoi, who was a member of the research team as a UCLA graduate student and now is a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA.

The investigators then searched pharmacogenomics databases for compounds that could best be used to treat melanomas characterized by the dedifferentiation expression pattern, either individually or in combination with other drugs.

IMPACT

The study introduces a new area of therapeutic possibilities for melanoma, because it is the first to link ferroptosis to melanoma differentiation states. It also more precisely defines different subtypes of melanoma based on specific gene expression and metabolic profiles that characterize four steps along a trajectory taken by melanoma cells as they respond to exogenous stresses such as drug treatments. The approach for targeting dedifferentiated melanomas could complement existing standard-of-care therapies, since kinase inhibitors and immunotherapy do not target de-differentiated cells as effectively as they target differentiated cells.

Furthermore, these standard-of-care therapies can induce dedifferentiation, and thus in a co-treatment setting, ferroptosis induction can potentially block melanoma cells attempting to take this escape route, Graeber said.

AUTHORS

Graeber is a professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. Tsoi is the first author. Other authors, also of UCLA, are Dr. Lidia Robert, Kim Paraiso, Carlos Galvan, Katherine Sheu, Johnson Lay, Dr. Deborah Wong, Mohammad Atefi, Roksana Shirazi, Xiaoyan Wang, Daniel Braas, Catherine Grasso, Dr. Nicolaos Palaskas and Dr. Antoni Ribas.

JOURNAL

The research is published online in Cancer Cell.

FUNDING

The research was supported by grants from the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, the Melanoma Research Alliance, the Concern Foundation, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, the Dr. Robert Vigen Memorial Fund, the Garcia-Corsini Family Fund, the Ressler Family Fund, and the Grimaldi Family Fund, the V FoundationGil Nickel Family Endowed Fellowship, and the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology for Translational Research in Reference Centers.

In collaboration with Graeber, the UCLA Technology Development Group has filed a provisional patent application based on this research.

UCLAThe residents of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo live one year longer today than 25 years ago. The reason is that the levels of air pollutants from road traffic have fallen. This is shown in a new study published in the discussion forum of the scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics by researchers at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Analytical Chemistry (ACES).

The research group has used results from measurement stations centrally located in each city: In Stockholm, the instruments are placed on a roof at Torkel Knutssongatan at Sodermalm, in Gothenburg on a roof in Ostra Nordstan and in Malmo on the roof of the City Hall. The measurements have included nitrogen oxides, ozone and particles in the air from 1990 to 2015. Now scientists can draw certain conclusions about the causes of changes in levels over time and what health effects this gives for the residents of the three cities:

In the case of nitrogen oxides, concentrations have fallen noticeably in all three cities, but the levels of ozone have risen somewhat, and for particles, the measurements show slightly different results for the three cities.

Overall, this means that the air quality has improved in all three cities, which has led to improved public health, and it is estimated that life expectancy has increased by up to one year. This is mainly due to reduced levels of exhaust emissions from road traffic, says Henrik Olstrup, PhD student in atmospheric science at ACES.

Nitrogen oxides are mainly produced by combustion processes in engines and, in large part, the reduction of nitrogen oxides in the air can be explained by stricter rules for new vehicles in terms of exhaust emissions, researchers say. Nitrogen oxides are indicators of combustion-related air pollutants from traffic. The health benefits that have taken place are unlikely to be linked only to reduced nitrogen oxides, but rather a result of a general reduction of exhaust emissions, involving a wide range of gases and combustion-related particles.

In both Stockholm and Malmo, the amount of nitrogen oxides in the air has fallen from about 40 micrograms per cubic meter in 1990 to about 20 micrograms per cubic meter in 2015. In Gothenburg, the levels of nitrogen oxides in the air have fallen from about 60 micrograms per cubic meter in 1990 to about 40 micrograms per cubic meters in 2015, so the decrease has been about the same in all three cities, although the overall levels are higher in Gothenburg. The reason for the higher levels of nitrogen oxides in Gothenburg can be the several highways through the city and also the presence of major motorways close to the city.

The fact that the ozone content has risen slightly during the measurement period, the researchers believe is largely due to the decrease of nitrogen monoxide, which reduces the importance of photochemical reactions with ozone, so that higher ozone concentrations can be built up.

But the higher ozone levels give a relatively small effect on health, as opposed to reduced exhaust gas exposure. And for coarse particles, which mainly arise through road wear from studded tires, there are no clear changes in the levels during the period 1990-2015, which means that the impact on the expected life expectancy becomes insignificant, says Henrik Olstrup.

The calculations of how life expectancy is affected by air pollution are based on previous studies of exposure to air pollution and mortality, and partly on statistics on, among other things, population size and age structure. The calculations have also taken into consideration how the levels vary across the cities and where people live.

That air pollution exposure can shorten life and make people sick has been known for a long time.

The average life expectancy in the three cities has increased by approximately 4-5 years from 1990 to 2015. Significant causes for this increase include, among other things, more effective treatment methods for cardiovascular diseases and reduced smoking among the population. The reduced air pollution exposure is expected to contribute up to 20 percent of this increase, which can be considered as a very significant effect. It shows that emission control measures can give major health benefits, says Henrik Olstrup.

The article Trends in air pollutants and health impacts in three Swedish cities over the past three decades is published in the discussion forum of the scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.The tablets were found in the cell of prisoner Dean Teeling

A major investigation is under way after around 11k of drugs were seized from a violent inmate at a Dublin jail.

The seizure of around 2,500 tablets - considered a significant haul behind bars - was found in the cell of serial knife attacker Dean Teeling (30).

Prisoner officers attached to the Operational Support Group (OSG) Nationwide searched his cell in Mountjoy Prison last Friday, where they recovered the large quantity of drugs as well as an expensive mobile phone.

A number of investigations are now under way into the drug seizure, with authorities looking to establish how the package of tablets was smuggled into the jail.

"It is a very significant amount of drugs to be smuggled into a prison - we're talking about more than 2,000 tablets - and there'll be efforts made to establish how it was brought into the jail," a source said.

Officers at the nearby Mountjoy Garda Station are also understood to have been made aware of the seizure.

Prison officials believe the haul of tablets is worth in excess of 11k, and that the drugs were to be sold to inmates in the jail.

The drug bust is one of the largest at the prison in recent years.

Around 15,000 of tablets were seized in 2010, prompting questions being asked about security at the prison.

Brutal

Last Friday's operation is not the first time Teeling has been involved in a serious offence while behind bars.

In March of last year, the Ballymun thug launched a brutal knife attack on Thomas 'Tossy' Fox and his close associate Michael Taylor Jnr on Mountjoy's A-wing. Fox (30), who is currently on remand awaiting trial for the feud murder of Gareth Hutch, was stabbed in the back of the head, while Taylor (37) was knifed in the stomach.

Teeling is currently serving an eight-year sentence for several vicious blade attacks - including slashing a French tourist's face from his ear to his mouth.

His 81 previous convictions include thefts, robberies, criminal damage and firearms and drugs offences, and he has been involved in a number of feuds.

Dublin Circuit Court heard in November 2015 that Teeling repeatedly stabbed a man, before slashing the tourist and another stranger across the face with a razor blade in unprovoked incidents a year later.

Teeling, of Cappagh Avenue, Finglas, Dublin, pleaded guilty to violent disorder and assaulting Ian McKenna causing him harm at Central Bank Plaza, College Green, on September 9, 2013.

He also pleaded guilty to assaulting Gerard McKeever at McDonald's, Lower O'Connell Street, on April 24, 2014, and assaulting French tourist Loic Marie-Magdaleine on Fleet Street, Temple Bar, later on the same date.Brian Rattigan is facing a retrial just four months after he won an appeal against his conviction for the murder of a man almost 17 years ago.

In December, by a three to two majority, the Supreme Court overturned Rattigan's 2009 conviction for the murder of Declan Gavin (21), who died after being stabbed outside Abrakebabra in Dublin's Crumlin Shopping Centre on August 25, 2001.

Rattigan remains in jail for a 2013 conviction for drug dealing while in custody.

Publicity

In seeking a retrial on the murder charge, Pauline Walley, for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), said the director had conducted a genuine review of the matter and considered there should be a retrial.

Brendan Grehan, for Rattigan, argued that another trial would be unfair on grounds including lapse of time and alleged prejudicial publicity.

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Giving the court's ruling, the Chief Justice, Mr Justice Frank Clarke, said the test for a retrial is whether it is in the interests of justice that one should be ordered.

In that regard, the DPP maintained the matter concerns a serious criminal offence, murder, and that it is in the public interest the matter is retried, while Rattigan's legal team argued there were several factors against retrial.

Mr Justice Clarke said the most common reason not to permit a retrial was not present in this case.

A retrial should not be permitted if it is intended to allow the prosecution to mend its hand after being unable to prove its case at the original trial, but that was not an issue here, he said.

The trial judge is obliged to ensure a fair trial, that all procedural requirements are complied with and, if there is a conviction or sentence, all relevant matters would be considered, he added.

Mr Justice Clarke also pointed out that a retrial should only be refused if there was a clear case there could not be a fair trial for reasons such as delay or prejudicial pre-trial publicity.

Having considered the arguments on those grounds, the court concluded it would direct a retrial and remit the matter to the Criminal Courts of Justice for that purpose.

Rattigan, of Cooley Road, Drimnagh, Dublin, denies the murder of Mr Gavin.

He won his appeal against conviction after the majority Supreme Court found some closing comments to the jury by the trial judge, Mr Justice George Birmingham, involved him unintentionally engaging in "a piece of advocacy in favour of the prosecution".The jarvey injured in the pony and trap accident that killed two tourists in Co Kerry is understood to be still "very upset" following the tragedy.

Experienced driver Dan Casey was hospitalised following the accident in which Rosalyn Joy Few (64) and her partner Normand Larose (62) died when they were thrown down a steep ravine at a beauty spot by the Gap of Dunloe.

The couple, who had been visiting from Phoenix, Arizona, were on holiday in Ireland with their family.

It is believed the horse may have been startled and bolted, causing the fall.

Upset

A source close to Mr Casey said it may take some time for him to get back to work.

"Of course he's very upset. With anything like this, it will take time for him to get back into it," the source said.

Around 30 ponymen cover the area, taking thousands of tourists out for drives around the valleys each year.

As was the case on Tuesday, the jaunting cars near Kate Kearney's Cottage lay idle yesterday.

No pony and trap tours are expected to resume until at least the weekend, out of respect for the dead couple and driver Mr Casey.

Fellow jarvey Paul Cremin, speaking on behalf of his colleagues, said everyone hoped Mr Casey would return to work before long.

Mr Cremin said the other ponymen were "shaken" following the accident, adding: "It's a disaster. It was a freak accident, like a car accident but this was with a horse.

"It's going to be a big ask for him to come back, but I hope he does come back."

Mr Cremin said that the ponymen have been working along that route for hundreds of years.

A book of condolences was placed just inside Kate Kearney's restaurant for locals to record their respects.

Mr Casey and members of his family attended a vigil near Kate Kearney's Cottage on Tuesday in memory of the tragic tourists.

Local TD Michael Healy-Rae said: "Everybody is traumatised by what has happened."

The couple were on holiday in Ireland with Ms Few's daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren.

Support

It is understood the bodies of the pair are yet to be released, and it may be some days before their repatriation to the United States.

An official from the US embassy and a garda liaison officer are understood to be offering support to the family.

A niece of Mr Larose, who was originally from Quebec, Canada, said earlier this week that the whole family were "in shock".

Maude Larose said: "My uncle was a very happy person who loved life very much."A female relative of two brothers who were slashed in a gruesome jail attack has revealed that the family is living in fear of gangland thug Jason 'Jay' O'Connor.

Criminal brothers Jason (45) and Gerard Halpin (42), who are from the Corduff area of Blanchardstown, are continuing to recover from their horrific injuries after being attacked by up to seven inmates in Mountjoy Prison on Monday.

It has now emerged that the Halpin brothers, who were formerly members of the 'Westies' gang, are linked to a faction that has been involved in a bitter west Dublin feud with O'Connor.

Innocent

A female relative told the Herald yesterday that after the jail attack, she has major fears that O'Connor's associates may target innocent family members and "shoot up" the family home in Corduff.

"Jason and Gerard have absolutely nothing to do with 'Jay' O'Connor - in fact, it is him that was targeting the brothers before they were locked up," she said.

"They hate his guts and he hates theirs as well."

Sources revealed last night that prison bosses have not ruled out whether O'Connor, who is linked to many of the capital's most dangerous gangs, was actually behind Monday's savage attack.

The female relative told the Herald that feared criminal O'Connor falsely accused the brothers of being involved in the mistaken identity gun murder of the gangster's pal Keith Walker at Blanchardstown Pigeon Racing Club on June 12, 2015.

Walker was shot dead by cross-dressing machine gun killer Christopher 'Git' McDonald in a gruesome murder in which O'Connor was the intended target.

After the killing, crazed O'Connor (40) reacted with a foul-mouthed tirade to a newspaper reporter.

"I'll tell you a story, there's going to be a f**king war in Blanchardstown - they are f**king dead, stone f**king dead," he said.

It can now be revealed that O'Connor wrongly singled out the Halpin brothers because of their friendship with a dangerous west Dublin duo who are considered O'Connor's biggest gangland rivals.

"Yes they are friends with them [two criminals who can't be named for legal reasons], but they had no involvement in the murder of Keith Walker," the relative said.

"Jay blamed Jason and Gerard for giving information to the killer about what time Keith Walker was in the pigeon club. They did no so such thing and the gardai know that."

The Herald can confirm that the Halpin brothers have never been arrested in relation to the Walker murder.

However, this did not stop O'Connor embarking on a campaign of terror against the brothers, which involved his associates giving Gerard Halpin a severe beating at his Corduff home for which he later required hospital treatment.

Jason Halpin also had a lucky escape when he was attacked and stabbed by associates of O'Connor as he walked his dog in Blanchardstown.

Since both men were jailed for separate offences, it has been suspected that O'Connor has been plotting to get 'revenge' on them, according to their relative.

Torturing

"Jay O'Connor has been torturing the family, who are living in terror of what will happen next. Everyone knows that Gerard and Jason are complete criminals but that does not mean that everyone else in the family is," the woman said.

Gardai and prison bosses are continuing to probe the attack.

Gerard Halpin was pulled into his cell on the D-wing of Mountjoy Prison on Monday afternoon and attacked by a group of up to seven inmates.

Jason happened to be walking back past the cell from the C3 wing and jumped in to intervene.

He sustained a number of stab wounds to the legs, thigh and back. There are claims the stabbings were inflicted with scalpels and Stanley blades rather than shivs.George Hook has revealed how he feels he "paid a fairly high price" for making controversial comments last year in relation to a rape trial involving a former member of the British swimming team.

The resulting furore saw the outspoken 76-year-old losing his Right Hook lunchtime weekday show on Newstalk.

"Live broadcasting, as everybody knows, is the most dramatic thing imaginable because you say something and can't take it back," he said.

"I paid a price for that indiscretion, which I didn't have that much of a problem doing."

Error

The BAI recently found that Newstalk failed to act in a "timely fashion" over the comments he made.

Hook told VIP Magazine that his entire life could not stop just because he made a serious error.

"It was live radio, I made a mistake, I've apologised and I will again if you want me to," he said.

He has now resumed his role with the station and is in the throes of a new show, Sit In, which airs every Saturday from 8-10am.Fancy owning one of Miriam O'Callaghan's glamorous gowns or pulling on one of Rob Kearney's sweaters?

Well, here's your chance. The generous Prime Time presenter has raided her extensive wardrobe to donate some of her most head-turning pieces for a worthy cause, as has the Ireland rugby star.

Organised by Lorraine Keane, the Fashion Relief fundraiser at the RDS on May 13 sees a host of well-known faces selling on their old clobber to the public to help combat hunger in East Africa.

Miriam has donated several full-length dresses by top labels including Kate Middleton-favourite LK Bennett, in addition to handbags and shoes, while Rob gave signed rugby jerseys and jumpers.

Model Sarah Morrissey parted with some of her favourite dresses, along with some shoes and accessories, while rugby commentator Brent Pope handed over some footwear from his Pope Shoes collection.

Lorraine, who travelled to Tanzania last year, said everyone had been very generous as they knew it was going towards a good cause, namely helping Oxfam Ireland tackle the hunger crisis overseas.

She said that every 50 raised will give clean drinking water to six families for a month.

"We all have so much and a little goes a very long way in the developing world," she said.

Aware

"How can people starving not be really big news?

"I think that if people know and we make them aware, they're happy to donate, and that's what I hope Fashion Relief is going to do.

"I will go over with the money we raise and every single cent of it will go towards the commun- ity and the projects over there."

RTE presenter Miriam, who recently ruled herself out of the presidential race, said she was "absolutely delighted" to support Lorraine in such a worthy cause.

"It looks like it's going to be a superb event and I for one have donated a pair of shoes and a couple of dresses that I really love, so the standard of items on sale look like they will be really lovely," she said.

Rob said he was more than happy to row in behind a good cause and de-clutter.BYU researchers make micro lab-on-a-chip breakthrough

Academic jargon can often confuse the average person about the topic at hand, but make no mistake on this, researchers at Brigham Young University have made a monumental leap  and people are talking about it. BYU researchers are among the worlds leaders in creating labs on a chip at increasingly small sizes, and have just had another breakthrough with a new 3D printing technique that allows them to print valves at 15 microns in size. Commercial 3D printers cant print near that small, said Todd Hollingshead, BYU spokesperson. BYU researchers have demonstrated the ...Top dogs: Winning pet statues for Humane Society centennial unveiled

A dozen colorful dog and cat statues decorated by local artists for the Humane Society of Washington County's centennial were unveiled Wednesday evening.Transport corridors are the arteries through which trade, commerce and people flow within and across countries. Now in our digital age, fibre optic submarine cables run thousands of kilometres under the sea connecting North America and Europe, Europe and Asia and continental Asia to archipelagic Asia. They carry enormous volumes of data and voice traffic across vast distances. Despite satellites providing an alternative platform for carrying digital traffic, they constitute only 1% of current digital flows. Submarine cables once laid are cost-effective but they are difficult to repair when disruptions and damage occur and accessing them for maintenance is also a challenge. There are concerns over interception and hostile interruptions. In the recent past, there has been renewed interest in overland fibre-optic cables which are cheaper to lay down and are easier to maintain. They are riding piggyback on roads, railway lines, oil and gas pipelines which are appearing all over continental Asia. Advances in drone technology also enable more effective surveillance and monitoring of overland cables. There is relatively greater security.

China has made the laying of fibre optic cables an integral component of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Wherever highways and railways are being constructed as part of the BRI, for example, in Central Asia, they become ready-made platforms for optical fibre networks. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has just such a component. China has also laid an optical fibre network across its border with Nepal and this has begun providing digital services to Nepal at a cost less than India does.

With the exception of Bhutan, all of Indias neighbours have signed on to the BRI and it is only a question of time before there is a hard-wiring of transport and digital infrastructure linking them more closely to China. This is despite the fact that geography favours cross-border links with India. In fact, some of these links were inherited from the colonial period but were interrupted by partition in 1947 and the India-Pakistan war of 1965.These links have suffered through neglect of maintenance. The whole of eastern India including what is now Bangladesh was connected through a dense network of riverine transport and Chittagong served as a port for this entire hinterland. This is only now being revived thanks to improved relations between India and Bangladesh.

During a recent visit to Colombo, one witnessed the massive Port extension project being undertaken by China by reclaiming land from the sea. This is supported by a Chinese built expressway connecting the capital to the international airport. We are aware of Chinese ambitions to entrench itself in the Maldives and this will significantly impact Indias maritime security.

India needs to rethink its strategy because the default outcome of what the BRI is likely to accomplish in our periphery is its steady economic integration with China and the marginalisation of India in its own neighbourhood. During my assignment in Myanmar I was able to observe how most of the ethnic areas bordering China had been steadily integrated with China through superior transport network, efficient cross-border trade and movement of people and the provision of telecom, financial and banking services. The central Myanmar government was mostly absent except in the security domain. The security perspective overrode every other consideration while China filled the vacuum through its investment in modern border infrastructure and facilitating cross-border trade and traffic. It is now proving difficult for the central government in Myanmar to restore its jurisdiction over these areas. One fears that unless India acts swiftly and effectively, a similar alienation of its neighbours may take place and this may even begin to exercise its pull on some of our own border areas.

Indias neighbourhood strategy must seek to implement, through a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) approach, the numerous cross-border rail, road and digital infrastructure projects we are already committed to but are still far from implementing. It was disappointing to read that during Nepali Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Olis recent visit India once again, as it has done several times in the past, declared its intention to construct the Raxaul-Kathmandu railway. The Barauni-Amlekhganj oil pipeline was mooted during the time I was ambassador to Kathmandu (2002-04) but the ground breaking ceremony was held only now, 14 years later. If one makes an inventory of all the cross-border projects India has committed to undertake over the past decade and more, then their implementation by now would have knotted the subcontinent in a dense web of connectivity and interdependency. But it is pointless to bemoan this lack of delivery. We need to approach regional connectivity as a front ranking challenge which permits neither delay nor default. And digital connectivity must be an integral part of this effort.

I have pointed out on several occasions that India is the largest transit country in the subcontinent. It has the potential to emerge as the transport hub for the entire neighbourhood by providing the most efficient, cost effective and speedy transit for goods, services and peoples. This requires not only physical infrastructure but also efficient processes. There is no point in having a glass top highway but still require trucks to line up for miles at a crossing because of cumbersome procedures and security checks. There are best practices in Europe and South East Asia which are available for us to study and follow without compromising security. Borders are connectors and connectivity generates incomes. Transport corridors become platforms for generating incomes and employment for the countries being connected. Let us not end up marginalised in our region.

Shyam Saran is a former foreign secretary and is senior fellow, CPR

The views expressed are personalActor Akshay Kumar has been tackling social issues in his films for quite some time now - after promoting the causes of menstrual hygiene (PadMan) and the need for toilets in every household (Toilet: Ek Prem Katha), he has now helped an entire community in building water harvesting pits. The actor, who is currently shooting for his upcoming film Kesari in Wai, was made aware of the water crisis in the village of Pimpode Budruk in Satara, Maharashtra and decided to help them. He donated Rs 25 lakh to help build pits and also helped in digging them.

Kesari first look: Akshay Kumar is ready for war, in the third film on Battle of Saragarhi

Accompanied by a few members of his team, Akshay headed to the village, which is located in Koregaon Tehsil in Satara, Maharashtra, and helped the locals. A source close to the actor told Hindustan Times, Besides donating Rs 25 lakh to the villagers to get them to begin work on water harvesting, Akshay travelled there yesterday to work with them. He helped them dig huge recharge pits to store water that could later be harvested.

The village, with a population of around 10,000 people, has been facing a severe drought. An insider, who accompanied Akshay on his trip to Pimpode Budruk, said that the locals were happy with the actors participation and the crowd cheered when Akshay said that he didnt want them to have water in their eyes, but in their taps instead.

Akshay Kumar: I can now steer the ship where my heart leads

Akshay is currently working on Kesari, a film based on the battle of Sargarhi. The battle was fought between British Indian Army and Afghan Orakzai tribesmen in North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan) in 1897. Directed by Anurag Singh, the film features Parineeti Chopra and will hit theatres on Holi 2019.

Follow @htshowbiz for moreSisters Janhvi and Khushi, the lovely daughters of late Sridevi and producer Boney Kapoor, have been bonding big time with stepbrother and sister combine, Arjun and Anshula Kapoor. Ever since the sad demise of late actor Sridevi, the bond between the four siblings has become very visible.

Latest pictures of Janhvi and Khushi, which are all over the internet, show them entering a housing complex along with their dad, Boney. While Khushi keeps it simple in a monochrome pair of a shirt and a trouser, Janhvi can be seen in an off-white outfit.

Whats noteworthy is that relationship between Sridevi and her household and that of Boneys children from his first marriage have over time moved from being cold to cordial. However, the untimely death of the late Bollywood and Kollywood actor-diva, led to further melting of hearts. It has been extensively reportedly how Anshula stood as a solid support for the girls when the news broke out that Sridevi had passed away in a Dubai hotel on February 24 this year. Arjun, on his part, has been his bereaved fathers sheet anchor -- being by his side in Boneys hardest hour. He joined his father to Dubai to bring back the mortal remains of the late actor too.

On work front, Janhvi is shooting for her Bollywood debut with Karan Johar-backed Dhadak. Said to be an adaptation/remake of hit Marathi drama, Sairat, it will also see Shahid Kapoors kid brother, Ishaan Khatter, make his Bollywood debut. The actor has already made his acting debut in Iranian auteur Majid Majidis Beyond the Clouds (2017).

Arjun, meanwhile, has his hands full with four projects. These include Panipat, Kaneda, Namastey England and Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar.

Follow @htshowbiz for moreDays before Shoojit Sircars October hits theatres and Varun Dhawan fans gear up too watch him in a new avatar, the makers held a special screening in Dubai and the response is overwhelming. While Karan Johar called the director a genius, he also praised newcomer Banita Sandhu. The film was screened Wednesday evening in Dubai and Varun, Banita and producers Ronnie Lahiri and Sheel Kumar were present for the movies premiere show.

Varun was especially excited to see his dad David Dhawan, mentor Karan Johar and filmmaker Shashank Khaitan watch his upcoming film. 2 DaDS and one dada @karanjohar @ShoojitSircar #DaViddhawan. Last night I was all nerves as my dad and Karan saw #October as well as @ShashankKhaitan but this picture is a memory I shall never forget. #legends, he tweeted along with a picture.

2 DaDS and one dada @karanjohar @ShoojitSircar #DaViddhawan. Last night I was all nerves as my dad and Karan saw #October as well as @ShashankKhaitan but this picture is a memory I shall never forget. #legends pic.twitter.com/T7x9vm7gqA  Varun DAN Dhawan (@Varun_dvn) April 11, 2018

Filmmaker Karan Johar tweeted, #October is absolutely beautiful... just beautiful....sucks you into its world and absorbs you completely...I felt like I was standing there with the characters and feeling their every beat and emotion....@ShoojitSircar and @writeonj are a genius team!

#October is absolutely beautiful... just beautiful....sucks you into its world and absorbs you completely...I felt like I was standing there with the characters and feeling their every beat and emotion....@ShoojitSircar and @writeonj are a genius team!  Karan Johar (@karanjohar) April 11, 2018

The filmmaker also mentioned the cast. @BanitaSandhu is so so lovely! Her stillness and silences speak volumes ! She has a striking and supremely heartening presence ! Welcome to the movies! Huge mention to Gitanjali Rao for her brilliant performance! #october...@Varun_dvn as Dan is a character I have never met at the movies before! Flawed but so real and so intuitively hearful.....by the end of the film you root for him with a heavy heart....undoubtedly his best work to date..... he added.

@BanitaSandhu is so so lovely! Her stillness and silences speak volumes ! She has a striking and supremely heartening presence ! Welcome to the movies! Huge mention to Gitanjali Rao for her brilliant performance! #october  Karan Johar (@karanjohar) April 11, 2018

@Varun_dvn as Dan is a character I have never met at the movies before! Flawed but so real and so intuitively hearful.....by the end of the film you root for him with a heavy heart....undoubtedly his best work to date.....  Karan Johar (@karanjohar) April 11, 2018

Shashank Khaitan, who directed Varun in Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya and Badrinath ki Dulhaniya, also praised the actor and tweeted, #OCTOBER ... @Varun_dvn as Dan is brilliant. He is so real and loveable and really brings out the complexities of this 21 year old character. His eyes are so innocent and vulnerable that he makes Dan endearing even in his awkwardness. So happy to see him make such brave choices..

OCTOBER ... the cinematography by Avik Mukhopadhyay is brilliant, the visuals breathtaking ... the music by @ShantanuMoitra is beautiful ... the casting by Jogi ji is just bang on... loved the film in everyway... @Varun_dvn  Shashank khaitan (@ShashankKhaitan) April 11, 2018

#OCTOBER ... @Varun_dvn as Dan is brilliant. He is so real and loveable and really brings out the complexities of this 21 year old character. His eyes are so innocent and vulnerable that he makes Dan endearing even in his awkwardness. So happy to see him make such brave choices..  Shashank khaitan (@ShashankKhaitan) April 11, 2018

#OCTOBER ... @Varun_dvn as Dan is brilliant. He is so real and loveable and really brings out the complexities of this 21 year old character. His eyes are so innocent and vulnerable that he makes Dan endearing even in his awkwardness. So happy to see him make such brave choices..  Shashank khaitan (@ShashankKhaitan) April 11, 2018

Check out a few more reactions:

#October is a movie experience like no other. Its subtle yet leaves you feeling things words cant do justice to. @Varun_dvn you are a revelation and @BanitaSandhu welcome to the world of movies! Props to @ShoojitSircar and the ever brilliant @writeonj   Amul Vikas Mohan (@amul_mohan) April 11, 2018

Directed by Shoojit, October stars Varun opposite Banita who makes her Bollywood debut with the film. Talking about Varun, Shoojit had said, It wasnt like I wanted to work with Varun Dhawan. I saw him in my office one day and I just found some kind of honesty and innocence in him which I was looking for my character. I went on with him purely on instincts. Though he was an overnight sensation, a star, but there was something really teenage and young in him.

A Rising Sun Films Production, the film is set to release on April 13.

Follow @htshowbiz for moreFilmmaker Anurag Kashyap, who rarely shies away from voicing his opinions, has said he was scared when his family received threats for his tweets criticising the ban on Pakistani artistes from working in Bollywood in 2016. He added that he has stopped reading responses to his posts.

We are dealing with a country which is so over-populated, where there is so much resentment, so much repression, so many mouths to feed, so many people looking for work, so many disillusioned people. Sometimes I think when they are frustrated they want to take it out. And they feel better after abusing. So now when I put out a tweet, I dont read the response, he said.

Why havent you said sorry for Pak visit: Anurag Kashyap asks PM Modi

The filmmaker also said it has positively affected his work: After I stopped engaging, I made Mukkabaaz, finished Sacred Games, Lust Stories and I am shooting Manmarziyan. Suddenly, the frequency of my work has increased because I have gone off social media.

During the Ae Dil Hai Mushkil controversy, when I tweeted to the prime minister, people went after my personal life, (they) started threatening my parents. My family got scared. That was very, very scary. The trolling went on for six-eight months, he said.

Kashyap had come out in support of his filmmaker friend Karan Johar, who faced protests during the release of Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016), which featured Pakistani actor Fawad Khan in a pivotal but small role. In a series of tweets, Kashyap had asked why only Indian filmmakers should be targeted for casting Pakistani actors when Prime Minister Narendra Modi also visited Lahore.

The filmmaker added that his opinion on the controversy over Sanjay Leela Bhansalis film Padmaavat also rubbed some people the wrong way. Social media has kind of levelled the field. People use it to bring others down, silence others and threaten them. During Padmaavat, it had happened, they put out my number on the social media because I had an opinion, he said.

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap feels that the agitation against Padmaavat is in many ways similar to what his film Udta Punjab (2016) faced before its release.(HT Photo)

The 45-year-old director, who will be seen in the finale episode of MTV Troll Police, airing this Saturday, has realised that the aim of trolls is to silence those whose opinions differs so he has stopped engaging with them.

Kashyap has become a calmer person today, and says he has mastered the art of channelising his anger through work. Whatever I want to say, I will say it through my work. I am enjoying this process much more than anything else. I am actually in my best phase. I am only working and I am happy. My anger has found a better way to project itself through my work. I made Mukkabaaz and put it all out there, in a way that is more effective. It says what it wants to say. I dont have to scream and shout.

I want to reflect, evoke and provoke. I want to put it out there and see how people react to it, he says.

Follow @htshowbiz for moreActor Priyanka Chopra met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on Wednesday to invite him to an upcoming conference of Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH). She was part of a delegation that included Union health minister JP Nadda and former President of Chile and incoming chair of PMNCH Board Michelle Bachelet. Priyanka was there in her capacity as the UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

However, what seems to have caught the eye of people on Twitter is her choice of dress -- the actor was dressed in a demure anarkali that had full-sleeves and a high neck. Priyanka had faced a backlash online for wearing a short dress when she met PM Modi in Germany more than a year ago.

Priyanka had met the PM in May 2017 in Berlin where she was promoting her Hollywood release, Baywatch. Modi was on a four-nation tour during which he happened to meet the actor. Refusing to take the trolling, the actor had replied on social media as well.

Later, Priyankas mom had said, All I taught her, if you have done no wrong, you have nothing to fear. She was going for Baywatch promotion, suddenly she bumped onto Mr Modi, she cannot go for a dress change and come back to say hello? The meeting was not pre-planned, it was impromptu. However, many on Twitter pointed out that Priyankas choice of dress is decidedly different from last time, others applauded her sartorial style.

She was going for Baywatch promotion, bumped into PM: Priyankas mom on controversial pic

The actor also shared an image of her meeting with the PM on Wednesday and wrote, Very grateful to the honorable @PMOIndia, Shri @narendramodi to meet me, Shri @JPNadda and Mrs. @mbachelet in regards to being a patron for the Partners Forum... #2018PMNCHLive https://www.instagram.com/p/BhcCY8VAQI1/ 

In her post, the actor has expressed gratitude to PM Modi for meeting them and described the conversation with the Prime Minister as insightful.

Very grateful to the honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi to meet me, Shri J.P. Nadda (Indian Health Minister) and Mrs. Michelle Bachelet, (former President of Chile, incoming #PMNCH Chair) in regards to being a patron for the Partners Forum which is being held in New Delhi in December this year. The aim is very important - the improvement and transformation of access to quality healthcare at at every life stage for women, children and adolescents, in an effort to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030, she wrote in her post.

This year, India will play host to the largest ever Partners Forum, with more than 1,200 delegates from more than 92 countries. It was an insightful, positive conversation which was very heartening and inspiring because of the personal commitment of everyone at the meeting. We covered a lot of ground from the various efforts being taken by individual countries & partners to building a collective environment that could help propel the change we seek for a better world. We started something important today and I am looking forward to what is being set in motion, the post read.

Priyanka Chopra shuts up trolls, gives it back to haters in style with more legs

While she does not have any Bollywood projects at hand, Priyanka is currently awaiting the third season of her American sitcom Quantico and will soon be seen in two Hollywood films -- A Kid Like Jake and Isnt it Romantic?

Follow @htshowbiz for moreFor a country thats known as the worlds biggest arms importer, Indias defense market is a notoriously difficult nut to crack.

Airbus SE hasnt won a single military contract for half a century. Unperturbed, the European firm is building a supply chain in India, training and expanding a slew of existent part-makers that already help it build commercial jets. The hope is to easily meet local sourcing norms when, and if, it eventually wins an order.

Airbus isnt alone. The likes of Lockheed Martin Corp., Saab AB and Boeing Co. -- gearing up to bid for the worlds biggest fighter jet order in play -- are also looking for more local partners who can build sophisticated parts for defense products. At the heart of the development is Indias insistence on local manufacturing, which mandates that at least 30% of parts in imported defense products are made in India.

Building a self-sufficient domestic arms industry -- a key facet of Prime Minister Narendra Modis push to increase the share of manufacturing in the countrys economy -- will be at the forefront of a government-organized defense expo near Chennai this week. Dozens of foreign and local companies are hoping to catch Modis eye when he addresses the event on April 12, aiming to win a chunk of business for India.

Still, local production and sourcing is not a natural fit for the majority of companies. Most original producers of defense goods are actually assemblers rather than manufacturers, and setting up shop in India requires not only investing in training a local supply chain, but also convincing major global part-makers to do the same.

Make in India officer

Airbus is a case in point. In 2016, less then two years after Modi took power, Airbus appointed Ashish Saraf as its Make in India officer, the only company to create such a position. His job is to ensure a credible supply base in India that can contribute to the companys defense products. Its also a strong signal to the government about its seriousness to build in India.

It is a dual industry where people who do defense goods also do commercial aerospace goods, Pierre de Bausset, managing director for Airbus Group in India, said in an interview in Hyderabad in March. It makes sense to leverage what we are doing in commercial aerospace to be relevant in defense campaigns -- whether they are for helicopters, for defense airplanes.

The opportunities are immense. India will set up a budget of $620 billion in the eight years to 2022, and local and foreign firms would have business opportunities of $168 billion, according to a study by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and Centrum Capital Ltd.

$15 billion deal

That potential has attracted companies like Lockheed Martin Corp., the worlds biggest defense contractor. Lockheed is pitching its F-16 fighter jets for a tender for 110 combat aircraft worth at least $15 billion, and has vowed to move its entire production line for the jet to India if it wins the deal.

This will put India right into the biggest fighters global supply chain immediately, Phil Shaw, who heads Lockheeds India operations, said in an interview in New Delhi. That will give a leg up to what the government is looking for -- to try and get an ecosystem developed.

One potential roadblock is Indias slow pace of decision making. Although Modi wants to modernize the countrys aging military equipment with a $250 billion investment, hes been bogged down by a defense procurement process thats known for delays, backtracking and corruption, making it a sensitive, slow-going process.

The warplane deal is a prime example. India started looking for new warplanes in 2007, a contest that ended with the government selecting Dassault Aviation for 126 Rafale jets for $11 billion. With talks stalling over price and quality guarantees, the government scrapped the purchase in 2015 and bought 36 jets separately to speed up the process. The nation last week started the entire process all over again.

Nowhere is the rush to boost local manufacturing more visible than in the fighter jet deal thats still to be concluded. While Lockheed has partnered with salt-to-software conglomerate Tata Group to bid for the order, Saab has teamed with billionaire Gautam Adani to offer its Gripen jets. The Indian order mandates that at least 85% of the planes are built in India.

Our plans in India are based not just on selling products but on creating a defense eco-system which would involve hundreds of Tier-1, -2 and -3 partners, vendors and suppliers,  said Mats Palmberg, vice president of industrial partnerships and business area, aeronautics at Saab AB. Saab would incubate partnerships between its global supply chain and Indian suppliers.IHH Healthcare Bhd. has proposed a potential bid of as much as $1.3 billion for Fortis Healthcare Ltd. that tops an offer from the TPG-Manipal consortium, according to people with knowledge of the matter, opening a possible takeover battle for Indias second-largest hospital chain.

Asias largest hospital operator sent a letter to the Fortis board Wednesday saying it may be willing to pay as much as Rs 160 rupees per share to acquire control of the company, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. It has asked the Fortis board for some time to update its due diligence before making a formal bid, the people said.

The Kuala Lumpur-based company told the Fortis board it wants to work with them on a friendly offer, according to one of the people.

IHHs interest came only a day after TPG-backed Manipal Health Enterprises Pvt sweetened its bid to hive off Fortiss hospital operations and merge them with its own business. Manipal said its revised plan offered Fortis shareholders Rs 155 per share in value, up from Rs 140 earlier.

The potentially competing bids are the latest twist in the Fortis saga. No final decisions have been made, and theres no certainty IHH will proceed with a bid, the people said. A representative for IHH declined to comment, while a spokesman for Fortis said he couldnt immediately comment.

Manipals controlling shareholder Ranjan Pai said in an interview Wednesday the reason he was not buying Fortis outright was because of the potential liabilities posed by investigations. IHH is planning a cash offer for Fortis shares, people with knowledge of the matter said Wednesday. If the approach is rejected by the Fortis board, IHH will consider taking its offer directly to the Indian companys shareholders, according to the people.

IHH had engaged in talks early last year to invest in Fortis, people with knowledge of the matter said at the time.

--With assistance from George Smith Alexander and Choong En HanInternational Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde said on Thursday Chinas Belt and Road initiative is showing signs of progress but warned of potential debt risks for partner countries involved in joint projects.

One challenge is to ensure that Belt and Road only travels where it is needed, and the second is to focus on sound fiscal policies, Lagarde said in prepared comments in a speech at a Belt and Road conference in Beijing on Thursday.

Fortunately, we know that Chinas leadership is aware of these potential risks -- as well as the proven strategies that can help address the challenges, Lagarde said.

President Xi Jinpings Belt and Road Initiative, unveiled in 2013, aims at building a modern-day Silk Road connecting China by land and sea to Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. China has pledged $126 billion for the ambitious plan.

In his opening speech to the annual Boao Forum on Tuesday - Asias equivalent of Davos - Xi said Belt and Road pacts had been made over the last five years with more than 80 countries and international bodies.

Lagarde said the initiative can provide much needed infrastructure financing to partner countries, but should not be considered a free lunch by those nations.

Belt and Road ventures can lead to a problematic increase in debt, potentially restricting other spending as debt service obligations rise, which could create balance of payment challenges.

In countries where public debt is already high, careful management of financing terms is critical, in order to protect China and partner governments from entering into pacts that will cause financial difficulties in the future, Lagarde warned.Indias steel-to-autos conglomerate Tata Group, widely seen as a potential suitor for Air India, is unlikely to consider a bid for the state-run carrier as the governments terms are too onerous, two sources familiar with the matter said.

Indias ministry of civil aviation, keen to sell the loss-making, debt-ridden airline, finalised plans in late March to divest a 76% stake and offload about $5.1 billion of its debt.

But the government has stipulated the winning bidder cannot merge the airline with existing businesses as long as the government holds a stake. The winner may also be required to list Air India and would need to abide by conditions designed to safeguard employee interests, restricting its ability to cut staff.

Since the terms were disclosed, no company has come forward to say it is interested or to reaffirm previous interest, while Jet Airways and rival IndiGo, have already publicly opted out of the race.

Tata Group, which already owns stakes in two airline joint-ventures in India, does not see how a deal would be workable under the current terms, said one of the sources, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

The same source also said the airline had too much debt and noted there was little clarity on what a buyer would be allowed to do with the airlines large workforce.

Anyone who puts money upfront ... even for Tata to put in that kind of money, it would want complete control, added the second source.

Tata Sons, the holding company for the conglomerate Tata Group, declined to comment.

Prior to the disclosure of the terms, there had been some expression of interest from the group.

In January, Leslie Thng, the chief executive of Vistara, a joint-venture between Tata and Singapore Airlines told reporters its owners were open to evaluating a bid for Air India. Vistara declined to comment and Singapore Airlines had no immediate comment on Wednesday.

Last October, Tata Group Chairman N. Chandrasekaran, said in a TV interview the group would definitely look at Air India once the privatisation process was finalised.The Mumbai police on Wednesday recovered the decomposed body of a 50-year-old woman from her residence in Andheri (East).

According to the police, Manisha Bhave, a teacher in a college in Vile Parle, was found dead in her flat after the neighbours in the locality complained of a foul smell emanating from her flat. When the police came, they found the door locked from inside.

She used to stay alone. When the team reached her flat, they opened the door by force and found her decomposed body near the door. She was taken to a nearby hospital where she was declared dead, said an officer.

The police said prima facie it looks like a case of natural death. There were no visible injuries marks and prima facie it looks like she died of a heart attack. We had sent her body for post-mortem and are waiting for the report. An accidental death report was registered, he said.Thirteen more detailed project reports (DPRs) for works related to the Chardham all-weather road project have been approved by the Centre, chief secretary Utpal Kumar Singh said here on Thursday.

Authorities, he said, will ensure that pilgrims are not inconvenienced due to the construction of the road during the soon-to-start Chardham yatra (pilgrimage).

This year, the annual Chardham yatra begins on April 18.

The Centre has approved 13 more detailed project reports for works to be carried out for the Chardham all-weather road project. Work on the DPRs approved earlier is already in full swing, the chief secretary told reporters after reviewing the road project.

The 12,000 core centrally sponsored project is being implemented in an 890-km area in Uttarakhand.

Work on the 13 DPRs approved by the Centre will start soon. It will begin as soon as tenders that will be floated (by different departments) will be finalised, Singh said.

He said authorities had been directed to ensure that pilgrims, who would participate in the Chardham yatra, were not inconvenienced owing to the construction work on the route.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone for the Chardham all-weather road project ahead of the 2017 assembly polls.

Apart from district magistrates concerned, forest officials and those of the line departments and the Border Roads Organisation besides contractors implementing the mega project also participated in the meeting on Thursday.

Officials and contractors were called at the meeting so that issues and problems relating to the implementation of the Chardham all-weather road project could be sorted out, Singh said.

He said all issues relating to land and forest clearances for the crucial all-weather road project are being processed fast.

Giving details of the project, Singh said of the total 890-km Chardham all-weather road project, the DPRs had been cleared for up to 650-km length. The process of clearing the detailed project reports for the remaining portion of the project area is on.

On a query regarding work in a patch of the project being held up owing to objections raised by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), he said a master plan for development in the Bhagirathi eco-sensitive zone is being readied.

It will be ready by the end of this month. A draft report in that connection has been circulated among officials and stakeholders and their opinions will also be incorporated in the document.

In that connection, a monitoring committee had been reconstituted by the Union environment and forest ministry. We will see if the crucial projects get approval from that panel. If such an approval is given, those (projects) will be fast tracked, Singh said.

He reiterated that the state governments top priority at the moment, however, is that pilgrims who will be undertaking the Chardham yatra are not inconvenienced owing to the construction work.

Officials have, therefore, been directed to ensure that activities like hill cutting and blasting of rocks are not carried out once the yatra starts, the chief secretary said.

BRO chief engineer also assured us that the agency would ensure arrangements so that pilgrims could easily cross the patches where the road construction was on.

Similarly, the police would also ensure an uninterrupted flow of traffic on the Chardham route during the yatra.

We have no such information, he said when asked about the reports that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to visit Kedarnath during the ceremonial reopening of its portals on April 29.The Special Investigative Team (SIT) of the Uttarakhand Police probing Rs 300-crore NH-74 scam on Thursday filed second charge sheet against six accused, including two suspended Provincial Civil Service (PCS) officials, in the court of special judge (Prevention of Corruption Act), Nainital.

The two PCS officials, suspended sub-divisional magistrates (SDM) Anil Shukla and NS Nagnyal, are currently in jail.

The first charge sheet in the case, running in 5804 pages, was filed against 12 accused on February 3, this year.

The second charge sheet has been filed against six revenue officials. A team comprising three additional superintendents, two inspectors, five sub-inspectors, and seven constables are investigating into the scam, senior superintendent of police (SSP) Sadanand Date said.

It was then Kumaon Commissioner D Senthil Pandiyan who blew the whistle on the scam in procurement of land for construction of NH-74 in Udham Singh Nagar district. Soon after coming to power in March last year, chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat took cognisance of the issue, suspended six state-level officers and recommended a CBI probe.

The case was simultaneously handed over to the SIT that has since then questioned more than 225 officials of revenue department, National Highway Authority of India (NHAI), farmers, builders, and brokers in connection with the case. The SIT, in course of investigation, also arrested 20 people including revenue officials, farmers and four officers of SDM rank.

Oman-based multinational Galfar Galfar Engineering & Contracting SAOG is constructing and widening the 375-km NH-74. It has been alleged that some land sharks joined hands with the administrative officials and purchased agricultural land from the farmers and got the land use changed to commercial under Section 143 of the section 143 of Zamidari Abolition and Land Reforms Act before it was finally acquired by the NHAI. The compensation paid for commercial land is almost 10 times higher than that of the agricultural land. The change in land use, allegedly with the help of revenue officials, was mostly carried out in back dates between 2012 and 2015.

PCS officer BS Fonia was first to be arrested in the case in November last year. Prime accused and former special land acquisition officer DP Singh surrendered before SSP Date on November 23 after evading the arrest till three week Suspended SDMs Shukla and Nagnyal were arrested later.

Fonia, Shukla and Nagnyal are accused of illegally changing the land use while holding the posts of SDM in Jaspur, Kashipur, Bazpur. Farmers were provided upto 10 times more compensation for the land leading to an estimated loss of Rs 300 crore to the exchequer.

The first charge sheet had been filed in the court with recorded statements of 77 witnesses in the scam. It named Fonia, DP Singh, the then Tehsildars in charge Madan Mohan Paladiya and Bhole Lal, suspended Sangrah Amin Anil Kumar, data entry operator Arpan Kumar, former Peshkars (caller) Sanjay Kumar and Vikas Chauhan, Jaspur Tehsil staff Ram Samuch, farmers Charan Singh and Om Prakash, and stamp vendor Zeeshan as accused.The uncrowned crown prince of the citys gangsters is back. Released from a four-year stint in jail three months ago, 25-year-old Sanju (alias Sanjay), the ringleader of Firebrand Gang  a notorious burgle-and-burn gang  has racked up a substantial number (more than 20) of crimes, including burglaries, thefts and armed robberies.

According to the police, he has been arrested in three cases  an armed robbery committed on January 25 this year, a failed robbery bid on February 11, and the possession of a pistol and three cartridges with the intent of attempting his modus operandi (setting the house on fire after a burglary) in a government flat in Sarojini Nagar committed on December 18 last year.

But the fact that he has been bailed out quickly (in less than a month) in one case (in the Arms Act case of December 18) and that the charges against him in the other two cases are not enough to keep him behind bars has been haunting south Delhis Sarojini Nagar, RK Puram and Kotla Mubarakpur police.

They fear cases of burglary and arson will soon escalate on Delhis crime map with Sanjus return. And not without reason. Sanju already has a decade-and-a-half-long career in crime  more than a 1,000 burglaries, 17 arson cases across government colonies in south Delhis Laxmibai Nagar, Kotla Mubarakpur, RK Puram and Lodhi Colony, and countless escape bids from juvenile homes  to his credit.

Sanjus foray into crime began in 2002, when he was 10 years old (and living with his father and older sister in Sarojini Nagar) with a theft in the neighbourhood. Its all because of my father; he drove me to this kind of life. He would drink and beat my sister after my mother died. I fell in bad company, got addicted to drugs, started stealing because I liked gambling, and here I am, Sanju had said in an interview to Hindustan Times after his arrest in 2011.

As Sanjus criminal activities increased after 2007 (more than 20 cases of robbery, house breaking and burglaries and arson were reported till his arrest in 2011) and the police started raiding his house now and again, his father disowned him. He became a vagabond and started living on the pavements and hiding in empty water tanks of government flats to avoid being arrested.

A house in Laxmibai Nagar near Sarojini Nagar that was burgled and burnt allegedly by the gang. (HT File Photo/Sunil Saxena)

Sanju would get high on smack or white correction fluid (applied to paper to mask errors in text) with his associates and sleep inside water tanks during the day. The group would then commit burglaries by night and later dispose off stolen articles in Bihar through one of their contacts. He mostly targeted government flats that had window or split air conditioners as he believed that those who install ACs were rich people and committing burglaries in such house earned him maximum profit, says a police officer.

As a juvenile, Sanju was well-versed with the IPC and used all the loopholes he could find within the juvenile justice laws to evade the police or get them a rap on the knuckles over some technicality.

Sanju knew that the juvenile justice laws prohibit police to arrest a juvenile, handcuff him, interrogate him, keep him in police station lock-up, or send him to jail (instead sent to correction home). He used to harm himself by banging his head against the wall in the police station or with self-inflicting cuts before being produced before the juvenile justice board to make the judge believe that cops tortured him in their custody, says the officer.

His teenage years were marked by a spree of crimes and he seemed to embody three of the numerous tattoos across his body  denger (sic), darinda, mahakaal (danger, demon, destroyer).

The police managed to arrest him for the first time only in February 2011  two months after he turned 18. At that time, he was already the leader of approximately 35 like-minded juveniles and adults, who, like him, loved tattoos, body piercing, branded clothes, slick hairstyles and drugs.

Inspector Sanjiv Mandal (then posted to the Sarojini Nagar police station), instrumental in apprehending Sanju as many as five times between 2009 and 2011, says Sanju and his gang members only targeted locked government flats because he hated government servants, specially police personnel.

They would scale houses using drain pipes, break open locks and decamp with cash and valuables. They would then set the house on fire to wipe out any accidental evidence. They also believed it was auspicious, says the inspector.

Besides gaining a reputation for burgle-and-burn, Sanju also became notorious as a robber who carried firearms, red chilli powder and committed street crimes like snatching and robbery.

After he was released in October 2017, Sanju was first allegedly caught with a pistol, three bullets and a plastic packet of red chilli powder, following information that he was consuming heroin with his associates in a park in Laxmibai Nagar on December 18. We interrogated Sanju to ascertain where he procured the firearm from and its purpose. He said that he and his associates were planning a burglary in one of the government flats in Laxmibai Nagar, says a police officer familiar with the case.

Sanju was jailed, but because he was only arrested for possessing a firearm, he was bailed out quickly in January this year. It took him less than a week to regroup with his cohorts and commit another crime  this time a serious one.

On January 25 around 9.30 pm, V Sathish Prabhu Kumar, an assistant engineer posted to Tamil Nadu House, had stepped out of his car outside his government-allotted flat in Sarojini Nagar. Suddenly, four men stopped him and one of them put a pistol to his head. The four allegedly robbed Kumar of his two expensive mobile phones and Rs 18,000, and fled on two motorcycles, says another police officer privy to the case.

A few days later, the investigating team caught two of the suspects and their interrogation revealed that the man who had held the complainant at gunpoint was Sanju. While a manhunt to nab Sanju was launched, he was caught red-handed by the locals during a snatching bid in North Delhis Rani Bagh on February 11.

According to the complainant Monica Gupta, she was out for shopping with her husband when a man snatched her gold chain and tried to flee. Her husband caught the snatcher with the help of the locals. It was Sanju, who tried to mislead the cops by identifying himself as Satish. However, thanks to fingerprint records, Sanju was identified and sent to jail.

When the Sarojini Nagar police learnt about Sanjus arrest recently, they secured his police custody remand and arrested him in the robbery case. His interrogation led to the solving of 10 more burglary and theft cases, says a senior police officer associated with cases against Sanju.

What the police is very worried about, though, is Sanjus modus operandi while in jail. He meets like-minded inmates, forms a gang, and starts committing crimes once they are released on bail.

It is a part of the professional policing to keep a watch on criminals and their activities. If a criminal is arrested, the investigating officer and other personnel of the police station concerned are duty-bound to keep themselves updated in terms of the court proceedings and release of the criminal from jail. Preventive measures should be taken to make sure the criminal does not begin a rerun of his criminal activities, says Dependra Pathak, special commissioner and chief spokesperson of the Delhi Police.The result for the Andhra Pradesh intermediate 2nd year or (Class 12) examinations 2018 was declared on Thursday.

Candidates can check their results by visiting the official website of the Board of Intermediate Education Andhra Pradesh at bieap.gov.in. They can also check their results by visiting http://www.examresults.net/ap-board-result/inter/ .

According to reports, around 457,292 candidates registered for the Andhra Pradesh Board intermediate second-year exams that started on March 1 and ended on March 19.

The intermediate public examinations, also conducted by Board of Intermediate Education, began on February 28 ended on March 19 in Telangana.

As many as 9,63,546 students - 4,55,635 first year and 5,07,911 second-year students, appeared for the exam at 1,294 test centres across the state.

The authorities took all precautions to prevent malpractices in the exam.

Apart from closed-circuit television or CCTV cameras in all the exam centres, they also installed GPRS system to prevent leakage of question papers from the centres by blocking calls and text and WhatsApp messages.

Note: You can also check your results here.The Delhi Police on Thursday said that two bank officials and a woman have been arrested over their alleged involvement in leaking the CBSE Class 10 mathematics paper, in connivance with a teacher, held earlier from Himachal Pradesh.

The three accused have been identified as Sheru Ram (35), branch manager of Union Bank of India, Om Prakash (58), head cashier of the same bank and the 40-year-old woman, who had circulated hand-written question papers of Class 12 economics and Class 10 mathematics on WhatsApp, which went viral on social media.

Last week, Rakesh Kumar, Amit Sharma and Ashok Kumar, all employees of DAV Centenary Public School in Una, were arrested by the crime branch in connection with the economics paper leak.

The police said Rakesh, who had been teaching at the DAV school as a PGT economics teacher for eight years, was also found involved in leaking the mathematics paper.

The woman, from Ferozepur in Punjab, was allegedly sent a handwritten copy of the leaked paper by Rakesh, the police said.

During interrogation, Rakesh revealed that he had also planned and executed the leak of Class 10 mathematics paper.

On March 23, he took out the question paper bundle of both Class 12 economics and Class 10 mathematics from the bank, said Alok Kumar, joint commissioner of police (Crime).

He gave the economics paper bundle to Amit and Ashok but kept the mathematics paper bundle in his bag and later opened it and took out a question paper. After taking the photographs of the mathematics paper on his cell phone, he kept the paper inside the cover and resealed it.

He then called one of his students to his residence and got it handwritten and took the photographs and sent them to his female relative in Firozpur through Whatsapp, said the officer.

She then sent the images to her sister in Panchkula who further sent it to her relative in Paschim Vihar.

Police said being the main custodians of the sealed question paper bundles of CBSE, the two bank officials were supposed to be present when the bank locker was opened and the centre superintendent was taking out the question paper bundle of the concerned subject on the date of the examination.

Rakesh was the centre superintendent of Jawahar Navodaya Public School in Una, where the CBSE exams were being held.

The economics paper was leaked on March 23, three days before the examination date in Una town, and was shared on WhatsApp by at least 40 groups.

The paper leak was exposed after an envelope containing four images of a hand-written copy of the question paper was delivered to the CBSE headquarters in Delhi on the evening of March 26, the day of the exam.

On March 30, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced the re-conduct the class 12 economics exam throughout the country on April 25.

The police has registered two cases in connection with the matter. The first case relating to the leak of the economics paper was filed on March 27, while the other on the mathematics paper leak was registered on March 28.Ananya Pandey may only be 19-years-old, but her sense of style far exceeds her age. While she lives in laid-back denim shorts and comfy tees, the actor, who makes her debut opposite actor Tiger Shroff in filmmaker Karan Johars Student of the Year 2, wouldnt be caught looking anything less than top-to-toe chic. The young star also enjoys feminine, ethereal style, and we cant get enough of her sexy-yet-pretty designer lehengas.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Apr 11, 2018 at 12:24am PDT

Always reaching for the perfect little black dress or short dresses in pastel tones that are often adorned in delicate beads or lace, actor Chunky Pandays daughter has a whimsical wardrobe that is every girlie-girls dream.

Weve rounded up some of Ananyas sweetest looks, from pretty floral to summer-cool denims. Keep scrolling to see them all:

1. For the 25th annual Bal des Debutantes in Paris, also known as Le Bal, in November 2017, Ananya picked a strapless blue gown by French designer Jean Paul Gaultier, jewellery by Payal New York and shoes by Christian Louboutin. The pretty pick also warranted her very first-ever interview (a sure sign that shes a fashion fan?).

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Nov 27, 2017 at 6:40am PST

2. She wore a rich metallic asymmetrical Nandita Mahtani gown in December 2017.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Dec 24, 2017 at 1:23am PST

3. Ananya wore this super-chic black tulle dress from designers Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla and black lace-up heels in November 2018.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Nov 25, 2017 at 7:10am PST

4. Ananyas peach lehenga adorned in ruffles and tassels complemented her perfect complexion. She wore the Surily Goel design in October 2017.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Oct 22, 2017 at 6:44am PDT

5. Ananya in a heavily-embroidered handcrafted Manish Malhotra lehenga in October 2017.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Oct 20, 2017 at 7:06am PDT

6. This baby pink embellished lehenga from Seema Khan couldnt have been more fitting for a princess. Ananya wore it in February 2017.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Feb 27, 2017 at 1:58am PST

7. She wore this figure-hugging salmon pink jumpsuit with a dainty choker in May 2017.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on May 21, 2017 at 9:22am PDT

8. Ananya went with a black mini-dress with sheer sleeves and equally snazzy boots in November 2017.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Nov 22, 2017 at 8:11am PST

9. This October 2016 Instagram shows Ananyas off-duty, laid-back style.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Oct 30, 2016 at 1:45am PDT

10. Ananya shows in this August 2016 look how matching your printed top and bottom with a flash of flesh in between is the perfect look in sunshine season.

A post shared by Ananya  (@ananyapanday) on Aug 20, 2016 at 7:01am PDT

Follow @htlifeandstyle for moreDays after holding a mahapanchayat and deciding to hold a massive protest demanding relocation of the Bandhwari waste treatment plant, residents of seven villages called off the stir after a meeting with chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar at the PWD rest house in the Civil Lines on Thursday evening.

Following a mahapanchayat on Thursday morning at the Teen Murti Mandir, next to the Gurugram-Faridabad toll, residents of seven villages  Bandhwari, Dera, Gwal Pahari, Ghata, Baliawas, Behrampur and Mangar (in Faridabad)  held a silent protest outside the Bandhwari waste treatment plant seeking its relocation. They claimed that over 100 residents have died of cancer owing to the contamination of groundwater resources by the waste treatment plant.

However, they called off the protest following an assurance from the chief minister that his government will look into their concerns. He further assured them that the waste-to-energy plant (WTE) is being built keeping their interests in mind.

The CM is scheduled to lay the foundation stone for the Bandhwari waste processing plant on Friday.

The CM has assured us that his government will look into our concerns on the environmental impact on the waste treatment plant on priority. He said that the plant will cater to our interests as it will not only help process tonnes of untreated solid waste that piles up at the site but will also prevent leachate (chemical leak) from contaminating our groundwater resources and seeping into the water table, Manoj, a resident of Bandhwari, said.

Read I Gurugram: Officials meet Bandhwari villagers with health problems

The protesting residents said that the seven villages are home to approximately 50,000 people.

Environmentalists said that a report issued by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in September 2017, which had tested groundwater samples from Bandhwari, Mangar, and Dera, confirmed that the groundwater sources in the area were contaminated by the leachate (liquid that drains or leaches from a landfill) from the Bandhwari plant.

The CPCB report confirmed groundwater contamination and hence, it is vital that the government relocates the plant. Across the world, WTE plants have ceased to exist or are not considered viable, as the process of burning mixed waste results in emission of toxic gases which have a severe neurological and biological impact on humans, Vaishali Rana Chandra, an environmentalist, said.

Chandra claimed that she and a few other environmentalists had even sent reports of the findings of the environmental impact of the plant to Khattar and Dr Harsha Vardhan, the Union minister for environment, forest and climate change, earlier, but did not get any response.

The residents said a team from the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) visited the affected villages on Wednesday after reports of cancer-related deaths surfaced. After taking a tour of these villages for 3-4 hours, they determined that the cancer deaths couldnt be attributed to the plant.

Dr Asrudin, the chief medical officer of MCG who led a team to the villages on Wednesday, did not wish to comment on the matter and said that he has already submitted his report. He reiterated that there is nothing in the report submitted by the MCG team to suggest that the Bandhwari waste processing plant poses any health hazard.

Despite assurances from the CM, few residents continue to hold the waste plant responsible for losing their loved ones.

My wife, Ramwati, died of cancer in the gallbladder in January. Doctors said that environmental factors could well have been responsible for my wifes death. Since the time the Bandhwari waste treatment became functional, many residents have been diagnosed with cancer, Karam Singh Tanwar, a resident of Gwal Pahari, said.

Nirmal Singh, a resident of Bandhwari, lost his brother Veer Singh to kidney cancer a month ago.

There has been a spike in cancer cases in the last few years and my brother was of the unfortunate ones who fell prey to this disease. It seems the chemical contamination from the waste treatment plant is taking a toll on villagers nearby, Singh said.A man was robbed of 3.6 lakh in Sohna after he tried to purchase a car at an ostensibly low price in Sohna on Tuesday. The accused, a group of six, had lured the victim Pradeep Kumar, a resident of Mohaniya in Kaimur district of Bihar, with a car advertisement on an online site, offering the vehicle at a very cheap price. However, when the victim reached Sohna Dhani, the group accosted him and snatched his cash on gunpoint, he told the police.

The police, meanwhile, said that they have identified the accused involved in the robbery and they would be arrested soon. All the men involved in this crime have been identified and they will be arrested soon. A similar gang was arrested few days back and they operate along the same lines, said Ram Kumar, SHO, City Sohna police station. He also said that buyers should be wary of fake advertisements on websites and refrain from carrying large amounts of cash as it makes them easy targets.

Meanwhile, in two other incidents, two Gurugram residents were duped of over 2 lakh. One of the men had fraudulent transactions carried out on his credit card. As for the other, the accused swapped his ATM card with a fake one and withdrew cash from his bank account.

Read I Major call centre racket duping US citizens busted in Gurgaon, 33 arrested

In the first incident, the victim Ramesh Chander, a resident of Gandhi Nagar, Gurugram, told the police that he had gone to purchase household goods from the canteen at Air Force Station, Gurugram, where he used his ATM card for the payment. However, after a few days when he checked his account, more than 1 lakh had been withdrawn from his account. A complaint in this regard was made by him at Sadar police station, which registered a case against the unidentified accused. The case is being probed, said an official.

In the other incident, a man lost 98,000 when criminals used his credit card to withdraw the cash. A case was registered against the accused under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code and the IT Act. The police said a case has been registered and the matter is being investigated.An eight-year-old girl whose gangrape and murder has split Jammu and Kashmir along communal lines was held captive in a temple, sedated and assaulted repeatedly, says the state polices chargesheet.

The girl, who belonged to the nomadic Muslim Bakarwal community, was abducted on January 10 in Jammu regions Kathua district while grazing horses near her home. A retired revenue department official planned the crimes against her, says the chargesheet filed by the crime branch of the Jammu and Kashmir police.

Sanji Ram planned the abduction because he wanted to scare the Bakarwals and make them move out of Rassana village in the Hiranagar tehsil of Kathua, alleges the chargsheet. He allegedly enticed his nephew, a school dropout, into committing the crime, it says.

Eight people have been charged in the case: Sanji Ram, his nephew, Sanji Rams son Vishal Jangotra, a friend of the nephew, a police sub-inspector, a head constable and two special police officers. The nephew was first identified as a juvenile although the charge sheet said a DNA test showed him to be 19-years-old.

The nephew allegedly told Sanji Rams son, Vishal Jangotra, in Meerut over the phone about the abduction of the girl and asked him to come to Kathua if he wanted to satisfy his lust.

The policemen were supposed to help destroy evidence and cover up the crime in exchange for bribes, its alleged.

The girl was held in a temple identified as Devasthan, which is run by Sanji Ram, after she was kidnapped, drugged constantly and subjected to multiple rapes including gang rape.

The girl was held in the temple until January 14 before the nephew strangled her to death and bludgeoned her with a stone to make sure she was dead, said the charge sheet.

It added that before she was killed, one of the accused asked his accomplices to wait as he also wanted to rape the girl. Her body was found on January 17 not too far from Devasthan.

According to the charge sheet, whatever surfaced in the course of investigation leads to the irresistible conclusion that the eight undoubtedly committed offences including kidnapping, wrongful confinement, gang rape, murder and tampering with evidence.

It also mentions that investigators along with forensic experts and a first-class executive magistrate visited the crime scene and a minute examination of the locations, including Devasthan, led to the recovery of blood stained wooden sticks and hair strands.

A few hair strands recovered from Devasthan and the nearby forest where the body was dumped, were sent to New Delhi for a DNA profiling. One of the strands from Devasthan matched with the girls DNA profile.Civilians thronging encounter sites are responsible for their deaths as bullets dont distinguish between a stone pelter and a militant, Jammu and Kashmir police chief S P Vaid said on Thursday as he again urged youth to stay away from such places as they were not marriage venues.

Nobody wants civilian deaths and the police and security forces are pained at such incidents, he emphasised.

We have been appealing to young boys to stay away from encounter sites. A bullet does not distinguish between a stone pelter and a militant. It has a trajectory to hit. They are responsible for their own deaths. They should not come to encounter sites, Vaid said in a live Twitter question-answer session.

He was replying to a question posed by one Tajamul Wani about civilian deaths in gunfights.

The strong words from the senior officer came a day after four civilians were killed in the crossfire in an encounter in Kulgam district. An Army-man also died in the line of duty while the three militants managed to flee after civilian casualties increased.

No citizen of India would like any civilian killing. We have been repeatedly requesting people not to come near the encounter sites when bullets fly whether from the militants or from the Army, from paramilitary force and police. They have a trajectory. They will not look for the chest of a particular person. They can hit anybody so it is advisable not to come near the encounter sites, DGP Vaid said.

It pains me most and pains all the forces when a civilian dies, he added.

Our effort is not even a single civilian should get hurt, but they have no business to be there. Marriage of the militant is not going on. Why are these boys coming near the militant encounter sites, he lamented.

Read | As civilians get caught in the crosshairs, Kashmir braces for unrest this summer

Four civilians, and a soldier, were killed on Wednesday in an encounter in Kulgams Khudwani village  the latest in a spate of deadly gunfights that threaten to push Kashmir into a spiral of protests for the third straight summer.

Official accounts and news reports show that since the beginning of 2018, 22 civilians were killed in the crossfire during gunfights and protests.

In a bid to reduce civilian interference at encounter sites, the government in January said it could offer amnesty to youth who have been booked in cases of stone pelting.

Responding to a question on the pending FIRs, Vaid said the police had already moved the concerned courts in such cases.

In some of the cases, parents were supposed to come and approach police stations and give an undertaking, he added.

To a question about solution of the Kashmir problem, he said violence was not the answer.

I personally feel that the gun is not the solution. Everybody concerned including our neighbour (Pakistan), and only way out is to sit together and talk it out and sort it out and gun is not a solution and violence is not a solution, he said.

Vaid said his most challenging task was post the Burhan Wani episode because as Special DG law and order to deal with the situation.

On the internet blockades, the DGP said my effort is to minimum disruption of internet. I am totally against it. But let me tell you there is mischief and misuse of it to spread hatred and false propaganda. This is what we want to prevent.

We want minimum disruption of education of children from Kashmir valley and we will ensure it, he added.Calcutta high court on Thursday directed all processes of the West Bengal rural polls to be suspended till April 16, when the state election commission (SEC)?will submit a report on the steps it has taken to ensure peaceful filing of nomination by the Opposition.

The court will decide on the next step only after going through the report.

Justice Subrata Talukdar delivered the order after hearing a petition by the Bengal unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The Trinamool Congress (TMC)?decided to approach a division bench of Calcutta high court against Thursdays order. The BJP filed a caveat so that there is no hearing at a division bench without informing its counsel.

Trinamool counsel and party MP, Kalyan Banerjee, argued both inside the court and outside that according to Article 243-O of the Constitution, courts do not have right to interfere in electoral matters after the election process started.

There is no precedence of courts interfering in such situations. While we think the poll process kicks off with the notification by the election commission, the court thought otherwise, said Banerjee outside the court.

Justice Talukdar also observed that, if necessary, the date of polling can change.

Since the nomination process began on April 2, opposition parties have been alleging that the ruling party supporters have indulged in violence and strong-arm tactics to prevent their candidates from filing nominations, an allegation dismissed by chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

The polling is scheduled to take place on May 1, 3 and 5. Counting is on May 8. Six people have died in violence surrounding the rural elections over the past month.

Countering Kalyan Banerjee, advocates for the petitioner maintained that under Section 43 of the West Bengal Panchayat Elections Act, 2003, the SEC has the powers to extend the date for completion of any election.

Opposition leaders welcomed the courts decision.

The Supreme Court directed Calcutta high court to redress the grievances of the common man centring the rural elections. I salute courts. At least they are listening to our agony when the government, the police and even the SEC are turning a deaf ear to our pleas, said state Congress president Adhir Chowdhury.

The court order justifies our grievances for which we called a six-hour bandh in Bengal on Friday, said Left Front chairman Biman Bose.

Ruling party leaders refrained from criticising the order but said they will have the last laugh.

The delight of the Opposition will be cut short by the people who will defeat them in the elections that will be held tomorrow or day after, said Trinamool secretary general, Partha Chatterjee.

The polls are crucial because the TMSC, which wants a larger role in national politics, wants to retain its hold over the states grassroots-level politics, while the BJP, fast emerging as Bengals main Opposition party, is keen to expand its footprint.

On Thursday, the judge asked the SEC secretary, Nilanjan Sandilya, how many candidates wanted to file their nominations on April 9 and 10, but couldnt. The official told the judge that he did not have the information ready at hand.

On the night of April 9, the SEC issued a notification extending the filing of nomination by a day (till 3 pm on April 10). But barely within 12 hours, state election commissioner, A K Singh, issued another notification withdrawing the extension order and cited two letters  one by the state government and the other by Trinamool Congress vice-president Kalyan Banerjee  had pointed out legal infirmities in the earlier notification.

The BJP moved the apex court that ordered the matters should be heard by Calcutta high court on April 12.

The court also imposed a penalty of R5 lakh on petitioner Pratap Banerjee, general secretary of the Bengal unit of the BJP for not informing the court that he also approached the Supreme Court on Tuesday with the same complaint.

The CPI(M) had also moved the Supreme Court on Wednesday with an appeal to postpone the panchayat elections till the question of the filing of nominations by opposition candidates was settled.Several Union ministers on Thursday sought to defend the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, facing criticism over its response to the alleged gang rape of a minor girl in Unnao, saying it is committed to protecting women and ensuring that law takes its course.

BJP legislator from Bangarmau, Kuldeep Singh Sengar, was on Thursday booked by the UP Police on various charges under the IPC, including rape, kidnapping and criminal intimidation, in connection with the alleged rape of the 17-year-old girl.

The state government said it would hand the probe over to the CBI.

... When we say Beti Bachao, we really mean that. We are here to safeguard the interests of our daughters and we are committed to their safety. As far as Unnao incident is concerned, the law of justice will prevail, culture minister Mahesh Sharma told reporters.

Sharma said whosoever is found responsible for the incident, irrespective of his stature, will be punished.

Women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi said action should be taken in every such case against women.

This is distressing and justice will be done. The case has been given to CBI and law will take its course, she said.

Backing the Yogi Adityanath government, railway minister Piyush Goyal said the Uttar Pradesh government is working day and night to maintain law and order in the state.

The state government will bring to book all the culprits in the state, he said.

The Uttar Pradesh government is facing strong criticism over its response to the case. Opposition political parties have hit out at the BJP government in the state.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wedneday wondered if Prime Minister Narendra Modi would observe a fast on the alleged rape and death of the complainants father in custody, which he said has shamed humanity.

The case came into the limelight after the victim tried to immolate herself outside chief minister Yogi Adityanaths residence on Sunday alleging police inaction against BJP MLA Sengar.

On Wednesday night, an SIT investigating the case handed over its report to the government after which it was decided that an FIR would be registered against the MLA and the case would be handed over to the CBI.

A purported video of the alleged rape survivors father before his death was shared on social media and was aired by several TV news channels. In the video, he alleged that he was mercilessly beaten up, including with rifle butts, by the MLAs brother and others.

It also showed the victims father  who died on Monday  with serious wounds on his back. The veracity of the video could not be ascertained.

(This story has not been modified from its original version.)A war against the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi had begun, Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu said on Thursday equating Modis rule with the British Raj.

The people will not give up the fight till they pull down the government, added president of the Telugu Desam Party that pulled out of the BJP-led NDA last month over the Centres failure to grant special category status to Andhra Pradesh.

Modi has betrayed the faith we had reposed in the last four years. Now, it is time to wage a war against him and teach him a befitting lesson for his great betrayal, Naidu said after inaugurating the Andhra Pradesh Police Technology Centre at Amaravati, the proposed capital of the bifurcated state.

Earlier in the day, while interacting with his cabinet colleagues, Naidu said there was no difference between the British government (of pre-Independence period) and the present BJP government at the Centre.

Have you ever seen a Prime Minister going on hunger strike in the history of the country? He is trying to blame it on the people of the state for his inability to run the Parliament. He is trying to instigate his party cadre against us and gain political mileage, Naidu alleged.

The TDP president claimed that Modi had denied special category status and other benefits to Andhra Pradesh only because of political reasons.

Now, he is trying to provoke other states against us. He takes pleasure in stalling development of our state. Unfortunately, some parties in the state are supporting Modi for their own political benefits, he said.

Referring to the state-wide bandh call given by Pratyeka Hoda Sadhana Samithi (Committee to achieve special category status for AP) on April 16 to protests against the BJP governments denial of special status to the state, the chief minister said strikes and shutdowns would cause more harm to the state than highlighting the issue.

We need to educate the people against the Modi government and take the battle to Delhi. What is the point in stalling the development in the state? It will make Modi happier, he added.

BJP leaders take up deeksha in support of Modi

Meanwhile, the BJP leaders, including MPs, MLAs and MLCs, took part in one-day deeksha in different parts of the state to express their solidarity with the Prime Minister and BJP president Amit Shah staged one-day fasting to register their protest against recent Parliament logjam.

On the other hand, activists of TDP, Left parties and other organisations demanding special category status protested against the one-day-long fast undertaken by BJP leaders across the state on Thursday.

In Vijayawada, Eluru, Bhimavaram and Visakhapatnam the agitators were taken into police custody as they came into blows with the BJP activists. In several places TDP Legislators and workers undertook Padayatras protesting against BJP leaders hunger strike.

Alleging that the TDP was behind these attacks, BJP spokesperson GVL Narsimha Rao, who sat on fast in Vijayawada Dharna Chowk, said that permission to hold the day-long fast in Lenin Centre was denied at the behest of the ruling TDP.

State BJP president Kambhampati Haribabu in Visakhapatnam said that Naidu and the city police commissioner Yoganand had provided moral support to the attackers.The Congress on Thursday attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his alleged silence over the Unnao rape case and questioned why the accused BJP MLA is yet to be arrested.

The Uttar Pradesh police on Thursday registered an FIR against ruling BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in connection with the alleged gang-rape of a minor girl in Unnao, hours after the government said it would hand over investigation into the case to CBI.

The victim did not name him (the MLA) because she was afraid. Why then was he not arrested? Congress leader Kapil Sibal told reporters in New Delhi.

The former Union minister added that once the case is transferred to the CBI, the investigation agency would take its own time to conduct the probe and the MLA would go absconding meanwhile.

After some months, the CBI would give a report that he had no role. Some people would again threaten the family (of the victim). We are seeing whats happening in the country, he said.

Sibal also asked the Prime Minister to observe fast over rape incidents and register his protest against Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath over the Unnao rape case.

The BJP is holding a country-wide fast on Thursday to corner the Opposition over the recent washout of the Budget session of Parliament.

Sibal also alleged that Modi is not serious about crimes against women across the country.

Referring to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report for 2016, he said that BJP-ruled states have the highest crime rate against women.

Alleging Modi to be not serious over such incidents, Sibal cited NCRB statistics to suggest that BJP-ruled Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh reported highest crime against women in 2016.

Sibal also referred to reports on the Adityanath governments decision to withdraw a rape and kidnapping case against a former Union minister.

The chief minister wants to withdraw a case against a rape accused former minister  this is their mindset  the Prime Minister is silent, Sibal.Warring members of the Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadavs family are likely to bury the hatchet to work together for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, two party leaders familiar with the development said.

Mulayams brother and aide Shivpal Singh Yadav and cousin Ram Gopal Yadav, who is close Akhilesh Yadav, met in New Delhi about a week back, the party leaders said on condition of anonymity.

The turf-war within the family over the control of the party had sharpened during last years assembly elections. The then chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, staged a coup by getting elected as the party chief, ousting his father.

Differences between the father and son revolved around political and bureaucratic appointments, ticket distribution, campaign strategy, and alliances.

The competing ambitions of Shivpal and Ram Gopal were also key drivers of the rift.

The feud, however, is slowly on the mend. Shivpal, who was allegedly slighted by Akhilesh and was subsequently courted by the BJP, voted for the Samajwadi Party candidate in the last months Rajya Sabha election ending speculations about him quitting the party. This was seen as an early signal of a possible patch-up.

The meeting takes forward the process of reconciliation. Sab kushal mangal hai (everything is fine), a source close to Shivpal said, confirming the meeting.

The Samajwadi Party leader, who was in Etawah, was not available for comment on the development.

The meeting between Shivpal and Ram Gopal is significant given their bitter past. Shivpal has reconciled to his new status in the Samajwadi Party, a party leader said.

Shivpal, a former national general secretary of the Samajwadi Party, might soon return as a party office-bearer but may not get as prominent role as he used to enjoy during Mulayams tenure as SP president, the leader said.

On Tuesday, Mulayam endorsed Akhileshs decision to explore an alliance with his political rival Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

It is a very good effort...with both the parties coming together, no one will be able to stop them (the two parties) in the Lok Sabha election...there is a need to keep it going, Mulayam said at a public meeting at Kishni in Mainpuri. The SP under Mulayam and Shivpal had a deeply acrimonious relationship with Mayawati and the generational shift in SP has helped the process of rapprochement with the BSP.

The Samajwadi Party patron also thanked BSP workers for successfully backing the SP candidates in the recently held bypolls to two Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh.

Mulayam has conveyed to his extended family that Akhileshs move was in the right direction and everybody within the family and the party should support him, another SP leader said.

The SP patriarchs endorsement of his sons political move is seen as reinforcement of his faith in Akhilesh and another sign of the reconciliation within the family. Since losing power in Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh fastened his grip over the SP, by edging out Shivpal loyalists from the organisation and getting re-elected as partys national president in October last year for a 5-year term.Bharatiya Janata Party lawmaker Kuldeep Singh Sengar has been booked for allegedly raping a 17-year-old girl last year in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao even as the Yogi Adityanath-led government handed over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation amid widespread criticism and outrage over police inaction.

The first information report against Sengar, who represents the Bangarmau constituency in Unnao, was registered at Makhi police station under various sections of the Indian Penal Code as well as the stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012.

The FIR was registered on the complaint of the mother of the girl, who was allegedly raped and harassed by the MLA.

The Uttar Pradesh government also handed over the cases of rape and the custodial death of the teenagers father to the probe agency. The girl has accused Sengars brother Atul of assaulting her father, who was later arrested for allegedly illegally possessing firearms and died of his injuries in judicial custody.

The state government has sent a letter to the department of personnel and training and Union ministry of home affairs for the central probe.

Hours before he was charged with rape, Sengar visited the house of the senior superintendent of police in Lucknow on Wednesday.

But instead of arresting him, as media reports suggested prior to his visit, a policeman at the house of the senior superintendent told Sengar that he will be contacted if needed. He insisted to reporters that he was being framed.

The decision to handover the case to the agency was taken after the Adityanath government received the report of the special investigation team headed by additional director general of police (Lucknow zone) Rajeev Krishna, a government official said.

The government made the report public soon after BJP chief Amit Shah left for Delhi after holding a marathon meeting with Adityanath and other party leaders.

A separate inquiry report has been submitted by deputy inspector general of police (prison) Love Kumar on the role of Unnao jail officials where the father of the girl died in judicial custody. The district magistrate of Unnao has also submitted a report to the state government on lapses on part of the district hospital.

The state government also decided to suspend chief medical superintendent Dr DK Dwivedi and EMO Dr Prashant Upadhyay based on the report submitted by Krishna.

Disciplinary proceedings have been initiated against three doctors namely Manoj Kumar (ortho surgeon), GP Sachan (surgeon) and Gaurav Agrawal (EMO) for laxity in giving proper medical care to the victims father, both prior to judicial custody and on referral from jail to the district hospital while in judicial custody, a statement said.

Circle officer Safipur Kunwar Bahadur Singh has been suspended for negligence in handling the repeated complaints given by the victim, it added.

The state government has also ordered to provide adequate security to the girl and her family.

The alleged rape took place on July 4 last year but the MLA was not formally named in the investigation. A day before the girls father died, she attempted suicide in front of Adityanaths residence to force the police to prosecute Sengar.

She said on Wednesday that she and her family had been placed under house arrest and told a social worker she met that Sengar had also sexually harassed other girls.

The Allahabad high court took cognisance of the case and asked the state government for a response. It said it will hear the case on Thursday and appointed senior advocate Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi as an amicus curiae in the case to represent the girl.The charge sheet filed by the Crime Branch in the rape and murder case of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district of Jammu has revealed the depravity of the crime. In January, the minor girl was sedated and held captive inside a small temple where she was raped repeatedly for a week before being bludgeoned to death, the charge sheet says.

The abduction, rape and killing of the Muslim Bakherwal girl was part of a carefully planned strategy to remove the minority nomadic community from the area.

Heres what we need to know about the accused and their role in the gang rape and murder of the eight-year-old:

Sanji Ram, 60: A retired revenue department official, he is the main conspirator who reportedly wanted to dislodge the nomadic Muslim Bakarwal community from his native Rasana village. He incited his nephew, an alleged minor, to abduct the eight-year-old as revenge for the Bakarwals having beaten up the boy in the past.

Sanji Rams nephew: Sanji Rams nephew who is 15, (19 according to a DNA report, said the charge sheet), was expelled from his school in Sikdi, Hiranagar, for unruly behaviour with girls. He is an alcoholic and a drug user, says the charge sheet. On January 13, he strangulated the girl to death before bludgeoning her face with a stone twice.

Deepak Khajuria: A special police officer, who had a bone to pick with the Bakarwal. Deepak convinced Sanji Rams nephew to kidnap the girl with the assurance that he would help him get through his board exams.

Parvesh Kumar, alias Mannu: A friend whom the juvenile took into confidence to execute the plan. On January 10, the juvenile and Parvesh drugged the girl in a forest. The juvenile raped her. Parvesh also attempted to rape her. They took the unconscious girl to Sanji Rams Devasthan (temple) and locked her up. There, she was drugged and gang-raped repeatedly.

Vishal Jangotra, alias Shamma: Sanji Rams son who studies in Meerut. He raped the girl with the juvenile who called him and asked him to return in case he wanted to satisfy his lust. On the morning of January 13, Vishal and the juvenile gang-raped the girl inside the Devasthan. On the same day, Parvesh, Vishal and the juvenile took the victim from the Devasthan to a nearby culvert, on Sanji Rams directions, to kill her.

Tilak Raj: A head constable, he struck a deal with Sanji Ram on January 12. He took Rs 1.5 lakh from Sanji Rams sister, Tripta Devi, to scuttle the probe. Tripta and Tilak were good friends and classmates at the government primary school in Dhamiyal.

Anand Dutta: A sub inspector, he was paid Rs 3 lakh in all by January 13 through Tilak. After the girls body was recovered on January 17, he was paid another Rs 1 lakh and he asked the juvenile to stick to a tutored version of events. A deal was struck at Rs 5 lakh for Anand and Tilak so they would tamper with evidence by washing the girls bloodstained clothes and leaving out other evidence.

Surinder Kumar: A special police officer, he conducted a recce of the surroundings of Sanji Rams Devasthan on January 14.Rakesh Kumar, the school teacher arrested on April 7 for allegedly leaking the CBSE Class 12 economics paper, also revealed the Class 10 mathematics paper, said the Delhi Police on Thursday.

Both the question papers were leaked last month causing nationwide furore and sparking protests at various places. The Delhi Police Crime Branch had registered two separate cases in connection with leakage of both the question papers.

Police achieved a major a breakthrough with the arrest of Rakesh, who taught commerce at DAV School in Una in Himachal Pradesh, and two of his colleagues on April 7. Amit Sharma, a clerk and Ashok Kumar, a peon of the school, were also arrested in connection with the case.

Rakesh had initially said that when he went to collect the question papers of computer science and information practices from a Union Bank of India branch in Una on March 23, he picked up a packet of economics paper as well. But he later admitted to have picked up a Class 10 mathematics paper bundle as well, said deputy commissioner of police (crime) G Ram Gopal Naik. The maths examination was held on March 28.

The economics paper was leaked on March 23  three days before the exam date. Rakesh had purportedly leaked the Class 12 economics paper to help a student who took private tuitions from him, but ended up sharing it with his relative too from where it went viral through more than 30 WhatsApp groups in Delhi, Punjab and Haryana. His reasons behind leaking the Class 10 paper, however, were not shared by Naik.

Police have clarified that so far, no monetary angle has come up as a motive for leaking either of the two papers.

Earlier last month, in a police complaint, the board had said that a day before the exam, an e-mail was received on the CBSE chairpersons official ID informing about the leak, according to officials.

In the mail, the sender had stated that the mathematics paper was leaked on WhatsApp, they added. The mail also contained attachments of the handwritten mathematics paper allegedly leaked on WhatsApp, according to the complaint.

Delhi Police had registered two cases. The first case in connection with the leak of the Class 12 economics paper was lodged on March 27 and the second pertaining to the leak of the Class 10 mathematics paper was lodged on March 28, following a complaint by the regional director of CBSE.

The cases were registered on charges of criminal breach of trust, cheating and criminal conspiracy.A 38-year-old Indian engineer in the US state of Ohio, accused of funding a top al-Qaeda leader, has pleaded guilty to concealing financing terrorism. Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad is accused of sending money to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was later designated a terrorist and killed by a US drone in 2011.

Mohammad is to receive an agreed-upon prison sentence of 60 months, although he would receive credit for the 30 months he has already spent in the Lucas County jail awaiting trial, The Blade newspaper reported on Wednesday.

US District Judge Jeffrey Helmick told him that due to his plea and conviction, he would be deported to India. You ultimately will be removed from this country and told you are not welcome back, the judge said.

Mohammad had studied at the University of Illinois and lived in Toledo since 2006.

Two co-defendants, Sultane Roome Salim, 43, and his brother Asif Ahmed Salim, 37, are scheduled for a change of plea hearing before Judge Helmick later on Thursday.

Michael Freeman, an assistant US attorney, outlined the factual basis for the charge to which Ibrahim Mohammad pleaded guilty. Freeman said Mohammads brother and others raised money in 2009 in the United Arab Emirates to deliver to al-Awlaki in Yemen.

Freeman said Farooq raised some funds through credit card fraud, sought funds from others he knew, and enlisted his brother in the United States to help. Two associates of Farooq delivered $7,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki in Yemen in late January, 2009, Freeman said. In July, 2009, Farooq delivered $22,000 to an associate of al-Awlaki.

Ibrahim knew, Freeman said, that al-Awlaki had expressed support for the killing of 13 US service personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, by Nidal Hasan on November 5, 2009, and that al-Awlaki had been involved in the attempt to destroy an airliner over Detroit on December 25, 2009.Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti on Thursday said she will seek exemplary punishment for the gang-rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district and bring in death penalty for such crimes.

We will never ever let another child suffer in this way, she said on Twitter.

The girl, who belonged to the nomadic Muslim Bakarwal community, was abducted on January 10 in while grazing horses near her home. She was held captive in a temple, sedated and raped repeatedly, the police has charged.

Read | Held captive, raped repeatedly: Chargesheet describes atrocities on Kathua girl

Thousands of members of a radical Hindu group have marched to demand the release of the six men accused in the repeated rape and killing of the girl inside a Hindu temple. Hundreds of Hindu lawyers have protested that the men, two of them police officers, are innocent.

The chief minister earlier assured that her government will not allow law to be obstructed in the investigation of the case.Indias terrible record in crimes against women is once again international headlines after the gang-rape, torture and death of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua district.

The girl was abducted and savagely attacked to terrify the Bakarwals, a Muslim community of nomadic herders she belonged to, into leaving Kathua, the police have alleged.

International news organisations reports speak about how the crime has split Jammu and Kashmir along communal lines and that it was another instance of battleground in Indias religious wars. These organisations noted that news about the crime in Kathua came as India was debating a 17-year-old womans allegation of rape against a legislator in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao district.

Heres how the foreign publications reported the Kathua case. [Note: The name of the murdered girl in Kathua has been removed from the news reports quoted here.]

New York Times

On Tuesday, the NYT carried a story by the newspapers South Asia correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman that focused on how the rape and murder had fuelled religious tensions in India.

It seemed another isolated, horrific episode of sexual violence in India, perpetrated against a powerless girl by brutal men. But in the months since...the murder, the case has become another battleground in Indias religious wars.

Hindu nationalists have turned it into a rallying cry  not calling for justice for..., but rushing to the defence of the accused. All of the men arrested are Hindu, and ...nomadic people, the Bakarwals, are Muslim, says the story.

The Washington Post

The Washington Post covered the case in detail, with stories and follow-ups. In her article, Malwa Eltagouri writes of how the crime has inflamed Hindu-Muslim tensions. ...case is the latest example of Indias religious friction: As some denounce sexual violence and demand justice for [the girls] family, others demand justice for the men accused.

In a column for the Wapo, Indian journalist Barkha Dutt writes, This week, two cases of rape and murder  one of a shepherd girl in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir, the other in Unnao, in Indias most populous state, Uttar Pradesh  have been moments of acute national shame. They have proved how the powerful conspire to enable and protect sexual abusers. Worse, they have exposed the ugliest underbelly of India. Political and societal responses to these charges of rape have revealed entrenched misogyny, religious hatred and a shameful class bias. They have held up a mirror to the worst in us.

The Associated Press

The news agencys story contrasts the Kathua case with the protests that erupted after the December 16 gang rape in Delhi in 2012. But the gang rape, torture and death of a Muslim girl in...Kashmir has seen far different protests: Thousands of members of a radical Hindu group with links to the ruling party have marched to demand the release of the six men accused in the repeated rape and killing of the girl inside a Hindu temple. Hundreds of Hindu lawyers have protested that the men, two of them police officers, are innocent, it says.

BBC

The BBC has a detailed report on how the girl disappeared and the subsequent investigation, and how the incident has set Kashmir on edge. The crime has shocked the community, exposing the fault lines between Hindu-majority Jammu and the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley in a sharply divided state, the BBC report says.

The Asia Times

A report in The Asia Times said that details of the crime remained cloudy while the response of local officials was strangely subdued amid claims that her community occupies land eyed by a rival Hindu village.

The report gives context on the historic tussle over land ownership in the region that between the Hindus and the nomadic Muslim tribes. The story quotes social activist and lawyer Talib Hussain, who is fighting the girls case, on Kathuas history. Almost 90% of the land is custodian property, and 100% of it is occupied by members of the majority community. Over the past three to four years, tensions over land occupation have been so high that communal boundaries have been fixed over it. Even if a cow owned by one community infiltrates into land owned by the other, its not returned. What do we say about humans? he says.Having failed to ensure a big gathering at their March 23 protest in Delhi, farmer unions across the country have now decided to start a fresh agitation from June 1 by not selling anything in the market, including milk vegetables and foodgrains.

The farmers are demanding a loan waiver and implementation of Swaminathan Commission. Growers from Haryana will also join the protest, titled Kisan Avkash (farmers on leave), under the banner of Rashtriya Kisan Mahasangh.

They will sit on dharnas in their respective villages and will not sell anything in the market. They are even saying they will not purchase anything from the market till the protest will continue.

Farmers are also opposing visits of BJP leaders in their villages after the police action against farmers on March 23 at Radaur in which 35 farmers were detained and about 150 were booked under various sections of the IPC.

Talking to Hindustan Times, Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) chief Gurnam Singh Chaduni, who is also among seven members of the Mahasangh, said, The decision about Kisan Avkash was taken unanimously in a meeting of farmer unions. It was decided that the farmers are left with no other option but to boycott the market. The protest will continue for at least 10 days and will be extended, if required, Chaduni added.

Thousands of farmers associated with seven farmer unions of the state are likely to join the protest and farmer leaders have already started a campaign and are appealing to people to extend their support.

Chaduni accused the BP governments at the Centre and in the state of suppressing the voice of farmers, who wanted to protest peacefully for their demands of a loan waiver and implementation of Swaminathan Commission.

He said farmer leaders are also not satisfied over the Centres assurances given to social activist Anna Hazare with regard to the welfare of growers .

By holding this protest, we will show our strength to the government peacefully, without blocking roads and disturbing anybody, said Prem Chand, a farmer of Yamunanagar.

Farmers are also opposing visits of BJP leaders in their villages after the police action against farmers on March 23 at Radaur in which 35 farmers were detained and about 150 were booked under various sections of the IPC.Scores of Congress workers assembled near India Gate in central Delhi on Thursday night after party chief Rahul Gandhi called on people to join a silent, peaceful protest demanding justice for victims of rape and murder.

Gandhi said the protest was not a political statement, and demanded action from the BJP-led Centre to ensure womens safety.

One after another, there have instances of women and children being raped and murdered. We want the government to resolve these issues, Gandhi said at the vigil.

Several senior Congress leaders, including Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Kapil Sibal and Ambika Soni, were also present at the protest. Gandhis sister Priyanka was also there with her husband and children.

Follow live updates:

1:06am: Police begin dispersing crowds thronging the area around India Gate. At least 1,000 people had gathered to join the protest, according to several policemen on duty at the location.

12:57am: There have been incidents, one after the other, of women and children being murdered and rape. We want the government to take action against this. We want the this (BJP) government to resolve these issues. Women are afraid to step out of their homes, says Rahul Gandhi near India Gate.

12:45am: This is a matter of security of women, this is not a political issue. There hundreds of people standing hear demanding justice. The Centre needs to do something, Rahul Gandhi says at the vigil.

#KathuaRapeCase #UnnaoRapeCase | View from the ground: People gathered near India Gate in New Delhi for a candlelight vigil to protest the rapes of minors  the Kathua case of an eight-year-old who was also murdered and the Unnao case of a teenager. pic.twitter.com/6LfaDJL0Tu  Hindustan Times (@htTweets) April 12, 2018

12:44am: We want the BJP government to address the issues of rape, says Rahul Gandhi.

12:43am: BJP leader Vaibhav Aggarwal calls the Congress-led protest near India Gate a fashion walk on NDTV channel. Says people are out there (at the candlelight vigil) taking selfies.

12:42am: Priyanka Vadra has been stopped from reaching India Gate, says NDTV.

12:39am: NDTV visuals show Priyanka Vadra tells people not to jostle each other and says this is to be a peaceful protest. Those who are here to push around people must go home, she says in Hindi.

12:32am: A student present at the protest, Noor Alam, says he has come to seek justice, and not for any political reason.

12:29am: TV reports says Priyanka Vadra is present at the vigil with her children.

Priyanka Vadra (centre, in blue) sits in protest. (Raj k Raj/HT Photo)

12:26am: Scores of people carry lit candles, shout slogans against the government over the rape of minors in Kathua and Unnao. Scenes reminiscent of protests that were carried out in 2012 after the December 16 gang rape of a paramedic in the national capital.

12:21am: Congress leader Randeep Surjewala says the peoples conscience has woken up.

12:15am: Ghulam Nabi Azad accuses the BJP government of sleeping. So at this time Congress will have to wake them up. PM had given a slogan Beti Padhao, Beti Bachao and its in his regime that our girls are being raped. He isnt taking action against his ministers who are trying to save the rape accused, Nabi says referring to the Unnao case. UP BJP legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar is accused of raping a teenager.

12:13am: Police put up barricades to control crowds heading towards India Gate. People climb over the barricades.

Police barricades block people from advancing. (Ridhima Shukla/HT Photo)

12:10am: Congress president Rahul Gandhi arrives at the vigil, joins the march. UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi also present.

Rahul Gandhi reaches for the candlelight march at India Gate against Kathua and Unnao cases. #Delhi pic.twitter.com/U53vuw3Xbu  ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2018

12:06am: People chant slogans of Beti bachao, demand death penalty for the culprits.

12:01am: People begin marching towards India Gate.

11:58pm: Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal says the issues should not be politicised. Whoever commits such heinous crimes do not have a religion, he says.

Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal (Rhidhima Shukla/HT Photo)

11:53pm: Congress chief Rahul Gandhis sister Priyanka and her husband Robert Vadra are also present.

11:55pm: Kapil Sibal, Ambika Soni and Randeep Surjewala are among the Congress leaders present at the vigil.

11:51pm: Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad speaks at the candlelight vigil.

11:40pm: Traffic jams on roads leading towards India Gate.

11:30pm: People begin gathering in groups to march towards India Gate.

The girl, who belonged to the nomadic Muslim Bakarwal community, was abducted on January 10 in Kathua district while grazing horses near her home. A retired revenue department official planned the crimes against her, says the chargesheet filed by the crime branch of the Jammu and Kashmir police.

A Special Investigation Team formed to probe the incident has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destroying evidence.

The case has left Jammu on tenterhooks, polarising the region on communal lines and once again exposed fault lines in the ruling coalition.

Several Congress leaders accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of being silent on the issue.Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a one-day-long fast with BJP leaders in Karnatakas Hubli on Thursday to protest against the Oppositions conduct in Parliament.

BJP president Amit Shah also staged a sit-in at Hubli on the same day.

Both the Opposition and the BJP have blamed each other for the repeated disruptions in the budget session of Parliament, which concluded on April 6 with several key bills pending as the country heads towards the 2019 general elections.

The BJP leaders protest, to be observed in poll-bound Karnataka, comes days after the Congress had earlier this week held a similar fast to expose the ruling partys lies and to promote communal harmony. The Opposition partys fast was also to protest against the clashes during Bharat Bandh organised by Dalits across India on April 2.

Here are the updates:

3pm: PM Modi observes the fast as he continues with his official work, including addressing the 10th edition of Defence Expo in Tamil Nadu.

BJP president Amit Shah undertook the hunger strike at Dharwad in election-bound Karnataka along with partys CM candidate BS Yeddyurappa and other MPs.

2:30pm: Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani and several BJP leaders, including MPs and MLAs, participate in the fast.

2pm: BJP ministers and partys Karnataka leaders observe the fast on Thursday in cities across the state.

The Modi government wants to make laws for the people but the Congress isnt letting us do so by continuously disrupting the Parliament sessions, says Union human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar.

1pm: BJP President Amit Shah holds dharna in Karnatakas Dharwad, BJPs chief ministerial candidate BS Yeddyurappa is also present.

12:30pm: The Congress dubs BJPs fast as a farcical fast by a fascist party, tweets party spokesperson Randeep Surjewala.

Surjewala also used the hashtag #UpvasKaJumla along with his tweet.

12pm: BJP MPs observe the day-long fast over parliamentary disruptions at Hanuman Mandir in Connaught Place, New Delhi.

Union minister Harsh Vardhan, who represents the Chandani Chowk constituency, East Delhi MP Maheish Girri, New Delhi MP Meenakshi Lekhi, West Delhi MP Pravesh Verma, North West Delhi MP Udit Raj, South Delhi MP Ramesh Bidhuri and North East Delhi MP Manoj Tiwari are among the leaders participating in the strike that will end at 4pm.

10:30am: PM Modi inaugurates the Defence Expo in Mahabalipuram and delivers a speech.

9:30am: Before joining BJP leaders in Karnataka, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Tamil Nadu to inaugurate projects.Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised Tamil saint-poet Thiruvalluvar as a legend and quoted his couplet which said greater learning brings more wisdom.

Amid applause, the PM during his address at the defence expo in Thiruvidanthai in Tamil Nadu, quoted Thiruvalluvars couplet in Tamil extemporaneously, describing him as a celebrated poet-philosopher.

Thottanaith thoorum manarkeni maandharku, kattranaithu thoorum arivu, he said and explained the essence of the couplet.

In sand and soil the deep you delve you reach the spring below. The more you learn the freer streams of wisdom flow, he said.

Beginning his address with good morning in Tamil saying Kaalai Vanakkam, Modi said this was the first time he was participating at a defence expo.

He said, I am both delighted and overwhelmed to see such a gathering here in the great state of Tamil Nadu.

He said the place where the defence expo was being held (Thiruvidanthai in Kanchipuram district) is historic. He lauded Tamil Nadu as the land of our glorious maritime legacy, in reference to the great Cholas and added this is the land from where India looked east and acted east 1000s of years ago.The decision of the Uttar Pradesh police not to arrest Kuldeep Singh Sengar even after booking him for rape is bad in law, say legal experts, claiming that police were clearly favouring the ruling Bharatiya Janata Partys legislator in the case.

Police booked Sengar for allegedly raping a 17-year-old girl last year under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO)Act, 2012, on Thursday. The POCSO Act provides for immediate arrest of the accused.

The state police did not arrest him saying they have referred the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), who will take a call to arrest him or not.

Uttar Pradeshs principal secretary (home) Arvind Kumar said the central agency will investigate the case and decide on arresting the MLA, whom he repeatedly referred as mananiya (respectful) during a press conference on Thursday.

Supreme Court lawyer Vrinda Grover said not arresting Sengar was a breach of law.

He has been booked for cognizable offence and non-bailable offences under which he is required for immediate custodial interrogation by the police. Not arresting him clearly shows that the police was favouring the accused, Grover said.

Another legal expert said action should be taken against the police for not arresting Sengar immediately after he was booked for rape.

Under the section 21-B of the POCSO Act, there is a provision of registering a case against the police for not arresting the accused. In this case, this section should be invoked, former member of Uttar Pradesh Commission for Protection of Child Rights Nahid Lari Khan said.

Former additional solicitor general of India, Indira Jaisingh, said the Unnao case shows the law can be twisted to help the mighty and powerful.

If the police will not implement the law, who would? she asked, claiming that such cases are the reason for growing disenchantment of the people with police.

Grover said that not calling Sengar for interrogation was a display of shameless power and indicates that law is applied differently to common citizens and those in power.

She also asked why Sengar was not booked as a co-accused in the case of the alleged murder of the rape victims father, who died in the judicial custody on Monday. Sengars brother has been arrested and named as an accused in the murder case.

The first information report (FIR) said a person called Shashi Singh, now a co-accused in the case, took the girl to the MLAs residence in Makhi in Unnao at about 8pm on June 4, 2017, on the pretext of recommending a job for her from the legislator.

At the lawmakers residence, the victim, who was 17 then, claimed she was raped by Sengar.

The police did not name the MLA in the case lodged earlier even though the girl named him in the complaint to police.

Sengars name was included in the FIR only after the special investigation team headed by additional director general of police (prison) Love Kumar submitted a report to the director general of police.

(With inputs from HT Correspondent, Lucknow)Federal investigators will decide if legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar should be arrested for the alleged rape of a 17-year-old girl in Unnao, said a senior Uttar Pradesh government officer on Thursday after the lawmaker was formally charged in the case.

The state government announced the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) will investigate the charges against Sengar, who belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party, after allegations that the state police had botched up.

Nobody is defending him (Kuldeep Singh Sengar). All we are saying is that we have to hear both sides. Now that the case has been given to the CBI, they will decide on arrest, said OP Singh, the states director general of police.

If any evidence is found, the CBI will take a call if the accused has to be arrested or not, Singh said at a press conference in Lucknow.

Arvind Kumar, principal secretary (home), said the Uttar Pradesh Polices special investigation team will handle the case till the CBI takes over.

The first information reported against Sengar, who represents the Bangarmau constituency in the UP assembly, was registered at Makhi police station in Unnao under various sections of the Indian Penal Code as well as the stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012.

The rape victim tried to set herself on fire outside chief minister Yogi Adityanaths residence on Sunday, claiming inaction in the gang rape case. The girl alleged that her father was roughed up by Atul Singh and his aides on April 3 and was arrested by the police in evening. He died on April 9, hours after he collapsed in prison where he had been detained after being assaulted by the MLAs aides.

The incident triggered a political storm and public outrage in the state.Former Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) chief minister and National Conference (NC) leader Omar Abdullah, in an email interview with Abhishek Saha on Wednesday, said the rape-murder of an eight-year-old girl from the nomadic Muslim Bakarwal community has revealed the depth of polarisation in the Jammu region. Excerpts:

Can you comment on the Kathua rape-murder incident, especially in the light of what has come to public knowledge following reports on the charge sheet filed by the crime branch?

Its a horrific, dastardly and inhuman act that should break every conscientious heart. The details in the charge sheet are chilling and makes ones blood boil. How a group of individuals could plot and execute this barbaric crime is beyond imagination and should make us all ponder where the politics of polarisation and division have led the state.

What troubles might the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Peoples Democratic Party(PDP) alliance face due to this case? On the one hand, chief minister Mehbooba Mufti is assuring justice while on the other BJP ministers were seen in a rally supporting the suspects.

Well, for now the PDP has bent over backwards to allow ministers, legislators and proxy support groups of the BJP the space to obstruct justice and shield the culprits. When two cabinet ministers violated Section 144 and addressed rallies taken out to support the accused, the chief minister remained silent and couldnt act. That has set this tragedy on a very dangerous course. Its evident now that proxy fora and organisations are being used to somehow shield the accused and to subvert the legal process.

The fact that lawyers in Kathua tried to prevent the challan to be filed with the judicial magistrate is shocking and extremely condemnable. Im glad the police have registered an FIR against those who were involved in this attempted obstruction of justice. That said, the forces that have engineered this despicable support for the accused continue to sit in seats of power.

How has the incident brought to light the communal polarisation in the Jammu region?

It has revealed not only the severity and the depth of polarisation but also exposed the fact that the ruling dispensation is leaving no stone unturned to further widen this chasm for political dividends. There have been various signs and incidents in the past few years that have indicated the growing levels of polarisation in Jammu but in this case, our worst fears have come true. The polarisation is being further accentuated by the powers that be with each passing day.

Do you think the BJP-PDP alliance has created a bridge and brought people of J&K closer or done the opposite?

That smokescreen that was used to justify PDPs sellout would be funny if it wasnt so tragic in terms of the costs the state has had to pay. Late Mufti Syed and then Mehbooba Mufti parroted the line that the PDP-BJP alliance was to bring J&K closer together but it has divided the state and its two largest population groups like never before and has pitted one against the other. The psychological and perceptional distance between the regions is increasing every day. J&K has never been this internally divided and tumultuous in this context  not even during the worst phases of turmoil in the 90s.Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah led their partys day-long fast against the Congress for allegedly causing the disruptions that resulted in a washout of the Parliaments recently concluded budget session.

The Congress knew very well that it cannot debate in any of the House so they did not let the Parliament function. BJP was left with no choice but to go to the people as it is the biggest forum for us, Shah said during a sit-in at Hubli in Karnataka, where he is campaigning ahead of the upcoming elections.

Modi, who had left for Tamil Nadu earlier in the day to inaugurate the Defence Expo before returning to Delhi, worked through the day while observing the fast, a BJP leader said.

Members of the Union council of ministers and senior BJP leaders also sat on a fast in different parts of the country. Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad observed the fast in Patna while Railways minister Suresh Prabhu, environment minister Dr Harsh Vardhan, WCD minister Maneka Gandhi, minister for Drinking Water and Sanitation Uma Bharti, rural development minister Narendra Singh Tomar and SS Ahluwalia, junior minister for water and sanitation, fasted in Delhi.

Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis, Gujarat CM Vijay Rupani and Jharkhand CM Raghubar Das took part in the fast in their respective states.

Congress attack

While the BJP organised the fast in a bid to corner the Congress, the main opposition party took on the PM for his silence over the Unnao rape case and said he was not serious about the crimes committed against women across the country.

Addressing a news conference, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal asked the Prime Minister to observe a fast over various rape incidents and register his protest against Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath over the Unnao rape case. He also questioned why the accused BJP legislator in the case had not been arrested yet.

Referring to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report for 2016, Sibal said that the BJP-ruled states of Maharashtra, MP and UP had the highest crime rate against women.

Even the no-confidence motion was not taken up for discussion. This has never happened in the past. Shouldnt the PM have observed fast on that? he said.

In Visakhapatnam, few CPI workers picked up an argument with the fasting BJP leaders. This led to a clash between the two sides, after which about 20 CPI workers were arrested, police saidPrime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday inaugurated a defence exhibition in Mahabalipuram near Chennai amid protests by opposition parties and Tamil groups against what they say is the central governments failure to form the Cauvery management board despite the Supreme Courts order.

Protesters planted black flags on the way and also reached the Chennai airport in large numbers even as 10,000 policemen stood guard to prevent any untoward incidents.

They held Modi Go Back posters and some, wearing black shirts, climbed up a huge advertisement hoarding in the parking area shouting slogans as the police ordered them to get down.

Police also detained most of the high-profile protesters, including film directors Bharatiraja, Seeman, Vetrimaran and others, at the Chennai airport.

As Prime Minister Modi took the aerial route to commute to different venues, the protesters could not show their black flags and released black balloons instead to register their protest against him for failing to take care of interests of the people of Tamil Nadu.

Chennai: Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) Chief Vaiko & his party workers protest outside Raj Bhavan with black flags & balloons. #CauveryProtests pic.twitter.com/f2L5kxkveS  ANI (@ANI) April 12, 2018

Chennai Police personnel could be seen bursting the balloons, but some slipped away, soaring into the sky.

DMK working president MK Stalin has asked his partys workers to hoist black flags at the party office and homes to register their protest. Several regional party outfits too came out on the streets to protest, but were kept in check by the strong police force.

Tamil Nadu has witnessed almost continuous protests seeking the creation of the Cauvery Management Board. The protests over the water sharing dispute grew to include opposition to hosting Indian Premier League matches in Chennai, which were eventually shifted out as police said they will not be able to guarantee security.

Modi was received at the Chennai airport by governor Banwarilal Purohit, defence minister Nirmala Seetharaman, chief minister Edapaddi Palaniwami, deputy chief minister O Panneerselvam and senior officials.

From the airport, Modi was taken in a helicopter to Mahabalipuram helipad from where he was driven to the venue of the DefExpo 2018, a biennial military systems exhibition being attended by close to 680 Indian and foreign firms.

The four-day-long DefExpo, on the outskirts of Chennai and close to the temple town of Mahabalipuram, began on Wednesday but was formally inaugurated by the Prime Minister on Thursday.

Later on Thursday, the Prime Minister encountered a silent protest by students at IIT Madras as he walked a few steps from the helicopter into the car that was to take him to the Cancer Research Institute in Adyar. The students, too, held posters demanding creation of the Cauvery Management Board.

PM Modi is scheduled to take off for Delhi later in the afternoon.The government had listed the bill aimed at protecting trafficked persons, especially young girls and women, for introduction in the Lok Sabha in the just-concluded budget session. But continued disruptions, which virtually wiped out the second part of the session, prevented the Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2017 from being introduced.

Here is all you need to know about the proposed law

Issue

More than 300,000 children went missing in the country between 2012 and 2017, government data shows. Around 100,000 are yet to be traced and it is feared that many of them could have been trafficked.

In 2016, for instance, 111,569 children were reported missing. Of these, 55,944 children were traced but only 8,132 trafficking cases were reported.

Many of these children are victims of modern slavery -- forced into prostitution, labour or domestic work.

They are also used as drug mules and even given up for adoption illegally. Poverty and lack of opportunity also pushes a lot of young women, especially from the interior parts of West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Jharkhand, into prostitution.

Despite the enormity of the problem, India lacks a single comprehensive law for human trafficking. At present, trafficking is covered under half-a-dozen laws resulting in confusion and poor enforcement.

Significance

For the first time, a standalone law to address the problem has been proposed that will treat a trafficked person as a victim and not an offender. It not only prescribes stringent punishment but also addresses the crucial issue of rehabilitation of victims, many of whom are lured by traffickers on the promise of a better life and jobs.

The rehabilitation is not contingent on criminal proceedings. A special rehabilitation fund has been proposed for immediate protection of rescued persons. The punishment for traffickers varies from 10 years rigorous imprisonment to life sentence and Rs 1 lakh fine in cases of aggravated crimes.

Also in a first, a national anti-trafficking bureau run by the National Investigating Agency (NIA) has been proposed to coordinate with other countries, as many times the victims, mostly women, are smuggled out of the country.

The proposed law also makes registration of placement agencies that recruit or supply domestic helps mandatory.

Debate

The bill has been debated intensely, within the government and also among activists and organisations. When the bill was being drawn up, the ministry of external affairs said the law should address trafficking of persons within India as well as overseas.

The women and child development ministry (WCD), which is piloting the bill, had countered, saying the bill already covered the movement of trafficked person from one place to another within the country and also overseas.

Activists and non-government organisations such as Lawyers Collective have criticised the proposed law, saying it has nothing new to offer and all its provisions are already covered under existing laws. The new law will only end up complicating the legal framework and its enforcement.

The government says because the laws dealing with trafficking were not consolidated, the issue could not be tackled effectively. Hence, the need for a comprehensive standalone law.

Activists have also said no substantial research has gone into the bill, an argument rejected by the WCD ministry.

Lawyers Collective has pointed out that the provision to charge a person who encourages another person to migrate illegally into India or Indians to some other country with aggravated form of trafficking punishable with 10-year imprisonment could have serious implications for cross-border movement of people, including refugees.

The WCD ministry has said the argument does not hold.Congress president Rahul Gandhi led a silent march in Delhi on Thursday night to protest the gang rape and murder of a child in Jammu and Kashmir and a teenagers allegation of rape against a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lawmaker in Uttar Pradesh.

Women in India are scared to step out of their homes. The government should ensure that the women of India feel safe. This is a national issue and not a political one, said Gandhi as Congress leaders and workers marched towards India Gate before police dispersed them.

Join me in a silent, peaceful, candlelight vigil at India Gate at midnight tonight to protest this violence and demand justice, he said in a tweet before the protest. His tweets made no mention of the BJP, but Congress leaders accused the Narendra Modi government of shielding rapists.

Conscience of India is outraged by the BJPs protection of rapists. The governments slogan of beti bachao (save the girl child)  has turned into betion ko BJP se bachaon, said Congress leader Randeep Surjewala.

The government is sleeping and so at this time Congress will have to wake them up. The PM had given a slogan beti Padhao, beti bachao and its in his regime that our girls are being raped. He isnt taking action against his ministers who are trying to save the rape accused, said Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad.

#KathuaRapeCase #UnnaoRapeCase | View from the ground: People gathered near India Gate in New Delhi for a candlelight vigil to protest the rapes of minors  the Kathua case of an eight-year-old who was also murdered and the Unnao case of a teenager. pic.twitter.com/6LfaDJL0Tu  Hindustan Times (@htTweets) April 12, 2018

The Congress was protesting the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammus Kathua district. The child was held captive inside a Hindu temple, tortured and killed allegedly because the accused wanted to scare away the nomadic Muslim Bakarwal community. Thousands of members of a radical Hindu group with links to the ruling party have marched to demand the release of the seven men accused in the case. Hundreds of Hindu lawyers also protested that the accused, two of them police officers, are innocent.

The Congress also accused the BJP of shielding Uttar Pradesh legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who on Thursday was formally charged with raping a 17-year-old girl in Unnao district. The case sparked new headlines after the girls father on Monday died of injuries reportedly sustained while in police custody. The states BJP government on Thursday announced that the Central Bureau of Investigation will handle the case and decide if Sengar should be arrested.

BJP spokesperson Vaibhav Aggarwal, while speaking to TV news channel NDTV, dismissed the Congresss midnight protest and called it a fashion walk.

Scenes from #IndiaGate, mix of Congress workers, students, some citizens, lots of police. pic.twitter.com/yTMceh5FTO  Niha Masih (@NihaMasih) April 12, 2018

Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, her daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, senior party leaders Salman Khurshid, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ahmed Patel, Kapil Sibal, Ashok Gehlot and Ambika Soni took part in the protest.Congress president Rahul Gandhi will on Thursday night join a candlelight vigil at India Gate for an eight-year-old girl who was gang raped and murdered in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua.

Like millions of Indians my heart hurts tonight. India simply cannot continue to treat its women the way it does, he said on Twitter as he invited people to join the vigil.

Gandhi earlier said the unimaginable brutality cannot go unpunished, and called the violence against the child a crime against humanity.

The girl, who belonged to the nomadic Muslim Bakarwal community, was abducted on January 10 in Kathua district while grazing horses near her home. A retired revenue department official planned the crimes against her, says the chargesheet filed by the crime branch of the Jammu and Kashmir police.

A Special Investigation Team formed to probe the incident has arrested eight people, including two Special Police Officers (SPOs) and a head constable, who was charged with destroying evidence.

The case has left Jammu on tenterhooks, polarising the region on communal lines and once again exposed fault lines in the ruling coalition.

Several Congress leaders accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of being silent on the issue.An affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) wants the union government to designate Maharshi Sandipani Rashtriya Ved Vidya Pratishthan (MSRVVP), an autonomous body under the Union ministry of human resource development (HRD), as the nodal agency that can work out the way to offer equivalence for those wanting to join the formal education stream from the gurukul system, which is an informal, unrecognised arrangement.

The Bharatiya Shikshan Mandal (BSM), an RSS offshoot that works in the education sector said that while there should be no government interference in the gurukul system, there is a need to streamline the registration of the over 5,000 gurukuls in the country. Mukul Kanitkar, the national joint organising secretary of the BSM, which is bringing together gurukuls from India and abroad at conference in Ujjain later this month to share best practices in the informal teaching system, said the Pratishathan in Ujjain can evaluate the gurukuls.

There is need to have a system for equivalence, which allows students from gurukul to migrate to formal schooling if they want to, he said.

The MSRVVP, according to its website, was established in January 1987 for the preservation, conservation and development of Vedic Studies by establishing and supporting Ved Pathshalas.

The objectives of the Pratishthan include fostering the oral tradition of intonation and recitation of Vedas, providing research facilities to students with a background in Vedic knowledge and to establish, takeover, manage or supervise Vedic Pathashalas and research centres.

Currently, gurukuls in the country are not regulated by any board or government body.

Kanitkar said this is how it should be, because trying to impose any standardisation or uniformity in curriculum would rob gurukuls of their individual pedagogy. Each gurukul has its own way of imparting knowledge. There is need to draw up a list of gurukuls that operate across the country so that people can make an informed choice. As per our assessment, there are nearly 5,000 gurukuls, some of which are operated from private residences ... he said.

At the upcoming conference, being organised with support from MSRVVP and the government of Madhya Pradesh from April 28-30 in Ujjain, representatives from over a 1,000 Gurukuls in India, 250 from Nepal and a few from Bhutan, Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius, Malaysia and Sri Lanka will be present.

According to Kanitkar, BSM has already organised similar conferences in Nepal and Bhutan. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat will inaugurate the conference, and HRD minister Prakash Javadekar is also expected to speak.

Shriram Adhikari, who heads a Gurukul in Nepal and is attending the conference said, Gurukuls in the country have included sciences and other modern subjects to the curriculum that includes traditional forms of learning including Yoga and astrology.The rape allegation that a 17-year-old girl has made against Kuldeep Singh Sengar, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lawmaker from Bangarmau in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao district, is not the first instance of a politician facing accusations of sexual assault.

Some of the politicians, who have been charged with rape in the past, are in jail and others have managed to get bail.

Gayatri Prasad Prajapati

Gayatri Prasad Prajapati, the mining minister during the Samajwadi Party regime (2012-17) who called the shots in the corridors of power, was accused of gang raping a woman and attempting to rape her minor daughter. The woman, a resident of Chitrakoot, alleged Prajapati raped her for three years.

The police refused to register her complaint and she moved a petition in the Supreme Court which directed the department to register a case against Prajapati.

Gayatri continued to evade arrest even after registration of the first information report (FIR) and tried to intimidate the woman. The woman, along with her family members staged a sit-in protest at the gate of Prajapatis official residence in Lucknow, leading to statewide outrage.

The opposition parties launched an agitation, demanding justice for the woman.

The police arrested Gayatri, who had remained untraceable for about a month, and his six alleged associates in March last year. The matter is in court and the former minister continues to be in jail.

Gayatri Prasad Prajapati, the mining minister during the Samajwadi Party regime (2012-17), was accused of gang raping a woman and attempting to rape her minor daughter. (HT/File Photo)

Purushottam Naresh Dwivedi

Another lawmaker Purushottam Naresh Dwivedi was charged with raping a girl in his house in Banda district in December 2010. Dwivedi was the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party MLA from Naraini in Banda from 2007-12.

The police refused to register the girls complaint and, instead, sent her to jail after Dwivedi accused her of theft.

People, who followed the case then, said the then BSP government tried to protect Dwivedi, fearing that action against him might lead to anger among upper caste voters.

Social organisations staged demonstrations against the unlawful arrest of the girl. The media also highlighted the issue and the opposition parties tried to derive political mileage in the run-up to the 2012 assembly election.

Under pressure, the state government ordered a probe by the crime investigation departments crime branch or CB-CID into the matter. The agency cleared the girl and nailed Dwivedi.

The state government ordered the registration of an FIR against Dwivedi, who was sentenced to jail in 2011. Dwivedi was lodged in Banda district jail but was granted bail later.

Amarmani Tripathi

Another powerful politician Amarmani Tripathi was accused in the murder of a woman poet in 2003. Initially, he used his political influence to escape arrest.

His clout could be gauged from the fact that the then BSP government removed the investigation officer in the murder case after he refused to clear Tripathi.

The government eventually bowed to public pressure and Tripathi was arrested.

The case was handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation on a courts directive. In 2007, the case was transferred to a Dehradun special court that sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Tripathi allegedly used his influence and got himself admitted in the BRD Medical College Hospital in Gorakhpur where he was given a private room from where he managed his political activities.

The state government shifted him to jail after the media highlighted the issue.

Amarmani Tripathi was accused in the murder of a woman poet in 2003. (File Photo)

Others

Former MLAs Anup Sanda, Sri Bhagwan Sharma, Manoj Paras and Mohammad Alim were also charged in cases of alleged sexual assault.

The victims filed complaints against them but the accused enjoyed state protection due to their political connections. The cases against them are still being heard in various courts.The Punjab government on Thursday told the Supreme Court that the Punjab and Haryana high court was correct in convicting its tourism and culture minister Navjot Singh Sidhu in a 30-year-old road rage case.

Counsel for Punjab government told a bench of justices J Chelameswar and Sanjay Kishan Kaul that Patiala resident Gurnam Singh had died after Sidhu punched him.

Read | Thirty years on, final arguments in Navjot Singh Sidhu road rage case begin in SC

The government said the trial court was wrong in its finding that Singh had died of cardiac arrest and not brain haemorrhage.

There is not a single evidence that suggest that the cause of death was cardiac arrest and not brain haemorrhage. The trial court verdict was rightly set aside by the high court. Accused A1 (Navjot Singh Sidhu) had given fiesty blow to deceased Gurnam Singh leading to his death through brain haemorrhage, the state government counsel told the bench.

(This story has not been modified from its original version.)External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are scheduled to be in Beijing on April 24 to attend different meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and interact with their counterparts from the member states.

The eight-member SCO, in which India was a latest entrant along with Pakistan, is due to hold its summit in the Chinese city of Qingdao in June. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to attend the summit and also hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The SCO comprised of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan.

Ahead of the summit, the organisation which is focused on anti-terrorism cooperation is holding a host of ministerial and officials meetings to work out a firm agenda for the summit to provide a new direction to the grouping.

SCO Foreign and Defence Ministers meetings are scheduled on the same day on April 24 and almost around the same time, according to officials here.

The visits of Swaraj and Sitharaman are the first high-profile visits by Indian ministers after last years 73-day long standoff at Doklam.

The two ministers are expected to hold bilateral meetings with their Chinese and other counterparts.

Since December, the two sides are trying to reset the relations and looking to iron out differences on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Indias entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group and China blocking the efforts to designate Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar as a terrorist by the UN.

Besides the two ministers, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval is also expected to visit China in the coming weeks.

Both sides attach a lot of significance to these meetings to reset their ties as they were taking place after President Xi has commenced his second-five-year tenure last month with the prospect of continuing in power for life following the removal of the two-term limit for the president.The Taj Mahals gates suffered minor damages in an overnight thunderstorm in Agra on Wednesday.

Winds blowing at 130 km/h brought down pillars of the royal and southern gates of the Taj, a Mughal-era monument which has been declared as one of the Seven Wonders of the World and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A north-west pillar on top of the royal gate and a flower vase in stone and a brass filial were brought down in the thuderstorm, said Ankit Namdev, conservation assistant of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) at Taj Mahal.

Similar loss happened at the southern gate too, he said, adding that a portion of the wall of Rewti Ka Bada got damaged when a tree fell on it. A red sand stone flower vase at Sahindi Begum Makbara also broke and fell.

No damage has been assessed yet on the main monument made of white marble.

A broken dome and brass filial lies in front of the royal gate of the Taj Mahal on Wednesday night. (Raju Tomar/HT Photo)

The royal gate of the Taj Mahal is seen without its pillar on the north-west on Thursday. (Raju Tomar/HT PHOTO)

We are assessing the damage and restoration measures would be planned accordingly after having full details of damage, Namdev said.

Similar assessment will be done at other heritage structures in Agra district, which has 198 ASI-protected structures including three world heritage listed monuments  the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and Fatehpur Sikri.

The heavy rainfall and thunderstorm which started around 7 pm caused eight deaths in Agra, four in Mathura and two in Firozabad  all fall under Braj region.

The southern gate of the Taj Mahal is seen without its right pillar on Thursday. (Raju Tomar/HT PHOTO)

In rural Agra, Gauri Shankar (75) and Hamid Khan (55) died in village Mahua Kheda under Tajganj police station. Lambardar (40) and Angoori Devi died in Doki area after being trapped in debris of a wall which fell on him. Thakur Dass, also from Doki area, died in a wall collapse.

Nirmala Devi (30), Chandrawati (35) and Kalua (30) of Achhnera area also died due to the rains and thunderstorm.

In Mathuras Jhudawai village, children of two brothers, Mahesh and Naresh, Karan (7), Visakha (3) and Tillu (3) were killed when the roof of the house fell.

In the same village, Resham Devi (70) was killed when a water tank fell on her.

In Firozabad, Sonti (10) of Ballarpur village under Sirsaganj police station and Sunil under Line Par police station were killed.

Commuters wade through a waterlogged road in Agra on Wednesday night following thunderstorms. (Raju Tomar/HT PHOTO)

The sudden change in weather caused traffic snarls on several roads, including the MG Road and the National Highway 2 which connects Delhi and Kanpur. Uprooted trees and electricity poles added to the woes of commuters while power outages were reported in many localities throughout the night.

Standing wheat and barley crops were damaged in rural areas of Agra, Mathura, Firozabad, Kasganj, Mainpuri and Etah. This is the second time a thunderstorm has struck in a week, the last one being on Friday.The Congress plans a secret talent hunt to identify and groom potential young leaders for a larger role in the grand old party, a Congress functionary said on condition of anonymity.

The move, the person added, is part of new party president Rahul Gandhis strategy of reviving the party in the states, in many of which it doesnt have strong leaders.

Detailing the plan, the functionary said teams to scout for such talent have already been formed and that they would start touring the states. The identity of the team members, the tours, and the process itself, will be kept secret to ensure that no one tries to influence the selection, he explained.

The absence of regional leaders, barring a few exceptions, has been a cause for concern for a long time in the Congress. At present, the party can boast of just a few such names  Siddaramaiah in Karnataka, Captain Amarinder Singh (Punjab), Virbhadra Singh (Himachal Pradesh), Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia in Madhya Pradesh, and Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan  and several of these are actually veterans. The talent scouts of the Congress plan to look for younger leaders.

Political experts say the Congress should take a cue from Karnataka and Punjab where it allowed state leaders to play their game.

Every party should groom their leaders but the Congress definitely needs do it more effectively as it is losing state after state. There is a lesson for the Congress from Karnataka and Punjab. In both the states, the Congress allowed Siddaramaiah and Captain Amarinder Singh to play their game. That is why the Congress won Punjab and are relatively ahead in? Karnataka, said Delhi-based political analyst N Bhaskara Rao.

This is certainly a good way of reviving the party. The other thing Congress should do is to identify the issues and then let these leaders work on such issues, he said.

This isnt the first time the Congress has embarked on such an exercise. Rahul Gandhi first tried this in the Youth Congress, the partys youth wing, but a similar talent hunt only resulted in the rampant use of influence and money. Several leaders had also tried then to subvert the process to benefit their kin.

Gandhi is convinced the plan will work this time. According to the Congress functionary, the talent scouts will seek feedback from party workers and the general public on district- and state-level leaders. They will also elicit the views of the leaders on local and national issues before finalising their names. This will give a chance to young people from non-political families to emerge in leadership roles and check nepotism, the functionary said.

Gandhis plan is part of his effort to revive the party in states where it has been relegated to the political margins. There has been a growing realisation within the Congress that the partys fortunes at the national level hinge on its revival in states. The party is now in power in just four states  Karnataka, Punjab, Mizoram and Puducherry.

At the partys 84th plenary session in Delhi last month, Gandhi promised to build a new Congress with talented young people. He also stressed the need to change the Congress organisation, and said his first task would be to break the wall that exists between the workers and senior leaders.Two policemen were injured in a grenade attack in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama district on Thursday.

Militants hurled grenade at the Pulwama police station, an officer said.

Two policemen sustained minor injuries in the explosion. The area has been cordoned off for searches, the officer added.Uttar Pradesh police lodged a first information report (FIR) on Thursday against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar for rape, criminal intimidation and abduction of a teenaged girl whose father died this week after an alleged assault by Sengars brother.

The state government handed over the investigation of the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation as the Allahabad high court questioned the Uttar Pradesh governments handling of the Unnao rape case, asking why Sengar hadnt been arrested even after the FIR had been lodged.

The CBI will start a probe into the rape of the woman and the death of her father on Friday. In a notification, the Department of Personnel and Training said three cases registered at Makhi police station in Unnao will be investigated by CBI. People familiar with the development said a CBI team is likely to visit Unnao on Friday to take up the probe.

A Special Investigation Team constituted by the state government ,in a report submitted to chief minister Yogi Adityanath, had recommended the registration of an FIR against Sengar in the rape case and handing over of the investigation to the CBI.

The UP government has handed the probe over to the CBI. No accused will be spared, PTI quoted Uttar Pradesh deputy chief minister Keshav Prasad Maurya as saying.

In the FIR lodged at Makhi police station in Unnao, the stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, was also cited against the MLA. The girls date of birth, according to the FIR, is August 17, 2002, on the basis of which she is younger than 16. Previous reports have put her age at 18. The police complaint was lodged on the basis of the report submitted to the government by a SIT led by additional director general of police, Lucknow zone, Rajeev Krishna, on Wednesday night.

The FIR was lodged at around 2.50am on Thursday on the complaint of the girls mother.

According to the FIR, a man identified as Shashi Singh escorted the girl to the MLAs residence in Makhi, Unnao, at around 8pm on June 4, 2017 on the pretext of getting her a job recommendation from the MLA.

The complainant alleged that the girl was held captive there and raped by the MLA in the presence of Shashi Singh, who was also named in the FIR for abetting the crime.

A senior police official said the MLA had been charged under Sections 363 and 366 (kidnapping of minor girl), 376 (rape) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Sections 3 and 4 of the POCSO Act have also been included in the FIR, he said.

In the Allahabad high court, a bench comprising Chief Justice DB Bhosale and Justice Suneet Kumar heard advocate general of UP and amicus curiae (friend of the court) Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi, who had sought a court-monitored investigation of the case. The advocate general informed the court that an application had been sent to the chief ministers office on August 17, 2017, in which allegations of rape were made against the MLA.

He said the application was forwarded to officers in Unnao for action. Since no FIR was lodged by the police officers at that time, action is being taken against the errant officers as per departmental rules, he said.

The bench asked when the government proposed to arrest Sengar, to which the advocate general replied that he was not in a position make a statement on the matter. The police will proceed in accordance with law only after recording the statements of the complainant and witnesses, he said. The advocate general said that in Uttar Pradesh, the police only made arrests after conducting an investigation.

Referring to the SIT report, the court said,  In spite of SIT report, you are repeating that we can only take action after investigation. If this is the conduct of the police in the state, whom a victim will approach to register a complaint? If this is the stand you are repeatedly taking, then we will be forced to observe in our order that law and order has collapsed in the state.

Amicus curiae and senior advocate Chaturvedi said that In cases involving heinous crimes like rape of a minor, the accused should be immediately arrested.

On the one hand, the advocate general is seeking more time for investigation in the rape case before arresting the accused, claiming it to be a procedure followed in the state, while on the other, the victims father was arrested for possessing illegal firearm without any investigation, he said.

The rape victims father died in judicial custody on Monday after the alleged assault by Sengars brother, Atul. Social workers and political parties organised protests to demand the arrest of Sengar. Former member of the Uttar Pradesh Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Nahid Lari Khan, said Sengar should be immediately arrested under the POSCO Act. What is happening? It is really surprising that despite an FIR, the MLA has not been arrested as yet, she said. Police officials shielding the MLA should also be booked under the Act. The womens wing of the Congress took out a protest march demanding the arrest of the MLA.

President of the All-India Mahila Congress, Sushmita Dev, who led the march, said the role of UP police was highly questionable. They are allowing the MLA to roam freely despite him being accused of committing a heinous crime. There is no rule of law in UP, she said.

BSP chief Mayawati said PM Narendra Modi, who, with his colleagues, sat on a day-long fast on Thursday to protest disruptions in the second half of Parliaments budget session, should instead fast to protest against the misdeeds of BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar.

The police have lodged FIR against Sengar, accused in the rape of a minor girl, under POCSO Act and other serious sections of the IPC, but he has not been arrested yet. It clearly shows that jungle raj prevails in the state. The Prime Minister should apologise to the people for the conduct of his party MLA. Since he represents Varanasi in Lok Sabha, the banks of Ganga will be appropriate for his repentance.A 17-year-old girl who has accused Uttar Pradesh legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar of raping her said on Thursday she fears he will harm her uncle and should be arrested immediately.

Why is he being shielded? she said. If the MLA is allowed to remain out he will not leave my uncle... He had earlier too hatched conspiracies against my kin, said the girl, a resident of Unnao district.

The girl was allegedly abducted and raped last year. The case sparked new headlines after the girls father on Monday died of injuries reportedly sustained while in police custody.

The Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday announced Sengar, who belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had been formally charged and handed over the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

I will get justice only if CBI investigates the case with honesty. How will I get justice if they dont investigate honestly? she said about the governments announcement. Only when he is arrested, I will be satisfied and I will be able to say that the BJP government is doing justice.

Read | In midnight drama, Unnao BJP lawmaker Kuldeep Sengar meets police

The girl attempted to immolate herself outside chief minister Yogi Adityanaths residence on Sunday. She says her father was tortured by police and was arrested for trying to pursue the case.

Sengar has denied the charges. I am a disciplined BJP worker. I am innocent. I am being implicated, he has said.

The state goverment rejected allegations that it had been soft on Sengar. Nobody is defending him (Kuldeep Singh Sengar). All we are saying is that we have to hear both sides. Now that the case has been given to the CBI, they will decide on arrest, said OP Singh, the states director general of police.

If any evidence is found, the CBI will take a call if the accused has to be arrested or not, Singh said at a press conference in Lucknow.

(With agency reports)Showcasing its precision in strike capabilities during day and night, Indian Air Force (IAF) has started exercise Gagan Shakti on Wednesday. Over 11 aircraft have been deployed at their operational locations. This exercise is also unique as LCA, indigenous fighters are being deployed at forward bases.

During the first phase of the exercise, all the deployed LCA aircraft took part on Wednesday. The operational efficiency and mission worthiness of these platforms would be put to test in a real time intense exercise environment. A milestone towards Make in India, LCA will employ Close Combat and Beyond Visual Range Air to Air missiles in a simulated scenario apart from Air to Ground weapons.

Defence spokesperson Lt Col Manish Ojha said the IAF has consistently encouraged the development of indigenous defence production capability. A look at the past demonstrates the IAFs participation and promotion of indigenisation programs. This versatile multi-role fighter would be put through its operational paces towards validating concepts.

Gagan Shakti will test the LCA across a varied spectrum encompassing Air Defence and Strike capabilities among others. Ojha said the employment of LCA in the exercise will go a long way in incorporating its capabilities in the operational matrix of the IAF.

During the exercise Gagan Shakti-18, the IAF has formalised the concept of a Forward Surgical Centre (FSC). FSC is set up at a remote forward location in the IAF with the aim of enhancing the medical capabilities at a forward base which is located away from a service hospital. The establishment of FSC at a forward base enables immediate life and limb saving surgery and stabilisation of the patient.

Air Force Station Naliya is the first AF Station where an FSC has been operationalised, using existing men and material of the IAF. Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa chief of the Air Staff visited the FSC at Naliya and he was impressed with the set up. It has a dedicated surgical team, equipped to undertake six to eight surgeries a day. FSCs are also being established at Phalodi and Sirsa.The departments of school education and higher education have instructed schools and colleges in the state to organise programmes to observe Ambedkar Jayanti on April 14. School and college principal said that this is the first time such a direction has been issued.

Opposition leaders, however, slammed the move as mere tokenistic and one taken by a desperate government.

Ambedkar Jayanti or Bhim Jayanti is an annual festival observed on April 14 to commemorate the memory of social reformer Dr BR Ambedkar.

The directorate of secondary education, Bikaner, issued an order to schools on April 7, directing the institutes to ceremoniously organise programmes and competitions on the occasion of Ambedkar Jayanti, said Nathmal Didel, state director of secondary education.

We received a letter from the department of social justice and empowerment, directing us to observe Ambedkar Jayanti early as the exams in most districts are scheduled from April 13 and preceded by two days of preparation leave, he said. We have instructed the schools to observe it on their last working day.

Asked if it was the first time that such an order has been issued, he said, As far as I remember, this is the first time.

But this has been done in view of the exams and preparation leaves.

A similar order was issued from the commissionerate of college education on April 12. The colleges have been directed to organise programmes on Ambedkars life history, works and the constitution by April 14.

Jyotsna Bhardwaj, the joint director (academic) who signed the order, said it was issued at the behest of the state social justice department.

According to the list of orders on the commissionerates website, no such order was issued in the past four years.

Reacting to the governments decision, state Congress chief Sachin Pilot said the BJP government in the state is desperate as it has been clearly identified as anti-poor, anti-farmer and anti-Dalit.

This government only believes in tokenism, said Pilot.

If they really cared about Ambedkars teachings, they wouldnt have let the situation of the Dalits in the state come to such a sorry pass. The atrocities and injustices against Dalits in the state speak for themselves.

Earlier this month, the government made Parshuram Jayanti a public holiday, conceding to a long standing demand of the Brahmin community.Chief minister Vasundhara Raje has no moral right to remain in power as the people of Rajasthan have lost faith in the BJP government, Congress general Secretary Ashok Gehlot said on Thursday.

She has no moral right to remain in power as there is no rule of law in Rajasthan. From top to bottom, (state government) is riddled with corruption, Gehlot said.

The former chief minister claimed that whenever BJP workers try to reach out to the people in rural areas, they have to face public ire. The ministers are not allowed to enter in their own constituencies. CM is cancelling her visits (to different assembly constituencies). What kind of governance can they provide? The government has lost its credibility, Gehlot said, adding I dont know what (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi and (BJP president) Amit Shah think (about Raje continuing as chief minister)... She needs to contemplate whether she has the moral right to remain on the post.

Talking about the law and order situation, he alleged that, houses of Dalit leaders were torched in Hindaun in the presence of the local SP and collector, which is very alarming and shows there is no rule of law in the state.

A mob, allegedly of upper caste people, set ablaze the houses of a sitting BJP MLA, Rajkumari Jatav, and former minister and Congress leader Bharosi Lal Jatav both from the Dalit community, a day after April 2 Bharat Bandh.

Police asked family members of Bharosi Lal to leave before their house was set on fire. The vehicles at his house were torched in presence of SP and the collector. Bharosi Lal is in a state of shock and not in condition to speak. Even BJP MLAs home was attacked... the chief minister never spoke to the two leaders or visited them, Gehlot said. He was addressing newspersons at his residence in Jaipur.

He said 11 people died in protests during the April 2 Bharat Bandh across the country, but the anti-reservation Bandh on April 10, which was without any leadership, was peaceful. This shows security arrangements on April 2 were not as effective as that on April 10, he said.

If the government could suspend the Internet on April 10 and clamp Section 144 of IPC, why did it not take similar preventive measures on April 2, asked Gehlot.

Gehlot also held state Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria for rising number of criminal incidents in the state.

Factionalism in the Congress

Congress general secretary Ashok Gerhlot on Thursday sought to brush aside the talks of factionalism in partys Rajasthan unit. He also sought to downplay questions about the possible CM face in the state that goes to polls later this year. Such issues are raised by immature people, who have no political knowledge. Those who are spreading such things are damaging (their own chances) instead of benefitting, Gehlot said. He said that in last four years, there has been no statement by any Congress leader against party leaders. What is this factionalism being talked about, he asked.A section of prominent Kolkata-based intellectuals came down on Trinamool Congress for the second consecutive day alleging the ruling party has strangulated democracy in Bengal with its strong arm tactics to prevent opposition candidates from filing nomination papers for the panchayat elections.

Former Supreme Court justice Ashok Ganguly, economist Amiya Bagchi, former Presidency College principal Amal Kumar Mukherjee, Naxalite leader Azizul Haque and a few academicians held a press conference at Kolkata Press Club on Thursday. They slammed the State Election Commissioner, alleging the regulator is completely toothless.

Read: The road ahead for Bengal after Calcutta HC suspends panchayat poll process

On Wednesday, a section of intellectuals who backed Mamata Banerjee during the Singur and Nandigram land movements held a press conference to lambast the ruling party and state government for the ongoing violence over nomination for panchayat polls.

Shocked by the criticism from the intellectuals, the chief minister claimed on Wednesday that they were misled by a section of the media.

On Thursday, the pitch of criticism was sharper and it came from more prominent personalities.

"The State Election Commission is toothless. Legislators have to empower it to take and enforce decisions," said Bagchi.

Read: TMC virtually unopposed in zilla parishad, nominations for Bengal rural polls extended

Mukherjee alleged that ruling party leaders visited the residence of state election commissioner A K Singh after he issued the April 9 order, extending the deadline for filing nomination by a day, to coerce him to withdraw the order within 12 hours. "They knew that they could not intimidate him at his office, and therefore, chose to visit his home," alleged Mukherjee, a noted professor of political science.

Ganguly said the violence from the beginning of the nomination period gives ample indication of what will follow during the days of campaigning and during polling. The tendency of ensuring a panchayat system without the opposition is most dangerous for democracy, he said.

Read: BJP, Congress move courts for free, fair Bengal rural polls

Mukherjee pointed out that a SEC cannot be dismissed by a state government. Only the President can impeach him if the decision has the support of two-thirds of the members of both houses of Parliament. This is to ensure that the commissioner can function with independence," said Mukherjee. He alleged that A K Singh succumbed to pressure from the ruling party. He should have demanded Central forces just as former SEC Meera Pande did in 2013, said the veteran educationist.

The current State Election Commission is a toothless organisation and steps should be taken to empower it, the intellectuals said unanimously.

Sugata Hazra , a professor of geology, said, Democracy needs to be strengthened to resist communalism.To meet the target of making the city open defecation free ( ODF) before October, the Lucknow municipal corporation has decided to install more than 100 ready made toilets with precast technology in more than 141 areas where there is no space for construction of traditional toilets.

These toilets would be used in narrow lanes where residents live in small houses which cannot house toilets inside them.

According to municipal commissioner Udairaj Singh, a company has been directed to furnish the design and quote the rates for such toilets. The company has been asked to furnish its idea for meeting the ODF target.

He said, The precast concrete toilets have many advantages over other prefab items available in the market. Such toilets have been a success in other cities like Bhopal, Jabalpur, Indore, Jaipur, Delhi, Karnal and Jalandhar. These pre cast toilets are made of cement and concrete and therefore they are rock solid, lasting more than the traditional toilets.

During the past one year, the LMC has helped 20,000 households to construct toilets but still there are some areas where public toilets are required.

The other advantages are that pre cast toilets are better insulators besides being resistant to weather conditions.

They are theft proof and can be installed anywhere.

However, the toilets which would be used in the city would be aesthetically painted and designed to spread the message of Swacch Bharat.

Messages like Toilet Ek Premkatha or wash hands , keep clean, flush after use would be written outside them.

Additional municipal commissioner PK Srivastava said, The best thing about these toilets is that they take up lesser space, are joint free and would be connected with sewer lines passing nearby.

The LMC team will interact with the locals to know whether they want western or Indian seats.Coming down strongly on the Uttar Pradesh government for not arresting Unnao rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Sengar despite FIR registration, Allahabad high court on Thursday said the administrations stand would force it to declare that law and order has collapsed in the state.

A bench comprising chief justice D B Bhosale and justice Suneet Kumar made the observation when state advocate general Raghvendra Singh sought more time for the police to complete the investigation to make the arrest.

Singh said three persons, including the MLAs brother have been arrested in the case, but when asked about Sengars arrest, he said the police will proceed in accordance with law only, and repeatedly asserted that it would happen only after investigations.

Amicus curiae and senior advocate, Gopal Swaroop Chaturvedi, who had sought a court-monitored investigation into the rape and death of the rape victims father in custody, said an SIT had conducted preliminary probe and filed a report after which an FIR was lodged, but the state government wanted to conduct further investigation before arresting the MLA.

In spite of the SIT report, you are repeating that we (the government) can only take action after investigation. If this is the conduct of the police, whom will a victim approach to register a complaint? the bench asked.

If this is the stand you are repeatedly taking, then we will be forced to observe in our order that law and order has collapsed in the state, it said.

Initially, advocate general Singh told the court that an application was sent to the chief ministers office on August 17, 2017, in which allegations of rape were made against the MLA. The application was forwarded to the officers concerned in Unnao for appropriate action.

Since no FIR was lodged by the police officers at that time, action is being taken against the errant officers as per departmental rules, Singh said.

To this, the court said, Medical officers and the police, all were hand-in-glove with the accused to save them, and you acted against those officers on the basis of this report. But to arrest the rape accused you need to do further investigation!

Highlighting the governments double standards, Chaturvedi said, On the one hand, the advocate general is seeking more time for investigation in the rape case before arresting the accused, claiming it to be a procedure followed in the state, while on the other, the victims father was arrested for possessing illegal firearm without any investigation.

The girls father died in police custody after he was allegedly beaten up by the MLAs brothers and his aides.

Advocate general Singh requested the court to adjourn the hearing to give police some time to investigate the case so that action could be taken if some prima facie case was made out against the accused.

You took eight months to register the FIR. Do you want us to wait for eight more months so that you may investigate the case further? the court asked.

After hearing both the sides, the court reserved its order for Friday.

The state police has handed over the case to the CBI and said that the central agency would take a call on Sengars arrest.

The victim girl, who tried to immolate herself outside chief minister Adityanaths house on Sunday, has said the politician should be arrested immediately and said she feared for her uncles safety.

The demands to arrest Sengar grew shriller as social workers and oppostion parties organised protests on Thursday. They questioned the reluctance on the part of the state police to arrest him despite allegations of rape and the registration of the first information report.In a relief to Bollywood actor Salman Khan, a sessions court on Wednesday agreed to keep the warrant issued against him in a road accident case in abeyance, till the process of submission of fresh surety is not completed.

The actor on Wednesday approached a sessions court for cancellation of bailable warrant issued over non-compliance with process of surety in connection with the 2002 road accident case.

In February, Khan had approached the Supreme Court for discharge of present surety given by his publicity manager Reshma Shetty and wanted to replace the same with the surety of his bodyguard Gurmeet Singh Jolly. The Apex court which is hearing the appeal filed against his acquittal in the 2002 case by the state government, had allowed his plea on February 23. He was asked to comply with the process.

The sessions court had issued two notices to Khan. Khans lawyer Niranjan Mundargi on Wednesday told the court that the judgement of the court in Jodhpur had delayed the process. Mundargi contended that Jolly had got a solvency certificate valid till March 2, 2018.

Since it was about to expire, Khan sought extension of validity of solvency certificate as time taken for verification would have made the whole process redundant. On April 3, the solvency certificate was received. However, Khan was in Jodhpur since April 4. On April 10, he furnished the certificate before the court, and the same is pending before the police for verification.

It was argued that as soon as the verification is completed and the report is submitted, Khan would appear before the court and comply with the remaining process. Till then Mundargi prayed that the warrant issued against the actor be kept in abeyance. The sessions judge MG Deshpande accepted the plea and has stayed the warrant till the process is completed. The warrant was issued on April 4 by the court after the actor failed to respond to the two notices sent by the court for compliance of the surety.The sessions court on Thursday granted anticipatory bail to Sameer Bhojwani booked for cheating Bollywood actors Saira Bano and Dilip Kumar.

The couple had filed a complaint against him for allegedly cheating them and forging the property documents of a plot leased by Kumar. In December 2017, Bano had claimed that the developer was harassing and threatening them over the plot in Pali Hill, Bandra (West).

The defense pleaded that its a case based on documentary evidence and his custodial interrogation is not needed. While the special public prosecutor Raja Thakre objected the plea saying that he has played a crucial role and his questioning is needed to unearth the conspiracy.

The court granted him anticipatory bail on Wednesday on the condition that he should cooperate with the investigation.The Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJP) state and city leaders are participating in the one-day fast called by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday across Maharashtra.

Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has been holding the fast since 12 noon at the partys Vile Parle office along with MP Poonam Mahajan and city chief Ashish Shelar.

The citys other two party member of parliaments (MPs), Kirit Somaiya and Gopal Shetty, will also participate in the one-day fast in their constituencies in North East and North Mumbai.

Somaiya is holding a days fast near Bhandup station and Shetty in Borivili.

The fast is to protest against Congress obstructionism in Parliament. I will be sitting here the whole day, said Somaiya.

All party MPs have been asked to hold a one day fast in their respective constituencies. Majority of the party ministers will also visit the MPs in their constituencies to take part in the fast.Union railway minister Piyush Goyal visited Thane on Thursday morning to participate to participate in the nationwide one-day fast held by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against the Congress recent disruption in parliament.

Goyal, who participated in the hunger strike along with local BJP leader outside the Thane collectors office, remarked that by disrupting the parliament, the Congress has insulted the constitution of India. He added that the Congress leadership is involved in politics of personal gains.

Goyal said, How are we supposed to serve the people of India if the opposition does not allow us to function for even a single day in the parliament? Today I started the fast in Thane by paying a tribute to BR Ambedkar, who penned our constitution with a vision to develop our country. However, the Congress has insulted this constitution. Our party, along with the people of India, will condemn this behaviour of the Congress, and especially its leader Rahul Gandhi.

He added that the party has no concern for the country or its people. The Congress has no concern for the people of India, constitution, progress of India or even the hopes and ambition of the people, Goyal added.

The fasting began around 11am, with other senior BJP leaders from the city in attendance.

Sandeep Lele, Thane city president of BJP, said, Around 200 BJP party workers, BJP MLAs, corporators and office bearers participated in the fast in Thane along with the railway minister. Goyal came early in the morning and we are hoping he will be in the city till 5spm.Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has won four of the six urban local bodies that went to polls.However, in Kankavli, BJP was defeated by one of its own MPs (Member of Parliament), as Narayan Ranes Maharashtra Swabhiman Party bagged 10 out of 17 seats. Ranes party also managed to win the seat for the president of the municipal council.

Rane has recently been elected to the Rajya Sabha as a BJP MP. In Kankavli, he had pitted his candidate against the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance by joining hands with the Nationalist Congress Party.

In Guhagar in Ratnagiri district, Shahar Vikas Aghadi, a group of independents, won 9 of 17, seats including that of the president. BJP enjoyed a sweeping victory in the Jamner municipal council in Jalgaon district, winning all 24 seats, led by party leader and water resources minister Girish Mahajan.

Mahajans wife Sadhana has been elected as council president. Todays results have proved that contrary to the perception created by the media and opposition parties, BJP has been popular among the people, said BJP spokesperson Madhav Bhandari.

We are confident that this feat will continue even in the forthcoming general elections, Bhandari added.With land mafia eyeing mangroves and wetlands across Mumbai, citizens, NGOs, state machinery as well as courts are focusing on conserving these green spaces in the financial capital of the country.

According to non-profit Mangrove Society of India (MSI), intertidal regions are in high demand as they can be potential hotspots for construction and infrastructure development.

HT has been consistently reporting and breaking stories related to mangrove and wetland destruction over the past year, with major cases and conservation-related developments over the past month. A battle is underway in Mumbai, said Arvind Untawale, executive secretary, MSI. Citizens, NGOs and state government bodies are on one side against the space-starved builder lobby eyeing mangrove and wetland patches, some of the last remaining open areas that protect the city from flooding. Many cases in private areas, especially involving the builder lobby, have gone undetected where structures such as housing complexes, apartments and several private projects are currently built. With increasing awareness, citizens have forced the state machinery to act against them, and we are currently witnessing a contest between development and conservation.

Mangrove trees are salt-tolerant plants that help absorb pollutants and reduce chances of inundation. Wetlands comprise creeks, estuaries, marshes, riverbanks, seashores, backwaters, coral reefs, which mangroves are a part of. Destroying these areas is an offence as per the law.

N Vasudevan, additional principal chief conservator of forest, state mangrove cell, a government body formed in 2012 to protect mangroves and wetlands across Maharashtra, said, Citizens or the media report every case of mangrove destruction, almost on a daily basis. As far as development works are concerned, the law is stringent. The government is proactively taking up protection in this area, which has resulted in a 16 sqkm increase in mangrove cover in Mumbai. Some major development projects will definitely require mangrove areas and wetland patches, but it is a small price to pay. Compensatory afforestation and mitigation measures will be carried out in such cases. However, it is our mandate to ensure none of them are done illegally.

City-based activists dont agree. It is not sustainable development. Instead of restoring and conserving protected areas, they are being given away at the smallest pretext. Despite having options, destruction continues unabated. Every project is possible if equal amount is spent on conservation, said Stalin D, director, NGO Vanashakti. The developer lobby is too strong for the mangrove cell or the chief minister to ignore.

Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the environment group Conservation Action Trust, said the state needs to do more. Favouring developers suits them (state). It is a vicious cycle where all government bodies are happy to capitalise on the slow well-planned mangrove destruction, he said.

Goenka cited destruction cases reported in the media such as at the Indian Navy station at Hamla, Marwe, where only the private contractor was booked, and the district administration refused to take action against the Navy; the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) destroying mangroves along Mithi River for Metro and Mumbai trans-harbour link; City Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) destroying mangroves for the Navi Mumbai airport or the municipal corporation cutting off tidal flow to mangroves for the Brihanmumbai Stormwater Disposal System.

The mangrove cell is aware of all these violations but sits on them. It is a long-term systematic process to destroy trees by stopping the seawater from spreading. Once the trees die, a slum colony is set up. Following this, a developer approaches the slum rehabilitation authority (SRA) to construct a building and with zero floor space index (FSI), a four-storey building is ready, he said.

While the media is doing a great job, Mumbaiites cant do anything apart from filing complaints. The system does not allow us to do it. On-ground implementation is hogwash, said Valentine Vaz, Malad resident.The Thane crime branch recorded the statement of Ayesha Shroff, wife of actor Jackie Shroff, on Thursday in connection with the call data records scam.

Abhishek Trimukhe, deputy commissioner of police of the Thane crime branch, said, We have recorded her statement in the morning and have got important information related to the scam. We will verify the information furnished by her.

The scam came to light on January 24 when four private detectives were arrested for allegedly illegally procuring call data records. They used to sell the data for Rs25,000 to Rs50,000. Makesh Pandiyan, 42, Prashant Palekar, 49, Jigar Makawana, 35, and Samresh Jha alias Pratik Mohpal, 32, were arrested from Kalwa.

As many as 14 people have been arrested, including an Assam police constable who was arrested by the police of that state. He will be questioned by the Assam police.

Earlier Rajani Pandit, Indias first woman private detective, was also arrested and granted bail last month.

Meanwhile, another private detective was arrested on Wednesday and sent to police custody till April 17. Jignesh Jayantilal Chedda from Thane runs a private detective agency.

An officer of the Thane crime branch said, We have arrested Cheddha. We have recovered CDRs from his office. We have found that Cheddha had obtained call data records from Makesh Pandiyan in the past couple of years.

The Thane crime branch has filed a 2,163-page charge sheet.Water pollution in Ulhas creek by factories in Dombivli is set to reduce as the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) has prepared a Rs100-crore plan to control it.

MIDC plans to increase the capacity of the common effluent treatment plants (CETP) in Dombivli MIDC within a year. This will help treat more effluents before they are released into nullahs which finally meet Ulhas creek. We have come up with a Rs100-crore plan to improve the capacity of the CETPs in a year. This will help treat the effluents efficiently. The tenders for this work will be floated soon, said an officer of MIDC, Dombivli, requesting anonymity.

The development plan report has been prepared by a Singapore-based consultant which studied the CETPs functioning. There are two CETPs in Dombivli MIDC region  one in phase 1 and another in phase 2  which treat effluents of 375 factories daily. Of these, 120 are chemical units, 70 are fabric production units. The CETP in phase 1 has a capacity of treating 16mld of effluents and the one in phase 2 can treat 1.5mld of effluents.

Since the capacity of the latter is less, at least 4mld of effluents from phase 2 is sent to phase 1 CETP, overburdening it.

The work for increasing the capacity of the CETPs and their maintenance will be given to a private company on a contract-basis for five years.

The MIDC will spend 75% for the project while factories will spend 25%. The upgradation will be done considering the demand for the next 15 to 20 years.

Once complete, pollution caused by factories in Dombivli MIDC will reduce to a remarkable extent, claim officials.

It will take at least 10 to12 days for the tenders to be floated, said SR Patil, deputy engineer, MIDC, Dombivli.

Mumbai-based NGO Vanshakti has been fighting against pollution in Ulhas river through its Save Ulhas River project since 2012. In November 2013, the NGO approached National Green Tribunal (NGT) complaining about the violations of environmental norms.

The project plan is pending for more than five years. Unless effluents are treated at an individual level at every factory, there is no point in upgrading the CETP, said Ashwin Aghor, project officer, Vanshaktis Save Ulhas River project.

The chemical oxygen demand (COD) level of the effluents released by each unit is more than the permissible limits. This is because the units production is more than the limit, he said.

Rajesh Joshi, chief executive officer, Dombivli Better Environment System Association (DBESA) said they had been demanding the expansion since the past two and a half years.

ABOUT THE CETPs IN DOMBIVLI

Dombivli Better Environment System Association CETP in phase 1 of Dombivli MIDC

Location: Opposite Savitribai Phule auditorium , Dombivli MIDC

Dombivli Chemical CETP in phase two of Dombivli MIDC

Location: Near Abhinav School, Dombivli MIDC

ULHAS IN TROUBLE

The Ulhas River provides drinking water to nearby cities. However, it is facing pollution because of untreated effluents discharged into it by factories and CETPs across Kalyan-Dombivli, Ulhasnagar and Ambernath cities.

WHAT TRIGGERED THE MOVE

In March 2016, National Green Tribunal (NGT), Pune had ordered the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to conduct surprise checks at Dombivli and Ambernath MIDCs and submit reports. CPCB in its affidavit filed on February 29, 2016, to the NGT clearly stated that the CETP operated by the DBSEA in phase 1 is not upto the mark. NGT had passed an order asking the CPCB to ensure proper functioning of the CETP in Dombivli and Ambernath regions.

The order by the NGT stated that the CETPs are not performing well and there has been no consequential action by the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) in this regard. It said there is a need for joint inspection of the CETPs by CPCB and MPCB. It said they need to meet CETP operators with the fact findings to identify ways of effective implementation.

The affidavit filed by CPCB at the NGT clearly mentions that there has been no improvement in the functioning of industries and the CETP. The outlet COD of the CETP is 2,000 mg/l when it should be 250mg/lThe Maharashtra Real Estate Regulatory Authority (MahaRERA) has been asked by its appellate tribunal to initiate action against an architect who is the former president of Practicing Engineers, Architects, and Town Planners Association (PEATA), for issuing a factually incorrect certificate for a building.

The certificate had helped the developer obtain an occupation certificate (OC) for the building. However, the work had not been completed.

Manoj Dubal, former president of PEATA, said, The order was passed without listening to my side. I was not heard at all.

In October 2017, home buyers of the Borivali project, Gundecha Trillium, had approached MahaRERA after the developer, Sea Princess Realty, did not hand over possession of the apartments and amenities within the stipulated time, by December 2016.

In January 2018, the authority had ordered that the developer to pay the interest for a six-month delay. The developer appealed in the tribunal seeking concession for the charges imposed.

It is unfortunate that the architect has stated in his certificate that the building is complete. A responsible authority is not expected to sign blindly when the project itself is in doldrum and incomplete, said the tribunal.

Sirish Sukhatme, senior architect with PEATA, said, After the architect issues the certificate, a joint inspection is carried out by the local authority to reconfirm the factual elements of the certificate. This means that the officials who carried out the joint inspection before issuing the OC have also done a shoddy work. Why is the authority only blaming the architect?

The tribunal finally stated, The secretary of MahaRERA is requested to independently initiate action under the provision of RERA against Manoj Dubal for issuing a factually incorrect certificate.A Vakola-based developer has approached the Mumbai crime branch after he allegedly received threat calls from gangster Ravi Pujari for extortion.

The gangster threatened to kill the developer if he did not pay Rs10-12 crore to settle a property dispute with another businessman. According to police sources, the complainant Ismalil Waseem Dhamankar (name changed), who has a project in Vakola, received phone calls from a person, who identified himself as gangster Ravi Pujari. Initially, he did not pay attention, but later he started getting calls regularly.

The gangster threatened to harm him if he did not settle the property dispute with another businessman by paying Rs10-12 crore, said an officer.

Scared, he approached the police and an FIR with the Vakola police was registered. The case was transferred to Unit 8 of the Mumbai crime branch.

The gangster made phone calls using some mobile applications in which, calls look like VoIP calls, but they are not, said another officer. Cops are exploring all possible angles and will also be questioning the person with whom he has the dispute.

The crime branch have registered a case under relevant sections of the IPC and are further probing the case.The final list of wetlands in the Mumbai suburban areas will be made public within a month, the district administration said on Thursday.

Based on satellite maps developed by the Space Application Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad, under the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the Mumbai suburban district collectors office started to identify and demarcate wetlands across the suburbs.

Currently, 412 wetlands have been identified in the suburbs and 63 in the city. The final wetland list, framed on the basis of the criteria mentioned in the new wetland rules promulgated by the Centre in September 2017, will be released by May. We will invite suggestions and objections from citizens, said Deependra Singh Kushwa, Mumbai suburban collector.

The exercise is being carried out almost five years after the Bombay high court (HC) asked the state government to develop a brief document for wetlands in Maharashtra, acting on a petition filed by NGO Vanashakti. A year later, acting on the same petition, the HC banned reclamation and construction on wetlands. Based on a Supreme Court order and directions from the state environment department issued earlier this year, the process has been expedited across all coastal districts, said members of the HC wetland grievance committee.

Action by the Mumbai suburban district administration will help deter destruction of wetlands. All district collectors have begun the exercise. As the suburbs have fewer wetlands, the process will be completed faster. We will check the status of other districts during our next monthly meeting, said JR Gowda, member secretary of the HC committee.

The Wetland (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017 provide a framework to legalise destruction of wetlands, and also amend the definition of a wetland. The new rules disallow industrial development, garbage dumping or discharge of wastewater at wetland sites across the country. The rules direct states to constitute committees to focus on conservation of wetlands.

Environmentalists had, however, criticised the new rules, claiming it was a means to allow development at these ecologically sensitive areas. Several development projects in the city have been stalled owing to wetland destruction complaints by environmentalists. In many cases, the areas are not demarcated as wetlands. The activity is being carried out to resolve these issues and ensure wetlands have the highest protection status, said Kushwa. Using coordinates provided to us from SAC, we have first superimposed all locations on a map. Based on field surveys, we have identified the exact area of a wetland site. After we collate this data, the sites will be notified and finally demarcated.

Between January 2012 and January 2018, there have been 652 cases of wetland destruction in the state, of which 60% have been reported from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Wetland areas account for 3.3% of the total geographical area in Maharashtra, and almost 25% of the total geographical area of Mumbai suburban areas.

Environment watchdogs said the haste was to issue swift environment clearance to construction projects. Wetlands have been under severe threat for the past decade and it seems the state machinery was snoozing for the past five years. This is not for conservation. By the time the inventory is complete, not even 70% of the current wetlands identified will be a part of it, said Stalin D, director, NGO Vanashakti.If youre enjoying an unlimited thali at any of Mumbais Gujarati and Rajasthani restaurants, youre not looking up from your plate. Heres what you miss: an army of waiters communicating wordlessly through hand-signals, relaying to each other that its time to refill your sabzi, that you prefer Jain kadhi or can be cajoled into yet another gulab jamun.

Gautam Purohit shows the Jain version sign developed at his 73-year-old, award-winning, Thaker Bhojanalay in Kalbadevi.

Gautam Purohit, who runs the 73-year-old, award-winning, Thaker Bhojanalay in Kalbadevi, says sign-language is easier than yelling service instructions over diners heads. Each server is responsible for a particular item on your plate, Purohit says. Hes constantly relaying information to others so your plate is always full, he says.

Take a look at some of the signs developed at Thaker. Maybe you can signal them yourself the next time you run out of roti.

CAN YOU READ THE SIGNS?

When the Bomanjee Hormarjee Wadia Clock Tower on Perin Nariman Road in Fort was restored last year, media reports were understandably gushy.

The clock tower was erected in 1882 with money raised by public subscription to honour the sheriff and philanthropist Bomanjee Hormarjee Wadia. It was built with yellow basalt stone from Malad, while the sculptures and parapet cornices are made of grayish-blue basalt from Kurla.

The Bomanjee Hormarjee Wadia Clock Tower on Perin Nariman Road in Fort was erected in 1882. (Kunal Patil/HT Photo)

But it had been neglected for decades  its clock face shattered, the hands and gas light stolen. But efforts by conservation architect Vikas Dilawari and the Kala Ghoda Association got the clock working again. The holy flame atop the tower had shed its ugly coats of paint and the stone work had been cleaned.

One mystery remained. What were those strange wedge-shaped symbols on the plaques on the sides of the tower? Reports attributed them to be a message in Old Persian Cuneiform script, copied from a rock inscription at Behistun in south-west Iran dating back to 520 BC.

This one seems to be a quote from the tomb of Darius: adataiy azda bavatiy parsahya martiyahya duraiy arstis paragmata or Then you will know: The spear of a Persian man has gone forth a great distance. (Kunal Patil/HT photo)

But what do they mean? We asked Team Cuneiform, a group of Finnish enthusiasts of the script who run @cooleiform on Twitter, for help. They deciphered the symbols in no time at all.

Rachel.Lopez@htlive.comIn the neon world of car stickers, GTB Nagar shines bright. You wouldnt know it from the size of the little stores at Sion Koliwada. They barely fit a seat, desk and a printer.

But check out the walls. Decals of every sticker design youve ever seen on a Mumbai vehicle (and many you hope to never see) cover the display surface. While bikers in the West decorate their vehicles with skulls, flames or Baby On Board signs, Mumbai does it with film logos, religious symbols, random figures, slogans and crazy shapes  an unusual shorthand for our aspirations.

The upper classes dont decorate their cars at all  at the most, theyll get those strange car tattoos with knives or pups, says Amjad Ali Qureshi, who owns Sai Art. The middle class loves stickers, especially those who drive two-wheelers or want to cover bumps and scratches on a second-hand car.

Fast-moving designs at Qureshis store include Bob Marley (I dont know this charsi, but young boys love him), the Transformers logo, and Calvin (from Calvin And Hobbes) relieving himself into the fuel tank. Ive sold lots of Harley Davidson logos, Qureshi says. Never to a Harley Davidson owner.

Irshad Alis Nisar Arts, down the road, also has American bald eagles, Arabic numbers, Dubai license plates and date palms. There are perennial favourites: Shivaji, Sai Baba and Salman Khan. (Rachel Lopez/HT photo)

Irshad Alis Nisar Arts, down the road, also has American bald eagles, Arabic numbers, Dubai license plates and date palms. Its to show off that they have family in America or the Gulf, says Ali.

There are perennial favourites: Shivaji, Sai Baba and Salman Khan. First-time bikers almost always get typographical art honouring their mothers. Taxi drivers emblazon Gavilgad, Ajinkyatara, or Bhagwangad on their rear windows, referring to their hometowns forts.

Since 2014, it has become fashionable to mark your car with your political affiliations. Shiv Sena stickers beat every other partys design, says Qureshi. Alis store also has big full-colour, photo stickers  great for gods, temples and, of course, Salman Khan. They cost more, but Mumbai loves decoration, theyll soon get popular, Ali says.

Rachel.Lopez@htlive.comThe Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) undertaking has not conducted the mandatory Pollution Under Control (PUC) Certificate checks of more than 400 of its vehicles in 2017, thus violating the provisions in the Motor Vehicles Act.

Right to Information (RTI) activist Shakeel Ahmed Shaikh said BESTs reply to his query suggests that BEST has a fleet of 3,830 vehicles of which it has conducted PUC checks of only 3,428 all buses. BEST has 2,087 CNG, 1,337 diesel and four battery-run buses. If BEST has conducted PUC certification of only buses, it means it has not done PUC certification of more than 400 vehicles, he said. The RTI query suggests that apart from buses, BEST fleet includes six motorcycles, 15 bikes, eight cars, 145 four-wheelers, 57 delivery vehicles and cash vans, nine fault-finding vans, 7 forklifts, and 164 vehicles including lorries, tankers and mobile canteen bus, among others.

Every registered vehicle needs to go through PUC checks every six months, barring new ones, which have valid PUC Certificate for a year. In the RTI query reply, BEST said it has conducted 8,091 and 7,296 checks of buses in 2016 and 2017 respectively. Some vehicles might have gone through PUC checks more than twice a year, he said, adding that if the vehicle was found polluting beyond prescribed norms, it needed to go through repairs.

BEST has spent Rs60 per bus for PUC checks and incurred Rs4.85 lakh and Rs4.37 lakh in 2016 and 2017, respectively.

PUC certification indicates that the vehicles emissions are in alignment with standard pollution norms. Shaikh said vehicular pollution is one of the major reasons for pollution in Mumbai.

Shaikh has written to the chief minister and transport minister demanding stern action against concerned officials. Any vehicle, which does not carry a valid PUC Certificate, becomes liable for prosecution under section 190(2) of the act. BEST spokesperson was not available for comments.A 12-year-old boy, Ishan Misal, was gravely injured when a part of the ceiling collapsed on top of him in his house at Government Colony, Bandra (East), around 3:30 am on Thursday morning.

Ishans parents, who are government employees, have registered a police complaint against states Public Works Department (PWD) for failing to maintain the quarters over the years.

The slab fell on my sons head in the middle of the night. He has four stitches on his head and his right hand is injured. He has an exam on Friday, said Pramila Misal, a resident since the last 15 years.

The PWD is making repairs in the house now, but temporary repairs are not enough, she added.

Thousands of families have been living in the 60-year-old structures in the Colony with fear. PWD officials had said the lifespan of 2,300 houses would be increased by using advanced technology before building new towers for the government employees.

In a separate incident at Satish Compound, Grant Road, a fire broke out in a timber mart at around 9:40am. No injuries were reported.

The fire was brought under control by 10:18am and doused by 10:40am, said officials from the disaster management department. The fire affected a furniture shop and a garage in the compound.A 38-year-old Singapore national of Indian origin wanted in the Rs2,276crore SpeakAsia online marketing fraud, was arrested at the Chennai International Airport.

Balwinder Singh, founder director of Singapore based MMWG Pvt. Ltd. was held by the immigration officers and handed over to the Mumbai EOW.

Singhs mother Harender Kaur, one of the key accused is still at large, police said.

Singhs company MMWG Pvt. Ltd. and La Marca Services Private Limited, are linked to Speak Asia Online Private limited, Singapore, against which the Mumbai police had registered a criminal case seven years ago.

The police probe had found that SpeakAsia promoters had started an online marketing survey company in March 2010. It then asked investors to deposit Rs11,000 and fill survey forms of some multinational firms and on successful submission of surveys, they were promised Rs52,000 in return.

Initially, the company paid the investors back, but later it wound up its business, duping investors, the police probe found. The firm allegedly duped over 24 lakh investors and the amount of the scam has been pegged at Rs2,276 crore. According to the police complaint, SpeakAsia had allegedly remitted over Rs900 crore to Singapore. The money was sent from India to the banks in Singapore and from there to Dubai, Italy and the UK. However, the money came back from UK again to UAE (Dubai) and to India.

Cops suspect that the arrested accused Singh was instrumental in transferring money in Singapore by using bogus invoices, CA certificates and other forged documents. Hence, cops will be checking the bank accounts Singh was operating. Investigators suspect that Singh was in contact with the wanted accused Manoj Sharma, Harender Kaur and Mansur Patel.A 34-year-old tenant has been arrested for allegedly killing his landlords son on Wednesday after the latter tried to intervene in a fight between him and his wife in Malwani, Malad (West).

Police said the incident took place around 1.30pm on the first floor of a one-storeyed house in Malwani. The arrested accused Sultan Fakir Patel, 34, lived there on rent with his wife Reshmani, 28, and two sons.

Patel and Reshmani hail from a village near Jalgaon. For the past seven months, Patels family was living on the first floor of the house owned by the complainant Hasina Mateen Abdul Shaikh, 45.

Shaikh and her three sons live on the ground floor. On Wednesday Hasinas youngest son, Altaf Shaikh, 24, heard Reshmani and her two sons screaming. Hasina, who was sleeping, woke up due to the screaming but asked Altaf to not venture upstairs.

However, Altaf went running upstairs and tried to stop Patel, who was allegedly beating his wife. Patel and Altaf then got into a scuffle, in which Patel pushed Altaf to the ground and the latter suffered internal head injuries. He was rushed to a nearby hospital but was declared dead.

Altafs eldest brother, Faisal, told HT, There was no bleeding but he suffered internal head injury. For the past one month, Patel has been getting violent. The night before the murder, he was creating nuisance outside our home, abusing people. We had locked him in his room but he started beating his wife and children after which we unlocked him. But the next day he again continued beating his wife when my brother decided to intervene.An eight-year-old is sedated and gang raped in a prayer hall and then bludgeoned to death. Among the perpetrators are a police officer and a juvenile. The post-mortem report found that the young child  our child, your child  had lacerations on the vagina and her death was caused by asphyxia leading to cardio-pulmonary arrest.

The gruesome details of the pre-planned kidnapping, rape and murder of the child should make our collective blood boil, but that has not been the case in Jammu and Kashmir, a region deeply divided along religious lines.

The killing has instead sparked outrage across J&K, first because the Mehbooba Mufti government handed over the case to the Crime Branch following protests from the nomadic Bakerwal community to which the victim belonged. It then took a communal turn after an outfit called the Hindu Ekta Manch was set up by politicians in support of the accused. At the forefront of those who rallied behind the accused are two Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members of the Mehbooba cabinet.

The fissures have only widened in a state where the two separate regions of Jammu and Kashmir appear to be at war with each other. Worse, Mehboobas Peoples Democratic Party and the BJP are involved in a dangerous tug of war despite being in an alliance that was stitched together in March 2015, in the hope of bridging the gulf between the two regions.

The late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed (Mehboobas father), who was the principal architect of the alliance, was clear about why he wanted the BJP as an ally, despite opposition from his daughter, who had campaigned and sought votes on the main pretext of keeping the BJP out of the Valley. Jammu backed the BJP and the Valley voted in large numbers to keep the BJP out.

Despite the hard political reality that makes the BJP and the PDP strange bedfellows, Mufti was clear that joining hands was the only way forward. In the middle of nail-biting negotiations between the two, Sayeed flew out to Mumbai to play a few hands of bridge. There, in the financial capital, he also chose to do a few interviews, one of which was with this paper. He shared his thought process and did not mince his words.

Ideologically we are North Pole and South Pole but the state has given us a historic opportunity to unite Jammu with Kashmir and to unite the state with India. It is important to connect the two regions and I believe I can do it. I am saying, delegate the responsibility to me. VP Singh (the late former PM) used to tell me that politics is the art of possibility and of managing contradictions. Let me tell you on record, I want to leave a legacy. I see an opportunity to mend the divide between the two regions of Jammu and Kashmir and I will form a government only with the BJP, or Im out, Mufti had told HT.

Mufti had the philosophical wisdom to back the decision he took then, but into its fourth year in power, Mehbooba must ask what kind of legacy she is promoting by being part of an alliance that is clearly being stretched to its seam.

She has lost control of South Kashmir  PDPs stronghold  where statistics back the contention that one young Kashmiri is joining the militant fold every three days. In Jammu, which must appear very distant to her  many miles further than it was during Muftis time  the BJP-backed lawyers association is waving the national flag to whip up fervor in support of rapists and murderers.

Politicians, across party lines, have taken great pride in referring to Jammu and Kashmir as the jewel in Indias crown. What pride, they must ask, can there be, in preventing a charge sheet from being filed; from justice being denied and finally, from a deepening political and communal fault lines being drawn?At least 30 people, including 27 school children, were killed on Monday when a private bus fell into a gorge in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. Prima facie, negligent driving and overspeeding are the main reasons for the accident, an official said. Be it in the plains or in the hills, road safety is not something we care about, even though the number of vehicles and motorways are increasing rapidly. Unsurprisingly, India tops the list when it comes to road mishaps. According to a recent report of the International Road Foundation, the country records 10% of global road accidents with more than 1.46 lakh fatalities annually, which is the highest in the world. As a signatory to the Brasilia Declaration, a global high-level conference on road safety, India is committed to reducing the number of road accidents and fatalities by 50% by 2020.

When I read about the accident on Tuesday, I recalled a social media post  a medley of photographs  that often pops up on my timelines. It is about drivers in Himachal Pradesh, mainly those who drive the state roadways buses. The photographs (search for bus drivers in Himachal on Google) fete the expertise of these drivers in negotiating the hill states treacherous dirt roads and hairpin bends, come rain/snow or shine. These photos are not photo-shopped; I have seen these drivers in action during my numerous visits to the mountains; they are indeed awe-inspiring. As one of the headlines on a website says: 21 Pictures That Prove Bus Drivers Of Himachal Pradesh Are The Best In India.

They could be the best but lionising their capability is absolutely foolish, just like the famed Mumbai Spirit. These drivers dont take these risks because they are the Rambos of the road. They do it because they have no choice. This is because some other department fails to discharge its responsibility of maintaining the roads and putting the guide rails (a barricade between the road and a gorge).

Blaming the driver for Mondays accident would be the easiest thing to do. But that will not lead us anywhere.

Instead, the focus must be on improving road infrastructure and signages, patrolling, penalising rash drivers and investing in proper driver training to avoid such mishaps in the future.

@kumkumdasguptaA day before the re-release of controversial film Nanak Shah Fakir, the Akal Takht  the highest Sikh temporal seat  on Thursday excommunicated its producer Harinder Singh Sikka for not abiding by the Takht which had banned the movie citing that it is blasphemous.

Sikka had filed a civil writ petition in the Supreme Court seeking protection for screening of the movie in theatres. He, however, has stated in the plea that he would not release the film in Punjab. The apex court had on April 10 okayed the re-release of the movie and directed the state governments to ensure its smooth screening.

The movie is based on the life of the first Sikh master, Guru Nanak. The chief objection is that portrayal of the gurus or their family members in human form is a violation of Sikh tenets, though the movie claims to have only used graphic effects to outline Guru Nanak. It was released first in April 2015 and the producer was forced to withdraw it in view of protests.

Unhappy over Sikka moving the apex court, Panj Singh Sahiban (Akal Takht jathedar-led presidium of Sikh clergymen) issued a hukamnama (religious decree) and termed the act as violation of the Takhts decision.

Apart from banning its release, the Akal Takht has also cancelled all letters issued earlier in connection with the movie, said Akal Takht jathedar Giani Gurbachan Singh.

Ignoring the Panth sentiments, Sikka is adamant on releasing the movie and for this he has also taken legal measures, reads the decree. Keeping in view of his stubborn attitude, Sikka is excommunicated from the Panth, said the Takht jathedar, adding that, Sikh sangat is directed to shun social, religious and other kind of associations with Sikka.

Besides GIani Gurbachan Singh, Takht Patna Sahib jathedar Giani Iqbal Singh, Takht Kesgarh Sahib jathedar Giani Raghbir Singh and Takht Damdama Sahib jathedar Giani Harpreet Singh were also present.

The Sikh high priests also directed presidents of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) and Sikh MPs to meet Union home minister Rajnath Singh and make him aware of the Sikh sentiments and urge him to ban the movie.

SGPC panel to be summoned for giving clearance

Giani Gurbachan Singh said the SGPC sub-committee that had given clearance to the movie in May 2016 will be summoned. The clearance was withdrawn by the apex gurdwara body on March 29 this year after protest by Sikh organisations.

HT Explainer: The unholy row over Nanak Shah FakirFor former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, his stint at Panjab University was the happiest period of his life. The 85-year-old alumnus was here to deliver the first Prof SB Rangnekar Lecture organised by the economics department on Wednesday.

Speaking fondly of his association with Dr S B Rangnekar, former head of the economics department at PU, Dr Singh  who joined the department, then at Hoshiarpur, in 1952  said it was he who inspired him to go to Cambridge.

On his stint as a faculty member in the department when PU shifted to Chandigarh, the former PM said: Dr Rangnekar and his wife Shalini treated me as a member of their family. That was the happiest period of my life.

Dr Singh delivered the lecture titled The Seventieth Anniversary of Our Independence  Strengthening the Roots of Our Democracy at the Law Auditorium on the campus.

Must read | At home in Panjab University, former PM Manmohan Singh delivers a critique on Modi govt

Trip down memory lane

Economics department chairperson Upinder Sawhney said: Dr Singh was very happy to be at the department. As he could not climb stairs to the second floor where the department is situated, we made arrangements near the entrance.

The former PM spent around five minutes at the department and got pictures clicked with the faculty members and students. He also signed a flex board with one of his quotes that will be put on display at the department.

The quote reads: I am confident about the future of India. I firmly believe that the emergence of India as a major powerhouse of the evolving global economy is an idea whose time has come. Blending tradition with modernity and unity with diversity, this nation of ours can show the way forward to the world.

Later, Dr Singh visited the Institute of Social Science Education and Research (ISSER) and spent around 10 minutes with the faculty. He also went to Guru Teg Bahadur Bhawan, where 3,500 books and memorabilia donated by him will be housed.

History professor Reeta Grewal said: Dr Singh and his wife, Gursharan Kaur, interacted with the faculty and expressed their happiness over collaborative programmes being conducted at ISSER. The Chandigarh College of Architecture (CCA) team gave the former PM a presentation on how the space would look like once the books and memorabilia are put there.

Dr Manmohan Singh with faculty of Department of Economics, while signing a poster carrying his quotation. (HT Photo)

A teacher admired by all

After his return from Cambridge, Dr Singh joined PU as a senior lecturer in 1957 and remained here till 1966.

Professor Emeritus HS Shergill, who was his student from 1964-66, said: Dr Singh was a teacher admired by all in the university. He became a full professor at the age of 33 and at that time, he was already among the top professors in the university. We were the last MA batch taught by him. Prof Shergill said Dr Singh used to come fully prepared for the lecture every day.

His delivery used to be so clear that students understood everything. He was very punctual and even students never came late to his class, he said. Prof Shergill said all students used to stand up to wish Dr Singh when he passed by. It was not just because he was a teacher but because he was very helpful to students.

Meanwhile, students who got an opportunity to listen to Dr Singh on Wednesday, were also elated. Nausheen, a research scholar in the economics department said: I completely agree with Dr Singhs views on curbing corruption through better governance.

It is not frequent that you see a person of such stature in person, said Ankit Khullar, an MA, economics, student.Till not very long ago, the kandi (sub-mountainous) belt in Punjab was known for its barren land and impoverished people. Ithe te ik muth maah vi nahin ugdi (Not even a handful of daal can be grown here), was the common refrain among farmers of the area which is located in the foothills of the Shivaliks.

Now, the area exports 1 lakh litres of natural vinegar a month, ships its powdered pink salt to London, and sells a host of other products, from gooseberry (amla) byproducts and aromatic oils to leading pharmacies in India. A total of 38,000 hectare of its forest land has been certified as organic; and it generates 1 lakh man hours of work a year.

The belt owes its transformation to a series of interventions by the Punjab State Council for Science and Technology (PSCST), which devised ways to process and monetise its bio-resources.

These projects have been such a success that Dr Roshan Sunkaria, principal secretary, science technology and environment, is now toying with the idea of setting up a small winery demonstration unit at Talwara.

Besides using bio-resources, the council has also persuaded farmers in the area to grow lemongrass, citronella and palmarosa with the help of the Kelkar Science Research Centre, Mumbai.

The amla revolution

It was in 2004 that we initiated our first project at Talwara, Hoshiarpur, with a grant from the department of biotechnology, government of India, recounts Dr Jatinder Kaur Aurora, the executive director of PSCST, who was fascinated by the rich crop of gooseberries (amla) growing in the wild.

PSCST partnered with Unati, a cooperative set up by Jyoti Swarup, an MSc student who reached out to Aurora when she used to deliver lectures at the Himachal Pradesh University (HPU). Our aim was to use the natural resources of the area for providing jobs to the locals and this cooperative fitted the bill, says Aurora. The council invited experts from the Indian Institute of Horticulture Research to train women self-help groups (SHGs) in harvesting the berries.

Then, Aurora and Jyoti visited Partapgarh in Uttar Pradesh, which has one of Indias largest cottage industries of processed amla. From candies to barfi, every household there makes a living from amla, says Aurora.

Once the processing protocols were in place, Aurora got on rent two unused sheds owned by the Punjab State Power Corporation Ltd (PSPCL) near Talwara and turned them into state-of-the-art processing facilities. Soon, the amla byproducts produced by the local women were certified by the Food Safety Standard Authority of India (FSSAI).

After amla, the council targeted other bio-resources in the region, such as karela, giloy, turmeric, moringa, black carrot, mountain salt and started processing them. Today, all the 220 plus outlets of Apollo Pharmaceuticals store their products. They are also available on Amazon and HealthKart.

It was in 2004 that we initiated our first project at Talwara, Hoshiarpur, with a grant from the department of biotechnology, government of India, recounts Dr Jatinder Kaur Aurora, the executive director of PSCST.

Vinegar wins

Always on the lookout for new products, the council has also started making vinegar. Dr Deepinder Bakshi, a scientist, says unlike the vinegar derived from petrochemicals, they use technology from Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana, to derive it from sugarcane, grapes and amla syrup.

The department of science and technology helped them set up a demonstration unit at the site, which today exports 1 lakh litres of vinegar a month.

All along, the council has tried to ensure that only locals are employed in these projects. Its a great initiative for women empowerment as 90% of the workforce comprises women, says Sunkaria, who was impressed with a shipment of pink salt headed to London.

Aromatic crops

Besides using bio-resources, the council has also persuaded farmers in the area to grow lemongrass, citronella and palmarosa with the help of the Kelkar Science Research Centre, Mumbai, and the regional research station at Gurdaspur. Wild animals dont touch these crops, says Dr Alkesh, a scientist.

A distillation unit at the site helps in producing essential oils from these three crops, which are sold across India. Everything we grow and process is organic, says Aurora, who was thrilled when the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID) found their interventions had led to a 30% jump in local incomes.

Sunkaria attributes the success of these projects to the synergy between the Punjab Science Council and Unati.

Sunkaria is now looking forward to producing wine from fruits in the area. With Aurora already initiating a research in this direction, it wont be long before we get wine, produced in kandi.Telugu actor Sri Reddy doesnt seem to be in the mood to stop. The actor, who stripped in front of the Telugu film chambers to protest casting couch in Telugu film industry, accused producer Suresh Babus son Abhiram of sexually exploiting her. Now, she has reportedly leaked private messages with four directors including director Kona Venkat and Abhiram. These were initially carried by a local portal, Telugu 360, and later reported widely. In the screenshot, we see an alleged conversation between Kona Venkat and Sri Reddy in which the director comments Just got free, U really lost weight. I can see on your face. To this, the actor says,But what is the use, you are not giving me the chance. Claiming that these allegations are not true, Kona Venkat has demanded an investigation.

Read | Sri Reddy claims Rana Daggubatis brother Abhiram used her, leaks pics

The actor took to his official Twitter handle to defend himself. He wrote, Im shocked with some allegations made by one actress against some film personalities including me.. I demand the government to conduct through police investigation in these allegations and punish whoever are guilty.. Truth must prevail. legal action follows!!

He also added, Its really pity that film industry and film personalities have become soft target to many people who are trying to gain cheap publicity... I definitely support taking Telugu artists in our films.. In Geethanjali u find only Telugu artists. But this is unacceptable. I condemn it.

Kona Venkat has worked with actors like Ram Charan, Akhil, Ravi Teja and others as a producer, director or writer .

Follow @htshowbiz for more

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktopSuperstar Mahesh Babu, who is awaiting the release of his new Telugu film Bharat Ane Nenu, seems to be in a happy and confident space. Just nine days before the release of his new film, he has reportedly left with his family -- Namrata Shirodkar and kids Gautham and Sitara -- for Paris for a holiday.

Mahesh, who left to Paris on Tuesday, is expected to be back in Hyderabad on April 17 to promote Koratala Siva-directed Bharat Ane Nenu.

Its a brief break of Mahesh, who has been shooting non-stop over the last two months. Every summer, the entire family explores a new place on a holiday. This year theyve gone to Paris. Mahesh is expected to join his family back after the release of Bharat Ane Nenu to continue the holiday, a source close to Mahesh told Hindustan Times.

Bharat Ane Nenu marks Sivas second time collaboration with Mahesh after Srimanthudu. It will also be the Telugu debut of actor Kiara Advani. The film also stars Tamil actor Sarath Kumar, who will be seen as Maheshs father in the film. Although Sarath has starred in a few Telugu films over the years, this will be a huge project in his career.

At the films audio launch last week, Mahesh said hes delivered his finest performance yet in Bharat Ane Nenu. Despite having qualms about playing a chief minister on screen, he accepted the role because he was inspired by Sivas story. The director said that the film couldnt have been made on a lavish scale if not for Maheshs conviction in the story and overall support.

Originally slated to release on April 27, the makers recently advanced the release to April 20 to avoid clash with superstar Rajinikanths Kaala, which is slated to hit the screens on April 27. Latest reports suggest Kaalas date may again get postponed.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktopThe National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on Thursday served notices on the Information and Broadcasting ministry and the Telangana government, calling for detailed reports on the alleged sexual exploitation of women in Tollywood. The NHRC took suo motu cognisance of media reports about aspiring Telugu actor Sri Reddy stripping in public in Hyderabad on Saturday to protest casting couch in the film industry.

After the Movie Artistes Association (MAA), an apex body of the Telugu film industry, refused to make the actor a member taking a serious view of her protest, Sri Reddy accused some prominent people in the industry of sexually exploiting her. She even started SriReddyLeaks page on Facebook for her campaign and leaked the pictures showing her in intimate poses with the son of a famous producer.

The NHRC has taken serious note of the absence of a committee to address sexual harassment complaints from women artistes in the film industry. It felt that the contents of the media reports, if true, are tantamount to inaction on the part of the state government.

The commission said that the reported ban on Sri Reddy and warning others from working with her are violation of her right to livelihood and live a life with dignity. The Centre and the state government have been asked to inform the NHRC about the availability or proposal to set up a mechanism to deal with the subject.

The Commission has also observed that reportedly, legal action against the actress has been taken under section 294 of IPC but it is nowhere mentioned, if action on the serious allegations of casting couch and sexual harassment, levelled by her, has been taken by the authorities. Therefore, it appears to be an attempt to muzzle the voice of whistle blower both from the sides of MAA and the State authorities, a release from the NHRC said.

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktopAfter his close friend Rajiev Dhingra blamed Preeti Simoes for Kapil Sharmas depression, former co-star Sugandha Mishra has defended Preeti and claimed that Kapils new team pushed him towards negativity. In an interview to Times of India, Sugandha said she has known the comedian-actor since her college days but the Kapil we are seeing today is not the one she knew. Sugandha has also worked with Kapil on his shows, Comedy Nights with Kapil and The Kapil Sharma Show.

While Sugandha was a frequent guest artiste on Comedy Nights with Kapil, she took on the permanent character of teacher Vidyavati in The Kapil Sharma Show. She is currently working with Sunil Grover on his web show, Jio Dhan Dhana Dhan.

#jiodhandhanadhan #instashootmode on A post shared by Sugandha Mishra (@sugandhamishra23) on Apr 9, 2018 at 3:54am PDT

Preeti Simoes drove Kapil Sharma into depression, says comedians friend

After spending a year mired in controversies and his show failing to garner the expected TRPs, Kapil Sharma made a comeback on the small screen on March 30 with Family Time with Kapil. Even before the second episode could be aired, reports of him cancelling shoots began doing the rounds. The channel was forced to air re-runs instead of the third episode. To worsen matters, Kapil posted a series abusive tweets slamming the system and the media, and named one journalist in particular. The said mediaperson also released a call recording where Kapil is heard threatening him. The two have also filed cases against each other.

Reacting to recent developments, Sugandha told the English daily, This is not the Kapil I knew. He was the one who got me to Mumbai and helped me seek permission from my family to have a career in this stream. But the choices he has made currently has led to his downfall. When we were a team, he was all fine but the current choices have somewhere led to all this. Probably the sudden stardom and success that he has got, had made him lose control on himself especially with the current team.

Kapil Sharma said he is not in the right state of mind, claims Bharti Singh

When we all were together, we never felt that he was going towards a negative side. In fact we all, including him, were extremely positive. But this began from the time of his movie Firangi. I guess that was when we started noticing a certain change in him. His new bunch wanted to separate us and probably change the team as well. But our team was strong enough and they knew how to handle Kapil, especially Preeti Simoes. Kapil is like a kid and she literally has caressed him like a child by bribing him into doing things, she added.

Sugandha is the second person, after Bharti Singh, to come out in support of Preeti Simoes, even as they refuse to blame Kapil entirely for his behaviour.

According to latest reports, Kapil Sharmas show has been stalled for at least a month. He has also spoken about the fiasco and said that Sony TV is completely behind him and he is not bothered by people spreading lies about him.

Follow @htshowbiz for moreIndian actor-director Nandita Das has made it to the Cannes Film Festival with her Manto, a kind of biographical sketch of the radical Pakistani thinker and writer, Sadat Hasan Manto. This will be her second movie after the 2008 Firaaq - a political thriller set a month after the terrible 2002 Gujarat riots in which thousands were butchered by marauding mobs.

Dass Manto will be part of the festivals official line - which was announced in Paris a while ago by the general-delegate, Thierry Fremaux.

Das had introduced Manto at Cannes last year with a short trailer. It stars Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the title role along with Rasika Duggal as the writers wife. Ismat Chughat, Mantos friend and another radical thinker, will be essayed by Rajshri Deshpande. Rishi Kapoor has a minor part, and Tahir Raj Bhasin will be seen as the 1940s Bollywood superstar, Shyam Chaddha - who was Mantos confidant and inspiration for a number of stories he penned.

Manto will be part of A Certain Regard, which is usually a canvas for experimentally bold features.

Incidentally, no Indian has made it to Cannes Competition in many years.

Despite all the challenges a film is emerging @Nawazuddin_S @mantofilm -feels like I'm going back in time with Manto pic.twitter.com/4QmWffoQIe  Nandita Das (@nanditadas) April 6, 2017

In the all-important Competition, the American big name, Spike Lee, will present his BlacKKKlansman, and Irans enfant terrible Jafar Panahi his Three Faces.

At the moment, Panahi is under some sort of house arrest in Tehran, and is facing a 20-year ban on making movies. However, he has refused to be cowed down making films on the sly. His Taxi, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin a couple of years ago, was a bold venture by Panahi who disguised himself as a cabbie, drove down the streets of Tehran, picked passengers, recorded their conversations with a small camera placed on the dashboard and made a movie out of all these.

Fremaux told the press conference that the festival would write to the Iranian authorities to allow Panahi to travel to Cannes and present his film. Some years ago, Cannes had placed an empty chair on the podium to assert its displeasure at what was happening to Panahi. He was to have served on the Cannes jury that year, if my memory serves me right.

As already written in these columns, Asghar Farhadis (also from Iran) Spanish work, Everybody Knows - starring that delightfully brilliant acting husband-wife duo, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, will get the festival on the French Riviera rolling on the evening of May 8. The 12-day festival, often called the Queen of All, will end on May 19.

Here is the lineup - as of now - because Cannes will add a few more names before it opens.

Competition:

Everbody Knows, Asghar Farhadi (opening film)

En Guerre (At War), Stephane Brize

Dogman, Matteo Garrone

Le Livre Dimage, Jean-Luc Godard

Netemo Sametemo (Asako I & Ii), Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Plaire Aimer Et Courir Vite (Sorry Angel), Christophe Honore

Les Filles Du Soleil (Girls Of The Sun), Eva Husson

Ash Is Purest White, Jia Zhang-Ke

Shoplifters, Kore-Eda Hirokazu

Capharnaum (Capernaum), Nadine Labaki

Buh-Ning (Burning), Lee Chang-Dong

Blackkklansman, Spike Lee

Under The Silver Lake, David Robert Mitchell

3 Faces, Jafar Panahi

Zimna Wojna (Cold War), Pawel Pawlikowski

Lazzaro Felice, Alice Rohrwacher

Yomeddine, A.B Shawky

Leto (Lete), Kirill Serebrennikov

Out Of Competition:

Solo: A Star Wars Story, Ron Howard

Le Grand Bain, Gilles Lellouche

Un Certain Regard

Border, Ali Abassi

Long Days Journey Into Night, Bi Gan

Manto, Nandita Das

Girl, Lukas Dhont

Gueule Dange (Angel Face), Vanessa Filho

Euphoria, Valeria Golino

Rafiki (Friend), Wanuri Kahiu

Mon Tissu Prefere (My Favorite Fabric), Gaya Jiji

Die Stropers (The Harvesters), Etienne Kallos

In My Room, Ulrich Kohler

El Angel, Luis Ortega

The Gentle Indifference Of The World, Adilkhan Yerzhanov

A Genoux Les Gars (Sextape), Antoine Desrosieres

Special Screenings:

Ten Years In Thailand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The State Against Mandela And The Others, Nicolas Champeaux & Gilles Porte

O Grande Circo Mistico (Le Grand Cirque Mystique), Carlo Diegues

Les Ames Mortes (Dead Souls), Wang Bing

A Tous Vents (To The Four Winds), Michel Toesca

La Traversee, Romain Goupil

Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, Wim Wenders

Midnight Screenings:

Arctic, Joe Penna

Gongjak (The Spy Gone North), Yoon Jong-Bing

(Gautaman Bhaskaran has covered Cannes Film Festival for 28 years.)

Follow @htshowbiz for more

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktopStreaming giant Netflix refused to screen any of its movies at the Cannes film festival just hours before its official selection was announced Thursday. The US platform withdrew four films which were rumoured to be in the running to compete for the Palme dOr top prize. They include Paul Greengrass much-awaited Norway about the 2010 Utoya massacre, in which white supremacist Anders Breivik killed 77 people at a political summer camp.

The move is a major blow to the worlds top film festival, already facing a revolt by critics furious at a shake-up in the way its screenings are organised.

Netflixs withdrawal -- which seemed to be timed to cause the maximum chaos as the last-minute selection was being made -- was in retaliation for a new Cannes rule banning movies that are not first released in French cinemas from the competition.

The platform was already riled by a French law stipulating that movies cannot be streamed in France until three years after their cinematic release.

French cinema owners protested last year at the inclusion of two Netflix films, Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories, in the selection. The outcry prompted festival director Thierry Fremaux to change the rules.

Last month he hinted that what he termed hybrid films made for streaming services could only be shown out of competition.

in this file photo taken on October 26, 2017 Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos attends Netflix's Stranger Things 2 premiere in Westwood. (AFP)

Netflixs chief content officer Ted Sarandos made no attempt to hide his irritation with Cannes and Fremaux in a scathing interview with the trade daily Variety late Wednesday.

We want our films to be on fair ground with every other filmmaker, Sarandos said. Theres a risk in us going in this way and having our films and filmmakers treated disrespectfully at the festival.

The festival has chosen to celebrate distribution rather than the art of cinema, he charged.

It is not a coincidence that Thierry also banned selfies this year, Sarandos added, in a biting reference to Fremaux outlawing them on the red carpet.

I dont know what other advances in media Thierry would like to address.

Despite the row with Netflix, Cannes has had no problem accommodating its rival, Amazon.

Its films are shown in cinemas before they go online and in France they can be streamed individually four months after their release. It is Netflixs subscription-only model that falls foul of French rules.

The 18 films in competition during the 71st Cannes international film festival, set to take place from May 8 - 19. (AFP)

Embattled Fremaux last month incurred the wrath of hundreds of French and international critics for changing the timings of press screenings, which they said would play havoc with the festival.

They argued that critics would now have to wait until the day after gala red carpet premieres to see many of the films.

But the French producers union said it backed Fremauxs changes which did away with the tradition of having press previews before the gala premieres.

Australian actor Cate Blanchett will preside over the main jury this year with the Puerto Rican-Spanish star Benicio del Toro who is heading the jury in the Certain Regard section.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktopThe international chemical weapons watchdog on Thursday confirmed Britains finding that the substance used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia was a nerve agent.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had made a technical assistance visit to Salisbury, where the Skripals were found slumped on March 4 following the suspected attack blamed by London on Russia, which set off a wave of expulsions of diplomatic personnel between the West and Kremlin.

Russia has consistently denied its involvement.

Following the release of OPCWs conclusion, British foreign secretary Boris Johnson said: That was a military grade nerve agent  a Novichok. This is based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world. All returned the same conclusive results.

There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record.

The OPCW conclusion did not identify the substance as Novichok, but reiterated Britains views: The results of analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people.

The TAV (technical assistance visit) team notes that the toxic chemical was of high purity. The latter is concluded from the almost complete absence of impurities.

Besides the Skripals, police officer Nick Bailey who was among the first attending them, was also affected. He and Yulia have since been discharged, while Sergei Skripal remains in what is described as a serious condition in hospital.

Johnson added in his statement: We will now work tirelessly with our partners to help stamp out the grotesque use of weapons of this kind and we have called a session of the OPCW executive council next Wednesday to discuss next steps. The Kremlin must give answers.

We must, as a world community, stand up for the rules based order which keeps us all safe. The use of weapons of this kind can never be justified, and must be ended.President Xi Jinping on Thursday reviewed a massive drill by more than 100 Chinese Navy vessels in the South China Sea, which was launched as the US carried out what it described as a routine training exercise in nearby waters.

In a rare event, Xi boarded the destroyer Changsha and reviewed a fleet that included 76 combat ships and Chinas lone aircraft carrier. He called on Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) commanders to build a world class navy that would be ready as the country steps into a new era.

Xi said the navy has a big role to play in Chinas rejuvenation, adding that the task of building a strong peoples navy has never been as urgent as today.

The three-day drill was launched in the South China Sea on Wednesday and features what the state media described as a vast armada of ships, including the aircraft carrier, submarines and combat ships.

The large-scale exercise reflects Chinas growing maritime might as its naval exercises reach across seas, including the Indian Ocean. The Chinese Navys warships now spend longer periods at sea and the fleet is said to be rapidly adding combat ships. The first home-grown aircraft carrier is expected to be deployed later this year.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, conducted a training exercise earlier this week in the South China Sea, where China is locked in maritime territorial disputes with a number of countries, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. The US vessel was on its way to the Philippines.

The drill by the Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) began off Hainan provinces southern coast on Wednesday even as  according to a report in Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post -- it said it had completed a separate week-long series of live-fire drills involving the aircraft carrier Liaoning to the east of the island, near the venue for the Boao Forum for Asia, which was attended by President Xi Jinping.

The Chinese Navy began a three-day series of exercises in the South China Sea on Wednesday, state media quoted the Maritime Safety Administration as saying. It added that the navy had released the coordinates of the drill zone - a rectangular area off Hainan province's southern coast - on its website on Tuesday, asking ships to stay out of the area.

PLAN didnt officially comment on the latest exercise but the Chinese militarys website featured a report by state-run China Daily on the drill.

The information (about the naval drill) sparked a wave of speculation among Chinese military enthusiasts who, since last month, have been talking on internet forums about the possibility of a large display of the Navy's best ships and submarines in the South China Sea, the China Daily reported.

Some fans also posted what they claimed were satellite images of a vast armada of Chinese ships, including the CNS Liaoning aircraft carrier, gathering recently in the South China Sea area, it added.

The Chinese Navys combat ships and submarines now spend around eight months each year at sea, carrying out patrols, drills and other training operations - much longer than before, PLAN announced in March. As a result, their operational capabilities have improved substantially, the navy said.

The China Daily report added, In 2017, the Navy commissioned at least 16 ships, mostly large combat vessels. China is now building its second aircraft carrier and a new-generation guided missile destroyer believed to be the most powerful of its kind in the world.

Cao Weidong, a military expert, told Peoples Daily Online: Weve already accumulated data and experience during the building of the Liaoning aircraft carrier, and our experts and workers have been working hard in recent months with enough financial support. So I would not be surprised if the carrier is to conduct such a sea trial soon.

The carrier is being built in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning by Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Company. All the equipment and devices on the carrier are in the joint debugging stage, and the main engine has been powered. In 2018, we will present a surprise to the Chinese people, company chairperson Liu Zheng said last month.India has rejected Nepals proposal to create the Saarc Police, a regional body to counter terrorism, narcotics and human trafficking, cyber crimes and other criminal activities.

The proposal was floated during a meeting of senior police officers and officials responsible for countering drug and narcotics trafficking from the eight Saarc countries that concluded in Kathmandu on Wednesday.

A senior Nepalese official who participated in the meeting said India was not keen on setting up such a body at present and had called for more consultations and deliberation on the issue among Saarc members. The official added the Indian side also indicated the environment was not favourable for such a move.

In New Delhi, the external affairs ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

Nepal has been proposing the creation of such a body at the regional level to effectively deal with trans-national criminal activities, including narcotics trafficking and terrorism. The Indian side, according to Nepalese officials, proposed a phased approach for such a regional body.

With the situation currently not favourable for holding the stalled 19th Saarc Summit, some observers believe the proposal was also affected by the rivalry between India and Pakistan. Among other proposals at the meeting was the setting up of a regional secure database on criminal activities.

Nepal had proposed the merging of two Saarc desks focused on narcotics and terrorism stationed in Sri Lanka, and upgrading them to create the Saarc Police. This, officials said, would involve giving the body more teeth and giving an expanded mandate to the proposed force.

Under the Saarc charter, any proposal opposed by even one member cannot move forward.

The Saarc process has been stalled since India pulled out of the 19th Saarc Summit that was to be held in Islamabad in 2016 after cross-border terror attacks that were blamed on Pakistan-based groups. Indias move was supported by other members and the fate of the summit has hung in the balance since then.

Meetings of senior officials of Saarc states have been held since then but India has maintained that the environment is not conducive to holding the summit, officials said.The United States and Pakistan are engaged in a diplomatic row which  despite denials from both sides  could lead to strict restrictions on the movement of their diplomats, according to a media report on Thursday.

The Trump administration has notified Pakistani authorities that diplomats at the embassy in Washington and at consulates in other American cities will not be able to travel 40 km beyond from their posts without permission.

The notice, shared with the Pakistan embassy in Washington and sent to the foreign ministry in Islamabad, indicated that the restrictions could be imposed from May 1 if certain issues remained unresolved, the Dawn newspaper reported.

Both sides clarified the move has nothing to do with an accident in Islamabad involving an American diplomat who ran a red light and rammed into a motorcycle, killing a Pakistani national.

The Dawn quoted an email from a US spokesperson saying: I can confirm that there are no restrictions on travel for Pakistani diplomats in the United States. Asked if such restrictions could be imposed in the near future, a spokesperson said: Beyond that, we have nothing to announce at this time.

A spokesperson for the Pakistan embassy gave an almost identical response, saying there were no restrictions so far on the movement of Pakistani diplomats in the US, but the mission had no information about future restrictions.

The issue was also raised at Tuesdays news briefing at the state department, where spokesperson Heather Nauert said: I dont have anything for you on that.

The Dawn reported that the Pakistan embassy received the notification in mid-March and since then, the two sides have had several discussions on the issue in Islamabad and Washington.

Both US and Pakistani officials clarified the notice had nothing to do with Saturdays fatal accident when a US diplomat ran a red light and killed a Pakistani motorcyclist.

According to the notification, diplomats will need to apply for permission at least five days ahead of an intended trip outside the imposed 40-km radius.

In discussions with their Pakistani counterparts, US officials pointed out that Islamabad had already imposed similar restrictions on American diplomats in Pakistan, who are not allowed to visit the tribal belt or Karachi.

Pakistani officials argued these are not restrictions but security measures intended to protect US diplomats. They pointed out the state department too does not allow its diplomats in Pakistan to visit the tribal areas, Karachi and certain other places in Pakistan out of security concerns.

Last month, Pakistan received a letter from the state department complaining that while Americans issue two-year visas to Pakistani diplomats, US diplomats only get one-year visas, forcing them to get the documents renewed every year during their three-year postings.

The state department complained Pakistan was also very restrictive in issuing visas to other US officials and traders and warned it could reciprocate in the case of Pakistani officials and citizens. The state department maintained Pakistanis were usually given five-year US visas but US officials and businessmen only got single-entry visas of three months duration.

Recently, the US also introduced short duration visas for Pakistani officials. Even interior minister Ahsan Iqbal and foreign secretary Tehmina Janjua were issued one-month visas for recent visits.

Pakistanis working for international organisations, such as the World Bank, are also facing visa delays. The Dawn reported the US had issued about 40,000 non-immigrant visas to Pakistanis over the past five years.

Islamabad issued 60,000 visas to American citizens during the same period. But more than 60 per cent of those visas holders are US citizens of Pakistani origin, who travel home to visit families.Seven people were killed and 13 injured when a truck carrying more than five tonnes of explosives blew up in northern China, the local government reported on Thursday.

The blast struck just before midnight on Tuesday outside an explosives warehouse, according to a statement from the Zhenan county government in Shaanxi province posted on its official website.

The warehouse operator works in using explosives for mining and construction purposes. The government statement said the cause of the explosion remains under investigation.

The official Xinhua News Agency said victims included truck drivers, warehouse staff and security guards.

China has made major strides in industrial safety in recent years, although large-scale accidents still occur.

Some are linked to corruption and lax enforcement, such as a 2015 blast at a chemical warehouse in the port city of Tianjin that killed 173 people and was found to have flouted multiple safety regulations.President Donald Trump was evasive Thursday about when the United States might attack Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons assault, saying it could be very soon or not so soon at all!

A day after warning starkly that missiles will be coming, Trump in another early morning tweet storm wrote: Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!

He added: In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?

Trumps new tweet seemed to backtrack from the bellicose one of Wednesday in which he suggested to Syria and its ally Russia that a US attack over the alleged chemical weapons assault on civilians last weekend was all but imminent.

That one, which came after a warning from Russia, went like this: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

The tough talk between Trump and Russia has raised fears of the Syria conflict mushroomning into something even more serious involving America and its Western allies on one side and the Russians on the other.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned world powers Wednesday to keep the confict from spiraling out of control.After putting Syria and its ally Russia on notice for incoming nice and new and smart missiles, US President Donald Trump sought to turn down the rhetoric and tweeted he never said anything about the timing of a strike.

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place, Trump tweeted. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! He then veered off topic, posting: In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our Thank you America?

Trump has boasted of never revealing war strategy or time and intensity of a move, but on Wednesday he spoke angrily of Russian threat to shoot down American missiles fired in retaliation for the chemical weapons attack on the rebel-held town of Douma.

He had tweeted: Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is supported by Moscow.

Critics had asked why was that not giving away US strategy, something Trump had vowed to never do and had criticised past presidents for.

The president has not laid out a timetable and is still leaving a number of other options on the table, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said at a news briefing. But she had also made clear the president was holding both Syria and Russia responsible for the attack.

Trump is facing criticism for sending conflicting signals on his Syria policy. His threat to retaliate with all options on the table runs contrary to his desire to pull out most of the 2,000 US troops deployed there, leaving behind a smaller contingent for hunting down remaining Islamic State fighters and train local forces to secure areas liberated from the terrorist outfit.

US diplomats and military leaders have pushed back, and publicly, indicating much needed to be done.In remarks for his confirmation hearing, Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trumps pick for secretary of state, said soft policy toward Russia is now over. What he means by now is the interesting bit.

A false narrative emerging in the US holds that Trump has just recently turned tough on Russia. One look at the long chronology of his administrations hostility toward Putins Russia should dispel that.

It includes the early appointments of Russia hawks such as United Nations representative Nikki Haley and Central Intelligence Agency director Pompeo; the first ever US missile strike on Putin ally, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assads military installation in April, 2017; the abrupt closure of three Russian diplomatic facilities in the US in late August (which Russia accurately described as blatantly hostile); the decision to send lethal weapons to Ukraine in December; a deadly counterattack on a group of Russian mercenaries in Syria in February. A column Wednesday by The Intercepts Glenn Greenwald, who like me has long disagreed with the Trump is a Russian puppet narrative, contains a slightly different list of the Trump administrations anti-Kremlin actions.

Trump can blow hot and cold on Putin and Russia in tweets, just as he did in the course of one day on Wednesday, first threatening Russia with nice and new and smart missiles and then saying theres no reason for the US-Russia relationship to be so bad. But Americans should be used to the low price Trump puts on the meaning of words. He, like many habitual social network users, employs language to communicate emotions rather than precise messages.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and "smart!" You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

The missile tweet says Im angry and the seemingly conciliatory tweet telegraphs Im frustrated. What matters with Trump are actions or, rather, transactions. And on that level, he hasnt been a pro-Russian president from the start, as those who alleged without any evidence that the Kremlin had some kind of leverage over Trump seemed to think.

The more recent moves -- the biggest ever expulsion of Russian diplomats from the US following the poisoning in the UK of a former Russian double agent, the harshest ever sanctions imposed on a Russian billionaire (aluminium tycoon Oleg Deripaska), fresh anti-Russian appointments (Pompeos move to State and John Boltons elevation to national security adviser) -- merely continue this line of actions. They constitute an escalation but not a policy shift.

Pompeo was referring to years of soft policy on Russia under President Obama, which ended with Trumps election. And indeed, Obama pointedly rejected all the hostile actions that Trump has taken -- except hawkish appointments, which only led to the appointees frustration. Pompeos now is the Trump presidency itself.

The anti-Kremlin tenor of Trumps presidency is often written down to the Republican establishments influence, to the advice of grown men in the administration. But, as my Bloomberg View colleague Tim OBrien, an eminent Trump expert, has written, Trump rarely seeks advice or heeds it if its volunteered anyhow; his Russian policy hasnt been imposed from outside.

The US president wants reportable wins. He doesnt, however, work quietly to obtain them. He demands to be handed them because theyre due to him as the man in the ultimate position of strength. Trump appeared to have expected a more compliant Putin ever since the Russian presidents remark that Trump is a colorful and talented individual was mistranslated as brilliant. So far, were off to a good start, candidate Trump commented in 2016. He said Trump is a genius, OK?

Putin, however, has provided no gifts and no wins. If he ever had an interest in Trumps victory, it was for the havoc it would wreak on the US establishment. He, too, always negotiates from a position of strength, even when this stance masks actual weakness. That Tillerson chose to play his own confrontational game must have contributed to Trumps disappointment with his bold personnel experiment.

For Trump, business and politics is a macho contest. It was obvious during the campaign that he seeks to establish his male dominance by patronizing his opponents, giving them insulting monikers and commenting on their purported manly shortfalls. Hes done the same with North Koreas Kim Jong Un. Hes doing it with Putin, too.

Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, he tweeted on Wednesday -- a phrase calculated to offend.

Trumps machismo fits in well with Republicans traditional Russia hawkishness. The party isnt dragging a reluctant Trump along. Nor is Special Counsel Robert Muellers collusion investigation (which has, so far, unearthed no trace of collusion) making Trump act out on Russia as forcefully as he has: He knows he cant make Mueller go away by bombing Syria or expelling diplomats. Trump is out to prove that he, not Putin, is the 800-pound gorilla, the alpha male.

The logic of a macho confrontation is that it escalates to a fight unless one side or the other backs down. Putin, however, has a talent for stretching out conflicts he cannot win outright. Hell use the hostilities to avoid being treated as a lame duck president in what, constitutionally, is his last term in office and to further his long-standing dream of returning exported Russian capital to the country. Putins advantage is that he automatically outlasts Trump if the president isnt re-elected in 2020.

More than ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and Russia need to set the boundaries of their hostile engagement. The festering macho conflict will ensure that the two nations will clash over and over again. One big test of whether there are any grown men in the war rooms of both Washington and Moscow is whether any US or allied action against Assad is coordinated with Russia on a military level, as happened with last years missile attack. Lets hope so. Bloomberg View

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Only one of the over 60 US lawmakers who questioned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over two days about his companys slack privacy practices remarked on his looks  his hair used to be curly when they last met years ago, he offered  but no one had anything to say about his suits, shirts or ties.

Zuckerbergs outfit was a big part of the conversation that preceded his first visit to Capitol Hill and has continued since he left for Silicon Valley, where he is presumably back to his preferred jeans, gray t-shirt and sneakers.

Radio hosts, lifestyle page guides and gurus and late night pundits were all having a go.

The verdict  the suits were large and ill-fitting. GQ urged readers to think of them as a sartorial dog collar: hiked up around his ears. The shirts were a size or two larger as well, and the ties looked as if they were pre-knotted and slipped over his head just before he walked into the hall.

The New York Times called it Zuckerbergs Im sorry suit in reference to his mission  to apologise for allowing London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to use inappropriately harvested personal data of Facebook users, including his own. And for being slow to respond to Russian manipulation of his website he founded and continues to run.

And the hair? It was cut so close that it was more like penitence than grooming, according to The Washington Post.

Thats probably why a congressman couldnt stop himself. You hair was curly back then. he suggested, hoping, perhaps, to trigger Zuckerbergs memory of their meeting eight years ago.

Thirty-three-year-old Zuckerberg is a carefree dresser or a consciously careful one, depending on which side you are of the #DeleteFacebook divide. He has said he prefers the same gray t-shirt, or a hoodie of any other colour, and jeans every day because he doesnt think its worth his while to spend time choosing a different one every morning.

Former President Barack Obama cited exactly the very same reason for sticking to his dark suits. Until he showed up in the White House news briefing room one say in a light tan suit, which he never wore again in public, the backlash was so intense.

Zuckerberg switches to suits when he wants to, and sometimes, forces everyone else to fall in line as well.

The day before Prime Minister Narendra Modi was expected at the Facebook headquarters at 1, Hacker Way, Menlo Park, California, in September 2015, a directive went out mandating a dress code for everyone planning to attend.

Formal attire for men  formal suit and tie, easy  and nice dresses presumably for women. Sleeveless shirts and shorts were outlawed for the day, even for reporters.

Modi, an occasion-conscious dresser, also showed up in a semi-formal suit  dark pants, white shirt and a dark waist coat. But no tie  the prime minister hasnt been seen in one in decades.

Zuckerberg wore one, as he as for meetings with Obama and a state dinner at the White House  and Pope Francis in the past, and now the congressional hearings.

But Zuckerberg also used four-inch thick booster pads on his seat to achieve the right eye-level elevation to be able to glare back at lawmakers, some of whom were twice his age and treated him as they would an errant grandchild, indulgent but impatient.Appointment

12 April 2018

Aqua-Aston Hospitality has announced the appointment of Alexander Dale to the role of executive chef at Aqua Kauai Beach Resort, a pristine 25-acre resort on Kauai's longest eastern coast beach. Dale hails most recently from the well-known Turtle Bay Resort on Oahu's famed North Shore, where he served up a menu utilizing ingredients from the island's community-based farms to surfing royalty, guests and locals. A third-generation chef inspired by his family's Italian culinary tradition, Dale maintains copies of the original recipes from his grandfather, Alfredo Dilisio, a silent film actor and chef who opened his own restaurant with a loan from the famed fellow silent actor, Charlie Chaplin. While living in Newport Beach, California, Dale developed a deep appreciation for the sea and secured his first culinary job at the world-famous Newport Beach institution, The Crab Cooker. Dale's early experiences shaped his approach to preparing the finest locally sourced cuisine. He also served as chief culinary officer for Sea Legs Wine Bar which was awarded "Best California Cuisine" in four out of the five years that Dale was there. He graduated with high honors at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, Los Angeles, California. At Aqua Kauai Beach Resort, Dale will bring the same type of local influence to his signature dishes. "I look forward to elevating the cuisine at Aqua Kauai Beach Resort by sourcing my ingredients from local family-run farms and using global techniques with a nod to my Italian roots," said Chef Dale. Some of his newly introduced menu items include sauteed whole Kauai sweet prawns served with Portuguese sausage, smoked pineapple and creamy grilled polenta cake; Parmesan pasta topped with Wailua lamb and beef meatballs, smoked marinara sauce, and a macadamia nut pesto; and "The Wedge" salad featuring Kauai butter lettuce, Hau'ula grape tomatoes, pickled onion, blue cheese crumbles, candied bacon, and a "green goddess" dressing. The resort will formerly introduce Dale in his new position during a commemorative Chefs' Collaborative Dinner Event on April 20, 2018, in partnership with esteemed Oahu-based chef Ed Kenney. Kenney is a successful restauranteur and five-time James Beard Award-nominated chef with four restaurants - including Mahina & Sun's at The Surfjack Hotel & Swim Club. Kenney has previously cooked for former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama, and is the star of the hit PBS show, Family Ingredients. Tickets to the event are extremely limited; priced at $150.00 per person, the tickets include two specialty cocktails, passed pupus, a three-course dinner, as well as post-dinner s'mores by the fire pit. For reservations or more information, please call (808) 246-5501.Event

The Cornell School of Hotel Administration (SHA) is delighted to present two outstanding panels in Washington, DC this April. Moderated by SHA faculty members Chris Anderson and David Sherwyn, this high-profile event will encourage discussion and present expertise on two timely topics the hospitality and travel industry is facing today. Over 100 alumni and members of the hospitality industry are expected to attend this not-to-miss event.

This hospitality thought leadership event is brought to you by the office of external relations in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. The Office of External Relations, established in 2016, was created to enhance the coordination for the following important functions within the college and to support programs and activities of its three constituent schools: Corporate and foundation relationships, global strategy and partnerships with universities, government, local, and non-profit relationships (public engagement), college events, and collaborative programs with sister colleges within Cornell University.

Cornell Hospitality Thought Leadership Event is organized byPress Release

12 April 2018

An intense week of exchange of experiences and capacity building linked to wildlife and biodiversity protection has taken place in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A major result of the regional initiative that lies under the framework of the UNWTO/Chimelong Initiative on Wildlife Conservation and Sustainable Tourism has been the Declaration of

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The Regional Conference served to summarize the itinerary training workshops conducted throughout 2017 which encouraged local communities and tourism stakeholders to act as champions of biodiversity conservation and environmental protection. As a result, more than 120 people were trained last year from Niger, Gabon, Benin, Guinea and Democratic Republic of the Congo on how to design and implement local initiatives on tourism and wildlife in their respective countries, which they showcased during the conference.

Opening the Conference, which welcomed more than 100 participants from the five countries in addition to Zimbabwe, the Minister of Tourism of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Franck Mwe di Malila Apenela underscored "the vital importance of the link between tourism development and biodiversity conservation" and that "it is not a coincidence that the upcoming UNWTO Agenda for Africa encapsulates it as one of its key priorities". Mr. Shanzhong Zhu, UNWTO Executive Director, said that "the results presented during the conference will provide opportunities to generate economic benefits while stimulating protection and appropriate management of biodiversity in harmony with the sustainable development of tourism".

The opening ceremony was followed by a key note speech by Seamus Kearney, journalist and producer, who emphasized the potential to involve the media in sustainable tourism-based initiatives and the need to communicate with honesty and transparency.

On the occasion, Mr. Shanzhong Zhu, UNWTO Executive Director met with the DRC Prime Minister H.E. Bruno Tshibala, to discuss the links between economic diversification, tourism development and biodiversity conservation. Mr Zhu welcomed the vision of the government of DRC to put tourism as a priority for job creation.

A ministerial debate involving the Ministers of Tourism of DRC Franck Mwe di Malilia Apenela and of Niger, Ahmet Botto, together with the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Tourism and Hospitalty Industry of Zimbabwe, Dr. Thokozile Chitepo and UNWTO Executive Director, Shanzhong Zhu stressed the relevance of institutional communications and the potential of engaging tourism authorities on wildlife conservation measures.

Involving local communities, developing educational programmes on sustainable tourism and increasing awareness on biodiversity and wildlife were some of the themes underlined in the debate.

"The achievements of the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development that we celebrated in 2017, the Lusaka Declaration on Sustainable Tourism and Community Engagement in Africa and the First African Charter on Sustainable and Responsible Tourism adopted by the COP22 constitute the best framework to advance the tourism sector towards more sustainable practices" said the Mr Zhu.

As stated in the Declaration, the undersigning countries commit to "reinforce the role of Sustainable Tourism as a lever for local development and support for the conservation and preservation of the environment" and "to become involved in strengthening the conservation of biodiversity, raise awareness and fight against various forms of over-exploitation of resources including poaching and reduce the carbon footprint of tourism-related activities".

Strategic Communications at the core of wildlife preservation

Alongside the Regional Conference, delegates participated in a training workshop on communications and media relations in the framework of the UNWTO/Chimelong Programme. Under the topic of communicating the link between wildlife and sustainable tourism, delegates analyzed the potential of wildlife in the promotion of their destinations and revised strategic communications methodologies and practices that can facilitate their work.

The workshop included an exhaustive revision of theoretical and practical approaches to strategic communications as well as of the different modalities of media relations. The creation of innovative products to attract the interest of journalists, building trust-based relations with the media communities and empowering outlets as advocates of wildlife protection and sustainable tourism were part of the training. Through working groups participants had the opportunity to build communications strategies for their touristic products, like the parks of Zongo and Malebo in DRC.

Both the workshop on Communications and Media Relations as well as the Regional Conference take place within the framework of the UNWTO/Chimelong Initiative on Wildlife Conservation and Sustainable Tourism. This initiative, which is being implemented between 2017 and 2019, addresses the potential of sustainable tourism as key driver of wildlife protection and conservation in Africa and in Asia. The Programme integrates capacity building of tourism administrations, media engagement on these themes including a Media Award and talent development through a fellowship programmes, among other actions.Press Release

12 April 2018

ATLANTA -- Hospitality Ventures Management Group (HVMG), an Atlanta-based, private hotel investment, ownership and management company, in conjunction with Investra Capital Group Ltd through its subsidiary Investra Capital Inc, a private equity real estate investor and asset manager, today announced the completed joint venture acquisition of a 12-hotel portfolio totaling 1,465 rooms comprised of Marriott- and Hyatt-branded hotels across the Southeastern, Southwestern and Midwestern United States. HVMG also will operate the entire portfolio.

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"As we grow our footprint into the U.S., our acquisition philosophy aligns with HVMG's, as we both remain focused on assets in strong secondary and tertiary markets flanked by strong corporate, government, healthcare and university demand generators," said Mobeen Jassat, Investra Capital Inc, CEO. "With their successful industry track record in maximizing asset value and seasoned acquisition and operation expertise, we are confident HVMG will act as the ideal stewards of these hotels as they quickly achieve improved performance as the respective segment leaders in each sub-market."

"The acquisition of these 12 assets brings Investra's portfolio to a total of 20 hospitality assets across the U.S. since its initial acquisition in 2014," said Zaid Randeree, Investra Capital Group Limited, CEO. "This also is in line with Investra's strategy of steady, focused acquisition and growth of assets in the select service hospitality sector across the USA."

"In the first few months of 2018, HVMG has added 16 hotels totaling 2,611 rooms to its portfolio of full- and select-service and extended-stay hotels across the United States, putting us on track for an historic growth year," said Robert S. Cole, president and CEO, HVMG. "We continue to seek best-in-class partners like Investra as we selectively target hotels that can benefit from repositioning and/or capital improvements located in top tier markets. Our goal remains to be the most sought-after operator, employer and trusted partner in the hospitality industry."

The hotels include:

Courtyard Atlanta Marietta I-75 North - Marietta, Ga. (146 rooms)

Courtyard Atlanta Norcross Peachtree Corners - Norcross, Ga. (131 rooms)

Courtyard Atlanta Marietta Windy Hill/Ballpark - Atlanta, Ga. (127 rooms)

Courtyard Austin University - Austin, Texas (198 rooms)

Fairfield Inn & Suites Austin University - Austin, Texas (63 rooms)

Courtyard Dallas Addison Midway - Addison, Texas (145 rooms)

Hyatt House Dallas Richardson - Richardson, Texas (130 rooms)

Courtyard Grand Rapids Airport - Grand Rapids, Mich. (84 rooms)

Courtyard Detroit Southfield - Southfield, Mich. (147 rooms)

Fairfield Inn & Suites Indianapolis Airport - Indianapolis, Ind. (86 rooms)

Residence Inn Indianapolis Airport - Indianapolis, Ind. (95 rooms)

Courtyard Cleveland Beachwood - Beachwood, Ohio (113 rooms)

"With these additional 12 assets, our portfolio now contains a combined total of 25 Marriott- and Hyatt-flagged hotels across the United States," Cole noted. "We are very familiar with each of these brands, as well as the unique demands of each of the regions and traveler types, allowing us to improve bottom lines and guest satisfaction scores expeditiously."

About Investra

Investra is a private equity firm specializing in sponsoring and asset managing commercial real estate investments in U.K and U.S.A. The company manages its investment activities from its offices in London and Atlanta. The principals have been involved in transactions valued at just over 1 billion in the United Kingdom alone and in over US$400m in U.S.A. Since 2014 Investra has successfully acquired eight select-service hospitality assets, excluding the current portfolio.

About Hospitality Ventures Management Group

Hospitality Ventures Management Group is a privately owned, fully-integrated hotel investment and management group that specializes in turning around and repositioning underperforming hotels, as well as maximizing the performance of stabilized hotels. It currently operates 45 hotels in 18 states totaling 7,674 guest rooms. HVMG operates independent and boutique hotels and resorts, as well as full-service, select service and extended stay hotels under the Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt, and IHG brands. Visit www.hvmg.com for more information.Opinion Article

11 April 2018

Note: The following is an excerpt from the new Starfleet Research report "Built for the Cloud: A Blueprint for Hotel Technology Success" (now available for complimentary access):

When it comes to hotel operations, no times are more interesting than these, to borrow that oft-quoted Chinese curse (or blessing, depending on your perspective): "May you live in interesting times."

Competition in many lodging markets is more intense than ever. Guest expectations, particularly with respect to anytime, anywhere mobile engagement and information access, are through the roof.

Hoteliers face a variety of other challenges, too, from rising labor costs and onerous OTA commissions to competitive threats from disruptive business innovation, home-sharing models being an obvious example. In short, the world is changing fast and hoteliers cannot afford to sit back and relax.

Perhaps the biggest challenge  and, also, the biggest opportunity  relates to the increasingly large role that technologies play in enhancing the quality of the guest experience. Foremost amongst these technologies are next-generation cloud property management systems (PMS). Most hoteliers who haven't already upgraded to a cloud platform plan to do so shortly, if only to keep pace with others in the same competitive set.

And while even the most advanced cloud PMS cannot address all the challenges hoteliers face, it can address many of them while setting the stage for continuous performance improvement.

The allure of the cloud is undeniable. Oft-cited benefits include elimination of on-site server hardware (and the day-to-day maintenance that goes with it) and software that is continually updated with the latest features and functionality, without the need to purchase and install each new release.

Also, with a cloud solution it becomes much easier to integrate data from different sources and integrate other technologies. What's more, a cloud solution usually allows for nimble technology stacks. If part of the integrated system becomes obsolete or fails, for whatever reason, new software can be readily plugged in to replace it.

Hotels have come to embrace the cloud somewhat belatedly compared to other industries. Some of the "blame" for the lagging cloud movement lands squarely with the hotel brands themselves. On-property legacy system solutions, including proprietary technology stacks built by internal IT departments for exorbitant sums of money, have, ironically, become a hinderance to achieving optimal hotel performance.

Having underestimated the need to migrate their product road map to the cloud, and hamstrung with legacy installations across thousands of customers, some major solution providers are also to "blame."

Upgrading to the Cloud

As if to make up for lost time, hoteliers are now upgrading to next-generation cloud solutions in record numbers. Today nobody questions the cost savings that come from streamlining operations across all hotel functions and all parts of the property (or properties).

By now, everyone can agree that having a cloud PMS is a prerequisite to improving guest satisfaction, speeding guest services  from check-in and housekeeping to concierge and maintenance response times  and enabling guest-facing interfaces, including self-service options. Hoteliers know that only by harnessing the power of data and analytics  core features of a cloud PMS  can they present guests with relevant and personalized offers, messages and treatments, further engendering satisfaction and loyalty.

But buyer beware: Not all cloud solutions billed as "next-generation" are worthy of that description. For that matter, not all cloud solutions are even truly cloud solutions. Fact is, some legacy on-premise solution providers, eager to jump on the cloud PMS bandwagon, engaged in what is commonly known as "cloud-washing."

Even today, solutions billed as cloud-based may not, in fact, be true cloud solutions. It is important to understand the difference between a "true cloud solution" and a "fake cloud solution."

Whereas the latter is built on software originally designed to run on-premise, a true cloud solution is built from the ground up, coded to perform as a fully-hosted cloud solution and optimized for tablet and mobile use. The solution provider hosts the solution across hundreds of servers and with multiple levels of data redundancy in a multi-tenant "pure cloud' environment. Customers typically access the same solution via an internet browser, allowing for instantaneous product upgrades.

A customization platform maintains property-specific changes following these software upgrades so that customers can gain immediate access to the latest functionality without having to re-implement custom changes and integrations.

"True Cloud" Versus "Fake Cloud"

Cloud-based solutions are not, in fact, always based in the cloud. Some of the dominant PMS legacy solutions that are currently in place across Europe, North America and Asia have been merely upgraded with a web front-end interface. The interface provides access via an internet browser on a computer, tablet or mobile device to the back-end software, which remains hosted on a local, on premise server.

This type of cloud-based hospitality software, in which certain critical elements continue to reside on-premise  including, in many cases, the actual database housing the guest data  are known as hybrid cloud solutions. A web-native "true cloud" solution, on the other hand, is hosted on shared application servers in a public cloud environment and has the advantage of being more agile, flexible and open to multi-tenancy.

Another advantage relates to software release updates. With a true cloud solution, these upgrades are more seamlessly and frequently deployed and also included as part of the cost.

With respect to system upgrades, the shift from on-premise installation to cloud-based deployment have caused hoteliers to pay close attention to service level agreements and up-time guarantees. This is no surprise given that the PMS handles virtually all operations, including guest-facing service functions. Hotels that experience technology performance issues generally pay a dear price.

In the past, these issues have tended to arise most often during, or immediately following, system upgrades of on-premise, client-server software. Regardless of how much time and effort may have gone into quality assurance testing, new releases of hospitality applications with monolithic feature-laden code were bound to have performance issues. The problem was oftentimes related to the difficulty of simulating a hotel's customized software configuration, including the specific data streams that flowed into the PMS.

To help reduce potential performance issues related to system upgrades, solution providers would commonly implement user acceptance testing processes. This meant creating a copy of the production database and installing an advance copy of the new software release on the hotel's servers. Hotel staff would rigorously test the new system, trying to identify defects and reporting any bugs or performance shortcomings.

A benefit to this approach, in addition to reducing the risk of calamity, was that hotel staff could familiarize themselves with new interface as well as features and functionality prior to going live. Software fixes would be either installed as patches or incorporated into a new release, which, typically, would then be reinstalled and retested. The trial run process continued until all issues were resolved and the software was deemed to be relatively free of defects.

The software upgrade process for a true cloud PMS is very different. In sharp contrast to the process involving legacy systems and even, to a lesser degree, hybrid cloud solutions, this process tends to be largely hassle- and worry-free for hoteliers, who, in past, were often held partially responsible for any performance hiccups. With single-version development, all hotel customers are upgraded simultaneously, putting the onus on the solution provider to ensure that the software is delivered with unfaltering quality and performs in an error-free manner.

Multi-tenancy, storage arrays and the same data center hardware generally means that all hotel customers are in the same boat when it comes to technical performance issues. If a problem arises, the same problem will usually have already affected other hotel operations. The problem will likely have already reported it and the solution provider will already be working to resolve it. Single-version development and deployment benefits everyone.

Due to lower deployment overhead, new releases tend to be smaller and scope and more frequent. In general, there are no long downtimes for upgrades and maintenance windows are shorter. New features designed to meet current business challenges, and incremental improvements to existing functionalities, tend to be rolled out on an ongoing basis as they become available.

Note: This article is an excerpt from the new Starfleet Research report "Built for the Cloud: A Blueprint for Hotel Technology Success" (now available for complimentary access).If you're worried about 6ix9ine being in jail, you probably don't have to worry any longer.

Earlier this week, New York rapper 6ix9ine asked his fans to pray for him, as he was facing his upcoming court date related to his guilty plea for usage of a child in a sexual performance back in 2015. The condition was that if he could pass his GED he could potentially avoid up to three years in prison.

Then yesterday, as all his fans awaited the results of his trial, 6ix9ine deleted all of his posts on Instagram. DJ Akademics reported that 6ix9ine hadn't shown up for his court date, leading people to believe that his arrest was imminent.

A new post then appeared on 6ix9ine's Instagram, promoting his new song "GOTTI" and the re-release of his debut mixtape, Day69. The post was supposedly written by his management, saying that we won't be hearing from 6ix9ine until further notice, only intensifying the rumors of his incarceration. He also posted "#FREE69" on his Twitter account.

Now the reports that 6ix9ine's court date was actually adjourned have been proven to be true. The Blast got a hold of the county clerk of the Supreme Court of New York County, who confirmed that 6ix9ine's trial has been moved to June 19th, a little over two months from now.

So if 6ix9ine isn't in jail, where exactly is he? Is this all an elaborate ruse to promote "GOTTI", or is this something else entirely. Regardless of what the intentions are, the jig is up.When Mike WiLL Made-It takes a personal liking to your rap persona, there's little in the way of you achieving something. It clicked with Rae Sremmurd, and his sights were set on Bankroll Fresh's promising career before the rapper's tragic death.



Mike WiLL Made-It and his new protege Trouble have now cemented their partnership, as the rapper is fully invested for once. The rapper and producer made an appearance together on the Breakfast Club this morning in support of their album Edgewood, where they discussed a range of topics pertaining to the local scene in Atlanta.



Charlamagne brought up the contentious argument of who invented trap music, and to my surprise Trouble sided with T.I. over Gucci Mane. Trouble argued that "TIP set that shit in stone" in spite of greater traction achieved by Gucci through his use of the nomenclature and subgenre's main motifs.



"Nothing but gettin' off and gettin' in." was one descriptor for T.I.'s early trap aesthetic.



Mike WiLL Made-It and Trouble agreed on an order of conveyance for the trap genre, stating that the movement began with T.I. with Jeezy and Gucci crashing the gate around the same time several years later. For what it's worth, they both seemed to rate Gucci in higher esteem. Trouble's taste in hip hop lies in the rapper's ability to weave a story around a topic.



Two months ago, Nikolas Cruz enacted a homicidal rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Equipped with a semi-automatic rifle, the 19 year-old blasted through the school's hallways, killing 17 innocent people in the process. Cruz was eventually found by police and promptly detained, and is now awaiting his judicial fate in relation to his heinous crimes.

In an effort to mend the grief and despair he has inevitably manifested throughout the Parkland area, Cruz is looking to "heal the community" in any manner he can.

When the gunman turns 22, he is set to inherit a $800,000 trust fund in relation to his mother passing away. Speaking to a Broward County judge on Wednesday, Cruz's lawyer Melissa McNeil notes how "Mr. Cruz does not want those funds, whatever money that he is entitled to. He would like that money donated to an organization that the victims family believes would be able to facilitate healing in our community or an opportunity to educate our community about the issues that have ripened over the last four or five months."

Howard Finkelstein, another member of Cruz's legal team, exclaimed to the judge "let it go to those who have been hurt, period."

Cruz's lawyers are currently investigating if the instalments are paid monthly or yearly, and whether or not he is still entitled to the money.In the aftermath of the deadly shooting that occurred in the once-innocent hallways of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, gun control laws have come to the forefront of concerns percolating throughout America. President Donald Trump has proposed that teachers become equipped with firearms in case of another threat, while others have been lobbying for Congress to make some justfiied amendments to the constitution.

As the Parkland community continues to mend their broken hearts following the unforgettable tragedy, a teacher employed within the high school has found himself in hot water after leaving behind a loaded 9mm Glock in a public restroom. Sean Simpson, who has proclaimed that he would be willing to arm himself in his classroom, "forgot to pick the gun back up" after using the men's washroom in Fort Lauderdale.

A man who was heavily intoxicated then discovered the pistol and fired it at the wall, but luckily no one was injured; Simpson returned shortly afterwards to retrieve his possession.

Both men were charged and arrested in relation to the potentially-dangerous flub, with Simpson having to post a $250 bond. The educator will not likely face any discipline at work, as he is legally authorized to carry his Glock around.Relative newcomer Yung Bans has landed himself a dream feature in the form of Travis Scott. In his young career he has already worked with the likes of Lil Yachty, Playboi Carti, Lil Xan, XXXTentacion, and Smokepurrp, all big fish for the present time.



A video has surfaced of what appears to be a collab between the Bans and the Houston rapper. The following snippet presents Bans with a best case scenario for his career. Twitter users commented that Travis Scott's recorded verse in the clip sounded like vintage La Flame circa Rodeo, which for all intents and purposes works in his favors. It appears fans have not been over the moon with Travis' recent output and are hopeful for a return to former habits. Yung Bans seems to agree with that sentiment:

As of this writing, there don't appear to be too many details on the collaborative track apart from the snippet posted above. Travis Scott's Astroworld is slated for release a the end of this year, and is even expected to feature legendary songwriter Stevie Wonder. Yung Bans can count this among his many blessings to date. Stay peeled for news regarding the project/track.For the first decade of this century, U.S. petrochemical producers, such as LyondellBasell of Houston and Chevron Phillips Chemical of The Woodlands, flocked to the Middle East, spending years developing partnerships and building massive facilities to tap cheap natural gas feedstocks to make plastics and other materials.

But now, the U.S. Gulf Coast has become the locus of global petrochemical growth, outpacing the Middle East in a shift thats only expected to accelerate as North American shale producers siphon more natural gas from vast reserves in West Texas and elsewhere. Even Saudi Arabian companies, including the government-owned Saudi Basic Industries Corp. and Saudi Aramco, are making the shift, with plans to invest billions of dollars to expand chemical operations here and develop new partnerships with Houston and other U.S. firms.

RELATED: Saudi Arabian companies plan massive Houston investments

The migration of petrochemicals manufacturing is more evidence that the Gulf Coast is becoming an energy hub rivaling the Middle East, which for a half century has played an outsized role in the global economy and geopolitics. It shows that the so-called shale revolution pioneered by Houston and Texas producers is continuing to reshape global markets, transform trading relations and lift the regions economy, which so far has attracted more than $60 billion in petrochemical investments - an influx of capital, according to the Greater Houston Partnership, that will support tens of thousands of jobs for years to come.

The shift from the Middle East to the Gulf Coast is driven by two simple facts: Supplies of natural gas liquids such as ethane, a feedstock for petrochemicals and plastics, are dwindling to the point of shortage in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, but growing rapidly here as drilling in the Permian Basin in West Texas and other shale plays floods the market with cheap, abundant raw materials for chemicals. U.S .ethane production is projected to increase nearly 60 percent to 2 million barrels a day by 2021, up from 1.26 million barrels a day in 2016, according to the research firm IHS Markit.

The Middle East accounted for the majority of global petrochemical growth between 2000 and 2010, according to IHS Markit, adding 37.4 million tons of production capacity for natural gas-derived materials including ethylene, propylene and methanol, three base chemicals used to make a wide range of plastics, building materials and consumer goods. During that same period, U.S. natural gas prices were soaring, leading petrochemical makers to close more plants here than they opened and instead take their large-scale projects to Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Thats what drove the world of chemicals during that period, said David Witte, the head of IHS Markits energy and chemicals division. And then shale comes along.

Dan Coombs, LyondellBasells executive vice president of global manufacturing and projects, years ago worked for Chevron Phillips Chemical, a joint venture of the oil company Chevron and Houston refiner Phillips 66. He moved to Qatar in 2008 to help the company build a joint-venture petrochemicals complex there, one of the last major projects it built in that region.

When I left here to go to the Middle East, if you wanted to do a big project, that was where to do it, he said. When I came back at the end of the 2011, it was all about shale oil and gas production and the technology around it.

The new gas supply had an immediate and measurable effect on the global petrochemicals industry. Between 2011 and 2017, the U.S. added roughly 14 million tons of petrochemicals production capacity, according to IHS Markit, just under the amount built in the Middle East. But this year marked a turning point: Through 2020, the U.S. is expected to add another 14 million tons of production capacity, more than double the amount slated to come online in the Middle East, where the lack of new ethane supplies is forcing producers there to switch to pricier feedstocks derived from crude oil.

The region has a hard time attracting investors like it did 10-plus years ago, said Alex Lidback, head of global chemicals, polymers and fibers for research firm Wood Mackenzie. The feedstock is nowhere near as advantaged as it once was.

That dynamic is pushing some of the Middle Easts premier energy companies to expand along the U.S. Gulf Coast with multibillion dollar projects that underscore the industrys faith in the longevity of the shale boom. Coinciding with the recent visit of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is leading a drive to diversify an economy long centered on oil production, Saudi Aramco announced that its Houston-based refining subsidiary, Motiva Enterprises, will make its first major foray into petrochemicals through two separate agreements with Illinois-based Honeywell UOP and TechnipFMC, which has headquarters in Houston, Paris and London.

RELATED: Saudi crown prince wraps up U.S. tour in Houston

Motiva will examine TechnipFMC's production of mixed-feed ethylene made with multiple feedstocks and Honeywell UOP's production of certain oil-derived base chemicals as it considers building processing and production units at its Port Arthur refining site. The company expects to invest between $8 billion and $10 billion dollars in the projects, pending the evaluations.

Separately, SABIC, the Middle East's largest petrochemicals maker, reaffirmed plans to build a headquarters for its Americas operations in Katy, where it purchased about 70 acres of land in 2015. The expansion, slated for completion within the next four years pending a final investment decision, would boost the companys its Houston-area workforce from 400 to about 1,000 employees.

SABIC has for years homed in on the U.S. Gulf Coast as a place for future growth. The company is a partner with Exxon Mobil Chemical Co. to build the world's largest ethane cracker, which processes ethane into ethylene, as part of a massive $10 billion petrochemical complex near Corpus Christi. Ethylene is the basic component of most plastics.

Lidback, who recently traveled to the Middle East, said other petrochemical companies there are looking at the United States for their next growth phase. The Gulf Coast, he added, is particularly attractive because of its established network of pipelines and production facilities adjacent to major export hubs.

Houston-area producers, meanwhile, are capitalizing on their access to cheap ethane and other natural gas feedstocks by expanding existing plants and building new ones along the Gulf Coast.

LyondellBasell, for example, recently expanded capacity at three of its facilities in La Porte, Corpus Christi and Channelview, increasing its annual ethylene production capacity by 2 billion pounds. And its now completing a $700 million facility at its La Porte complex expected to open next year with the annual capacity of more than 1 billion pounds of high-density polyethylene, the worlds most common plastic.

The company also plans to build world's largest propylene oxide and tertiary butyl alcohol plant at its Channelview complex to produce chemicals for furniture, automobiles, adhesives and other uses. The $2.4 billion project, the companys heftiest investment to date, is a substantial bet on U.S. petrochemicals retaining a competitive edge in the global market.

As weve seen, said Coombs, the executive vice president, the supply of shale in the U.S. is a pretty vast resource.

Chevron Phillips Chemical worked for years on four plants in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, ultimately wrapping up its final projects there around 2010. At that point, the company, intrigued by the promise of shale oil and gas discoveries in West and South Texas, decided to build a massive ethane cracker in Baytown at a time when few such investments were in the works.

Nearly a decade in the making, the cracker began operations last month with the capacity to produce an annual 1.5 million tons of ethylene. The cracker will supply the production of polyethylene at the company's Old Ocean facility near Sweeny, where it recently built two new production units with the combined capacity to produce 4.4 billion pounds of plastics a year.

The No. 1 criteria for an investment of this kind of magnitude is a long term supply of feedstock, said Ron Corn, the companys senior vice president for petrochemicals. This is where the growth is today.

MORE: China's environmental crackdown opening markets for Houston exports

katherine.blunt@chron.com

twitter.com/katherinebluntBradbury Anderson, chairman of Houston-based Waste Management, resigned this week citing "personal reasons" according to a company SEC filing.

Anderson replaced the late Bob Reum as board chairman a little more than a year ago. He was formerly vice chairman and CEO of Best Buy. He joined the waste disposal giant's board in 2011.

RELATED: Waste Management appoints chairman of board, CFO

Anderson has also recently resigned from the boards of General Mills and Minnesota Public Radio, as reported by the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

The resignations follow the revelation by the Center for Responsive Politics that Anderson donated to a conservative group that has publicly claimed the Council on American-Islamic Relations civil rights nonprofit has ties to terrorist groups, and which launched an anti-Muslim social media campaign supporting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Secure America Now received a $25,000 donation from Anderson, according to 2016 tax returns obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The returns also show that Secure America Now received $2 million from Robert Mercer, a billionaire and a politically influential supporter of conservative causes.

RELATED: Waste Management reports growth in Q4

Anderson told the Star Tribune he was unaware of the group's anti-Muslim campaign, nor did he know that Mercer was a fellow donor.

Anderson did not return a call for comment from the Chronicle on Wednesday.

Waste Management, Houston's 10th largest publicly traded company, reported $14.5 billion in total revenues for 2017. The company is valued at $35.7 billion.

Thomas Weidemeyer, chairman of the Waste Management board's nominating and governance committee, will serve as interim board chairman until a successor is elected.When the Bear Creek Islamic Center recently held an open house, more than 100 Christians and residents living near the mosque were able to pose questions about whether Islam considers Jesus a God, fosters terrorism and views women as a lesser gender.

People live with opinions formed from sound bites, said Kate Sunday, who is a Methodist and came with her husband. We have dear Muslim friends who go to the mosque, and we wanted to experience what they experience. We differ when it comes to our prophet. But we are all children of God.

GainPeace, a Chicago nonprofit established to promote better understanding of the Islamic faith, local mosques and other Islamic groups, has held more than 3,000 open houses during the past four years to combat negative stereotypes of Muslims and the Muslim faith.

Open houses have been held in nearly every major U.S. city, with a quarter of mosques holding at least one open house annually in recent years, said GainPeace executive director Sabeel Ahmed.

We have felt that there are many barriers between Americans, and these barriers are giving rise to Islamophobia, said Ahmed, a physician, who spoke at the Bear Creek Islamic Center open house. This event helps us connect as humans. At the end of the day, we find that we have so many things in common.

Visitors learned that Bear Creek Islamic Center served as a shelter during Hurricane Harvey, runs a food pantry and is a social and community center for Muslims. Along with GainPeace, the Islamic Society of Greater Houston and the Houston unit of the Islamic Circle of North America also sponsored the Bear Creek open house in west Harris County.

Suzanne Itani, president of Taiba, a Houston nonprofit that works to empower and mentor Muslim women, said non-Muslims have so many misconceptions of Islam.

The open house was, she said, an excellent program. It allows us to own our own narrative rather than what is out there in the media. Its a great effort to bridge our communities and get to know each other and break down barriers.

As she tried to corral her wandering young son, who was sporting face-paint, Stacey Bohm said the open house had made her aware of how Muslims are pigeon-holed.

I came to learn more, and I brought my kids so they can enjoy the experience. They dont really know anything about Muslims. The event was nice, she said. Organizers talked about stereotypes against Muslims.

Visitors received a gift bag that included a Quran and a dozen brochures on the central tenets of Islam, Islams view of Jesus and the reasons why some Muslim women wear hijabs.

Ahmed encouraged visitors to read the Quran to gain a better understanding of Islam.

They will find that Islam stands for justice and peace and harmony. Just like the crusaders and the Inquisition and the KKK do not represent Christianity, some misguided Muslims dont represent the just teachings of Islam, he said. If you want to know what Islam is, pick up a Quran. You will find that Muslims are here to work to better their communities.

Here are snippets on Islam from the brochures (published by GainPeace and the Islamic Circle of North America) given out at the open house:

On Allah, the Arabic name for God

Belief and worship of the One True God is the cornerstone of a Muslims belief.

The message of Islam is simple: To believe and worship One True God alone and to accept Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as His final messenger.

Worshipping others beside God or associating partners or equals with God is the worst sin in Islam. This includes ascribing some of Gods attributes to other objects or beings (e.g., idols); claiming that God has a son, mother or any other partner; or disbelieving in God.

On Jesus and whether he was a divinity

Jesus is a figure who is loved and revered by billions of people the world over, yet there is much confusion surrounding the status of this colossal personality. Muslims and Christians both hold Jesus in high regard but view him in different ways.

Thousands of prophets were sent by Allah, at least one to every nation, with the same message: to worship Allah alone and not associate any partner with Him. Some of these Prophets include Adam, Noah, Joseph, Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (peace be upon them all). Jesus (peace be upon him) was one of the greatest Prophets sent by Almighty God.

Some Christians claim that Jesus is God or part of a trinity - that he is the incarnation of God on earth, and that God took on a human form. However, according to the Bible, Jesus was born, ate, slept, prayed and had limited knowledge - all attributes not befitting God. God has attributes of perfection whereas Man is the opposite. How can anything be two complete opposites simultaneously?

On Islams view of terrorism

In war, the targeting of innocent non-combatants is a despicable act which Islam clearly prohibits. In fact, Muslims are not even allowed to destroy plants and animals unnecessarily, let alone innocent humans.  However, it is important to distinguish between terrorism and legitimate resistance to occupation, as the two are very different.

On hijab

To observe the hijab, Muslim women are required to cover their bodies with modest clothes that do not reveal their figure in front of male strangers. However, hijab is not just about outer appearances; it is also about noble speech, dignified and righteous conduct, and modesty.  There is nothing in hijab that restricts a Muslim womans freedom to express her views and opinions, to own property, to have an education and a career, or to choose a husband. The hijab is an act of honor and dignity, an empowerment, and a guarantee that a woman will be judged according to her inner spiritual beauty rather than her outer superficial appearance.

Bill Murphy is a writer in Houston.A day after the Montgomery County Toll Road Authority's attorney told members of Commissioners Court that there is no time to haggle over the funding mechanism and ownership of the Texas 249 project, state Sen. Brandon Creighton said he will enlist Texas' top brass in an effort to construct a non-tolled road  and the Texas Department of Transportation appeared open to exploring the idea.

"I expect TxDOT to do everything it can to fund our roads before tolls are considered," Creighton, R-Conroe, told The Courier Wednesday. "All options are on the table; and to my knowledge, the county has not taken any action to move any contract forward and to push this train out of the station."

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STUDY: Texas 249 toll to generate millions in revenue

Commissioners Court members, who also make up the MCTRA, have been split on funding a 3.6-mile portion of the Texas 249 project, also known as the "Aggie Expressway" because it will connect Houston to College Station. Differences have been ongoing because it's a state highway, and the MCTRA would fund construction through revenue bonds, then collect tolls to pay off the bond debt  without a referendum for voters to decide on the project. The cost is estimated at just over $76 million.

A referendum is not required when using revenue bonds because it is paid off by money generated from the project, in this case the toll road. General obligation bonds require voter approval because property taxpayers fund those projects.

At Tuesday's MCTRA meeting, commissioners were expected to vote on a $56 million contract so the project could get started this summer. However, prior to the meeting, Precinct 3 Commissioner James Noack threatened to initiate a petition and garner a reported 30,000-plus signatures necessary to force a bond election in November.

During the meeting, MCTRA attorney Rich Muller warned that delaying the project past mid-summer would jeopardize the county's ownership of the project because the agreement with the Harris County Toll Road Authority enables HCTRA to take over a portion of the project, including receiving the toll revenue, if the project is not let by September 2018. In addition, if the project is not completed by January 2020, TxDOT could take back the project and still toll the roads. The county's project is from the Spring Creek Bridge to FM 1774 near Pinehurst. HCTRA already has constructed and is tolling its part of the expressway to the south, while TxDOT is responsible for the road starting at FM 1774 all the way to College Station. It's portion in Montgomery County also will be tolled.

Muller said the project must start soon to achieve the agreed-upon deadlines and a November election would delay it too much.

"Our agreements with Harris County and TxDOT are for us to try and complete the road by 2019," Muller told the court.

Ultimately, commissioners tabled the contract vote because it was not properly noticed on the MCTRA agenda to determine whether the county would lend at least $5 million more to MCTRA so low-bidder SpawGlass, of Houston, could start the project; or start the process of selling the revenue bonds before funding the project. It is expected to be back on the agenda April 24.

In response after the meeting, Noack proposed using $66.6 million in pass-through toll revenue the state still owes the county to fund the Texas 249 project and not toll it. Those funds were part of the 2005 road bond package and earned through vehicle miles traveled on specific county roads included in the bond.

"I think we have to respect contract deadlines, but I also understand that many projects that we face, including the 249 project, are up for negotiation; and all these factors have to be included until we run out of options otherwise," Creighton said. "I know that deadlines are coming, but I also know that a lot of people are working to advance solutions and I look for good things to happen."

Noack wants the state to take over the project and use its own funding or the county's remaining pass-through revenue to fund it, then not toll the road.

"This is no small task; they (TxDOT officials) don't want it delayed," Noack said.

Precinct 2 Commissioner Charlie Riley and County Judge Craig Doyal have maintained that TxDOT would not construct the project without tolling that portion of the road and that the $66.6 million in pass-through funds are not available at this time. They also have argued that TxDOT made the decision to toll the state road, and by MCTRA constructing it, the county would control the tolls and, presumably, when to remove them. The two also have said the traffic and revenue study shows the tolls will generate at least $4 million a year; and the debt will be able to be paid off by 2029, according to the financial analyst.

But TxDOT appeared to be at least considering the non-tolled option Wednesday afternoon after speaking with Noack and Creighton earlier in the day.

"We value our partnership with Montgomery County and will work to meet the transportation needs of this area," TxDOT's media relations department stated in a release to The Courier.

Quincy Allen, Houston District engineer for TxDOT, said the agency would review it.

"Give us a chance and we will be in touch," he told The Courier.

The project in Southwest Montgomery County, which falls in Riley's precinct, previously was approved in a 3-2 vote with Doyal, Riley and Precinct 1 Commissioner Mike Meador voting for it. However, Riley and Doyal both have said that if TxDOT can build it without tolls, the agency can have it back.

Creighton, who serves on the Senate Transportation Committee, said state funds should be available for Montgomery County, the seventh-fastest growing county in Texas and 18th in the nation with a population above 10,000, according to the latest Census data for 2016-17.

Creighton said a 2015 statewide constitutional amendment, Proposition 7, allowed for $5 billion in additional state road funding for the current biennium. In addition, in 2017, the Texas Transportation Commission approved the Unified Transportation Program, earmarking $70 billion over the next 10 years for projects to meet mobility demands.

"For a few months now, I have been working hard to push TxDOT to prioritize our region, and specifically Montgomery County with funding," Creighton said.

He said he understands the funding challenge, stating that in 1965, 33 percent of the state budget was allocated for roads; and today, it's only 8 percent. In addition, the oil revenue came in around $2 billion less than expected. However, Creighton wants to explore all alternatives before resorting to toll roads.

"That project (Texas 249), along with many others, I've been very consistent in pursuing non-tolled options," Creighton said. "I have been doing that. I have been very clear about the state having resources and having more fair funding formulas for our areas.

"I'm consistent with the governor (Greg Abbott) and lieutenant governor (Dan Patrick) that we should phase out tolls if funding is available. We have a priority problem rather than a funding problem."

Noack said he was both pleased and optimistic after his conversations with TxDOT and Creighton Wednesday.

"He (Quincy Allen) said he would be happy to look into TxDOT doing the 249 project," Noack said. "I want to thank James Bass and Quincy Allen for working with the county and understanding that views of toll roads have changed."

More than 91 percent of Montgomery County Republican voters in the March primary supported a nonbinding statewide proposition that states: "No governmental entity should ever construct or fund construction of toll roads without voter approval."The latest scandal involving Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller includes a number of sordid details.

Thats because the self-described maverick doctor at the center of the scandal, Rick Redalen, has more than one character flaw. The same could be said of most humans, of course. But Redalens are such that his medical license had been revoked or suspended in three states by the time he met Miller, who appointed him to the states rural health task force in 2016.

And the Austin American-Statesmans Sean Collins Walsh, who broke that news last week, left many Texans with lingering questions.

In Iowa, Rick Ray Redalens medical license was first suspended when he was convicted of perjury in a case involving his marriage to his 15-year-old former stepdaughter, wrote Walsh.

Walsh, of course, is not to blame for Millers decision to appoint such a person to the rural health task force, which works with the Department of Agricultures Rural Health and Economic Advisory Council.

Similarly, its not my fault that Redalen is a self-pitying fool who tried to convince the Statesman that he and Miller bonded over their mutual commitment to working tirelessly on behalf of rural Texans.

Miller is one of the first actual political people that I have met that talks constantly about improving health care in rural Texas and among rural Texans, Redalen said.

Most people arent interested in that, he added.

Read more: Texas Republicans cant coast to victory this year

Redalen, who is 75 years old, may think Texans are stupid enough to believe that.

But the fact is there are many actual political people on both sides of the aisle who see this as a very important issue.

One such person is state Rep. J. D. Sheffield, a family physician from Gatesville who was elected in 2012 after unseating the incumbent in that years Republican primary. The incumbent was Miller, whose manifest disinterest in the needs of his district was precisely what made him vulnerable.

Another such person is Julie Oliver, who is in a runoff for the Democratic nomination in Texass 25th Congressional District, which is widely ignored by everyone, including its representative, Roger Williams. Oliver, however, is an exception. So, just in case anyone else is curious, Texans who live in the 25th Congressional District would like reliable access to affordable health care, apparently.

My impression, in fact, is that some of the rural Texans Oliver has heard from consider that issue even more urgent than figuring out whether the Russians were actually trying to help Trump win the election or if they got more than they bargained for.

Also, the 25th district is heavily gerrymandered, as you could probably guess.

Read more: Normal Republicans deserve a voice

So I asked Oliver, who is an attorney and accountant who specializes in health care finance, if the city-dwelling voters shed met along the way are as obsessed with health care as the rural voters shed been telling me about, who see access to lifesaving medical treatment as potentially a matter of life and death. She said yes.

I cant confirm that Oliver is right about all of this because I, too, typically ignore the 25th Congressional District. But I believed her because in my experience, most voters do consider health care a major issue. I also find that those of us who live in cities are generally capable of grasping the concept that obstacles to access vary, in part because some people live in cities, and others live in places where nurses are vastly outnumbered by tumbleweeds.

For that matter, a couple days ago Beto ORourke, the Democratic Senate candidate, was in Lubbock, and joined Chad Hasty, a conservative radio host, for a discussion that I tuned into because I wanted to hear a substantive and respectful discussion between two Texans, neither of whom is prone to gratuitously embarrassing our state.

Read more: Beto ORourke is giving Ted Cruz a run for his money

Health care was, in fact, among the issues that came up. I wasnt surprised by that, because ORourke is another example of an actual political person who spends a lot of time brooding about the various challenges that his constituents have been known to encounter during the course of this journey known as life.

And, hey, for all I know, perhaps Miller does spend a lot of time talking about the concerns of rural Texans in the privacy of his own home.

Maybe thats what he and Redalen talked about last year, when they traveled to Israel together, so that Miller could open up trade relations with with a group of Israeli settlements in the West Bank which are not legally recognized by the United States.

But for some reason, I doubt it.

erica.grieder@chron.com

twitter.com/ericagriederAs millions of students across Texas took the state-mandated State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness on Wednesday, Jennifer Richard's daughter sat at home.

The Humble ISD fifth-grader is not physically ill, but Richard said she is sick of the state's reliance on standardized test scores to make decisions that affect students, teachers, schools and districts statewide.

"There is so much emphasis put on STAAR throughout school year," Richard said. "I find up until that point, until STAAR happens, kids are so focused on STAAR completion work that they're being taught the test."

Only about 35,000 Texas students were counted as "not tested" in the state's accountability ratings last year, and since 2012, only about 1 percent of all eligible students have not taken the STAAR test each year. The state does not separate out that data to show who missed the test intentionally and how many students missed it due to medical issues or emergencies. That data likely only counts students who stayed home during the entire testing window and excludes those who may have opted out of one of several tests, said Scott Placek, an Austin-based attorney who represents families who opt out of STAAR.

Still, Placek said he has not seen as much interest in refusing to take the test as he has in previous years.

"I wouldn't say it's waned, but I don't think increased in this year way it has in previous years," Placek said. "I don't think it's as hot an issue as it has been. I don't know if it's because of assessment fatigue, parents saying 'STAAR's here, might as well get used to it.' Or is it the case they don't believe opt out is an effective way to protest? I don't know."

The number of students across the state who do not take the tests this week likely will not be available until the Texas Education Agency releases its accountability ratings in the fall.

Opting out of state-mandated standardized tests became a national phenomenon about five years ago, when parents in Long Island and other large cities in New York began refusing to let their children participate in testing. Parents at the time pointed to an increasing amount of classroom time spent testing and consequences tied to the assessments, many of which were created at the behest of the national No Child Left Behind law that beefed up the federal government's role in state education systems and required more testing.

The opt-out movement reached a fever pitch in 2015 and 2016, where some states saw as many as 10 to 20 percent of their students refuse to take the tests. No Child Left Behind was replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, which gives states more leeway in terms of testing.

Since then, some states, including Idaho and Rhone Island, have dropped requirements for high school exit exams. Maryland put a cap on the amount of time districts can spend testing their students.

Instead of rolling back testing requirements, however, states like Texas have increased the consequences and accountability measures tied to standardized testing in recent years. In 2015, for example, Texas Legislators passed a law requiring traditional public schools to close if they fail to meet the state's academic standard on the STAAR test for five years in a row. That same year, lawmakers passed a law that will grade schools and districts on an A-through-F letter grade system. Districts will be rated on that new system this fall, and individual schools will be subject to the grading system in fall of 2019.

Some of those consequences may not affect school districts impacted by Hurricane Harvey this year. While the TEA has remained mum on whether it will issue an accountability reprieve for districts impacted by the storm, Education Commissioner Mike Morath announced in December that fifth- and eighth-grade students in Hurricane Harvey-affected districts who failed or refused to take the STAAR three times would not have to go through a Grade Placement Committee to advance to the next grade. Instead, Morath is leaving decisions about whether to hold back such students to local school districts.

The reduced consequences made Richard more confident in her decision to keep her 11-year-old daughter home this week so she can avoid testing and retesting days.

Although Richard's daughter is opting out of the state tests, her performance on mock versions of the assessment has affected her standing in class.

"My daughter had just barely missed one reading question, otherwise she would have passed mock part of reading test. The next day I got email from her teacher recommending my daughter for reading tutorials," Richard said. "I said she's not doing that when she's had A's in report card all year long, but now the school wants her to do tutorials because she didn't pass a mock test."

shelby.webb@chron.com

twitter.com/shelbywebbWASHINGTON  Amid swelling political rancor over the recent FBI raid of President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Democrats in Congress are rallying around a long-shot bid by U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and others to protect special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired.

The Houston Democrat and her allies on House Judiciary Committee rolled out legislation Thursday that would require federal court review of any move to fire Mueller or end his probe of possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Although the effort has little chance of getting backing from House Republicans, it comes a day after a bipartisan group of senators introduced a similar bill protecting Mueller as Trump grows increasingly agitated about this week's FBI raid.

Among those who have spoken out against firing Mueller or his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, is Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate. Cornyn, speaking to Texas reporters Wednesday, said it would be a "big mistake" for Trump to fire Mueller, adding "the repercussions would be dramatic and overwhelmingly negative."

Jackson Lee's Special Counsel Independence Protection Act, first introduced in August, has since garnered 152 cosponsors  all Democrats. On Thursday, it was wrapped into similar legislation being spearheaded by New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.

While the House Democrats would put the issue directly before the courts, the Senate bill  backed by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Cory Booker, D-N.J.  would require that the special counsel can be dismissed only for "good cause"  a determination that a fired prosecutor could then contest in court.

The congressional action comes during a week of increasing strains surrounding the Mueller probe, highlighted by an FBI raid on the offices, home and hotel room of Trump's private lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Trump reacted to Monday's FBI raid by openly musing about ending the special counsel investigation and criticizing Rosenstein, who is overseeing the Mueller probe. Rosenstein, a Trump appointee, reportedly had a hand in approving the necessary search warrants targeting Cohen, which were filed by federal prosecutors in New York.

Trump called the probe a "witch hunt," and raid an "attack on our country." He's also inaccurately portrayed Mueller's team as "Democrats, all."

Search warrants filed in connection with the raid suggest that investigators sought communications between Trump and Cohen over the 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape that caught Trump boasting about grabbing women sexually.

Some legal experts say that would be a sign that prosecutors could be looking at a pattern of suppressing unflattering stories about Trump as he sought the White House  in particular, alleged payments to quash stories about romantic dalliances.

Cohen has acknowledged making a $130,000 payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the election, a transaction that some critics contend could have violated campaign finance laws.

Trump has long said that any encroachment on his personal finances would cross a "red line." After the raid, he tweeted that "attorney-client privilege is dead."

Government lawyers, along with Jackson Lee, an attorney, have argued that the attorney privilege cannot be used to commit or further crimes such as possible wire fraud, bank fraud and violations of campaign finance law.

The special counsel's office original charter was to investigate foreign election meddling and potential campaign coordination between Kremlin agents and the Trump campaign. Trump and his defenders maintain that there has been no evidence of "collusion," but the investigation increasingly appears to be focused on potential financial entanglements between Trump or his associates and Moscow.

With the White House seemingly on a collision course with its own Justice Department and the FBI, there have increasingly anxious calls among both Democrats and Republicans for the Trump administration to respect the independence of the Russia probe and let it run its course.

Nadler said any move by Trump to end the special investigation would constitute an "abuse of power," adding that it would also be consistent with the "actions of someone who knows he is guilty of crimes."

Jackson Lee warned of a Constitutional showdown if Trump acts against Mueller.

"This is an Article I moment," Jackson Lee said, referring to the opening section of the Constitution that vests legislative powers in the Congress. "The framers of the Constitution wisely divided power through a system of checks and balances. They envisioned moments like this."

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said earlier this week that the president believes he has the authority to fire Mueller, though that is not currently under consideration. Trump fired back on Thursday at a New York Times article reporting that he considered firing the special counsel at least twice before, including once in December.

"If I wanted to fire Robert Mueller in December, as reported by the Failing New York Times, I would have fired him," Trump tweeted. "Just more Fake News from a biased newspaper!"

While Mueller appears to have broad bipartisan support in Congress, Democrats have accused Republicans of timidity in standing up for an exhaustive Russia probe. Reacting to House Speaker Paul Ryan's decision Wednesday to leave Congress after his current term, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin challenged him to clear the way for legislation protecting Mueller.

"Speaker Ryan, long mute in the face of increasingly erratic and dangerous Trump behavior, should now find his voice and allow a vote to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller from being fired," he said.

Some Republican leaders, including Cornyn, have questioned the utility of passing legislation specifically intended to constrain Trump in the Russia probe.

"The biggest question I have is if it did pass, would the president sign it?" Cornyn said in a CNN interview earlier this week. "I think it's unlikely he would and, as I've said, I don't think it's necessary."

Lee responded that the goal is to pressure Trump. "I would like the bills  that's pressure," she said.

Amid the heightening tensions, Cornyn also has called on fellow conservatives to dial down their criticism of the Justice Department and the FBI, which has been building since Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey last May, citing his role in the Hillary Clinton email controversy.

"So much of what we've heard about the FBI and the Department of Justice recently has been caught up in the emotions and the drama here in Washington," Cornyn said in a Senate speech Thursday.

Cornyn, a former state attorney general and Supreme Court justice, cited the FBI's work in solving the recent Austin bomber case. "These days it's important that our appreciation for the bureau not get drowned out by the criticism," he said.



By Ritah Kemigisa.

Ugandans are to pay 1% tax on each and every mobile money transaction made while depositing and withdrawing.

This has been revealed by the State Minister for Planning, David Bahati while addressing journalists at the Uganda media center today.

Bahati meanwhile government has also proposed a daily taxation of Shs100 on all Sim cards that all social media.

President Museveni recently revealed plans to introduce taxes on social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, claiming that people use these platforms mainly for lugambo (gossip).

Bahati said these tax measures are aimed at growing domestic budget financing.On April 2, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to ease vehicle emissions standards, which would require average fleet-wide efficiency of new vehicles to be 54.5 miles per gallon (closer to 36 miles per gallon factoring in a complex credit system) by 2025. Like the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration designed these standards, known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement. Much attention has been directed at the Clean Power Plans repeal, but weakening CAFE standards would be worse not only for the environment, but also for the broader U.S. economy and national security.

Environmentally speaking, CAFE standards are more important than the Clean Power Plan. Most states are still expected to hit their CPP targets because of increasingly cheaper wind, solar and natural gas. And some states such as California and New York are forging ahead with more ambitious campaigns to reduce power sector emissions. However, the transportation sector has been slower to slash emissions.

But CAFE standards are not just about climate change. When they were first introduced after the 1973 oil embargo, their primary purpose was to increasing Americas energy independence and reducing its exposure to foreign oil producers. America has since transformed itself into one of the worlds largest oil producers, but few other market dynamics have changed. As oil is traded globally, Americans are still vulnerable to the instability that occurs anywhere oil is produced.

EDITORIAL: Our state produces wind and natural gas while politicians fight for coal

In the near half century since the embargo, supply disruptions seem as likely as ever, as major oil producers face persistent turmoil  civil unrest in Venezuela, civil war in Libya and the Islamic State in Iraq. Iran still regularly threatens to shut down the Straits of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the worlds oil passes. Coming elections in Iraq and Venezuela or the reimposition of sanctions on Iran could trigger price spikes.

These scenarios are not individually likely but collectively demonstrate the enduring need for safeguards against global oil price volatility.

There are only two surefire ways to minimize U.S. exposure to this volatility: keeping strategic petroleum reserves to smooth over disruptions and reducing oil consumption. In the second case, global price swings matter less if the economy needs less oil to function. CAFE standards work toward this goal and are all the more necessary at a time when Congress plans to sell off a substantial part of Americas emergency oil reserves. Without either safeguard, the U.S. economy is more vulnerable to market fluctuations at best and its adversaries intentions at worst.

OPINION: Domestic energy is key to independence

And oil prices are cyclical  right now, they are relatively low at about $63 a barrel, but they have doubled from a 12-year low of below $30 a barrel in 2016. There are myriad indicators that prices will continue to rise. Among them are not only the geopolitical risks that major oil producers confront, but also OPECs discipline and Russias surprising willingness to cooperate in maintaining production quotas, which they might extend for a decade or more.

When oil prices do rise, American consumers will be on the hook for higher gasoline bills. If Americans pivot to more fuel-efficient cars in the eventual spike, they would likely send their dollars to European, Japanese and Chinese vehicle manufacturers, which must meet their own stringent domestic fuel economy standards.

These consumer preferences come with national security concerns. Beijing is positioning itself to dominate the global vehicles market as part of its national strategy to capture strategic, advanced technology industries. Considering recently enacted tariffs on solar panels are unlikely to erode Chinas entrenched position in that market, the White House should not cede the vehicles sector while it still has the chance.

EDITORIAL: The rise of battery-powered cars threatens disaster for Houston's oil and gas economy

Softening CAFE standards also undercuts the administrations energy dominance strategy, which would see America become a net energy exporter and use its energy resources as an engine for economic growth. Even without CAFE standards, the United States is projected to become a net energy exporter by 2022, net exporting 2,500 more barrels per day. But, with CAFE standards, that same goal would be achieved a year earlier with net exports reaching 1.45 million barrels per day. That disparity is staggering in the long-run. If America keeps CAFE standards, net exports would be as much as 4.2 million barrels a day by 2030. Without them, net exports drop to 1.47 million barrels a day. This difference represents foregone jobs growth, sacrificed trade gains, and missed opportunities to bolster ties with less energy-secure allies.

More so than any other EPA rule, CAFE standards align with the White Houses plan to lift the economy and usher in a new era of energy dominance. Even if the environmental benefits do not appeal to Administrator Pruitt and the Trump administration, the economic and geopolitical benefits should be enough to keep CAFE standards in place.

Sagatom Saha is an energy policy analyst and Fulbright researcher in Ukraine. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Defense One, Fortune, Scientific American and other publications.In the year after Hurricane Harvey, an important question looms on the horizon: What happens if a storm hits this year and we still arent prepared?

Gulf Coast hurricane season starts June 1, and signs that the county is up for the job dont look so good.

RELATED: A top 10 list for local Hurricane Harvey recovery

On Feb. 12  two months ago today  ProPublica and Texas Tribune co-published a damning, in-depth investigative report on the failure of Harris County government to adequately prepare for Hurricane Harvey. The report  based on more than 3,000 emails gathered via public information request  detailed step by step how Harris County had not implemented a 17-page Mass Shelter Plan it had developed seven months before the storm. While the plan accurately predicted key risks such as a slow response by the Red Cross, only one scenario-based training was ever held for county employees. Most Harris County employees were completely unaware that a plan existed, a fact that became evident amidst the storm. When asked by reporters about the plan, some officials  including Precinct 3 Commissioner Steve Radack  demonstrated no memory it existed in spite of having voted for it.

EDITORIAL: Politicians must work together in Harvey recovery

The plan also called for developing a list of shelters prior to any disaster so the county could be prepared for relief needs as quickly as possible. When reporters asked for this list months after the storm hit, an email chain was accidentally forwarded to them by a county media specialist demonstrating a back and forth discussion about how to spin the story.

Twenty-four hours after the report was released, I addressed the Harris County Commissioners Court during the open comment period of their monthly meeting. I reminded the Commissioners Court of the heroic grace and generosity volunteers in our county had displayed during the storm, then questioned the court on the claims of the ProPublica/Texas Tribune report, hoping to gain some insight into what the county was doing to fix the issue. I had just finished emphasizing that Harris County deserved answers as a matter of public accountability when the timer indicating the end of my three minute testimony began to beep.

EMMETT: Act now on flood prevention  with or without a comprehensive plan

The only response I received after the testimony was, thank you for your service, Mr. Cohen.

Later that meeting, the court approved $105 million in funding to renovate the Astrodome. The Astrodome dominated every evening news broadcast, printed paper, and radio spot in the Houston area for the next news cycle. Any discussion of Harvey became a footnote.

I was disappointed.

In the days that followed, I thought about all the people I have come in contact with who were affected by Hurricane Harvey. I reflected on the jarring inequalities Harvey had exposed. The storm had demonstrated our common bond, yet shined a light on our socioeconomic divides. Life may have returned to normal for many inner loopers, but for others, the effects were still being felt. Many people in this county are still homeless, including students who struggle to keep up with their school work in spite of their hardships. Recently, I was asked if I knew anyone who could help a single mom with a 5-year-old find donations of food, gift cards, and cash to help get them back on their feet. Their home is still in bad shape. They havent come close to getting the help they need.

EDITORIAL: The clock is ticking on Houstons next flood

The people of Harris County are working hard to restore life to normalcy for those hit hardest. Federal money has yet to trickle in. Established organizations and grassroots activists alike are working to find resources for those in need. Last week, several area philanthropists organized a clothing drive to help Harvey survivors rebuild their wardrobes. Houston Strong families continue to swing hammers and rebuild their homes. Such is life in post-Harvey Houston.

Emergency preparedness is above politics. Harris County must take immediate action to prepare us for the next flood and show the receipts indicating said action to the public with clear, easy-to-read, biweekly updates, starting now. Harris County deserves accountability in governance, but more importantly, we deserve to know that the Harris County Commissioners Court is doing everything in its power to take proactive, preventative measures against disasters  before its too late.

Cohen is the president of Indivisible Houston, a local public advocacy organization.We take our social responsibilities seriously and we want to enable our co-workers to take individual responsibility too, said Aldys Kong, IKEA Southeast Asias benefits and employment manager.

Employees that need more than one day will have to apply for annual leave, she added.

Local public transport operator Go-Ahead Singapore will also be showing support for staff by rearranging schedules for its shift workers.

Our shift schedules are planned such that most colleagues will have ample time to return home and cast their votes before or after a shift, its spokesman said.

Go-Ahead will also be open to facilitating feasible arrangements, according to Channel Newsasia.Rawat also threatened trouble in the employees home countries on return..

The Labour Inspectorate regional manager Loua Ward said its alarming to see a franchisee operating under such a well-established brand mistreat and underpay their staff.

The pair was made to live in accommodation provided by the employer and pay excessive amounts in rent, despite poor living conditions where they were required to sleep on the floor, said Ward.

The employees continuously received threats from Rawat saying that he would cancel their visas and theyd be forced to leave New Zealand if they spoke up about the mistreatment.

Mr Rawat previously pleaded guilty to eight charges in the Napier District Court relating to falsifying immigration documents and misleading Immigration New Zealand.Then a few hours later received an email that obviously was not meant for me, Sharp wrote on TripAdvisor. It was in fact an email from the lady we saw, the manager of the day, to her mum, the manager, about me and our visit.

The email reportedly called the bride-to-be a cow, adding that shed p****d off the employee.

In response, the embarrassed owner of the restaurant Karen Williams wrote that she was mortified by the email scandal. Writing on TripAdvisor, she said: I am absolutely mortified, horrified and completely embarrassed that you had sight of such an email. It is completely unprofessional and indefensible.

I did telephone you as soon as I found out what had happened to offer my profuse and sincere apologies and did apologize repeatedly to you.

You were adamant that you did not want to get married at The Mulberry Tree, completely understandably so after the email you were sent so I did not wish to insult you by attempting to make amends after such a catastrophic mistake on our part, especially when it is your wedding day involved.HEDNA, the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association, announced the launch of two new white papers developed to help hotels leverage the plethora of content, diverse platforms, distribution channels and data to gain critical insights, optimize their distribution performance and operations.

HEDNA, the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association, announced the launch of two new white papers developed to help hotels leverage the plethora of content, diverse platforms, distribution channels and data to gain critical insights, optimize their distribution performance and operations. The insightful reports are a prelude to some of the topics that will be explored at the upcoming HEDNA Global Distribution Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

Hotel Descriptive Content White Paper

Presented by the HEDNA Content Working Group, the white paper titled, Hotel Descriptive Content: Considerations for Sourcing and Exchanging Content, describes the current state of content today, including the various content API standards available. The report identifies different content usage scenarios, the key attributes typically applicable to each, and examples of companies that have implemented those scenarios. It also explores the critical questions to ask when evaluating your content needs and the solutions that are available  with a listing of content providers who are offering access to an extensive collection of chains and properties.

Highlights from the white paper:

 Addressing the content conundrum

 Available interface standards

 Delivery methods  push and pull

 Example usage scenarios

 Addressing the challenges

 Selecting a content solution

 Content providers matrix

To download a complimentary copy of the Content Working Group white paper, visit https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/hedna.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/Publications/Content_Whitepaper- Mar2018.pdf

Hotel Distribution, Data Management, and Analysis White Paper

The HEDNA Hotel Analytics Working Group analyzed the results of one of the most abundant survey samples collected and published the outcomes in the white paper titled, Hotel Distribution, Data Management and: A 2018 assessment on global and regional practices. The 20-part survey was released in October 2017 and over an 8-week period, generated 1,053 global responses, representing over 40,000 hotels and Management Companies. The Survey responders come from all major continents and represent hotels, management companies, and independents. The survey set out to quantify current practice in data collection, storage, and usages, as well as test respondents overall data satisfaction. Next steps are for the Analytics Working Group to share best practice recommendations for the hotel industry.

Highlights from the white paper:

 Objectives and methodology

 A detailed breakdown of survey responses

 Main takeaways from each specific segment (Chain, Independent, Management Company)

 Addressing the challenges in data quality, timeliness, collection, and storage

 Developing formal industry data management best practices

 State of the industry and next steps

To download a complimentary copy of the Hotel Analytics Working Group white paper, visit https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/hedna.site-ym.com/resource/resmgr/Publications/Analytics_Whitepaper- Mar2018.pdf

With the significant amounts of hotel data and content generated every day, it is more important than ever for organizations to acquire the tools and technologies necessary to gain business advantage and shape the standards for our industry, said Sarah Fults, President of HEDNA. Associations like HEDNA, offer the ideal forum and opportunity to facilitate active dialogue and collaboration between the suppliers and users of hotel technology. The goal of our working groups and these white papers is to set the stage for future discussions leading up to, and including, the upcoming Lisbon conference in June.

Registration is open for the HEDNA Global Distribution Conference in Lisbon, Portugal from June 4 to 6, 2018.

The theme of the Lisbon event, A Conversation with Tomorrow's Guest, encapsulates the engaging content that will be featured during the three-day conference which takes place at the Sheraton Lisboa Hotel. Hospitality professionals should participate in if they want to stay informed, understand and compete in the dynamic hospitality landscape. To learn more visit https://hednalisbon.com.

Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest all industry news and trends. Subscribe

 2021 Hospitality TrendsBy Ritah Kemigisa.

Kampala city traders have condemned the newly proposed social media taxes by the Uganda Communications Commission.

These argue that the taxes are unfair especially for traders who transact business online through various social media platforms.

The President in a March 12 letter to finance minister Matia Kasaija proposed tax measures that seek to help government raise between Shs400 billion and Shs1.4 trillion from social media users annually.

According to the traders chairperson Everest Kayondo, this is double taxation for them and is now advising the Uganda Revenue Authority to look at a more pro-people approach to widen the countrys tax base.Bright prospects for Thailand in next EU report on fishing industry

April 12,2018 | Source: Nation Multimedia

A sense of optimism could be forgiven after an EU representative yesterday expressed satisfaction with the countrys recent efforts. Thailand in 2015 was slapped with a yellow flag for shortcomings in its fisheries monitoring, control and sanctioning systems. There has been significant progress thanks to serious government support, said Stefaan Depypere, the European Commissions director for International Ocean Governance and Sustainable Fisheries, yesterday.



We have recognised the Thai governments efforts and determination in addressing IUU on a continued basis, he said. During the past few years, Thai authorities have taken seriously the issues raised by the IUU. If the EU were to issue a red flag, Thailands seafood exports would be banned by EU members. Depypere said he hoped the Thai government would continue its anti-IUU efforts so as to set a good example for others. He was speaking after a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister General Prawit Wongsuwon. Depypere heads an EU delegation that is in Thailand to discuss the countrys performance entailing IUU isues from April 4-11.



Given his comments, it is quite possible that the EU will decide later this month to remove the yellow flag for Thailand. The EU delegation is evaluating traceability along the supply chain, regulations, law enforcement and punishment against wrongdoers regarding illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Prawit said the Thai government would continue to fight IUU fishing, even if and after the EU removes the yellow flag. We will pursue the goal of becoming the IUU-Free Thailand. We will not ignore the woes of fishermen, he said. Prawit added that Thailand was ready to share its experiences with other nations. We also plan to declare IUU issues as important agenda items at the Asean level next year, he said. Depypere said if Thailand could solve IUU problems, the Thai economy would benefit and the quality of life for fishermen would improve.

 2017 by THE NATION

Theme(s): Others, Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Fisheries Resources, Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Landing Centres, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Communities and Organisations, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture.So what really happened here? Getty Images

Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.

For United Airlines, the anniversary of dragging a paying, bloodied passenger, Dr. David Dao, down a plane brought nothing more than a few fond remembrances and claims that the airline is so much better now.

This doesn't mean that somewhere, on some airline, there aren't passengers still being forcibly dragged off planes.

Indeed, as if with perfect timing, a passenger has just claimed that he was "threatened," "manhandled by the crew" and "offloaded from the aircraft."

His alleged offense?

He complained that the early Sunday morning flight was garlanded with mosquitoes.

Dr. Saurabh Rai, a heart surgeon, was flying on IndiGo Airlines from Lucknow to Bangalore in India.

He claims that his complaints led to him being dragged by the collar and marched off the plane.

He even claims he was told: "If you have a problem with mosquitoes, then why don't you leave India." Which does seem a touch harsh.

Bengaluru-based cardiologist Dr Saurabh Rai speaks to TIMES NOW and shares his account of what happened onboard the Indigo flight which led to him being offloaded pic.twitter.com/Evf7VsCFVg -- TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) April 10, 2018

He told Times Now that he asked for mosquito repellant cream or spray. He said many children were crying.

Thankfully, there's at least a little video, posted by Asian News International, that appears to show mosquitoes were bothering several of the passengers. (It was incorrectly marked by ANI as Jet Airways.)

#WATCH A video shot by a passenger at Lucknow airport on a Jet Airways flight shows passengers swatting mosquitoes (8.4.18) pic.twitter.com/vVh3LbrMJk -- ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 10, 2018

I contacted IndiGo, a budget carrier that enjoys more passengers than any in India, to ask for its perspective. I will update, should I receive a reply.

Could it be that complaining about mosquitoes can get you removed from an IndiGo flight?

Bugs are, after all, an occurrence in flights all over the world. In some cases -- British Airways, for example -- a big problem appears to be bed bugs.

IndiGo doesn't appear to see things in the same way as Rai. It suggests he had a stinging manner.

The airline told DNA India:

Before cabin crew could address his concerns he became aggressive and used threatening language. As matter escalated after closure of the aircraft doors, he attempted to instigate other passengers on board to damage the aircraft & used words such as 'hijack'. Hence, keeping in mind applicable safety protocols crew apprised pilot-in-command, who decided to offload him.

That sounds very different from Rai's version.

Oddly, DNA says passengers on the flight insisted that the cabin crew's only reaction to Rai's complaints was to suggest he take another flight.

There was more. It doesn't make the airline look entirely friendly.

"Eyewitnesses said neither the staff nor the security men arranged any vehicle to drive Dr Rai back to the airport lounge; he walked all the way back," said DNA.

Indeed, at least one passenger offered his complaints on Twitter.

@IndiGo6E @ZeeNews @TimesNow @republic @timesofindia I don't know #sauravRai. I was traveling with family on Sunday8th Apr by @IndiGo6E & yes definitely there were mosquitoes in flight.We even complained to crews but didn't get any help from them. Sorry Indigo for speaking truth. pic.twitter.com/as0RwzHF1z -- Adv Sumit Kumar Singh (@sumit35_adv) April 10, 2018

NDTV suggests that this isn't the first incident involving alleged manhandling on an IndiGo flight.

And now India's Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu has ordered an inquiry.

Optimists will say that at least Rai doesn't appear to have suffered physical injury, unlike Dao, who lost a couple of teeth.

Pessimists will say that Rai must have provoked the cabin crew in some way with his tone and manner and surely won't get the sort of large settlement that Dao is said to have received.

In the end, such incidents merely underline the problems that, all too often, surround the flying experience these days.

Airlines used to pride themselves on customer service. Many still claim to, but good customer service requires a commitment that begins at the highest levels.

One difficult interpersonal incident can reverberate beyond anything airlines thought previously possible.

Passengers have phones with cameras. They have the web, which can magnify and accelerate with untold speed.

The minute they complain, the airline is often on the defensive.

The line between a situation defused and an international PR issue is thinner than a hamster's nasal hair.

Knowing how to react to a complaint -- look how cleverly KFC did it recently -- can bring enormous benefits in the future.Mark Zuckerberg is no doubt relieved to be finished with his two days of testimony before Congress. He acquitted himself well: no gaffes, no disrespect, and thankfully no flop sweat. On the other hand, several of our elected leaders asked questions that were highly uninformed, or in some cases just plain weird.

Part of the problem is likely their age--many are in their 70s or 80s, prompting some observers to wryly comment that Zuckerberg's testimony reminded them of helping their grandparents with their computers.

Some took to Twitter with merciless joking:

"Mr. Zuckerberg... Hypothetically, if someone's VCR won't stop flashing 12:00, how would you suggest they fix that?" pic.twitter.com/Wq6oA2l0OB -- SPORTZ! (@SportzByRyan) April 10, 2018

And:

"Mr. Zuckerberg, a magazine i recently opened came with a floppy disk offering me 30 free hours of something called America On-Line. Is that the same as Facebook?" pic.twitter.com/U7pqpUhEhQ -- Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 10, 2018

The tweets are amusing, but some of the real-life questions that the senators and representatives asked Zuckerberg are just as funny. Here's a sampling:

1. "Is Twitter the same as what you do?"

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham (R) asked this as he was seeking to discover if Facebook is a monopoly. "It overlaps with a portion of what we do," Zuckerberg said.

2. "If I'm emailing within WhatsApp ... does that inform your advertisers?"

That question came from Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz (D), who seemed unaware that WhatsApp is a chat--not email--platform. Zuckerberg, manfully resisting any temptation to correct him, simply said that content on WhatsApp would not lead to related ads.

3. "How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?"

This surprising question came from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch (R). Zuckerberg blinked for a moment--he couldn't believe it either--and then said simply, "Senator, we run ads."

"I see. That's great." Hatch responded.

4. "What was Facemash, and is it still up and running?"

Missouri Representative Billy Long asked that question, much to Zuckerberg's embarrassment. If you've watched The Social Network, as Long evidently has, you know Facemash was an early Zuckerberg project in which users compared two photos of women and picked who was hotter. But Zuckerberg started Facemash from his dorm room 15 years ago, and Harvard shut it down within days.

5. "What if I don't want to receive [ads for chocolate]?"

Apparently, Florida Senator Bill Nelson (D) is fond of a particular type of chocolate, and having mentioned that fact to some Facebook friends, is now seeing ads for that chocolate. His question might be a good one, but it's one for the entire internet, not just Facebook, as anyone who's ever shopped for anything online and been dogged by ads for that same item already knows.

Zuckerberg said that users can turn off third-party information within Facebook if they don't want that info used to select ads for them. But, he added, "even though some people don't like ads, people really don't like ads that aren't relevant."

6. "My son is dedicated to Instagram, so he'd want to be sure I mentioned him while I was here with you."

That loving parental plug came from Missouri Senator Roy Blunt (R). It was a useful reminder that Zuckerberg is the real star in this roomful of powerful elders. And it wasn't the only one.

7. "Would you bring some fiber, because we don't have connectivity?"

West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R) made this request--some of her state's rural areas apparently lack broadband. Zuckerberg said there's a group within Facebook bringing connectivity to rural areas, and "we would be happy to follow up with you on that." The following day, several representatives asked if he would bring broadband to their states, too.

8. "Some people refer to [Peter Thiel's startup Palantir] as Stanford Analytica. Do you agree?"

Washington Senator Maria Cantwell (D) posed this odd question on her roundabout way to asking whether Cambridge Analytica's data gathering was the brainchild of a Palantir employee, as recent media reports have said. There's no particular reason to think Zuckerberg would know the answer to either of her questions, and he said he didn't.

9. "Did you know that the Motion Picture Association of America is having problems with piracy and ... this is challenging their existence?"

Georgia Representative Buddy Carter (R) asked this question after first noting the rampant sale of opioids and ivory from endangered elephants over Facebook. Never mind that piracy takes place all over the internet and not just Facebook, or the absurdity of suggesting that it poses an existential threat to the Hollywood movie industry. Zuckerberg merely replied: "Congressman, I believe that has been an issue for a long time."Calvin Buari at the wheel. He used to drive a BMW and sell crack. Now he drives a minivan and hopes to build his small transportation company into a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Will Yakowicz

At 5:30 a.m. on a Friday in April, Calvin Buari pulls up to a New York City apartment building in the Bronx. The back door of his Toyota Sienna slides open. Two women jump in, and Buari drives north to catch the Taconic State Parkway. In less than two hours, the minivan will park in front of the giant concrete walls of Green Haven Correctional Facility, where the women will visit their husbands and sons who are serving time.

Buari is the founder of Ryderz Van Service, which he describes as the "Uber of prison visits." He is actually far more familiar with prison than with Uber. Buari spent 22 years at Green Haven for a double murder he always said he didn't commit. Last May, he walked out of the Stormville, New York, facility a free man, after a judge vacated his conviction.

The experience would probably make the average person angry--and Buari, 47, admits the first few years inside were hazed over with enmity. But being in prison also honed his skills as an entrepreneur. A one-time notorious crack dealer, Buari plans to use his innate business skills for more legitimate purposes. Last year, he started Ryderz Van Service with his girlfriend's car; the business now has three cars, two full-time drivers (Buari and his girlfriend, Chi), and two freelance drivers. He envisions the startup blooming into an app-based transportation company that shuttles family members of inmates to all 52 correctional facilities in New York State.

"Prison is so ingrained in our society," says Buari, who wears a black fedora and diamond studs in his ears, "that it will never go out of business."

The Path of Redemption

In the early 1990s, Buari was a well-known crack dealer in the Bronx. He owned two BMWs and ran a crew that controlled the corner of 213th Street and Bronxwood Avenue. He was making real money, wore Jordans, and had two mink coats, with a mink hat to match. Then, in 1992, a disgruntled associate who had recently shot Buari in an attempt to take over the corner implicated him in the murder of two brothers and turned state's witness for the Bronx district attorney. (In 2005, Dwight Robinson, Buari's associate, confessed to murdering the brothers and framing Buari.) At the time, the press reported that Buari practiced "black magic" and was a murderous thug. Buari was convicted and received 50 years to life in 1995.

But Buari never stopped fighting for his freedom, and journalist Steve Fishman followed his story for seven years. Fishman, in the podcast Empire on Blood, chronicles Buari's journey for justice. Eyewitnesses, first interviewed by Fishman, testified in court in 2015 that Buari was not the murderer, and by May 2017 the judge had vacated the conviction.

Just less than a year after walking out of Green Haven, Buari, now a free man, is driving the Sienna up the windy highway upstate. The three women inside, Shelia Clark, Darlene Vives, and Janoi Frye, talk about how they're going to visit their men, who are locked up for either murder or attempted murder. The women visit at least once a month. They say it's not only difficult emotionally, but also financially and logistically straining.

When you're visiting a family member in prison, they explain, you might have to drive hours just to get to the facility. Many family members of inmates don't have a car, so they have to rely on van services. For $50, you can get a round trip from the city, but most of the vans make only one trip a day, which means you need to stay for the full eight-hour visit--impossible for many people's work schedules. The services are "janky," as Janoi Frye describes them.

"You're crammed in with 14 other people and it's like a prison-wife clique," says Frye. "People are getting into fights or complaining about their husbands. But Calvin's service is civilized."

Buari's Ryderz still costs $50, but instead of being treated like cattle, rides are in a clean minivan with only four other people. Buari makes two trips a day so people can visit their family and still get back to the city by noon.

A year into operations, Buari says, the van service generated more than $100,000 in revenue. "Fifty dollars per person adds up," he says. "If we have cars going to Sing Sing, Attica, Five Points, Clinton, that's real money." If he can scale statewide, Buari believes he could build a multimillion-dollar business. "I'm rebuilding my legacy," says Buari. "But this time, I'm building a legitimate empire."

But there's a long road ahead. Ryderz Van Service is nowhere close to being the Uber of anything. Right now, it's a tiny business with three cars.

The Long Road Ahead

Buari's early days in prison went by slowly, punctuated by bouts of anger and self-loathing. At one point, Buari says, he accepted being wrongly convicted and felt he deserved it for running drugs. But about five years into his sentence, he decided to change after meeting Paul Clark, Shelia's husband, who is serving time for a murder he claims he didn't do. Instead of being angry, he would use all of his energy to get out and reinvent himself. "America is all about second chances," Buari says.

Buari met another inmate, Trevers Jackson, who was serving 27 years for commercial burglary and tax evasion. At the time, Jackson was making leather goods to sell to inmates and Buari was running a clothing and shoe catalog company from his cell with assistance from his ex-wife.

The two men started helping each other, and pitched the prison's supervisor the idea for a class on how to run a small business that they would teach. They got it approved. The syllabus included lessons about how to form a legal entity and the basics of accounting and economics. "Most people are in prison because they didn't know how to make enough money legally," says Jackson, who has more than a decade left in his sentence at Green Haven. "This class, for me, is a way to help people learn that there are ways to live straight and make money."

Buari is now getting to test that theory in the real world. Buari's gift, as he describes it on his resume, is being able to run a business in a "highly challenging business environment." But after nearly two decades cut off from the outside world, Buari is admittedly a Luddite. (Stuck in the "dinosaur age," as he describes it.) He still gets blown away by technology most take for granted, like smart phones. "The internet is beautiful," he says with no irony. "You can send money across the world in a second." He's hoping his brother, who runs a web development company in Virginia, can help build his company's app.

Buari arrives at his old home, Green Haven, which has imposing concrete slab walls punctuated with guard towers. After parking, his guests walk to the entrance and know the drill--cell phones in the lockers and get in line. A guard warmly greets Buari by name and compliments him on looking healthier as a civilian. "He used to walk around everyday with his case and legal documents, saying how he is getting out of here soon," says the guard, who goes by Mrs. S.

As we wait in line for about 30 minutes, Buari hands his card to everyone standing in the queue, explaining he's offering an "Uber-like" transportation service. More guards greet him after we remove our coats, belts, shoes, and hats, and clear the metal detector. "I knew you'd make it out!" says one, after we pass through an iron gate and head to the visiting center.

Once at a table, the women wait until their sons or husbands--all of whom have been imprisoned for more than a decade and have over a decade to go--come out to spend a morning in the gloomy room to talk and eat food from the vending machines. By the time Paul Clark and Frye's husband come out, it's about 9:30 a.m. "Services like Calvin's is what keeps families together," says Shelia Clark.

About two hours later, Buari steers the white minivan down the Taconic State Parkway back toward the city. A light April snow is falling as he tells me he used to drive commercial trucks up from Texas in the 1990s with packages of cocaine, smuggled from Mexico, hidden inside television sets. When asked how many kilos he brought to the streets of New York on a typical run, his eyes flash toward me--"tons," he says. Buari slows down to let a funeral procession pass on the right. He points to the hearse and I look over.A 3,000-year-old Egyptian text is being reassessed as one of the first records of a powerful man being accused pf sexual assault.

The script, known as Papyrus Salt 124, outlines a list of alleged indiscretions by an important artisan called Paneb, who lived in Thebes in about 1200BC. Its ruins lie within the modern Egyptian city of Luxor.

Paneb was the chief foreman in a community of artisans who built royal tombs in the ancient city.

But his apparent corruption, both legal and moral, led one furious peer to write a complaint to the pharaohs chief official.

The history of Paneb is not new as the papyrus was discovered in the 19th century by Egyptologist Henry Salt.

But the allegations regarding his sexual misconduct are beginning to take on new weight in the modern era, when the #MeToo has held powerful men to account for sexual harrassment.

An English translation of the papyrus, by Jaroslav Cerny in 1929, provided details of Panebs alleged crimes and prompted Egyptologists to take a real interest in the manuscript for the first time.

The chief accusation by the author, Amennakht, was that Paneb bribed his way to the position of chief workman, a job Amennakht himself was due to inherit.

 An ancient city has been discovered in the middle of the ocean

But he went on to allege a litany sexual assault and adultery charges, although ambiguities in the text make the exact nature of some of the charges unclear.

One allegation of rape, however, does appear clear cut. Amennakht accused Paneb of taking the clothes of a woman called Yemenwaw, before he threw her on top of a wall and violated her.

In another, Amennakht relayed testimony by Panebs own son Aapehty, who swore on oath examples of debauchery by his father, including one in which Aapehty took part himself.

The word Cerny translates as debauched, however, does not make it clear whether the interactions were consensual or not.

Ancient necropolis discovered in Egypt Show all 6 1 /6 Ancient necropolis discovered in Egypt Ancient necropolis discovered in Egypt An archaeologist works on a damaged coffin Reuters/Mohamed Abd El Ghany Ancient necropolis discovered in Egypt An archaeologist works on a sarcophagus at the necropolis EPA/IBRAHIM YOUSSEF Ancient necropolis discovered in Egypt Skulls found at the burial site Reuters/Mohamed Abd El Ghany Ancient necropolis discovered in Egypt Another sarcophagus found at the necropolis EPA/IBRAHIM YOUSSEF Ancient necropolis discovered in Egypt Four canopic jars designed to hold internal organs are decorated with the heads of the four sons of the god Horus EPA/IBRAHIM YOUSSEF Ancient necropolis discovered in Egypt Examining a sarcophagus on site Reuters/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

Rowland Enmarch, senior lecturer of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, told The Independent the ancient Egyptians considered adultery morally reprehensible.

Sleeping with married women, whether they wanted to or not, was a no-no, and particularly taking them by force just makes it worse, he said.

Paneb was probably put to death eventually, Mr Enmarch said, which may have had something to do with filching materials from the royal tombs  an even more serious offence.

Im not sure sexual misdemeanours were necessarily capital offences, whereas stealing from the King was, he added.

It is unclear what eventually befell Paneb, but the case unearthed by Narratively, shows that even in ancient societies, men could be exposed for their unacceptable behaviour.Donnie Yen  best known to Westerners for playing the blind, Force-guided warrior Chirrut Imwe in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story  has landed another major role.

The Hong Kong actor will next appear in the Disney-produced live-action remake of Mulan, Yen playing the titular characters mentor Commander Tung according to Deadline.

Niki Caro  of Whale Rider and The Zookeepers Wife fame  will direct the upcoming blockbuster, while Yifei Liu has been cast as Mulan.

Influential producer Bill Kong will act as executive producer, having previously worked on various hits, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, and Monster Hunt.

27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Show all 27 1 /27 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Black Panther Released: 12 February 12 February Director: Ryan Coogler Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Forest Whitaker, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 The Greatest Showman Released: 1 January 1 January Director: Michael Gracey Cast: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Darkest Hour Released: 12 January 12 January Director: Joe Wright Cast: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Mendelsohn 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri Released: 12 January Director: Martin McDonagh 12 JanuaryMartin McDonagh Cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Caleb Landry Jones > Twentieth Century Fox 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Coco Released: 19 January 19 January Director: Lee Unkrich ,p>Cast: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Renee Victor 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Downsizing Released: 19 January 19 January Director: Alexander Payne Cast: Matt Damon, Christopher Waltz, Jong Chau, Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Early Man Released: 26 January 26 January Director: Nick Park Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, Timothy Spall 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Fifty Shades Freed Released: 9 February 9 February Director: James Foley Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Kim Basinger 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Maze Runner: The Death Cure Released: 9 February 9 February Director: Wes Ball Cast: Dylan O'Brien, Thomas Brodie Sangster, Kaya Scodelario, Giancarlo Esposito, Aidan Gillen 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 The Shape of Water Released: 16 February 16 February Director: Guillermo del Toro Cast: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Annihilation Released: 23 February 23 February Director: Alex Garland Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Lee, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Dark River Released: 23 February 23 February Director: Clio Barnard Cast: Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Red Sparrow Released: 2 March 2 March Director: Francis Lawrence Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Tomb Raider Released: 16 March 16 March Director: Roar Uthaug Cast: Alicia Vikander, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, Dominic West, 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 A Wrinkle in Time Released: 23 March 23 March Director: Ava DuVernay Cast: Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Zach Galifianakis 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Pacific Rim: Uprising Released: 23 March 23 March Director: Steven S. DeKnight Cast: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Roman J Israel, Esq Released: 23 March 23 March Director: Dan Gilroy Cast: Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo Columbia Pictures 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Isle of Dogs Released: 30 March 30 March Director: Wes Anderson Cast: Bill Murray, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johansson 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Ready Player One Released: 30 March 30 March Director: Steven Spielberg Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance, Simon Pegg 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Avengers: Infinity War Released: 27 April 27 April Director: The Russo Brothers Cast: Robert Downey, Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Josh Brolin 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Untitled Han Solo Film Released: 25 May 25 May Director: Ron Howard Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke, Woody Harrelson, Donald Glover 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Released: 8 June 8 June Director: J.A. Bayona Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pine, B.D. Wong, Toby Jones 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Deadpool 2 Released: 1 June Director: David Leitch 1 JuneDavid Leitch Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Zazie Beetz, Josh Brolin 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Ocean's 8 Released: 22 June 22 June Director: Gary Ross Cast: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Anne Hathaway, Olivia Munn, Helena Bonham Carter, Rihanna, Matt Damon 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Ant-Man and the Wasp Released: 29 June 29 June Director: Peyton Reed Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Soldado Released: 29 June 29 June Director: Stefano Sollima Cast: Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Jeffrey Donovan, Catherine Keener, Matthew Modine 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 The Incredibles 2 Released: 13 July 13 July Director: Brad Bird Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Samuel L. Jackson

Yen may have come to international fame with Rogue One, but the actor has been a mega-star in China for many years having headlined the Ip Man trilogy (a fourth instalment has since been announced).

Meanwhile, Disney continues to release live-action remakes of their classic animated movies, with Aladdin, Dumbo, and The Lion King all coming soon.

Mulan reaches cinemas in 2020.Netflix will not be bringing any of its films to Cannes this year following the implementation of a new rule.

The streaming service's chief content officer, Ted Sarandos told Variety that they aren't aligned with a "new rule that bans any films without theatrical distribution in France from playing in competition."

According to French law, films cannot be available on home platforms until 36 months after being shown in theatres.

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While Netflix was told that they could show some of their films out of competition, Sarandos "says that doesn't make sense" for the company.

"We want our films to be on fair ground with every other filmmaker," Sarandos says. "Theres a risk in us going in this way and having our films and filmmakers treated disrespectfully at the festival."

He further added that the festival "set the tone," saying it wouldn't be a good idea for them to be there.

At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Netflix found success with two of its films: Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories and Bong Joon-ho's Okja.

After these films were announced to be a part of the competition, French theatre owners spoke out against the inclusion of the movies to the artistic director of Cannes, Thierry Fremaux.

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"We hope that they do change the rules," Sarandos said. "We hope that they modernize. But we will continue to support all films and all film-makers."

Sarandos encouraged Cannes to "rejoin" the world of cinema.

The 2018 Cannes Film Festival lineup has yet to be announced, but Netflix's decision to opt out of the event would mean works by Alfonso Cuaron and Paul Greengrass would not be shown.Earlier this year, Tom Hardy released the first image of himself as Al Capone, the actor sporting a shaven head and looking fairly miserable trapped in Alcatraz.

Hardy has since posted further photos, this time offering a clearer look at the makeup and prosthetics being used to recreate the infamous Chicago gangsters looks.

Mega awkward character misstep, Hardy wrote alongside the post, the Mad Max: Fury Road actor looking almost unrecognisable as they have attempted to age him up considerably.

Hardy is currently working with Fantastic Four director Josh Trank on the biopic Fonzo, principle photography having started earlier this year.

The movie will focus on Capones latter years, when the iconic figure suffered dementia.

According to the production notes, the story will also see his past becomes present as harrowing memories of his violent and brutal origins melt into his waking life.

27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Show all 27 1 /27 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Black Panther Released: 12 February 12 February Director: Ryan Coogler Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Forest Whitaker, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 The Greatest Showman Released: 1 January 1 January Director: Michael Gracey Cast: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Darkest Hour Released: 12 January 12 January Director: Joe Wright Cast: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Mendelsohn 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri Released: 12 January Director: Martin McDonagh 12 JanuaryMartin McDonagh Cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Caleb Landry Jones > Twentieth Century Fox 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Coco Released: 19 January 19 January Director: Lee Unkrich ,p>Cast: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Renee Victor 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Downsizing Released: 19 January 19 January Director: Alexander Payne Cast: Matt Damon, Christopher Waltz, Jong Chau, Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Early Man Released: 26 January 26 January Director: Nick Park Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, Timothy Spall 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Fifty Shades Freed Released: 9 February 9 February Director: James Foley Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Kim Basinger 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Maze Runner: The Death Cure Released: 9 February 9 February Director: Wes Ball Cast: Dylan O'Brien, Thomas Brodie Sangster, Kaya Scodelario, Giancarlo Esposito, Aidan Gillen 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 The Shape of Water Released: 16 February 16 February Director: Guillermo del Toro Cast: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Annihilation Released: 23 February 23 February Director: Alex Garland Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Lee, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Dark River Released: 23 February 23 February Director: Clio Barnard Cast: Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Red Sparrow Released: 2 March 2 March Director: Francis Lawrence Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Tomb Raider Released: 16 March 16 March Director: Roar Uthaug Cast: Alicia Vikander, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, Dominic West, 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 A Wrinkle in Time Released: 23 March 23 March Director: Ava DuVernay Cast: Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Zach Galifianakis 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Pacific Rim: Uprising Released: 23 March 23 March Director: Steven S. DeKnight Cast: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Roman J Israel, Esq Released: 23 March 23 March Director: Dan Gilroy Cast: Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo Columbia Pictures 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Isle of Dogs Released: 30 March 30 March Director: Wes Anderson Cast: Bill Murray, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johansson 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Ready Player One Released: 30 March 30 March Director: Steven Spielberg Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance, Simon Pegg 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Avengers: Infinity War Released: 27 April 27 April Director: The Russo Brothers Cast: Robert Downey, Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Josh Brolin 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Untitled Han Solo Film Released: 25 May 25 May Director: Ron Howard Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke, Woody Harrelson, Donald Glover 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Released: 8 June 8 June Director: J.A. Bayona Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pine, B.D. Wong, Toby Jones 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Deadpool 2 Released: 1 June Director: David Leitch 1 JuneDavid Leitch Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Zazie Beetz, Josh Brolin 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Ocean's 8 Released: 22 June 22 June Director: Gary Ross Cast: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Anne Hathaway, Olivia Munn, Helena Bonham Carter, Rihanna, Matt Damon 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Ant-Man and the Wasp Released: 29 June 29 June Director: Peyton Reed Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Soldado Released: 29 June 29 June Director: Stefano Sollima Cast: Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Jeffrey Donovan, Catherine Keener, Matthew Modine 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 The Incredibles 2 Released: 13 July 13 July Director: Brad Bird Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Samuel L. Jackson

Previous versions of Capone have focussed on the gangsters time as public enemy number one during the American prohibition. Fonzo does not have a release date.

Al Capone has been portrayed on screen by multiple award-winning actors, including Rod Steiger, Robert De Niro, and Ben Gazzara.

Hardy has been very busy recently, working on the Spider-man spin-off Venom, while a second season of Taboo has also been announced.Alex Beckett, best known for playing Barney Lumsden in the BBC satirical comedy W1A, has died aged 35.

Becketts agent Gavin Denton-Jones confirmed the news in a statement, calling Lumsden a wonderful man and a hugely talented actor.

Our thoughts are with his family and we kindly ask that their privacy be respected at this difficult time, the statement reads.

The actor was appearing in the Donmar Warehouses current production of The Way of the World, the London theatre cancelling the rest of this weeks performances.

Donmars artistic director Josie Rourke and executive producer Kate Pakenham said: We are deeply shocked by the tragic loss of our dear friend and brilliant actor Alex Beckett, a much loved member of The Way of the World company. We are completely devastated by this terribly sad news.

Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Show all 65 1 /65 Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Stan Lee Spider-Man creator whose web of Marvel characters brought joy to millions died on 12 November, aged 95. The prolific writer-editor worked through the Second World War, transformed the struggling publisher and paved the way for the empire it is today Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha Billionaire businessman who helped bring the Premiership to Leicester City died on 27 October, aged 60. The media-shy but hugely popular Thai Bhuddist made his fortune in duty-free and was known for his love of football and polo Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Paul Allen Billionaire investor and philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates died from non-Hodgkin lymphoma aged 65 on 15 October. Despite leaving the company in the early 1990s, he remained a powerful force in technology and charity work for decades Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Jamal Khashoggi Jamal Khashoggi was a well-connected, bilingual Saudi journalist who became a globally recognised symbol of press freedom and Middle East democratic aspirations during the 17 days he was officially missing. But he never lived to see the campaign by journalists, rights advocates and political leaders worldwide to draw attention to his disappearance and conditions for democracy advocates in Saudi Arabia. The Washington Post columnist had already died on 2 October under murky circumstances in his own nations diplomatic outpost in Istanbul, Saudi officials confirmed late on Friday. He was 59 AFP Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures James Lawton Passionate, devoted and fearlessly honest, James Lawton was a true giant of sports writing, he died on 27 September, aged 75. The Independents former chief sports writer was part of a golden era of writers who became integral in the sporting landscape through the power of their prose Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Chas Hodges The musician Chas Hodges was best known as one half of the cockney rock duo Chas and Dave, he died on 22 September, aged 74. Hodges and Dave Peacock rose to fame in the English pop-rock band, known for their witty lyrics about living in London, in the 1970s. They had a string of hits, including "Rabbit", "Snooker Loopy" and "Ain't No Pleasing You" Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Judith Kazantzis Poet whose sense of injustice spanned Greenham Common and Guatemala died on 18 September, aged 78. Her aristocratic background notwithstanding, she was a Labour Party supporter through and through and her verse was packed with politics Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Arthur Mitchell Trailblazer of ballet who ran circles around racism in America died on 19 September, aged 84. He braved racist taunts for doing what he loved best  dancing  but once his talent was embraced by the great George Balanchine he was unstoppable Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Big Jay McNeely Saxophonist who revolutionised rhythm and blues as the King of the Honkers died on 16 September 16, aged 91. Whether bringing traffic to a standstill or playing his trademark ultraviolet horn, McNeely was a pioneer who brought showmanship to jazz Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Isabel Quigly Translator of Italian, Spanish and French literature died on 14 September, aged 91. An outstanding Cambridge scholar, she got a job at Penguin and went on to become a Booker judge and film critic for the Spectator Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Fenella Fielding Carry On star who turned down a role in a Fellini film died on 11 September, aged 90. The actress, who started her career in 1952 and shot to fame with 'Pieces of Eight' and 'Hancock's Half Hour', was known for her husky voice, wicked humour and seductive eyelashes PA Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Mac Miller Rapper who Trump called 'next Eminem' before he made his feelings known about the president died on 7 September, aged 26. Trump was denounced by the Black Lives Matter supporter as an egomaniacal, attention-thirsty, psychopathic, power-hungry delusional waste of skin and bones Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Burt Reynolds Charismatic star known for having fun both on and off the screen died on 6 September, aged 82. Reynolds was listed as Hollywoods top-earning box-office star five years running from 1978 to 1982 Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Alan Oakman England first-class cricketer who helped beat Australia at Old Trafford in the Fifties died on 6 September, aged 88. He was at his best on hard wickets against medium or fast-medium bowling when, using his immense reach, he would unleash a stream of majestic drives PA Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Inge Borkh The opera singer who became a star of the stage in postwar Germany as Elektra and Salome died on 26 August, aged 97. With a powerful voice and commanding stage presence, she triumphed in portraying any number of tempestuous operatic heroines Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures John McCain The war hero Republican whose last stand was against his party's own president died on 25 August, aged 81 Mr McCain was a principled conservative in the Senate, and once survived five years as a war prisoner. AFP/Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Uri Avnery Israeli journalist whose voice of dissent was radical until the end died on 20 August, aged 94. One of the first advocates of a two-state solution in Israel, he was shunned by the establishment whose unreason he was never afraid to call out Reuters Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Hilary Lister Record-breaking sailor who made a splash in newspapers as she defied disability died on 18 August, aged 46. She risked her life and inspired awe as she refused to allow being quadriplegic to deny her the chance to chart the oceans PA Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Kofi Annan Former UN secretary general and Nobel Peace Prize laureate died on 18 August, aged 80. The Ghanaian national was the first and only black African to be appointed as the worlds top diplomat, a tenure that saw him mediate in some of the biggest crises of the 21st century EPA Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Aretha Franklin Queen of Soul who won 18 Grammys and sold 75 million records died on 16 August, aged 76. Regarded by many as the greatest singer of all time, Aretha Franklin bestrode 1960s and 70s R&B and sang at three presidents inaugurations AP Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Atal Bihari Vajpayee Former prime minister of India who fuelled the nuclear arms race in south Asia died on 16 August, aged 93. Elected to the office three times, Atal Bihari Vajpayee transformed Indias economy and held together a fragile coalition of disparate political parties during his tenure Reuters Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Arsene Tchakarian Last of WWIIs Armenian-led Manouchian network who fought the Nazis in France died 4 August, aged 101. He joined a band of immigrants from countries affected by Hitlers expansionism fighting for the French resistance AFP/Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Mary Carlisle Hollywood actress of the Thirties who was typecast as the blonde ingenue died on 1 August, aged 104. If her looks were a strength in helping her land roles at the outset of her career, they proved a weakness in the end as male producers failed to see beyond them Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Ellie Soutter Team GB snowboarder, Ellie Soutter, died on 25 July, aged 18. She secured Team GBs only medal at the European Youth Olympic Winter Festival in Turkey in 2017. She was was one of the countrys best up-and-coming snowboarders, competing in both snowboard cross and freeride Instagram/EllieSoutter Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Mary Ellis WWII pilot, Mary Ellis, who survived crash landings and Nazi bombs died on 24 July, aged 101. At a time when women in the cockpit were frowned upon, Ellis made a name for herself flying Spitfires to RAF bases to help the war effort AFP/Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures John Murray The stylish cricketer, John Murray, who rewrote the record books died on 24 July, aged 83. A wicket-keeper who enjoyed outstanding first-class career with Middlesex, spread over a quarter of a century Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Oksana Shachko The cofounder of feminist protest group Femen who put her body on the line for womens rights died on 23 July, aged 31. Regularly arrested and twice kidnapped, Oksana Shachko quickly drew worldwide attention for challenging all forms of patriarchy under the slogan I came, I stripped, I won AFP/Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Alene B Duerk Trailblazer who became the US Navys first female rear admiral died on 21 July, aged 98. She said checking released WWII PoWs for lice and diseases and taking requests for ice cream, scrambled eggs and ham was probably the most exciting experience of my whole career US Navy Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga Civil rights champion who sought redress for Japanese Americans interned during World War Two died on 18 July, aged 92. Among 120,000 people were displaced and sent to camps by the US during the war simply because of their Japanese heritage. Herzig-Yoshinagas diligence put a dark chapter of American history on record and led to reparations for those affected YouTube/Densho Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Lord Carrington Last of Churchills cabinet, Lord Carrington, who resigned as Thatchers foreign secretary over the Falklands died on 9 July, aged 99. His warnings against the withdrawal of Britains sole patrol vessel in the South Atlantic went unheeded  yet when the Argentine's invaded in 1982, it was he who fell on his sword Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Dame Gillian Lynne Ballerina and dancer, Dame Gillian Lynne, who revolutionised choreography died on 1 July, aged 92. Dame Gillian Lynne threw herself into dance during the war, and went on to inspire some of the West Ends biggest shows, including Cats and Phantom of the Opera Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Alan Longmuir The founding member of the Bay City Rollers died on 1 July aged 70. Huge in the 70s, the Bay City Rollers had a number of hit songs, including "Remember", "All Of Me Loves All Of You", "Shang-a-Lang" and "I Only Want To Be With You" Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Joe Jackson Tarnished starmaker, Joe Jackson, who drove his children to international success died on 27 June, aged 89. Collectively the Jacksons may have been the most prominent family in pop music history, but their fame came at the cost of family feuds Reuters Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Leslie Grantham The former Eastenders star died on 15 June aged 71. Grantham starred as "Dirty Den", known so for his many affairs, who was the landlord of the Queen Vic for the first four years of the show, returning briefly in 2003 before being killed off on the show's 20th anniversary episode Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Dorothy Cotton Civil rights leader, Dorothy Cotton, and confidante to Martin Luther King died on 10 June, aged 88. A key figure in the fight for racial equality, Cotton led marches and headed an education programme that taught African Americans about their basic rights of citizenship Alamy Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Eunice Gayson First Bond girl, Eunice Gayson, and originator of his most famous line died on 8 June, aged 90. Appearing alongside Sean Connery in Dr No, she would speak the immortal words: Trench. Sylvia Trench  before Bond ever did Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Anthony Bourdain The celebrity chef from New York died on 8 June, aged 61. Anthony Bourdain made a career recommending food and restaurants for people - and he didnt shy away from letting people know when his hometowns food offerings werent up to par Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Maria Bueno Four-time Wimbledon winner, Maria Bueno, who became a Brazilian tennis legend died on 8 June, aged 78. The female tennis pioneer won seven Grand Slam singles and captured the worlds attention with her grace and style Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Peter Stringfellow Nightclub entrepreneur, Peter Stringfellow, who booked The Beatles and brought table-dancing to Britain died on 7 June, aged 77. His brand was synonymous with sex but in spite of the sleazy nature of his venues, he managed to maintain an upbeat, nice-guy reputation Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Kate Spade New York fashion designer Kate Spade died on 5 June, aged 55. Best-known for her popular line of handbags, the American designers products were among the most popular accessories in the designer market, competing with the likes of handbag giants Coach and Michael Kors AP Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Philip Roth US novelist, Philip Roth, hailed as the greatest of his generation died on 22 May, aged 85. He became a literary star in the 1960s and continued to win awards and praise well into his later years with new, evocative works Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Ray Wilson England World Cup winner, Ray Wilson, died on 15 May, aged 83. A study in nimble poise and calm concentration, Wilson exuded style and efficiency, and although he shunned the limelight off the field, on it his voice could be heard constantly Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Tom Wolfe Audacious and inventive journalist and author, Tom Wolfe, who satirised the American pursuit of prestige died on 14 May, aged 88. His writing detailed the finer points of behaviour, trends, fashion and the pursuit of prestige that shaped the American social orderTom Wolfe signs copies of his novel 'Bonfire of the Vanities' in 1988 Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Margot Kidder Actor, Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve in Superman films died on 13 May, aged 69. She spoke out against the First Gulf War and campaigned for abortion rights but both her political activism and her acting career took a backseat to her struggles with mental health Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Tessa Jowell Former Labour cabinet minister, Tessa Jowell, who helped to secure 2012 London Olympics died on 12 May, aged 70. In a political career spanning more than four decades and as a minister in three Blair administrations, Jowell was a trailblazer for women in politics. Diagnosed with a glioblastoma in May 2017, a rare, high-grade tumour and malignant cancer that can spread quickly to other parts of the brain and spine, it came without warning and with none of the symptoms. Stoic, Jowell displayed passion, determination and a sense of mission, which had been the hallmark of her political career, in a bid to change the way cancer was dealt with PA Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Verne Troyer The actor died on 21 April, aged 49. Widely known for his role as Mini-Me in Austin Powers, Troyer also appeared in the Harry Potter series Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Avicii The musician, whose real name is Tim Bergling, died on 20 April, aged 28. A pioneer of EDM, and one of the most successful DJs in the industry, the musician found crossover pop success with his 2011 track Le7els, which sampled Etta James, going platinum in the US and becoming a number one single internationally Getty Images for Clear Channel Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Barbara Bush Barbara Bush, the matriarch of most powerful US first family in recent times died on 17 April, aged 92 AFP/Getty Images Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Winnie Mandela The ANC activist died on 14 April, aged 81. Winnie fought tirelessly against apartheid in South Africa, becoming a figurehead for the movement while her husband Nelson was in prison AFP Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Ray Wilkins International footballer, Ray Wilkins, who was handed the Chelsea captaincy at 18 died on 4 April, aged 61. Blessed with an adhesive touch and a calm temperament, Ray Wilkins went on to win the double with the Blues as assistant coach and was hailed as a gentlemen of the game Reuters Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Stephen Hawking The theoretical physicist died at the age of 76, on 14 March. The iconic physicist is known as one of the greatest scientific minds in the history of the world, and worked to peer into the most mysterious parts of the universe. Hawking was known also for the accessible way in which he communicated those discoveries, with his work including A Brief History Of Time making its way into pop culture Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Marielle Franco The politician was brutally murdered in downtown Rio de Janeiro on 14 March, in what officials have concluded was a targeted political assassination. A black LGBT+ woman in a country notoriously dominated by racism, sexism and traditional religious dogma, she was raised in one of Rios largest, poorest and most violent slums, the Mare complex AP Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Ken Dodd The comedy legend died aged 90, on 11 March. Sir Ken, famous for his epic stand-up shows which could go on for hours at a time, as well as his Diddy Men and tickling stick, died just days after leaving hospital Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Hubert de Givenchy The founder of the eponymous French fashion house died aged 91, on 10 March. In an impressive career that spanned more than five decades, Givenchy was renowned for dressing the likes of Jackie Kennedy, the Duchess of Windsor and Audrey Hepburn, his long-time muse Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Davide Astori The footballer died after a cardiac arrest aged 31 on 4 March. He was captain of Fiorentina, and an Italian international with 14 appearances for the national side Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Roger Bannister Athlete who broke four-minute mile, Roger Bannister, died on 3 March, aged 88. Sir Roger gave up running to pursue long and distinguished medical career AP Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Sridevi Bollywood superstar, Sridevi, who starred in 300 films and was hailed as Indias Meryl Streep died on 24 February, aged 54. She started off as a child star of Tamil-language cinema and then got her big break in Bollywood where she established herself as a low-key legend AFP/Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Emma Chambers The British actress, best known for her roles in The Vicar of Dibley and Notting Hill, died aged 53, on 21 February. A statement from her agency said: Emma created a wealth of characters and an immense body of work. She brought laughter and joy to many, and will be greatly missed. Rex Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures John Mahoney The actor, famous for his role in long-running TV show Frasier, died at the age of 77, on 4 February. The British-born star was on the show for 11 seasons spanning from 1993 through to 2004 and his character, Martin Crane, is a fan favourite Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Mark E Smith The lead singer and the main artist behind The Fall, died aged 60, on 24 January. Famous for his acerbic wit, Smith was the ever present member in the band, going through over sixty members in the group's fourty year duration Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Hugh Masekela The legendary South African jazz trumpeter and anti-apartheid activist died on 23 January at the age of 78 after suffering from cancer. Masekela, branded the father of South African jazz, died in Johannesburg after what his family described as a protracted and courageous battle with prostate cancer AFP/Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Jimmy Armfield The Blackpool legend and former England captain passed away, aged 82, on 22 January. The right-back played 627 matches for the Lancashire club between 1954 and 1971, and captained England 15 times in 43 appearances. He would later go on to manage Bolton Wanderers and Leeds United, before working as a pundit for the BBC for thirty years Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Ursula Le Guin The celebrated science fiction and fantasy author died at the age of 88, on 22 January. Among the authors best-known works are the 1969 science fiction novel Left Hand of Darkness, which explores themes of gender by featuring characters with no fixed sex, and the 1968 coming-of-age story A Wizard of Earthsea Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Dolores ORiordan The singer died on 15 January, aged 46. Born into a staunchly Catholic family, ORiordan was 17 when she responded to a press advert for a female vocalist to join The Cranberry Saw Us, comprising brothers Noel and Mike Hogan and Fergal Lawler, in 1989. Soon after she became lead singer, they became The Cranberries and cut a three-track EP on an independent label AFP/Getty Notable deaths in 2018  in pictures Cyrille Regis The former England footballer died from a heart attack aged 59, on 14 January. The ex-footballer, who scored 112 goals in 297 appearances for West Bromwich Albion, also turned out for Coventry City and Aston Villa in the top flight, as well as playing for Wolverhampton Wanderers, Wycombe Wanderers and Chester City in the later years of his career before retiring in 1996. Regis was a pioneer for black footballers in Britain Getty

Beckett played Barney Lumsden, who works for the agency Perfect Curve, in the satirical comedy W1A, as well as in Twenty Twelve, alongside co-stars Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes.

Hynes posted a tribute to Twitter, reading: Alex Beckett was a wonderful, clever, kind, brilliant person  so glad to have known him, so sad he is gone.

Shane Allen, comedy commissioner at the BBC, said: Were all incredibly crushed to hear of Alexs untimely death. He was a very prolific, versatile and much admired comedy star whose role as Barney Lumsden in both Twenty Twelve and W1A was a key ingredient of their success.

We think of him fondly and our hearts go out to his family and friends at this painfully sad time.

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Born in Carmarthenshire, South Wales, in 1982, Beckett trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, graduating in 2003.Catastrophic changes in global weather patterns could be on the horizon as scientists confirm the warming Atlantic current has reached a new record low.

The Gulf Stream current, which has not been running at peak strength for centuries, is now at its weakest point in the past 1,600 years.

Climate change resulting from rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a likely cause of this phenomenon.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), the system of currents that transports warm water from the tropics via the Gulf Stream to the North Atlantic, plays a major role in regulating the worlds climate.

10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Show all 10 1 /10 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A group of emperor penguins face a crack in the sea ice, near McMurdo Station, Antarctica Kira Morris 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Floods destroyed eight bridges and ruined crops such as wheat, maize and peas in the Karimabad valley in northern Pakistan, a mountainous region with many glaciers. In many parts of the world, glaciers have been in retreat, creating dangerously large lakes that can cause devastating flooding when the banks break. Climate change can also increase rainfall in some areas, while bringing drought to others. Hira Ali 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Smoke  filled with the carbon that is driving climate change  drifts across a field in Colombia. Sandra Rondon 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Amid a flood in Islampur, Jamalpur, Bangladesh, a woman on a raft searches for somewhere dry to take shelter. Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to sea level rise, which is expected to make tens of millions of people homeless by 2050. Probal Rashid 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Sindh province in Pakistan has experienced a grim mix of two consequences of climate change. Because of climate change either we have floods or not enough water to irrigate our crop and feed our animals, says the photographer. Picture clearly indicates that the extreme drought makes wide cracks in clay. Crops are very difficult to grow. Rizwan Dharejo 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Hanna Petursdottir examines a cave inside the Svinafellsjokull glacier in Iceland, which she said had been growing rapidly. Since 2000, the size of glaciers on Iceland has reduced by 12 per cent. Tom Schifanella 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A river once flowed along the depression in the dry earth of this part of Bangladesh, but it has disappeared amid rising temperatures. Abrar Hossain 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A shepherd moves his herd as he looks for green pasture near the village of Sirohi in Rajasthan, northern India. The region has been badly affected by heatwaves and drought, making local people nervous about further predicted increases in temperature. Riddhima Singh Bhati 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A factory in China is shrouded by a haze of air pollution. The World Health Organisation has warned such pollution, much of which is from the fossil fuels that cause climate change, is a public health emergency. Leung Ka Wa 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Water levels in reservoirs, like this one in Gers, France, have been getting perilously low in areas across the world affected by drought, forcing authorities to introduce water restrictions. Mahtuf Ikhsan

A fictional depiction of Amocs collapse was portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow, and while the films events were exaggerated, scientists say severe weather events are likely to result from the ongoing changes.

If the system continues to slow down, there could be weather disruption across the US, Europe and Africa, and sea levels could rise rapidly on the US east coast.

Two international teams of scientists have undertaken extensive analyses of sea surface temperature data and underwater sediments. Both studies were published in the journal Nature.

In both papers, the researchers found Amoc had slowed down by roughly 15 per cent, although the timescales over which this weakening had taken place were very different.

While one study found the dip had occurred over the past 150 years, the other concluded it had happened rapidly since the 1950s.

We detected a specific pattern of ocean cooling south of Greenland and unusual warming off the US coast  which is highly characteristic for a slowdown of the Atlantic overturning, also called the Gulf Stream system, said Levke Caesar from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the lead author of one of the studies.

It is practically like a fingerprint of a weakening of these ocean currents.

The circulation of the Atlantic Ocean plays a key role in regulating global climate. The constantly moving system of deep-water circulation, sometimes referred to as the Global Ocean Conveyor Belt, sends warm, salty Gulf Stream water to the North Atlantic where it releases heat to the atmosphere and warms Western Europe. The cooler water then sinks to great depths and travels all the way to Antarctica and eventually circulates back up to the Gulf Stream (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

While computer simulations have long predicted changes in ocean circulation, brought about by rising carbon dioxide levels, these studies provide direct proof this is happening.

The evidence were now able to provide is the most robust to date, said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute, who conceived the study with Ms Caesar.

Weve analysed all the available sea surface temperature datasets, comprising data from the late 19th century until the present.

 Earth Hour: Lights turned off at Eiffel Tower and Colosseum in support of climate change awareness

The other study used ocean sediments to explore the weakening Amoc over a longer period of time.

Taken together, the studies provide a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon, and the scientists suggest climate change is likely to be driving the effects they are seeing.

Increased rainfall as well as melt water from Arctic sea ice  both of which are the result of global warming  are thought to be diluting the waters of the northern Atlantic.

This reduces the oceans salt content, making it less dense and stopping water from sinking to the seabed. This in turn slows down Amoc, which is driven by the flux of water with different densities.

Previous work has demonstrated that the decline of Amoc has the potential to exacerbate sea level rise in coastal US cities like New York and Boston, as well driving extreme weather events such as storms and even heatwaves.

While the recent studies did not attempt to predict the future of Amoc, the researchers warned that climate change is likely to continue driving this worrying trend.

If we do not rapidly stop global warming, we must expect a further long-term slowdown of the Atlantic overturning, said Dr Alexander Robinson of the University of Madrid, one of the study authors.

We are only beginning to understand the consequences of this unprecedented process  but they might be disruptive.Two new studies published in the scientific journal Nature have brought a new threat to the worlds attention: the shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean currents including the Gulf Stream.

Barely a day goes by without new research emerging warning humanity of its impending doom, but the collapse of the Gulf Stream is an event with particularly ominous connotations.

Scientists have previously linked disruptions to Atlantic currents with everything from heatwaves in Europe to rising sea levels in coastal US cities.

The Day After Tomorrow was a disaster film based on the idea that disruption of these currents would lead to extreme weather events followed by a massive drop in global temperatures. Scientists think changes in Atlantic currents certainly played a role in the onset of the last ice age.

So should we be worried about the Gulf Stream, and is another ice age on the horizon?What constitutes a great cocktail bar, while sometimes subjective, centres around consistent themes: elegance; innovation; aesthetics; and most importantly, a kick-ass drinks menu.

According to Tristan Stephenson, drinks industry professional and author of The Curious Bartender books, the best bars are the ones that do things effortlessly, and make you forget youre even in a bar and not somebody.

Its obvious when a venue is too contrived, or takes itself too seriously and that makes it difficult to relax. You end up feeling like you need to conform to a certain ideal or perform a certain role.

Effortless bars feel like an extension of someones home: they keep you relaxed; keep things informal; and serve consistently great drinks.

With that in mind, weve put together a specially curated selection of some of the best bars in the UK.

Feel free to disagree, but we think our carefully balanced smorgasbord comprising both quirky and classic, traditional and edgy, high class and laid back, has something for everyone.

Alberts Schloss, Manchester

27 Peter St, Manchester M2 5QR

Named after Queen Victorias great love, this Bavarian-style beer barn describes itself as Manchesters first Tankovna, serving the freshest Pilsner this side of the Danube. You can eat gourmet, party, attend live gigs and even bring your dog to this weird and wonderful bohemian rhapsody, which is consistently chosen as Manchesters best bar.

The American Bar, the Savoy Hotel, London

The Savoy Hotel, 100 Strand, London WC2R 0EZ

The American bar at The Savoy (The Savoy)

Winner of last years Worlds 50 Best Bars awards, this classic art deco establishment has been serving cocktails with a side of class for more than 125 years. In fact, its Londons longest surviving cocktail bar. But dont be fooled by its historic credentials  the cocktails are nothing if not cutting edge and the head bartender Erik Lorincz knows more than 250 recipes.

The Beach at Bude, Cornwall

Summerleaze Crescent, Bude, EX23 8HJ, United Kingdom

The Beach bar is the heart of this charming seaside hotel, with stunning views of Summerleaze Beach in Bude, North Cornwall. Its contemporary, unpretentious and Instagram-worthy vibe will cater to both the young surfer and the more hip parents. The friendly staff and the cocktails sourced from the freshest local ingredients keep it a perennial coastal favourite.

Bokan, London

40 Marsh Wall, Isle of Dogs, London E14 9TP

This stylish sky-high restaurant, bar and terrace boasts absolutely stunning views of Canary Wharf and the city of London, as well as two AA Rosette awards. The Bokan 39 terrace bar is the real USP here: enjoy innovative cocktails inspired by the docklands with a jaw-dropping selfie backdrop.

BYOC City, London

19 Bevis Marks, London EC3A 7JA

BYOC  or Bring Your Own Cocktail  is our favourite disruptor model of speakeasy bar. It sells no alcohol (yes, you read that correctly); you bring your own and pay on arrival, meaning your choice of spirit is in theory limitless. This puts the skill of their mixologists to the test, because without a menu theyre forced to create something new for each punter. The millennial-friendly chain has bars all over the UK, but our favourite is the City spot just next to The Gherkin, in a Prohibition-style basement.

Dandelyan, London

20 Upper Ground, South Bank, London SE1 9PD

Dandelyan bar in London (Dandelyan)

According to Lachlan Rooney, bar manager at The Voodoo Rooms, and Francesco Cama, bar manager at Eve, Dandelyan is the best bar in the world  and theyre not the only ones who think so. Regularly cited as world class, the swish bar in the Mondrian Hotel provides a winning formula: great drinks, music, views, atmosphere... you simply cant go wrong here.

The Dead Canary, Cardiff

Barrack Ln, Cardiff CF10 2FR

The Dead Canary (The Dead Canary/Facebook)

Winner of Cardiff Life Awards 2016 and 2017, and the Cardiff Lifestyle Awards 2017, this eclectic bar serves cocktails with a side of the Roaring Twenties. The cocktail menu is charmingly Welsh folklore-inspired, the vibe is mysterious and atmospheric, and the secret door is an added bonus. Pro tip: this low-lit gem offers excellent cocktail masterclasses.

The Devils Advocate, Edinburgh

9 Advocates Cl, Edinburgh EH1 1ND

The Devil's Advocate (The Devil's Advocate Old Town/Facebook)

The perfect hideaway in an old Victorian pump house, The Devils Advocate is a popular spot in the atmospheric Old Town of Edinburgh. The exposed brickwork creates the perfect backdrop for the selfie-conscious drinker, and the bar is known as catering to even the most serious of whisky connoisseurs. Theres even a 400-strong whisky shelf.

Duck and Waffle, London

Heron Tower, 110 Bishopsgate, London EC2N 4AY

Overlooking the capital from the 40th floor of the majestic Heron Tower, no cocktail bar roundup is complete without a mention of this food and drink oasis. Come for the drink, stay for the food, as its menu consistently wins praise and accolades from industry professionals for its quality. Pricey it may be, but trust us - it's worth it for the views. You can even grab a sunset breakfast there.

Eve, London

34 Southampton St, London WC2E 7HF

Alongside Adam Handling's new restaurant, Frog, is the seductive subterranean Eve bar. Quasi-religious are the decorations; decadent are the cocktails; heavenly is the food. We recommend asking the bartender for a cocktail more personally suited to your tastes. Don't miss the accompanying bar hors d'oeuvres, available from the restaurant next door.

Piano Works, London

113-117 Farringdon Rd, London EC1R 3BX

One of those unforgettable city venues, the Piano Works brings old-world glamour back to live music. Part cocktail bar, part concert in a listed Victorian building, you can give your song requests to the musicians like a human jukebox, or simply lounge in the private candlelit booths with a selection of classic cocktails. Pro tip - the best happy hour deal in the area.

Weve partnered with Kahlua to celebrate National Coffee Week and you could win an overnight stay at the Hoxton Hotel, Holborn, plus cocktails and dinner for two. To be in with a chance of winning, tell us which Kahlua cocktail you'd most like to try by clicking here*.

*Terms Apply: 18+. Enter before 23.59 on 22 April 2018. Please read full Terms before entering.Elon Musks rocket startup SpaceX will launch manned missions to Mars within the next decade, the companys president has said.

Speaking at the TED conference in Vancouver on Wednesday, Gwynne Shotwell said SpaceX will send humans to Mars in order to make humanity a multi-planetary species and push forward the search for alien life.

This is the first step to us moving to other solar systems and potentially other galaxies, Ms Shotwell said. Fundamentally you go to other places to explore. Thats what makes humans different from animals.

This is the only time I out-vision Elon: I want to meet people, or whatever they call themselves, in another solar system.

SpaceX's journey through the Solar System Show all 6 1 /6 SpaceX's journey through the Solar System SpaceX's journey through the Solar System SpaceX's journey through the Solar System SpaceX's journey through the Solar System SpaceX's journey through the Solar System SpaceX's journey through the Solar System SpaceX's journey through the Solar System

When built, the rocket needed for the Mars mission - the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) - will have a residual capacity of also improving Earth-based transportation.

According to Ms Shotwell, the BFR will be capable of carrying around 100 passengers at speeds much faster than current aircraft. Flying from the US to China, for example, would only take around 30 to 40 minutes.

Im personally invested in this one because I travel a lot, and I do not like to travel, Shotwell said. I would love to get to see my customers in Riyadh, leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner.

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Mr Musk has frequently expressed his ambition to send people to Mars in order to form a colony that would help sustain humanity in the event of a species-ending event, such as the emergence of advanced artificial intelligence.

Such technology represents our biggest existential threat, Mr Musk said in 2014, adding that its development was similar to summoning the demon.

While a human colony on the Red Planet might offer some safeguards for the future of humanity, Mr Musk says the first people to take part in Mars missions would most likely be risking their own lives.

It kind of reads like Shackletons ad for Antarctic explorers, Musk told the crowd at the SXSW festival last month. Difficult, dangerous, good chance youll die. Excitement for those who survive.

A simulated mission to Mars by Israel's Space Agency, near Mitzpe Ramon, Israel, February 18, 2018. Rocket startup SpaceX wants to send humans to Mars within a decade. (REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)

Mr Musks timeline for beginning manned missions to Mars to set up a potentially species-saving colony is more ambitious than that of Ms Shotwells predictions.

Last year, the billionaire polymath said he believed the first cargo mission to Mars would be possible in 2022, with the first manned mission following just two years after.

The SpaceX founder does not always meet his enthusiastic deadlines, having struggled in the past to meet production goals with one of his other companies - electric car maker Tesla.

Ms Shotwell referred to the wild timelines set by Mr Musk as Elon time, but said that the latest projections for achieving manned missions to Mars were from her own calculations.

Thats my time, she said. Not Elon time.As I waded through the mud, swinging my spade like a medieval axe, I grew increasingly desperate to find a vibrator.

And no, this isnt a tale of rural sexual repression. This was the annual sex toy hunt in Wepion, Belgium. Forget the Easter bunny  I was hunting rabbits. The rampant kind.

In a little village just outside of Namur, the capital of Wallonia, I found myself knee deep in a crowded, muddy field, digging for dildos at the highlight of the Chasse aux Sextoys festival.

You might be picturing this as some sort of kinky, European orgy preamble. It was anything but.

Hen party vibes but no bridal glower (Soft Love/Pierre-Olivier Tulkens Photography) (Soft Love / Pierre-Olivier Tulkens Photography)

While the treasure hunt (there were 800 tokens buried in a field, to be dug up and exchanged for a sex toy) formed the peg  so to speak  of the event, the day was otherwise much like any summery festival: mud, music, beer tents and desperate queues for the Portaloos.

This year, there were more than 4,000 women taking part in the dig, dressed up to varying degrees in hen party-esque frippery, as well as the 200 men permitted to join in  so long as they dressed the part.

And although the quirky naughtiness of the festival contrasted delightfully with the traditional vibe of the Walloon region, it turned out to be a surprisingly family-friendly day, attracting more than 10,000 people, including infants in prams.

The festival was set up and organised by Nicolas Bustin, boss of Belgian sex-toy company Soft Love, and is hosted in a field on his family farm. In 2008, he instigated the first Chasse aux Sextoys for marketing purposes; only 400 people showed up and he lost money on that event.

Far from kink or sleaziness, the event functioned as a celebration of sexuality (Cherie Belgique)

It was then that he decided we needed to change our thinking around sexuality. He invited nonprofit partners to offer health advice and sexual guidance to coincide with his aim of achieving pleasure equality between men and women.

A clitoris isnt just to procreate, he tells me, somewhat redundantly. It can have pleasure, too.

I did learn something new about the clitoris at one of the educational health stalls in the tent  which was itself a haven of contradictions. Filled it may have been with STI awareness leaflets, sexology clinics and anatomical diagrams of le clitoris; it also sold dips.

And so, indeed, was the entire festival: attendees could enjoy Zumba sessions, body positivity workshops, beer and frites, but they were also welcome to watch pole dancing classes and gawk at the male strippers.

The event couldnt have been more perfectly designed for a hen party or girlie getaway, but when I spoke to people most explained they simply came to have fun with their friends and families.

Children rode the bucking bronco, designed in the shape of a penis  but nobody was calling social services. In fact, parents were cheering enthusiastically, as they managed to combine a healthy destigmatisation of sexuality with a good day out.

Diggers at the ready for the hunt to begin (Harriet Marsden)

At 1pm, female diggers lined up on the edge of the field, heavy metal spades at the ready. The male diggers were shepherded into a tiny cordoned-off section of the field; inclusive and male-friendly the event might have been, but this was definitely a womans game and the men were very defiantly handicapped.

The women pawed the edge of the field, champing at the bit like thoroughbreds, eager to get down and dirty. The whistle blew and we were away, stabbing at the earth, flinging mud and spades about with reckless abandon.

It was hard work, and I struggled to break any ground under the warm Belgian sun. After an increasingly frustrated hour, I headed back to the beer tent where I belonged. I did win a vibrator on the tombola, though.

Only 200 men were allowed to join in the digging  provided they dressed the part (Harriet Marsden)

All the buried treasure was found. Prizes ranged from bog-standard vibrators to massage oil and ducks. The duck symbol is everywhere  a rubber duck is an iconic sex toy in Belgium, the way the rabbit is in the English-speaking world.

The money raised from the event goes to womens health charities, including Think Pink for breast cancer and the ASBL association in Belgium, which supports sufferers of endometriosis.

But despite the charitable effort, the event still courts controversy. Bustin told SudPresse that his company received more than 1,000 emails and 400 phone calls from angry Catholics. Some people are not so keen on it, he says wryly, for obvious reasons.

But things need to change. We must start respecting and understanding women, and equality between men and women regarding sexual pleasure.

We are religiously, socially and familially conditioned to being frustrated and having limited beliefs regarding sex. It creates frustration, trauma and complexes, which can be dangerous and lead to terrible consequences.

Money raised goes to charities for womens health, especially endometriosis (Harriet Marsden)

Controversial or not, the event is growing and has become a celebration of womens freedom of sexual expression  and not only in Belgium. People are coming from France, Italy, Luxembourg, and this year a group of 15 British women  one of whom, came to prove to her husband that she too has needs.

As Bustin says: Sexual pleasure is accessible to all. It is a universal need. It is inside us, in our DNA.

So next year, hop on the Eurostar to Belgium. Youll have a blast, get some fresh air and exercise, and leave with a newfound sense of liberation and positive awareness.

And perhaps, if you get lucky, a free vibrator as well.

For more information, visit http://walloniabelgiumtourism.co.uk/en-gbA toddler with a dairy allergy was left fighting for his life after suffering a severe reaction to a vegan pizza that his family had been assured was dairy-free.

On April 8, two-year-old Zayaan Hussain went to a branch of Pizza Hut in Blackpool, Lancashire with his parents and seven-year-old sister Amara.

Zayaans father, 33-year-old Sajid Hussain, made a point of repeatedly informing the staff of his sons dairy allergy.

When the family ordered Zayaan a childs Margherita pizza, they checked once again with the server that the pizza was definitely dairy-free when it arrived at their table.

Even when we received the pizza, I wouldnt let him eat it before re-confirming that it was definitely dairy-free, said Sajid, from Bradford, West Yorkshire. They said it was, so he ate the pizza.

However, it wasnt long before Zayaans parents realised that something wasnt right.

Ten minutes went by and Zayaan just started shutting down, explained Sajid. He wasnt responding to me or my wife.

Zayaan Hussain in hospital after suffering a severe allergic reaction to a 'vegan' pizza (Hussain family / SWNS.com)

Sajid and his wife, 33-year-old Samia, immediately gave Zayaan a dose of antihistamine tablet, Piriton, and his inhaler in addition to calling an ambulance over the fear that their son was suffering from a severe allergic reaction.

While I was on the phone Zayaan was violently sick everywhere and when the paramedics arrived his oxygen levels were really low, Sajid said.

It actually got worse as we got to the hospital. There were talks of him having to be resuscitated.

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Zayaan was rushed to Blackpool Victoria Hospital where he spent two days in care.

It was absolutely horrific, Sajid said. We could have lost our son that day.

There are no words to truly describe what we were thinking. It was a very, very traumatic experience and not one I would ever want to go through again.

Sajid has spoken to Pizza Hut bosses and Environmental Health about the situation in the hopes that no one else goes through a similar tribulation in future.

Zayaan Hussain in hospital after suffering a severe allergic reaction to a 'vegan' pizza (Hussain family / SWNS.com)

Pizza Hut has revealed that Zayaan was mistakenly given a pizza containing dairy and has apologised for the grave mistake.

We are in contact with the family involved and are very sorry for what happened, a Pizza Hut spokesperson said.

We realise it was an unacceptable situation and have already completed an internal investigation with the Hut, which found that the wrong pizza was given to the family as a result of human error.

We will share the full investigation findings with the Hussain family and are taking appropriate action at this restaurant to make sure it doesnt happen again."Prue Leith has described Gambia as a real-life Tinder dream for geriatrics.

Desperate for some winter sun, the 78-year-old Great British Bake Off judge decided to escape to a sunnier location with her husband, John Playfair.

Lured in by its perfect climate, no time change and six-hour direct flight, the couple set their sights on Gambia in West Africa but were left shocked at what greeted them upon arrival.

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Writing about her travels for The Spectator, Leith says that Gambia ticked all the couples boxes but aside from its glorious sandy beaches they were left surprised by what else it had to offer.

Its kind of like a real-life Tinder dream for geriatrics, she explains.

The beach was full of elderly white European women happily strolling along hand in hand with beautiful young Gambian men.

And triumphant seventy-something white men living the dream, cocktails or beer glass in hand, lounging about with glamorous black girls on the double beach beds.

Leith also goes on to describe how, whenever she or her husband walked along the beach alone, they would be immediately approached by a stranger of the opposite sex offering to be their friend.

However, she does add that not everyone was there in search of sex.

Pru Leith said the trip to Gambia left her and her husband, John Playfair, "surprised (Getty Images)

Many had been going to the country for years and loved it. But those faithful returners mostly thought they wouldn't be doing so for much longer, Leith writes.

She details how, ever since British Airways stopped flying to Gambia, that most of the tourists are now on all-inclusive holiday packages.

A move she believes is attracting the wrong type of customer and has caused hotel standards to drop.

The hotels are going down market, attracting customers in search of the all-you-can-eat-three-times-a-day deal, she explains.

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Next door to our hotel was a mini-Magaluf, rammed solid with drunken young.

In its heyday it had seven restaurants; now it has only one for breakfast, plus a pool cafe, and it is thinking of trapping its clientele with an all-in deal. Sad.The price of oil has soared to a more than three-year high as the likelihood of the US and UK taking military action in Syria increases.

Brent crude oil surged past $72 (51) per barrel on Thursday morning, while US benchmark West Texas Intermediate hit $67, although prices edged down mid-morning.

The oil price goes up when tensions heighten in and around the oil-rich nations of the Middle East, because it threatens supply levels. Also keeping the commodity's value elevated is the threat of an attack on Saudi Arabia by Yemen, and the continued risk that the US will re-impose sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme.

Theresa May called an urgent cabinet meeting to approve Britains response to the escalating crisis in the Middle Eastern state, prompting concern that the UK will launch military action without the approval of parliament.

Ms May said: All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible and we will be working with our closest allies on how we can ensure that those who are responsible are held to account and how we can prevent and deter the humanitarian catastrophe that comes from the use of chemical weapons in the future.

The continued use of chemical weapons cannot go unchallenged.

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump pledged that missiles would be fired at Syria, and Ms May has similarly toughened her language in response to reports that chemical bombs were dropped on Douma, killing more than 40 people.Toys R Us has received several $1bn (706m) bids for a majority stake in its Asia arm, a lawyer for the company said.

The US company plans to sell some of its global operations after collapsing in September due to piling debt and strong competition from discount online retailers.

Lawyer Joshua Sussberg said that the company will attempt to continue running profitable stores in Europe and Asia while it folds its UK and US stores.

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Mr Sussberg told a US court hearing that sales and estate auctions were generating some money to repay creditors.

Toys R Us is also expecting to finalise a deal to sell its operations in Central Europe.

The retailer had almost 1,600 stores before it filed for bankruptcy protection, many of them characteristically located in out-of-town areas with large stores.

The rise of online shopping and the dominance of e-retailers such as Amazon made life difficult for Toys R Us as it never completely took hold of online sales.

Toys R Us in the UK has yet to find a buyer for 100 closed stores.

"We are working closely with the 2,000 employees affected by the closures to ensure they receive the support they need for redundancy and other compensatory payments," said Stephen Thomas, lawyer at Moorfields.

The stores across the county will be open as usual until the last day of trading and we would encourage shoppers to make the most of the great deals on offer".

Here is a comprehensive list of closing dates for UK Toys R Us stores;

Banbury, Friday-20-April

Bayswater, Saturday-21-April

Bedford, Saturday-21-April

Belfast Castle Court, Tuesday-24-April

Brent Cross, Tuesday-24-April

Brighton, Thursday-19-April

Bristol Friday-20-April

Bromley, Thursday-19-April

Carlisle The Lanes, Thursday-19-April

Southampton,Tuesday-24-April

Chester, Tuesday-24-April

Northampton, Monday-23-April

Chester Broughton, Wed-18-April

Preston, Monday-23-April

Chesterfield, Sun-22-April

Stevenage, Thursday-19-April

Colliers Wood, Sun-22-April

Glasgow The Forge, Saturday-21-April

Coventry, Tuesday-24-April

Wakefield, Saturday-21-April

Craigleith, Friday-20-April

Croydon, Tuesday-24-April

Glasgow Helen St, Monday-23-April

Derby, Tuesday-24-April

Basildon, Saturday-21-April

Enfield Monday-23-April

Manchester, Saturday-21-April

Harlow, Sunday 22 April

High Wycombe, Saturday-21-April

Blackburn, Thursday-19-April

Ilford, Sunday-22-April

Liverpool, Friday-20-April

Lincoln, Monday-23-April

Thurrock, Friday-20-April

Luton, Monday-23-April

Doncaster Frenchgate, Friday-20-April

Mansfield, Saturday-21-April

Dundee, Tuesday-24-April

Medway, Monday-23-April

Stirling, Sun-22-April

Merry Hill, Friday-20-April

Leicester Highcross, Friday-13-April

Metro Saturday-21-April

Milton Keynes Sun-22-April

Nottingham Tuesday-24-April

Norwich Tuesday-24-April

Oldbury Monday-23-April

Peterborough Sun-22-April

Portsmouth Friday-20-April

Leeds Monday-23-April

Reading Saturday-21-April

Sheffield Tuesday-24-April

Solihull Sun-22-April

Northampton Weston Favell Saturday-21-April

Sprucefields Monday-23-April

Oxford Saturday-21-April

Stafford Thursday-19-April

Warrington Tuesday-24-April

Staines Elmsleigh Friday-20-April

Stockport Sun-22-April

Swindon Tuesday-24-April

Stoke Saturday-21-April

Nottingham Victoria Centre Friday-20-April

Sunderland Wed-18-April

Swansea Sun-22-April

Poole Monday-23-April

Sydenham Friday-20-April

Aberdeen Union Square Thursday-19-April

Teesside Friday-20-April

Cardiff Queen Street Thursday-19-April

Uxbridge Thursday-19-April

Gloucester Monday-23-April

Woking Sun-22-AprilDrinking more than a glass of wine or beer a day shaves years off your life according to one of the largest ever studies on alcohol harm which found even low-level drinking brought significant health risks.

Anyone drinking much over the UK recommended limits, about five medium (175ml) glasses of wine or pints of four per cent beer, was shortening their life span, and increasing their risk of serious disease

Regularly having more than ten drinks a week cut life expectancy by up to two years, or up to five years for those drinking 17 or more.

The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol Show all 10 1 /10 The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 10. Poland Results from an OECD report The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 9. Germany The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 8. Luxembourg Rex Features The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 7. France The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 6. Hungary Rex Features The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 5. Russia AFP/Getty Images The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 4. Czech Republic The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 3. Estonia Rex Features The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 2. Austria Getty Images The 10 countries that drink the most alcohol 1. Lithuania AFP/Getty Images

Every half pint above the low-risk threshold amounts to about 15 minutes off your life, scientists said.

After tracking the habits of 600,000 drinkers across 19 countries the authors called for a global reduction in alcohol limits and better awareness among doctors that even staying under safe limits posed a risk.

The study, published in The Lancet medical journal today, did find evidence that people who drank a moderate amount had a 20 per cent lower rate of non-fatal heart attacks.

But this must be balanced against the higher risk associated with other serious  and potentially fatal  cardiovascular diseases, according to the studys lead author, Dr Angela Wood of Cambridge University.

Alcohol consumption at any level was associated with higher risk of stroke, heart failure, fatal hypertensive disease (high blood pressure) and fatal aneurysms.

The risks increased with the amount of alcohol drunk and above the five-drinks-a-week threshold any reduction in heart attacks, or other benefits, were negated.

These discrepancies between heart attacks versus other cardiovascular disease is thought to be down to the differing impact of alcohol on blood pressure and the types of cholesterol circulating in the body.

The key message of this research for public health is that, if you already drink alcohol, drinking less may help you live longer and lower your risk of several cardiovascular conditions, Dr Wood added.

Around half of people in the study said they drink more than the safe limit of 100g of alcohol a week, which is roughly equivalent to the recommended limit in the UK, Canada and Sweden.

By contrast the US recommends not drinking more than 196 grams a week, roughly 11 glasses of wine, and the low risk limits in Italy Portugal and Spain were all around 150gs of alcohol.

Doctors and other healthcare professionals must heed this message and transmit it to their patients. This study has shown that drinking alcohol at levels which were believed to be safe is actually linked with lower life expectancy and several adverse health outcomes, said study co-author, Dr Dan Blazer from Duke University in the US.

While UK studies have shown reductions in the amount being drunk by younger generations, academics said more needed to be done to help older people in retirement.

This is a massive and very impressive study, said Professor David Spiegelhalter, a professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge University who was not involved with this study.

The paper estimates a 40-year-old drinking four units a day above the guidelines has roughly two years lower life expectancy, which is around a twentieth of their remaining life.

This works out at about an hour per day. So its as if each unit above guidelines is taking, on average, about 15 minutes of life, about the same as a cigarette.

Of course its up to individuals whether they think this is worthwhile.

Tim Chico, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Sheffield, said: The study makes clear that on balance there are no health benefits from drinking alcohol, which is usually the case when things sound too good to be true.The Labour Party has pledged to bring in new laws to tackle bad hospital food after analysis found huge variations in spending, with some trusts paying less than 3 per patient for a days meals.

Legislation would introduce mandatory minimum standards and enforce existing guidelines which say patients should expect meals that are fresh and nutritious.

Prisons and schools have legal minimum standards for meals but this has been lacking in the health service, resulting in a postcode lottery where some trusts spend substantially more, Labour said.

Currently at least half of hospitals do not comply with existing requirements, according to the Campaign for Better Hospital Food.

Campaigners said it was long overdue that political parties committed to act on hospital meals, and called on the government to follow suit.

Data from NHS Digital analysed by the Labour Party shows 144 million meals were requested by NHS inpatients in 2016-17, with average spending of around 11 per patient a day,

However, 13 hospital sites spent less than 5. Gloucester Royal Hospital had the lowest spend, with an average cost of 2.61 for feeding one inpatient per day  spending 1.56m on nearly 600,000 meals a year.

Others, such as Heatherwood Hospital, part of Frimley Health Foundation Trust, report spending 40 per patient per day on meals.

These higher prices are likely to be down to the hospital including staff and equipment costs as well, but this variation is another sign of the lack of scrutiny hospital meals are under, according to Labour.

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The focus on food comes amid a 122 per cent increase in the number of people admitted to hospital with malnutrition since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.

Worryingly, the most recent Office for National Statistics figures (from 2016) show 351 deaths in NHS hospitals in England and Wales where malnutrition was mentioned, the highest level in a decade.

Howver the ONS made clear this could be due to more deaths of very sick people who have other complications that make eating difficult as general deman o nthe NHS is rising.

The Independent recently showed that hundreds of care homes were also failing to meet inspected food standards, and malnourishment was driving around 36 per cent of admissions to care homes, according to Age UK.

Speaking at a forum of the Hospital Caterers Association tomorrow, shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth is expected to say: Patient care isnt just about medicines, bandages, treatments and surgical procedures, its about nutrition and hydration as well.

Yet we have allowed a situation where some hospitals, according to the official data, are spending less than 3 a day on patient meals.

Labour will place hospital food standards on the same legal basis as school food standards, to ensure hospitals meet mandatory minimum standards for the food served to patients, staff and visitors, and these standards should be independently monitored and enforced.

Amber Jabbal, head of policy at NHS Providers, which represents NHS trusts, said good food was an important factor in patient recovery and staff morale, but added that trusts already have a duty to ensure they meet patients nutritional and hydration needs and that these are inspected by the Care Quality Commission.

It is important that this is not duplicated through extra requirements which could increase the regulatory burden on trusts, she said.

However, Katherine Button, coordinator of the Campaign for Better Hospital Food, said that despite current standards being in place  we know that at least half of hospitals are still not complying, and that the current government is failing to encourage progress.

Food writer and Bake-Off judge Prue Leith, an ambassador for the campaign, said: Finally, a major political party is waking up to the issue of hospital food. For the sake of patients recovery and for their enjoyment, lets hope the government follows suit and commits to better food in our hospitals.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: "Whilst food in hospitals is given a rating of 9 out of 10 by patients, we know nutrition is a vital part of recovery. Thats why we have already introduced the first ever legally-binding food standards in the history of the NHS, and continue to press for high standards.Night owls are putting their health put at risk by inflexible working hours according to a new study which found they have a greater risk of dying sooner when compared to early risers.

Researchers said more employers should offer staff the opportunity to have a lie-in a stay and at work later to minimise psychological stress that can affect eating and exercise habits.

Mortality rates in "owls",who prefer late nights, are around ten per cent higher than "morning larks", according to the team from the University of Surrey and Northwestern University, Chicago.

This lack of sleep from late nights and early starts at work has previously been shown to increase risk of heart disease and other conditions.

And the new study found mental health disorders and diabetes were most common in night owls and warned sleep deprivation could also fuel unhealthy drinking and drug-taking behaviour.

This is a public health issue that can no longer be ignored, said Malcolm von Schantz, professor of chronobiology at the University of Surrey.

We should discuss allowing evening types to start and finish work later, where practical. And we need more research about how we can help evening types cope with the higher effort of keeping their body clock in synchrony with sun time.

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The study, published in the journal Chronobiology International today, asked more than 433,000 people about their sleeping habits and followed their health over a six and a half years.

In total, 27 per cent of the respondents said they were definite morning types, 35 per cent were moderate morning types while the proportions for moderate and definite evening types were 28 per cent and nine per cent, respectively.

It found definite morning types tended to be older, were more likely to be women and more likely to be non-smokers. They were also more likely to be non-white, the study found.

Over the study there were 10,534 deaths, roughly 20 per cent due to heart disease, and deaths among "definite evening types" were 10 per cent higher than among the most committed morning people.

The participants health information is tracked as part of the UK Biobank project, and the authors found that even when they statistically controlled for things like smoking, and history of disease, mortality was still higher.

Humans have evolved to be broadly synchronised with the 24-hour day-night cycle on earth, but have individual variation in sleep habits based on a host of genetic and environmental factors, known as a chronotype.

There is increasing concern about the disruptive effects of blue light form phone screens and tablets which is similar to daylight.

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Sleep disruption has been implicated as a risk factor in things like Alzheimers disease, and the researchers said politicians should consider doing away with daylight savings time as the abrupt change has serious health effects at the population level.

There are already reports of higher incidence of heart attacks following the switch to summer time, says von Schantz.

We have to remember that even a small additional risk is multiplied by more than 1.3 billion people who experience this shift every year. I think we need to seriously consider whether the suggested benefits outweigh these risks.

Kristen Knutson, co-author and associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine said recognising that needing a lie in is not a sign of laziness should help guide policy as well.

Night owls trying to live in a morning lark world may have health consequences for their bodies

If we can recognise these chronotypes are, in part, genetically determined and not just a character flaw, jobs and work hours could have more flexibility for owls, Knutson said.

They shouldnt be forced to get up for an 8AM shift. Make work shifts match peoples chronotypes.At 6pm on a Tuesday evening in Hopkinstown, two miles north of Pontypridd, news reached the surface that up to 70 survivors, men and boys, had been located below ground and were waiting at the foot of the mineshaft for cages, dispatched one by one, to raise them to safety.

Earlier that afternoon anxious wives and mothers had assembled at the pithead in the hope of glad tidings. And eventually these shocked colliers  exhausted, covered in soot, their hair bedraggled, their coarse clothing in tatters  emerged and stumbled home. A few were so weak they simply lay, almost lifeless, on the slats of a pony-trap.

***

From early in the 19th century, the coalfield of southern Wales grew to be the richest in the UK. At its peak, in 1913, it provided employment for a quarter of a million miners capable of extracting 57 million tons of the mineral annually  a fifth of Britains total. In that same year, the Port of Cardiff alone exported 11 million tons of top quality coal. Llanelli, Barry, Swansea and Newport were also home to huge coal-handling docks and marshalling yards.

Inland, towns like Merthyr Tydfil (population 7,700 in 1801; 50,000 just six decades later), Ebbw Vale, Tredegar, Rhymney, Aberdare and Pontypool  and of course, Pontypridd (which grew from a humble settlement population of 1,000 to 150,000 in 60 years prior to the outbreak of the First World War)  became synonymous with coal, iron and steel.

The first incident to take more than 100 lives occurred in Cymner in the Rhondda Valley in 1856: 114 dead. Two disasters followed a decade later in Ferndale, further upstream. The first, in 1867, claimed 178 lives, while two years later another tragedy resulted in 53 deaths.

Crowds await news at the Universal Colliery in Senghenydd (Wikicommons/The Illustrated London News)

The grim reaper returned to Rhondda next on 23 June 1894, when no fewer than 290 boys and men, together with 123 horses, were killed at the Albion colliery. Less than twenty years later, and just a little way away, the worst British mining disaster ever befell workers at Senghenydd, near Caerphilly. On that fateful day in the year before the start of the Great War, 439 miners and a rescuer all perished.

Explosions have been the cause of the majority of underground calamities. Sometimes, a single miner with a single stick of dynamite would bring bad luck on himself and a few standing nearby. On other occasions, massive blasts have ended the lives of dozens of breadwinners at the furthest ends of a tunnel, in seconds.

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The silent build-up of carbon monoxide proved dangerous too. And on top of these dangers, hungry, ill-equipped and unprotected colliers had to contend with fatal roof-falls, flash floods, runaway coal wagons and faulty lift mechanisms.

***

For workers at the Great Western colliery in Hopkinstown, the date might have given a hint of foreboding.

After all, it was 11 April in 1877 when 14 miners at the Tynewydd mine in Porth found themselves trapped by floods. With water flowing in fast from a neighbouring, abandoned pit, the mens only hope of survival was to keep their heads above the current.

Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? Show all 9 1 /9 Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? The former industrial zone is now a green lung near Dusseldorf Jochen Tack/Stiftung Zollverein Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? Nature has begun to reclaim the land around it Jochen Tack Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? The land around the mine is now a kind of park Stiftung Zollverein/GNTO Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? There's a sparse beauty to the mine Stiftung Zollverein/GNTO Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? Zollverein's main shaft has become the symbol of the area Stiftung Zollverein/GNTO Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? The exhibition is well laid out inside Stiftung Zollverein/GNTO Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? The old pool in the mine Jochen Tack/Stiftung Zollverein Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? Guided tours of a coal mine are more interesting than you'd think Jochen Tack/Stiftung Zollverein Is this the world's most beautiful coal mine? Zollverein's been transformed into an event space for locals Frank Vinken/Stiftung Zollverein

The ensuing, heroic rescue effort occupied a full nine days, with all kinds of debate, frustration, setback, and change of strategy along the way. In our present age of rolling news, reporters from all over the world would no doubt have assembled at Tynwydd to follow events minute-by-minute. As it was, the Porth of 141 years ago did witness disaster tourism, plus a plethora of sensational newspaper headlines.

There was also great rejoicing at the fact that most of the trapped men emerged to tell the tale. Five did not, however.

But if the date of the Tynewdd disaster was imprinted in the minds of miners across Wales, there was no particular reason for the people of Hopkinstown to anticipate that tragedy would strike again exactly sixteen years to the day.

The Old Bridge in Pontypridd (Wikicommons)

It was a Yorkshireman, John Calvert, who opened Gyfeillion Colliery in the Year of the Great Exhibition, 1851. After a first sale of Gyfeillion in 1854, the Great Western Railway took a controlling interest, hence the mines poetic name ever since, although ownership reverted to Calvert for a time.

In 1878, after discovery of the Six feet Hetty coal seam, Calvert sold again, this time to a reconstituted Great Western Colliery Company Ltd. The mine was expanded in 1890 with the sinking of the Tymawr shaft and the recruitment of several hundred more men, many of whom were really boys.

With Clement Attlees nationalisation of the coal industry still half a century away, mine owners were rarely safety conscious. Profit was their overriding motive. Labour was plentiful, non-unionised; and crucially, that workforce was replaceable. Technology was basic.

Recommended Even I agree with Corbyn that we should renationalise the railways

So it came to pass that disaster struck on 11 April 1893 at the Great Western.

The cause was an engine fire at the junction of two tunnels, nearly two-thirds and one-third of a mile from their respective disembarkation points. Attending to that powerful engine  one propelled by compressed air  that day was a substitute mechanic, who was stationed there when the engines wooden brake engine overheated and threw sparks out that ignited surrounding brattice (the timber or rough cloth covering a partition, or lining crudely hewn subterranean passageways). Straight away, the engines staging burnt out.

An hour later, the majority of the 900-strong shift had exited the mine successfully. That left approximately 50 men aged between 14 and 61 totally trapped by flames, billowing smoke, and collapsing pit props; 70 or so others were at serious risk of being similarly cornered.

A handful of gallant heroes set out to attempt a rescue. One, James Titley, should have been standing, secure, on a 4ft-wide landing at the bottom of the Tynmawr lift. Instead, he became disorientated in the midst all the smoke and heat and lurched forward as if to leave the cage prematurely. His brother Jesse saw the danger and grabbed Jamess clothing. However, Jamess shorn body was loosed and promptly fell into the abyss. When his remains were eventually located, Titleys injuries were horrific.

Headframe at the Hetty shaft, Pontypridd (WikiCommons)

William M Jones, Great Westerns draughtsman, in the company of Morgan Thomas and the aptly named John Valliant, assistant surveyor, were inspecting the Five-foot seam when they heard about the demise of the first four men trying to escape a reported engine fire. The threesome frequently found themselves overwhelmed by smoke and total darkness, and although they could hear the cries of their trapped colleagues, eventually they had to beat a hasty retreat, slumping together on the floor of the Tymawr cage ascending. The Tymawr shaft was then declared out of bounds for other rescuers.

None of this deterred the trio, once they felt revived, from sending barrels of water down a different shaft in order to douse the wild flames spreading towards that band of 50 or more men seemingly entombed. In time, they sent down a long hosepipe, which promptly snapped.

The fifth hero was an intelligent district fireman called Thomas Rosser, aged only 23, who realised at an early stage in proceedings that smoke and noxious fumes endangered the lives of the 72 men who were working on the Four-foot seam.

So it was Rosser ran towards two doors on the left of his watch; doors which were there to direct the mines air supply forward, so preventing it from making a short cut back to the Seven-foot seam 500 yards away. His presence of mind in breaking open the doors resulted in the major portion of noxious smoke passing, in a mighty but harmless gush, upward to a higher chamber, well away from the threatened 72.

Rossers rescue mission was, however, only just beginning. Having re-routed the air supply, he needed to gather together the 72 and persuade them to follow him, through thick and thin, towards the Hetty shaft. But that meant negotiating not only the burnt-out engine but also up to half a mile of intense heat, dust clouds, prohibitive roof-falls and associated hazards.

Each time a new obstacle was met, Rosser indicated to all the other escapees where they might shelter while he worked out when and how they might next proceed.

The whole trek  the sort of miracle usually seen only in a Hollywood movie  took over three hours. Even then, these gasping, dehydrated, exhausted, and improbable survivors had to wait for a cage to descend the shaft to take them to safety. When at last they ascended they encountered a thousand eager well-wishers hungry for news that was bound for many to be the saddest of all.

Robert Thomass commemorative statue to the miners of the Rhondda was unveiled a century after the Great Western disaster (Wikicommons)

The eventual death toll of 63 comprised 48 colliers, three hauliers, two riders, two doorboys, one oiler, one fireman, one inclineman, one lampman, one engineer, one labourer, one roadman and a bratticeman.

The coroner for Cardiff, assisted by the coroner for Aberdare and a jury, convened an Inquest into the Great Western Disaster at the New Inn, Pontypridd, just over a fortnight later. No one was held directly to blame for what had happened, least of all the Great Westerns general manager, HT Wales, coincidentally son of the late and lamented Thomas Wales, who held the post of Her Majestys Inspector of Mines in South Wales.

However, recommendations were made that the width and surface of the braking mechanism of all haulage engines should be improved; also that more firemen should be on duty in the vicinity of mining equipment likely to overheat.

Despite the tragedy, the Great Western colliery continued to expand. The Four-foot seam was enlarged, as were the Five-foot and Nine-foot seams. A new Lower Four-foot seam was added. Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the mines new owners had 3,162 men on their books and underground.

***

Few if any observers in 1893 would have predicted a series of coal pit closures in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; nor, surely, could they have imagined a year-long, and ultimately humiliating, miners strike.

A coal miner at work at a colliery in Northumberland circa 1961 (Getty)

And had you told those working down the pit in 1893 that the last deep coal mine in Britain would close little more than a hundred years later, they would never have believed it. Close it did though, in Yorkshire in 2015.

And what became of Hopkinstown? Well, it experienced tragedy again, on 23 January 1911 when a passenger train carrying over 100 people collided with the back of a freight train  a coal train, no less  killing 11 passengers.

At the Great Western, the Hetty shaft was closed in 1926. Other old shafts closed too and although new ones were sunk, production declined and the last coal at the colliery was brought to the surface in 1983. The colliery which had given so many men their livelihoods, and which had taken lives too, was demolished not long afterwards.

Mining brought prosperity to the Rhondda without doubt; but it brought darkness to the valley too: truly a valley of the shadow of death.Police have urged people to respect tributes left by the grieving family of a burglar stabbed to death during a botched break-in at a pensioners home.

Officers have moved to ease escalating tensions in Hither Green, south-east London, after angry locals repeatedly ripped down flowers left by Henry Vincents relatives and friends.

Vincent, 37, was killed during a struggle with Richard Osborn-Brooks, 78, whose house he had broken into with an accomplice while armed with a screwdriver last week.

Recommended Flowers left for stabbed burglar torn down again as tensions rise

The burglars family have left floral bouquets, cards and balloons on a fence opposite the home of the pensioner, who was arrested on suspicion of murder but later released without charge.

But the makeshift memorial has been torn down four times by neighbours, who say the shrine is inappropriate and in poor taste.

Chief Superintendent Simon Dobinson, commander of Lewisham borough police, said he was aware of the concerns that have been raised by residents regarding the floral tributes placed in Hither Green but said they should respect the wishes of those who choose to pay their respects in public.

He added: My officers have a responsibility to provide reassurance to local residents so they can go about their daily lives, while also respecting the wishes of family and friends to mark the loss of a loved one.

They are not there to safeguard or facilitate the laying of floral tributes; we are liaising with the local authority who are considering appropriate management of the floral tributes. I do not want anyone to feel intimidated or that they are not being allowed to respond in a dignified way to a tragic death.

We would urge members of the public to respect the wishes of those who choose to place flowers and other tributes in the area. We would also request those placing tributes or visiting the area to behave in a responsible manner so as not to disrupt the local community.

Burglary suspect Henry Vincent was killed during an alleged break-in (Kent Police)

Mr Dobinson said there had been no arrests as a result of the tensions but officers would assess any potential criminal offences if allegations were made.

A small police presence will remain in the area to provide reassurance to the public, he added.

A hooded man ripped some of the flowers down on Tuesday, prompting Vincents family and friends to pin more bouquets to the fence.

But the shrine was pulled down again by local man Iain Gordon.

As he angrily ripped down the bouquets and threw them to the floor, he shouted: These people are scumbags, scumbags, scumbags. Weve had enough in this country of scumbugs.

If you dont know why I pulled the flowers down then you arent a human being. Would you go around allowing someone to stab your parents? Would you allow someone to come round with a screwdriver?

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Vincents relatives have pledged to keep restoring the memorial if it is torn down. The family, who have identified themselves as Gypsies, say they are being stigmatised because of their background and should be allowed to grieve.

The original shrine included hand-written cards from his children and aunt. One read: To my daddy, no words can describe the pain and heartache we are going through. These people wont put us down. We love you dad. We miss you so much.

The tributes were laid opposite the house of Mr Osborn-Brooks, who has yet to return home since he was freed by police. Neighbours suggested he may never return out of fear of a revenge attack.

Firefighters fitted new smoke alarms in the pensioners house, where he lives with his wife who is disabled.

Fire crews declined to comment but there have been fears of reprisals since Vincents death. CCTV was installed at the house last week, and it has been boarded up since the break-in and remains behind police tape.A series of police raids in the capital have struck a massive blow to a notorious and violent gang, with a Skorpion machine gun and ammunition, money and suspected class A drugs seized, Scotland Yard said.

Around 200 officers took part in operations across west London overnight, arresting nine people, including some the Metropolitan Police said were believed to be senior figures in a lucrative crack cocaine and heroin dealing outfit.

An alleged drug-running boy, aged 14, arrested at his family home, was among those detained in eight raids in the Northolt, Greenford, Fulham and Brentford areas.

The arrests were connected to the established MDP gang, police said, which has been linked with several murders.

Those detained were held over offences such as conspiracy to supply drugs and possession of firearms.

At a house in Dorchester Close, Northolt, young children could be heard crying as dozens of officers flooded inside shouting police.

Elsewhere, as a police squad crept up to one seemingly empty address in Stephendale Road, Fulham, officers noticed a 30-year-old suspect sitting in a car.

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During a search officers found a Skorpion machine pistol along with another handgun, 40 rounds of ammunition and a kilo of suspected class A drugs, Scotland Yard said.

Detective inspector Driss Hayoukane said: This is a massive blow to an established gang.

What weve taken out is probably a line which has been supplying the Earls Court and Fulham areas. This gang have been running that line for quite a while and making a lot of money.

These gangs have corrupted children and are using them to ferry drugs.

If you look across London these are the kids that are getting involved in violence and stabbings because they are generally on the streets while the suppliers are removed from it, collecting the cash.

Key members of the gang drove expensive cars and showed off their wealth online with luxury holidays to places like Dubai, he added.

One address in Earls Court had been cuckooed, which happens when criminals take over a vulnerable persons or drug addicts flat to sell drugs from it  named after the parasitic practice of the cuckoo bird which lays its eggs in other birds nests.

Overall, six males and three females, aged between 14 and 49, were arrested in the early hours of Thursday and are now in custody.

The operation was the result of about six months of planning by the Metropolitan Policess anti-gang Trident unit.

Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick had been on patrol in Hackney, east London, on Wednesday evening, where she said gang tensions were high after a spate of stabbings in recent weeks, including the killing of 18-year-old Israel Ogunsola.

Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick, centre, walks with officers through Stoke Newington in north London earlier in April (PA)

Speaking to reporters shortly before the raids, she said the suspects had been causing devastation and fear in communities.

She said: They are very violent, several of them have a history of serious violence, at least one is suspected of regularly using a firearm.

They will be arrested  not only have they been, as it appears to us, supplying crack cocaine and heroin, theyve been making a huge amount of money.

Theyve been exploiting vulnerable people and very young people have been engaged in the drug dealing operation. So they need to be locked up.

She added: When I arrived just over a year ago weve been stepping up our anti-violence operations, weve been learning along the way.

In the last two weeks or so and in particular since last weekend, weve been doing more and more. The Met is working very hard.

Asked if raids had been stepped up following a recent rise in violent crime in London, DI Hayoukane said: Its business as usual for us, our unit works to capacity all the time.

Since the start of the year, there have been more than 50 suspected murders in London.

PAThousands of EU nationals could inadvertently become illegal residents in the UK after Brexit, a report has warned.

Domestic abuse victims and other vulnerable groups could lose their status due to difficulties completing an application and providing the necessary evidence to secure residency, according to the Migration Observatory.

It also warns that other EU citizens, particularly elderly people and children, could lose their status because they simply do not realise that they are covered by the new regulations and need to apply for settled status (SS).

To acquire SS, EU citizens will need to show that they started living in the UK before the cut-off date  currently scheduled for 31 December 2020  and will need to complete five years of residence in the UK.

Despite efforts by the government to ensure that this process is as inclusive as possible, the report shows that several groups of EU citizens are at risk.

These include people who are already vulnerable for other reasons, including women who are victims of domestic abuse, especially if they are not working and rely on their partner for evidence that they have been living here, such as utility bills and leases.

Official data provided to the Migration Observatory shows that EU citizens are less likely to report experiencing domestic abuse than UK or non-EU citizens, with the same data suggesting that more than 50,000 EU citizen women experienced domestic abuse in the UK in 2016-2017.

Other vulnerable groups of EU citizens in the UK include children in care and victims of trafficking, although there is no reliable data on these groups.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford said: The Home Office is clearly keen to create a system that is easy and straightforward to use, and most EU citizens should be able to sail through a simplified application process with little difficulty.

But for a minority of people, the process will be more difficult. Many of these are already societys most vulnerablewhether it is because they are socially isolated, have been victims of exploitation, or face personal barriers such as mental health or poverty.

The report identifies larger, if less vulnerable, groups of people who may simply not realise that they need to apply. These include more than 140,000 people who have lived in the UK more than 30 years and 56,000 elderly people (age 75+).

There are also more than 900,000 children of EU citizens living in the UK whose status will depend on their parents knowing that they need to apply. Available data suggest that there could be tens of thousands of children born in the UK whose EU citizen parents mistakenly believe that they are automatically UK nationals.

Ms Sumption said the biggest challenge if the government aimed to include all EU citizens in the settled status process would be lack of awareness.

We know from other government programmes like child benefit that people often dont apply for something even when its really in their interests to do so, she said.

When the deadline arrives, people who havent applied lose their legal status. This means that one of the biggest policy questions is what will happen to people who were eligible but didnt apply in time.

The EU-UK agreement on citizens rights states that where there is a good reason, a proportionate approach will be taken to people who do not apply within the deadline. What this means in practice has not been set out in detail.

The report will stoke concerns that vulnerable groups will be negatively affected by Brexit. MPs warned last week that leaving the EU could be disastrous for disadvantaged groups due to the loss of the European Social Fund (ESF), which provides 500m per year of EU funding to vital services.

A report by the Work and Pensions Committee stated that programmes providing support for people who are poorly served or neglected by mainstream provision, including disabled people, offenders and prison leavers, risked being bankrupted as a result.

A Home Office spokesperson said: Throughout the negotiations, it's been our priority to secure the rights of EU citizens living in the UK and in December we reached an agreement with the EU that does this. Away from the negotiations, we have been working hard to build a new, simple digital application system for settled status and drawing up the rules that will underpin it.

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. 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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." 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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

We are well aware of the challenges of ensuring that three million EU citizens and their family members living here understand the need to apply and have the ability to. That is why we have already launched a national awareness campaign, are holding monthly meetings with EU citizens' representatives to understand their needs and are planning a range of support for vulnerable groups such as the elderly, children and families, victims of domestic violence and those with English as a second language."

The spokesperson added that they would be setting out further details before the summer and that EU citizens would have "plenty of time" to make an application.

"But we have also been clear that we will exercise discretion if there are good reasons why someone has not been able to make an application before the June 2021 deadline," they added.

Hundreds of people are set to rally against a new breed of white supremacism in London this weekend as racist group Generation Identity (GI) prepares to hold its first official conference on British soil.

The Identitarian movement, which propagates the far-right conspiracy theory that white people are becoming a minority, is hosting what it has branded a European reunion conference on Saturday at an unknown location in the capital.

Using slick videos and a high-profile social media presence, GI targets teenagers and young people in what researchers have called the weaponisation of internet culture.

Having garnered thousands of followers across Europe since the movement began in 2012, the racist group is now steadily growing its British support base, with experts saying it has now become the most active far-right organisation in the UK.

While its English-speaking faction remains relatively small in numbers  with its first major demonstration in Hyde Park last month attracting 40 people  researchers have warned of a worrying possibility that GI could attract thousands of unaligned online far-right activists in Britain.

GI boasts that the day-long event on Saturday will bring together members at a time when the European Union is creating animosity between its nations.

A counter-protest organised by the Anti Fascist Network has attracted more than 1,000 people, with the group claiming it will be monitoring venues in London and hoping to catch them at it.

On an event page for the counter-protest, the Anti-Fascist Network wrote: They are keeping a very close guard on the venue and access to the event for obvious reasons ... they are scared and know that a vast majority of people in the UK wouldnt stand for the nonsense they stand for.

We will be monitoring venues and hoping to catch them at it ... We will arrange a meet and action on the day in central London regardless of whether they crawl out from under a rock or not.

Hope Not Hate, which has been closely monitoring the development of GI, said the group had overtaken other far-right groups in the UK, as its Europe-based leaders target Britain in a bid to reach a bigger international audience.

Dr Joe Mulhall, senior researcher at Hope Not Hate, told The Independent: As an organisation it remains fairly small here, but it has probably already become the most active far-right organisation in the UK, even with its very limited numbers. Its the new breed.

Much of this is not driven by British activists themselves but by the European leaders, which have chosen the UK for obvious reasons. Theyve seen the UK as a way to reach a much bigger international audience, with the English language.

While small, they are incredibly active, and the worrying thing is they are very professional, very organised and tech savvy, and their imagery is very professional. Their website is streets ahead of other far-right groups in Britain. And theyre young.

By using this slick marketing and presentable imagery, and distancing themselves from the more rough and tumble elements of the British far right, theyre attracting a younger more professional type of person. And all of this belies what is actually a very extreme ideology.

Mr Mulhall claimed the ideology of GI was far more extreme than the likes of the English Defence League (EDL), highlighting the groups promotion of ethnoplurism  the separating and segregating people along racial lines.

These are racial ideas that are much more extreme than something like the EDL would have ever posited. Thats why its so worrying  they look very moderate and respectable but theyre actually pushing a very extreme far-right ideology, he added.

Support for GI increased amid a series of terror attacks across Europe last year, while it has also hijacked concerns over the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants in Europe.

Last summer, the group raised tens of thousands of dollars to set sail on the Mediterranean in a bid to obstruct NGO vessels from rescuing migrants who had set sail from North Africa, but they were forced to abandon their mission after a crowd-funding company cancelled their account.

GI now has a base in 13 European countries, with the largest operations in Germany, France and Austria, where the far-right movement has dozens of branches  some with their own gyms, bars and restaurants.

Since the summer, it has also bought its central tactic of staging stunts to the UK, including mounting a banner on Westminster bridge stating Stop Islamisation and dressing as Londons Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan and asking people to sign a petition to ban Christmas.

Mr Mulhall said that while support for the group is far less widespread in Britain than on the continent, there is a concern that a mass of far-right activists online could be drawn into the GI movement.

At the moment it seems unlikely that theyll have the same success in the UK as Europe. But then theyve been there for years and its just got off the ground here so well have to see, he said.

The thing with the UK is theres this mass of unaligned online far-right activists  thousands of people  who engage in online activism but arent part of a traditional far-right party in any sense.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 23 September 2021 Gabriella, the seven year old daughter of imprisoned British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, joins in a game on a giant snakes and ladders board in Parliament Square, to show the ups and downs of her mothers case to mark the 2,000 days she has been detained in Iran AP 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

If they have an ability to bring those people offline, then they become really important. And even if they dont succeed as GI, they might have a worrying impact on the normalisation of the rhetoric around race and ethnicity.

In any case, he said, the London conference serves as an indication of how seriously GIs European leaders are taking the British wing of the white supremacist movement.

GI has not responded to The Independents request for comment.Tens of thousands more families will be trapped in temporary accommodation across England over the next two years if current homelessness trends continue, a report has warned.

More than 100,000 households will be living in B&Bs, hostels and other forms of temporary housing by 2020, as rising housing costs and insecure work continue to lock people into poverty, according to research commissioned by Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF).

The annual Homelessness Monitor shows that 70 per cent of local authorities in England are struggling to find any stable housing for homeless people in their area, while a striking 89 per cent reported difficulties in finding private rented accommodation.

As a result, many councils have found themselves forced to place ever more homeless people in emergency housing, including B&Bs and hostels, leading to urgent calls for more permanent and genuinely affordable homes to be built.

Government figures published last month revealed almost 79,000 families were staying in temporary housing in the last three months of last year because they didnt have a permanent home, compared with 48,010 in the same period eight years before.

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.

The new report warns that if current trends continue, with housing supply dwindling and rents outstripping wages and benefits, more than 100,000 such households will fall into this trap by 2020.

Councils surveyed reported a growing reluctance among landlords to rent to people on welfare. One local authority in the Midlands told researchers it was pretty much impossible to access the private rental sector, with the cost of doing so prohibitive and the solution unsustainable.

A council in southern England, commenting on how reforms to social care services are contributing to homelessness, meanwhile said: There are more people than ever with complex and multiple needs than ever before. Mental health services are overstretched and unable to cope.

The findings come the day after it emerged the number of homeless people dying has more than doubled over the past five years, with deaths occurring both on the streets and in crowded hostels.

Crisis and JRF said more must be done to solve the problem  in particular that the government must build more social housing and ensure that homeless people can access it.

Jon Sparkes, chief executive of the charity, said it was truly terrible that councils across England were finding it increasingly difficult to find homeless people somewhere to live, saying: Todays report makes it clear that, unless we take action as a society, this problem will only keep getting worse.

Homelessness is not inevitable and our research has shown how it can become a thing of the past.

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

The charity welcomed the governments recent actions on homelessness, including its pledge to end rough sleeping by 2027 and the establishment of the Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Implementation Taskforce.

But they said more must be done urgently, highlighting that the upcoming green paper on social housing must be an opportunity to make a commitment to building genuinely affordable homes.

Professor Suzanne Fitzpatrick, the reports lead author, said: This years Homelessness Monitor has, again, provided evidence of the profound, cumulative and adverse impact of welfare reform on access to housing for low-income groups, especially in high-value markets.

The options are narrowing for local authorities charged with preventing and resolving homelessness, as benefit-reliant households are entirely priced out of the private rented sector in some parts of the country.

At the same time, homeless peoples access to a diminishing pool of social tenancies is increasingly constrained by landlord nervousness about letting to households whose incomes are now so very low that even properties let at social rents can be unaffordable to them.

Ms Fitzpatrick said the most fundamental and pernicious impacts for the poorest households were linked to the caps and freezing of local housing allowance and other working age benefits.

Homeless charity Shelter said the findings demonstrated the bruising toll that living in unstable temporary accommodation, especially B&Bs and hostels, takes on peoples lives.

Polly Neate, chief executive of the charity, said: We see children routinely fall behind at school and their health and happiness left in tatters, while their parents suffer with the heartbreaking belief theyve failed their children. Really it should be governments shouldering this blame.

If the current government wants to prevent these families from carrying the scars of homelessness for the rest of their lives, it must act now to build the social homes needed to end this crisis for good.

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: Everyone deserves a safe and decent place to live, and we are providing more than 1.2bn to ensure homeless people get the support they need.

To ensure they can access permanent accommodation, we are also investing 2bn in social rent housing and allowing councils to borrow more to build homes.

In addition, the Homelessness Reduction Act came into force last week, requiring councils to help those at risk of being homeless sooner.The international chemical weapons watchdog's report on the Salisbury nerve agent attack is expected to be revealed, as a diplomatic battle continues to rage between the UK and Russia.

Former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent thought to have been ordered by Moscow more than a month ago, leaving the pair seriously ill in hospital.

The Foreign Office said it had asked the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to release an executive summary of its findings on Thgursday.

It comes as Ms Skripal revealed she has rejected assistance from the Russian embassy, adding: "I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves."

The 33-year-old said she has found herself in a "totally different life" as she continues to recover from the attack.

It is believed that British authorities immediately spirited Ms Skripal away to a secure location when she was discharged from hospital earlier this week.

The Russian embassy reacted angrily, suggesting in a series of tweets that the Russian national had been taken against her will.

The embassy is perturbed by a refusal from UK authorities to grant Ms Skripal's cousin Viktoria a visa to visit her family.

It escalated the war of words, saying in a series of statements posted on social media: "Secret resettlement of Mr and Ms Skripal, barred from any contact with their family will be seen as an abduction or at least as their forced isolation."

But Ms Skripal said in a statement: "I have specially trained officers available to me, who are helping to take care of me and to explain the investigative processes that are being undertaken.

"I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 23 September 2021 Gabriella, the seven year old daughter of imprisoned British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, joins in a game on a giant snakes and ladders board in Parliament Square, to show the ups and downs of her mothers case to mark the 2,000 days she has been detained in Iran AP 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

"At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them. Most importantly, I am safe and feeling better as time goes by, but I am not yet strong enough to give a full interview to the media, as I one day hope to do.

"Until that time, I want to stress that no one speaks for me, or for my father, but ourselves. I thank my cousin Viktoria for her concern for us, but ask that she does not visit me or try to contact me for the time being.

"Her opinions and assertions are not mine and they are not my father's."

A Foreign Office spokesman said it has asked the OPCW to distribute the report to all state parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention, including Russia.

"This transparent and open approach, which we have pursued from the outset, is in sharp contrast to the Russian state's ongoing tactics of obfuscation and distraction," the spokesman said.

The Kremlin has repeatedly attempted to challenge Britain's claims that it was responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals.

Theresa May has said that UK military experts at Porton Down found that they were poisoned by Novichok, a nerve agent developed by Russia, and that the only plausible explanation was that the Russian state was responsible.

Despite the denials from Moscow, Britain has received strong diplomatic backing from western allies for its stance, with more than 20 countries expelling in excess of 150 Russian diplomats in protest at the Russian actions.

Last week, a Russian call for a new joint investigation was voted down by 15 votes to six at a meeting of the OPCW executive council in The Hague.

Former double agent Mr Skripal was jailed in Russia for selling secrets to MI6 but was released as part of a spy swap deal in 2010 and settled in the UK.

It is hoped he will soon be fit for release from hospital, despite grave fears that the exposure to military-grade Novichok on March 4 would prove fatal.

Ms Skripal said she was treated with "such kindness" at Salisbury District Hospital, and is missing the staff there.

"I have left my father in their care, and he is still seriously ill. I too am still suffering with the effects of the nerve agent used against us. I find myself in a totally different life than the ordinary one I left just over a month ago, and I am seeking to come to terms with my prospects, whilst also recovering from this attack on me," she said.Authorities in Rochdale showed a "total lack of urgency" to address the sexual exploitation of boys at a council-run school, a report has found.

Pupils at now-closed Knowl View residential school were also sexually exploited in the town centre, the bus station and at public toilets across the road from the borough council's offices over a 20-year period.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) panel found a "valuable opportunity" was missed to prosecute the town's former Liberal MP, Cyril Smith, during his lifetime in the late 1990s.

Recommended Rochdale council apologises to child sex abuse victims before inquiry

It also found that ex-council leader Richard Farnell, who has since been suspended by the Labour Party, lied during his evidence last October.

Publishing its report on Thursday, IICSA concluded that from 1989 onwards the police, Rochdale Council's social services and education departments, as well as staff at Knowl View, knew youngsters were being subjected to sexual exploitation for money in public toilets.

The panel found: "The records of individual children convey a total lack of urgency on the part of the relevant authorities to address the problem and treat the matters involved for what they were  serious sexual assaults.

"This remained the case even in the face of clear evidence of the risks to children's health.

"The file of one young boy at Knowl View recorded that he had contracted hepatitis through 'rent boy' activities.

"We concluded that no-one in authority viewed child sexual exploitation as an urgent child protection issue. Rather, boys as young as 11 were not seen as victims but as authors of their own abuse."

It ruled there was no "deliberate cover-up" by the authorities involved but said instead there was a "careless and wholly inadequate response".

The panel said the police did not turn a blind eye as records suggested they did not obtain sufficient evidence to prosecute, although they did not provide "any satisfactory answer" as to why no-one appeared to have been charged with abusing Knowl View boys in the town centre despite some disclosures from the boys and police knowing the names of some men.

IICSA also looked into the involvement of the late politician Smith at Cambridge House boys' hostel in Rochdale and found a "valuable opportunity" to prosecute him in 1999 was lost.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 29 September 2021 The family of Betty Campbell unveil the bronze sculpture of her during the unveiling of the statue in Central Square, Cardiff, of Betty Campbell, Wales' first black headteacher PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2021 A sign referring to the lack of fuel is placed at the entrance to a petrol station in London AP UK news in pictures 27 September 2021 Police officers detain a protester from Insulate Britain occupying a roundabout leading from the M25 motorway to Heathrow Airport in London PA UK news in pictures 26 September 2021 Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer watches the Arsenal v Tottenham Hotspur match at The Font pub in Brighton PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2021 Scottish pro-independence supporters hold a march and rally outside the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, Scotland Getty Images UK news in pictures 24 September 2021 Police officers remove two protesters from the top of a tanker, as Insulate Britain block the A20 in Kent, which provides access to the Port of Dover in Kent. The environmental activists have moved location after been banned from campaigning on the M25 motorway in London PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2021 Gabriella, the seven year old daughter of imprisoned British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, joins in a game on a giant snakes and ladders board in Parliament Square, to show the ups and downs of her mothers case to mark the 2,000 days she has been detained in Iran AP 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

Smith, a prominent councillor before he represented the town in Parliament from 1972 to 1992, acted as a governor for several Rochdale schools, including Knowl View.

Before he died aged 82 in 2010 he was the subject of sex abuse accusations and investigations but never faced trial and received a knighthood in 1988.

A Lancashire Police investigation into the 29-stone MP concluded in 1970  the year he first ran for public office  that he was hiding behind a "veneer of respectability" and had used his "unique position" to target eight boys at Cambridge House during the 1960s.

The boys said Smith, the hostel's honorary secretary, spanked their bare bottoms and carried out intrusive medical examinations despite not being qualified to do so.

But the then director of public prosecutions (DPP), Sir Norman Skelhorn, concluded there was not enough evidence to prosecute him.

From 1997 onwards, Greater Manchester Police investigated allegations of physical and sexual abuse in residential homes, with the Lancashire Police file concerning Smith and a further witness statement submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service in 1998.

Two additional statements were submitted in 1999.

The IICSA panel said the CPS branch crown prosecutor advised Smith should not be charged despite coming to the view there was a "realistic prospect of conviction".

The panel said: "His review of that advice in 1999 did not consider that those new complaints were capable of lending further support to the case. A valuable opportunity was, therefore, lost to prosecute Smith during his lifetime, and for the complainants to seek justice."

IICSA also addressed the evidence given last year by Mr Farnell, the leader of Rochdale Council between 1986 and 1992.

The inquiry heard that a paedophile had been admitted to Knowl View in September 1990, where he had sexually abused at least one boy but Mr Farnell insisted the information was not passed on to him.

Mr Farnell said he was also unaware of a 1991 report submitted by a health authority worker which detailed claims that boys at Knowl View as young as eight were being sexually targeted by men from as far afield as Sheffield.

The panel concluded Mr Farnell lied to the inquiry and that it "defies belief" he was unaware of the events involving Knowl View.

It said: "Regarding Mr Farnell's final statements at the hearing, it was shameful that he refused to accept any personal responsibility for the young lives blighted by what happened at Knowl View while he was leader.

"Instead he laid all blame for what occurred at the door of the senior officials in education and in social services."

Responding to the report, Mr Farnell insisted he had told the truth.

He said: Failures by Rochdale council, the police and other agencies in protecting children from abuse should never have happened.

The inquiry covered events going back 60 years.

For the period in which I was leader of Rochdale council from 1986 to 1992, I am deeply sorry and I apologise to all those who suffered as a result of the grave mistakes made and the unacceptable failings of the Council in respect of the children being cared for at Knowl View.

However, I am shocked at the findings of the Inquiry. I told the truth.

PAYassmin Abdel-Magied, the award winning author and one Australias leading female Muslim activists, was barred from entering the US immediately after she landed in the country.

The 27-year-old was set to speak at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York next week.

But after touching down in Minneapolis on Wednesday afternoon, the author who is a fierce critic of Australia's immigration policies, said she was detained by border agents.

Im currently at the border and theyve said Im being deported," the Australian-Sudanese author tweeted. "This should be fun. What are my rights?

"Interesting facts: within a few min of looking at my case the border security person - Officer Herberg looking at my case she announces: were sending you back!

US authorities said Ms Abdel-Magied was denied entry because they determined she was being paid to speak at the conference which is a violation of her visitors visa.

The activist, who live-tweeted her fleeting stay on American land, claims the agents informed her they had cancelled her visa and required her to return to London where she currently resides.

"They've taken my phone, cancelled my visa and are deporting me. Will follow up on messages once I understand what's going on, she said.

Ms Abdel-Magied was scheduled to speak on a panel at the festival titled The M Word: No Country for Young Muslim women.

Three hours after touching down in Minneapolis she found herself on a plane heading home.

"Well, guess that tightening of immigration laws business is working, despite my Australian passport. We're taking off now. What a time," she tweeted.

She claimed authorities still had her passport when she boarded the aeroplane back home.

"Apparently I can't be trusted with it until I'm in a foreign country because, as Officer Blees said, 'planes get turned away back way too often'," she wrote.

She added: "Oh yuh and did I mention they took my phone for the whole time? Fortunately, Im a paranoid person - notifications dont show previews of messages and a 12 digit passcode. Always be vigilant, yo."

A spokesperson from the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) said: During the inspection, CBP officers determined this individual did not possess the appropriate visa to receive monetary compensation for the speaking engagements she had planned during her visit to the United States.

Ms Abdel-Magied, who was born in Sudan, received a wide-reaching backlash after writing a Facebook post on Anzac Day, a national day of remembrance for members of Australia and New Zealand's armed forces, which suggested that her countrymen should remember the suffering in Syria and Palestine. She also highlighted the plight of refugees on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island and Nauru where Australia holds asylum seekers in refugee processing centres.

Politicians and other critics accused her of politicising the day and she later removed the post.

"It was brought to my attention that my last post was disrespectful and for that, I apologise unreservedly, she wrote at the time.

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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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. 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The writer subsequently moved to London. She said she felt betrayed by Australia and branded herself the country's "most publicly hated Muslim."

Ms Abdel-Magied, who trained as a mechanical engineer, founded the Youth Without Borders organisation. In 2007 she was named young Australian Muslim of the year.

PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said she was "dismayed" that her guest had been refused entry and would no longer be able to speak at the festival.

She said Ms Abdel-Magied was "an advocate of the rights of Muslim women and refugees and is a citizen of Australia, travelling on that countrys passport."

She added: "The very purpose of the PEN World Voices Festival, founded after 9/11 to sustain the connectedness between the US and the wider world, is in jeopardy at a time when efforts at visa bans and tightened immigration restrictions threaten to choke off vital channels of dialogue that are protected under the First Amendment right to receive and impart information through in-person cultural exchange," she added.

"We call on Customs and Border Patrol to admit her to the US so that she can take her rightful place in the urgent international conversation to take place at the Festival next week".David Davis has suggested he has changed his mind over military intervention in Syria in the wake of a suspected chemical attack, after he voted against similar action when David Cameron was prime minister.

The Brexit secretary said he had been given reassurance that any doubts on possible airstrikes would be addressed when Theresa May summons her most senior MPs for an emergency cabinet meeting on Thursday afternoon.

Ministers will be asked to consider Britain's response to the escalating crisis in Syria, following the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime in the city of Douma, in Eastern Ghouta, last week, where more than 40 people were killed and scores injured.

Speaking in London, Mr Davis said no decision had been taken on whether there would be a joint response by the UK and US and other allies against the Syrian regime, but he was reassured that he would be given the necessary evidence at the meeting of the prime minister's top team later today.

Outlining why he had previously voted against action, he said: "One was because he [Mr Cameron] hadn't provided the evidence and intelligence that we knew who it was, and secondly because there was not a proper plan, which was thought through properly.

"Those two things, I am assured, we're going to answer today."

Mr Davis was among MPs who rejected possible UK military action in Syria in 2013, after a suspected chemical weapons attack outside Damascus where hundreds of people died.

He told a Wall Street Journal conference: The situation in Syria is horrific, the use of chemical weapons is something the world has to prevent.

But also its a very, very delicate circumstance and weve got to make this judgment on a very careful, very deliberate, very well thought-through basis.

Opposition leaders have called for a parliamentary vote before any new military action in Syria amid speculation Ms May could authorise UK forces to back US-led action before MPs return from their Easter recess next week.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said MPs must be consulted, adding: "Surely the lessons of Iraq, the lessons that came there from the Chilcot Report, are that there's got to be, there has to be, a proper process of consultation.

"We elect Parliament, we elect members of Parliament. They should have a voice in this. Cabinet on its own should not be making this decision.

"The dangers of bombing now, which could escalate the conflict beyond belief. Just imagine the scenario if an American missile shoots down a Russian plane or vice versa. Where do we go from there?"

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable also urged caution over British involvement, as he pointed to the dangers of Russian involvement and Mr Trump's "erratic" behaviour.

And SNP leader at Westminster Ian Blackford told the BBC: "There is no mandate for the Government to take this action.

"And, I would simply say to the Prime Minister: be very careful, because you do not have a majority in Parliament.

"You are a minority Government, and you need to seek the consent of Parliament before you commit the United Kingdom to any action."

The US is preparing options for an attack on Syria, as relations with Russia, one of the regime's only international allies, plunged to new lows.

President Donald Trump told Russia to "get ready" for US missiles and warned Moscow it "shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal", referring to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

French president Emmanuel Macron said he has proof that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on the rebel-held town, an allegations that has been strongly denied by the Assad regime.

Ms May toughened her rhetoric over the attack on Wednesday, appearing to directly blame the Syrian regime for the Douma attack.

She said: All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible and we will be working with our closest allies on how we can ensure that those who are responsible are held to account and how we can prevent and deter the humanitarian catastrophe that comes from the use of chemical weapons in the future.

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

The continued use of chemical weapons cannot go unchallenged.

It comes almost a year after dozens of people were killed in an chemical attack in the northern town of Khan Sheikhoun, prompting Mr Trump to order the firing of several missiles as a Syrian air base.Under-25s would be given free bus travel under Labour plans announced by Jeremy Corbyn today.

The party said it would scrap fares for 13 million young people to help them save money and encourage them to use public transport.

The policy could save each young person up to 1,000 a year, Labour said, and will be funded through revenue raised by Vehicle Excise Duty.

Free travel would only be offered in areas where councils agree to either take bus services under public ownership or introduce a franchising model similar to that which already exists in London.

Labour hopes the plans will encourage councils to set up their own bus companies, which studies suggest could help save the taxpayer 276m per year.

Mr Corbyn will announce the policy during a visit to a sixth form in Derby.

He is expected to say: Young people deserve a break. Nearly eight years of Tory austerity have hit their incomes, their chance to buy a house and their career opportunities.

Labour wants to help young people make the most out of life by investing in them, which is why today we are pledging the next Labour government will provide the funds to cover free bus travel for under-25s, to support them to travel to work, to study and to visit friends.

He will add: Our policy provides help where it is most needed. On average, children, young people and households with children each have less disposable income than working age households without children.

Young people also tend to be in lower paid, more insecure work, and they spend a higher proportion of their income on travel. Giving them free bus travel will make a huge difference to their lives.

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

The pledge is estimated to cost 1.4bn a year, although the Conservatives claimed Labours own sums reveal the true cost could be up to 13bn a year.

It would be funded by using around a fifth of the revenue generated by Vehicle Excise Duty, which is forecast to be 6.7 billion per year by 2022.

The money is currently due to be spent on building new roads, but Labour said it would instead earmark a chunk for its bus fares policy and fund road building through increased government borrowing.

It claimed the plans would encourage young people to use public transport instead of driving, thereby reducing congestion and pollution. The party hopes the policy will encourage people to get into the habit of using cars only when necessary.

Speaking alongside Mr Corbyn, Andy McDonald, the shadow transport secretary, will say: Buses are vital for easing road congestion and air pollution, but for too long, private bus companies have run our services for profit not people.

 How UK rail fares have risen against the cost of living since 1995

The public purse already pays 42 per cent of the costs of providing local bus services, but deregulated private companies choose to run only the profitable services and leave councils to plug the gaps left for non-profitable but vital routes.

Thats why well encourage local authorities to take back control of their buses so they can provide a better and more sustainable service to young and old alike, wherever they live.

The announcement follows a worrying fall in the number of people using buses, which is now at its lowest level in ten years.

In London, the reduction has prompted fears among Transport for London (TfL) executives over the state of the organisations finances.

This, coupled with Mayor of London Sadiq Khans decision to freeze some fares, means TfL is facing a deficit of almost 1bn next year.

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

Mr Khan welcomed his partys announcement, saying he was delighted at this promise that the next Labour government will enable us to provide a huge extra boost for the capital by offering free bus travel to all under 25's.

He added: Investing to provide free bus travel will greatly help young people access opportunities at this critical stage in their working and educational lives. It will also reduce car use, cut congestion, improve air quality and reduce generational inequality.

The Conservatives said the policy would cost up to 13bn if it helps as many people as Labour claims it would.

Nusrat Ghani, the transport minister, said: This is yet another promise from Labour that they have no real ability to deliver.

Labour admit themselves this could cost up to 13bn meaning extra borrowing with working people paying the price.

She added: Last election Labour promised to pay off student debt if elected and then admitted it would actually cost too much to do. Now theyre bribing young people again with yet another empty promise.

Our balanced approach to the economy means that we are able to help people with the cost of travel by extending railcards to everyone under the age of 30, while councils also have the power to offer cheaper travel for young people.Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has urged the Prime Minister and Donald Trump to pull back from military action in Syria arguing that more war will not save life.

He warned that deploying forces in the war-torn Middle Eastern state would lead to further conflict elsewhere in the region, and called for a real ceasefire and a political process.

Speaking on a trip to Derby, Mr Corbyn appeared to suggest he would not back war under any circumstances, arguing that he is not in favour of increasing military action.

It comes as Theresa May, the US President and French President Emmanuel Macron were poised to launch military strikes on Syrian targets, following a further chemical weapons attack in Syria that has been blamed on the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

Mr Corbyn said that what had happened in the town of Douma, where 40 people were killed following an attack on Saturday, was disgraceful and that any use of chemical weapons is clearly illegal as well as immoral and wrong.

But he went on: More bombing, more killing, more war will not save life. It will just take more lives and spawn the war elsewhere.

Mr Corbn said: The United Nations has a duty and a function to ensure there's a proper investigation undertaken as the inspectors are now in Douma doing just that and, when we've got the results of that, decide what action to take.

 Syria crisis: Theresa May to chair emergency Cabinet meeting

But, I would just say this. Hundreds of thousands have died and lost their lives in Syria. Millions have been forced into refuge. Many are living in terrible poverty and desperation. There has to be a political solution.

He called for Russia, America, the EU, Iran and Saudi Arabia to be involved in ensuring a ceasefire and a political solution to the seven-year civil war.

Mr Macron conducted interviews on Thursday morning saying that there is now proof that chemical were used in Syria by the Assad regime.

But asked whether he opposed military action in Syria under any circumstances, Mr Corbyn said: "I'm not in favour of increasing military action in Syria, what I'm in favour of is a political process to bring about peace."

The Labour Leader added: "Assad should be dealt with by international law; by sanctions, if necessary; by the United Nations, but, also, by pressure from those countries that have supported him and those countries that have supported the opposition  to halt the conflict, to bring about a solution that does recognise the rights of the diversity of the people in Syria.

The Kurdish people and others have got to have their say in how this process works out."

 Former MI6 boss Sir John Sawers condemns Donald Trump's Twitter diplomacy with Russia amid Syria crisis

Ms May is due to meet her Cabinet later today to discuss potential military action by UK forces, with Royal Navy attack submarines already said to have moved into position in the Mediterranean Sea.

But Mr Corbyn again demanded that MPs be consulted over any potential attack prior to its launch.

He said: "Parliament must be consulted on this. Surely the lessons of Iraq, the lessons that came there from the Chilcott Report, are that there's got to be, there has to be a proper process of consultation.

"We elect Parliament, we elect Members of Parliament. They should have a voice in this. Cabinet on its own should not be making this decision.

 General Richard Barons on Russia's claim it will shoot down US missiles fired at Syria: 'That is war'

He said the dangers of bombing Syria are that it would escalate the conflict beyond belief, raising the prospect of US and Russian forces inflicting damage on each other and bringing about the possibility of the two superpowers becoming more deeply engaged.

With tension rising on Wednesday, Russias ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkinhad, warned that his country would shoot down US rockets fired at Syrian targets, and would even fire on the sources that launched the missiles  raising the prospect of direct engagement between US and Russian forces.

In a tweet responding to the threat, President Trump said: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria.

Get ready, Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart. You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Downing Street sources said the Cabinet meeting  unusual during a parliamentary break  represented the next phase of Ms Mays approach to the crisis, following her conversations with Mr Trump, Mr Macron and national security officials.Former MI6 spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned using a novichok nerve agent, the international chemical weapons watchdog has confirmed.

Four separate laboratories around the world all reached the same conclusion as the UK government regarding the nature of the poison, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in an executive summary of its findings.

The organisation was called in to carry out an independent investigation into the poisoning of the pair in Salisbury last month.

Recommended Johnson refuses to back down over Salisbury nerve agent claim

Its conclusion matches that of UK government scientists at the Porton Down defence laboratory and is likely to place fresh pressure on Russia to answer questions about its alleged involvement in the attack.

The Foreign Office claimed the finding proves there is no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record and demanded the Kremlin give answers.

While it did not name the specific chemical used, the OPCW said its scientists had confirmed the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical.

The UK government used its identification of novichok as a major strand of evidence in its decision to blame Russia for the attack. The military grade nerve agent is of a type known to have been manufactured by Russia and would likely have required state resources to produce, ministers said.

Russia has strongly denied any involvement in the attack, which initially left the Skripals in a critical condition in hospital. The condition of both victims has since improved, and Yulia Skripal was discharged from hospital earlier this week.

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

OPCW experts visited Salisbury last month and took blood samples from the Skripals and police officer Nick Bailey, who was also exposed to the toxin. Samples were also taken from sites known to have been contaminated by the nerve agent.

In the executive summary of its report, the OPCW said: The results of analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirm the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people.

In a finding that appears to confirm suggestions the manufacturers of the novichok would have had significant expertise, the watchdog said the chemical was of high purity and noted an almost complete absence of impurities.

The full report is classified but will be sent to all OPCW member states, including Russia.

Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, welcomed the finding.

Today the international chemical weapons watchdog have confirmed the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical used in the attempted assassination of Mr Skripal and his daughter, and which also resulted in the hospitalisation of a British police officer, he said. That was a military grade nerve agent  a novichok.

This is based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world. All returned the same conclusive results.

There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible  only Russia has the means, motive and record.

 Sergei Lavrov says the British government could have poisoned the Skripals themselves

The government had never doubted the analysis of our scientists at Porton Down, he added.

Mr Johnson said: We will now work tirelessly with our partners to help stamp out the grotesque use of weapons of this kind and we have called a session of the OPCW Executive Council next Wednesday to discuss next steps. The Kremlin must give answers.

We must, as a world community, stand up for the rules based order which keeps us all safe. The use of weapons of this kind can never be justified, and must be ended.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal were discovered unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury on 4 March.

The former Russian army officer, who worked as a British spy, remains in hospital although his condition has improved from critical to serious.

The poisoning sparked a major diplomatic row between the UK and Russia after ministers blamed Moscow for the attack. Russia has said the UK has failed to provide any evidence as to who was behind the incident and warned Britain it was playing with fire and will be sorry.Labours shadow international development secretary has unexpectedly backed intervention in Syria and called for Bashar al-Assad to be removed as president.

As Britain gears up to support the US in strikes against the Assad regime, Kate Osamor insisted intervention must take place if evidence suggests government forces used chemical weapons against civilians. She also said the Syrian president needs to be removed, although she admitted its not as easy as that.

Her backing for intervention came as her party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said he did not support further British military action in Syria.

Ms Osamor suggested Mr Corbyn should stop making statements on foreign policy and instead leave the job to his shadow ministers.

In an outspoken interview with The House magazine, the Edmonton MP also suggested Labour could support a boycott of Israel, which she compared to apartheid South Africa, and said Prince Charles should not be allowed to succeed the Queen as head of the Commonwealth.

Her comments on Syria are unlikely to be welcomed by Mr Corbyn, who has emphasised the need for a political solution to the war and said he is against increasing military action, which he warned could escalate the conflict beyond belief. Labour has said parliament must be allowed to weigh up the evidence and vote on the issue before the UK launches any strikes.

While Ms Osamor, an ally of Mr Corbyn, did not specifically endorse military action, the Labour frontbenchers call for intervention will come as a boost to Theresa May as she attempts to persuade her Cabinet, and then parliament, to back air strikes against the Assad regime. A spokesperson for Ms Osamor said she had been referring to non-military intervention.

Asked about reports that forces loyal to the Syrian president had used chemical weapons against civilians in the town of Douma, Ms Osamor said: That person needs to be removed. I mean, intervention must take place if evidence comes back that the PM or the president or whoever the leader is, is gassing his own people. Get them out.

But I suppose what we've seen is it's not as easy as that. And I think that's where Jeremy's position comes from. Its not as easy as just removing someone.

She added: I think thats what needs to happen. They always seem to abscond, end up in another country. This world is messed up. Its not easy. But if a leader is killing their own they need to be removed. We dont keep them there. They need to go. He needs to be removed.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 29 September 2021 The family of Betty Campbell unveil the bronze sculpture of her during the unveiling of the statue in Central Square, Cardiff, of Betty Campbell, Wales' first black headteacher PA UK news in pictures 28 September 2021 A sign referring to the lack of fuel is placed at the entrance to a petrol station in London AP UK news in pictures 27 September 2021 Police officers detain a protester from Insulate Britain occupying a roundabout leading from the M25 motorway to Heathrow Airport in London PA UK news in pictures 26 September 2021 Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer watches the Arsenal v Tottenham Hotspur match at The Font pub in Brighton PA UK news in pictures 25 September 2021 Scottish pro-independence supporters hold a march and rally outside the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, Scotland Getty Images UK news in pictures 24 September 2021 Police officers remove two protesters from the top of a tanker, as Insulate Britain block the A20 in Kent, which provides access to the Port of Dover in Kent. The environmental activists have moved location after been banned from campaigning on the M25 motorway in London PA UK news in pictures 23 September 2021 Gabriella, the seven year old daughter of imprisoned British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, joins in a game on a giant snakes and ladders board in Parliament Square, to show the ups and downs of her mothers case to mark the 2,000 days she has been detained in Iran AP 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. 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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. 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But how do you remove someone? Im saying this almost as a layman, but I know politically you cant just remove somebody who is elected.

A spokesperson for the shadow international development secretary said: Kate was expressing her horror at the chemical attack in Douma and the terrible suffering of the Syrian people in the conflict.

"She recognised that there is no simple solution to bringing about lasting peace in Syria, which is why there must be an urgent coordinated international drive via the UN to achieve a ceasefire, a negotiated political settlement and the right of the Syrian people to determine their own future.

Ms Osamor also suggested Mr Corbyn should stop making statements on foreign policy in place of herself or Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary.

The Labour leader personally responded to the killing of Palestinian protesters by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, but eyebrows were raised when, days later, a Labour statement on the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria was issued from an unnamed spokesperson, although Mr Corbyn also tweeted about the issue.

Asked about her party leaders comments on Gaza, Ms Osamor said: First and foremost, he should allow the spokesperson for that department really to respond. Its not that he shouldn't have said it, but if thats what hes being assessed on - thats what hes being judged on - then he should just let his spokesperson speak because it seems that whatever he says is not good enough - its too strong or its not strong enough.

When actually, hes the leader. So, it should be Emily or me, whoever, should be responding. And maybe thats what he should do."

Recommended Jeremy Corbyn calls for MPs to get vote on UK military action in Syria

She added: Its much more serious than whether or not Jeremy has made a statement or not. Its about the fact that this has taken place and what are the government doing.

We dont want this to be about the British media and Jeremy, which it has become, as opposed to that people are being gassed, people are being shot or whatever and the government has decided this is what they need to do.

Discussing the situation in Israel in more detail, Ms Osamor said Labour could ultimately support a boycott of the Jewish state, although she claimed educating people on the issue should be the partys focus.

I think we need to open up the debate before we start saying what we should be doing, she said. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not really educated on illegal settlements, people dont understand whats really going on, and its gone over their head. [They say] Its BDS, who cares, whats that got to do with anything?

But I think we need to get to a place where we start educating everybody and make a decision based on that and then say, this could be an alternative, this could be an option.

She added: I would not say at this point in opposition we should be planning around boycotting without educating a whole generation that have missed out on that and dont understand whats going on.

Theres a level of education that needs to take place first and I would more be an advocate of that than actually worrying about BDS or not because a lot of people arent educated and havent made a decision based on that.

Labours deputy leader, Tom Watson, has previously said calls for widespread boycotts, sanctions and disinvestment of Israel are morally wrong. Asked about that claim, Ms Osamor said: Sometimes people make statements but then they dont look about the history around apartheid, around separation, around people living side by side.

She said a boycott of apartheid South Africa did make a difference and called on people not to buy products from Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Ms Osamor was speaking ahead of a major meeting of Commonwealth heads of government in London next week.

She used the occasion to suggest Prince Charles should not succeed the Queen as head of the institution.

She said: I dont particularly think it should be him. Not because I have an issue with the royal family. I just dont think it should be him. I dont really know what hes been up to of late. Hes not been that vocal on issues.

But we just need someone whos level-headed, someone people respect but also someone who thinks outside the box.

Speaking to the same magazine, Ms Thornberry called on the UK government to apologise to the Commonwealth and to the Queen for Margaret Thatchers refusal to take a tougher stance against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

Ms Thornberry said: Back then, it was nothing less than our duty to take part in collective action against South Africa, and heed the urgent calls from our Commonwealth partners for the unified imposition of sanctions. But instead, the Thatcher government dismissed them.

I believe Theresa May and the Conservative government in Britain also owe an apology to the Commonwealth as a whole  and indeed Her Majesty The Queen  for ignoring the efforts of every other member thirty years ago to bring Apartheid to an end.Theresa May has called an urgent cabinet meeting to approve Britains response to the escalating crisis in Syria, amid concern the UK will launch military action without consulting Parliament.

Downing Street said Ms May and her top ministers would sit down, with the situation in the war-torn country the only item on their agenda.

The meeting comes as the prime minister toughened her language on the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, effectively blaming the Syrian regime and demanding it be held to account.

But with Donald Trump promising that missiles would soon be fired at Syrian targets, MPs including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn demanded a Commons vote before the UK deploys forces.

The heightened tensions came on another day of drama on the international stage, which saw the US and Russia squaring up over the on-going bloody Syrian civil war and Moscows support for Bashar al-Assad.

Downing Street sources said the cabinet meeting  unusual during a parliamentary break  represented the next phase of Ms Mays approach to the crisis, following her conversations with Mr Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron and national security officials.

With the callout notice for the cabinet meeting sent on Wednesday night, the prime minister appeared to harden her language on the Douma incident, in which reports suggest bombs filled with a chemical substance were dropped on the town leaving more than 40 people dead.

 US v Russia on Syria: The story so far

Ms May said: All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible and we will be working with our closest allies on how we can ensure that those who are responsible are held to account and how we can prevent and deter the humanitarian catastrophe that comes from the use of chemical weapons in the future.

The continued use of chemical weapons cannot go unchallenged.

All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible and we will be working with our closest allies on how we can ensure that those who are responsible are held to account Prime Minister Theresa May

She told reporters during a visit to Birmingham that she was appalled but not surprised by Russias decision to veto a draft resolution at the United Nations on Tuesday, which sought to create a new body to determine responsibility for the attack.

Indicating that she believes the diplomatic route may have been exhausted, she said: There can be no role now for investigations by the United Nations.

Russias ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkinhad, warned that his country would shoot down US rockets, and even fire on the sources that launched the missiles  raising the prospect of direct engagement between US and Russian forces.

 General Richard Barons on Russia's claim it will shoot down US missiles fired at Syria: 'That is war'

In a tweet responding to the threat, President Trump said: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria.

Get ready, Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart. You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Government insiders suggested it is unlikely that parliament would be called before it returns from the Easter recess on Monday.

It means that if Ms May decides to join any action before then she risks a backlash from MPs, including many on the Conservative benches, who think there should be a vote before any deployment.

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

Tony Blairs decision to take the country to war in Iraq in 2003 was the first time such a decision was put to a vote in the Commons.

In 2011 David Cameron offered no vote before UK air strikes on Libya, but won a retrospective one shortly after, once British service personnel were committed.

But then in 2013 he lost a vote to take action against Assad in Syria, winning votes the following two years to take limited action against Isis in Iraq and Syria.

Mr Corbyn urged the Government to wait for an inquiry into the source and usage of the chemical weapons used in Syria.

He went on: Parliament should always be given a say on military action.

Thats a case that Ive made going back many, many years in parliament. Obviously the situation is very serious, obviously there has to be, now, a demand for a political process to end the war in Syria.

 Syria civil war: Footage shows children treated following chemical weapons attack in Douma

The Labour leader also warned against a bombardment which leads to escalation and leads to a hot war between Russia and America over the skies of Syria.

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable said that while the use of chemical weapons crossed a clear red line, ministers should present their evidence of regime involvement to MPs.

A unilateral response by any country, outside of a wider strategy, without allies is not the way forward.

There must be a debate and vote in the House of Commons ahead of any military action, he said.

SNP defence spokesman Stewart McDonald also called for a parliamentary vote before any decision to launch air strikes against the regime.Theresa Mays cabinet has agreed on the need to take action to deter the use of chemical weapons in Syria, ahead of an expected military strike on regime targets.

Downing Street said an international response would be coordinated with allies France and the US, to show that the use of toxic weapons in the Middle Eastern countrys civil war would not be tolerated.

The cabinet agreed that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had a track record of using chemical weapons and was highly likely to have been behind last Saturdays suspected chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma.

Recommended Chemical weapons agency to begin probe in Syria on Saturday

It comes as the armed forces of the Western allies, Syria and Russia all prepared for action, with The Independent understanding that missiles could be fired imminently.

During the two-hour cabinet meeting, in which every member of Ms Mays top team is said to have spoken, the prime minister said the Douma incident was a shocking and barbaric act which killed dozens of innocent people.

A readout from the urgent gathering called by the prime minister amid rising tensions said Ms May had explained that the attack was a further example of the erosion of international law in relation to the use of chemical weapons.

The readout went on: Following a discussion in which every member present made a contribution, cabinet agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged.

 Emmanual Macron says France has prood the Assad used chemical weapons in Syria

Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

Cabinet agreed on the need to take action to alleviate humanitarian distress and to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime Downing Street statement

Cabinet agreed the prime minister should continue to work with allies in the United States and France to coordinate an international response.

Ms May later spoke to US President Donald Trump. A Downing Street spokesperson said they "agreed that the Assad regime had established a pattern of dangerous behaviour in relation to the use of chemical weapons.

"They agreed it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged, and on the need to deter the further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime

"They agreed to keep working closely together on the international response."

Some military forces from Britain, France and the US are already in place to strike Syrian regime targets, with others reported to be manoeuvring into position.

Syrian government forces are said to have been moving out of harms way and preparing defences, while Russia has said it will take action to protect its personnel in Syria, raising the prospect of a clash between Russian and Western military assets.

 Former MI6 boss Sir John Sawers condemns Donald Trump's Twitter diplomacy with Russia amid Syria crisis

The Downing Street readout said: This afternoon cabinet met and received an update on the attack against innocent civilians in Douma, Syria, on Saturday.

The prime minister said it was a shocking and barbaric act which killed up to 75 people, including children, in the most appalling and inhumane way.

Cabinet agreed that the Assad regime has a track record of the use of chemical weapons and it is highly likely that the regime is responsible for Saturdays attack.

 General Richard Barons on Russia's claim it will shoot down US missiles fired at Syria: 'That is war'

It is possible that an attack could come as early as Thursday night, with British attack submarines said to be on standby in the Mediterranean Sea, while RAF fighter jets based in Cyprus could also be used.

But an early attack would intensify domestic pressure on the prime minister, who faces demands from her own back benches and from Labours Jeremy Corbyn and other party leaders to allow parliament a vote prior to any action.

Former Tory chancellor Ken Clarke said earlier on Thursday: In a modern, parliamentary democracy, I think you have got to have parliamentary approval if you have a planned, policy decision to launch a military attack of any significant size.

 Jeremy Corbyn condemns Donald Trump's rhetoric on Syria: 'More war will not save life'

To say that parliament is just sidelined before you take such a serious decision is a very retrograde step. It makes parliamentary accountability fairly pathetic.

French president Emmanuel Macron also laid the ground for action, undertaking a round on interviews in which he said he had proof the Assad regime was responsible for an air strike involving chemical weapons on civilians in Douma.

He explained that he would decide on what action to take once all the information had been verified, insisting he would strive to prevent an escalation of conflict across the Middle East.

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

Mr Macron has previously called for a strong response to last weekends attack on the town, for which the Syrian government denies responsibility.

Donald Trump was also meeting his own security officials after a day in which he continued verbose diplomacy over social media.

Recommended Follow the latest tweets from Donald Trump and what they really mean

After earlier having told Russia to get ready for missiles to hit Syrian targets he took to Twitter to say an attack on the country could be very soon or not so soon at all!.

Just 24 hours earlier he had said on the same platform: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria.

Get ready, Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart. You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Russias ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkinhad, had warned that his country would shoot down US rockets, and even fire on the sources that launched the missiles.A former head of MI6 has hit out at Donald Trump for using Twitter to conduct critical diplomatic communications with Russia ahead of a potential conflict in Syria.

Sir John Sawers suggested Mr Trumps use of social media would not provide the clarity of message to Moscow needed, as the worlds superpowers squared up following the alleged chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma.

The ex-British intelligence chiefs call for better lines of communication to the Kremlin came after the President took to Twitter on Wednesday, to tell Russia to get ready for missiles to hit Syrian Government targets.

UK and US military forces are reported to have moved into position for strikes on Syrian regime infrastructure, with Theresa May due to hold a war Cabinet meeting later on Thursday afternoon.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4s Today programme, Sir John said the West was back to a level of danger in relations with Russia not seen since the Cold War, and that Western leaders now had to be perfectly clear in communications with Moscow.

He said: It is one of the weaknesses. I dont put this down just to the current US administration.

I think it goes back to the Obama administration, that failed to develop and invest in lines of communication at ambassadorial, or ministerial or head of state level, where although there are serious disagreements between Russia and the United States, there is at least clarity, so the scope for misunderstanding was minimised.

 US v Russia on Syria: The story so far

He went on: Weneed very clear commutation  not by tweet and I dont approve of what President Trump is doing  but his instincts on this issue, that you do need to respond is basically right.

The method for communicating with Moscow is not right.

With tension rising on Wednesday, Russias ambassador to Lebanon, Alexander Zasypkinhad, warned that his country would shoot down US rockets fired at Syrian targets, and would even fire on the sources that launched the missiles  raising the prospect of direct engagement between US and Russian forces.

In a tweet responding to the threat, President Trump said: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria.

 Donald Trump: 'nothing is off the table' for US response to alleged Syria chemical attack

Get ready, Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart. You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Downing Street sources said the Cabinet meeting  unusual during a parliamentary break  represented the next phase of Ms Mays approach to the crisis, following her conversations with Mr Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron and national security officials.

With the callout notice for the cabinet meeting sent on Wednesday night, the Prime Minister appeared to harden her language on the Douma incident, in which reports suggest bombs filled with a chemical substance were dropped on the town leaving more than 40 people dead.

Ms May said: All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible and we will be working with our closest allies on how we can ensure that those who are responsible are held to account and how we can prevent and deter the humanitarian catastrophe that comes from the use of chemical weapons in the future.

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 continued use of chemical weapons cannot go unchallenged.

She told reporters during a visit to Birmingham that she was appalled but not surprised by Russias decision to veto a draft resolution at the United Nations on Tuesday, which sought to create a new body to determine responsibility for the attack.

Indicating that she believes the diplomatic route may have been exhausted, she said: There can be no role now for investigations by the United Nations.

British attack submarines are reported to have moved into position in the Mediterranean Sea, while Tornado fighter bombers are said to be on standby in Cyprus.Hundreds of protesters laid the bodies of 17 people killed in clashes in the Central African Republics capital in front of the United Nations peacekeeping offices.

UN peacekeepers and local security forces have battled armed groups in Banguis PK5 neighbourhood, a largely Muslim enclave within the majority Christian city.

One Rwandan peacekeeper was killed and eight others wounded in fighting on Tuesday.

The surge in violence coincides with a visit by Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the UNs head of peacekeeping operations.

A demonstrator holds up a placard reading Too much is too much, we have enough (Getty) (FLORENT VERGNES/AFP/Getty Images)

The demonstrators, who blame UN soldiers for firing on residents protesting against the operation in PK5, carried the bodies wrapped in cloth to the gates of the mission, known as Minusca.

They shouted and carried improvised signs as armed peacekeepers stood before the entrance to the fortified compound.

The Red Cross quickly removed the bodies from outside the embassy.

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which operates one of the main hospitals in Bangui, said it had treated more than 40 people for gunshot wounds on Tuesday.

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

Violence increased in the Central African Republic after mainly Muslim Seleka rebels ousted its president, Francois Bozize, in 2013, provoking retaliation killings by Anti-balaka armed groups, drawn largely from Christian communities.

Self-styled Muslim self-defence groups sprang up in PK5, claiming to protect the Muslim civilians concentrated there against efforts to drive them out.

But Minusca now accuses them of extortion and violence against civilians and said it had launched the operation in PK5 at the request of the neighbourhoods residents.

In a statement late on Tuesday, Minusca said Rwandan peacekeepers had come under attack.

For four hours, the Minusca force had to push back heavily armed elements of criminal gangs who deliberately opened fire on the international forces, who fired back, it said.

Any attack against [UN troops] can constitute a war crime.Stephen Bannon, who was ousted as White House chief strategist last summer but has remained in touch with some members of president Donald Trumps circle, is pitching a plan to West Wing aides and congressional allies to cripple the federal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

The first step, these people say, would be for Mr Trump to fire deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the work of special counsel Robert Mueller and in recent days signed off on a search warrant of Mr Trumps longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Mr Bannon is also recommending the White House cease its cooperation with Mr Mueller, reversing the policy of Mr Trumps legal team to provide information to the special counsels team and to allow staff members to sit for interviews.

And he is telling associates inside and outside the administration that the president should create a new legal battleground to protect himself from the investigation by asserting executive privilege  and arguing that Mr Muellers interviews with White House officials over the past year should now be null and void.

The president wasnt fully briefed by his lawyers on the implications of not invoking executive privilege, Mr Bannon told The Washington Post in an interview on Wednesday. It was a strategic mistake to turn over everything without due process and executive privilege should be exerted immediately and retroactively.

There is no indication that Mr Trump, who forced out Mr Bannon and later said his former adviser had lost his mind after leaving the West Wing, would be willing to take Mr Bannons advice or is aware of the plan. Several of Mr Trumps aides also remain sceptical of the former strategists attempt to insert himself into the presidents decision making process.

If you say his name in front of the president, its not a pretty sight, said a senior administration official. The president really goes off about him.

Nonetheless, Mr Bannons efforts signify the growing pressure from an influential wing of Mr Trumps political base to thwart Mr Mueller, who, many allies of Mr Trump believe, presents an existential legal and political threat to his presidency.

Mr Trump boosters in Congress are preparing to take legislative action against Mr Rosenstein and other justice officials over the disclosure of documents related to the Russia investigation. That push is seen by Mr Bannon and others in the White House as a cause that could prompt Mr Trump to act and shift much of the Russia investigation to Capitol Hill, where Republicans control both chambers.

Mr Trump remains furious with the Mueller probe, which on Wednesday he blasted on Twitter as never ending and corrupt. He has also considered firing Mr Rosenstein, whom he has criticised for approving surveillance applications of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which extended a warrant that partly relied on information that was funded in a roundabout way by Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign.

Mr Bannon and his allies sense that Mr Trump simply needs a nudge to fire Mr Rosenstein, according to the people familiar with Mr Bannons discussions. They said Mr Trump has recently told friends and aides that he is willing to engage in political warfare in the coming months to stop his presidency from being consumed by the investigation.

Mr Bannons conversations, including a meeting on Tuesday night between the former strategist and Trump confidants, have so far remained through back channels.

The 64-year-old strategist has huddled in recent days  at his Capitol Hill townhouse, a Washington hotel and over the phone  with a handful of White House aides, GOP lawmakers and conservative media figures who speak frequently with Mr Trump, according to people involved, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

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 Bannons standing within Mr Trumps orbit is tenuous. In January, lawyers for Mr Trump accused Mr Bannon of breaking a confidentiality agreement by making critical comments about Mr Trump and his family in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff.

Ever since, Mr Bannon has seen his domestic political operation  which was focused on the 2018 midterm elections  fizzle and his attention has turned abroad to boosting far-right nationalist candidates in Europe, giving speeches and promoting his hardline views on global affairs. Amid all of that activity, he has regularly spoken with White House officials and lawmakers about Mr Trump and offered informal guidance on issues such as trade and the Russia investigation.

Mr Bannon, who has been interviewed extensively by Mr Muellers team, remains sensitive about directly approaching Mr Trump with his call to fire Mr Rosenstein and curb justices grip over the Russia probe, the people added, noting that federal investigators could raise questions about such exchanges.

Some top Trump advisers, such as White House counsel Donald McGahn, are said to be alarmed by the suggestions to fire Mr Rosenstein or Mr Mueller, worrying that such moves could prompt mass resignations at justice and a constitutional crisis, the people said. Mr McGahn, who in the past has threatened to step down if the president fired Mr Mueller, is widely seen within the West Wing as liable to resign if Mr Rosenstein is fired.

A guy leaning on a mop over the justice department may be the guy who ends up firing Mueller, one person said.

Asked on Wednesday afternoon whether Mr Trump would be pushing out Mr Rosenstein, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, I dont have any personnel announcements. But she offered no words of support for Mr Rosenstein, signalling that the deputy attorney generals job may be in jeopardy. Later on Wednesday, a White House spokesman pointed to Ms Huckabee Sanderss news conference when asked for comment about Mr Bannon.

Legal experts are dubious about Mr Bannons idea that the White House could suddenly claim executive privilege on interviews that were given voluntarily by officials and be able to exclude them from an investigation that is partly reliant on those interviews. They also wonder if this action would even be allowed under the law and say its certain to be challenged in court.

But Mr Bannon believes Mr Trump can argue he was given poor counsel by his lawyers on Russia, including Ty Cobb, who has encouraged a cooperative approach to Mr Muellers team.

Ty Cobb should be fired immediately, Mr Bannon said.

Mr Cobb declined to comment.

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The case against Mr Rosenstein has featured prominently in the closed-door discussions among Mr Bannon and other figures on the right, with Mr Bannon arguing that voters in the GOP base will stick by the president if he removes Mr Rosenstein despite protests from Republican leaders and many others.

Mr Rosensteins approval of the Cohen warrant, which led to raids on Monday on Mr Cohens home and office, has angered Mr Trump and prompted him to vent over the past day about Mr Rosenstein being out of control, one Republican lawmaker said.

If Mr Rosenstein were fired, his replacement could reel in the authority that Mr Mueller was granted last year and set new parameters for the scope of the Russia investigation, according to Louis Seidman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University.

Depending on how aggressive this person wanted to be, they could dismiss the criminal cases, they could get rid of the grand jury, Mr Seidman said. In the end, if Trump is determined, the people he appoints could shut it down.

For Mr Bannon, this hostility to Mr Mueller represents an evolution. A year ago, he opposed the firing of then FBI director James Comey and recommended a hands-off approach to the Russia investigation and justice.

I have the utmost respect for Bob Mueller and attorney general Jeff Sessions, but the developments over the past two weeks make it the right time to shift the centre of gravity of this back to Capitol Hill, Mr Bannon said. Make the Republican Party own this, force them to have his back.

The Washington PostLouisianas state senate has approved a bill explicitly banning sex with animals by 25 votes to 10.

The bill, which now goes to the House of Representatives, would make sexual abuse of an animal illegal; require an abused animal to be taken from its abuser; and bar those convicted from owning any pets in future.

A law covering crimes against nature  which includes bestiality  exists on the books, but was ruled unconstitutional in 2003 by the Supreme Court because it also included anal sex between consenting adults.

The state senator who wrote and sponsored the bill, JP Morrell, said it was written to better define bestiality and make it illegal under an enforceable law.

The current law, which Mr Morrell says is far too ambiguous, defines bestiality as carnal copulation with an animal.

The new bill, titled SB236, states any person who engages in sexual contact with an animal, or knowingly participates in an animal being sexually abused, will be charged.

 Animal charity take in 'Whisky' the goat after previous owner force fed animal alcohol and cocaine

Ahead of the vote, Mr Morrell told lawmakers: God forbid you vote against this bill, good luck explaining it.

The 10 senators  all Republican  who voted against the bill were senate president John Alario, Brett Allain, Dan Claitor, Jack Donahue, Jim Fannin, Ryan Gatti, Gerald Long, Beth Mizell, Jonathan Perry and Neil Riser.

Gene Mills, president of the conservative Louisiana Family Forum, perhaps gave an indication of the reason for Republican opposition to the bill.

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 believe (current) Louisiana law is instructional in nature and is written to reflect the values of the citizens of the state, he said. The last thing we need is another law on the books.

Mr Mills told The Times-Picayune newspaper if Mr Morrells intention was to ultimately strike the states anti-sodomy laws from the constitution, the Louisiana Family Forum would oppose it.The Florida school shooting suspect has offered to donate any inheritance money he is eligible for to the victims and families of the massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School, which left 17 dead.

Nikolas Cruzs lawyer said the 19-year-old, who is alleged to have opened fire at the school in the small city of Parkland, does not want any money from his mothers life insurance policy or any other source of income after reports surfaced he could potentially inherit $800,000 (648,600) from his parents.

It is not yet known whether the families of the 14 students and three members of staff killed or the more than a dozen left injured would accept such a gesture of reconciliation from the accused teenager.

Melissa McNeill, his lawyer, said: Mr Cruz does not want those funds, whatever money that he is entitled to. He does not want that money.

He would like that money donated to an organisation that the victims family believes would be able to facilitate healing in our community or an opportunity to educate our community about the issues that have ripened over the last four or five months.

Mr Cruz was in court on Wednesday for a hearing to decide whether he has too much money to expect taxpayers to pay for his legal defence.

But whether Mr Cruz is in that grouping is in an open question and Broward Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer said she would not respond immediately and instead give a ruling later this month.

Florida shooting  in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Florida shooting  in pictures Florida shooting  in pictures Police arrest a suspect in connection with the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida Reuters Florida shooting  in pictures Parents wait for news after reports of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida AP Florida shooting  in pictures Anxious family members wait for news of students AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee Florida shooting  in pictures Students being evacuated from the school AP Florida shooting  in pictures Students being evacuated from the school Getty Florida shooting  in pictures People gather waiting for word from students AP Florida shooting  in pictures Parents waiting for news on their children AP Florida shooting  in pictures People gather at a hotel where students were taken after the shooting Getty Florida shooting  in pictures Florida Governor Rick Scott speaks to the media as he visits Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School following the shooting AFP/Getty Florida shooting  in pictures Dr. Igor Nichiporenko, Medical Director Trauma, left, and Dr. Evan Boyer, Medical Director, Emergency Services, speak about treating victims and the suspect at a press conference outside Broward Health North hospital AP

Appearing in court in a red prison jumpsuit and shackles, the teenager kept his head bowed during the hearing and did not speak for the entirety of it.

Let it go to those who have been hurt, Howard Finkelstein, another public defender, told Ms Scherer.

Mr Finkelstein started to reiterate that Mr Cruz was prepared to plead guilty if the option of the death penalty was removed but Ms Scherer and prosecuting lawyer Shari Tate interjected.

The state of Florida is not allowing Mr Cruz to choose his own punishment for the murder of 17 people, Ms Tate said.

The hearing comes after it emerged the accused Parkland shooter has been receiving piles of fan mail at the Florida prison where he is being held.

Mr Cruz has been sent suggestive photographs, greeting cards, encouragement and other kind notes, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel which gained copies of some of the messages.

Recommended Florida killer suspect Nikolas Cruz receives adoring fan mail

The paper showed a thick stack of hundreds of pages of photocopies of the letters he has had posted to him.

Youre in a tough spot, Nik and that is something I know, because Ive been there myself. If you need something, I can mail to you ... ask. If you need to talk ... Ill listen, one letter penned to Mr Cruz read.

Mr Finkelstein, whose office Broward County represents Mr Cruz, voiced concerns about the notoriety Mr Cruz was gaining.

The letters shake me up because they are written by regular, everyday teenage girls from across the nation. That scares me. Its perverted, he said.

But it is by no means a new phenomenon and the pattern of so-called serial-killer groupies with other killers and men accused of violent crimes has been witnessed before.A Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School teacher left a loaded gun in a public restroom and it was fired by someone, according to local police.

Parkland, Florida, chemistry teacher Sean Simpson left his loaded Glock 9mm handgun at a Deerfield Beach Pier bathroom, according to the Broward County Sheriffs report. Mr Simpson had volunteered to arm himself while in the classroom in the wake of the 14 February mass shooting that killed 17 people at his school.

Mr Simpson said he left the gun there by accident, the Miami Herald reported. By the time Mr Simpson had returned to the bathroom to retrieve his weapon an inebriated man called Joseph Spataro had fired a bullet from the gun into the bathroom wall.

The Parkland teacher was able to grab the weapon from Mr Spataro, who was then charged with trespassing and firing a weapon while intoxicated. Mr Simpson was also arrested and charged with failure to safely store a firearm, which is a second-degree misdemeanour.

He has been released on $250 bond.

His arrest came just days before the Broward School Board rejected a proposal to arm teachers and other school staff, a move proposed nationally by President Donald Trump. Last month, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a school safety bill that allows some school teachers to carry guns.

The $400m bill, written since the 14 February mass shooting, balances our individual rights with need for public safety, said Mr Scott. Neither the shooting survivors nor the powerful gun lobby organisation the National Rifle Association (NRA) are pleased with the bill, however.

 11-year-old Naomi Wadler delivers amazing speech on gun violence at March For Our Lives protest

The legislation creates a so-called "guardian" program that enables teachers and other school employees in participating districts to carry handguns if they complete law enforcement training. The program will be up to local officials to implement and "if counties don't want to do this, they can simply say no," Mr Scott explained.

It also raises the minimum age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, extends a three-day waiting period for handgun purchases to include long guns, and bans bump stocks that allow guns to mimic fully automatic fire.

March for Our Lives  in pictures Show all 13 1 /13 March for Our Lives  in pictures March for Our Lives  in pictures Demonstrators chant during the protest for gun legislation and school safety AP March for Our Lives  in pictures Trevon Tre Bosley, 19, of Chicago, the brother of Terrell Bosley who was killed in 2006 in a case of mistaken identity, speaks during the rally AP March for Our Lives  in pictures Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Delaney Tarr speaks at the rally AFP/Getty March for Our Lives  in pictures Protestors line the streets in Washington Getty Images March for Our Lives  in pictures People arrive for the March For Our Lives rally against gun violence in Washington, DC AFP/Getty March for Our Lives  in pictures Protestors carrying placards in Washington AFP/Getty March for Our Lives  in pictures Protestors hold up placards in Washington AFP/Getty March for Our Lives  in pictures Schoolchildren wear targets ahead of the rally Getty March for Our Lives  in pictures Attendees congregate in preparation for the march Getty March for Our Lives  in pictures Students brought a host of innovative placards AFP/Getty March for Our Lives  in pictures The movements main demand is the banning of assault rifles Getty March for Our Lives  in pictures Since the Florida shooting, students have called for urgent gun reform AFP/Getty March for Our Lives  in pictures In the wake of the Florida attack, President Donald Trump called for teachers to be armed AFP/Getty

The NRA, however, thinks even those limits are a sign of "bullying and coercion," as NRA and Unified Sportsmen of Florida lobbyist Marion Hammer said in a statement. The group felt the new limits restrict people's Second Amendment right to bear arms and a way to punish and demonise legal gun owners.

"Obviously, this is what we've been fighting for. It's nowhere near the long-term solution," said Chris Grady, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

"It's a baby step, but a huge step at the same time. Florida hasn't passed any legislation like this in God knows how long. It's nowhere near what we want, but it's progress and uplifting to see," he said.

Parkland survivors have been out marching, taking politicians to task on social media, and speaking to the press in full force since the shooting, advocating for an assault weapons ban across the country, but particularly in Florida. The gunman, suspected to be former student Nikolas Cruz, used an AR-15 assault-style rifle. The bill would still allow the AR-15 to be sold in the state.

In response to gun ownership advocates and the presidents calls to arm school staff, Olivia Bertels, a Kansas middle school English teacher, and Brittany Wheaton, an English teacher in Utah began the #ArmMeWith social media movement, where teachers have been posting about arming them with counselors, better technology, more books, and higher pay to help their students.US Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the US has a crisis on the border with Mexico as Texas and Arizona have committed to sending National Guard troops there stem illegal immigration.

He was speaking in Las Cruces, New Mexico, at a meeting of local border town sheriffs as construction on part of the roughly 2,000 mile border wall is underway nearby. The city lies about 20 miles north of the border and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials say the heightened steel barrier will be harder to get over, under, and through than the old post and rail barriers that line the stretch of sprawling desert.

A 37 per cent increase in illegal border crossings in March brought more than 50,000 immigrants into the US, which was triple the number of reported illegal border crossings in the same period last year. As a result, President Donald Trump has authorised having up to 4,000 National Guard troops to man the border.

However, that number is still far lower than the surges of border crossings during the last years of the Obama administration and prior decades. At least 150 soldiers will deploy from the Arizona National Guard as early as next week, according to Governor Doug Ducey. The Texas National Guard said it will send 250 troops to the border.

Mr Sessions also said the Department of Justice recognised that the sheriffs are the thin blue line that stands between law-abiding people and criminals  between a familys security and lawlessness. You protect us and our communities, and you secure our country from drugs and violence. It parrots Mr Trumps rhetoric tying illegal immigration with violent criminals.

Last week Mr Trump, ditching his official comments on tax reform for a speech in West Virginia, said women in a caravan of migrants travelling through Central America to the US, fleeing gang violence and drug cartels, are [being] raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before, despite there being almost no evidence on which to base the claim.

 Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in talks with governors of border states about deploying national guard

Mr Sessions comments also came on the heels of his directive to US Attorneys in the southwest region regarding a zero tolerance policy on individuals caught while crossing the border illegally. He advised that first time offenders be prosecuted with a felony charge, a break from the past the first time when such offences were treated as misdemeanours.

He also set quotas for immigration judges to reduce enormous court backlogs, saying they must complete 700 cases a year to earn a satisfactory grade. The quotas take effect 1 October 2018.

Life on the US-Mexican border Show all 12 1 /12 Life on the US-Mexican border Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico A house stands next to a section of the border fence separating Mexico and the US Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico The border fence in Tijuana stretches all the way to beach Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico Migrants can often be spotted trying to cross the rusty barrier Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico Joaquin, 36, a chef from Guatemala who says he was deported from the US Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico A shack stands next to a section of the border fence Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico Tourists pose for a picture at the border Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico A family burns rubbish near the fence Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico Joaquin makes a living by selling rubbish Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico Neither Trump nor the wall is going to stop anyone, says Pedro Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico Mexicans have built homes right next to the fence Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico Mexican Carlos, 27, who says that he was deported from the United States, heats up tortillas at his house near the double fence that separates Mexico and the US Reuters Life on the US-Mexican border Tijuana, Mexico A girl climbs stairs near a section of the fence

Mr Trump also just ended the catch and release policy, which allowed immigrants who entered the US illegally are released from detention while awaiting a court hearing on their status. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the catch and release practice is dangerous because undocumented immigrants should not be allowed on parole.

The safety and security of the American people is the presidents highest priority, and he will keep his promise to protect our country and to ensure that our laws are respected. At the same time, the President continues to call on congressional Democrats to cease their staunch opposition to border security and to stop blocking measures that are vital to the safety and security of the US, the White House said in a statement.

Agencies contributed to this reportFBI agents who raided the offices of Donald Trumps personal lawyer were reportedly searching, among other things, for records about the Access Hollywood tape in which the president made lewd comments about women.

The Access Hollywood tape, taken from Mr Trumps 2005 appearance on the programme, showed the president bragging about being able to sexually assault women.

He said that when he met a beautiful woman he felt able to grab them by the pussy.

He hold host Billy Bush: When youre a star they let you do it. You can do anything.

Published by The Washington Post, shortly before the presidential election, Mr Trump was widely denounced and forced to issue a public apology.

It was unclear what role Mr Trumps lawyer, Michael Cohen, played Mr Trump's response to the tape, or whether he played any role at all.

But The New York Times reported that the FBI agents who searched Mr Cohen's office this week, were looking for evidence that he had suppressed negative information about Mr Trump during the campaign.

It was previously reported that they were also looking for documents concerning payments to Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford, who claim they were paid to keep silent about their affairs with Mr Trump.

Mr Cohen has previously admitted to paying $130,000 (92,000) to Ms Clifford, a porn star who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels.

 Donald Trump rages over search of his lawyer Michael Cohen's office, describing it as a 'break-in'

Ms Trump has denied having an affair with Ms Daniels and Ms McDougal.

Sources told CNN the warrant also referenced an investigation into wire fraud and bank fraud.

Mr Cohens lawyer, Stephen Ryan, did not immediately respond to The Independents request for comment, but he has previously claimed the raid was spurred by a tip from Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating possible Trump campaign ties to Russia.

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 Trump condemned the raids, repeating his allegation that the Mueller investigation was a total witch hunt. He called the situation with Mr Cohen "a disgrace," and claimed the raid was an attack on our country".

Taking to Twitter, he wrote: Attorney-client privilege is dead!

The raid of Mr Cohens offices was carried out by federal prosecutors, not Mr Muellers team. But Mr Trump continued to rail against the Mueller investigation this week, and White House spokespeople have not ruled out the prospect that the special counsel could be fired.

Weve been advised that the president certainly has the power to make that decision, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.Donald Trumps nominee for secretary of state has proved he is solidly in the presidents corner, dodging questions about the Russia investigation and endorsing the presidents stance on several international conflicts at his Senate confirmation hearing.

Outgoing CIA Director Mike Pompeo faced members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, as they vetted him to replace former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. The bipartisan group grilled their former colleague on mounting tensions with North Korea, Iran, and Russia  on all of which, Mr Pompeo backed up the administrations positions and actions.

Asked about the diplomatic consequences of pulling out of the Paris climate accord, for instance, Mr Pompeo defended Mr Trumps decision to pull out of the landmark international agreement.

There will be places that our allies come alongside us, and others that they dont, the former US representative from Kansas said. And my task as the chief diplomat will be to get Americas position well known and to rally the world to the causes that benefit America.

This sentiment extended to Mr Pompeos answers on North Korea, where he refused to rule out the possibility of a preemptive strike  something Mr Trump has previously threatened. The former army captain said he was optimistic about a planned summit between Mr Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, which he said would put the two countries on the course towards a diplomatic outcome.

 Rex Tillerson fired: Trump has 'total confidence' in new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

But in a testy exchange with Senator Ed Markey, Mr Pompeo said he could "imagine a time when America would need to take a response that would move past diplomacy" in dealing with North Korea.

"I don't feel comfortable with you not taking [military action] off the table," Mr Markey responded.

Several other senators expressed discomfort with the nominee's previous remarks about Iran. As a congressman, Mr Pompeo spoke out passionately against the Iran nuclear deal  an Obama-era agreement that Mr Trump has called the worst deal ever. At one point, he suggested using force to wipe out Irans nuclear capabilities instead.

The nominee backtracked on some of these comments on Thursday, saying he did not believe a first strike on Iran was prudent. Instead, he endorsed the presidents plan to fix the nuclear deal or withdraw by 12 May. Even after that date, he said, there's still much diplomatic work to be done.

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

The biggest test of the nominees loyalty to Mr Trump came in the form of repeated questions about Russia, as well as the ongoing investigations into possible Trump team collusion with Moscow.

Mr Pompeo confirmed he had been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller but refused to disclose details of the conversation, even after repeated questioning. He also said he would not resign if Mr Trump fired the special counsel  something the president has reportedly attempted to do several times already.

My instincts tell me that my obligation is to continue to serve as Americas senior diplomat would be more important at increased times of political and domestic turmoil, he said.

But Mr Pompeo was firm in his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who he said was working to undermine democracy in the West. He agreed to implement additional sanctions against Russia, and advocated pushing back against Moscow's efforts around the globe.

He also defended Mr Trump against allegations that he had been soft of Russia, pointing to the presidents decision to expel 60 Russian diplomats this month. He also highlighted Mr Trump's decision to personally call out Mr Putin for his support of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

The nominee also worked to distinguish himself from Mr Trumps first secretary of state, Mr Tillerson, who the president fired in March after months of tension. Mr Pompeo said he would work quickly to fill demoralising vacancies that his predecessor had left at the department, including key roles like the ambassador to South Korea.

I will work every day to provide dedicated leadership and convey my faith in their work  just as I have done with my workforce at the CIA, he said.

Mr Pompeos confirmation now moves to a full Senate vote.The British connection in the investigations into Donald Trump and the Kremlin will be in focus at a grand jury session this week with the appearance of a witness with ties to Nigel Farage and others in the Brexit campaign.

Ted Malloch, an American academic living in the UK, has been detained by the FBI and questioned about his involvement in the Trump presidential campaign. He was also asked about his alleged links to Julian Assange and whether he had met the Wikileaks founder at his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Mr Assange has been accused of playing a part in disseminating Democratic Party emails, allegedly hacked by the Russians, which damaged Hillary Clintons presidential campaign and helped that of Mr Trump.

The FBI agents, according to Mr Malloch, had also been keen to find out about his association with Roger Stone, a long-time supporter and confidant of Mr Trump, who had claimed in the past that he had met and had dinner with Mr Assange in London and that the Kremlin had been responsible for the Democrat hacking. Mr Stone is also reported to have known that Wikileaks were preparing to release the emails before they became public.

A subpoena was served on Mr Malloch and his mobile telephone seized by the FBI when he flew to Boston from London at the end of last month. At the same time, he says, he was warned that it was a felony offence carrying a term of imprisonment to lie to the FBI.

Mr Malloch is due to testify on Friday 13 April to a grand jury as part of the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the US presidential election which allegedly helped Mr Trump to the White House.

The UK has been increasingly featuring in the Mueller investigation. Alex Van der Zwan, living in London, became the first person to be jailed due to the inquiry. The 33-year-old lawyer, who had previously worked with Mr Trumps former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was sentenced to 30 days in prison and fined $20,000 (14,000) after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI.

The start of the FBI investigation in July 2016 into the Russia allegations can now be traced back to information which came from London even before the former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, produced his explosive Trump dossier.

In the summer of 2016 George Papadopoulous, a young Trump foreign policy advisor, confided to Alexander Downer, the Australian high commissioner to the UK, at west London bar the Kensington Wine Rooms that the Russians held thousands of emails which would embarrass Hillary Clinton. Australian intelligence officials passed on details of the conversation to their American counterparts after the emails began to be published by Wikileaks. Mr Papadopoulous, it emerged, has made contact with Moscow through Roger Mifsud, a Maltese academic, then also based in London.

Mr Papadopoulous has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is now cooperating with Mr Muellers investigators.

The revelation by Mr Papadopoulous was followed by another key strand in the inquiry, the dossier on Mr Trump and Russia put together by Mr Steele, which was passed on to the FBI director James Comey by senator John McCain.

Mr Malloch, it was claimed, was going to be appointed as ambassador to the European Union if Mr Trump became president. His outspoken anti-Brussels views alarmed some senior European officials, including Manfred Weber and Guy Verhofstadt, who publicly raised doubts about his suitability for the post.

The stance of the EU officials drew the ire of Arron Banks, the former Ukip funder and co-organiser of the Leave.EU campaign. His Westmonster website described the objections to Mr Mallochs supposed appointment, as EU nationalists attempting to block Trumps EU Ambassador.

Nigel Farage, who interviewed Mr Malloch on his LBC show, described him as the man tipped to be Trumps EU ambassador and wrote an afterword for a book by Mr Malloch called Hired: An Insiders Look at the Trump Victory. Mr Farage tweeted after a television appearance by the academic: Ted Malloch is the boy! Mr Farage also met Mr Malloch in Brussels, with The Spectator magazine reporting it had been passed a snap of Farage meeting this morning with Trumps soon-to-be man in Brussels, professor Ted Malloch.

But serious doubts were raised over Mr Mallochs credibility after a Financial Times investigation discovered that some of the claims about himself were untrue. He had not, as he had said in his autobiography, been knighted into the Sovereign Order of St John by the Queen, nor has he been called a genius by Margaret Thatcher.

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. 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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. 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Mr Malloch was not a fellow of an Oxford College, as he had also claimed and had not been an ambassadorial level official at the UN. He had also, it was discovered, declared himself bankrupt in 2013. The Trump administration then told The Wall Street Journal that Mr Malloch was not and never had been, considered for the post of European Union ambassador.

Mr Malloch, however, has told associates that he was able to organise a visit to Trump Tower in New York by Mr Farage, Mr Banks and another Brexit campaigner, Raheem Kassam. He has known Mr Trump since 1981, he says, and claims that he was involved in arranging Mr Trumps visit to Brussels and Italy. Mr Kassam, who now works for Breitbart, a right-wing website started by, among others, Mr Trumps former chief strategist Steve Bannon, told The Independent Mr Malloch, who he had not met, did not arrange his New York trip.

Mr Malloch, who has a book coming out next month, referred questions to his publishers. They produced a long statement by him in which he described his detention and questioning by the FBI at Boston airport on 27 March.

After exiting the plane, I was escorted to a special line for passport control. There, I was formally detained and asked to wait, along with my wife who was travelling with me. I was then escorted to another building and into a secure conference room where two young FBI agents introduced themselves to me. They said I was being detained to answer questions regarding the Department of Justice special counsel probe and showed me their identification, he said.

They seemed to know everything about me and had my colour photograph and personal details and said in intimidating ways, that it was a felony to lie to the FBI. I stated that I realised that and I would readily, in fact gladly, cooperate with them ... The questions got more detailed about my involvement in the Trump campaign (which was informal and unpaid); whom I communicated with; whom I knew and how well  they had a long list of names...

Mr Malloch wanted to stress that he had not met Mr Assange and had only met Roger Stone in the company of other people.

It may well be that Mr Mallochs exaggerations about his importance had drawn him to the attention of the FBI and Robert Mueller. But it is now clear from the scope and scale of the investigation that it is continuing to spread with interrogations and detentions following from witness interviews.

Mr Stone had, in the past, claimed that as well as meeting Mr Assange, he had a source in London who was a mutual friend of him and Mr Assange and this source had told him about the impending Wikileaks release of the Democratic Party emails. Mr Assange announced in June 2016 that Wikileaks had the Clinton emails and that they would be published soon.

A month later Mr Stone said he believed the Russians were probably behind the hacking. He said at the time the reason that the Russians are probably leaking this information is because they dont want a nuclear war. [Hillary Clinton] is bent on a war that benefits her donors and the multinational corporations and the defence contractors.

Mr Stone now denies meeting Mr Assange and also denies that the Russians were behind the email hacking.

Glenn Simpson, whose investigations firm hired Mr Steele to produce the Trump report, told a US Congressional inquiry in January that Mr Farage was a more frequent visitor to Mr Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy and had passed data on to Mr Assange in a thumb drive.

Mr Farage has stated that he only met Mr Assange once, in March 2017, for journalistic purposes and on no other occasion. The Twitter account of Wikileaks said the question was about what kind of data. Game of Thrones or emails? 2016 or 2017? Simpson answers with a diversion.

Mr Farage told The Independent: Yes, I met Ted Malloch a few times. I read his book and I thought what he had to say about the death of Davos Man was fascinating. He is an East Coast Conservative with interesting views.

Other than that I do not know about him and the Trump campaign and why he has been questioned and is before a grand jury or why there should be questions about me.

I met Julian Assange just once. I went there in a journalistic capacity because like you I wanted to find out about the emails, no real answer was forthcoming. It is nonsense to say that I had met him secretly. Do you think one of the best known faces in the country can go into the embassy without people noticing?The backlash against Donald Trump if he fired special counsel Robert Mueller would be like nothing youve seen, a former US government ethics chief has warned the president.

America is stronger than you, Walter Shaub told the Republican who last night plugged a Fox News programme featuring strong criticism of Mr Mueller and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, following the raid on his personal lawyers office.

Mr Shaub, who served as director of the US Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017, tweeted: Dear @realDonaldTrump, stop and reflect on how things got worse for you after firing Comey.

If you go after Mueller or Rosenstein, the reaction will be like nothing youve seen.

America is stronger than you because our forefathers were smarter than you and they planned for you.

Mr Trump fired FBI director James Comey last May over what were described as serious mistakes in his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clintons use of a private email server.

It came after a meeting between the pair in which Mr Trump was said to have asked the director for his loyalty, and a public declaration that he was not personally under investigation over Russian election meddling.

But Republican congressman Mark Meadows, a Trump ally, said he did not expect a new purge.

The president is not talking about firing Mueller. Ive had conversations with the president, and hes not talking about it, Mr Meadows said.

 Donald Trump rages over search of his lawyer Michael Cohen's office, describing it as a 'break-in'

On Monday the FBI raided the offices of Michael Cohen, a long-time Trump associate, in what the president described as a break-in and disgraceful situation.

A search warrant used in the raid sought bank records, business records on his dealing in the taxi industry and Mr Cohens communications with the Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Agents further seized records on a $130,000 (92,000) payment to adult actress Stormy Daniels, who claims she had sex with Mr Trump. The president has said he was not aware of the payment.

The raid was overseen by the US Attorneys office in Manhattan and was based in part on a referral from Mr Mueller.

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 Mueller is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Mr Trump has described the probe as a witch hunt and on Wednesday said it was fake and corrupt, headed by Democrat loyalists, or people that worked for Obama.

He tweeted: Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter). No Collusion, so they go crazy!

Additional reporting by agenciesOne of Donald Trumps federal judicial nominees has failed to say she supports the landmark US Supreme Court ruling that outlawed racial segregation in schools.

Wendy Vitter, Mr Trumps nominee for the US District Court for Eastern District of Louisiana, dodged questions about the historic Brown v Board ruling during her confirmation hearing.

I dont mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions, which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with, she said, when asked whether she thought the ruling had been decided correctly.

Recommended Trump judicial nominee unable to answer basic legal question withdraws

She added that she would set aside her personal, political or religious views if confirmed, and would of course uphold the ruling. The decision has been the law of the land since 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that establishing separate but equal schools for black and white students was unconstitutional.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, seemingly dumbfounded, asked Ms Vitter again if she thought the ruling had been correctly decided.

"I would respectfully not comment on what could be my boss ruling, the Supreme Court, she said. I would be bound by it. And if I start commenting on, I agree with this case, or dont agree with this case, I think we get into a slippery slope.

Ms Vitter is a New Orleans-based attorney who serves as the general counsel of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans. She is married to former Louisiana Senator David Vitter, who was involved in a 2007 scandal concerning a Washington prostitution ring.

Ms Vitter was also questioned on Wednesday about some of her past comments on abortion. In a May 2013 speech protesting a new Planned Parenthood clinic in New Orleans, Ms Vitter claimed the womens health clinic kill[s] over 150,000 females a year.

In her hearing, Ms Vitter confirmed she was referring to foetuses at the time, but declined to say that she stood by the claim.

My pro-life stance has been very clear, she told Mr Blumenthal. I have been very upfront with this committee about my views and about how serious I take it, and that I would set aside any personal or religious views if I were to be confirmed.

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

Her comments were a source of particular interest, as Vice News revealed she had failed to disclose this speech  and many other pro-life speeches  to the Senate Judiciary Committee before her hearing.

Asked if she had purposefully omitted these speeches in order to avoid tough questions, Ms Vitter responded: "My life has been an open book. It was always my intent to provide this committee with a full background and explanation of both my personal and professional life."

Ms Vitters confirmation requires only 51 votes in the Senate, meaning Republicans could easily approve her if none deviate from the party line.As the intrigue behind the upcoming US-North Korea summit gains momentum, theories on where the summit will be held prompted an additional question: how will North Korean leader Kim Jong-un travel to the meeting location?

While the summit on 27 April between South Korean president Moon Jae-in and Mr Kim is expected to be held at the truce village of Panmunjom on the border, the location and the exact date for Mr Kims meeting with Donald Trump is yet to be announced.

Some analysts have pondered whether Mr Trump might prefer a different setting, like Switzerland, Iceland or Sweden. A different destination, however, may pose a problem for Mr Kim.

As North Koreas leader, Mr Kim has only taken one international trip and that was to neighbouring China  via train. He may not have an aircraft capable of flying nonstop over long distances, some analysts cited by The Washington Post said.

We used to make fun of what they have  its old stuff, former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry said to The Washington Post. We would joke about their old Soviet planes.

They dont have an aircraft that can fly across the Pacific  most are quite old, added Joseph Bermudez, an analyst at 38 North, a US-based North Korea think tank.

Stopping by another country mid-journey to refuel could point out the limitations of North Koreas aircraft and by extension, the ruling powers struggle to keep up with technological advances.

But other aviation experts believe North Koreas fleet may include aircraft that have an excellent safety record and have the ability to make international trips.

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

Air Koryo, North Koreas state-owned airline, has two Tupolev jets  aircraft similar to the Boeing 757 jetliner  which have a 3,000 mile range, aviation journalist Charles Kennedy told The Washington Post.

Despite the potential limitations North Koreas aircraft may pose, Mr Kim would still have other options, according to Victor Cha, a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies and a Korea analyst at MSNBC.

In terms of his travelling anywhere, it would not be a problem  the South Koreans or the Swedes would give him a ride, Mr Cha said in the report. But it would be embarrassing.

Read more:

 Barnier: Britain has to follow EU regulations forever if it wants a Brexit trade deal

 Trump is weighing a massive strike on Syria  and it could bring all-out war with Russia

 Mark Zuckerberg gave his grueling testimony to Congress from a 4-inch booster seat

Read the original article on Business Insider UK.  2018. Follow Business Insider UK on Twitter.New Zealand has banned all new permits for offshore oil and gas exploration, the government has announced.

The change in direction, which faced furious opposition by industry groups, was hailed as an example of bold global leadership by environmental campaigners.

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern said it would help protect future generations from climate change and promised nobody would be losing their job as a result.

Unless we make decisions today that will essentially take effect in 30 or more years time, we run the risk of acting too late and causing abrupt shocks to communities and our country, she said at a press conference on Thursday.

The move, however, will not affect existing permits for exploration or extraction, meaning the industry will likely be operational for several more decades.

Ms Ardern, who is the worlds youngest female head of government, has pledged to go green by reducing the countrys net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.

Her government plans to plant 100 million trees each year and ensure the electricity grid runs entirely from renewable energy.

James Shaw, the New Zealand Green Partys co-leader and climate change minister, praised the move as the nuclear-free moment of our generation  a reference to a 1984 ban on nuclear-armed ships entering New Zealands waters.

Greenpeace New Zealands executive director, Russel Norman, said: The tide has turned irreversibly against big oil in New Zealand.

Todays announcement is significant internationally too. By ending new oil and gas exploration in our waters, the fourth largest exclusive economic zone on the planet is out of bounds for new fossil fuel exploitation. New Zealand has stood up to one of the most powerful industries in the world.

Bold global leadership on the greatest challenge of our time has never been more urgent and Ardern has stepped up to that climate challenge.

Voters last year elected a liberal coalition government, headed by Ms Ardern, following nine years of conservative leadership that favoured expanding the oil industry.

 Filmmakers use 100-year-old photograph to map effect on climate change on a glacier

The oil and gas industry is relatively small in New Zealand, employing about 11,000 people and accounting for about 1 per cent of the overall economy. It is dwarfed in importance by farming and tourism.

But the industry is important to the Taranaki region, where most of the activity is centered. New Plymouth mayor Neil Holdom told Radio New Zealand the move was a kick in the guts for the future of the Taranaki economy.

10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Show all 10 1 /10 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A group of emperor penguins face a crack in the sea ice, near McMurdo Station, Antarctica Kira Morris 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Floods destroyed eight bridges and ruined crops such as wheat, maize and peas in the Karimabad valley in northern Pakistan, a mountainous region with many glaciers. In many parts of the world, glaciers have been in retreat, creating dangerously large lakes that can cause devastating flooding when the banks break. Climate change can also increase rainfall in some areas, while bringing drought to others. Hira Ali 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Smoke  filled with the carbon that is driving climate change  drifts across a field in Colombia. Sandra Rondon 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Amid a flood in Islampur, Jamalpur, Bangladesh, a woman on a raft searches for somewhere dry to take shelter. Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to sea level rise, which is expected to make tens of millions of people homeless by 2050. Probal Rashid 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Sindh province in Pakistan has experienced a grim mix of two consequences of climate change. Because of climate change either we have floods or not enough water to irrigate our crop and feed our animals, says the photographer. Picture clearly indicates that the extreme drought makes wide cracks in clay. Crops are very difficult to grow. Rizwan Dharejo 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Hanna Petursdottir examines a cave inside the Svinafellsjokull glacier in Iceland, which she said had been growing rapidly. Since 2000, the size of glaciers on Iceland has reduced by 12 per cent. Tom Schifanella 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A river once flowed along the depression in the dry earth of this part of Bangladesh, but it has disappeared amid rising temperatures. Abrar Hossain 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A shepherd moves his herd as he looks for green pasture near the village of Sirohi in Rajasthan, northern India. The region has been badly affected by heatwaves and drought, making local people nervous about further predicted increases in temperature. Riddhima Singh Bhati 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A factory in China is shrouded by a haze of air pollution. The World Health Organisation has warned such pollution, much of which is from the fossil fuels that cause climate change, is a public health emergency. Leung Ka Wa 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Water levels in reservoirs, like this one in Gers, France, have been getting perilously low in areas across the world affected by drought, forcing authorities to introduce water restrictions. Mahtuf Ikhsan

Opposition MP Jonathan Young described the move as economic vandalism. This decision is devoid of any rationale. It certainly has nothing to do with climate change, he said. These changes will simply shift production elsewhere in the world, not reduce emissions.

The Petroleum Exploration and Production Association branded it a lose-lose for New Zealands economy.

The idea of an expansion in offshore drilling has proved contentious in New Zealand, particularly after problems elsewhere such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The announcement does not apply to onshore exploration permits. The government said those would continue for the next three years and be reviewed after that.

Additional reporting by APChina executed more people than the rest of the world combined last year, according to Amnesty Internationals new annual report on capital punishment.

Thousands of people were sentenced to death in the country, although exact figures remain unknown because such killings are kept a state secret, the report said.

Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan were also named as notable users of capital punishment. Together, the three countries executed more than 830 people.

But the report, released on Thursday, also highlighted an overall global decline in death penalties. Excluding China, some 993 were carried out in 23 countries in 2017  down four per cent from the previous year and 39 per cent from 2015.

Some 2,591 death sentences  not necessarily yet carried out  were recorded in 53 countries, down from 3,117 the year before, the London-based human rights organisation said.

And it particularly praised sub-Saharan Africa as a beacon of hope, highlighting the fact 20 countries in the region had now abolished the death penalty. Just two states there  Somalia and South Sudan  carried out executions last year.

With such progress, "the isolation of the world's remaining executing countries could not be starker," said secretary general Salil Shetty.

But the organisation said it would like to see the numbers come down even further.

It said the continued use of the death penalty for drug-related offences in countries including Singapore and Malaysia was distressing. And it drew attention to how the US, Japan and the Maldives had all placed people with mental or intellectual disabilities on death row.

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 countries, it noted, had resumed use of capital punishment in 2017, including Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

Worldwide at least 21,919 people are known to be awaiting a death sentence. Amnesty International said: "Now is not the time to let up the pressure."A Greek air force fighter pilot has died after their jet crashed in the eastern Aegean Sea amid rising tensions and near-daily mock dogfights in airspace disputed with Turkey, Greek defence ministry officials have said.

Greek navy ships and army helicopters were dispatched to search for the missing pilot, whose death was later announced by the countrys defence minister.

A Greek pilot joins the pantheon of heroes. He fell in the defence of our national sovereignty and territorial integrity, Panos Kammenos said in a tweet.

Officials from the Greek defence ministry told the state broadcaster that a Mirage 2000-5 jet crashed north of the island of Skyros.

They did not mention a possible cause, but patrols have intensified in recent weeks along the disputed boundary over the Greek islands, with both Turkey and Greece flying sorties in the area.

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

Though generally unarmed, their close engagements have led to fears of a potentially inflammatory accident.

Greek media reported a pair of Mirages were scrambled to intercept Turkish jets in the Aegean earlier on Thursday.

Turkeys military denied any involvement in Thursdays crash, according to the Haberturk newspaper, saying there were no Turkish planes in the area at the time.

The crashed Mirage was one of two sent to intercept Turkish planes in the area, according to Ekathimerini.com, which cited defence sources as saying no hostile action was involved in the crash.Emmanuel Macron has said he has proof the Syrian government used chemical weapons in an air strike on civilians in the city of Douma.

The French president added he would decide on what action to take once all the information had been verified, insisting he would strive to prevent an escalation of conflict across the Middle East.

Mr Macron previously called for a "strong" response to last weekend's attack on the Syrian town, which left a reported 70 people dead and 500 more injured. The Syrian government denies responsibility.

:: Follow the latest updates in our live blog

His comments came as Chancellor Angela Merkel ruled Germany out of any possible military action in Syria. She added it was hard to do nothing and restated the importance of unity among Western allies.

Donald Trump said on Thursday that a possible military strike against Syria "could be very soon or not so soon at all" while Theresa May is convening a special meeting of her cabinet to discuss a potential military response to the incident.

The French president does not need parliamentary permission to launch a military operation. France is already involved in the US-led coalition to fight Isis in Syria and Iraq.

The attack was first reported by Syrian rebel group Jaish al-Islam on Saturday.

Inspectors with the global chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, are due to investigate the incident.

 Syria crisis: Theresa May to chair emergency Cabinet meeting

The UK, US and its allies have promised a joint response to the suspected chemical attack.

Speaking on Wednesday, Ms May said "the chemical weapons attack that took place on Saturday in Douma in Syria was a shocking and barbaric act", adding that "all the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible".

She is not obliged to win parliament's approval for military intervention, although Jeremy Corbyn has said parliament should be consulted before any action is approved.

Mr Trump has issued a direct threat of a retaliatory strike, saying Russia should "get ready" for missiles to be fired at its ally Syria.Israeli authorities are investigating why Dublins mayor was allowed in the country even though he was banned for supporting boycotts against the country.

Interior minister Arieh Deri ordered an inquiry after Michael Mac Donncha announced he was in the West Bank city of Ramallah for a conference. He landed at Israel's Ben-Gurion airport.

Israel planned to block his entry because of his support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement, which has urged businesses, artists and universities to sever ties with the country.

Supporters of the movement say the tactics are a nonviolent way to promote the Palestinian cause. Israel meanwhile, has maintained the campaign goes beyond fighting its occupation of territory Palestinians claim for their state and often masks a more far-reaching aim to delegitimise or destroy the nation.

Israel says the campaign, with its call for a return of Palestinian refugees to land inside Israel, goes beyond opposition to the West Bank occupation and masks a deeper aim of destroying the country.

As a result it has blacklisted a number of individuals and organisations over their support.

Mr Mac Donncha, who claimed he was unaware that he had been banned, said attempts to bar his entry failed, because officials spelt his name wrong.

 Aerial footage shows Palestinian protests on the Gaza-Israel border

The Israeli strategic affairs minister did allow me in, he told Irish radio station, Newstalk's breakfast show. He said the problem was someone spelling my name wrong.

In an earlier statement, Mr Mac Donncha said he was going to Ramallah to acknowledge that East Jerusalem is the designated capital of Palestine under the two-state solution.

I am also here to express solidarity with the people of Palestine who are suffering violence from Israeli forces, as witnessed in Gaza most recently with the shooting down of protesters, he added.

Interior Minister Arieh Deri, who ordered an inquiry after Mr Mac Donncha's arrival, said that said that upon his departure, he would be notified he will not be allowed back.

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

Earlier this week, Dublin City Council voted to urge the Irish government to expel Israels ambassador over the killings of Palestinian protesters in Gaza.

Militant group Hamas has called for Palestinians to amass at the border with Israel as part of a weeks-long campaign of protests against a decade-old Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the territory.

Twenty-six protesters have been killed thus far.

Additional reporting by AP Close US v Russia on Syria: The story so far

Theresa May's cabinet has agreed on the need to "take action" to deter use of chemical weapons following an emergency meeting at Downing Street.

The prime minister summoned her senior ministers to No 10 to discuss joining the United States and France in possible military strikes against Syria after saying all the indications were Bashar al-Assad's was responsible for a suspected nerve agent attack on civilians last weekend.

President Donald Trump had warned Russia of imminent military action in Syria, declaring missiles will be coming and denouncing Moscow for standing by Syrias president, but on Thursday night the White House said that "no final decision" had been made about what Washington will do.

Mr Trump, Ms May and French President Emmanuel Macron have been in regular contact as they plot a course of action, with Mr Macron saying France has "proof" the Syrian government carried out the chemical attack which killed potentially doxens.

It followed the Kremlin's insistence that it would shoot down any missiles and attack their source, in developments that have placed the two global and nuclear superpowers closer to open conflict than at any time since the Cold War.

Our live coverage has ended for now - but read a full account of the day's events in the blog below. Please allow a few seconds for it to load.

Russia has repeatedly warned the West against attacking the infrastructure of Syria's government and army, which is also supported by Iran.

Moscow has said there was no chemical attack in Douma, near the capital Damascus.

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

Ms May recalled the ministers from their Easter holiday for a special cabinet meeting in Downing Street to discuss Britains response to what she has cast as a barbaric attack which cannot go unchallenged.

The chemical weapons attack that took place on Saturday in Douma in Syria was a shocking and barbaric act, Ms May said. All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had said it intends to send investigators to Douma to look for any evidence of a chemical attack.

Ms May has faced calls to wait for unequivocal proof of a chemical attack by the Assad regime before committing British forces to retaliatory action.

The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, joined other opposition parties, as well as some Conservative backbenchers, in insisting MPs must be have a say on any British involvement in military action.

However, Ms May faces growing impatience from Washington, after Mr Trump's tweet to say the missiles will be coming.

The prime minister is not obliged to win parliaments approval, but a non-binding constitutional convention to do so has been established since a 2003 vote on joining the US-led invasion of Iraq.

It has been observed in subsequent military deployments in Libya and Iraq.

Britain has been launching air strikes in Syria from its military base in Cyprus, but only against targets linked to Isis.

Parliament voted down British military action against Mr Assads government in 2013, in an embarrassment for David Cameron.

The vote deterred Barack Obamas administration from similar action.

Additional reporting by agenciesThe Russian ambassador to the United Nations has urged the US and its allies not to take military action over the apparent chemical attack in Syria, saying the immediate priority was to avert the danger of war.

International tensions have spiked over the attack, with Washington holding Russia partially culpable for what they believe is the use of chemical weapons on the town of Douma by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Moscow has backed Syria in denying allegations of the attack, and Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said he cannot exclude war between the US and Russia if President Donald Trump uses missile strikes on Syria, as he has threatened.

The immediate priority is to avert the danger of war, Mr Nebenzia said after a behind-closed-doors meeting of the UN Security Council. We hope there will be no point of no return.

He added that the presence of Russian troops in Syria, with Moscow backing the government of Mr Assad in the countrys civil war, meant that the world was facing a dangerous situation.

Pressure has been mounting for a coordinated international response, with Mr Trump putting himself front-and-centre on Wednesday in tweeting missiles will be coming. On Thursday, in an early tweet, the president made it clear he was still assessing what action to take. Never said when an attack on Syria would take place, he tweeted. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! He added.

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

Speaking later from the White House he said: We'll see what happens. Now we have to make some ... Decisions, so they'll be made fairly soon.

In the wake of a meeting between Mr Trump and his national security team on Thursday afternoon, the White House said no final decision has been made over what to do regarding Syria, and that the president was still assessing intelligence and speaking to international partners.

Mr Nebenzia has called for another emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Friday to hear from Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on threat to international peace and security from possible military action against Syria by the US and its allies.

Both Theresa May and French president Emmanuel Macron have said that they are working with Mr Trump to craft a response. Mr Macron has declared that France has proof that Mr Assads government was behind the attack in Douma, which is believed to killed dozens of people.

We have proof that last week ... chemical weapons were used, at least with chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Mr Macron said. We will need to take decisions in due course, when we judge it most useful and effective, he told broadcaster TF1.

 Emmanual Macron says France has prood the Assad used chemical weapons in Syria

According to reports by NBC News, US officials are in possession of samples of blood and urine from victims of the attack which suggested the presence of both chlorine gas and an unnamed nerve agent. Two unnamed officials told the outlet they were confident in the intelligence, though not 100 per cent sure.

A team of inspectors from international watchdog the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was on its way to Syria on Thursday to begin an investigation into the suspected chemical weapons attack.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday that it was obvious that Mr Assads government had not eradicated all its chemical weapon stocks, as mandated by a 2013 agreement brokered by Russia - which averted possible strikes by both the US and France

We... must now acknowledge that it is obvious that the destruction was not completely carried out, Ms Merkel said, noting that there is strong evidence that Damascus deployed the chemical weapons, but she ruled out being involved in any military action.

Back in Washington, US Defense Secretary James Mattis told Congress that he believes there was a chemical attack in Syria, but he has concerns over the use of military force.

Mr Mattis, addressing a hearing of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, declined to discuss US military planning on Syria, but acknowledged his two main concerns over military action: protecting civilians and avoiding triggering a military escalation that gets out of control.

I believe there was a chemical attack and we are looking for the actual evidence, Mr Mattis said. He added that the use of chemical weapons was inexcusable and claiming that with Russia blocking action being taken by the UN Security Council the US can sit acquiescent or do something about it.

US House Speaker Paul Ryan said that Mr Trump has the authority to take action against Syria under Congressional legislation and was against changes to legislation that ties the hands of the US military.

He added that the US has an obligation to lead an international response to the apparent chemical attack and that president Trump was being deliberate and careful in weighing up his options.

Agencies contributed to this reportThe first group of experts from the global chemical weapons watchdog have travelled to Syria to begin investigating an alleged nerve agent attack, the agency has said.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said the fact-finding mission would arrive in Syria on Thursday and start work in Douma, eastern Ghouta, on Saturday.

Bashar al-Assads regime is accused of killing more than 40 people, many of them children, in a chemical weapons attack on the town, a rebel enclave near Damascus.

Syria and its ally Russia have claimed reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers.

But Western powers are convinced regime forces were responsible and are considering military action against Syria.

Syrias UN ambassador said the regime would facilitate a visit by international chemical weapons inspectors at any point they want. Bashar Jaafari said OPCWs team were being given visas and claimed any delay or disruption of their visit would be as a result of political pressure from Western countries.

US president Donald Trump has pledged to respond forcefully to the alleged chemical attack and said America had a lot of options militarily.

We cant let atrocities like we all witnessed... we cant let that happen in our world... especially when were able to because of the power of the United States, the power of our country, were able to stop it, he said.

Theresa May joined Mr Trump in calling for a response if Syrian regimes latest use of chemical weapons was confirmed. She summoned ministers to a meeting at Downing Street on Thursday to discuss possible action.

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

Meanwhile, the Mr Trump was holding his own meetings in the US.

Fears of confrontation between the West and Russia, Syrias key ally, have been running high since the president said on Wednesday missiles will be coming and lambasted Moscow for standing by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

On Thursday, however, he wrote in a tweet: Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all!

Later, he added: Were having a number of meetings today, well see what happens. Now we have to make some... decisions, so theyll be made fairly soon.

French President Emmanuel Macron said France had proof the Syrian government carried out the attack near Damascus, which aid groups have said killed dozens of civilians, and will decide whether to strike back when all the necessary information has been gathered.

We have proof that last week... chemical weapons were used, at least with chlorine, and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, Mr Macron said, without offering details of any evidence.Amid speculation over an impending US missile strike on Syrian military assets, Donald Trump has tweeted that an American attack could come very soon or not so soon at all.

The US president said he never said when an attack on Syria would take place.

Mr Trump has said he will follow Israel in conducting an attack on the Syrian regime in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack on civilians in Douma, eastern Ghouta.

He tweeted: Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of Isis. Where is our Thank you America?

Mr Trump previously warned Russia to get ready, saying missiles will be coming.

After Moscow threatened to shoot down any missiles fired at Syria, Mr Trump tweeted: Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

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

The US defence secretary, James Mattis, said the US was assessing intelligence about the suspected gas attack.

Asked if he had seen enough evidence to blame the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, Mr Mattis said: Were still working on this.

Both the Syria and Russia have said reports of the attack were fabricated by rebels and rescue workers in Douma.

They have accused the US of seeking to use it as a pretext to attack the regime.The United Nations was only able to help a fraction of the impoverished North Koreans it had planned to as money was scarce in the face of rising tensions between the west and Pyongyang over nuclear weapons.

The UNs own Security Council sanctions were part of what hampered humanitarian aid supplies and financial transfers making their way into the country, UN resident coordinator Tapan Mishra told AFP News Agency. The UN was only able to solicit $31m in member country contributions of the required $114m.

Out of that 10.3 million people that Mr Mishra said need help, the UN targeted helping about four million with the decreased amount of aid money they had received. They reached approximately 660,000 people - or 15 per cent - of them.

Recommended Britain sends third warship to Asia Pacific to monitor North Korea

Undernutrition continues to be a serious concern with more than 25 per cent of children are stunted due to malnutrition, Mr Mishra said. People [are] struggling to have basic access to facilities including health, a large proportion of the population lives without a reliable source of safe drinking water, almost a quarter without basic sanitary facilities, he said, describing living conditions in the isolated nation.

As AFP reported: A higher proportion, two million out of a targeted 2.5 million, received nutritional support, which is cheaper to provide.

This year the UN is seeking approximately $111m in humanitarian aid for North Koreans, saying that even in times of war or conflict the needs of civilians should not be forgotten.

 Donald Trump says he 'believes' North Korea leader Kim Jong Un about peace talks

The sanctions imposed were intended to target oil, gas, textile, and seafood imports and exports of North Korea while attempting to stem some of the trade taking place between the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and countries like Russia, China, and Vietnam among others in southeast Asia.

The sanctions on the Foreign Trade Bank have been keeping North Korea "from honouring its obligation as a UN member state by hindering even normal activities such as payment of the UN contribution, the North Korean mission said in a statement in February. That same month, US President Donald Trump said the largest ever round of sanctions had been placed by the US on 50 North Korean companies, shipping vessels, and trade-related businesses.

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

The latest UN sanctions impose caps on North Koreas oil exports, bans all textile exports, and no country is allowed to issue work permits to those holding North Korean passports. Countries will also be allowed to freeze assets of cargo ships if they refuse to undergo inspections. Originally  before negotiations with China and Russia  the US had wanted to freeze all of Mr Kims assets, impose a travel ban on him, and have a total ban on oil imports.

The US and North Korea are set to meet at a location to be determined in May but there have been no talks of concessions being made on sanctions until Mr Kim decides to stop developing his countrys nuclear weapons programme.There are two types of people who go on holiday. Those who go straight for the local cats, and the misguided few who dont.

And while Istanbul, Rome and places further afield jostle for status as travel cat heaven, laidback Essaouira is quietly making things happen organically.

A charming coastal town, with none of the chaos that youll find in busier Moroccan cities, Essaouira has long been known for its surfing culture and the quality of its seafood restaurants.

Today, its also famous for being a Game of Thrones filming location.

One thing thats rarely mentioned in guides to Essaouira, however, is its status as unofficial cat nirvana. Here, on the shores of the tempestuous Atlantic, is a place that offers true joy for felines  and their adoring human friends.

The cats of Essaouira Show all 10 1 /10 The cats of Essaouira The cats of Essaouira Theres no competition for food between the cats here  because theres enough for everyone. Sanne Zurne The cats of Essaouira Stretching after a fulfilling nap behind a fishing crate Sanne Zurne The cats of Essaouira Portrait of a cat and his humble servant Sanne Zurne The cats of Essaouira Ships full of fresh fish arrive every day Sanne Zurne The cats of Essaouira The cats chillax on fishing nets Sanne Zurne The cats of Essaouira Here the bedding smells of their favourite food Sanne Zurne The cats of Essaouira Strokes are included with dinner here Sanne Zurne The cats of Essaouira The fishermen and the cats work hand in hand Sanne Zurne The cats of Essaouira Its easier to sleep on a full stomach Sanne Zurne The cats of Essaouira Its clear who is the boss here Sanne Zurne

At Essaouiras port lives possibly the happiest cat colony in Morocco. Well fed and completely relaxed, its inhabitants are quite a contrast to their counterparts across the rest of the country.

Why? Probably because they have certainty in life: a daily supply of more fresh fish than they could ever eat. Sardines, barracudas, eels  if it swims, the fishermen will sell it. And the cats are taking advantage.

An Essaouira cat dosing on the dockside (Sanne Zurne) (SanneZurne)

Essaouira fishermen seem to have a special connection with the port cats, giving them fine cuts of fish, along with the odd chin stroke. The leftovers  which a cat might usually be expected to eat  are for the seagulls.

With their bellies full the cats have a siesta on a bed of soft fishing nets, away from the wind. Anyone want to swap places?Shares in Norwegian, the rapidly expanding low-cost airline, have soared by one-fifth after IAG called its rival an attractive investment and sparked rumours of a possible takeover bid.

IAG, which owns airlines including British Airways, Aer Lingus and Iberia of Spain, has already bought 4.61 per cent of Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA. In an announcement, IAG said: The minority investment is intended to establish a position from which to initiate discussions with Norwegian, including the possibility of a full offer.

The conglomerate stressed that no such discussions have taken place, that no decision had been made to make an offer, and there is no certainty that any such decision will be made.

A further announcement will be made if appropriate, said IAG.

Shares in Norwegian soared from 18.70 to 22.59, an increase of 21 per cent, while IAGs share price initially dipped but then recovered.

A spokesperson for the Oslo-based airline said: Norwegian has just been made aware that the International Airline Group (IAG) has acquired of 4.6 percent of the shares in Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA.

Norwegian had no prior knowledge of this acquisition before it was reported by the media mid-morning Thursday.

Norwegian has not been in any discussions or dialogue with IAG about the matter. Norwegian believes that IAGs interest in the company confirms the sustainability and potential of our business model and global growth.

Norwegian was created in 1993 by a former fighter pilot, Bjorn Kjos, who remains its chief executive.

It has grown to become Europes third-largest budget airline, behind Ryanair and easyJet.

Unlike its giant rivals, Norwegian has a big and expanding low-cost, long-haul operation, with a large route network at Gatwick  mainly to the US, but also including Buenos Aires and Singapore.

It has also launched transatlantic flights from Barcelona, the base for IAGs Vueling subsidiary. In response, IAG set up Level, a low-cost, long-haul airline that flies many of the same routes.

Norwegian has also been cited by British Airways as a benchmark for costs on long-haul routes from Gatwick. BA is densifying its Boeing 777 fleet at the Sussex airport in order to become more competitive. In addition, on Wednesday it launched Economy Basic fares designed to compete with Norwegians offering.

Catching up? A Norwegian Boeing 737 at Schonefeld airport in Berlin, alongside a similar plane belonging to its giant rival, Ryanair (Simon Calder)

A takeover would also strengthen IAGs competitive position against low-cost, short-haul rivals, notably easyJet and Ryanair.

Mr Kjos recently told The Independent: You will always see airlines come and go. Mostly you will see them go.My name is Valerie Stark. But thats not my real name. In fact, I dont use the last name that I was given at birth for two reasons. First, its hard to spell and pronounce for non-Russian speakers. Second, after a few years of living in UK, I got tired of getting frowned upon or getting that commiserative look.

I quickly realised that acknowledging that youre Russian in the UK is like admitting that you have a deadly disease and you have only few weeks to live. And its contagious. Oh as a response to me talking about my national identity became the norm. I started to use my last name less and less. And eventually I completely dropped it.

Losing my last name didnt mean the end of the troubles, but at least I managed to avoid that look when my name was called for a reservation in the restaurant or when visiting a beauty salon. I stopped being a hooker or a criminal coming to laser off her nasty Russian pelage. I became Ms Stark, the woman with a few unwanted hairs.

However, my social life wasnt as smooth as my legs. Even though I wasnt the most social creature on planet Earth (mostly due to my workload), I definitely used to have a pool of people back home. People who I could call in the evening after a hard day at work and pop to their place with a bottle of wine on very short notice. And a couple of very close friends who didnt need any notice at all but needed two bottles of wine.

Things in London were very different. I struggled to make friends, and my nationality seemed like it was one of the main contributors to this problem. In fact, it started from day one when I arrived in London. I settled in the hotel, and after a short, refreshing walk, I went to the restaurant to have dinner. As I was waiting to be seated at the bar, I sparked up a conversation with two British men in their mid-twenties, and it was just a lovely chit-chat. Well, at least it was up until they asked me where I was from.

 US ambassador to UN Nikki Haley: 'Russia could stop this senseless slaughter if it wanted to but it stands with the Assad regime'

I dont have that prominent Russian accent were all familiar with, and most of the time people struggle to detect it. I told the boys that I was born in Moscow and expected some cheesy, tipsy comment about polar bears or vodka. But instead, it was, For f**ks sake. Not Russian!

I was shocked and, for a second or two, I tried to gather myself together to ask them why. But by that time, they were already gone.

Similar situations kept occurring, and each time they were more painful. At a yoga retreat, I was told by a yoga buddy to explain why all Russian women dress inappropriately.

A physiologist who I went to see for my pain in the neck (and I dont mean my nationality here) asked me if I was Russian as she was manipulating my C-3. Her response after receiving yes as an answer made my trust in her, as someone who I wanted to work on my vertebrae, quickly disappear. Her words still stick with me today: So many Russians with lots of money come here and buy all these expensive houses. You know we dont like each other. Well. You might not remember, but your mother definitely does. Cold War and everything. It was like a flow of really nasty diarrhoea coming from her mouth. She finished the session. I paid and walked away, and never went back.

Before moving to the UK, I had the impression that America and Europe were all about tolerance. Now I was coming to realise that tolerance and love towards other cultures isnt something that comes together with a certain citizenship or upon completion of a yoga retreat. Rather, theyre achieved through education, life experience and challenging ones own hypocrisies. Thinking that youre better than someone else because you were born and raised in a particular country that is now boasting its tolerance is a big fat myth.

There used to be such a thing as Clause 28, a law which existed in Britain up until 2003 that prohibited promoting homosexuality. Only 15 years ago, then, Britain was homophobic.

I understand that Russian culture might have been tainted by the revolution, Stalinism and the Cold War, and that the current political climate is very intense. I also appreciate that Russia still has a law similar to Clause 28, and that just few weeks ago the State Dumas Ethics Committee exonerated the chairman of Dumas International Affairs Committee who sexually harassed several female journalists.

Later, the Moscow State University dean, during his lecture at Novosibirsk State University, concluded that decent men can touch women anywhere. Yes, thats what he said, and thats a sad reality  but only if you compare it with reality in the UK or the US. Many Arab or Asian countries wouldnt even let harassment cases come to light.

Im also proud that half of the students walked out of the lecture hall in protest and that those young female journalists stood up for themselves. This would have been hard to imagine 10 years ago, and its happening now. Russia has long way to go when it comes to tolerance and equality, but this is due to entrenched prejudices from a long and painful Russian history. Things are changing, whether you want to believe it or not.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures 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 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

Even without going back in history, I can tell you that there are so many wonderful and talented Russians who are not only known in Russia but widely acknowledged internationally. Take Vika Gazinskaya, who designs clothes and recently launched a collection of vegan leather items which are sold everywhere, from Browns to MatchesFashion.com. Natalia Vodyanova is a renowned model, actress and philanthropist who runs the Naked Heart Foundation, which helps children with special needs and constructs play parks. Elena Shifrina founded BioFoodLab, which sells her healthy vegan Bite bars across the globe.

There are many more of amazing Russians who are definitely not criminals and hookers and who feel sad when they are being profiled and judged just because they are who they are.

Dont get me wrong both I and many other Russians living in and outside the UK absolutely adore British culture. There is a cult of British literature, movies and Britain itself in Russia. Russians obsessively read Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dickens, Wilde, Austen, Tolkien and, of course, J K Rowling. Our publishing houses reprint the works of Lewis Carol with handwriting and sketches inside and then cover the edges of the pages with gold. I have never seen one of those in the UK.

We love Charlie Chaplin, discuss every outfit of Kate Middleton, have multiple geeky communities who dress like Beowulf and Grendel and even some which speak Elvish. We listen to Robbie Williams and want to marry David Beckham, though only if he comes with Victorias wardrobe.

I myself studied the History of Western Europe while living in Russia and then comparative literature and Anglo-Saxon history for my BA and MA in the UK. I also met many wonderful Brits, including my favourite history teacher, Robin Anthony, who also knows how to speak Elvish and tells the best stories about Henry VIII.

But unfortunately, and despite my love of Britain, my nationality still plays a big role in how people treat me. I decided to write this opinion piece after being sent messages including Glad youre going back to Russia soon and Russian whore. Recent political events have dialled up the Russian-hating to 100.

I want people to hear about my experiences first-hand and not to buy into media speculations about Russians in Britain. What we need is more stories about self-made Russians who have assimilated happily into British life in the press, rather than articles and TV series which portray Russians solely as gangsters and corrupt oligarchs. We need movies about Russian culture, people and maybe even superheroes, rather than the same old storylines about spies and prostitutes. We need some of your love and respect and I believe we, as anyone else in this world, equally deserve it.

So far, what we have as a top definition of Russian in Urban Dictionary is An accent you can do to prevent yourself from getting mugged in a dark alley. Is that the best we can do?Oh, the hypocrisy of it. The ignoble aims. The distraction. The outrageous lies and excuses.

Im not talking about Americas tweet-from-the-hip president and his desire to escape from the cops raid on his lawyers office  theres a Russian connection, all right.

And Im not talking about his latest sleaze. Life with Melania might not be great at the moment. More distracting to sit with the generals and ex-generals and talk tough about Russia and Syria.

Im not talking about Theresa May, who wants to step out of the Brexit ditch with any distractions of her own: Salisbury attacks, Douma  even Trump. So Trump telephoned Macron, when the poor lady thought shed won his hand. What is this nonsense?

Macron has now hitched his own wagon to the Saudis against Iranian expansionism  and no doubt arms sales to the Kingdom have something to do with it. But how sad that the desire of young French presidents to act like Napoleon (I can think of a few others) means that they devote themselves to joining in a war, rather than pleading against it.

Now we have our spokespersons and ministers raging about the need to prevent the normalisation of chemical warfare, to prevent it becoming a part of ordinary warfare, a return to the terrible days of the First World War.

This does not mean any excuses for the Syrian government  though I suspect, having seen Russias Syrian involvement with my own eyes, that Putin might have been getting impatient about ending the war and wanted to eradicate those in the last tunnels of Douma rather than wait through more weeks of fighting. Remember the cruelty of Grozny.

But we all know the problems of proof when it comes to chemicals and gas. Like depleted uranium  which we used to use in our munitions  it doesnt, like a shell fragment or a bomb casing, leave a tell-tale hunk of metal with an address on it. When all this started with the first gas attack in Damascus, the Russians identified it as gas munitions manufactured in the Soviet Union  but sent to Libya, not to Syria.

But its a different war that Im remembering today. Its the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. When the Iranians re-crossed their own border and stormed into Iraq years later, Saddam used gas on thousands of Iranian soldiers  and civilians, for there were nurses and doctors at the war front.

Funny how we forget this now. We dont talk about it. We have forgotten all about it. Talk about the normalisation of chemical warfare  this was it!

Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Show all 12 1 /12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A man crosses a street in Aleppo, December 12, 2009 Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A vendor sits inside an antique shop in al-Jdeideh neighbourhood, in the Old City of Aleppo, December 12, 2009 Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A view shows part of Aleppo's historic citadel, overlooking Aleppo city, Syria Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A view shows part of Aleppo's historic citadel, Syria Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Visitors walk inside Aleppo's Umayyad mosque, Syria Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War People walk inside the Khan al-Shounah market, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A man walks past shops in al-Jdeideh neighbourhood, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War People walk along an alley in al-Jdeideh neighbourhood, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Visitors tour Aleppo's historic citadel, Syria December 11, 2009 Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A general view shows the Old City of Aleppo as seen from Aleppo's historic citadel, Syria December 11, 2009 Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War People walk near Aleppo's Bab al-Faraj Clock Tower, Syria October 6, 2010 Reuters Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A man stands inside Aleppo's historic citadel, overlooking Aleppo city, Syria December 11, 2009 Reuters

But in our desire to concentrate minds on Syria, were not mentioning the Iran gassings  Iran being another one of our present-day enemies, of course  and this may be because of our lack of official memory.

More likely its because of what happened: the institutionalisation of chemical warfare, the use of chemicals by Saddam who was then an ally of the West and of all the Gulf Sunni states, our frontline Sunni hero. The thousands of Iranian soldiers who were to die were referred to on Iraqi radio after they crossed the frontier. The Persian insects had crossed the border, it announced. And thats how they were treated.

For the precursors for the Iraqi gas came largely from the United States  one from New Jersey  and US military personnel later visited the battlefront without making any comments about the chemicals which were sold to the Iraqi regime, of course, for agricultural purposes. Thats how to deal with insects, is it not?

Yet not a soul today is mentioning this terrible war, which was fought with our total acquiescence. Its almost an exclusive to mention the conflict at all, so religiously have we forgotten it. That was the real normalisation, and we allowed it to happen. Religious indeed, for it was the first great battle of the Sunni-Shia war of our time. But it was real.

Of the thousands of Iranians who were asphyxiated, a few survivors were even sent to British hospitals for treatment. I travelled with others on a military train through the desert to Tehran, the railway compartments packed with unsmiling young men who coughed mucus and blood into white bandages as they read miniature Korans.

They had blisters on their skin and, horrifically, more blisters on top of the first blisters. I wrote a series of articles about this obscenity for The Times, which I then worked for. The Foreign Office later told my editors that my articles were not helpful.

No such discretion today. No fear of being out to get Saddam then  because in those days, of course, the good guys were using the chemicals. Dont we remember the Kurds of Halabja who were gassed by Saddam, with gas which the CIA told its officers to claim was used by the Iranians?

For this war crime, Saddam should have been tried. He was indeed a gas-killing animal. But he was hanged for a smaller massacre with conventional weapons  because, I have always suspected, we didnt want him exposing his gas warfare partners in an open court.

So there we are. May holds a war cabinet, for heavens sakes, as if our losses were mounting on the Somme in 1916, or Dorniers were flying out of occupied France to blitz London in 1940.

What is this childish prime minister doing? Older, wiser Conservatives will have spotted the juvenile quality of this nonsense, and want a debate in Parliament. How could May follow an American president who the world knows is crackers, insane, chronically unstable, but whose childish messages  about missiles that are nice and new and smart  are even taken seriously by many of my colleagues in the US? We should perhaps be even more worried about what happens if he does turn away from the Iran nuclear deal.

This is a very bad moment in Middle East history  and, as usual, it is the Palestinians who will suffer, their own tragedy utterly forgotten amid this madness. So we are going to war, are we? And how do we get out of this war once we have started it? Any plans, anyone? What if theres a gigantic screw-up, which wars do tend to usually produce? What happens then?

Well, I guess Russia comes to the rescue, just as it did for Obama when gas was used for the first time in the Syrian war.A man accused of murdering his estranged wife and hiding her body in a wardrobe has been found dead in jail.

Keith Lee, 42, who had been charged with killing Joanne Lee, in February was found unresponsive in his cell at Dublins Mountjoy Prison on Thursday.

Foul play is not suspected.

He had been arrested and charged after Ms Lees body was found at a house in south Dublin on February 15.

She had last been seen alive at her parents house in the Garristown area of Co Meath 10 days previously and Gardai had been carrying out inquiries as part of that missing person probe when they made the grim discovery.

Her body had been wrapped in a sleeping bag.

Lee had been hospitalised with serious injuries after being found by Gardai outside the property at Ranelagh Road in Dublin and was in a wheelchair when he appeared in court last month.

Meanwhile, Ms Lees uncle, John Curry described her as a lovely, beautiful girl and said her death had ripped the heart out of her family.Philip Hammond is 'foolishly pushing for a free trade agreement for the financial sector post-Brexit'

The British government must let go of "unrealistic" and "utopian positions" if it is to secure a free trade agreement with Europe post-Brexit, according to a former European commissioner for Economic and Financial Services.

Spanish politician Jaoquin Almunia said the cost of Brexit to the UK's financial sector must come at a "high price", at an event hosted by Irish Law firm Arthur Cox and Dublin City University.

He said members of the House of Commons, including Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip Hammond, were foolishly pushing for a free trade agreement for the financial sector that would mirror the single market.

He said it was "not wise.... to stick to these utopian positions".

"With only six months ahead of us, or less than six months to conclude the negotiations, this is not wise to stick to these utopian positions that will never be accepted," Mr Alumnia said.

European Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, has insisted the withdrawal agreement must be finalised by October in order to be ratified by March 29, 2019 when Britain formally leaves the EU.

Europe has rejected proposals from Britain which aim to secure access to the single market for financial services between the City of London and the EU27.

As a result, Dublin, Paris and Frankfurt are thought to be prime locations for companies who want to maintain the same access to financial markets in Europe.

Investment banks JP Morgan and Barclays have already moved to expand their Irish operations as a result.

Mr Almunia also said the British government had drawn red lines early on in negotiations and while these red lines have started to "fade", Britain must be the ones to pay the price for Brexit not the EU.

"Everybody is at risk of having losses but those who decided Brexit of course cannot be better off at the end," he said.

"To make this clear the British cannot be better off after Brexit, neither in financial services nor in many other areas."

He said the consequences of Brexit which include "fragmentation of financial markets, higher costs for financial services, loss of efficiencies and synergies, legal uncertainty" must come at a "high price" for the UK.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the EUs office for statistics Eurostat announced it was moving toward new aggregates which exclude information from the United Kingdom as it prepares for the country's departure.

The office which manages and publishes stats for Europe in areas of GDP growth and population numbers said the move was in response to "users requests".Artists impressions of how the Comer Groups development at Number One Ballsbridge will look upon completion

Ballsbridge is gearing up to become one of Dublin's dining out destination neighbourhoods. From next September with the Comers' opening of their new street connecting Shelbourne Road to Pembroke Road, at least three new upmarket food and beverage outlets - Avoca, Dylan McGrath and Butlers Cafe - will be open for business. These are expected to be supplemented by another cafe on the Pembroke Road side of the project.

In recent times, food and beverage trade in the area has been limited to catering for the local office workers from Monday to Friday. Unless there's a rugby match on the weekend, even the locals are inclined to go to the city centre where they can enjoy a much wider choice of restaurants and pubs.

Divided by a four-lane thoroughfare, the centre of Dublin 4 lacks the intimate village ambience of Ranelagh and Stoneybatter where the neighbourhood clusters of restaurants developed into new dining destinations.

But this could begin to be addressed later this year when Ballsbridge looks set to follow their example. D4's gastronomic geography will be helped by the hundreds of new apartments as well as the thousand square feet of extra office space which is being developed in the area.

The Comers' Number One Ballsbridge scheme has already signed up Avalon aircraft leasing for some of the 135,400 sq ft of Grade A office space in its 2.02 acre site.

In addition residents in its 88 new apartments can enjoy an 18-metre swimming pool. These facilities will help to create some of the more immediate demand for the retail, food and beverage operators which occupy 22,776 sq ft of retail space.

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Demand will also be boosted by hundreds more new residents who will move into the first of the new apartments being developed by Joe O'Reilly's Chartered Land at Lansdowne Place, formerly the Berkeley Court Hotel where one apartment sold last year for 6.5m. and where starting prices are as high as 850,000 for one-bedroom 750 sq ft units.

Already more than 100m has been generated from sales of apartments in the first three blocks of the 12 block Lansdowne project and it too will incorporate food and beverage and retail.

A Chartered Land spokesperson said high-end retail and premium food and beverage outlets will open on to a central plaza.

"There is 40,000 sq ft of retail space in the current planning permission. The retail is all located at ground floor level and will be in the same location as the original planning but the final design may alter all subject to future planning application. Construction is due to commence in 2019," she added.

Chartered also plan to develop a new 211-bedroom hotel on the site replacing the existing Jurys Hotel and this also can be expected to generate custom for the new restaurants.

As the Chartered Land project will have linkages to the Comers' development, the two together are expected to create a "vibrant village", and offer restaurateurs the opportunity to create a clustering effect. However with so many of the immediate neighbours living in million euro-plus apartments, the ambience is likely to be much more upmarket than that of Ranelagh or Stoneybatter.

Estate agent Simon Ensor of Sherry FitzGerald who has become a specialist in sales of million euro-plus Ballsbridge homes has welcomed the plans for the new Avoca food hall and restaurant. "It will bring what Ballsbridge has never had, a specialist upmarket food and grocery store. Donnybrook has had Donnybrook Fair and Dundrum is getting a Fallon & Byrne; in September Ballsbridge will have an Avoca," he says.

"It will also bring a fresh buzz to Ballsbridge, but not the buzz of late-night bars that you see around the city centre," he says.

His colleague, Louise Donnelly of Cushman & Wakefield, letting agent for Number One Ballsbridge, expects to complete deals with two retailers in the interiors and homewear trade for three of the units. This will leave five retail units available ranging in size from 1,000 sq ft to 1,800 sq ft. She is quoting average rents of 50 per sq ft for those.

Avoca has been reported to have agreed a rent in the region of 250,000 per annum for its 8,000 sq ft food hall.

Dylan McGrath is taking his 4,500 sq ft restaurant in a different building to the one earmarked for Avoca at a rent reported to be over 50 per sq ft.

But the key factor in the success of the new retail village will be the numbers of office workers employed in the other office development in the area.

More than 800,000 sq ft of new offices are in the pipeline for the whole of Ballsbridge. The Comer brothers were the first out of the blocks with their new offices at Number One Ballsbridge and their successful letting of 75,000 sq ft to Avalon has been a positive sign for the market. Even more positive was the report that financial services company CMIG has taken 2,900 sq ft in this development. Their rent of 70 per sq ft is 27pc higher than the 55 per sq ft rents paid for other recent nearby lettings at the Oval offices on Shelbourne Road by NTT Data, close to the new village.

Such strong rents appears to be encouraging other developers. David Daly has started demolition work on the former IPC House on a neighbouring site on Shelbourne Road where he plans to develop 67,000 sq ft of offices.

Meanwhile almost across the road office from Jurys, a planning application has been recently been made to increase the size of the hexagonal Carrisbrook House, the former home of the Israeli embassy to 24,700 sq ft. Colony NorthStar and U+I bought the office block on Pembroke Road for 23.6m last August.

Even more of a boost is likely should commit to taking a reported 45,000 sq ft at the Bank Centre site where developer Johnny Ronan plans 331,000 sq ft of new offices.Hammerson, the co-owner of the Dundrum Town Centre, has rejected a fresh takeover approach from French company Klepierre - saying the new 5bn (5.7bn) proposal continues to undervalue the UK property group.

But Hammerson said it remains open to discuss any proposal from Klepierre "which properly reflects the value of the company".

The latest proposal from Klepierre valued Hammerson at 6.35 per share - a 3pc increase in the previous proposal from the French firm. Klepierre has proposed paying half of that in cash and half in Klepierre's shares.

"The revised proposal represents only a marginal increase to Klepierre's unsolicited proposal of 6.15 made on March 8, which Hammerson's board unanimously rejected on the basis that it very significantly undervalued Hammerson, its track record of delivery, the quality of its portfolio, its market positions, and the opportunities it has for future value creation," the Dundrum co-owner said in a statement.

It added: "Accordingly, the board of Hammerson, having assessed the revised proposal with its advisers, believes it is not at a price that justifies further engagement with Klepierre and has unanimously rejected it."

"At 6.35, it is only a 3pc increase on the previous proposal and continues very significantly to undervalue the company," said Hammerson chairman David Tyler.

Under UK rules, Klepierre has until April 16 to announce a firm intention to make an offer for Hammerson, or to announce that it does not intend to make an offer.

Hammerson owns 50pc of Dundrum along with German insurer Allianz. It also owns 50pc of the Pavilions shopping centre in the north Dublin suburb of Swords, and half of the Ilac Centre in the capital.

Hammerson also owns 41pc of the Kildare Village outlet mall and is planning a major development called the Dublin Central scheme.

Hammerson said it had also delayed the finalisation of a 3.4bn (3.9bn) plan to buy UK rival Intu until it has more clarity regarding the approach for Hammerson from Klepierre.Concerns are mounting that new EU rules to limit the amount of toxin in fertilisers will give Russia an effective monopoly over the market and power over European food supply.

Final talks have begun at the European Commission in Brussels on proposals to cap the amount of the toxin cadmium in fertilisers.

Supporters say the limits - which will ultimately outlaw products with more than 20mg of cadmium per kilogram - will help protect peoples health, with research linking the toxin to organ failure, arthritis and fertility problems.

But opponents, including Britains National Farmers Union (NFU), say evidence does not support the strict EU limits, which they argue go beyond what is necessary to protect human health and will enable Russian suppliers to dominate the market.

Rival producers in North Africa and China have higher levels of the naturally occurring toxin in the phosphate they mine for fertilisers than Russian suppliers and may lose access to the European market if they are unable to invest in costly technology to reduce these levels.

Tensions have heightened in the West over Russian relations since an apparent nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Salisbury. Russia has shown a willingness in the past to exercise economic power over European markets, for instance in energy through giant Gazprom.

A fertiliser industry source told the Telegraph: Theres a very real risk if these limits go ahead, it will give Russia an effective monopoly over the European fertiliser market and greater power over our food supply.

The NFU has previously warned Europe could become solely dependent on Russia to supply phosphate and called on the EU to come to a sensible, evidence-based position which ensures that farmers are not left at a disadvantage in the global market.

However, environmental campaigners said the reforms were necessary. Emily Macintosh of the European Environmental Bureau said: Cadmium is a carcinogen that is also linked to osteoporosis, kidney failure, heart disease, and fertility problems.

As a bare minimum, EU governments must limit cadmium levels in many of the fertilisers sold in Europe to 20mg/kg.

The EU proposals would see cadmium levels limited to 60mg/kg initially, then 40mg/kg after six years and 20mg/kg after 10 years. The timescales were initially stricter, but were watered down by the European Parliament.

This week the European Commission began so-called trilogue talks between itself, the Parliament and member states to reach a final decision, with the aim of passing legislation by the end of June. Several member states are thought to oppose the strict limits.

A Commission spokesman said: Our positions remain unchanged and we look forward to an ambitious deal on phosphate fertilisers.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]As a compulsory part of second semester, Agricultural Science students in Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT) have to complete 15 weeks work placement. Jamie Doran .

Jamie Doran a third year Agricultural Science student at WIT and part-time Kildalton Agricultural college headed to New Zealand's South Island, where he's working on a 770-cow dairy farm.

He farms in partnership with his father, Martin, at Ballymurphy, Co. Carlow, where they run both beef and sheep enterprises.

Pencarrow Farm is owned by Andy and Tricia MacFarlane and Andy has his own farm advisory company based in Ashburton where Andy and his clients provide multi-disciplinary advice to the agricultural sector in the Canterbury region.

The farm has a 235ha effective milking platform, and according to Jamie, it's not like your typical mid Canterbury farm as the top end of the farm has a number of large trees and the rest of the farm is well broken up with shelter belts which provide shade for the cows on the hot summer days and excellent shelter for the wet and windy days.

At Pencarrow, 770 cows are split into two herds. The main breeds are Friesian, Jersey and Kiwi cross and they are milked in a 50-unit rotary parlour.

Morning milking starts at 4.45am and usually takes 75 minutes per herd. In the afternoon, milking starts at 2pm and takes 60 minutes per herd.

"At the moment the cows are receiving 1kg of supplementary feed in the shed consisting of crushed wheat and palm kernel. In the paddock they receive 20kg DM/day and up to recently some pre-graze mowing was done to increase dry matter levels in the paddocks.

"For the past three weeks or so the cows have been receiving some baled silage with the aim of increasing the round length and maximising cover in the paddocks. Also this week the feeding of fodder beet has start and the cows are getting 1.5kg (20pc DM) in the paddock.

The cows are milking well at the moment producing 1.7kg ms/day, according to Jamie, which is just over the target of 1.65kg ms/day for the month of March.

"At peak production in October the cows produced 2.1kg ms/day. The aim for this season was to produce 485kg/ms/cow but the extreme hot weather in November meant that the cows dropped off peak a lot faster than normal and decreased that aim to 475kg/ms/cow which would be 100pc of their live weight!"

Key farm stats

Farm size: 235ha

Cow numbers: 770

Milking parlour: 50-unit rotary parlour

Peak production: 2.1kg ms/day

The soil here is a stony silt loam type soil, according to Jamie, but it is very fertile and free draining with a water holding capacity of 99, according to Brad and Viana Fallaver - the managers on the farm.

"Pencarrow is fully irrigated using a mixture of set sprinklers, k-lines, a rotorainer, 3 pivots and a lateral. These are typically all the types of irrigation that would be used in the Canterbury region. There are a number of soil moisture probes throughout the farm allowing us to constantly monitor soil moisture levels, indicating when to irrigate and how much water to apply to the pastures."

In 2008 a 3ha storage pond was developed at the top end of the farm to hold water from the Lyndhurst irrigation scheme. The water is diverted from a main alpine river, gravity fed and naturally pressurised with 8 bar of pressure to irrigation points on the farm.

This type of irrigation is very efficient comparing to its predecessor, the border-dyke system where the land would be flooded, washing valuable nutrients through the soil and furthermore polluting ground waters, Jamie says.

"The weather has very good since I came over in mid-January. When we landed in Christchurch it was 34C  something I had never experienced before! The highest temperature was recorded just a couple of weeks ago when it reached 36C in south Canterbury.

"The drought back in December saw a huge increase in soil temperature (over 20 C) and grass growth declined as a result along with dry matter levels. The irrigation couldnt keep up with the blistering heat and 7-8 mm of water was lost due to evaporation each day during the drought.

"The rain in early January meant that there was a sudden burst in growth, grass grew too quickly and went to seed early meaning that quality was reduced having a direct effect on milk production. This, along with sub-tropical air coming down from the north in recent times was something that the cows didnt like and as a result they spent a lot of time in the shade which meant that intakes were down."

A cyclone in February saw 45mm of constant rain fall by 9am, which was almost the expected average monthly rainfall for February, and by 9pm a staggering 110mm of rain had fallen.

The cows will be dried off at the end of May and wintered off-farm where they will be receiving up to 10kg fodder beet, 2kg silage and 2kg of straw per day. From there they will be brought back in calving groups and calved on the farm with a 68pc six-week calving rate.

The Canterbury region has mainly dairy and tillage enterprises with a few sheep farms in between and typical yields for wheat and barley, coming from irrigated land would be 10t/ha, maize -30t/ha, fodder beet 25-30t/ha, kale  12t/ha.Glanbia will hold its March milk price for members at 33 cent per litre (cpl) including VAT.

The processor said in a statement that based on recognised indicators it is generally accepted that dairy markets are currently returning approximately 27cpl (including VAT) and have been for some time.

However, recognising the impact of recent exceptional weather conditions, Glanbia Ireland (GI) is continuing to provide support and will pay a base price for March of 30 cpl including VAT for manufacturing milk at 3.6% fat and 3.3% protein.

In addition, Glanbia Co-op will make a payment to members of 3 cpl including VAT for March manufacturing and liquid milk supplies at 3.6pc fat and 3.3pc protein.

Henry Corbally, Glanbia Chairman, said that March had been an extremely difficult month on Glanbia supplier farms, with temperatures below normal, rainfall of more than twice the long term average and grass growth significantly below expected levels. As a result, supply volumes, milk constituents and farm costs were adversely affected.

While dairy markets continue to be relatively weak, Glanbia is very conscious of the challenges currently faced by our suppliers and we will continue to do as much as possible to support them, he said.

It comes as Lakeland Dairies cut its March milk price by 2.5c/L, but announced that it will "balance a reduction in the March milk price with a payment to support milk producers during the current very poor milk production conditions caused by bad weather and the fodder crisis".

Ahead of announcing the March milk price, Lakeland Dairies Chief Executive Michael Hanley said the basket is returning far less than 30c/L.

That is with butter prices not far off 5,000/t but the skim market is 5-6c/L under intervention price which is very concerning, he said.

The overhang in the market place is a major negative shadow.

Since late 2017, global market conditions have become very difficult with a significant drop in the returns available across various product categories and most notably skim milk powders.

Taking all of the various factors into account, Lakeland Dairies has reduced is base milk price by 2.5c/L for March but has offset this reduction through the payment of 2.5c/L support for all March supplies.

It says that this maintains the effective milk price payout for March at 34.56c/L including VAT and lactose bonus.

The co-operative announecd that it is also continuing to provide fodder at cost to milk producers along with ongoing nutritional advice and assistance in this difficult period.Excessive use of insecticides and proposed changes to the laws regarding hedge cutting will cause further depletion of our declining bee population, bee expert Philip McCabe has warned.

Young and older bees have perished in large numbers over the extended winter.

"In the early part of the year our Irish bees were busy collecting pollen as the queen was laying eggs.

"As the brood nest started expanding we got those bad snow storms and sadly the older bees perished," said Mr McCabe, a former head of the Irish Beekeepers Society and current president of Apimondia, the world beekeeping federation.

"The young bees also died off due to lack of warmth inside. As a result there has been a serious loss to our bee population," Mr McCabe said.

For the past 10 years many Irish fruit growers have been importing bumble bees from the UK and these are used mostly in poly-tunnels during the winter months. This is overseen by James Kearns, who is chairman of the IFA's soft fruit growers' committee.

"While the honey bee will pollinate during the warmer weather, for indoor growing the bumble bees are essential. We would often bring in two or three hives of Irish bees a week," said Mr Kearns.

Mr McCabe maintains that many countries are not taking sufficient action to address the problem of the loss of bees.

Ireland, he says, also needs to take action before it is too late.

"Bringing in bees from overseas is not ideal as we never know what diseases they carry. Furthermore the use of chemicals and the cutting of hedgerows here are wiping out vegetation which is crucial for the survival of bees," he said.

"On top of that we have weather extremes which we have seen in the likes of California and Russia. This is a now global problem."Agriculture Minister Michael Creed has admitted that "lessons" will have to be learned from the fodder crisis gripping the country, but denied it was time to "dismantle" the ambitious plans to grow the multi-billion euro agri-sector.

Mr Creed came under considerable heat as politicians accused him of being "in denial" over the extent of the forage shortages due to the extended cold wet winter.

It comes as co-ops continue to bring in thousands of tonnes of stocks of hay, haylage, maize silage and alfalfa from the UK and as far afield as Spain.

However, Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) president Joe Healy warned it was now a "financial crisis as well as a fodder crisis".

Farmers will be counting the costs for months to come as they face major bills as they move to purchase feed and fodder to see their animals over the next few weeks. Weather forecasts from Met Eireann pinpoint signs the wet spring may soon start to dry out, with less rainfall than normal expected over the next week, while temperatures are due to jump by 2C.

Labour TD for Longford-Westmeath Willie Penrose described it as the "perfect storm". He said the expansion of cows in the dairy industry following the removal of milk quotas had been matched by changes in the climate with more extreme weather events.

Mr Creed said the "need for the lessons" to be learned is very much on his mind. However, he insisted targets set by the industry and stakeholders for the expansion of the agri-sector to 19bn worth of exports under Food Wise 2025 should not be abandoned.

"We are living with the visible impact of climate change," he said, adding they would have to "insulate" the sector against unpredictable events. "We'll have to factor that in to our farming practices. I do not believe for a minute it is time to dismantle our ambitions. It is an absolute priority to make sure that in future years we conserve enough fodder to deal with whatever winters may come at us."

Mr Creed stood by the decision to only sanction a fodder import subsidy scheme in recent days, pinpointing the "horrific rains" over Easter as a game changer.

However, Fianna Fail's Charlie McConalogue claimed the minister was "persistently in denial" and had been left scrambling to get on top of the issue.

It comes as vets report one of their busiest ever springs as they deal with diseases and injuries from cows, calves and sheep being housed for long periods, while some knackeries have reported a rise in the number of fallen animals.

Mr Creed said it was important to put the facts across as the "perception" for people listening in from the "outside is that cattle are dying on farms from malnutrition". "That is not the case." He said there were injuries on farms due to cattle being housed for long periods.

"There is no evidence to suggest at all there is any significant level of malnutrition of animals fuelling those numbers," he said, adding there was nothing to suggest there was a "calamitous increase".

He said the mortality figures reported to the Department of Agriculture for January and February were slightly lower than 2016, with March figures yet to be collected.

Politicians called for a 'meal voucher' scheme and on-farm inspections by Department of Agriculture officials to be called off. Mr Creed said they had contacted the European Commission in relation to inspections but suspending them could have an impact on releasing EU payments.Producers of the hit TV series Vikings had hoped to expand film-making at Ashford Studios but the expansion plans now face a delay of up to six months

A question mark has been placed over new plans for a 90m extension to the Co Wicklow studios where the hit series, 'Vikings' is shot.

Last month, Wicklow Co Council gave the green light for plans by Ashford Studios where the proposal - which includes four new 40,000 sq ft film studios, a TV studio, offices and support space - has the potential to create 1,500 movie-related jobs.

The plan also includes a visitor centre in a bid to underpin the development of a TV and film skills cluster in the county.

Phase one of the studios was completed in May 2012 and during six years of operation, the 'Vikings' series has been located there utilising 33 acres of space and hiring up to 450 people during filming.

However, two locals, Emily Olive Hill and Sharon Hughes have now lodged an appeal against Wicklow Co Council's decision to grant planning permission with An Bord Pleanala.

In opposing the plan, an objection by the two lodged with the council claims that "the scale and mass of the proposed development is not in keeping with the rural character of the area". The objection lodged on the objectors' behalf by RPS states that "the proposed development will inevitably radically alter the existing rural landscape and the views of the unspoilt hills forming the site".

The objection also raises concern over possible night-time filming at the site. The objection states that "night-time filming is likely to result in night-time noise and light pollution within this rural area which may have a significant negative impact on the residential amenity of our clients' property".

The objection stresses that the two are not opposed in principle to the provision of expanded film studios within the lands zoned for employment use specific to the film industry.

The objection states that the two do have specific concerns regarding the subject proposal with respect to the scale, nature and design of the proposed development.

The objection states that the proposed development does not conform with a number of requirements attached to the land zoning as set out in the Wicklow County Development Plan.

Ashford Studios had targeted starting work on the project in mid-June but the appeal will - at the very least - delay works by four to six months.

Last month, Ashford Studios MD Shelley Hargadon said that the planning decision provided an opportunity to market Ireland and Wicklow as a serious film destination.

In 2016, accounts show that Ashford Studio recorded profits of 1.59m.Aer Lingus owner IAG has said it may launch a full takeover bid for Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA, best known for its low cost transatlantic routes.

IAG, headed by Willie Walsh, said in a statement that it has acquired a 4.61pc stake in stock market listed Norwegian Air and considers it an attractive investment.

"The minority investment is intended to establish a position from which to initiate discussions with Norwegian, including the possibility of a full offer for Norwegian," IAG said.

To date, no such discussions have taken place, and nor has a decision to make an offer, IAG said.

Earlier this year Norwegian said that it was scaling back transatlantic routes from Shannon and Cork is a blow to tourism interests in the west and southwest.Bank of Ireland are warning customers of a "fraudster" who is allegedly making calls on the bank's behalf.

The so-called fraudster is also sending emails to customers, and is claiming to be from the Bank of Ireland.

The bank warned their customers today to be "very careful of any 'offers' you may be asked to take up".

They also advised customers to double-check with the bank if they are doubtful that a phonecall or email is genuine.

Were aware that a fraudster is making calls & sending e-mails claiming to be from BOI. Please be very careful of any offers you may be asked to take up. To check if its a genuine call just send us a DM. Never disclose any serial numbers or log in details to your accounts.  Bank of Ireland (@bankofireland) April 12, 2018

"Never disclose any serial numbers or log in details to your accounts," they added in their statement, posted on their official Twitter account.

In a statement issued to Independent.ie, a Bank of Ireland spokesperson said the type of fraud is referred to as 'vishing' or 'voice phishing'.

"We are aware that a fraudster has phoned customers in the past few days pretending to be from Bank of Ireland," the spokesperson said.

"This type of fraud is referred to as vishing, or voice phishing, where people can be manipulated into providing bank details over the phone.

"Vishing doesnt indicate a data breach or account compromise  in the vast majority of cases fraudsters are simply cold calling and hoping that the victim has an account with a particular company. Business customers can often be targeted as their contact details are in the public domain."

They added; "We would remind customers that we will never phone and ask them to share passwords or confidential information. If customers have any concerns please call 01 4885466 or 365security@boi.com."

The warning comes less than 24 hours after Irish supermarket chain Supervalu advised members of the public not to engage with a potential scam text message.

Some members of the public received text messages advising them that they would win a 750 shopping voucher if they completed a survey.

The message encourages people to click on a link and complete a survey to be in with the chance to receive the gift card.

It reads; "Congratulations! You have been privileged to have this rare chance to get 750 Supervalu gift card! Just complete a quick survey to find out how to win."

In a statement, the grocery giant, which is part of the Musgrave Group, said, "This is not a legitimate competition and we advise that members of the public do not interact with it."

The statement continued to say that it the message is "a potential phishing scam and has not been issued by SuperValu."Growth at its export hub has helped manufacturing giant Quinn Industrial Holdings (QIH) to a 59pc jump in pre-tax profits to 10.8m, its latest figures show.

Company chief Liam McCaffrey said the business - formerly part of the empire of fallen Co Fermanagh tycoon Sean Quinn - was investing in the future, despite major economic challenges.

It said growth at the cement export hub in Warrenpoint Harbour, Co Down had contributed to the performance, with sales up 7pc to 209m.

Job numbers at the company were steady at 800 though they were up 23pc on 2014.

QIH is made up of Quinn Building Products in Derrylin, Co Fermanagh and Quinn Packaging in Ballyconnell, Co Cavan.

The building division sells materials including insulation, cement, aggregates and quarry products.

QIH said it had benefited from recovery in the construction sector south of the Border as well as stronger exports to the UK through the Warrenpoint facility. "2017 saw a continuation of QIH's growth trajectory since its establishment in late 2014," said Mr McCaffrey.

"Progress has been facilitated by ongoing investment and by our 800 staff, who have again excelled by delivering on quality and service.

"Despite the significant macro-economic challenges posed by Brexit, we continue to invest, grow sales, innovate and drive margin growth.

"Encouragingly, volume growth trends from 2017 are continuing year to date in 2018 and at this point we are firmly on track to deliver our fourth successive year of strong earnings growth."

He said the company had ploughed 26m into the business, with a spend of 7.6m in 2017.

"Post year-end we are taking delivery of a further 33 new trucks as part of a 3m fleet upgrade, with further investment planned.

"This ongoing investment reflects QIH's positive outlook for the business and our commitment to driving sustainable growth post-Brexit."

Chief financial officer Dara O'Reilly said higher volumes were driving margin growth and generating a return on recent investment.

"Despite a relatively weak sterling exchange rate during the period and a shortage of raw material for our insulation products, the performance for 2017 remained robust.

"Current trading for both our building products and packaging businesses remains strong and based on a continuation of these trends we are targeting further growth for both divisions."

Quinn Industrial Holdings was formed in 2014 to acquire two of the key divisions of the Quinn Group.

The group collapsed into administration under the weight of borrowings from Anglo Irish Bank.Smurfit's share price is trading at about a 11.5pc discount to IP's offer, which is worth close to 38 a share. Stock photo: Reuters

Smurfit Kappa shareholders are unlikely to support a fresh takeover offer from International Paper (IP) if it is under 40 a share, according to a number of investors in Europe's largest box maker.

A successful tilt will require a valuation buffer that offsets downward pressure on International Paper's own share price from so-called arbitrage funds that trade on the volatility surrounding large merger deals.

Arbitrage funds typically buy the target's company's stock and bet against the buyer's shares ahead of the completion of a takeover deal. IP's bid is part funded with its own shares, so Smurfit investors will demand a larger upfront valuation to compensate.

Last month, Memphis-based IP tabled a revised bid that included a 15pc increase in the cash component to 25.25 alongside 0.3028 new International Paper shares for every Smurfit share held. But the board unanimously rebuffed the overture, and insisted the interests of the company were best served by remaining independent. With International Paper left out in the cold, the market remains divided about the prospect of a third tilt.

One stakeholder argued the company was likely to walk away entirely in the absence of any fresh offer within the next few weeks.

Others pointed out the impact of the arbitrage funds. While these specialist funds are part of the market dynamic in a M&A scenario, sources argued the inevitable downward pressure on International Paper's shares presents a problem for those Smurfit investors unable to trade in US stocks.

It is understood the US company told Smurfit investors it would consider a second listing during a series of meetings in London and Paris.

But some investors said while they would accept an effective 39-a-share offer, they'd require a buffer to compensate for market volatility - meaning a headline bid closer to 41 a share.

Smurfit's share price is trading at about a 11.5pc discount to IP's offer, which is worth close to 38 a share. A number of Smurfit investors remain convinced International Paper possesses the firepower for another attempt, claiming it could lift the cash element of the bid.They've come up with a wizard idea in Britain to ease the pressure on GPs' surgeries and A&E units. Paramedics in their estate car ambulances will be trained and authorised to write prescriptions for people with everyday ailments in their own homes, with only a visit to the chemist required.

Don't even think about it.

Can you imagine the objections, the scaremongering, the threats of industrial action, the pay claims, the lobbying by the professional interest groups if anything like it was proposed here? And if something was done, there would be the whittling away of changes until the previous situation was more or less restored.

One of the most striking aspects of Irish society - and one which is hardly ever commented upon - is the implacable resistance to change. Two national bankruptcies in the space of 30 years have not been enough to persuade the country that there must be fundamental flaws in the way it does things.

When solutions are put forward, they are nearly always for more old hat rather than anything radically different.

Even the changes wrought by the Great Recession were often the abolition of reforms introduced years before.

The remedies - to preserve central government spending at the expense of capital investment, local authorities and outside agencies - GPs for instance - were the same old remedies which caused so much damage in the 1980s.

That is why something like last month's OECD report on Ireland can seem a bit like old hat itself. The issues it identifies are all current, but many have been around so long they could perhaps be included in the centenary commemorations of the foundation of the State.

Much of the content in such reports is based on work done by domestic analysts, with useful additions from its own, admittedly excellent, staff.

But they are organisations of governments and reports pass through various levels of official scrutiny before publication - including the government of the country being analysed.

In this one, some commentators have noticed the absence of the EU commission's corporation tax plans among threats to the Irish economy. At best, one might interpret the section on the OECD's own anti-avoidance programme as an endorsement of that approach rather than internal EU arrangements.

The real value of these reports is the scale and depth of their analyses.

With so much included, one cannot fail to notice how long many of the problems have been around, and how many have been the subject of repeated plans for change and reform.

One also cannot avoid the realisation of just how difficult it will be, politically, socially and technically, for Irish society to come to grips with them successfully. This is also the case with the enormous problem which really is current - housing. Not only was this unexpected, it came after 30 years when it was widely assumed that relatively few would require social housing in the future.

Now, thanks to bubble and burst, we may be short 70,000 units.

Social housing must be part of the answer. But even on conservative estimates, some 5bn a year will have to be spent on construction for the next 10-20 years. Public housing can be only be a minority in that. House construction is increasing rapidly but meeting anything like that demand will be an enormous challenge for the industry, providers of finance and government.

The OECD report has no particularly original ideas either, but it does point to two very old characteristics in this new failure - the reluctance to upset vested interests and inexplicably high costs.

If the reports are correct, there will be an acid test in the question of 900 social and affordable housing units in the massive former Irish Glass Bottle site. This may indeed reduce the profit on the development as compared with little or no such housing. But it is impossible to envisage the shortage being met if, as it has in the past, government reneges on this kind of scheme.

As for building costs, the OECD cites work by Prof Ronan Lyons which finds they are significantly higher than in other EU countries.

Various reasons are given but it is hard to see that they fully explain the gap. As with healthcare costs, childcare costs and many other Irish costs, what might be called the story of why rarely, if ever, emerges.

What emerges all too clearly is that the cost of building an average dwelling, in Dublin especially, is more than would be prudent for the average household to borrow. With the Central Bank imposing prudence, the solution must be found in cost reductions, not increases in purchasing power; whether through borrowing limits or government grants.

The politics of that are unattractive and politics are behind much of the wearisome list in the report.

The most pertinent now, in view of the farcical Dublin transport plans, is the need for evidence-based decisions on launching major capital projects.

The omnishambles that is the Dublin Luas/Metro scheme is just the latest of many examples. A combination of keeping constituencies and property developers happy is never likely to bring any net benefit to the community.

There are also deeper, long-lasting structural problems which have proved resistant to change and reform. One is the poor quality of management in native Irish companies. It is better than it used to be, but not as good as it needs to be. Firms which struggled with going online will find it very hard to survive a hard Brexit. This is part of a general failure in training, further education and lifelong learning - managers included. The training system is better known for financial mismanagement that notable achievement.

There is also one that is easy to miss - the low levels of employment compared with most of the EU.

The OECD charts are depressing.

They show that only Spain took a bigger hit from the crash in its labour market. In Ireland, the same numbers are at work as in 2008 but the population is bigger. Participation rates are back to the low pre-boom levels, particularly for women.

This may go very deep. As the charts also show, Ireland is unique in having just about the highest earnings in the OECD before tax and deductions.

Naturally, that creates some of the highest levels of inequality when these record earnings are compared with those who have little or no earnings for want of work. But after tax and deductions, there is the biggest transfer of income in the OECD, leaving the country with average inequality. Even leaving aside the fact that this is hardly ever acknowledged, there is something badly wrong here - and the suspicion at least is that those in work are crowding others out of jobs with high levels of pay and then - usually quite willingly in Ireland - compensating them with taxes to pay for benefits for the underemployed.

One consequence is the difficulty this creates in making it financially sensible to move from welfare to work.

Changing that would take some doing, although it would help if debate took place around the known facts instead of the fake ones regularly on view.

They say there is an election coming. Anyone fancy having a try?TAOISEACH Leo Varadkar has expressed concern at the alleged data breach at Independent News and Media (INM), saying "democracy can't function without a strong and independent media".

His remarks come amid the controversy surrounding the country's largest media group over revelations that data, including the emails of journalists, executives and other staff may have been accessed by external companies in October 2014.

Mr Varadkar was speaking alongside Communications Minister Denis Naughten who said there needs to be a clear distinction between allegations made in relation to board activity and also the work of the employees within the company who are trying to do their work on a day-to-day basis.

The Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) will next Monday ask the High Court to appoint inspectors to investigate the suspected data breach and other corporate governance issues at INM.

The Data Protection Commissioner, Helen Dixon, is also expected to launch an investigation into INM which is the publisher of Independent.ie.

At Project Ireland 2040 event in Galway, Mr Varadkar said: "I do have concerns. I'm concerned anytime somebody's personal emails or electronic information is accessed by anyone.

"For our democracy to function we need to have an independent press and we need to have a diversity of press ownership as well".

Mr Varadkar added: "I'm a great believer in that because democracy can't function without a strong and independent media.

"What's going to happen now is a government office, the ODCE is going to initiate an investigation. At least until that investigation is completed I can't really say any more.

"I think it is appropriate that there be an investigation by this government office, the ODCE."

Communications Minister Denis Naughten raised similar concerns to Mr Varakdar but said it's important that there's a differentiation between the allegations made about INM board activity and the work of employees who are "trying to do their work on a day-to-day basis".

There's absolutely no doubt about it there are concerns in relation to what is out in the public domain now at the moment."

He referred to the probes by the ODCE and the Data Protection Commissioner, saying: "I think we need to let both of those investigations take place."

Mr Naughten added: "I think it is important that there's a differentiation here with the allegations that are made in relation to the board activity and also the work of the employees within the company who are trying to do their work on a day-to-day basis.

"I think there needs to be clear distinction made in relation to that."

Mr Naughten said: "Let's have the investigations. Let's see what comes out of that.Mother-of-two Victoria Duff, from Greystones, Co Wicklow, is among dozens of hopeful homebuyers who are desperately trying to buy a new house at The View at Glenheron before they go on sale this weekend.

Queues have formed in recent days but have dissipated after the development's estate agents took buyers' details ahead of the launch on Saturday.

Ms Duff said people are prepared to camp out if necessary to secure one of the new homes.

She has had her name on a list of hopefuls since the first phase of the development was launched a year ago.

Meanwhile, Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy came under fire over the Celtic Tiger-style queue at another new housing development, Hansfield, west Dublin.

Fianna Fail's housing spokesman Darragh O'Brien said it was "absolutely outrageous" that there has been a return to the days of people queuing to buy a family home. He said it is becoming more commonplace and he has seen it in Portmarnock and Kinsealy in north Dublin.

Labour TD Joan Burton said there was "enormous pent-up demand" for family homes, particularly among young couples. She accused Mr Murphy of not understanding the scale of the crisis.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing regarding the companys use and protection of user data on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., April 11, 2018. REUTERS/Leah Millis

Ten hours of testimony over two days. No one knows whether his giant chair cushion was to make his 5ft 7in frame look taller or was simply a comfort aide.

But it's clear that over some 10 hours of testimony, the combined forces of the US Congress and US Senate barely laid a glove on Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg.

Largely uninformed and unprepared, the US equivalent troupe to our TDs asked question after question on the same basic issues.

"Do you think Facebook is too confusing for users?" "Do you sell user data to advertisers?"

Expand Close Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing regarding the company's use and protection of user data on Capitol Hill. Photo: REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein / Facebook

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Whatsapp Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing regarding the company's use and protection of user data on Capitol Hill. Photo: REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein

"Don't you think it's time for regulation?"

Zuckerberg had the same basic answers, supplemented by platitudes such as "that's an important conversation that we need to have" or "this is something we're thinking about a lot" or "I want to be clear that this is my responsibility".

Watched by millions online, even Facebook's harshest critics found little new to bash the company with, or its 33-year-old founder, whose fortune rose to more than 50bn in the last week.

By and large, it's an opportunity wasted by America's most powerful political institutions.

After all, they could have asked some real questions.

Such as: why should we allow you to continue tracking users when they have logged out of Facebook?

Or: why should you be allowed to continue the service without making everything opt-in from here on in, even if it means disabling the app until users manually opt in to the various services?

Or even: why should you be allowed to continue to own WhatsApp, given its massive scale?

One senses, for example, that such questions may not be long coming in more privacy-oriented Europe.

Instead, the American politicians were more interested in trying to garner some sort of soundbite rather than build a new deal around Facebook.

To be fair, we did find out a few potentially useful things.

For example, Zuckerberg finally shot down the notion that Facebook taps your phone's microphone to listen to you while it figures out which ads to show later.

Yesterday, he insisted the social giant doesn't do this to Indiana Republican Larry Bucshon.

He had said the same to Michigan Democratic Senator Gary Peters the day before.

In Ireland, suspicion about this lingers in every pub and WhatsApp group. All of us have a cousin who was talking to a friend about a purple jumper last week, only to find an ad for a jumper on their Facebook feed the very next day.

There is also the possibility of a paid Facebook service, raised by Mr Zuckerberg the previous day.

Other than that, chalk this up as a circus where the tamers got tamed.Supply Finance, a Dublin-based fintech company, has raised 4m in funding in Series A funding.

The company received investment from, among others, European and Asian venture capital firm Finch Capital, and US venture capital firm Fenway Summer Ventures.

Founded last year, the company, which provides trade finance products to small and medium businesses (SMEs) across Europe through a network of partner brands, said that it aims to expand access to working capital for SMEs in Europe through its technology, ready access to capital markets, and partnerships with experienced local operators.

"Europes small businesses are too often denied the financial tools enjoyed by large companies, a disadvantage resulting in slower growth," Brian Norton, chief executive and co-founder of Supply Finance, said.

"We founded Supply to tip the scales back to even for SMEs. Through amazing technology and world-class capital markets expertise, were giving the little guys the same financing tools as their larger competitors."

The capital raise will be used to fund the companys expansion into at least three European markets, starting with Denmark, and as part of the announcement the company said that it has already completed its first partnership through a 1m investment in Omniveta, a Danish business that provides liquidity to its customers.

Through the Supply Finance partnership, Omniveta is expanding its capital base and upgrading its technology to provide an increasingly streamlined service to a larger set of customers, a statement from Supply Finance said.

In addition, Supply Finance assisted Omniveta in its recent closing of a 7.5m credit facility from Advance Global Capital, the London-based fund manager.

"This, coupled with the equity investment from Supply, will enable Omniveta to greatly expand its business in 2018 and beyond," Mr Norton said.

Supply Finance was founded by Mr Norton, a serial entrepreneur, who was previously co-founder and chief executive of Future Finance, a European-wide student lending business that raised nearly 200m in funding, and Jay Verjee, a serial entrepreneur, who has built three SMEs in the last five years.What will your next phone be? An Apple, a Samsung or ... a Huawei?

It's odd to utter it. But in a very short time, the Chinese manufacturer has risen to become the bona fide contender to the stranglehold that the Korean giant and California behemoth have on our flagship phones.

Its newest model, the P20 Pro (6.1-inch Oled, 899, 128GB) goes all out on particular feature - the camera.

It has crammed a lot more camera technology under the hood to help produce photos you'd barely believe weren't from a bigger camera.

The biggest jump is that it has three camera lenses on the back of the phone, going one better than the two on the iPhone X, iPhone 8 Plus and Samsung S9 Plus.

The rearranged lenses boast some pretty astounding specifications for a camera phone. Huawei has placed a 40-megapixel (f1.6) sensor on there, meaning that the amount of detail you get in each shot should be off the scale in relation to what you'd normally expect from a phone.

The two other lenses on the back of the device are an 8-megapixel (f2.4) telephoto camera and a 20-megapixel monochrome (black and white) lens, for zooming in and adding more detail, respectively.

That telephoto lens has a 3x optical zoom, which brings it beyond the 2x zooms of the iPhone X or the Samsung S9 Plus, which are this phone's main competition.

Without wanting to get too technical, the P20 Pro has also somehow managed to put in a larger camera sensor under the hood (1/1.7-inch), meaning that it can outgun any of its rivals for physically letting more light into the camera.

But all of this raw pixel power is one thing. Making it easy to use is always at least as big a challenge.

Huawei has done a decent job, here. The camera automatically detects what sort of a situation you're in (whether it's landscape or people or low light) and adjusts its capabilities to maximise the potential for the shot.

For example, if it detects blue sky, it enhances that (usually making it a deeper blue). Similarly, it appears to boost dynamic range in low-light shots.

In the last two weeks, I've managed to capture photos from it that I've had to look twice at because of their quality.

The 'night' setting is most startling. You point and hold the phone at something for a few seconds in dark conditions. If there's any light source at all - a window, neon sign or street light - the camera builds on that light. It also appears to take several photos, stacking them into one shot that includes way more detail than you'd normally get from even the best phone cameras up to now.

If black and white photos is your thing, one of the three rear lenses is a dedicated monochrome camera.

For those who care, the 'selfie' camera on this phone is 24 megapixels, an unheard-of level for a front-facing camera. Personally, I think this may be overkill: I couldn't discern much of an advantage to the 24 megapixels over, say, an eight megapixel or 12 megapixel lens when shooting your own face from such a close range.

It's worth mentioning again that it's not all software-related advancements driving the phone's camera improvements. As noted before, Huawei has stuck a bigger physical sensor into the device. Its 40-megapixel 1/1.7-inch sensor is around a third bigger than the 1/2.5-inch sensor you'll get in Samsung's S9 or Apple's iPhone X. You might argue that it needs it, with all those megapixels. But the upshot is that this is a physically superior camera apparatus than any other smartphone out there.

The photography-rating analyst company DXO Mark appears to agree, giving the P20 Pro its top score among phones for still photos, video and as an overall combination cameraphone. (It should be said that DXO isn't accepted by everyone as the ultimate arbiter.)

One thing that's noticeable immediately about the P20 Pro is that resembles the iPhone X more than a bit. This is mostly because it incorporates a 'notch' at the top of the device.

The notch is there ostensibly to facilitate facial recognition. I haven't tested this feature enough yet at this point to say whether Huawei has reliably pulled it off, but I'm betting it will be a challenge for them without the additional sensors that Apple has in its (larger) notch. My experience with other cameras' face recognition features is that they're very hit and miss. (The iPhone X is the exception, where it's fairly flawless.)

The other physical attribute which is worth noting is its top-end Oled screen, which is gorgeous. The difference between Oled and LCD screens is subtle but once you're used to an Oled screen, LCDs looks a little harsh. It's generally better at rendering colours and blacks and is easier on the eye. The 6.1-inch size is a sweet spot, too: big enough to watch videos comfortably but just about compact enough to be relatively ergonomic in your hand.

Other things I've noticed on the P20 Pro is that the battery life is excellent.

Huawei has imported the long-lasting 4,000mAh battery from its Mate 10 Pro line and the results blow most other phones out of the water.

For comparison, the Samsung S9 Plus (which itself has good battery life) has a 3,500mAh battery and the iPhone X (which has a smaller screen, admittedly) has a battery of under 3,000mAh. This is genuinely an all-day battery experience. For people like me, who snap a lot on their phone, that's pretty important.

The one partial negative I can find at this point is that it doesn't have a headphone jack.

Then again, no top-end flagship phone does these days. (There's a headphone adapter in the box.) So you'd better just get used to wearing wireless headphones from here on in.Sony has always made decent smartphones with great cameras. Of late, however, it has been falling behind the competition.

Its latest flagship model, the Xperia XZ2, has a lot of good features and is a very solid device. But it's now significantly behind on some of the features that are likely to attract you to a top-end phone.

I'll start with its optics. For some reason, Sony has opted not to include a second camera on this device. I can't understate how puzzled I am by this: the second lens on the likes of the iPhone and Samsung Galaxy 'Plus' ranges, as well as on strong newcomer brands such as Huawei (which is now putting three lenses on the back) and OnePlus, makes a big difference to a phone camera.

The absence of a second lens is all the more important as Sony has opted for a wider lens (25mm) than competitors such as the iPhone (28mm) on this primary camera, meaning that you lose even more detail when you zoom in to a portrait-friendly 40mm or 50mm photo of family or friends.

And while Sony is probably the world's biggest camera sensor manufacturer, the one it has placed in this phone is a lot smaller than the likes of the new Huawei P20 Plus (1/2.3 versus 1/1.7) and darker (f2) than almost every other high-end phone on the market.

I don't mean to suggest that the XZ2's camera isn't good, because it is. In fact, it's excellent when you have the right light around you. But its flexibility and range is significantly more limited than a camera on a rival phone. And I think this will really hurt its chances.

The camera is not the only sign of last-generation-itis. Where once Sony led the world in smartphone screens, it now feels like it has slipped behind its rivals. There's no Oled option, for a start, meaning the screen is an eentsy bit harsher on your eyes than top-end displays from Apple or Huawei.

And Sony still has old-fashioned, space-wasting bezels at the top and bottom, which Samsung phones have been rid of for two years, followed by Apple, Huawei and others.

Again, the actual 5.7-inch screen on this device is very bright and accurate. Its 18:9 ratio follows the general trend of facilitating a larger screen in a form factor that's still convenient to hold in the hand. And it supports HDR content, which is technically a step above most rivals, even if there isn't really any mobile HDR content on the likes of Netflix (but there is on YouTube).

So the XZ2's display is very good, but it doesn't feel as premium as what you're getting from other marques' flagship handsets.

To be fair, Sony has put in one or two unique features, but not all of them feel very useful. For example, the XZ2 has something called a 'dynamic vibration system' that basically lets you 'feel' videos and music as they're playing. I can't honestly say that this added much of anything to the experience of consuming videos or songs (though maybe some people will).

Other unique upgrades include enhanced 4K video recording (which now incorporates HDR) and an upscaled super-slow motion ability, where the 960 frames per second are now captured in 'full HD' (1080p) rather than just 'HD' (720p), which rivals such as Samsung's new S9 are confined to.

And the 3D creator selfie images from its front-facing 5-megapixel camera, first seen in the XZ1, can now be upscaled with more detail and shared instantly to Facebook.

While these emphasise that Sony is still very much at the top tier when it comes to video recording and photo creativity with a phone, for the vast majority of users they are very marginal upgrades.

As to the phone's physical design, it's a mixed story. On the upside, Sony has finally given up its penchant for sharp edges on the corners of its flagship phones, an event to be celebrated. This reporter has at least one pair of jeans whose pockets had prematurely been cut to shreds by the XZ1's piercing edges.

On the other hand, the XZ2 is significantly fatter and heavier than the XZ1 or almost any other top-end smartphone. Sony also says that the rounded (fat) rear is a design feature, which seems a little odd. To my mind, fat phones are rarely a thing to be desired.

Otherwise, it's a slick, pleasing form factor.

Like Apple, Huawei and a phalanx of other brands, Sony has done away with the headphone jack that the XZ1 had. While the company says that this is in line with sales of wireless headphones, some major rival companies (especially Samsung on its new Galaxy S9) aren't convinced and are retaining their headphone jacks. (You do get a USB-C to 3.5mm adaptor in the XZ2 box.)

As for the XZ2's battery life, I must say it's pretty decent, generally lasting the day without needing an extra charge. It easily matches an iPhone X in this regard and is comparable to a Samsung S9, though it doesn't reach the lofty heights of Huawei's top-end models, which beat all comers on battery life.

Storage memory of 64GB is a reasonable amount for a smartphone, although it's a shame that there isn't a higher memory option. Otherwise, the muscle power under the hood is on par with most flagship rivals.

In summary, the XZ2 is actually a pretty good smartphone with a very good camera and plenty of capabilities.

But on the key features that attract people to spend that little bit more on a top-end handset, it's just not on par with the flagship devices from its biggest rivals.Expedia has blasted Ryanair's attempts to prevent the US internet travel giant from having a so-called 'screen-scraping' case dismissed.

Ryanair has sued Expedia in Seattle in the case, but also launched related legal action against the online travel agent giant in Dublin.

The pair have been at loggerheads since 2016 and the Seattle lawsuit was launched in 2017.

The airline has claimed in the US case that Expedia uses automated computer programmes to 'scrape', or capture fares from Ryanair's website before selling them to Expedia customers who don't then have to visit the Ryanair site to make the airline ticket purchase.

The airline, whose CEO is Michael O'Leary, generated 27pc of its 6.65bn in revenue during its 2017 financial year from the sale of ancillaries.

Ancillary revenue includes sales from anything from coffee and sandwiches to passengers during flights, to car hire and hotel rooms via its website as customers are booking seats.

If passengers bypass the airline's website by buying screen-scraped tickets, Ryanair loses a sizeable opportunity to make additional revenue.

Expedia, which also owns brands such as Travelocity and Hotels.com, has previously claimed that Ryanair cannot recover any losses it may have incurred under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that the airline has relied on for claiming in the United States that it has been injured by Expedia's alleged actions.

"Ryanair identifies no statutory language showing that the CFAA's private right of action provision permits suits for injuries abroad," Expedia has told the US court.

Expedia added: "Ryanair's argument is that alleged screen-scraping of foreign computers that allegedly caused foreign losses to a foreign plaintiff somehow amounts to domestic injury.

"Not a shred of authority supports this theory."

Expedia has also insisted that Ryanair's own website says that use of that website is governed by Irish law.

"Ryanair does not dispute that its terms of use state that Irish law applies to those who use its website," Expedia has told the Seattle court.

"Its arguments for why it may invoke United States law are erroneous.

"Under Ryanair's terms of use, wherever a suit may be filed, Irish and not United States law governs," Expedia has insisted in its efforts to have Ryanair's case against it thrown out.

But Ryanair has continued to argue that even if had brought its legal action relying on its own terms of use, that the United States "would still be an appropriate forum" for the action.

"Expedia respectfully requests that the Court dismiss Ryanair's complaint with prejudice," the internet giant added in court documents.

Ryanair has previously taken other successful cases against so-called screen-scrapers.Graham Comiskey pictured leaving the Four Courts after the Circuit Civil Court approved amounts of 17,500 and 20,000 damages for his sons. Pic: Collins Courts

The father of two children, injured in a car accident, told a judge Thursday that he was not happy with the 37,500 damages the court had approved as adequate compensation.

One son (9) was offered a settlement of 20,000 for a suspected fracture of his left arm and his brother (7) was offered 17,500 damages in relation to soft tissue injuries.

Barrister John Nolan, who appeared with Tracey Solicitors for the children, told Judge Terence OSullivan in the Circuit Civil Court that while he was recommending the courts approval of the settlements he had to inform the court that the boys father, Graham Comiskey, was not satisfied with either settlement.

While the boys have sued through their father, Mr Comiskey, I have to consider the interests of the children and I do not believe they would gain higher awards in a full trial and may even be awarded much less, Mr Nolan said.

Graham Comiskey addressed the court and said he had seen the Book of Quantum with regard to compensation for such injuries and the settlements proffered were at the lower end of suggested damages.

He said he did not agree to the courts acceptance of either settlement offer and asked was it possible for him to appeal should the judge go ahead and approve the settlements.

Judge O'Sullivan said it was not for the court to advise him on legal matters but he agreed with Mr Nolan that there was a risk to the childrens compensation in not approving them which he was going to do in their interests.

Judge OSullivan spent 10 minutes explaining to Mr Comiskey that before a different judge the children may be awarded less than they had been offered if their cases went to a full trial. He was satisfied appropriate compensation fell between 15,000 and 20,000.

Mr Nolan said he had explained this to Mr Comiskey who was still intent on opposing acceptance of the offers. He had to leave it in the hands of the court.

Judge OSullivan said he was approving both settlement offers and directed that the monies be paid into court funds on behalf of the children.

Any decision of the Circuit Court can be appealed, he told Mr Comiskey who did not confirm to the court whether or not he would appeal.

The boys were injured in a car accident which occurred on March 26, 2016 and had sued an insured motorist, Dusan Gabor (correct) through their father.Former CEO of Anglo Irish Bank, David Drumm pictured outside the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. Photo: Collins Courts

AN Anglo Irish Bank official said he would have to have a chat with the rock star while making arrangements for a multi-billion euro deal with Irish Life and Permanent during the financial crisis, a court heard.

The banker made the reference to an unnamed colleague during a taped phone conversation played to the jury in the fraud trial of Anglos former CEO David Drumm.

Elsewhere on the tapes, an ILP dealer involved in the trade with Anglo spoke about a badger who was badgering him by asking for so much information.

The recordings were played today as ILPs then liquidity manager Paul Kane was giving evidence for the prosecution.

Mr Drumm (51) is pleading not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to conspiring to defraud by dishonestly creating the impression that Anglo's customer deposits were larger than they were.

He is alleged to have conspired with Anglos former Finance Director Willie McAteer and head of Capital Markets John Bowe, as well as ILPs then-CEO, Denis Casey, and others.

The case centres on a series of interbank deposits which circulated between Anglo and ILP in September 2008.

The transfers were routed through Irish Life Assurance (ILA), returning to Anglo where they were then treated as customer deposits, which are a better indicator of a banks health.

Mr Drumm also denies false accounting, by providing misleading information to the market.

Referring to Mr Kanes statement, Paul OHiggins SC, prosecuting, said there was a deal done effectively for ILPs end of half year on June 30 and events moved on to the end of September as the end of Anglos financial year approached.

ILP Head of Treasury David Gantly told Mr Kane Anglo would be looking for deposits and people from Anglo would be in touch. Mr Kane told the jury he could not remember exactly when he had this conversation.

He did not know the full amount of the transaction, which had got bigger anyway.

He agreed September was a turbulent time and ILP was finding it more and more difficult to get unsecured funds.

The jury heard a September 15 phone call Mr Kane had with his Anglo counterpart Ciaran McArdle about the year end stuff, followed by a call between the two men and Mr Gantly in which they discussed a back to back.

It was discussed whether the transaction could be done as a repo (or bonds repurchasing deal) but this did not go ahead. Mr Kane said this was because of the amount of collateral that would be needed.

In a later call, Mr Kane described a deal as a bit of a rinky dink. On September 17, he told Mr McArdle they had got the go-ahead from Denis (Casey) to run with this back to back.

They suggested meeting and Mr McArdle ended by saying: Let me go and have a chat with the rock star and Ill talk to you, OK

Mr Kane told Mr OHiggins at that stage they were talking about 5bn and a back to back meant ILP would pass that on to ILA and ILA would then deposit the 5bn with Anglo.

This was the structure that was eventually implemented, but on a bigger scale, he said.

In a call on September 24, Mr McArdle said I dont give a f**k how I get it back, as long as he got it back.

We have to be able to control the dough, Mr Kane told him.

At that stage, Mr Kane told him, ILP would have to lose our interbank and our corporate to go short.

That is what we start every morning thinking as well, Mr McArdle said, to laughter.

I was glad we could f**king do what we did, Mr McArdle said.

So was I, Mr Kane said.

I know I cant do f**king six yards worth of funny stuff, Mr McArdle said in a call on September 25, 2008.

The jury then heard a call made by Mr Kane to ILP Finance Director Peter Fitzpatrick on September 25, 2008.

He first asked Mr Fitzpatrick if he was alone.

The badger isnt there badgering you? he asked, to which Mr Fitzpatrick replied: no.

Badgering me, Mr Kane said, to laughter.

F**k sake, dont return his calls, Mr Fitzpatrick replied.

Mr Kane went on to say he sent me an email, hes looking for so much information now and its hard to put this into alphabetical form.

Mr Kane said Ger (Knowles, Irish Life Investment Managers Head of Business Risk Management) was a little bit worried about things and Mr Fitzpatrick replied: Ger is paid to worry.

Thats why she gets paid all the big bucks, Mr Kane said.

The two men spoke about a transaction, with Mr Kane saying everything will be netted out.

Shes bleating that this has to go through Citibank, Mr Fitzpatrick said.

Are we going to be absolutely satisfied that if something goes pop, we dont have to sort of give Anglo their Isle of Man monies and anything else back? Mr Fitzpatrick asked.

He said if Anglo goes bust next week and the liquidator walks in and says give me the deposit back and we say ah but like we had an agreement - prove it.

He turns around to ILA and he says p*ss off, he added.

Oh I know what you mean, Mr Kane said.

Mr Fitzpatrick said it had to be documented otherwise we are massively exposed.

Mr Kane said he would get on this straight away and Mr Fitzpatrick suggested standard treasury speak so there is absolutely no f**king confusion in anybodys mind and we can stand over it as a binding agreement.

Mr OHiggins asked Mr Kane in the witness box what this conversation was about.

He replied that banks had an agreement to net any exposure between them. Mr Fitzpatrick had wanted him to go and check that their agreement with Anglo would cover the deposit. He checked with a manager and the deposits were included.

Mr OHiggins asked what the purpose was.

That ILP were not exposed if Anglo went bust, exposed to losing their money, Mr Kane replied.

Mr Fitzpatrick had not wanted to take a risk on the transaction, Mr Kane said.

In call later that day, Mr Kane was heard telling Lorraine Hanrahan of ILIM: what Peter wants is that we have in writing a cover for set off purposes so if Anglo went bust the money we have, the money you placed is protected by the money that the bank has borrowed.

Earlier, Mr Kane told the jury his daily work involved acceptance and payment of deposits with other banks.

At 9.14am on March 28, 2008, he received a call from Mr McArdle.

Before that had you any intimation from anyone that you were going to be approached in relation to these transactions? Mr OHiggins asked.

No, he replied.

In the phone call, Mr McArdle said I believe we got to do something.

Mr McArdle asked if Mr Kane had spoken to Mr Gantly. He replied that he had not, as Mr Gantly was in the States on some road show.

I believe Im giving you a yard, Mr McArdle said.

Im giving it back to you, Mr Kane replied.

The jury heard a "yard" meant a billion.

Mr McArdle said Mr Kane may be giving it back in Irish Lifes name rather than Irish Life and Permanents.

Mr OHiggins asked what the state of the money markets was at that time. It was quite dysfunctional and Ireland as a whole was floored, Mr Kane replied.

He told Mr OHiggins he did not know at the time what the purpose of the transaction was.

Mr OHiggins asked if the transaction was of any benefit to ILP.

I didnt know the nature of the transaction at that time but I subsequently found out it wasnt of any benefit to ourselves, no, he said.

He spoke to Mr Gantly who informed him that Anglo would lodge 1bn with ILP.

That would be placed with Irish Life and Irish Life Assurance would in turn lodge that money back with Anglo, he said.

ILA was a life assurance and pensions company and was a separate entity, he said.

After speaking to Mr Gantly, he spoke on the phone to Mr McArdle again and said he wanted to be just a bit clearer on this thing.

He said they might have mentioned something about sterling and euros and Mr McArdle replied: whatever you need to the equivalent of a billion.

We are solid and tight on this side, Mr Kane said, adding that they were not sure who they were dealing with on the other side.

Do a billion into us and we will take it on board and get Irish Life to sort you out, Mr Kane said.

They discussed doing four transactions of 250m and Mr Kane said he would just do a back to back.

It doesnt really matter what the overnight rate is, he said.

The call stopped and Mr OHiggins asked Mr Kane why the overnight rate did not matter.

Because the deposit and the loan the other would be done at the same rate, they would cancel each other out, he replied.

The jury was shown emails in which Peter Fitzpatrick approved the transaction on March 28.

The trial continues before a jury and Judge Karen O'Connor at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.The driver drove at speed up a slip road causing the car to become airborne over a roundabout before crashing on the far side. Pic: M1 stock image

A man who drove a stolen car at 180 kmph after taking 28 sleeping tablets has been given a three year sentence.

Eoin Jarvis (26), who has 57 previous convictions, drove at speed up a slip road causing the car to become airborne over a roundabout before crashing on the far side.

Jarvis, of Corduff Grove, Blanchardstown, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to dangerous driving, driving without insurance, reckless endangerment and unlawful use of a vehicle at locations along the N1/M1 motorway on April 11, 2017.

The court heard Jarvis was not involved in the burglary in which the car was stolen.

Garda John Delaney told Monika Leech BL prosecuting, that the dangerous driving and crash were witnessed by two plain clothes gardai travelling on the same road at 9.45am. Jarvis exited the vehicle, ran across four lanes of traffic and up an embankment to an petrol station where he was arrested.

Gda Delaney agreed with defence counsel, Kitty Perle BL, that Jarvis was heavily intoxicated when arrested and unfit to be interviewed for a time.

The witness agreed that the defendant came from a decent family.

Ms Perle said Jarvis was heavily abusing sleeping tablets at the time and had consumed 28 tablets before getting into the car. She said he had been abusing drugs for a number of days and had no recollection of events.

She said there was no other explanation for his behaviour apart from his addiction. Ms Perle said Jarvis was aware he needed to do something about his addiction and was liaising with the appropriate services within the prison system.

Judge Martin Nolan said Jarvis had driven in a reckless and dangerous fashion, while under the influence of intoxicants. He noted Jarvis' guilty plea and that he had co-operated as fully as he could. Judge Nolan imposed a three year sentence.A JUDGE is set to grant a mother's wish to be allowed out of prison to see her son make his Holy Communion.

Amanda Hayes (27) penned a letter to Judge Patrick Durcan asking that he allow her to leave prison temporarily to attend her son's first Holy Communion at the end of this month.

Hayes is currently on remand at Limerick Prison awaiting sentencing for a number of recent drug-fuelled thefts, including stealing the contents of a Trocaire and an Irish Heart Foundation charity collection box.

A long-time drug addict, Hayes lost her own mother at the age of 11 in a car accident.

Hayes has 23 previous theft convictions and is now on a methadone programme.

The mother-of-two has pleaded guilty to the most recent theft offences.

Last year, she was released from prison after serving a three-year sentence, with the final 18 months suspended, for making a false rape allegation in December 2014.

In that case, Hayes, of Inis Ealga, Shannon, sparked a needless six-week long pursuit by gardai for a rapist around Shannon.

The investigation - which included gardai making 30 separate house calls - followed Hayes falsely reporting that she was raped by a man wearing a hoodie in the early hours of St Stephen's Day in 2014.

Hayes was taken to the Sexual Assault Unit at University Hospital Galway for a forensic examination, where she elaborated on her initial complaint to the doctor examining her.

At Ennis District Court yesterday, Hayes said that she was expecting to serve a prison sentence for the thefts, but wants to attend her son's communion.

Her solicitor Daragh Hassett had earlier read out her letter asking that Hayes attend the first Holy Communion.

Judge Durcan told Hayes: "I am not giving any guarantees, but my idea is a lengthy sentence with bail conditions for certain occasions."

Judge Durcan asked if the child is a member of a family of regular churchgoers and he was told that he was.

The judge said that would adjourn the case for one week and further remanded Hayes in custody, to re-appear in court next Wednesday for a member of the Probation Service to attend to put in place a post-release plan for Hayes.'The seizure of around 2,500 tablets - considered a significant haul behind bars - was found in the cell of serial knife attacker Dean Teeling' (stock photo)

A major investigation is under way after around 11,000 worth of drugs were seized from a violent inmate at a Dublin jail.

The seizure of around 2,500 tablets - considered a significant haul behind bars - was found in the cell of serial knife attacker Dean Teeling.

Prison officers attached to the Operational Support Group (OSG) searched his cell in Mountjoy prison last Friday where they recovered the large quantity of drugs, as well as an expensive mobile phone. A number of investigations are under way into the drug seizure, with authorities looking to establish how the package of tablets were smuggled into the jail.

"It is a very significant amount of drugs to be smuggled into a prison - we're talking about more than 2,000 tablets - and there'll be efforts made to establish how it was brought into the jail," a source said.

Officers at Mountjoy garda station are also understood to have been told of the seizure.

Prison officials believe the haul of tablets is worth in excess of 11,000 and that the drugs were to be sold to inmates in the jail.Student loans are off the agenda for the lifetime of this Government, at least, as the hot political potato of who should bear the cost of paying for third-level is put on the long finger.

There is also no prospect of a major increase in State funding for the third-level sector, which would be an alternative to asking students to pay higher fees through a loan scheme.

Universities and institutes of technology are crying out for more resources, but there is no political appetite for either funding option.

In 2016, the Cassells Report said the sector needed an extra 600m a year and set out choices.

But the wait for a funding plan is set to continue, in light of a recent letter from Education Minister Richard Bruton and his departmental colleague Mary Mitchell O'Connor.

The ministers were replying to a request from the Oireachtas Education Committee for the Department of Education to conduct an economic assessment of the various funding options set out in the Cassells Report, to establish the financial implications of each one.

The ministers stated the department would undertake such an examination and also want its remit to be broadened. It came with the caveat not to expect an outcome anytime soon.

"This constitutes a significant body of additional work and it is not possible at this stage to give a timescale. This will need to be considered by the department in the context of the resources required to undertaken this project," the ministers wrote.

The letter - sent in the week before Easter -added that they would update the committee "once there is greater clarity on the scope of the work required to be undertaken".

It was four years ago, in the lifetime of the previous government, that former Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) secretary general Peter Cassells was asked to address the funding issue.

Soon after taking office in 2016, Mr Bruton referred the Cassells Report to the Education Committee with a view to seeking political consensus.

The committee has held hearings and the economic assessment of the options is the final link awaited before reporting back to Mr Bruton.

The Economic and Social Research Institute (Esri) was the original choice to conduct the economic assessment, but when that didn't work out, the committee turned to the Department of Education.Undated handout photo issued by Police Service of Northern Ireland of fresh searches which the police have undertaken for the body of Lisa Dorrian who disappeared almost 11 years ago. PSNI/PA Wire

Police have undertaken fresh searches for the body of a missing hairdresser who disappeared almost 11 years ago.

Lisa Dorrian, 25, from Bangor, Co Down, vanished after a party on a caravan site 20 miles away in the coastal village of Ballyhalbert on the Ards peninsula on February 28 2005.

Police believe she was murdered.

Despite a series of arrests, the identification of around 4,000 potential witnesses and more than 275 searches, no-one has been brought to justice.

Detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland's serious crime branch conducted searches on land outside Comber, Co Down, on Monday.

They said the ongoing operation at the Newtownards Road had been prompted by "new information being provided to the investigation team".

While the general location was searched four years ago for a vehicle linked to the murder, the new investigations are focused solely on finding human remains and are concentrated on a different section of land.

The officer in charge of the investigation, detective chief inspector Justyn Galloway, said: "We will be deploying a significant range and amount of resources over the next few days.

Read more:

"These will include search teams, body recovery dogs and ground probes. Other equipment and experts are available, if required.

"Lisa's family are being kept fully informed about our enquiries. The search may yield nothing but we feel it is appropriate to act on this new information.

"This is the latest search in an extensive investigative programme and demonstrates our commitment to act on information which has been provided to us by someone who is not interested in publicity.

"Our enquiries will continue and I would again appeal to the small group of individuals who know what happened to Lisa to tell us precisely what they know before we come to them."

Lisa's mother Pat died in December without ever finding out what happened to her daughter.

Mrs Dorrian, 59, and her husband John led a decade-long quest to find Lisa's remains.Dublin Fire Brigade attend a scene of a fire at a derelict pub in Cabra. Pic: Dublin Fire Brigade / Twitter

Three units of Dublin Fire Brigade attended a blaze at a derelict pub in North Dublin tonight.

The fire at Fassaugh House, a derelict pub located directly across the road from St Finbar's primary school and GAA club, was brought under control.

It's understood the alarm was raised shortly after 10pm.

A total of three units from Finglas and Phibsborough attended the scene.

It's understood that nobody was in the building at the time and no injuries were reported.Gardai investigating the Rescue 116 helicopter crash are preparing a file for the DPP to determine if there is any criminal culpability or negligence related to the crash.

The inquest into the tragedy opened in Belmullet, Co Mayo this morning, where coroner Dr Eleanor Fitzgerald heard evidence from a number of different agencies outlining the initial search operation and subsequent investigations.

The air crew- Capt Dara Fitzpatrick, Capt Mark Duffy, winchman Ciaran Smith and winch operator Paul Ormsby- died after their Irish Coast Guard helicopter crashed around 12km off the west coast.

At this morning's inquest, death certificates were issued for the four crew including Mr Smith and Mr Ormsby, after the coroner allowed evidence to be heard to formally declare them deceased as missing at sea.

Inspector Gary Walsh, of Belmullet garda station, also told the inquest that a file was being prepared for the DPP by Gardai in conjunction with the Health and Safety Authority (HSA).

This, Insp Walsh said, is to determine if there is any criminal culpability or negligence in the case.

However, the senior investigator also said that there is a delay in the investigation as Gardai are still awaiting documentation pertinent to their inquiry.

The preliminary inquest also heard that the cause of death for Dara Fitzpatrick was drowning, while Mark Duffy passed away from multiple injuries.

Dr Fitzgerald adjourned the inquest until a later date to allow for the various investigations into the tragedy to be completed.

A preliminary statement into the crash was issued by the Air Accident Investigation last month, but a full report into the incident is not expected to be completed for a number of months.Intimate letters from revolutionary leader Sean McDermott to his sweetheart  including his last one sent on the eve of the Easter Rising  are among a fascinating collection of correspondence that has been donated to the National Museum of Ireland.

The collection of 22 hand-written letters from McDermott, also known as Sean MacDiarmada, to Josephine Min Ryan between March 1915 and April 1916, was unveiled at the Decorative Arts and History museum at the Collins Barracks last night by her descendants.

Richard Mulcahy, the grandson of iconic Irish revolutionary and politician Richard James Mulcahy who married Miss Ryan following McDermotts execution - donated the letters to the museum along with three notes of minutes taken during key meetings of Sinn Fein between 1912 and 1913, 1918 to 1919 and 1919 to 1922.

We felt this was such a valuable collection, he said. We felt as a family that Min deserved recognition, he added.

The Mulcahy collection letters include the last letter written by McDermott before he was executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol on May 12, 1916 for his role in the Rising.

Dated April 22, 1916 somewhere in Dublin two days before the Rising began on April 24, it reads:

My Dear Mairin: A wee note  I dont know exactly what I have to say but no matter. You seemed to be in bad humour yestdy. (sic) at dinner. I suppose you & all my friends think I am very rude lately, he wrote.

I realise fully that for several months past I have been very irritable. My attempts at being light-hearted once in a while have been a poor attempt at acting  though I enjoyed myself now & again in those attempts.

Soon I hope to be my natural self again, then, I suppose my friends will realise to some extent, the reason why I have been so morose lately, he added.

I cannot see you tonight, though I had hoped to & cannot promise for tomorrow night, but I hope to see you early in the week for a certainty. Till then. Love as ever, from your Seainin.

PS. Give my love to Kate Phyllis & all the crowd.

Goodbye.

Im in a little bit of a hurry  just a little rushed, so I hope you will pardon the note.

The poignant apology  which would be later explained by history  gives an insight into his relationship with the Co Wexford woman whom McDermott wrote in all probability, had I lived, would have been my wife.

The collection also includes a letter to Miss Ryan from Major William Lennon at Kilmainham Gaol, informing her that she and her sister Phyllis would be allowed to visit McDermott on the eve of his execution.

It read: Madam. I beg to inform you that John McDermott a prisoner here desires to see you & your sister if you wish to bring her. I am sending a motor car for your conveyance.The Fine Gael minister who raised the prospect of going in to government with Sinn Fein after the next election said the partys paramilitary links to the past are not helpful.

Minister for Older People Jim Daly said he has a good relationship with Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald.

He admitted he could not see Fine Gael members endorsing a move that would see the parties go into coalition after the next election.

However, he said ruling out the prospect of going in to government with Sinn Fein because they are Sinn Fein was not something he agrees with.

I do not believe an objection to going in to power with Sinn Fein for the sake of it because they are Sinn Fein is valid, he told RTEs Today with Sean ORourke.

I think the objection has to be deeper than that, it has to be more real than that and their anti EU stance.

When asked about Sinn Feins paramilitary links to the past, Mr Daly said: Theyre not helpful.

He was speaking about an interview he gave to Hot Press magazine where he said he had no objection to Mary Lou McDonalds party going in to Government.

He said the interview was carried out three weeks ago but its publication has coincided with suggestions in the UK that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is cosying up to Sinn Fein.

The UKs Brexit Secretary David Davis earlier this week attempted to blamed the lack of a solution to the border question on the Irish government.

Mr Daly said he did not want his comments to be unhelpful to Government formation talks in the North.

I accept that the timing of the comments, if not taken in their totality, or explained or clarified, can be unhelpful.

The last thing I want to be to the talks in the North is unhelpful on the 20th anniversary (of the Good Friday Agreement) or indeed Brexit.

Meanwhile, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar denied he has slapped down junior minister Jim Daly in relation to his remarks on Sinn Fein and other issues in recent months.

He said Mr Daly is doing a "fabulous job" as minister for mental health and older people.

He said: "Hes someone whos outspoken and who speaks his mind in a way perhaps that I did a lot in the past, so Im certainly not slapping anyone down."

Mr Varadkar said he was "puzzled" why "everyone is obsessed about future coalitions and elections."

He added: "theres no election planned for this year and Im leading a coalition, Im leading a government that is working, a government that has more work to do."

He said the government has balanced the books and increased employment and that his focus and that of his ministers is "very much on getting the job done, not on looking at future coalition partners".

Mr Varadkar said that Fine Gael and Sinn Fein are "incompatible" accusing the rival party of being "a Eurosceptic, high tax, sectarian party" and adding: "were not".

He continued: "For example, they want to increase VAT which would drive up the cost of living for everyone. They dont want to give any tax breaks to middle income people. Theyre Eurosceptic or Euro-critical at a time when we need allies around Europe, and also the very nationalistic approach when I think we should be internationalist."THE Israeli government accused Dublin City Council of waging a campaign of hatred and discrimination during a meeting with the Irish Ambassador in Jerusalem.

Ambassador Alison Kelly was summoned to a meeting with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a move that follows a row over the participation of Dublin Lord Mayors in an event in the disputed West Bank territory.

Tensions between the two countries are growing, with the Ministry this evening issuing a statement accusing the City Council of two hostile decisions.

This is a reference to motions passed by councillors on Monday. One proposed expelling the Israeli ambassador to Ireland, while the other supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Dublins Lord Mayor Micheal Mac Donncha then flew to Israel for a conference in Ramallah.

Officials had decided to decline his entry into the country but it appears Mr Mac Donncha managed to pass through Tel Aviv airport unhindered due to a spelling mistake.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs Deputy Director-General - Europe Division Rodica Radian-Gordon expressed her astonishment and deep disappointment that the lord mayor chose to participate in such a blatant anti-Israel event.

This is especially disturbing when taken in context with the timing of the event  the week during which Israel marks the Holocaust, the Israeli government said this evening.

The Government of Israel expects an official public response from the Government of Ireland with regard to the conduct of the both the Dublin city council and of the lord mayor, who are waging a campaign of hatred and discrimination against the State of Israel.

However, in a statement the Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin said Ireland stands by it firm opposition to BDS.

The Department said Ms Kelly expressed surprise that the Lord Mayor of Dublin had been the one international conference participant singled out by the Israeli authorities, given that he has worked well with the Israeli Embassy in Dublin in his current role, including hosting Irelands national Holocaust commemoration this year in his official residence.Israeli authorities are to write to the Lord Mayor of Dublin informing him he is not welcome in the country.

An investigation is under way after Micheal Mac Donncha was allowed to attend a conference in the disputed West Bank territory yesterday despite being on a no-entry list.

A blame game was underway between Israel's Interior Ministry and Strategic Affairs Ministry over how the Sinn Fein member was allowed to pass through Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.

It is believed the Interior Ministry had not spelled Mr Mac Donncha's name correctly on the notice banning him from entry.

The move to exclude Mr Mac Donncha followed two motions passed by Dublin City Council in recent days.

One proposed expelling the Israeli ambassador to Ireland, while the other supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

The Lord Mayor yesterday attended events in Ramallah where he said that "to ban people from entering Palestine on the basis that they oppose your policies is not only undemocratic, it is part of Israel's attempts to censor its opponents".

He said his visit was on the foot of an invitation from the Palestinian Authority asking him to take part in a conference on the status of the city of Jerusalem. Others who were due to attend the same conference are understood to have been stopped at the airport.

Israel's Interior Minister Arye Dery said: "With the Lord Mayor of Dublin's departure from the country, and in light of his activity against Israel, I've instructed that a letter be delivered to him which would forbid future entry into Israeli territory."Cigarette waste accounts for over half of Dublins litter, according to Dublin City Council.

Matches, cigarette butts and packets now account for 60pc of Dublin street litter, the National Litter Pollution Monitoring System (NLPMS) found in a report.

The rest of Dublins litter is a combination of food related litter (19pc) and packaging items (9pc). Chewing gum was found to be the main food related litter on Dublin streets.

Dublin City Council has rolled out an awareness campaign called Bin the Butt in response to the findings. The aim of the campaign is to tackle the growing issue of cigarette litter and to change the behaviour of smokers in Ireland.

A spokesperson for the council said that cigarette litter is a serious issue in Dublin city.

Our cleaning teams out on Dublins streets everyday are seeing the implications of this problem and the serious effects its having on our beautiful city, both visually and environmentally, said waste management services officer Simon Brock.

We are asking the people of Dublin to think twice about throwing their cigarette butts on the ground and see it for what it is- litter. Instead, we want smokers to make a conscious effort to bin their cigarette butt in the nearest bin or suitable container.

Everyone has a role to play in this serious litter issue and we hope that we can reduce these litter statistics in the future.

The NLPMS report also found that walking pedestrians are the main cause of litter pollution in Dublin at 61pc. Passing motorists are the second highest offenders at 15pc, followed by retail outlets at 7pc.

Cigarette butts are made from a form of plastic and do not break down quickly. As they are non-biodegradable, they can take up to 12 years to decompose.

A survey by Irish Business Against Litter found that Mountjoy Street, Hanover Lane and Capel Street were the most polluted areas in Dublin in 2017.Fears are mounting that US sanctions against Russia could threaten the Rusal-owned Aughinish Alumina plant in Limerick and its 450 jobs.

Enterprise Minister Heather Humphreys is liaising closely with management at the Aughinish Alumina plant about the growing crisis engulfing their Russian parent company over tough US sanctions.

IDA officials are carefully monitoring the situation amid concern the global problems which have hit Rusal could have serious implications for the Shannon Estuary plant.

Aughinish Alumina is the largest single employer in the area and local business officials said the firm was "hugely important" in terms of employment, exports and the traffic it generates annually for Limerick port.

Limerick Chamber of Commerce chief executive James Ring said there was great confidence in the firm's future despite the current global market issues.

"Rusal is a very significant employer, with 450 well-paid jobs, delivering an important economic injection into the Limerick and Midwest region," he said.

"It is a hugely successful business so while there may be short term speculation, we would be confident that a business as strong as this would continue to impact positively here long into the future."

Limerick TD Niall Collins toured the Aughinish Alumina plant just three weeks ago on a Brexit visit. "It is a hugely important plant for the area and region - there are 450 staff there but there are around another 200 contract workers," the Fianna Fail TD said.

Mr Collins pointed out that the plant, because of its efficiencies, avoided cutbacks in a rationalisation programme implemented by Rusal several years ago.

"This is a very successful operation with a very impressive local management team and it now needs to be properly supported by the Government and State agencies," he said.

Limerick TD Tom Neville said he had been assured that everything possible was being done by State agencies.

He said he was in contact with the Department of Enterprise and Employment and had been told the minister had spoken with plant officials.

"I was also told that the IDA is involved and is carefully monitoring developments," the Fine Gael TD said.

Rusal's bonds slumped to record lows, two major customers said they were now reviewing their contracts, and the London Metal Exchange distanced itself from the aluminium giant as the potential implications of US sanctions hit home.

The sanctions were imposed on Rusal and its main owner, metals magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Rusal took control of Aughinish Alumina in Limerick in 2007.

The Limerick plant refines imported bauxite into alumina, a major ingredient in aluminium manufacturing.AN INVESTIGATION is underway into the posting of a so-called sexual assault list in the toilets of an Irish school.

The 'rape list', which resembled graffiti, was posted in the male toilets of Davis College in Mallow, Co Cork and asked people to place a 'tick' beside the name of a number of young women included on the list.

Shockingly, the list then advised that the young woman who garnered the greatest number of 'ticks' beside her name would be targeted for a sexual assault.

"The ones with the most ticks is going to get raped," it read.

All those whose names were included on the list are minors.

The young women listed are all students at the school. The issue has now been referred to the gardai.

Expand Close Davis College. Pic: Google Maps / Facebook

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Whatsapp Davis College. Pic: Google Maps

One source indicated that the young women were very upset by the resultant publicity it has attracted.

One parent at the school, who is not connected to any of the young women on the list, contacted Cork's RedFM to express deep shock at what had happened.

Davis College stressed that it is taking the matter very seriously. It added that it was aware of only one such list - but it is investigating suggestions there may have been two other previous lists.

The safety and well-being of all of our students is our top priority," Principal Stephen Gilbert said.

"We are taking this issue extremely seriously, and immediately took steps to address it with both the affected students and student body at large."

"This work is continuing. The list was removed the minute we were notified of its existence and we spoke to each of the young ladies mentioned to answer any questions or concerns they had."

"We encouraged them  as we encourage all of our students  to come to us with any issues that may be of concern so that we can support them in any way possible."

It is understood an internal review is underway and, if the person or persons who compiled and posted the list are identified, they will face disciplinary action.

Mr Gilbert said every support is now being provided for the young women involved and their families.

"There has been a spotlight nationally on this topic in recent weeks," he said.

"In keeping with our ethos of caring for all our students and in light of public and media conversation, we wish to make sure that this issue is addressed among all of our students."

"Our S.P.H.E. (Social, Personal & Health Education) teachers will be facilitating discussions on this subject with every class."

"We want students and parents to know that we will continue to provide a safe learning environment for our students."

"We remain available to all parents and students who may have concerns in relation to this issue, he added.

Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI) director Cliona Saidlear expressed concern that any young man should "think threats to rape are a joke".The officer was taken to University College Hospital to be treated for non-life threatening lacerations

A young man has been arrested after a stolen motorbike, a double barrel shot gun and a quantity of drugs were found at a house in west Dublin.

The discovery was made in Tallaght yesterday afternoon.

The young man, who is in his late teens, is being detained at Tallaght garda station.

He is due to appear before Dublin District Court this morning in connection with the investigation.The battle between getting Chinese food or pizza is an age old debate on Irish shores.

Just Eat recently revealed that Chinese food holds the title for the most amount of orders in 2018 so far.

In 2017, thai green curry was voted Irelands favourite takeaway in the Just Eat National Takeaway Awards, beating the classic pepperoni pizza.

The days of deciding may soon be over, with the creation of the Chinese Takeaway Pizza by Love Food.

The pizza combines Chinese cuisine favourites on a regular pizza base. Tomato sauce is replaced with soy sauce, and toppings vary from shredded duck to king prawns.

Cooked at 180 degrees for 25 minutes, the pizza is finished off with classic starter dishes like prawn toast and spring rolls.

The video was posted by the popular Love Food Facebook page. With over 2 million likes, the page regularly post unusual and exciting cooking tutorials.I only needed a van, not an apartment on wheels. Honestly, there was more room in the Volkswagen Crafter van I had for two bits of days to shift a few things than some of the one-bed apartments for sale or rent.

Yes, I needed a fair bit of room, but what I loaded was dwarfed by the interior capacity.

Secondly, I take my woolly hat off (it was cold on one of the days) to the people who drive vans (or large vehicles of any kind for that matter) for a living. Especially within the thick traffic confines of towns and cities (where some equally thick people occupy our roads).

Now, I'll drive anything and have chanced my arm at most vehicles over the years at home and abroad, but it's a different world out there in the real world.

So many people in other non-commercial vehicles don't give you an inch, as if they had priority. With a long wheelbase Crafter, for example, you need to swing a little wider than with a car so as not to hop off the corner of the footpath or skim a car parked close to a junction. Does anyone else care? Well, yes to be fair. Other van and truck drivers do, but men in their saloons and ladies in their SUVs didn't.

It opened my eyes. I probably hadn't given van drivers a second thought, up to now anyway. Now I'm watching for all the different shapes and sizes and reminding myself of the challenges they face daily.

I also should point out that their numbers and activity more accurately reflect the real, active economy and how it is faring than anything else on four wheels.

Even though my new 181-reg Crafter had long wheelbase and high roof (HR), giving the voluminous capacity, it wasn't hard to manoeuvre at all (when given half a chance by others).

It's long, for sure, but the double wing mirrors gave me great rear perspective (especially at how close some car drivers were tailgating).The lower segments of the mirrors were excellent whenever I was reversing in a gateway.

The driving position was exceptional (there are adjoining seats for two passengers/helpers too) and let me safely keep in lane on narrow roads. The seats were really as good as you'd get in a mainstream car, maybe better than some.

The dash was simple, straightforward and uncluttered, and spec even stretched to voice control.

There are lots of nooks and crannies, including overhead slots, in the cabin, and I lost count of lashing points in the cargo area.

But I have to repeat, the high driving position was something else. Even Range Rovers looked like dinky toys from my vantage point.

The sliding side door was handy for offloading, meaning I could pull up directly outside a drop zone. I used the two-piece rear doors - right to the roof - for loading. A simple step made lifting stuff a lot less of a huff-and-puff affair than I anticipated.

Speaking of puff, I did notice crosswinds on the motorway, though they have a side-wind compensation system.

I'm not going to go all technical because those who drive and own these vehicles know far more than I.

But I will say that if this Polish-built Crafter is a measure of what a van currently constitutes, then we have come a long way.

If only some of the other drivers had come as far. Please, give some thought to those making their living in commercials and trucks. The roads are not just reserved for cars and SUVs, you know.

Key facts

* Volkswagen Crafter, 2litre diesel

* My long wheelbase, high roof: 6,836mm; MWB high roof 5,986mm long

* Range starts 28,345 incl VAT. Price of 6spd manual model driven, 38,340. Road tax: 333; 7.6l/100km, 198g/kwrm.

* LWB HR 3,500kg; payload 1,344Kg

* Towing capacity 3,000kg

* 75-litre fuel tank

* composition media- touchscreen; mobile phone interface, 12v sockets, lashing rings for load restraint, hill start assist, sliding door, dual passenger seat. Options: Composition media with 8ins touchscreen, four 12-V outlets, full-width rear step, front fogs/cornering lightA woman in an Irish nursing home wanted to go to the beach to have an ice cream before she died.

People ask for very simple things. We sometimes imagine people would ask for the moon. They dont. They ask for simple things. They ask for the sister they havent spoken to.

They ask to make a will. To go away on the holiday they never had. They say I want to see the dog. Sometimes the dog can be really important to them.

Bryan Nolan, a communications and development coordinator with the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF), runs workshops on loss and bereavement.

He trains staff in hospitals and residential settings in things like how to communicate with people with dementia or how to deliver bad news to terminal patients.

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In my experience, people dont ask for the moon [when theyre told theyre at the end of life stage], he tells Independent.ie.

One woman in a nursing home wanted to go to the beach to have an ice cream. [Her nursing home] literally pulled heaven and earth apart to get her to the beach. People do extraordinary things.

The only way these (wishes) can happen is if theres honesty, and if we ask people what is going on for them at the moment.

Peoples biggest fear is, am I going to be in pain? And am I going to be on my own? But unless were actually giving people the information that the end is drawing close, were never going to have those conversations.

He added: The stark reality is that when youre dying in Ireland you can be the loneliest person in the world because everybody is going to be talking about you, but nobody is talking to you. We end up isolating the one person we dont want to isolate."

Adrian OGrady, station officer at Tallaght fire station, is a complicated grief therapist with the IHF and runs workshops for emergency frontline staff on how to deal with bereaved families.

Every day, fire officers and paramedics encounter a death, and often they have to inform a family member of this death.

Were getting everything from Sudden Death Syndrome, right up to senior citizens dying and everything in between, from sudden traumatic deaths and people dying in their sleep.

Its very hard for a fire fighter to go from the rescuer mindset to a supportive mindset.

If you get the breaking bad news right, you start the grieving right. If you get it wrong, youll traumatise a persons grief.

Its vital for Dublin Fire Brigades crew to have proper training in how to help families, Adrian explains.

We looked at what the areas of stress are for fire fighters and paramedics, and one of the major stresses is breaking bad news, and we devised a breaking bad news lecture series.

Members of the public depend on us to help them and support them at their worst moments, and its up to us to do it professionally. There was a gap in the learning, and thanks to the Irish Hospice masters programme, I feel that weve filled that gap.

Were more aware of trying to get their family around and what the supports are that they need, the priest, whatever the person might need. Well make that call if the time permits us.

If its sudden infant death syndrome in particular, well slow things down and get all the supports the family needs. When youre breaking the bad news of a death of a child to a parents, thats the hardest. You can imagine, the grief goes so deep.

Even if its obvious [that their loved one has died], theyre still hoping that youre going to walk in and save them.

We dont like those moments ourselves. Were born to save lives. We dont like not rescuing people. To turn around and have to break bad news is difficult for us.

Fire officers also receive training in how to deal with death, and critical and traumatic incidents. The recent fire in the Metro Hotel in Ballymun was particularly challenging for fire officers, Adrian explains.

The fire in Ballymun, that is outside the normal - we dont normally get that type of fire. Especially after Grenfell going up the steps, we would have been thinking about Grenfell.

In the past, doctors might have discussed patients prognoses with their family members. But now the patient is at the centre of these discussions. Children too who have terminal illnesses are now included too, something that represents a big change, Bryan adds.

You have a mutual discussion about whats going on, you check how the person is, check how theyre feeling. And its about finding out how to break the bad news in such a way that the person can comprehend it.

Weve done a lot of work with kids over the years. We start with the adults because they know their kids. The evidence is that when kids are included, they do an awful lot better. Its not scary for them. Children are much more practical than we are, its the innocence, they want to know all the details and everything thats happening.

Bryan remembers one child who was discussing her prognosis with her doctors before turning to her mum and saying, mum you need to step outside now. The child was able to ask all the questions which might have been too painful for her mother to hear.

These conversations are hugely difficult. In dealing with bad news and talking to people about their end of life, we do need to go gently. If we keep the person at the centre always, were not going to go too wrong. Then theres safety and security and honesty and truth.Dublin Airport is introducing 14 new routes and 4 new airlines this summer.

Cathay Pacific, Croatia Airlines, Hainan Airlines and Icelandair will join the airport for a record summer this year.

Aer Lingus will begin flying to Seattle in May. In June, Air Canada will begin flying direct to Montreal, Cathay Pacific will fly direct to Hong Kong and Hainan Airlines direct to Beijing.

The peak summer months will see 446 flights per week to 16 destinations in the US and four in Canada.

One million additional passengers are expected on existing European flights, an increase of 8pc capacity.

Nine new routes are flying from Dublin to Europe, including Marrakesh, Paphos, Reykjavik and Luxembourg.

Dublin Airport Managing Director, Vincent Harrison said: We are continuously working with existing and new airline customers to provide more choice for consumers and to add new destinations to our route network.

We are particularly looking forward to welcoming our new services into the Asia Pacific region when direct services to Hong Kong and Beijing start in June.

56 airlines will operate in Dublin Airport this summer, with flights to 195 destinations in 42 countries.

More than six million passengers traveled through Dublin Airport in 2018 so far, a 4pc increase from this time last year.Hanna Dickenson, then 19, convinced her parents she only had weeks to live Photo: Facebook

A 24-year-old in Australia pretended to have cancer and swindled over 23,000 from her parents and friends in a despicable scam to fund her partying, drug use and overseas travel.

Hanna Dickenson, then 19, convinced her parents she only had weeks to live and desperately needed money for a lifesaving treatment and for travel to New Zealand and Thailand for special procedures.

Her parents, who are farmers, could not afford the alleged treatments and asked neighbours and friends to assist.

Nathan and Rachel Cue, who were neighbours, took money out of their mortgage and donated around 12,621 but went to police after spotting images that Dickenson posted on Facebook which showed her drinking and partying.

I started looking into it, doing my homework, Mr Cue told Channel Nine. I spent a fair bit of time and sussing things out and [I was] 100 per cent scammed. So thats when I took it to the police.

Police eventually charged Dickenson with obtaining property by deception. She pleaded guilty to seven charges.

Describing her offence as despicable, a court in the state of Victoria sentenced Dickenson, now a real estate agent, to three months in jail, 150 hours of community work and treatment for mental health issues and substance abuse.

It smacks of a Walter Mitty kind of lifestyle, said magistrate David Starvaggi.

"Ms Dickenson has engaged in conduct that tears at the very heartstrings of human nature."

The court ordered her to repay her numerous victims and heard she would lose her job.

Beverley Lindsay, Dickenson's lawyer, likened the case to that of Belle Gibson, a fake wellness blogger in Australia who claimed to have survived brain cancer after using alternative therapies and nutrition. She was fined 220,000 for profiting from her false claims but not jailed.

"Yes, [Dickenson] has harmed some people  she didn't ask them directly though," Ms Lindsay told the court.

"She hasn't engaged in this behaviour for three years, she's been a model worker  she's turned her life around, she's proven that. To send her to prison now sends her backwards.

But the magistrate said her conduct beggars belief and a prison sentence was vital to deterring future scams.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]Former FBI director James Comey describes President Donald Trump as unethical and untethered to truth in a new book.

He calls Mr Trumps leadership of the country ego driven and about personal loyalty.

Mr Comeys comments come in the book in which he casts Mr Trump as a mafia boss-like figure who sought to blur the line between law enforcement and politics and tried to pressure him regarding the investigation into Russian election interference.

The book provides a first-hand account of several moments under scrutiny by special counsel Robert Muellers team probing possible obstruction of justice by Mr Trump.

The book is sure to ignite a backlash from Mr Trump, who has previously attacked Mr Comey as a showboat and a liar.

It is to be released next week.President Donald Trump has emerged from a meeting with his national security team without a final decision on how to respond to a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Mr Trump held a meeting on Thursday afternoon with his team to discuss the situation.

But she said no final decision has been made.

She said that US officials are continuing to assess intelligence and are engaged in conversations with our partners and allies.

Mr Trump said earlier that an attack on Syria could take place very soon or not so soon at all, arguing he had never signalled the timing of retaliation for the suspected chemical weapons attack that he had suggested was imminent a day earlier.

A Kremlin spokesman warned the US and its allies against any steps that could destabilise the situation in Syria.

Asked about possible US strikes on Syria, President Vladimir Putins spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that its necessary to avoid any steps that may fuel tensions in Syria. He added that it would have an utterly destructive impact on the Syrian settlement.

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Mr Peskov would not say if Moscow could use a Russia-US military hotline to avoid casualties in a case of a US strike, saying only that the hotline exists and has remained active.

Mr Trump warned Russia on Wednesday to get ready for a missile attack on its ally Syria.Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn declined to say whether Vladimir Putin bears any responsibility for the Salisbury nerve agent attack.

On a visit to a school in Derby, Mr Corbyn was asked whether he thought the Russian president was responsible for the Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Mr Corbyn said: "I think somebody was obviously responsible for it and that somebody has to be found. My view is that the use of nerve agents is obviously vile and wrong. And the chemical weapons convention inspection must take place and those that did it must be held responsible.

"Clearly, Novichok is of Russian design and Russian origin, but the investigation should take place on this."

The student asked: "You don't think it's Putin?"

Mr Corbyn replied: "I don't say it is or isn't. I say an investigation must take place so the finger of blame can be pointed with evidence behind it. I think any differences between countries have got to be evidence-based so that we do have a legal basis for our complaints against whoever did it.

"I'm pleased that both the Skripals seem to be recovering although I think the long-term effects of Novichok will not go away just because they've recovered from the immediate effects of it."

The international chemical weapons watchdog has backed Britain's findings as to the identity of the chemical used in the Salisbury nerve agent attack.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said an analysis of samples taken from Sergei Skripal, his daughter, Yulia, and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, confirmed the UK's assessment.

The Government has said that its analysis by military experts at Porton Down showed they were affected by Novichok - a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia.

The executive summary released by the OPCW does not mention Novichok by name.

It states: "The results of the analysis by the OPCW designated laboratories of environmental and biomedical samples collected by the OPCW team confirms the findings of the United Kingdom relating to the identity of the toxic chemical that was used in Salisbury and severely injured three people."

The OPCW noted that the chemical was of "high purity" with an "almost complete absence" of any impurities.

The findings were welcomed by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.

He said: "This is based on testing in four independent, highly reputable laboratories around the world. All returned the same conclusive results.

"There can be no doubt what was used and there remains no alternative explanation about who was responsible - only Russia has the means, motive and record."

The OPCW was invited by the UK to carry out a technical investigation after Moscow strongly challenged its assertion that responsibility for the attack lay with the Kremlin.

The OPCW said that it had taken blood samples from the three affected individuals under "full chain of custody" for analysis at its laboratories, as well as checking their identities against official photo ID documents.

It also conducted on-site sampling from "hot spots" of contamination in Salisbury.

Samples taken by the British authorities were supplied to OPCW laboratories in Rijswijk in the Netherlands for comparative analysis in order to verify the UK's findings.

The OPCW did not identify the source of the chemical which Britain has said could only come from Russia.Prime Minister Theresa May during her visit to Alexander Stadium in Perry Park in Perry Barr, Birmingham, Christopher Furlong/PA Wire

British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her senior ministers to a special cabinet meeting on Thursday to discuss joining the United States and France in possible military action against Syria after a suspected poison gas attack on civilians.

U.S. President Donald Trump warned Russia on Wednesday of imminent military action in Syria, declaring that missiles "will be coming" and lambasting Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia has warned the West against attacking its Syrian ally, which is also supported by Iran, and says there was no chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma.

May recalled the ministers from their Easter holiday for a special cabinet meeting in Downing Street later on Thursday to discuss Britain's response to what she has cast as a barbaric attack that cannot go unchallenged.

The BBC said May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in action led by the United States without seeking prior approval from parliament. Downing Street spokesmen repeatedly declined to comment on that report.

"The chemical weapons attack that took place on Saturday in Douma in Syria was a shocking and barbaric act," May told reporters on Wednesday. "All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible."

The Daily Telegraph newspaper said May had ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria in readiness for strikes against the Syrian military.

May is not obliged to win parliament's approval, but a non-binding constitutional convention to do so has been established since a 2003 vote on joining the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It has been observed in subsequent military deployments in Libya and Iraq.

Britain has been launching air strikes in Syria from its military base in Cyprus, but only against targets linked to the Islamic State militant group.

Parliament voted down British military action against Assad's government in 2013, in an embarrassment for May's predecessor, David Cameron. That then deterred the U.S. administration of Barack Obama from similar action.A medical worker giving a child oxygen following a suspected chemical attack in Syria (Syrian Civil Defence White Helmets via AP)

France has proof that the Syrian government launched chlorine gas attacks, President Emmanuel Macron said.

Mr Macron said France would not tolerate regimes that think everything is permitted.

Speaking on TF1 television, Mr Macron said we have proof that chemical weapons were used, at least chlorine in recent days by Syrian President Bashar Assads government.

He did not say whether France is planning military action against Assads government.

Mr Macron said he has been talking regularly this week with US President Donald Trump about the most effective response.

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With increasing concerns about a US-Russia proxy war in Syria, Mr Macron insisted that France will not allow an escalation or something that could damage the stability of the region.

On Tuesday, Mr Macron said any French action would target Syrias chemical weapons abilities.

Syrian opposition activists and medics say a suspected gas attack last week in Douma killed more than 40 people.

The Syrian government has denied the allegations.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany will not participate in possible military action in Syria, but supports sending a message that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable.

She said she spoke on Thursday with Mr Macron.

Mrs Merkel said in Berlin: Germany will not take part in possible military action  I want to make clear again that there are no decisions  but we see, and support this, that everything is being done to send a signal that this use of chemical weapons is not acceptable.Police officers inspect cars at a checkpoint in the hunt for an escaped thief (Shingo Nishizume/Kyodo News via AP)

Hundreds of Japanese police are in pursuit of a convicted thief who escaped from prison and landed on a tiny island with abundant hideouts  some 1,000 homes made vacant by an ageing and shrinking population.

Tatsuma Hirao, 27, has been at large since Sunday, when he fled from prison in Ehime prefecture while serving five-and-a-half years for theft.

Police suspect he drove a stolen car and crossed a bridge to the nearby island of Mukaishima, near Hiroshima, which has a population of about 16,000.

TV footage shows police visiting every home and searching empty houses and huts.

Vehicles are being stopped at checkpoints, causing rare traffic jams on the usually quiet island.

Several cases of thefts have been reported to police since the jailbreak.People stand still in memory of victims of the Holocaust in Tel Aviv (Ariel Schalit/AP)

Israelis have stood still for a nationwide moment of silence in remembrance of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

A two-minute siren wailed across the country and the nation paid respects to those systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in the Second World War.

As every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, buses and cars came to a halt as Israelis stepped out of their vehicles, standing with heads bowed in solemn remembrance.

The sombre day is also marked by ceremonies and memorials at schools and community centres.

Restaurants and cafes in the ordinarily bustling streets of Tel Aviv close, and TV and radio stations play Holocaust-themed programmes.

Dignitaries laid wreaths at Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

A third of the worlds Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

Israel was established afterwards in 1948, and hundreds of thousands of survivors fled to the Jewish state.

On Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at a Holocaust memorial ceremony at Yad Vashem and warned that Iran should not test Israel amid rising tensions in Syria.

Events of recent days teach that standing up to evil and aggression is a mission imposed on every generation, Mr Netanyahu said.

Today as well, a murderous regime threatens us, threatens entire world peace, this regime explicitly declares that it intends to annihilate us, the Jewish state, he said, alluding to Iran.

Mr Netanyahu compared the 2015 nuclear deal between world powers and Iran to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the run-up to the Second World War.

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He said the agreement released the Iranian regime from its chains and since has devoured country after country, similar to what happened in Europe in the 1930s.

Israel regards Iran as an existential threat because of its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes and support for anti-Israel organisations such as the Shiite militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Tehran insists that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only.Jennifer Lawrence was among the victims (Ian West/PA)

A man has pleaded guilty to hacking into the iCloud accounts of Hollywood stars and others so he could steal personal information, including private photographs and videos.

George Garofano, 26, of North Branford, Connecticut, pleaded guilty to unauthorised access to a protected computer to obtain information, federal prosecutors said.

The charge stemmed from the investigation into the 2014 scandal in which the private photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, Kate Upton and others were made public.

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Prosecutors said Garofano sent emails that appeared to be from Apple encouraging victims to disclose usernames and passwords.

He then used the information to illegally access nearly 250 iCloud accounts.

Garofano, who remains free on 50,000 dollar (35,000) bail, faces up to five years in prison at sentencing at a date to be determined.Activists in Syria have reported that government forces have vacated strategic potential targets - including air bases around the country - as they prepared for a possible US attack in retaliation for the alleged chemical assault.

The Foreign Ministry in Damascus denounced US President Donald Trump's threat to attack the country as "reckless" and a danger to international peace and security.

The statement was the latest in a war of words raging between Washington and Moscow since Saturday's suspected attack on the rebel-held town Douma, just outside Damascus, which is believed to have killed more than 40 people.

The World Health Organisation said that approximately 500 patients showed signs of exposure to toxic chemicals following the attack on Douma.

Syria and its ally Russia deny such an attack happened.

Amid the unprecedented tension between the two former Cold War adversaries, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the nation's government evacuated forces from a number of air bases around the country.

But Damascus allies confirmed that precautionary measures were being taken throughout Syria.

Civilians in government-held areas in Syria expressed a mix of fear and defiance.

Social media pages were flush with defiant comments, mostly from government supporters, some lamenting Syria's perpetual conflict while others taunted Trump to go through with his threats.

One woman who refused to be identified because of fear for her security described herself as "trembling" and said she had stocked up on food and is considering not sending her children to school.

"People say Trump is insane and he would like carry out his threats," the woman said.Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a ceremony yesterday to receive credentials from foreign ambassadors at the Kremlin. Russia has warned it will shoot down missiles in Syria. Photo: Reuters

US President Donald Trump has warned Russia of imminent military action in Syria over a suspected poison gas attack, declaring that missiles "will be coming" and claiming that relations between the two countries are at an all-time low.

Mr Trump was reacting to a warning from Russia on Tuesday that any US missiles fired at Syria over the deadly assault on a rebel enclave would be shot down and the launch sites targeted.

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His comments raised fears of direct conflict over Syria for the first time between the two world powers backing opposing sides in the country's protracted civil war, which has aggravated instability across the Middle East.

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and 'smart!'," Mr Trump wrote in a post on Twitter.

"You shouldn't be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" Mr Trump tweeted, referring to Moscow's alliance with Syria's president Bashar al-Assad.

He also tweeted: "Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War. There is no reason for this.

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"Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?"

Later, US Defence Secretary James Mattis said the US was still assessing the chemical attack and the US military stood ready "to provide military options if they are appropriate as the president determines".

In response, Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a Facebook post that "smart missiles should fly towards terrorists, not towards the lawful government".

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said any US missile salvo could be an attempt to destroy evidence of the reported gas attack in the Syrian town of Douma, for which Damascus and Moscow have denied any responsibility. Dozens of Douma inhabitants died and hundreds were injured in the attack, according to the World Health Organisation.

The Russian military said later it had observed movements of US naval forces in the Gulf. Any US strike would probably involve the navy in waters within range of Syria, given the risk to aircraft from Russian and Syrian air defence systems. A US navy guided-missile destroyer, the USS Donald Cook, is in the Mediterranean.

The Syrian foreign ministry accused the US, which has supported some rebel groups in Syria's conflict, of using "fabrications and lies" as an excuse to hit its territory.

"We are not surprised by such a thoughtless escalation by a regime like the United States regime, which sponsored terrorism in Syria and still does," the state news agency SANA cited an official source in the ministry as saying.

After the Douma attack, the insurgent group dug in there, Jaish al-Islam, finally agreed to withdraw. That clinched a huge victory for President Assad, crushing a long rebellion in the eastern Ghouta region near Damascus.

In London, British Prime Minister Theresa May said all the indications pointed to Syrian government responsibility for the Douma attack and such "a shocking and barbaric act" could not go unchallenged.

"We're rapidly reaching an understanding of what happened on the ground," she said. "We'll be working with our closest allies to consider how we can ensure that those responsible are held to account, and also how we can prevent and deter the humanitarian catastrophe of the use of chemical weapons in the future."

Mr Trump's disclosure of his apparent decision to strike as well as the kind of weaponry to be used in a future military operation is likely to frustrate military planners, who hold such information closely.

The president had repeatedly said he would not telegraph military moves against foes such as North Korea and Isil.France has proof that the Syrian government launched chlorine gas attacks, President Emmanuel Macron said.

Mr Macron said France would not tolerate "regimes that think everything is permitted".

Speaking on TF1 television, Mr Macron said "we have proof that chemical weapons were used, at least chlorine" in recent days by Syrian President Bashar Assad's government.

He did not say whether France is planning military action against Assad's government.

Mr Macron said he has been talking regularly this week with US President Donald Trump about the most effective response.

With increasing concerns about a US-Russia proxy war in Syria, Mr Macron insisted that "France will not allow an escalation or something that could damage the stability" of the region.

On Tuesday, Mr Macron said any French action would target Syria's chemical weapons abilities.

Syrian opposition activists and medics say a suspected gas attack last week in Douma killed more than 40 people.

The Syrian government has denied the allegations.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany will not participate in possible military action in Syria, but supports sending a message that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable.

She said she spoke on Thursday with Mr Macron.

Mrs Merkel said in Berlin: "Germany will not take part in possible military action - I want to make clear again that there are no decisions - but we see, and support this, that everything is being done to send a signal that this use of chemical weapons is not acceptable."UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has stressed the need to prevent the situation in Syria from "spiralling out of control".

Guterres expressed regret on Wednesday that the UN Security Council had been unable to reach agreement on the issue of chemical weapons in Syria.

He said he had called the ambassadors of the five veto-wielding permanent council nations - the US, Russia, China, Britain and France - "to reiterate my deep concern about the risks of the current impasse".

He also renewed his "outrage" at reports of continued chemical weapons use in Syria.

President Donald Trump should steer clear of any military action involving Syria and avoid a nuclear attack at all costs, former president Jimmy Carter has said.

"I pray that he would keep our country at peace and not exaggerate or exacerbate the challenges that come up with North Korea, in Russia or in Syria," Carter said in an interview on Wednesday.

"I hope he realises very profoundly as I did, and as other presidents have done, that any nuclear exchange could involve catastrophe for all human beings."

The 93-year-old added that even a lesser military attack "is a dangerous thing" that can spiral out of control.

His remarks came after Trump said he was considering military action against Syria in response to a suspected chemical attack on civilians. Russia has countered that such a move would have "grave repercussions".The guided-missile destroyer USS Arleigh Burke leaves its base in Norfolk, Virginia, to head for the Middle East. Photo: Reuters

Donald Trump's promise to carry out US strikes against Syria despite Russian warnings could result in a showdown between two of the world's most sophisticated weapons systems.

US action against Bashar al-Assad will almost certainly come in the form of a hail of Tomahawk missiles, the sea-launched weapons costing 670,000 each.

But that strike could be disrupted, if not entirely thwarted, by Russia's state-of-the-art but untested S-400 air defence system.

Launched from US Navy ships and Royal Navy submarines, the Tomahawks can deliver a 1,000lb (450kg) warhead with pin-point accuracy from ranges of 1,200 to 2,400km, flying at 550mph just metres above the ground. But they have never been challenged by an air defence system as modern or sophisticated as the S-400, which Russia deployed to its Hmeymim airbase in Syria in 2015.

The S-400 has a sophisticated radar and control array that allows it to target dozens of enemy aircraft simultaneously at ranges of up to 400km.

While its missile interceptor capability is shorter range - about 120km - its missiles travel at 1,000 metres per second and can hit low-flying targets at just a few metres of altitude - perfect for killing sub-sonic Tomahawks.

US commanders, however, may plan to overcome that impressive hit rate with an overwhelming number of Tomahawks, given that Western experts estimate the Hmeymim system has only around 60 missiles.

The S-400 is not the only defence coalition commanders have to worry about.

Russia is also believed to have missile cruisers carrying the older S-300 anti-aircraft system off the coast and defending its base at Tartus. It also has a number of SU-30 interceptor aircraft in Syria, which could pose a serious challenge to coalition pilots.

Meanwhile, the Syrian Arab Army fields a formidable array of older, mostly Soviet-designed surface-to-air missiles, which while little threat to cruise missiles could prove extremely dangerous to coalition aircraft.

That effectively rules out conventional airstrikes, which would risk the lives of the coalition pilots and gravely raise the risk of direct conflict between Russian and Western forces.

Other coalition options include Britain's Storm Shadow cruise missile, an air-launched long range "stealth" cruise missile designed to evade radar that could be fired by RAF Tornadoes flying out of Cyprus.Federal prosecutors investigating US President Donald Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen are seeking records related to two women who received payments in 2016 after alleging affairs with Mr Trump years before - adult-film star Stormy Daniels and ex-'Playboy' model Karen McDougal - according to two people familiar with the matter.

The interest in Ms Daniels and Ms McDougal indicates that federal investigators are trying to determine whether there was a broader pattern or strategy among Mr Trump's associates to buy the silence of women whose accounts could have harmed his electoral chances, and whether any crimes were committed in doing so, one of those people said.

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Investigators are also seeking all communications about Ms Daniels and Ms McDougal among Mr Cohen, David Pecker - a friend of Mr Trump and the chief executive of American Media Inc, which publishes the 'National Enquirer' - and Dylan Howard, the chief content officer for American Media and a reporter there.

Ms Daniels is co-operating with the federal prosecutors, according to a source who is familiar with the ongoing investigation.

Her co-operation was first reported by NBC News.

The high stakes of the case were underscored by the involvement of the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

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He personally approved the move to seek a search warrant for Mr Cohen's records, leading to the raids on Monday on Mr Cohen's home and office, according to two people who have some knowledge of the investigation.

The raids infuriated Mr Trump, who was left "stunned" and "livid" by the prosecutors' aggressive move on Monday, according to an outside adviser who is in frequent touch with the White House.

Mr Trump privately continued to gripe on Tuesday about Mr Rosenstein, who also oversees special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 campaign, according to people who are familiar with the situation.

Many in the president's orbit think that Mr Rosenstein's position is currently the most endangered if the president should decide to take action to try to halt the probe, the people said.

Mr Cohen, Mr Trump's longtime attorney, is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, as 'The Washington Post' reported on Monday.

'The New York Times' first reported prosecutors' interest in Ms McDougal.

The former Playmate has said that she had a 10-month relationship with Mr Trump, beginning in 2006.

She said that she then sold her story to American Media for $150,000 (121,000) about three months before the 2016 election.

No story about Ms McDougal ever appeared in the 'National Enquirer', a tabloid practice sometimes referred to as "catch and kill".

American Media spokesman Jon Hammond did not respond to questions about whether the company had been contacted by federal investigators.

"American Media Inc has, and will continue to, comply with any and all requests that do not jeopardise or violate its protected sources or materials pursuant to our First Amendment rights," Mr Hammond said.

Ms McDougal's attorney, Peter Stris, declined to comment on the Cohen investigation.

The search warrants served on Monday on Mr Cohen's Rockefeller Centre office and home sought his personal financial information and client communications, including records related to Ms Daniels.

She was paid $130,000 (105,000) by the Trump lawyer just days before the 2016 election, in what she has described as an effort to buy her silence.

On April 5, Mr Trump said that he didn't know that his personal attorney paid adult-film star Ms Daniels the $130,000 days before the presidential election.

The raids, which also swept up communications between Mr Cohen and Mr Trump, left the White House scrambling to contain yet another crisis in an administration that has been rife with them.

Some White House allies think this one, like many of the administration's pockets of turbulence, was brought on by Mr Trump himself - specifically by comments that he made last week when he was aboard Air Force One, and when he claimed he had no knowledge of the payment Mr Cohen made to Ms Daniels, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

"He shot himself in the foot by saying he didn't know anything about the payment," one of the people said.

Several lawyers have noted that public statements from Mr Cohen and Mr Trump that the president was unaware of the payment may have significantly aided federal prosecutors' legal arguments to justify searching the lawyer's office, home and hotel room.

If both the lawyer and the client insist that Mr Trump had no idea that Mr Cohen had made the payment, they cannot then assert that those activities were protected by attorney-client privilege, legal experts have said.

"At that point, anything to do with that entire incident is, I would argue, not attorney-client privilege," said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who practices law in Chicago.

"If I were a prosecutor hearing both the lawyer and the client say the client had no awareness whatsoever of that, I would now feel very confident going to a judge to seek that material."US President Donald Trump has tweeted that an attack on Syria "could be very soon or not so soon at all".

Mr Trump also said he "never said when an attack on Syria would take place."

It follows comments he made on Wednesday when he warned Russia of imminent military action in Syria, declaring that missiles "will be coming" and lambasting Moscow for standing by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Earlier today, British Prime Minister Theresa May summoned her senior ministers to a special cabinet meeting on Thursday to discuss joining the United States and France in possible military action against Syria after a suspected poison gas attack on civilians.

Russia has warned the West against attacking its Syrian ally, which is also supported by Iran, and says there was no chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma.

May recalled the ministers from their Easter holiday for a special cabinet meeting in Downing Street later on Thursday to discuss Britain's response to what she has cast as a barbaric attack that cannot go unchallenged.

The BBC said May was ready to give the go-ahead for Britain to take part in action led by the United States without seeking prior approval from parliament. Downing Street spokesmen repeatedly declined to comment on that report.

"The chemical weapons attack that took place on Saturday in Douma in Syria was a shocking and barbaric act," May told reporters on Wednesday. "All the indications are that the Syrian regime was responsible."Donald Trump said House Speaker Paul Ryan, left, will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question. Photo: Getty Images

Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House of Representatives, has announced he will not be seeking re-election in November, in a blow to Republican confidence ahead of the race.

The departure of Mr Ryan, the most senior Republican in the House and their biggest fundraiser, is the most prominent in a series of retirements among the party in recent months.

The lawmaker denied that the party's uphill battle to maintain control of Capitol Hill had driven his decision, saying he was relinquishing his role to spend more time with his wife and three children.

"I have been a member of Congress for almost two decades. My kids weren't even born when I was elected," Mr Ryan said.

"What I realise is, if I'm here for one more term, my kids will only have ever known me as a weekend dad.

"I just can't let that happen, so I will be setting new priorities in my life."

Some will see Mr Ryan's retirement as a sign of the uncertainty over whether the party can maintain control of the House in November's midterm elections.

More than 40 Republican representatives are leaving the chamber, and Mr Ryan's departure is likely to have an impact on the party's morale.

Just weeks ago, Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader and a friend of Mr Ryan, told 'The Washington Post': "The notion that Paul Ryan is just going to abdicate and leave is preposterous... it would be a signal of surrender."

Allies of Mr Ryan insisted that he was simply committed to spending time with his family.

The Wisconsin representative has been a prolific fundraiser, bringing in more than $54m (43.5m) in donations for the 2018 election, and some fear he may now slow down his efforts before his January 2019 exit.

His departure may also trigger a civil war between Republicans for the cherished role, with Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, Mr Ryan's deputies, reported to be engaged in a silent struggle to become the next House leader.

Once referred to as America's most popular Republican, Mr Ryan got off to a rocky start with the US president - distancing himself from Donald Trump when he was a presidential candidate.

In the end, the 48-year-old opted to put the party above his personal views.

Just before the 2016 election, Mr Ryan confirmed he had voted for "our candidate", choosing not to refer to Mr Trump by name.

However, in office, Mr Ryan worked closely with the Trump administration to deliver the Republican tax bill in December, for which Mr Trump expressed his gratitude.

The president tweeted yesterday: "Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man, and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question. We are with you, Paul."

Mr Ryan has enjoyed a 20-year career in Congress since he was first elected to the House in 1998. Despite claiming he "did not want" the job, he was made speaker in 2015 when John Boehner, his predecessor, retired.

The lawmaker has been touted as a future presidential candidate, given his relative youth and his national name recognition after running alongside Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.

Political pundits yesterday speculated on whether Mr Ryan's retirement is paving the way for a presidential bid.

They noted that Mr Ryan did not rule out a future career in politics, saying instead: "This year will be my last one as a member of the House," and outlining the work still to be done.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, his Democratic counterpart, paid tribute to Mr Ryan.

"The speaker has been an avid advocate for his point of view and for the people of his district," she said in a statement.

"Despite our differences, I commend his steadfast commitment to our country."

 Daily Telegraph, London

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]The 2015-2016 Indian budget includes a proposal to set up manufacturing hubs in CLMV countries. The CLMV includes four Southeast Asian nations  Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, which are seeing the highest foreign direct investment growth in the region, especially in manufacturing.

As India seeks to deepen economic partnerships with Southeast Asia under an Act East policy declared by Prime Minister Modi, it has prioritized CLMV economies. The commerce ministry has sought US$16.1 million (Rs 100 crore) in budgetary allocations for a Project Development Fund to oversee investment in the CLMV manufacturing hubs.

There is a history of industrial cooperation between India and the CLMV countries. Major Indian investment in Vietnam includes large projects, such as oil exploration, power generation, and chemical manufacturing. In January 2015, there are a total of 84 projects funded by Indian investments in Vietnam. The EXIM bank of India has contributed a total of 20 Letters of Credit worth US$1 billion in CLMV countries towards power, irrigation, and manufacturing projects.

Trade between India and CLMV countries grew tenfold from US$1.1 billion in 2004 to US$11.2 billion in 2013. In terms of FDI, approved Indian foreign investment in CLMV countries stood at US$40.9 million in 2013. For the same year, total FDI from India to the ASEAN region as a whole stood at US$ 1.3 billion.

Why CLMV?

India and the CLMV countries share similar economic characteristics when it comes to prospects for manufacturing. All of these countries have a large young labor force and inexpensive operating costs. However, CLMV countries have become a major source of competition for India in manufacturing due to their position in integrated value chains in Southeast Asia. For instance, in 2013-14, the phone manufacturer Nokia moved its operations from Indias Chennai to Vietnams Bac Ninh province largely to take advantage of cheaper regional logistics.

Along with being a preferred region for manufacturing, CLMV countries are also large potential markets for Indian products. The region has a population of 165 million, growing incomes, and a rapidly expanding middle class. In Vietnam alone, the middle class is expected to increase from 2 million in 2014 to 33 million by 2020.

A survey by the Japanese External Trade Organization (JETRO) in December 2014 showed that base monthly salaries for manufacturing employees of Japanese-invested companies in CLMV countries were lower than those in India. While base monthly salaries in India were reported at US$239, those reported for CLMV countries were US$113 in Cambodia, US$112 in Laos, US$127 in Myanmar, and US$176 in Vietnam.

As India seeks to benefit from the emerging industrial power of the CLMV countries, it is also accelerating cooperation with cities within each country. In one such case, textiles, pharmaceuticals, tourism, and high-tech agriculture have been identified as sectors for Indian investment into Can Tho, Vietnam. India has also proposed bilateral trade agreements with each CLMV country. A major study by the EXIM bank in 2014 cited agriculture, infrastructure, and SME development as major potential areas of cooperation between India and the four countries.

Challenges remain

Indias goal of deepening economic relationship with the CLMV countries faces a number of challenges, which investors must be aware of. Foremost among these is connectivity. Despite sharing a border that is 1,643 km long, Indias immediate neighbor Myanmar isnt connected to the country by rail and there is only one poorly maintained road that connects the two countries. There are ambitious infrastructure projects in the pipeline like the Kaladin Multimodal project and the India-Myanmar-Thailand trilateral highway. However, implementation and building has been fraught with uncertainty. Construction of the trilateral highway has experienced numerous delays and may miss its 2016 completion deadline.

Another challenge is the Indian governments policy itself. The government hasnt clarified which sectors investors can focus on in the proposed manufacturing hubs.

One more challenge is competition from other countries already investing in CLMV. While connectivity may hinder Indian investment, in December 2014, China pledged US$11.5 billion to develop 92 high priority investment and technical assistance projects in the Greater Mekong sub-region, which includes the CLMV countries, Thailand, and Chinas Yunnan Province and Guangxi Zhan autonomous regions. 46 percent of these projects will be based in the CLMV countries.

Although trade between India and the CLMV countries has increased 10 times in the last decade, this pales in comparison to these countries economic relations with other partners, such as China and other ASEAN countries. Intra-ASEAN FDI in CLMV countries stood at US$ 3.5 billion in 2012-2013 and Chinese FDI in CLMV countries stood at US$ 2 billion. In the same period, more than 80 percent of Chinese FDI in the four countries went to manufacturing. Setting up manufacturing facilities in CLMV could help India tap into the highly integrated regional value chain networks within Southeast Asia and between Southeast Asia and China.

As India promotes a Make in India campaign, the decision to set up manufacturing infrastructure outside the country does not contradict the domestic manufacturing goal. Indian companies will benefit from utilizing the easier logistics, integrated supply chains, and cheaper labor costs in the CLMV region. Competition with foreign companies in the CLMV will also increase the competitiveness of Indian businesses and as a result the quality of Indian goods and services, which means that in the long-term, Indian companies will bring better production practices and improved technology back home. Provided that connectivity between India and CLMV countries improves, government support for investment ensures that companies will Make in India by utilizing regional supply chains.In this edition of India Briefing Magazine, we make the case for why now is the right time for foreign firms t...Image: NASA website

Washington, Apr 12 (IBNS): Scientists working on NASAs Juno mission to Jupiter shared a 3-D infrared movie depicting densely packed cyclones and anticyclones that permeate the planets polar regions, and the first detailed view of a dynamo, or engine, powering the magnetic field for any planet beyond Earth. Those are among the items unveiled during the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, on Wednesday, April 11.

Juno mission scientists have taken data collected by the spacecrafts Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument and generated the 3-D fly-around of the Jovian worlds north pole. Imaging in the infrared part of the spectrum, JIRAM captures light emerging from deep inside Jupiter equally well, night or day. The instrument probes the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below Jupiter's cloud tops. The imagery will help the team understand the forces at work in the animation  a north pole dominated by a central cyclone surrounded by eight circumpolar cyclones with diameters ranging from 2,500 to 2,900 miles (4,000 to 4,600 kilometers), read the NASA website.

Before Juno, we could only guess what Jupiters poles would look like, said Alberto Adriani, Juno co-investigator from the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology, Rome. Now, with Juno flying over the poles at a close distance it permits the collection of infrared imagery on Jupiters polar weather patterns and its massive cyclones in unprecedented spatial resolution.

Another Juno investigation discussed during the media briefing was the teams latest pursuit of the interior composition of the gas giant. One of the biggest pieces in its discovery has been understanding how Jupiters deep interior rotates.

Prior to Juno, we could not distinguish between extreme models of Jupiters interior rotation, which all fitted the data collected by Earth-based observations and other deep space missions, said Tristan Guillot, a Juno co-investigator from the Universite Cote d'Azur, Nice, France. But Juno is different -- it orbits the planet from pole-to-pole and gets closer to Jupiter than any spacecraft ever before. Thanks to the amazing increase in accuracy brought by Junos gravity data, we have essentially solved the issue of how Jupiters interior rotates: The zones and belts that we see in the atmosphere rotating at different speeds extend to about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers).

At this point, hydrogen becomes conductive enough to be dragged into near-uniform rotation by the planets powerful magnetic field.

The same data used to analyze Jupiters rotation contain information on the planets interior structure and composition. Not knowing the interior rotation was severely limiting the ability to probe the deep interior. Now our work can really begin in earnest -- determining the interior composition of the solar systems largest planet, said Guillot.

At the meeting, the missions deputy-principal investigator, Jack Connerney of the Space Research Corporation, Annapolis, Maryland, presented the first detailed view of the dynamo, or engine, powering the magnetic field of Jupiter.

Connerney and colleagues produced the new magnetic field model from measurements made during eight orbits of Jupiter. From those, they derived maps of the magnetic field at the surface and in the region below the surface where the dynamo is thought to originate. Because Jupiter is a gas giant, surface is defined as one Jupiter radius, which is about 44,400 miles (71,450 kilometers).

These maps provide an extraordinary advancement in current knowledge and will guide the science team in planning the spacecrafts remaining observations.

Were finding that Jupiters magnetic field is unlike anything previously imagined, said Connerney. Junos investigations of the magnetic environment at Jupiter represent the beginning of a new era in the studies of planetary dynamos.

The map Connerneys team made of the dynamo source region revealed unexpected irregularities, regions of surprising magnetic field intensity, and that Jupiters magnetic field is more complex in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere. About halfway between the equator and the north pole lies an area where the magnetic field is intense and positive. It is flanked by areas that are less intense and negative. In the southern hemisphere, however, the magnetic field is consistently negative, becoming more and more intense from the equator to the pole.

The researchers are still figuring out why they would see these differences in a rotating planet thats generally thought of as more-or-less fluid.

Juno is only about one third the way through its planed mapping mission and already we are beginning to discover hints on how Jupiters dynamo works, said Connerney. The team is really anxious to see the data from our remaining orbits.

Juno has logged nearly 122 million miles (200 million kilometers) to complete those 11 science passes since entering Jupiter's orbit on July 4, 2016. Juno's 12th science pass will be on May 24.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Italian Space Agency (ASI), contributed two instruments, a Ka-band frequency translator (KaT) and the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM). Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, built the spacecraft.



Klkata, Apr 12 (IBNS): Power Publishers and Motions Pictures recently shot a television commercial for Greenfield City, a township located in the southern suburbs of Kolkata.

The commercial, featuring fashion designer Agnimitra Paul and newcomer Suvosmita Mukherjee, and shot at a bungalow in the Ballygunj area and at Greenfield City, Behala, is about the real estate's offer for the Bengali New Year.

According to Pinaki Ghosh, founder of Power Publishers and Motion Pictures, the entire shoot was completed and edited within two days to meet a stringent deadline.

"We work with thorough professionals and our crew has been handing several ad films and feature film projects, ever since the inception of the company," said Ghosh.

The film was directed by Pratap Ghosh.

Power Publishers and Motion Pictures is a film production division of Power Publishers, one of India's leading self-publishing wagon.

Currently, the company is running the final edits of their feature film SinSister, slated to hit the theaters during the Pujas.New Delhi, Apr 12 (IBNS): In a major development, BJP lawmaker Kuldeep Singh Sengar has been charged with raping a minor girl in Unnao town of Uttar Pradesh.

Kuldeep Singh Sengar last night visited the house of a top cop in Lucknow amid allegations of rape against him.

When there is an arrest warrant, call me, he told media.

Sengar said: "I just came here to prove that I did no wrong."

Yogi Adityanath-led government ordered the police to file a police case against the lawmaker.

The government has reportedly directed to hand over the cases related to the incident to the CBI.

"Kuldeep Singh Sengar, 50, has also been charged under provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO)," NDTV reported.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT), formed to probe the Unnao gangrape case and the suspicious death of the 16-year-old rape victim's father, visited the site of the alleged crime on Wednesday to begin fresh enquiry in the case, media reports said.

The SIT was directed to submit initial reports of its investigation before Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday evening.

The team visited the crime spot and the tree where the rape victims father was tied up and thrashed.

The investigators also spoke to the victim, her mother, uncle and other family members.

They also had a talk with the suspended and other policemen posted at Makhi Police Station.

The SIT was formed on Tuesday to investigate the case after the father of the girl, who had alleged being raped by a BJP lawmaker and attempted suicide outside Adityanath's home on Sunday, died on Monday morning at the district hospital.

The autopsy report revealed that the father died to septicaemia.

According to the postmortem report, the father was not given proper treatment in the judicial custody.

The man was in judicial custody after a complaint was filed against his daughter's alleged rapists.

The girl had alleged that she was raped by Kuldeep Singh Sengar, the BJP legislator from Unnao, and his brother last year, but the police refused to take any action against them.

She also claimed that her family was being threatened after they tried to file an FIR.

Earlier on Tuesday, the brother of Sengar was arrested by the police.

Meanwhile, Sengar's wife, who met UP DGP OP Singh in Lucknow on Wednesday, demanded a CBI probe into the matter.Chennai, Apr 12 (IBNS): Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday reached Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu, to participate in the Defence Expo.

Modi reached the southern state on Thursday morning.

He was welcomed by Tamil Nadu deputy Chief Minister O Paneerselvam at the city airport.

Amid Modi's arrival in Chennai, several protesters blocked roads over the Cauvery river water issue.

People, who were protesting against the central government for not forming the Cauvery river water board, were holding black flags to oppose Modi's visit.

Modi had to avoid the blocked road and avail a bypass to reach the venue.Lucknow, Apr 12 (IBNS): Uttar Pradesh police on Thursday said they won't arrest BJP lawmaker Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who has been charged with raping a minor girl in Unnao town of the state.

Police said the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) will investigate and decide whether to arrest Sengar or not.

Sengar last night visited the house of a top cop in Lucknow amid allegations of rape against him.

When there is an arrest warrant, call me, he told media.

Sengar said: "I just came here to prove that I did no wrong."

Yogi Adityanath-led government ordered the police to file a police case against the lawmaker.

The government has reportedly directed to hand over the cases related to the incident to the CBI.

"Kuldeep Singh Sengar, 50, has also been charged under provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO)," NDTV reported.

The Special Investigation Team (SIT), formed to probe the Unnao gangrape case and the suspicious death of the 16-year-old rape victim's father, visited the site of the alleged crime on Wednesday to begin fresh enquiry in the case, media reports said.

The SIT was directed to submit initial reports of its investigation before Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday evening.

The team visited the crime spot and the tree where the rape victims father was tied up and thrashed.

The investigators also spoke to the victim, her mother, uncle and other family members.

They also had a talk with the suspended and other policemen posted at Makhi Police Station.

The SIT was formed on Tuesday to investigate the case after the father of the girl, who had alleged being raped by a BJP lawmaker and attempted suicide outside Adityanath's home on Sunday, died on Monday morning at the district hospital.

The autopsy report revealed that the father succumbed to septicaemia.

According to the postmortem report, the father was not given proper treatment at the judicial custody.

The man was in judicial custody after a complaint was filed against his daughter's alleged rapists.

The girl had alleged that she was raped by Kuldeep Singh Sengar, the BJP legislator from Unnao, and his brother last year, but the police refused to take any action against them.

She also claimed that her family was being threatened after they tried to file an FIR.

Earlier on Tuesday, the brother of Sengar was arrested by the police.

Meanwhile, Sengar's wife, who met UP DGP OP Singh in Lucknow on Wednesday, demanded a CBI probe into the matter.Chennai, Apr 12 (IBNS) : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday arrived in Chennai on Thursday to be greeted by black flags and black baloons hoisted atop the houses of DMK supremo M Karunanidhi and othe political leaders while waving the same workers hit the street protesting against the Centre's failure to constitute the Cauvery management board, media reports said.

Modi is in Tamil Nadu to inaugurate the DefExpo 2018 in Thiruvidanthai, and the diamond jubilee building for the Cancer Institute at Adyar.

According to reports, black flags were hosited at the houses of Karunanidhi in Gopalapuram, Working President M K Stalin on Cenotaph Road, the DMK headquarters Anna Arivalayam and houses of other leaders.

The Hindu reported that a crowd of protesters, armed with black flags and black balloons, lined Anna Salai - the approach road. The show of protest forced the Prime Minister to stay off roads, and depend on a chopper instead to go about his engagements.

Later, the police detained nearly 200 protesters.

The reports said that 50 DMK workers were arrested at Madhya Kailash in Chennai for staging a black flag protest.

A few cadre of Tamizhaga Vazhvurimai Katchi climbed atop an advertisement hoarding near Airport hoisted black flags to show their opposition.

DMK and other parties announced the protest to condemn the Centre for its failure to constitute the Cauvery Management Board.Kolkata, Apr 12 (IBNS): The Panchayat polls process in West Bengal has been stalled until Monday, April 16, following the Calcutta High Court's directive on Thursday, according to media reports.

The Calcutta High Court has asked the West Bengal Election Commission for a status report on the process, reports said.

The Court also pulled up the BJP for approaching multiple forums on the issue, according to NDTV.

TMC has said that it will move a division bench of the High Court, reports said.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday asked Bharatiya Janata Party and CPI-M to approach the Calcutta High Court to seek an extension of nomination filing deadline for the panchayat polls in West Bengal, scheduled to be held in May, media reports said.

The top court asked the two opposition parties in the state to approach the High Court in this matter on Thursday.

Monday was the last day for filing nominations.

The BJP moved the top court on Tuesday after the state election commission rescinded its own decision of extending the deadline for filing nominations till 3 pm on Tuesday.

The BJP and the ruling TMC have been at loggerheads, ever since the state election commission announced the poll dates.

The polls will take place on May 1, 3 and 5. Results will be declared on May 8.New Delhi, Apr 12 (IBNS): Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his day-long fast against the Parliament logjam during the Budget session along with other Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday.

BJP National President AmitShah participated from Dharwad in Karnataka as part of BJP's nationwide protest against divisive politics of Congress to the cause, according to media reports.

In a press statement on Wednesday, the BJP said PM Modi will hold a day-long fast "to expose the Congress for its undemocratic style of functioning & pursuing divisive politics & anti-development agenda."

The BJP is holding the 'Loktantra bachao Upvaas and dharna' from 10 am to 5 pm on Thursday, with its leaders participating in the fast in different cities in the country.



Image: BJP/TwitterNew Delhi, Apr 12 (IBNS); Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on Thursday condemned the Kathua rape incident which has left the nation shocked.

Rahul said the rape of a minor in Kathua is a 'crime against humanity'.

"How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil? What happened to Asifa at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished. What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?," Rahul Gandhi tweeted, giving his first reaction on the incident.

How can anyone protect the culprits of such evil?



What happened to Asifa at #Kathua is a crime against humanity. It cannot go unpunished.



What have we become if we allow politics to interfere with such unimaginable brutality perpetrated on an innocent child?  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 12, 2018

Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, on Thursday, said that the law cannot be obstructed by irresponsible actions, after a group of lawyers obstructed the Crime Branch and tried to prevent it from filing a charge sheet against those accused of raping and murdering an eight-year old girl in Kathua town three months ago.

The Crime Branch has already filed a charge sheet against eight accused who allegedly raped and murdered the eight year old child in Rasna area of Heeranagar.

There have been allegations that some BJP-backed supporters are trying to defend the rapists demanding transfer of case from Crime Branch to CBI.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister tweeted on Thursday: The Law will not be obstructed by the irresponsible actions & statements of a group of people. Proper procedures are being followed, investigations are on the fast track & justice will be delivered. #JusticeForAsifa.

Shocking the nation,the minor was held captive by the accused at a temple and later she was raped, mutilated and murdered in Rassana village of Kathua, months ago, crime branch of Jammu and Kashmir police stated.

Though former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah appreciated the actions taken by the police, he did not spare Mufti's smaller ally partner in the government, the Bharatiya Janata Party, from attacking.

He tweeted, "While appreciating action by @JmuKmrPolice against the Kathua mob masquerading as lawyers lets not forget the mob were emboldened by the actions/words of two BJP ministers in @MehboobaMuftis cabinet. What about action against them?"

Image: Rahul Gandhi Twitter pageNew Delhi, Apr 12 (IBNS): Vice President of India M. Venkaiah Naidu has serving in rural areas must be made mandatory for Doctors and they should have empathy, compassion and a caring attitude to enhance their effectiveness.

He was addressing the 20th Convocation of the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, in Bengaluru on Thursday.

The Governor of Karnataka, Shri Vajubhai Rudabhai Vala and other dignitaries were present on the occasion.



The Vice President asked students to become full-fledged healthcare professionals who can take on the real and continuous challenges that are going to become an integral part of your life.

He said that despite making rapid strides in the last two decades, continuing rise in communicable diseases and a spurt in non-communicable or lifestyle diseases pose greater challenge to the nation.

The evolution of the sector calls for active involvement and participation of all stakeholders and the use of innovation to bridge intent and execution to overcome change at all its stages  prevention, diagnosis and treatment, he added.



The Vice President said that the urban-rural divide in India needs urgent attention and action and said that collaborative public-private partnership to remedy the situation.

However, the private sector health facilities must not only be accessible to the needy and poor, but must also be affordable, he added.



The Vice President said that India can leverage the demographic dividend by improving the quality higher education adding that education system needs to reinvent itself to respond to the emerging challenges of a rapidly changing knowledge economy.

Excellence should be the watchword. Agility and alacrity should be the norm, he added.



Following is the text of Vice President's address:



"It is indeed a great pleasure for me to deliver the convocation address on the occasion of the 20th Convocation of Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, Karnataka.



Convocation marks a culmination, a milestone, a moment of celebration.



It is a day to which all students look forward to because they acquire a degree after years of hard work and study.



It is a day that is precious to the faculty as it marks yet another important milestone in their mission.

It is a celebration that the parent eagerly await as their rejoice at the progress made by their children.

I would like to congratulate all those who are graduating. My special appreciation to those who have received awards, medals and distinctions. I also offer my greetings to the parents and appreciation to the faculty, staff and leadership of this great institution.



Dear Students, this is a transition time when you are at the threshold of becoming full-fledged healthcare professionals ready to take on the real and continuous challenges that are going to become an integral part of your life.

We are now at a defining moment of our countrys history. It is a moment of formidable challenges. It is also a moment of widening opportunities.



By 2030, India is likely to be the youngest nation in the world with nearly 140 million people ready to enter the institutions of higher education.



One in every four graduates in the world will most likely be a product of the Indian higher education system.

If we in India can improve the quality of higher education, we can leverage the demographic dividend for the benefit of the society and community.



The Indian higher education system needs to reinvent itself to respond to the emerging challenges of a rapidly changing knowledge economy.



Excellence should be the watchword.



Agility and alacrity should be the norm.

I am happy to note that Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences, with the largest network of affiliated institutions in the world has pioneered many innovations in the field of healthcare education. It has emerged as a globally credible brand due to the unstinting efforts made by the leaders of this University since its inception.



Sisters and Brothers,

India has made rapid strides in the last two decades. The proportion of people living in poverty fell by half. However, this period of rising prosperity has been marked by a dual-disease burden, a continuing rise in communicable diseases and a spurt in non-communicable or lifestyle diseases. We have to address both these health concerns.



Healthcare delivery in India is now uniquely poised to undergo a change at all its stages  prevention, diagnosis and treatment. No single entity in the healthcare sector can deliver results and achieve health outcomes. The evolution of the sector calls for active involvement and participation of all stakeholders and the use of innovation to bridge intent and execution.



Dear students, as you all are aware, there is an acute shortage of doctors as also healthcare facilities in the rural areas. India has less than one doctor for every 1000 population. The rural areas are much less covered as compared to urban areas. There is an urban-rural divide that needs urgent attention and action.



We cannot have two Indias, with the cities having the state-of-the-art facilities and the rural areas lagging behind. There has to be a collaborative public-private partnership to remedy the situation. However, the private sector health facilities must not only be accessible to the needy and poor, but must also be affordable.



Dear students,

You have acquired new knowledge, new skills and new attitudes during your stay in this reputed institute.

You are graduating as a certified medical professional, as a doctor with a commitment to care for the sick and the infirm, to cure the illnesses and restore human beings to good health.



There cannot be a more noble profession than what you have chosen because you are the one who can heal, who can cure, who can add life to years.

You can bring good cheer to a depressed person, you can provide hope to those who are losing hope.

In short, you have the capability to change the lives of people.



Which is why people look upon doctors as demi-gods or as the ancient Indian saying goes Vaidya is truly a Narayana or Hari.



Dear Students,

Your entry into the noble profession today opens up for you unforeseen and unprecedented opportunities for serving humanity.

It depends on you as to how you use these opportunities.



As I said earlier, India offers you immense opportunities with ever expanding state of the art healthcare infrastructure and responsive health insurance system.



You can grow as sound professionals by practicing what you have learnt.



You can keep learning and refining.



You can improvise and innovate.



You can chart out new path breaking trajectories.



Serving in Rural areas must be made mandatory for Doctors.

Doctors must educate people on the adverse affects of Lifestyle diseases.



The demand for healthcare services in our country will undoubtedly be growing and the range of healthcare issues you will be addressing in India will be among the broadest in the entire world. When you treat a large volume of patients, your experience will broaden your professional skills. If you can keep updating your knowledge and skills by learning from the latest advances across the globe, you can certainly emerge as the leaders in your profession.



Let me remind you, as the Hippocratic oath states,

there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy and understanding may outweigh the surgeons knife or the chemists drug.



Clearly, your healing touch goes beyond your medical knowledge. Please master both the art and the science of medicine. Charaka in his Charaka Samhitha has described the ideal medical student as one who is

of mild disposition, never mean in his acts, humble, with strong memory, devoted to truth and study, devoted to theory and practice, thoughtful and compassionate, seeking the good of all creatures.



Empathy, compassion and a caring attitude enhance your effectiveness.

Ethical behaviour enhances your credibility and stature.

As Charaka again says, you must be reasonable in charging for your service and only do what is calculated to do good to the patient without any other ulterior motives.

Medical science like all other fields of knowledge is evolving rapidly and recent technological advances including imaging and robotics have brought in an unprecedented revolution in diagnostics and treatment. Improved drugs have made treatment of hitherto untreatable diseases possible.

You all need to keep abreast of these developments and lead the world towards future developments in the medical field. Along with this, I would urge you to focus on preventive medicine as well and more work with communities to bring about lifestyle changes.



Our country has a long history of ayurveda, yoga and a holistic approach to health and well being. You would do well to draw inspiration from some of these traditions and integrate them with your medical practice. As our ancient seers have said: Sarve Santu Niraamaya (Let everyone be free from illness) should be our ultimate objective.

I once again wish you all the very best in the future.



I hope that the Vice Chancellor and the faculty members will set their sights higher with each passing year and keep achieving new milestones on their institutional journey towards excellence.

Jai Hindi!"



New Delhi, Apr 12 (IBNS): President Ram Nath Kovind, and the President of Zambia, Edgar Chagwa Lungu, ceremonially commenced work on the 93-km Lusaka Traffic Decongestion Project on Thursday, the final day of Kovinds state visit to three African nations, Equatorial Guinea, Swaziland and Zambia.

The Lusaka Traffic Decongestion Project has received substantial financial support from the government of India and is being executed by an Indian company, AFCONS Infrastructure.

Speaking on the occasion, the President said that development partnership and economic cooperation are key pillars of India-Zambia relations.

He was happy to note that the two countries are collaborating on projects that will benefit the citizens of Zambia.

He said that India appreciates the people-centric approach of the Zambian government in its programmes and policies.

The President said that traffic congestion is a modern day challenge in urban centres across the world.

He expressed hope that the Lusaka project would lead to further cooperation between Zambia and India on socially relevant initiatives.

Later in the day, the President travelled to Livingstone and addressed the Indian community there.

Kovind said that the government of India seeks sustained and proactive engagement with the overseas Indian community.

"Dialogue with the diaspora is aimed at providing possibilities and platforms through which it can learn about as well as participate in Indias transformation. And link this transformation with the developmental priorities of Zambia," said he.Image: Sonakshi Singa Instagram page

Mumbai, Apr 12 (IBNS): Bollywood actress Sonakshi Sinha has posted an image on social media where she is looking gorgeous in a see-through red outfit

She shared the image on Instagram.

"Throwback to last july! #Repost@colstonjulian," Sinha captioned the image.

However, some social media users trolled her over the image.

One netizen user who called himself 'satpal.nayak' wrote: " Publicity k liye kuchh bhi."

Others, however, supported her and criticised fellow netizens for trolling her.

Netizen 'payalbulbule' said: "You look so stunning i cant believe people troll you for this ? . Have these guys ever seen Rihanna's or miley Cyrus or kim Kardashian's post? Its her body its her life her career who are you to quote ' sanskar bhul gai' . Girl i really think how much more you would have slayed if you were born/ living abroad YY."New Delhi, Apr 12 (IBNS): Bollywood actress Priyanka Chopra on Wednesday said she had an insightful and positive conversation with Narendra Modi during her meet with the Prime Minister here.

Priyanka shared an image on her Instagram page where she could be seen standing with Modi, Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda and former President of Chile Michelle Bachelet.

The Quantico star sought the Indian Prime Minister's support for being a patron for the Partners' Forum, to be held in the capital in December.

"Very grateful to the honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi to meet me, Shri J.P. Nadda (Indian Health Minister) and Mrs. Michelle Bachelet, (former President of Chile, incoming #PMNCH Chair) in regards to being a patron for the Partners' Forum which is being held in New Delhi in December this year. The aim is very important - the improvement and transformation of access to quality healthcare at at every life stage for women, children and adolescents, in an effort to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals in 2030," Priyanka wrote on Instagram.

She said: "This year, India will play host to the largest ever Partners' Forum, with more than 1,200 delegates from more than 92 countries."

Speaking on her conversation with the PM, she said: "It was an insightful, positive conversation which was very heartening and inspiring because of the personal commitment of everyone at the meeting. We covered a lot of ground from the various efforts being taken by individual countries & partners to building a collective environment that could help propel the change we seek for a better world."

Image: Priyanka Chopra Twitter pageNew York, Apr 12 (IBNS): The lives of six guards and their driver were taken Monday during an attack on the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation in the Virunga Park, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site in the Democratic Republic of the Congo  drawing condemnation from the UN agency.

I condemn this deadly attack on six guards of the Virunga National Park and their driver, said Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, on Wednesday.

I call on the Democratic Republic of the Congo to take all the necessary legal measures to put an end to these repetitive attacks, added.

The Director-General paid tribute to the courage of the guards who risk their lives to ensure the protection of this heritage.

Since 1996, attacks in the Virunga National Park have claimed over 175 victims, UNESCO said.

This marks the third attack this year against the staff of the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation in the Virunga Park and follows similar acts on other World Heritage sites in the country, namely in Dja and Sangha Tri-National.

The Director-General called on the international community to help the Institute ensure the safety of local people and staff.

With the support of the European Union, UNESCO has, for several years, been investing in strengthening human capacity and resources of World Heritage Sites in the countries of central Africa that are facing security challenges.



UNEP/GRID-Arendal/Tim FrecciaUNHCR/Vania Turner

New York, Apr 12 (IBNS): While the number of migrants and refugees reaching Europe declined last year, the dangers they faced along the journey in many cases increased, according to a new report from the United Nations refugee agency.

The number of people crossing the Mediterranean Sea to reach Italy from Libya, for example, decreased by 74 per cent in the first three months of 2018 compared to the same period last year. But the share of these migrants perishing along the way more than doubled, according to the report, Desperate Journeys.

Between January and March, one person died for every 14 persons successfully crossing the sea, compared to one death for every 29 arrivals in the first three months of 2017.

Furthermore, those reaching Europe in recent months arrived in extremely poor health and a significant share of them experienced trafficking, torture, sexual violence and other abuses prior to boarding boats in Libya, said the report, issued Wednesday by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Those attempting that sea journey also risk drowning aboard unstable boats, which often cram in people many times their capacity.

Journeys to and through Europe for refugees and migrants remain fraught with danger, said Pascale Moreau, director of the refugee agencys Europe Bureau, as he introduced the report.

He underscored the importance of swift and fair asylum procedures for those seeking international protection.

Managing borders and offering protection to refugees in line with States international obligations are not mutually exclusive nor incompatible, Moreau said.

Many of the migrants and refugees hoping to reach Europe are seeking refuge from violence and deepening economic insecurity in their home countries, in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

While overall numbers reaching Europe were down in 2017 compared to 2016, the flow of desperate migrants to Spain climbed, and the number reaching Greece surged in the latter months of last year.

Asylum-seekers arriving by sea to Greece faced extended stays in overcrowded and dire conditions on Greek islands, the report said.

When we reached Libya, the driver told us we had to pay another 1,500 dinars ($1,100) per person, so 4,500 dinars for all three, reads the testimony of 26-year-old Daniel, who left Cameroon in 2017 along with his brother and uncle hoping to reach Europe.

We didnt have any more money.

Unable to pay the asking price, the three were tortured and held captive by traffickers in Libya, he said, before they were taken to Niger where he was bound into forced labour by his captors, while his family remained hostage.

There have been reports of human traffickers demanding as much as $10,000 from individuals for transportation to Europe.

Elsewhere on the continent, increased restrictions and push backs facing people on the move have compelled them to take alternative and often dangerous routes to move across Europe, according to the new report. As Hungary tightened its borders, for example, more migrants are crossing from Serbia to Romania while others move from Greece through Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Croatia.

High risks for women and unaccompanied children

Women, especially those travelling on their own, and unaccompanied children remain particularly exposed to risks of sexual and gender-based violence along the routes as well as in some locations within Europe, the report said.

Once children arrive in European countries, lengthy waiting periods

for asylum applications, slow family reunification processes and limited access to relocation mechanisms compound the challenges, it said.

Increased solidarity and responsibility-sharing needed

Addressing the desperate situation requires wider international support for States at primary arrival points in Europe, such as arrangement of safe relocations. The European Union, it suggested, should strengthen cooperation among countries within the region.

The refugee agency also called for enhanced access to safe and legal pathways for those in need of international protection, including greater commitments to resettlement, removal of obstacles to family reunification and strengthened protection for children.Washington, Apr 12 (IBNS): In a massive setback for US President Donald Trump and the Republicans, House Speaker Paul Ryan has announced that he will not stand for another term, reports said.

The mid-term elections are scheduled for November.

Ryan cited family-related issues for his decision.

He is one among the 30 House republicans who have decided to retire.

"You all know that I did not seek this job. I took it reluctantly," he was quoted as saying.

"But I have given this job everything. I have no regrets whatsoever for having accepted this responsibility.

"But the truth is it's easy for it to take over everything in your life and you can't just let that happen," he added.

Ryan said he will retire in January 2019, after the completion of his congressional term.

Meanwhile, some commentators have said that Ryan's decision to step down stemmed out of his desire to flee a sinking ship.

"The speaker will frame his decision as one of putting family first - and, with young children, the fundraising and legislative duties of the office are burdensome - but it's impossible not to view the move in a larger political context. He's had frequent clashes with Donald Trump, and their differences - in temperament and policy - continue to be stark," BBC News' Anthony Zurcher said in a political analysis.

"Rather than go down with the ship - or perhaps suffer the same fate as Tom Foley in 1994, the last sitting speaker to lose a re-election race - Mr Ryan is reserving his seat on a lifeboat. He's not the first congressional Republican to do so, and with the top man leading the way, more are sure to follow," the analysis read.

Ryan too had in the past accepted that he and US President Donald Trump were 'very different people'.

"I'm from the upper Midwest. I'm not from New York, we're from a different generation. So we have different styles," he told CNN.

Reacting to Ryan's looming exit, Trump hailed him as a good man, who legacy will live on.

"Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man, and while he will not be seeking re-election, he will leave a legacy of achievement that nobody can question. We are with you Paul!" the US President tweeted on Wednesday.

Targeting the Republicans, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said that Ryan's exit will be followed by more step-downs from Republicans.

"Stay tuned for more retirements as Republicans increasingly realise that their midterm prospects are doomed," the committee said.



Image: speaker.govWashington Apr 12 (IBNS): Responding to the alleged chemical attack in Syria's Damascus earlier this month, the US said that 'all options are on the table', according ton reports on Thursday.

Briefing reporters, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said that a final decision has not yet been taken.

"The president has a number of options at his disposal and a number remain on the table," she said.

Sanders added, "We haven't laid out any specific actions we plan to take."

However, she said that the US holds Russia and Syria responsible for carrying out the attack.

The US has also found support from France and UK over the issue.

The US National Security Council is scheduled to meet on Thursday, while UK Prime Minister Theresa May has called a cabinet meeting, a BBC report said.

Contrary to US' claim, Syria has denied any involvement in the alleged attack, which killed dozens on Saturday in the rebel-held town of Douma.



Russia's threat

During a meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Moscow's UN envoy Vasily Nebenzia and his US counterpart Nikki Haley reportedly had a heated exchange over the issue.

Making Russia's intentions clear, Nebenzia said, "I would once again beseech you to refrain from the plans that you're currently developing."

Russia also vetoed a proposal to open a new inquiry into the alleged chemical attack in Syria.

After the US-drafted resolution failed to pass at the UN Security Council, Haley accused Russia of failing the Syrian people.

Moscow has also warned the West of 'dire consequences' if it attacks Syria on the pretext of responding to the alleged chemical attack.

Joint Western front

The US, France and the UK have reportedly backed the US' plan of striking Syria, in response to the alleged chemical attack.

France's President Emmanuel Macron told reporters that his soldiers will target Syrian chemical factories.

LIVE l Conference de presse avec Mohammed Bin Salman, prince heritier du royaume d'Arabie Saoudite. https://t.co/Wadfnt0khF  Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) April 10, 2018

"Our decision will not target allies of the regime or attack anyone but rather attack the regime's chemical capabilities," Macron said in a joint news conference with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in Paris.

"We will continue sharing technical and strategic information with our partners, particularly with the United Kingdom and the United States. And in the coming days, we will announce our decision," he added.

US President Donald Trump took to Twitter to warn Russia.

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2018

"Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart! You shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!" his tweet read.

Saudi participation possible

During his recent visit to France, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told reporters that Saudi Arabia could strike Damascus if the need arises.

Asked if his country will intervene in the growing Middle Eastern crisis, he said, "If our alliance with our partners demands it, we will be present."

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and French President Emmanuel Macron and First Lady Brigitte Macron in France. Image: twitter.com/EmmanuelMacronUnlike his father's conservative approach, Prince Salman, also known as MBS, has been open about reforms.

Under his leadership, Saudi Arabia has experienced better ties with Israel and has edged past Iran in a number of important areas, including women rights.

Russia's dilapidated diplomacy with the West

In recent times, commentators have said that Russia's diplomatic ties with the West have worsened.

It first emerged after the nerve agent attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in UK's Salisbury region.

In response, the UK asked 23 Russian diplomats to leave the country.

Soon after the incident, over 20 countries asked Russian diplomats to leave.

The US expelled 60 Russian diplomats.

Russia retaliated, expelling the same number of US diplomats from the country.

Diplomats from the UK too were expelled by Moscow.

Image: twitter.com/realDonaldTrumpLondon April 12 (IBNS): Yulia, daughter of former double agent Sergei Skripal, who was poisoned in the UK last month along with her father and was recovering in a hospital, has rejected help from the Russian Embassy in the UK, reports said on Thursday.

Yulia, who spent more than a month in hospital, was discharged from the facility on Monday.

In a statement released through police, the 33-year-old said: "I have access to friends and family, and I have been made aware of my specific contacts at the Russian embassy who have kindly offered me their assistance in any way they can."

"At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of their services, but, if I change my mind I know how to contact them," she said.

Russia however has been skeptical about the response, doubting its legitimacy.

Releasing a statement, the embassy said that it 'only strengthens suspicions that we are dealing with a forcible isolation of the Russian citizen'.

"With no possibility to verify it, the publication by the Metropolitan Police raises new questions rather than gives answers," it said.

"As before, we would like to make sure that the statement really belongs to Yulia. So far, we doubt it much.

"The text has been composed in a special way so as to support official statements made by British authorities and at the same time to exclude every possibility of Yulia's contacts with the outer world - consuls, journalists, and even relatives," the statement added.

Yulia's father Sergei is still said to be in a critical yet stable condition. He is presently admitted in Salisbury District Hospital.

The said attack took place in UK's Salisbury region on Mar 4.

A Novichok nerve agent was supposedly used, which led to UK believing that Russia was behind the attack, though the latter has rubbished the claim.

In response, the UK asked 23 Russian diplomats to leave the country.

Soon after the incident, over 20 countries asked Russian diplomats to leave.

The US expelled 60 Russian diplomats.

Russia retaliated, expelling the same number of US diplomats from the country.

Diplomats from the UK too were expelled by Moscow.



Image: Websitegrab from BBCToronto, Apr 11 (IBNS): Bruce McArthur, the suspected serial killer, has been charged with a seventh count of first-degree murder, media reports said.

Toronto police, meanwhile, announced that the remains of three of his alleged victims have now been identified.

The Crown announced the new murder charge in a city courtroom where McArthur appeared via video this morning.

The 66-year-old landscaper is already facing six murder charges in connection with the deaths of men having ties to the citys LGBTQ neighborhood. McArthur spoke just once during the appearance to state his name.

The latest charge is related to the death of 42-year-old Abdulbasir Faizi, a married father of two who vanished on Decemeber 29, 2010. Faizis final whereabouts were traced to a burger joint in the citys gay village near Church and Wellesley Streets. His car was discovered six days later just around the corner from a midtown Toronto house from where human remains were recovered.

Lead investigator Det. Sgt. Hank Idsinga told a news briefing that pathologists have succeeded in identifying three more sets of remains belonging to Selim Esen, Dean Lisowick and Faizi. He added that a seventh set of remains is yet to be identified.

Idsinga said the probe has expanded to include 15 homicide cold cases from 1975 to 1997, adding that most of the cases involve gay men or victims with links to the gay village.

Police have also increased the number of properties on their search list from 30 to 75. Idsinga said theyre hoping to start looking into these additional properties associated with McArthur in early May.

Forensic teams are still in the process of collecting evidence from McArthurs apartment in the citys Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood. Idsinga said they have succeeded in obtaining quite a few exhibits from the property and expects they will be there for a couple of weeks more.

Weve quite frankly never seen anything like it, the police officer said.

(Reporting by Sayantan Banerjee)Toronto, Apr 11 (IBNS): Toronto Police Services Board will discuss new appointment, among other issues, in its next meeting on April 18.

A statement from the TPSB said that the meeting will take place at its headquarters around 1pm.

The Board will consider correspondence from the City of Toronto regarding the appointment of Councillor Jim Hart to the TPSB, besides correspondence from Councillor Shelley Carroll regarding her resignation from the Board.

The Board will receive an update and presentation regarding the ongoing implementation of officers being equipped with Naloxone. As noted previously, the Toronto Police Service is moving ahead with the strategic deployment of Naloxone to members and it is anticipated that deployment of Naloxone to officers in the field will commence by the end of June 2018.

It will consider a report from the chief on the 2017 Hate Crime Statistical Report. As detailed in the report, in 2017, in comparison to 2016, the number of reported occurrences increased from 145 to 186, representing a difference of approximately 28 per cent, a fluctuation that can be attributed to multiple factors, including international events, community educational programs, hate crime training, and increased reporting. As the report also notes, in 2017, the Jewish community, followed by the Black community, Muslims, and the LGBTQ community were the groups most frequently victimized.

A report from the members of the Interim Steering Committee, containing recommendations concerning the creation of the Anti-Racism Advisory Panel (ARAP), would also be deliberated upon.

Finally, the 2017 Annual Report on Conducted Energy Weapons (C.E.W.s) would be discussed.

(Reporting by Sayantan Banerjee)Ottawa, Apr 12 (IBNS): Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has ruled out the possibility of his country's participation in military strikes against Syria as a counter to the suspected chemical attacks against civilians, media reports said.

In a recent interview, Trudeau told Radio-Canada that Canada won't participate in the military strikes as the country is already present in northern Iraq and Latvia on missions.

"We are not looking to be present in Syria" the PM has been quoted by The Star.

Days after suspected chemical attacks hit Douma, US President Donald Trump on Wednesday warned that Russia should 'get ready' to face missile strike in war-torn Syria.

Trump even called Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a 'Gas Killing Animal'.

Meanwhile, Russia has warned the US against military action in Syria, in response to the alleged chemical attack which took place last week, reports said on Wednesday.

Moscow's UN envoy Vasily Nebenzia and his US counterpart Nikki Haley reportedly had a heated exchange over the issue during a meeting of the UN Security Council on Tuesday.

Making Russia's intentions clear, Nebenzia said, "I would once again beseech you to refrain from the plans that you're currently developing."

Russia also vetoed a proposal to open a new inquiry into the alleged chemical attack in Syria.

After the US-drafted resolution failed to pass at the UN Security Council, Haley accused Russia of failing the Syrian people.

(Reporting by Suman Das)Ottawa, Apr 12 (IBNS): Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will take a break from his nine-day foreign trip to return to capital Ottawa to meet B.C. and Alberta Premiers John Horgan and Rachel Notley respectively to try to break the impasse over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, media reports said.

Trudeau will travel to Ottawa from Lima, Peru, and then go to Paris.

The itinerary change was announced minutes before Trudeau's plane departed for Peru, where he is scheduled to join more than 30 world leaders for the Summit of Americas.

Tensions over the pipeline expansion have been building since Kinder Morgan suspended all non-essential spending on the project on Sunday. It has given Ottawa until May 31 to deliver concrete expansion assurances. That prompted an emergency cabinet meeting in Ottawa Monday. Ministers disclosed no concrete solutions to the standoff.

Finance minister Bill Morneau met with Notley in Toronto early Wednesday evening.

Notley only disclosed that she felt "more convinced" that Ottawa will soon take action. "I will say that he did assure me the Canadian government plans to take swift action on this file," she said on a conference call after the meeting.

Today at a Public Policy Forum event in Toronto, Morneau said, "We are resolved to move forward on this project. We have the federal tools to do that. We will be, of course, discussing how to do that with the project proponent."

"Those discussions are already under way. I don't have the opportunity to give you more details because we do need to get through those discussions to find the right approach to ensuring that this is delivered on behalf of Canadians," the minister said.

(Reporting by Sayantan Banerjee)Tribal lenders cheered when the Trump administration started taking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in a new direction but an appeal in a closely-watched case is generating some concerns.

In January, a federal judge ordered CashCall to pay $10.3 million in penalties to the federal agency. CashCall was determined to have violated consumer protection laws in connection with loans issued by Western Sky Financial, a defunct lending company that was based on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.

Despite the apparent win for the CFPB, the agency is appealing, Reuters and The Los Angeles Times reported. That has the Native American Financial Services Association worried about the "mixed signals on tribal sovereignty" emerging from Washington, D.C.

To make matters more complicated, CashCall is also appealing, Reuters reported. At issue is whether the judge properly considered tribal sovereignty issues.

The case is now headed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals . In a prior decision that was closely watched in Indian Country, the court held that tribes were not entitled to be treated as "co-regulators" under the federal law that created the CFPB.

After the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn the decision, the Trump administration announced it was withdrawing yet another closely-watched lawsuit against tribal lenders. And Mick Mulvaney, the "acting" director of the CFPB, promised that he wouldn't interfere with tribal sovereignty.

"Trump has now struck a mighty blow in favor of tribal sovereignty and self-determination," Gavin Clarkson , a citizen of the Choctaw Nation who is running for Congress , told Indianz.Com after the developments.

Western Sky shut down operations after facing federal and state enforcement actions. Though the firm was based on Cheyenne River, it was run by a tribal citizen, not the tribal government.

Other lending firms that have been targeted by the CFPB are operated by tribes.

Read More on the Story: Appeal could jeopardize CFPB win in landmark tribal sovereignty case (Reuters April 11, 2018) In surprise move, CFPB appeals judgment against CashCall slashed by judge (The Los Angeles Times April 5, 2018)

Join the Conversation

Related StoriesSo, its the dress that decides a womans character?

Last time, when Priyanka Chopra met PM Narendra Modi, she was savagely trolled for wearing a dress and showing off her legs to the prime minister of the nation. Oh! And that is when a lot of people, including me learnt there exists a dress code to meet the PM (there is sarcasm here, of course). And that Salwar is a mark of respect. No Salwar = No respect.

Twitter

(Also Read: PC Gives A Kickass Reply To Those Who Shamed Her For Wearing A Skirt To Meet PM Modi)

Looks like, these insensible and shameful trollers led Priyanka Chopra to wear an Anarkali suit this time. The Bollywood diva met with the PM for an upcoming conference of Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH). She invited the PM to join the initiative, which will be held in New Delhi on Dec. 12 and 13.

We started something important today and I am looking forward to what is being set in motion, Priyanka wrote and shared the picture, in which she struck a pose with PM Modi, Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda and former President of Chile and incoming chair of PMNCH Board Michelle Bachelet.

Met with Honble Indian Prime Minister @narendramodi after the @PMNCH curtain raiser panel discussion to formally invite him on behalf of the global community to be the Patron of the Partners Forum December 2018. pic.twitter.com/IpAwYVchqR  Jagat Prakash Nadda (@JPNadda) April 11, 2018

And here's how people reacted!

Priyanka Chopra meets Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi. Big deal missy. @priyankachopra and pray what did you achieved by meeting him. I am really curious. Showing off your new white clowny gown????  nandita khaire (@nanditakhaire) April 12, 2018

Mam you support women cause all over the world's please request @PMOIndia to say something about recent rape cases in india  Bhadka Hwa Banker (@bada_shinchan) April 12, 2018

Fine.. beautiful white dress covering her from neck to toes. Last time when she met Hon. PM in France , some mean and jealous people criticized her proper dress . Bravo.  Dharam Paul Khanna (@dpkhanna35) April 12, 2018

Hope all are happy now. @priyankachopra chose to cover full arms and full legs while meeting the @PMOIndia @narendramodi

The trollers should now share this as praise and grace as legs showing off was shame too many. For me I loved her then and I love her now. And forever. https://t.co/mC1fvPVJgM  Karishma Joshi (@k7joshi) April 12, 2018

PRIYANKA MADAM KO SEXY AUR HOT DIKHNE KA BAHUT SHAUK HAI..LEKIN SHAYAD ABHI WO AAJ TAK KI SABSE SUNDAR PRIYANKA LAG RAHI HAIN...  ANAND PANT (@rudraananda) April 12, 2018

(Also Read: 9 Lessons We Learned From Troll Comments On Priyanka Chopras Viral Pic With PM Narendra Modi)Telugu actress Sri Reddy will apparently take her fight to the finish. After stripping off her clothes in protest against casting couch and sexual harassment in Tollywood, she revealed how Rana Daggubatis brother Abhiram Daggubati sexually exploited her.

BCCL

(Read More: Post Topless Protest Against Casting Couch, Telugu Actress Shares Even More Disturbing Details)

One by one, she is leaking chats with several people from the industry. The latest one to have joined the bandwagon is director Kona Venkat.

Twitter

In response to the same, writer-director Kona Venkat has hit back at her. Accusing her of maligning his image, he says, legal action will follow.

Im shocked with some allegations made by one actress against some film personalities including me.. I demand the government to conduct through police investigation in these allegations and punish whoever are guilty.. Truth must prevail  legal action follows!!  kona venkat (@konavenkat99) April 11, 2018

Its really pity that film industry and film personalities have become soft target to many people who are trying to gain cheap publicity... I definitely support taking Telugu artists in our films.. In Geethanjali u find only Telugu artists. But this is unacceptable. I condemn it.  kona venkat (@konavenkat99) April 11, 2018

Meanwhile, Sri Reddy has hinted that she will reveal two other big names.

(Read More: Women Activists Extend Support To Sri Reddy After She Claims Rana Daggubatis Brother Used Her)Mediocrity is for next life and this is something that forms the basic rule in Priyanka Chopra's life as well. A woman who strictly believes in following her own heart has been an inspiration for many and for reasons more than one.

From effortlessly straddling two worlds to doing a good job of being a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, Priyanka Chopra certainly knows her way ahead.

Instagram/Priyanka Chopra

Just to jog your memory a little, Priyankas journey in showbiz started at the age of 17 when she was crowned Miss World.



Then she made her Bollywood debut in 2003 with The Hero: Love Story of a Spy.

But one of the key turning points of her life was when she bagged the lead role in American show Quantico.

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Cut to 2016- She became a presenter at the Academy Awards and the Emmy Awards ceremony, followed by an invitation to the annual White House Correspondents Dinner.

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Then she was conferred Indias fourth-highest civilian honor, the Padma Shri, and featured in Time Magazines 100 Most Influential People of the world.

Priyanka was in New Delhi attend the curtain-raiser of The Partners Forum, a platform for learning and exchange between countries and partners to improve the health and well-being of women, children, and adolescents. The event was hosted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in collaboration with the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) and support of other partners.

At the event, PC said that women have always been considered second-class citizens globally and she would like to see a change in the mindset of those who devalue a girl child. An IANS report quotes the actor saying,

BCCL/Agencies

We are living in an extremely patriarchal society, not just in India, but in the whole world. Women have always been second-class citizens. We have to fight to get opportunities, to become a leader (but) the one thing that I have seen is that now women are not willing to settle (for less) anymore, and thats a big difference."

Priyanka  a Bollywood star who has now made her mark in Hollywood was asked to comment on the changes she has noticed among people towards women and the girl child in India.

BCCL/Agencies

She said, Its not like the world is going to change in 10 years. Hopefully, I will see it in my lifetime. But if not, (it should change) for the next generation. Thats what I am hoping. I love the tenacity of seeing women supporting each other, of women turning around and telling that its wrong. The fact is we are living in the era of social media, you are not alone. Theres good and bad in everything, but in this case, you are not alone and that is the biggest change. You see more men standing up for women and saying thats wrong, but there is yet a lot of work to be done globally."

Priyanka then expressed her views on how wonderful how women have an innate ability to fulfill different roles.

Agencies/PC

Women have the ability to take care, get married, have children and work at the same time. They make sure that the house is taken care of, but at the same time they go out and meet their dreams. All they need is someone to stand with them and say, Yes, you can, and that will come when families, husbands, fathers and mothers start teaching their children that it is going to be all right."

Talking about the whole obsession with 'settling down', PC added,

Agencies/PC

Of course, women should settle down, men should settle down, have babies, but that shouldnt be the end of a girls life. It should be the beginning. You should marry in a home that allows you to have wings and the parents need to make sure of that."

Girls need to be valued, stressed the actress who has made a name for herself internationally with the show Quantico.

Twitter

I have a lot of dreams. I dont want any child to go to sleep hungry, but the big change I want to see is girl children should not be treated as a commodity (used) just for reproduction. I want to see a change where we invest in our girls, where we treat them and give them the opportunity to have merit to prove themselves. At least we should give that chance to her. Devaluation of girls is something that I want to see change."

Priyanka is herself as invested in philanthropy as in her showbiz career as an actor and producer. And everyone has just one important question for her. Why is she not taking up a Bollywood project? And PC being her witty self-had the most epic reply. She said,

Twitter

I will do it when I find the right script. Its not like I am not working. I am shooting a TV film which has gone to 64 countries. I have produced seven films this year. I am working. And I will work (in a Bollywood film) when I find the right film to do. I am not someone who will compromise or settle for less."Playing real-life characters is never easy. There are layers of images and perceptions that the actor has to fit into, in order to internalise and portray the persona of the character that inspires a particular role. When we think of contemporary Bollywood actors performing such roles with sublime ease, Rajkumar Rao's name appears first in mind. Try that, again.

Rao is all set to play dreaded militant Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh in his next film Omerta. And, going by the reaction of viewers, one can easily say that he has successfully got into the skin of the character.

The film has been receiving an astounding response from all over the world. It has been featured in many film festivals and left the audiences spellbound. Rao's negative shade in the film literally sent chills down the spine of the audiences.

Before the film releases in India on April 20, 2017, let us tell you who real Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh is.

Twitter

Born on December 23, 1973, Omar made it to the headlines of international media after hijacking Indian Airlines Flight 814 in 1999. One of his worst crimes was kidnapping and murdering Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.

He is a Britisher of Pakistani descent and is associated with various militant organisations, including Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al-Qaeda, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, and Taliban.

Twitter

Omar was arrested by Pakistani police in Lahore on February 12, 2002, in connection with Daniel Pearl kidnapping and murder. Reports suggest that he was sentenced death on 15 July 2002 by a special judge of an anti-terrorism court.

Currently, he is in Karachi Prison and kept in a different cell as he attempted to commit suicide.

A mere thought of association with the real-life character leaves Rajkumar disgusted.

Twitter

I could not connect with him at any level. I dont think anyone would agree with his ideology. There is no way any sane person would connect with him. What these guys do is extremely inhuman. We all strongly condemn them. But yeah, I chose to do this and had to start my process by watching those disturbing videos and documentaries. I would listen to his hate speech over and over again, trying to get myself charged up and gather a lot of hatred and anger inside me, which I used while playing the part.

Twitter

Omerta is one of the most intriguing films of Rajkummar and we all are looking forward to watching him in this negative shade.Bowing to the outrage of the people from various sections of the society, the Uttar Pradesh Police have finally filed an FIR against BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger in connection with the alleged rape of an Unnao girl.

According to reports, the move has come as a result of criticism that the state government faced for not being able to intervene in the matter. The BJP MLA has been booked under various sections of IPC and POSCO Act, Times Now reported.

The UP government had yesterday decided to lodge an FIR against Sengar in the case and refer it to the CBI for investigation.

ap

The government also decided to recommend a CBI probe into the alleged murder of the rape survivors father in judicial custody.

The government decision for a CBI probe came just after Sengar made an appearance at the official residence of Lucknow police chief to announce that he had no role in the rape of the teenager and death of her father.

ap

The government also announced suspension of two senior doctors of Unnao district hospital.

It also announced disciplinary action against three other doctors of the jail department for dereliction of duty and negligence in attending to the rape survivors father, who died on Tuesday.

ap

An officer of the rank of DSP has been suspended for not attending to the repeated complaints of the rape survivor and her family.

The victim had alleged that she was raped in June 2017 by Sengar. She also accused the police in Unnao of not taking any action or registering a case on her complaint, Vijay Sen Singh, in-charge of the Gautam Palli police station, said.Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, somewhere in the dark forest, between the tall bladder-brown trees that wont even let the light touch the ground, a child wailed and cried as loudly as she could. She ran for her life, howled, tried to escape from the monster running after her. Her tiny feet and bleak voice ultimately gave up. She was groped from behind, her mouth was forcefully shut and her body stopped responding in shock. Her arms were twisted, she had fatal wounds and then, she was kidnapped. She was sedated. She was raped, repeatedly. She was murdered. She was thrown between the bushes. She was just eight-year-old. She was a child. She was a Muslim.

India is a country where a rape takes place just as often as a politician makes a ridiculous, misogynistic remark about the women in this country, which by the way, might be happening as we speak.

The internet is buzzing with the news of an eight-year-old girl getting raped and murdered in Rasana village near Kathua in Jammu & Kashmir. Now, whenever a rape happens anywhere in this country, the instant reaction of the citizens is outrage, angst, shock, vengeance and well, to pay condolences to the victim who went through the heinous crime and couldnt survive.

Sadly, thats not the only thing thats happening in this particular case.

In India, the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl has led to protests by Hindu nationalists  coming to the defense of the accused https://t.co/9vAjVE6tF7  The New York Times (@nytimes) April 11, 2018

Is India The Country That Supports Rapist & Murderers?

I am going to put it in simple words here, without twisting it any further. The victim belonged to a Muslim tribe, Bakherwal, who used to live in Rasana village near Kathua, which is a Hindu-dominated village. According to her father, Muhammad Yusuf Pujwala her rape and murder was crucially planned and executed with the sole purpose to dislodge the tribal community from the village. She was kidnapped and hidden in a prayer hall, where, she was raped and sedated multiple times. Police have arrested eight men, including a retired government official, four police officers and a juvenile who were all involved in this rape and murder case. Police also said that she was killed in a Hindu temple and that the temples custodian, Sanji Ram plotted her death as a way to torment the Bakherwals.

BCCL

The sad thing here is that there are activists who are now protesting the arrest of the accused, claiming that the reports might have been distorted, considering the officials involved to investigate the case are Muslims too.

They are against our religion, Bimla Devi, a protester, told the New York Times. She said that if the accused men werent freed, we will burn ourselves. The eight-year-old girl was murdered inside a temple, where Hindus pray to their Gods and now, there are marches by Hindus along with two BJP ministers where people are blindly, mind-numbingly supporting the accused and screaming slogans of Jai Shri Ram.

Asifas eyes haunt me.What depths are we stooping to? Where is our moral compass? Cannot let this rot spread. For the sake of Mother India. Let us be firm about bringing the perpetrators of this crime to justice. Let us show we are a law-abiding, law-enforcing country. @PMOIndia https://t.co/TZ0qLKKonT  Nirupama Menon Rao (@NMenonRao) April 11, 2018

The Game Of Hypocrisy

Can you believe that its the same country that went berserk after Nirbhayas rape case in 2012? Another case surfacing is the Unnao gangrape where a woman in Uttar Pradesh accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his accomplice of gang-raping her. When she tried attempting suicide outside Chief Minister Yogi Adityanaths house, her father was taken into custody and was allegedly beaten. He later succumbed to injuries. Both these incidents are appalling and are crimes against humanity more than anything else.

An 8 year old child is drugged and held captive in a temple for 3 days. Brutally gang-raped to the extent her uterus is damaged. Then strangulated to death and body is thrown in a ditch.

Why is this child not India's daughter??#Kathua  Preeti Gulati (@preetigulati28) April 9, 2018

India appears to be a country of hypocrites and our spirits seem to have died. THIS rape and murder case is also a murder of our conscience, collectively. Just because this little girl was a Muslim, the Hindu activists who are supporting the accused seem to have forgotten that she was a human being too. Hell, she was a kid who probably didnt even understand what a rape means, what a murder means. Her innocence was taken advantage and hence, she succumbed her last breath. You and I cant even begin to understand the struggles she must have gone through.

BCCL

The Rape Country

In schools, they teach 8-year-old kids that India is a secular country. But is it really? Every single day we read about a rape in some or the other part of our country, and while some of these cases come to light, some are completely ignored. BJP ruled states Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana have given death sentence to rapists in the past but for some odd reason is choosing to stay silent on this issue, even when two of its ministers participated in the rallies that supported the accused. Why, JUST WHY?

The lawyers in Kathua and the cops in Unnao are the flower of Hindutva manhood. Pass the sick bag.  Mitali Saran (@mitalisaran) April 10, 2018

After this case, the diminishing spirits of empathy and humankind in our country are silently killing our hopes. Its funny how religion has and will always overpower our morals. The victim's mother described her as a chirping bird who ran like a deer. She was the centre of our universe, her mother said. She was her daughter. She was Indias daughter too. With her murder, humanity has died too.Kosovska Mitrovica: subsequent to Salisbury, weve got new Sarajevo?

by nostradamus Thursday Apr 12th, 2018 4:53 AM

One of the major fronts of a new cold war, as well as, a potential front of a hot war is passing through South Slavic lands now, just as it was in 1914.South Bend, Indiana  Attorneys for Plaintiff, Joe Hand Promotions, Inc., of Feasterville, Pennsylvania filed suit in the Northern District of Indiana alleging that Defendants, MBK Holdings, Inc. d/b/a Mateys Restaurant & Bar, of Michigan City, Indiana, Bryan Konieczny, and Mark Kehoskie, both individuals residing in Indiana, infringed its rights in the UFC 202: Diaz v. McGregor 2, UFC 203: Miocic v. Overeem, UFC 205: Alvarez v. McGregor, UFC 207: Nunes v. Rousey, UFC 208: Holm v. de Randamie, and UFC 210: Cormier v. Johnson 2 (the Programs). Plaintiff is seeking statutory damages, attorneys fees, interest, and costs.

Plaintiff is a corporation that specializes in distributing licensed broadcasts for premier sporting events around the country. Typically, Plaintiff licenses rights to broadcast the events to restaurants and establishments around the country, on a pay-per-view basis. Plaintiff was granted the exclusive right to license broadcast rights by UFC for a number of UFC fights throughout 2016 and 2017.

Plaintiff alleges that Defendants pirated the broadcasts and showed them in their establishment through unauthorized satellite or cable signal.

Plaintiff has alleged both Satellite and Cable Piracy.

The case was assigned to District Judge Jon E. DeGuilio and Magistrate Judge Michael G. Gotsch, Sr. in the Northern District and assigned Case 3:18-cv-00232-JD-MGG.

JoeHand-v-MBKHoldings-ComplaintCorn December 2021 Chicago Quant Technologies - 45 minutes ago Corn continues it's upward journey

Corn Firms After Report Barchart - 1 hour ago Futures rallied sharply ahead of the NASS reports, anticipating another bullish surprise like last year. They didnt get one, and are currently trading 10 to 12 cents lower in fast market conditions.... ZCZ21 : 535-2 (-0.70%) ZCPAUS.CM : 5.1465 (-0.73%) ZCH22 : 543-0 (-0.73%) ZCZ21 : 535-2 (-0.70%)

Hogs Continue The Rally through Midday Barchart - 1 hour ago After yesterdays pullback, Thursday lean hog trading has the board working triple digits higher. December is up the most so far with a $2 gain. USDAs National Average Base hog price for Thursday... HEV21 : 91.425 (+0.69%) HEG22 : 87.000 (+1.43%) KMV21 : 110.400 (+1.08%)

Silver Miners ETF (SIL) Has Reached Support Area ElliottWave-Forecast - 1 hour ago Silver Miners ETF (SIL) has been consolidating since bottoming on January 2016 low at 14.94. Presently, it has reached 100% fibonacci extension from August 2020 peak at $26.2 - 35.3. This means the instrument... SIL : 35.09 (+1.83%)

Coffee Moves Higher on Brazil Supply Concerns Barchart - Thu Sep 30, 10:29AM CDT Dec arabica coffee (KCZ21 ) this morning is up +1.85 (+0.96%), and Nov ICE Robusta coffee (RMX21 ) is up +17 (+0.80%). Coffee prices this morning are moderately higher, with robusta recovering from a 1-1/2... KCZ21 : 194.00s (+0.31%) RMX21 : 2,126s (+0.47%) ^USDBRL : 5.45750 (+0.83%)

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USDA Report Days Barchart - Thu Sep 30, 9:23AM CDT Yes, Thursday is another USDA report day, among other things, and reminded me of a classic song from The Carpenters.Peter Tilocca, ANZ Wealth chief underwriter, said the change is a significant step forward for the insurance industry which has been locked in the same process for the past two decades.

The underwriting process today is at best described as cumbersome, and in a world where the consumer now expects instant gratification, an underwriting time frame average of 20 to 30 days will no longer be acceptable, Tilocca said. By working backwards from the claims history and seeking out commonalities in this data set, we have been able to reduce underwriting personal statements while maintaining the integrity of our insurance portfolio.

ANZ said the innovation has reduced the number of medical questions in the underwriting process for the full OneCare product suite to eight, and is anticipated to positively impact the completion rate of insurance applications.

Currently 20% of life insurance applications are not completed due to a requirement for more data or incomplete information provided, Tilocca said. This has a detrimental effect not only on Australias underinsurance problem, but also on the customer experience and the perception of insurers.

Tilocca said ANZ is excited about the opportunities big data and artificial intelligence are bringing to the underwriting process, giving advisers and their customers a better experience.



Related stories:Bringing with him more than two decades of experience, the key hire will be in charge of global innovation in life financial modelling, including driving the roadmap for Willis Towers Watsons RiskAgility Financial Modeller product. He was described by insurance consulting and technology managing director Joel Fox as an excellent addition to the team.

Fox added: Marks exceptional skillset will be a real asset to our life business and were confident he will help us deliver the innovative and cutting-edge solutions being sought by our clients, as the sector continues to face a volatile and challenging risk environment, exacerbated by regulatory change.

Brown, for his part, cited Willis Towers Watsons strong track record for solving business problems.

This is a challenging period for the life insurance industry, which is in the middle of a fundamental transformation, and I look forward to working with our clients to help them identify opportunities to improve business performance, he said

Meanwhile Juriaan Borst has been named as life capital modelling global product leader.

Juriaan similarly brings with him significant experience in capital modelling and during the 15 years that he has worked within Willis Towers Watson he has proved to be a major asset to the insurance consulting and technology business and our clients, commented Fox, who said Borst will remain based in the Netherlands.

Related stories:Specifically, the lawsuits allege that insurers have violated wage and hour, employee benefit, discrimination, and wage payment laws, InsureReinsure Blog reported.

In March, a Texas federal court judge denied a motion to dismiss an IC misclassification class action lodged against Texas Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance (TFB) and other insurers. The companies were looking to end an independent insurance agents proposed collective action that sought overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

The agent alleged in Ferguson v. Tex. Farm Bureau Bus. Corp. that he and his fellow agents had been misclassified by the defendants as independent contractors. In their motion to dismiss the action, the insurers argued that the plaintiff was not covered by the FLSA because he had entered into independent contractor agreements with the insurers under the name of his corporation, Chris Ferguson Insurance Services, of which the plaintiff was the sole shareholder and president. The court, however, dismissed the insurers argument, saying that the putative employer acquired the persons labor through a contract with a business entity rather than the person.

The defendants also maintained that, as a matter of law, the plaintiff was an independent contractor. The court said that the test for employee status under the FLSA is based on the economic realities of the parties relationship. The court then cited facts from the plaintiffs complaint that proved that he was working in a seemingly employee-like capacity: the plaintiff had worked exclusively for the insurers for 12 years, was issued TFB business cards, had a TFB email address, and was closely supervised by TFB management.

In another case that is currently on expedited appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, a district court ruled in favor of an insurance sales agents class action that sought pension and other employee benefits from American Family Insurance Company (AFIC).

In Jammal v. American Family Insurance Company, the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on July 31, 2017 appealed the decision which held that the insurance sales agents of AFIC are employees  not independent contractors  for purposes of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).

AFIC filed a brief earlier this year to have the decision reversed. Three amicus curiae briefs filed by the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Council of Life Insurers, and the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America also called for the reversal of the decision. The appellate briefs argued that prior to the issuance of the court decision, nearly all federal courts had held that insurance agents are independent contractors.

Related stories:According to the report, 58% of consumers in the US and the UK said that sharing economy platforms are too risky to use. The report suggested that only by having insurance can sharing economy businesses put consumers worries to rest. Some firms  like Uber and Airbnb  have recognized this, and have insurance policies in place. For example, Airbnb's Host Protection Insurance program provides home sharing hosts with protection against third party claims of property damage or bodily injury up to $1 million.

Insurance couldnt be more important for companies like this, Chris Moore, deputy head of casualty for Lloyds syndicate Apollo 1969, explained to Fast Company. As soon as you start asking people to share their time, share the things that are most important to them, you need insurance to provide that trust factor.

The lack of insurance appears to be a deal breaker for most consumers, the survey found; 71% of consumers from the US, the UK, and China said that they are more likely to use sharing economy services if insurance was available. Similarly, 70% of the surveys consumer respondents said that they would be more likely to share their home or other assets if start-up platforms provided insurance.

While insurance can be a big plus for sharing economy businesses, the issue of liability continues to be a divisive topic.

Many of the sharing economy platforms that participated in the survey  78% of them  believe they will attract more customers if they offer insurance, but are hesitant to take on the responsibilities that insurance implies. 53% of sharing platform employees also said that consumers are responsible if something ever goes wrong, while 27% said that the host/driver/provider is at fault. Only 20% of the employees said they should have to own up to any risks and damages that arise.

On the consumer side, 53% said that sharing platforms are responsible in the event of risk, while 32% said that providers should be put on the hook when something goes wrong.

Related stories:Agency owners affiliated with Allstate recently lent a hand to the various Boys and Girls Clubs across the state of Colorado.

Fox 21 News reported that agents in the Colorado Springs area volunteered their time by helping renovate the Boys and Girls Club of the Pikes Peak Region. Over the weekend, volunteers cleaned the facility, repainted walls, redid the floors, and so on.A massive fire has destroyed a multi-million dollar waterfront home in Massachusetts owned in part by a famous restaurateur.

The Gloucester home that burned late Saturday into Sunday morning was bought for $4.6 million in 2016 and was undergoing renovations, so no one was inside.

The fire chief says the flames spread to nearby grass and trees, and there were no fire hydrants nearby. One firefighter suffered a minor injury from burning debris.

It took more than four hours for firefighters to get the blaze under control.

City records show the home is co-owned by Steve DeFillippo, who owns Davios restaurants.

The cause of the blaze is under investigation.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics MassachusettsAuthorities say three highway workers were struck and injured on an eastern Pennsylvania interstate.

Officials said the accident happened Tuesday afternoon in a construction zone where they were patching potholes in the westbound lanes of I-80 in Tobyhanna Township.

Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spokesman Ronald Young said one worker was flown to a hospital and the other two were driven to a medical facility. Their conditions and details about the accident werent immediately available.

Young said the crash occurred during the national Work Zone Awareness Week and urged people to drive carefully and be aware of workers as the spring season allows roadwork to begin.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Workers' Compensation Pennsylvania NumbersJelf, a consultant that specializes in insurance, risk management and employee benefits, announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Clark Thomson, Scotlands largest independent insurance broker.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2018. Terms were not disclosed.

Established in 1965, Clark Thomson is headquartered in Perth and has offices in Dundee, Glasgow, Inverness, Kirkwall, Oban, Elgin, Thurso, and Nairn. With over 200 employees, Clark Thomson provides insurance broking services to small and medium-sized (SME) businesses, with particular expertise in the agriculture, renewable energy, food and drink, and retail sectors across Scotland, as well as providing personal lines insurance for individuals and families.

A subsidiary of Marsh, Jelf is a leading UK insurance broker in the mid-size and SME company sector, with almost 3,000 colleagues serving over 250,000 clients from over 75 locations, noted Chipping Sodbury, England-based Jelf.

On completion, Jelf will combine its existing Scottish operations and Clark Thomson into a single business unit. Subject to regulatory approvals, the combined business will be led by Ben Bailey, managing director of Clark Thomson, and a management team drawn from across Clark Thomson and Jelf.

This is a highly significant transaction that underlines Jelfs commitment to building the leading community based advisory business across the whole of the UK, said Phil Barton, CEO of Jelf.

Through the acquisition of Clark Thomson, we are significantly broadening our geographic reach whilst also building on our capabilities in sectors that are vital to the Scottish economy, such as agriculture, food and drink, retail, and hospitality and leisure, he added.

The transaction brings together two leading community brokers with well-established offices in complementary locations across Scotland. The combined business will offer clients a compelling proposition across a wide range of insurance, risk management and employee benefits services and solutions, Barton continued.

This deal is great news for our clients and colleagues alike. Through Jelf, our clients will have access to a wider range of services and solutions, while colleagues will benefit from being part of Marshs wider global network, commented Bailey. I look forward to bringing Jelf and Clark Thomsons operations together and building the leading advisory business in Scotland.

Source: Jelf/Marsh

Topics Mergers Agencies AgribusinessEuropean Union regulators urged banks, investors and customers on Thursday to take timely action to avoid disruption to cross-border derivatives and insurance contracts caused by Brexit.

Britain leaves the EU in March 2019 and a standstill transition deal until the end of 2020 agreed last month wont be formally ratified until October or later.

Contingency planning should consider timely responses to all potential challenges, such as contract continuity and possible relocations, said a joint report from the EUs banking, insurance and markets regulators on risks to the financial system.

In the short term, Brexit may affect the access of EU households and companies to financial services provided in Britain and may affect market confidence, it added.

British regulators have said that last months transition deal means that EU banks with branches in London dont have to rush to apply for new UK licenses by March next year.

The BoE wants EU regulators to reciprocate regarding British lenders with customers in the EU, to avoid hasty relocations that could damage the City.

Thursdays report said banks, insurers, asset managers and market infrastructure firms in Britain should instead press ahead with applying for licenses before next March to avoid their customers being cut off from services like clearing.

By the time legal certainty on a potential transition period may be attained, financial institutions would not have sufficient time to take necessary measures, the report said.

Relatively few firms have begun relocating staff and operations to the EU, but increased relocation activity can be expected nearer to next March, it said.

The Bank of England has said that financial firms on their own cant tackle contract continuity involving millions of customers in time, but the EU report appears to put the onus on private sector action.

Financial institutions are responsible for ensuring that they are able to fulfill their contractual obligations under all circumstances, not least with respect to derivatives, liquidity provision, and swap contracts EU 27 parties have entered into, it said.

Insurance undertakings are also advised to have in place contingency plans considering all the eventualities, it said.

The report noted that derivatives exposures of EU banks to Britain fell from about 800 billion euros in June 2016, when Britain voted to leave the EU, to about 500 billion euros by September last year.

Some of the drop is caused by the pounds decline in value against the euro.

The overall investment exposure of insurers from the European Economic Area to Britain is just 2.13 percent, but some insurance companies may be more substantially exposed, the report said.

(Reporting by Huw Jones; editing by Larry King)

Related:

Topics Carriers Tech Europe Uk BrexitQBE Insurance Group Ltd. announced a reshaping of the senior management team with the appointments of Inder Singh as group chief financial officer, replacing Michael Ford who is leaving QBE; Peter Grewal as group chief risk officer; Liam Buckley as group head of Culture and Talent; Matt Mansour as group chief information officer, and Anders Land as group head of Internal Audit.

Inder Singh is currently the chief financial officer for QBEs Australian & New Zealand Operations. He joined QBE in 2015 as group head of Corporate Development and was later appointed as group head of Financial Planning and Analysis before taking on the role of chief financial officer in the Australian & New Zealand Operations. Before joining QBE, Singh was the group corporate development and M&A director for Aviva and prior to that was the executive director, Financial Institutions Group, UBS Investment Bank, London. He is a qualified chartered accountant with more than 20 years experience in commercially oriented roles in large multi-national financial institutions. He will be based in the companys head office in Sydney.

Peter Grewal has been appointed as group chief risk officer, joining QBE from Swiss Re where he held the role of chief risk officer, Reinsurance, since 2014 with a global remit covering property and casualty and life and health reinsurance. Prior to this, he held executive roles in internal audit including head of group Internal Audit for Swiss Re, head of Internal Audit for Scottish Re and head of audit for HSBC (Bank of Bermuda). Grewal will join QBE in July 2018 and will be based in the companys head office in Sydney.

After Grewal takes up his position with QBE, Liam Buckley (currently interim group chief risk officer) will take on a new position as group head of Culture and Talent. Buckley joined QBE in 2014 as group head of Internal Audit. Prior to joining, he was general manager, Innovation Investments and Strategy at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. He has more than 25 years experience working across a broad range of industries.

Matt Mansour will be joining QBE as group chief information officer from Barclays where he is the chief technology information security officer. Prior to joining Barclays in 2015, Mansour worked for General Electric for more than 12 years in a number of senior roles in Australia and New Zealand including supporting GE Capital. Most notably he was head of Business Transformation and Digital, managing director GE Capital Digital and group chief information officer. Mansour will join QBE in late 2018 and will be based in London.

Anders Land has been formally appointed as group head of Internal Audit after eight months acting in this role. Land has almost 20 years experience working in insurance in the U.S. Before joining QBE as the senior vice president and head of Internal Audit for QBEs North America Operations, he held senior roles across risk and compliance at AIG and MetLife. His appointment is effective immediately.

We have commenced an accelerated reshaping of the companys strategic focus to create a stronger and simpler QBE, said Pat Regan, group chief executive officer.

This includes a prioritization of Brilliant Basics  improving underwriting quality, pricing and claims handling in every market in which we operate and every product we underwrite, Regan added. To deliver this plan we need a senior management team with deep insurance expertise and the capabilities required to build on QBEs strengths and to deliver excellence across the group consistently.

He said he was confident that these appointments will assist in delivering on our priorities in 2018 and beyond.

Source: QBE Insurance

Topics Swiss Re AustraliaAnbang Insurance Group Co., the troubled Chinese insurer seized by the government, is interviewing investment banks to advise on potential asset divestments, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The once-acquisitive insurer plans to hire an adviser to manage the sale of parts of its portfolio, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. Some bankers were in Beijing earlier this month pitching officials from Anbang and the Chinese banking and insurance regulator, one of the people said.

Advisers may also help find new investors to buy a stake in Anbang, the people said.

The Chinese government took temporary control of Anbang in February, saying at the time it would consider all or partial sales of its assets. Anbang burst onto the global scene in 2014 with the $1.95 billion purchase of New Yorks Waldorf Astoria hotel and continued its buying binge by snapping up financial companies and marquee properties around the world.

The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission didnt immediately respond to a fax seeking comment. Anbang currently has no plan to dispose assets, its public relations department said in response to Bloomberg queries.

Anbang bought Dutch insurer Vivat NV in 2015 and agreed to invest 1.35 billion euros ($1.7 billion) to recapitalize the company. The next year, it acquired Strategic Hotels & Resorts Inc. for about $6.5 billion, gaining a portfolio of luxury properties including San Franciscos Westin St. Francis and JW Marriott Essex House in New York.

The Chinese company also owns controlling stakes in South Koreas Tongyang Life Insurance Co., Antwerp-based insurer Fidea NV and Belgian lender Nagelmackers.

Chinas government has been seeking to broker the sale of a stake in Anbang, Bloomberg News reported in January. Regulators said last week that Anbang will start the selection of strategic investors and aim to introduce private capital as soon as possible.

Related:

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Carriers Fraud New York ChinaChicken salad made by an Iowa food processing company and distributed by Fareway Stores in the Midwest sickened 265 people in eight states and caused one death in Iowa from salmonella contamination, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The outbreak which sickened people from Jan. 8 through March 20, appears to have ended, the CDC said in an update posted on April 6. Ill people ranged in age from less than 1 year to 89 years. Sixty-seven percent were female.

The contaminated food left some people with serious illnesses, said Seattle food safety attorney Bill Marler. He and Iowa attorney Steve Wandro represent 48 people filing lawsuits against Triple T Specialty Meats of Ackley, Iowa, which made the chicken salad and Fareway Stores, a Boone, Iowa-based grocery chain that distributed the food under its store brand name.

Out of the 265 illnesses, 94 people were hospitalized, a high number for such an outbreak Marler said.

Theres a woman in Nebraska who was in ICU for a week and a gentleman in Iowa who has lost his large intestine. Hes now facing another surgery in a month or two to try to reconnect that. So there are obviously some pretty significantly sick people, Marler said.

Wandro said several of those sickened are in their 70s or 80s with weakened immune systems who have had to go to skilled care facilities for several weeks to recover.

Triple T Specialty Meats spokesman Dave Dutton said the company isnt commenting.

Were still receiving information and we want to make sure we have all that information before we make any public comments, said Dutton, lawyer from Waterloo, Iowa.

Asked if the company has determined the source of the salmonella contamination he said, thats the job of testing companies and we havent seen all the reports as yet.

Salmonella infection usually occurs when a person eats food contaminated with the feces of animals or humans carrying the bacteria.

On behalf of everyone at Fareway, our sympathy goes out to the affected families, and we are working diligently to resolve this matter, Fareway CEO Reynolds Cramer said in a statement.

The company is working with state and federal agencies on the investigation and hasnt carried Triple T Specialty Meats chicken salad since it was pulled from the shelves and will not carry this product moving forward, he said.

Lawsuits already on file in federal court in Des Moines allege product liability violations for distributing defective food and negligence for failure to ensure the food distributed was safe to eat. They seek money to compensate the victims for general, special, incidental and consequential damages incurred and attorney fees.

The illnesses hit Iowa hardest with 240 sickened and one dead, the CDC said. Illinois reported 10 cases, Nebraska had five, Minnesota had four and South Dakota had three illnesses. Indiana, Mississippi and Wisconsin each reported one case linked to the chicken salad.

Iowa Department of Public Health spokeswoman Polly Carver-Kimm said a woman in eastern Iowa died from the same strain of salmonella identified in the chicken salad outbreak but she stopped short of attributing it to the chicken salad since the woman wasnt interviewed about what she ate before she died.

CDC spokeswoman Brittany Behm confirmed Monday the Iowa woman died of the outbreak strain which meets the agencys criteria for inclusion in the outbreak statistics.

On Feb. 9, Fareway stopped selling chicken salad in all of its stores after the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals contacted the company about illnesses. Iowa public health officials issued a consumer advisory on Feb. 13 warning that chicken salad sold at Fareway may be contaminated with Salmonella. Eight days later Triple T Specialty Meats recalled more than 20,000 pounds of chicken salad after samples from two Fareway grocery stores in Iowa tested positive for the same strain of Salmonella that was sickening people.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Iowa PollutionAn insurance company has agreed to pay more than $1.6 million to settle a federal lawsuit filed by Indiana parents who were denied coverage for therapy for their children with autism.

Two families sued Anthem in 2016 after the company stopped covering applied behavioral analysis therapy for their children meant to improve communication, social skills and other behaviors, The Indianapolis Star reported.

The suit was brought by Indiana residents Chester and Kathryn Pierce, and Michael Beck and Joanne Kehoe.

The Pierces sought 40 hours a week of ABA therapy for their then 14-year-old son who has severe autism, court records said. Anthem denied the request for 40 hours of intense and individualized therapy and reduced the numbers of hours to 25 in 2013. The company then reduced the number to 20 hours one year later.

Anthem also denied Beck and Kehoe in October 2013 the 40 hours per week of therapy they requested for their then 11-year-old son, the lawsuit said. Anthem reduced the number of hours to 30, and then dropped it down to 20 hours a few months later.

Anthem said some therapy services could be done through school, court records said.

Anthem denied the lawsuits allegations but agreed to settle the case.

The insurance company agreed in the settlement to stop using guidelines that base coverage for ABA therapy solely on an individuals age.

The resolution ensures that Anthem members continue to receive the support they need, Anthen and the plaintiffs said in a joint statement.

About 200 children who Anthem denied ABA therapy coverage to from 2012 to 2017 may receive payment if the settlement is approved in court, according to The Arc of Indiana, an advocacy group for people with developmental disabilities.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Carriers IndianaJohnson & Johnson and a talc-mining company were ordered by jurors to pay $80 million in punitive damages for hiding that their products, including J&Js iconic baby powder, had been tainted by asbestos and posed a cancer risk.

The New Jersey jurys award brings to a total of $117 million that J&J and a unit of Imerys SA must pay investment banker Stephen Lanzo III over his claims the companies asbestos-laced talc products caused his cancer in what may be a precedent-setting case for U.S. talc litigation.

Lanzo wasnt in the courtroom when the punitive award was announced Wednesday. The bankers lawyers, however, wept with joy over the panels finding that J&Js and Imeryss mishandling of the talc warranted punishment.

The message to J&J is stop selling this product because its dangerous and can kill people, said Joseph Satterley, one of Lanzos lawyers.

The same jury concluded last week J&J and Imerys officials knew for years their talc contained trace amounts of asbestos, a known carcinogen. The verdict was the first time a jury lined up behind a consumers claims that J&Js baby powder and former Shower-to-Shower product can cause mesothelioma, an often-fatal cancer linked to asbestos.

We will continue to defend the safety of Johnsons Baby Powder and immediately begin our appeal, Carol Goodrich, a J&J spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement. Once the full evidence is reviewed, this decision will be reversed.

Having J&Js baby powder tied an asbestos-linked cancer tarnishes the brand a bit, said Jean Eggen, a Widener University law professor. The verdict and subsequent punitive award may draw more such cases in coming months, she said.

Imeryss officials said the verdict hasnt shaken their belief that the companys rigorous asbestos-testing regime insures that its talc poses no threat. We intend to appeal this decision and will continue to stand by the safety of our product, Gwen Myers, a company spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement.

Ovarian Cancer

J&J is grappling with about 6,600 lawsuits from women who blame its baby powder for causing their ovarian cancers. Lanzos case may open a second front in the litigation over whether the companys talc products pose a health threat to consumers.

J&J won the first mesothelioma talc trial tied to its baby powder when a California jury ruled in November the product wasnt responsible for causing a 61-year-old womans cancer. Colgate-Palmolive Co. agreed last year to settle a lawsuit claiming its talcum-powder products caused a Pennsylvania woman to develop mesothelioma.

Jurors in the Lanzo case awarded punitive damages after hearing arguments that J&J executives knew more than 40 years ago their talc products were laced with asbestos and hid that fact to protect the cornerstone of their baby products line.

A J&J scientists warned in a 1974 memo that the asbestos-tainted talc posed a severe health hazard, Moshe Maimon, one of Lanzos attorneys, told the panel. Lanzo, now 46, was only two years old at the time. They need to be told in a very loud voice, stop it and never do it again, Maimon said of the companys decision to hide its baby powders health threats.

Last week, jurors in New Brunswick, New Jersey, about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from J&Js headquarters, awarded Lanzo $30 million for his pain and suffering. The panel awarded Lanzos wife, Kendra, $7 million in damages as well.

Liability Determination

Under New Jersey law, jurors had to assess how much responsibility J&J and Imerys bore for Lanzos injuries. The panel found J&J liable for 70 percent of the compensatory damages and Imerys for 30 percent.

After the punishment damages were announced, Judge Ana Viscomi refused to apply New Jerseys damage cap to the award since it didnt exceed five times the compensatory damages awarded to the Lanzos.

The companies lawyers denied the companys baby powder and Shower-to-Shower product had ever contained asbestos. They argued that decades of testing found talc purchased from Imeryss units was clear of the carcinogen. J&J sold Shower-to-Shower to Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. in 2012.

J&Js testing regime was an expression of care to try and insure its baby powder was asbestos free, Mike Brock, one of the companys lawyers, told jurors in the punitive-damage phase. This is not a company that was putting its hands over its eyes and saying its not seeing anything in terms of asbestos in talc samples, Brock added.

The case is Lanzo v. Cyprus Amex Minerals Co., L00738516, Middlesex Superior Court (New Brunswick).

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Claims New JerseyMetLife has launched a multi-year collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) focused on technologies that it believes will transform the insurance industry.

MetLife has joined the MIT Media Lab. The Media Labs work has led to tech innovations such as the touch screen, GPS and wearables. Today, the lab has approximately 450 active projects. MetLifes collaboration with the Media Lab will focus on disruptive applications of these technologies for the insurance industry.

MetLife said it is also leveraging MITs advanced research in the areas of sensors (Internet of Things), social data, digital records, machine learning, and data science to simplify underwriting, improve risk management and differentiate pricing.

Every industry is impacted by the exponential growth in technology, the rise in globalization, and changing consumer demographics, said Marty Lippert, executive vice president and head of MetLife Global Technology & Operations. Lippert said the collaboration with MIT will provide MetLife with first-mover advantage in capitalizing on emerging consumer and technology trends.

MIT Media Lab is involved in various projects with potential impact on insurance including ones on blockchain, robotics, bionics, sensors and artificial intelligence. As a member, MetLife gains access to other sponsors as well as lab faculty, research staff, events and student recruitment. Many major corporations are members including American Express, ExxonMobile, General Electric, Google, IBM, Toyota and Verizon.

This move follows the insurers earlier steps to invest in insurance technology startups. In January, MetLife started MetLife Digital Ventures and MetLife Digital Accelerator powered by Techstars. Backed by a $100 million co-investment fund, MetLife Digital Ventures will invest in start-up companies. The MetLife Digital Accelerator program will mentor startups and host them at MetLifes Global Technology Campus in North Carolina for an intensive 13-week program.

Topics InsurTech TechLouisiana Insurance Commissioner James Donelon says he is supporting a bill that would create an insurance pool to help stabilize the states individual market for health insurance.

The Louisiana Department of Insurance announced that Donelon, along with state lawmakers Rep. Kirk Talbot, Rep. Major Thibaut and Sen. John Smith, is urging Senate passage of House Bill 472, which passed the Louisiana House of Representatives by a 63  34 vote. HB 472 would create a creating a state-wide reinsurance pool for health coverage.

In the last five years, insurance rates in the individual market have more than doubled while the number of health insurers doing business in the state has declined from 16 to 2, Donelon said in the LDIs announcement. The individual market where tens of thousands of self-employed Louisianans get their health care coverage, along with thousands of other Louisiana residents who do not have access to employer sponsored insurance, is in serious jeopardy of entering a death spiral where rates continue to climb and many decide to go uninsured.

House Bill 472 proposes that Louisiana create a program to provide reinsurance for high dollar claims. The program would mirror a federal program that existed for three years after the creation of the healthcare marketplace through the Affordable Care Act.

Louisianas program would authorize Donelon to impose a fee of approximately $1.40 per month on all insured lives to fund the reinsurance program.

In addition, the state would be eligible for the use of federal matching dollars that will help Louisiana achieve a higher rate reduction in the individual health insurance market than was previously achieved through the federal program.

The reinsurance program could lead to rate reductions of about 15 percent in the individual market, the LDI said.

The small fee on Louisiana policies would attract more than $100 million in matching federal funds.

HB 472 has bipartisan and bicameral support including that of Talbot, chairman of the House Insurance Committee, and the committees vice chairman, Thibaut, and Smith, chairman of the Senate Insurance Committee.

Source: Louisiana Department of Insurance

Topics Louisiana ReinsuranceNorth Carolina should tackle an emerging problem of water and air pollution from little-studied industrial chemicals by beefing up the states health and environmental agencies, Gov. Roy Cooper said Tuesday.

Cooper proposed spending $14.5 million to help improve the ability of the Department of Environmental Quality and Department of Health and Human Services to protect the water and environment.

Legislators have resisted increasing agency budgets for the past year despite rising concern over the presence of little-studied industrial chemicals in water supplies. Lawmakers failed in February to agree on an extra $2.3 million for the environmental agency.

State regulators said in new court documents this week that the operators of a chemical plant near Fayetteville have lied for years about discharging compounds that have gotten into drinking water supplies as much as 100 miles (160 kilometers) away in Wilmington.

Spokesmen for Wilmington, Delaware-based Chemours Company did not respond Tuesday to a request to comment.

A months-long investigation by DEQ found Chemours contaminated the states air, surface water, and groundwater through its release of the chemical nicknamed GenX, attorneys for the environmental agency said in an updated lawsuit filed Monday. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state health agency have recognized GenX may present an unreasonable risk of injury to human health and the environment, the court filing said.

The agency said that Chemours and its predecessor DuPont have lied about discharging GenX for decades into the Cape Fear River. DuPont spun off Chemours in 2015.

Despite knowledge of health risks associated with GenX, Chemours failed to disclose the presence of GenX in its process wastewater, and even made statements that misled DEQ as to the presence of GenX, the environmental agency said in the lawsuit. The suit was filed last fall in Bladen County, where the plant is located.

The agency said it continues to detect concentrations of GenX in the water being discharged by the Fayetteville-area factory that employs about 900 workers. The chemical has also caused significant and widespread groundwater contamination, and falls to the ground in rainwater miles away from the plant at levels that far exceed emission rates previously reported to DEQ, the court filing said.

GenX has been used since 2009. It replaced perfluorooctanoic acid _ or PFOA _ a chemical that was shown to stay in the body longer and which was blamed for increased cancer risks. Both compounds were used in making non-stick Teflon and other materials.

Studies point to GenX and related chemicals as having toxic effects in animals, but its effects in humans arent known. There are no federal health standards for GenX and the U. classifies it as an emerging contaminant to be studied.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics North Carolina Pollution ChemicalsThe owners of Opry Mills are asking the Tennessee Supreme Court to reverse a ruling that reduced their 2010 flood insurance coverage from $200 to $50 million.

The Tennessean reports the Simon Property Group filed an appeal last month with the state Supreme Court. It seeks to overturn an appeals court decision in favor of Arch Insurance Company.

The Opry Mills mall was caught in the 2010 flooding of the Cumberland River. Ten feet of water submerged the huge shopping center, causing millions in damage.

In January, the Court of Appeals ruled that Opry Mills fell under a $50 million coverage limit for properties listed in high hazard flood zones.

The appeals court reversed a jury award of nearly $200 million.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Flood TennesseeA Utah family who sued the Boy Scouts of America for policies they claimed discriminated against their son with Down syndrome has withdrawn the lawsuit after the organization said it would help the boy earn his Eagle Scout award.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that attorneys for 15-year-old Logan Blythes family met March 27 with national Boy Scouts representatives.

The attorneys said that the Boy Scouts offered the family resources that will make obtaining the award possible for Logan.

The family filed suit March 13 after local Boy Scouts officials approved, and then, the next day, suspended Logans Eagle Scout project. Logans parents sued for a minimum of $1 and for their son to be reinstated and accommodated within the Scouts.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics LawsuitsSeven decades after making key portions of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are being exposed to radiation as they tear down buildings that helped create the nations nuclear arsenal.

Dozens of workers demolishing a plutonium processing plant from the 1940s have inhaled or ingested radioactive particles in the past year, and even carried some of that radiation into their vehicles.

The incidents have prompted the federal government, along with state regulators, to halt the demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant until a safe plan can be developed. The contamination has also shaken confidence in the massive Hanford cleanup, which costs the federal treasury around $2 billion a year.

The U.S. Department of Energy has launched an independent investigation into the spread of radiation at the plant.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics WashingtonKen Wardrop impressed with His & Hers, and his latest heartwarming documentary follows a number of piano students and their teachers, writes Esther McCarthy.

WHEN filmmaker Ken Wardrop first contacted piano teacher Eileen McCollum about his latest film, she asked what type of cake she should bake for when he came for tea. He knew instinctively that he had found the right subject in the Crosshaven-based teacher, who has been bringing music into the lives of children for decades.

Eileen is one of a number of teachers and students who features in Wardrops delightful new documentary Making the Grade. Beginning with the most basic grade and going right up to grade eight, the film is as colourful and moving as youd expect from the man who brought us the award-winning His & Hers.

When I arrived down shed made the old-fashioned fairy cakes with the butter icing, he tells me. What a fantastic job I have. I go down and meet all these lovely people. You have the tea and cakes and for me thats a really important part of the process, because thats where you connect and you share your own stories. And people start to trust you and understand the project.

Many of his subjects would no doubt speak equally warmly of Wardrop, an open-hearted and funny filmmaker with the knack of drawing something truly special from his subjects. After heading to the US to examine the mother/son relationship in Mom & Men, he is back on home turf.

Director Ken Wardrop.

Eileen is a quintessential example for me of what youd imagine a music teacher to be, he says of his encounters in Co Cork. Eileen would have six to eight students only and is retired in many respects but enjoys music. And it keeps her young to have these children coming into her life. She has a beautiful piano in her drawing room. Its a living, breathing instrument because of these classes. Its her reason to keep going and keep practicing herself.

She got back to me recently to say how excited she was about a new kid who has come in and shows great promise. Shes excited as she would have been in her thirties. Also its just great craic to meet someone who tells you all about her life and her adventures when she was younger, teaching in America. Shes really lived a life and I would just love that as a kid, to have an opportunity to go in to someone like Eileen once a week. I probably wouldnt have enjoyed the music, but Id want to chat!

The filmmaker brings us his latest documentary through the Arts Councils Reel Art Scheme, which supports documentary makers who create films with an artistic theme. While readily admitting that he wouldnt have the most highbrow of tastes when it comes to the arts, the ethos of the scheme appealed to him.

It had been on my radar for some time. In 2016 I said: Thats it Im definitely going for it because its a wonderful opportunity. The Arts Council backs the artist as opposed to the project, really. You get free reign  ultimately their agenda is to make sure they are supporting the artist.

Normally, obviously, youll have financiers and co-partners and so forth that will all have a vested interest. And in general Ive been lucky to be honest  Ive never had an issue. But I always liked the idea of it.

Making the Grade celebrates the process as well as the practice of making music and features the beginners and the tryers as well as the accomplished. Wardrop wouldnt have had it any other way.

I wanted to find a subject that I could do justice to, that I could connect with. That are embedded in the everyday. So when I started to explore piano, I eventually found myself going after the every-person story rather than going after the prodigies. I wanted to not do that.

One of the films most moving personal stories is that of Loyola, a proficient player who had stopped playing for many years, and returned to music as a comfort in crisis.

Loyolas son had a brain tumour. She was going through a bad patch, says Wardrop. Everything kind of descended at once, as can happen in life. Difficult times, and the only solace, the almost therapeutic thing that she could find was to return to piano, something that she had loved and had been very competent at.

She found a wonderful teacher, and they connected, and it kind of resurrected this wonderful passion that she had for music and the fact that it brought her to a different place. In this case, a calm place.

It took Wardrop some time to find his way into film. He studied geography in Trinity but didnt complete the course, heading off to London and working as an office manager with an architecture business in his twenties.

That was an interesting time in my life, he says now. I was lost in many respects but it was also a part of finding myself. I was a young gay man in a strange city, finding myself and what I was about. It gave me a moment. I was quite a good office manager I think  they didnt want me to leave! he laughs on his eventual decision to return to Ireland.

I think then coming back to Ireland and studying something like film [he studied at IADT in Dun Laoghaire] I was bringing something to the table. Life experiences. I was one of a few mature students. The course was so intense and so busy that the kids had no life beyond the course.

While many of his peers would develop dramatic fictional storylines, he felt daunted at such a prospect.

I was scared of approaching things I didnt know. I wanted to delve into the world of the stories Id experienced. I copped on pretty quickly then that I had a great family who were very cheap to work with, he laughs. As long as I was willing to hoover for my mother and stand in the odd gap for my father, theyd be willing to do stuff for me.

It led to Undressing My Mother, his award-winning short featuring his mother Ethel, who also starred in His & Hers, which focused on the midlands of Ireland world that he knew so well.

I started early on in Dun Laoghaire documenting my family in little short films and noticing that they actually stood out as being a little bit different. Also Im in college with a lot of Dublin people and here I am telling stories from the midlands of Ireland, kind of a forgotten spot. And realising that people see this world as interesting.

- Making the Grade opens in selected cinemas tomorrowPlans to axe 115 parking spaces from Morrisons Island to facilitate a flood relief scheme are necessary to transform the city centre, says Cork Chamber president Bill OConnell.

Change is hard, there is no doubt about it, but we cant afford to stand still either, there is no progress with the status quo.

The needs of business and residents are changing and we need to adapt with these needs, to meet as best we can the expectations of those who commute to, live or visit our city environs. We now have the opportunity.

Cork Chamber recently surveyed our members priorities for creating a city environment for family living. The number one preference related to diversity of housing, followed second by an enhanced Cork transport network, and third the development of public spaces and amenities.

More public spaces in Cork are needed to increase the accessibility and permeability of the city for pedestrians and a diverse range of transport.

People want the option not to need their car, to feel safe commuting by bicycle or on foot and to travel on fast and efficient public transport.

Currently, the quality of the urban space on Morrisons Quay is exceptionally poor, with narrow and piecemeal pedestrian paving, decaying riverside railings, and poor quality road and parking surfaces.

It is generally a low value space, and almost exclusively used as a location for parking. If we focus on the potential, we have a south facing space, on the quayside, with exceptional historic features such as the Holy Trinity Church, Capuchin Friary and historic quay walls.

Looking at the flood defence project, for far too long residents and businesses of Cork city centre have been heavily impacted by flood damage, leading to uncertainty and concerns around business viability and insurance protection.

With the threat of flooding increasing, it is crucial that works are undertaken to protect the future of our city centre as an attractive location for business and residential occupancy.

If Cork is to transform into a living city accommodating an extra 125,000 residents by 2040, maximise its potential as Irelands second city, and attract more investment, certainty is needed. A city centre that is threatened unnecessarily and repeatedly from flood and weather incidences is not viable.

Since 2011, Cork city has seen a hugely positive increase in residential occupancy, up 5.4%, and a growing city centre workforce.

With more jobs, especially high-value jobs, opting to be based centrally to attract and retain the best staff, we expect Corks day and night-time population growth to increase further in the years ahead, bringing more economic activity with it.

But for that to happen we need an attractive, inviting, and flood protected city centre.

The public realm project at Morrisons Island will remove 115 parking spaces and this is a big step change in how we do things.

What is needed now is to ensure that parking and public transport measures are put in place within the 12-month period before the commencement of works to mitigate the impact on business.

These parking spaces are primarily used by city centre workers. And so we need to ensure that people have options.

We strongly encourage City Hall to explore the potential for expanding Park & Ride facilities from other sides of the city. Perhaps another site can be made available for professionals to park and walk to work?

We need tech solutions to the current pay and display parking disc system. Essentially, we need to more effectively utilise the available parking in the city.

Rather than looking at negatives, the removal of parking spaces should be seen as an opportunity  an opportunity to challenge the Government to release the 200m Bus Connects Programme funding as soon as possible.

An opportunity for dedicated bus corridors to be built so our city centre remains accessible for both workers, shoppers, residents and visitors.

We also have a chance to develop connected, integrated and safe cycle routes to offer a viable alternative to commuters and residents alike.

Overall, we are optimistic that the change in primary usage of this space will add to city centre vitality and trade. Research by the National Transport Authority has found that public transport users spend more than twice as much as car users in Dublin.

The same research found that cities rely on public transport users and pedestrians to deliver the strongest cash injection to a citys economy as a whole.

Why not also invest in painting and refurbishing the adjacent building facades along the quayside, and the streets linking Morrisons Quay to the South Mall? We would like to see this part of the city develop into a cultural hotspot similar to the Waterford Walls initiative, making the linkages between the Quays and the Mall a destination in their own right. At a low cost, we have potential to realise a hugely impactful cultural attraction.

We need to be ambitious, to move forward, and that is not possible without a change in how we do things.

We need to capitalise on the opportunity to grow our city as a vibrant, bustling urban centre, one that is opened up and inviting.

Why not set the bar high? Without a high level of ambition, we are not capitalising fully on the potential to transform Cork.One hundred cardboard cutouts of Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg were erected this week on the lawn outside the Capitol building in Washington.

The cutouts, bearing T-shirts with Fix Fakebook written on them, were placed on the neatly cut grass ahead of Mr Zuckerbergs appearance in front of the US Congress.

This was meant to be a time of reckoning for the companys CEO. Facebook is facing scrutiny following allegations that the London-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users to try to influence elections.

But its transgressions go way beyond that. The worlds most popular and most profitable social media network has exposed at least 87 million peoples data, enabled foreign propaganda, and perpetuated discrimination.

Avaaz, the advocacy group behind the cutouts stunt, said it intends to call attention to the hundreds of millions of fake accounts still spreading disinformation on Facebook.

They were unable to put any inside the Capitol building but there was no need, as Mr Zuckerberg, during his two-day grilling by American lawmakers, was no more revealing or animated than any of those cardboard cutouts. His response to senators was cynical and pre-progammed, akin to holding a phoneline and declaring your call is important to us while ignoring the caller. He knew in advance that each senator had less than five minutes speaking time, so all he had to do was shadow-box with apologies and count time to the bell.

His treatment of the House of Representatives was even more contemptuous, as he set the tone in advance of appearing there with a long, rambling prepared statement.

All these shenanegans in Washington may seem far removed from everyday life in Ireland. Yet the reality is that Facebook is as ubiquitous here as it is in the US.

The nature and scale of the serious data breaches are such that it is not exaggeration to say they pose a threat to democracy, not just in America but in other countries as well. As it stands, Facebook is operating with impunity while making billions of dollars in profit. It needs to be regulated but the likelihood of that happening Stateside is remote, given the tame response by members of the US Congress.

The only real prospect lies in the EU  most specifically in the form of new General Data Protection Regulation due to come into force next month.

When GDPR was first proposed, US commentators dismissed it as a piece of jealous protectionism by Europe. Now The New York Times is calling for similar rules in its editorial pages.

GDPR covers not only individuals based in the EU, but also data that is processed there. And, since Facebooks global data processing unit is in Ireland, that means any of its users outside the US and Canada are subject to its terms. Facebook users from Australia to Zimbabwe will get new rights.

From May 25, Mr Zuckerberg will have to take note of EU legislators even if he can blithely dismiss those in Washington.Leo Varadkar has begun a roadshow with cabinet colleagues in Galway and Limerick to bring the message of Project Ireland 2040 to the regions.

This is a hugely ambitious 116bn plan to prepare for a future society which will have an extra one million residents, and 660,000 more people at work.

According to Government spin, it will link planning and investment for the first time and avoid the mistakes of the past. It is not the mistakes of the past we need to worry about but the mistakes of the future.

The plan is one that seeks to balance rural and urban investment. It is big on promises but short on detail. While the construction industry has given it a broad welcome, it has also noted that the plan fails to recognise skill shortages in the sector.

That is a real problem that must be resolved. At present, construction is around seven per cent of GNP. It should be double that in a growing economy.

The logistics involved are also challenging. It will require that central government, local authorities, state agencies and regional development concerns work together in a constructive and coherent way.

Thats a big ask.

The Taoiseach has outlined a vision of the future. It is up to him and his administration to make that vision a reality.In marked contrast, with the house and grounds now for sale, it is viewing by private appointment, select parties only, wholl have millions of euros at the ready, and development in mind.

Two years after a spectacular contents auction, which saw 7,000 people visit the long-mothballed period Lotabeg House on the edge of Cork City, poring over the finery amassed from previous centuries travel, from China, India and lost empires, its time for this hidden home to find a buyer.Professor Carl Anders Safstrom from Maynooth University Social Science Institute (MUSSI) said attempts to cater higher education in Ireland towards industrys labour needs have often come at the expense of the humanities, because precedence is given to STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects.

While science and technology are important, this puts Irelands culture of literature and arts at risk  the same literary tradition that has played such an important role in the formation of Irish society, he said.

As professor of educational research at MUSSI, his work is examining the role of education in justice, equality and democracy issues.

It should be noted too that the need for well-informed, critical, and free-thinking citizens is as great now as it has ever been in maintaining European democracy. In an unstable world, we need thoughtful scholars as much as we need productive workers, said Prof Safstrom.

The professor has joined the Co Kildare college from the culture and education school at Sodertorn University in Stockholm Sweden.

In the first of Maynooth Universitys inaugural professorial lecture serious 2018 this evening, he will discuss the role of education in democracy and warn against only treating higher education as a way to build up a nations workforce.

University is a place and space that is best understood as being traditionally free from the obstacles of ordinary life, and has another function beyond the production of work and things, he said.

It is a place where the free time to think and question society and ourselves is possible in a world that often seems to be losing the space to do so, said Prof Safstrom.

Last year, he was on a panel at the European Educational Research Association that discussed the changing demands on universities arising from the Bologna process in which European countries have set standards around third-level qualifications and institutions.

I think that if universities put into practice all those micro-managing systems put forward by the Bologna Process, they would be at high risk of losing that which makes them unique and important to democratic life, he said.

A similar warning around the dangers of treating education as simply a means of turning out young people to fill jobs was made last week when Professor Anne OGara, president of Marino Institute of Education, said that those who do not really know that teachers do may think of education as just being about delivering knowledge and developing skills in pupils to serve the economy and make them employable.Sand is being blown off Youghals Front Strand and fears have been raised that unless there is investment to restore the beachs groynes  sturdy timber barriers built out into the sea to check erosion  it will have a serious, negative impact on the towns tourism.

Cllr Mary Linehan-Foley said that every few weeks sand was being blown away from the beach, some of it ending up in the town centre.

She said she had been recently approached by a number of people who were extremely concerned that the beach will disappear if something isnt done to rectify it.

She added that the beach has dropped in some places so noticeably that steps down to it near the lighthouse now dont reach sand level.

Cllr Linehan-Foley told a meeting of the East Cork municipal district council that the issue was so serious she wants the councils Coastal Management Unit to immediately address it.

Dave Clarke, the councils senior engineer in the region, said the groynes were largely gone or completely gone.

Council officials said that 20 years ago a proposal had been made to put five new rock groynes along the beach, which never happened.

Its coastal erosion/coastal protection matter. Its something for them to look at, Mr Clarke said, and he acknowledged sand levels had fallen in places.

Municipal district officer Joe McCarthy said the coastal unit should also be asked to review a report that was undertaken on the beach by Malachy Walsh and Partners in 2008.

We need experts to look at this as soon as possible. In Holland they use boulders.

I know its going to cost massive money to fix, but we cant afford to lose our beach, Cllr Linehan-Foley said.

Cllr Susan McCarthy, who is chairwoman of the municipal district, said that the council should develop a beach plan for all of Youghals three beaches  at Front Strand, Claycastle and Redbarn.

She said she had also got a call from somebody concerned about sand blowing away.

She said that a UCC hydrology report done a number of years ago in the harbour for the marina should also be revisited.

Cllr McCarthy said an overall plan should be developed for enhancing beaches and their facilities.

Meanwhile, officials said they would be extending the towns beachside eco boardwalk and putting in new public toilets.

They said the new toilets were almost complete at Redbarn and a new public convenience was being built at Front Strand. A lifeguard station will be built overhead.

They are also looking at upgrading the lifeguard station at Claycastle and confirmed that the public conveniences will be operational at Front Strand for the summer season.An Oireachtas committee tasked with looking at the future of third-level education is still waiting for Department of Education costings on the Cassells Report a year after first requesting them.

The Government has now been accused of creating yet another crisis as it continues to ignore the struggling third-level education sector.

The Cassells Report, published in 2016, put forward three funding options for third level including a student loan system; however, the Government has yet to act.

It is more than 18 months since Mr Bruton asked the all-party Oireachtas education committee to agree a consensus approach on the recommendations.

However, they have now been stalled in their work as they await costings of the options from the Department of Education.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin hit out at Mr Bruton for kicking the can down the road for too long and said education will now become the next crisis as the sector faces an estimated 600m shortfall annually by 2020.

Mr Martin said: The Government has had a tendency to wait until a problem becomes a crisis, we saw that in homelessness in 2013.

The same has applied to health and recently on an issue like the fodder crisis they were warned before Christmas that there would be a fodder crisis and it was only last week when the Government responded.

This is going to happen with education as well.

The chair of the education committee, Fiona OLoughlin, said she first wrote to the department around 12 months ago and contacted them again in January seeking the economic evaluation.

We have been waiting for over a year now, she said.

Mr Bruton responded to the committee on March 29, two days after the Irish Examiner queried the matter.

However, the minister was unable to say when the economic review, which is now holding up the work of the committee, will be finished.

The letter stated that the review would look at a number of things including how extra funding which has been called for can positively impact learners and how skills gaps can best be addressed.

Mr Bruton wrote: This constitutes a significant body of additional work and it is not possible at this stage to give a timetable for its completion.

Ms OLoughlin said: This is the final piece in the jigsaw, we need this to go ahead, so we do need even some indicative timeline. We cannot produce a report or recommendations without this.

Last night, there was further confusion when the department claimed they first received a request in January of this year.In letters issued to past and current employees of INM affected by the alleged breach, the company said the context in which the risk of unauthorised disclosure occurred dated back to 2014 when a number of INMs back-up tapes  containing backup copies of electronic data, such as emails to and from INM email addresses and digital files, stored on INMs servers as at 2014  were provided to a third-party service provider on the instruction of the then-Chairman of INM.

Leslie Buckley, INMs former chairman, has already said he will be robustly defending similar allegations reportedly made by the Director of Corporate Enforcement Ian Drennan in a High Court affidavit. It was reported yesterday Mr Buckley was not commenting on the INM letter.The Cork South West Minister of State for Mental Health and Older People gave the comments to HotPress, but the Taoiseachs spokesman branded Mr Dalys comments as inappropriate.

It was not... an appropriate thing to say, for sure, he said.

Minister Daly was certainly not speaking on behalf of Government. The policies of Sinn Fein are far too different to Fine Gael. Minister Daly is a very capable minister but he certainly wasnt in a position to comment, said the Government press secretary.

When pressed, the spokesman said such a coalition is not on the agenda.

The Government will not go in with Sinn Fein under any circumstances. Its not a consideration. Its not a desire, its not a circumstance being considered.

Mr Daly believes should both parties secure enough votes to form a government, then the electorates desire must be listened to by politicians.

Formally, Mr Varadkar has ruled out a link with Sinn Fein due to ideological reasons.

But there has been a sense that a thawing in relations between the two parties is under way.

Mr Dalys comments go further than any senior Fine Gael ministers to date.

I have no ideological objection to Sinn Fein being part of a government, he said.

I just think, on a policy platform, it would be very difficult to agree a programme for government between Fine Gael and Sinn Fein.

But, look, politics is the art of doing  and who knows?

Mr Daly said: I dont have an ideological objection. We live in a democracy.

The will of the people has to be respected and Sinn Feins mandate is as legitimate as any other party, as far as Im concerned.

Sinn Feins Pearse Doherty, meanwhile, did not rule out the prospect of joining forces with Fine Gael when asked about Mr Dalys comments yesterday.

The partys finance spokesperson said while the decision was up to voters, Sinn Fein was open to speaking with all parties if they can show they are willing to push social reforms.

In terms of future coalitions, look its up to the electorate; when the election is called they will decide who they want to support.

We believe we have a party which has the policies and the leaders to win the hearts and minds of people; we want to lead the next government, thats our ambition. Its a big ambition.

In February, Mr Daly was overruled by Mr Varadkar after he advised the elderly to keep their heating on 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the cold weather.

Mr Varadkar told the Dail that Mr Dalys comments were not the advice of Government.Health Minister Simon Harris was given sign-off to extend the plan, which is backed by the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation and the HSE, to hospitals nationwide at the latest cabinet meeting yesterday.

In recent months, a number of wards at Beaumont Hospital, St Columcilles Hospital in Loughlinstown, and Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda have been involved in a new pilot staffing project examining how nurses are deployed.

The project, overseen by the Department of Health and external researchers, specifically examined the skill-mix in hospital wards, the ratio of nurses to patients, the use of agency workers who are not used to the ward, and the activities of non-nursing staff.

The projects findings are not due to be published until Monday, at which point they will be discussed in further detail with other hospitals nationwide.

However, due to the fact the pilot project shows changes to how and when nurses are deployed in wards can reduce deaths, improve patient outcomes and save the State millions of euro as less agency workers will be needed, cabinet yesterday agreed in principle to extend the plan nationwide in the coming months.

What it has found is that there is a fairly uneven distribution of nurses in hospitals, some wards required more nurses or a different mix of skills, while it also found there needs to be a shifting of reliance on agency staff.

The next stage is to develop a national implementation development plan across hospitals as part of the Slaintecare implementation plan, a government spokesperson said last night.

Meanwhile, the Department of Health is separately due to publish a new report on its website later today explaining how the 55m set aside to cope with surging hospital inpatient waiting lists will be spent.

The Irish Examiner understands the new report  which is supported by both the HSE and the National Treatment Purchase Fund  will make it far clearer how many patients can be treated for high volume issues such as cataracts, knee and hip injuries.

This will happen through a new rule that any money provided to the NTPF for waiting lists will lead to the NTPF responding by saying how many patients exactly can be treated for the amount of money available.

The approach is different to the current system which has regularly been criticised amid claims money is handed over to the HSE before disappearing into a financial black hole.

Separately, Mr Harris yesterday brought a new bill to cabinet which will give effect to plans previously announced in December for 11m to be ring-fenced to pay for free GP cards to be given to carers.

The move is expected to benefit tens of thousands of people across the country who save the State millions of euro every year by looking after their direct family, relatives and friends at home.

Yesterdays cabinet meeting also saw Agriculture Minister Michael Creed update ministers on the fodder crisis affecting rural Ireland, saying he has now increased the support package from 2m to 2.8m.

Rural and Community Development Minister Michael Ring also put forward plans to increase access to libraries around the country as part of a new national strategy which could see late book return fines scrapped to encourage library access.

A number of officials have also been appointed to the project management board of the divisive Project Ireland 2040 initiative.

However, while not naming the officials, a government spokesperson said no members of the Strategic Communications Unit are involved.Inspector Brian ODonovan said the pilot, who had been flying for 14 years, had never before put such a contingency plan in place. However, he went on to land the plane in Cork where the man and woman were met by security personnel.

Judge Tim Lucey said: Other people on the plane are more vulnerable than the staff or pilot. The passengers are very vulnerable. It is very frightening. Everyone is trapped 25,000 or 30,000ft in the air. It ruins peoples holidays to have to deal with that kind of stuff.

This is a zero tolerance situation as far as this court is concerned.

Michael Murphy Jr, aged 36, from 36 Riverview Estate, Tower, Blarney, Co Cork, was sentenced to three months in jail and fined 750. The woman with him, Stacey OMahony, aged 30, of 1 Innishmore Square, Ballincollig, Co Cork, was fined a total of 500 for the same offences.

Stacey OMahony

Both pleaded guilty to being intoxicated to such an extent that they were a danger to themselves or others on board the flight and engaging in threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour with intent to cause a breach of the peace contrary to the Air Navigation and Transport Act.

Insp ODonovan said the two friends were on board the FR1401 flight from Tenerife to Cork on May 1, 2017.

They were in possession of two paninis which they wanted to have heated up. They were drinking their own vodka. The paninis were not purchased on the flight. They asked staff to heat them. When they refused they became aggressive and abusive to staff on the flight.

The captain was made aware of what was happening. This was a major disturbance. The flight captain had over 14 years experience. For the first time he put a contingency plan in place to divert to Portugal because of the disturbance being caused by Mr Murphy and Ms OMahony.

The captain told staff to disengage with Mr Murphy and Ms OMahony. Mr Murphy was aggressive throughout. They avoided dealing with him. Security arrived when the flight landed. He continued to be aggressive.

Ms OMahony was the lesser evil in this matter and she tried to get Mr Murphy to calm down, Insp ODonovan said.

She had previous public order convictions. He had more serious convictions including assault causing harm and received a six-year sentence in the past.

Paula McCarthy, defending OMahony, said the two friends had an argument when drinking vodka and the aggression ended up being transferred onto the Ryanair staff.

Michael Quinlan, solicitor for Murphy, agreed that the vodka was probably behind the outburst of aggression. He said Murphy was presently addressing his alcohol problem and was also dealing with other health issues. Judge Lucey said Murphys addiction problems were no consolation to other passengers on the flight.

Other charges initially brought against the two accused were withdrawn by the prosecution when they each pleaded guilty to the two charges related to drunkenness and threatening behaviour on board the flight.

The judge set 500 bail for an appeal of the jail sentence.

Judge Lucey said: As well as being frightening for people close to the disturbance it can be very frightening for people further away on the plane who dont know how serious it is.He made the claim at the launch of his partys policy paper on corporation tax in response to revelations this year that major banks will pay no corporation tax for the next 20 years.

If you were to see the type of revenue that was brought in last year in terms of the profits of the banks [and] occurring in the banks in the next number of years, you would be bringing in over 200m per annum as a result of these measures.Food Wa Restaurant Brings Food From the Mountains to the Big City

Some of the different kinds of Wa food served at Root Kitchen. / Htet Wai / The Irrawaddy

There are a lot of different ethnic restaurants in Yangon, making it easy to find Shan, Mon, Rakhine and Chin foods. I recently made a rarer discovery, a restaurant selling Wa food. Called Root Kitchen, it has been introducing Yangon residents to the food from upper Myanmar for two years from its location on Bo Myat Tun Road.

Root Kitchen serves traditional Wa food from the northern part of Shan State. Most of the ingredients as well as the tealeaves and traditional Wa liquor come directly from the Wa region, a two-day journey from Yangon.

Root Kitchen is the mission of three ethnic Wa including two sisters, Ipkaw Pang and Phyone Poung Yon.

I was working in Singapore and when I arrived back in Yangon I didnt see anything that was representative of Wa culture. So, I thought I should do something for our ethnic group and find a way to educate other people about us. And, I decided to use food, said Ipkaw Pang of her modern little restaurant.

She notes that there is another Wa restaurant in Yangon but adds the food we serve is more authentic.

Root Kitchen opened its doors in the lower part of Bo Myat Tun Road in 2016. The restaurants signboard is a bit small, so you need to look for it carefully.

When I visited, it was already after lunchtime at around 3pm but there were still a few tables of guests. A big timber and driftwood table stood just inside the entrance. Cushion covers feature Wa traditional textile designs. The walls are decorated with Wa musical instruments, traditional fabric weavings in bamboo frames and a bulls head.

As you see, we decorated the shop with bits of Wa culture but not too much. We just added a twist to the modern decorations to keep it comfortable, Phyone Poung Yon said.

With the subdued lighting and soft music playing in the background, the restaurant has a warm vibe.

A little book is placed on every table that includes an introduction about the Wa people, their traditional dishes and the ingredients used as well as details on where they come from. It also lists the food available at the restaurant.

A traditional Wa dish is Moik, which comes in three kinds: dry, wet and soupy. Root Kitchen offers only the wet style.

We think people will easily accept the wet type because its not too dry and not too wet. So, it will be OK for people tasting it for the first time, Ipkaw Pang said.

Moik is like a soup or stew cooked with a strain of brown rice that comes from the sisters hometown in Wa, and which, they said, is essential for cooking Moik properly.

The Wa dishes offered on the menu are mainly boiled, grilled, or come in the form of a salad and many are spicy. Most of the dishes also claim to provide health benefits.

Usually, Wa people live in mountainous areas. So, when they go into the jungle to hunt, they also pick herbs. Then, they put everything together in the meal and cook it with brown rice, Phyone Poung Yon explained.

I opted for their popular Pumpkin Moik (3000 kyats), and could taste the freshness of the pumpkin and pumpkin leaves. It was not very wet, nor very dry, while the brown rice was soft and overall it was very tasty.

I tried another hot item, Spicy Chicken and Glass Noodles, which came in a large portion that was too much for two people. It was a spicy soup and a bit oily but the taste leaves you craving more.

The item my companion and I liked the most was Smoked Beef Salad (8000 kyat), which we fully recommend trying. First, they put the beef out in the sun to dry, and then smoke it. Then, they stretch the smoked beef into small strips. Finally, they make mix it in a salad with chili.

Among the grilled items, I tried Lamb Chop (11,000 kyat), which included three pieces on three bones. The meat was so soft and had a strong aroma of charcoal because of the way it was grilled. That makes the meal special, and I recommend that one too.

There is a great variety to choose from on the menu and staff is helpful and friendly. If you want to know about of a particular items ingredients, just ask and they are happy to explain.

Root Kitchen offers Wa food that is quite different from the usual Myanmar fare you can get in Yangon. Most of the dishes are spicy but the particularly hot ones are marked with a small chili icon on the menu. You can also tell the waiter whether you want it to be more spicy or less.

The cocktail menu offers Root Specials mixed with Wa liquor such as Root-O-Tea, Wa Tang Clan, Wajito and so on. They also have fresh juices and several varieties of coffee. (The drink prices range from 2000-7,000 kyat).

The chef at Root Kitchen is not Wa, but he has been trained by the owners and can cook Wa foods very well, Ipkaw Pang said.

Therell be a new chef joining us in the coming month. So, therell be a new menu that will come with him, she added.

So, if you are a foodaholic and want to try some new ethnic foods, Root Kitchen is a worthy place to chill. I recommended it for all visitors.Burma Concerns Raised Over Public Display of Sacred Buddhist Relic

Aye Ne Win, a grandson of former dictator Ne Win, pays homage to the sacred hair relic at Botahtaung Pagoda early this week while a monk points to the relic. / Aye Ne Win / Facebook

YANGON  An unprecedented public display and procession of a sacred relic of the Buddha by the Yangon Regional Government has prompted fears that the more-than-2,500-year-old strand of hair could be damaged.

Previously enshrined in the relic chamber of Yangons Botahtaung Pagoda, the casket was taken out from the chamber on April 1 under the supervision of Yangon Chief Minister U Phyo Min Thein, some senior Buddhist monks and pagoda trustees.

U Sein Maw, the director of Yangon Regions Ministry of Religious Affairs, told The Irrawaddy last week that the relic was temporarily taken out to allow repairs to be done in the chamber.

The interior of the chamber needs renovation. Water leaks from its ceiling, he said.

According to the history of the pagoda, the religious structure was originally built by ethnic Mon some 2,500 years ago. Legend has it that two trader brothers, Tapussa and Bhalika, encountered the recently enlightened Guattama Buddha and made offerings.

In return, the Buddha gave the brothers eight strands of his hair, which they presented to the then King of Yangon (Okkalapa). The king ordered the pagoda be built to enshrine some of the hairs while other strands were enshrined at the Shwedagon Pagoda. Due to the relics, both pagodas have become centers for pilgrimages by Buddhist devotees.

The sacred hair relic is now on open view to the public at a nearby prayer hall. At the time of The Irrawaddys visit to the pagoda trustee boards office last week, some women were donating their jewelry and gold bracelets to the trustees.

While the display is a rare chance for Buddhists to see the sacred relic, conservationists are concerned that something bad might happen to this piece of national heritage during the display and procession. The relic is scheduled to be brought to another prayer hall at the Shwedagon Pagoda on Apr. 19, and will be kept there for public display until Apr. 24.

Should a piece of national heritage like the sacred hair relic be out for a long time due to its fragility? What if it is accidentally damaged during the display and procession? asked Daw Moe Moe Lwin, the director of the Yangon Heritage Trust.

I wonder if precautions have been taken, she said.

She made a comparison with Sri Lankas Temple of the Sacred Tooth in Kandy where that countrys most important Buddhist relic a tooth of the Buddhais enshrined in a heavily guarded room and only open to devotees and tourists during periods of offering or prayer.

Even when you are in the room, you dont actually see the tooth. Its kept in a gold casket which contains a series of six caskets of diminishing size, she explained.

To address the concerns, U Sein Maw said they had a well thought-out plan to protect the relic.

We have been discussing the best way to carefully put the relic casket in the car and transport it from Botahtaung to Shwedagon Pagoda, said the religious official.

He added that the renovation of the relic chamber was part of a thorough restoration plan for the pagoda that includes recasting all the gold on the pagoda structure and replacing it on the pagodas old umbrella, vane and diamond bud.

U Sein Maw revealed that they have estimated between 50 to 60 kilograms of gold would be needed to coat the umbrella crown, diamond bud and vane.

On April 1, the chief minister and his wife, Yangon Mayor U Maung Maung Soe, some senior monks, some businessmen from the Zaykabar conglomerate and the Shwe Than Lwin group joined a ceremony to remove the relic and circulate the pagoda three times while holding it.

During World War II, the pagoda was completely destroyed by the British Royal Air Force when they bombed jetties along the Hlaing River. The relic casket was found among the rubble as workers cleared the remains of the structure. The pagoda was reconstructed in the early independence era of Myanmar.Burma Myanmar Minister Assures Rohingya in Bangladesh Repatriation is a Priority

Kutupalong Refugee Camp, Bangladesh / Reuters

KUTUPALONG REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh  A Myanmar minister told Rohingya Muslim refugees in Bangladesh on Wednesday their repatriation was a priority during the first visit by a top Myanmar official to victims of what the United Nations says was ethnic cleansing by the Myanmar army.

Social Welfare Minister U Win Myat Aye, who is leading rehabilitation efforts in Myanmars western Rakhine State, met about 50 Rohingya gathered in a community center run by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in the Kutupalong refugee camp in southeast Bangladesh.

Acknowledging their mistrust and fear of Myanmar, U Win Myat Aye told the Rohingya to set aside the past and prepare to go back to your own residences, promising new villages would be built with hospitals and schools.

The most important thing is to start the repatriation process as soon as possible. We can overcome all of the difficulties, he said as he left the meeting.

A Bangladesh foreign ministry official said his country wanted to show the visiting minister the challenges it was facing in hosting the refugees. U Win Myat Ayat is expected to meet Bangladeshs foreign minister in Dhaka on Thursday.

Bangladesh wants the refugees to go home as quickly as possible and officials said this week they hoped the ministers visit would speed up repatriation.

But some refugees have said they are worried about going back to Buddhist-majority Myanmar, fearing persecution.

When asked about whether Rohingya could be granted Myanmar citizenship, which they had been long denied, the minister replied: We are trying to have that.

For now, Myanmar is offering Rohingya national verification cards (NVCs), which some refugees regard as inadequate.

The meeting became heated only when U Win Myat Aye tried to persuade the refugees to accept the NVCs, telling them they would be given an opportunity to apply for nationality later.

Before, applying for the citizenship card took very long and [you] dont get it in the end. Now, it wont take long and you might get it. You might get it according to the law.

Dozens crowded around the minister, showing him their parents and grandparents identity documents and raising their voices to be heard.

Some remained unconvinced by the ministers words and later voiced their doubts about the Myanmar governments sincerity.

At first I was glad to hear the minister was coming here, but after hearing his speech I am very upset, said Mohammed Showife, 29, from Buthidaung.

The Myanmar government does not wish to solve the problem, Showife told Reuters.

Myanmar has rejected accusations of ethnic cleansing in Rakhine, saying its security forces launched a legitimate counter-insurgency operation on Aug. 25 in response to Rohingya militant attacks.

According to UN officials, nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since then. Refugees have reported killings, burnings, looting and rape by members of the Myanmar security forces and Buddhist vigilantes.

Myanmar has dismissed most such accounts, but the army said on Tuesday that seven soldiers had been jailed for 10 years with hard labor for participating in a massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslim men in a village in September.

The two countries reached a deal in November to begin repatriation within two months, but it has not begun, with Rohingya, who face restrictions on their movements in Myanmar, still arriving in Bangladesh.

Huts of bamboo and plastic sheets will provide meager shelter for refugees when the monsoon rains and storms hit Coxs Bazar, the low-lying coastal strip bordering Myanmar where the camps are located, in June.

The minister asked the refugees whether it was better for them to go to Myanmar or somewhere else. They responded in unison: We want to go to Myanmar.Burma SSPP, Peace Commission to Hold Two-Party Talks

SSPP/ Shan State Army-North soldiers are seen in Namkham Township, Shan State in 2013. / Kyaw Kha / The Irrawaddy

CHIANG MAI, Thailand  The Shan State Progressive Party and the governments Peace Commission will meet at the partys Wan Hai headquarters in northern Shan States Kehsi Township within the next three weeks, according to the commission.

According to sources close to the SSPP, the government approached the party through Sai Aik Pao, the chairman of the Shan Nationalities Development Party and the former Shan State minister for mining and forestry, late last month, proposing bilateral talks.

The two sides are currently negotiating a date for the meeting. As the Peace Commission is scheduled to meet the Karenni National Progressive Party on April 23-25, it is believed the government delegation could meet the Shan armed group after that.

The SSPP is a member of the seven-member Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee (FPNCC), a northeast-based armed alliance which has a policy of insisting on holding collective talks with the government. Despite the policy, however, two of its members  the Kachin Independence Army and the United Wa State Army  have met the government delegation separately on previous occasions at the behest of Chinese officials.

Peace Commission secretary U Khin Zaw Oo, a former lieutenant-general, told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday that the meeting is planned for either late April or early May at Wan Hai.

He confirmed that they had communicated about holding talks, as mentioned in the SSPPs statement issued on Wednesday evening, but declined to reveal what would be discussed.

On Wednesday, a fake statement was circulated online purporting to be from the SSPP and announcing that it had made plans to meet unilaterally with the PC because the KIA and UWSA had done so.

A few hours later, the SSPP issued an official statement reading: There was a fake statement which attempted to divide the FPNCC alliance and sabotage the Peace Commission and the SSPPs optimistic approach toward national reconciliation, the peace process, regional stability and development.

Sai Nyunt Lwin, the secretary of the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, shared the SSPPs view, telling The Irrawaddy on Thursday, It [the fake statement] is an attempt to weaken trust and cause quarrels among the FPNCC members, and to cause misunderstanding between the Shan armed group members.

Chit Min Tun contributed to this report.Burma Zuckerberg Urged to Take Genuine Steps to Stop Use of FB to Spread Hate in Myanmar

Silhouettes of mobile users are seen next to a screen projection of Facebooks logo on March 28. / Reuters

YANGONMyanmar digital rights advocates and civil society representatives on Thursday urged Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg to hire a sufficient quantity of Myanmar-language content reviewers who have a good understanding of the situation in the country, and to implement effective systems to curb hate speech and messages inciting violence.

The US-based social media giant has been accused of contributing to the spread of fake news and hate speech in the country via accounts opened by users who seek to inflame communal conflict.

Last week, a group of six Myanmar civil society organizations published an open letter to Zuckerberg, Facebooks chief executive officer, in which they criticized the inadequate response of the company in reviewing reports of hate speech on the social media platform.

The six groups are Phandeeyar, Myanmar ICT for Development (MIDO), Equality Myanmar, Burma Monitor, Center of Social Integrity, and Myanmar Human Rights Educator Network.

The open letter followed Zuckerbergs interview with US-based digital media outlet Vox, in which he said the companys systems had stopped a harmful message from being sent between users in Myanmar via Facebooks Messenger application. He said his company is paying a lot of attention to the detection of such messages. In response, the CSOs expressed surprise that he had raised that particular case as an example of the effectiveness of his systems, saying it exemplified the very opposite of effective moderation.

The case mentioned in the letter involved two different messages sent separately to Buddhist and Muslim communities in Myanmar in September last year, with the aim of inciting violence. The groups raised the case with Facebook but the messages circulated on social media for days.

At a press conference at the downtown Yangon office of Phandeeyar, the six CSOs and human rights activists issued a six-point demand to Facebook, calling on it to emphasize detection, ban individuals who spread hate speech on the platform, invest more in technology to monitor such speech, and to be more transparent in implementing systematic mechanisms, among other things.

Aung Myo Min, executive director of the Myanmar-based human rights advocacy group Equality Myanmar, said the intention of the open letter was not to control the use of Facebook in Myanmar or individual freedom of expression, but to prevent abuse of the platform to sow hatred among communities.

Facebook has become an essential part of our daily social life, Aung Myo Min said.

When there are increasing abuses of the platform, its more dangerous and harmful for a country like Myanmar, adding that fake news and hate speech can easily do harm and cause violence in a country that is so religiously and ethnically diverse.

It puts a real burden on the government too, he said.

Overreliance on Third Parties

Htaike Htaike, director at MIDO, said the open letter created an opportunity to highlight the challenging situation in Myanmar when it comes to using Facebook.

The case we stressed in the open letter was not the only incident involving Facebook that incited religious conflict. There were several similar cases in the past, she said.

If Facebook only relies on reports and information from groups like us, it will be impossible for the company to implement effective and sustainable mechanisms to tackle hate speech in the long run, she said.

In a personal apology letter to the Myanmar CSO groups on April 6, Zuckerberg said his company was building artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help Facebook identify abusive, hateful or false content even before it is flagged by community members.

The groups responded with another letter the following day stressing that the proposed improvements would not be sufficient to ensure Myanmar users receive the same standards of care as those in the U.S. or Europe.

When things go wrong in Myanmar, the consequences can be really serious  potentially disastrous. You have yourself publicly acknowledged the risk of the platform being abused [to do] real harm, the letter read.

Human Resources or AI?

According to initial reports by The Guardian and The New York Times published in mid-March, political marketing firm Cambridge Analytica gained access to the personal data of 50 million Facebook users harvested through a third-party app. The number of Facebook accounts affected by the massive data scandal was later revised to as many as 87 million.

During Zuckerbergs appearance at the U.S. Senate hearings on Tuesday and Wednesday over the scandal, he was asked by Vermont Senator Patrick J. Leahy about his companys alleged role in spreading hate speech against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. The senator also raised the issue of death threats against Myanmar journalist Aung Naing Soe that were spread on Facebook in November 2016.

Whats happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy, and we need to do more, Zuckerberg answered. When asked by Senator Heahy if he would dedicate resources to make sure hate speech is taken down within 24 hours, he replied he was working on this.

He said Facebook was hiring dozens more Myanmar-language content reviewers to look for hate speech, as well as working with civil society organizations to identify specific hate figures who should be banned from the social media site, and working with product teams to make specific changes for the countrys users.

However, Chan Myae Khine, a local tech enthusiast and owner of a digital marketing enterprise, said Facebook  as one of the biggest tech companies on Earth  needs proper AI tools rather than human resources, and to sit down with linguists, Burmese-language professors and local tech experts to create algorithms that could detect and block hate speech.

[Hiring more Myanmar language-speaking people] is certainly not the solution as humans can always be biased and it is not practical to monitor [over] 18 million users with a hundred people, she said.

For Thant Sin, Phandeeyars Tech for Peace manager, trying to implement AI in an automated detection system would face many difficulties in Myanmar as the country is still struggling to come up with a standard font, while Facebook content in Myanmar can be displayed in many different ethnic languages.

Hate speech and fake news are not only being spread in the Bamar language but also in other ethnic languages, he said, adding that newly developed AI solutions deployed with sufficient human resources would be beneficial and effective.

Low Digital Literacy and Fake News

Another challenge facing Myanmar is the general publics low level of digital literacy, he said.

Many people still treat Facebook as if it were the Internet, he said.

According to a survey of 3,000 people last year, 38% of the surveyed people get most, if not all, of their news from Facebook. Many trust fabricated and fictitious news on the platform without verifying the source. Given such a situation, many minority groups get targeted online.

Nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmars Rakhine state and crossed into Bangladesh since insurgent attacks sparked a security crackdown last August.

United Nations officials investigating the crisis said last month that Facebook had been a source of anti-Rohingya propaganda. Marzuki Darusman, chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, said social media sites had played a determining role in Myanmar in spreading misinformation and hate speech that led to the violence.

Even though the platform has had negative impacts and caused harmful consequences in the country, it has also played an important role in Myanmars democratic transition by supporting the electoral process and encouraging public engagement in politics, as well as empowering people to express their opinions and be heard as the country opened up to the world after years of isolation, Thant Sin said.

When asked by The Irrawaddy if Facebook is generally causing more harm than good in Myanmar, Chan Myae Khine disagreed, saying that underlying hatreds are a fundamental problem of the conflicts in the country.

Any kind of conflict in Myanmar, including religious and racial ones, are because of the hatred rooted in the society. If there was no Facebook, they would still be using any platform they could access to spread hatred, she said.

Having said that, Facebook has the power to spread things quickly and without verification.News Mon Party Holds Meeting to Justify Ceasefire Deal, Get Feedback

The NMSP holds a public meeting in Ye Township, Mon State, on Monday. / Mon News Agency / Facebook

CHIANG MAI, Thailand  The New Mon State Party (NMSP) wrapped up a three-day meeting on Wednesday to explain its reasons for signing the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) in February and to gather public feedback.

The NMSP and Lahu Democratic Union signed the agreement at the same time, joining the original eight ethnic armed groups that joined the NCA in 2015.

More than 250 people joined the NMSPs meeting this week in Ye Township, Mon State, including politicians, academics and civil society representatives.

Nai Ong MaNge, a member of the NMSPs executive committee, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that his party took recommendations from the participants and explained the NCA process, including how its political, social and military provisions would be carried out.

People have different perceptions of what the NCA is. Some think it is just a political agreement. Others think it is just a military agreement, he said. We explained the NCA implementation process to the stakeholders, about the political dialogue and joint ceasefire monitoring.

Last month the NMSP cancelled a public consultation for ethnic Mon in neighboring Karen State because the Myanmar army insisted that attendance had to be limited to 30 people. But Nai Ong MaNge said the NMSP can hold meetings of any size it wants in areas it controls in Mon State.

The public consultations should be able to convene where our Mon people reside so that they can hear all of our concerns. But it is hard for us to say something because we dont know exactly what deals they [the NMSP and government] made before signing the NCA, said Nai Ong Mon, a civil society representative who attended the meeting.

He told The Irrawaddy that participants shared their thoughts on peace building, federalism and other issues concerning land and the economy.

The NMSP said it would hold a second, similar meeting in another NMSP-controlled part of Mon State on April 26 and 27.

Nai Ong MaNge said the party would then hold a national-level political dialogue in Ye on May 5-7, in preparation for the government-led 21st Century Panglong peace conference scheduled for later that month.News Tatmadaw Launches Major Offensive Against KIA Headquarters, Bases

KIA personnel travel in a convoy near the groups headquarters in Laiza, Kachin State. / The Irrawaddy

The Myanmar military (or Tatmadaw) attacked the Kachin Independence Armys headquarters and other bases on Wednesday in a major new offensive including both ground and air strikes, according to local sources. The attacks follow the KIAs raid on a Tatmadaw base earlier this week.

KIA spokesperson Colonel Naw Bu told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday that the Tatmadaw was using artillery to shell areas surrounding the KIAs headquarters in Laiza.

They started shelling our Laiza headquarters at 2 pm [local time]. They also attacked some of our other bases. They used fighter jets to strike KIA Brigade 2 and KIA Battalion 11, Col Naw Bu said.

Brigade 2 and Battalion 11 are based in the Hukawng Valley, where the KIA recently announced the launch of a guerrilla-style military offensive, including the laying of landmines, against the Tatmadaw. Illegal mine workers in the area were given a deadline of April 10 to leave the area.

The Tatmadaws attacks killed one civilian banana plantation worker and wounded three others on Wednesday, according to the Northern Alliance.

Col Naw Bu confirmed that some civilians had been wounded.

The Northern Alliance is a bloc of armed ethnic groups including the KIA, TNLA, AA, and MNDAA. It issued a statement on its Facebook page saying that the civilian casualties occurred when a shell landed on the plantation at 4 pm local time.

The Alliance said the Myanmar military used both air and ground forces to attack the KIAs Brigade 2 and Battalion 11 until 4 pm, with artillery barrages continuing until 5 pm.

The Tatmadaw attacked at least five KIA locations in the Hukawng Valley, according to the Northern Alliance, which said the Myanmar military had effectively declared war on it by attacking one of its members.

The escalation of fighting in Kachin follows the KIAs April 6 raid on the Tatmadaws Battalion 86, which is under Regional Operations Command 2, based in Tanai Township.

Peace talks between the Myanmar Army and the KIA have been held several times in recent years. However, they stalled in February after the KIA issued a statement listing conditions for its peace talks with the Tatmadaw.

The Tatmadaw has ordered the KIA to withdraw at least three battalions, including Battalion 14, which was in the Tanai area, and Battalion 12 and Battalion 27 in the Mansi Township area. However, the KIA refused to withdraw, leading to sporadic clashes in these areas. It eventually withdrew from the Battalion 14 base.

More than 100,000 people remain displaced from their homes after a 17-year ceasefire between the central government and the KIA collapsed in 2011.Thursday, April 12th, 2018 (10:10 am) - Score 1,136

Mobile operator O2 UK and wireless infrastructure developer Arqiva have teamed up to improve 4G and future 5G mobile coverage and network capacity across London by installing up to 300 new small cells. The first sites will go live this summer 2018, with deployment continuing up to 2020.

The new agreement will harness some of Arqivas existing concession contracts with 14 of the London Boroughs, including the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, Richmond upon Thames, Wandsworth, Camden and Lambeth, to name a few. Related contracts enable the firm to install WiFi and Mobile boosting small cell kit onto street furniture and the sides or insides of buildings.

In the future such equipment could also be upgraded to help support new capacity and ultrafast multi-Gigabit capable mobile broadband speeds via the next generation of 5G technology.

Brendan OReilly, O2s CTO, said: National 5G infrastructure  when it arrives in a few years time  will not only have a crucial impact on our economy, it will change the way we live our lives. Our partnership with Arqiva reflects this belief and demonstrates our commitment to exploring opportunities to provide the increased capacity and denser coverage our customers deserve in the areas they need it most. Only by working together, with industry partners, regulators, and government policy makers, will we be able to continue delivering the best for our customers and to help the UK maintain the digital leadership we have all worked so hard to establish.

David Crawford, Arqivas MD of Telecoms & M2M, said: New types of mobile infrastructure are now required to meet the needs of the mobile network operators and their customers. As demand for data continues to increase, the requirement for network densification will grow and use of street furniture and small cells will play a critical role in delivering the mobile networks of the future. The agreement between O2 and Arqiva represents the start of this journey and we look forward to working together to deliver an enhanced experience for O2 customers.

The first commercial deployments of 5G arent expected to begin until 2020.Thursday, April 12th, 2018 (11:51 am) - Score 1,914

Cable operator Virgin Media has announced that their 350Mbps ultrafast broadband and TV network is being extended to cover 11,500 premises in the Rothwell part of Leeds via their 3bn investment under Project Lightning, which should complete by the end of 2019.

At this point weve had to ask the operator (currently awaiting a reply) whether or not this is another piecemeal re-announcement of some sort, not least because theyve already revealed that 80,000 premises in Leeds (West Yorkshire, England) would benefit from their deployment; albeit all the way back in July 2015 (here).

Back then the operator hinted that its work would cost about 40m and the first to benefit were approximately 11,000 premises in the mostly residential suburb of Middleton, which we know is a deployment that did take place and one that probably cost a bit more than they forecast (judging by some of the delays and complications that weve seen over the past 2-3 years).

Hugh Woolford, Regional Director at Virgin Media, said: Time-strapped families and small businesses across Rothwell will soon be benefiting from our brilliant broadband service. Giving them greater speeds will enable them to do the things they need to do and love doing more quickly and more easily.

Overall the network extension aims to reach an additional 4 million premises across the UK by around the end of 2019 or 2020, which should extend their overall coverage to roughly 60%+ of the country (a total of 17 million premises); but so far theyre a bit behind schedule and have only completed c.1 million premises. Wed very much welcome a full rollout plan for the UK, as opposed to being fed small bite sized chunks of info.The Australian Greens have called on the Coalition Government to update privacy protections to stay in line with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation that is scheduled to take effect on 25 May.

In a statement, the part's digital rights spokesperson Senator Jordon Steele-John said the government should look to the GDPR as a model for privacy protection, especially in the wake of the ongoing revelations regarding Facebook's data collection.

Senator Steele-John has in the recent past spoken out condemning Cambridge Analytica, which has been at the centre of the Facebook scandal, and seeking the removal of absolute exemptions in the privacy act for politicians and political parties. The privacy exemptions are backed by both the government and the opposition.

In Thursday's statement, the Greens Senator said looking at best practice for protecting Australians' online privacy, particularly from companies that might employ surveillance capitalism, was extremely relevant at the moment.

The context for all of this, and what is really concerning to me, is that when you have companies offering an online service for free, what often ends up happening is that the individual becomes the product," he said. "This is exactly what has happened with Facebook and is exactly why, in the wake of this scandal, we need to seriously rethink how we approach privacy in the digital space.

Under the GDPR, consent must be explicit for data collected and for the purposes for which data is used, and individuals will have the right of access to their personal data and information about how this personal data is being processed.

Currently, in Australia there is no such regulation and there is no concept of consent in relation to the collection of data online; this is extremely problematic."

Senator Steele-John said there was an urgent need to move towards a consent-based system, "which we dont have, and one that includes the right to be forgotten  that is the right for all of your data to be removed, permanently, once you discontinue using that online service provider".

While the Privacy Act here in Australia does provide individuals with some rights in relation to the collection of personal information and greater transparency over the way that information is handled, these rights are all after the fact.

It is extremely concerning that Labor and the Coalition are not supportive of increasing Australians' rights to privacy in the online world, particularly in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The US Congress is calling for the protections Facebook is establishing for Europeans to be extended to Americans, and we should be doing the same for Australians. The Greens will continue to push the federal government to legislate for better data protection regulations.Ride-sharing service Ola has launched in Melbourne and has flagged future launches in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, Canberra, Adelaide, Darwin and Hobart.

The Melbourne launch of the ride-sharing platform follows launches in Perth and Sydney earlier this year.

To mark the Melbourne launch, Ola, dubbed one of the worlds largest ride-sharing platforms, is offering customers free rides from today, with the app downloaded either from Google Play, or iOS App Store.

According to Ola, it continues to receive a positive response from driver-partners with more than 15,000 registrations across Australia. It offers driver-partners a 7.5% introductory commission rate and daily payments.

We've been humbled by the response from customers and driver-partners alike in Perth and Sydney, and are incredibly excited about launching Ola in Melbourne, said Chandra Nath, vice-president and head of International, Ola.

"We hope customers and driver-partners continue to share their feedback to help us improve our service, as we continue on our journey to provide Australia with the best rideshare experience possible.

Ola says it is developing a number of new initiatives for its customers and driver-partners, including updates to the Ola app, and building a local support team that will help build a better ride-share experience.Posted Thursday, April 12, 2018 11:45 am

Michigan State Universitys Jewish Studies Program is hosting its 13th annual Israeli Film Festival, which features four award-winning films and a keynote discussion led by Nachumi Yaffe from Princeton University.

Yael Aronoff, director of the Jewish Studies Program, says that engaging the Jewish community and people who are interested in its history will crack open an important discussion.

Many community members who arent Jewish are still interested, because these are fantastic films and its something they cant see in a regular movie theater, said Aronoff.

The Jewish Studies Programs goal on campus is to educate and bring together a community of people to study the culture and history of Jewish people. Its annual film festivals purpose is to educate its audience about Israels sociopolitical climate.

Each year, the film festival committee previews contemporary Jewish films or documentaries and votes the four best to show. This years selection includes, A Quiet Heart, An Israeli Love Story, The Womens Balcony and Ben Gurion, Epilogue.

Aronoff believes that introducing people to another culture through means outside of a passe Hollywood film is a great way to provide context for outsiders. Her concern is that the majority of media has set a negative perception of Jewish people and their experiences.

Art has a different impact on people, said MSU assistant professor of Hebrew Yore Kedem. The media is used as a sole source for understanding Israel life and that is a shallow place. A film creates a deeper understanding and can help people see that things arent black and white in Israel, but in many shades of color.

In a space together with non-Jewish members, its a great way to examine universal issues together through different cultural aspects, said Aronoff.

Offering a greater understanding of Jewish culture and its challenges is a big portion of whats important to the film festival. Kedem believes film festivals show different aspects of complex places.

All emotional connections arent positive. Some connections cause people to be more woke than before and that is my goal when I lead discussion  to give insight, said Kedem.

13th Annual Israeli Film Festival

April 15 1-8:45 p.m. Wells Hall B-122 619 Red Cedar Rd., East Lansing 48824

April 16 7:30-9:15 p.m. Wells Hall B-117Summerville, SC (29483)

Today

A mix of clouds and sun. High 88F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable.Reddit Email 169 Shares

By Amelia Smith @amyinthedesert | (Middle East Monitor) |  

In the aftermath of the chemical weapons assault that suffocated to death over 80 men, women and children in the town of Douma, eastern Ghouta, this weekend British Prime Minister Theresa May issued a stern warning to the highest levels of the Syrian government:

The regime and its backers, including Russia, must be held to account, she said. This was an utterly  barbaric attack.

Former foreign minister William Hague is recommending missile strikes against the Assad regime whilst Tony Blair has waded in on the debate to persuade May that she does not need Parliaments approval for air strikes.

US envoy to the UN, Nikki Haley, said that Russia has the blood of Syrian children on its hands whilst US President Donald Trump has promised that there will be a big price to pay.

The chemical attack was indeed barbaric, but the complete lack of integrity these politicians have displayed in dealing with other crises in the Middle East has led to questions over the sincerity of these statements and whether they really have the best interests of the Syrian people at heart.

Lets start with Donald Trump. The US president has called for a ban on Muslim immigration and likened Syrian refugees to snakes that will kill the US with vicious and poisonous bites. Early last year Al-Assad came out in support of this ban arguing that it targeted terrorists and not the Syrian people.

Nikki Haley has blocked a UN Security Council statement urging restraint and an end to violence along the Gaza-Israel border twice, even though 32 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the Great March of Return protests began, including one journalist who was wearing a vest clearly marked PRESS.

Addressing a demonstration outside Downing Street, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn condemned Western silence around Israels actions against the Gaza protesters, called on the British government to get behind the UN inquiry, and to review the sale of arms. Last year alone the UK licensed $220 million worth of arms to Israel, which in part explains its silence on Gaza.

Whilst the US and the UK are appalled by this weekends attack on Syria, they have no qualms about selling billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Saudi Arabia, which is leading a coalition of countries currently bombarding Yemeni civilians, schools and hospitals. In fact on 9 April Saudi-led coalition air strikes killed 15 people in Yemen, but its unlikely you even heard about it.

Britain is now the second biggest arms dealer in the world and two thirds of this trade goes to the Middle East. Last year Britain sold over $5 billion worth of arms to Saudi and it is well aware that this military equipment might have been used to slaughter civilians because other members of parliament and human rights organisations have presented the evidence directly to them.

Whilst the British government is seeking an independent fact-finding mission and investigation into whether Al-Assad is responsible for the chemical weapons attack it has blocked a UN inquiry into claims of war crimes and civilian deaths in Yemen.

Last year the UK also sold $24 million worth of arms to Egypt, despite the fact that military strongman Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has imprisoned 60,000 political prisoners and is torturing them to death. It was Hague who was foreign secretary at the time of the Rabaa massacre in Egypt when the army slaughtered over 1,000 protesters in the streets. He merely responded that he was deeply concerned before his government pressed ahead with trade deals in the country.

During 2017 the monitoring organisation Airwars revealed that civilian deaths from US-led coalition air and artillery strikes in support of local ground forces in Iraq and Syria increased by 200 per cent; 13,000 civilians in Iraq were killed that year yet the UK sold $176 million worth of arms to the country.

Its unlikely Britain will ever forgive Blair for the role he played in Iraqi suffering  according to a poll conducted by YouGov a third of British people want to see him tried as a war criminal for knowingly misleading parliament.

In the last few weeks Theresas Mays government has been embroiled in a number of controversies at home, though being the weak leader that she is May has failed to take action. Two days ago Home Secretary Amber Rudd said that there is no link between police cuts and the rise of violent crime despite the fact that the department of which she is the head put together a report that concluded just this. Desperate to save herself, Rudd said she hadnt seen the report.

Our Foreign Secretary  who should have been sacked months ago  Boris Johnson faced criticism after declaring that the UKs defence research laboratory had been absolutely categorical that the nerve agent used in the attack on the Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury had originated in Russia when in fact they could not establish that it had been made there.

The foreign office then deleted a tweet blaming Moscow for the attack and Johnson attempted to shift the attention on Corbyn, labelling him the Kremlins useful idiot. This is the same foreign secretary who said that the Libyan city of Sirte can be the next Dubai once the dead bodies are cleared away.

Whether its foreign or domestic policy Theresa May cannot hide the hypocrisy of certain members of her government, its becoming more and more overt. The government is right to criticise the latest barbaric attack on the Syrian people, but it cannot blame us if we dont trust a single word it says.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.



Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Euronews: Life in Gaza after 10 years of Israeli blockade (360 video)Posted Thursday, April 12, 2018 11:45 am

The two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for Michigan attorney general are facing a smell test when it comes to their positions on marijuana.

Labor is playing a big role as usual, but when Democrats gather in Cobo Hall in Detroit on Sunday, Dana Nessel and Pat Miles track records on pot prosecutions will be a hot topic. Nessel is best known as a civil rights attorney who represented the Michigan lesbian couple whose suit helped pave the way for the U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Miles was the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Michigan under President Barack Obama. Detroit attorney Bill Noakes is also running.

While Nessel and Miles are both rolling into the convention with big endorsements from labor, its a battle for the pro-cannabis vote that is playing out as a fistfight.

As a former Wayne County assistant prosecutor from 1995 to 2004, Nessel handled the cases of 95 defendants charged with one or more marijuana-related crimes. Many included multiple charges beyond marijuana, such as possession of cocaine or weapons, or allegations of writing bad checks.

Altogether, Nessels work resulted in 50 of those defendants being convicted, either by trial or plea deal, of marijuana-related crimes.

That works out to be over 10 cases a year charged, and five convictions a year.

There simply was no discretion I held as an assistant prosecutor in the 1990s and early 2000s as to these matters, unlike Mr. Miles, who was the chief decision-maker in his office when he chose to prosecute a number of people under federal law in 2012, when those individuals were actually compliant with the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act and the state authorities were unable to bring a case a result, said Nessel in an email. Worse, Miles prevented those defendants from even presenting their state law defenses in the case.

Miles has been the target of ire by the pro-cannabis community for his prosecution of the Okemos 7. That was a group of men convicted and sent to federal prison under federal law in 2013 for their medical marijuana cooperative grow operations in Meridian Township. The investigation authorized by Miles included the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

As the U.S. attorney, Miles had the prosecutorial discretion to waive federal law enforcement off the case. Court records and contemporary reporting remain unclear why that did not happen in light of a 2009 memo from Obama directing federal enforcement actions be withheld in instances where marijuana was legal and the targets were compliant with state laws.

The comparison of the two records is not necessarily an apples-to-apples one, said Jamie Lowell, a board member of MI Legalize.

These are very different, he said. Miles had the ability to not prosecute. Theres absolutely no comparison.

He said his group has brought in at least 300 pro-cannabis voters to the party in advance of the convention.

Miles campaign manager, Abby Clark, called the comparison apples to a bushel of rotten apples rancid with hypocrisy.

She pointed to Nessels prosecutorial record as evidence.

Not only has she not always been progressive, she was on the very front lines of prosecuting people, many of them minorities, on minor drug offenses, Clark said. She has told supporters she wasnt comfortable prosecuting marijuana cases so she moved to other divisions, but her last two years in the prosecutors office were the two that she prosecuted the most marijuana cases.

In fact, of the 95 cases related to pot Nessel handled, 27 occurred in 2003 or 2004, her last two years as a prosecutor. Thats just over 28 percent of all her marijuana-related cases during her career. Of those 27 cases, 15 resulted in a guilty finding related to the marijuana charge, while 12 resulted in a dismissal of the marijuana charge.

Nessel said she didnt decide on the charges she prosecuted.

As an APA, I was never the chief decision-maker on any of these cases, unlike Pat, said Nessel, who filed charges against seven people who were not violating state law.Reddit 23 Email 388 Shares

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

The Trump administration and the May government in the UK seem poised to launch missile strikes on Syria in the near future. It probably wont matter.

The Syrian regime figures it can take the punishment, which is likely to consist of another set of one-off missile strikes similar to those launched on the Shuayrat Base in spring of 2017 after a chemical weapons attack by the regime in Khan Sheykhoun. Syrian and Iranian troops are said to be quietly deserting major air force bases, temporarily relocating outside them, in anticipation of the strikes.

The Syrian regime has all but won the civil war. It has all the major citiesDamascus, Aleppo, Latakia, Homs, and even Hama. It controls what the French colonialists used to call useful Syria, the band of fertile land stretching from Damascus to the north in the west of the country. While it has lost the ten percent of the population that is Kurds in the northeast, the Syrian Kurds are not regime enemies and likely will be forced into an alliance with Damascus over time in the face of attacks by Turkey and by fundamentalist Arab militias backed by Turkey.

ISIL has been largely defeated as a territorial force, though it holds out in some small pockets in the east.

h/t Al Jazeera

There were three remaining significant enclaves of resistance to the regime in Arab Syria. They were Idlib (a province in the northwest) and the area north of Aleppo; East Ghouta, a set of suburbs of Damascus of some 350,000 inhabitants just east of the capital; and the far south and southwest of the country (Deraa and the Golan Heights). There are a few other minor rebel outposts, for instance in the Qalamoun mountains on the Lebanese border or outside Hama. They are not militarily important and more an annoyance for the regime than anything else.

Although Russia has offered the rebels de-escalation zones, a sort of temporary cease-fire, these turn out to be a way to nurse regime strength while preparing for further assaults on the rebels. East Ghouta was such a zone. The government of Bashar al-Assad maintains that Damascus took regular mortar fire from the Salafi Jihadi militias that had come to control the three major districts of East Ghouta. In any case, during the past two months the Syrian Arab Army, with air support from the Russian Aerospace Forces, began a brutal battle of conquest against East Ghouta. Two the the districts and their guerrillas surrendered, agreeing to go north to Idlib. About half the population of East Ghouta appears by now to have gone with them.

The third district, Douma, was dominated by the Saudi Arabian proxy, the Army of Islam. It had a problem with going to Idlib since it is at war not only with the regime but with the other hard line Salafi guerrillas who dominate that northern province, especially the Levantine Liberation Council (HTS), the core of which is the old Nusra Front with its ties to al-Qaeda and 9/11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The Army of Islam was inflicting substantial casualties on the elite Panther Brigade (Syrian Arab Army special operations forces) who led the invasion of Douma last week. The Army of Islam refused to surrender and said they wanted to work out a deal to remain in Douma. This was a non-starter for Bashar al-Assad, who wanted all the rebel bases near the capital completely gone. But my hypothesis is that he could not risk losing more troops from the crack Panther Brigades.

So he decided to send down a barrel bomb of mixed chlorine and sarin gas on Douma. Perhaps he just meant to kill a dozen or two dozen Army of Islam fighters. Instead, the gas killed around 70 people, including mostly civilians and some children, and the relief workers in the enclave got video and blew the whistle on the regime. Al-Assad brazenly committed a war crime, confident that the Russian Federation would protect him from its consequences.

While the focus of the Western press has been on the response from Trump, who considers chemical use a red line that requires a US military response, it has been little noted that al-Assads ploy worked.

The Army of Islam leaders abruptly surrendered, perhaps under severe pressure from Doumas terrified civilian population, who did not want to be further gassed so that the Saudi-backed Salafis could go on trying to save face.

Late Wednesday, a Russian spokesman at Latakia announced that as they departed Douma, the 8,000 Army of Islam fighters surrendered four hundred pieces of military equipment, light and heavy. Some 41,000 people have left Douma this spring through Russian checkpoints, 12,000 of them in April alone. They seem to be heading not to Idlib but to Jarabulus in the Aleppo governorate near the Turkish border and there are some reports of Turkey settling them in Afrin as part of its ethnic cleansing campaign against leftist Kurds there.

The Syrian flag now flies over Douma. Russian military police have flooded into the enclave to establish law and order. (I can only imagine that this step was negotiated by Douma municipal leaders fearful that Syrian Arab Army troops might commit reprisals against them.) Those Army of Islam guerrillas who did not want to leave were offered a six-month amnesty if they laid down their arms, during which time they are not liable to conscription. (One way some rebels have surrendered without facing dire consequences has been to agree to switch sides and join the Syrian Arab Army.)

Adding insult to injury, Ali Akbbar Velayati, the special adviser to Irans clerical Leader Ali Khamenei, made a tour of east Ghouta on Wednesday!

Saudi Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman must have been doing a slow burn to see Velayeti strutting around territory that had once been a promising base for the takeover of Damascus and from which Saudi strategists had planned bombings of regime facilities in the capital.

Velayati covered himself and Khamenei in indelible shame, however, inasmuch as he implicitly gave his imprimatur to the gas attack that had sealed the regime victory. Iran suffered mustard gas attacks at the hands of Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, and had previously taken a principled stance against the use of chemical warfare.

Velayati said that the upcoming US strike on Syria would offer no hope to the defeated rebels. In that pronouncement, at least, he likely is right. And it reveals Syrian, Russian and Iranian thinking. The war aim has been achieved and the lives of Syrian special operations forces (who are limited in number) were preserved. The little kids with white foam around their mouths, eyes staring lifelessly, were collateral damage.



Bonus video:

CGTN: Rebels and their families flee Douma under Russia backed dealReddit Email 128 Shares

By Jake Johnson, staff writer | ( Commondreams.org ) |  

Having successfully rammed through tax legislation that massively rewards Americas billionairesincluding his long-time patrons Charles and David Kochand sets the stage for his ultimate goal of obliterating the safety net, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is reportedly set to tell his staff on Wednesday that he will not run for reelection in 2018.

First reported by Jonathan Swan of Axios and confirmed by numerous other outlets, the news comes after rumors had been swirling for months about Ryans possible retirement from Congress. It also comes as a popular progressive candidateRandy Bryce, aka The Iron Stacheis quickly gaining steam, outraising the corporate-funded Ryan by nearly $2 million in the first three months of 2018.

House Republicans were already in very tough spot for midterms, with many endangered members and the good chance that Democrats will win the majority, Swan noted in his report on Wednesday. Friends say that after Ryan passed tax reform, his longtime dream, he was ready to step out of a job that has become endlessly frustrating, in part because of President Trump.

In his last tweet before reports emerged that he is retiring from Congress, Ryan celebrated President Donald Trumps executive order on Wednesday that calls for more punitive work requirements for recipients of Medicaid, food stamps, and public housing assistancean plan Republicans have celebrated as Welfare Reform 2.0.

Reacting to the new reports on Wednesday, The Nations John Nichols argued that Ryans retirement would be a devastating blow for congressional Republicans.

Ryan would not merely be giving up on his own profound ambitions, he would be giving up on the notion that the party hes devoted his career to remains functional, Nichols concluded.

Via Commondreams.org

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Paul Ryan Legacy Gives Lie To Beltways Deficit Hawk Mythology | Rachel Maddow | MSNBCToronto, Ontario (FSCwire) - Tsodilo Resources Limited (TSX Venture Exchange: TSD) ("Tsodilo" or the "Company") is pleased to provide an update on its BK16 kimberlite project in Botswana.

BK16

The BK16 kimberlite project is located within the Orapa Kimberlite Field (OKF) in Botswana. The diamond mines in Botswana have produced an average of 27 million carats annually in the last 10 years and Botswana is the worlds largest producer of diamonds by value. In 2017, the OKF area produced 11.07 million carats. Of the 83 known kimberlite bodies, eleven have been or are currently being mined. These are AK01, AK02 and AK07 (Orapa, Debswana), AK06 (Karowe, Lucara Diamond Corporation), BK01, BK09, BK12 and BK15 (Damtshaa, Debswana), DK01 and DK02 (Letlhakane, Debswana) and BK11 (Firestone Diamonds). The Karowe mine has produced such notable diamonds as the 1,109 carat `Lesedi La Rona` and the 813 carat `Constellation`.

The diamondiferous BK16 kimberlite pipe is approximately 6 hectares in size at surface and is known to contain rare and valuable Type IIa diamonds (see press release dated May 31, 2016 located on the Companys website). The following phases of pre-resource mineralization kimberlite were identified during the 2015 drilling program:

Red Country rock Breccia (CB);

Black Volcaniclastic Kimberlite (VK2);

Grey Volcaniclastic Kimberlite (VK3);

Volcaniclastic Kimberlite with high concentrations of basalt country rock xenoliths (VKxxx) also referred to as the basalt breccia; and,

Coherent Kimberlite (CK1).

The 24 inch (60.96 cm) Large Diameter Drilling (LDD) program, which included collaring of the holes, was executed between July and October 2017. Including the Kalahari cover sediments a total of 3,150 meters was drilled into 4 of the main kimberlite facies (VK2, VK3, VKxxx and CB, see table below). Excluding the cover sediments, 2,043.4 dry metric tonnes of kimberlite was extracted. A 1 mm screening unit attached to the drill removed material below 1 mm resulting in 1,441.5 tonnes of kimberlite material over 1 mm to be processed through the DMS plant (see table below). The kimberlite was generally sampled every 12 meters down each LDD hole, although geological intervals were honored, subdividing the 1,441.5 tonnes into 243 individual samples for treatment. Each LDD hole was piloted by a core drill hole to identify the lithology in advance of each LDD hole to ensure that no country rocks would be sampled and to ensure the representative nature of the samples to the kimberlite phase ascribed.

Kimberlite Phases LDD Interval (m) No. of LDD Samples Assumed LDD Hole Diameter (m) *1 Dry Bulk Density Used (g/cm3) *2 LDD Dry Metric Tonnes (Calculated) *3 Tonnes to the plant (wet)*4 VK2 961 81 0.6096 2.51 704.0 539.6 VK3 1,686 141 0.6096 2.54 1,249.9 852.0 VKxxx 89 8 0.6096 2.51 65.2 28.7 CB 33 3 0.6096 2.52 24.3 21.2 Total 2,769 243 2,043.4 1,441.5

*1 0.9069 is the assumed diameter of 24 inch LDD drill holes. Caliper data has been obtained for these holes, however the volume calculation are still being verified. *2 Domain average Dry Bulk Density, where the density is measured via the Archimedes principle on larger numbers of representative diamond drill core. *3 Calculated Dry Metric Tonnes using the volume of a cylinder formula, where the LDD Interval in meters is the height. Then converted to Dry Metric Tonnes using the Dry Bulk Density. *4 Wet LDD Tonnes placed into bulk bags (mass measured using a hanging scale) after drilling and processing through the 1mm drill site screens (as per standard industry LDD practice).

Dense Medium Separation (DMS) Plant

All of the 243 LDD samples have now been processed through the companys 10 tonnes per hour (tph) mobile Dense Medium Separation (DMS) plant located in Letlhakane, Botswana. The DMS plant has a scrubber with a trommel screen of 16 mm (effective ~12 mm), a primary jaw crusher that has a closed size setting of ~25 mm and a secondary cone crusher that has a closed size setting of 10 mm. This cone crusher product is pumped back to the scrubber making a closed circuit. The lower cut aperture on the plant screens is 1mm (effective ~0.8 mm). Therefore, material between ~12 mm and ~0.8 mm goes to the DMS cyclone that has an inlet density of 2.55 to 2.65 g/cm3, and an inlet pressure of around 90 to 110kPa. This achieves an effective cut point of around 3.10 to 3.15 g/cm3. The DMS tailings are screened with 8 mm panels (effective ~6 mm) where anything larger than ~6 mm is conveyed back to the cone crusher before it joins the jaw crusher product. Material smaller than ~6 mm is discarded into tailings bags and stockpiled. The DMS concentrate product is placed into drums and sealed in a hands off manner via a glove box for transport to the X-ray facilities.

Quality control measures were introduced at the DMS plant whereby sub-samples of the tailings from each sample are tested using a mechanical jig for kimberlitic heavy minerals. Although rare, any sample with more than 6 ilmenites recovered have been earmarked for re-treatment. In addition, a number of tailings from other samples have been set aside for auditing purposes, and this process of re-treatment of selected samples has commenced as of today.

The total concentrate weight (wet) from the approximately 1,441 tonnes of kimberlite delivered to the plant is slightly over 5,300 kg. Although the DMS plant is not accredited to the ISO/IEC guide 17025, all industry standard practices for the treatment of diamond exploration samples through the DMS plant have been set-up and observed by a competent independent plant metallurgist, as defined in National Instrument 43-101, hired to oversee the entire treatment process.

A third consignment of 71 drums of concentrate have been securely moved using industry security standard and protocols to its secure complex in Maun for storage waiting to be processed through its final recovery unit. The chain of custody has been maintained during the transport and storage of the concentrate.

Diamond Recoveries

The Bourevestnik (BV) Polus-M X-ray sorter has to date sorted 56 of the LDD concentrate samples, representing 925 kg of DMS concentrate. This DMS concentrate has been dried and classified into the following three fractions before each fraction is processed through the Polus-M X-ray sorter (weights after X-ray sorting shown):

1-3 mm (10.6 kg)

3-8 mm (1.2 kg)

8-12 mm (70.6 kg)

Please see press releases located on the Companys website from December 11, 2017 and January 15, 2018 for a more detailed description of the BV Polus-M X-ray sorting machine.

An independent and experienced diamond classifier was deployed for 5 days (April 20-24) to sort the first X-ray concentrate samples from both the LDD samples and the historical tailings samples which were used for commissioning and calibrating the DMS plant (see press release of January 15, 2018). One hundred and one (101) diamonds (18.571 carats) were recovered from these samples, the largest of which was 1.375 ct. The diamonds recovered so far are very similar in appearance to those diamonds that have been recovered from previous operations which were all classified as D, E and F colors with a high percentage (8%) of Type II stones (see press release of May 31, 2016 located on the Companys website). Photos of some of the diamonds recovered from the LDD samples have been posted on the Companys website at: Click Here .

Final diamond counts and initial weights will be compiled once all samples have been processed, sorted, and a thorough tailings re-treatment audit has been conducted.

Detailed breakage descriptions and resorption characteristics; definitions of habit, color, size distributions; sample grade calculations; and commercial characteristics will be finalized once the diamonds have been cleaned by acid treatment.

About Tsodilo Resources Limited

Tsodilo Resources Limited is an international diamond and metals exploration company engaged in the search for economic diamond and metal deposits at its Bosoto (Pty) Limited ("Bosoto") and Gcwihaba Resources (Pty) Limited ("Gcwihaba") projects in Botswana and its Idada 361 (Pty) Limited ("Idada") project in Barberton, South Africa. The Company has a 100% stake in Bosoto (Pty) Ltd. which holds the BK16 kimberlite project in the Orapa Kimberlite Field (OKF) in Botswana and the PL216/2017 diamond prospection license also in the OKF. The Company has a 100% stake in its Gcwihaba project area consisting of seven metal (base, precious, platinum group, and rare earth) prospecting licenses all located in the North-West district of Botswana. Additionally, Tsodilo has a 70% stake in Idada Trading 361 (Pty) Limited which holds the gold and silver exploration license in the Barberton area of South Africa. Tsodilo manages the exploration of the Gcwihaba, Bosoto and Idada projects. Overall supervision of the Company's exploration program is the responsibility of Dr. Mike de Wit, President and COO of the Company and a "qualified person" as such term is defined in National Instrument 43-101.

This press release may contain forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, that address activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future (including, without limitation, statements pertaining to the use of proceeds, the impact of strategic partnerships and statements that describe the Companys future plans, objectives or goals) are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect the current expectations or beliefs of the Company based on information currently available to the Company. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results of the Company to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements, and even if such actual results are realized or substantially realized, there can be no assurance that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on the Company. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things, changes in equity markets, changes in general economic conditions, political developments in Botswana and surrounding countries, changes to regulations affecting the Company's activities, uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future, exploration and development risks, the uncertainties involved in interpreting exploration results and the other risks involved in the mineral exploration business. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made and, except as may be required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise. Although the Company believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV) nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. This news release may contain assumptions, estimates, and other forward-looking statements regarding future events. Such forward- looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties and are subject to factors, many of which are beyond the Company's -control, which may cause actual results or performance to differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements.QUEBEC, QUEBEC--(Marketwired - April 12, 2018) - Nemaska Lithium Inc. ("Nemaska Lithium" or the "Corporation") (TSX:NMX)(OTCQX:NMKEF)(FRANKFURT:N0T) is pleased to update its project financing plans and confirm that it has entered into a USD 150M streaming agreement (the "Streaming Agreement") with Orion Mine Finance II LP ("Orion").

In a press release dated March 28, 2018, Nemaska Lithium outlined the components of its overall USD 775 - 825M financing structure to fund the construction, commissioning, working capital and reserve funds for its Whabouchi lithium mine and Shawinigan electrochemical plant (the "Project Financing") and also for general corporate working capital. Since that time, the Corporation has made steady progress on the following:

Streaming facility for USD 150M - the Corporation: Signed the Streaming Agreement with Orion for same amount;

Equity offerings through private and/or public offerings - the Corporation: Obtained, on March 29, 2018, a receipt from Canadian securities regulatory authorities for its final base shelf prospectus (filed on Sedar the same day); Issued, on April 5, 2018, a press release outlining the agreed terms of a private placement for up to CAD 99M with SoftBank Group Corp. to hold no more than 9.9% of the shares outstanding once the project financing is completed; and Expects to provide further details in the short-term on current discussions for the additional equity financing required;

Debt financing aggregating USD 300-350M - the Corporation: Expects to provide further details in the short-term as regards its continuing debt financing endeavours.



"We have made solid progress in our project financing endeavours over the past couple of weeks, firstly with a private placement with SoftBank, a global technology leader, and now with the signing of this agreement with Orion, a leading and well-regarded financier in the mining industry," said Guy Bourassa, President & C.E.O. of Nemaska Lithium. "This Streaming Agreement is a financing tool which limits shareholder dilution, lowers Nemaska Lithium's cost of capital, and is under terms which are both competitive and flexible," Bourassa continued.

Michael Barton, Portfolio Manager at Orion Resource Partners (UK) LLP said, "Orion is delighted to become a major investor in one of the most exciting lithium projects globally. We look forward to supporting Nemaska Lithium as Whabouchi and Shawinigan enter the next phase of development."

The Streaming Agreement provides for the sale and delivery to Orion of 14.5% on all lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate produced at the Shawinigan plant and sold to third parties (collectively, "Stream Products"). Orion's purchase price paid to Nemaska Lithium under the Streaming Agreement will be 40% of the sales proceeds of such Stream Products. Nemaska Lithium will act as Orion's agent in the sale of the Stream Products to third-party off-takers. Through this arrangement, Orion will receive 60% of the sales proceeds from such Stream Products, which will result in Orion receiving a net portion of approximately 8.7% of the Stream Products sales. The maximum amount of Stream Products deliverable per year will not exceed the equivalent of 5,000 tonnes of refined lithium products.

In consideration of the Streaming Agreement, Orion will make an advance payment equal to USD 150M to Nemaska Lithium Shawinigan Transformation Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nemaska Lithium. The advance payment will be released in two equal tranches of USD 75M with the first tranche expected to be payable once the Project Financing is in place and once Nemaska Lithium has satisfied certain customary conditions which it expects to satisfy soon after the Project Financing completion. The second tranche will be payable upon the satisfaction of certain technical and other customary conditions that must be satisfied no later than December 31, 2019. In the event that these latter conditions are not satisfied, the second tranche will not be released and the percentage of Stream Products will be reduced from 14.5% to 7.5%.

About Nemaska Lithium

Nemaska Lithium is a developing chemical company whose activities will be vertically integrated, from spodumene mining to the commercialization of high-purity lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate. These lithium salts are mainly destined for the fast-growing lithium-ion battery market, which is driven by the increasing demand for electric vehicles and energy storage worldwide. With its products and processes, Nemaska Lithium intends to facilitate access to green energy, for the benefit of humanity.

The Corporation will be operating the Whabouchi mine in Quebec, Canada, one of the richest lithium spodumene deposits in the world, both in volume and grade. The spodumene concentrate produced at the Whabouchi mine will be processed at the Shawinigan plant using a unique membrane electrolysis process for which the Corporation holds several patents.

Nemaska Lithium is a member of the S&P/TSX SmallCap Index, S&P/TSX Global Mining Index, S&P/TSX Global Base Metals Index, S&P/TSX Equal Weight Global Base Metals Index, and the MSCI Canada Small Cap Index. For more information, visit nemaskalithium.com or twitter.com/Nemaska_Lithium.

About Orion

The Orion Mine Finance Group is a mining-focused investment business with USD 4.5 billion under management (as of January 31, 2018). Orion specializes in providing comprehensive and customized capital investment solutions to mining companies.

Cautionary Statement on Forward-Looking Information

All statements, other than statements of historical fact, contained in this press release including, but not limited to, those relating to the Corporation receiving the USD 150M advance payment under the Streaming Agreement and to the completion of the Project Financing (or any component thereof) in general, constitute "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of certain securities laws and are based on expectations and projections as of the date of this press release. Certain important assumptions by the Corporation in making forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, (a) the satisfaction, in a timely manner, by the Corporation of conditions precedent to the payment of each USD 75M tranche of the advance payment, (b) the receipt by the Corporation of proceeds therefrom, and from all other components of the Project Financing, and (c) the Corporation having raised a sufficient amount under all components of the Project Financing to bring the Whabouchi mine and the Shawinigan plant to commercial production.

Forward-looking statements contained in this press release include, without limitation, those related to (i) the sale and delivery to Orion of the above-mentioned percentages (14.5% and 8.7% net) of Stream Products, (ii) the eventual sharing of proceeds from Stream Products between Orion and the Corporation, (iii) the Streaming Agreement being a financing tool that limits shareholder dilution and lowers cost of capital, (iv) the satisfaction of conditions no later than December 31, 2019 for the second tranche payment, (v) the Corporation's project being one of the most exciting globally and entering in its next phase of development, (vi) the Corporation providing further details regarding the equity and debt components of the Project Financing in the short-term, and (vii) generally, the above "About Nemaska Lithium" paragraph which essentially describe the Corporation's outlook, 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 a comprehensive USD 775M to USD 825M Project and general corporate working capital financing package will be put in place and that any component of the Project Financing will be completed, as the next steps and, eventually, the actual results of financing endeavors, in particular as regards the debt financing and the equity offerings, and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

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. Forward-looking statements are provided for the purpose of providing information about management's endeavors to complete its project financing and, more generally, its expectations and plans relating to the future. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as a number of important risk factors and future events 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. All of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements and those made in our other filings with the securities regulators of Canada including, but not limited to, the cautionary statements made in the "Risk Factors" section of the Corporation's Annual Information Form dated October 5, 2017 and the "Risk Exposure and Management" section of the Corporation's quarterly Management Discussion & Analysis. The Corporation cautions that the foregoing list of factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive, and new, unforeseeable risks may arise from time to time. 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 Nemaska Lithium is available in the SEDAR database (www.sedar.com) and on the Corporation's website at: www.nemaskalithium.com.Serb academic turned far-right leader Vojislav Seselj won notoriety during the 1990s Balkan wars for his incendiary rhetoric and remains defiant since his provisional release from more than a decade in detention in The Hague.

UN war crimes judges in The Hague are due to give an appeal verdict on Wednesday against the shock 2016 acquittal of the stocky, ruddy-faced former deputy prime minister, 63.

Prosecutors had accused Seselj of poisoning the minds of volunteer forces who committed atrocities in the 1990s, in a quest to forge a Greater Serbia as Yugoslavia fell apart.

Judges found there was not sufficient evidence to prove he was guilty on nine counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the murder, torture and deportation of non-Serbs in large areas of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.

I do not feel guilty of anything, Seselj declared triumphantly at a press conference in Belgrade after his acquittal ruling in late March 2016.

The Serbian Radical Party leader has since stuck to his nationalist line.

We will never give up the idea of a Greater Serbia, he told AFP in an interview.

Prosecutors have appealed against his acquittal, saying he is is spreading politics seeking to unite all Serb territories in a homogeneous Serb state.

Seselj spent more than a decade in detention before and during his trial. He was excused from attending the 2016 judgement having returned to Serbia two years earlier on medical grounds.

After the acquittal ruling, he was elected as an MP in Serbia.

Since his return, ill health has not prevented Seselj from appearing on reality television, publicly burning EU and NATO flags and firing up far-right rallies.

He said he will not be in The Hague for the appeal verdict by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, which is wrapping up the last legal cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was closed in December after 24 years.

 Counter-revolutionary 

Born in Sarajevo in Bosnia in 1954, Seselj studied law and obtained a doctorate, going on to lecture in political science at Sarajevo University in the early 1980s.

The nationalist ideas he developed were not appreciated by the communist regime, and he was convicted of counter-revolutionary activities and spent two years in jail during that period.

He then moved to Belgrade where, after communism collapsed, he formed the Serbian Radical Party in 1991.

He quickly became an MP, known for his shocking antics in parliament  from swearing to drawing pistols.

Among his ill-famed comments as the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia broke out, Seselj once boasted on a television talk show that Serbs would slaughter Croats with rusty spoons.

From 1998 to 2000 he was Serbias deputy prime minister under the autocratic regime of Slobodan Milosevic, who died during his own war crimes trial at The Hague in 2006.

After giving himself up to the court in 2003, Seselj forced the cancellation of his first trial three years later by going on a hunger strike to demand the right to represent himself.

A second trial opened in 2007 in which he cast himself as a martyr and a victim of an anti-Serb conspiracy.

He said he regretted that the tribunal did not allow for the death sentence, so that proudly, with dignity, upright like my friend Saddam Hussein, I could put the final seal on my ideology.

Among his angry outbursts, he once said he smelled the odour of gas when a German judge arrived in the courtroom, and also compared the proceedings to a satanic ritual.

 Breaking with allies 

His party was Serbias largest until 2008, when Seseljs close allies Tomislav Nikolic and Aleksandar Vucic broke ranks and formed the ruling pro-European Serbian Progressive Party.

Vucic is now president while Seseljs anti-Western and pro-Russian rhetoric holds less sway, despite his attention-grabbing tactics.

He briefly benefited from public attention following his acquittal and with the Radicals became the second strongest single party in the parliament at elections two years ago.

But last month he was on the verge of political disappearance when his party won only two-percent support in local Belgrade polls.

Political analyst and columnist Cvijetin Milivojevic said that since returning from The Hague, Seselj has toned down his criticism of his now-powerful former ally Vucic as he bids for electoral success.

Seselj is a serious, calculating politician who has rarely improvised things, Milivojevic said. In that sense, he has not changed.Across Southeast Asia  but especially Myanmar, Cambodia and the Philippines  journalists are facing arrest, intimidation and violence.

On the afternoon of December 12 in Myanmar, Ma Pan Ei Mon asked her husband, Reuters journalist Ko Wa Lone, if she should cook dinner for him and his colleague, Ko Kyaw Soe Oo.

Kyaw Soe Oo was in Yangon from Sittwe, Pan Ei Mon told Frontier. But [Wa Lone] told me that they were meeting the police for dinner.

Later that night, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were arrested near a restaurant on the northern outskirts of Yangon. Prior to their arrest, the journalists had been investigating the killing of 10 Rohingya men at Inn Din village, in Rakhine States Maungdaw Township, in late August. They had uncovered evidence and testimony tying the killings to security forces and Rakhine villagers.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo remain on trial. They are accused of breaching the countrys Official Secrets Act, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment.

The circumstances around their arrest have been a key point of contention during the trial, which at times has descended into farce.

Myanmars Ministry of Information said that the pair were arrested for possessing important and secret government documents related to Rakhine State and security forces, which they intended to share with foreign media.

Arresting officers said the documents were found during a routine patrol, but the pair told relatives that they were arrested almost immediately after being handed documents by two policemen they had met at the restaurant for the first time. They said they had not read the documents before they were arrested.

Two police officers were also arrested under the Official Secrets Act, but it is unclear whether they are still being held or if they have been charged.

The trial has revealed the glaring gaps in Myanmars judicial system. Under heavy scrutiny from the defence lawyer  a rare occurrence in the countrys courts  one of the arresting officers said he had burned his notes, without offering an explanation why.

Another prosecution witness was shown to have Thet Oo Maung  Wa Lones real name  and No.3 road and Nilar road junction  the place where police said they were arrested  written on his hand, apparently to ensure his testimony matched the official version of events.

The trial has attracted widespread international condemnation; those who have joined the chorus calling for the pairs release include former US President Bill Clinton and UN Secretary-General Mr Antonio Guterres. Last week, the London-based firm of world-renowned human rights lawyer Ms Amal Clooney, said she would serve as their counsel.

The trial has been farcical in many respects and has laid bare that the two Reuters reporters arrest was a government setup from the start to suppress their news coverage of the Rohingya crisis, Mr Shawn Crispin, Southeast Asia representative, Committee to Project Journalists, told Frontier.

If authorities are willing to take down Reuters on spurious charges, then what local media will dare to report on sensitive stories, particularly the Rohingya humanitarian crisis? The case, filed under the vague and overbroad Official Secrets Act, will inevitably lead to widespread self-censorship among journalists going forward.

For many, the prosecution of the journalists highlights the huge backsliding on press freedom in Myanmar over the past year. Yet this phenomenon is not confined to Myanmar; it stretches right across Southeast Asia, from the arrests of journalists covering the Rakhine crisis to restrictions on media access to Indonesias West Papua in the east.

While the issues in West Papua for example are not new, developments in Myanmar, as well as Cambodia, the Philippines and Malaysia, are relatively recent, and represent a worrying trend towards illiberalism and, in some cases, authoritarianism.

The night of the arrests

On the evening of December 12, Pan Ei Mon said she tried to call her husband shortly after 9pm, but his phone was switched off.

He is usually home by about 9pm, she said. Sometimes his phone is off, but he knows I was home alone so he uses someone elses phone to contact me.

When he was still not home by 10pm, Pan Ei Mon said she phoned the Reuters driver who had taken the journalists to the restaurant. He said the meeting had not yet finished.

At 10.45 I called again. The driver told me the interview was still happening, but there was something different in his voice, she said. I think he didnt want me to worry, so he told me the meeting was still happening.

After midnight she said she received a phone call from the Reuters office in Yangon, telling her that her husband and Kyaw Soe Oo were missing.

Pan Ei Mon said she spent a frantic night desperately trying to contact Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, but to no avail.

I thought I was going crazy. My anxiety was limitless, said Pan Ei Mon, fighting back tears. I was even worried if they were still alive. I mean, what does missing mean?

After two weeks of being held incommunicado, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were finally brought to court on December 27.

Since I have seen him at court, I feel better, she said. But every time I go to the court, I hope I can bring him home with me. I feel discouraged and weak without him.

Journalists from the Cambodia Daily working in Phnom Penh shortly before the publication closed in September. (AFP)

The Reuters case is not the first time journalists in Myanmar have been detained in the past year.

In June 2017, three reporters  two from DVB and one from The Irrawaddy  were arrested after covering a drug-burning ceremony in territory controlled by the Taang National Liberation Army, an armed group active in northern Shan State.

The trio were released in September, after spending two months in Hsipaw Prison facing a charge under Article 17(1) of the Unlawful Associations Act.

Then, in October, three journalists and their driver were arrested in Nay Pyi Taw after flying a drone near the parliament building. They also spent two months in jail, under the 1934 Aircraft Act, before being released in December  just days after the Reuters journalists were arrested.

Just as one of your colleagues is released, it feels like another one goes inside. Its like a revolving door, one Yangon-based journalist told Frontier at the time.

Reporters operating in the country face personal risks, too. In December, Ko Kyaw Lynn, a freelance journalist based in Rakhine State, was stabbed while walking through downtown Sittwe.

Kyaw Lynn told Frontier that on December 20 he was stabbed in the back with a makeshift weapon. He was rushed to hospital, where he underwent surgery, before being released four days later.

I do not feel safe. I do not feel secure anymore, said Kyaw Lynn, who is now in hiding in Yangon and still too weak to return to work.

Kyaw Lynn said he believed the attack was related to the articles he had been writing concerning corruption and illicit drugs in his home state, and that his attackers had been paid to kill him.

In our Rakhine State, there are people who force-feed hatred among the communities, he said. However, he added that young people are determined to stand up against those who show nothing but hatred and aggression to any and all international organisations, exploit the ignorance and lack of awareness of the grassroots people, traffic narcotics and lie to the people.

If we stand up and resist them by criticising them, we are labelled as human rights defenders or activists greedy for US dollars and traitors, and we are blamed and verbally abused.

As bad as it has ever been

Which Southeast Asian country has backslid the furthest on press freedom over the past year? It would be a close race, but Cambodia must surely be near the front.

Cambodias facade of media freedom collapsed in 2017, said the Cambodian Center for Independent Media in its most recent survey on press freedom.

One of the most notable developments was the closure of The Cambodia Daily in September, after a battle with the government over a US$6 million-dollar tax bill. The Daily, which was founded in 1993, had been critical of Prime Minister Hun Sens increasingly authoritarian administration. With an election expected later this year, critics view the tax demands as being politically motivated.

The paper went down swinging; in its final edition, published on September 4, its front page ran with the headline Descent into Outright Dictatorship above a story about the arrest of Mr Kem Sokha, leader of the Cambodian National Rescue Party.

The CNRP was dissolved a month later, a move that Mr Charles Santiago, chairman of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, called the final nail in the coffin for Cambodian democracy.

The papers closure followed the shuttering of more than a dozen radio stations, including Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Voice of Democracy.

The situation is as bad as its ever been, said a Cambodia-based journalist who spoke to Frontier on condition of anonymity because of safety concerns in the country. The absence of [the Cambodia Daily] means that people have less independent and in-depth stories.

The situation will get worse in the next few months ahead of the election, I think. There will be a lot more pressure on journalists, said the journalist.

In November, two former reporters for RFA, Mr Uon Chhin and Mr Yeang Sotherain, were arrested under charges of espionage, and the pair remain in jail.

Last month, reports emerged that The Phnom Penh Post was the next publication to be targeted by the Hun Sen regime with a hefty tax bill, this time totaling $3.9 million.

However, the papers CEO Mr Marcus Holmes denied the tax demand was politically motivated and said talks were continuing with the countrys General Department of Taxation.

This is a perfectly routine tax audit. This is not us being shut down, Holmes told Southeast Asia Globe. Were not in the same situation the Cambodia Daily was. This is a number that is halfway through an ongoing negotiation with the tax office about a tax audit that happened at the end of last year.

Whatever the outcome of the tax bill, it is clear that press freedom in Cambodia has taken a giant leap backwards in the past year.

The situation for journalists in Cambodia has deteriorated rapidly, closing what was once a relatively open space for the media in the region, said Crispin from the CPJ.

Prime Minister Hun Sen has made it clear that his government will no longer tolerate media criticism and is moving with a vengeance against previously critical newspapers and broadcast outlets, he said, adding that Hun Sen appeared to taking cues from his financial patron China on how to repress and control the media.

Battling the president

Governments are also targeting independent media elsewhere in the region, not least in the Philippines where President Rodrigo Duterte has Rappler in his sights.

Rappler was only founded in 2012 but has been one of the strongest critics of the bombastic leader, particularly his controversial war on drugs that has seen thousands killed. The International Criminal Court recently announced a preliminary examination into the campaign, to which Duterte has threatened to withdraw from the ICC.

In January, he accused Rappler of being a fake news outlet  repeating the well-worn trope of US President Donald Trump towards any media outlet that is critical of his administration.

CEO of Philippine news website Rappler, Maria Ressa (centre), arrives at the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) headquarters in Manila. (AFP)

Later that month, Rapplers licence was revoked and the publications political correspondents have been barred from covering government events, including those outside the presidential palace. The government denied that the decision to revoke Rapplers licence was an attack on a free press.

We would like to deny that the state has infringed on the freedom of the press, particularly on Rappler or any of its reporters, said palace spokesman Harry Roque in a statement. If the President wanted to do that, he could have just sent the armed forces and padlocked them as done by other regimes. The President has never done that.

Frontier was unable to reach Rappler founder Ms Maria Ressa for this article, but she told The Guardian in March that her publication is ready to fight the charges against them.

The end goal is to keep reporting as long as were a democracy, and this, as far as I know, is still a democracy. And in a funny way its a backhanded compliment that the president sees us, a small start-up, as a threat, said Ressa.

Im banking on the fact that there are still good people in government who will prevent this, Ressa told the British publication. Ive been a journalist for more than 33 years, and at Rappler we refuse to change, I refuse to be bullied.

Rappler was not the first Philippines outlet to be targeted by Duterte. In March 2017, he criticised newspaper Philippine Daily Inquirer and television station ABS-CBN for what he called unfair coverage of his presidency, and said they would meet their karma one day.

Months later, renowned Filipino businessman Mr Ramon Ang  who helped finance Dutertes presidential campaign  acquired control of the Inquirer. Duterte also threatened to block ABS-CBNs application to renew its operating licence, which requires congressional approval.

A worrying trend

While it is Myanmar, the Philippines and Cambodia in particular that have attracted the most attention for their attacks on press freedom, few other countries are making progress.

In the 2017 Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters without Borders, the only country in Southeast Asia to break into the top 100 globally was East Timor.

Even Indonesia, which is the top-ranking member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, has seen some setbacks.

Indonesias media is, for the most part, quite vibrant, said Dr Ross Tapsell, a researcher from the Australian National University, who specialises on media in Southeast Asia. Professional journalists can report on a number of issues that they couldnt 20-odd years ago  with the exception of [West] Papua.

However, Tapsell said that the government is increasing its crackdown on criticism on social media, including the use of the Electronic Information and Transaction Law, which is being used to arrest citizens for online defamation.

It has been around since 2008, but it is increasingly being used by powerful people, such as politicians, to arrest those who criticise people in power, Tapsell told Frontier.

In recent days, press freedom in Malaysia  where an election is due to take place later this year  has also been thrust into the limelight, with the countrys cabinet on March 21 approving a draft law against fake news. The bill was being discussed in parliament as Frontier went to print.

Under the Anti-Fake News 2018 Law, anyone deemed to have published fake news faces a fine of up to 500,000 ringgit (K171 million), up to 10 years imprisonment, or both.

The bill defines fake news as news, information, data or reports which is or are wholly or partly false, according to a Reuters report.

The drafting of the bill is intended to provide for several offences related to the circulation of fake news and measures to curb fake news, said Ms Azalina Othman Said, a minister in the Prime Ministers Department. The bill was drafted for public interest to protect citizens from the wave of fake news and from becoming victims of fake news, she said, adding that the new law would not curb free speech.

But critics disagree.

Mr Phil Robertson, Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said that Najib and his administration was taking a page out of Donald Trumps playbook.

The issue is the government doesnt like independent journalists doing critical reporting on Malaysias myriad scandals and rights abuses, and has been looking for a way to attack popular news sites, he told Frontier. The fake news laws are best understood as the next assault on media freedom in the region.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak is planning to introduce an anti fake news law. (AFP)

Some shining lights

Bright spots in Southeast Asias media landscape are difficult to find, but they do exist. Close to home, Frontiers senior reporter Ko Mratt Kyaw Thu was in February awarded the Kate Webb Prize for Asian Journalists, the first Myanmar recipient of the prestigious award.

Mratt Kyaw Thu has been covering conflict in Rakhine State  including being chased out of Maungdaw by a mob threatening to kill him in September  as well as the civil war in the countrys north.

In his acceptance speech, Mratt Kyaw Thu dedicated the award to the journalists who have been arrested in the country in the past year  including the Reuters pair, who themselves were granted the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award in February. Last month, Ko Swe Win, editor of Myanmar Now, was one of three people awarded the EUs Schuman Award for Human Rights.

Despite the challenging environment, new outlets have been established in the region. One example is Mekong Review, a quarterly literary journal that publishes fiction, essays, reviews and poetry from across Southeast Asia. An independent publication with no political, institutional or commercial affiliations, it exists only on the proceeds of sales and subscriptions from readers.

Mr Minh Bui Jones, the Reviews chief editor, said he founded the publication as a personal project to stay connected to Southeast Asia after living in Cambodia for seven years.

We created the magazine in a month, which sounds improbable, I know, but it was made easier by the fact that the idea of a regional literary journal has been bubbling in my head for several years, Jones told Frontier by email.

He said that, as the magazine does not run news or political commentaries, it didnt have many issues with the increasing restrictions in the region. In addition, were small, obscure and have bugger-all influence, he said.

Additionally, he warned against over-generalising too much about Southeast Asia, drawing parallels in press freedom between countries such as Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam. We need to be careful when we generalise. Southeast Asia is not Western Europe, he said.

With regards to the future of the magazine, Jones said that he doesnt really have future plans. Everything is in the present. We live issue by issue. Were like those streetfood vendors. Our future rests with our content.

Dark days

Crispin, from CPJ, said that the press freedom situation is deteriorating across all of Southeast Asia.

These are dark days to be a journalist almost everywhere in Southeast Asia, he said.

No one is feeling that more keenly than Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who appeared in court once more on March 21, exactly 100 days since they were arrested. Pan Ei Mon was there again, hoping in vain for the release of her husband.

Ever since we first met, I have always looked up to him, she told Frontier on February 15, a day after she had attended another of the pairs hearings, which fell on Valentines Day.

When I see him at court, I try not to show my inner feelings to him; I try to hide my sadness, she said. But this pretending is exhausting.

This article was first published on Frontier Myanmar.149 Shares Share

Anybody who has ever been to Europe, knows that fashion trends and the way people dress are very different from the United States, and generally more formal and fashion conscious (not to make a generalization  but its true). Growing up in England, every school has a uniform from an early age. (There are pictures of me wearing a tiny little shirt, tie, blazer, and hat to preschool when I was only four years old!)

In medical school, it was mandatory for males to wear a shirt and tie on clinical rotations, and females were advised to wear professional business-like attire. Therefore, dressing up in the morning was always something I was always used to. I remember when I first arrived in the United States to start my medical residency, my co-residents would comment to me how well dressed they thought I was (to my surprise, since I thought I was just dressing normally). Its a habit I have continued, and to this day, I always wear a shirt and tie to hospital  even on weekends. Its funny because since I left the U.K., the National Health Service (the universal government-controlled health care system) instituted a policy banning anything below the elbows in any hospital or office. This included any long sleeves or even watches. My own view is that this was a political stunt, and from what Ive heard  many physicians in the U.K. thought so too. The idea was that white coats, sleeves, and ties transmit infection (with somewhat dubious evidence). Such is the power of a centrally administered socialized-type health care system to be able to institute a very dramatic immediate directive to every health care professional in the nation. But I digress.

Back to the point on what physicians wear  because overnight the U.K. went from having some of the best-dressed doctors in the world, to something quite different, in every hospital and office throughout the country. The USA, of course, has no such country-wide policy (or ability to dictate one, at least yet). However, its an area where I feel physicians do not do themselves full justice. Of course, for certain specialties like surgeons who are in the OR for large parts of the day, wearing professional attire may not be practical. But for those who are not going into the OR, dressing well for work has a lot of benefits and communicates a lot about oneself:

1. You care about your appearance

The most basic message that wearing professional clothes and trying to look good has, is that it subconsciously tells everyone around you  colleagues and more importantly your patients  that you are somebody who puts in the effort and takes pride in yourself. Like it or not, this will also lead to follow-up assumptions about your competence and abilities as a physician. If a doctor (or for that matter any professional) is immaculate in their appearance, will they also be immaculate in my care? Without wanting to go off topic here, and Ill probably save this for a future article instead, there have also been multiple studies into how what you wear  especially the colors  have an immediate effect in communicating certain things to the people around you (you can google some of that research yourself in the meantime).

2. Patients really like it

I have lost count of the number of times I have had compliments from patients and staff alike about what I am wearing. I get them on a daily basis (and who wouldnt enjoy that). Without making this sound inappropriate (not my intention, as I know this can have different implications for males and females who may be receiving comments about how they are dressed), but Ive noticed very elderly female patients especially go absolutely nuts over a nice tie, especially one with a unique design. Oh, such a lovely tie Dr. Dhand!. Its all very well-meaning and jovial, and Im happy with anything that makes my patients smile. But all joking aside, almost all patients  male and female  appreciate a physician who is well-dressed and looking professional. Even if you dont like ties (I know many men who dont), at least consider wearing a nice shirt!

3. You are somebody who is going places and on a kickass career path

Whatever it is you want to do, whatever your long-term goals are  the importance of looking the part cannot be overstated. If you are someone with lofty ambitions and big career goals, show the world you mean business! Theres a reason why every career success expert advises you to: dress for success.

None of these things mean you need to spend exorbitant sums of money on designer clothes or an exclusive wardrobe (I assure you, I am far from that myself). Its simply about dressing to impress. At a time when the medical profession is facing a number of challenges, and some may say even being under siege a little, remember each time you step out onto the floor of the hospital or office, and put on your physician face to the public, you are an ambassador to your profession. I am a little saddened when I see some doctors come into work looking like they have just rolled out of bed. Or worse still wearing dirty, stained and creased clothing. Not good and a huge missed opportunity. Furthermore, in the era of corporate medicine and so many suits walking the halls in health care, I am also cognizant of the fact that I dont want the business guys wandering around looking sharper than the really important clinicians!

I personally enjoy dressing up for work. Some may think this bordering on slightly obsessive, but I without fail iron my shirt and pants the night before I wear them to work. Its part of my evening routine. You dont necessarily need to be as extreme as me however if thats too much for you. But every doctor should at least put some thought into whether they are looking their best. Eliciting the feedback of immediate family may be a good first step if you are interested in taking things up a notch. I wouldnt even want to show up at work and present myself to a patient or their family, unless I thought I looked the part.

Finally, theres also one other aspect of dressing well that I believe in strongly. Thats the mantra: look good, feel good. If you are putting in the effort, theres a fair chance that you will be more likely feel good as well! And maybe, just maybe, send over some of those feel good and energetic vibes to your patients too.

Suneel Dhand is an internal medicine physician and author. He is the founder, DocSpeak Communications and co-founder, DocsDox. He blogs at his self-titled site, Suneel Dhand.

Image credit: Shutterstock.comPosted Thursday, April 12, 2018 11:45 am

Haslett-based entrepreneur Konstantin Konny Zsigo hopes to make mid-Michigan a mecca for chocolate lovers with his new business, Park Lake Creamery. The gourmet chocolate and ice cream shop opened this week in Bath Township on the northeastern shore of Park Lake.

Its going to take me 10 years to get where I want to be, but I think people will eventually fly here for the chocolate, Zsigo said. There are stores in New York, France and Italy that have perfected chocolate making and attract visitors from around the globe. Thats what I aspire to do here.

Zsigo, 52, has been honing the art of chocolate making for seven years, and he already has a loyal customer base thanks to Internet sales and local corporate accounts. He started the business as a hobby, importing 10-pound chocolate bars and teaching himself how to combine flavors, colors and textures into a wide range of confections. Then his hobby became a full-time passion two years ago after retiring from his longtime tech career.

Im passionate about technology and now Im passionate about chocolate, he said. My process is half art and half science. Im still learning, but Ill be bringing the community along with me. Their feedback will help me master the craft.

In 2016, Zsigo bought the building  previously home to the Kathys Pier Delight frozen custard stand  and converted the second floor into his personal chocolate factory. He said he uses the bare minimum of sugar in his recipes, which he combines with the best non-GMO, non-high fructose corn syrup chocolate bars he can find from France and Belgium. He melts the bars down into molds, often using an airbrush to decorate them. He crafts each one of his pieces by hand; some, including his cherry cordials, take up to four days to complete.

You dont pop five of these on your way to work, Zsigo said. These are chocolates that you sit down with and enjoy each bite of while youre watching the sun set. Theyre meant to eaten slowly.

An early standout has been his coconut almond bars, an artisanal take on Almond Joy candy bars. Production includes adding ground roasted almonds to coconut flakes that have been seeped in sweet cream, then double dunking the results in dark chocolate, adding sea salted toasted almonds and drizzling in more chocolate.

It took me a while, but I think its as good as it can be at this point, Zsigo said. Its what an Almond Joy would be if they werent trying to mass produce them.

Park Lake Creamery also features coffee drinks and specialty shakes, eight flavors of hand-packed, 16-percent butter fat ice cream from Country Dairy and two flavors of Moo-ville soft serve ice cream. The indoor dining area and sales floor is small  only about 500 square feet, accommodating about 15 people  but Zsigo said his production space upstairs is plenty big enough to keep up with all his foot traffic and online sales. And come summer, he plans to make full use of his patio overhanging Park Lake, including offering pontoon rides at sunset. And in the meantime, hell keep on practicing.

Year after year, Ill continue to work on new creations and keep improving, he said. Customers will see me get better, and as more people discover us, I hope word will get around.

Park Lake Creamery 6320 Park Lake Road, Bath Township 11 a.m.-8 a.m. daily (hours later in summer) (517) 657-4400, parklakecreamery.com273 Shares Share

Every person working in medicine has stories to tell, and sharing those stories is a great way to process grief or stress, celebrate triumphs, vent, move on or think more deeply.

Occasionally, writing about an experience helps others facing a similar situation. True narratives of and reflections on medicine are now encouraged, honored, promoted  and sometimes required of medical students.

This is a commendable trend, though the exercise can be affected by issues with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), designed to protect patient privacy, and other confidentiality issues. And students may feel too vulnerable to share their deep-seated emotions; some of them have told me that, concerned about setting off alarms, they started dumbing down their mandatory writing in order to avoid worried calls from advisors who are concerned that the students might be depressed or too anxious.

Freed by fiction

Fiction, then, is an amazing outlet  one rarely tapped in medicine or medical education. It can be as long as an entire book or as condensed as a short story. Creative expression can be as brief as a haiku or flash fictiona short paragraph written quickly. Given the constraints on a medical students or physicians time, that can be a real blessing.

Most fiction has a basis in amalgamations of real people, real events, and real places, and it is remarkably liberating. Your characters can be inspiring or weak; they can struggle or shine. They can exhibit many attributes at once, because people are complex. (As Walt Whitman said, I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Ive found both professional and personal release in my novels, which belong to a genre I call evidence-based medical adventure. Making physicians and patients come alive through fiction has been tremendously satisfying. I can get to the heart of how a physician reacts to stress; I can explore how he or she deals with a missed diagnosis that may be haunting, or manages an especially difficult patient. After all, a simple sore throat can be a sign of leukemia, and a depressed patient may cause self-harm. Though such scenarios are rare, giving them consideration in story form can allow doctors to better deal with such issues in the real world.

Making doctors real

Fiction grants physicians the opportunity to show sides of their lives that patients dont always get to see.

Physicians worry about their patients and about their own competence, which sometimes leads to loss of sleep and then having to deal with fatigue as well. They have all the same needs for friendship and romance as everyone else does, and they make the same mistakes. Their relationships may be particularly affected by long hours, work distractions and fear of failure. Their ability to cope may be strained, for physicians tend to expect themselves always to be right; it is critical to their identity. But of course, no one is always right, which contributes to how vulnerable and sometimes flawed doctors can feel. And somehow they must balance all of this at the same time, in order to stay capable and effective.

Its a complicated life.

Exploring the doctors world

Yet none of the difficulties of being a doctor negates the joy of an effective intervention, the satisfaction of helping a patient better control a chronic condition or the many rewards that come from daily interactions with people seeking help.

Being able to include all aspects of the medical issues, keeping a story scientifically accurate and compelling, showing the process of divining a diagnosis and dealing with patient struggles  these are challenges I truly enjoy.

The protagonist of my novels is a young female physician who has battled an anxiety problem and is starting over at a unique rural clinic on the edge of the Grand Canyon. This setting allows me to incorporate much of what I love: primary care medicine, hiking, geology, and astronomy. Thats the beauty of fiction: you can create your own world and explore whatever you desire. It can be serious and playful at once, it can be both somber and absurd, it can be devastating and triumphant. What a great and entertaining challenge.

Surprisingly little fiction is written about physicians or med students, and even less about female physicians and primary care roles. If asked about medical fiction, I suspect most American doctors would conjure up The House of God by Samuel Shem, written almost forty years ago.

Well-known American physicians alive today, writing traditionally published medical novels in the last five or so years, include Abraham Verghese (Cutting for Stone), Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed, parts of which are about medicine) and Tess Gerritsen (who writes medical thrillers). Ive probably missed other American physician/authors; more untapped stories likely lurk within the ranks of self-published authors, including Therese Zinc (Mission Rwanda and Mission Chechnya).

Getting started

So what should you do if you are a doctor or medical student who wants to try your hand at fiction? If youre a student, any of your medical narratives can be transformed into fiction, so long as you keep issues of privacy in mind.

Physicians can find  or start  writing workshops at medical conferences, or just about anywhere else, at any time. These workshops can become part of wellness or burnout-prevention events. To interact with other writers, all you need is a championsomeone to organize a time and space for you to get together and share what youve written. Its great to exchange ideas and give feedback to one another, either online or off. Participants in these events can feel energized, enlightened and creative. You can even tweet haikus or flash fiction to one another. The work doesnt have to be perfect; it just needs to be thoughtful and come from the heart.

Not everyone wants to write, but theres room for those who have not yet tried. Who knows? You might wind up writing a book or two yourself.

Sandra Miller is a family physician who blogs at the Doctors Tablet. She can be reached at her self-titled site, Sandra Miller.

Image credit: Shutterstock.comPreparations are in full swing for the 21st Smithwicks Kilkenny Roots Festival.

The festival kicks off on Friday, May 4 with a special tribute gig to Willie Meighan that will celebrate his life and legacy.

Willie was one of the committee that organised the successful event for the last 20 years and people are still trying to come to terms with his death in November last year.

Seamus Fogarty will take the stage in Billy Byrne's for this show. Willie was a great supporter of Seamus over the years and was delighted with his recent success.

The festival will be officially launched at the Smithwicks Experience on Thursday and the organisers are expecting a very successful year.

Selling Fast

Tickets are selling fast and the Sold Out signs have gone up for shows by Birds Of Chicago, The Deep Dark Woods, Molly Tuttle/Rachel Baiman, Bennett Wilson Poole, Prinz Grizzley and Peter Oren.

Many others are close to selling out, with huge interest in shows by Darlingside, Hillbilly Casino and The Blasters.

Bookings are running well ahead of last year, with a big increase in visitors from the UK and Europe. ORF TV, the Austrian national television station, is sending a reporter to cover the festival.

The festival was recommended to them by Prinz Grizzly, a band from the mountains of Austria, who are returning to Kilkenny for the second year.

Free Music Trail

As well as the ticketed shows the festival will again feature a broad range of acts on the free Smithwicks Music Trail.

This is an incredible weekend where locals and visitors mingle in the relaxed atmospphere created by festival founder, John Cleere and his hard working team.

Booking can be made online on through www.kilkennyroots.com or call to Rollercoaster Records on Kieran Street, tel 056-7763669.The barrister for a Kilkenny man charged with murdering another man in his home has suggested that his client was trying to wrestle the knife from his self-harming nephew when it entered the deceased mans chest.

Michael Bowman SC was cross examining his clients nephew this (Thursday) morning in the Central Criminal Court trial of a 37-year-old a father of five, charged with murdering that nephews friend in County Waterford.

Tadhg Butler, with an address at Seafield in Tramore, is accused of murdering 25-year-old Michael ODwyer on 10th January 2014. He has pleaded not guilty.

Denis Vaughan Buckley SC, prosecuting, this morning read out the statement made later that day by Mr Butlers nephew, Tony OGrady. He told the gardai that his uncle had simply walked up to the deceased and stuck a butchers knife into his chest during a party in Mr Butlers home.

However, the 25-year-old told the court that he had no recollection of giving that statement or of any of the events from that time, as he was on medication for mental disorders and was a drug addict at the time.

Under cross examination by Mr Bowman, he agreed that his client had previously wrestled implements from him to prevent him self-harming. He agreed that he would have been upset that night as it was approaching the anniversary of the death of his only sibling, who had died of a drug overdose outside a Dublin takeaway.

He agreed that he could have taken a knife from the kitchen with the intention of harming himself, and could have said that he wanted to end it all. He agreed that his uncle could have tried to intervene and that he could have resisted.

And he (the accused) struggled to take the knife off you, and he forcibly pulled the knife out of your hand in circumstances where Mr ODwyer was standing beside him or behind him and the knife went into him? suggested Mr Bowman. Could that be possible. Could it reasonably be true?

Yes, it could, but Ive no recollection, agreed Mr OGrady.

The trial continues this afternoon before Mr Justice Paul Butler and a jury of six men and six women.After months of waiting finally the Fosca family were told that the drug their daughter so desperately needs is to be funded by the HSE.

Cezy Fosca (12) lives in Kilkenny City and has Morquio Syndrome - a degenerative condition affecting major organ systems. In 2011 Cezy was one of two children, included for trials for Vimizin - which is the only enzyme replacement therapy designed to target the underlying cause of this disease.

The Health Service Executive drugs group has previously denied a number of applications for reimbursement made by the manufacturer, Biomarin. On March 29 BioMarin has reached agreement with the HSE for the supply of Vimizim to Irish patients with Morquio A Syndrome.

In recent months Cezy had travelled to Leinster House and pleaded with the Minister for Health, Simon Harris. Taoiseach Leo Varadker also spoke on the matter in the Dail.

Local TD, Bobby Alyward has campaigned tirelessly on Cezys behalf and raised the matter in Dail Eireann on several occasions.

Elena told The Kilkenny People that she was contacted by a nurse from Temple Street Hospital over the Easter break to inform them that Cezy will be able to resume taking her medicine.

We are very happy and very relieved that this is now over and Cezy can get her medicine. We want to thank people for their support and Deputy Bobby Alyward.

Cezy will have to wait for a number of weeks before they can give her her medication and now she is feeling quite tired - you can see the effects of her off her medication, her mother, Elena said.

The Kilkenny People has campaigned for Cezy to remain on the medication since first highlighting the case last November.

BioMarin have informed the Fosca family that they expect that Vimizim will be available and reimbursed immediately, subject to the conclusion of contract negotiations, the finalisation of logistical arrangements, and the completion of approval processes.

The manufacturers BioMarin have stated: This is a transformative and innovative agreement, which recognises both the burden of this disease in Ireland and our need to continue investing in the search for new medicines. BioMarin will now work with the HSE move quickly so that Irish patients can join those patients around the world who already have access to Vimizim.

Deputy Aylward stated: "I am so delighted for the Fosca family and for all of the patients in Ireland that can now look forward to a much improved quality of life following the approval of this drug.

Cezy Fosca has battled bravely to lead a robust and fun-filled life despite this challenging medical condition and she and her family can now look to the future with renewed positivity and hope."Posted Thursday, April 12, 2018 11:45 am

Ive always been a builder type, Jeff Boerger said. You know, a tool guy.

It makes sense Boerger would be involved in set design and construction.

When I was a little kid, I was always tinkering and taking things apart and trying to put them back together, he said.

For about 35 years, he has been connected to local theatre, as an actor and as the creator of sets. Boergers favorite role was Atticus Finch in Riverwalk Theatres To Kill a Mockingbird in 2006. The 74-year old was recently seen as the rancher in their production of White Buffalo. It was a lot of fun for me, Boerger said. I like cowboy stuff.

His first links to area theatre began with Len Kluge at the Ledges Playhouse. In their Play it Again Sam, Boerger played Bogie in his first acting role. I acted on pretty much every stage in the area at one time or another, he said. An internship with BoarsHead Theatre followed. Thats where he first got involved in creating sets.

There have been times when Boerger acted on sets that he made. That includes playing a cop in Bonny and Clyde at Peppermint Creek Theatre Company in 2013, last years Lansing Community College production of Eurydice in the role of the father, and this years PCTCs I Now Pronounce playing a minister. Each time I swore Id never do it again, he said. It will kill ya.

Chad Swan-Badgero, Peppermint Creeks Artistic Director, said, Working with Jeff is a directors dream. He praised Boegers skill to take a directors vision and making it a believable reality on stageand within a budget. His set designs are unique and interesting, Swan-Badgero said. I love how attached Jeff gets to his sets in a very fatherly way, which shows how much of his heart he puts into the creation of a show.

Boerger said making sets was a good artistic outlet for his creativity. Most of his career was spent in creative advertising and graphic design. I got burnt out on it 20 years ago and opened a woodworking business, he said. Its called Corbincraft Studios and its in a pole barn behind his Mason home.

When his father was an executive with International Harvester, Boerger  who was born in California  moved around a lot. His high school years were spent in West Virginia and he went to a London boarding school for a year. His Europe Adventure included six months while a teen as a backhoe and bulldozer demonstrator for International Harvester in France. I got lucky, Boerger said, and had some opportunities many people dont get.

The art major attended Capital University and then Columbus College of Art and Design  both in Ohio. He married, moved to Phoenix, and then back to Columbus before settling in Michigan with his wife, Ann.

I never got into painting and living in a garret in New York, Boerger said. Instead, he has also been a photographer, folk musician, male model in Detroit, and a traveling Abe Lincoln. I played Abe in schools all over the country, he said. That gig ended 12 years ago. I had to stop when my hair turned grey. I didnt want to dye it.

The sets Boerger is proudest of include Riverwalks The Full Monty in 2008 and Bonnie and Clyde. Monty featured a two-tiered steel mill with a backdrop he painted. Looking out a train window on the way to Chicago inspired it. Clyde had a makeshift car with a real, classic radiator and Styrofoam wheels and fiberglass fenders that Boerger fabricated.

To create a set, after a director asks for his designing skills, he reads the script and decides to pick it up. Im pretty choosey right now, Boerger said. Ive turned down people.

He will meet with the director and attempt to come up with some common vision.

Boerger brings a box of blocks. Like a little kid would use, he said. Using those and saltshakers or whatever else is handy, the two will arrange the objects into a stage plan. From that, Boeger will build a model. I make it  inch to a foot, he said. I do it in my shop. A floor plan is drawn up for the builders. Boerger more often than not helps with the construction.

Michael Hays directed Advise and Consent at Riverwalk and Stuff Happens at PCTC using Boergers sets. He always designs sets that truly serve the story of the play, rather than just look good to the eye, Hays said. He also appreciated Boergers attention to actors safety and comfort, Throw in the fact that hes also a master carpenter, with a smattering of electrical and plumbing knowledge, and what more could you ask for?The Herald reports:

Two Opposition MPs want law changes to clean up New Zealands $50 billion apartment sector, dogged by disputes, power struggles, lax governance, lack of pre-purchase disclosure, poor maintenance and management plans and financial issues. Auckland Central MP Nikki Kaye and housing and urban development spokeswoman Judith Collins have met Housing Minister Phil Twyford with Kaye saying that as a result, they hope changes will be underway soon.

A nice reminder that not everything is adversarial. Kaye has been working on this issue for some years, and while there has been a change of Government, shes still pursuing it with the relevant Ministers.

Judith Collins and I recently met with the Minister of Housing. We committed  if we were in government  to have a unit titles reform bill introduced into Parliament by Christmas last year. The minister has said he is interested in progressing the reform that the last government was progressing but that it may take until the latter part of this year to draft a reform bill. Judith and I are working with some sector representatives to try and progress the drafting of a members bill so we can move quicker on this. The final details of a bill would need to be agreed by the National caucus but we hope to have something ready in the next two months, Kaye said.

So we may get a Government bill by years end, or a members bill earlier.

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Islamic terror attacks in the West are far less common since 2017Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon declares his bid for a third-term at the headquarters of the Democratic Party of Korea in Seoul, Thursday, joining the party's primary race for the June 13 local elections. Yonhap



By Park Ji-won



Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon announced his bid for a third term in the upcoming June 13 local elections, Thursday.



Park is one of the three contenders in the ruling Democratic Party of Korea's (DPK) primary.



Declaring his re-election bid in Seoul, Park, a former civic activist, described himself as a "revolutionist" who shares a vision with the Moon Jae-in administration.



"Now, Seoul will start a new challenge. Based on six years of experience in office, I will focus on improving the quality of life for citizens and making Seoul a truly global city," Park said during a press conference.



He said he needs a fresh term to change Seoul.



"Six years ago, I became Seoul mayor when the former president was digging rivers and building a wall to block communications. At that time, I announced that citizens are the mayor and I would become the first mayor who changes people's lives," Park said.



In the party's primary which will likely be held next week, the 62-year-old incumbent is set to compete with two former floor leaders, four-term lawmaker Park Young-sun and three-term lawmaker Woo Sang-ho.



The winner of the primary will face former presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo of the minor opposition Bareun Mirae Party and former Gyeonggi Province Governor Kim Moon-soo of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party in the mayoral race.



The local elections will be held for the first time since President Moon Jae-in took power last year.



Park's pledges include seeking gender equality amid the #MeToo movement, peace between the two Koreas, care services for those in need, job creation, allowances for young people, seeking balanced development throughout the city, creating an eco-friendly environment and building a smart city in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.



In his speech, he emphasized his policy achievements, including offering free school meals, halving tuition fees at universities run by the city, increasing the social welfare budget, hiring contracted workers as full-time workers and revitalizing old parts of the city.



Asked about taking the Seoul mayor position as a stepping stone to a presidential bid, Park answered his only concern is bettering the lives of citizens and the success of the Moon government.



Park also hinted at the possibility of cultural cooperation with Pyongyang in line with the upcoming summits which will be held with North Korea.



When it comes to policies coping with fine dust, Park said the city has been working on a comprehensive policy for the next 10 years and it is about to be materialized soon, saying the city is about to introduce an "alternative-day" driving ban and car registration system.



Meanwhile, Park Young-sun and Woo Sang-ho continue to criticize Park Won-soon over his fine dust policy, saying the incumbent has wasted taxes.



Ahn ran for Seoul mayor in a 2011 by-election as an independent candidate, but gave up his bid to support Park Won-soon.



Asked about his relationship with Ahn, Park said they have a special relationship but came to share different views and directions on politics.



Park Won-soon's approval rating as Seoul mayor is around 50 percent, according to surveys.



Seoul is the country's largest city with a population of about 10 million and an annual budget of 30 trillion won ($28 billion).

Bogota, Apr 12 (AP) Colombian officials say eight police officers were killed when a homemade bomb exploded as they escorted a caravan of government workers belonging to a land restitution unit.

Authorities attribute the attack today to the ruthless Gulf Clan that dominates drug routes near the volatile Uraba region of northern Colombia.

President Juan Manuel Santos expressed his solidarity with the victims.

Colombia is implementing a peace deal with the nation's largest rebel movement, and the government has been redirecting its security forces to combat criminal gangs that have aggressively stepped in to fill the void left by retreating guerrillas. Thousands of soldiers and police have been trailing the Gulf Clan's top leaders for over two years. (AP) AQS

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)Dharwad (Karnataka), April 12 : BJP President Amit Shah on Thursday lambasted the Congress for the washout of the second half of the Budget Session of Parliament, saying a party which lacks "internal democracy" cannot protect democracy in the country.

Accusing the Congress and its President Rahul Gandhi of promoting "divisive politics" in the name of caste and religion, he said the people of Karnataka will see through their tactics and give them a befitting reply in the upcoming polls.

The Bharatiya Janata Party chief, who undertook the party's day-long hunger strike here along with party's Chief Ministerial candidate B.S. Yeddyurappa and other MPs, said what happened in Parliament in March and April was "unprecedented".

"Parliament could not function due to the stand taken by Rahul Gandhi. Since independence it has always been the ruling party that avoids discussion but it was for the first time that the party in power was ready for debate while the opposition lacked courage," Shah told the gathering.

He said the government was ready to discuss all issues including the multi-thousand crore Punjab National Bank fraud and special status demand for Andhra Pradesh but it was the Congress that used the smaller parties to disrupt the proceedings.

"We were even ready to discuss the bank fraud case. Not a single BJP leader or minister is involved in it. But if a list of corrupt Congress leaders was to be drawn, the entire party could be found in the roll call," he said.

"Post-independence if there was any government that carried out the maximum developmental work in Andhra Pradesh, it was the Narendra Modi-led NDA government.

"Modiji, Madam Speaker (Sumitra Mahajan) and Chairman (M. Venkaiah Naidu) tried their best to persuade the opposition to allow the Budget session to be fruitful, but all went in vein.

"The Congress does not believe in democracy. Rahul Baba, don't preach us on democracy. You have forgotten that your grandmother (Indira Gandhi) imposed Emergency and muzzled people's voices.

"It is you who put democracy in shackles at your home. Nehruji, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and now Rahul Gandhi... I don't know who will be the next Gandhi...

"Congress cannot save democracy in the country as it has no internal democracy," Shah said.

The BJP chief also accused the Congress of promoting divisive politics in their lust for power.

"It has been the Congress nature to promote divisive politics in the name of caste and religion. The people of this country understand all these tactics.

"After winning the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, we won elections in Maharastra, Jharkhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam, Manipur, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya. Now it's Karnataka's turn."

Citing a conversation Shah had with a reporter at the Lucknow airport, he said he was of the view that Rahul Gandhi has been working hard in Karnataka as it was the only state, besides Puducherry, that is left under its rule.

"But you know what the reporter told me... he said Karnataka is ATM of corruption for Congress. He is working hard to save the only ATM left in the country," he said.

Later, in a blog Shah repeated the charge against Congress, saying the country was not going to forgive it for disrupting parliamentary proceedings.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 12, 2018 04:37 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).Vatican City, April 12: Pope Francis on Wednesday agreed and accepted that he made grave errors in his judgement in the Chiles Clerical sexual abuse cases and has invited the victims to visit Rome so that he can ask for forgiveness from them personally. The Pope had visited Peru and Chile in the month of January after there were accusations on him of failing to handle allegations of clerical sex abuse which took place in both the countries. Pope Francis had initially defended a bishop who was accused of covering up the sexual abuse that had taken place in Chile and come under heavy criticism for it. In his letter to the Chilean priests, the Pope said that I have made serious mistakes in the judgement and perception of the situation, especially due to a lack of truthful and balanced information. He also expressed his sadness and said that scandal had done huge damage to his reputation and the reputation of Chilean church.

The error in judgement that the Pope has spoken about is in the context of him defending Bishop Juan Barros who is a protege of the Rev. Fernando Karadima. After years of investigation by the church, the Vatican found father Fernando Karadima guilty of sexually abusing minors in Chile and he was prohibited by the church to participate in any ministerial act. The church also barred him from spiritually guiding any seekers or those visiting church.

The Pope in his letter has said that, Today I want to speak to you not of assurances, butthe joy, the peace of forgiveness of our sins and the action of his grace.

Speaking about the report regarding the case submitted to him by Charles Scicluna, the Archbishop of Malta and to Rev. Jordi Bertomeu Farnos, who listened to 64 testimonies, the Pope expressed his gratitude to them and said that, I sent them to listen from the heart and with humility. Later on, when they delivered to me the report and, in particular, its juridical and pastoral assessment of the gathered information, they acknowledged before me of having felt overwhelmed with the pain of so many victims of grave abuses of conscience and power and, in particular, of the acts of sexual abuse committed by various consecrated men of your country against minors, those who were not taken seriously then and were even robbed of their innocence.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 12, 2018 04:20 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).Apr 11, 2018, 3:35pm ET

Family of driver in fatal Tesla crash hires law firm

Family of Walter Huang will \'explore legal options,\' firm says.

The family of Walter Huang, the deceased driver of the Tesla Model X which caught fire after hitting a median divider while Autopilot was engaged, has hired a law firm to "explore legal options" in response to the accident.

The firm Minami Tamaki LLP announced Wednesday that the family had hired it to investigate the accident, Reuters reports. The firm posted details of its initial review on its blog.

While the focus of the firm's interest appears to be on what it alludes to as a failure of Tesla's Autopilot system, it also points out that (as previously noted in several reports), the metal crash barrier designed to mitigate impact damage had been previously struck and not yet repaired/replaced.

"The lack of a guard potentially increased Huang's injuries," the firm says.

Both Tesla and the National Transportation Safety Board are still investigating the crash and resulting fire. Tesla CEO Elon Musk met with NTSB officials over the weekend after the latter expressed frustration with Tesla's decision to release preliminary crash information ahead of the NTSB's official report, according to Bloomberg.A Portlaoise man with a terrible attitude was last week given a suspended prison sentence having been charged with three separate public order matters.

Before the court was Paul Greene (22), Cois Na Habhainn, Portlaoise.

Sgt JJ Kirby gave evidence that on August 11, 2017, at Mountain View, Portlaoise, the accused was acting in a threatening and abusive manner. He tried to obstruct a garda from arresting another man.

On September 25, 2017, at OMoore Place, the gardai attended at the accuseds home with a search warrant, but the accused pulled the warrant out of the gardas hand and ripped it up.

He was verbally abusive and attempted to spit at the garda, said Sgt Kirby.

And on October 10 last, the accused was directed to leave OMoore Place by gardai, but he became abusive and threatening.

The accused had seven previous convictions.

Defence, Mr Barry Fitzgerald said that at the time his client had a very poor attitude and felt that the whole world appeared to be against him. He is now facing up to his problems, said defence

He was using drugs in the company of negative peer groups, with his biggest problem being benzodiazepine tablets which made him very abusive.

He stopped cold turkey last December, but is still addicted to weed, said Mr Fitzgerald, although he had taken the first tentative steps towards addressing his problems.

Defence said that the accused, in his own words, needed to get the head sorted and had written letters of apology to the gardai.

The court heard that the accused was on social welfare of 100 per week, out of which he gives his mother 20 and 20 to each of his children.

Judge Catherine Staines noted that all his offending was in relation to public order matters and the accused had a terrible attitude.

The gardai are just doing their job trying to keep Portlaoise safe, said Judge Staines, telling the accused to take the chewing gum out of his mouth.

She asked was the accused willing to do community service, but the accused said he had back problems following a car accident.

On the charge of obstruction, Judge Staines imposed a six-month sentence, suspended for one year. The other charges were taken into consideration.

I dont want to see you back here, if you commit any more public order offences you will go to prison, Judge Staines warned the accused.

Extra gardai to crack down on drugs and crime in Laois town.A woman who tried to smuggle phones into the Midlands Prison has been given the benefit of the probation act.

Before last weeks sitting of Portlaoise District Court was Deanna Gill, with an address listed at Rathangan, Co. Kildare.

When she first appeared to the face the charges at the end of 2017, Inspector Ollie Baker gave evidence the accused was detected at the Midlands Prison on July 31, 2017, with two mobile phones, two SIM cards and two chargers.

She was arrested and cooperated fully, said Insp Baker.

The accused had no previous convictions.

Defence, Ms Josephine Fitzpatrick said her client had now turned her life around.

She had been visiting her boyfriend at the prison and is now barred from returning there.

She didnt realise the extent of what was in the package, said Ms Fitzpatrick.

The matter was adjourned to April 5 for an up to date probation report.

When the matter returned to court last week, Ms Fitzpatrick said the case had been put back to see how the accused behaved.

Ms Fitzpatrick said her client had not come to garda attention since, and asked that that she be allowed to proceed without a recorded conviction against her.

The accused had charges of criminal damage and perhaps a related assault to come before Waterford District Court, said Ms Fitzpatrick, but these offences happened before the offence at the prison, when the accused had been 16 or 17.

In ruling, Judge Catherine Staines said that the accused had an extremely difficult background and had now embraced the help of the probation services, doing everything to put her life back on track.

Judge Staines applied the probation act, section 1.1.All outstanding farm scheme payments must be made as a matter urgency in light of the current fodder crisis, IFA Rural Development Chairman Joe Brady has insisted.

Almost 70,000 farmers are awaiting outstanding payments worth 30m under GLAS and the Sheep Welfare Scheme.

The immediate payment of outstanding monies is one of a number of practical measures IFA has outlined to Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed that he should take to ease the burden on farmers and alleviate serious cash flow difficulties on farms.

Joe Brady said a number of payments are due to farmers, including 26m in 15% GLAS payments to 48,000 farmers and 3m in 15% Sheep Welfare Scheme payments to 21,000 farmers.

Joe Brady said the Sheep Welfare payments can be made from April 1st while GLAS payments are due next month so there is no reason they cannot be paid now.

In addition, Joe Brady said flexibilities are required in situations where the weather is making adherence to GLAS plans impossible.

In relation to the closed period for Traditional Hay Meadow, the closing date should be extended to the end of April. Flexibility should be provided in relation to other GLAS measures such as Low Input Grassland to ensure farmers can maximise any grazing opportunity.

Meanwhile, Joe Healy said Minister Creed has to implement further measures to support farmers immediately.

He said the fodder import scheme announced by Minister Creed must be open to all co-ops, licensed merchants and livestock marts.

The Scheme must be inclusive of outlets who serve all farming sectors and all regions of the country, he said.

The Ministers attempt to resuscitate his National transport scheme by reducing the minimum distance fodder has to travel from 100k to 50km before it will be eligible for a subsidy will not work.

He should stop tinkering with restrictions and make the scheme a straightforward subsidy to all farmers in need of fodder.

While it welcome that fodder is now coming into the country, easing the supply issue, some farmers have already spent huge amounts on fodder and will not have sufficient resources to purchase the imported fodder.

Joe Healy reiterated his call on the Minister to suspend all on-farm inspections while the crisis is ongoing and to fast-track outstanding payments and remove any impediments either nationally or at EU level.

Farmers are awaiting the final instalment of payments under GLAS and the Sheep Welfare Scheme worth 30m.

The Minister should pay out this funding immediately, as well as payments under any other scheme owed to farmers.

Releasing this funding would provide a badly-needed cash injection on farms at this difficult time, Joe Healy said.

Tillage farmers are under severe pressure to adhere to the three-crop rule under Greening requirements as very little sowing has been possible and time is running out to sow some crops, such as oats, beans and spring wheat. Joe Healy said the Minister must secure a derogation on the three-crop rule to ease the pressure on these farmers.An anti-wind turbine group has claimed a 'victory' in its campaign against a Coillte wind farm in Laois after a European Court of Justice ruling.

People Over Wind were responding to a ruling made in Europe in relation to State-owned forestry company's plan to build a 18 turbine wind farm to be built on Cullenagh mountain, Ballyroan.

The ruling does not overturn the granting of planning permission but it does require Coillte have to carry out an extensive environmental assessment of connecting the wind farm to the electricity grid.

In doing so, the European Court deemed that a screening process carried out by Coillte was not sufficient to allow work to proceed to connect the project.

The ruling was made after the Irish High Court referred the matter for a decision in March 2017. People over Wind had previously lost a Court of Appeal case against the wind farm.

People Over Wind claimed the ruling as a 'victory'. They have said the case will now return to the Irish courts leaving them in 'a strong position'.

"Coillte should now withdraw their plans for unwanted wind-farm on Cullenagh mountain and leave our community alone," said the group in a Facebook post.

Referring the case to Europe last year, Judge Max Barrett said objectors had argued that the future of the freshwater pearl mussel may be threatened by the proposed development.

Coillte had proposed mitigation measures in a so-called screening process but the European Court has deemed such a process is not sufficient to measure the impact of the connection on the mussel in the Rivers Nore and Barrow which are both part of a Special Area of Conservation.

...

TEXT OF RULING

JUDGMENT OF THE COURT (Seventh Chamber)

12 April 2018 (*)

(Reference for a preliminary ruling  Environment  Directive 92/43/EEC  Conservation of natural habitats  Special areas of conservation  Article 6(3)  Screening in order to determine whether or not it is necessary to carry out an assessment of the implications, for a special area of conservation, of a plan or project  Measures that may be taken into account for that purpose)

In Case C323/17,

REQUEST for a preliminary ruling under Article 267 TFEU from the High Court (Ireland), made by decision of 10 May 2017, received at the Court on 30 May 2017, in the proceedings

People Over Wind,

Peter Sweetman

v

Coillte Teoranta,

THE COURT (Seventh Chamber),

composed of A. Rosas, President of the Chamber, C. Toader (Rapporteur) and E. Jarasiunas, Judges,

Advocate General: J. Kokott,

Registrar: A. Calot Escobar,

having regard to the written procedure,

after considering the observations submitted on behalf of:

 People Over Wind and Mr Sweetman, by O. Clarke, Solicitor, O. Collins, Barrister-at-Law, and J. Devlin, Senior Counsel,

 Coillte Teoranta, by J. Conway, Solicitor, S. Murray, Barrister-at-Law, and D. McGrath, Senior Counsel,

 the European Commission, by C. Hermes and E. Manhaeve, acting as Agents,

having decided, after hearing the Advocate General, to proceed to judgment without an Opinion,

gives the following

Judgment

1 This request for a preliminary ruling concerns the interpretation of Article 6(3) of Council Directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992 on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora (OJ 1992 L 206, p. 7; the Habitats Directive).

2 The request has been made in proceedings brought by People Over Wind, an environmental NGO, and by Peter Sweetman against Coillte Teoranta (Coillte), a company owned by the Irish State that operates in the forestry sector, relating to the works necessary to lay the cable connecting a wind farm to the electricity grid.

Legal context

EU law

3 The 10th recital of the Habitats Directive states:

 an appropriate assessment must be made of any plan or programme likely to have a significant effect on the conservation objectives of a site which has been designated or is designated in future.

4 Article 2 of the Habitats Directive provides:

1. The aim of this Directive shall be to contribute towards ensuring bio-diversity through the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora in the European territory of the Member States to which the Treaty applies.

2. Measures taken pursuant to this Directive shall be designed to maintain or restore, at favourable conservation status, natural habitats and species of wild fauna and flora of Community interest.

3. Measures taken pursuant to this Directive shall take account of economic, social and cultural requirements and regional and local characteristics.

5 Article 3(1) of the Habitats Directive is worded as follows:

A coherent European ecological network of special areas of conservation shall be set up under the title Natura 2000. This network, composed of sites hosting the natural habitat types listed in Annex I and habitats of the species listed in Annex II, shall enable the natural habitat types and the species habitats concerned to be maintained or, where appropriate, restored at a favourable conservation status in their natural range.

...

6 Article 6 of the Habitats Directive states:

1. For special areas of conservation, Member States shall establish the necessary conservation measures involving, if need be, appropriate management plans specifically designed for the sites or integrated into other development plans, and appropriate statutory, administrative or contractual measures which correspond to the ecological requirements of the natural habitat types in Annex I and the species in Annex II present on the sites.

2. Member States shall take appropriate steps to avoid, in the special areas of conservation, the deterioration of natural habitats and the habitats of species as well as disturbance of the species for which the areas have been designated, in so far as such disturbance could be significant in relation to the objectives of this Directive.

3. Any plan or project not directly connected with or necessary to the management of the site but likely to have a significant effect thereon, either individually or in combination with other plans or projects, shall be subject to appropriate assessment of its implications for the site in view of the sites conservation objectives. In the light of the conclusions of the assessment of the implications for the site and subject to the provisions of paragraph 4, the competent national authorities shall agree to the plan or project only after having ascertained that it will not adversely affect the integrity of the site concerned and, if appropriate, after having obtained the opinion of the general public.

4. If, in spite of a negative assessment of the implications for the site and in the absence of alternative solutions, a plan or project must nevertheless be carried out for imperative reasons of overriding public interest, including those of a social or economic nature, the Member State shall take all compensatory measures necessary to ensure that the overall coherence of Natura 2000 is protected. It shall inform the Commission of the compensatory measures adopted.

Where the site concerned hosts a priority natural habitat type and/or a priority species, the only considerations which may be raised are those relating to human health or public safety, to beneficial consequences of primary importance for the environment or, further to an opinion from the Commission, to other imperative reasons of overriding public interest.

Irish law

7 The High Court (Ireland) explains that development consent is regulated by the Planning and Development Acts and regulations made thereunder. The competent authority is the local planning authority and an appeal lies to An Bord Pleanala (the Irish Planning Board).

8 Certain types of development are classified as exempted development and, subject to certain exceptions, do not require consent under the Planning and Development Acts. Thus, an example of exempted development is the carrying out by any undertaker authorised to provide an electricity service of development consisting of the laying underground of mains, pipes, cables or other apparatus for the purposes of the undertaking.

9 Nevertheless, exempted development projects may be subject to other types of consent or a process of adoption. The European Communities (Birds and Natural Habitats) Regulations 2011 (the 2011 Regulations) apply to projects other than developments requiring development consent within the meaning of the Planning and Development Acts. Furthermore, a development which comes within exempted development must nevertheless be subject to consent under the Planning and Development Acts where appropriate assessment under Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive is required.

10 Regulation 42 of the 2011 Regulations provides:

1. A screening for Appropriate Assessment of a plan or project for which an application for consent is received, or which a public authority wishes to undertake or adopt, and which is not directly connected with or necessary to the management of the site as a European Site, shall be carried out by the public authority to assess, in view of best scientific knowledge and in view of the conservation objectives of the site, if that plan or project, individually or in combination with other plans or projects is likely to have a significant effect on the European site.

2. A public authority shall carry out a screening for Appropriate Assessment under paragraph (1) before consent for a plan or project is given, or a decision to undertake or adopt a plan or project is taken.

...

6. The public authority shall determine that an Appropriate Assessment of a plan or project is required where the plan or project is not directly connected with or necessary to the management of the site as a European Site and if it cannot be excluded, on the basis of objective scientific information following screening under this Regulation, that the plan or project, individually or in combination with other plans or projects, will have a significant effect on a European site.

7. The public authority shall determine that an Appropriate Assessment of a plan or project is not required where the plan or project is not directly connected with or necessary to the management of the site as a European Site and if it can be excluded on the basis of objective scientific information following screening under this Regulation, that the plan or project, individually or in combination with other plans or projects, will have a significant effect on a European site.

The dispute in the main proceedings and the question referred for a preliminary ruling

11 The main proceedings relate to the assessment of the effects that the laying of the cable connecting a wind farm to the electricity grid potentially has on two special areas of conservation under the European ecological network Natura 2000, one of which is that of the River Barrow and River Nore (Ireland). That river constitutes a habitat for the Irish subspecies of the freshwater pearl mussel (margaritifera durrovensis; the Nore pearl mussel), which is included in Annex II to the Habitats Directive. The extant adult population of this pearl mussel is, according to the estimates mentioned by the referring court, as low as 300 individuals, having been as high as 20 000 individuals in 1991. The life span of each individual is said to be between 70 and 100 years, but the Nore pearl mussel is said not to have reproduced itself since 1970. According to the referring court, it is apparent from recent monitoring surveys that this species is threatened with extinction, on account of the high level of sedimentation of the bed of the River Nore, to which the species is particularly vulnerable, sedimentation which inhibits the successful restocking of the river by juveniles.

12 The consent required for developing the wind farm at issue in the main proceedings, with the exception of its connection to the grid, was dealt with in previous procedures. The consent granted by An Bord Pleanala in 2013 was subject to various conditions. Thus, according to condition 17 of that planning permission, the construction of the development shall be managed in accordance with a Construction Management Plan, which shall be submitted to, and agreed in writing with, the planning authority prior to commencement of development. This plan shall provide details of intended construction practice for the development, including ... (k) means to ensure that surface water run-off is controlled such that no silt or other pollutants enter watercourses ....

13 Following the grant of that permission, the developer addressed the question of connecting the wind farm concerned to the electricity grid by means of a cable. The dispute in the main proceedings concerns that connection.

14 The applicants in the main proceedings submit that river pollutants resulting from the laying of the connection cable, such as silt and sediment, will have a harmful effect on the Nore pearl mussel.

15 Coillte contends that the cable laying at issue in the main proceedings is exempted development not requiring consent, within the meaning of the applicable national planning legislation. However, it accepts that, if the project were to require appropriate assessment of the environmental implications, planning permission would have to be obtained from the local planning authority.

16 In order to determine whether it was necessary to carry out such appropriate assessment, Coillte instructed consultants to conduct the examination (screening).

17 The screening report drawn up by those consultants concluded, inter alia, as follows:

(a) In the absence of protective measures, there is potential for the release of suspended solids into waterbodies along the proposed route, including directional drilling locations.

(b) With regards to [the Nore pearl mussel], if the construction of the proposed cable works was to result in the release of silt or pollutants such as concrete into the pearl mussel population area of river through the pathway of smaller streams or rivers, there would be a negative impact on the pearl mussel population. Sedimentation of gravels can prevent sufficient water flow through the gravels, starving juvenile [Nore pearl mussels] of oxygen.

18 It is apparent from the file before the Court that protective measures were also analysed by that report.

19 Subsequently, on the basis of that report, the following recommendation was drawn up for Coillte by the programme manager:

As set out in detail in the  appropriate assessment screening report, on the basis of the findings of that report and in light of the best scientific knowledge, the grid connection works will not have a significant effect on the relevant European sites in light of the conservation objectives of the European sites, alone or in combination with the Cullenagh wind farm and other plans or projects, and an appropriate assessment is not required. This conclusion was reached on the basis of the distance between the proposed Cullenagh grid connection and the European sites, and the protective measures that have been built into the works design of the project.

20 Adopting the above reasons and recommendation, Coillte, as a public authority referred to in Regulation 42 of the 2011 Regulations, determined that no appropriate assessment, within the meaning of Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive, was required in this instance.

21 The referring court considers that the decision that appropriate assessment was not required is based on the protective measures referred to in the screening report. That court makes clear that the protective measures proposed and taken into account by the authors of that report are not as stringent as those required in condition 17(k) of the planning permission for the wind farm concerned.

22 In the light of the foregoing, the High Court decided to stay the proceedings and to refer the following question to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling:

Whether, or in what circumstances, mitigation measures can be considered when carrying out screening for appropriate assessment under Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive?

Consideration of the question referred

23 First of all, it should be noted that Article 6 of the Habitats Directive imposes upon the Member States a series of specific obligations and procedures designed, as is clear from Article 2(2) of the directive, to maintain, or as the case may be restore, at a favourable conservation status natural habitats and, in particular, special areas of conservation (judgments of 11 April 2013, Sweetman and Others, C258/11, EU:C:2013:220, paragraph 36 and the case-law cited, and of 21 July 2016, Orleans and Others, C387/15 and C388/15, EU:C:2016:583, paragraph 31).

24 According to the Courts case-law, the provisions of Article 6 of the Habitats Directive must be construed as a coherent whole in the light of the conservation objectives pursued by the directive. Indeed, Article 6(2) and Article 6(3) are designed to ensure the same level of protection of natural habitats and habitats of species, whilst Article 6(4) merely derogates from the second sentence of Article 6(3) (see, to that effect, judgment of 14 January 2016, Grune Liga Sachsen and Others, C399/14, EU:C:2016:10, paragraph 52 and the case-law cited).

25 Thus, Article 6 of the Habitats Directive divides measures into three categories, namely conservation measures, preventive measures and compensatory measures, provided for in Article 6(1), (2) and (4) respectively. It is clear from the wording of Article 6 of the Habitats Directive that that provision contains no reference to any concept of mitigating measure (see, to that effect, judgment of 21 July 2016, Orleans and Others, C387/15 and C388/15, EU:C:2016:583, paragraphs 57 and 58 and the case-law cited).

26 It follows that, as is apparent from the reasoning of the request for a preliminary ruling, that the measures which the referring court describes as mitigating measures, and which Coillte refers to as protective measures, should be understood as denoting measures that are intended to avoid or reduce the harmful effects of the envisaged project on the site concerned.

27 Thus, by its question, the referring court asks, in essence, whether Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive must be interpreted as meaning that, in order to determine whether or not it is necessary to carry out subsequently an appropriate assessment of a projects implications for a site concerned, it is possible, at the screening stage, to take account of the measures intended to avoid or reduce the projects harmful effects on that site.

28 The 10th recital of the Habitats Directive states that an appropriate assessment must be made of any plan or programme likely to have a significant effect on the conservation objectives of a site which has been designated or is designated in future. That recital finds expression in Article 6(3) of the directive, which provides inter alia that a plan or project likely to have a significant effect on the site concerned cannot be authorised without a prior assessment of its implications for that site (judgment of 7 September 2004, Waddenvereniging and Vogelbeschermingsvereniging, C127/02, EU:C:2004:482, paragraph 22).

29 As the Court has pointed out, Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive refers to two stages. The first, envisaged in the provisions first sentence, requires the Member States to carry out an appropriate assessment of the implications for a protected site of a plan or project when there is a likelihood that the plan or project will have a significant effect on that site. The second stage, which is envisaged in the second sentence of Article 6(3) and occurs following the aforesaid appropriate assessment, allows such a plan or project to be authorised only if it will not adversely affect the integrity of the site concerned, subject to the provisions of Article 6(4) of the directive (judgment of 21 July 2016, Orleans and Others, C387/15 and C388/15, EU:C:2016:583, paragraphs 44 and 46 and the case-law cited).

30 It should be added that Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive also integrates the precautionary principle and makes it possible to prevent in an effective manner adverse effects on the integrity of protected sites, resulting from the plans or projects envisaged. A less stringent authorisation criterion than that set out in that provision could not ensure as effectively the fulfilment of the objective of site protection intended under that provision (judgment of 26 April 2017, Commission v Germany, C142/16, EU:C:2017:301, paragraph 40 and the case-law cited).

31 In the present instance, as the parties to the main proceedings and the Commission agree, the uncertainty of the referring court concerns only the screening stage. More specifically, the referring court asks whether measures intended to avoid or reduce the harmful effects of a plan or project on the site concerned can be taken into consideration at the screening stage, in order to determine whether it is necessary to carry out an appropriate assessment of the implications, for the site, of that plan or project.

32 Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive sets out clearly that the obligation to carry out an assessment is dependent on both of the following conditions being met: the plan or project in question must not be connected with or necessary to the management of the site, and it must be likely to have a significant effect on the site.

33 It is apparent from the file before the Court that the referring court considers the first of those conditions to be met.

34 As regards the second condition, it is settled case-law that Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive makes the requirement for an appropriate assessment of the implications of a plan or project conditional on there being a probability or a risk that the plan or project in question will have a significant effect on the site concerned. In the light, in particular, of the precautionary principle, such a risk exists if it cannot be excluded on the basis of objective information that the plan or project will have a significant effect on the site concerned (judgment of 26 May 2011, Commission v Belgium, C538/09, EU:C:2011:349, paragraph 39 and the case-law cited). The assessment of that risk must be made in the light inter alia of the characteristics and specific environmental conditions of the site concerned by such a plan or project (see, to that effect, judgment of 21 July 2016, Orleans and Others, C387/15 and C388/15, EU:C:2016:583, paragraph 45 and the case-law cited).

35 As the applicants in the main proceedings and the Commission submit, the fact that, as the referring court has observed, measures intended to avoid or reduce the harmful effects of a plan or project on the site concerned are taken into consideration when determining whether it is necessary to carry out an appropriate assessment presupposes that it is likely that the site is affected significantly and that, consequently, such an assessment should be carried out.

36 That conclusion is supported by the fact that a full and precise analysis of the measures capable of avoiding or reducing any significant effects on the site concerned must be carried out not at the screening stage, but specifically at the stage of the appropriate assessment.

37 Taking account of such measures at the screening stage would be liable to compromise the practical effect of the Habitats Directive in general, and the assessment stage in particular, as the latter stage would be deprived of its purpose and there would be a risk of circumvention of that stage, which constitutes, however, an essential safeguard provided for by the directive.

38 In that regard, the Courts case-law emphasises the fact that the assessment carried out under Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive may not have lacunae and must contain complete, precise and definitive findings and conclusions capable of removing all reasonable scientific doubt as to the effects of the proposed works on the protected site concerned (judgment of 21 July 2016, Orleans and Others, C387/15 and C388/15, EU:C:2016:583, paragraph 50 and the case-law cited).

39 It is, moreover, from Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive that persons such as the applicants in the main proceedings derive in particular a right to participate in a procedure for the adoption of a decision relating to an application for authorisation of a plan or project likely to have a significant effect on the environment (see, to that effect, judgment of 8 November 2016, Lesoochranarske zoskupenie VLK, C243/15, EU:C:2016:838, paragraph 49).

40 In the light of all the foregoing considerations, the answer to the question referred is that Article 6(3) of the Habitats Directive must be interpreted as meaning that, in order to determine whether it is necessary to carry out, subsequently, an appropriate assessment of the implications, for a site concerned, of a plan or project, it is not appropriate, at the screening stage, to take account of the measures intended to avoid or reduce the harmful effects of the plan or project on that site.

Costs

41 Since these proceedings are, for the parties to the main proceedings, a step in the action pending before the national court, the decision on costs is a matter for that court. Costs incurred in submitting observations to the Court, other than the costs of those parties, are not recoverable.

On those grounds, the Court (Seventh Chamber) hereby rules:

Article 6(3) of Council Directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992 on the conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora must be interpreted as meaning that, in order to determine whether it is necessary to carry out, subsequently, an appropriate assessment of the implications, for a site concerned, of a plan or project, it is not appropriate, at the screening stage, to take account of the measures intended to avoid or reduce the harmful effects of the plan or project on that site.

Delivered in open court in Luxembourg on 12 April 2018.



A. Calot Escobar



A. Rosas

Registrar President of the Seventh ChamberLaois is better off being promoted by a developed tourism brand related to history according to the Chairperson of Laois Tourism.

Chairperson Ian Finnan has said that he understands the decision to exclude Laois from the latest Failte Ireland tourism plan for the Midlands.

Ireland's Hidden Heartlands was launched in Athlone today on the banks of the River Shannon which is set to be the focus of the 2m project.

Mr Finnan told the Leinster Express that following meetings with Failte Ireland he thinks Laois is better off in a tourism brand related to history.

Laois tourist attractions are more historically related which ties in more with Irelands Ancient East.

The new plan is based on the Shannon corridor and my view is that it is a fabulous new brand, he said.

When asked if he thought that the new bike trail in the Slieve Bloom Mountains could be part of the greenways included in the new Hidden Heartlands plan in the future, Mr Finnan said that it has potential but the consensus during meetings with Failte Ireland was that Laois was best placed in a more developed brand.

Irelands Hidden Heartlands will cover the heart of the country, from Leitrim down to East Clare and extending through Longford, Roscommon, East Galway, as well as parts of Westmeath, Cavan, North Tipperary and Offaly.

Offaly, Tipperary and Westmeath are also part of Ireland's Ancient East and will benefit from both branding campaigns.

The River Shannon will be a central focus of the brand with a Shannon Master Plan currently being developed by Failte Ireland in partnership with Waterways Ireland.

The Beara Breifne Way, which spans from the Beara Peninsula in Co. Cork to Blacklion in Co. Cavan will offer a compelling walking experience developed to international standards under the Hidden Heartlands brand.

It is planned that a series of food networks and trails will also be developed as part of the new brand.

Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross T.D launched Irelands Hidden Heartlands in Athlone today.

Im delighted to launch Irelands Hidden Heartlands  a new brand which will significantly enhance the Midlands as a tourism experience and bring growth and jobs to the whole region.

"We have always been committed to ensuring that Irelands success as a world-class tourist destination is shared among the regions.

"Some of the countrys finest natural assets are in the Midlands, including spectacular lakes, walkways and blueways.

Irelands Hidden Heartlands will bring these gems to life, offering a unique experience to both domestic and international visitors," he said.

Minister of State for the Office of Public Works, Kevin Boxer Moran T.D. from Westmeath was happy with the plan which he said has been in the pipeline for two years.

Irelands Hidden Heartlands will transform the Midlands and how it is positioned to tourists. Ive heard first-hand from people and businesses across the region about the major potential this area has to attract visitors and the willingness there is to grow tourism.

It is fantastic at last to have a tailored brand for the Midlands as this is just what we needed to develop local tourism and unite our visitor experiences behind an offering of scale," he said.

Invisible Laois left out of new Failte Ireland midlands tourism plan Ireland's Hidden Heartlands.

'Victory' claimed in battle against Laois wind farm planned by State-owned forestry firm.

Construction of Coillte's Slieve Bloom Bike Trail about to begin.This week as part of Bord Bias Marketplace International, over 50 international food buyers visited Kildare to meet with leading businesses in the county.

Meat processors, Kildare Chilling Company, hosted 21 buyers from Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, South East Asia, Germany and North America. From there, they visited the ICBF Progeny Test Centre in Tully which holds information on all the animals in the national herd. In Naas, 24 Chinese dairy buyers visited the Kerry PLC Innovation Centre while Lily OBriens in Newbridge hosted 13 grocery buyers from the Middle East.

The sector-focused itineraries will allow buyers to see Irish farms, factories, retail stores and manufacturing facilities all around the country to showcase the very best of the Irish food and drink industry.

The buyers include representatives from Australia, Algeria, Bahrain, China, Indonesia, UAE, Japan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. Interest from UK buyers has remained strong, with close to 50 in attendance. The registered buyers represent every sector of the industry including for dairy, beef, lamb, pigmeat, alcohol, seafood, prepared foods, grocery, bakery, confectionary & snacks and specialty foods.

In total, almost 550 food buyers, from 50 countries around the world, will participate in the week-long trade development event, the largest of its kind ever to take place in Ireland. Bord Bia is targeting 40 million worth of new business as a direct result of this years event.

Today (Thursday) all international visitors will reconvene in the RDS Dublin, for meetings with 185 Irish food companies.About 1,000 homes will be affected by the likely round of the planned Naas ring road.

The new road, estimated to cost 10.5m, will provide a link between Dublin Road and Blessington road. This route, together with the existing ring roads, will provide an orbital by-pass of the town. Its estimated that 16,000 vehicles will use the route on a daily basis. However, residents living in the Dublin Road area are objecting on the basis that the routes will bring more traffic closer to their homes.

Kildare County Council is considering three routes. Two (1 and 2) start at the entrance to the Monread residential area and pass on the Naas Racecourse side of The Gallops, Kings Court and Woodlands, exiting between Elmwood and AIB centre on Blessington Road.

Another route (known as route 6), which is 1-1.5kms longer, is proposed to leave Dublin Road on the town side of the entrance to Naas Industrial Estate and pass on the opposite side of racecourse, shaving off part of the track and eventually exiting at Blessington Road on the Blessington side of Oak Glade.

Christine OSullivan, a resident of Racecourse Gate, near the racecourse, argues that routes 1 and 2 are based on a development plan that is over twenty years old.

Apart from the residential areas closest to the where the route will start, Ms. OSullivan said that Sundays Well, MountainView, Woodlands, Bru na Riogh and Gleann na Riogh are also affected. The inner relief road would be located at a four way junction and therefore the traffic build-up at the traffic lights (at the racecourse entrance) would be substantial as is evidenced on race days when the lights are turned off and a garda helps the flow of traffic.

Given the proximity of of routes 1 and 2 to housing areas, strict speed limits would have to apply and speed ramps may be necessary because of the number of children living there, said Ms. OSullivan.

She also suggested that exits from various estates will mean that there will be no free flow of traffic.

Therefore the so-called inner relief road would not provide much relief to the person wishing to avoid traffic and arrive home quickly, added Ms. OSullivan.

She also said there are concerns about noise, air pollution and the dangers of putting a main road through residential estates.

Ms. OSullivan said routes 1 or 2 dont actually provide a solution to the traffic build up but will create further problems and increase the traffic in the town.

SEE ALSO: Residents object to Naas ring road route

SEE ALSO: Residents opposition to massive housing plan in Maynooth

SEE ALSO: Brannoxtown primary school near Naas closesAlthough the concept of heritage is more associated with that which is considered to be ancient, unused and unusable, many of Kildares local churches, still used daily and weekly, are of an age that they can be considered heritage.

More to the point, they are a part of our heritage that is in need of maintenance and preservation.

That is the case in Kilcullen where, for instance, the stained glass windows in the Church of the Sacred Heart were created by Joshua Clarke, the father of the world-famous stained glass master Harry Clarke.

It was built in 1872 and was designed by JJ McCarthy, who designed many of Irelands churches in that era, after Catholic Emancipation.

The church was built when John Harvey Lewis of nearby Castlemartin Estate donated the land for it and donated a sum of 300 to the project.

The then Cardinal Cullen donated 100 on behalf of the diocese. The building cost a total of 8,300 which was an enormous amount at that time, considering it was only 25 to 40 years after the famine and there was very little money around.

The organ in the church is a John White, again a well known designer and the altar was made by the renowned church sculptor William Pearse, father of the 1916 Rising leader Padraig Pearse.

And all of the above are starting to show their age, which is heading for 145 years.

In recent times, a member of Kilcullens Parish Council, Peter Moloney wrote and presented a document called Kilcullen Parish Going Forward 2017 and Beyond, a blueprint for the preservation of the critical elements of heritage in the church, and of course the church itself.

Naturally, the question of funding preservation had to be addressed and Mr Moloney does so in the opening paragraph: The first thing we need to do is to extend the finance committee. At the moment we (the Pastoral Committee) do not have a proper finance committee in place.

From there, he proposes the establishment of Heritage Fund Committee in order to raise funds for the roof and other areas of the church that require attention.

Mr Moloney believes the roof needs to be the number one priority.

After that he believes that the parochial house should be restored, noting that it is a very important listed building which should be restored.

He recommends that choirs of the parish should be developed in addition to the restoration of the John White organ.

The nearby Gormanstown Church also requires work, including painting the inside, replacing the Stations of the Cross, some attention to the big window at the rear of the Church and replacement of pews.

Mr Moloneys detailed proposal concludes with the need to communicate and agree a plan that is beneficial to the people of Kilcullen and not to some building developer and his associates.

He believed that the laity will need to take charge and pride in these wonderful listed buildings that are in our care for present and future generations.

He warns: We do not have the right to sell, or do away with the efforts of our previous generations, especially the people who put these wonderful buildings and interior furnishings in place back in 1872 to 1900.A District Court case was briefly adjourned at Naas yesterday when a man charged with trespass and public disorder at a west Kildare business went down on his knees before the judge.

The incident began when the case of Zydrunas Dismonas (36), of 25 St Patricks Street, Edenderry, was called at the April 11 sitting of the court.

He was charged with public order and trespass at the Carbury Mushroom plant earlier that day and brief evidence of his charging was given by Garda Michael OConnell from Carbury Garda Station.

Mr Dismonas then went down on his knees, started to wave his arms about, and said: I am going to stay on my knees.

Judge Desmond Zaidan adjourned the case briefly, telling solicitor, Seamus Boyle that if he wanted his client assessed in the Central Mental Hospital, he could do that.

The judge said that the defendants demeanor towards the bench was very, very aggressive...if looks could kill...it was either an act or something was seriously wrong.

When the case resumed, Mr Boyle said then he had no concern about Mr Dismonass mental health after talking to him.

His client apologised for his behaviour explaining that he takes anti-depressants and had not taken his medication that day, as he had been custody.

Garda OConnell said there was no objection to bail but with conditions, including staying out of Derrinturn.

The Garda said that the defendants alleged behaviour at the mushroom factory had been very intimidating after an issue over pay.

Judge Zaidan said if the mushroom company got any calls or contact from Mr Dismonas, that would be considered a breach of bail.Two volunteers who work at the NCBI shop in Celbridge, have been presented with achievement certificates at a lunch in the charity HQ.

Kitty Kiernan from Maynooth and Bernie Gough from Celbridge have been volunteering with the National Council for the Blind of Ireland, (NCBI) which works for people with sight loss, for the past seven years.

NCBI said there are 2,112 people with sight loss in county Kildare. The organisation has eight shops in the county.

Speaking at a lunch on April 11, to celebrate some of NCBIs 700 strong volunteer force, Finbarr Roche, NCBI Head of Property and Retail, said that without their help the NCBI simply couldnt open its doors.

He told volunteers:  You are the lifeblood of the NCBI, you keep the wheels moving. Not only do you give your time, energy and skills for free, you bring a whole new level of enthusiasm and dedication to our organisation. We are totally indebted to you all, and NCBI is able to do what it does as a result of your generosity.

Kitty and Bernie both said that working for the NCBI is a pleasure and a joy and we get back so much more than we give.

Kitty said: I worked in retail for years so it was a natural fit for me to volunteer with the NCBI shop, I love it, we are a great team and we have great fun. We are always busy and I think people know and appreciate the hard work that the NCBI does. It truly offers a great service.

Bernie said she worked in a supermarket for 16 years and was used to being busy and active.

She said: I felt I just had to get back out there doing something again. I approached the NCBI and seven happy years later I am still there. I love the camaraderie, we have great customers and donors. People are so generous and people always comment on how good the shop is. They are amazed at the quality of the stock. Both said the time they give to the NCBI is time well spentA spokesperson for the new owner of Kildare's famous sinking pub has said that it is due to be fully sunk in 236 years time.

Jim Roche, no relation to the previous Roche family, was speaking on behalf of the new owners of Rochess of Donadea, at Naas District Court on April 11.

Cloudglen Ltd, with an address at Palmerstown House, Palmerstown, Dublin 20, which was set up on January 12 last by Louis Fitzgerald and James Roche, was seeking, and was granted, an ad interim transfer of the pub licence to it.

The premises, dating back to the late 1800s, is near Derryvarogue bog at Donadea.

Conal Boyce, solicitor, representing Cloudglen Ltd, said Roches was a famous landmark.

Judge Desmond Zaidan asked if this was the pub sinking into the ground. How long has it to go? he asked.

Jim Roche replied it would disappear in 236 years time.

Mr Roche said they took charge three to four weeks previously, of the pub, which the court heard, has a 13 million public liability insurance.

Judge Zaidan asked rhetorically if the pub had not offended any EU laws on bogs. Mr Boyce said it was worth a visit.

The court heard that the previous owner had been in place for seven and a half years. A famous former owner, Mrs Roche, took over in 1943.

Mr Roche said the pub has had a licence for 200 years.

Mr Boyce said the court did not hear of it much because there are no breaking of laws there.

Asked about his experience of the pub trade, Mr Roche said he has been behind a bar since the age of eight.The Aidan OBrien trained Capri will begin his season at Naas tomorrow, Friday 13 in the Group 3 Toals.com Bookmakers Alleged Stakes.

The hugely talented colt is one of five declarations for the valuable contest which is the feature race on a seven race card beginning at 1.35pm.

World class jockey Ryan Moore will be in Naas to ride the dual Classic winner Capri who memorably defeated subsequent Champion Stakes winner Cracksman when winning the Irish Derby at the Curragh last year and will be joined by stablemates Cliffs Of Moher and Yucatan tomorrow afternoon. Completing the five runner field is the Ger Lyons trained Cannonball and the Jessica Harrington trained Beautiful Morning.

Also on this rescheduled card is the Group 3 Gladness Stakes with Willie McCreerys Downforce looking for a second notable victory in the space of six days having won at Navan on Saturday. A field of six will run in the 60,000 race including Group 3 winning British raider Larchmont Lad who will represent trainer David OMeara and owners Cheveley Park Stud. Dermot Weld has declared last months Lodge Park Stud EBF Park Express Stakes winner Making Light and the highly rated Psychedelic Funk adds plenty of intrigue to a fascinating race which is completed by Aidan OBriens War Secretary and the Adrian Keatley trained Simmie.

Willie McCreery said; The weather has worked out quite well for Downforce because it has meant he was able to run at Navan last weekend and run again at Naas on Friday. He has come out of the race well and now that he can take in both races we felt weve nothing to lose so we should take our chance. Navan was over five furlongs but I would say seven-furlongs is his best trip so Im looking forward to him running.

Toals.com Bookmakers is one of the most progressively family-run bookmaker firms and continue to offer customers with cutting-edge technology and best bookmaking services. Toals Bookmakers was established in 1932 and have 49 ultra-modern branches in Northern Ireland.

Gates open tomorrow at 12:15pm and the first race goes to post at 1:35pm. Naas have recently launched their new Golden Ticket, providing racegoers with excellent value for money. The Golden Ticket costs 30 and includes admission, 5 bet, 10 food voucher, 5 Drinks voucher and a racecard. Visit naasracecourse.com for more information on hospitality packages.A massive fundraising drive has been launched to a ensure a Leitrim man, who sustained life-changing injuries in a freak gym accident in 2016, regains his independence.

32-year-old self-confessed fitness fanatic, Andrew O'Malley was left paralysed after a freak accident while exercising in December 2016.

The accident resulted in damage to his C3 neck vertebrae, severing Andrews spinal cord and leaving him only able to move his head, neck and part of his shoulders.

After initial treatment in Sligo University Hospital he was moved to the Mater Hospital in Dublin and then, transferred to the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dun Laoghaire on June 14, 2017.

Andrew, who grew up just a few miles outside of Mohill, then began the process of preparing for his discharge planned for the following September. However he remains in the NRH nearly 7 months after his discharge date because there is simply nowhere for him to go.

Despite the number of young people who suffer catastrophic spinal injuries in this country, there is no residential nursing home for young people to move to on their discharge.

Unless their families have the ability to provide highly specialised, expensive care in their own homes, young people are often forced to move into nursing homes which are specifically designed for geriatric patients, not young people like Andrew, who want to be able to live as independently as possible.

Andrew's injury has resulted in seriously weakened lungs and he is very susceptible to chest infections and requires regular medical intervention to clear his airways. As part of his treatment he has a tracheotomy for emergency intervention.

Andrew also has autonomic dysreflexia, a condition which develops in those with spinal court injuries resulting in acute, uncontrolled high blood pressure. Andrew's swallow reflex is also very weak and his windpipe does not always close when he swallows. Because of this there is potential that he will choke on food or even his own saliva.

Andrew's parents are in their 70s and are unable to provide the highly specialised care he needs and, further complicating matters is the fact that Andrew's medical needs are such that, to date, no nursing home has come forward to say it is prepared to take on Andrew's care.

He has effectively been left stranded in the National Rehabilitation Hospital.

As a result of his effective 'discharge' his access to supports such as physiotherapy has also been curtailed. Prior to discharge he was getting more than 6 hours of physiotherapy a week, now he gets just 1.5 hours.

An application has been approved for funding for accommodation under the Fair Deal Nursing Scheme, but the family are still waiting for a placement.

Andrew and his family are, understandably frustrated by the situation, but Andrew remains hopeful that he will find a place in suitable accommodation and is determined to regain his independence.

Speaking to the Leitrim Observer through his family, Andrew said he remains extremely hopeful for the future.

At the time of the accident he had been due to start a course in Tourism and Hospitality and he said that he hopes to return to college and eventually on to full-time work. He dreams of finding somewhere he can live as independently as possible and is focused on reaching his fullest potential, regardless of the challenges he faces.

Andrew's sister, Emma McCabe, said their family had been devastated by Andrew's injury, but were amazed at his positivity and determination to take back control over his life.

He has remained so positive all along. We dont know how he does it. We should be the ones being positive for him and dragging him along with us but the reality is that it is Andrew who is the positive one, hes convicting us he will get back to normal. It will be a new version of normal, but hes determined to get back out there, to live a full life.

She says the real frustration has been that, although Andrew is entitled to receive support and accommodation, this still hasn't become a reality.

He's really stuck at the moment. It is so frustrating, admitted Emma.

He is entitled to all these things but he hasn't been given them. He is still at the National Rehabilitation Hospital, where the staff are wonderful, but he wants to move to the next stage, to get a place where he has privacy and the services he needs to get some real independence back. That's what he wants, that's what we want for him.

A gofundme page - https://www.gofundme.com/andrewomalley - has been set up and has already raised 22,625 in just 29 days towards providing much needed technology, physio and other therapies that Andrew will require going forward.

Emma said the gym where he sustained his injury had no insurance and is now closed with the owner allegedly leaving the country, closing off the avenue of compensation.

However, the sheer volume of donations and kind messages of support following the launch of the gofundme page has stunned the family.

They (the messages and donations) are really doing Andrew the world of good, said Emma.

For him to know that so many people out there are supporting him, are willing him on... it has made a huge difference to us all.

Last week Andrew was interviewed for Prime Time and his story has also featured in a number of national media outlets.

The HSE has confirmed that an application for Fair Deal Nursing home funding has been approved however due to his considerable care needs the only service locations available to accept him requires a nursing home 'top up' payment, said the HSE.

The HSE said two service options are being considered for Andrew and added they are progressing the purchase of a motorised wheelchair for Andrew.Recent misinformation about the Western Rail Corridor is damaging to the West of Ireland and does absolutely nothing to progress plans for quality public transport here, Leitrim Councillor John McCartin has said.

McCartin hit back at those who are attacking the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in relation to the Western Rail Corridor.

Lets look at the facts, in the best interests of everyone who wants good public transport in The West of Ireland.

The inclusion of capital infrastructure projects on the European Commissions Trans-European Transport Network (Ten-T) had no impact on whether they were funded by the Government at the time.

If successful, Ireland still would have been required to cover the vast majority of the cost of the projects, as the EU funding would have only covered a minority element.

Thanks to the crippling recession experienced by this country, we simply did not have the resources at that stage to commit to that level of investment. We were emerging from the worst economic crash in our history and Fine Gael was attempting to stabilise the ship, balance the books and get the economy growing again.

The irony that some of those involved with the party who caused that crash, are now attacking the current Government over this issue is remarkable.

In spite of the very limited resources at the disposal of the Fine Gael Labour Government at the time, the then Minister for Transport, Leo Varadkar initiated the Gort to Tuam motorway, the biggest ever infrastructure project in the west.

This is just one part of the Atlantic Road Corridor proposed in the Governments development plan, Project Ireland 2040, which will be extended further to Limerick and Cork via the M20.

Project Ireland also proposes countless other significant projects in the between now and 2040, which will benefit communities and businesses all across the west of Ireland.

It was also Minister Varadkar who Initiated the programme to realign the N16 and awarded the first 1m for the project to Leitrim County Council in 2012.

By contrast, our Fianna Fail deputies allowed the greatest boom in the history of the state to pass without any major infrastructural investment in the north west of the country.Aldi has announced it is seeking applications from County Leitrims small to medium Irish food and drink producers to enter their products to win a place on its new Grow with Aldi supplier development programme.

Aldi is investing 500,000 in the new programme to give up-and-coming Irish food and drink companies the chance to supply all 130 Aldi stores during a special Irish Food Market promotion in August 2018, and potentially secure a permanent place on its shelves with a long-term contract.

Aldi will select up to 50 of Irelands and County Leitrims best new artisan products to take part in the promotion, with each supplier providing a guaranteed volume of their product. Up to five of the products will be given the opportunity to become core line Aldi listed products, winning a contract to be sold in Aldis Irish stores year-round.

Developed in partnership with Bord Bia, Grow with Aldi has been designed to help small to medium Irish food and drink businesses secure a retail listing. Participants will receive tailored mentoring and bespoke workshops with Aldi buyers and Bord Bia technical experts, teaching them the skills to help grow and develop their product and business.

Speaking at the launch, Giles Hurley, Group Managing Director Aldi Ireland, said: We know there are fantastic products from emerging businesses in County Leitrim and we want to make it easier for them to get our shelves.

We have always led the way with Irish sourcing and supporting Irish food and drink companies, having developed long-term partnerships with over 175 Irish suppliers throughout the country. Last year we increased our support for small Irish suppliers by significantly reducing their payment terms.

Our Grow with Aldi supplier development programme is the next step in our commitment to buying Irish. For a lot of small food and drink businesses, trying to secure a listing with a major retailer puts huge pressure on their team.

Food and drink companies in Ireland with ambitions to take their product from concept to shelf and see it stocked in Aldis 130 Irish stores can apply for the Grow with Aldi supplier development programme by contacting grow@aldi.ie

Further details are available at www.aldi.ie/growNorth Leitrim County Councillor, Justin Warnock has described the inclusion of North Leitrim in the Ireland's Hidden Heartlands tourism region as "completely wrong" and "baffling".

Earlier today Failte Ireland unveiled Ireland's new Regional Experience Brand - Ireland's Hidden Heartlands - an area which a runs from Leitrim's coastline through East Clare, Roscommon, East Galway, as well as parts of Westmeath, Cavan, North Tipperary and Offaly.

The remaining parts of the country have been divided up under three other tourism brands namely Dublin; Ireland's Ancient East and The Wild Atlantic Way Region.

Cllr Warnock said that the decision to not to include any part of Co Leitrim in the Wild Atlantic Way tourism region, despite the fact that the route runs through North Leitrim "just doesn't make any sense".

Speaking to www.leitrimobserver.ie this afternoon, Cllr Warnock said he was "disgusted and angry" that north Leitrim has been "effectively cut off from its natural hinterland, the Wild Atlantic Way".

"When you look at the map of the new tourism areas you see the Wild Atlantic Way running through North Leitrim but insofar as promotion of the area is concerned, we've been lumped in with the midlands," he observed.

"I can't for the life of me understand the thinking behind this. The majority, if not all, of each county the Atlantic Way passes through, is included, in the Wild Atlantic Way Region brand. All counties that is, with the exception of Leitrim.

"Four years ago the Wild Atlantic Way was launched and at that time we had to fight to have Leitrim included on the maps. Now, here we are once again, cut off from the very tourism area we need to promote North Leitrim. It is baffling.

"When you see that all of Donegal and most of Sligo has been included in the Wild Atlantic Way tourism area and North Leitrim hasn't, it just doesn't make any sense. Who made this decision to put Leitrim in the Hidden Heartlands area with the rest of the midlands? The Hidden Heartlands area may have some relevance for south Leitrim because of the Shannon, but it has no relevance all all to North Leitrim."

Cllr Warnock said serious questions needed to be asked about the rationale behind this decision.

"Do Failte Ireland think North Leitrim has nothing to offer tourists coming to visit the Wild Atlantic Way? This is crazy. Those of us in the north of the county have been working to ensure that the tourism potential of the area is realised. The only way we can do that is for North Leitrim to be in the Wild Atlantic Way Region. That is where our potential lies. That is where we can grow and develop our services. The Wild Atlantic Way is the only way we will bring tourists to North Leitrim.

"There is nothing, no real link for North Leitrim to be in the Hidden Heartlands area. What possible draw can there be for tourists to move north from Carrick-on-Shannon along the R280 to see all we have to offer. The N15 is the obvious route for tourists to move into North Leitrim and the Wild Atlantic Way Region is the only tourism area North Leitrim should be in."The fourth Sligo Engineering Expo is coming to the Knocknarea Arena, IT Sligo on Thursday, May 3, between 10am  7pm. Admission is free.

The Engineering Expo is an exciting collaboration between IT Sligo and industry that provides an interactive, information sharing day which is open to the public and openly encourages public engagement throughout the event.

The Expo, which is headline sponsored by AbbVie, is a chance to see the superheroes of engineering display innovative, cutting-edge technologies to inspire future generations of engineers.

How do robots work? Are comic book heroes such as Iron Man really possible? Can a car transform? How is Virtual Reality used in the real world? How are engineering technologies being used in industries such as Manufacturing, Medical Devices, Pharmaceutical, Precision and Tool Making Engineering, Agricultural, Construction, ICT and Food Industries?

At the Sligo Engineering Expo, as well as interactive demonstrations, you will be able to gain career path information and talk with captains of industry, indigenous industry leaders and companies of all sizes from across Ireland.

Bernard Murray, Engineering Manager with AbbVie in Ballytivnan, said: As a global company, we offer opportunities for engineers in automation, manufacturing, controls, quality, science and technology, metrology and validation disciplines at locations all over the world. Locally, we are mindful of the importance of connecting with Engineering Students at Sligo IT to offer them an understanding of the technologies and capabilities of our Ballytivnan site.

Developing a pipeline of potential employees who would be suitable to join, support and optimise our work at all sites is critical to the future success of our organisation, clients and our patients. It is important we support the North West community where we can by ensuring we also have a local focus when we concentrate on identifying this future talent.

Some 45 industry representatives will be at the event, including SL Controls; Abbott; Kilcawley Construction; Ward Automation, JFC Manufacturing; Kuka Robotics; and GW Plastics. And IT Sligo students will also demonstrate final year projects in Mechanical, Mechatronic, Precision and Civil Engineering as well as Construction, Electronics and Computing.

Una Parsons, Head of the School Engineering and Design at IT Sligo believes the Expo is unique and a fantastic opportunity to see an extensive range of activities on show that include student projects, industry exhibits and a variety of interactive activities. This major event is aimed to inspire future engineers, showcase our graduates, provide job opportunities, and promote the extensive range of engineering and technology employment in the North West.

To find out more, visit www.itsligo.ie/ engineeringexpoPlease allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content.

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Support our mission and join our community now.We're sorry that the ministry you were looking for is no longer available on LightSource.com. However, below are some great ministries that offer related content. Enjoy the inspiration, encouragement, and Biblical challenge from these LightSource.com ministry partners!THE TOP garda leading two murder probes in Limerick city has said that he is very satisfied with the progress of probes, months after they were both launched.

This Saturday will mark four months since elderly widow Rose Hanrahan was murdered in her home in Thomondgate on December 14. No individual has been arrested in connection with this investigation.

It is understood that more than 2,000 individuals have been interviewed by Mayorstone and Henry Street gardai during the extensive investigation.

Martin Clancy was found dead in his apartment on Little OCurry Street on January 7, and two men were arrested in connection with his murder.

Two men, aged in their mid-20s and early-40s, were arrested on January 10 in connection with the murder. The man in his 40s was arrested in suspicion of withholding information from gardai. They were both released on January 12.

Asked about the progress of the 78-year-old womans murder inquiry, Superintendent Derek Smart said: The investigation is very much still to the fore and it is still being actively investigated, and I am very satisfied with the direction in which that investigation is going.

Supt Smart said the file for the Director of Public Prosecutions is almost complete in relation to the murder of Martin Clancy, aged 45.

Separately, a file is to be prepared for the murder of 23-year-old Jamie Higgins, who was stabbed to death at Shannon Knights night club in the early hours of March 18.

Ennis gardai arrested a man, 19, who was later released without charge.LIMERICK'S Adare Manor has been featured in a Vogue magazine travel article which described the property as unapologetically grand and efficient.

The travel feature was done by Vogue writer Jo Rodgers, who stayed in Adare for several days to review the local resort.

While in West Limerick, the writer also visited Clonshire Equestrian Centre, which she described as an excellent independent stable.

My husband and I spend one of the best mornings of our trip here riding in the rain, squelching through fields on two Irish Hunters, she wrote.

Adare Manor is an ambitious property, unapologetically grand and efficient. Take a tour inside here. https://t.co/ZWSZzwZvB3  Vogue Magazine (@voguemagazine) April 5, 2018

Award-winning cottage restaurant 1826 Adare was also dubbed a terrific restaurant in the piece.

The view through the Adare Manor windows is the winning feature, writes the author  with the view across the Maigue undeniably pretty.

The positive review concludes that luxury fans will not want to leave.

US Vogue is one of the most influential lifestyle publications in the world.WHEN I met with Eva Birdthistle and Simon Thompson in a local cafe just over a year ago, they were in the early stages of creating a new festival for Limerick city.

The duo, along with a number of other volunteers, spoke with energy and enthusiasm about the new Limerick Fringe festival which premiered in the city in 2017.

A year has passed and the second year of Limerick Fringe has now been put to bed after a great weekend.

Credit where credit is due - the team of organisers at the festival have created a cultural animal that most certainly deserves recognition as one of Limericks most exciting new additions in terms of potential and audience development.

Just to put it in perspective, here is just a little of what Limerick Fringe achieved last week. Some 79 performances took place across four days in our city. Six key venues were engaged. The diversity of the Fringe offering included cabaret, comedy, dance, music, spoken word, theatre, family events and street performances.

Limerick Fringe welcomed performers from the USA, Brazil, Iran, Denmark, Catalonia, Belgium, Poland and the UK, as well as Dublin, Galway, Tipperary, Clare and Limerick.

Limerick Fringe in the space of just over a year has achieved phenomenal recognition. How often do you see the UK Times newspaper dedicating a three page summary to a Limerick festivals offer?

Nationally we saw TV3, the Irish Times and the Sunday Times giving it column inches. Local media were equally supportive.

At Dolans on Saturday evening the Fringe organising team and participants in the festival gathered to attend a cabaret finale of the festival which featured Limericks Brad Pitt Light orchestra.

There was a palpable sense of achievement in the room. Yes, there were dark eyes, weary bodies and frazzled brains.

But what was clear looking from afar was that this was a group of people who had invested countless man hours in a voluntary capacity to create something culturally special in our city.

When I spoke to the team in January 2017, Simon told me: We didnt set out with an idea and wait until we received funding.

We are developing a product first and what happens later in terms of funding or sponsorship  well thats for another day, he outlined.

That day has now come. The Limerick Fringe team have proved to our city that they can attract a wide range of participants over a three-day period.

They have proved that they can get it right when it comes to promotional materials, website design, social media, marketing and PR.

They have proved that Limerick talent has the wherewithal to organise, project manage and stage manage a logistically challenging three-day cultural festival.

It is important to acknowledge that the past eight years have been an incredibly tough time for cultural practitioners in our country.

The economic recession led to enormous cutbacks in terms of cultural funding.

There can be no doubt that a legacy of our year as National City of Culture in 2014 led to the creation of the spirit of can-do that permeates our citys cultural practitioners today.

Now that we have emerged from the economic cesspit of recent years it is time for the local business community, multinationals and other bodies to recognise what volunteer-driven festivals like Limerick Fringe can bring to our city.

I would encourage business leaders out there to take a quick look at the sponsor section of the Edinburgh Fringe to get an idea of the wide range of sectors who back the festival.

Ok, Edinburgh is big act to follow but there is no reason why the sponsorship model cannot be taken as a blueprint to ensure the continued development of Limerick Fringe.

Limerick Fringe is here to stay. The team have proved their worth. The volunteers have proved their energy. The audiences have proved their interest.

The next piece of the puzzle is that the bigger players across the Limerick business community now recognise the value of Limerick Fringe in terms of our citys brand, our cultural offering and the value offered to employees and citizens of our city.

If Limerick Fringe continues to develop at the rate it has in just over 12 months, the animal they have created could become a very welcome monster.

Key appointments can drive Kings Island renaissance

Some weeks ago the CEO of Limerick Civic Trust David OBrien talked me through some of the works being undertaken by Limerick Civic Trust at present.

One that stood out was their plans to create a new military museum located in the former St Munchins Church on Kings Island.

The Kings Island part of the city is witnessing what might be considered a renaissance in terms of the personnel now in place to run some of the key tourism attractions in the area.

David OBrien took up the reins of Limerick Civic Trust not too long ago.

Since his appointment we have seen Niall OCallaghan (formerly of the IDA) heading up Shannon Heritage.

Most recently we have seen Niall J Sloane appointed to the role of Dean at St Marys Cathedral and Jill Cousins appointed as director of the Hunt Museum.

These appointments are not only bringing a fresh approach to each individual institution but also offering a new opportunity for cross collaboration as Limerick develops its tourism strategy.

It is both timely and welcoming that the Kings Island/Nicholas Street area of the city is already benefiting from the energy being brought to the table by these new cultural leaders and I wish them all well.THE full, untold story of the life and death of Limerick man Jason Corbett is set to be told by his sister in a new book detailing the behind the scenes story of his high profile murder.

My Brother Jason: The Untold Story of Jason Corbetts Life and Brutal Death, a new book written by Tracey Corbett Lynch and Irish Independent journalist Ralph Riegel, will tell the story of the life and death of the father-of-two from Janesboro who was savagely beaten to death in the bedroom of his home in August 2015.

His second wife, Molly Martens and her father Thomas, a retired FBI agent, are both currently serving life sentences of more than 20 years after they were found guilty of his murder at the home he shared with Martens in Wallburg, North Carolina.

The duo claimed to have acted in self-defence although they were uninjured.

Behind the scenes of a high-profile murder trial that gripped both Ireland and the US, his family was locked in a desperate custody battle to bring his children back to Limerick.

In My Brother Jason, Ms Corbett Lynch, who led the Justice for Jason campaign, will reveal for the first time the full and shocking story of what Molly and Tom Martens tried to get away with.

The book is expected to include full access to Jasons personal collection of letters, emails, keepsakes and photographs. Including the photograph, above, which is from the Limerick Leader archives of Jasons first day of school at Our Lady Queen of Peace.

Four sets of twins, including Jason and his brother Wayne, began school together in September 1980.

My Brother Jason, published by Gill Books, will be available from May 15.

Meanwhile, Molly Martens has avoided an extra four years being added to her murder sentence after she breached strict prison policy.

Martens is thought to have left a supervised area without the permission of the guards or failed to report a supervised visit, according to reports.

Martens and her father Thomas are expected to bring their challenge to their sentences for the murder of Jason Corbett to the North Carolina Court of Appeals by autumn. A ruling is expected by 2019.A SPECIAL contribution scheme is likely to be introduced to fund the construction of a new distributor road in County Limerick.

Maria Woods, a senior planner with Limerick City and County Council, has revealed there is likely to be a 5m shortfall in funding for the Mungret project which will open up around 26 hectares of land for development.

Briefing members of the Economic Development, Enterprise and Planning SPC, Ms Woods said while government funding from the Local Infrastructure Housing Activation Fund (LIHAF) has been approved, further monies will be needed.

Details of the proposed scheme are being finalised and its expected there will be public consultation later this month.

Around 850 new homes are to be built in the area and it is expected that any developer will be required to pay a levy of between 2,500 and 3,000 per house.

Cllr James Collins says the proposal to introduce a special contribution scheme will mean house-buyers will have to pay more.

Its unfortunate that we are going to drive up the price of houses but, I suppose, we are between a rock and a hard place, he said, adding that it might put the cost of houses beyond the reach of potential buyers.

Cllr Daniel Butler called on any future developers not to pass the levy on given that they will not have to fund the cost of the distributor road.

Without LIHAF the houses would be dearer, he said, adding it is essential that the road is built as soon as possible.

Separately, Ms Woods confirmed that negotiations are continuing with landowners along the route of the proposed distributor road.

When quizzed by councillors about the progress, she only confirmed there are ongoing discussions and that the council has not considered Compulsory Purchase Orders to date.

A master plan for the development of the 26 hectares in Mungret is currently being drawn up by Limerick 2030 on behalf of the local authority.THE RUSSIAN company that owns Aughinish Alumina in Limerick has been plunged into a global economic storm, following the imposition of severe sanctions by the US last Friday.

And the hundreds of workers at the Askeaton-based plant are now facing uncertainty about the future of the company, UC Rusal, as it is engulfed in a global trade crisis.

The controlling owner of UC Rusal, Oleg Deripaska, was targeted in the sanctions list, announced by the US Treasury Department, along with six other oligarchs. The news caused shares in the company to dive to record lows.

On Monday, Rusal shed half of its value on the Hong Kong stock market, as investors jumped ship.

A Government spokesperson here said that the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation is keeping the situation under review and, together with IDA Ireland, is working closely with the company.

The minister spoke with the CEO of Aughinish Alumina this morning but ultimately this is a global situation that is extremely fluid and continues to develop.

The US action effectively bans American companies or individuals from doing business with Rusal, which is the second biggest Aluminium producer in the world, and the biggest outside China.

It is not yet known whether there have been any effect on suppliers to the plant, which, if American, would no longer be able to trade with Rusal in most circumstances.

The company issued a statement, saying that it is continuting to evaluate the impact of the sanctions. Rusals initial assessment is that it is highly likely that the sanctions would be materially adverse to the business and prospects of the group, it continued. It warned shareholders and potential investors to exercise extreme caution.

The London Metal Exchange has distanced itself from Rusal, and at least two of the companys biggest customers are reported to be reviewing their contracts.

Swiss trader Glencore, which owns shares in Rusal and is one of its major customers, said it was evaluating its contracts. The CEO of Glencore, Ivan Glasenberg, this week stepped down from his role as a director at Rusal.

County Limerick TD Niall Collins called for action from the Government in the aftermath of the sanctions.

The Government and the Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation must act quickly to ensure that the 450 jobs at the Aughinish site are protected in so far as possible. This is a very fluid situation and the protection of these 450 valuable jobs is of huge importance, along with the almost 250 contractors who also work on site.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Rusal website went down, only coming back online the following day.

In total, the US list targeted seven Russian oligarchs and 12 companies they own or control, as well as 17 senior Russian government officials, and a state-owned Russian weapons trading company and its subsidiary, a Russian bank.

Announcing the measures, US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the Russian government operates for the disproportionate benefit of oligarchs and government elites and engages in a range of malign activity around the globe, including continuing to occupy Crimea and instigate violence in eastern Ukraine, supplying the Assad regime with material and weaponry as they bomb their own civilians, attempting to subvert Western democracies, and malicious cyber activities.

He continued that Russian oligarchs and elites who profit from this corrupt system will no longer be insulated from the consequences of their governments destabilizing activities.

Deripaska and his assets have been hardest hit, with Rusal making headlines across the world as the biggest victim of the sanctions. The oligarch owns the controlling share, nearly 50 percent, of Rusal through his company EN+.LIMERICK Chronicle historian Sharon Slater has been chosen as the Heritage Councils Heritage Hero of 2017 this Thursday.

Sharon, who was selected out of a long-list of 122 entries, received the accolade at the Medieval Mile Museum in Dublin for her outstanding contribution to the protection and promotion of heritage in Ireland.

Sharon was commended for bringing history to life for the people of Limerick.

The historian, who unearths significant moments of Limericks history in the Limerick Chronicle every week, said she was in shock when she was informed of her award.

Congratulation to Sharon Slater @limerickslife Winner of Irelands #HeritageHero award for bringing history to life for the people of #Limerick #HeritageAwards pic.twitter.com/h6fX4XmMSK  Heritage Week (@HeritageWeek) April 12, 2018

They let me know that there a few people who put my name forward. I would like to thank them for taking the time to do that. Limerick history has been my passion for such a long time that I cannot remember when I wasn't interested in it.

Luckily I am standing on the shoulders of giants when it comes to history in Limerick, from John Ferrar who wrote the first history of Limerick in 1767 to the incredibly prolific historians such as Kevin Hannan and Jim Kemmy.

Luckily when I began my research too long ago to mention there were a number of helping hands to guide me along the way, without the likes of Frank Prendergast I would have stopped researching a long time ago. Limerick is unique when it comes to history and how it can be accessed, this is down to the likes of the Limerick Library, Limerick Museum and Limerick Archives who have put large portions of their collections online.

Ms Slater added: This has made my work as a historian a lot easier than it would be if I had fallen in love with the story of another city. From the coal holes to the cathedrals Limerick history is everywhere and for me it has been a pleasure to explore it.THE Belltable-bound My Left Nut is described as the true story of a Belfast boy growing up with no father to guide him, and a giant ball to weigh him down.

The play, a Prime Cut and Pan Narrans Co-production, performed by Michael Patrick and directed by Oisin Kearney who wrote it, comes to Limerick on April 19 and 20.

Set in Belfast in the late early 2000s, My Left Nut tells the true story of Belfast native Michael Patrick who developed hydrocele testis when he was 14, a condition which caused one of his testicles to start swelling.

Too embarrassed to tell his mother, he let the condition worsen for three years until he couldnt ignore it any more. By this stage it was bigger than a can of coke and his friends could see the outline of it through his trousers.

A show overflowing with awkward teenage comedy and nostalgia from the last decade, it sold out a run at the Dublin Fringe Festival, where it was nominated for The Bewleys Little Gem Award and has toured up and down the country.

It also has real heart, showing how Michael slowly comes to terms with his fathers death as he deals with his own illness.

It touches on the inability of men to talk about their problems, and on the difficulties single mothers can have in raising young boys. In sharing his tale, Michael hopes to encourage men to seek help for their problems and remove stigma from such issues.

The play was originally developed through the Show in a Bag programme, run by Fishamble, The Dublin Fringe Festival, and The Irish Theatre Institute to resource theatre makers and actors.

See www.limetree theatre.ie for more details.Camelot was a mythical castled city, said to be located in Great Britain, where King Arthur held court. It was the center of the Kingdom of Logres and in Arthurian legend would become the location of the round table that held 150 knights.

French origins

Stories about King Arthur are known from at least as early as the ninth century. One of the most famous early Arthurian writers was Geoffrey of Monmouth, who lived during the first half of the 12th century. In his book, "History of the Kings of Britain," Monmouth wrote a number of stories about King Arthur and Merlin, mentioning Arthur's birth at Tintagel.

However, Monmouth  and other early Arthurian writers  made no mention of Camelot. The earliest known mention of Camelot comes briefly in a late 12th-century poem written by Chretien de Troyes, and the earliest detailed description of Camelot would emerge during the 13th century in a series of French romances we call the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate cycles.

"In the thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle, Camelot becomes the principal city of Arthur's realm and remains so in many, though certainly not all, later texts," writes a team of University of Rochester researchers working on the Camelot project.

Researcher Norris Lacy writes that the Vulgate Cycle was composed between 1215 and 1235 by an anonymous author or group of authors. "This cycle of five imposing romances can only be termed monumental, owing in equal measure to its enormous length, its complexity and literary value and influence," she writes in the preface to the five volume book "Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation" (Garland Publishing, 1993).

"The romances run to several thousand pages of text, and they offer many hundreds of characters and countless adventures intricately interlaced with one another." She also notes that the Post-Vulgate Cycle was written shortly afterward, again by an anonymous author.

In these cycles, Camelot would be discussed in detail. The text says, in translation, that it "was the city most full of adventures that ever was ..." Although located in Great Britain, its world was a place that included magicians, giants, dragons and, of course, many knights.

It's a mystery why Camelot is mentioned by Chretien de Troyes and by anonymous 13th century French writers but not by earlier writers.

Early Camelot

The story of Camelot starts with Joseph of Arimathea, who according to the Bible donated his tomb for the burial of Jesus. According to a Vulgate story, he came to Britain and then to Camelot, finding it to be an Islamic city.

"It was the richest of the Saracen cities in Great Britain, and it was so important that the pagan kings were crowned there, and its mosque was larger and taller than in any other city," part of the text reads (translation by Carol Chase).

Joseph succeeded in converting more than 1,000 of its inhabitants to Christianity. Its king, a leader named Agrestes, who is described as being the "cruelest man in the world," falsely converted. After Joseph leaves, Agrestes persecutes the Christians, eventually going completely mad and throwing himself into a fire.

Joseph then returns and sees that Camelot has converted to Christianity, "in the middle of the city he had the Church of St. Stephen the Martyr built," the text reads. This building would remain Camelot's largest church throughout the Vulgate cycles with additional, smaller, churches also being built.

Of course, Islam didn't even exist in the first century, and why the anonymous author(s) of the Vulgate cycle claimed that first century Camelot was an Islamic city is unclear.

Camelot in King Arthur's time

Camelot was described as a city surrounded by forests and meadows with plenty of open space for knightly tournaments (which were held frequently). When a tournament was held, wooden reviewing stands for the ladies and maidens would be set up, one of which is mentioned as running for half a league (about 2.5 kilometers).

The text said that Camelot was a "rich and well provided town" but offers few details as to its layout or exact size. It was small enough that during a particularly lavish court so many barons and nobles came that "not a tenth of them could be lodged in the city of Camelot, and the others found shelter in the meadowland, which was wide and beautiful, in tents and pavilions," (translation by Rupert Pickens).

The church of St. Stephen apparently contained a large burial ground as numerous knights are mentioned as being interred there.

Indeed, Camelot saw more than its share of wars in the Vulgate stories. The city's defenses were formidable, surviving a war against the Saxons and another invasion in which Cornishmen aided the Saxons. "After the bridges were raised and the gates shut, they [a group of knights] climbed high on the walls to see whether or not the Saxons were coming to storm the city, but the Saxons did not have the will," reads a section of one story (translation by Rupert Pickens).

The text says that Arthur held court in a castle (or a tower as it's sometimes called) furnished with a main courtyard, bedrooms, areas for feasting and, apparently, the Round Table. The castle is close enough to a body of water so that in one story Arthur could see a boat coming into Camelot holding what turned out to be a dead maiden.

While tournaments are held frequently, the people of Camelot also enjoyed other, less-violent, forms of recreation. In one story, Lancelot gives King Arthur a fine chess set, knowing that Queen Guinevere is a good player.

According to one story, an inscription was found saying that the quest for the Holy Grail (a quest discussed at length in the Vulgate) must begin 453 years after the resurrection of Jesus. This gives a rough date for when King Arthur supposedly ruled Camelot.

In this image depicting Arthur's Whitsun feast, the Companions of the Quest tell him of their adventures. (Image credit: Public domain)

The Round Table

The most famous aspect of Camelot is certainly its Round Table, and the Vulgate cycles discuss in detail how King Arthur came to possess it.

According to the text, it was a wedding gift from Guinevere's father, King Leodagan of Carmelide, after Arthur asked for her hand in marriage. At the time, there were already 100 knights (out of 150) who were members of the table. This led Arthur to ask the magician Merlin to choose the remaining members to bring it to full complement, emphasizing that each must be chivalrous.

When they were assembled, Merlin said that from "now on you must love one another and hold one another as dear as brothers, for from the love and sweetness of this table where you will be seated there will be born in your hearts such a great joy and friendship that you will leave your wives and children to be with one another and to spend your youth together," (translation by Martha Asher). The names of the knights were engraved on their chairs.

Merlin left one chair, called the "perilous" chair vacant, to be filled by a great knight (who would turn out to be Galahad, the son of Lancelot) at a time when the quest for the Holy Grail begins. Galahad is also responsible for pulling a sword from a stone that is meant to be pulled by the strongest knight in the world.

Needless to say, as the story goes on there are many deaths and members of the Round Table are replaced after they perish. By the end of the saga, after the death of King Arthur, nearly every Knight of the Round Table is dead.

Piousness and betrayal

In the Vulgate cycles, there appear to be two sides to Camelot. On the surface, the leaders of the city are pious; the king attends mass regularly, and makes the sign of the cross when he hears bad news. Chivalry is essential, and vespers, a form of evening prayer, are held regularly. At times, battlefield enemies are even buried with honors.

Yet some of the most senior people in the city engage in destructive behavior. Some of the stories discuss how Queen Guinevere and Lancelot (the most powerful knight of the realm) engage in an affair. When King Arthur finds out about this, he soon finds himself in a ruinous war with Lancelot.

A knight name Bors tells Lancelot that "now it's going badly; now the affair is revealed; now a war will begin that will never end, and as much as the king has loved you until now  from his heart, more than any other man who was not of his kin  so much will he hate you from now on, once he knows truly the wrong you've done with his wife," (translation by Martha Asher).

In fact, at the end of this story it is not Lancelot who kills Arthur, but the king's own son, Mordred. Entrusted with the kingdom of Logres while Arthur pursues Lancelot, he takes it over, forcing Arthur to confront him in a final battle. This betrayal of his father is foreshadowed in the appearance of an image of a dragon at St. Stephen's church that is meant to represent Mordred.

In the final battle, the king attacks Mordred, "bearing down on him with all his force (he) struck him so hard that he ripped apart the links of Mordred's hauberk and thrust the steel of his lance through his body." Mordred repays his father in kind, when "Mordred saw the seriousness of his wound he realized that it would be fatal; and he struck King Arthur so powerfully on the helmet that nothing could protect his head, and the sword cut away part of his skull," (translations by Norris Lacy).

Mordred died and King Arthur would pass away soon afterward. "Thus did the father kill the son, and the son mortally wounded the father." The final battle also claimed the lives of most of the Knights of the Round Table.

Camelot's last stand

The story of Camelot does not end quite yet. According to the Post-Vulgate Cycle this would occur sometime after the death of Arthur. A ruler named King Mark of Cornwall, whom Arthur (with help from Galahad) had once defeated in battle, takes his revenge by launching a final invasion of the Kingdom of Logres.

He reaches Camelot, whose people are now without the protection of the Knights of the Round Table. King Mark "went to Camelot, whose people were few in comparison to his own, but they were of great heart and reputation, and they said they would not let themselves be besieged. They all rode forth from the city and fought with the enemy, but they were so few that they were all soon killed, so that none escaped..." the text reads (translation by Martha Asher).

"King Mark entered the city and destroyed most of it," it continues. "When he came to Round Table and saw Galahad's place, he said, 'this was his place who in a single day destroyed me and the Saxons. For hatred of him I'll destroy the Round Table, his place first and after that all the others."

This was the end of Camelot and the Round Table. For the 13th-century readers this story may have provided a reason why Camelot did not still exist.

Camelot in later writings and culture

During the 15th century, the Arthurian legends, Camelot included, would be published in English thanks to the work of Sir Thomas Malory. His book, called "Morte d'Arthur," drew heavily on the French Vulgate cycles in addition to other Arthurian sources.

"Though little is known about Malory himself, the influence of his work has been considerable. Writers such as Alfred Tennyson, T.H. White, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and countless others have encountered the Arthurian world through some version of Malory's work and reinterpreted it in their own writing," writes researcher Kara McShane in an article republished on the website of the University of Rochester's Camelot Project.

Indeed, in the 20th century the idea of Camelot was powerful and, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the name was used as a term used to describe the years of his presidency.

Perhaps one of the most beautiful post-medieval written works on Camelot comes from an 1833 poem by Alfred Tennyson called The Lady of Shalott. The start of the 1833 version reads:

On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And thro' the field the road runs by To many-tower'd Camelot; And up and down the people go, Gazing where the lilies blow Round an island there below, The island of Shalott. Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Little breezes dusk and shiver Thro' the wave that runs for ever By the island in the river Flowing down to Camelot...A photo taken on the ISS captures an aurora over the southern hemisphere during an earlier solar storm.

A powerful gust of solar wind is crackling its way through Earth's upper atmosphere yesterday (April 11), after it escaped through a large gap in the sun's atmosphere.

The first signs of the stream of energized particles turned up Tuesday night (April 10), in the form of dramatic auroras appearing at latitudes as low as Williston, North Dakota, as seen on spaceweathergalley.com.

They followed a geomagnetic storm warning from the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center, which indicated that auroras might be visible in Alaska, much of central Canada, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and northern fractions of Wisconsin, Michigan and Maine. Much of Scandinavia, the Shetland Islands and northern Russia could also plausibly witness geomagnetic lights in the sky. [8 Dazzling Facts About Auroras]

This storm is the result of what's called a coronal hole, which, as Live Science sister site Space.com has reported before, is a patch where the sun's atmosphere  its corona and outermost layer  has thinned substantially. Coronal holes are actually pretty common. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory reported that three coronal holes covered wide swaths of our local star from April 3 to April 6. Such holes make it easier for solar wind to escape earthward.

A map released by the National Weather Services's Space Weather Prediction Center reveals the expected visible extent of aurora activity. (Image credit: Space Weather Prediction Center)

No one needs to worry too much about a G1-class storm like this one  the lowest severity of geomagnetic storm, where G5 is the most severe  even though there is some possibility it will disrupt satellite communications. But, it is yet another reminder of the sun's awesome power. Sooner or later, it's likely that a massive solar storm will strike Earth with only minimal notice, on a scale similar to a storm that struck in 1859. Only next time, in our electronics-dependent age, the consequences will almost certainly be more serious than telegraph operators' burnt fingers or auroras over Cuba.

Originally published on Live Science.The 2004 film "The Day After Tomorrow" imagined a world in which the complete collapse of a climate-regulating Atlantic Ocean current triggered catastrophic sea-level rise and extreme weather events in the U.S.

Freak floods drown buildings, bone-chilling air flash-freezes pedestrians and ice encases the Statue of Liberty. It sounds like a disaster movie, and well, it is: In 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," the collapse of an ocean current in the North Atlantic sends the world into a whirlwind climate doomsday.

And while that ocean current has not actually collapsed, scientists reporting in two new studies have found that it's weakening, by a lot. In fact, the current hasn't been this sluggish in 1,500 years  a finding that could carry serious (although not disaster-movie serious) repercussions for weather and sea-level rise in locations around the world.

In the Atlantic Ocean, the current known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) ferries warm surface waters northward  where the heat is released into the atmosphere  and carries cold water south in the deeper ocean layers, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its circulation transports heat around the globe like a conveyor belt, and if its movement were to stop, that heat would not get distributed, and weather havoc could ensue. [Doomsday: 9 Real Ways Earth Could End]

But the AMOC has been getting weaker, and cold, freshwater infusions by the runaway melting of glaciers, sea ice and permafrost are to blame, and the AMOC may weaken even further if temperatures on Earth continue to rise and ice reserves continue to melt, scientists reported in the two studies.

Written in sand

In one study, published yesterday (April 11) in the journal Nature, researchers analyzed ocean sediments in a core sampled off the eastern coast of the U.S., from depths where most of the water originated in the North Atlantic's Labrador Sea. They examined positions of different-size sand grains in the geologic record, to reconstruct how the flow of the currents that carried the grains may have changed over time, said study co-author Delia Oppo, a senior scientist in the geology and geophysics department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

The researchers traced the start of the current's weakening to the mid-19th century at the end of the Little Ice Age, a centuries-long period of extreme cold that froze northern Europe. When temperatures began warming up, freshwater from melting ice that flowed into the Nordic Seas would have diluted salty seawater near the surface. This weakened the current and prevented it from carrying bigger grains of sand as far as it used to, which told the scientists about differences in the current's strength, Oppo told Live Science.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, also known as the Gulf Stream System, brings warm waters from the South to the North, where it sinks into the deep and transports cold water from the North to the South. A weakening of this major ocean circulation can have widespread and potentially disruptive effects. (Image credit: Caesar/PIK)

Then, beginning in the 1950s, another stage of warming and ice melt began in the Northern Hemisphere  this time, likely driven by human-induced climate change  infusing the sea with more chilly fresh water and further weakening the ocean circulation system, study lead author David Thornalley, a senior lecturer at University College London, told Live Science in an email.

"Theory and models show the AMOC weakens when there is warming and increased input of freshwater, and these are both things being observed as part of global warming," Thornalley said. The research team estimated that, since the current began to lose strength in the mid-1800s, it has weakened by about 15 to 20 percent.

Finding the "fingerprint"

Another study, also published today in Nature, arrived at the same conclusions about a weakened AMOC  this time, by reviewing sea-surface temperature data going back to the late 19th century. In this study, the researchers' temperature analysis confirmed computer models' predictions of AMOC behavior and suggested a decline of about 15 percent in current circulation strength, beginning in the 1950s.

"The evidence we're now able to provide is the most robust to date," study co-author and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of physics of the oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said in a statement.

The researchers detected an ocean temperature pattern that was a "fingerprint" for an AMOC slowdown: anomalous warming in the Gulf Stream and cooler waters near Greenland, suggesting that warm water was not being transported north as effectively as it once was, according to the study.

"The specific trend pattern we found in measurements looks exactly like what is predicted by computer simulations as a result of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream system," Rahmstorf said. "And I see no other plausible explanation for it."

Though these two research teams used different methods, they arrived at a similar conclusion: that a crucial part of the climate system on our dynamic planet is not performing as it once did.

"What's happening now is that the evidence is converging from different sources," Oppo told Live Science. "So, we're becoming more and more confident, as we see several studies starting to show similar things using different approaches." [7 Ways the Earth Changes in the Blink of an Eye]

An uncertain future

While the complete disintegration of the AMOC is extremely unlikely, the ocean circulation system will probably continue to weaken, and that prospect is far from reassuring, Oppo told Live Science. Prior research has suggested that a feeble AMOC brings more dryness to the Sahel, a region of Africa bordering the Sahara Desert; spurs sea-level rise in U.S. coastal cities; encourages patterns of increasingly cold winters in Europe and the northeastern U.S.; and prompts warmer summers across Europe. However, more research is needed to confirm a persistent connection, Oppo said.

But a weakened AMOC does make the ocean less effective at absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide, Oppo noted. If the ocean current continues to weaken, it will likely take up even less CO2, leading to higher quantities of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and potentially worsening the effects of global warming, she said.

"More research into the potential weather impacts of an AMOC slowdown and the associate sea surface temperature pattern is needed, given the results of the two new studies suggesting a weak AMOC that is likely to weaken further," Thornalley told Live Science.

Editor's Note: This article was updated to clarify some statements from Delia Oppo.

Original article on Live Science.Viking navigators guided by mysterious crystal "sunstones" may have accidentally sailed on to the mainland of North America while looking for Greenland, according to new research.

The new study shows that so-called sunstones  crystals of translucent minerals like Iceland spar, which split the polarization of light passing through them  would have been "surprisingly successful" as navigation devices, by revealing the position of the sun on cloudy days, a common occurrence in the North Atlantic Ocean.

The Vikings had no knowledge of the use of magnetic compasses for navigation at sea.

But observations with these crystal sunstones might have helped Viking ships steer a course due west from Norway to Greenland, the site of several Viking settlements after the 10th century, said Denes Szaz, an optical physicist at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.Szaz is the lead author of the new study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science this month. [7 Secrets of Viking Seamen]

Computer simulations showed that Viking navigators who made observations of the position of the sun at least once every 3 hours had a very high chance of sailing due west and reaching the coast of Greenland, Szaz told Live Science in an email.

" may have accidentally sailed on to the mainland of North America while looking for Greenland (Image credit: Shutterstock)

But Vikings who made observations of the sun less frequently ran the risk of drifting south and missing Greenland altogether  and, if they didn't all die at sea first, of eventually reaching the coast of Canada.

"Through archaeological findings, we know for sure that the Vikings were present in North America centuries before Columbus," Szaz said. "But we do not know whether they got there through such a misnavigation, or started discovery expeditions from previous colonies on Greenland."

Viking sunstone mystery

For the new study, Szaz and co-author Gabor Horvath, also of Eotvos Lorand University, ran 36,000 computer simulations of Viking-ship voyages across the North Atlantic, to determine the expected success of navigations guided by sunstones.

Their research builds on earlier studies that measured the human error involved in navigating with sunstones of Icelandic spar and other translucent crystals that create a double or bright single image, depending on the polarization of the light passing through them.

Szaz explained that, while there is little archaeological evidence for the use of such crystals by Viking navigators, the 13th-century Icelandic saga of St. Olaf described mysterious sunstones  solarsteinn, in Old Icelandic  that were used in cloudy or foggy weather to find the position of the sun.

Viking navigators are thought to have used a nonmagnetic sun compass to measure the angle of the sun at midday, which would have enabled them to steer along a constant line of latitude  due west from Norway to Greenland, for example.

But because the North Atlantic is plagued by cloudy weather and fog for much of the year, the sun often can't be seen for days or weeks at a time.

In a hypothesis proposed in 1967 by Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou, Szaz said, Viking navigators could find the sun on cloudy days by rotating sunstones in front of the sky and observing where the images in the crystals aligned or brightened.

Simulated sea voyages

The computer simulations of Viking voyages revealed that sunstones used to find the position of the sun on cloudy days would have been "surprisingly successful" as navigation aids, especially when the observations were made at least every 3 hours and taken evenly around midday. [Images: Viking Twilight Compass Helps Navigate North Atlantic]

The simulations showed that Vikings from Norway who kept to this regular schedule of observations could sail close enough to due west to reach the coast of Greenland in three to four weeks, Szaz said. "We showed that if the navigation periodicity was 1, 2 or 3 hours, the navigation success was very high, between 80 and 100 percent," Szaz said.

But the research also showed that Vikings who made sun observations only every 6 hours or more, or none at all, tended to stray south on their voyages, with a very high chance that they might have sailed right past Greenland entirely.

If that happened  and if the Vikings on board did not perish from thirst, hunger or storms at sea  some of those Viking voyages might have sailed all the way to the coasts of what are now Labrador and Newfoundland in Canada, Szaz said.

The computer simulations used in the current research took into account weather changes, the different mineral types of sunstone that might have been used, and the times of year when the voyages between Norway and Greenland were undertaken.

Future research would add factors to the simulations, including the effects of storms, water currents and varying winds, he said.

Original article on Live Science.Here's a brainteaser: Do the 520-million-year-old fossils of an ancient, bug-like creature actually show a silhouette of its brains? Or are these blobby shapes in its head merely fossilized bacteria?

According to a new study, the fossilized structures in the Cambrian-period creature's head aren't brainy remains, but rather fossilized bacterial mats, called biofilms.

However, not everyone is on board with this interpretation. The researchers who originally discovered the brains are standing by their results, and other paleontologists Live Science interviewed agree with them. [Fabulous Fossils: Gallery of Earliest Animal Organs]

The creature in question, Fuxianhuia protensa, is an early arthropod, a group that includes modern-day insects, spiders and crabs. The roughly 3-inch-long (7.6 centimeters) segmented critter lived in what is now southern China during the Cambrian, a period that lasted from about 542 million to 488 million years ago.

F. protensa fossils are fairly common, and researchers pored over more than 1,000 of them before finding 10 with outlines of brains, said Nicholas Strausfeld, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Arizona. Strausfeld first reported on the brain-like features with colleagues in a 2012 study published in the journal Nature, a 2014 study in the journal Nature Communications and a 2015 study in the journal Current Biology.

But researchers in China and Germany had their doubts. They decided to check if they, too, could find fossilized F. protensa brains. After examining about 800 fossilized specimens, the researchers noticed that 10 percent had blobby structures in the head region.

But these blobs weren't uniform in shape, and this made them "question whether the 'brains' in the original studies were really being interpreted correctly," said the new study's lead researcher, Jianni Liu, a professor at the Early Life Institute in the Department of Geology at Northwest University, in Xi'an, China.

Liu and her colleagues presented an alternate hypothesis in a study published online yesterday (April 11) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Liu's team suspected that, instead of brains, these odd cranial structures were fossilized bacteria. That's because, after arthropods die, the bacteria in their gut creates biofilms, "which can rupture out of the gut wall and form structures which might superficially resemble brains, nerves or other internal organs," she said.

Liu and her colleagues also read studies detailing how modern arthropods decay after death. These studies showed that "the brain and nervous system actually decays very quickly," meaning it often doesn't have a chance to fossilize, Liu told Live Science. (Strausfeld disputes this notion. He and his colleagues showed that neural tissue can be preserved if the arthropod is quickly buried in a slurry of mud and seawater and then subjected to sustained pressure, comparable to conditions of entombment, he said.)

Liu and her team, however, did acknowledge that it is possible to discover fossilized brains in Cambrian-period arthropods. For instance, another 520-million-year-old early arthropod, known as Chengjiangocaris, has "more pristine tissue preservation  that have convincingly been interpreted as ventral nerve cords," the researchers wrote in the study.

Differing opinions

Other paleontologists told Live Science they weren't swayed by the new results. For one thing, Liu's team did not examine the fossils described in the previous studies, said Peter Van Roy, a paleobiologist at Ghent University in Belgium who wasn't involved with any of the studies. [In Images: Fossilized Dinosaur Brain Tissue]

"They did not look at the actual specimen that supposedly shows the brain," Van Roy told Live Science. "That is quite a major shortcoming."

Moreover, the brains in the previous studies were perfectly symmetrical, just like the brains of modern arthropods are today. "We can even resolve axon [nerve] bundles in the fossilized optic lobes, as well as evidence of fiber tracts across the brain," Strausfeld told Live Science.

A 520-million-year-old Fuxianhuia protensa fossil and its counterpart (upper corner). Notice how the fossilized brain is symmetrical. (Image credit: Xiaoya Ma; Nicholas Strausfeld)

In contrast, the blobs Liu and her colleagues found were asymmetrical and obviously not brains, Strausfeld said.

Jakob Vinther, a United Kingdom-based paleontologist who wasn't involved in the studies but has studied other fossilized Cambrian brains, said he was "highly skeptical" of the new study's conclusions.

"Fuxianhuia was the first Cambrian fossil to have been argued to preserve nervous system [material]," and other fossilized brains have been found since then, Vinther told Live Science. "Criticizing the initial study that made the foundations for the paradigm while not rejecting the subsequent studies is problematic, and hence, for that reason alone, the study fails to make a solid claim," Vinther said.

Moreover, just because fossilized brains are rare doesn't mean they don't exist, Vinther said. For instance, "most dinosaurs don't preserve feathers, but that doesn't mean that we think that they are artifacts [fabrications]."

Even so, the new study does bring up an important point, Van Roy said: It may push paleontologists even further than before to show that so-called fossilized brains are, in fact, neural remains, he said.

Original article on Live Science.This mummified squirrel monkey was found in the ceiling of an old Minneapolis department store during renovations.

There is a mummy mystery in Minnesota: How did a dead monkey end up in a department store ceiling?

The mystery broke on April 8, when an image of the "mummified" monkey appeared on the Old Minneapolis Facebook page. The photo was submitted by a man who claimed to be working on the renovation of Dayton's department store (a 100-year-old institution that's being converted into a shiny, new commercial space) in downtown Minneapolis.

The photo showed what appeared to be the long-dead remains of a monkey  desiccated, yellowed with age and sliced across the abdomen with a horizontal gash. The photographer said he found the "perished primate" while renovating the department store's ceiling. [Gallery: The Best Monkey Mug Shots]

Where did this monkey come from? How did it end up in a department store ceiling? Who  or what  inflicted that nasty cut? Readers of Old Minneapolis filled the Facebook page with theories.

Several readers trawled up advertisements from the '50s and '60s, publicizing the pet store that used to inhabit Dayton's upper levels. The newspaper clipping advertises "hilarious monkeys" for sale (including squirrel and spider monkeys), as well as tropical fish and mynah birds. Another reader recalled a former co-worker who said he had worked at Dayton's for 50 years; once, a monkey escaped into the ductwork on the seventh or eighth floor, the man said, and was killed there by the blade on an exhaust fan.

So far, only one family has claimed credit for the mysterious "monkeycide." Regan Murphy, the mayor of nearby Robbinsdale, said it was likely his father's doing.

My dad [Larry] once stole a monkey from a Dayton's display back in the '60s, Murphy tweeted.

Larry and his buddy were apparently playing hooky from high school one afternoon when they ended up at the department store's pet shop. The boys allegedly smuggled a monkey out of the building under one of their jackets and brought it back to Larry's place. When Larry's mom came home to a trashed house reeking of monkey business, the boys were ordered to take their prize back to Dayton's, the story goes.

"They went back in the store, put him on an escalator and left the store," Murphy told the Star Tribune. From there, perhaps, the monkey made its way into the ceiling ducts.

That's one explanation, anyway. According to the BBC, building officials are working with local museums to find out which stories are true and which are mere monkeyshines.

But for now, here's one mystery solved: The monkey depicted in the photo is "most definitely a squirrel monkey," Mary Blair, a primatologist and director of biodiversity research at the American Museum of Natural History, told Live Science in an email.

Squirrel monkeys primarily live in tropical rainforests in Central and South America, and they have long been the victims of black market pet trading. Maxing out at about a foot (30 centimeters) in height, squirrel monkeys are small, easy to smuggle and can be sold alarmingly cheaply. One old Dayton's clipping advertised the pets at $18.88 each. Sale ads for these monkeys even showed up in the backs of comic books.

According to Primarily Primates, a nonprofit sanctuary for discarded pets and non-native animals, there are no federal laws banning primate ownership, although importing primates as pets is forbidden. The nonprofit was founded in the '70s, specifically to help resettle squirrel monkeys that had been abandoned as pets.

Originally published on Live Science.This hot-selling product is a fake ... and that's exactly why buyers want it.

Sales of synthetic urine  which people can use to cheat on drug tests  appear to be on the rise in the United States, according to news reports. And the substance has become such a problem that some states are moving to ban it.

According to The Washington Post, Indiana and New Hampshire passed laws last year banning synthetic urine, and two additional states  Missouri and Mississippi  introduced bills this year to make the product illegal.

"Our employers are reporting to us a concern that more and more of their employees are using synthetic human urine to cheat on a drug test," Dan Gibson, executive director of the Mississippi Association of Self-Insurers, which has lobbied for the bill in Mississippi, told The Washington Post. [9 Weird Ways You Can Test Positive for Drugs]

Mississippi State Rep. Willie Bailey said at a hearing that fake urine is a "hot seller" at truck stops, the Post reported. "They can't keep it in stock," Bailey said.

Synthetic urine is made from a mix of chemicals, with some manufacturers saying their products contain uric acid, the Post reported. (Uric acid is a chemical found in human urine.) The fake urine sells for $17 to $40 and can be bought online or in certain stores, such as some head shops.

Originally published on Live Science.Two weak tornadoes touched down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Tuesday (April 10), damaging property, tearing up trees and scattering debris across the city's downtown as well as the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport south of the city, the National Weather Service (NWS) reported.

No casualties associated with the tornadoes have been reported. One homeowner fled her residence when a fallen tree destroyed part of her roof, and a flood of rainwater poured into her home, according to the local news station WSVN Miami. The Red Cross is helping the woman relocate, the news station said.

Both tornadoes were classified as EF0, which is the weakest classification on the Enhanced Fujita intensity scale for tornadoes and pertains to sustained gales of 65 to 85 mph (105 to 137 km/h). [Photos: Tornado Damage Scales in Images]

According to the NWS, the first tornado blew through downtown Fort Lauderdale between 3:34 p.m. and 3:58 p.m. local time with peak winds of 65 mph. A second, stronger tornado formed near the airport around 4:25 p.m., and blew for 10 minutes with winds reaching 84 mph. This second tornado toppled shipping containers and delayed flights.

See more

A severe thunderstorm warning was in effect until about 5 p.m. local time, but the NWS didn't catch wind of the tornadoes until residents started sharing videos of the dark clouds swirling over the city via social media.

As Live Science previously reported, tornadoes generally form in the United States every spring and summer when warm, moist air blows north through the Gulf of Mexico and collides with the cold, dry air blowing south from Canada. When the two fronts meet, the cold air can form a kind of ceiling over the rising warm air, forcing the warm air to rotate in place instead of rising higher. More warm air rises throughout the day as the sun heats the ground until, finally, it breaks through the ceiling and pushes the cold air beneath it. The resulting column of wind can span up to 10 miles wide and whirl at more than 200 mph (322 km/h).

An average of 1,000 tornadoes are reported in the U.S. each year, according to the National Climatic Data Center, resulting in 80 deaths and 1,500 injuries.

Originally published on Live Science.Oaklands system of penalizing landlords for bad conditions in their buildings, in which appeals of penalties are reviewed by an appointee of the same city agency that imposed the original penalty, was dealt a final blow by the state Supreme Court on Wednesday in a case that could affect other cities in California.

The justices unanimously denied review of a January ruling by a state appeals court that said Oakland was violating California law. The state law, enacted in 2010, requires cities to set up independent appeals boards to hear property owners challenges to their penalties, or let their City Council itself hear the appeals.

An Oakland landlord who challenges a fine must instead appeal to a hearing officer appointed by the citys Building Services Division, whose inspector has already decided that the building violates safety standards.

The challenge was filed by Thomas Lippman, owner of a three-unit apartment building in the Harrington neighborhood, east of downtown Oakland. An inspector found violations in 2010 that included cracked ceiling paint and a water heater installed without a permit, and fined Harrington $9,500. A hearing officer then upheld the fines and also found Lippman responsible for damage that the landlord had blamed on a tenant facing eviction.

Oakland had established the appeal process after an Alameda County grand jury criticized the city for allowing a building inspectors supervisor to hear a landlords challenges to the inspectors findings. The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco said the change wasnt enough.

The state law was intended to direct a property owners appeals outside the enforcing agency rather than having them heard by an officer chosen by the very enforcing agency whose decision is being appealed, the court said in a 3-0 ruling. It was written by John Kennedy, a Contra Costa County Superior Court judge temporarily assigned to the appeals court.

Oakland argued that state law should not override its decisions as a charter city on local housing policy. But Kennedy said protections for the basic rights of property owners are a matter of statewide concern.

The ruling will have a statewide impact because there are a number (of cities) who believe they can modify state law rules because they are charter cities, said attorney Frank Busch, who filed arguments with the court on behalf of a property owner in Vallejo.

The case is Lippman vs. Oakland, S247380.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@BobEgelkoA state appeals court has struck down a San Francisco ordinance that requires landlords who evict their tenants and go out of the rental business under the states Ellis Act to wait 10 years before rebuilding or renovating any of the formerly rented units.

The local law, enacted in December 2013, penalizes property owners for exercising their rights under the Ellis Act and thus conflicts with California law, the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco said Wednesday.

The 1986 state law, backed by real estate interests, allows owners to evict renters without any of the reasons usually required for evictions  like nonpayment of rent, or property damage  if the owner is taking the property off the rental market. The Ellis Act is typically used to convert a building to a condominium, although less often in San Francisco, which has severely limited new condo conversions.

The owner must also pay the former tenants reasonable relocation costs. But the courts have struck down another San Francisco ordinance that would have required landlords to pay the difference between the previous rent and a two-year apartment rental at market rates in the city, up to a maximum of $50,000.

Wednesdays ruling was one of several decisions from the court rejecting San Francisco ordinances that have sought to discourage Ellis Act evictions and preserve affordable rent-controlled housing.

Were hopeful that San Francisco will take heed of (Wednesdays) decision and the earlier ones and be more respectful of the rights of small property owners, said attorney Andrew Zacks, who represented owners in both the relocation-payments case and the latest case.

John Cote, spokesman for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said the ruling was not the outcome we were hoping for, and would be reviewed for possible further action.

The 2013 ordinance, sponsored by then-Supervisor John Avalos, was challenged by a group called the Small Property Owners of San Francisco Institute. An initial ruling by Superior Court Judge Teri Jackson upheld the measure.

In overruling Jackson, the appeals court cited a 2016 ruling by another panel of the same court that overturned a San Francisco ordinance requiring landlords to wait 10 years after an Ellis Act eviction before merging the former rental unit with other units on the property.

City officials said they chose the 10-year waiting period because the Ellis Act itself allows property owners to resume rentals after 10 years if they offer the evicted tenants a chance to return to their former unit. If the owner returns the unit to the rental market within five years, the law says, it must be priced at the previous rate.

The court said San Franciscos ordinance goes further by prohibiting property owners from expanding, renovating or making other changes to the site within the 10-year period.

The ordinance penalizes property owners who leave the rental market, as they have a right to do under state law, Justice Marla Miller said in the 3-0 ruling.

The citys lawyers argued that allowing owners to remodel the vacated units would price them out of the reach of former tenants who sought to return if the units were again offered for rent. Miller said the argument is speculative and ignores the substantial protections provided by the Ellis Act.

Besides the relocation payments, she noted, renters are entitled to advance notice of evictions  120 days for all tenants, one year for the elderly or disabled who have lived there for a year or more. And if the owner returns the unit to the rental market in less than two years, both the tenant and the city can sue for punitive damages.City supervisors are scoffing at an allegation by Bird, one of three companies that has dropped shared electric scooters on the streets and sidewalks of San Francisco, that San Francisco supervisors were set to ban the motorized devices within days.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whos been leading the charge for regulation of the rental scooters, said the allegation was, well, bird-brained.

Those people are out of their minds, Peskin said late Wednesday from Southern California, where he was attending a state Coastal Commission meeting. Its amazing that a company with that kind of money would spread such misinformation. Its made out of whole cloth.

Bird, in a breaking news missive emailed to The Chronicle and at least one other news outlet Wednesday night, said the Board of Supervisors was plotting an unusual action on Monday known as an emergency ordinance.

Thats when the boards Land Use and Transportation Committee is scheduled to take up a Peskin proposal to allow the Municipal Transportation Agency the authority to regulate shared motorized scooters. Its a fairly bureaucratic action that would let the MTA create a permitting process and remove scooters without proper permits from the streets and sidewalks.

But thats not how the folks at Bird saw it from their perch in Venice Beach.

It has come to our attention that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering banning Birds and other electric vehicles  and doing so via an extraordinary regulatory maneuver, usually reserved for emergencies like earthquakes, Birds statement read.

Ken Baer, a spokesman for Bird, said Thursday that the companys representatives in San Francisco had heard that an urgent move was afoot to ban the shared scooters, and felt the need to launch a counterattack.

As evidence, he cited a quote from Supervisor Jane Kim on Walk San Franciscos Facebook page: We should remove these scooters immediately until we implement common-sense rules to keep people safe.

Ivy Lee, Kims chief of staff, said Thursday that the supervisor has no intention of banning scooters and was aware of no such plans.

As far as we know, there is zero in the works, Lee said.

Lee said Kim sees the scooters as a way of getting more people out of their cars, but she wants to keep them off sidewalks.

Sidewalks should be for people who are walking, Lee said.

Bird, along with the firms Lime and Spin, suddenly deposited hundreds of electric-powered standup scooters on San Francisco sidewalks about two weeks ago. The scooters can be dropped off anywhere, which has led to a flood of complaints that theyre left blocking sidewalks and building entrances. Critics also say riders use the scooters on sidewalks, which is illegal.

But the scooters are clearly popular, especially downtown, South of Market and in the Financial District, where riders take them from BART to work, meetings or lunch. Bird stressed that point in its release.

Rushing through a moratorium on Birds and similar vehicles, without the input of San Franciscans and without careful deliberation, ignores the fact that thousands of city residents love using Birds to get around a growing  and congested  city, and feel good doing so because it does not add to traffic or carbon emissions.

The company ended its message with a cry  a caw?  for support from riders.

Listening to the people is not only fundamental to democracy, Bird wrote, but it is also how San Francisco works  and works best.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuanMr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense

By Jenny Uglow

Farrar Straus Giroux. 598 pp. $45

---

Edward Lear is the other great master of Victorian nonsense. Admittedly, Lear (1812-1888) lacks the universal appeal of his contemporary Lewis Carroll, but his longer poems - such as "The Jumblies" ("Their heads are green, and their hands are blue"), "The Pobble Who Has No Toes" and "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" - have been favorites for generations among children and adults alike. A multitalented man, Lear also composed scores of four-line, non-obscene limericks, coined immortal phrases such as "runcible spoon" and dashed off spindly, surreally cartoonish drawings to accompany virtually everything he wrote.

Jenny Uglow calls her capacious and astute new biography "Mr. Lear," which is certainly straightforward. Still, I wonder if she means us to think, if only for a flickering moment, of yet another great English writer and artist for children, the celebrated "Miss Potter." Like Lear, Beatrix Potter was equally accomplished with pen or brush and, like him, too, much of her life was characterized by hard work, melancholy and the search for love.

Of course, there's a far more obvious explanation for Uglow's title. One of Lear's best-known poems begins like this:

"How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!"

Who has written such volumes of stuff!

Some think him ill-tempered and queer,

But a few find him pleasant enough.

His mind is concrete and fastidious,

His nose is remarkably big;

His visage is more or less hideous,

His beard it resembles a wig.

The bounce of this versified self-portrait - there are six more stanzas - is quite irresistible, as T.S. Eliot recognized when he paid them homage: "How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!/ With his features of clerical cut ..."

As the 13th surviving child in a middle-class London family, young Edward was ignored by his parents, taught at home by older sisters and sent into the world as a teenager to make his way, despite multiple disadvantages: He was homely, extremely shortsighted, subject to epileptic fits, often ill and largely self-educated in art, which he hoped to make his profession.

Yet the fairies, or DNA, partially offset these obvious deficits with some extraordinary gifts. From an early age Lear's draftsmanship could be breathtaking, and he soon earned a name for himself with gorgeous pictures of parrots and plants. John James Audubon, no less, found Lear's bird portraits stunning and told him so. Yet along with his artistic skills, Lear possessed a genial surface personality that made him more than welcome at the country-house weekends of the well-born and well-to-do. He could amuse the children with rhymes and drawings, produce paintings of the local scenery as a hostess gift, regale the dinner table with jokes and stories, and in the evening sing his own musical settings of Tennyson's poems while accompanying himself at the piano or even on the accordion.

Before long, the young Lear was giving drawing lessons to the newly married Queen Victoria. Still, he was more gypsy than courtier and much of his life was ultimately spent abroad, sketching or painting in Italy, Albania, Greece, Egypt, Palestine and even India. He learned Italian well enough to give lessons, taught himself modern and ancient Greek - he read the New Testament and Plato in the original - and made a stab at basic Arabic. To underwrite this peripatetic lifestyle, he transformed his expeditions into a series of illustrated books with such titles as "Journals of a Landscape Painter in Corsica" and "Views in the Seven Ionian Islands." Some of the most famous pictures evoke the Mediterranean of Middle Eastern sublime: The Roman Campagna, the sea cliffs of Amalfi, the ruins of rose-red Petra.

Like other Victorian bachelors, Lear was regularly - but chastely, frustratingly - attracted to handsome younger men but also relished the company of sensitive, clever women, such as Emily Tennyson, the wife of the poet laureate. Among the many pleasures of this biography are its frequent quotations from Lear's journals and fanciful letters. In one of the latter, he reimagines possible accommodations as "a Pharmouse or a Nin." To be a good traveler, he philosophizes, one should "put yourself, as a predestinarian might say, calmly into the dice-box of small events, and be shaken out whenever circumstance may ordain."

Among Uglow's most valuable and personal chapters are those devoted to Lear's fantastic, in all senses, drawings and verse. Some of his later poems, such as "The Dong With a Luminous Nose," can be decidedly pensive or bittersweet, but as Uglow writes, the limericks in his first collection, "A Book of Nonsense" (1846), are "comprehensible as both the foolery of childhood and the foolery of carnival, turning the world upside down." On the surface, they seem transparently simple:

There was an Old Person of Rhodes,

Who strongly objected to toads;

He paid several cousins, to catch them by dozens,

That futile Old Person of Rhodes.

The accompanying illustration, however, shows a slanting row of identical women - they resemble accordioned paper cutouts - who hold out toads to a sharp-nosed man about to dive off a kitchen chair. Together the words and picture produce an altogether eerie, haunting symbiosis.

Lear passed his later years in San Remo, Italy, with a tailless cat and a loyal servant, dying at age 75. Since then he has been exceptionally lucky in his biographers. I myself own essential books about the poet-artist by Angus Davidson, Peter Levi, John Lehmann, Robert McCracken Peck ("The Natural History of Edward Lear," which I reviewed for The Washington Post in 2016) and the late doyenne of Lear studies, Vivien Noakes. Still, "Mr. Lear" is by Jenny Uglow, and her name on anything guarantees both biographical and critical excellence, whether she's writing about wood engraver Thomas Bewick, the "merrie monarch" King Charles II or a plump, Victorian gentleman who is so very pleasant to know.Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average

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British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: kaput

04-12-2018 01:33 AM











Post: #1 British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

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Iran's semi-official news-agency Fars, said the "British military men" were taken in Eastern Ghouta, near the capital of Damascus.



The report claimed the Brit soldiers were part of a plot involving "terrorists and NATO forces" to attack Damascus.



https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6031400/br...y-reports/ Brit special forces soldiers are captured in Syria after infiltrating country, Iran news agency reports.Iran's semi-official news-agency Fars, said the "British military men" were taken in Eastern Ghouta, near the capital of Damascus.The report claimed the Brit soldiers were part of a plot involving "terrorists and NATO forces" to attack Damascus. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 01:39 AM











Post: #2 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

"False reports claim Brit special forces soldiers are captured in Syria"



FALSE means not true. Roddy's Creed

Registered User

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 01:44 AM



Posts: 5,419









Post: #3 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

What the f*#k are they doing there? They were not invited. I do not label myself. What I stand for is based on my own convictions, and I don't care which box - the left one or the right one - they happen to belong. beans

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 01:47 AM











Post: #4 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

Roddy Wrote: (04-12-2018 01:44 AM) What the f*#k are they doing there? They were not invited.

Probably eyes on the ground for when the bombs start falling...



Probably eyes on the ground for when the bombs start falling... LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 01:48 AM











Post: #5 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 01:39 AM) "False reports claim Brit special forces soldiers are captured in Syria"



FALSE means not true.

Well I'll be.. It didn't say false report when I posted it..



Now.."The Sun Online contacted the Ministry of Defence, who denied the claims made by Iran's semi-official news agency."



Hmmmm.Who's lying? Well I'll be.. It didn't say false report when I posted it..Now.."The Sun Online contacted the Ministry of Defence, who denied the claims made by Iran's semi-official news agency."Hmmmm.Who's lying? LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 01:52 AM











Post: #6 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

Captured? Nope. Don't believe it. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 01:52 AM











Post: #7 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 01:48 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 01:39 AM) "False reports claim Brit special forces soldiers are captured in Syria"



FALSE means not true.

Well I'll be.. It didn't say false report when I posted it..



Now.."The Sun Online contacted the Ministry of Defence, who denied the claims made by Iran's semi-official news agency."



Hmmmm.Who's lying?

Members who commented without checking the link? Members who commented without checking the link? beans

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 01:55 AM











Post: #8 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

It is common for countries to deny their soldiers were captured...

I know the US did it more than once, then to find out later it was true... LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 01:58 AM











Post: #9 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

strap them on some missiles and send them back to their israeli masters LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 02:02 AM











Post: #10 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

Earlier reports had disclosed last month that foreign military forces were deployed in Eastern Ghouta of Damascus to launch a ground assault against Damascus in cooperation with the US.



The US and Israel planned to launch attacks on Damascus from several fronts in collaboration with the NATO and Jordan, but the plot failed after the Syrian army scored rapid, major victories in Eastern Ghouta.



Informed sources disclosed that the US and Israel intended to support the terrorists in Eastern Ghouta by airstrikes so that they could capture vast areas of Damascus to pave the ground for the Syrian government's collapse. silversides

The bare necessities of life

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 02:10 AM



Posts: 28,403









Post: #11 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

Roddy Wrote: (04-12-2018 01:44 AM) What the f*#k are they doing there? They were not invited.

Spotting targets.... Spotting targets.... Popurri Perez Prado

LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 02:15 AM











Post: #12 RE: British Soldiers Captured in Syria Per Iran News

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 01:52 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 01:48 AM) Well I'll be.. It didn't say false report when I posted it..



Now.."The Sun Online contacted the Ministry of Defence, who denied the claims made by Iran's semi-official news agency."



Hmmmm.Who's lying?

Members who commented without checking the link?

Western Media is reporting this as well . Western Media is reporting this as well .















PARIS - Not since 1963 has the Louvre mounted a major retrospective devoted to Eugene Delacroix, the great painter of the Romantic age whose works the museum holds in almost obscene abundance. The Louvre owns most of the artist's explosive early masterpieces, paintings on a grand, immersive scale that are too big, too precious and too essential to the Louvre's identity to move. So no other institution can really do him justice.

Even so, some in France mutter: Another Delacroix exhibition? Isn't he already too familiar, the maker of such icons as "Liberty Leading the People," which recall a bygone France full of contradiction, hypocrisy and self-conceit? But by far the majority say it's about time. So this exhibition, with some 180 of his works on view and a focus on the artist's later and lesser-known paintings, is a genuine event.

Delacroix was born in 1798, into an age of political, economic and artistic turmoil, the son of a prominent government official who moved in high-bourgeois circles. But he was orphaned, his family lost its wealth and Napoleon's empire collapsed, so by the time Delacroix was a young man, he was forced to be intellectually and socially entrepreneurial. He made his splash early, in the 1820s, with major pieces for the great Paris Salon, the prestigious art exhibitions that were a fixture of French creative and political life through the 18th and most of the 19th centuries. For the Salon of 1822, he painted "The Barque of Dante," a terrifying vision of the great Florentine poet on a small, tempest-tossed boat, besieged by the damned in hell. For the Salon of 1824, he came back with "The Massacre at Chios," an enormous canvas almost 14 feet tall that depicts an Ottoman slaughter of Greek civilians, in which the central protagonists emerge from a flat, almost theatrical backdrop with the preternatural presence of a 3-D film.

By the time he was in his 30s, he had made his mark in almost every genera of painting. He had scandalized the public with his magnificently lurid "The Death of Sardanapalus," the Assyrian king who took with him to his death all his concubines, slaves and riches; and he endeared himself to new audiences with "Liberty Leading the People," painted in 1830 after the revolution that toppled the reactionary Charles X, brother of Louis XVI, who lost his head in an earlier upheaval. He also turned his hand to the more popular form of lithography and produced exquisitely moody illustrations of Shakespeare and Goethe, authors who remained central to his imagination.

Read through the reviews and analysis of the Louvre's previous Delacroix exhibition more than half a century ago, and it seems both France and the art world still belonged to the 19th century. Much of the commentary was about the nature of Delacroix's "genius," the fraught question of his status as a romantic painter, and the curious dissonance between his work - visceral, seemingly spontaneous and irruptive with emotion - and his life, which was not marked by the usual follies expected of a young romantic. Delacroix loved Mozart, not Berlioz; read widely in classical literature and had little enthusiasm for contemporary writers such as Victor Hugo; and despite liberal views, he remained wary of the political mob and the volatile streets of Paris that produced precisely the event he memorialized in "Liberty Leading the People." His paintings, especially his early work, were full of thick, kinetic eddies of paint, but as the many sketches and studies included in this exhibition demonstrate, they were meticulously planned, refined and generally improved through rigorous gestation.

The debates in 1963 about romanticism and classicism are old-fashioned now and have mostly disappeared from the discourse. This exhibition introduces the painter with a small painting of "Tasso in the Madhouse," one of the great tropes of romanticism, but the categories bleed into one another and often dissolve the more they are studied. Sebastien Allard, director of the Department of Paintings at the Louvre and one of the exhibition's curators, says, "What is needed now is a more panoramic view" of the painter, beyond the old "isms" of the past. So the show is structured around central chapters in the painter's career, his heroic youthful works, his interest in narratives from Byron, Goethe and Shakespeare, his trips to England and Morocco, his mural paintings for the Louvre and other grand edifices of Paris, his religious imagery, his lifelong reconsideration of and variations on past work, and his final paintings made before his death in 1863. If the previous big Louvre show prompted reflexive thoughts about which categories Delacroix belongs to, this one aims at making his career seem too capacious and surprising to fit any categories at all.

The twists and turns are indeed exhilarating. In 1832, he made an extended visit to Morocco and brought back notebooks stuffed with sketches and observations to which he returned throughout his life to create works such as "The Women of Algiers in their Apartment," a darkly lit interior scene of sumptuously dressed women gathered around a water pipe, conspicuously not noticing the observer who has intruded on their private space. The 1833-34 canvas was controversial for its lack of everything that had defined the painter's earlier work - violence, action, struggle and death. Today, it remains controversial as one of the central icons of Orientalism, the Western fascination with the exotic other, often a colonized, exploited and violated figure.

For the Salon of 1849, the 50-year-old painter produced floral compositions, breaking with the turbid and earthy colors of his earlier work to produce baroque effusions of brilliant blues, reds and greens in arrangements that prefigured the dissolution of conventional forms pursued by the impressionists. An 1848 bouquet made in watercolor seems to float in space, pushing to the edge of the paper on which it is painted, its whorl of flowers untethered to their stems or a vase or any of the markers of a conventional still life. He also produced religious paintings - of Christ on the cross and anecdotes from the life of Mary - more in the spirit of the agonized piety of a Bach passion than the supercharged, theatrical emotionalism of his romantic contemporaries.

So the exhibition presents the question: Is there a thread to connect all of this? Is there a comprehensible Delacroix behind the art he produced? And on reflection, it offers this answer: Delacroix made have been an extraordinary figure - perhaps the greatest figure of his age - but he was also, in many ways, exceptionally normal. He outlived his youth, as many of us do. He evolved and explored and reformed himself, but he felt no need to amputate any part of his past self as he matured. He grew reflective as he got older, but while his fiery vision steadied to a warm glow, it never flickered out.

Delacroix isn't just one of the most familiar figures of the 19th century, he is also one of the best documented. He produced an enormously literate and entertaining journal, and letters, and opined freely and insightfully on art. He was scrutinized, analyzed, glorified and finally eulogized by the greatest writers and poets of his day, including Baudelaire and Stendhal. Delacroix studies have been a vigorous industry for more than a century. An exhibition that opened in Minneapolis three years ago exploring Delacroix's influence on modern masters underscored how he is being reconsidered today.

But tug at even a single thread in this exhibition and there is clearly more work to be done. His Orientalist paintings present perhaps the most complicated problem, given the emergence of France as a multiethnic state facing periodic threats from its nationalist and nativist forces. Yet Delacroix's Orientalism is complex and ambiguous. His Arab men and women may be exotic and "other," but they are not caricatures and the painter doesn't underscore their lack of agency in his depictions. Delacroix's Orientalism also displaces the powerful and vestigial thirst for violence onto other people, especially the Turks. That displacement may be hypocritical, and deeply unfair; but one senses behind it the desire to exorcise the violence of an earlier age.

In his early works, including cinematic orgies such as "The Death of Sardanapalus," one senses the nostalgia of a young man who arrived on the scene just as the greatest event in modern Europe was finished. Napoleon may have conquered and slaughtered, but he also electrified, and now that chapter was over. And so there is a curious similarity in his image of Sardanapalus maniacally watching the destruction of his wealth and world to one of the smallest and intimate works in the show, a water color study of a messy, unmade bed. From the passions, sexual or violent, we must all awake and move on. Orientalism signifies the French desire to do just that, even as it created new forms of violence directed outward.

The exhibition will come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in September, but without many of the major, large-scale early works from the Louvre's collection. Viewers will be able to assess the later, generally smaller works of Delacroix, and his drawings, water colors and lithographs. But only in Paris can you see the full glory of his career, including his vivid murals. And without the juxtaposition of those works with the first gallery of this exhibition, in which hang five of his most monumental paintings, can you fully appreciate his crowning achievement: As an artist he gathered, and grew, and never gave away anything from his past to the cynicism of old age.

---

"Delacroix: 1798-1863" is on view at the Louvre in Paris through July 23. For information, visit louvre.fr/en.3 1 of 3 Angelina River Press Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Milkweed Editions Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Analicia Sotelos first book of poems and Katherine Hoerths fourth collection make quick and witty work of stereotypes. In Hoerths caseTexas males; and for SoteloChicanos and white males. Hoerths winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Award for poetry in 2015 was Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots and Sotelos new book opens with Do You Speak Virgin?

I am a Mexican American fascinator, says a voice in Do You Speak Virgin and Im not afraid of sex./Im afraid of his skeleton/knocking against the headboard/in the middle of the night. She continues: The virgins are here to prove a point.//The virgins are certain theres a circle of hell/dedicated to that fear youll never find anyone else./You know what it looks like:/all the loverscloaked in blood & salt/& never /satisfied,//I want to know whats coming in the afterlife/before I sign off on arguments in the kitchen & the sight of him/fleeing to the car/once he sees how far & wide, how dark & deep/this frigid female mind can go.The Last Word will pour its last drink April 30, when the Houston Street watering hole will close. But owner Jeret Pena said hes currently looking for the right space to reopen his home for literary libations.

We had a good run, but its just time to move on to another space, Pena said of the decision to leave Houston Street.When fishing in Northeast Texas, these folks have one common goal: beat a more than 50-year-old world record.

Bubba Bedre's Garzilla Gar Guide Service takes anglers out on the Trinity River hunting for alligator gar and monster turtles. And they have the photos to prove it.

Click through the photos to see what the company has caught on its many trips so far this year.

RELATED: Texas Fishing: Matagorda Bay alligator gar is a real monster

Currently, the world record for alligator gar is a massive 279-pound animal caught in 1951 on the Rio Grande River in Texas, according to International Game Fish Association's online records. The world record also doubles as a Texas record for an alligator gar caught with a rod and reel in freshwater, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's website.

On the Garzilla Guide's Facebook page, they detail 180-200 pound catches their clients have caught. On the company's website, they write they only offer trophy gar fishing with a rod and reel.

The company did not immediately respond for comment.

RELATED: 12 facts about Texas' river monster  the alligator gar

"We guide strictly for pleasure of enjoying the sport with you," their website reads. "If you are wanting to go after (an) exotic fish but don't want to travel halfway around the world, then look no more. We can take you on (an) adventure you will never forget (right) here on the Trinity River where wild boar, alligator, deer and game run the banks!"

Alligator gars, which live in large rivers, reservoirs, coastal bays and backwater,s can grow up to eight feet long and weigh more than 300 pounds, according to the parks department. They live off of mostly fish but are known to eat birds and mammals, according to the department.

RELATED: Crazy photos of Texas longnose gar stuck in fences that will haunt your dreams

The oldest known alligator gar was at least 95-years-old when it was caught in 2011 in Mississippi, according to the department.

Texan anglers are limited to bagging one alligator gar per day, according to the department.

kbradshaw@express-news.net

Twitter: @kbrad5Laredo police said Wednesday they have found evidence in a marked U.S. Border Patrol unit that is linked to the double homicide reported Monday in northwest Laredo.

Claudio Trevino Jr., Laredo Police Department chief, said they seized the unit but cannot disclose what investigators found in the vehicle.

On Monday, police said they arrested Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Ronald Anthony Burgos Aviles, 28, on two counts of capital murder for the slaying of Grizelda Hernandez, 27, and her son, Dominick Alexander Hernandez, 1. Police said Burgos Aviles was in a romantic relationship with the slain woman.

READ MORE: Officials discuss death penalty of BP agent

Also Wednesday, Border Patrol said it has suspended Burgos Aviles indefinitely without pay. Custody records showed he remained at the Webb County Jail on Wednesday evening.

As the case develops, LPD and Border Patrol say they continue to work together on the case. Investigators have returned to the scene with police canines that are specialized in tracking human remains.

Were not necessarily looking for more bodies, but were looking for anything that might have blood that these dogs can help us track. Theres evidence that we believe is out there that we still need to recover, Trevino said.

Authorities are combing the area where the bodies were found Monday. Their bodies were discovered in a brushy area south of Father Charles McNaboe Park in northwest Laredo. Each sustained multiple injuries, according to police. LPD has not disclosed how they may have died or if it believes they were killed at a different location.

Investigators are seeking out-of-town assistance to expedite the case.

Were also waiting for the official report for the autopsies in Corpus Christi. (On Tuesday), our investigators were there to speak to the examiner. We hope to get those returns quickly, the chief said.

He added, This type of case gets to the front of the list. We have a lot of work here. Police work piles up but this case will be expedited.

READ ALSO: Attorney: Laredo teen wasn't 'murdered by anyone,' argues suicide

Police encourage the community to call them with information on the case at 795-2800 or Laredo Crime Stoppers at 727-TIPS (8477). Callers may remain anonymous.

Police said Burgos Aviles quickly became a primary person of interest in the case after he called 911 at about 11:30 a.m. Monday to report that he had found a womans body. When police responded to the scene, they found the body of the boy near her. After police identified the woman as Grizelda Hernandez, they learned that Burgos Aviles had been in a romantic relationship with her.

Later Monday, he was arrested and booked on charges of capital murder.Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average

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Pope admits he made 'grave errors' in Chile sex abuse scandal LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: kaput

04-12-2018 02:35 AM











Post: #1 Pope admits he made 'grave errors' in Chile sex abuse scandal

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VATICAN CITY (AP)  Pope Francis admitted Wednesday he made "grave errors" in judgment in Chile's sex abuse scandal and invited the victims he had discredited to Rome to beg their forgiveness.



In an extraordinary public letter, Francis also summoned all of Chile's bishops to the Vatican for an emergency meeting in the coming weeks to discuss the scandal, which has badly tarnished his reputation and that of the Chilean church.



The Vatican orders up such emergency visits only on rare occasions, when Vatican intervention is urgently required, such as when the clerical sex abuse scandal exploded in the United States in 2002.



Francis blamed a lack of "truthful and balanced information" for his missteps in judging the case of Bishop Juan Barros, a protege of Chile's most notorious predator priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima. Francis strongly defended the bishop during his January visit to Chile despite accusations by victims that Barros had witnessed and ignored their abuse.







http://www.azfamily.com/story/37934084/p...se-scandal This will be solved allowing priests to marry.VATICAN CITY (AP)  Pope Francis admitted Wednesday he made "grave errors" in judgment in Chile's sex abuse scandal and invited the victims he had discredited to Rome to beg their forgiveness.In an extraordinary public letter, Francis also summoned all of Chile's bishops to the Vatican for an emergency meeting in the coming weeks to discuss the scandal, which has badly tarnished his reputation and that of the Chilean church.The Vatican orders up such emergency visits only on rare occasions, when Vatican intervention is urgently required, such as when the clerical sex abuse scandal exploded in the United States in 2002.Francis blamed a lack of "truthful and balanced information" for his missteps in judging the case of Bishop Juan Barros, a protege of Chile's most notorious predator priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima. Francis strongly defended the bishop during his January visit to Chile despite accusations by victims that Barros had witnessed and ignored their abuse. DrVIP

Registered User

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 02:39 AM



Posts: 3,902









Post: #2 RE: Pope admits he made 'grave errors' in Chile sex abuse scandal

white pope is the face of the vatican who kisses babies for the public to have good opinion of the vatican.



when it benefits the vatican to say communism is bad it says it.

when it doenst, it says communist china is the best model.



black pope is the one who orchestrates wars and controls nations Dreamily Resonant VIP LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 02:40 AM











Post: #3 RE: Pope admits he made 'grave errors' in Chile sex abuse scandal

DrVIP Wrote: (04-12-2018 02:39 AM) white pope is the face of the vatican who kisses babies for the public to have good opinion of the vatican.



when it benefits the vatican to say communism is bad it says it.

when it doenst, it says communist china is the best model.



black pope is the one who orchestrates wars and controls nations

Yeah, but that doesnt escuse pedophiles. Execute them all. Ask God for forgiveness not the people. Yeah, but that doesnt escuse pedophiles. Execute them all. Ask God for forgiveness not the people. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 03:02 AM











Post: #4 RE: Pope admits he made 'grave errors' in Chile sex abuse scandal

I thought the pope thought he was god so he can't make mistakes? He's going back on hundreds of years of papal doctrine. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 03:29 AM











Post: #5 RE: Pope admits he made 'grave errors' in Chile sex abuse scandal

Maybe he should tell it to a judge.















A homicide suspect who bonded out of the Webb County Jail last month is back in court after police said they found drugs and weapons in his home in west central Laredo.

Esteban Yruegas, 24, appeared before 49th District Court Judge Joe Lopez on Wednesday. That same day, prosecutors filed motions in Yruegas two pending criminal cases asking the court to revoke his bond.

Yruegas was indicted on murder, engaging in organized criminal activity and aggravated assault charges in connection to a 2016 homicide. He also faces a state jail felony possession of a controlled substance charge in an unrelated 2016 case.

READ ALSO: Murder trial begins for man accused of killing Laredo teen

Oscar O. Pena, Yruegas attorney, asked the court for three days to prepare his clients defense before responding to the prosecutions motions, saying that he had a one-day notice about the filing of the motions.

Additionally, Pena said that his clients ankle monitor had been cut off by jail personnel when he was arrested.

Lopez set Yruegas next court appearance for Monday. He said he would determine whether Yruegas bond would be revoked or modified at that time. He also ordered Yruegas to cover the cost of having a new ankle monitor installed.

Last month, Lopez reduced Yruegas bond from $1 million to $20,000 after the prosecution failed to indict him within the 90-day deadline following his arrest on the murder charge. Yruegas posted bond a day after the bond reduction was granted.

Home raided

Yruegas landed behind bars Saturday after authorities  acting on a tip to Crime Stoppers  raided his home in the 3600 block of Galveston Street.

Investigators said they had conducted surveillance of the home and saw possible narcotics activity. Authorities gathered enough probable cause to obtain a search warrant.

During a search of the house, police said they found Yruegas inside wearing an ankle monitor.

READ ALSO: Mother accused of driving drunk with 3-year-old son arrested in Laredo

Authorities said they seized a .40-caliber Glock handgun with 11 live rounds and a 12-gauge shotgun. Police also confiscated 4.3 grams of cocaine, 1.6 grams of crack-cocaine, 2.7 grams black tar heroin, 5.4 grams of marijuana and $512.

Yruegas was charged with manufacturing, delivery of a controlled substance.

He posted bond Sunday and will remain free pending the courts decision on whether to revoke his bond.

Fatal shooting

Yruegas and Pedro Vasquez, 31, are accused of gunning down Cesar Javier Sarmiento on July 26, 2016, in the 3300 block of Guerrero Street, outside a mobile home equipped with a surveillance system.

Sarmiento sustained multiple gunshot wounds to his head, chest and abdomen area. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police said Vasquez was the owner of the mobile home where the shooting occurred.

Officers later executed a search warrant at Yruegas home in the 3600 block of Galveston Street, but he was not there, authorities said.

LPD said Yruegas and Vasquez fled to Mexico after the shooting. They were arrested Nov. 28 after U.S. Marshals worked with their counterparts in Mexico to apprehend them in Monterrey, Mexico.Federal officials said Wednesday they need assistance from the public to locate the person or people responsible for harboring 70 undocumented immigrants at a south Laredo home.

Homeland Security Investigations officials said they also need information on those tasked with transporting the immigrants to the house in the 4500 block of Carrada Avenue.

READ MORE: Police find stash house in south Laredo with 69 undocumented immigrants

On Friday, Laredo police officers went to the home to execute an arrest warrant on Jose Gonzalo Ojeda, 22. He is wanted on a theft of property charge. When officers knocked on the door, they said they heard what sounded like a stampede of people inside.

Upon searching the home, 70 immigrants suspected of entering the country illegally were detained. Homeland Security Investigations said the immigrants were from Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Romania.

Theft warrant

Authorities said its unclear if Ojeda is connected to the smuggling of the immigrants.

He is accused of stealing a marble bench from a home in the 4400 block of Caroline Street on Feb. 3. Surveillance video allegedly recorded Ojeda taking the bench.

READ ALSO: South Texas man gets 17 years for immigrant death in toolbox

He remains at large. Anyone with information on his whereabouts is asked to call police at 795-2800 or Laredo Crime Stoppers at 727-TIPS (8477). Information leading to an arrest may be eligible for a cash reward.

To provide information on the smuggling case, call Homeland Security Investigations at 1-866-347-2423.Former City Councilman Alfonso Poncho Casso announced on Wednesday his campaign for Webb County judge, drilling in on his platform of freezing taxes for four years.

For their 2018 budget year, Commissioners Court adopted the same tax rate as the year prior but collected $7.9 million more in revenue due to an overall increase in property valuations and new development on the books. Casso is proposing the county use the effective rate each year, so that residents wont have to pay more in taxes even as their property value inevitably goes up. The only additional property tax revenue to the county would come from new developments.

Im going to make the appraisal irrelevant, said Casso, who is running as a Republican.

READ ALSO: Officials investigating mail-in-ballot fraud in Webb County primary election

Casso said he does not believe in slashing and burning the budget. He doesnt want to fire employees. He just wants a freeze, something thats never been done in Webb County, he said.

To pay for projects, such as the new county fairgrounds, Casso said he would go to the voters and ask for their approval to raise property taxes for that specific use. This way the county could pay in cash, rather than go out for bonds or certificates of obligation.

At the same time, Casso wants to wean the county off of its dependence on oil and gas property taxes, and create a separate fund for this revenue.

Its a non-renewable source of energy. Its diminishing, he said.

In 2017, Webb County brought in $13.7 million in oil and natural gas property tax revenue, the fourth-highest amount among Texas counties, according to the Texas Oil & Gas Association.

We need to wean ourselves off of it. Its going to be real hard, but we have to. And put it in a separate fund, and then use those monies for renovating L.I.F.E. Downs, and doing a bunch of other stuff, Casso said.

For new sources of revenue, Casso said he would like to invest in technology for renewable energies like wind and solar power.

READ ALSO: $33 million upgrade eyed for Border Patrol station

He adamantly opposes the countys involvement in the potential fifth bridge, and said he would not pursue the project if he were elected.

They have no experience building or managing bridges. That belongs to the City of Laredo, it needs to stay with the City of Laredo, Casso said. ... The county has no business going near it.

And the swell of revenue the county expects from a bridge would not come right away  it would all go to debt service, Casso argues.

Casso said he recognizes that he is the underdog in this race versus Tano Tijerina, the incumbent and Democratic candidate. But he feels voters will respond to his platform, which touches on nine other tenets, such as improving the county road system to support the oil and ranching industry, protecting the Rio Grande from pollutants and illegal discharges, and creating a county Office of Budget and Evaluation to operate as an analytical arm of the Commissioners Court.

Why am I even doing this? Why does someone run for office? Because it really p****s me off, Casso said. Their spending is a crime. Someone needs to step up.

Julia Wallace may be reached at 956-728-2543 or jwallace@lmtonline.comHard-nosed realists are likely to be incensed by the Holocaust drama A Bag of Marbles. But viewers willing to accept what filmmaker Christian Duguay is trying to accomplish will react differently.

We know the full scale of the horrors that are threatening the films central figures  two Jewish boys in Nazi-occupied France  but the youngsters dont. They understand that they are in terrible danger but are unaware of the details and depth of their peril. As they flee for their lives, forced to deny their heritage, were asked to observe their experiences and empathize with the dread these children  ages 10 and 12 at the start of their journey  must be feeling when forced to leave a happy and loving home.

The story in this French Canadian co-production is based on reality, taken from Joseph Joffos fictionalized memoir of his youthful experiences during World War II. Joseph (Dorian Le Clech) and his brother Maurice (Batyste Fleurial) are the youngest of four sons of a Jewish barber (Patrick Bruel) in occupied Paris. Its a sign of the boys naivete that they are willing to trick two Nazi officers into getting their hair cut in their fathers shop.

But things are moving in a direction in which pranks will be impossible. The boys parents decide to send them off, by themselves (so as not to arouse suspicion), to Nice, in the French free zone, where they will meet up with the rest of the family. They end up hitchhiking to this promised land, not the only journey they will be forced to take.

Duguay nicely suggests the sense of youthful freedom that the boys periodically feel, while not turning a blind eye to the deadly hazards of the road (including collaborators, con men and German officials bent on tricking them into revealing their Jewish heritage). They relax a bit once they reach Vichy France, where they encounter reasonably friendly Italian soldiers  although Joseph finds shelter with the family of a bookstore owner who admires the Germans.

But its a false paradise. When the Germans cement their control over the area, Joseph and Maurice are forced to move again.

There are moments when A Bag of Marbles threatens to stray off into wistfulness, with its emphasis on childish things (the title referring to Josephs favorite childhood pastime), its nostalgia-tinged photography and a rosy depiction of the allure of family life that sometimes strays toward the sentimental.

In the end, these are minor matters, and we cant help but admire the boys intelligence and resiliency (and, frankly, their luck  a point the film insists on repeatedly).

This isnt the first film to try to deal with the horrors of the Holocaust from a childs perspective, but its tricky material, and this one succeeds because it is direct and forthright.

Its also well acted, especially by the two young leads and the veteran Bruel. The remarkable scene when the boys father first tries to instill in them  abruptly, even shockingly  the magnitude of the dangers ahead will stay with you.

Walter Addiego is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: waddiego@sfchronicle.com

A Bag of Marbles

Drama. Starring Dorian Le Clech, Batyste Fleurial, Patrick Bruel. Directed by Christian Duguay. In French, German, Yiddish and Russian, with English subtitles. (Not rated. 113 minutes.)Lynne Ramsay is a Scottish writer-director whose movies invariably contain brilliant moments of character insight and quiet flourishes that light up the mind. But her films drag. They have story problems. They engage, but only intermittently. Sometimes they feel opaque, sometimes indulgent  and yet always intelligent and bespeaking a genuine cinematic talent.

The case of You Were Never Really Here seemed like it might be the solution. Its based on a novella by Jonathan Ames, with a tight plot involving a hit man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. What a match it might have been: Ramsay is weak on story, but strong on character. Plus, the specific nature of this tale  involving the uncovering of a sex ring trading in underage girls  seemed ideal for Ramsays affinity for the lurid and the strange.

But no. It was not to be. There are just some filmmakers who, when presented a haystack of exciting, will find that lonely needle of dull. Adapting the screenplay herself, Ramsay makes the story ponderous and mysterious. In a case of trying to run before knowing how to walk, Ramsay tries to make a different kind of action movie without bothering to master the rudiments of the form. The result is like any other Lynne Ramsay movie, whether its We Need to Talk About Kevin or Ratcatcher  slow, soporific and, here and there, wonderful.

Joaquin Phoenix plays the hit man, and this time his tendency to mumble doesnt matter, as the movie contains very little dialogue. He has a huge beard and looks like a troubled poet, and he has that kind of personality, despite being a contract killer. In an early scene, he goes to visit his mother (Judith Roberts), and if you know anything about Ramsay as a filmmaker, you will not be surprised that Ramsay makes something of that very simple visit. That is, nothing particular happens, and yet in the mother and sons playful, matter-of-fact interaction, we come away with a sense of that relationship, of its warmth and depth.

She also stages the mothers introduction beautifully, with the 83-year-old Roberts in the foreground, and a glamour shot of her in the background, on a table. So, we are confronted, in an interesting way, with the strangeness of time.

But Ramsay is less at home with the action scenes. Instead of paring down the genres requirements, so she can tailor the film to her own purposes, she ignores them altogether. She takes the approach of someone slumming, as if to merely mess with the genre were to do something artistic. And so, there is no discernible villain, no particular focus of audience concern, and no clear communication of the action. In a sense, there is no reason to watch, except to see whatever happens to be in front of your eyes in the moment.

Most of the time its nothing worth seeing, perhaps an extreme close-up of Phoenixs nose and mouth. But every few minutes  and this is whats special about Ramsay, but also frustrating, because she can neither be enjoyed, nor dismissed  she will devise a moment so compelling and odd that it redeems the barrenness surrounding it.

Just one example: At one point, a wounded assassin lies on the floor, bleeding to death, as his killer lies next to him. The radio happens to be on  the cloying 1982 hit Ive Never Been to Me  and they both start singing it. The moment is awful, beautiful, ridiculous. Its a moment of comfort and kinship, and a commentary on the song. Its a lot of things that elude description, the hallmark of art.

Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicles movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle

You Were Never Really Here

Drama. Starring Joaquin Phoenix and Judith Roberts. Directed by Lynne Ramsay. (R. 90 minutes.)

Movie newsletter

Get the latest movie reviews, Mick LaSalles views, critics picks and more film news each week in the San Francisco Chronicles revamped movie newsletter! Sign up here for Popcorn Picks and other Chronicle and SFGATE newsletters like the Taploid, Chronicle Commuter, and breaking news alerts.About 840,000 people across Puerto Rico were without power Thursday as the U.S. territory continues to struggle after the destruction of Hurricane Maria last fall, according to island's Electric Power Authority.

The power company, in a series of tweets Thursday, said that a tree had fallen onto the main line supplying power to the capital of San Juan and its surrounding communities along the northern coast, and to the southeast part of the island. The tree fell as crews were clearing land in Cayey, a mountain town in southeast Puerto Rico, as part of a power-restoration project in the wake of the hurricane.

It's the latest point of frustration for Puerto Ricans, who've dealt with the power line breaking down multiple times in recent months. Since the hurricane tore from the island's southeast corner though the central mountains and out the northwest coast six months ago, a cluster of communities near Cayey remain without power. Across the rest of the island, more than 1,200 FEMA-provided generators are still the primary source of power for hospitals, more than two dozen police and fire stations, correctional facilities and water pumps.

Blackouts are common: One in mid-February caused by a power point explosion left nearly 1 million around San Juan without power. What's worse is that another hurricane season looms, just months away.

Power slowly began returning to various parts of San Juan on Thursday afternoon, said the capital's mayor, Carmen Yulin Cruz, in a tweet. Backup generators fueled Puerto Rico's main public hospital and international airport.

The power company's interim director, Justo Gonzalez, estimated that it could take up to 11 hours for power to be fully restored across the island.

"This is the SAME line that was 'fixed' by Whitefish," the mayor tweeted, referencing Whitefish Energy, a small Montana firm that landed Puerto Rico's biggest contract to restore power.

The contract was then canceled after lawmakers questioned how the company, which had just two employees at the time of the storm, claimed it brought hundreds of workers and 2,500 tons of equipment to the island to make electrical repairs.

On Wednesday, federal officials told a congressional hearing that they hope to implement a plan by June to strengthen and stabilize Puerto Rico's electrical grid before the next hurricane season, according to the Associated Press. The initial estimated cost to rebuild the grid is $17.6 billion, though that number could change.

Bruce Walker, an assistant secretary with the U.S. Department of Energy, said at the hearing that officials are exploring renewable energy sources and building microgrids around industrial sites, the AP reported. Puerto Rico depends on imported fuel, and manufacturing makes up 50 percent of its economy.

Crews have also installed concrete poles, among other fixes, with the goal of bolstering the system.

"Those are very, very quick wins," Walker said, according to the AP. "You don't just build a grid overnight."

The federal government will carry 90 percent of the cost for permanent work on the power grid, according to a top FEMA official, the AP reported. On Tuesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that as much as $2 billion of $18.5 billion in disaster recovery grants intended to rebuild the island will also go toward the grid.MEXICO CITY - At the Summit of the Americas, the elephant will not be in the conference room.

President Donald Trump has bowed out of the summit, a periodic gathering of hemispheric leaders that opens Friday in Lima, Peru, with aides saying he needs to monitor the crisis in Syria. He has passed the baton to Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump is deeply unpopular in the region. He has lambasted Mexico over drugs and illegal immigration, reversed a thaw in relations with Cuba, and threatened military action against Venezuela. Without him, the gathering will likely lose a frisson of drama.

This is the first time in the nearly quarter-century history of the meeting that a U.S. president will not attend. But the last-minute change of plans may be one more jolt for a two-day summit that was already particularly unusual, a microcosm of the tumult sweeping the Western Hemisphere.

The theme for the summit is the fight against corruption and need for transparency, but it's taking place at a time when Latin America is a study in how corruption has spread. Scandals have engulfed an ever-growing roster of regional leaders, gut-punching their approval ratings, forcing some out of office and putting others behind bars.

"I would call this the surreal summit," said Richard E. Feinberg, who helped organize the first Summit of the Americas, in 1994, and is a Latin America expert at the University of California at San Diego. "The whole thing is rather bizarre."

The original host, Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski stepped down in disgrace on March 21 after lawmakers claimed he misrepresented his financial relationship with Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company. That firm is at the heart of the "Car Wash" scandal which was launched in Brazil in 2014, and has implicated scores of political and business leaders across Latin America.

In Brazil, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva ended a dramatic, two-day standoff with authorities on Saturday, turning himself in to face a 12-year sentence on corruption charges. Lula, who was planning to run for reelection, is by far the biggest figure yet to fall in the scandal.

Another president - Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, who was not invited because of his government's democratic shortcomings - had threatened to crash the summit. But this week, he said he would "stay home with the Venezuelan people."

"In truth, the Summit of the Americas is a waste of time," Maduro said Tuesday.

As the U.S. representative, Pence is set to face the leaders of a number of nations that have uneasy relationships with Trump.

Earlier this week, Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto launched a review of all bilateral cooperation with the United States, after several stinging Trump tweets accused Mexico of failing to stop immigrants from crossing illegally into the United States.

Trump has launched a renegotiation of NAFTA and ordered National Guard troops to reinforce the border. Pena Nieto had canceled a trip to Washington earlier this year amid an ongoing dispute about whether Mexico would pay for a giant border wall, and some in his government expected the summit could be a place for the two presidents to talk. Now that won't happen.

While Trump won't attend the summit, administration officials emphasized that the U.S. delegation will nonetheless include prominent figures like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the president's daughter and adviser, Ivanka, who will unveil a "new initiative to propel women's economic empowerment in the region," as she told reporters on a conference call arranged by the White House on Wednesday. Administration officials declined to release details on the new program.

"We are sending a very strong delegation down," a senior administration official said on the call, speaking under ground rules that he was not further identified. "We expect to see great things as a result of it."

But the summit could become a venue to air the discontent toward the Trump administration that is roiling the region.

A Gallup poll released earlier this year found Trump's approval rating in Latin America was just 16 percent, a dramatic drop from President Barack Obama's rating in the first year of his presidency. Latin American citizens have expressed revulsion at Trump's rhetoric, such as his reported vulgar comment about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa. Trump has moved to end programs that protect immigrants from deportation, such as temporary protected status, which benefited some 200,000 Salvadorans and 60,000 Haitians.

Trump has threatened other Latin American countries on issues from immigration to trade to drugs. Earlier this month, he warned that aid to Honduras might be cut because of a caravan of would-be immigrants heading to the U.S. border. Last year, he said he "seriously considered" decertifying Colombia as a partner in the war on drugs because of surging cocaine production. While many Latin American governments have backed Trump's decision to increase sanctions on Venezuela, the president sparked a backlash in the region when he said that he would not "rule out a military option" to confront that country's government.

The situation in the region is so troubled - and its relationship with the Trump administration so fraught - that some analysts even suggested the summit should be scrapped. Even though it's moving forward, experts predict it will fail to seriously deal with deep-seated problems.

When it comes to corruption, "they're going to have to finesse how do they talk about it seriously and keep a straight face," said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. "It's a good topic, but not a good political moment for it."

Feinberg, who has attended six of the seven summits that have occurred since 1994, said the hemisphere's leaders will likely announce some commitments similar to those made in a 1996 agreement, the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption. This, he said, raises the question: "In the last 22 years, what have you done and why should we believe you now?"

Accusations of fraud tainted the presidential election in Honduras in January, and Maduro's government in Venezuela has repeatedly flouted democratic norms. Pena Nieto's administration in Mexico has been battered by scandals involving government spying, police collusion with drug traffickers, and allegations that a government contractor built a home for the president and his wife.

But the Odebrecht scandal remains the most blatant symbol of the sludge that sloshes through Latin American politics.

In Colombia, former senator Otto Bula was detained last year, accused of receiving $4.6 million in exchange for securing Odebrecht a contract for a highway. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has acknowledged that his 2010 election campaign received illegal payments from Odebrecht, but said he had been unaware of the contributions.

In Argentina this week, a judge charged Julio De Vido - the former planning minister of ex-president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner - of wrongdoing in the awarding of multimillion-dollar contracts to Odebrecht. Fernandez, meanwhile, is fighting an indictment for allegedly covering up Iranian involvement in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

Pence's office issued a statement on Tuesday saying that he looks forward to "working with our close allies in Latin America to collectively hold undemocratic actors in the region accountable for their actions."

Among the Trump administration's priorities in the region is curbing socialist Venezuela's slide toward authoritarianism. Maduro is seeking a new mandate next month in elections that the opposition plans to boycott, citing the banning of several potential contenders and fears of fraud.

But now that Kuczynski, a leading critic of the Maduro government, has resigned, some expect the temperature will be lowered on the Venezuela issue at this summit.

The U.S. government also may press Colombia on a jump in the cultivation of coca - the main ingredient in cocaine. But just as notable as what will be discussed are those issues expected to be on the back burner.

The initial Summit of the Americas in 1994 was all about free trade. But Trump has threatened to raise tariffs and renegotiate or scrap trade pacts, saying many are unfair to American workers.

"This is one of the most unusual summits I've ever seen," said Eric Farnsworth, who worked on Latin America issues in the Clinton administration and is now Washington director of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, a regional trade and dialogue promotion group. "The anti-corruption element has been thrown out the window by recent events. . . . But it's also significant that the dog isn't barking on the economic agenda. Where are the talks on trade here?"Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 4 Vote(s) - 3 Average

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Page: 1 2 3 Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery LopDude

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04-12-2018 04:06 AM



Posts: 19,713









Post: #1 Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

Advertisement ONE of the greatest mysteries of Ancient Egypt may have been unravelled as archaeologists believe they have finally found the resting place of King Tutankhamun's teenage bride



The long search for the wife of one of Ancient Egypts most famous kings may be over after a startling discovery by archaeologists.



Ankhesenamun served alongside King Tutankhamun, who was also her half brother and cousin, until his death at the age of just 18 in 1323 BC before she went on to marry the next king, Ay.



A photo which has been released by archaeologists shows diggers excavating a spot which was previously analysed by radar and showed an entrance to the royal tomb where King Ay was laid to rest in the Amarna Tomb.



The research has been funded by the Discovery Channel which says that it has exclusive access to the site and will release a documentary on the discovery later this year.



https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/9...-wife-tomb Let us honor the Lop fallen-never forget them Let us honor the Lop fallen-never forget them The long search for the wife of one of Ancient Egypts most famous kings may be over after a startling discovery by archaeologists.Ankhesenamun served alongside King Tutankhamun, who was also her half brother and cousin, until his death at the age of just 18 in 1323 BC before she went on to marry the next king, Ay.A photo which has been released by archaeologists shows diggers excavating a spot which was previously analysed by radar and showed an entrance to the royal tomb where King Ay was laid to rest in the Amarna Tomb.The research has been funded by the Discovery Channel which says that it has exclusive access to the site and will release a documentary on the discovery later this year. LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 04:13 AM











Post: #2 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

I wonder if Geraldo will be hosting that? GREY LENSMAN

Blue Crystal Storm

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 04:19 AM



Posts: 3,480









Post: #3 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

HE DID NOT DIE IN 1323 BC, CARBON DATING PROVES THAT.



THE GREATEST MYSTERY IS WHY THEY HAVE NOT OPENED THE TOMB THAT KING TUTS RUSHED TOMB IS THE ENTRANCE TO.



GL The full force of Natural and Common Law shall be applicable at all times in all places and cannot be annulled by the declaration of emergency, war or other device by any State or entity.







[email protected] (This post was last modified: 04-12-2018 12:29 PM by GREY LENSMAN .) LopDude

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04-12-2018 04:21 AM



Posts: 19,713









Post: #4 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

GREY LENSMAN Wrote: (04-12-2018 04:19 AM) HE DID NOT DIE IN 1323 BC, CARBON DATING PROVES THAT.



THE GREATEST MYSTERY IS WHY THEY HAVE NOT OPENED THE TOMB THAT KING TUTS RUSHED TOMB IS THE ENTRANCE TOO.



GL

tell that to the publisher of said article he's all ears tell that to the publisher of said article he's all ears Let us honor the Lop fallen-never forget them Let us honor the Lop fallen-never forget them LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 04:23 AM











Post: #5 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

GREY LENSMAN Wrote: (04-12-2018 04:19 AM) HE DID NOT DIE IN 1323 BC, CARBON DATING PROVES THAT.



THE GREATEST MYSTERY IS WHY THEY HAVE NOT OPENED THE TOMB THAT KING TUTS RUSHED TOMB IS THE ENTRANCE TOO.



GL

Well, when did he die? Well, when did he die? GREY LENSMAN

Blue Crystal Storm

User ID: 1337

04-12-2018 04:27 AM



Posts: 3,480









Post: #6 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

800 BC



GL The full force of Natural and Common Law shall be applicable at all times in all places and cannot be annulled by the declaration of emergency, war or other device by any State or entity.







[email protected] LopDude

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04-12-2018 04:31 AM



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Post: #7 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

GREY LENSMAN Wrote: (04-12-2018 04:27 AM) 800 BC



GL

you mean the author who published that story got his facts wrong? you mean the author who published that story got his facts wrong? Let us honor the Lop fallen-never forget them Let us honor the Lop fallen-never forget them LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 04:32 AM











Post: #8 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

GREY LENSMAN Wrote: (04-12-2018 04:27 AM) 800 BC



GL

That's a huge difference. Gotta go check that.... That's a huge difference. Gotta go check that.... Monk-1

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04-12-2018 04:32 AM



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Post: #9 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

Damn the ones who melted their "metal loot", and all the other stuff just scattered about and broken. * (This post was last modified: 04-12-2018 04:36 AM by Monk-1 .) LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 04:40 AM











Post: #10 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 04:32 AM) GREY LENSMAN Wrote: (04-12-2018 04:27 AM) 800 BC



GL

That's a huge difference. Gotta go check that....

You think Carbon dating cant be 500 years either way from being correct ? You think Carbon dating cant be 500 years either way from being correct ? LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 06:59 AM











Post: #11 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

King tuts DAGGER has not RUSTED IN several thousand years. It is made of a metal so pure that science cannot explain it. They thought it was made from a meteor, but local meteor deposit analysis disproved that. I saw this on the tv series What on Earth S3E7 GREY LENSMAN

Blue Crystal Storm

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04-12-2018 07:01 AM



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Post: #12 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

http://alternativegenhist.blogspot.my/20...-ydna.html



SEEMS THAT MY QUICK FROM MEMORY WAS OUT BY 99 YEARS





GL SEEMS THAT MY QUICK FROM MEMORY WAS OUT BY 99 YEARSGL The full force of Natural and Common Law shall be applicable at all times in all places and cannot be annulled by the declaration of emergency, war or other device by any State or entity.







[email protected] (This post was last modified: 04-12-2018 07:02 AM by GREY LENSMAN .) LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 07:17 AM











Post: #13 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

LopDude Wrote: (04-12-2018 04:06 AM) ... Ankhesenamun served alongside King Tutankhamun, who was also her half brother and cousin, ...

cousin as in just cousin or one of those once removed things? cousin as in just cousin or one of those once removed things? LoP Guest

lop guest

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04-12-2018 08:22 AM











Post: #14 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-12-2018 06:59 AM) King tuts DAGGER has not RUSTED IN several thousand years. It is made of a metal so pure that science cannot explain it. They thought it was made from a meteor, but local meteor deposit analysis disproved that. I saw this on the tv series What on Earth S3E7

that is pyramid effect .

things stored within a pyramid become dehydrated and purified .

thats why mummies are not decomposed .

rust cannot occur without moisture . that is pyramid effect .things stored within a pyramid become dehydrated and purified .thats why mummies are not decomposed .rust cannot occur without moisture . GREY LENSMAN

Blue Crystal Storm

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04-12-2018 11:51 AM



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Post: #15 RE: Ancient Egypt: Experts on brink of major Tutankhamun discovery

TUTS TOMB IS NOT A PYRAMID



THE IRON WAS FROM PALESTINE



THE CARBON DATING CONFIRMS IRON AGE AS WELL.



GL The full force of Natural and Common Law shall be applicable at all times in all places and cannot be annulled by the declaration of emergency, war or other device by any State or entity.







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Further political upheaval is on its way in Brazil, if recent party-swapping by lawmakers is any guide to October's elections.

After years on the ropes, the right is poised to come roaring back, based on the sharp rise in legislators joining conservative parties as shown in a Bloomberg tally of their own reports. And with former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva now in jail, and likely barred from standing in the elections, the left is starting to fragment.

Longstanding, implacable opponents of Lula's Workers' Party, the center-right Democratas party has seen its number of federal deputies almost double in recent weeks - from 21 to 41 - as legislators take advantage of Brazil's pre-election transfer window to find a party likely to boost their prospects. Around 60 federal deputies, or almost 12 percent of the lower house, have swapped political parties over the past month with right-wing parties proving the big winners. What's not clear is whether this surge merely represents a backlash to 13 years of PT rule or a deeper shift in Brazilian attitudes toward the role of the state.

"The left is going to face a big challenge in the 2018 elections, especially if Lula remains in jail for a long time," said Rafael Cortez, a political analyst from Tendencias. "There's been a much greater mobilization of organizations linked to the right."

Once one of the largest parties in Congress, representing around one fifth of the lower house, the DEM had been in decline since Lula's victory in the 2002 elections. Now, it senses an opportunity.

"It's a conservative party, which maintains social and moral values and defends private initiative," said DEM lawmaker Alberto Fraga. "The collapse of the PT shows that our approach was right."

Other right-leaning parties, whose candidates have been advocating a leaner state, tougher policing to combat crime and a more business-friendly environment, have also seen a dramatic rise in their members. Four years ago, the Podemos party did not exist and now it has 18 deputies. The PSL, aided in large part by the affiliation of presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, has grown from one to ten.

Meanwhile, left-leaning parties, which have championed social welfare, government intervention in the economy and labor rights, have seen a decline in support. The PSB, the new home for possible presidential candidate - ex-Supreme Court president Joaquim Barbosa - saw its numbers fall from 34 to 26 deputies. Rede, the political vehicle for presidential candidate Marina Silva, also saw two of its four lawmakers leave the party.

The ideologically flexible MDB party of President Michel Temer is now at its lowest ebb since 1999, with 55 deputies in the lower house after 15 departed and 5 joined. The exodus was prompted at least in part by fears that the party is now synonymous with the corruption scandals that have rocked the Temer administration.

The decline of the MDB means that the PT is now the largest in the lower house, with 60 lawmakers, or just under 12 percent of the chamber. "The size of the caucus shows the party is alive," said PT Deputy Ze Geraldo.

Still, the PT has been hemorrhaging support since the last elections, losing eight of its legislators since 2014.An oil painting by Marc Chagall stolen from a New York City apartment has been recovered by the FBI and is expected to fetch several hundred thousand dollars at auction three decades after it went missing, the U.S. attorney's office of Washington and its owners' estate said.

The theft was "an inside job" by a temporary employee who had access to the apartment building in Manhattan's stately Sutton Place neighborhood when the owners were on vacation, FBI art crimes unit and Washington Field Office Special Agent Marc Hess said.

A Maryland associate of the thief who acquired the work after a dispute tried to sell it last year - still labeled with the names of its true owners, "Mr. + Mrs. E.S. Heller, New York." A Washington art gallery owner balked, however, because the piece lacked documents proving ownership and referred the would-be seller to the FBI, prosecutors said in a court filing Thursday.

The filing asks a court to approve returning the work to the Hellers' estate, which intends to sell it at auction to benefit charities and refund the insurance carrier's payment estimated at about $100,000 at the time.

A feud between the thief and a middleman with ties to Bulgarian mobsters, eventually led to the recovery of the 13-inch by 16-inch painting, one of 14 works stolen in the 1988 heist, the FBI and federal prosecutors said.

Because the investigation and efforts to recover the other 13 paintings continue, the suspects are not identified in the court filing, which suggests at least is cooperating in the case.

Both suspects are now in their 70s and may be motivated by "coming to your end times and wanting to set the record straight," Hess said. The cooperation is "not a (deathbed) confession" Hess said, but may be the associate's attempt to even the score with a thief he believed double-crossed him on a promised fee to find a buyer for the stolen Chagall through "connections with Bulgarian organized crime," as court papers describe the criminal network.

"I would say old rivalries die hard, and it's never too late to get your revenge," Hess said.

The building employee was convicted in federal court in Manhattan in connection with other art thefts from residences on charges of interstate transport of stolen property and mail fraud, court filings state without providing more details.

The employee approached the associate in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when the associate then lived in Virginia.

The two argued over the associate's fee, setting off a decades-long grudge and the attempt last year to sell the painting on his own, according to the saga in the court filings.

The associate by then was in Maryland and had stashed the Chagall for years in a specially made wooden crate, before approaching the gallery in Washington.

None of the other items stolen from the Hellers have been found, but "of all the works that could have been recovered, this is the one that would have pleased them the most," said Alan Scott, the Madison Avenue attorney who handled Ernest "Pike" Heller's estate and is the executor for Rose "Red" Heller, nicknamed after her hair.

Ernest Heller was a jeweler and pearl importer who died in 1998 at 95 after a lifetime of expanding his inherited collection of paintings, jewelry, sculptures, silverware and carpets. Rose Heller died at 105 in 2003.

"They were the quintessential old married couple," recalled Scott, who met the couple in the late 1980s before the theft, "They told it like it is to each other. And they got along well with everyone, particularly Red .... and they had a very active social life."

In a 1988 article reporting the $600,000 theft of all the items, Ernest Heller said he prized most "Othello and Desdemona, " one of Chagall's early Paris works, depicting the jealous title character from William Shakespeare's play holding a sword in a threatening pose over his doomed wife.

"I liked them all, but the Chagall was a very interesting one because it was a 1911 painting," Heller said.

Heller was about 8 and living in Paris when his father, a jeweler named Samuel Heller, bought the painting from Chagall, who was one of several artists in his family's social circle, said Scott.

It remained in the family and part of the collection that came to fill the Hellers' New York prewar three-bedroom apartment along with works by French painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir, George Rouault and Fernand Leger, the Italian Amadeo Modigliani and the American Edward Hopper. The Hellers also acquired Asian and pre-Columbian pottery.

Chagall, a Russian-French painter and Modernist pioneer, became a preeminent Jewish artist of the 20th century but was little known in 1911, having arrived in Paris just the year before.

Chagall thought enough of "Othello and Desdemona" that he suggested the Hellers offer a Zurich art museum a chance to include it in a 1967 retrospective of his work. It was exhibited and that June, Heller politely rebuffed a Basel gallery owner who asked whether the painting was for sale.

"Under the circumstances we would not like to part with it," Heller wrote, citing its "great sentimental value" after almost 50 years in his family, according to correspondence kept by Art Recovery International, a private firm employed by the Hellers' insurance company that recovers stolen and looted art.

The Hellers were longtime art and music patrons. Ernest Heller, who graduated from Princeton University at age 19 and joined the family jewelry business importing Mikimoto pearls before retiring in 1975, learned Chinese and became a trustee of the New York City Center, a forerunner of the Lincoln Center, according to his university alumni death notice.

Rose Heller, served on the boards of several U.S. contemporary music organizations, supporting festivals in Aspen, Colo., and Tanglewood in Massachusetts, and raised more than $1 million for the MacDowell Colony, which has supported more than 7,700 artists in residence since 1907 including Aaron Copeland, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein and Alice Walker.

Art investigators said it is not unusual for thieves to try to sell a painting over the span of many years, whether to an established business or through a formal but illegal network or ring.

In the case of the Chagall piece, various sales approaches by the Maryland associate failed before he finally called the FBI asking if there was a reward out for the stolen painting, said Hess and Tim Carpenter, who oversees field programs for the FBI art crimes unit that has about 150 pending cases.

There was no reward but agents confirmed the work was stolen using FBI and Interpol stolen art databases.

"There's no harm in asking if there is a reward, because sometimes there are rewards posted by insurance companies," either publicly or privately, said Art Recovery International's chief executive, Christopher Marinello. But not for anyone holding back an art piece or information for ransom, which is extortion, Marinello said.

U.S. prosecutors in Washington working with the FBI filed a formal civil forfeiture claim for the painting in federal court on Thursday to return the painting to the estate.

If the court agrees later this year, the painting is to be sold at auction, with proceeds going to refund a payout by the Hellers' insurance company and any remainder to charities named by their estate, 80 percent for the MacDowell Colony and 10 percent each to Columbia University and New York University Medical School, said Assistant U.S. attorney Zia Faruqui.

Marinello said the Heller painting has an "excellent provenance" but awaits formal blessing from the Chagall committee in Paris, to which it will be submitted before auction for examination and authentication.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston offered a $10 million reward in the 1990 theft of 13 works valued at half a billion dollars, Marinello said, while there is also a "sizable" bounty for one of two Aston Martin D5s used in the James Bond film "Goldfinger," stolen from a Boca Raton airfield in 1997.

Marinello said collectors, sales rooms, auction houses and dealers to can check items offered for sale against databases of stolen art maintained by the FBI, Interpol and Artive, a nonprofit group.

"The art market is reluctant sometimes of course to perform due diligence because that tends to get in the way of earning profits," he observed. "There are lot of people that do the right thing, I don't want to be critical of the entire art trade, but when someone comes to them with a painting that doesn't have proper paperwork, one has to be suspicious."FORT WORTH, Texas (AP)  The attorney for a man charged with murdering a Texas college student says the woman died accidentally during sex.

Charles Dean Bryant's attorney says her client then panicked and dismembered and burned the body of 24-year-old Texas Woman's University student Jacqueline Vandagriff.When the Environmental Defense Fund told commercial space guru Tom Ingersoll that it wanted to launch a satellite to measure methane from oil and gas operations, he says his reaction was "Whoa! You guys want to do what?"

Yet that's what the EDF is doing. It is well on its way toward raising about $40 million. It has tapped into the work of Harvard University researchers to fine tune sensors. And it has reached out to Ingersoll and others in the commercial space business to create a device that will be able to measure methane emissions on a 125-mile wide swath with pixel resolution of less than five-eighths of a mile.

EDF will also get support from TED Talks, which hopes to spur fundraising for a variety of causes through its "Audacious Project."

The satellite will enable EDF to more accurately measure methane emissions, which account for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. The results could be sobering. In February, EDF estimated that methane emissions from Pennsylvania's shale oil and gas sites may be more than five times higher than what oil and gas companies reported to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

The EDF analysis estimates Pennsylvania's oil and gas operators emit more than 520,000 tons of methane a year, primarily from leaky, outdated and malfunctioning equipment. This wasted gas causes the same near-term climate pollution as 11 coal-fired power plants, and results in nearly $68 million worth of wasted energy resources, the environmental group said.

In Pennsylvania, EDF relied on peer-reviewed scientific research conducted at the state's oil and gas sites. The state's published methane inventory is based on data reported by operating companies. They in turn estimate emissions on the assumption that their equipment is working properly rather than how it works in reality.

The new satellite "would be the first capable of monitoring worldwide all oil and gas facilities with precision," Fred Krupp, president of EDF, said in an interview. "It's a very compact satellite designed to do one thing way better than anyone's done it."

The satellite will produce a global snapshot of 80 percent of the globe every seven days and will detect methane in concentrations of as little as two parts per billion. Ingersoll said that the satellite would use infrared spectrometers and track methane's signature wavelengths and reflection of small packets of light, or photons.

The team of Harvard researchers including professor of atmospheric and environmental science Steven Wofsy has been doing similar work about the large increase in U.S. methane emissions over the past decade using existing satellite data and surface observations.

The new data will help compare actual emissions and the pledges made by companies or countries in line with the Paris agreement. While there is no Paris target, methane reductions are part of countries' individual implementation plans.

"Twenty-five percent of the warming that the planet is experiencing right now is from man-made methane emissions, and the oil and gas industry is a significant source of those emissions," said EDF senior vice president Mark Brownstein. "Reducing those emissions can have a material impact on slowing the rate of warming now."

The Trump EPA has been seeking to roll back rules issued in 2016 that would limit methane emissions. In 2016, President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto vowed to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sectors by 40 to 45 percent from 2012 levels by 2025.

When burned in power plants, natural gas, which is made up almost entirely of methane, releases half as much greenhouse gas as coal.

But those advantages can be offset by leaks of methane into the air because methane is a short-lived but extremely potent greenhouse gas. Though half of it vanishes in 8.3 years, EDF says it is still 84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over 20 years. The EPA uses a broader time frame and says methane's global warming effect is 28 to 36 times greater than carbon dioxide over the course of a century.

In recent years, EDF has been conducting 16 studies with industry and academics to produce an authoritative estimate of leaks all along the natural gas supply chain.

"There tends to be an undercounting of pieces of equipment in the field," Brownstein said. "Certain source categories not being counted at all, such as storage tanks in the Barnett shale field. The emission factors don't take into consideration that a significant part of emissions comes from malfunctions and failures."

He added that "what we now know is that with technology advancing, there are ways to collect this data - actual data in the field - and be able to do it more frequently than older measurements allowed for."The glee was palpable in the right-wing corners of the internet and media at the news that House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was leaving at the end of the year. There, Ryan's departure was greeted not with hand-wringing but celebration, as if it were a Super Bowl victory.

"We WILL NOT miss Paul Ryan," one Twitter user with over 20,000 followers bellowed this week. "President Trump is the one who truly loves this country, who loves the people of this country, and we give ZERO flying flips what you think."

"GOOD RIDDANCE," Trump loyalist and Fox News commentator Sebastian Gorka thundered on Twitter.

The reaction to Ryan's departure from the right is not surprising. Democrats, too, have excoriated Ryan for not standing up to Trump's extreme comments and outrages. But he's won no friends from the president's supporters for his silence, despite his crucial role in what Trump cites as his major legislative victory, enactment of tax legislation.

Indeed, Trump boosters have long seen the Wisconsin politician as, in the words of a Breitbart News report from Tuesday, "the leader of the globalist wing of the Republican Party." From this position, Ryan's departure is Trump's win.

Breitbart led the charge with two articles on Tuesday following the announcement. The first - "9 Times Paul Ryan Put American Workers Last, Foreigners First" - documented Ryan's "pro-immigration, wage-crushing, big business-first record, whereby American workers have been left behind by multinational free trade and mass immigration."

The same theme - the abandoned America worker - wove through a second piece, "Paul Ryan's Globalist Legacy: Ignoring America's Working Class at the Behest of Billionaire Koch Brothers." The article went on to argue the speaker would leave "behind a legacy that ignored America's working and middle class, while serving up an agenda favored by billionaires Charles and David Koch."

The right-wing Gateway Pundit offered speculation about Ryan's motives in "GOP Lawmaker Suspects Paul Ryan Leaving Congress To Salvage Reputation Ahead Of Possible Presidential Run." The piece prominently featured a photograph of the speaker with former president Barack Obama.

Fox News also picked up the signals emanating from Ryan's exit. Host Laura Ingraham, still losing sponsors for ridiculing a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, addressed Ryan's announcement on Tuesday night by contrasting the speaker with the president.

"The two of them represent opposing strains of conservatism in some sense," Ingraham told viewers. "One, the free trade, more interventionist, establishment. That's Paul Ryan. And the other, a more America first populism. That's Trump. The speaker's departure is a clear sign in my mind that Trump's vision, not Ryan's, is the future of the party."

Trump supporters online were more full-throated in their dismissal of the speaker.

"Paul Ryan is a bought-out globalist that went from opposing Trump to a supposed ally that's done nothing but stall the America First agenda," one posted.

"Paul Ryan's retirement signals that the establishment GOP are no different than the Dems & are losing their grip on power. American people have had enough of globalist rule," a second said.

"After That Outrageous Omnibus Bill Paul Ryan Put Out THAT DIDN'T FUND THE WALL & SUPPORTED ILLEGAL ALIENS AND OPEN BORDERS I Say, See Ya And I'm Not Gonna Miss Ya!!!," a third wrote.

The mood was equally buoyant on r/The Donald, the Reddit page dedicated to pro-Trump memes and rants.

"Trump is winning!!! Ryan steps down," a poster wrote. "The good guys are winning."

Outside the Trump base and its media organs, only one other person seemed to be pulling the same energy out of Ryan's retirement: Randy Bryce, the mustachioed ironworker running as a Democrat for Ryan's Wisconsin congressional seat.

"WE JUST REPEALED PAUL RYAN," Bryce announced. "Now it's time to replace him."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/Adapted from Marketers, Tear Down These Walls! Liberating the Postmodern Consumer.

When the founder of the beauty website Into the Gloss decided to create a new cosmetics line, she didn't contact vendors or post ads to entice new buyers. Instead she created an Instagram account -- @glossier -- and waited for suggestions to flood in. She mined the posts her followers submitted as she developed the line. Thousands of cosmetics aficionados helped her to build the new company.

Related: Don't Go Looking for Problems: Curing Your Own Pain Points Is a Good Way to Develop a New Product

We used to purchase goods and services from professional artisans and manufacturers. Today it's also everyday consumers who produce media content, design products and invest in startups -- not to mention those who also act as retailers, food critics, tour guides and even taxi drivers. Consumer-generated content (CGC) wipes out the traditional wall between producer and consumer. Everyday people collaborate with, or even replace, professionals in virtually every traditional marketing function. Let's take a look at one of the most important ones, product development.

DEWALT has an insight community of over 10,000 tool users who submit ideas for new products. LEGO fans can join LEGO Ideas, an online community where members submit their own designs for new sets. They vote on submissions -- if a project gets 10,000 votes, LEGO considers it for an official LEGO Ideas set it will sell around the world.

Co-creation is here!

Call it co-creation, call it collaborative innovation, call it crowdsourcing: The recruitment of consumers to act as product designers is a growing trend. While this teamwork can be threatening to highly trained designers who fear they will be replaced by hordes of naifs, the less insecure ones recognize that user feedback can only improve upon what they think people want.

Related: Post-it Will Introduce Extreme Notes, and It's a Textbook Lesson in How to Solve a Customer Problem

The practice of handing the inmates the keys to the asylum is booming. If you're doing this already, be sure to fess up about where these innovations come from. That's not just ethical practice; it turns out that buyers actually prefer products users actually suggested. One study found that crowdsourced products sold up to 20 percent more when they were specifically labeled as originating with customers. This helps to explain why some brands are going out of their way to trumpet this co-creation process. The German company Red Chili that sells gear for rock climbers proclaims, "Only climbers know what climbers need."

The Maker Movement

The rapidly growing DIY (do it yourself) trend represents another way that the wall between producers and consumers is crumbling. Analysts project that this market will grow by about 6 percent per year over the next several years. One reason it's exploding is what researchers call "The IKEA Effect": People prefer products they help to make (or at least assemble).

The DIY craze is part of a larger trend some call the Maker Movement. A makerspace is a collaborative workspace inside a school, library or separate public/private facility for creating, learning, exploring and sharing. Typically a healthy dose of entrepreneurship gets thrown in as well, as makerspaces double as incubators for business startups. Some spaces such as TechShop are themselves turning into businesses as they expand the number of locations where DIYers can access their sophisticated tools for a modest membership fee. Makerspaces already are pouring out success stories, such as the DODOcase company that uses a space in San Francisco to build its popular line of covers for phones and laptops.

Related: The 7 Steps of Effective Product Development

"Artisanal fries with that?"

Artisanal cheese. Artisanal soap. Artisanal beer. The term is everywhere. It implies that an item isn't mass-produced, and often the maker is a skilled artist who otherwise is "one of us" (i.e., he or she hasn't sold out to a big corporation). The ecommerce site Etsy calls itself "the most beautiful marketplace in the world"; it features thousands of unique creations that everyday people sell.

What's feeding the artisanal frenzy? Simply, the quest for authenticity. Consumers today often want to know a product's provenance; just where the things they buy came from. The J. Peterman Company clothing catalogs tell stories about the apparel they sell, and upscale grocery stores like Whole Foods provide great detail about the specific farms where produce and meat were raised. I recently ate at a restaurant where the menu actually listed the name of the specific fisherman who caught the catch of the day! Product genealogy, or the thirst to trace the backstory of a product from raw materials to final form, is a popular activity for many.

Related: 5 Maxims for Creating Products That Meet Real Needs

The bottom line: Consumers crave authenticity. They love companies that can boast of a long heritage and a history of giving back to the communities where they operate. If your company has a backstory, tell it. Often.

The wall between producers and consumers is tumbling down. Help your customers help you!

Related:

Sell More Products by Letting Your Customers Design Them for You

Don't Go Looking for Problems: Curing Your Own Pain Points Is a Good Way to Develop a New Product

User Experience Is the Most Important Metric You Aren't Measuring



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reservedLast year, the Interior Department abruptly transferred dozens of senior employees without prior warning, just as President Trump's new political appointees were settling in there.

Was it legal?

The department's internal watchdogs this week came to a conclusion, sort of.

In a new report, the office of Interior's inspector general said that it cannot determine whether Interior chief Ryan Zinke's unusual and controversial reassignment of 27 members - about 12 percent - of workers in the department's Senior Executive Service ran afoul of federal law.

That's because top agency officials failed to document how they made their decisions. The Washington Post obtained and reported the findings Wednesday before investigators published it later that day.

Individual reassignments are common for members of the SES, a corps of top career and politically appointed federal employees who serve just below top presidential appointees. But the mass transfer between June and October of last year - which forced some senior workers to move across the country - caught longtime employees and some members of Congress off-guard, especially given the scarcity of confirmed political appointees in the department at the time.

In the new report, Interior's Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall found that the members of a board set up to make the transfer decisions in May did not follow the correct protocol for record-keeping. The Executive Resources Board, Kendall's report found, "did not document its plan or the reasons it used when selecting senior executives for reassignment, nor did it gather the information needed to make informed decisions about the reassignments."

Without documentation including "meeting minutes, notes, voting or decision records," investigators were not able to determine whether the board's decisions complied with federal law to protect employees from sudden transfers. Interviews with those making personnel decisions did not yield an explanation. "When we asked the ERB members who in the Department leadership ordered the reassignment of senior executives, no one could provide an answer," the report read.

In a statement, Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said the inspector general report validated the department's personnel decisions. "Obviously, the evaluation confirmed the Department's long-held view that the ERB has the lawful authority to reassign SES Members and has done so here," she wrote.

But at least one member of the SES who was reassigned in Zinke's mass transfer held up internal investigators' findings as an example of ineptitude at Trump's Interior Department.

"I am stunned by the level of incompetence that this report describes; there were so few records kept that the inspector general can't even make a determination of the legality of the reassignment actions," said Joel Clement, an Interior Department executive-turned-whistleblower who resigned in October. "It's remarkable that the political staff at Interior would be so blithe, thoughtless and careless during a time of intense scrutiny. It begs the question, what did they have to hide?"

In a March memorandum, David Bernhardt, Zinke's top deputy, conceded to Kendall after reviewing her report that although they believe the personnel decisions were lawful, "the Secretary and I concluded that the ERB could benefit from incorporating best practices and improving its business process."

It is not the first time that the Trump team's record-keeping has raised flags from the inspector general's office. In November, the IG issued another alert notifying department officials that its audit of Zinke's travel practices had been hampered by "absent or incomplete documentation for several pertinent trips."

In this case, Zinke's attitude toward longtime Interior Department employees drew special scrutiny after the secretary said that nearly a third of his staff is disloyal to Trump in a speech to a federal advisory board dominated by oil and gas industry executives. "I got 30 percent of the crew that's not loyal to the flag," the secretary said, according to participants.

Clement was removed from his job as director of policy analysis, working on the effects of climate change on Alaska Native communities, and reassigned to a revenue accounting position for which he said he had no experience.

In a July op-ed in The Post, Clement said he believed he was reassigned because he spoke out about human-caused global warming, which Trump and many members of his administration have dismissed as untrue despite major scientific consensus on the subject.

"Behind this whole 'Keystone Cop' display of incompetence," Clement said in an interview Wednesday, "there's this determination to purge the agency of anyone who doesn't support the secretary's flag." In total, 12 reassigned Interior Department employees interviewed by the inspector general's office, including Clement, said they believed they were transferred because of prior work on climate, conservation, energy and other issues.

Another transferred SES employee at the agency, who declined to be named for fear of further reprisal, said the "investigation is vindicating for my colleagues and me. In my opinion it confirms we were the victims of ego and personal vendettas."

Democrats seized on the report as confirmation that the Trump administration sought to "punish" career staffers at the agency.

"This report backs up my concern that Interior Department leaders identified employees for reassignment as a way to punish career staff who were working on issues that contradicted the administration's anti-science agenda, particularly its climate denial campaign," said Sen. Tom Udall, N.M., the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Interior Department.

Democrats also point out that Republicans in Congress have not been as keen to call the transfers into question. "I have repeatedly asked Chairman [Trey] Gowdy to join me in investigating the reassignment of career employees at the Department of the Interior, but he has refused to request a single document, and he has even blocked the Committee from debating and voting on a subpoena," Rep. Elijah Cummings, Md., the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a statement. Rep. Gowdy, R-S.C., leads the oversight panel.

"Thank goodness for the Inspector General," Cummings added.

The IG's office made recommendations to improve record-keeping in its report. It now wants leaders to estimate the cost of all geographic transfers and writing out a plan for reassigning senior personnel "to ensure accountability." Indeed, the Interior Department carried out its own changes by drafting a formal charter for the ERB and restructuring the board to include a mix of career and non-career employees. Previously, all six members of the board were political appointees.

The probe began at the request of Democrats on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, led by Sen. Maria Cantwell, Wash., that committee's ranking Democrat, as well as Udall.

"We are concerned that mismanagement of this program could lead to premature retirements, lower morale within the federal workforce, higher costs for the Department, and discourage talented professionals from entering the SES," Cantwell and other congressional Democrats wrote last month in asking another investigative bureau, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, to look into the reassignment issue.